Acute insomniac

Hey. Watch this thing real quick: 
What to Do About Insomina | TSOL commission from Daniela Sherer on Vimeo.

Okay. So. I have no idea if that is scientific or reasonable, but this video fell into my lap today in a magical way.

Last night, I could not fall asleep, and I have no clue why. I didn't fall into a true sleep until probably 6:00 AM, which means I tossed around in bed for more than seven ridiculous hours. I have never had this problem before, and I was surprised by how intensely frustrating and exhausting the experience was. I am historically a good sleeper! I fall asleep between 15 and 20 minutes after turning out the lights, and if I experience trouble in those 20 minutes, I have an arsenal of tricks that work within 30-45 minutes. Nothing I tried last night worked for me.

The only issue I could pinpoint was this: why can I not slow my brain down? It raced through repetitive and useless thoughts all night long, moving more quickly than it usually does even during the day. It felt like sprinting a full marathon on a quarter-mile race track. And I think I ran at least twelve marathons. 

I'm hoping with all my hope that I never live another night like that again, but if I ever feel it coming on, perhaps I'll take a meditation or journaling break before returning to bed. The experience of last night, the way I found this video, and the way my one problem aligns with the one solution in this video together feel like pure destiny. 

If any of you suffer with insomnia on a more regular basis, maybe try out the ideas in the video? I'm curious about the efficacy of this treatment, buuuuuuuuut probably not curious enough to go research it further unless I continue to have insomniac tendencies. In the meantime, you have at least one new person who will now more empathetically hear your tired plea, so holla at me if you need a friend.

From the draft archives: "Just a lil thing"

One of my favorite things about Joe is that every time he sees me and we are in public he says bluntly, "Hello, wife."

It's just a little thing, but I enjoy it. We go together like milk and cookies (or husband and wife).

Originally drafted: within 6 months of our wedding. Pictures added tonight & photo cred to Brittney Seger during our engagement.

Some mellow tunes

I have to refrain from posting every new song that comes up on my Pandora station (because obviously Pandora now knows me better than I know myself), but these two are beyond my powers of self-restraint. They also are making me feel very cemented in my identity as someone who enjoys hipster music, so while I don't think that should make you shy away from listening, I do think I should warn you (people have strong, polarized feelings about this stuff).



As always, enjoy.

#461 (the apartment without a number on the door)

Did I ever mention that we bought a HOUSE on this here blog? Well, we did, and we love it. However, I spent some time reminiscing tonight about the radiator heat in that li'l place (so warm! such cheap utilities!), and it made me realize that I never posted pictures of our first place! So here I am, ready to overshare about all the memories these pictures bring back. 

Welcome to our apartment! This first pic is the summer edition of our porch, complete with my two little plants that never gave me any food but did give me lots of joy. 

As you walk in the front door, you see our living room. These are the worst pics because we had already started packing by the time I got around to taking them, and I regret this fact terribly. First one's not too bad, though! You can see that our living room doubled as a studio for Joseph.

The stuff on the couch is somewhat a function of moving craziness (I would have cleared it off and staged the picture if I had taken these earlier with all the other pics). However, there usually was stuff on the couch, especially that closest cushion (the unfortunate dumping zone for my bag after school each day), so I suppose it's at least an accurate representation.

Here you can see our boxes starting to pile up and our bookshelf that blended into the walls almost perfectly. We used that filing cabinet as a makeshift side table for the entirety of our time in that apartment, and we also lined this whole room with furniture, which I never loved. Here is a horribly blown-out panoramic photo to give the general scope of the room:

Now join me as we walk into the kitchen!

Don't look at that high shelf on the right because it will make you want to stand under it with your arms open to catch everything when it falls. We tried to put mostly lightweight stuff up there:

Turn around and you'll see the actual kitchen. We were quite possibly the first people to use that stove, and mercy me--it was marvelous. Not-so-marvelous were the limited cabinet and counter spaces of this kitchen, but you better believe that my cooking efficiency skills soared while we lived here. The left side of the sink almost always held drying dishes, which left me just the right side of the sink and any space I cleared on our kitchen card table as work space. I usually used the table for holding ingredients and chopping things up, and then I would put immediate use items on the counter while I worked at the stove. I felt lucky to have such a wide and deep sink because I could throw anything and everything into it while I cooked. I also enjoyed having the sink and the stove so close to each other! I could blow down a pot that wanted to boil over while I washed dishes, which meant very few things boiled over. Cheers, tiny kitchen.

Our flour container has no lid because getting those containers down off of the fridge resulted in more than one accident for me. I broke two lids while we lived there, and I replaced one. After the second crash, I gave up and just let one of the two containers always be open. It helped eliminate the crashing, since the lid could always stay atop the fridge with whichever container I wasn't using at the moment. Also, can you tell that this fridge photo was taken during wedding season? And yes, we still have our own wedding invitation on our fridge. It might be there until we die. Who's to say?

Some panoramas! You can see our pantry in the first picture, and I'm standing in said pantry to take the second picture. I believe all of the apartments similar to ours had no closet space in the bedroom, so that pantry was their closet. We felt lucky to be able to use that space for food storage and other common household items since we had other places in the bedroom for our clothes! 

Now, join me as we move one room deeper--to the bathroom. We're just going to walk in, circle around once, and walk back out. I loved the spaciousness of this bathroom, which may or may not translate in the pictures (I honestly can't tell because I know what it's like in there), especially since we definitely have a smaller bathroom now in our house. This bathroom had so much empty floor space in it (so little furniture, you see) that it felt like the largest room of our apartment! I didn't even mind the alarmingly tiny shower because the rest of the room felt so large.

Onward! To the bedroom. I posted once already about how the bathroom was the only room in our apartment with a door, but you maybe have noticed so far that the bedroom has been well-hidden. We never bothered to buy a curtain for the bedroom (although it had a rod for us to use for hanging one), and we never for one second felt like we needed one. I loved the open feel of each room leading into the next.

Believe it or not, we do have a lovely bedspread set, but our bed is the wrong size to use it. Joseph thought he had been sleeping in a queen for his whole life, but when we moved his bed into our apartment, I knew it was a full. Oh well! We've stored the bedspread since we like it and have plans to get a bigger mattress soon, and in the meantime we've loved using this quilt given to us by my friend Diane when we got married. The colors match our furniture nicely, and that apartment was always far too warm to ever use more than one blanket. 

This bedroom had waaaaay too much furniture for the space, but we made do since we were gifted a nice bedroom furniture set and wanted to use it. It was kind of funny to have to dance around each other while we got ready in the mornings, but it was not funny to sometimes run into the sharp corners of those dressers. Short dresser was perpetually messy, tall dresser was perpetually empty, which tells you how tall we both are.

Look, a closet! Kind of. It mostly fit everything we needed it to, and we never worried about improving it with extra shelves or organizing tools. We did worry about stuffing it to its very brim, and I believe we succeeded. Can you spot our bedspread being stored on the top shelf? And this next picture documents one of the messiest spots in our apartment because I just constantly piled things there. It's like how some people have The Chair in their bedroom, the one that holds the not-dirty-but-not-clean clothes? This area served that and similar functions. Unfortunate but true:

So there you have it! You might be wondering how I managed to take so many pictures of such a small space (I certainly am). The answer is this: I am a little bit obsessive about documenting the "everyday" things. I've always felt that it is great to document the noteworthy moments in life (vacations, trials, milestones, etc.), but what do they mean without knowing the context of the everyday? So here is the everyday that we lived in for the first two-ish years of marriage. We loved it and have fond memories of the entire space.

If you made it to the end of this rambly post, congrats! You have now seen every inch of the apartment we left in January. If you stick around, maybe I'll show you every inch of our new house, too...

Stuff I learn 8

:: I went to the doctor on Friday! And I learned that other than the potentially cancerous moles all over my body (hi, I'm moley) and the blindness in my left eye (hi, I'm 20/70), I am "perfectly healthy." (TMI?) I probably shouldn't really include these facts on this list because I technically already knew about both of these health....issues? hazards?... But I also thought I would probably go on living with them beyond this doctor visit because they weren't bugging me before Friday. Why fix 'em now? (I'm going to fix them now.)

:: The presence of a visible mobile phone has a negative effect on conversation quality. Just having a phone on the table or on the couch or in your hand, even if you never use it during the conversation, is an intimacy killer. So next time you meet up with a friend for lunch, leave it in your purse or pocket! You will both feel better and closer afterward than if you had left it out. (Brought to you by the first few pages of this book.)

:: Dysentery is not just a disease you die from when you're playing Oregon Trail; it is alive and well today! One of my coworkers likely had it last week, and it put her in the ICU for a couple days. Uh, yikes. Apparently it just means really bad diarrhea (I won't elaborate more than that), but it's not, like, its own virus or anything. It is not a cause, but rather it has causes. Does this make any sense? Is this blog post medical enough yet?

I'd share a picture with this, but now that I review the chosen topics for this post, I think I should just leave you without one. Which works out well, actually, because I haven't hooked up my phone to my laptop in probably more than a few months, which means my latest pictures are from 2015. Uh, yikes. I will hook them up and share pictures of my life soon. I promise!

Journal entry: 16 March 2016

Today is the day before the last day of the term. It was also the cutoff date for all late work and extra credit in my classes because I like to live on the edge and not give myself a week's buffer period (don't worry, I'm all caught up on grading! AND PROUD OF IT). I tell my students, "If you come on St. Patrick's Day with your extra credit, I might just say that I am so sorry that you have to be you in that moment, and I will send you away." This is because I lack compassion in a severe way on the last day of the term, and I already know that about myself.

And speaking of lacking compassion: I had to fight my instinct to heavy-sigh for about 10 minutes straight while I spoke with a mother of one student on the phone today. She called at about 4:00 PM, right when I was packing up to leave, and led with, "I know I should have talked to you earlier about this..." In a nutshell, her son has a 9% (solid F) right now because he has come to class approximately four times during this entire term, and it's kind of hard to stay caught up that way. In answer to her complaint that he and I must have gotten off on the wrong foot this term, I really wanted to say that "no, we are NOW getting off on the wrong foot" because I had no problems with this student until this desperate phone call. Like, what did she expect me to do? Why bother calling?? In what world would this phone call help either one of us feel better about our lives???

I need to take up meditation.

Or I can just let the frustration fuel my still-new and still-mild running habit. I motivated myself to move quickly today by running while our dinner baked for 15 minutes. I threw it in the oven, took a couple minutes to change and choose a podcast, and took the remaining 11 to run a mile. It's a slow mile, but it's a full mile! Which is basically all I ask of myself during end-of-term. I got back home just in time to ask Joseph to get that hot pizza out of that hot oven for me because running made me hot.

I fueled another run last week with some deep and abiding frustration, but unfortunately that story is not blog-appropriate. I just want to remember that it happened and that I have never run harder and that it was a healthier way to deal with my distress than past me might have chosen.

Happier news! Sister missionary Tara returned home from Taiwan this weekend, and we partied hardy. We intend to continue partying hardy next Monday, when Joseph and I finally host people at our new house. I am scared? A little? Okay yes.

There was something else....ah yes! I have a day off this week! Nebo School District (is that really a proper noun?) always tries to give a day off right at the end of term, and I appreciate it more than I appreciate most things. This week, I am taking my Friday off to go to both the doctor and the dentist. Might not be the funnest, but it is about as productive as possible, so that will feel good. 

If this sounds like it's through the lens of stress, it just might be. I'll be fine after tomorrow. Wish me some St. Patty's Day luck to make it through!

Books I read (no. 1)

I visit the library as often as possible in an effort to get through my ever-growing book list. These are some of my recent reads.

:: I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron. I definitely read this one in the wrong stage of life, but much of it was entertaining all the same. If you are 50 or older and a woman, I bet this is the most relate-able book in the world. If you are under 50 and a woman, you will probably giggle a few times. (If you are any age and a man, I have no idea what you will think of this book.)







:: Glitter and Glue by Kelly Corrigan. Oh! This memoir made me want to spend all my free time with my mom. Kelly reminisces about her summer as a nanny in Australia and all the ways she discovered her mother inside herself. As someone who is in that exact stage of life right now, I found myself saying "YES" to many parts of this book.

:: Mrs. Kennedy and Me by Clint Hill. Another memoir because apparently this is what adults read? I spent the week of reading this book in absolute awe of the Kennedy wealth. I'm still in awe. I can't think of anything else I learned from this book. How does anyone get to be so rich?? I did like reading this, though, and I teared up while reading about the JFK assassination from the perspective of those closest to him.

:: Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty. Fiction! Finally. I flew through this because it was hilarious and intriguing and well-written. It's told in turns by three narrators who often describe the same events, which might sound redundant but is highly entertaining. It also showcases both the fun and difficult aspects of family life, for multiple families. This one would be my "#1 recommend" from this particular batch of books.

I have funny students

Today was the last day of second term. I had a bunch of students begging me for particular grades so that they could continue playing their sports, and I was maybe a little fed up with it all by the end of the day (don't come to me on the LAST DAY or I might breathe fire at you). So! Today I bring you a blog post that will hopefully remind me of the happier days when I demonstrated greater patience and grace than I managed to have today.

Deep breaths.

Okay! So whenever something makes me laugh out loud, I try to take note of it. If it's something a student has written down, I usually take a picture with my phone real quick. And now I pass those phone photos to you.

One of my students turned in his test with question marks on nearly every surface:

(He did fine-not-great on that test, if anyone's wondering.)

One of them doodles amazing doodles on her every paper, and this is one of my favorites (I had lots to choose from):

(#sofancy)

One of them found ALL of the zeros:

(This is in no way what the question was asking, but at least they knew how many they should find.)

A large group of them squandered their homework time one Friday by Dutch braiding one boy's hair simply because he had straightened it that day (it's usually very curly) and NOT braiding it was apparently NOT an option. Due to a lack of elastics, they tied his braids with Scotch tape:

(Do you see the tape? I told them that was a mean trick cuz ouch, but they figured it was fine because he doesn't know about hair and tape and what better way to learn?)

One of them thought my struggling infinity sign looked like a Speedo, halted class when I tried to erase the board, and ran up to very carefully label (in cursive) the error:

(I must say that when he first circled it, I was very concerned that he might tell us all it looked like a uterus.)

I've had multiple students turn in bell ringers written on tissues. I've had one class track me down on Instagram using a clever combination of social media sites and some pretty intense stalking. And I've heard probably at least a million strange comments by now. (Naturally, none come to mind.) High schoolers, man. They are a weird bunch of nuggets.


I will share one illustration-less story from about a month ago: 

I had one student come in after lunch asking if he could go to the bathroom because his lotion had exploded in his backpack. I told him he could go when we reached homework time at the end of class, and nobody else happened to overhear that conversation. 

Class continued normally, and at the end, this student took the hall pass and his backpack to go clean up. When he returned fifteen minutes later, he stomped over to me saying, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Facer! That took way longer than I expected! It exploded all over and got on everything."

A nearby student, overhearing this complaint, interrupted, "Dude! That's disgusting! We don't need to know all the details!"

We both took a second to wonder why he was so grossed out by lotion, took another second to realize he had no idea about the lotion, and then jumped to the same conclusion he had: that the first student was loudly declaring his bathroom break saga to me and to the whole class.

I laughed until I cried.