The Haps

Not too much going on lately.  I got out of my funk – as expected.  With the freezing cold weather, I’ve had kind of a weird working arrangement.  On Wed, I worked from home, not because I couldn’t have gotten to work if I tried, but more because by the time I was getting everything dug out (I park outside) and would then change (cause of traipsing through 4+ inches of drifting snow, my pants were wet from about mid-calf down) and drive slowly to work, I’d have been to work SO late.  On Thurs, I did go to work in the freezing cold – I had meetings.  On Fri, I stayed home because my supervisor told us all to work from home and stay out of the cold.

I had a baby shower to attend in Chicago on Sat.  I had originally tried to go up on Saturday morning, go to the shower, then hang out that night and come back Sun, but that didn’t end up working out for the person I was staying with, so I drove up Fri night and came back Sat after the shower.  It was just starting to snow in the Chicago area when I left, so I called Mr. B to find out what the roads were like before I took off.  He said there was a little snow starting in Chicago, and nothing the rest of the way, so I decided to come home instead of finding a place to crash.

Just south of Joliet, I ran into some idiot guys.  They were hanging out in the left lane, and when I finally gave up and went to pass them on the right, they sped up to match.  I then got stuck behind a car and had to slow down behind them.  They then dropped down to about 60 in the 65 and hung out there.  By the time we finally got around the car, they sped back up where I couldn’t get around them.  This went on continually, ticking off another car that ended up behind us, until I finally gave up and just slowed way down.  That time, they finally just went past me and the guy in the passenger’s seat opened the window, leaned out and blew me a kiss.  If I’d have been closer and it wasn’t already dark out, I’d have flipped them off.

Just after I got rid of them, there were a bunch of police and fire trucks off the side of the road.  When slowing down, I realized the roads were pretty icy and it turned out there was a camper and two cars in the ditch.  Slowed things down to about 45 mph on the interstate.  I called Mr. B again to get an update and he couldn’t find anything anywhere about any weather or bad roads through there.  It ended up lasting for about 30 miles or so, which was very not fun.  I ended up seeing at least 10 cars in the ditch between both directions of the interstate.  Luckily, the jerks in front of me had stopped messing around. The rest of the trip home was uneventful.

Then I tried to just spend the rest of the weekend being lazy.  I did end up getting a haircut yesterday, and then Mr. B and I went out shopping.  I’m trying to find a new swimsuit since both of my others are pretty worn out, and I want to get one while there’s still a good mix-and-match selection.  The stores that did have them out before Christmas no longer had them out.  And the ones that still did have theirs out really didn’t have much of any selection.  The only thing we could think was they put some out before the holidays for the people who are traveling to the warmer states for the holidays and then pulled them all back until a few weeks from now when they really start pushing them. I’m just going to be keeping my eye out for now.

What I did on my winter vacation

Ya know, I much prefer summer vacations.  Can we move some of the freebie vacation days there?  No?  Well, then I guess it’s just winter vacation stories. Had quite a range of activities this holiday break.  Here’s a few highlights:

• Went shopping with Mr. B’s mom to pick my Christmas presents.
• Went to Mr. B’s work Christmas party and then got to take care of Mr. B for an hour or so while he worshiped the porcelain god.
• Got a call from work that big news was coming the next day and I needed to log in and check out the e-mails.  Checked e-mail at the appropriate time.  Was then called into work about 30 min later to make an emergency change.  Was called later that day to make sure I had read the e-mail and all the other supporting documentation in detail.
• Went to dinner with a group of friends.
• Caught up on Tivo’d shows.
• Spent Christmas Eve with my family.
• Spent Christmas morning with Mr. B’s family and Christmas evening with my family.
• Got a snow blower for Christmas from my parents.
• Drove through the near white-out stage fog to drop Mr. B’s car off at the shop.
• Hit the after-Christmas sales…hard.
• Went to lunch with a friend.
• Cleaned out most of my dresser and half of one closet.
• Drove up to Chicago to ring in the new year with a group of college friends.
• Read several books.  Bought several more.  Lost count of exactly how many.
• Watched several movies on DVD that we had purchased unseen based upon recommendations from friends.  Lost count of those too.
• Deflated and fixed the lights in the inflatable Santa car.
• Had dinner at Mr. B’s parents.
• Stayed up late and slept in later.
• Completely screwed up my sleeping schedule making the 1st couple days back to work slightly difficult.

If there was anything else, I’ve already forgotten.  Oh well…

Vacation is over

I’d just like to say that while I like my job, I really enjoyed being off the past 2+ weeks and I’m not really wanting to start the daily grind again tomorrow.  Who’s with me?

Happy New Year!

I’m a day late in posting, and so far, the New Year is kicking my butt.  After hanging out with some friends in Chicago to ring in the New Year, I couldn’t sleep pretty much at ALL.  Which kinda sucked.  Felt like I had downed some energy drinks and then tried to get to sleep.  My eyes were stuck open and my heart was racing.  I had a good time and all, but I don’t know what brought all that on, especially since I had been drinking Malibu mixed with juice all night, which wouldn’t have caused me to stay awake.  And I had stopped drinking a couple hours before I went to bed.  Oh well.

This morning I was woken up early (relative term – it was 9:30 but remember the no sleep the night before, so I was going for later) by Mr. B being annoying (a shock to those of you who know him, I’m sure), followed by Sylvia getting sick all over the floor in the bedroom.  Not really a way to start the new year.

On the positive side, the pups are now a year old.  Tag’s birthday was New Year’s Eve and Kyra’s birthday was New Year’s Day.  They’re growing out of puppyhood so fast.  For those keeping track – he’s about 75 lbs and she’s about 65 lbs, so they’ve been beyond puppy size for a while now, but still quite in the puppy playful stage.  Sylvia still doesn’t want anything to do with them, so we’re still working on that.  Our main obstacle is Kyra’s excitedness.  She sees Sylvia and runs over to greet her, which freaks poor Sylvia out.  Tag’s more calm, so we’ve tried a couple times to get them used to each other hoping that it will help her get used to them and also will keep Sylvia from feeling overwhelmed with both of them.

And I’m going to try to post more.  Still not completely defined on how much.  Certainly not a post a day, but anything’s gotta be an improvement on last year, so we’ll see how it goes.

Halloween Craziness

Halloween was interesting this year.  We went through an absolute ton of candy, and we weren’t even here the whole night. This was, however, the first year we didn’t run out of candy.

See, our neighborhood gets a lot of trick-or-treaters.  We’re a safe neighborhood just up the hill from a not quite as safe and logistically unfriendly neighborhood for trick-or-treating.  By logistically unfriendly, I mean not a lot of street lights, no sidewalks and not much shoulder on a decently busy road.

I’ve lived in this house for 6 years now, but moving in just before Halloween, I’ve now been through 7 Halloweens, and it’s been a madhouse every year.  The first year I was only home for a few minutes between work and other plans, and it was early in the night, so I didn’t see a lot of kids.  I had no clue what I was really in for here.

The second year, my parents were visiting, so we got what we thought was a normal amount of candy, but very quickly realized the amount of kids that showed up and were quickly out.  Even though the outside lights were off, because we’re under a streetlight and we did have lights on in the house, kids kept ringing the doorbell.  We eventually had to put a sign up saying “Sorry, we’re out of candy” because the doorbell was ringing every couple minutes and we couldn’t even eat dinner.

The third and fourth years, Mr. B was here.  We loaded up on candy and figured we had enough, but both years I ended up running to the store about 6:30-7 in order to buy more candy cause we were almost out, Mr. B seems to relish giving out candy and doesn’t want to turn off the lights, and we’d still get kids ringing the doorbell and making us feel bad that we didn’t have any candy left.

Two years ago, it was me and my dad, who had been living with me for a bit while he and Mom were attempting to move back to the area.  Mr. B was in class that night and missed out on it all.  Dad wasn’t feeling good and just stopped to pick us up some McDonald’s since cooking dinner doesn’t work out so well.  I barely got a chance to eat, though luckily I thought ahead and just got a salad so my food wasn’t sitting there getting cold.  But I was basically answering the door all night while he tried to sleep.  I think we ran out of candy about 7ish.

Last year, Mr. B and I were well prepared, but tt was really crazy year.  As cold as it was, everyone was driving kids around, so our normally quiet street was lined with parked cars and had a slow procession of cars driving through it. I think we just barely made it through the entire night with candy, but we started getting pretty stingy with how much was given out so we could make it through.  We generally like to give the kids a couple pieces of candy – more if it’s just the little gum and jawbreaker type.  This particular year, we started giving everyone one item for the bigger stuff, two for the little and still barely made it.

This year, we made sure we were going to have enough.  We went to the store and were pulling one of everything off the shelves, two if it was a 2-for-something without another matching one.  We ended up with the following pile of candy, which went straight into a tub downstairs to be hidden until Halloween.

• 40 oz Wonka Mixups variety pack (2)
• 35 oz Farm & Fleet Kiddie Treats (2) – the generic gum, jawbreakers, etc. mix
• 26 oz Tootsie Roll mix
• 13.3 oz Skittles fun size
• 13.3 oz Starburst fun size
• 12.5 oz 100 Grand fun size
• 11.5 oz Nestle Crunch fun size
• 11.5 oz Heath snack size
• 11.4 oz Caramel Twix fun size
• 11.18 oz Snickers fun size
• 11 oz Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup miniatures
• 10.78 oz Mr. Goodbar snack size
• 10.5 oz Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups snack size
• 10.5 oz Mike and Ike (2)
• 10.29 oz KitKat
• 10 oz Sweetarts

That’s 19 bags of candy totaling 334.25 oz, or approximately 20.9 lbs, sitting in a 12 gallon tub.

I actually got a little worried about having too much this year.  Just after we went to the store and bought all this candy, some friends suggested going to see a new movie on Halloween as this was about the only time we could get everyone together.  Everyone went along with going to a later dinner and movie so that we’d be able to get rid of some of this candy instead of having it around the house for next Halloween.

When I first got home from work, I was a little nervous.  It was already close to 6 and Mr. B said he had really just started seeing kids about 15 min before, and it wasn’t that busy.  We were planning on leaving around 7, so I was afraid this was going to be the one year we had a ton of candy, but no kids.  Shortly after I got home though, the crowds picked up with the normal steady stream of kids between 6:30 and 7.

It was nice enough we just sat on the front steps all night and saw a lot more costumes since they weren’t all covered up by winter coats.  It was kind of nice. And we actually had plenty of candy so we were giving a couple each, but we still had way more than we needed for missing the last hour, so by about 6:30 we were giving out small handfuls of candy.

Just before 7, I started getting the dogs back inside and in their kennels and the lights turned off so we could get going.  Our neighbor stopped by for a few min.  She had just moved in this year and hadn’t realized what a madhouse it is around here, so she ran out of candy early.  We hadn’t really seen her a lot in the recent weeks to warn her.  She said she and her family normally keep track of how many kids they get as a little contest and here she wasn’t even able to keep track.

At that point, it was time to go, but we still had a steady stream of kids and didn’t get another break until about 7:10, so we quickly turned off the lights and threw the candy inside and ducked out while we could.

So, what do we have left of all that candy?  A decent sized bowl full.  I got an estimated weight on the bathroom scale.  Seems we have around 2.5 lbs left.

If the weather is supposed to be somewhat nice again next year, we’re thinking of having a front yard party and inviting a bunch of friends to hang out and eat sandwiches and snacks in the front yard while the kids are all around.  Would be a good time, if anyone wanted to do it.  We tried to get that set up for this year as the pre-movie activities, but it didn’t really come together.