Archive for March, 2009

Organizing and Racing – My fantastic weekend

Saturday, March 21st, 2009

I am having a really fantastic weekend.

Friday, after working in the morning, I went on my first organizing gig.  I put up an ad on Craigslist and got a response from a woman who was interested in having me help with the apartment she and her sister share.  She’s a really lovely person and we worked for a few hours on getting the very small kitchen in their apartment more lean and functional.  Mostly, we just took everything out of the cupboard, wiped down the cupboard, and put back only what she wanted to keep.  In the broad scheme, that’s really all there is to organizing.  And she really understood how to do it; she just needed a little push.  And sometimes I was able to give her little ideas that might help her in the space in the future.

In trade, she gave me a full case of the food product that she and her sister make as their small business.  I’m trying to preserve her confidentially here, so I’m not going to list the food item.  But let me say that it looks delicious and I have a lot of it and it’s very exciting.

Overall, I’m pleased with how well it went.  And I’m fairly certain that she was also pleased about it.  I’m hoping to go back and help her with other areas in the apartment.

And I learned many, many things yesterday.  #1 was that even if I’m used to my allergic reactions, other people are not prepared.  She had a few dogs, and with the dust and the pollen in the air, the triple-whammy got me sneezing and sniffling and red and puffy.  And she was very concerned for my health.  I’m working on different allergy medications now, trying to see what I can take that seems to work well (just go for a walk in the pollen and see if I explode) and doesn’t make me really tired.  I don’t want to take something that will leave me really groggy on the job.  But I need to have something that will make it so I can work and not make the client worried about me.  And sneezing all over their house is just a bad impression to make, really.

So I’m testing medication and I picked up a box of saline solution for my neti pot and I’m back to seeing if I can get used to pouring liquid through my nose and if it really helps my sneezing.  And I picked up some local honey which, apparently, if eaten regularly, will eventually help my body adjust to the local pollen.  And if all else fails, we’ve got a box of surgical masks from back when we thought Justin had tuberculosis and I can just wear those, after warning the client, of course.

Another thing I learned is that I will probably come face to face with one of my biggest critter problems:  spiders.  As I’m helping people shift through messes, I’m very likely to run into a variety of creepy-crawlers.  And I’m frightened by spiders.  I’m not sure yet how I’m going to get over that, other than just gritting my teeth and dealing with each spider as it appears.  And hope that clients are sympathetic of my aversion.  Yesterday, there was a dead spider under the sink that I wiped up with the rest of the detritus in the cupboard.  It made me shiver, but it was dead and I had work to do.  Hopefully that mentality will help me face the next spider.

My last major lesson of the day (and there are several smaller ones that I just won’t go into here) was that I really need to get business cards.  The woman I worked with said that as soon as I have cards, she’ll hand them out like crazy.  She knows a lot of people and many of them would be interested in having me help them.  The sooner I can get some cards, the sooner I’ll be able to drum up more business.

So I’m talking with Justin about a design and all the things that go into that.  I have a name for the business that I would like to use, and we’re going to set me up with a website.  I still need to register the name and get a business license and business insurance and all those other things that I’m still not really sure how to accomplish.  But as soon as I can, I’m going to get some business cards.  Even just cheapy little ones that I can get for free from VistaPrint—so long as they’ve got my name and phone number, I can get started.  I can work up to nicer ones later.

This morning, moving on to the other lovely thing of my weekend thus far, Justin and I woke up unreasonably early for a Saturday and went to my place of employment to run in their second annual 5K race.  One of my goals is to run in at least three races before my next birthday.  I haven’t been training very well, and with Justin’s eye bothering him, he hasn’t either.  But we’d decided that we were going to go and we were determined to stick with it.

Justin ran near me for the whole race.  Instead of running it like a race, we ran it like a group-run.  Just going out, running with a whole lot of other people, some of whom were actually just walking it.  So there was no pressure.  And the only goal I had wasn’t to run a certain pace or speed or anything.  It was just to run the whole 5K without having to stop.  I hadn’t done that in a long time.  And our time was a slow 35 minutes and some seconds.  But I ran that whole stinkin’ course without stopping to walk one step.  It’s a little discouraging to see people walking ahead of me who managed to keep ahead of me the whole time, but it’s not about beating them!  It was totally about me making the whole distance without stopping, falling over, and dying of exhaustion.

And I made it all the way!  I have an enormous blister on the inside of my left foot that I’m still not sure about.  It felt like there was a rock in my shoe, but I couldn’t find it.  When I go running again later this week, I’ll have to see if it was something on my sock or what it was.  My biggest problem today was my heart.  My average heart rate was really too high—up around 172.  I kept pulling back because it kept creeping higher and higher and I know that I can’t let that happen.  I should go check my blood pressure at work several times this coming week to see if that’s gone back up again.  I was doing very well about keeping it low.  But if running made my heart go so crazy, I’m going to have to work on that harder.

To congratulate ourselves for a job well done, we came home and napped for a couple hours after our shower.  And tonight we’re going out to dinner at a place called Jim and Nick’s—I’ve heard they have really fantastic barbequed ribs and I’m drooling just thinking about it.

Tomorrow we’ll get some work done.  I’m going to put up another ad on Craigslist, see if I can’t get another gig to come in.  Now that I’ve seen how well that can go, I’m excited to get another opportunity to try.  And now that I know that I can run the whole 3 miles, I’m going to try to get back into running more dedicatedly.  See if losing a little weight doesn’t help my heart a lot.

I hope you’re all having as fantastic a weekend as I am!  I’ll be back again soon to babble at you some more.  :)

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Grace in Small Things

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

15 March 09

  1. Snuggles from my fantastic husband.
  2. Chatting with my mom for a while. It was a lovely conversation and I really enjoyed it.
  3. Watching NCIS while working on a project I’ve put off for too long.
  4. Dinner with my husband while watching interesting television.

16 March 09

  1. Receiving my 5S award and a $25 gift card for a restaurant. (A Savannah restaurant, but that just means we’ll have to find an excuse to drive into town.)
  2. I finally finished pulling the stitches from the hem of the pants I’m trying to fix.
  3. Justin made dinner and cleaned the kitchen at the same time—putting away the dishes from the dishwasher and washing the dishes as he made the meal. And then he surprised me with delicious waffles and a spotless kitchen.
  4. I have an organizing job on Friday!!!
  5. Castle: Once again, highly entertaining television.
  6. Laughing and cuddling while going to sleep, talking about slumber parties as children.

17 March 09

  1. Wearing my green and white stripped socks to work and getting away with it because it’s a popular local holiday.
  2. Getting more compliments on my green and white stripped socks than anything else I have ever worn.
  3. Pulling my hair back into a clip and having it look great and feel comfortable and *stay* that way for several hours.
  4. Yoga! Strength, balance, focus, and fabulousness.
  5. Reading in bed next to my husband.
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Babbling about the weekend

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Well, we finished watching Tin Man over the weekend.  More terrible writing and cliché situations and things where they just really should have thought it through more thoroughly.  The underground place where criminals and other low-life went to live seemed a lot like a Chinatown.  The shape-shifting turncoat redeemed himself, but the only other dark-skinned character remained the evil witch’s faithful servant to the end.

Justin and I agreed that they should take the idea and give it to Joss Whedon.  Half of the characters, including the most lovable and innocent ones, would die in the end.  Parts of it would be absolutely terrifying.  And it would turn out so much better in the end that we’d thank him for it.

We’ve also started watching Battlestar Glactica.  Justin found the 2-part mini-series that brings you from the older series up to the new one.  I don’t feel like looking up the details on that one, but I’m sure you’re more than able to find that information if you need it.  Wikipedia:  The Source of All Knowledge.

Anyway, we watched the first half of the mini-series and I really enjoyed it.  It’s gritty sci-fi, like Firefly, but without the witty, light-hearted banter.  It’s tragic, like . . . lots and lots of stories.  War of the Worlds, Independence Day, I am Legend, Titan A.E. *Grin*  It’s humanity fighting for her life against something she created.  It’s television that doesn’t pull punches.  And it’s fascinating—an enemy that fights against the tools of war, for the total annihilation of life, and can hide itself perfectly within the population.  I’m really looking forward to seeing where this trip goes.  I really have no idea.

I really had a lovely weekend.  I got home Friday afternoon and poked around the house for a while.  Justin was working from home since no one else from his office was going to be actually in the office that day.  I sat and worked on an Excel file that should help us create a functional budget, as well as show clearly where we are with our debt and our savings situations.  I’m trying to have it all set out clearly so we can really start pushing down on the debt and packing away money for travel and such.  It’s been a mess so far, and I’m trying to make it work better.

Saturday we cleaned house.  I mentioned needing to dust, right?  I dusted for 4 hours.  Along with washing windows and tidying and getting the house looking great.  Justin cleaned the bathrooms until they sparkled and you could eat off any surface, if you didn’t mind the addition of ammonia to your meal.  He vacuumed, I dusted.  He put in a fold-out drawer at the kitchen sink.  I dusted.  This house hasn’t been this clean in a long, long time.

So on Sunday, we rested.  I worked on sewing projects.  I have several pants and a skirt that needed mending, and a couple pillows.  I sat watching NCIS while hemming the legs of a pair of pants, pinning the seams back into my skirt, and sewing the stuffing back into the pillows.  And then I sat for many hours pulling out the stitching along the hem of another pair of pants.  They’re made of this really flowing, slippery fabric and each leg is about 3 feet around.  They’re very flouncy.  The hem came out once before and I did a really bad job of sewing it back up.  The fabric gathered and one leg ended up shorter than the other and it just wasn’t good.  I’m hoping that by undoing all my previous work, I’ll be able to get it to work out much better.  I worked on pulling stitches for hours.  I finally went to bed with about six inches left to go—about 30 minutes of work.  I plan to finish unstitching tonight, iron in a new hem (the pants were too long in the first place) and manage to get a neat, clean seam started.  I might do it all by hand, since it’s such a difficult fabric.  But I’ll find out once I get started whether that’s going to actually work better or not.

It’s going to be another long week.  I’ve been working on a complicated project at work.  A project where again and again I find myself completely out of my depth.  I don’t have enough training to understand all of this yet.  Thankfully there hasn’t been much a time crunch, but if it’s not finished by the end of today, things will get dicey.

We had another meeting this morning about the RIF (Reduction in Force) situation.  There’s still no definite information on what’s going to happen with us here upstairs.  So far as I know, the people downstairs in production are still going to be on furlough for several weeks in the middle of summer.  Across the whole company, from what I understand, we’re losing 1,200 employees.  Each department is looking at a 10-15% reduction.  I’m really not sure how that works out, other than losing 2 or 3 people from my department.  Possibly.  We’re still standing on the gallows, waiting.  Just waiting.

I’ll come back and rant about this sometime.  Not about the RIF, exactly, but about the reason for it.  But not today.

I just saw that the beautiful Amy, the fantastic woman who greatly improved my older brother’s life by agreeing to marry him, linked to my post about organizing (Organizing categories and the Landing Strip).  Thank you, Amy!  I appreciate the promo!

For anyone new and reading this because of the link, I’m trying to start a small professional organizing business.  It’s been very slow-going.  But hopefully things will start to pick up soon.  More news on that as it happens.  But now and then I’m going to try to post about things that I’ve organized around my own home and ideas I have about that whole thing.  Feel free to drop me comments or emails with questions and thoughts about that.  Most of the time, obviously, this blog is just about me rambling on and on about whatever’s going on in my world.

Okay!  I’m pretty much out of time on my lunch and I’ve got to get this up and posted.  I hope you’re all having a fantastic day!  I’m still sitting here waiting for the rain that was supposed to start falling on Thursday.  (Who stole my rain?!  Give it!)  But hopefully the weather over all your heads is beautiful today.

Cheers!

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Babbling about television stuff

Friday, March 13th, 2009

[I wrote this post yesterday off ‘n’ on during the day.  And then I forgot to email it home so I could post it.  So, it’s a day off and not all that informative, but hey!  It’s a post.  More posting to come, I promise.]

I’ve been dealing with some blockage.  Of the brain kind.  Of the writing kind.  Things have been happening, thoughts like “I should write about this” have been happening, but I haven’t been able to sit down and write about them.  Haven’t been able to get my brain in a place where that sounds like a good idea.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the weather.  This is the time of year when I absolutely love the south.  It was in the 80s yesterday.  Today will be cooler, upper 60s, low 70s.  We’re expecting rain.  And rain for the next several days.  Rain will be wonderful—make all the grass and flowers and trees give up this dismal winter brown and get some green on.  Right now, where I grew up, it’s -2˚ F.  Where my sister lives, it’s -5˚ F.  At my house, it’s 64˚ F.

I love the south.

For a few more weeks anyway.  Soon it’s going to be over 100˚ F and I’ll be sweating as soon as I get out of any air conditioned building.  And freezing anytime I’m inside those buildings because southerners are crazy about their air conditioning.  And so is my husband.

The pine trees are dropping their magical fairy dust all over the place right now.  We opened the windows of the house over the weekend to air out the place from being shut up for so long.  When I went to bed, I noticed a fine layer of dust on top of my book.  Yellow dust.  Layered over everything.  Guess how much dusting I’m doing this coming weekend?  Lots!  And this is just the pine trees so far.  Just wait until the flowers are actually blooming.  Fun times, fun times . . . .

I should share the work situation and Justin’s health situation, but I don’t want to talk about it.  Not here.  Not yet.  It leaves me with a fairly limited conversation pool, unfortunately, because those two items take up a lot of the brain-use time that isn’t thinking about the weather.

I watch TV, though, so I can talk about that.  Justin and I rented Tin Man from Netflix.  It’s a 3-part mini-series based on the Wizard of Oz.  Very loosely.  But it’s really fun!  Okay, so the writing is really bad sometimes and doesn’t make a lot of sense.  And for some reason, I keep totally missing information and Justin has to explain what the heck is going on.  I think his description of the show was “The Wizard of Oz done in steampunk while on acid.”  It’s a good description.  We’re waiting for the second disk now with the 3rd part of the series.  I’m interested to see how they’re going to wrap it all up, whether they’re going to avoid the really cliché ending that I could see happening.

I’ve enjoyed watching Zooey Deschanel and Alan Cumming.  I like seeing Zooey in things (even if Justin does find her extremely attractive).  She’s a fun actress and since we watch her sister (Emily) on Bones so often, I have fun seeing how these sisters are progressing in their careers.  And Alan (who played Nightcrawler in the X-Men movies) is playing a fun character that I’m really enjoying.

Bu the thing that irritates me a lot since Justin pointed it out to me?  The turn-coat character is a shape-shifter who turns into a dog.  And he is absolutely the only dark-skinned character in the whole show.  Everybody else?  Pale, pale white.  This guy?  Dark brown African American man.  Seriously, now!  Didn’t anybody think about that just a tiny little bit?!

I’m also still watching NCIS.  I’m about 1/3 of the way through season 2.  It’s going to take me a good long while to watch all these but I’m enjoying it.  I’m a little confused about the episode I watched last night (mostly “Why?” and “Why those people in particular?”) but still lots and lots of fun stuff.

And since I’m always happy to see Firefly people employed, Justin and I watched the first episode of Castle on Monday (I’m pretty sure it was Monday).  Nathan Fillion plays Richard Castle, a best-selling mystery novelist with charisma flowing off him like stink off a skunk.  Pat, one of our friends, called it “The anti-Bones.”  Best-selling author works with law-enforcement to solve crimes.  Yea!  It’s also been explained as being pretty much the same old story as told so many other times before, only better.

It really is a whole lot of fun.  Fillion is so much fun to watch no matter who he’s playing.  And in this show, he’s a frat-boy author with great insight into people and a whole lot of charisma.  He’s cocky and impulsive, but cares a lot for his daughter and mother.  And it drove him crazy until he worked out the problems with the murder in the first episode (murders based around scenes from his books).

We really enjoyed it and we’re recommending it to pretty much everybody.  It’s on at the crazy time of 10:00 EST, but it means we’ll watch it curled up in our pajamas before climbing into bed.  Or we’ll just record it, like everything else.

Anyway.  You should watch it.  It’s fun.

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Pictures for Mom

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

I finally got around to putting up a few pictures of the outside of our house and the neighborhood.  Not very many pictures, but they’re on the PHOTOS page if you’re interested.

I took the pictures back in November or something like that, so there are leaves on the trees that aren’t there now.  And we’ve cleaned up the backyard a bit.  I’ll try to add more pictures as spring starts coming in with new and fresh colors.

Enjoy!

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