Between my computer being down for some time and numerous other things going on, I haven’t posted in … well, by internet standards, forever.
So today, for your enjoyment:
The first page ever posted on the World Wide Web (Aug. 6, 1991)
The logical conclusion
So how am I doing on my two New Year’s Resolutions?
1. Be Healthy – I let down the team on this one during March, April and most of May. I just didn’t want to deal with it – too much going on with work. (Thank goodness this one monster project is closing today!) But since last week I’ve been back at it – I’ve gone swimming with friends three times in the last six days. I’ll get there. Onward.
2. Be Hospitable – That was supposed to be ‘throw more dinner parties.’ Hasn’t worked out lately. However, I did contribute homemade coleslaw to my friend’s Memorial Day cookout. And I’m going to take more homemade coleslaw to a cookout Saturday. So there. I’m going to have to get it together and do something to be hospitable. I’ve been busy with Toastmasters, work, work, Toastmasters – it’s just not happening.
But – I did get my new mattress set, finally! And the last two nights I’ve slept through the night, floating on a plush firm cloud by Simmons Beautyrest.
(I should have posted this Saturday but I was waiting for the world to end so I wouldn’t have to do it. Hooray we’re still here; boo, I have to clean the house.)
Saturday was as frustrating a day as I’ve had in some time. Thursday I came back from the doctor with an odd diagnosis. A couple of weeks before intense, deep pain centered around my left elbow woke me up. If the pain had been shooting down my arm I would have called 911. But I’d been sleeping with my arm curved up under my head, so I figured I’d just aggravated the arm. Yet the pains kept coming back.
More scene setting: You should know my work schedule has been too hectic by half the last three weeks. And going to my doctor is always a major production because I work way out on the Northeast side of town and Dr. Smith is closer to where I live, on the Northwest. It can mean two to three hours off, depending on when I can get the appointment! I finally found time in my work schedule to go last week.
Ok, enough preliminary jabber. I finally get to the doctor and he tells me I have medial epicondylitis – golfer’s elbow. Huh? I don’t play golf, and it’s not my predominant hand. Continue reading “Minor Irritations”
The pollen here has been so bad that I finally broke down and washed my car. I took a picture of it when I was done so I can remember how nice it looked. By tomorrow morning it will have a new coat of yellow. Ah, it was pretty for an hour or so.
The pollen hasn’t hurt me as badly as last year, but it’s as gross as ever:
Finally – doing something to live up to my 2nd resolution: to be healthy. I walked across the Lake Murray dam* Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
The walk one way across is 1.8 miles. Lots of folks in Irmo and Lexington are out exercising on the dam walkway.
Love this Daylight Savings Time – it’s giving us more time to walk at night. And the beautiful weather is great for walking. Now, if we could just do something about the pollen.
I wonder how often this little contraption is used to get workers back and forth from the dam to the Towers:
Sorry for the terrible photos – I forgot my camera and was relying on my itty-bitty non-smart phone.
*Okay, three-quarters of the way across and back. But that still comes to 2 miles total – I checked it with my car odometer after the walk.
Most Baptists (or Protestants, for that matter) don’t make a big deal out of Lent. Or “give anything up”. I remember one Catholic friend in high school told me her mom always gave up cantaloupe for Lent. Being out of season, it wasn’t too big a sacrifice for her.
But I like the discipline; your small sacrifice forces you to reflect on all our Lord gave up for us. Once I gave up all carbonated beverages for Lent when I was in college. And that was when I had an 8 a.m. class. Early Easter morning I popped the top of a Diet Coke and toasted the resurrection of our Lord. Nobody sang out more joyfully later that day on the Alleluias, I tell you.
This year I’m going to give up pointless Web surfing. (Sometimes, of course, surfing the Web is legitimate – like looking for airfares for our family reunion later this year.)
Specifically, I will remove most sites from my weekday browsing and limit my weekday Internet usage to
Nothing else. In fact, I think I’ll “de-subscribe” from some blogs so I won’t get their updates and be tempted to click over.
It shouldn’t be as hard to do as you might think. For the last three Sundays I’ve been doing an “Internet Sabbath.” I’ve completely unplugged on Sundays. The first one almost killed me; I had never had such an urge to go online! But it’s a wonderful way to slow down and shut down some of the stimuli. It’s so relaxing I now look forward to Sunday afternoons.
Last Friday I was supposed to meet a friend for lunch at Tiffany’s Bakery and Eatery, a chi-chi lunch spot near work. It’s chi-chi because it’s really too expensive for a working girl – $9 for chicken salad and sweet tea? Even if it is their specialty chicken salad served in a tortilla shell with a side of fruit. Now that gas prices are going up even more I can’t visit often.
I got there early and as I waited I admired the specialties at the Bakery counter. Mom’s birthday was the next day, and I already had her gift. But I knew we wouldn’t have cake, because we’re all watching what we eat. (Some of us are watching our calories and some of us (ahem, me) are watching ourselves shovel it in.) When I saw the beautiful mini-cakes – lovely little towers of sponge cake tiered with raspberry cream, then topped with raspberry cream, whipped cream and a raspberry to finish – I knew I had to buy three of them so we could all have a little treat at Mom’s birthday lunch.
So far, ho-hum. What made the occasion interesting was the queue at the bakery – not even an orderly line, but a clot of women. The lady to the right of me ordered three loaves of bread, all of which had to be sliced. The one counter attendant was struggling to keep up. I waited semi-patiently while women kept coming in and barging up to the counter. I’m thinking, these people are going to jump ahead of me! I’m going to speak up. I’m not letting them cut in line! To complete the scene, the ladies who were in front of me (sweet old things) kept dithering about what to order.
When it finally came time for me to order, I thought to myself, I’ll show them how it’s done. I crisply said “three raspberry cakes to go, please.” I was so pleased with myself, thinking “here’s someone who knows how to order quickly and efficiently.” But then I had to wait some more while the attendant slowly and carefully boxed the cakes, lifting them one at a time from the tray and meticulously setting them, still in their individual cake frills, inside the box. Then she put the ribbon on the box, taking an inordinate amount of time to secure it around the box.
That’s when the clerk came back to me and said “that will be $16 dollars and 17 cents.” I about fell over. I was standing there with a $10 bill in my hand, thinking, surely these won’t be more than $2.50 or even $3 apiece. I gaped and asked her, excuse me – how much? She repeated “$16.17. The cakes are $4.99 each.”
At that point I had about 20 minutes invested in getting these cakes. Much of that time I’d been sweetly glowering at the other patrons – you know how Southern ladies do, with a smile on their face. I felt bad about that. And I couldn’t ask her to unbox the cakes, since it took so much effort to get them ready. So, I just smiled and fished my debit card out of my wallet.
The moral of the story: No matter how pretty or precious, last-minute, spur-of-the-moment purchases are NEVER good for my budget.
(But they were tasty little cakes.)
Hi kids,
Don’t ever promise more than you can deliver. There’s a universal business saying “Under-promise and over-deliver.” That way you can make your customer very happy. Amazed, actually. (As Mark Twain once said, “Always do the right thing. It will gratify some and astonish the rest.”)
When 2011 started, I made just two New Year’s Resolutions – Be Healthy* and Be Hospitable (which translated means “throw more dinner parties and don’t be such a hermit.”) But every January when we turn the calendar over to a bunch of shiny blank pages, I’m seized with the urge to do more, accomplish more, make this the year I GET IT ALL DONE!!! Whew.
So naturally I went a little nuts in January with the hospitality. I threw a drop-in Jan. 1, then right after that a dinner party on Jan. 14 – a Friday, mind you, and I work for a living! I made plans to throw a dinner party every two weeks thereafter. I was busy drawing up guest lists for parties into March. I had a spreadsheet with guests, menu ideas, notes on food allergies, notes on previous menus so I didn’t serve the same thing twice to a guest, etc., etc. (On Jan. 1 when I thought about serving the same meal twice to a guest, I thought, how gauche. Now looking back over the whole Excel mania, I think, how bonkers.)
The dinner party frenzy has slowed down. Specifically, it has come to a halt. Why, Aunt Jim? Well, since you ask, while I was aiming to be the hostess with the mostess, I also was going into overdrive to achieve several different educational goals in Toastmasters. I’ve joined two clubs in addition to the club I belong to at work and agreed to be a club coach for yet another club. I’m going to be giving four speeches in a three-week time frame. (One of which involves memorizing Elizabeth I’s “Golden Speech” and interpreting that.) Oh, and I agreed to help assist at a Toastmasters training event February 26 by chairing a volunteer team.
Then there was that insurance certification class at work, which I signed up for in November thinking that the February exam was a LONG WAY OFF and I had plenty of time to study. (I passed on Feb. 11!!)
So, as you can see, I’ve been a tad overcommitted. Just a tad. But finally, finally, I had the backbone to say “No” to a request. A friend in our Adult Bible Fellowship at church asked me to serve on the leadership team as the outreach chairman. I would have loved to have done that; after all – outreach – that’s hospitality, isn’t it? But it would have involved going to five additional meetings a month – plus more tasks! I just couldn’t do that after all the other commitments I’ve made. What made it worse for me was this was a request to do something for my church. Ah, the guilt! But you can get so busy doing church work (no matter how well-intentioned) that you neglect your own inner spiritual and prayer life. So I found the guts to say no.
Now, I just have to work on my prayer life.
*An entirely different discussion for another time.
This is the speech I’ll give to my Toastmasters group which meets on Saturday mornings:
Fellow Toastmasters: My name is Jennifer, and I’m a packrat.
The joys of living simply and traveling light do not resonate with me. For years, I saved every single paystub from my job. This sounds good and responsible until you consider I’ve worked there since 1999. When my company implemented electronic Notices of Deposit it didn’t really help. I simply printed the NOD and shoved that paper in the bulging file.
Accountants say you should save all bank statements for seven years – just in case the IRS decides to audit your tax returns. But my motto is why do when you can overdo? I had shoeboxes full of statements going back to my first professional job in 1990.
I say had, because two years ago, I bought myself a paper shredder for Christmas. Some would call that an odd gift to buy oneself, but it made me happy. I wanted to take control of my clutter. I was starting to fear that one day the TV news would blare “Irmo woman trapped in home by falling towers of paperwork. Film at 11.”
The day I brought home my shredder, I happily shredded for six entire hours, until the machine jammed and quit. I can’t blame it for wanting to rest – even after that six hours I had a weeks’ worth of shredding left to do.
For a while (a very short while) I had my hoarding tendencies under control. Then, in 2009, I enrolled in an accelerated graduate degree program. For over a year and half, I let everything else in life slide while I studied. Come August 2010, I graduated to find myself sitting (once again) amid piles of paper.
The problem had come to a head: I was too embarrassed to have friends over. Anna Quindlen once wrote that she had closets which she didn’t let visitors open for fear they’d be injured in the ensuing crash. I had an entire room I didn’t want friends going into! That doesn’t sound so horrible until you consider, my little patio home is only 1100 square feet. I couldn’t afford to lose the space.
This is what my little spare room looked like before:
My road to recovery started with an ad I e-mailed to a few friends. This is the text of the e-mail and ad:
Dear Ladies,
I need your help. This is embarrassing to admit but over the past 18 months my spare bedroom has turned into a junk room or perhaps more accurately a landfill. More books than I have room for, an old computer monitor, reams of paperwork and old bills cover the bed and floor.
I’m looking for one person to help me “declutter.” I do NOT expect this person to work. All I need is someone to stand over me and make me do the job. Every time I start to declutter on my own I’ll pick up an old book and start reading. Two hours later nothing is done. I want someone who will give me advice on what to keep, store or throw out and keep me from reading the books instead of organizing them.
In my e-mail I included this job description:
Wanted – one good-natured but strict supervisor to monitor one lazy worker prone to goofing off. Job expected to take one hour. Set your own schedule. Pay: Soft drinks while on the job, reciprocal supervisory service if requested, undying gratitude and invitation to dinner party at future date.
I have great friends. Five immediately volunteered.
My friend Dee came over the next Saturday afternoon and immediately whipped the room (and me) into shape. She didn’t just supervise – she was a drill sergeant intent on a wholesale re-organizing. She’d point at items and fire questions at me: Do you need that? Have you used it in the last year? Are you ever going to read it again? She was relentless, forcing me to throw away items that I wanted to keep but will never miss. She even got me to make a stack of books to give away to the library.
Far from supervising me, Dee did most of the work. I really tried to help, I did. I’d pick up a book, and show it to her, saying “oh this is a great book, you should read it!” As Dee rearranged my bookshelves her work was punctuated by me saying over and over “Oh, I like this book.” Oh, I really like this book.” “Oh, now this book – I like this book.” After hearing that for the umpteenth time Dee turned to me and said “Jennifer, you’ve never met a book you don’t like!”
After three excruciating hours – not one – the job was done. We had stuffed several Hefty bags full of junk ready to throw out, and boxed up:
Here’s what the room looked like after Dee got through with it and me:
We are so obsessed with stuff in this country that we’ve created an industry – Self Storage – with $22 billion dollars in annual sales. Naturally, there are web sites devoted to this. My favorite is “the Fly-Lady” – yes, that’s what she calls herself – who will send you daily e-mails for free telling you what to organize that day. I love her de-cluttering method. As she goes through a room deciding what to give away, she sings “Please release me, let me go!”
But George Carlin really deserves the last word on stuff. I can’t repeat everything he said, but George’s Youtube routine on stuff says it all. Like he says, all your house really is, is “a pile of stuff with a cover on it.”
One of my friends brought by a huge container of chicken noodle soup. I’ve been noshing off it for three days. Wonderful friend, wonderful soup!
*Title of the post from the Lewis Carroll poem.
Notes from Aunt Gem 