First Attempt - Friday Fave Five

This week was a pretty decent week.  I figure it's as good a week as any to start doing the Friday Fave Five. So without further ado, here's what made me happy this week:

1. Flowers on my side table.  Last week, MOTU snuck into my house on his lunch break and left flowers for me.  I debated bringing them upstairs to my sewing room, but a) there's not enough space, b) I'm pretty sure I'd just dump the water everywhere, and c) leaving them in the living room makes it so they're the last thing I see (aside from my kitty's pathetic frowning face) when I leave for the day.  Makes me smile every time.

2. The number 4.  Specifically when it's the first number in a two-digit temperature reading.  Well, when that reading is from outside my house anyways.  It happened a couple times this week!

3. Taking care of business.  This week I got a lot done on the personal front.  My car feels better (she got her oil changed, which lead to the 75k mile tune up, transmission fluid change, spark plug change, etc) and safer...and my mechanic rocks too!  He took her down the street to get my inspection sticker reupped...just because.  What mechanic does that??  In addition to car stuff, I got Grisgris* scheduled for surgery next week.  He needs 3 teeth removed so he can eat regular food again...poor little thing. 

In addition, All my bills are paid (for now), my taxes are done and refunded, and a few rebate requests (specifically for my health club benefit from my health insurance...be sure to check on this if you've got a gym membership.  BCBS refunds up to $150/yr for this stuff) are in the mail. 

* I feel like I need to explain the name here.  I adopted Grisgris from a friend at work who had previously named him "Grey Kitty".  He is, in fact, very much a grey kitty.  I decided to rename him, and I'm a climber.  There's a piece of climbing equipment called a grigri.  I decided to spell it with the "s"es because gris = grey in French, which is my family heritage.  So it looks like grizgriz, it's actually greegree, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only one in the world who thinks it's clever.  :-D 

4. Peeling fingers.  Yeah, it's pretty much as gross as it sounds.  But it's so much better than that.  MOTU and I went rock climbing last night and as a result, my poor dehydrated and uncalloused fingers are peeling.  Hurts so good.  I managed to rock out a V2 in spite of lack of strength and epidermis. 

5. SNOW! While I recognize that there will be a couple of you who wholeheartedly disagree with me, bear with me.  It's actually the hilarious lack of snow that I'm a fan of here.  Last Wednesday, we got a lot of hype about a storm that sounded like it was going to be at least as bad as anything MD has been getting.  I even left work early that day to avoid it.  Class was canceled, the governor told us to stay home, I pajama'ed it up in my sewing room for the night...we got half an inch.  Half an inch!!  It was a joke!  BUT!  I went to class this week and the prof said that, since there aren't any extra weeks for us to make up last week, instead of making our midterm an in-class monstrosity (ok, he didn't call it a monstrosity), he's making it a take home!  w00t!! 
A little background here: I'm in grad school to get my Mathematics Master's.  It's a hobby degree (don't laugh), but because of work I've sort of been "nudged" to make it a Statistics emphasis.  I hate statistics.  It's been the one subject, my whole mathematic career, that I have always struggled with.  I happen to be the documentation writer for, you guessed it, the Statistics Toolbox from The MathWorks.  I inherited it about a year and a half ago, and taking classes has been my attempt at trying to help me write better for it.  Anyways, needless to say, a take home exam is WAY better for me than an in-class exam.  SO I like snow.  Especially when we don't actually get it. 

So that's it, my FFF.  I'll have more to post later (maybe not til tomorrow) as tonight's the Friday Night Sew-In!  I put in a new whiteboard in my sewing room to track the projects I'm working on (yeah I'm OCD like that) and tonight I've got 6 to select from.  8 if you include the 2 I have stuff for but haven't started yet.  I've got leftovers for dinner, so as soon as I get home, it's pajamas and sewing room time.  I can't wait!