Happy New Year Y’all!
Hope everyone was able to celebrate it in a fun and safe way. Some people may think it’s dumb to celebrate a kind of trivial holiday like New Year’s but I kind of like it. Aside from it giving us a chance to get together with people we love and enjoy, it’s kind of nice to to feel like there’s a fresh start to things. Plus, I really do love the well wishes and hugs and kisses at midnight!
It’s November, y’all! Y’ALL! I cannot believe I just typed that. It’s November 2011 and that means there’s less than three weeks until Thanksgiving and something like seven weeks until Christmas and then it will be 2012 and WHAT THE HELL WHY IS TIME GOING SO FAST?!
October did blow by pretty quickly in this house, more than usual. Seriously, ever since we turned thirty, both Steve and I constantly remark how fast the days, months, and years go by – it’s like the weight of time is bearing down upon us and before we know it we’re OLD.
But October was a crazy month here – I was sick for a week, then spent the next week doing all the prep for vacation that I should have been doing when I was sick, then vacation, then Steve was sick for a week and my dad has been having some heart issues which we still don’t know how they’re going to resolve. Then Halloween, of which we had a party to prepare for and also went over to my parents on Halloween-proper to help with their haunted house.
I thought my ears were never going to stop ringing.
The Sunday before last, Steve and I and two of our other couple friends headed out to the local fairgrounds, about five minutes from our house, to see the 98 Rock Fall Fest, which was supposed to be an all day long concert with some really great bands. If you head over to that link and read the comments, you’ll see that there were a few snags that made it rather miserable in the beginning.
The gates opened about three hours late, which the station is blaming on the bands though I’m not so sure what I believe because I know someone who set the stage up and said it was more the code inspectors. The lines were also ridiculous which is something to expect because there’s a ton of people gathered in one spot but all of the booths for food and drink, including beer and nonalcoholic drinks, were only accepting tickets. So you had to stand in line for tickets – Steve was waiting for an hour and a half – and then you had to stand in line for a wristband if you were drinking and THEN you had to stand in line for drinks and food.
Remember how in my last entry I mentioned that I needed a good rainy day or weekend to sort of justify my grouchiness and grumpiness? Then I hit publish thinking that wasn’t going to happen because you don’t get multiple rainy days here in Charleston – you get oppressively hot and bright days where the sun beats down on you and the humidity smothers your entire being then in the evening, you might get a really really good thunderstorm as the weather breaks but it’s always back to the same thing the next morning.
Except that following morning, I was startled awake by the sound of Baxter freaking out and of course, being the mama bear I am when it comes to the fur babies, I shot out of bed and ran through the house looking for him only to find him having a literal shit fit at the patio door because he had been caught in a torrential downpour. This is all fairly uncommon for him as not only has he NOT figured out to bark at the door when he’s ready to come in but he also seemed no where near as affected by thunderstorms and rain as Sammy, who cowers in fear if he hears a storm on TV.
On Sunday, we had to attend a housewarming party for two guy friends who had bought a house together as roommates. I racked my brain about gift ideas for them – they don’t drink wine and I didn’t want to buy them a gift card (I hate giving gift cards – not only because they indicate a lack of personal interest but also because it just doesn’t sit right with me that a person knows exactly how much I spent on them).
Regardless, I wasn’t sure what to do so I took to the Internet and thanks to some lovely inspiration that I’m now not sure where I stumbled upon it, I came up with this gift basket.