Not as easy to tell as I had hoped but the snow is up to my side mirror along the road. And it’s snowing again. Fab. I’m spending a few nights at my parents because they live closer to work in the event things get out of hand again. Were forecasted another 6 or so inches tonight on top of the 2 feet we have.

For once the snow started right about on schedule… early afternoon. I got off work (thank god) at 730pm and started my way home. Any later in the evening and I might have been stranded at the hospital all weekend. By the time I left work we had probably around 4-5inches:

The ride home was harrowing. I have AWESOME snow tires and might have made it home without so much as an adrenaline rush if it weren’t for the other yahoos on the road. I don’t know what’s wrong with people. There’s no happy medium in heavy snow. You’ve got the pussys going 5 miles per hour on the highway (not always in the right hand lane either) and then the fools in the pick-up trucks going 50.

There was the one particular asshole (that’s right, I said it) in a pickup truck that I just couldn’t seem to get rid of on the way home. He clearly had a rearwheel drive truck and bad tires because he was fishtailing on the straight aways even. He barely had control over his car and was fishtailing into the right lane while he was attempting to PASS PEOPLE. I would have been SOOOO pissed if he had hit my car. On more than one occasion I was stopped at a red light and had to leave a full empty car length in front of me so that when he tried to start his car again he wouldn’t swing over into mine. UGH. I was a ball of nerves by the time I got home. I fortunately didn’t work for the rest of the weekend and still have a few more days off so I haven’t had to worry about getting to work, but good lord I swear Friday night I woke up like 8 times in the middle of the night worried I was late for work!

Here’s what we woke up to the next day:

Hubbin even shoveled parts of the driveway before bed (can you see where he shoveled?)

And he shoved the deck off before bed cause he was worried about the weight of the snow.

Then here’s the clearing process:

Some kid came by and said “Can I shovel your driveway for $20?” we agreed and then snickered behind the closed door about the deal of the century. We ended up paying him $40 because our driveway is deceptively large. When he finished he said “uhhh, could I up it to $30? That was a lot bigger than I thought” lol Here’s the kid just starting his job (the driveway actually goes all the way over the the phone pole):

His shoveling made possible our going out to Barnes & Nobel for a starbucks today and to pick up some extra food from walmart, which did not include eggs because apparently eggs are essential to surviving any winter storm. This is the egg section all bare (because god forbid you go without an omelet for 24hours til they clear the snow):

I decided I needed a new hobby, I would have considered my old hobby scrapbooking, but I haven’t finished one of those since the end of college. Funny thing is there’s just not nearly as many photo opportunities when I’m doing nothing but working and going to school? Anyway, plus scrapbooking required expensive supplies and a messy working space – not something I could easily pick up and put down or take with me. Several of the girls at work were on a knitting and or crocheting kick in our downtime on nightshift. I jumped on the bandwagon in the spring and took off like a rocket with the crocheting business. Completely addicted to yarn. I actually started with knitting but it was a little complicated plus with knit projects there seems to be all this emphasis of ‘checking the gauge’ blah blah blah. I prefer the ability to invent my own patterns that seemed to come with crochet, plus there was less equipment. After I graduated from plain scarfs I moved on to baby blankets and hats, I’ve had a bit of success with booties as well but there’s still room for improvement there. I like making baby items because A: they are small and quickly finished projects and B: I completely have baby fever now, I won’t deny it anymore and knitting/crocheting baby items is a fabulous outlet. When people ask who they’re for I say “no one – but someone will have a baby eventually right?” So it’s perfectly okay to accumulate a pile of handmade future baby gifts. PLUS, when we have a baby I can keep all the ones I like

Here’s a few of my finished and mostly finished projects:

The first ever completed blanket – one of my favorite still very simple design with white yarn that has a hint of sparkly (simple double crochet with scalloped edges):

Scarf I completed for my MIL with a matching hat for Christmas (experimenting with shell patterns):

Hat and matching blanket I gave to my friend for her then 6month old girl – excellent fall pattern blanket for pumpkin hunting (Double and single crochet starting from the inside out):

One of my first granny square attempts using multiple colors of yarn (it’s not much further along than this now even though this photo was moooonths ago):

My first ‘boy’ blanket completed with patchwork granny squares. I simply fell in love with the blue/green multicolored yarn I still have like 4 balls I haven’t even touched yet but I have many goals for that yarn, I’m working on a knit hat to match and intend to make booties and/or leg warmers to match. Squee!:

A pink basket weave (all double crochet) I love the yarn, it’s twisted pink/brown/white that reminds me of Neapolitan ice cream. The blanket is very warm so someone needs to have a baby girl in the winter – I also made a little matching pink hat with crochet flowers sewn on (I kid you not, I am a crochet ninja) I haaaaate the basketweave pattern though because progress is SO slow (part of why I love the grannysquare blankets because they just let you zip right along) but I WILL finish it and soon. I swear. Maybe.

I am currently studying/paper writing at Panera and pondering the irony that I may or may not be stealing coffee from Panera while reading and writing my Ethics homework for the week……

Nothing but work and school since I last posted. I do lead a very lame life. My official stint as a steady charge nurse has begun which is really quite a pain in my ass. I accepted this position (which isn’t really a new position or more pay) really because it will A: look good on my resume and B: because it’s probably a good growth experience for me. However, with no additional financial compensation there’s not really many other benefits than now the “flow” of the ER and all the other issues throughout the day come back to me as my responsibility.

I am back on the diet wagon. We’ve got a competition going through my workplace with teams of 5 and we all weigh-in weekly. I know I’m not obese so can the negativity before you start… but my jeans are fitting tighter these days and I’ve got a bit of muffin top action going with my pants and shirts. (I do love that I get to wear scrubs on a daily basis – they are very forgiving)

Official starting weight on the 11th was 130.1… I’ll keep you posted. We have like 11 or 12 weeks of the competition and I set my goal at 8lbs (although 10 would be ideal). Which will get me close to what I was back in March when I fell off the wagon. The winner in the competition is based on the percentage of goal weight that the team achieves. I decided I needed a little motivation and accountability.

I’ve been using my Lose It! app on the iPhone.

I looked at my blog and was about to start typing “well at least it hasn’t been a whole month since I posted…” but then I realized that said November 22 not December 22 and we are after all in January 2010. Whoops.

I wish I had something exciting to fill you in on after  1.5month absence but unfortunately I do not.

We’re still hemming and hawing about the idea of the new house and haven’t yet even put our house on the market. Frankly I’d feel better about upgrading if I was closer to being done with graduate school. (ie: closer to my ~$20,000/yr raise I’m anticipating when finished rather than my whooping $917/yr raise I got this year… that’s $0.49 an hour. If I were my employer I might consider being ashamed about giving out less than 3% raises each year – just sayin’)

I’m about to start the first semester of my grad program and am quite cranky (among other reasons) because my one teacher has assigned homework that we’re to turn in the first class… SO on my last day of break before I go back to work for the rest of it I’m doing homework. Bleh.

I’m also cranky because I have cramps/PMS and because it’s 20 degrees out for like the 5th day in a row and I’m tired of being so damn cold, because I swear to you even though our thermostat hasn’t changed it feels colder inside. That’s right. I’m in a mooooood today. I did however recently knit myself a scarf that’s warm and fuzzy and I may just have to wear that while I sit here at my desk doing my HOMEWORK.

Yesterday the crew came in to take the remaining leaves off the trees, today they made it look like winter outside of the hospital, and tomorrow they’re going to make it snow while filming a movie…

Tonight Hubbin is falling asleep dreaming of scenarios tomorrow that would involve me somehow giving Anne Hathaway mouth to mouth tomorrow at work.

The meeting with our real estate agent and her boss went pretty well last night, not nearly as bad as I expected. I was expecting him to tell us that we would never be able to get out of this house more than we originally paid for it — forget the random improvements we made.

I think he genuinely liked our house, he was drooling not only over the refinished hardwood floors but thought we (it was all Hubbin) had fantastic taste in furniture and chose excellent projects for improvement. So while I don’t think we’d make a profit by selling our house, he did talk about listing it for $34,900 more than we bought it for 4 years ago. I don’t know exactly how much we’ve put into it since we bought it… but it’s probably close to that. (Paved the gravel driveway, new furnace, new hot water heater, new attic insulation, new ’styrofoam’ insulation throughout, refinished hardwood, new kitchen floor — I’m sure that takes us mighty close to $30,000) The sad thing is I don’t think anyone will ever make a profit on this house ever not because it’s not a beautiful house, but because it’s ~20ft from a main road. Part of the reason we would be hesitant to put on an addition or something like that.

I love my Husband he was completely cracking me up last night… I’m not sure I uttered more than 5 sentences the whole night (I’m the quiet one) but he was rattling on and on about everything as per usual and our real estate agents boss offered him a job, lol. So I guess if he ever leaves teaching we’ll have to put him straight into sales. Either real estate or there was one time we were at a BMW dealership (checking out the new minicoopers cause Hubbin looooooves him some cars) and he was telling me all the features and they offered him a job there on the spot too.

Anyway — so the meeting didn’t go bad and the agents essentially said our house can go on the market as is and they’re fairly optimistic.

Since Hubbin announced  that they think his mother has Alzheimers he’s become a bit more serious about the possibility of us buying a newer or bigger house and her moving in with us. We went through this phase last summer with this house we liked a mile or so away from us… but she wasn’t ready to move out of her house. Now she’s game so Hubbin’s been shopping around a bit and there’s a house we both like (MIL hasn’t seen it yet) and we’ve been to see it now with our temporary real estate agent…

Today though is the moment I’m dreading… The real estate agent is going to come take a look at our house, and tell us what we’ve got to do to try an sell it. Why I’m dreading this? Because I do believe our house was on the market >1year before we bought it and I think it’s going bring our dreams of buying this new house to a screeching halt while we wait for someone to take an interest in our house.

I’d love to move, I’m not crazy about our house for many reasons I didn’t think would be important to me at the time we moved in. For instance, our house was built in the 1870s and as such has only makeshift closets, 1 full bathroom (well technically it has two but the one is in the dungeon like basement with the man eating spiders — right next to the laundry) our kitchen is oh… 12×7 with approximately 3 square feet of counter space. The house we went to look at is one Hubbin found online. Also an old house… but more like 1920/30s so it’s considerably newer. It’s essentially a flipped house by some dude that works with a construction company and likes restoring old houses. I saw it for the first time last night and frankly, it’s swoon worthy. 2nd floor laundry! Squee! new kitchens and bathrooms! — he clearly made two of the bedrooms into bathrooms. He finished the attic to make a 4th bedroom and the second full bathroom. New furnace, new windows, new floors on and on…. the two big draw backs are 1. no attached garage (he would build a brand new detached one on as part of the sale conditions) and 2. Its right nextdoor to a funeral home (which I would mind much less if they didn’t keep their gigantic parking lot roped off round the clock…

I was chuckling last night when Hubbin was describing to his mother where it is in relation to our house and it does *honestly* sit right next to the funeral home and then a block on the other side is the cemetary lol… His mother said “well good you can just wheel me next door then when the time comes”. Hubbin did tell her it’s right down the road from an assisted living center also if she gets too rowdy :-p

The other draw back… okay so three I guess… is that this does not have a finished basement apartment like the one we looked at last summer or the more expensive one we looked at two weeks ago so my mother in law would either take a portion of the second floor or it would be possible to close off the living room area for her on the first floor. So that’s obviously not ideal… however it would be favorable to her living in our current dining room that you have to walk through to get into or out of the house. So well see….

I’m making an effort to post this now before the meeting tonight just because then there’s less to update… plus it was definitely favorable with the temperature “issue” a couple weeks ago to do a play by play rather than try to summarize 3 weeks later when I finally remembered to blog about it.

Just because it’s an impressive change and you’ve all been following along… I’m back to my chilly self — it was nice being warm for a little while tho…

Just because everyone should be updating their blog at 5:15am…

I think this was an official false alarm now…