With Vacation Days Like This, Who Needs To Go To Work?

Restful...yesterday...not so much.  A quick recap...

I got up at 6AM and went running with my running buddy.  When I came back I was tired but I knew it wasn't a good idea to conk out right after a hard run (even though I used to do it all the time) so I hauled the coins out of my piggy bank, counted them up, and made out my deposit slip.  Then I took a nap.  It wasn't a very long one, though, because Mom came about 45 minutes later to go to Curves.  At this point I was still in my workout clothes from my run, and this made sense because I was going to go work out and sweat some more.

On the way home from Curves Mom mentioned that if I was going to weed my garden, I'd better come right over and do it, because it was supposed to rain in the afternoon.  So I immediately went over to my parents' house and worked in my garden for three hours.  No point in wasting time for a shower just to go work in the dirt and get sweaty all over again, so I stayed in my workout clothes.  It never rained, by the way.

I had no sooner gotten back to Grandma's and started eating lunch when Mom showed up, wanting to pull my old dresser out of the storage room in the basement so Dad could pick it up and take it to Carol.  (She doesn't have enough dresser space to put all of her clothes away at once and I have two dressers sitting in storage in the cellar.)  Unfortunately, we found that HR had left his mark there as well.  He hadn't hidden things in the drawers, and he hadn't pooped in the drawers, but he had chewed the edges of all of the drawers.  At one point I said to Mom, "I'm really glad I didn't put my furniture in one of those dangerous storage units, where animals can get in and ruin your stuff.  I'm glad I kept it in the house where it would be SAFE!"  So we made a nice strong solution of Basic G and cleaned the whole dresser with that.  We found some other nastier things in the process - such as the syrup bottle from my apartment that HR had apparently chewed into (as he had chewed into my cooking oil and shortening) and some smaller cousin of his had literally crawled in and died.  Hacked-open syrup bottle with a dead mouse stuck in it...not a pretty sight.  I definitely screamed bloody murder, and then Mom jumped when she saw it, so I screamed again.  It will be a long time before I can think about eating Aunt Jemima syrup.

In the middle of all that, my piano student called, and she could come right that minute (3:30) instead of dinnertime as she had originally scheduled.  So she came over, we had her lesson, and then I had to go to the grocery store and pick up some things for dinner, and at that point it was after five and I was still in my grubby workout clothes, so since Grandma wanted the TV room rearranged I decided I'd better tackle that.  It's a good thing Matt arrived for dinner when he did, because I definitely had the bookshelf stuck...so he rectified a number of rearranging situations and we ate dinner, after which he and Grandma took turns trying to pry a splinter out of my finger that I had picked up who knows where, and after that I washed the dishes.  By this time it was 8PM, I was STILL in my grubby workout clothes, so I took a shower and then set out to bake the Amish Friendship Bread that somebody at work gave Dad the starter for, and it had to be baked that day...

I need a break from my vacation!

Simplicity

Right at the moment, I am sitting next to the window watching rain fall.  It's really nice to actually have time to sit down and watch simple things...this week it's rain, last week it was fireflies, literally hundreds of them in the meadow at my parents' house.

When I was in high school, I got an Indiglo watch.  Actually it wasn't an Indiglo watch, it was a Casio watch (Timex is the one that makes Indiglo) but it did the same thing - flashed that bluish-green backlight so you could always see what time it was.  There was a commercial back in the early 90's that showed a man's wrist with an Indiglo watch on it, and him getting a firefly to keep coming around by blinking his Indiglo.  I successfully replicated this one year while watching fireworks on the Fourth of July...only there was no music or a voiceover about Indiglo when I was finished with this particular amusement, only a firefly that wouldn't go away and leave me alone.

Go ahead - say it.  I'm easily amused.  That's fine.  I'm sure I'm not the only one.

So leave me a comment and tell me what amuses you.

Goals

I set a few goals for this summer, which is a good time to try some of them because the potential ramifications don't matter when I'm not teaching.  For example, my first goal of the summer was to get decaffeinated.  I'm not as much of a caffeine junkie as I have been known to be, but I just wondered what would happen if all of a sudden there was no more regular coffee or tea in my diet.  I'm not 100% decaf since I am still eating chocolate, but I think there's more of it in tea and coffee than in the occasional M&M.  I haven't had any really horrifying headaches yet, which is something I was really nervous about.  (Actually, I might save the regular tea for the days when I do have a really horrifying headache...it helps, and it helps more when there's not a constant stream of it...)

I also wanted to make a point of drinking eight glasses of water a day.  I am finding this much less of an adjustment than it was when I was in eighth grade and Mom decided it would be good for all of us to drink eight glasses a day.  The issue then was that I drank barely anything during the day at school - nobody carried water bottles then, and basically the half-pint milk container I got at lunch was all I would drink during the day, and I didn't drink a ton at breakfast or in the evenings, either.  (This was actually handy since it meant fewer trips to the gross school bathrooms.)  These days I drink most of a Nalgene bottle during the average school day and there are actually breaks between classes and nice teacher bathrooms, so drinking a lot of water isn't such a big change.  This notion brings to mind a humorous anecdote, however...Mom had put a chart on the kitchen cupboard back in the day where we had to color in our glasses of water as we drank them during the day.  Our church was having its annual business meeting one night (which I believe lasted until after 11PM that year) and halfway through the meeting (where I was camped out in the nursery, because I was too young to vote) I realized that I had only drunk one of my glasses of water, and I just couldn't stand the thought of Trevor meeting the goal and me not meeting it.  So I grabbed the package of cups from the nursery cupboard, figured out that if they were three ounces, then I had to drink 2 2/3 nursery cups of water to equal one glass...and yes, you guessed correctly...I drank the other seven glasses standing at the nursery sink.  All of this, however, is easier than when I was in elementary school and read that you should drink eight glasses of water a day and thought that this meant eight of our dinner glasses.  Good job, genius - those were sixteen ounces...so I was drinking sixteen glasses a day, not eight.

There have been years in the past when I had a garden, usually with limited success.  (Two years ago my garden was basically appetizers for the deer, who ate their fill at my bean patch and left Dad's alone...thus I had absolutely no harvest.)  A lot of times the garden gets away from me and I lose it completely in the midst of the weeds - though the deer always seem to find it!  This year I planted a whole bunch of vegetables, vegetables I can actually can/freeze/eat.  (If you want an inventory, it's zucchini, summer squash, carrots, beets, cucumbers, onions, and lots and lots of tomatoes and beans.)  I like the thought of knowing where my food came from and what was done to it, and ultimately with the rising cost of everything, it may be cheaper to have gardened than to buy the food from the grocery store.  This means I have been collecting a lot of mud on the toes of my ladybug gardening clogs.  That is a good thing.

I'm also trying to finish sewing projects.  So far...mostly so good.  I've only maimed one sewing machine...and I even figured out how to change the thread on my Serger without having a nervous breakdown.  Speaking of sewing...I ought to get to work.

Organization?

My motivation level officially plummeted on Friday...actually the descent started on Thursday, when I decided I needed to sort out my clothes and store everything school-related (that I wouldn't possibly be wearing anywhere during the summer) in another bedroom, since my dresser and closet space are really limited in my bedroom.  That was a good idea.  The part where I shoveled a path in the middle of the bed between the socks and polo shirts and curled up for a three-hour tour of the inside of my eyelids was not such a good idea.  Well, obviously I needed the sleep, but...that doesn't get an awful lot of work done.

So then on Friday night I got good and motivated and decided I would work on a dress I'm supposed to be sewing for a friend.  I got out the bag where the fabric (the real fabric, and the muslin that we're using to make a dummy dress to get the alterations right first) was stored, and reached for the pattern...which wasn't there.  Nor was it on the desk.  Nor was it in the closet.  Nor was it by the TV.  Nor was it in my sewing basket downstairs.  This led to spending a good chunk of Saturday (with Matt's help) ransacking and sort of reorganizing the room where my sewing stuff is.  The end of the story is, I found the pattern - in a shopping bag with another pattern, behind some frocks on the back of my bedroom closet door.  And I can at least see the floor of this room, and in the process Matt unearthed a bass clarinet arrangement of "O The Deep, Deep Love of Jesus" that I wrote years ago and so I ended up playing it for church yesterday.

And now I need to go sew like a crazy woman, and maybe I can finally finish some of the million projects I have going all at once right now.

Roger, the Shrubber

So school has been out for almost a week now and the only time I have gotten to sit still for any length of time was yesterday when Mom had a doctor's appointment so we decided to make it a day trip and run all the errands we could think of possibly needing to run at any time in the immediate future.  I have also done the following:

• Clipped all of my grandma's hedges.
• Written, printed, and distributed the program for the children's summer choir.
• Run many miles.
• Cleaned my car (it was a scary place.)
• Weeded my garden (it was also a scary place.)

This morning after I went running I went outside to repot a spider plant that I am entering in the fair later this summer.  It has been needing a larger pot for quite some time, and the deadline was this week because the fair regulations specify that it has to have been growing in the pot it's entered in a certain number of weeks prior to the fair.  So I went out, thinking it would be pretty dry (it's on the porch, so it doesn't get rain, and I last watered plants on Monday) and instead found myself pouring lots and lots of water off it - water that smelled really rank, like rotten eggs.  The only thing I can figure is that the pot has a weird water-keeping reservoir on the bottom that I didn't notice when I planted the plant in it, and that I've been over-watering it for quite awhile.  The plant doesn't look sick and the roots seemed fine - so I hope it doesn't die.  Does anybody out there have a clue what it means when your plant roots smell like a rotten egg?  I can't imagine it's a good thing...