Ten Things

So I just have a few things to post today, with no apparent theme.

Scott is almost finished sanding, bondo-ing, and priming the 'Stang so soon he will be able to paint it. He doesn't think it's going fast enough, but I think we should take our time and get it done very well the first time. We're looking to sell this thing for quite a chunk of cash, so it needs to be as authentic and carefully done as possible.

I hate tailgaters. When someone is that close behind me, the evil part of me wants to just SLAM on my brakes and pretend there was a deer in the road or something, because more often than not the car behind me is much MUCH more expensive than mine. Ha. But then there's that whole whiplash thing...

Diet Mountain Dew isn't very good when it's flat and warm.

I really really want to know who the final Cylon is, but I promised Scott I wouldn't go online to find out before we finish watching the series. It's just about killing me.

One of my friends' husband is a structural engineer and was kind enough to come over the day before yesterday and take a look at our sub floor and support beams in the basement. It turns out that if we replace one beam with steel and add one more on the longer side of the basement, we might not have to replace the entire sub floor before we can put the wood down.

Mim called me yesterday and asked me a chemistry question (I love when she does that!). Someone had told her that aspartame decomposes to make formaldehyde in your stomach and poisons you so you shouldn't drink diet soda with aspartame in it. Number one, there is no known one step acid to aldehyde reduction. Number two, if you did want to make it into an aldehyde, you would have to eat some lithium aluminum hydride tetrabutyl oxide or else some palladium and quinoline, and if you had eaten these formaldehyde in your stomach would be the LAST thing you should worry about. So there's your chemistry lesson for today: aspartame will not turn into formaldehyde in your stomach. The end.

I have been walking on the treadmill on my lunch breaks at work and sometimes again when I get home. I just pop in some Scrubs or Stargate or Gilmore Girls or whatever and walk while I watch and it makes it go so much faster. I feel like I have more energy and I don't feel so bad about having a cookie for lunch yesterday.

I wish I were a size 8. Or a 6. Whatever.

Kwiddens asked me to knit her special socks to wear to the hospital when she goes into labor. They will be purple. Also, I am stalling weaving the ends into her baby's blanket by starting a new lace scarf.

I'm in love with my new phone, but I miss waking up to Hedwig's Theme as my alarm. I will have to download a new tone.

The Whole Family

So this weekend I went down to Mim's house to hang, and Kwiddens drove down there as well. I had a lot of fun, since it's been a while since I've been with the whole family.

Friday I got off work at 1:00, which was further proof that I'm INVINCIBLE SUPERCHEMIST because I completed my work and a large chunk of my coworker's (he had the day off to hang with his family). I went to the mall and bought my new phone (Samsung Rogue, LOVE IT) and get its screen in protective film. This took a long time for whatever reason, and by 4:30 I was on the road. I got into Orem at about 6:00 and got a table for Mim and myself, and Mim got there and we ate tasty food and talked about lots and lots of things, which we haven't been able to do in a while, so it was really awesome. Right after we paid, Kwiddens called and said she had made it into town, so we all went to Cold Stone and got ice cream, and Mim thought it was gross. Because she's crazy. I have to admit, though, that the ice cream there has a different texture, and that was what she didn't like about it. Oh well. So I headed down to the house, and they had some errands to run, and came later, and we stayed up late talking and joking and just having fun.


Saturday I woke up and took a long relaxing shower and then Mim and I went to the Math Lab at UVU to tutor some of her students and she let me write the test for one of her classes. Once I finished, she looked it over and as she was reading it she got this evil grin on her face...yes, I made it tricksy. Kwiddens was supposed to meet with us, but she got stuck in traffic for like two hours because of traffic for the Festival of Colors at the Hari Krishna temple near Spanish Fork. So eventually she got through it and we met in Provo and ate at Los Hermanos, which was a little disappointing and the service was SO SLOW, but they had absolutely amazing strawberry lemonade so it was ok. This past week I've been feeling sick every time I eat, so I just went back to Mim's while they went to the mall. Once we were all home we all went and hung out in Mim's bathroom while we did each other's hair (her bathroom is huge so it's super awesome).


So my panels that were bright red last time had faded so they're fuchsia now.
Ignore the messy hair, I had just washed it and you know I can't be bothered to dry it.


Anyway, so after that it was pretty late and I drove home and went to sleep.


Today I pretty much slept all day...I felt like I had been drugged I was so tired. Anyway, now I'm watching Stargate and trying to decide whether I should work on Kwiddens's baby blanket. I'm feeling particularly lazy today (as demonstrated by sleeping all day).

Oh, Kwiddens...

You have to love your sister when she texts you a picture of a Play-Doh fetus.

Text Time 1

So this is the first installment of funny text messages/conversations that I have with my family and friends. Mostly my family. Chances are, my family is just going to keep getting funnier, so hopefully this will be something I can post often!

Mim: Will you make some hydrogen sulfide for me?

Me: Who are you trying to kill?

Mim: WHOM am I trying to kill...

Me: Shut up. So whom?

Mim: No one. Need for a friend who needs to do a comparison thing.

Me: Let some eggs rot. You'll have some in about a month. Maybe faster if you leave them out in the sun.

Mim: I'm just gonna tell him you said no.

Kwiddens: Is it bad that when I see a guy in the airport screaming "Sell! Sell! Sell!" into his cell phone I think he's faking?

Kwiddens: Isaac's mom was eating an avocado and Avogadro's number popped into my head.

Mim: So what do you suppose is a mole of avocados?!

Kwiddens: Isaac found my old ring!

Me: Where was it??

Kwiddens: In Nyah's room

Me: Isn't that your uterus? How did it get in there?

Kwiddens: Haha no the room where the guns used to be

Me: Buster just tried to eat a Schnauzer

Mim: Hors d'ouvres!

Utah Weirdos

A blog friend suggested I post about some of the interesting/weird things Utahns do. The problem with this is that most of these things are more of a Utah Mormon culture thing. So I'll list a few things, and try to keep it kind, and you'll think it's hilarious!

Instead of saying "the eff word" they say Flip! or Fetch! or Frick!, which I find hilarious, because we all know what they're actually thinking...

As everyone knows, A LOT of Utahns are Mormon, and they're not supposed to drink coffee, but there are so many people I know who drink like ten diet cokes a day for the caffeine (the rules aren't specifically for caffeine, just coffee and tea, so some people interpret it as no caffeine and some don't).

Weird names. Not even kidding. Kwiddens says she knew a girl named Bronwyn.

Nobody here knows how to cook. Meat gets overcooked to the point of being like leather. Pasta gets mushy. Vegetables are wilted. Foods that should not be combined are...like cauliflower and mayonnaise...and Jello with vegetables in it...Utah definitely has a Jello thing. It's like its own food group.

BAD DRIVING. I'm sure this is true everywhere you go, but it really does seem particularly bad here. My biggest pet peeve about Utah drivers is that they run red lights like crazy on left turns. After the light has turned red, usually three or four cars go ahead and turn even though they weren't even in the intersection when it turned red. Stoplights here have an extra few seconds between green lights in each direction, and I can only assume that this is why.

Also, for a state that gets snow every year, nobody here knows how to drive in snow. Pathetic.

The higher up on the mountain you are, the higher your social status. People assume Mim is incredibly wealthy because her house is up on the mountain, and she's just as broke as everyone else in the world. The funniest thing is, up on the mountain is right along the fault line...really the stupidest place to build a house, if we have an earthquake.

Remember in the 60's when women would back-comb and hairspray sections in the back of their hair so it was poofy in the back and on top? Yeah. They do that here. It's ugly as hell, too.

There are other things, but they're more negative and more related to Mormons specifically, and the last thing I want to do is Mormon-bash, so I'll end it here.

Happy Valley is a weird, weird place.

A Medicine Adventure!

So, once upon a time Anna was on a medicine that helped with her mood swings. She went on it a little while after she got married, and things were more hectic then than they are now, so her doctor thought she should try to see if she could go off this medicine (it can cause blood sugar problems, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, etc.)(it's on the list of the top ten drugs that can kill you).

So Friday night she didn't take this medicine, and watched all weekend to see how she felt. Saturday and Sunday she felt just fine, but when she woke up Monday morning she was shaking all over and achy and generally miserable and had to call in sick. Boo.

Tuesday the shaking was gone, but she wasn't sleeping well and when she did get to sleep she was having terrible nightmares every single night and would wake up screaming and messing with her hair (because usually the dreams were about spiders in her hair).

She also noticed that she was more irritable and moody, and that poor Scott was avoiding her a bit.

So, she decided that it was worth the risk and she took the medicine again last night. She slept better than she had all week, had no nightmares, and was in a fabulous mood all day long.

The end.

Ok really though, it was a miserable week for me. So many little things that normally wouldn't have bothered me were driving me freaking insane, and I was feeling anxious about it. I wasn't sleeping, so every single morning I had to fight with myself just to get out of bed and I felt groggy and achy all day.

I had blood work done this week and they haven't called me, so I assume everything is still normal, so I am not concerned about the health effects, especially now that I have lost weight and am eating better. So, I'm back on it. And that's that.

Also, it's FRIDAY.

Thanks A Million

I am thankful for:

• Diet Mountain Dew
• Cinnamon bears
• New equipment at work
• An awesome husband
• A great job
• Del Taco
• Not having french fry cravings (but the taco cravings are still quite intense)
• Buster
• My mattress heater
• Tax returns (even though the date we're supposed to get ours keeps getting pushed back...)
• Hand sanitizer
• Kleenex
• Yarn
• The internet and e-mail
• Good books
• Music
• Battlestar Galactica
• Being able to get done at work in six hours since it took me SO LONG to drive to work today (a 3000 gallon diesel tanker got smashed up on I-15 this morning and it took them ALL DAY to clean it up!)

Birthdayness

So for birthday week there were many festivities.

Last Friday Mim took me out to Applebee's and we had tasty steak and had so much fun talking to each other. While we were there, a little girl at another nearby booth hurt her finger and it was bleeding profusely, and she was crying (and I wasn't mad because she had been behaving super well for a girl her age before she got hurt, and dude, if I were bleeding like that I probably would have cried too) and right in the middle of it she said (in the most comical but sad way possible ) "Geez Louise!!!" and Mim and I just totally lost it, and we looked over and the mother was trying so hard not to laugh. It was hilarious. And sad, because I'm not totally heartless.

So then that weekend Scott was going to take me to Red Lobster for our birthday dinner, but when we got there it was going to be like an hour wait and we were feeling particularly impatient and hungry that day, so we just went and got Chinese at our favorite place. I thought that was my birthday dinner, but on Tuesday Scott convinced me that I wanted to go to Red Lobster in the first place, so that's where we were going. And I posted about that. But I left out another funny thing: A lady came out from the kitchen to get some lobsters from the tank in the lobby, and some little kids were watching her, and she pulled out three and then asked "Would you like to say goodbye?" And I don't know why that struck me as so funny but it was awesome.

So then Thursday was the actual birthday. It was my turn to bring treats to work, so I went to Krispy Kreme. I went through the drive-thru and she took my order and then when I pulled up, she was so confused that she had to take my order again, and because of this she gave me some of the donuts for free. And she didn't even know it was my birthday! So that was some good birthday karma to start out the day.

Then at work, my coworker so astutely pointed out that we hadn't ordered pizza for lunch in a while, and what an awesome thing to do on someone's birthday, so we did, and then I finished work early and went home and took a little birthday nap!

After she got off work Kwiddens came up to take me for another birthday dinner (I'm sensing a theme here) and we went to Applebee's again and just split an appetizer so we would have room for COLD STONE OH YES. And I got some Birthday Cake Remix.

And that was the end to birthday week.

I didn't want presents from people, because I have enough stuff, and I just want to spend some quality time with people I love whom I don't get to see often. But, as per tradition, Scott got me lots of presents from my wishlist and let me order some birthday yarn.

He got me several CDs, including a Ditty Bops, an Avril Lavigne, and a Vertical Horizon, and a few movies (Never Been Kissed, Step Up, and While You Were Sleeping), and a copy of The Hitchhiker's series (and Scott's parents also got me this book, leather bound with gold embossment, really awesome), and three awesome books about knitting socks!

I ordered rainbow sock yarn, and then some pink, green, and purple yarn that all mathces so I haven't decided if I want to use it for a big something or three little somethings with the individual colors.

So the moral of the story is:

I am SO spoiled. And I am okay with it.

Dye: An Adventure

So.

I had a birthday this past week. 24!

I got some birthday money from my grandma and grandpa (there'll be a post about that) so I decided to treat myself to something fun. I've been wanting to do something cool with my hair for a while but have either been broke or too busy.

Whenever I want to get something done I go to the beauty school. It's cheaper, and the instructors are there every step of the way so you know that even if there's a mistake it will be fixed.

Which I experienced firsthand.

So last time I dyed my hair (September) I had a lighter brown on top and a much darker brown on the underside and I loved it. It was the perfect color combination for my complexion and added depth to my own, boring, mousy brown color.

So this time I decided to do the same colors but add a little zest: hot pink peekaboo panels!

I went in and my stylist's name was Amanda. Let me just say that through this entire thing she was awesome.

So I told her what I wanted and she whipped out the color book and we decided on what colors to do and everything. Then she went to get the supervisor to ok the formulas.

Now, they kept the formulas from last time on file. And they worked perfectly last time. So you would think that they would use them again. But this instructor, RUTH, was an absolute moron and told them "No, you should use this developer instead of the other one" and when they took the dye off the top my roots were ORANGE. Not like, redhead orange, but orange like the Jayne hat I made earlier.

So, at this point they had bleached the panels to put in the pink, so they decided that they would put in the pink and then re-dye the roots with the correct developer this time and fix it. So, they went back to mix the colors and they came back out...they had failed to check to make sure they still had pink. Yep, they didn't.

So, out came the color book again, and we looked at all our options, and I was very disappointed because um, hello, pink is my favorite color. But, it was already bleached and ready to go, so I just chose to do fire engine red instead. Red tends to fade more quickly than most other colors, so I figured once it faded I could reapply pink and my stylist said she would help me get a hold of the right kind of dye later, and what the heck, red is fun too.

So they put the red on and then reapplied the new, correct, dye to the roots on top. We let it process and then went to rinse it out. Immediately we could see that the red was PERFECT AND AWESOME AND WOW COOL! However...my roots were still orange. Very very orange.

So, we called yet another instructor over (we'd gone through like three) and they decided on another formula to mix up to try to fix it again. So we applied that and waited...and they were still orange.

So, another instructor came over and pow-wowed with the other one, and came up with another formula, and they put it on, and while we waited for that I put in a formal complaint to the manager that it was, in fact, an instructor that made the wrong formula in the very beginning, and she should have known better. Oh, and she was really rude to me too and that bugged me.

So then we rinsed that off and it was wet but it looked better, so we dried it...and that took a long time because my hair is very thick.

But, once it was dry, the roots were almost exactly the same color as the rest! WIN!

So anyway. That was fun. I got there at 3:45 and was there until 9:45...6 hours. But it was fun, and I was in a good mood.

My attitude was basically this: that's what you risk when you go to the beauty school to get your hair done. Someone is bound to make a mistake somewhere and as long as they are willing to fix it, I'm cool with it. The only reason I was pissed off was because it was the freaking instructor that messed it all up.

So here's a picture of the back...it's really messy because I slept on it but you can see the red peeking through. It's all around, like a halo, and when I move you can see it peek through and I LOVE IT and it actually looks redder than this:

SO rock and roll.

Anyway. So I got birthday money and I was going to have fun with it and I knew this was going to be expensive. The instructor at the beginning was going to charge me $20 for the base color, and another $6 for adding another color to the underside, and then she wanted to charge $3 per panel, and they ended up putting in 20 panels (there's a lot more red in there than it looks like in that picture) and so it was going to be about $90. And that was fine with me, because it was birthday money. BUT, when the stylist sent me up to the register to pay she wrote down that there were only 5 panels (yay! saving money!) so that was going to be only about $40. AWESOME. So I brought the formula slip up to the register and they were like "$14 please" and I was like, "Um, you didn't look at the slip, I had panels and everything" and they were like "Yeah (sneaky looks on their faces) we're having a special". The instructor that had priced it out earlier was gone so they were able to fudge it and I had like $100 worth of work done for $14.

And that's the story about my birthday hair dye.

Silly Rabbit...

So I was at work today, bored, making a sock (as usual), and I started thinking.

I made myself Chef Boyardee ravioli for lunch. I love the stuff. And Pop-Tarts. And Lunchables. And Kool-Aid. I love kid food!

I was wondering why, and I think I realized that the things I love eating are based in childhood experiences. When I was growing up my family was so dirt poor that sometimes Mim went without food to make sure Kwiddens and I ate. Really freaking poor. We lived on beans and rice and the cheapest canned vegetables and fruits. We never had cereal for breakfast because it was too expensive, so we ate oatmeal or Malt-O-Meal or grits (yummy!) or cracked wheat (and whoever invented that, THANKS A LOT THAT WAS NASTY AND MIM MADE ME EAT IT ALL).

All that is a long way of saying we rarely ever got kid food. I got it occasionally over at friends' houses, but at home, not so much.

So, once I grew up and had control over my finances and eating habits, I fell in love with the foods I could never have growing up. During my senior year of college I was too busy to bother cooking, so I almost always ate on campus, and that meant from the vending machines in the basement of the chemistry building (since going to the food court would involve actually walking over there...). I was usually pretty reasonable and ate a ham sandwich and an apple, but I have to admit that my favorite meal was (and I kid you not) BYU Cookies 'n' Cream flavored milk and Hostess mini chocolate donuts. And I was skinnier than I am now. Go figure.

(I'm not actually proud of the way I ate, just so you know)

Shrimpies Are Tasty

So tonight we went for dinner at Red Lobster. This is one of a series of birthday dinners with various members of my family (after birthday week is over I will tell everything I got and ate, etc.).

We walked in and sat down for a few minutes while they got us a table. While we were sitting there, another man across from us PUT HIS FEET ON THE TABLE. IN A RESTAURANT. Ugh.

Then, we were seated in one of those little alcoves that are really echoey. We were also seated to two different tables with SCREAMING BABIES.

Pet peeve: If your child is too young to behave and be quiet at a nice restaurant, LEAVE THE LITTLE BUGGER HOME WITH A FREAKING BABYSITTER.

So I asked to be moved (I actually can't believe I had the guts to do that!). Apparently if you ask for something early on the manager will make sure to come take special care of you and make sure you get everything you want. Awesome.

So once we were seated in a quieter place and got our food it was wonderful and relaxing and I had three kinds of shrimp.

I had been having a really bad day because I missed some meds TWICE last week and my body is still trying to balance itself again, so even though everything at work went perfectly smoothly and I had a great day, I just got home after work and felt...well, I couldn't really figure out how I felt. I felt sad, but content, but tired, but restless. I felt like I was craving something, but it wasn't food or sleep or something to do...I wanted to get out of the house and do something but at the same time I just wanted to veg in front of the TV (I'm loving Stargate all over again). I hate when I feel like this because I feel like no matter what I do I will still feel unsettled.

So, when Scott got home we decided to go out and run a bunch of errands before getting dinner and once we were out and about and getting things done I felt a bit better, and at dinner I had a daquiri so I felt a little more relaxed and hopefully tonight I will sleep better and tomorrow maybe my brain chemicals will decide to behave. Maybe.

Either way, WHO PUTS THEIR FEET ON THE TABLE AT A RESTAURANT?

It was a grown man, for crying out loud.

Gross.

Phones Galore!

So a while ago Scott wanted a new phone, so he decided to look around in Hong Kong and see what he could find. Electronics are often less expensive over there, so we figured maybe we could get a good deal on a good phone. He looked around though, and they were comparable in price to what they have here, so he decided to look on the internet and see if he could get a good deal.

eBay is a beautiful thing.

Most of the time.

Scott found a decent deal on a G1. It was used, and the ad said it had a little cosmetic damage but that it worked perfectly, so we bought it for $130.

It arrived in the mail and it was WAY scratched up. This was not "a little" bit of cosmetic damage; this thing was thrashed. Scott put him SIM card in anyway, to see if it worked all right. The speakers didn't work at all, and the whole time he was using it (two or three days) he received no calls...which was a little suspect. It turns out people were trying to get ahold of him all weekend and no calls were going through, but he was able to place calls just fine.

Obviously this was not acceptable, so Scott tried to contact the seller to send it back and get a refund. Several times. The seller never responded, so he had to open up a case with eBay to get a refund through them. This took another week or two, but in the end eBay decided to refund Scott's money and told him to ship the phone back to the seller.

Scott sent it out, but when it got back to the seller, she never claimed it, so the post office just sent it back to Scott. When he asked eBay about it, they said just to keep the phone.

So, we ended up with a free phone...that didn't really work.

Scott put his SIM card back into his old phone and we waited for a while. Soon, Scott's contract with the phone people was up, so he could get an upgrade for a reduced price. He decided he wanted to get a new G1, and try to sell the old one (with a posted ad that said it didn't work well, because, well, we're honest).

All was well. We got the new phone, and Scott loves it!

However.

The phone comes with the original version of the software, and then in a few days after activating it it is supposed to (all by itself) update to the latest version. We waited...and waited...and then we went in to the store where we bought the phone to find out what was going on. The people in the store said it might take up to a month to get the update, which we thought was ridiculous, but what were we supposed to do?

So we waited.

A month.

No update.

So, Scott called tech support, and they were all like "Um, the store lied, you were supposed to get it already, I will open a ticket and make sure you get the update soon!" We were very happy that someone in the company was actually helping, and sure enough, in a day, the update came.

Which would have been awesome, if it hadn't FROZEN Scott's phone. It was stuck on the startup screen. Scott called tech support again and they tried everything, and apparently it was hopeless so they shipped a new phone. So while we waited for that phone to arrive, Scott put his SIM card back in his old phone.

But, in a couple of days, the new phone came and everything is working fine now.

So, before Scott sent the frozen phone back, we took a picture, so we could remember this moment forever.