don’t worry – i am alive

So, I did okay posting semi-regularly there for a little while.  And then dropped off the face of the planet.  What have I been up to since my last post you ask?

*I visited my good friend from high school and her family in Tennessee.  I got to meet her 10 month old baby for the first time.  And I fell in love.  Like wanted to steal her and bring her home with me.  Oh, how that baby stole my heart!

*We wrapped up football season.  Two games in the post season – not too shabby for our team.

*I saw two of my good friends down in Seattle (ok, Lynnwood) and we went to the Spaghetti Factory.  Which I love.  That browned butter mizithra pasta is to die for.

*I completed my cheerleading judging internship.

*We started basketball season.

*I turned 29.  My roommate made my favorite fondue to celebrate.  Apparently I like cheese based dishes a lot.

*Visited my grannie in the hospital.  Thought she could no longer remember mine or my uncle’s names.  Worried for about 14 hours and then got the call that she was “back”.  We still aren’t quite sure what the issue was, but I’m happy to have her healthy and remembering us again.

*I got deathly ill the day before Thanksgiving and was either on my couch or in my bed for the next 72 hours.  Worst cold ever.

*My first outing from the house was to go see Harry Potter with my roommate.  Loved it.

*Went to our staff Christmas party.  Won the best prize in the raffle.  Can’t wait for my personal boat day sometime next summer!

*Registered to take the WEST-B in January.  It is an entrance exam for grad school.  It was the first “real” step I took towards applying.

*Got our Christmas tree.  Finally figured out that it is better to get a smallish tree rather than one that will take over half of our (already small) living room.

*Did the majority of my Christmas shopping online.  Being able to ship things to Alaska (where I will be for the holidays) is wonderful.  I will still have to check a bag on the plane, but now I can at least pack clothes to wear as well.

*I observed a friend who is a newish (2 years) high school teacher.  It was good to be in a classroom and see what high schoolers are really like in that setting.  I am now excited/nervous for grad school.  Which is exactly what I was feeling before I observed his classes.  Oh, and I accidentally let it drop to my boss that I’m planning to apply for school.  Completely out of the blue.  Good planning, Cait.

*Flew to Spokane to judge a cheerleading competition.  Left Seattle at 8am and was back by 5:45pm.

*Saw Harry Potter again.  Loved it again.

*Went to a cheer coaches association meeting and got nice perfume in the white elephant exchange.  There was a $15 limit, so I’m guessing mine was a regift since the Be Delicous perfume by DKNY that I got retails for much more than that.  But I don’t mind – regifting was my gain.

*Came home and crashed.

*Woke up this morning for another round.  My eye is on the prize of the first weekend in March – cheerleading season will definitely be over by then and perhaps I can get my life back.

 

 

randy roos

Last night I had a bit of trouble falling asleep and started just thinking about random things.  And here they are:

1.  Right now the foods I am craving the most are oyster crackers, caramels, and milk.  And no, I am not pregnant.  Those are just the things I want to eat all the time.  And when I don’t have them I think about how good they would taste.  I’ve rounded out those 3 things with a little Panda Express and pizza lately.  My regular diet is just fabulous isn’t it?

2.  We checked two big things off of the cheer calendar last week.  That is always a relief and it is basically the only way I’m staying sane with cheer right now.  I can survive as long as I am seeing progress.  The next month(ish) will continue to be crazy, but I’m just going to keep plowing through.

3.  I am not happy with Directv.  We’ve had it for 4 years and have had issues with it for at least half that time.  There is now a tree that has grown enough to block the satellite feed and it is messing up the channels we can get and whether it will even be a clear picture.  Which yes, I know, “wah wah, my first world problems are soooo terrible!”.  The issue at this point is that I just hate confrontation and phone calls so I’m not looking forward to canceling Directv and trying to set something up with Comcast.  Why do I not have a personal assistant to do crap like this for me?  Oh right, because I’m not famous or a high powered CEO.  In fact I am an administrative assistant myself.  Thankfully I haven’t yet had to call and cancel my boss’ cable provider.

4.  Speaking of work, it has been CRAZY busy.  I work on the piles of tasks all day and feel like I leave with piles that are the same size at the end of the day.  We’re also getting to the point that everyone is so stressed that they can’t even remember what work has already been done so then they do it over again.  We are wasting time people!  And at this point I just don’t see an end in sight.

5.  I think I might start posting a “Song of the Week”.  Obviously I enjoy sharing the random songs I hear and like and it might be a way for me to just get on here more often and get the thoughts flowing otherwise.  I already have a song for this week picked out, but it will have to wait for its own post.  Gotta spread the wealth here people.

6.  I’ve been reading Harry Potter and I’m pretty much obsessed.  I didn’t read them while they were coming out and in fact thought they were kind of dumb and childish (sorry to my 2 college roommates who were obsessed with them at the time – I’ve been proven wrong).  But since then I’ve seen all the movies and for some reason last spring my current roommate (who was the 3rd college roommate but who also didn’t read them then) and I started to get all crazy about the movies and watched them all on ABCfamily.  I even went to Blockbuster late one night because our dvr hadn’t recorded one properly (damn you Directv) and we were sooo sad not to be able to watch it.  Anyway, I decided to read them and started at the very end of July.  And I am now more than half way through book 5.  And all I want to do is read it all the time.  I don’t want to have to work or coach or make food or clean my room.  I just want to read Harry Potter.  Where is my rich husband who would make it so that I could just sit at home (or even better – by a pool or on a beach while on a tropical vacation) and read?  I have a feeling he is off somewhere with that personal assistant of mine.  Now if I could just track them down.

7.  My mom thinks I might have Lyme disease.  That is the conversation we had on the phone yesterday.  She has some basis for believing this because many of the symptoms are things I have been dealing with.  Except for oh, the TICK BITE AND RASH you are supposed to have.  But I did google it and I could see there might be a slight possibility that this is what is wrong with me.  The symptoms do add up and the first site I read did say that sometimes you don’t notice the bite and that the rash might be so insubstantial that you don’t think anything of it.  Which great.  Now I’ve got stinkin’ Lyme disease.  Thanks Mom.

8.  Sometimes I think the world is going to blow up because of all the ways technology has just exploded (no pun intended) in the last 10 or so years.  I’ve been out of high school for just over 11 years now and the way I live my life and use technology now is so vastly different then it was back then.  Which duh, it is for pretty much anyone.  But it blows my mind that I didn’t have an email address until about the middle of my senior year (I can distinctly remember getting it too – a boy named Josh helped me while we were in our “Applied Graphics” class).  And now with the cell phones and texting and facbeook and blogging and tweeting and skyping and everything!  Which yes, I know this is not a new topic at all, but the thing that set my mind off about it recently was when I was watching the VMA’s on Sunday night and they kept reporting which celebrity was the most popular tweet conversation (is that what you call it?) at that moment.  First of all, who cares?  And second, why are we wasting our time tweeting about random celebrities while we are probably all at home watching it by ourselves?  Where is the face to face interaction?  I just can’t imagine what will be coming next with the rate everything has happened in the last decade.

9.  If you can’t tell from that last entry – I am getting old.  You know, 28.  Which is apparently when you start feeling old.  And when you are a teenager or college student you think that this could NEVER happen to you.  You will always be hip and with it (well at least as hip and with it as you are as a teenager or college student which as we all know varies quite a bit).  But there comes a day or a week or a time period where you realize that things have changed and you either haven’t changed with it or you’ve changed too much to appreciate the world changing.  And suddenly the hipness is no longer there.

10.  Does anyone want to call Directv and Comcast for me?

Friday Night Plans

I’m going to this movie tomorrow night, but only because I love Jennifer Garner.  I used to like Matthew McConaughey, but now I feel like he’s just been making the same movie over and over again just to get a paycheck.  Whatever happened to the Matthew who made movies like A Time to Kill?  But I could watch Jennifer Garner anyday.  My roommate and I have been watching the second season of Alias lately and I still love it just as much as I did when it first came out.  So anyway, this movie could be a real toss up (or as my friend Julie put it, “maybe just too cheesy”), but we’re still gonna go.  (Except for Julie – she really did decide it was just too cheesy and bailed.)

10 Things Right Now…

Well that Abba post has been staring me in the face for too long now.  And I really don’t have anything exciting to post (when will the monotony stop???) so I thought I would just post 10 random things that have happened recently.  And no, this is not my facebook version of 25 random things about me – that’s already on facebook.  You can look for it there.  If you are facebook friends with me.

1.  I finally saw Slumdog Millionaire last Friday.  Amazing.  So sad, but also so well done.  The story had just the right amount of intricacies to really hook you in.

2.  On Saturday I went bowling with some friends.  We bowled 2 games and I didn’t break 100 either time.  I should have the second time, but the stupid thing froze up and then knocked down my pins that I was supposed to hit for the spare.  Also of note, my friend who is currently in a wheelchair (due to breaking both of his heels) bowled too.  Definitely had a few gutter balls at first, but he worked on his form and technique and by the end he was giving us a run for our money.

3.  I watched Once and Step Up 2: The Streets on Saturday night.  I hadn’t seen Once since probably when it was in the theater.  So good, but it always breaks my heart in the end.  What can I say, I like happy endings.  Probably why I ended the night with Step Up – nothing beats an awesome dance routine in the rain followed by a couple’s first kiss. 

4.  I ate brie cheese with a mixture of almonds and brown sugar melted on top.  Oh my gosh.

5.  My new cat woke me up at about 3:45 in the morning on Sunday night (and wouldn’t let me sleep again for at least an hour).  I am so not used to sleeping with an animal.  She definitely got thrown toward the end of the bed numerous times.

6.  I’m actually looking forward to Valentine’s Day.  Not because I have a valentine of my own, but because even though this holiday is supposedly a contrived holiday meant to make us spend money on useless chocolates and flowers, I still really like it.  I mean yes, you should love the people you love everyday and let them know any old time.  But why is it bad to have a chosen day where everyone celebrates love?  It’s not saying that’s the only day you can love someone, it’s just helping to call all of our attention to love.  Which you know, is “the greatest of these”.  (Sorry, I couldn’t resist – but it is true!)  Anyway, I’m hoping to make some Valentine’s for my cheerleaders and roommate and Grannie.  I sent my niece and nephew’s out today.  I’m sure the 10 1/2 month old boy will be very appreciative.

7.  I’m going to take part in a blog share.  That means that someday in the nearish future I will be posting a post written by someone else.  In fact, a total stranger.  And you’ll never know who it is.  In fact, I don’t think I’ll even ever know who it is.  And I’ll have a post of my own on some other total stranger’s blog.  But I do think that there will be a list of all the participants or something so that we can check out the other blogs.  You can obviously see that this is my first time being a part of anything like this.  I am so the girl who jumps on technology after everyone else is pretty much on board.

8.  I was able to finish a pretty big project at work in less than one total work day.  It is something that comes up every year and we have to submit it to a higher entity in our work world.  (Apparently I’m deciding right now not to go into detail about where I work.  Even though I may have already talked about it in a previous post.)  So I think this was my 4th time putting it together and submitting it.  It is a crazy statistical report for things that we don’t keep very good records of (you would think we would have learned).  Anyway, every year they send it out about a month before it is due.  The first year I didn’t know what I was doing and it ended up being one of the most stressful couple of days for me to get it done.  Each year since has been better but still difficult tracking down all these numbers in random places and from various people.  So this year, I get an email last Thursday saying it is due today (Tuesday).  I completely freaked out.   Turns out none of us ever got the info they send out about a month before.  ANNOYING.  But in the end I got things figured out and I think we’re actually more accurate this time around than ever before.  Ok, that was a lot of blah blah blahing about work.

9.  I have been reading Gone With the Wind to Grannie.  It is so long!  And it takes me forever just to read one chapter.  I read to her yesterday and I think we are on page 196 of something like 1,060 pages.

10.  I have flossed my teeth every night since January 21st (the date of my last dentist appointment) and I’ve made my bed every morning this month (because of the new cat).  I’m sure this does not seem significant to many of you readers, but let me just tell you that it is.  At least to me and probably my mom who had to live with me never doing either of these things for all of my growing up years.