A Salt Flats photo shoot story....

On a perfect day in May we journeyed to the vast white

We dressed and undressed right out their in the open
We took some fun pictures
Relaxed..
And pondered the meaning of life..
Then I put on my finest slip and tank top and took the honeys to a buffet. When in Rome....
But then we ate too much....way too much. And it apparently put Amelia into a trance...
So we worked it off by pretending to gamble...
The End

Red Lobster

If you decide, during a girls/bachelorette weekend, to spend some time at a pool lounging in the sun less than a week before your nuptials, please consult a sunscreen expert, like a dermatologist or a fair-skinned redhead. If you don't your smugness for actually remember to bring sunblock will quickly be shattered when, even though you thought you applied the cream thoroughly, you find that you are a lobster five hours later, save it be a handful of random spots where you actually did apply enough sunscreen. You will be in mind-boggling pain, and though you apply aloe every hour on the hour it will do little to comfort you when you go to places where wearing a bra is absolutely mandatory. You will most likely be peeling on your wedding day and the thought of taking a sunny honeymoon cruise the week following your I do's may or may not give you night terrors. Moreover, you will learn the hard way that when your fairest-skinned friend, who is watching you apply sunscreen says under her breath "I don't trust your application," you should probably heed the comment.

Nerd alert

I love reading books and then seeing the movies. I don't know why but it really gets me going. Of late I have read/watched a couple that I have some opinions about....

Water for Elephants. It made me look at circuses differently....should I ever look at a circus....err. The book was better than the movie but I still liked both. It was a good story, fast paced and it made you think. Part of it is told from a 93 year-old man's perspective and it is so real as he talks about getting old and how people treat him and who he is now compared to how he used to be.
It has kind of changed how I interact with older folks and has given me pause about how I will be if I get old. (I say if because sometimes I text while I am on the road and if I don't stop it could do me in early - I'm working on it ok?) Would I recommend? Yes for sure. Unless you are my mom. Mom, that's a no for you. (She doesn't like when things get really intense in books and movies).

Winter's Bone. Eh. To be honest the only reason I read it was because I saw there was a movie about it. It was a rough read. It's kind of a slice of life from this girl that has had every hardship thrown at her and is just trying to track down proof that her dad is dead so she can save their land. It's set in present time but in the Ozarks, where people still marry their cousins, have family feuds (not the game show but rather death matches sometimes) and instead of moonshine they cook meth for their livelihood. It wasn't the worst thing I've read but at the end of it all I really couldn't say much about it. I didn't really walk away with anything other than maybe a better understanding of the present day Ozarks, something I could have probably done without, thanks. Sooo.... I am giving it an "eh."

Back to Mockingjay.

Woeful slumber

He says wedding planning stress is not getting to him. But this is what I walked into yesterday. Not exactly sleeping like a baby, are we? Notice his right hand in a permanent forehead slap position. I am pretty sure he was in deep REM and when he woke up his left knee had deep carpet marks.

How?

How do I cooly brag about getting a hole-in-one, when I don't even golf, without revealing that it was at a mini golf course at Hollywood Connection during a small child's birthday party?
I can't?
Whatever.
Fine. But it was still a hole in one and I didn't see any of those other smelly tweens pulling that off. Huzzah.

A San Francisco Story

I visited the city by the bay for the first time this month due to a work trip. I would be there a week and plane tickets were astronomical, since it was over Memorial Day weekend. So the night before I flew out, J hopped on a Greyhound with some interesting bus folk and met me out there, 15 hours later, for the week. Love. In the time we had I think you could say we gave SF the tourist treatment.
Double Decker tour bus with hilarious ESL bus driver? CHECK
Chilly winds and humidity resulting in mind-boggling hair, and wondering why everyone was marveling at what "such good weather" it was? CHECK
Famous Painted Ladies? CHECK
Lombard Street? (From a distance, we couldn't get our tour bus driver to drive down it, which was surprising because he had no problem driving that behemoth like a go-cart every where else) CHECK
Getting tangled in and inexplicable double helix? CHECK
Alcatraz from a distance because it was way too bloody cold to get on a boat? CHECK
My new favorite place, the staggeringly beautiful Palace of Fine Arts? CHECK
Failed car photo of SF from across the bay? CHECK
Riding a giant whale? CHECK
More crazy hair from atop Berkley? CHECK
Poor wiring in Chinatown that I am surprised didn't cause J's OCD electrical engineering head to explode? CHECK
Pier 39 and more bad hair? CHECK. I really can't with the climate there. I was pretty much cold and ugly that whole day.
Golden Gate? Of course. CHECK
Yes I realize that I've left out the trolley cars but they were down the whole time we were there, which was a bummer because we were right downtown off of Market Street. I did learn some lessons the hard way about SF that I will need to remember the next time I visit, when I feel like I want to give some bad hair and freeze to death again.
- Don't bring a car. BART. Driving sucks, parking is like $55 a night even if you are at a hotel. I turned our car in on day two.
- Bring a coat, and an umbrella, and rain boots and a wind breaker.
- Bring ample chedda, because this place isn't cheap.

All in all: It's a pretty vertical city. Lot's to see. I'm good for now.

Special thanks goes out to Kayla, our second tour guide, and for the thrills of accelerating the car down 45 percent grades on blind intersections. My butt cheeks are still clenched.

Congratulations!!

You are unequivocally the DUMBEST Bachelorette ABC has ever put on this show.

Hey, there network execs. Maybe it's time you go looking for some fresh blood than just old show cast offs. They were cast off for a reason. What happened to the days of the pro football player, or handsome hier, or prince? Now we get second-rate airline pilots and dental school drop outs. Let's get back to our roots, shall we?

"Just remember, bee yourself".....unless yourself is an overreacting idiot

Annoyed I was slightly dozing during the lonnnnng introduction to the conference keynote speaker. How you would need an introduction for the person who is going to introduce the keynote is beyond me. If I had to guess, there were probably a thousand or so people in this massive ballroom at the Mascone Center in San Fancisco for the speech. So to avoid the crowd, I opted to sit in the middle of the very sparsely populated rows on the perimeter of the room. People don't generally move to the middle of a row, you know. They see a completely emptily row or bench and plop down on the outside, forcing the awkward "crawl over" on people wanting to get to a vacant seat inside the row. It baffles me, but I've seen it a hundred times at church, school and work, this conference being no exception. Sure enough, a minute after I claimed a seat in the middle two older men capped the row taking the end seats. It was good though because with half a dozen perfectly empty rows in front of me I figured it granted me the the ability to sprawl out and spread my stuff out on the chairs around me. But a couple of loud morons ruined that when they, two women in stuffy pants suits undermined by the ample cleavage they were rockin, climbed over the men and sat their generously proportioned asses a seat away from me. I saw the two men looking around just like I was, searching for a reason why, with so many empty rows, did these two feel the need to be right up on us. So, I allowed myself to doze, calming my annoyance with the overly perfumed morons and their mind-numbing convo about why orange juice pulp is icky. A few minutes passed and the long drawn out intros had just gotten over when I felt a violent shove. Moron #1 was practically on my lap and staring, horrified, at a bee that was crawling on the back of the seat in front of her. People were staring and I was still trying to figure out what the big deal was when the damn bee started to take flight. Moron #1 then jumped off my lap/shoulder and attempted to run mindlessly down the row. With no regard to my feet, knees or bags, she tripped immediately over my legs, landing on top of my knees as if she was due for a spanking (or a paddlin' as my mom would say.) Even so, she was still not far enough away from the bee so she started air-swimming/crawling with her legs doing flutter kicks on my knees and then, after getting off my lap, loudly grabbing the backs of chairs, tripping, falling, and then getting up again, all the while whimpering like she was being chased by a killer. She was so loud that the keynote, who happened to be the Under Secretary of Education, stopped her address and said "Is everything ok over there? Do we need to check that out?" Conference officials quickly came over and calmed her in hushed tones and eventually she returned to her seat. I figured since she had practically given me a lap dance we were familiar enough for me to ask if she was ok. But it came out, "Are you allergic to bees or something?" "No." she said. "I was just scared."