Stress monster attack

I knew this week would be stressful. I'm stressed to the point of tears this morning. Nothing is going right. Between too much to do at work and school, over $3000 worth of money work owes me for reimbursements that is REALLY delayed coming in, about $1000 in consulting money that is delayed coming in and vacation being in two more days, I'm super stressed.

F@!*$*g Facebook!

I knew this was a danger when I signed up, but I thought if I didn't ever seek out anyone, nobody would really find me. WRONG! Let's look at my most recent friend request receipts in the last week:
1) J. This is good. An old high school classmate and DQ coworker. Sweet man.
2) Aunt D. Noooo! Relatives weren't supposed to find me! On a funny note, her real name is Madonna and she was a singer from way back. A really, really low budget country singer, but she had an album. :-) She's pretty cool as far as aunt's go, but no relatives!
3) V. This was an old family friend acquaintence. I was best friends with her niece and our extended families were pretty close. Later on, she became a higher-up colleague of mine as a fluke. She's retired now, but it's still too weird to have someone that was second in command at my workplace on there now.
4) K. Oh hell. This was an old middle school/high school friend. Me, D, & K were best friends, though we were all very different. K was the high-maintenance friend. Eventually she became too high maintenance for everyone & we couldn't take it anymore. Kind of an awkward ending to the friendship, but not horrid. Almost a mutual parting of ways. I think she's a good person and was a good friend at one time. However, the mere thought of restarting any friendship with her exhausts me.

Now Blogger is my last anonymous frontier, though I doubt anyone would find me on RTVW, either.

Out with the old

I have multiple bottles of shower gels & soaps to use.

I have multiple, half-used bottles of face cleanser to use.

I have a billion eye shadows to use.

I've been on a "no more new stuff" kick since early 2007. The eye shadows will take me at least another year to start getting scarce. The face cleanser will probably last until mid-February.*see note The shower gels another year.

Note: I have half a bottle of a plain Clearasil cleanser that I don't recall buying. It may just get tossed as it dries my skin too much.

The scoop

No, nothing juicy, just an update.

1. Vacation is less than 3 weeks away.
MIL is coming to stay with cats because, a) she really wants to be useful in her retirement, and b) our usual cat sitter is out of the country during that time. My dad and neighbor could have done the cat sitting, but as I said, MIL wants to be useful. She'll bring her black lab, so the cats will be stressed, but they'll be happier WITH someone there than alone for that long. Now, I'm kind of weirded out by MIL being alone in our house for a week. I'm wondering if there's anything I should hide.

2. We had to buy an $1800 snowblower attachment for our lawn tractor because the snow was just too much for our plow blade. Not money I wanted to spend before the cruise. However, it makes plowing SOOOOO much easier and faster!

3. I'm working out and watching my diet. I've dropped 3 pounds in the last three weeks, which isn't great, but I need to get back in control. I stopped working out during last semester and paid for it with about 6-8 lbs.

4. I'm on two back-to-back business trips later this week. First to the Hershey, PA area, then to Lincoln, NE. Woo. The good news is that it makes time go faster and vacation will be here before I know it!

5. We lit up the new smoker yesterday. It's quite fancy, because that's how I roll. We smoked trout, salmon & ribs. Yum!

6. I'm posting a questionaire about things in your house/apartment on OT today. If you haven't been to OT in awhile, come play.

My cup spilleth over

I broke my cup holder in the car. I know, it seems hard to break a cup holder, but I did. I'm special like that. So here I sit at the dealership, getting it fixed. They have wireless-bonus.

Tonight I'm going over to a friend's house after work. I don't do that enough. She's only about a mile from my workplace and I have a few hours to kill every Tuesday after work. I just usually run errands. So, I'm making an effort to do errands on alternate weeks and visit her a few times/month. Otherwise, we just rarely see eachother.

Do you have any friends you'd like to make more time for?

Happy New Year!

I DID get my hair cut. The bottom layer is about even with the tip of my chin and I have layers around my face, so it's short! I want to grow it out a few more inches and she cut it in a way it should grow out ok. Chris said I'm trying to look 20. *glare*

We had Christmas/New Years with my FIL. It was very nice. They always pamper us girls, so I got lots of chocolate, chocolate martini stuff, coffees, teas, lotions, fuzzy socks, perfume, and a few other things on my wish list. We also made pasta. I made the homemade pasta with Stir MixaLot and BIL made the sauces. We had a smoked venison, cheese and mushroom filled ravioli and a lemon pork with fettucini dish. Yum!

I was able to pack up most of my Gladware and replace it with sturdier stuff I recieved over the holidays (nice Rubbermaid and some Tupperware). Felt like a good way to start the new year.

I think I'm writing a Holiday letter this weekend to send out. We'll see.