NOV: Birthday Surprise, Family Time, Financial Advisor, Avoiding Plans With Other Plans, Work Stress, Thanksgiving

November was a short month. I felt like it passed by so quickly. One minute, it was my birthday, the next minute was already Thanksgiving.

On my birthday, Archana surprised me by coming over to my house with flowers and food and spending the rest of the week there. She had jokingly made plans with Shelle about it a few weeks ago, so I had forgotten about it until she showed up lol. It was nice having her there. We caught up and complained about work lol. We dropped her off at her apartment that Friday night as we left to go down and visit our parents.

For my birthday, mom prepared a huge menu for the whole weekend. It was so much food, I was never not full lol. I can't even remember everything that she made lol. 

I think I didn't mention it previously in my monthly updates, but I recently got a financial advisor. I mean, I should have done it earlier when Covid-19 first hit so that I could have set up my stocks earlier when everything was down, but it's too late now. Anyway, he's been helping me a lot with figuring out how to prevent myself from losing money and where to invest my money. I've been having monthly or weekly calls with him for the past few months to cover all of my bases.

Every year, Shelle and Kyle hosts Thanksgiving and Christmas at their house for Kyle's mom's side of the family. That Sunday, I made plans to have lunch at Archana's new apartment because I wanted to avoid it lol. She also invited Lee Ann and her sis, Kay, for lunch as well. 

After they left, Archana and I went for a walk (there's a hiking trail connected to her parking lot!) as the sun set. It was really nice. There's even a river next to the trail, and I saw a giant spider at the metal bridge we had to cross to get back to the apartments. Lol I definitely want to go back for a walk around the trail.

The next week was a short work week since we had Thanksgiving holidays. However, I still became extremely stressed out because of work. I found out that one of my projects were supposed to be pushed out on December 15th and panicked because we didn't have all of the training completed. I forgot about the project halfway through the year because my reoccurring meetings stopped, so I didn't get weekly reminders, and because I was swamped with other higher priority projects. This made me feel incredibly guilty for forgetting to keep up with the project and for stressed because I thought I had to pull out like 4 training decks out of my ass in two weeks.

Luckily, we had a couple meetings throughout the week and worked it out. We only needed two decks ready for the official launch, and the rest can be slowly worked on next year. Thank god. I was about to lose sleep over this.

After work on Wednesday, we headed down to the parents' house. I also brought Brian's birthday present down for him. The last time we visited the parents, he said that he wanted white Croc's for his birthday, so of course I thought it was my sisterly duty to accessorize it for him lmao. I wanted to make it as lame as I could, which is why I put the B22 for his name and age and then the puppy because he's been asking the parents for a dog for the past year. Then, I put the other accessories based on his interests like Marvel and Pokemon Go. 

Isn't it beautiful? lolol

We actually stayed at my parents' house until Monday night because Shelle had to go see dad's lawyers on Monday morning. It became an extended weekend vacation with the parents lol. 

Dad actually made some muscadine wine that he was ready to bottle, so Shelle bought some bottles off of Amazon and brought it down with us. We helped him bottle the wine and made some fancy labels or him to give to his friends lol. There was still a lot of wine left, so Shelle ordered some more bottles, and we planned on bottling the rest the next time we visited.

So yeah, November was a short but busy month!