Merry Christmas from the corgi

Normally, we have our Christmas picture taken, which we then include in our Christmas cards, but we were quite behind this year.  Alas, there is no picture of our threesome this year, maybe we'll get it tomorrow.

Instead, Gimli wishes a Merry Christmas!

Things for 2011

So a bunch of people I know are doing a '100 things I want to do in 2011' list and while I agree its a great idea, I am finding it difficult to come up with 100 things.

Therefore, I'm just going to write things down until I can't think of anything else and see where I end up.

   1. Read More, nothing special, just reading.
   2. Pay attention to my blog and post more
   3. Join BlogHer
   4. Attend BlogHer 2011, wherever it is
   5. Do what I need to do to get off one of my medications
   6. Go to the Zoo
   7. Make a better attempt at brushing Gimli more than once a week
   8. To achieve this, setup a grooming table in the laundry room
   9. Start expanding the list of meals that I can cook from memory
  10. Start branching out and cooking different things, planning is key and laziness is no excuse
  11. Eat more fruits and veggies
  12. Cut my hair, and not just a trim either, goodbye long locks.
  13. Get a 2nd corgi
  14. Learn to walk two of them properly
  15. Improve Gimli’s recall
  16. Make a Pooh Bear gingerbread house
  17. See The Lion King stage show
  18. Continue with the No Complaint experiment
  19. Take more visits to The Arboretum and see our coyote friend again
  20. Get off my butt and be more active
  21. Play with Gimli in the snow
  22. Try to make a snow ‘animal’
  23. Get more sleep
  24. Read Brene Brown’s book, The Gifts of Imperfection and apply it to myself
  25. Woofstock?
  26. Parasailing @Castaway Cay
  27. Discover local restaurants in my city
  28. See the Tim Burton exhibit
  29. Go to the Animal mass with Jeannie
  30. Make it to Trinidad to introduce Mike to the rest of my crazy family, hopefully I'll still be married by the time we return.
  31. ...
 

What to do when you can't get through the door?

Pull the fire alarm!  Yes, this device that one must only pull in the event there is a real fire.

I went into the office yesterday to catch up with everyone so they wouldn't think I've succumbed to cabin fever.  It was nasty cold outside, -18 or something like that with the wind chill.  Colder than a witch's tit.

It was the middle of the afternoon, the office is quiet and all of a sudden we hear this noise, which doesn't sound like any fire alarm at all.  We're all walking around for about a minute trying to figure out if this is the actual fire alarm, since most of us work from home.  Finally it sinks in and we rush back to our desks to grab our coats to head downstairs.

Outside its freezing.  We're standing there bracing behind minivans trying to stay out of the biting wind, secretly cursing whoever planned the fire drill and equally hoping the building burned down so we weren't freezing in vain.  Finally they gave us the all clear and we trudged back upstairs.

I later found out someone had pulled, yes pulled the fire alarm.  Why you ask?  Was it a prank?  A method to break up the monotony?

Nope, not in the least.

See, in our stairwells at each door there's a security box where you swipe your badge and you gain access.  Its quite simple really.  Well, this person, swiped her badge and I suppose it didn't take, so instead of swiping again, she pulls the fire alarm... why?  Because the lever on the fire alarm would open the door.

No tv, no phone, no Internet make Candy something something...

As I have mentioned before, I work from home.  Every day, Monday - Friday I'm up in the office with two work machines plugged into the VPN via the Internet.

Today, this did not happen...

See, there was a slight snowstorm last night, at least I think there was.  There wasn't enough snow to qualify for a snowstorm on the ground, but the roads and sidewalks were a bit icy.  About two blocks away from our house sits the 'transformer' box that holds our telephone/cable/internet connections as configured by our ISP.  Well, sometime last night a car smashed into that box.  It totaled the box.  To quote Mike, who saw the box this morning, "Smooshed!".

Needless to say, this morning there was no phone, no tv and no Internet.

I came back home from walking Gimli on icy sidewalks and blowing snow to hear Mike say, "We are dead in the water.", then turn around and walk back to the kitchen.  I thought of Jaws for a split second before he clarified himself and said the phone, tv and Internet was down.


Crap!  I was away on Thursday and Friday, (the topic of which I will post in a few days once I have the videos nicely compressed), and I had a large enough pile of work before I left that I couldn't possibly take another day off, especially when I'm going to be away again next week for Christmas!!, ran through my head

The next few minutes were spent scrambling to figure out how I could get to 'work'.  We have one car and Mike's office and my head office are in different directions.  The highway was a write off, it took Mike 1 1/2 hours to get to his office, which is closer than mine.

Thankfully, my boss lives in the same city and so I was able to work from his house sitting at his dining room table.  Mike picked me up after work and we came home to find our phone, tv and Internet working again.

How much do you want to bet it came up about an hour after I made it to my boss' house?

My head is full and no one likes my cookies

I had a nasty horrible headache today, which I can only attribute to the fact that I have so many blog posts swirling in my head that its full.  The blog area of my brain has reached capacity and is threatening the other portions of my brain.

So, in no particular order, here's what I need intend to write about in the next little while:

1. Christmas decorations
2. My birthday
3. Impending trip to another province, the reason I'm going there I've waited for about 12 years.
4. That other thing that was in my mind, but now I can't remember probably because a new thought came in and that thought was banished away.

---

Last Friday, I went to a social gathering in the neighborhood.  I was very proud of myself, I went there, was nice, polite, dare I say it - warm.  I mingled, I laughed and smiled and tried to join conversations.  Sometimes I succeeded, other times I stood there listening to women's birth stories.

I made peanut butter cookies with two little chocolate chips stuck in the middle.  We each were asked to bring something to eat, so I was glad to bring my cookies... Except it seemed no one ate them.  :(  By the time I left, the container was practically still full.

Here's a picture, don't they look appetizing?

On second thought, maybe they were scared off because the cookies do rather look like little beady eyed mouthless monsters.... hmmmmm