Month: December 2005

Finally, the long weekend is here! I can’t really complain, I didn’t go to work on Friday. Wade and I took the day off to look at houses. Daniel drove over from Huntsville and got in just in time for dinner. The three of us realized we hadn’t seen King Kong and decided to go to the 10 o’clock showing. That might not have been the smartest move – it is a three hour movie. We didn’t crawl into bed till about 2 am.

The movie was pretty good. I am curious now to see the original. I loved the dinosaur/gorilla fight scene. In what other movie would you see that? I was also impressed with the range of emotion that was displayed by a non-talking gorilla. However, the movie seemed to have an overabundance of long looks and huge, creepy, crawly bugs. Did I mention the island natives were a little freaky?

Wade and I are now officially house hunting. What fun! Now if we can just decide on which one we like…..

Most of the houses we are looking at are older houses that could use a little updating. The hardest part has been finding a house that has a shop (or a garage that can be used as a shop), but both of these houses have two car garages.

Do you ever just feel a little behind or a little different from everyone else?

As I was unpacking my bags, I discovered lots of forgotten presents. My favorite was the dark chocolate M&Ms that Jenny found for me. I posted about them a while ago – especially how hard they are to find. Thanks Jenny!!

Christmas Day finally arrived! We started the morning with madness at my mom’s house. She was doing the Christmas breakfast for our extended family. (We have oyster stew with the normal breakfast things – weird, huh?) I think about 18 people came. Wade and I snuck off as everyone was eating to join his family for breakfast. Then we went to church and then back to his grandparents’ house for presents. After presents, lunch, naps, and a couple of games of Uno – Santa and his elf even dropped by for a visit….

After arriving back in Atlanta late last night, Wade and I got up early to drive to Anderson, SC. Wade and I visited with his work friends and just toured the area. Wade has a tentative job offer from his internship and we wanted to check out the area. House prices are great!

These fish are all over Anderson – painted in a variety of themes. This one was located outside of Wade’s company, Ryobi.

The holidays tend to bring back lots of memories, especially those of loved ones no longer with us. As I was looking through some pictures, I found one of my papaw and remembered a joke he always told. Our family still gets a good laugh out of it.

A young man has just started dating a young woman. The young woman’s mother has invited him to dinner and he is rather anxious. The young woman has told him her mother is slightly hard of hearing.

During the meal, the mother asks the young man, “Would you like any more potatoes?”
The young man responds, “No thank you. I have dined sufficient.”
The mother says, “You say you went fishing?”
The young man replies, “I said I’ve had plenty.”
The mother asks, “And you caught twenty?”
The young man shakes his head and says, “The poor old sole.”
The mother sighs, “And you broke your pole?”

I woke up this morning to the sound of falling rain. Then I looked outside and saw a winter wonder land. Then I looked again and realized I had been fooled. It was just ice. Thank goodness the roads weren’t slick. I definitely think the dog will need a bath tonight!

I’m done. I’m really done! I finished my week of class in DC and took my EMT final last night. I had a little (make that a lot of) trouble getting motivated to do any studying. I finally did some studying and then the test turned out not to be so bad. I stayed late to help grade tests and even found out my grade for the entire quarter – an A. Woo hoo! Now if only I knew if I were going to be finishing the class at Gwinnett Tech….

It snowed twice while I was in DC! There wasn’t enough to cause any trouble, but it did cover the ground and looked pretty.

I have 8 hours of EMT class today – we are getting CPR certified and then I am off to DC. My company is sending me for a 6 day class to prepare me for my big Agent test. The good news is that class is about 2 miles from my Aunt Gayle’s house so I can stay with her. I still have most of my old friends in DC so I get to do lots of visiting. The bad part is I fly back in on Friday night, have 8 more hours of my EMT class the next day and then a final in my EMT class on Monday night.
Needless to say, I won’t be posting for a while…..

Nothing official has been announced. SA being bought by Cisco won’t even be official till March of 2006, but it is looking more and more like the IP department will disappear. One of my coworkers found an article today talking about Cisco and their patents. They only employee two patent lawyers and then use 10 outside law firms. I suppose they could decide to try something different with SA, but I doubt it. Why maintain five salaries when they can pay a flat fee per patent? Oh well, this will make deciding to leave Atlanta much easier.

I started making my Christmas wish list a few weeks ago. I had decided that a new laptop would be great, but that meant looking for one (the part I hate). My current laptop is a Sony Vaio and I swore it was the last Sony laptop I would buy. But of course, when I was searching for a new laptop, I found a Vaio that was awesome – it was red! I got really excited about it and put it on my list. Then I tried to show it to Wade and it was gone. Evidently I had seen it the last few days it was listed for sale. Darn it! Now I can’t even find anywhere that has a model still in stock – especially in red. There is a new version out, but I don’t like it and it doesn’t come in red. The same thing happened when I was car shopping. I liked the older version that was no longer made. Obviously I am jut always a day late and a dollar short…