Sister, Sister!

So this post is LONG over due, but I wanted to wait until the right time to make the announcement.  I mentioned a few posts ago that I had recently hired a PI to help me locate the Sister I have never met.  Well, I am happy to say they found her!!!!  I've been talking to my Sister since about April but I wanted to wait to post this since my whole family was not informed until recently.  On the off chance some one from my family reads this, I didn't want them to find out this kind of news from a blog, lol.

Needless to say I'm BEYOND excited about having a Sister and I was thrilled to find out I also have a Niece! Wow can't tell you how weird it is for someone to call me "Aunt" lol, never thought that would ever happen.  I got to spend Memorial Day weekend down south at my Sister's house and got to spend some quality time with her, my Brother in Law and my Niece.  I was also fortunate enough to meet the rest of her Family at a Graduation party.  Everything went super great and everyone was so nice to me.

I can't begin to express how great it was to meet my sister for the first time.  It was so wonderful, amazing, nerve wracking, scary and emotional all in one.  It was also a little weird, lol....her and I are SO much alike its almost scary.  We're built the same way, we have the same face structure, we have the same smile, the same laugh, the same little mole on the right side of our face, we finish each other's sentences and we laugh at the same corny stuff.  It's amazing how we can be 11 years apart and still be SO much alike.

Saturday night when I was down there my Sister and I went out to the Bar to get some good quality time in and when the bar closed and we were just cruisin' around listening to tunes in the car it just felt so normal and so comfortable.  It felt like that place I was looking for my whole life, the place I belonged was sitting next to my Sister as we cruised around listening to tunes.  It was totally amazing and I can not wait to go back and visit my Sister and Brother in law, who is one of the funniest men I have met, and play paper dolls with my Niece.

Love ya'll.

Thanksgiving Holiday and Black Friday Review

Thanksgiving was pretty good, a little hectic and short but good nonetheless. I got all the food made i sought out to make, always a plus, and everything turned out pretty good! We went to my parents Wednesday night to help my mom prepare since she screwed up her back. We spent the night there on the world's most uncomfortable air mattress, then got up and had breakfast and were on our way to his parents for dinner. We ended up staying there until after midnight playing rockband and hanging out, always fun. I got up at 4 am to trudge out in the cold for those few black Friday MUST HAVE deals, and yes I did go alone. The bf ended up getting sick, he came down with a pretty bad cold the day before Thanksgiving and by black Friday he was full blown sick and miserable, poor thing. So needless to say he wouldn't go shopping with me on black Friday, not that he would go with me if he was feeling good but even less likely with him feeling like crap. Getting a real Christmas tree was also outta the question since the bf was so sick, so we, or should I say I, opted to get a fake one on black Friday.

So off on my merry way to the stores I went. I only went a few places for a few choice things, I went to staples for the TomTom for my parents for $100, and to Lowe's for the $60 pre-lit 6.5 foot tall Christmas tree, a $30 air pump and a $47 inflatable Frosty the Snowman, then it was off to Home Depot for their $50 7.5 foot pre-lit Christmas tree. After that I was home bound but not after I learned a few valuable lessons about size, cars, and phone chargers. Note to self: 7.5 foot tall tree, even dismantled in a box, does not and i mean NOT fit in a little Toyota Corolla. I don't care how good you are and shoving things in trunks and making them fit, sticking them out windows/sun roofs, folding seats down to make more room, when the box is longer than your car is wide, you = screwed. That is were lesson #2 comes in phone chargers, although good tools to charger your cell phone on the go, have a dual purpose. They work really well in a pinch to tie down your trunk that is holding a big ass tree in your car so you can drive 3 miles home.

I'm still not sure how I made it home with out the tree being splattered all over the road. I got home about 8am, just in time for the bf to get up and need taking care of cause the poor guy was really sick. So I tended to him and took a little nap, then got up and went to get us lunch. We spent the rest of the weekend on the couch watching Netflix movies on the Xbox, totally awesome btw, and doing not much of anything else.

This past weekend we went to go see Brian Regan live for the bf's birthday, and let me just tell you how freaking awesome it was. That man is so effin' funny. On Sunday I went grocery shopping and finally got my tree decorated. It was a hard choice between the 7.5 foot one and the 6.5 foot one but in the end the nicer lights on the 6.5 foot tree won. The bf, the wonderful man that he is, made me a little platform for the 6.5 foot tree to sit on so it looks bigger, yay! So now the tree is not only up but decorated, all I need to do is get the lights in the windows and we should be good, hopefully that will happen before Christmas, but I can't make any promises.

My Christmas shopping is almost done, I just need an idea for the bf's dad, gosh men are so hard to buy for, then i should be good. I was out shopping last night for gifts for my mom from my dad, crazy i know, and I picked up a toy for the bf, lol. We got a mini digital camera that clips on the cat's collar so when he's nosing around the house during the day, we can see what kinda mischief he's getting into lol. Once i get the pictures from it I'll post some on here :-). Not too much going on this weekend, just dinner with the parents, bf, bf's parents and brother for the bf's birthday but other than that a pretty quiet weekend. Maybe over the weekend I'll take some pictures of the tree and the lights outside and post them with the pics i get from the cats collar....hmm....thats an idea :-) Let's just say I will not be posting the lovely picture the cat took of me this morning in my underwear getting ready for work, as much as I tried to avoid him while naked the sneaky little bastard found me...grr...that will be the first picture deleted cause no one wants to go blind. :-)

Holiday Cooking Fun!!

So cooking/baking went semi-ok last night. I got the rolls done, which is good, they didn't turn out too bad a little small but good. The Coleslaw is so freaking good, so that's a plus. And then there's the Tandy cakes...god I need to learn how to read a recipe. When a recipe says "bake in cookie sheet" don't assume you know more than the recipe and bake it in a 9x12 glass pan, bake it in a damn cookie sheet! What a moron I am. And to top it off, I found out that it is possible to burn chocolate in the microwave and its also possible to catch it on fire. Yeah, baking was not my forte last night. I ended up putting the chocolate on the stove and melting it that way instead. So now I have to make another batch of the Tandy Cakes tonight so I can have some for my parents house and some for the bf's parents house, fun.
I'm still debating on whether or not we should travel to my parents house tonight or tomorrow night. I think if we go up there tonight there is a better chance that we will get out of there at a decent time tomorrow. If we go up tomorrow night I'm worried we might not get out of there until Friday and I don't want to be driving on Black Friday, I want to be shopping :-)
Hopefully I'll get all my stuff done quickly tonight so that we can get up there...wish me luck and
Happy Thanksgiving!! :o)

Family Matters?

I can't believe freaking November is almost over already?!?!?!?!?! What the heck?!?! I swear it seems as though last week was September and I must have blinked or something and missed October and most of November, yeesh! Thanksgiving is next week already and my parents were supposed to come down to have dinner with me and the bf's family so we can spend a nice big family holiday all together but it seems as though my parents won't make it since they had a fight over where they were going and it ended with them going nowhere. Whatever.


It shouldn't matter that I won't see them on Thanksgiving but it's just weird since this will be the first time I haven't. I guess that's what happens when 80% of your family is fighting and hating each other, holidays get all screwed up. I can't wait for the family feud to be over, but I'm sure once it is there will be another one that pops up. Argh. I'm just getting annoyed with it all so I think it's time the bf and I get married so we can start our own family and just worry about our kids but at the same time I don't know if I'm ready for all that just yet so who knows, I'm just not happy with the crappy family crap right now.


Argh, oh well. I have much better things to worry about than stupid family drama bull-shit, like Christmas presents and how I need to start making those...yeah crap I should order the stuff tonight huh? lol. For now I'll just start working on the gifts I have. Yay gifts!! :-)

How Much Stuff Can a 90 Year Old Lady Have?

There never seems to be a dull moment in my life or with my family lately. Apparently Mom and Dad have decided to sell Grandma's house. Which mean I can have the Dining room set I want, Yahoo! But it comes at a price. For the next few weekends, maybe even months, I will be helping my Mom clean out my grandmothers house. You're thinking, "doesn't sound too bad, how much stuff can a 90 year old woman have?" to that I say HA! the short and skinny version is she has 90 years worth of stuff. And not just stuff like you and I have laying around the house, this lady has "stuff".

Let's give you a little bit of a back story shall we? My Grandmother is 90 years old that means she was born in November of 1917 so that means when the Great Depression hit in October of 1929 my Gram was just about 12 years old. Which in those times meant she was already working at the family dairy and taking care of her 3 brothers and 2 sisters (give or take a sibling or two), helping her Mother with meals, shopping, chores etc. So she saw first hand how the depression affected her family. She saw her mother saving everything she could to possible use it later for something else. Everything that could be re purposed after use was and everything that couldn't be was collected. Very few things were throw out for fear that it might be needed at some point. So at this very young age my Grandmother was learning to become, we call today, a Pack Rat.

Fast forward to the 1940's my Grandmother and Grandfather get married and move into their new house together that was a wedding present from my Grandfathers family, I believe. The house was ginormous by any day's means but especially for the 1940's.

The main house consisted of 5 floors:

1.) Dirt Floor basement with 3 rooms - one for laundry other 2 were storage

2.) Street level of the house was the family Business a Bar my Grandfather ran until the day he died in 1995.
(also had 2 storage rooms and a storage area for the Bar's Beer)

3.) Living Level of the house 3 Bedrooms, a living room/dining room, kitchen, bathroom and HUGE storage room that was possible a bedroom at some point.

4.) Upstairs which my family referred to as Mazlers because Mr. Mazler lived there until he died. Then this area all 5 rooms plus crawl spaces, became storage.

5.) the Attic, which went over Kochis' and Mazlers and was also the creepiest place in the world, this consisted of 3 rooms and was only accessible through a ladder from Mazlers closet area, and again became storage area.

Plus there was another 2 Floor Duplex attached to my Grandparents home which they also owned, this was called Kochis' probably because my Grandmother's maiden name is Kochis and i believe a brother or two may have lived there for a while:

1.) 3 rooms used primarily as a Garage like area for my Grandfather's tools and outdoor furniture.

2.) 4 rooms all Storage for Holiday decorations, etc. this attached to Mazlers and you could actually get from one side to the other through a door but for some reason you could never open the door from Mazlers only from Kochis', weird.

Ok, so after Mr Mazler died and the Kochis' moved out, (maybe mid 1960's), my Gram became the pack rat of the Century filling each of the rooms in Mazlers and Kochis' to the CEILING with "stuff". What kind of stuff you ask? Well here's a sample of what we found in Mazlers: the fabric room in Mazlers was a living room that was filled floor to ceiling wall to wall with piles and piles and bags and bags of fabric. The room was approximately 11x12 and there was a one foot wide path that went through the middle of the room and that was it. I'm surprised that room never collapsed under the weight of all that fabric. There was another room in Mazlers that was all old rinsed out vegetable cans there had to be thousands of them, there were the foam plates that meat and chicken come on all washed and stacked in neat piles about 10 feet high there were at least 5 piles of those, there were boxes of clothes and shoes from all 3 of my Grandmother's kids that they had out grown, all of Mr Mazlers things were there since he had no family so when he died his stuff stayed there (why not!?!?! add it to the collection!), all kinds of bar signs and promo items my Grandfather received for the bar, also things he got from people in the town since he was Mayor for over 25 years people gave him a lot of "stuff" too, and anything else my Grandmother could get up there, stayed there.

On the Kochis' side was the garage area which was 2 rooms (equivalent to a kitchen area and bathroom), then all the outdoor furniture was in the next room over and in that room was a stair case that lead to the next floor, that floor was 4 rooms of floor to ceiling piles of Christmas and Easter decorations for my Grandparents house and the church they belonged too. Fast Forward again to 1995, my Grandfather dies and my Grandmother can no longer take care of this huge house and the bar so my Mom helps her sell it to move into a smaller house. We find a buyer for the house, who happens to be a Local from the Bar who wants to preserve my Grandfathers place and fondly keeps the name "Jack's". He's willing to buy the house but has a limited time to do so and wants the place "cleaned out" before the sale is made. No problem, give us a few months and couple dozens people and we'll have it done in no time! Nope, sorry you get 6 weeks and just me and my Mom and my boyfriend at the time to clean it out. WTF?!?! That's just cruel!! I think the first few days were just me and my Mom sitting in between piles of "stuff" crying and wondering how we were gonna get this all done. We managed to get it done in about 5 1/2 weeks, with frequent trips to the Auction to sell what we could, old roll tops desks (3), claw foot bath tubs (2), boxes of clothes and hats (dozens), miscellaneous furniture (dozens of pieces), Old time Coca-Cola signs and Bar memorabilia etc. anything to make a couple extra bucks.

Mom and I finish cleaning it out and Gram keeps the things she just cant bear to part with and we move her into the newer SMALLER house. So the stuff that Gram couldn't part with is now in the Basement of her new house, an unfinished room about 25 X 16 with a cubby-hole of an additional 10 x 10 space. Also down there is a floor to ceiling metal rack that takes up one of the 16 foot walls that is all canned goods and pots and pans. So as you can imagine most of this room is just narrow walk ways between huge piles of "stuff" Gram couldn't part with from the other house and "stuff" she's collected since 1996 when she moved there.

So to answer your original questions of how much stuff can a 90 year old woman have? A lot! Especially if she's a pack rat like my Gram! So, back to my original point, I think I had one anyways, is I will be spending many a weekend in the coming months with my Mom cleaning out my Gram's house so we can sell it. Hopefully this one will just take us a few weekends instead of a few months!

Siblings or No Siblings, That is The Question...

Gosh what a weekend! Friday night we were supposed to meet a friend for dinner in NJ but plans fell through so we spent the night at home with Pizza Hut and the movie Iron Man (awesome movie, if you haven't seen it GO DO IT NOW!!). Oh, and those chocolate dunker things from Pizza Hut, omg are they disgusting!!! Who ever thought to take a hot greasy bread stick and cover it with chocolate and then dunk it in hot melted chocolate, must have been an idiot. I love and I mean LOVE chocolate and I won't touch them, what does that tell you? Yuck!

Anyways, Saturday went kind of as planned. Dropped the bf off at the Rock Band party, went to Gram's to get some furniture, fell out of the back of the bf's truck and broke my fall on the hitch, got a nice purple welt as a souvenir, lovely lol. Went to my parents and went to dinner with them, got into a huge fight didn't end up getting home until after 8. By the time I got the truck unloaded, showered, dressed, and over to the Rock Band party, it was over. Great. So we went back home and I put my furniture together and went to bed.

At least Sunday turned out to be what I hoped. Bf and I went to lunch, I had A margarita and was totally spent. I had to go home and take a 3 hour nap to sleep it off so I could go grocery shopping lol. Nothing like being drunk at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon lol. I got absolutely no cleaning done Sunday, no laundry, no nothing, just a drunken nap :-) and that's the way every Sunday should be.

I did get some nice furniture though from Gram's. I got a nice small corner hutch for our dining room and 2 end tables that we are using as night stands. All I need to get now is her dining table and chairs and I'll be happy. Who knows if that is going to happen or not though, with the family war going on now over her house. You would swear the lady was dead already, sheesh!

Sometimes I'm really grateful that I don't have siblings. At least I know now that when my parents are old I'm on my own. I don't have the false hope of help that just won't be there. It would have been nice growing up with siblings though, it got boring just going on vacation with your parents every year, having no one to play games with, fight with, talk to, etc. Now, however, I am content with out them. I can always pretend the bf's 2 brothers are mine if I ever get that desperate and feel like I need a younger sibling to pick on :-) that doesn't happen that often though :-).

Begin rant sequence...

Don't get me wrong, his brothers and family are great but it seems like the bigger the family the bigger the drama. It's that way with my Mom's brothers and my Dad's brothers and sisters all very good examples of why I'm happy to be a only child (especially my Dad's side, WOW talk about Drama, with a capital D, they could own the channel TNT with all their drama and they would never run out of show ideas, yeesh!).

It doesn't, however, mean I want only one child myself, hypocritical I know lol, but let me explain. The bf and I have decided on 2, I know what you're thinking, we're not even engaged yet and we're talking about kids, maybe we should be talking about getting engage first. Thanks Mom. Dually noted. The engagement will come soon enough and I think since we've waiting so long to get engaged and married it won't be long after we're married that we start having kids, so it's good to talk about these things now and know where we both stand :-). Anyways, back to my point, yes I do have one.

I think the bf and I both agree that the relationship the siblings have with one another is modeled after the relationship the parents have with the kids. Meaning if there is no respect between parent and child there will most likely be no respect between siblings either. Some people might argue that this is, in fact, not true and kids are kids and will behave how they want, blah blah blah and I say, you're wrong. Kids behave how you treat them and how you condition them to behave. I know it sounds odd but kids don't learn how to behave on their own, just like they don't learn how to ride a bike on their own, they need to be taught and guided. I'm a firm believer in disciplining a child when they have done something wrong or when they have disrespected someone. I feel without reinforcing your rules your kids will just act how they want because they know they can get away with it, and partially because they don't know any better, and you'll never have control since you didn't exercise it at an early age.

Blah blah blah and my rant continues. I don't want to go on forever here, because trust me I can. I'm sure there are people out there who think, "you say that now, just wait until you have kids and you don't have time to think let alone discipline them." To those people I say shame on you for not doing what is necessary to ensure the successful upbringing of someone you CHOSE to bring into this world. Maybe you should have thought about these things before you DECIDED to have children of your own and maybe it would have prevented you from having them all together, who knows. All I know is the bf and I are determined to make sure we raise our children as best we can and as we see fit for this crazy world we live in. Check back in 10 years or so and I'll let you know how it's going :-).

end rant sequence.

Relaxing Weekend - Stressful Monday

I had a very eventful weekend. I finally got to spend some much need time cleaning the house on Saturday. We haven't been home for the past few weekends and the house was just getting ridiculous. The house was turning into a kitty cat playground, with toys and scratching post all over, we had to fix that.


On Sunday we took the BF's parents up to my parents house for dinner, shopping and family time and I actually have to admit it went really well. They've met each other before and socialized but never spent a great deal of time together so this was essentially the first time that happened. It was very comforting to know that our two families can get along so well. It will make it a lot easier when we do combined family holidays and hopefully a wedding someday ;-). 


Afterwards we came home, I watched some tv then off to bed. Today should be a fun day I get to go to the Dentist and get a freaking tooth pulled. Woo Hoo!!! Boy Howdy what fun!! :-/ is this day over yet?