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November 30, 2005
Picture Show
Here's a picture of my table setting. I got to use the China set we got for our wedding for the first time! So excited!
My delicious turkey. Baked for 3 hours and basted every 10 minutes...frequent basting's the key to a tender and juicy turkey!
Don making his world-famous and fiendishly good turkey gravy! Mmmmmmmm!!!!!
Here's Nick and Pam. They came all the way down from Traverse City--in a blizzard no less--to have Thanksgiving dinner with us! Yay! So glad they made it, safe and sound!!
Gee, I think Nick enjoyed drinking the good Scotchy-wotchy with Don! He looks mighty happy now!
And a (somewhat blurry) picture of my Christmas tree, all decked out with the cool new ornaments that Pam helped me find at the dollar store. Yay! Now all I need are a few more lights outside the front door and some wrapped presents to put under the tree.
Posted by Amy at 11:34 PM | Comments (3)
November 27, 2005
Thanksgiving Weekend
Well, it was a lovely holiday weekend. It was unfortunate that we had to miss Thanksgiving dinner with our families. My family was having Thanksgiving lunch in Kalamazoo, but the weatherman said there would be storms and heavy snow. Plus we both had colds (we're better now--just fighting runny noses), so we decided not to go. Lo an behold, the storms held off. Figures. We had also planned to have Thanksgiving dinner with the Bucks, but our friends Nick & Pam, from Traverse City came down somewhat unexpectedly and we decided to cook a turkey for them. And not going to Kalamazoo made it easier to prepare dinner for them, which was really great. Plus we got to use our good China for the first time on them. I'll post a couple pictures later.
Then Pam and I went shopping on Friday. I got a ton of great new Christmas ornaments to replace all the crappy bulbs we had. Also got a few new items to decorate the house--some great silk flowers that had gone on sale. I'm so excited! Don spent the day with Nick making Iaido films in a cold and unheated warehouse. Don't worry, they came home and warmed their cockles with some expensive 25-year-old single-malt.
I spent a couple hours on Sunday "fixing" and decorating the Christmas tree (most of the branches were bent funny and needed straightening out). Plus I put up a few other Christmas decorations around the house. It's very festive. Now all we have to do is finish shopping for gifts, wrap them and put them under the tree. Yay!!
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday!
Posted by Amy at 10:30 PM | Comments (4)
November 22, 2005
Sick
Being sick really sucks. Someone at the dojo came to class with a cold and gave it to Don who gave it to me. Waaah! And so many others I know are sick--a few people at work and a couple of friends.
Fortunately, it hasn't been that bad this time. Mostly just a runny nose and sore throat. Though I did have to go home early from work yesterday. My stomach felt like one giant knot and my energy was totally sapped. I skipped Karate and even forgot (I'm sorry Katie!) that my friend Kate was supposed to take me out for a birthday dinner. I only remembered when she called to find out where I was. Whoopsie! I spent virtually all afternoon and evening laying in bed.
I'm taking Wednesday and Friday off for holiday vacation. Hopefully, I get over this stupid cold soon!
Posted by Amy at 02:00 PM | Comments (1)
November 21, 2005
Thanksgiving Birthdays
My friend Christy got me to thinking...how many times has my birthday fallen on Thanksgiving Day? Here's what I came up with:
1977 - 7 years old
1983 - 13 years old
1988 - 18 years old
1994 - 24 years old
2005 - 35 years old (YACK!!)
2011 - 41 years old (that's as far as I went...I'm not THAT bored!)
Spooky thing is, Christy's birthday is one day before mine and hers has fallen on Thanksgiving at the same ages as me!
Since my birthday is always so close to the holiday, I never really got to have any big bashes with a bunch of my friends (everyone's always with their families)...but then again, I didn't have that many friends; just a few really good friends (don't worry, I'm ok with that.) This year, I get to go to my sister's house for turkey (yummy!) and a birthday party with my family. THEN, I get to go to Don's family's house for more turkey and cake.
It's kinda funny...most people have more fun on their birthdays when they're kids. I'm having more fun on my birthday as an adult!
Posted by Amy at 04:19 PM | Comments (3)
November 18, 2005
It's Trogdor the Burninator!
You have to check out this cartoon. It's one of the funniest ever. Then, when you're done, go to the Strongbad homepage and wait for the button in the upper right hand corner to change till it says "fan costumes". Then you'll understand why this picture is so funny! MAKE SURE YOUR SOUND IS TURNED ON.
Posted by Amy at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)
Paranoid?
Call me paranoid, but I SWEAR the police are out looking for me, just waitingfor me to screw up! But it's NOT GONNA HAPPEN! I was driving back from lunch and in a 10-minute drive saw, not one, not two, but FOUR police cars. Fortunately, I've become a very cautious driver, so I wasn't in danger of getting pulled over, but it sure seemed like they're AFTER me. Leave me alone! I didn't do anything wrong!! And what really gets me is that one of them turned left on a red light, yet he was NOT on a call. Why is it cops can break all the rules and we're the ones who get tickets and insurance hikes? GRRRRRR!!!!
Posted by Amy at 02:00 PM | Comments (1)
November 17, 2005
The Real First Day of Winter
Today is the first day of snow and it wasn't a meager one either. We've got a veritable snow flurry going on and off (mostly on). It started as a moderate dusting. but it's beginning to collect on cars. I can hear Christy saying, "Wah, I want snow!" Well, I'm happy to trade places. You come here and I'll go to Cali!
Posted by Amy at 12:00 PM | Comments (1)
November 16, 2005
Why Ya Buggin'?
I have never worked a 14-hour day in my life...until now. UGH! Yesterday, I had one of the most hectic days ever. People were hounding me left and right, NON-STOP! When I finally got 2 minutes to myself, I sent out an email saying I was going home to work on some writing; it was the only way to get any productive work done with less distraction.
But after I worked at home for about an hour and a half, I had to stop doing that and start proofing my cousin's PhD dissertation. It was 60 pages long! And that was only one chapter! Thank goodness I didn't have to do any more that night.
She wanted me to proof it for spelling errors (only found one); grammatical errors (found maybe 7 or 8); syntactical errors and other punctuation. All in all, her paper was incredibly well written for someone whose native language is not English. Mostly all I did was capitalize a bunch of things and add some hyphens, and's and the's here and there. The thing is, it was all about civil engineering, so the concepts were WAAAAAY above my head. She had formulas in there that looked like something Steven Hawking or Einstein came up with! I had to laugh a couple times at myself because I recognized the words as being English, but they made absolutely no sense to me! I did my best, though.
But proofing her paper took more than 5 hours. So I started at the office a little after 9am and didn't stop working until 11:30pm! I only barely managed to get a little lunch and a little dinner in and took a half hour to drive home. My brain was FRIED! I felt a whole lot better this morning after a good night's sleep, but I better not have another day like that today! UGH!!!
Posted by Amy at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2005
Diva
Today, we had to take pictures at the office. Since we're working on the new Quicken Loans career site, we need some photos of people who work here. Our web marketing team also wanted to take photos of each person on our team to see who gets the most "conversions", meaning each of us gets our photo used on a page with an application and we test whose face gets people to submit the form the most. Not to toot my own horn, but I think it'll be me (cause I'm so cute!) and Jen (everyone loves blondes) and maybe Doug or Todd.
It was funny cause I ended up telling some people how to pose...not because I wanted to be bossy, but they were ASKING me what to do. I did my best to make them look casual, comfortable and fun. Though, a couple people just could NOT loosen up! Funny how some people get so nervous in front of the camera. It's understandable--I guess some people just can't get over being camera-shy. A few kept telling me how well I did posing--I told them I'd modeled before for friends like Sheri who's a photographer/graphic artist. It's really cool and fun to model, but at the same time (and I know this is really weird), I don't like having my face everywhere.
I might be able to post our team picture on my blog. Lea, our artist, will have some of the picture files. Hopefully, I can get a copy and you can see how they turned out.
Posted by Amy at 12:00 PM | Comments (4)
November 08, 2005
Lunch
Here's the gang that helped me on a really big project, called Dynamic Rates. Basically, it used to be that every two weeks, I would have to manually update text disclaimers and rate information several places on the Quicken and Rock web sites. And when I say several, I mean SEVERAL. It would take me a good 2 days (more when I didn't know what I was doing) to do the job, then it would take the engineers another 2 days or so to make the changes live on the sites. That's a long time to be tied up doing this kind of maintenance when we could be working on other things. We HAD to come up with a better way.
So Erik, the engineer second from the left, came up with some sort of way to pull the rate and payment information from the same system the bankers use. It gets updated once a day or so and it's automatic, so we don't have to do it. It's much better this way for the fact that rates will always be current as opposed to 2 weeks old (or more). Not to mention the fact that it cut down on the amount of work I had to do in RAMBO.
So as a thank-you to "Team Dynamic Rates", I took them all out to Ny's Thai Cafe for lunch and gave Erik a $50 gift certificate to Best Buy. My way of telling them how thankful I am for not having to manually update this stuff any more! Yaaaayy! I can tell you Ny was very happy that I brought in so much business considering his restaurant only has 8 tables--we took up 4. It's also nice that I could to expense it. Though, if I couldn't, I still would have taken at least a few of them out to lunch.
HAPPINESS!!!!
Posted by Amy at 05:45 PM | Comments (1)
November 07, 2005
Chopsticks
I learned a great new word last week while I was out to lunch with Gavin (above) and a couple other engineers. I was interested in learning a few Chinese words, so I asked Gavin what the word in Chinese is for chopsticks. It's "kwai-zee".
If you didn't know what it means, it sounds like a word that can be used in SO many different ways, depending on how it's said. Like:
* Kwai-zee...meaning hi/bye/see ya!
* Kwai-ZEEEEEE...meaning Yay!!/Hooray!!
* KWAI-ZEE!!...meaning Goddammit! or FUCK!
* kwai-zee!...meaning IDIOT!
* kwai-zee?!...meaning What are you talking about?!
Confuse your family! Confound your friends! Tell them "Kwai-zee" and find out just how much you can get away with.....You'll have hours of fun and the best part is, they won't know what the hell you're talking about!
Posted by Amy at 04:00 PM | Comments (4)
November 04, 2005
YEE-HAAAA!!
I just found out probably the greatest news of the year: that I don't have to use RAMBO ever again!! "Huh??" you say, to which I respond, "Lemme 'splain sometin to you, Lucy."
In simple language, RAMBO is the platform I use to make a lot of the changes to the Quicken Loans and Rock Financial web sites. (Don't ask me why it's called RAMBO—that's just the name the engineers gave it.) It's an INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT system to use, let alone learn. In fact, I didn't feel like I really knew what I was doing until I'd been using RAMBO for 6 months! That's a very long time to learn any system, and I'm a very quick learner for things like that.
But I just heard a very substantial rumor (don't worry—it's from a very reliable source) that RAMBO will be going away and that in about a week and a half, the engineers will be taking over my duties until they get the new content management system up and running, which hopefully, won't be very long.
So, I have just one word for you: WAAAAAAAAAAHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted by Amy at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)