Ahhhhh holiday weekend

We had a busy weekend in the NSC household.

• I got off work early on Friday and proceeded to clean the first floor of our house. We really needed it. Not quite what I wanted to do to start out a three day weekend, but when it needs to get done…

• CP and I made a delicious dinner of Kibbe meat sticks on the grill, tabbouleh salad and chopped veggies with a tahini dressing on top (all Lebanese dishes). Yum! It went quite well with light beer. :-)

• Buster didn’t pee in the house once the entire weekend! It was so nice to not have to break out the mop for a few days!

• We weeded our various gardens and the front yard.

• Bought and installed new cedar window boxes for the front of the house (the old owners had cheap plastic ones that were falling apart) and new two new planter boxes for our front step.

• Took Buster and Koda on a few walks- including an hour long walk yesterday before it got too hot. Buster was great and lasted through the entire walk….and then promptly fell asleep for hours once we got home.

• CP smoked ribs and a beef brisket all day on Sunday. He made two different barbeque sauces to put on top, along with a sweet potato salad and beans. Yum but not so healthy….

• We tried to watch Inception but the Directv download didn’t work properly so we ended up watching the Swedish versions of The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. They were pretty good. It will be interesting to see how Hollywood does the films.

• Buster doesn’t understand the meaning of sleeping in on holiday weekends….so he woke us up at 5am every morning. To combat that I ended up taking three naps yesterday!!! No wonder I feel so rested today!
  
  How was your holiday weekend?
  
  
  By the way, anyone else having problems commenting through Blogger? I have been trying to comment on posts but the site kicks me out and tells me that I am not signed in. Very frustrating!!

Confession

I am a very curious person. I’ll admit that I do like to “stalk” people on Facebook. It’s always interesting to see what people are up to these days if you haven’t seen them in a long time. Being bored at work yesterday I went looking for my ex boyfriend. I was curious if he ever finished grad school and where he was working. We are not Facebook friends anymore because at some point he couldn’t handle seeing CP in my pictures, hearing that I was happy with someone else, etc.

Not able to find him on Facebook, I googled his name and finally found him on LinkedIn. Most of his profile was private so I had to “friend” him to see what he was up to. He accepted and then sent a short email saying that he hoped that I was doing well. I ended up emailing him back and asking how he was doing, where he was working, etc. I received a LONG email about the past couple of years, his unhappiness over choices he has made, student loan debt and how he is currently trying to finish his thesis/couch surfing while job hunting.

I replied with some suggestions as he is looking for work in an industry similar to mine and told him about buying a house in CT, getting a puppy, hating my job, etc. He responded with part of the email bashing homeownership and dogs. That’s fine if it is not your cup of tea, but no reason to bash my choices in life. His response basically snapped me back into reality. Why did I contact him anyway? It’s been YEARS since I have talked to him or even thought about him. My original email was innocent in nature- bored at work and curious as to how life is turning out for him.

But if CP found out that I contacted him, that might not go over so well (CP is not controlling- this is just the ex that was trying to get me back after I started dating CP). If he is going to be all depressed over the way his life turned out and bash my life, then why do I need to talk to him anyways? So I deleted the email and won’t respond. But I feel guilty for contacting him in the first place.

Chalk it up to a life lesson that I should have learned years ago…..

Anyone else do something stupid like this with an ex?

A cautionary tale

As you guys know, I have been trying to decrease the number of chemicals both in our food (shopping for organic fruits/veggies and trying not eat processed foods) and in the products in our house. CP is completely on board with the food choices we make after reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma. (Haven’t read it yet? PLEASE DO.)

He is a bit more skeptical of green products. After reading some of the ingredients in toothpastes, I decided a while back that we were going to switch to Burt’s Bees toothpaste. Why not go a bit more natural with something that is in your mouth and that you ingest even without meaning to?

Well, after my dentist’s visit this week, I will be switching back to a chemical-laden toothpaste. I went in for my regular visit and the dentist found that I was starting to get a cavity in between two teeth. I had never even heard about that happening and it is not my regular m.o. for cavities! I asked the dentist if Burt’s Bees could potentially be the problem, and he thought that the toothpaste most likely didn’t have enough fluoride in it. While I hate to switch to his recommended Colgate Total, I hate cavities even more.

The moral of the story? I will continue to purchase green products and make good choices based on the ingredients of the products, but maybe not in my toothpaste.

Have you guys had a similar problem with a green/more organic product?

Sprouting seeds

At the beginning of the month CP and I planted the following seeds:

Beets

Carrots (two kinds)

Bibb Lettuce

Romaine Lettuce

Spinach

Bok Choy

Kale

Swiss Chard

Zucchini

Leeks

Brussel Sprouts

Sugar Snap Peas

Green Pole Beans

Yellow Wax Beans

Bush Cucumbers

We weren't sure what to expect because last year we only planted romaine lettuce, red leaf lettuce and carrots from seed. But so far most everything is doing great!

The start of cucumbers.

Our snap peas. I guess my rows were not very straight.... :-)


Zucchini plants that will eventually take over the raised bed! (Notice the fencing- we put that up because Buster kept jumping into the bed!)

From left to right: Bibb lettuce (in back), Romaine lettuce (not doing as well in front of it), Kale (in back), Spinach (in front), Bok Choy and finally, Swiss Chard.

I can't wait for fresh veggies! If these babies make it (we still have to cull the inferior plants to make sure that there is room for everything to grow), we will have saved a bunch of money over last year because it is so much less expensive to buy seeds than to buy already-started-for-you plants!

A typical day with Buster

1am- one of us gets up to take him outside to go to the bathroom. He hopefully does his business, comes back inside the house and goes back to sleep. This, of course, does not always happen and he thinks that it is playtime.

5am- CP wakes up and jumps in the shower. This wakes up Buster and he starts to bark, whine, etc. This also wakes me up even though my alarm is not supposed to go off until 6am. CP takes the dogs out and feeds them.

6am- I wake up and play with Buster to try to tire him out. This morning I went for a run afterwards before getting ready for work and that is supposed to wake me up right? Well it had the opposite effect on me and I am ready to fall asleep at my desk. :-(

7:30am- take dogs out again before leaving for work.

12pm- rush home during my lunch hour to take the dogs out, eat lunch, feed Buster, clean up any puppy messes and try to play with Buster to tire him out. Two days a week I won’t have to rush too much as I will be working from home, but the other three days it is going to be stressful to try to get home and back to the office within an hour.

5pm- rush home from work to take dogs out, clean up any puppy messes and play with the dogs.

6pm- feed dogs. FB always gets fed first (it’s especially fun trying to hold back a puppy that is lunging for FB’s food. That’s guaranteed to not end well if he bothers her while she is eating).

7:30pm- take Buster out to hopefully go to the bathroom.

9pm- walk Buster to try to tire him out.

Yeah, having a puppy is TIRING. I appreciate FB and her calm demeanor even more these days. Buster was supposedly the “calm” one who would be good for a home with an older dog. He was calm and quiet for the first day…. He has already tried to hump me and FB to assert his dominance (yeah right buddy) and we think that he is going to be one stubborn dog.

Hopefully he learns his place in the family soon. It’s hard to be mad because he is just so darn cute.

Tug

Despite CP’s worries about the urologist appointment regarding his sperm analysis, he came back from the appointment last month upbeat and laughing. You see, the doctor that he saw was in his 70s but referred to CP’s testes as his balls, swore a lot and genuinely made CP feel comfortable because of his casual attitude.

Basically, the doctor told him that a single sperm analysis test doesn’t mean anything. The 4% “good sperm” number is low, but it could have been influenced by something such as a cold several months back. Across the US sperm counts are dropping and no one knows why.

CP was told to go back to the clinic, watch some more porn and give two more samples about a month apart. If both of those samples come back with abnormal results then CP will get referred to a sperm specialist.

Of course at the end of the appointment, the doctor did have to give CP’s balls a tug to make sure they were okay. LOL.

---------------------------------------------------------------

The second sperm analysis results are back. CP's good sperm percentage dropped to 2%. He will go back in a month to get them checked again, but this is NOT good.

While we wait for his third sperm analysis, I am going to call my doctor to find out our other options.

Next month it will be a year of trying without getting pregnant. I think that we are then considered infertile. Awesome (please note my sarcasm).

iPhone

Last week I was finally able to upgrade my Blackberry Curve to an iPhone. My two year agreement with Verizon was up and it was time to cash in my discount!

Because I already have an iTouch I thought that I knew a lot about the phone. Turns out I am wrong. My coworker also has the AT&T version and told me that the earbuds that they give you are actually a hands-free device! You can use the earbuds to answer phone calls and end phone calls. So cool. I would have never guessed that.

I already have a few good applications. I tend to only download the free ones because you can start to spend a whole lotta money otherwise. :-)

Some of my applications include:

Iheartradio
Nook
Angry birds
Yelp
Shazam
Tosh.O
Mapquest
Weather channel
Daily Show
Urban spoon
ESPN
NPR
Goodreads
Facebook
Wikipedia
ShopSavvy
AroundMe

So here is where you come in. Do you have an iPhone? What application do you absolutely LOVE? Tell me about some more cool features on the phone because I am clueless!

Debt

Pretty soon (hopefully within this next month or so), CP and I will be able to say that we are credit card debt free. It has been a long road. We have both learned a lot about budgeting, our spending habits, what we prioritize and what we (still) need to work on.

Over a year ago, CP and I sat down with the program Quicken. We entered in ALL of our bills. Rent, cable, telephone, insurance, etc. We estimated what we spend on food, entertainment, household, personal care and other categories. After the first month we adjusted the budget based on our expenses the previous month. We have had to adjust a couple of times since then to add or subtract categories based on what is going on in our life.

Every week we sit down with Quicken to see how we are doing. If we know that we are going to spend more one month on a specific category (for instance: the month we put the raised beds together we knew we were going to spend more in the household category), then we do our best to decrease our spending elsewhere. Then at the end of every month we sit down and figure out how much money we have left over to throw at our credit cards. Some months it is more than others. And on the months where we can throw a bunch of money at our debt? It feels great.

Buying our house almost a year ago made paying off our debt a bit harder. Our mortgage payment is more than our rent used to be, but at least we are gaining equity.

So what are we going to do once we have our credit cards paid off? We are not headed off on an expensive trip to celebrate. We are going to put together a plan to build up some savings. We are going to put more money into our retirement accounts for the future. We are going to think ahead to future needs (Kids? Home improvements?). We are NOT going to get into credit card problems again.

How do you handle your finances? Are you also trying to pay off credit card debt?

Random questions

1. Why is it that the people I see roaring down our not busy suburban street are all of the mothers in minivans with kids in the back seat? The SAME MOTHERS that have a “Drive like your kids live here” sign in their front yard???

2. I understand that people are not as crunchy as I am these days. But why would you get pesticides sprayed on your lawn if you have a dog? I have to keep my dog off your lawn when I am walking her because of the chemicals- but yet you are subjecting your dog to the chemicals every day? I don’t get it.

3. It is supposed to be 70 degrees outside today. But yet I am in my office with cold hands and a fleece on because I am freezing. It’s really just the suite that I sit in that is so cold. The rest of the office is perfectly fine.

4. Why does my throat start to hurt the day before a 12-mile run?? Hopefully I’m not getting sick. The lack of sleep lately can’t be helping things.

5. Why are puppies born with a lack of fear? Buster jumped off our back stairs “Superman style” last night while CP was watering the herbs. The stairs are probably at least 4 feet off the ground. Almost gave CP a heart attack. (Buster’s fine)

What are you wondering about this Friday?

Meet Buster

Meet our new puppy Buster!


His first night was rough. I had run 11 miles that morning and was exhausted by 9pm because I never got a nap. I went upstairs to try to sleep while the puppy howled and whined because he wasn't happy being locked away from us. He was also sad because he couldn't find his brothers and sisters.

CP stayed downstairs for a bit and fell asleep on the couch. He heard a crash and suddenly the puppy was next to him, wagging his tail. The puppy had busted through the gate we had put up for him. And thus the puppy became Buster.

CP then put Buster in the Xpen (a metal playpen) for the night and stayed downstairs with him. Every two hours or so Buster would bark, whine, howl, etc. for about a half an hour like he was training for the opera. Although I was upstairs, I could still hear him and didn't get much sleep that night.

Meeting Fuzzy Britches for the first time.


Snuggling up to Fuzzy Britches. FB allowed it for 10 whole minutes!

Buster being playful.

So far it is going okay. I worked from home Monday and today and took the day off yesterday. The last two nights I have set an alarm for 1am and taken him out. Last night he decided that he needed to play until 2am which was especially frustrating. But that's life with a puppy!

Puppy tomorrow

Thankfully Fuzzy Britches seems to be back to normal again. She is interested in her toys, hangs out with us during dinner and while we are watching television and even took a 30 minute walk with me last night. We are still watching her like a hawk, but hopefully this was a one time occurrence.

Meanwhile, tomorrow I have to run 11 MILES. Not sure how long it going to take me- 2 hours or so? I have only fit one run in earlier this week so hopefully my body doesn’t rebel during the run. Weather.com is predicting showers which is NOT going to help me get up tomorrow morning. The 10 miles was cold and gross in the rain- I don’t want to add another mile on during bad weather.

But….by the time I finish my run CP should be back with the yet-to-be-named puppy. He wants to see him and bring him home before naming him. My top two favorite names are Rocky and Tank (since we already know he is going to be HUGE). CP thinks that we need to name him something fun and kid-like since he will be around when we have kids.*

I promise puppy pictures next week!


*That’s a whole ‘nother post- the fact that he still believes that we are going to get pregnant even though we have been trying for a year….

Next

This week we had an audit team come into our office to see how we were doing, make sure we were following company rules and procedures, etc. (because I need MORE stress in my life right now- HA!)

While in a meeting with two of the auditors, a coworker and my boss yesterday, one of the auditors asked what makes me stay in my position. Hopefully my face didn’t give it away (there is a reason that I am not allowed to play poker- my face is too expressive!), but I tried to answer as best as I could.

Meanwhile, all I could think of in the back of my head was that I am NOT staying in this position because it doesn’t challenge me and I am BORED. I hate being bored. I also hate the fact that I am not very busy. It makes me feel like I am wasting my time. I hate wasting my time. I hate not using my brain.

So I have the following plan to find a new job and specifically a new CAREER:

*Write down my strengths
*Figure out what sort of tasks I would like to perform at my next job
*Listen to two broadcasts put together by my undergrad career center on trying to figure out what you want to do. Yes these are probably more geared towards people that are just starting out in their career, but I figure it can’t hurt. I haven’t found THE career that I want to pursue yet.
*Once I get a sense of things that I may want to do, I will also have to figure out average salaries. We depend on my salary to help pay our mortgage and the bills so I can’t drop too far from my current salary.

Am I missing anything?

The nice thing is I still have a job that isn’t going anywhere while I look for a new one. Unless a fabulous job pops up that I simply.must.have. I expect to stay here until at least mid-August. That’s when I am vested in my retirement plan and my company has been matching my contributions so there is no reason to give that up.

But yeah. My time here is up. Definitely time to move on. I’ve given my company three years to prove that it can challenge me and it has failed. Next!

Needed: confidence

Poor CP. I have been down lately and couple that with lack of sleep? I start crying and sound a teensy-weensy bit crazy. Just a warning- this post IS going to be all over the place.

Example: our conversation while making dinner was about an article I saw on NPR about not being able to read everything that is deemed “great”, about not seeing every “great” movie, “great” television show, etc. There just isn’t enough time. I bridged that thought with the fact that there are facts out there, facts that are important to our nation’s history, facts that I SHOULD know or that I DID know at one point, that I no longer can recall. And that makes me sad. Partially because some of the facts are important and things that I do believe people should know, but partially because I don’t want to look stupid because I don’t know these facts.

CP then told me that I care too much about what others think of me. I completely agree with that statement. I NEVER want to look stupid. When I am writing something I make sure that I spell everything correctly, I will even change sentences as to not use some words, just in case I use them incorrectly. If I am writing about a date, a fact, a whatever, even if it is just a comment on a blog, I will look it up on the internet just in case my memory is wrong (even if most of the time I am right). I question myself ALL THE TIME.

And now that I am thinking about looking for another job, I am questioning myself once again.

Sure I got promoted within three months in the two jobs I had right after college- but they were easy jobs. Anyone could have done them.

Of course my parents thought that I did a good job when working for them- they are my parents are weren’t going to tell me that I did a bad job.

Sure I got into law school, but when surrounded by people that had worked on amazing things like the Peace Corps, or who had already gotten their MBA, how could I even compete with these people?

Me passing the bar was sheer luck. My parents say that they run into very stupid people that are lawyers and they have to have passed the bar. So passing the bar doesn’t make me smart.

Getting my current job was also through luck. How else to explain my friend that didn’t get into the program despite being in the top 10% of our law school class?

It’s like this vicious circle. At times I am proud of what I have accomplished, but most of the time I feel as if I don’t deserve it. Recently I have realized that the reason I didn’t choose to go into private law practice was because I didn’t think that I was smart enough to do so. I think that I actually talked myself out of my profession.

Huh.

So what now? I need to get some confidence. Figure out my strengths. Figure out what I like to do/ what work tasks I enjoy. Figure out what is going to challenge me. And then try to find that job in CT.

*sigh*

What do you like most about your job and why?

Devastated

Saturday CP and I had a busy day putting together two more raised beds and moving 6 years of compost and topsoil from our driveway to the beds (this is after I ran 7 miles that morning). Fuzzy Britches seemed to be fine, running after her ball every time we threw it and once in a while retiring into the house to hide from the sun and heat.

After eating dinner at home, CP and I headed out to grab some supplies for the puppy and left FB at home because we needed to make sure that we had enough room in the car. When we got home, FB was in a strange mood. She had way too much energy, almost manic. She also kept snapping her head to the side and biting the air. At first CP and I laughed about it. Clearly FB thought that there flies or something buzzing around- but it was too late for insects.

We went inside and FB became even more spooked. Moved from room to room, still snapping her head from side to side biting at the air. Then she started licking her paws incessantly. We tried to distract her with water, her bone, a ball. Nothing. She would hide in the corner of a room completely scared before moving to another corner of a different room just minutes later.

Totally perplexed, we tried to comfort her to no avail. By the time we went to bed she had calmed down a bit and neither of us heard her stirring that night.

The next morning I went to volunteer at Foodshare’s Walk Against Hunger while CP did some more yard work. FB joined him outside at times, but was exhausted and still snapping at the air a bit. When I got home CP showed me a website that described FB’s weird symptoms as canine seizures. We decided to take her to the emergency vet.

Of course while we were there she stopped showing any symptoms, but the vet came in and talked with us for a while.

Based on what we told him, it is most likely that FB had a seizure. Based on her age (7.5) and the fact that she is a large breed, she most likely has a brain tumor. The good news is that most of the time, brain tumors grow slowly in dogs. The bad news is that although we could do an MRI to figure out where the tumor is and depending on its location, perform brain surgery to take it out, the vet wouldn’t recommend it. In his words, “even if you had the surgery, because of her age, she is going to have a whole host of other health problems unrelated to the tumor in about a year.”

We are supposed to watch her to see if she has any more episodes. If she starts to have them more than once a month or once every two months, we could put her on anti-seizure medication, but the vet warned us that the medicine does have side effects.

It took all of my might to not cry while the vet was telling us this. But I burst into tears the second we got into the car. FB slept most of the day, staying downstairs with us only to eat dinner and go to the bathroom outside, but otherwise sleeping upstairs in our bedroom. CP and I were alarmed at this behavior. She usually stays in the kitchen with us while we are making and eating dinner (always hoping for something to fall on the floor) and always hangs out with us when we are in the living room because usually one of us is on the floor with her or petting her. We were hoping that the seizure didn’t change her personality too…..

Thankfully yesterday evening she seemed a bit better. Maybe she was just so exhausted from the seizure that she needed to sleep a lot? She hung out with us last night, but wasn’t interested in playing in the backyard with her squeaky toys. Hopefully that comes back too.

I am devastated. FB’s mortality is not something that was even on my radar screen. She is still playful and has tons of energy for a 7.5 year old dog. I can’t even imagine her dying- neither of us can. This may not be the best time to get a puppy (man I wish we had gotten one last fall), but he’s coming on Saturday nonetheless. Meanwhile I will continue to worry about FB and hope that she doesn’t have any more seizures….

The State of NSC- April edition

A monthly take on my world.

Weight: 202.5 (because of the discrepancy last month I have no idea if this is a loss or gain). But at least I’m getting closer to being under 200 pounds again!

Current Feeling: Devastated (more on that tomorrow). Exhausted. I think that I may be getting sick but can’t really afford to this week.

Running Stats in April
Total Miles Run: 65.7 miles
Time Spent Running: 12 hours, 58 minutes, 3 seconds
Calories Burned: 10,070
Longest Single Run: 10 miles (longest ever!)

Current aches and pains: Still having problems with my plantar fasciitis, but try to ignore it the best that I can. I have one month left of training and then I can rest it!

Current Favorite Song: Anything that keeps me going during my runs. I’m getting kind of sick of my “running” playlist. Any suggestions of songs to add?

Looking forward to: Puppy comes on Saturday! Unfortunately I will be in the middle of an 11 mile training run while CP is picking the puppy up at the breeder. I would skip the run if we were only running say 7 miles (like we did this past weekend as kind of a breather), but I know that doing 11 on my own is simply not going to happen.

Annoyed about: WORK. I need a new job.

Proud about: My first 10 mile run ever. Finishing the garden beds in our back yard. Moving all six yards of loam/compost this past weekend into the beds. Now all we have to do is start planting!

How are you feeling with the start of this new month?