Daily Jamie

Daily Jamie

September 28th

September 29th

Makeup Luvr 4 Life

Sometime during the last week of the month I receive the beauty box to which I've had a subscription for four months. I am elated as I tear through layer upon layer upon layer of packaging until I get to the contents, five beauty products that are tailored to a profile I did online when I ordered the subscription. And then, as quickly as the high came, it is gone. How many purse-sized hand cremes do these people think I need? And my hair isn't that damaged. I don't need a new, miracle serum every month. And excuse me, but where's the makeup? And that's the problem here: my misunderstanding. See, I'm a makeup enthusiast, not a beauty product enthusiast. I didn't even realize the difference until yesterday when the delivery that I had so longed for proved to be another letdown. So I canceled my subscription. Neither the box nor I knew me as well as we thought we did.

Daily Jamie

Would You Hold It Against Me?

Ohmygosh, you guys, I saw the sickest thing at the butcher today. I drove a couple of my colleagues there for lunch and spotted these big, white balls in the deli case. As if their appearance wasn't disgusting enough, their name "kroppkakor" means body cookies. Body cookies, people. At the butcher. It was unsettling. Until I Googled it, that is. Now I kind of want one.

Daily Jamie

Daily Jamie

Get It Together

There was some scheduling drama within The Family Swede today. The husband and I use a physical calendar hanging on the door in our kitchen, plus our Outlook calendars at work, plus the calendars on our iPhones. We try to keep all of them in sync, copying each other on our meetings in Outlook and trying to keep the one at home up-to-date with our virtual ones, but something slipped through the cracks and I double-booked us. Enter these clever days-of-the-week stickers from Granit that Linda turned me onto. They were ridiculously easy to put up, peel easily off, and you can't miss 'em, can you? So no bungling of appointments in our future. It's not on the schedule anyway.

Daily Jamie

Cheap Thrills

It's been literally years since I was able to go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted without having to ask for a ride or arrange childcare. The Swede and I work at the same office but since we have staggered schedules so that Jamie doesn't have to be at preschool for ten hours a day we have to have two cars. That means I get to go wherever I want on my lunch break, which feels crazy. I mean, I don't even have to tell anyone. It's feels just like when I got my first apartment and went away for the weekend or stayed out all night or booked a flight without telling my mom because, you know, I was an adult. And it makes me excited that the thrills aren't over. There is going to be some other, unexpected but possibly familiar sensation too quicken my pulse and clearly it could come at any time.

Daily Jamie

Taking It Easy

It was so nice to wake up today and not have anything planned. Those kind of days seem few and far between nowadays, so I luxuriated in it, staying in my jammies as long as possible. I also let Jamie make as big a mess of his breakfast as he wanted since there would be no rush to clean it up before we had to head out the door. It was quite a nice morning. Then The Swede got home from the cabin at lunchtime and the three of us took a leisurely walk around the neighborhood and stopped by Jamie's preschool to play for a bit before our Skype date with Mom. We had take-out pizza for dinner and played at home the rest of the day. I suppose there was a time that I would have found this schedule pretty boring but now I so appreciate nothing-to-do days like this one.

Daily Jamie

King Of The Castle

With The Swede off working on some carpentry at the cabin with Papa Swede, Jamie and I had the afternoon free to visit with Erin and Ossian. The latter, however, wanted none of it and preferred one of those long, luxurious weekend naps to our company. Who can blame him, really. So Erin and Jamie and I headed over to the Play Castle near Erin's home.

I've been wanting to toss this kid into a ball pit since he was just a glint in his papa's eye. This one was, sadly, only one layer deep but Jambo still appreciated it. Balls are balls in his world. There were kids everywhere and the place was gigantic but Jamie was generous and mostly stayed within the confines of the littlest kid area so that we moms could catch up without having to chase him down. And it's a good thing Erin had some interesting things to say because I needed some distraction. Those slides were calling my name, big time. 

Daily Jamie

Jamie and his favorite book, Vovve or Doggy depending on who's "reading" it.

Second Thoughts

It's not like I thought I was the only one, I just hadn't witnessed it happen to somebody else before.  I do it all the time; every time. I go into Ikea with some very specific and well-thought-out decorating scheme in mind and then, when faced with the seemingly millions of other, potentially better, options, I second guess myself. Then, pacing back and forth among the picture frames or lamp shades or decorative pillows or whatever it may be, I nearly paralyze the decision-making part of my brain weighing options. It happened to Linda today on our lunch break. It was hard to watch. I felt so helpless. Sometimes I think Ikea looks like a fun place to work but really it must do something to those poor peoples' souls to watch this scene day in and day out. And, you know, it's not always a happy ending, so it was good that Linda and I both left feeling pretty convinced that she had made the right choice.

Daily Jamie

Dangerously Declicious

I'm back, y'all! What a loser I've been. I offer my apologies, mostly because this post probably isn't much better than writing nothing at all.

Last weekend I got a tip from an acquaintance about an especially sweet American food section at a grocery store near my job that I'd never been to before. "They have Hershey bars," she told me. Say no more.

And it was an especially good American food section. These Swedes must think we're the nastiest population of all time. Marshmallow Fluff? Jolt cola? Beef jerky nuggets? That's what I call a square meal. Really, though, there were quite a lot of desirable items there so I was impressed with myself that I maintained control and only put a small percentage of what I actually wanted into my cart.  Even so, I walked out of that store about fifty dollars poorer.

Daily Jamie

Daily Jamie

Window Pain Revisited

Ugh, remember around this time two years ago, when I had just started working and found that after sitting in an office all day I had nothing to blog about? Mm, hmm. Here we go again. I'll try harder, I promise, but let's give me a break today, k?

Daily Jamie

Stuff

We're at the cabin so often on weekends that we almost forgot that what Swedes are supposed to do on weekends is go to Ikea and look at stuff.  With a couple of non-cabin items on the agenda, we stayed home this weekend and, while I can't get The Swede into an Ikea to save my life, we did the next best thing and visited the sporting goods store next door.  Then, today, with The Swede off at a Very Important Match, Jamie and I met up with Petra and her boys at the outlet mall.  It was hopping, of course; packed with Swedes looking at stuff.

Daily Jamie

Daily Jamie

Shout It Out

Tonight was ladies night out with Erin, a few of her friends and a few of their friends in the city. I probably oughtta pick up some lozenges on the way home 'cause we talked and laughed REALLY loudly.

Daily Jamie

September 12th

September 13th

Social Not-working

My supervisor has been out sick all week so it's slow going at the office. I've had to get up and running on a few business systems, taken a couple if meetings, and handled some miscellaneous action items, but until the big cheese recovers the only thing I can do in terms of my actual role is to manage our organization's Facebook site. I think it goes without saying that my professional stress level is at an all-time low.

Daily Jamie

Daily Jamie

Time Out

It was my first day back on the job, folks. I was feeling anxious all afternoon and evening on Sunday, that same way one feels on any given Sunday, except that instead of the end of the weekend I was dreading the end of fourteen months. And then it just wasn't bad at all. I won't get all crazy up in here and say that it was better than my stay-at-home-mom lifestyle, but I did get to pee in privacy for a change. Plus nobody at work threw a fit of any kind and I never even caught a glimpse of snot for six straight hours. Still, though. So, yeah, I went back to work and skimmed over a years worth of emails and discovered something delightful, something that I never experienced before because I haven't yet worked there during the month of July. During that month, while most of my colleagues were on vacation, they wrote emails addressed to the whole office telling each other about the trips they were on, the renovations they were doing on their homes, the weather wherever they happened to be, the exotic foods they were enjoying, basically how they and their families were enjoying their time off. They would comment on the others' messages and then share their own stories, and everyone clearly wanted to hear how it was going for their coworkers.  It was lovely and just what I needed to get me excited to be part of this very special team again.

Daily Jamie

Lit

It's officially fall, which is a little bit sad.  I was just telling The Swede the other day that we should have never planned for Jamie to start preschool and me to go back to work during my "bad month."  Up until then I'm pretty sure he was unaware that I had a bad month, but you guys know what I mean, right?  

September is tricky.  The weather is changing quickly and drastically (here, at least), the days are getting shorter, and there's nothing to look forward to, weather-wise.  There are no more first days of school to punctuate the season in a positive way and Starbucks keeps sending me emails promoting the annual introduction of the Pumpkin Spice Latte, rubbing my nose in the fact that all the best autumnal coziness lies in northern Ohio.

The September sunshine, however, I can totally get behind.  Sure, it's definitely not going to give you a glowing tan, but the way the sun was shining this weekend was something special and specific to this time of year.

Daily Jamie

Fest

Today, to celebrate my last day of maternity leave, we had a pizza party.  And by "we" I mean "I".  And when I say "party" I mean me sitting alone in my kitchen eating and clicking around on the internet.  Good thing there was pizza involved otherwise it could have been a pretty lame party.

Daily Jamie

Daily Jamie

Pillow Talk

I'm a real stickler about my pillowcases.  I like them clean and fresh and I like to know that I'm the only one using them.  I take my own with me if I'm staying over at someone's home.  The only person on this planet I would dare share a pillowcase with is my child, but I also pick his boogers so obviously my sense of hygiene knows some limit.  Also, I might think about sharing with The Swede if he could guarantee me that it would never touch the floor as is prone to happen with his.  Honestly, I can't even be totally comfortable lounging on the decorative pillows on my own couch, to say nothing of other peoples'.  So, yeah, I'm a bit scrupulous about where I lay my head.  Nelson knows this about me, so I can't really understand what in the heck he thinks he's doing here.  I'll tell you this, though, it's an outrage and if I didn't know that The Swede would be upset by my disturbing Nelson's nap I'd toss his germ-ridden behind outside faster than it takes to say "hot water cycle".

Daily Jamie