Christmas H2-NO!

Nothing says Christmas like family, midnight mass, presents and bottled water. Oh? You mean filling 5 gallon jugs of water from your next door neighbor's hose isn't on your regular Holiday to-do list? Well, I would definitely recommend it for next year. Christmas week isn't nearly stressful enough unless you add a little spice to it with a surgery, a kitchen demo, and most importantly - no water in the house. C'mon, you want it to be memorable, don't you?

Christmas is a wonderful time to spend with family and friends to reflect on your past year and to focus on what is really important. Although Nathan and I don't have children yet, we've noticed that some families may find it difficult to get the little ones to focus on the foundation of Christmas rather than the biggest gift wrapped under the tree. Well, problem solved!! If you need their eyes to focus on the most important lessons that Christmas brings, follow the steps below. They're a sure thing.

First, completely eliminate all of the running water in the house for an entire week. This means no showers, no dishwashers, no toilets, no brushing teeth, no ice cubes, no clean clothes. There has to be absolutely zero running water for this to work. It especially is successful if you complete this during Christmas week.

Christmas lesson #1:
Once you've eliminated all of the water, the lesson part comes in. The children will be left with a lot of free time that is normally filled with frivolous things like flushing, and cleaning dishes and changing into freshly washed clothes. This free time is perfect! It's right when you snatch their attention. At the exact moment that they've yelled at the other children, thrown something across the room, and then broken down and cried; that's when you choose to explain to them that Baby Jesus didn't have running water in the manger. Voila! Christmas lesson #1 completed: What Would Jesus Do?

Christmas lesson #2

For part two, when all of their dignity is stripped from them, have your children call every friend and family member they know and ask them to come over and dig up your front yard. Be sure that you have at least one of the aforementioned friend or family members walk all over your carpet during the digging. For this lesson to work, you have to have mud tracked all through your house. When the carpet and tile are good and muddy, ask the children to help you clean the stains before they set in. When they realize that there's no water to mop with or to dampen a cloth, explain to them the importance of the Walmart Neighborhood Market and Resolve Carpet Cleaner. TA DA! Christmas lesson #2 completed: Christmas is full of surprises; be prepared for the worst.

Christmas lesson #3

After cleaning the mud off of the carpet, ensure that your children receive news that ANOTHER plumber will have to come out and that it will cost them about $800. If they start to cry, comfort them by explaining that their body doesn't really need plasma; paying the plumber is way more important. Although they may have already spent all of their allowance on the previous $265 plumber visit, ease their pain by explaining that they will save money by forcing them to cancel their annual New Year's Eve Party. You may need to proceed with caution here. At this point, the lesson can begin to breakdown the child's soul. Although they designed, printed, sealed and hand-delivered special invitations for the big night, you must make them call all of the party attendees and tell them that there will be no party. Be sure to wait until the day before the party to call everyone. This allows the child to be exposed to many questions about what others are supposed to do at the last minute to ring in 2008. Christmas lesson #3 done: New Year's Eve is for alcoholic heathens and should only be celebrated by people with water.

Christmas lesson #4:

When your children are beginning to complain about stinky clothes or greasy hair, you've reached the point to teach them the last lesson. Make them gather all of their laundry and shampoo and stand in front of their friend's door. Once inside, have them break down in tears exclaiming that this has been the worst week of their life and then ask with a tear-stained face to use the friend's shower. This is when you explain Christmas lesson #4: Sharing is caring.

All this lesson-learning and traveling back and forth to take a shower hasn't left much time to blog, but I'll try to post pics tomorrow of what Christmas H2-NO actually looked like at the Blais' house. It definitely will go down as the most memorably frustrating Christmas ever.

I will Survive! - Hey! Hey!

It's all about the accessories, really.

I lived. That's always good. I'm doing fine and I'm glad it's all over with. Thanks to all of my well wishers by phone and comment sections. Now, I'm off for some more drugs. Huh, huh, they are awesome!

Saints in Action...

Do you think you can gain a false sense of security simply from a commercial? Well, I hope not, because this commercial is the only thing that has gotten me through the fear of going under the knife tomorrow. Oh, how I dramatize. I'm actually going under the tube.

At Noon on Thursday, I'm going to have my gall bladder and all its little stoned buddies sucked out of my stomach through a tube. Graphic huh! There's just something calming about the thought of my latex-gloved surgeon praying over my drugged body right before he goes to work. I'm definitely more confident in the praying surgeons than the hallway of dancing nurses in the other commercial. Hopefully, they will stay in the other wing of the hospital as long as I am there. Doo, doo, doo ,doo, doo, ta du, du - DO you mind?! I'm trying to recover here!!

Wish me luck. If for some reason I don't make it, the first person to comment on this post can have all of my valuables. I know a lot of you will be lined up for my collection of unmatched socks and 52 bottles of half-used hairspray. And don't worry, I'll try to resist the urge to post pics of my battle scars once it's all done.

A Whirlwind

That's exactly what this past week has been, a whirlwind. Between the ice storm extravaganza, a huge project deadline at work, and the pressure of Christmas being a week or so away, this week has me flat out exhausted.

Although our little house wasn't affected too much by the layers of ice that covered every nook of the city, I feel as though I lived the entire thing through the eyes of others. Horror stories of no hair dryers, scrolling closings across every inch of the TV and the sound of buzzing chain saws filling the air has been all too common this week. Thank goodness that our normally power-fragile house stood strong through it all. Otherwise, I just may have had to be tranquilized to stop me from running up and down the streets screaming " Don't be sour! Bring back the power! "at the top of my lungs.

As an employee for the State, many of my friends and family find it hard to believe that I do ACTUALLY work while I'm sitting at my desk. But this week has taken work to a whole new level. Even I can't believe that I have spent at least an extra 4 1/2 hours actually at work, 6 hours working from home, and every other hour of the week thinking about work beyond my usual 40. Luckily, the training program I'm working on is coming to an end and I am pretty proud of the results. I'm ready to go back to my lavish, no stress evenings again.

A couple of days ago, somewhere between thinking about how to write a training evaluation form and what color paper would be best to compliment the background of a logo, I had the scary realization that Christmas was LESS THAN 10 DAYS AWAY!! Ummm, why did no one tell me this?! Someone should really put something that important on the calendar or something. SHEESH!

Once I recovered from passing out on the bathroom floor, I remembered that I hadn't even started writing my Christmas newsletter that I've been putting off since, well, last Christmas. You'll be happy to know that I did take 1/2 of today to finish that AND put them into signed Christmas cards, WITH envelopes. Yeah, I went all out this year. So, if you're one of the lucky ones, your mailbox should be stuffed with The Blais Blizzard soon. If you're not one of the lucky ones, don't feel left out. You can be part of the other 43 people that didn't make the top 72 people on my list. It's not that those 72 are more important or that I even like them better. It really comes down to that's all the cards that came in the box and I'm already hoping to win the lottery to be able to pay to mail those.

There are a couple of people that will be guaranteed to get the Blizzard (hmmm Dairy Queen sounds good, No! Stay focused!). This chick let me babysit my favorite and only Godson on Saturday and this chick and her rooster? let Nathan and I come over to watch one of their favorite Christmas movies. Apparently, I'm way behind on the Christmas movie watching timeline. I remember something being said like, " OH MY GOSH!!!!!, You've never seen A Christmas Story?!! It's only on ALL DAY on Christmas! What are you doing all day that you haven't seen it?" Ummm... I don't know, actually celebrating Christmas?

Hopefully this week will bring back my usual "I have nothing to do; maybe I'll blog" schedule and I'll actually get to post some pictures of our decked out house soon. We'll see. The whirlwind is awfully lurky this time of year.

Spark Up A Guilt Trip

With every update from news reporters, every click on the OG+E website, and every war story from coworkers and friends about finding hotels and frigid night naps, I feel more and more guilty about having NOT lost power due to Ice Storm 2007.

At one point yesterday it was reported that 1 and 3 Oklahomans was without power. Apparently, Nathan and I are two of those three. With only a few flickers and a couple of "is it all going down" scares last night, we have managed to scathe through without losing heat or the ability to get online like so many others.

Unfortunately, my office was in full power and blazing heat today while Nathan got to stay home due to low productivity at his work while on back-up generators. It was probably a good thing because he actually was trying to produce a little heat burst of his own with a slight fever. (Insert your awes here. Despite popular belief, when a MAN gets a slight fever it truly is not the end of the world. Take it like a woman! Take 2 Tylenol, drink some OJ, move on!)

...speaking of moving on...

Although no one took us up on our offer to stay at Chateau le Blais, we're glad to be getting a few calls rolling in from friends and family that their power is coming back on and they are able to resume normal life. And let's face it, now I don't have to actually dust those high shelves in the spare bedroom, hurriedly sift through the linen closet to find towels that don't have holes or some sort of weird bleach stain on them, or pretend that I really do wear a bra under matching pajama tops and bottoms to bed.

To make myself feel a little bit less guilty for my lack of electric absence, I'm posting a few pics of the damage that we did sustain along with a few other shots for my readers outside of OK, who may not be familiar with the phenomena known as ICE STORM 2007. Also included is the Ode to My OG+E man I wrote last summer. I thought it would be fitting for a revisit here.

Chateau le Blais - We'll leave the light on for you! (No pun intended)

There's no peppermint in Ice Storm 2007!

Two of 4 Bradford Pear trees in our backyard had damage.

The evergreen in our front yard isn't so "ever" anymore.

Modified from the original post:

Whatever You Make... It's NOT Enough

An ode to my friendly neighborhood OG+E man:

Through the ice and into the night
You come to the rescue with your big noisy truck with strobing red light
Your yellow slicker, your hard hat on top
Wandering flashlight up and down the block
I peek out the window at five in the morning
Watching, scanning, waiting, neh longing.

Leftover ice, the cold, the dark
Suddenly! It happens! Your skill, your spark
I love you OG+E man, you are the best
I'll pay you whatever, anything you request

**************
I love my lights. I love my heat. I love my clothes dryer. I love my TV. I love my Internet. More importantly - I love you my OG+E man.

TOGEther we CAN make a difference.

Idiocracy is #1 in the BCS

Over the past couple of years, my friends have turned me into a college football junkie. I have always loved OU football, but other than that I have always been a little lukewarm about the sport as a whole. What irritates me most about the sport is the ridiculous BCS system. A few of my beefs are listed below.....

-How can Kansas make a BCS bowl over Missouri? Kansas' best win this year was over Tulsa Union, while Missouri BEAT Kansas and made the Big 12 Championship.

-The fact that the Coaches Poll is 33% of the BCS is beyond me. Why would you let coaches, some of which have agendas and biases, determine your National Champion? Take these votes for example:

*Bobby Bowden voted OU 7th and Missouri 5th.
*Howard "Absolut" Schnellenberger voted USC 12th.
*Mike Bellotti and Tommy Bowden voted Missouri ahead of OU.
*Bob Stoops voted LSU the lowest of any other ballot, 6th.

-The only reason Illinois, ranked 13th, is in the Rose Bowl is because that committee is insistent on getting a Big Ten, Pac 10 matchup. Get over it Rose Bowl! What was wrong with OU and Texas playing in your game? Oh wait, I guess the Big 12 kicked your precious little Pac 10. Your glory days are over......I can't wait to see USC defeat Illinois by 40-something points.

If I had it my way, there would be an 8 team playoff. The 6 big conference champions would make it, plus the next 2 highest ranked teams that aren't conference champs. If a small conference school made it into the top 12, they would also get a spot. Why shouldn't the only school who hasn't lost a game yet not get a shot? Notre Dame would have to be ranked in the top 8....we won't have to worry about them for a while. Here would be our playoff this year:

Ohio State VS Hawaii
LSU VS Georgia
Virginia Tech VS West Virginia
Oklahoma VS USC

I am certain we are going to be stuck with the current system for quite some time. It's great that OU is going to the Fiesta Bowl, but for what? To me, every single bowl game outside of the title game is meaningless. They feel like consolation games. Plus, how do we know Ohio State and LSU are the two best teams when they haven't played ANY other top ten BCS school? Easy answer: we don't know. Every other sport has figured it out. Why can't college football?

'Lil Lizzy Homemaker

That Suzy ain't got nothing on me...

Planes, Rains, and Such-a-big-deals !!

Check out the first comment in the post below. Yes folks! You saw it here.

AT is alive and well and keeping us safe while in the air. Have no fear when flying the friendly skies, Aaron is on the job.

I'm really just so excited, I can't even compose a complete thought. So, I'm heading to bed and hoping that my favorite weatherman will visit me in my dreams. And not the kind that happen when Nathan is watching Storm Stories in the bedroom as REM sets in.

Because someone asked...

Actually, I've just been waiting for an inquiry. I'll use any excuse to talk about my hot weatherman, Aaron Tuttle. The first time I mentioned him, GREAT things happened.

Many of you may have noticed that the handsome forecaster disappeared from the Channel 5 weather center a few months ago. Sadly, AT has gone far away from my home television to the FAA to be a weather stud for them. Truthfully, I don't see why he finds planes more attractive than spending time with me in my home, but whatever.

I do miss him though. I need Jessica to talk to her Ozarka-Man (AT's neighbor) at work to have him do some insider investigating to see if he will visit my little blog once again. I did track him down on another blog here though. (scroll to #13)

Audrey brought up a good point in her comment previously. AT and I were supposed to be good friends. I talked to him on the phone and then he commented on my blog. THAT in itself means that I should have at least been notified of any upcoming changes to his work status OR the availability for me to ogle over him on a daily basis. I guess I'll just have to keep my "secret lover" aware of his completely forgivable! mistake.

Come back Aaron. We miss you...

Side Dish: This post made me think of this commercial. I laugh every time I see it. Enjoy.

To Cheer or Not to Cheer?

THAT is the question!

VS

There are not many people that I severely dislike in this world. But if you were to ask me, there is one in particular that will always come to mind, Peyton freakin' Manning! I REALLY do not like that guy. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure his a nice guy. And yes he's featured in somewhat entertaining commercials. But, he really, really irritates me.

The Indianapolis Colts have always been the nemesis for my beloved Tennessee Titans; at least as long as I have been a fan. Sharing a division with the reigning Super Bowl Champions is not very fun. They always find a way to win.

Noon today marked a time that I've been dreading. The time in which I would be forced to cheer for the enemy in hopes of a loss for another wild card hopeful in the AFC South. The Titans needed the Colts to win today in order for the Jacksonville Jaguars' chance at OUR! wild card slot to be hampered. And as presumed, Peyton Manning and his entourage came through.

So the question comes to mind. Is it okay to cheer for the enemy if THEIR winning increases YOUR chances?

Is it okay to cheer for Manning? Or in the case for OU, is it okay to cheer for Texas for better scores in the BCS standings? I'd like to hear your opinions on the subject. I know you have them, so share.

And to make absolutely clear to all of my readers; this in no way hints that I am a Manning supporter. I never have been and NEVER will be. I will continue to roll my eyes at his commercials and I will continue to gag and rant at the mention of this guy's fantasy football star. These things will never change.

So I hope you saved the receipt for the Manning baby onesie, Jessica. Because in MY house, we cheer for the Titans. And ONLY the Titans!