Lessons Learned

No photos and no layouts for these…yet. I feel a couple may be calling for layouts

~Sleep – sometimes more necessary than exercise

I try to keep a rein on my desire to crawl back into bed after the males leave for the day. Usually I accomplish this by talking myself into going to the gym with that old adage, you’ll feel better after exercising. And really, 95% of the time I do. But DH has been gone this week and my insomnia has been worse than usual. I think I slept 2 non-consecutive hours Wed night and while I did put on my work out clothes and walked the kids to the bus stop, I came home removed those clothes & put my pjs back on. I was worn out tired. The sort of tired that might just cause me an injury at the gym. Probably I would feel good after working out. But not rested and I really really needed to feel rested. I was back in bed at 7:30. I woke up at 9:30 and thought “get up now, things to do”  then I thought “what? what do I need to do this morning? nothing. there is silence. no one to disturb me. no one needs me.” and I rolled over and woke up at 11am. I feel good to

~ Books seem shorter on the Kindle

I know it’s a perception problem but it seemed like Wicker Appetite, Janet Evanovich’s latest, was really really short. I watched the progress bar at the bottom as I read and was constantly thinking “50%? so soon? 62% already? 98%, it can’t be?”. So when I was in Target Wednesday I took a moment to compare the thickness of the hardback copy with the thickness of the hardback copy of Sizzling Sixteen, which I own & read in hardback & seemed longer than Wicked Appetite.

They were the SAME SIZE. Then I had to go pick up “The Nasty Bits” by Tony Bordain and once again, the hardback book seemed so much more substantial than the Kindle book I read.

That is going to take some getting used to.

~Rice cooked in a steamer – not as easy as it appears

And I have 2 cups of undercooked rice floating in water after 90 minutes steaming to prove it

~ Never read new books after 8pm if you want to sleep at night.

Part of the insomnia problem is an over stimulated brain caused by reading new books before going to bed, and reading them longer because they seem shorter on the Kindle.  I had gotten into a habit of switching my reading material in the evening to old familiar books, like Agatha Christie. Things I could recite in my sleep, so they don’t get my mind all worked up, but I got 3 new books this week and with DH not being around to talk to and nothing much interesting on tv, I indulged myself and read them right up to bedtime and occasionally past bedtime. If I have had 12 hours sleep this week (including the 3 I had napping Thursday morning) I’d be surprised.

~ Soaking the dirty lasagna pan before washing is useful, over soaking it is just nasty

No comment necessary I think

 

I sort of wish I had taken a photo of the steamed rice soup, because it does lend itself to a layout and my mind has more or less designed a layout for the sleep being more important than exercise one as well. I don’t think anyone will be more surprised than me at how my book of this project finally turns out.

and lessons relearned

I know better. I know I know better because I did this post about it only a month ago.

CHECK THE TAKE OUT ORDER BEFORE LEAVING THE RESTUARANT!

In my defense, it was my favorite sushi place* and they have NEVER, ever, in 4 years, made a mistake on my order, even when the person on the phone spoke as little English as I speak Japanese (I can count to 5 and say hello, which does not qualify me for a job in Japan taking calls at a hamburger place, but Miko was wonderful on the phone despite it).

And this time? It was a native English speaker. I ordered a Spicy Girl roll and got a Spicy Tuna roll.

Sure, not as heinous as giving me a green pepper and pineapple pizza when I ordered pepperoni & chicken, and that order was taken by a computer! (I at least like spicy tuna rolls & did not have to make a 45 minute round trip to exchange food) but still.

Not what I ordered.

Spicy girl rolls have 3 kinds of fish and are wrapped in soybean sheets. Spicy tuna rolls have just tuna and are wrapped in nori.  I was looking forward to that roll.

I never pull away from a fast food drive up window without going through the bags & making sure everything, even the condiments, I ordered is in there. Fast food is busy, the wrong things get grabbed & stuffed into bags. The wrong bags get grabbed. Been there, worked that, made that mistake myself more than once.  But I am a bit slack about take out from sit down restaurants. They do less of it so they seem to take more time about it & often go through the order with me when I pick it up if it is more than 2 things.

I guess such a long string of good luck is bound to get broken sooner or later & I need to remember to check everything everywhere because mistakes happen.

*disclaimer – this sounds like I have just so many sushi places to choose from but really there’s two in a 35 mile radius, which, granted, is a hell of a lot of sushi for the middle of nowhere. They are owned by the same family, who also own a place in the city an hour away, where we used to go frequently back before we had to haul babies around with us everyplace we went. The coming of the first sushi place 4 years ago was akin to the arrival of civilization in the wilderness. Gosh, we wondered, what next? a bookstore? But no…4 years later, still no bookstore.

Lessons Learned

As often happens when I make sweeping statements on the internet like “the kids are sleeping through the night”, suddenly the opposite happens and the kids are up at all hours.

Last week I said I was not going to try & scrap my lessons learned. Nor was I going to take photos.

Yeah, well, sorta I suppose.

I did two layouts, with photos last night,

 

So just in case that is how it works:

I’m going to try to put on 20 pounds in the next two months!

I’m going to attempt recklessly spending $1000 before Xmas

I want to stay up all night, every night!

So there!

Lessons Learned

I am once again taking shimelle’s Learn Something New Everyday class this month. This is my 3rd year doing it and my first lesson learned was

“Lowered Expectations are not Necessarily a Bad Thing”

I’m not going to do a layout of a lesson every day. It’s never happened and probably it never will. My priorities and lifestyle do not allow for a layout a day, even if I give myself all of October to complete those layouts. I can just about pull it off for Journal Your Christmas but that is more focused than LSNED.

I’m not going to do a photo a day of the lessons I learned. Should the lessons coincide with a photo, great, bonus for me, but I am already 249 days into my 365 Photo project and after 3 years of 365 projects I am perilously close to burnt out on photos (see next lesson) so I am going to be low key on taking even more photos.

I am going to journal every lesson.

In a notebook.

I know. How low tech can you be?

It’s not even decorated or doodled in. It’s just the $1 notepad on my desk by my computer.

But I write constantly in it, all day long. To do lists, to call lists, random thoughts, ideas for layouts, ideas for posts, things I want to buy, books I want to read. Adding the lesson I learned & my thoughts on it is easy, intuitive and what I have been doing for 3 years anyway. This year I decided to take the pressure off of creating & publishing it. It’s in the notebook. Good enough.

Many will make good blog posts, like this one, some will have accompanying photos, some many even become layouts. And I can merge all of them into a photo book when I feel motivated to do so.

My next lesson was

“There is Such a Thing as Too Many Photos”

Really. There is. I know this is heresy to scrapbookers but after spending a weekend editing and backing up 6 months of photos it is clear I take too damn many pictures.

Part of it is understandable, the urge to document is strong; the need to take multiple shots so you can pick the ‘best one’; with a DSLR there is the need to adjust your exposure & aperture & take a variety of shots with different ones, especially if you are learning about these things; there is the ease of holding the button down and firing off multiple shots with no effort. Then there is the 365 project which is not to TAKE one photo a day but to CHOOSE one photo a day to represent your day. You can take dozens that day if you feel like it, then pick the best, which is what I have had a tendency to do.

The rest of it is just overkill in my mind. I’ve had my D40 almost two years now. Taking 20 shots of the same thing at various angles is a bad habit I let myself get into & I am breaking it now. If I can’t get a clear decent shot in 4-5 snaps (and the vast majority of my photos are candid shots), maybe I’m just not meant to get that shot & just how many photos of my 7 year old on a swing do I actually need? 

Just because I can take a kajillion photos doesn’t mean I *should*.

DH & the demons went camping this weekend. They did not ask about & I did not give them a camera to take with them. Failure to document one camping trip is not the end of the world.

Though I admit my hands are a bit shaky when I think about it. What if Havoc goes fishing & catches a snake? That would be such a great photo for a layout. What if Mayhem gets stuck up in a tree? There will be NO evidence of it. I need a photo for a blog post about it.

Photography withdrawal.

It’s a sad thing