Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Busy week! (and a grammar question)

This week is busy! Sunday was great - we went to the casino for brunch and played for a few minutes... to my dismay, there were no penny slots. So I did 5 cent slots for 15 or 20 minutes. I lost $1.05. Boo. (that is the worst I've ever done!) After that we went off-roading in Hart's Jeep - it was great! Super fun. We learned all about different types of cactui. Then we had dinner at a place called Oregano's - yum. Great food. Monday morning we both came back. I wasn't feeling well Monday afternoon / evening, so I didn't really get much done. Waste of a day, which is irritating. Tuesday afternoon I had my Remicade, and then went home and popped a cake in the oven, did the dishes, cleaned the kitchen, emptied the dishwasher, unpacked, and tidied up my room. Geoff got home after about an hour and we had dinner at Hall Street Grill. We got home late and then went to bed. Well, actually I looked at cacti on the wiki first. It was fun. :)

Tonight I need to finish prepping for cake decorating class tomorrow (icing my cake, making a few more batches of icing, packing everything up, etc.) and then we're having dinner at Cheesecake Factory with Geoff's parents and his stepsister who is in town because she is on spring break! YAY, I love her. Tomorrow I have a class at the gym and then I have to rush over to Michaels for cake decorating. Geoff is taking Rebecca skiing tomorrow night... fun! Friday we're going to my friend Kendra's birthday BBQ, and Saturday we're going to Geoff's aunt and uncle's St. Patrick's Day party and then his friend Kyle's birthday party. Plus there is TONS to do around the house... it is a disaster. I was definitely feeling a little stressed about this last night, but there will be enough time. I need to update my Quicken... it is so behind and it makes me angry!

HUGE grammar drama! - Geoff wrote a note to one of our roommates asking him to make some time to talk to us tonight. He wrote "plaese make some time to talk to Kelly and me" and I said "no, it should be me and Kelly", so he corrected it. Then he wrote it again on a seperate white board and wrote it "Kelly and me" again... I corrected it again and he changed it to "me and Kelly". Not a huge deal... but then this morning his roommate had written back and responded and then wrote "P.S. it should say Kelly and me". Then I was like "OH NO - could I be WRONG?!" So I immediately emailed my mom, my personal grammar expert. She replied and said "I think me and geoff is correct. When you use "I" you say Geoff and I, but usually me goes first." That didn't sound like a very concrete answer, so I researched on the internet. I think I've concluded that it really doesn't matter - although for etiquette reasons, some consider "Kelly and me" to be more correct because it is more polite to put the other person before yourself. However, others argue that "me and Kelly" is more correct because "Kelly" could be replaced with "the most wonderful woman in the entire world" and it just sounds weird to put "and me" after that... "me and the most wonderful woman in the world" sounds better. Along those lines, I read in multiple places that it's not grammatically incorrect to say "I and Geoff went to the store"... again, it's a "politeness" issue. My mom has also sent an email to her sister (the other grammar expert in the family) to have her weigh in on the subject. I'd love to hear what you think too!

Here are a couple of my sources:
Source 1
Which is correct: 'my friend and me' or 'my friend and I'?

That depends on where you and your friend are in the sentence. In colloquial speech 'me' is often used where standard grammar requires 'I', especially when someone else is mentioned too. Sometimes people use 'I' instead of 'me', because they know 'me' is sometimes wrong, but have not understood the principle. (Others resort to 'myself', which can sound rather pompous.) I am the subject of the sentence, but the object of the sentence is me. If in doubt, take your friend out of the sentence.

Me and my friend went to a party last night. [Wrong]
I and my friend went to a party last night.
My friend and me went to a party last night. [Wrong]
My friend and I went to a party last night.

The mayor has invited me and my husband.
The mayor has invited I and my husband. [Wrong]
The mayor has invited my husband and me.
The mayor has invited my husband and I. [Wrong]

Incidentally, saying 'my friend and I' instead of 'I and my friend' is not better grammar, it's just being polite.

Source 2
I'm not saying that "me and Jane" is correct etiquette -- it just sounds better to most ears. There's no grammatical difference between "me and Jane" and "Jane and me", as far as I know. Grammar doesn't care about the order of the pair, but etiquette does.

Source 3
I hate to be technical on this point, but since it's the nature of our discussion, I believe it is proper to say "Pizza was delivered to me and Mike." You are correct with "Mike and I ordered pizza" wherein you allow Mike to be first, but since "me" is the direct object in the second, it should be first, so as to not run into the problem shown in this example: "Pizza was delivered to all of the little underground trolls that frolic in the woods and me." It gets somewhat confusing at that point.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

A quick AZ Post

Arizona is AWESOME. I really really really want to move here - maybe a year or more down the line I will have that opportunity! Wednesday we got here and then after work had dinner with some people from work at Gardunos, a Mexican place that I have been to before in New Mexico with my grandparents. Then I went to my hotel but they'd overbooked it so I had to go all over creation to the new hotel they got for me - greeeaaaat. Luckily Geoff helped me out on the phone, finding the new place and all! I did get the night for free though. Thursday after work I drove up to Scottsdale to find Patrick's apartment. We hung out for a short bit and then went to sushi with Hart and Becky at Sushi Eye. YUM. I got in trouble for not sharing sushi, but I have learned the ways of these AZ people. Then we had this AMAZING warm cookie with ice cream and whipped cream at Tilted Kilt, then went to go pick up Geoff at the airport. Oh - I had a glass of wine at Tilted Kilt and it was HOT. They're like "hey, that's what our room temperature is here". So weird. Friday Geoff and I went to CSK Auto Headquarters (first picture below) so he could say he's been there. We also went to one of the Checker (second picture below) stores here too. We also ate at In-N-Out... yum. We did random driving around for the rest of the night. For dinner, we met Patrick, Hart, and Becky at Grilled Expedition - AWESOME food. Then we went back to Tilted Kilt so Geoff could try a cookie. Then a quick stop at Walmart for closed toe shoes and then we go-karted. I apparently go-kart like "an old lady on the freeway" - sad! Geoff thought I was having a miserable time and crying in my helmet the whole time... NOT TRUE! I was having a blast I just seem a little slower than others. My average lap time was a full 10 seconds slower than everyone else's. And I only got to do 11 of the 16 laps everyone else did. Seriously, I was THAT slow. Oh well. It was a blast, and Hart says Patrick and Becky started out that way too! Saturday Patrick, Geoff, and I went to Paradise Bakery for lunch - I never thought I'd say this, but I like it BETTER than Panera! Insane! Great food though. Then off to a Cubs spring training game! There are a few pictures from the game below... I had a BLAST. I love baseball... it's so nice and warm and relaxing and fun. After that we went and looked at bikes for Patrick... I hope he gets one! I LOVE biking. Then we picked up Hart for dinner and went to Los Dos... my coworker has RAVED about this place to me for about a year. The margaritas were great... I haven't had a margarita like that any place other than Mexico. The atmosphere was fabulous and the food was good too. SPICY. But good. It was seriously a great place, I loved it. Picture below! That is outside in the cantina. It was perfect. Perfect night. Then we played the Wii at Hart's house - I had NO IDEA how much fun it would be, it was great. Unfortunately he has two cats and I'm SUPER allergic to cats. I took Benedryl before we went but that made me tired... so I was tired and allergic. We went home after an hour or so. But I still had a super fun night. Now we're off to Casino Arizona for the Sunday brunch and then some gambling! YAAAAY for penny slots! :) Hehe. More to come later.

Oh yes - Geoff finally got a blog! Check it out!
















Monday, March 05, 2007

Hello World

Wow, it seems that I haven't REALLY posted in a while.

Let's see... Thursday I went to the gym with Cindy and then went to cake decorating! It was REALLY fun, we went through all of the materials you'd need for class and then we watched our instructor decorate a cake doing all of the techniques we'll learn in this class (it's Wilton Course I, there are 2 more courses after this). After that I went home and watched 24 with Geoff.

Friday I took my usual nap (yay) and then Geoff came home from work with Comet, his parent's dog. His parents were in Vegas for the weekend so he picked the dog up from doggy day care and then was taking it back to their house. I went with him and we picked up Qdoba for dinner, then hung out at his parent's for a while. After that we went to The Way - it was Geoff's first time and he was a little overwhelmed/uncomfortable. He is not used to that style of worship, which generated a REALLY good discussion! It was one of my favorite conversations we've had in recent memory. It was fun... challenging and interesting. (he will probably think my use of the word "fun" here will be odd). The normal main speaker was sick, so he is going to go back at least a few more times to give the main speaker a chance and to see if he could adapt to that style of worship. We did run into several people we/he knew though - people from Quarterlife (the singles group where we met), a couple of friends of his brother, and my next door neighbor's brother. Oh, and a girl that is a friend of our friend Jenny... we couldn't realize how we knew her (and she couldn't figure out how she knew us), then realized that we'd all taken ballroom dancing lessons together last spring! RANDOM!! It's kinda fun how many people you run into at something like that. After that Geoff spent the night at his parent's house to babysit the dog.

Saturday Geoff didn't have to work until noon, so we went to Ihop for breakfast. I had their new cinnamon roll french toast, YUM! After that Geoff went to work and I went to town on the cake decorating!! It was pretty fun. I really don't remember what all I did Saturday - it was a worthless day I guess. Oh well. I had to bake the cakes and the first one took a while to decorate because I wasn't used to it. We had pizza for dinner. Oh!! I know what else I did - I went to a store called Cash & Carry (Smart & Final in other places). A coworker recommended it as a place to get cake supplies and it was GREAT. They had cake boxes (good for giving away cakes), cake boards, powdered sugar in big amounts, etc. And I didn't even explore the whole store, I'm saving that as a treat! It was like a Costco, but smaller, no membership fees, and geared more towards caterers for the most part. They had TONS of takeout containers, etc. They had more food items than I was expecting though. Anyway, definitely recommend checking the place out! Good prices and they take credit cards.

Sunday I slept in WAY late and missed church - ick! Then Geoff and I had lunch at Bugatti's and he asked if he could watch me decorate my cake. He had way more fun that he thought he would, and he even helped some too (he did the blue on the edge of the dino cake). Then he went to work. I went for a bike ride with Trevor and Eric and then came home, sat on the porch for a while (it was a GORGEOUS day) and then took a shower. Geoff and I met his parents at BW3s for dinner and heard all about their Vegas trip. They wanted to thank Geoff for taking care of the dog, so they got him a hat and shirt from the Shelby Museum (he is OBSESSED with the Shelby Mustang). We had a nice dinner and they invited us to go with them to Vegas next year (this same week) for the NASCAR race. Geoff and his stepdad really love NASCAR. They will get three day tickets for all of the pre-race events and Julie and I will just go for race day (we will be at the pool the rest of the time!). We'd go on Thursday and come back early Monday morning. How fun! So that's in the works. Then we went home, watched 24, and went to bed.

This week marks the "one year anniversary" of when Geoff and I remember getting to know each other better. On Wednesday of this week (Thursday this year, it was March 8th) we had Quarterlife and went to Applebees afterwards. Geoff was sitting directly across from me (he says he made Eric switch seats with him because he wanted to sit right across from me, I don't remember that). I was leaving for Spain the next morning to go see my sister, so I wanted to stay up all night packing, watching 24, etc. So I invited anyone to go to the 24 Hour Starbucks with me... my friend Serena and Geoff went. Actually several other people went too, but Serena, Geoff, and I stayed until 2 or 3 in the morning! (they both work retail and had the next day off). It started snowing about midnight and it was BEAUTIFUL. :) Geoff was going to volunteer to keep me company and awake while I packed, but earlier in the night I'd been talking about how it annoys me when people invite themselves to thigns, so he didn't (of course I didn't know all of that until later). But yeah, it was a great night, we talked for hours with Serena and had a blast. I did end up sleeping a little bit and then Geoff sent me a text the next morning to make sure I got to the airport okay (it had snowed quite a bit and he had chains on his truck). So sweet! When I told him that was this week last year he said "Let's go to Starbucks Wedneady night!" Too bad I'll be in Arizona without him. ;-)

I was thinking today about how different all of the blogs that I read are. I go into detail about every boring thing I do. Some people tend to be more topical, just focus on one thing that came up during the day. Those people tend to generate more comments. Some people are more random. And yet they're all interesting to read. Part of the fun of blogging is getting to know the person you're reading about better, and part of that is seeing their writing style.

Cake Pic Captions

Here’s the rundown on all the cake pics below (I finally realized that it’s much easier to do all of the pics and then the text, blogger doesn’t do captions very well):

1. The first two cakes I baked, cooling on my new cooling rack.
2. My cake decorating caddy – you can see quite a few tips and my 4 different bottles of color
3. My first layer… with the icing “dam” and then with raspberry filling
4. My first cake, iced but not decorated
5. The final result of my first cake… it looked a lot better before I tried adding the leaves (we don’t do leaves in class for 3 more weeks!)
6. Detail of my purple flower, with star filling
7. My second cake. I did dinos because I bought a box of 101 cookie cutters as patterns and dinos were one of the options. I thought a dino cake would be fun. I wish I had a 3 year old.
8. A picture of Mt. Hood over my house! My house is the tan one right below the mountain. How fun is that?!

The long awaited Cake Pics!















Thursday, March 01, 2007

Fuzzy Posters and Cake, oh my!

So Monday Geoff was REALLY cute and sweet... he was just adorable. Can't get over it. Then Tuesday he was "poopy"... just feeling kinda blah, didn't want to do anything all day. But I needed to do a ton of errands! So he did them all with me anyway... we went to Bed Bath and Beyond and got a credit, returned something to Target and something else to Target, deposited some money into my bank - see, good errands! Got like $200 back between all of those things. We also went to Michaels to sign up for Wilton Course I - Cake Decorating. YAY!!! The course was free with purchase of the Wilton caddy. So while we were there, he asked if we could get Fuzzy Posters to decorate. Um, okay you weirdo! His family always spends Christmas afternoon watching movies and coloring Fuzzy Posters. So he wanted to do that. Apparently, he has a secret passion for coloring that I never knew about! He said he even likes coloring books! Funny. But cute. So we bought them and colored them while we were watching 24. It was my very first Fuzzy Poster - I'm almost done!

Yesterday we went to Costco to get oil for an oil change in the Tahoe, and then we went to Sears to look at appliances. My dryer took THREE HOURS to dry a load of towels the other night and I've had it up to here! A coworker just got a new washer and dryer from Sears and RAVES about them constantly. A weeks worth of jeans and fleeces for a family of 4 in one load dried in 40 minutes?!?! Wow. Geoff also told me he could put new tile in the bathroom (the laundry room is also a bathroom) and I could paint it... it would be GREAT. That room is so ugly... the floor is really cheap quality and has lots of dings and the wall is all banged up. Not sure why, the rest of the house is in great condition. But it's always been that way. I think grey tile with grey walls and a blue washer/dryer would be GREAT! But... we'll see. Not quite yet. After that we went home and watched more 24. We are in the middle of season 2 and it's REALLY GOOD.

Can't wait for cake decorating class tonight! This weekend I plan to make and decorate a few cakes, don't worry, there will be pictures!