Another Photo Challenge, Pumpkin Carving and Spooky Teeth!

So in the midst of my yearly photo challenge, I was asked to partake in another photo event.  I was honored to be asked to take my mediocre photography skills and take Niall's 18 month pictures.  Of course I love shooting pictures of my little gem, but I knew that any 18 month old on the move would be somewhat difficult to get some decent shots of.  Turns out, they didn't turn out so bad.  He sat still for long enough for me to get some nice smiles and I even got him to say 'cheese' for me.  Below are some of my favorites.  I think these out of all of them I took capture all aspects of his personality the best.  :)

How was your Halloween?  I never get many trick or treaters around my house so I still have an almost full bowl of candy sitting on my living room chair begging me not to eat it.  Although I didn't get many kids to see them, I think my pumpkins were the best on the block.  Drew was bound and determined to get some sort of ski logo carved onto his pumpkin and since he "hadn't carved a pumpkin since he was 12", his skills were tested and somewhat failed when it was time to carve skinny part of the Nordica logo.  Oh the shame.  Thankfully some toothpicks saved the day and it didn't turn out too bad.  The other two faces were carved by yours truly.

And now for the really spooky (and maybe gross) part of this post.  I am getting my two front crowns replaced!  13 years ago I knocked out two of my front teeth in a rollerblading incident and ended up with one root canal and two crowns.  The crowns looked great in their day but they were starting to show their age and I figured it was high time I got them replaced.  So on Halloween, the most fitting day for this procedure, I went to appointment 1 of 2 to get my crowns replaced with the newest, latest and greatest technology in dentistry (according to my sister-in-law, the dental assistant).  If you look real close at this before picture, you can see my front tooth is somewhat larger and fatter than my other tooth and you can see my gray gum line.  That will all go away after these new crowns are in.  I know for a fact I had never been so excited to go to the dentist last Thursday!

And now for the 'during' photo:  This is what I looked like in the dental chair for a good half hour.  These are my real teeth that are underneath those crowns.  I guess this is what shade of yellow my teeth would look like if they were never touched by a toothbrush!  Disgusting, huh?  For now I have temporaries on that resemble my old crowns (minus the gray gum line), but in a week from Thursday, I will be good as new!  I will make sure to show you another before and after shot because I know you are dying to know.  I will leave you with this image so you can have a nice mental picture of it all day long!  Hopefully when I am famous someday this image won't surface.  I guess I'll take that chance.  Keeping it real is what it's all about, right?

Have a great week!

Oh and one more thing before I go; my four legged brother turned 6 on November 1st.  I snagged this picture of him with his birthday gifts from my mom's Instagram account.  Happy Birthday Rizzo!

Apparently I am too old.

So yesterday I was stuck behind this guy on my entire 10 mile journey home from work.  No doubt you have seen trucks like this in your lifetime.  And you have probably been stuck behind one at one point or another.  You know the type; lots of reading material on the back, the dual (not to mention massive) antennas sticking out of the bed of the truck...something I have never understood, and the best part of all...the extremely loud exhaust, lack of muffler, or whatever you want to call it.  Now I am not one to get all uptight about things like loud cars or trucks--they can be super fun. BUT when you are behind one for ten miles and you have your windows down and can't even hear your radio without practically blowing out the speakers in your car, it can be a tad annoying.  Also throw in the fact that you at one point have to roll your windows up because of the rancid stench that is coming out of the dual exhaust.  As I got up closer I read a few of the stickers.  A few were military stickers (kudos to them for having a son in the military--I totally respect that), some were weird symbols that I could not even begin to guess at what they stood for, and then I spotted the classic "Loud Pipes Save Lives" sticker.  I am sure this is a true statement in more ways than one...A., even the deafest of deaf could hear this truck coming down the road and would be sure to get the hell out of the way if he or she should happen to be in the middle of the road and B. I would be willing to bet this truck is a gas guzzlin' hog so he is sure doing his part to keep the oil companies in business which in turn keeps their employees employed and thus keeps food on their table to keep them alive! 
That second one was a stretch but you get my point.
And then I spotted another sticker that read "If it's too loud, you're too old".  It kind of made me depressed as I had just been silently ragging on this obnoxious truck, but I soon got over it.  Apparently I don't care if I am too old.

Walmart Run

Things I witnessed and/or Discovered On My 30 Minute Walmart Trip Today Over Lunch:

• A grown woman was wearing shorts and sandals.  Let's be reminded that it's only 39 degrees outside today, not 70.
• The boy working in the electronics department claimed he knew nothing about antennas for old tube TV's...turned out he knew more than he thought - I bought one.
• Don't try to ring up any electronic device in the self-checkout line...it will ask you to set you electronic aside and a service team member will assist you.
• The head of the self-checkout section disguises herself in street clothes and doesn't stay at her assigned perch at the head of the four-section self-checkout section.  Once her attention is finally got, said person can't figure out the electronic device hiccup either and sends me to a regular cashier.  I wonder how she got promoted to Head Cashier...
• Walmart needs to have cashier lanes open closer to the regular door, not just over by the grocery section.
• While waiting in the new line, the elderly cashier says hello to two people who walk past her line.  She calls the first one by name (Gloria) and does a long, awkward wink at Gloria's friend who is close behind.  I got the feeling that the elderly cashier and Gloria's friend know something about Gloria that Gloria doesn't know they know.
• Elderly cashier called me honey about 6 times in my 2 minute visit with her.
• While making the long trek to the opposite end of the store with my new purchases, I passed the head of the self-checkout (woman disguised in her street clothes).  We made eye contact and she didn't even bother to ask if I had gotten everything figured out ok.  She probably forgot who I was in that short amount of time even though I was carrying a large shovel...the same shovel she had to avoid and step around when she first tried and failed at helping me ring up my electronic device.
• As I was leaving the parking lot some woman in a large truck thought she owned the entire lot and was driving right down the middle of the isle.  Luckily I have a small car so I could avoid her with ease.  I may have said a profanity to myself as I passed her.  In her defense I was driving down the wrong way, but still...it was a short distance that I had to go and there was no need for her to drive right down the middle, especially when she could clearly see me coming.

The Notebook

I am taking a bathroom break post for a minute to let you into my young-adulthood for a second.  It's a little late--I've actually had this picture in my possession for a couple weeks but am only now getting around to blog about it.

A friend from Jr. High/High School emailed me the other week and we were just chatting about random house stuff and our weird blog obsessions.  She then asked me if I ever saw the picture of our Notebook from Jr. High that she posted on Facebook.  Being the non-frequent-Facebooker that I am, I of course hadn't seen this picture.  I logged in immediately and started digging through her pictures and found this little gem:

For the readers who don't know what this "Notebook" means, or why it's such an awesome flashback for me, let me explain:  If and only if you were cool (or in our case...THOUGHT we were cool) in Jr. High, you had a Notebook with somebody.  This was kind of like the mid-to-late 90's version of texting or tweeting, but our characters weren't limited and the phrases OMG, WTF and LMAO didn't exist yet.  It was like passing notes, only cooler.  You got together one night after school or on some random Saturday and decided to "make" your notebook.  You grabbed old copies of Teen BOP or Seventeen magazine and in our case, weird Looney Tunes stickers, cut out the stuff/phrases/products you thought were cool and of course cut out letters to spell your names, raided the Scotch tape dispenser to get the laminated look, and you had your self an official "notebook".

Like I said, it was just like passing notes, but it was even better.  The notes were longer and you could disguise what you were doing in class because the teacher probably thought you were just taking really long notes in your real Math/Social Studies/English notebook.  You got your note all written in class and then you would hand the notebook off to your notebook partner when you passed them in the hallway.  The notebook was also better than folded up notes (don't get me wrong, those still happened in the funky, I-would-never-be-able-to-fold-a-piece-of-paper-like-that-today-if-I-tried kind of way) because when you read them, you didn't have to be extra-quiet when you attempted to unfold the note, you simply turned to the page in the notebook and again, pretended you were reading real, class-worthy notes!

Anyway, I had a couple of these notebooks in Jr. High.  I am not sure who has the other one, but I can't wait to get my hands on this puppy one of these days so I can read all of our precious entries from 8th grade!  Not to judge a book by it's cover, but I bet we covered some pretty sleazy topics in that notebook...let's dissect the cover, shall we??

• Let's Talk $$$!!  ---please!  Who did we think we were??  Based on the Levi's tag, I don't think we thought we were big ballers.
• Ask the Expert ---Yeah, I am going to ask an "expert" who has a cat (which honestly, looks like it should belong to a 5 year old), a pineapple and looney tunes stickers covering their teal notebook.
• BAD GIRLS ---again, the cat sticker, the paw prints (which I am guessing were to symbolize the Cougars, our Jr. High mascot) and EATS, don't necessarily reflect a "bad girl" image.
• Yo-Yo's ---not sure if that meant the toy, or if it meant that we were the Yo-Yo's...I am guessing the latter.
• And let's not forget 1996 -- the year it all took place...oh, to be able to go back there again.  The year of the Cottage Grove Jr. High Flood Run, Science Olympiad and of course Mr. Armbrust! 

Pot luck

Why is the term Pot Luck so weird? Since when does "Pot" and "Luck" mean "let's bring in food and pig out"? A good coworker and even better friend of mine left our company yesterday to move onto greener pastures. He will be missed to say the least. He is also an avid STBA reader and claims to be the biggest fan--hopefully my blog address will follow him to his next company and I will be the first "favorite" he puts on his new web browser :)

Back to the subject at hand....Pot Lucks... we had a good bye Pot Luck yesterday at work for my friend and it was great. It's so funny though to me that no matter what the time of day, if there is a pot luck at work, anything goes. Meatballs and little wieners in BBQ sauce at 8:30 in the morning, why not?! Do you want some of this olive oil based pasta salad?..It's really good, you should try it. ..... Sure, just cram it onto my small paper plate next to the watermelon who's juice has run into my chocolate brownie, which has already been saturated in ranch flavored veggie dip.
And why is it you get so excited to see something at the pot luck that you see almost every single time you walk down the junk food isle at Cub or could possibly already have sitting stale and half-gone in your cupboard at home? The thoughts run through your head....oh my gosh!, I didn't see those Sour Cream & Onion chips sitting there at the end of the counter.... hmm....my plate is already full but I really want the chips....I will just take a few and sprinkle them on top of everything else already covering every single inch of my 8 inch plate.
Maybe the "luck" part of it means that if you are lucky, you will leave the pot luck without any BBQ sauce on your shirt and you will go back to your desk, look into your little mirror and realize you were successful at frantically (and discreetly) trying to get all of the debris out of your teeth with that tongue/sucking method while making small talk with unfamiliar coworkers.

Strange Sightings

Hey, you!...Yeah, you!, 40+ year old guy with all the tatts...you might impress us more with your 'cool guy' image if you didn't wear white sweat socks -oh wait, correction...ANY socks with sandals.