While I was watching a video for No Handlebars on Youtube I found a link to Bike Your Drive and I had to take a look. The basic idea, of course, is that you should ride your bike everywhere because it’s good for you and good for the environment. I’ve always wanted to be able to ride my bike the places I go, but I’ve never lived a place I could do that easily. When I lived in Greenville I could ride my bike down to the grocery store, Big Lots, and a few different eateries. I rarely did, but I could, and that’s the point. Right now I would love to ride my bike to do more, but I can’t. I say this as if I had a bike. Jay’s bike, I meant.

Right now I live on a military base (MCAS Beaufort) as a D.O.D. Civilian. Because of this, I don’t have a military ID and can’t get on or off the base or base housing without my car. Is that crap, or what? I mean, I could sit there and explain to the MP how I live here and my license says I live on a street inside base housing and they’d probably let me through. Probably. But it’s quite a bit of work and maybe not completely worth it. And if they don’t let me on, I’ll have to call one of my neighbors to come sponsor me on.

There’s really no reason anyone needs to know this, but I’m hoping someone out there will have an idea for me. The only thing within biking distance is a grocery store and a chinese restaurant, but I get groceries often. It’s probably an hour ride to the grocery store and I could only carry 2-4 bags, but that’s good exercise and what else do I have to do?

I didn’t get anything done today. I woke up bright and early at 8am, got in the shower, went grocery shopping.. I was on a good roll. Then I came home and cleaned out half of the fridge. You heard me, half of it. I was so tired after what I had done, I didn’t finish cleaning out the buckets that sit in the door. I ate some food and watched the movie Yes Man. In the middle of the movie (3pm) Jay called me and asked me to bring his platoon some pizza because they were going to be on a scene for a long time. When I got back from all that I finished watching the movie, had some more to eat, then went to lay down.  I felt so accomplished when I got 2 Pizza Hut PANormous pizzas for $15. They were big, and cheap. They’re on sale for $10 each right now and I found a $5 off coupon online (code: IX).

This is showing me that even with the kids gone, I have the power to get in my own way. I took note of a few things I should have done, but didn’t and things I shouldn’t have done, but did anyway. But I have a lot of responsibility here and I’m not sure I can handle it all. I work really slowly compared to other people, for some reason, and for me to get all my work done it doesn’t leave much room for rest. I did, however, get Michael’s room rearranged yesterday. I spent half the morning trying to find stuff to go into his room to organize it better, but found nothing. I’m just going to have to work with what I have.

Jay wants to go to Savannah tomorrow and do some site seeing. It’ll be a good opportunity to get some photos, but it’ll also be a huge waste of a day. I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to go. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sleeps too late to even go. He said he wants to get lunch and take some photos, but I only have $5.00 in my account so that may not happen. On a happy note, though, I did get all my grocery shopping done for less than $100 this week.

The boys are officially gone, and I’m thinking I’m going to see how good I can be this week. Here are the things that I can so easily blame on children that I could do better with.

• Keeping the yard clean
• Keeping the house clean
• Walk and feed dogs on time (2x a day!)
• Exercise daily
• Keep emails and tickets cleared
• Work on websites
• Eat well balanced, low fat meals

Now this will be my test to see if I’m just making excuses, or if the kids really are a good reason to slack on all of the above. It’s not that I don’t keep a clean house, but it’s not the cleanest. It’s dusty and you’ll find things out of place a lot. We’re doing a lot better than we used to, though. The exercising and eating are things I always wanted to work on, and I have to an extent, but really just couldn’t put a whole bunch of effort into without uprooting the kids lives, too. I’m sure Jay plays into all of it a lot, too, but he’ll be working some and sleeping a lot during the day.

I’m also going to go through a room a day and try to get it in order. Michael’s room alone is going to take me a day, I’m sure of it. He has more stuff than he does bedroom. I’m going to have to go through, send some things off to Goodwill, and rearrange it to get the most out of the room. No  clue how I’m going to do that just yet. It’s hard when he has 2 beds and a computer desk. I might split his room into 2 days with some of the easier rooms. I have some ideas that hinge on me finding the right stuff, like wall shelves and stuff. So much work to do. I’m definitely up for the challenge!

Today was a pretty productive day for me. I wish I had done more, but the day isn’t over yet. I spent quite a lot of time working on this site today. I found all my accounts so I can fill in the proper URLs to the icons at the top, then I modified the files so the links would say what they were correctly (they all said ‘rss’) and open in a new window. I also took out a bunch of excessive ‘floats’ on the divs on the comments page so they’d be formatted correctly. Actually, that was the most time consuming part. In the sidebar I put my Netflix queue and cleaned up a lot of the broken links. I added a couple, too.

jay's camera

My favorite part about today is that I finally got to take a decent camera out and get some shots of the park. The dogs were flipping out and wanted to go for a walk, so the boys and I walked the dog. Suddenly I felt an urge to go back and get a camera, since we were walking by the park, and so we did. When we got to the park I showed the boys how to use the old camera to satisfy one of their Cub Scout electives. The photos they took were pretty cute. Then I went around with Jay’s camera and took my own photos. While I was there, a girl asked me where I got my camera and we started talking about how we both wanted to get into photography. We exchanged numbers, so I hope we can get out and learn together. She’s having a baby next week, so it might have to wait.

So I got home and worked on installing a Flickr plugin and adding the photos. Unfortunately Nikon is crazy and they’ve decided that it should take more time and effort to get the photos off the camera than it should to actually stage and shoot the photos. They have their own program you must have to view their photos and you have to convert them for any other program to see them. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have this Nikon program, so I had to boot up Jay’s laptop and do it all there, then send it to my camera, then move it from my camera to my computer. What a hassle. I’m sure there’s an easier way, right?

The boys are leaving tomorrow to go to my mother-in-laws for a week, so it was nice to spend the day with them. I’m looking forward to having the house to myself (for the most part) and getting it in order. Maybe I’ll even be able to get some work done. I’ve been trying to get E-Starr‘s new design up forever. I’ve been waiting for a friend to make me a logo, but she’s been so busy lately and I don’t want to bother her. I think I’ve found a site that can do it for me that’s within my budget. Maybe things are finally coming together.