lucky

me. i've been having a what i would call sore pain if my right side for a few days. i figured that i had slept wrong and that it would go away. well, it's still here and last night i mentioned it to the girl. she did some examining and informed me that it is not a muscle. i might have a bruised and or cracked rib. i've never had a broken bone so i can't tell the difference between sore muscle and hurt bone, but when the girl was poking around and trying things out......i understand now. the pain is only in one area about the size of two finger tips. what do i do now? nothing i guess. i'd like to know for sure if it is broken or not, mostly so i can call my mom and freak her out and make her think i was in some sort of "dangerous city gang fight". then i'll for sure not have to host the easter dinner at my house. if a doctor did discover that it was broken they can't do anything i suppose so i'm going to see if it goes away as a bruise would do. then i might reconsider if it doesn't. one elbow during a basketball game might change my mind though. the best part is that i have no idea of how i would have done it. i have no memory of going "ouch, that really hurt. i hope my back is ok." damn alien abductions. last night i gave myself a splinter in the outer side of my pinky from my own drum stick while playing. it was a nice quarter of an inch in length. maybe it's not so hard to imagine that i hurt my rib.

my mom

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i am now finding out so much about her. she use to be one of those can can dancer things in st. louis. she played basketball on a city team. slick pages were better than just paper ones. (don't ask) she's my number one fan and i am hers.

they

called to say that sis #4 would be done early so i grabbed an address. i picked her up in a barn shaped building and they told me the care instructions and said "the medication can cause her to have amnesia type symptoms until it wears off." fun. we were talking in the car and then i would ask "do you remember what we were just talking about?" she would reply "some dude?" ummm.....no. we were just talking about some hair ball you found in your bathroom. hmmm...maybe it was a reference to some dude. we went to walgreen's to fill her prescriptions and she got some good pain killers. she needed stuff like pudding and yogurt so we walked around filling the cart. they happened to only have one thing of chocolate pudding so we grabbed that. well, we ended up in that aisle three times and it always went like this. "oh there's the pudding. darn, they're out of chocolate. maybe they have tapioca." i think she was playing with me because i was getting such a kick out of the conversation recap. when i dropped her off at home i thought she would go right to sleep, but she's wasn't in pain and she was bored. she mentioned going shopping. after discussing this with her, she decided to watch cnn to see if she can catch the repeat of the ticker tape or if it will be new to her for hours.

if

i'm lucky, i will actually find the dentist office that i am suppose to be at around 3 to pick up sis #4 who will be sedated and needs a ride home. the thing is that i waited till today to find out the address of the place. the whole thing started with her asking me if i remember the place that i picked her up at before. well sure i remember it, but that was about 2 years ago, so even though i remember doing that for her before, i have no idea how to get there or what the building looks like, blah, blah. i found the email where a month ago she was telling me to put it on the calendar and it mentions washington street. that helps a bit i guess. i think she is already there because i have been calling her every 5 seconds to get an address. brilliant. you can count on me. i suppose that this might get me off the hook for any other favors that she might come up with in the future. possibly by the time i find it she will have taken a cab home or the medication wore off and she drove herself. then i won't have to tuck her into bed with water and snacks in reach, which also means that i won't be able to do my favorite thing. i love getting her all settled in on a lazy day or a sick day, turning the tv to the worst program i can find, turning up the volume and then placing the remote in a random coat pocket in the closet. i really crack myself up with that one every single time.

with

our anniversary a little over two weeks away, the girl and i couldn't wait to exchange gifts so we did last night. we are such babies! neither of us can ever wait. christmas was hilarious. i think we started exchanging ninety days prior. we were very good about only giving one at a time though. this really just means that we get more gifts because you can't just not have anything to open on the actual day. this time we didn't even bother wrapping them. i just got hers in the mail and i think she just purchased mine. i just hid it in the ceiling when she got home and i was planning to wrap it today, but she said "i want to give you your gift now". i wouldn't want to hurt her feelings so i replied with "well, i guess just this once". whatever. i was all "really? really? ok! really? i'll go get yours. where's mine? gimme, gimme, gimme!" she now owns 40 hours worth of the matrix and i can listen to my satellite radio in the house. we then went out to eat and i wanted to take her to this cuban place that has live music and blah, blah. we pulled up and it looked a little dark inside. the place is open everyday except tuesday!! "surprise, i'm taking you out to eat at this nice hotdog place. i know how much you like italian beef." i must be so entertaining for her. "i had no idea that six flags would be closed in january. well, we can get something to eat at the cracker barrel while we're out here and browse at the bass pro shop." then we came home to play with our new toys. at the same time. in the same room. matrix gets louder. xm gets louder. i gave in and watched the movie.

where

did the purse blog go you ask? i have no clue. when did it start being just a blank pink page you ask? i have no clue. i just noticed myself. i then went investigating and found that the last half of my html just disappeared. i know that i didn't delete such important things as (/head) (/style) or (/body). i added them, previewed and it all comes back, but it is messed up. i don't seem to have the sideline html either. i've seen sites do this and come back before so i have two options. i can either wait it out and hope that there was some error that will fix itself or dump a bunch of time (i'm sure i can just copy and paste from another blog and be done, but i was going for more drama here) into it trying to fill in the correct html code. i'm sure the world is in suspense waiting to see what was going to be uploaded to it next. plus, i made a comment to my own blog about twenty minutes ago and it still hasn't shown up. i think i'm going to have a mental breakdown.

free

coffee is exactly what i need in my system right now. i served it up with some french vanilla creamer and sugar. i'm counting down for a buzz. i had brought a cup of yogurt yesterday and i left it on my desk until the end of the day because i forgot to grab a spoon in the cafeteria and when i felt like eating it......they had already put them all away. i then put it in the frig. i got it out today and right before i ate it something in my head was thinking that yogurt left out all day might cancel out the healthy part of it. i haven't broke out in a rash or started vomiting uncontrollably yet, so i think i will live. i think my body became dependent on the vitamin c that i was taking daily. i've been taking it regularly for about 2 years now. when i'm starting to feel sick i pop two to ward it off. i stopped taking it around the end of december because i wanted to see if i had passed my days of getting sick every second. (two years in a row i was hospitalized for having mono and pneumonia) shortly after stopping i got sick and went to the doctor who gave me three kick ass pills. i've been sniffle free ever since. lately i have noticed that i get hungry all of the time. so i snack and snack. then i remembered the time that a family dog ate the vinyl roof of a car and we were told that his body was craving something. so i took a vitamin c yesterday and all is well with my cravings. i still have half of my lunch and by this time last week i would find myself in front of the vending machines. is my mind playing tricks? can one really become addicted to vitamins? am i going to have to play this game until my body is no longer craving the extra dose of c? on another note, my coffee buzz is here. i think i had four whole cups of coffee last year. so yes, one cup works for me.

on

the job front, the word got around that the vp of the company had the vehicle that we were looking for and i found myself driving it to the loading docks. lucky me, not only was i nervous, but now it's the vp's car. great. i waited until all of the big shots were in a meeting and i snuck out to do the job without any interference. i finished without any damage to the vehicle. whew! and the switch works just like i said so take that gm! now i'll just have to argue about it with them and try to convince them that it's a problem with something in the vehicle and not our switch. on the personal front, i had asked sis #4 the dates of the other january birthdays in the family since she seems to be keeping track of them. she told me that today is sis #1's b-day and tomorrow is niece #5's b-day. so i called sis #1 around 11 to get an early jump on the lunch rush birthday phone calls and be the first one outside of her household to wish her a happy birthday. well i certainly was first. "happy birthday d! it's me andrea" "oh thank you, but mine is tomorrow." which is worse? being late or early? (i find the early experience a bit embarassing) after some explanation of my woes, we formed an alliance and went through as many birthdays as we could remember and wrote them down, which is no fair for me because it seems that i only have problems with the january ones. i have everyone else written down in a handy calendar that i am sure to remember to look at before and after and not on the actual day. i have sent sis #4 a nasty email, but she hasn't replied yet. hopefully she will say sorry with a cheesecake.

niece #5

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she is the daredevil and sneak of the group. she drank all of my soda before i could figure out that i wasn't the one drinking it. she likes it when i read to her because i get upset when she finishes the story before i read it outloud. her giggle is the cutest.

sis #1

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she is 15 years older than i am. she's addicted to scrap booking. she has been known to pop me in the head with her thigh master. she gets everyone's names wrong a lot.

now

i have my credit card linked to both united and american airlines. they both have this thing called idine. certain restaurants give you miles per dollar spent. some up to 20 miles for every dollar. i signed up for the united one last year because i was so close to getting a trip, but my company started using american airlines instead. well, now i have my free trip and i'm over half way to a free one on american soooo....switch! as of now i have both programs set up to the same card and i am going to try to use it tonight to see if i get miles for both or it gets all confused. i'm living in a dream world since i think it's going to work. i just have to use the united trip before they say something like "your account has not been active in the last 12 months, therefore your miles are no longer available". on the work front, they are planning on getting an employee's tahoe, taking a switch out of the steering wheel, replacing it with the one that i have that general motors says is bad and i say is good and testing it in a real live vehicle environment. ummmm...ok, how about recreating the environment via a source voltage in a nice, warm cozy lab? not good enough for them, they want to show off to gm. problem is that i'm the only one with experience of removing them from vehicles and i'm not so confident per the following reasons: a) i haven't done it in at least 2 years b) i've never removed this style of switch c) with it being so cold outside - if they don't warm the steering wheel up completely - it's going to crack when i apply force d) i'm nervous that i don't have any degrees of separation from the vehicle owner e) everyone will be over my shoulder or in my space watching me do it because they are curious as to how it is done. i pitched getting a rental, but we found out that only the airport has them and they don't guarantee that we'll get an actual tahoe. my plan now is to drink a lot of caffeine and have shaky hands so i can't even hold onto my screw driver.