Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 274

Rainy Mornings

I finally managed to sleep in! I made it all the way to 8:30. I don't want to reset my body clock because I'm rather liking being a morning person. I seem to get more done. I also have 9 a.m. physical therapy appointments three days a week. But after two days of getting up extra early in spite of staying up late, and after a 4:30 a.m. thunderstorm waking me up this morning, it was nice to get a little extra sleep. Even nicer was the fact that it was raining, and lying in bed and listening to ...

Monday

I'm all ready to face the work week after a busy weekend of singing and serving at a wedding, then having a very small, very casual dinner party. My house is clean, which makes for a peaceful environment. Now if only I could overcome the sleep deprivation. I'm back to popping awake early, but now it's at 6 a.m., in spite of staying up late the night before. I'm trying to decide if I would function better if I took a nap or if I just power through it and then try to get some sleep tonight. I g...

Fine Tuning

A quick, early post today because I have physical therapy this morning (ow), followed by some errands, then lunch downtown with a friend and a visit to the central library because I'm about to start the serious research, and I can't get a sense of which books I need just from the library web site, so I'm going to look at them instead of putting in requests to have them delivered to my branch. Plus, they have an exhibit on Harry Potter at the library that ends this weekend.

I'm in the nit-picky...

Making Something Happen

It seems that forcing myself to get up at 6:30 in the morning for a week somehow cured me of bouncing out of bed at 6:40. I slept all the way until almost 8 today. I must have been really tired because I went to bed pretty early. I think part of it is that this is my least-favorite time of year. I don't like summer in this part of the world. I read books about kids spending their summers playing outdoors, and I even lived in places where you could do that. Here, that would be a good way to co...

Researching a Book

I had a moment of triumph today in physical therapy: I managed to put my hand on my hip easily, with no effort or sense of resistance. I've been able to put my hand on my hip, but my elbow still was more back than to the side, and I felt like I had to overcome a lot of resistance to do it. Today, I just put it there. However, it does seem to be hurting more the closer I get to "back to normal." I guess that scar tissue is being stretched to the limit. Meanwhile, I spent most of the day yester...

Updates, Recaps and Precaps

Ah, a whole morning at home. I did wake up at 6:40, but I let myself lie in bed until 7:30, just because I could. It was brainstorming time, as I was mostly daydreaming about the book. I got to the end of this draft of revisions yesterday, and now I really do need to write the conclusion to the book. I got at least part of it figured out this morning. I hope to get the whole conclusion written today. Then I may do a pass focusing on particular characters who aren't living up to their potentia...

Toy Abandonment Issues

So, I survived last week and am more or less back to normal, except for the physical therapy. I'm really looking forward to tomorrow, the first morning in ages for which I have nothing scheduled. Now, watch me be wide awake at 6 on the first day I can really let myself sleep in.

I got up early Saturday because I went with my friends to see Toy Story 3 and we thought we could avoid the worst of the crowd by going to the early, pre-noon show. That was perhaps overly optimistic of us, as the the...

One Day More

I must say that the Bible school performance last night went far better than I expected. They only used the tracks with the Broadway Baby-bot voices for one song that the kids were doing in sign language. Otherwise, they just used the instrumental tracks, and the songs weren't so bad when sung by actual human children, and they were oh so cute. My boys who'd spent most of music time during the week trying to kill each other and who had an actual protest, with chanting, about having to go to m...

Evil Musical Earworms

Two more days to go with the kids. It seems to be getting easier. The kids have settled down some. I'm more used to them. And I think it helps that I'm getting to know them as individuals instead of as an amorphous blob of kids.

The one thing I'm not crazy about is, surprisingly for a choir chick, the music. The music seems specifically designed to irritate me. Back in the Dark Ages when I was in Vacation Bible School, the kinds of songs we did were the children's church classics like "This Li...

Those Dark and Dangerous Guys

I survived another day with the kids. It's only three hours, but those are the longest three hours ever. I feel like I've worked a full, eight-hour day by the time they leave. Having our discussion time outside seemed to help, but there are still a couple of little boys I would like to sedate. Or hogtie. And gag. They're not bad kids. They're just full-speed-ahead, and any instructions or directions just go in one ear and out the other. I'm losing my voice from shouting, "No running in the ha...