"Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied." -Douglas Adams

Great birthday!

September 26th, 2011

Other than the completely crappy cool rainy weather, it was nearly a perfect day! The kids made me breakfast in bed (since they missed out on that for Mother’s Day), complete with an adorable new coffee mug. (like this one but with words). Kelly had bought it on the Myrtle Beach trip and kept it a secret gift this whole time. Which for my blabber mouth kids is a big deal.

We baked and decorated cookies instead of a cake and then LYC took me out to dinner at Eddie Merlots. It was very nice and just because I’ve always wanted to see it done table side, I ordered Bananas Foster for dessert. (video) I was not disappointed!

Today I’m back to the ole grind and have accomplished a lot so far including school work, Girl Scout stuff, and cleaning up my old PC laptop (it’s been running super slow for the kids lately). I’m also trying to burn everything important off of it too. I really should have done that before I handed it over to the kids but I guess I like to live on the wild side…

Happy Monday to you!

A break

September 21st, 2011

I’m taking the next 2 weekends off from work. It’s just been one thing after another (nothing bad, just busy busy life) and I’m going to run myself into the ground if I’m not proactive about taking care of myself. Or I want to be a bit lazy at the expense of my banking account balance. Go with whichever reason floats your boat.

This weekend is my birthday and I may be whiney and spoiled but I really don’t think anyone should have to work on their birthday. It should be a personal holiday if they want it. I really don’t know why I’m not running the world with all these brilliant ideas that I have. hehe

The following weekend wasn’t actually a planned “off” weekend. It just kinda happened due to some wonky kid and G scheduling. I’m able to work during the week next week and the week after so why the hell do I want to work on the weekend when LYC is in town?

Plans, you ask? Well I don’t really know yet. This weekend I have the kids with their usual soccer and scout schedules. The only request I generally make is I don’t want to cook on my birthday. (Sheesh, am I demanding or what?) So that means either LYC and the kids will cook or we’ll go out to dinner. Either way I plan to enjoy it. :)

The following weekend (without kids) I’m thinking about camping some place close by. Our 4th of July trip was kinda rained out (not to mention hot). October is always a nice time to be outside and I think LYC might like the change of pace too. This is another one of my proactive things, you know how you always say “it would be nice to do XYZ” and then things distract you and all of a sudden it’s been like 3 years since you said you wanted to do XYZ? Yeah that’s me and camping lately. And since a trip to Ireland isn’t in my budget anytime soon, I think I can swing a weekend camping trip instead.

Procrastination

September 14th, 2011

strikes again.

So… I’m suppose to be writing a 1000 word paper for Theology on a Sibling Rivalry story in the Old Testament. I know, sounds like the most awesome thing to do ever, right?

*ahem*

Ways I’ve avoided writing so far include:

playing lots of Sims Social on Facebook
looking at nifty stuff on Pinterest
buying new sneakers for Kelly and a pen light for nursing assessments (okay that wasn’t a complete waste of time but the extra 15 minutes I spent looking at the clearance sections at Target were)
making homemade waffles for dinner
signing up for a long term cancer study (American Cancer Study)
setting up the coffee pot to brew coffee at 6:15 tomorrow morning
playing with the kitty cats
texting everyone and their brother

I’m also procrastinating planning tomorrow’s Girl Scout meeting (which hmph, I *thought* I had passed on all the meetings to the other parents and yet I’m still in charge tomorrow anyways).

It’ll be interesting to see which one gets done first.

Alrighty then

September 12th, 2011

I suppose things are back to normal around here. In the good category, my money issues are mostly better. My student loan check finally came through and I’ve completely caught up on bills including the weird ones like my accountant, life insurance, health insurance, etc. Yay! Now to keep anything financially stupid from happening for awhile.

But in the whine category, I’m so completely over college. The homework is killing me. I keep thinking, I’m 30-something years old with 5 children, why the hell am I writing a couple of paragraphs on Old Testament Bible chapters and doing dozens of statistic problems every other day? It’s annoying and I don’t like it. I just want to be working my 3 twelve hour shifts a week as a RN and not doing the unrelated BS anymore.

Also? I’m kinda tired of LYC’s work commutes to NJ. And that the only good time for me to work is the weekends which is exactly the only time he’s home. I miss him. For the longest time it was “hey cool, we can hang out” when he was in town and then the other part of the week, I just did my own thing. Now it’s “drat, he’s not here and I wish he was.”

Sheesh. I should just enjoy the fact that my bills are paid (ignoring the mounds of credit card debt, of course). Sometimes even when finding the silver lining, it still involves storm clouds.

Still…

September 6th, 2011

Feeling a bit under the weather. I actually called in sick to work last night cause I knew I was going to be worthless there if I could even drive myself downtown. So I slept a bunch and made it to school okay today (very important because I had a nursing lecture test, I think I did alright considering a huge lack of studying on my part).

The kids are at G’s til Friday so I’m going to take it easy again tonight. I have hospital orientation tomorrow for school and then work, lecture Thursday and then work and so Friday I plan to sleep a bunch again. It seems weird to schedule sleep like that but as usual, do I ever do anything the normal way?

You know…

August 31st, 2011

Things have been going along swimmingly. Classes are great, I think I’m finally getting the hang of my student nurse gig, the kids have been pretty decent about getting up and going to school, no major fights over homework, I’ve been keeping up with scouts, soccer, etc.

And then I got sick today. At 4pm to be exact. Sneezing, sniffling, runny nose, sore throat, sinus pressure headache, etc. So things went to hell in a hand basket very quickly.

As always, I had the evening planned: grocery shopping, Girl Scout prep (for tomorrow’s meeting, I was a whole day ahead of my usual schedule, yay me!), and I have a small writing assignment due and a quiz tomorrow. Kyle and Kelly are running for student council and wanted to make posters (we wrote the speeches yesterday) and Em needed to bake muffins for “Cooking Club” (which I suspect is more like “Eating Club”.)

Honestly a typical night around here. Maybe even an “easy night” since we didn’t have any scouts, soccer, etc stuff to go do.

Except when I don’t feel well, every…little…thing…is…sooooo…painful.

While grocery shopping, I kept snapping at Kelly for hanging on the cart, for not watching where she was going, bumping into other shoppers, and for touching everything. Grrrr…. When I got home, K and K couldn’t decide on pictures or fonts or words or anything for their posters and the twins were being anything but helpful. I set out all the ingredients and recipe for the muffins and Em kept asking annoying questions like “how do I make a well in the flour? What’s sifting? Where’s the wax paper? Do I crack the egg when it says put an egg in a medium sized bowl? What do I do with the extra batter?” (Apparently she only needs 6 muffins and was about to pitch the remaining batter for another 12 or so muffins.)

My original Girl Scout meeting idea of “Art to Wear” was quickly thrown out the window when I realized how much prep work I would need to do tonight for tie dye shirts and bracelets and mask making and face painting. If I didn’t feel like death warmed over, it would all be no problem. Feeling like my head is going to explode though… We’re doing “Let’s Pretend” and I sent an email for the moms to bring dress-up clothes/Halloween costumes. The twins can lead that without much help from me. (I’m holding a “Parent’s meeting” at the same time in another part of the house so I can pawn off the rest of the year’s meetings…)

Speaking of another part of the house… One of the other reasons I switched meeting ideas is because it’s suppose to be 900 degrees tomorrow evening and so tie dying outside would not be a good thing for a bunch of 3rd graders. So they can “pretend” in the basement. Except the basement is apparently a wreck. Of course…

Right now I’m trying to get all the kids through the showers. (Zach is yelling that Em is hogging all the hot water, Ally can’t find her special braces floss things, and Kyle thinks standing *near* soap and water counts.) The small writing assignment isn’t done and I haven’t studied at all for the quiz. Normally I don’t study for a quiz but this is stats (aka Weird Math) and I’m still a little unsure about sums of frequency of x and modes and standard deviation and nominal versus ordinal versus interval versus ratio let alone all the weird symbols associated with statistics. I feel it’s way too early in the semester to totally screw up on a writing assignment and a quiz but I’m not sure how I’m going to manage anything else tonight besides going to bed. It’s iffy if the coffee pot’s delay brew timer thingie will even get set before I toss in the towel and admit defeat.

I hate being sick.

1st Day of School

August 24th, 2011

So my first day back in college classes went okay. I worked the night before (11pm to 7:30am) and then I managed to stay awake through all my classes (4 of them, 8am-2pm). However at Kyle and Kelly’s dentist appointment at 3… I signed them in, sat in a comfy waiting room chair and slept the entire 45 minutes. And then another 14 hours at home after I dropped them back off at G’s. This is exactly why I’m only working weeks when I don’t have the kids. It’s taken awhile to figure out but I’m pretty sure my limit is only 2 full time gigs at once, either “work and school” or “kids and school”. Over the summer it was “kids and work”. Although I’m not guaranteeing the wheels won’t fall off this operation (money issues) at some point but for now this seems to be the best, most sane option out there.

Anyway the 4 classes I’m in are Psych Stats (ugh, weird math), Old Testament (Catholic liberal arts required curriculum), Medical/Surgical Nursing for the Adult Client 2 (shorthand: Med/Surg 2), and Theories of Personality (a psych elective). I did find out that I’m doing my clinical rotation at the local big Catholic hospital where I really want to work after I graduate. Yay! I currently work at the other big competing hospital chain that’s associated with the state medical school here. The Catholic hospital just doesn’t hire student nurses or I would have tried really hard to get a job there already. Granted my work hospital is actually one of the best in the country, I’d just rather be at the Catholic hospital when I’m a RN. (Closer to home, well respected, Catholic mindset, etc)

Now that I have this semesters syllabuses (syllabi?) in hand, I’m going to spend a good portion of today planning out the next few months. It seems silly but if I realize that I have to work on “blah, blah” paper 2 weeks before it’s due because the week it’s due I have the kids, an out of town thing, etc, it’ll get done on “stress-free” time and not “OMG, the paper is due this week and I have no time to work on it” crammed time. I’m not saying I still won’t be doing some stuff last minute. Occasionally I actually plan to do things last minute because the “last minute” is the “first minute I’ve had time to do it”. Good example is Halloween costumes. LOL I like to think I have this time management thing down pat. If only I could manage money as well…

Quote of the Day: “Each day should have a clearly marked emergency exit sign.” -Dr. SunWolf