Around these parts Jim and I have chatted frequently about our impending “Empty Nester” status. We’re not only fine with it; we embrace it. We’re all sunshine and rainbows, happy that we’re thisclose to being able to say that we have raised two boys and sent them both off to college to prepare for their own life paths. It’s pretty exciting. It was also pretty exciting for the two of us to accompany J over the border into America’s Dairyland (Wisconsin) on Saturday so he could audition for a music scholarship. (He’ll be majoring in Business but the college offers music scholarships to non-majors: hurray!) We arrived early and had…
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Sleep Would Be Nice
I don’t sleep much. This may not be a surprise to those of you who know how active I am and how much I get done on any given day. Unfortunately, often on any given night I’m pretty active, too. Even though I always get to sleep easily, I wake up often. Many nights I find myself wide awake at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. (for a while, 3:30 a.m. on the nose was my body clock’s daily wake-up time) When I don’t have these wide-awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night episodes, I get, on average, five to six hours of halfway-decent sleep each night. Believe it or not, five hours is really quite enough for…
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I Will Do Anything For Health, But I Won’t Do That
My sister has had a raging cold for about three weeks now. She’s been coughing her poor head off, and generally feeling icky, though this week she definitely shows solid signs of being on the mend. Jim got it last weekend. The speed with which he was slammed with the cold and accompanying cough was staggering. Saturday he was fine. Saturday night he felt ill. Sunday he declared that he had never felt that bad in his life. Monday he went to the doctor and was given antibiotics and a warning that if he didn’t feel better by Wednesday, he should come back so they could look for pneumonia. I…
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I Knew It Was Here Somewhere.
You know how you spend an entire Saturday complaining about how you didn’t get the house cleaned up like you wanted to, and then your neighbor calls and talks to your seventeen-year-old, telling him that they have a minor family emergency and could he grab the spare key that you keep at your house and go to her place to shut off the Crock Pot, and then after he says “Sure, no problem” and hangs up, NOBODY CAN FIND THAT KEY ANYWHERE because it never got hung up on the key rack after you let their dogs out the last time they needed you, and after ripping apart nearly everything…
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Do Us All A Favor?
As you can probably tell by the fact that I am posting less frequently than usual right now (and when I do post there’s a 50/50 chance it has something to do with LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER CHICAGO), I am swamped. SWAMPED, I tell ya. It’s nothing that hasn’t happened before. You might be thinking, “She’s always swamped.” True, sort of. I’m always busy, but the feeling of being overwhelmed comes and goes with no warning. At this very moment, I am so far underwater I can’t even see. I know that it will pass. Everything I’m working on in all areas will get done. Here’s some food for thought,…
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Old.
I had an appointment at the doctor today, just for a normal exam and a follow-up on my high blood pressure. (Who knew I would be the type of person to have high blood pressure, right?) I was not very excited about this appointment due to the blood pressure thing and the getting weighed thing and the probably waiting on the doctor thing. I had no idea. I got there at 10:50 for an 11:00 appointment and checked in. It did not get past me that there were six women already seated in the waiting room, and they had ALL checked off my doctor’s name on the sign-in sheet. I…
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2012: Saying “No” To Resolutions and “Yes” To Strategies
I know, I know: it’s just semantics, but for me the slight change in wording makes a world of difference. I’ve never really been a serious resolution-making person, but talking about changes I want to make in terms of strategy, i.e. the means to an end, the roadmap to my goals, HOW I will get there, feels comfortable to me. Take working out, for example. Although I still take my beloved Zumba class three times each week and teach my spin class once each week (and occasionally throw a walk with Roxie in there), it’s not nearly enough. The amount of time I spend on my tushie, working here on…
- Chicken in the Car, Fun in Chicago, I've Got Mad Skillz, My Friends Have Mad Skillz, Proud Moments, Something That Could Change Your Life
Move Along, Nothing To See Here…
I know. It’s been a few days. Well, only four, but in the blogosphere, four days can seem like an eternity. In fact, I have lots to share but no time to share it at the moment. I met my publisher in person over the weekend when we drove down south (in a loaner Chevy Tahoe Hybrid from General Motors, thank you very much!) for my niece’s graduation: my publisher’s office is only about twenty minutes from my sister-in-law’s house. I got a great package from the United Kingdom, full of goodies that made me totally giddy. I got a great package from Cape Cod, containing something that made me…
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Worrywart
I was on the phone with Michelle on Monday night, chatting about this and that when somehow we got around to how crazed we can get, worrying about all kinds of things from the large to the miniscule. I was telling her about all the things I have going on, and how I feel like I need to get certain things finished in order to have peace of mind. As we continued our conversation, we discussed how most of the pressure we have on our shoulders was placed there by none other than…ourselves. To me, that’s a more difficult pressure to work with than if it had been placed on…
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Under Pressure
And now, a vent. My apologies. It had to come out of me at some point. I haven’t spent much time online this week. I’m out of touch with Twitter, I’m unaware of my friends’ status updates on Facebook, and my Google Reader’s waistline is expanding by what seems like fifty unread posts every few hours. In real life? I’m not keeping up very well either. I have a tremendous amount of activity going on over the next two weeks, and earlier today a migraine sidelined me until, well, about two hours ago when I made myself get up from my self-imposed two-hour bed rest, in order to push through…