Operation Squish 'Em

I've officially begun my campaign against the bugs. No, I'm not on some sort of drug that's making me see things. Apparently since it's hot outside (The local newspaper today described the weather in one word: "sticky". I'm not kidding. It's that hot.) the bugs have all decided to join me inside. No idea what's attracting them to me and no one else (although I told Tim the other day that I think the spiders can smell my fear). Thus, I've decided to launch "Operation Squish 'Em". I've had a series of events that have lead me to become more brave regarding the extermination of unwanted bugs:

• Sunday night when I got home from the movies I was forced to take action against an attack spider. This action involved not only the squish method, but also resulted in the use of hair spray as an incapacitating agent.
• Wednesday night I was reading a magazine in bed before I went to sleep. I put the magazine on my night stand and rolled over to turn off the light. There, standing on the headboard was this weird black grasshopper looking thing. He looked at me and I looked at him. I busted out the hairspray but the sucker was fast and flew off the headboard and crawled under the bed. I spent the next 20 minutes using various covert techniques to finally squish him (thank goodness for skinny heeled shoes that reach behind there).
• Thursday morning I walked out to my car, tossed my purse on the front seat and situated my laptop bag in the back seat (usual process). I went to move my purse so I could sit down and lo and behold, there was a gigantic brown spider just hanging out on it. I grabbed my purse by the handle and shook it outside the car until the spider fell off. Then I got in the car and sped away.

I've decided I will take no more from the attack bugs. Starting today I wage my war. I will squish swiftly and with decisiveness. Hopefully. :)

I am so excited it's the weekend. Tonight I finally had a night to myself. I did some girly stuff (painted my toe nails, etc), surfed the net, read a little. It's been awesome. I can't wait to sleep in tomorrow. Sure, it will probably only be until 8am (darn internal alarm clock), but it's sleep. I have some day time errands to run, but I'm hoping to get some serious relaxing done. We'll see if it actually happens... :) Tomorrow night is karaoke night with Tim and the girls. I can't wait!

I Survived!

I survived the blood drive! Such a cool feeling to know you're saving a life. I had my little reaction, but the phlebotomist explained to me that it's not an anxiety or flight or flight thing - it's actually your body thinking it's going into shock because it's losing blood. Some people get it, some don't. He said he'd donated 25 times and had it only 3 of the times. I proudly wore my little blue armband and the sticker that said "Be nice to me, I gave blood today". :)

I'm exhausted and heading off to bed... hopefully I can get a good night's sleep and finally not feel sleepy tomorrow!

Good night!

Music Survey

There are some days that I just thank God for music. Today was definitely one of those. I worked a really long day and things had started piling up the minute I walked in (that would be 7am). By about 2-3pm, I needed a little break. I set my IM to "do not disturb", my phone to SAC (send all calls to voicemail), busted out the iPod and rocked out to Rascal Flatts while I answered the emails that had piled up and completed what seemed like 1,000 excel spreadsheets (gotta love being a business analyst sometimes - thank goodness I'm great with numbers!). I'm not kidding you, it totally helped.

I thought I'd take a little informal survey to see what music y'all (that's for you Kati!) listen to and what it does for ya. Cut and paste the little survey below into the comments section and fill it in for yourself (mine will be the first one).

Happy Wednesday! It's almost the weekend (ok, sort of)!

1. Name your favorite band.
2. Who are your favorite male and female solo singers?
3. What song do you listen to when you're angry and why?
4. What song do you listen to when you're sad and why?
5. What's your favorite love song and why?
6. Best road trip song of all time and why?
7. What song can you put on and instantly be happy?
8. What song do you dance to in your room when no one is looking?
9. Best breakup song and why:
10. If you own an iPod, what song is your most played song?
11. What song do you like to work out to (I know it's hard to pick one!)?

Allergies

Not sure if all of you remember my fantastic bout of bronchitis back in February (that would be three weeks of hell and two weeks of daily breathing treatments), but it was determined that I probably picked it up from a sinus infection caused by none other than ALLERGIES. To the smoke in Reno, to be specific. Now, I've known forever that I've had allergies and I've known that I had bad ones. But I decided that I wanted to have the skin testing stuff done again so that I knew exactly what I was allergic to. I had this done when I was really little and I remember that I was allergic to pretty much everything, but I still want confirmation. And that way I can avoid whatever it is that I'm allergic to (can I have a bubble please). So after a couple months and referral I finally made it into the allergist.

I had expected to walk in today, have them scratch my skin with every allergen under the sun, sit and itch for a while and then go home. No. Apparently there is much more to allergy testing nowadays. Now it involves blood work, heavy breathing and leg compliments.

That caught your attention, didn't it? :)

First things first, the nurse takes me into the room to do a lung test. I would expect to have fairly good lungs (hello, classical singer and runner). As I'm doing the test (breathe really hard into this little tube three times) the nurse looks at me and says "You're a runner, aren't you?" I said yes and something about how I had better have good lungs. She goes, "No you have runners legs". What does that mean?! Short and muscular?! When I think runner, I think long and lean. I'm anything but.

After that she leads me back into the room and the doctor comes in. He asks me 1,001 questions and tells me to stop taking my allergy medicine. I immediately ask for how long. He says until next Tuesday, which is when I have my skin testing. Apparently I WANT reactions to happen. Hopefully I'm ok until then... The following conversation then ensued:

Doctor Chang: "You need to go have bloodwork done."
Me: "Bloodwork?"
Doctor Chang: "Yes, today."
Me: "Today?"
Doctor Chang: "Yes, go now."

So off I went to have some blood drawn. Apparently, they can do some major allergy testing with your blood now, so while the skin tests help, this blood stuff is the best. I was so proud of myself... I didn't get all queasy! For those of you who don't know, I LOVE to give blood (Seriously) because I think it's a really special gift to give. However, I get a little queasy sometimes and the Red Cross has threatened to "flag my file" if it happens again. Now, mind you, I'm totally aware of this reaction, I know it's going to happen, and I'm ok with it. I always tell the phlebotomist! (isn't that the coolest word ever?) that I'm ok, that I just need to lay there and they panic. In high school they told me it was because I was near the 120 pound weight cut off. I'm thinking that's not really the case now, but either way, I'm totally ok! So this Thursday work is having a blood drive and I signed up. I used today as a practice run. There's only one problem. They did it on my right arm, which is generally the side they draw from. So now the Red Cross is going to think one of several things:

1. I am a drug addict.
2. I have some sort of disease that I am being treated for.
3. I just get weird bruises on my arm.

I'm hoping they don't turn me away... I'm seriously not sick at all and definitely am not a drug addict! Here's to hoping I get a leftie phlebotomist!
Tonight I had the book club over. It was my turn to host and to choose the book. We read "Honeymoon with my Brother" which was a really great book. This guy gets dumped like three days before his wedding and decides to still go on the honeymoon, but with his brother. It turns into a three year world travel. They both quit their jobs and sell their houses. It's a really neat story! It was so nice to have all the girls from work over. Most of the time we don't end up talking about the book the whole time, but it's really cool to hang out and just talk. Tonight it was about 98 degress (with a slight breeze), so we sat outside and munched on veggies and fruit. It was amazing!
On that note, I'm off to bed. Good night!

Weekend Wrapup

This weekend was CRAZY busy!

Friday I drove up to the Bay Area to hang out with Adam and Eva. We had a fantastic dinner at Aqui (I'm on a cheese kick right now). We went back to their house and Eva showed me all of her cool Jazzercise stuff. Check out the rolly cart thingy!
Eva taught her first class as a Jazzercise instructor on Saturday morning. I can't believe how amazing she was! Everyone in the class said that they couldn't believe it was actually her first - she looked like a pro! Here's her doing some stretches:


And here she is leading the class:


Adam and I were so proud! There were 30-40 people there and she didn't miss a beat! WOO HOO! After that we went to breakfast and did what everyone who completes an hour of intense activity does - we ate the most gigantic cinnamon roll we could find:
Ladies and gentlemen, repeat after me: "I exercise so I can eat". Very good.
After breakfast I drove home and met up with Tim to see Pirates of the Caribbean. Very good movie (see the movie review section). ---------------------->

After the movie we all went out to watch Tim's karaoke show. He did an amazing job and we had a blast! :)

Today was my "be lazy, clean your fish tank and nap" day. After church I met up with Brig, Amb, Kris and Tim to see "You Me and Dupree" (see the movie review section). We had an awesome time.

However, things turned dark when I returned home. I sat down to check my email and watched a huge (ok, the size of a quarter) spider crawl up my wall. I called Brigitte and she talked me through the extermination process. The problem was that he was above my head, so when I smacked him he fell onto the floor and ran under my dresser. So I did what any normal person would do and sprayed with hairspray like mad. Brigitte assured me that he was completely gone and Tim asked me if I regretted not getting the bug guy's card (see post from July 12th). I sat back down at my desk and that's when it happened. The spider attacked. He came running (full force, mind you) at me from behind the dresser. I think he probably didn't like the hairspray part. So I had to resort to some serious measures... the use of hairspray and the shoe. This comes from the Revised Four Step Approach (http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=11082959&postID=112734800293432598). Thank God, it worked.

I'm sleepy and going to bed. Good night!

The Bug Guy

Most hilarious story... so the bug guy shows up at our front door and is trying to sell his exterminating services. It was about dinner time (of course). The guy was fairly young and when my mom answered the door he dove right into his sales pitch. The whole thing was about getting rid of our spiders. So my mom says "What if I like the spiders? They get rid of the bugs!". The guy looked kind of shocked and said, "Well, we can get rid of your spiders and your bugs." Classic. She then proceeded to talk to him about the squirrels that live in our trees. Poor guy never knew what hit him...

The rest of today was kind of plain. Lots of work, but I'm learning to be a little more mellow. I'm also finding that I've been super productive, even with the new job. So that's good. Went to the gym with the girls to swim. It's been a while, but it was nice to be back in the water. We'll see how my body feels about it tomorrow!

I'm off to watch "So You Think You Can Dance"... my guilty pleasure. :)

X-rays

Wow, so yesterday's post generated some very interesting responses. People either agreed (generally those within the age bracket discussed) or talked to/emailed me to see if I was ok. lol. I promise, I'm totally fine. I'm on this new little mindset since vacation that I'm trying to be a little more relaxed and a little less uptight. That little article (I did not write it) caught my eye when a friend from college forwarded it to me.

I went to the doctor today to figure out what's going on with my hip. My humble medical opinion was that I was still compensating for/favoring the foot that I broke a couple of years ago. The podiatrist seems to think it's soft tissue or something actually going on with the hip. He suggested that I get x-rays and was surprised when I replied with "thank God!". For those of you who don't know the saga, I broke a small bone in my foot answering the phone (yeah, I know) and it was mis-diagnosed for a year. I went through doctor after doctor, telling them that something just wasn't right and finally doctor number three thought to take an x-ray. I had walked, run and jumped on a broken foot for almost an entire year. So I'm pretty stoked that this guy wants to run a quick x-ray right off the bat to make sure nothing is going wrong. Better safe than sorry!

Brig and I went to the gym today. I'm so proud of us! It's really hard to get back into the swing of things after vacation (and being lazy before that)...

In other news, our local Ross burned to the ground today. It was crazy - I saw smoke when I left the doctor and when I got home I had IMs from people at work telling me to turn the TV on. It was a 4+ alarm fire and the place was destroyed. I drove past it today on the way home from the gym (I know, I'm a looky-loo) and they were still spraying it with water from the big ladders. The entire roof had collapsed in and when you looked through what used to be the front door there was nothing in the building but walls. So sad because it turns out that the building had no fire sprinklers because it was one of the first buildings in Roseville.

I'm sleepy and heading off to bed.