Lalala.
It is really pretty out today. Nearly 70 degrees, sun shining. I am wearing a dress and spending the whole day… indoors. Indoors. I didn’t even bring my camera to work.
I will get a chance to take a walk after work, before the weekly Wednesday night trivia game, but it won’t be long and it won’t be really taking full advantage of such a beautiful day. Oh well. It’s spring.
I know it’s spring because I have crocus blooming in my yard, and I have heard the siren call of the spring cleaning bug. I cleaned my desk at work. You would not believe how long I’ve been living on a pile of papers in my cubicle. Months and months. I threw out (read: recycled) stacks of papers with dates from 2007 and 2008 and these were not important papers. I just live on top of crap sometimes, because it makes me feel comfortable. It’s not a good way to be. But I cleaned it all, threw a lot of stuff out, filed a lot of stuff that should have been filed way long ago, and now it is clear. I can see the whole top of my desk. It is a miracle! It is an International Women’s Day Miracle!
I have had heartburn all week. I took another step closer to the grave last summer, when my once-a-day Diet Coke habit finally caught up with me and started giving me heartburn. I gave up on it at the time and weaned myself off, and the heartburn went away (after a 14-day course of Prilosec, of course). Then I slowly started adding it back to my diet and, a few weeks later, the heartburn returned. It’s been like that for months, a cycle of heartburn and Diet Coke addiction.
It’s stupid too, because I think Diet Coke makes me crave sweet things more often than if I don’t drink sweet drinks all the time. I went through a tonic-drinking phase for a few weeks in January, and I didn’t eat nearly as much sweet stuff during that time, because the bitter taste of tonic water does not mix with sweets. It doesn’t help if I then eat a whole bag of chips, but honestly I don’t fear the chips as much as I do the cookies. The cookies have more calories, and they disappear at a much faster rate.
Anyway, the point is that I should be smarter about the Diet Coke, but I love the carbonated pop form of caffeine. I like tea as well, but generally I won’t make tea for myself, and buying it gets expensive even though tea bags + hot water at the nearest coffee shops are the cheapest option there is. Diet Coke is still cheaper, fits in the bag, pops open with a satisfying snap, and is fizzy and refreshing. Thus, Diet Coke.
Other than cleaning my desk at work, and trying to bribe myself into doing my taxes, I have not done all that much spring cleaning. I did clear out the birdhouses and put all the bird feeders in the dishwasher (this worked very well, in fact), and then moved the bird feeder stands around the yard and refilled all the now-clean feeders. That was a chore, and it worked out pretty well. Unfortunately, I’ve been neglecting the feeders for months and it will take a few days to lure the birds back to the yard. It is time to start thinking about gardening, the time when I am under the impression that I will be able to get a handle on the whole yard this year, and it will turn into a lush and lovely garden full of fountain grass and lavender and a canopy of tree limbs, when in reality I will have given up by mid-June and will be barely fighting the six-foot-high goldenrod by September.
Hello, me. You suck at gardening. Come up with a new dream, ok?
Another sign of spring at our house: spring peepers!! There will be three more freezes after you hear the peepers and then spring is here to stay. That’s the story and I have been keeping track since 2001 and it seems to be true……………