I would like to wish a Happy New Year to friends and family alike. Normally I’m rather pessimistic, but I’m trying to look at the new year with promise. You get to start a brand new calendar– what better time to look at things from a fresh perspective?
I wish you all a happy, and healthy new year. If you’re out partying, I hope you’ll make choices, and get home safely! And good luck with your resolutions!
I mentioned in my New Year’s Resolutions post that I also had some ANTI-resolutions to make this year. And here they are– the list of things that I fully intend to continue doing in 2007.
I will…
~ Not grow up. I will continue to enjoy making snowmen, blowing bubbles, jumping rope, watching cartoons and otherwise indulge my inner child.
~ Not care about make-up. I don’t know how to put it on, and to be honest, I don’t see the point of it.
~ Spoil my cats. Why have pets if you aren’t going to love them? A purring cat is perfection. My kitties will continue to be the two most spoiled cats you’ll meet.
~ Keep a messy house. Not dirty, mind you. But I don’t mind a little clutter and it’s hard to avoid in a tiny apartment anyways, so I’m not going to stress about it everytime someone comes over.
~ Spend too much time on the computer. Hey, it makes me happy. I meet new people. And it’s not like I need to spend that time cleaning.
~ Yell. I yell at other drivers. I yell at stupid people on my TV. They can’t hear me, and it makes me feel better.
I’m sure there’s more, but there’s a short list of things I fully intend to KEEP doing in the new year.
A little while back, I was tagged by Marcus to make a post of five charities that I think are good to contribute to. Without further ado, the five I’ve come up with are:
1. The American Diabetes Association (ADA)- I participated in the local diabetes walk in October, and I work at a company that manufactures diabetes diagnostic products. There’s a family history of diabetes, and that puts me at risk, and I’d love to see a cure.
2. St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital- Children are accepted for treatment regardless of the family’s ability to pay. Their research is changing the way children are treated for cancer and other diseases.
3. Children of Promise- Similar to charities like Compassion International (also a good one to donate to), where you sponsor a child from another country. It’s a ministry of the Church of God, and the coordinators Paul and Brenda Maxfield are dear friends. They personally visit all of the sponsored children every year!
4. Pet Refuge- I don’t know if this is strictly local or not, but I’m a big fan of Pet Refuge. They are a no-kill animal shelter, and they have many volunteers that foster animals until they can be adopted. They are always in need of money and supplies.
5. The American Cancer Society and their Relay for Life- Cancer has personally touched so much of my family, and continues to touch the lives of so many people. I can only imagine how the world would look if we could find a cure for cancer.
I can’t keep track of who has done this and who hasn’t, so forgive me if you are getting tagged a second time. I tag: Jess, Alli, Robyn, and Laura.
I mentioned in my last five things about me that I was going to make New Year’s Resolutions this year, for the first time in a long time. I’m working on my lifetime to-do list, but that’s for another post, another time. My resolutions this year are pretty cliche. They are:
~ To lose weight. Obviously, this is the most popular resolution made these days, but it is one of my goals. It’s something I decided I need to take control of, and what better time to get started than with a fresh new calendar year? Of course, losing weight is closely followed by…
~ Get out of debt. I have plenty of debt, and I’m not looking to get completely out of debt… that won’t happen without a lottery win or something. But I have a plan to get at least half of my credit card debt gone by the end of the year, and to have made a serious dent in the rest of it. This became a New Year’s Resolution because Christmas spending made it a little impossible to start now, and the next paycheck comes in 2007!
~ To Journal more. Obviously I blog, but I mean pen and paper journal. This is also the resolution that is most likely to fail and I recognize that. However, there are just some things that need to be out, written down, but not necessarily to be typed out and sent out to the internet as a whole. It’s usually all crap anyways. I’m seriously tempted to burn the old written ones I have.
Those are my goals for this year. Be on the lookout for my anti-resolutions post… I fully intend to NOT change things this year as well!
ABC News just broke into the program I’d been listening to to announce that Saddam Hussein has been executed. You can read the developing story at CNN.com.
Ash-lee’s baby shower is a week from this Sunday. I got volunteered to help my mom with the planning. It’s been a lot of work, and there is a TON of stuff left to do in the next week. So my dad’s side of the family (there’s only 4-5 women this involves) decided that they weren’t going to come, they were going to take her out to dinner for a “surprise shower” or something similar instead. At first I didn’t care, but the more I think about it, the more it just pisses me off. It’s not my baby shower, so maybe I shouldn’t care so much, but the thing is that one day it IS going to be my baby shower, or my wedding shower, or whatever and I don’t want to deal with this pettiness! Is it really so much to ask that they set aside whatever they think the “other” side of the family has done to personally grieve them and spend a couple hours in the same room?? What happens when I get married? “Sorry, we decided not to come to the wedding, we’re going to take you out to dinner instead because god forbid we have to be civil to those people“?? Maybe I shouldn’t be so stressed out about it, but I am. This has worried me since the divorce first got nasty, and this is just not indicating to me that things are going to go well when circumstances in my life require the two sides of my family to be in the same room and get along.
I started my first venture in paid to blog programs a couple months back, and I was pleasantly suprised by the results. I recently decided to join a paid-to-blog site called Blogsvertise. If you’re not familiar with how it works, basically what happens is that advertisers specify topics that they would like to be linked to, and bloggers write about them. The blogger chooses what to say (and the tone!) and gets paid for making the post. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with this.
I’ve already written out one set of Five Things I thought you might not know about me, but I was tagged again by Ted of PayPerPost so I thought I’d try to come up with a few more tidbits. They may or may not be as juicy as the first set 
1. I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions. This year will be an exception to my rule… I generally find it silly to stress myself out over something I know I’m not going to follow through with in the end. I made a resolution one year that I kept for a whopping eleven days– my youth pastor used it as an example in his sermons for like three years after that.
2. I collect DVDs. I had 180 at last count, not including the TV on DVD sets. And yet, I somehow still can’t find something to watch!
3. This one might be “juicy”. I have a subscription to bridal magazines even though I’m completely single. I blame this on the college roommates. One of them was actually planning a wedding and the others just liked looking at the magazines. They rubbed off on me… I like reading the stories of other people’s weddings, and looking at all the dresses.
4. I enjoy traveling, but I’ve never seen most of the US. I’ve never been any further west than Missouri. I have, however, been to Germany, Costa Rica and England. We drove through Austria (and I stood on top of a mountain in Austria) and I’ve been to Mexico if the Mexico City airport counts lol
5. I’m semi-fluent in German. At least I used to be. I took five and a half years of German in school so I was pretty fluent before I stopped using it. I can still understand a good amount, but I can’t speak much anymore.
 I’m not going to tag anyone because I can’t keep track of who has been tagged and who hasn’t!!
Just a couple of notes about work…
1. I love shutdown!! And yes, that does merit two exclamation points. The plant that I work security for is on holiday shutdown which means nearly no people in the plant for the next two weeks. Well, week and a half at this point. There’s only a handful of people in the building and I like it. The only downside (and I do mean ONLY) is that they are waxing all the floors over the course of two weeks. Obviously you can’t walk on freshly waxed floors so it makes it a bit tricky to do rounds… I have to get a little creative to get all the buttons. Minor detail.
2. I’ve never seen an elevator get put together piece by piece before, and now that I have, I don’t think I’ll be wanting to ride it anytime soon. I know that they (hopefully) know what they’re doing, and that it will have to pass inspection, but it’s been rather disturbing to see what it looks like before they start.
3. The coworker has figured out that you can play games on nbc.com. He’s playing blackjack, and the games has annoying sounds. God forbid he turn the volume down. I always turn the volume off on games, or wear headphones. He can’t turn the volume off completely because of the alarm systems on the computer he’s on, but seriously. He could be less annoying about it.
Just call me wonder woman. I ventured out of my apartment a little before 7am. I shopped at two different stores (on opposites sides of town), stopped at my apartment in between, got everything I was after and still was back home and back in my pajamas by 7:50! I did not put a single red cent on my credit cards and there is still some cash in my checking account!!
I searched and searched online and absolutely everybody was sold out of the Nintendo DS. Even places like BestBuy who have the in-store pickup options were sold out. So I wasn’t holding my breath that I’d be able to find one. I figured I might as well at least try though, so I set my alarm for 6:15 and got out of bed. I’d only fallen asleep, finally, about an hour before that so I seriously considered staying in bed. It’s a good thing I didn’t! I puttered about the apartment for awhile, and then finally headed out.
My first stop was Meijer on the other side of town. I walked back to the video games and lo and behold! One lone Nintendo DS Lite in the bottom of the case! Bestill my heart! I found someone to open the case for me, and she told me that she’d just put that system in the case not 10 minutes before I arrived. Apparently, it had been held for someone who never showed, so the store director told her to put it out to be sold. I said it was being saved especially for me! It was the Polar White one too, which is the one I really wanted. I would’ve taken a Coral Pink one if I’d have found it first, though. The best part about finding it at Meijer is that I could use the $50 gift card from Dad.
I left Meijer to head to the opposite side of town, and stopped by my apartment to drop of the DS. I’m not nearly crazy enough to leave one of those in the car while I continue shopping! And it was only like 2 minutes out of the way. So I dropped off the DS and figured out how much money I had left to spend and then went out to Walmart. I beat the crowds to Walmart (Meijer was pretty deserted when I got there too), so that was definitely good. I got Tetris and Super Mario Brothers. I also bought thank you cards because I’m going to be a good girl and send them out this year. And Nyquil because I spent all night staring at the inside of my eyelids and I’m going to get some sleep before work tonight if it kills me.
I played with the DS for a little while, but I’ve got it back in the box for now. Whenever PPP puts through the payments that came up over the holiday weekend, I’m going to get online and hopefully buy a carrying case, and MarioKart! For now though, I’m going to wait for the NyQuil to kick in and then go to bed.
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