Modern torture devices

February 24, 2009March 8, 20124 Comments

I have discovered that torture devices are alive and well in the 21st century. I had a particularly close call with one this morning. It taunted me with its promises of better health and weight loss and for thirty agonizing moments, I succumbed to glorious images of a new and improved me. Then, hot, sweaty, tired, and in pain, I wondered incredulously what the hell I had been thinking. Obviously it had some sort of mind control powers that it failed to mention or it would probably not have succeeded in keeping me in its clutches for as long as it did. In future, I will know better than to heed its siren song and fully intend to steer clear of it and any and all like devices. What is the device of which I speak, you may be asking yourselves, so that I, too, can avoid them? The answer, friends, is simple: the elliptical machine.

Yes, I have begun in earnest the workout regimen that I’ve been promising to start for at least the last two years. I somehow managed to break free from the lovely warmth and comfort of my cozy bed at 5:45 a.m. this morning and engage in an arduous workout. By arduous, of course, I mean that I set the thing to level 2 and spent thirty minutes whining about being bored, thirsty, hot, cold, tired, and sick while struggling to breathe through my nose for the first time in days. That’s right, folks, I’m a pansy and a whiner.

But of course you already knew that.

My goal is to get into better shape and lose all the weight that I’ve gained over the last year. Ideally, this will happen prior to September 26, but I suppose that’s too much to hope for. Maybe I can just lose most of it by then.

I still hate mornings, though, and getting up at the ass-crack of dawn is sooooooooooo not my idea of a good time. In fact, working out in general is not exactly my idea of a good time, in case you couldn’t tell. I love riding my bike and going swimming and taking walks, but those are all rather difficult to do in the middle of winter. Oh, sure, I could join a gym and do all of those things inside, but then there would be no mosquitoes to swat away, no sunburns to deal with, no bratty kids to shoo out of my way in the pool, no excess of heat and humidity…Why haven’t I joined a gym again yet? Oh, right, because then I would miss out on enjoying nature. Because I’m such the avid naturalist and all-around outdoorsy type. Right.

Maybe in my dreams.

Rachael cracked me up this morning. She came downstairs as I was about halfway through my half-hour of torture and sat down at the table to watch me, positively enthralled by what she saw. Whether it was the idea of me working out or the fact that she had no idea what it was I was doing that kept her attention riveted on my ever-reddening face, I’m not sure. “You look tired,” she said. I gasped my agreement. “I would be done now if that were me,” she continued. I stared at her for a moment, not sure whether to laugh or cry, then told her to go play. Greg told her that people don’t like to be observed while working out, which is true for me because I’m always afraid I’ll look like an idiot, even when I’m the only person around. I asked him if he heard what she’d said and he replied that he hadn’t, so I told him. He laughed. Then he came out and said that I didn’t look as bad as he thought I would. Apparently that’s supposed to mean that I’m in better shape than originally thought, despite the fact that I get winded running up the steps to the clerk’s office at the courthouse every day (I’ve been doing it for three years now, so you’d think I’d be used to it, but you would be wrong; and lest I make it seem like that’s a small amount of stairs, there are somewhere around two dozen steps just to get into the courthouse, then three more flights up to the clerk’s office). I could probably have phrased all that better, but my brain seems to have fallen asleep from all that exercising I did this morning.

In other news, the sinus infection that’s been threatening for so long finally hit with a vengeance on Friday and I spent Saturday on the couch. I spent most of Saturday morning asleep. Yay sleep! We went to Ankeny this weekend and did lots of wedding planningy type things, such as picking up my wedding dress. YAY!!!!!! Then I (accidentally) got super-drugged-up on cold medicine and Excedrin and felt like a space cadet all of Sunday. A word to the wise: Don’t mix two NyQuil liqui-gels with three Excedrin and a muscle relaxer. Bad things will happen. It was much less fun to go shopping and try on pretty dresses in my drug-induced fog than I had originally anticipated. But I still have to have it bustled and there are still other dresses to pick out, so I suppose I can deal with it.

Yay wedding dress! 🙂

I finally got around to sending my cell phone in to be fixed. I guess I procrastinated a bit with that. You would think I would have gotten it taken care of right away and I did try to do just that, but then I got lazy. Now I have to wait four to six weeks for my pretty pink phone to be usable again. Stupid phone breakage.

And in laptop news, we finally gave up on waiting for Dell to send the cds they promised to send. They kept pushing back the ship date and when Greg called to find out why, they told him they had the cds in stock (and they weren’t on back-order like he’d been told before) and they didn’t know why they hadn’t been sent out. *looking very earnest* They promised to send them out right away, overnight even. They still never arrived. So we finally managed to get them to send us prepaid shipping labels and we shipped it back to them. Once they’re satisfied, they’re supposed to send me a new one with the right operating system on it. It will probably be another month at least before that happens. Stupid Dell. Their computers are great, but their customer service really sucks.

My God I’m tired! I blame the early rising this morning, the muscle relaxer I took after my lovely warm shower, and the stupid sinus infection that won’t go away. And by won’t go away, I mean that the two doses of antibiotic I’ve taken haven’t managed to banish it yet. WORK FASTER, MEDICINE! I WANT TO BREATHE!

*sigh* In the meantime, I suppose I had better get back to work, although I’m really not sure what it is that I’ll do to pass the time and keep from falling asleep. I felt rotten enough yesterday that I toyed with the idea of calling in sick today so that I could stay home and rest up from the weekend, but I’m a goody-goody, so here I am. At work. Where I’m supposed to be working but am blogging as a way to put off doing anything even remotely productive instead.

Happy Tuesday!

On cell phones and why I’m mad at them today

January 16, 2009March 8, 20123 Comments

So today I went to enter an appointment in the calendar on my cell phone. I would be so lost without it that it’s just plain ridiculous. Anyway, I was halfway through typing in the appointment when my phone shut off. Weird. I’d had to turn it on when I dug it out of my purse because it was off then, too. Double weird; I hardly ever turn my phone off. I was in a hurry because I had to eat and run some errands, so I stuffed it in my purse and was on my way. When I got to where I have lunch, I fiddled with it again and it just kept turning itself off. Stupid phone. By now I was super irritated, so I contented myself with ordering lunch and reading the new Catherine Anderson book I got last weekend, annoyed at the thought of having to cut my reading shorter than I wanted so that I could stop at the cell phone store.

After eating a very quick lunch, I headed to the post office to get something in the mail and then I hurried over to the local cell phone store. Of course, they couldn’t really do anything to help me except suggest that I go back to the store where I bought the phone and see if they could do something with it. I’ve only had the phone since the end of November; it’s brand new! Apparently that’s one of its problems. My phone had just come out in November or right around then and evidently, it had some issues at first, so either it’s that and they may have to exchange my phone, or it’s a software thing and it just needs to be updated. I’m hoping for the software thing because they can’t switch text messages and I want to keep some of them, so I don’t want to have to turn my phone back in as part of an exchange. So I guess I get to go to Waterloo tonight with the kids to see if I can get my phone situation taken care of. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if it wasn’t my only phone…Okay, yes it would, but whatever. At least if I had a land line I could still call people. I hate being phoneless.

It’s funny how much cell phone malfunctions bother me. It proves just exactly how dependant I am on my cell phone and when you really stop to think about it, that’s probably not a good thing. Without my cell phone, it feels like I’m missing a limb or something, and it never used to be that way. Then again, that was back before I had a cell phone and it’s getting harder and harder to remember those days. The really sad thing is how I don’t know anyone’s phone number anymore. I used to be a walking phone book, as I suspect we all were at one point. Now, no one knows anyone’s phone number because all phone numbers are stored in our cell phones for easy, one-touch dialing. It reminds me of what my dad always says about calculators: “That thing’ll make you stupid.” And it’s true. I rarely do mental math anymore because I’ve come to depend so much on my calculator’s ability to do it for me. Any sort of addition or subtraction or anything, really, that involves carrying of numbers or anything with decimals or percents, I just can’t do without my calculator. My brain has grown weak from lack of use. It’s the same with phone numbers. Unless you’re someone I talk to frequently on the phone or someone I’ve known forever and your number doesn’t change, chances are good that I no longer know your phone number. It’s really quite sad.

But on the bright side, it’s Friday! Hooray! And I have a story idea! Hooray! And I have a book to read! Hooray! And possibly plans for the weekend! Hooray! Plans that involve shopping! Hooray! Is anyone sick of all these exclamation marks and shouts of hooray yet? Hooray!

🙂

I am so ready for the afternoon to be over. Only one more hour and forty-five minutes! Hooray! I need to lie down…

Again with the snarkiness…

December 12, 2008March 8, 20126 Comments

But this time it wasn’t mine. Well, okay, it reminded me a lot of mine, but this time it wasn’t me, I swear. This was an article from Wednesday’s Iowa Falls Times-Citizen, or rather, it was a letter to the editor of that newspaper. Here is what Jory Rapp of Alden had to say:

It saddens me, as well as angers me, to think that it has become so “politically incorrect” to say, “Merry Christmas.” We are so afraid of offending someone for one reason or another that stores won’t put Merry Christmas in their ads, school concerts are called “winter concerts,” and such ridiculous rot as that. It seems like it’s wrong to offend everyone else; everyone, that is, except for the Christians.

If memory serves me right, wasn’t our country founded on Christian beliefs, values, and morals? We trusted in God to establish, guide, and bless our country, yet now we spit in His face and are outraged at having Him be part of our country and its government. Then we have the audacity to moan at the shape our country is in and ask why God allows certain things to happen. If we would look to the Bible and the history of the Israelites, we would see what happens when people turn their backs on God, when they choose to worship other gods and idols. We are headed down that path and if we continue to kick God out of everything, one day we will be standing in the midst of a disaster asking, “Where are you, God?” and His answer will be, “You didn’t want me around, so I left.”

This Christmas season, I will remind my children that we celebrate because God chose to send His Son to this earth as a baby to one day be the Savior of all mankind and that we are to share that gift with others. I wish everyone a very blessed and “Merry Christmas.”

I thought this was very well written and I pretty well agree with it. If Ben Stein can stick up for “Merry Christmas” even though as a Jew, he doesn’t celebrate it, why can’t the rest of us? “Season’s Greetings” has got to be about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. The holiday is Christmas. If you have a problem with that, go back to wherever you came from. Or celebrate Festivus.

And now, on to snarkier matters…

It appears that the Idiot Brigade is back in full force. I swear I got stuck behind every idiot driver in Grundy County Wednesday. I was nearly hit by someone who decided to switch lanes without making sure there was no oncoming traffic and then again by someone who decided to take his half out of the middle while I was trying to pass him. If he’d come any further into the left lane, he could have knocked me right off the road. And then yesterday I was nearly run over by some idiot at a stop sign who was watching around the corner instead of right in front of him, where I happened to be walking. Jerks. What is it about winter that brings out the idiot in people?

On a more positive note, thank God it’s Friday! I am so looking forward to the weekend. No getting up for work and struggling to make it through the day, no idiots to deal with on the road because I fully intend to stay home and be exceedingly lazy, nothing but chick flicks and romance novels. Oh, and Christmas present wrapping. And Christmas card writing. And maybe a little bit of 4-H paperwork. Woo! I love weekends!

Merry Christmas, y’all, and happy Friday!

Perhaps a little more snarkiness…

December 5, 2008March 8, 20121 Comment

…After all, I was seriously upset last night. I suppose it’s a stupid thing to be that upset over, but I think the reason it bothers me so much is that music has always been such a huge part of my life that it really irritated me to see a performance where it looked like nobody really cared. They were shooting for mediocrity and barely achieved even that. I was always taught to strive for excellence. Those kids (the fourth graders in particular) had a serious problem with projection; we sat about as far away from the singers as you could possibly get and could hardly hear them most of the time. At one point we couldn’t even understand what they were singing because they weren’t enunciating at all. I remember quite vividly a lesson I received once on enunciation during kids’ choir practice at church. Let me tell you, I enunciated perfectly after that.

It also really bothers me that in so many public places, we are encouraged not to say anything even resembling a remembrance of what Christmas is really all about. Christmas is first and foremost about celebrating the birth of Christ and his life and works. Secondly, it is about spending time with family and friends and thanking God for the blessings you have had and continue to receive. It is not about shopping and buying and spending and receiving. As a kid, I remember not really caring so much about the family part and the religion part. But now that my mom and both my grandparents are gone, I really cherish the times that I can spend with my family all together. Those times are few and far between. And the older I get, the more I can appreciate what God has done for me in my life and the more I find myself…apparently forgetting to take my hot water out of the microwave so I can have some hot chocolate. Excuse me.

Okay. Yesterday I heated up some water twice in order to make a cup of hot chocolate and I forgot about it both times. I think I remembered it as I was leaving work for the night. Today I’ve only done it once so far. Let’s see if I can remember to take it out of the microwave while it’s still hot this time.

Anyway, I think I’m a little calmer now. I am just so sick to the teeth of all this stupid political correctness garbage. Kids don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance in school anymore because “it might infringe on someone’s right not to believe in God.” You can’t have the Ten Commandments in courthouses anymore. Oh, and by the way, no Christmas carols in the annual Christmas concert because someone might be offended. Really, how much farther are we going to let them take this? If you don’t want to hear Christmas music, don’t go to the concert. If you don’t want to say the Pledge of Allegiance because you don’t believe in it, don’t say it! If you don’t like the way we do things in our country, go somewhere else. Otherwise, shut your yaps and do like the rest of us.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the separation of Church and State, but I think in some cases we’ve taken it a bit too far and much farther than the Founding Fathers intended, Christmas concerts and prayer in school being prime examples. I’m not saying I want to live in a religious state, but seriously, people, use some common sense. By not allowing such expressions of faith as singing Silent Night in a school Christmas concert, we are effectively offending ourselves. I’m offended that kids are not allowed to sing a religious Christmas song at the Christmas concert because it might offend someone else. The community in which I live is predominantly, if not entirely, Christian, and I think it’s stupid that we are not allowed to sing Christian Christmas songs during the Christmas concert.

Okay, so maybe I wasn’t done being snarky. I’m sure I probably just talked in circles around my main point of wow, we’re all being stupid here, folks, but oh well. I guess I’d just like to know why what was okay for us to sing as kids in our Christmas concerts is suddenly not okay to sing now. For crying out loud, they could have at least sung something like Silver Bells or Jingle Bell Rock or Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow! While these are all nice songs in their own way, they’re no Angels We Have Heard On High or O Holy Night, but they’re at least Christmas classics. Where were they in the program?

Okay, okay, I promise I’ll get off my high horse now. I’ve been looking at my archives list and I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for over a year! I know, that’s not much for some people. I have one friend who’s been at it regularly for the last five years. But for me to actually keep something like this going this long is pretty cool, especially given that I haven’t been doing a whole lot of actual writing lately. I so need a free time machine.

And in case you were wondering, yes, I remembered to retrieve my hot water from the microwave so that I can have some hot chocolate. Yummy!