Yesterday, before he left work, Jonathan asked me if I needed anything from the store, he was going to stop in on the way home. I told him no, but then remembered I needed windshield washer fluid, so he said he'd get me some.
Later, we went out for dinner. We took my car, and he drove. On the way back, the following conversation took place (this is more or less how it went).
Me (looking at my windshield): I really need to put the windshield washer fluid in the car, huh.
Me: You put the fluid in for me? You're the best. I'm so bad at that. I actually washed my windshield with the squeegee at the gas station the other day, it was so bad.
Him: You know they sell windshield washer fluid at gas stations, right?
Me: Yes, but I was on my lunch break. It would have taken too long.
Him: It takes 2 seconds.
Me: I don't know where to put it.
Me: It was dark out.
Him: The cap is white.
Me: Well it's not like I let it go for too long anyway, it's not like it was weeks or anything (makes a face that means yes, I went a couple weeks without washer fluid).
I also have a tendency to wait until my car is all, "You have 5 miles until you run out of gas" before I actually get gas. The only thing I'm somewhat regular about is oil changes, but I even slack on that.
Also, today I left work to find that my blue car had turned green. I wasn't exactly parked under a tree, but I can't really help it if my car faces a forest in the parking lot.
So yeah, moral of the story?
I'm really bad at cars.
So it's that time when everyone is posting about the year ending, and I'm no exception because I'm just cool like that. So here's a (hopefully relatively short) review of my 2011.
I started 2011 pretty calmly. I had just gotten back from APO Nationals in Atlanta, and had a relaxing evening with my parents and Bootzie, who was only 6 months old at the time. I went to sleep right after the ball dropped, tired after a long day of flying. The rest of January went pretty smoothly, I had a job interview and didn't get the job, but stayed at my current job for a really long time.
In February, Jonathan and I went to the Cape to spend Valentine's Day. It was a nice getaway for us, and we made up for the fact that we didn't see each other on Valentine's Day 2010. Also in February, I became the Massachusetts Alumni Coordinator for APO Section 96.
In March, we had my birthday (woo!), and Jonathan and I started looking for a new, more permanent apartment, found one and signed the lease.
In April, we bought our furniture, moved into our new apartment, and I bought my new car!
In May, we saw Lady Gaga in NYC, I got my APO Presenter certification, and we celebrated Jonathan's father's birthday at a big surprise party.
In June, I found out that they were going to end my contract at work. That was actually pretty devastating for me.
In July, mine and Jonathan's parents met for the first time!
In August, I went 4 days/week at work in order to try and stretch my contract. I interviewed for and got an offer for my current job, and Jonathan and I celebrated our 4th anniversary.
In September, I started my new job, and we celebrated Jonathan's birthday (woo!).
In October, we went to Conclave at UMass, which was awesome! Also, the last weekend of October started our power outage that lasted until the 2nd of November, and resulted in me working from home and us camping out at my parents' house until the power came back due to a freak October snow storm.
In November, Jonathan and I celebrated Thanksgiving together for the first time with his family in NY, then went to see TSO in Providence.
In December, we prepared for Christmas with a lot of shopping and decorating. We spent some time with friends, and then started our long trek around the Northeast for Christmas/APO Regionals/New Year's Eve. We went down to my parents' house on the 23rd, we were in charge of food on Christmas Eve, spent Christmas day there, then drove out to NY to spend time with his family.
On the 26th we went Go-Karting, which was super fun! They went really fast, and I kept crashing into the wall, which likely led to the problem I started having around 3AM that night.
I started being sick. Really sick. Nothing wanted to remain in my stomach sick. It was bad, but I thought I had just caught the bug my sister had.
When I was still sick 6 hours later, it was decided I should go to the hospital. They gave me some lovely drugs, and made me drink this nasty liquid for a CAT Scan that also did not want to remain in my stomach. I got enough of it down for the scan, and they found a ruptured ovarian cyst. So they sent me home and I spent the rest of the day sleeping. The next day was APO REGIONALS!!! Which was super fun and a great way to end the year. After Regionals we went back to my parents' house and went into Providence for Bright Night.
All in all, 2011 came in very calmly, and left with a racket, but I have high expectations for 2012!
We got a 60 day free trial membership that we decided to activate after we lost all the food in our freezer and fridge and needed to restock. We went up there tonight because we needed a few things, and wanted to look around.
Our super romantic Friday night, right? Anyway, these stores are really funny.
I'm trying to decide on an e-reader to ask for for Christmas, and I got to play with one of them there tonight! We went through all the aisles, getting stuff here and there, not much.
We get to the food area.
Me: Do we need ketchup?
Me: Do you want to get 3 big bottles of regular or 2 big bottles of organic?
Me: I feel like we don't need this much ketchup.
John: Me neither, it's not like we're running a burger joint.
So we walk around through the food section a little more, and we come upon the eggs. The whole reason we went up there is because we needed eggs.
Guess how many eggs we ended up getting.
Have you guess? You're probably a few dozen too low.
We got 5 DOZEN EGGS. We were afraid to put them in the trunk, so I had them in my lap on the way home.
Me: I know what we can do with all these eggs! We can practice our hibachi skills!
So now we have a lot of granola bars, a lot of eggs, and a lot of chlorox wipes and deodorant.
It's really hard to shop at these stores because there's only two of us to use all the stuff, and there's only so much ketchup 2 people who don't use a lot of ketchup in the first place can eat.
Ahh... the trials and tribulations of being an adult. At least I'm not having jellybeans and wine for dinner again.
I have a big metal cup.
Since I haven't posted in a super long time, here's a bit of recap of the last 7 months or so.
We moved into a bigger apartment, and bought furniture. Buying furniture was a nightmare of trying to get financing credit, but we managed to find everything we wanted for a decent price, and moving in went really smoothly since we didn't have all that much to bring from the old apartment. I also got a new job, but that's a different post for a different day.
So when we bought all this furniture (couch, chair and 1/2, ottoman, dining table with 4 chairs and a bench, bed, 2 dressers, nightstand, mattresses- the whole deal) we decided that we would just use my coffee and end tables from my college apartments. They were still in good shape, and we wanted to save some money.
In getting all this furniture we ended up with the magical Red Sox hit the ball thing. Well, they didn't hit the ball (sad face) so we didn't get all of our furniture for free, but we did get 20% back as credit (happy faces).
We got our credit in recently and we thought "hmm.. what could we possibly do with all this money?" We decided that we should get another nightstand (somebody keeps complaining about not having one... not naming names though) and look into getting some coffee and end tables to replace my old ones. We looked around in the store closest to us and didn't find anything we liked, but it's a smaller store, so today we decided we would go to the bigger one where we actually chose our furniture.
The nightstand wasn't the issue. We found the one from our set, and that was done. Now to pick out tables. It was as hard to decide on these as it was easy to choose our dining set (we both wanted the exact same thing in the exact same color). We saw a set we liked, looked around the store forever, found another one we liked, and then sat debating forever. Then considered getting the matching server to our dining set instead, but decided against that based on the fact we don't have anything to put in it. Eventually, we went with the first choice. After getting all of that taken care of, we found we had $50 left in credit.
There's not much you can get with $50 in a furniture store. We looked around at decorations, and we finally decided on... a big metal cup.
Right now it's full of candy, but who knows what we may use it for in the future!
A little back story before I get into the point of this post.
I have never been a big nut person. I was on and off with peanut butter, not one to snack on peanuts, they just have never been my think. A PB&J every now and then was about as nutty as I got.
It's been the same with tree nuts. I kind of like almonds but I'd rarely seek them out, don't like cashews, or many other tree nuts. I'll eat a macadamia every now and then.
The thing is, while they aren't something I'd seek out in eating, up until sophomore year of college, I didn't have to AVOID them. That's when I met Boy.
I went from someone who wasn't crazy about nuts to someone who has avoided them as all costs. Which is generally alright, because I don't like them in the first place. However, things get a little tricky when it comes to avoiding an entire category of food. For example, someone I work with brings protein bars into work, and has told me I am more than welcome to help myself (we keep a drawer of candies and snacks together). All of them have nuts, so I don't eat any of them. On Valentine's Day, we couldn't buy a regular box of chocolates because those usually have some sort of chocolate with nuts in it, and it's hard to be totally sure you know which ones have them.
Occasionally I'll surf the internet for healthy eating tips. Almost every single website I have found or stumbled upon suggests nuts as a healthy snack alternative. We could never ever be vegetarians, since the best way to get protein besides meat is nuts (and I don't like beans). We're also both very much meat eaters so that wouldn't happen anyway but it's still nice to know the choice is there.
I know that nut allergies aren't the worst food allergies to have (gluten intolerance is pretty bad) but they are difficult to deal with. Fortunately, he's never had a problem with the "processed on the same equipment" stuff, or else we'd really have to limit our diet (and my chocolate consumption!).
Do you have food allergies? How do you cope with them? When were they diagnosed?
Every morning, I wake up around 7:30-7:45AM. It's right around this time that boy is usually going to sleep (maybe a bit earlier).
Boy: do you want me to make you breakfast?
Me: I haven't eaten breakfast since I was in 6th grade.
Boy: you sure you don't want me to make you bacon?
Me: I'm sure. *rolls over and tries to sleep before the snooze deactivates and starts blaring music/static*.
You see, I live in this awkward area where the best stations I get are located 45 minutes away or 1 hr away... which means that occasionally I get static and it's difficult to get my clock radio to tune into them. Once I get it, something inevitably will happen to the dial (like hitting it in my sleep). The most recent event involved me (or Boy) somehow messing up the volume. In trying to fix it, it was either OMG MUSIC WAKE UP NOW or *I think I'll just be quiet because even though I'm an alarm you're sleeping and I don't want to wake you up*. It was frustrating.
You should see the radio in my car. I live 15 minutes away from work, and somehow my radio thinks that I should get one station at the beginning of my commute and the other at the end. It's difficult to keep the continuity of a radio talk show when it keeps fading to static.
My car has some character to it. There's the radio thing, which is real fun on long drives, mostly because the seek button refuses to work. It will cycle through numbers forever without settling on a station, but if I set it to a number it's like.. alright, this one works. It's weird but I've learned to deal with it.
Mom: Well, at least it smells like bacon when Sheldon thinks.
Me: I wish it smelled like bacon when I thought! But then I'd smell it and want bacon, and get distracted and go make some. Hmmm.
Puppyness is totally conked out in the middle of the living room right now. She's adorable! She helped make coming home this weekend better.
Alright so.. this has gotten long enough. Also I'm starting to think I need a personalized layout but I have this problem of not knowing HTML beyond making the font change color, so if you wanna help me make it pretty let me know!
I really should post on here more than once a month.
It's perpetually on my list-of-things-I-should-do-but-forget-2-seconds-later.
I wanted to go out and DO THINGS. So I got up on Saturday- actually, I didn't wake up on my own. No, SOMEONE (no names here) decided that he wasn't going to sleep the night before, and woke me up at like 8AM ranting about bacon or something. Then I had to pee, so I was up for the day (I can't fall back to sleep after that for some reason. It's a thing.) Then I made a shopping list for groceries while going through a cookbook that I got for Christmas.
Eventually we decided that we wanted burgers, and I found out there was a Ruby Tuesdays not too far from here- the same city as the mall we usually go to! Hooray. Except we didn't realize that the city was huge and it was actually twice the distance. Whatever, we got burgers. Then I wanted to check out AC Moore, and for good measures the two stores next to it. Then to the mall.
As just about everyone in the universe knows, a certain bookstore is going out of business. So we went there and got some books and I got a calendar for work and it was good. Then we went to the mall, and I got some more hair stuffs because I decided I wanted to do more with my hair than just blah (I got a new headband. I love headbands. Though maybe not as much as Rachel from Glee- I've never written a song about them! (yet)).
So then boy got an oil change. And with the oil change came a free car wash, and there they gave him this cherry smelling thing for the car. And OMG. It smells like cough syrup except a little sweeter. Kind of like sour cherry stuff except more mediciney.
So then we came home, because someone was tired (I wonder why). While he slept, I decided that I was tired of the pile of clothes in the closet that needed to be cleaned, so I started the laundry. And I separated it all. And somehow I broke one of the dryers. Usually our clothes needs more than one cycle, so I put the quarters in for round 2 and it made a loud buzzing sound and then just stopped. So yeah. All the while I have 2 loads in the washer to be dried and only one dryer to use.
Those 2 were the last 2 of the night I'm pretty sure, things started getting fuzzy because it was like 11PM at this point.
Today we finished the laundry, went to iHop for breakfast, then went to Walmart and grocery shopping. We got a shower caddy thing for the shower because there's way too much stuff and not enough space for our stuff in the shower. I also got a drying rack for the clothes, and some various toiletries. I cleaned the bathroom and put our stuff on separate sides of the sink. My side has much more stuff on it!
We also made a good dinner of chicken fried steak, potatoes au gratin, and biscuits.
Now to keep up this cleaning/being a responsible adult/motivation thing. Though chances are I'm gonna get lazy again and forget to get quarters and I'll have another 8 loads of laundry to do (I have a lot of clothes).
Maybe I'll remember to post more.
I'm Nikki. I believe in love, and I want to make the world a better place through that love.