Nate went to see Santa today to ask for all the gifts he wants and Christine captured some really great photos. Here are a couple to make you all ohh and ahh.

Nathan and Santa

Checking out the big guy

First real snow of the year., originally uploaded by MelanitaC.

Last night was our first real snow of the year. Today is nice a sunny, and everything is melting. Wednesday’s forecast is as follows:

“Messier storm…snow to ice and rain.”

That ought to be a fun commute.

I would tell everyone to have a happy Thanksgiving except I’m in a grouchy mood. So there.

We don’t have children… so take a look at our cute cat!

Even though I can’t eat much and I’m not supposed to eat anything fatty, Patrick and I are still doing a Thanksgiving celebration this year. I ordered a boneless turkey breast and we’re going to do a turkey roulade with some of my mother’s stuffing in the center. I cannot wait to do this!!! :) We’re also going to have stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn, bread rolls, and PIE! Get excited! I’ve already done all the shopping and now I just have to wait for the big day! Luckily, I get a day off from work so that’ll be fun.

On the culinary school front, I went to get fitted for my uniform and picked up my kit last week. I was pretty excited! My chef’s coats have been sent out to be embroidered with my fabulous name and I only have my chef knife missing from my kit (I get to pick one on the first day of class). I couldn’t be happier that this is coming up in a month or so… I also paid the first payment of my tuition so I was sad about that, but happy about everything else.

Anddddddd….. I had originally planned on doing the professional pastry program, which is a 37 week pastry program and you get a diploma at the end… but I didn’t really care about things like sugar decorations, cake decorating, etc and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do in my future so I decided to change programs. I changed to the certificate culinary program which is a 16 week program where you do savory food and a tiny bit of pastry and get a certificate at the end. I thought this would be more useful to me for what I’d eventually like to do (be a personal/private chef). When I went to pay for my schooling, I was speaking to the lady in the office and we were discussing the costs of doing both certificate programs (culinary and pastry) and it turns out that it’s cheaper than doing just one professional program. This means I had to go home and somehow convince Patrick that I need to do both programs!

So I drive home, get some Subway, and start thinking about how to convince Patrick to let me do 2 programs. :) It was, in fact, going to be cheaper than doing the original plan so this shouldn’t be a big deal, right?!? Yeah right. At first, he thought I was insane… but then he saw the light! And I’m now going to do both programs. I’m going to do the culinary program from January to May and then the pastry program from May to September. Then, I’ll finally be done with school and I’ll be a big girl and get a job. I’m sure Patrick can’t wait for that time. Haha!

Those are our plans for now and nothing else is really going on. Patrick is still enjoying his work and all that jazz and I’m still working away at Whole Foods until I’m done with culinary school. Luckily, I’ll only be working part time while I’m in school. This makes me smile on the inside but I’m supposed to pretend that I’m so sad that I can’t work full time and study at the same time. So… :( (but really it’s :) yay!)

That’s all for now. Watch out for some pictures of food on Thursday. We might take some… we might not!

So it has been nearly 2 weeks now since my surgery. The first week was probably the grossest. My incisions were sore (especially my belly button… it’s where they sucked out my gallbladder!!) but my mom came to visit. She entertained me for a few days during my recovery. I tested myself with food and got some good and bad results. Basically, if it has fat in it, it shouldn’t go in me. If it’s low in fat or fat free, then it is definitely going to be eaten! I lost a lot of weight (yay!) but clearly that’s not the way to do things in reality. :)

I went back to work 5 days after the surgery. I was trying to do a demo but I didn’t feel very well so I went home after about 3 hours. At least it was a Sunday so it was time and a half! Haha!! The next day, I went back to work but I started to work the holiday table (where people order their turkeys and thanksgiving stuff). It wasn’t that bad. I have been back to work ever since but I’ve only been working the holiday table. Tomorrow will be my first day doing something that isn’t sitting around. I’ll be filling thanksgiving orders and giving people their turkeys. Should be fun!

About a week after the surgery, I did get some weird pain where my gallbladder used to be. Right under my right ribcage, I was feeling some pretty sharp pain. It was so bad that it hurt when I took any deep breaths. It woke me from my sleep and lasted about 24 hours before it went away. Since then, there’s been a sharp pain every now and then but nothing serious. The doctor told me that it was most likely nerves regenerating in my abdomen. That sounds really weird and kinda gross but whatever. She said it was normal and when I get the pain now, I just walk around for a bit and it generally goes away.

My stitches are pretty much useless now too. I can see that the incisions are closed up… and the stitches itch like hell so I’d like to cut them with my cuticle cutter but I think Patrick would flip out. I’m also going to see my doctor on Wednesday to get a check up. I am sure she’ll say that I’m a-OK and I can go back to doing whatever the hell I feel like. :) Right?

Speaking of doing whatever I feel like, I rode my bike today to the grocery store! It was my first time back on my bike since the surgery and I was scared that it might hurt me weak little abs or something. Luckily, it didn’t! The only pain that I felt was when I was picking up my bike to carry it up the steps on the porch. If it wasn’t for that, I would have had a painless ride. Very exciting! I plan on riding my bike to work tomorrow to see how it goes. I’m sure it’ll be magnificent and beautiful and perfect. Wish me luck in case it kills me! :)

I’m alive! My gallbladder removal surgery was on Tuesday afternoon at 3:10pm. I actually went to the ER the night before with really bad abdominal pain from a gallbladder attack so I was in the hospital from 5:45am until Wednesday morning at around 9:30am when they finally released me. The surgery went well. I suspect everything is fine as they let me go home the next day. I thought I’d get to go home the day before but they kept me overnight because the anesthesia made me barf. Sweet, right? :)

So I’m hanging out at home now… my mom is on her way to come visit me and take care of my pathetic ass for a couple days and then I go back to work on Sunday. I hope I feel up to it or I might have to bail on the specialty department again. We shall see! I am pretty sore when I walk and my bellybutton hurts like hell. They apparently sucked my gallbladder out of my belly button so I suspect that is why it hurts so much. :) I have 3 other incisions but they don’t hurt at all compared to the sucker outer incision.

In other news, Patrick and I were hanging out watching TV this evening when Noumi came in with a toy in his mouth. He looked pretty excited about it and it’s not like him to walk around with a toy in his mouth so I looked at him more closely. Um. It wasn’t a toy, it was a mouse. Ew. So Noumi let it go and it started to move again so then he played with it and picked it up again. Basically this poor mouse was his toy. He was having a ball! Patrick thought it was awesome and tried to take a picture but he keeps using his loser camera and it didn’t work. So sad! I made Patrick catch the mouse and toss it outside. Now we’re waiting for the landlord to come home so that we can tell him that there’s been a mouse visiting us. Luckily, we have cats so it’s not a big deal because they’ll all end up dead… but still gross. I blame it on the weather turning colder. Oh well… guess we’ll see what the landlord does!

I’ll update more on the recovery process and all that jazz once I feel like sitting at the computer for a longer period of time. :) Peace out for now!

For Patrick’s birthday, Brian came up from Texas to hang out for Halloween weekend. I requested some time off of work and was able to spend 2 out of 3 days with him and Patrick so that was fun. :) Here’s how it all went down!

Friday: Brian came in around 11am and Patrick picked him up from the airport. They went downtown for the day and visited all the Boston sights. They went to the Boston Commons, Fenway, Beacon Hill, Faneuil Hall, Harvard Square, Cheers, etc. There are a few pictures but I don’t know much about that time since I was at work. :) After their sight seeing, they came to get me from work and we went out for sushi at Yoki. It was awesome and fun. We then spent the night watching the Ghost Adventures Live show which wasn’t so awesome. It was actually pretty lame and they did not show any of our questions on the live chat so clearly it wasn’t live!! We went to bed at 1am after finally giving up on Ghost Adventures.

Saturday: I took Saturday and Sunday off so we decided to do something very New England-ish and went apple picking on Saturday. First we had breakfast at the Neighborhood restaurant in Union Square (which is always awesome) and then we drove to Stow and picked some awesome apples. After apple picking we drove back to Somerville and I made some apple crisp while the guys carved the Halloween pumpkins. We didn’t plan on giving out candy for Halloween but who can resist carving a pumpkin? Once that was done, we went out for dinner at Out of the Blue with Darcy so that she could meet Brian. The seafood was pretty good but it was a bit pricey. I have no idea how this place got a reputation for having cheap and good seafood because it was good but certainly not cheap! After dinner, we went to see Paranormal Activity at the Somerville Theater. Brian wanted to watch the movie in an old theater and this one was perfect. It was creepy and weird. I kinda liked it. Very clever of them. I can’t believe they made the film only spending $11,000 and made over $67,000,000!! Pretty good investment!

Sunday: We got up and decided to go to Salem. We figured that they would still be all decked out for Halloween so we drove out there. Of course, all the parking said that it was for residents and if you wanted to park in the parking garage, it was $20. How freaking ridiculous is that!? Well, I drove around for a while looking for a parking spot and ended up parking in resident parking. On my way to the museum, I looked at someone’s parking ticket and if you parked in resident parking without a resident sticker, the ticket is $15. Why would anyone pay $20 for parking in a garage when you can park illegally in Salem and get a ticket for less than the cost of parking!? Stupid. So I was parked illegally but we didn’t get a ticket so it was free parking! Yay! :) We did the museum, and walked around their small harbor for a bit. We then had lunch at some Witch cafe or something and that was good. We then drove home and invited Darcy to come over and hang out some more. We hung out at the house and I made apple sauce while the guys watched bad TV and we talked. It was fun. We went out to Mr. Crepe in Davis Square for dinner (also awesome, as usual) and then drove Brian to the airport.

Overall, it was a super fun visit and it was really nice to see Brian and hang out. It feels like it’s been so long since a visit from someone from Texas (other than family) so we had a good time. Sadly, I have to go back to work tomorrow and Patrick is already back to work today. If you want to check out some photos from the weekend, click on Brian’s photo below.

Auntie Diane shared this photo with us and I couldn’t help myself. Check out her awesome Halloween costume.