Really excited

I leave for Pennsylvania today to see K. I'll be back on Tuesday!

Happy New Year!

Why do I suspect a man was in charge of this study?

I saw on Good Morning America this morning that a new study has come out saying that doing household chores reduces a woman's risk of breast cancer by up to 30 percent.

What is this, 1952?

Evidently the light exercise of activities like dusting is more beneficial to women than "strenuous activities" like sports, the show said.

I'd like to see this followed up with a study about how buying jewelry for a woman reduces erectile dysfunction, or how sending flowers reduces a man's risk of hair loss.

Only in Dallas ...

Yes, that's definitely in Wal-Mart. And yes, that piano totally plays itself.

An open letter

Dear friends, family members and co-workers:

I really appreciate your attempts to recognize the holiday season. The pies, bourbon balls and orange rum balls back home were really good. Just like the donuts at work yesterday and the chocolates today. It really is nice to walk into the kitchen at the office and see goodies, but why don't we try to spread this out?

See, all these extra goodies I normally wouldn't be consuming in such excess amounts happen to be coming at a time I'm finding myself very busy in the evenings, getting home late and having no time to go to the gym. As a result, all the work I'd done to firm up my tummy is disappearing -- quite quickly. While I appreciate your efforts to prevent my pants from being a little loose on me like they have been in the past few weeks, I was actually enjoying that.

So if you all could refrain from enticing me with such wonderful, chocolatey, creamy, decadent goodies, I'd really appreciate it. And so would my getting-tighter-every-day pants.

Sincerely,
Me

P.S. While we're on this open-letter thing, a request for all retail stores: My bank account hasn't had time to recover from Christmas shopping, but I'm finding your amazing sales hard to resist. I love my new digital camera and Chi straightener, and I'm really looking forward to taking advantage of Victoria's Secret's semi-annual sale, but seriously? This is getting out of hand. For taking away from time I'd spend at the gym, you're just as guilty as all the fattening treats.

The things you'd never say

I got this post idea from s of New Beginnings and New Dreams. After struggling about whether or not I should say one of the things, I decided it would be best to get it out here.

The instructions s wrote on her blog, "the point is to list 10 things you want to say to people, but never will. don't say who the person is, either."

Most of these things will be negative, since if I have a positive thing to say, why would I keep that from the person?

1) I wasn't prepared to see you there that night since you had absolutely no business being there. I think it's really lame that you crashed that banquet. I also think if you had any integrity at all, you wouldn't have accepted the door prize. If you had the smallest fraction of integrity, you'd have given it to one of your co-workers who actually was supposed to be there. I don't think I have room in my life for people with no integrity.

2) You really disappointed me. I thought of any of my friends, you'd be there for me when he was gone. How could you talk to me for only 5 minutes and not even ask how he was doing or when I'd last heard from him, only to end our conversation because you had something else to do? Because of you, though, I've made sure I'm much better about doing what you didn't. But I still expected more from you.

3) You lied to me so much growing up -- probably more than you told the truth. You tricked me, you "tested" me, you walked over me, you used me. You stole my first boyfriend. It's sad it took me moving to college to find out what a real friend is. And you're still back home. With an arrest warrant. (Karma's a bitch!)

4) I don't know who you are, but if I ever meet you, I might hit you. You're not totally to blame, but you helped her hurt my dad. You knew what you were doing, and you had a family too. You put your "needs" over my feelings, my brother's feelings, my dad's feelings, your kids' feelings and your wife's feelings. You disgust me. I'm pretty sure karma got you, too, though.

5) I'm glad you realized it wasn't going to work out, but damn you for hurting him like that. You've made a lot of things easier for me, but you've made several things harder, too. He's happier now. And honestly, I hope you are, too.

6) We're friends, but I can only handle you in small doses.

7) Why do you all treat him like that? He's had a rough life, and none of it was his fault. Don't add to it.

8) I hate the way you let your kids take advantage of him. He works so hard, and he's not rich. And stop wanting all these expensive things!

9) That place is not your playground. Or your personal refrigerator. Stop eating everything. And when he pays for your dinner, eat it!

10) Why do you have to be so bitter? Why do you only come around when you need something? Why don't you ever thank him when he helps you? Why don't you straighten up?


Whew! I'm not even kidding -- that really does feel better! I think I might have just gotten out every piece of anger I have.

I am now convinced everyone should do this.

He's totally hinting

(and I'm totally blogging tons of little blurbs today ...)

K just called me to tell me he just bought his new truck. He's going to pick it up later tonight. He's pretty excited. I congratulated him and told him I couldn't wait to see it.

"Yeah, one priority down, one to go," he said.

"Really? What's the other one?" I asked.

"I'm sorry ... you're breaking up," K abruptly replied -- and very clearly, I might add, since he was still in the same place he'd called me from, and we'd been talking for about 3 minutes with an interrupted signal and a total lack of any static whatsoever.

Technology is awesome!

So far today -- thanks to camera phones -- I have helped ER choose a pair of shoes 20 miles from where I sit at work, and I've helped K choose the color of his new truck all the way in Pennsylvania.

What happened to YOU on Christmas?

I fell off a pogo stick! Who else can say that?!

Christmas at my place

I promised I'd post pictures of my Christmas decor at my apartment. Pretty festive for just starting off, I think. :)

My lovely tree, which is mainly OU ornaments, but a few having to three are ornaments for K (one's the patriotic guy in the middle; another is a guy in the green Class A uniform that my mom sent me this year; the third is from a military ball K and I went to last year.)

The OU Christmas decoration I got from my mom for Christmas last year.

The two angels I got for Christmas from a friend. I wish they didn't match the picture frames beside them so well, but that's okay.

And my other K-inspired decor:

This little guy's supposed to be an ornament, but he's a little big for the tree I have right now.

The Army nutcracker I found at Wal-Mart. I love it!

I LOVE CHRISTMAS!

You probably can't tell by looking at my blog, but I like the way it looks too much to risk messing it up by changing it. You should see my MySpace profile, though. :)

I've gotten very little sleep the last few days getting ready for everything. Three nights ago, I was up until 1 a.m. making my cheesecake for the office. Two nights ago, I was up until 2 baking cookies for Christmas presents for my boss and a co-worker. That night, I also wrapped all my presents and got that done, and I set up iTunes. That was a major reason for staying up late. And putting an additional dent in my dwindling bank account. But hey, I needed some more Christmas music to listen to while I was wrapping and baking.

And last night, I was up until 2 again. I made a cheesecake for my family this time. ER came over and kept me company while I was making it. I felt like I hadn't seen her in forever! We listened to Christmas music and updated each other on things going on. She told me about the Christmas lights at Frisco Square and how cool they are. She couldn't believe I hadn't been, being the huge Christmas fan I am. Since I'm not going to be here this weekend, we hurried and finished the cheesecake, and off we went to see the lights. They were definitely pretty cool. I wish I'd found out about them earlier because I totally would've taken K to see them. They have quite a few events on weekends, too, like watching Christmas movies outside at night on huge screens. That would be so much fun, and right up my alley!

After that, we went back to my place and exchanged gifts and hung out a bit longer. We made plans to hang out next week. I'm excited. When ER left, I started packing for my weekend in Oklahoma. Then, I burned myself a Christmas CD that I'm listening to at work and will most likely torture my brother with in the car on the way to Oklahoma.

I took pictures of my Christmas decorations at my apartment, and I'm hoping to post them tomorrow. Until then, my schedules pretty packed: work; picking up my brother from the airport; stopping off at my apartment to load my car with presents, luggage and cheesecake; and driving to Oklahoma.

It's gonna be another late night!

The closest thing I'll see to snow in Dallas

Make your own snowflake! It's fun, it's free, and you help out The Salvation Army!

The Griswolds have got NOTHING on this house!

This video totally pumps me up for Christmas, and it makes me want to buy a Trans-Siberian Orchestra CD. Badly.

I'm definitely doing this to my house someday. When I have a house. :)

A regular Betty Crocker!

I made my cheesecake today for my office, and I'm so excited! Everyone's been walking by it in the kitchen, and I can hear them say, "What a beautiful cake!" The few people who've tried it already have stopped by and raved about how good it is: "You made that?! It looks store-bought! And it tastes amazing!"

Cheesecake, anyone?

As requested, here's the recipe for Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Cheesecake. I've made it several times, and I was even told it tasted "professional" by a guy who called himself a "cheesecake connoisseur." And if I make it, so can you.

Trying not to scream (with excitement) right now

My cousin, who's like 16 days younger than me, called me last Friday to tell me she had gotten engaged the night before.

We were pretty close growing up, since her family lived in OKC, only a few hours away. She visited our grandparents quite a bit, and my brother and I would always stay the night with my grandparents when she was in. Well, she and her family moved to Hawaii a few years ago. I visited them for spring break my senior year in college and (of course) had a blast. They're moving back this spring.

I was pretty excited and surprised to hear my cousin's news. I asked her when the wedding was going to be. She said they'd either have it in March in Hawaii or after in Oklahoma, depending on her schedule and her fiance's. He's in the Air Force and in March is getting stationed at Tinker AFB, which -- conveniently enough -- is in OKC.

Today she sent me a message saying they're planning on a day in March. I had told K last Friday about her getting engaged and told him I was probably going to go to the wedding and wanted him to come, too. Well, my cousin officially asked me today to be a bridesmaid. Her parents (my aunt and uncle) will pay for me and the maid of honor to fly out there for the wedding!

I'm going to Hawaii!!!

I won!

http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2732069

Wow ... This is so unexpected. I mean, I didn't even have time to prepare an acceptance speech.

(If I have a blog, MySpace account and a YouTube account, does that mean I win three times over? Does Facebook get me bonus points?)

Shopped out (but still not quite finished)

I worked late Friday night. By the time I got home, it was almost 8:30, which meant by the time I ate and let my food settle for an hour, it would be 9:30, so I skipped the gym. Instead, I vegged out on my couch watching It's a Wonderful Life. It's my favorite Christmas movie, and we watched it every year growing up. I hadn't seen it yet. It's not officially Christmas until I have, so I went and bought it on DVD Thursday night so I'd have it in my own collection.

It's funny the things you don't get when you watch a movie when you're little. This was the first time I'd watched the movie alone, so it was distraction-free viewing. I understood why George and Mary started acting so funny from just standing close together while they were on the phone. I also realized that my dad is George Bailey.

He's lived in our little town pretty much all his life, and there's no one like Potter that he has to protect everyone from, but he's worked hard and doesn't have as much as he'd like to show for it. He doesn't get to go on vacations, and he's told me several times he wishes he could have paid for my college so I didn't have to have student loans or that he could pay for my car so I didn't have to. I tell him I wouldn't have things any other way.

Because I got a job when I was 13, I started paying for a large portion of things I needed -- everything from clothes to makeup to school supplies and even feminine products. I paid for my CDs and magazines. I got a checking account. I learned the value of a dollar. I'm not selfish or spoiled. I appreciate what I have. I'm a bargain shopper. And because I knew it wasn't going to be easy to pay for college, I spent a ton of time my senior year in high school filling out scholarship applications, writing essays and interviewing for awards. Because I did that, most of my college was paid for. I hope my dad realizes how much of a difference he's made for so many people. They don't make guys like him anymore. He's just such a great, nice guy, and he works hard. I'm proud of him.

Saturday, I was going to sleep in or go to the gym, but K called me at about 9. I talked to him for a while before dozing off for another 20 minutes or so. Then, I went to the optometrist and finally got a new prescription for contacts. I've needed to do that for a while. The doctor told me I looked like a younger version of Nicole Kidman. :)

I went shopping and got several people taken care of. I got my hair "trimmed," but the guy needs to go back to elementary school to relearn how little "half an inch or an inch" is. He definitely cut more than that off. Oh, well.

I went to my boss's Christmas party. I was the first person there, which was kind of uncool. That's why I'm always just a little late for things. If you're late, you don't find yourself being the only person at the party while the hosts are still putting out bath mats from the wash.

The party was fun, though, once other people arrived. There was a Christmas movie trivia, though, and the grand prize was an iPod shuffle -- not the teeny little square one from this year, but the one that's about two inches long and half an inch wide. Well, the final round of the trivia was over It's a Wonderful Life, so I totally kicked butt. I got all the answers right, and I won the iPod. Woohoo!

Sunday, we had our office Christmas part at our department head's house. Her husband is a chef, so there was some amazing food there! After I left, I ran a few more errands, and my shopping is almost complete. I do still need to get a couple smaller things, but it's no biggie. I'm almost done, which is great because I don't have time this week to do much shopping, and I'm afraid I don't have the energy either.

Braving those malls is exhausting!

I can't believe I'm admitting this

Every job I'd ever had before I moved to Dallas involved lots of standing or walking around. In fact, the job I had right before I moved to Dallas -- a carhop at Sonic -- was all standing and walking around. Not my job now. No, now I sit in my own office at a desk all day staring at a computer screen. It's really quite fun, except the opposite.

My desire to avoid getting raped because I was dumb enough to try running alone in Dallas at night meant that I was getting pretty much no exercise unless I took the stairs at work. For a while, I tried even taking the stairs to the first floor every time I needed to use the restroom. I was drinking a lot of water and climbing those three flights of stairs down and back up quite a bit. But the bathroom on my floor is much nicer, and women in the first floor bathroom always looked at me funny, like they knew I wasn't a first-floor girl or something.

Well, one day, I was taking the stairs to the first floor when I felt something very unfamiliar. I tried to remember if I'd ever felt it before and had forgotten, or maybe I'd just never paid attention. No, there was something very different: I could feel my butt moving. I'd never even had a butt before -- much less one that fought with gravity when I went down stairs. Horrified at any domino effect this could trigger, I decided to get a gym membership.

I worked out two or three times a week, since I get home kind of late and most weekends I was either going to Louisiana to see K or entertaining him here. The jiggle was still there on the stairs. I decided I'd either never paid attention to notice it before or that it was just some post-college body metamorphosis telling me I was really in the real world.

When K went to Afghanistan, though, I was in Dallas more. I worked out quite a bit more than usual -- sometimes even five times a week (didn't happen too often, though). I even thought it would be fun to work on my gluteal muscles, since K's a butt guy. I figured it'd be a nice surprise when he came back.

I started doing lunges two or three times a week. Not just any lunges -- lunges with 25-pound weights in each hand. Then, I moved to 30.

I did leg exercises. I did the gluteal training on the elliptical. I did the exercise bike from time to time. I could tell a difference, and it was nice to see my hard work paying off.

Well, I just ran downstairs for something today, and as I was climbing back up, I noticed something -- well, the lack of something, I should say. Nothing was jiggling! I found myself smiling wtih pride all the way up the rest of the stairs and all the way down the hall back to my office.

I probably looked like a grinning idiot, but who cares. My ass fought gravity, and it totally won.

Like little reality TV shows

Hello, friends! I miss you! Things have been so crazy since Thanksgiving. I went back to Oklahoma, and once I got back to Dallas was immediately getting ready for K's return from Afghanistan. I was there for several days, and once I got back to Dallas, I had a lot of things to do around here. Then, K was in that weekend (which was last weekend). It's left me very little time to blog and almost no time to read any!

Work has been crazy, too, and most days I take a few brain breaks a day by escaping to read your blogs. I haven't even really had a chance to do that, since everyone's taking off work because it's the holidays. It puts a strain on those of us who are still there.

But I'm catching up, and I've missed you! I've thought about all of you a lot while I've been unable to read about your lives.

When I was little, my mom and I both had penpals from some Victorian magazine -- I don't even remember which. Anyway, it was fun to keep in touch with my penpals and to find out what was going on in their world, as well as to share what was happening in mine. That's what I like so much about blogging. I really do think of you all as friends, and it's fun to read about your lives as they happen. It's kind of like a reality show that never ends.

I'm slowly catching up on reading. Sorry for the barrage of comments on your posts, since I'm reading them all one after the other. A good thing I've noticed, though, is it seems that for everyone I've caught up on so far (alphabetical order, if you must know), life has taken a turn for the better. How exciting!

I couldn't have written it better myself.

The weekend that went too quickly

K came to Dallas this weekend. He was able to leave Louisiana early enough to make it here in time for dinner. I needed it, since my day started off not so well. We went to a great Mexican restaurant and stuffed ourselves and had margaritas. It was relaxing and fun and funny and great.

Saturday, we went shopping all day. I got some Christmas shopping out of the way, and we got to do something that other couples get to do all the time but we don't because we live far apart. I love doing things like shopping or laundry with K. It makes whatever it is I have to do that much better because he's there.

Anyway, K got me this necklace last year for Christmas. He got something where I get it cleaned and inspected every six months, and as long as I keep up with that, if a diamond falls out, they'll replace it for free. The mall we went to had that jewelry store, unlike the mall closest to my apartment, so we got that done while we were there. After the worker took my necklace and told us it would just be a couple minutes, K said, "Gee ... I wonder what we could look at while we're waiting in a jewelry store with nothing to do?" He walked over to the engagement rings, but I looked instead at all the birthstone jewelry in a different section. Of course I wanted to go look at rings with him. But I didn't want him to think that I had decided to get my necklace taken care of that day so we would have to look at rings. I didn't want it to be a "while we're here ..." thing. I didn't want him to feel like that was what we had to do. (I did tell him that later so he wouldn't be confused as to why I seemed uninterested in looking at rings.)

We went to Best Buy, which for K is like going to a toy story is for most kids. It's kind of adorable. We were there for quite a while before heading back to my place for dinner. Then, one of my high school guy friends came over to go with us to a piano bar. ER met us there soon after.

This trip was so much more fun than last time because I wasn't worried about K -- he was there next to me, rather than being in some foreign country surrounded by people who might be trying to kill him. With ER and my friend Justin there, it was just a blast.

We sang at the top of our lungs and laughed at each other, and at one point, I even danced with K -- to "Sweet Home Alabama," our song. :) As the night went on, the pictures got goofier.





Justin doing his hipster impression. ER looks speechless!













Trying on ER's glasses ... K is looking slightly drunk now.











I didn't get the "be goofy" memo. ER totally snuck into this picture!












We're fun kids.










K even got called on stage a couple times since he'd just gotten back from Afghanistan. I had nothing to do with that. (riiiiiiiiight)

















Sunday was spent just lying around doing laundry and watching movies. It was the best weekend I've had in a long time.