Category: Daily Life

Yesterday morning I could barely resist the urge to skip work and play in the sunshine all day.  Instead, I skipped my daily blog entry.  Sometimes life is all about compromises.

Really, I didn’t have much to say.  I had a delightful weekend celebrating my husband’s birthday with a series of fun activities, none of which sound nearly as interesting when reeled off in print.  We’ve decided that we’re bored to death with going to the movies, going to the same old restaurants, etc., and our goal for the spring and summer is to seek out different things to do.  As of this weekend, we’ve covered:

• Friday night happy hour with friends
• Dinner and drinks at a restaurant and bar featuring a jazz singer and keyboardist
• Visit to a museum of modern art
• Lunch in the museum’s courtyard
• Garage sale that happened to feature a live band

See, I told you it doesn’t sound all that interesting, but it was one of the most pleasant and relaxing weekends I’ve enjoyed in a long time.  I remember smiling a lot.

My payback for ignoring the blog on Monday is that I had to deal with an infestation of comment spam this morning.  Man, that’s irritating.

Today I’m not so disinclined to go the office, mainly because it looks as though it’s going to start raining at any moment.  I have a busy week planned, including lunches with friends almost every day, activities every evening and two birthday celebrations for my niece.

This should be a delightful spring and summer.  I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.

To say that I have a poor sense of direction is a massive understatement.  Not only do I have trouble finding my way around in a car, but it took me years to develop a reasonable amount of confidence regarding which was my left hand and which was my right.  (Hint:  Hold up both hands in front of you with the thumbs parallel to the ground.  The one that forms the letter "L" is left.  You’re welcome!)  We won’t even talk about how long it took me to learn to tell time.

I know I have bad directions genes because I clearly remember my grandmother driving around with a water-filled compass mounted next to the rear view mirror in her car.  Still, I usually get around okay in the car, but that’s mainly because I’ve lived all my life in the same town.  However, I’ve gotten lost twice this week and driven around in circles trying to find my way back to a familiar road, all because I never have any idea which direction I’m headed at any given time.

On Wednesday night I attended an event at a college about 50 miles from home.  I couldn’t leave the auditorium parking lot the way I came in because of all the traffic, and consequently I got trapped within the campus for a good 15 minutes or so.  I didn’t know any of the street names and I couldn’t even hazard a guess at the direction I should be heading, so there was a great deal of U-turning and doubling back before I finally reached a street with a name that meant something to me.  Eventually, I made it to the street I needed to get home, but I wasted a lot of time in the process.

Clearly I’m having a multi-day bad direction spell because yesterday I got lost again.  I was heading to my dad’s house (which is less than five miles from my house), when I encountered a detour around some road construction.  I followed the first sign but didn’t see any further ones, so I turned left, which should have led straight back to the road I wanted.  Except it didn’t.  I found myself wandering aimlessly through a neighborhood I don’t know at all, vainly hoping to find a street I recognized.  I finally encountered a main road less than two miles from my house, which meant that I’d ended up almost halfway back home as I meandered around.  Sigh.

I don’t know if the solution is a car compass, a GPS, a homing pigeon or what, but it certainly is awkward to try to explain how you got lost two miles from your own house.  From now on, maybe I should hire a guide…

I have been visiting the same dental office since I was a child.  As of this morning, I have seen four different dentists there and watched the surrounding neighborhood decline in minor increments with each visit.

My first dentist was a wizened gnome of a man who was not at all sympathetic when I cried about having my first cavity when I was in college.  It wasn’t exactly comforting that he was an old-school amalgam filling guy.

When he died, there was an interim dentist that I barely remember and then the practice sold to another dentist who stayed there for many years.  I remember him as a friendly, soft-spoken man with very large fingers who eventually replaced all my ugly metal fillings with more attractive porcelain ones (and added quite a few besides).  He recently gave up his practice to devote time to some family issues, so I knew that my appointment this morning would be with yet another new dentist.

In the course of making the appointment, I learned that the receptionist was the new dentist’s wife and that she was very pregnant.  That led me to suspect that he was rather young, but I don’t think I was quite prepared for the reality.  I kid you not, he looked like he was twelve.

That was neither here nor there, but I couldn’t help reflecting on the course of dentists who had ranged from my grandparents’ age, to my parents’ age, to just a little older than I am and finally ended with this guy who could have been my own son if I’d been a more reckless teenager.

The hygienist took x-rays, partly because I was overdue thanks to a missed appointment late last year and partly because I suspected a cavity on the upper left.  She went to develop the film and the dentist proceeded to skewer my gums with the sharp, metal hook.  I’m used to a gentle cleaning by a hygienist, so I wasn’t too thrilled with the torture treatment.  The dentist gave me the usual lecture about flossing and brushing my gums.  Whatever, Junior. 

The hygienist then did a ham-handed polishing job that flicked sandy, mint-scented gobbets of paste onto my face continuously until she finished.  In the meantime, the dentist examined my x-rays and reported that I did not have a cavity on the left side, but I did have one on the right.  It was difficult for me to resist the urge to ask him if he was sure he hadn’t read the x-rays backwards.

I have a filling appointment scheduled a few weeks from now, but I’m having a difficult time deciding if I want to continue with the whippersnapper dentist and his klutzy assistant or if it might be time that I moved on to a more convenient location with more experienced personnel.  On one hand, I’m sure the young ‘un is probably well versed in the newest dental theories and techniques.  On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to serve as his practice case while he perfects his craft.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy my clean, smooth teeth and the cool orange and green toothbrush I got.  It doesn’t quite make up for my unpleasant morning, but it’s a start.

There’s nothing I enjoy more than a long, uninterrupted sleep.  Unfortunately, I’m a fairly light sleeper, so I tend to wake up a little irritated each morning by either my husband’s snoring or some kind of feline interference.

My husband is in the midst of a massive project to clean up our office/studio room, and he stayed up all night last night working on it.  Not only did that spare me the snoring, but it kept the cats dancing around by the door at the foot of the stairs all morning, wondering when he would come down and play with them.

Work has been busy and stressful lately, so I am extremely grateful for the good, long sleep.  I ended up sleeping a little longer than is ideal so I have to cut this short, but I predict that the world will face a calmer, happier Jane today.  Woe betide anyone who messes this up!

Has anyone else noticed how broken Hotmail is lately?  I think they may have just given up in the battle against Yahoo and Gmail.

Every time I log into my Hotmail account, it starts with a lovely purple error message that the page I’m trying to reach is no longer available or doesn’t exist.  It’s only fooling, though, because my account page appears as soon as the message disappears.

I pay for the premium Hotmail service so I can check my mail from my POP accounts.  There’s a setting that specifically says "Download new messages only," but that feature stopped working several months ago.  That means every time I check my POP messages, it pulls all of them down again.  If it’s been a couple of days since I dumped my e-mail to Outlook at home, I can end up with so many repeat messages that it’s no longer practical to keep wading through all of them just to see what’s new.  Did I mention it rearranges the messages fairly randomly, too?

I’m perfectly satisfied with the Yahoo account I use for Average Jane and the Gmail accounts I use for various other purposes (although Gmail takes a little getting used to).  I think it may be time to kick Hotmail to the curb and save $19.95 per year plus a whole lot of aggravation.

I’m waiting until the last possible second to mail my tax returns because I owe money and that always makes me a tad bitter.  I actually got money back from one state already, but I owe the Feds and my state of residence.  Sigh.

The good news on the financial front is that I’ve consolidated our credit cards and one other small loan into a home equity loan with a way lower interest rate than I was paying for any of them separately.  We’ve closed our credit card accounts and from now on we’re pursuing the radical philosophy of Living Within Our Means.  Sounds un-American, I know, but what can you do?

A side effect of this plan is that my husband and I now have debit cards for the first time ever.  I’m a little worried about my ability to effectively keep track of my debit card spending.  It might make me have to do something crazy…something I haven’t done in many years:  balance my checkbook.  That’s a last resort, though.  For now I’ll just hang onto my receipts, log them, and try to keep the total within my typical cash spending range for a given week.

We received our debit cards in the mail on Saturday and I still can’t get used to not having cash in my purse.  I know I don’t really need it, but I feel as though I can’t afford to eat lunch without at least $5 in paper money.  It’s been 15 years since I even had an ATM card, so I’m clearly in for some major readjustments in thinking now that I can spend money from my account without driving to the credit union or cashing a check at the grocery store.

The one thing that’s going to give the new budget a fighting chance is my hybrid car.  With gas prices rising steadily, I’m still paying about $50 to fuel the Honda Insight every month.  Yes, I said month.  You can’t fully grasp how much you spend on gasoline until that cost suddenly plummets.  Seriously, it’s almost covering its own payments in savings.

That’s all for today.  Wish me luck in my new budget plan and kindly stage an intervention if I start talking about churning my own butter!

For months on end, our phone rang every day at exactly 7:40 a.m.  I’m almost always awake then, but the caller ID would say "Unknown" and I think that’s way too early for someone to call, so I ignored the calls every day.

Finally, last Saturday morning I’d had enough.  I was tired and cranky from traveling, so when the phone rang at the usual time, I picked it up and snarled, "This is way too early to be calling on a weekend!"  Then I hung up.  Yeah, I know, I get that way sometimes.

So, yesterday I was flipping through our mail when I came upon an envelope from an unfamiliar company, addressed to me.  I opened it to find a letter from a market research company.  They apologized for bothering me recently and enclosed a dollar.

For a millisecond, I felt a little guilty for my crabby outburst because it was definitely the right kind of gesture for a company to make when they’ve done something to irritate a consumer.  However, it doesn’t excuse incessant weekend calling at the butt-crack of dawn.

As I was relating the story to my husband we both realized, "Wait a second – we’re not getting those early morning calls anymore either!"

Not having to sprint to the phone in the middle of getting ready for work each morning is way more valuable to me than a dollar.  If I’d known that the Greta Garbo approach to auto-dialers was so effective, I’d have tried it a long time ago.

I just returned from a very productive business trip to Wisconsin.  For those of you keeping score, that’s two trips in less than a week.  And yes, I’m pretty tired.

I zipped through airport security just fine on both trips, so apparently I look less suspicious when I’m traveling alone than when I’m with my husband.  It probably helped that I’m perfecting the Air Travel Uniform:  business casual attire with easily removed shoes, no belt, underwire-free bra and no jewelry. 

Speaking of traveling alone, I couldn’t help noticing that I was the only woman in the hotel restaurant at breakfast yesterday.  When I entered the mostly empty restaurant, I randomly chose a seat toward the back.  As I drank my coffee and ate my flavorless, rubbery scrambled eggs and greasy toast and hash browns, the front of the restaurant filled up with groups of men in suits, but the only other women I saw throughout the entire meal were the servers.  Maybe all the other women in the hotel knew better places to eat!

I had an all-day meeting, so I didn’t get the chance to bring home any cheese curds or other Wisconsin souvenirs.  At the rate I’m going, it would bankrupt me to try to bring something home from each trip anyway.

As far as I can determine, I’m through with travel for the time being.  I have a fiendish amount of work to do at the office, so let’s hope I can get most of it under control before I set foot on another plane.

These two trips are the first I’ve taken with this job, although I used to travel quite a bit for another company (mainly to do grueling trade shows).  I find that business travel is often more satisfactory than leisure travel because your expectations are more limited.  What do you think?  Do you have any interesting business travel fiascos to report?

Yesterday’s post about family superstitions made me think of something else that involves a lot of traditional but not necessarily effective folk wisdom:  hiccup remedies.

Everyone has the one Grandma recommended, the one Mom thought was better and the one picked up along the way that he or she thinks works best of all.  I can think of several right off:

• My mother’s advice: "Hold your breath and count to 79," which seems a trifle excessive and still doesn’t always work.
• One I learned in school that strikes me as a little scary:  close your eyes and press lightly on your eyelids.
• My husband’s favorite tip:  swallow a spoonful of sugar.
• My personal favorite:  drink a glass of water.

What hiccup cures do you know about that I didn’t list here?  Do they work?

On Sunday, my husband and I went to a neighboring state to eat lunch at our favorite Chinese restaurant.  As we crossed the state line, I asked automatically, "Did you hold your breath?"

He logically asked, "Why?"  My illogical answer:  "For good luck."

When my sister and I were growing up, our mother always advised us to hold our breath as we crossed the state line.  What could possibly be the reasoning behind that superstition?  That it’s lucky to bring a lungful of your own state’s air with you when you cross?  How long is the luck supposed to last anyway?

It got me thinking about other holdovers from childhood that I still practice without thinking.  Most of them involve wishing:

• Blowing a stray eyelash off your fingertip and making a wish.
• Pulling a chicken or turkey wishbone and making a wish.
• Blowing out birthday candles and making a wish.
• Wishing on a shooting star.
• Throwing a coin into a fountain or well and making a wish.

Those are all the ones I can think of off the top of my head, but I’m sure there are more family superstitions lingering in my subconscious.  What about you?  Do you have any superstitious habits held over from childhood that seem silly now that you’re an adult?  What are they?