Where to start… I suppose the best place is the beginning (or the end as it would appear). I got out of work an hour early (the day before a holiday, we get to leave an hour early 🙂 ). I had gotten a call earlier that day from Susan, she was wondering where the pie crusts were that we had bought. For some reason I thought they were precooked (they were packed in a tube) and thought they didn’t need to be refrigerated… so, I had put them in the cupboard above the microwave. Well, they weren’t looking to good after a week there, so I had a mission to get pie crusts after work (for the pork pies Susan had planned to make). Along with the pie crusts, I needed to get some fake wine for dinner and I also wanted to get some liquor to make drinks similar to the ones we had on our honeymoon (aka “Liquor Run Part 1”). My first stop… Meijer, where they have the fake wine I really like… I thought picking up the other stuff I needed would be easy… well guess again, the store was overcrowded, I couldn’t find any premade pie crusts and key items for the drinks. I ended up with two bottles of fake wine and a bottle of shampoo (as I was running low…) Off to Wal-mart, I knew where the pie crusts were as we had bought them here earlier… but their liquor selection was quite poor… so no mixed drinks for after dinner tonight… (and thus this liquor run was over…) Susan made a delicious dinner and a tasty sweetheart tart for dessert.

Saturday was a pretty exciting nite as we spent about three or four hours in the emergency room. Don’t worry, no one was seriously hurt… Susan wasn’t feeling well (she’s had a cold and a wheeze for quite awhile now) and was upstairs taking a nap (about 8 o’clock at night). I was downstairs just about to fall asleep when I heard a big thud. Susan had gotten up, went to her computer, then to the bathroom to splash some water on her face and ended up fainting. I raced up the stairs to see what had happened… Susan was on the floor, conscious, blocking the door (I thought I was going to have to tear it off the hinges.) She mananged to get to her feet and said she couldn’t breath very well. I told her we should go to the hospital, she agreed and off we went. We got there and they did some preliminary stuff… Susan felt pretty light-headed and almost fainted a couple more times. Eventually we got to see the doctor and he prescribed some medicine for her to take. That pretty much cleared her wheeze up and we were set to go (around 11:30ish).

Sunday, a day of cleaning (hah, that almost happened)… We watched those awesome Lions beat the Cowboys (oh yeah, the Lions didn’t finish last, the Raiders were 2-14!) We decided to go pickup the liquor for the drinks I had wanted to make on Friday, “Liquor Run Part 2”. We set off around six o’clock to Wal-mart, we decided to get groceries for the week too. Their selection of Liquor, as I mentioned above, wasn’t too great, so after loading up my car (in the pouring ran… it’s winter, thought it was suppose to snow…) we headed over to the Eastman Party Store. We struck out again… on the way home we stopped at a liquor store on E. Patrick, no luck there either. After dropping off the groceries at home, we decided to try the liquor store on E. Patrick once more, this time we found out they were sold out of one thing we needed (close, but no cigar). We then proceeded to Glen’s grocery store, Meijer (where we did get the rum), Kroger’s grocery store, Rite-Aid, and finally back to the East Man Party Store (where we got the rest of what we needed… must have missed it the first time… this liquor run was over just before ten o’clock…). We picked up a Papa John’s pizza on the way home (“The Superman”, it was pretty good). I made up a couple different drinks for New Years and they were both pretty good… just like St. Lucia, minus the sunny weather… In case your wondering, here’s the recipes I used (as you can see they made quite a bit… Susan was a little tipsy aftewards 😉 ):

Island Breeze (Makes four servings):
3/4 cup Dark Rum
3/4 cup Cream of Coconut
4 cups of Ice
3 Ripe Bananas
1 Tbsp Lemon Juice
Garnish with fresh pineapple

Hawaiian Blue (Makes four servings):
1/2 cup Blue Curaco
1/2 cup Light Rum
1/2 cup Cream of Coconut
1 cup Pineapple Juice
4 cups of Ice
Garnish with fresh pineapple

We welcomed in the new year and Susan was *cough* passed *cough* out afterwards. I stayed up to watch another Law & Order (they had marathons of each series over the weekend) and then snuggled up with my wifey on the couch once it was over. Our place was pretty messy and we planned on cleaning Sun… err… Monday, but that didn’t happen either. We relaxed, made up some more drinks and watched TV all day (that was nice…) Back to work… sigh… actually today wasn’t that bad, I went to Toastmasters and participated in “Table Topics” (1-2 minute speech about a random topic). Everyone was pretty nice and I’ll be joining Toastmasters soon (as dorky as that is, I think it’ll be pretty fun… at least Tuesday’s won’t be so bad at work…) Oh yeah and I actually did some cleaning today.