Footprints on the Moon

I really need to find my camera so I can quit posting these lousy quality webcam photos! And yes, that is a Christmas shirt I’m wearing… it’s a good bumming around the house shirt.

I’ve had a pretty lazy weekend. I had good plans to do some serious cleaning, and I did a little of that, but mostly I didn’t lol My lower back has been bothering me this weekend, so I just tried to relax most of them… caught up on the TiVo, played games on the internet, did some crocheting, that sort of thing.

Sarah came over Saturday and hung out for a few hours, and after that I just hung out around the house, researching options on the internet. One option is going back to school, but after some poking around, reading about grad schools and GMAT prep I realized that I still have no idea what I want to be when I grow up lol Since I’m not paying for any more schooling until I’m sure, I moved on to the next option: I’m putting together my resume, and keeping my eyes open.

Now I’m cuddling on the couch with Pudge, and watching Twilight (don’t judge!) Will probably go to bed once the movie is over.

I spent this weekend, in my brother’s words, “infirm.” I had big plans this weekend to really clean, organize and purge my apartment. As you might be able to guess from this picture, it wasn’t exactly possible.

Friday morning, I woke up and went to roll over. As I lifted my head off the pillow, and turned my head, there was a POP in my neck. And then there was pain. Just before lunch, I called the doctor to get an appointment. If you know me, you can start to understand how much pain I was in because I am not one who is quick to call the doctor. I ended up leaving work two hours early to go to the doctor. She gave me a muscle relaxer, a painkiller and an anti-inflammatory in patch form.

The painkiller had codeine in it, so as soon as I stopped moving I fell asleep lol I basically slept from 7:30pm until 10:30am Saturday morning with small bouts of wakefulness in between. My brother dropped off my dad’s heating pad, which you see draped around neck in the picture up here, after I’d called to see if I could borrow it. He called and said, “I hear you’re infirm,” and offered to bring it over on his way to my mom’s. Good thing too, since you’re not allowed to drive while on muscle relaxers!

So that’s been my weekend. Drugged up and sleeping on the couch (dreaming about hotels in cancun, of course), between watching TV and movies, and spending an inordinate amount of time on Facebook. Unfortunately, my apartment went in the wrong direction as far as clean and organized goes.

As far as my neck… it seems like it might be getting slightly better. I can move it more than I could before without hitting the pain. The real test will be tomorrow when I go back to work and have to give up all the good drugs for the day!

First Self Portrait Sunday of 2010! Of course, it’s a crappy cell phone picture. I didn’t realize how hard it was to take a self portrait with an iPhone until I tried. This is the only picture that didn’t make me look like I had a mental illness. You get a cell phone picture because my regular camera has gone missing. I haven’t seen it for about a week. I don’t know if it fell out of my purse somewhere and is lost forever, or if it disappeared into the black hole in my apartment and is lost forever. Either way, I’m very sad about the whole thing.

I had a pretty good weekend, though even this 3-day weekend feels far too short! I spent a good portion of the weekend cleaning and organizing. (Hoping to find my camera tucked away in some random place. No such luck.) Mom and Harold were supposed to come over today for Mom’s birthday dinner, but Harold was sick so we had to reschedule. So instead, I stayed inside while it snowed, watched movies, and crocheted.

Now, unfortunately, it’s time to go to bed in preparation for the work week. It should be back to business as normal after the holidays… I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing lol Probably good because it’s been incredibly boring with nothing to do for basically the last two weeks! Ask me again at the end of the week.

I’m getting ready to head to bed, but I wanted to get a post up real quick with my self portrait for this week. Not the greatest picture… taken with my webcam earlier today. You can see all the Christmas stuff and etc that still needed to be put back into my storage closet. And Lucy, who was greatly enjoying the stack of Christmas containers.

Don’t worry though, I was strangely productive today and not only did I get all that stuff into the storage unit, I also cleaned out the kitchen sinks, scooped litter boxes, and did laundry so that I wouldn’t have to go to work in my birthday suit tomorrow. One thing that I did NOT do was take out the trash and recycling because I had no desire to trudge through the snow to the dumpster. I’m already not looking forward to cleaning off my car tomorrow morning!

Speaking of tomorrow morning, I better get off of here and head for bed if I have any hope of dragging myself out of bed for work at 5am lol

Alternatively titled: The Picture I Would Have Posted Yesterday If My Computer Had Cooperated

This is me, wearing my brother’s Colts Santa hat, at our family Christmas gathering yesterday with my mom. I would have posted it last night after I got home, but my computer decided to ignore my attempts to download my pictures. I may as well have been shoving a glass tile into the card reader on my laptop for all my efforts. At first I thought it was because it was the small SD card that came with the new camera, but my laptop wouldn’t recognize my older larger SD card either. I did finally get the pictures downloaded this morning.

Speaking of the new camera… I don’t know that I ever mentioned it here. Last week, I ordered a new point and shoot camera to replace my dying uncooperative Canon A530. I got another Canon, this time the A1100IS. I chose it largely because I was happy with my previous Canon, I wanted a point and shoot that still took AA batteries, and I could get it for about $30 after all the Amazon.com gift cards I had were taken off. I used it last night and after that experience, I think I’m going to be sending it back to Amazon in exchange for another camera. It just would not take good pictures. It didn’t matter if I put it in Auto, or Program, Portrait, Kids and Pets… etc… everything was blurry, or overexposed, or or or. You can really hear the camera when is auto-focusing, and it just felt really cheap when I first took it out of the box.

So I’m going to spend a good portion of my day searching Amazon and reading reviews trying to find a different camera to replace this one. Any advice? Got a great point and shoot camera that you love? (That’s around the $150 range?)

I wish I could have gotten more of this shirt into the picture. My mom bought it for me at Walmart. Under the picture it says, “I told Santa Claus what I wanted for Christmas this year and he washed my mouth out with soap.” Hehe!!

As far as the past week that I didn’t blog, I can sum it up in two words: Work. Cold.

I worked all week, as per usual. And it was bitterly cold out. Thursday there was a windchill of -7. Brrr… Definitely the time of year I start dreaming about an Outer Banks vacation rental! Not much snow to speak of so far this winter. That’s kind of crazy, but I’m certainly not complaining. I’m the kind of girl who would be satisfied with snow on Christmas only!

Wow, ignore the raccoon eyes please! Hopefully those black circles don’t look as bad as they feel. I promise I don’t need any specialty eye creams or anything, I just need sleep. Which I will be headed to do in about 15 minutes– just as soon as I blow dry my hair and watch the end of The Amazing Race.

Did you all enjoy your 4 day weekends? I know I did! And I only had a 3 day weekend. I had Thursday and Friday off, but I picked up a shift on Saturday. Honestly, other than that, I did a whole lot of nothing this weekend! Thursday was dinner with the family, Friday I washed the dishes and took a 3 hour nap, Saturday I worked first shift, and then today I washed my work uniforms and watched movies! I really wanted to take a nap, but resisted the urge so that I’d be able to sleep tonight.

Now to dry my hair so I can sleep! Just didn’t want to miss another Self Portrait Sunday since I’ve been pretty lax about those lately.

Well hello there! I’m still alive even if I haven’t blogged in a couple of weeks. I just haven’t had the mental energy to deal with it! Between Grandma being sick, and worrying about Jason who is still in Ann Arbor fighting for his life I just haven’t wanted to come over here and deal with the every day mundane things like linking to glucomannan or talking about how I’ve gone to work everyday and everything was business as usual. Plus in the middle of that, my modem went bad and I had no internet for several days until I was able to call Comcast and schedule a service visit.

Anyways. The last time I posted about Jason, he was in the hospital with a fever of 104. Things got markedly worse from there as his fever shot up to 107, and nothing they could do would bring it down. They ended up putting him on a ventilator and then into a medically induced coma to keep him calm and try and let his body heal. By the time they decided to airlift him to Ann Arbor to be put on a heart and lung machine, he was on full life support, his kidneys had started to fail, and the doctor here was only giving him a less than 25% chance of survival.

Thankfully things started turning around once they got him in Ann Arbor. He’s improved quite a bit, but there’s still a very long way to go. Even today, he had a very rough day and they had to take the ventilator back up to 100% before backing it off to 60%. They have him off the paralytics, and we’re all just praying that he continues to improve every day. As of right now, we have no way of knowing what kind of recovery time line he’ll be looking at, or even what kind of lasting damage he’ll be dealing with. They’re still trying to get him out of the woods.

Needless to say, your continued prayers would be very much appreciated. He’s got a wife and a baby girl, as well as a large extended family that really need him to recover and come home!

Okay, obviously I didn’t take this picture today. Well, maybe it’s not obvious, but I did in fact take this picture yesterday, on my way out the door. I went over to my grandma’s to hand out candy to her trick or treaters. I live in an apartment with a locked lobby, so I’m fairly confident that I get zero kids coming by, or close to it anyways. So I dress up and go hand out candy at Grandma’s. I had at least one kid come up to get candy and yell “It’s Coraline!” so that was cool.

I noticed a couple of things though. First, what happened to manners? Except for the real little ones who were still holding onto Mom or Dad’s hand, we got very few thank yous. When I was younger and still going around, we all said thank you at every single house. Even handing out candy last year, the kids were very polite. Not so much this year.

Second… there was a house somewhere in the neighborhood handing out small cups of cider. Since when do parents let their kids have something like that? Did they buy term life insurance first? Maybe I’m overly paranoid… or just old enough to remember the horror stories around Halloween every year about things added to candy or whatever. My kids wouldn’t have been drinking the cider… and we wouldn’t have been able to drink it when we were young, you just don’t know! Take it to be polite, but throw it out later. I remember there was always an older guy in the neighborhood we trick or treated in as kids that would hand out Twizzlers. As in, peeled individually out of a regular package. We took it, said thank you, and threw it away at the next trash can.

Mom and I were the odd ducks out on that argument last night. What do you guys think? Prepackaged candy only for your kids from complete strangers?

Hello there! This is me earlier this afternoon before I headed over to Aiden’s birthday party. Don’t mind the crazy acne I’ve been dealing with all week. I had a pretty good weekend, even if I’m not ready for it to be over yet!! I got to hang out with one of my best friends on Saturday, and then got some cleaning done.

Then today, as I mentioned, I went to Aiden’s birthday party. It’s hard to believe that he’s 3 years old already! And that any of my friends are old enough to have three year olds! Seriously, weren’t we just in high school yesterday?