That's What Jenni Said

Life is good. I am healthy and happy. I have a fantastic husband, wonderful friends, a great job and I'm enjoying the other gifts in life God has blessed me with. I'm turning 32 on Saturday. The outlook is great! So far no wrinkles. Just a lot of joy, peace, and gratitude for life and everything God has provided. You are all in my thoughts and prayers. ~Jenni

I'm looking for the words to describe a situation that is sad and happy at all once, depending on which party to the situation you interview. Not the good kind of sad either such as weddings sad or sending kids off to college sad, but plain old-fashioned rip your heart out sadness. Today the remaining four sets of bone china that we needed to complete our service for twelve arrived in the mail. As we've continue to build and strengthen our marriage over the course of almost twelve years we've also taken steps to build our china collection. It came to us by way of a divorcing couple who chose to sell their place settings on Ebay for next to nothing. The place settings arrived, new in their elegantly themed gift boxes, the delicate wedding ribbons still fashioned around the boxes a luxurious bows.  So incredibly sad. Log onto Ebay.com at any time and you can peruse the remains of divorcing couples whose hopes and dreams were once focused on the joy that they were sure the fut...

This week I had my annual performance assessment with the federal contractor I do most of my work for. It went well and I received a small increase in my compensation. I finally caved and went shopping at Dress Barn. I have avoided the place for eons, despite the fact that the answer to the question I've posed many of my well dressed friends ("Where did you find that beautiful dress?") is often "Dress Barn". It's all about the name. Why would I shop in a venue that infers all of its clients are barnyard animals? Regardless, I saw yet another stranger beautifully attired in Dress Barn apparel so I felt I owed it to myself to take a look at what they have to offer. I fell in love instantly. Dresses - beautiful dresses- as far as the eye can see. I picked up 6 on sale for 60% off. A parade of dresses. My dream is to have so many dresses that I never have to wear pants ever again and this store may actually make that possible. My purchase was limited only by m...

A most productive weekend. Saturday morning led my walking group on a path from a nearby landmark to my home and back again and then we enjoyed a shared lunch. 5.2 miles round trip. Sunday after church Jon proved his claim to awesome husband of the year by spending the entire day shopping for kitchen items and small appliances with me. We went to two different towns and 6 stores in all. What a trooper! We have now replaced all of our kitchen items that were destroyed in the fire with the exception of the 3 fondue pots and all of our tupperware. And I may pick those up today after work. Sunday night we enjoyed cooking dinner for our friends Doug and Katy. I made roasted tilapia with a citrus spice rub, coconut infused jasmine rice, green beans and creme brulee for the finish. It was pretty good. The only downer to our weekend- we saw what is quite possibly the worst movie EVER - on Sunday evening. "Good Luck Chuck" - and it was the unrated version to make matters worse. Gra...

  I found this to be an instructive tale. I don't know if you have seen it or not, but Fox is airing a new show [actually taken from another show in Latin America] whereby contestants are asked questions in front of a live audience for millions of viewers to watch and if they tell the truth they win money. Sort of like truth or dare, but without the dare. The twist is that they've already been asked hundreds of questions beforehand while hooked up to a detector and then they are asked a small subset of those questions [the spicy ones] again on stage. On Monday's show - taped two weeks ago - one particularly cruel and greedy woman - Lauren - was a contestant. Lauren's ex-boyfriend made a surprise appearance and asked: "Do you believe I am the man you should be married to?" As Lauren's hubby Frank Cleri grimaced on the sidelines, his wife said, "Well, wow, um. I'm going to be honest and say yes." The lie-detector results said she was bei...

Our company is looking for a full time SAS programmer who has experience on the 9.1.3 platform and understands what I mean when I throw out terms like "OLAP", "Cube Studio", "Stored processes", etc. The pay is good, the job is located in Rockville with some days available to work from home. You must be a US citizen [but no clearance is required]. You would be working with our other programmers to create deliverables for our clients- mostly cubes, processes, info maps, and reports but you'd also be involved in our ETL work as well. If this is something you would be interested in, please email me: jenni AT parjen.com. Feel free to pass along to friends as well if you know of anyone who might fit the bill.

Last month I opened a trading account on zecco.com. They offer FREE stock trades if you have a minimum balance of $2500 in your cash account with them or $4.50 trades if you have less than that. I still keep my account at ameritrade.com because zecco doesn't offer trading on the OTC market, but Zecco.com looks promising for all my other trades. Why pay ameritrade $10 a trade if i don't have to right? Anyway, if you trade stocks, or want to get into the stock market, doing so with $0 commissions is the way to go. Then you just pick a decent stock and invest and sit back and wait for it to grow. Simple. Here's the link for my referral: http://friends.zecco.com/r/b0e416a63511102b8555 So far I am doing pretty well investing in CBI which was my first stock pick.