I am sick again – for the third time this season.

The first time was a cold, the second time was the flu and again I am battling with a cold. It seems as if no matter what I do I am destined to be always fighting off some bug or other. I comfort myself that it’s just that my body having been dried and burnt out in Texas for 2 years and not being used to this cold and wet climate. That it is just overwhelmed and that sooner than later it’ll be able to withstand the constant barrage of germs. That pep talk isn’t working.

I know that the greatest part of my problem is being sedentary and as much as I would love to run – yes, I think I would love to run – I just can’t do it now. I can barely walk. Yoga was a problem. Just going the 300 or so feet to the mailbox is an issue. Sometimes just carrying a laundry basket up the stairs here at home makes me winded. I am in bad shape.

I have never been very active. High school was the last time I was physically active and without batting an eyelid, I will tell you that high school for me was a good 30 years ago. Yes indeed. I am that old. And lately, I have been feeling it. Lucky for me, I think I finally figured out what is wrong with me and I am going to get it looked after. I sincerely hope that once this treatment kicks in I can actually climb the stairs here at home, at a brisk trot and not feel like I’ve run the marathon when I get to the top rung.

That being said, I refuse to let this cold keep me down for much longer. It’s kept me mostly stationary all weekend. There are so many things I should have been doing this last month. Not the least of which is spending time with my friend and her newborn. I am tired all the time, and I am sick almost every other week and I just don’t feel well. It has got to stop NOW.

School starts next month again, and hubby will be gone for 6 weeks starting the first. I need to get myself sorted out quickly. I can’t be alone and sick for 6 weeks whilst I take on extra work and school. So I’ve vowed to also include a dose of airborne everyday with my one glass of lemonade too. I think in a little while work will require me to be up for far later at nights and awake far earlier in the mornings and I need to prepare myself for that.

(P.S. By the way, I am loving After the deadline. )

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The doorbell has never brought this much joy! I ran downstairs and grabbed it up like my life depended on it. My brand new Kindle Touch!!! I had been waiting for this for weeks!

I haven’t had a lot of playtime since it landed on my doorstep, but I have noticed 2 things thus far:

One: The touch screen isn’t the most sensitive or sensible; I’ve had to touch a few times to get it to respond and a couple of times, it seems as if the gestures had been queued and ended up registering as two gesture instead of one. There is no indication when the display is frozen and waiting to process input.

Two: the on-screen keyboard leaves artifacts once the keyboard goes away. A faint image of the on-screen keyboard remains on screen even after dismissing it. This could be annoying as you get to the bottom of the page while reading.

Other than that – I am as happy as a pig in shit!

Photos follow:

that's going to get annoying

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When we heard we were going to be moving here to Washington state, my friend who has lived here for years warned me about S.A.D. I was never sure I would be affected because I have always been a fan of the rain and the darkness it brings.

As it turns out, the rain and the overcast days are actually the least of the problems. The real problem has started to emerge within the last few weeks as fall settles in for the long haul. Now underlined and bold-faced as we switch over to standard time from daylight savings.

The number of daylight hours is restricted even more when it is overcast and rainy. We have lived here for just about 3 months now, and I can tell you that on an average week, we get maybe 2 days of full sunshine – if we are lucky. Now that the days are shorter, it’s dark by 4pm or thereabouts. And I see it getting worse as we near the silly season.

And while I don’t know that I will suffer from S.A.D., I can see how the light (or lack, thereof) is going to play havoc with my internal clock. It already does. I find myself panicking at 4:30 because it looks and feels like much later. And I am finding that I am not a fan of the dark at all. I might like the rain and the overcast and the opportunity to build a fire and wrap up blankets … but I do not like the dark.

Yep – I am still adjusting to life out here. I never dreamed it would be this different, but nevertheless, I am liking it – a lot! I don’t know that I can live anywhere else after this. Dreary, rainy days or not!

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“Hey Mom? I finally understand why you don’t read, or crochet or garden anymore.”

With the advent of school and this new commitment to eating right, I’ve found I have less time to play as I once had. School and work has me in front of the computer almost all day, and when I am done working, it’s 5 ‘o’ clock and time to cook. If I get any time at all to play it’s for an hour or two before bedtime. And when I say play, I don’t mean World of Warcraft – which by the way, I am playing again.

We got turned off RIFT when 2 of our guild mates got into some drama that eventually affected the rest of our up and coming guild. Everybody left because everybody was either a friend of one or the other of those 2. Then when I asked a technical question of their support team, citing a bootcamped Windows installation, they told me “We don’t support RIFT on anything but Windows” and closed the ticket. That just annoyed me because if you are support, you need to know some basic technical facts, not the least of which is that a “bootcamped Windows installation is a perfectly legitimate windows installation”. That was the final straw for me – I am done with them. You can’t be serious about providing a service or product and not know enough about it to support it.

So anyway, to get back to “playtime” – I don’t have much time to indulge my hobbies – whether it be World of Warcraft, reading or watching TV. Of course, I make time for TVD, TSC, SVU or House episodes during the week – but it’s not the same. It’s rushed and I feel guilty that I am not doing something I ought to be doing.

I used to think my mother just wouldn’t make time for her hobbies. I understood that she had responsibilities, but it seemed to me that she was getting extremely anal about those responsibilities and not making time to relax and unwind. It is only now that I find myself with so many responsibilities of my own that I realize just how difficult it is to take time out and relax. And I don’t even have children! No matter how hard you work at stuff, there’s always something else that needs doing – another load of clothes, that batch of dishes, the dusting because of the wood stove…

All this even when I insist I need play time and steal time away from responsibilities, I still don’t get anything worthwhile done. Reading a book a week is a thing of the past. I had set a GoodReads.com goal to read 50 books this year – I don’t see that happening unless I get laid up in a hospital bed with nothing to do (knock on wood that I don’t). And even then, I think I would need to have something else to do other than reading. These days, I get tired if I read for more than few hours at a time, horror of horrors.

But life is coming at me full speed ahead now – it just isn’t the way it used to be. I am remembering with fond memories weekends that started at 6pm on a Friday afternoon, Saturday afternoons when one meal from Jade Garden in Sovereign Center (back in Jamaica) would feed me for 2 days and I could literally spend all weekend playing WoW – and most of the week’s evenings too. Those days are gone, methinks.

/sigh

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#currents

I learned to drive on a 1971 Fiat 127.

The first time I got into the instructor’s car and drove up the street, he asked me “have you driven before?” Apparently, I was doing really well for a first- timer. Yet the only experience I had before that day was going through shifting motions on Mom’s Fiat and moving it around the driveway when she would allow me to.

“A natural” – my parents knew I’d be a serious driver from the day when I was 4 and ran out to meet Dad at the gate for a ride in when he got home from work. On this day, I gave into my urge to drive by putting his car into reverse from park. Dad was able to get to me and the car before it had traversed the whole roadway onto the opposite sidewalk.

I started official lessons early in the year – possibly February or March. I was taking the test in May or June. This I remember because I ALMOST had a clash with my exams and the driving test.

I managed to fail my driving test the first time around because despite bringing the car into  a parallel parking spot and positioning myself 6 inches from the wall and at equal distance at the front and rear bumper … I had hit the rear cone on my way into the spot.

Luckliy, I had done so well on the rest of the yard tests, that they determined when I came back to re-sit all I had to do was parallel park again and then do the road test – instead of starting over from scratch.

The second time around, I parked perfectly – albeit not as close to the wall.

The instructor almost failed me again on the road test – I was driving too fast. Test speeds were supposed to be 25mph – but I found myself hitting 35 and over very regularly. I think what won him over was that I looked fairly comfortable behind the wheel and was quite intimate with the road code (a lot of it is common sense, though, isn’t it? – I said.)

My first car, that was my own, wasn’t until a good 10 years or so later. With the help of my parents, I bought a Nissan Sunny. I remember feeling lucky because my Sunny had an advanced filtration system in the ceiling – clearly the previous owner had been a smoker – and the sales people hadn’t realized it was there until after the paperwork had been signed and therefore couldn’t charge me extra for it.

I’ve owned a few more cars since then – all of them ‘pre-owned’.

But yesterday, I became the first-time owner of a brand new car. Well, to be perfectly honest, the bank owns it and I am paying them to keep it parked in my driveway. But it’s still my name on the title. Hubby’s name is on it with me, but for all intents and purpose – it’s mine!

It’s a 2011 Suzuki SX4 Sport … It’s red (who knew?), manual transmission (6 speed), it’s comfy and it’s light … and I love it. Driving it from the dealership home (some 40-odd miles) wasn’t enough for me. I intend to take it out again ASAP.

Imagine that – I come to live in the United States and the first car I buy for myself is Japanese.

Heh – talk about back to my roots.

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