The last post was maybe too many words which could be summed up thusly: the next time someone asks you how you keep it all together so well, just grin at them and say “magic!” and keep all your fussy lists and habits and routines to yourself, for yourself. I’m a little more impressed at the people that make it seem effortless, is what I’m saying. And with that, how about this weather huh?
I haven’t had much to say in a bit for a number of reasons. I pulled something in my back swimming on my birthday and now thoroughly hate getting older — I was okay with it before — and have been out of the pool for a while. I do my best thinking in the pool, so my mind feels sludgey. I’ve also been nose-deep in books, working on maybe one too many WordPress projects, and let a friend talk me into a drinking-and-working evening which left me in possession of a bad hangover (a merciful rarity) and this photo.
It looks like the site works well. If you hit something that doesn’t work, please tell me.
Mostly I came over here because I just read this post on Lifehack. Lifehacking is really popular among people I know, online nerd types who are looking to eke a little more happiness or productivity out of an already pretty happy and/or productive day or life. I don’t read it much because I already hacked my life the way I like it. The photo with the article is one of a man wearing a suit. My jessahack number one is don’t wear suits, unless you like them in which case you should wear them all the time.
Here’s the rest of their list and my commentary on it. I’m not trying to be a sanctimonious pain in the ass about this, I just think that lots of these sorts of essays have so many cultural assumptions built into them that we forget that there are so many more changes we can make if we are willing to look outside the normal “coke or pepsi?” set of choices. Actually, I just wanted to try out bulleted lists in this new template.
My birthday was yesterday. Today I had some free time. I decided to toss Blogger out the window and move this blog to WordPress. I’ll be tweaking with the design and functionality for a few days (oh let’s be honest, weeks) but I want to bang on it while it’s actually working. So, bear with me and report anything that’s weird. Thanks!
I’m now officially certified as a lifeguard by the Red Cross. apparently this sort of thing runs in my family. My Dad was a lifeguard and so was my grandfather (on my Mom’s side). I explain more about the story with the accompanying Flickr photo but here’s how my week went.
I had class from 4-9 pm each night Monday through Friday. Most nights we were done by 8 but some nights we weren’t. The other students in my class were three VTC students, one high school kid, one other guy from the community about my age and two lifeguards who were training to be lifeguard instructors. The instructors were two no-nonsense women sent by the Red Cross. We split the classes up between watching Red Cross videos, going over and practicing first aid, and going over and practicing drowning and rescuing. Then we’d have tests on these things culminating in an all-day testing situation on Saturday from about 9 til 1.
I do good on tests. I have an okay head for numbers and first aid mnemonics. I am a strong swimmer. What I am NOT any good at… is drowning. Part of the class involves pairing up with other students (the female instructors make sure the women in the class are teamed up with the guys because they want to make sure the guys get used to grabbing women in rescue situations where usually they’d be more like “um, excuse me”) and practicing rescuing each other. In most ways in the class I felt like I was holding my own as a (relative to the rest of the class) old lady, but I was the worst drowner of them all.
I could tell myself it’s because I have asthma and I’m not good at holding my breath or whatever but the truth is that waiting under six feet of water for some high school student to drag me to the surface when I KNOW there are better options is just not something I’m good at. I was sort of happy with myself for being able to just suck it up and do it. As I get older, there are fewer and fewer situations where I need to suck it up to do anything or accomplish anything. I’ve sort of created my life this way and overall I’m pleased with that. However it was nice to know that for a good reason, I could suck it up and just take orders in order to learn things.
Every night after Monday I came home sore and every day I’d take ibuprofen and drag my ass back to the pool and do more practice rescues and swimming and tests. It’s not like 30+ hours of class is all that grueling, but I think they normally break it up over a few weeks. By Saturday morning I was feeling feverish and just out of it, but I made it through the tests okay — as did everyone, I think the goal is for everyone to finish up cerified (certifiable?) — and I came home afterwards, popped in to a friend’s house to say hello and then went home and slept for almost twelve hours. I woke up today feeling much better — even went for a little hike — and didn’t even think about going to the pool. Normal swimming will resume on Tuesday.
I haven’t been driving the new car much mostly because the radio isn’t as good as my other car and there’s no AC and the windows crank, but I did get new plates for it. This was a heavy driving weekend. I must have gone 500 miles just getting to two dinners and a doctor’s appointment. It involved some amazingly lovely parts of route 100, both under 89 and above, and some not-that-interesting parts of route 89 that I’m already sort of bored with.
I got two add two photos to Wikipedia [Buels Gore and Hancock] and decided to update my 251 club status. I have 38 towns left in VT that I’ve never been to.
We’ve had thunderstorms here. Enough so that I was driving down a pretty empty part of Route 100, just north of Stowe and I heard the Emergency Broadcast Signal and then the “this is NOT a test” message and a warning about “quarter-sized hail” I came around a bend and I could see the massive thunderhead full of lightning spraying all over the place, in the direction I was driving. I got to Stepahnie’s house just as the winds were picking up and got to sit around watching the lights blink on and off for a while but the hail never materialized. I got home several hours later and all the appliances were telling me that my power had been off too.
The pool is going to be open until 10 pm. This is great news. This means there will be something to DO at 9 pm around here during the week.
I went to the movies again, this time with Rick and Sarah. We saw Ratatouille and then it started to pour rain so we skipped out on Pirates of the Carribean 3 which is okay by me. Then a bunch of social stuff fell through (mixed signals plannign a lake trip, too many clouds for flying) and I knew I was back to my old self again when I shrugged and thought “oh, well I guess I’ll have some free time to do a bunch of stuff around here” And I did.
I took all the recycling out. I cleaned up the kitchen. I took the hanging baskets with the fake plants on them off the kitchen ceiling (you’d have to see it to really get it) and put them out on the porch where they look nice and are more easily dusted. I mopped the floors. I paid the bills. I did the laundry. I unpacked some stemware that I’d brought home from my Mom’s place months ago and put the box out in the garage. I planned the Nova Scotia trip. I updated my blog software (well, I’m in the process now). I finished a blog project for a friend. I started another blog project. I downloaded some music. I changed lightbulbs. I did a little dusting. I threw out a bunch of bottlecaps with pithy sayings because I didn’t have anything to do with them. I wrote a few letters. I made plans to move my 401K from the random people who were managing it to Fidelity who has the rest of my investment-type money. I called the fuel oil people.
You get the idea. It felt GREAT. It’s been getting cold here and tonight I had tomoato basil soup and a two-cheese grilled cheese sandwich to welcome the Autumn. The Virgo Month of Leisure begins on Thursday and I think I’ve gotten a lot of picky nonsense done that I will NOT have to do while I’m trying hard (and failing, as usual) to relax.
Plus I’m training to be a lifeguard. More on that in a few days.
I got back from Seattle Wednesday morning the first and Wednesday was a sort of predictable sleepy haze. My sister arrived on Friday (see drive-in pic below) and there was a meetup at my house last Saturday for about 13 people. My friend Joanne stayed over so she wouldn’t have to drive down the moose and bear highway late at night. Sunday Gordon stopped by briefly with his cheese head and I had a friend from libraryland swing by on a trip through the Northeast for the evening. Monday I hung out in Randolph with my friends’ three cats. Tuesday my friend Peter stopped by on his trip around the US and I got to pick him up at the train station right in Randolph which is something I don’t do very often. It’s nice to get to walk to the train station. Gordon showed up at about 1 am on his way back from a punk show in Pennsylvania and he slept here brielfy before catching a morning flight. I drove Peter to his Dad’s house — one of my all-time favorite houses but alas I don’t want to live there — and then it was back to catland until Tom (MetaFilter user Meatbomb who sent me a lovely satchel from Afghanistan as well as this excellent hat) showed up with his fiancee on their first stop on their cross-country adventure. I made them some waffles in the morning and sent them off to Niagara Falls. Then it was back to clean-up and laundry and closing down the catsit for my friends’ return. When my friend Finn showed up last night I wanted to take a photo of him holding a sign that said LAST BAG but forgot about it entirely and we went for a walk down by the river and ate some homemade foccacia and were savaged by mosquitos.
I went to bed in an empty house and woke up with a totally open day. Well, open until I have dinner with friends this evening and I’ll probably hop into the pool before then, and I guess I have some errands to run. My plan is to spend the next few weeks doing some local visiting. I have friends renting a lakehouse up in Vermont and a few other pals with new babies a little farther out that I’d like to see sometime before things get hectic again. The hectic, of course, coincides with the Virgo Month of Leisure, as usual.
