Is a Break from Work Really a Break?

6 Comments / Daily Dose, Day to Day, Work /

I have been trying to take at least an hour, every day, away from my desk. I do this by scheduling myself a three hour break in the day — which guarantees me an hour. (Don’t ask questions, just go with it.)

But my breaks generally look like this:

– Play a couple of words in WWF.
– Play a couple of lives in Candy Crush.
– Read a chapter of my book.
– Fold a load of laundry and put away four loads of laundry.
– Move a load of laundry from the washer tot he dryer and start another load of laundry.
– Clean the dead leftovers out of the fridge, load the dishwasher and start the dishwasher.
– Answer three emails.

If I’m really lucky, I’ll also squeeze a shower into that hour break.

At the end of that hour, it doesn’t really seem like I’ve had a break … ya know?

I think I might be doing this wrong?

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All Dog Parks Are Not The Same

2 Comments / Animal Issues, Family Funk /

We’ve been to three of the four dog exercise parks in Lake County and have discovered that all dog parks are not the same. All dog owners are not the same either.

We love Prairie Wolf — it’s the one closest to us and the one we visit most often. It’s clean. The people are friendly. The dogs are, well, dogs. There’s nothing we don’t like (love!) about this park and I’m very thankful that this is the one closest to us, particularly since Lola can’t manage to hold the contents of her stomach long enough to go much further than that in one sitting.

We like the Independence Grove park but it’s closed right now due to construction along Milwaukee Ave. We discovered this yesterday when we attempted to visit it. Oy. We should have checked before we left but we didn’t — so we decided to drive the extra 11 miles to go to another one, since we were already out there. Lola’s stomach actually held out (though she didn’t quite make it home again, poor dog.)

The Duck Farm park is big and wide open. There’s not a lot of shade. The few wooded trails aren’t cleared enough for people to enjoy walking along them with the dogs, though the dogs did enjoy rambling through them a little bit. The dogs also enjoyed romping through the prairie and since there were fewer dogs than at the other two parks, they did a LOT of running with each other. There aren’t many water (mud!) spots at this park either. A real let down for our two mud lovers.

And, we encountered a couple walking a PACK of huskies. It was a literal pack, as in when the three off leash chased Skeeter, who yelped as she does when surrounded by dogs that intimidate her, the woman yelled to her male companion “be careful she’s alpha and she’s going to attack to protect her pack.” And she did. Or tried to. The dude launched himself on the alpha of the pack while his female partner screamed at him that he was out of line for doing that. While he yelled “What was I supposed to do, let her attack someone else’s dog” and… it was ugly. And uncomfortable. And a little scary.

While I agreed with the chick that his reaction wasn’t the best, she clearly had no control over her pack and her attempt to control the alpha weren’t doing the job, either.

It’s people like this that give dog parks a bad name. If you have a badly controlled pack of animals, a dog park may not be the best place to exercise them off-leash (even if your alpha is on a leash.)

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Maisie Dobbs: Birds of a Feather

2013, Audiobooks, Books in Bed, Favorites, Mystery, Women /

I enjoyed the first Maisie Dobbs so much that I immediately reserved the second book, Birds of a Feather. But, I accidentally reserved it in audio. Not intentional, definitely, because I have a lot of audio books on my reserve list and I try to keep it to less than three because otherwise they all come in at once and we don’t have enough time to listen to them before they have to back. I also wasn’t sure we’d like the English accents in audio — sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. This time — we did!

Another good story. I really like all of these characters (but I hope Maisie picks Dr Dean over Detective Stanton… jus sayin’.)

I’ve reserved the next book, in audio (sigh — all of my audios will probably come in next week and we’ll have to return some unread! I hate it when that happens…)

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5D!

Daily Dose, Day to Day /

A few weeks ago, I found myself on Groupon (don’t ask) and impulse purchased two tickets to Pix 5D. I have no idea why I bought this — it seemed like something odd, unusual, not what we’d normally do and we like to do unusual things.

So after a long couple of weeks, I told TW to be prepared to quit working at a decent hour and we were going out… I didn’t tell her where we were going, I just said out.

We went to Chick-fil-A and then headed back toward home — when I turned into the mall parking lot, TW looked at me like I was a little nuts. Particularly since she’d already asked if we were going to the Jockey Bra store so she could figure out which size she was (using the fit kit from BlogHer 13 was a little confusing — she seemed to need to separate sizes.) But no, I hadn’t thought of that and we didn’t have her coupon(s).

When we parked and started walking in – I told her we were going to do something really weird… but then I said what do NORMAL people do when they go on a date. She said “See a movie!” and I said “Yep – we’re going to see a movie, of sorts.”

She was pretty surprised when I pointed at the PIX 5D but was game for it. We got there pretty much right on time – just a ten minute wait. I was a little sad that the Toy Store movie they say is what’s playing wasn’t playing but the two we saw were totally fun. The getting sprayed by alien creature spit was kind of ewwww but in a fun kind of way.

Totally worth the $7 groupon. I’d even go again.

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Afterwards

1 Comment / 2013, Books in Bed, Fiction, Mystery /

There were a half dozen books on the library cart with an 8/18 due date. I knew I couldn’t read them all and none could be renewed – so I asked TW to tell me which ones she thought I should read.

Afterwards was one of those books.

Oy. One of those books that makes moms have nightmares. It was good, (good enough for me to stay up past midnight to finish it), even though I had mostly figured it all out long before the author let us in on who did it (or all of the its, since there were several things going on.) That’s probably the only problem I had with the book — too many issues going on with Jenny. Yea, that made it twisty but only a little twisty. The stalker bit just never really worked well for me, I guess.

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Stream of Somethings…

3 Comments / Daily Dose, Day to Day /

I thought I was going to write a grandmother-y blog post today but I haven’t had time. I knew I should have started it yesterday when I was thinking about it and I did have time.

Ah well, maybe tomorrow. Or this weekend.

In the meantime, you get my not so random string of somethings…

I should stick to my schedule of ONLY looking at Google Analytics first thing in the morning unless it is absolutely urgent that I look at some other time of the day. Time suck. Huge time suck.

TW does great things with tofu. It’s kind of weird, if you know TW and how she cooks — but lord, she really does good things with tofu. I could probably have tofu every day if TW would fix it every day.

I’m not getting enough JMP photos and videos. Good thing he’s going to be here soon.

Not soon enough though.

I have diapers. I have library books for him. I have toddler food (thank you BlogHer ’13 sponsors.)

Yea, he can come visit now.

Except the house is trashed. And Prince J’s room needs some serious “Denise attention” before Jenn and JMP can stay in there.

No idea of Michelle Belle is coming to visit or not. She’d better hurry up and decide or I won’t be able to afford the ticket.

Not that I can afford the ticket now because… her student loans, oy. What a mess that is.

And taxes. TW’s taxes. Holy hell.

That’s enough of that. If I think about money for too long I’ll wind up selling a kid on the corner for cash or something. (Kidding. DUH.)

Relationships are hard. Friendships are harder. Have you noticed that?

And August is the month of birthdays around here. What do you think TW and Jenn and Deanna and Chris want for their birthdays? What do I want for my birthday (besides someone to pay off my credit cards, TW’s pre-taxes, Michelle’s student loans, and a Starbucks gift card?)

I should go clean the kitchen — have I mentioned the Ninja Cooking System thingy is a joy to clean? It is. It really is.

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Bananas, Baking and Ninja

4 Comments / Daily Dose, Foodie /

There’s an art to choosing the right bunch of bananas. They can’t be too green (because I won’t eat them if they are AT ALL green) and they can’t be too NON-green because then nobody else will eat them and I can’t eat an entire bunch of bananas all by myself before they get so ripe that the skin is falling off of them — unless of course I choose a bunch that only has like three bananas on it. Which is silly. Who can buy just three bananas?

So yea. Lately I’ve not been doing a very good job of the banana choosing or the banana eating. I threw three bananas into the trash right before BlogHer ’13 and I swore I wouldn’t do that again when I bought this last batch. But, apparently I bought too ripe bananas because nobody ate them except me and by the time there were three very ripe bananas left, I was all banana’d out.

Which means I moved on to saying, “I’m going to make banana bread with those, before they turn into liquid banana goo all over the counter.” But errr, days passed and the banana bread didn’t get baked.

So I said, “I’m going to make banana muffins in the Ninja Cooking System! (And a loaf of banana bread the regular way!)” I was sure this would inspire me to get off my ass and just use the bananas.

Except it didn’t. Yesterday was go ninja or go to the trash bin with the bananas.

Since Skye says I am ninja, I had to make it happen even though I had no damn time to make banana muffins or banana bread. Mondays are usually slow work days for me (when I’ve worked four-six hours over the weekend) but they aren’t usually slow enough for baking. I bit the bullet and made the time.

Which was hard since I had absolutely no freaking clue as to how to make these banana muffins in the Ninja Cooking System.

The little cookbook says something about adding X amount of water for every 10 minutes. Which umm didn’t help because how long do you cook mini one bite (not two bite) banana muffins for, anyway? It also said something about using less fat. But how much less? I shrugged and guessed. I also turned to the back of the cookbook and found some recipe that looked like mini chocolate cupcakes and used those instructions.

Errr except I over-filled the little tiny one bite (note two bite) silicone muffin pan. And also, I have no idea if I picked the right amount of time to cook these things.

They turned out … fine. Not exactly like a normally baked banana muffin might turn out, but close enough. They certainly tasted just fine. They just didn’t really brown like a normally baked muffin might brown, (which is really a good thing for me, since I don’t really like muffins that are too “brown” on the outside.)

The biggest issue is that good grief, do you know how long it would take to turn the entire batch of banana bread batter into little tiny one bite (not two bite) banana muffins? HOURS and HOURS. Who has the time or patience for that?

I do, however, think this is going to come in handy for those times when you’re making muffins or cupcakes or brownies and you have just a wee bit of batter leftover that is too much to fill another full muffin tin or will only fill a couple of tins in your muffin pan so you either eat the batter with a spoon or throw it out rather than make another muffin tin dirty for no really good reason. (What? Am I the only one who has that issue?)

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The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

2013, Books in Bed, Queer, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Women /

Here’s another book that started a little slow for me — slow enough that I wondered why I take “what to read next” advice from TW so often. But, just as I was thinking I’d put down The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells and start something else, I realized it was written by the author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli so I stuck it out.

I’m glad I did. Because once Greta found herself in her second life/time, I was hooked and pretty much wanted to just read straight through (with brief stops for Candy Crush, of course.)

Interesting ending. I didn’t think that’s where the “original” Greta would stay, though it was the time/life that made the most sense for her (and probably the other Gretas, as well).

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Every Day

3 Comments / 2013, Audiobooks, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

Every Day is the YA trouble book of all time — there will never be a YA trouble book that has more trouble than this one. It’s impossible.

Because A wakes up in the body of a different 16 year old every single day. This means A deals with every single YA trouble under the sun. It gets particularly problematic when A wakes up in the body of Justin and falls in love with Justin’s girlfriend and tries to figure out how he/she can have a relationship with Rhiannon (and Rhiannon tries to figure out how she can dump Justin and have a relationship with A.)

Oy.

It was interesting — mostly because we couldn’t figure out how this was going to end. Since A obviously couldn’t stay in someone else’s body. It did all wrap up with a neat, but sad, little ending. An ending I didn’t particularly like but an ending that made sense. As much sense as a book about someone who has no body of his/her own and moves around to a new body every day for his/her whole life can make.

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