Five Things I'm Grateful For
1. Nate. I know it's ridiculously cheesy and if I was reading someone else's blog, I would totally roll my eyes and think, "Oh gawd" if I read that the first thing they were grateful for was their son... but I really haven't yet been able to find the words for how deeply his existence touches my heart. There is nothing I love more than his smiling face.
2. Getting our entire security deposit back from our old apartment. We NEED that money this month, more than we have needed money in two years.
3. My car is running beautifully. Okay, it cost $640, but I'm grateful that I have a fantastic mechanic who I know is honest and trustworthy (and who is letting us pay in a couple of installments).
4. The open space in our new home. Sure, there are boxes everywhere and they'll officially be driving me completely and utterly crazy in about two days, but even with those boxes, I can just feel the space around me every minute that I'm home and nothing right now is making me happier.
5. The hubby. (Yes, I know, first my son and now my husband. We can all groan together about how gross and cheesy it all is.) He's been wonderful these past few weeks. Moving makes me very bitchy and I've never moved with a child before, so it was particularly challenging. (Who knew babies don't sit around and let you pack for four hours with no interruptions?) But he has been upbeat and positive and has told me specifically when to cut the bitching when necessary. In other words, he's been perfect (which is more than I could say for myself).
Four Things I Can't Stop Thinking About
1. My Pioneer Woman cookbook. I cannot wait to finish unpacking and setting up my kitchen so that I can COOK SOMETHING. (So far I've heated up some Chef Boyardee and made PW's Egg-in-a-Hole (which the hubby does call "nom in a hole"). Tonight: frozen PF Chang's and some soba noodles. Really looking forward to peeling and dicing and cooking soon.
2. My pantry. It needs shelves. Right now it's just an empty closet and I really want to put all my dry goods in there and then start stocking it, little by little. I had an amazing pantry at my apartment in grad school and I really miss having certain ingredients on hand at all times.
3. Unpacking. My mind is constantly running through visuals of what's in all the boxes and trying to figure out where it's all going to go.
4. The floors. Our new place has really nice floors and I am fearful of screwing them up.
Three Things I Want To Accomplish This Week
1. Unpacking. I want to have the majority of the unpacking done by this Sunday. There are always those few remaining boxes that are hard to place, but I want to get everything reasonable unpacked THIS WEEK.
2. Put up the pantry shelves. I know this is probably asking way too much because it involves measuring and then buying the shelves and then installing them, all of which I need the hubby's help with (Nate isn't too good with the power drill yet). But it would be supremely helpful if they went up because then I could use the current pantry cabinets for our glasses and other dinnerware.
3. Go food shopping. The milk expires today. I have no yogurt. (I don't want the milk to become yogurt, ewww.) We need granola bars (super useful to eat when you have a squirmy baby). Just the essentials, you see.
Two Things I Am Working To Be Positive About
1. The money situation. It's better but it's still scarily tight, especially since I still have two more partial paychecks before I return to full pay and the holidays are right around the corner. But we should be able to pull through. If we can get to Thanksgiving and keep up, we'll be in the clear.
2. Some of the students at work are seriously trying my patience this quarter. They're not being rude or anything like that; they simply need a lot of help and attention with things that are very basic. (I don't want to get too specific.) I have to keep to myself about how unbelievable I think some of their questions are and remember that I don't know everything and that there are plenty of times I need help with something that someone else finds very basic. (Recently, for example, I had to admit to my father-in-law that I had no idea what my fuel pump should sound like. To him, this was as incredible as it is to me when a student doesn't know how to print from Word.) I just remind myself we all have our strengths and can all always help each other out.
One Random Thing
1. I recently discovered that a good number of people I know don't use alarm clocks. They all use the alarm clock feature on their cell phones to wake up. This seemed really odd to me but then I began to wonder if stand-alone alarm clocks are another thing that will disappear eventually, like wristwatches apparently are (again, because people use their cell phones to tell time). Will we eventually have an entire generation that can't read an analog clock? (I already know people who don't understand what it means to say "a quarter to four" or "ten minutes to three".) Things like this always make me feel old.
I'm going to be 85, wearing my wristwatch, listening to a record on a turntable - when I'm not watching a movie on VHS or playing with my Atari. (Um, all of which I will probably have to buy online since I don't own any of that stuff anymore, aside from the watch. Oops.)
Like this countdown? Feel free to copy it and link me to yours in a comment! I'd love to see how everyone else is doing this Monday. :)
Monday, May 2, 2011 at 10:40AM 
