The Aftermath

January is a slow month. The excitement of Christmas over, the gloom of winter stretching before me with no end in sight. I've just been hanging out with kids and trying to muster up the energy to take down Christmas decorations, trying to decide if I have SAD or if everyone just gets a little stuck in the winter.  

 One thing I've been trying to do is experiment with what my optimal amount of sleep is. I think I've actually been getting a little too much sleep--as in, I've been waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle so I feel tired. After trial and error, my optimal amount is about 7 hours. This means I can stay up until 11! Whoo-hoo! I did this for 4 or 5 days with great results--I didn't even need to take my precious afternoon nap. Unfortunately, my sleep schedule has been foiled by Kate the Cute. With a new tooth coming in, she's been waking up at odd hours. Aargh. This has turned me back into an unmotivated blob these past few days. Good thing she's so cute.

I do have some fun things coming up. I'll be teaching a 6 week homeschool writing class to a group of my teenage relatives starting February. We're going to Hawaii over Valentines Day. Also I started a new writing project while I'm waiting for inspiration to strike for a book. We travel a lot, and I end up blogging a lot about travel because I like to write about it, so I thought, why not start a new blog devoted to travel? I want to have Austin guest blog about how we use points and miles to get places, and I'll pull in some past stories from this blog as needed. I'll blog twice a week, and my intended readership (once I build up the posts a bit) will be much broader than a blog like this, where I share more personal stuff. (So I'm using my first name on the other blog, because my middle name is just so...searchable). It's still kind of in development stage, so feel free to give me feedback, but you can go take a look: travelspouse.blogspot.com. 

Back in Business

In some ways, I still feel like I'm recovering from our summer road trip. (The culminating moment of which was probably Austin being named Guest of the Day in Scranton.) Life has just been rolling forward as it seems to do, and I have managed to survive the loss of our computer. (It got dropped one too many times.) I have also been going a little crazy. These two things might be related. Anyway, I've missed blogging. I'm back!

Call Me Ishmael

Privacy on the internet...I'm all for it. But let's be honest, if someone wants to steal my identity they won't scroll through my blog posts collecting nuggets of information in order to do it. (Although I should probably post some vital pieces of misinformation, like "my mother's maiden name was Jensen," and, "all my passwords start with the number 2," just in case.) If someone wants to steal my identity, they'll find me on Facebook. It's the risk I take for the ability to find my college roommates and send them a Christmas card every 5 years.
Anyway, this post is about pseudonyms. I think blogging with pseudonyms can be tastefully done, but if your blog name is something like "I Love Chocolate" and your husband's name is "Snickers," your kids are "Skittles," "Reeses," etc., then you should really tone it down. A lot.
Today my husband asked what his fake name would be if I blogged using fake names. I thought about it for about 15 seconds while I put my baby to bed and came up with "Ahab." For those who love themed names, that would make me the "Great White Whale" that Captain Ahab relentlessly pursues/annoys until the whale bites his leg off. Seeing unexpected parallels, no? I really prefer "Ishmael" though, since I am the narrator of our family life. Then we have our children "Starbuck" and "Stubb." If we ever have an annoying child we will stick him/her with the name Queequeg. And no one will ever ever know who we really are...kind of like Ishmael.

The Absence

I was reading the few blog posts I had before I decided that blogging was too much work and too much like writing in my journal. It was kind of fun. So now I'm going to start blogging again. And the topic of the day is: Cafe Rio Pork Salad. I made a copycat recipe last night. It tasted amazing but I spent most of the afternoon doing prep work for it and we didn't end up eating until 6:30. I think that just for two people, it would have been cheaper to just go to Cafe Rio. Sammy doesn't eat Cafe Rio but when we are out and about and we ask Sammy where she wants to go eat, she will always shout "Cafe Rio, Cafe Rio!" So someday, she will actually want to eat it, and when that day comes, I will try the homemade version agian.