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I accomplished a great deal yesterday, and even though I doubt you’ll find it particularly interesting, I’ll catalog my achievements so I can at least admire them myself:

• Finished a well-received 7-page report for work
• Put away two weeks’ worth of clean laundry
• Washed a week’s work of pots and pans
• Went to the office and tidied up other work projects’ loose ends
• Had a huge lunch of pot roast, mashed potatoes, vegetables and peach cobbler, then did not fall asleep at my desk later
• Attended a club board meeting and submitted my resignation so a replacement can be elected to finish the second year of my term
• Drove 25+ miles from the meeting to band practice and caught the last hour or so of a really good audition of a second guitarist
• Had a shameful dinner of Velveeta on toast
• Watched everything good that TiVo had ready (notably, Scrubs)
• Fell asleep on the couch and crawled into bed around midnight.

My goals for today:

• Complete my timesheets for work (at this point, I’m 6 days behind)
• Clean off my desk at work (no desk surface remains visible)
• Clean out my “In Box” in Outlook
• Do actual work, if applicable and appropriate

Wish me luck!

I’ve been thinking and thinking about what to write this morning, but I’m all tapped out from spending the early part of the morning writing a report for work. Today I think it would be best if you just moved along to the next blog. I’ll do some thinking and I’m sure I’ll have something delightful for you tomorrow.

In the meantime, why not go to my favorite recipe site and find something to make for dinner? That would be a productive use of the time you ordinarily spend reading Average Jane. Just trying to be helpful…

I spent the weekend out of town at a district meeting of my community service organization. I roomed with a fellow club officer and things were going pretty well until about 1:00 a.m. the first night. I don’t know what woke me up, but I quickly realized that my roommate snored. In fact, she snored a lot like my husband, only more steadily. At home, I have a loud fan on my bedside table to drown out all intruding noises. The hotel room, on the other hand, was completely silent…except for the implacable snoring.

As I lay there awake, listening to the snoring that still penetrated the toilet paper I’d stuffed into my ears, my mind touched on each of the snoring solutions I’d ordinarily use at home: pillow throwing, verbal abuse, etc. Unfortunately, these options are all far too rude for use on a casual acquaintance. I realized I was hungry, so I fished a meal replacement bar out of my purse and ate it. The next thing I knew it was 6:00 a.m. and the alarm was ringing. Hooray! I’d fallen back asleep!

The next night I figured I’d be okay because I had a couple of glasses of wine in the hospitality suite before bedtime. I was oh, so wrong. This time I woke up at 2:00 a.m. I already knew that plugging my ears was a waste of time. I’d thought of a solution, but it was a little drastic. If my roommate happened to get up, she’d know how much her snoring was bothering me, and I didn’t want that. I hesitated for a while, but soon I knew there was only one thing to do.

I scooped the sheets, blankets and pillows off my bed and deposited them in the bathtub. With the bathroom fan on and the door shut, I turned off the lights, burrowed under the covers, and slept in the tub for four surprisingly comfortable, silent hours. I woke up just before 6:00 a.m. and dumped all the bedding back on my bed before my roommate awakened. I’d made it through!

It had to be done. Ever since my last hair appointment, my hair has looked absolutely awful. The highlights were uneven and I had acres of dark roots showing. (My bangs are too short, too, but they’ll grow.) At first I enjoyed the brighter blonde hair, but lately it’s taken a turn toward the trailer park; gone from flashy to trashy. My brief fling with the cheaper hairstylist is over.

I’m attending a big client function today followed by a weekend-long conference for my community service organization. Yesterday I took a hard look at myself in the mirror. My hair did not say, “Professional writer” nor did it say, “Trusted club vice-president.” It said something more along the lines of, “Down-on-her-luck, aging hooker.”

I’d been strongly considering dyeing my hair since the beginning of the week. Ignoring the well-intentioned color advice of my co-workers (blue), I selected a dark blonde shade from the drug store last night, knowing that it would probably turn out more of a light brown on my over-bleached hair. I opened the box as soon as I got home, but chickened out and watched “Lost” first. Then I pondered my reflection for a few seconds and realized I couldn’t stand to go out in public in that state again.

As I expected, my hair turned out light brown. The good news is that it’s a shade that you might reasonably expect to find on the head of a person with my eyebrow color. The bad news is that it’s a little bit ginger-colored and it may very well get too reddish as it fades. If I have to, I’ll just go with a darker color through the fall and winter until I decide whether I’m going to have another go at blonde highlights. Who says only animals get winter coloration?

Pounding headache, upset stomach, general listlessness…these are just a few of the delightful symptoms that I’ve been experiencing since yesterday afternoon.

I was planning to work a little late yesterday but I kept having to leave my desk and lie down, which is never a good sign. I left the office and immediately got caught in a horrendous traffic jam that took my 10-minute commute and stretched it to almost an hour.

Once I got home, I installed myself in bed and didn’t really get up again until a few minutes ago. I just had a couple of pieces of toast since it occurred to me that I didn’t have any dinner. I’m trying to knock back the headache with aspirin and a can of Coke.

I have way too much going on to actually skip a day of work, so I’m going to try to suck it up and get out the door, even though I still feel craptacular (not to be confused with crepuscular, which is a really ugly word for an otherwise innocuous idea, don’t you think?). Hey, a language joke – the Coke must be working!

Okay, I’m finished whining now, but you’d best move on to someone more cheerful.

Thanks to an ill-fitting storm window, we have a fascinating situation developing right outside our living room. A group of wasps is busily building a nest in the upper right corner of one of our living room windows. There’s a spider with a dense web in the lower right corner of the same window.

You’d think that the spider would be all set for a wasp smorgasbord, but I’ve observed that the wasps are strong enough to escape if they become caught in the web. They’ve learned to traverse the grooves along the window frame and avoid the web on their way in and out.

The spider seems to have no shortage of victims, though.

My husband and I are finding the whole thing so interesting that we hesitate to exterminate our little visitors. It’s like having a four-foot tall, two-species ant farm.

For now, we’ll leave the wasps and spider as an exhibit. Once we can afford new storm windows, though, all bets are off.

Tomorrow and Thursday I have meetings that will require me to dress like a professional woman in lieu of the “beach bum” look I usually go for. Luckily, I have a sister with great taste in clothes who ordinarily wears the same size as I do, except that she’s pregnant right now. That means she has a huge, walk-in closet full of fashiony goodness just sitting idle.

The dress I wore to that wedding on Saturday? Hers. In fact, I borrowed the same dress and wore it to a wedding last November. I don’t remember the sleeves being quite so snug back then. Perhaps the dress shrank a bit in the meantime…

I went to my sister’s house for dinner last night, which gave me the opportunity to borrow yet another outfit (I’m keeping the dress through the weekend because I’m attending a conference and might need it for Saturday night’s dinner). That means I still have one day this week when I’ll have to come up with clothes on my own. Aaagh, the pressure!

You’d think I’d be able to take the lessons in fit and style I’ve learned from wearing my sister’s clothes and apply them when I go shopping. Unfortunately, my attention span for shopping is almost nil. Once I’ve tried on three or four items, I’ve had more than enough views of my pasty, doughy skin under the greenish florescent lights. By then I’ve realized I don’t wear the size I thought I did, I hate myself and all of the available clothing, and I really need some caffeine or maybe an ice cream cone, but NO!, not an ice cream cone because that’s the kind of thing that got me into this mess! So I go home without any new clothes and continue the “I have nothing to wear cycle” the next morning, ad infinitum.

The solution? I don’t know, maybe a patient friend with a good eye for style who can dissuade me from bolting from the store the minute I start to tire of the whole operation. Any volunteers?

This was a pretty busy weekend. I finally saw “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.” I thought it was absolutely gorgeous and technically impressive, but the story, characters and plotline were merely coat hangers upon which the “look” was hung. On the other hand, my husband enjoyed the story and hated the look and color palette, so there you are.

We attended a lovely wedding on Saturday night. The wedding and reception took place at a stone and timber park lodge that had been built as a WPA project. The wedding was outside on a natural-stone patio overlooking a lake, and the weather was perfect, except for a little too much sun in our eyes. My favorite moment at the reception was when one of the little girls asked her mother if she could have her picture taken with “the princess,” meaning the bride. Why are little girls so princess crazy these days? Oh that’s right, it’s the Disney master plan. I forgot.

I took a few hours on Sunday to go to a local autumn festival with my sister. We’d already had chili at my house, so we limited ourselves to apple dumplings with vanilla ice cream, fresh-squeezed lemonade (limeade in her case) and a bag of kettle corn each (to go). I was keeping an eye out for the bierocks I’d had the last time we went, but I didn’t see them anywhere. I guess I’ll have to make a batch myself.

This week is going to be typically non-stop. I’ve managed to winnow down my after-work schedule so that I only have one place to be each day (except on Thursday I have a meeting and then band practice). Still, my schedule feels more open now because I’m doing things I want to do as opposed to things I wish I’d turned down when I had the chance. Enough rambling, then. Have a delightful Monday.

Yesterday I finally brought my espresso maker to the office to try to save some of the money that Starbucks keeps managing to weasel out of my wallet. Of course, there’s too much involved in making the iced Café Mochas I’m fond of, so I’ve fallen back to Café Americanos (espresso shots diluted with hot water). Now I’m so awake, I’m not sure my eyes close all the way when I blink.

I used to have a love/hate relationship with caffeine. I’d give it up for a while, suffer through the withdrawal symptoms, and swear that I’d never go back. Problem is, I like caffeine. I don’t really care that it’s an addictive drug, as long as it keeps me semi-focused and awake.

I started out as a fan of strong tea (Earl Grey, brewed until it’s almost opaque), then I moved on to coffee. At first I drank coffee with cream and sugar, then I learned to love cappuccinos and lattes. Now I’m less concerned about the taste than the act of getting the active ingredients into my system in the most efficient manner possible.

Maintaining my coffee habit takes a little extra work on the weekends. I don’t brew coffee at home just for myself, so I have to make a point of procuring some elsewhere before the headaches set in. Otherwise, I’m perfectly happy with the coffee monkey on my back. I think I’m going to have to start bleaching my teeth again, though…

I don’t know if it’s my more open schedule, the fact that fall is setting in, or some other factor, but lately I’ve started cooking meals at home again. This week I’ve made two dinners and a breakfast, which probably surpasses the number of meals I’d cooked in the previous two months.

When I was growing up, my mother knew a couple who never cooked. She’d say with obvious disapproval, “They eat out at every meal.” It made me feel a little smug that we almost never ate out.

Fast forward 20 years or so and here I am racing from place to place every evening, trying to think of the least evil fast food available in the 10 minutes I have before I’m due at my next appointment. We eat so much Subway that I can smell the rolls baking in my sleep.

There’s nothing I can do about band practice nights, but I’m really making an effort to stay in and feed us at home on the other evenings. It’s relatively inexpensive, potentially healthier and usually tastier than eating out. If only my husband would do the after-meal cleanup, the scenario would be ideal.

Tonight, well, we’re buying tamales from our favorite little Mexican restaurant because there’s a band meeting at our house and that’s what everyone requested. However, I’m thinking that a beef stew made in the Crockpot would be ideal for Friday night. If we don’t have to fight the rest of the metro area for a restaurant table that evening, maybe we can actually manage to make it to a movie. I guess we’ll see what happens.