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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Wednesday Thoughts

As a great American poet once said,

Back in Philly we be out in the park
A place called the plateau is where everybody goes

Guys out huntin' and girls doin' likewise

Honkin' at the honey in front of you with the light eyes

She turn around to see what you beepin' at

It's like the summer's a natural aphrodisiac

And with a pen and pad, I compose this rhyme
To hit you and get you equipped for the summertime

  
Now that it's summer time, I feel like I can't waste any of it. I have a few things I *have* to do this summer. Namely, 

  • Using my new roller skates. Which is more important, knee pads or wrist guards?
  • Resist the urge to shave my head. The humidity makes my hair a mass of chaos. I keep fantasizing about a smooth, bald head.


  • Experience an evening of summer magic. I don't know what this will entail but I picture a ferris wheel (without me on it - those things are death traps), strings of lights, water, sand, fireflies.... We'll see if it happens. 
  • Watch a summer blockbuster at the movie theater. 
  • Eat as much fresh produce as possible. 
  • Maybe even have some summer romance.
  • Have a watermelon seed spitting contest.
What about you guys? What do you want to do this summer? In Ann Arbor, there's a fun summer festival called Top of the Park. I went there the other night and watched the Goonies on the outdoor movie screen:


Pretty magical, huh? Yesterday on the radio, I heard an evil DJ say, "In six months we'll be shoveling snow." So evil!! But he had a point - summer is short (in Michigan) so we have to take advantage of it!

Happy Wednesday!

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

A little accident

Yesterday while washing a load of laundry, I threw a pillow in with the load. What I didn't know was that that pillow had a rip in its seam, and during the wash, it barfed up its insides. After pulling it all out (mumbling and grumbling the whole time) and tossing most of it in the garbage, I came up with a plan for the remaining fluff.

My sister, Katherine, has this teddy bear (sorry Katherine, I just outed you as a teddy bear owner). I love messing with it to annoy Katherine (do adults EVER grow out of pranking their siblings?). So I decided to use the fluff as (ahem)... poo. Teddy bear poo. And thereby make her second guess whether or not her teddy bear is house trained.

Doesn't he look so ashamed?
P.U.!!

(she doesn't have any bedding on her bed because she was washing it)*

Why this post needed four pictures, I have no idea. I just wanted to make sure you got the whole picture, I guess. Do any of you still like to mess with your siblings?

*I would too if my bed was covered with bear poo.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Starlight Spectacular

Over the weekend I went on vacation and basically had the time of my life. I'm not going to lie you guys, I needed this trip. This year has been rough - I can't get into why on here (sorry, not trying to be cryptic/annoying) - but suffice it to say, I need a vacation from my problems.*

So my friend Emily and I planned a trip to ride in the Starlight Spectacular - a moonlight bike ride through Colorado Springs and the Garden of the Gods. Emily invited two of her friends and the four of us proceeded to spend the weekend doing things we won't be able to tell our grand kids about.**

Here are some pictures:

Girl talk at the cabin
Bad news for my love life :(

At the top of Pikes Peak - over 14,000 feet!
Grilled watermelon salad - three thumbs up! (out of two)
The ride itself starts at 10:30 PM Saturday night. Most people were dressed in funky costumes adorned with blinky lights, glow sticks, and other fun items. It was so fun to see how creative some people are! It's a 22 mile ride and I think we got back at 1:30am. It's not a race - just a fun ride. In fact, at one point while riding through Colorado Springs, we saw about twenty + people from our ride in line at Dunkin Donuts. There were two themed rest areas, and the second one was pure magic. It looked like Stars Hollow. Here are some more pictures.

(Sorry about the quality - it's hard to get good pictures at night with your phone!)


Glowy

magical...


It was a super fun ride - kind of hard at times for yours truly since I'm not used to the altitude, but I would definitely do it again! Oh and in case you were wondering, no one noticed my scrape. In conclusion, I'd rate this vacation 21 out of 10.


*Ten points to Ravenclaw for anyone who gets that movie reference. 
**I felt peer pressured to sound cool. We didn't do anything that bad. Except for that one thing. But our grand kids will think it's cool.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

First Impressions: The story of the Scrape: A Lifetime Original Movie

I woke up this morning with a little bit of dried blood on my forehead. I looked in the mirror and noticed I had a tiny scrape. Most likely some demon got in my bedroom in the night and scraped me or something (a mini demon). I cleaned the scrape and thought, "oh great, I am going on vacation tomorrow with a scrape on my head. What will they think!?"



I know it's tiny but here's the thing, I'm going on vacation with a close friend and two of her friends who I've never met. You know how it is when you meet your friend's friends. You size them up. You wonder what it is your friend sees in them. What are these girls going to see in me?

Emily is friends with a girl who goes around with open wounds on her head?

Am I supposed to say something about it? She's a scrape person!

Is this just something people in Michigan do? Get scraped and act like it's no big deal!?

I'm thinking about nipping it in the bud right away and just saying, "Hi, I'm Elizabeth! I was stabbed by a demon with a toothpick in my sleep but don't worry, I cleaned it out and it's all good."

Or maybe, "I know I have a scrape on my head but I'm still a good person."

I just hope I can overcome this setback and have a good vacation anyway.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Wednesday Thoughts

I had an incident with some cookies tonight. I was left five no bake cookies. I knew when I saw them that I was going to have a very hard time not eating them all at once. They just looked sooo good, and I was so hungry. I took one bite and then tried to gain some control over the situation:

Me:

Stop eating cookies. One is enough.

Ok.... I'll just have one. Well, and this second one is broken in half...

...And this part is broken too.

Ok, that's ENOUGH! STOP!

I'm trying but I can't!!! I think I might be at the point of no return!!

Save the last one for later!! Don't eat them all at once!!

I think it's too late!!!

Just walk away, you idiot!!!

Its gravitational pull is too strong (quickly eating it)!!

-and scene.-

And that's how it went down. I think I blacked out after that.

When I came to, I visited my grandma. She was asking me about a trip I'm leaving for this weekend. Her first question after, "are you excited?" was, "How are you going to wear your hair." She's become very concerned lately about me letting my hair fall over my face at all. She said tonight, "Your hair looks so pretty from behind when it's curly."

From behind.

She is constantly telling me to put two barrettes in it - one on either side - even when it's curly. This is what I imagine whenever she says that:



I mean, no offense to Anne, who looked adorable with that hair style. I just don't think a thirty-blank year old can pull it off. Nor do I want to try.

Happy Wednesday!

Friday, June 7, 2013

Best Friends Forever

When you're a kid, the most important part of finding a best friend is geography. You live next door to me? You're probably my best friend. You're in my class and we're in the same brownies troupe? Best friend. No wait, what I meant to say was best friend FOREVER. Because that's how dedicated we are to each other.

But what we don't know is that next year, when we have different teachers, things won't be the same. We'll give each other high fives in the hallway when my class is walking to recess and your class is coming back in, but you'll be hanging out with that girl you sit by in your new class, and I'll be increasingly hanging out with my back-up best friend and next thing you know, our best friendship will be dissolving. It's not a tragedy, it's just childhood.

Which is why when I saw this on a sidewalk last night, I was tempted to write "I give this one year, tops."



When I was about six years old, I was best friends with a girl named Kelly R.  We weren't in the same class, but she lived down the street from me, which is the next best thing. We played together all the time. Saying "played together" sounds weird, doesn't it? But it doesn't become "hanging out" till you're what they call today a "tween." That's when you have to start correcting your mom that you're not "playing," you're "hanging out - JEEZ." And you have to say it very earnestly and with a bit of an eye roll if you really want to drive the point home that you're no longer a kid.

Anyway, we played together all the time. We were really into Footloose and we danced and sang along to that all the time. We had grand dreams of building a secret garden in the tiny bit of shrubbery and two trees in her backyard. And we played truth or dare, which at that age was about as G rated as you could get. Kelly's parents were divorced, so it was just her, her mom, and her sister, which was a very different dynamic than my own home where I had two parents and three younger siblings. Their house, just one block down from mine, had the exact same layout as my own though, so it didn't feel like I was too far away.

I remember nothing about Kelly's mom. Nothing at all. She must have been there, but who knows what she was doing. I do remember her sister though. She was overweight and a couple years older than us. She'd play with us sometimes and was nice enough. I played at their house so often (it must have been summer vacation) that one time when I was at my own house playing on the swingset with my sisters, I found out just how much I'd been gone. I said something like, "He's such a wiener." And my sisters went, "ooooOoOoO! That's a bad word! We're not allowed to say wiener."

I was astonished. I mean, yes we were allowed to say wiener. Or rather, at Kelly's house we were. Suddenly I realized that I was spending too much time at Kelly's house if I didn't even know what the rules were at my own house.

Soon after that, Kelly and her sister and mom moved. I have no idea where they moved to. It could have just been an hour away, but when you're a kid it may as well have been California for all I knew. I didn't know how to buy stamps, (I didn't know how to express myself in writing anyway) the internet hadn't been invented yet, and we just had to face the facts: best friends forever just wasn't in the cards for us.

It was ok though, because as soon as the school year started, I had a new best friend anyway.

So maybe after writing "I give this one year, tops," I could add, "but it'll be ok."

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Wednesday Thoughts

Dang, I haven't really been blogging much lately, huh? I don't know why, exactly. I've just been busy, I guess. Catching chipmunks, making hula hoops, playing with doggies and kids, looking up gifs of Jessie Spano losing it in the "I'm so excited" episode of Saved by the Bell, and so on and so forth. Normal adult stuff.

One of my biggest accomplishments in the past week has been to make maple bacon cupcakes. Yama mama they were good!! I will share the recipe here, if you guys are interested. The cake recipe I used was sort of "meh." But the frosting.... oh my gosh you guys the frosting...... It was SO GOOD! Check this out:


Don't you just want to lick that bowl clean? Well you can't, cause I already did. That is not my own Kitchenaid mixer, by the way. I wish it was. One of my top life goals is to own a Kitchenaid mixer. The life goal list goes something like this:

1. Trick someone into marrying me
2. Have kids
3. Get a Kitchenaid mixer
4. Save the planet
5. Get a dog

But not necessarily in that order. And if I can even just get 4/5 of those, I'll be happy. I won't say which four.

But I digress. Here is a picture of the finished cupcakes:



In other Wednesday Thoughts, I heard that song, "I had the time of my life," from Dirty Dancing, on the radio this morning. Just thinking about that movie made me feel so summer-y! I just love summer movies. I'm actually not a huge fan of Dirty Dancing (what was she - like 17? And he was like 35? That ain't right) but the music was really good. Some of my favorite summer movies are as follows:

The Sandlot! (duh!)
The Great Outdoors (a classic - cracks me up every time!)
What About Bob (a family favorite)
Weekend at Bernies (I'm kidding!!! Calm down!)
The Parent Trap (old and new - I love both so much.)
Summer Magic (one of my most favorite Disney movies ever.)

What are some of your favorite summer movies?

Happy Wednesday!