Barabara ni naranai you ni...
Jan. 7th, 2008 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dejanaWhew, I finally finished catching up on my flist. I'm afraid to touch my communities filter. I've been out of town for almost a week.
It's dreadfully gray outside today, and unusually warm. If I didn't know better, I'd think spring was already approaching.
I'm pretty close to absolutely exhausted. I got more sleep last night than I usually do before my first day shift (four hours instead of two), but I was so tired after my visit up north that it didn't really matter. I have no idea where I am in terms of sleep right now. If I go to bed immediately after work, I might sleep through the night or I might doze until midnight and then be wide awake. Hard to say. But at least I only have today and tomorrow, and then I can straighten myself out on my days off before Friday.
This month's hometown visit definitely could've gone better.
Thursday morning when I got home from working the overnight shift, my sister was awake, so we ended up talking and I didn't get to sleep right away. So, as usual, I got going later than I would've liked. If I hadn't had an appointment to get an oil change on my car, it would've been even later. After that and some errands, I finally got on the road at the beginning of rush hour. Traffic wasn't too bad yet, so that was okay. I got to my friend's place around 7:30 PM and had dinner with her family, and we watched movies and stuff like we normally do. I got my friend to watch "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," which was yay, I'd been wanting her to see it. And I finally gave my godson his Christmas present: a custom-cut puzzle of his first name that I'd ordered at the State Fair, and he loves it, which is awesome. He's starting to learn the alphabet, so the puzzle will be useful in learning to spell his name. And since it was a special-order gift, I didn't have to worry about competing with his overenthusiastic grandparents and other relatives, heh heh. :3
Friday I got to sleep in a little while my friend had a job interview and her son went to day care. I'm glad for that, since it was pretty much the only chance I had to catch up. @_@ My friend's 25th birthday was on the 2nd, so as a last-minute thing I rented us a hotel room Friday night in one of the nicest hotels in town. There was a good deal on the internet for a two-bedroom suite, so there was plenty of room for us to invite our other friends and all hang out together. It was the Inn on Lake Superior.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vayleen and jasonulloa will know the place I mean. God, I love that hotel. If I ever get to the point where I'm going on writing retreats to work on novels, I am totally doing it at the Inn. I'd have to be making serious money, though, because omg the regular rates $_$ but it would be worth it. Great facility, great service, and great location. If I could wake up every day and see Lake Superior over breakfast, I would be so happy.
(I am so damn spoiled to have grown up in the kind of place people retire to. I have thus far refused to accept the rather high possibility that I will never live there again.)
Anyway, arriving at various times, we had my best friend and her son, another friend, her boyfriend and their daughter,jambosana and a kid she was babysitting, and myself. We went swimming and ordered pizza and watched movies and all that sort of thing. I got to try out the various swimming pools at the Inn, including the hot tub on the roof that's heated to over 100 degrees F so it can be open year-round. It was steamy. :D
Friend 2's daughter was sick with an ear infection, but she liked the puzzle I gave her, it was one of her name like my godson's.jambosana gave me some silicone muffin cups that will hopefully fit in my bento boxes, and from Friend 2 I got a tin of cookies and a mug.
Still... we are all so old. ._. Here we were having a hotel party, and we were half-overrun with kids and spending half the time just laying around. At one point my best friend and I were lying in one room doing nothing, and we couldn't find the TV remote, so we just continued laying around instead of getting up and standing next to the TV to press the buttons.jambosana teased us for being so lazy. xP It was kind of sad, though. Most of us were tired really early, too. It was fun, I guess, but I'll probably think twice before doing the expensive hotel thing again. :\
I did stay up until the early morning hours chatting withjambosana and Friend 2, who I don't see often. I paid for it with a lack of sleep, although I'm not sure it would've made any difference if I'd tried to go to bed earlier. Even with two bedrooms, that's a lot of snoring people and fussy kids. I spent five or six hours barely sleeping at all. And it didn't help that killyoudead started texting me around 5 AM. :P I was kind of glad for a little distraction from my failing attempts to sleep, but I felt bad for not being more conversational.
Saturday morning, though, was the Breakfast of the Gods, despite me being death warmed over. Since I wasn't rushed like we were during MoonCon, I had time to have some of everything. :D The Inn has breakfast like no other hotel I've been to. In addition to the usual cereal and juice, they have eggs and sausage and waffles and all sorts of fun stuff. Mmm. (Again, SO STAYING THERE if I ever become one of those writers who goes on writing binges in hotels.)
I needed the food, because after checkout I met up with my dad and headed to my mom's to help him clean out the garage. He's had a bunch of stuff in my mom's garage since their divorce, both his and his mother's. It's been fine there, but Mom wants to rent out the garage for storage for a little extra cash, so she needs his stuff out of there. I put up the cash for a rental truck to make a run to the landfill and Goodwill.
Don't ever, ever, EVER rent a pickup truck from U-Haul in the winter. It was cheap and all we needed to fill our needs, so I went with it, but it was REALLY cheap. It was rear-wheel drive only. So when we drove it around into the mushy-snowy-icy cleared-but-not alley behind the garage, it got stuck in the snow. Twice. At one point we thought we were going to have to call a tow truck to get the stupid rental out of there. Lamest truck EVER. Fortunately there were some bags of sand in the truck (bet this happens a lot!), so with me and Mom and her new boyfriend helping we were able to push the truck free. Still, GRR. That was not fun. (Also, the pending charge showing on my bank account for the truck rental is way more than it should be. It had better not go through like that. D:)
We got all the large items cleared out before we had to return the truck, but now Mom's stuck with a mountain of boxes of trash and we're not sure how to dispose of all that. Dad passed me some old MAD magazines and photos and things, so that's a bit of a fun bright spot. He left late Saturday evening.
Mom and New Boyfriend disappeared for a while, and he hurt himself pushing the truck or something, so when they got back he was cranky and they hid upstairs watching TV and having dinner by themselves. I still don't know what really went on there, but I was really uncomfortable to the point where I felt like I should just go to a hotel for the night. I was watching a movie when they got home, for example, and although I said it was no problem if New Boyfriend wanted to watch the football game, and Mom turned it on for him, he went upstairs to the bedroom and watched it upstairs instead. I stuck it out and he seemed agreeable enough on Sunday, though, so I dunno. My sister didn't have any problems with him during her visit the week before. It was weird.
New Boyfriend seems nice. He's very softspoken, which is unusual, since my mom's the loud type, but they laugh together a lot, which is a good sign. He's definitely better than Old Boyfriend, which isn't difficult but a VERY good thing. Especially since Old Boyfriend has started showing up again. Under those circumstances I'm very glad she has New Boyfriend, and he's bigger than Old Boyfriend, which is a helpful bonus.
I didn't get much good sleep at my mom's though, either. I slept in so late I had to cut my visit with Grandma short, but after the hotel night and everything it wasn't very restful. I probably would've slept even longer but my sister called, and we ended up in a weird three-way joking argument with Mom (which fortunately stayed lighthearted, it was eerily reminiscent of the old nasty fights we used to have but it narrowly never took a serious turn, maybe because New Boyfriend was around). Mom has apparently forgotten about kicking me out of the house a week before I moved to the Twin Cities, after which I didn't speak to her for five months. ._. It was four years ago, so I didn't let it become a rehashed ancient fight, but still, buh? How could you block out something like that, even with polished negative-event forgetfulness skills? It's kind of unnerving, too, since I've attributed Mom's increased agreeableness and understanding to my five months of silence, and now I'm not sure where it came from. I suppose it doesn't really matter, though. The important thing is that people can change, even when you thought it could never happen.
I didn't do anything special for Mom's birthday, which was also around the end of the year. I meant to take her out to dinner, but with the packing and her disappearing on Saturday it didn't happen. I did give her her Christmas present, though, which was a couple of DVDs, "Eight Below" and "Wild Hogs." She was so excited about "Wild Hogs" she started jumping up and down, it was so cute. xD
Gah, this entry's getting long. My lunch break is approaching. ^^;; To wrap up, I visited my grandma for a bit on Sunday. Had some cookies, snagged some recipes, and picked up the gifts for my mom, my sister and me from my uncle's family. My sister and I each got a couple of handbags and a tin of candy, and Mom got a set of Santa-themed kitchen cloth stuff (towels and that). It was a good visit. Grandma likes to pile the compliments on me and my sister (and by extension, my mom) now that my uncle's kids have turned out to be terrors. :3
That was about all. A good visit, but not as fun as I'd hoped. :\ I suppose it could've been a lot worse, but at the time it didn't seem that way. ^^;; I got home around 10 PM last night, just enough time to unpack and squeeze in a few hours of sleep. I'm so tired. Although I had some free time during my visit I was too worn out to do anything. I got a start on going over the Operations docs for Detour, but not much of one, and I'm terribly behind on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sm_monthly. Knowing me, it's not likely I'm going to catch up on the latter. :( And it's fast food for me today and tomorrow, as I got home too late last night to make bento lunches. Sigh.
It's dreadfully gray outside today, and unusually warm. If I didn't know better, I'd think spring was already approaching.
I'm pretty close to absolutely exhausted. I got more sleep last night than I usually do before my first day shift (four hours instead of two), but I was so tired after my visit up north that it didn't really matter. I have no idea where I am in terms of sleep right now. If I go to bed immediately after work, I might sleep through the night or I might doze until midnight and then be wide awake. Hard to say. But at least I only have today and tomorrow, and then I can straighten myself out on my days off before Friday.
This month's hometown visit definitely could've gone better.
Thursday morning when I got home from working the overnight shift, my sister was awake, so we ended up talking and I didn't get to sleep right away. So, as usual, I got going later than I would've liked. If I hadn't had an appointment to get an oil change on my car, it would've been even later. After that and some errands, I finally got on the road at the beginning of rush hour. Traffic wasn't too bad yet, so that was okay. I got to my friend's place around 7:30 PM and had dinner with her family, and we watched movies and stuff like we normally do. I got my friend to watch "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," which was yay, I'd been wanting her to see it. And I finally gave my godson his Christmas present: a custom-cut puzzle of his first name that I'd ordered at the State Fair, and he loves it, which is awesome. He's starting to learn the alphabet, so the puzzle will be useful in learning to spell his name. And since it was a special-order gift, I didn't have to worry about competing with his overenthusiastic grandparents and other relatives, heh heh. :3
Friday I got to sleep in a little while my friend had a job interview and her son went to day care. I'm glad for that, since it was pretty much the only chance I had to catch up. @_@ My friend's 25th birthday was on the 2nd, so as a last-minute thing I rented us a hotel room Friday night in one of the nicest hotels in town. There was a good deal on the internet for a two-bedroom suite, so there was plenty of room for us to invite our other friends and all hang out together. It was the Inn on Lake Superior.
vayleen and jasonulloa will know the place I mean. God, I love that hotel. If I ever get to the point where I'm going on writing retreats to work on novels, I am totally doing it at the Inn. I'd have to be making serious money, though, because omg the regular rates $_$ but it would be worth it. Great facility, great service, and great location. If I could wake up every day and see Lake Superior over breakfast, I would be so happy.(I am so damn spoiled to have grown up in the kind of place people retire to. I have thus far refused to accept the rather high possibility that I will never live there again.)
Anyway, arriving at various times, we had my best friend and her son, another friend, her boyfriend and their daughter,
jambosana and a kid she was babysitting, and myself. We went swimming and ordered pizza and watched movies and all that sort of thing. I got to try out the various swimming pools at the Inn, including the hot tub on the roof that's heated to over 100 degrees F so it can be open year-round. It was steamy. :DFriend 2's daughter was sick with an ear infection, but she liked the puzzle I gave her, it was one of her name like my godson's.
jambosana gave me some silicone muffin cups that will hopefully fit in my bento boxes, and from Friend 2 I got a tin of cookies and a mug. Still... we are all so old. ._. Here we were having a hotel party, and we were half-overrun with kids and spending half the time just laying around. At one point my best friend and I were lying in one room doing nothing, and we couldn't find the TV remote, so we just continued laying around instead of getting up and standing next to the TV to press the buttons.
jambosana teased us for being so lazy. xP It was kind of sad, though. Most of us were tired really early, too. It was fun, I guess, but I'll probably think twice before doing the expensive hotel thing again. :\I did stay up until the early morning hours chatting with
jambosana and Friend 2, who I don't see often. I paid for it with a lack of sleep, although I'm not sure it would've made any difference if I'd tried to go to bed earlier. Even with two bedrooms, that's a lot of snoring people and fussy kids. I spent five or six hours barely sleeping at all. And it didn't help that killyoudead started texting me around 5 AM. :P I was kind of glad for a little distraction from my failing attempts to sleep, but I felt bad for not being more conversational.Saturday morning, though, was the Breakfast of the Gods, despite me being death warmed over. Since I wasn't rushed like we were during MoonCon, I had time to have some of everything. :D The Inn has breakfast like no other hotel I've been to. In addition to the usual cereal and juice, they have eggs and sausage and waffles and all sorts of fun stuff. Mmm. (Again, SO STAYING THERE if I ever become one of those writers who goes on writing binges in hotels.)
I needed the food, because after checkout I met up with my dad and headed to my mom's to help him clean out the garage. He's had a bunch of stuff in my mom's garage since their divorce, both his and his mother's. It's been fine there, but Mom wants to rent out the garage for storage for a little extra cash, so she needs his stuff out of there. I put up the cash for a rental truck to make a run to the landfill and Goodwill.
Don't ever, ever, EVER rent a pickup truck from U-Haul in the winter. It was cheap and all we needed to fill our needs, so I went with it, but it was REALLY cheap. It was rear-wheel drive only. So when we drove it around into the mushy-snowy-icy cleared-but-not alley behind the garage, it got stuck in the snow. Twice. At one point we thought we were going to have to call a tow truck to get the stupid rental out of there. Lamest truck EVER. Fortunately there were some bags of sand in the truck (bet this happens a lot!), so with me and Mom and her new boyfriend helping we were able to push the truck free. Still, GRR. That was not fun. (Also, the pending charge showing on my bank account for the truck rental is way more than it should be. It had better not go through like that. D:)
We got all the large items cleared out before we had to return the truck, but now Mom's stuck with a mountain of boxes of trash and we're not sure how to dispose of all that. Dad passed me some old MAD magazines and photos and things, so that's a bit of a fun bright spot. He left late Saturday evening.
Mom and New Boyfriend disappeared for a while, and he hurt himself pushing the truck or something, so when they got back he was cranky and they hid upstairs watching TV and having dinner by themselves. I still don't know what really went on there, but I was really uncomfortable to the point where I felt like I should just go to a hotel for the night. I was watching a movie when they got home, for example, and although I said it was no problem if New Boyfriend wanted to watch the football game, and Mom turned it on for him, he went upstairs to the bedroom and watched it upstairs instead. I stuck it out and he seemed agreeable enough on Sunday, though, so I dunno. My sister didn't have any problems with him during her visit the week before. It was weird.
New Boyfriend seems nice. He's very softspoken, which is unusual, since my mom's the loud type, but they laugh together a lot, which is a good sign. He's definitely better than Old Boyfriend, which isn't difficult but a VERY good thing. Especially since Old Boyfriend has started showing up again. Under those circumstances I'm very glad she has New Boyfriend, and he's bigger than Old Boyfriend, which is a helpful bonus.
I didn't get much good sleep at my mom's though, either. I slept in so late I had to cut my visit with Grandma short, but after the hotel night and everything it wasn't very restful. I probably would've slept even longer but my sister called, and we ended up in a weird three-way joking argument with Mom (which fortunately stayed lighthearted, it was eerily reminiscent of the old nasty fights we used to have but it narrowly never took a serious turn, maybe because New Boyfriend was around). Mom has apparently forgotten about kicking me out of the house a week before I moved to the Twin Cities, after which I didn't speak to her for five months. ._. It was four years ago, so I didn't let it become a rehashed ancient fight, but still, buh? How could you block out something like that, even with polished negative-event forgetfulness skills? It's kind of unnerving, too, since I've attributed Mom's increased agreeableness and understanding to my five months of silence, and now I'm not sure where it came from. I suppose it doesn't really matter, though. The important thing is that people can change, even when you thought it could never happen.
I didn't do anything special for Mom's birthday, which was also around the end of the year. I meant to take her out to dinner, but with the packing and her disappearing on Saturday it didn't happen. I did give her her Christmas present, though, which was a couple of DVDs, "Eight Below" and "Wild Hogs." She was so excited about "Wild Hogs" she started jumping up and down, it was so cute. xD
Gah, this entry's getting long. My lunch break is approaching. ^^;; To wrap up, I visited my grandma for a bit on Sunday. Had some cookies, snagged some recipes, and picked up the gifts for my mom, my sister and me from my uncle's family. My sister and I each got a couple of handbags and a tin of candy, and Mom got a set of Santa-themed kitchen cloth stuff (towels and that). It was a good visit. Grandma likes to pile the compliments on me and my sister (and by extension, my mom) now that my uncle's kids have turned out to be terrors. :3
That was about all. A good visit, but not as fun as I'd hoped. :\ I suppose it could've been a lot worse, but at the time it didn't seem that way. ^^;; I got home around 10 PM last night, just enough time to unpack and squeeze in a few hours of sleep. I'm so tired. Although I had some free time during my visit I was too worn out to do anything. I got a start on going over the Operations docs for Detour, but not much of one, and I'm terribly behind on
sm_monthly. Knowing me, it's not likely I'm going to catch up on the latter. :( And it's fast food for me today and tomorrow, as I got home too late last night to make bento lunches. Sigh.
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Date: Jan. 7th, 2008 07:57 pm (UTC)Also, your lj header is so freaking fantastic it blows my mind!!!!!!!!! I don't know how long it's been there but I just noticed it. *explodes* That picture of you is sooooo nice, and the blending and the castle are so perfect.
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Date: Jan. 7th, 2008 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 8th, 2008 06:07 pm (UTC)i forgot to ask if you wanted anything to help with the bill from the weekend. i know that you said that you had semi planned this, but i dont want to just expect that you were paying my way, if you werent expecting that. if you dont want anything, thank you and it was very nice, but if you do want something, just let me know.
hope your weeks a good one. it was nice seeing you. i hope those cups work for your boxes.
~me
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Date: Jan. 8th, 2008 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 9th, 2008 02:51 am (UTC):)
thank you, it was fun.
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Date: Jan. 14th, 2008 12:27 am (UTC)That's a European breakfast. :) Over there you'll see TONS of meats and cheeses and fish. You get totally stuffed.