My beloved one.

I have an object in my household that I love more than I should. My favorite Christmas present this year was a sodium chloride containment unit--a salt cellar, if you will. I started cooking with kosher salt in preparation of owning this piece of art much more than because all the cooking shows harp on it. I longed to possess it. I was tremendously excited when I opened it at Christmas. Although I wasn't sure I'd be receiving it, I had hoped that it would be there, under the tree. If it hadn't been, though, I would have bought it as soon as the holiday was over. I simply really wanted to have this salt cellar. (Good Eats fans, of course I'm talking about the one Alton Brown has.)



I'm still very happy that I have it, I use it every time I cook, and it looks quite nice sitting by the stove. But I thought I had moved past the obsession with my sodium chloride containment unit. Last night, while M was cooking himself a lunch sandwich and doing dishes, I was sweeping the floor and cleaning the counters and putting things away. I noticed after a while, though, that I had been standing in one place for ten minutes, cleaning and polishing the stainless steel with a dishrag. And furthermore, once I had it gleaming like a dentist's tool set, I snarled at my poor totte when he accidentally touched it, leaving a fingerprint.

Is it normal to consider a sodium chloride containment unit part of the family?

My Plan.

I can't believe how productive I've been today. Along with confusing most of my LJ friends (sorry, ya'll, I didn't know I was being so vague about the salt bowl. See? I didn't call it anything with a long dorky name this time!), I've done a heap of other stuff. I've paid the bills and deposited two salary checks in the bank, mailed the bills, mopped the kitchen and the bathroom--since paradisecowgirl never showed up to clean my kitchen, I had to do it myself, cleaned the bathroom, downloaded two thingies for Magnus, fixed his start page (offline list of links that we use as browser start pages) and uploaded it so he could get it at work, scanned a picture of me as a kid that Magnus particularly likes and we borrowed from the parents, repotted my basil and parsley and sat them out in the sun for a while, done two loads of laundry, transferred the pictures in the camera and formatted the card (I'm really bad at remembering to do that), filed a bunch of papers and had lunch with my parents, planned and defrosted dinner ingredients, gotten the pictures ready to update my tatting blog (the internet connection is being extremely screwy, though, hence I'm writing here while I wait for it to stop.. multitasking!). It's only 4 pm, this getting up at 8:30 thing is for the birds!

Oh, right, did I mention that I'm getting up early now? I decided that it might help me with my boredom if I started getting up earlier. I'm not entirely sure how I came to that conclusion, since it really means that there are more hours in the day in which to be bored, but I've been doing it for a week now (including the weekend, which was scary) and it seems to be working. But this way, I'm up, showered and dressed and checked mail (not in that order, I must say) with a couple hours to spare before lunchtime, which means I can actually start working on stuff before lunch.

Speaking of working on stuff, I have a Plan now. I have three major things I want to work on in the coming weeks. I want to spend more time working on my Swedish. Possibly up to an hour a day, although that might vary. I'm going to learn PHP (hopefully this won't be too hard. I do have programming experience.) I want to work on writing a book. Haven't decided what this book will consist of, but I'm warming to the idea again. I always wanted to be a writer, right up until high school. Why did I stop in high school, you might wonder? Because the state of Kentucky decided that they were tired (understandably so) of being ranked 48th in education, and so they would implement this huge system called KERA. All the administrators were tremendously excited about it. All the teachers and students were pissed off in a major way. No one talked about the fact that this system was apparently tried in two other states. I could go on about this for ages. Anyway, the point is that we were forced to write in every single subject, especially math classes.

So what they've ended up with was a group of students with writing skills that shocked our college professors, apparently used to kids who can't string a coherent sentence together, when we got to college, but not a single one who still enjoyed it. Isn't that sad? Sometimes I honestly think that the purpose of public school is to kill out any possible love of learning that might remain in a child. I'm seriously considering homeschooling our kids, though I don't think M is too into the idea. It's been almost six years since I've been out of high school, and the enjoyment I used to find in writing is only now returning. I don't think that's a system that works, regardless of how it turns out with test scores.