Cybertoad's Blog

There is no way that I am going to bore you with the nuances and details of my life this past month or so. Instead, I’ll take advantage of the “extended” entry option and give you general updates on what has been going on with me on all levels. Grab a seat, it’s a long entry…

Professional: This is where the biggest change happened. After almost a year and a half I have left my job and joined a much more stable and larger company. Stress is 10 times lower, policies are much more consistent and reasonable, hours are much more reasonable (wow, I can actually leave at 5 PM), pay is better, benefits are better and my commute went down from 11 miles to 1 ½ miles! I can go home for lunch and save money on both eating out and on gas. I miss my co-workers but not the management at my old company, which had been pulling me emotionally and professionally for the last 9 months, significantly affecting my personality and my mood.

Domestic: Due to lots of things going on with me on all levels, mostly centered around the job I had, I had been extremely stressed and agitated for most of this year. My house suffered so much for it, which further added to my stress and aggravation. It was embarrassing and to me getting unbearably messy. Recently though I turned a corner on the domestic front and it is slowly but surely getting tidied and organized once more and we made a couple of minor updates to the kitchen (new sink, new lighting). Everything has a place to go once more and we are making an effort to put things way. It is amazing how much this helps my state of mind – just being able to easily put my glass down on the coffee table is a nice change. I also look forward to inviting friends over more often, like we used to.

Creative: Over the past year or more I have been creatively neglectful (again, you can track this back to the old job). Over a year ago I sold the nice digital SLR Kenny had bought me and I relegated myself to taking pictures with my relatively antiquated Canon Elph PowerShot S410 (a mere 4.0 MP). Lately though I have been missing my creative side and Kenny must have sensed it too because he, once again, offered to buy me the latest digital Rebel XT (he had offered before on a couple of times but I had said no). I finally said yes and have been loving the new camera ever since! I can use Kenny’s lenses from his film Rebel and thanks to the Flickr community and a a great local group that has monthly “assignments””, I am slowly getting back into photography and it feels good.

Besides photography, I *finally* finished our scrapbook for our Christmas trip to Paris back in December 2004 and can turn my attention to the trips we took last year. I look forward to working on books for Chicago, Washington/Idaho and Hollywood. They will be smaller endeavors and will hopefully get done a little quicker. I am also going to try my hands at ATC – Artist Trading Cards. I think it might be a fun way to creatively combine my photography skills and use my card-making supplies. Once I make a handful I am going to go to a local ATC meeting and see if it is something I want to get more involved in.

Social: Despite making positive strides in most areas of my life, I find my social needs not being fulfilled so I need to work on this. Kenny and I are one of the last married but childless couples. On top of that, we are an incredibly independent married couple and enjoy going out for coffee and drinks, even during the week. Unfortunately, the selection of friends who are able to do this has dwindled to almost zero. Friends have settled down a bit more than us, just had a baby or are going to have a baby, moved away or just never were the late-night people were are. I struggle to find a friend who I can call up at the last minute to grab drinks (or coffee) with. The few I do have can’t be this spontaneous. We have to plan days (or weeks) in advance and life, exhaustion or weather often makes plans change at the last minute. I am not blaming anyone here. Not at all! I am thrilled about some of the changes my friends have taken! I’m just getting lonely over here. LOL.

Kenny and I go out on our own as much as we can but sometimes I just want to talk to someone other than him. So what do I do? I still don’t know enough people at work but I will work on that. Maybe I can meet some local photographers though Flickr. I also am *finally* going back to salsa class – I had stopped going for the last 3 months because I was working too late – and expect to be heading back out to the clubs to go dancing, something I have also missed incredibly. I will begin to re-invite our friends over to our house on the weekends as well and I will try to join Kenny for pool more often now that I get off work at a decent hour. Hopefully this will help!

Healthwise: Despite completely falling off-track in terms of making healthy choices (hate to say it, but work stress is the culprit yet again – can you see a pattern?), I have only gained about 8 pounds back. Still, it’s 8 pounds too much since I am creeping back up a dress size. I don’t mind gaining a handful of pounds but when my clothes start to get too tight to wear, I need to re-adjust my food choices and behavior. Right now, certain jackets no longer fit across the chest and half of my pants are too tight. Not good. Since keeping track of what I ate on a daily basis helped me lose the initial 25 pounds, I am going to try this again but I am going to go ahead and use this blog. I have started a new category called “Toad’s Diet” where I will post my daily intake and progress. I will use the extended entry option so it won’t clutter the site but will help make me more accountable for my eating choices.

Misc.: In other news, Kenny introduced me to geocaching and every few weekends we spend time between running errands hunting down caches with our GPS. I am having much more fun than I had expected and love that it is an activity Kenny and I enjoy doing together. We look forward to geocaching wherever we travel and have an endless supply to look for here in town.

Speaking of travel, we have been saving up our time & money to go to Las Vegas in the fall around our 8^th anniversary. A friend is getting married so I thought it was a great opportunity to go. Neither of us has ever been and although we aren’t into gambling, we want to see Vegas at least once in our life!

OK, is that enough of an update?