This past Monday was Andy's 24th birthday. His school was nice enough to give him two tests to take that day. He also had class most of the day and didn't get home to celebrate until around seven. I made him a birthday cake on Friday so we could have more time over the weekend to eat it.....This is why his cake is partly gone in the picture. He wasn't allowed to "blow out his candles" until his actual birthday or his wish wouldn't work. We failed at actually consuming much of the cake...It was good (lemon with lemon frosting) but other things seemed to have more need-to-be-eaten urgency....Like the potato salad that I made him.

For his birthday present I made him a quilt. I finished it awhile ago, but had to keep it hidden. I also had to work on it in secret so it could be a surprise. It's about 70 x 60 and has a nice cuddly fleece backing. I almost got caught several times working on this because Andy would get home early from class or work, but in the end it still finished as the surprise that it started as. I ended up tying the blanket because I didn't have a chance to visit my aunt to get it machine quilted and I'm not good enough to do it on a regular machine. Andy didn't seem to care.

One failed attempt

Last Saturday I decided to make my first attempt at drinking a 40. I hate beer (and malt liquor if you want to be picky). A lot. But apparently it's a taste that can be acquired by drinking a ton of it. I decided to document my progress through this attempt. Please note the excited look on my face at the start of the evening. I was very confident. Andy and I got a Mickeys and an Old English. I picked the one that tasted the most bearable--the Mickeys. Andy's theory regarding drinking 40's is the think of them in thirds. The first third should be chugged. The second is enjoyed. The third basically has to be forced down.

I'm not sure how this theory stands for other people, and since I haven't got one of my own, I decided to go for it. The first third was not great. The next photo in sequence is me as I made my way through the second third. As I'm sure you can see from the photo, my enthusiasm went down dramatically.

I won't go into great detail, but the evening ended about midway through the bottle. I couldn't force anymore down my throat. Eventually, what I drank forced it's way back up my throat along with the sandwich I had for supper...This was not photographed. The concluding photo show the failed first attempt ending just about exactly half way through the bottle.

On a completely unrelated topic, I started working on a puzzle with Andy. I think we started it last Wednesday and finished it sometime early this week. It was not the most attractive puzzle, but it had really neat shaped pieces and a pretty easy picture to give clues about where pieces should go. All in all, i think Andy put about one eight of it together and left the rest for me.

Rivers

With all the rain we've been getting and all the snow that's been melting, there has been a lot of talk about the rivers in the area. I decided to go out and take a look at how things were going. I went with Daniel on Tuesday to the Rapidan Dam. I think it's the Blue Earth River that runs though it. I've never been there before. It was pretty neat. The water was still frozen over on one side of the dam, but it was still flowing through really heavily. There are some walking/bike trails around the area that I might devote more time to exploring when the weather starts staying nice.



On the way there, we passes a really neat lokoing house. With a little bit of work on the main floor, I think it would make a fantastic Zombie house. (meaning a house to hide out in when the zobies come. Not a house for zombies to live in). I would like to explore it more thoroughly but I'm not sure if there are acutally people living in it. I bet it's haunted.



We also stopped at the Le Sueur River. There is a park called ther Red Something Something park that has a really cool walking bridge built over the river and highway. There seems to be a lot of trail ruinning through this area that will be worth checking out in nicer weather too. This river was also really high. I wish I had a paper boat that I could have dropped in to watch.



The weather was great for two whole days. It made me want summer really badly. This winter has been going on for far too long.

Kiddie Casket

When I graduated from the Mortuary Science program I received a very nice, unique gift. My friends Trista (aka T-borg, T-bot, T-bear, and t-bibbity)'s dad makes plane pine caskets/coffins. As a gift to me, he made an infant/display size casket for me to have. It's really neat. I said that since I don't currently have a dead infant to put in it, I would use it to store some things. I keep my photo albums in it along with a box of "treasured" items, which actually is more of a random assortment of silly things that are not horribly important. That's what I keep in there for now, but I said that if I ever to have a dead infant, I'll use the casket for it's intended purpose.

Shirts

In my last post I mentioned something about a shirt obsession. Ever since I was little, I have always wanted a raglan shirt. For those unfamiliar with the concept, it's a shirt where the sleeves/shoulders/neckline are a different color than the torso of the shirt. I developed the odd little obsession because of the movie My Girl I think. The main character wears a few raglans throughout the movie. I have basically never been able to find a raglan shirt that fit me until last year. I found a bunch of different colors at a store for $6. I went nuts and got six of them. Then I found a couple to wear as pajamas for $7. Then I found some on sale at the bookstore in college. And on it went. I now have 19 or 20 of them, and have recently taken to trying to make some of my own.

I didn't have a pattern, so I made on of my own from a shirt I already had. There have been several failed attempts, but I now have three homemade raglans that I wear on a regular basis. Fabric stores don't seem to carry enough colors of the right fabric to make my shirts, so I've taken to buying shirts from the thrift store and cutting them up to make what I want. Maybe I'm weird, but who cares. THEY'RE RAGLANS!






On a different topic, Andy and I have been making a lot of homemade pizzas. Here is a picture of one of our delicious creations. We use basically the same toppings every time, but sometimes we go wild with the dough and make beer-dough pizza.

At work the other day I was doing some measuring for new costumes we got in. I found some super silly costumes. There was an alien with silly hands, so I took a picture wearing those. (It is my current profile picture on facebook.) Then I found a gorilla costume so I had fun with the feet. I really would have enjoyed it if I could have worn the feet all day, but I didn't think the bosses would appreciate it.

Lastly f or the day... When I work at the Jackson Hewitt Kiosk at Walmart on the weekends, this creepy 50-ish year old guy seems to find it necessary to come talk to me. He works there, and I have to see him almost every time I come in. Within a few weeks of starting the job, he told me that I should come to his birthday party, and that as soon as he figured out when it would be he would let me know. A week or so later he presented me with this fancy invitation. It seems like the more I look at it, the more grammatical mistakes I find. It creeped me out beyond belief to be given the invitation. Thankfully, the d-bag seems to have caught the hint that I would rather not talk to him because he doesn't bug me as much. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go look for something to wear to the "restaunt" for the "brithday" party...

My computer is falling apart.

I have tried a couple of times to upload a video onto my blog. It failed both times. Some times my computer pretends to be working when it actually is doing nothing at all. I did finally manage to get it to load. Recently the B button stopped working and the space bar had been on the fritz. I picked off the cover hoping to snap it back on to get it to work. Instead, it refuses to snap back on and now my computer keyboard is missing a piece and looks really silly. I've been thinking about getting a new computer for awhile. It's very frustrating. My computer also decided to lose all of my information and now I can't do anything with my stuff or save any new stuff unless I save it to my external hard drive. I don't like the idea of spending money, so it's been difficult to find a computer I would actually want to buy.

I haven't tried much on for costumes at work, but a week ago I had to try on several. They were all very silly and this time I even snapped a pick of me in one. I tried on the Sexy Scarecrow, the Sexy Tin Man, the Sexy Cowardly Lion, the Forrest Fairy, the Sexy Dark Angel, the Fook Mi, the Sexy Garfield costume which I can't find a link to, the Gangster Moll, and the Sexy Wild West Sheriff which is what I'm wearing in the picture. I wanted to kill myself for how I looked in the garfield, fook mi, and tin man costumes. They are so gross looking. I thought the gangster moll one would have been good for when I was working at the mortuary.

Other than that, nothing too exciting has been happening. I've been attempting to make my own shirts, but so far I'm about 2 for 6 on actually having them turn out. Sometime I will take some picture of them and explain a little obsession I have in regards to shirts.

So after finally getting the video to upload...this is a video of me playing along to jezebel by iron and wine. I am playing along because there are two guitar parts and the one i play is very repetitive. Without the vocals and second guitar part, it's pretty boring. I played part of this in the iron and wine medley video from a different post.

I hate titles

I've been very tired lately. It probably doesn't help that I work all the time, but that's not going to change any time soon. For the next couple of weeks I'm supposed to work about five hours extra, and I've been working ten hours every weekend for Jackson Hewitt. Gotta love the 55 hour weeks.

Sometime it's so discouraging to know that some things don't change no matter where you work (this is not in regards to the number of hours worked, but rather how frustrating office politics can be). I'm still much happier overall than I was at the mortuary despite how frustrating things can be at the current place. Still though, it's terrible that people can be so disappointing by always fitting the stereotypes that are set for them.

This week I tried on the "rustic female pirate" costume and there was a lot of joking around about me trying on the "Sequin Flapper" costume. The latter, however, never happened.

I've posted a video. I'm playing "clothes of sand" by Nick Drake. I haven't been playing the guitar much at all lately so I'm getting out of practice. But for your listening pleasure...




I was supposed to have a lot of play dates this week with people who were going to come in from out of town. All of them failed miserably because of the stupid weather. I'm pretty sure it can stop being crappy out any time soon. I'm not the biggest fan of driving on ice rinks...