The 4 a.m. Blog Post
By Susan | February 4, 2010
Sometimes when I’m lying awake at 4 in the morning, I compose blog posts in my head. Like I did this morning.
Wait, why was I awake at 4 a.m. this morning? I’m glad you asked, if only to give me the opportunity to tell someone my tale.
But first you need to know a particular quirk about our cat, Zelda. Every morning, she follows me in the bathroom while I get ready for the day. This is her “bathroom kitty time,” a time when she brushes up against my legs and rubs her face on my ankles and lets me pet her and love on her while she purrs her little heart out. I must admit, it’s a nice way to face each new day, with a purring kitty warming up my shins.
The only problem is that sometimes, Zelda’s internal clock wants bathroom kitty time a little early. And sometimes, it’s a few hours early, like today. To get my attention on these days, she’ll paw at the cupboard door under the bathroom sink, opening it just enough for it to slam shut very very loudly. The resulting BAM! BAM! BAM! wakes me up and gets me out of bed and into the bathroom to investigate, where I see Zelda, who starts purring and looking for her bathroom kitty attention.
Except that instead, she is removed from the bathroom, placed unceremoniously into the hallway, and the bathroom door is shut.
And on mornings like this morning, that means that I find myself unable to sleep at 4 a.m., as Zelda takes the opportunity to chase after her sister, and runs all over the house for an hour. As it turns out, nine pound cats sound like elephants when they chase each other in an empty, silent apartment.
Which is why I was composing blog posts in my head this morning at 4 a.m. I can’t remember most of it, but the point was:
Why don’t people use the world “lovely” anymore? I love that word. I use it whenever I can. The problem is that I think it makes me sound a) like a grandmother; or b) pretentious. Which makes me sad, because I don’t want to sound pretentious, or like a grandmother, or like a pretentious grandmother. But sometimes “lovely” just works perfectly.
I say we bring back “lovely.” Who’s with me?
You know, this may be one of those posts that sounded way better in my head at 4 a.m.
Topics: Daily Ramblings, My Life Recapped | 1 Comment »
My Life Needs a Report Card
By Susan | February 1, 2010
In school, I always knew where I stood. I understood the rules, I understood the grading system, and I knew that good grades meant I was on the right track. If a class was too hard, I knew that I could struggle through, and move on once the semester was over. Then I knew to avoid that type of class, or at least that professor, for the remainder of my school days. For me, it was philosophy courses – my brain wasn’t wired that way. I worked my way through a semester trying to decipher the readings and writing the best essays I could about caves and lights and all that, knowing that once I got to the end of the semester, I could move on.
My problem, I’m finding, is that life doesn’t hand out systematic report cards. Sometimes I find myself struggling with a situation, and trying to find the best answer to it, but I don’t have much to guide me. If I knew I was getting a C+ at this area of life, I might try to find a better solution. Without a quarterly report card, it’s sometimes hard for me to see a situation clearly, to understand what the issues are and to better decide if I should try to find a different class, or a different professor, of if I need to change my major entirely. As much as I may love Einstein, it doesn’t mean I’m cut out to be a physics major, you know?
I’m sure this seems pretty transparent, but in reality I just had a rough afternoon. Today made me miss the confident Student Me who knew how the system worked, and figured if college was that straightforward, surely grown-up adult life would be a breeze. I guess I need to look at days like this as my Adult Report Card, and take stock of the grades that life seems to be handing me. No one wants to live a C+ life. Or, at least, I don’t.
Topics: Daily Ramblings, Grumbles | No Comments »
Paying Down Debt – This is Going to Be Worth It In the End, Right? Right?
By Susan | January 29, 2010
I don’t know what came over me at the end of December, but all of a sudden I started to care about our money.
Wait, that doesn’t sound right. I’ve always cared about our money. We pay our bills on time, we aren’t starving or scraping or on the brink of destitution and bankruptcy. But something in my head went *click* and it’s like I finally realized just how much we were spending each month paying off our debts.
Seriously, the amount of money we’re sending out the door each month to pay off our lenders drives me insane. It’s money that could be saved for a house payment, that could send us on a trip somewhere fabulous, that could be building compound interest that will allow us to retire in comfort. Instead, we’re paying interest on
I can’t believe it took me this long to see the ridiculousness of this situation. Granted, we didn’t rack up this debt on frivolities. OK, truth be told, some of it was on frivolities. But most of my debt was accrued while in grad school when I was flat broke and chose to charge rather than take out a loan (I don’t recommend this). Mr. Martini’s debt is mostly student loans. Neither of have maxed out credit cards, we both have good credit scores. Truly, this is a problem that has a solution.
The solution is simple – get out of debt.
But “simple” is hard. “Simple” requires sacrifice. “Simple” requires a good hard look at our finances, and may even mean (*gulp*) a budget.
But to keep things simple, I’m going to try to take the most straightforward path out of this situation. That means focusing on one thing at a time. I’ve been bogged down in the past trying to do too much at once (build 401k! build savings account! plus pay off debt!). This resulted in too little forward momentum on any one goal, which ruined any motivation to keep going.
As of today, we’ve saved a baby emergency fund. Which means that all other major saving has stopped, and all energies are focused on the debt. The first goal is to pay off credit card #1 which has the smallest debt. That’s the focus. Everything else is on hold until that’s paid off.
Oh, you guys. I’m not kidding myself, this is going to suck. But for now, I’m trying to keep a positive attitude to keep myself motivated. Because of the two of us, I’m the spender, and Mr. M is the saver, so really, I’m the one that is going to have to rewire my brain.
But it will all be worth it when we can put a down payment on our own home, and pay cash for all of the furniture to furnish it. It may take a while to get there, but it is possible.
Topics: Paying the Bills | 3 Comments »
My Perfect Saturday
By Susan | January 26, 2010
If you had asked me a week ago what my perfect Saturday would entail, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned something about “watching a movie” or “shopping for yarn.”
As it turns out, I had a perfect Saturday this Saturday. The best part was, it all happened organically, as in, I didn’t plan for it to be the perfect Saturday. It just sort of happened, which I think added to the perfection of it all.
The day started by sleeping in until 9 a.m. There was a leisurely breakfast with coffee and the DVR. From there, I made a batch of scones, just for the heck of it. They were delicious, by the way.
Then, I went to the spa for my first ever full body massage. I am in love with the spa. I’m in love with the goofy new age music, with the goofy waterfall sound effects, all of it, because it smells so good there, there’s no cat hair, and everyone is so quiet. It’s heavenly. The massage was exactly what I wanted, and the therapist was careful to ask me exactly what I wanted to achieve from the experience. Really, it was better than I hoped it would be, and I left feeling like a well-energized noodle.
A well-energized noodle that can cross #79 off the list, I might add.
From there, I went home, read a magazine, took a nap, and woke up just in time to go out to dinner with Mr. Martini. A bowl of ice cream and Dexter on Netflix rounded out a fantastic day.
I think the best part of the day was that I could see how great it was while it was happening. I looked up at Mr. Martini and one point, and said, “Wow, this is really a great day.” He was happy, since he had given me the gift certificate for the massage over a year ago and I finally used it, and enjoyed it so much.
I could go on and on, but I think I already have. It was a great, great day, and I think it help me through the workweek this week.
Hello. I’m a well-energized noodle, who had a really good day.
Topics: 101 in 1001, Daily Ramblings, My Life Recapped | No Comments »
Organize My Digital Photos – Done!
By Susan | January 19, 2010
In the last week or so, I organized all of my digital photos. While I can say I did this for my 101 in 1001 list, I also did this because I’m trying to move as many files over from my PC to my new (to me) MacBook, and start using the Mac as my main computer. The 101 in 1001 list was really just an excuse, but a good one, as it got me to do this now rather than waiting a few months.
I am no expert at this particular task, but I did find discover a few tricks that made the process much, much easier. I figured I’d share these tricks in case you, like me, have never, ever, ever organized your digital photos in the entire time you’ve had a digital camera.
Did you catch that? I have never, ever, ever organized my digital photos. Ever. So that, my friends, is a lot of photos to go through. In fact, I believe that there are years-worth of photos that were lost on previous defunct and now recycled computers that I’ll never see again. I’m trying not to think about that.
Here are my suggestions if you, like me, have thousands of digital photos that you’ve never really sifted through before:
1. Find Duplicate Files
This is HUGE. I didn’t realize it, but I discovered that since I wasn’t clearing photos from my camera card in between imports, I was basically saving the same photos to my computer over and over and over again. That’s a lot of duplicates. Rather than deleting them all by hand, I downloaded a free duplicate file finder to do the work for me (I used this one for my PC). I ran this program on just my photos and chose to delete just the duplicates, leaving the “original” (or just one copy, in my case) safe. By doing just this step, I freed up about 3.5 GB of duplicate files. THREE POINT FIVE GIGABYTES. This was way easier than trying to delete them one by one by one. Augh.
2. Find an organization system that works for you.
Personally, I fell in love with a trial version of Adobe Lightroom, which I can’t say enough about. When I transferred the photos from my PC to my Mac, I used Lightroom to organize them. It placed them into folders for me, so I didn’t have to manually drag and drop all of the photos by date or category. It also has a keyword and search system that is fast and simple to use. Love it, love it, love it.
3. MAKE FRIENDS WITH YOUR DELETE KEY.
Because I’m doing the 365 project, I sometimes have dozens of versions of the same shot, and I’ve been keeping them all. Why? I have no idea. But during this process, I made an effort to be vigilant and delete as many of these multiples as possible. This cleared up a lot of space, and now when I look at my photos, I focus on the good shots, rather than the 15 shots that are just so-so.
If you’re hesitant to delete these extra photos just in case, my friend B. made the following suggestion: Put those extras in a separate folder, and date them. If you don’t open or view those extra photos for a month, delete the folder. Simple!
I’m so glad I took them time to do this, and to back up all of these photos to an external hard drive. And with that, I can cross #69 off of my list!
Next week – a massage. I’m so happy about this, I can barely stand it.
Topics: 101 in 1001, Daily Ramblings | No Comments »