Tag: me

A bit of a digression.

I assumed that I had run out of the material I was using to make the bias tape for the Laurel dresses, but after (it’s always after) I finished the dresses using a different bias tape for the neckline for one of them, what should I discover but a whole bunch more of said material.

This led to a massive overhaul of the closet, when I was supposed to be doing other things.

Which led to peeking into bins, which led to the discovery of this box, which was a gift from my high school friend, sent to me during college.

It even included fun pictures, of me with her nephew (who is now in his 20s) and a picture of the jazz band my senior year.
I rearranged the closet and even organized my material and patterns.  So that was a good thing.

Quoted on Filmspotting. About Channing Tatum, of course.

Filmspotting is a recent discovery, I stumbled across it last fall and really look forward to the weekly podcast, as well as dipping into the archives.  The hosts, Adam and Josh, spend a good 20+ minutes chewing over the movie they’ve chosen to review every week and there is always a top-5 list.  One of the other features is a reader poll.  Every other week they announce the results and read comments.  I’m excited to say I’ve been quoted twice before (both times talking about women and movies!) but the poll for this week was about Channing Tatum.  So you know I had stuff to say about that.  They even linked to my Channing Tatum Personal Film Festival blog post.

http://www.filmspotting.net/reviews/1180-496-top-5-films-of-2014-so-far-the-rover.html

If you would like to listen, click on the above link and then move along to the 25:40 minute mark.

Thanks Filmspotting for making my to-see movie list long, giving me something to listen to when I clean the house and also making me famous!  You know, in that internet way.

Kid thank you

So sweet.  This is from one of the K/1 classes.  My favorite is “she has her own style” which is a comment that another co-worker also got.  I laughed because the other co-worker has a very fun sense of style, while mine involves wearing the same thing every day of the week.  But to a K/1, I guess that counts as “own sense of style.”

Ah, the illusion of control

It’s summer!  And that means I have things to do at work.  So I’ve put things in order and have goals for all the weeks I’ve worked.  Nicole, from First Unitarian introduced me to this planning method. It’s great for when you have specific tasks to do over a set amount of time, not all of which are date specific. My summer tasks mostly just need to get done, and some can’t start before I finish others, so this system works fabulously for me.  Whatever doesn’t get done in a given week gets moved down to the next week.  The trick is to keep July 21-25 from getting to full of too many un-done post-it notes.
Another way to do this is to use index cards instead of post-its.  Then you can save the index cards, make notes on the backs, and throw them in a folder to retrieve for the next summer.

Sorting the letters.

Along with the journals, the letters from the first two years of college were recovered.  They are all a jumble and I’m sorting them.  I have another tub of letters which I went though a few years ago, so I hope to get everything in neat piles of people.  It’s been fun to see what I can find.  They are especially nostalgic because after my first two years of college I got an email account. Though the letters still arrived, it wasn’t with the same frequency.  All of that early electronic communication has been lost and I mourn it.  That makes these letters all the more wonderful to read now.

KRPS schedule in 1994

Just in case you need to know what I was listening to my first two years of college.  Friend Sue and I especially enjoyed the Bob and Bill show.  That’s the first time I can remember a radio show giving an email address to write to, along with the regular postal service address.  We also loved the Radio Reader, though Friend Sue got to listen to him more than I did as she was always doing something in the Art building, whereas my hours were spent in the library.

Exercise goal for April.

I get a goodly amount of exercise, but I would like to do better.  My goal for April will be to average 60 minutes of exercise over six days.  I’ve just tallied up my exercise for the 12 weeks since January 6, and I averaged 45 minutes per day.  So I have a good foundation built.  Exercise can be anything but will most likely be the following things I do:  walking, jog/walk, Pilates, exercise class.  The only thing I’m not counting is restorative yoga, which I love, and is very good for me, but I cannot in good conscious call exercise.  I don’t have to complete 60 minutes all at once, can break the sessions and scatter them through the day.

I’ll check in at the end of every week.

Week of March 31
I did 370 minutes of exercise over seven days, but since I’ve decided to divide 370 by six and not seven, I made my goal.

Week of April 7
380 minutes over six days.  Goal achieved!  Also, I walked home from work for the first time.  It took 85 minutes.  Which is not really that long, in the grand scheme of things.  I might think about doing this more often.

Week of April 14
365 over six days.  I took Easter off.

Week of April 21
Despite the fact I did no exercise on three days, I still clocked 360 minutes this week.  This makes me think that 360/week is a reasonable number to shoot for on a regular basis.

Week of April 28
Although this week I only did 165 minutes over four days.  I did run a 5k on Saturday though, which meant I skipped my walk to the gym and the gym which meant 80 minutes of usually automatic exercise I did not obtain. Not such a great finish to the experiment, but still successful enough that I will continue to strive for 360 minutes of exercise per week.

Picture from long time ago.

This is E.F. and myself sitting in downtown Amherst in November of 1997.  I had traveled back to Amherst for Thanksgiving, or perhaps a fall visit.  The two of us had been roommates the previous summer.  Excellent mid-90s details include the red point-and-shoot camera held by EF, her short hair the fact that she’s smoking.  I am not smoking in this photo, but I’m guessing I have either just finished a cigarette or am about to have one.  I’m wearing my dad’s army pants, left over from the national guard, a spanking new pair of Doc Martens, my green sweater, which once upon a time belonged to Sara’s Great Aunt Hazel.  I’m also wearing the coat that kept me warm through many a freezing cold New England Winter.  On my hand is a ring that I gave myself, so as to be engaged to me and not any guys.  The backpack carries my things for the weekend.  I will take the Peter Pan bus back to Boston to work my first post-college job as a receptionist.  It is a job that is boring and lonely and I travel an hour each way to get to there.  I am lonely, and this weekend has been a very good one.

The first two years of college journals.

For a few weeks, I thought they were gone forever, but they were tucked away in my Aunt’s basement, behind sacks of romance novels.  They were great to read.

And I think the cigarette manufacturers wasted their advertising dollars on me.  Apparently, they just needed to get the boys I liked to smoke.

From 22 January, 1995. Sunday.
I smoked my last cigarette for the weekend.  I can still taste the tar and nicotine on the back of my throat and on my teeth.  It tastes like the kisses of K.–or so long ago the kisses of T.  I became addicted to smoking this summer when I sat in truck stops and Shari’s late at night with TM and K and breathed in the smell of the pipe, or sat on the front porch of the house sittin’ house and smelled the smoke from the Lucky Strikes.  I guess now I ‘m the only one around to smoke, so I do and remember the kisses.

Back to the early twentieth century

I spent a year without a watch, figuring I would be like everyone else and just use my phone to tell me the time.  But you know what?  Sometimes I just want to know the time by flicking my wrist toward me and glancing down rather than rummaging around for my phone, finding the “on” button and pushing it.  There’s no way to do that in a non-obvious manner.  So welcome back Wenger watch!