So, in brief, you are spared hearing about how sick I was. In retrospect, not that much but I’m a lousy sick person.

However, you will not be spared hearing about how I had written a post about being sick and then didn’t post it, but then wrote about not writing about it. Oooo – I’m all meta right now!

I will say this about being sick: it did afford me lots of time to do nothing but sit around, knit and watch movies. Normally when I try to take a day off to do something like this, a nagging little voice in my head compels me to do productive things, like doing the dishes, doing laundry, sweeping the floors, dusting, reorganizing something, etc. and before I know it I’ve spent the day being productive instead of relaxing. ² Whenever I tried to do any of the above while sick, I’d quickly realize I just didn’t have the energy, and didn’t my couch look like a great place for a nap, and oh – is there *another* episode of Criminal Minds on? Bring on the nap!

(It also afforded me the opportunity to clean a big chunk of unwatched shows off my PVR. I was waaaaay behind on Stargate: Universe, Bones and Fringe.)

Resolution update:

I’m not much further along on anything. I’m working on a striped scarf and have added over a foot to it, and even though I should be working on something else, I’m still adding inches to my cardigan (ideally, I want it done by Easter). No more wine has been consumed, but I did consume a lovely mocha porter from Lake of Bays Brewing Company.

1. I was ranting about children, water bottles and germs. None of it made sense.
2. Don’t get me wrong – sometimes all of these things help me focus my energy and it’s a good thing.

Backstory: like a lot of kids, during the summer I played soccer. Probably like a lot of kids, I didn’t find it to be a particularly enjoyable experience. I don’t know if I was good at it – for most of my time playing it, I played halfback, which is the line that picks up the slack for the forwards and acts as early defense for the fullbacks (or, the last line before the goalie). For the last year or two, I spent part of the time at halfback, part of the time in goal. Most of the time, I believed that I was no good at at the game, and that I was messing it up for everyone else.

One year in particular helped reinforce this (perhaps mistaken) belief. That was the year that the house league team I was on was also the elite team for the area, meaning we had to do a lot of traveling to tournaments. During house league games, I might play for half the game, but only if we were ahead or playing a weaker team; at tournaments, I’d be lucky to play ten minutes all weekend. What it said to me was “you’re not good enough to play, but we’re stuck with you because there was no other team to put you on.”

It sucked – HARD – to know that my parents had had to spend the weekend traveling and staying in hotels so that I could go to a tournament that I knew I had no chance of playing in, unless everyone ahead of me got injured or that we were blowing the other team out of the water. The team won – a lot – but I never had anything to do with the outcomes.

To this day, I still don’t like team sports for the same reason: I feel like if I’m not playing really well, then I’m letting everyone else down. I don’t even like group activities, which is why I stopped going to the running class, why I don’t go to fitness classes, and why I haven’t joined the Ultimate Frisbee team a friend invited me to a few years ago. I still go to the gym, but prefer solitary activities.

(There is one sport I enjoyed: fencing. I started in the first year of my undergrad and did it almost until my last year. If it hadn’t been for some pretty serious injuries in important bits (like, by back, ankles and wrist) I would have continued with it. Sure, there’s a team component, but when you’re on piste, there’s only you and your opponent – no one else to let down.)

Back to soccer… some of it probably had to do with the fact I was painfully shy and not very competitive. My excuse now is that I’m basically an introvert who prefers to do things on my own than with others. I won’t say that I’ll never participate in team sports ever again, but it’s going to have to be a compelling reason to end my self-imposed ban.

2. I already have two heirloom tomato plants in pots on my deck. One is a Green Zebra, and the other simply says “orange-yellow” on the tag. I also have two long planters on my deck with sugar snap peas in them.

3. Housework, including sweeping (!) and dusting (!!!) was accomplished. As well, the bed in the guest room got made up, and I pulled all of my winter clothes out of the drawers and closets to make room for the summer stuff.

4. One of the other things I’d planned to do was go to the gym; instead, I ended up having an epic nap. While getting exercise is important and necessary, catching up on sleep is also important. And since I don’t get to nap during the day the rest of the week and I do make it to the gym a couple of times after work, I think napping was a better use of my time.

5. Today is the fifth day in a row that I’ve posted. Lately, I’ve been ignoring the blog too often, so I thought I’d try to post a little something every day for a few weeks to get the creative juices flowing.

I have a sinking feeling that this weekend is going to be the latter. Oh, there’s a plant sale I want to go to tomorrow, but since my garden is just about full, there’s not much I want. And it’s supposed to rain, so I can’t really do any outdoor activities (unless Environment Canada is spectacularly wrong). My house isn’t to the stage of disorder where I feel it necessary to devoting an entire day to cleaning, although it could stand a good tidying. There are the movies I brought home from work, which can be Sunday’s task. Maybe I’ll make bread tomorrow.

Weekends like this are rarely relaxing because I can’t settle on any one task for very long and shut my brain down as I sweep or sort laundry or papers. And then Sunday night rolls around and it seems like the weekend was wasted and I have to wait a whole five days [1. Or, in this case, three, as I have Thursday off. Which is to make up for having to work Saturday. ] for another one to roll around. Perhaps I should set up a series of arbitrary deadlines for trivial things to motivate me, such as “dusting must be finished before 2:03pm”, “water the plants before they frakking die already!” or “you’re not allowed to listen to that Passion Pit song you really like until the tablecloth on the dining room table is changed” (which is actually a pretty good motivator – I’ve been listening to that song on almost constant repeat for the last few days).

Perhaps, having identified that this is a possibility, I will make an effort to avoid it and surprise myself by having a lovely weekend after all. Fingers crossed!

Okay, now I’m hungry. Awesome.

In all fairness, it’s been a busy few weeks.

The Family Day long weekend was lovely and relaxing. I’d get up in the morning and change out of my night pajamas into day pajamas, and then spent the day knitting, watching TV, or going to the gym. It was the first Family Day I didn’t have to go into work because some major systems update/server migration absolutely needed to be done and since the library was closed, it was an ideal time. I’d also like to mention that both times I had to do this? Whatever we were doing ran into unexpected obstacles that required a tech who wasn’t in because it was a holiday [3. The official techs were located somewhere in the States, and I walked through it here in Ontario. The tech were usually someone over in the IT department who were smart enough to say "Hell to the no!" when I asked if they were going to be available. ]

Then there were the Olympics, of which I need to say no more. Y’all know how it turned out. I did participate in the Knitting Olympics and successfully finished a pair of mittens for my sister.

I lack just enough modesty to say these are pretty awesome, considering that I designed the pattern and knit them up in just 17 days. In retrospect though, because I can’t resist the urge to punish myself for my lack of modesty, I should have made the pattern on the back a mirror image on each mitten instead of the exact same pattern. Normally that’s not a problem because the motifs are symmetrical, but these are asymmetrical and should have been flipped between the two.

Last week I was in Toronto for a conference where I:

• Ran myself ragged for five days. Sit-down meals were a rare luxury, and food was mostly eaten on the fly. Fortunately, I seem to have made it through with no ill effects except for a desire to catch up on my sleep, while my boss is suffering through his annual post-conference cold.
• Sat through a session about programing with Perl, which is complete Greek to me. I compared it to looking at a lace chart which makes no sense at first, but once you know what all the symbols and lines mean, you know what to do. Actually writing and editing the code is like learning how to knit, and one day I will get there. [4. When I made this analogy to a group of the coders, they gave me blank looks, much like I assume I was giving them during the session. ]
• Had fly-by visits with three groups of friends, with whom there is almost no overlap. Julie, who also shared a room with me, knows some of my Sudbury friends, so I was able to combine some of those encounters.
• Didn’t get to the Mexican restaurant, which has been our conference tradition for the past few years. Instead, we went out for delicious Thai food, so I’m still happy.

I will begin the following post-conference story by telling you up front that my sister and her friends are fine, the place they are staying has very minimal, if any, damage, and she will be coming home sometime next week.

Saturday, the last day of the conference, my mother was supposed to come up and we were going to go for lunch before heading home. However, she hasn’t been feeling well, I was exhausted, and the weather was kind of craptacular. I called home to tell her not to bother coming in, as I would be heading out after the session I was presenting [5. Oh yeah, I also was a co-presenter in a session. ]

Mom: “I hadn’t planned on coming because I need to be here in case your sister calls.” (My youngest sister is on holidays in Chile with some friends and they were staying in some kind of conservation area.)
Me: “Why? What’s wrong”
Mom: “Have you seen the news?”
Me: (blood running cold) “No – what. happened?”
Mom: “There was an earthquake in Chile, between Santiago and where she is. It was bigger than the one in Haiti. We haven’t heard from her and we don’t know how to find out if she was okay.”

Everything after that was a bit fuzzy. I think I suggested she call the Red Cross, but I don’t remember what her response was. My mom sounded pretty calm even though I knew she wasn’t, and I managed to hold it together until I got off the phone and burst into tears in front of Julie, who then offered to go to breakfast with me instead of going to the plenary session like she had planned. I called my mom back and gave her my cell number, and told her to text me if she heard anything (fortunately, my sister had taught mom to text before she left.) During my session, I got a text from her telling me that they had heard from one of the other girls in the group, and that they were all okay, except the power had gone off. You can imagine how relieved we all are that they are okay, and that the greatest hardship they suffered was that they didn’t get to watch the gold medal hockey game Sunday night because they went to see the penguins. Yeah, I kind of hate her too.

When she gets home, we are confiscating her passport and not letting her leave the country until she is at least 40.

2. While I was home, I took the opportunity to watch a couple of movies on TV that I hadn’t seen (or hadn’t seen all of ) before. The first was 17 Again, which was surprisingly good. There were some genuinely funny moments, especially between Mike’s nerdy best friend and the principal. And while I know I may not be alone in acknowledging that Zac Efron is a pretty, pretty guy, he’s actually not that bad of an actor. The second was It’s a Boy Girl Thing, which is a mostly Canadian production, about two teenagers who swap bodies [1. It seems that I had a theme going on, what with two movies about body swapping. ] I’d seen parts of it before, liked it, but never actually got to see the whole thing. It also is surprisingly good – I thought that both of the actors who were playing the teenagers did a good job of mimicking the body language of each other when they were supposed to be in the opposite bodies. Certainly worth checking out.

3. A few weeks ago, when I posted about this year’s theme, I mentioned wanting to have more meatless weeks. There are many reasons for it, both personal and environmental, in addition to examining how often I fall back on eating meat or meat products. It’s worth noting that I am still drinking milk and eating eggs, as they are important sources of calcium and protein; while I do enjoy soy milk and have used egg substitute successfully on a number of occasions, this whole thing is about awareness, not making radical changes. [2. It's also worth noting that the milk and eggs that I do consume come from organic sources in the province. ] That day marked the first day in what was going to be my first meatless week of the year – I had a menu all planned out, including lunches that didn’t include lunchmeat, and was pretty gung-ho about it.

Except, here I am, three Sundays later, and I am still meatless [3. Except for a cheat when I made soup one day - I didn't have any vegetable stock and had to use chicken stock. ] I haven’t run out of meal ideas, and have often surprised myself with my inventiveness, especially when it comes to lunches. Yesterday I was craving one of my favourite comfort foods, chicken and dumplings, because I still wasn’t feeling great; however, this morning I looked at the chicken in the freezer [4. I also vowed to clean out my freezer, so that chicken is going to get eaten at some point. ] and then looked at the corn I froze this past summer, and decided that corn chowder is just as comforting, especially with biscuits. As well, most of my meals this week don’t involve meat, such as the veggie fajitas I’m going to have for lunch this week, the roasted tomatoes with pasta, and the curried tofu possibly Friday or Saturday. It’s become less about “I am only going to do this for one week” and more about “let’s see how long I can keep this up.” [5. Sort of like when I was still running on the treadmill - one day, instead of alternating between walking and running, I just ran to see how long I could go without stopping. In the end, I managed about 15 minutes - go me! ]

4. There will be a full post about this later, but I managed to fit in some reading this month. I was reading five books in total which leads to all kinds of distractions, and only managed to finish two of them.

This is the conversation I had with myself earlier today:

Me: Um, Brain? Could you please pull it together? I have to finish a Very Important Presentation Including Handouts, plus write an update on the status of a Very Important Report That I Have To Redo. And let’s not forget the schedules that need to be examined.
Brain: Leprechaun giraffe sidesaddle!
Me: What does that even mean?!

So, making sense of anything is damn near impossible right now. In lieu of anything meaningful, I’m going to tell you about my new bedtime ritual. It’s all well and good to say that I go to bed shortly after 11pm, but all that means is that I make my way upstairs at that time; there’s still getting my pj’s on, brushing my teeth, remembering to go back downstairs to make sure the cat has water, going back upstairs because the cat is in the tub crying because he wants water from the tap, trying to remember where I left my book [2. Usually downstairs. ] and so forth. By the time I’m in bed and am ready to read a few pages, it’s well after 11:30 and it’s time to shut off the lights (and yet I read until midnight anyway.)

To cut down on the amount of puttering I do when getting ready for bed, I start much earlier. Around 10:30ish, no matter what I’m doing, I go upstairs and do the following:

1. Put my pajamas on.
2. Brush my teeth [3. This also means I'm less likely to snack right before bed because I don't want to have to brush them again. ]
3. Turn on the heating pad on my bed so it’s toasty warm when I get in.
4. Fill the humidifier and turn it on low.
5. Make sure the cat has food and water.

This way, when I meander up shortly after 11pm, all I have to do is hang up my housecoat and crawl into bed, making my reading time that much longer!