Bring your wife to work day/week/summer

Last Tuesday Jesse came home from work and said "hey, how would you feel about working this summer at Bold?"  And I was like "you said you don't want me working there."  Turns out Jody needs some help in the office, covering phones and such, and Jesse said "dude, just hire Rianna.  She will work for $20/hour."  Well later Jesse got a text saying that Charlie approved me working as a temp (not for $20/hour, unfortunately).  We talked about it, and decided that it probably wouldn't be the best idea, especially with Cricket coming.  It wouldn't be super fun to be stuck in our apartment all summer all alone.  No fun at all.
So the next morning I was sitting on the couch, watching music videos, trying to work up the energy to do the dishes, when my phone rang.
"Hey, Dave says he needs your help in the shop.  He'll take you whenever he can get you."  And so began my week of juggling.  I threw on some shoes, grabbed an extra shirt, and headed in to the shop.
By the time I got there, it was 9:55, and I had to be at Party Planet by 11, so it wasn't a super profitable morning, but I followed Annie around nevertheless, and started having flashbacks to being 16 and working off my first car.  My dad and I found my beautiful 1970 Nova (later dubbed Tetanus) in the junkyard owned by Dennis Stafford (later dubbed the Mayor of Colton), and worked off the equivilent of $500 for it.  Most of my working involved sorting a big rack of various nuts, bolts, hooks, screws, and other things I didn't even recognize.
I ditched and ran to Party Planet for a couple hours, where I changed into a clean shirt and scrubbed most of the grease off my hands.  Under the fingernails was a lost cause.  Don't even bother.  when I got back I had another three hours ahead of me of organizing a really heavy box full of little bags of little parts labeled things like 0808ER.725 BD or 0804ER.225 SS or 223RX526.  I still have no idea what they all were, but I attempted to put them all in numerical order so that Jason will have an easier time dealing with them all on Monday.  Hopefully that will make up for the fact that I opened like, 6 bags of something (each bag containing 1000 little parts, I think) before realizing that he is going to have to count every single on of them on Monday.  Oops.  I'm probably going to have to help him, which serves me right.

The next day I had off from Party Planet, so I came in at 7:30 with Jesse and followed Annie around some more, doing inventory and stuff, but it was her last day in Texas and she was pretty distracted doing her own work.  She kept telling me things like "Go move that pallet" and when I came back she would say "are you already done?  Go put that box upstairs.  Why are you so fast?  Uhhhh..."  Finally she ran out of things to have me do except saying that she needed to find a table and put it somewhere so that all the stuff that was in this one place could be put on it and lined up so that when they find a rack they can have everything ready to put on the rack..."or you can go help Jody."
I glady chose staying in the air conditioned office, stuffing flyers into manilla envelopes, opening and sorting the mail (Dave gets the magazines, Jody gets the bills), taking the company car to get it inspected (where the guy asked me how many miles were on it and then announced that it passed...I think inspections are usually supposed to involved inspecting things, but whatevs), and printing out UPS labels.  Jesse seemed to think that I wasn't capable of typing information into a computer, because he had to come over and check everything that I was doing.  I was doing it right.

The problem with working multiple jobs is that it's hard to keep my routine that I have become quite accustomed to.  Get up, make Jesse breakfast, read/sleep for an hour or so, do the dishes, walk to work at 10:40, call my mother while I walk home and 1, do my workout from 2-2:30, take a shower, and be back downstairs by 3:00 when Castle is on.  Then Jesse gets home aruond 5, which is when I start dinner, so we can eat at 5:30, make popcorn at 6, and have ice cream at 7.  At 9 Jesse takes his shower, and then we go to bed and I read him Harry Potter until 10, so that I can get 8 hours of sleep and do it all over again.
I worked out once last week...but it's really hard to make myself get up and do stuff after I've been up doing stuff all day.  I'm gonna get fat when school starts, just wait and see.

Parting note: it's really hard to wear pants more than once when you're hanging out in a machine shop.  I hope next week I get to spend more time inside.  I probably won't be that lucky though...

TGIF!

So today was a Day.  Leeeeet me tell you about it!

First of all, it started with a massive tangle in my hair because I forgot that Jesse talked me into braiding a teeny tiny braid in my hair and then tried to brush through it.  Nice.
Last night (around the time that I was braiding my hair), Jason texted Jesse and asked if I could make a minecraft cake for Ashley's birthday party on Saturday (tomorrow), and of course I said "challenge accepted!!"  So this morning at 7:30 I was sitting on the couch pinteresting minecraft cupcakes and googling recipes for chocolate cakes, buttercream frosting, and fondant.  I learned many things about fondant today, the most important of which being...well, two most importants.  1: if you refrigerate it until you're ready to use it, it's much less sticky.  2: tiny amounts of water make different little pieces stick together quite nicely.  Anyway, 7:30 a.m. I almost called my mother, and then realized that 7:30 is not a nice time to call someone, and 5:30 is even worse.  Instead, I texted my friend Sarai and asked her if she knows anything about fondant.  She doesn't, but she asked if I wanted to go give blood with her around 9.
"Uhhh....sure, why not?"

By 9 I had eaten a second breakfast (wouldn't want to pass out), found all my recipes, and written my shopping list.  Sarai came and picked me up, and we went to the blood donation bus.  Well, even though they were supposed to open at 9:00 and it was 9:05, they weren't ready, so we went to Nutri-Box (where Sarai works) to see her coworker Yuri.  We sat around and talked for almost 45 minutes...that's another story in itself that I will have to tell you sometime.  Finally at 10:30 we made it inside the bus and started the process of giving blood.  And I have now donated blood for the first time!  I had never been stuck with a needle before, except at the dentist and when I got stitches in my ankle, and that's not really the same thing.  Yay me!!  The lady wouldn't let me look at it.  They had to double tourniquet it to make my vein get-at-able.  My hand kinda turned blue and got really tired, but it was all good.
So then Sarai and I went shopping, and got everything I needed to make some fantastic cupcakes.
Aaaaannnnddd...the rest four hours or so we spent up to my eyeballs in powdered sugar.  I had no idea a single project could use that much powdered sugar!  Oh. My. Lanta.  Just mixing up 13 different colors of fondant took up the entire length of my kitchen.  I know it's small, but it didn't leave me much room for...anything.

Now, I don't know what you know about minecraft, but basically you mine for different metals, and chop down trees, and butcher pigs and cows and chickens and sheep, and build awesome houses to keep you safe from the zombies and the other monsters that come out at night.  Also, everything is square.  It's like everything is super pixelated, so it's all squares.  Everything.  So I decided to follow in the footsteps of many others and make square fondant faces to put on top of cupcakes.  Simple, right?  Actually, it wasn't too bad, just very time consuming.  My little squares of grass definitely don't look quite right, mostly due to my lack of symmetry, and I have a couple pick axes and a sword that I made after taking this picture that I think are pretty cool.

After a few hours I got really tired of fondant (and it was getting late), so I mixed up the buttercream frosting and the cake batter, and started on my spinach and homemade sausage quiche for dinner.  Jesse complained and said that quiche is gross and eggs are gross and spinach is green, which means it's gross, but he ate it anyway and then went out to Charlie's to shoot.  I assume he'll be back soon...it's rather dark and he's still not home....oh well.
After dinner I went to work to finish training the new up front-in charge person at party planet.  I am actually taking the weekend off, which means she'll have to handle it alone tomorrow, and I kind of felt like I was handing over my baby to a stranger, so Leslie said I could come in for an hour or two and make sure she got everything going smoothly, knows the alarm codes, all that jazz.  I also left her a note with reminders of everything I usually forget, ending with my phone number and "if you need anything, I'm literally a mile away."  How did I become this possessive of a business that isn't even mine?  I think a weekend off was definitely due.
Of course, I took it off because James was hoping to be able to visit, but the air force owns his soul and they denied him leave, but that leaves us free to go to the birthday party and eat cupcakes, so....sorry James, you won't be missed that much.
And that was my day.  Oh, except that I came home after work and baked cupcakes and in a little bit I'm going to go frost them...or maybe I'll leave that till morning.  I haven't decided.  How to Train Your Dragon is on TV, so I might not be moving from the couch for a while....

"Let me get the door for you!"

Jesse has become quite the gentleman.  I haven't had to open a door in weeks!  And as long as the doors are off the Jeep, that one won't get old for either of us.

Well, I am now 22 years old, and what have I accomplished?

Or that I am a great interior decorator (earthtones!)

I could say that I am a master pizza crust tosser

Highly qualified pastry chef
(Yes, that's homemade ice cream)

X-man (I totally look like Wolverine, right?)

But I guess those things don't really matter.  What does matter is that I have an amazing husband who makes me laugh, who took me to my first drive-in movie, and who lets me do whatever I want to our little home.  Where he draws the line is me taking pictures of him and posting them on facebook.  But I am a highly resourceful woman, and Windows phones just got instagram!  He says he's going to get an instagram just to follow me and see what I post.  And people say that you marry your father...They're right.

So lets get on to the narrative, shall we?  I have more pictures than I know what to do with, today!

Sunday was my birthday.  It was pretty laid back...Just lots of food and a movie.  We had planned on going to the beach, but we decided to wait and go with Cricket.  Thankfully, I didn't have to work that day, which was nice.  Two of the three owners of Party Planet are no longer part of the business, which leaves a lot of stuff on Leslie's plate, the remaining sole owner.  It also has given those of us employees who are accustomed to working alone and handling money a few more hours than we have gotten before this.  I've really been enjoying working there more.  Having one boss instead of three is much less stressful and confusing.

The other great thing about working at Party Planet, is that we now are living about 1 mile away, which means I can walk to work!  I've been trying to put the time I spend walking home to good use by actually calling people and talking to them.  Like, on the phone.  Like, hear someone's voice and have conversations.  How old school is that?  It's been good, though.  So if you ever wanna have a good old phone conversation, I'm usually walking home from work at 1:00 (which is 11:00 Oregon time).  Sooo....call me, maybe?

My artistic endeavors--or...daydreams; I haven't actually done any of it--are expanding.  I am planning to recreate The Wall.  When I was in highschool (so not that long ago), I taped some pictures to my wall, like every teenage girl does.  Every time I did something with my friends, we would take pictures, I would print them out, and they were added to The Wall.  Eventually it grew to cover almost the entire wall, and included things like a rice krispy treat wrapper, and the top of a pringles can.  Not super classy, but one of the best things I ever created.  It was an entire wall of memories.  Some were sweet, some were bittersweet, but it was my life, and it made me happy.  It took it with me when I moved out, and finally threw it away shortly before Jesse and I got married.

Jesse thinks it's just teenage drama, and it will be dumb, but I think (and Cristin agrees) that if you put anything in a frame, it becomes art.  So my plan is to get a ton of little frames, and put them all together in an intentionally hodge podge way.  I can put up pictures from the movie we saw the first time he tricked me into hanging out with him, of the time we went to the beach and soaked when we first started dating, of the wedding, of the train park right before me moved.  I can put up the picture of me and Joy, the last one I took before getting in the Uhaul and driving to Texas.  Pictures from Thanksgiving with the Oregonian Orphans and Christmas with the family.  I can frame the pile of notes that  used to put in his lunches, and that will eb all cute and stuff, and when Cricket comes down I can put pictures of her on the wall...It would just be great. 

So that's my latest interior decorating plan.  But for the moment, it is time for me to put on another hat (chef's hat) and start dinner.

Till next time!