Sunday, October 28, 2007

October 27, 2007

My days these days go so quickly. I'm currently in the middle of a weekend where Joel has come in to visit and be the groomsman in a wedding of a friend of ours. It has been a packed weekend and he flies out tomorrow. So, again, I will have to keep my writing to highlight reels with the only hope that at some point I can sit and write something decent. The compulsion to write and to drain my thoughts and actions on here is so great such that, as long as they are written, then I can let them out of my immediate consciousness and think about something else. So....
Wedding at a parish called St. Joe's this morning, off to Buffalo Wild Wings for some wings before my arrival out in St. Albans at the St. Albans Country Club. Oh my, expense beyond what's normal. Nice dinner, fillet mignon, open bar, good friends, nice location, great time. Last night was the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner. Ate like kings there as well and got a chance to sit down with the groom a little bit and reminisce. Played Wii when we got home for a couple hours.

A phone interview, two in person interviews, an employee assessment test and a look through of my references takes me to where I'm at in my job interviewing process with a meeting on Tuesday and them calling me Wednesday with a possible job offer! That's the time line for that.

Been having some pain in my right wrist for a week now, wonder if it is from typing on the laptop and using the mouse. Will minimize those in the coming weeks to see if it'll work.

There's more, but really, I just wanted to post this that someone sent me.
It's Funny! A fellow blogger with a video of a
funny parrot, you'll laugh too!

Thursday, October 18, 2007

A little Fall story written by Joel

It's story time!

Once upon a time, a certain girl met a certain guy during their senior year of college. They dated, then graduated. After a fun summer, highlighted by "summer lovin'", they both went their separate ways, one to law school, one to work in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. They remained committed to each other through different jobs, different cities, different apartments. Along the way they traveled countless miles via car and plane, saw at least 16 different states and one country. They hiked, swam, camped, snorkeled, canoed, fished, enjoyed numerous culinary cuisine, read, talked, and did a bunch of other adventurous things together. Through it all, they had a blast.

Fast forward a few years... This same couple decided to take an annual trip to "leaf peep" in the Northeast. After a plane flight to Philly and then State College, this girl and guy were reunited in central Pennsylvania. A day later they traveled to the Berkshires and spent time enjoying the leaves, the weather and friendship (and a game of poker) with old friends. The next day they traveled to a favorite vacation location, Cape Cod. On a perfect day, with the sun shining bright, they boarded a ferry to Martha's Vineyard. After a day of seeing quaint towns, window shopping, seeing Gingerbread Houses, Beaches and Lighthouses, they returned to Cape Cod. On the drive home, they stopped at a beach, Monument Beach. Amidst the cold wind blowing off the Atlantic estuary, the guy could no longer contain his feelings of love and devotion. After a brief verbal expression of these feelings, he knelt down on one knee, pulled a box out of his jacket and asked the girl for her hand in marriage. Between the chatting of her teeth, the girl in a moment of (some say romantic feelings of joy, some pity, others delusion), said yes. They both hurried to the car, turned on the heat, celebrated with a kiss, and then left to enjoy a delicious dinner. Later, they called, texted, or e-mailed their families and friends, informing them of the news.

And they are living happily!

If you haven't figured it out, Sarah and I became engaged this weekend while at Cape Cod. No more details have been decided, but we will definatley keep you in the loop.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

October 9, 2007

So it’s been awhile, but I have good reason, which most of you know. Aaron ended up staying in the hospital for 2 weeks with us being up there a good majority of the time and now he’s here, as of Friday. We’ve got crutches, wheel chair and lots of stuff from the hospital here. Basically, he should still be there, but they’re letting him be more comfortable here at home and he goes back in 2 weeks. He’s got this thing called a wound vac on and it’s an interesting contraption that is supposed to cut healing time in half. If he has it for 3 months, that would have been 6 months before. He may get to start putting weight on the foot around Christmastime. Then looking like a year after that before everything works closer to normal. Today we went on an outing to Home Depot, the bank, and St. Louis Bread Co. (Panera) and it took us 3 hours what with all the stuff we were doing. :-p darn cripples J

Other than that being a good portion of my time taken by that, I find time to do other things too. I’ve been on the job search for about 2 months now. Been through a couple of interviews with different places and I’m pretty confidant about an interview I had yesterday. It is at a place called FRI Resources. The job itself sounded pretty interesting and definitely high paced enough for my needs that I won’t be bored. I hope to hear back from them early next week at which point I would be set up for another interview with the president of the company and then a 50 question psychological exam. They have interviews two other days this week, and I hope that I wowed them with my abilities. :-p
I’m tired of filling out applications for jobs and then not hearing back, and I’m putting all my eggs in this basket and then I’ll figure it out if it doesn’t work. Oh well.

Tomorrow I’m headed out for a mini vacation. I am on an early flight into State College to see Joel and get there tomorrow afternoon. On Thursday evening, we will drive over to the farm, yay farm!, yay for visiting and seeing fun people! Saturday we will make a little jaunt over to Cape Cod and take the ferry out to Nantucket. I’m psyched about that! Sunday is another day at the farm and then back to State College. I fly out Tuesday. It should be a nice little break from being nurse/care giver here.

Weather has been perfect, if not, unseasonably warm. Been in the 80’s consistently all ‘fall’? long… We’re due for much more 70’s weather and then it could go up in the 80’s again for the last two weeks of October. Definitely unseasonably warm. I’ve been keeping busy ~4 days a week with grasscutting and misc. projects for the bro’s company. I’m now co-managing it with schedules and bills and such and that at least keeps my mind a little bit sharp.

Still taking an aerobics step class at the gym. It kicks my butt every Monday and Wednesday and I love it. It’s addictive and I have a great teacher. I will definitely sign up for one of her classes again, she’s great. We had a sub once, she was not so great. I’m even sad that I’ll be missing it twice while I’m gone on vacation.

I have been doing lots of house cleaning, laundry, dishes, grocery shopping, cooking and house tidying while the parents have been off-kilter with Aaron. I’m ready to pass some of that back to make it a little more evenly distributed. I helped my sister with grocery shopping and her Physics homework last weekend. Heck, I became the model citizen here. Hopefully everything doesn’t go to pot when I do have a job and less free time for helping people. As for volunteering, I did it once. I’m not planning on stopping, something just got in the way. Plus, since the population I’m working with is Bosnian and their religion observes Ramadan, we won’t be starting tutoring back up until after the 15th because they can’t eat from sunrise to sundown and it is hard for them to concentrate.

The garden outside is still growing. We are still eating tomatoes and there are little yellow flowers on the plants indicating continual producing. Our fall squash is in abundance and it’s amazing how the stuff out there just keeps on growing. The flower gardens look great and sadly, some of our bird population has started to migrate south. The hummingbirds left us about a week and a half ago. We had a good flock of them around here this year.

As for the cooking, I really got into it this past weekend. I made a great batch of chili, a salmon pasta salad with basil mayo (it was in a cookbook for all you naysayer’s), breakfast sandwiches, fruit pizza (divine), chicken salad, coconut curried lentils, a cream cheese and pepper and onion relish dip, some roasted potatoes with oven soup mix, and other random things. Anything I thought I might want to eat and with the general intention of making lots of food so no one else had to cook.

Been dealing with random things a lot too. Got a phone, which I may have written about awhile back, my pretty pink razr, and I love it and am waiting for a rebate. I have bought a couple of pairs of shoes recently that have not been to my liking and I’m hoping to get rebates on one of them – they’re causing me foot problems and so I’m happy to report I’ve just gotten a new pair of tennis shoes and after wearing them for a few days, there are no problems!!!

For the botanist in all of us, I’m attempting to help my mom’s orchids along. Those and the African violets are in need of some TLC. I’m trying. I am reading a book on caring for them as well. I guess within a few months I’ll know more about what’s going on.

I love my laptop still, it is so nice to have it and I’m not sure what I’d be doing without it.

I just checked in out there and they had me eat my yogurt, but took my snack pack and my pineapple. I guess they count as liquids or gels, but how the heck am I supposed to eat anything healthy and transport it if I can’t have it in a container. Stupid rules. I just was looking forward to having that later and am now disappointed. Being in an airport reminds me much of the movie Terminal with Tom Hanks and how he lives in it for 20 years without anyone really noticing. I think that would be a good movie to watch again.

Pretty sure that I got everything packed. Laptop detects that there are two networks available and that I should be able to connect to one of them, but it has limited connectivity. If I have to hear that one more time… been having the same problems at my house. It is now 6:27 and I think we are boarding at 6:50. By then, the sum total of what I need to accomplish is sit here and at some point give up my seat so as to fill up my water bottle with water. That whole 3 oz. bs. Looks like I’m flying with a bunch of businessmen who need to look nice and me in my tennis shoes, SLU sweatshirt and beat up rundown sweats. If I didn’t have books in my bookbag, I’d be hobbling over to the book store. I’m not sure why I’d be hobbling. My feet work just the same, I think the inconvenience of having my laptop and bookbag with me makes me think of hobbling. People all around me have their laptops out, are talking on their cell phones and so many of them have Starbucks. I think just about everyone fits into those categories, that is, unless you’re just sitting zoning out with a newspaper. I can’t believe she took them! If I would have had a choice about which I could keep, I’d have eaten the snack pack. OK, I’m done.
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