Like sands through the hourglass of time...

So are the days of Reffie's life.

Well gang, It's back to our regularly scheduled broadcast. Back to the grind of day to day life. What's been happening since I last posted?

Well, I went hunting. I spent 5 days freezing my butt off sitting in my blind. I seriously sat and watched my snot freeze for hours. Opening day was awesome! I spotted 10 deer and shot at 2. The "Big" buck (at least a 6 point) and a larger doe. I missed both. Though I'm gonna claim that I "shaved" the doe. Those of you who hunt know what I'm talking about. The rest of the time in the woods was a let down because after the thrill of opening day, I didn't see another deer. While I'm disappointed that I didn't get one, I'm happy that everyone else in my family got one.

The bad part of the whole experience was that I spent the majority of my "vacation" totally sick with a major allergic reaction. (Coughing, Congestion, Facial swelling...The works.) I conveniently forgot that I had recently developed a severe allergy to pine trees and mold. Which is a problem considering that I spent 5 days sitting in a moldy blind smack dab in the middle of a pine tree field. With all the hacking coughing that I was doing, no wonder I didn't see any other deer after opening morning. But if you look on the bright side, I probably scared them all to the rest of our hunting party.

The funniest thing that happened was that my brother discovered a new "friend" in his tree stand. A porcupine had taken up residence over the summer. It was less than thrilled to share the space with Bill. It passed (pardon the pun) time by playing poop plinko over Bill's head. It climbed up to a higher branch and let loose. The poop would bounce down from branch to branch on top of Bill.

Next we celebrated my niece Susie's 1st birthday. Susie cruises around now that she can walk. She loves anything with lights, sounds, or food involved. My favorite is how she jumps on the bed. We had everyone there (it was Thanksgiving time as well as her birthday) and it was fun to watch her make a mess with her cake. I can't wait to watch her and Leah grow up. Watch out world, here they come!

Thanksgiving was nice. Though most everyone in the family was ill with the current upper respiratory bug that's going around. It was nice to relax with the entire family. Then mom and I went shopping on Black Friday. We hit Kohl's at 4 am and picked up some good deals. (I'm not gonna mention what we got since some were Christmas gifts for people who read this blog.) I'm still eating leftovers.

In between all that I sandwiched a few days of work here and there. We're still dealing with the stupid phone tree switch that has all of central scheduling calls for the hospital coming to our department. There is still debris falling from the ceiling onto my desk. And to add to all the fun, they got us new computers. Normally new computers wouldn't be a bad thing, except we got the village idiot for an IT person. She installed the new computer towers, crashed both printers for hours, deleted all of the data we had saved on the original PCs, and made it impossible to access the information we have saved on disks. Her exact words to me today were "Why do you use disks, they're almost obsolete?" Ummm... could it be that our old computers that we were using were from the dark ages and that's what they used. Our budget cutting powers that be made getting things like flash drives out of the question. UGH the frustration.

I'm almost finished with my Christmas shopping. Just have one 5 more people out of the 12 to get something for. I tried very hard to stick to my $20-$25 price range per person. There were so many things that I wanted to get for people but couldn't. Though I think that everyone will like what I got for them. Now comes the fun part of matching every one's schedule so we can all be together for the holidays. It's like a giant game of chess trying to find a day that everyone is available at the same time. Adding to the fun is that mom's gonna be having surgery on her knee before the end of the year.

I really have to get back to my diet and exercising. I haven't been on doing either for the last 2 weeks and have gained 5-6 lbs. It's HARD to get back into it. But, I don't want to undo what I worked so hard to do for the last 2 years. So, it's back to the videos and away from the leftovers.

Today I got an unexpected blessing. I had to run to the store to pick up a few things and take my pop cans back. I grabbed what I needed, returned the cans, and even treated myself to some bacon and broccoli salad. (Big mistake since it had peanuts hidden in it. I'm allergic to peanuts and am currently swollen up with a reaction to them right now.) But anyway, I had a scratch off lotto ticket that I wanted to redeem while I was there. I thought it was good for $1, but it turned out to be a $2 winner. I got 2 more $1 tickets with the winning. And with those tickets I won $45. That $45 couldn't have come at a better time. With the Christmas shopping that I've been doing, I was down to $5 in my checking account.

Well gang, I've written a book. Hopefully I didn't bore you to sleep. I'm off to exercise, take a benadryl or 3, and then go to bed. The forecast for tonight and tomorrow is kinda iffy so I want to go to bed early just in case.

See ya later skaters, Joelle "Reffie"