Today started off kinda funky with the weather sucking (storming and bad visibility) and drivers sucking more. It’s just so strange, Houstonians are so nice in person, but once they get behind the wheel, all human dignity goes out the window and assholeness sets in. I swear! I was making a left turn, at a yield light that had not turned the green arrow yet, so I wasn’t sure if the cars were stopping or going, and apparently was not making that decision fast enough. So the person behind me decides to just turn. Listen buddy, not sure if you’ve ever had any science classes, but two vehicles cannot occupy the same space at the same time! You could have hit me! It was raining for crying out loud. People, I swear! And of course, on the drive home, visibility was near nonexistent, but apparently speeding by 10 miles was still not acceptable by some awesome tailgators and people who drove nearly inbetween other cars to get by. Traffic was awful on the way home, no thanks to these people.

Tonight was the women’s meetup to see Mamma Mia, which, by the way, was awesome. Not as good as the broadway show, naturally, but still good. I love, love, love ABBA. I grew up listening to their music and I had to fight myself just to sing along under my breath. But I felt like I watched the  movie alone. See, a few people I knew were supposed to go to the meetup as well, but probably due to awesome weather and traffic, couldn’t make it. Sara and I had to work late (thanks Pete) and I barely got home in time to make it, and since she lives an hour away, couldn’t make it. At least this meetup was held in my town, so I literally just had to drive down the street. The organizer was supposed to meet everyone out front, but no one was there, and as I walked in I got to talking to another woman who was there for the metup but didn’t see the organizer either. It was my first meetup so I didn’t know the other people so couldn’t recognize them. So basically I sat with this woman who I talked with a bit, but it was like seeing the movie alone. That kinda sucked. And it really made me wish I had a best friend or two here to hang out with and have fun with. Not that I really had those in Cali toward the end before moving out here, we’d long since lost touch and moved on. I realize it’s hard to make friends with people I haven’t known that long but dammit this alone feeling sucks.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Kitty Limericks does doggie limericks too. This one is about Dixie.

Dixie loves to play in the pond.
Of chasing her ball she’s very fond.
They put them together
In sunny weather.
Just watch Dixie and Hubby bond.

She is referencing this video I made of Dixie at the dog park playing with Hubby:

If the video doesn’t work, you can view it on youtube.

Thanks again Karen Jo! You are awesome!

Popularity: 8% [?]

This is adorableness. It really is.

This is the limerick:

Dusty Rose is a kitty who loves her woofy.
She snuggles up in her fur so floofy.
She makes her a pillow
Of her own free will-o
Just to show how much she loves her woofy.

This limerick summarizes my behbeh’s friendliness with the doggie.  They like to use each other as a pillow.

Thanks Karen Jo! Your limericks are just precious.

Popularity: 16% [?]

The average adult has read only 6 of top 100 books.

Look at the list and:
1. Bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (one collection)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Ok seriously, why isn’t Twilight on this list????

But looks like I’m better than the average adult huh? 20/100. I tried reading Pride and Prejudice, but couldn’t get into it, and I also tried War and Peace, but same thing, and the size of the book intimidated me. If only I had it in sections that were smaller and easier to read. Oh, and those that I listed as my faves are those I’ve either read more than once, or would be willing to read again. I did enjoy some of those I read, interestingly enough on purpose rather than in school. I didn’t enjoy much of those “classics” we had to read in school, nor do I remember them. But when I picked them up on my own free will, I enjoyed them quite a bit. On that list is Wuthering Heights, Little Women, and Jane Eyre. There are also a few authors that I feel were left off, like Isabel Allende, Jules Verne, HG Wells, and of course, Stephenie Meyer.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Tonight (yes it’s after midnight but it’s still tonight for me, Saturday) I went to the Miller Outdoor Theater with a few ladies to watch the free showing of the Disney musical Wish Upon a Star.  The plan was to meet at Christina’s and carpool to the show, which is a good thing we did because it was crowded and parking was really hard to find. Who knew that everyone and their children and their mom would be at that show, a free show on a Saturday at that. Yea, maybe we should have expected that.

Anyway though as I arrive at her gate, the security guard yells “flat” and I’m like oh crap. I park in front of her apartment and get out, and sure enough, my back tire is flat. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I think it was after I got off the freeway, cause the road was bumpy and had tons of potholes. That’s Houston for you. So I call USAA and report it, and tell them to save the roadside assistance request until we get back from the show, cause I’ve got my priorities. The guy on the phone told me to call back to activate service about an hour and a half before we will be back, as that is the average wait time on a Saturday night.

So we go to the show. It started at about 8:15. It was alright, but man some of those singers really shouldn’t be. I expected a little more of a story line, not exactly like Mamma Mia (which I’m going to see on Thursday!) but something drawn together. No this was basically a random pairing of medlies with various songs from various Disney movies strung together. It was kinda odd. And really, some of those singers were quite awful, but some were good. And it is kinda scary that when this show isn’t running at that free theater, it’s running for full price tickets at a real theater. Perhaps with the best of the cast, maybe the backup people played larger roles at the free show because the good people couldn’t be bothered, but still, wow. Some of those people, I felt like I could do better, or at least just as well. And I haven’t sung since I got out of high school. But there was one cool thing. I forget which song, but there was a cool gymnastic person climbing up and down and doing funky movements on like a vertical scarf-rope thing. She was tying her self up and hanging upside down and it was really quite pretty. So I got to hear some weird meddlies, got to experience some poor singing, and view a circus show. Anyway at 9:30 they decided to hold intermission, and we decided to leave early, cause we’d had enough of the bad singing and random meddlies.

On the ride back to Christina’s I called USAA to activate my roadside service request. They called me back to tell me a person will be there within 30 minutes. Wow, that’s pretty awesome service. So Christina and I sat around and chatted for a while, and she’s really an awesome lady. I made a new friend! We’d only met like once or twice before then and didn’t really get to talk to each other a lot. The guy showed up pretty quickly, and he replaced my tire in like 5 minutes. He was super fast! I had a full tire in my trunk (not one of those temporary 50 mile tires) but I didn’t  have a full jack set so I couldn’t have done it on my own even if I knew how.

So now I have a broken tire in my trunk instead. I have to get hubby to get me a new tire when he gets back (he’s away in California for a week, I know, I’m so alone this summer!).  Hubby said to check the tires in the morning, because whatever caused that tire to go flat might have damaged another tire, and a slow leak will have it flat by morning. So I need to check and it will really suck if I find another flat. Cause then I’ll have to have the car towed to somewhere they can repair or replace the tire, since I won’t have any new tires. The morning will show, I guess.

Popularity: 32% [?]

So there’s this man at work, JA, who I really don’t think is a nice person. He’s usually really short with people and one time he chewed out the person sitting next to me really loudly in the middle of the cube world. I mean he just yelled at her. She had made some mistake, and instead of taking her into his office and talking to her calmly, he YELLED at her in the middle of cube land for all to hear. Anyway, so this isn’t typically a good guy. Though he can be helpful sometimes, like the time my car battery died he gave me a jump. But anyway. Today he was walking by my cube and decided to come talk to me for a second. He said to me - “by my calculations, you should be getting another promotion in 3 weeks. Great work”. WOW. I mean, that’s quite a compliment coming from someone who isn’t known for saying nice things. But perhaps he’s nice to me because he’s special friends with my Dept Mgr.

EDIT: To clarify, I believe the reason he said 3 weeks is because it took me a year and a half to get a first promotion, but only 6 months to get the second promotion. So he was making a sarcastic compliment.

Popularity: 25% [?]

And apparently, I help.

Two days ago, I thought it would be cute to put my kitteh on top of the gazebo and have her be up high. She’s too cute in tall places cause she’s small and kinda scared acting. Well, hubby got the idea to spray her with a hose, and make her come down quickly. And then he continued to spray her around the backyard, and she kept running around trying to hide. She decided I would protect her, and CLIMBED up me, leaving some nice scratches in the process, and getting me quite soaked. It was pretty funny though. I got to hold her wrapped up in a towel after I got myself cleaned up.

But last night was the worst mean thing ever. Hubby decided it would be fun to leash the cat to the air compressor (which was out in the room cause he was nailing down one peice of trim that had come loose). So I got the harness, and we leashed her to it. So when she tried to run away, she pulled the pin out and the air compressor went POP with lots of loud air noises. That freaked the behbeh kitteh out and she went flying. She tried to run away but because she was leashed to it, she ended up doing flips. It was so hilarious, and so sad at the same time. Her little tail got SO BIG. I always feel bad when I let him be mean to her, but it’s so funny. After a few minutes of it I felt so bad I unhooked her leash so she could run and hide in her bathroom.

We went up after her, and she’s hissing and growling through the door, and as soon as I open the door, she stops, cause she is only mad at him, not me. I’m her favoritest and she’s never blamed me for anything he’s done. Well, I go to pick her up and calm her down, she’s still panting hard and fat tailed, and I see a few poop drops under her. OMG we literally scared the CRAP out of my cat. Poor thing. We just wanted to have fun, not traumatize her! But this morning she’s just fine, she played with me while I was getting ready in the morning like nothing had happened. But man, we made the cat poop herself. That’s just wrong. I’ve never scared the crap out of anything before. Needless to say hubby is now forbidden to mess with my behbeh kitteh.

Popularity: 33% [?]

This week was definitely interesting. I went on a trip to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to the Air Force Base. We were contracted by the base to do an air emissions inventory, and I was on the project. So myself and the project manager flew out to Colorado for 4 days.

The majority of the time was spent waiting on government personell to move their asses. Seriously, they don’t want to do aything. The project manager sent the data inventory sheets to the contact about a month ago, and he did nothing. Instead, he waited for us to get there, and we spent the time calling people and visiting various buildings and shops to gather the data that should have been gathered by now. We also inspected equipment to see if something was not captured in last year’s inventory of the equipment.

But aside from the boringness of that, I got plenty of eye candy. Men in uniform = YUMMY. Of course, that made me miss my own man in uniform so much more. Speaking of, he’s at drill right now. That’s right, I came home, got to spend one evening and half day with him, and he had to go to his 3 day Army drill.  So yes, I’m a bit lonely right now. But we had fun playing hookie. See, I had my 40 hours of work by the time I flew in from Colorado last night, so I decided to work from home today (a few extra hours to get some overtime) but take most of the day off. I haven’t really done much work today though, but I have the weekend to make it up since I already released and had my timesheet approved. So we slept in today, and even went to see a movie! We saw Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D, and it was really good! I really enjoyed that story and I like what they did with the movie.

Anyway, back to Colorado. We got done a few hours early on the last day we were there, yesterday, so on the way to the airport we took a detour through the Garden of the Gods park.  Several different people told us we needed to go there, so we did. It’s quite lovely. It’s got some really neat rock formations and such. Here are a few of the photos I took, for your enjoyment.

And there’s me!

Popularity: 54% [?]

Happy Birthday to the greatest country on this Earth. (If you think otherwise, good for you, but I don’t want to hear it!)

Today was nice so far. Hubby got a bunch of fireworks for us yesterday so when it gets dark we’ll get to shoot them off. Probably after we come back from the city’s fireworks show at the mall. I’m looking forward to that. Otherwise today we went and saw Hancock, which was pretty good, I like Will Smith movies. Then we went to Panera for lunch, and that was our first time eating there so it wa nice.

Last night we went to the Comedy Showcase with some friends. They had an email-only deal with up to 10 free tickets for a special pre-4th of July Thursday show, so we were able to round up 6 people to go. It was pretty good, I love comedy clubs. We went with Sara (my pregnant frient from work) and her husband Joe, another girlie with the same name as me, and another girl I met recently through another friend. I think Sara and Joe are going to become our best Houston area friends. Sara and I get along real well and Joe and Steven are a lot alike too. The comics were pretty good and I got get some awesome tropical rum drinks, with umbrellas! I love getting drinks with umbrellas. I put one in each ear and then I know I’m done with my two drink minimum, and get cool head decorations too. I know, I’m weird. After the comedy club we went to IHOP for dessert cause we didn’t want to split up just yet. So today we slept in quite a bit.

Yesterday at work we went out to lunch with all the girls in my department, to celebrate me. I know, I’m that awesome. It was one girl’s idea for us to all get together for lunch to celebrate my promotion, cause we all rarely get together, so the 5 of us met up, 4 actually coming from the office and one meeting us from a client’s office. It was really nice. Another girl there announced she was pregnant, so there were to pregos at the table (Sara was there too). And when the bill came they didn’t let me pay and split the bill 4 ways. It wasn’t expensive at all but still, it was really sweet of them.

Popularity: 77% [?]

I just got promoted again! In December I got promoted to Staff Specialist II, which made me very happy. My department manager met with me this week and said I’m getting promoted to a Senior Staff Specialist which comes with a 6% raise! Apparently my leadership, maturity and good work on projects with client recognition justifies another promotion even though technically based on years I shouldn’t be eligible. This promotion typically comes with 4-5 years work experience, and I’ve been with the company for two. Though I suppose if you count my internship that makes 3 years work experience, but still. WOW. YAY! My supervisor has really been taking care of me here. I think they are really afraid to lose me but little do they know that I wouldn’t be brave enough to quit my job while hubby is still in school. Plus, things are pretty good for me here, the people I work with a great and even though the clients can be really stressful, it’s better than having stress from management. The only way I’d leave is if I wasn’t being treated well and a new job might be better. But since that’s not the case, I’m staying put.

Popularity: 89% [?]