Posts Tagged ‘i love my husband’

Delicious day

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Today I didn’t work overtime, which was what I was expecting to do all week until suddenly I wasn’t going to have to work overtime!  It really came as a surprise.  So today, instead of working overtime, I slept in.  Which was especially good because I was up in the middle of the night with an upset stomach that felt like I had swallowed tacks, either as a side-effect from my flu shot on Thursday or because I gave in to my craving for Cheetos.  (Delicious radioactive orange chemical and carbohydrate crunchies!)

But sleeping in felt wonderful and my stomach felt fine when I woke up.  I went downstairs and I did yoga for about half an hour, which is half an hour longer than I’ve done yoga in the last couple months.  My goal for the next couple weeks:  get back on track with the Couch to 5K program (we got out of that when I hurt my knee), walk three of the other days of the week when we’re not running, and get back to doing my yoga.  My flexibility is completely shot.

We showered, dressed, breakfasted, relaxed a couple minutes, and then tidied up the house a little bit.  I sat down to write the post here about credit reports (you really should check yours) and watched some TV with Justin.  And then we went downstairs and cleaned the kitchen, which we’d put off earlier in our tidying, and I started a loaf of bread in the breadmaker and worked on making a pie.  We had apples and pears that were past their prime, so I baked them into a pie following this recipe.  Delicious!  And I love baking.  I love the patience of it and the intricacies of it and just the movements that go into pealing and slicing apples and mixing that with sugar, flour, and spices, and filling in a pie crust.  It’s like singing, except I get to eat it in the end.  And that analogy probably doesn’t work unless you understand how I feel when I’m singing.

Moving on.  I got that started and asked Justin to make sure it got out of the oven okay, described what it should look like in the end, and then I went for my walk.  See?  Goal:  yoga and walking.  Accomplished!  I took an umbrella with me because it looked like rain and about 10 minutes away from getting back to the house, it did start to rain.  I ran into three women who were sheltering beneath a tree, waiting to see if it would stop.  I told them I didn’t think it was going to end very soon, and they started back to their homes.  We ran into Justin about a minute later, coming to look for me with the biggest umbrella we own.  Because he’s wonderful like that and he wasn’t sure if I’d taken an umbrella with me.

We got home and I changed into dry clothes so we could go to our chiropractor appointment, saw an enormous rainbow on our way, and then we came home and started meatloaf for dinner and caught up more on television shows that started last week.  He’s been catching up on How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family and I’ve been watching NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles.

And then, finally, we got a piece of that pie!  It was amazing!

And really, I’m just writing all this because it was a wonderfully relaxed, delicious kind of day and I wanted to write it down.

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Highlights from my weekend

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

I didn’t work on Friday! So I got up early-ish and went outside to do yardwork. We got an email from our landlady saying that the Property Owner’s Association (POA) had contacted her to say that the front yard was a patch of weeds. So I weeded it up and now it looks great.

I also mowed the back yard until I found the BIG SPIDER that had moved from where it was previously living near the trash bins to up in between two bushes along the side of the property. At that point I decided that Justin could do the weed whacking and I quickly cleaned up everything and went inside to shower. Where I tried not to imaging large spiders crawling up the shower curtain and failed.

And then had to read a book for Book Club and forgot to call Erica. :(

We didn’t go to Game Night because Justin wasn’t feeling well.

We did go to Book Club on Saturday where we once again disappointed our friend Elizabeth, the leader of the club, by not enjoying one of her favorite books. And we were the only ones who showed up. So when they told us they had double-booked the room, we introduced her to a burger at Five Guys and then invited her back to our house where we watched the new Star Trek movie and an episode of Sherlock and basically hung out chatting until it was almost 10:30 and she needed to head home.

And then she came over after church the following afternoon to watch the second episode of Sherlock with our friend Julie. Our friend Becky eventually made it over as well and we all ate pie and chatted for a while until it was time to decide whether they were going to stay for dinner or head home and do their jogging for the day – they went home. Elizabeth, however, fell asleep on the couch. She woke up around 9 and we fed her and made sure she was awake before sending her home.

Earlier in the afternoon on Sunday, Justin decided that since I’d done so much work on the yard while he wasn’t feeling well on Friday, he would tidy up the house for me.  And that made him the best husband ever because I could focus on paying the bills and then hang out with my friends in a clean house.

Monday, which I know is past the weekend, but I didn’t get around to posting this yet, was a fairly easy day at work and then we started up our running again in the evening, making for a tired and cold Kylene for the rest of the evening with very little cogitating power.  One of these days I’ll figure out why I drop so fast after exercising.

And today was another pretty easy day — I’m just waiting for the shoe to drop at work.  I know it’s coming.  I just don’t know when.

And I finally went to the Christmas site and put up my votes.  Justin will, hopefully, vote on that tomorrow and we can get that moving again.

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Rain, rain, rain

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

Potential landfall for Irene is shifting further and further north and east of us here.  If she keeps on turning, we might not even get much rain.  That actually would be a shame because we could use the water.

On the other hand, Justin is helping the church move the equipment from the high school to a storage shed near the movie theatre on Friday and that would be miserable to do in the rain.  The school, where we have been meeting in the auditorium, was struck by lightning the week before last, I think it was, and it knocked out their fire alarm system.  The school worked out an evacuation plan so the kids are safe during classroom hours, but extracurricular activies and other people who rent the building are out of luck.  So we’ve moved to the movie theatre down the street.  All our kids ministry and music equipment is stored at the school, though, so the church has to move it out and down the street, but during hours when the school will let us in do to that.  So, Friday afternoon, hopefully, is when that’ll happen.

And the on Sunday, after church because Justin is on rotation to run the computer and projector and I’m on schedule for singing, we’re helping a couple of our friends move from Beaufort to Bluffton.  It kind of works out well that we can’t help in the morning because they have a cat that sheds like a maniac.  With any luck, they’ll be at the place in Bluffton by the time we get out to help and the cat will be safely tucked away somewhere and we’ll be able to help without dying from allergies.  But, again, it would be miserable to do that in the rain.

In other news, I hurt my knee a little bit running.  I landed on it wrong and hyperextended it just a little bit, probably.  It’s been hurting on the calf-side behind my knee.  But ice and Advil and rest and a really annoying knee brace and it’s doing much better already.  We took a rest day yesterday instead of our regular running schedule and it was GOOD.

Honestly, the rest day was only partially because of my knee and also because we’ve both been having  a heck of a week and we both just needed time to do absolutely nothing.  It’s been really crazy and we’re both feeling the strain.  So we ate leftovers for dinner, I folded the laundry that Justin washed during the day, and then I sat downstairs watching TV while he played computer games with friends online.  I finished off the bottle of wine, which really only meant I had a glass and a half, but it made me giggle.  And then we had ice cream cake that we found at the grocery store on Tuesday.  It was perfectly relaxing and wonderful and NEEDED.

Today we’re back at it, plugging away.  It’s going to get better eventually.  We just have to slog through a couple more week of this, hopefully, and then we’ll be out.

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Happy birthday, Erica!

Monday, August 8th, 2011

Happy birthday to my wonderful sister, Erica, who I totally tried to call earlier but who didn’t answer, even though it was only, like, 4:30 in Minnesota and who I must therefore assume was out rocking the town because by my count she’s turning 30 and that’s absolutely the birthday for which you should go out and rock the town.  Yea!!  So I’m not going to call her back tonight because now it’s after 8:00 there and I’m really hoping that part of her birthday also means that she actually gets some sleep for the first time since JD’s birthday (doesn’t that sound like a fantastic birthday present?!) and besides that I don’t have any cell service at the house and she’s not on Skype right now (again, hopefully either rocking the town or sleeping) so I don’t actually have a way to call her and I’ll just have to catch up with her some other time.

BUT!  I really do hope that your birthday was ABSOLUTELY OFF THE WALL FANTASTIC and I’m sorry I didn’t send you anything, but I hope Tim got you something AWESOME and we’ll totally have to catch up later this week.

I wasn’t even home on Friday, when I would normally call.  Friday, I got up and went to the church offices to do my monthly cleaning there, and then when I got home, Justin and I ran down to Savannah to run a couple errands and catch a showing of “Cowboys & Aliens” (really fun movie, by the way) and then drove straight from there up to Beaufort to go to a board games party at a friends house.  And we were there until after midnight so I started to fall asleep on their couch, which was why it wasn’t until we were nearly all the way home before we realized that I’d forgotten my purse, with our house keys, back at their house.  45 minutes away.  But luck!  I stuck a spare house key under the bumper of the car!  And fail — the key didn’t actually work.  We have no idea why it didn’t work, but the dang thing wouldn’t turn.  So at 1:30 in the morning, Justin borrowed our neighbor’s extension ladder and climbed in through a window on the second floor of our house.

Saturday, I was fighting off some bug because I slept a lot.  I tried to stay awake and managed a couple hours at a time, but then would fall back asleep again.  It was really annoying, actually.  I slept through most of Sunday morning, too, failing to go to church, and then took it pretty easy for the rest of the afternoon.  Friends came over in the evening to collect boxes from our attic for moving and we fed them dinner in exchange for ice cream and Justin fixed the power supply on one of their computers, too, and some other computer work.

And after they left, because the air conditioning unit refuses to blow cold air, we set up the bed in the living room and slept down there.  The a/c unit upstairs hasn’t been working right for the last week or so.  It was working in the evenings, like it was exhausted from the heat, too, and decided that it would just work its best overnight.  And then it stopped doing that, too.  The downstairs unit is working, so we’ve got a box fan at the bottom of the stairs, blowing air up to another fan that moves it closer to either Justin’s office or the bedroom, depending on where it’s turned, and a third fan that blows air up from the floor into faces.  But it’s just not quite cutting it.  So we’ll be camping out downstairs for a couple days.  We have an appointment set up for a guy to come look at it on Friday, which our landlady set up a couple weeks ago for regular maintenance.  So when he comes, hopefully he’ll take care of the problem.

And how’s that for about the most random post ever?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MAE-MAE!!

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RUN!

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

So, I’m pretty sure you all know this about me, but if you didn’t already know:  I’m terrified of spiders.  TERRIFIED.  Have been for a long time.  Maybe before the day when I was playing in the yard as a small child and saw a huge daddy long-legs spider climbing up toward my face on my arm, but for SURE after that.  I don’t like them.  They creep me out.  I don’t like pictures of them.  I don’t like videos of them.  I don’t like seeing them.  And I sure as heck don’t like touching them.

I’ve been working on it.  I can handle little ones.  And by “little” I mean smaller than the eraser on a pencil.  And by “handle” I mean kill on my own or step away from without shouting.  I can handle them a little bigger than that when they’re outside and heading in a different direction from me.  So, working in the yard and upsetting spiders in the grass?  Okay as long as they’re running away.  Inside the house, they have to be little.  Big as a dime and I call Justin down to save me.  And I won’t go close to him as long as he’s handling it and he has to wash his hands before I’ll touch him.  If I’m very brave, I can kill one in the house with the vacuum.

Luke can probably remember the day we were sitting down to dinner and I freaked out because a tiny little spider suddenly showed up on the table beside me.  I shouted and jumped away and the thing was seriously smaller than half a pencil eraser.  I was playing a game online with some friends and one of them thought it would be hilarious to suddenly throw a picture of a tarantula up on the game.  I screamed and started shaking and Justin had to come out of his office (I was sitting in the living room on another computer) and calm me down before we could go back to playing.  To this day, I’m can’t remember how I managed to sit in the same room with the real live tarantula that Mr. Dennis had in his biology class.  And every couple months, I bolt awake from sound sleep because I think there’s a spider in bed with me, on my pillow or in the sheets or climbing up the walls.

So Justin and I have started running again.  (Can you guess where this is going now?)  We’ve been running on the bike path along the main road near our house, but the other day Justin found a trail that we could go running on.  We checked it out last week and it was fantastic!  We’ve already established on other runs that he goes first and knocks down any spiderwebs on the trail.  It’s either that or I run the whole way with an arm up in front of my face like I’m waiting for the noose to drop in Phantom of the Opera.  (“Raise up your hand to the level of your eyes!”)  So we ran the trail last week, found it to be delightful and not too overgrown, and planned to return in a couple days.

Today we returned to the trail.  And about 100 feet in, Justin ran into a spiderweb that stopped him in his tracks because it was enormous and gross and all over his face.  So he stopped to pick it out (and I’m already getting creeped out just telling this story) and I stood about 3 feet away helping him see if there was a spider on the web and if he got it all out.  (Me, helping!  By standing out of arms reach away from the spiderweb!)  So he did and he stuck it to a nearby bush and I saw something out of the corner of my eye.  At which point I SCREAMED and turned and ran.  Apparently Justin had to yell “STOP” like 8 times before I heard him and turned around.  I got maybe 10 feet away.  He asked, “WHAT?!”

I shouted back, “I FOUND THE SPIDER!”

“Where?!”  At this point, he’s thinking it’s on him.  On his neck and if he moves he’s going to die, so he’s standing completely stock still.

“THERE!”  And I pointed at the spider.  It was hanging in the air about a foot away from where my face had been.  He didn’t see it.  But I wasn’t pointing at him, so he looked around.

“Where?”

“There!”  And I managed to somehow explain that it was eye-level at his 2:00 (I think I said 11:00, since I was opposite from him) and THEN he saw it.

“OH.”  And he pointed back at the bike path.  “GO. RUN.”

And I BOLTED.  By the time I hit the sidewalk, I was worked up in to a good solid sprint and speeding up.  I had the fear in me and I was hauling it as fast as I could possibly haul it.  And then the timer on Justin’s phone beeped — the timer that’s telling us on the Couch to 5K program when we should walk and when we should run.  And since we’d been running, the beep meant it was time to walk.  My ears heard the beep and my feet turned the running into a walk.  Sprint to walk in 3 seconds or less.  And then my brain caught up and I started to hyperventilate.

The spider was huge.  Irrationally, I want to say that it was as big as my face, which just really creeps me out and I can’t even follow that thought to the finish.  It probably wasn’t that big.  It was maybe 4 inches long, including the legs, but it was BIG.  And close to my face.  And BIG.  And I think it was yellow and black, but I couldn’t even really tell you that and there’s not any chance in heaven I’m going to look it up to try to figure out what it was.  Not.  Happening.

Justin caught up with me when I stopped and asked if I was okay, and helped me calm down and stop hyperventilating.  That took a little bit.  He gave me a thorough looking over to make sure I didn’t have a spider on me, and I checked him to make sure he was clear, too.  And then we walked away from the trail and back up the paved bike path that we’d been running on.  And we walked until I was sure not to hyperventilate again and then we picked up the running again so we could finish the training for the day.  And now and then I’d shudder and twitch and Justin would reassure me that there wasn’t a spider nearby and we were okay on the bike path.  But I could still close my eyes and see it.

And, really, I can STILL close my eyes and see it, but I’ve found my solution for when I go to bed:

(1) I’m leaving the dang light on and I don’t care if it makes me look like I’m 6 years old, I am not going to sleep in the dark.  Justin comes to bed later than I do because he doesn’t get up at 5:15 in the morning and he can turn it off when he comes in.

(2) I’m imaging myself on the beach.  There aren’t spiders like that on the beach.  There are crabs and jellyfish and lots of other weird things in the water, but spiders can’t breathe underwater (Lord, save me from that thought) and I can sit on the sand with my toes in the water and not worry about spiders at all.  I can sit under my umbrella in my fantastic beach chair and stare out at the waves and not have to worry about them at all.  I know that there are big spiders in the woods just off the beach, but ON the beach?  NO SPIDERS.  So that’s where I’ll be picturing myself when I close my eyes.

Anyway.  Justin says he’s never seen me quite so freaked out.  And I’m not sure I have all the details right.  I didn’t know he shouted at me to stop until we were talking it over again while getting dinner ready.  I honestly have no recollection of him shouting — though it does make sense because there’s no other reason why I would have stopped instead of just running my butt all the way back out of the woods.  And, if it wasn’t already obvious, we won’t be going back into the woods for a while again.

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