I’ve decided to join AA. That’s AirMiles Anonymous, for the uninitiated.

I have a problem. I have to face that problem. It’s running my life.

I cannot go into the grocery store without being lured by the siren song of Bonus Air Miles.

Oh, sure, the odd time? I can pick up three jars of marmalade for the 5 bonus Air Miles it offers me, and hardly even think twice. Bonus Air Miles on ketchup? Oh, well then, let me get a few.

But this month? They’re offering 20 and 25 and 30 bonus Air Miles at a shot.

I’m out of hand.

Two weeks ago? I bought 20 cases of pop. Well, you got 20 bonus Air Miles each time you bought 2. And 30 if you got 2 six-packs of paper towels (I got 4). Kleenex, cheese, taco shells, soup… I bought it ALL, baby.

Who leaves the grocery store with a cart full of cheese and paper towels? It’s insane.

Sure, I’ve gotten something like 400 or 500 Air Miles so far. That’s going to get me a few movie passes, or some gift certificates at Chapters, or almost half a microwave or something. And it’s not like I can never use paper towels with 4 barfing cats around. And doG knows, BDH loves him some Diet Pepsi. All that stuff’s not going to go BAD.

Well, except for the cheese, maybe.

But… I’m running out of storage space.

And honestly? How many granola bars can a person eat, anyway? (Although, they’re perfect for travel to Ethiopia…)

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

It’s an illness. I must be stopped.

If they combined Air Miles with coupons, I’d be able to build a bunker out of boxes of Kleenex. Don’t worry, there’d be lots of soup and taco shells to eat.

The withdrawal at the end of this promotion is going to kill me dead, I tell you.

Things I need to get done:

• Cleaning every stinking room in the house
• Vacuuming
• Mopping the floors
• Zipping out to the store to get a few groceries for the weekend
• An article I’ve been working on since September 1 (!!)

Projects I’d like to finish:

• A few gifts I am making with my own two hands
• Scanning all my photos to digital
• Getting rid of all my old magazines
• Getting the garage sorted
• The never-ending patio

Big jobs that need doing:

• Finding a place to store and/or getting rid of all the clutter!
• Cleaning the baby’s room
• Decorating the baby’s room
• Painting almost every room
• Finishing the basement
• Putting gates on the backyard fence

Things I need to finish the above:

• Time management skills
• Money
• Sleep, and by extension, energy
• The strength of will to just chuck stuff out!
• A team of helper elves

Tuesdays are good. I find I am productive on Tuesdays. And I always have been.

Even when I was working, Tuesdays were my “busy” days. Mondays were… well, MONDAYS… and it was a struggle to just function after the weekend. Wednesdays were rough because it’s the middle of the week — too far from the next weekend, and the past one has completely worn off. Thursdays were not bad — I am a Thursday’s child, after all — but usually it meant an awful lot of rushing so you’d have everything done so you could cruise through a more relaxed Friday with your mind on the weekend.

Weekends used to be nice, when I was working. Although when I was coaching, even weekends became a busy time of rushing around and organizing and planning and DOING so much. They were hardly restful, and often times, they were downright exhausting. But now that I work at home, my weekends are just another day, with the exception of the presence of BDH over in his little cave.

But still, Tuesdays are my best work day. Tuesdays are good.

Fridays used to be good, when I was doing infertility treatments. Friday was the day I did a lot of baking — usually loaves of bread — and some cooking to get ready for the weekend. But now, that Friday routine has gone by the wayside, along with the barrels full of hormones that used to drive me to bake. I am sure Kelly misses those times too, because we could spend a Friday on the phone, on speakerphone, me endlessly kneading dough and her laughing at me for my baking frenzy.

I find I get a lot done mentally on a Tuesday. I have a writing deadline each Tuesday, and so I am usually just plowing headlong through my research and writing all day, and well into the evening, to get my article done before day’s end. And BDH usually has soccer on a Tuesday evening, which means my days are extra-long and he is not home until after midnight sometimes. I can also have other things going on while I write, like laundry and the dishwasher and that sort of thing. I usually feel stimulated to write, more organized, more busy and useful on a Tuesday.

Even on rainy Tuesdays like this one. I can sit here and do research and have something baking (not bread) in the oven at the same time.

I learned not to visit the grocery store on Tuesday, because that’s when the Oldsmobile would come. The Oldsmobile is the nickname I have given to a city bus that goes and picks up seniors from a local old folks’ home, and brings them to the store for their weekly shopping. While a great idea, it also makes for very crowded aisles and ponderously slow progress through the store and checkout. So, apparently, old folks like Tuesdays as well.

Of course, everyone has their good days and their bad days. And some people are good and busy and happy every day, and others just stumble and grumble through all the days of the week.

But me, I am just glad every week to have this one day where I feel like I am busy and useful and productive. That’s a hard thing to come by sometimes when you are on your own schedule.

And maybe — likely — there will be a better day for our Mystery Baby, and my Tuesdays will not be the days they are now. But I hope I can retain a little bit of my Tuesdays when he or she comes along. It’s a part of the week that I enjoy, and I hope I can still fit a little bit of a good Tuesday into life with Mystery Baby.

Ah, Tuesdays. Research is calling me. And a bit of laundry.

And maybe a loaf of pumpkin bread, too.

It’s a beautiful day
Don’t let it get away…

~ U2, “Beautiful Day”

And it IS! It’s gorgeous and sunny and clear. And so nice and warm! Yesterday too.

Yesterday I convinced BDH to do some work around the house with me. BDH is not a fan of the “house work” — stuff that needs to be done to maintain the house (not “housework”, as in the cleaning you do inside) — so getting him to come out with me was a big thing. He works all week, and sometimes in his off hours too, so when he has a day off he likes to rest and relax. Working outside is not his idea of relaxation.

But yesterday, he came outside with me, and together we put away flower pots and outdoor furniture and tidied things up a bit. And… we started to tackle the garage.

Now our garage is scary. It has, for the past few years, been the repository of big stuff that we don’t know what to do with. We have been unable to store things in our basement because of The Peeing Kitty, so out into the garage it goes. But nowadays, The Peeing Kitty is more into sleeping than peeing, so the basement is not as scary a prospect as it once was. We can store things like lawn furniture and such down there with little fear of ruin.

We opened the door and went to work. We are accumulating a pile of… well… JUNK, actually… which we will then call a junk company to come and haul away. So, we bagged up all the stuff we can throw away in a regular garbage haul and put it on one side, and stuff like bed frames and computer parts and construction materials on the other. We put up some shelves for storage and swept and cleared away debris from Adventure Mouse. (No doubt he came home from visiting or shopping or whatever yesterday and was VERY surprised.)

Our garage is being reclaimed, slowly. We worked for about 4 hours yesterday and got about halfway through. We felt good about our progress. There’s still a lot to do — there’s still half the garage to do, and anything we want the junk people to haul away that is inside the house has to be dragged out — but still, we made a huge dent in it.

We got done, and cleaned up. I suggested that maybe, one evening this week, we could spend an hour and do a little more. Maybe in little increments like that. BDH agreed.

So this morning, I woke up to another gloriously sunny morning. I went downstairs and made lunch for BDH and coffee for me and got breakfast for the cats. BDH came down to the kitchen.

He kissed me on the cheek and said, “You don’t need to pack a lunch for me today.”

Inside, I fretted. Normally that means he would be going out for lunch, which can get expensive. Plus, I had already packed his lunch and boiled a bunch of eggs for the week’s breakfasts.

“Oh,” I said, bracing to NOT get peevish. “Why is that?”

“I’m taking the day off today,” said BDH with a wry grin. “It’s going to be a beautiful day. I thought maybe I’d spend a couple of hours playing my computer game, and maybe have a little nap. And then I thought we could do a little more work out in the garage.”

Today I decided to make stew. A lovely stew full of meatballs and tomatoes and beans and squash.

I shopped for the ingredients the other day…. meatballs, canned tomatoes, kidney beans, and chicken stock. One of the ingredients was a 3 lb butternut squash. But I had a couple of acorn squash already at home, so I figured I use those up instead.

So today, I went down to start preparing. The first step was to cut some onions into wedges and cook it in oil with garlic. So, with my harvest of onions gathered from the garden and down in the basement, I went downstairs to grab a few. I grabbed a nice fat one — and it was squishy. EW. I grabbed another one — also squishy. OH NO, I thought… all my onions are rotting.

I brought up a bunch, and fortunately, got 3 that were okay. But I’m going to have to go down and deal with the rest of them. ICK.

The next step was to peel and chop the squash into 1 inch cubes. Well. Hm. Not as easy as you might think, given the shape of an acorn squash. Oh no. I was cutting that sucker every which way, trying to get a flat surface to peel. Shards of green skin were flying everywhere. So, after trying for an hour to peel a squash that is ribbed on the outside, I can safely say that when they tell you to use butternut squash, they’re not just whistling Dixie.

I had intended to do both squash — 3 lbs being the weight of the squash in question — but after fighting for an hour with the most combative squash in the universe, I said “screw it” and peeled and chopped a couple of potatoes instead. One squash would have to do.

So, onions and garlic and spices went into the pot, and were cooking nicely. Then the recipe called for the squash (and in this case, potatoes) to be thrown in and cooked until tender in 1 1/2 cups of stock. Okay, I thought, and in they went.

You’re JOKING, I thought. How are you supposed to cook THAT MUCH SQUASH (okay, squash and potatoes) in that TINY AMOUNT OF LIQUID?

So, I added more liquid.

It said to cook the squash on low for 20-30 minutes until slightly tender. So I set the timer, and set about unloading and reloading the diswasher.

BEEP! The timer went. I checked the vegetables…

…which were not so much “slightly tender” as they were “downright soft and losing structural integrity”.

Eep. Not good.

The next step was to remove 1 cup of the squash and 1/3 cup of the liquid and puree them. Okay, well, maybe the puree would help, I thought, so I doubled the amounts I put in the food processor. Surely that would make up for the overabundance of liquid and soft veggies.

The puree went back into the pot, and the recipe called for a pound of meatballs, a cup of chopped canned tomatoes, and a cup of kidney beans. Well, I was going for broke anyway, so I threw in a pound and a half of meatballs, a full can of diced tomatoes (and their liquid — ACK! The recipe didn’t say one way or the other!) and a full can of kidney beans (drained and rinsed, of course).

Well, there was an awful lot of fluid, and a whole whackload of meatballs, and the odd bit of tomato and squash floating about…

I heated it through, stirring only very reluctantly and gently, trying to preserve the already fragile bits of vegetable still looking cube-like. And I made some biscuits to go with the stew, because that might be good for mopping up the mess afterwards. And nothing cancels out a mediocre stew like fresh baked biscuits, laced with cheddar.

I needn’t have worried.

The puree did its job, everything thickened up nicely, and by the end, we were full and content.

“That was really tasty. It’s nice to have home cooking,” said BDH.

“Oh, well, it was so simple….” I said.

DUDE. We’ve been without internet for FIVE DAYS.

Do you know what that means? No internet, no telephone, no email… NOTHING for 5 days.

It was KILLING us DEAD, I tell you truly.

No blogging for 5 days. And good doG, am I behind. I don’t know how I will ever catch up.

And there’s SO MUCH to tell you! Such NEWS I have for you!!

But not now.

Now I am just happy to be able to see that our internet is finally back. And to go to bed.

I get up and walk each morning. Or, at least, I try to. So, the night before, I check the weather and gather some appropriate clothes to wear for when I get up.

Last night it said it would be about 13 degrees, and there was a possibility of showers. I got some rain pants and a t-shirt together, and went to bed.

When I got up, it was foggy, but the pavement was starting to dry. The rain happened overnight, it seemed. So instead of the rain pants, I grabbed my regular dry-fit yoga pants and got dressed.

I got my shoes on, grabbed my iPod, and was ready to head out the door when I realized my jacket was in the car. Usually it’s too hot for the jacket, but it has pockets for my inhaler and kleenex and such, so I wear it. So I stepped out on the porch to go to the car and get my jacket.

It was warm and humid.

So I opted not to wear the jacket and just set out walking instead.

It was really, really warm. I had worn a hat because my hair was ready for a shower, and I was melting. It was so humid, I was thinking how nice it would have been to have gotten the rain. Even just a little bit.

Just over halfway through my walk, a breeze began blowing. I was walking into it and it was so refreshing and cool. Perfect for someone getting all hot and sweaty.

I walked another 1/2 kilometre and I started to feel some raindrops.

Then, the heavens opened and it began to pour.

I thought about stopping under a tree to wait it out, but I was only about 15 or 20 minutes from home, and who knows how long I would have to wait? So I pressed on.

My clothes began to cling to me.

Water was pooling in my shoes.

Rain was streaming off the bill of my hat.

By this point, it was too late to seek shelter — I was in a new-ish neighbourhood with no big trees. I was completely, utterly soaked through to the skin.

And then I realized — I’m wearing a white t-shirt.

Now, we have gotten a lot of these white t-shirts, free as part of the charity walks we have done in the past. They’re cheap, lightweight and perfect for walking and working around the house.

They’re also very transparent when wet.

So, with 10 minutes to go, I was holding my shirt out away from my skin, trying to avoid any embarassing revelations (because white sports bras, as I now know, are also transparent when wet).

I sloshed along, wringing streams of water out of the front of my t-shirt as I went. Almost home.

As I crossed onto my street, the rain let up a bit. And by the time I got to the door, it was just a bit of drizzle.

You know, the weather forecasters have often been blamed for predicting a lovely weekend and the disappointment that ensues when it rains. But no one ever says, “Well, we were warned.”

Happy October, peeps!

I love the fall. Two of my favourite months, September and October, bringing warm sunny days and cool nights. And I feel like doing things again, whereas in summer, between the humidity and the air quality warnings, I’m a prisoner in my own house.

I like being able to open the windows and have the fresh air making it feel less stuffy. In the daytime, it’s still plenty warm — even hot — and then as the sun begins to set it’s gloriously cool and refreshing. These are the days when I start to regret not having a fireplace. This is the first house we’ve lived in that didn’t have a wood-burning fireplace in it, and we really miss it sometimes. As the autumn wears on, it’s always so nice to put a fire on when it gets colder.

It’s dark-ish when I get up to walk, which is weird but kind of nice. I walk in the early morning because I like the quiet and the privacy. So it’s pretty lovely that the dark cool mornings start to discourage other people from getting out. Soon, I’ll be kicking through the pretty coloured leaves and having to put on a fleece against the frosty mornings.

And I can bake and cook in the oven again, which is wonderful. It’s not too hot out, so having the oven on again isn’t going to make the house a sauna. Right now, there are two loaves of pumpkin bread baking, making the whole house smell magical and homey. Fresh baking smells like home to me. After that, I’m going to make a whole bunch of homemade calzones and freeze them for BDH’s lunches. Also, I got the crock pot out yesterday for the first time since the spring, and made a roast. So I’m really enjoying being able to cook and bake in comfort again.

It’s perfect clothesline weather, but I don’t have one yet. But I am putting it on my Xmas list, so maybe next year, I’ll be able to have fresh-smelling (and economical!) laundry.

This is also one of the first years in a long time that we’ll be home for Halloween, since we’re not coaching and have nothing going on. Teenagers don’t go out for Halloween — they go to practice — and so coaches do too. So this year, I am kind of looking forward to it a little. I bought some electric jack-o-lanterns at Target (for a ridiculously cheap price! Yay!) and I’ll be able to decorate a little but. I always look forward to seeing the wee little kids as they come around, dressed as peas-in-a-pod or pumpkins or whatever. Most are far too little for candy (or should be, anyway) but it’s still fun.

So take some time each day and enjoy the little things that make life wonderful. Live in the moment. Because soon it will be November and the cold rain will be here. And then we’ll have to hibernate once more.