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I’m reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin right now, which I actually bought. This is significant, because as much as I love books and reading, I limit the number I own to just a few, and mostly for sentimental reasons, such as the copy of Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs that my dad gave me for Christmas the year that my parents divorced. Or an early–and most unpolitically correct–edition of The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore, because it was one of the first books I read on my own as a child.
Mostly, I own textbooks. Books I paid too much money for to part with. Lately, genealogy books have started to creep into my collection. But mostly, I borrow books from the library. I work there, after all. Why take up permanent space when you can have them over for a visit whenever you want and send them back home when they’ve overstayed their welcome?
Like most books, I checked this one out of the library. I’d read other blogs mentioning it and wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It sounded rather self-helpy to me, and that’s not my thing. The books I’ve read for self-improvement so rarely seem to fit my life. A book on grief, for example, didn’t really touch upon the unique issues pertaining to a 28-year old widow.
So, I really wasn’t expecting much when I opened up The Happiness Project. No one was more surprised than me when I sat down to order it from Amazon having barely started the second chapter.
I’m still not very far into the book. There have been other things occupying my time lately, and so I find myself reading it in small bits. I think that’s probably the best way for me to read it, actually. And it’s definitely making me think. It’s almost as though Gretchen Rubin had read some self-help books in the past and realized that none of them really applied to her life either. She’s not saying exactly what I’m thinking, but she’s pretty darn close.
I might be talking about this on the blog in the future. I hope I will be, at least.
So, I’m in New Jersey at the moment, at The Boyfriend’s grandmother’s house. I am waiting for him to wake up so that we can go down to Starbucks and get some coffee. I don’t really like starbucks but anything is better than the Maxwell House singles that we brought along. And have subsequently run out of.
Best of all, I can get no internet access, save the access available on my droid. And while I am extremely thrilled to be able to have this convenient backup, it is not a substitute for my laptop.
We head home tomorrow after one more excursion into the city today. I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss home. I miss my cats and my garden, and most of all I miss my own bed.
I have photos to share, but they will have to wait for another day. Perhaps after I’ve recovered from this vacation. Until then…
So, it started with some godawful Smurf blue boards that we painted red:
Eventually, those boards turned into these:
The cool things were that the wood was free and the paint was only $5 in the “Oops” section of Home Depot. We’re all about the budget here.
I have a small, postage stamp sized yard, surrounded on three sides by two garages and a privacy fence that you don’t want to get me started on. Where the neighbor’s garage ends begins my view of the rest of the backyards on my block, including two in-ground pools. BONUS: One of them is in the backyard of house that has been foreclosed and abandoned.
I can’t really afford a privacy fence of my own right now. The Boyfriend is a little hesitant to even consider one, since we’re not sure how it would affect our sunlight in that area of our veggie garden. Our solution? Trellises with pole beans and sugar snap peas:
 Note the homemade one on the extreme right. The Boyfriend made that out of branches of a junk tree I cut down. Also note in the foreground my triangular cages. I’m hoping to trellis up cucumber and zucchini plants. I’m pretty sure those aren’t going to be tall enough, but I can add to it later. I basically wanted something in place to see how it would work with the boxes.
On the other side of the yard is my driveway and garage. We’ve re-purposed the area in front of the garage as our patio, since we never pull the cars in that far anyway. This presented another problem because the house next door is on a corner lot and I’m a little uncomfortable with how much of my yard can be seen from the street. The neighbor in the corner house does have strategically planted shrubs, but there are a few gaps. And let’s face it; I don’t particularly like the shrubs they have.
Our solution:
 The boxes contain Morning Glory and Moon Flower seeds that are just now sprouting. In between the boxes is a clematis that will hopefully help fill in the ugly chain link. I am still debating on what to do with the area around the boxes. But I have lots of annuals left to plant, so let’s just say I have options.
There is still work to be done. I haven’t figured out where I’m placing all of my other containers just yet. We have lights to string up and while I’ve obtained the hooks for two of my hanging planters, I still have at least one basket to find an elevated home for. I’ll take more photos this weekend when the weather is FINALLY supposed to be sunny AND warm.
My life since the semester ended:
- Wake up far earlier than any self-respecting night owl should be expected to open her eyes
- Stagger into the shower and make myself less offensive to the outside world
- Drive to work
- Have coffee whilst wondering how I got to the office
- Work
- Lunch (Check Facebook and blogs)
- Work
- Drive home with big plans on what I’m going to accomplish that evening
- Sit down on couch
- Kick self at 10 p.m. for not having accomplished anything
It’s not that I’ve done nothing. It’s that I’ve had little direction in what I have done. Typical of me. I sit down to blog and then I realize that I just don’t have the energy to form a coherent thought, let alone put it in written form for all three of you to read. But I will try to be better. I promise. I have photos that I told Mel I would post–and I will! Not right now, mind you, as they’re on my laptop and I’m at the office. But I will.
I keep trying to think of ways that I can motivate myself to stay moving once I get home. Yesterday was actually a good day. I was out and about on Mother’s Day and somehow ended up with two flats of flowers, a hanging basket, a shepherd’s hook (to hang said basket) and three containers of Black Mondo grass that I am ridiculously in love with.
Unfortunately, we had plans that evening and frost was expected that night, so there was no planting to be done. We were having a hard enough time finding things to cover all the things that we’ve already stuck in the ground! I had made up my mind that I was going to plant when I got home last night. But it was awfully chilly with the wind blowing…
I had nearly talked myself out of it when I decided that I would just go out to the garage and at least get some of the empty boxes tossed into the recycling bin, to clear a little more space. And it worked. I hauled the boxes out, and then gathered up some stuff to be thrown away, and before I knew it I wasn’t noticing the cold.
So, I pulled up a chair out of the wind and started planting annuals in containers. Before I knew it, I had planted flowers in all of my containers but one. (And I still have a LOT more flowers to find homes for.) Then I went into the house, washed up, finished the dishes that The Boyfriend had started before he left for work, did two loads of laundry, called and scheduled two follow up appointments with my eye doctor and made a looooooong overdue hair appointment.
All in all, pretty impressive. I know the snowball effect works and yet I so rarely implement it. I wish I could figure out what combination of factors have to be present in order for me to do it all the time. If I could, there would be no stopping me.
Even blogging about it doesn’t hold me accountable, because it’s easy enough to just not post. 
So… I don’t know. Any suggestions?
In honor of the semester from HELL finally ending (I submitted my final exam in cataloging yesterday), I am going to make an effort to blog every day in the month of May. Of course, I started this post yesterday (hence the title), so clearly that’s going well so far, eh?
I‘ve been was up at 6:30 this yesterday morning when we had a thunderstorm move into the area with some pretty spectacular lightning. We are in the midst of getting our veggie garden started and we’ve been putting our plants outside (they’re currently in pots) when the weather is nice enough to give them more sunlight. But The Boyfriend was putting our strawberry plants in the same spot on the porch, a spot that gets a ton of run off rain, and the strawberries have nearly drowned twice. The last time they were FLOATING in their pot.
Actually, though, they don’t seem to mind. There is the beginnings of at least one strawberry on one of the plants, so I think they’re going to be just fine.
I actually ended up planting them yesterday afternoon, along with our buttercrunch lettuce plants that we bought a while back. Turns out they’re a cool weather crop, so they’d have been perfectly happy living outside. I sorta feel bad for the little guys now. We also planted our blueberry shrub. I doubt we’ll have fruit off of it this year, but maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised.
I haven’t been outside yet this morning. I’m hoping we weren’t visited by rabbits overnight. Although I left The Zola Cat outside, so perhaps she was walking the perimeter.
Last night, I discovered that while May 15 is the “last average frost date” out by the airport, here in the city it’s May 1st. Guess who will be planting more stuff today? I soaked Morning Glory and Moonflower seeds last night for planting in boxes to climb up trellises by our patio area. They’re going in today. We bought garbanzo beans on a whim last night. I’m planting some of those as well. I hear they can be difficult as far as yields go, but the plant itself is supposed to be pretty. And if it produces, we learn to make our own hommous. If anyone has a good recipe for us to try, please pass it along!
Other than finally being a full time participant in the gardening (The Boyfriend had started all of our seedlings and has been nurturing them lovingly for weeks), I’ve been doing genealogy stuff, such as attending the OGS conference. I’ll talk about that in another post. I think I’m going to re-create a genealogy blog, since in addition to my mom’s side of the family, I decided to at least to build on the research done by my aunt on my dad’s side. Annnnd, I’m working on The Boyfriend’s family as well.
The calendar hasn’t caught up yet, but for me, summer is here. And it’s going to be full!
- The sight of the Zola Cat waiting on the porch for me to get home. It’s reminscent of Mickey and reminds me that we’re building a lifelong friendship.
- The mallards have returned to campus. Now I’m just waiting for more Canada geese to accompany the lonely one I’ve seen hanging around, and also for Blue.
- My stepmom comes home today so I can worry a little less about my dad. But just a little.
- Knowing that this semester is more than half over.
- The seeds The Boyfriend started last week are already sprouting!
I wasn’t sure what she was talking about when I saw a Facebook friend chastise some people for gloating over someone else’s death.
So, being me, I had to find out. And as it turns out, someone from our town is scheduled to be executed soon for a crime committed several years ago. And some of this person’s former classmates are pretty happy about it.
Now, let me just start off by saying that I am anti-death penalty anyway, for a few reasons. First, I don’t believe in hell, so I think executing someone is not really a punishment. I think that spending the rest of his life locked in a small cell would have been far more of a punishment for Saddam Hussain, for example, especially since he was living the high life at the expense of so many for so long.
Second, when someone gets sent away for something they didn’t do (and it happens), you can’t release them if you’ve already killed them. On a local forum I frequent, there is constant chatter about the ridiculous amount of laws that are starting to infiltrate our society, supposedly to protect us. Red light camera tickets not paid? We’ll boot your car. Don’t break the law and you’ll be fine. Until the day the computer has a glitch and records my license plate instead of the guy with 15 tickets, and I walk out of work one evening to find I can’t get home.
It’s not the same as the death penalty, I realize. But if you’re mentally saying that, you’re missing my point, which is that mistakes get made. Not all mistakes can be corrected. Once I submit my paper with four typos to my professor, it’s a done deal. In my heart, however, I believe that executing people is one area where we shouldn’t mess around. Salem witches, anyone? Trial by ordeal?
And then there’s the old “two wrongs don’t make a right.” The death penalty doesn’t only punish the convicted. It punishes anyone who ever loved the convicted. And this is where a lot of people (frequently mothers) like to point out that the criminal took the life of someone they loved, so why shouldn’t the criminal’s mother lose her child?
Because the criminal’s mother didn’t commit the crime. No matter how much you may want to blame her.
The crime is a terrible thing. The crime has irrevocably changed the lives of every person related to both the victim and the criminal. The victim’s family has lost the family member that they loved. The criminal’s family has lost who the family member that they knew. I’m not saying that one is harder than the other. I’m saying they’re different. But the bottom line is that the criminal’s family should not have to pay for what the criminal did.
But they do. The sibling of this particular criminal is a classmate. Not someone I was close to by any means, but just an acquaintance. The sibling is on Facebook as well. The people making the comments are mutual friends of the sibling’s friends. The person who originally alerted all of FB about the latest development actually claims to be an old friend of the sibling. I’m glad I don’t have friends like that.
I may not be a praying woman, but I definitely wish for strength for all of the people whose lives have been affected this. I’d wish for some sensitivity on the part of the people shooting their mouths off, but I realize that’s asking a bit much.
(I know that my word choices here are pretty annoying, but I’m trying to be as gender neutral as possible because it is not my intention to add to this former classmate’s grief.)
It’s ridiculous the amount of things I have in my head right now that I want to blog about, but just not sure that I have the time (or the energy) to really get into it.
There are three specific things on my mind at the moment, but I’m only going to talk about one of them in this post.
Last night was the television debut of “Who Do You Think You Are?” Produced (I think) by Lisa Kudrow, this show has been in the works since shortly after I became interested in genealogy, or at least shortly after I started listening to genealogy podcasts. That it took so long isn’t surprising, given how fickle networks are. And to put it on the Friday night schedule? Ouch.
Genealogy buffs everywhere are talking about it today. Most seem to be glad that there is something here to help get people excited about family history research, but at the same time feel that the show made it look too simple. As someone pointed out, however, we all have the same resources available to us. What we don’t always have, however, is the resources to hop on a plane and go from New York to Ohio to California to Massachusetts. And in at least one case, she was dealing with someone identified as a professional genealogist, which again requires resources that not everyone has. Like every hobby, there are costs associated with genealogy and sometimes it’s not just possible to do everything you’d like to.
To be honest, I was more irritated with the advertisements for Ancestry.com. Before I say anything else, I subscribe to Ancestry and I love what it offers. But you want to talk about someone making it look so easy? Every time I see someone talking about linking to all of the other people who have created trees on Ancestry, I cringe. A while back, Ancestry added a new feature that allows you to see if others are adding the same records to their trees that you have added to yours. I found someone had added a census record for my great great grandfather and I got really excited because I’ve been looking to make a connection on that line. It turned out that the ancestor they linked this record to was a completely different person than my great great grandfather. There were fairly obvious clues. Her ancestor and my ancestor were married completely different spouses. I am assuming that the other tree owner decided that my great great grandmother must have been a previous or later wife. However, I have verifiable proof that my great great grandfather was only married once. And he died well before she did.
Even though I contacted the person, the last time I checked, my great great grandfather’s census record was still linked to her ancestor. Since both men have the same first name and a similar last name (which has been spelled a variety of ways), it is likely anyone searching for either of our ancestors will find both trees. Anyone encountering her tree is viewing bad information. If they in turn add it to their trees, this snowball of bad information is just rolling down the hill.
I would like to see Ancestry find a way to make their ads incorporate a little bit of reality. Yes, you might find all kinds of shaking leaves when you add a family member. They really need to stress that these are potential leads.
As for the show last night, the other thing that it would have been nice to see addressed (and hopefully it will be in a future episode) is the infamous brick wall. Sarah Jessica Parker, in my opinion, was extremely lucky that so much information involving her relatives was available. I have a great great grandmother on my mom’s side that no one can find. And though I think I’ve come the closest to finding her, I am certainly not the first person who has tried. I’ve connected with distant cousins who have been unsuccessful in locating her. I don’t know if professionals were ever called in, but I do know that the author of a book about her husband’s family didn’t seem to know anything about her either.
I would love to see more people develop an interest in their family history, especially while they still have living relatives to ask about the past. And I hope this new show does generate new interest. But I hope that in future episodes, they work in that it’s not always as simple as it appears on TV. It doesn’t have to be easy to be interesting!
Oh, I almost forgot… cheesy music recap montage at the end? Yuck. If I want cheesy, I’ll watch CSI Miami.
I know, I KNOW.
The surprise from FedEx was my new Droid, which I would post photos of but that would entail me putting it down long enough to pick up my camera and actually take the photo. Aaaaand… no.
It’s been a crazy (and not in a good way) week. My dad was scheduled for a bone marrow biopsy last Friday. It has been postponed until March 1, due to some mixed up numbers on the blood work reports. The numbers have been straightened out, but the test couldn’t be completed that particular day.
My stepmom is in Tennessee right now, taking care of HER father, so I went out to take my dad to the appointment and then after it became clear that he wasn’t going to have the bone marrow biopsy, I came home. I just checked on him and he’s watching the race, so all is well, at least for the moment. I’m not going to say that I’m not worried. But I’m choosing not to dwell on it until we have more concrete things to worry about.
Ok, so maybe I tried to poison him just a tad by fixing a frozen pizza while I was there and forgetting to take the cardboard off the bottom. That’ll teach him to refuse my offer of stopping for takeout on the way. I wonder if THAT’S why he opted to go out for Mexican the following night. Hmm….
My stepsister just told me (via text message) that I am a fast typer (of text messages). That makes me laugh because I used to get so frustrated with Kimmer sending four messages to my ONE that I’d just say, “Eff it!” and call her. So, yeah, I love the Droid. I love checking in on Foursquare. I just wish that I had more friends there. It’s sad when you’re the only geek in your group of friends. It’s also sad to realize that I’ve been part of Foursquare for nearly two months now and I have a pathetically small amount of checkins.
That’s the life of the full time working grad student.
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