Category: Daily Life

My husband and I spent the better part of the weekend undoing months of household neglect. I know no one cares about this except us, but I'm going to document it here just as a reminder to myself.

The vacuum cleaner was my best friend for the whole endeavor. I used it to sweep the floors, remove the fur coats from the ceiling fan blades, get cobwebs out of the corners, and I even hefted it onto the kitchen counter so I could vacuum all the dust bunnies off the tops of the cupboards.

I mopped all of the floors in the house and cleaned the mosaic tile bathroom floor with a scrub brush. My husband took on the cleaning of all the bathroom fixtures and mirrors. I cleaned out my bathroom drawers for the first time since we remodeled about four years ago.

My new favorite cleaning product is Method hardwood floor cleaner. It's really easy to use, does a lovely job of cleaning (see how shiny my living room floor looks in the picture?) and it smells great. Even our bedroom floor looks pretty good now, and it's almost completely devoid of varnish. Best of all, the product is non-toxic, which is helpful when your cats think nothing of walking over the just-mopped surface.

So now our house is clean enough that it won't be too embarrassing when one of my book clubs comes over on Sunday afternoon. Assuming I can maintain the cleanliness that long. I'm certainly going to try.

Please admire my painstakingly scrubbed floor and baseboards.

This may be the worst spring allergy season I've ever experienced. I've had a solid week of constant throat clearing, coughing and nose-blowing that I am sure is irritating to anyone with the misfortune to be in my vicinity. I know it's driving me crazy. Worst of all, there's no end in sight.

I take a daily prescription pill for allergies and asthma anyway, but it's no match for the onslaught of tree pollen and mold spores that have settled in with the warmer weather. Even with the addition of the neti pot, cough tablets, rescue inhaler and boxes of tissues everywhere I go, I can barely sleep through the night, much less sit quietly while I'm trying to work or otherwise live my life.

Fortunately, my breathing isn't particularly affected, so I can still go walking outside. Whatever is triggering this, it's just as bad indoors as outdoors.

My husband and I have set aside this entire weekend for spring cleaning, so I'm hoping that will serve to cut down on some of the worst of the indoor allergens by the time we're finished. Of course, it will stir them all up in the process, but I can't imagine my level of suffering getting much worse than it is now.

As long as I'm miserable anyway, I've also started taking liquid iron supplements prescribed by my doctor for iron deficiency anemia. (I'm just the picture of good health these days, aren't I?) It is truly horrible, but I've learned that I can choke it down more effectively if I mix it with fruit juice. That doesn't hide the hideous aftertaste, but it's much better than drinking it plain.

So how is your spring going so far?

Photo credit: subtle_devices

We went from snow to warm, gorgeous weather in a week. That's the Midwest for you. I'm thrilled with the temperature change, but I can't quite make myself peel off the plastic that's covering our bedroom window. It's only March and it wouldn't be unheard of to have another ice storm before spring gets really serious.

Let me get the big news out of way first: I'm staying at my job after all. So a huge weight has been lifted and now I can get back to doing what I do without the distraction of having to job hunt.

Once again, a big thank you to everyone who has helped, supported and encouraged me over the past five months. I cannot begin to thank you enough for keeping me optimistic.

Last night I celebrated by lighting two big sparklers I'd been saving and dancing around the yard with them. That was fun.

Earlier in the evening I attended a city council meeting in a nearby town to help support a friend who was there to address the council. She had obtained the council members' travel expense records via the Freedom of Information Act and prepared a damning presentation about the amount this small city spends on lavish restaurants, limousines and four- and five-star hotels.

I was incredibly impressed at the amount of work she had done to go on public record to try to change the way her city does business. It made me think I should be paying a lot more attention to the local politics of my own town.

For now, I'm just going to work on getting back to normal. I need to get our tax paperwork out the door and figure out a household budget that will allow for some much-needed savings but also, I hope, restore a few expenses we cut out over the past months. (House cleaning!)

Happy Spring!

Photo credit: Darren Brooker

It's a beautiful, sunny day out and I feel better than I have in weeks. Let the weekend begin!

I'd say it really began last night. Before I left work, my husband told me that one of our friends wanted to meet us for dinner at our favorite Americanized Chinese restaurant. My husband and I split a gigantic appetizer platter, complete with an open flame for warming our beef-on-a-stick and then split an entree. I was stuffed when we left.

After that, we watched a DVD of The Expendables, which was just crying out to be given the Rifftrax treatment. As I watched it, I kept finding myself saying things like, "The political system on that island is so compromised, it seems unfair to be killing off their entire military." So much for suspension of disbelief.

I wrapped up the evening by finishing The Magicians: A Novel by Lev Grossman. It was my pick for one of my book clubs this month and I chose it based on several positive online reviews I'd read. I found the book interesting and engrossing, but never quite warmed up to the protagonist. However, that doesn't mean I won't read the sequel when it comes out. I'm looking forward to hearing what my fellow book clubbers thought.

Today I'll be participating in a pre-St. Patrick's Day parade with The Animal Rescue Alliance (T.A.R.A.). I don't know if I'll be walking a dog, passing out flyers, etc., but I guess I'll find out. This evening, my husband and I have decided we're going to hang out at home, have burritos for dinner and catch up on our TV watching from last week.

Tomorrow I'm doing my regular volunteer shift taking care of the adoptable cats at Petco, then going to my aunt's birthday brunch with my sister and nephew.

That doesn't even count the housework, work work and other activities I'll be interspersing among the fun stuff.

Have a great weekend! I'll post any good photos I take on Monday.

As I've mentioned many times before, I'm a big hard rock and metal fan. For years I've kept my radio on music stations or blasted nü-metal CDs on my way to and from work and everywhere else I've gone.

I don't know if it's the gloomy weather or all of the other things that are making me struggle to keep a positive outlook on life right now, but I've suddenly lost my tolerance for grim, minor-key ranting during my commute.

Fortunately, one of my local radio stations has recently changed to an all-comedy format, so now I have a much less road-rage-inducing form of in-car entertainment.

The station mainly plays little snippets of stand-up acts with a few SNL shorts and other satire bits interspersed. They don't limit themselves to the past couple of decades either; I've even heard some of Bob Newhart's classic one-sided phone conversation routines. Of course, not everything they play fits my sense of humor, but the material is curated pretty well.

It took about a week before I heard a repeat, which I thought was a pretty good sign. My only criticism is that the station's signal is weak and breaks up at random locations and under overpasses.

It feels almost therapeutic to laugh most of the time I'm in the car. Right now I need all the happy energy I can get.

Photo credit: Pete

I started feeling poorly on Friday afternoon and ended up leaving work early and taking my misery home. It turned out I was suffering from my all-time favorite ailment, food poisoning. You can tell it's my favorite because I get it ALL THE TIME.*

This was a particularly nasty case** and it laid me out for the rest of the day and night and well into the next day. I managed to emerge with a face full of broken capillaries and the inability to drag myself out of bed or form a coherent thought for nearly two days.

The first night was so bad that I considered going to the emergency room for an IV. However, a friend suggested I get a bottle of Pedialyte to drink and it ended up helping enough that I managed to take an ibuprofen for all of the head-to-toe pain I was in and actually get to sleep.

On Saturday morning I started out with dry toast and Pedialyte and managed to graduate to half a sub sandwich and some Sprite by evening. Even though I felt better, I was still so tired and lacking in motivation that I never actually accomplished anything all day long. Needless to say, I canceled all of my social plans.

I spent Sunday catching up on all of the work I'd missed the previous two days. So now it's Monday again and, for the second week in a row, I feel as though I haven't really had a weekend.

I'll bet you had a lot more fun this weekend than I did. What did you do?

*Actually, I probably do get it more often than most people. One of the many delightful side-effects of taking acid reflux medication is an increased susceptibility to food poisoning.

**No, I'm not sure where I got it. I'd had a lot of restaurant meals over the previous 24 hours and it could have been any of them.

I have now been fruitlessly job hunting for four full months. I've been extraordinarily fortunate to have had my tenure with my current company extended through the end of March, but I'm starting to come to grips with the idea that I will not be moving seamlessly from one job to another.

However, I keep stumbling across opportunities to do social media consulting of various kinds on a contract basis. So although I swore I was never going to freelance or start my own business again, that may very well be what ends up happening.

The last time I went out on my own, I learned a few things about myself as a sole proprietor. One is that I am terrible about keeping my books and paying my quarterly income tax. This time around, I would have to make a special point of enlisting my accountant from the get-go so she can help me do my recordkeeping and tell me how big a check to write every three months.

Another business owner flaw I encountered the last time around was a lack of focus in my offerings. However, social media didn't even exist at the time and I've been doing a lot more specializing since then, so I think I can put together a logical and concise package of services to market myself.

Step one of that marketing plan will be a new blog that I'll use to discuss some of the things I've learned about social media marketing over the past four years. I'll share the link once the first post goes up.

My biggest worry about having two self-employed people in our household is that we won't be able to afford the health insurance we need. My husband and I both have pre-existing conditions galore, treated with a smörgåsbord of prescription medications. Even now, our out-of-pocket medical costs are so high that I contributed the maximum to last year's FSA.

On the other hand, I know that if I work hard and follow up on every lead, I could actually come out ahead. It's scary, but it can be done.

I cannot say enough good things about everyone who has been giving me job leads, references, LinkedIn recommendations and freelance offers. I thank you from the bottom of my heart and appreciate every effort you've made to give me a hand.

Although I'm not completely sure what the future will hold, I'm headed toward something new one way or another. I might as well decide now that it's going to be awesome.

Photo credit: Paul Joseph

When I'm not feeling well, I'm a big proponent of the "suck it up and soldier on" approach, but this weekend it occurred to me that I've been canceling more and more activities because I'm literally under the weather.

The weather has been very strange this winter, with lots of big storms and wild temperature fluctuations. Unfortunately for me, it seems that my head has turned into a living barometer. When the atmospheric pressure is high, I get headaches that don't respond to any OTC medication and cause me to curtail most of my plans in favor of sleeping or just lying around saying, "ow."

It took me more than a month to figure out what was happening and accept there's really nothing that can be done about it. This past weekend was two days of misery that finally relented when a big thunderstorm came through.

So if I've seemed like a party pooper lately, I apologize. It's just hard to concentrate when your head is a huge ball of pain. I'm sure that's also why my blog posting has been light. Here's hoping that spring is a little easier to bear.

Photo credit: Jon Swanson