Oh How Time Flies!!

I've been reflecting today on the year of 2010. It is almost over with! Wow, just where does the time go?? This year there has been a lot of changes in my life and they have all turned out to be good changes. The biggest one was my move back to the Fargo/Moorhead area. I genuinely like the people I am working with and am thankful to have the leadership that I do in this position. I'm looking forward to starting 2011 off on the right foot and not run down (see last post on that business).

Last year at this time I was stuck at my parents' house in Perham during a blizzard. I spent nearly a week there and it reminded me that there are many different ways to live life. It was so incredibly boring there. There is only so much tv a person can watch, ice fishing, and sitting around pretty much doing whatever my dad wants to do (which is usually sitting around watching tv-and stupid tv too, and either complaining about other people or talking over and over again about the same thing). It was nice to get back home again after that. Then the spring was a whirlwind of work. I'm thankful that I made some great friends up in that area from work. I miss them and I hope to get back there for a visit soon.

I think I decided in March that I would start looking for something else. If you're a regular reader, you know the disdain I had over certain superintendents and an ineffectual board (which was all of the superintendents). I had big plans for that position for the next year and really didn't want to leave. It was one of the hardest decisions I've had to make -especially as it became real after I interviewed at Moorhead. It meant a hold off of being a director for quite some time, but it also meant that I would finally be part of a team. I've been wanting that for many years now.

In retrospect, although I'm quite confident I would have been able to implement most of the things I was hoping to, it would have been all on my own. Now I can implement stuff as a team and I have that support. That's important to me. I'm very grateful for the apartment I found. It's nice and affordable for the amenities it offers.

So, today I ventured out to do some shopping. I needed to replenish my wrapping paper and was able to find quite a bit of wrapping paper items that I can use year-round for many things -birthdays, weddings, babies, you name it. It was all super cheap too because of the after Christmas sales. I even bought a bunch of toys to have on hand when I have friends and relatives over who have kids. It's my goal to build that up a little more. I need some cars/trucks and stuff that boys like to play with as well as some older kid stuff like barbies, etc.

I've been lazing around lately and it's after 1am already and I'm not so tired. Sleeping in has been WONDERFUL, but I need to get back onto my regular waking up schedule of 5:30-6am. This will be a good week to get back into that. I have to work this week. Well, I don't HAVE to, I could take vacation days, but I have lots to get done before teachers and students come back. I have a dentist appt tomorrow in the afternoon and I decided to take the morning off too as vacation. Tuesday I will go in to get stuff done (first thing is to totally clean my office) and Wednesday I can finish up. Then it's another few days off that I get as Holidays. I still have about 7 books from the library yet to read, so I'll be working on that!! Also, I still want to make noodles from scratch & make chicken soup with them. My freezer will be completely stocked with various soups! I'll never have to cook again until at least late February!! haha.

That reminds me...I've been toying with the idea of getting a small (like 1.5 cu ft) freezer. That would enable me to have much more room for storage and I could make my own "tv dinners", if you will. When I come home from work, I am so tired and although that might change now that I'm medicated appropriately (again, see last post for that nugget of knowledge), I don't feel like cooking anything so popping stuff into the microwave for a quick meal suits me just fine. I should think about making another pot of chicken chili to bring to my Grandma Rotta's Christmas on Saturday. Geez...I should have bought that one crockpot that has the lid clasps for traveling when it was about $24 bucks last week. I need a new crockpot anyway because the one I have now is cracked and doesn't seem to heat as well as it used to. I guess that happens when stuff is about 10years old!! Haha.

I should think about getting to bed. It's nearly 2am now as I finish this up. I am such a night owl!!! Oh well. I look around my apartment and all I see are messes. I'll clean later...like Thursday or something!! Then I can take all the Christmas stuff down, wrap all of my gifts, and get the Christmas stuff packed away for another year.

Have a good one, faithful blog reader!! I hope that 2010 has been good to you and that you are looking forward to 2011. Life is what we make it, so be good to yourself, be thankful, enjoy the life you have and live it to its fullest...even if you piss other people off. You've got to stay true to yourself and make yourself happy. It's no one else's job than your own to make your life fantastic!

Peace to you all!!!

Merry Christmas!!

Hello faithful blog reader!! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and everyone you care about...and don't care about. :P

I secretly hate the holiday season. Not because it's busy, not because of all the merchandising around Christmas, and not because it's so darned difficult to stay away from food-like substances made with an abundance of butter and sugar. I have to say...this has been a very good holiday season for me. More than usual. Only a few times have I felt sorry for myself. Otherwise, I've felt content, happy, and thankful.

I used to hate having my family's Christmas celebration so far after Christmas (we usually do the second weekend in January). Now I LOVE it. That means I can spend Christmas truly relaxing and basking in the joy of Christmas. No, by "joy of Christmas" I do not mean a whiskey or wine induced state (LOL). I mean having time to really spend relaxing, reflecting, and lazing about. I've needed that a lot this past year.

Santa came a bit early for me and gave me the most unusual Christmas present. I have been feeling incredibly run down, tired, and (for lack of a better word) stupid lately. I attributed it to an overabundance of stress from work and working too much. While some of that may be true, I have modern science to thank for the most help in relieving that. So, I went for my physical this last week and after telling my doctor about my tiredness, etc and attributing it to job stress, she said, "well, there's no wonder you feel like you do, and I wouldn't attribute all of that to job stress....your vitamin D level is very low and so is your thyroid level." As we discussed my lab results further, she was clear that low vitamin D is a huge problem (I almost argued that it couldn't make that much difference in a person's health and she said, "yes it can, if a person is as deficient as you are"...oops.) and she rattled off a bunch of side effects of an out of whack thyroid and it matched every single one of my complaints. So I get to take 50,000units of vitamin D a week for 8 weeks ("normal" dosage is up to 14,000 units a week) and syntroid to regulate the thyroid. Wow. After 2 days of these prescriptions, I do not feel worn out, my eyes do not burn like they are too tired, and my constant headaches are gone.

So, santa brought me wellness this year -something I think we all need, if I were honest. He also brought me time to spend lazing around to recouperate and get back on the mend. I've got a week to "get better" before the rig-a-ma-role of work starts up again. Even though I have 3 days of office hours next week, that doesn't compare to the job when school is in session and teachers are there. Boy, am I looking forward to being back at 100%!!!!

Today I got up around 6am to take my synthroid, read a book, then have breakfast and coffee while I checked out the ads in the paper. I went back to bed around 8, got up again around 10 and back again until noonish. I'm kinda ready to go back to bed for a little bit again. One of the best Christmases I've had in a LONG time. Actually, since I was little I think!!!

My Christmas Eve was good as well. First, I slept in until I had to get up at noon, then I went to a service at my brother's church in DL in the afternoon. That was very, very enjoyable. He and his wife attend a nondenominational church and since my sister in law is 8-1/2 months pregnant, she was asked to play Mary in their outdoor manger exhibit with a live donkey. I got to hang out with my niece for a little bit and then I came home to read, watch some tv online, and sit around. Loved it.

For the rest of the day, I'm going to continue to read, snooze, and later when it gets dark I'm going to go for a drive to look at lights. I want to wrap Christmas gifts as well (I need to find one more gift for one of my nephews...I haven't found the perfect thing for him yet!) and take stock in my Christmas stuff to see what I should be picking up tomorrow when I hit the sales in all of the stores. Ok, in some of the stores. lol

So Merry Christmas to you and I hope you make this upcoming new year a year of contentment in your life and kindness to others. Enjoy who you are and what you do. You only have one life to live. :)

Mondays are Dumb.

I have nothing to say, so I'll share some pictures. Enjoy!!

it's beginning to look a lot like....too much snow!

More snow is in the forecast this weekend-we aren't supposed to get a lot, but those south of us are. My problem with it is that the snow south of us has to drain into the Red River of the North and therefore threatens to flood the town I FINALLY live in after taking the "long way around" to get here. There were plenty of flood prevention projects in the works this summer -mostly building levees and flood plain buy-outs (the city/county/whatever buying the houses of people who live on the flood plain and who get flooded every year). I don't believe this community has decided on what kind of flood diversion project they were support...there are implications for each model being examined.

Anyway, I was just thinking the other evening while leaving work that it was SO cold!! Then, I thought, geez angela -this is just the beginning of cold so you'd better get used of it!! Blech. I hate cold. But I hate lotsa heat more I guess.

Let's see, what's new? Nothing much. I'm super tired and it isn't yet 10:00 so I'm thinking of going to bed now. If the weather is good I am going to Ada tomorrow afternoon for an evening of games and fun. If the weather is not, then I am staying put. I have a gazillion books from the library to read and my Hulu queue is packed full of tv episodes I haven't had time to watch yet. I also need to take naps and get some sleep in. :)

But enough about me. How are you, dear blog reader? It's the holidays...are you stressed out? Do you feel left out? Or do you feel like everything is on your shoulders? Or do you feel loved and surrounded by people you are happy are in your life? However you feel during this busy and hectic holiday season, I hope that you find peace and spend some time in quiet reflection by yourself. The new year starts in a few weeks and if you're in the habit of making new year's resolutions, now is the time to reflect and think about what you want to commit to. I don't do new year's resolutions -if I do, they are things like "I will give myself more time for quiet and processing" or something like that. Yes, I need to lose some weight, but I don't keep resolutions like that. I do keep resolutions (mostly) of taking care of myself emotionally. I have learned to excel at that -probably out of survival need when I was a kid.

But anyway...I wish you a good holiday season. I re-read "The Gift of the Magi" the other day again. If you do anything, read anything, reflect on anything during this Christmas season...do it on that. Google the title and you'll get the full text (it's a short -short- story) -and because it's OLD, copyrights have run out so it's available online many places for free. Careful when you read it though, because it's written in "old style" conversation-type writing. If possible, find a summary in today's colloquialisms and jargon -but please read the original text too -it does a fine job of setting tone, setting, background, etc. Whenever I read it, I feel like I am THERE, watching this unfold. ...and if you ever wanted to figure out "just what IS irony, anyway???", this story is pretty much the epitome of irony!!

Time to hit the hay. A sure sign of getting old is going to be earlier on a Friday night than a weeknight- and staying in rather than running around! :) Take care!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh Woe Is Me!!

A very disappointing thing happened to me this evening. I realized that it is ONLY MONDAY today!!! Today, for some crazy weird reason, I thought it was Wednesday -and that continued through the entire day, to an after work visit to Caribou coffee to answer some work emails I didn't get to today, and to grocery shopping. Cognitively I knew it was not Wednesday because I remembered to pick up a ton on Lunchables that were on sale at Hornies and that sale ends Tuesday. I even left work "on time" today at 4:30!!

So tonight I was washing the lettuce I bought, thinking to myself, "well, what should I bring for lunch tomorrow because I'll be at the middle school and won't probably have time to eat something I have to warm up...thank God for my Lunchables!"...and then I started to think, "wait a minute...it is only MONDAY today!!!!!!!!!!"

Then I was sad.

I think this is symptomatic of my crazy schedule at work. Some "signs" have been coming my way lately about needing to wrangle my schedule (news articles about streamlining work & ways to shut the world out while you get work done, different Facebook friends posting quotes about making work NOT a priority in life, getting a tiny lecture from the doctor last week about resting not working, etc, etc, etc). So therefore, I am going to be kinder to myself after the new year. Wednesday mornings and Friday mornings are MINE -my office time. I have to pull back on my availability to fill in for meetings. I have to NOT feel guilty about spending a day in my office rather than in one of my buildings and just DO that. I need one full day in my office a week because the snippets of time is not working out for me. If I wait until the end of the teachers' day (3:45 for High school, 2:45 for middle school) to do my office work then I am at work until after 7pm. That's just not healthy nor is it a good use of my time anyway because my brain is usually fried then anyway -and I spend more time reviewing and responding to emails from that day rather than get any of my projects worked on. I'm vastly behind on that stuff. I have 3 days between Christmas and New Years that I have to work (the rest are holidays because Christmas & New Years are on a weekend this year), so that means that I can have 3 WHOLE days in a ROW with only my stuff to do. I've got a HUGE list. I'd like to get at least 2 things completely finished from that list.

So yeah, woe IS me because it's only Monday. However, I think I COULD look at it positively and think, "wow!!! I have 2 more extra days this week!" -like finding an extra $20 bill in your purse (which NEVER happens to me!!) :( oh well.

Christmas isn't too far away. I am excited to go for drives and look at lights. Maybe I should do a little of that right now....nah, I'll stay in and read a book that has to go back to the library by the end of the week. See???? There!!! I have 2 more extra days now to read the book that must be returned on Saturday!

A silver lining in a stormy cloud. :)

Hooray for Weekends...

So, I've been meaning to put in a blog entry for some time. I've also been meaning to get ND plates for my car, but you know how it goes!! A day off turns into a sick-in-bed day and good intentions all day long turn into I-have-no-time-to-get-away because I think my schedule is actually a living, breathing thing...it schedules me back to back with things at the last minute. Hmmmmm....maybe if I scheduled time to go to the title/registration place (like 2 mns from my apt), that wouldn't happen...huh. Next week I pledge to block off 1-2 hours of vacation time to take care of that FINALLY!!!

However, since it is finally a weekend, I have time to post. -Well, I guess feeling better has something to do with that too.

So as you have read from my last post, I was sick. Seriously, I stayed home from work for 1-1/2 days -and it takes a lot to keep me home. Hopefully the Physician's Assistant who I saw on Weds for this sickness doesn't see this because she said I was to GO HOME after I saw her at noon on Wednesday because I was running a fever. Anyway, here's the story:

So, as you know from my previous posts, I have been sick. Thanksgiving through the weekend I have been sick with a cold. Then, on Monday, that cold turned more nasty- or I noticed that it was not getting better, but worse...no matter what I did to care for that cold. I stayed at work most of the day on Monday (I left slightly before or right at 4:30), but then on Tuesday, I stayed home and I slept most of the day. Also, between Monday evening and today (actually), I have gone through at least two whole boxes of Kleenex. OMG, I've had an ASTRONOMICAL amount of snot. wow. And I've taken most of my monthly "stipend" of sudafed...a person can get 48 tablets a month without a prescription, and I have only 10 tablets left...in ONE week I've consumed 38 tablets -that's 19 doses. And don't get me started on the mucinex either! BUT, I can buy a gazillion bottles of that and not get arrested. haha....ok, I digress.

I went to the doc on Wednesday. I was gonna go on Tuesday because I had taken that entire day off as a sick day. BUT, I felt like crap and it was nasty weather out (damn near a blizzard, actually) so I stayed home and slept most of the day. So, Wednesday I ended up staying home until noonish. Then I went to the Sanford Fastrack Clinic at CashWise in Moorhead. Ok, so you're saying, "you went to a clinic housed in a GROCERY STORE???" yes. I did. I KNEW I had a sinus infection and needed antibiotics -I even know what kind works for me when it gets like this (augmentin), so the hell with playing Russian Roulette to see if I could get an appt with my "real" doctor when I needed it (actually, I tried, but no appts were available until late afternoon or Thursday). I just needed antibiotics...and you can't pick those up over the counter!!

Fastrack is staffed by physician assistants. The one on duty Wednesday was a nice, older lady who told me everything I already know about sinus infections, BUT, she was very responsive to me and didn't make me annoyed or mad -so I was nice too. I actually had a fever. I normally run about a degree or more below 98.6 when I'm healthy (I'm usually 96.7 to 97.7 regularly) and my temp at the doc was between 99 and 100. So along with my diagnosis, she actually made me promise that I would only spend an hour at work (I told her I had to go in and do some office work -because she said I should go home RIGHT away) and then go home to bed. I feel bad because I totally broke that promise (I was there until after 4:30), but anyway, I had an obvious ear infection, an obvious sinus infection, and she speculated that I had early bronchitis...or, rather, I would develop bronchitis if I did not nip the ear & sinus infection in the bud right away.

So now it's Saturday. I've been on antibiotics for 3 full days now. I do feel better, but I had to take a nap this afternoon between getting my mom's stained glass panel done and meeting a friend for dinner. I'm more tired -and it's been weird to remember to take my antibiotics. It's been a while since I was sick enough for them. In fact, last year, I did not need antibiotics for anything. Yes, I needed narcotic pain relievers for a torn off toenail and gallbladder attacks, but no antibiotics. LOL

Geez, that reminds me!!! Thank GOD I decided to blog about going to the doctor....I almost forgot to take my next dose of antibiotics! So I have blogger.com to thank about my need to take my medicine. What a cool tool blogger.com is!! haha.

Hey, you heard me mention that today I got my mom's stained glass panel finished, right? That's correct. It is done. I won't describe it or show it because it's a surprise, but....I will post a picture after I give it to her. I'll post pictures of all of the stained glass projects (and fused glass!!) that I've done so far. Next on the agenda are some panels to hang in my vaulted ceiling windows. The studio I've found in Fargo is MUCH cheaper than the one in Grand Rapids. Mom's project was $100 less in Fargo than it would have been at the studio in Grand Rapids. AND, the studio owner in Fargo is more "authentically artistic" than retail-ish. Not that retail-ish is bad, but the Stained Glass Workshop in Fargo is definitely the "real deal" and an example of an actual studio that is designed with the fundamental elements of stained glass craft than with the retail aspect of stained glass, as the Grand Rapids shop is. Does that make sense??? It's getting late and my nap this afternoon was cut short due to meeting a friend for dinner -so I feel as if I'm babbling. :)

Time to get some shut-eye. Rest assured, dear blog readers...I am on the mend. By next Wednesday I should feel 99% better. By next Saturday, I should feel spectacular!! :)

Thanks for tuning in!! Have a GREAT week and be nice to each other - apologize for the wrongs you've done if you have done so. Friends & especially family should be forgiving of one another.