Saturday, July 7, 2012

My week in four totally unrelated words: Teething, report, garden, books

Sometimes when I'm having a full week and I want to blog about several things, I write a little reminder note to myself. I could've sworn I did that at least once this week, but I'm not finding any little notes to myself hiding anywhere. So I guess all the notes I made were in my head...? If that's the case, I'm definitely going to forget to mention a thing or two. My brain is a bit mashed potato-y after the last couple of sleepless nights.

Yup, it's another round of pain and suffering in our house. Baby Girl is going through a monstrously tough round of teething -- fevers, inconsolablity, trouble sleeping and eating, and a bit of diarrhea. The last couple of nights we were up and down with her about half the night, so today we took turns watching the baby so we could each nap. I'm happy that it's only just 8pm as I sit down to write this; it means I can blog for half an hour and still go to bed at 9pm. Yippee.

Other than that, I don't think there's anything else new to report about Baby Girl. She has her one-year checkup on Monday (I know it's happening late, but the doctor's office didn't have any openings in June!). She was a trooper with the last couple rounds of shots so I am hoping it goes smoothly once again.

There's exciting news coming out of my office this week: My report is finally done and will be released to the public! After a long six-month project which involved designing a survey, distributing it and collecting responses, analyzing data, writing my report, and re-re-re-writing my report, it's DONE and it's about to be public! I feel very accomplished and proud of myself. This is the first major project that was basically entirely  my responsibility (though I had a lot of help executing the various tasks), and I think it went really, really well.

Now I don't know if I should mention this, but the report is actually already out there on the web, so if you go to QualityInfo.org and hunt around, you can find it  :o)  But since it's not "officially" available (i.e. we haven't sent out a press release on the report), I will wait until Monday to give you, my dear blog readers, the specific URL of the report.

WHEW. Relieved. Excited. Pleased.

And moving on...

The garden is doing great! The corn we planted last Saturday has already popped up. The zucchini plants are huge and starting to flower, so I should be able to pluck some "fruit" in just a couple of weeks. Awesome. (We've been munching on lettuce for ages, so the zucchini won't be the first yield of the year, it's just my favorite.) When we were grocery shopping this morning we had to buy a couple of zucchini and I said to Nate, "Pretty soon we won't be buying any, just going out back and picking it!" I love having a garden. I feel very grateful and blessed that I can grow my own food, and that it is coming up happily. (I know, I still need to get some pictures. One of these days... in my free time... it will happen.)

Reading: I really love books. I don't make enough time to read. And I have a hard time finding books that I like. I keep telling myself that I'm going to read more classic literature, but every time start a classic, I get distracted (i.e. Catcher in the Rye, Grapes of Wrath, Anna Karenia, etc.) and I don't finish. I hardly get started.

But I digress. What I really wanted to say is that this week I read a couple of books. I re-read the original Hunger Games book. I ready the trilogy about a year ago, and if you read them altogether, the obnoxious conclusion that is the entire third book can really sour you on the whole thing. The first book, though, it was good. Pretty good, anyway. The first half or so is excellent, then it drags on, and it is left totally, irritatingly unfinished. But the world that Suzanne Collins created is fascinating, and I think that's the real draw of the books. Panem. The Capitol. The system of governance and the culture. That's the good stuff.

I'm about to finish a book called The Loom. Meh. The main character annoys me. It starts off well enough, but then she makes some bad choices, and the writing is a bit slow. The storyline gets convoluted at times. And the plot is a total mystery. What's the point? What are we driving toward? What is the writer trying to say? And since I don't like the main character all that much, I'm not really rooting for her to succeed... and what's the point in that? Anyway, if anyone wants to recommend a good book, I'm all ears. I have pretty broad tastes. :o)

As for now, I'm off to make some chocolate peanut butter shortbread cookies (trying a new recipe, http://theviewfromthegreatisland.blogspot.com/2012/03/peanut-butter-chocolate-chip-shortbread.html) and then go to bed! Happy July to you all.

3 comments:

AMY AND MIKEY said...

So sorry about the teething! Why can't they just be born with them already! ahhhhhhhh. So annoying!!!! One thing that maddie loves when she's teething is those mesh holder things with ice in them. So nice- it calms her right down, and so nice cause you don't have to worry about her choking. I HATE TEETHING! HATE! Hunger games: I skipped that paragraph, it's disturbing to me, so don't ever talk to me about it! Glad you like it though! My sister LOVES the books. I'm the same way with blogging, so many things come to mind during the week, then I get to blogging and nothign comes to mind.

AMY AND MIKEY said...

OH- and congrats on the report!

Julie said...

Oh, gardening: I'm now glad I haven't gotten around to planting much because the DEER were in our garden all afternoon Wednesday. They spent the morning eating Bridget's roses (two house over), then browsed through our apples, peas, a volunteer tomato, some other volunteer (that I hadn't gone up to ID yet), and left their - um - calling card. A huge 'log' for a deer; Mike said they really must be eating well.