So 2009 is merely hours away from being just a memory. Its been a difficult year. There has been much loss and much celebration through out the past 365 days. I started 2009 working a small private party in a pent house in midtown manhattan and watched someone else get engaged. As Pat stood by my side he just squeezed my hand and rubbed my back. I tried to not cry as I still had to work.
This New Years eve will be the first new years eve in many years where i am not working!! While this makes me very happy, it seems that no one is celebrating this year. I can't blame them. No one wants to celebrate after the way that this year has wound down and finally come to a close. We have no official plans. Its more like stay home and attempt to stay up until the ball drops (HA!).
What I wish for ni 2010 is for my life to be a little less trying. Im not asking for life to be easier, because that is unrealistic. Instead I wish for the ease of stress in my life. I make no resolutions, just to continue to be myself and not bend to what others want me to be.
So I will go home, pop a bottle of cider into the fridge, attempt to have a decent dinner, Pat suggested Pizza Hut, I dont think thats going to fly tonight. I will try to go for something else where I can get sushi out of the deal. We will see....
With no Further adieu, I wish you all a Happy and Safe New Years Eve and wish a wonderful 2010!!
See you on the flip side...
the sickness continues
So here it is X-mas eve and im sitting here on the sofa, with 3 blankets, two shirts, long johns wool socks and the thickest pair of sweat pants i own. guess who's sick (again) for the holidays (thats two in a row now).
I was up all night last night with a sore throat, but it wasnt the painful sore throat it was the constant tickle that almost chokes you every third breath sore throat. i really just want to be well again. i dont feel like me lately. it really is incredibly depressing to be so sick all the time. and its not knock down drag out sick either, its just run down gross feeling sick.
oh to be well again, wellness where are you? are you out there? do call if you find me... Im sitting here waiting for you with orange juice, tea, lemons, honey, fluids, & crackers and soup.
I was up all night last night with a sore throat, but it wasnt the painful sore throat it was the constant tickle that almost chokes you every third breath sore throat. i really just want to be well again. i dont feel like me lately. it really is incredibly depressing to be so sick all the time. and its not knock down drag out sick either, its just run down gross feeling sick.
oh to be well again, wellness where are you? are you out there? do call if you find me... Im sitting here waiting for you with orange juice, tea, lemons, honey, fluids, & crackers and soup.
its been an interesting past few days
So since thursday we have been somewhat extrordinarily busy. We've had work and scouts and to top it all off an ill family member. So lets start this story at the beginning shall we...
A bout a year to year and a half ago, patricks uncle, Patrick, had a benign tumor removed from his neck. During the course of the surgery they found that this tumor had attached itself to one of his vocal cords and had done a fair amount of damage to the muscles in his neck on the side where the tumor was. Also the man has had asthma most of his life. So to further complicate things, this tumor had to be removed and subsequently after what was supposed to be an outpatient surgery wound up being a few week long stay in the hospital. (oh joy) after he came home he was going through physical therapy and working on retraining a more or less paralyzed vocal cord and also had a feeding tube inserted because the muscles in his neck responsible for swallowing had been weaked over time by the tumor. he had some smaller surgeries along the way to repair the muscle damage and voal cord damage. also during this time he had gotten pneumonia and the asthma led way to COPD.
so last thursday pat calls me as i am getting home from work to call his cousin to see what was up cause she had left him a voicemail and said that something was wrong with patrick. so i called and she tells me that he is stuck in the basement cause he threw his back out. so i told her i was on my way over in a few minutes to help get him back upstairs. After that I called my friend Victor, an FDNY EMT and asked if he could come and give me a hand. Thankfully he said yes and dropped his x-mas wrapping to come and give me a hand. About 20 minutes later when i get to the house, i find Patrick in the basment bathroom struggling to breathe. Knowing that he has asthma and COPD, i am now concerned. i attempt to call Victor to find out how much longer until he arives, but alas my phone battery bit the dust on me (always good timing right?)... i give his lungs a listen with my stethescope, but im struggling to hear anything at all over the family members yapping and s shitty scope. Vic finally shows up (thank god) and senses immedietly that something is decidely wrong and its far more complicated that a thrown out back. After some debating and heming & hawing over going to the hospital and calling for Medics, we were allowed to call. Vic was wonderful in calling a favor and getting the right people to show up, not some bully Medic who thinks that they are the be all end all of EMS care. To make a long story short (and leave out all the BS family drama that always occurs at times like these) Patrick was packed up and shipped off via Ambulance to Einstein. Later that night we find out that Patrick had had a blister on his lung burst following a surgery to remove a small damage portion of one lobe of the lung. This had caused his back pain as well as some other symptoms that I have conveniently left out of this story. This popped blister over the course of a few hours had caused the right lung to collapse and put pressure on his heart. A chest tube was inserted and the lung reinflated in the wee hours of friday morning. yesterday, Saturday in preparation for his discharge the chest tube was removed, however the lung collapsed again and he is now scheduled for surgery tomorrow morning to have the weaked/damaged portion of the upper lobe of his right lung removed. unfortunately he may now spend Christmas in the hospital, something he was very adamant about not doing. so now we are trying to help out his wife who has a few issues of her own and trying to keep ourselves sane with the amount of work we have to do around the house and just working in general.We saw Patrick today in the hospital, he was actually looking pretty good.
so a bad few days over and im sure a few more less than stellar days to come.
A bout a year to year and a half ago, patricks uncle, Patrick, had a benign tumor removed from his neck. During the course of the surgery they found that this tumor had attached itself to one of his vocal cords and had done a fair amount of damage to the muscles in his neck on the side where the tumor was. Also the man has had asthma most of his life. So to further complicate things, this tumor had to be removed and subsequently after what was supposed to be an outpatient surgery wound up being a few week long stay in the hospital. (oh joy) after he came home he was going through physical therapy and working on retraining a more or less paralyzed vocal cord and also had a feeding tube inserted because the muscles in his neck responsible for swallowing had been weaked over time by the tumor. he had some smaller surgeries along the way to repair the muscle damage and voal cord damage. also during this time he had gotten pneumonia and the asthma led way to COPD.
so last thursday pat calls me as i am getting home from work to call his cousin to see what was up cause she had left him a voicemail and said that something was wrong with patrick. so i called and she tells me that he is stuck in the basement cause he threw his back out. so i told her i was on my way over in a few minutes to help get him back upstairs. After that I called my friend Victor, an FDNY EMT and asked if he could come and give me a hand. Thankfully he said yes and dropped his x-mas wrapping to come and give me a hand. About 20 minutes later when i get to the house, i find Patrick in the basment bathroom struggling to breathe. Knowing that he has asthma and COPD, i am now concerned. i attempt to call Victor to find out how much longer until he arives, but alas my phone battery bit the dust on me (always good timing right?)... i give his lungs a listen with my stethescope, but im struggling to hear anything at all over the family members yapping and s shitty scope. Vic finally shows up (thank god) and senses immedietly that something is decidely wrong and its far more complicated that a thrown out back. After some debating and heming & hawing over going to the hospital and calling for Medics, we were allowed to call. Vic was wonderful in calling a favor and getting the right people to show up, not some bully Medic who thinks that they are the be all end all of EMS care. To make a long story short (and leave out all the BS family drama that always occurs at times like these) Patrick was packed up and shipped off via Ambulance to Einstein. Later that night we find out that Patrick had had a blister on his lung burst following a surgery to remove a small damage portion of one lobe of the lung. This had caused his back pain as well as some other symptoms that I have conveniently left out of this story. This popped blister over the course of a few hours had caused the right lung to collapse and put pressure on his heart. A chest tube was inserted and the lung reinflated in the wee hours of friday morning. yesterday, Saturday in preparation for his discharge the chest tube was removed, however the lung collapsed again and he is now scheduled for surgery tomorrow morning to have the weaked/damaged portion of the upper lobe of his right lung removed. unfortunately he may now spend Christmas in the hospital, something he was very adamant about not doing. so now we are trying to help out his wife who has a few issues of her own and trying to keep ourselves sane with the amount of work we have to do around the house and just working in general.We saw Patrick today in the hospital, he was actually looking pretty good.
so a bad few days over and im sure a few more less than stellar days to come.
Christmas makes me broker than I already am
I dont know why I have this overwhelming urge to buy people stuff that I really can't afford during the holidays. I mean I am sitting here wondering how Im going to be paying my next bill and yet Im spending money on other people as if it were going out of style. Oh well.... here are a few of the gifts that I have purchased. I know I can put there here to share with the rest of you cause I know the parents are not web savy. I would put the sisters gift up here to, but I'm afraid that she might actually see it, and thus ruining the only surprise I got going for x-mas. LOL
So lets start with Dad...
He is a remarkably difficult person to buy for. He never really says that he wants anything except for tools, and at this point Im beginning to belive that he has Home Depot Outstocked. My parents bought themselves a Bose home theatre system as their x-mas gift to themselves. So my thoughts of getting him an external hard drive for the new laptop mom was going to buy him was pretty much tossed out the window. So I started to think about his love of reading, thought a gift card would do nicely, did that last year. Turns out it took him forever to use it and bought something for someone else, so scratch that idea. Then I thought about geting him one or two of those War/History movie packages, only to find out he has most of them already and no one can remember which ones he has.... too much effort to try and figure it out. So as of yesterday I am in panic mode... No ideas.. short on cash.. the whole shebang. So then I miraculously come across this.....
it is a Blue tooth speaker for the car!!! The man loves to be on the phone when driving, and is not a great driver to begin with. So i quick made a call to mom to make sure she approved and low and behold she loved it!!! So it was purchased. It is currently in transit to the house from Bed Bath & Beyond, for which i had a 20% any single item coupon. I done good on this one $80.55 was the total including shipping & tax
So now we get into Mother....
another difficult one to shop for. I asked her this year what she wanted and she told me new tops for work since she has lost so much weight. i was told that if i bought her anything like what my father has gotten her in past years, she would kill me. so keeping this in mind, i have found a couple of tops for her to wear for work (really hope she likes them, if not Kris will, lol) and I also found these on Bath & Body works...
Mom has a white kitchen. white cabinets, plates etc. She also loves Christmas. I thought that these two cookie jars were just too good not to get. They will fit right in with her Kitchen decor. :-) Grand Total was $20.00 each. tax and shipping where higher because I ordered some other stuff for some other web-savy people who read this blog... so they will just have to wait and see what Santa leaves under the tree for them.
As for Pat.... still have no damm idea what to get him for Christmas except for maybe a big bah humbug sign.... no wait... already gave him that... no really i did, like two years ago. LOL. I ahve found a few things that i would like to get him, but i know he will quite literally have a tantrum if i do buy him anything. sometimes i dont care if he does have a titty-attack, sometimes i just cant be bothered with the whining so i just give up and dont get him anything. not sure what the verdict this year will be.
Then the last one we are blogging about today is Donna. She is pretty easy to shop for. She likes most anything we give her. This year its a small gift, but as always filled with love. The lady loves coffee. She really does. Especially her instant Bustello. So at work a while back they had given us these " I am not a paper cup" coffee mugs. They looks just like paper cups but they are ceramic and Eco-Friendly. The overall complaint about them is that they really are just too small. they only hold 8oz, and that is to the rim of the cup. So I found one that is a 10oz or 12 oz one. and that is what she is getting. they are actually pretty neat. not a bad iea overall, just a bit weird at first, it has a rubberized lid. so you kind of get the sensation that you are drinking out of a baby bottle.
So overall not too bad on my x-mas shopping. but still spent far more than i should have. there is one nameless person who pretty much blew 2/3 of my budget. that gift we shall blog about later when i have a picture of said person holding their present.
Stealing other's bloggind ideas
So I don't all that often "blog" but I was reading Perks of Being a Jap's blog this morning and had myself a pretty good laugh when I saw her entry about "routines". I'm still trying to get a grasp on this whole blog-iverse. So I've pretty much made her blog my tutorial. :-) She's got lots of great stuff, like recipes, random gripes & rants and some really nice & sweet stuff about her and the hubby-to-be's relationship and wedding planning. (woot wedding in about 3 months :-))
So here we go... off on a tangent of a few things...
First...Routines!!
I don't really "set" routines for myself, they just seem to kind of happen and become habits more than anything else I suppose.
Morning routine
6:30 alarm #1 goes off
6:45 alarm #2 goes off
TV goes on, channel 11 morning news
7:05 thrid & final alram goes off
Get out of bed hit the bathroom for the necessaries :-)
Get dressed, search house for glasses, keys and electronic card key for work (i always try to get my stuff together the night before, but it never seems to happen all that often)
As long as it is above 40 degrees or warmer, not raining, and no 30+ MPH wind gusts, take Motorcycle to work, otherwise hightail it to the QBX1
Get to work at 8am regardless of mode of transportation
walk in front door, sign in, walk to my "area" saying good morning to about a half dozen people
put down purse, take off coat, hang it up
back to desk, change shoes
turn on monitors
open outlook
open firefox
open excel call log
open document tracking software
read e-mail that came in between 5pm previous day and 8am
answer the necessary ones
review to do list
get coffee/tea/hot cocoa from kitchen upstairs
begin "real" work after checking g-mail, facebook, 101wins.com, weather.com & nydailynews.com
thats pretty much it. i find it mildy amusing how upset i can get if one of those little things, that is ultimately inconsequential, either doesnt happen or is disrupted in some way shape or form.
Moving Right along.......Baking & Cooking
I really do love to cook and bake, my only real issue is doing the dishes and cleaning up afterwards. I dont have any real aversion to it, but i just don't like to do it. I always try to get someone else to do it for me. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't LOL.
This sunday I am having a cookie-baking-fest after getting hoe from scout camp. Lacey Bean & Robin will be comming over to help me make cookies, fudge and other holiday goodness. It should be a nice quiet afternoon with just the 3 of us. I have sugar cookies, Never-Fail-Fudge, and a couple of new recipes lined up for sunday. I will try to take a page from Lacey Bean's blog and post the recipe & pictures here to share with those of you care to try them. I will do my best to note their success/fail rate as well as deliciousness (if appropriate) :-D
Next UP....Scouts
So over the past few months I've been trying really hard to get back into scouting. Its one of the few things that I really do enjoy. So I've been trying my dammdest to make it down there for the weekly meetings to work on advancements and go on the camping trips when i can. Last camping trip wasn't a great success, but it was okay. This camping trip should be better, but that remains to be seen. This weekend we go to Baiting Hollow Scout Camp in Long ISland. From what I am told this is a beautiful camp and has a beach. Its on the north shore of Long Island, just off the William Floyd Parkway. So it shouldnt be a long ride to camp which is nice. Also over the past few weeks Robin has been comming down to learn how to "be a scout". She always has a smile on her face and seems very willing to learn and to camp. I really do think that it is awesome that she is comming down. I think she finds some solace in it even though she is probably dying on the inside cause it was something that was so close to John's heart. But I really do commend her on comming down and being willing to learn.
Lastly.... Work :-/
So work has been intersting as of late. lots of corporate re-arranging going on. They can't really seem to decide who's going to do what as of late. So they have taken this person and moved him there, and another person is in the same spot just doing different stuff, and also lots of you report to this person and not that person anymore. We had a small informal breakfast meeting a couple of weeks ago to talk about some of this stuff and one thing that was said was that there would be "a few" organizational announcements before the year was out. So two announcements have been made so far and at this point I am waiting to see if there will be anymore before december 31st.
so now that I have spent enough time avoiding "working" at work, I really should get to it as i actually have a fair amount of stuff to do.
Wishing everyone a happy and warm weekend :-)
sick
It really is no fun to be sick. especially when you body can't make up its mind as to what type of sick you are. are you flu-ish, cold-ish, or just plain old miserable, and then there is the all of the above option.
for the past few weeks i've varied between all of the above and right now feel down right gross. all i want is to not feel like this. so i've made a dr's appt for tomorrow morning, tried to go today but of course my dumb luck the dr's weren't in today. so hence i go tomorrow morning.
on the upside i get to sit here with the kitties in my lap all day. trying to sleep has been damm near impossible. i lay down i cough, i sit up, i cant sleep, its a loose-loose situation.
someone just needs to take all of my "sick" away. i just feel so blech.
for the past few weeks i've varied between all of the above and right now feel down right gross. all i want is to not feel like this. so i've made a dr's appt for tomorrow morning, tried to go today but of course my dumb luck the dr's weren't in today. so hence i go tomorrow morning.
on the upside i get to sit here with the kitties in my lap all day. trying to sleep has been damm near impossible. i lay down i cough, i sit up, i cant sleep, its a loose-loose situation.
someone just needs to take all of my "sick" away. i just feel so blech.
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