victory!

after searching through literally every bookstore in my town, i finally found a copy of the joy diet! i'm so glad because i'm not a big fan of ordering online (i think it's that instant gratification need). so, i'm well into chapter 1 and am loving it, but i have some catching up to do. tomorrow will be my first foray into doing nothing (i may just decide to do it in court - ha!). we shall see how it goes.

nothing - literally

when it comes to participating in the joy diet's first chapter - nothing, this past week was an utter failure.

problem 1: no book - i've literally been to every bookstore in my city and the book cannot be found. looks like i'm resigned to ordering online.

problem 2: the past week was chock full of problems, stress, and chaos. while it was certainly the most needed week to take a few minutes to do nothing, i have to admit that i spent it enjoying a few cocktails instead. sigh...

last week was supposed to be a little break away from life while our entire office went to corpus christi for a work conference. i had planned to leave for the coast on tuesday, but for some reason i decided to work in the morning and then leave in the afternoon. thank goodness i did! while i was doing some prep work on a huge case that is quickly approaching trial, i discovered that the detective had not sent extremely important dna evidence to the crime lab to be tested. i cannot begin to express how big of an error that is, so i got to spend tuesday writing memos (aka - hate mail) to the officers on the case and contacting the defense attorney about the mistake. the silver lining is that i discovered this before trial and not during. can you even imagine how stupid all of us would look when the jury learned that the evidence was just sitting there, never tested??? UGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! needless to say, the trial will have to be reset and i have the distinct joy of explaining this to the victim. anyway, this situation was the biggest impetus for me to head to the bar rather than do nothing. probably not the best reaction. breathe in...breathe out...

the rest of the trip was nothing to complain about, but i ended up leaving on friday completely exhausted and so happy to be home. so, my first entry is way too negative. next week will be better!

when can i slow down?

so i finally joined 2009 and converted my page to the new layout feature. thank god! it's now so much easier to pretty up my page. unfortunately, my old template is no more and instead of a pink space it's become more of a peach and brown, but whatever. it's all pink in my head. :)

seriously, though, september has been a month of sheer craziness for me. hence, my absence from blogging or tweeting or just communicating in general. i already posted about our SANE room cutting ceremony at the beginning of the month (complete with paintings done by moi!). my artistic inclinations were put to the test again when i volunteered to participate on one of the judge's bbq cook off teams. i'm not particularly fond of bbq, but it was good to socialize with work peeps and i delegated myself to the booth decoration committee rather than actually cook any meat. so, me and two other girls spent all our after work hours last week literally creating a ring of fire. check out the picture - an entire fence of plywood that we sawed flames out of and painted. out of 80-ish teams, ours was one of four that received a showmanship award. holla!

in other news, i also got to be on stage with george strait last week! he was emceeing at a local fundraiser (for the love of kids and harleys) and i not only got a free VIP ticket, but i also got to stand on stage while he did his thing. like 2 feet away from him! eek! didn't get to actually meet him though, which bummed me out, but oh well.

with all the craziness that has been going on this month (including prepping for 4 upcoming jury trials and getting sick) i haven't been to good to myself physically. but today i finally went to a lunchtime pilates class and ate a healthy lunch, but boy am i sore now. better get it together because tomorrow i'm heading down to corpus christi for the rest of the week for a work conference. a much needed break!

doing good

this afternoon, we had the ribbon cutting ceremony for our new SANE (sexual assault nurse examiner) room at the local hospital. amazingly, this day has been many years and tears in the making. it's hard to believe that professionals are so difficult to convince that sexual assault is actually a problem, but i suppose many prefer to bury their heads in the sand than acknowledge it. but, we finally have our dedicated room and multiple nurses in training to become SANEs. as we were preparing for the ribbon cutting, somehow i got picked to create the wall art for the room. so, the past 2 days have been spent in my garage creating "art." i don't paint very often, so i was seriously nervous about how this would turn out, but i really surprised myself. the canvases looked fantastic and everyone was so excited about how the room looked. i felt fabulous...plus, i get to say that my artwork is hanging in a hospitals. how cool is that?!?