bloggers
Random thoughts
Feb 11th
I thought this was really interesting.
Group think has always intrigued me. I was a good kid in school; never really got into trouble, but I’ve still experienced this to a point. You get with a group of people and you do things you would never have done alone. In some cases it can be good (exercising comes to mind), but in many cases it is disasterous. I am certain that without it there would not have been the historic changes that have taken place in Egypt.
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Also, I found this blog today: The Feminist Breeder, and this post in particular, about her 2nd son’s birth (a VBAC). Every time I read about this kind of thing it gets me worked up. I have so many thoughts about childbirth and breastfeeding, and I love reading people’s stories. I wish I knew what to do with all of that emotion and energy for those topics. Some times I think I should go into some kind of line of work that involves that stuff, but I don’t want to be a nurse or doctor. I’m not sure what I want to do.
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Speaking of, I recently took the Strengthsfinder 2.0 quiz, on recommendation of my aunt Marcia. My strengths are Harmony, Includer, Consistency, Context & Restorative. Basically, I want everyone to be treated equally, I’m very sensitive to people being left out of groups, and I like to have everyone at peace. There are some other things, but those types of statements were repeated over and over, and they are very true. I’m a people pleaser, and I have always been EXTREMELY sensitive to things being fair. Note I did not say equitable; I said fair. They are different. Now to figure out what to do with that information.
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The Bulldogs are playing hockey against St Cloud State tonight, and they are not doing well at all. The beginning of the game started off alright, with both teams scoring a couple goals, but it’s now 7-2 in favor of St. Cloud. Pull it together, ‘Dogs!
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That’s about it. I’m very glad it’s Friday and that we have a weekend with no specific plans.
Blogshare 2011
Feb 10th
The following post was written by someone else for Blog Share. You can read my post, along with all the others, by following the links from this page, as well as the entry on her blog here. I like this idea; it gives us all a chance to say things we wouldn’t say otherwise.
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There are certain people I just can’t stand, no matter how much I try.
My brother-in-law is not a bad guy, but I just don’t like him. We don’t have anything in common, and we have completely different senses of humor. He does things like try to massage my shoulders, and it gives me the heebie jeebies. He is an ok dad, though I think two of his kids are functionally illiterate, despite being in junior high and hgih school, respectively. He is also a stepdad, and he used to be excessively mean to his stepson. Now I think he just ignores the stepkid. When he talks to me, I try to be civil and pleasant, but I can barely prevent myself from rolling my eyes, at best, or openly mocking him, at worst.
My sister is really nice to her friends, but I think she is extremely unpleasant to my family and to me. My dad grilled us hamburgers a few holidays ago, and my sister thought hers was too pink. Instead of just putting it in the microwave, she told us all how disgusting the hamburger was and how she could never eat something so pink and how unfair it was that she got the too-raw hamburger. Last time I saw her, she was telling me a story, and I was listening normally. She interrupted herself to yell, “Why are you always making that face at me?! God!” It was just my normal face; I’m not sure what the problem was. I gave her a t-shirt from my college for Christmas a few years ago when I was still in school, and my sister told me that it was an awful present. So I took it back and kept it for myself. I still have it. I would also like to note that she has given me a number of t-shirts from schools she has attended over the years, and I have always accepted them graciously. My husband pointed out that most people tell stories to entertain or inform, but my sister tells stories to point out how much better she is than everyone else. It is to the point where I don’t answer her phone calls and avoid her as much as I can at family holidays.
My mother-in-law has always been nice to me. But she drives me crazy! I think the main problem is that she thinks she should be as involved in my life as she is in her own daughters’ lives, while I think she is over-involved in her daughters’ lives and would never want her to be that involved in mine. She really wanted to be at the hospital when I gave birth. I told her I did not want her at the hospital period, but that she could visit us a week after we brought the baby home. She showed up at our house the day we got home from the hospital. The same day I had the baby, she asked my husband to send her a birth announcement she could send to the local paper. My husband told her that we needed a few days because we were kind of busy. So she wrote her own birth announcement and sent it in to the paper, listing all her family members as relatives of the baby but accidentally leaving off members of my family. When it appeared in the paper and my husband called her to tell her that we were pissed off, my mother-in-law denied sending the announcement to the paper. She claimed someone else must have done it. Even though she and my father-in-law are the only relatives who live in that town. Again, I try to be civil with my mother-in-law, but we don’t have anything in common, and I just struggle to carry on conversations with her.
I do honestly try to be nice, but I think it is obvious when I am with these people that I don’t like them. There are plenty of worse people I deal with who I don’t have problems treating civilly. I am not sure why I can’t just pretend with these people for the short periods of time I spend with them. Do you have any people in your life like this?
Another one!
Jan 24th
My youngest sister is moving to San Francisco today (her plane should be landing any time now). I am so so excited for her. And after my (and a couple others’) urging, she has started a blog to chronicle her life there. She writes really well; it’s like hearing her tell you a story. I love it, and I hope she keeps it up. Welcome to the blogging community, Kim!
ps. Anyone out there have experience in/with San Francisco and have some advice for her?
To Dos
Jan 3rd
Jennie from She Loves Purple has done a list like this the past couple years, and it has inspired me. It’s part resolution and part to-dos that I should have done a long time ago (*cough*anythingtodowithourwedding*cough*). So, to help hold me accountable, here is my list of things I would like to accomplish in 2011. I’ll be adding it to the side bar and crossing things off as I get them accomplished (getting rid of cable is already done, for instance).
1. Make dinner 2 nights per week
2. Finish James’s baby book
3. Own a pair of comfortable dress boots
4. Read 25 books
5. Take a week of vacation in the summer and visit my family
6. Try a new ingredient once a month
7. Organize my recipe collection
8. Develop a more efficient workspace at my office
9. Own investment jeans
10. Go to 3 local museums
11. Organize a group camping trip
12. Learn how to run
13. See a concert
14. Try out four new restaurants
15. Acknowledge the birthdays of every person on my list
16. Make something for James using some of his old clothes
17. Watch James take his first steps/say his first real words
18. Put pictures in all the frames in our apartment
19. Buy a cake from a local bakery
20. Go to a band concert at UMD
21. Exercise more
22. See my sister graduate college
23. Cut back on sweets
24. Get rid of cable
25. Finish our wedding scrapbook project
26. Start purchasing Christmas gifts in March at the latest
27. Create a weekly menu, and stick to it!
28. Meet someone in real life that I’ve only known on the internet
29. Get my hair cut and style it more often
30. Host a party
31. Go to church at least once per month, and make a donation each time
32. Send thank-you notes for all gifts
33. Make ice cream
34. Encourage Ryan to get his first Cisco certification
35. Try a new food
36. Hang out with Alyson for an entire weekend
37. Make more of an effort to dress up for work
38. Make a lunch (not frozen) 2 days per week
39. Take a community ed class
40. Make something in our dutch oven that requires using it in the oven
41. Go to bed before eleven more often
42. Go to a Farmer’s Market and buy something 3 times this summer
43. Call my parents and sisters every other week just to check in
44. Make: caramel rolls from scratch (get the recipe from my grandma)
45. Bring James on his first trip to Canada
46. Learn to drive a stick
47. Print out photos from our wedding and put them in an album
48. Make breakfast more often on the weekends
49. Keep the apartment cleaner than past years
50. Buy a good area rug for the living room
51. Make a general doctor’s appointment to get my cholesterol, blood pressure, etc., checked out
52. Take more pictures and put some in albums
53. Clean the basement and organize all our stuff down there
54. Organize my jewelry
55. Buy more bins for storage and put seasonal clothes away
56. Donate all unused clothing/toys to Goodwill/Salvation Army
My sister started a blog
Dec 30th
And she (and her kids) are hilarious. Check it out.
I’m so glad she’s blogging. Now we can keep track of all the ridiculous things that her kids say. ;-)
Would you do it?
Nov 2nd
I was recently reading this post at Grumpy rumblings of the untenured, which lead me to this post at Punch Debt in the Face. The question is posed (based on a CNN article): would you pose naked for Playboy (or Playgirl, as the case may be)? At what price? $500,000? $1,000,000?
I would do it, I’m not ashamed to say. One lump sum big enough to pay off our debt and buy a house free and clear for one day’s work? Definitely. I’m not actually famous, and I’m not going into politics, so people would probably forget about it pretty quickly. I think the question is inherently different for people who are or plan on being famous. No one lets them forget it.
Playboy is fairly classy, as far as those kinds of magazines go, and they have professional photographers. A professional photographer can make anyone look good. Believe me. I’ve had “intimates” taken before (for Ryan as a wedding gift). They are on the internet, and I thought about linking to them because they turned out so great. But I hesitated. I don’t know if I want my friends and family to see them. What will they think of me? And maybe that says more about whether I would actually go through with such a thing or not. But on second (third?) thought; what the heck? They are beautiful (and pre-baby, so no stretch marks!). And I’m proud of them. And no, they aren’t nude. I want $500,000 for that, remember?
So, would you do it?
Read this
Oct 29th
There will be another post coming shortly, but I read this post from Daughter Number Three this morning, and it’s got some really good stuff summed up quite accurately. It’s about politics, but it’s not inflammatory in any way. Mostly talking about what people say vs what it would mean if implemented in real-life. You should check it out.
Writing Daily
Oct 23rd
I have noticed that this whole 30 days meme has been beneficial for me. Once I got going, it was fairly easy to keep up the writing daily, and there have been times that I post more than one entry per day, or when I think about new things to write about, even though I have posts scheduled a couple days out. For instance, I am writing this on the 20th, but I have posts scheduled for the 21st and 22nd already, so it might not get posted until the 23rd.
I’ve never been very good at writing consistently. When I was younger and kept written journals I would go in spurts. Usually the spurts coincided with whenever I found a new crush or had a new energy for an existing one (quite often). But it would quickly die out when my life (and hormones) slowed down a little. I still write that way, although I don’t get crushes on boys anymore (other than Ryan. awww….*puke*). I get very energized about politics for a while, and then I get sick of it all or I can’t think of anything else to write that hasn’t already been said (better) by someone else. I want to talk about cooking, but I’m not a great cook, I don’t cook often, and I never remember to take pictures while I’m doing it. I read a ton of blogs, and there’s almost always something interesting that I read and tell Ryan about, but I don’t want to spend every entry rehashing things that people have probably read somewhere else. I want to develop my own original content, but I feel like my life is pretty boring. Even writing about James I worry that I’m writing too much about a baby who doesn’t do that much that is of interest to anyone but his dad and I. Our life is pretty mundane…laundry, dishes, Target runs, TV.
Hopefully I can keep up the mostly constant writing once this meme is over. And hopefully the content will be at least mildly entertaining. ;-)
Freezer Cooking
Oct 19th
I recently started reading a blog called Mom’s Plans, and she wrote about her October freezer cooking day. It was a schedule of her day, during which she made 22 meals, 64 muffins and 7 breakfast burritos. Did I mention that was in one day? Actually in about 6.5 hours, and it included cleanup.
I have occasionally toyed with the idea of making meals ahead and freezing them. We do that a little bit now, with soups mostly. But I would love to get in the habit of making a lot of them at once and having them ready to go so that we have good, healthy food ready to go when we are hungry, rather than having to make a full dinner every night. Or, let’s be more realistic here, eating frozen pizza/pre-made foods or going out. I thought that before James was born that we would do something like this: set aside a weekend and cook like mad. But we didn’t. And we haven’t. I think seeing it laid out like this might inspire me to try it, though. It looks much less daunting from this angle.
Today, she is having a contest where you can win a cookbook and some software to help you organize your meal planning. It prints out a grocery list for you, divided into sections of the store, which is awesome. Part of my entering the contest is blogging about it, so I admit that there is some selfishness going on here. But it is something I’m interested in, and maybe you are interested in it too, and would like to enter. You don’t have to blog about it (or even have a blog); all it takes is a quick comment on her blog.
So…that’s the story. Let’s pretend there’s a witty wrap-up here. The end.
What is going on?
Oct 6th
I scheduled a new post to go up at 8am. WordPress says it’s there, and when I click “view post” from the editing screen, I can see it. But it’s not on the home page of the blog. Am I missing something obvious here? It’s set to Public viewing…I don’t know what else to check.
Suggestions?
