I have been thinking about the challenge my friend Chris has come up with. (Go look! Join the challenge! It’ll be fun!) I thought it was a great idea and waffled on participating because things have been so crazy lately, and I didn’t want to say I would do it and then not find the time to do it. I am always wishing I had my camera so I could take pictures during the day and I just in general wish I would take more pictures, so finally I signed on, and this morning I grabbed the camera and decided I was going to fulfill one of the challenges today.

I helped get the kids into James’ car this morning, with the camera hanging around my neck and I exclaimed, “I’m going to take y’alls picture!” and was all excited, until James informed me that the camera battery was dead and needed charging. Grrrrr.

Anyway, so unless I use some other way of fulfilling a challenge, guess that isn’t happening today. Perhaps I’ll think of something else. We’ll see.

Life has been busy. It’s a good busy. Tonight I have bunko with the neighborhood ladies, and I’m really looking forward to that. Tomorrow is a bachelorette party that will probably last until the wee hours of the morning (except that one of us is going to have to get home at a somewhat decent hour to thank the sitter and send let her go home. Oh, James is going to the bachelor party of the groom tomorrow too.) Sunday evening I have poker with some friends/ acquaintances of Chris’ again – I had lots of fun the first time, this time, I want to have fun and WIN WIN WIN! And then Monday is President’s Day. Both James and I have the day off, but the kids’ daycare/ school are open, and so it will be the PERFECT day to lay our newly purchased from Costco laminate flooring. I sent an email to some friends inviting anyone who wants to help over, because I think a few people at least want to learn about the process so they can do it in their home, so we might have help/ onlookers, or we might be going it alone. Wednesday is my 32 (is that right? good lord, I’m old) birthday, and while we are going to get me a bike for my birthday, it probably won’t put in an appearance ON the ACTUAL DAY, so I’ve informed James that I still want a present on the actual day of my birthday, doesn’t have to be anything fancy (because the bike will be the fancy thing!) Because I do! For the last couple years, money has been tight and I’ve always just told James that I don’t need/ want anything because honestly the bank account couldn’t really afford it anyway. So this year… SCREW THAT! I want me some PRESENTS, DAMMIT! Well, just one, will be fine 🙂 I also told him I want to be surprised, and therefore he needs to come up with it himself, and not just have me tell him what to get me. I can think of a couple of options that I hinted I wanted around Christmas that he could still give me (HINT HINT HONEY!), but something totally different would be fine too.

I just want a present 🙂 On my actual birthday. Which is next Wednesday. It just hit me that my birthday is next week. Damn, life has been busy.

Work has been going well, lots to do and some interaction with folks that I can actually label as “my” clients, and that’s a nice feeling. I think I may pick up a book about project management, or maybe just organization. There’s a lot going on, both at work, and also personally and right now my method is to write down everything that comes to me so that then I have got it on paper and my brain doesn’t feel the need to pop up with the random things I need to do in the middle of other things, like “I have to do up Jocelyn’s invitations!” (which I did, last night, although I still need to do a few more.) Sometimes just purging the brain of all the random thoughts, getting it all down on paper (or website, as the case may be,) is helpful in itself. There’s a great book called “The Artist’s Way” that recommends “morning pages” where you just sit EVERY morning and write, write, write for a specified amount of time or number of pages and then you are done and can go on about your day. There really is something behind that, because if you get all of the mundane out, or the thoughts you’ve been kicking around in your head, it is like you release them and are then no longer bothered by them, and your brain is free to focus on other things.

So my biggest issues right now are sleep, this diet pill I’m currently taking, and the thousands of things that my brain reminds me of every 10 minutes on a rotating basis.

The sleep and the pill thingee are inter-related. I have been taking it for a few weeks now, and I am seeing results. I still don’t know how I feel about it. I think I will be pretty relieved when the 6 weeks are up. I have always kind of been afraid of drugs/ medicine, even when I was a little girl. When my mother would give me tylenol or whatever when I was sick, I used to not swallow it, and then wait until she was gone and spit it out. I just didn’t like the thought of the medicine breaking down and going all through my body doing heaven knows what. I still don’t, but I’ve gotten over it for the most part. Any girl who hits puberty and then knows the horrid bloated pain of MENSTRUAL CRAMPS gets over fear of medicine VERY QUICKLY and pops the pamprin like it’s candy.

So, the drugs. If you interested, it is called Phentermine, and it acts as an appetite suppressant and also ups the metabolism. They don’t make me crazy, which is good, that is always my first fear of any drug. It does affect my sleep though, and my reaction to it. I am not the sort of person who can go day to day on a little bit of sleep. I need 7 or 8 hours a night, or I feel it the next day. And even if I don’t feel it, my mood and state of mind shows it. If I am getting weepy or depressed, the first thing I look at is how much sleep I’ve been getting the last couple of days, and that is usually it.

So first off, I don’t get tired and all ready for bed at the usual times. I still seem pretty awake and alert and my mind is always on the go-go and I have often kept James up for a half hour or 40 minutes just talking and blabbering away while we’re settling in for bed. This isn’t out of the ordinary, in fact one of the main symptoms of me being sleeping is I will get very chatty and just can’t seem to stop talking. The sleepy-chatting and this mind-racing chatting are pretty different though. So I have to make a pretty concerted effort to go get my butt into bed at a decent hour, and it is hard, and I often fail.

When I fail, I don’t feel tired the next day. I sometimes have the same “you are TIRED” body feelings, like I get this emptiness feeling somewhere in my stomach when I need sleep or have had too much caffeine, and I’ll still feel that, but I don’t actually FEEL tired. Also, even like last night, when I went to bed at 11:30, when I wake up in the morning (at 6:30, this morning) even though I’m tired, it’s like a switch has been flipped, and I’m AWAKE. BING! AMY’S AWAKE! Mind ON! Brain GO-GO-GO!

So these aren’t necessarily BAD things, but they are different, and I am not taking this pill every day, I take it for 5 days a week, and then I’ve found that the 2 days I’m not taking it, I need a lot of sleep. Last Sunday James got up with the kids in the morning and I didn’t even notice. I was too busy sleeping. And then that afternoon, I went upstairs and had a nap. I NEVER have naps. I was so set on the sleeping that I didn’t even take off my bra, and sleeping in a bra is never a good thing. My body just needed the sleep.

So, even though this pill makes me Not Sleepy Ever, I need to really make an effort to get my body the rest I know it needs. It’s hard. Especially when the weekend is facing you and it has “staying up past midnight every night” written all over it.

Ok, I could go on and on, but I think that this is probably way longer than a blog entry should be, so I will spare you the torture to reading more of my speedy-brain thought vomit, and let you get on with your day 🙂

– amy never knows if I comes before E, and who knows what’s after C