Thursday, September 26 2019

Dear Journal,

Oof. I'm having a lot of trouble waking up this morning. I rolled over to shut off my 6:30 alarm clock and it was somehow already 6:45. I think my brain made an unconscious compromise to sleep for an extra fifteen minutes. I don't know how that happened, but it sounds like a dangerous game. This morning I feel like I could easily sleep until 10AM right in this chair in our dining room if I just shut my eyes. Or I could just trudge over to the living room couch, and I'm sure before my head hit the pillow Zig Zig would be right there with me ready to power nap the morning away.

I'm hanging in there. I'm drinking coffee. I'm warming up and I'm slowly starting to feel human. This Thursday morning I feel like I'm heading into battle. It's going to be a busy one today. I have a handful of things to wrap up at work, and over lunch today I need to put together a lesson plan for KidsCode. After work, we're going to chow down on some leftovers, then it's over to KidsCode until 7:30. I'll walk back home, but my things away, then I'll ensconce myself in a blanket on the couch and nap for as long as it takes. Lately one of my favorite ways to take naps is by falling asleep to the Peaceful Cuisine channel. Tonight I think I'll cue up a long playlist of relaxing vegan recipes that I'll be blissfully unaware of. Man, that's going to be a good nap.

Yesterday I worked from home all day, taking a break to walk to walk to Glass Nickel with Marissa and Rod. We had a quick lunch, walked back, then I had a few meetings to attend in between chipping on some code. After work, I took a quick power nap on the couch (just a quick one - not the deep, luxurious Thursday evening naps that I'm fantasizing about), then took Rod to Hy-Vee. When we got home, Rod and I put the groceries away and then I started on dinner. Lunch wasn't sitting well with us, so we all agreed we needed something on the blander side. I seared some chicken thighs in cast iron, baked a few potatoes, and sliced of a loaf of bread.

After dinner, we put Rod to bed, then I hung out in the kitchen for a while and slowly finished all my Wednesday night chores. The kitchen needed some love - I still had some dirty dishes hanging around from Tuesday night's spaghetti and the stove needed a good cleaning. Ah, which reminds me - I have a great tip for cleaning the stove. If you turn the oven on for about twenty minutes beforehand, it heats up the metal a bit and makes it easier to wipe up the grease. It doesn't need to be a lot of heat - I just turn the oven to 350F and clean something else while I wait.

I continued cleaning the kitchen until about 10:30. Marissa was still finishing up in the studio, so I sat town at the dining room computer and worked on some code. I'm beefing up the statistics generator for my blog. This new version that I'm working on goes pretty deep. Last night I wrote the code to calculate the longest "droughts" - or days without blogging. It's exciting when you finally get the math right and suddenly you recognize the data that spits out of the program. For those of you wondering, the longest drought was from June 6th to June 18th of this year, and it lasted for 11 days. I'm pretty sure that was while Marissa and I were in Vancouver. Hopefully when I'm done with this code, you'll be able to see this info on the homepage and even click on these dates to read the posts from around that time.

That's my time. Time to mount up and bravely ride into Thursday. Today, I'm going to be focused, thorough, and efficient, and when I finally walk in the house at 7:30 when it's all done, I'm going to take the world's most triumphant nap. You should do the same - it's been a long week, and you probably deserve a nap too.