Sweet Summertime

Hello, hello and happy Monday to you!  How was everyone’s weekend?  Mine was lovely, because I spent most of Saturday and Sunday in my roommate Danielle’s pool.  Well, technically it’s her parent’s pool, but they were out of town and we took full advantage.  When I say I spent most of the day in the pool, I mean in, it was 106 degrees out.  I’m sure the amount of chlorine I absorbed through my skin was not healthy, but you couldn’t even stand on the pool deck without your feet burning.  Anyway, I’m sporting quite a deep tan/burn today, and I like it.

Dani, her bf, and his daughter enjoying the pool

Prior to heading up to MD for the weekend, the Orkin people came to our house to try to take care of our mouse situation.  My appointment window was from 10-12 and the guy showed up at 10:23 which was awesome.  He was so nice, and asked me where I thought the mice were coming from.  I told him that the cat usually sits in the kitchen staring at the oven, and the trap I had placed in front of the oven on Friday night was the only one that caught something.  He pulled our oven away from the wall, and immediately saw our problem.  Two giant holes in the floor by the back wall.  There was also mouse hair and droppings along the sides of the wall and the back, so it seems my intuition about where they were coming from was correct.

He put some copper wire mesh stuff in the holes, and then calked over them, which he said should ultimately solve the problem.  He also closed up another hole on the side of the wall near our radiator.  I took advantage of the oven being pulled away from the wall and scrubbed the side of it clean with bleach.  It was disgusting.  After taking care of the problems in the kitchen, he did a once over of the whole house, including my room in case there were any strays up there, and then sprayed the outside.  It’s been two nights now with no mice in traps and none in my room!  So hopefully we’re in the clear.

So, I’m only in the office for three days this week before I head off to Bethany Beach for a nice long weekend at the shore.  This is the 4th annual trip, and we have a pretty big group going this year.  I’m excited.  Past year’s trips included things like this:

2009

2010

2011

I’m excited.  My liver is not.  We’ve gone every year around my birthday, some years the trip falls on my birthday, this year it doesn’t, but I’m still calling it my birthday trip.  It’s also my one and only beach trip/vacation for the summer and I plan to relax and enjoy as much of it as I can.  Come on Wednesday, get here!

Magic Mike… and Crafts

First up today is this, which I think pretty much speaks for itself:

Those moves! I love them, and him, and all his terrible movies, especially She’s the Man.  However, any movie in which Channing Tatum dances, automatically get’s an “A” from me.  I won’t even disclose how many times I’ve seen Step Up.  Anywho, my roommate Dani was working from her parent’s house in MD yesterday so she met me after work and we had a lovely lady date.  We started with dinner and drinks at Bonefish, dessert at 16 Handles, and then the highlight of the evening, Magic Mike.

The movie was terrible and wonderful all at the same time.  I laughed a lot, enjoyed the stripping and dancing, but could have done without the “romance” aspect of it.  So yeah, there’s not much more beyond what you see in the previews, but still enjoyable.

Alright moving on from half naked sexy dancing.  Despite the power outage over the weekend, (OUR POWER CAME BACK LAST NIGHT!) I still managed to complete the crafts I wanted to.  First on the agenda was a key rack to hang next to the door out to our garage.  I had an idea in my head of what I wanted to do, and after an hour in the craft store I had the supplies I needed.

paint, wood glue, paint brushes, hooks, pieces of wood

I didn’t know really where to start, so I figured painting the letters was the best place.  Each one got two coats of white paint, which actually was more of a pain in the ass than I thought because of their curly, cursive nature.

Next I painted the larger piece of wood that will serve as the anchor for the key hooks.  I ended up buying two colors of paint for this because I couldn’t decide between a bright green or purple.  I ended up going with the green because I thought it had a better chance of eventually matching what we do in our kitchen (since the garage door is technically in the kitchen area).

Looks dark here, but it’s really very bright

I wanted to buy cute metal hooks to screw into the wood backing, but I couldn’t find any and didn’t want to go to another store so I settled on those white plastic wall hooks and just painted them green also.  I let everything dry overnight and assembled it the next day.

I’m happy with how it turned out, and I hope Darren likes it too.  Although he claims he’ll like it because I made it.  We’ll see though, I’m sure he’ll be critical of my painting job.  Also, because the power was still out, I tackled another craft I’d seen floating around Pinterest.  Well a slightly altered version of it anyway because that original was a little too cutesy for my liking.   It was really simple too.  All I did was find the states I needed in an atlas, and make copies of them in the size I needed.  Cutting them out was probably the most tedious part.

So you’ve got where we met in PA, where I live in VA, and where our house is in WI.  I might try to make PA and VA a little bit bigger, but we’ll see.  Now I just need to box everything up and ship it out there!

So even though it’s weird that the 4th of July isn’t a long weekend this year, it will be nice to have a random Wednesday off.  Then I work from home on Thursday and just have to come back to the office for Friday.  Not too shabby. Anyone got any fun plans?

I Survived, Kinda

So Vegas, literally kicked my ass…

My feet may never be the same again from the excessive amount of time they spent crammed into high heels.  I never knew it was possible for feet to swell so much… seriously.  That bruise on my arm?  A pole dancing casualty.  Let’s back up to the beginning though.

The roommates and I were up at the ass crack of dawn (4:30 am) on Friday morning to hit the road to Baltimore for our 8 am flight out to Vegas.  We flew Southwest, and weren’t in an early boarding group, so ended up in the very last row of the plane in order to sit together.  Soon after boarding, we all passed out.

post 4 am wake-up call, pre-3 hour plane nap

Eventually I woke up and took some pictures as we flew over New Mexico, there’s not much down there… at all.

In no time I spotted the Hoover Dam and knew we must be close to our final destination.

The three of us made it to our condo by 11:30 am, and met up with two other members of the bridal party and did some decorating before heading out for some lunch.

Lunch was a quick stop at Emeril’s restaurant in the MGM Grand before heading back to the condo to wait for our bride to be to arrive.  Once she did, we all changed into our sparkliest outfits and most uncomfortable shoes to head out for a night on the town.

cheers!

I spy, a pink penis center piece.  First stop was Aria for dinner at Sirio, where we all enjoyed some delicious Italian food and numerous bottles of wine.

I'll have a little of the white and red please

So many sequins.  (Completed unrelated note, that shirt annoyed the crap outta me all night and left me with a rash on the underside of both my arms where it rubbed).  After dinner, we moved on to Encore where we partied at XS with some famous DJ (who knows, I don’t really care) until I could literally no longer stand.  Thankfully there were places to sit near some VIP tables, and the bachelor party next to us was happy to share their bottle of vodka with us.  Finally around 3 am we drug ourselves out of the club and home to our beds, a mere 26 hours after waking up.  Yes, if you don’t count the time change, which my body surely was not, I was up until 5 or 6 am.  Ouch.

Unfortunately, in Vegas there is no time for hangovers or tiredness and at 9 am later that morning I was awoke by the sound of giggles and bagels, and a bottle of champagne popping.  Time to do it all over again.  It takes 9 girls a really long time to get ready (even with 3 showers) so it was a few hours later before we were out again to explore the strip.  Even so, we were on the 11 am shuttle to the Monte Carlo.

walking up and down the strip

I spy, a pink penis veil.  This was my first time to Vegas, so I was really excited to see the strip and all the amazingly huge hotels.  I took pictures of almost everything, but I’ll spare you the full collection.  However, I think The Cosmopolitan may be my favorite.

I would like to stay here next

Of course we stopped for some photo ops along the way.  New life plan, dress up in costumes on the strip and charge people to take their picture with me.

Our lovely B2B has a “Springtime in Paris” wedding theme, so our destination for the afternoon was The Paris, where we enjoyed some outdoor cocktails and pizza while taking in the fountain show at The Bellagio across the street.

Not France

After some more exploring, we had to head back to the condo to change into some stripper gear (totally serious) as we had a 5:45 pole dancing class to attend.  It was one of my favorite parts of the weekend, and I learned I could always have a fall back career as a pole dancer.  We also gave each other lap dances.  It was awesomely hilarious and I highly, highly recommend it for bachelorette party fun.  Also? My arms have never been so sore in my life, I can’t even lift them completely over my head, so it was also an awesome hour-long workout.  There are photos, but they are for the bridal parties eyes only :).

After pole dancing it was some serious quick changes and sprucing up that happened as we had a 9 pm reservation at Blue Ribbon in The Cosmopolitan that they only hold for 10 minutes.  Talk about a stressful time crunch!  Anyway, we all made it and had an awesome dinner that include the 3rd best fried chicken in the world, apparently.

more sequinssss

After dinner it was onto Vanity in the Hard Rock, which we got into for free, and hung out for a few hours.  The majority of us called it quits early by Vegas standards but my second night in a row in heels was doing me in and I wasn’t the only one.  We still stayed up hanging out in the condo, and I was cursing our 10 am check-out time on Sunday morning.  We had one last lunch on the strip before heading to the airport for our 2:25 pm flight to the East coast.

We didn’t make it home until after midnight on Sunday evening, and when I was still soul-crushingly tired this morning at 9:30 I was congratulating myself on having the foresight to take today off from work.

So in short, Vegas was awesome and injured me, I am still a zombie, I am scared to look at my credit card activity.  I can’t wait to go back!