Weather Update

Me: OOO look, it is snowing!
Mentor Pam: I know I just looked up and saw that crap.
Me: It's so preeeeetty...
Mentor Pam: Yes, you're right. It is the pretty kind of crap.

Can you guess which of us has a longer commute? 4-10 inches tonight! Whoohoo!!!

Girl with the pearl earings...

Grams and I have the same birth month which means all of her amazing antique garnets have my name on them. Whenever I visit Sister, Mom and I all get to dig threw Grams' jewels trying on pieces as we go. She has some stunners including a pendant made of old Jerusalem church glass, a giant aquamarine cocktail ring that is so sparkly it almost looks fake, and all of the great grandparents inscribed wedding bands. When I turned 18 I got a package in the mail, postmarked from Ventura. In it was a Waterford crystal martini glass holding Grandma's string of Japanese pearls. I adore that necklace and make a point to wear it on my first day of every new job; they make me feel grown-up, glamorous and unstoppable.
Over Thanksgiving break while I played cards with her, the ocean over our shoulders, she told me she had won a gift certificate to her favorite jewelers and that my birthday would be coming early this year. The next day we walked Main Street and window shopped, finally stopping at the jewelers. Together we oooohed and aaaahed over the beautiful necklaces, bracelets and rings until we stopped at the pearl earrings. We picked out the perfect pair and put them on hold. Grandma worked out the details and a few days after getting home from my trip to California I found a little package waiting for me. Inside were my pearl earrings. My set is complete and every time I see them I will think of Grandma, crystal martini glasses and Main Street strolls.
Happy (very) early birthday to me!

Socks and underwear

Do you know what everyone loves to get? New socks and underwear. No seriously. There is nothing quite like unfolding a pair of tube socks and slipping your toes in that shapeless cotton for the very first time. You know that the fabric is going to mold perfectly to your feet and the elastic around the top will fit snugly to your ankle. Everything about it feels clean and new so you know it is going to be a good day with a fresh start.
Then there is new underwear. Guy or girl, it doesn't matter, new under-things make everyone feel special. Whether it is printed boxers, ruffly underwear, or something else entirely they are your very own little secret. Even if no one else but the inside of your jeans sees them, you feel pretty/handsome/beautiful because of your new little pants.
So maybe this Christmas season as you are trying to watch your money you should consider the gift of new socks and underwear because really, who wouldn't want some of those?



(Photos from google images, boxers from www.oldnavy.com)

The "Sometimes Taco Bell" Story

Sometimes during class I get so hungry I have to go to Taco Bell on my way home. Sometimes when I go to Taco Bell on my way home I order extra food so I can have the leftovers for breakfast.
Sometimes when I order extra food so I can have the leftovers for breakfast I eat all of it that night and have none left for the next morning.
Sometimes when I eat all of it that night and have none for the next morning I end up running late and have no time for breakfast so when I get to work my blood sugar is so low I want to throw things.
And sometimes, just sometimes, when all of that happens someone surprises me with a package of Hostess Suzy Qu's chocolate cake sandwiches on my desk which boosts my low blood sugar, nothing gets thrown, and all is well.

Sidenote: Mentor Pam is the best.

In a funk

Sometimes it is easier to post things I've written long after the fact.

10.2.08
Do you ever get in a funk? Where nothing is wrong but everything feels off? You know that everything in your life is wonderful and nothing bad has happened but you just don't feel like yourself. The roof of your mouth tickles and your ankles itch. Your eyes change colors with your moods, from hazel to a definite green. In the morning you wake up after 8 hours of sleep and feel like you could do another ten. Your appetite is gone and you crave everything. Staying at home in the quiet sounds perfect but being alone is lonely. You blame the barometric pressure, the full moon, maybe hormones, allergies, or a bad batch of Chinese food. People do nothing wrong and yet it feels like they're out to get you. The mirror becomes your enemy and the shower your best sanctuary. Do you ever feel like that? No? Yeah. Me neither.

The prettiest mom

Flashback...circa 1995...blue dodge caravan...driving home from 5th grade...

"Mom there is a new girl at school and she is in my class and she is so pretty but I haven't talked to her yet and she has long hair and she has highlights in it and she was wearing really cute shoes and her name is Andrea and she is from Mexico and we met her mom and oh my gosh her mom is the prettiest mom I have ever seen." I paused to take a breath.
"The prettiest mom, huh?"
Without hesitating I said, "Yes. The prettiest ever."
"Prettier than me?" The van filled with silence as I thought.
"Well, she is the prettiest mom but you are the funniest."
"That's ok, she can be the prettiest." Mom said without skipping a beat, "I'll be funny for much longer than she will be pretty."

Yet another old lady moment

After a cold snowy day of shopping Kelsey and I voted on having a Sunday movie afternoon. The whole way home we talked about how much we wanted a cup of tea, blueberry tea to be specific. Since I usually just make a cup for myself I have never gotten to use my teapot for company. I boiled the water and poured it into the pretty ceramic pot to brew our belly warming drink. When I set it on the table Kelsey laughed. "Your teapot has a sweater!"
"It isn't a sweater. It is a tea cozy! My grandma knit it."
She started laughing so hard at me she could barely speak. "Most 23 year olds have beer cozies. You have a tea cozy."
"True story but I am still PUMPED to use it."

Oh boy(s) III

Recently a good guy friend of mine stopped by. Looking around my house, which is decked out for Halloween, he said, "You have an actual house. A respectable one."
"As opposed to what?"
"As opposed to mine. Every weekend it is full of empty beer bottles, drunk guys and leftover White Castle burgers. Sometimes during the week, too." Hard to argue, he has a point. After that he went to the fridge to grab himself something to drink and I heard explatives coming from the kitchen.
"You ok in there?"
"Yeah, I just can't find a beer in all this healthy s*!$" I laughed but was a bit confused. Healthy? I didn't think so. Judge for yourself.
Contents Of My Fridge
-A jar of pickle (not pickles, just one lonely pickle floating in the jar)
-Chunk of cheese
-Expired soy milk
-Ranch dressing (to go with my frozen chicken nuggets)
-Tortillas (flour and corn)
-Three jars of salsa
-Sketti sauce
-Parmesean
-Olives
-Butter
-More butter

G-chat giggles

Grandma Doris recently entered the world of technology. Over the past few months she has been recieving gmail tutorials from Katie, who drives up the coast every few weeks to visit Grandma in Ventura. While she has gotten quite good at sending and reading emails she hadn't quite figured out how to respond in a chat box. Us grandkids decided it was too confusing to explain on the phone so I promised to teach her when I visit over Thanksgiving. In the meantime, I said, she could just enjoy our little messages when they popped up and know we were online thinking of her at that very moment.
The other day I sent her a quick g-chat message when I saw her onling, just saying hi. All of a sudden I got a response! I was shocked! Aunt Dorene was over for dinner and figure it out. She passed the lesson along and now, Grandma knows how to g-chat. "Miracle of miracles," she said. "Can you just believe this?"
Then, today, she popped online during my lunch hour and I told her Paul and Katie were around too! Paul was napping in the library in London and Katie was eating her mid-morning snack at work in LA. We all said hi to her and I think it made her week. "Caley I am giggling too hard to type!" To Paul she said, "Katie came on too and now I am laughing out loud for real!" Jumping from box to box she occasionally 'lost' one of us but as a whole she did a great job for her first time talking to more than one person at once.
After about ten minutes of chatting we must have worn her out because mid conversation she said "BYE." I told her, "Shhh, Grandma, capital letters mean you're yelling!" She said she just about fell out of her chair laughing at the thought of someone yelling on the computer.
I have a feeling she can't wait to tell everyone at her bridge game about her morning of g-chat giggles.

Cheap concert

Recently at a concert I decided that if you are too cheap to buy a ticket to a concert, just give a friend who is going a few bucks and tell them to call you and hold their cell phone up for the whole show. At least that is what the incredibly tall giant drunk man in front of me did at the Jason Mraz concert. It was like standing behind a brick wall. But hey, at least his friend on the other end of the phone call got to hear my favorite songs even if I didn't really get to see them.


Giant Man. If you can't tell how giant he is, note the fact that the arm of Normal Guy (who is standing next to Giant Man) just barely reaches to the top of Giant Man's head.

Temperature by nose

There are two kinds of cold here in Minnesota during the winter: runny nose cold and frozen booger cold. That might be a crude way of telling the temperature but it is true. Either you walk outside and the inside of your nostrils are immediately crystalized or within 30 seconds you're sniffling.
So far it has only been runny nose cold but at about 15 degrees last night it threatened to enter into frozen booger cold. After a long walk through several parking lots, Kelsey and I had to find some way to warm up. I opted to try and squeeze my entire body under the hand dryer in the bathroom while Kelsey stole my scarf and tried to wrap it around herself as tightly as possible. (See pictures below)
I think this little one had a better idea on how to warm up...

"Wicked" around the world

London, Minneapolis and Los Angeles: Sister, baby brother and I all saw the musical Wicked at different theaters around the world within two weeks of each other. The best part is that none of us really planned it. Paul got tickets through his study abroad, I got offered an extra ticket from a friend, and Katie's show was a birthday present.
Almost ten years ago I read the book and Gregory Maguire's descriptive prose made me feel like I was swimming in colors, smells, and textures. It brought me to a specific place and time as only one other author ever had: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Maguire's scenes were as vivid to me as the cocktail party Daisy visited at Gatsby's house. Even seeing the play, with the bright costumes flashing and music surrounding me didn't compare to reading the book.
His writing makes my fingers itch to take up a pen and there was one passage that has become a bit like the holy grail of composition to me. I read it and want to dive in.

"The skies throbbed with turqoise, even at midnight. Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into a hammered silver like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing. If she could drown in the grass, she thought, it might be the best way to die."
-Gregory Maguire, Wicked

Someday I would like to be able to write like that.

Beauty post

I usually stay away from writing about fashion, even though I love to shop. One blog I follow is called Karla's Closet and Karla sometime does beauty posts. She gives great advice on products as well as tips and tricks about make-up. I said to myself, "Self, lets try to mix things up a bit." So, here is my version of a beauty post. Really it is just ridiculous and doesn't have much to do with beauty but thats ok.

1) Lip products. At 10:00pm at Hennepin and 10th in downtown Minneapolis in the freezing cold I stood on the street corner digging through my purse, trying to find my lipstick. Not just any lipstick, I wanted, no I needed, the Bobby Brown lip matte in Sandstone. Noticing how many other products I found during my hunt I decided to take time the next morning to count how many there are floating around in the secret corners of my handbag.

There are 13 in my purse. Right now. Yes, I do realize they all seem to be almost the exact same color but see--I get in my head that I tend to need the perfect shade of peach/pink/mauve and keep buying things until I find exactly what I pictured.

2) Tights. Wearing dresses and skirts during winter in Minnesota requires creativity as well as lots of pairs of tights. Somehow I ended up with a bum pair that has no elasticity and doesn't keep their shape so after walking 17 gazillion blocks from the parking lot to the office, I looked like this first thing in the morning. It did not bode well for the rest of the day.
No, not looking like the bees knees here. Just elephant knees.

3) Nailpolish. Sometimes I get bored. In class. And I chip my nailpolish off. But for those of you who have experience in this wildly popular middle school pastime, it is nearly impossible to get all the polish off of your writing hand because the other hand just can't quite hack it. Of course, normal people would go home and use polish remover to get the remaining color off of their hands but I am not normal. No, I forgot that logical little step and spent the entire next day laughing at my hands on the keyboard: one polishless and one dark, dark, merlot.

(Sorry for the poor quality. It is really hard to take a picture with your cell phone of both of your hands. Near impossible, actually, so Kels took this for me in a dark theater.)

And that, folks, is my stab at a beauty post. Or maybe more of an anti-beauty post...

Migraine pause

Ever had a migraine? Then you know that even the next day you wake up feeling like a semi-truck backed over your head a few times. So, excuse me while I pause to try to wipe the tire tracks off my face and pretend I feel fine.
I won't expose you to any horrid "hold music" but I will give you this link to fill the space. A live web-cam of an ADORABLE litter of shiba-inu puppies. [Sigh.] Enjoy!

Family Musings, Part IV

For as long as I can remember my mom has worn the perfume Opium by Yves Saint Laurent. It a dark amber color and sits on the glass top of her dresser in the deep red bottle with gold leaves swirling around the label. She never leaves the house without a spritz and although it is never overpowering, everything she touches seems to keep a little of the scent for itself. When she visits my house and cuddles the cat I can smell her on Ebbie's fur even after she is gone.
During my time studying in Madrid I traveled every few weeks and always found time to stop at the duty free shops at the airport. Walking through the aisles of perfumes at Madrid Barajas Airport I stopped when I saw the YSL display. Opening the dark red bottle with the gold cap I breathed in deeply and almost started to cry. It smelled so familiar I expected Mom to come around the stack of boxes at any second. It smelled like hugs, Mom's warm car, a cool hand on a hot cheek, and borrowed scarves. Fumbling with my bag I pulled out my travel pillow and spritzed some of the perfume on it. For a few days, I felt a little less homesick falling asleep with that familiar scent.
A few weeks ago, for Katie's 30th birthday, Mom flew out and surprised her in California. My brother-in-law Joey was in on the secret and brought Katie to "run an errand" at the grocery store, where Mom was waiting in the wine aisle. Joe said that when Kate saw Mom she stopped walking so quickly it looked like she had run into an invisible wall. Slowly she crept closer to see if it was actually Mom. She sniffed the air, recognized the YSL perfume and knew for certain Mom was really standing there.
I've always wanted to find signature scent, one that makes people think of me automatically. Hopefully I'll discover it before I have kids so that when they are far from home they can feel me by their side, too.

Procrastination conclusion

You know that paper I procrastinated about and put off until the last second? Well, I got it back; 100%. That is beyond an A. That is an A+. "A perfect paper," according to my prof. Take that and put it on your fridge. No, really. My parents are out of town so I have no one to "OOOO" and "AAHHHH" over my big girl accomplishment and I decided putting my grading sheet up on the fridge in the break room at work might be a little sad/creepy/desperate. So, here I am...hanging it on a virtual refrigerator so you can humor me by "OOOOing" and "AAHHHing."

Hold my hand when you cross the street!

Look both ways!
Don't jaywalk!
Wait for the light!
Use the crosswalk!

Sounds simple, right? It should be, except for when the street/sidewalk line painters can't make up their minds. Every time I walk on this stretch of road, which is several times a day, I mentally shake my head. Get it together, people!


Just to be safe, I walk on the part where the two intersect. Can't be too careful...

Take me to Malaga, please

When I was living in Spain I made a trip to visit my favorite British ex-pats and it was an escape from the heat of the city, from tasteless food my body hated, and the whir of a foreign language constantly slipping through my ears. Homesickness had taken over and all I wanted to do was find some ruby slippers to click. Apparently hopping on a RyanAir flight to see Gerald, Liz and Lizzie would be just as good.
In Malaga, my bed had fluffy bedding, not thin, worn blankets. Instead of having to fight the heat without even a fan as a weapons, I got to sleep in a room with air conditioning and a cat curled up under my chin. The TV showed programs in English, even some American sitcoms. Doors opened up to an ocean view instead of a busy plaza and then there was the food. Porridge, fresh fruit, roasts, potatoes, vegetable soup, cherries on ice cream, shrimp cocktail: extravagant and comfort food all at once.
While the physical accommodations were priceless, it was getting to be with people I consider family that really made my short trip the most relaxing vacation I took during my six months abroad. I got constant hugs, pats on the shoulder, linked arms and hours to catch up on years apart over tea. Palm trees, fresh picked oranges, a house full of cats, and surrogate family; I need to plan a trip.