A few hours in the life of Sharon-about-to-go-on-a-trip

It is not even funny how much you can get done the night before you have to fly out for a week, even if you hate procrastination! I don't think it was procrastination... I think it was timely pleasant stress.

I was so mindblown by how much got done that I just had to share :)  even if this is super boring. And all on 4.5 hours of sleep!

7:30am to 5pm: put in a full day of reasonably stressful work

5pm to 7:30pm:
-stopped by the orthodontist to pick up more rubber bands
-went to TJ Maxx to get a bigger piece of luggage to check (on sale for about half price. All I had before was my faithful R2-D2 baggage that was just a bit too big to carry on but not nearly full size. So a while back I bought my first piece of carry-on-able luggage... and now the real deal!)
-went to the shoe store and bought a pair of sneakers (my first pair I'd had for probably 9 years, went with me through college, to France and Argentina, etc. etc., and was bought at Goodwill to begin with...).  And a pair of sandals (my 2nd real lasting pair in my life and a bit snazzier)
-went to a SECOND shoe store and bought a pair of silver heels! just little ones.
-went to JC Penney and picked up my bridesmaid dress that I'd had to order because no store closer than 2 hours away had it, and whew! it turned out to be just the right size! :)
-on the way home suddenly remembered I needed pills and stopped by WalGreen's
-on the way out of WalGreen's suddenly remembered I needed real and decent food to eat even just for 2 more meals, and ran to the grocery store
-on the way out of the grocery store realized I might possibly need gas before driving to AND back from the airport on a late Sunday night to come... but my errand productivity had hit its limit and I refused to stop and fill up the half tank even though it was right there. I mean seriously. Who gets gas at half a tank??

7:30pm to 10:00pm:
-began packing, basically now done with it all
-managed to eat some decent food for supper (sliced carrots, cooked an egg)
-washed the dishes
-took out the trash
-called one of my hotels next week to re-arrange the schedule
-washed out a new blouse

And that may be it. It felt like a lot more. I really hope that list impresses everyone!

And maybe I will get to bed before midnight tonight.

Hope you have had all had a Thrilling Thursday and will have a Fabulous Friday tomorrow!!

~credits and thanks to Ray Sloss my colleague who likes to call the days of the week like that~

A day with my family

Hi readers! I know you have missed me, heaps. I was making my family a priority while hanging out with them over the holiday weekend. Now at 12:30am on a Wednesday morning (eeks! SO early!) I am making you a priority over sleep. Or is it because I just watched the movie The Next 3 Days and am too wound up to properly konk out?

Anyway, for kicks, I thought I would share some of the activities of a holiday Monday at home.

Since the Big Kids watched a movie on Sunday night and we finally had no place to go in the morning (after school/work and then graduation and then church) we got to sleep in. Sleeping till after 9 is such a happy healing much-needed restoration of all those little tired-out cells in your body! Breakfast after 10... an extra cup of coffee that my thoughtful mother left for me! Then it was time to go play another round of our Age of Empires multi-player game with my three youngest brothers up in the computer lab. We had started the game the day before, and now that I was slightly more familiar with it, we got into attack mode... it was rather stressful for everyone, judging by my  brothers' reactions. This is why I don't like to play computer games generally speaking, they are too stressful. Why I usually stick with Capture the Flag. 

After that I thought I would get a little bit of work done. But that was useless because my laptop browser refused to pull anything up for several hours. Seeing that it was bent on still sleeping in, I went on to the next thing. What was the next thing? This was two days ago and my memory is already failing me. I think we goofed off until just before lunch when I ran downstairs and went on the treadmill for a bit because I was going nuts not moving enough.  It was rainy you see, and we were cooped indoors instead of being outside playing racketball or Capture the Flag or other things that could properly exhaust our lungs.

After lunch it was back to the computers for more game time! This time my youngest brother Trevor and I had a "race" in Commander Keen. I was internally giggling over this the whole time because I remember Trevor exceeding my Keen skills back when he was about 4, which was already 7 years ago. But I wanted to try my hand again at C Keen for old times' sake. I think I made it to the 4th level in the 45 minutes we had... Trevor was probably already at least on level 10. It's hard not to jump at the stomping cactus enemies! Stunning the big one with 2 back-to-back shots was extremely stressful but I somehow made it. Trevor showed me the secret of saving your game just before you get to a tough spot so you can save your lives and retry as often as you need.... Genius!!

I had posted on Facebook that I was having this race with Trevor when we started. At the end of our time I saw that my sister Kendra who was (as far as I knew) still in Des Moines, commented on my wall to see how the race was going. I found that odd. Then found my mom had announced on Facebook that Kendra was here. Yikes!! Time to run downstairs and yell at her for sneaking in without us noticing!

After that we hung out with her in the living room for a while, and she regaled us with her Wicked soundtrack, which the kids all clamored for as soon as they heard the name (go figure).  They did have to put up with about 5 minutes of my Disney station on Pandora while they tried to decide what to listen to. Heh heh! 

At some point we regaled Kendra with the barbershop arrangement of "Hey Mary Lou" that we had whipped together...

Later after various other activities including listening to a lot of Wicked songs, Mommy had us gather in the kitchen to assemble our Tinfoil Dinner suppers. Originally she had planned to cook them out in our burnpile I mean bonfire pit. Since it was way too wet and rainy, we were just going to cook them in the oven instead. I had just finished a nice suite of push-ups and other strength training, so I could  barely safely slice the potatoes, or at least so I felt. Mommy had raw burger for us to each mush into our own hamburgers and layer into our dinners. When I realized Kendra was starting to giggle as I absentmindedly watched her collecting her hamburger, I spotted her blue surgical gloves and my eyes popped. "Kendra?? Seriously?!"  She adamantly held that human guts were ok but raw animal meet creeped her out. Unfortunately I didn't quite get a good picture, I had to run upstairs for my phone and by then she was peeling them off in the trash... 

While waiting for dinner to cook, some of us played the card game Scum. I was Scum most of the time, maybe Vice-Scum once. The story of my life.

And so we happily sat around the huge family table later, diving into our tinfoil dinners, discussing everything from bone tones (ask Kendra about that) to Colorado to how car transmissions work. 

Then there was cake and ice cream and further evening stuff which I can't recall.... Till the little boys went to bed and we watched the next Harry Potter movie, #6. Kendra was quite determined to have a movie night with us even though she was getting up before 5am the next morning to get to her next class in Des Moines. This HP movie is not one of my favorites and I conveniently had to leave the room to attend to something at the worst scene, I think the one with the Inferi.

And I think that's all... A typical day, nothing super amazing but just good to be home in the lovely normalcy of family. Oops, I had better stop thinking about it because now I want to go back and hug my siblings again.  Want to have my 5th brother want to play more computer games with me and my 4th brother want to play chess with me, want to sing with my 3rd brother and read the stories my 4th sister writes, and actually I want to just sit on the couch between Kendra and Carolyn again, surrounded by sisters and goofing off.

I am not proofreading any of this, that is my new rule of thumb! at least for tonight.

a milestone!

We saw my sister Kendra graduate from her Physician's Assistant program this morning. Kendra, the first Hoyt child to receive a graduate degree. The first to get earrings! Jason suggested that perhaps he could be next. We recommended a nose ring for greater uniqueness.

Extremely proud of her!! and  all the adventures braved, all the tough times fought through, yes even all the hours of sleep lost and meals skipped or replaced with junk food to reach this goal!

return to Iowa

Sorry guys, I think I forgot to post yesterday. Not that anyone cares, right? Nobody can read a blog post every day!

It was quite a day yesterday, finished by packing for TODAY - the wonderful drive home to Iowa! The first time since Christmas! Today was a 6-hour road trip to my brother's house. I thought I would share a few special moments:

-First of all, the whole trip seemed to whiz by in my shiny new red car. Even the gas tank thought it whizzed by, it just kept sitting there at 200 miles left, then about 400 miles once I decided to stop and fill it since I needed to stop for a break and water anyway.

-At some point in Illinois I swear I saw a helicopter divebomb toward the ground ahead. I was horrified and kept looking around for it as I got closer. Suddenly it zoomed up out of the trees and over the nextdoor field and I saw it was a cropduster. I was not happy with it for freaking me out. Seriously those crop dusters are insane, they swoop and zoom right over the fields and the highway. Somebody is going to die, if only from a heart attack from seeing it.

-There was one narrow escape in Iowa where a red-winged blackbird (I think?) was swooping around over the highway, it was close but it got out of the way in time.

-I managed to not stop once in Illinois and this was super funny at the time. I guess because both Indiana and Iowa are my homes, I have to be just a little biased against Illinois.

-I did have to turn around twice once getting to Cedar Rapids because I got so excited about cruising in my car... and/or so glad that those slow people were finally turning left that I didn't realize i was supposed to turn left too...

There was probably something else to share but I forget what it was. Getting sleepy and tomorrow is the big day when my sister graduates from her physician's assistant program!

oh to be a barber

---by the way: I apologize for the outdated pictures and links and stuff on this blog, I will fix that as soon as I have the time and energy---

Today I am not sure if I have any adventures to relate,  but I did want to say, isn't it so wonderful to have a hair stylist or barber who knows you well and is your good friend? So much better than going into one of these salons or cheapo quicko places. I have a friend who cuts hair in a little shop off her house, I met her when we both went on a missions trip to Guatemala, and now she is definitely my hair cutter (is that a term? well who cares!). Such a cozy little place and I can talk to her about anything, she is my adopted mom (well one of several!), and she probably knows more about my family and I about hers than you would ever expect from people who haven't actually met each other's families... What a total stress relief to go after a long interesting day at work, and unwind, and get prettier in the process, hee hee!

Anyway, (1) I wish you could all have that fabulous relaxing experience, (2) wouldn't it be fun to be a barber or hair stylist and have decent-length conversations and friendships with that many people,what fun! But actually cutting people's hair without ruining it for them would probably stress me out.

peril on a hot spring evening

I decided to start posting again so I could keep my younger siblings who are not on Facebook updated on my life. If they are amused and informed, that is plenty enough for me!

Well, people who know me know that I love weather and temperatures- all types, all extremes and everything in between. I love winter and snow and cold, I love summer and heat, love rain, rainstorms, gray skies, and blue skies too, etc. etc. For me the temperature range is as follows:  Below 20 is cold... 20-30 is chilly... 30-40 is cool.... warm is 40-90, and then above 90 it starts getting hot. I used to say, "I'm not cold, I'm Scandinavian!"  Until it struck me that I was (unintentionally) lying over and over, whereupon I considered my German and English heritage and switched the saying to, "I'm not cold, I'm AngloSaxon!"  (this reverberated into many other areas such that, "I'm not hurt, I'm AngloSaxon!"  "That doesn't bother me, I'm AngloSaxon!" .... but I digress, I guess)

My bedroom is the room I can totally control in this house, I mean in this chicken coop, and so I like to keep my windows open as long throughout the year as I can, and enjoy as much of the natural outdoor seasonal temperature and fresh air as possible. They might  be closed November through February. This year, as has become the latest fashion, spring has been basically non-existent, so we suddenly had a week of 90-degree weather in May and even though I was ecstatic, I realized I would have to do something because it is always a bit harder to sleep in hot weather. 

And we don't have the air conditioner installed yet because we don't have a drill.... We found this out after opening the new window air conditioner and figuring out how to install it while I was busy and Stacey was tired, and after I had got a huge splinter in my toe running out barefoot to hold the air conditioner in place from the outside while we attempted to maneuver it into the correct position only to find that- the screw holes were missing! After that I sat on my floor trying to pry out the splinter with a needle while Stacey chatted with the neighbors to find out when someone could come drill. It has been a long time since splinter digging started drawing blood and wreaking throbabble pain and so I was quite relieved to get it out.

After the failed installation, I remembered the brilliant idea of last summer where I propped up my box fan on my window ledge and on the ironing board so it could suck all the cool air of the night into the room and blow it all over. Aaaaahh! I was very happy. I can't take total credit for this though, it was inspired by the basic science behind my dad's construction which involved a huge fan on the attic stairs doing the same thing. Ahh fans, so much nostalgia around them, don't you find? Anyway, I was very proud of my homemade air-cooler and took a picture. With my snazzy phone of course. Telling myself, "I wasn't born yesterday!" and giggling proudly. See below for the picture.

5 seconds later I took a step backward and happened to glance down and see a grass stem on the floor, which I poked, only to find it was my needle which I had almost stepped on.

Sharon returns

So if I start this blog up again... will anybody read? or are blogs a thing of the past?