Holiday Week

I worked Tuesday and Wednesday this last week. On Tuesday afternoon, I realized that there were only three full work weeks left in the year. "Oh, you are kidding me?" I actually said that aloud. Nope, I checked the calendar again and it's true - THREE WEEKS!

I have to get ready for January, for sending the books at work to the accountant, I have to get IFTA done... and about a hundred other things too! One Hundred!? I looked at my notes and to-do lists in OneNote from last January and February and realized that 100 things really isn't a stretch - there are 88 things on my January/February to-do list. I told my boss about the few weeks left until zero hour and told him I was getting ready. I got a thumbs up.

????????

Really?

On Wednesday, I began wrapping up financial stuff for the month of November and left the office at one. Then I blew off the rest of my day talking on the phone and watching movies. I should have been doing homework. I didn't.

Thanksgiving Day came and I made mashed candied sweet potatoes that were so good, even I ate them - and I hate sweet potatoes. I also made cranberry sauce from scratch that gelled in the refrigerator overnight - I like it runny, so lesson learned: add more water! There were also creamed peas and green bean casserole. Nothing I took to Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmothers house was low fat or 'healthy'.

Much to my mothers delight, I refrained from speaking to my aunt who is a racist and a bigot.

After dinner at my grandmothers, we stopped off at Rob's grandparents house. We talked, they played cards (I don't play) and everyone (but me) had pie. I was just too stuffed and didn't want to risk real pain.

We got home around eight and started to relax.....

And then it happened.

The shit always hits the fan on holidays. No pun intended. There were no feces involved, thank heavens.

The toilet got clogged and we couldn't clear it. The stupid thing has had something stuck in it for over two years; something we could never get out and we couldn't identify.  Rob decided to take the toilet out and put the snake in from the bottom to try and clear it but couldn't get the toilet off Thursday night so we left it until Friday morning.

So Black Friday came and we found ourselves at Lowes buying a new toilet. It's cheap. It's white. It's clean. It's new. I love it. Except that we had to replace the shut off valve and it's leaking. Our house is a never ending nightmare and I can't wait to get out of here and rent something. I don't want the responsibility anymore. At least not for a little while. When we buy again, maybe we won't get stuck with a money pit.

And the toilet? It was blocked by this. Well, not the whole box, just one of the trays they go in. I guess it fell in the toilet, sank and got flushed. And YES, I broke the toilet to find out what was in it.

So now I'm down $98 and I have a beautiful new (CLEAN) white toilet in the master bath.

Today I had the Meeting of the Moms. We were at Starbucks for four hours planning and enjoying each others company. We are looking for a place that will allow us to bring in the soda and maybe some snack food to supplement whatever catered food we have. All of the catering companies around here bring in cans of soda rather than 2-litre bottles and charge $1-$2 each. Well, with a guest list of around 175, that could add up pretty quickly - especially with the kids.

Tonight Jake called me and asked if the GF could come to Christmas at his grandmothers house with us. I told him I didn't mind and I'm sure Grandma wouldn't. He said it was okay with the GF's mom as long as he could go to Christmas Eve dinner with her family. None of this is a problem for us so it looks like the kids are sharing holidays already. They are also planning to go to the same college, along with several of their best friends. They've all been accepted so now it's just a matter of graduating and figuring out how to pay for all of it. Yeah, not looking forward to that, but we'll do what we have to.

Meal Plan for the coming week.

• Thai Spaghetti with shrimp
• Beef Stew
• Pork Loin Roast with mashed sweet potatoes and sauteed spinach
• Pork Chops
• Orange Chicken with rice
• Chicken Piccata
• Turkey with mashed potatoes

I don't like pork but my family does so I'll try it.

The Meeting of the Moms

Jake graduates this year, and with graduation comes the mother of all graduation parties - seeing how he's friends with half the school, it pays to host a party with others.

So, in preparation for the mother of all graduation parties, four of us moms have decided to throw the party together, assuring we can not only afford the mother of all graduation parties but that the four kids involved* will have the party to attend this year and they won't be stuck at their own while their best friends are somewhere else.

I guess being 18 these days is a big deal. And of course, I want him to have what I didn't - walking in commencement exercises (I graduated, I just didn't walk), a graduation party, someone to push me when it came to going to college... The list is really endless.

Anyway, the Moms will be getting together on Saturday to discuss preliminary plans for a graduation party: what our kids want, what we can afford, where to hold it, discussing catering options, decorations, etc. We're just getting an idea of what everyone thinks at this point. I look forward to sitting and having coffee with these three amazing women.

I guess I'll be thinking about this a lot over then next six months and chronicling the event as it unfolds. Hopefully, it will be good practice for Matt's graduation.

*The four friends are Jake, the GF, Jake's best friend of seven years, and the best friends girlfriend.

I almost died!

I laughed so hard I cried. You have to see this!

Meals and Food

I love me the meal plan. I do it every week now. I'm kid of bummed that I didn't post them here because it would have been nice to track. I've kind of expanded the way I do it though; I come up with the number of required meals but don't normally assign meals to days. I also have a list of main dishes that I can easily look over and pick from - that doesn't keep me from pouring over cookbooks though. I still love to do that. As a matter of fact, we're having a couple of new pasta recipes this week thanks to The Dinner Doctor. I know lots of people are fanatical about making everything from scratch but I'm not. If a can of cream of mushroom produces edible results and I don't have the time to make a creamy white sauce then canned soup it is.

This week looks like this:

• Penne with ham and sugar snap peas with salad. Supposed to be rotini and prosciutto but I like penne better and have you seen the price of prosciutto?
• Mac N Cheese casserole - soooo easy. Blue box, cream of mushroom, tuna and peas.
• Burritos/Tacos with rice and refried beans.
• Smoked salmon penne with capers and lemon. I probably spent the most on this dish but did find the salmon on sale. This is supposed to have ziti but - well, I like penne better.
• Taco soup - already have leftovers for after school snacks, lunch or soup and sandwich night next week.
• Spaghetti and meatballs.

...and then there's my contribution to Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmothers house:

• Sweet potato casserole - probably mashed but lumpy with butter, brown sugar and marshmallows.
• Creamed peas with onion.
• Green bean casserole.
• Runny cranberries (a thin cranberry sauce) - if I can get the recipe from someone besides my MIL. Otherwise I'll make it up.

The cool thing the past month or so is that I've ended up with enough leftovers from one week to feed us for part of the next. It helps that Jake goes out for dinner with the GF or Matt goes to a friend's house.

The In-Law family is already planning The Night Before Christmas party they throw every year. It is a time for the whole family to get together, NOT on Christmas, eating and enjoying every one's company as well as exchanging gifts through a reading of The Night Before Christmas, hence the name of the party. So here's how it works. Everyone brings an inexpensive gift suitable for male or female (kids pass among themselves) and everyone settles in a circle. One of the girls (just because my boys aren't interested and the younger boy is 4) reads the story. Every time the word 'and' is said, the gifts are passed. Whatever you end up with at the end of the story is yours. It's fun. This year the party is on December 20 and I've been asked to bring two batches of chili. I'm looking forward to it but may be hung over. My company party is on December 19 and I always drink plenty that night.

It's all about me now...

I haven’t felt like writing – for a lot of different reasons, none of which are really relevant right now. In order to feel like writing again I had to think a lot about why I wrote, who I was writing for, and what I was writing. After all that thinking (wow, did I just smell burning batteries?) I decided that I was going to go back to just writing for me.

In a way, my blog didn’t even start out that way. I was always writing with someone else in mind – what would they think of me? The truth is - I don’t care. There has been so much going on in the past couple of months I haven’t written about that it makes me sad. Like the letter I got in the mail from some deranged republican who anonymously begged me not to vote for Obama. Or the phone call/confrontation with my Aunt Wanda regarding that letter where she denied sending it. Then I asked her, would she please leave me alone about my political beliefs – after all, I didn’t slam her email account with democrat propaganda… That little discussion still has fruit to bear since I’ll see her for the first time since then on Thanksgiving. Oh, the things I am thankful for this year!

And the holidays coming up. Ugh, the stress that’s creating this year. Seriously? My FIL wasn’t going to the cabin this year for Christmas because he was going to be on-call over the holiday – then he went and screwed it up (just joking) and traded Christmas for Thanksgiving. I’d already started making plans with my mom to go to her house on Christmas Day with my brother and two nieces. I haven’t seen them outside of a major family function in years and this is the first Christmas since my brother and his wife divorced. I just thought the whole thing would be nice. Anyway, we’ve got decisions to make. Rob, Matt and Lindsay all want to go to the mountains, Jake knows he may have to work Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas so he’s okay staying home – besides, the GF's family has invited us for Christmas dinner. I don’t want to go to the cabin because I’d already started making plans with my mom – oh, yeah… and I hate my mother-in-law…

Long story, that one. I got a call from her in September asking if I was going to send her some money. I owe her $600, all that's left of a rather large sum of money we owed her for putting a new engine in our car a while back. I started working $100 into our budget and then it just didn’t happen. I didn’t know what to do since talking to her is like talking to a television announcer or game show contestant – they don’t hear you and keep talking. So I did what I always do when life is too much for me. I bury my head in the sand and ignore the situation. Kind of like what I've been doing for the past month about my blog. She called a month later and left another message, this time saying that she hadn’t made me beg for the money when we needed it, she didn’t understand why she had to beg to get it back. Oh, damn! I felt like crap and still didn’t have the money to pay her back but it did decide to take some action rather than ignore the situation. I wrote her a letter outlining why I didn’t have the money, some of our current struggles and apologized for making her beg. I sent her a good faith check for $5. The outcome? Don’t know. She hasn’t called me, hasn’t talked to any family about it, and hasn’t cashed the check I sent her. I thought about sending her a letter saying that I’d be happy to send her another five or ten dollars if she’d just cash the first check I sent her, but that’s passive aggressive and I don’t want to go there.

That’s all for now but I’m going to make an effort to write regularly. I love the idea of having an online journal.