VEGAS, BABY

We'll be landing here in a few weeks!

THE SNOW CAP

Can't wait to eat at this beauty on Route 66 in Seligman, Arizona! Now that's what I call "vacation food"!

NEW SHOES AND WESTERN VIEWS

It’s the middle of January. It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s…January. Time to be done with winter and skip to spaghetti straps and backyard BBQs. I haven’t been on an official vacation (meaning, it will take a plane to get there) since Spain in March of 2010 and I’m getting antsy. My husband and I are planning a couples vacation with J&K and I’m excited, but it’s still 11 weeks away. (But who’s counting?) We’re doing a 12-day hiking, biking, kayaking, camping, anything-outdoors excursion around Nevada and Arizona. It’ll be my first time doing anything like that and I’ve been YouTubing a lot of Motion’s Greg Aiello to get me prepared. If it has a trail, he’s hiked it. If it has stars above it, he’s camped it. Today my Merrell hiking boots were delivered via Zappos.com. I was thrilled to stand on the tiled kitchen floor cooking tilapia, breaking-in my first pair of hiking boots I’ve ever owned. A good pair of boots are by no means cheap and I’ve never hiked enough in my life to warrant buying a pair. Phone text, me to my husband:
Me: I just got my boots!!
Him: They feel good?
Me: Feels like a pillow on an angel wing!
I also bought a pair of eco-friendly Simples for walking back and forth (and back and forth again) to all the yummy diners along Route 66 which we’re driving Kingman to Seligman. I’m really getting into this “surf, click, buy” thing when it comes to online shopping. By the time our vacation rolls around we’ll have purchased the entire thing online: the plane tickets, hotels, campground reservations, camping gear, and Elvis mp3s for the drive back to Vegas. Now if I could only figure out how to buy more time off of work…

THE KITCHEN REVEAL

Whenever I know I'm having friends or family over I use that date as my goal to do something new to my home. Last year it was the visit of my in-laws which was a great time to repaint the guest room (including painting the ceiling purple!), and get a bed and  new furniture for that room. It was also the time to dust all my baseboards, spray-paint antique furniture-salvage finds, and basically make myself exhausted and insane. This year, the big event was last weekend's overnight party (read recent entry) in which I had about 17 people spend the night. So two days before the party, between cooking and cleaning and running around in general like the Bride of Chucky, I also painted my kitchen and accent wall of the living room. I had another color in mind, but when I got to the Benjamin Moore store I was instead inspired to choose colors from their new 2011 brochure.When the guests arrived I got lots of rave reviews and I felt much better that I had just painted my beige walls JADE GREEN!!!! What do you think? (check out "before" pics in a previous entry)

DAY TWO 2011

10:30 am still found all three of us sleeping under the covers repairing our brains and bodies from the night before. But, alas, an irritable beep awoke us. It was a text.
Nicole: Hayes and I are on the way to Mimi’s for brunch. If ya’ll are awake meet us there.
Me: Nope. Not awake.
An hour later I wiped the drool off my face and turned to my husband.
“Let’s go to brunch”.
So we headed downtown to the best brunch location in the world, Capital Club 16, where they know us so well they even know our daughter’s stuffed animals by name. The joint was hopping, the coffee was hot, and the Farmer’s Breakfast was amazing as usual. The owner, Jake Wolf, even threw in some extra strawberries on my side-salad. Afterwards we went to the history museum around the corner. We could have stayed there all day, but had to be at Saint Augustine college by three where my grandparents were to receive an award, so we cut it short at the museum. My whole family went to see the award ceremony, which took place in the gym at half-time of the women’s basketball game. My grandparents are in their 80s, yet cook and deliver food for Meals on Wheels, meals for battered women’s shelters, and collect and donate clothing for the homeless. They are involved in way more community activities than I could ever spare time for and I’m very proud of them. After the basketball game we drove to my parents and ate dinner together. It was just taco salad but of course my mom made it into AMAZING TACO SALAD with her own homemade mango salsa which put Paul Newman’s to shame. Being the nerds we all are, we sat around the dinner table playing a made-up version of Trivial Pursuit for the next four hours. And that’s how we ended the second day of 2011.

NEW YEAR 2011

 Here are a few pictures of the highlights from Friday night into Saturday, 2011. We ate, drank, and lamented over how poor Dick Clark looked like a ventriloquist's dummy and Ke$ha looked like a dude. We had about 15 people over our house and most of them ended up bringing an air-mattress and just spending the night. At 3 am I was baking quiches for breakfast and vowed to make this an annual event. The next day when I was cleaning up like the Ringling Bros was in my living room, I changed my mind. After lots of coffee and quiche some of us went walking on a trail near our home. When our house was again empty, we hit the bed like Rip Van Winkle and slept until about 6pm. We woke up and then went to a cook-out over Jason and Christine's house. J & K came too. By then we were all a bunch of zombies so we didn't stay super late. It began to rain hard and fog rolled in as we drove on the back roads home. Thus ended our very first day of 2011.

SNOW-ATTIRE RECIPE

 This is just an addendum to the previous entry and is a recipe for all moms or any adult who has ever dressed a child for the snow.
 Approximate time to get child dressed: upwards of 53 minutes if matching glove or boot cannot be located. More if child has to pee in the middle of preparation. Approximate time outside playing: one minute for every year of age. In my daughter’s case, ten minutes.
Ingredients:
One impatient child (forget keeping sanity if you have two. Three or more, forget going out altogether)
1 pair tights
2 pair knee-high socks
1 pair regular socks
1  pair pj pants
1 pair  fleece pants
1 more pair of knee highs to stuff pants into
1 tank top
1 pj top
1 regular long-sleeved shirt
1 long-sleeved turtle-neck
1 fleece hoodie
2 bread bags over top of socks
2 rubber bands holding bag-socks in place
1 pair mom’s smallest boots due to losing kid’s
1 scarf around neck
1 scarf around ears
1 beanie cap holding scarf to ears
1 brimmed hat to keep falling snow out of eyes
1 pair gloves
1 pair mittens over gloves
1 raincoat over whatever is left of your child to repel melting snow. Too much moisture exposure could cause wrinkling.
Side dishes:
1 carrot for snowman’s nose
2 black olives for snowman’s eyes
2 strings red licorice for the lips
1 scarf for snowman. Scratch that. Might get stolen in bad neighborhood.
1 bag of torn bread to feed birds or they will die
 1 old towel near door to take wet boots off
2 more old towels to throw wet snow clothes onto
1 cup hot chocolate for drinking around minute 12
1 large smile of approval for your child. Fake is ok
900 dashes of patience
Congratulations! You have just made 1 more good memory for your child.

CHRISTMAS WEEKEND

The week was shaping up to be a good one, especially with my year-end bonus in my greedy little hand. I had Wednesday through the next decade off for the holidays. I had been training at the gym with Paul who helped me to lose five pounds and work up to 8 real push-ups in just a couple of weeks. We ordered a new flat-screen tv with free shipping. (who can resist all those year-end sales?!) I took girl-time for myself and went and had coffee and croissants with K, one of my BFFs. My husband was to have Christmas Eve day off and sleep in with me for once. I beat the traffic and lines and crowds and got all my Trader Joe’s and farmer’s market shopping done in time to take a nap and then bake a sweet potato pie. Overall life was good. I had big plans and little complaints. Then came Friday morning: Before the sun was above the horizon I was awakened by  frightening alien-like sounds. I got up and walked to the back of the house, thinking the dogs were being romantically involved or something along those lines.  But as I passed the hall bathroom, my eye caught sight of a small hunch-backed white creature! It was my ten year old daughter vomiting over the toilet in nothing but her underwear. She had peeled off her footed pj’s and went right to work, taking breaks to lay on the cold tiled floor. The vomiting continued for two more hours and she never ate the rest of the day. We got our new tv and  hooked it up in our bedroom. We let her lay in our bed to watch cartoon classics like Betty Boop and Popeye on DVD…for thirteen hours. She was too sick to do much else. Christmas morning I woke up... sick. Her stomach virus had somehow morphed into my body like most illnesses do when you become a mom. Never had diabetes? Anemia? Claustrophobia? Simply get pregnant and you will. By this time my husband realized  he didn’t have the proper antennae for our new tv and since we live in the country we only got half a channel. Plus it was Christmas, so we could forget running out to Wal-Mart. Thus commenced thirteen more hours of cartoon classics. Some of them, like Mighty Mouse’s “Wolf! Wolf!” were ok to watch because I remember actually seeing them on TV in the 80s. It was a nice trip down memory lane. Others, like Hippity Hoppity Hooper made me want to spend more time hanging my head over the toilet. Saturday night, midnight: Our female Chihuahua also gets sick and has a major poop explosion in her crate. As I’m too sick to move, my husband kindly (NOT!) gets up and cleans the mess. Sunday morning: we  awoke to snow, a pure blizzard in N.C. terms, and the roads were impassable. Stuck at home yet again.
 “How much more snow will we get?”
 “I don’t know. Can’t watch the weather channel. The tv doesn’t work. “ (we don’t have internet in our home)
“Oh. Right.”
Silence.
“Back to cartoons?”
“Oh, Jesus, SAVE us!”
My husband’s boss called.
“Just want to let you know the store is open tomorrow. But drive carefully when you come in.” We look out of the window. Birds are flying backwards and then being thrown to the ground by the wind before being swallowed by snow drifts. My daughter, who had been back in those crusty footed pajamas for two and a half days pressed her nose up against the window.
“I feel 100% better, mama.”
“Great, sweetie.” (I don’t)
“Let’s go sledding!”
“Ok, maybe later.” (Wanna watch more cartoons? Felix The Cat is sooo wonderful, yet racist.)
The power flickered on and off and on again. My dad calls.
“How ya’ll doing over there? We got about seven inches too. Pretty nice. Ya’ll got enough food? Yeah, your mama baked a sweet potato pie too. Ok, talk to you later.” Click.
My grandpa calls. This is the longest conversation of them all and I’m starting to think I should go sledding.
“Yeah, grandpa, I bet New York got way more snow than us. No, grandpa, my husband is not watching the game and cheering for the Tarheels. He‘s actually in bed right now watching Porky Pig, but I‘ll tell him you said hello.” Click.
“Come on, kid, let’s go outside.”
No, I didn’t get to sit around a cozy fireplace sipping on spiked punch with friends. I didn’t get to go to the movies and sneak into each theatre to see the new releases like I usually do each Christmas weekend. I gained all my weight back because I couldn‘t even get out of bed, let alone get to the gym and when I stopped puking I ate too much pie. Add to that I’m having nightmares of Tom chasing Jerry. But I did make one heck of a sweet potato pie that my husband showered me with kisses for. (yeah, he’ll be sick tomorrow) I did build a snow man with my little girl and joined her against her daddy in a snow-ball fight. I did eat vanilla pudding (without puking) that her and daddy made together. (and I gained more than I lost) I did play a game with them today while drinking the hot tea my husband fixed me. I did call and check on all my relatives while my husband and daughter played Barbies together. I did spend the weekend with my lovely family inside my warm, safe home. So while I didn’t have the weekend of my dreams, I may have had the weekend of someone else’s and I‘m very grateful for whatever life throws me. Or throws up on me.