One of my most favorite movies is Dirty Dancing (1987).  When it came out on video (remember VHS?), I was working at a video rental store (remember when you went to small, locally owned video stores?  Yeah, I worked at one of those).  The biggest perk of the job (other than watching movies AT work) was getting advance copies of movies.  After all, the owner theorized, how could his employees recommend a movie if they hadn’t seen it?

So there I was, in college, working part time at the video store and The Fiancee (now starring as The Hubby) was on the West Coast on a temporary assignment.  So I had tons of time to watch movies.  I think I watched Dirty Dancing twice a day for a week.  I could quote it, scene by scene.  The only thing I couldn’t do is the dance moves.  “Look, spaghetti arms. This is my dance space. This is your dance space. I don’t go into yours, you don’t go into mine. You gotta hold the frame.”

Then:

Steel Dawn

Road House

Next of Kin

Ghost

Point Break

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar

Forever Lulu

11:14

And now Patrick Swayze is gone.  At age 57, pancreatic cancer won out.

All right, pop quiz. Airport, gunman with one hostage. He’s using her for cover; he’s almost to a plane. You’re a hundred feet away… Jack?

Wait, no, it’s not that pop quiz… it’s more of a water quiz, not a “pop” quiz…

Can you tell the difference between the single water bottle and the case of water bottles below?

Some obvious differences:

1) one vs. many: one bottle is less than a case of water

2) brand: the single bottle is Aquafina and the water in the case is Poland Springs

3) size: the Aquafina is actually abit larger than the Poland Spring bottles

The non-obvious difference:

4) price: $4.25 vs. $3.99.  Guess which one is which…. go on, I dare you.   Yup, the Aquafina bottle was $4.25 while the CASE of Poland Springs was $3.99.  The magic difference??  The place of purchase.   I bought the Aquafina at a movie theater.  And they wonder why movie attendance is down???

When we went to go see Inglorious Basterds, we went to the matinee show – so for the three of us is was about $20 for tickets.  Then we got some goodies… which we know will be about the same as the ticket price.   But I forgot to get The Hubby his water, so I had to go back and get it.  And heard the single pricing for the single bottle.  And about died.  I just paid more for one bottle than I paid for a case of THIRTY TWO bottles.   This totally justifies me sneaking in candy and just buying “fresh” (ha!) popcorn.

One of the hazards of my name – religious signs.  This was taken somewhere between CO and CT.

I wish I could say I was the genius, but it was the internet that gave me this little bit of genius.

Have you ever thought about freezing your cookie dough?  Me neither, until one of the wonderful baking websites I lurk on told me.  I was absolutely in love with the idea.

And it only took me 2 months to do it!

To be fair, I really didn’t do any baking in the last few months, so opportunity was limited.  But, for some reason, I made Peanut Butter Cinnamon Chocolate Chip cookies last night and Peanut Butter Banana Oatmeal cookies tonight.  I really don’t like peanut butter; I’m not that fond of bananas; and oatmeal is in the “leave it” column.  But the combination of the three – yummy!!  For both batches, I made a double batch and just baked several dozen.  I used my Pampered Chef melon baller and made perfect cookies balls.  For the ones I didn’t bake, I put them on some paper plates and stuck them into the freezer for several hours.  Then, after they were all frozen, I popped them into an empty ice cream container.  The only downfall to that storage method – I can see The Hubby some member of my family actually expecting ice cream to be in an ice cream container.  I do have some in a freezer ziploc bag – so I will have to see which one works the best for us. Next week I will have to test how well the frozen balls bake and how the final product comes out.  Life’s tough, huh?

From our trip to Denver –

We went to the Whole Foods across the street from my mother in law’s house.  It was the first time I’d ever been in one. The Boy laughed, well, his ass off at this.  He saw the bottles on the top row at such an angle that all he saw was “ass”.  He couldn’t figure out how they bottled it!

We tend to celebrate birthdays in batches – summer birthdays and winter birthdays.  My mom, my niece and my nephew have their birthdays in August, so we generally celebrate summer birthdays in August at our place.   And this year was no exception.

So Saturday we had about 20 people over for dinner.  It happened that our church was having a take out lobster dinner that night, so I offered people the choice of burgers and dogs or buying the lobster dinner from our church.  It was split 50/50 – half did the lobster and half did the grilled stuff.  The Hubby grilled as I went and picked up the lobsters.  We had ice cream, ice cream cake, brownies and cookies for dessert.  Yum!

As it got dark, The Hubby pulled out the fireworks we had gotten in MO on our cross country drive.  He and The Boy, with occasional assistance from a cousin or two, set them off to lots of “ohhhh” and “ahhhh” from the crowd.  I have to admit, those were some pretty decent fireworks.  When The Hubby set off the first one, he didn’t think it was going to be very loud, so he didn’t bother taking the dogs in.  He should have.  Chewie went absolutely nuts.  I got them in the house and behind our bedroom door for the rest of the show.  But Chewie was so upset, he wouldn’t go out of the house for the rest of the night.  Pansy, however, was more than content to hang out by the fire pit and get attention from the little cousins.

My brother, his wife and three boys spent the night in a tent in our backyard, and my parents brought over their camper and parked in my driveway for the night.  Sunday morning we had fresh farm eggs, scrambled up by The Hubby, as well as sausage, hash browns, bagels and juice/coffee.  Everyone stayed until noontime and then it was time for my brother to head back to Boston.

Both The Hubby and I were dead tired, but we had promised to go to see Inglorious Basterds with friends in the afternoon, so away we went.  It was a pretty good movie – I’m not upset to have paid money to see it.  We had our friends come over for dinner after since we still had so much food left over from the party.

But, reality was setting in – by 9, I was totally ready for bed.  We snuggled up and watched True Blood and Hung, and I could barely keep my eyes open.  It was one of best nights of sleep I have had in a long time!

my new laptop showed up yesterday afternoon.  I had a pretty productive morning, work-wise.  I scanned and filed and then moved the pdfs to the old Lenovo hard drive.  By noon, I was pretty much done with everything I thought I would get done and was just basically waiting for the UPS man to show up.

And there is no more sure way to get the UPS man to show up than to be in the middle of some project that you can’t stop.  So I made some pizza dough around noon, and sure enough, about the time I needed to start kneading the dough, guess who shows up?  Yup, Mr. UPS Man.

So from about 1:30 to 5:30 I spent unpacking and setting up my new laptop.  It has a much wider screen than the old one, so I have tons of space to look at in Excel (awesome!).  And web pages look pretty cool too!  It has a different setup for speakers (there are two up top near the screen) and the mousepad is textured.  On the right side of the keyboard “IdeaPad” is light up in white.

So I got 95% of my programs installed yesterday.  I moved over files last night (work stuff, personal stuff, music, etc.).  This morning I buckled down and got my Firefox profile moved over (how I have missed my favorite sites!) and now am working on getting my email up to speed.

I have long term plans to check through my old Lenovo hard drives, make sure I have everything I want, and then wipe them clean to use as mass storage for pictures and video.

But for now, I am happy just to be able to use a computer at the breakfast bar while I bake cookies for church.

So, after calling Lenovo about my most recent computer failure, I escalated my call ticket to their Customer Relations department.  It was going to take 5 to 7 business days for them to respond to the call.

I got the call last Thursday, the 13th.  Steve was a nice guy, working at the corporate headquarters in NC.  He explained that they wanted to take a look at the machine, so he was authorizing a return to his location for “high level” technical assistance.  I explained how I purchased an extended warranty to have some one come to my home and fix the dang computer at a minimum of downtime on my work computer.  And even with those efforts, I ended up having to send it to Texas anyway.  And then it didn’t work and I had to send it back.  I told him that even though everyone I had dealt with on the phone and in person was perfectly wonderful, I pretty much thought this fell under the “three strikes and you’re out” rule.  I really liked my Lenovo (when it worked) and wasn’t interested in finding another computer, I just wanted one that WORKED.

So he offered me a new computer.

It turns out they don’t make my model anymore, so he had to customize the next most similar system to replace what I had.  He placed the order that day, and the notification email came back as an estimated ship date of Aug. 20, with a 2 day UPS shipping.  So I figured if I was really lucky, it would show up on Saturday the 22nd – but more than likely it would be Monday the 24th before I would see my brand new laptop.

I checked my email this morning and saw a notice from Lenovo.  My computer shipped on Monday the 17th.

That means Tomorrow …. I will be checking out and falling in love with my new, working laptop.
Awesome!

Epi Pen.

I can’t believe the weekend I had.

The awesomeness started on Friday when my computer died (again).  I also got head-butted by a runaway goat Friday night.  (There’s a great bruise growing on my leg right now).

Saturday The Hubby and I were going to tackle the mulch pile.  It’s been in the driveway for what seems forever.  So he started mowing, and I started weed pulling under the deck.  As I was sitting there, my left hand ran across something that pricked me.  I thought it might be some berry bush growing, but it turned out to be a bee.  He bounced off my wrist and glanced across my chin.  I ran out from under the deck and into the house, getting some ice cold water running on my wrist and holding a baggie of ice cubes to my chin.

I decided to get something liquid into my system as I hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink for a few hours.  I sat outside on the step, watching The Hubby mow and trying to take it easy.  I started to feel hot and generally just “not right”.  I went into the house, took off my shoes and socks (my feet were really hot all of the sudden) and laid down on the couch.  I started to feel itchy and it seemed like my eyelids were puffy.  I called The Hubby in and told him what happened.

He looked for some Benadryl, but couldn’t find any.  I was feeling worse and worse, so he decided to drive me to the pharmacy, pick up some Benadryl, and go to the walk in center.  He gets the liquid medicine, and the pharmacist told him to double the dose as it was children’s benadryl.  So I took a double dose.  Then I took a look at my arms – they were all red and white splotched – hives were breaking out every where.

We speed up the highway (just one exit away, thank goodness!) to the walk in clinic.  He parked on the side of the building, got me into the office and said – my wife is having an allergic reaction to a bee sting – can you see her right now?  Luckily for me, they were pretty slow and they rushed me right in.  We explained what happened, how long ago, what medicine I took, etc. and the doctor told us that since I took the liquid stuff, she wasn’t going to give me the shot.  The shot would have worked in 10 minutes; the liquid was going to take an hour.  Then she looked at the dosing and figured out I took too much.  The dose is 2 teaspoons, but the line on the cup is at 3 teaspoons.  So I took an extra 2 teaspoons of medicine – and she pretty much promised I’d be out for most of the day.

We stayed there for an hour or so – I was mostly out of it.  The hives and itchiness went away.  We got the prescription for the Epi Pen and steroids and went on our way.  After a stop at the pharmacy, we got home and The Hubby made me some lunch.  I ate about one scrambled egg and that was all I got down before I fell asleep around 12:30.  I slept until 4:30.

But The Hubby was determined to finish our project.  So he finished weeding and started up mulching.  He got most of it done before 4:30, with breaks to check in on me to make sure I was still breathing.  What a great guy!

So, now I have to practice how to use this darn Epi-pen.  And keep it with me all the time – one in the house and one in the purse.  And we now have tons of Benadryl in the house (and my purse).

So we are traveling to Denver (actually, Salida), CO for a family vacation.  And because we like to be challenged, we are driving there.  Nothing like a road trip to bond the family together, I guess!

I am going to post all of this after we get home, so bear with me on this.

We left CT on Wednesday night; drove into Milton, PA and slept.  Up several hours later and continued through PA, OH, and then the I states – Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa.  Thursday night was a hotel in Des Moines.  And Friday morning (today for me as I write this), we take off for our final destination.  It’s going to take about 12 driving hours to get to Salida from here.

Saturday is my sister in law’s wedding, which was the whole reason we came out.  I’ve already gotten a little emotional thinking about it, so I made sure The Hubby will have a handkerchief for me when I start to tear up at the actual wedding.  We will get to see a whole bunch of The Hubby’s family – some I have never met, some I met once or twice over 20 years ago, and some I actually know (like his mom and sisters).

The driving setup has apparently evolved over the years.  Now, generally speaking, The Hubby drives, The Boy sits in the front and I sit in the back.  This works out best for our “car sickness”.  Not that anyone really gets sick, but everyone is best suited to those seats.  I took a turn driving on Thursday for a few hours, and because I am so short, the seat has to be pretty close to the wheel.  That, in turn, gives the person in the back a TON of leg room.  So The Hubby sat back there and did some work and generally relaxed for a few hours.

After we got past Chicagoland, The Hubby pulled over and let The Boy drive.  It was his first experience with highway driving, and other than being a bit challenged on the onramp, he did just fine.  We may not have him drive today as we are pressed for time (sort of), but on the way back it will be flat and straight for miles and miles as we head to Kansas, so I suspect he will get tons of time practicing then.

Well, it is 6:30 am and time to start getting on the road.  Happy trails!