First there was the stare down contest in which the rules changed so rapidly, I forgot what we were playing. Then, the worst thing ever during I Spy. I spy something gray. There were too many giggles so I knew the answer was my hair.
Now I’m at home weeping into my keyboard.
See…it did make it into a post.
So, our leaves still sit in the street. One day my prince leaf truck will come. New mega recycle bins were doled out today and we did not get one. I’m a little sad because we are recycling fiends. Oh well, next round of bins will surely correct that. Or, there is something about our side of the street that is cursed–mountains of leaves and no new recycle bins.
This morning, at 4am, there was a noise in the kitchen best described as 4 wind chimes being thrown on a concrete pad. The culprit was in our bedroom faster than you can say “wha?”. The better-half channeled his grandmother and said “what in the world”–that phrase tickles me to no end–and then we went downstairs to see some items on the floor (the noise was likely my travel coffee mug) and other things strewn about the counter. The faucet was on. The faucet, people, was on.
We turned off the faucet and went back to bed.
We’ll be making some good luck foods later today, but lunch was grilled oysters.
They were pulled out of the water on 12/30:
We put them on the grill so they pop right open (about 5 minutes):
Then we feasted:
We saw a few shows this year and I just asked the better-half what his top three were. He answered: 1) Broken Bells, 2) Rodrigo & Gabriela and 3) Fleetwood Mac.
My top three are: 1) Broken Bells, 2) Fleetwood Mac and 3) David Wax Museum.
Honestly, there were some really good shows and only one that blew (Earth, Wind and Fire). We walked out of that show and it’s hard to know if it was the band, the venue or both. For certain, I won’t go back to that venue.
2014 can go ahead and fade into oblivion as far as I’m concerned. Humans all over the planet were really frightful to each other this year. Dude, how are we supposed to explore the galaxy if we are still fighting amongst ourselves?
This is easily my favorite song of 2014:
We raked leaves yesterday and are still waiting to find out when the city will stroll through with the collector truck. The leaf piles in the neighborhood are reaching epic proportions.
We only have one more gift to buy and by “we” I mean not me. Everything is wrapped and the wine is ready to haul to my parent’s for Christmas dinner.
Today we made our first batch of chex party mix. Sausage balls will follow soon and the ham goes in for a spin in the oven overnight. The house will smell so good tomorrow morning. I hope the smell makes up for having to get up at o’dark 30 tomorrow for work. I miss the days of my office closing for a week or more.
I asked the better-half if we have to run around naked at 6:03EST. He said that may be a bit cold. It would probably scare the neighbors too. Instead I’ll leave you with this.
Have you been listening to Serial? We’ve been parceling it out and I just found out next week’s episode is the last for this season. We’ve been back and forth over the innocence of Adnan. I think we are both leaning towards innocence right now, but a couple of episodes back he was guilty. We have episodes 10 and 11 to catch up with before next week.
I just finished watching The Game on BBC. Pretty good twist at the end, but a bit formulaic. Although, that formula is more than made up for it by the hair and cheekbones of Tom Hughes.
I’m a third of the way through The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. I loved his Cloud Atlas and so far I’m enjoying this book too. I have to keep reading not only because the story is compelling, but I only have the book out from the library for 14 days. It’s a long book and I’m at the point where I need the characters to start overlapping because you know it’s going to happen. I find it interesting there are tie-ins to his other books.
We don’t have many trees in our yard, but the neighborhood is full of them. Huge oaks and maples, mostly. The leaves tend to blow to our side of the street. I’m not sure how that happens, but a significant portion of leaves end up in our yard or along our sidewalks. The city posted the schedule of when they’d be sending around the leaf sucking truck and, for our neighborhood, we’re still two weeks away from the start of the leaf sucking truck. We could certainly bag and have the regular trash guys pick them up, but bagging leaves is hateful.
Today we saw the leaf truck go by in front of our house and we were outraged that with a day’s warning we could have gotten the leaves into the street, but no. Then we thought about how a bunch of rain is expected today, and, maybe, the city is being proactive about the drains and they are just hitting the highlights. As it turns out, as we were returning from an errand, there were trucks at the other end of our side street and it didn’t seem like they were only collecting around drains.
We quickly raked the side street’s shitton of leaves. As we were nearing completion, a city worker stopped and talked to the better-half. One of the things he said is yep, we’ll come get these leaves and the other is where is your leaf blower. The better-half said it isn’t much of a leaf blower and I refer to it as the crappy leaf blower nearly always. It was fine for blowing grass off the pool deck, but it isn’t useful for much else. Yet another thing we need to spend money on in the future. As in not this leaf season.
We will end up raking the backyard at some point, but most of those leaves are also from a neighbor’s tree and the grass is already dead in that area anyway. We can wait another two weeks to see when the leaf collection signs are posted and then scurry to take care of that task. In the future. Leaf raking procrastination is the best kind of procrastination.
We took a quick trip to Florida with my mother and sister to visit my other sister. My other sister is a Floridian and she moved to a new town.
We walked down this pier:
Eventually finding this:
This guy was hanging out in town:
No trip to Florida is complete without walking on the beach. It was really windy and so it was a quick visit to the Atlantic:
For a brief moment, I thought both cats were going to hang out with me on the sofa this morning. Simon got his jodhpurs in a knot when Lucy joined us.
This week at work was a bit tough. I’m still working on a project with the person who is chronically unprepared. We recorded system training, multiple times, and I edited the heck out of those sessions so we have two training recordings to offer learners next week. My boss and the director of our department thanked me for my hard work. That meant a lot.
Coming up, I’ll be taking one of our existing modules and laying in text and audio that has been translated into Spanish. A first for me. The translation service has been great so far so I’m looking forward to what they send me.
Train travel is kind of cool:
So is seeing Fleetwood Mac, even if the seats were in nosebleed:
We ate at Lincoln and how cool was the serving dish for the deviled eggs?
When we got home, someone showed us how displeased she was that we left her alone with Simon:
