Yellow Wallpaper

I really can't let leap day pass by without writing a post about it, since it only happens every four years. I'm curious to see what my life will be like four years from now--hopefully I'll still have a blog, and even if I don't I'll be able to go back and read this and reflect. In four years I'll have kids that are 16, 13, and 10! That feels old to me. I wrote a post in 2008 that reflected on what my life had been like in 2004, and in some ways it wasn't all that different four years later. We were still in school, still didn't have a lot of money, and probably spent too much time waiting for 'real life' to happen (well, I know I did). Really, 2008 was mostly a good year and a lot of nice things happened.  I did write again in 2012 , but it wasn't consciously a leap day post. In fact, it was more processing a lot of feelings about the divorce. I feel a little weird going back and reading it now, but it had only been about six months out a...

I'm forcing myself to write this post. Almost every night, after I get the kids in bed and tidy the house, I sit down at the computer to catch up news and blogs and do my homework. Too often, instead of homework or writing or something productive, I end up scrolling through Facebook again and again, hoping someone will update something. Then I hop over to BuzzFeed and mindlessly read through a bunch of posts, most of which have the same jokes and the same GIFs I've seen a bunch of times before. I have a lot of ideas for writing in my mind and yet I never seem to take the time to write them down. Not only have I been neglecting this personal blog, I've also had a hard time getting things up on Segullah lately and I always feel guilty about that. Additionally, I should be more dedicated to my homework--I've been getting by in my classes, but I'm not very dedicated. I realized the other day that I'm scared of writing. When I think about sitting down to write, I f...

I started this blog nine years ago, back when I lived in a two-bedroom apartment that didn't have any air conditioning, I was in grad school, and I only had a two-year-old. Since then I 've gained two more children, finished my degree, lived in two other states before coming back to Utah, found a full-time career and started a new graduate degree, lost my mind a few times, got my sanity back a few more times, and lost my marriage. It's been an interesting ride and I'm not even sure if I've got anyone else still reading what I post.  I've posted quite a few times about blogging , why I started a blog, my feelings about blogging, and why I keep at it. Back when I started this whole thing, blogging was the new, exciting thing to do. Facebook, and Twitter weren't around yet, and even smartphones and the ubiquity of texting weren't that big. YouTube wasn't here, and most 'viral' stuff was shared through emails. Communication has changed a lot du...

It's been almost a month since I last wrote a post on here. I keep thinking "I should write a post; I have stuff to say." And then I don't end up writing anything after all. Stuff has happened--it's been a mostly good month I guess. I might write a better post about the last month at some point later this week. Here, however, is a quick glance into a typical evening around here.  5:30--Get home from work and talk to the babysitter a bit before she leaves. Put away my things and figure out dinner. I actually made a menu plan and bought supplies for meals this week, but no one is feeling excited about breakfast for dinner (too many pancakes at their dad's house over the weekend).  5:45--Decide to make some veggie soup and biscuits for dinner. It's a bit ambitious, but uses up food I have on hand and sounds tasty. P. Bibby "helps", which mostly means getting in my way while I try to quickly make dinner. At least we get to spend some time togethe...

Just when you start to forget what short sleeves and bare feet feel like, you wake up one day and realize that the sun is shining and the air feels clear and warm(er). I can tell that I have overcome my California childhood and acclimated to Utah because the temperatures have been in the 50s lately and I have stopped wearing socks. Well, until today when winter weather came back and I got my coat out again. Spring in Utah is pretty fickle. Last week was Spring Break at the university I work for; what that meant for me was the execution of a rather big project. We have a satellite campus that is about 45 minutes away, and last week we needed to inventory and relabel all the books that are in the small campus library branch. There were about 10,000 books total, so each day two of my coworkers and I drove up with several students and spent about six hours a day re-labelling books. It was an adventure and a lot of hard work, but mostly went smoothly. That took us through Th...

I don't pay any attention to football, college or otherwise, and hadn't heard of Manti Te'o until his "fake girlfriend" story hit the news this week. I find the story oddly fascinating and have spent the week reading all kinds of articles about similar internet scams (good links here and here ). The interesting thing to me is that so many people lie on the internet for no other reason than boredom, loneliness, and curiosity about how other people will react to them. There usually isn't any kind of tangible physical gain for the perpetrators, and often there isn't a tangible loss for the victims. It almost seems worse to me, though, to be stealing things like trust and intimacy rather than money. These types of stories make me a little uncomfortable too because they bring to the surface the feelings I have underlying many of my internet interactions: is this a 'real' event? We are sharing ideas and writing intimately about ourselves, and my mind ...

Remember when I actually used to talk about my life on this blog? That was fun. I've taken an unscheduled blog break for about a month or so and I think it was good to recharge. It feels a little weird to take up the reins again, but I miss blogging and I want to get back into it. Some of my personal highlights from the last little while: We went to Hawaii for about two weeks. It's been nearly four years since we went back and it was a lovely trip. I think I spent a little too much time stressing about it being a fabulous trip and so I should have relaxed and enjoyed it more, but it was nice. I also didn't fulfill my goal of taking more pictures; part of that was the fact that I'm not great at taking pictures, and part of it was the fact that our camera starting acting weird and actually died before we came home. We also officially hate United Airlines because we ended up with major delays both coming from and going to Hawaii. I don't ever want to spend half the ...

I'm afraid that my blog is rapidly devolving into irregular updates that focus on my apologies for not regularly blogging. I've been in a funk for the last few months that I can't seem to shake. One of the hardest things about my job is that, while it works in well with my family life, it leaves me with little real free time. And I've been spending too much of my free time doing unfocused things that are just a way to avoid my work. I need to do a better job at just living my life and doing what needs to be done. I have a lot of good posts in my head and I just have not been taking the time to write that down. Maybe that will be one of my goals next month. I have an idea that it might help me with a lot of things in my life. I'm also trying to decide whether I want to keep teaching next year or not. For this whole year I've had mixed feelings about my job, but I've also invested a lot of time and energy into it and that often means that the second year will ...

Is 'giveaway' a legitimate word? It is now! I used the "random number generator" and came up with commenter number 3--Jenny! Hope you like the book! Thanks to everyone else for commenting; keep an eye out for future prize giveaways and maybe some day you can get in on the action too.

This month marks five years since I started this blog. I was going to write a post with some musings about blogging, but I've already written quite a bit about my history with blogging and don't feel like rehashing it. Plus it's late and I really should be in bed (story of my life). Five years is a long time; it feels like a lifetime. I now have two more kids, a master's degree, a house, and have lived in two different states since starting the blog. Amazingly many of my friends and readers who have been here since the beginning are still following along (I think) and I've gained new ones along the way. About two years ago I tried to change things around and didn't get anywhere. So the blog has been kind of ugly for two years. Thankfully Blogger just made it easier to make changes to your template so I prettied it up a bit. I'm still not totally satisfied so I'll probably tweak things a bit. And finally I wanted to give back to my readers by giving them...

I use sitemeter to keep track of visits to my blog, and one of the more interesting things to look at is searches that people use to get here. It provides an interesting snapshot of what people are thinking about, and what my blog is about. Not surprisingly a number of them are either looking for something to do with the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and another significant portion are looking for some sort of wallpaper in general (I've even seen a search for 'poop wallpaper'; not sure what that's about). Some recent ones that have led people to my blog include: "shouldn't have gone to grad school" "Gentlemen Without Weapons" (wow, someone else has heard of them!) "I left my heart in San Diego" "how never to shop at WalMart again" "music is my life wallpaper" "what's a soapbox"

November is National Blog Posting Month (or NaBloPoMo ). I did this last year and managed to post nearly every day, so I decided to try it again this year. Lately I've been worried about how much time I waste on silly things, particularly time online, but I feel that blogging can be a productive part of my life so I'm still going to commit time to it. Now I need to cut out the stupid, time-wasting stuff like researching cruise lines for the vacation we hope to take five years from now. Today I posted a book review on Northern Lights so I'm going to let that count as my 'real' post for today (this is just filler). We'll see what this month brings: we've got Mr. Fob's big three-decade birthday, our anniversary, Thanksgiving, and hopefully buying a house and moving. Should be interesting.

Mr. Fob and I attended the Sunstone Symposium today; we really did not have the time or resources to attend the entire event over the last few days, but perhaps at some future time we will. Today was a nice experience for both of us. The sessions we attended--together and separately--were enriching and it was nice to spend a day away from the children focusing on adult contact. I had been a little nervous about asking my sister-in-law to watch them for a full day but they enjoyed themselves and were also happy to see us when we picked them up. I will admit that one of my motivations in attending events like Sunstone is meeting people. After typing that sentence I realized that I made it sound like a bad thing. It's not a bad thing to be sociable and to be part of community. I do feel a little silly when meeting people that I perceive as being somehow 'cooler' than me and acting like a giggly fangirl. It's silly because I realized today that we are all working together t...

When I started blogging a few years ago, FoxyJ seemed like a perfectly decent pseudonym--cute and fun, kind of like myself. But then I started meeting people in person and having to say it out loud ; there seems to be something a bit embarrassing about calling yourself 'foxy' in person. I hope that most people realize that at least a bit of irony is involved in the name. I had another great opportunity to meet people and make more connections yesterday at the Sunstone conference. I came home exhausted from travelling and from spending all day listening to and conversing with other people, but it was the positive exhaustion of energy spent on good things. I'm glad I chose to go down Friday night and spend some time with my friend Skylark; she was generous in allowing me to stay at her apartment and talk her ear off, and it was a much-needed break from my regular routine. The conference was also a fabulous experience; I attended sessions on a variety of topics and came away...

Did you miss me? I bet you didn't realize I'd gone anywhere, and I didn't really. Just my computer did. Last Wednesday it suddenly started freaking out and acting crazy. We did some investigating on the interent (thank goodness for having two computers) and tried a few things, but nothing worked. It seemed to be a hard drive issue, which is beyond our level of expertise. Thankfully I found a repair guy online who had a lot of positive reviews and took my computer to him on Thursday morning. He called me back right away to tell me that the hard drive was shot. He ordered a new one, installed it, transferred my data and gave me back my computer this morning. The price was pretty reasonable too. It was weird being without my computer this weekend, but at the same time refreshing to have a little break from being so attached to my electronics. It's also disconcerting to get used to my 'new' machine; my documents and pictures were transferred, but none of my bookmar...

This is my seven hundredth post. I can't believe I've been blogging for nearly four years now. I haven't run out of things to say; unfortunately many of my greatest posts end up lost in my head somewhere before I can write them down and publish them. My life over the last few years has been through a lot of ups and downs, and this blog has been a reflection of that. Apparently I still have an audience, so I guess there is still some interest in my life. I'd like to think that I would keep writing even if no one were there to read it, but sometimes I'm not sure how much of this is dictated by the simple need for self-expression and how much is dictated by the positive reinforcement of comments. After four years I still don't feel like I have found my voice or my online identity. We were having a rough evening today and I spent a lot of time writing a really whiny post in my head about how frustrating life is right now. The economy and the possibilities of findin...

Today is the last month of November, and I managed to write a post nearly every day this month. I'm trying to figure out if forcing myself to blog every day is a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, I did produce a lot of content and got more practice in writing. On the other, I felt like many posts were rushed and created simply to fill a quota. I still have many post ideas rattling around in my head and have yet to sit down to put them on paper. And we'll still have to wait because the end of the quarter is here and I have serious work I need to get done. So I'm going to try and avoid frivolous uses of the computer for the next two weeks in hopes of getting my papers written. We'll see how well this works out.

First of all, if you actually read my blog in person (not through a reader), I apologize for the current ugliness. I wanted to change some things around and add some new elements, but in order to do that I had to upgrade my template. Unfortunately Blogger is experiencing some sort of issue because it made me upgrade, and then promptly lost my old template and refuses to let me add or change anything on the current one. So it might be a few days before I get things looking nice again. In the mean time I'm going to go cry because change unsettles me and computers stress me out. I had hoped this post would be a grand unveiling to celebrate my third year on the internet . I guess it's not, but I'm still here at post six hundred anyways. Even if it's ugly. I realized the other day that I have never written down the reasons why I started blogging in the first place. About four years ago, when S-Boogie was a small baby, I stumbled onto a bulletin board for LDS women at a pare...

One of the best pieces of advice I got when I first had a baby was to layer the extra sheet and mattress pad on the crib under the top sheet (mattress, sheet, pad, sheet), so that when your baby poops all over the sheet at 3 in the morning you don't have to dig through the closet to find a new sheet and put it on. I thought that was great advice and I'm glad someone told me about it. Also, now I share it with everyone I know who is going to have a baby in the hopes of improving their lives a little bit. In that spirit, I'd like to share a few things about blogging that I've picked up along the way: 1. Blogger has this cool feature where you can embed links into your posts. I love linking to things, but I hate to draw attention to them. I'd rather just add a link, with perhaps some sort of textual clue like "I read this article the other day." Notice how the words "this article" were highlighted in the sentence; that means you can click on them a...

I feel like I've had a lot of people asking questions about thing in my comments and I haven't been very good about following up on them. So, here goes: 1. I didn't buy either of the things from Eddie Bauer. I really don't need a new dress or new pants right now, and after reevaluating my budget I decided to err on the side of fiscal responsibility. I'd rather have more money for moving later this year than a new dress right now. But, if anyone out there actually needs and can afford new clothes I wanted to let you know since that is an amazing sale. 2. Tonight we had friends over and made the Greek food highlighted here by STM. It was awesome. I bought cucumber sauce from Trader Joe's instead of making it myself, and I didn't make the potatoes, but the rest of the dinner was fabulous. I love gyros, Greek salad, and rice pilaf. Can't wait for lunch tomorrow. 3. Haven't heard anything back from other schools yet (UC Berkeley and U Oregon). Still kind...