A disappointing weekend.

I was all prepared to have a fantastic three day weekend when I left work on Friday. I went out for margaritas with a couple of friends and had a great time (as always). I woke up early on Saturday morning feeling rested and ready to do everything I wanted to do, including baking brownies for my sister's birthday party and buying her a present. And I planned to do all that right after I took a short nap in the afternoon.

When I woke up, I had a scratchy throat. Which I thought might be allergies, but just in case, I started taking Emergen-C just to be on the safe side. When my friend PJ called and asked me if I wanted to go to Chevy's, I of course said yes. We ate and then went to Big Spoon for yogurt afterwards. I was feeling about the same, but continued taking Emergen-C the rest of the night.

I woke up feeling pretty crappy yesterday. My throat hurt, my nose was clogged and I felt really awful. I kept up with the Emergen-C thinking I'd feel better.

I slept terrible last night and did nothing at all today. I didn't leave the house or do housework. At this moment, I am feeling better than I did this morning, and I'm thinking it's because of the Emergen-C. I've been taking it all weekend and I think I'd be feeling a lot worse right now if I hadn't taken it as much as I have been.

With my luck, I'll be feeling great tomorrow morning, just in time to go back to work. Which is a good thing, since we're still working on the huge project and this week will be just as crazy as last week.

I guess I should be happy that I didn't get it as bad as my husband did last week, but I'm still disappointed that I felt bad enough that it put a damper on my weekend.

Oh well - next weekend will be here quicker thanks to the 4 day work week. Guess I'll just make up for it then!

Jillian Michaels is a tool of Satan.

I did level 1 of her 30 day shred workout this evening, and now my arms barely work well enough for me to type. I did this workout for a few days a couple months back, and then I abandoned it. I've got to stick with it this time - I saw a side view picture of myself taken last summer and my middle section disgusted me. It's time to do something about it. Thirty days really isn't that long, and it's only a 20 minute workout. I'm not that lazy that I can't do that every day.

So here's hoping by June 19th, I'll feel entirely different and be able to do bicycle crunches without cursing at the television.

Or at her for being so evil.

Casserole = goooood.

Did I take pictures? Of course not.

This dish is really, really good. I will definitely make it again, just not when it's 9831 degrees outside.

Here's the link to the recipe if you are so inclined to try it yourself. You will not be disappointed. I left out the cilantro (yuck), and I was thinking of adding garlic next time just for kicks. It might also be good to add chicken or pork to this - that would bring it to a whole other world of deliciousness.

Enjoy!

I can be a real moron sometimes.

Leave it to me to decide to cook a meal for the week (as I planned earlier on) in the crock pot on the hottest frickin' day of the year. Easy? Of course. Smart? Not really.

This enchilada casserole better be worth it. Pictures to come later.

Not sure how I'm going to sleep tonight.

My husband's mild cold has turned into a bad one, and he is snoring like I've never heard anyone snore before. And even with our air conditioning going at full force, it's still 81 degrees in here. I probably won't get the most restful night's sleep tonight.

Thank goodness tomorrow is Sunday.

Free weekend.

I have absolutely no plans this weekend except to do my usual, which is go to my Weight Watchers meeting on Saturday morning, then head to Trader Joe's to pick up a few things. I have some ideas of what I'd like to accomplish by the time the weekend is over:

• Weigh in for the month of May. My body isn't cooperating right now, so I may have to postpone that until next weekend.
• Clean, clean, clean. It's no fun but I always feel so good when it's done.
• Start a new book. I haven't read a book in a couple of months now.
• Get my giveaway clothes in a bag and ready for the garage sale we're having at the beginning of June.
• Relax and recharge. It's going to be another brutal week at work.
• Call my best friend. We haven't spoken on the phone in a few weeks, so we're overdue.
• Cook something healthy for the week. I need to stop eating processed frozen lunches because of the salt. I think that's one of the reasons I've been bloated.
• Bake a healthy dessert. I'll start by looking on the Weight Watchers website.
• Buy an album off iTunes with the gift card I got for my birthday.
  
• Burn some of my already purchased music onto CDs.
• Make sure my husband takes care of himself. He's fighting a mild cold and I think he has a fever tonight. I swooped in with the Tylenol and made sure he's drinking enough liquids.
• Organize my bathroom. It's gotten out of hand.
• Watch a movie. It's either going to be Doubt, Burn After Reading or Seven Pounds. I'm going into Mad Men withdrawals now that we've finished the first season and have to wait until July to watch the second one.
• Buy my sister a birthday present. Her birthday's on the 25th and we're all getting together on the 24th at my mom's for her party.

I think that's quite enough for one weekend, and of course, I won't hold myself to doing everything. If I can take a good chunk out of this list, that would make me happy.

Thank goodness tomorrow is Friday - I've never been happier to end a work week!!

This is just so sad.

I've been watching the television show Jon and Kate plus 8 for awhile now. The kids are adorable (all of them except one of the twins who drives me crazy), and it's interesting watching how a family of 10 survives in this day and age. I also feel bad for Jon, seeing as he's constantly berated and belittled on national television by Kate.

So it made me really sad to see this today. I feel bad for the children. It's hard enough having your family filmed and put on national television so that everyone can judge you, but then to have the paparazzi and tabloids publishing everything that's going wrong in your marriage is just awful. I can't imagine what it must be like to go to the grocery store with their kids and having to try and hide the fact that their parent's pictures are on the cover of the tabloids.

Rob and I have talked a lot about this family, and my point of view is that they chose to have as many kids as they did. They had a set of twins first with fertility drugs, so I'm sure they knew that they would probably have another set of multiples the second time around. How could they not? Rob says that now that they are on the show, it would be hard to take it away because of all the free stuff they're getting from TLC, and the show is allowing them to provide for their children what they might not have been able to on such a tight budget.

Again, it's a choice. And it was the choice they made. They probably had no idea that the show would get this popular, and now it's backfiring.

I just really feel terrible for the children involved. How sad that they have to be subjected to all of this nonsense.

This makes me drool.

I have a day-to-day calendar at work that has a different shoe every day, and the last few have been ho-hum until today's eye candy:



















You can't really see it in the picture, but the clasp is a little disco ball-looking closure.


Is this perfection or what?

I ROCK.

Oh yes, I do.

I finished a HUGE chunk of work today and I'm feeling pretty great about myself. I plowed through mounds of data entry like it was nothing. I wrote 25 test cases. I wrote some SOPs. And now, I can sleep tonight.

You win, Facebook.

I finally gave in and now I can't stop. Help me.

Don't really have a whole lot to say tonight, but I'm here anyway.

My brain has nothing left to give after an entire day of writing test cases and standard operating procedures. The good news? There's a light at the end of this very long tunnel. We have a couple of major hurdles to clear this week, and then we get to breathe a little. And by a little, I mean a day, maybe two if we're lucky.

But I'm feeling good. I felt really productive today and had a good groove going while I was writing everything. This is all proving to be a really good learning experience for me and will be an excellent item to add to my resume'.

If I can even remember that I have a resume' by the time this is over.

To take my mind off of all of this: television, of course. My husband and I have been watching Mad Men on DVD for the last couple of weeks. That show blows my mind. The way those people behave at work is shameful (says the HR person). I have always thought that it would be fun to live back in the 50's and early 60's, but after seeing this show, I had second thoughts. Lots of repressed, unhappy people who smoked and drank a lot (even when they were PREGNANT!). But the fashion - oh, the fashion. I love the costumes on this show and I'm always looking forward to seeing what kinds of things the women are wearing. I sometimes wish we could go back to the day when men wore nice suits and hats and women wore fancy dresses on a regular basis. Everyone looked so sophisticated and elegant.

Maybe I could start a new (old) fashion trend?

My favorite TV show is gone.

Tonight was the series finale of Scrubs, and I am so sad right now. I know it's really silly to be so down over the end of a television show, but I got so connected to this show over the last few years that it's going to be hard not seeing any new episodes. Granted, it went a little downhill during the last season and wasn't quite the same show it once was, but I still loved it just the same. It was kind of like eating mediocre pizza: though it wasn't that great, it was still pizza! (I really like pizza, as you can tell.)

Thankfully, I have every season of the show on DVD (with the exception of the current one), so I can still get a good laugh whenever I need it. And be reminded of the fact that I really am a lot like Elliott (those who watch the show will know who I mean).

So I guess I need to find another TV show to be obsessed with. Any suggestions?

A very special Cinco de Mayo.

Today is both of my late great-grandmothers' birthdays. They were both born on May 5th, 1909.

Today is their 100th birthday.

Happy birthday, Great-Grandma and Next-Door-Oma. I miss you both.

A case of the yucks.

I haven't been feeling well since Sunday. I woke up feeling like I weighed a ton - everything I did felt like it took all the energy I had. I wanted to run a bunch of errands that day, but all I ended up doing was going to the grocery store to get food for the week. I thought I was just a little tired, so I laid low and took it easy all day.

But I still felt bad when I woke up yesterday morning. So I stayed home from work because I knew I would be utterly useless, sitting at my desk like a lump just waiting for it to be 3:30. I felt a lot better by the end of the day after napping and again, laying low.

And then I felt bad again when I woke up this morning, which I suspect is because I did not sleep well last night.

It took every ounce of will power I had to get myself out the door this morning. My brain was screaming at me to stop moving already and just lay down. But this software project we're working on at work has a big deadline coming up next week, and I've still got a lot to do before then. So sitting at home for another day was not an option.

It was a tough day. I struggled a lot this morning. Getting up to do anything took a lot of energy. I thought I'd feel better each time I ate something, but it never worked.

I came home and I've been sitting and enjoying the evening, and thankfully, I feel worlds better than I did this morning. I think with a good nights' sleep, I'll be almost back to normal tomorrow morning.

Whatever normal is these days, I have no idea.

It's nice to feel appreciated.

We're installing a new database at work and as a result, have had to do a LOT of data entry over the past two days. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. Our whole department has been doing nothing but data entry since yesterday morning. I don't mind it (it's very zen for me), but when there's that much and it takes away from being able to do other work, it's grinding.

So it was a nice surprise when we got in today and discovered that our manager had left us all fuschia plants to thank us for all the hard work. And then the project manager for this project bought us lunch today as a thank-you for all the data entry.

Even though it's been a tough week, I feel like my efforts are being recognized and appreciated, and that only makes me want to work harder.

It's amazing how great work can be when you have the right manager.