laura705

I didn’t go to the gym last night, but did one Body Electric workout in the basement, followed by ab work.  I’m sore today.  Still whining about my feet, so I’m going to get to a foot doctor.   My hair stylist & I got on that topic during my appointment on Saturday, and she mentioned that the guy her mum sees is a few doors away from the salon, i.e., in my neighborhood.  That’s a possibility.

Eating hasn’t been good past couple days.  Understatement. 

Work has been busy and the day flew by today. 

Tonight we’re seeing the movie ”The Soloist”.  I’m feeling sort of indifferent about it, so I might just skip it.  I don’t know.  If I do that I’ll probably just sit around doing nothing anyway because I’m feeling tired right now.  I swear the ventilation in this place disappears in the afternoons and it gets stuffy and warm and it sucks the energy right out of me.  Maybe once I get out of here and walk the half mile to the train station I’ll feel better. 

The new admin will not be in today and I feel guilty that it makes me happy.  Not because I don’t want her around, just that I get a little privacy for a change.  Of course I only need privacy if I’m slacking off doing non-work stuff…hence the guilt, LOL.  But now that makes me think that I should have given more thought to the floor plan back before we moved to this office space.  It didn’t occur to me to insist on having our department’s one empty cube across from me and not the lead admin.  I guess I just figured that since I wasn’t getting an office, what did it matter. 

Enough grousing about things I can’t change, and besides I hate thinking of myself as the kind of person that will let this bother them.  I need to be grateful for my job and get satisfaction from it where I can. 

The weekend was good.  Even just that one extra day made a difference.  It started off nicely Thursday after work with my pedicure.  Not only did I get a mini foot/leg massage during the pedicure itself, I also got a nice shoulder rub while I was afterwards while I was sitting with my toes under that light/fan dryer thingy. 

I didn’t do much of anything Friday morning.  No, take that back.  I spent some time getting rid of old e-mails.  I’m just as bad with the personal e-mail as I am with the work ones!  I also did 3 Body Electric workouts.  So I had a somewhat productive morning.  In the afternoon (after bf went off for his weekend) I had lunch (chicken pot pie at Boston Chicken) and then stopped in at a store in the same strip mall called “Foot Solutions”.  It had a very small selection of shoes, and I learned they mostly specialize in orthotics.  An employee approached me and I said I was interested in shoes, but mentioned that I was having foot problems and her first question was if I wore high heels.  That sort of annoyed me because I already feel like “Why me?” because I don’t wear high heels, and try to wear good fitting comfortable shoes most of the time.  Anyway, I got past that and we talked a bit.  I felt so ignorant about it all, and I asked how a pedorthist differed from a podiatrist, etc. (this employee is a pedorthist), and it sounds like a pedorthist does an analysis of your feet and your walking, etc and fits you with orthotics.  I believe I should start with a podiatrist because I don’t feel like my feet are hurting from wearing ill-fitting shoes, but maybe from some injuries that need to be addressed, and so seeing a doctor should be step one.

I ended up at Kohl’s after that and bought a few things – a few tops and a bra.  I had several gift cards with me, but I ultimately I didn’t feel like going to the mall or driving to other shopping areas (I’m even too lazy to even drive!!), so that was pretty much the extent of my shopping.  In the evening I watched tv and read my book.  Dinner was leftover pizza.

Saturday morning I puttered around went to my hair appointment.  After that, I dropped some stuff at the library that was coming due, then went to the plant sale at the park district.  I bought a geranium and some ground cover.  What else - bought some groceries, ate lunch (grilled cheese & rf salami sandwich), walked and brushed doggy, loaded the dishwasher and weeded and Preened the front landscaping.  In the evening, more tv and reading.  Dinner was more leftovers.

Sunday I did some laundry, sweeping and vacuuming.  Bf got home a bit after noon.  We took his mother to an early dinner at the Mexican seafood place.  I didn’t enjoy it as much as last year – the music seemed too loud and I was facing the windows and the blinds were open and it wasn’t super sunny, but it was still sort of bright and facing that way for a couple hours bothered me.  I ended up feeling sort of headachey and cranky after that.  We were going to go to home depot and finally buy some shrubs to replace the ones that died in front, but then I checked craigslist again for a commuter bike for me.  I’ve been checking periodically without much luch, but a posting made just a half hour before I checked had a good option, not far from home and we ended up going to check it out and ultimately buying it.  I now have an almost new 7 speed bike, so between having gears and being lighter weight than my ancient Schwinn, I should be able to pedal easier and use it for more than just my work commute. 

Ugh, the boss just told me about a project that came out of a staff meeting with her boss.  Ugh, it involves expanding what is already the least favorite part of my job, the thing that is the bane of my existence.  My boss asked me if I minded if she gets the sr mgr involved in it.  I don’t mind at all, why not share the misery?  Seriously, I really feel having another person involved will be a good thing.  With all the projects starting up right now I feel like running away…but that’s just silly. 

Okay, I better get this posted.  Since I can’t seem to stop typing when I write these entries, I realize this definitely cuts into my productivity.  I will likely be cutting back on my posts – fewer entries, I guess.

After a bunch of rambling posts this week, maybe this will be short.  No guarantees. 

Work was okay yesterday.  Meetings really goof up my productivity, and I have to work on that.  I rode home from the train in a light rain.  A bit later, bf and I went to the gym.  I did a full body strength workout.  I may go to the gym tomorrow, and I might do a class instead of the weight machines. 

Food was okay.  Lunch was a turkey sandwich, snacks were an apple, yogurt w/ blackberries, cottage cheese, a boiled egg.  Dinner was leftover chicken tamale casserole.  I had two Milano cookies for dessert.

Today I had a webinar, but this one didn’t have a dial in number, so the audio was strictly through my boss’s laptop, and we were in her office for this webinar.  The volume doesn’t go very high, so we had to listen very closely so we could hear the speakers over the sounds of the ventilation system.  I think we need to buy a set of speakers for this type of thing.  Of course, I used to have a set of ancient PC speakers I inherited from a co-worker.  When we moved last year I decided that I wouldn’t be using them since I no longer had an office, and took them home.  I think we might have sold them at that indoor garage sale we did a couple months ago.  I honestly don’t know.  Anyway, we might need to buy another set, unless IT has another suggestion. 

I’ll be off to lunch soon, and if it’s not raining, I’ll eat outside again.  I brought a rf salami sandwich from home.  After work I have a pedi appt.  Need to rush home, change into flip flops and rush back to the nail place, but it’s near the train, so not far from home either. 

Tomorrow is my day off, so I won’t set the alarm clock.  I’ll still wake up early, I’m sure.  Nothing firm, but I want to get in a workout, and then do some shopping.  Bf has decided to stay overnight on the mostly guy getaway thing for both Friday and Saturday, so I’ll have some good “me” time and I’ll enjoy sitting around reading and maybe watching a movie or two .  Still thinking about booking a massage too.  Sunday, however, is a mother’s day lunch at a very good, but pricey seafood restaurant, and the travel expenses for the funeral sort of dented the finances a bit, so I’m sort of debating the massage.  I think I’ll just enjoy the shopping with my gift cards. 

Okay, this wasn’t really brief, but it’s not ridiculous.  Have a good day everyone!

I started an entry in MS Word, and then my computer went goofy and that was that.

Still sore from Monday’s workout, but will go to the gym tonight.  I may be going alone, as bf went yesterday afternoon.  I’ll do another full body weight training workout, since I’m only exercising 2-3 times a week.  I need to go online and print out a new exercise class schedule - I think they’ve made some changes.

Lunch was a large soup (chicken tortilla), breadstick, and diet soda, and it cost me almost 9 bucks!  Today I remembered to bring my turkey sandwich from home.  Food was so-so overall. 

Dinner was a sandwich - didn’t have much time after wrapping the marinated chicken breasts for the freezer and getting into a tiff w/ bf over the use of the sodastream.  We’ve used it twice now.  Per instructions, you shoot co2 into the bottle with water, then add flavor.  Bf complained he did that, but didn’t want to shake the bottle to mix the flavoring and make the soda go flat.  I asked why the flavoring can’t be added first…we tried it and it didn’t work out well, as predicted by a customer service guy at sodastream.  Apparently all you really need to do to mix it is just turn the bottle upside down once or twice.  We’ll try that next time.  I’m not all that concerned…we’ll probably just be using it to make plain seltzer and use it the way we do the cans.   I’ll keep you posted!

The movie Adventureland was enjoyable.  I missed some dialog here and there - thought it was just me, but another woman in our group agreed that the sound was low.   But I liked the movie.  I think bf wants to see it, so when he gets it via netflix, I might watch again.  My snack was a bag of white cheddar popcorn I stopped to buy at the market on the way to the theater, and some ice water. 

My logging went okay yesterday - not time-consuming, just jotting what I did as I went. It made me more aware of how my time is being spent - including personal stuff like blogs & phone calls!  I’m doing it again today. 

Today’s my Thursday since I’m taking Friday as vacation.  :)  Need to schedule a pedicure, and I think I’m going to gather up my gift cards and do some shopping.  I’ve got Amex, Borders, and Bed Bath & Beyond gift cards and maybe some others I’m forgetting!  I also might do a class at the gym. 

Okay, better publish & get back to work.

Starting slow today, and being absent-minded.  I brought my snacks to work, but forgot the sandwich I made last night for today’s lunch.  Then I went to make my tea and forgot to bring my snacks so I could put them in the fridge in the coffee room.  Hopefully I’ll snap out of it soon.

Yesterday at work my messy desk was driving me nuts and while finally straightening it later in the day, I found something I should have been working on.  Another addition to the workload.  So then I dug up my to-do list and worked on that as well.  It’s good to cross off items that are done, but it didn’t make me less anxious because I also added a bunch of stuff to it.  I also scanned and printed an “accountability log” that was in a time management seminar workbook I have.  I need to give it a go because yesterday flew by and I don’t know what I really accomplished, except to become anxious and disgusted by my lack of organization and time management skills.  It’s either that or admit to a serious lack of work ethic.  Anyway, it might do me good to log my time, hour by hour and see if it helps me use my time more wisely.  I’ve been in a real funk lately, and I thought that now that I’d finally sort of gotten past the admin crap and wasn’t supervising anymore I would just put my head down and crank away on my work. 

But no.  I think my work environment depresses me.  While walking to the office and passing by my old office building this morning, I thought of how much more I liked my old office space than the new one.  Only one block from the train station.  My own office with a window that let in natural light and had a pretty decent view.  Now our department is in the crappiest part of our new space.  I have a cubicle with no privacy, and worse yet, I wouldn’t even want an office – the boss and the sr. mgr’s offices are awful caves of darkness with no exterior windows.  Hmmm.  Am I being truthful about not wanting an office?  If I was told I was being given an office, would I really turn it down??  Okay, that would be unlikely.  But it would only be because of the privacy and peace factors, not the atmosphere. 

Okay, moving on.  Yesterday after work I went to the gym by myself.  I did an hour of full body strength training.  Felt good.  This morning, I’m feeling tired and already a bit sore and I think a stretching session would feel really good right now.  Waking up a bit early to do 10-15 min of stretching would be a good way to start the day, but right now I have trouble just getting my act together to make my usual train, let alone getting up earlier to stretch and catch an earlier train (also a good idea).  Well, I could start with just 5 minutes of stretching…

Yesterday’s food.  Snacks from home were fine.  It was the ones I bought that were bad!  Lunch was not enough, so thank goodness for the snacks.  I didn’t enjoy my salad because of the dressing, which I’ve had in the past and enjoyed.  I’ll try another salad (different dressing) later this week.  Dinner was mac n cheese w/ tuna mixed in. 

Today I had cereal at home.  I’m working on tea right now.  Morning snack will be an apple.  Lunch is to be determined – maybe some soup and a roll.  Afternoon snack will be baby carrots and/or vanilla yogurt with blackberries.  I also have some almonds with me. Dinner is also open.  I have a bit of time since the movie we’re seeing starts at 8.  Maybe leftovers from Friday.  We’re finally seeing Adventureland, but now I’m annoyed because it wasn’t at the theater 2 miles from the house, or at the next closest one.  

Okay, have to publish this, record my journaling time on the log, and get some work done.  Have a a good day everyone!

Well the weekend’s over, but at least it was a nice one as far as weather goes. 

Friday night we went to dinner (curry) and then went to look at a bike to replace my train station bike.  It needed too much work, so we didn’t buy it.  We haven’t seen many suitable bikes on craiglist, so bf stopped at FIVE places on the way home to try to pick up a publication called “The Tradin’ Times”, which is essentially a pre-internet version of craigslist – classified ads for just about everything.  Our tally was that 3 places were sold out of it, one didn’t carry it, and one place didn’t count because it’s a liquor store & not a convenience store.  Here I was thinking, “Who still tries to sell stuff through this kind of newspaper when you’ve got craigslist?” but I guess there are plenty.  The paper comes out on Thursdays and the places were out of them Friday night.  I guess we’ll try again this Thursday.  There’s also the possibility of finding a bike at our village garage sale coming up in a couple weeks.  It would be easier to just buy an inexpensive new bike from, say, walmart, but bf is right that it would be better and cheaper to find a higher quality used bike.

Saturday we woke up early and went to breakfast and then went to bf’s niece’s 1^st communion.  We only went to the mass at 10 am, so it was not an all day obligation.  But it was quite a drive, so we didn’t get home til after noon.  At least we made our appearance and didn’t have to spend much time w/ his brother & SIL.   I really hate going out there because it’s a newly developed area and it’s sad to see how everything is so built up now, except here and there you see little farms with dilapidated houses and barns and you just know in a year or two those will be gone as well.  Suburban sprawl.  Yes, I know that 50 years ago the suburb where I now live was like that – eating up farm land and covering it with houses and businesses. 

In the afternoon, Bf did the first lawn mowing of the season, but it took a while to get to it between puttering around with buying the gas & a new spark plug, running the gas out of the snowblower (it took over an hour and gawd is that thing loud) and labeling the gas cans (why use a sharpie when you can print a nice label from the computer, once you finally figure out how to do it).  Finally, the main event – picking up the dog poop and then actually mowing the lawn.  It had rained so much last week that the grass was very long – too long for the clippings to be mulched, so they had to be bagged.  Lots of stopping to empty out the bag. 

In the meantime I got my coupons organized and made a shopping list.  I also rummaged through the bathroom and linen cabinets and organized and tossed some makeup that was sitting around too long.  For some reason, I couldn’t part with all the lipstick tubes – do those go bad?  There were over 20 (!) – many never used.

Lunch was a turkey sandwich, dinner a frozen entrée.  Not much around to snack on, so that was good.

Sunday I left the house around 8:30 am and went to Walmart (toiletries, dog food) and two markets (groceries).  Finally back at home, I marinated some chicken breasts for this week and made the chicken tamale casserole for lunch.  Yum, we liked it.  I think it’ll be a good recipe for when we have leftover rotisserie chicken to use up.  As it is, I used some chicken thigh meat that had been in the freezer a while and some leftover cooked taco meat (ground beef). 

I sorted and did a couple loads of laundry and spent some time in the yard with the newspaper.  It was nice to just sit and enjoy the nice weather for a change.  I washed and trimmed the baby spinach I’d bought (okay, next time I’m definitely buying the bagged stuff that’s all trimmed and somewhat clean!).  I made a salad for lunch today while bf put together dinner – grilled salmon, rice and spicy green beans.  Afterwards, I came across last week’s TBL episode on the Fine Living channel, so I the rest of that. 

I didn’t do any clothes shopping over the weekend, but I think I’ll pop over to a mini version of a department store near the office (mainly cosmetics, jewlrey, hosiery, handbags, accessories and clothing) and see what they have.  I have coupons!  I didn’t exercise either, so we’ll get to the gym tonight. 

That’s about it for today.  Oh, great, bf just phoned me to tell me that the contractor that did our windows, gutters, etc. last summer is basically out of business.  They owed us some work.  One thing was a replacement window because bf noticed a small dent in the windowsill.  I’m not upset about that at all - it’s barely noticeable.  But the thing I’m annoyed about is that we ordered & paid for larger downspouts and we got the normal sized ones, and they weren’t installed properly and they also drip from the seams.  Bf was not persistent in pestering them to get this taken care of right after the work was done, so he waited all winter - and now this. Another issue, although minor, is that the window installers got some adhesive on one of the window screens and the screening material needs to be replaced.  We also need some screening material for another screen that the dog damaged.  If bf would just open the window from the top instead of the bottom, we wouldn’t have that problem…  Anyway, neither of us is happy about this, but we’ll see if we can get some blood from the turnip (unlikely, even if this is relatively small $).  Otherwise, we’ll have to get the downspouts taken care by someone else.  Thank goodness we didn’t get stuck with a half-done job or anything like that. 

Okay, time to publish this novel and get back to work. 

Yay for Friday!!  I’m happy it finally got here! 

Not much to report.  Work went alright yesterday.  After work bf and I went out for dinner - we had gyros.  I like them, but anything more than once a year is probably too much.  So no more gyros this year!  (Wish I felt that way about the other fattening foods I like!  Afterwards we bought the sodastream thingy.  I had a coupon for another 15% off, so after the sale price, my Kohl’s cash and the 15%, it was $56, and then bf did the refund form, so we have another $20 coming.  I hope we like this thing and use it a lot, but if not, at least it wasn’t ridiculously expensive. 

I was sore from my workout on Wed and didn’t exercise last night. I think I will go to the gym tonight.   Except we have to buy the communion gift!  I also don’t know what I’ll wear to the service, ugh.  My wardrobe is pathetic.  Need, need, need to shop!  Wish I could just hit a single store and come out with 5 great tops.  I guess that’s my problem - being overly picky.  They don’t all necessarily need to be great, they just need to “do” for work and match my other stuff. 

It’s finally getting more springlike, and thankfully, salads are much more appealing to me in warm weather.  I think this weekend I’m going to prep for salads for next week’s lunches.  I want to buy some greens and other veggies and also marinate and grill some chicken breasts.  I’ll see what dressings we have in the fridge as well.  We have a big fridge on our floor at work and I see a lot of condiment stuff in it, but I don’t know if the cleaning people leave it alone when they do the fridge cleanup once a month.  It would be convenient to keep some stuff at work instead of schlepping it back and forth.  I hate having to remember to remove my stuff each month.  I guess a reminder in my Lotus Notes calendar would be helpful. 

Well, I’m just rambling now, so I’ll stop and post.  Have a great Friday and a great weekend everyone.