Getting to the Bed On Time

SleepyheadNo, I’m not talking about a bride’s wedding night – rather, the importance of a good night’s sleep.

I don’t get them – good nights of sleep, I mean. I am too enthralled with the Internet, with all the jobs and ideas I have floating around in my head, and I stay awake until the wee hours of the morning. Usually I get about five hours of sleep a night – but to feel truly rested, I would need seven hours every night.

I think the most important part of that sentence up there is the last two words: every night.

Articles about good night’s sleep have been done. We all have a general idea of why we should get enough sleep – it affects your weight, your mood, and how your body functions. But just for kicks, I thought I’d trek around the Internets and see what great tidbits I could pull from other articles and gather them here.

  1. Sleep keeps your heart healthy. I honestly completely didn’t know that. I have some history of heart disease in my family, so my attention is perked, here.
  2. Naps make you smarter. Oh yeah! I love to nap – and maybe that’s just because I don’t get enough sleep at night. But going out to my car during my lunch hour for a twenty minute snooze is definitely one of my favorite things.
  3. Sleep deprivation (even in the most modest amounts) can interfere with how efficiently the body regulates the release of cortisol, which plays a significant role in hunger, stress and appetite. Okay, so I’m seriously hoping that getting to bed early and waking early to do some Wii Fit Yoga could drastically help my weight-loss goals.
  4. Somewhat related to that, studies have found that people who don’t get enough sleep often indulge in excessive sneaking [sic]. Okay, well, that is actually exactly me. I was waiting to finish my soda before I got myself a bowl of ice cream. That’s after constantly eating the M&M’s from a coworker’s desk all day, having a huge lunch and then still eating the chips and candy corn I brought from home, and having a cookie before I even ate supper. It looks like I get shift some blame for that from weak willpower to sleep deficiency. Woohoo!
  5. Sleep may prevent cancer. Well, I’m honestly skeptical about this one. I mean, really? But hey, I love to sleep. This would be an awesome benefit of one of my favorite activities.

There are so many things that I want to do in my free time that I neglect my health (by getting enough sleep) in order to get things done. That’s no good. Last night I sketched out a “perfect day” plan, and started a list of all the things I really want to do in the two hours between when the kids and DH go to sleep and when I should be going to bed. I’m all up for treating this like one of my son’s activities, to schedule particular activities for particular days, so I don’t try to cram it all in a hodgepodge fashion, but rather give quality time to each activity. (Come to think of it, that’s a good idea for food, too…tsk.)

If It’s Worth Doing…

Photo by Zsuzsanna Kilián

Photo by Zsuzsanna Kilián

“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. Just [write]!”
-Phil Hodgen, BHB

This is exactly what I needed to hear today, and yesterday, really. I am obviously not in a position to need to pour quite as much effort as Mr. Hodgen did to his particular topic blog, but it is a good sample of what your dedicated efforts can bring you.

I have been watching a particular agent at my office do exactly what Mr. Hodgen just did. Intense effort for a relatively small return. Paying out a not insignificant sum of money for a campaign that has the potential to pay out tenfold, and most probably more. If she gains paying clients from just 0.3% of the mailing sent, it will pay for the entire endeavor, plus the next five just like it. If she received a 2% response, she could earn more than I do in a year. 5%? The one marketing campaign could pay her fees, her mortgage, her utilities, all of any expense she might have for a year. And that’s on the low end on both sale price and commission for our current market. Imagine if she had some kickass, world changing sales?

Whether or not I have a good idea today, the most important thing is to keep working towards my goal. Write, even if it sucks. Write, even if it’s off topic. Write, even if nobody reads.

Obviously I don’t have success yet in this blogosphere to give any credit to my claims. I haven’t backed things up with six references from other successful bloggers, although I’m sure they’re out there. But I’ve seen it work. Mr. Hodgen saw it work. And if I could get more people in my office to try it, they would see it work as well.

And I will see it work.

Links for 2009-09-29

Motivation…almost

I’m blocked tonight. Why am I blocked tonight? I really don’t understand.

I wanted to write about Motivation, but I’m having a hard time finding any. I did find an article I really liked on the subject at A List Apart: Staying Motivated. (I often find interesting articles at this website, but until hadn’t actually added them to my feed reader. Crisis averted – I subscribed today.)

Writing Den, or 4th Bedroom?My absolute favorite tip was to build a creative den. I thought about where I do most of my writing, TV watching, and web surfing – a not-terribly-comfortable-after-two-hours rocker recliner. That’s not a den. I think I would like a separate space in the room just for me. DH has the desktop computer on a makeshift desk, and soon he will get a real desk for the computer. So where will I work? There are no extra rooms for me, and at this point there aren’t even any empty walls. There is a very long, narrow closet…

Of course, picking a Den would require space that isn’t unusable at certain times during the day – or night. For example, it wouldn’t make much sense for me to set up my space in our bedroom. DH goes to bed with the kids at 8 p.m. (tonight being a notable exception – he just went up), and is a very light sleeper. I wouldn’t be able to work with him sleeping, thereby only giving me time to write on the weekends when I’m not at my parents house doing laundry or driving my son to Boy Scout things or taking both kids to church. Oh, wait, I don’t have any time that’s not doing those things.

When my husband gets his desk, I will evaluate the remaining space in the room. Perhaps I will be able to create a Den out of what his new desk has displaced. I can set up my sewing machine, and have an outlet for my laptop, and keep a book on the side for when I’m waiting for my laptop to kick up, and that little piece of wall can be my one-and-only creative space. A bit of wall would be ideal, so I could put up sticky notes and cover the wallpaper noise.

Staying motivated. Repetition. Doing it so often it’s simply habit, and not doing it leaves a void.

Boiled Dinner Remix

RiceIn Nicki World, there isn’t a lot of cooking going on that doesn’t start from a box. Hamburger Helper is frequently about as far as we extend ourselves. Frozen dinners in bags are my friend.

Tonight was an exception. When I was a child, my parents made this really awesome soup. Cabbage, carrots, potatoes, onions (yuck), and kielbasa sausage, all boiled together with maybe a bit of salt and other random Parent Ingredients.

My favorite parts, of course, were the carrots, potatoes and sausage (especially the sausage). Which is why my Boiled Dinner Remix is a bit…scant on the ingredients. Here’s what we had for dinner tonight.

1 bag baby carrots
1 kielbasa sausage
1 box instant rice

Boil carrots and sausage. Make rice according to directions on package. Serve carrots and sausage over rice.

While it was pretty, and DH thanked me for making supper, he did say it was rather bland. Well, that’s probably because I’m not much of a cook. There wasn’t any salt or butter to be found anywhere near the stuff. Seasoning has never been my strong suit. Either too much, or not enough, as in this case.

Maybe next time if I add some salt…

Links for 2009-09-27

English as a Second Language

When I met my husband, he was attending the same school as I. With eight years between us, it really was fortunate that this was the case. Otherwise, I’m really not sure where we would have met. At the time, aside from school and Star Trek: TNG, we really didn’t have a lot in common.

His interest in school was to teach ESL, or English as a Second Language. There was a need for it in our town, and state, and he probably would have had no trouble finding a job anywhere, had that been where he ultimately ended up.

StudyingI read an interesting article today titled, Can you read this?: US suffers foreign language weakness. I didn’t know that only 8% of U.S. college students are currently taking a foreign language? How is this possible, when there are 200 million Chinese students studying English?

Oh, wait, I remember.

In high school, my French teacher did not have enough passion for what she was teaching to distract the twenty-some kids in her class from rubber-band fights and note-passing. She may have been a great instructor, but she couldn’t get us interested.

In addition, my English education was (is) lacking so that terms used to describe things we have in English were foreign to me. I tried to look some up to give you examples, and since I don’t know what words to look for, I can’t even tell you what didn’t make sense. Genders for words was completely abstract. Hell, I was in junior high before I could tell you, without thinking, whether something was an adjective or an adverb. (Funny stuff for a writer, huh?)

Later, in high school number two, I didn’t even have French as a choice – I had German and Spanish. To switch was difficult. Instead of going with the similar language, though, and taking Spanish, I chose German. This was a hard switch, although I received extra tutoring and did well. Score one for the school.

A combination of lack of interest (mine, various instructors, and the school system’s) is probably to blame. As students, I can think of one classmate who thought that their foreign language skills would give them any kind of advantage. One. It’s been a while, but I don’t think I ever heard my teacher devote a lesson to why the language I chose would be helpful once I left school, and to be honest, my former language teacher parents probably never made the lecture either.

My kids haven’t heard it yet from me, but that will change tomorrow. Reading that article makes me want to force my kids into Spanish proficiency, so when they’re in high school and the system finally gets around to forcing them to take a second (third, hopefully, at that point) language, they’ll be ready for it.

The hardest part, I think, is helping a kid realize how helpful the things they learn right now are going to be in an abstract future they can’t envision. It’s completely foreign for my kids to think about jobs, or careers, or their future resume. My hardest job will be to get them interested in spite of that fact.

A Certain Sort of Tired

Sleeping Dogs LieThere’s sleepy tired, there’s physical exhaustion, and there’s mental exaustion. Currently I believe I’m experiencing all three.

Or it could just be apathy.

My Thursday was frantic. There was a very large project that I needed to accomplish by a particular deadline. The deadline was impossible. There simply wasn’t a way to make everything move quickly enough to get it done, even if I had spent every second at the task. I started work early and stayed late (although I refused to say how late when questioned this morning by my coworker). I endured minor injuries. I felt like a factory worker on the assembly line – insert paper, fold paper, sort paper, fold paper. Stuff paper, stuff envelopes. Stand. Sit. Hunch. Bend.

We talked about preparing for this particular type and volume of project next time. There was little notice on this occasion, and as it goes, life got in the way so the project didn’t even launch until the last moment. But what about next time? I can see this scenario repeating itself, and I don’t look forward to it.

How do you plan for things that happen at the last moment? At best, we had five days to accomplish this task, but until the last moment, there were always more important tasks to do first. Isn’t that the way it always goes? But had we given the project some attention daily, we would have stood a much better chance of making it happen on time.

Do you plan for the worst, or keep the order? In my job, I have a backlog of tasks quite regularly. I log new items as they arrive, and work through them in a top to bottom manner, in most cases. Occasionally urgent tasks cross my desk, and those get immediate priority. Was this all-day task something that could have been given a one-hour jump in the line every day so that one day didn’t have to be given completely to it? When I let something jump the line, I risk upsetting people who feel that their task is just as important and critical as the jumped task.

Well at any rate, the week is done. I still have a backlog, and I missed some tasks that had firm deadlines for Friday, but I can’t do anything about them now. All I can do is recover from my exhaustion and make it through my weekend.

At least I got to mow before it rained.

Blocked

What to write?The past couple of days my posts have come easily. I had something to write about, and I didn’t have to think about it much. Wednesday was an entirely different story.

I watched  a good movie last night called Sleepwalking. I like to think about what happens to the characters after the film is over (I do this with books, too). Usually either the film (book) says explicitly how things end, and you are presented with a definitive “happily ever after”, or you receive a vague “happy ending”, where you presume things will be okay because now everyone is on the right track. Of course there are exceptions, but this one wasn’t one. In Sleepwalking I received the vague idea that James would be okay, but I still enjoyed speculating as to what exactly happened. (I won’t spoil it for you.)

Right now I’m thinking back on what some people said when they heard where I might be moving. They thought, and told me, eventually, that I wouldn’t be happy here. I wonder what made them say that? What did they know that I didn’t? Was it just a feeling? Because now, of course, I’m very curious.

My son finished his homework at school Wednesday afternoon, which worked out very well because then my mom came by and they got to watch movies with her. My poor daughter cried when it was time for Grandma to leave, which was sad, but I’m sure made my mom feel loved. I think she worries that even though we’re going to visit every weekend (and hijack their clothes washer), that the kids will forget them. Not happening, Grandma.

I’m reading again! The Time Traveler’s Wife is an interesting read. I was warned that it was jerky, but I don’t mind it at all. It’s completely perfect with the way the protagonist’s life is.

That’s all there is for now. Expect your regularly scheduled programming tomorrow. Thanks!

Links for 2009-09-23

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