Nosy Nosy Neighbor (Me)

The pimp of our neighborhood is my 60-something year old neighbor. She is a retired teacher but she still works part time. Over the past year, I've seen her go out with a bunch of different dudes. I guess she finally found one she really liked, because his truck is at her house 7 nights a week. When the in-laws were in town, Marilyn was all "Um, your neighbor had a friend over. His truck was at her house early. Like, real early." So they're totally shacking up. Play on, playa'.

Our other next door neighbors are out of town all week. They went on a week long trip to Alaska, so he asked me to keep an eye on their house while they're gone. So of course I took an inventory of all the toys in their back yard to make sure that none go missing. I take my job as nosy neighborhood look-out totally seriously.

Neal left for work Tuesday so he'll miss both New Year's and the National Championship game. SUCKS.

I got a sewing machine for Christmas, but I haven't opened the box yet. I guess I need to learn how to sew now? It makes me think of that episode of the Cosby Show when Denise sews a shirt for Theo that is supposed to be a replica of this designer shirt that his parents wouldn't give him the money to buy. It was all jacked up with one sleeve shorter than the other and the buttons all out of whack. This is exactly how I picture my sewing projects turning out. I can see me in tears with Neal going, "Baby, it looks GREAT!"

I went to Houma today with Mom and the fam to visit my grandparents. I stopped at the ATM to get some money for the bridge toll so when I got to the toll booth I gave the lady a twenty. She looks at me and goes "got anything smaller?" I'm like, "No, sorry, that's all I've got." She then gave me the dirtiest freaking look and handed me my change. Ummmm BITCH. My coworker was telling me that she was going across the bridge one morning and got in the toll tag lane. When she got to the booth, she realized that her mom had taken the toll tag out of her car and she didn't have it with her. She had cash with her, but the toll bitch wouldn't take it. She shut down all the lanes Coyote Ugly style and made her exit the toll way and get back in line. I am 99.9% sure that this is the same hag that gave me the attitude today. I don't expect toll bitches to be thrilled with their lot in life, but COME ON.

My other coworker Cindy made some cookies around Christmas and gave some to all of us to take home. She told me that they were "ricoytcha" cheese cookies (I'm pretty sure she meant ricotta cheese). Neal tried one before I did and he took one bite and made the funniest face I have ever seen right before he said "they taste like feet" and spit them out. I decided not to sample them.

It's like 70 degrees outside right now, so I'm not feeling like it's New Year's. My azaleas are blooming too??? It just seems wrong. Our tree is still up and while I play like I'm going to take it down soon, I will probably wait for Neal to get home. But it's almost time for Mardi Gras decorations!!! And king cake!!! Whoop whoop! Happy New Year's y'all and Geaux Tigers!!!

So I Creep, Yeeeaaahhhh

Just keep it on the down low. Said nobody's supposed to knoooooow.

Sorry, I just heard TLC's 'Creep' on the radio. No lie, I still jam that shizzz.

I read The Help forever ago but I just decided to watch the movie yesterday. So I knew the story, I knew what was going to happen, I knew it all. And I still cried at the end. I hate crying at movies, I really really do. But it was just so sad and happy and emotional that I couldn't help it. Ha - no pun intended. And why are white people such privileged racist assholes sometimes? It's embarrassing (even when it's in a fictional movie).

And I guess I haven't updated y'all on Olivia..well, she's at home, back at school and she seems to be doing okay. She keeps herself occupied and sober while hanging out with friends and going to play laser tag and going to the movies and stuff like that. She knits a lot too; I think it's therapeutic for her. She's still as quirky as ever and she works for Dr. Bob (the artist - you know, the 'Be Nice or Leave' guy) on the weekends. So all in all, she's pretty good. She turns 18 in April which is just unbelievable. I think she'll find her niche somewhere and she will be just fine.

Target at 8am Saturday was empty and wonderful. I got out of there with everything I needed in less than an hour and then had to go to Best Buy. I was one of the people sitting in my car waiting on Best Buy to open at 9. I felt old. Like, when did I become this person that sits outside of a store at 855am on a Saturday waiting for it to open? I also went to World Market which seems to be where they are hiding all of the Abita Wheat beer. Abita Wheat is my fave, but I forgot it was seasonal. They took it off of the tap at the Brew Pub and it is nowhere to be found at any grocery store in or around the Abita Springs area. So for whatever reason, World Market is the Abita Wheat hoarder of south Louisiana.

Over the past few months, I have sat in on meetings with some healthcare executives. There was this one guy who was not very pleasant and pretty abrasive, but his ass was kissed by everyone because he was important. He ended up getting into some legal trouble and was fired and he has had to do some community service as part of his punishment. Last weekend I was cleaning out closets so I got a bunch of stuff together and brought it to the Habitat ReStore to donate. This person in shabby clothes walks up to me and asks if I needed help getting the stuff out of my car and I recognize him as this former VIP that has gone from being feared and appeased to being forced to volunteer at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. I was shocked. His fall from grace was quick and ugly. I mean, it was soooo a reminder that you should never treat people like shit, act entitled, or abuse your current position in life because it could all go away in a flash.

Neal gets home Wednesday and we get two whole days together before his family comes in town Friday for the whole weekend. Lawdy lawdy it's going to be a busy week.

It's The Little Things, Y'all

I got a mini heater from our office supply catalogue and it is making my life. I no longer have to wear my coat while I'm sitting at my desk working.

If anyone ever looked at our online bank account, they would notice that for two weeks a month the most frequent, repeat purchases are at the Covington Starbucks and the Dairy Queen of Yorktown, TX. There is only one 'restaurant' within a 20 mile radius of Neal's rig, so it's DQ for dinner most nights. And while I tried to give up my Starbucks habit, it didn't quite pan out. So every morning when I log in to our bank account to check the balance and transactions, there are always those two charges right there in the pending transaction section. Becuase neither one of us carries cash. EVER.

I just payed our first property tax bill last night. And I was excited about it for two reasons: 1. Because it means we own a home; and 2. Because we can pay the bill. Growing up I lived in a rental house. My parents owned a home for about 1.5 years before they got divorced, and from then on out it was all rentals. And of course money was always a big problem and my mom never let us forget it. We didn't come from a place where the parents hid the problems and didn't tell the kids about them, we were always totally aware of the financial issues. And because kids are sometimes victims of their upbringing, part of me thought that I would have those same kinds of experiences all throughout my life. And I definitely went through some rough times when I was in my early 20's and I was about the worst money manager that you could ever imagine. But I've learned from all my mistakes and so just that Neal and I both have jobs and we work hard and have health insurance and we own a house and have vehicles and can pay our bills....it makes me happy and I feel very fortunate. It's the little things, y'all.

Anyway, country is coming to town next weekend. The in-laws and Neal's sister and her kid will be at our house from Friday through Sunday. My work Christmas party is Friday afternoon from noon to three, so I will more than likely be a little tipsy when I get home Friday afternoon. This makes for great entertainment, I promise. Marilyn texted Neal last week and asked him what kind of perfume I wear, so he told her Dolce and Gabbanna - Light Blue. He then went on for about 5 minutes into all sorts of scenarios about how she will pronounce 'Dolce and Gabbanna' when she asks for it at the department store. This was comedy gold. I soooo wish I had recorded it.

I have a nice, modest garland wreath with a red bow on our door, and that's it for our outdoor Christmas decorations. A lady in our neighborhood put up the biggest, tackiest, colored lights on the outside of her house. I'm thinking of cutting letters out of magazines and pasting them on the paper (like ransom notes in movies) that say something like "Yo' Shit Is Tacky" and leaving it in her mailbox. But I think she'll probably figure out it's from me considering the face I make every time I drive by her house.

I have to do all of my Christmas shopping this weekend which means I will be fighting the overdressed, yat-ed up bitches in Target and everywhere else I have to go. And our pest control guy put a crimp in my plans because he's coming to spray the house sometime between 10 and 12 Saturday morning, so now I have to be home at that time. Maybe I'll go to Target at like 7am while all the yats are sleeping off their skinny-girl cosmo and white zinfandel hangovers.

Just Some Stuff

1. Neal gets home Friday...by that time, he'll have been gone for 18 days. Because not only did he have to work for 14 days + travel time, but he then has to go to training this Thursday in Corpus Christi. Sweet lord, by the time Friday comes around I will have his pillow dressed up in his clothes drinking bud light and eating dinner with me.

2. And speaking of Corpus...when we lived in Austin we used to drive down to Corpus for the weekend to go see concerts at the Concrete Street Ampitheatre. I remember one time we were walking/stumbling back to the hotel after a show and it started pouring down raining. We were soaked and it could have been a scene from a romantic movie had we not stopped at the Whataburger where I proceeded to get a messy hamburger and woof it down in the hotel room where I then passed out all drenched and bloated.

3. I watched Crazy, Stupid, Love 2.5 times yesterday. Ryan Gosling. That is all.

4. I took off 3 days next week and we have holidays Thursday and Friday, so this means ONE WHOLE WEEK OF VACATION! I think this is the first time I have taken an entire week off of work since I started this job. YYYYAAAAYYYYY!!!! I am pretty sure that I will wake up Monday morning, go to the gym, then come home and look at Neal and go, "I'm bored."

5. It's mid-November, 75 degrees outside, and humid as frick. Why do I even bother with the hair straightener in the morning on days like this?

6. I think I'm going to try out a gel-polish manicure this week. I've heard good things, so I'll let you know how it goes.

7. My office has decided to start smelling like vomit in the mornings now. Not sure why. It never smelled good to begin with and it's always been sort of like a third world country, but lately its been straight-up stank. It may have something to do with the fact that our 64 year old office manager has started eating boiled eggs every morning. She eats them while she reads the obituaries on nola.com while wearing two pairs of glasses (one on top of the other) because she refuses to get cateract surgery until she qualifies for Medicare. Seriously - this place is a circus.

8. And while I've still been doing stuff to the house and getting ideas off of pinterest, the whole "DIY" craze has gotten out of control. I'm seeing posts lately for stuff like, "Do It Yourself Glue." I mean, just buy some fucking Elmers for 99cents at the Rite Aid and be done with it. I'm sure it will come in handy in the event of the apocalypse to be able to make your own glue, but is it really that necessary?

9. I've started making coffee at home in the mornings lately. I needed a break from the Starbucks iced lattes. I'm sure I'll pick up the habit again, but in the meantime I'm saving $4.78 a day. This will pay for my gel manicure. :)

Work and Weight and Hair and Stuff

I've gained a little weight. Not a lot, but enough so that the pants that I've been wearing for the past 3-ish years have become too tight. I can get them on, but they hug my mid-section and it's not pretty. So I've had to go buy more work pants because I'm in this place now where my 2007 pants are still too big, but my 2008-2010 pants are too small. I have to wear ugly blue uniform shirts to work Monday thru Thursday, so my pants options are limited. And when in the hell did the gap stop selling everyday khakis? I don't understand. I now have to go to Old Navy to get my khakis, and they don't fit nearly as well as Gap pants do. There is a J Crew outlet in Mississippi that I only go to about twice a year, so I will have to hold off on my major khaki purchase until then. PS - The word 'khaki' looks weird when you type it over and over.

I also bought some comfortable work shoes - they're clogs. Like, brown clogs. The kind that you see nurses and chefs wear. They make me feel tall(er) because they've got thick soles. I think they're a little butch, but holy shit are they comfortable. I've worn them everyday this week because wearing comfortable shoes to work makes my day better.

And this whole weight gain thing? I mean, I'm still doing the gym thing four days a week. I'm starting to think that I've plateaued with the running; but I can't get up any earlier than I already do to get to the gym to run longer, so it is what it is. I also think the weight gain may have something to do with Neal going to a 14 and 14 schedule earlier this year. I eat so differently when he's gone and when he's home and I think my body was used to 7 and 7. Eating like crap for 7 days in a row while he's home is probably not as damaging as doing it for 14 days in a row. And once I gain weight, it's so freaking hard for me to take it off.

ANYway, I got my hair trimmed Tuesday and my hairdresser told me she was 14 weeks pregnant. I feel like the only non-mom on the planet. She is 28 and has been married for 6 months and she is very sweet, but she's not the brightest bulb in the tanning bed. I kind of miss my NOLA hairdresser, Charlotte. Charlotte is about my Mom's age and I have always wanted to be her. She's so cute and always wore the best clothes and I think it would be so great to just hang out in my Magazine Street salon all day and gossip and drink PJ's and be quirky and fashionable. Instead I'm wearing blue uniform shirts with lesbian shoes and reading policy everyday. (No, serisouly I love my job but sometimes I think it would be nice to just gossip all day long uptown while wearing expensive jeans and $60 t-shirts from Gae-Tana's.)

And while I'm thinking about moms and hair and stuff, I realized that if I ever get pregnant and have a girl that I will have to learn how to fix hair! I can't fix my own hair, much less someone elses. Is there a class that teaches you how to do this? The thought of this makes me very nervous.

Oh, and don't laugh but I recently finished a book called The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques: Understanding How Your Brain Makes You Anxious and What You Can Do to Change It and it was very helpful. I skipped over some of the parts that either did not apply to me or were too science-y, but the explanations on how the brain works and the relaxation/thought control techniqes she taught were worth the read.

Ohhhhhhhhhhh Y'allllllllllllll

How about some short, short stories? Here we go:

1. We went to breakfast Saturday morning at the Abita Springs Cafe. It's a little breakfast place in walking distance from our house. The guy who owns it used to work at Brennan's and runs it with slave labor, aka his wife and children and probably nieces and nephews or something. Now, the cafe is not a place to eat if you are in a hurry. These people take FOREVER to do just about anything. And they forget stuff all of the time. But you can sit outside and the western omelet is pretty good and they serve grilled biscuits that are the size of your face, so you just accept the slowness and tip well anyway. And the owner loves to talk to everyone. He will talk to you for 10 minutes while your coffee mug is empty and then look around for his wife and be like, "Oh, do you need more coffee? I'm not sure where she is. Hold on, I'll get it for you." But he did spout out one little piece of advice to all the guys who were sitting outside. Here it is: "Never let your wife smell a baby or a new car. 'Cause she'll want both." And you know what? He's so right.

2. I made a Halloween wreath this weekend. I got a foam wreath, wrapped it in pieces of black fabric with 'boo' written on it in orange, and then painted some wooden letters (they spell out 'Boo') orange and hung them in the middle of the wreath with ribbon. I guess it turned out cute, but I didn't think about how the outside elements would affect the trusty glue dots I used to attach the letters to the ribbon and then to the wreath. So the letters kept on falling off, and it was making our house look like it was stupid and couldn't spell the word BOO. I took everything inside to re-do and almost put the letters on backwards, so it would have spelled 'OOB'. So guess what the new word in our house is now? OOB. Sounds like, 'boob' minus the first 'b.' Everything is oob now. It's a verb, noun, and adjective. We've used it in the following phrases:

You're an oob.
Son of an oob.
What the oob?
He totally oobed it.

It's a very versatile made-up word. Feel free to oob it if you want to.

3. Pants were 40% off at the Gap yesterday and I think today too. FYI. I got some flared khaki colored work pants and even though I got the ankle pants, I still had to hem them. They're super long, but very cute. And then I got some brown wedge mid-calf boots from Belk for 40% off; they have the best deals on shoes. I need the weather to get permanently cool so that I can stop worrying about getting pedicures. So with the money that I save on not having to get pedicures, I can spend on shoes. See how that works?

4. I went home for lunch yesterday to see Neal before he left for work. He left a few minutes before I did. I had a meeting in Mandeville so I passed him at the gas station on my way there. I didn't stop because I'm pretty sure I would have caused a huge sobbing crying scene at the gas pumps of the Danny & Clyde's because I didn't want him to go. You see, yesterday was the worst day of my period and I was a teeny bit emotional. Neal leaving for work + bad period day = batshit crazy. Thankfully I was able to maintain enough control of myself to make it through my afternoon meetings. Then I felt muuuuuch better after I bought pants and shoes. Retail therapy - for the win.

5. I usually don't like mainstream country music a whole lot. I normally go for the indie/Americana/Texas type of country. You know, raspy voiced boys that sing about drinking whiskey and ex-girlfriends and stuff. (Until they get married, have kids, and become too happy to write anything good so they sell out and go on tour with Rascall Flatts.) But, um, I am sort of loving Keith Urban's song "Long Hot Summer." I jam the shit out of it. I think I'm going to buy it on iTunes right this second.

Wednesday

I was listening to Kidd Kraddick this morning and they were doing their "Does That Make Me Crazy" segment. A girl called in and said that when she's at work and she goes to the bathroom, she brings another pair of shoes in there with her so that "if something happens" she can change her shoes and no one will know it was her. Kelly Rasberry thought it was genius and Kidd started calling them her "poop shoes." I found this all completely hysterical because really, what girl has not had this issue at work? I mean, as I've gotten older I've become more okay with the fact that everyone poops and why be embaressed? But this whole things was just hysterical. Poop shoes - HA!

His 32nd birthday is Sunday so to celebrate we've been eating cake all week. Like, his parents made a peanut butter cake, then we bought a small cookie cake at the grocery store, then he wants me to make an all white cake this weekend for his birthday. So, cake cake cake.

How did I go from poop to cake? Oh well.

Anyway - Halloween is soon, right?

Day 1: "I'm not decorating the house for Halloween, it's stupid, blah blah blah."
Day 2: "Well, maybe we can paint some pumpkins or something."
Day 3: Girl at work mentions decoupaging pumpkins. "Wait, what?"
Day 4: Googling pictures of pumpkins and pumpkin-on-porch arrangements.
Day 5: Googling pictures of wreaths. 'Cause if I'm going to have pumpkins on the porch, I kind of need a wreath too.
Day 6: Writing out shopping list so I can go to Hobby Lobby during lunch this week to buy paint, stencils, fake spikers, spider web stuff, orange and black fabric, orange and black ribbon and wire and/or foam wreaths.

Here are some ideas that I liked:








So we'll be busy this weekend watching football, decorating the front of the house for Halloween, and eating cake.