A Dispatch in Which I Declare This Week a Success

I’m having such a good week!  I just had to stop by tonight to tell you about it.

I’ve been reading like a maniac for work this week, but today I finished my quota—three papers between Sunday and today!—and I’m feeling very accomplished.  Also, this afternoon I got an exciting preliminary result which is stoking my science fire.  On top of those things, today I knocked out a set of niggling little things that have been crowding my to-do list for a week, and there is nothing nicer than checking things off the list when they’ve been hanging over your head for way too long.

On the home front, I’m so excited to start making my new apartment feel like a home.  I’ve been living in my new place for about four months now, but it still doesn’t feel quite like home.  One of the big projects on my list is to finish unpacking and organizing the second bedroom, which I’ve dubbed my writing studio.  Does that sound pretentious?  Maybe a little.  But it’s true that I do the majority of my writing in there, and I just like the idea of having a writing studio.  Anyway, there are two big things I want to do with this room: get rid of my old college textbooks and buy bookcases for the books that I’m keeping.  This week I placed an ad on craigslist to see if I could just give someone my textbooks, and I received more than a dozen e-mails.  Now I’m just waiting to hear back from someone about making arrangements to give the textbooks to her.  I have trouble waiting—I want them gone!—but I think I’ll give her a week.  After that, the books go to the next guy!

I also started working on the bookcase question.  I’m having a hard time deciding exactly what kind of furniture I want to buy for this apartment.  There are too many options!  So I’ve decided to start small: I want to buy a pair of nightstands for my bedroom, and I want them to have some shelving.  I found a cute maple-colored nightstand at Target.com.  Before I purchase them, I’m going to check out the options in a brick-and-mortar Target, but I’m feeling happy having found something I like.  Baby steps, friends.

Finally, there was refrigerator soup for dinner tonight and a big oven-crisped flour tortilla topped with white bean hummus, melted sharp cheddar, and two roasted tomato halves.  I cooked with the classic rock station cranked up so I could sing along with it.  There may have been some dancing too.  Admittedly, the soup was bland and desperately needed a hefty dose of salt, but its frugality pleased me, leaving behind it an emptier vegetable drawer and just one bowl of leftover soup.  I’ve still got room for dessert, which will be a piece of shortbread, retrieved from the freezer, and a square each of dark and white chocolate.  (I’m craving chocolate tonight.)  There are good books waiting for me and maybe a spot of journaling as well.  Tomorrow morning there will be a bowl of pumpkin cottage cheese oatmeal similar to this one and perhaps a mug of lightly sweetened chai to match the warm spiciness of the oats.  I’m going to soak the oats overnight like I usually do.  There’s just something nice about doing that little bit of prep work the night before to make the morning more welcoming.

I hope your week is going well, sweet reader, with lots of getting-stuff-done and good meals in between.  The weekend is just two days away!