I Can Do It

I've been living in my house for a couple weeks now. I closed about five weeks ago and have been having a random problem. My garage door has been coming open on it's own. You might think that I'm crazy.  That I leave and just forget to close it, and while that might occassionally be true since I'm not used to having a garage door....this is typically not the case. I sometimes sit in the driveway after I shut the door for about five minutes, checking email, sending texts, checking work voicemail. After I'm sure that it's really shut, off I go.

I thought that I'd fixed the problem about two weeks ago, because I was no longer coming home to an open garage door. I pushed some button on my wall opener. Wahoo! And yet, just to be safe, I continued to lock the door between the garage and my house. So today, I'm sitting in my dining room, wrapping presents, when suddenly, up goes the garage door. WTF??? I run downstairs, throw open the door to the garage look out, to watch the door going up. And then 20 seconds later it's going back down again. Clearly someone else is on my frequency.

So, I decided I'm smart enough to figure this out, right? I dig out the manual, read it over a few times and head downstairs, step stool and manual in hand. Move the car out of the garage. I begin my search for the "Learn" button. The picture in the manual only showed and extreme close up of a button. Clearly, no one has ever seen a button before. Hmm...not on this side, not on that side, or that side. Why wouldn't it be inside?  I have to pry the cover off of one end, hold this button in and wait. The button looked nothing like the picture FYI, thank God it was labeled. Then reprogram the remotes. No big deal, been there, done that. And then moved the car back inside. But here's the thing. I still have no clue if this actually worked. I like to think it did. Otherwise, I have to move all the stuff in my garage inside my house before I leave for trip to Iowa.

Holiday baking

Don't you just love holiday baking? Amanda came over on Sunday and we make pretzels dipped in almond bark and covered in red and green sprinkles. And then we made candy cane cookies. Photo to come later. We found the recipe on allrecipes.com and decided to go with it because it got such good reviews. It was okay, but a bit awkward and if you were going to go with the five star review recipe, I'd recommend doing the following. Instead of waiting until after pulling the cookies out of the oven to put the sugar and crushed peppermints on top, pull them out halfway through and add it - we figured this out on the third sheet of cookies. Other suggestions involved glazing with Karo syrup but that still had a mixed result.
Today I made some caramel puff corn, it's in the oven RIGHT now. This stuff is awesome! It's so much better than caramel corn because the hulls don't get stuck in your teeth.
I've also got dinner in the crock pot - Baked potato soup, courtesy of IowaGirlEats.com. It smells great and I'm getting so hungry.
I have a lot of baking yet to do before I hit the road on Thursday to start my trek across Iowa - peanut butter balls, fudge, hot chocolate on a stick, gingerbread cookies on a I still have to work this week. Details, details. :)

Not my kids, but still cute.

My sister had her friend, Kristin (she's my friend too), take Christmas pictures of Ethan and Anna, my niece and nephew. Kristin recently started her own business.  My nephew would wear sweats every day if he could, but obviously my sister wasn't going to let him wear that for the photos, hence the sweater and slacks. Ethan told Elizabeth he'd never worn a sweater before. I thought that was hilarious, that he can't remember the last time he's worn a sweater. Since he only had the sweater on for like 30 minutes, she asked him if he wanted to wear it to school the next day. His answer, "No, kids will make fun of me." HA!

Horrible, Awful, No Good, Very Bad Week

Have you ever read this book with the similar title? I've kind of felt like this was the week when nothing would go right.
Here's a quick laundry list:
-The Direct TV guy took an enternity to install my cable on Sunday (after he was 1.5 hours late). I really wanted to take a nap as I was coming down from a sugar high. Amanda and I had been baking.
-My furniture got delivered on Monday from NFM. YAY! Except the boxspring wouldn't fit up to the third floor. So their customer service contacted me, I ordered a split box, and was told I would get a $100 credit and free delivery. It's going to come on 12/29.
-Two days later in the mail, I received a charge for basically a second bed and a charge for delivery. Um, Hmmm....Still working on this.
-Qwest was supposed to come on Wednesday to install my internet, and a package would be delivered for my wireless. I did not need to be home. I was not home. I got done with my afternoon appointments and had a phone call that told me I needed to be home to install my internet. WTF??? Don't know when I'm going to get this done. Maybe next Wednesday.
-And last night, I locked myself out of my house. Pure genius.
-Tonight, when I was making dinner was a minor mishap (they have been getting smaller since the NFM issues), I set the smoke alarm off with my cooking. Which normally wouldn't be a big deal, but I was worried about the sprinkler system. It's only now that I'm remembering that those are heat sensored.
So yes, this week cannot end fast enough. Thankfully tomorrow night is a party at April's. :) And things will get better. I keep saying that, over and over.

Be back soon

Tomorrow I get internet....and then I will get back to blogging. Promise.

Pack it up, Pack it in...

I've lived in my apartment for almost three years. This is the longest that I've lived anywhere since leaving home in 1997. Every semester in college, I would move to different room in the sorority house and then move out over the summer. So over time, I got to be a packing pro. And then I lived in a few apartments in Ames, did a 3 month at Elizabeth and JJ's (where I didn't unpack much) and moved in with Nikki for 18 months.
Since then, I've had an apartment for six months in West Des Moines and when it came time to leave there, professional movers packed and moved me. Really, really nice. And then when I left Lansing, just under three years ago, the professional movers came in again and packed up all my stuff and moved it again. They raced to see how fast they could pack it since there were four of them. They were done in an hour and a half. I haven't accumulated a ton of "personal stuff" since then, but I have picked up quite of bit of work related material. I have half a closet full, a filing cabinet and rolling cart. Seriously, several trees have been sacrificed on my behalf and in the name of insurance.
I feel so disorganized with this move and it's very frustrating. I typically just box my stuff up/or have it boxed up and run down my list of to do's. Then I'm off to destination B and settle in. I'm tired of having stuff at two places and just want it to move itself the 20 minutes across town. Hopefully in 24 - 36 hours I will feel much better about all of this. Or at least I'll have a box city on my hands. :)