I am having a bad week at work and thus don’t have enough mental energy left to write a cohesive entry. What I do have is a bunch of notes. Some of them are useless, like the one that says “400 escol. last room next”–huh?–but some still make sense to me. I figure if I pull together what I can out of these scraps of paper and the swirl of stuff in my head that at least I won’t have lost all of the last week.

First up, the department of natural resources. When I walked out of the building last Friday night to go home, I noticed two deer in the little strip of grass and trees behind the parking lot of our office building. They noticed me, too, and watched me get into my car while I watched them. It was neat to see, but I felt bad about these deer ending up in such a poor excuse for woods. And where are they going to roam when this area gets built out? I worried less about the resourceful red squirrel I saw on my patio over the weekend. It had gotten warm enough that the snow was melting, but this little furry wasn’t going to just wait around until the sun freed the birdseed on the ground from cold storage. When I spotted him, he had a chunk ice in his front paws and was twirling it around like corn on the cob and eating the seed right out of it. Too cute.

In the department of human interaction, I stopped at Denise’s house on Saturday to pick up the scrapbook supplies I’d ordered in my so-far vain attempt to amass a big enough collection of supplies to reach critical mass, at which point I hope they will just spontaneously start forming themselves into layouts, because I sure haven’t gotten around to doing anything. (So far I’ve used exactly one sheet of my cardstock, and that was to make templates for the manhole quilt.) I spent most of my visit admiring Tess’s toys and felt very privileged that she shared them with me. I was also wowed by her knowledge of things Disney–she knows more about the characters than I do, and I’m like ten times her age. Those mice in Cinderella, the ones I’d be hard pressed to tell apart? Tess knows their names. Impressive. On Sunday Erica came over with her sewing machine worked on a quilted jacket while I continued stitching the manhole quilt, which is going slower than I’d like, mostly because I am figuring it out as I go along. Well that and the fact that I’m doing the applique by hand, which I enjoy but am not very efficient at (yet).

In the department of catching up, I finally bought 2005 calendar pages for my paper planner. At this moment, they are sitting, still shrink wrapped, on top of the planner on top of my desk, but I’m hopeful that soon I will get them in the binder. I do my time tracking for work online and keep a calendar there, too, so I wasn’t sure I really needed the paper, especially since I rarely wrote anything on my 2004 pages, but I found I missed it, mostly for the year at glance view so handy when it comes to vacation planning. I also ordered new checks after procrastinating for some weeks. At least I didn’t have the angst I felt the last time; once I got myself to look at the check site, it wasn’t long before I chose these. I’m not crazy about the flowery one, but I’ll only have to see it one check out of four and I like the other three patterns more than my current checks.

In the department of shaping up, there is very little to report. My Nia class was on spring break this past weekend, so I tried the Global Unity DVD I got a few weeks ago for the first time. I was not thrilled by it. The menu is not well laid out; if my instructor hadn’t clued me in that it had two parts, one of them instructional, I wouldn’t have had any idea. I did the class part, which was about 50 minutes long. It didn’t feel like as good a workout as I get from class. Maybe it’s that it’s a little shorter, maybe it’s that I don’t push myself as hard when I’m by myself, maybe it’s that the video really is paced slower than the routines we’ve been doing in class. Or maybe they purposely made it not as good as a class so I wouldn’t be tempted to stop going. I don’t know. One positive is that when I’m dancing alone at home I can wear the tank top with the built-in underwire bra that I was all excited about when I ordered it from a catalog because I’d be able to wear it to class but then when it arrived, it turned out to look a lot more indecent than I expected. I do not think the ladies at Nia really want to have my cleavage all up in their faces.

In the department of everything else, I’ve run out of notes and thoughts for now.

One year ago, I wrote nothing here.

Two years ago, I was also stressed at work. Must just be that time of year, I guess.