New Years Resolutions - 2010

Never being one for either making or keeping resolutions, I'm taking this opportunity to list area in my life which need serious consideration and at the end, I'll think about picking one to work on. Ok?

1) McDonalds - According to my mother, there was a time, in my youth, when we didn't have enough money to go to McDonalds all that often - it was more of a 'special' thing. Now, when I look at my bank statement each month, I see a third to half of all my debit card charges going to McDonalds. I've already sort of tamed the Sweet Tea demon in my life and at least 9 out of every 10 visits to McD's I get regular tea instead of the diabetic-coma inducing liquid which I would prefer. Since moving to Wadesville, the only McD's on my way in always has 15 cars in the drive-thru in the mornings, so I need to work on taming the McD's Sausage Burrito demon so I don't waste 10 minutes each morning in the drive thru.

2) Weight Watchers - No, I'm not suggesting the ubiquitous resolution to 'diet and lose weight.' What I need to do is either resume going to the damn meetings or stop paying the $40 a month to them. The actual weight loss is not my main concern. It's the $40!

3) Walking - As you may or may not know, depending on whether I'm imaging that I blogged about it, I bought myself good walking shoes and a pretty purple iPod earlier this year for the sole (hahaha! shoes? sole?) purpose of getting out and walking for exercise. When I lived in town, I lived near the University of Evansville and had good sidewalks and nice neighborhoods and a campus that I could walk around. Did I do it? Um.. about 5 times in the 4 years I lived there, yes. I know why, well, other than the obvious fact that I'm lazy. I grew up in the country and am used to wide open spaces. I could take a walk down the road with my Walkman and sing along to the music at the top of my voice and no one could hear me but the residents of the cemetary (and they were not complaining.) I couldn't really do that in town. Might've gotten arrested. So, now that I live back in the country, and I have the shoes, and I have the pretty purple iPod, Rose needs to get her footies in gear and start walking up and down the road.

4) Facebook - Again, as you know, I have a serious addiction to Facebook. Not to the friendship aspect. I don't really like people. But to the games. I have a farm in both Farm Town and FarmVille. I grow and sell crops on an island in Island Paradise. I desperately dig for relics in Treasure Madness f/k/a Mania. And I am currently maintaining both a clan and mafia in Vampire Wars and Mafia Wars, respectively. I'm exhausted. So, I need to decide on one, that's all I'm asking for, just one, FB application and drop it. I was going cold turkey on Treasure Madness this past week, as I'd finished all the maps. But then they drag me back in with more maps! Vampire Wars, well, I'd gotten bored with that, but then they started this special New York thing and I've almost mastered all the New York jobs. Mafia? Well pretty soon after New Year's they'll open the Hong Kong part... and I am on level 200 or so, it seems a waste to give up now.

Yikes! This looks difficult, doesn't it? Well, as promised, I'm going to think about this, and I'll let you know next New Year's which one I picked. Sound good? For now, though, I need to run by McDonalds and get me some tea so I can have something to drink when I get home because I have a lot to do... I have crops to harvest on FarmVille and I'm almost done on that last Christmas island on Treasure Madness. And I'm listening to this great book on my iPod...

Oh, well, Happy New Year's to all!

E.T. Where's the #*@& Phone!?

So, my sister Haley, who is infamous for her rather bizarre gifts to me... exhibit A: the Golden Poop ... got me the Alien Gnome Bandits for Christmas. Actually, I opened it over Thanksgiving, because she wanted to be able to see my face when I opened it. I was easily persuaded to not have to wait until Christmas. I found them charming and learned that their names were Eldon and Tarak, or "E.T." collectively. Unfortunately, due to all the Christmas craziness, the little dudes were pretty much left to entertain themselves. I didn't have time to deal with them over the holidays, so I put them up on the piano until after Christmas.

But then it started happening... things started disappearing and reappearing in different areas of the house. The cats professed innocence.. at least I think that's what they were saying. My skills in speaking feline are still growing. So we set up the ol'nanny cam.

Lo and behold, we were not prepared for what we saw. The pictures that follow are explicit, but for anyone who is contemplating inviting Alien Gnome Bandits into their home, well, you need to be prepared, it's shocking.

This photo was found the morning after I herd (haha) a strange moo'ing sound in the middle of the night. Turns out Moontgomery the cow was being abducted. He later reappeared in the dining room in a bowl of fruit.

E.T. played it cool for a couple of days before nabbing their next victim - a member of our considerable collection of snowmen. From the photo, it doesn't appear that the snowman had an snowball's chance in hell of avoiding the horror in store for him. About a week later, the snowman's hat and scarf were found floating in the cat's water bowl.

From the next photo, it would appear that E.T. had been taking advantage of our three months of free HBO and had found a new hero. The Scream duck disappeared one night and was not seen again until he reappeared floating in the seat of honor in the pink bathroom.

As the days drew closer to Christmas, E.T. must have needed some decorations for their lair. A Christmas tree was absconded with... not yet to reappear. It'll probably show up on the curbside for the first trash day after the New Year.The most threatening photo was the last straw. It would appear that the cats, Sophie, Gizmo and Winifred, had made vain attempts to prevent E.T. from making off with their ill-gotten booty (or ill-booten gotty) because this photo can be interpreted as nothing short of a threat to them to leave the Aliens to their thievery.

It was shortly after this photo was taken that I had to make the hard decision to remove E.T. from our household. After all, Sophie, Gizmo and Winifred don't have opposable thumbs and thus aren't able to defend themselves from this deviltry.

E.T. are now at my office where my co-workers naively call them "cute" and "adorable". But already a strange stapler has appeared on my desk and one co-worker continually roams around the office in a daze always saying the same thing...

... Where Shall I Go, What Shall I Do? - Scarlett O'Hara

My aunt drives me crazy! She travels all over the world as a part of her job and feels free to email me pics of her travels when she daw-gone knows that I want to travel too. My current goal in life is to get a stamp in my new (but as of yet not used) passport!

The other day, she e-mailed me pictures from her current vacation on the beach in Florida. She tried to downplay how wonderful it was by saying it was cold and damp, but I could tell she was having a good time. And since it was 32 degrees here, I'm pretty sure I'd have swapped with her in a heartbeat despite how "cold" it was there.

Sometime this spring, she and mom are contemplating going out to San Diego to visit one of their sisters. I've been invited along, but I don't think I'll go because 1) Been there, done that (refer to my as of yet mental blog regarding the infamous train trip with Grandma Hollis out to San Diego); second, someone really ought to hang at home and take care of the livestock; and C) I have my own vacation plans in mind. (mwa-ah-ah-ah!)

I, Rosemary, am going to go somewhere this year. I have suggested to my fiend Jennifer who has not really had a vacation in several years, that she leave her hubby for a week or so and go on a Thelma and Louise-style trip with me (only without the driving off a cliff part - unless we get a rental... hmm.. mental note: investigate car rental rates) preferrably to the beach because we're both in need of some rest and relaxation. I don't know if she'll actually do it, but I've decided that since I'm now living rent-free and putting considerable bucks in my savings account, either way, Rose is going to take a vacation.

So where would I like to go? Well, the following list is my list of ideal vacations:

1) Egypt. Somewhere in the middle of reading Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody series, I decided that if I had to do it all again, I'd become an archeologist. Now, I readily admit that I don't like bugs, dirt, sweat, heat, mud, snakes, spiders, or the idea of working in a country where there are those who might be ideologically opposed to me, but I'm pretty sure that I'd have been a great archeologist. Probably would have found a tomb that would put ol'King Tut's to shame by now. But I digress. Since I can't do it all over and since I don't like bugs, dirt, sweat, etc, I'll have to go as a tourist. I'd love to see the Pyramids at Giza and the Sphinx. Just think of the blogs about that trip! Holly has told me she'd go with me, as she enjoys those books, too. Ah, excuse me while I Google the price of pith helmets!

2) The Beach. I came to the epiphany a while ago that I was meant to be born to sea-faring folk, or at a minimum to folk who live by the sea. Not that I'm saying the good Lord messed up by giving me to my current fam, but I'm just saying that somewhere along the line my ancestors moved west when they should have stayed closer to the water. There is nothing more wonderful to me than slowly wandering up and down the beach, with the water coming in and wabbling over my footies. I can't swim and I don't like seafood, except for Captain D's or Long John Sliver's, but I just need to return to the beach every so often. After certain amount of time passes, something deep in my soul starts yearning to sit in the sand and listen to the waves as then crash in and then go back out. Sigh...

3) England. I want to go to Europe, but I only speak English. I took French my freshman year in high school, but then the teacher quit and they hired a Spanish teacher and I cheesed, so I was NOT going to take Spanish even if it killed me! Humpf! So then in college, I took two semesters of Italian with my roommate Janna. But I didn't take anymore because 1) that's all DePauw offered and B) I transferred to University of Evansville, which didn't offer it at all. Unfortunately now, 26 and 21 years later, respectively, I can't speak either French or Italian... although I can generally hold my own with a menu at the Olive Garden. So I guess my point is that for my first trek to Europe, I think I ought to go to a country where we speak the same language, relatively speaking. That and I do love history, so I would enjoy going to the Tower of London and go see where the Battle of Hastings was fought! If I went in August, I could go see the island where Princess Diana is buried! (Do they still open it up for tours in August?) Oh, and I could go to Mrs. Miggins' coffee shop! And of course, since I'd be that close, I'd have to run over to see Scotland (the birth place of my beloved Gerard Butler) and Ireland.

Christmas Time is Here

Well, really Christmas time is over, and we’re patiently waiting for the New Year! It was another success and here is the wrap (hahahaha!) up of the events... After Thanksgiving, we got the tree and other decorations up. I’m happy to say that Sophie and Gizmo (especially Gizmo) weren’t even remotely interested in the tree. I say this because a couple of years ago I had to take my tree down 5 days after putting it up because my handsome guy was terrorizing it. This year, the tree (yup, same tree) was terrorized by someone else…

Winifred enjoyed her first Christmas tree despite the soakings she got from the evil purple spray bottle. Hardly a day went by without her crawling up the tree, knocking off and playing with ornaments, and just generally bothering the tree limbs. By Saturday, December 19th, when mom’s sisters’ families came over, I had to redecorate the tree with all the ornaments the little Turd had knocked off!

So come Christmas Eve, mom and I packed our toys into our little red (actually it’s tan-ish) wagon and prepared to go up to Indy to spend the holiday with the Sibs and what did we have to do BEFORE we could leave? Yup, we had to take down the tree. Sort of a bummer, but it was nice to come home and not have to worry about doing it afterwards.

As usual, I think my gifts were hits. I got each of the Sibs’ families the The Office Clue game. We played a couple of rounds – I won both, thank you very much, mostly due to my perspicacity (look it up). Hollian’s belated 21st birthday gift, a bottle of Bailey’s :), was a hit, too! I’ve already received a request from Natalie that I get her the same thing next year for her 21st!

Of the gifts I received, I got money for clothes from mom (BTW, the new bras fit great!), some gift cards, some DVD’s. But the prize for best present from this season goes to Haley. This adorable set of aliens making off with a gnome! I actually found the bigger yard version of this in a catalog a year or so ago, and I thought about getting it for Dad. But it was too expensive for me to get and I guess I never got around to suggesting a group gift from the three of us, so… Anyway, Haley found a smaller version and it’s perfect! It is currently sitting on the ledge of my desk at work. I had it at home, but the little critters kept making off with various things around the house. I figure they can run amok at work for a while.

The runner up in the fun gift category is Phil (see pic) from my Secret Santa, Shawn. The best part is when I opened it up and read the directions to add water to the dirt pellet and “fluff the dirt with a fork”! I loved it. Less than a week later, I come in to work and Phil has sprouted a head of hair, ur.. grass! I’m not sure how long the thrill of watching grass grow will entertain me, but for now, Phil is hanging with Bob, Ted, and Jareth the African violets.

Christmas did end up with a big uh-oh, though. Mom got sick and instead of getting better up in Indy, she got worse. I brought her back home and took her to the convenient care center and she was diagnosed with pneumonia. The doctor shot her up with some high-powered antibiotics and gave her an Rx for a Z-pac, but she wasn’t bad enough off to have to be hospitalized (I said ‘refrigerated’ at one point when I was talking to Boss #2 at work about it, don’t know where that came from). Unfortunately, I don’t have any paid time off until the new year due to my having sprained my neck muscles while hanging up my coat (don’t ask, it’s a short, un-interesting, and very painful story) earlier this month. And my aunt who lives less than a football field length down the road, well, let's just say it would never occur to her to volunteer to come over and hang with mom, her sister, while I was at work. Fortunately, Holly, who is off work until next week sometime, came down to nurse the sickee.

Ch-ch-ch-Changes!

I moved in with my mother this past month. (Hence the lack of updates during November – all of my free time has been spent either packing/unpacking, toting, lifting, etc. or playing Treasure Mania (now Treasure Madness) on Facebook. BTW, I'm SO happy to have Columbus's underpants!)

We both had to get rid of some of my furniture. My big thing was my couch. I loved that couch. I got it about 10 years ago for $250 and the cats and I would snuggle together on it. I’m a big girl, and the couch was big girl sized. I’ve never been all that comfortable (physically, not mentally or emotionally) on mom’s couch. But it has the matching love seat and is newer, so my couch went. It took four men from my church 30-45 minutes to figure out how to get the behemouth out thru three consecutive 90-degree turns and outside the house. (It took four men over an hour four years ago to get it in the apartment, but this time we already knew that it wouldn’t go out the backdoor and that the front window was too small, so they didn’t have to waste time testing those options. While we waited for one of the men to go get his truck, so he could take it to Goodwill for me, some frat guys came walking down the street and one of the men yelled and asked if they needed a couch. They said they could use it, so off trotted my couch. Sniff.. I loved that couch. I wonder if they would have noticed, being frat guys, if I’d left the petrified hairball in it.

Quite some time has been spent getting the room ready. Mom and I went to Lowes one Sunday after lunch on a fact finding mission and in less than an hour, I’d picked out paint, carpet and the border. Of course the underlying theme was “purple,” duh! and once it was all put together, I think it looks pretty stinkin’ good! Martha Stewart, eat your heart out! Tom and other Bro-in-Law Ed helped hang pics and a dragon and a wizard and the bi-plane dad made me this past weekend, so now once I get rid of a couple of more boxes, it’s all done! Here's a pic of the final product.

The border is my piece de resistance – is that spelled right? I opened a wallpaper/border book for kids rooms and chose it within minutes. It was $36/roll, but then I found the exact same border online for $15.99 per roll!! What a coup! (What’s with all the French all of a sudden??)

The cats and I moved in the weekend of November 7th, and the furniture followed us on the next weekend. It has been an adjustment for all concerned. Sophie and Gizmo had to leave the only home they’ve really ever known AND get used to there being another cat in the mix. Winifred had to get used to going from being Queen of the Castle to smallest and youngest of three. Giz and Wini made friends pretty quickly. I understand they even play together at night while I’m asleep. But Sophie and Wini are still not completely sure of each other. Although things have improved. This past weekend (Thanksgiving) there were 8 extra adults in the house for 2 days and 2 extra adults for 2 more days. We didn’t see much of Soph or Giz, and Wini accidentally got shut in the basement and spent one entire night downstairs, but everyone survived. Now the Christmas tree is up and assuming young Winifred doesn’t decimate it, we should have a happy holiday season.

There have been adjustments for me and mom, too. My normal routine was to come home, heat up some Easy Mac or a bag of frozen veggies, sprinkled with shredded cheese and go play on Facebook (Farmville, Mafia Wars, Treasure Mania, you know, the usual) and watch some TV until the old carpal tunnel acted up, and then hop into bed with whichever cat was still awake. Other than the occasional comment to a cat, I didn’t have to talk, no one wanted anything from me. I lived alone. Now I get home, mom generally has dinner made – BTW, she thinks vegetables are for every night! – or in the process, and although she says I don’t have too, I feel like I have to hang out and chat with her. I’ll adjust. I don’t have a problem hanging and chatting with mom, but it’s not my natural inclination, so until I get acclimated to being a roommate, I have to remind myself to do it.

Biscuits and Gravy

Well, yet again, my biscuits and gravy are a hit at KDDK's Bosses' Day breakfast.  One of the attorney's told me that he's been looking forward to them all week (as his assistant had the sign up sheet and he'd been nosing around to see what we were having), and another attorney told me that he'd never considered himself a biscuits and gravy type of guy, but mine are making him rethink his entire existence.

 

Tee Hee!

What's Up with Rose? - "The Working Years"

I know my long time fans have been thinking, "Rose celebrates her 100^th blog and disappears from the face of the earth!  I wonder what she's up to now!" for the past several weeks.  Well the answer isn't pretty.

 

First, there's work.  Let me state at the beginning that there is nothing that I do as a part of my job that I don't like doing… with the slight exception of calling people.  I just don't like calling people.  I don't mind talking to people who call me (which is odd because one would assume that the aspect about not knowing WHO is calling or WHAT they want might be something I wouldn't like), but I HATE calling people.  If I have only one work-related flaw (and I'm not saying I ONLY have one, I said IF there were only one), it would be that phone calls that I need to make tend to be put off.  I'm very bad about that.  Non-work-related case in point: I'd love to talk to my old college roommate, Janna.  I have her phone number.  I have a cell phone and a cell plan with free long distance.  There is NO reason not to call Janna.  I just hate calling people so I don't.  But you know, if she called me, I could talk to her for hours.  I'm weird, I know.

 

Where was I??  Sigh… Work.  Steve (Boss #1) is the partner in charge of the collection department at the firm.  He does a lot of administrative stuff regarding the department and, consequently, has me running all sorts of reports and working up spreadsheets, etc for him.  Oh, that reminds me.  When I was last looking for a job, back in August 2000 (not a pretty time in the history of Rose, BTW), I had an interview with a company for a job that I probably would have really enjoyed.  But they needed someone who had a strong working knowledge of Excel and who could jump into the job with both feet and run with the Excel stuff.  At that time, Rose didn't know Excel and although we had a nice time talking, I had to tell the interviewer that I just wasn't the girl for him.  Fast forward to now, or even 5 years ago, and Rose is very proficient in Excel.  Mostly self-taught, although there have been plenty of urgent phone calls to first my friend Kathy, then later Dad, before he retired, and now Haley with Excel questions.  I know there's tons that I don't know about Excel, but on my last review I requested advanced training in Excel.  Of course I specified training from someplace other than our illustrious IT department, but that's a whole other blog!

 

I really am wandering today aren't I?  WORK.  Back in June we got a placement of 3,600+ new collection accounts from a local business that in a big month normally only sends about 250-300 accounts.  So decisions had to be made.  Do we hire new people? If so, how many?  Steve has had me running all sorts of fun reports and whipping up all sorts of fun spreadsheets.  Very exciting, but all on top of my normal duties.  So Rose has been very busy in that regard.

 

And then, about two, (three?) weeks ago, two of the new hires started and guess who got the job of training them on entering all these new accounts.  Yup, Rose.  I know the girls in collections are busy, and none of them are busier than the supervising paralegal, so I'm really not bitching that it was ME instead of THEM doing the training.  I realize that it is a comment regarding my abilities and Steve's faith in me that he gives me these things.  Occasionally, though, I could do with a little less faith in me!  I don't like strangers (although I am better with the aid of my precious pink pills than I used to be – again, not a pretty time in the history of Rose) and having to sit in there one on one, or two as the case may be/is, with them was probably more stressful for me than them!  And although the two of them have really caught on like a house a fire, Steve still is having me review their work until they have the FDCPA training.  Did I mention that my life was good until I met the FDCPA?  And did I mention that I didn't really meet the FDCPA until I started here, despite doing collections/subro at the other firm?  J  hahaha!  Reviewing their work turned out to be quite an undertaking, and boring, since they were doing well enough that I wasn't finding many mistakes.  So generally it was after Noon before I was done with their previous day's work and I could start on my work.   Fortunately, they did their FDCPA training today so I'm free!!  Fun fact!  The third (and hopefully final) new girl starts on Monday, so the whole training thing starts again!  (yeah.)

 

Meanwhile on the other work front:  (and here, I'll sketch in some background since I don't' recall if I previously wrote about this,) last October the sh&! hit the fan in our subrogation department and the woman who was responsible for the work, well let's just say that she's no longer working here.  I had worked in … well, really, me and my secretary Becky WERE the subrogation department at my old law firm, but I'd managed to live a subro-free life for the bulk of 8 years.  Unfortunately the partner in charge of the subro department worked with me at the old firm (BTW, he adores me) and he knew that I am a Subro Diva and he asked me to help out until things could get back under control.  Now, a year later, I'm still helping out because they didn't hire a replacement for her.  In fact, we've split the job up and we have one person opening all of the new subro files and a variety of other duties, one person (me) filing suit on all of the files when the time comes and handling settlements, and a third person handling the litigation aspect of those files that I hated having to do, such as discovery, trial prep, etc.  And the files just keep pouring in.  I worked a big bunch of OT from last October until this past April at which point I just couldn't take it any longer.  Of course, then Dad started getting worse and I spent more of my time out with the 'Rents, so work wasn't my main priority.  Although I must say, the OT fundage was very nice.  Things on my end started piling up again, especially since the collection aspect had increased considerably (see above), so the OT has slowly weedled its claws back into me, and the fundage is still nice, especially after my recent review/raise. 

 

I'm thinking that this is enough for now.  Part Deux of "What's Up with Rose" will be devoted to her personal existence and possible medical/emotional issues.  Or maybe that'll be Part Theux.  Either way, it may have the subtitle of "Too Much Information" so be forewarned.