Friday Fragments - May 6, 2011

Holy McFudge, it's Friday isn't it???

I don't know what day it feels like but it sure is a strange day.

A coworker is leaving us today as she ventures into a new career and is starting nursing school this summer.  Deep sighs.  We'll miss her.

The Husband encouraged a shopping trip to Kohl's.  He felt we needed to buy new pillows for every bed in the house because the price is right and while we're at it, let's replace some of those raggedy towels!  I also managed to squeeze in a few wardrobe additions and then I have the Kohl's Cash to spend this weekend --- wooooo!!!!  These trips are big deals to me because I'm such a non-shopper and I always manage to find something I like.  Hopefully I can find a decent pair of khakis, but who knows what I will walk out with.

Sunday we gathered at my mom's house for a combo Easter/Birthday celebration.  Ian turned 14 on Monday so he got birthday cake and a few cool items.  It sucks getting older - gift cards and practical gifts have replaced toys. 

I learned the name possibilities for the coming grandbaby - I approve of both options.  You realize that I plan to drown you in baby cuteness when he or she finally arrives.

Saturday Ian and I dyed eggs.  They were expired eggs that we had hard boiled a few days before.  It was a complete waste but we got the joy of dying eggs.  Before we left for our shopping extravaganza we poured several of the colors together and dropped two already dyed eggs in to sit for several hours.  I am SO doing this from here on out.  That was fun.  I then piled them up in a basket and took them as a center piece for Sunday's dinner.

Kindle Cover

My daughter requested a quilted cover for her new Kindle.  I pondered how to attack such a project.  I dug through my project bin with my mind focused on a set of scraps with no color pattern.  Instead, I pulled out two squares left over from another quilt, purple with butterflies.  An online search gave me dimensions and these two squares would be perfect.

 

I stitched the two squares together and then with batting and a muslin back.  This was my first project to hand quilt a design.  I doodled some loops and stitched over them.  That was great to do sitting in front of the TV and really didn't take too long.

It needed a flap so I dug through my pile and found a dark purple.  I also gave it a muslin back (no batting or quilting).  All seams were folded under so no loose threads to generate damaging debris.

I'm a little upset that I used purple thread to stitch it all together.  That looks sloppy.  I found a button in a tin of stray buttons (just like my mom has) and added some embroidery thread as a fastener.

Friday Fragments - January 28, 2011

In case you've overlooked it, today is my HALF birthday.  And good Lord, you all know what a freaking nut I am about birthdays.  No?  You're new?  Oh well let's fix that!

In a few minutes I need to place a call to my friend Mendy and remind her that although it is her actual birthday she has six months left to prepare for my birthday.  And in six months she will return the favor.

OMG!  In six months, ON MY BIRTHDAY, I should be a GRANDMA!!!!!  My first grandchild is due mid July, just before my 45th birthday.  Excuse me for a moment while I absorb that... eh... I still can't wrap my head around being a mother so the grandma thing is just impossible.

So let's get into my fragments for Friday.  Yeah, I know, I have posted a metric shit ton already!  Does it bother anyone that I swear in my posts?  Hope not, my filter was lost somewhere in college.

1.  As I was getting ready to leave work last Friday, I got a frantic call from my future DIL (daughter-in-law) that my son (baby daddy) was on his way to the ER.  Never a good call for any mother, but when your kid is a diabetic that is exactly where your thoughts go.  Nope, not a diabetic problem, HE GOT IN THE MIDDLE OF A DOG FIGHT!  Grotesque descriptions were conveyed and I flew home.  I never made it to the hospital (45 minutes away in no traffic, but this was the height of rush hour).  My SIL called from the hospital after her 15 yr old daughter drove him to the ER.  Turns out it wasn't a dog fight and there weren't huge hunks of flesh dangling from his arm.  THANK GOD!!!!!

The two family dogs were playing and one caught her jaw on the other's collar, strangling the dog.  Keith held the dogs and by necessity had his arm in the jaws as his cousin cut the dogs free.  He has six puncture wounds that could have been stitched, but they butterflied them shut and he was out tromping around in the woods on Sunday shooting airsoft guns at his little brother.

2.  We attended a trivia night on Saturday.  I love attending these.  The one we attended last year was HARD.  This year someone else compiled the questions and our table ended up with 72 out of 100 correct.  Not too shabby.

3.  We're working on a new recipe for our business.  I'm playing with my mom's roll recipe.  Unfortunately my first run used old yeast.  Absolutely NO rising whatsoever.  Instead of tossing out the dough I rolled out some of it and sprinkled salt on it... CRACKERS!  They weren't too bad, but rolling out the dough was too much work so we tossed the rest.

4.  My youngest has missed an entire week of school.  He just cannot shake this fever.  The doctor's office suspects a sinus infection, but in a little bit we'll make a visit to make sure.  Hopefully his teachers will take some mercy and not slaughter him with homework.  I've got emails out to the teachers trying to get the assignments so he can work on them over the weekend.  We'll see.

5.  Yesterday I ran an update on my mac laptop and received the new App Store in my apple menu.  And I discovered a ton of free and incredibly cheap apps - some for my iphone others for my laptop.  OMG!  Lots of fun.  I've spent a couple of hours with one called RINGER that takes songs in your iTunes library and allows you to make ring tones with them.  Oh so much fun.

Friday Fragments - June 4, 2010

Friday Fragments is a great opportunity to review the bits and pieces of the week, to post little fragments that don't quite make a full post. Click the button and follow the fun!

*Happy Birthday to dear friend, Mix Master K, the DJ to all of our drunken Solid Gold dance parties.  Thank you for always playing La Bouche's "I Wanna Be Your Lover" no matter how much you detest it. To the man who realized too late that marrying Piranha meant he got three extra wives in the deal, none of whom he can sleep with.   Stay healthy dude, we need you.

*Yesterday I was dancing around the office doing a happy dance.  We were looking for "a thing" on the internet that nobody else could find.  *And I'm entering a huge edit here courtesy of another online friend*  In the end I made Google my bitch.  I downloaded the Google Translation tool and filtered a DUTCH "thing" through it.  I won.  I found it.  Without a garbled translation. 

*Despite my late afternoon geeky victory, yesterday was a royal bitch of a day.  I declared it a Monday.  As I left I said as much to the CEO.  She laughed and said, "yeah, but really it's Wednesday."  Nooooooo... it was Thursday.  Like I said, a MONDAY.

*Ian is officially out of school.  He plotted his summer a month ago alternating weeks between me and his dad.  So really there isn't any big thing planned, just a rotating change of scenery.  He came to work with me yesterday and got to hang out with his bud, K-Man, a co-worker's son who happens to share the same birthday.  These two are thick as thieves and us moms prefer to let them have limited access to each other.  What's so funny none of us discussed with the other about the possibility of both boys coming to work - it just happened.  Also funny is that Ian is exactly a year younger than K-Man.  K-Man has been strutting his stuff amazing all of us with how much he's grown.  Then Ian shows up a clear five inches taller and a finally deep voice.  K-Man nearly fainted.  Poor kid.

*New Business update - failed the building inspection.  We spent last weekend ripping out the plastic plumbing and replacing it with copper.  Wednesday night we turned on the water and all of the connections were good, no drips.  Had to dismantle one of the sinks because its fittings are screwed up, but nothing to do with the new copper pipes.  I guess either tonight or tomorrow we'll deal with that.  One cooler is running fabulously.  The second is a piece of shit so we're trying to find a new condenser and compressor.  Since neither of us is a member of the Nitwit Good Ole Boys Club Refrigeration Union, we can't call around for new parts, but have to rely on our refrigeration friend who has a different job during the day.  In other words, this ordeal is getting drawn out even longer.

Thanks for stopping by!  Have a great weekend!

Why 25 Sucks

Age 25 was a hard year for me.  And as I talk to other people I find they agree.

When you turn 10 you're in double digits
When you turn 13 you're a teenager
When you turn 16 you can drive
When you turn 18 you can vote/join the military/be an adult/tell your parents to fuck off (well if you're waiting to turn 18 for that then maybe you really don't need to say it so bad)
When you turn 21 you can drink legally (don't screw up the day by being pregnant - experience speaking here)

And then what?

30?  Is anyone excited about 30?  No.  After 21, there is nothing exciting, no major milestone to look forward to.  It's a major let down.  So you and everyone you know is graduating college, starting full-time jobs, getting married, having babies, buying new houses and bam.  Whether or not you're achieving all of these things you're getting settled into the adult world and starting to realize that it's not really all that much fun.  And still nothing to look forward to and people yelling at you and setting weird deadlines for shit and bills needing to be paid and working for an asshole boss?

There are milestones to look forward to, but they aren't etched in stone.  I mean unless you croak, you're going to have a 16th birthday.  Nobody may celebrate it, but it's going to happen.  After 21 the only thing that happens is that you get another year older and then another year.  The milestones are no longer your age but "life events".  And the "life events" that happen to me are not necessarily the "life events" that happen to you and they don't happen according in any specific order or on any special timeline.

25 is when adulthood takes hold.  It's when you realize you are not going to be conquering the world, just surviving it.  It's when reality kicks you hard in the ass and shows you that you are just a baby in the grand scheme of things, you don't know shit, you are on the bottom rung of the ladder, now get back to work.

25 is when I saw all of my plans and hopes for the future were just childish dreams - and for somebody like me to say something like that, well it's bad.  I remember sitting at the kitchen table and silently declaring to myself that THIS was rock bottom, it can only go up from here.   I've had shittier things happen to me since, deeper depression roll over me, declared bankruptcy, got a divorce and still, that 25 year is what I consider my rock bottom.

I've started looking forward to "0" years.

Friday Fragments - Apr 2, 2010

 

*Week Five of a new business - Business cards are in and people are raving about them (thank you very much).  The website, no longer the greatest monstrosity of the interwebs, is up and running.  It's still not great, but no longer horrible.  The walk-in cooler was the last large piece of equipment to arrive, but it arrived only after multiple phone calls with the trucking company that kept insisting it was scheduled to be delivered NEXT WEEK.  Totally unacceptable.  But now it's arrived and assembled.  We're deep in the trenches of getting the truck and the shop ready to go.  There are many nights of a tired and grumpy Husband and another week ahead of the same. 

*Grandma was rushed to the ER on Tuesday.  Her potatsium levels were too high.  A review of her meds and an adjustment here and there, and she was released five hours later.

*Apparently I am completely unable to dress myself.  After I came home yesterday I realized that my pants had been unzipped all afternoon and then I noticed that the tank under my blouse was on BACKWARDS.  That certainly explained by I could never get it to pull up over my boobs properly.  *sigh*

*Piranha and I had a fun email exchange earlier this week reminiscent of passing notes in high school.  In fact we invoked a few names we haven't mentioned for many many years. 

*THEN in the same email exchange I had a minor meltdown.  She asked what are we going to do on our 45th?  After a quick calculation of my current age because I can no longer remember (43), then how old I will be at my upcoming birthday (44) and HOLY CRAP I AM TURNING FORTY FIVE NEXT YEAR!  This is the first time I have flipped out over my age.  It's like half way to fifty (don't ask, my math methods are fucked up and I realize that 25 if halfway to 50 but 25 was the worst year of my life so we totally ignore 25.  I'm talking about the halfway point between 40 and 50.  Fortyfive.  PANIC).  It's not like I'm scared of 50, it's just barreling up on me awfully fast.  I want to savor my 40's.  These have been good years especially since my 30's sucked ass.  Fortyfive.  Next year.  HOLY SHIT! 

But it's all good.  My meltdown is over and I've got a year and four months to start to embrace it.  We are contemplating a trip to New York to celebrate our birthdays - June 22, July 28, August 22 (yes, I am the oddball of the trio and that can be said about a lot of things).  But our girls weekend to New York might be invaded by the husbands which makes it a totally different type of trip, probably too expensive and thus NOT a trip to New York but something we've already done like Chicago or Memphis or Kansas City.  And that's less exciting.  I don't know, we have time to figure this out.