I'm Homeless...

... at work.

Today we had to completely pack up our office and break down our computers.  It was really weird to know that I will never again walk into my office and actually do anything productive.

This is part of what my 1/2 of the office looked like.  Yes obviously the one on the left.  I will have to post my panoramic picture of my ducks at another time.  It was very impressive.

 This is what it looked like when everything was gone.  Very sad and lonely looking.

This is what happened when the furniture movers came.  Yea the painters totally painted around the overhead part of the desks.

And this is a shot of my new desk (a major downgrade from what I had before).  I must be very creative with my ducks because as you can see I lost the length of one and a 1/2 of the overheads in this picture.  And yes, all of my ducks will be heading back to work.  Don't you worry.

Hopefully they will let us move into our new offices tomorrow since we have absolutely nothing left to do at the old place...

More news to come tomorrow I am sure!!!

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Gluten-Free Food Review: Butternut Squash

The gluten-free food review for this week was kinda a bust.  I know I shouldn't start my post with that, but it is totally true.  I do have to explain that I realized that I really don't like butternut squash... which might have been why I ended up not really liking the souffle.

I thought this looked really good on the box, because it reminded me of sweet potatoes.  I had never had any of the Garden Lites brand before so I didn't know what to expect.

I was surprised at how large the bowl was.  The box said that the souffle was meant to be a side dish not a full meal.  But with how big it was I could have had just that!

I couldn't really tell when it was done or not since it looked just about the same as when I put it in to cook.  I just had to guess.

It looked light and moist inside.  I still wasn't sure if it was completely cooked but I had met the time specifications on the box.

I have to say I almost spit my first bite out.  I was completely expecting it to taste very similar to a sweet potato.  It totally did not.  The texture was similar and I am sure would have been very enjoyable to someone that actually liked butternut squash.

I sadly threw almost all of it away.

I do have another of these but a different veggie that I hope to try soon.  I will let you know if I liked it better than this one.

Tomorrow is my final day with a desk at work in our current location.  I am not sure what we will be doing on Friday since we won't have desks, computers, or internet...

Sister Time Confirmed!!

I almost wasn't able to take the course with my sister.  I didn't know that you had to apply to to the school in order to take it.  I didn't find that out of course until the time I was supposed to register.  Some frantic phone calls later and I learned I was quite possibly screwed.  As you already know, I had bought my books already.

I spend the weekend trying to decide what to do.  I was sad and so very disappointed with I wouldn't be able to take the class.  I did however, cook up a plan.

Monday afternoon I emailed the professor from my work email.  I explained my sob story and at the end asked if there was any way I could just go and sit in on the course.  Being that it was the first day of school I didn't expect a reply until at least 24 hours later.

I checked my email later that evening.  And I had an email.  From the professor.  SAYING I COULD SIT IN ON THE CLASS!!!!

I was so excited that I started yelling.  At 10:30 at night.  In my apartment.  With others sleeping upstairs... I think.

I am so excited, obviously.

The first class is tomorrow night. 

Now I just have to figure out what I am going to do about dinner... I can't wait until 10 pm to eat...

Happy day!

What I'm Reading Monday: Off to the Moon!!

I am a little late on this one, but I still managed to get it done!!  I have had a busy week.  I hopefully will find time to catch you up and post about the things I have made!!

Another week has gone by with me completely leaving this book alone.  I mean I carry it everywhere with me because it is on my phone, but it just isn't my first choice.  I might have to schedule some one on one time with this book this week.

I finished Mysterious Skin.  And I am very glad I did because it was very disturbing to read about what happened.  I dont' want to give too much away for those that might actually want to read it.  The remainder of the molestation and hustling references were just too much for me.  I am curious about how people get to that point in their life but I don't really want to know the play by play after the fact.

Jon and I finished Skybreaker and I loved it just as much as the first.  I did manage to enjoy the new Kate's voice by the end of the book (still not as good as the first reader though).  The adventure was going on so long that I was worried that it would end in the middle of it.  Don't worry it doesn't.  I did feel as though a bit more explaining about what happened to each character was needed.  You don't learn what they do once the expedition is over.

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I, of course, immediately started the final book in the series Starclimber.  I really don't like this Kate's voice.  I am loving the training that Matt has to go through to see if he is space worthy.  They, of course, don't know exactly what space is like since this would be the first group of people to go that high.  I can't wait to get to the point where they head out.  I am curious how similar it would be to how space is in real life.

I have made no progress on this book either.  Mostly due to the fact that for a few days I was not sure if I would even be able to take the class with my sister... stupid re-applying to school.  But the professor teaching the class is awesome and allowing me to sit in!!!  I will be updating you on this book and the other one we are to read in class shortly I am sure.

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I also am planning to start reading the next Fables book this week.  We shall see if I am able to finish it too... :)

Hope everyone has a great week back at school!!

Alternate Uses: For Shoe Inserts!

I have been going to the chiropractor for a month or so to fix my knee.  He had mentioned that my shoes could be effecting how I was walking.  I happen to wear the same shoes to work just about everyday.  I really took a few minutes to look at how the heel was wearing away.  It definitely looked like I was walking towards the outside of my heel.

All of this prompted  me to buy a new pair of shoes.  I found a pair of black flats at Payless and they had some cushion already in them.  Perfect!

Don't you hate how shoes will feel great and not have any ouchie parts in the store but when you get home they feel completely different?  It happens to me all of the time.

I am not sure if my legs are different than most peoples but the height of the back of the shoes are too high and hit the back of my ankle.  Completely uncomfortable.  And who wants blisters?!

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So I had to put my thinking cap on and remembered about these shoe squishies I had bought a long time ago for a pair of heels I had.

Perfect.

I placed them at the heel of the shoe and tried them on.  The top of the shoe didn't hit the back of my ankle!  It didn't hurt!

It doesn't look all that cute to have to adjust them throughout the day.  I will eventually buy a pair of squishies that would span the entire length of the shoe so that I wouldn't have to adjust it.

I was thinking about some other ways to use the shoe squishies and I thought about placing them on the table when removing pins from a project.  The pad is sticky enough to hold the pins in place and stop them from rolling all around the table.

You would probably even use them in the car to hold your phone in place.  But I am not sure if the plastic would stay solid or if it would melt though.

If you have a set of these on hand I challenge you to think up some other ways to use them too!

Stepping happy.

Gluten-free Food Review: Chocolate Covered Pretzels

Now this past week I have been craving chocolate like crazy.  Prior to this point I had not been craving sugary, sweet things.  I have no idea what is going on.

I was in the grocery store and had a craving.  Instead of getting cookies or something equally yummy from the bakery that I know would be bad, I cruzed over to the gluten-free aisle and spotting the sweet stuff.

 

I have had the Glutino Chocolate Covers Pretzels before and I knew they were delicious.  They even have ones coated in yogurt too.  I grabbed them and used all of the will I had to wait to open them until I was in the car.

So good.  If you need a sweet and salty fix this is the thing to grab.

The serving size is kinda small, but the pretzels are a fairly good size so you could make it into three bits or so.

Just thinking about them my mouth is watering...

Yum.

Peek Into My Life: No Longer too Cool for School

As an employee of UCF I am lucky enough to have the ability to take a class to two for free each semester.  I have not taken them up on this offer until now.

This is my sisters last year at UCF and I am devastated.  I have loved having her here and wish UCF would have had a program for what she wants to major in.

With her leaving soon, she got an idea in her head that we should take a class together.  Now, I have not taken classes since I graduated in 2009.  That is a long time.  I am not sure how I will deal with having another thing listed on my daily checklists.

But I am going to do it.  Especially since it means that I will have a guaranteed 3 hours with her each week.  I mean she is even picking me up from work and driving me to class!!

We went and bought our books this past week.  It was weird being in the bookstore again.  And apparently they are letting you rent books now.  I am not exactly sure how I feel about that.

I even treated myself to a new composition book to take notes in.  Staci thinks it is crazy that I want to take hand-written notes because she does everything on the computer.  I will just have her send me the notes.  :)

I have about two weeks till classes start and I am getting excited.

It may cause me to want to continue taking classes to explore if I really do like accounting...

Hope everyone's second day of school is going great (or teacher planning days)!

What I'm Reading Monday - Who needs a man?

I have slacked on posting again (mostly because my computer at work can't handle all of my multitasking during lunch time).  I hopefully will have a better go at it this week.  I may start having to just post random life happenings just to get me back into the groove of posting everyday again.

Anyway on to the good stuff.

I have been a busy reader.  Mostly because I have a lot of different things started.

Jon and I finished Airborn.  I really enjoyed it and was glad that it tied everything up very nicely.  I liked that each character had a different reader.

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Of course I had the second one ready to go.  It is Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel.  It continues Matt and Kate's story by hunting after a ship that most people had thought smashed into the ocean years and years before.  I really disliked how they got a different person to read for Kate's character.  It was driving me crazy on the way to work the first morning.  I am starting to get used to it now that the book is well into the 10th chapter, but I think I would have enjoyed the first reader more.

I am still working on Mysterious Skin.  I am about 1/3 of the way through and I am beginning to see how all of their lives are starting to come together.  I am still a little weirded out by some of the stuff happening in the story - all of the molestation of kids is a little off-putting.  I am thinking how all of this would translate to the big screen and I don't think I want to watch the movie... the book is descriptive enough.

I have made absolutely no progress on Alibi In High Heels.  I have to say that Mysterious Skin has me completely distracted from it.

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Kellee let me borrow a graphic novel from her and she asked if I could get it back to her before school started.  Well her school starts with kids next week so I decided I better start reading it today.  I managed to start and finish it today.  It is Princeless Book One: Save Yourself by Jeremy Whitley.  I really liked the idea of the princess saving herself from the tower and the "horrible fire breathing dragon".  The images were very well thought out and organized.  Easy to follow.  I actually am a little curious how the story proceeds from where it left off in the first book.  Maybe Kellee can get me on the waiting list. :)

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Lastly I started a book that I have to read for my class I will be taking with Staci.  I didn't get far enough to even really review it yet.  But from the preface I think it will be very interesting.  I will have to fill you in more on it later.

Not to mention that I have many many hours of recorded Olympics to contend with my books.  I have to say that I think I did a fair job balancing them all out.  Which means that Olympics for me aren't over!!

Hope everyones week is great!

MIA = Mostly Invisible Amanda

So I had mentioned a few times that I have been busy and what not.  It makes me really sad that I missed out on my blog for over a week!  I had been so great about making sure I posted each and every day (besides Sundays) since I started in January.  Was it really January?!  That is hard to believe.

Anyway.  I have been dealing with an upset tummy and a mini vacation.  When my tummy was all upset blogging was the last thing on my mind.  I just wanted to eat without the gut wrenching cramps.  I dealt with them for almost a week before heading to a doctor.

Now I am one of those people that believe that all parts of the body are interconnected and that "regular" western medicine is not the best option to actually find out what is wrong with and heal your body.  I totally believe in homeopathic and eastern medicines.  So much so that I paid a ridiculous amount of money to be checked out by an eastern friendly medical practice.  They found out that I was basically running on "e" and I was deficitent in a bunch of very important vitamins and what not.  They got me on a round of supplements and I was feeling 100 times better within a week and a half.  I don't think I would have made it through the New York trip if I hadn't been taking them.

So going in to see the "regular" doctor I already knew he would not be too keen on my taking supplements and trusting "those doctors".  Sure enough the second I had said that I had been taking supplements he blamed all of my issues on the supplements.  I insisted that was not the case since I had been taking them for almost two months and not had a problem.  He didn't believe that I had stopped taking them that week and kept telling me not to take them.  Well HELLO!  I could barely even think about drinking that much water let alone taking pills with it!  UHG.  I left there two viles of blood less with no helpful information about why I was feeling so horrible.  So I deemed the visit a complete waste of time and money.

Oh and those blood results?  Super waste of time because the letter literally gave the medical short hand name of the test, the normal ranges, and where my results fell.  It didn't even tell me what the hell they tested for!!!  All they wrote was that I was all within normal ranges.  So stupid.

I had gotten home and ate bland, plain, boring foods and I eventually got better.  I mean I had a deadline of Tuesday to get better so that we could go to the Keys!  I still have no idea what happened and why I couldn't eat anything, but I am better now and plan to stay that way.

Although once I was better it was time to get everything ready to head out of town.  That meant a trip to Honda to get my poor little car checked out (no crazy broken things YAY!), a meeting with the loan officer for the house, a failed trip to JoAnn's with Staci (I think I'll be posting about that later), and a crazy busy night of packing for the Keys!  I hope that my hiatus from the blog is over.  I must start planning better, I was doing so well beforeI know I can get back to it.

I will be sharing our whirlwind trip to the Keys and back this week along with a silly little trick I discovered.  Plus, I will be starting a college class with Staci near the end of the month.  That will be interesting.  It will be the first college class I will have taken in three years.

I think I have caught you all up enough.  Especially since I didn't have any pictures for this post!

I hope to have a more interesting and funny post tomorrow. :)

What I'm Reading Monday- Emerald Atlas

It is very obvious I have been very busy these last few weeks.  I promise I will share that soon.

But for today's event!

I have been busy listening to books this past week (mostly due to a trip to Key West).  I managed to almost listen to two whole audiobooks!

First, I finished The Emerald Atlas.  I had mentioned how it was much different than the books I had been listening to prior and it took a little while to adjust and get into it.  I must say that I really enjoyed it.  I fell in love with the three children (Kate, Emma, and Michael).  I don't want to give too much away, but I was on the edge of my seat the whole second half of the book.  Their adventure at times looked as though it would not be successful.  I was relieved to know that there are two more books, the only bad thing is that I have no idea how long I will have to wait to hear them!  I think Jon even got into it slightly albeit at the very last disk and a half.

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We immediately started the next audiobook that I had brought with us for the long drive down to the Keys.  It was Airborn by Kenneth Oppel.  I had picked it because of the audiobooks I had it seemed the most Jon friendly.  I was excited because this is my first full cast audiobook!  I have mentioned how some readers aren't able to keep all of the voices sounding different and I knew that a full cast would solve that no problem.  But it did have music at the beginning and that is just something I don't think is necessary.  Jon and I made it to the 8th disk and sadly we arrived home and couldn't sit around and listen to the rest of it.  I think he really got into it because each time I turned it off to ask a question or take a little break he was itching to turn it back on.  :)  Now the only problem is how am  I going to get him to listen to the rest of it...  Oh, yea.  You might want to actually  hear about the book huh?  It is about a boy who works on an airship.  He loves his job and wants to become a sailsman.  A kink is thrown into his plans and he meets a very demanding young girl.  She turns him upside-down in her pursuit of a creature her grandfather claimed to have seen.  I have to say that I thought we had gotten to the part where they would be all clear to go, but nope!  And that is unfortunately where we had to stop. :(

I am still chugging along on this one.  I didn't have much time for reading this weekend since we spent so much time driving around in the car.  She has gotten herself into trouble- big time.  Luckily her cop boyfriend has just showed up and will hopefully set things straight... or handcuff her so she can't go off and get into more trouble.

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Silly me, since I finished Tricks last week I decided to start another book.  Yes, I already have one started (see above) and I insist that I must have a hardback book in addition to my audio and iphone books.  Crazy I know.  I have not gotten very far in Mysterious Skin but so far I am intrigued.  It seems to focus on a few different kids that may or may not be living in the same town.  There is molestation, playgirl magazines, and strippers.  I am not exactly sure the point of the story yet (since I can't remember reading the synopsis).  I'll let you  know more when I learn more.

As for reading, that is all for the week.  As for everything else, that will come later.

Hoping everyone a good week.