Get Ready for Random...

Last weekend I went to Canton to hang with Johnny for roughly 24 hours. Somewhere during our Sunday we stopped over at his best friend's house and I finally met the younger brother. We've been Facebook friends for months but have never before met. I actually have quite a few of those, including friends from Wales, Scotland, and Russia. Not bragging, that's just how it is.

Anywho, my knees came up into conversation somehow and I showed them how my knees have eyes. They then grab a pen and made smiley faces.

New subject.

Yesterday was a food day at work, and I didn't know it until about two hours after getting there. Had I known, I definitely would have brought something. As it is, there were four different kinds of meatballs and more dessert than real food.

Glad to see my co-workers have their priorities straight.

This is a picture of just the regular food table, not including the bags of chips on top of the cabinet, and that was before it was all set out. I would have also taken a photo of the dessert table, but this picture was taken surreptitiously by me while sitting at my desk so people wouldn't think I'm any weirder than they already do.

Yes. As luck would have it, all food was right next to my desk. This means Emily did very little work and gained back any and all weight she lost over the past month in just one day.

Johnny came down to Cincinnati yesterday. He applied for a bajillion jobs in the area and the Apple Store called him. My fiance is a total Mac guy and used to have the iPhone until he found out it didn't work at his parent's house. So they called him about an interview, which he had yesterday at 3pm. He stopped by my office building to get my apartment keys on the way there so that after the interview he'd have somewhere to go and relax until I got off work at 5:30.

In other news, here's an update on my mom.

WARNING: Here is where I get serious.

For my new readers, my mother has been battling cancer for the past year. There are tumors growing in her abdomen, and they have gotten so large that she actually looks like she's pregnant, and she's in a lot of pain. Her doctor has her on this new pill that costs an arm, a leg, the Empire State building, and a couple of Jupiter's moons, but apparently it's the miracle drug. Anyway, she ended up making a surprise trip to Columbus yesterday to give a plate of her famous Christmas cookies/chocolates to her special staff at Riverside Hospital. While she was there they tested her for fluid retention and today she went to the local hospital to drain her a bit.

They extracted 3.5 LBS of fluid from her body.

This helped with her pain, but she's still creeping around the house slowly. It really makes me feel guilty for complaining about having to work so much extra or about minor pain or just complaining in general. It really puts things into perspective. And this drug had better by golly work because it hurts to see my mom go through all of this.

On a happier note, tomorrow is Christmas Eve and we will have the ENTIRE family together tomorrow night for our annual Christmas Eve traditions.

Sorry for all the random! I hope you all have a glorious, beautiful, and blessed Christmas. :)

"For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given. And the government shall be upon his shoulders and he shall be called Wonderful Counselor. Mighty God. Everlasting Father. Prince of Peace." ~ Isaiah 9:6

Confession

Okay. I give. The truth is finally coming out.

I actually like Justin Beiber.

*covers face* I am ashamed.

In other news, here's the picture of the ornament I made.

Have a great Christmas, y'all!!

Happy Christmas!

So, I feel like everything I do in this city is a fiasco of some kind.

It all began with a gloriously amazing weekend. I spent Saturday evening and Sunday with Johnny and we really had a blast. We even braved going to the mall to find his mom a gift. I'm thrilled that we made it out alive.

So I drive 3.5 hours home and I leave all the stuff I brought home with me in my car because it's too cold and I'm too tired and lazy to drag all of it in.

As a temporary employee with hourly pay, when everyone else gets paid to take Thursday and Friday off this week, I get to work three ten hour days and then work from home on Thursday for eight hours to make up for the time lost. This makes for an exceptionally long, boring day, especially since all I do is key insurance claims into the system.

Anywho, I'm late for work yesterday, I forget why. It was a slow morning and I was tired and I actually found myself falling asleep at my desk no matter what music I listened to. I'm not the biggest fan of arriving to work in the dark AND leaving in the dark. Which was yesterday and will be today and tomorrow.

While I was working I was also taking a few breaks to find a) an Aldi's nearby so I can eat for the next few weeks, b) a Hobby Lobby so I could buy the stuff to make the ornament for the ornament exchange at work, c) a Goodwill so I can find mismatched picture frames for my sister for Christmas and d) a Barnes and Nobles or any music bookstore so I can buy my brother in-law HIS Christmas present. All of which I intended to take care of after work last night.

Get off work at 5:30 (FINALLY) and headed out to my car to drive to Aldi, which I found without too much difficulty AND which has a Hobby Lobby literally right next door! Very excited. I found almost everything on my list (and a couple things that weren't *cough*cookies*cough*) and I go through the checkout and I'm below budget, which rocks, and then my debit card wouldn't swipe. Swiped it. "Bad Swipe, try again" the keypad yells at me. Over and over and over... even the two employees tried and it wouldn't work. Then I find out they don't accept credit, only debit or cash. So they hold my order as I rush out to my car, annoyed, and drive down the street to the nearest Chase bank to withdraw cash, come back and pay for everything and finally, an hour later, leave that place.

Next comes Hobby Lobby. As I used to work at a Hobby Lobby I know what they have, especially at Christmastime. I managed to pick my boss out of the grab bag, and after asking everyone I could find what on earth to get him I discovered he loves the Bengals. Die hard fan. So I'm like, okay, well, if I don't find a Bengals ornament of some kind I'll just make him one.

No Bengals ornaments. Go figure.

Scrapbooking, here I come! Browsed the paper aisle searching for tiger print. There's zebra print. Cheeta. Giraffe. Leopard. But no tiger. Well, that's a lie, there was tiger print in a huge packet of paper that would cost me upwards of $20, and pink/purple/green tiger print in a small package of cardstock. No thanks. I did find football paper, and then I grabbed the zebra paper, figuring I have an orange highlighter and I can just color in the white parts. Run to the other aisles and grab a glue stick, gold glitter, and ornament hooks, purchase it all and leave.

By now it's going on 7pm and I'm exhausted and had no interest in finding the B&N or Goodwill so instead that's today's after work excursion. More on that later. So I drive home to kick off my heels and put on jeans and boots and make seven trips to and from my car with clean laundry, bags of groceries, a giant scrapbook my grandmother gave me, boxes, etc, etc.

Still no rest for Emily.

On go the shorts and tank top in my swelteringly hot apartment and I proceed to put things away, reattach the doors to the entertainment center after propping it up with blocks of wood (dad and Johnny broke off the wheels on their trek up the stairs. That sucker is HEAVY), organizing my books, etc etc (sorry for all the lists, it was a crazy day). Of course Johnny called somewhere in the middle so I'm holding the phone to my ear with my shoulder as I set up the DVD/VCR/TV. Once all of THAT was done (groceries still not put away) I got my laptop and found a tutorial on how to make origami stars, colored in the zebra paper with an orange highlighter, made three stars (two tiger, one football) in different sizes, strung them together with thread, glue-sticked them and shook them around in a baggie of gold glitter, and finally boxed and wrapped the final product after taking a pic of it to show Johnny.

And then I collapsed on the floor and relaxed for the first time since 5am.

Rinse. Repeat.

Today is the same, only it's B&N and Goodwill, I did major organizing before I even left for work, and I left my phone at my apartment so I'm without directions and I was late to work AGAIN... but in seven minutes we are having our ornament exchange and hopefully my boss doesn't sneer at my handiwork.

Once I have my phone back and am sitting at home, I will post a less hectic story and show y'all pictures.

Deep breaths... and scene.

Oh movies. :)

I don't know if you knew this, but Netflix and I are like this *crosses fingers*. Until I got my TV and DVD player here with me all I had was my computer and some internet I borrowed from the neighbors. I literally watched When Harry Met Sally three days in a row.

So if you're on Netflix you know how it asks you to rate movies you've seen and then it'll give you a list of movies they think you'll love. Nothing on the lists they usually give was working for me a couple days ago, so I did that rating thing. In the list of movies they offered there was this one indie flick called Keith.

I watched it.

Love at first sight.

It stars Jesse McCartney

 and Elizabeth Harnois. 

You probably know who Jesse McCartney is. He's the original Justin Beiber. Elizabeth Harnois, however, I had never heard of her. Apparently she's on One Tree Hill. But I don't really watch TV (and especially not shows like One Tree Hill) so I wouldn't have known had I not creeped all over her imdb.com page.

Yes, I admit it. I'm a creeper. But in a good way!

I also creeped Jesse McCartney's page, and I appreciated what I found. On some people's pages it says things like "dating some Russian supermodel (2004)" or "got engaged to the Queen of England (Jan 2006)" (ok, that's an exaggeration, but you get the idea) and then two months later it's over. On his, though, it's all about his music and the TV show he co-starred in for awhile. And he's, like, 23 or 24, normally the imdb pages for actors that age are smothered by that kind of junk!

While I'm at work my imagination likes to jump into overdrive so I don't go completely insane. The day after I watched this movie I had all these imagined situations where I was in L.A. for whatever reason sitting in some coffee shop with my comp waiting for a friend to finish, idk, whatever. I was singing along with the radio and Jesse McCartney happens to be there, hears me, and wants me to come with him to the recording studio so I can be on his new album or something. Pretty sure I'm the only person who does this. 

And of course I'm always the Joe Cool of meeting celebrities, never freaking out once. In my daydreams, at least. If I actually did meet someone famous I probably would be pretty low key while there. I'm not the type to have huge crushes on celebrities because, honestly, what's the point? However, I would definitely send an OMG text to my BFF the moment the situation was over.

Anywho, that's me. I'm weird. It's okay.

I also made the mistake of buying the movie on iTunes. Now there's no free way for me to burn it to disc and actually watch it on my television. Not for lack of trying, though.

Back home to my parent's house for the weekend! Unpacked all of my stuff today during the blizzard, working eight hours on Saturday. 

Cheers!

Yay and Grrr.

It's it weird that I'm stupidly excited about going from 4 followers to 7 in one day? I mean, there are people with hundreds of followers and after two years of writing this blog I finally have 7 followers! Of course, I also networked this blog to my Facebook so there are actually a lot of people who read it that I don't know about.

In any case, thank you thank you thank you to amyschmamey for the shout out and gettin' me three more! Totally made my day. :D

Now for the grr.

Have you looked at the weather radar lately? There's a HUGE blue splotch headed straight for Ohio starting with *drumroll please* Cincinnati.

Now, for most of the people I work with this is no big deal. They'll just stay home and sign on to their work computer from there and do their thing.

Then there's me. The poor girl who moved here two weeks ago, just got her final apartment on Saturday and hasn't had a chance to call the internet company to set anything up. So I, who does not get paid holidays or time off (that sounds weird grammatically) due to being a temporary employee with hourly pay gets to either brave the snow and ice and frigid temperatures tomorrow at 6:30am OR I get to forfeit eight hours of pay that I desperately need. OR I get to make up the time by working on Saturday. Assuming I have internet by Saturday. In either case, any high created by actually being mentioned in someone else's blog and gaining new people to become friends with has been blown up by this frustration.

However, to finish on a high note, I now have almost all of my stuff. I've about three more loads of dishes to do (everything is really gross after spending a year in the garage) and a bunch of boxes to dispose of and tons of organizing to do, but if I don't work tomorrow that will not be a problem.

Anywho, welcome new friends! I hope I don't bore you too badly and that you have a wonderful day!

Song of the Day

I'm not actually going to post a song every single day. Mostly because it'd probably be the same song over again, I tend to go back to things.

However, Sunday's song was "Rock of Ages (When the Road Seems Long)" by Sandra McCracken. This video is, unfortunately, not Sandra singing but you get the idea.
Rock of Ages

Monday's song was "Eet" by Regina Spektor.
Eet

Tuesday
Colors

That's it. Enjoy!

$%&# snow.

Ok. So, this morning I walk to church. It's literally right over there *points* so that was easy enough. Except it's cold. And wet. And I was on the verge of a panic attack because I'm going to this enormous church all by myself and have no one to sit with.

SO! Church went well, the sermon was good and very thought provoking. I filled out a "Connection Card" because I want to get involved in a small group. When I turned it in this very nice blonde woman gave me a welcome packet that included a CD, a little booklet with church info, and a piece of dark chocolate. "How can you go wrong with chocolate?" she says. "Well, I can't have chocolate," I reply. "I'll just give it to someone."

Hey, anyone want a piece of dark chocolate?

Go home and have quite the afternoon of phone calls with my bestie and the fiance and movie watching. Have a gloriously amazing headache, and the whole time it's snowing like crazy. This morning for church you could still see road. and grass. Not anymore!

Now, at 5:30 there's a young adult service for people in their 20s-30s that I wanted to go to, figuring I could meet and connect with some other Christians and make some new friends. It's also at the church so I'm thinking I can walk there, which is great considering there is now around four inches of snow on the ground. I get all bundled up and start walking over only to find the main entrance is blocked by an automated gate. Wonderful. The other entrance is a bit further away so I go to dig out my car.

Ten minutes or so later I'm driving uber carefully down the drive to the road. Make it to the main drag, head up the street, get stuck at a stop light in the left turning lane. I literally sat there at that light waiting for a good five minutes because the light decided no one wanted to turn left and never gave me a signal.

FINALLY I turn onto the correct road (after nearly getting in an accident because some really intelligent person ran the red light while my green arrow was on. Lovely.) and head down there to the building and found a parking lot devoid of people except for some poor girl whose car had slid into the curb and up onto the landscaping and getting trapped there by a bush. Two other cars had stopped and I watched as two guys and a girl lifted her Mini as she drove in reverse and get her out.

Once she was free I went over and asked if there was even church tonight, considering the parking lot was empty, and no one knew. But considering it was going on 5:40 and it was supposed to start at 5:30, it was most likely cancelled.

So I dug my car out and went through all of that for nothing.

And now I get to sit in my empty apartment and watch the millionth movie of the weekend.

The most wonderful time of the year.

To end on a happy note, I found a couch and a chair for completely free and my dad is coming down with Johnny on Wednesday with all of my stuff and we're also going to pick up the couch/chair and I can FINALLY get settled in! So excited, I actually really like this apartment a lot. :D

Have a great evening, y'all!