Blog

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?

Sorry I didn’t post on Friday.  I had a marathon business trip to Denver and back and I didn’t have time to write before I left.

When I got home, I was so wiped out that I could barely stay awake to watch a movie.  I made it through "Alien vs. Predator" (which wasn’t too bad), but slept through most of "Van Helsing" (which, from what I saw, was absolutely awful).

After I finally woke up at noon on Saturday, I ended up having a fairly active weekend.  We went bowling on Saturday night with four other couples.  I started out with a strike and a spare on the first game, but it was downhill from there.  I hadn’t bowled since last year;  my husband hadn’t bowled in about 35 years.  Luckily, it was all just for fun.

For the past several years I’ve meant to plant a kitchen garden, and yesterday I finally made it happen.  I went to a huge garden center to buy potted herbs:  oregano, cilantro, parsley, thyme, rosemary and more.  I was tempted to buy hundreds of dollars worth of other plants, too, but I limited myself to the project at hand.

When I got home, I dragged my small roto-tiller out of the shed and began the laborious process of trying to get it to start for the first time of the season.  I don’t do any of the proper maintenance, so it’s always a struggle to get it going each spring.  It finally started and I tilled a strip of ground in front of an existing flower bed to the left of our front door.

I edged the new garden with bricks, picked out all the grass and weeds that were mixed into the dirt, and went to a nearby hardware store for manure, peat and topsoil.  Once the bed was prepared, I planted each herb and seeded lettuce around the perimeter of the bed and between each plant.

The result is a tidy row of varying shades and textures of green plants set off by black dirt.  My husband suspects that the rabbits will get more benefit out of the garden than we do, but I hope he’s wrong.

Today I have sore muscles from shoulder to knee, but it felt good to get outside and accomplish something.  This week includes another business trip and a massive amount of office time, but at least I’ll be able enjoy watering my new garden each morning before I face the day.

My husband and I went to my aunt’s house on Sunday afternoon.  As we prepared to leave, she said, "You have to try these."

She handed me what looked like two tiny, elongated oranges and said they were kumquats.  I’d heard of them but never tried one before.  Despite her assurance that they were delicious and could be eaten peel and all, I thanked her and tucked them into my purse for further consideration. 

Yesterday morning I noticed an odd odor.  At first I thought it was something in the house, but it followed me to work and intensified when I opened my purse.  It smelled like…a rotten orange.  Aaagh!  I’d forgotten to take the kumquats out of my purse!

My purse is at a record low for excess junk, but it was still a challenge to locate even one of the kumquats.  The second one was still more difficult to find because, well, it was the odor culprit and it had turned grey and fuzzy.  Ick.

The pungent smell permeated my purse and all its contents to the extent that removing the source had minimal effect.  I can only hope that airing it out will help eventually because there’s not much more than can be done.

That was my lesson for the week:  Don’t put food in your purse. 

Would I have told this story if the fruit in question had been limes or plums?  Perhaps not.  A legitimate chance to use a funny word like "kumquat" is impossible to resist.  Say it with me:  "Kumquat, kumquat, kumquat."

</silliness>  Thank you.

We slept with the windows open last night!  Spring is on its way!

Winter wasn’t that bad this year, but I am so happy that the season is changing.  I’ve been keeping a tally of each sign of spring I see:

• Crocuses blooming
• Robins in the yard
• Daffodils blooming
• A bluebird in my sister’s yard
• Greening grass
• Hyacinths blooming
• Magnolia trees and forsythia bushes covered in blossoms

All leading to last night’s warm, windy weather that allowed us to air out the house and sleep bathed in fresh breezes. 

Man, this topic lends itself to a lot of alliteration!  (I almost said "bathed in balmy breezes," but even I know when to pull back.)

Have a lovely pre-spring Wednesday!