I’m going to leave it all a mystery for now. Well, not all of it. I’ve been working on trying to get more freelance work, also known as “fill in the gap in the resume work.” I signed up with oDesk and managed to get a little work through that site.

In the meantime, I’ve been working on my resume and trying to do a better job of targeting the jobs I’m interested in and the companies I want work with.

Along with that, my whole routine has been trashed for more than a month now as they worked on the repiping project in our building. It wasn’t too much of a disruption until they had to start work in our condo. Then they had to extend the amount of time they needed to work in our condo.

The rough part was that I had to be up, showered and dressed by 8 a.m. because they had to have access from 8 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. each day. They weren’t always in here, but they had to have access just in case something went wrong or they were actually going to do some work in here. There have also been about 6 days when the water was shut off all day too, so if I didn’t get a shower in right away, I was just out of luck.

It also made it hard to fit in a workout during the day. When there was no water, it was gross just thinking about going for a run and not being able to shower afterwards. On the other days, I never knew if and when they’d be in my condo, so again, showering in the middle of the day after a workout didn’t seem like a good option.

Now that they have officially wrapped up work in our condo, the hubby and I are taking the opportunity to get our condo looking a little nicer. By nice, mostly I mean less cluttered. We’ve done some nice work with painting and whatnot the last few years, but we just have too much stuff for our place.

So as long as we had chaos going on already, we figured we’d add to it with an effort to organize and weed out things we don’t really need.

All that leads up to hopefully having it all done by Saturday this week so we can have some people over for a Thanksgiving dinner. (For those of you in the States, Canada celebrates its Thanksgiving in October.)

So here I am again, full of excuses and plenty of reasons why I’ve been too busy to post anything new. And I’ll probably still not get around to writing and posting much because I’ve got some more freelance work to do, plus I had a job interview that has panned out for a second interview next week plus a homework assignment to test my abilities for the job as well.

The good news is that part of our efforts to pare down gave me an idea for another project for the site. I’m releasing some of my books back into the wild. Some of them can’t be released until I get a review written for them, but then they’re going off to various book drops, good wills and whatnot. Stay tuned to see how this turns out to be a project for the site.

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Monday and Tuesday we had people in here most of the day working on the repiping project that’s going on in our building. It was incentive to get out of here for most of the day both days, and making room for them to work also made it darn near impossible to see the TV anyway.

They didn’t come in at all on Wednesday, but I had the space still cleared in case they started repairwork on the walls they had cut through. On Thursday, same deal except they actually were in here for about an hour and a half or so to mud and tape walls. Meanwhile, I had gone to the store for a new dryer vent clamp and to costco for kitty litter.

Friday they came in to put the dryer back in and that was it. So I could have moved stuff around and watched TV, but only gave in for about 20 minutes while I ate some lunch.

I wish I could say I did more productive things with that time. I spent one day finding all our photo files and getting them backed up onto a storage drive, plus scanning in a few photos to go with our digitals. I did get a job application done on Wednesday, and managed to score a little freelance work that will start on Monday from one of those freelance sites.

I’m not sure accomplishing those things was an actual product of the No TV Challenge, but I’ll give it the credit anyway. I may even try to keep it up more often.

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How could I possibly stick to not watching TV during the day when the games start at 10 a.m. and run most of the day?

The clarification had to be that I can’t mindlessly watch TV during the day. If I’m actively participating in a show, like watching football to see how my fantasy football team players are doing, that’s acceptable. If I’m just watching TV to pass the time without really caring what I’m watching, that’s not acceptable.

So now that we have that clarification, yes, I watched football pretty much all day on Sunday. Then Troy had hockey sunday evening. I went and watched him play and also took my netbook to do a little editing work.

Monday was much easier to follow the No TV During the Day Challenge since the workers came in at 8 a.m. on the dot to start work on the repiping, and I decided to just get out of there. I spent a large chunk of the morning chatting with my sister-in-law before getting some lunch and doing a few errands and going home around 3 p.m.

I was home for a few hours – just enough time to do a little job searching and make myself some dinner before heading out the door again to go bowling. I signed up for a bowling league on Monday nights. I’m still unsure if I actually am on a team or if I’ll be switching to another league next week, but I did have a fun bowling with the ladies Monday night.

I have’t bowled regularly in years, so it was pretty surprising when I bowled a 144 the first game. Not so surprising when I couldn’t break 100 for the two after that. At least my average is nice and low for the season.

Now I need to get to work on some cover letters and get some job apps out there again. I’ll let you know how my adventures go today with no TV, and at some point these will be more interesting posts too – hopefully.

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Today I already had a plan in place to combat that. I haven’t gone to Stanley Park and walked the seawall all summer this year. I usually find a reason to go a few times each summer, but not this one. We didn’t have anyone come visit, and I didn’t make plans with anyone to walk  the seawall for fun this time.

The rain held off until this evening today, so I got my butt in gear and made the trek downtown to the park. My goal was to test my jogging skills, or perhaps test my jogging stamina or jogging fitness is a better way to put it, and jog the seawall from one side of Stanley Park all the way around to the other side.

I had no clue how far it actually would be. My jogs are 30 minutes, and I don’t often push myself to go beyond that so I was pretty much hoping that the distance would fit neatly inside that time or at least close to it.

I lucked out. The path I took around the outer rim fit nearly into my 30 minutes, and I decided to keep jogging a bit further and make it a full 5k before I slowed to a speed walk.

So here’s the proof:

(It should be noted that the first 4.5 minutes are walking from the bus to the seawall, and then I jogged for 35 minutes before slowing to a speed walk again as I cut across the park and reached the bus stop.)

Something I learned from my adventure is that jogging close to home is much easier just because I don’t have to take as much with me. Normally I can throw my keys in my pocket and grab my mp3 player and head out the door. Today I had to make sure I had water, a cell phone, a bus pass, and at least a credit card in case I needed it. That meant also having a small pouch to put all that in, and carrying my water in my hand while I jogged.

I now have rope burn across my chest and an area of my tummy that’s red from where the pouch rubbed while I ran. Super attractive.

Point Number 2 against going downtown to jog: Having to get back on a bus and then the skytrain while crusty with dried sweat and not really sure what I smelled like. I know there was a coconut smell from my sunscreen, but beyond that who knows, so I owe apologies to all the transit riders near me  today. Sorry.

The aftermath of the run served to kill some more time out of my day. After some lunch, I figured a successful run around the seawall merited a nice bubble bath. Then I took time to blow out my hair nice too. Then I made a popcorn snack and sat down to write some blogs and do my usual social network checking.

And now here I am. In a few minutes, I’ll go start our nice steak dinner with fresh corn on the cob and artisan multi-grain bread. Then I’ll be allowed some TV time since Troy will be ready to watch some shows by then.

No TV During the Day Challenge Day One = Success.

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I’ve had all sorts of free time, and the end result hasn’t been lots more writing done. Instead, it’s been dull boredom that has drained my brain of creativity and ideas to write about. So not only have I been lacking in the site upkeep department, I haven’t been good about writing any fiction like I want to or even editing the work I have done.

So there I lay in bed thinking about this and I have the brilliant revalation that the story I’m working on needs to be in first-person, and then I start writing the blog I want to post about these thoughts in my head.

Oddly enough, it turns out when I picture myself writing, I picture myself as sort of the prim and proper secretary type sitting ram-rod straight in front of a typewriter … yes, a typewriter. In reality, I tend to be slouched over a laptop keyboard either sitting cross-legged on the couch or at my desk in the computer room. Rarely am I even out of my pajamas for this work, and when I am, it’s certainly not in exchange for a button up shirt, pencil skirt and heels.

I suppose that wildly inaccurate picture of myself is at least a good indicator that my imagination still has some juice left. Maybe I just need to write when I’m half asleep.

If this blog entry is any indication, I probably should try that idea. It took me more than half a day to even remember that I wanted to write a blog after pretty much writing it in my head last night. Then I couldn’t remember half of what I wanted to say anyway.

I’m almost positive what I had last night was 200% better thought out than this thing is today, but at least I’m putting in the effort to make it happen. And I’m going to start trying to make that effort more often again. Since I’m lacking in imagination, creativity, motivation, or whatever you want to call that little secret glimmer that guides us to create brilliant, entertaining things for other people, I’ve come up with a few things to motivate myself.

First will be the “No TV During the Day Challenge.” Don, don daaaaaaaa!

Scary for so many of us who have nothing better to do than sit in front of the TV and let it pass the time for us. So starting today, I’m not watching TV until my hubby is home from work and ready for his evening of TV snuggle time. This weekend, I’m avoiding it unless we’re both going to watch one of the shows we have on tap.

So each day, I’ll be forced to find other things to do. (Hopefully that means lots more writing.) I’ll also blog about what I did instead so anyone who wants to know what a person does without TV can find out.

My second initiative is to get cracking on reviews of the books I’ve read and movies I’ve watched in the past few months. We’ve done a lot of camping and other activities, but I haven’t just been a couch sloth on the other days. Time to show what I’ve been up to.

My third thing is to find inspiration to do some more fiction writing. That’s easier said than done since I haven’t had much luck thus far in all my free time. But I know there is a short fiction contest that should be coming up in one of the newspapers. There’s also NaNoWriMo coming up in November and I probably should come up with a good idea if I’m going to give it a run again this year.

I’m also open to any ideas to get me going. I’d like to start posting up some short fiction work now and again, but I need some inspiration, something to give me a jump start again.

Now if only I could figure out how to hook up a computer to read my brainwaves and write this stuff when I’m in bed trying to sleep.

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At least the Justin Bieber memoir was a misunderstanding. It’s actually just a book of behind-the-scenes pictures during his rise to fame. Which seems more appropriate for the now 16-year-old pop singer who’s main fan base still relates better to picture books than to chapter books.

But still, how does a kid go from being just your average teen to international superstar? Bieber did it. Miley Cyrus did it. Look at all those kids from High School Musical.

Then there’s the story about the “Mini Monet,” an 8-year-old kid in Britain who has sold some of his paintings for a total of more than $200,000. Not only did his family discover he has a talent for painting, he actually has the drive at such a young age to keep at his “hobby.”  On top of that, other people, important art world people, decided he has something special and they buy his stuff up like hotcakes.

There must be some sort of magic or voodoo you have to do for your kids for them to get that lucky. The stars certainly don’t align like that for the vast majority of us.

It’s not even just about the fame along with that fortune. I went to a conference once where a woman in her early 20s was one of the presenters because she had started a successful internet company when she was in her teens and was now considered one of the top online content authorities.

She’s not a household name, but she found her niche as a teen and now lives quite comfortably off the fruits of her early labor.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life at age 8 or as a teen, or when I went off to college, or even now. But I certainly wish I’d had those kind of aspirations so I could look back now and feel like I’ve accomplished more than just treading life’s waters. Those millions of dollars in savings would come in handy for an early retirement too.

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Sure, I could probably get nectarines or their fuzzy cousins, the peach, year round at the big chain grocery stores, but the little, less expensive stores within walking distance only get them when they’re in season. They’re so much better in season – I’m not really sure why. Perhaps it’s because they can be picked a little closer to ripe since they don’t have to be shipped so far. The ones that get boated up from South America in the dead of winter are hard as rocks still and never do ripen up very well.

In honor of the lovely nectarine season, I tried the Cracked Wheat Salad with Nectarines, Parsley and Pistachios recipe for my June Culinary Adventure with Cooking Light.

It sounded like a pretty simple side dish, and I was intrigued that it included fresh dill and parsley. I hadn’t used either herb in a recipe before. To me, parsley has always been that sprig of green on the side of a dish in a restaurant.

I was right in how easy it was to make. The only thing you have to cook is water, and that’s just to boil it and then let the wheat soak in it. Everything else is prep-work of chopping up herbs and nectarines. Simplicity isn’t quite enough though to make me want to make something again.

This dish was missing something – and not something I forgot to put in. I went over the recipe a few times to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. All it had for dressing to add flavor with the herbs were olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

I’m not sure bland is the right word for a dish with dill and vinegar in it, but that’s the best word I can come up with for it. The mix of flavors wasn’t quite right. If you got a lot of nectarine in your bit of salad, it was better, but overall it wasn’t anything special.

I don’t think I’ll be making that one again unless I can figure out what special ingredient it needs to make it better.

On a positive note, the recipe called for one tablespoon fresh dill and the smallest amount of dill I could find to buy was plenty more than that. I decided to use some of it to make some refrigerator pickles. I found a recipe online that I used as a guideline for the amounts of vinegar and sugar to use in it, then I put in the dill, garlic, onion and some jalapenos with my sliced cucumber. That was waaaaaay better than my cracked wheat salad.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to duplicate it since I didn’t pay attention to the amounts that I added aside from the vinegar and sugar, but man are they tasty.

I also didn’t want to end June on a negative Cooking Light review. So far the recipes have been really good, so it was disappointing to stumble on one I couldn’t rave about. The next one I tried was more of an “inspiration” or “guideline” for what I actually made.

The recipe was Walnut and Rosemary Oven-Fried Chicken. What I made was Pecan and Oregano Oven-Fried Chicken. Obviously I made a couple substitutions right off the bat – I didn’t have walnuts or rosemary. Then I used milk and honey Dijon salad dressing instead of buttermilk and Dijon mustard, and crushed cereal instead of Panko breadcrumbs.

So I guess the recipe was more of a guideline of the types of ingredients I needed to put together to get an oven-fried chicken with crunch and flavor.

The only issue I had with this one is that the bottom side of the chicken didn’t get crispy like the top side did. And I even put it on a wire rack like the recipe called for.

Otherwise, this one was a rousing success. The chicken stayed juicy and the crunch was ok, but the flavor was what really won me over on this one. It could have stayed soggy, and the mix of parmesan, oregano and the honey mustard would have still made this dish a winner.

I actually got my July issue of Cooking Light the other day and I’ve already got several recipes tagged to try. Stay tuned! There may be a lot of grillin’ and burger recipes coming up to check out.

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The warning is, someone is going to see it. Your drunken photos; your posts about hating your boss; the “free” supplies you told the world about getting from the office.

It’s out there for the whole world to see, including potential employers. Even if you have your privacy settings set right, it’s still possible the supervisor or hr person at the company you want to work for is connected to you through a friend of a friend.

Luckily for me, most of my posts are about my boring life – like going grocery shopping. No everyone fares so well.

If there is any cautionary tale this week that best exemplifies why you need to be careful, it’s the Jennifer Wilbanks story. In case you don’t remember – it has been five years since she hit the news – Wilbanks was the runaway bride who faked her own kidnapping to avoid her wedding back in 2005.

So if I’m Jennifer Wilbanks, I’m thinking five years is plenty of time for people to forget about me. I can go about my business and post on Facebook about my life like any other normal person.

She had to have been feeling pretty safe that her five minutes of infamy were over, because she posted on Facebook about finding love.

How do I know this? Because someone in the “news” profession noticed and wrote a story about it that made it onto MSNBC’s online news page. I can’t even imagine how they got wind of it.

Is there someone in a newsroom out there whose job is to troll these social media sites looking for stuff like this? They’re like sharks, just waiting for that little drop of blood they can hone in on.

Or worse yet, could one of her own friends have tipped off the media?

Her friend Bob sees the post and turns to his cubicle mate at work and says, “You wanna hear something funny? I’m friends with that runaway bride chick and now she’s got a new man she says she’s in love with. She just posted about it online – I’ll believe it when she actually makes it down the aisle.”

Then Bob’s cubicle mate sends out an e-mail to his friends, and it circulates until it hits the desk of some news guy who finds a way to check it out on Facebook and write his little story. Then I write a little blog about it, because it’s just crazy that anybody even cares still.

So the moral is you’re never safe. Go ahead and post your crazy life updates and dramas, but be warned that you don’t know who out there is actually reading it. And be especially warned if you are or have ever been the subject of national/international news – they’re watching and waiting for you to do something stupid.

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In a moment of weakness I was watching Julia Roberts on Oprah discussing the book and her experience starring in the movie. I’d never even heard of Eat, Pray, Love and here it was inspiring Julia Roberts, being talked about on Oprah and developing a small cult following.

The book is Gilbert’s search for life’s answers as she travels to Italy, India and Indonesia after her divorce. In as much as it is a spiritual journey, it is also a search to find out who she again.

The book is split into three sections, each with 36 chapters. There’s a significance to the way the book is structured and the number of chapters, but I’ll let you discover that for yourselves if you decide to pick it up and give it a read.

I didn’t dive into this book looking for answers, but I did find at least one idea or story that spoke to me out of each section.

The book begins in Italy, with some reflecting on how she ended up there divorced and learning Italian. This is the “Eat” part of the book where Gilbert lets herself experience all the pleasures that Italian food has to offer as she learns a language that will only be useful to her in Italy.

Chapter 21 is what spoke to me most in the Italy section. Gilbert writes:

Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here, I admit it. While I came to Italy in order to experience pleasure, during the first few weeks I was here, I felt a bit of panic as to how one should do that. Frankly, pure pleasure is not in my cultural paradigm.

The rest of the chapter recounts her discussion with Luca Spaghetti about how Americans don’t really know how to do nothing. We seek entertainment and amusement, but we don’t now how to enjoy doing something that has no bigger purpose than to bring us pleasure.

That was something I could completely understand her struggling with. I’ve been unemployed for a year now, and I’ve spent so much time finding ways to occupy my time and be useful, that I haven’t taken the time to actually enjoy not having that responsibility either. I’ve found ways to make good use of my joblessness, and we’ve t taken advantage of it to do some fun activities like camping and fishing, but I haven’t taken a day to just do nothing and enjoy it.

The “Pray” section takes us to India as Gilbert visits her guru’s Ashram. This section was the one I thought I’d least identify with, but there was one particular chapter that was a sort of “aha” moment for me.

India is where Gilbert really struggles with her internal demons – no surprise since all she does is meditate and pray when she’s not helping clean as part of her Ashram duties. All that time alone with your thoughts is like a golden highway to brooding.

In Chapter 50 she talks about how guilty she feels being in India on this spiritual journey and she’s still wrapped up in thoughts of her ex-boyfriend and why she couldn’t make that relationship work or her marriage work. Of all the deep things she could be thinking about and trying to figure out at this time, she’s stuck on such a “shallow” topic.

But then she remembers a story her psychologist friend told her. She had volunteered to counsel a group of Cambodian refugees, and though these people had experienced genocide, torture, murder, starvation and more, what they most wanted to talk about were relationship issues.

Gilbert writes:

This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape.

I am just as prone to negative thoughts and brooding on actions and activities that have long since past. Now I know that I can just accept that those thoughts are a part of my human nature – accept them and let them go and don’t make it worse by beating myself up for having them.

In Indonesia, Gilbert finds love again. But it’s not her love story that I like from this section; it is a bit oflife lesson that she gets from Ketut.

In Chapter 87, Ketut talks about how he is able to use meditation that takes him “to up,” aka heaven. He also knows the meditation that takes him to hell. When Gilbert asks him what hell is like, he says it is the same as heaven.

Basically, the universe is a circle so the destination in the end is the same – it’s how you get there that makes the difference. You can choose to “go up” through happy places, or go down through sad places, but you’re going to end up at the same place in the end regardless.

Those are the top things I took from Eat, Pray, Love, but there are so many stories and so many different personal revelations that Gilbert has in her journey that the book will speak differently to people depending on where they’re at in their lives.

Throughout it all though, Gilbert’s writing is entertaining and she writes in a lighthearted way that allows you to find the humor in her journey as well as the lessons.

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I had actually stopped at the bookstore the other day to pick up a different book, but in a moment of judging a book by its cover, I decided I had to give Pride And Prejudice And Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith a try.

I was curious how someone could incorporate zombies into a Jane Austen novel without treading too much on her own style of storytelling as well as her basic storyline.

Of course, since my experience with Jane Austen is through the movies based on her work, I can only rely on my impression of how the story measures up to those. And it measures up well. The wit and flirtation between characters is all still there, and that overall feel of the Victorian era sensibilities.

Basically what Seth Grahame-Smith seemed to do was ask how the story might be different if you introduce a plague of zombies into it as well. It’s not that they are suddenly besieged by zombies like a horror story, but instead “the plague” is something that has affected England for years and is something the characters have learned to deal with.

The Bennet sisters are all well trained in the “deadly arts” so they can serve the crown by killing zombies. Meanwhile, their mother is still concerned with marrying them off. Their social status is a stumbling block to them marrying well, plus Grahame-Smith adds the element of their decidedly unlady-like killing talents to that.

The result was more entertaining than I thought it would be. The addition of the zombie killing aspect is subtle – just a side quirk to a story that is still focused on the Bennet girls finding love – but Elizabeth’s thoughts as a result of being a well-trained zombie killer are a hilarious contradiction to what a proper lady should be thinking in that day and age.

What was a period romance novel is turned into a laugh-out-loud comedy instead. Jane Austen purists will be horrified, but if you want a light, entertaining twist to a classic, this one has my thumbs up.

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