I wrote this last night but wanted to wait to post it until today so that it would get some good top post time.

So I’m sitting here on the couch waiting for Will to finish…whatever the hell he’s doing on his game right now so that we can go get dinner and replenish my soda supply because dudes, I have no Pepsi and that is making me sad.  And kind of stabby.  But we’ll talk about that in a minute.  First can I just tell you how happy I am with my productivity level today?  I kind of rocked the house with work stuff today even while sitting on the couch and watching Friends on DVD.  I know, I know, I keep talking about turning off the television while I work because I do not need the distraction but sometimes I having the sound of human voices as my background noise.  Sometimes (not often but sometimes) I kind of miss human interaction.

So.  My Pepsi supply has dwindled and we need to go restock it.  I get cranky when I do not have soda available for me to drink which is probably not good for someone who is going to have to cut out the caffeine when she decides to procreate.  But the fact that I’m cranky about not having a supply of Pepsi in my fridge is kind of a great segue into….

A Giveaway!

I know! Another Pepsi Products giveaway!  I am rocking the house!  Actually, Pepsi is rocking the house, but I love giving stuff away to you guys, so here’s the info that Kathleen sent me:

This spring, Pepsi and Mountain Dew are taking a nostalgic trip back in time by offering special retro formulas of their popular beverages sweetened with natural sugar, just as they were back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, giving fans literally a taste of the past.

Here’s what the winner will get:

• Pepsi Throwback Trucker Cap
• Retro Pepsi Tin Lunch Box
• Retro Clock Radio/CD Player
• USB Lava Lamp
• Pepsi Throwback & Mountain Dew Throwback

Kind of cool, right?  What’s better is that you’ll be able to buy Pepsi Throwback at your local store as well.  Twenty ounce bottles and Twelve Packs of cans are going to be avaialble for about seven more weeks.

I am beyond excited about this.  Pepsi, as you know, is my personal water and being able to drink the Pepsi I drank as a kid will be awesome.

So how do you win this great prize (and seriously, if I could just snatch it up for myself, I totally would)?  Leave a comment in the comments section (with a valid e-mail address) about a great memory from when you were a kid.  It can be soda related if you like, but I’m not going to force that.  I’m more interested in the great stories you guys will tell.

Oh and, sorry peeps, but this is US residents only.

I’ll pick the winner on Friday morning!

So I have a post all written but I need to save it for tomorrow.  Isn’t that intriguing?

I’m starting to think that I am one of the last stops on my UPS guy’s route because the only time this guy gets here before six is when he is delivering Will’s textbooks and on those days he always shows up about six minutes after Will has given up on waiting for him and left for the train.  Our UPS guy? He has great timing.

I’m debating on whether I should wait to post about Dust and Shadow by Lyndsay Faye until after I have actually read it.  That would be the smart reviewer’s choice but at the same time I’m a proud (and, honestly a little jealous) friend and I can’t decide which part of me is going to win.  Dudes, I went to college with the author of this book.  Oh yes, I knew her as a wee frosh theater major.  I was two years ahead of her in school but she and her (now) husband and I bonded quickly as Pacific Northwesterners tossed into the great San Francisco Bay Area.  We mostly lost track of each other after I left school but we’re still MySpace and Facebook buddies and dudes.  Someone I know wrote a book–a book that has been published by a major publisher.  So you should go buy it.  Because I said so.

And that is all I will write until after I have read the book which, with any luck, will be within the next couple of days or so, depending on my workload.  If only clients would accept “but dudes, there’s this book I need to read because someone I know wrote it” as an excuse to push deadlines, I’d be all set to just sit and read and read and read.

Today I managed to sneeze and punch myself in the forehead at the same time.  Can I just say…

1.  Ouch.

2.  If I had been watching somebody else do that, I would have laughed so hard I would have hyperventilated a little.

3.  It is hard to find a middle ground between wanting to laugh really hard at yourself and wanting to nurse your now bruised forehead.

4.  I pack quite a wallop!

In other news, I actually got quite a bit of work done today and am feeling very proud of myself!

Damn you Target and your awesome DVD sales!  Last night Will and I went to Target because we needed chocolate and toilet paper (my life. It’s glamorous).  Of course no trip to Target is a complete without at least one full lap of the store and that is how we discovered that Target had the first four seasons of House on sale.  Target has shrink wrapped the seasons together in two-sets for $34.99, which makes each season about $17.50.  How can you say no to House for $17.50? Will can’t and I’m a pushover when it comes to television on DVD so…yes.  We brought home the first four seasons of House on DVD for about $70.  That? is kind of awesome.  It helps make up for the fact that I forgot to take How I Met Your Mother off of my Netflix Queue and two discs of it showed up today.  Oops.

More of the yarn I ordered off of eBay (shut up, I know I have a problem) showed up yesterday afternoon.  It arrived in a nice and pretty twisty skein and I’m used to winding yarn from the fatter, red-hearty kind of skeins and…yeah.  It took me 1.5 seconds to turn that pretty twist of yarn into a giant knot of yarn that took many many hours to untangle.  It took most of yesterday evening and most of this afternoon but dammit I untangled all five frickin’ hundred feet of that pretty yarn.  And then maybe? Did a victory dance so flamboyant I scared the cat and now she won’t come out from under the bed.

Wedding planning is kicking into gear and every day I find a new reason to hyperventilate over how expensive everything is.  Seriously!  What the hell is wrong with you, you people I need to hire?  And once again I feel the need to ask, where are these people who can afford to pay thousands of dollars on a cake?  Who has that sort of disposable income and why are these people not my friends?  Gah!

Also? Dear Wedding Dress Designers: not everyone wants a strapless dress.  Some of us? Are built flatter than the walls of our apartment and have no way to hold up a strapless dress.  And what’s more?  Some of us? Like the idea of having short sleeves.  Some of us have discovered that we are fighting matronly upper arms already.  What’s up dress designers?  Where are the sleeves?  I don’t need or even want long sleeves! Short sleeves or even cap sleeves will be fine!

Finally, because I feel like I need a finally right here:  I’m totally hungry but I’m not sure what time I’ll be starting dinner so I don’t want to get a snack because it’s pan fried steak and french fries night here at the Snarke homestead and, um, yummy!

For Earth Day I am staying mostly still.  Except for when I walked over to Fred Meyer to buy more Pepsi because people? I was almost out.  And that is pretty much a travesty.  Except that I am determined to cut back on my soda consumption so that I don’t drink it much at all by the end of this year.  This is actually going well because I’ve been noticing lately that soda just doesn’t taste as good as I remember it tasting when I was younger.  Sometimes? It even tastes a little bit gross.

What was I talking about?

Right! Earth Day! Staying Still!

Yeah–for some reason my energy savings today seem to be mostly in terms of personal energy savings if you know what I mean.  I am not sure why it is so hard for me to get going.  I got a reasonable amount of sleep even though Will’s version of “I’ll set my alarm for seven so you can sleep in” was actually me setting my alarm for seven so that I can poke him every five minutes until he actually gets up which means that, yes, I’ve pretty much been awake since seven.  So I’m about an hour shy of my usual eight hours of sleep, which means that I am still on the sane and rational side of being a little tired.

What was I talking about?

Yes! Earth Day! Personal Energy Savings! Right.

Speaking of energy savings, in the two months since the disastrous mo-fo roommate has left (aka since we kicked him out) our electric bill has dropped by…wait for it…NINETY ONE DOLLARS.  Seriously.  So.  There’s some proof that the mo-fo was costing us some serious coin (never mind the three times in six weeks that we had to completely restock our kitchen because apparently the mofo has a Dyson in his stomach or something)…and that we haven’t turned on the heater in a month.  Part of me was really glad to see our “low” bill of $112 this month.  Part of me was horrified that even with just the two of us  and in spite of not using the heater we still managed to have a $112 energy bill.  Part of me keeps having to remind the rest of me that we signed up for renewable energy which costs more so that I would not feel so damn guilty for the amount of energy we consume because apparently if you ever turn off Will’s desktop computer or unplug any one of his various portable device chargers that isn’t actually connected to anything at the moment (phone, gaming stuff) the apartment will get sucked into a vortex of doom.  Not that I’m bitter about that.  Or considering conducting an experiment in which I unplug all of his stuff whenever he is out of the house for the day just to see what kind of energy savings there are to be had.  But to prove that there are energy savings to be had he would have to witness the unplugging and would probably say “hey, why are you unplugging that? If it isn’t connected to anything, it isn’t using energy! I’m in engineering! I know how these things work!”

But what was I talking about?

Yes. Earth Day.  Conserving Energy.  Lower Electric Bill.

So yes, most of my energy conservation today has been in the form of sluggishness and “wow, I do not want to move or do anything at all.”

Maybe I should drink a bunch of the soda I bought so that I can get all hopped up on the caffeine.  And then not sleep much at all tonight..so… apparently I need a new plan.

Does anybody know where I can get the energy to come up with a new plan?

Oh, and Happy Earth Day!

I think I got too much sun yesterday but it was so, so worth it.  Today, sadly, I could not run around all day in the bright bright sunlight but that didn’t stop me from keeping all of the windows open all day.  It was kind of distracting, but there was no way that I was going to leave the blinds closed when it was so pretty out.

Another big deal for today is that it is SEVEN PM and I have not yet turned on our television set.  Or a radio.  I have had quiet all day and I have enjoyed it! …thought I probably will turn on that ol’ boob tube in a few minutes.  I like having the background noise while I play with yarn.

Honestly, the biggest part of my day was this last hour, which I spent on the phone with one of my older brothers.  We’ve been talking more often over the last few months and I really really like that.  I am not really a phone person but for family I will happily chat for as long as they want.

Other than that, today has been a big bag of working working working.  I got a bunch of client work done, washed, dried and put away a load of jeans, straightened our apartment and dinner is about to come out of the oven (we are having oven baked barbecue chicken and salad tonight).  So, honestly?  I have had two great days in a row!

This kind of makes me worried about tomorrow…

Today I went over to South East Portland to hang with my friend Wendy.  We had a yummy lunch at Burgerville and then hoofed it over to The Yarn Garden where we spent some time drooling over all of the fun and fluffy yarns that they had to offer crocheters and knitters like us.  This place even has a small sitting area/coffee shop where you can sit and sip coffee and handicraft your afternoon away if you want.  We chose to skip that part as we hadn’t purchased any yarn (though we did spend quite a lot of time lusting over the shop’s many many offerings) but still had fun.  Of the three yarn shops I’ve visited up here I think I like Yarn Garden the best.  It was a friendly feeling place where, even though the yarn was a little on the spendy side, there was a distinct lack of pretension that I felt the one time I went into Knit Purl downtown.

It was a lot of fun hanging out and chatting with Wendy.  I love Will and I love hanging out with Will but chick chat is quite a lot different than fiance chat and I haven’t had a dose of chick chat in a while.

Because I stayed so long with Wendy (and I totally would have stayed longer if meals didn’t need to be cooked and trips back across town did not need to be taken) I decided to meet up with Will when his last class got out so that we could come home together.  This turned into quite the adventure because apparently while we were walking from the PSU campus to the Goose Hollow train stop one of the Max trains derailed in downtown causing a huge clusterfrack for train commuters while TriMet people got things organized.  We didn’t want to get sardined onto one of the few operating trains so…we took the bus.  Taking the bus is nothing new for me but Will? Has a self professed loathing for the bus (this is based up on two Greyhound trips he took in his youth) and has refused to use the busses up here.  And I mean refused.  He even wanted to try walking back to Beaverton from the Goose Hollow train stop instead of taking the #58 bus.  Thankfully I won and lo and behold! The bus! It does not suck the donkey nuts that Will thought it did!  It got us home a little bit faster than the train! It let us off closer to home! There were places for us both to sit! The people were friendlier! Okay, it smelled a little funky but Will! Took the bus! And did not die! It’s a miracle!

I don’t think he will voluntarily hop on the bus again, but it was nice to hear him say “that wasn’t that bad”!

• Today I ate too much lunch so I decided to lay down on the couch for a few minutes.  I woke up an hour later.  Whoops.
• Will found a job at school today! Woo!  I’m not sure if I am allowed to blog about it so we’ll just keep it to Woo! Yay new (better paying that is flexible enough to work around his class schedule and other part time job’s schedule as well) job!
• Last night we went to Target because I needed to buy kitty treats and an iron and an ironing board.  We came out with the iron, ironing board, kitty treats as well as three new pairs of jeans for Will, a new “interview ensemble” for Will and Catch Me if You Can on DVD.  Target is an evil place of money suckage.  But I still love it.
• Will? Looks WAY HOT in his “interview ensemble” of dark gray pants and white button down shirt.  Yum. Mee. Mmm.  Me likey. *Drool*.
• A couple of days ago I decided to start looking for a new bag on eBay.  The bag I’ve been carrying around is one of those mini-backpack things and it has a hole and I’ve had it since 1997.
• While perusing bags on eBay I decided to see what kind of yarn was being auctioned off.  This? Turned out to be a Very Bad Idea.
• I? Might have spent about $30 (thankfully, this includes shipping) on auctioned off yarn.  Oops.  But it’s pretty pretty yarn!
• Tonight Will and I went out to Fry’s in Wilsonville to look at computer parts and, because I was bored almost instantly, I started to play around on one of the portable pianos they had and was very surprised to find out just how much I still remember of Canon in D.  Now I desperately wish we had the money for a real piano.  Can you put pianos on your wedding registry?
• I have decided that next week will begin my 50/50 work/wedding split.  I’ll spend the mornings working on client stuff and the afternoons on wedding stuff because I really don’t want to get swamped with wedding stuff at the last minute.  This plan ensures that the last minute swampage is exactly what will happen because that’s how I always roll in spite of myself, yo.
• I’m kind of looking forward to cleaning the house tomorrow morning.  If I get done with it early enough that means I can spend most of tomorrow playing around with yarn!
• Earlier tonight as we were driving home from Fry’s, Will said “wow, I just got the urge to go on a road trip.”  We are both sad and thankful that we do not have the money to just take off for a weekend or we’d probably be well on our way to…somewhere right now.  Maybe, if it is as sunny and wonderful as the weather report promised, we’ll go out to the beach on Sunday.  Most likely we will end up sitting around in our pajamas all day on Sunday but it’s nice to think we might decide to do something different.

Have a great weekend!

Last night I was idly perusing Wedding invites and stationery sites and found what I thought were wedding invitations that were folded into the shape of super awesome paper airplanes.  Will and I both fell instantly in love with them because, really, who wouldn’t want to send out paper airplane wedding invitations?

Today I take a closer look and realize that these aren’t actually invitations but save the date announcements.  And, well, crap.  Will says that we can still order them and send them out because seriously? Awesome fun.

Still though, I decided to look at other, more traditional, wedding invitations and I only have one two questions:

1.  Are there really people out there who will spend thousands of dollars on just their invitations?

2.  Why are these people with intensely large disposable incomes not my friends??

Last night when I was going to sleep I decided that, even though I was only going to get six hours of sleep, I would fore-go the usual “make sure I get eight hours before trying to function” nap that I usually take after Will leaves for school and just stay up and get to work.  Then, this morning, I woke up after only six hours of sleep and said “eff this, I’m going back to sleep!” and as soon as Will left for school I crawled back into bed for a couple of hours.  And? It? Was Glorious.

Today has been full of situations like that: I decide that I am going to do something and then, when the opportunity arises to do that something I do something completely different.  Example? I was going to only do the Wii Fit for twenty minutes or so after waking (back) up this morning.  Instead? I did the Wii Fit for an hour (and discovered that I have no balancing skills to speak of).  I was going to sit down and write like crazy today.  Instead I sat down and planned like crazy.  I did research for a bunch of articles I have to write, cleaned out my “desk” drawers, started searching for wedding invitations (found some that, miraculously, Will and I both love) and tried to find a new pork chop recipe (epic Fail).

And? I waited for the UPS guy. And waited and waited and waited and waited for the UPS guy.

Oh UPS guy.  Usually you get here at one or so in the afternoon, so I tried to not be doing anything non-interruptable at around one (not too hard since today turned out to be a day of planning) and you, UPS guy, decided not to bring me my books until SEVEN THIRTY.

I was beyond annoyed by the time he showed up, especially as he was absolutely not moved by my very enthusiastic “hooray!” when he finally knocked on the door but, in retrospect, it is probably better that he showed up so late.  See, I ordered Not Your Mama’s Crochet and Not Your Mama’s Knitting from Amazon and if those books had arrived at one-ish?  Not even planning would have gotten done today…though several half assed attempts at knitting and a few started crochet projects would probably be scattered all over the living room.

Dudes, I am getting into this crafting thing.  Also? If you want to get started with crochet or knit, I highly recommend these books.  And then coming over and hanging out with me so that we can crochet and/or knit together!