Tis the season to be SHOPPING!

I don't like the shop. It is a pain, I get angry and frustrated at people and I generally leave the store in a foul mood. There is one notable exception to this and that is black Friday shopping! As stupid as it sounds, I love getting up at the crack of dawn, standing in line in the cold and fighting the crowds for a few deals. We plan our trips with miliatry precision. We get the ads on Thursday (I actually browse them on blackfriday.info beforhand and hope that that information is close to right on the big day) and we all sit down and go through them together. We pick the stores that each person will go to, in what order we will go and figure out what time everyone needs to be up and where and when to meet after. This year, my brother, who works nights typically, stayed up and got in line at Staples at 2:45 for the opening at 6. He took a lawn chair, some blankets, coffee and his computer and camped out in front of the store. Mom and I got up at 3:30 and mom headed out while I went for more coffee for me and him. We ended up being about 25th or so in line, which was fine. It seemed like everyone in front of us where looking for a super cheap laptop that they had so i wasn't worried about getting my stuff. As the morning wore on, more and more people showed up and the line ended up being clear around the corner of the building. We also had several people who jumped in line with people in front of us but we couldn't complain too much since we did the same thing, 2 hours earlier. We had several things to get and assigned each person a task. D got put in charge of getting the hard drives because he is the biggest and the tallest and has the easiest time getting through the crowds and that was the most important thing to get. I got put in charge of my memory card and flash drives and mom came along as a third person to buy the one per person items :) I ended up getting a Maxtor 500gb external harddrive, a 2gb CF card for my new camera, and a package of CDs.

We were in and out of the store in under 20 minutes and would have been even faster (last year, we had everything we went for and had checked out before the end of the line made it in the store) if we could haven't goten D to stand still and get in line. After Staples, we went to Meijer and I got pillows (I bought some a few months ago and they horrible. They are all flat and gross) and a chicken fryer, not because I fry so much chicken but because it is a nice big deep pan and I broke my other one (it fell off the edge of the sink and the handle broke). After that, mom and I went to Walgreen's where she got a digital picture frame keyring and moon sand. Then to the mall where we had a $10 off a $10 item at Bergener's. I got the "Pop Bottle Science" kit for C, for $5 so score. Then to breakfast and home by 9:30 am :)

In other news, my back is KILLING me. It has hurt since Tuesday morning. I'm seriously thinking about going to the doctor on Monday, if it isn't better. I'm been taking Advil round the clock and sleeping on a heating pad. It still hurts to walk or stand up or sit down or bend over or pick up the kids, etc. It got so bad the last couple of nights (rolling over in bed is horrible) that I took real pain meds left over from my broken toe and my c/s. The sad thing is, I don't even know what I did to it. :(

My anniversary present

Dh got me this for our anniversary on Saturday. I can't wait to get a chance to play with it some more. I just need to wait for the right oppourtunity because just sitting in my living room playing with it isn't that much fun.

Gift cards as gifts

I LOVE gift cards. I was just reading something about how it is SO rude to give people give cards because it means you don't care enough about them to know what they would want instead. IMO, getting someone a gift card means you care enough about their time to get them something useful, instead of something that they may not need or want and will just have to return (or regift, which is also OMG SO rude, apparently). My MIL hates giving gift cards and I've been asking for one for every gift giving holiday since dh and I got married. I simply don't understand this. I know what I want, I know where to get and I want the best deal for my money. Why kill yourself buying something I don't like (she has this thing with buying jewelry, which I often don't like or can't wear because of an allergy) or won't be able to use. For example, we asked for a Wii this year for Xmas and I asked for a gift card to buy accesories for it. I don't know what games we want, I want to wait until we find a good deal on something. I don't know how many controllers we will want or need, I don't know if we will need remote skins or anything else.

I swear, when I sat down to write this, this was a lot more intelligent. I've been distracted 20 times since I started and it no longer has even close to the same flow as when I started. :(

Moving

Not out of my house but we have moved nearly everything in the house around in the last few days. Several months ago, I set up centers for various activities around the house and it has helped keep my house so much cleaner!! The centers worked great over the summer when dh was working fairly normal hours. Since he has started working nights, they haven't worked as well. The two favorties, art and kitchen were in the dining room, nearest his room. I was forever shushing them and eventually making them leave the centers because they were being too loud. Last week, I decided that I needed to move them into the living room. Well, I don't have enough room in the living room for all the stuff so I had to move blocks and trains into the dining room. I backed blocks up to my desk (partly hide the crap that falls off my desk) and put the train under the bar. Then I decided that I was tired of the laundry room the way it was. We drug out this nasty old cabinet (it was a ktichen counter that someone had tried to cut a sink in and then covered with masking tape when it didn't work) Since we just stored soap in there, it wasn't a big deal. I decided that I wanted to put the dressers in the laundry room so that I could put clothes away as they came out of the dryer. Previously, I had been tossing clothes on the floor (my typical place for storing clothes, unfortunately) and then I set up a basket system, where each person had a basket in the laundry room and I would toss each person's clothes into their basket as they came out of the dryer. This was working well, but the baskets were taking up lots of room and it was hard to get through to the washer. The other issue was putting away clothes because they all go in the room that Evan sleeps in. I couldn't put them away during the day and I couldn't get them back out in the morning either. We have moved the dressers in there and they take up way less room. I still have a basket for Lizzie because her dresser is in the other room and I'm not going to move it into the laundry room. As long as I put the clothes away as soon as they are done, it shouldn't be an issue. We are hanging a bar on one side and hanging up all the clothes in there and a shelf on the other side for non-dresser folded clothes (pants). We are also mounting a shelf for soap and bleach and other things like that and then I'm mounting a shelf over the art center for things that need to stay with it but that I don't want the kids to have access to all the time (beads, hot glue gun, extra paint brushes, etc) Since none of the dressers are in dh's room, he drug his desk into his room while I was gone picking C up at school. Now I have to clean that area up (it has been awhile since it has been vacuumed really well under his desk) and then clean my desk off. Then I'm going to move my desk in to the nook that his was in, next to the file cabinet. Then I have to clean really well where my desk used to be (also quite some time since it has been vacuumed well) and then I'm going the flatten the blocks against the wall. Not sure what I'll do with the extra wall space (our desk have been in the same place since we moved in here 5 years ago) but I'm sure I'll find something to fill it.

So I should be cleaning the dining room but I'm sitting here on my tail blogging about how I'm going to clean it. Lame :)

Child support update

Our local office says they have no record of any payments since Nov 2006. They suggested we call the payroll person at work and verify they were sending the payments to the right place and with the right number. He called. She is. Her suggestion was to call the main office and see what they say. He called and they said, they show that payments are current as of Nov 5th 2007. They suggested calling CO and seeing what the problem is on their end. He did and was told (after waiting most of the day for a return call) that he needed to call someone else about the accounts being frozen. He did and was told that they showed he was current as well, but they couldn't do anything about the notice once it had been sent. Once they get the paperwork that we are supposed to send, they can unfreeze the account. Even though they admit that he is current, they can't do anything to correct their error until we send proof that their files are correct. SO frustrating.

A couple of good things have come out of this though. We actually have the name of a case worker in CO that we can call when they do stupid crap like this. He said this is also the first time that he has called about an issue that everyone that he has talked to hasn't treated him like a lying deadbeat.

Going forward, we were able to stop his direct deposit so this own't tie up all our money for the next 2 weeks. When he gets paid, I'm going to have him sign the check over to me and then I'm going to go to our other bank (where I have an account in my name alone) and cash it. Then I'm going to open a new checking account in my name alone. He will have to change his direct deposit to that account and I'll switch all of our bill pays over to that. I intend to keep the original account open and once this mess is resolved, I'll transfer money into it every pay period to cover his gas and what have you. That way, he still has access to money, without having to worry about another error tying up money for days or weeks. We were fortunate this time that the problem occurred at the end of a pay period, when there wasn't as much money in the account.

Pilates and PE

I figured out why I don't like my Pilates book. It isn't PILATES, it is all crunches and legs lifts. Throw in a fat lesbian or a football coach in the midst of roid rage and you have my high school PE class.

I HATED PE. I hated it all through school. I managed to get into it with every single PE teacher I ever had. In elem school, I kicked my PE in the knee because he thought I wasn't stretching well enough so he decided to help me. He pushed my leg up further than I wanted it so I reared my other leg back and unleashed on his locked knee. I got sent to the principal's office over it.

Freshman year in high school, I told my PE teacher (the fat lesbian)that I would run as soon as she did. She was pissed. Later in the year, she tried to give me a same day detention (against school policy) and I walked out the of the class. She called my mom and mom told her to take a flying leap.

Sophomore year, I got thrown out of my PE class. I refused to dress one day for some reason or another (any excuse I could come up with was good enough for me) and the coach (roid boy) told me that I had to dress. The rest of teh conversation went sort of like this:
Me: yeah, I'm so not doing that.
RB: you are REQUIRED to dress for this class
Me: I'd like to see you try and make me
RB: you will dress!!!! or you can go sit in the office for the rest of the class period.
Me: *thinking* I could sit in the air conditioned office, in a comfy chair or in the hot, smelly gym on the hard floor. DuhI'm outta here.

I flunked PE one quarter and had to quit pissing off the coaches for the next quarter because if you flunked the whole semester, you had to repeat it next year. My junior year, I fully loaded my schedule so I wouldn't have to take PE, because I was "college bound". My senior year, I decided "screw it" and took only the bare minimum of classes to keep me out of PE. It wasn't like I needed the credits. You had to have 16 to graduate and I had that by the middle of my junior year. Without flunking classes, I'm not sure how you could manage to not have 16 credits but some people did.

Excercize and scrapping

I have started doing pilates and yoga again. I had been doing really good at it and then I got sick and quit (it is really hard to invert when it feels like your head is going to explode when you pick things up off the floor) Then I never got back into it. I need to get the book that I had from the library because the ab workout in it was muxh better. This book I have now is ok, but it is less concentrated (I realize I griped about not liking the other book I already had because it was too specific but there is a happy medium between too specific and not specific enough) than what I want. I've been doing the yoga on and off for a couple of years. If nothing else, I sleep better when I do it, so doing it as often as possible is a good thing.

I've also decided to do something aerobic 10 minutes everyday. If that is swimming with the kids or chasing them around the playground or flailing around wildly to music. 10 minutes a day isn't that hard to commit to. Eventually the plan is to work up to doing 20 minutes a day and then 30 minutes. Over the course of the day, none of that is too much. 10 minutes is seriously nothing. I can do 2 minutes an hour (one song to flail to) and it won't even take all day. Do I want to lose weight? Yes, I would really like to lose 50 lbs. However, that isn't the main focus of this. I want to be in better shape. I don't like not being able to breathe. And I don't like not being able to run and play with the kids without being winded.

As for scrapping, I'm so tired of commenting on layouts. I want the comments on mine (which are boring, I know) but I'm tired of spewing the same pointless drivel at every layout I see. It is rare that I see a layout that really inspires me to say anything real. I always complained about galleries where all that was said was "Nice page,I like your color choices" or "I really like your page, you did a good job with that picture" I always want some kind of constructive critism but I find that hard to offer. I see the layouts and they are "fine", nothing spectacular but nothing wrong either and it is so hard to come up with something that doesn't sound 100% lame. So I may not like the robot comments but at least I understand them now :(