Saturday, September 27, 2008

Randomosity

Hrm. Still not sure about this hair thing. It’s all wavy and weird looking. I guess I might have to cave and buy some styling stuff. We’ll see.

I mentioned it a bit ago, but I watched Penelope a few days ago. It’s a cute movie, but nothing particularly original. I’ve always like Christina Ricci so it was easy to watch. Kind of a lame moral, but I suppose it’s supposed to be kind of fairy-tale-ish anyway. I also watched Amadeus last night. Adam was up in Green Bay attending to some family drama so I had the house to myself. Surround sound is cool.

This weekend looks to be another boring one. We opted out of the wedding. We decided against going to the drive-in even though it looks like this might be their last weekend of the season. I’m not sure what we have on our to-do list other than our normal shopping trips. I don’t even have any baking to do. I’m sure I could come up with something, but I’m thinking it’s better to not make things because when I make things, then I eat them. I lack self control.

On a kind of related subject, we’re trying to plan our Christmas party well in advance so, I don’t know, PEOPLE WILL ACTUALLY COME TO IT. Yeah, last year sucked, mostly blamed on the weather. We’re hoping to have better luck this year. I haven’t really started thinking about the menu yet, but I know for sure we’ll bring back the spinach-artichoke dip and the chicken wonton stars. I also know I’m going to add the cheesy corn bites we found this past summer. Other than that (and the requisite variety of cookies), I’m still poking around for ideas. I do have two crock pots (in addition to the little dipper) now so that opens up some possibilities for hot appetizer choices. We also recently got a roaster when there was a big sale at Kohl’s so I have that to play around with as well. So many possibilities! I’ll become a Martha Stewart one of these days yet.

In pet related news, I’ve been able to reach out and pet Conner quite a few times in the past few days. He approaches me and rubs against my legs a lot too. He still freaks out sometimes and eventually runs away when I pet him, but this is definitely progress. I can still only get to Ted when I’m feeding him. And JC seems to be going through a cycle of moods. For awhile he was sleeping in our bed, in between us. Then he moved to sleeping by my bathroom door. Then he was out in the living room with the other cats. Then he was on the foot of the bed. Then he was inside my bathroom by the toilet. Now he seems to be back outside my bathroom door with an occasional trip up onto the bed to bite my feet. Fabulous. Sometimes I’ll wake up and find Conner sleeping on the foot of the bed, which is kind of weird.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

The New Me



Not sure if I like it. We'll see how it looks after I wash it tomorrow.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Three cats and a wedding

Adam had a coupon for an afternoon off that he had to use so I also took Friday afternoon off. We went out to lunch and then did some shopping. Mostly pet stuff shopping. We got two new litter boxes. The ones we had were almost a year old and were starting to show their age. Ted and Conner like to dig around and their claws were scratching the bottom. Also, cat pee must be very acidic and was actually burning into the bottom a little. Neat, but kind of scary. So we replaced them. With all the hamsters gone now we also did our room re-arrangement. We’re not so concerned about a cat versus guinea pig death match since the guinea pigs are much bigger than Howie was and their cages are more secure. The third bedroom is noticeably smaller than the second bedroom. It’s a squeeze, but we got everything to fit. Then we cut Mo’s unruly hair (which he thoroughly disliked), cleaned their cages, and vacuumed.

On Saturday we did the rest of the shopping. We also stopped at Kohl’s during their early bird small appliances sale to pick up Adam’s grandmother’s apartment-warming gift. (As an aside, why is it an “early bird sale” when it goes until 1pm? That’s not early in my opinion…) Anyway, we then drove up to De Pere to drop off said gift. His grandmother seems really happy in her new apartment. She’s definitely not a wallflower and appears to have made lots of new friends in the short time she’s been there. She took us out to lunch at a restaurant right down the street. Terrible service, but otherwise a nice place. We came back home and watched Chicago on the new TV with the new surround sound system. Not too shabby.

Sunday morning Adam headed up to Appleton to get new gutter covers. The tree in front of the house had been dropping all kinds of tiny flower things all over the roof and they’d been able to sneak through the old gutter covers and clog up the gutter. The swap out seemed to go pretty quickly. We’ll see if this new version works better. I baked some brownies, a co-worker of Adam’s having given me a Ghirardelli brownie kit. The caramel chocolates had melted a little in transit, but they still turned out pretty well. Very rich. We killed some time by watching She’s the Man. I went and swapped out Chicago for Penelope in case I got bored during the Packer game and wanted something else to watch. Mark and Pat, Adam’s co-worker and friend, came to watch the game. I managed to stay and watch the whole three quarters they were here. It’s easier to watch the game when someone else is yelling at the TV with you. Adam is so stoic in his TV viewing. I feel stupid talking to the TV. But it’s ok when two other people are doing it too. :) They left after the third quarter and we turned it off before the fourth was over. Not a good game. But at least it wasn’t Aaron Rodgers’ fault.

We got a last minute invite to Adam’s cousin Amy’s wedding. Apparently our invitation “got lost.” (Ahem.) We’re not going to go – it’s in Kenosha on Saturday – but we’ll send a card along with his parents. She didn’t come to our wedding either and although it might be fun to meet a few more people in his extended family, I’d rather not spend four hours (round trip) in the car and have to find something to wear to a wedding. Although it does sound like it’s going to be a big party. Hmm.

Not much else going on this week. I think I’ve decided what I’m going to do about my hair situation though. Heads of Time (the place we went for wedding day hair) has a $30 cut & style where they do a consultation prior to the choppage. This might be a good option because then I can get the professional’s opinion on what might work best. I’ll be paying a little more than my standard $12.95 Cost Cutters amount (yay for coupons!) but I think it will work out better for me this way. Now I just need to call for an appointment. Ugh. I’m still unsure of what style I want, but I guess I’ll just see what they come up with. It can always grow back if it turns out really horrible.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Kicking Butt...



The one game I can play on Adam's PS3. Although I maintain my controller was conspiring against me in the first round...

Yah, You Betcha

We DVR Saturday Night Live not just to skip commercials, but because we’re totally lame and are usual in bed before it even starts. Shut up. We’re old.

Anyway.

The season started last week with Michael Phelps as host. The first (and really only) political sketch was the opener, with Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton (albeit a noticeably pregnant one) and Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. Being the politically apathetic person that I am, I do know who Sarah Palin is but I hadn’t really listened to her much. So when Tina Fey’s take on her made her sound like she came from Fargo, I was skeptical. But I caught a clip of an interview a few days ago and man, she really DOES sound like she’s from Fargo! What’s with that? Isn’t she from Alaska? (As an aside, Conan had a take on this same subject on his show on Thursday. Great minds...) Between McCain’s generally obnoxious whiny voice and Palin’s accent, it could make for a long four years, having to listen to them. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the actual subject content of their speeches. Ugh. Then again Obama tends to yell and Biden, well, I don’t really know about his speaking voice. Haven’t heard too much from him. I guess it’s not a good idea to use their speaking voices to choose our next president, but if that were the competition, it would be a hard one to call, dontch’a know.

Friday, September 19, 2008

RIP Howie



At the beginning of this week, seemingly out of the blue, I discovered Howie had a humongously puffy eye. It was huge. I figured perhaps he had gotten some bedding stuck and it had gotten infected. As advised by some internet sources, Adam used eye drops and tried to clean it out and get rid of as much of the crap inside of it as possible. The swelling went down considerably, although he still couldn't really open the eye at all.

Yesterday morning I refilled his food bowl. He was sitting under his water bottle, chewing on a hamster food cheerio. I patted his head, thereby scaring him. As I closed the door for the day he hopped into his food bowl to scrounge around. I considered checking on him at lunch but didn't. When I went in the room to feed Conner after work Howie had found his way back into his house and expired.

So, again, not completely unexpected. But he had been acting pretty normal all week so we thought maybe he'd pull through. He was the first of our stable crew of critters. Now we've just got the two guinea pigs. That's kind of nice because now we can move the cats into their room and keep all the pet stuff in one spot. That's our weekend project.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Short, Numbered List

Not a long one here. Just a few things:

1) I managed to catch up on my cooking blog. Finally. Until tomorrow, when I'll be behind again.

2) Adam got a nice gift from work for having a great quarter. Now I can know the joy of Spongebob on a 37" HDTV.



3) I finally went and got some new containers for the flour and sugar. Our old sugar canister hasn't had a good seal since, well, we got it. So it was time. And these were on clearance. Go me! I also got one for pasta while I was at it to free up some space in the pantry.



(Yes, we eat Reese's Puffs cereal. You got a problem with that? It's good!)

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Random Stuff

Still no progress made on my hair conundrum. This weekend I’ll really need to go get it trimmed, if nothing else. I don’t want it to get too crappy while waiting for me to make up my mind.

We’re almost done with our marriage property/power of attorney/living will stuff. Adam called the lawyer yesterday to firm up our plans for our enormous amount of wealth if we both die. Ha. They’ll revise the paperwork and then we get to go back in to sign things and pay them money. Fun stuff. We’ll definitely need a bigger safe now though. Between these new legal documents and the house stuff (which is in a drawer by the computer now, not even in the safe!) we’ll probably end up getting one of those file drawer safe things.

I watched another movie last night. I must have been on a Woody Allen kick when I added these titles to the Blockbuster queue. This one was Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Too Afraid to Ask.) Hilarious. Adam only caught the last two parts (he was out golfing), but even he was laughing a bit.

Tomorrow is a good day for our checking account. Adam gets his quarterly bonus (yay!), and I get some flex spending and expense reimbursements from work. Woo. Unfortunately, as is usually the case, we’ll then get to watch it all seep back out of the account. *sigh*

Monday, September 08, 2008

And because there's been a severe lack of cute and cuddly around here...

JC has gotten into the habit of hanging out on top of the window in the guinea pig room. You see, in order to keep the cats out of the windows since they were stretching out the screens, we have been opening them from the top. This is just JC's way of saying, "Ha ha! Not as smart as you thought you were, eh?"



The cooler evenings and days have meant more open patio door time. And the cats love that. They can get up close and personal to all the nature in the backyard.



Apparently sleeping in pants isn't limited to JC or my pants. Here's Ted in Adam's pants.


All three cats sit in the same position and they all get that same "you with the camera, go away" look.



And finally, here's JC, relaxed and just hanging out.

The Beat Goes On

Another boring weekend here and gone. We hit Seafood Fest on Friday night. We went a little early to beat the crowds and managed to find a parking spot in the parking lot. Sweet. We had dinner, were attacked by wasps. I hate eating outside. As I was finishing up our onion rings a bug fell from the tree above us making me scream and scare everyone around us. Awesome. We were also serenaded by a local high school band. Ah, memories of bad band music at football games.

Anyway, we stopped at Walmart on the way home. Saturday morning Adam left to go help his grandmother move and I did the rest of the shopping. I also went to Shopko and managed to find a couple of shirts on clearance. Yay! I made the white chocolate-strawberry bars which Adam says are addictive. Sunday was pretty boring. Football, racing. I made a chocolate cake that turned out so horrendously that I refuse to even take a picture of it. It tastes wonderful. It just looks like total crap. I’ll attempt another one at some point in the future. I need to regroup first though.

I made some honey-mustard chicken and potatoes on Saturday night. They were meant to be grilled but I baked them in the oven instead. The potatoes worked out fine, but the honey in the chicken ended up burning and stinking the place up. Oops. We had quinoa and vegetables last night. The quinoa is teeny tiny and Adam says it looks like baby fish eyes. Appetizing… The recipe I used was pretty easy but I might cut the tofu up in smaller pieces next time. It seemed to overwhelm everything else.

My testing this morning was pretty quick, but not painless. I never seem to be able to get by the blood pressure thing in one try. Only two times this morning, but last time I went to the doctor I had two tries on both arms before they got it. The blood taking, ugh. My veins are apparently sneaky fellows and luckily the nurse got one on the first try this time. Last time both my arms got jabbed while hunting for one. But then I started gushing blood when she went to tape the gauze on. Grr. My arm still hurts, but at least it looks as though I’ve avoided an ugly bruise. That was pretty much it. I got some apple juice and was sent on my way. I don’t know what kind of information I’ll be getting back from this effort, but at least they can’t kick me off the insurance plan for non-compliance. Woo.

The rest of the week looks boring. A few new dishes on the menu, the start of the Packer’s season.

Movies (post Oscar)

After finishing the Oscar movie list I kind of forgot to keep up with my quasi movie reviews. We/I’ve watched a few in the last couple weeks:

The Simpson’s Movie – We didn’t get around to seeing this in the theater and didn’t get around to renting it until now. It was the first Blueray movie we got to make sure the PS3 player worked correctly. Not having an HDTV, it really didn’t make the movie-viewing experience better, but whatever. The movie itself was pretty funny. I’m thinking it’s similar to other “tv-shows-turned-movie” wherein some things are only funny if you’ve seen the original show. Having only watched it once I’m sure I missed many references. I caught enough to appreciate the nerdy-ness of Matt Groening and the other writers. How it is possible for people to remember so many previous things and be able to throw them into a new storyline? One of my friends from college had pretty much every “Simpsons” episode memorized and could spout off dialogue in an appropriate context. While it was kind of creepy, it still amazed me that he could devote so much of his brain capacity to a cartoon show. Oh well. I thought the movie was pretty good even though I seem to recall that the overall reception of it wasn’t too stellar.

The Graduate – Also kind of amazing that I had never seen this movie considering how much of a classic it’s supposed to be. I must say I was kind of surprised. Everything I’d heard about the film didn’t really prepare me for what the actual plot turned out to be. It’s much darker than I anticipated (dude, he totally stalks the poor girl!) And man, Simon and Garfunkel really got on my nerves quickly. It’s an interesting movie with some interesting camera work and sound editing. I’m not sure it’s the masterpiece I expected it to be, but it was better than the semi-related Rumor Has It. Ha ha.

Miss Conception – Ok, so this was probably a bad choice on my part, but this movie was awful. Heather Graham plays a lady who can’t agree with her boyfriend on when to have kids. After kicking him to the curb, she finds out she only has one egg left and will thereafter be as barren as the Sahara. And she ovulates in two weeks so she’d better get moving to find herself a baby-daddy. Oh Barf. She and her two classic side-kick friends (gay male friend, bitter female friend) come up with a foolproof, three-prong plan which (of course) doesn’t work. But wait! This is a comedy! Everything works out in the end even though it negates the premise of the entire film. *sigh* Absolutely nothing redeeming about this film at all. It wasn’t even that funny. And it just makes me nuts when females are portrayed as sperm-hungry mommy wannabees with raging biological clocks.

Scenes from a Mall – I appreciate most of Woody Allen’s work. And Bette Midler has her days as well (although she can tend to get kind of shrieky sometimes.) So I figured this would be a fun movie. While I admit it did start to get tedious towards the end, overall it was a good movie. I want to congratulate whoever came up with the idea of giving a surfboard as an anniversary gift in the first 10 minutes of the film and then requiring the characters to carry this neon green thing around for the rest of the movie. The mime character kind of got on my nerves, but I’m guessing that was kind of the point.

Superbad – I’m afraid this falls into the Napoleon Dynamite category. That movie was so popular and everyone raved about it. I watched it and thought it was boring and had no plot. Now Superbad has a plot, but I really don’t see what all the fuss was about. Entirely too much unnecessary profanity and dirty conversation which takes away from the finer points of the movie (not that there were many.) I mean, the DVD even has a counter feature so you can keep track of how many cuss words and sexual references there are. I suppose this appeals to a certain demographic (hello adolescent males!) but I’m not it. I was just put off by the swearing and the ridiculous storyline. I never went to parties like that in high school. I can’t relate. And unlike American Pie (the original), I just didn’t care whether the guys got any or not.

Sunday, September 07, 2008

A Hairy Situation

I'm having a problem making a decision. I've been procrastinating on getting a haircut because I'm not sure what I want to do. Adam pretty much always tells me to just shave my head but that's not happening. I like longer hair, but it gets to a point where unless I devote more attention to it it just looks like crap. It's to that point now so I need to regroup.

So I went online to look for one of those things where you upload your picture and can see what you'd look like with certain styles. What do you think (just ignore the hideous color - it was the closest to red I could find)?



Or how about this one?



Bwahahaha, just kidding.

I suppose the only way to go is shorter, but it looks to me like layers might be too much work for me. I'm a wash, towel dry, run a comb through it kind of person. I don't even have a hair dryer or hairspray. I do have a flat iron, but even that has gotten very little use. I was hoping it would eliminate frizz, but it didn't really do what I wanted it to. I also have some leave-in conditioner spray but that makes my hair greasy. I'm totally lazy and don't really want to add 10 minutes to my morning just to arrange my hair. I'd be thrilled if I could get something that takes no additional effort on my part.

So I'm looking for opinions. Ideas. Suggestions. Something I can take to Cost Cutters and hand to the hair cutting person.

Friday, September 05, 2008

The cat is chewing on my toe

Sorry, couldn't think of a title for this post so I just made an observation. JC is weird. He likes sitting below the computer desk and chewing on my feet.

Anyways...

You’d think after a number of years I’d realize that I drop off the face of the earth for a week every month and I’d maybe plan ahead and have some posts automatically show up or something. Alas, I’m not that organized. So apologies again for being lost in the land of the month-end close. (I did post on my cooking blog over the weekend though – I was way behind on that one as well.)

This week was a short one thanks to Labor Day. We people in the accounting world dislike most holidays because they always land in the most frustrating places in respect to the month-end/year-end close calendar. Labor Day is no exception. And the fact that it was on September 1st only added to my annoyance. This means we did our physical way back on the 29th, leaving plenty of time for people to mess everything up before final sales and receivings were complete. *sigh* Just look ahead to November though. Freaking Thanksgiving. We’ll end up doing our physical on the 26th. That’s just ridiculous.

Anywho, our Labor Day weekend was pretty uneventful. We finally got our comforter to the dry cleaners. I’m not sure I’d do that again. I didn’t want to try and stuff it in our washer/dryer because it’s a king-sized and therefore would probably not fit. I also have this reputation for screwing up the comforter in the dryer and all the batting bunches up. So I figured it might be easier/safer to have a professional do it. Yeah. It came back clean I guess. But noticeably faded and with a couple snags I don’t remember being there before. Live and learn.

We did our normal shopping rounds, feeling the pain of a cat food week. Of all the price increases, it seems like I notice the pet food ones the most. We used to be able to get the cans of Fancy Feast for $0.42. Now they’re $0.48. That’s almost a 15% increase! Guinea Pig food used to be $8.97 for the big bag and now it’s $9.44. While that’s only a 5% jump, it’s not nothing. Bedding went up as well. And it’s not as though I’m wishing death on our rodential (is that a word?) friends, but it will save us some money once they kick. And we considered adopting a dog. We must be nuts.

For the first time in quite a while we decided to go out on Saturday night. We went to the Monkey Bar in downtown Appleton. Thanks to the holiday weekend it was pretty dead. We got a decent parking spot and were two of five people in the bar. Sweet. We each had a drink and two “deadly sins” shots. I think mine were greed and vanity. Don’t recall. But they were good. Then we went downstairs to Déjà Vu, the martini bar. They were also pretty empty until a bachelorette party came in about ten minutes after us. Although they are part of the same bar group, Déjà Vu doesn’t have the “dirty drink” menu that The St. James has. Luckily the bartender knew what the Dirty Girl Scout was so it was all good. I also got the Tiramisu. Yum-a-licious. We stopped for food on the way home as all semi-drunk people should do. Then we went to sleep. And woke up with a headache. Drat. We also spent some money on some basics for our bar. So it was a lot of alcohol purchases this weekend. That’ll throw off our categories in Money. Heh. Sunday and Monday I don’t think I even left the house. Relaxation to the max.

But Tuesday it was back to work, thrown into month-end in a most unrelaxing way. It’s been pretty much work, home, dinner, sleep this week. Tomorrow Adam will be helping his grandmother move into her new apartment. We also plan to hit Seafood Fest in Menasha for dinner tonight. I’ve got some basic shopping/cleaning on my list, but nothing too interesting. Handbell rehearsals start a week from Monday and the first IMA meeting is the 17th. With the crappy weather we’ve had the last two days it sure looks as though fall is here a bit earlier than desired. Adam even built a fire last night!

I’ll be trying out a lot of new recipes in the next few weeks. In my quest to replace Cooking Light (and man, are they persistent in trying to get me to renew!) I bought three new magazines and found quite a few interesting things to try out. Our first meal with quinoa is coming up this weekend. I’m hoping it’s easy to find – I’m guessing it’s probably in the natural foods section. I’d never even heard of it until Adam sent me some article about it and how great it is for you. On the other end of that spectrum, I’m going to make some white chocolate-strawberry bars I saw on a blog awhile ago and I also hope to bake a cake to test out my decorating tools. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve got my (stupid, mandatory) biometric testing bright and early Monday morning. That means I have to do the 12-hour fast thing on Sunday night. Boo. I guess I’ll bring my breakfast to work with me and eat it after they forcibly take my blood. Boo on that too. I hate having my blood drawn. The things I do to keep my health insurance… I guess I shouldn’t complain. At least I have insurance in the first place, right?

In any case, time moves right along and before we know it Christmas music will be playing in the grocery store again. Blech.