awesome things

Today was one of my days off of work for this week. My work schedule has been so screwy, with working some weekends and taking random days off during the week, that I have very little idea what day of the week it is lately. We spent a good chunk of the day hanging out at Lucy's parents' house, in and around their pool. I drank a bottle of wine. I was hungover by 6pm. It was awesome.

I'm sure I'm the last person on earth to discover this website, but it's funny. I like this article in particular.

Also, happy birthday to Mike and Ellery. We had dinner with Ellery last night, he lit his birthday candles with a blowtorch. It was awesome.

two more weeks

Then our busy season at work is over. I'll be back to 9-5 work days, sitting in my office for more than 5 minutes at a time, taking lunch breaks.... ah, summer. I'll also be alone, because Kara's quitting, which I've been expecting. She's been totally checked out the last couple of weeks, she's more than ready to leave. She called in sick this past Tuesday, then told our boss that she wasn't really sick, she was just "exhausted" from having to walk part of the way to her dentist appointment the day before. Yeah, I'd like to call in tired too, but some of us have a work ethic. It still pisses me off. My boss told me I should call Kara on Friday morning and tell her I was too tired to come to work. I was tempted, seeing as how I was there until 10:15 Thursday evening. Two more weeks, just two more weeks. I can do it.

In other news, I was emailing Mike one of the power hour CDs we made (so that he can listen to a song and then drink) and gmail told me about a program called myPowerHour - you put in your playlist, set how long you want it to go for, and it plays a minute (or more or less, depending on how you set it up) of each song, plays a sound at every minute change, and can even keep track of each person, what they're drinking, what minute and beer you're on, and even your blood alcohol content based on what beer you're drinking! It's so unfortunate that we didn't find this sooner. All of our power hours when Mike visited could have been so much more official. Of course I downloaded it, maybe tonight Alfred and I will give it a test run. I'm so excited!

It is a little creepy that gmail can look at my email subjects and then give me an ad for something it thinks I want... I mean, I know that sort of thing existed, but I never had it actually work for me. Or I never paid much attention before. I guess the phrase "power hour" is enough to catch my eye.

We're house sitting again this weekend, first time in awhile. Alfred's out doing something with Max at the model, so I'm here along (with Sam, the dog). Seeing as how it's sunny and gorgeous outside, I'm at a house with a pool, and I brought a bathing suit, I'm going to get off the computer now and go enjoy the fact that I live in Florida. Peace out!

bullet points!

• I left work at freaking 4:00 this afternoon! I had to stop at Home Depot on the way home, but still got here by 5:30. Amazing. I've been working a lot of (unpaid) overtime the past couple of weeks, so I decided to see what it was like to work only a 40 hour work week again. So far, it's nice. But judging by my schedule the rest of the week, I'm guessing the 1 hour I saved today is going to be swallowed up by Wednesday.
  
• We made a massive amount of beef stock yesterday. About 40 cups, to be exact. Which sounds like a lot less than it was. Alfred got a bunch of beef bones for free from our grass fed beef source, so we couldn't let them all go to waste. We froze most of the stock, but kept some in the fridge for french onion soup this weekend. We actually just went through the process of getting rid of the fat (it solidified in a thick, disgusting layer on top overnight) and packing it all up for the freezer. Messy.
• Yesterday I also made what might be my best loaf of bread ever. We cracked open a jar of our fresh strawberry rhubarb jam to try it with. Words fail to describe just how delicious it was. I could eat the entire loaf in one sitting. I'm trying to resist.
• We totally forgot about the shuttle launch yesterday. We were watching tv while dinner was in the oven and suddenly Alfred said "hey, when was the shuttle supposed to go off?" Answer: ten minutes earlier. Oops. We had discussed driving down to see it go up in person, but that damn stock needed to be made.
• I went jogging this afternoon when I got home from work. I also planted my new(est) azalea (I'm up to 5 now, and I think I'm killing them) and cleaned the bathrooms. I should work 7 hour days more often.
• Re: azaleas. Yeah, of the 3 I got last year, 1 looks awful, 1 looked great and had lots of flowers but the flowers and leaves have gotten all droopy, and 1 looks ok but has no flowers. I have 2 new ones now, both of which still look ok, but haven't been around long enough for me to really destroy yet. Give me time.
• I found a hilarious blog by this girl who was rereading all of the old Baby Sitter Club books. I loved those damn books when I was younger. She's not posting anymore, but I've been plowing through the archives. It's good stuff.
  

two stories and a link

This happened last week as we were driving to the office. Alfred was driving, and all of a sudden slammed on the brakes and went from about 40mph to about 20.

me: What are you doing?
Alfred: It's a school zone.
me: Um, school's not in...
Alfred: Oh yeah, it's the weekend.
me: No, it's Wednesday.
(we laugh)
Alfred: Right, I forgot. I guess I got confused because they just put that flashing light in at that intersection.
me: (laughing) No they didn't, it's always been there!


The other funny thing is my dream the other night. I was dreaming that I was in the car and Alfred was loading a tray of food in at my feet. The food started to slide off the tray, so I leaned forward really fast to catch it before it hit the floor. I also apparently leaned forward in real life, because I woke myself up and was sitting straight up in bed. It took me a good 10 seconds to figure out where the hell I was. It was like something out of a movie, except I wasn't having a nightmare. Weird.

And 1 last thing. This video is funny, especially to an old married woman like me.

1930's marital test

Ok, this is really funny. You should really go here and take this test, if only to see how funny the different items are. It's pretty quick. It rates what kind of husband or wife you are, and apparently is from the 1930's. I took it and got:

39 As a 1930s wife, I am Poor Take the test!

Poor Alfred, he has a terrible wife. That's what he gets for marrying a woman who doesn't darn socks. Then I wanted to see what the husband questions were, so I took it for Alfred. He did great!

79 As a 1930s husband, I am Very Superior Take the test!

In other news, we're going home tonight! Woo hoo!

odds and ends

Katie, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna have to post more goofy pictures of you apparently. I got more comments on that picture than on anything else I've written so far. Thanks for taking one for them team.

So, what do you get when you have 3 19/20 year olds staying with you for a week?


Except for the couple of Red Bull cans on top, those are all from beer. We had an entire second bin full of our other recycling. We looked just like the house of alcoholics down the road this morning.

In other news, Alfred and I hit up the big main library downtown last night. I love libraries. I used to love to go to the stacks in the older libraries at Cornell and just look at all the crazy books they had there. The library near our house now kind of sucks. It makes me kind of sad. But now that I have Alfred's card to this one, and they have a self check out thing, I can go there and explore to my little heart's content, and no one can get suspicious that I'm not named Alfred. Anyway. I checked out a few teaching books, and Alfred checked out like 10 books on house design. He's got a whole station set up at home with the books and sticky notes and a pen so as he goes through them he can mark stuff he likes. I'm getting the feeling this house building process may take longer than we planned.

One last thing. Go look at this website with lots of passive aggressive notes that people submit. I spent a long time Tuesday looking at them and then my computer shut itself down overnight so I had to re-find it today, but I lost my place where I was, and I was several pages in. And I actually have work to do today, so I can't even read them until tomorrow. But you can, and you should. Have fun.

dreams and annoyances

Last night I had a dream that I was in the hospital, and our bedroom was my hospital room. The door was closed and Alfred was outside, and I wanted him to come in, so I started calling his name to get him to come in. Apparently I said his name out loud for real, and woke both of us up. At 4:40. It sucked. Then on my way to the office (I dropped Alfred off to meet his dad) I stopped at Starbucks, and it was freaking closed! What the hell!

I also had a dream last night that I was babysitting for this little boy. The link is for his parents' blog. He's a 4 month old baby with a genetic disease similar to Down's Syndrome in that he has 3 copies of 1 chromosome, but different from Down's in that it's fatal (more fatal than life generally is, anyway). Only half of all babies conceived with this are born alive, and only like 5 or 10% make it to their 1st birthday. (I somehow found a blog for another baby with this condition and have read about several more since. For some reason I read a lot of blogs about sick kids.) Anyway, in my dream he looked totally different but somehow I knew it was him, and Katie kept getting him to laugh. Then he stopped breathing a couple times in my dream. It was weird. And kinda scary cause I thought this baby was going to die in my care.

(By the way, I had a dream last week about someone coming to our house with a gun and getting ready to shoot me in the head. I woke up before he shot. The last time I dreamt about someone shooting me was a few days before Mike was shot. Also weird.)

So now for the annoyances part of my post. This damn order is driving me crazy. Our dealer who placed the order, more specifically. He called yesterday at 4, all frantic because he had a mistake in the order and wanted to know if it had been picked up yet. I called, it hadn't, and they were able to fix the mistake and still have it ready to ship out right away. Which is great, but apparently not good enough for my dealer. He called me again today and was bitching about how the shipping company is going to be late. You'd think he's be appreciative of the fact that they were late and saved his ass from having to pay for a $3000 item he didn't need. He sucks. (The picture is another shot from the house this order is going to. It appears that whole back wall is going to be glass.)

lying liars

(I will warn you now, there are no pictures today. But there are nifty little graphics, so I figured that might make up for it. If not, sorry.)

I found this website yesterday. It apparently tells you how many people in the US have a certain name. So I put in my name and got:

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 5 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

I thought that was pretty cool. So then I put in Alfred's name.

HowManyOfMe.com

There is 1 person with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Um, I happen to know 2 people with this name (Alfred and his dad.) I was like, what the hell? I put in Alfred instead of Max for the first name, and got 3 people. Then I put in my dad's name:

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Well, we know this is not true. So I got annoyed and stopped. Than I went back today and looked for more people. There's apparently no one with Cathy, Ella or Mason's names. But it does say (which I did not notice yesterday) "While both names you entered were found in our database, neither was common enough to make it likely that someone in the U.S. has that name."

So apparently it's not actually searching a database and figuring out how many people in the US actually have a certain name, which is what they make it sound like. They're really just taking the number of people with the first name and the number of people with the last name, and figuring out statistically how many people are likely to have that combination. What a rip off. But you can still use it to see how many people have the same first or last name as you. Of course, I don't know how accurate it really is, because it says no one has the first name Ellery, and that more people are named Guy and Alfred than Max. Oh, and I just found out that no one has Steph's last name. (Yes, I'm purposely not mentioning any last names here. Yes, I'm probably irrationally paranoid.)

Ok, I just decided to read the "Accuracy" section, and it says: Fourth, not every name is on the list. A certain number of instances of a name were required to even make the list. About 10% of all responses were not included on the list because they appeared too few times. So, uncommon names are not represented on the list. So I guess that explains that. 10% seems like kind of a lot to just not include, but what do I know.

So, what's the take home message here? It's kind of fun to play with, especially when it says you don't exist, or you're one of a kind. Why did I bother writing all this? Cause I have nothing else new to talk about (I mean, really, do we need to hear about my burn again?) Plus, lots of blogs I read have really long posts, and I wanted one too. And I wanted to see if anyone would bother reading all of this. And I don't feel like going back and editing. Take that! :)

not much to report

One of the girls in my book club is in labor! She's the first one due in a string of about 7 or 8, one's due every few weeks from May to October. She's actually 3 weeks early, so hopefully everything goes fine. There were 4 babies born in the group this winter, now with the new crop starting our meetings should be pretty lively! Luckily there's a few of us staying "strong till 2009" so I'm not the only one getting my baby fix whenever we meet.

Anyway... Ellery got an early birthday present the other day, so he gave us a ride around the driveway last night. Door to door service. Pretty sweet, huh? Alfred wants one, of course. But I don't have a car, or a computer, so I think I get the next toy, right?

Slow blog day here. So go look at this website I found yesterday. It's funny. This is my favorite one.

why you should move to florida

Because the high today is 83. In March. That's awesome. Never mind that the high tomorrow is only 66. Actually, that's pretty good too, compared to New York or Minnesota. Weather.com says it's only 74 right now though so we'll see. Moving to Florida would also mean living near me, which means you'd get to see things like this more often. I'm awesome. You know you all miss me.

The only problem with it being warm out is that when our building's AC kicks on, it kicks on hard. Yesterday it was in the low 70's outside, and inside it was 72. Today it's going into the 80's, and right now our office is 69. I'm wearing a short sleeve shirt but I'm cold. (Maybe if I got off my ass once in awhile I'd be warm, but who can be bothered to move around.) Really, this is a problem most of the year. If you dress for the weather when it's 90 and humid, you're wearing shorts and a tank top, but any building you go into has the AC set to like 60. I end up carrying a sweatshirt with me everywhere I go. I'm like a little old lady.

The other problem with warmer weather is the damn mosquitoes. I'm not looking forward to them returning. They love my sweet northern blood.

At lunch today I ordered the Stromboli for Two (I had no choice, there was no Stromboli for One.) The waitress gave me a funny look. I told her I really like leftovers. About 2/3 of it is currently in the fridge at the office. It's big and long (that's what she said!)

P.S. Need a movie? These people can help!