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free at last
Finally starting to feel much better. So much so, in fact, that I have sifted through my office book shelves, set three boxes worth aside to be purged in some manner, and boxed up another four boxes worth to be put on additional shelves once they are purchased. This made enough room to put the piles of books on my worktable and floor on four newly-empty shelves in categories thusly: library books; fiction to be read; research - crafts (ie knitting, etc.), househunting, writing; research - cards (as in playing cards, card cheating etc.), swordplay/dueling, pirates. It's amazing how much clearer one's head can seem when one's space is clear. The surface of my desk having been cleared off a couple of weeks ago (and miracle of miracles, I've managed to keep it that way) and rearranged and one set of file organizers reorganized and purged, that just leaves the second set of file organizers to go through, my filing cabinets to purge and clean out, my office supply cupboard thingy to purge and clean out, and the closet to reorganize. Then my office shall be completely cleaned out and reorganized and I shall rightfully sing "We Are the Champions" at the top of my lungs. All the remaining stuff, though, is stuff that hides behind closed doors, so it isn't bugging me as much as the books everywhere thing was. Nevertheless, I am intent on continuing to tackle one or two of these projects at least a week. Pretty much all the other cabinets in the house are in the queue as well. Eventually I might even start writing again, too!
We've started looking for a house, our first purchase of real estate. Three real estate agents, all of whom come highly recommended by friends, are coming over on Monday to try to convince us that we should use them. We've gotten preapproval for a mortgage, far more mortgage than we actually want, in fact. Now the trick is finding a house big enough that we can afford in the approximately 30 square block area that we love.
Something highly amusing: the Voco clock, which awakes you with Stephen Fry's voice doing his perfect valet routine. It says fifty different things, all highly encouraging and yet vaguely (or not so vaguely) sarcastic. For example, "I feel sure that you have slept soundly, feel thoroughly refreshed, and await the day with the anticipation of an energetic gazelle. Good heavens, sir! I saw a pig flying past the window." This is much funnier when you actually hear Fry's voice of course; there are lots and lots of sample recordings at the site.
Also of interest: the bodybugg. This sounds like some kind of scary, space-going parasite (and who knows, perhaps it is) but it claims to be an electronic device you wear on your arm that measures exactly how many calories you've burned in the course of the day. You upload the data from the device to a website, where you can also input a daily record of your caloric intake. If you're not keen on keeping track of your caloric input, however, it can approximate a daily average intake from changes in body mass over weekly weigh-ins. Eventually, no doubt they'll have a device that keeps track of both inputs and outputs automatically and scolds you before you have a chance to put that bite of cake in your mouth. Trying to keep track of what I was burning when I was doing Weight Watchers and the gym both was always a major problem, and always necessarily very approximate, so this device is really interesting to me. There's a sweet spot with input/output calorie ratios, where if you don't take enough food in your metabolism shuts off and you stop losing weight, so it was always tricky, especially when I was hitting the gym a lot and never sure of how much exactly I was burning, to make sure that I was eating enough but not too much. I might look into this more seriously when I am ready to start hitting the gym again.
We've started looking for a house, our first purchase of real estate. Three real estate agents, all of whom come highly recommended by friends, are coming over on Monday to try to convince us that we should use them. We've gotten preapproval for a mortgage, far more mortgage than we actually want, in fact. Now the trick is finding a house big enough that we can afford in the approximately 30 square block area that we love.
Something highly amusing: the Voco clock, which awakes you with Stephen Fry's voice doing his perfect valet routine. It says fifty different things, all highly encouraging and yet vaguely (or not so vaguely) sarcastic. For example, "I feel sure that you have slept soundly, feel thoroughly refreshed, and await the day with the anticipation of an energetic gazelle. Good heavens, sir! I saw a pig flying past the window." This is much funnier when you actually hear Fry's voice of course; there are lots and lots of sample recordings at the site.
Also of interest: the bodybugg. This sounds like some kind of scary, space-going parasite (and who knows, perhaps it is) but it claims to be an electronic device you wear on your arm that measures exactly how many calories you've burned in the course of the day. You upload the data from the device to a website, where you can also input a daily record of your caloric intake. If you're not keen on keeping track of your caloric input, however, it can approximate a daily average intake from changes in body mass over weekly weigh-ins. Eventually, no doubt they'll have a device that keeps track of both inputs and outputs automatically and scolds you before you have a chance to put that bite of cake in your mouth. Trying to keep track of what I was burning when I was doing Weight Watchers and the gym both was always a major problem, and always necessarily very approximate, so this device is really interesting to me. There's a sweet spot with input/output calorie ratios, where if you don't take enough food in your metabolism shuts off and you stop losing weight, so it was always tricky, especially when I was hitting the gym a lot and never sure of how much exactly I was burning, to make sure that I was eating enough but not too much. I might look into this more seriously when I am ready to start hitting the gym again.
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Ohmygod, that's hilarious!! I want one!!! What a great way to wake up, laughing one's ass off.
Congrats on all the organizing -- you champ!
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Speaking of sleeping, how's that going for you?
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As for sleeping, it's definitely better than the 4 hours, but I swear, sometimes it seems that the Universe has it in for me. On the rare night that I'm sleeping undisturbed something else happens that wakes me up instead of myself. It's almost funny. I can't remember what all, but random stuff like the doorbell rings at an ungodly early hour, or somebody's snowblowing the sidewalks at 4am, or like just this week my furnace freaked out on me and started pumping out the daytime temperature at 4am. I've also added doing a 20-minute guided meditation (Cheryl Richardson's "Tuning In" CD) and some special supposed to foster sleep brain rhythms CD on top of the pills.
The word thus far is that I am sleeping better, having more dreams, but still nowhere near rested. And very thankful to you for giving me hope!
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