Went to the Saints game yesterday (Mom has season tickets!) and, delightfully, they won quite decisively against the 49ers. The Saints have a good strong defense, and the offense has finally caught up and started to play strong football as well. The game was played in the New Orleans Superdome to a sold-out house, and there were times when I thought the roof was going to come off of the dome with the level of noise. Totally awesome. If you've never been to a pro-football game--especially in New Orleans--one thing that the fans do is yell and scream and stomp their feet whenever the opposing team has the ball and are on the line, with the point being that if the fans make enough noise it can throw the quarterback off and make it hard for him to give audibles at the line and also cause team members to jump off early and thus earning a penalty for false starts. The cool thing is that it works--which makes it ten times as fun for the fans.

Terrific game. Lots of fun. (Helps that Mom has extremely terrific seats!)

Then I got home, and heard my refrigerator making an unnervingly odd noise. You know that noise that the fridge makes when it cycles on, that kind of click-prrruummmmmm noise? Well mine was going click-prruuuu-clack then about a 30 second pause and then it would try again. click-prruuuu-clack

Luckily most of my stuff was still fairly cold, and my frozen stuff was only slighly thawed, so I piled all of my frozens into my laundry basket and trucked them over to Mom's house and luckily she has an extra freezer in her garage that had a bunch of room in it, so I took over a couple of shelves and was able to save my freezer stuff. Next, Mom was kind enough to loan me the teensy dorm-type fridge that my Dad kept in his office. Only drawback was that it was majorly frozen up and required serious defrosting before I would be able to use it. So, I trucked that over to my house, set it up in the kitchen with some towels inside to soak up the thawing ice and set up my blow dryer to start thawing.

About five minutes later my blow dryer decided to die. Dead. Called my Mother in a whiny pouty panic, and wonderful Mom walked over and brought me her blow dryer to finish the defrosting.

Then I had to start on the cake. You see, today was my Lieutenant's birthday and I had been volunteered (and I had nobly accepted) to make a cake. Well, I have not made a cake in ages--I tend to just do cookies and the like, so I had forgotten that for cakes you really need an electric mixer to get everything mixed up properly. I didn't even have an egg beater. All I had was a spoon and a metal wisk which was no good at mixing cake batter. Another whiny pouty call to Mom, who once again walked over, this time with an electric hand mixer. Cake finally got made and iced, though there was no fridge to put it in, so I covered it with aluminum foil and hoped for the best. But by that time I was in an unbelievably aggravated mood.

(But all is better now, because a super cool buddy just brought over cold beer. Woo! (That was the greatest tragedy of the dead fridge. All my beer was warm!))

Anyway.

In other News. I went to a baby shower for one of the other lieutenants (who used to be the lieutenant on my team) and at said shower there were several People Of Significant Rank Greater than Mine (especially since the shower was thrown by the Major) and at said party a Person of Significant Rank asked me if I was putting a letter in for the SWAT team. Now then, I knew that there was an opening on the team and had in fact seen the posting on our departmental email, but I'd also seen on the posting that they wanted at least two years of law enforcement experience. And, of course, I only have one year as of this past October. So, I told the Person of Rank that I had only one year in, to which he replied, "So? Put a letter in anyway." At which time other Persons of Rank in the room nodded sagely in agreement. "Yup, make them look at you," was the general consensus. (Note: To apply for any transfer or new position you have to submit a letter of intent and then, if your commander sees fit to sign your letter, you can move on to the actual interview/tryout/whatever.) So, I went and asked the Major (since he was the one who would have to sign my letter) and explained that I only had one year in, but that Certain People were suggesting that I put a letter in anyway. Well, he basically told me to go for it. Therefore, I spent much of today drafting my letter up, trying to make myself look competent capable and cool while trying to avoid the fact that I have only a year experience. Of course then I'll have to go through the actual tryout for the SWAT team which I expect to be pretty darn demanding and strenuous. Time to up the level of the workouts since I figure I only have a couple of weeks before the tryouts.

Should be interesting.

And, of course, I also went fridge shopping today, since I am 34 years old and have no desire to make the attempt to live out of a refrigerator that is about 2'x2'. Luckily I've been doing some fridge shopping in the past few months since I have been wanting to get a new fridge--though I'd really wanted to wait until about March when I had more stuff paid off but Oh Well. Arggg. But, since I had been doing shopping I was able to walk right into Home Depot and point to exactly the one I wanted. I ended up having to finance it--which I've really been trying to get away from--but I figure I can still get it paid off before the same-as-cash period ends. My next project is to draft several of my teammates to help me pick it up tomorrow, since the earliest the store can have it delivered is Friday--which is a day I work, so actually I wouldn't be able to have it delivered until next Tuesday. No way am I living without a real fridge that long!