Almost belatedly, I realized that it is Thursday, and that I gave myself a deadline to complete blogs weekly on this day. I’ve actually been a busy bee this week. Last week, I told you my schedule and honestly, I’ve been keeping up with it…kinda, sorta. My blueberry coffee routine has been going pretty well, except for the day I was running late, and the day they hadn’t brewed any. The daily chatter is as usual on point. I’ve been doing a work project almost every day this week. I’m up to Chapter 6 on my first text. My summer leisure reading is going at an excellent rate; I stand to finish one novel before I leave work today. I will admit to not being fully consistent to any of these activities, but more or less, I’m attempting to develop these habits. Of course, the easiest to accomplish are the leisure reading, the chatter and the coffee. I drink coffee almost every day, regardless of the flavor. I find it gives me a much-needed caffeine boost in the morning. I do limit myself to just one cup per day, even though I used to do two or more. After a while, I found that more than one cup will give me the jitters, so I generally don’t drink more than one unless I’m eating a nice breakfast.
Other than that, what have I been doing? House stuff mostly. Being a new home owner (gosh, I love the sound of that—the attainment of the American dream of land), I find that there is always some project to do, especially when you’re just moving in. This week, I decided to tackle the task of washing some clothes and getting my son’s room together. My plan in getting his room together is that at the end of this month, we’re going to start phasing him into his room, with the hope that at six months, he will be fully transitioned in his very own crib and I can take his cosleeper, soon to be just playpen, downstairs to the family room. Keep in mind, this is the adult vision; my son may have another plan in mind. Also, my plan in getting his room together is so that I can stop plucking his clothes out of the plastic storage bins that they were packed in when we moved. So needless to say, but just worth saying anyway, is that the first piece of furniture that will be in place is a chest of drawers. This chest of drawers has for the better part of five months been stored in its original box. This, along with his crib, is one of those pieces of furniture that must be assembled. I don’t know about you, but I actually relish the thought of putting furniture together. There is something so rustically charming about “building” your own furniture. Granted, I’m not doing anything like chopping, whittling, and sanding the wood, and the package contains the exact number and type of screws and bolts that you need, along with a detailed set of instructions, but there is a certain joy of at least pretending that you are a pioneer. I’ve actually “built” quite a bit of furniture in my day, and I can say that there are at least three pieces (including the chest) in the new home that I have—okay, okay I’ll use the proper term—assembled. I will, however, allow his dad to assemble the crib, not because I don’t want to do it, but because I don’t want him to feel left out of the whole experience of flexing his inner caveman and using tools. He’s already feeling sensitive about not being the first man of the house to light fire (another primitive caveman need carried over into the 21st century). I tried to console him by saying that lighting up a small travel hibachi is not the same as actual grilling, but he would not be moved and quite simply told me that I would not understand until I became a man. Little does he know that I believe I was one in my past life (that statement is not to be taken extremely literally because I am not at all certain I believe in karmic reincarnation).
So anyway, I’ve been putting together his chest, and clearing out a few boxes and bags at a time with the faint hope that most of the house will be in some kind of order by the time the Christmas holiday arrives. While I would like the other occupants to get on board and help me in my hope, part of me again wants that satisfaction of doing most of it myself, and “assigning” them tasks to accomplish. But men and women do not move at the same pace; women expect an assignment to be done when it’s assigned; men tend to take the assignment they receive from that woman and do it in some other time than the immediate. This is a communication that is as old as those cavemen I was talking about earlier, so I don’t have a clue as to when they will “get around to it.”
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Getting Routine with the Routine
So, blog readers, I have decided to be something that I have not been in quite some time when it comes to this blog, and that is consistent. As a matter of fact, I have committed myself to a consistent schedule when I am at work. I would like to do the same thing at home, but my son pretty much has reign of the clock there, and therefore my time. And while at work, I need to feel in control of something.
So here’s my routine in a nutshell. Arrive in the morning, cup of 7-11 blueberry-flavored coffee in hand. Log onto computer. Cut on heater; put on sweater. Shoot the breeze with partner in crime and find out what’s on the day’s agenda. Perform said actions as relates to work. At hourly intervals, take a five-minute break to tone and strengthen arms. Around lunchtime, go over textbooks for the fall with the goal of completing at least one chapter per day; this will in turn make it easier for me to develop my syllabi and writing assignments for the semester. After about an hour of this, continue working and make sure I get a cup of hot water and/or hot tea. Late afternoon, go to front counter with leisure reading while I wait on patrons. Prepare to leave by grabbing my purse, makeup bag, doing a key check and a cell phone check. Turn off heater. Remove sweater.
On Thursdays, this routine is about the same, but instead of leisure reading, I’ll replace it with write a blog. I’m actually imposing my own weekly deadline of 4:00 pm. I’m proud of myself because today I looked at the calendar and actually remembered to start before my first warning went off at 3:00. So this little ditty will be posted earlier. Yay for technology.
Keep your fingers crossed, gentle readers, that I can keep this up.
So here’s my routine in a nutshell. Arrive in the morning, cup of 7-11 blueberry-flavored coffee in hand. Log onto computer. Cut on heater; put on sweater. Shoot the breeze with partner in crime and find out what’s on the day’s agenda. Perform said actions as relates to work. At hourly intervals, take a five-minute break to tone and strengthen arms. Around lunchtime, go over textbooks for the fall with the goal of completing at least one chapter per day; this will in turn make it easier for me to develop my syllabi and writing assignments for the semester. After about an hour of this, continue working and make sure I get a cup of hot water and/or hot tea. Late afternoon, go to front counter with leisure reading while I wait on patrons. Prepare to leave by grabbing my purse, makeup bag, doing a key check and a cell phone check. Turn off heater. Remove sweater.
On Thursdays, this routine is about the same, but instead of leisure reading, I’ll replace it with write a blog. I’m actually imposing my own weekly deadline of 4:00 pm. I’m proud of myself because today I looked at the calendar and actually remembered to start before my first warning went off at 3:00. So this little ditty will be posted earlier. Yay for technology.
Keep your fingers crossed, gentle readers, that I can keep this up.
Friday, June 3, 2011
De-Clutter
So last year, I made a goal to de-clutter my life. In this de-cluttering, I was going to tackle my home, my room, my desk and my car. I am proud to say that this is a goal that I have accomplished. Even though this goal was met by force on most occasions, the point is that it’s done! Let me further explain what by force means and how each de-cluttering came about.
The first thing to get de-cluttered was my car. January of last year, I finally had to let go of my Honda Civic that I had proudly kept for 10 years. We’d had a good run and got to explore many places together, but after 175,000 miles, I knew it was time to depart from Greylan (my pet name). So I went to Carmax and traded him in, still receiving $2000. You can view my “Out wth the Old” dedication album via Fb. This of course forced me to clean him out at the spare of the moment when I drove off the lot with my new vehicle, Oliver Black (named in part after his first detailer), a Dodge Nitro. It’s really rather a funny story how Oliver and I got together. I was scoping out cars in January and found two possibilities: Oliver and another type of Dodge vehicle. I had them both shipped to the dealer and was waiting for them to arrive when…Snowmaggedon hit and stopped all traffic. My poor prospects were literally stuck on the road and I was only able to view them after everything had sufficiently thawed out to make roads passable. So Oliver and I never got a chance to play in the snow. Nevertheless, we have had fun. Within the next few months, he and I had driven up to Jersey, over to Deep Creek Mountains in Maryland and down to Salisbury and Virginia Beach. And while he’s slowly accumulating stuff, I do make an effort to clean him out once a month so as to avoid the clutter trap with the new vehicle.
My desk was also the result of being forced to de-clutter. As you know, I had a son this year and that required me to take some time off from my job. And as a condition of my leaving, my boss told me that I HAD to clean my area. So once again, I found myself gouging out spaces that had old papers and books and every other thing imaginable. I even wrote an article that drew an ironic conclusion that I was turning into my old professors. And while I claim that my desk is nowhere near as bad as it was before I endeavored to clean it, I can tell that I am back and am starting to accumulate items little by little. But, as with the vehicle, I attempt to clear the clutter on a regular basis and not re-collect junk.
Finally, there’s my home environment. I have lived in the same place for almost 20 years, and after dating the man I’d eventually have a child with, and subsequently having that child, I was once again forced to take serious inventory and de-clutter again—this time an apartment and most importantly a room full of stuff. In the final days before moving, I began referring to my room as the “Room of Doom.” Prior to no longer residing permanently in the apartment, I’d essentially used the room as a walk-in closet/dumping ground for all my books, magazines and papers, and OMG was it a lot to clean out. In my next blog, I will detail some of the treasure and trash items I discovered that had been collected from years past.
Overall, I’m proud of my de-cluttering process but alas I am not done yet. With the consolidation of two households, and all my stray junk, I have some hefty decisions to make in the coming six months. My goal is that by Christmas, most boxes should be reasonably discarded and that we should be working primarily with only Rubbermaid® storage boxes. I will try to keep you abreast of the project as it progresses.
The first thing to get de-cluttered was my car. January of last year, I finally had to let go of my Honda Civic that I had proudly kept for 10 years. We’d had a good run and got to explore many places together, but after 175,000 miles, I knew it was time to depart from Greylan (my pet name). So I went to Carmax and traded him in, still receiving $2000. You can view my “Out wth the Old” dedication album via Fb. This of course forced me to clean him out at the spare of the moment when I drove off the lot with my new vehicle, Oliver Black (named in part after his first detailer), a Dodge Nitro. It’s really rather a funny story how Oliver and I got together. I was scoping out cars in January and found two possibilities: Oliver and another type of Dodge vehicle. I had them both shipped to the dealer and was waiting for them to arrive when…Snowmaggedon hit and stopped all traffic. My poor prospects were literally stuck on the road and I was only able to view them after everything had sufficiently thawed out to make roads passable. So Oliver and I never got a chance to play in the snow. Nevertheless, we have had fun. Within the next few months, he and I had driven up to Jersey, over to Deep Creek Mountains in Maryland and down to Salisbury and Virginia Beach. And while he’s slowly accumulating stuff, I do make an effort to clean him out once a month so as to avoid the clutter trap with the new vehicle.
My desk was also the result of being forced to de-clutter. As you know, I had a son this year and that required me to take some time off from my job. And as a condition of my leaving, my boss told me that I HAD to clean my area. So once again, I found myself gouging out spaces that had old papers and books and every other thing imaginable. I even wrote an article that drew an ironic conclusion that I was turning into my old professors. And while I claim that my desk is nowhere near as bad as it was before I endeavored to clean it, I can tell that I am back and am starting to accumulate items little by little. But, as with the vehicle, I attempt to clear the clutter on a regular basis and not re-collect junk.
Finally, there’s my home environment. I have lived in the same place for almost 20 years, and after dating the man I’d eventually have a child with, and subsequently having that child, I was once again forced to take serious inventory and de-clutter again—this time an apartment and most importantly a room full of stuff. In the final days before moving, I began referring to my room as the “Room of Doom.” Prior to no longer residing permanently in the apartment, I’d essentially used the room as a walk-in closet/dumping ground for all my books, magazines and papers, and OMG was it a lot to clean out. In my next blog, I will detail some of the treasure and trash items I discovered that had been collected from years past.
Overall, I’m proud of my de-cluttering process but alas I am not done yet. With the consolidation of two households, and all my stray junk, I have some hefty decisions to make in the coming six months. My goal is that by Christmas, most boxes should be reasonably discarded and that we should be working primarily with only Rubbermaid® storage boxes. I will try to keep you abreast of the project as it progresses.
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