There are exactly 32 hours until our plane takes off for Punta Cana and we get to enjoy a week of doing SFA. Instead of feeling excited, I'm feeling panicky. Like full-on, Ativan-necessitating, pulling-out-my-hair-in-literal-handfuls panicky. The thought of being away from work, away from my BlackBerry and laptop, and away from the day-to-day grind for a full week should make me ecstatic. And I know my worries will disappear with the very first mojito I get my little sunburned mitts around. But in the meantime I feel kind of like I'm having something amputated.

Here's what I'm freaking out about, in no particular order:

-a client emergency will blow up and I won't be there to help fix things.
-my coworkers will realize the world continues turning quite nicely when I'm not around and I come back to find out my desk has been cleared out and I'm unemployed. At least I'll be unemployed with a nice tan.
-something SUPERDUPERIMPORTANT will happen and it'll be old news by the time I get back and I'll be totally out of the loop.
-I won't do a thorough-enough job briefing people that are looking after things and they'll hate me as they struggle to do their own work plus mine and I'll always be known as the jackass colleague.
-people will hate me in general for taking a week off and sabotage my projects.
-no one will care that I've gone away at all.
-some miniscule thing that I didn't do properly is going to rise to the surface and become a behemoth deal and I won't be there to defend myself.

These thoughts have all seriously been clouding my head all.week.long.

If there's a secret to going away on vacation and not stressing beforehand, someone please fill me in. I'm thisclose to packing my BlackBerry, which would be disastrous. I have 32 hours to get everything done and get into vacation mode. I hope to spend at least 14 of that sleeping. HALP!

I was inspired by Ellie's post: Ten Things I Can Do In Three Minutes. And by "inspired", I mean, I'm going to recreate the exact same post here because I can't come up with original ideas.

1. Make dinner.
The secret? Pre-washed bagged salad blend and pre-cooked chicken strips. Fire the chicken in the microwave for one minute, dump some salad on a plate, add a handful of olives/almonds/raisins/whatever's in the cupboard, a sprinkling of cheese and a few cherry tomatoes or avocado slices. Add the chicken and a splatter of oil or balsamic vinegar and that's all she wrote.

2. Manicure.
Unfortunately, it might not last much longer than three minutes without chipping, but Sally Hansen Insta-Dry makes painting one's nails freakishly fast. If your nails are clean and bare you can absolutely have them polished in three minutes.

3. Makeup.
Concealer, powder, blush, curl eyelashes, mascara, lipstick or gloss. It's pushing three minutes, but totally doable. Makeup used to take me more like 20 minutes to do so I'm happy to have streamlined that ordeal. It mostly has to do with the fact that I no longer care what I look like! Yay!

4. Eat a meal.
When I was a kid I couldn't wait to get mealtime over with because it was interrupting my playing. I know I'm supposed to do things like chew each bite 24 times and savour the taste of my food. I've tried it. Do you KNOW how long it takes to eat a plate of food with all that chewing? I don't have time for it. Down the hatch, K cya!

5. Make a phone call.
I hate talking on the phone, so the less time I'm on the horn the better. One thing I'm very bad about is leaving voicemail for people. I don't break the three-minute mark but I swear the voicemails I leave are longer than my actual conversations!

6. Get to Starbucks.
It's just around the corner! Luckily we got a lovely new coffeemaker for the wedding so my Starbucks investment is much smaller than it used to be. But it's still nice to know I can be ordering a tall skinny latte in just a few shakes of a lamb's tail.

7. Run .3 of a mile.
Nike+ tells me I average a nine-minute mile pace when I'm out for a longer run. If it's a 5K my pace is a bit faster.

8. Choose shoes.
Getting dressed takes me forever. If I don't have an outfit in mind the night before, I will go through at least five articles of clothing in the morning that don't make the cut. (This is why being able to do three-minute makeup is important.) Pretty often I have to try on a couple different pairs of shoes in the full-length mirror before I'm happy and ready to leave.

9. Get a phone call from anyone.
The formula for this is based on the amount of time it takes me to get up from my desk at the office and either go to the loo or into the kitchen to make myself a coffee...because every time, when I come back to my desk, GUARANTEED the voicemail light is glowing red. I could sit there from 8:00AM to 6:00PM, get up for 30 seconds, come back and I'll have missed a call. Ridiculous.

10. Fall asleep.
Anytime, anywhere, out like a light instantly. If it takes me three minutes to fall asleep I start freaking out that I can't sleep. When it comes to falling asleep, I am a gold medalist. I am Shaun White Triple McTwisting the act of entering dreamland. Staying asleep, not so much.

I love my car. Currently I'm driving a 2007 Mazda 3 sedan. She's a girl. You know how cars look like girls or boys? No? That's just me? Anyway, I love my little girl. She is the fifth car I've owned, and thinking about that prompted me to post about my cars over the years.

Let's start at the beginning...

When I was 19 I had my first car: a 1989 Ford Taurus.



This car was a gift from my parents, mostly because they were happy that I had started going to class, obtained a quality summer job, and broken up with an idiot ex-boyfriend whom they despised. It was really a reward for good behaviour. It also ended up saving them money. If I'd been driving their vehicles, my insurance would have cost them more than the price of the car. When they bought me this car, it came with the old "Now you can learn RESPONSIBILITY! and pay your own insurance! What a fun life lesson!"

The Taurus felt like a very luxurious car. The seats were soft and cushy, the cruise control worked like a top and as grandmotherly as it appeared, it had lots of power. The air conditioning didn't work but no matter--windows were always down so everyone else could listen to Dr. Dre along with me. PS...that would be Dr. Dre ON TAPE because the car didn't have a CD player. Big pimpin' indeed.

Fun fact: I sold the car and it COMPLETELY ate shit later that same weekend. Perfectly timed move on my part.

Driving Infractions: 0
Accidents: 0
Incidents of running other parked cars and doing damage: 2

Moving on...next up was my 1995 Pontiac Sunfire.



I felt like a total negotiating badass when I bought this car because the owners wanted $5,500 and I talked the man down to $4,700. His wife was suuuuuuper pissed and kept huffing and saying things like "I think you can get more out of it" and then giving him the stink eye and flouncing into the garage, only to reappear five minutes later. This car gave me pretty much zero trouble. It had a CD player, so the Dr. Dre tapes were relegated to a box in the basement. I had many temper tantrums in this car and took lots of angry drives in it. Even looking at the photo of a similar car makes me feel a little nauseated.

Driving Infractions: 0
Accidents: 0
Incidents of running other parked cars and doing damage: 3

When I got my first "good job" I upgraded to the 2001 Saturn SC1.



This car was fully loaded with all the fixin's. Sunroof, power everything, you name it. It was cute and fun and had a little doggie door on the drivers' side. I loved how sporty it was, and good on gas. I loved that it was made of plastic and wouldn't rust. This car cost me lots of dollars and license points in speeding tickets.

My relationship with the Saturn ended abruptly when I was leaving work one night, innocently enough, driving along and BOOM! Got the big T-bone right up the side of 'er. To add insult to injury my car was totalled by a YELLOW FORD RANGER. Pfffft.

Driving Infractions: 5
Accidents: 2. One was more of a 'bump'.
Incidents of running other parked cars and doing damage: 1, but it was a DOOZY. Red paint shows up on eggplant Intrepids like whoa.

I replaced my Saturn with a 2005 Mazda 3...



Driving Infractions: 0
Accidents: 0
Incidents of running other parked cars and doing damage: 0

...which I upgraded to a 2007 Mazda 3 after a year when I had the opportunity to make the swap basically for free. Same colour, same style overall, but with a little spoiler. Because that makes it go faster.



Driving Infractions: 0
Accidents: 0
Incidents of running other parked cars and doing damage: 0. I have cleaned up my act!

I love my little 3. She is great on gas, cute, peppy, and feels safe and secure. She is fun to drive and easy to park. If I were shopping for a new car today, I'd head for Mazda first, for sure. And that's my vehicular history, summed up for your viewing pleasure.

Last week I attempted the 6 O'Clock Challenge, with a goal of leaving the office and getting offline at or before 6 p.m. every day for a week. How did I do? Not so well. Now it's suddenly really apparent why I'm crazy. Here's the summary...

Monday
I unplugged my laptop at 6:00 p.m. on the dot and left the office when the sun was still shining, which in itself was kind of an accomplishment. 15 minutes later, I arrived home...and snuck a peek at my Blackberry. I couldn't help it. There were a couple emails that had come through but nothing urgent. Fast forward to 8:00 when I realized there were three bananas rotting to crap on my kitchen counter--perfect banana bread situation right thurr. Unfortunately my banana bread recipe is ONLINE. What to do? I fretted a bunch, and then Peter told me it wasn't cheating if I went online just to get the recipe and didn't look at anything work related. (Obviously, someone was craving my b-bread.) I fired up the laptop and went straight to Google, found the recipe, and didn't look at anything else. Checked the Crackberry before bed.

Tuesday
Tuesday was easy because we had appointments to view two houses at 7:00. I left the office right at 6:00 and stayed busy all evening, with only a couple sneaky peeks at the Blackberry. I was beginning to think this challenge would be a breeze.

Wednesday
I left at 6:00 again, but was stressed about it. I may or may not have sent an email via Blackberry, but overall I stayed offline all evening. Still good...

Thursday
I'm pretty sure that if I played Thursday backwards I'd hear Satan's voice telling me I'm bound for hell. Thursday was just batshit crazy and I spent most of the evening working...from...home. Online. There may have been crying as well.

Sorry, IT guy, my macbook needs to be replaced because the salt from my tears and the blood from my overworked fingertips have seeped in under the keys and disintegrated the motherboard. There could be some Ativan that got dropped in there too.

Friday
I left at 5:40!!!! FIVE FRIGGING FORTY!!

Overall
This challenge was awesome because having a hard-and-fast deadline at the end of the day motivated me to get stuff done and get things in order for the following day well in advance. It put an end to "I'm just going to do ONE more thing" syndrome. It was also eye opening to find out that if I don't respond to a 9:00pm email until 8:00am the next day, the world actually continues rotating on its axis. It was a neat experiment and something I'm going to try to follow more regularly.

Highlights from the past week:

-hearing the UV index as part of the daily weather forecast/no snow/no rain/double digit temperatures. It's MARCH in Canadialand, so this is a biggish deal. Today I went outside without my coat and was comfortable. Hollaaaaaaaaaa!
-playing basketball with my hubby and beating him twice at 21. White boy can't jump.
-huge client presentation went over swimmingly, much better than anticipated.
-bowls of vanilla frozen yogurt with Cadbury Creme Eggs smooshed up inside.
-discovering the dark cherry mocha at Starbucks. Yum yum!
-coming home to a completely clean apartment yesterday. We're talking kitchen scrubbed, laundry done, linens washed, windows open--it was a wonderful surprise.

Now it's the weekend and plans involve looking at some houses, shopping for our trip (nine more work days-yikes!), a couple of runs including a 10K practice for the Bluenose, possibly yoga or skating, and going to see Alice in Wonderland tonight. And a metric shit ton of work to do...buuuuut, we won't dwell on that too much.

Happy weekend!

This post is inspired by one of Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop prompts--head over there every Thursday to see her submissions. This week the prompt I chose is write about when you first started wishing you were older or bigger.

I was four or five when I got my first tube of lipstick. It was a bright, pinky-red shade, tasted like strawberries, and had a rabbit on the tube. I remember standing on tip-toe to see my reflection in the chrome on the side of the stove--the only mirrored surface I could come close to reaching--and applying my rabbit lipstick, rubbing my lips together and making kissy faces. With my bright pink mouth and my Strawberry Shortcake purse slung over my shoulder, I'd layer on beaded necklaces and walk around the house talking in a high falsetto voice about drinking tea--it was what I thought a grown-up would do. I couldn't wait for the day when I could leave the yard with lipstick on, and not have my mom wiping my mouth off before we went to the grocery store. Being grown up sounded like the best thing in the world.

For a long time, I wanted to be bigger and older, because I equated those things with a) being rich, b) having endless amounts of free time, and c) having no responsibilities. My whopping two-dollar-a-week allowance (upgraded to five dollars in middle school) and my exhaustive routine of breakfast, school, homework, and playing had me feeling pretty downtrodden and dreaming of better things.

I had an emo fit in elementary school because we never took any cool vacations as a family (I think my best friend at the time had just returned from her annual Disney World trip) and screaming that I couldn't wait to be grown up because I'd do whatever I wanted, every day, and I'd take my kids to Disney, and I wouldn't be such an unfit parent, keeping my family confined to craptastic New Brunswick while other GOOD parents took their children to Florida and Ontario and Maine. We were lucky when we drove 40 minutes to spend a weekend at the beach, picking up a pizza on the way. I more or less considered myself an abused child.

I wanted to be bigger and older right up until my 19th birthday, that fateful day when alcohol and cigarettes and all that other wonderful stuff was no longer out of reach. I went to the liquor store to buy some Revs to toast the occasion (SIIIICK) and slammed my 4-pack down on the counter just waiting to whip out my suddenly useful ID. The clerk didn't even question my age, just rang through my booze with barely a glance. I was crushed. And since that day, I've been wishing I was younger and smaller. Drinking stopped being fun the minute it became legal.

Confession: over the past couple of weeks, I've been extra stressed and extra sooky and overall a horrible person. There are a few excuses reasons for it:

-hormones
-house hunting
-sleeping crappily
-uber busy work schedule
-minimal friend time/fun time/TIME in general

I have been working like a banshee the past few weeks (do banshees work?? What IS a banshee?) Anyhooters, I've been working like an EMPLOYED banshee and all work and no play makes Amy a total nightmare.

This week, I have a little strategy put in place to help offset my failing sanity: the 6 o'clock challenge. The idea is that at 6:00 PM every day for the next five days, I will unplug my computer and stay off it until bedtime. Whatever work doesn't get done before 6:00 PM is going to have to wait until the next day. I'm simultaneously terrified and excited.

Some people might think this is irresponsible or that I'm becoming a nine-to-fiver, AKA a royal slacker. Not the case. Even if I start working at 8:30 and knock off at 6:00, that's nine hours, give or take half an hour for lunch. That's plenty of time to get everything done.

The idea is that putting an end-of-day deadline on myself will force me to work smarter, more efficiently, and more productively during the day instead of putting things off and letting them pile up until I end up spending half the night hissing at my MacBook with eyes crossed from exhaustion. It will mean a rigid to-do list that I'll be crossing things off all day long, with chunks of time carved out for every item (sadly, I'm getting kind of excited about making a list for tomorrow). Annnnd best of all, with daylight savings time back in all its sunshiney glory, it'll mean getting some fresh air, guilt-free, after work and NOT be getting home after dark!

I'm pumped to get stuff done tomorrow, get organized, and not spend my evenings this week in a crying, sweating ball on the couch hunched over my laptop and rocking back and forth with bloodshot eyes and a can of Red Bull at my side--I spent enough nights doing that when I was in school. I am a sane adult who can manage her time without resorting to things like speedballs and paying the neighbour's children to do her proofreading for her. The 6 o'clock challenge will save my sanity, if not my life.

Allow me to preface this post by I have a multitasking problem. Even at home I'm always doing two or more things at once. Right now I'm watching The Office and blogging. At the gym, I'm running, listening to music, and watching TV simultaneously. I call my parents while I'm folding and putting away laundry and needless to say, multitasking at work is the only way I get through the day.

Anyway, I'm hanging out on the couch trying unsuccessfully to unwind from a long workday by multifuckingtasking some more, and I have been perusing glamour.com. I came across a blog post about the writer's first fight with the boyfriend, asking readers what their very first disagreement with their significant other was about.

I've been thinking about it pretty hard and I even asked Peter, and we're both at a loss trying to remember what our first argument was about. It's not that we don't argue, because we do, almost always about stupid things: doing chores, visiting our respective parents, and so on--nothing serious. I feel like not being able to remember our first fight is a good thing. It couldn't have been THAT horrible. We definitely argued a bunch during wedding planning, just because it was a crazy stressful time. And I have a horrible and irritating habit of picking fights over the most idiotic things, which I've been trying to curb.

One thing we're really good at is getting our fights out of our system and not going to bed angry or sooky. We get our bitchery out and deal with it instead of sulking and allowing things to spiral out of control. We both hate talking about our feelings, but we're able to do it when it means the difference between going to sleep content and laying awake huffing and puffing at each other like passive-aggressive choo-choo trains.

But as for that one initial tiff that broke the ice, our first argument as a couple, neither of us can remember what it was. I'm guessing I started it. And it was probably about something completely ridiculous, like Peter asking me if I was hungry and me snapping, "Why do you always think I'm hungry? IS IT BECAUSE I EAT ALL THE TIME? IS IT BECAUSE I'M FAT?????" and then refusing to let it go. Being a female is awesome!

Do you remember your first fight with your s/o or your ex? What was it about?

In 27 days, hubby and I will be going from this:



to this:



Yesterday, Peter and I booked a weeklong all-inclusive at the Majestic Colonial in Punta Cana, the same resort we spent a week at two years ago. To say that I'm pumped is a gross understatement.

This vacation is what I'm calling my Sanity Maintenance Plan. Things have been absolutely apeshit around these parts, between work and house hunting and just being trapped in the grips of a gross Canadian winter, and my nightly 3am panic attacks are not a ritual I'm keen on making permanent, so we decided a week of sun, sand, and cervesas is what we need to keep us from legit flipping out.

Before we'd been on an all-inclusive, I was pretty "meh" on the whole idea. "It's not real traveling", I thought.

Maybe not--but let's look at some facts:

-you don't have to pay for anything the entire time you're there. You can get on the airplane with ZERO DOLLARS and you're golden for the whole week.
-the sun shines every day.
-you eat as much food as you can.
-you drink as much alcohol as you can.
-Blackberries don't get reception.
-the towels in your room are folded into animal shapes.
-you get to say HOLA! and people don't look at you like you're retarded.
-you get a sweet tan.
-they have horses.
-you get to pee in the pool next to the swim-up bar and then laugh at all the Jagerbombers who are standing and drinking in your pee.

And so begins my 27-day boot camp, during which I'll be working out four hours a day and subsisting on water, apples and oxygen while slathering myself in self-tanner in a joint effort to ensure people aren't blinded by the sun reflecting off my wide white ass lumbering down the beach.

Back when I was just a baby fresh out of school in the working world, one who still believed that journalism was a respectable and well-paid profession, I had a mentor at work. She was a senior editor at the daily newspaper where I worked and right from my very first day I could tell she commanded a lot of respect in the newsroom. Her columns were well-read and always got lots of reader feedback, mostly positive, she got invitations to everything cool that was going on in the city, and she was one of those people whose opinions really mattered--people seemed to care about pleasing her more than even her higher-ups.

When I found out she was also a single mom, I admired her even more. Until then I'd figured she came in at 5AM and left after midnight and didn't even take breaks to eat but was just some kind of award-winning story-producing robot. She seemed to get so much done and was so accomplished professionally--knowing that she was also raising a family on her own was super impressive.

These were the days before I had a laptop, so at the end of the day, if I had something to work on in the evening, I'd save it to a disc (OK KIDS, DO YOU KNOW WHAT A DISC IS?? Holy shit, I feel like a frigging dinosaur right now) and bring it home with me. One night, this particular editor saw me packing up to head home, and she asked what I was doing that night. I waved the disc at her and mumbled something about working all night on a feature piece after I got home and had a bite to eat.

She made a face and shook her head at me. "You should just stay here until it's done," she said. "That's my rule of thumb. Never take your work home. Even if you have to be here half the night, keep your work at work and keep everything else separate."

She was totally right, and for a long time I lived by those words. It was way less convenient to bring work home, not having a laptop. And it was so nice to come home and know that even if it was 9, 10, 11 PM, I wasn't going to park myself in front of the computer for another hour or two. When I left the office, I was done.

Since then things have changed. I've had a laptop for the past five or so years and a Blackberry for the past two, so work not only comes home with me, but it goes to the grocery store, out with friends, in the car, to the bathroom. Sadly, I'm not joking. It's convenient and sometimes it's great to be able to curl up and work on a project from the couch or a coffee shop. Other times, I wish being home meant being home, relaxing, not thinking about work. I would say my mind is at least partially occupied with work at least 95% of the time and I'm guessing that's because I can't/don't ever leave it behind physically.

I wonder if times have changed for my old colleague too. I'm guessing she's all hooked up with laptops galore and probably an iPhone by now...I wonder if she has managed to leave her work at the office at the end of the day. I think her advice was fantastic and I'd like to start following it, even one night a week or one day on the weekend.

Do you prefer to get your work done AT work or elsewhere?

The first thing I said this morning after my 6:30AM alarm went off, right after cursing the local radio station for playing "Bed Rock" approximately every 15 minutes (NOT the best wake-up call, JUST SAYIN'), was Rabbits Rabbits Rabbits! It's something I've been doing on the first day of every month for years and years without knowing why. I have been under the premise that it's some kind of lucky ritual to guarantee a good month ahead. I much prefer luck to bring happiness, instead of things like hard work. Therefore I keep spouting Rabbits Rabbits Rabbits! without actually knowing the reason.

I consulted Teh Intarwebz today to find out if Rabbits Rabbits Rabbits! is indeed a good-luck charm, or if it's actually reaffirming my deal with Satan that I made as a child or otherwise unpleasant things. Phew...it's a good thing. Wikipedia says it's an old superstition that creates good luck for every day of a new month. There are lots of variations on it, but basically the gist of it is if you mention "rabbits" today you're going to have a good March.

I'm super happy March is here because I can't really deal with winter much more. Knowing that spring is just 21 days away, even just on the calendar, is good news. Who are we kidding--it's going to be colder than a witch's tit for another couple of months. But knowing that spring and Easter and tulips are all coming soon, and that living the life of a coal miner, a.k.a. going to work AND coming home at the end of the day in pitch black darkness, will be over in a matter of days, makes me ecstatic.

Things I'm jazzed about over the next several weeks:
-My income tax return (uhh...hopefully)
-Easter. Long weekend + chocolate.
-A possible trip south, TBD
-The Ideal Home Show at the end of March, because I can't get enough house stuff and am a total home improvement geek, especially in springtime
-Alice in Wonderland opening this weekend, and a movie and dinner date with Peter on Saturday to check it out.
-Gossip Girl resumes next Monday. *squee*
-Fun projects at work.

Things I'm not so pumped about this spring:
-Turning 29.

But I digress.

Back to the original point of this post: do you say Rabbits Rabbits Rabbits? Or do you have any other odd superstitions you'd like to share?