Over the river and through the woods

I got done with everything I needed to do around 12:30pm. I got all my presents wrapped before dh even got up. Back didn't hurt too bad and a few presents I put in bags or boxes that didn't need wrapping. I got 2 loads of laundry done, changed the sheets on our bed, and finished the vacuuming upstairs.

DD and SIL got here a little after 1pm yesterday, so they made good time and all the roads were good. Their pickup is big and sturdy, so I don't worry much about them driving anyway. SIL is always prepared when they take a road trip.

They only have the one dog now, which makes things a little less chaotic. Amos seems to remember the dog and while he, of course, keeps his distance, he is not hiding in my closet for 2 days this time, LOL. 

I've kind of been monitoring my work emails from my phone (just to keep all the junk cleared out) but there was one with an invoice to pay for a subcontractor we use. I didn't want him to have to wait 2 weeks for his payment, so I just hopped onto my work login this morning and got his payment processed. Then I logged right back out.

Today we'll make some more cookies - which just reminded me I need to get some butter out to soften. Be right back......These shortbread cookies will be made trying this Danish butter I bought. 

Dh said when he went outside last night around 10:30pm, to go lock up the shop, there were 3 elk and a small group of deer in our front yard. He's going to be happy to have a game camera again. DD bought a 2 set of game cameras for one of his presents and I got him the battery packs and sd cards for them. It's a rechargeable battery pack made just for these outdoor game cameras so I'm guessing they will be more weather resistant than his old game camera which he was just using AA batteries (and 8 at a time). 

Both SIL and dh were wanting to open presents yesterday LOL. Even dd...I finally said I don't care - you guys decide! In the end no presents were opened haha. Yet........

Dinner was spaghetti and garlic toast. Tonight's dinner will be my homemade mac & cheese. Maybe a pizza on the side. Lots of carbs and comfort food :) That mac and cheese is a favorite of anyone who has had it and I haven't made it in awhile, so I am looking forward to it.

Most of the evening was just spent listening to dh talk LOL. At least 95% of it was not about politics haha. We all had to laugh, while sitting at the dinner table, after eating, dd asked him a question and in true dh style, he spent an hour getting side tracked with story after story and then never did answer her original question! Typical. I'm just happy he has someone else to talk to besides me, for a few days, LOL.

Almost ready for Christmas

I took the advices yesterday and put the frozen turkey in the sink filled with water. I'm not sure how long I left it there - 4 hours or so. The water stayed cold the whole time. I know our well water is very cold and maybe the copper sink also kept it cold. I kept checking it to see if it was getting room temperature and I'd put in some more cold water, but it was cold the whole time. I'd say the turkey got a good day ahead of my original schedule now, LOL. I'll check it again tomorrow and see if I need to do that again for a bit to help it along.

That organic coffee I got not too long ago is awful. I decided to try it again, using my "strong" button on my Keurig, but that didn't help either. I just went downstairs and dumped it out and made myself a cup of good old Folgers (Dark Silk). I'll see if dd wants to try it/take it home with her. It seems too expensive to just throw away.

Yesterday morning I messaged a funny gif to dd (we had not been messaging yet) and at exactly the same time as I hit send, she hit send....to send me the exact same gif! We were like wait! what?! LOL. What are the odds that we would pick the same one?

I still have a bit of upstairs vacuuming to do this morning. I got the downstairs and part of the upstairs done yesterday, but my back can't take doing both on the same day, especially with the upstairs being all carpeting. I've also found, with the upstairs, it really helps if I just do one, maybe 2 rooms and then stop - before my back starts hurting, and then continue on with another room in a half or or so.

And all my presents need wrapping. I know that is going to hurt my back, so I think that's why I keep delaying it. When I did those 4 gifts for the delivery people, my back hurt just doing those. I think I'm just going to give it a try sitting on the floor, rather than bent over a table. Probably what I should be doing is using more bags and doing less wrapping! Or I should break up the wrapping into short sessions.

DD messaged and said they left at 5am instead of 4am, so have been on the road about an hour and 15 min. Getting near the first of 3 mountain passes to go over. First one is bare and wet.  Second one is rain and 3rd pass says scattered wet, so should be an easy drive over here. 

Ok, I just wrapped some presents sitting on the floor. Nope! LOL. That just hurts my hips and lower back. I have lots of bags - just going to use some of those to help the situation ;)  Work smarter, not harder.

From busy to relaxed

I was kept busy with work yesterday, so I skipped blogging. Payroll, taxes and the last day of the work year, so lots to get done, before having 2 weeks off. Though I was able to get the 2 "big ticket" items, payroll and the tax filing, done in the morning, so the rest of the day wasn't too stressful. My boss sent my bonus check over via UPS and that's supposed to get here Monday.

DD and SIL plan to leave their house at like 4am tomorrow so they should be here around noon (they lose an hour when they cross the state border), which will be really nice and will feel like we have the whole day with them. They are staying until Thursday. No white Christmas this year. Not even any snow on the ground, what we've gotten kept melting.  DD was supposed to have to work from here on Monday, but one of her coworkers decided not to take it off, so dd was able to now take it off. She was really happy about that. Now she can just totally relax. I think we'll make more cookies on Monday.

On Thursday I had taken my Christmas treats down to the neighbor at the end of the street. Had a nice chat with her for a bit. After I got back she texted me "those ritz cracker cookies are amazing!"  Everyone sure seems to like them, even dh. Then our retired friend stopped by for a visit yesterday, so I gave him some to take. Plus I am out of the shortbread cookies. Those are my favorite, I think. They just melt in your mouth. The recipe only makes like 2 dozen small cookies, so might have to double the batch next time.

DH said he'd like our big turkey dinner on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas Day and then just have leftovers Christmas Day. That sounds like a good idea, but wish he would have suggested it a day earlier, LOL. I just took the 17# turkey out of the freezer yesterday afternoon. I don't think it will be thawed by Tuesday morning. What's a quick way to get it thawed the rest of the way Tuesday morning?

Well, I still have lots to do before the kids get here tomorrow. Clean, vacuum, wrap ALL my presents, a couple loads of laundry.... My plan for dinner tomorrow is spaghetti. If we do turkey dinner Tuesday, then I will do the homemade 4 cheese and bacon mac and cheese and a pizza (can you say carbs?!) on Monday. I was trying to figure out what to make for Monday anyway. Hopefully, I can get the turkey all the way thawed by Tuesday morning.

At least it's Thursday already

Holy shit show! The incompetence of some people/companies is crazy. Myself and 2 of my coworkers have been dealing with one of our manufacturer's and I honestly don't even know how this company has managed to stay in business. On Monday, our salesman just wanted me to send them a purchase order for a very small order - a sample he needed on jobsite by Thursday, our customer willing to pay the overnight shipping. If this sample gets approved by the customer, then of course hey - big order will come....

Several emails on our end the next day trying to confirm it was shipped...finally a reply mid afternoon "your accounting needs to contact our credit dept". I emailed right back - please give me name/email/ph# to contact? We have a main ph# listed in our records for this manufacturer so I tried to call. I got a rude person basically saying "why'd you call this number? we are "sales" OMG - just transfer me to your credit dept then! She gives me another number to call so I try that but can only get voicemail. Our sales support assistant then tried calling 3 different numbers to this company yesterday, all with no luck actually getting anyone. Nor did they reply to any of our emails about the order yesterday. Their order dept person, who first emailed us that we needed to contact their credit dept doesn't even have a phone number in her signature line. Hows that for great service?!

So, finally they email back this morning that they have sent us a payment link so we can prepay the order before it gets shipped. Um....we've been emailing you since Monday that we needed this on the jobsite TODAY! What a joke.

DH wanted to get our garbage man the gift this morning. The garbage truck typically arrives in the morning on Thursdays around 7-ish, but he got up at 6am to wait to listen for the truck, to make sure he didn't miss him. It's now almost 9am and still no garbage truck. Of course, LOL.

I was trying to kill 2 birds with one stone yesterday by not having to walk all the way down to the end of our street to drop off the Christmas cookies to neighbor. Her son gets off the school bus at 4:30 or so, so I was watching for the bus from our dining room window and then would get out there and meet up with him as he's passing by on his walk home and then I'd continue over next door to Mr & Mrs house to drop off theirs. It was very windy rainyish day, which is why I really didn't want to take the long walk down to their house. I get out there, the bus has gone by and no kid. Damn it! LOL. I guess he didn't go to school yesterday, so I walked over to Mr&Mrs and dropped off with them and brought my other box back home. I'll text other neighbor today around noon and make sure she's home, before I walk down there. I think today's weather will be better for a walk.

Annoying cat behavior

More "teaser" snow overnight, but it's warming up and a bit of rain coming or at a minimum it will melt off again today.

I got an email from my health insurance company yesterday about don't forget to claim your rewards. I vaguely knew something about this program, but thought I'd better check. I had $25 to claim for an Amazon gift card, from having my annual exam and screenings this year. Oh nice! Then I decided to explore what else they offer rewards for. I earned another $30 answering a questionnaire and putting an app on my phone. Glad I looked - that was an easy $55 found/earned. I will have to remember this for next year, where I can at least get another $25 for my annual check up.

DH also really likes the "Christmas crack" toffee treat I made with Ritz crackers, chocolate, peanut butter and toffee and the top sprinkled with mini m&m's. He said it tastes like a really good Reese's. I agree. 

I made myself a to-do list for work, so that I (hopefully) don't forget to take care of before I'm off for 2 weeks. Worse comes to worse and I wake up one morning, in the next 2 weeks, suddenly remembering I forgot to do something, I can always log into work and do it, haha. 

DH is going to have to get up early tomorrow so he can try to catch the garbage man and give him his (giant LOL) box of chocolates. I think they usually come around 7am but it's not super consistent. Even if they don't come until after I am up, I don't typically even hear them out there. He did manage to fit the box in our mailbox for the mail carrier yesterday, so she got hers. We also still have the box for our FedEx gal. We don't get FedEx here as often as UPS or USPS. I told dh a week or so ago, as far as I know, we don't have any packages coming via FedEx before Christmas and offered to order something from Walmart (who usually ships FedEx) so that she has to stop here, but he just said oh, let's just wait and see. Oh well. Maybe we'll get something by New Year's.

My cat is being very annoying lately. He's just acting very agitated a lot of the time. Maybe it's because he wants his normal outside time off and on during the day but he's not liking the cold, so he comes back in. Mostly he sleeps most of the day now but when he is up he just seems restless. Then as soon as I go to bed he wants to meow and up on the bed, down, up in the window ledge, down, out to the living room, then repeat. After I went to bed last night dh shut his den doors (french doors with windows) because he was talking to a friend on his phone and didn't want to wake me up. I guess Amos was meowing he wanted in, so dh let him in the den and reshut the door. He immediately started meowing he wanted back out. Repeat. From about 5am he was annoying. I let him out when I got up at 7 and left him out there for about 40 minutes. He followed me up to my office (where his food and litter cabinet is). I fed him, gave him his treats. He starts meowing. I played with him and his mouse on a stick for awhile. Then he went downstairs and I didn't hear him meowing again, and he woke dh up (again). He's back outside now. Dh was not happy. I guess I'll just have to put him up in my office for the night. It seems like, in the past, when I have done this for a few nights, the then seems to mellow out and doesn't act like this for awhile. Hopefully he gets over whatever is going on.

Miscommunication

Yesterday morning, while it was snowing, dh came upstairs and said "Bumble died". We had this whole conversation where I asked what's wrong and he said the motor died, it won't go up. Bumble is what he named his big white sidexside snowplow. I thought he was talking about that and that something was wrong with the plow part/motor that raised and lowered it. Off he went to try to fix it.

Only I kept hearing noises right outside the front corner of the house. Hours later (because I was busy getting our bonus payroll submitted and other things) I go look out the window to try to figure out what in the heck all this noise is. He was working on Bumble.....Bumble the inflatable Christmas decoration! RIP big Bumble. He didn't last very long.

Bumble on top of Bumble (old pic)

Boy, we had a lot of snow that year compared to now, with barely a dusting on the ground.

Ok, I got Monday done. I still don't think my expense program syncing with my accounting program issue is fixed. I guess I'll find out when I have to try to sync again. Seriously, if it is, I'm just going to wait until after the holiday to figure it out, I think. I can just add the info manually this week, plus we don't usually have many expense reports being submitted mid/late month. They are supposed to get them in the first week of each month (ha! who am I kidding?!)

As dd and I say to each other: we now have 5 more sleeps until we see each other :)

I've been thinking about someday getting a new area rug for my living room. One that's a bit bigger, with maybe a bit of color in it. What has been catching my eye are rugs that have copper and blue colors in them. I'm always seeing those ads for the washable type rugs. And then this morning I see an ad for them, but they now have holiday rugs. How cute would that be to be able to change out the rug for the holidays!, but easy to store when not using it. I'll have to keep that in mind, whenever I do finally decide to get a new rug. DH would be "OMG - you have a rug for Christmas now?!" haha. 

Oh, Monday!

I got up, ready to take on Monday and the week and was immediately annoyed with the first email, from work, I read, LOL. We have this vendor we purchase from fairly regularly - for years. They email me the monthly statement, and for some reason also always email it to our dept head that purchases from them. Our dept head, while I love her to pieces, always has to forward it to me and half the time is questioning me, if we are past due. I have told her repeatedly over the years, that I also get this same statement email.

This morning I wake up to this email from her: 

Making sure you had seen this from XXX. Since it's unlike us to be overdue on payment to XXX (Invoice 9172....), I'm hoping it's not a case of a check being lost or anything. As such, I wanted to bring it to your attention.

First off, if by chance, I missed getting an invoice from them, then I will see it on the statement and get it taken care of right away. You don't need to remind me. Here is my reply to this one:

It's all good - 9172.... is a Credit Memo, not an invoice, that was on last months statement and it will get applied to the current invoice on the statement, that is not due until next month. 

Give me a break - I've been doing this job for 20 years (40 years of experience). I think I know how to do my job. I'm just annoyed because she does this all the time and all the time nothing is wrong. From now on, I'm not even going to explain myself anymore, I'm just going to reply "ok, got it".

Then I go to do a process where I sync our 3rd party expense reporting system with our accounting system and now suddenly that doesn't want to work.

But, then I got a nice surprise. My boss emailed the report with all the bonus's listed, for me to enter for a payroll batch, and turns out I'm not getting half of what I would have gotten, if we had met our goal, I'm getting more than that, LOL. As usual, there are a few getting extra and I am one of them. I will put my annoyances aside (once I figure out what the heck is wrong with our expense report system!) and count my blessings.

I made the pork chops meal last night and it was a total hit. The added packet of Lipton onion soup mix, in addition to the cream of mushroom soup, made the rice taste really good. My only complaint was it needed more water, there wasn't enough of the soup/gravy for the rice. Or maybe I just needed to cook it about 10 minutes less. The recipe said an hour, but these weren't very thick pork chops. I'll work on tweaking it next time I make it. Plus it looks easy to make a homemade copy cat recipes of the onion soup mix and cream of mushroom soup, with no additives. It looks like pork chops are a great source of protein. I only bought a 4 pack this first time, because I wanted to make sure we'd like them. Now we have to wait almost 3 weeks before we shop again LOL.