Question of the Day

Today's question of the day is a fill in the blank.

My biggest pet peeve is__________.

I'll go ahead and answer. My biggest pet peeve is when people come up to talk to me at the gym. If I know you, then that's fine. If I don't...well then I have my headphones in for a reason!


(Dear God..did I just put a LOL cats pic up? *sigh*)

Let's hear those answers!

One Small Step for Mel....

I think I've mentioned this before, but Sean is the cook in our household. Yes, I can cook and quite honestly I can make some really tasty food, but it's Sean that is really the cook. One of my favorite things that he makes is breakfast. He goes all out, pancakes with fresh fruit, sausage, scrambled eggs, hashbrowns...you name it, he does it.

Well, I always try to make sausage the way he makes it. We like to heavily sprinkle a bit of Tony's on our sausage and then cook them. Well, mine always end up way to salty and barley edible. Until today! Today I cooked them almost as good as Sean cooks them, but not quite.



As you can see I like to celebrate the small things in life.

However, today would not be complete without something odd and completely random happening to me.

Our house phone rang this morning and since only Sean and my parents know that number I assumed it was them. So I answer it...and it's neither one of them. It's some Middle or Far-East sounding guy on the phone. He spoke English and proceeded to tell me he was following up a call from when we met and I gave him my number.

Obviously I know I've never given this man my number.

A. I don't give my number to random,creepy dudes
B. I don't even know my house number without looking at my cellphone

So I ask him where I supposedly met him. All he would tell me was it was eight months ago at some entrance to a place and I had a child with me. I tried explaining to him I never gave him a number, I don't have a child and whoever gave him the number must have lied and made one up, but he wasn't having it. Basically he told me he didn't believe me, but that was ok because he would no longer waste my time.

Yeah...I have NO idea.

Wednesday White-Out

Well, Mother Nature has gotten the best of me once again!

See...in Italy this past week it seemed as if spring was on the way. I could smell spring in the air, farmers were plowing up fields, trees were being pruned, small flowers were blooming. I even laid out on our balcony to soak up some sun.

Then the wind hit. Now, let me just say, being from Oklahoma I am used to the wind blowing, but living in Italy has spoiled me because here the wind rarely blows. The last two days it has howled. It's been so loud it's even scared Boomer and he doesn't usually get that riled up by weather.

Then this morning I open up my shutters to see huge flakes of snow. I'm talking massive snowflakes. These would be the Goliaths of the snowflake world.

However, I had to go to post for my new tires to be put on, so I couldn't slack at home and see what happened. Fast forward about five hours later and the snow is now sticking and it's gotten colder. It's still snowing like crazy, so bad in fact that post is closing at 4p.m. today.

Now it looks like this here:



Do you see how big those flakes are?

I'm not too worried about the storm though, I got the essentials at the commissary before I came home. You know, things like milk, cheese, Weight Watchers ice cream bars and of course some breakfast sausages. Yeah...I'm not sure there is a method to my madness, but I also got Gone With the Wind on DVD at the library today so I think I'm good.

Deployment Month 3 In Review

Well, I'm already done with month 3 of this deployment. Seems like sometimes the time goes by quickly and other times it seems to drag.

In Month 3:

- have maintained working out 5 days a week, most weeks. Last week was a slacker week for me and I only went 3 times

- took day trips to Milan and to Venice for Carnevale

-read Something Blue, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, She Got Up Off the Couch, My Life in France, Living Dead in Dallas and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

-sold my first photography print

-started taking a spin class

-made Pioneer Woman's Butter Chicken

-got to hear Sean's voice several times. Our contact hasn't been as good this month as their satellite is broken, so Internet time has been scarce

-bought my tickets to go back to the States in April for our R&R

And although not my favorite picture of the past month, it's probably one of the most amusing. Me fist pumping! (Please ignore my squinty face, I was laughing)

Bend and SNAP!

Do you ever have one of those days where you think you just might snap?

Granted today really is not that bad, I feel much better than I did on Saturday, but sometimes I really wish I could just say what I want to people, watch their reaction and then hit rewind to undo it.

Let me explain.

The last couple of weeks I've been taking a spin class on post. I have a love/hate relationship with it. However, I LOVE our teacher and I think she's awesome. Today there were two Chatty Cathy's sitting to one side of me. As in, they didn't shut up the ENTIRE class. Here our spin teacher is trying to give us instructions and one of them actually says, "Um...we can't hear you." I almost snorted when Suzanne (a fellow blogger) says, "Well maybe if you weren't carrying on a conversation" Granted...they didn't hear that, but come on! Not only is it rude to the teacher, but it's rude to the rest of the students who paid for the class to get instruction not to have to listen to you sit there and gossip about what's going on in your company. It was all I could do not to tell them they were extremely rude. They do that next class and I will say something.

Secondly, I called the optometrist on-post to see if I could get in to see them. My eyes are most likely infected again and I can't wear contacts. I don't have an appointment with my eye doctor back home until April, so in the meantime I wanted some drops like I got last time to help with the infection. So...I tell the lady at central appointments that I need an appointment.



Her: Ma'am you'll need to see a general practitioner first.
Me: Why? I had this problem several months ago and saw an optometrist first, without seeing a doctor.
Her: Well....let me let you talk to the optometry people.

Me: I need to make an optometry appointment
Optometry guy: Ma'am, you'll need to talk to central appointments.
Me: I already did, she transferred me to you.
OG: Why? Did she explain to you that we won't have a new doctor in until the end of the month and we are swamped right now.
Me: No, all she did was transfer me to you.
OG: Well what's the problem?
(I explain once again that I have an infection, most likely caused by my contacts and I would like drops to put in my eyes.)
OG: Well, first of all don't wear your contacts. Then see if the infection clears up.
Me: Um...yeah..I haven't been wearing my contacts for a couple of weeks and the infection isn't any better.
OG: Well, you should be wearing your glasses right now.
Me: I am!
OG: Well, it's probably best to not wear your contacts until you see your optometrist in the states.
Me: Uh....yeah. In the meantime I would like drops though.
OG: Well, if it gets any worse then come in and see us!

At this point I just stared at the phone in amazement at the complete stupidity of the situation. Seriously folks? Seriously?

Deployment Blues

This past week has had a lot of ups and downs for me. I'd say it's probably the worst week I've had since Sean deployed.

Mainly I just feel that even though I try to stay busy that the days are all starting to feel like the same. Kind of a never-ending Groundhog Day and that bugs me. I'm hoping with summer coming and some travel opportunities in the future that will shake things up a little bit.

I also had a lot of nightmares this past week. Everything from tornadoes to me getting stalked and murdered. It's been bad and on Thursday night I seriously only got about 3 hours of sleep. I think I'm going to have to go back to taking sleeping pills some nights, even though I tried to break that habit the last few weeks.

There's some other things going on that I won't get into, but it's not been a good week. I'm hoping this next week will be better.

TV Talk

Ok..first a little background on why I asked the question I did yesterday. On the Army wives forum I'm a part of there was a debate about that very question. One of the women, who married her husband later in life and had already been divorced and had a child said she was never moving from where she currently lived and her husband would just have to PCS without her. I believe currently she lives around Fort Bragg and her husband lives at Ft. Benning. She says because she has a job that provides her stability and the fact her child would have to move away from his father is her reasons for never moving. Ok..I get that, but in that case, why would you even start a relationship with a soldier knowing that eventually he would have to move? That's what I don't understand.

Ok moving on to today's post- TV Talk

Who else is addicted to True Blood? I'm a season behind, since I obviously don't have HBO. I'm watching Season 2 online and I think it's even better than the first season. I've always been a fan of Sam, but this year I think I've gone to the Erick side. He's so hot.... *sigh* The only thing that bothers me about the show is that it's WAY different than the books, especially the 2nd season.



I know it's been a few days since the Bachelor finale, but can I just voice my disgust? This is the first season I've watched since forever, but I may swear off it. I was so disappointed with Jake's choice. Vienna? Really? Any respect I had for Jake at that point went right out the window.