Off The Desk 3/9/2026

Hello, happy Monday. Thanks for joining us yet again for another edition of Off the Desk. I'm Kaylee Collins. I'm Julia O'Keefe. And I'm Chris Bizacchus. Happy Monday. Happy Monday. I was, I will say it was, yeah, it was easier getting up this morning knowing it was gonna be like nice weather. Like come, come back home later today or this afternoon and be able to like enjoy the warm weather for later. Yes, that's gonna be nice. It was still cold this morning. I thought it was gonna be warmer when I walked outside this morning. So it was not, I was not too thrilled to walk out to frost on my windshield. Yeah. And a lot of fog. It was weird. It was foggy. I was driving and there was no fog when I left and then I would go through patches and then it would clear completely. It was really low too. And I really can't see anything. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was wild. Yeah, I mean. Eerie. But what I always say, what is fog? It, it snows. Yes, yes. It eats the snow away. So like that's pretty much the snow like evaporating pretty much. So yeah, the snow is disappearing very fast. I know my yard, I'm seeing grass that I haven't seen in months. So nice. But yeah, today's gonna be really nice. Sunny temperatures in the 60s this afternoon. I think a lot of us are in the mid 60s. So feels more like a mid to late April than, you know, early March today. So that's nice. Tomorrow looks even warmer. I think tomorrow many spots will be around 70 degrees. So that's gonna be really, really nice. So enjoy today and tomorrow. The sun, the warmer weather. We will have that back to reality back at the end of the week in the 40s where we should be this time of year. So enjoy the next few days of nice weather. But it's signs of what's to come. This, this time of year, I always say you have to be really patient with the weather. Yeah. Because it's going to start warming up, but you're kind of in like this weird March is just the month that it has a very big swings, you're going to go from 70 degrees tomorrow to by Wednesday, you're in the 40s and 50s. And then there can still be snow sometimes rain and snow spring is coming. Yeah. Yeah. The worst is the worst of winter is behind and better, brighter days are coming. Yes. And we sprung forward. Yeah, we did. So we're all kind of feeling it this morning. Yeah. There was a beautiful sunset last night though. Really, really pretty. I was honestly getting ready for bed when the sun was setting. So I didn't look outside. But then I saw this morning. My brother lives in Boston, and he has to come across the harbor, like from home home from work. They took this picture last night. Wow. That's so bright. Yeah. Wow. So it was really pretty. I'm looking forward to more of those. Yes. Spring season continues. So that's like I was saying, even the daffodils were coming up in my neighborhood. Yeah. One of my neighbors has like a ton of them. And I could see when I looked up near the yard, like the little green buds coming up. Yeah, my parents like at their house growing up, it was always that was the time of spring the daffodils that were climbing parts of the driveway. Yeah. So we're getting there. Yes, surely. Only 11 days officially now until the start of spring, right, Chris? Yeah. March 20th. Yep. So. Wow. Countdown's on. Yeah. And that means that we're 13 days away from the parade. Yes. Hopefully it's spring weather for the parade. I know. I'm really hoping that the weather. So less than two weeks. If only we could pick up the weather from today and tomorrow and put it on that weekend. That would be so awesome. 70 degrees, sunny for parade. St. Patrick, if you're listening. St. Patrick. St. Patrick, please. Wait, fun fact, I read something kind of in the spirit of St. Patrick's Day. Massachusetts is ranked the number one state to find a four-leaf clover. Is it really? Yeah. Really? On average, find four in your lifetime if you look. I guess if you looked. I haven't had much luck. I can remember finding at least one as a kid. Really? Yeah, my mom somehow always finds them. I found one. She's just lucky, I guess. I guess so. I don't think I've really looked. I don't know. You'll have to look. I gotta go looking. Yeah. Are you Irish on both sides? Oh, yeah. Maybe she's got that Irish look. Maybe, yeah. Maybe. What about you, Chris? Are you Irish at all? Very, very little. My mom is kind of a mutt of a lot of things. She's more Danish, and then she's a mix of English, Irish, and then my dad is 100% Greek. Nice. Do you guys ever do those ancestry? Yeah. I've never done it. I did do it, yeah. I had to do it for a class in college. It was cool. Did you have anything very unique? Not super unique, but the class was a genealogy class, so we all did it. Eventually, anyone with Irish or English ancestry traces it back to each other and find out that you're cousins. My professor, everyone was pretty much his cousin, so he would address emails as like, hi, cousin, but he told me a cool story. He told me a cool story about one of our common ancestors who came over on the Mayflower, fell off the Mayflower, and was pulled back on the ship by a rope, and that's how he made it, so if that guy never got pulled back on the Mayflower, my whole bloodline might not be here. I would not be here, yeah. That's crazy to think about. That's crazy. Yeah, I have 1% Nigerian. Oh, I remember you telling us that. 1% North African Sahara Jew. Interesting. Wow. Which kind of makes a little sense if you want to go so far back because my dad's side of the family is from the island of Crete in Greece, and it's right off the coast of Africa, right off the coast of North Africa, Libya, Egypt, like that area, so maybe somewhere way down the line, there is someone from North Africa that got into the bloodline or something, but yeah, I got 1% of North African Jew, and what I say, what was the African country I just said? Nigeria. Nigeria, yeah. Wow, maybe I'll do that one day. You should. Because I know I'm cool. I'm mostly Irish on both sides, but I think like on my dad's side, I'm like a little German. There's some French in our bloodline somewhere, too, so it'd be interesting to really kind of see what the percentages are. Yeah, cool. It was interesting because my grandfather did his, and he had like 1% like Mongolian in him. Oh, really? Yeah, it's just like you wonder where this comes from, like if you go down so far back, someone somewhere mixed into the gene line. We had to build the family tree from the whole thing, and that's how I found out about tracing it to the Mayflower and such, but eventually it automates, like it gives you suggestions on who to add, so you're supposed to confirm it based on documents, but if you use the database, it gives you, like I found my great-great-grandfather's birth certificates and photos and stuff. It's really cool. That's kind of cool. Yeah, it was cool, but I was just kind of like looking for a way to add the people. Yeah. It also shows you, because I did mine through like that ancestry DNA and stuff, and it shows you like how many matches in DNA you have, which is weird. All like your cousins and stuff. Oh, really? You can click on it because people that are out there that have done it, it'll match like down to the slightest DNA that you guys could share, and I had like almost a thousand matches. Yeah, that's wild. Just like distant cousins. Somewhere, somehow, they're very distantly related to you. I don't know, and like I was scrolling through, and I had no idea who these people were, but somehow they're genetically related somehow. I don't know. Yeah, it's fascinating. There's a lot out there. A lot out there. That's for sure. Yeah. All right, we'll take a quick break here and go over some other things going on today and things we're looking forward to for the rest of this week. Maybe do our Yeah. Stay with us. All right, welcome back to Off the Desk on this Monday morning. I'm Julia O'Keefe. Kaylee Collins. And I'm Chris Bozakis. Monday morning. Monday morning. After we lost an hour of sleep, so we're really trying to cruise along here, but it was a really nice weekend. At least yesterday felt nice weather-wise. Yeah. Saturday was a little bit rainy, a little chillier, but overall still pretty good. What did you guys get into this week? Not too much. Friday, just chilled out. It was a Friday. I was feeling tired from the week. Just chilled out. Saturday, I went out to Boston. I went around. We went shopping in the back Bay area on Newbury Street, which I haven't been there in a long time, so that was nice. Ate lunch at Gordon Ramsay's restaurant. Fun. So that was good. Yeah, the food was really, really good. That was fun. Then yesterday, went for a walk outside. That was beautiful. Good day for it. Yeah. Other than that, chilled. Watched some TV when it wasn't super nice out. Watched the movie Tangled. One of my favorite Disney movies of all time. Me too. Loved it. It was a nice chill weekend. Chill spring weekend. It was good. That's good. What about you, Chris? Went to a rodeo. That's right. We have to hear about that. Rodeo in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Yeah. Yeehaw. What picture is there? Downtown Bridgeport. It was actually a lot of fun. Yeah, it was good. My buddies and I, we went to dinner in Trumbull. That was fun. Then we went to the rodeo. It was actually a lot of fun. I always love that kind of stuff. We went out to Montana a couple of times, all of us. We've done Wyoming and all these fun things. When we saw there was a rodeo in Bridgeport, we were like, yeah. People that we've known have gone to the group that does this in other spots and said it's really fun and you should go. We did. It was actually really cool to watch. Those bulls are crazy. I can't imagine how those people walk after riding that bull for five seconds. Throws them around. They get lost, literally. It was cool. They did bull riding. They did a lasso thing. It's so dangerous. They carry one of the guys out on a stretcher because the bull literally stepped on him after he went off. The bull would come running up to the side. They didn't allow anyone to sit in the first three rows because the bull goes crazy after they fall off. They would try to tame it with the lasso and try to drag it away. It was cool to watch, though. It was exciting. Then yesterday, nothing. I deep cleaned my house. Just had that fresh feel. I cracked some windows in the house, got some fresh air, and took my dog for a walk. Went to Home Depot. That was it. Nice. Are you guys all set with your bathroom? Yeah, completely done. Oh, nice. Yay. How are you liking it? Yeah, we love it. It's completely brand new. That's so nice. It looks like night and day. The bathroom looks so much bigger. The shower is beautiful, the tile and everything. Yeah, so nice. It just makes the house feel so much fresher. It's really nice to have. That's exciting. The roof is brand new. The gutters are brand new. Oh, great. All good things. Nice. Yeah, so it's all nice and new. Exciting. Yeah. What did you do? I went back to Friday. Oh, Bobby and I got pizza. Yum. We haven't done a little pizza date in a while, so we did that. It was nice. Then I went to bed pretty quickly after that. I was tired. Saturday, oh, I hung out with Ciara, Ciara Speller, and I got lunch together, so that was really nice. We haven't caught up in a while, so we went to this brunch place in Westford. Nice. Hung out there for a bit. Then Saturday night, oh, I had a little incident Saturday night. Nothing serious. I was making, I told you guys a little bit about this. I know that sounds dramatic. Jump scare incident. I was making dinner. I was making some lasagna, and I decided to make an extra batch for my friend who's pregnant to freeze so that once the baby's here, she can have that as a freezer meal. I was cooking for a while, and we have a gas stove and oven. I don't know if there was something going on with one of our burners or whatever, but I'm not kidding. As soon as I'm done, as soon as we go to sit, I'm cutting into my lasagna. Our carbon monoxide detector is beeping going off, and it wouldn't stop. We open all the windows, and then I'm like, we probably should call the fire department and just get them to check it out. You have to treat that kind of stuff as an emergency. Do you have a separate fire alarm and carbon monoxide detector? They're together. It'll alert you to which one it is, so it was beeping, and it was saying, boys, it's a carbon monoxide detector. Obviously, it's unnerving or whatever. We call the fire department. They come in, and they do a full sweep. They do a reading of our apartment, of my in-laws' house next door. Everything was normal. Zero reading. Our town officials or town first responders, I should say, were very good, thorough. It was nice to have them come and check it out just for peace of mind. We did keep the windows cracked and everything just in case, but it didn't go off again, so that was good. That's good. I think there was just one of our burners that had something slightly wrong with it, so we reached out to our gas company, maybe come and check it out. That was a little bit of an adventure on Saturday night, but we dealt with that. Yesterday, I hung out with some of my cousins and my sister and had a really nice good weekend. Speaking of your carbon monoxide going off, it is a good time to probably check batteries in your smoke detectors and alarms. They say when daylight saving rolls around, to treat that as do your clocks and your smoke detectors. It is important, and I'm grateful that we had that. Thankfully, it turned out to not be a real emergency, but if we didn't have that, we wouldn't have even known that there was potentially something wrong with something in our house. Always a good time to make sure that that's got the right batteries and everything working properly. Start a little bit of your spring cleaning and stuff too. Do you guys usually do that? Do you do a major clean out in the spring? Yes. That's kind of what I was doing yesterday. I'm going to start on some of that this week. Get rid of some clothes. I started changing over my winter clothes to springer. Springer. Springer. I got to do a closet clean out. Get rid of some stuff. Got to donate it maybe. That's good. That time of year. It's also National Napping Day. I know we talked about that before. That's fitting this time. You'll take a nap in the sun. Nap in the sun. I can't wait for those days. Catching the rays. Even the UV index is going to be like a three today. It's March. It's not high, but you're going to enjoy it. Yesterday was International Women's Day during Women's Month. That's nice. Shout out to all the lovely ladies out there. All of our lives. And it's National Barbie Day today. Oh, look at that. I used to love playing with Barbie. Yeah, I did too. My sister was a huge Barbie fan. My sister was a huge Barbie fan. Barbie movie? Actually, the Barbie movie, yeah. I had never watched the Barbie movie all the way through. So, I didn't watch it when it first came out. I watched it, I think like, either last year or maybe just this past summer. And it was good. I just, I don't know why I didn't get into the hype of it when it first premiered or whatever. When it was Barbie and Oppenheimer, right? Yeah, Barbenheimer. Which I've actually never seen. I don't even remember. It's really good. Which I hear is really good. It's long, but it's really good. It's like three hours. Speaking of this, I don't know, it kind of reminded me of this just because Cillian Murphy is in it, but Peaky Blinders, the movie, is out on select theaters. You've seen the show? I've seen the show. I love the show. And I didn't realize, it's only out in select theaters for maybe a week or so, and then it'll be available on Netflix. Really? Yeah. So, yeah, I thought that was kind of interesting, but I'm gonna, now I have to go back and re-watch it because I haven't seen it in a while to kind of remember what was going on leading up to the movie, because the movie's like... I like him as an actor. Yeah, he's a really talented actor. He's really good. There's a lot of good memes about him too. Yeah. Yes. Yes. That's funny. There are. Yeah. We also have national meatball there. Look at that. Have a meatball? I love meatballs. So, take a nap in the sun today and have some meatballs for dinner. Have a meatball and maybe watch the Barbie movie. Put it all together. I've made meatballs a couple of times, different kinds. I've done the Swedish meatballs, which are pretty simple. Oh, those are good. Just for appetizers for things, but making the Italian meatballs to go with sauce and sauce and everything. I feel like mine are okay, but they're never as good as my mom's or my mother-in-law's. I need to keep working at it. And I think it's something that... It's funny when I hear my parents or my in-laws or aunts and uncles, the way that they talk about recipes and things. Oh, I make my meatballs like this. I'm just like, I want to get to that point where you're like, it's yours. I have my go-to recipe and I know what I'm doing every single time. Meatballs is something that I haven't yet. My dad makes homemade meatballs too. But I have the same problem. I've tried to make my parents' food before, my grandparents' food, and it comes out fine, but I've kind of accepted it'll never taste like theirs. It's just like, it's not the same. Maybe it's just like, it just comes from them. They just make it and that just makes it different. I don't know. Even when they write down recipes and stuff, because I have some of my great aunt's recipes or my grandma's that she's passed down to my dad and his siblings and stuff. My dad has shown me how to make a couple of things, but I think when they're cooking too, maybe they're not conscious of things that they're adding in. They put their own little twist on it that they're not thinking of, that when you go to try to recreate it, you're missing those steps. So it's just something's a little bit off about it. But I don't know. I love that the idea of passing down recipes. Meatballs is adding to the list of things I need to work on. My parents also make... My grandma's stuffing recipe, I think I might have said before, around Thanksgiving, is so good and my dad makes it really well. He showed me how to make it once, but then I didn't try to recreate it. But I think my sister is going to make her Easter spice things up, so my dad might make the stuffing, because here will be another lesson. Easter is right around the corner. It's just coming up. It's early. It's like one of the earliest times it could be. Yeah. Next year will be March 28th. Really? That's crazy. That's really the year after. That'll be an earlier start to Lent then. My struggle then is like, what did you wear? You can't wear a cute spring outfit when Easter is March 28th. The earliest it can be was actually on my birthday, March 27th. But yeah, March 28th next year. And then it's weird because I have to... I celebrate both, like the Catholic and the Greek Orthodox one. So like last year, for instance, they were on the same exact day. This year, they're exactly a week apart. But next year, the Catholic Easter is on March 28th. The Greek Orthodox Easter, which is Orthodox in general, is May 2nd. So there's no Easter in April next year. May 2nd. That's close to Mother's Day. Yeah. You'll have things to look forward to in between, I guess. But speaking of holidays and food, do you guys like corned beef and cabbage? Yeah, I do. I used to not really like cabbage that much, but it's kind of grown on me as I've gotten older. Yesterday, when I was hanging out with my cousins, my sister's husband, brother-in-law made Reuben's. Oh my gosh, they came out so good. So I do enjoy a good Reuben. Yeah, but I like it. I'll eat corned beef, like if it's like corned beef, potatoes and cabbage. Yeah. Yeah, I love it. My grandpa gifts my family and then my cousin's family a corned beef for St. Patrick's Day every year. I love it. And yeah, I like the way my dad cooks it. It's really good. And then I had a really good Reuben recently on an Irish pub. That was good. So I'm looking forward to that. Last night, Matt was like, do you want to have corned beef for St. Patrick's Day? I can think about buying it. And I was like, yeah. I mean, I don't know if we're the best at cooking it, but figure it out. Maybe I'll do that this year. And then we make Irish soda bread. Oh yeah. I like Irish soda bread. That's another thing that has grown on me. I didn't like it as a kid, but I like it now. Yeah, I used to eat around the raisins. Yeah. I didn't like the raisins either. And now you suck it off and eat the raisins. It's good. Yeah. All right. We'll take another quick break here. We'll think about, yeah, other Irish foods that we like. Be right back. All right. Welcome back to these last few minutes of off the desk. We really only have two minutes. So this is going to be a quick goodbye. A sweet ending here. Yeah. But it's going to be nice out today. I'm looking forward to going home and walking my dog. He needs to get better at walks because he's still a puppy. He doesn't do very well with walking. He hates to leave the other dog. That's the thing. So if both of them don't walk together, he won't walk. But we'll go before Deacon gets home from work today, because he's a therapy dog. He's got a shift today. Yeah, he's working today. I love that, though. I'm going to go for a walk. Very nice. Maybe I'll go for a walk, too. Try to get outside and enjoy a little bit of the sunlight. But I also do want to partake in napping. That's true. I'm struggling a little bit, so I think I will probably take a nap. But maybe I'll do it, like, so right when I get home, try to take a quick nap or a little like a power nap, maybe like five minutes or so and then get outside, go for a walk. Maybe I'll make some shrimp tacos. That sounds like a good. I have shrimp. I was thinking of making some type of pasta, but shrimp tacos feels more like spring like. Yeah. Probably go for a walk today with my dog. Just sit outside in the yard and in the spot the snow has melted. There you go. Try and clean it up a little bit. Start doing some spring cleanup in the yard. Good idea. And just enjoy the sun. There we have it. Hopefully you all have similar plans to go outside and enjoy the weather this afternoon and tomorrow as well. So we'll be back at the same time tomorrow to talk about, yeah, more nice weather on the way and what we are expecting for the rest of the week. Yeah. Bye. See you later.