Unimpressed

So for whatever reason, all of my fingernails except my left pinky break as soon as they get even slightly long. My left pinky, though, it grows & grows if I let it. This past week I told Andy instead of cutting it down I was going to see how long it would grow. I guess I must have jinxed it.

Now how will I do coke?!

Can You Smoke It?

To that, in Andy's world, the answer is always yes. To be fair, though, we've really only had one thing that didn't turn out so great...Stick with the grill or indoors for asparagus...It tastes like ashes on a smoker. Stuffed mushrooms, though, two thumbs WAY UP on the smoker!

Once upon a time, probably during the summer, the topic came up of smoking a meatloaf. I can't remember now how it came up, but we Googled it to see if it had been done. Of course, it had. We decided to do it at some point, and left it at that.

A few nights ago, I suggested to Andy that we buy some ground beef to keep on hand. It's not something either of us love but it can be cooked straight from the freezer for quick meals if you haven't planned ahead. Much to my surprise, when he ran to the store that night for something specific he brought some home. 3 whole pounds, easily enough for 3-4 meals with leftovers!

....and then promptly proceeded to turn all 3 pounds of it into a meatloaf to be smoked.

Smoked Meatloaf

The good news is, even though he fell asleep and it cooked 2 hours longer than intended, it was pretty damn good.

Slave to Fashion

Do you ever see someone wearing something, and wonder to yourself whether it's that they're incredibly fashion-forward or they just don't have a mirror? That person is me.

When I got these paisley tights, I thought they were the coolest fucking thing I'd ever seen. They don't fit me all that well, so I'll share with you that today when I wore them I wore a pair of underwear OVER them just to keep them from sliding all the way down my butt. I wore them today to work with a dark blue sweater dress and a yellow cardigan.

I always make Andy approve my outfits, and he said that I looked 'fun' and 'cute', so off I went to work. When I got here, one of the HR ladies said I was 'so bold'. She has a way of saying things where you're not sure if it's a backhanded compliment or a thinly-veiled insult, so I didn't really say anything back.

This is the same woman who a few weeks ago when I was coming in from outside told me I looked like a bag lady. When I very sarcastically thanked her, she seemed surprised I'd taken offense and told me she meant it in a good way.

HOW do you say someone looks like a bag lady and intend for it to be a good thing?!

[Note: In addition to being "bold", I also don't own a proper full-length mirror (I have one, but it's decades old, cracked and covered in weird brown dots that make it difficult to see anything in it.).]

Gifts that Keep on Givin’

Today Andy's boss gave me these. I was more excited about them than anyone should be about Velcro (TM) bells. I was instantly transported back to 3rd grade, when we would ring these bells in Music class while we sang silly Christmas songs.

Once the nostalgia faded, I realized how totally useless these are and now I'm left wondering what the hell to do with them. For now, they are hanging on the doorknob of my back door. Call it a low-budg security system, if you will...

The Eve of Christmas

Well, the holidays are officially here! Tonight we did dinner and the exchanging of gifts with my Dad's side of the family, out at my parents' house. It was a nice visit, and it's odd to have little ones on that side of the family, but it was odd in a good way I think. My cousin and his wife told everyone on their way out that they are expecting another one, so by next Christmas there will be at least one more addition. Pretty cool. My grandparents got my sister and I pearl earrings, which is probably about the second 'nice jewelry' I have. I should probably class it up some one of these days. When I was younger I had a few more things, but move after move I ended up with none of it.

Anyway, everyone left pretty early, and Andy & I were planning to spend the night and have Christmas morning over there, so once everyone else left we played The Game of Things with my family. For hours. It was a blast. Andy of course came up with the most absurd answers ever and you always knew which one was his but it was still good for a belly laugh.

This is my sister, making some saltwater for Andy to soak his toe (he has an ingrown toenail that has been pretty ugly, on and off), wearing an apron she made when she was approximately 5:

Our Little Helper

A New Year’s Epiphany!

Okay, so like nearly everyone else in this country, year after year I vow to shed those extra pounds...and then don't.  This year, I've probably taken more positive steps than any other year, so I'm proud of that at least.  I'm enrolled in Zumba through May of next year so far, and don't really intend to stop after that - I freakin' LOOOOVE Zumba!!!  Partly, I'm sure, because of our super awesome instructor Mandi....when we have 'sub's I don't love it as much.  My bar is set high enough for a Harlem Globetrotter to effortlessly Limbo under.

ANYWAY, I was being depressed the other night about how little difference I've seen despite my half-hearted attempts to the contrary.  Me & pickle nachos were working through it (they're not that bad - really!), and I had an epiphany of sorts.

For 2011, I'm not going to resolve to 'lose 50 pounds', I'm going to resolve to lose '1 pound a week' - that sounds WAY less intimidating, dontcha think?!

Christmas Vacation!

In North Kansas City, there's a Screenland theater that Andy & I love going to. They play a lot of independent and local movies, and also have fun things like 'Glee' & Chiefs watch parties (never been to either), and they show 'cult classics' on occasion. An example of this is they play The Big Lebowski on the last Friday of every month. I've been dying to make it to that, but haven't yet either. They serve booze, which is a wonderful bonus (Yes, when the day comes that I see 'The Dude' on-screen, I will be drinking a Caucasian), they have a bar food menu (fried green beans!) and they also have a row of red leather recliners, which totally rock:

]

Besides that there are some loveseats in the front and little living room set-ups in back. There is also a nifty robot guy who opens the curtain. As you can tell, it's pretty awesome.

Andy told me last week that they were showing National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. He has a tradition of watching that on Christmas Day at some point, but last year we weren't able to. We didn't figure we'd be able to make it to the theater on Christmas either, but I checked the times anyway. As it turns out, they weren't even playing it on Christmas. The last day to see it was the Tuesday before. So we saw it on Monday.

And it was glorious.

(I also discovered that they sell the DVD of Blackhand Strawman [a movie about organized crime in KC], so I will be purchasing that next time I am there and have money.)

Mum’s Fiesta

Mom's party was Saturday night and it was more or less a success. Sobriety checkpoints and snow had people leaving way earlier than I'd have hoped, but the core group hung around the whole time, and if you counted all the in & out folks there were probably close to 70 people who showed up. I had a good time, but more importantly I think Mom did. I suppose it was worth all of the insane amount of work!

Instead of doing a regular guestbook, we made some postcards that were 1960-themed, and had people write messages on the back of them. Then we will make a sort of scrapbook of them. When I was going through them, I found this:

Mom thinks it's from her cousin (the one from Indy I mentioned before). We do all have the same twisted minds...

Cross Stitching Success

Finished!

I was able to get this finished in the nick of time - with Mom's party and all the other Christmas ends to be tied up, I was a bit worried I wouldn't make it! I stayed up late last night until I fell asleep working on it, and finished it this morning. I have to say, I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out, and am even toying with the idea of starting an Etsy shop. I would mostly start off cross-stitching song lyrics, but if people wanted specific phrases I could do those too. Then, if I ever get good at any other crafty things I could put them there too. What do you think?

I hope Andy likes it!!!

Let the Surprising Commence!

The Good Foot

My mom, being who she is, was not about to let her birthday party be a surprise...SO her cousin and I came up with a way to surprise her so at least there was something! Her cousin Tina lives near Indianapolis and decided to come to town for the party. Since the party is Saturday, and Tina and her husband Mark were planning to come in early Friday, they wanted to be able to visit with her for that extra day without 'ruining the party surprise'.

They'd wanted to go to Knuckleheads since they'd heard all about it, and it just happened that Thursday night my friend Q's band, The Good Foot, was playing there. I asked if they could come in Thursday night and it turned out that they could. We beat them there by about 15 minutes, and when they walked in it was hilarious. Mom had no expression whatsoever. She looked past them like they weren't her family. She later said, "I thought, 'That looks like Mark and Tina, but they don't live here'." So that's Angie -1, Mom -0, for those of you keeping score. (:

'Twas a good time.

Feliz Cumpleanos, Madre!

Masterpieces, if I do say so.

Hooray Patron!

On Mom's birthday I spent the majority of the day finishing up the centerpieces and some other last-minute thingies, then went up to Mom & Dad's to watch the Chiefs game, and then we all went to dinner at Bonefish Grill. YUM. Hopefully she had a good birthday, and hopefully the party goes well next weekend!!

DIY Centerpieces Gone Wrong

Ghetto rigging.

Tonight Jenny & I began working on centerpieces for Mom's party. I had a general idea of what I wanted - a photo cube with 3 wires to hold 6 pictures on each. We went to Hobby Lobby and found some wooden blocks, crafter's wire, some star & circle clips, and got some gold spray paint, and some ribbon to put around them. I bought some hot glue refills for my glue gun, and we were off to get the photos copied.

The pictures to be put on the centerpieces were pictures of Mom throughout time. I didn't want to use the original photos, especially since many of them weren't mine, so I planned to go to CVS and scan them in, edit some, and get reprints done. We headed to the CVS nearest my house, and the computer with the scanner attached was out of order. We waited 10 or so minutes for a lady at the neighboring kiosk to finish (read: get off of the phone and leave), and plugged the scanner into it, but that didn't work.

We headed to Walgreen's, and only had to wait a couple of minutes for someone to finish up with their scanner kiosk (Sidenote - why do people always use the scanner kiosk if they're not scanning?! Assholes.), and we were good to go. I went through the on-screen steps and then the system froze while the scanner was 'warming up'. We had the photo attendant restart the machine which probably took about 20 minutes. Then we did it all over again, only for the machine to end up frozen at the same step. FML.

Finally, we headed to the busier CVS a couple miles farther from my house. Lucky for us, third time's a charm! By this point in time, not only was it frigid cold but the snow was starting to look pretty foreboding. We scanned in the 72 pictures, and just an hour & a half later we were touching them up, and 30 minutes after that we were finished! Yes, it literally took 2 hours. The woman working the register actually said to us, "You should have brought some dinner, ladies!". About 15 minutes before we finished up we realized there was a portable DVD player on display right next to us, and it had a DVD in it, so we got to see the beginning of The Last Unicorn. I'd never even heard of it, but it's an animated movie from the early 80's and it has some pretty great actors doing voice work: Alan Arkin, Jeff Bridges, Mia Farrow, and Angela Lansbury! Okay, maybe Angela Lansbury isn't a GREAT actress, but she's pretty damn famous so it counts.

We head home, after Jenny's car threatened to not start in the cold, to put the centerpieces together. I go to the last place I saw my glue gun, and you guessed it - not there. Not ANYWHERE for that matter. I decide to focus first on drilling the holes in the wooden blocks and then crossing the glue bridge only when I have to. Come to find out, my cordless drill is still at my parents' house from when Andy helped them with a couple of projects. I think that's okay because Andy has a corded one on the shelf...only it turns out that's not a drill; it's some weird drywall screwer or something like that that has virtually no depth and will be completely useless to me.

I found an aluminum roofing nail that I'd found in the yard the previous day (Great news, right?!) and we use it to hammer holes into the block. Getting it back out of the block takes a fight, and the holes aren't as deep as we'd like them to be, but we think we can make it work. Several blocks split as we try to hammer the holes through them. I find some wood glue and clamps to try to repair the split ones.

FINALLY we get holes in all of them, and I look around for the glue gun, to no avail. I find some spackle and decide it will work. It sort of did.

We assembled the wires and clips before we put them into the blocks, and the plan was to just twist the wire around the clip with some needlenose pliers....except Andy doesn't have any at the house. So we used regular pliers.

...You get the drift. It was a nightmare, and what should have taken us a couple hours to produce quality products, will now take a day and a half to produce shoddy work.

Such is my luck.

Beer Tasting/Pairing Party

The Ranks

Friday we went to a coworker's house for a Beer Tasting & Pairing Party. I totally misunderstood how it was going to happen, but I had a great time anyway. I (and Andy) thought that the judging was going to be based not only off of the beer but off of your pairing choice.

The party started at 7, and Andy worked until 5:45, and we had to go home first, and it's a half-hour trek...I wasn't sure at all what kind of food I could make in 10 minutes. I finally came up with the idea to make soft pretzels out of refrigerated canned breadsticks, and alter the leftover Rotel cheese dip we had to make it go. I worked as fast as I could and we managed to make it to the party only like 20 minutes late, with 2 dozen warm soft pretzels and a 6-pack of Arcadia Nut Brown Ale.

Apparently the food and beer were totally separate things, so I could have just taken a bag of chips or some bakery cookies, but oh well! Now I can make fast, semi-convincing soft pretzels at least!

I made some new friends, because they had Order of the Engineer rings! I need to Facebook stalk them so we can hang out with them again - they live right near Debbie & Robert!

...Our beer placed right in the middle, if you were wondering.

Babies Everywhere!

This > Flowers

Sara and Alicia both had their babies yesterday, and Melanie had hers Saturday, and Andy's cousin and his wife (Kaleb & Stephanie) had theirs today...there are apparently a lot of people getting it on in early March.

There is no aphrodisiac quite like green beer. As a Rolla student, I can say that for certain. And all of this concrete evidence only backs me up.

Instead of getting Sara flowers when we visited her, we got her this chocolate bouquet. THAT'll get rid of the post-partum acne!! (I don't even know if you get acne after you have a baby, I just made that up.)

Sooo....

Welcome:

Charlie Liam

Alexandra Ann

Jackson Dennis

:)

Budding Ad Execs

Branding Geniuses

This is what Andy & I did while we ate lunch today. I'm not even sure how we started talking about it. Apparently though, we've invented a new laxative, called Turdlelax. The logo will be a turtle walking away from a pile of steaming poo, sporting a toothy grin.

FUUUUCKING COLD

Beer + Sub-Freezing = :(

Okay so you really can't tell at all in this picture what's happening, so let me explain.

Jenny gave me some tickets to the Chiefs-Broncos game, and I happily took them. Turns out it was like 1 degree outside, and in my half-awake state of packing I didn't do a very good job of being prepared for the weather. Usually when I go to Chiefs games I'm the one person who has everything I need to kick the cold's ass. Not this time. Honestly I'm not sure even if I brought everything I ordinarily do I would have been warm.

This picture, my friend, is a frozen tap. All of the taps in the stadium were. No draft beer for this crowd. :(

On a positive note, bottled beer was the same price as bottom-shelf cocktails, so I had a bourbon & water and it helped warm me from the inside.

In Soviet Russia, Vodka Drink YOU.

Or Poland. Whichever.

This vodka is $120, and if I had an extra $120 I would have taken this picture from my house instead of the liquor store.

The flask is a hand grenade....it does not get any better than that.

God Bless ‘Merikuh.

Liberal Propaganda

I got this sticker from Turn Off Fox, and I love it. I wasn't sure where I wanted to put it - we're definitely not the stickers on cars types, and putting it at home wouldn't do any good - most of the people crossing our threshold are already bleeding heart liberals. I decided for now to hang it up in my cubicle at work, to maintain my reputation as a young (read: naive) hippie-type.

I'd like to have about a million and stick them at every high-traffic area I can think of, but alas I do not. Anybody who watches Fox News and believes it to be unbiased or wholly factual is on crack. You want to watch it, fine, just don't cite it to me or anybody else who is interested in legitimate news journalism.

Turn off Fox is a product of CREDO, an organization that fosters slacktivists such as myself. It's a site worth checking out, even if you just want to find out about some of the issues Congress is dealing with at any given time.

The Elusive Christmas House

There is this house, probably just over a mile from mine, and they have SO many Christmas decorations in their yard! Ordinarily, I think it looks gaudy and tacky, but they've somehow taken the high road. Rather than inflatable snow globes, and life-size nativity scenes, they just have a lot of lights - light trees, light snowflakes, and just lights - in a wonderful variety of colors. It's not like any other yard decorating I've ever seen.

I've been trying to get a good picture of it for like 3 weeks, every time we pass it on Tuesday & Thursday evenings, and this is what they always look like. Much like my tree, this house apparently doesn't like to be photographed. Before Christmas, I will make Andy stop and I will use my real camera and I will try my damnedest to properly capture it. It's awesome.

Sexting FAIL

Me: Too bad you're not here, we could sneak into the shower and do it.  ;)

Andy:  You're not getting me Star Trek Online are you?  I just found one marked down to $10.