Bah!

So its the week between Christmas and new year's and I'm mad. I'm mad because Target already has Valentine's Day stuff out. Seriously? You can put Christmas stuff out in mid-freaking-October, but come December 26, it's time to sweep it all away and move on to the next moneymaker? I mean, come on, can we actually stop to enjoy a holiday for longer than five minutes? I hate to sound all “back in my day...when I walked to school uphill both ways...” but come on! No wonder we're all freaking out and ADD and all that crap. We spend months getting ready for Christmas and then it's over in a day! I am kind of getting over Target after all this. And I know it's not just them, but they're the ones I see. So that's my rant. Keep the flipping decorations up, at least till new year's! For pete's sake!

Podcast Fun

New Episode of the Renaissance English History Podcast up.

http://englandcast.blogspot.com

Yay for Podcasts done in front of the fire and christmas tree.

Email and fertility

I'm trying to get control of my inbox with the help of InboxZero - a site by a guy who wrote a book about how to get control of your email. Honestly, the amount of time I spend on email is seriously mind blowing. I'm especially sick of the people who "reply all" on stupid stuff that has nothing to do with me, and then like 6 people get involved in a conversation about when to have a conference call, and the thing goes on forever, and it just kills me. So I'm learning how to create rules in outlook for listservs and reply-all's. And I'm committed to keeping an empty inbox from now on. Every day I lower it a bit more. It's part of not being a procrastinator any longer.

So I bought one of those over-the-counter fertility tests at Target the other day. J and I have been trying to get preggars for a couple of months now, and since I'm a little bit older (33 - egad!) I thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to just do the test and see what it said. Here's the funny thing, though: I balked at the $22 price tag. I was like, "dang, I can buy something from bare escentuals with that money..." and then I thought about it and figured that $22 for a fertility test is like the biggest spending joke ever. Should I actually have a kid soon, I will be spending way more than $22 on him. So I better just get used to it. I hope my future kid appreciates it.

Oh, and the good news? According to the test, I'm fertile. Good to know.

Stillness

Remember when you were a kid and December seemed to last forever? I used to keep tick marks on a white board with a picture of snoopy on the bottom, and those lines could never accumulate fast enough. Now December just flies by, and I hate it. I really want to be still and enjoy the peace and quiet of the snow, the fire, the coziness, and the lights. So I'm trying to create stillness these days. One way I've found that slows things down is that I actually say out loud what it is I'm doing - like, "I'm driving to work right now," or "I'm cooking dinner right now," or "I'm feeding the cats right now." It presences me to what's going on at that moment and helps me slow down and do just one thing at a time. I wish I could take credit for the idea, but like many good things, I read about it in O Magazine.

So I'm watching The Sing Off right now, and am happy that a capella music is getting popular again. I'm also working on my next episode of the Renaissance English History Podcast. Some of the reviewers on itunes said they wish that I did more episodes...well, I wish I had more time to do more episodes. Once my ILP is over, I'll have so much time, it'll be awesome.