My mom went all out to entertain everyone, but this year my two sisters and I pitched in a lot to keep the kitchen running. I took mom to the grocery store for the last few things and she told me how tired she was. So the three of us took over the kitchen and had mom get off her feet as much as possible. After all, we knew how to cook everything – mom taught us all how to cook!

Almost everyone was on their best behavior. But I swear, you cannot get this many people together in one house without someone getting mad over something. This year it was my brother’s wife who turned out to be the bitch. She is a little bit of a dingbat anyway, but something my mom said must have insulted her – unintentionally – and she went stomping out the door. We were all surprised, as no one heard anything said out of the way. But whatever it was, my brother got the bitch calmed down and they stayed outside for about 20 minutes “to smoke.” When it was time to eat, they came back in and acted like everything was fine, although she sat at the far end of the table away from mom and went they left she barely said thank you before rushing out of the door.

All in all, I’d call it a success. And I’m home again, safe and sound.

Some of the things that I want to do with this blog are not working out right, so I started asking some tech friends if there is anything I can do. Of course there is! I can use plugins to do almost all of the extra things that I want WordPress to do for my blog. I just have to read up on plugins a little and try out a couple of them.

If you have any favorite plugins, leave me a comment and share the name of it with me. The only one that I know is Akismet, which came with WordPress for free and it blocks spam. I love Akismet – it works great and saves me from the aggravation of deleting doznes of spam comments every day.

Maybe I should dedicate 2 or 3 hours of a Sunday morning to the cleaning. most weekends I am out late on Saturday night and I need Sunday morning for sleeping in and getting my rest. I feel like I actually recharge my body’s energy batteries by sleeping late on Sundays. But I have to carve out some time for housework someplace and it looks like Sunday morning is the most likely target.

One thing that I have never really mastered in the kitchen is properly cooked hashbrowns. I keep trying but they never seem to turnout like the hashbrowns that they serve at Waffle House. Maybe its because they cook everything on a flat top grill and its seasoned better than my cast iron frying pan. I use the same frozen, shredded potatoes that Waffle House uses, but their always stick together and brown evenly. Mine tend to fall apart when I try to flip them over with my spatula. So frustrating!

However, I do kick ass when it comes to pancakes. I use my mom’s recipe for pancakes and they always turn out light and fluffy and perfect! I like small pancakes – not the tiny silver dollar size, but smaller than a salad plate. I know some people like big ones that take up the entire dinner plate. But I would rather have a small stack of pancakes with butter and syrup tucked in between each layer.

My scrambled eggs are a nice finish. Sometimes I like fried eggs, but most of the time I like to scramble them so there is nothing runny. Sometimes I add some shredded cheese, and if I have any, a spoonful of salsa.

I am not that desperate for bargains, but I do like to shop and save money when I can. We decided to meet up at 7:00 am at the outlet mall and I was shocked at how full the parking lot was already. We had to park way out in the outskirts and walk forever to get into the mall at all. I didn’t really see that many bargains on the things that I was looking for, and by 10:00 I was ready to leave.

My friends were upset that I wanted to leave so early, and they wanted to stay. So I went to the food court and got a table in the corner were I wasn’t going to be jostled and bumped by dozens of people. I pulled out my Nook tablet and read an entire book while waiting for them to finish their shopping and meet up with me.

It turned out to be a good day. Not exactly what I had envisioned, but we all bought a few things and had fun being together. That’s the important thing anyway! And next year, if I do a Black Friday shopping party again, I’ll take my own car so I can leave when I’m ready to go.

I had  just run a load of dark clothes, including to two favorite pairs of black pants and a pair of designer sweats in the washing machine. I got busy and wasn’t too worried about getting themout of the washing machine and into the dryer – I was going to get around to it. But it wasn’t fast enough for my roommate. I didn’t even know that she wanted to do any laundry.

So, she went in and poured bleach into the washer so she could run a load of white things. The problem is, that she loaded the bleach in there before opening the door and seeing that my clothes were still sitting in there and that the fucking bleach was pouring out onto my dark clothes. So everything I had washed ended up getting bleach on them. She says it was an accident.

Its all ruined! I’m so pissed! She says she will take me shopping and replace it all. That’s a joke! We both know she has no damn money to be buying me new clothes. And some of that stuff can’t be replaced. FML!

So about an hour after I made my comment, I got a private message from someone. Some asshat guy who decided that my comment to the Facebook friend that made the post needed to be argued with in a private message. That just struck me the wrong way. I mean, he could have made his asinine comments on the original Facebook status with everyone else. But, no. He had to write this long nasty note to me and send it to my private FB email.

So I wrote him back and said, I don’t know you and I’m not in the mood for your bullshit.

So then he writes back and says, well you were wrong and I have the right to correct you with facts, and there is no need for you to be disagreeable with me. So, I’m like, WTF? I wasn’t trying to make an argument and I was just expressing my opinion on the subject. I am entitled to my fucking opinion and don’t need some guy throwing facts in my face trying to start an argument with me.

I wrote back one last time and said I don’t know you and you can stuff your facts up your ass – leave me alone. Then I clicked on his name and went to his profile and blocked his ass.

Anyway, they finally finished all the construction work and they had a grand opening. When I went in, it was nice nice to see everything so clean and new. And they have a huge new deli area. Its like a mini cafeteria and salad bar in there. And they have a sushi bar! So they keep a variety of popular sushi trays in the cold case and you can take it home with you for fresh sushi at home for under ten bucks! That’s a great deal and I bought one last night so I can take sushi to work with me for lunch today.

If I decided to go west instead, there is a Redbox at the Walgreens drug store and also at the McDonalds. If neither one of them are working or have run out of the movie I want, there is one at the airport and you don’t even have to pay for short term parking to get to it.

I signed up with my email and cell phone for specials and announcements, so I always know what are the latest releases and what are the most popular movies. Plus, I get discount codes. Sometimes it is 50 cents off one night or a dollar off on a week night. I like the way you can return the movie to any Redbox – you don’t have to take it back to the place where you rented it. I don’t know how they keep track of all those movies being dropped off all over town, but that’s not my problem.

I like the idea of a concert on Thursdays. It is so much better to have something nice to do on a Thursday night that is entertaining but does not keep you up really late and there is no hangover the next morning, either. Sure, you can buy a beer from a street vendor, but it’s not like going out to the clubs and getting drunk. It’s more about hearing good music and being outside and enjoying downtown.

Its too bad that the local independent radio station is the only one who ever does anything like these free concerts for the community. The big network radio stations are such greedy motherfuckers that I never see them sponsoring anything good. It’s all about profit to these fuckers and what can they take – not what they can give. I hate commercial network radio. Their music sucks, there’s no good DJs anymore, and they don’t take requests from listeners. They suck.