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Work, ugh

kasper — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:03:12 +0000

Okay, that title isn’t exactly true. I actually really like my job, more-so now than ever before in fact. After my first week back after Christmas holidays I’m absolutely wiped out though. I meant to blog all week. In fact, if I can find a way to hook up my brain right before I fall asleep I’d have a blog entry every day! I often find myself thinking of all the things I would blog about, and I find myself quite eloquent too at that time of day. I’m just too tired to drag myself out of bed to get it all down. I think it’s kind of like when you dream, as soon as you wake up and open your eyes it all vanishes. I think if I did actually get my butt back out of bed after blogging in my head to get it all down, it would just fade away like a dream.
So this past week, I have been getting home and pretty much crashing on the couch shortly thereafter. Besides being pregnant I’ve been super swamped at work trying to do too much. I’ve been working on our school’s website, I have a payroll report (like 35 pages) due Monday and I had to get our Principal’s retirement flyer done. None of these things are part of my “job description”, but I like being busy, so I tend to take on way more than I should.
The one thing I really wanted to work on this week is yet another remodel of this site. Even though I actually really like the current layout it isn’t something I made and it bugs me. The only problem is, I just can’t get what I want out of my head and everything I’ve tried so far I end up hating before I can go live with it. Little D and hubby went to the mall so I hopefully will use the brief reprieve to my advantage. Hopefully the new site (whenever I manage to get the stupid thing done) will be worth the wait!

Back to work

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Pregnant!!

kasper — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:23:18 +0000

How does it happen that with the best of intentions to keep up with a blog, you fall all to pieces and can’t seem to find the time?
Well I’m back (yeah I know, again?). I’ve been meaning to get things rolling ever since I found out that I was pregnant. Yup, that’s right, my little guy is finally gonna have a baby sister or brother. I don’t know if it’s hormones or just me being indecisive, but I’ve been working on and off on a layout for like the last 6 weeks. I start something and before I can actually finish it up, I hate it. Then I’m on to a new design, and end up hating that one too. So here I am with a premade theme, which I generally don’t like to use because I’d rather design my own, but at this rate the baby will be 2 before I get anything put together. So expect things to change around here in the next little while as I try to put my personal mark on this theme. I just had to get something up so that I could finally put an entry together.
So of course the biggest news I already mentioned – I’m pregnant. We I was trying to get pregnant, even though the timing wasn’t the greatest in terms of cashflow since hubby’s been off work since the beginning of September, but the ticking was getting louder in my head and I always plan for the end result. That just means that I was hoping for a May/Taurus baby, but will be ending up with a June/Gemini instead. Since I work at a high school that timing is fairly important to me. I don’t want to leave in the middle of the year, because that just means that I will be coming back a year later, in the middle of the year. It’s so much easier to just make a clean break of things. So June is actually pretty perfect.
I have been pretty nauseous this time around. No actual throwing up, just the constant feeling that I might. As I have now reached week 13, I think that most of that is behind me. It will be interesting to see how different this pregnancy will be compared to my first. For instance, with my son, he was constantly hiccuping, which I found kind of funny. I didn’t really have any nausea with him, so might this be a girl? Everyone seems to think so, or at least would like it to be. A little girl would be nice, but I’d honestly be happy either way. I don’t expect to find out the sex of the baby this time either. You really get too few really good surprises in your life, why rush this one? Hubby is really hoping for a boy again, which is pretty funny since he really wanted a girl the first time. Now he’s decided that girls are just too hard to raise. Not sure what that thought is based on, but whatever.

What a glorious day

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Back in the saddle

kasper — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:32:50 +0000

Finally back to my very dusty corner of the web! The long absence from this site started with a little boy (who shall remain nameless) who no longer wanted to sleep in his crib. I must admit I tend to take the path of least resistance whenever possible. So instead of simply putting my son in his crib and walking away I would let him fall asleep on my chest while watching tv, then transport him up to his bed. This worked very well for a while, though it didn’t leave me with much time to myself. It eventually got to the point where I couldn’t even get him into his crib after being asleep. Somehow the little darling seemed to sense that he was being put in his crib and would immediately wake up, jump up and start screaming. It was almost like he was terrified of his crib. This progressed to me sleeping with him in my bed. As you may well have guessed this left NO time to blog, knit or shower for that matter. This went on all summer. It’s only been in the last month that I finally dismantled his unused crib and put his mattress on the floor. He still doesn’t sleep on it (I think because it’s plastic and makes a fairly loud crinkly noise when he moves), so I’ve set up a thick comforter on the floor. Finally with a consistent bedtime routine and some perseverance, I’ve managed to get him to sleep in his own room… for most of the night. From time to time he still gets up in the middle of the night and crawls into bed with us, but I feel like we’ve come a long way and am proud that he mostly sleeps on his own.
I returned to work full time in mid-August. It was a strange adjustment but I quickly fell right back into things and soon felt like I’d never left. In mid-October I got an email from an old colleague out of the blue, offering me a promotion. I stewed over the offer for a LONG time, and finally decided though the job sounded tailor made for me and was fantastic, the much longer commute would leave my son in daycare for 10-11 hours which I couldn’t deal with. With a heavy heart I turned down the promotion, but it just got me thinking that there were other opportunities for me out there. In the last month and a half I’ve had the opportunity to try my hand at a different position within the school. Our guidance secretary Dawn, is out on stress leave and Jenn, the VP secretary moved into her desk. We were going to get a supply to cover Jenn’s desk, but I suggested that I take it to get a bit more experience with different job duties. It’s a refreshing change, since I used to be on reception and therefore chained to the phone. Now I don’t answer any phones (okay, except mine), I can have a conversation with a co-worker without checking to see who’s at the counter, and I can move around without anyone hollering for me to get back to my desk. The best part about this job is that I’ve managed to automate our staff attendance coverage using excel and some handy formulas. It’s so fantastic to be able to use my brain and computer skills instead of the same old, same old on my old desk. I guess the only thing about the new (temporary) position, is that I start at 07:30 which basically means that I should’ve been in bed oh, like 2 hours ago…

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Dust off the old barbeque

kasper — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:39:11 +0000

Yesterday was the second day that I took advantage of the weather and got baby D out in his portable crib. It was another beautiful day and I was trying to get a little more sun to even out the burn I managed to get on my long hour and a half walk on Monday. I love that my son likes the outdoors so much, but then I suppose he’s just a contented type of kid all around. I was only out for about half an hour when my Dad came out and started doing some more yard work. Late last week we worked in the front yard raking the last of last year’s leaves and trimming up the hedges that needed so much help. Yesterday was all about the backyard and pulling weeds, raking the caterpillarery things that fell off the tree and transplanting a hedge from the front yard. I became obsessed with the mini trees that seemed to be sprouting all over the backyard. In trying to get rid of them I cut and pulled out roots that were about 2 inches around. There is some serious root system running through the entire backyard so I wasn’t going to get it all out by any means. When I went out from my kitchen, on the step down to the deck was a brown paper bag. My Dad had bought some bulbs for me to plant. He got purple gladioli and pink lilies. I can’t wait to plant them, but the problem will be the fact that we have no idea what’s already been planted.

By the time hubby got home we had pretty much finished for the day so I got him to cook up some hamburgers and we had our first barbeque. Before dinner I took the little guy inside to get him out of his shorts and tee and put on his jammies since it was starting to get cool. I had to be reminded that it is only April still. Sounds funny, but it just seemed like such a summer’s day.

Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but I have been working on and off on bringing back all my old posts. It’s a nostalgia thing really. In reformatting the entries for mysql I came across an entry that mentioned my new layout on August 29, 2005. I couldn’t remember what it looked like so I had a look at my past-domains page but I didn’t have a pic for that layout. Now I just can’t have that! So I ended up spending an exorbitant amount of time getting the pic. Thanks to Web Archive an oh so cool site that records static copies of the internet, and Firebug a very neat Firefox plugin, I did manage to get what I needed. My sanity has been protected, but unfortunately my beauty rest suffered for it. I can’t believe I’m up already considering I didn’t get to sleep until around 03:00!

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Where does my time go?

kasper — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 05:00:25 +0000

I was planning on blogging yesterday and putting up my Weekend Snapshot, but I did a whole lot of little things and managed to get next to nothing accomplished. I suppose since I did nothing but watch movies all weekend I will forgo the snapshot and hope that this coming weekend will bring something more interesting to photograph.
I swear I am so ADD. I seem to spend hours upon hours at my computer and still feel like I don’t do anything or at least get anything finished. For instance, last night when I was about to blog about my day I thought about how to get the most out of PayPerPost. I surfed over to Technorati and joined, then proceeded to see how to maximize my rankings there. One of the suggestions made was to make sure that your css & html are optimized. So off I went to try to validate my coding. There’s the difficulty though. My coding would be fine, but when you get into 3rd party widgets and such there’s really no way of altering the code much if at all. One of the errors that appeared on this site was in reference to the YouTube video I embedded in a previous post. Off I went again to see if anyone else has had this same issue and whether or not they were able to fix it. With the help of this site I found exactly what I was looking for and was able to fix the validation error. I was able to completely validate my other site queenb.ca, but gave up for the time being on this one.
If fact in writing this entry I’ve found myself drifting away from what I’m doing. With the outside links I’ve added I remember reading somewhere that ...target="_blank"> is not xhtml standards-compliant and that there was another way to accomplish what I wanted. Sure enough, I had to hunt down my answer. Then in doing so I remembered that I have a barely used Del.icio.us account that I could save that page for later reference. Well since it’s been so long since I’ve been there I am fighting the urge to sort through all my old bookmarks. If you can believe it I actually started this entry at 19:20. Though in my defense I ate dinner and watched The Biggest Loser since then.
In the last couple of days I have managed to install 6 new plugins. I’m sure there won’t be anything noticeable as they’re all backend stuff. But I now have a Maintenance Mode, and Theme Tester plugin as I am toying with getting a new layout up. If you actually read the above then you’ll imagine that it won’t be up anytime soon, but when I get my shit together I certainly would like to see something I created here instead of a canned theme.

Lazy, lazy, lazy

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