Category: Daily Life

["I'm A Regular Here" by Megan Reardon]

This is the actual progression of thoughts I had while driving home this evening. Low blood sugar may have been a factor.

I like the thermal coffee mugs with stainless steel inside better than the ones that are plastic inside.

I wonder if we're eventually going to find out that stainless steel does something bad to you when you drink out of it?

When ancient conquerers used to drink out of the skulls of their enemies, I'll bet they picked up all kinds of bad stuff. Well, maybe the alcohol killed everything, but I don't think so. Creutzfeldt-Jakob, anyone?

That was a great X-Files episode. "Good people, good chicken."

If you're going to drink out of your enemy's skull, would you just cut off the very top part or would you leave the eye sockets so it's easier to tell that it's a skull? Or would that make it too hard to drink out of?

I wonder how much liquid the average human skull holds?

So anyway, I need to wash some coffee mugs

Once upon a time, a woman fell asleep on a Friday afternoon and the next thing she knew, it was Monday night.

That's the way I feel after the weekend I've had. I had to leave work after just a few hours on Friday because I felt absolutely horrible. I made it through a conference call after I got home, then dealt with a brouhaha involving someone who was trying to use the name "Average Jane" for a group in Kansas City. After that, I had no energy left for anything but a hard sleep.

I woke up and made a doctor's appointment late in the afternoon. The nurse practitioner prescribed some antibiotics because my symptoms suggested a kidney infection. Once I got home, I installed myself in bed until late Saturday morning.

Somehow I made it through all of my obligations for the weekend, which included a birthday lunch with my aunt, a gig with my band, a volunteer shift taking care of the adoptable cats at Petco, and a hair appointment. I cannot even fathom how I managed to sing forty rock songs in front of a crowd as bad as I felt, but I give all the credit to Gatorade and the over-the-counter pharmaceutical industry. I couldn't tell if it was the stage lights or my fever that made me feel uncomfortably warm the whole time.

I slept for hours and hours and hours over the weekend. My appetite was shot, the fever lingered, and there was nothing in the world that I wanted to do other than lie down.

This morning, I actually thought I was feeling better when I woke up. I went upstairs to read my e-mail and check in to see what I'd missed on Twitter and Facebook. (I'm disappointed that I didn't catch any SXSWi chatter this year.) By the time I went downstairs to get ready for work less than a half hour later, I was wiped out. I tried to get dressed, but had to stop and lie down. I gave up and went back to sleep.

The nurse practitioner called in the afternoon and said I could stop taking the antibiotics because I didn't have a kidney infection after all. She said I probably had some kind of virus, which left me no recourse but to rest, drink lots of fluids, yadda, yadda, yadda. As if I hadn't spent the last three days doing exactly that.

Now I think I actually do feel better. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I can make it through the workday tomorrow and the next day before I head to Waterloo, Iowa to speak at Creative Bloc. Wish me luck getting caught up.

I'm writing today to demonstrate that there's more to my existence than cats. But if you're interested in how Velcro is doing, I can tell you that she does seem to be improving daily.

So what else do I have going on?

Well, I'm in a bunch of book clubs, but my participation is pretty occasional in all but the most convenient one. We met last night to discuss Very Valentine and drink martinis. As usual, the martini drinking took precedence over the book discussion. Maybe I should have looked up those discussion questions yesterday…

I'm still doing my best to keep up with my favorite TV shows, although I never watch anything live anymore. The current list includes:

• Lost
• Burn Notice
• Psych
• Ghost Whisperer
• Pawn Stars
• American Pickers
• Tool Academy (I'm ashamed of myself, but I cannot stop watching)

I know there are other good shows I should be watching, but I have a hard enough time keeping up as it is.

Then there's my band. We have a gig tomorrow night and a couple booked in March already. If anything interesting happens at tomorrow's show, I'll let you know.

Other than that, I spend all my free time surfing the 'net, occasionally cooking or baking, doing as little housework as possible, hanging out with friends or family, and doing yoga.

Ooh, and this weekend I'm going to Evil Dead – The Musical. I can't wait!

So what are you up to these days?

I knew this was coming. All week long I'd been around one sick person after another, both at work and at home. My husband has a full-blown Man Cold and there's obviously no way to avoid him completely.

On Saturday, I not only took a three-hour nap in the afternoon, but I cut my evening plans short, was asleep by 10:30 p.m. and slept until 8:30 a.m. Forty-some years of life have taught me that that level of sleep need is always a sign that I'm fighting something off.

As soon as I woke up this morning, I knew the cold had finally gotten me. One sinus is radiating pain in every direction so that I have a both a headache behind my eye and a toothache on that side. 

Fortunately, my husband and I weren't planning on doing anything for Valentine's Day until tomorrow night anyway. Unfortunately, it's because I have band practice. Singing like this is going to be a real treat.

How's your Valentine's Day so far? Better than mine, I hope.

I'm happy to have inspired Cop's Wife to play along with the whole Q&A thing. Ask her a question, if you like.

Some more from my formspring account:

Describe a perfect day for you.

Here's a rather typical but still perfect day at home for me:

After about ten hours of sleep, I wake up and meet a friend or two for breakfast somewhere that has wonderful coffee. After that, I go home and read for a while, with cats all around me. I do a bit of baking and prepare something tasty for lunch, which I eat while watching one of my favorite shows. If the weather is nice, I go out to the deck or front porch swing and read some more – or maybe even take a walk in my neighborhood. Once my husband wakes up, we hang out and chat for a while in the studio and play with the two upstairs cats, then select a good restaurant for dinner. Once we get home, we watch a couple more TV shows and then I get to bed no later than 11.

Were you a tomboy or a girly girl as a kid? by karlerikson

Way more of a tomboy. We lived on a farm so I helped with chores (feeding the horses and chickens, stacking bales of hay, etc.) and played outside a lot. I was also fond of climbing trees.

On the other hand, I enjoyed playing with Barbies, so there was some girly girl hidden in there, too.

Do you get excited about the Olympics? by angelchrys

No, I am not a sports person at all, so I'm barely aware of the Olympics when they're happening.

Here's a question for you: are you doing anything fun this weekend?

One of the first things that happened to me this morning was that I reached into a cupboard and dumped an inexplicably open bag of powdered sugar into my face, all down the front of my robe and onto the counter top and floor.

I carefully walked outside to remove my robe and shake out as much powdered sugar as possible from my clothes and hair. Hi, neighbors! Don't mind me! Aren't you glad I wear baggy pajamas?

Then I did what I could with the Shop Vac to sweep up the rest before the cats could come in and distribute it throughout the house in the form of sticky little footprints.

You know how when you eat powdered sugar donuts in the car and get the sugar on your clothes, it's really hard to brush it off? Yeah, it's the same phenomenon when you're trying to vacuum it off a slate floor.

So, onward and upward, right?

There are few things in life that I dislike as intensely as shopping. That's why I do 99% of my holiday shopping online. It's also why my wardrobe consists mainly of Threadless t-shirts.

Unfortunately, I've gotten to the point where the t-shirts, jeans and Chuck Taylors look is starting to get a little stale on me. There are times when I need some flattering clothes that give the impression that I'm a grown-up, and my supply of said clothes (that fit) was running short.

So yesterday I begged my sister to accompany me on a shopping trip and help me pick out some decent shirts and a pair of everyday shoes that weren't sneakers. She has a good eye for style and fit, but she is not a shopping fan either, so neither of us are inclined to dilly-dally at the store. We make a good team.

I managed to hit the jackpot with the clearance sales at Macy's. I got five tops, a pair of comfortable but not too casual shoes, a tube of the mascara that Kelly recommended, and a couple of random gadgets from the clearance table in the kitchen department.

We paused briefly to recharge at Starbucks, then continued on to JC Penney where I got a couple of necklaces, some sparkly purple eyeliner for stage wear, and two packages of socks to start replacing the ones I keep throwing away on laundry day.

All that took only about two hours, but we were both exhausted. We made one more stop at Best Buy to pick up a couple of birthday gifts for my brother-in-law and then dragged ourselves back to her house.

Sadly, I still need to go to an actual shopping mall for two final purchases that I couldn't secure yesterday. After that, I should be good for another year or so before I have to set foot in another department store. At least I hope so.

If I were a home improvement contractor facing my typical cold-weather slump in business, I would drive through neighborhoods and stop at every house I found that had this problem:

Then I would knock on the door and offer an on-the-spot price quote for installing more attic insulation. 

I am just kicking myself for not doing something about our severely under-insulated attic over the summer. This is what I get for being a cheapskate.

So there was a huge snowstorm here on Christmas Eve. Once we'd slid our way home from dinner, we kept an eye on weather updates online and, particularly while I was up with stomachache-related insomnia at 3:30 a.m., it looked as though our Christmas Day commute to my sister's house was not going to happen.

Once I finally woke up for good, I decided to give it a go. After all, I had already made a ton of food and my little car gets around in the snow pretty well.

Our driveway slants downward into the garage from the street at a fairly significant angle, so backing up it in the snow has always been a chore. It was worse back in the days when the driveway was made of cracked asphalt, so it helps that it's now concrete and has predictable boundaries.

Of course I had to shovel. I made parallel paths through the snow all the way up to the street, which was exhausting and made me sweat off my makeup and hairdo. Even with a path cleared, it still took me a couple dozen attempts to launch myself up to the street. From there on out, I was the living embodiment of "taking it easy" on the road. I made the usually 30-minute drive in less than an hour.

I helped my sister with the meal, opened gifts with the family and snacked on all of the goodies all afternoon. My husband joined us right before dinner and said he'd gotten his SUV out of the driveway in one try with no shoveling. Hmmph.

My aunt, uncle and cousin couldn't make it because they live on a rural road that didn't get plowed right away. We're hoping to be able to get together with them sometime this weekend or possibly next week to exchange gifts.

We left before it started getting dark and had a significantly more difficult time getting home than we had getting there. My brother-in-law had to push my car out of their cul-de-sac, and I got hung up at an intersection trying to leave their subdivision and had to make a number of attempts before I freed my car.

Once we got home, I was exhausted and took a long nap. I woke up and made a tasty batch of spaghetti out of random ingredients we had in the pantry and we ate while watching "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation," thus completing our annual trifecta of holiday movies which included earlier viewings of "Elf" and "Bad Santa."

This morning I awoke determined to get to the store for some groceries. All night long, it had continued to snow and drift. There was no way I was going to try to get my own car out, so I took my husband's Honda Element. It took at least a dozen tries, but I finally got out of the driveway and made it to the grocery store.

Here's what the driveway looks like now:

Note the drifts on the right-hand side, which my tiny little Honda Insight would have to plow through. It's just not going to happen.

My office is closed all next week, so I went ahead and got the ingredients for a variety of meals, including stuffed peppers, tacos, homemade pizza, stir-fry, and chicken noodle soup. Chili, meatloaf and potato soup are also possibilities. I grabbed two half-gallon bottles of milk, assuming we'd want it for cereal and baking, and I replenished our rapidly-diminishing coffee supply.

We know two guys with snowplows who live nearby, so odds are we'll get our driveway plowed today or tomorrow. Still, I wanted to be able to hole up and have tasty food choices in case another blizzard makes its way through.

Did you have a White Christmas? Was it merely pretty or was it as much of a pain as ours?