One Half Buddhist, One Half Christian, One Half Pagan

The bad: My friend with the new baby is still in the hospital, and it's looking like she's going to be recovering for a very long time. Her heart, liver, and kidneys are all malfunctioning, and some of the problems are interfering with the treatments for other problems.

The good: I had my annual review at work today, and got a small raise. It's not much, but every little bit helps.

The forward slash has many legitimate uses in the English language. The same is true for the dash and the hyphen.

What none of them can be used for is a substitute for a period. When you do this, it makes your writing nearly incomprehensible. This is a problem when you are telling us why we need to give you money.

Also: PRINT. Typing would be even better. Do not, under any circumstances, use cursive for anything except your signature.

Thank you.

For some reason I've been thinking a lot lately about one of the major messages from Louisa May Alcott's book Little Women and its sequels. The message is basically that you need to find a balance in life between work and play, and it's most clearly expressed in Chapter 11 - Experiments. Here's what I see as the money quote, from the very end of the chapter: "Have regular hours for work and play, make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life become a beautiful success".

I feel like I'm not doing a very good job finding that balance. I get my eight hours of paid work in everyday, but it doesn't feel particularly useful. In theory I'm making a difference to people's lives, but that difference is so abstracted from what I do that it's hard to see. I put in another hour or two of work at home making dinner most evenings, and try to do some other random chores around the house then too, but I'm so drained by my unsatifying day job that all I want to do when I get home is collapse. So most days when I'm done with work and chores that's all I do. I plop myself in front of my computer and proceed to not accomplish anything for 3 or 4 hours. I'm not knitting, I'm not writing, I'm not embroidering, I'm not crafting, I'm not even playing Sims. I'm just bouncing from website to website, reading a little then moving on.

One of the few websites that has really been speaking to me is Down To Earth. Rhonda blogs about homemaking as her vocation, and makes it sound appealing in a lot of ways. There's definitely a significant part of me that would like to go that route. It seems like the days I feel most accomplished are the ones that I spend going back and forth between household projects and personal ones. I go to bed at the end of a day like that and I'm both physically and mentally tired, but feel satisfied, not drained.

I don't know... I said these weren't very articulate thoughts. :)

It would be a little tacky to look at job postings on Craigslist while I'm at work, right?

I'm still tempted.

I really hope today isn't setting a trend for the year.

I am:
- exhausted
- freezing
- sick
- ready to go home

Work has decided to start blocking Facebook. I'm not even sure if this is going to cross-post properly.

Very annoying.

I have tomorrow off from work. I did not ask for the day off, and resent being told I have to use vacation time for it. As much as I dislike "use it or lose it" policies, I think it would annoy me less than this policy of "some people are letting too much vacation time accumulate, so everybody has to use two days worth on days that we choose."

Anyway.

My to do list for tomorrow is:
- Take Skif to the vet. He's due for some shots and a general checkup.
- Go jeans shopping. I had one pair die on me last weekend, and another is getting pretty worn out, so I need at least one new pair
- Get a haircut. My ends are looking pretty ragged, so I'm going to get an inch or two cut off.
- Get a manicure. (Second most likely to get dropped if time is short.)
- Grocery shopping. It's always a readjustment when the farm share ends and I have to start buying vegetables again.
- Finish the 2xcreative project (part 1). I just need to draw in the tree trunk on one side of the paper, and then do the embroidery.
- Pick a project or recipe from my pinterest boards and do it. (This is the one most likely to get skipped if I run out of time.)
- Make dinner

Next Friday, work is encourging everybody to wear a jersey from their favorite sports team.

I debating between an MSU shirt, a Pennsic University shirt, and a Transylvania Polygnostic shirt (again, I'd probably have to make one).

The MSU shirt is probably easiest, but not nearly as much fun as either of the more geeky options.

What do you guys think I should go with?

Give me a category (a given author, a band, a type of book or music, things that start with the letter z, whatever else you can come up with) and I'll tell you my five favorite things in that category.

I'm staying at work late today, to make up for time lost to bad weather and car problems. My plan is to leave at 6:30 or when I run out of forms to work on, whichever comes first.

After that I'm going to the gym. I'll probably stay there about an hour.

That means I probably won't get home until sometime around 8:30 - more than twelve hours after I left this morning. All for a fairly ordinary day.