Back in DC

I’m back in DC tonight after being away for almost a year. I wish I had time to write more, but it’s been a long day and I’m completely exhausted. I started writing a post on my flight today, but it’s nowhere near ready to publish yet. I wasn’t as productive as I wanted to be while traveling today, but I did get a lot done after I arrived. But more on that later. Right now I”m going to try and get some sleep so I can get up and walk or jog before I have to be at work at 9 AM. That might be the only time of day that the weather here is condusive to exercise this time of year! I’ve got my fingers crossed that I can get some exercise in the morning because I feel like a slug for sitting so much today. We’ll see how that goes. Good night!

Dressing up on Monday

I usually pick out my work clothes for a particular day the night before because my brain doesn’t seem to be cabable of making such important choices early in the morning. So last night I pulled my favorite blue dress and silver heels out of the closet for work today. Dressing up on Mondays seems to make the start of the work week a little smoother. However, when I got up this morning all I wanted to do was throw on jeans and a t-shirt. I almost wore an outfit of that sort to work, but after some deliberation I managed to talk myself into the dress and heels instead. And it’s a good thing I did because my group had a lunchtime meeting with our program manager today! I would have felt like a total slacker if I’d shown up for that in jeans. Not that I think any less of my co-workers who do wear jeans because that’s my go-to article of clothing most of the time, but I felt much more confident wearing a dress and heels in a meeting with my program manager. All of this makes me realize that my wardrobe really needs an upgrade. I need some options that are somewhere between jeans and dresses. Too bad I’m such a picky shopper! Maybe I’ll have more luck when fall rolls around.

What I’m thankful for now

I haven’t written a gratitude list in a long time for lots of reasons, but while I was sitting at work this weekend I made a list of some of the things I’m thankful for right now.

1) My job. I’ve never been so grateful to be gainfully employed as I have been these last six months. It’s the only thing that seems to be going right in my life these days! I can’t afford to lose sight of that so I have to remind myself every day how lucky I am.
2) Overtime pay. Since I had to work over the weekend supporting some testing and I can’t take days off later this week to make up for it, I’m lucky that my boss approved my request for overtime. A little extra money will be nice.
3) A decent raise. Fortunately I already make a good salary, but with the economy still suffering I was convinced my raise was going to be dismal this year. It’d been that way the last two years so I didn’t expect anything different in 2013. But when my boss gave me my new salary notification I was pleasantly surprised to see that I got a 4.8% raise. I’ll take it!
4) Free food. One of the good things about supporting this testing at work is getting free meals. Even if it might not be exactly what I’d order if I was on my own, I appreciate every dollar I can save these days!
5) Trying new things. Speaking of free food, we ordered lunch from a Thai restaurant on Friday which made me a little nervous because I’ve never tried Thai food before. I was afraid I wouldn’t like it so I ordered something basic – chicken pad thai. And it was delicious! I’m so glad I tried it.
6) Aleve. I won’t go into too much detail about this one, but I wouldn’t have made it through work on Saturday without it. Sometimes being a women really stinks, if you know what I mean. But fortunately I always have a bottle of Aleve in my work bag for just such an occasion. It’s God’s gift to women, I swear, and this woman is exceedingly thankful for it.

To be continued…

Weekend bullet update

Since the topics I’ve gathered to write about have nothing to do with each other, I’ll just make this post a bullet list…

***Last Sunday I met a friend at Disneyland for lunch. It was about ten degrees colder than it had been on Saturday (which was unseasonably warm), and it was obvious that most of the patrons hadn’t prepared for that. There was a long line of people buying sweatshirts at Downtown Disney before going into the park. It was pretty funny. It would have been even funnier if I didn’t need to stand in that same long line to return a t-shirt. That took quite a while. But as I was waiting I saw a couple of women buying a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt that caught my eye. I’ve been wanting one for a long time so I bought one for myself before going home that afternoon. I learned that sometimes waiting in line is beneficial!

***I’ve been having some really vivid dreams recently for some reason. Like last week when I dreamed about trying to escape a forest fire. I was in a group of people in a house out in the woods, but a lightning storm sparked a fire. We had to get out of the house and outrun the rapidly approaching fire on foot. Our prospects didn’t look too good so I was a little anxious when I woke up that morning! I thought the other people were just fictional characters when I woke up, but as soon as one of my co-workers sent me in instant message later than morning I remembered that he was in my dream. I told him about it and he asked whether I thought it was symbolism or foreshadowing. I thought about it for a minute before settling on symbolism. We both agreed “running from a forest fire” was a good way to describe our jobs!

***I won an award at work recently – Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems (S&IS) 2013 World Class Engineering Award. My boss told me I was nominated back in November, but I promptly forgot about it. So imagine my surprise when I found out about a month ago that I won! There were a couple dozen winners so it’s not like it was just me, but I’m still really honored to have been selected. My job doesn’t exactly allow for a lot of professional exposure so it was a pleasant surprise to be recognized for some of my accomplishments. (The award was mostly for something that I worked on last summer.) So the Friday before last I went to an awards luncheon in El Segundo to be presented with my award and shake the hands of some very important people (which also happened last summer when those same people and quite a few others were very happy about a crisis that I diverted). Not a bad way to spend a few hours.

***When I’m at work I listen to the news most of the time, which can be boring, but it keeps me up to date on current events. Unfortunately I don’t have any control over what news channel is being broadcast. It’s usually CNN, which I can handle, but sometimes it’s Fox News which has the potential to make me physically ill. There’s only so which whining about our non-Republican president and the “liberal media” I can take. But anyway, I always pick up some amusing tidbits no matter what I’m listening to. Like yesterday when a few of the newscasters were talking about dictators and the death of Hugo Chavez. I’m not exactly sure how it came up, or even what it means, but I heard the phrase “Dictator Tots.” That made me laugh. Then it made me hungry for sweet potato tots from Sonic. I would have gone to Sonic for lunch today, but it’s a decent drive to the closest one from where I live. Next time I’m there’s I’ll have to make sure I don’t accidentally order “Dictator Tots”!

Quick update

Just stopping in to let you know that I’m still alive. I’ve been keeping busy, but I haven’t written anything substantial in over a week because I just haven’t been in the right frame of mind. And on top of that my work schedule has been a bit screwy which makes maintaining any sort of normality really difficult. My gym visits have been few and far between for a while which isn’t making me feel any better. Right now my workout schedule is slaved to my usual spinning classes which doesn’t make it flexible at all. I need to get over that and make sure I have more than one option for exercising every day. I shouldn’t make it so easy for myself to throw in the towel when I miss spinning for whatever reason (work, laziness, etc.). Luckily I did make it to my spinning class today after work. That felt really good. I read somewhere that it takes thirty days of doing something to make it a habit. Unfortunately the next thirty days aren’t going to work for that because I have to support some testing at another facility over a couple of weekends (Friday through Monday), sometimes during odd hours. I went there for what I thought would be just a few hours of training last Tuesday and didn’t leave until almost 10 PM. That was a nice fourteen hour work day. I’ll try to keep up with my workouts while my schedule is in flux, especially since I saw the dizzying array of Cheez-It crackers available at the testing site. They had every flavor I’d ever seen before and a few that I hadn’t! I have a feeling I’ll be eating a lot of things I shouldn’t while I’m working there. All the more need for me to hit the gym on a regular basis. On a lighter note, I took last Thursday off as a “mental health day” and did something a little crazy – I bought myself a Disneyland annual pass. We Boeing employees got our annual bonuses last week and I decided to get myself something frivolous with a little of the money. I’ve been to Disneyland three times since then, for a few hours at a time, and it’s been wonderful. I needed something to boost my spirits after the miserable start I’ve had to 2013. I plan to thoroughly enjoy my visits to Disneyland and get every penny’s worth out of the pass. Having something to look forward to after all of the mess I’ve gone through in the next six months is wonderful. It’s very refreshing.

Fitness backslide

So after the last four days I’m all caught up on posting chocolate chip cookie recipes. For now, at least. I reserve the right to make more this weekend, but hopefully I’ll use whatever free time I have to fine tune my perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe rather than try anything new. I guess we’ll find out. Unfortunately I’m not exactly feeling up to anything right now. This week has been brutal. I already knew that it would be on Sunday night, but I thought I could power through and come out on top. I was wrong. I crumbled. Tuesday and Wednesday were particularly awful (but I won’t go into that and depress everyone), and then work decided to rear its ugly head. On Thursday I was sent home around lunchtime so I could get some rest and come back at 10 PM to work overnight. I hate it when that happens. I did manage to get about five hours of good sleep during the day on Thursday, but then people decided to start texting me at 5:30 PM and I couldn’t fall asleep again. So working until 7 AM on Friday morning was a struggle. At least I was busy (sometimes with work, sometimes fooling around with my co-workers) during my whole shift or I would have been dragging even more. When I got home on Friday morning I didn’t even change clothes or wash my face before I fell into bed. I passed out for about six hours before I was able to rouse myself into any sort of wakefulness. The only good thing about my wacky schedule is that I didn’t have as much brainpower available to dwell on my troubles. That was helpful after how disastrous the beginning of the week was. Unfortunately it’s the weekend again and it’s hard to keep busy enough so that I don’t stress out about everything that’s going wrong in my life. And as the title of this post suggests, I’ve had a fitness backslide this week. I was doing so well with my workouts for a couple of weeks and it was really improving my mood, but I felt like I got hit by a freight train this week. I was too emotionally distraught to go to my spinning classes on Tuesday through Thursday, and then I missed my Friday morning class because unfortunately I didn’t get out of work in time to be there at 6 AM. Not good. Throw that on top of all the other stuff I’ve been dealing with this week and I was a very unhappy person. So when I found myself parked on the couch watching bad TV late last night I finally dragged myself to the gym to get some exercise. It was the best thing I did all week. Let’s hope I can keep it up. And let’s hope this upcoming week is better than the last one! I really don’t know if I can survive another one like that.

Holiday magnet art

A while back I wrote about art that my co-workers and I create with a bunch of magnets. It’s a fun, creative activity that we enjoy when we have a little time and energy to spare. Well, another holiday is almost upon us so I thought I’d revisit that topic because holidays are usually what inspire us to create new magnet art. In October I rearranged the magnets into a jack-o-lantern. Not the most unique shape, granted, but I didn’t think I could make a decent looking witch’s hat or anything else using just little black circles. Maybe I’ll try candy corn next year. Then for Thanksgiving in November one of my other co-workers amazed us with a depiction of the Mayflower, complete with Plymouth Rock! I didn’t think that was possible with such limited resources, but I work with some pretty talented people. After a couple of days our Thanksgiving decoration was supplemented with a stick figure (drawn on a Post-It) in the bird’s nest of the Mayflower and a couple of stick figures in the bow of the ship reenacting the famous scene from “Titanic.” I told you the magnet art was a collaboration! The Mayflower and its additions were so impressive that they stayed up on the metal breaker switch access panel until about two weeks ago. No Christmas-y magnet art this year! Around the beginning of February I realized that Valentine’s Day was approaching so I decided to rearrange the magnets into a heart with an arrow through it. It turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. But it won’t last since Valentine’s Day is Thursday and will be over soon and then it will be time for St. Patrick’s Day! Last year I completely failed at making a shamrock out of magnets, but maybe I’ll give it another try this year. Holiday magnet art is an evolution! I’ll keep you posted on our future installments.

P.S. I went back to the gym today for another spinning class and I feel great! Four workouts in four days and I’m on a roll!

Old dress

How’s this for a Monday? I had to be at work at 3 AM, which is extremely difficult to do right after the weekend, and on top of that I had to work for more than twelve hours. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Obviously I wasn’t looking forward to a day like that so I decided to start it the best way I could – by looking really good. I only own a few dresses that are workplace appropriate and I’ve already worn two of them in the last couple of months, so this time I went for a different one. I bought this black and white dress at Ann Taylor back in 2004 to wear to my friend Meghan’s bridesmaid’s luncheon before her wedding. That’s when the above photo was taken (3/25/04). (I probably don’t look a whole lot different now, but my hair is longer!) Lucky for me it’s a simple dress that’s classic enough to not be out of style almost nine years later. And it’s a size 0 which I am so thrilled I can fit into again! So Monday was a very long, stressful day at work, but at least I looked good!

Return of the scones

Today was the day I wait for all year. You guessed it – our annual holiday potluck! Traditionally this means I eat my weight in mouthwatering homemade scones before noon (they really are that good and I just have to try every flavor), but this year I held back a little to try and maintain my girlish figure. This means I only had two scones for breakfast…and stashed another four in my desk for future consumption. I admit it, I’m obsessed with these scones. But I don’t feel guilty about hoarding them because there were plenty, so it’s not like I was depriving anyone else of delicious scones. I even introduced three of my co-workers to the wonders of the scones and and I think they are all now converts. Just doing my part! Lunch was an impressive spread this year that had to be served out of two conference rooms because there was so much food. I went a little overboard and made two dishes (Moroccan spiced chili, an old favorite, and a new recipe for BBQ chicken) as well as two kinds of cookies (classic peanut butter blossoms and a new recipe for peppermint candy cane blossoms). I filled my own plate up with Chinese chicken salad, BBQ meatballs, and jambalaya. The jambalaya was a bit spicier than my wimpy palate could handle, but it was out of this world. I had to eat it slowly to avoid burning out my taste buds, but it was too delicious to pass up. I skipped dessert after eating all of that, but it was worth it (especially since I’d already had my weekly allotment of sugar in scone form earlier). My BBQ chicken was extremely well received which made me really happy. I got the recipe out of my Slow Cooker Revolution cookbook (same as the Moroccan chili recipe, funny enough). It was incredibly easy to throw together and very tasty. I’ll have to post the recipe sometime. I made way too much chili so I brought quite a bit of it home with me. This means I’ve got dinner covered until I leave for Florida on Saturday! Yes, today was a good day. Now I just have to wait 365 or so days for the 2013 holiday potluck. Luckily I still have four scones in my desk waiting for me tomorrow!