Is self-awareness a good or a bad thing?

I consider myself to be extremely self-aware. It is more than that really; unfortunately, I just don't know the correct, most applicable adjective to describe how obvious all my short-comings are to me.

I am long-winded. Obviously, I ramble on and on (and on and on) in most posts on this blog. I have little doubt that most of you who read my blog skim it, rather than reading every single word. It's tiring just writing the posts! And I know that I talk too much (and sometimes interrupt people as a result of my talking so much). However, when I am around people whom I don't know well, I am actually pretty good at letting others take over the conversation. At a neighbor's party two weeks ago, I spent about one and a half hours talking to a woman I had just met. Actually, I talked about 15 minutes; my "new friend" pretty much monopolized the rest of the conversation, which was fine by me.

I get bent out of shape about things I probably should not. Last week, my little brother and his family were at my mother's for an extended visit. I found myself getting supremely annoyed by how late the kids stayed up. In this household, Jordan is in bed around 9 p.m. during the summer. I don't mind her staying up past that when she and I visit my mom. But when my kid is still up at 11 p.m., I get really irritated, rather than tell myself it is just for a couple of nights (in my defense, it it were only one night, I would be fine with it).

I am messy. I am rarely bothered by accumulating dust. I see the top of my bedroom dresser only about two or three times a year. And I can walk by the various pieces of dirt the dog tracks in for over a week before dragging out the vacuum. I cannot, however, stand a messy sink or a dirty bathtub.

I am cheap. And I am quite certain my friends and family don't want to hear about the little money I have or why I can't do this or that, but it is what it is, and I am who I am. The upside of my being cheap and having lived beneath our means for so long has put us in a better position than others in our situation. Cutting things out is not a huge deal to me, and the money we have saved over the years will help pay the bills. This is what I tell myself, anyway, when I feel sorry for myself for not spending the money when I had it...

I obsess about silly things. As Brian often points out, I can spend 30 minutes on hold trying to get a $1 credit on my phone bill, but I won't take 10 minutes to clean out my car. I like to think of as more like my being highly principled. If I think I have been ripped off, I will fight for it.

Finally, one of my biggest issues right now is my parenting. I am so aware of all the things I am doing wrong (unlike so many parents) yet I keep doing them. Last week I started reading Setting Limits with Your Strong-Willed Child. I can see myself in most of the pages, and fortunately, I have gotten a better as far as saying exactly what I expect from Jordan and what will happen if she does not follow through. Unfortunately, I need to follow through myself every single time. Which I don't. Yeah, I really need to fix this one.

My list of faults goes on and on as have my ramblings, so I will stop now before I put all of you to sleep. I guess being self-aware is a bad thing when you don't try to fix all your short-comings. Sigh.

Let's build something together!

That is one of my favorite slogan's (Or is that a tagline? Over a year removed from a design firm, and I can no longer remember). It belongs to Lowe's, although I am more of a Home Depot gal. But suffice it to say if someone handed me a $5,000 gift card to Home Depot (or Lowe's), I would be ecstatic. If I had $10,000 to spend, you could hear my shouts of joy from miles away. The things I could do with that money. Well, the things I could have Brian do with that money anyway. I love walking around Home Depot and admiring the fancy bathroom sinks and tubs. I look at the lighting and think about where I would put each fixture. I touch textured and colorful tiles and wistfully look at the fancy kitchen cabinets. I admire the various carpet styles and blinds. I look at the fancy front-loading washer and wonder what it must be like to have a steam dryer. I even look longingly at the vacuum cleaners because I can no longer buy a replacement filter for my eight year old mo...

Summer in review

This summer I made it a point to try to take at least one pic of Jordan whenever we went somewhere, which most often was a park. I wanted to capture all the great, fun things we did this summer, knowing that it was probably going to be my last summer not working for quite some time. So here goes. I have expressed my love of Frick Park, particularly Blue Slide Park, in other posts ; it really is one of our favorites. And this summer marked the first one I did not feel the need to follow J around like a little puppy dog. I actually let her run around and explore, though, admittedly, I would panic if more than three minutes went by and I had not seen her. In the pics above, J is at the end of the blue slide, and then hanging several feet above concrete (which scared the crap out of me). We also visited another section of Frick Park, the area on the corner of Braddock and Forbes, a few times. There is not as much to do as Blue Slide, but we go there to mix things up a bit. In the p...

If only I had taken pictures of my detoured drive

When I moved to the Burgh just over 14 years ago, I had a lot of anxiety about getting from "here" to "there." I found the city, which is triangular, and even some of the suburbs quite confusing. On top of that, a lot of the signs were of little help. Clearly they were put up by either natives who had no need for directions or people with a sick sense of humor who thought it would be funny to put signs in random places, leaving off important roads. At some point, I got over that fear of driving to a new building downtown. I don't recall when it happened, but eventually I just figured most of the city out; and when I had to head to a new place, I just drove around, no longer with a feeling of dread, knowing I would eventually get there. But on Sunday morning, that awful, long-ago feeling returned, thanks to the closure of the outbound Fort Pitt Tunnels. I had to pick my mother up from the airport, so there was no avoiding it. (For some reason, my family think...

Facie’s Ramblings

Search This Blog