24

• 24: the number of hours in a day, far too few in my personal opinion
• 24: the name of a really awesome show that I can't watch too many episodes of or else I start to crawl out of my skin from all the suspense - ask Mike, he thinks it's hilarious
• 24: a decent sized pack of beer
• 24: the number of dollars Mike and I spend when we go nuts at a drive-thru and order way more food than we can should eat
• 24: the number of pictures we got on our view and share disc from Picture People last night that I am thoroughly pissed off about - I'll come back to this one
• 24: the number of years I have been alive starting today...

Yep, that was my long-winded way of saying that, yes, today is my birthday. As you can see, 24 is a pretty boring number, but it's another tally on the chalk board none the less. This morning Mike and the girls made me a wonderful birthday breakfast - orange cinnamon rolls, my favorite, it was awesome! The girls got me three really awesome pictures frames for my desk at work. 

Mike and I are giving each other an Xbox 360 for our birthdays (he wants one to play grown-up first-person shooter games, and I want one because its a blu-ray player and it streams Netflix for our bedroom - so excited ). Mike smoked a tri-tip and it was delicious as usual; he really is a great cook! And Dennis and Gloria came over for dinner and pie (the custard was AMAZING) and we had a great time and some great conversations.

So circling back to being pissed off about Picture People...I am really pissed off at Picture People! We went last night to get family pictures taken because I had a LivingSocial deal for several pages of prints that I got for $10 and last night was the last day that Shutterfly was having some ridiculous sales (we are getting our Christmas cards and a few Christmas presents through them). Since last night was a school night timing was really tight because - par the course - we weren't completely prepared for the pictures yet. We all had our sweaters and we got the girls dresses from H&M - which we got an awesome deal on because they were having a "buy one get one" knit wear sale when we bought them - but we were still sans belts to complete the ensemble. So I leave early from work, Mike picks up the girls, we go home, they do homework, I feed Parker, we all get dressed and head to the mall so we can get belts before the picture appointment. Of course Justice - which I usually try to stay away from because I think that the clothes they sell are usually ugly or inappropriate for 7 and 9 year olds, but in a bind I have no problem being a hypocrite - only has one belt in the right size. I buy one XS and S and just use a bobby pin from Hailey's hair to pin the belt at the right length so it doesn't slip off her hips. We check in at Picture People and they get us in a room for pictures almost immediately. The girl taking our pictures does a great job making Parker laugh and we actually get some pretty good family pictures (if you can get Mike and I to overlook our overall chunky-ness, yes, we admit it, we're pretty vain when it comes to those kinds of things) and the pictures of the kids together and individually come out great.

Then things start to go downhill.

First the girl tells us it will be about ten minutes before we can go through the pictures...more than 30 minutes later we are still waiting. The girls are bored, Parker is starting to fuss and my patience is rapidly approaching the bright red "Severe-risk-of-terrorist-attacks" level. They finally come out and we go through the pictures, we are really happy with most of them and we start to talk about what we want printed. I tell her that I have my fancy-shmancy LivingSocial deal, and she tells me that the deal is for one pose only for all prints. This gets marked as number two on the list of not-so-good Picture People incidents for the night. We move forward and pick a really awesome Christmas pose for our numerous prints and we picked a few others to print since we have the membership and get a free one when we go. We also add on the disc of images. I am on the fence about whether or not to get the high-res disc because we got it last time for Parker's first pictures and I was irritated that I paid $100 for 18 images, so I end up getting the view-and-share disc because I doubt that the quality will be that much worse...WRONG!! And here's number three: we get home and I get ready to go through the images to upload (remember, this is the last day for ridiculously awesome Shutterfly deals and I have been waiting to finish Christmas projects because I wanted to include these pictures but I have to finish everything tonight otherwise I won't save a bunch of money, and when you're on a budget that's a big motivator). Come to find out the images are such bad resolution that I can hardly use them for anything on top of the fact that there is the Picture People logo super-imposed on every single picture - SO LAME. If you try to zoom in at all they are completely pixelated and pretty much useless - what a waste of $35. So now I get to go back to Picture People this weekend while they still have my images on file and get a few more prints of my favorites and I am less than happy about it. Live and learn I suppose...

here's a few of the best and a link to see them all if you're interested: