Kids

I'm job hunting again. 

This job (with the bank), like the last one, has been wonderful and I've learned tons, but I need more hours.  So, I'm on the hunt for a full-time job... which is sucking up all the energy that I'd normally spend writing.

I've updated my resume, found a couple places to apply to (one of which I'm really excited about), and today I'm writing cover letters and sending applications off.

The agent is still sitting on my manuscript.  I emailed her last week to confirm she got it, and she did.  So it's more waiting.  Which is fine, as I don't have the brain cells to deal with it if she did get back to me. (Read more)

Bad planning on my part let the fact that #4-son started school on Wednesday catch me by surprise.  He had all his school supplies, but I hadn't adjusted my sleep schedule to get up at 6:30am instead of the 9am or 10am (with 1am or 2am bedtimes) that it's been most of the summer.

So I've been up at 6:30am the last two days, and spent both days basically incoherent.   Not good.

I'm hoping that if I get to bed at decent hours this weekend that next week will be easier.

After spending the summer in Texas working for my brother, my #2-son is home.  He pulled in about 3am.  Right now he's unloading all his stuff out of the car and comparing his tan to the pasty-whitness of the rest of us.  :-)

And we just had our first fight... ahhh... the joy of children.

Blessings upon my boss for being understanding.

So, starting off with that, I worked today, because I really needed the money, unfortunately having to work didn't negate everything else that had to be done today, so I actually didn't even start working until 4pm today.  But I put in four hours on not-critical-but-useful stuff for work, so that's good. 

And before 4pm, I actually got a fair number of things checked off my to-do list for today.  Make note, that was only today's to-do list, not the overall to-do list, but I guess every little bit helps.

It also helped that today I realized I've been wallowing in victim-mode for the last few days.  When I recognize what's going on, I can deal with it, and as soon as I realized what was up, I knew why I was thinking that way, so I'm now working on thinking a more productive way.  It's not an immediate fix, but it's a start. (Read more)

I was tired of #1-son sitting around playing video games so I put him to work porting my old blogs to here.  Tedious, but useful.  I'd been dreading doing it, but I really wanted all my blog entries in one place so I could search them, so it was perfect for him to do and well worth the investment.  #3-son helped him, which made it go faster. 

#3-son was also very useful this last couple days since two of my websites got hit by a comment spammer... to the tune of about 120,000 comments on one of the sites.  And there apparently is no easy way to take massive amounts of comments off at once.  So, my kid went to work cleaning up the site for me.  He clocked his hours, and I'm happy to pay him to do it because it's such a huge load off my mind. (Read more)

#2-son took off yesterday morning and drove to Texas to spend the summer working for my brother.  Son decided to drive straight through instead of stopping for the night, against Mom's advice, but called my brother this morning and Son made it there, so all is well.  So, I'm minus one son.

And today is #4-son's last day of school, so as of 11:30 I'll have him home full-time.  Oh joy. (Read more)

I had a nice Mother's Day.  I had two kids home, #2 and #4.  I took them out to lunch at my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, then we all went to "Star Trek".  It was a great movie, and a good time was had by all.  An excellent way to celebrate Mother's Day.

All of the kids came home for Easter and it was really good to have them here all together.  After years and years of being stressed-to-the-gills by too many kids, with three of them gone most of the time, I find that I really miss them.  So it felt really good to have them home.

They colored eggs late Saturday evening, Easter bunny came at 8am Easter morning (having realized in the last several years that staying up later than housefull of teenagers is impossible), then about mid-day family arrived and we had a huge Easter dinner.  And, silly Easter bunny brought each of them Nerf guns, so we had ongoing wars all day.  So, a good time was had by all. (Read more)

At 10:00 last night I went and picked up my crew from IMSA, my one plus three others… and it’s so cute to see how excited they are about their silly robot. Here’s a video of the goal of the competition. (It’s from the Oswego team, not the IMSA team, but it’s all I have at the moment.) So they all collapsed last night, and I have to get them up in a few minutes. They’re working from 10am-10pm today, 8am-10pm tomorrow, 10am-10pm Sunday and 10am-whenever on Monday. They’re going to be exhausted by the time they are done. Saturday is their first scrimmage against Oswego and Batavia… which should be interesting considering the fact that as of last night they hadn’t yet tried to move their robot.