never go back

I have a list of things to accomplish during kids' naps today, but they would all require me to get off of this bed. 

Hello, blog post.

Today, I want to commemorate a few things I would never go back to.

1. Classic peanut butter. A few months ago we started eating natural peanut butter (my definition: the only thing on the ingredient list is peanuts) from Costco. It is deliciously non-sugary and not a pain to stir to get the texture right. The hardest part about the switch was remembering to look for it in the fridge not cupboard.

2. A single computer monitor. My main computer is my laptop. It has a home on my work desk, next to an external monitor. I always hook it up so I can work from two screens. Now I am almost incapable of getting anything done without having 2 monitors' of workspace (current blog writing excepted). It is unreal how much time I spend comparing between two applications (e.g. looking at a webpage while taking notes in a word document, or writing an email while checking numbers on an Excel file). Being able to see both simultaneously is a huge gain in productivity.

3. Bedroom without a ceiling fan. Okay. This is a lie. I currently do not have a ceiling fan in my bedroom. But every night as I lay in the stifling air trying to sleep, I fantasize about ceiling fans.

4. Using a mouse to navigate in Gmail. In Gmail, you can enable keyboard shortcuts that let you navigate through your inbox, open/label/archive emails, send replies, etc. It's actually kind of fun to open my email in the morning and fly through all the junk mail, deleting it all with a few keystrokes in under 30 seconds.

5. Self checkouts at the grocery store. I am constantly tempted to go back on this one: I'm at the store, ready to check out. The "live" checkout lines are so long, and there's only one person ahead of me at the self checkout. Surely it will be faster this time. 

But a fundamental law of nature declares that either 1) that one person ahead of you is completely at a loss for how to use the self checkout, bogging down the entire system and tempting you to think horribly negative thoughts about them OR 2) you have more produce than you thought you did and you have to look up the item number on each one, place it on the scanner and wait, and then bag it. Over and over and over again until you think you are going to die. 

Only use self checkout if you can answer yes to all of the following:

1. You have less than 10 items.

2. None of those items resembles a fruit or vegetable.

3. There is absolutely no wait in the self checkout.

4. There is at least one other person in the live checkout.

5. You feel 100% confident in your ability to use the self checkout.

Bonus: here's an outdated picture of the kids. It's the most recent one I have that doesn't require additional downloading from a device. Plus, I like to think Xena is looking up to read my list of self checkout rules. Learn young, little one.