Random Ramble, including lots of stuff about my lifetime relationship with Vans tennis shoes
The knee is much better today and only woke me up a few times last night. Hurray!
Shannon and I spent a couple hours this evening packing stuff up and moving storage bins out to our fabulous new garage with its fabulous new shelves. The closets are suddenly so spacious! We are also getting rid of a lot of stuff. I mean, is there really any chance that we will ever want to play the board game Clue? We have no children, and I can't imagine any of our adult friends having a burning desire to find out what Colonel Mustard is up to with that pesky rope. And do we really need three Scrabble sets? (We each owned one when we met, and then we bought a nicer one -- with a lazy Susan -- much later.) So I'm planning a heavily laden trip to Goodwill sometime soon.
I have some stuff I'm not quite ready to get rid of, though. For example, Shannon found my dad's black leather traveling bag in one of the closets, with the airline baggage claim tags still on it from when I brought it home from Nebraska after the funeral. I don't think we really need this bag, but it's in great shape and has the potential to be useful someday ... and it was my dad's ... so it's hard to get rid of it. I decided to hang onto it for now, with an option to change my mind at some future time.
Shannon also discovered a couple pairs of Vans tennis shoes (mine) that are still almost like new. I stopped wearing them several years ago because they were giving me blisters on my heels, but I plan to give them another try, because I have a rather nostalgic attachment to Vans, as I wore them almost daily throughout elementary school, junior high, and high school. (They were very trendy in the late 70's and early 80's in our part of Southern California.) After I moved to the Bay Area after college, when I went back to Anaheim to visit my mom would take me to the Vans store where we always shopped when I was a kid, so that I could stock up on Vans in various different colors. (I sometimes had several colors at once: white, black, green, navy, and brown were my most common choices.) I remember that I had custom Vans at some time -- in high school, I think -- but I can't remember what pattern was on them. (Something cutesy, no doubt -- I think it was some kind of calico-style flowery thing. Pink may have been involved.) At the Vans store you could choose the color (of which there were many), pattern (checks, plaid, stripes, butterflies, flowers, houndstooth, polka dots, leopard print, tiny repeating skulls and crossbones, peace signs, stars, parrots, cheeseburgers, comic book art, camouflage, hearts, tiny robots, zombies, happy faces, Hello Kitty, flames, candy sprinkles, paint splatter, etc.), size (including pretty much any width), and style (slip on or lace-up, mostly, back in those days) -- and you could have all the different parts of the shoe made in different colors or patterns, resulting in almost infinite customizable combinations, which I thought was incredibly cool. So I hope these ones (solid navy and solid white) work out this time around, even if they aren't all jazzy like my old custom ones. (I doubt I would want to wear girly calico flowery shoes these days, anyway. Maybe peace signs. Maybe comic book art. Maybe robots. But not all on the same shoes.)
I've also been working (these past couple days) on some "Do Not Disturb"-type signs for my office door. Sometimes I close the door for privacy, and sometimes I close it just to avoid sounds coming from downstairs or the family room, and sometimes I close it so that my noise won't bother Shannon (e.g., if I'm watching a movie or YouTube stuff on my computer, or if I want to listen to music relatively loudly while he is reading just across the hall), and there's no way for Shannon to distinguish between these situations. Also, when I close my door part-way, he's even less sure about what I want. I never really thought about this communication issue until last week, when we sorta stumbled onto the subject while talking about something else and I realized that Shannon had basically no clue what I was wanting. I decided that I may as well be as explicit as possible -- makes you more likely to get what you want, right? -- and so I'm making 3 different attractive signs: 1) privacy please, 2) please knock, and 3) please enter. The images are all ready, and I just need to take them out to Staples to print on card stock and get them laminated.
I was going to make only two (privacy and enter), but I realized that there are times when I might want a bit of privacy, but I'm still open to being interrupted if there's an actual reason (e.g., "Want to watch such-and-such on tv together?" as opposed to just coming in randomly to chat because Shannon is bored). I hope this will make things easier for both Shannon and myself!
Though I got a lot of good stuff done, I also slept a lot today. Very annoying. And yet it was largely because my weekend was so very busy and social ... I needed the down time. I hope tomorrow will be more productive, as I have a rather long list of things I'd like to get done.
Shannon and I spent a couple hours this evening packing stuff up and moving storage bins out to our fabulous new garage with its fabulous new shelves. The closets are suddenly so spacious! We are also getting rid of a lot of stuff. I mean, is there really any chance that we will ever want to play the board game Clue? We have no children, and I can't imagine any of our adult friends having a burning desire to find out what Colonel Mustard is up to with that pesky rope. And do we really need three Scrabble sets? (We each owned one when we met, and then we bought a nicer one -- with a lazy Susan -- much later.) So I'm planning a heavily laden trip to Goodwill sometime soon.
I have some stuff I'm not quite ready to get rid of, though. For example, Shannon found my dad's black leather traveling bag in one of the closets, with the airline baggage claim tags still on it from when I brought it home from Nebraska after the funeral. I don't think we really need this bag, but it's in great shape and has the potential to be useful someday ... and it was my dad's ... so it's hard to get rid of it. I decided to hang onto it for now, with an option to change my mind at some future time.
Shannon also discovered a couple pairs of Vans tennis shoes (mine) that are still almost like new. I stopped wearing them several years ago because they were giving me blisters on my heels, but I plan to give them another try, because I have a rather nostalgic attachment to Vans, as I wore them almost daily throughout elementary school, junior high, and high school. (They were very trendy in the late 70's and early 80's in our part of Southern California.) After I moved to the Bay Area after college, when I went back to Anaheim to visit my mom would take me to the Vans store where we always shopped when I was a kid, so that I could stock up on Vans in various different colors. (I sometimes had several colors at once: white, black, green, navy, and brown were my most common choices.) I remember that I had custom Vans at some time -- in high school, I think -- but I can't remember what pattern was on them. (Something cutesy, no doubt -- I think it was some kind of calico-style flowery thing. Pink may have been involved.) At the Vans store you could choose the color (of which there were many), pattern (checks, plaid, stripes, butterflies, flowers, houndstooth, polka dots, leopard print, tiny repeating skulls and crossbones, peace signs, stars, parrots, cheeseburgers, comic book art, camouflage, hearts, tiny robots, zombies, happy faces, Hello Kitty, flames, candy sprinkles, paint splatter, etc.), size (including pretty much any width), and style (slip on or lace-up, mostly, back in those days) -- and you could have all the different parts of the shoe made in different colors or patterns, resulting in almost infinite customizable combinations, which I thought was incredibly cool. So I hope these ones (solid navy and solid white) work out this time around, even if they aren't all jazzy like my old custom ones. (I doubt I would want to wear girly calico flowery shoes these days, anyway. Maybe peace signs. Maybe comic book art. Maybe robots. But not all on the same shoes.)
I've also been working (these past couple days) on some "Do Not Disturb"-type signs for my office door. Sometimes I close the door for privacy, and sometimes I close it just to avoid sounds coming from downstairs or the family room, and sometimes I close it so that my noise won't bother Shannon (e.g., if I'm watching a movie or YouTube stuff on my computer, or if I want to listen to music relatively loudly while he is reading just across the hall), and there's no way for Shannon to distinguish between these situations. Also, when I close my door part-way, he's even less sure about what I want. I never really thought about this communication issue until last week, when we sorta stumbled onto the subject while talking about something else and I realized that Shannon had basically no clue what I was wanting. I decided that I may as well be as explicit as possible -- makes you more likely to get what you want, right? -- and so I'm making 3 different attractive signs: 1) privacy please, 2) please knock, and 3) please enter. The images are all ready, and I just need to take them out to Staples to print on card stock and get them laminated.
I was going to make only two (privacy and enter), but I realized that there are times when I might want a bit of privacy, but I'm still open to being interrupted if there's an actual reason (e.g., "Want to watch such-and-such on tv together?" as opposed to just coming in randomly to chat because Shannon is bored). I hope this will make things easier for both Shannon and myself!
Though I got a lot of good stuff done, I also slept a lot today. Very annoying. And yet it was largely because my weekend was so very busy and social ... I needed the down time. I hope tomorrow will be more productive, as I have a rather long list of things I'd like to get done.