Off the Beaten Plan

plan: to devise or project the realization or achievement of

Browsing the archives for the Editorial category.

Pain Relief

As desperately hoped and expected, thankfully my back pain has waned to the point where I feel normal again.

Well, not completely normal. I still can’t put on my own socks. I get my 4-year-old to help me in the mornings.

And the morning car rides are difficult, but not impossible. Discomfort now rather than outright pain. I’ve just been taking Aleve in the mornings, and then…

In the evenings, after I’ve been up and down and have walked around and moved all day, I don’t feel much at all.

I’m really eager for the weather to warm more and the light to stay longer in the evenings so I can start walking, which I am confident will help even more. Plus, it won’t hurt the waistline. When I can get out and walk in the evenings I am less likely to sit and pork out on snacks and more likely to get a glass of water so I don’t ruin all the good I’ve done.

Aside from that, well, work is stressful as always. The next two weeks will be chock full of one task repeated over and over again, and at the end I’ll sag down in defeat with a case of Lager and drown my misery for one night, then go back to the grind. It just never lets up, and it’s…

Well, it’s hard. Nobody said it would be easy, though, huh?

Pain Relief was published on March 2nd, 2010, with the tags , , under the Editorial category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Spring Is Here-ah!

Yay, Spring!

Snow, I love you, but really, we’ve had enough.

Yay, Spring!

Signs of Spring

  1. It’s light late enough that I can read on the way home.
  2. I can go outside with no coat regularly.
  3. Daffodils.
  4. Spring Time Change (March 14th – set your clocks forward 1 hour!)

So as you can see, Spring is absolutely here. I love it, I love it, I love it.

My kids started begging for their bikes to be let out. Since I’m not quite ready to let them ride around the neighborhood yet, I pushed it off. Plus, I’m going to have to either fix the training wheels or remove them on my son’s bike.

The snow has nearly all melted away, and I feel safe in scheduling a car wash for this week. If the snow isn’t over yet completely, at least I can get rid of the layer of salt and grime that’s all over it. Not to mention the bird poo on the window from the flock of seagulls I saw earlier. (There must have been over 1000 of them, no kidding.)

What are seagulls doing so far inland, by the way? This is strange to me.

Plus, they don’t say “mine” like they do in Finding Nemo. I wish they would. ;)

Spring Is Here-ah! was published on March 1st, 2010, with the tags , , under the Editorial category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Bye-bye, Vancouver

Well, I got to watch the Canada v. USA Gold Medal hockey game today, and loved it. I’m glad that Canada won – they were hosting the games, they should have won. I think if the Olympics had been hosted any other location other than Vancouver, Canada, I would have been all “GO USA!”, but I couldn’t manage it today.

And I don’t think it’s being un-American, as has been suggested. It’s just a game, they’re all NHL players (and even NHL Refs!), and it doesn’t matter that much to me. In the scheme of things, I mean.

But I missed most of the rest of The Games. I didn’t see any Downhill Skiing, nor did I catch any of the really cool looking snowboarding (Downhill Snowboarding?), or the figure skating. I just took a moment to watch some recaps – only about ten minutes worth – and I realize again just how much I missed it.

I want to be in a position, two years from now, to be able to have cable and sit and watch Olympics from the moment they start until the second they finish. To be able to take two weeks off of work, still send the kid’s to daycare, and just veg. Turn up the television and clean in the other rooms when there’s something on I’m not completely in love with.

That would be cool.

So I’ve got some events queued up in another tab, and I’m going to enjoy the things I missed. It won’t be the same, of course. I can see who won already, and I know who crashes and who doesn’t stand a chance. A lot of the fun is gone.

On the other hand, I did finally figure out who that squat little man-figure is supposed to represent, all on my own. Yay, me!

Bye-bye, Vancouver was published on February 28th, 2010, with the tags , , under the Editorial, Financial, Planning category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

TV Zombies and The Zone

When my daughter watches television, she does nothing else. She could sit there for hours and watch Spongebob and then Dora and then Sailor Moon (yay, VHS!), and not complain a moment (except for the traditional V battle cry, “I’m hungry!”).

My son could play on the computer for hours. On a lazy Saturday morning with only half-awake parentage, he could easily kill three hours on Kidzui.

Lately, if the TV isn’t on, my daughter doesn’t want to do anything. And if my son can’t play “something with electricity”, he’s not happy.

That’s not good.

They both have tons of toys, and when we do finally manage to get them to start playing, they get totally into their respective activities – blocks, coloring, playing Spy – and don’t miss the television at all. It’s just getting through the whines and cries of “I’m bored!” and “There’s nothing to do – can’t I play on your iPod?” that’s the difficult part.

My husband had a suggestion – no television for a week. It’s a great idea, and something I want to try as well.

You see, I can’t really complain about my kids’ habits, because they’re my habits, too. When I’m up in the evenings after everyone else has gone to bed, I “have” to have the television on to keep me company. Usually I’ll put in a movie I’ve seen about 16 times. And then I turn on the computer, and start playing games on Facebook, addicted to Farmville and Cafe World (darn you to heck, Zynga Games!).

But when I have the television off, and I’m actually working, I easily slip into The Zone, that place where everything gets done and you lose track of time because you’re so focused on what you’re doing. And that just helps – the pocketbook, the bills get paid, my task list, everything.

So – a week without TV. I’ve got other things for this week too, but I’ll try hard to focus on getting this done.

Wish me luck!

Photo by Wynand Delport

TV Zombies and The Zone was published on February 22nd, 2010, with the tags , , , under the Editorial category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

I Want, I Want, I Want!

We don’t have cable right now, and while I realize how much I really miss it just after I get back from doing laundry at my parents’ house, I’m so glad we don’t. Because when the kids come with me to do laundry, I hear one thing for the entire trip.

“Mommy, come here, quick! I want that!”

Commercials suck. They teach my kids to beg for things they don’t need. An overpriced robe you wear backwards? My son wants it. A machine that squeezes toothpaste out of the tube automatically because the user can’t figure out how to get the last drop out? My daughter needs it. A bunch of markers that change colors? The helicopter that floats around your living room? The latest TV show card game toy?

“I want it! I want it! I want it!”

I’m trying to get them to change their verbiage. “That’s neat! I like that! It looks like fun!” But with kids, it’s hard. I like to get stuff, too, so teaching my kids to not want everything they see is hard. Still, I feel like if I can steer them away from always saying they “want” something, or it’s something they have to “have”, that maybe I can adjust their attitudes a little.

There’s got to be a book out there to teach me what to do. All the advice that’s spread out on the Internet in all the great blogs that I read, all in one spot so I can read it all at once and reference it. Does anyone know where that link went?

Photo by Ivan Petrov

I Want, I Want, I Want! was published on February 21st, 2010, with the tags , , under the Editorial category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.