Midget On The Edge

It snowed like crazy today. We had to cancel our yard sale for Saturday for the third week in a row. The snow was pretty much guaranteed, as it was coming from the gulf. It started around 3:30pm and I was driving in it until I got to my parents’ house to dog sit at 7:30 (errands, having to drive 30 mph on the interstate). The snow is lovely, not like the ice we’ve had the past few weeks. It is perfect, fluffy, beautiful glittering snow.

I spent the third night since getting married without Kyle (first two, I was on a business trip). He had to stay home with our animals, and it would have been too dangerous for him to try to come to my parents’.

The upside is that I got to watch the Olympics opening ceremonies. At home, we don’t have cable and I’d have missed it.

I know, this photo doesn’t technically have me in it, but trying to get a creative photo of me every day is starting to rack my nerves.

Kyle’s hand is on the left, mine on the right.

After a frigid morning alone at my parents (I was snowed in while dog-sitting), Dad arrived just in time to sand the driveway so I could leave. When I got home, Kyle and I went on a nice walk with the dog, and then I played with the girls outside for a few hours. When I couldn’t feel my feet, I returned home. Matt came over and we watched Moon, and Zombieland, both awesome movies.

Valentine’s Day. Horrible shot, but I didn’t care to spend 10 minutes trying to get it right. I just wanted some shot of us. :)

We went grocery shopping and spent a lot of money on healthy things. While eating dinner after cooking together, we watched Australia.

I took a lot of photos like this that I liked, and couldn’t decide which one to use.

I loved the shoes I wore, but didn’t like any of the shots I got with them included.

Monday was a good day; I stayed busy with work, got my allergy shots, then watched some stuff at home on Hulu until I fell asleep. I had a pretty bad dream until Kyle got home, but nothing too serious.

An awesome day at work.

I was due to go to the eye doctor at 4, but they asked if I could come in early. My boss said it was fine, but assured me that I wouldn’t be able to come back since they were dilating my eyes. I took all of my stuff with me not believing them (I hadn’t had my eyes dilated in a few years, so I forgot what it was like), but she was right. I couldn’t see jack. The light everywhere was terrible (love the funny roll-up sunglasses they give you, seen in the picture), and anything close to my face was blurry. My eyes looked pretty creepy all the way until I went to bed.

But I ordered some awesome glasses and can’t wait to get them next week. Back to the cute thick glasses that I liked before. I love my wire rims, but I think thick ones suit me better.

I turned 24 today. They day pretty much rocked for the most part. Everyone at work remembered, Kyle took me out to lunch, and I spent the evening with Heidi, Clay and Bryan playing Gin/Rummy. I pretty much laughed until my gut hurt. :)

I love potatoes. My favorite way to prepare them is making mashed potatoes, but it’s not always necessarily the complicated use-the-mixer kind. Most of the time, I just boil them until they are soft and then mash them up with a fork, adding only butter, salt and pepper. If I’m feeling crafty, I’ll add broccoli and cheese, too.

I had an emotional epiphany today. Not a good one, but it’s the first day of seeking out answers and suggestions for change. I only heard back from one friend, who gave me a fantastic idea.

This is a terrible photo (Kyle doesn’t know how to use my camera very well, and the shutter speed was super slow because of the light) but I love it. We had a huge company dinner put on by one of our sponsors for all the clients we had in town for training (21 of them). We do this every time clients are here for training every 2 or 3 months. This is Renato’s and the alcohol and food flows endlessly.

The guy seen here was the representative of the company who paid for it all. He was drunk before he even got to the restaurant, and was entertaining all night long. Kyle joined me for the first time (normally he gets my leftovers) and had a blast. Our table was the loudest and funnest; my face hurt the whole time from laughing.

Today, I got my birthday present in the mail, even though my birthday isn’t for a couple weeks (the 17th). I found what I wanted and went ahead and ordered it since it would make a DRASTIC improvement on my 365 photos. I had no idea what I was getting could be gotten at such a low price.

I ordered a package deal for my camera on Amazon: a wireless remote, a tripod, and a free cleaning cloth. With shipping it was all under $40. I was so thrilled! I wanted a ukulele, thanks to Ashling, but I want to have enough money to get a nice one, and we’re trying to save money right now, so that shall come later. Until then, better photos, yay!

As for the day, it has been flooded everywhere, raining so hard since the previous night. I felt so cool in my cute galoshes all day until they started blistering my toes. I also had to go to Sam’s Club for work, and got soaked. All the stuff I bought got soaked (and several items fell off my cart on my way to my car, plunging into puddles), which soaked the insides of my car. I was very grumpy until I got home and opened my camera package.

Saturday, Kyle and I spent the morning playing Nintendo until we got a phone call about a birthday party for the kids. We spent some time at Barnes & Noble until we had to get to the party, which went well. It was a little stressful for me for a few reasons, but I was proud of how I handled myself.

When we got home, Kyle popped in “Stranger than Fiction” which is now one of my favorite movies. :)

I was trying to mimic the case, but Will Ferrel looks a little more frustrated than I do. I look like a chicken staring at the sky in a rain storm.

Sunday, Kyle and I rolled out of bed for church. We got there at the same time as his sister and the kids, so we sat in the balcony (no one pew (pew pew) had enough room for all of us).

After church, Kyle’s parents took us out to lunch, then we went to my parents house for a short while. They are giving us a coffee table for the new place, but the glass on the top needs to be be replaced, so we measured it so I could get pricing this week. Then we shopped around for a TV stand at a couple thrift stores with no luck. Once home, we spent the afternoon taking pictures of all of Kyle’s Star Wars stuff to sell, as well as a couch and 2 coffee tables.

Our house is so cold; I can’t wait to get into the smaller apartment where it will be warm. I pretty much change into pajamas and my hoodie as soon as I get home. I got my allergy shots today, so I got home earlier than usual. I spent the evening clipping coupons and watching shows on Hulu until I fell asleep. I got just the right amount of sleep, as I had plenty of energy when Kyle got home to cook him dinner.

It’s a slow process, but the acne that has randomly been on my face for a few months is going away. Yay!

I know it’s silly to most, but I love to be organized. At work, I use one particular steno pad to take phone messages and random notes; it’s usually right at my fingertips anytime I need to write something down. Well, I’ve had my steno notebook since March 08 and it’s finally time to retire it. I technically still have a few pages left in it, but it got rained on really bad last week while I was running my errands and the remaining pages are pretty useless.

I had such an eventful day, and this photo doesn’t represent it very much at all.

I called my grandmother and made sure she was going to be home after I got off work, and she was. She was thrilled to hear from me and said it made her day that I wanted to see her. I have been putting off seeing her for a few reasons. I knew I’d never go if I didn’t just force myself to call her. It was absolutely wonderful. I look forward to many more visits.

After I left her house, my friend Clay called and wanted to hang out. I met him and Heidi at Barnes & Noble where we played cards until the store closed.

This photo was an afterthought. I realized while I was in bed that I hadn’t take a 365 photo. I wanted to at my grandmother’s but felt silly and embarrassed. Kyle grabbed my camera and we spent the next half hour in giggles.

A buyer from an hour and a half away wanted a small lot of our Star Wars figures that Kyle listed on Craigslist. I agreed to meet her in Greenville, half way, to make the trade. Greenville is also the half-way point between me and Billy, so we decided to hang out and make it an evening. At some point, we decided to race to Starbucks on Pelham; loser had to buy the drinks.

He got there 3 minutes before me, despite the fact the he lives farther away. Traffic from Spartanburg to Greenville is always worse, and I got stuck in it 3 miles from the exit. We ended up having dinner after I sold the Star Wars stuff, and then sat in the car making fun of the music on my iPod.

All day, the big S word came up in conversation. Weather.com kept going back and forth between snow starting at 9, or midnight, or 3AM…For once, it started EARLIER than they predicted, and flurries started falling downtown around 4:30. One I was done grocery shopping, there was a little more, and when I got home, it was full blown snow.

Today, I did my first big grocery trip based solely around coupons and sales instead of just getting things we need. I’m really pushing myself to get into this instead of using coupons here and there so we’ll have more money to pay off bills and move.

I spent just over $120 but saved over $80 between sales and coupons. I’m so proud, and can’t wait to see those numbers reverse.

All night, it snowed and iced over so that our road was impossible to travel on. It’s pretty steep, and any attempt to leave would have been futile. At the crack of dawn, the nieces and nephews were sledding, so we joined in near dinner time. We had planned to have a yard sale as part of our downsizing, but obviously it didn’t happen. We spent most of the day playing No More Heroes 2 until the kids coaxed us to join them. It was SO much fun!

Matt came over later and went sledding with us. When his truck slid several feet down our driveway, he moved it to level ground across the street and decided to stay the night.

On Sunday, Clay and Heidi came over for dinner. Our street was still bad for most of the day with cars struggling to leave, but the sun finally shined its rays on the pavement and it melted pretty quickly. I made a yummy white bean chili and bought a cake (that we didn’t eat!) and Clay and Heidi brought home made corn bread and a salad. It was delicious! Afterward, we played Cranium until after 10, and it was so much fun.

This is a sample of one of the activities. I was trying to draw without speaking or writing words and Kyle was trying to guess what action I was drawing. All my drawings looked like people getting molested. The word was “frisk.”

Copying Sara, I started knitting a very simply cover for the back of our toilet. I had never heard of it, and loved the idea; Sara’s looked so good! I didn’t have any yarn to match our shower curtain perfectly (the beige there sort of does, but I wanted more color in it) but that’s okay. I’m so excited to use this in the new apartment, and am still trying to decide if I should save it for the new place. :)

I am not a big fan of leftovers, but found myself happily chowing down on leftover chili and cornbread from dinner with Clay and Heidi.

Ice still covered a lot of the ground, and I spend the first few days of the week listening to city workers chipping away at the sidewalks. Our city is sooo not built for this.

Every couple of months, my company does a training session for three days where clients come from all over the US and Canada to learn about the shredding industry. The first night they are there, we have vast amounts of barbecue delivered to the brewery our company owns, RJ Rockers, and we serve them dinner. They eat and drink our beer and hopefully brag about it when they go home. It’s always fun.

For the first time, we had a vegetarian client, so I had to get some food for him elsewhere because the only thing he could eat was the coleslaw (which is all I ever nibble on). This gave me an excuse to ask for some other food myself, and I was permitted to get some Thai food for both me and the client. Yay!

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Fridays are my errand days at work. My boss gave me the keys to the available apartment so I could meet Kyle there to look at it. We loved it. It’s smaller than our house, but we were planning on downgrading majorly for Savannah anyway. The apartment needs a few minor repairs, but once the carpet is cleaned, they are going to let us start moving stuff in, although we won’t be living there yet. Move-in looks like March 20-21 (our current landlord required a 2 month notice).

We had lunch at a local Thai place and made a list of furniture we are keeping and a list that we need to sell. We hope to have a yard sale next Saturday to sell some other random stuff from around the house. I spent the evening measuring furniture to see what we could keep, listing stuff on craigslist, and posting stuff on Freecycle to get rid of.

Kyle and I spent the afternoon working on our laptops before heading to Clemson to hang out with Billy for a party he was having. Half the time we were there, we played Super Mario Bros Wii in his basement while he greeted party guests. We couldn’t stay long, besides hanging out while preparing for the party, because Molly was at home and would have left a big mess if we left her in the house alone all night. I drove Billy’s new car around Clemson and reveled in driving a manual transmission again.

Sunday was a relaxing day once we got into the afternoon. We went to church and lunch with Kyle’s parents, and then headed to their house so his mom could cut his hair. After that, we rushed home because someone was due to pick up our recliner and a coffee table. The recliner guy was late, but very nice and let me know ahead of time. The coffee table people vanished off the face of the earth. Never heard from them again. Oh well.

Kyle read a comic while I colored in one of my Hello Kitty coloring books until we heard from Wiggy. She met us at Barnes & Noble in the monsoon and we hung out for a few hours, knitting and catching up. I miss her.

When I got home after work, allergy shots, and a random drug test, I was exhausted. I chowed on some fast food, caught up on Scrubs episodes on Hulu, and then passed the heck out. I woke up long enough when Kyle got home to fix him dinner and then I was pretty much out again.

I didn’t react to my shots this week. Because of the bad reaction last week, they pushed me back 1/3 of the progress I’d made…

I finally started playing WiiFit again today. All of our previous data (when I first got the game) has been lost because the Wii was repaired at the beginning of last year. It was nice to start over, and not even see what I weighed last time I played.

I’m on a mission to regain my self-confidence. Much of it has been lost over the last year, and I miss it. This is the first step that I know to take.

I finished my first fingerless glove today after work.

I did nothing at work all day. Nothing. Tuesday, a virus showed up on my computer. It shut my computer down twice in 3 hours, and our IT guy did his work. I thought he got it all, although IE was corrupted but I never used it anyway. Wednesday morning, my computer shut down 4 times in an hour. The IT guy worked on it for a few hours before giving up. Our company was due to get new computers within a month, so they went ahead and brought mine in an totally replaced my computer because they couldn’t fix it. Because of the company server and all the programs I use at work, it took the whole rest of the day to set it up. I took the IT guy out lunch for fixing Kyle’s laptop a few weeks ago. Chris is my favorite. :)

The surprise about my new computer at work is that it came with a 22 inch monitor!! Heck YES. And soon, next time the IT guys come by, they are hooking up my old monitor so I’ll have dual screens.

Windows 7 is amaaaazing. I even like the new IE! I haven’t redownloaded FF yet. :)

Today rocked. About time I had a damn good day.

I came up with a great idea for a photography project, the weather was wonderful, I was expecting Sara to get her package this afternoon, and I reconnected with an old friend who wants to hang out more often. Yay! Bad news came in the evening, however, when trouble with Sara’s package ensued.

Kyle and I watched The Princess Bride and did a lot of work on our laptops. Because neither of us felt well, Kyle worked on his website and I played around with a new site that I joined. I have lived a pretty long online life and have made a handful of Friends. Friday night, I learned of a site created that had a handful of our old online friends. The site was down, though, and I couldn’t join until Saturday. I spent all day on it.

We stayed out of church because I woke up with a migraine both Saturday and Sunday, and Kyle came down with a pretty terrible cold. We laid around and played video games. I played with the kitty. <3

Today was a rough day. After work, I got my allergy shots and had a terrible reaction. First of all, my right arm here wouldn’t stop bleeding. After 15 minutes in the waiting room after I got my shot (you have to wait 30 minutes afterward to see if you react. Standard procedure) I started wheezing. I didn’t freak out and decided to see if it would go away. It didn’t, so I told a nurse when it got really hard for me to breath. My doctor freaked out and took me to the back to give me a shot of adrenaline. He said everything would be fine in 2-3 minutes, although I’d feel jittery and nervous and I should lay down if I feel like I’m going to pass out. Luckily, that didn’t happen, but the wheezing didn’t stop either. After 15 minutes, they made me use an inhaler and everything was fine. I was jittery for another hour and felt miserable the rest of the night.

Kyle came home sick from work. He thought he was fine, but felt terrible as soon as he started doing manual work. Matt picked up Jagermeister, shot glasses and Super Mario Brothers Wii for us as a belated Christmas gift and came over after he left work early, too. We all played Mario for a while, and they played drinking chess after I went to bed.

(this photo is best viewed larger!)

I was craving Chinese food at lunch, so I grabbed some stuff and took it home to eat with Kyle. I hadn’t had Chinese food in probably over a year since I went vegetarian. This was my fortune. I think it’s one of my favorites.

While waiting on my Chinese food, I found a favorite store. It’s a resale store with really good clothing in it. They frequently run sales, and their prices aren’t that bad to begin with. I hope to be able to buy some new clothes soon since most of mine are too big.

I got a great idea from a co-worker to knit leg warmers. I currently wear soccer socks because I get so cold, but leg warmers would be a nice alternative. Instead of wearing the same 2-3 pairs of soccer socks all Winter, I can wear my ankle socks with some knitted leg warmers. I had no idea how many stitches to cast on, so I just made stuff up (I didn’t look up a pattern). They looked too small for my leg, but since I knitted them with a ribbing pattern, they stretch a lot and do actually fit my legs. I can’t decide if I’ll make these arm warmers or leg warmers.

Today, Kyle and I decided to move into a smaller apartment.

While talking with him on my lunch hour, I decided that I wanted to pay off some loans before moving to Savannah. One of them has an astronomical interest rate and I’d rather not have to worry about it. When we talked about this for a while, he suggested us finding a cheaper, smaller place in town. I loved the idea, hoping we could find a good place. My company has some apartments and duplexes around town, so I asked my boss, and they had one open that would save us nearly $300 a month in rent and utilities. All that extra money will go towards paying off loans, with a handful going into savings. Once they are paid, all the money will go into savings for Savannah.

I’m very proud of myself.

Sara made my night even better with a sweet email thanking us for the package that they finally received on Tuesday.

My brother was in town from school. He and his girlfriend were starving when I got off work, so we went to Wild Wings. I just had a beer and some fries while they ate dinner. Our server was quite a character and left us many inside jokes to use throughout the rest of our lives.

I organized the craft room some, painted half of the green stripes left in the dining room, and cooked a wonderful breakfast. After some Halo and Rune Factory Frontier, I passed out for an hour while Kyle took Molly for a walk. Our internet (or my SIL’s internet, rather, that she lets us use) hasn’t been working for a couple of days now. We spent the evening at Panera bread so websites and photos could be updated.

We bought a rug. It is huge and gorgeous and takes up the floor of the entire front part of the living room. It was only $100 at the flea market, of which we went after church and lunch to look for more of Kyle’s crazy art magazines (they didn’t have any). This rug was hanging up and I fell in love. It still smells brand new. The carpet in the house we live in is pretty gross, so it’s nice to have our feet freed from at least one room of gross carpet.

I like that I got all of our feet in the photo, except the kitty’s. The kitty was outside.

I got some bins for the cat and dog food, and took great joy in labeling them. The dining room is finally done, and now organization stage is in full swing. It makes me very happy and helps keep my mind off other things.

I was exhausted today. I ended up falling asleep shortly after I got home, so hard that I didn’t hear my phone at all throughout the messages and phone calls I got for 3 hours. I purposely didn’t go to my knitting group for the first time since we started it last year.

Today was a very, very emotional day. Not only did I inadvertently cause a confrontation for one of my best friends, but I had a very rough exchange with someone else. I was in tears for 2 hours at work after being accused of being such a hateful person. The whole thing was supposedly resolved, but I feel little closure yet.

Kyle’s computer has been infected with a trojan virus this week. When I couldn’t fix it, I got in touch with Chris, one of the guys who works for the IT company that services my company. Their office is right up the street, so he came by when I got home and worked his magic. Rough emotional day. My brain is still recovering and deciding how it feels from recent events.

Kyle took this photo. Bless his heart, he tries to get it focused right. :P