Everyone needs a little "Smashing Pumpkins" in their life, right?



My sweet friend katielovesmatt was another of the participants in the "Pay It Forward 2011" meme on Facebook, and I made her a dozen of these special cookies. You see, the "Smashing Pumpkins" are her very favorite band ever (and I imagine that welfy will agree heartily). To make things extra-special, I jazzed them up by making them both purple (Katie's favorite color) and sparkly-silver (Katie's second favorite color).

(Disclaimer: I have no idea what Katie's second favorite color really is, but I know she likes glitter!)



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I did a lot of secretive mailing a few days ago. Today, my first friend received her box of surprise cookies, so now I can put the pictures up! :-)

You see, I mentioned last week that I was baking cookies. This friend jokingly asked me to send her a bite... with sprinkles. Now, since I'd not made many sugar cookies with sprinkles, I figured that showing a picture of them so soon after she'd commented would be a dead giveaway. So I waited and waited...

tigrrgrr sure was surprised, and I love it! *grins*



I had all these fun icing colors leftover after making the cute birdies, and I hated to waste them. Instead, I whipped up a batch of cookies just for my family. You see, we don't get to eat that many sugar cookies because the cookies are always for someone else! I played around with our cookies, just having fun. In turn, we had some easy, whimsical designs:



I worked on the cookies at the dining room table, and when I finished, I began to carry the racks to the kitchen for overnight drying. I wasn't careful enough, and one big cookie began to slide... I scrambled to save it, but in my haste, I wiggled more cookies. Before I knew it, SPLAT! I had five bold, vivid, and very wet cookies face-down on my hardwood floors.

Thank goodness they were just cookies for us! It would have been awful to lose so many on an actual order - yikes!

It took us about four days to finish up our special cookies, but that's good, right? We didn't shovel them all in just one day. :-)

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This girl is tired.

Philip and I stayed up last night until 4:30am. Now, he needs to be on that schedule, as he went back to work tonight. Myself? I shouldn't be doing that, but I always end up staying up too late with him.

I mean, I'm a night owl, yes. I always have been. But for me, that means a bedtime between 1-2am, usually. I am DRAGGING right now because of it, so I suspect I will fall to bed with a book as soon as the boys are finished bathing.

Tomorrow, we are delivering all sorts of goodies to our neighbors. I've got "care packages" all over the kitchen, and it makes actually cooking in there feel very cramped. I made Chicken Fried Rice, egg rolls, and crab rangoon tonight for dinner. I'd been planning to have that meal on a night when Philip was gone, as he doesn't really care for Chinese food. We had fresh pineapple for dessert.

My puzzles are framed and ready for pick-up in town. I'm thinking that I might just brave the drive myself with the GPS during the morning while Philip is sleeping. I'm dying to get them up on the walls now that they're finished, but on his work days, he really doesn't have enough time to do much. We'll see. I also still really need to find a quilt shop...

I reinstalled iTunes last night, and then I spent several hours putting music back onto the computer. We have over 55gb in our iTunes collection, and I had backed it all up on the T-cube before upgrading the OS. I put As-Ms back on last night, and I had planned to finish the second half of the alphabet tonight, but it will wait until I'm not quite so tired now.

I got my gorgeous scarf in the mail today from daphyn! It is so light and so fun and so bright! She only began making it last Friday, and I already have it in my hands - crazy! She also included a note and a sweet little book - A Taste of Chicken Soup for the Mother's Soul. And OMG, but she must use the most glorious detergent and/or fabric softener EVER, because the entire package smells like bits of beautiful heaven. Really!

I went over to my neighbor's house tonight to let the maintenance crews come in and turn off their water. They're on vacation, and we're their "Quarters Watch." They only moved in one week before we did, and they are in the unit on the far side of us - the one not connected to our own. We are in an A-style unit, and theirs is a B-style. I just was floored to see how very different our houses are. Other than sharing a wall together, there is absolutely nothing the same between A- and B-units. It was just too radical to try and picture what rooms are adjacent to our walls in certain places.

Today was payday, and I didn't even remember it until this afternoon while talking to Marissa. Lovely! We've got a reimbursement check coming to us from Runza too, as well as our W-2s. The military will likely put out their W-2s late next week, and then I can finish up our taxes. I love having that done, and I enjoy seeing that nice chunk of refund, too.

Alrightee, the dinner dishes are calling me, and I can hear my bed even more loudly. 'Night!

Today's regular and forwarded mail brought only Christmas cards - yay! Nothing but the good stuff! :-)

Among those received were ones from ashen_butterfly, 1grl_revolution, and sdaisyk - thank you!

We're on the home-stretch now: 530 miles down, 208 left to go. We will make it to Minot AFB tomorrow!

A la Kevin Smith, I yelled as we passed the border: "NORTH DAKOTA, I am IN YOU!"

*giggles*

Now the knowledge is out in the open, and that feels nice. Even so, it still gives me a great little thrill that we kept our moving news so locked down for six months to just a handful of special people in real life. I love that folks didn't know until I chose to let them know. For the sake of the boys and their church/school situations, it made things much simpler. Thank you, my LJ friends, for keeping mum on the subject since June - hee!

And it sounds like our friends in Nebraska have had more than a bit of snow since we left. We got some on Sunday night that put us in a tizzy over whether to leave or not... but we decided that we couldn't wait and then risk being trapped by the larger storm system due on Monday night. Apparently, we made the VERY RIGHT decision in leaving, as they have been nothing but blasted by snow since we left.

Meanwhile, I'm not a great big ol' fan of South Dakota. There was hardly any accumulation going on along the interstates, but the 3-5" of snow that was already in place was whipping across the lanes, and we felt as if we were driving in an intense fog. For most of the roads in SD, we were buzzing along at 35-40mph... in an area with a speed limit of 75mph. Philip's truck pulled the U-Haul, and he was the one equipped with our GPS, so I was lolling afterward. At one point in the afternoon, he was at 1/4 tank of gas, and I had a solid 1/2 left plus Jack and both kitties sound asleep. We made the decision for me to whip on and find a place for dinner and 'free time' for the kitties, and then it took Philip another 40 minutes or so to catch up to us.

I was super-nervous this morning when we hit the blustery roads, but by mid-afternoon, I was asking Philip to go faster. I'm more than a little proud of myself for keeping it together and pressing on. :-)

Philip just brought me a hot fudge sundae from McD's while I'm down here in the hotel lobby using the computer. Mmmmm!

My friends have more than kept me occupied with texts and Tweets. Thank you, all of you, for checking in so frequently. If nothing else, I catch up on potty breaks. ;-) Oh, and kerryblaze, thanks for the LJ gift, too!

hearts_refuge, did you get your box yet? Mailing that sucker out involved being a party to the most RIDICULOUS conversation ever. Seriously, I was shaking my head in bewilderment and looking around for a hidden camera.

kp_nut, I received your Christmas card in our last day's mail. Anything else should be forwarded right now, but yours came just in time. Thank you!

On a side tangent, our hotel tonight has the best showerhead ever. Goodness, it was relaxing to stand there forever after the chilly parking parade. I also love how hotels have neverending supplies of hot water. Philip jumped in with me, and then afterwards, Jack took his bath. We were dressing in our jammies and giggling, listening to Jack singing, "Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town" while he bubbled away in the tub.

I can't wait to download some pictures. I've not taken any of the trip, but I have several from before that I think will be keepers. We were SO PROUD of A.J. in his very first band concert last Thursday night. I was so tickled that we were able to stay until that point (the next day, Friday, was their last day of school), and that he enjoyed it so much. We sat in the second row, and I took a bunch of snaps. He is one of six clarinet players, and he clearly knew his stuff.

Even better, he surprised the heck outta me when we arrived back at the TLF that night. I had watched Mr. Holland's Opus with the boys the previous weekend, and A.J. had been particularly interested in the clarinet player's struggles (which I expected, and which is the reason I suggested the movie, besides just loving it to pieces myself). He told me he wanted to play something for me, and he pulled out his clarinet...

... and then he played THAT TUNE from the movie! He played it by ear, having guessed and practiced it by himself all week. I was ASTOUNDED! I told him he's really got a gift, and that not many folks can "hear" notes like that, and especially not just three months after beginning to play an instrument. He just grinned and played it over and over, working on figuring out the next note as he went. Wow!

I should probably get moving here. No one's waiting on the computer, but I would like to get a long, lazy sleep in, and that means I should start snoozing soon. 'Night, all!

Look what was waiting for me in a box from mostcurious when we returned from vacation:



She sent me a ton more Coke codes, another little collectible bear-in-tin, and handmade knitted socks in 'Slytherin' yarn - how cool! And the socks were a perfect fit and are so soft and warm. I'm wearing them right now, in fact. ;-)


SOCKS!

Seriously though... don't my feet look just so happy? :-)

I'm so busy lately, and I keep meaning to update, but then have no time to do so. As a result, here are some bullets of the going-ons in my life as of late:

• Runza was burglarized on Friday, the 26th. No one was at the store at the time (it as early morning - about 6am), so we were all safe.


• But it's an "inside job," as someone used a key and also was able to open the safe to empty the contents (and said safe has a pretty complex code).


• This is causing me GREAT unease. I clearly don't know someone as well as I thought I did - whether it is one of us four current staff with such access (including myself), or one of the two staff who left in the last couple months (both of whom I consider to be friends).


• The fingerprint dust from the detectives all over the office caused me to have several freak-outs. Too much of a trigger from the other robberies. *sigh*


• Because of the burglary, we have been piecing the store back together in the past week. I have worked a lot of hours. A LOT. And this past week contained the "end of month" stuff for my monthly bookkeeping role anyway. It has been a really heavy week.


• Next week looks to be about the same for the first three days. The four of us are also now required to travel to Lincoln, to the Runza National office, to be interviewed individually by a theft committee.


• We're still waiting to hear the final word on taking polygraphs. We were told originally that we would need to, we all agreed to do so, and then they decided, "No, not just yet. Let's do the committee meetings first."


• I received a lovely, super-duper surprise from mostcurious! She knitted me my very own, PoA-style Slytherin scarf! I don't have pics to share yet, though. :-/


• I got my hair cut on Friday night after work. I told the gal to do what she wanted, and it is VERY different! Again, no pics yet.


• The boys' school pictures came in, and they are both good. A.J.'s pic is PHENOMENAL, in fact. I was very pleased, and I've been working on getting them mailed out.


• I took family portraits for a friend visiting from Florida on very short notice, and she LOVES them. I'm very happy, and you can see those HERE, if you're interested. I still need to burn her a CD of the images and mail it to her...


• Today is my little godson's birthday! Only he's not so little anymore - he's now TWO! Happy Birthday, Douglas!


• It is OCTOBER already. How did that happen?! Seriously, Jack will have been 7 for two months already next week, and A.J.'s been 10 almost as long. That is insane! My little (not so much!) guys haven't yet decided on costumes for this year, though we keep looking...


• I still need to get Halloween decorations up. Jack has been begging to put them up this year (I didn't decorate last year at all, as October was a difficult time), and I was just too darn busy this week. I'm hoping to get to it before...


• bigbrain61 comes to visit on Wednesday! Dude, I'm so stoked! I've known him online for about 5.5 years now, and we'll finally get to meet in person! He'll be here from Wednesday evening to early Friday afternoon - I can't wait!


• Speaking of online friends, I passed my 6th LiveJournal anniversary on 09/22. Can you believe that? Craziness! Thanks to all of you who've made this such a great place for so many, many years. *hug*


• Aaaaannnnnd, in BIGGER news, Philip and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary on 9/12. We marked the occasion by renewing our vows, and a handful of very close friends celebrated with us at our church. There were tears, of course, but for the first time in about a year, they were really HAPPY tears! Heather took a few pics for me, but I don't have them up yet, either...


• Also in the works, Philip and I are headed to Colorado in January for a ski trip! We will be gone for five days, and it will be only the second time we've ever been alone in our entire marriage (the first was for one night last December while we were in West Virginia). We've already paid our deposits, and we're really looking forward to it. Philip will be skiing and snowboarding, and I plan to veg out in the beautiful scenery with my camera, some tatting, and good hot cocoas. We'll spend our evenings in the condo with another couple, making homemade meals and chatting and playing games - I'm so excited!

I'm sure there's so much more I need to update about, but I've got to get moving and push some more laundry through. I've got leaves to rake in the backyard, laundry to put away, dinner to fix, and a mandatory full-staff employee meeting tonight to attend as well. Go, go, go - that's me!

While doing nothing in particular today, I was struck by a shocking thought: posthaste's little one, Sophie, is going to be 2 this summer! How is that possible already? It seems like I was *just* begging her not to have the babe while I was in West Virginia for a visit, as I didn't want to miss the big announcement (she did anyway, though - stinker).

Also, welfy? I received your mail today, did my part, and am now off to shop for a postcard. I'm so honored to have now also touched something that your beloved friend Frances did as well - wow! Thanks for letting me participate. :-)

Several weeks ago, during a time when I was really struggling, my friend gardenmama reached out to me with an encouraging quote. She left it for me in a comment, and I clung to its message instantly. I loved it so much that I wrote it out on sticky notes, and I stuck the message to my desk: I wanted to see the hopeful words each and every day with ease.



A couple weeks later, a surprise box arrived at my doorstep. Imagine my heart's delight and warmth as I dug through the bubble wrap to find that same wonderful quote, this time immortalized on a beautiful plaque. The plaque was a gift from Carmen as well, and she'd included a small stand. I proudly displayed the gift in my kitchen, and I think warmly of my friend each time I see it.

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Good friends can be so hard to find, yet I have been blessed with so many. I am luckier than I can ever put into words.

I just opened the mail (the first time I've done it this week, no less), and in it I found a strangely-shaped, duct-taped package for me. I recognized the sender as livemockingbird, and I was giddily curious. It took me a little bit to work the scissors through the tape (duct tape is HARD!), but I finally got it. I then noticed that the strange shape was due to the 'package' actually consisting of a rolled-up brown bag. I reached inside, and I pulled out this:


"Pop in the Bath" Bubble Bar Slice

Uplifting citrus bubble bath brighten outlooks
Do you ever reminisce about summers past when you got lost in fields of flowers and had a good time? Well, then try a Pop in the Bath bubble bar. Let its soothing bergamot and invigorating citrus oils lift you out of the doldrums. We make four different-colored bouquets of bubbles, each as lovely as the next, so you never know which one you're going to get.

Mine is white, topped with a green flower with orange center. I can barely smell, but even I can smell how yummy this is! OMG, I'm so excited to try it! Soooo many of my friends rave about LUSH bath products all the time (if I recall correctly, mama_bec's little girl Haley even made it into their catalog), but I've never experienced anything from them myself! It will be SUCH a treat!

I noticed then that the rolled-up brown bag was actually a LUSH bag. Ha, I'm such a newbie. A seasoned LUSH fanatic would've spotted that right away, I'm sure. ;-) Oh, and there was a note enclosed with the bubble bar:

For a wonderful, thoughtful, caring, loving, lovable, very-rarely-puts-herself-first kind of friend -- I can only hope this brings you at least one relaxing, think-only-about-Nicole-for-a-while-bath!

Love, Meri

Thank you SO much, girl! You just have no idea how much this means to me, and your thoughtful gift couldn't have come at a better time. I'm so geeked to take a bath now. Thank you!