Something Shiny! - Home category

No rest for the sleepy

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:40:54 GMT

So, I've not been sleeping well lately. SHOCKING, I know. I'll give you a minute to crawl back up into your chair, having recently fallen out of it because you were so surprised at my sleep update. All settled? Good. Now, I was reading about Eden's on-going battle with insomnia the other day, and she mentioned that taking a calcium supplement with magnesium before bed helped her sleep. To which a commenter added that eating a banana and drinking a glass of milk had helped her sleep. So that's my new plan: eat a banana (food miles be damned!) and choke down a glass of milk before bed. Hopefully that will keep the night terrors AND the light sleeping AND the drooling at bay. Stay tuned.

The other problem with working from home

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:46:52 GMT

Okay, cards on the table time. The other problem with working from home is the knowledge that my bed is just down the hallway. Can I tell you how much I love that bed (which, let's be honest, I capitalize as if it's a proper noun, as in "Bed")? I have been known, when I'm extra tired, to compose Odes To Bed once I've crawled under the sheets. Usually they're short, like "All Good Things Happen In Bed" or "Bed is So Nice" or something like that. I come by this Bed love affair honestly. My mom also has an affinity for Bed. When I was little, she used to call down the stairs from my parents' room and say, "What would we do without beds?" This Bed Mania isn't without its hazards, though, as every now and again when I'm neck-deep in research, I have the sudden urge to go take a nap. I convince myself that it wouldn't be a long nap, and don't I deserve a little break? And that's just a slippery slope. Because first it's all, "I'll just take a five minute nap." And then it's "I haven't fallen asleep after five minutes, so I might as well set an alarm for an hour from now." And then, before you know it, someone is shaking you and informing you that it's been three days, are you're planning on going back to work ever? I'm just saying.

The thing about working from home

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:45:18 GMT

The thing about working from home that nobody seems to realize is just how much toilet paper you go through. Think about it! When you're at the office, you occasionally have to use the facilities (let's be adults here and not go into specifics). So you do, and you use office toilet paper. For eight hours a day, five days a week, you've got access to toilet paper that someone else is buying. But when you work from home? Not so much with the free toilet paper. This is something that wasn't explained to me adequately when both John and I started working from home. It wasn't explained at all, come to think of it. So now I have this nagging thought that I should start tracking how much money we spend on toilet paper for the bathroom between our offices, so that I can write it off on our taxes. Hey, it's a home office expense, right? RIGHT?

The ice cream diet

Tue, 13 May 2008 14:19:04 GMT

I normally don't know how much I weigh. Despite the fact that we own a scale, I rarely step on it. A couple months ago, though, I felt compelled to weigh myself. And then I did it again over the weekend. And folks, something amazing had happened. Without trying (that is, without exercising, watching what I eat, actively dieting, or anything), I had lost eleven pounds. You may well ask, how I accomplished such a feat? It's certainly a question I asked myself. And the only thing I can come up with is this: I ate ice cream. In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that I'm not the world's biggest fan of ice cream. When John and I started dating, in fact, I once told him that I didn't even like ice cream. But a couple months ago, we bought a box of mini ice cream sandwiches. And then another. And, well, one thing led to another, and now it's common at the end of the day for one of us to say, "Hey, it's ice cream sandwich o'clock. You want one?" So there you go: the ice cream diet. And they said it couldn't be done.

All the pretty flowers

Mon, 12 May 2008 14:49:03 GMT

Two weeks ago, we signed up to get a flower share from Rosie's Organic Farm, the same place where we get our weekly vegetable share. For just $25, we get five weeks of beautiful fresh flower bouquets that we pick up with our veggies every Saturday. And I can't tell you how lovely they are! It's like having a little bit of spring brought to our doorstep.

Rock, paper, scissors?

Wed, 07 May 2008 14:24:40 GMT

Ever since the semester ended, I've taken to getting up around 8 and not showering right away. Instead, I hang around the house (working, yes, don't worry) in my pajamas for a few hours until the mood strikes me to take a shower. (N.B.: This is what happens to you when you work from home. Do not desire it.) John, of course, is a willing and able accomplice in all this and sometimes manages to out-do me in the Dance of the Shower Postponement. This is all fine and well, of course, until the doorbell rings. And then we both get that deer-in-the-headlights look and suddenly our lives devolve into all-out negotiation. It's a battle of wills, really, of Stubborn v. Stubborn. And when one of us finally breaks down and goes to the door, after innumerable rounds of PLEASE GO GET THE DOOR FOR ME! I'LL UNLOAD THE DISHWASHER! and OH COME ON, IT'S NOT THAT BAD- JUST GO ANSWER THE DOOR!, inevitably the person at the door has left. Hopefully they assumed that the people inside were on important conference calls to London, not sitting around, unwashed, holding talks about door-answering responsibilities.

Transitioning

Tue, 06 May 2008 13:03:11 GMT

So, it sort of dawned on me over the weekend that we'll be moving next summer (fingers crossed, knock on wood, salt over the shoulder, and all that). And, along with that move, we'll also have to sell our house. Our first house. The house we've been working on since we bought it four years ago. The house that, thanks to our hard work, has been stripped of its 1980's cedar paneling, has bamboo floors throughout, has updated appliances, and has cheerful landscaping. (And gutters! This week we're getting gutters!) But with weekend realization, I've started to think less and less about what improvements we could make that we would enjoy, and more and more about what we could do to make our house more desirable to prospective buyers. It's a subtle shift, I suppose, but it's a weird transition nonetheless. It's odd to think of other people-- strangers-- living in our house, our home.