Out With the Old, In With the New

One of my personal goals this year is to get rid of the old; people that don't deserve my time or aren't there to support me, things I want to change such as paint colors, wardrobe and habits as well as many other things.

One of the "old" things that I am for sure getting rid of is my couch. While it has served its purpose by providing me a place to park my butt, but we did find it on the side of the road the day before we moved into the condo. Also, it has broken in the center so 3/ of the couch can no longer be sat on. One of the many reasons that we chose this couch, nearly by fate, is because it matched the green wall from the previous tenants of the condo. Before finding the couch, the only piece of furniture to sit on was a red overstuffed chair. This makes me feel like I am always waiting for Christmas; what, with my red furniture and green walls.

When the couch goes, the wall paint will be changing too. We found a great blue sectional couch that we want to take up the living room. If we get this, the blue and green are going to clash badly. Not to mention, the paint job is less than stellar, with lines of green on the wall and corners unevenly painted. I am unsure as to what color I want to paint the wall, perhaps just a plain white. No matter which, I know that I am going to dread the process. While the paint dries, I am going to have the daunting task of keeping Hail out of the living room. I do not want him to touch my paint and I do not want him inhaling the paint fumes either. I did learn a nifty trick though that many people will be happy to know. When you are painting your home, room, floor, whatever, add a teaspoon of vanilla extract into your paint while you are stirring it. No matter the color, it will remain the same but the extract takes away the paint smell that we all know and hate.

Gah! Sick!

Well I am starting my new year off sick. My sinuses are KILLING me. To make it all worse, I feel as if my whole head is swimming above me, disconnected from my body. I definitely don't feel up to doing anything, so blogging will be it for me today. I didn't improve anything either by doing a bunch of running around on the bus today either. Here was my day;
We went to the college to pick up books, only to find that the college was closed. The trip out wasn't a complete bust; however, because we were meeting someone to sell an old phone. Then we went to Raph's mom's house so that Hail could see his "girlfriend" and doggies. We stopped at the post office, but they were closed, then decided that we were tired and hungry. We went to the Village Inn for breakfast. They have some pretty good food, although my bacon and mushroom omelet could have gone with a little less holendaise sauce. When I came home, my head hurt so bad that I took a nap.

This brings me to my topic of this blog, time management. When you work from home, it is all too simple to say, I can rearrange my schedule and work whenever. Well too many days of taking time out to grocery shopping, going to the post office, whatever, will lead to nothing ever getting done. I also have a little kiddo so I don't have much time for anything as it is.... Tomorrow I also have a busy day since I have to go back to the post office to mail my packages and back to the school to pick up books. I also have to go grocery shopping which is always a 2 hour event or longer. So my question to all of you is; when you have the availability to change your schedule as you need and you do, how do you stay organized and manage your time so everything isn't rushed and you feel behind?

Happy New Year!!!

Well 2011 was a decent one, although several less than pleasant things happened throughout the year. The good things that did happen include; health of myself and my baby boy, finding an AMAZING guy like Raph, having the ability to work for myself successfully, and getting started with school again. Unfortunately, I get to spend the first day of the year doing my taxes. How I loathe taxes, but how I love the refund! I decided to try and do it today so that I can get it back as soon as physically possible. So because I have been slacking miserably, I am going to try and post every day of the year, at least once, but hopefully more. Here are my New Year's goals of the year.

1. blog daily- I really want to get good at this working for myself and creating my own income so that I don't have to worry about taking a day off as often as I did in 2011. I want to blog daily to help get my information out there and hopefully it will be something that will inspire at least one person.
2. work less, earn more- That's right. I want to work less but continue earning money through my residual sites I write for. Don't be surprised if you see links for articles I've done pop up from time to time and also, don't forget to click on them as well. :)I want to master social networking to aid in my earning potential as well.
3. Complete the 50 book challenge- This year, I am going with the theme of nurture. I want to nurture my mind and feed it full of books. Hail loves books and I do too but I need a little more mental stimulation than One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. I have tried this challenge several times and have always fallen a few books short. I suspect this year will also be difficult because I now have a little one that I have to deal with first and foremost before reading, unlike before.
4. Take a Class and Learn Something- I have just started knitting and admittedly I am not good at it. I have figured out how to make a simple rib using knit and purl stitches but I know nothing else. This will be the world's longest scarf if I don't learn to cast off.
5. Get Healthy- Each year I say that I'm going to lose weight and it never happens the way that I want it to. This year, I'm going to more loosely define it so that I will still be getting healthy but don't necessarily have to limit myself to just losing weight. I really want to start drinking more water and figure out what is causing and how to fix my iron issue.
6. Spend More Time Adventuring with Hail- As many of you may know, we just recently moved to Portland. Because of the odd weather we've had this year, we haven't had time to really explore and venture out into our new world. I want to explore things, go to the mountains, ballet, Saturday Market, Ape Caves, just do things we haven't gotten to explore yet. I want to create awesome, lasting memories with him that he will remember the rest of his life.

I'm sure that there are many more things that I would love to do but I can't really think of any right now. Me and my little buddy, a big 15 months old today, are going to go get in trouble at the grocery store :)

Update

I have not written on my blog nearly as often as I wanted to. I have been overwhelmed with parenting an active and fussy little one as well as everyday life, working and all other life's attempts. We have survived Hail's first birthday, Halloween and now we are approaching Thanksgiving. I'm not sure what we are going to do for the holiday but I'm sure that it is gonna be a little rough.

Some of the challenges we are experiencing include; separation anxiety, "mommy neediness," not walking, not really talking, not using sippy cups or making huge attempts to hold his own bottle (he's starting to work on it but gets pissy because he hasn't figured out that he has to tip his head back), not wanting to eat table food or feed himself,and not sleeping well at night or nap-time. He throws a huge fit each time it is time to sleep and he wants to go to bed at 6PM, which means he is getting up around 3AM. I have tried and fought him to stay up longer and the couple times I succeeded, he still woke up that 3AM :/

Other than all that, things have been going well. We got our own place in Portland. We live with an awesome guy who loves us, and all the bills are getting paid. What more can you ask for right? Here's a recent picture of the little one on Halloween.

Summertime

Well, summer hasn't been all that I hoped that it would be this year. It has been largely in part to my horrible work schedule as well as the fact that the weather here has been less than summery. It seems that it can't decide what it wants to do- one day it will be sultry and nearly 90 degrees and the next it's overcast and looks like it's going to rain.
"Dear Mother Nature,
Make up your mind.
Thanks!"
I guess it's a good thing that Hail is still too young to really understand or enjoy the summertime. Hopefully he does once he gets a little older- maybe next year. I find it funny when he wrinkles his little nose when the sun is in his face and he crinkles his forehead when rain falls on it. I sure do hope that he learns to walk before the height of fall. I want to teach him to "leaf crunch".

Here are a couple photos from the highlights of our summer so far.

In the first photo, he was swimming in his first swimming pool.
In the second photo, we were playing with circus animals on the floor on a cloudy day.
In the third picture, he is enjoying his first river trip, squishing sand between his fingers.

I love Summer

I love the summer time. It's the only time that you can go out and do all those fun things in the outdoors that you weren't able to do in the winter and fall months. Things like slap your friends on the back and claim it was a mosquito, eat fresh watermelon that doesn't cost a million dollars, go to the county fair, camping, swimming and just play outside in the sunshine!! Sadly, with my new work schedule, I don't have the time to do most of those things most of the time. I have the money to but not necessarily the time. Working 5 days a week 15 miles away from home is taxing. Because I work across the bridge, depending on when I have to be there, I sometimes have to leave for work over an hour early for a 20 minute car ride. I'm hoping to have a long weekend soon so that I can go play in the sunshine with my baby boy!! You're never too young to go camping!

4th of July

Never before have I been so excited for the 4th. This is going to be Hail's first one and although I have to work, we are gonna celebrate it early. I figured, since he doesn't really like loud noises that I would get some of the more kid friendly fireworks and let him see those so that he won't be so overwhelmed by the loud bangs and booms, dogs barking, car alarms and other loud noises that the night brings. Hopefully he will enjoy it as much as I plan to.