1. I need to install Microsoft Money on the laptop so I can keep track of our money while we’re in Chicago next week.
2. Also?  It’s 4:30 in the afternoon and I haven’t eaten anything yet.  I need to eat something.  Soon.
3. Must go to Borders and pick up a few shipments of books I had shipped there for free.  Christmas presents for the kids (Dave’s little brother and sister).
4. I miss my family, like, whoa.
5. Super glad that Dave went through our cabinet in the office with me last night and we now have a pile of stuff to sell on Ebay, as well as a garbage bag full of stuff that is no longer any good to us and not really sell-able.
6. Must use my $10 register rewards at Walgreens this weekend before they expire.
7. Need to do laundry before Monday!  Was going to do it last night but someone was using all the washing machines so we just said forget it.
8. My best friend is having her baby tomorrow! They are inducing her at 7am!  Can’t wait to meet baby girl!
9. Need to finish cleaning the kitchen before we leave for Chicago, too.  Don’t want to come home to a messy apartment!
10. Also need to go to the Verizon store tomorrow to get all my stuff transferred from my phone over to the new one they just sent me.  (Same phone/model…my current one just has a glitched out QWERTY board.)
11. Oh!  I wanna go catch up on my TiVo.  There’s about 6 hours of Army Wives on there that I need to watch.
12. I think my meds are making me sluggish and lethargic again.  Could barely pull myself out of bed this morning.  Not cool, you guys.
13. I have a $25 Amazon gift card and have no idea how I want to spend it.  I’ve changed.  I’ve always known how to spend money.  Now there’s nothing that I need or want.  Weird, right?
14. I’ve been living on cheese rollups for the past week (melt cheese on a flour tortilla, add sour cream and hot sauce…PRESTO!).  So addicting and easy and did I mention cheese?  Mmmm…cheese.
15. Dave usually never likes to eat sweets.  So last night as I was finishing the last scoop or so of Edy’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream, he asked me for a bite…right after I just swallowed the LAST bit.  Then he proceeded to make me feel guilty (jokingly, of course!) because I didn’t share with him.  Dork.

I spent a majority of the day watching season 1 of “Californication” on Showtime On Demand with Will while Dave was at work. I drug myself away from the TV long enough to go up to the Verizon store to have them order me a new phone because my QWERTY keyboard has been glitching out on me lately and it’s annoying. They’re sending me a new on via FedEx and then I just have to take it in to have them transfer all my stuff to the new one and then ship the old one back. This is the second time I’ve had to replace my phone in the past 3 months. I love my phone but can’t wait until we can get our 2 year upgrade for cheap next July. Was looking at some new phones today at the store and I wouldn’t mind the LG Dare. Very similar to the Voyager (which I also love).

Anyway. Came back and we finished watching the rest of “Californication” and then Dave got home and I made dinner for all of us. I love being around Dave and our friends just relaxing and watching TV. Probably one of my favorite things to do.

We ended up watching “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” on TV. Ok, so I fell asleep and woke up as it was ending. But then I stayed up to watch the rest of “Bridge to Terabithia” which we caught around halfway in. That movie is sad! I had tears in my eyes! God damn kids movies making me semi-cry. Once that was over we watched “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. Talk about a night of movie flashbacks, huh? (Aside from Terabithia.)

I’ve had such a sweet tooth lately. I keep craving ice cream. I bought some Ben & Jerry’s Cake Batter ice cream the other night and that was pretty good. Very sweet, but good. I had been craving Coldstone Creamery’s cake batter ice cream for a while, so that satisfied my cravings.

We leave for Chicago next Monday for a week. I’m kind of excited about it, even though it’s not like a real vacation because Dave will be working the whole time. I’ll have the laptop and the Xbox with me though, so even though I can’t leave the hotel (he’ll have the car) I’ll have stuff to keep me occupied. Hopefully we’ll get some time to go explore the city a little bit, though.

Going to cuddle up on the couch while Dave plays “Assassin’s Creed” on Xbox and probably try to read some more of “Fight Club” while I’m at it.

1. I’m enjoying all the jam we made a few weeks back. I’ve been having toast with jam on it for breakfast and/or snacks. So yummy.
2. Our homemade canned pickles came out just wonderful, too! I’m so glad. We were worried because we’d never made them before.
3. I did three loads of laundry today. I hate laundry.
4. Our air conditioner broke over the weekend, but got fixed today. I’m going to still try to use the box fan in the bedroom window at night to save on our electric bill. We’ll see how that goes.
5. I love Glade Scented Oil candles. They smell amazing. The refills are kind of pricey because I go through them so much, so I’m trying not to burn them as often. *pout*
6. Spent a while organizing my iTunes on my desktop computer since I had to migrate over from my laptop when I sold it. I’m now on last.fm again if you want to check that out. Still has my stats from 2005 but I didn’t want to make a new account, so I’m just going with it.
7. I’ve got cramps crazy bad and just want to curl up and sleep. But I just woke up from a nap on the couch. At 10pm. Ugh.
8. Currently reading “Fight Club” and so far it all matches up really well to the movie. I’ve got another 35 or so books on my shelf to be read after that. Yes, really.
9. I went to the farmer’s market today and bought a few pounds of potatoes, 2 huge green peppers, 2 banana peppers, 6 tomatoes, and a zucchini for $8.50. I’m happy about that.
10. I made homemade potato salad for the first time ever and it turned out yummy. Needs more mustard though.
11. I am looking forward to the end of the month so that I can do a summary of my finances and then set new goals for August since this month didn’t go as well as planned. I’m a geek, I know.
12. I miss my family.
13. …and my best friend. We were supposed to have lunch last week but she wasn’t feeling well. She will be giving birth in the next few weeks and I’m so excited for her.
14. Dave is currently napping on the couch where I left him when I woke up, and he looks so peaceful that I don’t want to wake him up.
15. I should really wake him up so he’s not awake all night when he has to be up for work at 7:30.

Anyone out there?  Hello?…

I went to bed early last night (12:30 - that’s early compared to my standard 3am or later).  I went to bed early with hopes of getting UP early this morning.  You see, yesterday I was up at 8am and I enjoyed being up and have the entire day ahead of me and time to do the things I needed to get done.  It felt a lot better than sleeping until 1 in the afternoon.

But I’m also really sore from my accident over the weekend, so I took a muscle relaxer around dinner time hoping it would solve the tightness in my neck and enable me to turn my head a bit better.  When that didn’t do much, I took another one at bedtime and I crashed.

I crashed hard.

Mixing muscle relaxers with Vicodin always makes me tired (and yes, it’s all prescribed and legal…I’m my own walking pharmacy).  As soon as my head hit the pillow I was out cold.  I vaguely remember Dave getting up for work this morning and kissing me goodbye before I quickly fell asleep again.  That was at 8am…the time that I had wanted to get up and get my day STARTED.

I was awoken (is that a word?  It just sounds funny to me.  Hmm.) around 10:30 to some guy going around to all the apartments selling magazines.  He gave some spiel about how each subscription would give him points and when he hits “x” number of points he gets a FREE trip to Italy, OMG!  I was still half asleep and squinty eyed and in my pajamas and I’ve got some guy trying to convince me to buy a compilation of children’s books to send to a hospital and WTF?!?!  I just wanna be back in bed…

So after convincing him that, “Yes, I have enough magazine subscriptions” and “No, I don’t hate children, I just can’t afford your LOW LOW price of $65 for the ‘Animals at the Zoo’ compilation series”…he walked away with his tail between his legs and I knew I ruined his day in some way.

I went back to bed to be awoken (seriously…that just doesn’t sound right) again by the maintenance guys who were coming to look at our air conditioner that had stopped working yesterday.  It was blowing out HOT air.  Not what I intend my air conditioner to do.  So when he turned it on to look at it…it was workin FINE.  And to make it worse?  This is the second time it’s done this in the past week.  I call it in after hours to the emergency maintenance line, shut my air off for the night, die in a hot and humid apartment (can’t leave windows open because our cats will push the screens out and then whine to be let back in the apartment), only to have maintenance show up the next morning and turn the air back on and PRESTO…it works.

I’m not crazy.

…

Really.

So.  The point of this post was really to say how I didn’t get up early like I wanted and because I wasn’t up until 1pm, I feel like I’ve wasted the day.  And I was lazy.  Ok…I left the house to cash my check (but the irony is that it’s an UNemployment check…you DO see the irony in that right?).  Other than that, I made a few bucks online by doing some product reviews and then we ate leftovers for dinner and played Guitar Hero on the 360 (a new track pack was made available today for download…nothing like some awesome guitar songs by Buckethead, Joe Satriani, and Steve Vai).

Looking forward to lunch with Andrea (the BFF) and movie night with hubby and the boys (Nick and Will…my other unemployed buddies who got fired the same day with me) tomorrow.  Dave’s on call all weekend, but that just means more money, really.

I’ve been without a job since the middle of March. That’s a long time, people. That’s over 4 months of me sitting at home, trying to amuse myself all day until Dave gets home from work. I fill my days with online paid surveys (we need the extra cash!), cleaning, menu planning, running errands, grocery shopping, and cooking. I have a growing list of blogs that I read via Google Feeder and I spend way too much time on the internet for my own damn good. Our TiVo hasn’t been cleaned out in weeks and I have a shelf overflowing with books I need to read.

I’m restless.

I love the time off. I love being able to spend my time each day however I please. I know that I should enjoy every last second because once I get a job and start classes again, I won’t have time to do the things I’ve become accustomed to over the past few months.

The only problem is, nobody is calling me back when I submit my resume. I’ve had 2 interviews since I lost my job, and they were within the first 2 weeks of being jobless. Since then? Nothing. Not one single phone call.

I’d like to think I’m not this useless!

I’d love it if we could afford for me to continue to be a stay at home wife. Then I could really settle into the “role” and not be stressed about all the what-ifs and questions that surround my going back to work in the (hopefully) near future. Instead, I don’t want to get too comfortable because I know it’s not going to last forever. Which leaves me feeling like I’m stuck in this middle ground where I can’t enjoy each day to the fullest of its potential. Rather, I’m worried and stressed and somewhat bored because I don’t want to let myself start to ENJOY it all too much.

This summer is going to fly by. We’ll be in Chicago for a week in August on a business trip for Dave’s job. Then we leave for Myrtle Beach exactly 3 weeks after we get back from Chicago. Once we get back from Myrtle Beach, classes start up again for me a few weeks after that. (Tuesdays and Thursdays I’m in class from 2-4p and 6-10p. Those are going to be some loooong days. I’m hoping I can do my homework and everything in the 2 hours between the 2 sets of classes from 4-6p, that way I will have more free time at home with Dave during the evenings and on weekends rather than worrying about homework.)

I just needed to rant a bit. My life feels like it’s going nowhere and I’ve gone from this successful young woman who had it all, to this whiny, unemployed girl who can’t find her place in life anymore…

I read an interesting article over at Zen Habits that details how everyone should incorporate a Life Laundry Day, or a day to clear up any unfinished business so that you are clutter free and your mind is at ease.  I think I may try to do this once a week (not sure what day would work best, yet…probably Mondays since I can get all my errands done then — grocery shopping included).  Plus this will give me a nice start to the week so that the apartment is nice and clean, all my errands are done for the week, and I’m good to go.  And as the week goes on, I can add things to the list of what needs to be done on the next Life Laundry Day.

I like it.  How about you?

It’s been so hot here the past few days, and extremely humid.  It’s making me sick to my stomach to even be outside and not in where it’s lovely and air conditioned.

On a positive note, we (Dave, Will, Nick and I) are going to see Batman: The Dark Knight in IMAX tonight for the midnight premiere.  I’m super excited!  I saw a 6 minute preview of the movie on Will’s special edition and can’t wait to see the whole movie now!  We pre-ordered our tickets a few weeks ago, and it’s sold out (obviously).  We plan on getting to the theater around 10:00 so that we have better chances of getting seats together and not being all split up!

On that note, I need to go take a nap because I was up until 6am this morning playing Guitar Hero with Will and then I got up at 12:30.  I had to go meet someone who was buying my laptop off of my for $250.  Extra cash for the upcoming vacation in September

I woke up this morning all bright and early to meet up with Will at his place because his family invited me to go blueberry picking with them at a local orchard.  So I got there around 9am, and we were supposed to leave between 9 and 10.  We’re sitting there playing Guitar Hero while waiting to leave and his mom informs us that the berries aren’t ready for picking and won’t be until the end of the month.  Great.  No blueberry picking for us.

Dave and I even went to the store last night and bought the beginning supplies to do some home canning because I wanted to make blueberry jam!  Not that it’s going to go to waste, we will end up going to the orchard when the berries are ready.  Plus, I’m going to try and make some homemade pickles this weekend if I can find cucumbers on sale for cheap.  We LOVE pickles.  And I’m also going to try to whip up a decent batch of strawberry freezer jam.

I’m super excited!

Anyone who really really knows me knows that I am a huge candle junkie. I love candles. I have candles in every single room of our apartment including the bathroom, and I enjoy lighting every single one of them. Now, over time I have become a candle snob and only bought from PartyLite. A former friend of mine used to be a PL consultant and I got a lot of stuff from her. I only ever hosted one show myself, but it was a great way to get free wax and some nice candle accessories. That was probably 2-3 years ago and I am still surviving off all the candles I got from hosting that one party. Anyway…

I went into the hallway closet where I keep all my wax together and pulled out enough to fill all my votive holders and tealights and whatnot and realized that…I am getting low on candles! I never thought I’d see the day, haha! So now I have to resort to either a) buy cheaper candles that I probably won’t like as much because I don’t really want to get involved with the PL scene again, or b) try other forms of “smell good” items.

…because I am also a fan of air fresheners.

What can I say? I love our apartment smelling all fresh and nice. We can’t very often open our windows because the cats like to push the screens out and get away outside. So unless we are watching them like hawks, we don’t get that warm summer breeze through the apartment, which then leaves me to the last resort of lighting candles and having air fresheners to make it not seem so “closed up”.

I have also become an air freshener snob and only like to buy the plug in ones from Bath & Body Works. I always get them when they’re on sale and stock up and that lasts me a few months for the two that I have plugged in.

But now…there are Renuzit TriScents. This thing is amazing! It’s like three of the B&BW air fresheners built into one! It’s fresh and calming and aromatic and just plain genius. (Plus? You can get a coupon if you go over to their website…$3 off!) I have it plugged in by the front door and it smells like heaven every time we walk in or when we’re just sitting around the living room watching TV or whatever. Can we say new addiction?

Ok…that’s my rambling for the day. See what happens when I get low on candles? I freak out and buy new products and fall in love with something that I can’t get enough of!