It’s the Final Countdown.

I have that song stuck in my head now. If it’s not in yours here is the video to enjoy.

 

 

Nicholas should be home sometime this week. He’s still over there but not for much longer! I can’t wait to get the call from his in between location! It’s going to be fabulous! I’ll keep everyone updated by email as I find out info.

That’s about it around here. I have Sam and Hails all week while Sharon is out of town for a work conference. Last night went fine, it took a few minutes for everyone to decide where they wanted to sleep and then we were all happy. I’ll spend the week doing all the last minute cleaning and organizing before the boy gets home so he won’t have anything to do when he gets here. At least he won’t be completely exhausted when he gets home because he’s had a week off to catch up on sleep. I wish it had only been a day or 2 if it had meant him getting home sooner. At least it’s almost over.

Nicholas Update

I talked to Nicholas today and he is done flying. He flew his last mission on Sunday night our time. He has now packed all his flight gear up and he’s ready to come home. Still no word on exactly when he will be home but it will be soon. Not soon enough for me but what can you do!

 

In other news. Here’s some random pictures from my drive home from GA.

I want to be my dog. She lives the good life.

And a horse with it’s head out the window. I was really surprised to see this. The truck was going at least 70! You would think the wind would hurt it’s eyes? It looked pretty happy though so I guess not.

And I am a safe driver, it’s very rare for me to take pictures while driving but I couldn’t resist on these 2.

And then the day I got home Mari called me and said “I need you to come get me the truck won’t crank!” It was pouring rain so I called daddy to make sure it was safe to jump a vehicle in the rain because I didn’t think our husbands would appreciate if we blew ourselves (or most importantly our cars) up by being stupid. Daddy said it was safe but better to wait until the rain lets up a little. Thankfully it did after sitting in the parking lot talking for a few minutes. Then we took this picture because it was just so funny. Some guys walked out and got in the car you can see in the edge of the picture and did not even look at us or ask if we needed any help?? What’s up with that! I guess we looked like we had it under control. Yeah, that’s probably what it was.

So that’s what’s going on with me. I’ve been going to the gym everyday. I started out with a year to loose weight. Now I no longer have a year. Fastest. year. EVER.  Oh well. lol Life in the fast lane as daddy says.

Calm and Quiet

After the absolute insanity that was V-day weekend in GA I’m now back home and it’s so quiet here I don’t know what to do with myself. Well it would be quiet if Ki would stop barking every time she hears a car door slam. I guess she just has to get back used to the sound, that or I’m going to start wearing ear plugs in the house.

We ended up having the busiest Valentine’s day at the shop in years! We had 188 orders on Monday alone. We delivered a good number of Valentine’s orders on Friday and Sat. We also had a lot of orders for dance flowers and some funeral work on top of everything else. It was a BUSY weekend. So busy in fact that I barely remembered to take any pictures! We thought the cooler was full on Thursday after we got all the preordered flowers in but we hadn’t seen anything yet! We ended up buying around 1,100 red roses and by the end of the day Mon we had around 50 left. I have no idea how many pink and yellow roses we bought extra because it got so busy those numbers just ran together and I didn’t go back to add them up. We completely ran out of cut flowers so on Mon the only orders we were taking was for roses and roses. lol We worked til around 6 on Thurs, 7 on Fri, 7 on Sat, 6:30 on Sun, and 7 on Mon. We had a pretty calm day on Sun, not  too many phone calls and we  got all the orders done and even had a few extra things in the cooler. We turned the air down to 55* and pulled all the orders that were going to schools and businesses and had them sitting out on tables ready to be loaded Mon morning. The problem was we had so many things pulled that once we started loading into the 4 delivery vehicles we had  to make sure we were getting the right flowers going to the right areas. It got a little hectic Mon morning with that! When we walked in the door Mon morning at 8 the phone was ringing off the hook and we had a line of walk in customers. It was crazy.  We are so thankful for all the business though!

This was Sat evening before we finished the stack or orders we had left to work on when we got to work Sunday.

One section of the orders we had pulled. This ended up being 2 van loads. We sold SO many balloons this year. We were really surprised about that and we’ll make sure we have more to choose from next year.

The other section of pulled orders, again 2 vans full. We also had around 30-40 arrangements still in the cooler that I didn’t take a pic of because this was on Mon morning and about 5 seconds after this all hell broke loose.

And this was the end of the day. The poor cooler was STRIPPED! We had nothing left!

All the roses we had left. It looks like we had 2 packs of red left and 1 yellow so 75 red and 25 yellow left at the end of the day.

So it was crazy! We are beyond thankful.

Ohhhhh flowers!

Ever wonder what the back of a flower shop looks like during Valentine’s Day? Well here you go! Needless to say we are BUSY!

Roses still in their packaging waiting for us to strip the stems and wire them. This is just a few of the roses by the way, we got in 400 red roses today.

Tulips!

The cooler is FULL!! We had buckets of flowers all the way to the door and we’ll have to pull them all back out to be able to get in there and work tomorrow.

Arm bouquets for all the school dances this weekend.

Red roses.

More arm bouquets.

So if anyone gets bored tomorrow feel free to come on by the shop and help us out! I’m sure we can find a job for you.

 

Oh and it snowed in GA. Yeah, I was THRILLED to wake up and see snow on the ground AGAIN. At least it wasn’t 5 inches.

Nah, she’s not spoiled!

When I went to bed last night I found Pooh snuggled up in bed like this.

She put herself to bed like that, I had no part of it at all. She’s not spoiled! Usually it’s Ki that likes to sleep with her head out from under the covers, and usually with it on the pillow! Pooh generally goes completely under the covers and curls up in a ball. They are so funny. And this is also why I don’t bother making the bed. Ever.

 

This might come as a surprise but IT’S SNOWING AGAIN!! It started about an hour ago and we already have a night coating on the ground. The forecast says that we could get up to 3 inches. Have I mentioned I’m so over snow. I told Nicholas this morning that hopefully next year we will be farther SOUTH and won’t see as much snow. I guess I should go put some ice melt out on the driveway. Oh and now I’m seeing schools are closing, the poor kids around here are completely out of snow days and now have moved on to adding time to their day to make up for all the missed time.

 

Nicholas is doing pretty good. He has moved out of his room and he’s not in a tent but in some kind of modular building and he’s sharing a tiny room with 5 other guys. He said they are CRAMED in there together with all of their stuff. The room has 2 sets of bunk beds and 2 single beds plus all their bags and stuff. They weren’t expecting to get kicked out of their rooms until this weekend but things changed very suddenly. He no longer has internet in his room but today he was able to pay to use some Haji internet so we could chat for a few minutes. Needless to say even though we haven’t officially received a Stop Mail date it would be best that nothing else get sent to him. They have already started getting in aircraft from the replacing unit and the new guys should be there SOON so they can start handing things over. It’s looking like we still have another month of this left because Nicholas is now one of the most senior guys in the troop so they need him around to get stuff done. They act like things will come to a screeching halt if he’s not there to take care of it. I’m not sure what they are going to do when he gets out. I guess that’s why they’ve spent the whole deployment begging him to change his mind.

So that’s what’s going on with us. Nothing too exciting, just trying to get through this last few weeks of the deployment. We are both to the point that we are just done and we are so ready to be back together and have this behind us. The last month is always the worst of the deployment. Watching all the homecomings for the guys that have already made it back in makes it even harder because  you wish your husband was on one of those flights. I think around 20,000 soldiers will be coming home between now and June so there will be A LOT of homecomings.