Don’t you hate how hard it is to find a good movie these days? I feel like everything out in the theaters is either just dumb, or some overplayed concept, or unnecessarily deep, or plain old boring. That’s why last night, when we rented Hot Tub Time Machine, I had pretty low expectations. However, I loved it.
In case you haven’t seen it yet, please rent this movie. It’s hilarious. And has a neat little ending that they tie right up in a bow for you. I love films like that. It hearkens back to the good old days of movies like Overboard and Mannequin — those which have ridiculously far fetched premise (like a nasty hot tub that actually defies the space/time continuum) and entertains you for 90 mindless minutes. It was perfect.
In my opinion, movies these days just try way too hard. So many films try to be all deep and Quentin Tarrantino-ish. What ever happened to the movies of the 80s where you feel good after watching it, not confused or depressed? Movies where everything is spelled out for you and the ending is satisfying, not ambiguous or purposely sad.
I’m not that huge on my own birthday. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy barking orders at Grey all day long and saying things like, “Celebrate me, damnit!” when my birthday rolls around, but, especially ever since I had Ollie, 8-28 isn’t that big of a deal. Not that it ever was a huge extravaganza; I’ve always gotten way more excited about days like Halloween and Thanksgiving than my own date of birth. (What’s better than costumes or eating massive amounts of stuffing? Cake? I think not).
I think my lack of birthday enthusiasm has something to do with the fact that I never truly like being the center of attention. Yes, I like people paying attention to me, but up to a point. Even on my wedding day, the thought of having everyone’s eyes directly on me made me want to barf on myself (hence all the valium and champagne and then my inevitable inability to recall anything past 11AM). So having people just sit around and party because it is the day I came into existence? That just makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.
That’s part of why I’ve always been fascinated by who else shares my birthday. One of my best friends from Erie, Sarah, was born on August 28th too and we always had fun co-celebrating. Plus, as a pre-teen, the fact that Jason Priestly of the mega-hit Beverly Hills 90210 was popped out of his mother’s womb on the same day as me, well, that was pretty much incomprehensibly cool. I took it to mean that Brandon Walsh and I were soul mates. So even though my parents didn’t let me watch 90210 because they thought there was too much teen sex, I’d secretly catch every episode telling them I was watching Growing Pain reruns.
So happy birthday, to Mr. Jason Priestley. No clue what you’re doing now, but here’s to our day!
Only in the 90s could a pale, pasty dude in his dorky underwear and periwinkle shirt be so hot!
I now realize celebrating my birthday was probably a whole lot more fun for my parents than me. Ollie's birthday is my favorite day of the year -- how can my own date of birth hold a candle?
YAY! Bob Blumer, AKA The Surreal Gourmet found my note to him and acknowledged it! Yay. Haven’t been this excited since I heard from Punxsutawney Phil!!!
While you probably gathered from yesterday’s post that I enjoy cooking, I truly despise baking in all of its forms. I think it has something to do with the fact that baking requires following a recipe exactly; precise measurements of ingredients like baking soda and flour can make or break a cake or pie. And that’s exactly why I suck at it. I can’t just make up a cookie recipe as I go along — adding a little of this and that — like I can with a pasta or vegetable dish. I’ve done that before and gotten comments like, “Wow, this cake cuts like a Porterhouse!” Not exactly the reception for which I was hoping.
However, if you’ve read this blog more than once, you also probably know that I’m a glutton with a serious sweet tooth (Whoopie pies, anyone?). So though I wish I could bake myself spectacular confections to scarf down in the throes of my pregnant cravings, I can’t. So I have to satisfy myself with the next best thing: store bought cookie dough. My obsession with raw dough began as a small child while baking chocolate chips with my mom and it’s never really gone away. It reached its peak while in high school when I worked at Dairy Queen and during each four-shift I’d eat around 100-200 dough nuggets stolen from the Blizzard candy stash.
And though every doctor on the planet will advise a knocked up gal like myself to avoid ingredients like raw eggs (found in almost every store bought dough out there), I say, screw that. I’m a risk-taker. Plus, I’m a pig and I just can’t help myself. So when I found “Wholly Wholesome Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough” at the grocery store, I was thrilled! Yeah, it still has eggs in it, but with a name like “Wholly Wholesome” — who cares? I feel like I’m downing spinach and kale with every bite of 70% organic raw dough I consume. I know, logically, this snack is not the equivalent of munching on carrot sticks, but sometimes I prefer just to trick myself into thinking pure butter and sugar is a wise dietary choice. It’s like a euphemism for my stomach!
Faced with these options in my fridge for breakfast (fat free Greek yogurt, cherries, whole grain English muffins, or chocolate chip cookie dough) -- isn't my choice obvious? Good thing it's the same thing as eating a egg-white omelet!!
I’m home! God bless drinkable waters and the plentiful air at sea level! Life at 18,500 feet sure aint easy, but wow is it beautiful. I’ve been home for 24-hours now and I still can’t believe that I stood at the base of Mount Everest and looked up to see the highest point in the world. What a way to turn 30.
I didn’t get sick, my brain did not swell from the altitude and I was not robbed by armed bandits. But man, was it harder than I thought it was going to be. 12 days of straight hiking, sometimes for 10 hours a day, is a real kick in the pants. It feels like you are slowly running a marathon uphill with a backpack on. In reality, you are walking really slow because you’re gasping for breath, but it feels like you’re sprinting while your quads are crying and your knees remind you that you’re not 15 anymore.
But then you look up and you see the most beautiful mountains on planet earth and the pain slowly fades away. And we had much more than mountains to see. We met incredible people who invited us into their homes, let us pray in their monasteries, and fed us for next to nothing.
The sherpa families who live in the hills near Everest exist in a region with no roads, no cars, very little electricity and a lot of beauty. Many make their living as porters or guides for treks, as our guide Kansi did. Kansi has climbed to 27,230 feet and lost his older brother in an avalanche on Mount Everest. He promised his mother he would never climb it from the Nepal side, as that is how his brother died, but told us that if he had another chance to go up, he would as it pays well and he has to support his family.
Without Kansi, I don’t know if I would have made it to 18,500 feet. It certainly would have taken me a week longer and I probably would have cried every five minutes. But Kansi told us all about the region when we hiked and taught us that when you’re up there, marching from sun up to sundown is just a way of life. Porters do the same routes with 220 pounds on their backs.
Would I do it again? I don’t know. But I’m thrilled I did it once. It tested and pushed my every limit, and I hope I came out better for it in the end.
A monk crossing our path on our second day of hiking.
A porter on one of the many scaaaary suspension bridges.
Roscoe, our amazing porter, with a little girl in Tengboche.
This is the morning we climbed to 18,500 feet, higher than Everest base camp. I was so bitter about starting our hike at 4 am, but when I saw this sunrise, it made it all okay.
Me at the top of the world! Or almost. Mt. Everest is the tallest mountain in the trio behind me.
Lakes right off the foot of Everest.
I love this picture because it looks like I took it from an airplane, but really we just hiked above the clouds.
Prayer flags blowing in the wind, which are all over the Everest region.
When my friend Mary-Alice and I trekked around the world, we ended up being totally broke in Hungary. We had money before and money after, but in Hungary we were paupers. I am guessing our parents bailed us out, but Budapest just brings back memories of a stale crust of bread and a lot of walking.
Looking back, I really don’t know why we were so broke there. Are there no ATMs in Budapest? Did we spend it all on boos and goulash? I have no idea. What I do know is that our lack of money forced us to break the law. Tired as can be, we really wanted to take a cable car down this humungous hill, but we had zero cash. So we made up an elaborate scheme to shimmy under the turnstiles and hop on the car without paying.
As I subtly crawled under the turnstile and Mary-Al did her very best distraction song and dance, the 200 pound stout woman who ran the place looked down just as I was mid crawl. With the furry of Satan’s handmaidens, she started screaming in Hungarian and coming at me with her arms extended. Visions of her squeezing my head till it popped off flashed before my eyes as I backed up on all fours, stood up, and obeyed Mary-Alice’s ingenious command of “RUUUUUUNNNNN!”
We headed down that hill as fast as our impractical travel sandals could take us all while turning our heads to see if the thunderous Hungarian roar was hot on our trail. She was not. We were exhausted and broke, but we were not beaten up or arrested.
Did I learn any life lessons from this? Ehh, sure. Don’t break the law. It is wrong. But I still waited till I had $19 in my bank account to fly home that summer. And I had a blast because of it. As we all know, fun and money are not always linked and sometimes being a broke backpacker with no common sense is the most fun of all.
The charming cable cars of Budapest. Just not meant to be...
Before I met Grey, the very thought of marriage made me feel as though someone was smothering me with pillow. It repulsed and disgusted me; I likened it to a death sentence – but only way more boring because even prison inmates have lots of random sex with multiple partners. Not that I wanted to have a jail bitch or even lots of loveless hook-ups, but I couldn’t seem to get past seeing marriage as punishment of sorts where you were forced to kiss the same person for all of eternity.
However, when Grey swept me off my feet as though he were my knight in shining tapered sweatpants, so did my ideas about getting married. All other guys paled in comparison and I just knew Grey was the ONE and nobody else would ever do. Suddenly, instead of equating white wedding gowns with orange prison jumpsuits, I began happily daydreaming about the day we became husband and wife. Luckily, Grey seemed to feel the same way and I didn’t have to stalk or blackmail my way into his heart or burn locks of his hair while dancing naked under a full moon to make him love me; it just all worked out.
Now, six years after our wedding day (which is frankly blurry due to all the valium and champagne), I love Grey more than when I first met him. I thank my lucky stars on a daily basis that I married someone who is so intelligent, funny, kind, and aging so darn well. Six years has given us a heck of a lot of happiness, a healthy son, and another little bundle of trouble on the way. Cheers to that!
Happy six, Captain Sexy!
Our first Halloween as a married couple...Grey and I are going strong while Brit and K-fed were dunzo years ago.
The great American sport of lacrosse has been getting a lot of horrific press lately thanks to that violent sociopath at UVA, George Huguely. Huguely is from my hometown and played lacrosse at the Landon School before going to UVA. I spent a lot of time in high school playing tonsil hockey with Landon lacrosse players, as did many a gal who grew up in this area, and when it came out where Huguely went to school, we all let out a collective gasp. So it’s nice to hear another story about lacrosse players that doesn’t involve murder or those Duke boys and their strippers.
Lately I am really into the plight of the Iroquois nation lacrosse team. Ranked fourth in the world, they are trying to get to the UK for the lacrosse world championship and the Brits won’t let them in because they hold Iroquois Nation passports instead of American passports. The US State Dept. said they are a-okay to go, but the Brits still won’t let them in.
There is the small detail that the Iroquois invented lacrosse about 1,000 years ago and the Brits wouldn’t be holding any sort of championship if it wasn’t for the ancestors of the team they are not inviting through their borders.
I didn’t play lacrosse growing up, but I did spend a lot of time ogling lacrosse players, and this case is really bothering me. As the AP said, “Their participation in the once-every-four-year world championship tournament is a rare example of international recognition of their sovereignty.” Right?? The sport needs a little boost, Britain. How about you let our people play?
Have you ever wondered what happened to all the circus freaks of yesteryear? Like the bearded ladies or 500-pound babies that it’s no longer acceptable to keep in cages and showcase for traveling big tops? I think I know. Yep, now that it’s not politically correct for the circus to keep guys with blue skin or children with tails on display for people to ogle like elephants in the zoo, all these freaky folks go to one place: WAL-MART.
I know this sounds incredibly snobby, but I bet deep down in your little black hearts, you’ll agree with me. I mean, the other day I went there and I swear, the cashier that checked me out weighed as much as my car. It was the world’s heaviest woman!! Yes, gross but not abnormal here in America, but the crazy part was, she only had one tooth! This boggled my mind. I mean, how does someone with one tooth even become obsese? Are they scarfing down Big Macs whole? Or just on an incredibly high calorie liquid diet? This woman’s size defied the laws of physics. One hundred years ago she probably would have been Barnum & Bailey’s star oddity with a boxcar all to herself where she could drink lard milkshakes all day long.
Then, later I went back to the big box store to grab some cheap baby wipes and literally bumped into a girl that had earlobes down to her kneecaps. She had those gigantic tribal looking discs stuck in each side of her head and looked like a human version of Dumbo ready to fly off to Disney. Plus, her whole body (or what I could see of it) was covered in tatoos — even some on her face! Again, I thought — man oh man, would you be a big top money maker!
It’s like this every time I visit. A guy with blue skin. A man with dentures that look like alligator teeth. A woman with boobs resembling dead blue whales. You can find them all at Wal-Mart — where the prices are cheap and the people are freaky!
Here's a pic I snapped during my last visit to the superstore.
Today, while Grey toils away painting our house and doing work, Grey’s mom, Ollie and I are heading to Lancaster PA to visit Grey’s Nana. Not only is Lancaster Grey’s homeland (he was born there), but it is also the Amish capital of the United States. Indeed, sometimes I like to imagine that Grey was in fact switched at birth with a little Pennsylvania Dutch baby, but then I remember he looks like his parents and I realize he has no hidden genes good for pretzel-making or carving wood.
It’s ironic that I’m actually going to Lancaster, especially since I’ve been talking so much lately about my fear of the Amish. I guess this is the Universe’s way of making me face my demons — by sending me into the heart of Mennonite country — while of course allowing some great outlet shopping as well.
While I’m really looking forward to seeing Grey’s grandmother and also letting Ollie play with his second cousins, I am also eager to swing by Dutch Wonderland, which is to my knowledge, the world’s only Amish-themed amusement park. I don’t know who the mastermind behind this genius concept was, but something tells me it wasn’t an actual Mennonite considering the park showcases motorized buggies and electric plow-horses. I’m hoping to buy Ollie an authentic Amish playsuit and hopefully they also sell real-looking beards. Hopefully there will be some good photo opps!
I don't know who these people are -- but this family photo is priceless. I wish Grey was coming with us! Uhhh -- Christmas card???!!!
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