It Ain't Easy Being Green... or... How We Spent Our Weekend

This past weekend was really wonderful and really, really awful all at the same time....which in my experience is a lot like life in general. Great times corresponding with really hard situations...but I digress! On to the good, the bad, and the scary...

Friday

A great day! Stuart was on what I like to call his "Friday High" all day long. I think for him, the anticipation of the weekend is better than the weekend itself sometimes! He likes for me to stay in the office with him sometimes if I'm not tutoring or doing other chores around the house, so on Friday afternoon I basked in the sunshine filled office with a worn copy of Little Women and my journal, keeping him company while he worked. Bliss! We had plans later that night to eat at Moe's Southwestern Grill, go shoe shopping, and see this:






Those of you who know me know I am a huge fan of all things A Christmas Carol (and all things Charles Dickens for that matter), and this was the perfect opportunity to kick off the holiday season! What I didn't know or expect was that it was digitally animated (think Polar Express with Tom Hanks). We actually saw it in 3D, which means we had to wear those goofy glasses they charge you a fortune for. But! No matter to us! We were on a date, and Stuart of course had me giggling like crazy with his glasses and general hilarity. The storyline really didn't vary much from the book version, and the visuals were really stunning, especially with the 3D effects. Stuart was a little disappointed that it wasn't more humorous (being that Jim Carrey was playing pretty much every role in the movie), but still thought it was very well done. We shared our usual Coke Icee and popcorn and were two very contented lovers!


Saturday

Mostly bad! I woke up sick, sick, sick. Ugh. All I could do was curl up with my heating pad and try and rest. Achy, dizzy, headache.... No fun Saturday adventures for us! Or so I thought. Stuart very sweetly stayed with me and talked to me, and somewhere during that conversation we decided to paint the kitchen...for real. No more deliberating on the green swatches splattered against our wall! Just pick a green and go with it! So we did! I blame that decision on the Extra Strength Tylenol....no really....because there is no way I would have spent all of Saturday afternoon, Sunday afternoon, and Monday afternoon painting if I hadn't been feeling...extra powerful. But we love it! Sure, it took forever because I needed to rest quite often and we had to tape up 3 million things, but hey...

it is so done....

Here's a picture of the painful taping process...



Don't have one of the finished product yet, because I don't consider it one! So you'll have to be patient!

Well, after collapsing into bed on Saturday night, I thought the excitement was over. No no! At 3:45ish I woke up not feeling too well (I went to sleep with a bucket by my bed...I hate nausea, don't you?) and was pretty restless. I got up to go to the restroom and then I slid beneath the covers once again and tried to fall asleep....

So there I was...

minding my own business.....

trying to go to sleep.....

trying not to be sick.......

when................................................................................



I heard a noise. A car actually. Somewhat in the distance. Which isn't highly unusual being that we live in a neighborhood and all, but still.... I noted it.

And then....my stomach tensed.


Was that a gunshot?

I thought, "No, it's just the car backfiring. It sounds like it has a really loud engine and all that, so that must be what it is. How obnoxious!"

But then all in a rush, I heard tires squealing, and the engine roaring closer and closer and then...

another gunshot!

A really loud gunshot.

"Stuart!" I cried ( in what can only be described as a panic-stricken voice), sitting up like a rocket in bed.

Stuart was awake in an instant saying, "I heard it! I heard it! It was in my dream! Gunshots in my dream!" (We've kind of laughed about this since then, because his reaction was so fast but still so muffled and sleepy sounding. If I hadn't been so freaked, I probably would have laughed right then!)

We ran down the hallway and into the office, both of which are on the second floor of our house. The office has 5 windows in it, and you can see everything that's going on outside, so that was naturally where we headed. Instinctively, we dropped into a crawl once we hit the office, not knowing what might be going on outside. Stuart warned me to stay down as he looked out of the windows, but whoever it was had turned around in our cul de sac and gotten the heck out of dodge. Needless to say, we were exhausted, shaken up, and worried. What on earth had happened? We found out later from some neighbors that no one was hurt, but some windows were shot out of at least one of the houses being built around us. Sooo, in the last couple of days I haven't been sleeping too well, and tense up every time I hear a car driving by. I don't know if it was a prank or what, but it definitely messes with your security, you know? And we live in a really safe, family friendly area, so nobody is really sure why this happened as of right now.

Sunday

Well, after a not so restful night of being sick and worrying about being murdered in my bed (you know, the usual), we slept in and missed church. Stuart let me sleep. And sleep. And sleep. I woke up about noon, still not feeling like myself, but a bit better with no nausea. We pretty much just rested and painted a little and that night, since the kitchen was totally destroyed, we did something absolutely unheard of in the Graydon household. We went out to dinner for the second time in one weekend. Ruby Tuesday is only about 5 minutes from our house, so we got all cleaned up (which made me feel a lot better in and of itself) and headed out the door, talking about how approx. 4 years earlier (November 5, 2005 to be exact), on our first date at the Colonial Ball, we had no idea that on this night approx. 4 years later we would be married and painting our kitchen and going to Ruby Tuesday because we were tired and our appliances were all covered in plastic (I'm sure all you married couples know this game). We snapped a fast photo as we headed out...


See? Not a speck of green or a single bullet hole on us or in us!


Well, that was the first weekend in November for us! Hope yours was a little less exciting than ours was!

Kicking off the holidays with a bang-bang,