I’ve never been much of a one for make-up and major beauty routines in the morning and lived with pretty much the same hairstyle for long periods of my life. Before I had children and moved to Sweden (Land of Personal Poodle-Hair), my morning routine with hair was much longer and more involved. Big round brushes, blowdrying and curling iron, etc. Long periods spent getting each wave and curl to behave and stay in place before setting out. Nowadays, it’s mostly wash-scrunch-capture-and-go. I’ve gone down from a shower-dress-face-hair routine of 1 hour to about 20 minutes, max. It always seems that taking a shower is such a long time, but it’s so subjective. I used to get accused of taking “military-style” showers when I was in college by my roommates, meaning jump-in-and-out, even though I always felt like I was in there forever. Once when we were camping and had to use those minute-tokens in the camp showers, I found out that it takes about 7 minutes altogether to wash, shampoo, condition and rinse, if I wasn’t hurrying. Add shaving and you’ve got another 5 or so minutes, depending on how thorough you are.
Routines are so important to us human animals. Getting your child on a bedtime routine, an eating routine, a daily routine is one of the first things a parent leans to prioritize. Mess them up at your peril. I’m always amazed at people who get up extra early just so they’ll have time to putz around the house, eat breakfast, read the newspaper. For me, it’s all about staying under the covers until the last possible second. I’ve got things timed to a hair, so if I get thrown off, I’ll tend to get cranky, too. Most days our routines all mesh and I can whip through the morning, drop the kids off at school/dagis and get to work by 8 a.m. so that I can begin my pre-work morning routine, which consists of reading my favorite daily comics online, a quick run-through of a couple of blogs, news sites, home email and LJ, and then I can settle down to work. I have to go through them in order, though, which feels a little OCD of me. I don’t allow myself to check home email or LJ until I’ve read CNN, for example.
This is the new phone I’ve been given to play with at work: Z600. It’s really pretty and lots of fun, and playing with the camera is cool, but I can’t get the damn thing to sync with my computer, which means I don’t have access to my full phone book or calendar. argh
Work is bugging me, and I’m not sure what to do about it. My work tasks have always fluctuated from feast to famine, but it really feels as though the famine stretches are getting longer and longer. I’m also not too thrilled about the direction my boss is trying to push me in, away from the creative marketing stuff to business intelligence, for instance. All this is edging toward wanting to start looking for a new job and the realization that now is not a good time to be doing that. There are VERY few marketing jobs out there and I’ve got a good one with good job security and pay, which I don’t really want to mess up and by god, I think the sun is coming out, so who cares about my job?!
It peeked and retreated. Mondays = bleah