I could have written entries these last five days and thus not fallen so far behind the Holidailies crowd (the collab has gone into bonus time again this year), but instead I was enjoying a very long weekend relaxing at home. It was such luxury to have five days to do what I normally try […]

I’ve read a lot of articles in the last few years pushing the 10,000 steps a day goal for better health. It’ll do your heart good, they say. It’ll lower your chances of getting diabetes and raise your good cholesterol, they say. Get yourself a pedometer, they say. So I did. However, I am not […]

As alert and/or notified readers know, I was in Florida with Mr. Karen visiting his parents for the past five days. This has become something of a tradition. Some years we fly down early and leave on Christmas Day and some years we fly on Christmas Eve or Day and come back just before the […]

In what might become a holiday tradition (we’ve done it twice now), my mother-in-law Joan and I went to the quilt shop today to turn my Christmas money into fabric. Unlike at the malls, there were no half-price bargains to be had, but there were no crowds of bargain hunters to contend with, either. Since […]

Amber called her uncle, said “We’re up here for the holiday, Jane and I were having Solstice; now we need a place to stay.” And her Christ-loving uncle watched his wife hang Mary on a tree, He watched his son hang candy canes all made with Red Dye No. 3. He told his niece, “Its […]

I went to a candlelight Christmas Eve church service tonight, a special occasion for which I put on both pantyhose and heels. Growing up a Unitarian, my first exposure to the gospel of Luke was the Charlie Brown Christmas Special (the original one, not this new fangled one that’s just come out), so whenever I […]

Ta da! I finished another baby quilt, putting the last stitches in the label this morning about 7:15. It’s only been about two weeks since I finished the last one (less, if you consider that I was out of town for four days). I am on a roll. Now, it helps a lot that this […]

It’s Monday, so I should be reporting on how I did on last week’s goals. I’m not going to. I’m cutting myself some slack. It’s Christmas time and I’m giving myself the present of not stressing about how I’m doing on my goals. I’m still working toward them, but I’m not going to make myself […]

We went to look at the Contour this afternoon. I’d hoped I would like it. I’d hoped we’d negotiate a price and write a check and drive it home and I’d have a new (to me, anyway) car. That didn’t happen. I wasn’t wowed. I liked the look of it, including the color, a pretty […]

As I type this, it’s a little after seven in the morning on a Saturday when I don’t have a plane to catch or any other time-sensitive task to do. This is bizarre behavior for me to be up so early on a weekend. Stranger still, I’ve been up since five. Five! That’s just so […]

Today is the last workday for Purple Systems in our current office; Monday we move to a new building. I’m spending today packing up the contents of the three desk drawers I haven’t gotten to yet and hoping that all the stuff I want to keep will fit in the one crate I managed to […]

It’s time for us to buy a new car. It’s my turn to pick, and I’m having trouble. (Yet another instance of poor Karen with a problem that’s one many people would love to have.) It’s not a matter of being overwhelmed, like it often is when I have a purchasing decision to make such […]

On a normal weekday, I’m in the car about two hours a day, an entirely too high percentage of which I spend sitting at stoplights waiting for green means go. Sometimes to entertain myself while I sit, I glance into the vehicles around me. It feels a little like spying, getting to peek at what […]

I sat down yesterday and figured out that I can spare a couple vacation days to ski in January. (I used a spreadsheet, of course I did; I’m an accountant at heart, no matter what my business card says.) Yay! But then Mr. Karen called the lodge where he’s staying with rest of the group […]

It’s time once again to report on my weekly goals. This more frequent check in plan seemed like such a good idea two weeks ago when I started it. Now, it seems like a crazy thing to do in a month that has holiday hoopla and a vacation added to the normal everyday stuff. Yet […]

Yes, I’ve been gone. As is my wont this general time of year, I was skiing in Colorado with Mr. Karen. It being early season, the snow wasn’t great and none of the areas we went to had all their terrain open, but still, it’s skiing on real mountains, so any snow is good snow. […]

Thanks to staying under my WW points limit for the past two days, I’ve lost enough of my bloat to fit into my high self-esteem pants. These are the pants that cause people to compliment me on how skinny I’m getting even when I haven’t lost weight. These are the pants that go with the […]

I am thinking about toilet paper. This is probably not the best use of my time, given that I have tasks lists full to overflowing for both work and home. I say probably instead of definitely because it might be a good thing to be distracted for a while from thinking about how one of […]

A week ago, I declared that December was going to be a better month than November had been as far as my achievement of personal goals went because this month I was going to have weekly mini-goals to keep me on track. Now it’s time to grade my performance. First, I promised I would write […]

One down, eleven to go. Here’s the baby quilt I just finished. It’s for the brother of the boy who got the first soccer baby quilt. Like the two boys share some DNA, these quilts share some of the same fabrics. I’d saved the leftover triangles, some of them already sewn together into squares, from […]

I’m starting to wonder if the scar on my belly will ever fade and flatten enough that it doesn’t make me think “ugly” every time I see it. All the other scars I’ve got are unobtrusive enough that I don’t notice them unless I’m paying attention because their white against my fairly pale skin doesn’t […]

This morning, I am multitasking, cleaning off my desk at the same time as I write about cleaning off my desk. Of course, this is not true multitasking, since I cannot simultaneously declutter and type, it’s more Windows-style multitasking, where I do one thing for a little bit and then do the other thing for […]

My quilting to do list just got longer because I got a commission to make two baby quilts. Now, calling it a “commission” is rather more high falutin’ than the situation merits, since I’ll only be getting the cost of the materials and I didn’t have any competition in getting the job, but I’ve decided […]

Diane’s mention of her paper journals a few weeks ago reminded me that I have boxes of my own in the basement. They go back to the early 1970’s (Mrs. White told me to put that apostrophe there, and I’m going to. Or did she tell me not to?) I figure there’s no better time […]

I had a dream about my bank last night, one of those dreams in which I get so frustrated and annoyed and angry that I wake up tense rather than rested (or still tired, depending on the morning). There’s no mystery about why my subconscious cast the bank as bad guy; it’s the new logo […]

This morning, I finished listening to Balsamic Dreams: A Short But Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation. While this book was meant to be humorous, it was also educational. The most important thing I learned is that, at least according to Joe Queenan, I am not a boomer. Unlike sociologists who stretch the baby […]

I cleverly avoided having to do a goal check-in for October by leaving the country. This month, I have no good reason not to do one. Not accomplishing much is not a good reason. I wish it were. I wish I could go back and redo October and November so I’d have more progress to […]