Christmas Time is Here....Bringing Lots of Cheer

Christmas, as usual, was great!  We actually celebrated the Saturday before "real" Christmas, which was great because basically it fed my lack of ability to wait!

Oh I also like pictures!  :)

And being weird!  >.>

A more legit Thanksgiving post

I had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday, much to the surprise of my family and friends.  Yes, I love Christmas, but to me, Thanksgiving is so great because it is just getting to hang out with family.  There are no expectations like Christmas seems to have, with gifts and such.  Thanksgiving is just a time to relax, eat, talk, eat, have fun, and eat.  I have so much to be thankful for, and it seems in today's environment, it is important to reflect on the many things I have been blessed with.  First and foremost is my amazing family.  I know I take them for granted so much, they are the greatest family ever, and I could never adequately express how grateful and thankful I am for them.  My parents are just wonderful and I am truely blessed to have them!

I am thankful for great friends.  I have a great group of friends who are so diverse and make me into a better person.

I am also thankful for my job.  It gets stressful at times, but it is great; I have great co-workers, my job continues to challenge me, and just the mere fact I have a job is reason enough to be thankful.  I am thankful for my house, and other such materialist things; though they are materialist, I am thankful for them.

I know I will never be an eloquent writer or speaker (though I do have delusions of grandeur), but I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the vast amount of things I am thankful for!!

Oh and I am thankful for this lil' girl!

Thanksgiving 2008

While it seemed not to start well....

(just kidding!)

It was wonderful!  I have soo very much to be thankful for, including my wonderful family!

I couldn't help myself!

I love Christmas and I was simply ready to decorate.  And so I did!

Happy Halloween!

So we dress up at work for Halloween.  It's super fun!  I was Sarah Palin this year, and coincidently enough, one of my co-workers was Bristol Palin!

Trip to Michigan, Part 2

So I forced Andrew to upload his pictures, if only so I can steal some of them to post.  As I said the weather was beautiful last weekend.  We went for a couple walks on the river.  I forced Andrew to take a self portrait with me.

Who knew there would be seagulls in Michigan, after all it's not the "sea".

Oh and of course there were Canadian geese, as Canada is like RIGHT there!

We also went on a walk down to a wildlife area where there are a few deer, both bucks and does.

The Cutest Dog!!

I'm in a picture posting mood.

She is so cute!

Super Sweet

So I was driving home this evening and I spotted this super awesome ride.  The trunk locking system is super fantastic!!

Fall in Michigan

It is very strange to me to go to a far away land and experience what some people may call "fall weather."  It's like seasons occur in this strange land, or something.  My mind is boggled, to say the least. This strange land is also referred to as Michigan, where I went this weekend to see Andrew.  It was very nice and relaxing; I can't say we did much, except watch movies, watch football, walked a bit, went pants shopping (how does a guy who lives in Michigan not have an overabundance of pants is beyond me), and such.  We did go out to dinner with most of his mom's side of the family for his grandparents 53rd wedding anniversary.  As a side note, one of his cousins or aunts or something is getting married in December and there are 14 wedding attendants for both the bride and groom!  I am mind-boggled by that.

We watched "Pan's Labyrinth" with Pete.  I say "we," but really Pete and I watched it while Andrew slept...and snored.  I was impressed with this movie.  I wasn't sure what to expect, and none of us had seen it before, and though it has subtitles, it was very easy to follow and very good.  It really is kind of like an adult fairy tale, but way darker.

We also watched "Iron Man," "American Psycho," and I am sure something else, besides football.

But it was a great weekend and I had a blast!  I would say I took pictures, but I didn't.  Andrew did and I will totally see if I can't steal some of his to post.

I am still so super impressed with my parents blogging!

Welcome to the Blogosphere/Bloggersphere/Blogsphere!

Yay for new blogs!  My parents are entering the 21st century!  First they got twitter accounts and now they have blogs!  How cute!!!

This is a short week for me, I am only working 3 days.

I just got a new camera and I am super excited about that.  I shall have to take copious amounts of pictures now!

The weather was amazing last week.  So fall like.  If it was spring, I would have said it was "spring like."  That is what I initially thought, but since it is fall, I guess it is fall like.

Allie has fleas...

She really does.  And I can't get rid of them.  She has had a bath every night for the past 4 nights and she just got her monthly flea medicine.  Argh!

I had to go out of town last week, I had to go to Washington, DC for a meeting.  I flew up on the 8th and then flew back home on the 11th.  My parents, nor Andrew, realized I was flying on September 11th until that morning.  I thought I would have been more aware of my surroundings that morning.  I took the metro to the airport and that was really the only time I looked around and thought "nah, its too early for anything to happen,"  as it was 5:30 in the morning.  When I got to the airport there was a few more TSA people there, I thought, but no lines for security and really it was just business as usual.  My main thought was I was worried about someone calling in a bomb threat.  I didn't worry about anything actually happening, just worried that someone would thought that something would happen.  Are we as American's to be applauded to be able to recover from an event so devastating, or are we just that lazy?  Personally I think it is a bit of both, and that is ok with me!  :)

On a side note, MMA is crazy.  I don't see how people do it, but it is entertaining to watch.

Guilty Pleasures...

So I have a few guilty pleasures.  I do not know what draws me to these things but if I see these certain things on TV or hear them on the radio or something, I just can't not watch/listen.  What brings this up you ask?  Well I was watching the Georgia football game on TV and during the commercial I was flipping through the channels and stumbled on TBS and "Save the Last Dance" was on.  This is guilty pleasure numero uno.  I have seen this movie so many times, it is sad.  It's on TBS probably at least once a month and every time it is on, I seem to find it.  It seems to send out a signal in my TV to me saying, "come and find me."  And I do.  And every time it is on, I watch it.  There is nothing in the movie that is particularly appealing to me, but I watch it, always.

My song guilty pleasure of the moment is some Miley Cyrus song.  I don't even know the name, but every time I hear it I have to stop the radio and listen to the whole song.  It is not a particularly good song, imo, but dang it, I have to listen.

I do not understand why I am drawn to these things, but I guess that is the point of a guilty pleasure.

Peas out.

Look at this stuff, isn't it neat...

So, I decided to harness my inner 13 year old girl this afternoon and watch "The Little Mermaid" while on the treadmill.  Oh how I love this movie.  What I love even more is the memories I have surrounding the movie.  Just watching it (and singing along to it, of course) takes me back to when my family had a beach house down at Shell Point.  My sister, our friend Mary-Kate, and I would watch this movie, listen to the soundtrack, and sing the songs from the movie continuously.  Almost 20 years later, I guess, I can can still quote the movie and sing the songs (and seriously, what great songs! Le Poisont, le poisont, hee hee hee haw haw haw).  When I was young I used to have pretty long hair, and we would "play" The Little Mermaid in the pool (yes, we had a neighborhood pool at the beach, it totally makes sense) and I would try and jump out of the water and flip my hair back, a la Ariel, and yeah, with thick hair, that is quite a painful, almost neck-breaking, task.  But more than my love of this movie is my love of the memories it stirs in the brain pan.

:)  

Peas and carrots!

Michelle

(I think I am going to start signing my posts, though it is my blog, it seems cool)

Prime Rib? YUM!!

I went to my parents this weekend for Labor Day. I had a great time, it was very relaxing. On Saturday evening we went with some of my parents' friends to this restaurant called "Chef Jay's." Apparently this guy used to work for Conrad Hilton or something and then had a place in Bainbridge and now owns this dive of a place in Reynoldsville or Donalsonville or something. The a/c barely works, there are probably 20 tables max in the place, and the paneled ceiling is not in the best shape. His waitresses are in black and white pretty nice attire, but he is in a chef jacket and like pj-looking things. Well on Friday and Saturday nights he has prime rib, and O...M...G...it is FABULOUS! He won't cook prime rib more than medium so I had the medium cut (I am usually a medium-well kind of eater, but the medium was delish and not undercooked at all). It was phenomenal. Oh, and it was huge! I ate it all, but passed on the potato because I couldn't eat anymore (and plus my mom made cheesecake for dessert!!).

We also went to Chef Jay's for brunch on Sunday and it was great as well. I had an omelet and the buffet. Then the wife of the chef passed around benettes (sp?).

All in all...WONDERFUL!

Well, you learn something new everyday!

Ok, so I was reading something today about the top 10 movie villains and one of them was Cruella de Vil. HOLY COW! I never realized that Devil was in that name. I always got the "cruella" part was girl for cruel, but the De Vil part revelation floored me today!

On an unrelated but equally important note, I am ready for fall. It is super hot out right now. I go outside 4 times in 5 minutes and I am dying of heat! Plus, my A/C is set at 80 so its not exactly a meat locker in my house.

Trying to decide if I am going to watch the Obama speech tonight.

I decided to have breakfast for dinner this evening. Scrambled eggs, grits, and bacon. This reminds me of a story. Dan, Kara, and I decided to make breakfast for dinner one night, and we (I) put the sausage patties on the skillet, and the smoke took over! :) My bad!

Vroom Vroom

After having hand-me-down vacuum cleaners since I moved in to my house, I finally decided I needed to get a new vacuum. I was vacuuming on Sunday and though I love the lines a vacuum cleaner makes (sometimes I make different designs in the carpet, like when I was younger and I used to mow our lawn, when I got to a nice open area I would do different designs. Sometimes it was a box, sometimes it was more of a circle, sometimes it was just straight lines) when I went over the same piece of fuzz from Allie's bed multiple times and it was still there, I deduced that the vacuum just was not sucking. Well, it was sucking. It was sucking at sucking.

Now I have a new one, and its purple! And it works wonderfully! Its sucks awesomely.

Also, I have decided that I like downloading music from Amazon.com rather than iTunes. Amazon's music is DRM free, so I can put it on my ipod but also on another mp3 player.

How I Met Your...Father?

I love the show "How I Met Your Mother." The reasons for this love include the people on the show are around the same age as I am; there are pop culture references I totally get; and I can relate to the lead guy. In case you may not know, the lead guy, Ted, is telling the story to his kids of how he met his wife/their mother through flashbacks. Ultimately, it tells of his trials and ups and downs of what it took to meet his children's mother. I can relate to this. Plus, who would not want a friend like Barney. NPH does a, should I say, legendary job as Barney. He steals the show.

I am ready for the fall season of TV shows.

And I am a fan of french vanilla coffeemate creamer stuff; takes the place of milk and splenda/sugar.

Fay's Aftermath

I survived the Tropical Storm! Yay! I got a bit worried a couple of times. The first time, I looked out my back window and noticed the water on my back porch was really high. It seems my lack of sweeping caused the water to back up and not flow off the porch and it was backing up. So I put on my galoshes (not really) and rain slicker (ok, rain coat) and got to shoveling and such. The situation was quickly resolved and I felt better. Then the house down hill from me, the water got super super super close to getting in the house. I talked to the homeowner this morning and thankfully the water didn't get in the house. The water did go over the main road though. Lets see if I can link pictures!

(I need to work on how to upload pictures)

Overall, everything was ok. I learned a couple lessons. One was to keep the back porch clean, and another was to wash my windows!!

On a side note, I bit my lip this morning and OW!!! It hurts!!

Fay Today!

Tropical Storm Fay is here, finally. At least it is just rain and such. The great thing is, it gives me a wonderful excuse to stay inside and do nothing. Technically I could do some cleaning around the house, but we will see about that. But it has rained alot. I think it started Thursday night and has not stopped yet. When I was on my way home Thursday night about about 9:00 p.m. (duh, night...pm) you could see Fay's clouds coming. It was almost like a front moving through, and there was this clear line on the horizon of the dark clouds against the evening sky. I should learn to carry a camera with me, it was a pretty cool sight.

Allie hates the rain. You can tell when I open the front door she struggles with her strong desire to go outside and run around versus her desire to stay away from the rain. Its cute actually!

Here's a little video of the water around my house: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y4SPwsiUM0

Here's another one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksv1ItBQi1g

This one was taken just a couple hours later: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjWYmKe1Lws

One more video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9CUhgyaLhQ

!!!

My English teachers would hate me. I am absolutely in love with the exclamation point. I think if I had to choose the punctuation mark that best describes me, it would for sure be the exclamation point. And I know why; I am a very excitable person. I enjoy surprises and anticipation, and thinking about exciting things. What better way to visually represent the excitement and anticipation than the exclamation point, I ask you. There is no better way!! See, I did that for affect...or is it effect? Oh well, thats something else English teachers can hate me for!

Yes another thing English teachers can scold me on is my non-sequitor'ness. I can spout out some random thoughts and push them all together into one or two sentences, which basically ends up like this, "Oh hi, my hands are dry, did you know mountain dew is neither from the mountains nor is dew'y?" Very random!

So Say We All

I am officially addicted to "Battlestar Gallactica." I love it. I also love Netflix. I will admit I have, in the past, purchased at least half a dozen tv shows on DVD to watch them all once and then they get shelved (I rationalize this by saying I am helping the economy, and Best Buy, and TV studios). Not a wise investment, imo. Probably the only anomaly to this is I will watch Season 1 of "Alias" as well as various "Firefly" episodes more than once ("Shindig" is probably my favorite episode). However, Netflix is a great answer to the "I want to watch a tv show on DVD but I really don't want to buy it" dilemma. I netflixed all the BSG DVD's and have been watching them since probably the beginning of July. And as quick as Netflix is, its just not quick enough!! In the words of the Willy Wonka girl "I want the world, I want the whole world," but in this instance, the world means the BSG DVDs.

Which brings me back to the point of this post. And what is the point? Absolutely nothing! :) But it is my blog and I can do what I want! Maybe the point of this blog is to say how cute Jamie Bamber is, because he really is.

On an unrelated note, this hurricane/tropical storm Fay deal is killing me. The sinus pressure I feel in my head right now is tantamount to vice grips clamping down on the bridge of my nose while someone attempts to turn them counter clockwise. I need an oil rig to drill into my nose and relieve the pressure. And no, I am not being over dramatic at all, not even a little.

I DO!

I just can't stand it, I have to try the blogging thing as well.

Last weekend we took a family vacation to Atlanta, GA. It was the first family vacation since approximately 1993, maybe. The odd thing is, probably the last family vacation we took was to Atlanta. Circle of life, it seems. So we drove about 4 1/2 hours to Atlanta to attend my cousin's wedding. And it was a great wedding. John and Jackie are perfect for each other. Jackie is one of those people who is genuinely, whole-heartedly nice, and you can't help but just be drawn to her honest, sincere, gracious personality; one can't help but like her. John is super smart, but so down to earth and normal. They compliment each other greatly.

Anyway, I love weddings. Not so much because of the girl inside of me (well not just inside, as I actually AM a girl), but I love the planning that goes in to it. I love the outcome of weddings, I love when funny things happen (90% of the time involving ring bearers and flower girls), and I love the joy that surrounds weddings. I also love critiquing weddings, I think if there was a wedding critic (similar to a restaurant/food critic) profession, I could be one. I just always enjoy them. My favorite wedding story is random, it is when my friends Dan and Kara got married and the photographer was taking pictures and apparently as they were leaving (after the "I now pronounce you man and wife" part) I waved and they waved and it was caught on camera. I still laugh when I think about that.

However, I am very tired. Because of the traveling, I really did not get a weekend though. And this week has been so super busy at work. Busy is good, but busy is still busy!