Happy Halloween!

We will be going over to Tracey's so Sky can trick-or-treat with Tristan. I have already made a deal with Sky to snag some of his Twizzlers and Gummy Savers. We shook on it so that means....well, absolutely nothing. I can't wait to get my braces off so I can down some Milk Duds and bite into a carmel apple.

School's out for...

Well, for 2 weeks at least. My brain will enjoy not being crammed with real estate knowledge for a bit. I ended up with a higher “B” on my midterm since we got to take a different test. I thought I did better than that but I’ll take it. We had 2 finals tonight due to the finance & appraisal instructor we had for 2 weeks. I got a 101 or “A+” on the finance/appraisal test. We got an extra credit question on capitalization rates and figuring out a commercial property’s value using the income approach and he graded them right there. Aced it! Cheers and applause please. Come on, I’m old and stupid and suck at math so that is quite an accomplishment. The other test I wasn’t as confident about and won’t know my grade until next week but every time the instructor mentioned math on the test, he looked at me. I suppose even if I bombed it with a “C”, I should still pass the class with a decent grade overall. I got the attendance grade and turned in my interviews so I have that going for me too. Next I get to take a whole term of finance and appraisal.

Friday was our anniversary so we wanted to get out and do something. We also wanted to finally get into the spirit of the upcoming holiday and dress up but we are broker than broke. Luckily we found a party being thrown by an ex co-worker of Mau. Even though we didn’t know anyone there, it was fun. There were good decorations, party favors and a keg. Yep, we basically went to a college kegger. It keeps us feeling young at least. We met some cool people and our costumes were good.

I’m still looking for a job and not too happy about not finding one yet. I am hoping that soon one of the hundreds of positions I have applied for will come through and pay at least half of what I was making before but I’m not being that picky. My bills might be but you gotta do what you gotta do.

This is how smart the kids on my street are...

I wake up Saturday morning in a grumpy mood. Yeah yeah, I know that is pretty much every day. I’m just not a morning person and never mind that this is approximately Noon. That is irrelevant. I hear Mau brewing up the coffee then the whole house goes silent. The power is out on the whole street. I stumble out of bed to look out the front window on a beautiful, sunny 70-ish degree day and I hear kids screaming and yelling. One of Sky’s friends, who just got a puppy this past week, had been swinging around the dog’s choke chain and flung it onto the power lines, connecting two of them together. Eyewitnesses say there were tons of sparks and it completely fried/melted the dog chain to the wires. Mau marched outside and gave the kid a small pummeling for denying us of our morning coffee. Don’t worry, Mau pummels all these kids on a nearly daily basis with fairly good reason and the mother of the kid gave permission.

Happy Birthday Mau!

Didnt' realize your license expired this year, did ya? Don't you just love those pop-up expenses when you're dead broke? Enjoy the cupcakes!

FunkyB came through when I couldn't. He decided to get us tickets to King's Island's new Halloween Haunt. We brought Nick (the neighbor boy) and FunkyB brought his sister, Jill, and Natalie ended up meeting us out there after she got off work. The price included all day admission so we went early and rode some rides then you could do the haunted stuff after 7pm until 1am. Since Cedar Point bought them this year, the haunted thing was much better than Paramount's which had gone downhill since it started. Much more crowded but the decorations were way better than past years. There were tons of haunted attractions which I thought would even out the people but all the lines were horrible. I liked the CarnEvil one we went through and was surprised when Sky liked it. He spent the entire line saying how he didn't want to go through it and made me keep my arm around his neck. Once we got in there, however, Sky was laughing his head off and I found myself literally dragging Nick on my back. He had his head buried in my back the whole time and a death grip on my hoodie so it was choking me. I laughed everytime someone jumped out at us but Nick screamed like a little girl so of course the person would go after him. I kept telling him to just laugh and they'd leave him alone but he wasn't hearing it. After that, he refused to go through any more so Mau would tell every monster we met walking around that "He wants to talk to you." and would point at Nick then Nick would scream and run away. Keep in mind he's 17. It was rather comical until Nick was visibly pissed at Mau so he stopped. We did the haunted path without Nick because the line was only 20 minutes long and the outdoor ones are always cool but everything else was a 2-3 hour wait. Forget that. We even waited over 2 hours for the Beast "Unleashed" but it was must and even though I was coming down with something and felt like I was going to die in the endless line, it was worth it. I held my still-healing boob in one hand to reduce the bouncing/pain and held my other hand up the whole time. Laugh if you must. We all had a good time and I really thank FunkyB for making it happen and buying pizza!

I'm not a test taker...

The Bengals suck so far this year so we’ll move on.

In the world of orthodontics, I am pink…sigh, again. There are only so many dark colors to choose from and I have used them all many times now and I just want them off. I kept my powerchain on the top and they put a partial one back on the bottom. Just 6 weeks of not having it on the bottom and those teeth were on the move. I am going to have to be very diligent about wearing my retainer…I would rather not go through this again or spend another few thousand. Once is definitely worth it but definitely enough. I am very happy about the difference in my teeth. It’s like night and day and I have had a few comments from people about how much I smile now and how I never used to. On that note, after Dr. I was done shaping some teeth, he said “We’ll do this then we’ll get you wrapped up.”. I hope that means I get them off next month. I ran it by the assistant and he said it looks like I will be done then. Oh, keep your fingers crossed for me!

After studying so hard every day, thinking I had absorbed the information fully and feeling pretty confident, I fell apart during my midterm. I was in some pain due to the surgery and my orthodontic adjustment earlier that day, the instructor decided we could skip our break and take the test during that dreaded 4^th hour of class and he threw in some questions from a chapter we hadn’t covered yet. I was a mess and it was really hard. The guy next to me had figured to this point that he didn’t need to buy the required textbook for the class. During the test he was rubbing his forehead really hard in that stressed out way, making the noise that goes along with that (that forced breathing thing) and frantically punching numbers into his calculator, rubbing his forehead again then punching more numbers then nearly slamming his head onto the desk. Guess what he had in his hand the next week? Yep, the textbook. The instructor said everyone did poorly but gave us a break on the questions we hadn’t covered yet which left me with an 82%. I was satisfied with that but he also gave us an option of taking a new, shorter test that day and taking the higher of the 2 scores. I figured it was a win-win so I took this second test and it was much easier and I felt confident in my answers. I don’t know when we get the scores since we have a different instructor for the next 2 weeks for finance and appraisal. Lucky us, we get 2 final exams, one from each instructor. Whoopie!

It's over...

This goofy picture is from Oktoberfest. As you can tell from my camera in my hand, I did take photos down there. They will be up somewhere and sometime soon.

My surgery is over and I survived. Aside from the usual IV-bawling, it wasn't that bad. The nurses were super nice and I didn't wake up with my boobs hanging out this time. I got tons of pain meds that I really didn't need and I was able to bowl on Sunday, even bowl my highest game ever, a 191! Natalie said I should have surgery more often before bowling. My surgeon said the tumor came back as benign. She figured but no one could say 100% without it being biopsied so now I know for sure and that is a huge relief.