The Blog

It’s yet another gloomy and rainy day here in Ohio.  While I admit these are my favorite kind of days, I must also admit that I’d really like some warm sunny days.  I am really excited to take H for a walk in her stroller and have her actually NOTICE what’s around her.  (Unlike the walks we took last August/September, when she was 2 months old.)

With it being rainy again…I have no set topic.  Let’s go with a standard Ten Thought Tuesday.  Here goes….

1.  I am EXHAUSTED today.  I had to put H to bed 4 times last night.  At least the first 3, D and I were still up for.  But #4 was just after midnight.  I came to the conclusion it was a combination of tooth-pain and gas.  Tylenol at wake-up #3, about 10pm, allowed her to sleep for over 2 hours.  The last one though, I held her so her head was against my chest and her legs pulled up.  I rocked her like that for about 15 minutes, and she let off alot of baby gas and fell asleep.  So there you go. 

2.  Did I mention it’s raining AGAIN? 

3.  We have a neighbor.  I think I’ve talked about her before.  Mama Bird, we call her.  She made a nest at the top of one of our porch posts last Spring.  D took the empty nest down in the Fall.  We figured that was that, but no…she’s back this year.  So pretty to watch her sitting up there.

Mama Bird in her nest

4.  My sister, C, and I appear to be getting back into the genealogy research.  We haven’t done much on it in 6+ years.  With luck, more records will have been digitized and we’ll have some better luck.  I love the thrill I get when I find a new piece of information.  It’s such a nice high.  But the lows associated with being “stuck” on a line just SUCK BIGTIME.  May sound weird, but keep in mind, I was an english lit minor and my sister was a history major in college.  Research is not foreign to us. 

5.  I need to dust this house.  I hate dusting.  It is THE single cleaning job I dislike the most.  I’ll even clean our bathrooms before I’ll dust.  (As evidenced by my cleaning this past weekend.  Clean bathrooms…no dusting.)  But really, I should dust more than 3 times a year, don’t you think?

6.  H is napping.  Why does it take 3 repositionings, 3 put-the-binkie-back-in-her-mouth, before she actually falls asleep?  It’s kinda funny.  Each naptime, it takes 3 tries. 

7.  Saturday is National Scrapbooking Day.  Are you ready?  I must print some pictures. 

8.  I am hearing strange banging noises from outside.  Very odd.  Maintenance people, if you are nearby…go away.  Baby is sleeping.

9.  H is really close to crawling.  I don’t know if she’ll actually do it.  She’s decided she likes to stand…if we hold her up.  She doesn’t want to stand up herself.  Just like she enjoys sitting, if we put her there.  She doesn’t want to move into the sitting position by herself.  So I’ve decided to leave her laying down, rolling around.  Just like she finally decided that being on her tummy was ok, she will eventually decide that she’d rather be in a sitting position and put herself that way.  She’s my kid.  Why should she learn to do it herself if someone else will do it for her?  Exactly. 

10.  We had low-cal chili cheese dogs for dinner last night.  That means Lite Hotdog Buns, Oscar Meyer’s 98% Fat Free hot dogs, 1 can of 98% Fat Free Turkey Chili (Hormel), and Reduced Fat Cheddar & Monterrey Jack cheese (Sargento).  Oh, and I baked some Orida fries in the oven and made some vegetarian baked beans for myself.  It was quite tasty.  You feel like you’re being really bad…with not nearly as much fat.

1.  Today was a really crappy day for me.  I think it almost 100% has to do with the fact that yesterday the high temp was in the upper 60s, and today it was 45.  30s are forecast for the next 10 days or so.  I am sick of cold weather, plain and simple.

2.  However, I noticed earlier that my tulips are 6inches tall.  Apparently THEY were also liking the bit of warm weather. 

3.  H decided to possibly give crawling a try after all today.  Now if you follow my blog, I’m sure you know that to-date, this kid hates being on her stomach.  NO tummy time for her.  She quickly learned how to roll from her tummy to her back, and would do that every time we placed her on her tummy.  Then a week ago, she woke us up in the morning screeching, because she’d rolled onto her tummy in her crib and was PISSED.  That was all for that…until yesterday.  Yesterday, she started rolling on her tummy, then her back, then her tummy, then her back…and she figured out she could get over to the toy I wasn’t handing her.  (I am such a meanie.)   Today…I changed her diaper on the floor, threw it away and turned back…and she was on her tummy, facing her favorite toy, and repeatedly pulling her knees up under her bum. 

I say…batten down the hatches, get off the sidewalks, and hide the cats….H is gonna be on the move!

4.  There’s no Dancing with the Stars on tonight.  So I’m torn about how I should spend my evening.  Should I…watch some (free) online tutorials to learn how to get started with digital scrapbooking?  Not that I want to digitally scrapbook, because I don’t own a wide-format photo printer (Santa?)  But I want to learn how to work with the overlays and brushes in Adobe Photoshop Elements. 

5.  …OR…if I don’t put in the time on the scrapbooking….should I give some love to my Worgen Druid?  Phia dinged 27 yesterday.  I’m so having fun with her.  I’m thinking I might start another Worgen, so I can move it over and go through the new quests in the Eastern Kingdoms.  (Goldshire, Westfall, etc.)  Why a Worgen and not a Human?  Well, I like the Worgen starting area best.  I wish I’d gone through the Dwarf/Gnome starting areas per-Cataclysm enough, so that I’d recognize changes in the quests.  But sadly, I didn’t.  And I did even less on the Horde side.  But even so, at least with the new quests on Kalimdor, I’m loving leveling through the Night Elf area that I’ve been through probably 20 times pre-Cataclysm.  It’s made leveling fun for me again.  Well, at least until I hit Outlands.  *shudder* 

[I am aware my non-WoW friends have NO CLUE what I talked about there.  Sorry...pick up the game.  It's FUN.]

6.  Job hunting sucks.  Even more so when you HAVE to do it.

7.  Ok, I took a break and did my time on the elliptical.  My performance is dismal, but I did take a year off, with having H and all.  It’s at least not back to what it was when I first started several years ago.  But note…this was the second day in a row that I hit the elliptical.  Twice…not in a month, but in a WEEK.  I’m on a role.

8.  I have this desire to make this chicken fajita soup recipe I found.  I’m not sure of the Weight Watchers points, because I can’t get into eTools to figure it out.  But…seriously, strips of chicken, green & red peppers, peblano peppers, chicken broth, spiced black beans, fire roasted tomatos….how bad could that be on points?  That said, D won’t eat it…it’s to veggie based. 

9.  I went to Weight Watchers tonight.  That’s all.  Not great.  But I went.  I really want to get back to where I was with the program when I met D 4 years ago.  Pre-baby, pre-married weight-gain, pre-dating slacking.  I need to get back to when I was focused.

10.  Maybe I need a spreadsheet that calculates my Weight Watchers points for me.  I was the most focused when I had my spreadsheet set up to enter my points and it calculated my remaining points for me.  See…I don’t theory craft in Wow…I do it in everything else. 

1.  March is National Craft Month.  As such…I started up my crafting webste.  Check out My Time Crafts to talk crafting with me! 

2.  Yes…I went to Weight Watchers tonight after eating donuts and cupcakes over the weekend.  No, I have not actually looked at the results.  I was half-way home when I realized I’d weighed in with my cell phone in my pocket.  I believe I should be able to take something off the total then, at least. 

3.  I have decided that the Hershey Nuggets Extra Creamy Milk Chocolate with Toffee & Almonds are now on my list of favorite chocolates.  Luckily there were only 2 in the house.  They are gone now. 

4.  H has been babbling up a storm this week.  Nyah nyah nah nyah nyah.  No idea what she’s saying, but she’s telling me some kind of story, that’s for sure.

5.  My office is a mess.  I had such grand plans of getting some decluttering done in here today.  At least, I was going to try and clear out 2 piles.  Didn’t happen.  Don’t know when it will happen.  Maybe I can talk D into helping me with some of it this weekend.  The room needs help.  It’s my catch-all room.  But it can’t stay this way.  It’s driving me bonkers.

6.  Think I’m going to make lasagna this weekend.  I bought more plastic food containers to freeze leftovers in.  Gotta keep the fridge stocked up.  I’m finding pasta dishes result in more leftovers and seem to reheat better.  At least, that’s my experience so far.  I’d love to hear other ideas of large meals I could make that would result in at least 2 leftover meals that I could freeze. 

7.  I actually scrapbooked last night!  Not only that, but I did the first layout for H’s baby book!  And it’s before she’s a year old!  Can I get a Boo-Yah?!

8.  I’m wanting to go to Disney World again.  Funny thing is, it’s not in our plans for this year.  My job issue isn’t the reason, though.  Rather, we want to take H when she’s old enough to remember and enjoy some of the experience.  So this year, we’re sticking to places closer to home, like the Zoo.  That said…I still want to go.  I always want to go.  I just love Disney. 

9.  Something else I’ve been wanting to do.  My gamer friends out there…have you checked out Rift?  I’ve been hearing alot about it.  Yesterday I started reading about the game.  At the moment, I’m wanting to try it.  This isn’t like when I was hearing good things about Aion.  When I checked that out, after reading the story and details about the game, I wasn’t interested.  Rift, I am.  But I don’t like the name.  It makes me think of the series of Roll-playing books called RIFTS.  This is nothing like those. 

So while I’d like to try Rift out, there’s some barriers.  A)  I want to play the game with D.  That means 2 copies for our 2 PCs.  Remember…I’m jobless at the moment.  Jobless = no money.  B)  It’s a subscription game.  Reference issue in item A.  C)  D thinks even if I did have a job, that we should only be paying for one subscription game at a time.  I say…but I don’t WANNA give up my WoW account.  I am emotionally attached to my characters. 

Sigh.  So I don’t know that Rift will happen anytime soon.  Maybe as a “congrats on getting a new job” present to myself.  When that happens. 

10.  H didn’t want to nap most of the afternoon.  That meant she conked out around 7:30pm.  AWESOME.  Quiet time for the evening!  D is playing WoW, while I am BLOGGING.  I like these quiet evenings.