The “Dog Days” are (nearly) Over! — February 29, 2012

Oh March 1st….you are so close!

There is something really satisfying to me about turning the calendar and seeing that March is upon us.  March is the beginning of happy for me, every year!  I love knowing that we are leaving our winter months behind us.  I hate the dark dismal days that are so short on daylight.  I don’t like the cold weather at all, and I could bypass the winter holidays as well.  In short, happiness abounds once March arrives!  I know we’ll have a few more cold snaps, perhaps, but for the most part, the days get longer, there’s lots more sunshine, and then there’s always the advent of all the baby animals that I love.

(Although, in truth, I have not been able to make nearly as many valid complaints this winter about the cold as I have in years past.  I am never one to call a winter “mild,” but we have truthfully had a mild winter this year!  It’s been nice.  There has been no snow this year at all for us, nothing much in the way of weather-related school closings, and few days of below freezing temps.  I was even cleaning out some stuff at work today from last February, and I saw some paperwork from last year when we had to reschedule some things due to too much ice!!!  I am glad this year was different.)

So, spring is coming.   We can now be happy!  This makes me think of one of my favorite happy songs:

—-

And, with spring we draw ever closer to our cruise!  My focus for March is to get my clothes shopping finished and ready!

I think I’ve mentioned that we are sailing on a different cruise line this year from the cruise we took before.  Last time we sailed with Carnival; this time we are going to see what it’s like to sail with Royal Caribbean. I am a little more comfortable about how to dress this time around, since we’ve already done this once before.  I’ve been reading everything I can get my eyes on about what to expect with dress code, just in case there’s anything different between different companies.  It seems about the same.

With Carnival, you were encouraged to dress pretty casually for just about everything during the daytime, including meals.  (There were a couple of different dining options available.  The dining room is basically like a nice restaurant, with waiters and menus and multi-course meals.  The Lido Deck had a very casual buffet setup, including a grill just outside the dining area for serving burgers, etc.  The buffet setting was casual at all times – you could come in and out as you pleased and as often as you pleased.  People would jump out of the pool, throw on a coverup, and go eat!)  The only real “rule” was that you could not wear shorts if you chose to eat in the dining room for the evening meal.  That was pretty easy also because even jeans were allowed, so some nights we wore jeans, and some nights we wore slacks.  Of course, we also had one “formal” night, where you were encouraged to dress up, no jeans allowed that night.

This cruise we are taking in April has two formal nights.  I noticed on our first cruise that some people really go ALL out for formal night.  They scheduled their spa days for this day, hair/makeup/nails, everything!  I don’t think I plan to go that route, hehe!  I don’t want to be Prom-ready, but I do want to dress up a bit.

So, as I started considering wardrobe choices, I stood in front of my closet and stared at my dresses.  Dresses are nearly a foreign object to me these days.  In fact, I had a momentary debate with myself if I have even WORN a dress since our cruise!  Has it really been that long? It seems logical.

Not many parts of life right now really require me to dress up in any way.  That’s kind of crazy, really.  I used to wear dresses all the time!  Now, though, it’s just not something I do.  Working every Sunday morning at CVS basically precludes the whole idea of church, so there’s no dressing up going on with that.  I could wear a dress to the bank I suppose, but everyone would just look at me crazily.  Who wants to dig around on the dirty floor to do change orders from a coin vault in a dress?  Not me, surely.  My pants (and usually my shirt) look dirty within about 10 minutes of my arrival to work each day.  Money is just so gross.

And I definitely have no incentive to wear a skirt at CVS!  What would I do with it?  Pair it with my CVS shirt?  I’m not hanging sale signs in that kind of getup.

So, yeah, life is not a dress-wearing experience right now.  :)  And thus I am lacking in cruise-worthy wear!

Time for a fix!  I am heading to Plano next week to meet up with Brooke and do some serious shopping.  Wish me luck!

A “Beary” Good Valentine — February 14, 2012

David and I generally take a pretty casual attitude towards Valentine’s Day.  It’s a fun holiday to me, but we don’t feel overly obligated to celebrate it every year.  Some years we exchange gifts and some years we don’t, depending on what all we have going on at the time.  I know he loves me to the ends of the earth, whether we’re dining out by candlelight in a four-star restaurant or if we’re sitting on the couch in our pajamas eating Little Caesar’s $5 hot-n-ready pizza, hehe.  Either way, we’re pretty content with it all.

We decided early on not to make a huge event out of Valentine’s Day this year.  Our cruise is just around the corner, and we still have to make decisions (and pay for) whatever shore excursions we decide to try.  We also still need to do some clothes shopping for our trip, especially me!  (I’ll talk about that some more another time.)

(Plus, David ended up giving me a great gift this year without even knowing it.  One of our goals for 2012 was to close out our storage unit and then purge what we could from what was in there in order to fit all of it in our garage.  (We have some shelving units in there with a surprising amount of space.)  I figured it would be quite a bit later in the year before we were able to get all our stuff moved out of the storage unit, but David surprised me by getting all of the boxes out of there and the unit closed out this month!  That is really great.  Now we can save a bit of money and start deleting some of the “stuff” that we have been carrying along with us all this time.  The fact that he was able to get this done so quickly was nice in itself, but when you consider the fact that he also used one of his coveted days off from work only to spend all day in the garage on one of the grossest, coldest, wettest days we’ve had lately….that is love!)

Anyway, regardless of our Valentine plans, or lack thereof, we never miss an opportunity to incorporate one of our favorite SNL “commercials” into life: the commercial about a bear holding a heart.

We saw this commercial years ago and it immediately became part of our lexicon.  It’s so true!  What gift could ever be more original than a bear holding a heart!

A lot of our conversations this time of year are consumed by the topic:

Me: Turn your cart around now.  You’re getting too close to the bin of bears holding hearts.

David: Guess what I saw today?  I saw a bear holding TWO hearts!

Me: CVS is now officially out of bears holding hearts.  I think we need to just give up and close the store down.

David: Walmart is a total zoo right now with people buying junk for Valentine’s day.      Me: Oh gosh, please don’t tell me…..they aren’t out of bears holding hearts ARE THEY????!

So it was not a huge surprise to David when we were discussing what we wanted to do for Valentine’s Day and my answer was this:  “You know….we’ve been together all these Valentine’s Days….years and years now….and you know what?  I’ve never gotten the ONE THING I’ve always wanted.  A bear holding a heart!!”

We laughed together and moved onto other topics, and I truly just about forgot the entire conversation as soon as it was over.

David had to go to Beeville for a week of training last week, and about midway through he called me to say, “Guess what?  I just got you a present!”  I had no idea what in the world he had gotten me, but as soon as he got home, lo and behold:

Hehehe silly!  He was only too proud to confess that he had gotten it at HEB, of all places.  Oh, HEB, the pinnacle of romantic gifts!!

Another life goal of mine: conquered.  I now own a bear holding a heart, hehe.  Good for me!

And now, I am moving on to bigger aspirations.  For Valentine’s day this year CVS had this: a cheap, generic Valentine’s day mug….and inside this mug?  A bear holding a heart!  Bears, hearts, AND mugs.  Stand back world.  I have a new goal!

;)

It’s the Zoo That Comes to You! — February 9, 2012

One of the greatest advantages of working at a bank drive up (as opposed to the lobby) is that we get a built-in tour of the animal kingdom on a regular basis.   Our days are filled with an endless zoo parade of animals, just outside our window!  We always hand out treats to our little friends, so it’s almost like a drive through animal safari.  You just don’t get that from working in a stuffy lobby setting!

We have a lot of customers who love to bring their dogs to the bank.  It should be no surprise that dogs are our most common animals who visit us.  Some of them just sit and look cute, and some of them do great things that make our day.

We have one group of dogs that we have labelled our “traveling zoo.”  This is a carload of no fewer than four dogs who love to come to the bank!  They range from a dog the size of a small horse (who stands up in the back of the suv,) all the way to a tiny wiener dog who believes his place is to be planted firmly on the driver’s left shoulder.  hehehe.  They travel together nicely, but we always have a little trepidation about sending all those treats out to the car, because you’d think that the excitement of the treats would cause a doggie riot.  Not so!  The traveling zoo accepts their treats calmly.  The small dog on the shoulder takes his first, the two dogs in the middle get their snack, and the horse-sized dog in the back stretches his neck towards the front and calmly waits for his reward.

We have a fuzzy dog who chases windshield wipers, a chihuahua with a too-small head, a hyper dog who tries to get all four feet on the little window ledge of “his” truck in his excitement to see us (sometimes he does it….and wobbles precariously (and hilariously)), and of course, a particularly rotund brown dachshund who rests his chin on the window ledge and gives us sad looks while waiting for his treat….and then actually smiles when it’s time to eat.

We also have great customers who know how much we love their animals.  It’s not uncommon for us to get to bring the dogs into the bank, just to hug them for a minute!  We often get to bring teeny tiny puppies inside and it just makes our day.  Once we even brought a puppy inside through the transaction drawer!  (That little dog was TERRIFIED of the bank for months afterwards, hehe.  ooops.)

Besides dogs, we also get the occasional cat (rarely, since they aren’t as fond of rides), and then we have a small collection of exotic animals as well.  We’ve seen chickens, this super cute baby turtle:

So Tiny!

and, our latest exotic visitor…..

a MONKEY!!!

Yep, one of our customers owns a monkey and brought him by to play.  We could not stop laughing!  He was just constantly entertaining!  He was on a leash so he couldn’t get very far, but the leash was long enough to give him leeway to run all back and forth in his truck, up on top of the truck, over to our window ledge, over to the opposite side of the truck, hanging out the window of the truck……just all over.  And, it was constant motion!

The first thing he did when he saw the drawer open was to reach straight in and grab our paperweight!  His human-like hands held the paperweight just the same way a little kid would.  He inspected the paperweight and even licked it before the owner grabbed it from him and gave it back to us.  Undaunted, he reached back into the drawer and grabbed our pen.

Trying to get the lid off....

He knew exactly what he was holding too, because he immediately got to work trying to uncap the pen!  He really enjoyed it and played with it for quite some time (he stole it, actually!)  He was even twisting at the cap to get it off, just like a human.

His owner told us that the monkey liked suckers, so we got a lollipop and gave it to him.  We figured his owner would get it and take the wrapper off for the monkey.  Not so!  The monkey knew exactly what the lollipop was and what to do with it!  He ripped off the wrapper and started eating!  He even bit through the stick and tossed half the stick out of the truck so he could put the entire sucker in his mouth.  Sometimes he’d hold what was left of the stick in his hand and would lick on the lollipop, and other times he’d just toss the whole thing in his mouth and gnaw on it for a bit.

Needless to say, all our other customers were as mesmerized by the monkey as we were.  We were enjoying their reactions too.  It was such a look of surprise on their faces when they realized they were right next to a monkey!

Up close and personal.....he couldn't figure out why he could hear us and see us, but couldn't reach out and touch us.

The monkey loved sitting on our window ledge.  (It is such a tiny ledge…I am not sure how he even stayed on it!)  He was probably as fascinated at watching us through the glass as we were when watching him!   He kept putting his perfectly formed little hands on the glass, and now we have an entire collection of little monkey fingerprints all over our window!   That makes me happy.