Tag: post (thrice) a week challenge

Rate your mate

by Karen, posted in relationships

The March 2011 Cosmopolitan Magazine contains The Sex Quiz for 20-somethings to take to find out what…well, you can do that math.

I decided to design a quiz that we forty(and over)-somethings can take to gauge the viability and durability of our marriages (or other less formal but no less consuming unions).

Here are the rules: read each question, then answer a,b, or c. Go!

  1. Looks: He’s a) drop-dead gorgeous! b) not bad to look at c) drop-dead drab, but he’s mine and I love him
  2. Sex: He a) rocks my world! b) Sometimes he’s not too tired c) I lie back and think of England
  3. Housework: a) He could be on the cover of Porn for Women (he’s that good)! b) He knows what a vacuum is and he’s not afraid to use it…but that’s it c) He says, “My father never did housework and neither will I!”
  4. Parenting: a) I wish he’d been my father! b) He’s got some…issues c) He’s not even sure how many kids we have!
  5. Hygiene: a) He could be on the cover of Men’s Health Magazine! b) He has pretty good aim… c) I have to remind him to shower; ugh!

Okay, so it’s a short quiz, but hey, women our age are short on time, aren’t we?

So, how’d you do?

Mostly a’s: OMG! Are you married to my husband?!

Mostly b’s: There’s still hope. Consider calling one of the Dr. Lauras: Schlessinger or Berman for a consult.

Mostly c’s: Be thankful that there’s no more Dating Game. Consider setting up a profile on Match.com.

What do you think of my quiz?

Bin Laden dead

by Karen, posted in no fear, Someone's gotta say it

On the Channel 13 WGME News tonight they called the “Bin Laden Killed” story the story of the day, maybe even the story of the year. I’m thinking it’s the story of all times; the classic “eye for an eye…”  (Matthew 5:38).  Doesn’t it seem fitting that in Bin Laden’s religious (muslim) war against us, this age-old form of justice is was delivered unto him?

On the early news this morning on Channel 8 WMTW, George W. Bush’s statement was read, Bill Clinton’s speech…er statement was read, along with various and sundry other politician’s politically correct remarks. I was not quoted, but have decided to overlook the omission and offer my statement here for all to read.

“I hope that when they killed Osama Bin Laden, it really really hurt. I hope that he peed and crapped his pants. I hope that he begged for mercy, and when he saw that there was none, I hope that he cried for his mommy. Reports say that he was buried at sea. I hope that he had a lifelong fear of the ocean. I hope that they played the theme song from Jaws when they tossed him overboard. I hope that they slammed his dead corpse up against the deck (and then again against the side of the ship) a few times before they fed him to the sharks…only I hope the sharks just chewed him up and spit him back out. They don’t need that kind of evil in their stomachs.

Thank you, and God bless.”

Feel free to share my statement with anyone.

Spring garden, part 1: the herbs

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, fitness, gardening, health
Chives

In honor of National Herb Week (first week of May) we’re starting to get our herb garden into shape for this year. A quick tour of the raised bed revealed a nice surprise: some of last years perennial herbs have greened up already and are looking pretty edible.

The first ones I noticed were the chives. As Stephen King says in the story “A Good Marriage” in his book Full Dark, No Stars, they are “upright and sniffin’ the air”. 🙂 Makes you want to cook something, doesn’t it?

The lemon thyme is just as beautiful, but currently is pretty flush with the ground so is not as readily visible. One of the prettiest plants in there right now is the lamb’s ears. Just one is up right now…so my husband asked me if it could hear me okay since it had only one ear…ha ha.

There were a few varieties of strawberries tucked in there last year, and I can see they are starting to send out some shoots; more shoots means more strawberries for me. Yay!

I’ve already got my annual rosemary plant waiting to go into the garden, but it’s not looking too healthy (as of this writing) so I’m hoping she hangs in there for a few more weeks on the kitchen counter.

Any of you have herb gardens? What are you growing this year?

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Addendum: Rosemary is dead. Oh well. Off to buy a new one!

Spring chicks update, week 5: Teens in transition

by Karen, posted in chicks, family, friends, raising chickens, tweens

The peeps have graduated!!!  They are “teenagers” now…each week in a chicken’s life roughly corresponding to 3 to 4 years in an adult’s life (in my non-expert opinion).

They are big enough to move to the transitional coop where they can see the big chickens and the big chickens can see them. This gives both populations a chance to get used to being together while allowing the teenagers to get a little bigger, enabling them to hold their own when they are assimilated into the larger population in the main coop.

We usually start this transitioning when the chicks get to be about 5-6 weeks old, but how big they’ve gotten, how strong they seem, how (awful) the weather is…all these things are considered when we are timing the move.

They are currently eating up a storm. Bright and active, they are still somewhat skittish as they adjust to their new digs. My son commented that he thought that his batch of chicks was friendlier overall than prior ones; they tolerated our picking them up without much fuss. This comes in handy when friends come to visit and want to hold a chick.

We have about 19 teenagers at the moment (well, 20 counting my son, who will not be one for much longer either, come to think of it), and as they get older we are learning that the breeds may turn out not to be what we ordered. Determining the sex of a chick is not an exact science, and some vendors are better at it than others. The White Leghorns  (might be White Rocks) and the Light Orpingtons (might be Buff Orpingtons) are in question at the moment, but as is true with most things, time will tell.

They should be off the heat lamp by next week. For now, they are adjusting well to their Brave New World.

🙂

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Cakewalk in the cube

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, baking, friends, Life in the cube
Amazing cake baked by Kathy Cyr

The planets somehow aligned last week. That’s the only explanation that I can come up with for this phenomenon that occurred at my place of employment. Are we a restaurant? A cafe? A bakery? No. We are an office full of nurses.

Yet we  had 4 (count ’em) cakes to share during the work week. Birthdays, comings and goings, TGIF days…any of these are good enough reasons to let ’em eat cake. Some are store-bought, some are baked by colleagues…and we have some amazing bakers where I work.

The one in this picture was baked by Kathy (a fellow nurse) and this is just a small sample of the wonderful treats she bakes for us (which include breads, cookies, and whoopie pies, to name just a few things in addition to the cakes!). One bite of this cake and you completely forget that you are eight hours into your ten hour shift, your fourth one that week.  Yep; those are raspberries in the midst of all that chocolate.

The next cake we had was this lovely chocolate cake with vanilla frosting from the Wild Oates Bakery in Brunswick.  Shirley bought this cake for Pauline to celebrate her birthday this week.  It was the best birthday at work ever!

We also had two other supermarket variety purchased cakes, one (you guessed it) chocolate with vanilla frosting and the other (sorry, didn’t get a picture of this one) was marble with vanilla frosting. We were inundated with cakes! Both of these were very good, but were eclipsed by Kathy’s homemade one and the Wild Oates bakery cake.  Really though, it was a win-win situation for us all. Well, except for the people who avoid gluten. Sorry guys.

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Post Easter Post

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, Holidays, tweens
The baskets

Easter is one of my favorite holidays, having somehow escaped the drama and bad memories with which  many of the other major holidays are fraught  for me.

Although the bunny is now known to be Mom and Dad by both kids, we continue the traditions that we started when they were little. We fill a basket (or receptacle of some sort) for each  one and have an egg hunt. In the leaner years we used chocolate pirate coins to fill the plastic eggs for the hunt, otherwise we filled them with cash.

In the baskets? Candy, of course, gum, Tic Tacs, beef jerky (for the boy), lip gloss (for the girl), gift cards…things like that. What was not in the baskets? The dreaded plastic Easter grass, banned after the year that Dad was still finding it in various household crevices in December. 🙂

We were lucky to have a nice day weather-wise: sunny and in the low 70’s. The day before and after Easter it snowed! We had dinner with family, got to visit Dad at work and bring him some dinner, and still got home early enough for a normal bedtime for the tween (it was, after all, a “school night”).

Hope you all had a nice day too!

Write it down, make it happen

by Karen, posted in books, Date night, family, fitness, health, Life in the cube, Midlife Crisis, no fear, Someone's gotta say it, tweens, writing, yoga

Okay, it’s a book (not mine!) title. It occurred to me to apply the philosophy of: “If you build it, they will come” espoused by James Earl Jones and put into force by Kevin Costner in the Field of Dreams movie which coincidently (?!) contained a female lead character named “Karen” (not sure how she spelled it!) played by Amy Madigan.

I decided to build my perfect work day.

  1. Get up–not too early.
  2. Get some exercise. I like Stephen King’s idea from his book On Writing where he would take writing breaks and jump on the treadmill that was next to his writing desk (if memory serves). A little bit of yoga couldn’t hurt…
  3. Get some coffee–oh wait! That should be first!
  4. Get some breakfast (ABO…or “Anything But Oatmeal” :)).
  5. Write until noonish.
  6. Get some lunch.
  7. Check email, blogs, FB (you know, all the usual time-sucking suspects) etc.
  8. Read until 4pm. This is when I get to make a small dent in my pile of books, magazines that I am dying to read but have no time to.
  9. Get some more exercise…go for a walk? At the beach! Look for sea glass, sand dollars, unusual rocks and shells. Sigh. Life is Good.
  10. Watch DVD’s or preferred TV series of the moment (The Good Wife, Survivor, Breaking Bad) with my husband.

What does a perfect day for you look like? Quick! Go right it down; then maybe you can figure out a way to make it happen! 🙂

Clearing Clutter for Clarity, continued

by Karen, posted in fitness, Midlife Crisis

I have unsubscribed from many of the automatic emails that I’ve been getting. You know, the ones from stores that promise to send you exclusive coupons if you sign up? Well, what I’ve found that (for me)  what that leads to is the clutter of the (nearly daily) emails from them in my inbox, which I have to read and then make decisions about. Usually, there will actually be a coupon that looks pretty good to me, sparking that well-worn refrain in my mind of “Hey, I might need that!” which leads me to print it out.

Seems harmless enough, right?  But now that coupon will be added to the glut of other coupons that I already have stuffed in my pocket-book: more physical clutter. Then, I will carry it around for a long time, usually for so long that I forget that I have it. If I should happen to recall it when I am at the store (which rarely happens; I’m much more likely to recall after I’ve left the store), the there are so many other coupons in there that I am unable to locate it in a timely manner.

Is it in my wallet? Is it in the special coupon holder that I keep to file these things in an organized way so that I can find them quickly (like, when there is a long line of unsympathetic shoppers waiting behind me)? Is it stuck in the front zipper compartment of my bag? Could I have left it in the car? At that point, I”ll usually give up, shrug, and just pay full price. And then when I get home, there it is (of course): right there on the kitchen island where I left it, where I’d be sure to see it before I left the house.

So today, I’m exercising my will power by not cutting out any coupons from the Sunday paper. Hey, at least I’m doing some sort of exercising today!

At least it’s not too strenuous.

🙂

The 6 W’s diet

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, health

I was talking with someone the other day about her desire to lose weight.

She and her friend were working on their weight and following a diet. “Which one?” I asked her. “The 6 W’s diet,” she replied. “What’s that?” I asked. Since I work in the healthcare field, I thought I’d heard of them all, but this one was new to me. “We invented it,” she said. Okay, well, that explained why I was unfamiliar with it, at least.

She said it was the culmination of years of ‘trying everything’ that led to her decision to make up a diet for herself. “It can’t be any worse than any of the ones I tried already,” she reasoned. Also, her spouse had gastric bypass surgery, lost a lot of weight, but had already gained back 25 lbs. “See? Even getting the operation doesn’t work!”

The 6 W’s diet:

  1. Watch the fat
  2. Write down everything you eat
  3. Walk more
  4. Water: drink more
  5. Win!!!!

“That sounds great,” I said, “but that’s only 5. What’s the 6th W?” “Oh,” she said, ” I added ‘wine’ to the list,” she said. “‘Wine’ … or ‘Whine’?!” I asked. “Both!” she replied, laughing, “depending on what kind of day I’m having!”

Makes sense to me.

🙂

The math of less and more

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food

Okay, as you all probably know, I don’t love to exercise. In the spirit of being sprung by Spring, though, I am trying to develop some exercise-program-momentum and keep moving.  Because I don’t have to be at work until noon today instead of 9am (that’s a whole ‘nother story that I won’t get started on here. You’re welcome.) I put my daughter on the school bus and then put my sneakers on and headed out. I used to walk fifteen minutes in one direction then turn around and come back when I was losing weight on the Weight Watchers Program a few years back so that I could earn “Activity Points” so that I could (you guessed it) eat more. I did it 6 or even 7 days a week, sometimes twice a day when I was actively losing, and I continued to do it 4 or 5 times a week when I entered the maintenance phase.

Then November came. Now, November certainly came the past several years as well, but for some reason, this November was different. I stopped walking every day. First of all, it was hunting season. There were plenty of pick up trucks pulled over at the side of the road along my walking route, and you just know that (probably liquored-up) half asleep hunters were out there…armed. That, the freezing temperatures, and the piles of snow were enough to keep me on the bench (read: couch) for most of (okay, just about all of) the winter. The less I exercised, the less I wanted to exercise.

Also, I was (over)confident that after maintaining my weight loss for more than 3 years, I could afford to slack off some. Guess what? That wasn’t true. It was just a lie that I told myself so that I could eat a few more of those cupcakes, those Raisinets, those Peanut M+M’s (that I think we can all agree are the devil!). The more I ate from my favorite food group, the more I wanted to eat from it.

Hello, spring. Uh-oh.  I made a “5 lbs by May” challenge my friend Sheila. I meant to say, “5 lbs off by May”…the Universe has a funny way of delivering to us what we ask (as I’ve written about before)…so I should have been more, um, precise with my description of my goal.

Okay, so let’s try that again: 5 lbs off by May.

Hang on tight; it’s going to be a bumpy ride. 🙂