January 2013

So I have been trying not to buy new gadgets but I ended up buying something this week. We have had the same bathroom scale for 15 years. It’s electronic. It zaps your body with some low voltage current to determine your BMI. It is suppose to be highly accurate.

I don’t know if I have drop-kicked it one too many times or what, but Monday morning it told me that I weighed 188. This was impossible, because the day before I had weighed 176, and there was no way I could put 12 pounds on in one day. So I hopped off the scale, refrained from yelling or kicking anything, reset the scale to zero and I hopped on again.

I weighed 142. (Just call me Karen).

I tried again.

I weighed 191.4.

Since the numbers were not getting any better I decided that the scale had finally died and it was time to order a new one. A quick hop on Amazon, a little Prime membership shipping and I am happy to say that today we will have a new scale that is synchronized with our FitBit and MyFitnessPal accounts. I have a hunch that there will be no way to jimmy the numbers in our favor. It will be what it is and it will be recorded as such.

I guess I’m really a geek if I’m excited about a new scale arriving. I don’t find it at all odd that I have to connect to the scale with a web browser and configure it; any sort of odd feelings of this nature dissipated when I had to reboot the dishwasher after a firmware upgrade.

Ain’t the 21st century grand?

My domestic ways are kicking into high gear again and I think this is a good thing. Last night before bed I emptied the dishwasher and readied the table for breakfast. Instead of running off and reading the latest tech news during my lunch hour, I got a head start on dinner. Tonight we are having a roast via the crock pot. I am already making plans for tomorrow night’s dinner.

Working from home is certainly help with all this.

There is something quite satisfying of taking proper care of your home. I have always been impressed with people that strive to keep their homes neat and tidy. There’s certainly nothing wrong with a home that has plenty of indicators that it is a lived in house, I mean, who would want to live in a museum? But I do appreciate the amount of effort it takes to keep your home looking its best.

I’m working at the office today. Under these circumstances I normally join a couple of co-workers for a couple of laps around the parking lot. We take this little jaunt twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. It does wonders for stretching, getting out of the cubicle for a moment and regaining our vision after staring at the computer for an hour or two at a time.

Since it was barely above 0ºF this morning at 10:00 a.m. (it was -19ºF when I left for work this morning), the weather wasn’t really prime for walking around the parking lot at a brisk pace. Not even at a very brisk pace. On the off chance that I would be crazy enough to do such a thing I did wear two coats, a hat and gloves to work but that wasn’t going to be enough.

I briefly considered doing what others were doing and just skipping the walk altogether, but I couldn’t bring myself to not get some exercise this morning. When I work from home and it’s unbearably cold, I ride the exercise bike for 15 minutes. I forgot to pack it in the Jeep (not that I really could have done that) and so I opted to walk laps around the office building. This isn’t an uncommon activity and the building is designed to readily accommodate this sort of thing. I walked ’round and ’round for 15 minutes. It was somewhat boring but it was energizing. I was definitely more productive after my walk vs beforehand.

This got me thinking about what I can do to energize the first half of my morning as well. I’ve gotten in the habit of waking up to my alarm and grabbing my iDevice to catch up on emails and the like while snuggled under the covers in bed. This is not an optimal way to wake up, but I suspect that it is becoming more and more common in this modern world. So tomorrow morning, even though it will be a Friday morning, I am going to modify my wake-up routine and force myself to get up and get moving a little bit. Just because it’s winter doesn’t mean that I can’t get up and do something, despite the winter morning darkness and cold. Who knows, if all goes well it might turn into a habit.

I know that everyone is talking about the weather in the United States today, what with this Arctic blast that we’re all being subjected to. There’s quite a few people griping about the cold snap and others griping about the ones that are griping online. Well guess what, I’m going to talk about the weather too but I’m not really griping. At least I hope I don’t sound cranky.

Here’s the thing. It’s January. We live in the Northeast. Not only is it January, but it is the third week of January and if memory serves correctly, this is traditionally the coldest week of the winter in these parts. So it makes sense to me that when we woke up this morning, it was a tad bit chilly outside.

If you can’t see the photo, it says –12F.

-12F is pretty cold. The furnace has been working overtime in attempts to keep The Manor warm today and the farther reaches of the house are still a bit chilly. But these things happen and quite frankly there’s no harm in putting on another layer of clothes.

Especially when the cold brings along clear skies that help make a pretty picture like this.

Backyard.

Tom has parked himself on the window casing closest to a radiator and I’m positioned in my home office really close to the space heater.  It’s a little chilly but that doesn’t have to ruin my day.

Keep warm.

So I have been sitting at EWR since shortly after noon. After being shuttled from terminal A to terminal C with a tour group headed from Kentucky to Israel (I didn’t question the specifics or intents), I found myself with plenty of time and decided to treat myself to a civilized, sit down lunch at a place called Gallagher’s. Taking a cue from Darrin Stephens and Larry Tate, I decided to have an adult beverage with my lunch. My beverage of choice was a short Yuengling. It went well with my steak salad.

This combination has made the afternoon go by rather quickly.

I have answered all of my outstanding email, wrote a few pages of code for a project I am working on (using my iPad!) and listened in as a man with a Sony Walkman cassette player listened to “Crush on You” by the Jets. He be jammin’.

EWR (or Newark Liberty International Airport) is not as busy as I have seen it in the past, probably due to the MLK Holiday today. The skies are gray and thankfully my flight in less than an hour of this writing is just over an hour in length.

I am feeling productive and relaxed at the same time. Perhaps my standard workday would be more enjoyable if accompanied by Yuengling and/or The Jets.