First, the good news:  I have my “new” (aka refurbished and new to me) iPhone!  It came in today and I don’t think I’ve ever made it from our house to the Cedar Hills Shopping Center that fast on foot in the whole time we’ve lived here.  I got totally overheated (when am I going to learn that my new coat is actually warm?) and probably looked like a maniac but.  I have my beloved phone again.  It has been “restored” and, thanks to the resiliency of the sim card, I still have everything.  All of my photos, contacts and even my text message history are in tact.  The phone is charging right now but every few minutes I go over and pet it.

It is amazing at how completely dependent upon technology I have become.

When I was waiting for them to find my phone in their stock room I met a fellow writer!  Whose name I did not get!  But she was very friendly and we exchanged commiserations on how hard it is to find decent writing gigs these days (she’s a technical writer).  She asked for my name and I gave it to her, along with this here blog name, but I was so distracted by the getting my phone back/turning in of my “loaner” phone that I didn’t manage to get hers until she had already left the store.  Bummer.  But, if you’re reading: hello fellow in-line-waiter!  It was nice to meet you!

Next the pretty cool news:  I don’t know if you read or follow Kristin (of Kristabella fame), but she decided that, instead of giving up something for lent, she was going to do (among other things) try to post to her blog at least five times a week during lent.  We chatted about it on twitter when she was deciding whether or not to make the commitment and I told her that if she did it, I’d do it to.  So! More posting during lent to, hopefully, keep my blog mojo up.

Finally the arrrrgh news:  It’s crunch time.  You know how it gets when you live paycheck to paycheck and its the last week of the month and the rent is due and you and your husband are looking at each other and saying “oh crap.”?  Yeah that’s where we are right now.  This means that I super need to get my nose to the grindstone and turn up work and bring in money pretty much any way I can get it to come in.  So! This week’s postings might be sponsored.  And there WILL be ads appearing in the sidebar pretty soon to help bring in $$ for next month as well.  And that means yet another site re-design to accommodate everything.  Which, when paired with the awesome new posting frequency, might start to feel a little drudgey by Friday.  I’ll do my level best to keep it interesting around here, but if you suddenly see a few wonky links that I wouldn’t usually post? It’s a fair guess that someone is paying me a few bucks to stick them there.  Until next week, when I’ll get a lot more selective about advertising, paid posts and all that stuff.

Also? In case you couldn’t tell, I am caffeinated today.  Next week: decaffeination.  Again.  This ol’ wagon is getting a leeettle bit wobbly.

It’s Friday evening and you know what that means: blogging from a coffee shop at PSU!  I am, in fact, sitting not more than twenty feet away from where I sat last week when I revealed to all of you my Big Plan to sort of focus my purposes for this blog.  I had plans.  Big! Plans!

And then the plague hit my apartment.  Will came down with the sinus crud first and, thankfully, is mostly over it now.  I caught the sinus crud from him Tuesday and by yesterday night it had moved right on down to my chest.  I am not thrilled about this development, but I am also not surprised.  This happens every. single. time I get a cold or the flu.  Those of you who can just get a head cold? You are my heroes! Tell me how you do it!

So, while I have been (mostly) cooking at home this week, my big dinners have consisted mostly of chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.  I think I cooked something real at least once but hell if I can remember what it was.

Note to self: If you spend ten minutes making faces at your reflection in a dark window to entertain yourself while you try to remember what the hell you cooked besides soup and sandwiches, you should probably remind yourself that it is a WINDOW and not a MIRROR and that you are probably frightening the people standing around outside.  Whoops.

I know! I’ll cook something real tonight and post about that! Woo!

So remember how awesome (and caffeinated!) I felt yesterday morning?  Well, my day? Did not end on the same positive tone.

Oh, I got everything done that I wanted to do (and early! Thank you Real Simple for the pants ironing video!) and then…and then….

Then I dropped my super expensive iPhone in the toilet.  And even though I did everything I could to dry it out (including but not limited to using a hair dryer on it, blowing condensed air into it, vacuuming the moisture out of it–which was actually very successful–and leaving it in a bowl of rice over night) it died.

And then it turned out that the sniffles I’d been feeling all afternoon were not the result of simply being cold and too stubborn to turn on the heat but a full blown sinus thing.  A sinus thing that required two benadryl to help me sleep through the night.

It’s CRAZY how quickly my day went from awesome to total suck.  Arrrgggh.

The good news is that we foresaw my klutziness contributing to some sort of technology catastrophe when we bought our phones so we also bought the Best Buy insurance.  This insurance allows me to replace my phone (with a refurbished one) through Best Buy and not have to go through a bunch of craptastic red tape with Apple.  The guys I talked to today were all “yep, your insurance policy just paid for itself!” and I should have my new phone in a week (or less).

Can I give a quick shout out to my neighborhood Best Buy? The Beaverton Best Buy is teh awesome.  Seriously.  We have never ever had a bad experience there ever.  And today when I went in today to have them look at my phone both of the guys I worked with were very nice and funny and reassured me that everything would be fine and that replacing my phone wouldn’t be a problem.  They didn’t give me a hard time or ask “how did you drop it?” or any of that stuff.  They got me a “loaner” phone and charged it for me and laughed with me when it started lighting up with a bunch of missed messages.  Honestly–it doesn’t matter what we’re after when we’re there, we always have a good experience.

Oh, and just for the FTC’s sake?  I am giving this store review just because I feel like it.  I’m not being paid to gush for them and the best buy powers that be don’t even know that I’m writing this right now.  So there you go.

The flu/sinus thing though… It is no fun.  I don’t know where I’ve been for the last few years but I guess during that time the laws in Oregon have changed so that you are no longer allowed to get real Sudafed from a pharmacist by simply showing them your ID.  Nope, now you need a perscription.  Suckfest.

So I called the women’s clinic at OHSU to ask my doctor to phone in a perscription for the stuff but after talking to her and the nurse we decided that it would be better if I opted not to get it.  It turns out that taking it during the first trimester isn’t the greatest idea.  And since I’m allergic to Tylenol, this leaves me with Benadryl to help me sleep at night and toughing it out during the day if I want to stay awake.

And just to note: I AM NOT PREGNANT (that I know of).  But we are trying again and I am not taking even a tiny chance of contributing to something going wrong again.

This means that I get to try a bunch of natural remedies so earlier today I tried the holding my face over a big steaming pot of water for a half an hour with a towel over my head thing and that actually felt pretty good.  Now I’m off to search for more natural head cold/sinus remedies.  What’s your favorite?

Today is, well, “full” is kind of a good word.  There is house cleaning to be done, work-work to be done, blogging to be done, projects to be researched and…ironing Will’s clothes for the fancy engineering business dinner thing that he’s going to tonight (sans me, which I’m kind of okay with because engineering is not my deal.  It would be kind of like forcing him to go to a Grey’s Anatomy symposium).

These things are in addition to the trips to Fred Meyer and the UPS store that I have already checked off my list.

So, as most you might already know, we here in the Snarke household are “trying” again.  I thought about writing a post similar to Dooce’s “The Procedure” but decided against it.  But those of you who have read it will understand what I’m talking about.

But! My point!

Because we are “trying” again, I’m also trying to live sort of like we’ve already succeeded: giving up/cutting way down on my caffeine intake, eating healthy…er than we have been (not to difficult considering that for two months we ate pretty much only fast food or frozen dinners), etc.  According to all of the baby/pregnancy books pregnant women can have up to 200mg of caffeine a day.

By the way: just because “the procedure” has been reconvened does not mean that we have succeeded at anything yet, so please don’t get all “ohmigod!” on me.

But! Back to My Point!

On Friday I may have accidentally had quite a lot of extra caffeine, thanks to the 16 oz cremekula I ordered at Seattle’s Best without asking it to be espresso free (I thought they were the same things as the non-espresso’d frapuccinos at Starbucks.  Oops) and ended up containing a double shot of espresso as well as my total stubbornness and refusal to give up my table by the outlet to order a new one when I discovered my mistake.

I might have been awake until after five in the morning thanks to that, but…bygones.

Anyway, so I was really caffeinated on Friday/Saturday morning and so have spent the last couple of days going through caffeine withdrawal headaches.  Which TOTALLY defeats the whole “giving up/cutting way back on caffeine” goal I’ve been working toward.  So I resolved No More Caffeine.

Then this morning I woke up feeling kind of sluggish and bleh and overwhelmed by just how much I have to do today–which included a trip to Fred Meyer where they have a soda fountain.  So.  I decided to look up the caffeine content in Pepsi.

And it is totally within the 200mg cutoff point.  According to the site I found, a 20 oz Pepsi has 63 mgs of caffeine.  Score!

So.  I have been slurping on a caffeinated Pepsi and have quite a lot of energy now.  Which will really help me get everything done.

That’s right.  I get an energy buzz on the caffeine in soda.  I? Am a lightweight.  Which is why soda is the strongest beverage I usually drink (except for when I accidentally end up with double shot cremekulas).

It has taken all of my self control not! to! end! every! sentence! with! exclamation! points!  (a sure sign that the caffeine has gone straight to my head).

So.  After my big “I’m going to be more domestic and blog about it!” announcement, what do you think I did?  Did I go right home and cook a big dinner from scratch for my husband?  Did I thoroughly clean our apartment from top to bottom?  Did I spend my weekend organizing stuff?

Heck no!  We went to Ikea for a new desk chair (and wok for me and pillow for Will), to WinCo for some groceries and then spent the rest of the weekend lying around.  I made frozen DiGorno pizza for dinner on Valentine’s Day.

We’re extremely cash poor these days so, even though it is our first Valentine’s Day as a married couple, I wanted to keep things low key.  I didn’t want Will to have to worry about whether or not we could afford to go to dinner (nevermind that every place we’d want to go would probably be packed) and I didn’t want him to buy me any presents.  In fact–for this Valentine’s Day I really really wanted to spoil him.

So, I found a card (“If our love were a garden I’d wanna be your hoe”), some “naughty” dice and, because when we saw it in the store he went into a childhood nostalgia riff, a box of 24 packets of fun dip (which in this context sounds x-rated, but is not).  And, for the BIG gift, I told him that he could spend the whole day in front of World of Warcraft without nary a complaint from me.

To add just a little hint of “awww, we’re married now and soooooooooooooo in love”-ness to our day, after we finished eating our pizza we defrosted the tier of our wedding cake that has been sitting in our freezer since the wedding and ate most of it.

As a present to me, Will said we could wear our geek shirts (his: “geek”, mine: “I <heart> my geek”) and, after spending the morning and afternoon in front of his game, he spent most of the evening curled up on the couch with me watching stuff that we’ve saved on the DVR.

In a word? Awesome.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it enough here or not, but I have developed quite an affinity for the movie Julie & Julia.  I have eluded to the fact that Julie & Juila has become my “go to” movie when I just want to curl up, veg and feel happy warm fuzzies.   This affection rivals those months in college when my friend Teresa and I watched Empire Records over and over and over again (she even had it set to repeat in her VCR) and left each other quotes from the movie on our white boards.

I’ve written about how the movie has inspired me to blog more often and more…put-myself-out-there-y.   It made me think about why I started this blog (my SIX YEAR bloggiversary passed a few weeks ago, can you believe it?!?) and where I hope to take it.

What I haven’t talked about is how the Julia Child part of the story has inspired me as well.   I have been going through what some might call a Julia Child “phase.”  I’ve checked out The Way to Cook and Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom from the library.  I bought My Life in France.  I have DVDs of The French Chef checked out from Netflix. But this is more than a reading about and watching DVDs about someone with whom I have become recently fascinated.  This has led to action.  Real and practical action.  I’m cooking at home almost every night now. I’m trying new things.  I’m learning about food and how it’s put together.  No kidding, I was reading through The Way to Cook like it was a novel.

I’ve also been developing an affinity for Martha Stewart.  I watched a Nightline interview with her a while ago and was left with a “wow, she’s kind of a badass” feeling about her.  Until I watched that I’d sort of regarded her as one of those Femzillas–the ones who think women NEED to grow their own rose gardens just so that they can have fresh petals for centerpieces or else they are failures as women.  It turns out she’s more of an “I do this because I have the time and get paid to think this stuff up.  Normal women have far more important things to do with their brains” and I totally respect that.

Growing up I had absolutely no use for domesticity of any kind. Over the last few years, though–since I’ve had a home of my own that I’ve wanted to feel proud of–I’ve started to come around to the idea of learning how to do all of that domestic stuff.  Granted, I’m limited by a few things: budget being the biggest and the limitations of apartment living (hello expensive coin op washers and dryers with only three settings) being another, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that there are things I can start learning and experimenting with now.

And then, one morning a couple of weeks ago I was trying to be a “good wife” and iron some pants that Will wanted to wear to a dinner thing.  After it took me more than a half an hour to iron those pants I declared “that is effing good enough.”  and gave up.  As I was hanging the pants back up (and hoping Will wouldn’t mind the damn creases I couldn’t seem to stop ironing into the back of the pant legs) I thought to myself “I bet Martha Stewart has a trick that will teach me how to iron these damn things perfectly in five minutes.  And I bet her fitted sheets get folded perfectly too.”

And, though I did not actually go look up Martha Stewart hints on ironing and sheet folding, an idea began to take form.

I thought “what if I blogged about all of this?”

And one of my big ideas was born.

I’ve toyed for a few weeks with the idea of starting a new blog that would be dedicated to my learning how to be a domestic diva.

But I decided against it.

Why?

The biggest reason is that, after my wedding, one of my friends had an idea for the same kind of website that the two of us could work on together.  We were both really jazzed about the idea of going in on a site together and doing a joint venture complete with advertising, and all of the bells and whistles.  And then life got busy.  Super busy.  For both of us.  So we haven’t gotten the idea off the ground.  But hopefully when things calm down we can revisit it. (Not that I’ve actually brought this up with her, but Hi friend! What do you think?)

The other big reason for not branching out with this topic is that, thanks to my sore lack of direction or focus on this blog, it is easier to incorporate these (mis)adventures here than it would be to build a whole new site for it.  The things I plan on trying out, playing with and blogging about are not things that I would not ordinarily write about here anyway.   While there are topics that it would be hard to fit into the general feel of this blog, learning to cook and clean and, well, be Donna Reed (but badasser) is not one of them.

So.  That’s part of the big news that I was planning on talking about yesterday.  I’m going to be applying a semi-focus to this site.

The other part of the big news that I was planning on talking about yesterday is that I plan on advertising and promoting the crap out of this as well as putting ads back up on this site.  I WILL be doing paid posts for things that, I think, tie into these topics.  I’ll hopefully find some sidebar and potentially post footer advertising.

The whole ad thing isn’t something that I am in love with.  But here’s the thing: Will and I? Need every stream of income that I can come up with.  And even if the ads and paid posts only bring in five bucks a month, that is five more dollars than we would have had otherwise. I do not view this as “selling out.”  I view this as “trying to help provide for my family.”

So there will be some design changes happening to this site over the next couple of weeks as I figure out what works and what does not.  Be patient and it should even out before too long.

So how does this all tie in to the way my day got away from me yesterday and how that getting-away-ness was oddly appropriate?

Yesterday I:

• made cupcakes for Will to take in to work as an early Valentine’s Day treat for his coworkers (and because I had a knot in my knickers to do some baking and needed an excuse)
• Did four loads of laundry
• Washed a bunch of dishes
• Cleaned our apartment (I even vacuumed!)
• Cooked Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo for dinner (our battle cry last nigh? “Fettuccine is a bitch!”)
• And did some work too.

So the day that I was going to talk about the new domestic semi-focus for my blog, I got caught up in doing very domestic things! Kind of fitting.

This post? Is far too long for a Friday evening.

I MEANT to blog today I really did.  But then I got all busy doing stuff and now it is time for bed.  And I’d elaborate on the stuff I was busy doing but it relates to the thing I was going to talk about and I don’t have time to go into all of that right now because it is time for bed.

Seriously? Where did today go? Shouldn’t it still be Thursday morning?

So yesterday I walked over to Fred Meyer to get some stuff for dinner and to buy Will another book of transit tickets (with me driving in and paying for parking once a week it is a lot cheaper to just buy the books of passes than it is to buy him a semester transit pass from PSU).  When I got to the front of the line for the transit tickets the clerk at the counter told me that Fred Meyer had just stopped carrying the ticket booklets Monday.  And to that I say: W. T. F.

And here is where I’d put in a nifty graphic of my tweet about it but I do not know how to make those yet so you’ll just have to use your imagination.

The clerk at the customer service counter told met that the closest place to buy them is the information booth at Pioneer Square.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with such terminology, Pioneer Square is smack in the middle (well not smack in the middle but it’ll do for the purposes of this afternoon’s post) of downtown Portland.  In other words: in the middle of Inconvenienceville if I hadn’t needed to pick up some books from the library.

I had been planning on going to the library on Friday to pick up my books but Will only had one pass left in his current book and, let’s face it, I have started to lust over excuses to get out of the house so I agreed to come downtown today and pick up a booklet for him and then meet up with him after his last class to give them to him so that he would be able to get home without having to find cash somewhere.

I came in at noonish.  I went to the library and picked up my books and then grabbed some lunch (McDonalds, aka Not A Good Idea Bleccch.)  I got a couple of things notarized and had a very interesting conversation with our US Bank Personal Banker that lasted for an hour (a good hour, not a bad hour) and now, here I am.  I’m sitting in the basement of the engineering building at PSU waiting for Will to be done with his midterm.

Wasn’t that  a long winded and terribly long winded way to tell you that I get to spend time downtown TWICE this week?

I think there is definitely something to my “I think better when I’m out and about” theory.  Because here I am, sitting in a visually boring room with no ambient noise (yay for Rhapsody and headphones) and very few people to watch and my thoughts are still flowing easier than they do when I’m at home.  This, I think, is a sign.  I’m not sure what it is a sign of, but it is definitely a sign.

So.  I’ve hinted at having a couple of ideas and not knowing whether I want to commit to them or not and not wanting to tell you about them until I know for sure.  I’m pretty sure that I’ve decided to do them.

And if I told you all about them now you wouldn’t have a reason to come back tomorrow now would you?

Just spent an hour writing a post and then? The internet and my computer ate it.

Tuesday? Immaletyouwin.

So.  What a game huh?  Those were some plays! Yeah! Go Saints!

Don’t I sound like I know what I’m talking about?

Honestly? My favorite parts of the game were the screaming chicken commercials.  And that the Saints won because that’s the team Will told me we were rooting for.

And the part when the guy kicked the ball too wide to go through the goal posts when I looked at Will and said “maybe they should have played some Beyonce first” and he totally got my joke.  He enjoys the show but isn’t quite the Gleek that I am but it still made my afternoon that he understood and appreciated the reference.

The commercials this year… look I know that football is, stereotypically, a guy guy’s sport.  So all of the commercials for beer, cars and gadgets were understandable.  But I was disappointed that the commercials didn’t have more of a universal appeal.  How many people tune in just for the commercials?  Why play to the basest and most stereotypically minded of football viewers?  Still–the screaming chickens were pretty damn funny.

Also? We totally called Barney Stinson’s 877 number and got through and? It was awesome.

In other, unrelated news, I am starting to think that I really do think better when I’m out of the house.  I don’t know if it is the being physically unable to sit down and really get to work on the things I’m thinking about or if it’s the change in scenery that ups my inspiration but I had all sorts of great ideas that felt like they’d be really fun to tackle when I was hanging out in downtown on Friday.  Then, when we got home and had dinner and I actually was able to access my computer files and the other things I needed to put some of my great ideas into action I lost my motivational mojo.

Oh there are still a couple of projects that I’m chomping at the bit to explore further (I don’t want to go into them yet in case I decide not to go into them) but now that working on them is easier to do I’m not sure exactly where to start or where to focus first or if I still really want to approach them in the same way that felt like such a good idea on Friday.

Maybe its that I’ve had time to start doubting myself.  Or that it’s an early onset case of the Mondays.

Either way, the screaming chickens cracked me up!