i'm very delighted to be spending next week at home. what i'm not delighted about is the fact that since thanksgiving i've devoted a significant portion of my free time, which is limited as is, to much curling and christmas shopping/decorating/baking and other such nonsense. i'm wondering why there's only 3 days left until christmas and wondering why i haven't seen a hollidazzle light parade, sipped hot cocoa after ice skating, had people over for a holiday carol or two by the fire? i guess i know why, i just wished i had done it.
i'm heading home on saturday morning. my mother thinks i'll be there in time for cheese sandwiches and such at the tavern downtown. she calls this down time. what it really is - an excuse to do nothing but gossip and pretend we've got nothing to do. the curling club and some of the curlers are expecting to have some holiday festivities tomorrow night and since i'm not off the ice until 11 i can't imagine that i'll be home early. i could be, but this will be my frist chance to actually embrace christmas and i'm actually very excited about it. and with just enough sleep i'll hopefully make it home for lunch saturday. i'll do my best. even if means gunning down a reindeer on the interstate, because frankly, this down time is way overdue.
saturday night i got pulled over a little after 11pm. i had 3 intoxicated friends with me and some pretty serious anxiety as my history with the law is not something we laugh about at the family reunions. i was doing nothing wrong but the police ran my plates anyways and when he asked me to step out of the car i felt sure that this was not going to end well though i couldn't imagine what the problem was. apparently in MN, if you have unpaid parking tickets - for which i have ONE - they will suspend your license. i admitted to the kind man that i am sure i received some notice but i likely disregarded as a reminder to pay the $45 parking ticket issued to me on a saturday night i 'stopped in' to the office for 3 hours and forgot to plug the meter. i had no idea MN did this. neither did my other pals from the west coast - the land where parking tickets multiply and eventually they just boot your car because your delinquent ass has so many of them it would take a very large portion of your salary to pay. even if you paid them on time. for in CA, especially San Francisco, parking is just not easy. i think they understand this. they are forgiving of this to some extent. so i pulled my car over and stayed at my friends and now I need to figure out how much these tickets are going to cost me in order to drive home for christmas.
just another very expensive lesson learned.
despite whatever's been going on in my life i can usually say that during the christmas season i am the most pleasant i can be. this is both because i do believe that santa is watching and because i love the shift in everyones elses attitude. things that would piss a user off any other time of the year is quite promptly responded to with a 'that's ok! have a joyous holiday season' and bracing myself for the standard reaction is no longer necessary. i need to remember to enjoy this time of year even with everything that i'm struggling with. so yes, i'm still working on my holiday cheer, but i've had some delightful liberace christmas playing at work, roger whitaker christmas in the car, and the 101 symphony strings christmas in the player at home. i will get there. even if i have to cram it down my throat and top it with a bow.
throw them at other people. you'll feel better.
rather than head to my aunts house to hang out at her bar, look at her pretty decorations, gossip, smoke, drink, and make pies i'm at work. thanksgiving at my aunts starts pretty early that day so i'll be one of those cars blazing down the interstate at 6 a.m. trying to get to a place that's close to 3.5 hrs away before the coffee is drained and the breakfast put away. i could leave after work tonight but i did that last year and i decided that going east towards wisconsin on any holiday is pure hell. maybe it's not if you leave before noon, but that's not going to happen. if my aunt ever moves to south dakota then i'll reconsider driving the day before.
i almost don't mind being at work today. i haven't even cringed over the fact that we already know this coming weekend will be a working weekend. nope, the weekend was that good.
saturday afternoon i met my aunt and uncle and did some shopping. after the exercise in 'how many people can you wish were dead at once' in the basement of macy's we three toted their newly purchased christmas items to the hotel. it was as we were about to turn the corner to the Mariott that two busses with a police escort came by that 2 lightbulbs went on (my aunts and uncles - never mine) and i started running as though i were a convict on parole heading to the nearest bar. the busses were just opening their doors as i watched the entire green bay packer team decend upon us and then there was brett. i screamed and jumped and waved and told him to have a great game and his response was a nod and half-smile directly to me. we were allowed to enter the hotel because, well, my aunt and uncle were guests there. as i stood and waited for an elevator, just a mere 10 feet from brett i felt ridiculously happy and knew this was a sign that we'd win the big game. the battle of the borders. we did win which was such a bonus from spending two minutes in the same room with brett favre. my mother of course has been telling everyone i spent the afternoon with him.
my mom has that on a magnet at home. i often have that dream. and then i wake up and it's not.
last sunday i did a massive amount of laundry - most of it i made it's way back into closets and drawers. Except the towels. those ended up in a massive pile, clean pile, in the basement and have remained there. i decided to deal with the issue and downstairs i went last night. and they were gone. the basement was empty and i immediately checked the window that i broke into a few weeks ago when the keys were stolen (btw, the guy returned them!) and the window was still in tact. i was puzzled. who breaks into someones house and steals towels anyways? i went upstairs to the linen closet and they were all neatly folded right where they should be. again. puzzled. i dreamt the other night that i folded a ton of laundry but i swear to god it was a dream. unless i've taken up housecleaning in my sleep which would be great - especially if i woke up fully rested!
yesterday took on a new meaning for 'delivered by the end of the day' as we finally fixed several buggy things in our application that had to be done before sending off to for everyones review. things were fixed and QA'd and at 10:45PM i sent email with access information and detailed updates - the deliverable had the 11/6 date on it. even taking eastern time into consideration we delivered on 11/6.
so in my head - we rock.
saturday i spent the entire day at the office working on documentation and serving as a filter for some angry co-workers in need of venting and then on sunday i worked again. working most of the weekend destroys any sense of life outside of the office and at the same time protects me from feeling neglected by my friends that work weekends and nights or who have boyfriends and families, etc. i tend to get pouty when i'm ignored but at this time - i've been ignoring just about everyone. i've been receiving some whiney messages saying so.
i also spent some of sunday cleaning gutters. i've known i've had to do this for awhile and in my head the task was fairly simple. big extention ladder up, climb, dig out stuff, move down 5 feet and repeat. what my head forgot to consider was that my yard is not level and ladders are scary enough without one foot planted directly 2 inches higher than the other. after much considering, planning, and working i finally finished the whole thing in under 2 hours. still. with every climb up and down, i feared for my life. now that i know i am independant enough to actually accomplish the job... i never need to do it again.
there were winter frost advisories all over the weather last night and this morning on my msn.com i finally gave in and click on some article about preparing your house for winter. i figured this couldn't be too difficult - it's a house, it has windows and doors and you close it all up nice and tight and maybe even put some of that plastic stuff around the older (yet to be replaced) windows and voila you are ready for winter.
am i ever right?
this article discusses the urgency behind insulation and how to measure whether i should add more to what's already in the attic. it reminds me to check for leaking anything (how exactly is still not clear) and to bundle up any pipes that might get cold - like i bundle myself up at night? i had the part about the cleaning of the gutters already listed as a 'to do' some weekend only because there's an ugly little water spot in my kitchen from where an ice dam had caused some damage many years ago. this has been repaired and it was decent of the previous owners to leave the ice shovel should we experience a heavy snowfall (or should i say when...) so i'm prepared. so i have all these other things to do and i'm still terrified of what my first energy bill is going to look like now that i keep the thermostat firmly between 58 - 62 degrees around the clock but hopefully it won't be as bad once i have my whole house all ready for winter... right?
and all this time i'm reading about preparing my house and wondering what it all means when it finally came to me: this winter i won't have to harass the landlord to up the heat just a titch because my dog won't stop shivering and i can see my breath while watching t.v. no no no! this year, i can walk down the hall and bump the heat up the real high, pretend i'm hawaii and hope like hell centerpoint takes Visa.
my weekly to do list is long. too long for a normal work week and this is kind of amusing to me considering that we're going to an online work tracking program where we enter in the time spent doing X amount of work and when they said that they anticipate 35hr work weeks i first was angry and then i realized they're going to have to finally acknowledge just how much work we do around here. put my time into hours - sure - then try telling me that i shouldn't complain.
i spent a lovely weekend at home - arrived at the nephews birthday party around 9 friday night. this was a bad time. the birthday boy was jacked up on so much sugar that at one point he just stood in the middle of the living room and screamed. not because he was upset, angry, scared... i just don't think he had any idea how to handle that kind of energy. i imagine the same thing would've happened if someone gave him 8 lines of cocaine and then told him Not To Do Anything and he might've lasted maybe 12 seconds trying to figure out how to funnel THAT kind of ENERGY into nothing before exploding. it was piercing and i hope they never give him sugar again.
the rest of the weekend was spent with my mom working on crafts. i painted a snowman on a window that turned out very cute and we worked on her window boxes and i put together a fall basket of fake flowers and autumn colored leaves to put on Emilies grave. we watched some horrible movies and i got to cuddle with my dog and sleep in. i never got dressed on sunday and drove home after the packer game only to crawl in bed and ignore all the unpacking. my car was packed with good stuff from home. totally worth the 10hrs spent driving.
