A Snowy Weekend

Over the past 48 hours or so we've gotten somewhere around 8-10 inches or more of snow. I'm loving it. I'm personally of the opinion that if everything is going to look dead and it's going to be cold and gloomy then it might as well be white! Plus, it's just not Christmas unless it's snowy outside. Here's what the trees near our parking lot look like now that it's stopped snowing

Snow puts me in a Christmasy mood, so I've been doing a lot of online shopping. I'm also getting the urge to bake, so I spent some time taking an inventory of the ingredients I have on hand as well as making a master list of everything I'll need. Then I cross checked them and made a grocery list. I've been slowly accumulating baking necessities over the last month or so, which is nice because now I won't have to endure the shock of buying everything at once.

I was also craving chocolate. No, that's not quite the way to put it....I REQUIRED chocolate (you ladies know what I mean). It's been months since I needed chocolate that bad, so I had to make some no-bake cookies, which are like all chocolate (otherwise I probably would have eaten an entire bag of chocolate chips). Not exactly on my diet, but a girls gotta do what a girls gotta do.

Mame and Steve got married this past Friday. Mame spent two weeks looking for a dress--buying many and returning all of them before finally settling on one that was soooo the opposite of a wedding dress. Unfortunately, this meant that I had to go shopping with her. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the quality time with Mame, but I'm not a shopper. Mame, on the other hand, has to touch everything in the store. So it's rather excruciating. I almost got my sister to take her, but in the end Missy guilt-tripped me into going along. It was a lot more tolerable with both of us there though. And like I said, quality time with Mom is a plus.

I took Friday off and Mame and I went to the cosmo school and got pedicures, which were good, especially considering they were only $10. Missy came over when she got off work at the hospital and Joe got home about 3 with Missy's boys in tow (he'd picked them up from daycare on his way home). Mame went home to get ready and we all gathered at the courthouse around 3:45. In attendance were: Myself, Joe, Mike, Laura, Missy, Timmy, Odin, Julie, Mame's Boss and her husband, another co-worker, Rick and Cheryl and Lax and Katy (practically aunts and uncles to me) and two couples that are close friends of Mame and Steve.

And so they got married at 4:00. I think the ceremony lasted about 4 minutes and I somehow got appointed the photographer, so I'll share a few:
Before the Ceremony (with the flowers and boutinere that I made for them)

Vows and Such

Rings:

At the restaurant afterwards:

Uber cute pic of Joe and Timmy at dinner



























(For those of you who haven't noticed, I intentionally refer to my mother by her first name. I do this for two reasons: first, to get revenge for my grandmother, who hates that my mom refers to her as Betty, and second, because I've found that she flat out doesn't respond to "mom," no matter how many times you say it, yell it, scream it, etc. etc. So it's not a respect thing. It's just more practical.)

Other than that, Joe and I did very little this weekend. I cleaned the house, read two Harry Potter books (I'm re-reading them all), and sat around in sweats. We've barely left the house really, and it's been wonderful.

In other news, Baxter has decided to restructure Biolife. The company finally figured out that the phlebotomists have the hardest job in the center and that we pretty much control everything from yeild to cost per liter and has thus decided to compensate us accordingly. They gave everyone in the center a raise and also decided to cross train everyone at the basic level for every job in the center. They renamed everyone Plasma Center Technicians (instead of Phlebotomist, Medical Historian, and Sample Prep Tech).

The main phlebotomy team was given a raise on top of the center wide increase and we're all training to become "Master Plasma Center Technicians" because we're all advanced trained in what is now being termed "plasma collections". Once totally trained, this will put us "Master Techs" at more than $4/hour than we all started at - most of the phlebs were given a pretty big bump in pay this week. Unfortunately, I didn't qualify for the first round of raises because I was already the highest paid phleb on the floor (except the few that are already cross trained, because they fell into the new middle position - Sr. Plasma Center Technician). I'm a little bitter about this because I was previously cross-trained (first time I worked there) and have been told for months that I would be retrained in that area, but it never happened. On the other hand, I should be a "Master" by the spring and will get a raise at annual compensation time in addition to the yearly COLA (cost of living adjustment).

In the end it's just a lot of title changing with new, significantly higher, pay ranges for the different titles. Still, it's kind of nice to know they they finally figured out that the success of a plasma center rests on the quality of the phlebotomists. We're no longer the Interrogators and the Bruisers (our old softball team names at the annual center game) because now we're all on the same team....but some of us rock way more than the rest. :)