So...

Sorry about the serious lack of blogging. Well, that is, if anyone is still out there. In my defense, I have plenty of perfectly good excuses - most of which i probably won't get into here. Let me start by saying, it's officially Tax Season. Oh, and in case you're not aware (don't know if I've mentioned it), I'm a tax accountant. So you can imagine the fat one my life is sucking right now.

Also, there have been some health issues in the family this year. Some scary but not serious, some just annoying and some both scary and serious. None that I care to talk about.

On the home front - we got chickens!! We originally purchased 2 silver laced wyandottes, 2 rhode island reds, and 2 barred plymoth rocks. One of the wyandottes died the 2nd day we had them, so we'll have to replace her. We can't have just 1 wyandotte walking around feeling like she's the only one in the world! Imagine how awkward that will be when they hit their teens!! The other 5 seem to be doing quite well. They liked me a lot at first but now they're getting old enough to know they should be scared of me. So I make it a point to hold each one of them at least once a day. We're attempting to become friends. We're bonding. They mostly sit in my hand and stare at me, no doubt trying to figure out what the hell I am. Oh, and they also trying to escape, but not too actively. They live in a big ass rubbermaid container in the spare bedroom right now, so they're close enough that I'll go in there everyday.

Nothing else exciting happening. We've have 2 big snow storms this month. The first one hadn't even melted when the 2nd one dumped about 7 inches of "new snow" on our house Monday night. Needless to say, my Mustang is hopelessly stranded in the snow, so I've been riding to work with Husband. That's making it difficult to be here enough to get my require minimum of 50 billable hours, so I'll probably end up making some of that up this weekend (which should go on next week, not this week). It's confusing, but its the joy of living in a "billable time" world.

Speaking of which - this most certainly isn't billable, so I better get back to work!

Ever notice...

How the bloggers you really love never seem to post enough and the ones that really grate on your nerves (and yet, you can't stop reading) can't seem to STFU??

Or is that just me? heh

We started some home improvement projects this weekend, decided to put a big one (hardwood floors) off for a little while because of the $$ and added another quick one to the list (re-tiling the floor in the half bath), so that's pretty sweet. Tonight we'll finish painting the guest bathroom and it'll finally be usable again, after a long time of being out of commission while we tried to figure out what color to paint it (finally settled on a mocha-like color called "Wool Coat"). After that, we'll carry on with painting the living room, an on-going project. At some point, we will have painted everything we can reach and we'll be down to renting scaffolding. Fun.

After we re-tile the half bath, it will most likely need a new coat of paint as well, but it's a tiny room and the toilet and sink will be out of it at that point so that'll be super-duper easy.

I'm not sure what's next on the list. Probably finishing the small room in the basement so Husband can move all his stuff down there. That'll clean out one of the spare bedrooms upstairs, I guess we'll turn it into a real live guest room at that point, although I'm not really sure why. No one ever stays the night with us because they all live close enough to just drive home. I need to get all my stuff organized and get my room painted at some point too I'm not sure when that'll happen though because I am still studying so I don't exactly have unlimited amounts of free time just hanging around. Anyway, that particular task seems overwhelming, so for now, I'm just ignoring it.

Well, better get back to work, there is some time off in my future, so I need to try to get things caught up around here.

keeping the mystery alive

Because I'm loving this idea of B.W.O. (blogging without obligation), I'm not going to tell you where I've been. HA. :-)

I've decided that there are some bloggers out there that I really dislike. Of course, I don't know these people in real life, they may be perfectly wonderful people, but something about the images and descriptions of their lives, the way they make it all see like butter in their asses and lollipops in their mouths* makes me puke. You know the ones. They post a picture of something "random" and every single thing in the picture is places *just so*, it's all spotless, wonderful, like a fairy tale, or a Stanley Kubrik movie. Bullshit. If I post a pic, you can bet your sweet ass there will be dog hair on the floor, or crap piled on the tables, or a giant weed-patch growing in the background that I will swear is a garden (look back to the post about the tractor). Holy crap - I'm pretty sure with the baby guineas I even posted a pic with actual shit in it.

Geez - I'm hateful today, huh? My bad, I just saw a picture on a blog a few minutes ago that ruffled my feathers. I'm over it now.

So October 15th is fast approaching - no more extensions for the individual returns - which translates to "I'm totally fucked because there is no way I'll get all this shit done in time". So I'm working late tonight, that's my point. Why am I on here posting and wasting time, you ask? Because my brain is fried and I needed a break, that's why.

Oh, also, took the 3rd part of the exam on October 2nd (or something like that), will not find out my grade until sometime in November, maybe the end of November even. I'm re-taking the first part I ever took on October 20th, so after the 15th passes, I'm taking off the 16th (Friday) and the 19th (Monday) to study. Been trying to study since I took the last one but I've been busy as fuck and working overtime and just haven't been able to properly motivate myself. I'm working on that.

Ok, gotta get back to work.

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.

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.

Boo Hiss

Work has been very "Boo Hiss" since I got back from vacation (aka yesterday and today). I came back right in the midst of a deadline crunch and not just any deadline crunch, but one that involves a brand new, HUGE client (and by huge I mean it has 26 trial balances, 26 different entities all rolled into one, not to mention 5 or 6 other related companies that are actually separate...and this is not all we do, this is just ONE client). So, yeah, it has sucked. But tomorrow is Friday and that rocks.

Vacation was fun, it was a decent mix of 'together with the family' and 'alone with the Husband' time, so that's good.

We came home on Monday night and my in-laws brought one of our dogs back home (they keep the 12 year old chihuahua, the big, young girls go to the kennel) and while they were there, we decided to let the guineas out of their coop for the first time! It took about 30 minutes for all of them to figure out how to get out (after I physically crawled inside the coop and brought one out to show the others that escape was possible). They had a lot of fun walking in grass for the first time ever and eating real bugs (instead of man-made food) and flying. Apparently the flying is made of awesome. They all celebrate everytime any one of them flies - it is very, very exciting. So Monday night we had to pick them all up and put them back in their coop. Then Tuesday evening we let them out for a couple more hours and had to pick them up and put them back in there again. Last night, however, they actually walked up the stairs into the coop on their own!! We did have to encourage them, but didn't have to touch them. So we're hoping that they'll catch on and just start putting themselves to bed at night and I'll just have to go down there and lock the door to their coop. That would be sweet.

Oh, that part of the exam that I took last week was fucking horrible. And that's putting it lightly. If I passed that, it will seriously be the biggest shock of my life. Ever. Dude, it was awful. And believe me, it is getting tougher and tougher to stay motivated to study for this damn thing. Ugh.

Randomness

There is something comforting about a big dog, even if said dog would beat you back into the house should actual danger arise. Last night we heard something outside (while the ducks were still outside) and we all (me, Husband, Jazzy - the australian shepherd, Vikki - the french brittany, and Cleo - the chihuahua) all ran out onto the back porch. Jazzy and Vikki ran down to check on the ducks while Cleo did her little spitting-half barking thing from the top step (closest to the door). I just love that about a big dog, how she'll run right into the fire with you, and for some reason you feel safer with her by your side, even though she isn't trained in any way, shape or form to protect you from anything, except perhaps a slobber-free face or fur-free sheets.

When someone walks into your office and goes, "what are you working on right now?" - it is best to say, "Oh, just this return for blah, blah, blah" or something else legitimate. It is not recommended that you say what first pops into your head, which is, "I'm trying to write a blog post - what do you want??" Especially if that person is a member of senior management. I'm just sayin'.

Husband has been sick the last few days, just a cold (NOT the swine flu, regardless of how many times my MIL says, "Are you sure it isn't the swine flu??") but he is feeling much better. And I'm pretty sure it isn't going to rain today, so we might actually get to weed our garden tonight. Which would be an amazing thing because the weeds are getting taller than the plants and harvestins is going to be impossible soon! Plus, I need to get the tomatoes staked up better before they get much bigger. I can't wait for that first juicy tomato...I have a plate and salt shaker all ready for the occassion!

Garden bounty so far: 1 yellow squash, 2 cucumbers.