What I got for Christmas

We are back from North Carolina and I figured I would go ahead and blog about what I got for Christmas because when people ask I forget half the stuff. Christmas with the in-laws (Friday, December 23, 2005):
-Pair of jeans
-CSI puzzle
-Season 4 of E.R.
-Gift card to Starbucks
-Norman Rockwell puzzle
-Seal-a-meal vacuum sealer with bags (very excited about this it was on our wedding registry)
-Pistachios, Dr. Pepper and Poly-o String Cheese

Christmas with my family:

-Odyssey putter
-Season 2 of E.R.
-Long sleeve t-shirt with a beer logo on it
-”I ‘m picking out your Christmas present” t-shirt with a guy picking his nose
-”How to out run a cop” t-shirt with directions 1. Get cop’s attention 2. Drop some donuts 3. Run like hell
-Packman t-shirt
-Two, yes count them two, “Made in Ireland” t-shirts
-”I’m right, You’re wrong, Any questions?” t-shirt
-Thinsulate shirt
-Lots of fun socks
-Black pair of dress boots
-Turbie Twist hair towels
-Wallet
-Business card holder and matching briefcase
-Deception Point by Dan Brown
-Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
-1000 Best Bartenders recipes
-As an added bonus, Beanie Babies that my parents picked up at an auction.I hope everyone had a great Christmas!

I’m baaaack

It has been quite a while since I blogged mostly because I have been super busy at work this week. At the end of Wednesday I had put in 31.5 hours of work time and the earliest I had got home was 8 pm. Needless to say I didn’t have time to blog at work and I didn’t feel like doing it when I got home, all I wanted to do was collapse and go to sleep. I guess I will walk you through my week.

Monday I worked the same spill that occurred the previous Friday. I got home a little after nine, did my blog complaining of my day, took a shower and went to sleep.

Tuesday I had to go back to the same facility and finish the clean-up. It should have been a two hour job but it turned into a pain in my butt because our intern left the ignition engaged on the backhoe and its battery was dead. So, we had to jump the backhoe before we could load the truck with the contaminated soil. I then had to go to a site where a spill occurred a year ago and re-route the blower that we had set up there. Why did I have to re-route the blower you ask? Because petroleum vapors were back in the house for like the third time. We didn’t get to the house until 3ish and we had to dig a six foot hole, drill a hole in the house and then route PVC through the hole to pull from under the slab. Needless to say we did most of the work in the dark with flashlights and I didn’t get home until 9:30. You can guess what I did once I got home.

Wednesday I had a geoprobing job in Warrenton. I had to geoprobe to find a place where the groundwater isn’t contaminated with MTBE so that we can drill the homeowners a new well (their current one is contaminated with MTBE). Overall the day went well but geoprobing in itself is a slow process. On my way back to the office I found out that a client was going to be coming to the office to sign the VPSTF papers and get them notarized and he wouldn’t be there until about 6. Guess who the notary in the office is…you guessed it, me! So, I had to wait around for him to notarize the papers. That night I got home around 8, ate, took a shower and went to bed. Wednesday was also the one year memorial for Nick Mason a soldier in the Army National Guard that was killed last year in the Mosul attack. Nick was a good friend and fellow HS wrestler of my brother-in-law and the son of one of Boo-Boo’s former co-workers.

Thursday I was supposed to have another geoprobing job but this time at a home built on a mountain in Madison County. We got to the site and saw that not only do they have a beautiful view of “Old Rag Mountain” but that same mountain keeps their yard from getting sun. Their entire yard was a sheet of ice and it just wasn’t safe to have the geoprobe rig on the ice so we called the job off. I came back to the office and worked on some reports and actually got to leave at the normal time. When I got home I was able to wrap the rest of the presents, including Boo-Boo’s, and cook dinner all before Boo-Boo got home. Boo-Boo was working in WV with our friends that started their own medical billing company about a year ago. They have expanded so much that they have started to hire outside help and offered both of us a job. I had to turn them down but Boo-Boo accepted, we figured that he can still help them out even when he becomes a police officer because he gets multiple days off in a row.Today has been uneventful work wise but I have put in 42 hours already this week and no matter how much I work I only get paid for 40, the beauty of being a salaried employee. The exciting thing that happened today was that our photgrapher

called and said that our wedding album, printable CD and DVD were done. When I got there she had made us an additional smaller album with pictures other than the ones we chose for our big album and she also couldn’t decide which picture to make an 11 x 14 so she gave us four at no extra cost. Now I am just sitting here waiting for Boo-Boo to get back and for the Explorer to get its oil change and then I can go home. We are celebrating Christmas with Boo-Boo’s family tonight, which I have never done, so it should be an interesting experience. Tomorrow we leave for NC to celebrate Christmas with my family and we will be back on Tuesday. I will do my best to blog while I am at my parent’s house but no promises, otherwise check back on Wednesday. Merry Christmas to everyone!

I just finished my Christmas shopping, thank God. I don’t know what I would have done today if I didn’t have my good friend right there with me. I am not much of a shopper and I can’t stand to shop for more than an hour, I get totally uninterested in the task at hand. If she hadn’t been there giving me ideas for people, really good ones at that, I don’t think that I would be done (thanks Aminallady for all your help). Now all I have to do is wrap all the presents, we bought presents for 22 people (this includes buying one present for all the kids that are under 16, which is five children) and some of them got multiples. At least I have a week to wrap all the presents before I leave for North Carolina. We got the Explorer back yesterday. That is another stress that is done with, I didn’t know how we were going to get to NC with all the presents and the two dogs in my truck. Now I don’t have to worry about it because we have the Explorer back. I am so happy that the transmission guy found out that our warranty was still good! The total bill for rebuilding the transmission came to a little over $2,200 and we only had to pay our deductible. I love my truck to death and I wouldn’t trade it for the world but we really need the larger vehicle to get places.

Work this coming week is going to be busy, busy, busy. We try to get as much done before the holiday’s hit because we all know we aren’t going to be motivated the last week of December and first week of January. So, I have something planned for every day next week and that means running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Work yesterday was totally nasty, I came home smelling like fuel oil and I didn’t get what I wanted to get done, done. Which means that all that work has to be put off until next week, hence why my schedule is CRAZY. Anyways, back to what happened yesterday, one of our fuel oil companies that uses us as their environmental consultant had a fuel oil leak in their yard and it was just disgusting. We spent all day using sorbent pads to get the fuel oil out of puddles, keeping the fuel oil from getting to the neighboring creek and getting the leak stopped. When I got home, every time I closed my eyes all I saw were red puddles (fuel oil is dyed red for tracing purposes), it was quite disturbing.

I don’t understand why people have to be so grumpy when they are out shopping, it’s not my fault you waited until the last weekend before Christmas to finsih your shopping. I wasn’t grumpy today because I knew that I did this to myself and the quicker I found what I wanted the quicker I got to go home. I was on my way home today and I was sitting at a light, I happened to be the car that would block the intersection of people turning left into the strip mall on my right. I however did not block the intersection while my light was red, people were turning in and out of the strip mall just fine. When my light turned green I pulled up behind the car in front of me and lo and behold someone came and wanted to turn left into the strip mall and at that point I was in his way, even though I was at that second moving up. He turns to me and says “you know, you aren’t ever supposed to block intersections”. So what does he proceded to do??? He pulls in front of the car behind me, which happened to be my friend, and blocks her from proceding to the light. Would those five extra seconds that he had to wait made that big of a difference? I think not…hello people its the holiday season, you know the season for giving and holiday cheer! Again I just don’t understand.