I just powered up my laptop not only 10 minutes ago and my Twitter and Feedreader are swamped with blogs and micro-blogs about the new year, resolutions, year in reviews, etc. Why should I be the outcast? This is my big, fat new year’s eve blog!

Best movie: The Dark Knight & Iron Man
Worst movie: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Best new phone: iPhone 3G & Blackberry Bold
Worst new phone: Any iPhone imitation

Best new video game: Wrath of the Lich King expansion
Worst new video game: I don’t really have one. Most of my time was spent playing WoW

Best BlackBerry Application Launch: MySpace Mobile. We’ve all been waiting for it.
Worst BlackBerry Application Launch: Yahoo! Go.

New Year’s Resolutions. Past years I haven’t even cared to have any. Most people do them and never achieve them. Well, I think I’ll use the year as an experiment to see if I can stick to my resolutions at all.

1. Lose all my pregnancy weight. A whole year later and still not back to normal, but it’s pretty much my fault anyways, so my goal is to get my ass into gear and hop to it.

2. Buy a new house. This one could be pretty easy, hopefully. We’re already set up to see a really, really nice house on New Year’s Day and if we like the inside as much as we like the outside, we’re going to see about buying out our lease and buying this new home.

3. Go on a vacation. It’s been far too long since I’ve gone on a vacation.

4. Save more money. We tend to blow our money from time to time on things we really don’t even need. LoL. I need to lower my addiction for designer bags, sunglasses, etc.

5. Have more of a social life. Sad, I know, but between family, work and home, I just haven’t the time anymore to go out with friends as much as I used to or would like to. I also find that the things some of my friends do don’t really appeal to me anymore. I don’t really want to go out drinking or clubbing or anything. Being a wife and mother has turned me into an old woman… and I like it. LoL. Not to mention, my friends do live quite far from me.

6. Get even more organized. I have this [healthy] addiction to being organized but I never feel like everything is as organized as it should or could be. Since we will be buying/building a new home, my goal is to get the entire house organized in the best way possible. Organization makes life soooo much easier!

In 2008 I really got my site up and running. It has grown quite a bit since I began blogging on it in June. Below is a chart from my cPanel showing how my site has increased with visitors from the time I began using it to now.

This postcard is made especially for all my followers on Twitter and all the subscribers to my blog! Thank you so much for coming to read my nonsense from time to time and leaving me comments! Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

It’s Christmas Eve! No work but still very busy! Aside from the normal things I do throughout each day, today I have additional things to add to the list, which should make for a full, busy day. This is where my awesome organizational and planning skills will come in handy. And I have to do this while one of my favorite movies is on TV, The Family Stone. Quite a distraction!

Below is my agenda for the Christmas Eve day:

-Prepare my breakfast casserole for Christmas morning. approx. 1 hour

-Go to my sister’s house to exchange gifts with the immediate family. approx. 2-3 hours

-Come home and open our own presents with Chris and Sean. approx. 1 hour

-Bake cookies for Santa. approx. 1 hour

-Have hot chocolate and watch a movie cuddled up on the couch with my husband. approx 2 hours

These plans could possibly change

2008 is closing to an end and it seems like it’s gone by so quickly. It seems like yesterday that Chris and I sold our house and trekked our way 700 miles with an infant to live in Cincinnati but it’s been over 8 months and 3 seasons later. Where has the time gone? Well, I can’t complain too much, most of 2008 has been great to us and I look forward to 2009.

In 2008, we started the year off with selling our house and moving to my hometown and both starting new, great jobs. I am thankful that we’re now close enough for my mother to watch Sean during the day while we work. Over the course of the twelve months, Sean has begun sitting up, crawling and now walking and saying a few words and so many more other milestones. I look forward to the milestones to come. By the time 2009 comes, he will be 13 months and 20 days. He’s growing so quickly.

I got my new car this year and also had a semi cause an accident that I was involved in, but my car is fine anyways. Gotta take the bad with the good it seems. Sold our house in 2008 and will be buying/building a new one in 2009. Reconnected with old friends and lost touch with some others. Went from the BlackBerry Pearl to the BlackBerry Curve and plan to head to the BlackBerry Bold in ‘09.

There’s one thing I know won’t change no matter what year it is and that’s being married to my wonderful husband. 2008 was a great year for Chris and I. We celebrated our one year anniversary, grew as a couple and a family and have realized more than ever how much in love we truly are. I love him no matter what and can’t wait to see what life is like in 2089 with him.

So, the plans for 2009 so far is to buy a new home. A permanent home. I am so done with moving and would like to never have it as an option unless we make it an option. I’d also like to do some traveling once we do get comfortable in the new year and new home. Ultimately, I want to take Sean to Florida to see his other side of the family and go to Disney World. I’d like to travel to other places I still haven’t had the chance to go to. I’ve been to many places but there are still that I have yet to see and would love to share that with my family.

My website has grown quite a bit in 2008. I get a ton of visitors and new subscribers all the time. The traffic to my site has increased immensely throughout the year and I plan for it to only get better. I’ll be adding some new things and maybe changing some current things. It’s always a work in progress.

Overall, the year has been great and I can only imagine that things will be getting better. I am enjoying the new chapter in our lives and can’t wait to see what happens in the next chapter.

Perhaps another child? We’ll see, I’m still up in the air on if I want to have other kids whether now or later or at all.

I’ve finally got all the Christmas shopping done and not a moment too soon. Anything else that I buy between now and Christmas is just extra. Yesterday, Saturday, I gathered Sean and we went out to a few stores to get daddy and Ryan’s Christmas presents which were the last ones on the list to buy for.

There was so much pandemonium at the stores. Sales reps were ignoring people, customers were hogging 2 to 3 sales reps for long periods of time which was unneccessary and the crowds of people were rude and slow enough to make you want to punch a puppy.

There were other stores I’d like to have gone to, but just being in the two I went to for hours on end just to buy maybe 10 things or so which should have only taken an hour was frustrating enough to make me want to go home, wrap presents and lie on the couch and take a nap, which is exactly what I did. Not to mention I had a 1 year old that was overdue on his nap time as well.

Now that the gift shopping is finished, I do need to go back to the grocery store at some point and get the items I need to make my new Christmas tradition; a breakfast casserole for Christmas morning. Yum! It has potatoes, suasage, cheese, etc. I will be preparing it the night before, which looks like it might take a while based on the recipe, and then popping it in the oven Christmas morning. Depending on how it turns out, this will be something I do every Christmas for breakfast.

In case you haven’t been able to tell yet, I am a very tradition oriented person. I didn’t have too many traditions growing my in my family, but I want to make sure my son has those experiences and has something that he knows he can look forward to every year.

All in all, I plan for this Christmas to be great, obviously! Family, parties, dinner, gifts, fun, etc.

Oh and speaking of parties, my company held their Christmas party Friday night at the Beckett Ridge Country Club and it was a damn good time. Once I get pictures I’ll post a better blog for it and explain more.

Enjoy! So fun! www.elfyourself.com

They seem to keep coming in! Six so far. All different types. Show me your Christmas cards!

21 Days ‘Til Christmas!

Usually I am great with buying gifts, well actually, I’m awesome, but this year I cannot think for the life of me what to buy my husband! The one gift I’ve gotten him so far he picked out while we were Christmas shopping.

I needed a little help so what else do I do but Google “top mens Christmas gifts 2008″. It seemed promising, but once I clicked on the first link, the list went something like this:

- Nintendo Wii
- LCD HD TV
- Blu-Ray Player, etc.

All those are great ideas. They’re wonderful in fact! They’d be great if he/we didn’t already have those things. So either we went overboard in the beginning and bought all the cool stuff and now there is nothing cool left for me to buy him or I really can’t think of anything and Google isn’t helping.

My husband is a retro gamer and a geek who likes to read. If you have any ideas, any ideas at all, drop me a line! Or just tell me what you got your husband or the other men in your life!

27 Days Until Christmas!

I was not fortunate enough to see this when it aired but thanks for my Feedreader, Wil Wheaton posted this on his blog to share with anyone who had missed it… like myself.

No need to give details, just watch it!

31 Days until Christmas and counting!

This year seems much different than every other year when it comes to Christmas and the holidays in general. It’s no secret that the economy is bad, but has the Christmas spirit gone sour too? We started our Christmas shopping Friday night by going to the mall and buying Sean some toys and clothes. Even doing Christmas shopping didn’t seem very holiday festive. Normally the malls are packed and you can’t find a place to park by this time of the year, but we had no trouble at all and I didn’t even get frustrated with the large crowds of slow walking people because there weren’t any. Perhaps this is a good thing?

So, to jump off the Christmas spirit in our house, we put up our Christmas tree! It looks wonderful!

The hardest part seemed to be locating it and all the decorations and then yanking it out of the back of a closet! You wouldn’t really tell by looking at the picture, but the tree is a merely 3 or 4 foot tree sitting on a table! We don’t really have the room for a huge tree and quite honestly we don’t need one. Plus we didn’t have to move any furniture to put it up! How wonderful is that?!

The star we have to go on top is a bit too heavy and weighted the top down. Kinda sucks because we have a really pretty star.

To continue the holiday festivities and get into the spirit, my laptop got a small holiday makeover.

I grabbed a new desktop background from deviantArt, changed the color theme of my Rocket Dock, snagged a Yahoo! Widget for a Christmas countdown, changed the colors for my weather widget and added an animated Christmas tree widget to add some color to my desktop background. The tree in the middle is actually not part of the image and it also has flashing lights! So fun!

Show me your holiday themes and Christmas trees and decorations!

As I am sure you all know, today is Friday… oh and it’s also Halloween! Of course, since it is also Friday, I am at work. So that means lots of crazy people in lots of crazy costumes! Here are a few of my favorites!

Myself dressed as a Greek Goddess!

Todd the bull rider!

Laura, the naughy school girl and Zac, a vow of celibacy!

Chris as a Pirate. Believe it or not, that’s actually my hat and eye patch!

Nancy as Madonna/80’s mall girl!

Zach about to embark on a glorious expedition!

Dan dressed as Brett Michaels! NOT Hannah Montana!

Karly is so totally Alice in Wonderland!

All photos were taken by our resident graphic designer, Javier Santiago! I love Halloween! Tonight will be Sean’s first night trick or treating! I am so excited! I