By far the most noticeable and sort of strange side effect of taking phentermine to get both my bootylicious curves and cholesterol under control is an incredible ability to focus my attention on tasks.
No kidding. When I very first started taking it, I was all aflutter with nervous energy for the first few hours until I levelled out, but lately I get this crazy focus along with it. I can get on a cardio machine at the gym and hammer out 40 minutes without really thinking about it. I'll start on a project and forget to eat, go to the bathroom, feed the dogs, or whatever, and before I know it, HOURS have gone by. Tyson's been gone this week, and I've been alternating between playing video games and reading blogs and stuff and working on materials for my class next year in about four-hour stretches at a time.
Today a contractor with a giant tile cutter pulled up in front of the neighbor's at 6 a.m. The dogs started barking so I got dressed, fed them, let the dogs out of the back house, ate some quick breakfast, took my meds, and sat down at the computer at about 8. I remember resurfacing at noon and thinking, "man, I'm hungry," preheating the oven for leftover pizza, and forgetting all about it for another hour. I did think to set a timer once I put the pizza in, or I may well have caught the whole house on fire.
Based on information from my browser history and jump drive, I have reconstructed what my day looked like, I think:
1. Read blogs.
2. Read comics.
3. Did crossword on yahoo.
4. Made a blog post.
5. Dicked around on Facebook. (This is about where my medicine would have kicked in. I remember feeling really thirsty about then, a sure sign of being hopped up on stimulants.)
6. Started working on school stuff. Typed up job descriptions for 6 management positions, training checklists for 4 of them, and evaluation sheets for all. Lots of it was straight off the hard copies I have in a folder, but I had to invent some things, too.
7. Made a long list of logs, calendars, and other organizational templates I still have to make. Decided not to get into an involved search for whether I could import XML files from my gradebook program into Word, or if I needed an Excel table instead. Made sketches of what some of the tables should look like, instead. Somewhere in here is where I ate leftover pizza (sort of--I kept forgetting I was supposed to be eating and kept working instead until it was cold).
8. Started searching for school and office supply wholesalers. Specifically, compared prices on cheapest 2" binders available. This is where my right hand started to ache and I had to switch to my left.
9. Shook head to clear the cobwebs. Realized my butt and right foot were asleep and I really had to pee.
10. Checked email.
11. Remembered I was supposed to check the status of my federal student loan consolidation application. (Hooray for 4.2% interest!!) Waded through online bureaucracy to find out my loan was in "preprocessing," meaning nobody's probably even looked at it yet.
12. Read increasingly desperate emails from local Kung Fu studio I expressed interest in. Followed links to some interesting videos on the different styles they teach.
13. Facebook again. After my students last year accessed my blog from my profile, I removed it, and now that I am back on I am driven by an intense need to know what's been going on in the lives of lots of people I don't really like in person all that much.
14. Blogs again. Nothing new since this morning. I need a bigger blogroll.
15. Realized I was very, very hungry and the dishes I started this morning are still sitting in cold, murky water in the sink. Ate ice cream and tried not to think about it.
And now it's, well, it's now. I purposely worked too hard at the gym yesterday (I'm sure there was a reason, but now I've forgotten it), and my mouse arm and shoulder are aching. I stayed up too late and woke up too early, but my brain is still just humming away. If I wasn't so sore, I'd be doing a few more things, like: looking online for a memory foam mattress topper, doing research on the AWESOME Christmas present I'm thinking of getting Tyson, looking up ab exercises, playing with Pandora radio, trying to learn how to use Excel, trying to figure out why dividing a portion of text in a long Word document into columns makes a new section start, therefore restarting page numbering and also how to fix it, looking for or designing a snazzy logo for my program's course expectations, making a list of school supplies we can sell to get the other stuff we want since our budget's all slashed to hell, looking for advice on how to write a small grant to get some DVDs from Boys Town Press, practicing importing XML files into other documents, reconciling my checking account in Quicken, plugging the AmLit reading list I made yesterday into a week-by-week planning chart for each quarter of next year, going back over the stuff I did today and making sure a few of the details are consistent with my 25-page expectations packet, figuring out how the code for my "Recent Comments" plug-in got broken and how to fix it, and pricing plane tickets to Rochester in November.
Whew. I am glad I have to go to the airport soon to pick up friends or I might never leave this chair.
UPDATE: This is possibly the stupidest post ever. Still, I seem to have expended an awful lot of energy getting it all down. Case in point?
