work

Stuffity Stuff Stuff (Pictures)

/ aidan, friends, halloween, life, pictures, work

Today was a weird day.

When I got to work, I was making myself some tea and also getting some water for my water bottle. One of my co-workers came over and asked if I’d heard about our receptionist. Now, I knew our receptionist had been very sick. This morning, I found out she’d passed away.

I haven’t worked at Zaner-Bloser long, but Ann was always a sweetheart. I’m in denial, because I can’t believe I won’t hear her say “good-niiggght” to me as I’m leaving for the day, anymore. I mean, it just doesn’t seem real. 🙁 I’m still going to be checking her desk, wondering when she’s going to get better and come back to work.

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After work, I went to the library and ran into one of my neighbors there. The nice one. He sits out back and he reads and smokes his cigar. We stood in the parking lot and talked for two hours. He is older, but funny as hell. He’s one of those naughty old men. 🙂

Although, he did give me three pounds of hamburger because he said he doesn’t want to cook it. So now I have a HUGE three-pound roll of hamburger meat that I will separate and use for spaghetti and chili and other assorted yummies.

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I went to two costume parties this weekend. Had a blast-a-rooni. Friday night’s was at a clubhouse, and with a few friends I used to go to church with. Aidan was freaked out by the creepy decorations. But he looked very cute:

See?

Spider Aidan & His Healthy Dinner

Spider Aidan!

Aidan was so cute! And this little girl came to the party and I sat there and watched him try to impress her and get all flirty and stuff. It almost make me cry, because it was like I was getting a sneak peek at teenager Aidan. Eeek!

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Saturday night, Aidan and I hit my friend Heather’s housewarming/Halloween party. It was the best party ever. EVER. Seriously. There was so much food (she had me take some home, and I have enough for lunches all week, and a few dinners, too), and there was candy and all sorts of treats and toys and favors and fun fun fun. Again, best party EVER.

Roy & Laura

Roy & Laura, who is having her baby RIGHT NOW. OMG.
Laura is on maternity leave from ZB at the moment. If she didn’t go into labor on her own, they were going to induce her at 8pm today. OMG.
I was so happy to see her.
The story is so funny. She and my mom live right around the corner from each other. Her mom is my mom’s pharmacist. But Laura and I just met this year.

Sarah
Sarah the Bling Bling Cowgirl.

Mary
Mary, the art director.
She’s really cute and she wears very nice perfume.

Heather and Aidan
This is Heather, the hostess, and Aidan!

Heather the Candy Corn
Heather again! She was Candy Corn!

Aidan & The Purple Witch!
Aidan and Heather’s Mommy. They got on really well! 🙂

Again, Heather’s party was amazing. Her house is gorgeous, and I have NEVER seen so much food at a party before. Seriously. It was incredible. And Aidan had a BLAST, running around and playing and melting everyone’s heart. People kept coming up to me with tons of compliments about him. He’s adorable, he’s a sweetheart, he is well-behaved, he has great manners. Yay! He’s just such a great kid. ♥

On top of that, Heather’s house has this amazing energy about it. I can’t describe it, but I felt so relaxed there, and happy. It’s carrying over, too. My back didn’t ache at all when I was there, nor did it ache yesterday and today. I’ve been smiling a lot since hanging out over there.

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My friend Dave works as a reporter out in Los Angeles. He was covering the fires. He was pretty much right there. Check out this picture:

Isn’t that crazy? Of course, this guy’s been blown around in hurricanes, played in the no-gravity simulator in a plane, all sorts of stuff. He loves doing this kind of work.

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The other night, I was giving Aidan a bath. He asked me to scratch his back. I did, and cracked up laughing as he went “OH YEAH OH YEAH” in this funny gruffy voice. That boy is hilarious. And his obsession with Tom and Jerry is the best thing ever. He LOVES the Zoot Suit episode. And we love to quote a part from a SpongeBob episode. The cartoon goes like this:

Sandy: I love karate!
SpongeBob: I love karaTAY!
Mr. Krabs: I love moneyAY!
Squidward: I hate all of you.

Yeah, Aidan and I quote that over and over and over. He’s so getting another SpongeBob DVD for Christmas, so I can watch it with him. 🙂 That cartoon is growing on me.

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It’s finally starting to get really cold in my apartment. I’m in running pants, a sweatshirt, and fuzzy socks and I am totally shivering. It’s about 65º F in here now. The electric blanket will feel nice tonight. I’m trying to hold off as long as I can in regards to turning on the furnace.

How early do you guys (who this applies to) turn on your furnace?

Cheers!

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An Update (Lots of Pictures/Survey)

/ adam, atlanta, family, life, pictures, recap, ronni, survey, Uncategorized, vacation, work

Hello, LJ people.

Yes, I’ve been away. Well, not exactly. I’ve been reading, just not posting. And it’s not because I haven’t had much to say. Okay, sometimes that was the case. But often, I was just too tired to sit here and write an entry.

But I am here now, so sit back and brace yourselves. It might be a long one! 🙂

Here are the things I’ve done since I last posted:

– Took my laptop to Best Buy again because the power adapter thingy was overheating and melting the cord. I mean, it was getting uncomfortably hot. It will scald you. Was told that there was liquid damage to the motherboard and they wouldn’t fix it unless I paid them more than $1200. I told them to leave the computer as is. I’ll just not touch the damn AC adapter part. It’s at Best Buy now, waiting for me to pick it up. I’ll go get it tomorrow. Seriously, who’d pay $1200 to repair a two-year old laptop when one can buy TWO NEW ones for that price?

One of these days, I’m going to get a Mac.

– I’ve subscribed to a bunch of feeds; The Bargainist, WiseBread, zen habits, The Happiness Project. I call the folder they’re in “Lifestyle” The Bargainist has lists and lists of deals, free samples, coupon codes. It’s neat. Wisebread is a money-management blog. The other two are just for me to become more at peace and happier. Good stuff, those. I have a ton of feeds on my Google Reader, actually. It’s such a convenient way to get loads of info in one place.

– Downloaded the new version of Flock. Got irritated because the pages with feeds and searches on them kept bringing up this little bar that asked me if I wanted to subscribe to them. I finally went into configurations and turned them off. Now I like Flock again. Except I can’t figure out how to turn off the media stream notification. Ugh.

– Had my one-year evaluation at work. It went really well. The copy editors are all going to start taking classes for Copy Editing certification. We wanted to start this month, but we’re waitlisted. We’ll see what happens. At any rate, work has been really good lately. The new lead copy editor is very cool. I won’t have page proofs coming in until October (sigh), so I’m doing a lot of pick up work for marketing and leftover stuff for everyone else. Plus errata. Always errata. Boo to errata. But yay to the style guide coming together!

– Became ADDICTED to enchiladas from El Vaquero. Seriously, they are SOOOOO good. I had some yesterday for lunch. Yummy.

– Started listening to the following bands a lot: Lacuna Coil, Grateful Dead, and The Crüxshadows. I also decided that I love the song Breakin’ Dishes by Rihanna. And If Tha Mood by Esthero. More songs, too.

– Went to Atlanta to meet adamselzer‘s parents and also for Dragon*Con!

Read about and see pix from Atlanta/Dragon*Con

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Nothing says, ‘I have no idea what to get you,’ quite like giant beige bath towels. – Missbhavens

/ aidan, pictures, ronni, Uncategorized, work

As usual, Sundays go way too quickly. It’s kind of annoying.

I decided to do the 101 in 1001. My list is here: 101 in 1001 || RonniStyle. My start date is tomorrow. I plan to keep most of my updates about it there, but I’ll probably talk about it here from time to time as well. I saw that lovely_lunai was doing it, and I think starlit12 is doing it as well. Good times.

Last weekend, Aidan and his dad went to Kentucky. Here are some pix from that trip:

…check it out…

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Very Much A Potluck

/ birthday, friends, music, work

Way I Are – Timbaland
I heard this song for the first time on the radio on the way home from work today. I was enjoying the beat. Then I heard the chorus. A part of it. THE WAY I ARE. Again, I like the beat. It’s a catchy song. But, as a copy editor, I feel morally obligated to refrained from obtaining it in any way, shape or form. It’s like the way I cringe when, In Big Girls Don’t Cry, Fergie sings, “like a child misses their blanket.” The noun/pronoun agreement in that sentence is off. But I like the song. So now what? *sigh* I just know that everytime I hear that “way I are” part I’m going to want to throw something across the room. So I guess the answer is to let the song be.

During the Spring, I was taking the Zaner-Bloser Handwriting course. It was a correspondence course. I worked on certain letters, manuscript and cursive, and turned them in to an evaluator. It was HARD. Writing is very much about muscle memory, and my hands had been trained to write a certain way, to make letterforms a certain way. To retrain is hard and painful. Even still, I got very good scores on my lessons, and on June 7th, I became certified to model and teach Zaner-Bloser Handwriting! 🙂 Yay.

Other than that, work’s been pretty run-of-the-mill.

I did a BAD THING last night. I installed Zoo Tycoon on my computer. And no, not the new one. The ORIGINAL one. And I played it for TWO HOURS. ARGH. I can’t believe I got sucked in again. I managed to spend $250,000 trying to get the thing established, and the stupid giraffes just kept on being pissed off, and the stupid zookeepers and maintenence workers refused to clean up all the poop which pissed the giraffes off even more! So I sold all the giraffes, and I’m going to rebuild the exhibit and only put two giraffes giraffes in there. I’d added too many before, then they started making babies and oh man. OUT OF CONTROL. I never got any of the expansion packs, and I don’t know if I am going to ever invest in the newer versions (they look fun!), but I tihnk that’ll be okay. Speaking of computer games… OMG Bookworm Adventure. Defeat the enemies by making big words!!! Yeah, game heaven for a word geek like me.

This just in:
Nielson did some research on the Harry Potter phenomena, and here’s a statistic that surprises me:

51% of people age 12+ in the U.S. are aware that the new Harry Potter book is coming out in July.

I honestly thought it’d be a higher percentage. Wow. But I think 51% is still pretty darn impressive.

The whole “Save Harry” campaign is kind of annoying. Let the author do what she will. Signing a petition to get her to sign more books, while it must be flattering, has to be kind of infuriating as well. The security measures around the book are crazy!!!!! I can’t believe the lengths these companies are going through to keep it secret. Well, one week and one day, and the fans can be satisfied.

And one last note…. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO goaliej54!!!!!!! ♥

See ya!

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Health Fair

/ work

Highlights is sponsoring an Employee Health Fair, and it happens to be in my building (Zaner-Bloser) for today. On my first round, I got a chair massage, a mini-reflexology session, loads of packages of free foods, a free BMI screening, and a free blood pressure screening. On my second go round (coming up), I will sample some catering and grab a coupon for a free loaf of bread from Harvest.

YAY for workday distractions, especially ones that offer free food and massages!

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