the most fun you can have and get paid
HI, well once again the house is empty so I can have the computer to myself. The man is helping the boy get groc and move his girlfriend in, I assume. At least the old roomate is moving out today....The youngest is off at a friends, sort of a post Halloween party.
It was a quiet Halloween, sort of, for me. I was at work and it was quiet. Gave away a few cool pencils to some fairly ungrateful goblins. The weather was half decent (eg. not raining, snowing or blowing cold freezing wind) so I think a lot of kids were out there, but there were none at the house while I was home for supper, and none after 9 when I got home, so I assume that in those hours when I was not here, there were a few. At least the cauldron seems half empty of choc bars...and I have only eaten four so far, one in the a.m and three in the p.m.
Of course that didn't stop me going to a drugstore to get cheap choc for a program at work and also grabbing some half price candy corn to feed my craving and a box of cheap choc bars " for the winter car bags..." (riiiiiiigggghhttt--like I am not going to scarf any of them down this week.) I mean, hey this is the first chocolate holiday of the school year. (I think New Years should be Sept 1, as nothing really changes in January, but everything changes in Sept) Anyway it starts with Halloween, you get fired up by Christmas (not forgetting my birthday, which often results in a box of chocolates all to myself, no sharing... or not much anyway), which leads pretty much to Valentine's Day (I can still see myself on the night of Feb. 16, in labour, scarfing some Valentine Choc. before heading to the hospital, with the reasoning that I had better eat it now, as I may not be able to eat it when I was nursing....) Actually I don't think any of the kids were bothered by choc. but I probably didn't eat as much then....To go on, Valentines leads directly to Easter. Then comes the problem, warm weather, not really conducive to keeping chocolate in ones' purse, car or pocket....So I generally wean myself off chocolate in the summer, but there is always hot fudge sundaes...and frozen chocolate treats.....and choc bars keep well in the fridge, although the flavour is not the same. It really is meant to be a room temp treat.
Anyway I stand by the theory that dark chocolate is good for you and I generally have some several times a week. Gives me a good excuse to spend money on expensive, better quality chocolate. (not that I am too finicky for Halloween chocolate, but I don't enjoy it as much as I did before I trained myself to eat the high test stuff. Although I always liked dark choc even as a kid...)
I think dark chocolate almonds qualify as health food, right???
Okay, I am off topic, as per usual. Today I am in a pretty good mood. Listening to Chenille Sisters on the living room stereo, with no one else to bother because they are watching tv or using the rest of the house, so I have it cranked up for me and the cat. Just got home from an afternoon of book buying. I really think the best part of my job is that. Imagine spending $3000 of someone else's money in a bookstore. Yeah!!!!
My new boss was saying she never got given a shopping cart in a bookstore before she came here. You know how we measure how much we spend? a full cart is about $2000 of paperbacks. This is full overflowing mind you. And we had to stop because we were out of time, or we could have bought more.....We actually only had about a quarter of a cart of kids' books. I used to get to do this about once a month or so with my first boss, not at all with my second, once with my third. Now who knows if this will continue, maybe it was just the end of the year bash, but still....the most fun you can have at work.
Yesterday I was book buying for my other job, and only got to spend about 200 bucks, I get about a hundred a month and you do it every other month. I am actually in the hole, I will owe about three hundred bucks at year end, but sometimes you just have to buy what people want when it comes out. The list yesterday was not very good, I was surprised it added up anyway. Usually I go through, figure out what I must get, then slash about ten titles. Mind you, that is about a hundred bucks or so nowadays. ( Keep in mind we get 30% or so off the list prices)
Actually it was funny, today, there was no room in the parking lot to park, which was odd for a Thursday afternoon at a bookstore, but there was a big banner outside, with American Books at American prices, on it. This has been a huge bone of contention lately. Our dollar is at par, but the book prices (and many other items in stores, esp big ticket ones, even ones manufactured here....) are still much higher in Canadian dollars. People have pretty much been revolting. I have heard tales of people going into stores and saying they want to pay with American money, and they want to pay the American price. I have no idea if they get away with it or not. Anyway the place was fuller than I have ever seen it, except for just before and just after Christmas. So I assume they are making money in any case. The story all along has been that the stores pay for the items with the old price and therefore pass it on to the customer. But people have been conditioned to think that we pay more because our dollar is so dismal, so now that it is no longer so low, they don't want to pay more. Why should we be penalized? I think Canadians are used to feeling penalized. Maybe it has to do with being a British colony and being treated like second cousins.
I have always felt that rural people are penalized for their choice of living location. Especially as the hospitals, schools, etc. are all moving farther away and the roads are getting worse. It is one thing to know that you have to drive when you live in a small place; you have to drive everywhere, but what point is there in bussing a 5 year old an hour each way to and from school? I think small towns are quite able to educate elementary school kids with no loss in quality... Bus the big kids, who need the advantage of a bigger school. Although if you really ask me, I don't think high school should start until 11 a.m. or so. All the studies they do about the teenage brain tell you that they really do have a hard time sleeping at night and I see them struggle in the morning. It is not just about lifestyle choices, but how the brain is wired at their age. Some of it really is genetic, as in my family. I am sorry but we are so much night owls. We learn to get up in the dark and struggle to work in the a.m. but it goes against what our bodies are telling us. Even when I am exhausted all day, swearing to go to bed early , I still feel better as the evening goes on. Although having said that, I went to bed last Thursday at 9:30...slept 9 hours.....
We have been struggling with some kind of respiratory thing that almost seems allergy related. I am finally starting to feel more myself, after a month, but Bruce keeps trying to hack up a lung. Makes you very tired. Plus it just always is really busy in October. Library week, Halloween, other fall activities. I think this year was even busier for me than usual. I think tommorrow is the first day in three weeks that I have not made a big list for. It feels so weird, I feel like I must be forgetting something. every darn day has had something added to it lately. School visits, appointments, volunteer activities. I haven't had a chance to go to exercises for weeks. And then there is the poor eating that goes on when you are hardly home. OH well, feels like New Years resolution time. November, get act together, exercise more and eat better. Yeah, gear up for xmas......
It seems I go in bouts of being "good" and "bad" in terms of food and health. It really has to do with how busy I am. I sometimes wonder if I manage to cut back to four days a week, if I will actually have a day off to devote to myself? I always feel catch 22, I haven't enough time at either job to do all my work, I am never caught up, but at home, I am also behind, always. So if you wish for more hours at work, you get even less time at home. If you have time to be home, you have less money. I know it is not all about money, money isn't everything but it sure helps pay the bills.
This spring, when I went on the cruise with Cait, I read that most people in North America don't take their vacations. A big reason is they hate to deal with everything when they get back. I know that is a real pain, seems to take longer to prep everything before you go and then cope with the fallout when you get back than you are actually away. You feel so good being away and then you get back and it crashes on you. I get that. You wonder if it was worth it, seems easier to just keep slogging. But they say people who take vacations live longer. So I vow to take more vacations. (Yeah, although I have no pay when I take time off, there fore I take as little time as I can and still have a life. I will never have the vac days that B has, so it doesn't really matter) The other day a woman told me how she took two weeks off the other day, to clean her house and fix it up a bit. I think that must be how people do it. I know when I tidy, I find stuff lying around that dates to when I started working in the city. Scary.
the other day I wondered when the last time any big cleaning has been done here, eg. walls. I manage to wash the floor, because I am close to it, being short. I dust and wash things a few times a year, not many. Depends how much company I get. (not much anymore) I bet you could plant seeds in our bedroom carpet and they would grow. At least the hardwood floors get more or less clean as they can be swept and swiffed. I keep thinking some day I will get the place tidy enough to hire a cleaning lady and not die of embarrassment. Yeah right.
Going downstairs makes me seriously depressed. I can't see where the time will ever come from to deal with it unless I quit a job. Everything needs to be dealt with and cleaned and stored. I am actually worried that the cat is finding someplace to use as a litter box where I don't know. At least, the last two weeks her litter box has been hardly used. I know she uses outside more in the summer, but it is not that warm out now and I have never seen it with this little use. So she is either sick (being 16 or so, she could be) or going outside a lot (but what about the weekend we were away????) or perhaps finding a nice box in my sewing room full of fabric or something????
Poor old thing, she must have arthritis, I hope she isn't diabetic. I live in dread of someday when we have a vet decision to make. We were spared with Rosebud, by having her live at the farm for her golden years. Yup, passed the buck. Didn't have to cope with aging dog problems. I feel we owe the folks bigtime for that. I can't see being without an animal, but I am sure B can't wait for an empty house. I think I will manage to get used to being without kids eventually but not without at least a cat....
Even being almost kidless feels pretty weird. I suppose grandchildren sustain some people.
(aside: I can type quite a lot in half hour, can't I? ) My stove timer went off, I went to get some odd thing out of the oven. There was a recipe I wanted to try, but when I went to make it, two of the ingrediants were too old to use and I tossed them and then improvised, so that it really isn't the same animal as the recipe anyway, so no idea what it has morphed into. I think it is overdone in any case. Isn't that the way of it. You look forward to making a recipe but either you don't have the ingrediants or you look at the recipe and wonder why they want it done that way, so you change it a little. Just once in a while might be nice to just follow a recipe exactly and see how it turns out....
I think this is universal. Along with only making the same usual foods. I read once that most people make the same 10 things over and over. I go in streaks. get a new recipe, if I like it, I make it a lot for awhile and then forget about it. I have hundreds of cookbooks, I am sure, yet I still look forward to my annual new birthday cookbook from my friend. I think I only use maybe one recipe in each book...but still we like to look at them. Dream books, wish books. In my case, it is like if I copy a recipe I might just make it. I have to face reality. I hardly ever cook anymore and when I do, it is the same old, usually even out of my head, rather than a book.
I have made a few new things lately. But didn't copy them down, likely won't make them again if I do. Sometimes I think I would love to get all my favorite recipes down in a book. My ma in law made a cookbook for all of us a few years ago. It is full of many of her favorites, but I was surprised at how many of them I had never seen. I wanted all the old favorites that we love and have had over the years. Plus she put down the recipes the way they were in the books she got them from, not the way that she does them for us, which is how WE want them. No, she had to put them down the "right" way.....Still I love being able to check it when I make family dinners.
okay must go, take care, grateful for lovely new books today and the chance to spend other peoples' money.....
D
It was a quiet Halloween, sort of, for me. I was at work and it was quiet. Gave away a few cool pencils to some fairly ungrateful goblins. The weather was half decent (eg. not raining, snowing or blowing cold freezing wind) so I think a lot of kids were out there, but there were none at the house while I was home for supper, and none after 9 when I got home, so I assume that in those hours when I was not here, there were a few. At least the cauldron seems half empty of choc bars...and I have only eaten four so far, one in the a.m and three in the p.m.
Of course that didn't stop me going to a drugstore to get cheap choc for a program at work and also grabbing some half price candy corn to feed my craving and a box of cheap choc bars " for the winter car bags..." (riiiiiiigggghhttt--like I am not going to scarf any of them down this week.) I mean, hey this is the first chocolate holiday of the school year. (I think New Years should be Sept 1, as nothing really changes in January, but everything changes in Sept) Anyway it starts with Halloween, you get fired up by Christmas (not forgetting my birthday, which often results in a box of chocolates all to myself, no sharing... or not much anyway), which leads pretty much to Valentine's Day (I can still see myself on the night of Feb. 16, in labour, scarfing some Valentine Choc. before heading to the hospital, with the reasoning that I had better eat it now, as I may not be able to eat it when I was nursing....) Actually I don't think any of the kids were bothered by choc. but I probably didn't eat as much then....To go on, Valentines leads directly to Easter. Then comes the problem, warm weather, not really conducive to keeping chocolate in ones' purse, car or pocket....So I generally wean myself off chocolate in the summer, but there is always hot fudge sundaes...and frozen chocolate treats.....and choc bars keep well in the fridge, although the flavour is not the same. It really is meant to be a room temp treat.
Anyway I stand by the theory that dark chocolate is good for you and I generally have some several times a week. Gives me a good excuse to spend money on expensive, better quality chocolate. (not that I am too finicky for Halloween chocolate, but I don't enjoy it as much as I did before I trained myself to eat the high test stuff. Although I always liked dark choc even as a kid...)
I think dark chocolate almonds qualify as health food, right???
Okay, I am off topic, as per usual. Today I am in a pretty good mood. Listening to Chenille Sisters on the living room stereo, with no one else to bother because they are watching tv or using the rest of the house, so I have it cranked up for me and the cat. Just got home from an afternoon of book buying. I really think the best part of my job is that. Imagine spending $3000 of someone else's money in a bookstore. Yeah!!!!
My new boss was saying she never got given a shopping cart in a bookstore before she came here. You know how we measure how much we spend? a full cart is about $2000 of paperbacks. This is full overflowing mind you. And we had to stop because we were out of time, or we could have bought more.....We actually only had about a quarter of a cart of kids' books. I used to get to do this about once a month or so with my first boss, not at all with my second, once with my third. Now who knows if this will continue, maybe it was just the end of the year bash, but still....the most fun you can have at work.
Yesterday I was book buying for my other job, and only got to spend about 200 bucks, I get about a hundred a month and you do it every other month. I am actually in the hole, I will owe about three hundred bucks at year end, but sometimes you just have to buy what people want when it comes out. The list yesterday was not very good, I was surprised it added up anyway. Usually I go through, figure out what I must get, then slash about ten titles. Mind you, that is about a hundred bucks or so nowadays. ( Keep in mind we get 30% or so off the list prices)
Actually it was funny, today, there was no room in the parking lot to park, which was odd for a Thursday afternoon at a bookstore, but there was a big banner outside, with American Books at American prices, on it. This has been a huge bone of contention lately. Our dollar is at par, but the book prices (and many other items in stores, esp big ticket ones, even ones manufactured here....) are still much higher in Canadian dollars. People have pretty much been revolting. I have heard tales of people going into stores and saying they want to pay with American money, and they want to pay the American price. I have no idea if they get away with it or not. Anyway the place was fuller than I have ever seen it, except for just before and just after Christmas. So I assume they are making money in any case. The story all along has been that the stores pay for the items with the old price and therefore pass it on to the customer. But people have been conditioned to think that we pay more because our dollar is so dismal, so now that it is no longer so low, they don't want to pay more. Why should we be penalized? I think Canadians are used to feeling penalized. Maybe it has to do with being a British colony and being treated like second cousins.
I have always felt that rural people are penalized for their choice of living location. Especially as the hospitals, schools, etc. are all moving farther away and the roads are getting worse. It is one thing to know that you have to drive when you live in a small place; you have to drive everywhere, but what point is there in bussing a 5 year old an hour each way to and from school? I think small towns are quite able to educate elementary school kids with no loss in quality... Bus the big kids, who need the advantage of a bigger school. Although if you really ask me, I don't think high school should start until 11 a.m. or so. All the studies they do about the teenage brain tell you that they really do have a hard time sleeping at night and I see them struggle in the morning. It is not just about lifestyle choices, but how the brain is wired at their age. Some of it really is genetic, as in my family. I am sorry but we are so much night owls. We learn to get up in the dark and struggle to work in the a.m. but it goes against what our bodies are telling us. Even when I am exhausted all day, swearing to go to bed early , I still feel better as the evening goes on. Although having said that, I went to bed last Thursday at 9:30...slept 9 hours.....
We have been struggling with some kind of respiratory thing that almost seems allergy related. I am finally starting to feel more myself, after a month, but Bruce keeps trying to hack up a lung. Makes you very tired. Plus it just always is really busy in October. Library week, Halloween, other fall activities. I think this year was even busier for me than usual. I think tommorrow is the first day in three weeks that I have not made a big list for. It feels so weird, I feel like I must be forgetting something. every darn day has had something added to it lately. School visits, appointments, volunteer activities. I haven't had a chance to go to exercises for weeks. And then there is the poor eating that goes on when you are hardly home. OH well, feels like New Years resolution time. November, get act together, exercise more and eat better. Yeah, gear up for xmas......
It seems I go in bouts of being "good" and "bad" in terms of food and health. It really has to do with how busy I am. I sometimes wonder if I manage to cut back to four days a week, if I will actually have a day off to devote to myself? I always feel catch 22, I haven't enough time at either job to do all my work, I am never caught up, but at home, I am also behind, always. So if you wish for more hours at work, you get even less time at home. If you have time to be home, you have less money. I know it is not all about money, money isn't everything but it sure helps pay the bills.
This spring, when I went on the cruise with Cait, I read that most people in North America don't take their vacations. A big reason is they hate to deal with everything when they get back. I know that is a real pain, seems to take longer to prep everything before you go and then cope with the fallout when you get back than you are actually away. You feel so good being away and then you get back and it crashes on you. I get that. You wonder if it was worth it, seems easier to just keep slogging. But they say people who take vacations live longer. So I vow to take more vacations. (Yeah, although I have no pay when I take time off, there fore I take as little time as I can and still have a life. I will never have the vac days that B has, so it doesn't really matter) The other day a woman told me how she took two weeks off the other day, to clean her house and fix it up a bit. I think that must be how people do it. I know when I tidy, I find stuff lying around that dates to when I started working in the city. Scary.
the other day I wondered when the last time any big cleaning has been done here, eg. walls. I manage to wash the floor, because I am close to it, being short. I dust and wash things a few times a year, not many. Depends how much company I get. (not much anymore) I bet you could plant seeds in our bedroom carpet and they would grow. At least the hardwood floors get more or less clean as they can be swept and swiffed. I keep thinking some day I will get the place tidy enough to hire a cleaning lady and not die of embarrassment. Yeah right.
Going downstairs makes me seriously depressed. I can't see where the time will ever come from to deal with it unless I quit a job. Everything needs to be dealt with and cleaned and stored. I am actually worried that the cat is finding someplace to use as a litter box where I don't know. At least, the last two weeks her litter box has been hardly used. I know she uses outside more in the summer, but it is not that warm out now and I have never seen it with this little use. So she is either sick (being 16 or so, she could be) or going outside a lot (but what about the weekend we were away????) or perhaps finding a nice box in my sewing room full of fabric or something????
Poor old thing, she must have arthritis, I hope she isn't diabetic. I live in dread of someday when we have a vet decision to make. We were spared with Rosebud, by having her live at the farm for her golden years. Yup, passed the buck. Didn't have to cope with aging dog problems. I feel we owe the folks bigtime for that. I can't see being without an animal, but I am sure B can't wait for an empty house. I think I will manage to get used to being without kids eventually but not without at least a cat....
Even being almost kidless feels pretty weird. I suppose grandchildren sustain some people.
(aside: I can type quite a lot in half hour, can't I? ) My stove timer went off, I went to get some odd thing out of the oven. There was a recipe I wanted to try, but when I went to make it, two of the ingrediants were too old to use and I tossed them and then improvised, so that it really isn't the same animal as the recipe anyway, so no idea what it has morphed into. I think it is overdone in any case. Isn't that the way of it. You look forward to making a recipe but either you don't have the ingrediants or you look at the recipe and wonder why they want it done that way, so you change it a little. Just once in a while might be nice to just follow a recipe exactly and see how it turns out....
I think this is universal. Along with only making the same usual foods. I read once that most people make the same 10 things over and over. I go in streaks. get a new recipe, if I like it, I make it a lot for awhile and then forget about it. I have hundreds of cookbooks, I am sure, yet I still look forward to my annual new birthday cookbook from my friend. I think I only use maybe one recipe in each book...but still we like to look at them. Dream books, wish books. In my case, it is like if I copy a recipe I might just make it. I have to face reality. I hardly ever cook anymore and when I do, it is the same old, usually even out of my head, rather than a book.
I have made a few new things lately. But didn't copy them down, likely won't make them again if I do. Sometimes I think I would love to get all my favorite recipes down in a book. My ma in law made a cookbook for all of us a few years ago. It is full of many of her favorites, but I was surprised at how many of them I had never seen. I wanted all the old favorites that we love and have had over the years. Plus she put down the recipes the way they were in the books she got them from, not the way that she does them for us, which is how WE want them. No, she had to put them down the "right" way.....Still I love being able to check it when I make family dinners.
okay must go, take care, grateful for lovely new books today and the chance to spend other peoples' money.....
D
posted by Diana @ 6:50 PM
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