Ten on Tuesday

Ten on Tuesday with Chelsea is back!  Girlfriend took a much needed hiatus but now we're up and running and all is right with the world again.

1. What’s your variety of apple?

Pink lady.  So appropriate, right?  But I will say that before I moved to friggin' apple country I thought an apple was an apple.  Except for the green ones.  Those made my face hurt.


2. Do you prefer Long-English or Field cucumbers?

No, thank you.

Yuck.

3. Tomatoes – Delicious or disgusting?

I'll eat one with a big ol' glob of mozzarella, or anything else that can mask all of the flavor.

4. What’s one fruit or vegetable that you can’t stand and why is that?

Beets.  A word of caution: if you go into a beet soup expecting red velvet cake (and why wouldn't you, it will be the most beautiful shade of red and so silky smooth) you will be disappointed.  Beets taste like dirt.

5. What’s your favourite way to prepare veggies? (Grilled, boiled, roasted, sautéed, etc.)

Steamed.  It's easy.  I dont need it to be delicious, just soft enough to go down quick.  I'm in it for the vitamins.

6. Sweet potato pie: Love it or hate it?

Never had it.  But. I. Want it.

7. What’s your favourite “style” of French fry? Wedges, shoelace, curly, crinkle-cut or other?

Steak fries are my weakness.  So much so that I eat them off of others' plates.

8. What’s your favourite fruit-pie filling?

Razzleberry.  I'm not entirely sure what this means, but Mrs. Smith does and she does it goooooood.  It's tart and sweet and goes perfectly with ice cream.  This is my dessert of choice for bad days.

9. When you were a kid did your parents make you sit at the table until all your veggies were eaten off your plate?

I was such a good child there was probably never a meal where I didn't eat all of my vegetables.

That's probably wrong.  I just don't remember!

10. Do you drink veggie & fruit juice blends (such as V8, etc.) or make them yourself?

Here's something you might not know: fructose from fruit juice has the same negative long-term affects on your liver as alcohol.  So I tend to stay away from the stuff, unless I absolutely need a shot of OJ with my scrambled eggs.

Real men improvise

Recently Corey and I had to rearrange some of the pictures we have hanging around our apartment.

I say "had to" because Corey was itchin' for something new.

We got everything all lined up and ready to go on the walls when Corey said,

"Hang on a sec.  I'll grab my tool box."

What he brought out was a box.  Of tools.  A small cardboard box.

My husband has a literal tool box.

(turns nose up) And I bet your husband has one of those clanky metal things.  That is sooooo pretentious.

You asked, Stacie answered

I heard you.

You were dying to know what we did this weekend.

It's because Corey and I lead such fascinating lives you feel the need to live your own through us, right?

That's what I thought.

Without further ado, our weekend in bullets:

• pajamas
• oatmeal
• pajamas
• crepes
• pajamas
• lame daytime TV
• more TV
• some felting
• horse racing
• pajamas
• shower!
• navigate Albany to find restaurant
• interrupt drug deal
• birthday dinner for friend
• dream of pajamas
• pajamas
• church
• pajamas
• felting
• stomach ache

The End.

What's that, you say?

You may have overestimated the amount of excitement you expected to find here?

Would this be more or less riveting if I told you those pajamas had pink flamingos on them?

....

Hello?

Friday Confessions

Friday rewind!  This one is from the good ol' days....2010.





1. I would like to find a job that included nap time as a company policy.


2. My Friday nights are spent baking. Because I am a 75 year old grandmother.

3. I really do think those Reebok butt shapers will make me look like the girls in the commercials. "Who wears short shorts?" Well if I had those shoes I could, but I wouldn't because I like to set a good example for the younger pre-adolescents .

4. My friend had a baby last Thursday. She has since uttered the words "nipple confusion" and I am now concerned for all future conversations.

5. I really did walk around NYC on Sunday with my fly down. Again.

6. A driver's ed car went by my office on Tuesday. It was on a flat bed with a smashed front end. Oh how I laughed at the poor flunky's expense.

7. My parents taught me a harsh, humiliating lesson in stealing when I was three. I have never even considered taking so much as a dust bunny from any store, home, or baseball diamond since then.

8. I am in a hippie transformation process. I now only eat free-range chicken, grass fed beef and cage free eggs. I am also considering buying a Subaru and not wearing deodorant.

9. Tomorrow is the Kentucky Derby, one of Corey's favorite days. I will be walking the dog and eating nachos because I bring bad luck to horse racing and girl talk to boy time.

10. I ate dessert before dinner last night. And then again after dinner. Because I'm an adult.

Good ol' boy

Oliver

Birthday: July 15

Age: 6.5  years

Age in people years: 50-ish

Weight: 80lbs-ish

Breed: Golden Retriever

Energy level: high off the charts

Hobbies: sleeping on the bed, chasing balls, peeing on things

Hopes, dreams and aspirations: go for a walk

Occupation: mid-level security: will bark at intruders/guests/other dogs if awake and if they look creepy

Awards and accolades: best dog in the whole world (currently undisputed)

Nicknames: Oliver-dog, Bro Wolf, Boss, Bud, Buster Bottoms

....

Corey and I got Oliver from a family that kept him locked in little bitty crate in a garage when he was 7 months old and now I can't imagine not having his long, lanky self snuggled up to me at night, panting his stinky trash breath in my face as if to say, "thank you for loving me...now can I lick the rest of dinner off your face??"

Colder than a witch's walk-in freezer

Raise your hand if you now have to wear two pairs of pants, long wool socks and no fewer than four shirts even when planning to spend the entire day inside curled up next to your own personal space heater in fear of being exposed to even one second of the bitter cold that lurks outside just waiting to freeze you to your bones.....

Yeah, me too.

Good luck with that.

Friday Confessions

1.  I'm wishing we could go back to the era of split-level homes and just skip it.  Skip that who entire decade of design.  Because I just don't like it.

2.  Although some of the best years of my life were spent in a split-level.

Years I didn't know any better.

3.  I called Corey last night from my office phone:

"Hey, can you call my cell?  I can't find it anywhere!"

bzzzzzz, bzzzzzzz, bzzzzzz

"Yup, it's right where I put it.  In my purse."

4.  I should not be given grown up responsibilities.

5.  Sometimes I pick a random blog month and read my old posts because I think I'm funny. 

6.  My friend, Jill, and I play WordFeud constantly.  I've gotten in the habit of forgetting to play and after two days the game automatically resigns for me.  What a coincidence this usually happens when Jill is 80 points ahead of me.

7.  I don't know how old my sisters are.  But I do remember when they add another year to whatever number they're going with these days.

8.  My hair is finally long enough to tuck under my arms and make it look like I have really long armpit hair.

Don't act like you've never done it.

9.  I slid through an intersection last night and then almost off an on-ramp.  I say this to one particular person who decided we really didn't need to be in Southern California.  Thanks pops.

10.  If my family stayed in SoCal I doubt I would have missed meeting Corey.  I think we figured out he was there, in the same city many, many years ago.  But if I had met him then I doubt there would have been any kind of love connection.  He was 21 and I was 11, and that, my friends, is illegal.

...

Peace out.

On Oliver and life's little adventures

My darling little Oliver-dog.

Mama's little tootie pie.

I believe I've had my last "kiss" from this mutt for a very, very long time.

You know what you did, Oliver.

You know how sometimes you find yourself in that "perfect storm" kind of scenario where your mouth is open mid-sentence just as your dog is jumping up to lick your chin where he found a dallop of ice cream the day before and you end up with a tongue all up in there?

Mmmhmmmm.

And then you get all grossed out but still semi-ok with it because "dogs have the cleanest mouths in town, for realz"?

Right, right.

But then there is a brief moment when you remember that time you caught him sampling cat doody and your insides curdle ever so slightly?

Yeah.  Me too.

See, our little munchkin has been having some digestive issues lately; in that he walks away from the pooping grounds with a dingleberry clinger, a poo-nugget, if you will.

The first time he brought his little friend inside and deposited it in the form of a poo smear on the carpet.

The second time Corey managed to dislodge it while still outside. 

Thank goodness.

And this last time, just last week, Oliver-dog took on the big boy responsibility of removing that little dangly crap nugget himself. 

What a big helper!

Only Oliver does not have hands.  Or fingers.  Or a plastic baggy to place over and protect anything that must go near that region.  He has his tongue.  That multipurpose tool he uses clean, eat, and collect pee scents from neighborhood shrubs.

Grrrreat.

So there I witnessed my nighttime cuddle-bug, hunched over, going to work on that turd like his life depended on it.

And maybe his life did depend on it.  Because how comfortable can it be to lay around all day with this thing just hanging out down there?

Anyway, to end a long story that could have been made very short about seven paragraphs ago, I ended up grabbing a piece of ice and stepping in to assist.  Successfully. 

However, I would say none of us walked away from that situation as winners.

But life-lessons were learned that day.

In grosser news....

I found a little caterpillar stuck to one of my edamame beans.  It was just inches away from my mouth.

Ewwwwwwwww.

I showed one of my co-workers.

"Awww, are you going to grow it?!"

I'm pretty sure the freezing and microwaving stunted its growth.

And its life.

But it makes me wonder: how many of those suckers have I eaten already....?

One of life's tough questions.  Hmmmm.

My Thoughts Exactly: Walgreens

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Walgreens for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Despite the fact that I complain endlessly about my newly developed trick knee, and I'm pretty sure my hip is about to give out on me any. day. now, I'm actually pretty healthy.

I eat a vegetable once every few days, I walk between my desk and the copier a few times a day and I manage to fall asleep to Matlock by 10pm....that is, when I'm not up until midnight on a felting binge.

Ok, so I could do better.

My goal is to be like my granddaddy, 80 years old and he only just recently started taking prescribed medication. 

I'm not sayin' he led the healthiest of lives; I doubt following in his footsteps and taking up smoking and rabble rousing is going to get me as far.  I'm also not sayin' there's something wrong with needing a little extra help.  I just know myself.  And myself can barely remember to put clean socks on let alone a variety of medications at different times each day.

You know how good I am at getting to the point...

So there are people in the world who need medicine.

And a good deal of them use Walgreens to fill their prescriptions.  (It's actually one in five prescriptions, but who's counting?)

But now there's a little drama that just might complicate everything:

The contract between pharmacy benefits manager, Express Scripts, and Walgreens expired at the end of 2011 and there was no agreement reached in time.  It's looking like there won't be any agreement. 

For details visit this  Walgreens and Express Script press release.

But in summary this means the buck does not stop here, no soup for you, you're not going to be able to get your meds at this store.  Even though you've been going there for years and your pharmacist knows the ins and outs and inbetweens of your battle with eczema you now have to find a new in-network pharmacy.  I don't have this kind of relationship with my pharmacist; I can't even remember which pharmacy I use for cryin' out loud.  But I do know what it's like to have a professional relationship and how difficult that is to reestablish with someone new.

Fortunately, Walgreens is doing what they can to make this transition as easy as possible.  And for some that means not having to make the transition at all!  They are offering discounts for the Walgreens Prescription Savings Club, which will give everyone in the immediate family (including pets!) a year membership for only $10, and $5 for individuals. 

Benefits include discounts on prescriptions, savings on more than 8,000 brand-name and generic medications, and discounts on flu shots pet prescriptions, nebulizers and diabetic supplies.

Commendable, if you ask me.

You can follow along and show your support at Walgreens on Twitter and Walgreens on Facebook.

(and if you like them on facebook they will donate a dollar to the Way to Well Commitment aimed at improving overall health and wellness....bo-nus!)

Friday Confessions

1.  Sometimes I think to myself:

If I don't look at the gas gauge it's not really empty.

2.  (just kidding daddy)

3.  I let myself become addicted to The Bachelor.

4.  And Celebrity Wife Swap.

But in my defense...

Nope.  I've got nothing.  This stuff is 100% trash TV.

5.  On New Year's Eve I ran in a 5k race with 1,500 other people.  A 78 year old man beat me by several minutes.

6.  I tried to text a friend of mine "Awwwww snap!"  But what came out was "Sewsweetbags snap!"

7.  Corey has had it much worse: he tried to tell his friend he could meet him for a beer but what came out was "cuddled heterosexual beer."

8.  I ended up with macaroni and cheese in my hair yesterday, but that was only because I splattered it throughout the kitchen in my office.

Long story.

9.  I usually drive with the radio off, but somehow on my way to work yesterday I found myself singing,

"Straight up now tell me do you really want to love me for-ev-a....oh, oh, oh."

This song always reminds me of a Barbie I had that came with a taped song that sounded reeeeeeally similar.  Someone, please tell me you also had this same Barbie because everyone I've mentioned this to (in my age group) looks at me like I popped out one of my eyeballs.

10.  At nearly-thirty I still talk Barbies with people.

Because I can't keep from making conversations awkward.

...

Happy Friday friends!

Pinterest? No, thank you.

So, word on the street is there's this fancy new thing to do on the Internets called Pinterest.

The following is what I know about this site:

• It can be found on the World Wide Web.
• People really like it for some reason.
• My friend Alyssa found a bunch of recipes.
• Little buttons are now popping up in other websites that say "Pin It".
• It is a black hole of stuff that sucks you in and turns your entire day into one big long interweb search of everything you didn't know you didn't know.

But I may exaggerate.

After all, I have never been to the site.

This is what I've heard:

"I learned how to do such-and-such on Pinterest."

"You can find lots of cool ideas on Pinterest."

"I spend a lot of time on Pinterest."

"OMGosh Pinterest is so addicting."

"Seriously, I was on Pinterest for hours and hours."

"I just. can't. stop...."

"Hey Stace, you should really try Pinterest."

Here's the deal friends, I am currently neglecting most aspects of my life already.

I don't have time to prepare healthy meals.

I only fold laundry when we are having to dump a full basket of clean clothes onto the bed in order to find a sock match.

I have enough time to make jewelry to stock one store.  Partially.

And I'm not entirely sure what Corey looks like these days.

So if there is just one more thing out there that is going to fill me with all kinds of ideas of fun things I can do or make and cause me to spend a full Saturday crafting or baking or sawing things out of wood with very little experience doing so I'm going to have to politely pass.

Because that Saturday was probably already designated for something else.

Martha Stewart Living is where I draw the line.

...but only because I paid for the entire year.

Food, football and fighting in New Jersey

Corey and Stacie sittin' in a tree....

...watching the Giants vs. Dallas game last weekend screamin' like a couple'a buffoons.

This is one of our favorite traditions.  Corey has a wonderful friend who is a season ticket holder and lets us buy his tickets for this game every year.  This year ended up being a super important game and that made it a little extra exciting.

Add some persistent rain and a whole bunch of crazy Dallas fans and you get one good story.

Going into this game, we're usually a lot more prepared than we were this time.  We know who we're going with (we get four tickets), we have a set game time and most importantly we have a tailgate game plan.  This year, however, we had a bunch of people not quite interested in the tickets, the game time changed to 8pm (hellooooo late night three hour drive!), and we did zero tailgating.

Eh.

Although I do enjoy the collective cheering and stuffing of faces with meat, and 8pm did technically put me in a different state waaaaaay past my bedtime, at the end of the day (literally) I was still going to be planting my buns in a seat on the 10 yard line screaming like a 7th grade cheerleader.  And that was pret-ty okay by me.

So there we were, walking into the stadium in a steady drizzle.

And then there we were, watching warm ups in a steady drizzle.

It was raining, is what I'm trying to say.  We got rained on off and on for the entire game, which would have been that side of terrible if it wasn't an unseasonable 50 degrees.  But rain is still rain.  And when you get those towels you're s'posed to wave when good things happen wet you end up launching a lot of water into unsuspecting eyeballs.

Whoopsie daisies.

So far, I haven't mentioned a thing about the game.  Maybe you've noticed.  But that's only because all of the action happened in the stands.  We were surrounded by Dallas fans.

Dallas fans from New Jersey.

Here's something I was unaware of before moving to New York: New Jersey is terrible.

There.

I just became offensive.

Or insulting.

Whichever applies.

My apologies, New Jersey.  But your roads make me turn four times to go straight, and your people are mean and abrasive and scary.

Corey and I were lucky enough to sit in front of father-of-the-year, and I say that with every ounce of sarcasm I can muster from deep within my bones.  Mr. Stereotypical New Jersey himself brought his entire family, children and all, to the game to cheer on their team, the Cowboys.

The following is an excerpt from an overheard conversation within two minutes of the first quarter:

"(playful ribbing from two Giants fans in front of us)"

"I'm here with my f(udging) family!  You want to f(udging) come back here??  I'll kick your f(udging) a(pple).   Yeah, that's right you couple'a qu(esos).  Turn the f(udge) around.  I'm here with my f(udging) family."

Apparently, he was there with his family.

And he doesn't want his 10-year-old to know what it means to be innocently teased.

Did I not mention his 10-year-old was standing to his right?

I wasn't surprised when the drunk two rows ahead of us started throwing around fudge-bombs in Mr. New Jersey's general direction his kid came back with:

"Kiss my a(pple)!"

If only I'd packed a bar of Irish Spring...

Maybe I'm just old fashioned.

In between all the fun there was actually a football game.

A pretty good game!  It's always good when you can walk out of a stadium and say your team is going to the playoffs.

That's what I always say.

It's also good when you can go to bed at 9:30pm, but sometimes you just have to make sacrifices.

Survey Says: Run and hide

Thank you all for your responses to my bat quandary.  I especially appreciate the sincerity in which most of you advised whoever might find themselves in this situation to run and hide in the bedroom/bathroom.

But I should be honest with you.  The situation I described wasn't entirely hypothetical.

It was actually 100%....actual.

I was the one who woke up to find the danged thing, I was the one wrestling an 80lb dog to the ground so he wouldn't go and catch himself some rabies, and I was the one who had to find some kind of solution so that we didn't end up fostering a colony of bat babies.

You're not surprised?

I guess I was able to provide a lot of details for a hypothetical situation.

But anyfranticmoment, here's the end of my bat fiasco:

In between rounds of fireworks and moments of panic I decided I should give this bat more opportunities to make an exit.  I had already opened two windows but thought maybe the door would be a bigger target.

One problem: the door is across the room.  As in, in direct line of the swooping.

So I wait.

The sucker starts his route.  Office, living room, office, living room, dining roomTIMETOMAKEARUNFORIT!!!  I shove Oliver in the direction of the front door, I follow and fling it open.  I set out a basket to keep it open and sprint toward my bedroom.

From there I could see the bat swooop around the office.  Every few minutes I'd walk toward the main area of our apartment hoping because I hadn't seen it the poor guy found his way out the window.

But then he'd swoop within inches of my head and I would scream and flail my way back to the bedroom.

This went on for 20 minutes.

Finally there was no more swooping.  I went through the entire apartment, turning lights on and off and making a real ruckus to scare him out of his hiding place, if in fact he was still inside somewhere.  When I didn't find anything I put a check in the win column, shut the windows and door and went to bed.

(Corey was out with his buds for this whole mess...)

This is where I hoped and prayed and hoped and hoped and prayed the story ended.  But....sigh....Corey found the bat later on in the day as he was packing up goodies to take to the Giants game.

It was hiding under a bag in our kitchen.

If you don't like hearing about the demise of any creature (raises hand) you might want to, oh I don't know, browse my etsy shop (shameless plug) at this time.  But I'm not even able to give too many details simply because I spent the entire time the poor bat was being disposed of in our bedroom with my head buried under a mountain of pillows.

But he was, um, eliminated.  And I now live in a crime scene.

So here I just get done saying how I'm glad to leave 2011 behind and then 2012 comes barreling in with terror and the cruel reality of death.  I'd be lying if I said I'm looking forward to what "surprises" this year holds.

But since there still is no way to tell what's a'comin', happy new year and here's to hoping everything goes exactly as planned!!

Survey: What would you do?

I'm going to give you a purely hypothetical scenario and I would like to know what you would do, hypothetically.

It's 11:50 New Year's Eve and you wake up on the couch (after falling asleep to the Big Bang Theory marathon, hypothetically) to your dog staring intently at something.  A something that appears to be swooping through your house.

You follow your dog's gaze to what could be a bat.

Then you confirm it is a bat as it flies at your head.

Now, let's say you live less than a block away from a park in a house that gives you a perfectly unobstructed front row view of the fireworks that are set off for two different occasions: July 4th and New Year's Eve.  A feature of your living arrangement you brag about to your friends endlessly, hypothetically.

But in this scenario you find that because you're less than a block away from a park, when those rockets explode and you're already terrified of contracting rabies you find yourself unable to control the urge to scream, pee or sweat profusely.  Hypothetically.

Now, let's say you have a rather large dog who is terrified of fireworks.  A dog who uses the tactic, "If I bark loud enough they will go away," further scaring the bat and causing it to swoop even more erratically in the region near your head.

So as you lay there, in between your couch and ottoman, on top of your shaking Golden Retriever (hypothetically) you ask yourself what in the H-E-double hockey sticks you should do.

Well friends, what would you do?