Currently

I saw this on my friend Jessica’s blog and thought it sounded like fun and I immediately wanted to play.

loving

Just like Jessica I’m currently loving something music related – Away From the World by Dave Matthews Band. This came out on the 11th and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve listened to it since then. It is so good. These two songs are currently fighting it out to be my favorite:

If you watch college football you might recognize Rooftop; I know they were playing parts of it going into commercials during the Notre Dame/Michigan State game.

reading

I’m currently re-reading Eat Pray Love. Again. I pretty much read this once a year. I adore this book and when I’m in a reading funk or just can’t find something that interests me I put this out. Sadly the Italy section is my favorite (shocker) so I find myself losing interest during India and Indonesia this time.

I have decided that I’m going to finally face my fear and tackle IT as my scary read for the fall/Halloween season. It’s pretty big and I’ve been a slow reader lately so I’ll probably start it soon.

watching

I’m loving Go On. It was one of the few new shows I’m interested in this year and so far it isn’t disappointing. I hope it does well because I’ll be sad if it gets cancelled. I love Matthew Perry; Chandler was my favorite Friend and I really liked Fools Rush In when I was a kid (I was strange). I think he’s really great in this role and I love the supporting characters. If you haven’t watched it yet give it a try!

 Source

thinking about

November! We’re hosting Thanksgiving for the first time so I’ve already started planning and thinking about numerous things – do I have the right dishes? what sides should we make? where can I find more cute placemats? do we have enough chairs? what sweets should I make? etc. Thankfully Doug is just as excited/nervous about this as I am so he’s right there with me making tons of lists and excel charts… ok, only I make excel sheets.

Also, I think I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year. I tried a couple of years ago and failed horribly. But a lot of m friends have been writing lately so I have a ton of support and I have a few ideas  floating around in my head. So I think I’m going for it.

Finally, November means my birthday. I’m not nearly as excited about birthdays as I used to be but my loved ones insist on acknowledging the day still ;P so what can I do? Originally I had told Doug that I wanted to go see DMB for my birthday. There was a rumor that they were going to be touring this fall and that they’d be very close to us a few weeks before my birthday. But now it seems that isn’t actually happening so I’m going to have to come up with something else. Oh, and Grux’s birthday is in November too, so we’ll have to celebrate that too.

anticipating

Putting out my fall decorations. A few houses in the ‘hood already have pumpkins, mums, scarecrows, etc out but my summer flowers are still hanging in there so it feels wrong to bust out the fall stuff yet. Plus I spent enough on those dang flowers I want to get my money’s worth.

wishing

For a change. I’m a little sick of the day to day thing I’ve got going on. I want a challenge, something that really requires me to use my brain. Some days I honestly think a monkey could do my job.

making me happy

My boys. Seriously, my husband and my dog are the best things to ever happen to me. My  husband can make me laugh no matter what’s going on. He’s totally my partner in crime. Last night I stumbled on the Rolling Stone list of the top 100 artists and was reading it to him and cracking up at some of the comments we were both making. And Grux is just as good at making me feel better. I came home at lunch the other day totally stressed out and on the verge of a breakdown and he just went nuts. Running all over the place, flinging his toys around, getting in to his “I’m going to get you” crouch and then giving me this big goofy grin with his tongue hanging out. All I could do was stand in the kitchen doorway and try not to fall over from laughing so hard. So, yeah, my guys make me happy.

Also, my book club girls. Someone stumbled on to yet another fanfic that was made into a book and how much the author made so I announced that I was going to start writing fanfic (no, not really). Well, this lead to a bunch of us tweeting fake fanfic relating to a certain vampire series. In the confines of a tweet no less. I was cracking up so hard. It was fantastic. I adore my friends.

Have a great weekend!

Powder Room Poll

Scene: you're washing your hands in the bathroom at work. There is a long mirror above the sinks that reflects the stalls.

A coworker walks out of a stall.

You look up to get some soap.

Your eyes meet right as that person is exiting the stall.

Question: Creepy? Just a part of life?

For some reason when I'm the eye catcher I feel kinda creepy and when I'm the eye catchee I feel like I'm on display.

Maybe I'm just weird.... yeah, that's probably it.

Happy Holidays!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas. I'm excited for New Year's Eve and, almost more so, New Year's Day - so I can have another day off!

And to give you something to look forward to, I'm planning to get back to blogging more in 2010 - so be ready!

I'll leave you with some cuteness :)

My Day as a 4 Yearold

Last night about an hour before I left work I got a call asking if I was supposed to cover at another location today..... I wasn't. Then I was asked if I could.... umm, sure, thanks for the notice.

This location is about 35 minutes from home, as opposed to the 10 I usually drive, and required me to be there 3 hours and fifteen minutes earlier than I was supposed to be at work today. Lovely.

Needless to say I was not in the best mood this morning. And it doesn't help that I've worked at this location before and know that it is incredibly slow most days, oh and did I mention that I'd be all by myself. Yep, all alone. I despise working alone. Had I known that would happen I never would have taken the job.

Anyway, jump ahead about 2 hours into my day. I have everything that needs to be done up to this point done, and had it done for about an hour, and had had one customer.... that's it. This is the point when I snapped and started to act like I was 4.

First, I grabbed the crayons and color sheets we have for little kids and colored.

I'm not really sure why Rabbit and Pooh are on a stripper pole....

Then I snacked on a couple loops out of the container of generic fruit loops I had brought.

Then I had my oh-so-grown-up lunch: PB&J.

I couldn't remember if this location had a microwave, and we can't really leave for lunch, so it had to be this pretty much.

And finally I had a few Sweetarts.

Then I read a lot of the book I smuggled in with me (this is a no-no but I would have lost my mind otherwise). Tomorrow I'm back at my normal location (at least as far as I know). Which, while I dislike it, it is better than being alone.

Hello World!

We survived the move! I'll have a full recap of the move soon, promise! Two teasers: I've had no stove since the move and my freezer door is currently rigged to stay closed. I'll explain later.

And this weekend is our DMB concert! So be prepared for lots of DMB awesomeness coming up.

And finally, check out Prior Fat Girl's awesome cookbook and apron giveaway. I want that apron sooooo bad!!

Dear Pandora,

Ok Pandora, you know I love you... usually.

But I'm slightly concerned about you tonight. Pandora dear, do you know what year it is? No, scratch that. Do you know what decade it is? No, scratch that too. Do you know what millennium it is?

How on Earth do any of the bands I've entered get me 'NSync??!? I used to love them.... when I was 13! At 23? Not so much.

Oh, and if you must insist on them, how about some of the good songs?!? The ones I used to sing at the top of my lungs with my friends. The ones where there is a good chance I may remember some of the words. Stop with the crappy filler songs, please.

So, we'll just pretend this never happened, ok? Good.

Signed,

No Longer a Teenybopper.

A Lesson From Mother Nature

About a week and a half ago I noticed some big popsicle wrappers flying around our neighborhood on a particularly windy day. They flew off before I could grab them and I didn't think anymore about them. Until this morning.

I walked out our front door and noticed that a nest had fallen out our tree in the wind and rain we had yesterday. Then I looked a little closer. The bird had apparently tried to use one of the popsicle wrappers as the base of its nest and I guess the bird learned that, when wet, popsicle wrappers are slick and like to move around. Hard lesson for the bird, I hope it can rebuild. I didn't see any eggs or anything, so hopefully it wasn't too big of a loss.

So, what have we learned here? Garbage makes a poor choice for home building. And plastic is slick. And that my mind is mush this lovely Friday morning. :)

Randomness
Some random things for this Friday morning.

- I have a post about our camping trip last weekend coming soon, promise!

- We found a house we might like, although it has a few things I'm not thrilled about. But I'm going back to look at it again tomorrow with my parents. And I found another one I want to look at.

-My bff Sarah started a blog! I've finally corrupted her! ::evil laugh:: Check it out. She has an awesome story on there right now. And her daughter is 1. the cutest and 2. freaking hilarious, so I'm confident there will be lots of great stories on there.

- Watch for another book review sometime next week. I'm current reading a book I won from Goodreads and it's really good.

I ate leather

So last weekend Doug was off on a little vacation (yay!), so we spent the weekend running around and cooking a ton of food. Saturday we went shopping up in the "big" city north of us and found the local food co-op that I didn't know existed until recently (I'd wanted to hit the farmer's market but we were too late). The co-op was so cool, filled with bulk bins and shelves full of products I can't find in our little town, like coconut milk yogurt (like what Meghann's been talking about) and fruit leathers like I've seen all over the blog world but can never find.

These were so good. I got strawberry and Doug got raspberry. Mine was really sweet while his had a nice tartness to it. I definitely think I'll be getting these again. I haven't tried the yogurt yet, but I need to.

Saturday I also got an armband for my ipod, so I don't have to carry it or try to shove it in my pocket anymore. And it has a handy little pocket for my key, so no more putting my key onto my shoelace! I used it tonight and the key fit perfectly. I hadn't gone out for a walk/jog in almost a week because it just kept raining, so I left out the jogging tonight to try to get back into the routine without overdoing it. We're going camping next weekend for Doug's birthday and I've been hoping to use the paths and roads of the campground for some awesome long walks/jogs with a few little hills thrown in, so hopefully I'll get back into the routine soon.

The only other thing we really did last weekend was watch the Indianapolis 500. We both love the 500. We actually both went there in 2001 with our school's marching band (yes we were both band geeks). But it wasn't the most enjoyable experience. 

We stood in the rain and then the humid weather for hours before the parade they have on Saturday, I ended up having an asthma attack about halfway through the parade because we were practically running, so I had to dropout and then my director had to fight with the Indy EMTs because they wanted to take me to the hospital but I was fine after my inhaler (also they had a film crew with them, I think it was COPS, so thank goodness a 15 year old having an asthma attack isn't that interesting, I'd have hated to have been on tv in our horrible uniforms). Then we had a horrible dinner and were forced to stay for a "dance party" (even though we'd all been up for hours) at a restaurant in Indy that is no longer open, then we had a horrible long drive back to our hotel (on plain ole school buses) because they didn't want to pay to stay closer, where we got in late and had to leave early the next morning with horrible breakfasts that totally sucked. Then there was a parade around the track (which I didn't do because my asthma attack the day before had left me incredibly dizzy), but I heard it was hell because of the pitch of the track. And then the race, which was great....except I had a migraine for most of it (worst experience ever). So needless to say we are both very eager to go back and do the Indy 500 right :)

We don't have anything planned this weekend, Doug has to work, so I'll just be getting ready for our camping trip and I'll be busy being really jealous of Jess because she gets to see DMB at Fenway this weekend (lucky!).

I Hate The Rain

I don't really hate the rain... usually. But I kind of do right now. It has rained so much lately, including Wednesday when I drove back home through a torrential downpour to get back home because I was sick, that all the rivers and creeks on my drive to work are way up at the top and the fields are now like lakes.

But the thing I really do hate is when a simple storm turns into a severe storm. I woke up at 1 am Thursday to a text from my mom saying their tornado sirens were going off and then a few minutes later ours went off. I hate tornado warnings and sirens, I get so panicky.

And tonight we're facing it again. I got home from work and turned on the news and they were talking about a severe storm, "super cells", and rotation about an hour or so north of here. It hasn't gotten here yet but it's a giant system and it's coming, which means I'm on edge for many hours tonight.

And on top of putting me on edge the storms also canceled my walk and my plans of grilling tonight, the storms pop up so fast and I didn't want to risk getting stuck a mile from home or with my shrimp just going on the grill.

So now I'm off to watch the news and try to read before I try not to blow away.

Why is it....

that hot dogs come in packs of 10 and hot dog buns come in packs of 8?

I was pondering this as I put our all natural, all beef no filler hot dogs on the grill tonight. I've become quite comfortable with the grill lately, after pretty much being terrified of it in the past. I've actually grilled a number of times already this year, I really love. With the dogs we had a ton of fresh vegetables that were on sale, gotta tasty, good-for-you foods for a great price!

And now I'm off to read before Deadliest Catch is on. Have a great night!

Random Things

*Sometimes I feel like a total fraud and like I have no business giving advice. Mainly this happens when I'm blogging or posting on a message board. I'll be mid sentence and think "wait, who am I to tell this person you can just make half a 9x13 recipe for an 8x8 pan?" And then I remember, "oh, cause I've done that before" and then get all excited that I can actually answer. Same thing happened tonight when I blogged about the monkey cupcakes I helped make (check out the post on Central Cooking). I was making a suggestion and thought, "oh wow, I actually know what I'm talking about about!"

*We had storm warnings popping up all around us tonight, nothing really happened here except some heavy rain but they kept breaking onto the tv to update the warnings. Doug and I joke that it takes them so long to spit out the warnings that we'll all blow away before we know the storm is here. I hate severe storms, I don't mind rain or even thunder but anything worse freaks me out. I'm a major worrier, so if there's a tornado watch I start to feel panicky and start about my routine: making sure I know where my purse, tennis shoes, keys, flashlight, and cell phone are, getting the place where we'd cower (the hallway here) cleared out, etc. Last summer when we had a fish I'd put his bowl (it was a beta so no power needed) into the tub, just in case. See? Total freak.

*That house I mentioned the other night was already sale pending, darn. But then our realtor started telling Doug about an 800-some foot 3 bdrm....... ummm, that's smaller than the 2 bdrm we rent. So now I've spent the last few days trying to figure out how you ram 3 bdrms into a house that size. The things my mind thinks about during the day :)

Ok, that's it for now. It's time for bed. Doug is going to be building our cornhole/bags/whatever you call it set tomorrow. We call it bags here but maybe that's a Midwest thing. It's going to be Fighting Illini themed (ILL - INI!). I'll post pics when we're done.