I don’t know about you, but I’ve been sick since the winter solstice. My general blah feeling came to a head last week when I crawled into bed on Monday night and didn’t come back out until I went to pick up Janet at the airport Thursday morning. On Friday, I finally had the energy to sit upright and work on my jigsaw puzzle. I was so exhausted, after an hour or so, I had to go back to bed for a while.
I still feel blah and tired but I’m having moments of activity where I’ll jump up and vacuum or do laundry or some other crazy lifestyle choice. I’m happy Jessie has Monday and Tuesday off from school. We can stay up late and sleep till we can’t sleep no more! in the morning. At least until Roxy the Boston wakes us up.
Roxy
Originally, we’d planned on changing Roxy’s name to Sadie because (I thought) we all agreed we didn’t like the name Roxy. Jessie informed me, when we were going over to pick up our newest family member, that she thought the dog looked more like a Roxy than a Sadie. So, now we own a dog, or the other way around, whose name is Roxy The RockStar, The being her middle name.
She’s fitting in quite nicely seeing as how she’s a little chow hound like the rest of us. You’d think we had nothing better to do than eat, or plan our next meal, or plan tomorrow’s meals. Speaking of that, Janet is coming home today and bringing me the world’s most delicious sandwich from Cafeteria 15L in Sacramento California. I skipped my first dinner so I could truly enjoy the Buffalo Chicken Sandwich during my second dinner or The Fourth Meal of the Day (not including snacks).
Roxy is doing her job, as far as making me get up off my butt several times a day. So far this week I’ve had two days over ten thousand steps which is great considering last week, my sick week, I had eighteen thousand steps total. I’m crawling back up to quasi-healthy status. Roxy and I walked for a solid mile and a half, earlier this afternoon and I’m pretty sure Roxy could have kept going if I’d let her.
Coursera
I love math. I appear to be, at least in my little family, alone with my passion for algebra and calculus. How can you not like imaginary numbers? I’ve been reading, over the past year or so, about these websites you can join and take classes for free and one of the websites usually listed is Coursera.
I finally got around to checking out Coursera and I’m pleasantly surprised by their course offerings. They have a little over two hundred courses available in Biology, Computer Science, Nutrition, Psychology, Finance, Business…the list goes on. They also offer courses in math, if you like that kind of crap (to quote Janet).
I’ve signed up for Algebra (a class I’ve taken many times but, surprisingly, I don’t retain much of it in my real life), a film class and a psychology class. I’m not getting credit for the them, but I just love the idea of taking a class offered by a real university for free: my favorite four letter f-word. I’m also thinking I should take advantage of the free status before the universities come to their senses and start charging people for them.
Book Two
I’m this close (just imagine my fingers very close together) to sending my newest manuscript to the editor. I think Janet and I will go over it one more time before we put our seal of approval on it. It really does help to read your work out loud. You’d be surprised how much better something sounds in your head. When you read it out loud you realize, oh, that’s awkward.
I’ve noticed that a lot during the course of my life. Many a times I’ve had a thought and imagined, ‘that’s going to make me sound wise and worldly!’ When I actually say it, though, I think, ‘nope. That was just stupid. Sounded much better in my head.’
Book Two of the Vancouver Series, Alex’s Story, should be available for download by March first, on Amazon and Smashwords, unless I do something crazy like find a real publisher.
jenn
jjwallingford 