Halloween 2006

Halloween is one of my favorite days of the year! I love everything about the fall, but Halloween is the best part. I have been carving pumpkins for many years now and it is something I look forward to doing months ahead of time. When I see the corn maze growing at the Petaluma Pumpkin Patch, I start getting excited. This year I introduced John the to wonders of the corn maze and made him carve his first pumpkin (at least that he can remember) with me. His carving was the easy one, but he did great. Next year he will be a pro! Man, I love this time of year!

Slaughtered Again

Aarrggghh!! I got spanked again in fantasy football today. I was beat by 50 points! The worst part of the day though was that I scored the second highest points in the league and would have beat any other player but the one I played. He had an outstanding game and all his players had the game of their lives. My players played great too, but I lost. Enough said!

Crash!

My weekend has not started out too swell. Driving home from Novato on Friday night I got in my first car crash. I was driving northbound on highway 101 when traffic came to fairly sudden stop. I came to a complete stop and looked in front of me and noted to myself I had plenty of room and then I checked my rear view mirror too see if the car behind me was going to stop in time, which it did. The car three back, however, did not stop at all and rammed into the car in front of him, who then hit the car behind me who hit me and pushed me into the car in front of me. The end result, a five car pile up on the freeway. I was so shocked because I have never been in a car accident and I still can't believe how loud it is when you get hit. My glove box flew open and everything came pouring out. All my CD's flew out and my phone went flying too. I pulled over to the right and within a minute at most a CHP arrived on the scene. I am assuming he was just a few cars behind the accident because he arrived to fast. All involved were instructed to drive to the next off ramp and pull over there. The car that was hit first was really messed up and my damage was not bad, but definitely noticeable. The whole back end needs to be replaced for sure but lucky for me I barely hit the person in front of me and don't even have a scratch on the front end. My side hurt pretty bad after the crash and I am still trying to figure out why my side hurt, but today my lower back is hurting too, so I had to call into work for the next couple of days since three quarters of my job is lifting, turning and moving people. I am hoping by Tuesday I will be all healed and ready to go back to work.

At least I got to do something productive today. John and I went shopping for colors for our bedroom. We agreed on a red duvet cover with cream sheets and now just have to figure out what color to paint the bedroom. It's turning out to be a much tougher decision than I thought it would be, but fun at the same time!

Additional Comments

Since I wrote the last post about a half an hour ago, I have been doing some major thinking. If you know me at all, doing heavy thinking before noon is a major step for me since I am NOT a morning person. My conclusion is that I am right. I have been trying to think of nouns that end in "ch" and so far, sadly, I have thought of about three....pooch, match and watch. Of which, two can be used as verbs also. However, when used in the noun form, to pluralize them there must be an "es" added to the end. So ,I am making up my own english law (which may already exist but I am too lazy to search for it) that a noun ending in "ch" must have an "es" added to it to make it plural! If you can prove me wrong, I am easily swayed, but for now, I am right.

To "Mooch", To Be A "Mooch", Or Be "Moochs?"....

The other night John, Spencer and I sat down for a nice friendly game of Scrabble. For the most part, it was a fun game but then I challenged John on one of his words. This game happened a couple of nights ago, but I have been thinking about it since and I can definitely see his side of the argument, however, I still disagree. Spencer laid the word "mooch" down. Fine, no questions there. John then added an "s" to the end of "mooch" to make the new word "moochs". That "s" was the beginning to the word sexy spelled down. Sexy happened to fall onto a triple word score and I was not going to let him get away with that. I had to challenge it because I was quite certain "moochs" was not a word. I explained to him that adding an "es" to the end would be correct and he agreed but also argued that mooch can be a noun so therefore you could have moochs. We went up to dictionary.com and typed in the verb mooch which did show up. With the word mooch, mooches was also okay and so was moocher(the noun) but no moochs. Now, in the sentence, "you are such a mooch", mooch is intended to be used as a noun. So, in slang it is okay to use mooch as a noun . I think, though, when you are referring to many people who "mooch" you would still have to add an "es" to make it right....they are all mooches. I really have no english rule to support why it would be an "es" as opposed to just an "s", other than it just looks right to me but I could be wrong. Who really knows. All I know is that I won the challenge and ended up winning the game. Yeah, I know, I rule!

Back To Reality...Fall Of The Leader

A couple of months ago, John asked me to join his fantasy football league. Now, I know what fantasy football is because I have watched my dad and brother play it for years, but I have never wanted to partake. I play fantasy basketball because I love basketball and kind-of follow it, but football is something I have always hated and have never been able to stand to watch it. At first I told him that I would not join because I don't understand football and nor do I like football, but he asked a couple more times and I figured, why not? I can always ask John or my dad (who is undefeated every year he has played) for help.

The first thing you do in fantasy football is a "draft" with the other people in the league. For the draft, I spent hours with my dad prepping me on who are the best players to "draft". I was randomly selected to pick 5th out of 10 people. My dad and I came up with three possible drafting routes to take depending on who got picked in the first round ahead of me. Lucky for me, I was able to select who I wanted on my first pick, Peyton Manning! I was so nervous for the draft because I was the only girl in the league, it was my first year playing and I had no idea who any body was. I really didn't want to slow the process down and was totally freaked out. I found out soon enough, however, that I had done so much prepping with my dad, I selected my players faster than anyone else in the league.

Now skip forward to the beginning of the football season. I still have no idea who anybody is or what I am doing but with the help of my dad and John, I have selected the players that will start for me. My first week is against Spencer, John's roommate. Now, let me add that there is always smack talk going on between the players that are matched up for the week, so you can only imagine what he was saying to me. Spencer is, of course, favored to beat me by about ten points, so my interest was low because I figured I was going to lose. All it took was just this one week of competition to make me want to kick ass and beat all the boys! Our first match up was the best. It came down to the very end of the Monday night game to determine who was going to win the first week between me and Spencer. By some miracle, I managed to beat him by one-one hundreth (.01) of a point!! That is the absolute closest anyone can come to beating their opponent. It literally came down to 1 yard from the whole weekend. I was hooked!

Since that victory, five weeks have passed. I am the only person in the league who is 6-0. Not even in my dad's league is anyone 6-0! I am on the computer constantly. I read up on players, review stats and determine which players are facing the weakest teams. Basically, I am addicted. I check my phone no less than 50 times a day to see if anyone has proposed a trade to me. I even keep my phone right next to me in bed so I can check it just before I fall asleep and in the middle of the night if I happen to wake up. It's actually kinda sick. John just shakes his head at me and says, "you're not checking your phone again, are you?". He has even started putting limits on the number of times I can check my phone when we are in bed for the night watching tv. Winning is just so amazing. I love watching the games and checking the stat tracker on the computer during the games. I am way more into it than any of the guys (John and Spencer anyway). Sadly though, my reign came to an end yesterday.

Week 7 match up: Kristine vs. John. He had a stellar record of 2-4 (I am trying to be nice), while mine was an incredible 6-0 going into this match up, but from the first plays of the morning games, he maintained a solid lead. All in all, he was pretty nice about it. He would just smile at me and say nothing, but I knew what that smile meant. He was basically telling me that he was destroying me and was loving every minute of it. The silence was worse than the verbal beating I was preparing myself for. Heading into the Monday night game he is ahead 39-65. My chances of victory are slim to none, but I am okay with that. This loss has brought me back down to reality and made me realize I am not as great as I thought. For 6 weeks, I was the fantasy guru. I sat on my high horse believing I would not get knocked off, at least not by Mr. 2-4, but it happened. I suppose of all the possible losses, I would rather lose to John than anyone else, but it still sucks. So, I just have to pull myself together and bounce back from this truly awful ass-kicking. I face the new #1 and #3 the next two weeks. They are big games, but for now, I am just going to bank on a very slim, outside chance Tiki gets me 26 points and Glenn gets John negative points and somehow, I win this match up!

I Claimed Too Much

I just had a meeting with my CPA, and according to her, I claimed too much income on my 2003 taxes. After reviewing all my paperwork, she says I should even get money refunded to me! I can't believe it. After all my fears of owing $3500 dollars, I may get money back in the end. The IRS categorized me as a bartender instead of a server and never counted any of the money I tipped out to other staff memebers. To top all of this good news, my CPA doesn't charge for the first hour of consultation and we finished in 45 minutes. So, I don't have to pay for the meeting too. Let's just hope all this good news stays the way it is and keep this good luck rolling....

Cabin Fever

Yay! I just talked to Quinn and John and I are going to meet her, Justin and baby Logan in Tahoe this weekend at their cabin! It's been way too long since I was there last, and this will be John's first time up to Tahoe. I can hardly wait.

The IRS Sucks

After hours and hours of building my template, I finally have a beginning I like. Now I just have to learn to add things to it. Over the weekend I found out I got audited by the IRS for the year 2003 when I worked at Cattlemens. They tell me I owe them $3479.22! Yeah, right! I claimed all my tips when I worked in restaurants. Apparently, the company of Cattlemens got audited and therefore, every employee who worked for them and earned tips that year got audited as well. Such BS...but lucky for me, I was organized that year and saved every single print out of the nights I worked, how much I grossed in tips, who I tipped out and the amounts I gave them, and then how much I ended up netting after tip out! Now I have to hire a CPA and get all this straightened out. Such a pain in the butt, but I refuse to get taken advantage of by the government!

Templates

Okay, I have been working on this stupid, stupid template for hours now. It is really annoying because I do not know how to read html at all and nothing is turning out the way I want it to. So frustrating!

Birth Of A Child Blog

This is my very first post on my new blog! Since I have stolen the idea from John, he calls it a "child blog". Per John, "child blogs are blogs my blog has given birth to". I thought I would start this site as a way to keep in contact with some friends I don't see on a regular basis, or use it to put my thoughts and opinions out there for people to read, and comment if they so choose. Perhpas I should give a little background information about myself first, but I'll do that a little later. For now, it's Friday the 13th and I am getting ready to head to Sacramento to meet up with my brother and his girlfriend to help move them into their new condo. I am so excited to have them nearby. Sac is so much closer than San Diego!