I’m a terrible procrastinator. It’s mostly because I’m lazy. I don’t know why I persist in procrastinating, though. When I want something done, and then I do it…it’s done, and it’s always so nice to not have it weighing on my mind as something that I need to do.
Over on Lifehacker I read a great post about a post (because that’s what Lifehacker does) called How to Tackle Dreaded Tasks. The very first hint was a keeper - do it first thing.
The Kid’s bedroom was a disaster. So the first “project” of my day was to tell The Kid, “In 15 minutes we are going to set the timer for 15 minutes and clean your room as hard as we can.” I invited DH to help. Flylady readers will recognize this strategy as a 15 minute room rescue. We got an enormous amount done in 15 minutes - so much that I decided to take the extra five minutes to vacuum. I was rewarded for the effort several hours later, when I went to put his clothes away. Instead of tiptoeing around stuff all over the floor, zig-zagging from one minute bare spot to another, I just walked through his room. Heck, DH and I could dance in there, the floor is so clean. It’s far from clean, but it’s such an improvement that I’m not going to stress about the stuff on the dressers.
Do any of you have tricks for getting motivated to do stuff you dread? Or are you all so mature and well-adjusted that you just get ‘er done?
For a video treat, watch this procrastination video by video blogger ze frank. And just try to get the little theme song intro out of your head after.
Thursday night, right before cub scouts started, something apparently bit me under my arm. It itched like crazy, but it didn’t seem unusual. We have lots of bugs here, and fat people get mosquito bites, even this early in the summer.
About 45 minutes later, on the way home, I started itching all over. Everywhere. My ears, my scalp, my chest, my other arm, my back. I thought I was going to go nuts. I got home and told my husband what was happening. I took a Benadryl and got in the shower. He turned to the internet for research.
Continue reading ‘Ouch’
DH and I talked a few months ago about finding something we could do together that would be interesting and physical. Well, besides that. He suggested we try gardening.
Our back yard is a swamp. The soil doesn’t seem that it would grow much, but perhaps it could be used for making pots. We don’t have the money right now to hire a landscaping firm to install french drains (freedom drains?), and it could be years before we do. So we decided to start out with a single raised bed. If we enjoy it and it works, we can add more. This also has the advantage of adding features to the yard while at the same time reducing the amount of grass we’ll have to cut.
Last weekend, DH built a 5′ x 3′ box, a foot deep. This weekend, he bought 12 cubic feet of topsoil and 2 cubic feet of compost and manure. We dug up the turf under where the box will live, to allow room for root expansion. He hauled the topsoil into the back yard. The kid and I dumped the bags into the box, mixing in the compost and manure and leveling it off with a hoe. Saturday afternoon, after we were done preparing the bed, we went to a garden center and bought tomatoes, yellow bell peppers and various seeds - blue runner bush beans, english peas and spinach.
We planted the tomatoes, peppers and beans this afternoon. The english peas and spinach are for later in the year. We’ll need to mulch in a few days, maybe after the beans come up a little.
So far, it’s been pretty fun. The Kid had a lot of fun. It was a little frightening the way he swung the hoe, but nobody got hurt.
My daughter passed her boards. She is now an R.N. She leaves tomorrow for a point very, very far away in the continental United States to start her new career. Her husband and children will follow in a month.
I don’t know if I’ve written about this before (I’ve been writing for four years, so I probably have). But even if I have, I want to say it again. I simply couldn’t be more proud of her. For the last four years, she has worked her butt off to take care of her family while planning for her future. During the year between her DH’s college graduation and when he started law school, she worked a crappy job, full-time, second shift (pregnant) while he worked a crappy job, full-time, first shift so they could take turns with day care (because they couldn’t afford day care with either of their crappy jobs). She worked third shift every other weekend as an aide in a nursing home, attended school full-time and took care of two small children, all while her husband was enrolled in law school, also full-time. Her theory was that they were going to be dirt poor until they got their schooling completed, so best to get that poverty out of the way all at once. Before they started, I thought maybe they were doing it the hard way. Now I see that it was by far the best decision.
Her decision to go to school trailed his decision to go to law school. It was an excellent call. It’s what she always wanted to do, from the time she started college at 18. She drifted during her late teens and early 20’s, but when she found herself in a place where she could make things happen for herself, she did.
What a woman.
Today while I was working, I listened to Pandora. For only the second time ever, I heard the song “Is Your Love in Vain?” by Bob Dylan. I love this song. Love it, love it, love it. The melody is simple, catchy, and sticky - I’ll be humming this song for days. The lyrics are cynical, hopeful, yearning…a gauntlet thrown to the “you” Dylan sings to.
My feminist side was appalled by the last phrase, “Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow, can you understand my pain?” That phrase isn’t enough to turn me off of the song. It’s the only piece of the song that I see as sexist - the rest is gender neutral and could be a woman singing as well as a man. Heck, it’s the 21st century - even with that couplet, the song could STILL be a woman singing to a man. Or to a woman, for that matter. Or a man to a man. No hetero bias here!
What will happen to me if I fall in love with you? What’s in it for me? Will you hold up your end?
“I’ve been burned before and I know the score…” Stealing from one of the reviews I just read, the song makes explicit the silent negotiation that happens when contemplating a new relationship.
Are you willing to risk it all?
My older son is conducting a survey on preferred news media sources for his PR class. He thinks the deadline has been extended to Thursday, but the syllabus says Tuesday, so he wants to be sure. He asked me to entreat my vast number of internet friends to please take the survey.
News Source Credibility.
He needs 50-100 responses in 24 hours. Help!
We were supposed to have cub scouts at 5:45 this evening. Nobody showed.
It was OK, really. But gee, you’d think they could have called. They probably forgot, but I just saw them on Saturday, and I reminded them then. I shouldn’t have to call AGAIN.
The theme this month was cooking. I bought stuff to make pizza rolls, and I was going to show them that they can prepare an easy tasty treat for snacks or a family dinner, and how to set the table. I ended up just making the pizza rolls for supper for the family. The Kid loved them, which is always nice (he’s such a picky eater).
Easy Pizza Rolls
1 package crescent roll dough
pepperoni
1 package shredded mozzarella cheese (or shred your own).
Spread out the crescent roll dough, stretching slightly. Put four pieces of pepperoni on each like this:
OO
O
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Top with about a tablespoon of shredded cheese. Roll up like crescent rolls, starting at the wide end. Try to keep things as enclosed as you can, but don’t stress about it too much.
Bake @ 375 for 12 minutes or so. Serve with small bowls of hot pasta sauce for dipping.
As a variation, I used prosciutto ham and cheddar on four of the little rolls, because I ran out of mozzarella cheese. These were tasty, too, and would probably be nice with a honey mustard or dijon mustard dip.
These were more time consuming to prepare than the recipe sounds. It probably would go much faster as an assembly line - one person to stretch out the rolls and top with pepperoni, another to top with cheese and roll them up.
I noticed two things last night.
- I only posted two blog entries in March. That’s lame.
- I spend way too much time on the internet.
This brings to mind two questions:
- Should I post more? I like to try to post when I feel like I have something interesting to say, but since that happens so rarely, maybe I should just post the boring stuff, too.
- Have you ever taken an internet hiatus? If so, please comment about how it went. If not, please comment on your ideas about the concept.
Internet Friend #2 was the second internet person I met in Real Life (the first being Internet Friend #1). I first met Peggy on the newsgroup soc.religion.mormon. She was a frequent poster and a wonderful writer. She had interesting ideas and expressed them well. I think the first comment she ever made directly to me, rather than to one of my ideas, was “could you please quote something from the post you’re responding to in your posts, so we have a frame of reference?” It was a eureka moment. “Wow, if I put some of the text of what I’m responding to in my post, people will have context for what I’m saying!” It was the first of many useful insights Peggy gave me.
Continue reading ‘Internet Friend #2′
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