The Muffin Man?

Recently, I stepped out of my comfort zone and went dancing at a local nightclub. I was convinced by my friends that I should put my school books away for a few hours and dance, dance, dance. Since there was no cover charge, I decided that I might as well go.

As it turns out, Tuesday night is Muffin Top night. (Yup, click on the words Muffin Top to learn what exactly it is!) I was horrified to see tons of women wearing tight jeans with upper body fat spilling over the top. It was wrong on so many levels. Who would go outside looking like that? Who let these girls go outside like that? NO! Ladies of the Inland Empire, a roll of fat is not sexy. As I watched these "ladies" gyrate around on the dance floor, it became apparent why there was no cover charge on this particular evening. The boys were going to need every penny they brought to buy alcohol at the bar. I did not think there was enough alcohol in the bar to convince me that PDMT (Public Display of Muffin Top~~ my new term) was acceptable. As it turns out... two drinks later I found my muffin top absolutely hysterical. And I have the pics on my cell phone to prove it! I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that this picture picture of me DWMT (Dancing With Muffin Top) takrn by my phone just didn't turn out like I had hoped. Oh well. But one picture did take...there it is... in all of it's glory. My Muffin Top!

All Better!!!

If you recall, I took issue with the bottle in Randy's hand.

I got that bottle taken out of the picture! Thanks, Rob!

Not So Much

The other day, I was driving east on the 60 fwy just outside of Moreno Valley with my husband. The recent rains had made the hills pretty and green. I said, "You know, babe, it would be neat to one day buy some land up there and build our own home". To which Randy quickly replied, "Umm... not so much, that's the county dump". So much for my keen eye in real estate.

Check It Out...

I have yet another blog to introduce to you all...Robbie Paetz (click on it to see his blog) is an old friend of mine. We met 18 years ago, and in that time he has definitely become one of my favorite people around! The blog is about his 22-month world adventure. Recently, he has sold his house and car, and with that money he will voyage the globe! In addition to being funny and smart, Robbie is an incredibly talented photographer... and he is gracious enough to post all of his pictures from his trip on this blog for us! So go ahead, and bookmark his blog! This is gonna be great!

Jo!

P.S. I managed to link his site to mine... see over on the right hand side... it says "Robbie's Blog" you can just click there too! Bravo, my team!

A Poke In The Eye!

This house is located on the same street that I grew up on! (Ours was much better looking) This house is currently listed for $450,000. I would never pay $2600 a month to live in Riverside! I give up. I just give up!

Poor Form, Italy

Is it wrong that I'd like to be standing behing Mr. Cascioli in line on The Day of Judgement?

VITERBO, Italy - An Italian judge heard arguments Friday on whether a small-town parish priest should stand trial for asserting that Jesus Christ existed.

The priest's atheist accuser, Luigi Cascioli, says the Roman Catholic Church has been deceiving people for 2,000 years with a fable that Christ existed, and that the Rev. Enrico Righi violated two Italian laws by reasserting the claim.

Why?

President Bush was asked about Brokeback Mountain after giving a speech today at Kansas State University.

Question: You're a rancher. A lot of us here in Kansas are ranchers. I just wanted to get your opinion on Brokeback Mountain and if you had seen it yet... You would love it. You should check it out.

Bush: I hadn't seen it. I would be glad to talk about ranchin' but I haven't seen the movie... I've heard about it... I hope you go.. you know.. heh, heh.. I hope you go back to the ranch and the farm is what I was going to say... I hadn't seen it.

The thing is, I voted for the guy! There is a warm spot in my heart for him. But... why? Must they ask these questions? Must he answer like a total retard? Why?

Our Troops...

I have been sitting here at my computer for 45 minutes, desperately trying to think of something funny to write. Actually, after 30 minutes I scraped any attempt at funny and just tried to think of anything at all... it appears as if I have bloggers-block. Oh well. I will come up with something soon, don't you all worry. So, today I will just leave you with a picture that I like...

Get a Job!

I spent last night working at the local community hospital. By the luck of the draw, I was dropped into Gomer-ville! As therapists, we refer to the old people who do nothing but lie there and leak stuff onto the bed as Gomers. I had a six-pack of Gomers, and all of them were riding a ventilator. While this may seem like an easy night, because they are all so completely snowed with seditives that they can't even blink, I can tell you that it was not. Due to a recent outbreak of enterobacter bacteria, everybody who works in the Intensive Care Unit, must gown up every time they enter a patient room. Before you leave the patient room, you must then pull off all of the protective stuff you are wearing and toss it into the trash. This procedure does not make for a smooth shift. Now, normally enterobacter bacteria is found everywhere... unfortunately we have developed strains that resist any type of medication. This does not present a problem for me, because as a healthy individual, my body can still manage to resist the bacteria... but if you get yourself a 95 year-old woman on life support... well, she can't quite fight the bacteria. So to make sure that I am not taking the bacteria from one patient to another in the ICU, we are forced to gown-up 5,000 times a night! With that in mind, I started my night of checking ventilators, pulling lung-cheese out of old people's throats, and the general upkeep of the terminally ill. As luck would have it, one of my Gomers needed to have all of the taping around the enodtracheal tube replaced.
I found this lovely picture online to show you what we have to work with. Basically you have to tape the tube down to the patients face. Doesn't seem all that difficult, does it. WRONG! Now the people who put this picture online are liars. This is not what you find upon entering the patients room. This is never what it looks like. Usually there is a big green blob of half-dried snot dripping down the side of their face, and yellowish, bloody gunk is stuck all over the tape around their mouth. The best part, is that the human body really resists foreign objects... especially tube tape. Once the tube tape is placed on the face, the skin beneath it will begin to break down and you get super gross sores on the face as well. It's all very delightful, really. Now, my gomer was old, close to death, and conveniently missing teeth, which serve as a very important piece of structure, because without the teeth the tape on the lip just slides down and off of the upper lip and into the mouth. I spent 20 minutes attempting to re-anchor the breathing tube to the face, all very unsuccessfully. After my second attempt of crawling onto the patient, lifting the floppy head up so I could place the tape around, and then maneuvering my tape between the five other tubes coming out of gomer's body I was getting frustrated and very sweaty because the gowns are made of PLASTIC! Imagine doing your daily activities wrapped in seran wrap! By the time I had finished my task, and ripped off all of my protective equipment, my scrubs were completely soaked with sweat. It was disgusting. Ironically, the only thing running through my mind at the time was, "wonder if I lost any weight just now"!

Hello?

Hellooo? Are you out there. It appears as if my audience has ceased to exist. Sadness for me. Clearly I am not in possession of the "staying power" that I need to amuse the masses. Oh well. Why doesn't anybody comment anymore? I guess I will have to go back to my original goal... writing for my own amusement.

Jazz Festival Pictures

I found a few pictures that I forgot about!

Earlier this year, Randy and I went to a Jazz festival at some guy's bajillion-dollar "estate" in the hills of Los Angeles. I realized we were terribly out of our socio-economic group, when we pulled our Ford Focus into a parking lot full of Range Rovers and other cars over $80,000!

Above is a view of the small part of his back yard! Me, I'm sportin' my Jackie O sunglasses!

Randy looks confused, while I explain to some drunk lady how to use a camera!

Nothing cuter that a picture of me, the husband, and a bottle of beer! (Does anybody know how to photoshop that thing out?) umm..Randy just informed me that he was holding a bottle of water. oops, my bad.

oops, did I drink half the bottle of wine already? (I think we all know that all I needed was a half of a glass to act like a doofus)

D.M.V. is the D.E.V.I.L.

I got this letter in the mail today:
Dear California Driver,

Drivers with crashes and traffic convictions on their records are at a greater risk of causing future crashes. Your recent record of bad driving places you at increased risk of causing crashes, injury and death. We do not want you to suffer those consequences and want to help you avoid them. We understand that you may believe you are a good driver, and yet your driving record is much worse than the average driver.

In our effort to urge you to drive safer, we are offering you a choice. You can choose to prevent further action from DMV by avoiding additional traffic convictions and by not causing any crashes. However, if you choose to continue your unsafe driving, the penalties will increase and eventually lead to probation, suspension or revocation of your driving privilege. We hope that you will decide to change, but the choice is yours.

Are they kidding me? Yes, I may have gotten two tickets in the span of three months, but those are the only two tickets I have ever gotten in my life. Where the heck was my letter for 13 years of fantastic driving? Did they even bother to notice that? What kills me most is that I have been repeatedly made fun of for YEARS because of my safe driving. I am the slow-lane kinda gal. Not that long ago, Randy was following me home on the freeway. When I finally exited the freeway, I waited for him on the side of the road. After a few minutes of waiting, I called him on my cell phone to make sure he was safe... He told he had already gotten off the freeway and was almost home. I couldn't believe it, I didn't even see him pass me! He told me that I was driving so slow he couldn't take it any longer, but I should have noticed him, he was the only person going around me on the freeway that wasn't flipping me off! In another incident, I was following a friend home who insisted he was fine, but had been drinking. As we got onto the freeway, he pulled into the fast lane and left me in the dust. The next time I saw him, he made sure to let me know how useless I was at following him because of my grandma-like driving skills.

The DMV can kiss my rear-end. (PS If they need to find me, just look in the slow lane!)

Canine Cataplexy

As a respiratory therapist, one of my job duties is performing sleep studies. To help me prepare for my clinical rotation, I had a lecture at the VA hospital today on sleep disorders. One of the topics was narcolepsy (also referred to as cataplexy). While the doctor who presented the information was duller than dirt, he did manage to toss a few jewels into his lecture. He had video of canine cataplexy. Basically the dogs have a genetic problem, where their brains don't ever allow them to get enough deep sleep, and their bodies begin to suffer. I want you all to know that I am currently searching the internet for a video, but I must tell you that it is, by far, one of the most amusing things I have seen in a while. In the picture above, the owner threw a frisbee and about 10 yards into the chase, the dog just fell over and was out cold! In another video, the dog was following a trail of "treats" and by the third doggie biscuit, he just keeled over and went to sleep. Now, I have no idea how this will assist me in my future indeavors, but the videos was the only thing that managed to keep me awake during that sleep-study lecture.

Hippity Hoppity

It was brought to my attention recently that I was going to come up one unit short in my requirements for graduation. One teen tiny unit. To rectify the situation I had to sign up for either a three-unit health class or a one-unit dance class. I chose the dance class. Hip Hop. I did not subject myself to a hip hop class because it sounded like fun, but because I couldn't fit a three-unit health class into my already tight schedule. Now that I have actually attended my first hip hop class... I wish I would have made room for health.

My day started around 5:30 AM with the incessant beeping of my alarm clock. Traditionally I prefer to see 5:30 AM from the other direction: after a long night of Bloody Marys, but school has forced me to to align myself more closely to the circadian rhythms of life. In my haste to get to class on time (and still get my fresh baked morning bagel from Lock, Stock, and Bagel), I threw on a sweatshirt and running pants -the kind of pants that make that swoosh swoosh sound when you walk...and with thighs like mine, occasional sparks-, and headed off to my early morning lecture. Six hours and two lectures later I began the long trek to my very first hip hop class.

Last year I took a golf class, but since golfing and an indoor gymnasium tend to be incongruent, I had never actually seen the inside of our school's gym and I had NO IDEA where room "G-101-E" was located. Fortunately, a few girls ahead of me seemed to be heading in the same general direction, so I just followed the herd (the really really skinny heard) in front of me. After I hiked the hill and found the door they had entered, I convinced myself that I wasn't huffing and puffing all that much, and I walked into my class. As I opened the gym door, I discovered that room "G-101-E" was, in fact, not a room at all. "G-101-E" was just a section of bleachers located on the opposite side of the indoor basketball court I was dripping sweat upon. The entire class was quietly perched on the bleachers and staring directly at me. I was on center stage in hell. The silence of the gym was broken by my thighs rubbing together as I walked the length of the court. Somehow, the usual swoosh swoosh of my pants had changed it's sound and all I heard was, "plusss sizzze, plusss sizzze" as I tried to blend in with the wall and go unnoticed.

As I arrived to my chosen spot on the bleachers, I began to take assessment of the students I would spend the next eighteen weeks with. It was necessary to quickly locate the classmates that would validate my existence by being so underqualified for this class that they would immediately swing the bell curve to my advantage... I was looking for old ladies and fat chicks. To my delight and great relief, I was sitting among two oldies and four fatties (self not included). I had struck gold. I found a beefcake that I could even hide behind during any "bouncing" part of the class. As I began crafting my master plan of creating a spot behind a beefcake and next to the sixty-five year old crack-head the door across the gym entered and our instructor walked through.

I kid you not, this is an actual picture of my instructor (I found it online!)

To my horror, in walked the girl that I had been silently making fun while I ate my cheeseburger and fries in the cafeteria during lunch! (I think we can all see the psychological significance of my resentment towards her.) She was wearing four-inch spiked heels, a mini-skirt, and a t-shirt that really enhanced her aftermarket accessories. Obviously there would be no hip hop for us today. I realized at that point that this is not a thing I can charm my way out of. It doesn't matter if I am the smartest, nicest, or funniest girl in the class... all that matters is that I will be forced to hip hop for eighteen weeks in front of an aspiring porn star I think her porn name would be Butter Face!

PS... For those of you who don't know what a Butter Face is... click here to check it out!!

Come and get it...

I have decided it is time that I learned to be a tad more domestic. I have less than a year until I enter my 30's, and with our desire to finally begin our family in the next few years, I think I should actually learn how to cook a homemade meal. I scoured the internet in search of classic meals of yesteryear. Lo and behold I struck gold...

Creamed Pea Jello Mold!

(Obviously served with a side dish of mustard)

And for dessert???

LARD CAKE!

I hope Randy is hungry!

Back To The Grind

I start back to school Monday morning. Why
can't this vacation go on just a little bit longer???
I will try my best to blog... but with 27 units (yup twenty-freaking-seven) and a part-time job, things might get a little tough to maintain. On the upside, I often get great stories when I work at the hospital! Hopefully I will find lots of amusing things this semester! This is what my school looks like. Pretty huh?

The Guild Wars

NOTE: This is not about accuracy of gaming... this is not for you crazy gamers who have googled Guild Wars and found this page. This is a little blog picking on my husband and a game concept that I totally don't "get" or understand. It was meant to be funny. Get over yourselves, I don't care that my facts are totally wrong. Don't comment about it. I don't care. You take this whole thing way too seriously anyways. You don't have me reading your blogs making fun of the way you can't get a real woman because you are playing these stupid games at all hours of the night... and, yes, I know my pictures are inaccurate. Let me repeat, I don't care. That was not the point.

For Christmas, Randy wanted a computer game called Guild Wars. For those of you who have never played this type of game, it is somewhat of a role-playing/ choose-your-own-adventure concept. Purchased at "Dorks-R-Us". The game is played online, allowing the player to interact with other online gamers. Each player creates a character and they are allowed to decide on the physical characteristics, clothing, and finally name their online character. (Randy has named his Psylint Wynd... I guess Breaking Wynd was taken! ha ha...yeah I said it!)
Throughout the adventure, each character is able to accomplish tasks which earn more money, rank, equipment, and various magical powers. That is all I understand about the game.
*
Now I have never "played" the game myself. I have, however, logged on and added a few touches to Randy's character... as a surprise to Randy. Mostly I spent time harassing the other online gamers. (Randy can't figure out why all of the other gamers incessantly pick on him!) The character to the right is kinda what Mr. P. Wynd looks like, a few differences would be that for some reason Randy gave him a hankerchief that he wears over his face. I decided that, just like my beloved husband, this character has severe allergies and incessant asthma. That is why he wears the hanky around his face. So with this "back story" in mind, I spent some time asking other online characters if they, "happen to know the pollen count today" or would they, "mind helping me find my inhaler, I think I dropped it somewhere near here when I was practicing my magical spell." Of course I find myself wonderfully amusing... but let me tell you, some of these gamers take this game VERY seriously. They spend HOURS and HOURS developing the character and their story line, and simply don't see the humor when I knock one of them over for, "wearing the same outfit at me, jerk".
*
Happy Gaming, Randy!

Gotta love the news...

ABC News reports that, “Doctors and nutritionists say it’s ok to cheat on your diet. In fact, eating more treats once in a while may be the best way to shed those pounds.” (Clearly the geniuses behind this jewel of knowledge have failed to recognize HOW we managed to GAIN THOSE POUNDS IN THE FIRST PLACE!) They continue on to tell us that, “…two main problems with diet are boredom and lowered metabolism.” Boredom and lowered metabolism!?! Brilliant! “Regularly indulging in ‘forbidden’ foods like ice cream and pizza lets you feel less restricted and keeps your metabolism revved up, making it more likely you will lose weight in the long run.”

Hmmm… funny, this method hasn’t really managed to work for me. Maybe I am doing something wrong? Let’s see here, “eating more treats once in a while” and “regularly indulging in forbidden foods” Um, yeah, I can officially check both of those off of the list. Yet somehow I still can’t manage to tie my shoes and breathe at the same time. Should I be concerned?