I’m taking a day off from work today to have a mental health day. Unfortunately, I always feel obligated to be productive on my mental health days, and so I’ve managed to make three appointments throughout the day. So no big afternoon nap for me.
A few weeks ago Denis and I bought some new vinyl floor tiles to lay in our master bathroom (the current vinyl flooring is ripped in places and unattractive (even without the rips it’s unattractive). The new tiles are nice – we just didn’t buy enough of them. We bought 60 sq ft, but apparently we’ll need more like 90 sq ft when you account for the cuts we’ll have to make along the edges of the room. Who knew? I’m going out today to the store where we got them and I’m praying they still have them. If not, we’ll have to order them online and wait for their arrival.
I started a new audiobook yesterday, and in looking at my list for the year I’m sad that I’ve only read three books thus far – and we’re already halfway through MARCH. That’s pitiful. I could swear I listened to an audiobook between “Huck Finn” and “Tiger’s Wife”, but I cannot find any reference in any of my log-keeping that refers to another book. Right now as I type I am downloading 7-8 audiobooks so that I have plenty to choose from. I’m also in the middle of reading a book on my Kindle and hope to be done with that one this week.
Work is going well – not much to report there. One of my bosses was promoted into my top boss’s old position. I’m pleased with the choice because she would have been my pick had I been able to express an opinion on the matter. What’s tricky though, is that Top Boss specifically told me that I’d be primarily supporting Top Boss and that Co-Admin would be supporting New Boss. But the past two weeks this has NOT played out that way. I’ve pretty much been providing 90% of the support to New Boss. I’m not going to complain – I like being busy. But I just don’t know if Top Boss ever told New Boss that she needed to go to Co-Admin for her stuff. And as much as I love Co-Admin (and I do – she’s a great co-worker to have), I don’t know that she’d be able to handle that kind of additional workload on top of what she already does on a day-to-day basis. I find that even after 20 years of experience, she has trouble with true secretarial work. On more than a few occasions I have sat down with her to give her advice on being more effective with time management, work prioritization and teaching her additional computer skills. Fortunately, she takes the advice well and is eager to learn, so I don’t believe I’m stepping on her toes by doing so. With any luck I’ll get her to a point where she CAN handle additional work on top of what she’s doing now. Because I’d say at this point I’m doing 75% of the work and she’s doing 25%. I don’t say that to puff myself up – it’s just pure honesty. And yet I appear less busy at times because I’m able to manage time and prioritize my work more effectively. So I’m hoping she can take what I teach her and run with it, so that work can be closer to 50/50, as it should be.
We took the kids to go see “The Lorax” on Sunday after church. I wasn’t impressed. It definitely had an agenda (“Plant a tree for your tomorrow, John Denver“), and just wasn’t that good. Next up for me at the movies is “The Hunger Games,” which was filmed in our area last fall. Loved the book, can’t wait to see the movie in a few weeks.
I gave up sugar for Lent a few weeks ago. I didn’t go hardcore like, “a potato converts to sugar so don’t eat that,” but opted for the much-easier-to-track “no obvious sugar” route. So far it’s gone well although I’ve had a couple mess-ups simply because of not paying attention. For instance, we took the kids to ChickFilA a last week and Denis ordered me the fruit juice for my drink. I’ve not been drinking juice because of the high sugar content. When he handed me the cup (he placed the order while I was chatting with an old college buddy who happened to be there at the same time), I drank it without even thinking about the fact that it wasn’t water. There was also a family dinner a couple weeks ago when Denis gave me applesauce on the side, and it was only after dinner ended that I realized I should have skipped the applesauce. But when I’m intentional about it, I’m doing well – for instance, I had water and popcorn at the movies on Sunday. And the result? I’ve lost 6.5 pounds since Lent began on February 22.
As for TV, Denis and I are one step closer to cancelling DirecTV. We recently purchased a converter box and antenna and put it on the TV upstairs – it works great. We’re going to test it on the big TV in the main living room, and if it works well there, we’ll buy a duplicate converter box and antenna, and call DirecTV to cancel our membership. We own two Tivo boxes outright, and I’m considering hacking into those to see if I can configure them to work like VCRs so that I can still record shows when we’re not home. According to the Internet, this should be possible – I just need to sit down and do it.
Remember how I said I wanted to have our house on the market by April? Yeah, that’s not happening. We haven’t packed a thing and we’ve done virtually nothing by way of repairs around the house. I know we’ll get to it eventually, but I’m not putting a timeline on it. I was pushing hard to get the new house built and us moved in by December, but then I realized that there was really no need to put us under that kind of pressure. We have time – there’s no rush. We’ve waited this long, there’s no harm in waiting a bit more. And so I’ve been bringing home empty boxes from work, stacking them in our formal living room. I think we have about 30 at this point. I’m going to visit my grandmother in April and will be bringing home all of her empty boxes as well. At that point we’ll begin packing, rent out a storage unit to hold all the stuff we pack up, and really focus on fixing up the house for sale. If that doesn’t happen until July, that’s fine. If the house doesn’t sell until December, that’s fine. It’ll happen when it happens. There’s no rush.
And that’s that. Nothing else to report. I’ll try to remember to log in with my thoughts on this week’s American Idol live performances. I meant to do that last week and totally forgot. And then Jeremy got booted (no surprise there). So I’ll try and muster the time this week to tweet about the show and then report on it here.