Category: Daily Life

This week felt as though it simultaneously rushed by and dragged on endlessly.  Even though the weekend will be just as hectic, I’ll be happy for the chance to at least sleep in once or twice.

I took the morning off from work yesterday, primarily to go to the doctor about the fact that I still get heartburn all the time despite the acid reflux medicine I take every morning. I doubted there was much she could do for me and I was right. She’s going to try having me take two doses a day for a couple of months and see if that settles things down.

She also lectured me a bit about my diet and it looks like I’m going to have to be better about avoiding some of my faves: ketchup, food containing tomato sauce (but I can make stuff with fresh tomatoes), vinegar, etc. Of course, I’m also supposed to limit caffeine, but I only drink it in the morning anyway.

Before my doctor’s appointment, I had an appointment in the same part of town to get my eyebrows tidied up.  While I was there, I invested in some decent makeup for once: Jane Iredale PurePressed Base.  It took some experimentation to settle on the right shade, but I think I’m really going to like it.

For my vocal lesson yesterday evening, I decided it would be nice to work on my ballad singing skills so I downloaded the karaoke track for "My Immortal" by Evanescence. It’s going well so far.

I had the house to myself after my vocal lesson, so I had drive-thru Schlotzsky’s for dinner and watched "My Name is Earl" and "The Office" with the cats.  (They were really more sleeping than watching.)

This weekend my husband has a gig with a country band tonight and Saturday, but that’s okay because I have a happy hour tonight and a book club meeting on Saturday.  On Sunday, we have a recording session scheduled with our guitarist and bass player.

So there’s my non-exciting life in a nutshell.  How’s your weekend looking?

I’m not going to lie to you, this is not going to be a very interesting post unless you come across it 100 years from now while you’re researching your dissertation on "Everyday Life in 2006."  However, I’m hoping it’ll help remind me of some of the things that keep slipping through the cracks every day once I get into work mode.

Dear Jane,

Please schedule the following appointments before the week is out:

• Exterminator (husband won’t set foot in the basement anymore because he’s afraid a spider might "get him")
• Septic tank (the last reminder card we received about this included a 10% discount coupon that has now been expired for two years)
• Massage (my spa gift certificate from Kaboodle arrived!)
• Printer repair (my laser printer is depressed and has decided to share its mood by shading each page in mottled grey)

While you’re at it, finish the lyrics for the last two songs you’ve been working on over the last several months, you lazy beyotch!

Thank you.

Your friend,

Jane

Let’s hope that helps.

In case you were not aware of it, today is Talk Like A Pirate Day.  That might make for some interesting meetings later on.

This seems like a good time for me to recommend some pirate-oriented entertainment.  If you haven’t read Gideon Defoe’s "The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists," I highly recommend it.  The sequel, "The Pirates! In An Adventure With Ahab" was okay, but not quite as funny.  I see from Amazon that there’s one called "The Pirates! In An Adventure With Communists" coming out next month.  I’ll have to add it to my wish list.  (Note: If you’re in the UK, some of the books have different names.)

If you don’t have time to read a bunch of books, you can always watch "Dodgeball" to pick up Steve the Pirate quotes.  Gar!  (My favorite thing about the entire movie is that the chest full of gold they win at the end has "Deus ex machina" written across the front.)

Okay, off to work.

Last Friday evening, my brother-in-law had planned a surprise party at a comedy club for my sister’s birthday. I’d known about it and had tickets for the past week or so, and I had to dodge my sister’s efforts to get me to babysit that evening and also bite my tongue when she revealed that she was going to the same theater the following night with some college friends.

We saw D.L. Hughley perform and he was funny enough that my face hurt from laughing by the time the show ended.  After the show, we walked to a pub and spent a couple of hours on the upper deck enjoying the warm evening breeze. 

The next night my husband and I had tickets to see Nickelback, Hoobastank, Chevelle and Hinder.  The show was held at an arena that isn’t used as a concert venue very much anymore.  I reviewed my collection of old concert ticket stubs the next day and it seems that I hadn’t been to a concert there since I saw Def Leppard in 1992.  The venue was a lot smaller than I remembered.

The main use of the arena is for the American Royal rodeo, and I noticed a distinct odor of Eau de Livestock when we sat down.  Sometimes it’s really difficult to make the case that Kansas City is not, in fact, a cowtown.

I was determined to party a bit, but it was not an easy task. The only beer for sale was Michelob Lite and Bud Light and it cost $6.00 a cup.  I guess the $24 I eventually spent must have accomplished something; I had my arm around my husband at one point and thought I was caressing his shoulder, only to realize that I was actually fondling the knee of the guy sitting behind him.  Heh.

The concert was the last one of the tour, so the bands were in practical joke mode.  Apparently Nickelback hired four male strippers to parade onto the stage during Hinder’s set.  I had to hand it to to the Hinder guys – they looked bemused but continued their song.

On Sunday, tapped out from the expense and effort of all of the previous evenings’ gaiety, we chose to stick close to home.  My husband watched football while I went and had my hair dyed back to dark brown for fall.  I also bought and read "My Sister’s Keeper" by Jodi Picoult for a book club meeting I have next weekend.  It’ll be nice to go and discuss a book that I didn’t read at the absolute last minute, for once.

This should be a very busy work week for me, but I’ve kept the evenings scheduled fairly lightly.  Aside from a Wednesday evening meeting and a probable recording session on some other night, I should be able to take it easy.

So what’s up with you?  Seen any good comedians or bands perform lately?  Have anything good scheduled for this week?

Lately I’ve been wrangling with designers and proofreaders at work over a habit that only someone about my age or older would have:  typing two spaces between sentences.

When I learned to type in high school, we used manual typewriters.  If you were really lucky, you could use one of the huge IBM Selectric typewriters now and then.  Because typewriters produce letters that are equally spaced, the teacher, Mr. Bates (or, as the class clowns found endlessly amusing, Master Bates, ha! ha!), taught us to put two spaces between sentences to make it easier to see the divide. 

Little did I know that in 20+ years, this habit would come to signify my advanced age and irritate everyone who handles my copy.

By the time I started working with word processors (WordPerfect for Windows 3.1 – woohoo!), my typing habits were already ingrained.  I still type 85+ words per minute, even allowing for the unnecessary spaces.

My wrangling with proofreaders doesn’t stop with the sentence spacing.  It turns out I’ve become sentimentally attached to word usage that has now been "modernized" and changed in ways I don’t like.  For example, I consider "backyard" an adjective and "back yard" a noun (with adjective sidecar).  Not so anymore, apparently.  Now "backyard" is the all-purpose word and you don’t get to use "back yard" at all anymore.  This makes me feel all pouty.

What about your habits have you realized shows your age in subtle ways?

On Saturday, I got up early to volunteer at a 5k fundraising race for Parkinson’s Disease.  After my last 5k experience, there was no way I was going to consider running or even walking, so I figured that volunteering was just as good.  I worked the finish line, calling out the numbers of the runners as they came in.  A lot of my co-workers ran and some of them had very impressive times, which made me even more glad that I hadn’t dragged my out-of-shape self through the course.

After that, I went to lunch with my sister at a lovely Swiss bakery, then met up with some friends for a beer and yet another meal, and returned home to take a much-needed nap.  I don’t even remember what we did that evening, so I imagine it involved lots of web surfing and other couch potato behavior.

On Sunday, I had two of my company’s tickets to see the Chiefs vs. the Bengals.  It was fun to go to the game, but not so much fun to watch Trent Green laid out on the turf for 15 minutes before they rolled him away.  My husband and I left before the end of the third quarter when there was a break in the rain, and listened to the predictable end of the game on the radio in the car.  When we got home, well, I took another nap.  Hey, it was grey and gloomy outside all weekend!

So, once again I didn’t really accomplish very much over the weekend.  However, I got in a lot of quality time with family members, friends, co-workers and the cats, so that’s something.

How was your weekend?

I’ve switched back to coffee in the mornings ever since my sister convinced me to order the Gevalia coffee pot and Breakfast Blend coffee.  I don’t know why I ever hesitated – it was $14.95 for a nice coffee maker and 2 pounds of coffee.

Until I got the Gevalia stuff, I’d had a series of cheapo Wal-mart coffee makers that made absolutely horrible coffee.  Rather than trying to solve the problem, I’d just stopped making coffee at home.  Now I make a 4-cup pot each morning, which fills up my thermal travel mug and gives me a few extra swigs for home. 

Today I carefully wrote out instructions for my husband so that he could make coffee for himself, too.  I don’t blame him for not knowing how; I never could figure out the whole measurement and coffee-to-water ratio thing either until I had a measuring scoop and some directions.

In other news, thank you to everyone who voted for my Kaboodle pages!  I just found out yesterday that I’ve won a $100 spa gift certificate in their BlogHer promotion.  Woohoo! I haven’t even received it yet and I’m already researching local spas and trying to figure out what kind of massage I want to get.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

I’d love to post something long and well thought out today, but I’m still working on the BlogHer presentation that I’m giving at work this afternoon.

Here are a few interesting things I’ve bookmarked in the past week:

• t-list – Get a t-shirt printed with your own personal top 5 list of overrated bands, favorite bands, films, artists or a collection of your interests.  As the site says, "Consider it the street-level lo-fi equivalent of the current wave of
  social software (MySpace.com, Friendster.com, last.fm et al.) and
  message board or LiveJournal ‘top 5 list’ discussions."
• VooDoo Babies – Creepy little yarn voodoo dolls that are cuter than you’d imagine.
• StolenGear.org – A site where musicians can list their gear that’s been stolen in the hope of getting it back.
• Star Trek Inspirational Posters – Exactly what it sounds like.  Nerdy and funny, but still not quite as good as Despair.com’s Demotivators.
• Last, but not least, GIANTMicrobes – Plush, stuffed toys representing the common cold, the flu, sore throat, stomach ache, cough, ear ache, bad breath, kissing disease, athlete’s foot, ulcer, martian life, beer & bread, black death, ebola, flesh eating, sleeping sickness, dust mite, bed bug, and bookworm microbes.  They also have a microbe-shaped liquid soap dispenser.

Have a lovely Thursday!

After my enjoyable but too short weekend, I decided to look and see how much vacation time I have left this year.  6.5 days!

Therefore, I have proposed to my husband that we take a week-long trip between now and the start of the really cold weather.  We’ll drive, of course.  Neither one of us is willing to put up with the hassles of flying anywhere right now.  If I can’t take a bottle of water with me on the plane, I ain’t flyin’.

Now we just need to decide where we can go that’s about a day’s drive away.

We’ve already been to Nashville, Tennessee several times (my husband lived there for 10 years), so that’s probably out, although I always love a nice breakfast at the Pancake Pantry.

South Dakota is an option.  We’ve never been there together and neither of us has been at all for many years.

I like Colorado, but I think any trip there should be outdoorsy, and hubby is too much of a city boy for hiking, fishing, etc.

We could always just focus on the trip rather than the destination and plan a route that takes us past a bunch of interesting stuff.  I don’t know – it’s going to be a challenge to decide.

Do you have any suggestions for an interesting stop or destination within 8-10 hours of Kansas City?  Help us plan our vacation!

I actually set my alarm this morning so that I could get up and take out the trash.  Nevermind that it would have been a lot easier to get off my lazy butt and take it out last night.  That wasn’t an option because I was too busy playing with Google Image Labeler.  It’s been fun, but it’s a huge time-sucker and I think I’m going to make a point of avoiding it from now on.

We get one large trash pickup on the first trash day of every month, so I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to dispose of the empty boxes and broken appliances that have been cluttering the house.  First to go:  the last two Littermaid cat boxes I purchased.

I used to be a huge booster of Littermaid, but their quality has gone down the toilet (no pun intended).  The last three I bought each broke within a month and there is no way in hell that I’m going to drag a stinky, used cat box back to the store, receipt or no, and try to exchange it.  Thus, into the trash they went.

My husband has been cleaning out and rearranging the studio this weekend, so it was time to get rid of the many shipping boxes that had been collecting near the door.  Ebay is great, but there’s really not much you can do with a giant, foam-stuffed cardboard box once you take out the merchandise.

All my grand plans for working over the weekend came to naught, so I’m going to make some coffee, get to work early, and burn through a couple of briefs I need to send off later this morning.  The personal stuff – getting the new blog off the ground and finishing my latest song – will have to wait until Wednesday night.

Okay, maybe Friday night.  I’m giving an hour-long presentation about BlogHer at work on Thursday, so I’ll probably need Wednesday night to prepare.  Ah, procrastination, how cruel you can be!