Category Archives: Daily Grind

Numbers

Blogging
12 – Days since I’ve posted an entry on this blog. Not nearly as long of a drought as it feels like.
62 – Days since I’ve posted an entry on Spacebar. Now that’s a drought.

Traveling
1,400 – Miles driven last week in the span of three days when I went to Kansas with my parents to pick up a wardrobe and tried to go to a friend’s wedding.
1 – Kansas ditches I drove through during a snow storm in an attempt to get to said friend’s wedding.
14 – Hours I spent in the car on Saturday after driving through a snowstorm, giving up on making it to the wedding, and then re-routing my trip through Nebraska.
75 – Speed limit in Nebraska, God bless ’em.
3 – CDs I bought in Des Moines, Iowa to keep me awake for the final 230 miles home.
1.5 – Times I was able to listen to each CD before they jammed in the CD changer the day after I got home.

Volunteering
13 – Average hours per month for youth group events (four 2-hour Wednesday nights, one 2-hour meeting, one 3-hour special event).
16 – Hours we spent at youth group this month (two 2-hour Wednesday nights, one 4-hour Christmas party, one 8-hour Operation Christmas Child/Chronicles of Narnia event).
20 – Hours of youth group events we skipped out on (two 8-hour clean-a-thon events to clean up the church’s new addition, one 2-hour Wednesday night, one 2-hour meeting).

Ignoring
215 – E-mails in my inbox needing to be sorted, deleted or (gulp) answered.
8 – Other e-mail inboxes on my computer that we dare not count how many e-mails they contain.
1,894 – Total unopened e-mails on my system, thanks in large part to spam, publicists and e-mail newsletters.
4,241 – Unread blog entries in Bloglines (not counting the Craigslist classifieds).
120 – Total blog feeds tracked in Bloglines.

Expecting
30 – Days until the baby’s due date.
14 – Working days Abby has left until the baby comes (assuming it comes on the due date)
10 – Days left in 2005.
7 – Days until my anniversary.
6 – Days until massive 11-month freelance project is due.
3 – Days until Christmas.
1 – Working days Abby has left in 2005.

Beating the Summer Heat

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks it’s hot. My solution is to work summer hours. Get up as early as possible (6:00 a.m. this morning) and work until about 11:00 a.m. when it starts getting hot. Then go do something else. Today that involved bike riding, which sounds stupid since it’s hot outside, but once you get outside and start sweating, hot is hot.

Then around 6:00 p.m. you can start working again. Though it helps to shower first. The evening’s probably the worst since the house has been roasting all day and it doesn’t cool down until well after dark, but what are you going to do?

My other solution is to try working downstairs where it’s cooler and we have ceiling fans, or hole myself up in the bedroom with our window air conditioner. I’ve contemplated working in the basement, too.

I also work in nothing but my shorts (No iSight chats for me!) and have lots of Flavor Ice. Thankfully Minnesota only has a handful of 90+ days (I heard an average of 15 somewhere the other day). I can handle -9 no problem, it’s the heat that melts my brain.

Biking For Work in St. Paul

I biked almost 15 miles today. I didn’t mean to, it just sort of happened. It started as a quick morning bike ride as exercise of sorts. Not that I usually exercise. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m usually sedentary man, with occassional bursts of exercise so rare they require blog updates. But I recently landed a freelance job to rewrite the trail guide I helped put together five years ago, and that means lots of biking. So I set out this morning for a quick ride to get back in the saddle.

Continue reading Biking For Work in St. Paul

It’s a Good Thing I’m Married

If I weren’t married I’d be such a freak. Abby’s off at some teacher conference today and most of tomorrow, and the lack of a semi-stable spouse really throws me for a loop.

I ate lunch at 12:30, two hours later than normal. Usually I eat lunch when Abby comes home on her lunch break, which works out pretty nicely. But since she didn’t come home, I kept working until I realized I was hungry, then kept working until I finished what I was doing. Same thing happend for dinner, which meant I didn’t start dinner until 7:00. But I did make dinner

Brownies 1, Kevin 0

I had a brilliant plan. Brownie mix, pecan pieces, carmel. I’d make my own brownies to rival the tempting carmel brownies at the Starbucks, situated so enticingly in the middle of Barnes & Noble. I’d have a week’s worth of snacks for the same price as one indulgence.

Easier said than done.

The edge of the pan is hard as a rock. I nearly bent the spatula. The center of the pan is chewy–too chewy. You can taste carbon. They’re not exactly burnt, but they’re not right either. The carmely nut goodness drizzled across the top has kept me from chiselling the whole pan into the trash, but it will happen soon enough.

See you at Barnes & Noble.

Vocational Defintion

There’s nothing quite as depressing as entering your receipts in Quicken and seeing where you stand financially (who balances their check book anymore? that’s such an antiquated term). Unless you’re loaded, I suppose. Then it’d be kind of fun.

I made it worse tonight by running a year end report so I could send some figures to the tax guy. Sheesh. Surprisingly, I actually made some money this year, and considering I started my own business that’s amazing. Every day I’m surprised that I can still do this freelance writing thing. I keep expecting to tell my wife, “Well, that’s it. I better call up Target and see if they have any openings.”

Continue reading Vocational Defintion

Efficiency of Late

Well, my latest attempts to take advantage of Abby’s Monday night grad school classes haven’t gone so well. My Read/Write Mondays have more often than not been a chance to catch up on work. Well, not so much catch up, but make up for less than efficient days.

I did manage to plough through several Harry Potter volumes and have done a fair amount of blogging on Monday nights. So it’s not like I’m a complete failure.

I am finding it hard to sit at my desk and do “work” all day long and into the evening. Especially in the summer when it’s hot and sticky in the afternoon. Tonight I worked into the evening, then started catching up on some not-as-urgent work. Just before it got dark and the mosquitos came out in full force I went out to the front yard to pull weeds. Despite the many things I want to blog about, my mind is busy, my eyes bleary, and my wrists on the edge. Sometimes you need to do work of a different variety.

I’m not a gardener. I really don’t like it. But it gave me a lot of satisfaction weeding the hill we filled in with ground cover a few weeks back. I was amazed to see how the little plants spread, both growing larger and wider (actually beginning to covering the ground) as well as launching some new satellite plants.

Then I took Speak around the blog, came home to write about it, and now Abby’s home. So no more time to rant, which is probably OK.

I can’t get no motivation

Click for a larger version
This is a crazy week. I have to finish editing a book by Friday (well, technically Saturday, but I’m calling it Friday), I have to prepare a blog seminar by next Wednesday, Friday is our youth group’s missions dinner — which involves a lot of prep and a lot of stress, and Sunday through Wednesday is the EPA convention, which is a major networking opportunity for my new business, so I’ve been scrambling to get business cards printed, polish up my web site, and other business-y things. I’m also supposed to have an issue of my youth group’s newsletter ready to go to press next Friday.

And what do I do today? I stay in bed until 8:35, and now it’s 9:06, I’m still in my pajamas writing a blog. And I desperately need a shower, so it’ll be at least 9:30 before I start work. Have I mentioned I’ve been having problems getting up in the morning? I thought stress would be a motivator, but apparently not.

Yesterday I worked some long hours, punctuated by a few breaks (including Freeks & Geeks, a new Mario Cart “Baby Park” time trial record in the 1:15 range, watching the Red Wings lose, and the picture above). I do like my stay-at-home job and this whole new business thing, I just need to work on the motivation. Maybe it’s just the motivation to get out of bed. Nothing happens if I stay in bed like missing the bus or being yelled at, so I lie there. Part of me feels like I need more sleep now, but I think I’m just not forcing myself to get up even when I’m tired. It used to be that I just shook that morning tiredness off because I had to. Now I don’t have to, so I give in.

I think I’m also at a point where I need to blog. That’s why I’m still typing. I have thoughts swirling around my head, and if I don’t get them out they’ll distract me all day.

It’s 9:55. I’m finished blogging. No more distractions? Please.