Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Week 46 - Visiting with Carolyn

This week was all about Carolyn’s visit. I spent the beginning of the week prepping for her arrival on Thursday and then it was all a breeze from there. It was all good.

The time change kicked my butt! Despite staying up until after 10:00, I still woke up Monday at 4:45 and couldn’t fall back asleep. This continued for days so I got more and more tired as the week wore on. Then the weather early in the week turned cold and rainy, which didn’t help. The older I get, the harder the time change gets. Oh well.

The work day Monday dragged by but was eventually over and I headed to Kate’s to drop off more food for her. Luckily she’s doing well so I’m calling it good and taking that off my list (unless she asks for more.) It was just Andrea and I at knitting, most likely because of the teeming rain. I was toasty fried but stayed up reading in hopes of normalizing the time. Didn’t work.

I got through Tuesday at work, feeling like a zombie. I decided to skip swimming in favor of going right home to finish prepping for the cleaning lady. I also tracked her number down and called to ask her to stay longer so she could do a thorough clean of the newly reclaimed spare room.

The F&A consultant was due Wednesday afternoon so I left my calendar free in case they needed me. Of course, they didn’t ask for a thing until just before 5:00 so I stayed late to reformat the file and so missed the only night in the pool for the week. Oh well. I went home to check out the extra cleaning and walked in to a sticky kitchen floor. The cleaning lady uses swiffer wet on the floors and I’ve noticed it leaving a film on the laminate in the kitchen and back room lately but this was ridiculous. I was sticking with every step. So I got busy rewashing the floor. I did it once with just water, which came up filthy BTW, and that did no good so I got out the orange clean and washed it again before going to bed. Still sticky. Only when I did a small spot with a kitchen scrubbie did it finally come clean. But I didn’t have time to do more than the spot so left Thursday for a pre-work Wal-Mart run to pick up a few things for Carolyn’s arrival. The day was a breeze, with no more data requests from the consultant. Oh well.

Darla and I went to In Time (the Justin Timberlake sci fi movie) to kill the time until I had to leave to pick Carolyn up in Omaha. It was REALLY good. Made you think. Then we went for a quick dinner at Cracker Barrel, where I rushed to finish only to get a call when I got to the parking lot saying Carolyn was still in Chicago with a delayed flight. I ended up sitting in the lot of the park across from the airport reading a magazine until she arrived. It was great to see her but I was exhausted by the time we got home so we went right to bed.

Helen came over to hang out with us on Friday, arriving just before I made my favorite comfort food lunch – tuna melts and tater tots along with brownies Helen brought. Yum! We visited all afternoon and then headed to Omaha to go to Hobby Lobby (Carolyn was curious about them having never been) before having dinner at Farmer Brown’s. Helen went home and Carolyn and I watched a relatively depressing movie about a famous British author we’d never heard of who got Alzheimer’s and died. Not a happy, peppy movie but at least it was British, which is always a plus for me.

Saturday was supposed to start with Darla coming for breakfast at 8:00 before she headed to visit relatives and we went to Omaha but she unexpectedly was babysitting and so couldn’t come as early as we planned so it didn’t work out. We grabbed something quick for breakfast and headed to Omaha, where we planned to thrift shop. After stopping at Yankee Candle to use a Buy2/Get2 coupon, we went to Personal Threads, where Carolyn was looking for soft yarn with good drape for a sweater that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. No luck so we drove to New Life Thrift, the huge store with cheap prices way east in the old part of Omaha. We didn’t find much though, which unfortunately, would continue for the rest of the day. We hit a couple of Goodwills, still finding very little, and ended up having a late lunch at Noodles, which was yummy. After picking up Starbuck’s, we headed home, deciding to skip dinner and have just popcorn while we watched movies. There was another downer British movie about John Keats that ended with his early death from TB. So we watched Dream Girls looking for some happy but that was endless and not as peppy as you’d expect from a musical.

We had toyed with the idea of having an open house on Sunday but neither of us had enough energy and we had forgotten to go to Garden Ridge, which Carolyn had specifically requested so, we decided to go back to Omaha Sunday afternoon. We had a leisurely morning and left for Omaha right after lunch. You guess it – we bought nothing! On the way home, I called Andrea to see if she wanted to go with us to Our Corner Cottage, a cute gift shop outside of Wahoo. We picked her up and headed out there but again, bought nothing. I dropped Andrea off and we headed home to eat the steaks we hadn’t eaten on Saturday and watched the last movie we had – The Town with Ben Affleck. It was the best movie of the lot but was about down and out bank robbers in Charlestown, Mass. Still not happy/peppy but at least I got to enjoy the Boston accents.

Carolyn was leaving the next morning and while we hadn’t been super successful with our shopping, it was still a great trip with lots of visiting and laughter. I could have fun with Carolyn in a sewer treatment plant so failing at shopping was nothing. And the best part was I'd be in RI for Christmas so more face time with CaWa was only 6 weeks away. I'm a lucky girl. : )

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