I'm full of oj

Alfred and I have both had colds for the last couple of days. It sucks. Hopefully we feel better tomorrow, because we're planning to go over to Ilya and Mercedes' house and have a little Halloween party. I bought a $3 clown wig at Walmart and everything. I always want to hand out candy to kids, but we never get any trick or treaters at our house, I guess cause we're so far back from the street. Or because our neighborhood is full of a bunch of jerks. Although we never got trick or treaters at the apartment either, and we were right on the street there. We even bought candy when we lived there, and then got stuck eating it all ourselves. Not that that was so bad, of course. But that probably contributed to the whole needing to lose weight thing.

I've also been trying to convince Alfred that Halloween is a great reason to have kids. We're too old to get dressed up and go trick or treating ourselves, so clearly we need a child to do it with. So far, no luck. Too bad, cause then we could have our own little cat and Darth Vader.

When I was in high school I spent a semester interning at an emergency room. It was a quiet hospital and was kind of boring, though. I was there the night of the hospital Halloween party and got to help out with it instead of staying in the ER. That night I decided that I wanted to spend the rest of my life celebrating Halloween with little kids. It was so much fun. Of course, that hasn't exactly panned out, but it did point me in the direction of working with children. Neat, huh?

cold snap

The high today was only 62 here. It got into the 40s last night and will again tonight. We actually had to turn the heat on last night. In other words, it's our equivalent of the first snowfall of the year. Seriously, I saw someone walking outside today in a winter coat and hat. Yeah, it was cold this morning when it was 40-something, but it wasn't that bad, especially in the sun. Crazy Floridians.

Man, I spent so much time trying to photoshop this damn picture that now I'm all worn out. And honestly, I can't really think of anything interesting to say. So look at the picture again, please. Thank you.

heh heh, I said duty

I did my civic duty today: I voted! I had to leave work early for a doctor appointment and left a little earlier than I needed to so that I'd have time to stop and vote. It's kind of funny, I waited longer today, at 3:30 on a Monday afternoon for early voting, than I ever have to vote at my actual polling place on an actual election day. Weird. I wanted to try to vote early because by the time I get home from work on election day I know I'm going to be tired and not want to deal with waiting in line. I'm sure anyone who knows me can guess who I voted for. There was also an amendment against gay marriage, I voted against it (as in for the possibility of gay marriage) but it's not like there's any chance of it not passing in this crazy ass state.

I also hit up Michael's and Target on my way home. I could spend hours in Michael's. There were these really cute Christmas ornament place setting thingies that I almost bought, since we're having Christmas dinner at our house this year, but then I remembered that we don't really do assigned seating (we're planning on a mroe casual barbecue again) so I managed to stop myself. I did decide to start a new project, it's a baby gift for friends of ours who are having a baby this spring. I'm not sure if they know about this blog or ever read it, I don't think so but just to be safe I'm not going to mention what it is until I give it to her. How's that for some intrigue? I bet Lindsay can guess what it is.

Oh, I almost forgot to recap our fancy weekend meals: we had pumpkin and sausage soup for dinner on Saturday (good, but when we make it again I'm going to change it a bit to improve it) with some sweet potato custard for dessert (would have been better if I had halved the salt and nutmeg along with the rest of the recipe. yeah, oops), blueberry cottage cheese pancakes (with homemade cottage cheese, surprisingly good considering how weird the batter looked) and sweet potato pancakes (made using some of the aforementioned custard, they were ok) for breakfast on Sunday, then for dinner Sunday we made a chicken pot pie (I've been wanting to make one for ages and finally got to, we made it totally from scratch and it was damn good. Possibly the best crust I've ever made).

happy birthday Xyla!

She's 2 today, hard to believe. I remember getting a call from Jeff that morning that Lindsay was in labor, and then getting another call while I was doing a tour and not being able to answer. I checked the voice mail as soon as I was done with the tour, then went around to tell everyone working that day that it was a girl! That was the first time I was around someone for their entire pregnancy and got to see and sort of experience it all (aside from my sister, but I was so young then, it's not the same). Plus since Lindsay's my age, it made me really think about actually going through pregnancy and having a baby myself. Before that, I wanted to have kids and all, but I think after Xyla I actually understood it a little better and realized I could actually see myself doing it. Man, I can't believe it's already been 2 years. What a cutie.

belated anniversary

Tony and Cathy's anniversary was last week, the 13th, and I realized that I forgot to blog about it. Looking at the pictures made me want to post some, although I decided to stick with normal ones since we're so young looking, instead of going for the funny ones. We took a road trip out to MN for the wedding, we were so young.

Aw, aren't they cute. I guess that's why they made such cute kids. I don't really remember the cake, but I bet it was good.

Until our own wedding, this was the only picture we had of us together in nice clothes and posing nicely. We used this picture for our wedding announcement in the paper, Robyn gave away frames with this picture in it for rehearsal dinner favors... I feel like we used it more, but I can't remember.

The best part of of this one is Katie. She was only 12. I was 20. One of Tony's relatives on his mom's side thought Katie was me. It was a little embarrassing.

Ok, I know I said no funny pictures, but how could I resist this one?

work junk

I worked until 10:00 last night. That's why there was no blog, in case you were wondering. I'm sure everyone was devastated. It kind of sucked, especially because I ordered dinner from IHOP and they got rid of my favorite salad. I was 15 minutes late picking up my dinner, because of an issue with lights, then a kid had an asthma attack and I ended up having to sit in the store with him and a teacher for the rest of the night, so I had to eat half of my dinner 2 hours after I got it. But it could have been worse. Our group for today canceled so I got to sleep in until 6:50 this morning. Bitchin.

I got bitched out at work today by a woman that I just offered a job to. Apparently we pay slave wages, she's worth twice what I offered her, she doesn't take prescription drugs or do cocaine so she shouldn't have to do a drug test, and we have no standards because all of our existing guides are constantly giving incorrect information. I got an earful for a good 10-15 minutes, then she finally left once she realized I wasn't falling all over myself to offer her the salary she wanted. So that was fun.

We're watching Kath and Kim right now, it's kind of crappy. We weren't sure after watching the first one, but I think the second one has sealed the deal. It's not overtly awful, I don't think, I'm not really sure to be honest. I'm sort of doing three things at a time and can't fully concentrate.

happy birthday Mercedes!

Today is Mercedes' birthday! Ilya's taking her out for a root beer float tonight. She's been looking forward to that and the tiramisu we had for her party on Saturday for weeks. Unfortunately I forgot to bring our camera to her party, so I have no pictures of it, but it was fun. Ilya's family was there and Max was there, plus us. They made 6 racks of ribs and 4 giant burgers (like 2 inches thick) and baked brie and bruschetta and then had fruit and tiramisu for dessert. We were freaking stuffed. Then we stayed and hung out for the afternoon, played some games, then ate again. They bought birthday hats and had balloons all around too, it was really festive and fun.

Yesterday we did a whole mess of housework. We cleaned the bathrooms, swept, vacuumed, did laundry, and I even dusted. Alfred exercised twice, to make up for Saturday. We caught up on a lot of tv, a lot had taped since Alfred had been home last. Other than that, not much. It was nice.

Right now we're eating dinner, fish baked with pineapple and sweet potato chips. We baked the chips, they're more like fries really, and they're really, really good. And we're eating in the living room while watching tv, which we almost never do. I feel like we're being bad or something. Ok, the girls next door is on, peace out!

as promised

Sorry about the delay, I've been working really long days this week, plus between 2 nights of power hours I've been a bit behind on sleep as well. By the time I got home yesterday I was worn out from work, and went to bed about an hour later. Anyway, let's start out with some alcohol-inspired artsy fartsy pictures.



That was fun. Ok, enough stalling: here's just a few of the dozens of wrestling pictures I took the other night. Seriously, this went on for a good hour and a half. By the time they stopped, I was sober again.


I considered doing a slideshow with more pictures, but really, they all looked about the same. Plus Alfred's sitting right next to me, I think he'd be unhappy with me if I posted all 47 of them.


I hope the homoerotic pictures make up for the lack of substance here because honestly, all I've done this week, besides drink, is work. It's been insane. Actually I made lady fingers tonight, I'm making a tiramisu for Mercedes' birthday party this weekend. That's exciting, right?

happy birthday Max and Egee, and Mike's weekend, part 2: drinking

Today is Max's birthday, he's a whopping 60 years old today. I told Alfred yesterday that 60 is a good age to become a grandfather. It's also Egee's birthday - that's Alfred's grandmother, Max's mother. Yes, he was born on his mother's birthday. He was the fourth of her 4 children, and her only son. She says he was the best birthday present she ever got. I'd put a picture of her up, but to be perfectly honest, I'm writing this on Monday night to post automatically on Tuesday night, so I don't have a picture of her on the laptop. Dammit, now I've blown my cover. I'm several minutes deeper into the power hour mentioned in yesterday's post. Bear with me, please.

So, drinking. We've done quite a bit of it. Friday night we went out and some of us drank, unfortunately some of us had to work on Saturday so we had to go easy. We had a gift certificate that required that we spend $100. We ordered mozzarella sticks, chili cheese fries, 10 mini burgers, 48 wings, a piece of cake, and 2 pieces of pie. And a couple of pitchers of beer, of course. On Saturday I had to work, so Alfred and Mike spent the day at our local haunt, drinking and watching college football. They were there for 9 hours straight. They went through 3 different waiters/waitresses. And made friends with some lawyer who I think Alfred has a crush on.

Surprisingly, it was Sunday night before we did our first power hour. Mike brought his power hour CD, which has 60 songs that play for a minute apiece, so I was off the hook for timing. I have a sneaking suspicion that the CD wasn't 60 perfectly timed 1 minute songs, but hey, it worked. Since we're house sitting and don't have our full range of drinking paraphenalia, I used a little measuring cup instead of a shot glass. I got a bit artsy-fartsy with the camera.

Mike and I did some dancing.


I then woke up after about 6 1/2 hours of sleep and worked for 8 1/2 hours. Cause I'm the man. It was probably the best power hour of my career. Seriously, I didn't even feel a thing until about 30 minutes in. It helped that we had eaten roughly 75 pounds worth of junk food earlier that day for Max's birthday party, my stomach didn't get that sloshy feeling it usually gets with a power hour. We were also able to bottle the beer that Mike made with the Mr. Beer kit that we bought him last Christmas.

And now that I've already blown my cover about writing this post in advance, I would like to announce that we are 50 minutes in to tonight's power hour, and not only am I doing well, but I'm still able to type coherent sentences. Well, I assume these are coherent. I'll have to check back tomorrow. However, we just realized that while we are 50 minutes in, we have only gone through 36 ounces apiece. Something's not quite right. I guess that's why I've been doing so well tonight and last night. Damn.

p.s.

Max Alfred and Michael Joseph have been wrestling for what seems like hours. I'm eating a tiny bowl of Cheerios. You better believe there will be pictures here on Wednesday.

happy birthday Katie! and Mike's visit, part 1: animals

Katie-friend, not Katie-sister. Not only is today her birthday, but she got engaged this weekend! Her fiance flew over and surprised her (he's from Germany, and they met in Australia. Such a worldly couple). I'd say it's been a good birthday weekend for her. Happy birthday, Katie!!

Mike came to visit again this weekend, he's been here since Friday night and is leaving tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. It occurred to me, as I was looking through my pictures from the weekend so far, that he's been quite the little animal charmer this weekend. We spent yesterday at Alfred's parents' house, so he got to feed the raccoons.

He actually had one eat out of his hand. Kind of disgusting, if you ask me, but hey. He was excited.

Today he and Alfred came to visit me at work (they even took me out to lunch!) When I went in this morning, Marc Anthony (the chicken) was limping really badly and one of his spurs was torn. I made him an appointment for 5:00, since I had a school there all day, and Alfred and Mike offered to take him earlier for me, so I wouldn't be stuck at work so late. The two of them chased him out of hiding, caught him, and we put him in a garbage can for transport.


They brought him back 2 hours later, down 1 more spur and with bloodier feet. But apparently he's all healthy. And Mike got to make a joke about taking him to KFC and threatening him if he didn't behave. So that's good.

I happen to be smack in the middle of a power hour right now, but that's another post entirely. Stay tuned tomorrow.

Friday wrap up

Just a couple of quick things. First, in case you didn't catch it in the comments, my mom has promised to have warm chocolate chip cookies waiting for me at the door when we go up for Thanksgiving. Between those and all the pizza and wings I plan to eat, I don't know that I even need to bother with Thanksgiving itself.

Second, I was reading an article online the other day that said that Obama used to smoke and has been working on quitting during his campaign. In the same article it said that he exercises 6 times a week and generally has to wake up extra early to fit in his workout, losing sleep for the sake of exercise. The following conversation then took place between me and Alfred:

me: I'm just like Barack Obama!
Alfred: Yeah, you smoke and you're black.
me: No, I sacrifice sleep so I can exercise.
Alfred: And you're a man.

I guess it was funnier in person.

Third: a couple of pictures of the sunset as seen from our back porch last night:

Very pretty. And that is all, have a lovely weekend!

breaking celebrity news!

It was a big day for me, celebrity gossip-wise. Let's get right to the nitty gritty.

1. You know it's big when 3 different people contact me before noon to make sure I know about it. Mike texted me, Allison (friend from work) called me, and Alfred emailed me, all to tell me that Holly and Hef have broken up! And - shocker of shockers - she broke up with him! Now, for any of you poor souls who do not watch the fine program "The Girls Next Door," this is quite a big deal. This girl has been deluding herself into thinking that Hef is her soul mate, that he's going finally to divorce his wife and have babies with her and she'll live happily ever after with all his money when he finally kicks it. For some reason, she has finally come to terms with the fact that it's never gonna happen, and has left him. Well, not really left him, but moved out of his bedroom at least. It's a start, I guess. I mean, who is she without him? Just some blonde with a fake nose and tits. Seriously though, this is pretty earth shattering stuff, at least for some of us.

2. Guess who's in town auditioning skanks/potential soul mates for a few days?

Yup, Bret Michaels. His busses were parked in the TSA lot (our downtown office) so I pulled a stealth paparazzi move to take a couple of pictures. Either he's eternally optimistic about his chances of finding true love on a reality show, or he's just trying desperately to hang on to the last shreds of his fame. I'm guessing the latter. But then, I'm a cynical bitch. The women in the TSA office got to see a bunch of girls coming off of the bus earlier today. As you might guess, they were not the most demure looking bunch.

3. Perhaps the most important finding of my day. Apparently parts of Pirates of the Caribbean 3 were filmed at the Fountain of Youth, and apparently parts of the 4th installment will be as well. Last time they were filming there, Johnny Depp moved into a house nearby so he wouldn't have to travel very far. So, if all of this is true, which I believe it to be, Johnny Depp will be living within 2 miles of my place of employment. You better believe I'll be pulling plenty of stalker-paparazzi moves if I find out when he's in town. I mean, he is one fine looking man. And he's cool, which is very important. So I'll let you know when I get rich from selling candid photos of him to Us Weekly.

food and work, a.k.a. I have no life

You can tell I'm back on the wagon because all I'm writing about (and thinking about) is food. I've hauled myself back onto the eating-well-wagon because now that I'm not going to the gym anymore, I have definitely noticed a difference in my body, and not one for the better. The little muscles I worked so hard on are shrinking. I miss them already. We should have gone to the beach more this summer. Stupid job, making me work a full 40+ hours a week.

I just watched an episode of Good Eats about making bread. Now I totally want to go bake a loaf of bread. Go figure. All that flour is just sitting in my freezer, waiting to be baked into delicious little bites of carb-laden heaven. Sigh. Actually I may have used all of that giant bag of flour we bought, I can't remember if there's any left in the freezer. But still. There's some in the pantry at least, begging to be made into something tasty and fulfilling, like cinnamon rolls. If I were to have visitors I would bake them some delicious cinnamon rolls. Ahem.

Ah, the good old days. When we were fat, dumb and happy, and ate whatever the hell we wanted. And weighed more and were less healthy, of course. I don't really look any different in this picture but I was definitely sucking in my stomach. And all the health consciousness keeps me from turning into this (gratuitous photoshop usage ahead):

But that would be so much easier. Sigh. (by the way, Katherine, I don't think walking in snow is as good for you as walking in sand. I think the cold shuts down your metabolism or something, I'm pretty sure it's a scientific fact. Also I've developed a severe snow allergy. Sorry!)

Ok, onto something that won't make me hungry, but will make me mad instead: venting about work! I had a teacher call me today and tell me that I booked her for the wrong dates. This is kind of a big deal, because she had already set up the busses and planned out the rest of her field trips for the year. The thing is, I didn't mess it up. She did. I know because I took notes during our conversation and those notes were right there for me to look at today when she called. I had listed several possible dates, she picked 3 in a row in December, but now she says she had picked 1 each in October, November, and December. The dates she thought she had were dates that I offered her, but she ruled one out because the start time would have been later, which she said she could not do, which I wrote down in the aforementioned notes, thus proving that she decided against that date and I WAS NOT WRONG! Ugh, I was SO frustrated about this. Because of course I can't blame her and tell her she made the mistake, I had to apologize and take the blame and apologize some more and try to fix it. Unfortunately since she took 2 freaking weeks to look at her paperwork and realize the dates were different, other schools have since taken the dates she wanted. Double fuck up on her part, really. I was really extremely angry about this for a good portion of the day. Well, now that I'm thinking about it I'm mad all over again, actually. I do my job well, dammit! I hate having to take the blame when I know I'm not wrong.

I'm not sure what's worse, writing about nothing but food or nothing but work. I'll try to do better tomorrow.

a belly full of taco

We had a little mini adventure tonight. We went to go look at a freezer to store the quarter of a cow that we're getting sometime in the next couple of weeks. It turned out that the couple who was selling the freezer owns a taco shop right next to the farmers market that we go to when we're home on the weekend and not lazy. So we stopped there for dinner and are now stuffed to the brim with tacos. And a burrito and a "mexicake." It was all really good. It's too bad it's not within walking distance of our house, because it would be perfect on a Saturday night after we've been boozing for awhile. Man, we drink a lot. And right now I could pass for about 4 months pregnant. But now we have a cool little local place we can go to down here, so that's neat. Real neat. It actually worked out well, because when I put everything in the crockpot this morning for our stew I apparently neglected to plug it in, so we didn't have a nice hot dinner ready for us when we got home, like we were supposed to. (By the way, when you do a google image search for "taco girl" the results aren't nearly as dirty as you might think. Also, I think I want to be a taco for halloween. I wish we had a party to go to. Or kids to take trick or treating. This paranthetical aside has gone on long enough I think.)

I love tacos. I also love pizza. And hamburgers. I love a lot of basic sorts of foods. Alfred and I had a conversation the other night about our very favorite desserts in the entire world, and it was really tough to narrow it down. I picked my top 5, then top 3, and I think if forced I could pick 1, but man, it's tough. Try it. If you could only eat 1 dessert for the rest of your life, what would it be? By the way, my top 5 were blueberry pie, my mom's warm chocolate chip cookies, flourless chocolate cake, twice baked chocolate cake, and some sort of super chocolatey ice cream with chunks, like Ben and Jerry's chocolate fudge brownie, maybe. I like that 3 of those have been mentioned in this blog. It's also interesting (or not) that there's no raspberry or cheesecake items in there. Although it may be even more interesting that I included something that wasn't chocolate. Mmm, I love pie. Gosh, I love food. I could never be anorexic. I wish I still had my teenage metabolism. Stupid calories.

lazy sunday, and saturday

We had a very lazy weekend, which was awesome. I love sitting on my ass for days on end. I left the house twice: once to go grocery shopping, and once to water my azaleas. Both times were on Sunday, I didn't venture outside once on Saturday. Again, awesome. Alfred did some chores around the house but was nice enough to let me be lazy. I was kind of cranky/not feeling great too, so I guess it probably worked in his favor anyway. In honor of my laziness, I am posting 2 pictures of nature-type things. This spider lived on our front porch for a long time. He's gone now. Oh, and I saw a big green snake in our yard yesterday. Scared the crap out of me, I had just put the hose back and was going into the house and there he was, stretched out right across where I was about to walk. I scared him too, he slithered under the house. I wonder if he's friends with Our Friend, the Black Snake. He probably is. They have us in common, at least.

Our crockpot has been getting a good workout the past couple of days. We made split pea soup in it today, which was pretty delicious, and tomorrow we're going to make a lamb stew. It's so nice to come home and have dinner all ready to go. It's especially nice to get all the prep work done ahead of time when Alfred's here to help. I've been getting home before him and making dinner myself a lot lately, so it's been fun to cook together again. We played Iron Chef on Saturday night, I made ham rolls and he made ham cakes (like crab cakes, but with ham). Guess what the secret ingredient was. We had to squeeze in lots of domesticity, because we're house sitting for a week and a half starting this weekend. I'll probably be coming home most weeknights, but I don't exactly cook much for myself when I'm eating dinner alone. And Mike is planning on visiting again this weekend. Unfortunately I have to work Saturday and possibly Sunday, although I'm doing my best to get out of it on Sunday. I'm making the new girl work both days, so maybe I'll just be really mean and make her work by herself on Sunday. We'll see, I guess.

dinners and not much else

We've been on a roll with good dinners this week. With Alfred on this low carb kick, we've been mostly eating salads with either chicken or fish. Which is fine, but it was getting a little old for me. Well, the other night I made catfish with a garlic dill marinade and dill sauce, with a red pepper and squash salad. Then tonight we had some ham (which is actually about 3 years old, we got it for Christmas one year and it's been in the freezer ever since) and I made a pineapple-red pepper-red onion combo, plus cut up some tomato and avocado to go with it. I should have taken a picture, it was pretty. And delicious and healthy and just lovely.

We hired that girl the other day and she started today. I now realize how much I liked being alone in the office. She's very nice, but it's just a lot of work to have to talk all day and teach someone and all. Basically, I'm lazy.

Eh, I can't seem to come up with anything else today. I'm watching South Park and it keeps distracting me. They made a boy band called Finger Bang. Awesome.

blast from the past: NYE 2006

Yay, New Year's 2006! This is the year we went to NYC and met up with my hoes from Cornell. (Looking through all these pictures made me really miss you guys. Hoe Reunion February 09?)

We got into town first and met up with Katherine after she got off work. We walked around a bit and played tourist. For some reason, I really like this picture. The off-centered-ness appeals to me.

We did plenty of boozing, of course. This was the night we got a giant fishbowl full of alcohol (actually I think we got multiple fishbowls, but I was pretty toasted that night so I don't really recall). Clearly Rosemary's expression is my favorite part of this picture.

New Year's Eve itself was pretty rad. I didn't really get drunk, since I had had more than enough the night before, but I certainly danced the night away. They played a lot of good 80's and early 90's dance music, it brought me back to my childhood. Or at least our drunken nights at Cornell.

Everyone else did plenty of drinking that night. This picture just says so much. Clearly Katherine had had a few, and I love the expression on both Ro's and Steph's faces. Also, Ro was double fisting.

At some point the next day we managed to go on a quest for some hot dogs. Mmm, I could totally go for a hot dog right now, I haven't had dinner yet. Ok Tracy, keep it together.

Ok, we don't want to get too greedy with all these pictures in one post. Plus I need to save some for another time. I hope you have all enjoyed this little trip down memory lane. We'll see you here again tomorrow, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.