Guest Post

I wrote a guest post at Hey Nonny for today. Head on over and check it out.

My House is So Cold...

Back when I lived in New Zealand I sometimes wrote and whined about the cold. I couldn't wait to get back to the States and live in homes with central heating that I could set to 72 degrees. And I did. Except now that I have to pay the gas bill to heat an entire house, I am much more frugal with my heat.

I have the thermostat set to 60 degrees during the day. I only keep it this low because I don't want to forget to turn it down on days that I'm not in the house. On days that I am at home, I usually will turn the heat up to 65, maybe 67 if I feel like it. I pretty much always wear a fleece jacket when I am at home. It basically doesn't matter how cute my top is because I never even get to see it. I also usually wear some kind of warm socks or slippers. Some days I forget to turn the heat up in the morning, so I'll be upstairs working away and wondering why I'm so cold. Then I remember and run downstairs to turn the heat up a few degrees.

At the beginning of each month I check dutifully for the heating bill to show up online. I get very antsy about it. Our bill shows us how we compare in our utility bills relative to other homes with our same square-footage. As much as I like to keep my bill low (because I like money), I am even more thrilled to see how my usage compares to previous months, and whether I earned a 5 star rating for energy efficiency. I probably deserve a Saving the Planet badge. Somebody should get on that.

Remakes

I am thoroughly enjoying the surge in movie and movie series remakes that we've seen in the last few years. I loved the two new Batman movies and am eagerly awaiting The Dark Knight Rises. I really enjoyed the new Star Trek, even though I was never a huge Star Trek fan to begin with. I also cannot say enough good things about the 2010 adaptation of True Grit. And now I have another film to add to the list of remakes - Rise of The Planet of the Apes.

First off, I have never seen the original Planet of the Apes, but I have learned enough about it through pop culture and people explaining the movie to me, that I understood the basic premise of the new film. I also knew enough about the original to be thoroughly amused with the references to it in the new movie. (There is one part where the lead chimp is playing with a toy Statue of Liberty. Very funny.)

I loved that the whole premise of the movie is based on a researcher trying to find the cure to Alzheimer's disease. It allowed the viewers to be sympathetic to the research and his overall objectives.

I am probably very late on the bandwagon for seeing this one (we just watched it this past week), but we're always behind on movies because we just wait for them to arrive via Netflix. (We have been on a list for ages and ages and ages and ages to receive The Help. I'm actually a little perturbed that Netflix hasn't just purchased more copies for distribution. This is the only bad thing I have to say about Netflix. Maybe I will get a Redbox code and go get The Help from Redbox. It would be my first ever time to get a movie through one of those machines. Seriously.)

Free TV

We do not have a TV. Okay, that is a lie. We have two TVs because we got a new one for Christmas. The old one is in the extra room quietly awaiting its use as a future babysitter. The new one is in the living room where the old one used to be. But still, we often tell people we don't have a TV. That is because it is easier to say that than to say, "Where we live we cannot get any reception, and we don't have cable or satellite, and we have a policy not to pay for TV." See? "We don't have a TV," is much simpler.

I like our no-paying-for-TV policy. I like it a lot. It saves us a lot of money to watch the shows we watch ("Downton Abbey," "Person of Interest," and "Who Do You Think You Are?") on Hulu or on the network sites. I guess it's a pain to have to wait 24 hours from the original time the show aired, but you can pay me $50 per month (That's how much a cable bill is, right?) to wait for each of the shows I watch.

I will readily admit that I miss having ready access to college football during the fall. We usually would go to other people's homes to watch the BYU football games, and that was always fun. Still I was sad that I didn't get to see more than just the BYU games. (Although not particularly sad that I didn't get to see the National Championship (if you can call it that). I heard about it on NPR and on Facebook. It sounds like it wasn't an awesome game.)

We've actually been spending so much time watching TV online lately (we have recently started watching "Arrested Development" again) that we've downgraded our Netflix account to only have 1 DVD out at a time. We're just saving money left and right, folks.

We are surely not the only people who are not paying for TV. Are we?

Monday

You know how some days are full of getting stuff done and are super productive and you are really proud of yourself at the end of the day? Those days never occur on Mondays for me. Except yesterday. It was awesome.

First of all, I always work from home on Mondays. And because Mondays are always lousy I usually consider it a good Monday if I can put in two hours of work. (This is also because sometimes I don't have enough work to do on Mondays since I am usually in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays - meaning I'm done with everything I brought home for the week.) Yesterday I worked 4.1 hours. (Yes, we log our time in increments of 6 minutes so that we bill clients as accurately as possible.) I'm afraid that with all my parenthetical comments you may have missed the point of this paragraph. It is thus: usually less than two hours of work, yesterday four!

I made a really good dinner. It was pasta in sun-dried tomatoes in cream sauce and blue cheese and cheddar scalloped potatoes. It was a very creamy dinner, but that was because I purchased the cream very discounted since it was about to go bad, so I had to use it very quickly.

I vacuumed the stairs while my child threw his Little People (which are really zoo and circus and farm animals) down the stairs from behind the baby gate at the top. He learned this game from his father and his grandpa, who  let him sit at the top of the stairs and chuck tennis balls at them.

I put on real clothes and wore make-up and my hair still looked good from the day before, which totally counts as "doing" my hair.

I made the bed. (I would say this gets done about 80% of the days of the week.)

I unloaded the dishwasher and loaded it again and then hand-washed the pots from dinner.

I thought about exercising but ultimately did not because I messed up my hip being too enthusiastic on the elliptical machine and then later taking a flying leap over the baby gate. I hope to be back on the machine tomorrow.

And it wasn't yesterday, but today my curtains arrived in the mail and I will be hanging them with Eric as soon as I finish what I'm doing right now. So, check off that to-do from my 2012 goals.

2012 Plans

I tend to be fairly ho-hum about the new year. I really enjoy looking back and examining my previous year, but often looking forward doesn't do much to get me jazzed. I don't know why that is. But this year, I'm just really excited about 2012. I'm not sure exactly why. We don't have anything huge in the works. I'm just excited to have a reason to set some goals and kick some bad habits. (Yes, I know this is very contradictory to an anti-goals post I wrote last year. Times have changed.)

Without further ado, here are the goals that I am publishing for the Interwebs to read:

• Exercise at least 20 minutes 4 times per week.
• Cook three planned real-food meals per week (This is more of a lifestyle maintenance goal than a new goal.)
• Organize the pantry.
• Get some curtains for the sliding glass door and the kitchen window.
• Write three blog posts per week
• Read 52 books.

For me the hardest ones will be exercising and blogging. I only really need to organize my pantry once. It's really a matter of creating an organizational system. I will only buy curtains once, as well. But exercising and blogging regularly will take more diligence.

Here's to a year of less time-wasting.