Fun and Games Dept

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.

I am sitting in seat 11A on United flight 4548 en route from Raleigh-Durham to Newark. I have a four hour layover in Newark and then I will be on my way home. I’ll probably write more during this layover. Now that I think about it, the layover and flight time is longer than if I landed at Newark and drove home. Oh well.

The flight attendant’s name is Courtney and she is quite pleasant. Initial impressions is that she enjoys her job. She is another one with “fierce” knee high boots. The flight attendant between Dulles and RDU on Friday featured Julie with her knee high boots. I’m not sure why I’m noticing these boots since I have zero interest in women’s footwear, but looking fierce is looking fierce regardless of sex, so there’s that.

The skies are clear for this flight. We don’t seem to be as high up ask would expect, maybe 20-21,000 feet. Oh my gosh how I love flying.

The other passengers are interesting to observe. Since today is a Federal holiday there’s not a lot of business folks traveling, at least from what I’ve seen, but there’s a lot of those that are casually dressed. I am dressed in a sport coat and tie and I am definitely enjoying a better customer service experience and I think it’s because I’m dressed this way. It could be because I have a stronger feeling of self-confidence when I dress this way. Whatever the reason, I am happy that I feel good and that I feel like I’m being treated well.

There is a mom and one of her sons seated across the aisle from me. The young man is well behaved. The mother does things like drop items in the aisle during take-off and eat nutri-grain bars but we can deal with that. The man behind her brought a greased soaked sack of McFat onto the flight that smelled extra pungent for the frivolity of all within a two mile radius of this flight, but we can deal with that with minimal personal irritability.

I’m wondering if this flight would normally pass over Washington, D.C. The reason I’m wondering this is because we’ve done several S banks and for some reason I’m equating this to avoiding flying over the Inauguration celebrations.

It’s time for refreshment! The favorite time of the flight for all. Especially if it helps the passenger behind me wash down his McFat.

So I’m sitting at gate D3 for my return flight from the Raleigh-Durham area. This has been an off-the-grid weekend with a little bit of work and a little bit of play. I see more of these weekends in the future.

If I were ever to monetize my blog, I would seriously consider becoming a spokesperson for PopChips.

My monthly case of PopChips arrived on Thursday. There was much excitement because I decided to go with 11 different varieties in this case instead of the standard six. I tried the That Sweet Chili Potato flavor and the Sweet Potato variety to much delight. Today was my first experience with Parmesan Garlic Potato.

Delectable.

Now, when you’re in line at Subway trying to eat healthy by ordering a Veggie Delight on wheat bread with barely a suggestion of dressing and a complete absence of cheese, take a moment to look at the bag of the healthy-looking SunChips. They’re really not that healthy. In fact, I think the caloric count of the SunChips will outweigh the caloric count of the healthy sub you’re ordering.

PopChips? 100 calories a bag. No saturated fat. No Trans Fat. Total fat 3.5g. And quite frankly, I don’t see anything in the ingredients list that I can’t pronounce.

I won’t ever ad ads to my site, after all, you have my vivacious personality to enjoy, but if anyone ever asks for a snack recommendation, I recommend PopChips.

So it has been a week since I set some goals for myself for 2013 and quite frankly I’m feeling good about them thus far. The scale and I are getting along. I have completely revamped my workflow at work and I am markedly less stressed (though sometimes I played the harried part to keep people off my back). At home, well, the cleaners come back in a week. Two out of three ain’t bad.

Earl and I went to the gym the other night and I snagged the last available elliptical machine (otherwise known as the ‘Spazz-master’). It seems that there are many people trying to get fit for the New Year and I applaud their efforts. The social engineering person in me is curious to see how long the overpopulated gym situation lasts. I think some make a list of dozens of resolutions and lose interest in them. I know that I would. I’m finding by concentrating on less than a half dozen goals, instead of trying to revamp my life, I’m focused on what I want to get done and I’m actually accomplishing something. This is a good feeling.

I’m employing technology in my new routines where I can; I still use MyFitnessPal to keep track of my healthy stuff. I have a FitBit that is keeping tracking of my steps and sleeping patterns. I was a little surprised to find out how many times I wake up during the night and after the first few nights I adjusted my sleep schedule so that I would get more restful sleep. My organizational goals at work have focused on a completely paper-free desk. I wiped out a bunch of unused apps on my computers and iDevices. I’m getting rid of older technology that I used to keep around for nostalgic purposes and only keeping the things I actually use.

It’s a good feeling. I guess when your only resolution is to set up achievable goals for yourself, you’re setting yourself up to win.

And that feels good.

So I haven’t written in my blog in three days. This is unusual for me, though there have been weekends where I haven’t written much in the blog simply because there has been too much going on in our merry lives.

Apparently such was the case this weekend.

At the beginning of the year I decided that I was going to reassess my social networking ways and decide what was microbloggable, what was bloggable and then act accordingly. This weekend I decided that I just wanted to enjoy life without telling the world about it through every inane detail. Earl and I had a lovely date night on Saturday night, saw an enjoyable movie and accomplished many chores around The Manor yesterday. It was a simple, yet effective way to enjoy the weekend and quite frankly I loved it. I feel good today.

Yesterday I actually sat down and read. I didn’t read to find things to talk about on the blog, I didn’t read to get the latest trends in technology news, I read because I wanted to read and enrich my mind and stoke the creative fire. I loved it. I feel stoked.

Sometimes it’s good to take a short break.

So today is the first day of 2013 and people all across the world are taking it easy and relaxing, having partied like wild people last night. Earl, Jamie and I did not party like wild people last night but instead opted to sit in front of the television, enjoy some snacks and laugh a lot. It’s what we do.

I thought it would be kind of weird to have a New Year’s Eve Countdown without Dick Clark and I was right to an extent; it was actually much weirder than I thought it could possibly be. I mean, who in their right mind thought that Fergie and Jenny McCarthy should be hosting a tribute to Dick Clark? Jenny McCarthy was her usual incoherent self so that wasn’t the weird part, the weird part was Fergie, who was apparently auditioning for a sex tape where she was captured by spaced out, apparently drugged crowd people that glued her right hand to her hip as she nearly serviced the microphone and made people uncomfortable with her pronunciation of the word “Dick”.

We couldn’t take Jenny and Fergie so we switched to Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper as soon as we could and we found them to be much more enjoyable. I’ve always found Anderson to be adorable (and I like his journalism ways) and Kathy can be fun in managed doses, so it was a good combination again this year. We watched the ball drop, there were kisses and hugs and text messages and then we called it a night.

Today has been a day of relaxation with bouts of productivity. I just hauled a bunch of stuff out to the curb for garbage pickup tomorrow. Cleaning clutter is always a good way to start a new year.

Happy New Year everyone!