There's something in the water...literally

It was a hot summer day in suburbia. Well, I call it suburbia. My grandpa said we lived in a forest and he swore up and down he’d get eaten by a bear when he came to visit. My grandfather’s definition of forest meant any bit of land involving a tree taller than him. And our yard had three large pine trees on a three-quarters of an acre lot. So by my grandfather’s definition, we lived in a huge forest. He also referred to any body of water as a “crick” (creek) even if it had Ocean or River in its proper title.

Anyway, in the forest, or suburbia, or whatever you want to call it, we lived in a neighborhood with a wide variety of socioeconomic statuses. My family lived in a smaller, older home amongst a neighborhood boasting million dollar mansions; we didn’t have luxuries like air conditioning or underground pools to keep us cool when the temperatures started to rise, or waterfront views of the Puget Sound to keep us occupied while we watched the maid fold laundry. But we did have the most bad-ass, kiddy pool ever invented as off 1999.

It was a three-foot-deep, blow-up pool (probably made in China, and therefore containing large amounts of lead) that took what seemed like five days to fill with air (really it took about 30 min, but that seems like forever when it’s hot out and you need some fast heat relief).

On one unassuming day, I decided it was time to take a dip. The pool was littered with countless floating toys and inner tubes that covered the entire surface area. Yes, we crammed that dinky pool with floating devices. You could only float about a foot to the left or the right, but if you closed your eyes you could pretend you were on a beach instead of in the forest.

I stood in the water, shuffling the inner tubes around, preparing to sit in one, when a dark spot in the corner of the pool caught my eye. Slowly, I moved the inner tube away. My eyes became wide as I realized that I was staring at something furry with a tail. I shrieked in horror, “AHHH!!!! THERE’S A DEAD SQUIRREL IN THE POOL!!!”

I jumped out of the water and ran shrieking to the shower, scrubbing my legs that had come into contact with the dead-squirrel water. I couldn’t scrub them hard enough. I wanted to throw acid on my legs.

My dad heard me screaming and came out wondering what was going on. I kept screaming, “DEAD SQUIRREL! DEAD SQUIRREL!” Even while scrubbing in the shower, I couldn't stop screaming.

He walked out there, and removed the dead squirrel with a shovel. “It must have fallen from that tree and drowned,” my dad said looking up at the guilty branch that led the squirrel to its fate.

When he lifted the squirrel out of the water, it was rigor mortis with its arms outstretched as if it had attempted to go against all biological instinct and swim. Its mouth was open, trying to emit a squirrel scream, oblivious that it was inviting water to invade its airways. The poor guy ended up being taken out with the yard waste on garbage day. What a terrible way to go.

I never wanted to see a squirrel again, but I didn’t get that lucky, as they frequented my parent’s back yard as though we lived in the backdrop of freakin’ Snow White. Every squirrel I saw reminded me of the dead one I took a swim with.

After I was convinced our kiddy pool was haunted with the soul of the squirrel, we ended up throwing it away. Okay maybe my mom was just concerned about bacteria. Who knows what kind of squirrel disease stuck to the lead-infested plastic, only awaiting us for next hot summer day. Regardless of the reasoning, we were rid of the retched pool.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but look before you leap (into the three-foot kiddy pool).

YES!!!

The last time I cried because I was overwhelmed with utter joy and happiness was when I was watching Extreme Home Makeover. And because this occurred each and every time it was on, I had to make a conscious decision to stop spending my Sunday nights as a smiling, blubbering mess. I now purposefully change the channel before Ty's bleached tips can have a chance to blind my eyes.

But then today, it happened again. The cause: a simple text message: your mom got on the transplant list in sf!!! love dad

Right when my eyes met the word "list," a grin sprung across my face from ear to ear and tears started pouring from my eyes. Did I mention I was walking into the grocery store? People were looking at me like I was crazy, but I didn't care. We've been waiting to hear those words for a year and a half. I called my dad immediately and was walking aimlessly around the store, trying to remember why I drove there in the first place.

Once I hung up (and remembered to go towards the organic milk), I couldn't get through the line fast enough. I couldn't get out of the parking lot fast enough. The car in front of me wasn't going fast enough.

Once I was finally at my house. I bounded through the door and let out the biggest "whooo!!!" as though I were in a rock concert. I'm sure I kind of freaked out my new neighbors too. I did a happy dance all by myself, and practically jumped on my boyfriend when he came home from work. He even did a cartwheel in celebration with me :)

I called my mom and called my sisters and we celebrated through the receivers. I'm going home this weekend to celebrate some more.

YES! YES! YES!

Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but nothing will break my hope.

Food Schmood

The time has come for me to stand atop my soap box and preach to you about the disgusting things I learned about food over these past few weeks. I have been deeply engrossed in Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser’s exposé that reaches far beyond your Big Mac craving and delves into the ways the industry has shaped our society and the way we get all food today. Because the book was not grossing me out enough, I decided to also watch Food, Inc., a movie that Eric Schlosser also helped produce.


That did it.

(A word of advice before you watch this, don’t eat baked chicken breast -or anything for that matter-while viewing it. Bad idea.)

Now, before you begin to condemn me for becoming an ultra-hippy, please know that I pondered reading Fast Food Nation for years before I chose to actually read it. Being the foodie that I am (let us not forget my candid blog about being the Fatties Fo Life Founder and President), I, like many of you, kept telling myself that ignorance is bliss. However, this mantra only gets us so far.

Ignorance is bliss if you don’t mind supporting conglomerate food industries that focus more on deregulating factory standards than making healthy products. Ignorance is bliss if you don’t mind supporting an industry that recruits Mexicans to illegally immigrate to the US, only to turn around and call the feds on them – but they only deport fifteen at a time so as not to affect company productivity. Ignorance is bliss if you don’t mind eating meat that’s made up of thousands of different cows that were raised standing in their own feces. Ignorance is bliss if you don’t mind eating chicken injected with antibiotics and growth hormones, which make them grow so large that their legs can’t even support them. This results in them sitting for much of their short life and living in their own feces, much like our friend the cow. Oh yeah. One last thing - ignorance is bliss if you don’t mind dying from e coli.

Do you need me to continue telling you how blissful our ignorance is? Just think of all that guilt and feces resting on your tongue.

These are the practices we support by simply putting food in our mouth. We are so disconnected from the source of our food, that we choose not to care about what’s being fed to us. Ignorance is not bliss if you value your health to any degree. The USDA, the FDA, and the food industry want you to revel in your ignorance. That is how they are able to bring you such dietary staples such as the dollar menu or the $5 foot long. They cut corners to fatten their wallets and to fatten your belly. 

But really? The USDA and FDA are in on this too?

Unfortunately, yes. Many of the execs that run the organizations meant to protect the health of the American people are now in it to protect the businesses that profit from destroying the health of the American people. Those that run the FDA and the USDA also ran food conglomerates or industrial farms/slaughter houses prior to their appointments in a government agency.

If that isn’t sheisty enough, let the numbers talk. In the 1970’s, tens of thousands of food inspections were conducted per year in the US. Today, that number is dwindling around 9,000.

Beef recalls. Spinach recalls. Tomato recalls. They are not recalled because someone overreacted. They are recalled because there is a serious problem here. Food is not being processed the way nature intended, resulting in diseases and other bacteria encountering the human body in ways that should never occur. Most, if not all of the food we consume in any given day are unnatural, filled with preservatives, pesticides and artificial flavor.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

With all of that being said, you must be waiting for me to declare my new-found vegan or vegetarian lifestyle.

I hate to disappoint you, but I absolutely refuse to give up meat. I crave it like a caveman, a trait that I attribute to my mother who also has meat cravings (we are a product of our environments after all).

BUT, I do vow to be more conscious than ever about the food I consume. I’m going organic. I’m going free-range chicken. I’m going grass-fed beef. I’m turning into the stereotypical, east-side yuppy that refuses to shop anywhere but Whole Foods or PCC (wow that didn’t take long).

I’m in an economic position where I can choose to buy foods that nourish my body rather than destroy it. It is no mistake that processed foods are cheap and healthier foods are pricey. The industry wants you to choose between Pop Tarts or baby carrots. And the industry wants you supporting them no matter how little your income.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but I am no longer living in ignorance.

Things that go "UGH!" in the night

 This woman brings a whole new meaning to the term "mouth breather."

Alas, the adventures of living with my significant other begin. The hardest adjustment has been learning to sleep with each other in the bed each night. While this isn't exactly a brand new experience, we both like to sprawl out, hog the sheets and take over every square inch of the queen-size bed.

Up until now, it wasn't so hard to adjust to limited bed space - it occurred on a weekend-only basis. Now that this is a nightly occurrence, this has become a problem. Limbs get shoved left and right, I scoot over to get away from his face that has suddenly become only inches away from mine, mouth hanging open, spraying the unquestionable scent of bacteria cells forming the early stages of morning breath.

Ugh.

Additionally, I am not one of those people that can fall asleep cuddling in her lover's arms. If you so much as have your toe touching me, I'm instantly awake and shoving you away from me. I absolutely cannot sleep with someone making contact with me in any way. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm just as big of a bed nuisance. I like to claim my spot right in the middle, and I often wake to him trying to scoot away from me as far as the bed will possibly allow (which isn't far). All I have to say, is that I really don't understand the couples that can comfortably sleep on a full-size bed. I'm convinced a king bed is in our future.


As I candidly explained in a previous blog entry, I'm a sleep talker (and walker, although this hasn't occurred in over a decade). This habit has gone unchanged with the new living situation.

The second night that we were adjusting to having company in the bed, he came in from a late night of playing his beloved video game. I had been in a dead sleep, trying to get in my z's before I was forced to toss and turn the rest of the night.


My boyfriend settled in, got in a comfortable position, and began to surrender himself to the comfort of sleep. Just before he was completely under, I yelled, "UGH!! LOUD BREATHIIIIING!!" and angrily rolled over, huffing and puffing.

I have no recollection of this whatsoever. He was instantly awake and laughing at me. He is used to me angrily huffing when he comes into the room when I'm sleeping, but I haven't formed an audible sleep-talking sentence for him like this in quite some time.


But he does breath loudly when he's sleeping. If he hasn't broken out into a full on snore, the air is escaping his nostrils at a force equal to Hurricane Katrina. Okay, so maybe I'm exaggerating, but my hair is fluttering in his wind. It's like sleeping next to a fan.


As much as I love telling you of all our misadventures, I'm happy to report that the sleeping situation is getting better. We've slowly but surely began getting used to each other in the bed, as I am sleeping soundly through the night, and through the unquestionable heavy breathing that's occurring around me.


Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but I'll always cherish the days when I had a queen bed to myself.

Conference Call Catastrophe

I really do hate writing about work, but I just couldn’t let this story go untold. This one of the most embarrassing things to almost happen to me.

I was getting ready to do some training via conference call and webinar. I looked at the webinar interface and dialed the conference call line I had manually put in there. The line rang as expected, but all of the sudden I heard jungle music and a woman’s sultry voice speaking dirty to me through the receiver. I had dialed a sex line!! I immediately hung up and thought, “Okay I must have missed a number when I dialed or something. No big deal.” I carefully re-dialed the number and it called the exact same line and I heard that nasty woman’s voice again. Panic mode!

That’s when realized I had an even bigger problem – all of the managers that would be accessing this training would be dialing the number I provided!

I quickly booked it out of the conference room and crash landed at my desk. On the verge of a major freak out, I saw that I had made the simple mistake of inputting 1-800 into the webinar information rather than 1-888.

I released a huge sigh of relief when I saw that I had typed the conference call number correctly in the Outlook Meeting Request I sent out. The number I had dialed incorrectly, would only be discoverable if the managers went onto the webinar interface and searched for the meeting, which luckily, no one did. Or if they had, they said nothing to me. Everything went as planned and the disaster was averted. Right?

Well, almost. I looked into other meetings I had set up using this same webinar tool, and realized I incorrectly typed in the sex hotline for future training sessions, and sent out the number on ALL of the Outlook meeting requests! Needless to say, emergency updates went out for everything and I’m praying that everyone gets them and the future training session occurs without incident.

Yikes.

I’ll keep you posted.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but a wrong number can turn into career-ending mortification.

When did I grow up?

Ay carumba. Bart Simpson’s infamous Spanish expression is the only phrase to describe how busy I’ve been (hence the lack of updating- sorry faithful readers). While training for a Half Marathon has been my favorite excuse to use (mainly because it sounds cool and time consuming), I have also been packing and hauling and moving in with my boyfriend. A first for us both!

So far it’s been an amazing two whole days. (Yeeeaaah. Check back with me later and see how I feel then.)

Because I’m stubborn and didn’t want to use any vacation time to prepare for the big move, my schedule this past week has been: work, run, pack, sleep, work, run, pack, sleep, work, run, pack, sleep. Two days before the move, in a fit of PMS rage, I declared, “I’M NOT RUNNING TODAY! I AM OVERWHELMED!” And I just packed all night instead. But now, I get to come home and relax.

Anyway, I’m getting off the subject before I’ve even started it. My point is that, I am more than excited to venture into this new step in our relationship. We even got a joint checking account to manage our bills, which really makes this step feel huge. It’s really like being married without the title (or the ring). I swear I’m not pressuring you Honey, just pointing out a fact. But I’m ready for this. He’s ready. And we’re excited to start our lives together, almost four years into our relationship.

Even my mom has said, “Now you and your boyfriend are one, so he’ll be around family functions more, huh?” I laughed. But it had some truth to it.

We’ve already begun learning each other’s quirks (and we thought we knew them all by now): He’s realized that I absolutely hate cleaning the shower and think anything more than once a week is a complete waste of time (he likes it daily). I’ve realized that he likes to leave wet towels on the bed. I’ve also realized that he absolutely cannot help but comment on something while I’m attempting to cook. He’s realized he cannot trust me alone in the kitchen. I’ve realized that nagging is the only way to get anything accomplished. He’s realized that if he doesn’t hear me nag him three times he won’t get it done. Oh love.

And while I had dreams of getting a dog immediately after our move-in date, my- I mean our- checking account is starving for money that is already designated to be spent on upcoming expenses such as a kitchen table, mixing bowls, a side table, not to mention our much-needed decorations and finally, saving up for his brother’s California wedding which will be here sooner than we know it. Realistically speaking, the dog isn’t happening until mid-summer at the earliest. But don’t worry. Our little family will be complete one day (that reassurance was more for me than it was for you).

But really, this truly is a milestone. I felt like an adult when I graduated college. I really felt like an adult when I landed my full-time job. But now, more than ever, I feel like I just woke up from being an 8 years old, and wondering when I became of age to move in with a boy.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, unless I break my boyfriend’s first. Just kidding! I love you honey!