What Now

So I lied.

Technically the Stupid Paper isn't done, but the rough draft is, so I'm back just breifly for a quick post.

Did you guys have a great Thanksgiving? I did. My dinner was lovely, thank you for asking. You would have been so proud of me! For the first time in 5 years, the smoke alarm didn't even go off once. *happy dance* I was able to do some of the preperation the night before by making my little bundt cakes and decorating them and getting together all of my other ingredients so that I wasn't scrabbling around looking for things. Steve and I spent the morning getting the rest of the house cleaned and doing some laundry, and by the time Rhonda and Lee came over at noon, everything looked nice. I didn't know when they were going to get there, so I didn't have any food to feed them lunch. I felt bad! However, Rhonda still isn't able to eat that much and Steve and Mr. Lee went out to get lunch and would bring me something back. Unfortunately, they went to a buffet, and when they got back, they were full. I was cooking by that time, and they had brought me some lunch, so we hung out until dinner. I ended up making way too much food since Rhonda can only peck, and Steve had gotten a mild case of food posioning from the place they ate lunch, but Mr. Lee and I at least got to enjoy everything. I sent home a ton of the food with Rhonda and Lee, and set about cleaning up. While I was doing that, Steve was watching his recorded episodes of "Prison Break" which is really a very good, albeit far fetched, show. Then we watched a "horror" movie called Spirit Trap, which starred Billie Piper (the newest Dr. Who girl). It wasn't scary at all to me, but Steve hid his eyes. ; ) I ended up throwing away all of our leftovers except for the turkey, so when Steve felt well enough to eat, we didn't have anything left! I felt bad, and he's been ribbing me about that all weekend. Oh well, you snooze, you lose!

We were still going to go to Georgia to spend the rest of the weekend with his family on Friday, so after we dropped off the dogs at the kennel, we drove out there. We have a tradition of listening to the newest Rick & Bubba CD while we go out there every year, but he hadn't bought it yet. We were going to have to go to Wal-Mart and get it. Now, I avoid shopping the day after christmas like the plague. I especially avoid Wal-Mart on this day. I don't like to be shoved out of the way by women in stretchy pink pants, who are willing to rip out my soul for a Holiday Barbie. It's not my idea of a good time! However, I was nicely surprised to find that it wasn't THAT bad. Apparently we had missed the door buster sale earlier that day, thank God. We couldn't find the CD, so we didn't stay long, so we moved on to the Boaz outlet center to see what they had. The Tanger (?) Outlet center out there used to be huge, but most of it has closed down, but there are still two fairly busy sections where the stores haven't been closed down. I knew that it would be busy, but I wasn't expecting what I saw when we got there. It was the shoulder to shoulder, walking in front of moving cars, loaded down with bags, bringing your whole family and herding them around, kind of shopping. I went into one store, and it was a soccermom free-for-all, yanking things off of racks, knocking things over and not picking them up, digging UNDER piles of already searched through clothes and even reaching under the displays in case something got under there...and that was just the GAP outlet. I hate stuff like this. I HATE shopping at this time of year. The monster of consumerism has bitten the general population and turned them into these rude, pushy, irritable, gimmie-gimmie jerks who obviously don't remember why we celebrate Christmas in the first place. I have worked in retail around Christmas, and it was enough for me to want to crawl into a bomb shelter and just wait for it all to me over. I try to get my Christmas shopping over with by the end of September. I always have some little thing I want to get, but it's the only time of year I want to get in and out of a store in the shortest amount of time possible!!!!

Anyway...

We got to Waleska around 6 or 7, I think, and we had dinner with the family. We had a great time laughing and talking and watching the news footage of the people getting stomped on at shopping centers. If you havent seen the footage of the woman who got knocked down, and was so worried about getting her wig back on before she stood back up, that she got trampled. Classic. The next morning, Steve and Greg were supposed to go hunting, and I got settled down to work on the Stupid Paper. I worked on it all day. I took some breaks, but for the most part I was alone, highlighter in hand, trying to formulate a way to finish writing the darned thing. By the time dinner was ready, I was at a stopping point, so I joined everyone else as they ate and watched some college football. I think it was Florida and Florida State...one team had bright orange helmets and the other team was wearing pale blue and yellow. I just cheered when everyone else did. We spent some time after that sitting around waiting for the Georgia & Georgia Tech game to come on, and I ended up grabbing a couple of books and settling back to listen to everyone else do their thing. All in all it was a nice visit, marred only by the Stupid Paper looming over my head.

Well, I'd better get back to work! Duty calls! : )