All posts by Christy

The person who keeps it all together (mostly) with the aide of coffee!

BROKE AND INFAMOUS

Dave:

So some genius decided that they were going to make a facebook page with my name and all my stuff today while I was taking a well deserved nap.

My question is, “Who the hell would want to be me?” I am probably the only person tough enough to be me. Seriously, think about the crap I’ve been through in my life. It’s not that my life is bad, it’s just that I’ve been through some bad s**t in my life, you know?

For my small amount of fame I paid a heavy price. I mean, I spent years away from my family, I lost everything I owned, and for what? A wiki page?  Yeah, I’ve done interviews in magazines, and for a show, and got a cameo in a movie…but, really?  I suppose someone has it worse than me, or lives under some misconception that my life is fabulous.

Anyone wanting to be me is absolutely absurd, and I think that’s about all I can say about that.

My wife says though if someone wants to be me and finishes the honey do list, she’ll make them a batch of cookies. And on that note if anyone feels like getting to it,  here is the….

Honey Do List

  • Clear shed of spiders and then clean
  • Disassemble old porch and build new one
  • Rake yard
  • Build Potato box

THE SMELL OF LOVE

Pork roasting gently in the oven with an applesauce glaze and cloves…

That is the smell of love right there. It smells so good in our house right now that the dog didn’t want to go outside even though he hadn’t been out in a few hours; he walked onto the porch and turned back looking at me pleadingly to just let him back inside.

Hey Dave, guess what’s for dinner

THANK YOU MR. RICKMAN

I just saw on the newsfeed that one of my favorite actors has passed away. All I could do was sit here and keep saying ‘no, no, no’ even though I know that we must eventually all pass to our next great adventure. The thing is that Alan Rickman has been a favorite of mine for years, I was hooked on his skill when he played Hans in Die Hard and I’ve enjoyed many of the movies he was in including Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and the HP movies of course, but I think my very favorite part he played was Alexander Dane in Galaxy Quest because it looked like such a fun part in a goofy movie and everyone should have a chance to be silly every once in awhile. My condolences to the Rickman family, and many thanks to Alan for making the world a bit more entertaining. You will be missed

COLD SUNDAY

Ok, so you’re like, how cold can it be because Dave and Christy live in Florida right? Well it’s cold enough that Dave has slippers on because it’s wet and dreary outside, which actually kinda fits with our mood today since Nancy’s visit is over and she needs to get back to North Carolina to have her back surgery 

We’ve been putzing around this morning, Dave with his chest cold, Nancy packing up the car, Bella scootering around the house on her Yflicker, and I staring at the tree I need to take down and put back in the shed so I can have my craft desk back. Then I need to set up kiddos computer for her to do her classwork come tomorrow morning, I can’t believe it’s already the end of Winter Vacation.

I can honestly say though that today has been weird, perhaps even wyrd because we’re overdue for something strange, and anyone who knows us knows that weird sh** happens to us all the time, it’s like we’re a magnet for the off the wall, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

It was a good December for us starting with Aunt Nancy finally arriving after her car broke down like 3 times on the way down and her having to overnight at a hotel before finally making it here; Bella was so antsy and kept looking out the door every few minutes asking where she was, lol.

There was candy making for the hols in the way of homemade turtle candies with pecan halves rather than chopped bits, peanut butter balls made with PB/graham crackers/and peanuts dipped in chocolate, and yummy chocolate lollies that Bella and her friend did up with different colored chocolates in holiday molds.

We had a trip to Papa’s for Christmas and we got a chance to see everyone but Jon and Rach who were visiting up North but did leave a nifty robotic arm kit for Bella to put together (pssst Jon, Dave says he wants to have words with you over the directions and the screws being so tiny he was having an issue seeing them even with his glasses on, lol)

There was fabulous food of course courtesy of Team Warren in the kitchen (basically Dad pulling stuff out and putting stuff in to cook, Mom chopping and fussing at him, and grandkids everywhere asking for chocolate milk and juice) there was wine and laughter, and giggles, great fellowship and the loving embrace of friends and family who have no expectations of anyone beyond being the lovely people that they are gathering and catching up on life.  And that right there is the Spirit of the holiday season.

Also at this time is the celebration of the Oak King overcoming the Holly King as the days will once again be lighter longer until the wheel turns again at the summer solstice, which is super handy to know if you do any kind of gardening, lol.  Note to self: get new almanac for this year and more fertilizer to put in the garden now so it will be ready for planting in a couple months.

I’m a pretty lucky person that I am a member of the Warren family, a nicer bunch of people you’ll never meet and not a single one gives one whit if you live in a trailer or a McMansion, if you’ve got tattoos or glitzy earrings, or what you do for a living.  Some are conservative (oddly enough those of us which earn less, lol) and some are liberal, some are retired and some work full time, some of the ladies stay home with the kids and some work full time. Nobody is out to brag about anything but all joyfully cheer each other on in any accomplishments, it’s a jolly mish mosh that has sustained me even through the darkest hours of my life and I am forever thankful for the loving support of my family through good times and bad. One phone call and an “I love you” is worth more than anything else in the world no matter what is going on. {{{hugs}}}

I didn’t do a lot for the hols in the way of gifts because we’re on the low end of the scale currently with Dave’s work hours being wonky over the past few months, but I did make some great sewn slippers for Liz and Rach, homemade bread and candy for Uncle Bo,  and  Jon and Sean got those neat engravers as seen on tv. The parental units were a bit more difficult since they’ve got everything they actually need and are a bit hard to shop for so I went with food in the way of fresh pomegranates, turnip greens (expertly cooked by Nancy) dripped with balsamic vinegar, rambutan fruits, fresh avocados, and real white sweet potatoes (courtesy of the ever awesome Diaz Fresh Produce that sets up over by the Yard Depot up the road from me, just wish they’d had those fab purple potatoes last time I went there too) and of course I took along a ham I snagged at 99¢ a lb  We did not go hungry let me tell you.

Hmm, this is turning out to be more of a newsletter than a post, lol, suppose I’ll just continue on in the vein since I seem to be on a roll.

This next year we are hoping once again to move a bit further up north. We want to start our own mushroom and herb farm and would like to have a home that is all ours and maybe some chickens for pest control which if we do it right would also give us fresh organic eggs. If you’ve never had an egg that didn’t come from the grocery store I feel really really bad for you because the fresh from the farm ones from chickens that eat everything they can get their beaks on are just scrumptious. We of course also want to do some wild mushroom hunting for morels once they’re in season because, yeah, morels! And maybe some photography on nice days and painting in the winter to keep me busy.  Dave’s got it in his head he needs a man cave/ work shed if I’m going to have an art studio to stretch out and I’m all for it especially if I get to play with the tools too. My only stipulation on our would be home and farm is that we have some kind of hill in our yard so Bella and I can go sledding.  I really miss sledding, it was like my favorite part of being a kid, even more than getting to live in Hawaii and boogie boarding in the middle of everyone else’s chilly winter.

Of course to do this we actually need the funds to move and jobs to hold until we can get ourselves set up and productive which could take a couple years depending on what we can plant our first year. I’m all for what would be a set it and forget it crop like parisian carrots (check out this great HONEY BAKED PARISIAN CARROTS WITH ORANGE + THYME recipe) to get us started while our first batch of mushroom logs get inoculated and hang out for a year and we get our hydroponic herb towers up and growing, wow fresh herbs for all my meals is going to be fabulous!  But of course, we still need the funds to get up and go which means I need to get off my rear and get my books finished, which I will now be able to do in the mornings when I’m most productive since Bella got her own desktop for Christmas to do her online schooling on.  She doesn’t really need me as a learning coach when she’s in the middle of an online class with a teacher so I can do my thing during that time frame and hopefully get done by June.

Wow it’s taking me all day to write this, I started this morning right after our weirdness for the day occurred just as Nancy was walking out the door to drive back to Gastonia.  Dave’s cell phone rang and so he picked it up, listened for a second, looked at it as if someone had lost their mind and said with a grin “ham and bacon to you too brother” and hung up [laughsnort] my husband thinks he’s a comedian or something and had bacon on the brain this morning like I did obviously. Well, the phone rang again and he was like looking at the caller id and says, “it’s from Afghanistan?” So we picked up the phone again and there’s some dude jabbering in a foreign language and I’m like, jeez, wrong number much? Well, the person rang a couple more times and he’d already been told wrong number in obvious English so Dave just dismissed the call but whoever it was left a message.  Frickin weird let me tell you, we don’t know anyone over there and Dave is the only one of us who had ever been anywhere that far from home because he was once in the Army and did his time in during shield/storm years ago you know? So he called the authorities and let them know he’d gotten the call, which is actually kinda funny that he deliberately called the FBI over the call, but hey, honestly it was weird enough to pass along you know? I mean what would you do? No idea what it was all about but better safe than sorry [shrug]

So that done, and Nancy down the road stuck in a traffic jam less than 10 miles from the house because our weirdness is contagious obviously;  we get a call from Nancy that she’d forgotten her electric razor on my desk where she’d been packing stuff up to go, in my mind though she should be fine because it’s not like the doc is going to be checking out any would be leg hair when he’s fixing her back. 

And the day moves on, and there are kids piled in Bella’s room playing Minecraft, and thank goodness her friends like it because we’re happier playing the lego games with her since there is a story and not just building stuff.

So at the moment it’s 5:30 and I suppose I’m going to wrap this up with the last weird thing for the day (thus far, and I say thus far because you never know, rofl).  Dee went to get the mail because she’s waiting for a birthday prezzie (just turned 19 yesterday!) and our lock has been funny lately so I told her to wiggle the key while showing her an up down wiggle motion in the air before she went out .  She of course wiggled it side to side instead and so now the key is bent of all things and of course my ebay feed is showing me that the mat cutter for my watercolor mats is in that box and I can’t get to it because the key is now crooked.

Oh, and Nancy just sent a message, she’s stuck in more traffic but this time 30 miles south of I26.  And just so you know, it’s still cold here, like the heat just kicked on and I wish I could find my other slipper [sigh] one of those days I reckon.

RED EYE

Yeah, it’s one of those days, the weird stuff is just starting too I’m sure since today is the day we’re finally putting up “The Tree”

To be fair “The Tree” isn’t awful, it’s small and lopsided as is every tree I’ve ever put up and no amount of adjusting the fake branches ever helps but it’s cute and we like it.  Currently “The Tree” (and I put it in parentheses because it’s, ya know, THE TREE and because I was having a haha moment and thought what the heck, why not)

Of course the day started out like any other for any other person anywhere in the world, I woke up and used the facilities (see! we the citizens of the world do have some things in common eh? We all pee) and then I went on my merry way to make coffee and check on the cooler that Dave offered to loan to Rach today so that she could have cool drinks at the flea market.

Dude, my darling husband’s idea of an acceptable cooler and anyone who isn’t a seasoned fisherman looking to just have something to hold stuff version of acceptable is vastly different let me tell you.  It still had his ice water bottles in it from the last time he used it and a cracked side [rolling eyes]

So then I was off to get bread, which I managed to do in record time and even scored a loaf of pumpernickel which of course is a favorite here.

Then I came home to see what I had left in the account after paying electric and internet (which I kinda have to have considering our kiddo goes to school online eh?) and of course after I splurged $40 on groceries, which is when I discovered that a service that I have was getting ready to renew and I just don’t have the funds for it right now so I wanted to cancel my monthly fee of $6.95 but of course could not for the life of me remember my login information [facepalm] you know, I understand having different log in information for different sites I truly do know that from a security standpoint that it is a good idea but I know that I’m not the only one that ends up forgetting them and now understand why my mom always carries a little notebook of important info in her purse, lol.  Not that that I would ever start carrying a purse because that just leads to kids and hubby asking me to carry stuff but I understand the reasoning now.

So how is it one of those days? Well, immediately after getting the site situation straightened out (20 minute wait for a pop up chat mind you) I walked past the fan and something flew into my eye.

It burned! WTH, was my first thought as I dashed through the house to my bathroom so that I could flush my burning eyeball.  So there I am flushing and flushing and flushing my eye and looking occasionally into the mirror to see if I could locate what flew in and I just kept seeing this dang red spot right near the iris and it was completely freaking me out even though my eye had stopped burning from whatever had flown into it and was now just burning from the tap water that I used. So I switched to the little mirror over by the window for a more light saturated look-see as it hadn’t even occurred to me to turn on the bathroom light because …ya! it burned! And there was nothing there. Hmmm, so I looked back into the other mirror and it was back!  So I looked into the medicine cabinet mirror again and there was nothing there, so I looked into the mirror over the sink again and it was back! So I gave the medicine cabinet mirror the stink eye and that was when I noticed my red bra sitting on the counter because I was a lazy ass last night and didn’t put it where it belonged (don’t judge me, it’s the hols and every chick should have red unders to match what they’re wearing) Anyway, the light from the window was just enough to reflect the over the shoulder boulder holder that was on the counter onto the medicine cabinet mirror to (of course) my wet eyeball while I was looking in the mirror over the sink [facepalm] only me.

Still haven’t figured out what got in my eye but it’s done now and I don’t trust my sneaky medicine cabinet mirror anymore.

Can’t wait to see what fight the tree puts up later, should be interesting as I left it out on the porch last night uncovered to scare any spiders from the shed out of it’s packaging

THE BEANS ARE STRONG IN THIS ONE

Dave (texting from work): Forgot my lunch

Christy: You’ll just have to go get one then . Though fyi,  if you were considering the leftover chili for your lunch it will still be here when you get home if you want it for dinner…

Trust me when I say I won’t be eating chili today

 Dave :  Where is your sense of adventure?

Christy: It was chili that kept me up til midnight last night, it was the antivirus having a compatibility issue with the windows antivirus that I didn’t even know was on the pc that kept me up past 3 and much to my chagrin the chili kept making itself known.

Dave: ?

Christy: As my eyes watered for hours because of flatulence the likes of which I don’t think I’ve ever experienced I managed to triumph over the evil that is noncompatible programming that was making our computer unsafe due to two companies not being on the same page when it came to updates. 

Dave: …

Christy: And I still have gas

Dave: ROFL

I DREAM OF DONALD?

I had the strangest dream last night after finally falling asleep after laying there for hours after working on a project at one of my sites.

I dreamt that Donald Trump was going to buy an old building that needed fixing up so that I could start a small t shirt printing business in the basement of the building and continue renting out the rest of the building (that still had people living there even though it was in shoddy shape after the owner passed) and then I would be able to fix it up for the people whose walls were like literally crumbling.


There was an old and I mean old old fashioned gym at the top of the building that I was going to leave the equipment in for the retro feel but throughout the grounds there were going to be sustainable garden spots to help grow food for a restaurant in the building and the leftover food (if one didn’t accidently run it over like my husband did playing with his newly restored car) would go to the people of the building that needed it.

The building itself was reminiscent of a photo I saw on Facebook yesterday by Dmitry Arkhipov

Stone Island by Dmitry Arkhipov http://bit.ly/1ItrfZF

which you can see even better at his site at  http://dmitryarkhipov.com/p/spage/photo/oid/32501971.

The building in my dream was kinda like the island in the middle of the stream, it was teaming with life and even though eroded at the bottom from time and water it wasn’t going to go down without a fight. An industrious person would make sure it didn’t despite everything going on around it.
Now there was one of those walkthroughs going on for potential buyers I went through the building and he wanted to buy it because it was tht right thing to do but there was some guy against him so he decided to help us purchase it. With a bit of wile and cunning we would have (in his mind, and hey he’s the business guy who would know, lol) the perfect portfolio in our names that made it look like we would be some chumps to the seller but in reality he’d been wanting to get that other company that he was putting in our portfolio that everyone else thought was going to go bust anyway even though he had a great plan for it.

Oh and there was a werewolf living in the building but I drew the line at having ghosts and the were was a nice fellow that didn’t bother anyone unless he was bothered first. And the nice couple I met had a daughter who seemed to be like a combo of an escape artist and a climber with no fear because I saw her in on the stairs all the time when we originally toured it and the family were part and parcel with the building with the father being the maintenance guy doing the best he could with what he had and the mom running the reception or whatever downstairs.

I’m pretty sure we got the building before I got woke up by Dave crawling into bed this morning after his shift but I can’t be sure because as soon as he moved the covers I got cold no matter how warm he was.

Maybe I didn’t need the fan on last night? And maybe I shouldn’t have a glass of wine when trying to work on shirt projects? Because I’m pretty sure in the dream I had also gone to a ‘wedding mall’ no, I’m serious, lol.  It was a huge place where people could rent out rooms for weddings and receptions but the other part of it was filled with shops and all I really wanted to do was get my tee idea printed for as little as possible because the online place I’d been trying to use kept getting a frozen screen while I was working with their tools and I was just fed up. My friend Susie was there with her fab partner for some reason.

Oddly, Donald was in the mall too having a look see at what was going on and someone gave Bella some cake from one of the weddings [scratching head] yeah, maybe I shouldn’t have had a doughnut stick with that glass of wine…

I really want to go back to sleep now because I am still half asleep but once I’ve been woken that’s the end of the story. [sigh] coffee time.

So, I think the question I should have asked myself when I woke up was the dream a lead on to “One of Those Days” ?

Hmmm, lets see:

  • Insomnia 
  • Weird Dream 
  • Woke Early 
  • Woke Freezing (in the middle of summer and … [putting hand on forehead] nope no fever 

Hmm, hang on there is someone at the door?

Okay, yes, it seems like it is going to be one of those days after all. That was Danny letting me know that he and his father won’t be cutting the lawn til Friday instead of this morning because their lawn mower is on the fritz.  Which means with my luck the landlord will be putting a note on my door today telling me I have 72 hours to cut the lawn [sigh]

I need more coffee

MESSENGER MOMENTS

So, Dave and I usually chat at lunch now that we finally got him another cell phone and I thought to myself, some of the stuff that we talk about is pretty amusing so I should probably catalog it too and so I’m making another category here on the blog called “Messenger Moments”

😉

To understand today’s bit you have to understand that Dave usually gets up in the morning, makes coffee and checks his email before leaving for work, he also keeps me updated on spending so I can do accounting sooner rather than later… later isn’t so great we’ve learned after 10 years because he’ll forget to tell me and it screws up our budget 

earlytowork

A YEAR AGO TODAY

So Facebook has this thing where you can share memories of posts from whatever day you are at.  Today’s was hilarious insights and haha’s courtesy of Bellatrix and I thought I’d share.July 14, 2014 at 9:29am ·

Bella: Does Bacon have vitamins?
Me: Bacon has something even better, it has love.
Bella: Cool [munch munch munch]July 14, 2014 at 5:49pm ·

At the pizza place and Bella was gearing up to eat…
Bella: We have to name the pizza
Me: Let’s call it Fred
Bella: You’re going down Fred, I’m gonna eat you up
Me: [facepalm]

pizza