Monday, January 17, 2005  11:52 pm  <|>
<205> Use What You've Got: So I've been thinking lately, into this new year of ours and all, that I should start paying more attention to what I have and not worrying so much about what I want. I mean, sure, it's good to want things and there is still plenty of goals and gadgets I have floating around in my head all the time... but I'm talking about something else. I'm talking about really trying to enjoy what you have to work with; what is sitting there right in front of you. For example, I've long been meaning to reorganize my book shelves - a feature that I just could not bare to go without for long once we moved into our apartment last April since we finally had the room to display our book collection properly... well you can guess what it looks like. We have them all mostly on the shelves, some in piles on the ground, and though several attempts to organize them into some kind of category structure has been made, they still lack the actual organization part. Now, this may seem like a silly thing to worry too much about, but this represents something larger at work here. How nice would it be to stand in front of my wonderful book shelves and pick out any assortment of related books to look upon. For Dan, this doesn't matter as much as the art books he most often enjoys he keeps out in other rooms all over the place, so that he may pick one up at just about any point in the apartment and start looking at it. That's fine with me, at least he gets his money's worth when he buys a book. I love my book collection, but often I wish I had more time to browse through them, to be inspired and excited about the topics they contain all over again. This would more than likely spear me forward onto some kind of research tangent, that would ultimately lead to who knows what... ok I'm getting ahead of myself. Book shelf organization... yes, it is a good thing and this thought can be applied to all sorts of useful projects from here. For the record, I'd also like to mention that there are often other reasons why certain projects get started and never finished, they can also be read as excuses, don't get me wrong... for instance the common reasoning for not completing our book shelves the way we wanted is that we were missing support brackets for some of the shelf pieces, thus reducing how many shelves we had to work with, thus forcing us to pile certain books on the floor until we had more room for them. I've even attempted to look for brackets while out shopping... but on the other hand, if I stopped this post just for a minute and looked online, I bet I could find what I was looking for... Who has the time to take care of these little things? Often not many people, but I'm going to try to pay more attention to such little holding back details from now on... so how's that for a late resolution?

So as I mentioned in my last post, I've been sick ALL week long, and it has sucked - BIG TIME! Last night I got all excited because I started to feel better, finally after days of not having even a slight break in feeling icky... but when I woke up this morning I felt just as sick as ever and didn't really start feeling better until 3 or 4pm. I'm feeling ok now, but not great, and it just so happened that I was already planning to take off work today as my "floating holiday" for the year - an extra day we get off like other main holidays, only we get to pick one out of a list. Most people take this extra day on Martin Luther King Day or Presidents Day. I guess it worked out well to use today so that I save just one more sick day for the rest of the year. Though I don't feel that I was especially productive today, after literally not leaving the house more than twice since Thursday night - once on Saturday and once today - my days have seemed a lot longer and therefore it has seemed like even the little things I get done are therefore useful. Although some could say completing the Story Mode in Tony Hawk Underground 2 is, in a way, productive. ;)

So Saturday, my other venture outside of the house other than today to go visit Concetta, was to dinner at The Mexican Post for Dan's birthday and out to play pool at Drinker's afterwards. I was sorry to not have more exciting things planned for Dan's birthday, but he knew I'd been sick so I guess he understood. It was just a slow night for everyone I think, though our friends did go out to see a movie afterwards as well, as Dan and I decided to just chill out at home for the rest of the night, seeing that we went out so early for a Saturday. The whole weekend has felt weird actually in terms of time of day. Half the time it feels so much earlier or later than it actually is, that it's been throwing us off completely.

Dan had off from work today too, so tomorrow it's back to work for the both of us. And hopefully I'll start to feel better this week because I can't take much more of this ickiness. I'll probably attempt to go to bed early, but who knows if that'll actually happen. These last four long days have been nice to have off, but so much of them were taken up by "resting" or bad headaches that it really didn't feel like much of a break or vacation... at least having off today will make the rest of the week jump by just a little quicker, and I'm hoping to restructure some things at work this week too. So we'll see how all that goes. I'm feeling good about the future, wherever it may take me. Even though for the last of my closest friends, tomorrow's mark of a new semester's start may be the last they have (in the way they are used to at least), it seems like more things are starting than finishing right now. But enough of my sickie ramble for one night... later!