Posts Tagged ‘babbling about nothing much at all’

Silence from the Southern front

Monday, February 6th, 2012

 

I haven’t felt like writing much lately.  I feel kinda bad about it because I know some of you come here every day to check if I’ve put up anything new.  But I just can’t get myself to write anything lately.  And it’s not that things are quiet — things are pretty busy, actually.  I have plenty of things that I could write about.  I just haven’t felt like I could open up the website and put anything down in words.

Are we done with winter yet?

Okay.  Update.  Randomness one paragraph at a time.  In no particular order.

Yesterday I accidentally burned my arm while doing my ironing.  I have a burn about 2 inches long on the outside of my right arm.  And when I went to bed, it was rubbing on the bedding, so I asked Justin to help me put an Ace wrap around it, covering the cotton swabs, covering the aloe, covering the burn.  (Don’t blame him for anything that comes after this — it was my stupid idea).  I woke up this morning and discovered I’d cut off circulation to my hand overnight. My hand was numb and tingling and swollen up so much I couldn’t make a fist and the knuckles on the back of my hands were little dimples.  It was possibly one of the freakiest things to wake up to see attached at the end of my arm.  I removed the wrap and started rubbing my hand and making fists to try to get the circulation going and by the time I got to work, it was considerably smaller.  Now, this evening, it’s back to normal size.  It’s not redder than my other hand anymore either.  But it is still a little tingling.  I went to talk with the nurse over lunch and she said there’s no permanent damage and it’ll right itself eventually.  But when we get to the store next, I’m buying gauze and medical tape and not wrapping my arm like that ever again.

Now that I’m working this job and I have more flexibility with my schedule, I’ve gone back to the four 9-hour days and 4-hours on Friday.  This means I get out of work at 4:30.  This means I can make it to the yoga classes held at the other building on Monday and Wednesday.  Which means I’m going to FREE yoga TWICE a week.  And it’s wonderful!  I missed yoga.  I find it interesting and humbling how much I remember about the poses and how much I’m not able to do them compared to when I was doing this more often and how I can do some poses without too much trouble but others are completely impossible for me right now.  Case in point:  Half Moon pose, modified so my hand is on a block instead of on the floor, I can do almost without falling over.  But Cow Face pose?  I can’t even get one leg over the other, not to mention trying to get my hands to grab one another.  Just getting seated to do that pose is impossible.  But I’m getting better and I’m getting stronger and I just have to give it time and keep working.  Plus, on days when I’m not doing yoga, Justin and I are trying to get out to go running, which will also help.

I’m irritated at my doctor and my pharmacist.  I called in early last week to refill two prescriptions.  One of them I got without much trouble.  The other one was out of refills and had to get called in by my doctor.  That was Tuesday.  They finally did that today.  And when I went to pick it up, the insurance won’t cover it until she calls in to explain why I’m taking it.  It’s for restless leg.  I’m taking it so I don’t kick Justin out of bed at night and cover his legs in bruises.  So I paid full price for 5 pills and I’m calling my doctor again tomorrow.  I actually went over to my doctor’s office on my lunch hour today to hand in paperwork to get my prescriptions moved to an online pharmacy, which will (I hope) make this whole thing much more streamlined.  I tried to get her to fill out that paperwork BEFORE CHRISTMAS but she didn’t get it done in the 10-day window that the paperwork required.  So I had to do it again, take it over, talk with the receptionist who told me that they could do it for the prescription that they renewed today (done before the current month’s pills are gone) but they’d like to wait until the other prescription is out of refills.  The whole thing is such a mess.  But at least we got Justin’s meds on the online thing and set up with automatic refills and hopefully won’t ever have to deal with him having to threaten malpractice to a doctor for not renewing his antidepressants.  That was not a fun day.

I have friends over every weekend now — we make dinner and watch Dr. Who.  It’s WONDERFUL.  The friends thing.  Dr. Who is good, too.  But mostly the friends thing.

We had a bunch of people at the house on Saturday a week ago.  Another game night when we open the house to whoever on the game group website would like to come over.  We had 8 people over, I think?  We played Apples to Apples and introduced 4 people to Munchkin for the first time.  It was a blast!

Things that are on my list of things to do at work tomorrow:

  • Finish getting R—’s trip to Denver set up with the travel department
  • Get the food set up for A—’s lunch presentation to the big-wigs
  • Finish linking the cells in the Excel workbook with the source document
  • Work the math out to figure out the hours spent per department on this project last week
  • Follow up with several people regarding deadlines for projects due this week
  • Figure out how to ship that box back to the supplier
  • Get a hold of S— in finance and get the right account charged for that event
  • Get the standardized template out to the guys for updates on their tasks
  • And more…

Things on my list of things to do at home:

  • Write thank you notes to Mom/Dad and Grandma.

But for now?  TIRED.  And going to bed.

2
Tags: , , ,
Posted in Living! |

Sitting at home

Thursday, January 5th, 2012

It’s a fun day in the Barnett household.  Justin’s ears are blocked up so he can’t hear very well.  My throat and sinuses are raw, so I can’t talk very well.  I decided that if I need to tell him something, I’m going to carry a dry-erase board and write it to him.  Or text it to him.  :)  Mostly, I’m just hoping that we don’t catch Isaac’s ear infections.

My hands are already much less chapped than they were on Tuesday.  It’s amazing to me how quickly my hands react to the change in humidity.

I used my new coffee maker this morning.  It was awesome!  We picked up coffee and filters at the store yesterday afternoon.  It’s so easy!  I mean, not as easy as Erica’s spiffy Keurig machine, but still pretty easy.  I’ll try to take pictures or something tomorrow morning when I do it again so I can show you.

We’re pretty sure that what hit me on Monday wasn’t the flu, mostly by the fact that Justin hasn’t had any stomach troubles at all.  Generally, he’s going to catch whatever it is that I’ve got, if it’s contagious.  It’s surprising that I got sick first this time, actually, with this stupid cold.  But my immune system was already taking a hit, so that’s probably how that happened.

I’m already frustrated at being sick.  My nose is sore and flaking and my head hurts.  It’s annoying and I’m ready for it to be done already.  I have stuff I wanted to do in the handful of days between getting home from our trip and going back to work.  But “the best laid schemes of mice and men” and all that.

You know, I just looked up that reference.  Did you know it’s from a poem from 1785?  It’s nearly impossible to read about half of it (link) because of the changes in English, but it’s a man talking to a mouse scampering away from the nest he just plowed up in his field.  (Wikipedia has a translation here.)  I find that interesting.

Anyway, I hope you’re all doing well.  I think I’m going to try to drag our luggage upstairs and try to get some semblance of tidiness to this place.  Or find another anime to watch and drink more hot chocolate…  Decisions, decisions… :)

3
Tags: ,
Posted in Living! |

I am why we can’t have nice things.

Monday, November 7th, 2011

I hope everybody had a delightful weekend!

Mine consisted of the following highlights:  Watching Justin play BioShock 2, shattering the side of a glass decorative bowl, taking down the Halloween decorations, and watching several episodes of Terra Nova with Justin.

It was a quiet weekend, which was good because Justin’s knee is still bothering him.  He’s been icing it and taking Advil and it’s getting better.  But he’s not able to move around on it a lot yet.

And I had to work several hours of overtime on Friday, putting the whipped topping on the end of a stressful week, so I was perfectly happy to sit on my butt on Saturday, watching Justin play a creepy video game.  We did spend some time getting the house back in order, but then we sat back down again with pizza and watched the first couple episodes of Terra Nova.  It’s a fun show!  It sounded kinda corny to me, looking at the previews, but I’ve been delightfully proven wrong.

After church on Sunday we started cleaning up the Halloween decorations.  I put so much time and effort into cutting out the bats that I didn’t want to take them down right away – but it’s been more than a week and they needed to go.  While working on un-decorating, I accidentally broke the glass bowl that was sitting on the table – it’s one of those rounded ones that we used on the tables for our wedding.  We have a dozen more of them out in the closet, so I’m not heartbroken about it or anything.  But it scared the snot out of me!

I grabbed the edge of it, forgetting that it was full of sand and rocks and REALLY HEAVY, so when I tried to pull it, it gave a loud POP! and I ended up with a fistful of glass shards.  I was standing next to the dining room table, so I shook the glass from my hand onto the table and ran upstairs to wash my hand under water and see how badly I’d hurt myself.  Amazingly enough, I only had one tiny little cut just below the bottom joint of my index finger.  But my heart was racing so fast that the cut was bleeding profusely.  I got Justin to bandage me up because I was too shaken up to do it with one hand, and got him to pull the sliver that I found afterward, and then I just sat still for about 30 minutes until I was calm again.  I don’t know what it was, but it scared me a lot.  I break things all the time, but they don’t usually make me shake the way this thing did.

Justin, wonderful man that he is, cleaned up the glass for me, vacuuming the floor and the carpet and the tablecloth, so I didn’t have to worry about cutting myself during the clean-up.  I could have done it myself, but it works better this way – he gets to feel all defender protective of me and I get to feel protected.  What girl doesn’t like to feel protected now and then by a man wielding a vacuum cleaner?

What’s the phrase?  “No woman has ever shot a man while he was washing the dishes.”

1
Tags: , , ,
Posted in Living! |

Over the weekend was busy

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

I have a lot of thoughts rattling around in my brain today so this is going to be a “purge post” of several of those things.  So, in no particular order, here we go:

I am SO EXCITED that my sister gave birth to her son yesterday!  I’m looking forward to lots more pictures of Josiah and eventually getting up there to smother him in kisses.  I don’t know when that’s going to happen, since our financial situation for the second half of the year isn’t looking optimistic, but when it happens, it’s going to be awesome.  Especially because it’ll mean smothering all the rest of my nieces and nephews in kisses, too.

We had a lot of fun over the weekend with our friends from out of town visiting.  It’s a pair of sisters, the boyfriend of one, and the two teenage sons of the other.  We had people ALL OVER in our house!  It was great!  We went down to Savannah one day and walked all over, stopping at the candy store on River Street and through the squares.  We had dinner at a Scottish pub and went on a terrible walking ghost tour that we skipped out of early.  By the time we left, everyone was exhausted, with sore feet, and irritated at the tour guide.  But dinner was excellent!

We took them to Hunting Island another day.  It was a beautiful day and we splashed in the waves some, sat in the shade and chatted some, and watched the boys with their boundless energy try again and again to catch a wave with the boogie boards.  The beach was strange, though, because the water was filled with floating wood debris that made it really uncomfortable.  The old foundations of buildings that had long washed away were exposed – the last time we came they were covered in sand.  I had no idea there was so much concrete buried on that beach!  The whole shoreline was changed.  Apparently a big storm came through a couple weeks ago, but I was astonished at how much it affected the island.

The rest of the time, we sat around chatting and playing cards and enjoying each other’s company.  We played a several hours long game of Munchkin, the boys played Halo, I taught the adults how to make bread in a breadmaker, one of the boys showed me some tips for the guitar, and the whole weekend was relaxed and fun and comfortable.  After they left yesterday, the house was too quiet.  I walked around looking at everything that’s not quite in the right places and the piles of bedding and Justin told me not to mope.  “But they’re gone!”  “No moping!”  “But I miss them!”

On the other hand, a couple of our other friends, who live in Beaufort right now, are moving closer to Bluffton.  They signed into an apartment over the weekend that’s 15 minutes or so from our place.  They’re moving at the end of August and that’s going to be awesome.  Okay, not the moving during a horribly hot time of year part because that’s going to suck.  But having them so much closer is going to seriously rock chickens.  Movie night!!

Meanwhile, have I mentioned that we’re not going to move?  We couldn’t find anything we liked in our price range.  So, that’ll hold off for another year, I guess.

My plans for this evening include cleaning our bedroom and the bathroom so they’re back the way they’re supposed to be, and maybe the kitchen because I’ll be in there making a loaf of banana bread anyway.  Maybe watching some television, or reading the book I’m supposed to finish before book club on Saturday.  Eating leftovers for dinner.  And going to bed at a decent hour.  It’s going to be exciting!

2
Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Living! |

Only YOU can prevent forest fires!

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

I’m not really sure how much of the country is on fire right now but I’m guessing that it has to be A LOT.  And if your part of the country isn’t on fire, then you’re probably dealing with flooding.  And I don’t know about you, but I’m sitting here going “REALLY?!”

The smoke from the fires in Florida are so bad today that there’s a haze everywhere, even up as far north as our house in South Carolina.  At work in Georgia, I can smell the smoke even when I’m inside the building.  It took me a while to figure out that it wasn’t because the smoke smell was stuck in my hair, but that it was actually coming in through the ventilation.

And meanwhile, the people in Minot, ND, are looking at flooding eight feet higher than the record.  Eight feet more water than the last time they had major flooding?  That’s a LOT of extra water.

Where on earth is it going between there and the coast?  Can anyone explain that one to me?

In other news, I saw a great way to annoy people this morning:  Remind them that they need to attend a meeting, and then when the meeting starts, close and lock the door and turn away all people who show up to the meeting late.  While it’s a very good reminder that promptness is required, it’s really confusing to the people locked out and adds the burden of letting those people know what happened in the meeting to the people who were good enough to show up on time.  I have a hard time arguing with the fact that it’s an effective way to keep the meeting on track and inform people of what the leader thinks of tardiness.  But I’m not totally sure I agree with the tactic.

In other randomness, because I’m really just bouncing from one thought to another here, I realized that I have a strange fondness for documentaries on yoga.  I was checking out our Hulu Plus subscription last night and while I found a lot of interesting things that I would enjoy watching on there, I settled on watching a show about the yoga industry and how much money is in it and the controversies about that. (Should a yogi be interested in the money or is that against the very principles of yoga?  How about competitive yoga?  Is it an ancient tradition or is it a perversion of the practice?)

I’m not sure how I feel about a lot of those issues and my own yoga practice is in a sorry state.  I haven’t been to a yoga class in ages, since the gym closed down and I haven’t got the money to go to the yoga studio in town.  But I do enjoy yoga and I find it interesting to listen to the conversations about it.  It’s one of those things, like playing the guitar and speaking multiple languages, that I wish I could do well but haven’t found the patience to actually commit to doing.

I expect that I’ll be at work for at least part of the day tomorrow.  I have some projects that need to get caught up and there’s just not been enough time to do it.  Plus, being out sick on Tuesday didn’t help me much with the task load. On the up-side, after next week, I get a full week of vacation!

1
Tags: , , ,
Posted in Living! |
« Older Entries