It was bound to happen. I failed at something miserably. But, the good part is that it wasn't really my fault. 

It was that time of year again. It was my turn to host the book club this month. That also meant that I had to choose the book. I chose a bit of a downer for a book, but I wanted something different, and it kinda meant a lot to me. I chose The Devil Came on Horseback by Brian Steidle.  Overall, it was a good book, but it was lacking in writing skill. I also felt like I did not connect to it emotionally like I did with the movie. But I still liked it. Let's say 6 out of 10. 

As usual, I kinda freaked about having people over.  For some reason, I get it in my head that 500 million things have to be done before I can allow more than 1 person into the house. So, first up was the Curtains/Panels in the dining room. Granted, we knew we had to do this for weeks, but we waited until the last minute. They turned out so amazing. We finally finished them on Sunday morning. 

Here's a pic of one side of the dining room. I'm going to try to get a better picture of the whole look. I freakin' LOVE this. 

The rest of the list didn't really get done, and I wasn't freaked about it. Some members of that list were finishing the kitchen kick boards, clear off the patio, mow the yard, put away the rest of the china. Actually, I did put away the china, and Mike put up a missing cabinet door on one of the cabinets. He also drilled the hardware holes on one of our pantry doors. It'll be nice to be able to open both sides again.

On Saturday, we were supposed to go to my friend Malaka's house for her annual crawfish boil. I've been SOOOOO looking forward to it, and was so psyched for it. However, we ended up not going cuz we had so much to get ready for. Mike was kinda stressed about it too, and that is mostly my fault. Anyway, we ended up skipping out on the party, to devote all this time to getting stuff ready, and then seriously... 5 people did not show up. Out of a possible 8, that's a pretty big party killer. And these people RSVP'd yes to it, so it wasn't just me hoping that 8 people were coming, it was supposed to be a  pretty sure thing. I could understand one person having something come up unexpectedly, but 5 !?!?!?! So much food got wasted. LOTS of money spent too. Now, I didn't have to go so overboard, but it's how I do things. If everyone had actually shown up, it would probably have been a perfect amount of stuff. I even baked my blueberry crush dessert thing. Granted, it came out pretty gross, but still. It's the effort that mattered. I also managed to get two hunks of brie together and even put the puff pastry on myself. I only baked one to start with, thank gawd. I'm trying to not sound melodramatic here, but it really was heart crushing. That's not to take away from the 3 ladies that managed to actually show up. I'm glad they did, but I'm sure they were expecting more to come too. I might have to think about future bookings. I'm not quite sure all the stress is worth it in the end.

A few weeks ago I went to a birthday shindig for my friend Richard. He and his wife Malaka have kinda recently bought a new house, and really recently, just had a brand new pool built. The weather was kinda grim and their pool was not yet done filtering out the sediment, so we all stared at it in awe. I got their first cuz I'd had a rough month and needed to unwind. But once all the peeps were there the entertainment of the night was Dance Dance Revolution. Now, I'm sure a lot of you have seen the freaks in the arcade that just play this game non-stop and you think... weirdo freak geek. Or something. And accompanying those thoughts is "I would never do that", yet you know it looks really fun. Well, indoors among friends it doesn't seem quite so freaky. Granted, I was still going nowhere near it, but it was awesome to watch people. But I did definitely think if I knew what I was doing a bit more, I might have gone up and taken a turn or two. Mike and I, both, commented on how much fun it looked.

So, fast forwarded to about a week later, and I get a package in the mail while I was working from home. Mike told me to open it and voila! Dance Dance Revolution Supernova for the PS2. I was really really giddy. I went searching the house everywhere to find the PS2 (I have the xbox and xbox 360 hooked up, but stashed the PS2). After about an hour I found it in a peculiar place, but then couldn't find any of the cables. Then I finally find those. And I'm doing all this kinda frantically cuz I'm so excited and I want to try it out. I finally get everything, and discovered my TV doesn't have any openings and my surge protector doesn't seem to have any power ports, so I yank out everything for the xbox 360 and finally get it up and running. It takes me awhile to figure out the menus and the settings, but I master that quickly. What I think I will never master is the ability to move off of the Beginner setting. Holy crap, this ain't easy, but it's crazy fun! Within 15 minutes I was sweating like an oinker but having a blast! Mike came in from work and was all jealous and stuff, so he had to try it out too, of course. We may have to buy an additional pad cuz it's kinda hard to watch someone else do it without wanting to do it yourself. 

Later at TheAndrea... the dilemma of the TV & component situation that the addition of the PS2 brought to light. 

I was able to ride the SXSW glow I had for maybe a week, before work was able to obliterate it completely. I went from crazy high on life, to completely and utterly depressed. I'm still coming off that, but I am finally feeling a bit of an upswing. I, unwittingly, volunteered to work on a technical manual at work. Sounds like nothing huge really, but it has been a nightmare. First, no one knows the product the manual is on at all. There were like 10 authors for it, and no one had much experience with it. It's a brand new product, so I'm sure this is typical, but *$&%$&@!

There were four of us from my team working on it part time. We would work on the book from 7-11am, then break until 1pm where we would start doing our normal job until 5pm. I honestly feel like this was the main cause of my depression and anxiety. Coming off of 4 hellacious months at work didn't help either. I guess I was hoping that with four people that if a couple of us weren't motivated, that the others would be able to push us along. However, I did not anticipate that all four of us would be so utterly burned out and dejected over the lack of knowledge, that we would just shut down and accomplish nothing. 

The moral of this story... I will never again volunteer for something so hideously stupid.