Adam wanted me to post this...

So there, it's posted. :-)

Caturday - Christmas is Coming

We picked this towel up at Alpha Dog Omega Cat in Charleston. It was pretty much the only thing in the store we could afford. Well, this towel and this totally cute strawberry catnip toy:



Anyway. Here's what's part of "A Cat's Christmas":
Twelve Tabbies Tapping
Eleven Persians Purring
Ten Toms a-Spraying
Nine Fleas Biting
Eight Kittens a-Mewing
Seven Siamese a-Sleeping
Six Legs a-Rubbing
Five Golden Abyssinians
Four Furry Footstools
Three Clawed Chairs
Two Fur Balls
and
A "Partridge" in a Pear Tree



(Looks like maybe this cat knows Simon's Cat?)

Cookie Monster, SNL Host?

Really, this is so dumb I can't believe I'm posting it. But it made me laugh so hard.



He can't be worse than some of the horrible hosts they've had these past couple of years, right?

Million Word Monday: Malbec, anyone?

I blame this on Door County and all the good wine they make up there:



But I blame this on my brother:

I'm a Total Slacker...

I'm sorry, I'm just lacking the motivation to do the complete recap of our trip. Or this past week. Here are the pictures to tide you over until I get my butt back in gear.

Caturday with Ted

Ted is enrolled in the immersion program...

Photographic Memory: In the Beginning

This is the first thing I ever cooked for Adam:



Porcupine Meatballs and mashed potatoes.

If the way to man's heart is through his stomach I must have done something right!

Caturday with Carly

Is that a smile I see there?

Photographic Memory: The Endless Winter

It was sleeting the other day so I'm mentally preparing myself for winter. By looking at pictures of our first winter at the house. The one with all the snow





and ice.



Ugh.

Week in Review

Let's just pretend I did a recap last week. I meant to, but time just got away from me. I blame it on trick or treating and the fact that the last day of the month fell on a Sunday. Boo (on both accounts.)

Anyway. Onward.

Monday:
We didn't have many kids trick or treat at our house this year - 39. I wonder where they all went? I brought about half of our leftover Halloween candy to work with me to get it out of the house. It goes pretty quickly at work between chocolate-loving accounting folk and the maintenance guys who pop in from time to time. They seem to come around a lot more if they know there's food. Day one went pretty well. The system wasn't as slow as I expected since we had another group of plants go live on 10/31. Hope their experience has been better than ours! Bells was a pretty low-key practice.

Tuesday:
I love my new day two. I don't have to come in early, I don't really have a lot of stress over deadlines. It's great. I went and voted after work - it was pretty busy, which was great. It was also great that I didn't have to stand in line to register. (Ha ha suckas!) I was in and out in about two minutes.

Wednesday:
Day three is where it starts to get messy. I also had an annual enrollment meeting to attend since the one next week (meant for people who would be busy at month-end) is when I'm on vacation. Skipped lunch, stayed late. Didn't really matter since Adam was golfing.

Thursday:
Day four, messiest of them all. Apparently the third month close on SAP is the worst. Guess which month this was! Processing times for WIP and variance calculations were ridiculous and settlements timed out on me and I had to have Tina run them in the background (so it doesn't allow timeouts) for me. *sigh* On the bright side, I got a lot of other things done while I was waiting for things to process. On the not bright side, I was at work late again. But luckily Adam was out and about so it didn't really matter again.

Friday:
Finally finished up my month-end stuff. Kind of. Some "misunderstandings" in some new files led to doing the same report three times. Awesome. It was a long day. I left much later than I had hoped, feeling frustrated and needing a drink. Come to think of it, I think I worked later than I wanted to every day this week. And through lunch two days. Yay for month-end.

Adam got home after an adventure (including a fender-bender incident) in Green Bay and we went down to Kodiak Jack's for dinner (see: desire for booze and bad day in previous paragraph.)

Saturday:
Shopping - and some crazy prices on leftover Halloween candy at Target. People are work are going to LOVE me! Mini nap. Church and then dinner with Adam's family.

Sunday:
Time change left us up for the day at 6am. Weekly cleaning, including cleaning out litterboxes in preparation for a few days away from home. Getting around to thinking about our Christmas party menu.

This next week should be better. We both work Monday and Tuesday and then Wednesday morning we leave for Charleston. This has been Adam's trip to plan so I've been staying out of the details. What I do know is that we'll be in Charleston Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning. We then head up to Charlotte for the rest of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday we head back to Charleston and back home. The weather looks good so far and hopefully things go smoothly. We're signed up for a 5k race on Saturday morning so we'll see how that goes. My only experience with races has been counting the donation money and I'm woefully behind on getting my butt back on the treadmill so it could be brutal.

Caturday

Hey Goldilocks - I know how you feel...

Martha's Top Ten: John Irving Edition

I admit I'm still working my way (albeit very slowly) through Last Night in Twisted River so this list might not be totally accurate. I also seem to remember I couldn't bring myself to read all of Setting Free the Bears so perhaps that's a little unfair as well. But oh well. This is my list.

10) A Son of the Circus

9) The Water-Method Man

8) The 158-Pound Marriage

7) Until I Find You

6) The Hotel New Hampshire

5) The Fourth Hand

4) A Prayer for Owen Meany

3) The World According to Garp

2) The Cider House Rules

1) A Widow for One Year

I don't have a lot to say about many of these individually. John Irving's style and subject matter is divisive at times and it's a matter of taste as to who likes him and who doesn't. All of his books touch on many of the same themes and I enjoy reading and re-reading them. He makes up a good percentage of my home libary.

Photographic Memory: P-I-G spells "love"

On our very first camping trip to Door County we went to Washington Island and visited the petting zoo - The Double KW Ranch. While there we met the cutest pot-bellied pigs I'd ever seen:



But then we met this one on our most recent trip:



I don't know - I'm torn. Why are all pot-bellied pigs so darn adorable!