Month: May 2006

I think I have finally figured out my movie taste – in part. I recently received Just Friends from Netflix. It pained me to watch the movie. It was supposed to be a romantic comedy, but the comedy part is what I found painful. A young overweight teenager is in love with the popular girl and ends up professing his love in front of the football team. The first thirty minutes of the movie is about him doing embarrassing things and other people laughing and making fun of him. I just don’t find it funny when people are embarrassed or laughed at. It just seems cruel.

As for why I don’t like other movies (the few that I don’t like) – I like movies to have a happy ending. Why would I want to watch something for 2-3 hours and have my favorite characters die or the boy and girl end up apart? Some movies are great until the very end when there is no happy ending.

So my perfect movie? Lots of fighting and blowing things up where the main characters don’t die and the girl and boy end up together. Thank goodness that seems to cover most movies made!

Speaking of movies, if you go see X-men 3 – be sure to stay till the very end of the credits. There is a very cool scene that changes your outlook on the movie.

Madison ran away once again. Or maybe I should say she went chasing a squirrel again. We are staying at my mom’s house, which doesn’t have a fenced in backyard. I was taking Madison out without a leash – bad idea. (The leash was upstairs in our room and Wade was still asleep.) She saw a squirrel and off she went towards a busy street. I had on jeans and a shirt and not my pajamas – thank goodness. I took off after her but by the time I turned the corner she was gone. At this point I realized she didn’t even have her collar on because it had been making noise while we were trying to sleep.

I walked up and down the streets calling for her. Mom, Melissa, and Chris were all up and came out to help. Melissa even called Wade to wake him up – Madison tends to listen to him more than me. There were a lot of people outside that I talked too, but only one small boy said he had seen a small black and white dog. The small boy got his three brothers and sisters and wanted to help me look for her. The young girl even held up a kitten and called, “Want a treat?” Surprisingly, Madison rounded the corner about this time and came right towards me. I guess she was finally tired out.

My very sweet husband recently bought a domain just for me! I am the proud owner of www.toadfrogs.com. I thought about www.toadfrogsandelephants.com, but that is just too long to type. The old website – www.holly.firemonkey.org – will still work too. I’ll hopefully get email on toadfrogs.com at some point, but that is in the future.

I am writing this post to introduce my imaginary friend Sally. I love that people read my blog but sometimes that makes it difficult to talk about certain events or people. In order to continue writing about anything and everything, I have created Sally who will take on whatever characteristics (male or female) are needed to get my point across.
My first rant about Sally: She walks up to join a conversation and then takes over. The previous conversation is abruptly ended. Instead of creating a new three person conversation it is suddenly a two person conversation with me just listening. Very annoying and very rude!

I mentioned yesterday that I was going to have to change hotel rooms. I didn’t think finding a new hotel would be a problem, but I was very very wrong. Evidently May 23rd and 24th are big travel days (I actually have no idea why there were no rooms). I tried three hotels before a nice lady at the Courtyard Marriott called around and found a room for me. I drove to the Country Inn & Suites to check in during our lunch break. The lobby was empty except for the man behind the desk. He began the check out process and made a comment on the bottle of water I was drinking. It has gotten pretty hot in Atlanta and he had a dry throat. I happened to have another bottle so I gave him one. He was a good employee and refused it, but I convinced him to take the bottle. He said thank you and told me he was going to give me a discount. Then he had some trouble assigning me a room. He fixed the problem within 10 minutes but was extremely apologetic (I wasn’t complaining or making him feel bad). When he finally corrected the error, he told me he had given me the second best room in the hotel to make up for the delay. I told him he didn’t have to do that but I really appreciated it. I now have a suite! Aren’t I special?

Talk about an early morning – I had to get up at 5:30 am in order to be in Atlanta for a meeting at 8. It just hurts when the alarm goes off that early. Today starts the four day Cisco/Sci Atl meeting that I am being paid to attend. I have met some cool new people and seen familiar faces from my trip to San Jose this past March. The only bad part of the meetings today was that my day was planned from 8 am to 9 pm. After the day of presentations, there was a BBQ with activities. I was beat! I did meet up with Steven for a burrito and then went by his house to pick up his Angel DVDs.

I didn’t get to the hotel till about 10 pm. It turns out that something went wrong with my hotel reservation – maybe because I only booked it last Friday. The Marriott had an open room last night, but there were no rooms for the rest of the week. I’m not complaining. There is a hotel closer to our meeting place that I hope to use.

After taking my test yesterday, I decided I needed a day off. Danielle, my next door neighbor, and her two year old daughter, Emma went with me to the Gaffney Outlets. Emma handled the hour drive great – maybe because we played Bambi on the DVD player in my car.

Having Emma around was like bringing our own entertainment. She is this tiny, petite little girl who is extremely lively. She says hello and goodbye to everyone she sees. At one point she was even adding, “Take Care.” She also liked to run up to people and say “This is Holly.” In Ann Taylor, Emma got a little restless. I took her picture and then gave her the camera. I tried to explain about not putting your finger over the lens, but that never quite sunk in. She did manage to get a pretty decent picture of Danielle.

On a side note: I have added two albums to my gallery. Kate’s Wedding is now up and some of my favorite pictures from my Semester At Sea.

That was a hard test! I was two points away from passing. I almost wish I had been 20 points away. I know I studied (a lot) so I am going to blame it on the luck of the draw with test questions. The test is computer generated and the questions are randomly chosen. Now I am going to start the whole process all over again – yuck!

For the first time in my life, I celebrated Cinco de Mayo. The girls at work decided we all needed to get together with our significant others and May 5th just happened to fall on a Friday. There is even a Mexican restaurant near work so Maryellen made a reservation. I went to work for half of the day and then Wade and I ran errands until time for dinner.

Dinner was a hoot. Wade and I were a little late arriving and everyone else had started the drinking, which just made everyone really funny. I laughed nonstop. Kim even started us playing a few rounds of “I never”.

My favorie quote of the night was Tina asking, “What does Cinco de Mayo mean?”
Carol was hiding in the first picture so here is one of her and her husband, Rick.

I have been eating chocolate pop-tarts and drinking a glass of milk every morning for breakfast for the past twelve years. That is a lot of pop-tarts! Anyway, this morning I opened my pack of pop-tarts to find something I have never seen before. Chocolate pop-tarts are supposed to be covered in chocolate frosting, and eleven in the box were but this one wasn’t. There is a tiny bit of frosting, but definitely not up to normal standards.

I am having one of those days – a day when things just don’t seem quite right. There is nothing obvious that I can point my finger too. I just feel like I have a lot I have to do, a lot I want to do, and things I’m just not sure about. I know part of this stems from the upcoming patent bar exam. I am trying to make myself focus on studying so I won’t let myself do a lot of the little things that need doing. (In reality I am sure I waste the time doing something besides studying.)

As for my wants: I want to finish painting the trim in my office and the hall. I want to finish the desk for my office so I can unpack the last couple boxes. I want to take the recycling to the recycling center. I want to get back to running every day. I want to enjoy cooking dinner. I want a pedicure. I want to take walks with my neighbor. I want to read a book. I want to finish remodeling the bathroom. I want to wash my car. I want my sun chair so I can enjoy the sun. I want to go shopping at Sam’s. I want to get some of my work completed and therefore paid. I want to feel like I am working towards a future, a secure future.

My conclusion: I’ll worry about it all after I take my test.

It all started with a late night ice cream run to Wendy’s. We were on our way to drop Max back at work when we passed a Canadian Goose standing in the middle of the left turn lane. We laughed and drove on. However, when we drove back by on the way home, he was still there. At this point we decided to save the goose. We pulled over, got out of our car, and proceeded to lead the goose out of the road. (He is very good at follow the leader.) Someone actually leaned out of their car and asked if the goose was ours – weird. We were just going to get him away from the road, but he kept following us back to our car. At this point, we decided to walk him back to the pond at Wade’s work (where there were other geese). We walked over grass, parking lots, construction areas, and Wade even picked up the goose to cross a fence. The goose didn’t like that very much and actually honked at Wade. Otherwise he was very well behaved. He didn’t have to be shooed or scared – he just calmly waddled on. We got him to the pond but the goose didn’t seem very interested. He still wanted to follow us. At this point, Wade made loud noises and ran at the goose. That scared him in the opposite direction. Hopefully the goose was smart enough to stay at the pond with his fellow geese.

This is why I hate laundry. I don’t know how I did it, but I ruined another shirt. My new pink and green polo shirt now has a few extra white dots where it shouldn’t. They are right in the front too so I can’t hide them. I have had trouble with random bleach spots in the past so I make sure to finish all the colored clothes and put them up before I do the whites (with the added bleach). Yet somehow I still end up with the bleach on the colored clothes. If the darn whites weren’t so much brighter with the bleach, I would just say forget it. Ugh – I really liked that shirt.