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.

Happy birthday, Audrey!

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!!

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!

 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.

Last night for dinner, we had honey mustard chicken.

• Take 2 breasts of chicken, salted and peppered to taste
• Mix together:
  • ¼ cup of honey
  • ¼ cup of spicy mustard
  • ½ teaspoon of paprika
  • ½ teaspoon of parsley
  • ½ teaspoon of basil
• Put the chicken in a small, lightly greased baking dish and spoon half the mixture over the chicken.
• Bake it at 350* for 30 minutes.
• Turn the chicken over and spoon the rest of the mix over that side.
• Bake it for another 15 minutes or so, until the juices run clear and you’re sure the chicken is done.

I ate it over spaghetti squash.  Next time I do this, I’ll remember that the squash will need to cook hotter and longer than the chicken because it was still a little crunchy when I took it out.

Yesterday the VP over my area had his monthly performance review meeting and I had to give a quick presentation on the 5S status in the area.  To give you an idea of how out of my depth I was in that company, let me quickly explain my organizational chart.  First there’s me.  I report to A. He reports to B.  B is the group head for my department.  B. reports up to C, who’s the director of several departments.  There are several level B guys under C.  C. is one of several directors who report up to D.  D. is one of several VPs who report up to the president of the company.  I’m pretty sure that broadly covers how we’re organized.  So yesterday, I gave a presentation to the level D. guy for my area.  I don’t do a lot of public speaking and especially not to people who get paid that much.  Hopefully I didn’t stumble around too much and I hope I answered all his questions adequately.  The director (level C) came over afterward and thanked me for doing my part at the meeting, which was really surprising.  He’s not a man who gives out positive feedback very often.  So that was nice.

I’ve been wearing makeup to work the last couple of days.  Yesterday, obviously, I had the important meeting.  But I read some articles that said studies show that women in business who wear makeup and skirts are more likely to be respected and advance in their careers than women who don’t.  Also, people who smile a lot are more likely to be trusted.  So, I already like to wear skirts more than pants, so I’m good there.  And I’m pretty good at smiling a lot.  So I’ve started wearing a little makeup, not because I feel like my face needs it but because it’s a tool to try to get more respect at work.  It’s taking some getting used to.  I’ve got to schedule more time into my prep time in the morning.

One of the things that’s really frustrating me at work right now is the amount of perceived self-importance.  I get really tired of dealing with people who think that they’re more important than anyone else around them or that their little piece of paper is more important than whatever else I’m working on right now.  I understand that I’m a small duck on the totem pole, but I’m really tired of hearing the squawking from the rest of the puffed up geese around here.

Justin and I have been playing a video game together that’s got a lot of “go out into the woods and find these items” or “go out into the woods and kill these birds” and stuff like that.  It’s a lot of fun!  My brain is a strange place, though.  Driving into work this morning, I saw a bird land on a wire and thought “What kind of bird is that?  Is that one I need for that quest?  Target the bird to see what kind of bird that is.  Tab.  Click.  Wait, I can’t actually do that!  Dang it!”

Happy birthday, Tim!  I know he doesn’t read my blog, but let him know that I remembered, Erica?  He probably doesn’t care, but I wish him a happy birthday anyway.

I tried my first pistachio on Tuesday.  It was yummy!  Very salty, even though the sodium count wasn’t too bad.  I had a handful of them and enjoyed them.  So I threw some in my lunch bag yesterday for snacking on during the day.  When I went to eat them, I got through 4 of them before my throat started itching and swelling up.  It’s so annoying.  I took a children’s strength allergy medication and felt fine a little while later.

On a slightly related note, if anyone knows where I can get Emerald’s Sweet and Salty Dark Chocolate and Peanut Butter mixed nuts for cheap, let me know.  I have a serious addiction to those nuts and, besides the addiction, they haven’t effected me poorly at all.

I’m also really enjoying sugar free Peppermint Patties.

If you don’t hear from me again for a couple days, we have plans with friends for most of the Memorial Day weekend.  I expect that our days will be filled and our evenings exhausted.  But I’ll try to post pictures later.

Today is Justin’s birthday (Happy Birthday, love!) and I expect that I’ll be baking a cake and going out to dinner and not really available to sit down and write to all of you.  So I’m writing this up now.  Unfortunately, I don’t have a whole lot to talk about.

But do you know how confusing it is sometimes to have his birthday the day after Nathan’s?  My whole life, there’s been a birthday on November 9th.  So when I think of November birthdays, my brain automatically fills in the blanks as 11/9.  When people ask my husband’s birthday, a lot of times it comes out as “November 9th, 19## . . . no, wait!  November 10th.  Yeah.  The 10th.”  I’m getting better about it, but it’s taken some mental acrobatics.

And speaking of mental, I’m feeling a lot better today compared to yesterday.  There’s a lingering shadow of a headache, but I’m ignoring it.  Seems to be working pretty well.

And now my lunch break is over and it’s time to get back to work.

Today, I had low-level anxiety about everything and nothing at all and it was so frustrating because it made no sense.  I made it until 4:00 and then the headache that had lingered all day started pounding and I went home and curled up in bed for a couple hours.

But I felt better after my nap and I finished the bizarre movie I started yesterday (Ink – it was actually quite good, but definitely bizarre (and the first few words are the F-bomb shouted really loud, so that was surprising, but it wasn’t a recurring thing)), ate dinner with Justin, watched NCIS, and had a really wonderful conversation with Nathan when I called to wish him a happy birthday.  And I made a surprisingly yummy dessert.

So apparently food pictures are the theme lately, but I didn’t take any photos.  I’ll tell you all about it through, and then I’m going to bed.

I took 2 apples, pealed, cored, and sliced (thin slices that I cut in half again) and two little 2-cup Pyrex bowls.  And then I followed the Apple Pie by Grandma Ople recipe from AllRecipes.com, cut down for 2 apples.  So I melted 2 tablespoons of sweet, unsalted butter in a pan, added 2 1/2 tablespoons of flour to that to make a paste, and then added 1 tablespoon of water, 2 tablespoons of white sugar, 2 packed tablespoons of brown sugar, and a dash of cinnamon and nutmeg.  I brought it to a boil, and then let it simmer while I took a package of Pillsbury crescent rolls and put them in the Pyrex bowls so the wide side of the triangle was at the bottom and the thin points folded over the side of the bowl like a flower.   I then put the apples in the crusts and, while the recipe says to pour the melted sugar mix over the lattice of the crust, I wasn’t sure that would work for rolls, so I spooned it right onto the apples and folded the crust over top.

The rolls say to cook them for, I think, 15 minutes at 350, so when I checked them at that time, the top of the pie-puffs were nice and brown, but I could see that the parts in the bowl were still not cooked.  So I put foil over the tops and let them cook for probably another 15 minutes.  I forget how long it was.  I just kept looking until the rolls inside the bowls were nice golden brown — putting the foil on top was definitely a good idea because they wouldn’t have gotten much too dark otherwise.  I took them out, gave them a poke to make sure the apples were done, and let them cool.  They were totally cool by the time we were ready to eat them, but a quick nuke took care of that.  We actually cut one in half, put the halves in bowls with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream, and ate it that way, just because we weren’t sure if the roll was going to work.  Also, because they’re huge.  (Still, can you guess who’s not on her diet?)

It was surprisingly good!  And not terribly difficult to put together.  I was surprised about melting the ingredients together on the stove, but it was really, really good.  I used my Pampered Chef spatula that resists heat and it worked excellently for that.  The Pyrex bowls were the prefect size, and obviously oven safe.  And while it just didn’t seem like crescent rolls were going to be the right choice for the crusts, they worked out really well.

So there you go!

Happy birthday, Nathan!

And I was doing pretty well for the first several months.  I had one month where I read a really short book in an afternoon in order to meet the goal, but I was keeping up.  I was doing well!  It felt good.

And then I picked up Iron Council and things s-l-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-w-e-d down.  Way down.  Like, holy buckets, am I ever going to make it through this thing?!

Part of my problem was that I tried reading the Oxford English dictionary at the same time as reading the book.  It’s one of the wonderful, and difficult, things China Mieville.  He uses words I don’t know!  LOTS of words I don’t know.  I’ve never heard of these words and I might be able to figure out what they mean contextually, but IT’S WORDS I DON’T KNOW!  And I should!  So I’d write them down if I didn’t have a dictionary nearby.  Or I’d read with a dictionary on my lap and stop and look up words I didn’t know.  Sometimes, I’d stop six or seven times on a SINGLE PAGE.*

It was slow.  And frustrating.  And a little uncomfortable because my dictionary is really big with sharp corners.**

So I finally just gave up and just started skipping the words I didn’t know just so I could finally make it through the whole book.  Which I finally did on Sunday.

I started the book on our trip up north for the Barnett Reunion.  At the very beginning of July.  It took me until the end of October to finish it.  That’s 4 months!  This book went to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Florida, and all the states between South Carolina and Pennsylvania and back.

That’s a lot of mileage for a book.  I really wish I could say I enjoyed it more.

So, I missed my goal of reading a book each month because of that one taking me so forever long to finish.  Which means I need to switch up my goal a little bit:  instead of reading one each month, I will read one FOR each month – meaning I’ll finish 12 before the end of the year (and my year starts and ends on my birthday, BTW).  So, I have to catch up on a few month’s worth of books, but I can still make my goal by reading 12 total.

So on Sunday, after finishing Iron Council, I picked up the book for the book club meeting on Saturday, The  Hunger Games, and got a few pages in, just to whet my appetite.

And then I read it at lunch on Monday, and in bed on Monday before bed, and again at lunch yesterday, and then I sat there, wishing I could read all afternoon while sitting at my desk.  So last night I sat and read the whole rest of the book.  It’s a much shorter book.  Much easier to read.  I read it in two days. (Also, got me much more emotionally involved.  I enjoyed this book a lot more than Iron Council.)

And I think I might hold off to start anything new until after the book club meeting just so I can keep the characters and story fresh in my mind, but it was really fun – sitting down and inhaling a book that quickly.  It reminded me of why I used to put my book under the mattress of my bunk bed in college.  Because my roommate could see it there (she was on the lower bunk) and help make sure I was actually doing my homework instead of reading all night long.  Because I would.  I did it many times.  The next day was almost always awful.

Anyway, that’s what I was doing last night, instead of baking cookies or calling Sara, whose birthday was yesterday and who I thought about calling all day long until I got swallowed up by that book.  (Sorry, Sara!  Happy Birthday!!)  I got to bed around 11:30.  This morning was rough.

I think I’ll read Dawn of the Dreadfuls next.  Sounds like a great book to read on Sunday.

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* This really makes me want an e-book reader with built-in dictionary.  This would go so much faster!!

** E-book reader also so much lighter!