The Good and The Bad

My alarm did not go off this morning (my cell phone is having major issues these days) But mom ordered me a new phone which is waiting for me in AZ. Thanks mom!

My legs still hurt from Saturdays workout, but last night the work out fairy left icy hot on my door step, pretty sweet!

I don't want to go to work tomorrow, but we only have a half day, and that includes lunch.

I have a 7 hour drive ahead of me (YUCK) but, I now have a car with a CD player, a brother to do most the driving, and food family and fun at the final destination.

Jake and I am headed out to Arizona tomorrow to spend Thanksgiving with Lindsey and Kevin (maybe Gavin will even make a guest appearance - here's hoping). Therefore there may not be any posts for the rest of the week.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving all - eat lots and lots of mashed potatoes.

Thanksgiving Preperations

I take Thanksgiving very seriously. There is a lot to be thankful for and a lot of food to be consumed. Therefore in preparation for Thursday I enlisted the help of my dear friend Carlos. Angela and I asked Carlos to lead us in a Saturday morning workout in the park (we needed to make room for all the food we will be eating later in the week). Sounds pleasant right? A good way to start your weekend. In case you don’t know Carlos, he is a workout enthusiast, this is of course why we asked him to help us. It also does not hurt that he was previously a personal trainer – so I guess you could say going into it we knew he would lead us in a challenging work out. But was Mandy up for the challenge?

The scene we arrived to: Carlos with his clipboard which contained I diagram of our activities, and a look or intensity. This was about the time that I realized I got myself in too deep. I know I am out of shape and at no physical level to workout with Carlos. YIKES!!!

Over the course of an hour he led us in a series of exercises ranging from jumping squats, side lunges, abs, to calf raises. To say it was intense would be an understatement (at least for those of us who work out oh lets say maybe once every 2 months).

I somehow managed to persevere………..after many embarrassing attempts at pushups. I was actually able to complete everything with lots of water and encouragement from Carlos. Now two days later, I can barely move because my legs are so sore – like really extremely I have never been so sore in my life sore. But alas it will be worth the pain come Thursday when I can eat mounds and mounds of mashed potatoes.

2nd is the BEST!

My congratulations go out to team Drift Wood - who places second place in the Biola intramural volleyball championships. It was a close match to the finish taking it to the full three with a nail biter of a finish. Jake - maybe the number one player (I might be a bit biased) had quite a few amazing saves and some rather dramatic spikes that drove their score up.


The previous night (I was unfortunately not alerted of and therefore not present at) Jake's team won the Dodgeball intramural championships. Wahoo!

I am not that skilled at taking action shots - my camera is a little too slow, so this was the best shot I got of Jake maybe about to pass the ball.

Freaky Friday part 2

For some reason today has not been my day. As you read earlier, I had issues with my alarm. Now I am having issues with the printer/scanner/copier at work. A coworker just asked me if we had more toner for it because it says it’s out. I thinking I am going to save the day go into the copy room grab the toner off of the top shelf and tell her I will change it for her.

Here is where the problem arose. I open the front of the machine, and I am pulling the old toner out when all of the sudden it shoots out a thick cloud of black powder (the ink) that effectively covers everything. And trust me I do mean everything. It was on my face, my hands, my pants, the floor, the copy machine, the file cabinets, and disgustingly in my mouth.

GROSS!

Luckily it was pretty easy to clean up with a few damp paper towels, but I did have to walk down the hall to that restroom looking like I had just been through an explosion. I got some questioning looks, but no one was brave enough to ask what happened.

Freaky Friday

I am big on routine/schedules and being on time. I have the tendency to freak out if I am running a mere 3 minutes behind schedule. There are many a morning when I run across the apartment screeching about being late…………and yet what that really means is that I am late to be early, so I will be just plain ol on time. I only tell you this so you can understand the panic that I was feeling in the two situations I am about to share.

Last week I was laying in bed when I hear Angela ask me “hey Man are you going to get up?” I grunt say “yeah, why?” And she kindly explains to me that it is 5 minutes past the time when I normally get up. I yelp and get up/sprint to the shower faster than ever before. Thanks to Angela who knows how I react when late, the Crisis was averted, although I must admit I had to give myself a calming speech about how I was not going to be late, five minutes was not a big deal, I am usually ready 15 minutes early – stay calm stay calm stay calm. I survived.

That brings me to this morning……………..major alarm clock drama. Doot doot doot my alarm goes off. I look at the screen it says 6:45am. I get up look around and realize that Rachel is not up yet. Think to myself that is odd, she always gets up before me. At this point I know if I wake Rachel and she gets to the shower before me I will be running late…………but I also know that Rachel will be even later than I, so I decided to offer her the shower first. Rachel looks at her phone and tells me that it is 5:45 and she is not getting up yet.

WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I check my phone again. It definitely says 6:45am. So I stumble to the kitchen check the 3 clocks in there. Coffee Maker 5:45, Microwave 5:45, wall clock 5:45.

Back to bed I went. All the while wondering how in the world a cell phone goes from working fine to gaining an hour over night.

Why is it that strange things always happen to me?

A little Pre Thanksgiving Thankfulness

Seeing as it is Thursday now exactly one week before Thanksgiving, which may just be my second favorite holiday, I have decided to share with you all something that I am thankful for. That being said I will cut to the chase, I am thankful for my roommates. Not only are they my roommates but two of my bestest friends. I am continually blessed by them, and do not tell them enough how much I appreciate and cherish their friendships and the roles they have had in my life.


So Angela and Rachel, thanks for befriending me – encouraging me, listening to me, helping me, making me laugh, laughing at my incredibly stupid comments, praying for me, holding me accountable, making me do my chores, throwing me an amazing birthday party, and all around loving me. You guys are the best!

FYI

I just keep on moving up in the world. More and more responsibilities, how ever will I handle it all. Today I received and email that was entitled FYI. I take a moment to ponder what I am about to be informed of, make a good guess before I open the email and read. Today my guess was………………”Due to the horrendous amounts of smoke and ash I have decided to let everyone take the rest of the week off of work.” Maybe it was more wishful thinking than an accurate guess.

Shockingly my guess was incorrect. The email was actually the new 2008 updated tenant contact sheet for our office. Now you may not think that is something worthy of a blog post………………..but I have not given you the details yet. This list contains my name, phone number, and email address more than one time. I am now the official Emergency Contact, Information Contact and After Hours Contact. WHAT?!

Again thanks for the heads up. At least I did find this one out before someone calls me in the middle of the night to tell me our office has been broken into. At which point I will tell them “why are you calling me? What can I do about it?” Seriously, what am I going to do if something goes wrong at the office after hours? Well I will tell you exactly what I would do. I would call my boss, which makes me wonder why in the work he would not make himself the after hours contact person. Since he will ultimately be the one handling the problem.

Weird.
I embrace the new responsibility.

One Of A Kind

Every Sunday after church we head over to Fresh and Easy to pick up grocery’s for the week. It is always a funny little adventure as it is full of grace people, so really it is like a continuation of fellowship time. This week upon our exit from church we were walking back to our cars, which is actually quite a trek, as we are currently in the middle of building a new sanctuary, the parking lot has been closed off. Some of the neighboring businesses have allowed us to use their parking lots Sunday mornings. So as I was saying we were walking through Mike’s Burgers parking lot when we spotted this:

What is that thing? It rendered us completely speechless.
Would that be considered a stretch prius or a station wagon prius? Never in my life have I seen a vehicle with so many doors.

P.S. You can tell by the discoloration that we are still surrounded by smoke and ash, but thankfully the fires are now under control and I believe it is safe to say we will not need to evacuate. However we may get lung cancer from second hand smoke.

Smoke, Ash and Fire Oh My

This morning I was sitting in the comfort of my apartment, sipping my coffee when my mom called. She asked me if the fires were near me and if it was extremely windy. So what did I do I looked out my bedroom window and saw the sun shinning brightly, no wind and no smoke in sight. I laughed and said "no the fires are not any where near us." And with that I went about my Saturday like any other day.

Once I exited my apartment I could see that I had in fact been wrong when I told my mom the fires were not near us. We could see dark smoke billowing up near the Brea mall (about 5mi from our home) and continued on to said location to do some shopping. As you can tell we still were not concerned about the flames, as we were driving into them. After our shopping we did learn that the fire had jumped the freeway and both the 57 and the 91 had been closed.

Here are some photos of the smoke, taken by Angela, who chose to live dangerously by taking photos while driving. (Don't worry due to the freeway closure the traffic was insanely bad - and no one was hurt in the process of taking these pictures)

Thankfully we are not in the evacuation zone, so far. After a quick phone call to the folks correcting my earlier statement about not being near the fires, I was reassured by them that we were in fact safe - and not needing to evacuate...........................................yet.

I'm A Thief

So I basically stole this post from my sister's blog - so many of you may have already seen these. I have never been especially skilled at looking at ultrasound photos. I would stare and stare and then smile and nod when people asked me if I saw the baby. "Oh yeah, he's ssssooooooo cute." But no longer. Lindsey gave me specific instruction on how to view these, and magically it is as if the scales were removed from my eyes. I can see Gavin. Can you?



The fist one is of his hand, I could actually see that one without any help. Then if you look at the third one you can see his whole head (if you are lacking skills like I was I will help you out, his head is sideways with his chin to the left). 3 weeks to go!

To Craft Or Not to Craft

I have the incredible urge to craft something right now. That’s what happens when you spend too much time reading design/decorating/refurbishing blogs. But I must share with you my new favs: Scrappy Girl Decorates and 86n’it. I have always liked to refinish and craft things, and these blogs have just further inspired me. Some day I would love to partake in a project a la 86 n’ it. But, reality check - I think for tonight I will have to be satisfied with working on my Christmas cards.

The Show

This morning I used some delightful peppermint mocha coffee creamer in my morning cup of joe at work. It was good, but not quite as good as the real peppermint mocha I had at Coffee Bean last night. Did any of you go hit up the freebies? It was amazing. Angela and I went with time to spare, expecting the place to be packed out massive lines, everyone gathering trying to get their free coffee. We were a little shocked to see that there were no such crowds. We did not even have to wait. Not only were they giving away free holiday drinks, but they had a wide array of holiday treats to sample as well. We tried quite a few options, and Matt the friendly barista gave us each a full size chocolate peppermint biscotti to take home with us. So great!




After hitting up the freebies we scooted on over to the Biola production center to catch the second ever episode of The Show. We arrived 20 minutes early and the line already had about 30 people in it. Good thing we were on "the list," with reserved seating. I had a totally “I feel like royalty moment.” Imagine that you are trying to get into this great club right and you are waiting in a line wrapped around the block, your freezing thinking you are never going to get in. Then the bouncer walks up to you and says oh you’re ___________(insert last name here). You reply "yeah that’s me." Then he takes you to the front of the line, passes you through the velvet rope and escorts you straight to the VIP section. Yeah pretty much that what it was like. Here is Jake and I with our front row reserved seating. So official.



If you are wondering what “The Show” is, I shall give you the details. It is a student run live sketch comedy show at Biola. Jake is one of the many students that puts it together. I think he is pretty high up in the ranks, but then again that could just be the whole sister bias thing. He was not in any of the sketches last night, but he did star in one of the digital shorts entitled Laundry Date. It was all extremely fun – if you are in the area of Biola the one night a month that The Show happens to be going down, I highly recommend that you stop by.

Learning New Things

The Internet makes all things possible. Or so it seams. Almost any question I have can be answered by searching the Internet. It's amazing! Friday I put the information super highway to use. I decided I wanted to learn how to knit. Whala 10 minutes later I was printing out step by step instructions with pictures.

It was quite exciting. All that was needed was some yarn and knitting needles. After those were purchased I put on a movie and settled in for a night of knitting. Unfortunately it was harder than I anticipated. As good as the directions were I was still having some issues. Which soon led to frustration. I mastered the casting on stitch and could even get the first row of stitches after that. But then I hit trouble – I don’t know why, I don’t even know what happen, but it was a disaster. I think I started over at least 8 times in 2 hours. At that point I decided to give up for the night. I was more than a little frustrated.

But have no fear, a new day dawned and I had fresh eyes for knitting. I would hardly call myself a master, but I showed definite signs of improvement, I even made some great progress on what will some day be a scarf.

Free Free Free!

If you were not able to go hit up all the great freebies last Tuesday for voting I have another great opportunity for you. That is if you all like free things as much as I do. Tomorrow from 5pm-8pm Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is giving away free 12oz beverages. They are welcoming in the holiday season by giving out their holiday drinks. Good think there is a Coffee Bean across the street from my work. I am a huge fan of the peppermint mocha.

Send Out Search Party

A couple of days ago I purchased something online and it was to be delivered to my apartment via UPS. Upon my arrival home from work Wednesday I found a UPS sticker on my door informing me that a delivery attempt was made, but the package required a signature. Bummer. I quickly got on UPS.com and changed the delivery address to my work. Problem solved. I checked the tracking number Thursday morning and was informed it was en route to my office. Wonderful!

Well the day passed on and no package arrived. This morning I again entered the tracking number only to discover that the package had been delivered to my office building and Gloria signed for it. Where was it delivered? And who is Gloria? I asked the security guard if anyone had brought down a package that was wrongly delivered. No such luck. I called UPS to try to find out what suite it was delivered too. After holding for many minutes I was told that my package was signed for and locked in the office. My building has no office – so it is not really possible that the package was signed for there. Again I asked what suite it was delivered too, by this time the girl was a little annoyed at me but she searched and informed me it was delivered to suite 800. SCORE! However she did not end there she told me that since it was not delivered to me I had to call the shipper and have them send out a search – after they searched and found the package they would redeliver it to me.

Uh I think not. I got in the elevator went to the 8th floor and asked the receptionist if they got a delivery yesterday for Mandy Floch. She told me I was lucky she still had it because UPS was on their way to pick it up. Whew! Package finally delivered.

However I do have a few problems with this situation 1) why was it delivered to the 8th floor? It clearly has my office name and suite number on the package. 2) Why did Gloria not just bring it down to the 2nd floor? Weird weird weird. But really none of that matters, I was able to use my killer detective skills and track it down before it got shipped off again.

Oak Glen

On Saturday Rachel, Angela, Ashleyann and I decided to welcome in November by going to Oak Glen. It was lovely almost fall weather and we got to enjoy all things Apple, including but not limited to apple picking and apple pie. Take a look:

The Wait Is Over

A while back I told you all how we had a staff photo taken. Well today I went and picked up the pictures. They were terrible. Not in the sense that the people looked bad - it was the photos themselves. The lighting was not good, some of them were blurry, the overall appearance was not attractive. Major bummer, I am pretty sure we are going to have to retake them.

But the individual photos came out pretty good. Therefore I am going to give you all a sneak peak of my never before seen business portrait.

What a professional I am.

Muddy Monday

We had a celebratory office lunch today. It was one of my coworker’s birthdays, so we went out to VIP Buffet. Buffet food is really not my favorite, but who am I to turn down a free meal. After lunch we were all stuffed to the brim, and walking back to the cars. As I approached the vehicle that I arrived in, I stepped up onto the small grass median, to await the car being unlocked. Unfortunately for me I did not see the gaping hole in the grass. My left foot quickly sunk into the hole, and I could feel is slowly submerge below the oozing mud. Yes that’s right MUD. Naturally I screamed and all my co workers came running. They all stopped short when they saw me wobbling on one foot as I pulled the other one out of the hole minus my shoe which came off in the mud. Their concern quickly turned to laughter as they all scrambled to find me a napkin or something to try to clean up my foot.

With the help of a single napkin I was able to remove most of the mud from my leg and foot – however the shoe needed a lot of attention. For lack of napkins I had no choice but to go back to the office with one shoe on my foot and one in my hand covered in mud. I got quite a few funny looks i we came back into our building and proceeded to the bathroom to clean up. Gross gross! I think my shoes are going to pull through just fine, however one of them is currently soaking wet – wearing wet shoes is no fun. And I was able to get the majority of the mud off of my clothing, thank goodness.