Baby, its cold outside.

Fall has officially fallen and I couldn't be more ready for it. This summer, while fun and productive, was exhausting. I'm ready to snuggle in, to read (for pleasure!!), to wrap myself and the chihuahua in a blanket and watch crappy TV and eat yummy comfort food until March. Maybe April. :-) I have 3 exams scheduled between now and Thanksgiving, the first of which being this Friday. I feel as positive as I can about it in light of having failed the first 2 I took. I'm studying, reviewing, really trying to be hopeful. Then the next one is October 20th - just 17 days to study 20 chapters. But I've studied for and taken this one before and scored 2 points below passing, so it seems possible. Then the next is the Monday before Thanksgiving. That one is new, I'm not sure how it'll go.

After that, I'm going to try to take off Tuesday and Wednesday to cook and clean because we're hosting Thanksgiving. Hosting used to be difficult for me, I stressed out about every little detail and would inevitably work myself like a dog until the wee hours of the morning the night before. Nothing seemed right - it wasn't clean enough, tasty enough, something enough. But somewhere along the way, I've given up on all that silliness. My house is what it is, if I think it's clean and, more importantly really, if Husband thinks its clean enough, then it is. everyone else can,effectively, suck it. I know I cook decently well and if people don't like my food they are more than welcome to stop at McDonald's on their way home. And I'm not trying to be a bitch here - I want people to enjoy our home and my cooking and to have a good time when they come to our house, but I don't worry about it like I used to, which probably makes it all run smoother, actually. I make our home they way Husband wants it and the way I want it and that is good enough. We're having my parents, my sister, her husband, our neice and hopefully my in-laws for dinner. A big crowd for me since we have such a tiny family.

Right now though, I have a nasty case of poison ivy. It started on my left wrist, I thought it was a bug bite and I scratched it. The next morning, it was all over the inside of my wrist. The next day, it has jumped to the other arm and now it is all on the side of my left boob and all over my stomach. It is slowly creeping around my sides too, I'm hoping it'll stop spreading before it gets all the way around! My arms are fine but my stomach itches like a mother!!

I gotta get back to work right now, but to end this on a happy note, I weighed in at -5 pounds this morning!! Yeeeah, biaotches!!

Happy - then crappy.

So this morning I hopped on the scale and found myself at -2 pounds. Boo-yah!!

Then I sat thru 2 1/2 hours of team meeting at work - my back hurts, my ass is numb and I'm almost asleep.

Then I logged on and saw that my exam score was finally posted. And I failed it. Miserably.

Fuck.

Tuesday.

Hey! I still exist! What do you know about that. Crazy, huh? So I've made it - thru tax season, thru 5 of my co-workers being fired and 2 managers quitting, thru the Sept. 15th deadline and now we're heading into the October 15th deadline then it will be smooth sailing (HA!) until tax season starts again in about 3 months. Joy.

Since I last posted, work has just been insane and there hasn't been time to turn around much less turn around, sit down, log into blogger and post something. I've been reading and keeping up (for the most part) with my blogroll, but that's been the extent of my accomplishments. I've even been relatively quiet on twitter - and how hard is it to spit out less than 140 characters a couple times a day??

Right now, I'm studying for my 3rd part of the ever-present CPA exam and anxiously awaiting my results on the 2nd part (and getting more than mildly annoyed at how long those results are taking to materialize). I feel certain I didn't pass it, but I want to know, dammit!!

Nothing else is new really. I don't have time for anything but studying at this point, and won't until the Monday before Thanksgiving. Then I'll get a few merciful days off and it will be awesome. But until then, I'm just trying to make time for studying, still trying to cook for my Man *most* nights, trying to keep the house at least liveable, taking care of the guineas, the dogs, the Man, AND being available to help with home improvement projects, etc. Unfortunately, the whole working out thing has fallen by the wayside. And I hate that, but I'm just overwhelmed right now, to say the least.

We have, however, been on a diet for a few weeks now. Well, "diet" isn't really the right word. We're just making better decisions, not eating out, limiting desserts and sweets and fixing healthy stuff for lunches and dinners. So far, I've lost about 9 pounds. And trust me, we've still been out and there has been ice cream consumed (very little, but still). I have a weight that I call the "magic number". Once I got above that number (no, I won't say how much it is), I've never gotten below it. (At the worst point, I was 20 pounds ABOVE that number, about 6 years ago.) I mean, I have been below it, but only by a pound or two and only very briefly. Our diets have always been derailed right about the time I get back down to that number. Perhaps you have that number too. It's so ingrained at this point that I think of my weight in terms of that number.

Let's say the number is 100 pounds (HA-HA-HA), if I get on the scale and weigh 112, I don't think, "I weight 112 pounds", I think "I'm 12 pounds over." And by the same token, if I weigh 98 pounds, I think, "Ooo, I'm down 2 pounds!!" So this morning, I weigh 0. And I'm stoked!! Our diet is going along swimmingly, I don't see any reason it will derail on me and right now I'm at 0, so the only place to go from here is into negative numbers!!

Hopefully one day I'll have a new "magic number". I can imagine in my head what I'd like the next one to be, and the one after that, but I'm not sure what I'd like my Long-Term Magic Number to be. I guess I'll know when (IF) I get there. I feel motivated to exercise now, to speed up my progression toward my new number. Hopefully I'll be able to start working that into the schedule again.

Ok, right now, lunch is over and it's time for me to get back to work.

We put the "labor" in Labor Day

I have to be honest - I'm not really sure what Labor Day is, I'm not sure what we're celebrating. But it's a day when you can take off work and no one minds, so I'm down with it. This year, as usual, we spent our long weekend working way too hard.

My sister and her husband had a get-together on Saturday afternoon. I had big plans to paint something or clean something or something-something before that, but I had a headache Friday night and woke up with it Saturday and accomplished dick on Saturday morning. We went to their house but I had to come home after the food smells permeated the house. Ugh. So the day was a wash.

Still, over the rest of the weekend, we managed to buy ourselves a new kitchen sink (yes, we are slowly rebuilding our entire house) and installed that (I'm a plumber!! And my crack doesn't even hang out!!), then we finished painting the back doors and the hallway. I clipped the chihuahua's nails and we did a ton of laundry (there is still a ton more to do). I also managed to keep up with my studying schedule. The studying seems to be going a lot better for this section of the exam than it did for the other two. I'm not sure if it's the use of the audio cd's - I can listen to them in my car on the way to and from work, which gives me an extra 1 1/2 hrs a day with the material - or if it's just that this stuff is easier than the other stuff. My progress so far is that I failed the first section I took (Business Environment & Concepts, or BEC) and I'm awaiting my scores on the second section (Financial Accounting & Reporting or FAR).

Here's my schedule now:
AUD (Auditing): Friday, October 2nd
BEC (Business Environment & Concepts): Tuesday, October 20th
REG (Regulation): Monday, November 23rd

If I didn't pass FAR (likely) I probably won't be able to retake it until January because December is a dark month (no testing). I can't even begin to express how glad I'll be when this is over.

About the sink replacement - our old sink was stainless steel, nothing wrong with that, but it was only about 6 inches deep. Something majorly wrong with that. You can hardly wash dishes in a sink that shallow and when you rinse them off, the water flies everywhere. But the deal-breaker was when the plumbing under the sink fell apart and I had to use a thing of a dog shampoo and a bottle of Goo-B-Gone to hold the p-trap in place. At that point, we were going to have to re-plumb the thing anyway, right? So we bought this shiny black cast iron (yes, it weighs a billion pounds) Kohler sink - it is a thing of beauty. Every time I walk through the kitchen I stroke it and say, "Hello, Lover"...pretty sure Husband is getting jealous. :-) We debated over faucets and decided to stick with the kind with the separate sprayer, not the attached sprayer. Our faucet is beautiful too - brushed nickle to match the cabinet handles. And it's deep, like 8 or 9 inches (I can't remember) and that part is the most wonderful of all!! I'm so tickled with this sink, I'll have to post pics of it soon.

Same as it ever was

As it turns out, I have not perished or disappeared from the face of the earth although, admittedly, there has been very little evidence to the contrary lately.

When we got back from vacation, everyone at work was in a mass panic because of the 09/15 deadline that is swiftly approaching and the new giant client. You know, the one the entire tax staff has been working on, pretty much exclusively, since last Wednesday. So we've been working OT and then I go home (sometimes after Husband gets there) and I have to figure out how to cook dinner, attempt to keep the house livable, keep the dogs in food and water, take care of the guineas and still find time to study. This is not easy, let me tell you. As you can probably imagine, the working out has fallen by the wayside recently. I did really good until we left for vacation and I've been a loser since then. But I really want to get back to it and I really plan to - I'm just thinking this isn't the week.

However, we have gone on a diet. Not a starve-yourself-and-be-miserable diet, just an eat-right-and-make-better-choices diet. So far, I've lost 5 pounds. I'm pretty stoked about that. I mean, right now 5 pounds is like pissing in the ocean, but I'm still pleased. So I figure the weight loss will increase, at least for a little while, once I get back to working out and that's an exciting prospect. But I can't let the studying slide, I just can't.

This super nice girl that i work with recently passed the exam and she gave me her audio cd's of the part I'm currently studying for and access to the online feature too (it has quizzes and simulations, etc) and that is really helping. I can listen to the lectures on the way to and from work, which gives me an extra hour and a half of time with the material each day. And also, once I've heard the lecture, I'm more familiar with the material once I start reading and so that part goes faster now too, so that's pretty sweet. If I didn't pass this last part I took (won't get the scores until at least Sept. 15), then I think I'm going to buy the cd's for it to study with next time.

One nice thing that has happened is that I've met a group of women in my local area - well, I've only talked to one online so far, but I'm going to meet them all on Sept. 12. We met via a website for "farmgirls" that has local groups setup all around the country. The woman who setup up this group lives about 20 minutes from me. So they're having a meeting on the 12th and I'm gonna go meet everyone. Regardless of what they're like, it will be nice to at least know some people in the area, so I'm looking forward to that.

Oh, and, very exciting, the guineas are putting themselves to bed!! About 8:30pm they all pile back in their house and them scream for me to come down and lock the door - it is too cute. Last night they ventured out into the front yard (outside the dog fence). We have no idea how long they were up there, but they stayed close to the house and when I went down to put food in their coop for their bedtime snack, they all came running down the hill, so they still knew where their house was. So our little fowl are growing up!! It's so precious.

Ok, I really have to get back to work.