Happy Non-holidays!!

I'm glad the holidays are over. Though, I'm not entirely finished. I still have to buy some thank-you cards to send to my relatives.
Jason and I decided that we don't want to celebrate something we don't believe in. So guess what's going into my Christmas thank-you cards?! Yeah.. I bet my relatives (all, oh, 7 of them) aren't going to be all happy about it. Ah well. At least I appreciate their gifts!! (Really, I do.) And I'm not telling them to go to hell. Just that I am not going to celebrate Christmas any longer.
Speaking of needing to purchase things. Jason and I have to get our butts to the store! We have this rather large list of items to stock up on. Things like shampoo and vitamins. We're so domestic. Hahaha

Uh.. you want to know how my New Years and last weekend went?
New Years was a party at Otherworld. It was a Masquerade. Jason and I made masks during that day.
Jason's mask was awesome! It was a three-quarter mask that he put yellow duck (Duck brand, similar to duct) tape and black gaffer's tape on it. And then wired some mini black-light tubes for eyebrows. And there was some other stuff. It was cool.
Mine was made to match my peacock dress (I graduated high school in that dress! It's my favorite). I used strips of white cloth, glued down with spray adhesive (which never really dried.. that sucked) with two peacock feathers attached to it. It lasted most of the night.
When we got home, and I took it out of the paper bag I stuck it in at the end of the night (day.. we got out of there ~9am-ish), one of the feathers was broken, and stuck over one of the eyes of the mask. It doesn't look too horrible, so, I guess I'll still keep it.
It was really nice to be able to be creative with Jason. We hardly do anything creative together. Well.. not much *yet.* We just have to find something to do together. Mesh in with one another a bit better.
And it was *storming* that night!! Jason and I were waiting in the rain for a little while waiting to get to the party. Crazy. I think it got me sick. Because the entire last week (well, we got monday off, and we took friday off, so, the three days in the middle of the week) I was so sick! Nausea and nasal congestion. I was miserable. Jason and I wondered if we should go to Tahoe City for Sandy's birthday on the weekend (what we took friday off for).
Thursday night I was still sick, but decided I would be a trooper, 'cause we have been waiting for this trip for a while.
Friday rolls around, and we rise at around 7:30am to get our little Jetta to the tire shop. The guy says it should take 2 hours. It was pouring. Jason and I walked to a Burger King and ate some hashbrowns (closest thing we'd consider eating from there). Then, we went around in Rite Aid next door. Then to Kragen's and I think even Safeway. Then we went and sat in the tire shop for ~2 hours. It took 4 hours for these people to be done with our car.
They changed the tires, changed the transmission fluid, and changed the oil. I thought the tires would take 2 hours, and I'd say ~1 hour for the fluid changes? Then where did the extra time go? Bleh.
So, finally, they were done. We went to Dittmer's and got a sandwich so we'd have some food finally. Then we ran back home, packed our stuff, went to Jason's parent's house for him to pick something up and we were on the road! Yay!
We were going to stop outside of the Bay Area to pick up the cheese, bread, cranberry juice and whatever else to snack on/eat that weekend. Sandy & co brought a lot of food, so we didn't have to grab a lot.
We were going to take I-80 up to Tahoe City, so, we get on it.. Things are looking stormy, then we see snow on the side of the road. Then it's snowing. We get the snow chains put on our tires by those dudes on the side of the road that charge you $20 dollars to do it, because it's dark & blizzard-y, and we've never done it before. I can't remember where that was. But, we get to Cisco, and traffic *stops.* They closed I-80 about a mile or two right in front of us! They are making everyone exit the freeway, and get back on in the opposite direction.
We called Jason's dad, Dave, when we pulled over on the opposite side like lots other people had done. Dave looked on the computer for us, because all we had was CalTran's roadway number (1 800 427 7623), and that wasn't updated yet (it was still telling us that chains were required). He didn't get us too much more information.
We decided that maybe we should just go find a hotel and stay the night. The other option was driving down to I-50.
We called Brad, because he was supposed to be going to Grass Valley this weekend. He was about 20 miles from Auburn, and so were we, so we decided to meet up there. We went to a Denny's for food. Since Brad and Jenny (I didn't really remember her, but Jason did from the house on the rue Norman. Said that she started hanging out as we were moving out) already ate, they just had something to drink. Jason and I ordered breakfast.
I noticed the waitress brought me wheat toast instead of sourdough toast. I thought aloud about what they would do with the wheat toast if I the waitress I didn't order it, and wanted the sourdough. This prompted a few joking comments about how they would just give it to the next customer that ordered it. They aren't supposed to do that. That's nasty. Jenny mentions in a couple different ways that they hypothetically do that. I said that's nasty, and that I didn't want to talk about it anymore, because I was trying to eat the food. She apologized, and we continued eating.
And, then, I think I mentioned that the toast was a little burnt. And Jenny said "well, it's burned because the person before you didn't want it, and they put it in the toaster to warm it up for you." This made me stop eating. I had to put the food down, and pause for a few minutes. I was thisclose to not being able to finish my meal.
She did it on purpose. Because I was *adamant* that I didn't want that stuff said while I was trying to eat, and she looked me straight in the eye and said that crap to me! What a damn $*&!#&^@!!!!! Jason even mentioned it later, when we were leaving. He said "what was up with what she did in there?" Yeah.. exactly.. wtf was up with that crap. I wish I was more aggressive sometimes. Instead of just being a little confused or hurt, it would be nice to be able to put these people in their place. It sucks to get walked on.
So, we drive to a few different hotels, and because of the closure and storm/blizzard , they were all full. We were told by one of the hotel people that in Rocklin (about 15 miles west of Auburn [which is about 66 miles west of Truckee]) there are three more hotels.
So, we drive down there. It's still storming. We get the last single bed-double room in the place. I think the rest were double queen-double room. It was close to $72 total.
It smelled weird/kinda nasty in the room. We turned the heater on full blast and opened the window. Glad it was wasn't raining hard any longer. I woke up early in the morning (3-4am?) sweltering. And because I was already congested, it sucked even more to wake up with a dry mouth. I fumbled around in the dark until it didn't blow at me any more, then shut the window.
We woke up early that morning, 7:15am. We turned on the news, and heard that I-80 and I-50 were both still closed (we gave up on the idea of driving down to I-50 last night because we got seated at Denny's at midnight). We left the news on and stayed in bed. Around 9:30am they said I-80 was opened. We jumped up to shower and check out. We stopped at a store to get water and some snacks. I think we decided to eat when we got to Truckee? I can't really remember.
All in all, we finally got to the house around 2pm. It was exhausting. Jason was really tired. He had only about 8 hours sleep in the last two days, and driving in a blizzard is hard work. I wasn't doing that much better with about 1 hour more sleep than he. We rested a while, sat around with people for a while, listened to music, ate some bread and cheese.
That night, it was snowing really hard, it was really piling up. There was a lot of crap about cars in the driveway (no parking in the street because they plow). We were the last in the driveway, so there was lots of moving in and out. The driveway was too steep for us to make it up covered in snow and ice, so we had to slump at the bottom. More cars showed up.
One car ended up sitting in someone else's driveway ("illegally"), and another was granted a spot in another person's driveway for two of the guys helping them dig out the(ir) driveway. I started to help them, but genius I am, I was out there in loggers boots (just some black leather work boots), jeans, a t-shirt and regular pullover sweatshirt over it, and a beanie. Yes folks.. I'm stupid. I left them when I no longer felt that cold. I kinda figured that wasn't too good of a sign on account that I wasn't wearing stuff that was sheltering enough for that weather.
I found Jason upstairs with a headache, and unable to sleep. I put my soaked jeans and sweatshirt in the dryer, and we laid in bed for a while to warm me up. It took forever (maybe an hour or so) for my skin to finally warm up.
After that, we all (there must have been close to 20 people there) had dinner, and they brought out a cake and candles for Sandy. Then it was pretty much music and partying while it snowed us in outside.
At one point, someone cleared off the hot tub out on the balcony and people hopped in. Jason and I didn't go. We were having a pretty good time, though. Talking to a few people, watching lots of people. At one point we went to our room (we were one of the lucky people to get one of the 4 bedrooms) and talked for a while. It was a good evening. We went to bed kinda early. Check out was 3pm the next day, sunday.
We woke up a few times that morning, but stayed in bed until around 11am. I took a shower, and Jason went upstairs.
There was breakfast cooked, and everyone started packing up and cleaning the place. The power went out noonish-1pm-ish. We finally left (being the most front in the driveway) around 2pm. The power still hadn't gone on. Someone's cd was stuck in the house's cd player. That sucks.
We had a rather difficult time getting over I-80. We had our chains on.. then we hit a spot where the road was cleared, so we took them off.. then it got really snowy on the ground, so we put them on.. and then it was cleared again, so we took them off (argh!) and then it seemed to get more snowy, but it was terrible so we persisted in not stopping and putting them back on. We finally made it out of the snow without putting the chains on again, yay!! It was also an incredibly beautiful ride down the mountain. The sun was setting. We took a bunch of pictures.
We ate at a Mexican restaurant called Tio Pepe "Full Service Mexican Restaurant & Cantina" (says the business card) in Auburn. It was amazingly good. We took a few business cards. It was the right choice. We were glad to not return to the terrible Denny's or resort to fast food.
I think we got home around 8pm. We were really tired. I think we passed out pretty early.

Okay.. I've typed enough. >.<  ¶ 7:40 AM