monday surprises!

so erik and i have this ritual of sorts where every day before i go to work we check the mail together... lame, i know but it's fun to see what kinds of mail we get and seriously what else do we have to keep us entertained?

much to my surprise, we opened the mail today and not only were my long awaited checks in there from the stupid bank as well as some other stables but I GOT A PACKAGE! not just an package, a love birthday package from home! just as i was starting to get homesick too.

aren't birthdays and parents wonderful?

just plain scary

still think it's strange that giant squirrels can attack out window out of the blue...
erik thinks they like his music.
THIS SQUIRREL WAS HUGE!

friday is apparently bar night with the at&t crew

even though we have no money, my options this weekend were to desperately wait at home for erik to come home from work at 4 am or spend some time out with my coworkers indulging in some $4 long islands and learning more about them than one person could possibly want to share.
i really didn't feel like being out too long. kaylee was going to pick me up and then we were just gonna hang out for a bit. i figured i'd be home long before erik, but out long enough so i didn't really notice he had been gone for so long.
i didn't think i'd be out long enough for him to be able to pick me up at denny's on his way home...
i think the start of the night was what doomed me. we were all supposed to be meeting up at this place called the caboose which is basically like a dave and busters- not that i've ever been there either but this place is a sports bar on one side and a family restaurant with games and what not on the other. and they have $2 margaritas on tuesdays and $4 long islands on fridays.
kaylee and i got there around 10:30 and couldn't find chase or steve anywhere so we decided to just get a drink while we were waiting. moments after receiving our beverages, steve texted me to tell us they were in the restaurant bar. not realizing we can take our drinks into the next room, we started pounding our long islands.
i spent my evening educating texans about what a REAL long island has in it as well as introducing the crowd to grateful deads. mmm...
by the time that bar closed we were all pretty happy and mosied over to this other bar called jakes where i think chase spilled his beer all over tiffany, kenda lost her phone only to find it on the floor after sending steve back to the other bar and we all decided we need a girls dancing night and sung journey at the top of our lungs.
from there we headed to dennys where kenda lost her phone again and chase told me all about how he's been engaged twice and he may have a baby by this woman. we also all texted each other across the table and switched seats a bunch.
i work with some interesting people.
and next friday is my birthday. pretty exciting stuff!

our new creature!

so we finally got the new door frame put in and therefore thought that would be the end to our life in the wild. unfortunately we were quite wrong, because as erik was going downstairs yesterday he came across this:

this creature was crawling around on our carpeted stairs! barely visible, completely blending in with the floor! and he used my glass to capture it! my glass!













i just stood around and screamed and got my camera to take pictures only after it was securely maintained within the glass and plate barrier.
erik safely released the lizard type gecko creature into the wild. this was only after him pointing out that we could have eaten him in our sleep if we weren't careful. thanks honey.

then he stood victoriously in our itty bitty kitchen. he is after all... my hero.

week 3

today is the beginning of week 3 out o my 6 week training.
we most likely won't even touch a phone for another 2 weeks. my brain is still fried from last weeks intensive training on every program we could ever use. i'm already waiting for this week to be over.
there are 2 things that bother me about this situation.
1. we can take notes. i take massive notes. it helps me to refresh my mind on what we've previously gone over so i can make sure i understand what i'm talking about. the problem with this is that even though we can take notes, we can't take them home or use them any time we aren't being paid-which would be fine if every moment of our day wasn't filled with learning more and more information.
2. we start class at 12 o'clock and work until 9 pm. we take frequent breaks, like every 2 hours or so but the problem still lies that my brain is not fresh at 9pm. my brain's like what are you doing? you should be watching movies or doing something that doesn't require trying to jam more info in me! not only that but it's a 9 hour day... and we only get paid for 8 of it yet we still have to be there.
now this is a great company to work for and it has great benefits but the likelihood that one can get out of working the late shift within the first 3 years is slim. i've heard horror stories about people who have been working that shift for 8 years. 8 years with neither a morning/day or a night free and there's no way you can have a 2 day weekend unless you have saturdays off which is highly unlikely.
i'm here and i'm going to stick it out. i just hope i'm a lucky one and this lifestyle isn't forever.

my future husband

recently i've been getting a lot of advice from people who are married, dating or have been married about my relationship situation. it seems it got out that erik and i haven't been together that long and are already engaged.

one woman i work with (four years my junior) warned me after work one day not to rush into anything. she got married at 17 and has 2 or 3 kids now at 20... i guess if i were her i may offer the same advice.

another person i work with asked me about my dress and when i told him i already had the dress and the venue and most everything planned he asked me if that was a good idea. things change.

there are so many reasons why i know that erik is my soulmate. but today i figured i would share yet another amazing fact about the man i'm about to marry (as he sings time is on my side...):
erik and i have just moved cross country. i moved with my tiny little car and therefore couldn't carry much in the ways of furniture or dishes or anything really like that...
erik moved via plane and therefore could bring even less.

we have one car and one bed that was borrowed from a friend. o and some dishes. those are our only possessions. robbers would walk into our house and think they were too late.

that aside, with the exception of these last two weeks which i still won't receive my first paycheck for another week, i haven't worked in two months. erik was supposed to finish out the season at his last job but i couldn't be apart from him for that long. basically, we're not only living off the bare essentials but we can't really afford to buy anything more.

with all that being said i'd like to remark on the type of person erik is and keep in mind this is only one of many occurrences where i'm completely in awe of him.

we were on our way to the grocery store to pick up some food for dinner.

on our way inside, we were stopped by a couple women who were standing at the front of the store asking for donations of poptarts for hungry children. hungry children have a harder time learning, and what kid doesn't like poptarts?

we took the brochure they were handing out and went about finding our ingredients.

we walked through the store entirely and then on our second trip around, erik stopped and got some poptarts.

when we got home i told him that i love that that is the type of person i'm marrying and he responded with helping others, helps yourself. people are more likely to help you if your kind, have a good attitude and help them.

how could i ever ask for anything more?

things i've learned since living with erik

• it's not all about me. i know. i was shocked too. but apparently it's true.
• rice and eggs is a fine combination. although i still get made fun of for eating pasta and cottage cheese?
• one person can eat burgers every day
• i need to take things less personally. and i'm super sensitive. weird. hopefully that goes away.
• i apparently leave my stuff every where. when this was determined the word stuff was substituted for another word beginning with s. again, sensitive. idk.
• foreign asian movies can be fun.
• his keyboard is smaller than mine, making this difficult to type. (my computer at work has the like huge hand keys where you're hands are separated and on an upward angle making it hard for me to type on anything else...)
• big tvs are very important. especially for playing video games.
• i learned that when i get home from work in the evening, i need to unwind with momentary me time but i really enjoy that he picks me up from work.
• netflix is amazing when you are broke and have nothing else to do.
• not working makes him very unhappy.
• it's good to have someone around that cares for you. especially when you are almost in tears because the washing machine doesn't work and you spent your last quarters to find that out. he's a good egg. i think i'll keep him. :)

other random thoughts

• my computer hates me. it goes through these phases where it just doesn't want to work. sometimes it's fine. today and last night... it hates me.
• today is not only 1 year until my amazing wedding with my soulmate but it's also our 3 monthiversery!
• today also marks the end of week 2 of my training at my new job. my brain is frizzled. hence the non-blogging.
• it also makes week two of my coworkers mingling outside of class. we're so visiting erik on his first day of work!

erik! we have snails!

this morning i walked downstairs, in my usual morning blur, to make coffee. as i was walking over to the windows to open the shades, i felt a crunch under my foot. cereal was my first thought. i know i swept the day before but it has to have been possible for some cereal to sneak out and land in our mid should be if we had furniture living room. no biggie.

as i'm returning, few sips of coffee to awaken my stupor, i look at the crunch on the floor. that is not cereal. bug? ewwwwww.. but it looked weird for a bug. texas bugs. everything in texas is strange.

one more time downstairs, getting ready for my wonderful day of work. i'm about to run back up the stairs when i see something strange on the floor and the woodwork. do we have bugs? then...
ERIIIIIK! can you come here please!

........ WE HAVE SNAILS!

not only snails! we have baby snails. that can grow up and become big snails right in our house!

that's right. that crunch from earlier? crushed snail under my barefoot. and when erik opened the door, more snails waiting to sneak in under our misshapen door.

it still gives me the heebie jeebies just thinking about it. escargot is not for me.

no more poppit in space

today was a sad day.
today i realized that everything has a cost and money really is everything.
it started with drive-thru pizza....
and now...
poppit.
http://www.pogo.com/games/poppit?pageSection=free_home_my_fav
unfortunately, up until now i've had the pleasure of playing this game under a temporary free membership and become wildly addicted for no apparent reason to the wonder of popping balloons for prizes. it gives me entertainment and i would receive new balloons and percentages as to how close to the next level i was... it also gives me something to do when erik is killing blue cats and green monsters... (don't ask. i really have no idea.)
now, when i play the free version of poppit... i get commercials every 3 games and pauses and worst of all... no new balloons. no chance for a new theme.
so instead of poppiting, like i'd like to be to past the time on this wonderful saturday night and regain some sanity after some intense tv shopping and computer movie watching with a belly full of what passes for tasteless cheese pizza in texas (blah!), i'm looking for a new game... hopefully one that will bring me just as much joy and entertainment...

"If we can get through Adolph's, we can get through a sandstorm!"

erik and i had big plans for our friday night. i sit in a building all day doing mostly nothing but staring at a screen and he spends most of his day hanging out in our townhouse, so i made the big suggestion. let's go for a walk when i get home!

needless to say when other plans came up with the people i work with, we jumped on the bandwagon.

the big plans were to go to this karaoke bar by the mall called adolphs. place your world war two jokes here.

kaylee felt the need to warn me as she and i are two of seven people out of our twenty-one person class that do not smoke. thank goodness.

erik and i show up around 10:15 pm. before even parking we got a glimpse of the type of people we were about to encounter. honestly, i wasn't sure if this woman was dressed to a T for the area or a transvestite. either way this isn't the type of bar i was used to.

as we walked in the door, the bouncer wearing a pink shirt and cowboy hat announces the fact that we are a long way from home. you're telling me...

we stood at the bar but apparently not at the walk-up which was the only place we could actually order drinks if we weren't sitting there. it seemed to take forever. in this time, the two people from my work that had already arrived noticed me: chase, the ex-marine californian and lisa, who's roller derby name is psycho sweettie.

both smokers.

next to arrive was jane, the excitable teacher and her husband of two years. then steve, the new mexican who says wicked and his girlfriend, kenda. kaylee and tiffany. and finally rocky. most of the gang.

lisa introduced us to her friend, shooter who continued to hit on tiffany all night even after she told him that the fact that he wanted to take photographs of her was creepy. might i add that shooter looked like a 60 year old scary version of kris kristofferson with sketchy glasses.

sketchy guy #27 at that bar got up to sing my girl to apparently every woman in the room. his arms were approximately as long as his body and he could be compared to a hillbilly cowboy umpa lumpa.

by the time chase was up to sing his second song (ice ice baby- unfortunately sketchy guy #27 also dirty dances), my eyes felt like little ash balls rolling around in my head. red, scratchy and squinting, i was blinking to try to keep some moisture away from the amount of smoke that was overwhelming every orifice of my body. after finishing our cheap pitcher of water beer, i think we were both about ready to leave. being the troopers that we are, we stayed until a little after midnight. endured as much as we could, inhaled around 90 cigarettes a piece and came home to try to brillo off everything.

i'm pretty sure if i burned the clothes i wore last night, people 4 states over would still get a nicotine fix.

snails, Snails, SNAILS!!!

so this morning i went for a little run around our townhouse, and on my way back i was shocked to find this little snail... well not so little for a snail but it was exactly what you would expect a snail to look like. strange for what i think about when i think about texas, but it's true i guess: things are always bigger in texas. it had the little antena thingies popping out of it's head, a perfect little shell and it had the perfect little tail and it was just wandering around on the sidewalk.

that was the end of my thinking about it. then i went to work.

when i got out of work tonight, i asked erik how his day was. he responded with this story: well, i was walking to check the mail today and i looked down and there was this snail! (my shock! because i never told him about my snail story even though i meant to!) his story continued, he ran back to the townhouse to grab the camera. who sees a snail in texas?! and apparently as he was walking he kept hearing this crunching noise which he didn't think about until he saw this snail.

the crunching? baby snails! the place was crawling with them. all over the place.
not only on the ground either, THEY WERE CRAWLING UP THE WALLS!! as he was walking to the car to come get me, they were falling down on him like rain!

unbelievable! i was no joke, shocked by this story. who gets rained on by snails?

so, when we got home i didn't really think about it much except for the fact that erik kept looking around. they were no where to be found. absolutely no snails anywhere! i started to question whether or not him staying home was a good thing....

and then just as i opened the door, there they were! three itty bitty snails with perfect spiral shells!

who would of thought?!?!?! snails in texas.

first day of work

isn't it weird how starting a new job is like starting school?

first of all, it feels odd getting dropped off. because erik and i only have one car he has to drop me off in the afternoon and pick me back up at night. (12-9 shift. blahhh!)

then it's awkward because there are obviously the people who share too much and you have to decide which ones are going to be your new friends. the crazy goth roller derby girl? the woman with the crazed frizzy hair who can only talk about how terrible her divorce was and how he left her with 3 kids and she has to battle him for everything? maybe not.

thankfully i settled on kaylee, a 22 year old who lives in lubbock and is working at at&t because her mom and her aunt have both previously worked there.
so making friends (at least for now) is accomplished.

up next is trying not to fall asleep when we go over all the wonderful information that is the world of a customer service rep at a call center.

*** luckily for me, i got to come home to a wonderful cooked meal. :)

Maxey Pad Park

ok, so it's really just maxey park.
trying to get out of the house when you aren't working and have no money leaves limited options. i thought it would be nice to check out this park i had seen once when i was interviewing... a little fresh air, get us out of the house and away from our computers for a bit, maybe a little exercise?
no.
this place looked worse than the dumps back at home. AND PEOPLE WERE FISHING THERE? all i could think is what are you going to catch? a mutated frog with 17 heads and 8 legs? a diaper?
when i think of parks, at least parks in new hampshire, they are well maintained, clean. trash goes in the trash can, not the pond.
not cool. one less thing to do in lubbock.

Rosa's Fine Dining

so erik and i have officially had our second fight. (our first fight involved an apple core in my salad bowl)
fight#2 started out like this.
me: honey, i want burritos! let's get burritos for dinner!*
him: ok, where should we go?
(i don't know lubbock! are you kidding me? i just moved here too!)
so i decided it was best that we ask my friend's husband where we could get good burritos like chipolte or dos amigos; not that he, being a true texan, would know what i meant by that.
he suggested rosa's cafe. they're cheap and good. my fave.
then he told me they were located on quaker and 4th.... me thinking i have great direction skills took it from there. let me also state that this was erik's second time driving in texas and we had my friend's two year old babbling in the backseat.
and scene:
me: baby, just get on the loop and go to quaker.
him: o the loop, like by our place.
driving. driving. driving. driving.
quaker.
him: ok so which way do we go?
me: uhhhh... i don't know i've never been there before. take a right so you're on quaker and we'll figure it out.
head scratching...
me: uhhh.... i think we're really supposed to be more towards 4th. (the street we live on, we were currently at 73rd....) we can just ride up quaker.
17 million stop lights later.
we stop to get gas.
erik has by this point become less chatty.
7 more stop lights.
me: well, the address says 4407 4th so i think we should go right...
(erik still being a good sport but obviously waaaaaaaay less happy)
me: i think we should turn around. this is tech. i don't think rosa's would be in tech.
him: why don't you just look it up and tell me which way i'm supposed to go?!?!?
me: baby! i've never been there before! how am i supposed to know these things?! can't you just find some place to turn around?
him: why don't you figure out where we're going so i don't have to keep turning around!!
me, mopey and grumpy and a bit hungry: look it's right there!

thankfully we made it in ok.
and then we got the food. this food was the most disgusting pile of dirty grease i've ever encountered. we thought taco bell was bad, taco bell was heaven compared to this place.
we got two chicken burritos. the only way to describe them was to say that they were like sweaty, dirty balls. it was, no joke, slimy chicken meat wrapped in this gummy tortilla that was about 4 inches long. within two bites, we were sick to our stomachs and ready to leave.

the greatest part was on the way out we followed lubbock's finest, all of which apparently meet and dine at rosa's.

then we drove about 2 seconds down the road to united, where we picked up a frozen pizza. the same united, might i add, that we had walked to from our apartment the day before...

*all conversation stemmed from emily's crazed memory

Newwww BLLLOGGGG

so i haven't blogged in a while...

when i started blogging it was because there was so much going on in my crazy hectic life, i needed some sort of outlet to realize that it was all happening.
now, my story is a bit different. currently i am laying on the floor of what has been deemed the game room of my brand spanking new fiance and my townhouse. now there's so much going on in my life that i want to document it all so i can keep it forever.
for starters, i just moved to lubbock, tx. i got engaged a little over a month ago to the most amazing man i've ever met. we fell in love in under 2 weeks. we have been living in our little bamf townhouse for 2 whole days now. we have absolutely nothing but our computers and ourselves to entertain with. i am just days away from starting a new career at at&t, but in the mean time i'm occupying my days by playing mahjong and planning a wedding we currently can not afford. basically, i have my hands full with nothing and it's driving me a wee bit crazy but i couldn't be happier.