Start over Saturday

[Kathryn-in-Canada]

Lucylee: I could have written your post. Both about getting showered and dressed in the morning and putting off writing up minutes that just took a few moments to do!

I got the three items done and wrote a thank you card to the Presbyterians who donated money to the refugee families. I'll take that to them tomorrow. Which means I'll be going to church in the morning.

Time to go for a walk now and then dinner. We'll take the long way to get to the pub. Even so, I'm unlikely to get 10K steps today.

[Nancy]

I have done some sewing prep. Pressed and cut out fabric. Laundry is going now.

I walked the ddog after lunch, hens are on their free range time.

Rock hunt was cold & windy they did not space out the age groups so some missed out because parent was w the other sibling.

[blessedw2]

did about an hour of tossing, putting a pile to file and a pile to take care of - actually smaller than I thought but still time consuming.
I feel not so scattered now that I straightened my desk up. I did my 1" of paper plus more!

going out to dinner - take care

I will say hello soon!!!

laundry washing itself
took tylonel - thinking my head is trying to say I could possibly get a headache

what I still want to do but may not do:
15 minutes on the wallpaper
5 -15 in zone (but probably not)

I will pull up my checking account to balance

[Ramblinrose]

LadyM....
My dermatologist won’t let me shower every day due to my extremely dry skin. However I do wash off wth a cloth. No soap either. I use a non-soap wash. Then I use a concoction that I make which is vascillen intensive care mixed with olive oil all over my body...twice a day I might add. Extra virgin OO is very close to a human body’s natural oil and I can use it at night and it doesn’t stain my sheets.

I’m not suppose to use really hot water, but hey sometimes I cheat. So I only shower twice a week. Otherwise my skin would fall off.... which it does anyway in little tiny specs. I also try to “brush” my skin every day to rid my body of dead skin. I use a soft body brush with a long handle to do this, and I try to drink 80 ozs of water daily to stay hydrated.

[Kathryn-in-Canada]

Back from dinner. My walk to dinner, despite being as long as it could be in that direction wasn't long enough so I just finished a mile on the treadmill so I could make the 10K steps today. The walks gave me enough calories to finish the day in the green so I'll be able to colour in both bubbles on my tracking page for the first time this month. Better late than never!

My weight stalled at the beginning of the month (perhaps because I wasn't on program?!) so I won't make my end of month goal. Best case scenario will be 2lbs over that goal but it might be 3. I keep wondering if I'll be able to make up lost distance towards my final goal during the month of June when dh isn't here. I'll get a taste of that this week when he's away. It is only for 4 nights, though. He's home by dinner on Friday. I'll eat out on Monday because I drop him at the airport at 3 and then go back for 7 to meet the incoming refugees. It is just easier to stay at that end of town than battle rush hour traffic. I'll go south to a Subway for a reasonably safe meal calorie wise.

[Harriet]

The family get-together of HRH's maternal family at a restaurant's reserved area was the biggest thing today. Too varied an experience to explain, really. Long, long table and difficulty hearing much about each one.

We had expected neither dstepson nor dd19, but he had called her at school before he left work and for their Dad's sake they made a plan to manage getting there. I think HRH had a rose-colored-glasses idea that it would be so great if the large family could spend time with the two of them today. As it was, none of us could hear each other talk there were so many voices. But, perhaps there is value in even a little more contact with distant relations.

[Nancy]

I did a rock drop with the ddog again. H did a great job on the bbqing burgers yum. The rock hunt was a huge hit great turn out! Lots of work for the gal that set it up. At least it was not raining.

Painted some Easter theme rocks.

[lucylee]

It was good of dd and dss to make an appearance, Harriet — even if the crowd made real conversations difficult. At our family gatherings (Christmas, Thanksgiving), with our 30 or so, I often feel I haven’t had “quality time” with everyone, but I still treasure the time we spend together.

And blessed, I meant to tell you — WTG with those special dmom/grandma skills! So glad you could smooth out things for your dd while she’s visiting your dmom.

So much I want to reply to but I am on phone— about to give dgs his bath and settle this night down. Maybe I will get a fresh start tomorrow?

We went out to eat with dgs, ride around awhile... now back home. No more ta-das at this point.

EDITING to ADD -- TA-DAs!
* Already put up the bath toys (another chore I sometimes procrastinate on)
*Cleaned mirror in my bathroom (card comes up on 4th Thursday to clean all mirrors, but my bathroom is really the only one that needs it b/c both dh & I use that sink more than any other)
* Smoothed/bundled plastic bags for ladies ministry at church (They make mats for the homeless from them. You can google this if you've never seen it -- a lot of church groups do this. Supposedly, the mats are quick to dry and provide some cushion & barrier for people who would otherwise be sleeping on the sidewalk. I don't know how much comfort they actually give, but they look kinda like braided rugs when they're done.)
This took approx 10 min and it is something else that I over-estimate, time-wise, in my mind. I do it when I have a kitchen drawer crammed so full of bags that I can't get anymore in, and then it makes this HUGE pile on the floor, which I sit down to smooth. It always looks like it will take FOREVER to do it, but there you have it: 10 minutes. Good grief. Talk about "stinkin' thinking."

DH is aggravated b/c I am not interested in watching a ballgame, just to see the girl in the dugout who has "40 batting gloves balanced on her head."
DGS isn't interested either; he's copying sentences about the presidents into the notes of my phone.
DH doesn't understand us...

Something else I realized, yesterday, re: family.
I have often talked about my ddad being such a horrible critic and perfectionist. I never actually realized my dmom has these same tendencies.
* Sheesh * No wonder I'm a mess.
We were talking about ds, and dmom (who honestly thinks ds is just as wonderful as can be) made some comment about one little thing that she found fault in (a song he does) -- maybe not "fault" more like "his arrangement is different than what I've always heard..." Just an innocent little comment, but out of all the good she could have said, she picked that ONE thing to comment on. It just rubbed me wrong.
Then I realized, as I was driving home, I realized, YES... my whole life was shaped by these two people who apparently always thought there was SOMETHING MORE, something DIFFERENT, something ELSE that I shoulda/coulda done.
* sheesh *
She says she never tried to put pressure on me in school; that I always put too much pressure on myself.
Hmmm... you think???

Of course, I did the same -- probably to a greater extent -- with ds... and now I have a wonderful human being who is intelligent, talented, hardworking in a job that takes him on long road trips, an amazing father, a good husband (so far as I can tell ), well-liked & well-respected by his peers and those older & younger than himself ... but while his wife is working sometimes 40 hours a week and going to school 4 nights a week, he seems content to do the bare minimum of keeping the children in clean clothes and enough clean dishes that they don't have to starve. It would not bother him one bit if he had to use a shovel to dig through the toys, laundry, books, boxes of things they still have not unpacked after 3 years, etc... I just apologize to ddil for not doing a better job of teaching good habits to him.
But -- I'm glad I didn't warp his thinking worse. I could have made him a nervous wreck like myself, but it seems he rebelled against my anxieties and his ddad's OCD and he's just as laid-back and happy as can be.

[Kathryn-in-Canada]

Lucylee: Maybe your baby was switched at birth with another one!

I'm done updating refugee stuff. And then getting it out to others so they'll know what we need. Through it up on Facebook too.

Off to bed now. My voice is gravelly and my eyes sting from the wood smoke in the apartment. The penthouses have real fireplaces but they don't draw well at all, especially on windy nights so there's smoke throughout the building (we smelled it in the lobby when we arrived, must have come down the elevator shaft.)

[lucylee]

Kathryn, if he didn’t look so much like us, I’d think you had to be right! LOL!!!

Good job on the refugee work.