I know I have been awfully quiet as of late. I'm not even sure if anyone reads anymore. I never lost my desire to write, I just find it hard to let it all spew out when this site is so publicly known (not famous per se but known to friends and family in real life). Plus, as I get older and take on more normal grown up responsibilities, I find it so hard to carve out some time to write.
Read MoreHoly crap on a cracker, there’s a blog here? Something I can write in every day if I’d like? Pffft, who knew? Apparently not me since it’s been close to a month and a half since my last update. I feel like this is confession …
Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It’s been <too many to count> days since I have blogged …
(Look at me trying to act like I’m Catholic. The closest I come is that I was baptized. I tried to ask Steve because he did all of that good Catholic child stuff up until high school and then he quit. Which, apparently it’s like a job that you can just stop. They even have a colloquial name for it … lapsed Catholic, which basically means you don’t give enough of a shit to care about the rituals and traditions anymore.) But I digress, because I didn’t disappear for a month and a half to talk about religion. I would just look like an idiot (and probably offend what little readers I have left) if I tried.
But no seriously, I know, I’m bad, I’m awful at this. I just can’t force myself to give up on it. Actually, these past few months, there has been more I wanted to write about than in the past few years. My problem is that I’m such a damn perfectionist that I’m not good at snippets and I haven’t figured out how to let go of the ideal of a complete and concise blog entry, one that has a beginning, middle and end and tells a story and makes a point. Or something like that. So instead of trying, I just don’t do it and then it gets daunting when I do try it because there is JUST.SO.MUCH and I’m writing four or five pages worth of crap that makes no sense because it’s all thrown together and one long rambling mess of I did this and went here and tried this and etcetera and so on.
And the days, they just disappear. I keep telling people the older I get, the faster time seems to go. One minute its January and then I turn around and the holidays are staring me in the face. I’m closer to thirty than I like, all my siblings and cousins are growing up, all my parents and and grandparents are getting older. Time moves so fast that it’s hard to get a grasp on it. Even these past few weeks, we’ve been making plans for the holidays and other stuff and it’s like oh, we have three weeks, no, wait, two weeks, holy shit, it’s just days away.
And of course, it flies when you’re having fun!
One thing has changed that has consumed a lot of my time these past few months: me. In a sense that I stopped being so lazy and started making a point to give myself a routine that worked. One that allowed me to be more organized and to effectively accomplish the tasks that needed to get done in a timely manner. I don’t know how it started or what forced the change but basically, at some point a few weeks ago, I realized we had A LOT of things coming up this holiday season and I need to budget them into my finances as well as my time.
I made up cleaning lists, ones that allowed me to do one area of the house in about half-an-hour each day during the week (my weekly list) and ones that forced me to take care of daily chores that made the weekly ones easier (my daily list).
That change alone really revamped how I spent my time. No longer would I come home and mindlessly veg out on the couch, playing pointless games on the laptop or watching TV (it could be argued that I never posted or did tasks during that time either and that’s correct because even when I was “vegging” out, I was so exhausted that I didn’t do anything on the computer that required me to think). Instead, I started coming home, cooking (or finishing) dinner, doing my daily chores and whatever room that needed to be cleaned that evening, watching whatever shows came on that night, then bed.
Of course, this freed up time on the weekends and I spent that free time, plus whatever I had during the week, doing productive things, things that needed to be taken care of. Paying bills, returning emails from family and friends, working on some business related stuff. We also spent more time with friends and I didn’t have to feel guilty about it.
Because we’ve been trying to cut down on expenses here, I spend a lot of time “managing” the house to be more efficient financially. Budgeting in events and meals so that we can buy only groceries that we need and will use.
I’ve just been more organized and more active and more productive and unfortunately, that means some of my hobbies have suffered more than ever. But I’m working towards a balance and have been doing quite a few things in my Internet life on the back end. So eventually, I think this is going to get me to a place where I can have life in order, both online and off!
Coming soon are the monthly love posts for September and October, because I am that behind!
Sometimes the hardest part about making a life with someone is syncing your schedules.
Steve and I have been living together for three years and even now, it’s difficult to work around each others wants and needs.
These past few weeks have been quiet. There have been a few changes in my life that have given me more time but less pay. Thus, I find myself with some half days during the week and less money in my pocket at the end of two weeks.
I’ve spent those days cleaning and running errands and doing stuff that would normally take up my weekends. Stuff that would normally keep me from spending time with Steve or the dog or family or from doing nothing. Just normal house stuff – laundry, cleaning, errands, phone calls, bills. In all honesty, I’m loving it because by last Friday night, my house was spotless, my to-do list was virtually non-existent, and I could sit on the couch and surf the Internet all night guilt free.
The problem was I was exhausted. My sleep schedule has been thrown off with my foot injury and allergy meds and thunderstorms that keep me awake until god awful hours of the morning (plus a dog who is terrified of thunder and insists on crawling in bed and snuggling with us everytime he hears a sound) so by Friday evening, all I wanted to do was plop on the couch, eat a good dinner, watch some TV and surf the Net. And I would have been perfectly content to do that all weekend. Mostly because I was trying to save money and also because the sheer effort of getting dressed and making myself looked human was utterly unappealing at the time.
Steve, on the other hand, wanted to go out. Somewhere, anywhere. He wanted to get dinner, then maybe hit up Best Buy then Wal-Mart to get some stuff. And while I wanted to spend time with him, it would require makeup and brushing my hair and PANTS! And I just don’t want to wear pants on most occasions (just you wait for my new header graphic – it speaks perfectly of me!).
But I put on my pants and brushed my hair and we went out to dinner. No makeup since we were just going to get some cheesesteaks and I didn’t really care what I looked like at that point. Then I think he compromised because afterwards he drove home instead of heading to Best Buy or WalMart.
There are times when Steve says the he wants to stay in and have a relaxing weekend and I jump for joy. Because that means I can sleep late and hang around the house and just be lazy. And generally he means it, until about 3pm on Saturday when he is so utterly bored that he turns into a five year old and whines because he’s so bored and he can’t find anything to do and let’s do something. Which leads to me feeling either guilty because I feel like I need to suggest we do something and we need to spend time together or feeling resentful and angry because we have all of this expensive shit and he can’t entertain himself.
It’s just striking that balance that’s hard. I think we did well with it this past weekend. We went out for cheese steaks on Friday night then met some friends for dinner on Saturday evening. And while that may not have been enough for him, it was enough for me. It was fairly reasonable as far as money went and we both got a chance to get out of the house and not drive each other insane. But we were able to relax enough to feel like we had not drove ourselves crazy overdoing things.
We have enough stuff coming up this summer that we really need to be able to enjoy the downtime.
In the meantime, we are making plans and trying to strike a balance there. We’ve got some trips in the works, some trips that are specifically for us to enjoy and some that allow us to visit with people who we haven’t seen in awhile. We’ve got some movies to look forward to and some dinners and small events with friends. We’ve got an enjoyable summer ahead of us.
And now we just have to work out an amicable schedule between the two of us. Because I want to sleep until 10am darn it! And somebody in this house like to wake up at 7am, even on Saturdays!
I didn’t set out to post every day this month, it’s just kind of happened like that so far. And it’s actually a bit easier to keep up with me because I’m not forcing myself to do it. If I don’t, so what, there’s another month.
But it’s nice to at least be writing again on a somewhat regular basis. Even if my life is a bit mundane and boring. How do people find stuff to write about everyday?
Because what I did today is basically what I told you I was going to do yesterday. I slept until about 10am or so, got up and took care of a few household duties, spent a leisurely amount of time getting ready, then went to see The Watchmen. After that, it was dinner at Sticky Fingers then dessert at Cold Stone Creamery, where I tried some of their rather delicious, but insanely rich, marshmallow ice cream, which pretty much had the taste and consistency of frozen fluff.
So overall, we did the same thing tonight that we did yesterday night with the exception of the movie. And the fact that between the popcorn, dinner and the ice cream, I feel like I ate my way through the afternoon and evening.
I haven’t been able to focus much lately because I’ve been a bit exhausted. Adapting to the new schedule is tiresome and the Daylight Savings Time rollover tonight probably isn’t going to help much. I am just all about being lazy these days and truthfully, would’ve like to stay in bed until noon today. Unfortunately, I was wide awake around 10am and had we not had plans, I would’ve been super-motivated to actually get shit done.
I love going out and having friends and a social life but some days, knowing that I have to stop what I’m doing to get ready to go out and then go out makes me so unmotivated to actually start a task or household chores, mainly because I don’t like leaving things unfinished.
So my house is a wreck, we are in desperate need of a major grocery run, I’ve got phone calls and appointments and plans that need to be made and all I want to do tomorrow is lay in bed with the windows open and the breeze blowing in, surfing the Net, watching crap TV and reading. What will probably happen is that I’ll be wide awake, will sit in the living room doing the same thing for the better part of the day until it’s time to get ready to go to trivia. I’ll have thought about everything that needed to be done but never actually started.
Last time I checked, thinking didn’t stock the cabinets.
One of these days I’ll work out some sort of balance where there’s no guilt about my messy house awaiting me while I’m out eating delicious food and having some laughs with friends.
I’ll just have to teach the maid to be as meticulous as I am.
For now, I’m just going to go cuddle up with my puppy dawg, who has been at home by himself for the past seven hours patiently waiting by the window for us and is now snuggled onto my chest and begging for attention. Babies may make my ovaries dance, but my Sammy just makes my heart melt!
