You People Are No Fun

A summary of my most awesome weekend...

Friday was the last day of school for the kids. They have the next two weeks or so off of school for Winter Break. I'm so looking forward to not driving kids to and from school every day. Friday night, the Youngest child had a new friend spend the night at our house. She was an...interesting kid. We had a Christmas event planned for Friday night but with the nasty weather we had, we nixed that and went to iHop for dinner instead.

Saturday, both the girls managed to make plans to spend the night at friends' houses so the Mister and I had the night to ourselves. It's the first night we've had alone since our anniversary vacation back in May. Because the girls made these plans on the fly, we didn't have a chance to plan a special night so we just went out to dinner and then did some shopping. It was just nice knowing that we could do what we wanted to do without worrying about having to get home to the kids.

Today, we vegged. The Mister had two papers to finish up for his classes and the girls were both tired from their nights out. I think that I might be coming down with a cold (my throat is scratchy and I'm tired beyond all belief), so I took a pajama day and watched Netflix on the couch all day. I also played Tiny Tower on my phone too, heheh. My Bitizens are prosperous just in case you were wondering.

We did have a couple of hiccups in the weekend. Bailey peed on our brand new couch. I'm pretty sure this is a jealous reaction to the cat. She used to pee in our bed when she got mad but our bed is so high now that I can barely get into it, lol. Bailey won't even jump into the back of our SUV anymore. As for the couch, we got Lazy Boy's maintenance coverage or whatever they call it so all I have to do is schedule someone to come out and clean it. If they can't clean and remove the smell, they have to give us a new couch. Even so, the Mister and I were very upset by this behavior. Not to mention, the house smells like dog pee. Bailey has also taken to eating cat cookies if you know what I mean. Besides the fact that this is totally, completely, and utterly disgusting, and she's making a mess throughout the house with kitty litter, we have the clumping litter which could make her sick. I have what I hope is a solution to this problem but we haven't tried it out yet, so we'll see. Since Friday, I've vacuumed the house, upstairs and down, four times.

All in all, and in spite of the dog, we had a great weekend and I'm looking forward to the next couple weeks. Woot!

NaBloPoMo Day 9: Hump Day

Wednesday has me thinking about what we have going on this weekend. Not a whole lot.

First of all, the Oldest Child's punishment will come to an end on Saturday. I'm not going into the details of the offense, but I will tell you what the punishment was because it's a bit funny. She's been grounded, but not in the traditional sense. Grounding kids to their rooms, nowadays, it's a pretty useless thing to do. Even when I was a teenager, I was never very upset to be grounded. I had a TV, a radio, a Nintendo, a phone, and a full bookshelf. The Oldest Child has many similar things. She has a TV, an old Playstation 2, her cell phone with it's Internet, games, texting, etc., and whatever else she has in there for entertainment. Out of a 24 hour weekday, she spends 15 hours of her day in her room, voluntarily. So her punishment was that she had to sit at the kitchen table doing homework or reviewing her text books if she didn't have homework, for a minimum of two hours directly after school. Then she was grounded FROM her room until 8 pm. This has been a three week long punishment and she's whined and complained about it every single day. I'm hoping that it has been an effective punishment but only time will tell.

Secondly, the Mister and I are going to make a serious dent in our Christmas shopping this weekend. I'm saving some stuff for Black Friday and Cyber Monday but for the most part, I want to get as much done as I can, as soon as I can. Last Christmas sucked with the Mister being deployed so I want this year to be fantabulous.

Lastly, the Oldest Child has her last band competition of the season on Saturday. This competition is being held at Vista High School. Her high school band has come in third at the previous two competitions so they're hoping to place higher this last time. I can't believe they didn't place higher last weekend. The band that came in second sucked. I know, I'm biased, but they really did. While I enjoy seeing the bands perform, it's supposed to rain on Saturday. I'm a weany and have no desire to sit in the cold rain. Supposedly, the show will go on unless there's lightening and the chances of that are slim to none. Oh wells.

That's my weekend plans.

Halloween 2009

After my rather eventful Friday, laying low for the rest of the weekend seemed to be in order.

Halloween was nice. The oldest dressed as a dead bride and the youngest was a clown. We had more trick or treaters than last year but still had left over candy. The major drama of the night was the mosquitoes. It was almost 80 degrees when the kids were out and the mosquitoes were out in full force as well. My favorite costume of the night was a car wreck. A girl came by in a bloodied and ripped dress, lacerations on her face, neck, and arms, and she was just a general mess. It looked very realistic and while disturbing, I thought she did a great job with her makeup and costume.

Today, was a big ol’ nothing. It’s been rainy and overcast and the only time our door opened was when the Mister went out to grab us breakfast. It’s nice to turtle in your house every once in a while especially when the weather’s nasty.

NaBloPoMo 2009, post 1 of 30.

A Bust of a Weekend

(This has nothing to do with this post, but do you know how many posts I type up and then delete?)

I figured I would recap our weekend. For us, it was pretty eventful.

Friday, the oldest attended a school dance. It wasn’t her first but it was the first one this year. She had a good time and then ended up spending the night at a friend’s house. To occupy the youngest while her sister was gone, we invited her friend to spend the night at our house. This little girl is a neighbor and she’s 7 to our daughter’s 10. They get along like two peas in a pod. We’ve had her over before and of all of our daughters’ friends, she’s among our favorites. I just love kids who are polite but join in on our teasing and stuff. She gives as good as she takes.

Saturday, we had to chauffer kids to and from places and then we spent the rest of the night IN. What’s so funny about Saturday is that my sister called in a panic. Why? I turned my phone off Saturday morning after all the kids were in their own houses. So, when my sister called all of two times and my phone went straight to voicemail, she thought something was wrong. Talk about jumping to conclusions, lol. She called the oldest on her phone (like she would ever turn her phone off and risk missing one of a thousand texts she gets in a day.) to get a hold of me. What can I say? I’m on the phone ALL week with work and kids and stuff and the weekends, I just don’t want to hear it. Plus, it picks up my e-mail from three different accounts so not only does it ring when someone calls, but it makes various noises for incoming texts and e-mails. On the weekends, I enjoy a bit of silence. Sue me.

Sunday, we took the kids out for their Halloween pumpkins, We found two rather nice pumpkins and bought decorating kits for them. This year, we’re doing lights. We try and decorate the pumpkins a little different each year. We also bought candy to give out to the two trick or treaters that we get. When you live in a development that consists of two cul-de-sacs, you don’t get a lot of thru traffic. We’ll have a handful of kids that live in our neighborhood and that will be it. They make out pretty good at our house though cuz I give out handfuls of candy instead of just one or two pieces to get rid of it all. I don’t want to indulge myself in leftover candy, heheh.

Oh. And on Saturday we had an issue with our smoke detectors and our alarm system. See? Our smoke detectors are wired in such a way that the alarm system monitors them. So, if they go off, it alerts the fire department and if the battery(s) are low, the control panel beeps and lets us know. Well, for some reason it was detecting that the battery was low in the detector in the hallway. So, the smoke detector was beeping and the alarm system was beeping too. Thing is, we had just replaced every smoke detector battery last week for the same reason. Not knowing what else to do, we went to Lowes to buy MORE batteries. We went around and replaced them all again but the beeping didn’t stop. I called the alarm system company to see what to do because at this point, the Mister was having a minor breakdown (and a major overreaction)  over the situation. The alarm guy could look and see that it was the hall detector causing the problem. I explained to him that we had changed the batteries in the detectors twice in a week’s time and that didn’t help. He had no solution for me. I’m sorry, but what an idiot. At this point, I was ready to rip the thing out of the ceiling and be done with it. What we ended up doing was disconnecting the alarm system from both the house power and the backup battery and that worked. Still, we listened to incessant beeping from two sources for four hours before we got it to shut the eff up. It was a very long four hours.

And I think that sums up our weekend. It was a mover and a shaker compared to what we usual do which is nothing, lol.

12 days to go until we leave for the Outer Banks! Woot!

Drama-Filled Weekend

(Past Pets Hall of Fame will be back tomorrow!!)

We had one heck of a weekend. Where to begin…

Well, Friday night the Mister had a mess night to attend. A mess night is a Marine only event that’s pretty basically an excuse for them to get together and get drunk. They punctuate the evening with ceremony and tradition, but drinking takes the main stage. I’m rolling my eyes as I type this just so ya know.

So, the girls and I decided to have a girls night of our own. We started off by buying junk food to snack on at the grocery store. Then we ordered a pizza for dinner. The oldest child and I played some Phase 10 while the youngest played on her DS. Next we decided to go for a cruise around town with the windows down, the sun roof open, and the music blaring. It was fun, lol. We returned home, played another game of Phase 10, and then sat outside for about an hour and a half watching lightening from storms that were in the area. It was awesome. I had never seen lightening like that. It was virtually nonstop for several hours. Anyway, by this time, it was about 11:30 so I sent the girls to bed and then sat on Facebook waiting for midnight when I could grab my vanity URL, lol. I’m such a nerd. I’m www.facebook.com/trishaj in case you wanted to friend me up.

Saturday, I had to drive the Mister to pick up his car at the restaurant where the mess night was. Yeah. Then we grabbed the girls to go to Jacksonville for some shopping. On the way, we went to the library to return some way overdue books. The road to the library is under construction. They’re widening it or something. Anyway, it’s a mess, narrow, and you can only go about 20-25 mph. The Mister hit a nasty bump in the road that wasn’t even marked. It was a doozy abut nothing seemed wrong so we continued on to Jax. We got home after a couple hours. We got some books at the Barnes and Noble and we got the girls new bathing suits because we planned on making our first trip to the beach this season on Sunday.

Later that evening, we decided to go to Lowes to get some gardening stuff for my tomato, broccoli, and cabbage plants. They’re being attacked by bugs. Anyway, we go to start the car and the lights flashed, then nothing. Crap. The Mister tried turning it over and nothing. The freaking battery is dead. Mind you, the Rav is only three years old so the battery should still be good. We borrowed some jumper cables from the neighbor, charged up the battery and ran it for a bit. Then, the lights started flickering again. The Mister turned it off, tried to restart it, and nothing. We’re figuring we broke the alternator hitting that bump in the road. It’s all very bad timing besides just being damned inconvenient. The Mister has to leave Wednesday for some training in Jacksonville for the summer. He needs a car and I can’t go without one for weeks at a time.

I called the warranty people this morning and if it is, in fact, the alternator, it’ll be covered under the warranty. So, I made arrangements with the Toyota dealer, called for a tow, and it’s now at the dealership getting diagnostic tests run. Our warranty is freaking awesome. It’s going to cover the repairs the towing, and a rental car if we need one.

:(

:(

Having the car broke kinda ruined Sunday so we didn’t do anything other than go to the commissary and tend to my plants.

Things I Did This Weekend

The title makes it sound like I actually did stuff this weekend, huh? After our whirlwind weekend last weekend, I was determined to do as little as I could get away with this weekend. Having it rain 75% of the time really helped me attempt to achieve my goal.

Saturday, I got in an afternoon run on the elliptical. No rest for the too fat and lazy. I haven’t slacked off of the exercise at all, but after our weekend in Georgia, my eating habits have been on a downhill slide. I gained almost three pounds over that weekend. THREE POUNDS!! But you know, without the pecans, pralines are basically pure sugar. I wonder why I gained so much weight!!! Anywho, Saturday night I did something that I haven’t done in a looong time. I actually planned to and sat down to watch a movie. Sex and the City was on HBO and I enjoyed a girlie night to myself on the couch. Glass of wine in hand, candles lit, and the windows open to a fantastic night breeze, I enjoyed watching the movie all by myself. The Mister was on the computer or something and the girls were in their rooms playing. It was really nice. And the movie was pretty okay. For a chick flick, you couldn’t really ask for more. It was very predictable though.

Sunday, the Mister and I hit the commissary and then he disappeared for a marathon paper writing session. I, however, sat down to read Twilight on my Kindle app. I’m almost done with it and I have to laugh at how many times Meyers uses the words “beauty” and “beautiful”. It gets to the point where the meaning is completely lost. It’s just like when you say, “I’m sorry” all the time and people stop believing you after a while. I was prepared to thoroughly dislike this book. I began reading it keeping in mind that the intended audience is tweens and teenagers. In fact, that’s why I decided to read this book at all, because my 12, soon to be 13 year old daughter, wants to read it and I wanted to read it first before I gave her permission. I can see why it would appeal to teen girls but I really could take it or leave it. The dialogue comes off as being fake 90% of the time and Meyers has yet to make me care about the characters. Also, I dislike how much she has deviated from the traditional vampire myths and legends. I don’t mind creativity but her take on vampirism comes off as too contrived. It’s as if she was trying to be different just for the sake of being different. Whether or not I read any of the other books in the series depends on whether or not the oldest child wants to continue reading them. Twilight is too easy to put down to make me want to read the rest of them for myself.

As for the rest of my Sunday, I washed my car. It was such a gorgeous afternoon that I wanted to spend some of it outdoors so I decided to clean off all the bug guts from the drive too and from GA. It was disgusting. The really irritating part is that as soon as I was done washing my car, it had a layer of pollen all over it. Pollen freaking sucks. I also got my garage cleaned out AGAIN, so that I could park my car inside of it. I’m hoping that it will keep the pollen coverage to a minimum.

And that, folks, was my fun and exciting weekend. I got my workout in already this morning and now I’m headed for the shower. Then it’s work, dinner, work, bed, rinse and repeat.

Quiet Weekend

We didn’t do much this weekend. With it being our last weekend alone without the kids, you would think that we would have taken advantage of it but we didn’t.

Friday night, nothing.

Saturday, we cleaned out the shed in our backyard and hauled a bunch of our old moving boxes to the recycling center. I saved the ones that weren’t damaged so that I could use them to pack. After that, we were so tired that we didn’t do anything else. We didn’t even eat dinner until 10 o’clock. We stayed up until 1 am watching the first season of The Shield on DVD.

Today we went to take another look at the new house. I got a picture of the outside but since the owners weren’t home, we couldn’t take inside pictures.

Your regular, run of the mill, house. The yard is MUCH greener than ours, lol. Hopefully we can keep it that way. And notice the lack of pine trees.

After that we finished watching the first season of The Shield. Then we went to Morehead City to buy the second season of The Shield, heheh, the first season of BSG, and the Mister bought some football game for the Wii. We also had to go to PetSmart to get the dogs food. While we were there we bought a Boxer coffee mug. On it, it didn’t have one single Boxer with docked ears. That’s different because Boxers are more recognizable with docked ears even though I think that’s incredibly mean.

I’m also gearing up to start a new project for my job this week. It’s pretty involved so I’ll be getting more hours which is nice. Also, since we decided that we couldn’t turn down the reenlistment bonus which means there’s no longer a rush, I am cutting back on my classes. I’m only taking two classes versus three and four per semester now. It was really hard keeping up with that many when I wasn’t working. I have a cousin who graduated from Ohio State University in three years. I have ABSOLUTELY NO idea how she managed that.

Anyway, that’s my weekend in a nutshell.

My Day

We finalized the plans for getting the girls to Ohio. Turns out that I get to drive them to Asheville to meet my dad and stepmom halfway a week from Monday. The Mister has an inspection at work that he can't get out of so I get to make the six hour trip myself. I've driven 13 hours by myself from VT to Ohio so six hours is not that bad. This time, I'll have my GPS whereas the first time I had a map and two kids that hadn't a clue how to read it, lol. I'm totally looking forward to touring the Biltmore. Asheville was actually my idea because I've always wanted to see it.

Also today, we drove to Jacksonville to buy a mat for our new elliptical machine, food for Bacon the guinea pig, dog food, beads for crafts, rechargeable batteries, AND...I hit the Barnes and Noble and bought June's book plus TWO more which I'm totally excited about reading. I'll post more about them on another post.

Lastly, we're grilling black angus ribeyes and broccollini for dinner and I'm roasting potatoes in the oven. I was outside with the Mister putting the broccollini on the grill and got bit three times by mosquitoes. They're evil down here.

Tomorrow our plans are to veg. The Mister has homework to do and I have reading to do. Yay! Reading!

Not So Bad

My Monday is off to a good start so far. I got to sleep in 20 minutes because I drove the kids to school this morning. The oldest child is going to an overnight fifth grade camp and I didn't want her to have to ride the bus with her duffle bag, pillow, and sleeping bag. Any day that you get to sleep in is a good day in my book.

It seems that I entertained some of you with my "Things" post, lol. I'm pretty surprised that I didn't get any negative comments. I'm not complaining, I'm just surprised is all.

So, our weekend went along pretty good. Friday was LOUD with the oldest child having a sleep over but they were so exhausted from the graduation activities that they fell asleep on their own around 10:30.

Saturday, we went to the beach. It was about ten degrees cooler at the beach, making it a chilly 90 degrees, heheh, and the water was perfect. I went boogie boarding with the oldest child and we had a lot of fun. All four of us ended up with a sunburn despite wearing 50 SPF sunblock and only being there for two hours. The weather here has been outrageous with highs in the upper 90’s and the heat index in the 110’s. I don’t know if I’ve said this before, but I have a bad feeling about the hurricane season this year. Our weather has been completely different this year than last, and last year we didn’t have any hurricanes hit the N.C. coast. It makes me happy that the kids will be in Ohio for part of the season.

Anyway, Sunday we didn’t do a whole lot of anything. I had to put in some time with my work because I got a little behind with stuff going on Friday and Saturday. The Mister had to work yesterday too because he took Friday off for the graduation. He got some neato pictures of the airshow from the roof of his building though.

This is Fat Albert. It’s the support plane that flies with the Navy’s Blue Angels. The Mister has gotten a ride in this before when we lived in California.

 

Today, I have some work to do and I’m going to my friend’s ultrasound appointment. They won’t video tape it for her so I'm going to record it with my nifty new camera. Did I mention we bought a new digital camera Friday? Yeah. It's nifty.

One last thing...I typed this post in Microsoft's Windows Live Writer. Me likes. Inserting pictures is super easy. It's a free application if any of you want to check it out for yourselves. I imagine it would make posting way easier for those of you with multiple blogs. You can also preview before you post, view the source code, insert tags, among many other things.

Figure Out Your Own Title

We had a full day yesterday. We had to start our Sunday way earlier than we usually do because we had an hour drive to Jacksonville for the birthday party. We got to see the Camp Lejeune base theater for the first time, lol. Camp Lejeune is my favorite base of any that I've ever been on. You feel like you're on a military base when you're there. We passed a huge convoy and there was another one forming up in the theater parking lot. You just don't get that kind of thing on an air base which is all the Mister would ever be stationed on. Lots of aircraft taking off and landing, but no tank crossings, grenade launching areas, or ammo dumps. I've been coming and going on that base since 1991 and it still doesn't get old for me. They also have a nice exchange which we took advantage of while the girls were watching the movie. We bought ourselves a snazzy flat screen HDTV for our bedroom. It's an inch smaller than our old tv but the screen seems bigger. Maybe it's because it's not surrounded by the huge box our old one was in.

After the party, base exploring, and shopping, we headed over to our friends' house to hang for a bit and to say goodbye. They'll be moving to Texas shortly for a transfer. Hopefully, we'll get to see them this summer but who knows. We have plans to tour Texas but you know what they say about the best laid plans. After ten years, I am heartily tired of saying goodbye to good friends. I have more friends out of state than I do in and they're literally scattered coast to coast.

Anyway, we got home last night around 5'ish, ate a light dinner, and I explored the variety of Twitter spinoffs before hitting the couch to watch The Next Food Network Star. It was good. From the looks of it, someone cries on every episode, lol. Get a grip people. I'm really interested to see how far Shane gets because he's only 19. Wow! At 19 my specialty was a rotisserie chicken from the grocery story and a box of Velveeta shells and cheese, lol.

So, I'm really tired this Monday morning and feel really scattered. I hope at least some of this post makes sense. I'm off for some Cranergy and a coffee bar.

Check, Check

The youngest child's publishing party was neat. All the kids wrote nonfiction books about an animal and read them aloud to all the parents and grandparents. Mine chose to write about Boxers. I wonder why. ;) The sad thing is that because of my meeting, I had to leave early. I got to hear all the kids' stories, but they were having refreshments afterwards and I couldn't stay for that. It's the first time in either of my kids' lives that my work has affected them. It made me really, incredibly sad and I felt like slime. The very lowest order of slime. Now I know how my husband has felt when he's had to miss things because of work. The three years we lived in Vermont, I think he made it to 3 or 4 of their events, meetings, or appointments the entire time. I think that's what makes this job such a good one for me. Not only does it give me experience, but it's easing me back into the working world. I think if I were working full time outside of the home and missing all or most of the kids' things or having to make extravagant arrangements to go, I wouldn't last.

So, check, check. Two of my weekend things done.

Busy Weekend Ahead

Here is my itinerary for the weekend:

• Today we have to go for the youngest child's publishing party at school. All the kids wrote books and are going to read them. It should be a fun time.
• I have my weekly phone conference after the school thing.
• I balanced the checkbook and paid bills first thing this morning.
• Tonight, the oldest child is having a sleepover.
• Pick a fight with the Mister over nothing. Oops. Already did that.

Saturday:

• Mow the lawn.
• Go to the commissary

Sunday:

• Get up bright and early to go to Jacksonville for our friends' daughter's birthday party. Then we get to say goodbye to them as they are moving to Texas in less than two weeks.
• Be depressed for the rest of the day. I'm going to miss them.
• Go to bed early because this much interaction with live people in the real world exhausts me.

Holiday Weekend

I love holiday weekends. The Mister works half a day today and has both Monday and Tuesday off and the girls have Monday off. Yay!! We don't have any big Memorial Day plans. I would like to bbq something and maybe we'll hit the beach. I can't believe May is almost over. This month really flew by. To commemorate the unofficial start to summer and because I found this on Pam's blog today, heheh, I'm posting about my flip flops. This thing is pretty close if you take the "outdoorsy" part to mean the beach. I've never been to Costa Rica so I can't say if that is true or not. The most beautiful beach I've ever been to in the U.S. would be Pensacola and the Bahamas weren't too shabby either. I hope everyone else enjoys their long weekend too! :)

What Your Flip Flops Say About You

You are an outdoorsy person. You feel most comfortable in nature. Beautiful scenery and good weather always brighten up your day. Being outside allows you to feel calm and connected to the world. Problems don't seem so big when you realize how small you are in the scheme of things. Your ideal warm weather place: Costa Rica

The Flip Flop Test