On the mend

And it's about time, too! That cold I was coming down with ended up being pretty nasty. It was just a virus but whatever was going around this year has been lingering with people for 3-4 weeks, at least according to the nurse practioner I finally dragged myself to see. It took me 3 days off of work and sleeping all day--in the guest bedroom :(-- before I finally started to feel better. I can't remember the last time I was so sick, and I hope it's a looooong time before it happens again.

As for the thumb, I got "upgraded" to a real cast when I went to see the hand specialist two days after the ER. I was too swollen for him to do a good exam (my hand was seriously bloated) so he wanted me to immobilize it for a week or two and then come back to make sure I didn't need surgery. What?! This thing just kept escalating. I initially thought they'd just pop the joint back into place...then I had to go to the ER...then x-rays...then 3 doctors to get it back into place...then temporary cast...then specialist...then real cast...and now maybe surgery?! Ugh.

Finally 12 days of showering with my arm in a bag later, I went back to the specialist who gave me a thumbs up (haha) on my progress. Ligaments were healing well, no surgery needed. Finally some good news. But I still needed a splint--the world's most ghetto splint ever, apparently.

Here's how you make it:

1. Place paper towel over palm and sketch out shape of splint with pen.

2. Heat up plastic material until flexible and cut out according shape of paper towel mold.

3. Wrap plastic around palm and thumb; hold until it hardens.

4. Secure the back of splint with a giant, ugly velcro strap.

So, 2 more weeks of splint time to make sure I healed some more. At least it's removable and now I could shower normally and shampoo my hair normally, wash my left arm, move my wrist, etc. Finally, 4 weeks to the day of my injury (just 3 days ago) went to the specialist one more time and everything looked good so I finally could get rid of the splint and start physical therapy. I've been doing the exercises for the last few days and I've already gained so much flexibility in that short time. Yay, just in time for Vail! No way I'm gonna take 6-12 months to fully heal, silly doctors.

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Or Gong Xi Fa Cai in deference to my pseudo Mandarin-speaking husband :) Hope you all have a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year filled with much love, laughter, and good times!

Sick & Broken :(

On Sunday WC and I played in our first Yankee volleyball tournament. Yankee is one of the main, formal vball organizations in the area. They organize tournaments and have official rankings for individual players that range from C- to A+. The guy who put our team together entered me as a C-, which honestly kind of bummed me out because I'd like to think I'm a little better than beginner after more than 15 years of playing. I ended up having a great tourney day and the official rater wanted to write me up to a C+. Yay!

So I went into our regular co-ed 6s league last night pretty jazzed to play after my great outing the day before. I'm currently battling a cold with a nasty cough though so I thought about not going but couldn't resist. I should have listened to my instincts because at the second-to-last game of the night I went to dig a hard-driven ball that managed to contact my thumb in just the right way to both dislocate it and tear the ligaments. And on my dominant (right) hand too! Spent three hours in the ER where it took three different doctors to try before they could finally get the bone back in place. I tried to tough it out with no pain killers but after several minutes of them pulling and pushing my unnaturally angled thumb I couldn't take it anymore and let them shoot me up with some numbing liquid. They're telling me 4-6 weeks of recovery time, but I hope it's sooner because one month from today I'm supposed to be snowboarding in Vail! Send me healing vibes!

P.S. It sucks to type with one hand. To immobilize the thumb until I see the hand specialist tomorrow (who knew there was such a thing, btw?) they wrapped me up in a temporary cast-like thing up to my elbow. Got a sling and everything. Blah, seems like overkill.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas (albeit it a little late), everyone! Things have been kind of hectic, but I love the holidays and all the celebrating around them. On Friday 12/21 my mom turned 60 and my sisters and I threw a big birthday party for her at a local function facility, Spinelli's. We had about 50 guests and I think she enjoyed it. It was just like planning a mini wedding reception, complete with centerpieces, favors, a tiered cake, slideshow, and gifts. My sisters did most of the work, I just "coordinated" :P Thank goodness for crafty and technically-literate siblings!

Four days later on Christmas day we hosted the 24 guests at our house. Amazingly there was still too much food. Of course, I didn't make it all though I did bust out not one but two Crock Pots for the first time ever and made three different dishes with them--chicken with stuffing, pork roast, and salmon. I think they turned out decently well, though I didn't love any of the recipes in the end. Next time I'll stick with my tried and true chicken thighs instead of dry chicken breast--blech.

Each family was asked to bring one dish so that I wouldn't end up cooking all day and, honestly, there's no way I'd be able to pull off cooking for 24 if my life depended on it! Somehow there was still waaaaaay more food than we could ever eat so everyone was forced to take a couple of containers of leftovers home. But WC and I are still eating the leftovers this week!

All in all, the whole family party went pretty well I think. I was very happy that we pulled off hosting our first family Christmas at our place :) And, thankfully, we'll probably never have to host Thanksgiving since we usually use that time to visit WC's mom in Arizona. Heehee....

And Happy New Year to everyone, too! After all the parties around Christmas we totally weren't into New Year's celebrations this year so WC and I met up with my mom and sisters for a little steak dinner and then just went home and played video games for the rest of the night. First we played the Wii at my sisters' place, then we went home to our PS2 and played the SSX game I got him for Christmas. That game is more fun than I remember! I'm totally addicted now and spending way too much time on it. It's getting me jazzed for our trip to Vail in February (it's a snowboarding game, for those of you who don't know).

With Christmas and New Year's both falling on Tuesdays this year everyone's schedules are all wacky. Yay for what feels like a whole bunch of short weeks in a row though!

Oh, and as an aside, when I checked the thermometer in our bathroom this morning it was...wait for it...7 degrees outside. Seven! I don't know what happened, it's been in the 40s most days but today is definitely CCCCCCCOLD! Ah, New England :P

A Christmas Miracle!

This past weekend was all about Christmas party prep since we're hosting the extended family this year. We finished gift wrapping, planned the menu, bought all the groceries we needed, and the last chore was shoveling the snow off the sidewalk in front of our house. We had done it once but then it snowed again, covering over all our work and we hadn't touched it since. Can't have that when there are 24 people showing up tomorrow (more on that later). But then two miracles simultaneously happened: (1) the weather warmed up to low 50s or so, encouraging the ice-hardened snow to melt and (2) a little Cat snow plow showed up and dug out the entire length of sidewalk in front of our house and 3 others!

We suspect that one of our neighbors had a friend that came over and did the plowing. At first I was wondering why there was a truck making all that racket on a Sunday morning, beep beep beeping as it backed up. When I got up to check it out my jaw dropped and I was so excited--seriously, that saved me probably 40 minutes of work, at least. Woo hoo!

As for the number of guests, originally it would have been the usual 18 family members (immediate family plus aunts, uncles, cousins, and their kids). But then we invited the H family over because they don't have family in town, except that MH's mom ended up coming to visit and will be here for a few weeks. Then my godmother apparently doesn't have anywhere to go this year so she and her boyfriend are coming over. That's +6 = 24 people total. I sure hope there's enough food to go around!

I'm breaking a holiday food rule and trying out three brand new recipes tomorrow, all in the CrockPot. I'll have to report back on how it all goes. At the very least I finished most of dessert-type baking this afternoon (cookies, brownies, Rice Krispy treats) so at least there will be sugary sweets to tide people over ;) Wish us luck tomorrow! And Merry early Christmas!

Stop snowing!

Damnit, it's snowing again! The novelty's wearing off now, mostly because this is the third time in a week that the white stuff's fallen out of the sky. And I'm bitter because I didn't get to work early enough to snag one of the covered parking spots so I'll have to clean off my car before I can drive home tonight...grrr. I'm spoiled by the garage we have at home; it's so nice to be able to just leave in the morning and not have to deal with scraping the car first. But, I have to admit, it does look pretty on the trees and it's pretty peaceful to watch the flakes drop from the warm coziness of being indoors. It's the remembering that you have to drive in it later part that sucks :P

Tomorrow is my mom's 60th birthday and my sisters and I are throwing her a big birthday party at a function hall near their house. There are about 50 people coming and it should be fun, but I'm a little stressed about making sure everything looks nice and having it go off well. Then right after that I'll have to really start dealing with details for hosting Christmas at our house this year. I have no idea what I'm cooking, but I admitted to my weaknesses early and asked every family to bring one dish each so I'm not flying solo on providing eats. Besides cooking I still need to finish wrapping gifts (and maybe doing a bit more buying of gifts), clean the house, make sure our walkways are clear so someone doesn't slip and fall on Christmas day...ack, I don't want to think about it anymore. Let me get through the birthday party tomorrow first before I tackle the next one!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

...especially if some of it falls on the slopes in Colorado since we're headed to Vail in February :)

We got our first real snow of the winter on Sunday night into Monday day. We got probably 2" or so where we live, nothing too bad. Temps have dropped considerably in the last week or two, regularly registering in the 30s and below. That part kind of sucks, but it's getting us ready for Vail, that's for sure!

Happy belated Thanksgiving, by the way. We spent the holiday in Arizona with WC's mom. My mom came with us too so I wanted to keep her entertained while we were there. Usually WC and I end up just doing chores for his mom while we're visiting since she lives by herself and always ends up with a list of miscellaneous upkeep items she needs help with. Unfortunately for WC this time he had to take care of everything himself while I drove my mom all around Arizona to fill up our days.

WC's aunt and uncle (from his dad's side) recently moved to AZ as well, and only 10 minutes away from his mom. She's still friends with that whole side of the family so she's enjoying having some "family" around. Two more of WC's aunts and one of their husbands also flew in from out of town (Philly and Toronto) for the holiday and all nine of us sat down for dinner last Thursday at the aunt and uncle's house. WC, my mom, and I actually flew in Thursday evening so we went straight from the airport to dinner, starved by the time we finally got dropped off by SuperShuttle. Good thing, since they'd cooked up about 10-12 different dishes, mostly Chinese-style. Yum....

While WC and his mom stayed home with the chores, my mom and I went off with the rest of the family to explore Scottsdale and Sedona in the following days. Old Town Scottsdale is basically one tacky tourist shop after another--nothing to write home about. I wish we'd driven around the town instead and done a tour of the nice homes. Sedona, on the other hand, is gorgeous. All those red rocks. WC and I did a Pink Jeep Tour the last time we were there and got to walk around on the formations a bit. This time we strictly did a car tour and stopped at a couple of places to check out the view. It was nice.

After a nice visit, we finally boarded our red eye home on Monday night. Three hours later, we were still on the ground. Stupid mechanical problems. We finally had to de-board and get on another plane, only to miss our connection in Detroit by 2.5 hours. What was supposed to be an 8:15am Tuesday arrival time turned into more like a 3:00pm arrival time--one whole day lost of work. I did drag myself into the office around 5:00pm (in jeans because no way could I handle getting dressed in office wear after 18 hours of travel) . I don't think my partners appreciated me missing another day, but they didn't say much about it. Oh well, will just have to not take too many days off around Christmas. But, seriously, in all my traveling days this was probably the worst return trip ever. Thank goodness WC found direct R/T flights for Vail in February. The Thanksgiving trip exemplified exactly why I hate layovers.

It's snowing! And Miss SC goes to Boston.

And since I'm snug indoors it looks so pretty :) First snow of the season. I don't think it's supposed to stick so for now it just looks pretty drifting down.

Our friend SC was here from S.F. to visit last Thursday to Sunday. She had a conference to attend at the new Boston Convention Center but mostly used it as an excuse to come see us (at least that's what we like to think). She was a sport about navigating Boston's spaghetti street system, but thank goodness she got out of here before it started snowing or she really wouldn't come visit us again! We didn't get to do much tourist-wise with her besides taking her to Fanueil Hall and Harvard, but we had fun walking around and got some cool stuff at the FunUsual store.

Thanks for visiting, SC! We hope you, hubby, and Rocky will come visit us again soon!

Done!...

...with weddings for the year. Congrats again to PY and CC; it was fun being involved in your wedding and I'm so glad the two of you had a great time.

Now that the '07 events are over, planning for the '08 ones are already underway. Got home on yet another lovely red eye flight this morning and found in my inbox an e-mail about EC and TC's August '08 wedding which I'm also coordinating. They're getting married at Kohl Mansion, which I've heard lots about but have never actually been to so I'm looking forward to seeing that.

For now though I'm just looking forward to getting some sleep tonight. I knew it was a bad sign when a half dozen people answered the call to pre-board our flight with children. Sure enough, one of the kids was a devil child that had the most ear-piercing screech I have ever heard. Luckily she got her two major screaming fits out of her system relatively early in the flight, but she actaully made our ears hurt.

Going back to Cali one more time

We're off tonight for our last trip to S.F. for the year. It's going to be a quick one too--get in at 11pm PST tonight and crash with EL, PY & CC's wedding all day tomorrow, then we have just Sunday to hang out before leaving on an 11:50pm flight that night--ugh! Why is it that all of the flights we've booked this year have had schedule changes after we buy the tickets? Originally we were supposed to leave OAK around 10:30pm but that got pushed to nearly midnight. Which means we don't get home to BOS until 8:15am on Monday morning and I'll barely have time to shower before needing to run into the office for Monday meetings. Blech.

Oh well, at least we'll get to see everyone again. This wedding has the potential to be the drunkest one we've been to yet, so should be fun ;)