Succinct

I guess I should get right to the point. I am so pressed for time lately, that I'm going to go on hiatus for a bit. I'm going back to lj when I have time for snippets of updates. :p Ugh...back to slamming down some wine and getting ready for bed.

Nice!

Routine

Routines are necessary.
They make life manageable. Comfortable.

So when does a routine go bad? When do we turn on it?
And is there a way to reconcile with it, or is the only thing to do, to turn our backs on it and do something new?

History repeats itself.

I am spreading myself too thin. So exhausted most days. I'd 6 of 7 days of the week are spent utterly, well, spent. I have given up on posting. I'll get home at 8:30 most nights, then I race to get Alyssa ready for, and into bed. By 9:30 I am trying ot wolf down some dinner, and then I clean up and get ready for the day for another hour, get ready for bed, and veg out for another hour and a half. At midnight, I crawl into bed, and get about 6 and a half hours of sleep. 7 on the days that I am really lucky. I don't even try to study at night. That would only keep me up later.
Ugh.
It is exhausting.
Add other stress factors (the same two that have been with me for the past 3 years that I will not bore you with), and I am left without wind in my sails, so to speak.

I have given myself a deadline for making an important decision. It has been about 4 years in the making, and I feel that i need to make my happiness a priority again.
I am giving myself a deadline for fulfilling one of many goals. Just one. I have to start somewhere, right?

And that is all.

And so, with that, good-bye for a while blogger. I may post from time to time, but it will be sporadic. Whenever I use that word, I think of Clueless.

Goodbye!

Absence

Ugh. I used to enjoy blogging, but lately, I haven't been into it. Not keeping a personal journal or anything, really. Been busy. And at the end of the day, I am exhausted. Blahhhhhhh..

After-School...

I haven't updated in a pretty long time- we had Michael's little brother stay with us for a few weeks, during which, my computer was occupied at most hours of the day.
And I didn't feel right kicking him off because we're a pretty boring bunch, and I assumed that that computer provided the only bit of entertainment that he would get while visiting.

At any rate, I have a slew of pictures from the holidays and of recent family outings to post.

Michael and I are watching an episode of Boy Meets World...scratch that- I am watching it and Michael loves me enough to sit through it. I LOVE after-school specials...and Michael's mind-in-the-gutter side commentary. Haha!

What's new? Since I last updated I have:
Watched It's Complicated, Garden State, Date Night, and True Grit. Next on my queue is The Fighter. This is an unusually high number of movies that I've been able to watch...let's keep it up!
Gone out TWICE with friends. (Getting out for a few hours is a feat rarely accomplished, so I'm happy!)
Started School. It's a bit intimidating being back in something I've been away from for a while.
Updated my iPod.

It's well past midnight.

Goodnight!

Quick Holiday Update

We're so near! Christmas is almost here! I haven't been to church lately, haven't sent out even one Christmas card, purchased even one gift. To say that I am behind on things this year, would really be an understatement.

Next year, I promise I'll up my game.
At least we did decorate cookies and make homemade hot chocolate according to Martha Stewart's recipe. Yum!!

I am excited for the new year. Every year has the potential to be great, but this year, things are lined up in such a way that I am not just hopeful, but excited even.

What will we be doing on New Years? Not sure yet, but we are definitely hitting the town while grandma watches Alyssa. I'll work out those plans in detail, I guess, this week. Okay. Off to get ready for Lesli to come over for lunch!

A Dilemma

Is it really a dilemma when I have made my decision? It's only every now and then that I wonder if I shouldn't reconsider. Then I snap back into reality and realize that my initial answer is the correct one.

An incomplete decision? Not really, I guess. It's there always on my mind...the other option isn't. So the feeling that is overwhelmingly present in my heart/mind is the one I should go with, right? Hmmmm...

It's not often that my heart and my mind are on the same page, but I can say in this case, that they actually are.


Sort of.



This didn't help at all, did it?





One thing is certain-- Alyssa is my favorite person to be around. She is just amazing. She is my world.

Men I Love

I have had a long-standing celebrity crush on Christian Bale.
He had me at Huey Lewis and the News.
I usually don't like gory movies, but his performance made me put that aside. 3:10 to Yuma? For realsies. He is still my favorite.





Next up, Jeff Bridges.
Yes, he's old. His is not a legitimate crush like the one I have for the man above. He's magnificent and I respect him. He's what I imagine a man should age like.
Here's to you, Mr. Bridges.






Honorable mention goes to James Franco and Mark Ruffalo whose eccentricity and intelligence never fail to keep my adoration engaged.
Okay, I have to get back to Christmas Cupid. Yeah, you read that correctly. Shut it.

This weekend...

Our mantra was: Get fat and be lazy.

Seriously. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were spent eating not just one or two or even three cookies at a time, but as many as I could put down before getting nauseous. We had ribs on Friday, Philly cheese-steak and mac n' cheese on Saturday, and pizza today. I had alcohol, midnight grilled cheeses, popcorn, french fries, and gluten-free donuts.

And how much did I run on these three days? Not even two feet. I didn't even pretend to struggle over whether or not to run. I just woke up and indulged in playing with Alyssa and munching on comfort food.

How much progress did I make in preparation for the week? (Grocery shopping, cleaning, laundry, cooking?) Nothing. Not a thing got done. I didn't even tidy our place up. At one point, Michael made the suggestion that he put things in a bit of order, but I talked him out of it.

So, all week I'll be scrambling to make up for lost time.

Thanks a lot, Megan. Thanks a whole lot.

Really, we were layabouts. My motivation was partially hormonal, and partially emotional. Tomorrow, I pick myself up again by my bootstraps, and put my lackadaisical self back on track.

With that out of the way, I can celebrate- I finally saw The Deathly Hallows Part I!!! I love the Harry Potter cinematic series. Admittedly, I cannot count myself among the literary fans, as I have only read one book- the last one, which I did enjoy immensely.

Off to be lazy for the remaining time I am allowing myself to be...maybe with some ice cream?

Coming Full Circle Brings Us Back to Square One

Dear Diary,

We're right back where we started.





No, thanks.

What Makes You Happy.

If you were to ask yourself, what made you happy today, what would it be?...

Here's my list:
Sleeping in till 8 with my family.
Seeing Alyssa and her cousin get along, even if only momentarily.
Eating chocolate chip cookies AND rice and beans in the same day. Two favorites.Yummy!!
Being able to run.
Seeing Alyssa and Cameron happy to play outside in this unusually nice weather.
Being able to hear the things that my sweet little baby says. She's 2 going on 20 sometimes? God, I just love her.
Music. Always always and forever.
Reading a bit of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Watching Running Wilde and Arrested Development with my husband.
Seeing my family.
The weather.


THE END.

Turkey Day in Recap

Thanksgiving this year was an amazingly great one.
Right, maybe it feels like I'm saying that just to put on a show of a fun and carefree life? Well, it's not. My life, I mean.
Not that it's not great, but it's no Target commercial.
That's why I have to brag about the days that come around every so often when I have really enjoyed myself from beginning to end. And my daughter was content with the whole day, which also constituted a big part of my satisfaction/happiness.

I think I took 1 picture of the event and spent the rest of the time relaxing, playing with Alyssa, playing Dance Central (a few times with Aly, too!), and talking easily with my husband and family. It was a rare day of doing only fun or relaxing things.

Michael and I are lucky. We really are. I know there may be a deeper or perhaps more artful way of saying this but, we're lucky not to be desperately poor, chronically or fatally sick; we are relatively well-educated, and content in the knowledge that we have people that love us and have our best interests at heart (no matter if sometimes their methods are entirely wrong, hah). We're not alone in this world, and we've got a pretty solid foundation right now. Our looks notwithstanding (I think we'd both agree though that they could be worse), we're very happy with what we've got.

Thanksgiving being done with, it is time to move forward with the fun stuff-- twinkling lights, songs that make me happy...and hopefully a few days of colder weather! And some good old fashioned American decadence...on a Bud Light budget. Scratch that-- make it a Natural Ice budget! (Amy Sedaris might be of some assistance in this department. Everyone might be getting googly-eyed peanuts for Christmas).

Okay, I'm off to read about Tony and Eva's split.

Enjoy:

Magic

Two big dates: December 13th and January 4th.
The first is the day that I will be at the dentist's office for no less than 3 hours getting everything that I need done, in one fell swoop. It is also the day that Michael will begin school.
The second is the date that I start school. Sweeeet. I have to do well if I want any chance of getting into the grad program. For now, it's just the prerequisites, but there's quite a list of them! 27 credit hours, actually. Today, finally, I received confirmation that everything has gone through.

That having been said, I have to get the apartment picked up-- someone interested in purchasing it, will be stopping by tomorrow afternoon and it needs to be presentable.

Holiday in Handcuffs is on (why do I like that movie so much??!), a cheesecake pumpkin pie is in the oven, and my baby is finally asleep (as of 10 o'clock!). Time to get ready for tomorrow...

Running

I began running when I was 13 years old.
My brother convinced my parents that it would improve my basketball-playing skills if I joined other sports. Cross country, he suggested, would increase my stamina, and keep me in shape off season.

I was annoyed, but relented. I wasn't much of a fighter, and I figured it would take less energy from me to just join this team, than it would to try to fight with my brother and father for the next four years over what a mistake I had made in not following their advice. I wasn't in love with basketball anyways; it was unlikely that I would hate this sport any more than I hated that one, right?

As someone who to this day remains a bit socially awkward, I was surprised to see how well got along with my fellow runners. That made me happy immediately. Formerly a loner, I felt like I might have company.
Who constituted the group of people I would spend the next four years with?
Well, there were two types of people that were on my high school cross country team: 1) Athletes that were there to condition themselves for some other sport they preferred and 2.) People (athletic or not) that desired the opportunity to get into shape while avoiding physical contact with other people. No one initially joined the team because they had any kind of passion for running.

But...many of us converted.

I have to admit it-- I couldn't run 1 mile the first day, but I decided right off the bat that I was in love with this sport and that I would climb my way to the top.
My stubby little legs (I'm maybe 5 foot 2) were not built for distance running, but I decided that I would prevail. Most of the people that I really got along with were the actual runners; those that had joined for some other reason, but that stayed and excelled because they fell in love with running for hours on end.

I was training with the varsity team by my sophomore year (not racing varsity yet, but training). I had made it up to the group of neurotics and over-achievers that I felt comfortable with (even if I was not really an over achiever, myself).
If you're curious, I ran varsity my junior and senior year. I would never be amazing at running, but I held my own.

I still remember my runs with a team:
We would warm up with one mile in the park, stretch, and then hit the road.
Once on the run, we would all talk and sing in unison, clap in unison, and laugh about funny incidents that we could relate to one another. And then around the fourth mile, the chatter would die down, we would all settle into the run, and peace and quiet would reign over the last few miles. This was the golden hour, and probably my favorite time of the run: Our need to socialize spent, we could easily settle into a silent reverie. Once there, my mind would be blank. Only audible was the easy breathing of my fellow runners, the sound of about 40 sneakers lightly padding the pavement in stride, and the steady stream of cars whirring past us.

Once I left for college, I had to settle for running in a gym by myself. Literally non of my friends from cross country went to UF, and only one other friend of mine from high school went there at all. So, no runners there.
Beyond college, I have continued to run in a gym or on my treadmill at home; it's been soul-less and not nearly as fun. I had given it up during pregnancy and for some time thereafter, but have picked it back up again with a vengeance.

Darn the gym! I am getting used to it, but it's still not the same.

,

Not Hopeless

Tom Petty was runnin' down a dream. American Idols and Next Top Models are chasing one of their own.
Novelists, poets, and filmmakers have tackled the theme of ordinary people struggling to fulfill a dream that will either go realized, or remain a dream for the remainder of their life.

Lately, I have been making a dedicated effort to arrive at mine.
It doesn't involve me becoming a huge success (although that would be a bonus); but it does end with me spending the rest of my days doing something that I really enjoy. Actually, my dream is a combination of things; an amalgam that reflects the mixture of qualities in my character.

I wonder how people decide on a dream. I know how I arrived at mine finally, at the ripe age of 27. i often wonder if that's a bad sign- will I not be any good at what I want to do? Most successful people that I'm aware of, seem to have known what they have wanted to do for a large part of their life.

But this brings me to my question: What is your dream, and how did you decide on it? I wish i could ask this of some of the greats and not-yet-so-greats.

I grew up really really very sheltered. Being a dork came naturally enough for me, so my parents' commitment to removing popular culture from my everyday life only served to further draw attention to the kid that might as well have already had a club foot or something.

And then I went off to college...and among other things I had not encountered within my controlled and sheltered life, was cable television. What wonderful, mind-numbing-but-scintiallating entertainment I had been missing out on! As a child, weekdays had belonged to 60 Minutes, National Geographic, and Jeopardy, while weekends allowed for some lighter fare- Looney Toons, Spiderman, Batman, and X-Men; or, as I got older, morning news. And now, the possibilities!

In the beginning, I tried to keep things high brow; I was after all, trying to prove my medal as a psuedo-intellectual student that was more interested in Sartre than in The Real World...but after some light experimentation things quickly spiraled out of control and I found myself watching Laguna Beach and Disney Channel movies. Yeah, embarrassing; blame it on my upbringing. I missed out on a lot of mental "junk food" and I was greedily taking in whatever was easiest to ingest after spending hours fumbling through things that made my head hurt in a way that nothing else had before: numerous scientific abstracts about research done on married couples, divorced couples, single people, and statistical data on household demographics in City X, Y, or Z. Derrida, Joyce, Chomsky. I was in over my head...
With more of a workload than I had ever been used to, I was all-too glad to escape from it through that lovely little glass screen perched on my dresser.

I'm still a bit of a rookie when it comes to navigating through the array of options I have out there, but I have at least come across some good stuff I feel I should share.

American Dad, for one, is great. And in my opinion, it's far better than its more popular McFarlen creation, Family Guy. I watch some pretty lame stuff that I don't want to admit to here, but we'll say that one involves a team of gymnasts. Yeah...preeeetty lame...

So, let's stick with the animated stuff:

The Venture Brothers. Brilliant. It makes me want an arch-nemesis to call my own. One that dresses as something ridiculous (like the Monarch in Dr. Venture's case); maybe a dust mite? I would find that one an appropriate nemesis...I have some wicked allergies, after all.

American Dad. Irreverent, funny.

Archer. Ridiculous.

Max and Ruby. Haha. Well, it's the only one of Alyssa's shows that I don't zone out to, besides Sesame Street. Actually, pretty enjoyable, if not so slow paced.

Ok, so I've written nothing of substance yet again. I'm calling it a night. I'll try to post a Day-In-the-Life-Of post on Wednesday.

Sleepless Nights, Quotidian Days

Alyssa's sleeping habits have been a bit erratic the past few weeks. I won't weigh you down with the details, but definitely, it was not an easy two week period. Today, she took a three hour nap. Weird! She's approaching her second birthday and I'm hoping that this has been a blip caused by a growth spurt; this perhaps was our welcome into her second year of life- official entrance into toddler-hood.

Otherwise, life has been fairly routine. I'm not complaining, though.
The holidays are quickly approaching which makes me supremely happy.
Silk has released their Pumpkin spiced soymilk and nog-flavored soymilk.
This time of the year has always been my favorite.

This weekend was a wash in regards to doing much outside of chores, but I got to spend time with my baby and husband, I'm really really happy.

ok. Off to get ready for tomorrow!!

I changed my mind.

Last night, I wrote a few thoughts down on love.
I saved it as a draft and deleted it this morning.

It was dull. I'll tell you all about it later.

I'm watching a Tivo'd episode of Archer. I love this show. And I love that they have the parents from Arrested Development on it...overall, it's pretty entertaining.

I want to type more, but I cannot currently use my left arm/hand. I got my ass kicked at the gym tonight and that arm is spent. I did however, treat myself to cuban food and flan as a reward. Yummy!

This weekend, we'll go to the beach again...


We'll do a crap load of laundry.
And of course, we'll go do something fun for Aly-- maybe a festival or Flamingo Gardens...have to see what's going on.

Night night!

One for the money, two for the show...

This weekend:
http://www.fliff.com/index.asp

And a movie I'd like to see:



Because a love story without a little heartbreak just isn't that interesting, is it?

Food 101

This girl's pedestrian tastes.