DO NOT WANT

I went to bed last night feeling just fine. I woke up today with a cold. Or, at least, what I assume is a cold. My head is stuffy, my nose still manages to run like a faucet, and my throat is rebelling against me. It was early, the sun wasn't up yet, and I had a day full of work and school ahead of me. If I was less broke I may have called in sick, but my bank account urged me to get up and be a responsible adult.

All the way to work I was praying that it would be an easy day. I work with developmentally disabled adults and while there a lot of days, bad days are usually REALLY bad. At first it was looking good. My client that I work with was in a good mood, all laughs and smiles and funny jokes. Our ride to the program was pleasant, with lots of awesome music on the radio. Everything was going great. Then, when we got to the program, my client informed me that her bag was wet so her juice must be leaking. No worries, that's easy enough to deal with. We get inside and I ask to see her bag. I look through it to make sure everything's okay. It wasn't juice that was leaking. There, hidden in the bottom of the bag, was a rotten, liquefied apple.

DO. NOT. WANT.

Normally I do okay with stuff like this. But for whatever reason today I couldn't handle it. I gagged. I will admit to seriously considering just leaving it for the next person to find. Instead, I did the responsible thing and composed myself and helped the client take care of it.

Not a great start to a friday.

More productivity equals less brain power

The brain is definitely a muscle. Okay, not literally, but at least figuratively. The more you exercise your brain, the more useful it becomes. Like a muscle. Also, if you stop using your brain, it atrophies and then takes work to get it back to where it used to be. Like a muscle. And finally, if you overuse your brain, it starts to get tired and act funny. Like a muscle. At least, that's what happens in my case.

Today was my day for catching up on school work. I did some editing on a group lab report. I completed a quiz for my astronomy class. I rewrote four-and-a-half lecture's worth of notes on how to condition your muscles. It was all very productive, and it felt good to finally get caught up on all of my studying. But today was also my day off, which meant I spent the morning sleeping in and my early afternoon catching up on the internet, followed by the required procrastination time. I didn't get started on my school work until 5pm. Not so good.

At first I was powering through it, but as the hours passed my hand-brain coordination was slowly waning. The words I was writing out took a bit more effort to process, and I kept adding random g's in places they don't belong (seriously, where did I find a g in "creatine kinase"?). Just as I was deciding that maybe it was time to call it a night, my boyfriend sent me a text letting me know that it was "tim" to make some tea, and he was just going to put his clothes in the laundry and call me in a "non". A SIGN! I giggled at his autocorrect fails, and sent him a quick text asking why Tim was making him tea and how long a non was before packing up my school work. As I happily put my books and pens away, a thought slowly dawned on me. When he said it was time to make tea, he also said something about studying. Why would he be studying? He doesn't go to school. My brain struggled to process what had happened. Eventually, I went back to the text message and confirmed that niggling thought. He hadn't sent that text. I had.

I had a good laugh at myself and went to clear up the confusion. The hand-brain coordination continued to remain at an all time low as I talked about "tra" instead of "tea" and typed symbols instead of letters. When my boyfriend called a few minutes later, he listened quietly as I stumbled over my words trying to tell him what happened (the mouth-brain coordination also becomes compromised). At the end of my story, his only response was "you should probably take a break from studying for a while."

We are now at 2 hours since I stopped studying and brain function is almost back to normal. Only the occasional errant letter or two. Lesson of the night: 4 hours of straight school work is probably a few hours too many.

A puzzling puzzle.

Every time we have family over for an event, a puzzle comes out. It's a tradition. However, we also will rarely, if ever, do the same puzzle twice. Meaning that for every get together we have, we need to buy a new puzzle. More often than not a trip to the toy store will be made for this exact purpose, but occasionally we stumble across the perfect one unintentionally. This is what we thought we had done for my brother's birthday. Soon we were to learn how wrong we were.

It all started out innocently enough. We were on a walk through a small shopping district in our city when something in the window of a shop catches our eye. It's a puzzle, very different from the ones we've been doing and therefore a nice change of pace. It was 1000 pieces, our standard, and had a picture of a fairy looking at herself in a mirror that is surrounded by candles and cobwebs. My mom and I both agreed that this was the puzzle we HAD to have, and that day we walked away full of excitement about our find.

After weeks of patiently waiting my brother's birthday finally arrived. As soon as I woke up I excitedly dumped the pieces onto a table and began sorting out the edge pieces. In the process, a realization slowly dawned on us: there was a lot less colour in these puzzle than we had originally thought. In fact, everything was a shade of either beige or grey, with the occasional little dot of colour here or there. As a started trying to assemble the puzzle, I discovered that the pieces also were the type to fit together even when the weren't supposed to. It took us most of the afternoon just to get the outside edge together. We're usually very good at puzzles, but this was our achilles heel.

When buying the puzzle, my mom had commented that we always finished our puzzles so quickly and maybe this one would take a bit longer. She turned out to be right, but much more than expected. The puzzle is still upstairs a day later, with barely more than the edges done. Perhaps a month from now you'll get a post from me celebrating that we finally finished. That, or we finally just burned the pieces and are pretending the puzzle never existed. One of the two.