Ouch! My arm hurts!

Actually, its fine. But I did give blood today. :)

Em donates with some frequency and usually tried to guilt-trip me when she gets home each time. This time, the American Red Cross was taking donations on our campus (in the basement of my building in fact) ... so I had no excuse not to go. I was happy to see they had a steady stream of people coming through, and they said it had been that way since they started with no signs of them slowing down. I still don't like the sight or the feeling of the needle going into my arm but everything was pretty painless and I was in and out in a jiffy.

Hurray For Em!

Proudly, I would like to let everyone know that Em received a really good job offer yesterday for a school counselor position at a great high school here in town!

It has been a long road for her to get this (crazy schools start posting jobs in February but don't have HR departments who will contact people when the position has been filled) but she was finally given a chance to show her stuff in a couple interviews the other week and nailed it. :-) A current counselor at the school is going on maternity leave in October so Em will be filling in for her for the remainder of the '07-'08 school year and thus will have first dibs on interviewing for positions for the following year. The job should be some great experience for her, and will let her really help some kids.

Congradulations Babe!

Labor Day Weekend Wrapup

Happy Belated Labor Day (and congrats to all of us American who are working too hard ;-) )

Em and I had a rather lazy Labor Day weekend which I think was perfect. Between actually getting to sleep in, getting cable near the end of last week (finally) in our new apartment, 2 different BBQs with Em's family, Tempura night with at our apartment with my parents and watching Em beat my dad at XBox .... it was a good weekend.

** Tempura night went better than I was expecting (I feared large amounts of grease everywhere and a few days of food smell, but niether happened luckily). The second grocery store I went to had tempura batter which made making a TON of food a piece of cake. Between the peppers, broccoli, cauiflower and sweet potatos, we had plenty of food. I also tried out a recipe for PopCorn Chickpeas. Flavor was good and a fast and easy snack ... but they didn't turn out crispy like they should have. My guess was that I needed to have the oil hotter before I put them in. Definetly going to try these again. **

Today I was supposed to have an allday follow-up class on TDD/TFD (Monsanto offers an internal certification which this class is a step toward: 3 day class, 1 day class, X number of hours of using the technique with mentor review...), but the instructor was sick so it was back to my normal work.

I have some more house-hunting info to post and I want to get a post or 2 about personal finance topics up soon, but I haven't finished any of the posts yet. Thanks Kooz for the tip about the county websites (assesments and tax info). STL county has a real nice website and a ton of information on it.

This weeks goals are to actually secure a safety deposit box, finish up scanning our important documents, and get them to the bank. Also, hopefully I will be able to catch up on my scanning/shredding of bank statements/bills so that they are in the computer and not in our filing cabinette.