The Best Laid Plans...

You’ve heard that saying.. “the best laid plans…” well that has been the last 24 hours for me. To tell the whole story though, we have to back up a couple of days. Lets go back to… FRIDAY! Derek had his yearly spring paintball party out at mom and dad’s place… 35 acres.. woods… ravines, what more could a pack, no a herd of 16 year old boys armed with paintball guns, roughly 32,000 paintballs, multiple tanks of air, masks and boots want? Not much I’d say… WE came armed with 72 cans of soda, 36 bottles of water, 6 square feet of pizza, 60 sausage biscuits, 2 gallons of orange juice, 8 lbs of hamburger meat and 2 packages of hotdogs (with all the fixings.) Now the boys pretty much at 8/10 of that food and all but 4 cans of the soda! Im glad I don’t have to feed that group all the time that’s for sure! So Im sure you are wondering what this has to do with my day today and Im getting there.

Like I was saying this is his yearly spring 24 hour paintball event. He sent out his notices back in November I think just to be sure everyone had it on their calendars. (Happy Birthday to Mom!) This always seems to get planned on her birthday… she says she doesn’t mind though. Anything to make her grandson happy! So with all of the excitement there was something Derek forgot to give me on Friday or for that matter over the whole weekend that would come into play in my day… The event went off without a hitch and all the boys left tired but happy I think. What was kind of sad for me was that several of the boys, for the first time, drove themselves out, instead of all the parents dropping them off… This group of boys that Derek has been friends with all his life are growing up too… (insert sad tear here.)

Saturday night when we got home, I hit the treadmill for an hour of mostly jogging at 4.0 mph (that’s a 20 minute mile for your information) not bad for me 3 months after my surgery…. Then did a bit of a work out with my resistance bands… (Im up to about 4-6 hours of exercise a week trying to get back in shape and healthy) now you read my post from last weekend so you know I had 4 hard days of work outside (lots of exercise) and didn’t get the house cleaned… I was out of town all week so it didn’t happen then either and as I mention above, we were tied up all of Friday and Saturday. Sunday comes along and Im determined to get the house all cleaned up if it kills me and the boys too! Im up and about getting everything set so cleaning can commence! We get going but only after I finally decide that Ive had it with Kenny’s old vacuum and go buy myself a new one, on sale, with a coupon it was $85! On a side note, these new canister, no bag vacuums work GREAT, and I thought my rainbow was doing a good job until this thing changed the color of the carpet in our bedroom. Anyway, ask me sometime if your interested in knowing more about that. We got to cleaning house, Derek cleaned up the kitchen, Kenny got all his stuff put away in his office area in the bedroom and the game room and I did the floors and dusted, all in all the house looks much better! So I bet you are still wondering how this affected my day today… I know… Im getting there. While all of this activity was going on, our neighbor from across the street comes over and asked if I would bake his wife a cake for her 70th birthday coming up on Tuesday… sure no problem, I can bake one from scratch made with Splenda including the frosting. Derek and I made a grocery list of things I needed to get since we haven’t bought groceries in over 3 weeks because we’ve been gone on the previously mentioned trips. We had no milk, eggs, bread NOTHING in the house. Because we had worked so hard on cleaning I was to tired to buy groceries last night (this will come back to bite me in the ass today) so Kenny just went for boneless skinless chicken breasts so I could grill them with some canned veggies for dinner… we were all tired of eating out. No problems there! I had Monday all planned out.

Ok so with that done, no matter how hard I work on Sundays or the whole weekend for that matter, I never sleep good on Sunday nights. I don’t know why, its probably a mental thing (NO IM NOT MENTAL) so many Sunday nights you will find me sleeping in the office because I HATE laying there in the dark tossing and turning, I might as well sleep in here where I can watch TV and not bother Kenny who must sleep in absolute silence and darkness (the colder the better.) Kenny comes in to tell me good night and says “You sure you feel comfortable sleeping with that window open?” This also will come back to bite me in the ass in just mere hours. I say yes, of course! Im not a paranoid person but that little comment put my subconscious to working. I settle in with the TV on low and listen to it raining lightly, hear the leaves shuffle with the wind, etc. Nothing major sound wise outside, maybe a cat… as it nears midnight… that must be a DAMN BIG CAT! I begin hearing noises that small animals don’t usually make… no, im being paranoid… thanks for that not so subtle suggestion dear. As the noises get louder and closer, Im thinking, “Gee I bet that’s Kenny out there trying to prove that its not safe to sleep with the window open!” Then I hear the rattle of chain link fence (growing up with them in our yards in the neighborhood you KNOW what they sound like when someone is climbing over them) next door. I know that it isn’t the neighbor because he is 91 and you NEVER see him outside except in the mornings when he comes out to get his mail in his bathrobe and pajamas. Now Ive got my glasses on and Im ½ sitting up. When I hear this noise coming from the gate outside my window I actually sit up as I see someone walk past my window… without thinking (and probably not really smart on my part) I yell “HEY” loud enough Im surprised it didn’t wake up Derek but then he sleeps like Rip Van Winkle. I jump up and grab the phone and dial 911 as I head through the house turning on the lights out front. Kenny at this point hears me talking to the dispatcher, describing what happened and that no one should be between the houses and certainly not in the neighbor’s back yard. We then realize as we wait for the officer to arrive that Kenny’s car interior light is on. Until this point Ive been able to convince Kenny to stay in the house but that did it. He had about 10 dress shirts and 5 golf shirts from the cleaners in the car… He goes out to see that they are all still there and that nothing is missing from the car. All is ok there and about that time the officer arrives. I tell him what I saw and heard and what the guy was wearing best I could tell in the dark. He tells us Im the 3rd call they had last night with people hearing someone in their backyard. He looks around with his spot light and flash light and says they will continue to look and thanks for calling. We head back inside and of course close the remaining open windows and Kenny heads back to bed, me to the office to sit down at the computer since now I KNOW I wont be sleeping any time soon! 15 minutes later we hear a BANG BANG BANG on the front door… I was thinking it was Kenny hitting something (hey it was late… what do I know) Then I hear Kenny say, no I cant see, I don’t have my glasses on. I walk up and its another officer with some items he is asking us to see if we can identify them. It seems they caught the guy who had been going through the back yards as he matched the description the 3 of us gave. He was drunk and covered in mud, probably from where he came over this fence here and fell where there is no grass and of course it has been raining. He had items that did not belong to him, including some girl’s college ID. I didn’t recognize the CD’s but I went down to Derek’s truck to check and all was well there, his tool box hadn’t been touched either. With the bad guy in jail.. I think I finally laid down to sleep some time after the outer limits went off at 2 or maybe 3, Im not certain. Boy did I NOT want to get up when the alarm went off at 6.

Ok so that starts my day… Midnight does technically begin the day you know! So the daylight starts off alright, got my car back from the shop after I took Derek to school… boy do I love that 2 hour drive but that’s another story! I get to work and start playing catch up and working on my big upcoming meeting in just over a month. I was away from my desk when I miss 2 calls from Derek… never a good sign to get a call from your kid at 9:45 when they are at school… then the text message comes in… School till 8… something with band…. He’s not happy. (You see, there was this note I mentioned above that Derek forgot to give me… that was the note about school late today AND a concert.) I text back, and I hate doing that because I don’t want to be the cause of him getting his phone taken up again. The return messages state it’s a clinic… I ask.. is there a concert? Anything I need to be there for? See I had the evening planned as I mentioned above, pick him up, hit the grocery store, come home and bake and ice a cake (remember from scratch) and cook dinner. Nope just a clinic… ok I can still manage the cake and groceries and still get him by 8! HAAAAA HAAAA I get a late afternoon message from the ex stating… there IS a concert at 7…. OMG Im so gonna have to punt here. I am able to get away from work at 4… and because of our lovely mother nature (Im not complaining that we are getting rain mind you) the rain has caused the idiots to come out who cant drive! It takes me an hour to go 16 miles… I figure skip the grocery store and get the eggs and milk at the corner “convenience store” (boy is that an oxy moron if there ever was one.) Well guess what? NO EGGS. By the time I go ahead to the store and get back through traffic home, its well after 5. Did I mention the cake was from scratch, not out of a box, ready to go in a pan in 5 minutes? Oh and did I also mention the cake has to bake for 40 minutes? Well I finally got it in the oven but by now there is NO way I can make it in time to hear Derek play so Im majorly bummed. I figure ok, Ive got time and my calendar keeps reminding me to update my blog (yes even with a reminder I cant manage to keep this updated every week, yet you expect pictures too?) I sit down to regale my story of last night, get it all written out and decide that I want to copy it before I run spell check so that if it gets lost when I publish (yes that has happened to me) then I would still have all this I had typed (this version has taken me about 45+ minutes to write because Im putting in all the details I skipped in the last one.) Well I get the whole thing highlighted and bam it disappears before I can hit CTRL + C - OMG… who’s rainbow did I poop on yesterday that THIS would be my day today? No matter what I do I cant find or retrieve what I’d written. (Im currently writing this one in MS Word so if I do delete it… I can click UNDO, boy do I love that little button.) Well, I head on out to get Derek from school because now the cake is done, and doesn’t taste half bad for scratch and no real sugar in it. I’ll let you know how the frosting goes another time, thats my PLAN for tomorrow evening (get Derek, make the icing and put it on the cake and be to the restaurant with said cake and what ever Gifts Keith wants brought to the restaurant by 6 pm.) I then realize… all Ive had to eat today is a piece of birthday cake because I was that busy at work and then had to go running out trying to get the cake ingredients, groceries and to Derek’s concert on time… well I got the cake done anyway. I hit a drive thru (I know not so healthy but hey I gotta eat something) So now its 20 minutes past when I want to be asleep and Im typing this up… go figure…. Best laid plans and all….