Posts Tagged ‘happy birthday to someone i love’

Stuff ‘n’ things

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Happy yesterday birthday, Nathan!

Happy today birthday, Justin!

This is why I have to concentrate really hard when people ask me when Justin’s birthday is.  I have to remember it’s not the November date that first comes to mind — it’s one later.  I think I’ve gone over that before.

Today was a really weird day.  I went to work, got a bunch of stuff accomplished as quickly as possible, and then from 9 o’clock until 5:15ish, I worked in another building for another department, learning the ropes from the woman who’s last day at that department was today.  The way it’s playing out, as far as the guy in charge over there would like it to work, is I’ll work 1/2 over there and 1/2 at my current department.  And if/when I take the job there, I’ll keep on working 1/2 and 1/2 until either my current job is filled or a certain length of time has passed.  That way he gets me before I’m hired and my current department gets me after I’m hired and it’s a win-win for both departments.  I might go a little crazy.  And I’m probably going to get a bunch of overtime.  And it’s going to be a VERY strange couple months.

It was fun, though!  The work is definitely stuff I’ll be able to do, and do it faster and better than the lady who was doing it right now.  Mostly just because I’m better at Excel than she is and because I’m WAY more organized.  And the organizing thing is why I’m being pulled into the department because they desperately need someone to get that group of people organized.  I mean, seriously?  Not familiar with lean concepts?  5S?  YOU WILL BE!!!

Probably the most bizarre thing is that the guy who I work with, the guy in charge of my “pod” — his wife is over in this other department and I didn’t know that.  And he didn’t say so when I told him this morning that I was heading over to spend the day with the woman on her way out.  So I got over there and was being introduced as the person helping fill in as possible until the position is filled (we’re not saying that I’m filling it because we want to keep that quiet for now) and she looks at me and says “Kylene?  Like my husband’s Kylene?!  Oh, he’s going to come home crying tonight.”  And she kept giving me sad looks all day long.

He wasn’t at his desk by the time I got back.  And then I worked another hour at my other department getting some things done that had stacked up while I was out.

I have no idea what the rest of my current department thought about me being away all day.  I’m not sure how this is all going to work out, with me working for two different departments.  I should call Dad and ask how he managed it, but I think he managed it by working 80 hours a week and I DON’T want to do that.  I’m excited because I’m not working tomorrow, so I’ve only worked 90 minutes of overtime this week.

Tomorrow Justin and I are celebrating his birthday by going on a date on Hilton Head Island and his birthday present should come by post sometime during the day and the rest of his day will be spend playing Skyrim and I will probably spend watching him play Skyrim.  Pretty, pretty Skyrim.

Anyway.  I’m beat.  It was a crazy day.  I’m going to curl up with my fluffy bathrobe and watch some TV for a while.

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Random

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

I ate homemade bread and drank sweet, black coffee for breakfast this morning and it reminded me of Europe.  The bread is an indulgence that I made over the weekend because I missed it so much.  And the coffee is sweet and black because I’m out of the sugar-free mocha mix that I’d usually put in as creamer.  But I learned to really love sweet, black coffee while on choir tour in Europe.  I miss wandering those old, cobbled streets and listening to the bells in Salzburg.  Of all the places I’ve been, and I’ve been to a lot of places, Austria is the place where my heart felt most at home.

Happy birthday, Audrey!

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Happy birthday, Erica!

Monday, August 8th, 2011

Happy birthday to my wonderful sister, Erica, who I totally tried to call earlier but who didn’t answer, even though it was only, like, 4:30 in Minnesota and who I must therefore assume was out rocking the town because by my count she’s turning 30 and that’s absolutely the birthday for which you should go out and rock the town.  Yea!!  So I’m not going to call her back tonight because now it’s after 8:00 there and I’m really hoping that part of her birthday also means that she actually gets some sleep for the first time since JD’s birthday (doesn’t that sound like a fantastic birthday present?!) and besides that I don’t have any cell service at the house and she’s not on Skype right now (again, hopefully either rocking the town or sleeping) so I don’t actually have a way to call her and I’ll just have to catch up with her some other time.

BUT!  I really do hope that your birthday was ABSOLUTELY OFF THE WALL FANTASTIC and I’m sorry I didn’t send you anything, but I hope Tim got you something AWESOME and we’ll totally have to catch up later this week.

I wasn’t even home on Friday, when I would normally call.  Friday, I got up and went to the church offices to do my monthly cleaning there, and then when I got home, Justin and I ran down to Savannah to run a couple errands and catch a showing of “Cowboys & Aliens” (really fun movie, by the way) and then drove straight from there up to Beaufort to go to a board games party at a friends house.  And we were there until after midnight so I started to fall asleep on their couch, which was why it wasn’t until we were nearly all the way home before we realized that I’d forgotten my purse, with our house keys, back at their house.  45 minutes away.  But luck!  I stuck a spare house key under the bumper of the car!  And fail — the key didn’t actually work.  We have no idea why it didn’t work, but the dang thing wouldn’t turn.  So at 1:30 in the morning, Justin borrowed our neighbor’s extension ladder and climbed in through a window on the second floor of our house.

Saturday, I was fighting off some bug because I slept a lot.  I tried to stay awake and managed a couple hours at a time, but then would fall back asleep again.  It was really annoying, actually.  I slept through most of Sunday morning, too, failing to go to church, and then took it pretty easy for the rest of the afternoon.  Friends came over in the evening to collect boxes from our attic for moving and we fed them dinner in exchange for ice cream and Justin fixed the power supply on one of their computers, too, and some other computer work.

And after they left, because the air conditioning unit refuses to blow cold air, we set up the bed in the living room and slept down there.  The a/c unit upstairs hasn’t been working right for the last week or so.  It was working in the evenings, like it was exhausted from the heat, too, and decided that it would just work its best overnight.  And then it stopped doing that, too.  The downstairs unit is working, so we’ve got a box fan at the bottom of the stairs, blowing air up to another fan that moves it closer to either Justin’s office or the bedroom, depending on where it’s turned, and a third fan that blows air up from the floor into faces.  But it’s just not quite cutting it.  So we’ll be camping out downstairs for a couple days.  We have an appointment set up for a guy to come look at it on Friday, which our landlady set up a couple weeks ago for regular maintenance.  So when he comes, hopefully he’ll take care of the problem.

And how’s that for about the most random post ever?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MAE-MAE!!

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Over the weekend was busy

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

I have a lot of thoughts rattling around in my brain today so this is going to be a “purge post” of several of those things.  So, in no particular order, here we go:

I am SO EXCITED that my sister gave birth to her son yesterday!  I’m looking forward to lots more pictures of Josiah and eventually getting up there to smother him in kisses.  I don’t know when that’s going to happen, since our financial situation for the second half of the year isn’t looking optimistic, but when it happens, it’s going to be awesome.  Especially because it’ll mean smothering all the rest of my nieces and nephews in kisses, too.

We had a lot of fun over the weekend with our friends from out of town visiting.  It’s a pair of sisters, the boyfriend of one, and the two teenage sons of the other.  We had people ALL OVER in our house!  It was great!  We went down to Savannah one day and walked all over, stopping at the candy store on River Street and through the squares.  We had dinner at a Scottish pub and went on a terrible walking ghost tour that we skipped out of early.  By the time we left, everyone was exhausted, with sore feet, and irritated at the tour guide.  But dinner was excellent!

We took them to Hunting Island another day.  It was a beautiful day and we splashed in the waves some, sat in the shade and chatted some, and watched the boys with their boundless energy try again and again to catch a wave with the boogie boards.  The beach was strange, though, because the water was filled with floating wood debris that made it really uncomfortable.  The old foundations of buildings that had long washed away were exposed – the last time we came they were covered in sand.  I had no idea there was so much concrete buried on that beach!  The whole shoreline was changed.  Apparently a big storm came through a couple weeks ago, but I was astonished at how much it affected the island.

The rest of the time, we sat around chatting and playing cards and enjoying each other’s company.  We played a several hours long game of Munchkin, the boys played Halo, I taught the adults how to make bread in a breadmaker, one of the boys showed me some tips for the guitar, and the whole weekend was relaxed and fun and comfortable.  After they left yesterday, the house was too quiet.  I walked around looking at everything that’s not quite in the right places and the piles of bedding and Justin told me not to mope.  “But they’re gone!”  “No moping!”  “But I miss them!”

On the other hand, a couple of our other friends, who live in Beaufort right now, are moving closer to Bluffton.  They signed into an apartment over the weekend that’s 15 minutes or so from our place.  They’re moving at the end of August and that’s going to be awesome.  Okay, not the moving during a horribly hot time of year part because that’s going to suck.  But having them so much closer is going to seriously rock chickens.  Movie night!!

Meanwhile, have I mentioned that we’re not going to move?  We couldn’t find anything we liked in our price range.  So, that’ll hold off for another year, I guess.

My plans for this evening include cleaning our bedroom and the bathroom so they’re back the way they’re supposed to be, and maybe the kitchen because I’ll be in there making a loaf of banana bread anyway.  Maybe watching some television, or reading the book I’m supposed to finish before book club on Saturday.  Eating leftovers for dinner.  And going to bed at a decent hour.  It’s going to be exciting!

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Shiny!

Monday, June 6th, 2011

I know I’ve been terribly remiss about updating lately but I’ve been distracted.  I heard an acronym the other day that fits it perfectly.  ADOS:  Attention Deficit OH SHINY!

 Justin and I determined that we don’t really watch TV.  So what was the point in paying for it to be delivered to our house?  Justin did a bunch of work chatting with our cable provider and for an additional $5/month, removed about $70 from our monthly bill, cleared space in our media cabinets by taking out the cable boxes, and removed live TV from our lives entirely.

Yay!

We then turned around and put some of that money into Hulu Plus, which will satisfy most of our television wants, along with the websites for those actual shows.  So, TV?  Fixed.

Then we went and ended our relationship with Verizon and started new terms with Sprint.  So far, it’s been a rocky relationship.  I haven’t been able to get access to the information I want on their website and their customer service has been *really* annoying.

On the other hand, I spent my whole weekend playing around with my very shiny new smart phone.  It’s an LG Optiumus S.  It’s purple.  It has things on there that tell me the weather and what movies are showing nearby and where to find cheap gas and MY CALENDAR and my to do list (though that one’s still a work in progress) and oh, my gosh, it’s SO AWESOME.  *cue the kid at the end of The Incredibles movie there*

Unfortunately, it turns out we don’t actually have cell service at our house.  So we’re looking at what we can do about that because phones that don’t actually work, while they’re very pretty, are kind of pointless.  And, since there’s no service, I haven’t set up my voicemail yet, so if you call and get a weird answer, that’d be why.

But it was fun and terribly distracting sitting there with my brand new phone going “Oh!  What does THAT do?!”  Plus, I couldn’t get my contacts list to transfer over so I had to do that all by hand.  The bonus there is that my whole physical address book just became obsolete because it’s all stored electronically now.

Oh!  Our phone numbers stayed the same, by the way.  So you don’t have to worry about that.

And my podcasts upload automatically!  I have so many stories to listen to now!!

Anyway, it’s my first Android phone, so I’m still stumbling my way though stuff.  If any of you more experienced users have any advice, I’d love to hear it.

We went to see the new X-Man movie over the weekend, too!  It was very good.  I enjoyed it a whole lot.  You have to ignore some continuity problems, if you’re the kind of person who notices that type of thing, but I thought it was a lot of fun.  It made me gasp in surprise and alarm and made me really sad in some spots and made me laugh at points and I thought it was an entirely enjoyable experience.

A very happy belated birthday to Amy and Isaac and belated happy anniversary to Mom and Dad!  I’m sorry I didn’t call any of you (or you, Erica, for our regular chat) but I figured you’d mostly be busy, plus, like I said, no cell service.  But I hope you all had a delightful day!!

Edited to add:  I just wanted to say how tickled I am right now about how my phone has improved my outlook for this afternoon.  This morning, while getting ready for work, I checked the weather on my phone.  And it told me that it would rain this afternoon.  So I brought my umbrella into the office, even though there were clear blue skies.  It’s been thundering for the last 30 minutes (I can’t see outside to know what else is happening) and I am SO HAPPY that I have my big umbrella for what sounds like a wet walk out to my car.

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