While making online payments and checking emails in the early, quiet of the morning, before beagles hound (heh, heh, clearly pun intended) me for a toast crust and before I must head out for the daily grind, I peruse things that showed up in my inbox while I was sleeping.
I could be using this time to write. Or marketing Out of the Frying Pan, or even taking an online course on something to make me smarter or at least appear smarter. But instead I open interesting articles like the ones this morning. What to order at every MLB stadium. For starters, on this one, I clicked to see what a freakin MLB is. Major League Baseball. This I had to figure out on my own. It is so apparent to any sport fan that this is what MLB is that they didn't even define it. I had to figure it out via thinking and context! (Aren't there bunches of studies that show it's so good for your brain to do puzzles? Look, I was being productive after all!) Plus this is research for my recipe column. I can justify it doubly. I might just want to recreate a super churro or waffle concoctions. Probably not bacon on a stick, ever. However, carrot bacon is the newest meat free bacon option. (Also discovered in one of the many factoid newsletters I get in my inbox.)
Then my little eyes spied a top 15 locations to visit in Italy. I've never been to Italy in my life. But dog gone it, I want to go. There is a huge part of me that wants to buy an Italian farmhouse and live off the delicious land. I don't speak Italian. I have no Italian roots that I'm aware of. I feel kind of the same about English, French, Irish, Spanish, Scottish, well you get it, any European countryside. Italy just feels like the food would be the best and for some reason they would be warm and friendly. The UK feels like it would be too gloomy and grey, (UK spelling, and if I lived in Italy, I could just hop a train and visit the UK and the corgis. I don't want to see the queen but I do want to peek at her corgis!). Also food. In the UK
they eat things like blood sausage. In Italy there seems to be sunshine and bodacious red tomatoes everywhere. And grapes. If they only had mango trees I might just buy a one way ticket today.
And look at the time! I've managed to use my morning well. Got a blog post done. Check. Did a little marketing. Look at the picture and the hot link to my book! Oh, and maybe I'll tweet a link with hashtags #shinythings #squirrel #whoamIkidding?
So. After my lazy half week of laying on the couch and wishing for swift death, I mostly recovered. By mostly I mean that I worked a full day plus at work then came home and did some chores that hadn't gotten done while I was sick and pulled together another hundred "get rid of" items or so to make up for lost time.
My son manages a service learning group at his local high school and they had a huge rummage sale and I usually donate. So Rob and I loaded up probably three hundred items. (I've been counting and packing things away for this fundraiser.) And I hauled it to his school early Saturday morning. But. I think my crazy making up for lost time on Friday did not agree with me on Saturday because I started feeling punk again. I cancelled my violin lesson in case I was still oozing germs and because, well, I didn't want to relapse there. It's rough enough to cry in front of my teacher, I can't imagine vomiting on him. Ya know?
Anyhoo. Dropping the load of stuff I wanted to never see again at the school made me feel a little better, kinda. I'll tell you, the cart and the table next to it had our stuff. And that's just a portion of it, there's been way more leave my premises. YAY!!! Plus his group/club made some decent money so I feel good about donating.
The only, and I mean ONLY negative is that I only have 24 more items to hit my entire year long goal. But I couldn't complete it before I needed to drop the stuff off and I am now at the point where I need to carefully consider whether an item is something I want to let go of.
Not saying I don't have a bunch of stuff I could chuck and never miss, just that I don't want to go all willy-nilly and then wish I hadn't. Case in point. I have this super cool enamelware roaster that was just decorative and I eyed it "do I really need this?" At about the same time I decided I hated a corner of my counter top where we store things like powdered drink mixes, bags of protein shakes, medications, etc and I had them in a big basket that took up too much room. So I just started poking around online to see if I could find the perfect thing that would clean up the corner and make it less sloppy. I found a super cute retro break box that would be perfect I decided. I put it in my Amazon cart but didn't purchase. Fortunately. Because, DUH, my roaster was perfect, and immediate, and FREE.
And while I was doing one more pass through my closet before the rummage sale run I made a final decision about this super cute pink bag. I mean. Use it or give it. So I'm using it. Spring is almost here. And who cares that I may or may not be over fifty sporting a bright pink velvety bag? Do you? Didn't think so.
It appears as if Spring has sprung in our locale. It's hard to trust this "fact," though. Last week boasted freezing rain and snow and tomorrow is allegedly going to be in the 90's. I think our spring might possibly have been two days long. Sigh. Spring Sandwich anyone?
And while I'm pondering things such as the weather...let me also ponder things like, how is it possible to be SO tired that you can't sleep? Or why on earth it seems reasonable to cram so many things in in one day that one becomes too tired to sleep?
Or why leather couches only feel like they've ripped the top two layers of skin off of the back of shorts clad legs but never actually do anything useful like wax the back of thighs so one can avoid that pesky spring ritual?
"Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?" Are you humming that song right now?
If a wood chuck could chuck wood, how much could he chuck? Where did the word upchuck com from?
