Friday, July 23, 2010

Whew! What a Day!

Hi All!

Well - Thursday is officially over . . . FINALLY!

Let me tell you - it was quite a day! First, I swam and walked. That was a good thing. I felt good about exercising and I felt HOT! I managed to cool off a bit while watering my gardens - since I was already in a swimsuit, I figured a little water from the hose wouldn't kill me. It felt WONDERFUL!

Since I have started swimming I found that I needed something to hold my towel and shorts, etc. to dry after I got home. At first I was just draping them over the bathtub in my bathroom. However, that didn't work because they didn't dry by the next morning when I wanted to wear them again. Not good. So I started thinking of alternatives.

Finally I decided that I would buy one of those drying racks with the dowels that fold up accordion style when you don't need them (okay - not the best description but . . . do you know what I mean?). Off to Wally World I trotted and purchased my very own high quality drying rack. For about four dollars!

Once I got the thing home and assembled it with the help of a hammer - those dowels certainly didn't want to go into the little holes they were supposed to go into - I had a lovely drying rack. I took it out to the patio and thought that it was going to solve all my problems.

I was almost right.

The towel and clothes dried beautifully on the rack. They smelled like fresh air and were warmed by the hot, hot Texas sun. Perfect.

Sort of.

After about a week or so I noticed that the rack was getting a little wobbly. Then dowels started dropping out of it if you moved the contraption even an inch. Trying to put the dowels back in was an exercise that only led to OTHER dowels falling out. A never ending task!

The sun which warmed my towels and clothes had also sucked every last drop of moisture from the wood of the drying rack dowels causing them to shrink and drop out of the rack. What a dilemma.

Well, I solved the problem by removing all of the dowels and soaking their ends in a pitcher of water over night. They absorbed a bunch of water and swelled right up. Yes, they swelled up so much that I couldn't get them into the proper hole without using a hammer!

After a little pounding the rack was once more functional and I decided that it would get watered each morning just like my pots on the patio. So far it works like a dream!

That was what I did in the morning - before blogging and getting ready for work.

Work was . . . well . . . it was. As I said before, it is interesting to go back to a place I used to work - and which I basically organized - and see the changes. The new person is certainly not as organized as I was and that was a bit frustrating for me. Tasks which took me ten minutes when I worked there suddenly took me an hour to complete! Information I needed wasn't where it should have been and finding it took forever. It was a little frustrating.

Plus, the therapists were giving me work to do that the current person doesn't do too well so that it would get done. To help the current person "catch up." That meant a lot of work! Instead of getting out of there at 4:30 - I didn't get out of there until closer to six! Then there was the long, traffic filled drive home.

I was planning on picking Hubby up at the airport at around 8:00 yesterday evening. So - getting home at about 7:00 meant that I was squeezed for time. As I drove the last few miles home I was working out a tight schedule in my head.
Spend time with my cats.
Go next door and check on the cats I am cat-sitting.
Get the mail for us and the neighbors.
Change clothes.
Find something for dinner.
Jump in the car and head to the airport.

As I rushed in the door to the house, the phone was ringing. It was Hubby telling me that his flight was delayed - by FOUR hours! Even though I felt relief at having more time to do what I needed to do - I was also not too happy about heading to the airport at eleven o'clock at night! Such is life!

It turned out that Hubby didn't make it into the airport until about 11:45 or so and then we had a half hour drive home. It was a late night!

Between the morning construction job, the seemingly endless time at "work" and the long wait and airport pick-up the day seemed to last forever!

Today I am tired from the start. I overslept and didn't do the walk/swim thing and now I am just struggling to get myself going (Hubby is still snoozing away in the bedroom. He took today off rather than try to work with only four hours of sleep!)!

Wish me luck!

Trisha

Voice Update: Between the talking to clients and therapists at work and reading some of my current good book out loud to the kitties I got more than an hour of speaking in yesterday. Things sound good even though I did notice that a couple times during the day my voice got "stressed." That was usually when I was trying to do something and was having trouble and then had to talk to a client or something. Not fun!

2 comments:

Mental P Mama said...

That drying rack? Kindling.

Mary Q Contrarie said...

I found the same problem with those cheap drying racks I bought this clothes drying rack off the internet and I LOVE it. I do not have a dryer for my family of four and I dry everything on this rack.