First morning alone.

Okay, so yes, I haven't been around quite as much as usual, but this story I just had to share. I seriously could not make this up if I tried. Leave it to me...

If you've been following my tweets, then you already know that John left again last night for Brazil. This time he'll be gone about 2 1/2 weeks. Now, why my first morning alone had to be so unusal, I haven't the slightest idea.

The morning started out pretty routine. Got up, let the dogs out, fed dogs, tried to go back to sleep...couldn't fall asleep so just laid in bed for an hour learning more stuff on my iPhone. Once my tummy started grumbling I decided I better go ahead and get up and start my day. Lots to do when you're the only one home! I went downstairs to get some breakfast. Thought I'd have some peanut butter toast...haven't had it in a while...sounded good. So I take my slice of bread and put it in the toaster. Get the peanut butter and stand and wait for the toast to pop up. Now, I've made toast/waffles plenty of times with said toaster. All the while with no incident. This morning however, said toaster had other plans. As I stand waiting, I turn around and talk to Cocoa who's laying on the kitchen floor. When the toast pops, it startles us both. I turn around to find an empty toaster.

Umm....

My toaster (which coincidentally sits on the edge of the counter right next to the fridge) has decided to completely pop the toast right up out of it. In which case it, of course, pops right over the edge of the counter and BEHIND THE REFRIGERATOR. Now, of course, I don't want toast growing old and moldy behind my fridge attracting bugs, so I struggle with the fridge to roll it out of way so I can get to the toast. Well, I can't get it all the way out so I wind up having to use a pair of tongs, while stretching as far as I can over the side of the counter around behind the fridge to rescue my escaped toast, which is now completely covered in dust and dog hair. Major, who has been watching intently this whole time, takes one look at my hairy toast on the way to the trash and decides it looks just mouthwatering. He takes a bite. Cocoa wants in on the action and before I know it, I'm standing in front of the trash can with an empty tongs. Eh...if the dogs think hairy toast is a treat, who am I to stand in the way.

So, at this point the story should be over. I did, however, still need to move the fridge back into its place. No prob, right? Rolled it out, just have to roll it back in. Well. Would have been no problem if the wheels on the darn thing hadn't gotten stuck in the grout line of the tile! So I start pushing and pushing and about knock the fridge right over. Just as I'm about to give up and am resolving myself to having the refrigerator sticking out into the walkway for 2 1/2 weeks until John can come home and move it, I finally get one corner to budge just enough to get one wheel out of the grout line. So with just a little more nudging, I get the other wheel out and am finally able to roll it back into place.

That toaster hadn't heard the last of me, yet. I DID have peanut butter toast for breakfast! (Though I did stick my knife over top of the toaster before it popped the toast this time...)

Priorities

Hello all! Happy Tuesday to you! I hope that today is finding you all very well. I’m doing pretty good myself. I think I finally got (almost) enough sleep last night. I didn’t wake up quite so groggy, though I did stay in bed about 15min. after my alarm went off. I was absolutely exhausted last night. We went to Pappasito’s for dinner with John’s mom, dad, his dad’s wife, and his brother for his brother’s 21^st birthday. We finished up about 8:30pm and I really just wanted to go straight home and go to bed, but his mom asked us to come back to her house for cake. So of course we did. I didn’t even have any cake. I was too full from dinner (of which I only ate half in the first place). (Go me on portion control!) Anywho…when we got there I laid on the couch for a few minutes then sat in the kitchen for a bit while they had cake. We ended up leaving there about 9:45pm and I slept the half hour home and went straight to bed when we finally got home. I’m sure some people might wonder, being as exhausted as I am, if I’m pregnant, but I’m pretty certain I’m not. With my hormonal challenges, and the fact I don’t want to spend a fortune on pregnancy tests, I decided maybe I’ll just wait for the tell-tale sore breasts as my indicator. Oh, please tell me that that’s a universal sign and everyone gets sore breasts when they get pregnant! I need something definitive! Ugh…why can’t I just be normal and wait for a missed period?

Wow…I got WAY off subject there! Sorry ‘bout that. I was actually meaning to talk about priorities today. My life priorities. We’ve been going through the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People during our weekly staff meetings. And we have a big discussion each week. It really is like a book club, I swear. But we talk about not just work related things, but also things in our own lives. A big principle in the book is balancing the four dimensions of your life: physical, spiritual, mental, social/emotional. While reading this, I was realizing that for a while I had been focusing mainly on work. I went to work, I went home, I slept, I went to work…  This caused me to not work out, gain weight, be unhappy, not hang out much with friends or family. Lately, however, I’ve been shifting my focus. I started working out, with friends even. I started cooking more to make healthier meals. I started thinking more about life outside of work rather than things that were happening at work. I basically started to realize that the priority in my life is NOT work. I’m becoming more family oriented. And especially with wanting to start a family soon, I want to be home preparing the house, and reading books, and checking out hospitals…  If I didn’t have to work anymore, I probably wouldn’t. Not because I don’t like working, but because it’s just not as important to me as other things, such as my family, my house, and my friends. And I think that this is causing me to be more distracted at work. I’d much rather be doing something more related to more important things in my life. I’m not giving the same effort as I used to and don’t do projects with as much gusto. I know it’s affecting my work, but I just can’t help it. I just don’t want to be here as much as I want to be at home doing things for my family. And I know that’s horrible…mostly for the fact that at this point in our lives I HAVE to be working. We need the income.

So for now, I’ll just have to keep forcing myself to come to work and be productive and hope that John gets a raise soon. :o)

Oh, BTW, John’s going back to Brazil on Sunday and won’t be back until Aug. 10^th…we leave for Iowa on Aug. 12^th! Will the madness never end??

Disconnected

As some of my regular readers may have noticed, I’ve been a little disconnected as of late. While I was gone for a week on vacation, it’s still been a week since we’ve been back and I haven’t posted much. Well, I’ve been pretty disconnected overall since we got back from our (awesome) vacay. I STILL have not uploaded all our pictures from vacation. I was a pretty lazy bum all week last week after we got back. I just never felt like getting on the computer. But we were also doing something every night. Wednesday we went and picked up our dogs from my parents. Thursday I went to Hobby Lobby and Red Robin with Bailey. Friday John and I went out to dinner and to the AT&T store to switch my cell service over. We were gone most of the day on Saturday to Galveston to meet with a roofer with John’s mom for the beach house. John left to go fishing Saturday night while Bailey and I went to Lowe’s and Wal-Mart and he was gone until Sunday evening so I pretty much laid around and read and did laundry all day Sunday. And now here it is back to Monday. I have yet to go grocery shopping. I still have piles of laundry left to do. I’m still tired. And I’ll probably continue to be disconnected until my new phone comes in.

That’s my other story. I think I’m going to go crazy at work the next few days until I get my new iPhone. We went on Friday to switch my service. They didn’t have any of the new 3GS phones in stock so I had to get a temporary phone until one came in for me. The temp phone I have is awful. It’s this little Nokia and it is a piece of crap. So I can’t get on the web. I can’t check my facebook from work. I can’t get on twitter at work. I did all that on my phone before. And now I can’t with this new temp phone. I had 2 new friend requests on facebook and I can’t get on to confirm them! Grrr. This is going to be so frustrating! The guy at the AT&T store said that since I ordered a white iPhone it shouldn’t take too long to come in, but I still haven’t received an email saying it’s shipped yet so who knows exactly how long I’ll have this crappy little phone that won’t let me distract myself at work like I’ve grown so accustomed to. Lord knows I won’t do any more actual work without my distractions…I’ll just end up sitting here staring into nothingness…daydreaming…  :o)

Come ON!!

I swear life hates me. I seriously need to get pregnant just so I can grow some boobs! I seriously keep shrinking. If this keeps up I’m about to have to start buying bras in the little girls section. Ugh…how embarrassing. How much does a boob job cost?? That’s all. Just whining.

I'm Back!

Hey guys!!  Did you miss me?? Well, we are back from vacation and it was AWESOME!! Totally great…except for the fact that our 6 person trip ended up being a 4 person trip. Bailey’s grandmother passed away unexpectantly the day before we were to leave so her and Matt were unable to go on vacation. While it was a super great trip, it of course felt as though a little piece was missing. I won’t write too much here right now. I want to get all my pictures uploaded so I can post a really good recap of our 6 days, photos included!

I will just say that the Dominican Republic was a great place to vacation and I would totally go back there! That and my Google Reader is OUT OF CONTROL and I have NO time at work today to start catching up. So much to do!! And to think…I’ll be taking another 6 days off from work in just one month! How will I ever get back on track?? Well, wish me luck in trying to figure out where to start on all this stuff today (already took me an hour just to read all my emails!) and I hope to post more real soon!!

Weekend away

Oh my goodness, guys! I was almost totally absent from the computer all weekend! I mean, I played around on Twitter and read a few blogs on Friday since I had the day off, but that was it for the whole weekend! And now my Google Reader says (1000+). I’m afraid that I’ll have to un-follow a few if I can’t keep up! And I know I will totally NOT get caught up this week. For one, I only have until Thursday to read them since we leave that morning for vacation! And then I’ll be gone for 6 long days. I wonder if Google Reader will ever say (2000+)! Haha! That would be my luck. :o) So between now and Thursday I will be SOOOOOOO busy both at home and at work. I’ve got so much to finish before I leave plus get things ready for other people to cover while I’m gone. We’ve got workout class tonight, nail appt. tomorrow, and class scheduled for Wednesday. Don’t know if I’ll make that class. Depends on how ready we are to leave at 3am Thursday morning! We’ve got to bring the dogs down to my parents Wednesday night as well. They live about 30min. from us so we might go down a little early in the evening so we can have dinner with them. But still have enough time left in the evening to get back home and throw together all the rest of our stuff. Oh, but here’s a recap of what we did this weekend:

Friday – I mostly worked around the house on Friday. I finished painting the dog house, went and tanned (probably the last time before vacation), ran a few errands, washed some laundry, cleaned up around the house, watched  a few movies. Nothing really exciting.

Saturday – John got home about 7am. Yay! About 45min. later we left to go down to my parents. July 4^th is my mom’s birthday so we were celebrating with her. We had breakfast at their house and mom opened her presents. A couple of their friends came over. Then we all loaded up and headed down to the beach house. We took the dogs, of course. The beach was way more crowded than I’ve seen it in a long time, but we were still able to let the dogs off the leash and let them romp about. We had a great time. We headed back to the beach house for lunch and to clean up. After lunch, everyone took naps. We didn’t end up leaving there until probably 7:45pm so it was a long day. A good friend of John’s was down home from Dallas and they were having a July 4^th party so we stopped by there and hung out for a bit. By 10:30pm I was absolutely exhausted so we headed home.

Sunday – Mostly a typical Sunday for us. We did lots of laundry. Ran a few errands. But it was all centered around vacation. We laid out all our clothes and got what toiletries we could all together to go ahead and pack. Since it’ll be such a busy week I wanted to get a good headstart so we’re not scrambling Wednesday night when our flight is so early Thursday morning. Our errands consisted of going to the bank to pull out the cash we’ll take with us and going to Walgreens to get our malaria medication and snacks for the plane. Thankfully we have most of our stuff packed. The only things left to put in the suitcase are what items we’ll be using in the next couple days (brush, comb, razor, straightener, toothbrush…) so that is GREAT.

So, yeah, if you don’t see me around this week again, you know why! I can’t wait until Thursday!!!

Work - this and that

Since I seem to be in a mental rut these days and have been lacking very interesting things to share with you all, I thought I’d go the easy route and copy one of these great question/answer dealies:

1. How many post it notes are stuck to your computer screen?
4, at the moment

2. Do you have one of those plastic floor covers for your desk chair to roll on?Absolutely.

3. How many (work-related) emails to you receive & send per day?
Let’s see..yesterday I received 30 (well, that’s how many are left in my Inbox after having deleted some, I’m sure) and I sent 13.

4. At what part of the day are you the most productive?
It totally varies on the day. Some days I’m really productive in the mornings…other days I just CAN’T get started, but I get a ton done in the afternoon…

5. How often do you go out to lunch?
Every Friday, except the last Friday of every month when they order pizza for the whole office!

6. Does your boss pop the collar on his trench coat?
Not that I’ve ever noticed.

7. Is there someone in your office that you just can't stand?
I can’t think of anyone that I “just can’t stand”. There is one pretty creepy guy though…

8. What percent of time each day would you say on non-work related tasks? i.e. blogging!
I used to RARELY do anything other than work, except maybe read the news online for a quick break, or during lunch. Lately? I’m ALWAYS doing something else…would that translate to me being bored with my job?? But since there’s very few things I can get to on the internet here, it’s probably like 70/30 work to non-work.

9. Do you have a favorite pen that you use everyday?
LOTS! I went out and bought all my own pens so that I could have a variety. Well, variety of colors, that is. I really like to color code, so I have about 10 different colored pens/Sharpies.

10. Do you listen to music while @ work? If so, what kind?
I would not be able to function without my music!! I used to just listen to the radio…either country or pop. Lately I’ve been bringing my iPod and listening to that exclusively. I have ALL KINDS of music on there. I LOVE music…and I love the variety while I work.

Now copy the questions and plug in your answers, then leave me a comment to let me know you played along. Thanks!

Delicious!!

We like to have potluck lunches here at work around the holidays. Since we have so many people taking the day off tomorrow, we had our potluck for 4^th of July today. Mmm….yummy! I always make sure I make something for the potlucks. It’s so much fun! I usually like to make a dessert dish…just because those are my favorite! :o) For today’s, I looked back through some of my summer issues of Kraft’s Food&Family magazines. I came upon Berry Squares and thought it would be perfect for a 4^th of July potluck! And it was delicious! So I am going to share the recipe with you all! Well, I will share how I made it…

Berry Squares

(1) frozen pound cake, thawed, sliced into about 10 slices

(3) Tbsp. orange juice

(2) bags frozen berry medley, thawed (roughly 5 or 6 cups, I think…they had these at Wal-Mart…the original recipe called for 4c of mixed berries)

(2) Tbsp. sugar

(2.5) c. cold milk

(2) 4svg. boxes of French vanilla instant pudding

(1) tub Cool Whip

Arrange slices of pound cake on the bottom of a 13x9 pan. Drizzle with orange juice. Spread berries over cake. Sprinkle with sugar. Pour milk into large bowl, add boxes of pudding mix and mix with whisk for 2 min. Gently stir in 1c. of Cool Whip and spread over berries. Spread remaining Cool Whip on top of pudding. Refrigerate at least 1 hour prior to serving.

See? Super easy and really really good! Enjoy!!