Monthly Archives: November 2013

This is my Saturday post

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As mentioned, I’m doing NaBloPoMo as part of a larger push to get stuff done. Here are a few things I accomplished during my first week:

  • Cancelled my gym membership.
  • Ate a ton of Halloween candy.
  • Learned a great trick to help remember how to spell ‘diarrhea’ correctly – it is rrrrrunning out of you, and therefore needs two r’s. Thanks, EP.
  • Started to hang some curtains.
  • Wished I hadn’t signed up to do NaBloPoMo.
  • Ate more Halloween candy.
  • Refrained from getting another haircut.

Speaking of haircuts, I don’t know if you heard, but Jennifer Aniston chopped her hair off. That’s right – the Ultimate Hair Icon now has a short chin-length bob. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I think we all know where she got the idea. Best of luck to you in the aftermath of that decision, Jenny.

It’s revolutionary up in here

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I am scrambling to squeeze in a post today – I failed to write early this morning, my kid is refusing to nap right now, I need to go pick up the other one at school soon – and my brain is dry and empty. In need of help, I turned to today’s NaBloPoMo prompt, which was this:

Prompt #6 (Nov 8)
We all work with social media and when we first started experimenting with it, social media was disruptive and threw each of our careers and professional lives in a new direction. But what was new then has grown old. So tell me about the last time something blew your mind. What’s the last truly revolutionary idea, experience or thing you encountered?

Uhhhh. Uhhhh. Uhhhh. Let me think…the last experience that truly blew my mind would have to be…childbirth. Or was it a new app on my iPhone?* No, no. I think childbirth wins.

Ok fine – I realize that’s probably not what the prompt creator had in mind. So if I had to think of another, I would say…breastfeeding. I had no idea that milk came out of multiple holes! Or that my boobs would leak all over my shirt when a baby cried. Any baby! Not just mine!

Ok, ok, you can do this, Amy. Tap into your former career self. It’s only been two years – she’s in there somewhere. They are probably looking for some kind of product here. In which case, I would say…the breast pump? Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be able to feel like cattle at a dairy farm, with modern day machinery sucking milk from my teats, enabling me to feed my child AND do a conference call from my office at the same time.

It probably speaks volumes about my current life stage that my brain could not get beyond anything related to children and parenthood for this one. I read things like this and am reminded how far away I am from my old life, where my job required me to think about technology and pretend like I had a passion for it, when all I wanted to do was get home to see my kid. I’m so grateful for the change.

Which leads me to one last thing that really does blow my mind – isn’t it amazing how much life can change in just a year or two?

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*I actually have an Android phone. I just said iPhone to sound cooler.

Throwback Thursday: The Romance Edition

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In honor of Throwback Thursday, here’s a photo of a handsome young man who came to live with my family for a while in 1984. He was a foreign exchange student who had an overbite and needed dental work, so my parents paid for his braces, along with his awesome mustard yellow sweatpants.

ValetinesDay hotness

Actually that’s me, showcasing a box I made for my 4th grade Valentine’s Day party. As you can imagine with that haircut and serial killer stare, I had loads of young lads clamoring to put their cards in my box. Ahem.

This horrendous photo has brought much laughter to me and my husband. In our old house, I used to randomly tape it to the inside door of his bedside cabinet as a way to say “I love you,” and “Don’t you ever break my heart or I’ll stab you in the neck.” Ahh romance.

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My writing friend is sending me prompts for #NaBloPoMo. I have no idea where she’s getting them (I hope it’s not illegal), but today I actually followed it. It was:

Prompt #6 (Nov 7)
Throw back Thursday. Post an old photo and tell us about it. Transcribe an old journal. Share a memory. Keep it short and simple.

NaBloPoMo Writing, NaBloPoMo Problems

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I need to issue a disclaimer that I signed up to do NaBloPoMo, which in case either of my two readers is unaware, is National Blog Posting Month. It means I’ll be posting something every day. I know – I’m just as worried as you are.

I did this at the urging of a friend of mine who is doing NaNoWriMo, the novel writing counterpart. So while she is busy writing a 50,000 word science fiction novel, I’ll be over here writing 200 word posts about things like ants, bunions and barnacles. I cannot be held responsible for the quality of my posts, and if you want to just skip this month and come back in December, I won’t blame you.

I’m doing this in part to help with what I have previously referred to as my relatively chronic case of blogstipation. I often struggle to put the words in the computer, deeming them too unfit for public consumption. But at some point you just need to let it out, knowing that only 2-7% may be worth reading. NaBloPoMo shall be my blogging laxative. In which case, I apologize in advance for what is sure to be at times an unsightly case of bloggerrhea. (fact: diarrhea is one of the most difficult words for me to spell correctly on the first try) (extra and unnecessary fact: apparently I write about diarrhea a lot?)

I am also doing this as part of a larger ‘just do it and move on’ effort. There are too many things on my list that I am overthinking or procrastinating or avoiding. I tend to get more done and be more productive when I have more on my plate, so we’ll see if this daily writing commitment can motivate me elsewhere. However I just used 15 minutes of free time to take a nap on the couch, so I think I’m in trouble.

I signed up late and missed the first couple days, and then of course yesterday’s post dated itself as the 6th instead of the 5th (a downfall of being a last-minute writer in the Pacific time zone), so I am already bringing my standard train wreck flair to this endeavor. Should be fun. This totally counts as a full post.

Single and ready to mingle

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This weekend I created a profile on match.com. Look out dating world! Mama’s coming in hot. Actually it’s for a friend who is single, but she wanted help. She even gave me her password and wants me to weigh in on her prospects. So naturally, I am using it as an excuse to peruse the local dating inventory.

I never did the online dating thing. I signed up for match.com when I was single, but before I could muster the courage to pull the trigger and make it official, I met my future husband. Sweet relief!

My husband and I know several people who have met and married their partners through online dating, including my sister, which is partly why my we gave our friend a gentle-but-probably-annoying nudge to re-sign up (she has done it in the past). Clearly it can work, right?

However now that we are four days into this online dating experiment, I’m feeling a tad skeptical. My friend has people ‘winking’ at her and contacting her, but I don’t think there’s much match material yet. I can tell she feels the same. Last night she texted me that she will not be responding to any suitor who has the word “rough” in his ID name. Even if it’s spelled “ruff.” I think that’s fair and prudent.

Then again, I suppose this is how it works in ‘real life’ too. Lord knows I had my share of mismatches, or just zero matches, before I stumbled on The One. I was never very good at putting myself out there or pursuing a love interest. My dating strategy went something like, “He’s cute, so I’ll go to the opposite side of the room and never make eye contact.” It’s weird how that never worked out for me.

The internet makes it both easier and harder to find someone. You have a larger pool of prospects, and fancy algorithms to help you hone in on your type, but you still have to dig deep and be willing to put yourself out there in a way that is even more public. It takes guts. You can’t help but applaud everyone who does it for making the effort. You also can’t help but want to edit some of their profiles. Yes I’m talking to you, Mr. Ruff.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m cheering for my friend and hoping she finds someone worthy of her awesomeness – whether he’s in the computer or elsewhere.

Losing sleep on wasted paper

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I am awake at 3:45 a.m. My brain won’t shut off. I wish I could say I am thinking about something interesting. A problem I need to solve. A product I want to invent. A great blog post idea (clearly not).

But no. I am awake at this painful hour because it just dawned on me, out of the blue, that I think I wasted a ton of construction paper when I volunteered in my daughter’s kindergarten classroom last week. I won’t bore you with the details, but let’s just say I may or may not have cut 160 strips of black and orange paper that were not needed.

Two years ago I used to wake up in the middle of the night sweating about work-related issues. Did I remember to respond to that urgent email? Should we revise our media strategy? Is my client going to fire us?

Now I wake up sweating about kindergarten craft projects.

My how things change. I don’t miss the work sweats one bit. But I can’t help but wonder if, in their absence, my brain is allowing itself to overvalue the importance of those paper strips. OH NO I WASTED CONSTRUCTION PAPER does not exactly seem worthy of a sleepless night.

Then again, in my defense – construction paper is clearly a valuable commodity at my daughter’s school. They have it on lock down in a super special storage room, accessibly only to adults who have a key and pass a retinal scan identity test. Ok fine, that last one isn’t true.

Who knows – maybe I also feel a need to prove myself after my math class/Roman numeral failure. Unfortunately it appears that craft projects are also not my strong suit, but I should’ve known this. I may be the most ill-equipped kindergarten Room Parent ever.

On the upside, writing this blog post has made me sleepy again – I’m guessing that reading it will have the same effect – so now I’ll go back to bed and see if I can squeeze in 15 minutes of shut-eye before my children wake up because they think they should. Curse you, time change.

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Please note that I updated this post to correct spelling errors that are inherent in 4 a.m. writing. Also let the record show that now I am lying awake wondering if there is a different craft project I can propose that would require 160 paper strips…