A new month, a new update into the lives of John and Susan. This weekend went by pretty fast. Friday I went on a shrimp hunt. Wal-mart use to carry fresh (raw) shrimp in their seafood section and I was buying them almost every week. As previously noted, Wal-mart and logic do not go together, as they stopped carrying these shrimp (just before lent started). I figured GFS would be a good place to find some frozen “fresh” shrimp. I found out all they had was cooked or breaded (in just about any kind of flavor you could think of…) Meijer was my second choice (they do have fresh lobsters there, maybe one Friday I’ll pick up a couple…) They didn’t have any fresh shrimp, but I did find some uncooked ones in a bag (jumbo size, the shrimp not the bag…) They were alright, but I’m going to try and find a better seafood place (or we could just go to Red Lobster every Friday 😉 ).

Saturday was a busy day (after I got to sleep in late), we headed over to the Home Builders Show (Susan had gotten free tickets from work). We entered a raffle for a 42″ LCD TV (hope we win, that’d look sweet in our new house) and got some information about landscaping and basement finishing (we also entered a raffle for a $25,000 basement makeover, that’d be nice!) Getting to the Home Builders show was not an easy task. The address was something like 1321 E. Wackerly. Looking at this we decided it was going to be pretty easy as we knew where Wackerly was and figured it wouldn’t be too hard to find (boy were we wrong…) After we get onto Wackerly, I notice we are heading west, the address is on east Wackerly, a reasonable person would think, okay we need to turn around and head the other direction. After seeing 1400 E. Wackerly and no Home Builders show I thought, maybe it’s in Bay County (US-10 goes through Wackerly so I thought maybe on the other side of US-10…). The only thing over th ere was farmlands, and I didn’t see anything closely resembling a Home Builders Show (maybe a half-dilapidated big red barn…) After going back to the apartment we saw that it actually was “west”, but further down the road (in another county I think).

After the show, we were really getting the home itch and decided to take a spin down to Sears to look at appliances. We get a 30% builders discount on appliances at Sears, wOOt! After oogling at all the stainless steel appliances, we did pick a few Kenmore appliances. After I memorized the model numbers we took a quick drive by our new house and headed back to the apartment. After looking at a number of poor reviews for Kenmore appliances, we decided they were not for us (no sense in investing in appliances that don’t work…) GE seems like a good choice and we’ll be hitting the local stores to get a better idea of what different models look like (Sears didn’t have very many on display, but we have to order online anyway…) We also went to the movies on Saturday to see Zodiac (I didn’t think it was all that great, but Susan enjoyed it). It is an interesting story, but I felt the movie moved along really slowly… Too bad Midland still doesn’t have Breach (that one looks really good…) O n the way home, I pulled into Family Video and rented Inside Man, which was pretty good. I recommend it if you’re looking for something to watch/rent (it’s got Denzel Washington and it’s about a bank robbery, of course it’s gonna be good.) Susan fell asleep before the ending, so she doesn’t know how sneaky the robbers really are!
Sunday was a pretty lazy day. I’ve got our desk plans mostly finished. I’m working on designing an L-shaped desk for our two computers in the corner of our living room. If I can build it, I think it’ll fit pretty nicely in there (a picture of the design can be found on the Pic of the Day page).

As far as work goes, this last week has been kind of interesting. I’ve been developing sim code to help validate the process control code (and have already found many problems with the control code). I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, because some of the stuff should have been caught before the code was ever tested, hopefully when my validation protocol is executed, we don’t find to many errors (which has a deadline I’m pretty sure we won’t hit…) I do have a couple job leads I’m hoping to hear back on, one at CMT (I really hope they give me a call), a “real” job at Dow, and my resume has been passed off to an acquaintance at EDS (contracting company that does IT work). I don’t know how much more of this job I can take, it’s gotten to be extremely boring (I need to figure out how to get internet access 😉 ).

Probably about time I added a new blog entry. Apparently blogs are becoming more popular these days, even the CEO of Dow is creating his very own blog (which I learned during the Dow World News Broadcast the other day). If you haven’t heard by now, we have an agreement for the house and our closing date is April 30th. We talked them down quite a bit from the starting price and are pretty excited to move in. Susan’s folks came down the other weekend to help go through the house to see if there was anything majorly wrong. We had a couple minor issues and hope to see them fixed before we are the offical owners. We also took a spin over to Frakenmuth to meet up with Susan’s Aunt and Uncle. They stay at a hotel with a huge indoor waterpark with tube slides, water slides, a lazy river, and a huge bucket that dumps water out every so often (and it’s really cold!) It was fun, even if Susan tipped us over after going down the tube slide together. We got to eat at the Bavarian Inn and have the oh-so-famous chicken dinner. There was still a few ice sculptures around and they still looked pretty good (from Snow Fest a few weeks ago, though the statues weren’t as exciting as Tech’s… they used dirty snow). I got to see Susan perform in an orchestra concert last weekend, which was really nice (I’ll be going again this weekend to another one and that should be fun as well). CMT is looking for another person and maybe they’ll even hire me this time, that would be exciting. Scout’s been doing good, she got a new toy that she’s absolutely crazy about. It’s a cube made out of fabric with 3 holes on different sides and ribbon hanging from one. She’ll get in that thing and roll around and have a merry old time, even though she was scared of it when we first took it out. She tried jumping on the top, which wasn’t a good idea as it sprung back up. Nothing else too exciting, just getting everything ready for the house.

A new month, about time a new blog entry! This past weekend was pretty exciting. As you may have noticed there are pictures of a house filling up this month’s “Picture of the Day”. As of yesterday it has been agreed upon by the seller, that me and Susan will buy the house. Yup that’s right, you’re looking at a couple of future homeowners (April 30th to be exact). This attractive two-story home is located in the quaint little town of Freeland (if I hand a virtual hand I could show you where exactly that is, or you could mapquest it…) We talked the seller down from their asking price (which was quite a bit below the SEV), so we got it at a really good price. This week our focus is getting the agreement signed and heading over to the Dow Chemical Employee Credit Union for a loan (a really BIG loan… :/). Another exciting event that happened this weekend was that we got our taxes figured out… okay, maybe a little more exciting for us then you, but still we got it figured out! You’re probalby more interested in the fact that we went up to Winter Carnival (pictures coming soon…) We met up with my sister, Beth, brother-in-law, Matthew, and our little nephew Marcus. We survived the chilling winds to see the magnificant statues so carefully made (some more then others… as some had used dirty snow… >_<) It was a pretty good time, we went to the Ambassador where we got their ever-so-popular pizza. We also got to see the unveiling of the Houghton snowflake postage stamp and Susan got to meet up with her sirority sisters for a fishbowl. Later that night, back in Ishpeming, I dropped off the computer I had built for my brother and found out “Ambo” pizza isn’t all that tasty coming back up. We ended up taking Ben to Border Grill (going here was important, aparently…) and hung out the rest of the night with my lil brother. All and all, it was a pretty excellent weekend.

Let the house hunt begin! Last weekend was definitely a busy one. On Saturday, we took a ride through most of Midland on a hunt for that “perfect” house. We went up this street and down that one, we even went into Larkin Township. For those of you unfamiliar with the oh-so confusing town of Midland, that’s where the really rich people live. The houses nestled in the woods look more like castles than houses. Most of them were made out of some type of stone, and all were pretty huge-mungus (and just a little out of our price range…) There was an open house for one of these places, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to go in (even though I kind of wanted to). After oogling at the extremely nice houses (and figuring a way out of the woods), we drove by a few more houses we could realistically afford. On our way to church there’s this house on the corner (just down the road from Amy and Bill’s) that looks like it could be really nice. And every time we pass by the house we tell ourselves we should walk through the house. Well, sure enough this weekend we did. I called up the realtor and we had a private walk-through. It was pretty nice, but there wasn’t a walk-in closet in the master bedroom (apparently that’s important…) But, the big drawback was there wasn’t really a good place for a dining table. The realtor was pretty nice and now she has us set up to get emails about houses in the area. We’ll be going through another private walkthrough this weekend (maybe a few…) There’s another house we’ve had our eye on and I’m pretty excited about it (I suggested looking at this house a few months back…) Maybe if I get ambitious I’ll put pictures up of the houses we’re looking at.

As for my job, yeah that’s pretty boring… My supervisor thinks I’m doing a good job (which I am 😉 ), but my job is more or less sitting in front of my computer and staring at a screen all day long. No typing, just staring (okay I lied, I did type this at work, but don’t tell anyone =P ) A position just opened in Mount Pleasant for a Network Technician, hopefully they’ll call me back for an interview. I’m also considering taking the GRE to be able to get into a graduate program in the area (even though Tech has already accepted me, but we won’t go there…)

Scout’s been doing pretty good since her surgery last week. She still thinks she can sharpen her claws on the furniture which is kind of funny (though not as funny as when she tries to climb up the back of the chair…) She goes back for a checkup next Monday and to have her sutures removed, hopefully she’ll stay dry on the way there (and on the way home!) Other exciting news, the Colts finally made it to the Superbowl… after taking down their arch-nemesis the Patriots. I had planned to watch the game, but was pretty disappointed with the performance of the Colts during the first half. I went up stairs and watched online as the game progressed. I ended up catching the final few minutes on TV and was pretty pumped when the Colts intercepted Tom Brady’s pass to seal the victory (besides Tom’s got enough Superbowl rings…) The Colts ended setting a new NFL record for winning a conference championship after being down 18 points (go Peyton!) It’ll be a clash of the titans in a couple of weeks, I’ll be cheering for the Colts and Susan will be rooting for da Bears (horses can out run bears, so I already know who’s gonna win 😉 ).

Well, we went to our first open house today… The guy was pretty nice, the typical salesperson (tries to be buddy-buddy with you). Susan was a little hesitent in going in, but we gotta start looking for a house sometime… (and now she’s really excited about going to open houses). The house was pretty nice inside, a master suite with two sinks jacuzzi tub and a huge walk-in closet (from 2 sides). It also had a really nice living room/kitchen, three bedrooms, and a two car garage. We saw a lot of potential for the big basement and it’s located outside of town. As you may have guessed we’re pretty excited about the house, maybe we’ll set up some time with a loan officer and see how our financials look. Other than that, nothing too exciting… Our kitty is obssessed with going into the bathroom now to stare at the water faucet in the tub (yes… water comes out of there, really exciting!) She also has a big “holiday” coming up (more like the holiday from hell…) She’ll be declawed and spade all at once on Monday and will be staying at the vet’s overnight.

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.

Isn’t it funny how Christmas sneaks up on you? I remember as a kid waiting and waiting until Christmas finally came… and of course I couldn’t sleep at all the night before. Nowadays it seems to come up really fast… Well, I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas (we certainly did). We started off our celebration in Detroit on Christmas Eve. Awhile back, when the Lions looked like they might do pretty good this season, we picked up a couple of tickets for the Lions-Bears game… row 6, lower section, man those seats were awesome! The trip getting there was definetly an adventure. We set out with our Mapquest directions in hand and a printout of a map that had places marked as to where we could park. On the way I figured it’d be a good idea not to fill up in Detroit and decided to make a gas stop 45 minutes outside of Flint. We pull into a BP and I start filling up the car when I notice there’s a sign in the window, “Cigars, Cigerettes, Blunts”, not your typicaly gas station sign. I went in to get a couple pops and thought I picked a real winner of a gas station since there was bullet proof glass around the cashier’s counter. As I quickly got back in the car, I mentioned the sign to Susan, she glanced at it and we laughed about that for awhile. We finally get into Detroit (where people drive like they’re crazy), took our exit, and drove by Ford Field. It was time to find a place to park, there were a couple places with signs, “Parking $60” “Parking $50” that seemed kind of pricey. We drove around and somehow found ourselves north of Ford Field. We actually could have gotten back on I-75 going south to take the same exit we took 10 minutes earlier, but my navigator didn’t like that idea. So, we ended up going down a dead end street, I recognized this as a dead end, as there was a sign that said “No Outlet”. I also realized we wouldn’t be able to turn around once we got to the end (cars were parked on both sides of the road and there was just enough room to drive down the middle of the road), but my navigator insisted there might be parking at the end, so away we went. Sure enough it dead ended and there wasn’t much room to turn around. Well, there was a small dirt hump ahead of us and a street, so what did we do… a little bahaing. Luckily there wasn’t much of a curb where we drove up, over and back down again. We pulled up to an intersection (I think we might have actually been going the wrong way on a one way… oops!) Then this guy comes over, asking if we want to park for 20 bucks. Well considering the other parking areas less than $20 looked pretty sketchy we decided to park there. We paid the man, reversed in the middle of the road (because I passed the entrance) and were finally at Ford Field. It took awhile to get to our seats, they were so far down… but it was worth it. As we sat down, we noticed there was not a Lions fan around us (sweet… Bears section). I was disappointed, I mentioned to Susan, who am I going to high-five when the Lions do something great. She gave me a look and said high-fiving wasn’t cool (that’s what she thought…) Eventually a couple Lions fans came in and sure enough the high-fives were going around when the Lions did something amazing (Susan even got into it… she even complained at the end of the game that we weren’t really in the high-fiving group, sometimes the people in front of us didn’t turn around…) The game was awesome, the Lions were holding their own against a first place team. The last few seconds were really intense as the Lions were driving with a couple minutes on the clock. When they got to the 25 yard line (right in front of us), there was about eight seconds left on the clock (4th and 2, no time outs left). Kitna snaps the ball, he’s in trouble, he manages to break free, pressures coming, he’s scrambling, finally an oppurtunity presents itself, Kitna passes, it’s caught in the endzone, Lions wi… doh he landed out of bounds! So they lost by five points, oh well it was still a good game… It sounds like we’ll be going to a game next year (as long as Susan has a Mike Furrey jersey, #87… and yeah I got her to wear some Lions gear to the game 😉 ).

We got back into Midland around 7:00 PM, I know this becaues we wanted to pick up a few things from the grocery store for Christmas Day dinner. Well, all the grocery stores closed at or before seven (even Wal-mart…) We did managed to get into Meijer as they were closing, but they didn’t have any ground pork left (which is something we needed). We managed to find some food around the house to eat and decided to have our fancy Christmas dinner on Friday. We each opened a present before going to bed (it’s tradition), I opened one from my folks and it was a beef jerky maker. After I opened it, I told Susan, “I bet you any money that’s a dehydrator.” (pointing to the big box that had both our names on it, also from my parents). As you can see on the Picture of the Day page, we had quite a few presents. We didn’t get up super early (6:00 AM) to open them though (as kids we use to get up and wait until six before we woke our parents up to open presents…) Low and behold we did get a dehydrator (and I’ll be making some venison jerky with that this week). After opening all our gifts we were happy with what we got. I had to talk to the big man himself (Santa) to get a hat and glove set like the one Susan use to have (the hat had gone missing and we couldn’t find it anywhere, Susan was pretty bummed out… we couldn’t even find any on the internet). I think she was pretty excited when she opened that gift. Scout must have been a really good kitty as she got a ton of new toys. Since she has a tendency to lose her toys, we decided we’d put most of them in her cat carrier and leave a few out she could play with. We went back upstairs, to our presents, and after we were up there awhile, I noticed Scout wasn’t meowing at the door, like she usually does when we are in the computer room. I ended up going downstairs for something and wouldn’t you know she had every single toy out and was running all over the house just as happy as could be. We decided to shut the door to her carrier so she couldn’t get to all the toys in it. Every now and then she’ll sit in front of the carrier looking in at all those toys… We also got her a new laser pointer and boy she was excited for that too, she was literally running up the walls (trying to catch that little red dot…)

Figuring to save a buck or two, we thought we could stroll into Target and pick up an artificial tree (a little bigger than the one we had…) There were still quite a few left and we had saw one a couple weeks before that we both decided we wanted to get (too bad we couldn’t remember the display number or the type of tree, as they didn’t have the display up anymore.) I somehow ended up opening three different boxes (these things were taped shut) to find out if the needles looked real enough… they didn’t so we ended up not getting a tree (they were 50% off too!) That was pretty exciting, then we went over to Wal-mart to pick up groceries for the week. It was only slightly busy, luckily we didn’t run over any unsuspecting pedestrians or hit any cars that thought blocking the aisles was a good idea… it was close though… 😉

For all of you patiently waiting for an update, here it is! I meant to do this sooner, but unfortunately Zelda was consuming a lot of my time (ok not that unfortunate =P ) and I’ve been busy with Christmas stuff too (like surprises for the wifey!) The first of these was to come a couple weeks ago… During mid-November tickets became available for Dow employees (and contractors) for a Ray Charles tribute, “I Can’t Stop Loving You”. I figured this would make an excellent Christmas surprise for Susan and the scheming began. I figured we would go somewhere romantic to eat and head over to the Dow Event Center in Saginaw to watch the show. I made reservations at a place I’ve been to (not ate at, but stopped in for some wine-walk tickets) and was able to book a table next to the fire place (doesn’t get any better than that). Of course I mentioned to Susan to keep her plans open on December 9th and to figure out something dressy to wear… well then the questions came. I played it cool and managed to get her to think we were going to Mount Pleasant, when in all reality we were going to The Atrium in Bay City. During my planning, I remembered way back in June, around Lori’s wedding, Susan had mentioned she really wanted some beach glass earrings. I thought about driving all the way back past the “End of the World” to pick up the earrings she liked, but couldn’t see myself doing that and decided to hit the internet. I found a site that had Lake Erie beach glass jewlery and ordered not only a pair of earrings but a necklace too! Everything was coming together, until Susan comes up to me the day before saying she has to play at 4:30 PM mass on Saturday (sigh… thought I said keep your plans open). So she called the church and said she wouldn’t be able to do it, alright… one bullet dodged. The day has finally come, we start getting ready when Susan realizes she doesn’t have any shoes to match her dress or pantyhose to wear (didn’t I say get something dressy to wear a month a head of time… women…) A quick run (quick so we could make it to dinner on time) to JCPenny to get pantyhose (and shoes while I was waiting ever so patiently in line). The person ahead of me wanted to ship something and the sales associate that should have been helping me was helping her co-worker sort out what the customer wanted (I think we waited 20 minutes before we could actually check out…) The rest of the night went unhitched. We got to the restaurant on time, Susan really liked the beach glass jewelery and we managed to survive going to Saginaw late at night (though the parking ramp guy was kinda scary) and enjoyed a fantastic tribute to Ray Charles. As for the rest of Susan’s presents (she must have been a good girl), she’ll just have to wait and see…

This last weekend was also pretty fun. We went to the DeHate family Christmas party. Boy was it an adventure to get out there. Being internet-savy I decided I’d mapquest the directions. Mapquest marked the path and the maneuvers and I thought we were set. We grabbed the directions and headed on out. We’re doing good until we were suppose to turn right onto old M-30 N. We turned on an old M-30 road but that must have been south because it dead-ended after about a mile. We get back onto M-30 and continued heading north. After about 10 minutes we see the road to turn on for the next step and did so (I still don’t know where old M-30 N is, unless M-30 just changed into it). This is where it gets tricky, the road splits and there is only about 5 or 6 street signs with different names on them and arrows pointing every which way. We took a guess to go right and we guessed wrong, but we did get a nice scenic view of the area (needless to say Mapquest had let me down). Finally we got back on track and managed to miss the turn for their driveway. Luckily no one was on the road and I just backed up and we headed down the driveway (which must have been close to a 1/4 mile long). We got to see my family, eat lots of food, and had a really good time. We got to play the panthose reindeer game. The objective was to blow up balloons (there were all kinds, long balloons, big balloons, and water balloons) and fill the pantyhose with them. The first team that could get the pantyhose on someone’s head and to stand up (like reindeer antlers) and sing Jingle Bells won. Our team was really close… we had the pantyhose full of ballons and standing up but the other group had already started singing. Probably a good thing as I was the one elected to put them on my head (whew…) Susan’s group couldn’t seem to get the balloons in the pantyhose (probably should have had a girl doing it…) There was also a gift exchange at the end that went by birthday (starting after Jesus’s birthday). The presents were laid out on a table and each person got to pick one, according to what day they were born, and open it up. If they didn’t like what they got they could exchange it with anything that had already been open (kind of neat idea). When it got to my turn, I somehow picked out a 6-pack of beer (lucky me… :\ ), though I’m glad I didn’t pick the “man” gift my aunt got. I ended up exchanging the beer for a set of Nascar mugs. Susan must have sniffed out the M&M’s… as she picked out the gift that was almost a pound of M&M’s (she got to keep them). It was a pretty fun-filled occassion. When we were ready to leave, we were of course blocked in… We got the car moved and were on our way. Only one problem… there were enough vehicles there to the point I couldn’t turn around and ended up backing the whole way out the driveway (that was pretty exciting…)

Recently me and Susan decided to apply for grad school at good ol’ Tech. Susan got her acceptance letter yesterday and mine came last week. It doesn’t look like we’ll be getting any funding so that’ll probably be a no go… I finally beat Zelda the other day and man I thought I was going to be disappointed. The boss of the last dungeon was super easy to beat and I thought that was the end of the game, well it wasn’t… there was still one more boss to go and man was he tough (which made it rewarding to beat). I forgot to mention above Susan had made Taffy Apple salad for the Christmas party. Well, it was so good we decided to make it for our work Chirstmas parties (both yesterday). The plan was Susan was going to make it Monday night for both of us to take to work with us on Tuesday. She wasn’t feeling very well and somehow I got the job of making it. Mine didn’t look nearly as good as the one Susan had made earlier, but everyone at Dow Chemical seemed to like it. Dow Corning on the other hand, didn’t seem to appreciate it as much (oh well… I tried…) After work yesterday I decided to try and get some of our packages sent at the UPS store. The line was almost out the door when I got there and I subjected myself to this again today. Though, I didn’t get puked on yesterday (or today) and that made me happy. As I was waiting in line, yesterday, I decided I’d fill out the form indicating I had three packages and where to send them. As I was going up to the counter to get one, I see this milky white liquid spraying to my left. I turn only to see this poor kid throwing up and luckily I was out of the projectile’s path (but just barely…) The poor little guy just kept vomiting and everyone felt bad for him (never thought the UPS store could be so exciting…) I did managed to get 2 out of 4 packages shipped. Your probably thinking that’s not too good, well I forgot to grab one present for the package (they box everything for you) and Susan wrote down the address for the other one to the point where I didn’t know what the road name was… That’s why I went back today and managed to get everything shipped out (without any puking…)

The weekend went by way too quickly. After finally getting out of work on Friday (my job has gotten to be quite boring), I ran a couple of errands and picked up a bottle of champagne for later that evening. After eating I surprised Susan with the bottle… We put in Lake House (pretty decent romance movie, gotta love Keaneu Reeves acting, or lack thereof), snuggled on the couch and sipped champagne in our flutes that we got from Beth and Matthew. It was a nice relaxing night.

Saturday, we got almost all of our Christmas shopping done and had quite the experience with a couple of sales associates at Wal-mart. We printed off three 4×6″ prints at the Kodak printing machine. Written clearly above (I know because I went back and checked) was 28 cents a print. A logical person would think three prints at 28 cents each, a total of 84 cents plus tax (as you might have guessed, logical is a hard concept for Wal-mart to grasp, or simply put, the wheel’s spinning but the hamster’s dead). We took the two slips (yes… two slips, one slip was for two printouts and the other slip for one printout… this is important…) We finished the rest of our shopping and proceeded to the checkout. As per typical Wal-mart there wasn’t a whole lot of checkout lanes opened (hmmm… Christmas season is upon us, let’s have fewer lanes opened!) and we had well over 16 for the express lane. When we finally got to check out, the sales associate greeted us (yes… some don’t and you can actually provide feedback on the credit card swiper machine, but that’s a different story…) She began to swipe our items after which I handed the two slips for our pictures. As she swiped the first I noticed a sale of ten dollars came across the screen. I thought, whoa that seems pricey and sure enough the second slip also came up to ten dollars. At this point I mentioned to the sales associate, “Ten dollars for a 4×6″ print?!” Her face went blank; she shrugged and said “I don’t know”. So I asked again and she went through the same dumbfounded actions. I thought, okay this is getting me nowhere and figured if I wanted something done I better not deal with her. After paying the ridiculous amount of twenty bucks for three pictures, we went over to the service counter (after I ran back and checked the sign…) We showed this other sales associate (after again waiting in line) our receipt that had two (this is where it gets tricky) items labeled ‘PM 4×6″‘ with a price of ten dollars each. We said we had three pictures but only two slips. This sales associate was like I only see two items not three (yes, but this receipt only shows we had two slips, and one slip had two pictures on it…) Sigh, after about ten minutes of trying to convince her we actually did have three pictures (we did show them to her) with two slips (guess the hamster had a jolt or something) we managed to get our money back. An after thought of this occurrence was, gee I could print a thousand pictures get one slip and it’d only cost ten dollars (better try this quick before they fix the machine 😉 ).

Sunday was a pretty fun filled day as well (I know, it ranks just a bit higher than going to Wal-mart and having the fun I mentioned above… just a wee bit of sarcasm). We went to church and as Susan said after choir practice last Monday (she plays her violin in church) St. Anthony’s/St. Joseph’s Parish have a thing for O Come Emmanuel. Just about every song sung had the same music behind it, just different words (even the Alleluia… this is going to be an exciting advent… well I guess it’s better than no music at all). Afterwards we stopped for a bite to eat and headed to Grandma’s house (over the river and through the woods, well sort of). Me and Susan took part in the annual frosting of the sugar cookies and had a pretty good time visiting, frosting, and eating any cookies that were “accidentally” broken (a rules a rule…) We managed to get back just as the third quarter of the Lions-Patriots game ended. Somehow the Lions were keeping up against the once World Champs. Of course if I were the Patriots and I saw the Lions put the 2nd string quarterback in as a wide receiver I wouldn’t know what to think either… I’m not just saying once or twice, but I guess Josh McCown played quite a bit of wide receiver and he did make a couple of catches as strange as that may be… Well after the Lions got a safety I was thinking, oh boy wouldn’t that be something if they win (at this point they were up 18-13). A turnover and another field goal for the Lions (21-13), and I was getting pretty excited. Somehow the Patriots managed to stomp down the field, go for two and tie the game. The Patriots then come up with another touchdown and pull into the lead. After the kickoff the Lions turned the ball over again (this makes the third one this game for them) and I thought eh it’s over now. But somehow they managed to get the ball back again (Patriots now had three turnovers). I look to Susan and say two plays and Jon Kitna throws an interception. Sure enough just like clockwork, two plays and tada an early Christmas present for the Pats… those stupid, stupid Lions. Feeling a little disappointed, I flipped on Zelda (which made the thought of the Lions losing another game by seven points or less go away) and got to play a few hours. I made dinner (lemon chicken, always a favorite) and watched Law & Order and went to bed in anticipation of another exciting week at Dow (doing not much at all…)

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Zelda for the Wii (Twilight Princess). Which is a very cool (and frustrating) game. I had preordered it about a month ago selecting the cheapest (and slowest) shipping, because I knew I was going to be in Missouri last week and wasn’t in a hurry to get it. When we got back I noticed a note on the door left by the UPS driver (ended up getting bumped to 3 day select for only 2.99 =) ). The note said a delivery attempt was made on 11/22/06 and the package was left at the office. So after work on Monday I decided I’d go pick it up. Well the lady there was like I don’t have your package, and after searching the office and still no luck, I started thinking ok maybe Susan picked it up. I stopped by the mailbox and thought why would she get the package and not the mail. After getting the mail I headed back to our apartment. Well, Susan wasn’t home yet so I was like, ok where’s my package. I went to the UPS website and tracked my package. It said the package was delivered on the 22nd and that someone from the office signed it. I printed this off and grabbed the note left by the driver and went back to the office. The lady still didn’t believe me the package was delivered… Finally she looked around the office and managed to spot it on top a shelf (even though it wasn’t suppose to be there…) At last I had Zelda in hand and man I’m glad they opted out of cel-shaded cuteness.

I forgot to mention yesterday at the brewery they had flavored beer, and I’m not talking something somewhat normal like lime (though they did have that). You can get these energy-like additives to your beer. They had hot chocolate, melon, lime, and something else pretty random. None of us were brave enough to try one of these specialty flavored beers. However, as you walked through the cafeteria you would see these green or pink glasses of beer and you could definitely smell them as you passed by! I also failed to mention how excited our kitty was to see we were home. She purred louder than any other cat I’ve heard and was rubbing up against us for two whole days. We left a ton of food for her and she managed to gobble most of it up (and probably gained another half a pound in the process). We plan on getting her kitty paws until her de-clawing in January. That should be exciting, gluing plastic things to her claws so she doesn’t scratch up (ruin) the furniture (maybe I’ll get a couple pictures of the process…) Work is pretty slow, I’ve got all my tasks at hand done… still waiting on my co-workers before I can get any more work done. I just got a rejection letter from the place I interviewed at… oh well maybe I’ll start the job hunt again…