Stuology

I have that muffled voice thing going on for me again, my throat feels swollen, and my right lymph node in my neck feels like it is the size of a tangerine. I’ve slept an entire three hours. Back to work today. Joy.

Oh, sore, horrible throat of pain! At least my entire head doesn’t feel like it is about to explode, and I can hear out of my left ear again, but my throat really, really hurts.

If it still hurts tomorrow, I will get to use my new, crappier, and more expensive health insurance that went into affect on January 1st. I need to look up and see if my doctor is even in the plan. They wouldn’t allow me to look that information up until January 1st, even though I had to elect this coverage the beginning of November. I probably could have just called his office and asked though.

I start working again on Monday^*. I like 90% of my job, so it isn’t a big deal. It will probably take a day to get my brain ramped back up. I’ve not been working on my current project since December 18th. I don’t even fully remember where I was at in this particular project.

I made a trip to KC to get my hair a much overdue cut and color. Part of the delay was procrastination and part was to grow out hair that I wanted cut off. I kept the same asymmetrical cut, but I went much shorter on my longer side. It was feeling dry and brittle from not being cut as much as the other side. I wanted to start over on that side. My hair grows pretty fast. It will only take about 4 months for it to be long again. I darkened it again, and went with red highlights–the red that matches my walls.

I’m getting a head cold, or something. I had a hard time sleeping last night, feeling a bunch of drainage that was making my throat sore. I woke up about 4 hours later, and couldn’t get back to sleep. Right now, the entire left side of my head feels like it is going to explode. I can barely hear out of my left ear. I have a feeling it will be another crappy night of sleeping.

*I actually start work at 8:00pm tonight for an outage. As long as everything goes well, it will be easy. Possible bad weather in some of our areas has postponed this until next Saturday.

My first boule

Here is the bread creation from the NYE get together. Now that I’ve had hands-on instruction on how to shape the dough, I just need the practice to get it perfectly round like the one in the back. Here is another photo.

I had some with lunch today. It was delicious!

Daycare opens again tomorrow. That is my last vacation day, and Mac and I can spend it together without kids in tow. I’m not sure what we are going to do yet.

I have to get back to work on January 5th. Well, technically, in the evening of January 3rd, but only for a few hours.

Today is the day we mark for giving ourselves a fresh start. I was going to post some more about this, but I am tired enough that my brain is fogged. I finally was tired enough to fall asleep a little before 4:00am. We had good company last night. I was instructed in the ways of shaping a boule loaf. I have photos that I will post later tonight. I even got to peek at a Google phone, and see the application that I wish I had in my iPhone.

As far as resolutions go, I still hold the same stance. People who don’t keep them likely do not make attainable ones. They make broad ones with no clear means to measure if they have succeeded. How to write goals is one part of corporate life that I have found useful. People’s goals usually involve these types of things:

• Lost weight
• Eat healthier
• Save money
• Be happy
• Stop procrastinating

How do you measure your success with this? How, in one year, do you accomplish this big list of vague tasks? If you want to be successful in your goals for 2009, take each of your general goals and write down more measurable goals. Then write down a list of things you think you can do to accomplish them. Pick which of those you feel would make your goal a success, and then put a timeline to when you want to accomplish it. I’ll pick one from this list now:

Stop Procrastinating

Measurable Goals
These items are suffering because I put them off

• Cleaning the house
• Exercising
• Photography
• Fix bathroom faucet
• Renew Costco memebership

Plan
Looking at this list, part of my problem is procrastination, and part of it is time management. Here are things I can do to tackle the above list:

• Read through Getting Things Done by David Allen — the guru of time management
• Keep an updated list of priorities–It is true that you only have a limited amount of time, but that isn’t the problem for not getting any exercise or learning how to cook healthier meals or getting your laundry done. The biggest problem for those is that you don’t have the correct priorities. Change your priorities, and you will get those things done.

Timeline

• GTD — get this read before the end of January. Start putting it into practice by the beginning of February. One month of reading a little every night during the week would be plenty to get started in February.
• Make your priority list of small, attainable tasks every Sunday, and pick one to do every day of the week.
• Renew that freakin’ Costco membership right now. You do it online and you are sitting in front of your laptop.

[Time passes]

[Even more time passes]

Costco membership is renewed. It took forever. Their site is slow and there are way too many steps just to renew a membership. Maybe membership renewal is on everyone’s resolution list.

My tiredness is now bordering on really bad eyestrain headache. I’m eating some leftover bisque with some bread that was made last night and then taking a nap.

New Shiny

I finally took a photo of the new shiny that I got for Christmas. I’ve never owned a large stock pot. Now I do. Santa also filled my stocking with kitchen gadgets: two silicon spatulas, a new lighter for candles^*, corn on the cob holders, a jar opener, and these silicon collapsible measuring cups that I’ve been drooling over, but haven’t purchased since I have measuring cups that work.These new cups will withstand temperatures to 650-degrees, should that ever be a requirement for a recipe, I’m set. Two of my old 1980s blue, plastic measuring cups that I’ve had since I got my first non-dorm place in Lawrence are now in the bread and whole wheat flour containers acting as scoops^**. The other two were given to my children this morning to play with since they both want to anyhow when I cook. Now they have two measuring cups, three old plastic green and blue measuring spoons and an old pan that they can use to play with. They usually put a sweet potato or squash in the pan and pretend to cook.

My new template doesn’t work for my photos. If I have time soon, I’ll adjust it to work better. I think a lot of people just read my RSS feed anyhow, so maybe it doesn’t matter much.

*Santa must have gotten tired of hearing me constantly ask “Do you know where the lighter is?” We have one downstairs and one upstairs. Now we have two upstairs.

**I do all my bread baking by weight, so for that I just need to scoop flour into my bowl on the scale. My AP flour has a scoop, and now my other two main flours do as well.

According to James, I’m “Money!” This is an improvement. He used to call me “No! Daddy!”

Yesterday was a bust, sort of. I woke up in the morning with the kids, letting Mac sleep in. James would not let me put him down. When I was holding him, he would just lie his head on my shoulder. He only does this when he is sick. I pulled him up in my lap in the recliner where he snoozed for about an hour, and I almost snoozed for about an hour, but Ada kept wanting help with Animal Crossing. After Mac woke up, I felt as tired as James, and I went back to bed. I took a nap, and then lied around with Ada, either playing with stickers and drawing or building our garden in Viva Piñata. That is all we did all day. We only changed out of our pjs when it was time to go back to bed. Then we put on clean pjs.

We started off a little better today. I’m taking a break from cleaning now. I started thinking about this week’s menu. I think that this week I’ll be winging it. I’m still not sure what I’ll be making for Wednesday either. The only thing I can think of as far as meals go is that I want to empty out the deep freeze so I can defrost it. One thing in there is a turkey, which for the four of us will provide meals for most of a week.

Todo List

• DONE: Finish cleaning kitchen. This was the kind of cleaning where I moved everything off the counter tops, cleaned the lids to all the flour bins, and polished all the stainless steel.
• DONE: Mop floors
• DONE: Organize the kid’s playroom
• STARTED: Fill up and label 400 DVD changer–It can read some of the discs and automatically put in the title, the others have to be added manually. Blech.
• DONE: Make bread–we are out of loaf bread
• Clean our bathroom
• Dust the high places that I can’t reach without a step ladder. That is a lot of places.
• Start planning Ada’s new math activity for her laptop. I requested a developer’s key for the XO. It should be ready so I can start programming things for her laptop.
• DONE: Get Ada’s Animal Crossing photo off the SD card in the Wii. Her favorite things are getting coffee, getting her haircut and getting new shoes. Want to see Ada’s Animal Crossing Personality?
• DONE: Make appointment to get the kids’ haircut in real life. James is getting shaggy^*, and Ada’s bangs are in her eyes and she’s starting to get tangles again now that it is shoulder length.
• DONE: Make an appointment to get my hair cut.

*I like shaggy hair on boys, but Mac doesn’t.

Today if I can get the following done, I’ll be happy:

• Clean the kitchen- I did this as I was cooking for the first part of the day on Wednesday, but it needs to be tidied and bit, and some appliances moved to clean the counter tops completely.
• Pick up the kids’ room - This needs to be tidied and vacuumed
• Clean our bathroom - Another necessity.
• Clean the kids’ bathroom-Mac is tackling this one for me.

Mac ran some errands this afternoon, including a trip to the store where Christmas candy was 75% off. He picked up Reese’s peanut butter trees. Drats. I’m staring at them right now, contemplating if I should give in. He said, “They have Valentine’s Day candy out.” I replied, “Yes, they put it out before Christmas.”

Candy season ends with Easter. I have done pretty well so far. We will see how I do with those cinnamon hearts that are in the stores right now and the egg shaped Reese’s that will be put out before Valentine’s Day has passed. Even though reason should dictate otherwise, Reese’s taste way better when they are shaped like eggs.

No meal list for the week yet. Tonight is stew, which I didn’t make from last week. I hope to get that figured out tonight.

We are now back home. It was really windy today, but in the upper 60s. It was a shame that the day was spent traveling in a car. I was thankful for the warm weather though because the car window by Ada broke on the drive home and will not stay rolled up.

The first thing I did when we walked in the door was throw the kids in the bathtub while Mac unloaded the car. I got James undressed first. When I put him down to start the bath, he ran off. I followed a tad later to find him in the entry way by the door to the garage watching Mac. Just as I went to go get him, he peed on the floor. He looked at his penis, and then looked at the floor, pointed and said “juice?” Thankfully it is a hardwood floor. I went to get supplies to clean it up, he took the towel and wiped the floor.

I got both kids in the bathtub, and clean. Then I let Mac take over getting them out while I showered. We were all clean and in our pjs by 5:30pm. I want tonight to be laze around the house night and tomorrow be clean up the house day, but Mac is tackling taking down the tree. I don’t know where he is getting the energy, but I suppose I feel incredibly tired because I did not sleep well the last two nights because of Ada’s frequent crying out at night.

Ada is sitting beside me stamping with some alphabet markers she got from my mother and playing with Hello Kitty stickers. Santa filled her stocking with Hello Kitty items from the $1 bins at Target. I’m going to contemplate dinner, where we are ordering from or what we will eat if not ordering. I didn’t have anything planned.

Last night, just as I thought I finally had the opportunity to go to sleep, Ada started crying. Ada frequently cries out in her sleep. I go in and check on her, and she stops, not really even being fully awake. I waited a bit, hoping that she would stop, but instead got louder. I got up to check on her, and she was crying so hard and loud, and at times, almost screaming, and no matter what I did or said she wouldn’t stop or even really acknowledge that I was there. I would hold onto her face, and say her name repeatedly, I would hug her, and she just cried and screamed and kept throwing herself backwards and then sitting up. Then Mac said, “I don’t think she is awake.” I got really close to her–it was dark in the room–and her eyes were not open. Suddenly, she stopped, lied down and continued sleeping. Night Terror?

I have a history of odd sleep issues–paralysis dreams, the repeating I-think-I-am-awake-but-I-am-not-dream, waking hallucinations.

Hmmm….