I clearly fell off the blog wagon...

The weekends lately have really been throwing off my sleeping schedule. We keep staying up/out until 3:00ish and yet my body insists on waking up at normal time. Which I suppose is a good thing 'cause then on Sunday night when I have work the next day I'm actually too tired to stay up ridiculously late. I never really realized how much my body depends on its rhythm though, haha. 

I clearly fell off the blog wagon a few days ago and have been thinking about writing ever since. Thursday night I came home in a bad mood and didn't feel like doing much of anything, not the least of all blogging. It was one of those funks due to wacky monthly hormone levels that makes me feel like life is too hard and I can't possibly function as an adult. Boyfriend clearly doesn't suffer from the same hormonal hardship and can't relate/doesn't understand whenever I get into one of those extremely apathetic, nearly catatonic states. He just tries to encourage me to stop, which does absolutely nothing at all except for remind me that I'm being outrageous which just further aggravates me because I can't just be normal at times like that. It's a vicious cycle and I feel bad that he has to be a part of it, but living with your loved one means participating in all aspects of their life, not just the good times :P

The mood carried over into Friday when I again became extremely depressed about a Groupon I bought back in July for CorePower Yoga. It was the last day I could use it so I called one of the studios to try to set up my membership only to be told that I'd have to do so in person. Boo. That set me off into the depths of despair because actually going to one of the studios to sign up just seemed way too difficult. And we were supposed to be meeting up with Boyfriend's sister and time was moving too quickly but all I could seem to do was lay there and lament about how incredibly taxing the entire situation was. Obviously, writing this now I can see what a windy whiner I am about it all. And really I feel like at the times when life seems like one entirely too complicated feat, there is a small, logical side of me that's telling me to get up, shut up, and do whatever it is I feel I'm incapable of accomplishing. I'm working on getting that side to grow bigger in hopes of one day dominating the dreadfully depressed, hormonally influenced parasitic organism that takes over my brain from time to time. 

I've decided that I'm going to go to yoga today. I think. I told myself I'd go to a 1:30 class and in my head I really, really want to. It's just getting the rest of me to cooperate with that decision. And now since writing that, I looked at the class schedule again and decided I really don't want to go today because I'd like to use my Sunday to relax. I know that's just a cop out. And I know that I really should go because I absolutely LOVED going to yoga all the time before I moved out here. Until I get back in the habit of going on a regular basis, I feel like I need to schedule it on a weekday morning to make myself get up and do it before work to serve as a nice start to my day. What I really need is someone to go with to motivate myself to get there so I don't let them down by flaking out. What I really need is to stop talking about it and just do it. 

My Sunday feels incomplete because the Bears have a bye this week. Before moving here I wasn't a necessarily a Bears fan, but since I live in the city, I feel compelled to root, root, root for the home team. (Random Chicago related tidbit about that song--At the Cubs games they say, "Root, root, root for the Cubbies" and when Boyfriend heard me sing the song as just "home team" he realized that not everyone [obviously] says Cubbies when they sing it :P) I'm sure the day will mostly be spent helping Boyfriend recover from too much drinking last night and hopefully carving our pumpkins (finally). If we don't do it today we might as well not carve them at all because, unlike Christmas, I feel like Halloween is a holiday whose decorations should be put away by November 1st.

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I started this blog before noon today and now it's nearly 9:00. We've literally spent all day just laying around, making great use of our Netflix streaming app on our tv. We've watched 2 episodes of South Park, Paranormal Activity 2, and 3 episodes of The Walking Dead. It's the most tv I've watched in one sitting in a reallllly long time. Boyfriend is also the most hungover he's been in a reallllly long time. Hah. I know my limit. He apparently does not :P Needless to say, pumpkin carving did not happen today. I think pumpkin guts would have made Boyfriend lose his guts yet again :P Poor puker. 

I'll end this blog with one last bit of exciting news: I have a phone call scheduled tomorrow night with one of the volunteers from a local Mastiff Rescue to hopefully start the adoption process for adding a new member to our little psuedo-family :)  So anxious and excited!!! :D Fingers crossed we are accepted as potential adopters! I will most definitely be posting a follow up blog tomorrow. Until then!!

If that's not a sign of some dangerous moves, then I don't know what is

I think the last time I posted four days in a row was...wait? Have I ever done that? 

• I just realized that it's almost November and I signed up for something I mentioned on here a while back called NaNoWriMo. To me, completing that will be the equivalent of a mental marathon. I still haven't even started brainstorming ideas and should really probably get on that if I plan on taking this challenge seriously considering it starts next Tuesday.
• Also next Tuesday is my neice-y's 2nd birthday! I can't believe she's already 2! I also need to get on having her present made and shipped. Why oh why aren't there enough hours in the day?
• In all honesty, I feel kind of guilty complaining about a lack of free time when tonight I fully enjoyed laying here on the couch all cuddled up with Boyfriend as we watched "Casper" on ABC Family. Haha. It's not often that I take nights off to do absolutely nothing. Monday we bottled a batch of hard cider that Boyfriend made a few months ago and then started a new batch with some cider we bought at a farm the same weekend of the corn maze 5k. Last night I went all sorts of shopping, so tonight I think I'm entitled to some down time. Especially considering today is the most loathed day of the month coupled with this intense sinus pressure related to some grimy sickness the germ-laden kids I work with have so lovingly bestowed upon me. I really don't know who I feel the need to justify myself to. Haha. I'm an adult and I'll do as I please.
• Boyfriend and I submitted our information to be considered to adopt a Mastiff through the Great Lakes Mastiff Rescue! It says we'll hear back within 10 days from someone regarding the next step in the process and I am suuuuuper excited that we might be adding a little, ok well not so much little, but a puppy friend to our little household! :)
• Boyfriend is sitting on his computer about 15 feet away from me and I just sent him the link to this video. I'm having formatting issues and Blogger isn't letting me post it in the right spot. As soon as he started listening to the song, he started dancing. I smiled and then I melted and fell in love with him all over again. I melt when he dances. Seriously, his dancing is so potent, it caused this warm weather loving, Southern California girl to move to the North Pole! If that's not a sign of some dangerous moves, then I don't know what is :P
• Tomorrow is gonna be super easy in my reading groups because it's Progress Monitoring day. Yay! Today actually wasn't bad either and I ended up awarding my 5th graders all an extra point for our positive behavior system because I appreciated their hard work so much. I love when days go smoothly. And I love being able to tell my kids how proud of them I am at the end of our time together instead of taking about what could be improved upon for next time. One student was absent today so the feel of the whole group was different. I'm hoping the rest of them feel some confidence from today and that carries over into tomorrow and the future. 
• I managed to stay awake past 11:00! That is nearly unheard of these days. I don't like it at all because it means I rarely get to talk to my mom anymore. That needs to change. Still working on my overall progress in life :) And with four straight days of blogging under my belt, I'd say I'm doing a fairly good job at re-establishing old routines :D

It may be baby steps, but it's progress

Three days in a row! Could it be I'm slowly finding time in my life to do things once again?! Kind of. I'm still working on things like returning library books on time (note to self, that one book is about 5 days overdue), actually going to yoga class that I paid for like 4 months ago, and going running. I'll return that book tomorrow, I'll go to yoga on Friday (kind of have to because it's the day my Groupon expires! :P), and running...well...soon enough. I'm liking these bullets as of late, so they will continue.

• At the beginning of the school year, on a day that looked like it was threatening to rain, I asked one of the other playground supervisors what we would do if it were to begin raining while we were outside. She said she wasn't sure because she could never really remember a time when that had happened. At home, if it's going to rain, it's raining. When rain is predicted it's an all day event. Here, if rain is in the forecast, it might happen, it might not, and if it does it can and will stop and start at least 10 times, just for good measure. Since I asked that question, it has started to rain halfway through recess at least 4 times. Today was the worst time it had ever done so. I think I jinxed the school.
• I also realized today that people here don't have sprinkler systems for their front/back yards because there is enough precipitation here all year round to keep their lawns green. That is such a weird concept to me. Haha. Sprinkler lines would freeze and bust in winter here, so I totally understand why they're not used. But it was just funny finding yet another difference between Chicago and home. 
• I drove 45 minutes in traffic to get to my afternoon job, only to be told I was only needed for an hour today. I then proceeded to drive home in traffic for 45 more minutes once my hour was up. I spent more time getting to my job than I actually spent at it. Definitely need to look into something different for the new year. 
• Another one of my lilies opened up today. I love that I'm getting to enjoy them for so long! And there are still two more buds to go!
• One perk of getting off so early meant that I got my grocery shopping, Target shopping, and Costco shopping done in one fell swoop! And with Boyfriend along for the errand running to boot! I spent way more money than I care to at one time, but at least we'll be stocked up for like well over a month! :) You know you're an adult when something like that is one of the silver lining moments of your day. 
• I've been thinking a lot about trying to find a time to go home to visit lately. I'm just not sure when. Traveling over the holidays just does not at all sound appealing (not to mention it's super expensive). In my head, in my ideal future I'm trying to imagine for myself, I'll finish working my afternoon job at the very end of the year and use the second week of my Christmas break to go home to see my family. That is definitely some good motivation for me to work out my income situation!!
• Boyfriend and I decided that one of our goals to accomplish next year is for both of us to have what we refer to as "real people jobs". Yes, he and I are both real, physical people, but we want jobs that real people have, you know the kinds with salaries and benefits? I know those are hard to come by nowadays, but for serious, we need/want them. In obtaining these real people jobs, we will sell both of our cars and buy something new together. Provided he (or I for that matter) can get a job where we can take the L, we really only need one car. Super excited at the prospect of that!

That's probably plenty of reading for one sitting. I intend on doing this again tomorrow so I'm feeling less and less like I need to write a lengthy post of "The Iliad" proportions. It may be baby steps, but it's progress :)

Oh you betcha

Blogging two days (techinically) in a row? Oh you betcha (reminds me of Bobby's mom from Bobby's World). As I write this, I'm listening to an album an old friend of mine recently completed. We used to be email pen pals, with various periods of time producing more emails than others. I once got a hand written letter (people still write those?) from him as he took a road trip across multiple states and it was honestly one of the funniest things I have ever read in my life. I hope that I still have that letter tucked away in a drawer somewhere 'cause it was a precious little literary gem. Initially I just spelled gem, "Jem", yet another literary Jem :P

I'm a bit pressed for time as I'm trying to write this during the time Boyfriend's taking a shower in between our "Breaking Bad" marathon we've been in the middle of having for the past few weeks. We're about to watch the Season 2 finale. So I think tonight's entry will be in bullet form for speed purposes. 

• I think I'm going to quit my nanny job after the holidays, provided I can find another source of income because lord knows I can't survive on my 11.25 hours a week I work as a Reading Interventionist. I want to go back to school to get my ESL endorsement. Those of you who are interested in knowing exactly what that means and entails can find that out here. My hope is that I'll be able to get enough money in grants/loans that I can use that to live off of until I acquire full time employment. 
• It's really interesting working at such a diverse school because the students I work with are aware of so many different countries and cultures that in the past couple weeks I've been asked if I am Romanian as well as Russian. And really they're not all that far off. I feel like most kids from the melting pot I hail from would not be able to pinpoint exactly where I look like I descend from. The students at my school seem especially in tune with it. I secretly love that about them.
• I haven't tweezed/threaded/maintained in any way my right eyebrow since June. June. That was 4 months ago. I usually go for threading but haven't been able to find the time to do so. And because I wear my side bangs over my right eye, they hide it so well that one would never suspect I have a rainforest of an eyebrow growing under there. At first I didn't tweeze it 'cause I didn't want to mess up the beautiful shaping the girl from the threading shop so perfectly created. But now that shape is long gone and I chalk my unkempt eyebrow up to laziness now. 
• I've discovered my stomach is intolerant to sugar alcohol. So much for the sugar-free caramel I was dipping my fresh from the orchard apples in. Boo. 
• This morning as I was backing out of my driveway to leave for work, I saw a firetruck drive up the street in my rear view mirror. I didn't really think anything of it until I realized that if the firetruck ended up being called to our street, that it would have no where to park but in the middle of the car-lined, one-way street. Aaaaand of course it stopped about half way up my street, apparently having been  called out for some medical emergency. I came back in the house and called my school to tell them I might be late if the fire truck didn't move in time. Then along came an ambulance too. I decided I didn't want to wait any longer so I drove the wrong way down my one way street to leave for work. I figured that if by some unfortunate stroke of luck a cop were to drive by and see me committing this terribly illegal driving maneuver, that I would just bat my lashes and hope that they'd be sympathetic to my plight of getting to work on time, seeings as how they are fellow civil servants and all :P 
• If my 5th graders can't stop saying the word "fart" while we're in our reading group, I might lose my mind. Someday they'll realize that word is no longer amusing. Sighhhhh. 
• This afternoon at my nanny job, the 4th grader and I were pretending to be ninjas and my right pinky finger got jammed. I forgot what it felt like to jam a finger. Brings me back to my tetherball days :P

That's all I've got for tonight. Yay for being consecutively consistent! :)

15. 1-5. Fifteen.

I decided that last page layout I was using for my blog was just too much and as a result I am reverting back to something simple in the meantime until I find a good amount of minutes to logically sit down and come up with something cutesy again. I have minutes right now. Lots of minutes actually. But I don't feel like using them for anything that requires thinking. I really should be using the word time but because I already used it in the word meantime, I don't feel like I can use it again in this paragraph. I am most definitely the type of person who will Shift+F7 (yay for you if you know what that means!) repeat words in my writing just to sound more intelligent and to assuage my OCD tendencies. I learned the word assuage in my 6th grade language arts class. It took me a long time to realize it wasn't pronounced "a-sausage". Clearly I have no phonetic abilities. 

So here it is, 3 weeks after I last wrote and I am nearly just as fail as before. On the plus side, I guess I am getting this written before the one month between postings mark so there's a bit of a silver lining as far as the regularity of this blog is concerned. Not like digestive regularity. But regularity as in blogging consistently. 

Speaking of regularity, in a sense, I have a funny bathroom related story. I promise to not go into gross details but if you'd rather not read my potty prose, just quit here...

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For those of you who stayed, thank you for being as curious of a soul as I am ;) Last Friday, Boyfriend and I met up with his sister and some friends for an impromptu and super casual dive bar bar crawl. We started out at a not so scummy place and then proceeded onto a cesspool of filth before taking a detour to  a very nice, rather pristine local gay bar/club called Side Track (how appropriately named it is since we got "side-tracked" from our dive bar bar crawl :P). Shortly after arriving, my stomach started to churn and make weird noises in protest of who knows what. When I get these stomach episodes, they include cramps to the point of nausea, cold sweats, hot flashes, and other undesirable ailments. Typically I try to head home when I become so afflicted, but the trip home would have taken well over half an hour with lots of walking without bathrooms nearby. So I decided to swallow my fear of public bathrooms and wandered to the back corner to find the facilities. 

Usually when you enter the women's bathroom in a bar in the city on a weekend night, one walks into a barrage of various women doing various things like redoing their hair and makeup, crying with friends about how so and so isn't paying enough attention them, giving drunken directions to someone on the phone, etc. I braced myself as I pushed open the door, silently praying that it would be one that had more than 1 or 2 stalls and that hopefully no one would come wait in line behind me while my intestines angrily expelled their contents. To my surprise, the bathroom was completely empty. I then realized, duhhhh, 99.5% of the patrons at a gay bar are men! I was in the clear to use the bathroom in peace :) Crisis averted!

Life lesson # 101,511: Gay bars are one of the best places to use the women's restroom. 

In other news, Boyfriend and I ran a 5k through a corn maze in quite literally the middle of nowhere Illinois. It was difficult in that it was nearly impossible to gain any speed as there were essentially no parts of the course that were straight-aways. 

Here is a rough gps tracking of the course that I recorded on my phone using RunKeeper:

I know a 5k is not that far of a distance, but I was proud that I was able to run it in 35 minutes considering I haven't been running on a regular basis since July really. Boyfriend would have loved to go faster but he was sweet and stayed with me the whole time. He said he was running this race for fun, not for speed which I think is a nice way of saying I'm slow but he loves me anyway :P 

I've already picked out our next 5k: The Santa Hustle on December 3rd. Every participant gets a Santa shirt to run in along with a beard and hat. Plus there are hot chocolate and cookie stations along the course. Doesn't get much better than that! I'm sure I'll be singing a different tune when it's actually the first weekend in December and it's more likely than not snowy and/or snowing. But the concept behind it all seems super fun and I'm excited :) We'll see what it's like to run in snow... Definitely something I don't have any previous experience with!

Speaking of cold weather, this is something I found out a while back but never blogged about. Apparently here in Chicagoland, students are permitted/required to have outdoor recess until the temperature drops below 15 degrees. 15. 1-5. Fifteen. I know that the Mid West is not in any way, shape, or form Southern California and so the frame of reference for acceptable weather temperatures here is completely different. But I feel like 15 degrees is cruel and unusual punishment. If somehow the weather in Southern California were ever to drop that low and schools insisted the students still have outdoor recess, there would be a litany of complaints filed against the district. Haha. I am not at all looking forward to that aspect of Winter and have a list of cold weather items on my Christmas wish list that I'll be giving to Boyfriend :P

Speaking of Boyfriend, we had a bit of a disagreement on Tuesday night that carried over into Wednesday morning. We don't argue very frequently at all which, considering we have not spent a day apart since December of last year, is nothing short of miraculous :P Anyway, following the not so fantastic night/day, I came home from work on Wednesday evening to find that Boyfriend had bought me flowers as a peace offering. Super sweet. Just when I think he can't possibly get any better, he does :) The bouquet is a really pretty lily arrangement (my 2nd favorite flower after orchids, but those obviously don't come in bouquet form) and at the start there were 3 flowers and 5 buds and now four days later, 2 of those buds have opened and another 2 look like they'll be following suit soon :) I've never had such a successful flower arrangement where the buds actually continue to mature and open. Just typing this makes me smile. I love that boy. 

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Yet again I've failed to complete a blog the same day I start it. I began writing this on Friday evening and now it's Sunday night. We had quite the busy weekend that resulted in us not going to bed until after 3am both nights, which definitely used to be the norm but is not at all our way of life as of late. My body is still used to getting up around 9 and promptly did so yesterday and today. So needless to say I'm pooped and feel as though I've been run over repeatedly by a truck. There's a random thunderstorm going on outside right now that sounds absolutely lovely so I think I'll go curl up in my freshly laundered, deliciously scented sheets and put myself to bed at a decent hour. Until next time! :)

P.S. I need to find a better way to link common topics between paragraphs. I started 3 paragraphs off with, "Speaking of..." Repetitive much? :P