In like a...

Well, it seems that February was a bust at the old blog, but in "meatspace" I had a lot going on:

I did more traveling than I usually do, all solo, which is quite unusual for me. It's nice to be by my lonesome every now and then, but as usual I was reminded what a great travel companion I have in my husband. After a few evenings of only being able to talk to him for a few minutes on the phone, I also remembered how much I don't miss the long-distance dating we did. I mean, dating was fun. Needing a phone to connect with each other wasn't.

All the traveling was for the two baby showers held for my sister. The one I hosted turned out pretty well, and I was proud of its special twist: I asked everyone to bring their favorite children's book. She got a pile of great books! This had the doubly-good effect of taking up so much time, the one game I had planned got scrapped. Nobody was sad about this.

My sister got some important necessary items at her showers, like a stroller and a baby seat... and clothes, clothes, clothes. We were wondering how many onesies a kid can wear at the same time. I started mentioning that babies need their clothes changed all the time, but as we started unpacking two showers' worth of cute outfits in the nursery I realized that there is perhaps such a thing as too many clothes for a baby. Especially one born in the spring... don't babies just hang out in their diapers during the summer?

Before the traveling (fortunately!) I had the flu for the first time in... years. It took me at least 24 hours before I admitted it was the flu. I thought I was just tired, or lazy, or something. Turns out not wanting to move and hurting everywhere was on account of the 101-degree fever I was rocking. Ohhh.

Having the flu for three days confirmed for me that our apartment is too small. It's workable for the two of us on evenings and weekends; it's not entirely bearable when one of us is quite ill and wants to sleep/watch TV/make 37 pots of tea and the other is about six feet away in his office trying to grade papers and prepare for the class he's teaching that night. Alas, it seems unlikely we'll move soon, so I just need to stay as healthy as possible.

Perhaps with that in mind, I started swimming in earnest during the latter half of February. I hope to have more to mention in March about my certainly ill-conceived plan to participate in a sprint triathlon in July. The longest atheltic event I've participated in up until now was an 8K last March, so I have some nervousness about the swimming and biking bits. Which I understand is two-thirds of the race.

Most importantly, I hope to make this less of a "first of the month" blog and more of an "occasional" blog. I admire bloggers who post daily, but I know myself well enough to know that this, at least at this point in time, is not one of those blogs.

Happy March, everyone!

The return of the return, and suggestions of kisses

That was certainly a long break, wasn't it? So here's a short post to parallel my last:

I am still alive and am getting back into the patterns of work, school and life in general. This includes planning an upcoming baby shower for my impending niece or nephew, seeing the dim but strengthening light at the end of the graduate school tunnel, pondering possible moves of both career and geographical natures, and - fortunately - reading some good writing.

I finally subscribed to Roger Ebert's blog, after having read several excellent posts over there (I think blog-subscription is a commitment I take a bit too seriously sometimes). He posted again today, about the subject of making out, of all things.

Mr. Ebert writes "It is more erotic to wonder if you're about to be kissed than it is to be kissed." Upon reading that I recalled one of my heart-poundingest memories of high school, when I was riding in a car with a boy and he merely put his hand over mine. I recall becoming a bit dizzy from the least physical contact possible. Fantastic.

So if you require a good long post that will hopefully conjure up a few good memories of your own, head over here. If you find you haven't many memories of this sort of thing, it might time to go make out with someone, don't you think?

Happy new year!

A quick note

Well, it's December already, so I wanted to do a quick little rundown of November and think about what I'd like to do here this month.

* NaBloPoMo was a moderate success for me - I posted 11 times, which fell short of my 15-post goal, but is still the most I've ever posted in a month. (You know, in my long blogging career.) At the moment I'm thinking roughly 10 posts a month is a good average to shoot for while I continue to get my blogging bearings.

* My busy quarter is finished, so I have no classwork to worry about this month... except perhaps some work on my thesis proposal, but I'm giving myself a couple of weeks of not-school thinking.

* I've thought of a few fun stories I'd like to recount here, but I'm still mulling over the multi-part post vs. one huge post format. Readers, which do you prefer? Shorter, episodic storytelling? Or one big blast of reading? If they're shorter posts do you find it annoying if an unrelated post goes up between episodes?

That reminds me, have you read The Pioneer Woman's love story? That was episodic and took her like two years to finish (if it's finished now... I keep hoping she'll pick it up again where she left off, after the wedding). Good reading. I want to be like her when I grow up.

*I'm planning a few more good causes posts. If y'all have suggestions for causes you'd like to hear about, let me know!

It just started snowing outside, so I think this counts as the first day of real live wintertime for Chicago. I love this time of year, when snow is still exciting for everyone, we're all decorating and baking and plotting gifts, school years are winding down and family plans are getting firmed up.

Happy December!

Plenty of writing... just not here

I'm wondering if I really will manage this 15 posts in one month thing... it's getting down to the wire.

Also, I have some slightly more pressing writing to do this weekend: namely, a final paper which is due on Tuesday, and which will potentially serve as the foundation for my thesis proposal literature review.

So, friends, it's going to be a quiet weekend on the Yo-hah! front, unless I pop in to tell you about interesting research - and I sincerely hope I don't do that to you.

(Hm... my blog has an exclamation point, just like "Jeopardy!"... which reminds me of a story... But I'll save that for later.)

Happy weekend-before-Thanksgiving!

Wednesday

Other blogs have "Wordless Wednesdays", and "Wedded Wednesdays", and perhaps my personal favorite, "Unitasker Wednesdays" on Unclutterer.

I just like Wednesdays, but I'm not sure I'm ready to give them an alliterating theme on this here blog just yet.

There is a lot to like so far about this particular Wednesday. It's raining here in Chicago, and I kind of enjoy rainy days. My coworker gave me a surprise coffee-and-donut treat this morning, and oh, how I love coffee and a donut. I don't have class this evening - in fact, I'm finished with class meetings for 2009 - so I can go home this evening and spend time with my husband and our kitty and probably some acoustic musical instruments.

I will probably chat with my mom on the phone this evening, because she and I chat on the phone every Wednesday - something we've done since I moved out of the house 9 years ago. This is the grown-up version of Wednesday afternoons many years ago, when I was in kindergarten in the mornings. Mom would take off work midday and would walk me home from school so we could spend a little time together, just the two of us, before my older siblings got home from all-day school and my dad came home from work and the house got crowded again.

I think this means it's my mom's fault I like Wednesdays. That's OK. I hope my kids like Wednesdays in the future, too.

So, happy rainy/coffee/time-with-loved-ones Wednesday, everybody.

Because I'm not used to having readers.

Before I started writing this blog, like, ten minutes ago, I was reading other people's blogs. My reader has a long list of regularly-visited blogs on it, but I realized a while ago that the one I've visited most regularly has been That Wife. There's a simple reason for this: she just finished posting every single day for the last year. And she's a very interesting writer.

This week, Jenna (that's That Wife's name) has been having a celebration week of giveaways to commemorate her 10,000th comment. Part of qualifying for the giveaways is having commented in the past. I wasn't sure if I'd commented enough to qualify for the big giveaway at the end of the week... but she informed me that actually, I've commented more than almost anyone else.

Uh, wow.

I'm still not sure if this makes me a scary blog-stalker or or just a fan. I do think that it shows I should have started writing over here sooner, rather than leaving tomes on someone else's blog. But as long as she doesn't think I'm creepy (and I hope she doesn't), I suppose this status of frequent-commenter might work out for me - especially because she actually offers perks to the perennially opinionated over there (hey, I did not know that before, like, a week ago. I just write too many comments - it's not mercenary, it's compulsive.)

One of these perks is that Jenna is telling her readers to check out the blogs of those who regularly comment. Which includes my blog. Which is an infant.

I am accustomed to thinking of this blog as a project with 1.5 readers, both of whom I know well in real life. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, happens when more people check it out.

If you're here from ThatWife, please leave a little comment to say hello. And if you wouldn't mind, let me know what you think of this space. I'm still working out how to write a normal-length post, for instance, and am pondering incorporating more graphics, though as you can see, text-heavy is sort of my style. Also: how's the color? This background seems to look different on every computer. Does it stab at your eyes? I wouldn't want to do that to you.

In short: welcome! I hope you enjoy it over here.

NaBloPoMo

Apparently, some people call November "NaBloPoMo" because they can't type out "National Blog Posting Month". The concept is that one posts something each day for the whole month.

My camping backstory post went up Sunday, the 1st of November (at least, that's what blogger claims... I'm still learning how this system works), so technically so far I'm managing to post every day this month - even though this wasn't the goal when that post was written.

And it's only the second day of the month.

With everything else happening this November - I'm finishing two of my master's classes and, you know, working and living a life and stuff - I'm going to aim for fifteen posts this month, roughly one every two days. This should offer some practice in shorter posts, which is something I'm obviously not great at (see camping post below).

2 down, 13 to go!