Blissful afternoon. *LOVE* fall. Enough said.

But anyway… I do babble. Shot at 7pm, cleaned up site and home by 8:30pm. Thus, it just felt like we’d done something wrong because there was still so much evening left to burn. At least we had Joyce & Pete’s newly lightning-replaced big screen to watch.

This morning we did a final disposal of our three carved pumpkins, with a couple of entertainingly dramatic quarter-sticks of dynamite for two of them. The lids seemed to fly sky-high with a slow rotation, while the rest of the pumpkins just chunked and blew in all directions.

The third pumpkin had a leftover titanium salute placed inside, which James proceeded to attempt to shoot. It was my favorite, carved with a smirky smile which we originally thought just looked like he was oblivious to the fact that he was about to go boom! After emptying a couple clips trying to find the salute shell inside the pumpkin, however, he just seemed to be mocking the shooters. After having shot enough to put us all off guard, and leaving the pumpkin looking more like swiss cheese, James finally hits his mark with a rifle. EVER so much more efficient than a quarter-stick, instead of flying chunks you could see, the salute exploding simply caused the pumpkin to cease to be, replaced by a huge puff of smoke. Almost looked like a magic trick… now you see it, now you don’t.

Anywho… trapped now in Winfield with the Talladega race crowd between us and home, we’re still hanging out. We’ve already gotten to go through a huge collection of Barbie’s and Ken’s today, and I have a couple pictures to post of their fabulousness. Unfortunately, only camera phone pics this weekend. James and I both neglected to pack a camera, and Joyce’s seems to have died. This was the first paid show we’ve done that I haven’t filmed. =\

Last funny note: When Joyce told Angela by phone that we were blowing up pumpkins this morning, Angela said we were retarded. Dennis, however, thinks we are the coolest people ever.

So, James had a dream, where he opened the patio door to go water and Kitty ran out. He stepped back in to grab her harness, and when he came out he found her just sitting up by Smudge’s grave. I think it was a sweet dream, and probably us projecting that Kitty misses him, too.  It’s one of those things that is weighing on us as to whether to get another cat right now or not. We have to go out of town again to do two fireworks shows for the 4th, so I guess whether or not she’s all crazy again after our absense will help us decide. I don’t think we really want another kitten though, and –speak of the devil, I’ve sat still here for 5 minutes so it’s time for Kitty to be crawling on me — instead I have been looking for 2-3 year old cats on craigslist, hopefully as grown as they’ll be and already used to people and other pets. James, I’m sure, is looking for Savannah cats again.

So, mom called yesterday. She hadn’t gotten my letter yet, but had talked to Joyce and heard about Smudge. She could hear me making dinner over the phone, so she wouldn’t talk long. Nothing was resolved. She told me she was sorry about Smudge, sorry she hadn’t called sooner, and sorry she had to lie to Dennis about driving down to Alabama for the 4th. We hung up with our “usual” I love yous, but I’m still not going to be calling her. We probably will just stay there for my reunion, but I’m not sure I’ll even call until we’re in town.

So, this is week 3 out of bootcamp. I was going to start back today, which is probably why my sinuses went nuts. Instead, I’ll do next week. I have to get back in the habit. Two weeks of crappy sleep, crappy food, too many desserts, forgetting vitamins, booze instead of water, and of course the fabulous emotional roller-coaster, well, they’ve left me pretty vulnerable.

So, we’ve recently watched Road House, Top Gun and Independence Day with rifftrax, and I watched Crossroads, which needs a rifftrax. I’ve also had a desire to watch Beastmaster, Krull, and Ice Pirates. This leads me to believe I must have an incurable brain fever which is causing me to crave and enjoy crappy 80s movies. Oooh… yes, maybe even a little Pirate Movie would be good. I clearly need help.

The 97 degree heat apparently cut our numbers despite the RSVPs, and it was commented that mostly local folks didn’t show. Our anticipated 150 turned into about 90, and left us with much food — though amazingly we went through the booze PDQ. The pavillion setup worked out great, and the combo concrete-sand dance floor was perfect. And I guess for never having run a wedding rehersal or ceremony before, I did okay. Figuring out how to walk down the aisle to non-traditional music was fun, and I owe a big “sorry” to Angela for messing with her plan for the girls. Angela had to walk first, and when I threw in the “try the traditional walk to slow things down” she did it great… then of course, nobody else could figure out how to do it, though at least they all walked slower than in rehersal.

Got tons of comments about how smooth everything went, and how beautiful it all was. Myself, the caterer, the DJ and the bartender were all invited to put together another party soon, and all but me apparently took the job gladly. My reply: “Am I related to the person this party is for? Otherwise, hell no. You can’t pay me enough.”

There are a million little gripey-bitchy-moany-whiny things I’d like to relate, but I think I’m just going to let things go. I’m still worrying about things relating to the event as if I could go back and fix them, even though I doubt anybody even noticed. More than anything I wish we’d had more hired help for the night as the help we had was kept pretty busy shuttling folks back and forth to their cars.

Honestly, I have no idea what family p0ses were made, though I hope the photographer was on top of those. Not sure why Jessie elected to let the photographer leave so early in the night and blow our chance of any good night shots with the fireworks, but was really too tired to care. Don’t think anybody got good shots of the fireworks really, but maybe there is video. I have 2 tapes left by Steven’s mom which need to be converted to digital so I can go through them.

Overall, caterers: wow! food was awesome! DJ: yeah, awesome. Nobody expects that many costume changes and for him to jump in and be dancing, too. He was hilarious! Cake lady: Um yeah, when I mentioned the cake would be in the sun, I meant the cake would be IN THE SUN. And she didn’t even leave us a box to save the cake top. I do hope somebody got pictures before we had to slice up the leaning-tower that it became in the sun. Dumbass.

And finally I was impressed at how many people just jumped in and worked their butts off to make things come together and to keep everything going. I guess it just goes to show how much Jessie is loved for the whole family to pull together in such a way to make the day the best it could be. I couldn’t be happier to have planned things and even to be HBIC for the day. It was sort of amazing to be running around materializing fans and water and safety pins and bobby-pins and whatever anybody needed without them having to ask twice in the midst of setting things up. I can’t wait to get more pictures to go through!

I’m not even IN this wedding and I have just picked up yet ANOTHER possible dress I want to wear to it. I’ve got quite the array, and should be able to cover whatever mood I’m in day of the event. I even have them narrowed down so James only has to bring two ties to match any and everything I have. So, I know at least WE will be dressed…

24 days. This weekend, Alabama trip. Staining/finishing the floor in the pavilion. Joyce has picked up our “big-ass roll” of fabric, and it’s time for the final assessment of what we still might need to order or buy while we still have the time to do it.

Next weekend, “Girl’s weekend” for James’ mom’s birthday, where hopefully I can manage to relax and maybe even borrow some nice jewelry to wear with my array of dresses. We’ll likely get a mani & pedi and I’ll see if there’s a chance in heck I can maintain it for two weeks. Shyeah. Need to color my hair, too.

Then the following weekend, June 13 I leave for “week of wedding”, which I have mostly off work, with the promise to check on things daily a couple times, and will attempt to keep sis and myself sane as we finalize things and set up the event. Most of the rest of the family will be arriving on Wednesday, so we should have a lot of help.

James is downstairs soldering cables for the new fireworks firing system which will debut at this show. Actually, sis talked to the caterers today to confirm and see if they’d leave us some items to return the next day and they’ve said that if we’re doing fireworks and having an open bar, that they might just stick around for the whole party.

Mmmm… open bar. Which reminds me… must go liquor shopping. Wonder where I can find a site to help me scale up a drink recipe to mass quantities so I can mix up a gallon or so of things. So much work to be done still.

But now, time for tv and a workout.

JamesT was gone fishing for a week with his dad and the gang, which gave me the opportunity to drive up to Bristol for mom’s birthday.  I know I meant to post about that, but the I fought the initial urge because it was just too soon. Suffice it to say it was a miserable trip overall from a combination of my own neck pain allowing me no sleep and making me edgy and mom in a particularly hermit yet needy mood. Sometimes we have those phone calls where I realize she’s in that mode, and I regret having called… knowing that the next call will be a difference like night and day where we can just pretend the previous call didn’t happen. Unfortunately this was an in-person trip that I just couldn’t hang up from, and as such, she didn’t ever really seem to break out of that mode. I couldn’t have been more conflicted leaving Sunday, as I’d been DYING to escape since about 20 minutes after I’d gotten there Friday, yet I knew it had been a miserable experience for mom’s birthday, too. Since then, of course, it has been business as usual, with some good phone calls that just pretend that whole weekend didn’t happen.

JamesT made it home earlier than expected, though, which even though it meant they’d had some misery and drama at the end for the fishing gang, still meant he got some days off at home with me that were appreciated. Five minutes after we walked in the door from picking him up from the gang passing through town on the way home, he realized he’d left a present he’d gotten for me in the truck. He confessed it was a combo trip and Valentines present, and was sort of upset though just tired. It was no worry, though, since I’d gotten so caught up with the bad mom visit and then work that I’d neglected to place the order for my gift for him until late, and it wouldn’t be here by Valentine’s day either. Thus, we just said “screw Valentines Day” if it is just going to stress us both out trying to do something special because of the day. We had thought about going out or making something special, but on the day… Saturday as it was… it just seemed like the best thing was a zero stress day, where we sleep in, stay in our pajamas all day, hang out, play video games, and order pizza delivered. That worked out just fine, too.

This weekend we’ll be heading to Alabama to help as we can with their continued “yard work” .. aka turning their house into a site for an outdoor wedding in June. It should be “brisk” to say the least, but it’s a good weekend for us to visit, and we’re up for whatever we can help with. Just in case, we’ll have some Netflix movies in tow in case of a yard-work rainout, but likely we’ll also have some yard-work rain gear, too. =)

Work is… work, and I am thankful every day to still have anything to do that is providing a paycheck in these times. The frustrations are typical, and have been vented about before… things not working as expected, tasks taking longer for me to figure out than expected, a billion other little things coming up that keep me from devoting wrapping my head around big problems and just solving them. Thankfully I have a very nice customer who is being very accomodating with me providing some updates to his site, because I have had stupid hassle after hassle at trying to get it done, all based right here on my stupid computer.

Something is going on with my permissions, where I can work on a file for hours, saving it every so often, but if I close it for the day… or the computer reboots or anything that causes the file to close, then it will only open as read only. I can save it as a new version and work on that, but the same thing will happen again the next time. Additionally I can’t seem to get the older versions to delete. But, even dealing with multiple copies of things, I have added fun when I try to cut my images and put them in the proper directory tree so I can zip them and upload them to the site. Some items will save as read only and won’t let me rename the file or copy or move it to the new location. 

 Anyway, it’s just making me nuts… which of course is only enhanced with random insanity from Mac thrown in. In theory he’s on vacation now, though I’m sure he’s probably still so mad at me he could just spit.

I guess it’s been a while, but want to hear a funny life in Mac’s world story? If you’re not James, then sure you do…

Mac calls customer he is hoping to meet with next week on a visit, leaves her a message. Customer responds to his voicemail with an email saying she is looking forward to it, and mentions that she had previously emailed me about customizing her site (something which he is talking to people about on this visit). Mac forwards customers email to me and simply asks “Is this familiar to you?” I read the exchange, don’t recall customer’s name, search my emails, find an email from customer from December asking me a question about customization, find my reply to customer with answer and instructing her how we should proceed if she wants to do it. Finding nothing else, I send her email and my reply to Mac, with the message, “This is all I found. Never heard anything else back from her. If she wants to talk to you about customization while you’re there, I guess that will work!” Mac replies to me angrily about “did I call her today?” and “why would I waste time replying to him when she is waiting for my reply”. I am confused by his response, considering I had replied to her and he had never asked me to call her. I reply that “I replied to him because he asked me a question, and in case he didn’t read down, I also included to him where I had replied to her, so as far as I knew she wasn’t waiting on any reply from me.” He replies again, angrier, about how “he isn’t interested in walking down this same path with me again” and “if I’d only called her instead of being so rude with him when he was just asking for some help”. Apparently, he also called Mary to complain about my not being a team player and not responding to customers who “are older and don’t expect emails. They expect phone calls and barely even use their email, and when was I going to learn that.”  To make his point here, he copies a section of her original message to me out, blows it up to a big blue font, underlines it and sends it back to me. The section from the customer says “I look forward to your response by phone or email.” I am baffled how this might make his point, since she EMAILED me, she says I can respond by EMAIL or phone, thus if I do choose to email her, how am I non-responsive? Moreover, this poor older agent who barely uses her email in fact started this whole mess by responding to a voicemail from Mac with an email of her own. Clearly, she is accustomed to the practice of replies by emails, even replies to phone calls by email, which our exchange had not been.

Bottomline here, whatever else he’ll come back later and try to point out, that is ALL that was in our email exchange. If he meant to say more, he didn’t actually say it. Isn’t it just like a man to expect you to read his mind.  All he had to say was, “Apparently she didn’t get your reply before, would you please call her?” Instead… lectures, anger, acusations and the tri-fecta of poor emailing etiquette in pasting select portions back to me in large fonts, strange colors and underlined for my attention, since as you all know, I never learned how to read and reading BIG BLUE UNDERLINED words is easier than normal words. OH! I get it NOW! Gah, my bad! When you just said call her, I couldn’t read that, but when you said CALL HER, then it made sense. Got it.

On his mom’s side, his grandparents are both full of health complaints, and likely won’t be doing much travel in the future. I’m glad they got to see our house once, and that they made it to Alabama last summer to finally meet mom. James’ aunt Iris has moved back in with them in her transition back to town, and while she looks for work, but it seems she might not look for her own place afterall, since they seem to be benefiting from having someone living with them to help out.

This was also Jen’s first Christmas solo, and I guess the separation is underway, with a year required before they can divorce. She expressed how nervous she was to be visiting the family after all her drama, and was afraid we’d all be mad at her just because we all like Marc. None of us have to live with him, though, and we all support her on her road to happiness however she may have to get there.

I didn’t spend much time with James’ dad’s side of the family this visit, other than some time Christmas morning, and even then his Aunt Mary was too sick to join us. I think Noah was suitably spoiled by Santa, though he was grown-up enough to wait for us to arrive before opening presents Christmas morning and not complain. James’ Dad and Noah will be coming down to Alabama to help set up the New Years eve fireworks show, or rather his Dad will help. Noah will likely get stuck playing games with GNI, pending they managed to extend her visit.

If we didn’t need to check on Kitty, and if I didn’t have work issues, including needing to pick up my paycheck, we probably would have just headed on to Alabama to see my family and start on the fireworks prep, but instead we came back to Atlanta for a couple days. It is always nice to get to sleep in our own bed again after a trip to Chattanooga with the “Worst Waterbed on Earth^TM“. So, today including some random work nonsense, we’ve been doing laundry and packing for a cold New Years eve working outside.

Not really sure what the post-New Years fireworks plan is. I guess there might be some drinking and carousing at the house afterward, if we’re not all just exhausted from the clean-up. Next day we will have to walk the site by daylight and make sure it’s all taken care of. Neither James or I have to work Friday, so I guess we’ll figure out our schedule as we can. We likely won’t head back until at least Saturday, or if they have worked out to extend Ivy’s ticket, we’ll likely be heading back to coincide dropping her off at the Birmingham airport, probably Sunday. The frewtnut niece and her hubby should be on their way home today, though.

Anywho… long gone are the days of just enjoying the holidays, as we continue to endeavor to put on these firework shows. The cabin getaway with Kit & Bob the following weekend should be just the nice, no-brainer break that could use after all this travel and work. For those of you lucky enough to just “enjoy” New Year’s eve at some party, perhaps with a tasty beverage, and with or without fireworks, know I envy you and also wish you well. Drive safe and we’ll see you next year!

This weekend will be the first visit east by the Alabama sis & hubby in quite a while! They’re picking up the Cali niece, hubby & GNI (great neice Ivy) on the way over, and should be here late tonight. She gets to be GNI, at least in writing, because she calls me GAK when she can’t be bothered to say the whole phrase “great aunt Kim” every time. God forbid she just call me Kim.

Anywho… time… has… crawled… today. When we had originally planned on getting the fridge and some furniture from the office this week, I’d figured we’d be buried in a wreck of a house just in time for our visitors. As it is, we’ve actually got it together. There’s beer in the fridge and vodka in the freezer. Still need to run our water line to get the ice maker going, but the essense of the party-fridge is now in place.

James’ office, even, with his new desk, is already all set up. We even managed to keep the countertop and filing cabinets he was using for a desk, just move them down, so we can dub them “Pete’s desk”, as some payback for the Alabama folks who dub the countertop in Pete’s office as “James’ desk”. If only they’d get over this way to use it more often, maybe it would be more true.

Most of you already know I took the Facebook plunge over Thanksgiving, primarily because the frewtnut niece is there. I’m discovering a wide range of folks use it, though, and have found more classmates than on any other free network. Now I’ve got the urge to dig out some yearbooks and look people up. It was sort of strange just listing everyone from the same year at the same high school and asking them to be friends, but that seems to be the norm there. I’m looking forward to sending out some personal messages though — after I look people up!

LJ will likely continue to be my venting/journaling site, but I have to say I’m checking Facebook much more often than LJ now. Perhaps it will help keep mom from passing on her terrible case of “hermit” to me if I manage to reconnect with some folk.

Meh… still not even 6:30. Jeez. They will never get here. =)

I guess I don’t have to say here how hard it is to leave, simply because of how much I miss these guys all the time. I might add that with their crazy schedules I just feel like I didn’t do enough to help them while I was here. I feel like the days off they took to spend with us are days they just got further behind in their already tight routine. It’s a tough feeling to shake, though I know would have rather goofed with us than do the boring household stuff anyday.

I guess it’s really time to pack up and get out of their hair. Did all the great-niece spoiling I could get away with already, hugged her twice today, left her a bunch of notes in her room to find this afternoon. Still get some niece time at brunch, though I’m going to leave her card and present here for her to find after work. Told them all last night that we’ve “done” San Diego, so it’s time for them to move back to the east coast, ASAP.

Sure would love to swing sis & Pete picking them up at the airport for their Christmas visit and bringing the whole clan over to see us for a night or two before going back to Alabama. Otherwise, we likely won’t see them over their Christmas visit, since they have to leave before New Years. Like for them to see the house finally, too. I’ll have to plant a bug in sis’ ear about it.

Anywho… enough stalling. Time to get ready.