Vocal exercise

I think my vocal chords don't get enough exercise.

I went to a conference this weekend and when I got home, my voice had that lovely hoarseness, like when you are getting over a bad cough or have spent 4 hours yelling nonstop at a football game.

To be fair, I was spending my free time in rather loud places and had to raise my voice above the clamor. And, I may have been hogging the conversational spotlight, too. But I have had this problem on other occasions, where I am in a social setting and come away hoarse. Given that on most days, I go to work and have an hour and a half to 2 hours of talking spread throughout the day, then come home and have no one to talk to, I think my vocal chords are atrophying.

So, yeah, I think maybe I need to make a bit more noise.

Be impressed

Whether you are a soccer (it's football people, football. Or futbol if you prefer) fan or not, you have to be pretty darn impressed by these numbers:

Yes, that's billions--1.08 billion, to be exact. And, yes, that says 0.57 seconds. So, basically, that is amazing.

Winning the family lotto

So, you don't really get to choose your family (outside of who you marry), but when it comes to the family-luck-of-the-draw, I think I won the lotto. I have a big family: 8 kids in my family, and more aunts and uncles and cousins than I can count on my fingers and toes. I was always a shy little squirt, so I was a bit intimidated by my aunts and uncles as a kid (generally speaking) and never really got to know them.

Which is a shame, but has provided me the wonderful opportunity to get to know them now. I don't see them much, just because I'm not in the same geographic area and because we are growing up and spreading out, but whenever I see them or talk to them or hear from them, I am just so amazed at how great my family is. From time to time, I call upon them for a favor, and I still feel a bit shy, but they always just cheerfully help out. And when I get done asking for the favor, I find I've also really enjoyed talking to them about stuff. My relatives are just great people who make you feel worthwhile (good grief, they remember my name out of the 50+ other nieces/nephews/cousins they have! That's remarkable in and of itself!) and just cheer me up.

So, whatever other lottos I lost I think I definitely won this one. Which is one of the most important ones anyway.

Time suck

I hesitate to say life is busy, but I do have a lot of things to do at the moment. Many of them are things that shouldn't take a lot of time, but do. For example, buying a plane ticket. Shouldn't be that hard. But, I have to coordinate getting to and from the airport, figure out what days to fly, wait for a paycheck, then gamble with prices going up or down, which means monitoring prices over a couple of weeks. Time consuming.

Or picking a doctor. I have no idea how to pick a PCP. I would love to just call up and say, "Hey, I'm a single 30-something woman looking for a PCP. Who do you recommend?" But, I don't think that would fly. So, I have to find doctors that I can actually get to via bus, then figure out what all their credentials mean, and then pick one. All using a very user-unfriendly system.

I have also spent a great deal of time finding housing. Again, a decision that shouldn't have been so complicated, yet was. And now I have to plan a move for this coming weekend and work out the details of that.

At work I'm balancing research for the committee I chair, my work for 2 different departments, and at some point before the end of the week I need to throw together a rough draft of a presentation for a conference taking place in 2 1/2 weeks. Which, I really don't have time for at work, but I don't have a lot of time in my personal life for it right now, either. None of which is helped by the amount of time it takes to travel from point A to point B by bus.

Really the biggest time suck I'm facing right now is worry. I have so many things to work on and decisions to make, and no clue how to deal with any of it, so I worry and worry and worry. And worry eats up a LOT of time. It's not just something you feel, it's something that really takes up resources - energy, time, attention, emotion. I wish there were a way to just pause time, regroup, and then jump back into things.

But since there isn't, I will just try not to panic too much.

Headlines

Study confirms geese fear 2-yr-olds
British television deemed better than American television
New Disney movie warns of 'winged violence'
Housing options, lack of transportation cause frustration for apartment hunters
Local citizen considering volunteering as guinea pig for hibernation research
Summertime travel called 'economic amputation' by some travelers
Call goes out for investigation of time shortage
New restaurant serves reindeer lichen with steak; others recommend dropping steak in a forest to save money
Life goes on