Everything was frozen except my heart
When we stepped off the plane last Thursday night, it was 11pm and it was -1 degrees. The doors on our rental car were frozen shut and oh, the seats were so cold that it hurt to sit on them. I tell you all of this to illustrate just how much I adore the people I was in Green Bay to visit. I knew it was going to be that cold (if not colder!); I knew that I would probably not be warm very often over the next few days but I really didn't care that much becuase all that mattered was that I was going to be surrounded by
my Tribe and we were going to sing and dance and drink and hang tightly onto each other for 3 days.
It's like coming home, walking into the lobby at St. Brendan's, sticking my head into the pub to see if anyone if hanging out there, having a beer and smoking and chatting with each other. Settling into the corner table, surrounded by people I don't see enough or call enough or email enough made the -1 instantly worth it.
And then there was Friday with the booyah and the Doctor and the sleigh and the freezing hands that were only warmed by the heat of a giant bonfire. There were ridiculous hats and adorable kitties and a dog who wanted to drink with us. And helping with the raffle, overwhelmed and trying to count faster as people thrust their money at me. We are a generous group, which is not a surprise to me; we ended up donating $410 to help provide fresh foods for a food pantry.
But since we are rock stars when we are together, the night couldn't end there. There was karaoke to be sung and dancing to be done and shots to be drunk, and we did it all. Well, some of us sang; others of us (*ahem* me) pretty much just shouted. And we all dragged ourselves on stage to sing Sweet Caroline in tribute to a fallen soldier, sick at the hotel with a Cold of Doom. Proof we are a tribe: we all did the same choreography with no rehersals.
Saturday started like Friday did: to Starbucks for a triple venti nonfat extra hot sugar-free cinnamon dolce latte, no whip. (I call it my high maintanence survival mechanism.) And then we were off to Winterfest! To see alpacas and ice schulptures and igloos and chili. So much chili, so little time. We judged the chili (and found most of it wanting), and then we stopped to sniff and fondle and gather smelly lotions and bath bombs to play with in the giant bathtubs back at St. Brendan's. For lunch, there was kettle corn, a full to the brim bag that was still warm as we passed it around between us as we headed over to see the wee little baby alpacas.
And then there were steaks and the grilling of them and the distracted eating that led to Drama for me. Luckily, it was a passing drama and by the time we were ensconced at the Bad Bar (oh so very bad bar), things were good to go. A hot bartender gave me a free beer, and when I spilled it, she didn't even smack me...just got me a new one. (So much for not drinking anymore, eh? However, I have discovered why so many weight loss surgery patients become alcoholics...A) it's really cheap and easy to get drunk and B) it goes right through you so no hangover.) I helped Scotty win a bar bet by being very brave (okay, by being very drunk), and I danced and sang and got handsy with all my friends. I am the girl who is a VERY FRIENDLY drunk, and I am glad I have understanding friends.
Sunday was for hamburgers (after MORE COFFEE of course), and for accidentally driving out on Weetabix's thinking road. I already miss the fried cheese curds, but not as much as I was already missing my friends as we sat together one last time before departing on our various pathways. We dropped Shawn and Mike and Dave off at the airport, with lots of hugs and promises to call soon, just like I had said goodbye to Jake and Foo and Eben and Nonk and just like I would say goodbye to Weet and Fredlet and Mary and Joe and Susan later that night.
I'm always glad that I'm exhausted on the way home from these weekends, because if I wasn't, I would be teary and sniffly. At least this way I don't get all emo until a day or two later, which of course means tonight will be a Sad Pants night. Le sigh.
Any excuse to buy more office supplies
Tonight, I have class. (really, I have class all the time because I am a Classy Girl. Riiiight.) I've done my homework and learned about histograms and frequency distributions and woo, STATS ROCK! Well, not rock so much as be quietly awesome. Because I realized as I did my homework last week that statistics is really the only kind of math that I like. Manipulating numbers and tweaking them around to make them mean something, and then using them to make pretty pictures that help make sense of things to people. Really, it's a thing of beauty.
But the real thing of beauty is that going back to school means I had an excuse to go buy school supplies. Man, I love school supplies. Pretty pens and nifty notebooks and those little Post-it flags to mark important parts of your book. So I went out and bought a
nifty binder thingy and a pack of multi-colored ballpoint pens (so I can do color coded notes, see) and a bunch of the little flaggy things and then I packed everything into the binder thing along with my scientific calculator (left over from the stats class I took for my BA) and oh, I was so happy. The binder thingy is basically a grown up Trapper Keeper, with an expanding file for me to put my homework and syllabi into and pockets for my pens and my calculator and oh, I am kind of in love with it.
So yeah, the school thing's going well. Stats are nifty and school supplies are awesome, and that makes me one happy teacher's pet.
Thing That Makes Me Pretty: A Scrub To Rule Them All
(So okay, there are certain products that I love and adore and want to tell the world about. This of course means that I have decided to start a new category of short little blog posts about various Things I Love. And then you can buy them and try them and love them too!)Everyone thinks that my skin is simple and easy to take care of since it doesn't tend to break out or misbehave in any obvious ways. But in reality, my skin has always and forever been picky and sensitive (and also combination!), and the only reason I haven't used all the fancy creams and scrubs out there is because I've been afraid that they will anger my persnickety skin. It's really been frustrating because I have always had these little teeny bumps on my chin that have only gone away when I've endulged in a professional facial. Plus, my skin's gotten duller and more unevenly colored as I gotten into my 30's.
So I decided to hit my local Walgreens and see if there were any exfoliating scrubs that wouldn't kill me with ingredients designed to dry me out or rough edged scrubby pieces. And I found Oil of Olay's
Regenerist Daily Regenerating Cleanser. After a week of using it, I was in love. My skin looks and feels awesome, and the little bumps are gone! I think I've only gotten 2 or 3 tiny little zits since I started using it, and really, I'm the only one who noticed they were there.
It's got teeny little beads that don't make my face feel like it's getting scraped, and the cleanser itself is creamy rather than foamy, which means it doesn't dry my skin out as much. I only use it once a day since it does have salicylic acid in it and twice a day would probably be too much for me. But scrubbing in the morning seems to be enough to keep my face unshiny and soft all day. And the best part? It's only $7 or $8 since you can find it in just about every drugstore (and also Target and Wal-Mart).
So if you're looking for a good scrub, get yer butt out to your closest drugstore and pick up some of this stuff.
Labels: beauty product, review
How TV brought back my childhood
Last Monday, I took a couple hours off in the middle of the morning to hang out at the apartment and watch a very nice guy tack roughly 5 million miles of cable onto our wall. We finally joined the rest of the world and upgraded our stinky old fuzzy regular cable to digital cable, and then we decided that hey, let's do digital internet and phone too! (Seriously, I kind of feel like an idiot for not figuring out a year ago that hey, it's like $50 less a month to do it that way! Dur.) But since our computer is really as far away from the TV as it can be in our tiny little place, the cable guy had to track cable all the way around our living room and around two doorways. Of course, he's a trained professional, so it looks awesome (and by that I mean it looks like there is not cable tracking all over the house, unlike when I do something like that).
And also, now we have hundreds upon hundreds of TV stations. Just what the pair of us need, with our short attention spans and our tendency to watch syndicated shows until we've seen all the episodes. Between the fact that we've seen pretty much every episode of
Law & Order, That 70's show, The Simpsons and Family Guy and the current writers' strike (go writers!), our viewing choices lately have been kind of abysmal. But now they aren't! Because we have a zillion channles!
So what did I decide to watch on Monday night, the first night we had digital cable and a frillion million channels? Why, I watched
Thundarr The Barbarian of course! Oh my god, I loved that cartoon when I was a kid. I would pretend I was Princess Ariel, able to cast spells and leap onto horses and in general, be awesome. I happily watched the rest of the episode on Boomerang that night (involving werewolves trying to take over, and a guy with a magic ray gun thing that he stole from the Smithsonian), even though it is not a cartoon that has withstood the test of time. I mean, come on, look at the opening narration:
The year: 1994. From out of space comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction! Man's civilization is cast in ruin! Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn...
A strange new world rises from the old: a world of savagery, super science, and sorcery. But one man bursts his bonds to fight for justice! With his companions Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his courage, and his fabulous Sunsword against the forces of evil. He is Thundarr, the Barbarian!
Reading that, it's really not clear whether this is a cartoon or a soft core porn on Cinemax, really. But either way, it brought back happy, fuzzy memories of building tents out of TV trays and sheets and hiding out under them for the entirety of a Saturday morning to watch cartoons and eat cereal. Ah, the good old days, when the animation was stiff and scratchy looking, the dialogue was simplistic and cheesy, and the men had fabulous Sunswords.
Now if someone would just start running old episodes of
Picture Pages my life would be complete.
From that day on, I was running
I haven't mentioned it here yet, but Laura is getting married this year. I haven't mentioned it because I've spent the past couple of months getting used to the fact that she's engaged. It was a whirlwind romance (as in at this time last year she was still 3 months away from meeting him), and those darn whirlwind romances have a tendency to cause apprehensions. Add in the fact that she'll be moving to Texas as part of the whole getting married thing and you can see why it's not something I've wanted to talk about until I got my head on straight about it. (And really, my head hasn't been on straight about anything since July so that was not an easy task!)
ANYWAY.
We've had our drama and worked things out and now we're fine and excited and squeeful about bridesmaids dresses and showers and yadda yadda. But before she leaves, we're going to run at least one 5K race together. She's planning on running a half marathon in a month or two so she's already doing the running thing but that means I have to get my ass in gear.
Gear found, thank you very much.
Can I just say that the
Couch to 5K program fucking rocks? Last week was week 1 for me, and I did it just fine. I even laced up my shoes and went out and ran on New Year's Day! This week was week 2, and I realized tonight that I couldn't do my planned Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday schedule because duh, I have class on Thursday nights starting this week. So what did I do? Changed it to Saturday-Monday-Wednesday and bopped out tonight to start week 2. And it was still easy! And doable!
I'm sure it'll get hard eventually, and I'm sure I will be cursing myself and Cool Running and the guy who makes the podcasts that I listen to while I run at some point, but for now it's awesome and it's fun and I cannot wait to get out there and run with my best friend before she moves away.
Labels: BFF, C25K, whatever, workin' out
First lesson of 2008
Over the holidays, a few things fell to the wayside. Things like getting the ford smogged and registered, renewing our Zoo membership and paying the AAA dues. I was going to take care of the car stuff today, but this morning as I backed the car out to head to work, I realized that something was very wrong, what with the tilting to one side and loud CLONK CLONK CLONK noise.
Woohoo, flat tire!
So I called AAA, who very nicely told me that I needed to pay them first (since my card expired YESTERDAY) before they sent someone out to save me. $71 later and they were on the way to save me. Yeah, I could have changed the tire myself but I was wearing a white shirt and my makeup just got finished and I was wearing my really cute Mary Janes with the really high heels so fuck it. That's what AAA is for.
One trip down the freeway on the spare, two new tires, and $186 later and I was finally on my way to work. What a great way to kick off the year, right?
On the good side, it did present me with a perfect opportunity to take today's picture for
Project 365. A photo a day! I joined a couple of Flickr groups to help me with the whole "take more pictures" resolution, and so far it's working. Go me!
I need a Fudgesicle.
