Thoughts on Boredom

Dear Readers,

I grew up with a mother who did not tolerate boredom.  And boy did we learn quickly.  The second one of us whined, “I’m bored,” we were sentenced to vacuum the living room, wash the dishes, or weed the garden.  (Not that we didn’t regularly do these chores, mind you; I'm talking extras.)  We learned to either find something to do or be content being bored without anyone else knowing of our plight.

As I got a bit older and got an AOL Instant Messenger account (I know, right?) I had so many conversations along these lines:

Friend: ‘Sup?

Me: Not much, just playing Solitaire/listening to Plus One/reading a book.  How about you?

Friend: Bored.

Me: Why don’t you do something about it?

Friend: What?

Me: Go play with chalk.  Dye your hair.  Read a book.  Invent a language.  Quit whining.

Friend: Whatever.  I’m bored.

And I simply couldn’t understand.  Why wouldn’t you do something else – or at least shut up about it?  Because if you’re whining to me, I’m going to assume that you’d like my advice on how to better your situation – and by golly, I’m going to give you my advice.

But now with my current job, I’m experiencing a little boredom.  In fact, someone asked me today if I was bored, and I actually said yes.  My job this summer goes like this:

Monday – panic panic panic hurry panic hurry 5:00

Tuesday – do stuff, 1:00 sit around and answer phones until 5:00

Wednesday – Friday -    sit around and answer phones, maybe have 1 hour of actual tasks a day.

Okay, it’s a slight exaggeration, but I seem to spend so much time just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.  My usual boredom busters don’t work.  I can’t go play with chalk because I couldn’t hear the phone from outside.  I can’t dye my hair because the smell would make Caleb sick and hair dye is expensive.  I can’t read a book because honestly?  If you walked in the office and saw your employee reading a book while getting paid hourly – what would you do?  Yeah… and that’s the reason I can’t do a lot of other things to fill my time, either: knit/crochet, make jewelry, color, Facebook, Pinterest, blog, etc.  Oh wait…  (Shh… I’m actually at work as I write this, emailing this from my work email to my personal email to post later.) 

And who knows – maybe my boss wouldn’t mind.  But … yeah… that’s not how Momma raised me.

And I hate being bored because it’s such a waste of time!

Actually I just remembered a project I wanted to try (Pinterest) that involves the big office cutter (the one  you’re always afraid people will accidentally use to cut off their fingers)… maybe I’ll go get that.  J

Love and Boredom,

Leah Joy

Pieces of Thoughts Too Long to Tweet

My great-grandma (or someone like that) apparently had a box in her attic labeled "Pieces of String Too Short to Save".  "Why save them?" you may ask, and rightly so.  Because it was the Great Depression and she was Dutch, that's why.

Anyway, sometimes I have pithy thoughts (whatever that means) but they're longer than 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation.  So I thought I'd write a few of them here.

Some people will never be happy.  No matter what the circumstance or what you tell them, they will still find something about which to complain.

I once told someone I always check pockets before doing laundry and she told me she didn't have time to do that because she had so many kids and so much laundry.  I still don't understand this, because one tissue or pen can cause you to have a do a whole load over, if not ruin the clothes entirely, meaning you have to go shopping for more underwear or jeans or whatever, thereby taking up more time than it would have taken to just check the five pockets or whatever.  I figure you don't have time to NOT check the pockets.

Who decided that red and green are Christmas colors?  And then why do other people make home decor in those colors when it's not strictly Christmas decor?  I mean, really, why would you make an owl egg timer in red and green?  Is it supposed to be your Christmas owl?  Is this just a ploy to get me to buy two egg timers so I have one for Christmas and one for other seasons?

And now it's so definitely bedtime.

I made a mug for Zoe today using my new Pebeo Porcelaine pen.  I'm going to bake it in the morning and then fill it with Jell-O tomorrow night, so I'll let you know how it goes!

Love and Graham Crackers,
Leah Joy

Posting From My Own Laptop??

The page opened!  This is so exciting because it hasn't been able to for a long time now!

This summer is very crazy for me!  This is the first job I've ever had in the summer like this.  My first few summers of work involved nannying, which didn't really feel like work (well, sometimes, but not like a desk job or something).  Then I worked a summer of housekeeping at Cornerstone which involved lots and lots of cleaning, which I really enjoyed, actually.  It was 8 hours a day, but we started at 6 in the morning, so I still had lots of free time after work.  The next summer I worked as a cashier at Salvation Army and I only got 6-hour shifts there, so I had lots and lots of free time!  And then this past summer, I worked in the office at the warehouse, and while it was definitely full-time, once I left work, I was done with work.

Now, however, I work 9-5 in the office, and then 5pm-9am live under the office.  I'm always here and it's sometimes really hard to detach from work.  Plus, since most of the other staff are salaried (weekly, but still salaried) and I'm hourly, many of them don't understand that I'm only hourly.  When it's not 9-5, I'm just staff family; I just live here.  I don't mind helping, but I also don't want it to become completely invasive and make me a stressed-out ball of tears, because that's what over-committing does to me.

So, my house isn't the tidiest, but I'm discovering that I can't have that in the summer.  Certainly not if I want to do well at work, spend time with my husband, and be a good friend.

In closing, I may post more now that I actually can (fingers crossed), but not every day.  And here's a fun story.  We had a one-night camp for kids entering 1st grade, so they're all 5 or 6.  We only had 9 campers (which is typical - and fun, because then they get to do everything!) and so they all registered up in my office.  One girl came bouncing in and when I asked her name, she said, "My name's Isabel but I go by Izzie but I changed it to Ariel."

Love and Lemonade,
Leah Joy

I Stole My Husband's Laptop

Hi Friends,

Now that I haven't been blogging most of the summer, thoughts are flooding my mind.  There's so much about which I'd love to write.  I really should start writing them down so that when I do have time to blog, I don't run out of topics.

Anyway, I only have a few minutes, so I wanted to let you know that since Blogger updated their format, it doesn't work on my computer.  I don't know if it's the camp's internet security or just that my laptop isn't a spring chicken anymore.  Either way, it works on Caleb's, so I may start stealing that until they find a way to make it more old-chicken-laptop friendly.  Or something.

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a great rest of the summer!  And I hope I get to write more soon!

Love and Arby's Mozzarella Sticks (guess where we went for dinner!),
Leah Joy

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

This might be my favorite vlog ever, even if it's only a retelling of Pride and Prejudice.  Here's episode 1, and they just keep getting better (hey, just like the book!).  They've done 11 now, and upload them every Monday and Thursday.



Enjoy!

Love and Jane Austen,
Leah Joy

As Most Bloggers Say...

I am the worst blogger ever.

Lately, I've been so busy with my work hours increasing (I worked 20 hours this week!), keeping up with housekeeping, trying to maintain something of a social life, trying to learn more than four dinner recipes, keeping up relationships with my family, and making sure I'm getting enough sleep and exercise.  I actually worked 4 days this week (not full days, obviously).

I don't understand why people now say that you should only use 1 space between sentences.  When I was a kid, you always put 2 spaces in there, and if you didn't, you lost points on your homework!  And now you tell me to use only 1?  No way!  I won't get 100%!  (Especially when the teacher turns the zeros into eyes and puts a little smile underneath?  I loved that!)

Tomorrow, my mom, sister, and I are volunteering as officials at the TBC Tournament.  I was always in TBC (Teen Bible Challenge, if you don't know, think Bible Bowl, but slightly less cheesy) as a high schooler, and our tournaments were just an extension of our regular season.  Each of the 6 competitions over the year would cover only one portion of the material, but tournament covered everything.  That's what made it so fun for me, because I studied regularly, so this material was still in my head once I had brushed up a little bit.  But for the kids who always crammed the night before the competition, well, they had 6x as much information to cram in now!

After high school, I volunteered as a coach for a year, but soon got pretty burned out on the whole thing, so I switched to officiating.  Now that I live 30 miles north of most of their competitions (area churches), I only volunteer at the ones really close to me.

They've recently changed tournament.  Instead of a way to challenge the current year's quizzers with everything they've learned, it's now a way to recruit quizzers for next year.  They take some of the next year's material.  Teams can consist of current quizzers, parents, veteran quizzers, etc., but they also must have a new quizzer to compete.  It's set up like any sports' tournament.  And then there are door prizes and stuff, too, because that's supposed to make more people want to come.

Okay, so I'm a little bit jaded.

I wasn't planning on volunteering at this year's tournament.  It's too far south for me, and I never really have a lot of fun (which isn't the main reason one should volunteer, of course).  But my poor mother got roped into volunteering (and she was not looking forward to it either), and there's a 50% off clothing sale at Salvation Army that day, and I thought, what if we suffered through it together (each room has 3 officials, so that's perfect) and then went and bought really cheap clothing, like we've been wanting to.

So it's a plan.

TBC really is a great organization.  It's amazing how many Bible verses kids learn, and how many I still know from high school.  They come to me when I need them most, and that is extremely valuable.  I really do admire the organization, but as with any organization, by spending too much time with it, it's easy to get burned out.

Today, I'm getting a free 30-min massage that I won in a drawing!  I never win anything in drawings!  (Well, I guess I can't say that anymore.)  I'm super excited!

Love and Thrift Stores,
Leah Joy

P.S.  They just switched all Bloggers over to the new look, which is what I had tried before and no one could comment.  I hope they fixed that!

The Wednesday Ramble: It's Been Forever

Not literally, of course, because that's impossible. And even to say it's been a very long time would imply that I had somehow become trapped in some wormhole in the space-time continuum and visited the past and lived for a while there before developing a way to return here.

Clearly, I watch too much sci-fi.

However, it has been a few weeks, I think, since I have last posted. I'd update you on what's happening, but there's not much to say. We've been living life, keeping busy, and preparing for summer camp. We do live on a camp, you know. Oh, I was mistaken for a high schooler. That was fun.

I saw the 7th-8th grade choir teacher from the school district I went to 1st-12th. I never had choir with her, but she recognized me and said, "Oh you go to Northview don't you?" And I, feeling that I really don't look that young, said, "Um, no, I've graduated. ...From high school and college... and now I'm married." She felt bad, and old, of course, and the real kicker would have been if I told her that I had 3 kids and another on the way, but I decided not be a jerk. :)

So yes, I haven't been baking a lot, but I've got enough recipes to keep Tasty Thursday going for a while. And I haven't been crafting a lot, but ... whatever.

I finished Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy... wouldn't recommend it unless you truly want to read it. You have to truly want to read it to make it through, and it's not that rewarding.

Our camp director and his family were gone for two weeks, so I was working short shifts every day instead of longer shifts twice a week. Meaning that I didn't blog in the morning because I was working, and if I don't blog in the morning, I'm most likely to forget. It's true, just check out the times of my posting! They're back now, but camp work is also about to pick up, so who knows what will happen next.

I've started a list of goals, projects, and garden ideas for this summer. Yes, we're starting a garden. If you have any suggestions for good goals, projects, or garden ideas, please comment. I might consider them. :)

Other than that, my biggest project lately has been a price comparison of ALDI and Meijer. Of course, any 6-year-old who has accompanied their mother shopping knows that ALDI will have lower prices than Meijer on anything, hands down. However, Meijer has far more sales - and coupons! Also, ALDI is much farther away than Meijer, so weekly shopping there is out of the question. Therefore, I went through ALDI one afternoon and wrote out every item, including weight, price, and aisle, that we might purchase there. I brought my several-page list home and entered it in the computer to figure price per ounce. Then I printed a version of that and took it to our local Meijer and wrote down the price there, plus any weight differences. Now I have all the information in my computer.

There are truly some interesting finds. For example, tortilla chips are far cheaper at ALDI regular price than on Meijer super-cheap sale price. But pretzels, on the other hand, regularly go on sale at Meijer and are a much better price than at ALDI.

I think the information will be very helpful to us in the future, and I'm glad I did it before we have little ones tagging along impatiently! (And that was not an announcement.)

I've also been enjoying Pinterest, and I've discovered the posts of Once a Month Mom. She has a big cooking day once a month and prepares meals for the next month that can be frozen. It's really quite amazing. With our tiny freezer (and the mystery meat therein from before we got married) we could only do a small version of it, but I do hope to try some of this sometime. It's fascinating!

Well, that's enough rambling for one day.

Have yourselves a merry little Wednesday.

Love and Pinterest,

Leah Joy