Holiday weekend

It's the end of May already....where did all the time go? My kids only have school for another week and a half. Aidan turned in his last homework packet yesterday. He was THRILLED, I can tell you!

We have Jimmy's girls this weekend and I went to pick them up last night. We're supposed to have them through Monday, but as usual, things are complicated when it comes to their mother. Tonight we will just relax and maybe play a few games at home since Jimmy has to work. Tomorrow I have a girls afternoon planned with my girlfriends and tomorrow night, we are all taking our kids to a Whitecap's game. Jimmy's oldest daughter, Rain, is REALLY excited about that. Sunday we had planned on a day of playing outside (volleyball, soccer, etc), grilling out and possibly putting out the sprinkler depending on the temperature. If the girls have to go back on Sunday though, we will take them back after church.

I hope everyone has a safe and wonderful Memorial Day weekend! God bless!

Pictures

I've finally found some time to upload pictures so I thought I would put some of them up. There is a mixture here of the wedding, and some Libby Lu shots of the girls.

Work rant....

Let me give you readers (all 1 of you!) some warning…this is a work rant. I love my job….I adore my boss, he’s the best boss I’ve ever worked for and the owners are awesome too, I get along really well with my “partner in crime” (as my boss calls us) but I just have to vent today. This is a smaller company, 11 years ago it started in one of the owner’s basements and it’s grown from there. From the basement it moved to a 5,000 sq.ft. building and from there, to an 8,000 sq.ft. building and finally, we’ve grown into a 50,000 sq.ft. building. Buildings aren’t the only thing we’ve grown out of….we finally had to move on to a new accounting/order system. Since the company’s inception, we’ve used Quickbooks. I know, I know, accounting for dummies. But it worked! On January 1st this year, we went live on a new system. The first month was nightmarish. The software company that provided this system for us was very new at this system and we’re still feeling the pains from them not knowing what they were doing. So, about two months ago, we found a local consultant who was a “pro” at this new system. We brought him in and he was a HUGE help. Our mistake was allowing him free reign over everything. I handle the bank reconciliation and I haven’t seen it in two months. Now that I’m doing April’s, I’m finding a lot of problems with the way he did the last few months and this is going to cause endless headaches and a lot of clean up. Now beyond the system issues, I also have a pet peeve. I think it’s terribly rude of someone to come to your desk while you are sitting at it, and start going through your files to find something they want. Am I crazy? This gentleman does that ALL the time. I’ve taken to moving my files around, but he inevitably finds where I’ve moved them to. He also comes to my desk after I leave for the night and takes things. The worst part of that is that he NEVER puts things back where he got them from. Our filing cabinets are a mess now because he puts things back in out of order.

Ok **deep breath and some big prayers** I’m done now. I’m just trying my best to hold my tongue at work but this all just needed to come out! Sorry! God bless!

Graceland, TCB and all things Elvis

Who knew? I planned our trip to Graceland with much eye rolling. I huffed and puffed about doing it for my mother-in-law...what a great DIL I am, huh? I anticipated the trip solely for the excuse to get out of town for a few days...and for the break, I just had to put up with a bunch of tacky, overdone Elvis memorabilia. Imagine my surprise when I found that I actually ENJOYED the visit to Graceland. I learned more about Elvis in those four hours than I have in my entire life. I'm in no danger of collecting kitschy Elvis baubles but my interest has been tweaked. Walking through Graceland was eye opening, if only for the fact that it made Elvis more of a real person to me than the Vegas lounge act that I had in my mind. Most of the rooms in Graceland were pretty hideous but let's cut the guy a break, he bought the place in 1957. Tacky was the style then, as was evidenced by the many jumpsuits we saw in the costume museum.

Beyond Graceland, Memphis is a beautiful city. I wish we had more time down there, the day and a half we actually spent in the city was not enough to see all of it. Sometime, we will make another trip to Tennessee and see both Nashville and Memphis again. For now though, we have enough trips on our plate. In a little over two months, we will be taking our delayed honeymoon to Orlando, and then we are going to Holly for the Renaissance Faire later this summer and Traverse City in October.

God bless!

Returning to normal life....

Last week was a blur. I can't even remember which books I read. I spent the entire week decompressing from the wedding. Yes...it is FINALLY over and I'm extremely happy to say that I am now Mrs.Chase. I love it. The wedding itself was beautiful and it went off without a hitch. As the story normally goes, it was over so quickly. The same can be said for Thanksgiving, you spend all day cooking and it's eaten in less than 30 minutes. Or about Christmas....all those months shopping and baking and decorating and then BOOM, the kids tear through the gifts in under 15 minutes and you're left to wonder "Is that it?!?!?" The weekend was a VERY long one but it seemed compressed into a very short amount of time. I'm still tired thinking of it and I'm very glad that we planned our honeymoon to take place months after the fact. I would have been useless the first few days.

We haven't gotten our pictures back yet but I will add one poorly lit on that we do have to this little note. I hope that everyone is doing well. God bless!

4 more days

It's amazing what a little quiet will do for my peace of mind. It's only four more days until the wedding but I haven't stressed at all this week. Maybe it's because my kids are out of town, visiting my parents, so I have less to worry about. Jimmy & I are getting things done at a good rate and I'm not freaking out that Friday will arrive with a ton left to do. As usual, when my kids are gone, I make too many plans with friends and that's put a little bit of a pinch on my evenings. For instance, tonight I'm going for drinks with my favorite coworker, then I need to get my manicure & pedicure AND my good friend, Heather is supposed to be coming over to visit. Did I mention I also need to do laundry and clean tonight? :-)

This week work seems to be more of an interruption of real life...there is so much I need to get done outside of work. Thankfully the week has gone by relatively quickly. Tomorrow they are throwing me a shower/luncheon here which will be very nice. Jimmy is off work tomorrow night so we will finish up the shopping and probably go out to dinner for our anniversary (it's been three years tomorrow). Friday will be filled with small stuff..finishing up cleaning, picking up the flowers and making them all up, etc. Someone just asked me this morning if I'm nervous and I'm not. Not at all, I'm just excited. I'm ready to be married.

More books..

I finished Change Baby by June Spence and I wouldn't recommend it. It wasn't so horrible that I couldn't finish it but it wasn't worth the read either.

From Change Baby I moved on to another supernatural fiction novel.....Night Life by Caitlin Kittredge. It's the first in a new series and it was pretty darn good. The heroine is a homicide dectective that just happens to be a werewolf as well. I like her character and I will definitely keep an eye out on the rest of the series.

After that, I started Tales from the Crib by Jennifer Coburn. So far it's a hilarious read that has kept me laughing out loud (my fiancee thought I had lost it last night!) and I can't wait to finish it. It's not a book I would buy to read again but I'd definitely recommend it as a good read to women who like chick lit.