Category: Misc

We got back from Nashville on Tuesday (late) and I fully intend to write up a nice post about it, but so far I. have. not. had. time! Since we’ve been home, I’ve put in over 20 hrs at the office and a few more on top of those at home. Tabby had climbing class last night and tonight we finally went to pick up our darling doggie. I just finally got some time tonight to pull the photos from our trip off the camera. I still need to process the photos from the weeks before we left. Whatever.

We’re having fun along the way. Matt’s got a boy’s poker night tomorrow he’s looking forward to. Tabby’s got a stranger-danger class on Saturday. We’ve got some fun Thanksgiving homework to do this weekend. And I plan on resting quite a lot. I want to cook up some tasty food.

But now it’s bedtime.

You know you’re from CO when you get excited about rain. Even when we haven’t had a particularly dry, HOT summer like this one, I am always excited to see rain. It started last night when I was heading home from the PTA meeting and I had little drops pelting me the whole (2 blocks) home. It hadn’t gotten much worse when I went to bed but when I got up I could hear it hitting the roof and the windows. Our streets are covered and we had to hold bootcamp entirely inside. Tabby wore her rainboots (we bought them while in NYC) to school. No one minds though – I think it would take a week or more before we’d get sick of rain. I look at it as a great excuse to drink tea – just wish I was doing it from my own kitchen instead of my office. Oh well!

 

So yesterday I got to go on a couple of jobsite visits. We visited two sites on CSU’s campus where we’re busily renovating a library and an arena. It’s cool stuff. The arena is very much a work in progress still, but the library is almost done and it is really neat.

It has many cool touches, like a water bottle filler. Continue reading “A Day on the Job”

What a week we had. Not only was it one of the busiest on the calendar, but it was just … weird. I received two pieces of very bad news … a divorce, a diagnosis. Neither belong to me, but both affect dear friends will continue to for years to come. It was hard and kind of depressing. You hate to see the ones you love in pain. Continue reading “Where’d that week go?”

Is the weekend really almost over? It went by so fast!

The mercury was pushing the high 90s so Friday we went to the pool and stayed for hours. It was the only outdoors place to be, that’s for sure. It was so much fun hanging with our friends. That evening my family came over for Pizza and Downton Abbey (a great combo if there ever was one).

Saturday morning we had our friends’ boys with us. The kids played for a while and then we took them on a short expedition to IKEA where Matt and I looked for this and that and mostly didn’t find it. I did get a great new bin for Ben’s train tracks and some shelves for Ben’s room. The kids were hungry early and we took them to the restaurant for meatballs which they practically licked off the plate.

Saturday afternoon we had a birthday party for our friends’ kids. It was a nice low-key BBQ and we all enjoyed ourselves. Afterwards my parents picked up the kids for a date at Larkburger and a showing of Ice Age 4 – both were well-received. Matt and I meanwhile headed off to the 5th anniversary party for my gym, another nice lowkey BBQ affair. We hung around with all of my fab classmates and their spouses and celebrated Robyn, our awesome coach. We got to spend the rest of the night relaxing sans kiddos.

In the morning, Matt and I slept in REALLY late – I think that’s the first time in years I’ve slept past 9. Then we did stuff around the house – cleaned out the fridge, worked in the garage and hung Ben’s shelves. Then we hit the grocery store and went to get the kids. We ended up going out to lunch with my mom and before we knew it it was time to head home. Tabby had afternoon swim lessons. We had to rush to get there on time and as soon as we showed up, the pool was closed for lightning. Boo. Lessons rescheduled for later this week.

So now we are doing the Sunday night thing – getting ready for the week and doing just a bit more relaxing. It is quiet and nice.

… and other things running through my head.

It’s all been just a little crazy lately. Yesterday we had to buy a vacuum, completely out of the blue. Our housecleaning faeries, as I affectionately refer to them, do not bring their own vacuum with them and since ours died and they were flying in today, a new vacuum had to be purchased. It gave us 10 years of dog hair removal so it probably doesn’t owe us much. Matt and the kids went to Sears to pick it up and the kids were thrilled with the whole process and fought over who would use it first. It really sucks, that’s for sure.

Suddenly there’s this mad race to do all these things … trips, parties, girls’ nights, dinners, weekends-away, etc … BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS. Though in all fairness, there are a few things on the calendar even after school stars, every weekend until SCHOOL STARTS will be filled.to.the.brim. We may even have to move our anniversary trip.

We’ve been cooking quite a bit, but it’s been all super simple stuff … meat on the grill plus nuked veggies with seasoning on them. Super easy and tasty but pretty boring. Life just hasn’t been lending itself well to the use of cookbooks. However, we are throwing our sitter a retirement/thank-you-for-putting-up-with-us-for-five-years dinner in a couple of weeks and I will be pulling out all the stops … or at least baking.

I have some really cool stuff I want to share. Kjersten asked about my digital scrapbooking which I would definitely like to share since I’ve been enjoying it and since I’ve actually been making headway (though less since we got back from vacation, I notice). I also made Tabby her own “Learn to Read” book in digital format, inspired by a project on Playdough to Plato, and put it on the Kindle which was a major hit, so I’d like to share how I accomplished that as well because it was fun and pretty easy.

I have not been running much, though I have been keeping up my bootcamp routine. There are reasons for the lack of running: being out of the routine, things at work being insane and some ennui caused, oddly enough, by a running clinic I took. But I am really wanting to get back into it. Tonight I signed up for a 5K to do with a big group and I’m really looking forward to it. Now to dust off my shoes and get back to it…

We had a nice weekend. It felt longer than normal somehow and the office feels somewhat foreign to me like I haven’t been here in a while although it’s only been three days, like usual.

Friday the kids and I had a quiet day. We pulled out the water colors. We did laundry. We watched TV. We chilled. I handled some of the little things that I’ve been too busy for the past few weeks, including ordering Ben a nap-mat from Etsy that he will be using for the next two years at preschool.

Our friends needed us to watch their boys Friday night so they came over after dinner and stayed with us all night. Everyone did pretty well except for a smallish incident Saturday morning when Tabby’s decorative “special things” shelf got pulled down (now that she has bunkbeds, it is way too easily accessible) and her piggybank was broken.

We ended up taking them to see Madagascar 3. The kids had waaay too much popcorn and lemonade, but a really good time. They behaved really well. To my surprise, Matt and I enjoyed the movie too – the penguins were hilarious and so was the cross-dressing lemur.

After we dropped the boys off, we headed to my mom’s house where we played in the backyard and had dinner. The kids stayed with her Saturday night so Matt and I could accomplish a few things. We purged the kids rooms of excess junk (I contend there is still more that should go!) and rearranged Tabby’s room. Her shelf still needs to be fixed, but the room is flowing much better now and looks really cute. We also did some rearranging in Ben’s room and made some decisions about where his two decorative shelves will go. I think it’s finally starting to look truly put together.

Sunday we slept in and then we went to the kids’ consignment shop to pick up a check for the kids’ old dresser and see if they want to sell Tabby’s toddler bed (they did) and picked up some new jeans for Tabby. Then we met Mom and the kids for lunch and kiddo exchange and went home (via Target) to have naps and a quiet finish to our weekend.

I still need to post about our amazing parties from last week, but I spent my weekend just having fun and relaxing. So maybe I’ll get to that tomorrow. I was so exhausted after the parties that I really took it easy on Friday … I hardly did anything. I folded some laundry, had lunch with my family and had one helluva nap. Mmmmm …. nap. That evening our friends and their three kids came over and we lounged at the pool and ate pizza and watched the kids play in the water. It was pretty darn nice. Continue reading “Weekend oh Weekend”