The scale said 146.5 yesterday. You might expect me to be doing a happy dance about that– after all, it’s another new low for this round of weight loss. Not only have I gotten rid of the pudge I put on during the Christmas season eat-o-rama, I‘ve lost a couple more pounds beyond that. Only […]

One of the exercises in The Artist’s Way is to establish a God Jar, a place to put slips of paper upon which you’d write your hopes and dreams and problems that you wanted God’s help with. I skipped this exercise. Who was I to be telling God what to do? Over the past few […]

This is not going to be a year in review entry. I’ll save that for my journal anniversary in May (or April, depending on when I decide to celebrate). This is not going to be a New Year’s resolutions entry. That will come when my personal goal year ends in March. This is not going […]

So yes, I did just disappear for a couple of days there. I wish I could now share tales of the big fun I had while I was offline, but there was no excitement. Neither was there major emotional drama that I might be tempted to hint at even if I couldn’t tell the whole […]

I’m out of step with the rest of my office today. It’s not an official company holiday, but the boss is away and so are a lot of other people and most of the people who are here are not getting much done. The music’s louder (the “you must wear headphones” rule was rescinded, but […]

I’ve been lying you—by omission, yes, but that’s still disingenuous– for almost a week, and now it’s time to come clean. I’ve been in Florida, where Mr. Karen and I spent five days visiting his parents. They’re fortunate to have the use of a house down there in the winter (and a long winter it […]

I intended to write a cheery holiday entry today, drawing inspiration from Great Lakes Christmas Classics, a slim volume of short stories and other vignettes from the turn of the 19th into the 20th century that I picked up at the library on my last visit. Unfortunately, when I started reading said book, it made […]

One of my Christmas presents to myself this year was Signs & Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts. I’ve wanted this book since I first saw it in a bookstore years ago; I didn’t buy it then because it was an expensive hardcover and my budget was pretty tight. After a few raises, I […]

Rather than running around to all the office supply stores looking for the kind of calendar pages I like, I ordered the 2003 ones directly from DayRunner. Yes, I had to pay almost in much in shipping as it cost to buy the refills, but if I’d gone to the store I’d probably have bought […]

Random Acts of Journaling:What is something, or someone, you’ve misplaced and want to find again? Why? For a long time I missed my essays from a writing course I took in college. Near the end of the quarter, the professor had us hand back in all the papers we’d written for him so he could […]

We had our first web developers meeting in a long time at work yesterday and once again I was the only woman in the room, a lone stand of estrogen in a forest of testosterone. There are other women at Purple Systems, but most of them are in support roles or on the implementation team, […]

All I want for Christmas is a blood-free day, A blood-free day, yes, a blood free day Gee, if I could only have a blood-free day Then it would be a Merry Christmas It seems so long since I could say, “I don’t need underwear in any way.” Gosh, oh gee, how happy I’d be, […]

I’ve come down with a bad case of holiday stress. I’ve done so little, and I want to do so much, and there’s little time left to close the gap. In my fantasy life, I buy perfect presents that surprise and delight Mr. Karen and our parents and siblings and nieces and nephews. In reality, […]

When I was in high school, we didn’t have computers. There was one machine students could use to create punch cards, which would then be driven down the road a few miles to the community college for processing. If the program didn’t run correctly, it was a multi-day effort to make corrections and try it […]

As you may remember, last ski season left me with ugly toenails well into the warm months that followed. I certainly remember, since it wasn’t so long ago that the damage finally grew out. I tried to do things differently this year, hoping to be able to bare my toes in public in summer 2003. […]

Last night was supposed to be my office’s official Christmas party, but it was cancelled, causing me to pout and stamp my feet. Then about two weeks ago, my boss buzzed me and asked if Mr. Karen and I were free on the 14th because he was going to have a gathering at his house […]

Yesterday I finished another baby quilt, and now I am all caught up with the offspring born to my coworkers this year. Even though this is one of the simplest quilts I’ve made, with only ten fabrics and one basic block design, it took me about two months to make. If I had worked on […]

Tomorrow I’m going to Weight Watchers for my December weigh-in. I’m curious to see what the scale will say. When I went last month, I was 151.5 on my scale and 153.2 on theirs (if only they’d let us go to meetings nude!). Given the ups and downs reflected in my weight log recently, I’m […]

We got new windows installed in all the rooms upstairs yesterday (and when I say “we”, I mean Mr. Karen, because he did all the research and scheduling and took the day off work when the guys came to put them in; I just went to the showrooms with him a few months ago and […]

I said there’d be a trip report, and a trip report there shall be. What there will not be are more pictures, because the pictures are at home, and I am here at the office, and if I do not write this now in my usual lunchtime writing slot, it may not get written at […]

I trust that the other participants in Holidailies have kept you entertained since I last wrote five days ago. I’ve been off in Colorado, seriously vacationing. I left the laptop at home and didn’t touch a keyboard or even look at the Internet the whole time I was gone. Even the temptation to check my […]

Mr. Karen and I wrote our paragraph for his parents’ Christmas letter last night. Well, I did a very rough first draft, and he did the rest, turning my disconnected sentences into a cohesive story. Until his mom called a few days ago to ask for it, I’d forgotten all about having to write this—obviously, […]

I clear all the papers and folders and writing instruments off my desk every night. When I arrive in the morning, my work surface is uncluttered. The two desks arranged in an L-shape support a phone, a PC monitor sitting on top of a docking station, a box of facial tissues (usually genuine Kleenex in […]

We got our first serious snow of the season yesterday, which means it’s now officially winter according to the rules in my big book o’ seasons. If the ice scraper has to come out, it’s winter. The calendar in my DayRunner insists that the season won’t change until December 21, which is clearly wrong. Probably […]

It’s been more than six weeks since my last goal check-in, so it’s once again time to publicly review how I’m doing. The next couple months are going to be super busy for me, so I have the feeling that this is as good as it’s going to get until the frenzy passes. (“But Karen,” […]