Category: Daily Life

Sleeping is one of my favorite activities, which makes it all the more uncharacteristic that I’ve been staying up really late recently.  I still wake up at 6:30 or 7:00 a.m., so I’m starting to get pretty worn down.

I used to be asleep by 10:00 or 10:30 p.m., but lately I find myself still surfing the net while Craig Ferguson introduces his final guest.  I’m not accomplishing anything worthwhile, unless you count gaining encyclopedic knowledge of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.  (And, damn, that’s a bizarre show.  Bizarre, and yet I cannot look away.)

If I were shredding my mountainous piles of junk mail or even folding laundry I might be able to justify the squandering of midnight oil.  As it is, all I can claim is more quality time with the cats.

On another subject, it was interesting to read everyone’s comments about bad pets yesterday.  I think we’ve learned that we shouldn’t attempt to befriend poultry.  Assuming that scientists are correct that modern birds descended from dinosaurs, perhaps we should take a moment to appreciate the fact that our world isn’t overrun by pea-brained, aggressive, toothy lizards.  It’s one thing to be attacked by a peacock, rooster or goose – it would be quite another to be chased down by even a small T-Rex.  Just a little food for thought as your week winds down…

Yesterday’s post on Fussy.org made me realize that I have a ridiculous number of dishes.  In fact, I have nearly three complete sets.

It all started with the set of cheap, clear glass Corning dishes I bought when I first moved out on my own.  They are as close to indestructible as dishes can be.  I’ve dropped them in the sink and frisbee’d them across the counter to no effect.  I think our cat managed to knock one of the bowls onto the slate floor of the kitchen hard enough to break it, but otherwise the set remains intact.  The plates are scratched and ugly now, but how can you throw away perfectly serviceable dishes?

When I got married, my mother insisted that I register for nicer dishes.  I didn’t want china, but I registered for a stoneware pattern that probably seemed like a great idea at that very moment, but is now as dated as a pair of stirrup pants layered with a shoulder-padded sweater.  It’s Noritake Sand ‘n Sky, if you feel like looking up a photo of it on Ebay to confirm my assertion.  The very fact that I would select something that had ‘n in its name tells you how compromised my taste was at the time.

Thanks to my Vegas wedding and at-home reception, the wedding gifts didn’t exactly come rolling in.  Thus, I didn’t get a full set of the Sand ‘n Sky (urgh!) until quite a few years later when my grandmother noticed the oversight and insisted on buying the rest.  By then I already knew I wasn’t exactly in love with them, but the cereal bowls are nice and large and I have the matching chip and dip set and gravy boat, so it seemed reasonable not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

I’m sure you’re thinking that’s all the dishes anyone could possibly need – and you’d be correct.  However, that didn’t stop me from buying another set of dishes a few years ago.  I was on a garage sale shopping roll one day when I spotted a nearly complete set of Vitromaster Jazz china for $25.  I was contemplating turning my guest room into a dining room (and, in fact, the contemplation continues) and I thought the colors in the Jazz dishes might be a good starting point for the decor.  The Jazz dishes have a little bit of an Art Deco feel, but they’re really the Madonna lace gloves and rubber bracelets that would nicely accessorize the aforementioned stirrup pants and linebacker sweater.  In other words, I don’t know what I was thinking.

So here I am with three sets of dishes hogging an entire kitchen cabinet.  We use the old glass dishes every day, move on to the stoneware ones when all of the glass dishes are dirty, and almost never use the china.  Yes, that was money well spent.

It’s all a symptom of my compulsive collecting of kitchen items.  But that’s a story for another time…

Clearly I’ve squandered some reader goodwill since I attracted so much attention last week with my food discussions.  I’ll try my best to hit upon something equally interesting again someday.  Then again, maybe you’re just as busy this week as I am and I’m being way too "Put ME out, I’M on fire."  I just can’t know, can I?

Even though yesterday’s Ask Average Jane proposal fell flat, I’ll still answer Stacie’s question about my archiving and calendar.  I wish I could take credit for mad programming skillz, but my calendar is merely an option offered by my blog host, Typepad. 

I have one blog on Blogger and several on Typepad and I have to say that Typepad is by far the superior system.  The Basic level of service is only $4.95 a month.  For Average Jane I use the $14.95 a month Pro service with more bells and whistles than I probably need, and there’s also a Plus level in between at $8.95 a month.  The comparison chart is here.

If you ever decide to switch blog platforms, I definitely recommend Typepad.  Occasionally they’ll have some access and speed issues, but they’re growing pretty rapidly and I imagine that’ll settle down eventually.

That’s all for this week.  Feel free to still ask a question.  In many ways, writing a blog entry is like cooking dinner:  the hard part isn’t the production, it’s deciding what you’re going to produce in the first place.

Sorry about not posting yesterday.  Wednesdays seem to be particularly hectic for me and often leave no time for blogging in the morning or evening.  Yesterday was a prime example, as I left the house a little after 8:00 a.m. and didn’t make it home until almost 9:00 p.m.

I’m trying to think of ways to cut down on my more unpleasant manifestations of stress and first on my list is a massage.  I have a gift certificate for a free one-hour massage from a massage therapist I’ve never been to before.  She lives about four blocks from me, so you’d think it would be a no-brainer, but I can’t seem to remember to bring her phone number with me when I leave the house.

I’m a big fan of deep-tissue massage.  Anything lighter seems like a waste of an hour of my life.  Back when I had more in the way of excess income, I used to try to get a massage once a month.  I think it’s been at least a year since my last massage.  Sigh.

Next on my priority list is trying to work in some kind of regular exercise.  I really enjoy yoga, but I’m not advanced enough to be able to maintain a creative and varied practice at home.  There’s a yoga studio not far from where I live, but the classes they offer at times I can work with are not the classes that I would necessarily prefer.

That leaves the treadmill in my guest room, which works perfectly well but is in no danger of ever wearing out because it sits upright and unused, day in and day out.  Once it gets warmer, I might be willing to take walks outside, but that tends to fizzle out after a few journeys to the closest places of interest.

I’m rambling, I know.  I need to get ready for another marathon day of work, so I’ll cut myself off. 

I’ll end with an idea designed to give me something to write about tomorrow that I ripped off from J-Walk Blog:  Ask Average Jane.  Ask me anything and I’ll try to answer to the best of my ability, research skill and willingness to be candid.  Use the comments area or e-mail me using the e-mail link on my About page.

I had a lot of things I should have done over the weekend before and after my niece’s visit.  Unfortunately, I rediscovered Yahoo Games and watched a Battlestar Galactica marathon instead.

A year or so ago I got hooked on the Bookworm game and played it incessantly.  In fact, I pretty much played it until I got so good at it that each game lasted forever and I finally stopped playing out of boredom.  My favorite game of late has been Jewel Quest and over the weekend I discovered Avalanche.  I’d probably play even more games, but I’m on a Mac laptop using Firefox, and most of the games just aren’t compatible.

It’s dangerous for me to have a laptop with a wireless connection next to the television.  I can stay rooted to one spot all day long playing games and watching TV, occasionally breaking away from the game to check the IMDB to sate my curiousity about the age of a particular actor or actress.  (Brigitte Nielsen is younger than Flava Flav by about four years.  Who’d have guessed?)

I did tear myself away to make pizzas from scratch with my niece on Saturday.  She "flatted" her own crust (which I think is a pretty inventive description of rolling out the dough if you don’t know the correct term) and selected and placed her own toppings (pepperoni, sausage and cheese).  We watched "Shrek 2" and afterward my niece treated me to her rendition of "Holding Out for A Hero."

Even though my niece won’t be five until April, she’s already learning to read a little bit.  She surprised me by reporting that I had the blender set to "Chop" and "On" when I was mixing my protein shake on Sunday morning.

She also quizzed me closely about when I’m going to have a baby (survey says:  never), which gave me flashbacks to my own childhood when I did the same thing to my aunt (who eventually did have my cousin, but not until I was a teenager).

So how was your weekend?  Did you manage to accomplish more than I did?  Did you manage to be even lazier than I was?  Let’s hear about it!

Maybe it’s post-holiday fallout or maybe it’s my rapidly increasing workload, but this week has seemed absolutely endless.  I’m practically beside myself with joy that it’s finally Friday.  I need a couple of days to lower my stress levels before my shoulder muscles snap from the tension and my lower esophagus dissolves from the excess acid.

So how was your week?

Really, though, despite my typically reflexive stress internalization, things should be more under control by next week.  Solutions are moving into place and the worst uncertainties are nearly resolved.  I just need to be patient a little longer, as difficult as that is for me.

On Saturday, my niece is coming over to spend the night.  I thought we’d make a pizza, although she is usually more interested in coloring with markers and watching DVDs than cooking.  It won’t hurt to offer, though.  Now that she has her own copies of "Shrek" and "Shrek 2" at home, I might have to consider a trip to Blockbuster to keep her entertained.

I guess I’d better go find some Tums and take a shower now.  There will be no coffee for me this morning, that’s for sure.  Wish me luck – despite the vagueness with which I have presented my situation!

I woke up this morning right after a dream that I’d returned home after a business trip and immediately gone to check on my pet monkey.  This dream is silly from the get-go because I have never had any desire to deal with the many problems that owning a monkey can present.

Anyway, in the dream, I find that my husband has purchased three more monkeys in my absence and they’re shunning my original monkey, causing her to huddle in a corner of her pen with mud on her fur.  This made me quite irate.  (I’ll thank all of you Freudians to keep your interpretations to yourselves.)

Then I woke up because one of the four lesser mammals we do own was poking me with his damp nose.

The only thing I can think of that would make me dream of having a monkey is our office in-joke based on the old Saturday Night Live "Bathroom Monkey" skit.  Whenever we don’t want to work on a project, we say, "Monkey hate clean."  Maybe that’s one of those "you had to be there" jokes.

That’s all I have for today, a little dollop of surrealness to start your morning.  I can’t even think of a question to ask, but feel free to tell me about any strange dreams you might have had that don’t relate to your real life at all.  If they involve a celebrity, so much the better!

The other day a friend and I discussed the differences between what we fix for dinner when our husbands are around and what we have when we’re on our own.  There are a number of nutritionally-suspect meals I would never feed to my diabetic husband that I eagerly make when I’m home by myself in the evening:

• Pork and beans over rice.  One serving of quick-cooking brown rice topped with a pat of butter and smothered with a can of Van Camp’s pork and beans that’s been heated on the stove.
• Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  Sure, they make EasyMac in small, microwaveable packets, but I can eat a whole box of regular Kraft Mac & Cheese made with butter (but no milk) and accented with freshly ground pepper.

• Tuna and cream of mushroom soup over rice.  Heat up the mushroom soup and tuna until bubbling, serve over white or brown rice.  This is tasty and filling, but it’s important to note that we called this "throw-up and rice" when I was a kid.  You can add a few frozen peas to make it marginally more attractive.  Potato chips are a tasty side item with this recipe.

This doesn’t count the perfectly legitimate foodstuffs that my husband just doesn’t like, such as pot roast, beets, tuna noodle salad, pork tenderloin, rotisserie chicken, ham with beans, steamed broccoli or cauliflower, etc.  Those things I usually eat in restaurants rather than waste the effort of cooking a huge meal that one of us won’t eat.  Too many rejected, large meals can lead to unwelcome homicidal thoughts on the part of the cook.

So tell me, what’s your "guilty pleasure" meal when you’re home alone?

Over the weekend I ran across a discussion thread on Salon’s Table Talk prompted by this question, "What ridiculous things do you squirrel away
compulsively, thinking that you’ll never get a chance at another one?
Why do you do it?"

I try very hard not to squirrel things away, as evidenced by the fact that I rent an enormous dumpster every year to clean out my house.  Still, reading other people’s stories showed me that I still have some squirreling tendencies, despite my best efforts to resist.  They include:

• Canned goods.  Tomato sauce, tomato paste, Ro-Tel tomatoes, red beans and tuna are all valuable staples.  Therefore, it seems reasonable to buy them every time I go to the grocery store, just in case I want to make a dish that contains one or more of them.  As you can imagine, I have quite the stockpile of most of these items (except when I don’t – you see how reasonable this is?).
• Plastic grocery sacks.  They’re perfect for wrapping up meat scraps to freeze until trash day or for disposing of kitty litter.  Unfortunately, I tend to amass them at a rate beyond their usefulness as trash sacks.  Still, I could take them back to the store for recycling, if I could ever remember to grab them when I’m on my way out the door.
• Castoff clothing.  I do a closet-and-drawer purge a couple times a year, but ever since I discovered It’s Deductible, I don’t just bag up the discards, take them to the charity shop and hazard a guess at the value.  No, I must save all the garments until I have time to enter them into the program one by one to get a more accurate value and itemized list for the accountant.  Unfortunately, I never seem to have the updated version of the software or the time to launch into the whole project.  My latest bag of clothes has been sitting so long that I actually retrieved a skirt that should have been long gone and wore it again.
• Cookie cutters.  Okay, this is a weird one, I know.  It all started because I wanted a set of the lumpy and indistinct Christmas cookie cutters I recalled from childhood (remember Hunchback Santa?  Anyone?).  I won at least two big Ebay lots after I’d already bought a bunch of newer cookie cutters that proved unsatisfying.  Let’s just say I have a whole kitchen drawer full of cookie cutters in every imaginable holiday shape.

Those are my worst squirreled items.  I have recovered from squirreling away gift boxes and Cool Whip bowls (mostly).  I could still stand to deal with the excess bedding I keep despite the fact that we no longer own a double bed and we won’t go into the reams of paper I keep in my file drawer "just in case."

So what do you tend to squirrel away?

This morning I went to open my garage door and discovered that it was frozen to the ground.  We had an ice storm followed by snow over the past few days, so this wasn’t a complete surprise, but I’ve been through many an ice storm without the garage door freezing shut. 

Rather than pausing to consider the novelty, I tried to unstick the door with a few kicks.  The mechanism strained and failed to open the door, so I desisted lest I break the opener.  It was time for a crowbar.

I was pretty sure my crowbar was in our shed, so I crunched through the snow and ice into the back yard.  The latch was coated in ice and wouldn’t move…until I gave it a nice karate kick.  The latch is slightly above my hip height and I was rather surprised that I could kick that high.  It did the trick, though, and I retrieved my crowbar, took it back to the garage, and pried along the bottom of my garage door until it broke free and opened.

My trip to work was uneventful.  The little Honda Insight gets around just fine in the snow and slush, although I don’t think I’d have chanced it yesterday.  Yesterday was Jeep weather all the way.

Today I’m back at work after failing to accomplish anything of note while attempting to "work from home" yesterday.  It’s about 7 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but the ice on the trees is really pretty when the sun shines through it.  That’s winter in the Midwest:  a bunch of mixed blessings for sure.