Merry Christmas

Hope everyone had a great Christmas. I got to spend it with a lot of my family. Still not ready to write much. Some of you may be relieved to know that you are seeing the last Santa's Marching Band video of the season. Soon we will have to burn the tree, take down the decorations, and enter the bleak month of January. It's also the month of my birth so I'm at least a little excited about that, I'm still young enough that I don't mind another birthday.

Christmas Eve

too tired

almost Christmas

Customers were crabby at work today. Some were very nice and a couple even brought us treats, but overall it was incredibly hectic and stressful today. Tomorrow I am in pharmacy, not sure how it will go but we close at 2pm so as long as I can survive five hours things should be okay. If it's nice out I might try to ice skate again. Tonight Dave and I have been picking out Rock Band songs to buy with our Christmas gift from M, my brother-in-law. I'm nervous about the big snowstorm that's supposed to happen, I'm hoping that family can still make it up here.

tired and boring

more chores make me a dull girl. I just spent 1/2 an hour making a grocery list and writing out where to find each item (aisle number, etc) since I'm sending Dave out on his own. I am excited for Thursday, just hoping that it waits to snow until late evening.

sleepy

Ugh, I was so sleepy and unmotivated when I came home from work. I laid down on the couch and tried to de-stress. I then went on to watch a National Geographic episode about stress: portrait of a killer. Finally I got around to the cleaning I've been meaning to do. Currently the oven is cleaning itself and stinking up the house. I swept and mopped the linoleum and cleaned the ferret's cage. I made a schedule and list of things to get done so I feel better about that at least.
Tomorrow I need to give Dave a lesson on getting ready for and going to the dump. It will be an exciting little adventure for him to go all by himself.
Since once again I am an hour later than I had hoped to get to bed, I will finish up with more marching band.

Little Drummer Boy

Jolly Old Saint Nicholas

family weekend

I meant to put another music video up on Friday morning but got to busy packing and trying to make it to work on time.
We left for the cities Friday evening and went out to Saint Paul late to watch our friends band perform. We got back to (my) in-laws house pretty late (2 am) and proceeded to marvel at M's brand new 46 inch flat screen television. After about half an hour of the new Star Trek movie I had to get to bed and Dave eventually followed.
The next morning (at 7:30) I received a couple calls in a row from my grandma saying NOT to come visit because the flu was going around her living place. That wasn't really a concern since we weren't in town but I advised her to drink lots of water since she was recovering from the flu.
I wasn't feeling too sleepy after that so I tried to study my pharmacy tech book. I am becoming a little more intimidated by it, there may be more to memorize than I had initially assumed. Dave's parents cooked us breakfast and we enjoyed visiting with them and his grandma who is in town from California. Next it was on to errands. I mostly just followed around and ate samples as Dave's mom and grandma picked out the great dinner. I recommend Target's cinnamon sugar covered almonds, semi-healthy candy. The whole family got to eat together at Champ's for lunch and soon after the women left for our tour of the James J. Hill house. There were actors that kept us engaged in the day to day life of a servant in the house and often belittled us for our poor skills at housekeeping and cooking, since we were all applying for a waitress position at the house in 1901. We returned home and enjoyed a great meal with everyone before talking and joking, and finally just relaxing in front of the television.
Today I visited a good friend who's studying in Norway. Her mom still lives two houses away from my parents. We tried out a breakfast place in the area and were very pleased with the place, we finally left because it was pretty busy. I stopped at my parent's house to pick up some gifts. My dad (G) offered me food and advice before hugging me and sending me on my way again.
Dave and I packed up the car before meeting up with my dad (O) (there are two dads) and his girlfriend. We had a nice time visiting and opening presents.
My mom offered a suggestion for a new way to get home and it worked out pretty well, we may try it again in the future. Sometimes I forget how wide the twin cities area is, if we leave from one house we take a completely different route to get home than if we leave from another house 20 miles west.
Enough rambling about the weekend, I'm going to get to posting the videos so I can go to bed.

give the Neil Diamond cd a rest

big sigh, I finished wrapping presents. I'm still enjoying Christmas music although I'm hoping that our pharmacist somehow forgets his Neil Diamond Christmas cd because I've heard that on repeat for a few days now. I don't have a whole lot to say so I'll just get to today's "marching" installment.

notes on the day

I think that I finished my Christmas shopping so I'm pretty happy about that. Now I just need to get ready for the weekend (we're driving down to the cities) and make a plan for next week.

I watched Kiki and Lydia play today, mostly because I threw Lydia on top of Kiki. I've started to realize that Lydia now knows that she can't be the Alpha when it comes to Kiki so she's begun to sort of ignore Kiki's presence. I think that she's decided she's not willing to surrender her dominance in the household, thus she pretends Kiki isn't there.

I made myself go outside and skate tonight and I'm glad I did. It was a new moon so it took a while to adjust to the darkness, but it was fun. I'm not any good at it, but the limited gliding I did felt nice.

I wish there was more time in the evenings, I will have to get the gift wrapping done tomorrow. and now for your enjoyment, or displeasure...

Grandma got run over by a reindeer (but not really)

No cooking today, Dave and I went to my grandma's after work for her home's holiday party. The food was pretty great, and best of all I didn't have to cook or do dishes. My grandma took a surprising amount of food, surprising until she started to give it to Dave and me. Sometimes I think this is part of the Great Depression mentality - she better take what she can get and make sure we have enough, she was born in 1916 after all. Once dinner was over it was easy to see where I got my sweet tooth from, Grandma had no trouble putting away the ice cream and tiny cake squares, we even snuck some back to her room. Dave was quite the gentleman helping out some octogenarians with seating and drinks. I have to admit that spending time there makes the distant future seem a little scary, but also helps me to appreciate my youth and health.
Another confession... I am mostly writing every day lately so that I can post a new Santa's Marching Band song on here :)

more cooking mishaps

Staying motivated when it's cold and dark is difficult. I've been using cooking as therapy for the sluggishness. Cooking desserts is motivating to me because I have an enormous sweet tooth - I'm still not super motivated about cooking dinner. Tonight I decided to start some creme brulee. I have to let it cool for 3 to 4 hours so we probably won't enjoy it until tomorrow.
I found that I have a bad habit of looking right into the oven upon opening the door (we don't have a window on our oven). Usually I am just greeted by a blast of warm air, but since the creme brulee has to sit in a warm bath (pans half full of water with the ramekins inside) there was a lot of steam this time. As I stuck my face close to take a look I experienced two thing immediately: burning pain on my lips, and my eyelashes curling back. I quickly stepped back recalling overhearing a conversation about steam burns being worse than other burns and also realizing that I wasn't really hurt. I'm not sure if my actual eyelashes were reacting to the steam and heat or if it was the mascara melting and reforming, but all is well and from now on I will try to remember to step back when I open the oven door.
Now that my it's starting to wear off I better get to dishes before my motivation is completely gone.

C is for Cookie, (that's good enough for me)

This weekend was spent making cookies and doing small errands. My phone died early Saturday morning but luckily I woke up around 8:15am and made it to my grandma's house. She had me re-wrap a gift and send it back to the giver (shoes didn't fit comfortably). After stopping off at the post office I went to Target to return some lights we bought (it turned out that there were 3 strings of lights in the crawl space). While in Target my brain turned off and I wandered the aisles aimlessly wishing that I was more tuned in to what people want (for Christmas). Eventually I forced myself to the check-out line and made my way to the grocery store. Other than trouble finding molasses (syrup area, not baking), that went smoother than the Target trip.

Back at home I started the cookie process. In all I made 4 types of cookies... sugar, gingerbread men, candy cane, and corn flake wreaths. Since our porch is a "one-season," I just kept the dough out there to chill. Not long after we moved in to this house I reorganized the spices and put some of them into old baby food containers. When I tried to get the container with ginger in it open I had trouble. I used grandma's special "atlas grip" gloves, had Dave try, and finally came up with this solution -


(solution being to jab madly at the lid with a corkscrew until I had a suitable opening).

Other cooking mishaps include overly sticky goo for the corn flake wreaths, they are made very similarly to rice krispie bars... melt butter and marshmallows together and then stir in the cereal. I think the problem was that I had made one batch without incident and instead of cleaning out the green sludge (you add food coloring and vanilla to the wreath recipe), I just added new butter and marshmallows. The thing turned against me and was almost impossible to scoop out of the pot. I think the green food coloring may have done something bad, or the marshmallows were too sticky, or maybe I didn't add enough butter the second time. Here are some Pioneer Woman inspired cooking pics of the crushed candy canes, the before and after. Lastly, in the cooking department, since I didn't have raisins I used frosting and red hots for decoration on the gingerbread men. Sometimes the red hots melted a little and looked demonic, which resulted in some interesting decoration...At last cookies were finished so I decided to venture out on the frozen lake.
I started timidly along the shore and stomped around quite a bit. It's been pretty cold up here (between 0F and 25F) so I wasn't too worried. After a while I got comfortable and started twirling around. I was too lazy to go back and grab my skates but there's a pretty good patch for skating in the "bay."to end the post, my favorite Christmas song, performed by Santa's Marching Band.

O Christmas Tree

Here it is, the Christmas tree. I haven't managed to get a very picturesque photo of it but it's getting late and I wanted to be done writing this entry by now.

It was mostly a good day for me. A sick co-worker was feeling a little better and back at work, I got to "play" in pharmacy. I am slowly getting better, I know where to find a lot more drugs now and I can generally move the drugs on without many questions. I used to really like stickers but working with the sticky labels has almost changed my mind, some people will be getting some slanted labels and/or labels with wrinkles. I still like counting pills, it just gets a little nerve-wracking when a lot of people are waiting. Oh, and the big news (for me) is that another co-worker (a pharm tech) is leaving to work somewhere closer to her home (over 30 miles away from our store) so I will now be working in the pharmacy 3 days a week, almost guaranteed (versus the possible 1 1/2 days I had recently). I feel a little bad for my co-workers on the sales floor since I was getting to be a decent help there, but I have to admit that I'm pretty excited. It sounds like a newer employee will be getting more hours so she can help on the sales floor. Now I just need to start learning all of the drug names and their generics.

When I got home from work I found an awful surprise. Vomit. Vomit on the dining room table. Kiki had managed to get sick on two separate place mats, the tablecloth, and over the edge to the carpet. I checked the poinsettia first (they are poisonous to animals) but there weren't any signs of chewing. Eventually I realized that a gross leftover of mine is what caused the problem. Yesterday I had a small amount of leftover steel cut oats that froze in the car. When I got home I brought it in and set it on the table before going to Dave's band concert. When we got home I was too tired to clean up so today Kiki must have tried it out for herself. The milk I used was a little questionable yesterday morning, so after freezing and then thawing out all day it was probably nice and rancid. I considered adding pictures of the mess but decided they would be too explicit for the blog. Explicitly disgusting.

Dave's band concert was good. There were a few really great moments, one in particular where the brass were really in tune and blending beautifully, another when the junior and senior high students came marching in to pounding bass and quad drums. The parents and faculty seem to really appreciate Dave which was nice to see and hear. I just hope they feel that way come spring, and are possibly ready to show/fight for it if his job is on the cutting block.

I need to help my grandma out with some packing at 9am tomorrow morning so I need to get to bed.

Santa's Marching Band

Do you have anything that you absolutely love even though you know it may be awful to others? This is my seasonal love...


This is Santa's Marching Band, something I inherited by marrying Dave. His grandma passed it on to him and I love, love, love it. Dave isn't huge on Christmas music, and especially not noisy, slightly out of tune, bell Christmas music. The "band" plays something like 50 different Christmas songs in a row before finally starting over. Even my favorite "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." When we lived in the apartment it sat in the moldy basement until I discovered it the second year. Dave is ready to take a hammer to it so I can only play it for so long while he is home. I didn't think about the fact that "filming" on the camera's side would produce a sideways video. Maybe I will fix this later on, but for now just tilt your heads.

It's starting to feel more like the Christmas season now. Yesterday Dave and I cut down our first Christmas tree. We tried a tree farm nearby but they were closed due to sickness. We ended up taking my brother's (uninsured, yeah that might have been a bad idea) noisy truck to the next town to a tree farm. The whole way I kept telling Dave not to hit anyone, not that he would do that in any vehicle but I was nervous. We got to the place with saw in hand and found a nice fat balsam. I lay down on the ground and writhed around like a worm as I maneuvered the saw back and forth, after my arm began to burn Dave took over and we had our tree. The tree was a little pricier than I anticipated ($37), but it sounds like they were similarly priced elsewhere and we got the fun of the experience. I'm undecided about what we will do next year (real tree or fake) but we can decide when we get to it. I will have to take a picture of the tree later. After the whole tree experience and some relaxation at home we went to my work party. It was fun seeing everyone's spouse/partner. It was also nice seeing the pharmacists' (both of them - married to each other) house. It was very nice and spacious. Lots of antler decor, but tastefully done. I want their kitchen. No pictures, sorry. We had yummy food, both prepared and catered. Before leaving we had a White Elephant gift opening. There were about 30 people there total. I had a lot of fun watching people open the gifts we brought. A wine bottle holder (for just one bottle), some decorative fruit, pewter mugs, and a big stuffed frog with tag still on. Dave and I did pretty well, someone stole his scented oil heater (which he was very pleased about) so he stole a small drum to use at his school. I opened a drummer boy tree ornament that no one stole from me and is now hanging on our tree.

In other news the lake finally froze this week, not to the point that you could safely walk on it. In my grandmother's words, "___ Lake is treacherous!" I like that comment, I told Dave that she reads a lot of romance novels. It really can be dangerous though because a river goes through it so the ice in the middle isn't safe until it's been really cold for a while. Here are some pictures of the newly frozen lake.
I took the pictures at dusk. The close up is of some animal tracks, possibly a dog, not sure because I wasn't willing to go close enough to look.

Me trying out the ice, seemed solid in one spot, but I broke through in another. I wasn't planning on walking out anyway but as long as it was shallow enough to keep my feet dry I figured I'd see how thick it was.

Lastly, since I was going to introduce foxkitty, here is pic of him. He's a trouble-maker. Really he's a finger puppet, but he has stories.