Take it easy

I grew up on classic rock.

My mom is a hairstylist, always working on Saturdays. So growing up my dad would load me and my brother up and off we'd go to spend the day at the body shop while he worked on cars. I remember him pulling my hair into pigtails, buckling me into the bucket seats in the back of the s10 and singing along to Tom Petty on the half hour drive. "the tree's fallllllin...." was my 7-year old self's rendition of Free Fallin.

I'd play with my Barbies on the empty jack stands while he bending and twisted and beat on the metal bodies of cars the next bay over. Those Saturdays are where I earned my appreciation for classic rock. Classic rock and the smell of brake parts cleaner.

One of my friends gifted me quite possibly one of the greatest birthday gifts I've ever received.... tickets to the Eagles concert the weekend of my birthday.

Good tickets!

All night long I garnered remarks about how young I was, and how no one expected me to be an Eagles fan. But I just shrugged them off and told em my daddy raised me right!

It was a seriously awesome concert, although the crowd was understandably mellow compared to the concerts I am used to ha! I'm so glad I got the chance to see them once in my lifetime though!

Is it water on the knee? Operation!

Once October rolled around my mind went into Halloween mode. I am one of those weirdos who hates buying a costume (slutty nurse? no thanks.)

I could always resort to the pinata costume from last year again.

As I was talking with a friend one day he started joking that I should be the Operation board game, following the year I had. Uh, hello... GENIUS.

In the span of a single Saturday afternoon I hit up Walmart and Joanns, dyed some horribly ugly white faux Under Armour, and cut out all my "pieces", the next night I attached velcro to the red side, and adhered them to my new tan body suit using a mix of sewing and fabric glue.

I added a "popped balloon" piece to commemorate the good ol' lung collapse. Adorned my nose with a dab of red lipstick, added some 'tweezers' and I called it a success!

Apparently no one over the age of 25 remembers the board game Operation, and no child plays it any longer. So, basically no one got my costume. Womp womp.

(PSA: Fruit of the Loom's "WarmWear" is incredibly high rise and has a very awkward extra panel that could accommodate for an adult diaper maybe? I'm not real sure. Consider yourself warned.)

At least my niece loved it!

Snoots.

These days, I hit up Starbucks on one of two occasions:
1) if someone has given me a gift card, or 2) if someone else is buying.

Being that my 21st* birthday was Sunday, of course I'm armed with gift cards. (*how long can I keep this 21st birthday facade going? I wish I blogged on a graphic calculator, so I could literally type 21^5... actually I don't even think that's the proper mathology, but then again I did drop out of calculus as soon as I got my acceptance letter to art school. And I'm rambling.)

Tangent.

I swung into Starbucks yesterday after leaving work, I had somewhere to be and by some miracle of God I was running slightly early. After scoffing at the pumpkin spice littered menu, I struggled to decide what I want.

I'm probably the cheese standing alone when I say this... but 'bucks just makes their flavored coffees too damn sweet for me. And I'm not about to be THAT girl with 37 cliff notes to my order because I'm not a fan of drinking spit-in coffee, and we all know that's what 'only one-third of a lump of sugar, 135degrees, steamed soy milk" leads to.

I finally settled with a good ol' large iced green tea.

To which I was corrected that I wanted a "VENTI".

Out of habit I rolled my eyes, and this ensued:
"Dude... did you know what I meant when I said large?"
"Well, of course but it is referred to as a venti here"
"But you knew when I said large which cup size I was referencing?"
"....yes ma'am"
"...then don't be an asshole."


I pulled around to the window, handed him my gift card as he delicately Bieber-flipped his blond locks, and handed me my LARGE iced green tea.

And I drove on down the road enjoying my spit-filled tea. I don't even know how you "regulars" deal with this daily
 

birthdays in blue

I can't say I'm sad to send my 25th year on it's way. It had more cancer, surgeries, and hurt hearts than I ever want to deal with again.

It just so happened that my birthday fell on one of the biggest Colts games of the year, the night Peyton returned to Indy. So I gathered up some friends and we tailgated the night away!

As with all tailgates, we ate, we drank, we danced.

We Dirty Danced. 

I think it's safe to say a good time was had by all. And the fact that the boys in blue gifted me a big fat win against our ex-qb really made it that much better!

Crappy jobs.

The weirdest thing occurred to me last night as I was telling a friend I was spur of the moment ripping tile out of my bathroom... I learned that some people actually (wait for it) PLAN their home renovations.

Which just sounds totally foreign to me.

I mean I have been dreaming about redoing my upstairs bathroom since before even signing the closing papers (I mean, pale green floors, really?) But it was functioning, therefore the least of my worries. At some point during the HJ era we bought quick-fix peel and stick tiles and I redid that in some fit of "I don't need you, you cheating asshole" rage after we broke up. (This story is getting dramatic quick).

Everything was fine and dandy in a 'god I still hate this floor, and this toilet has been unlevel since I bought the house' kind of way until I realized my bathroom starting to smell last week. Which made my dad laugh in a "damnit, I've been saying for three years we would need to redo that bathroom and rip out the subflooring because your toilet is unlevel so naturally it probably has leaked' kind of way. And so we both shrugged it off because DAMNIT three years of tearing up my house is TOO DANG MANY!

And then yesterday, prompted by an impending house guest next week, I decided 'hey, what better time?!'

I conspired with my mom how to trick my dad into coming over to help me work on my house yet again. By 8pm we had removed the toilet, sink, vanity, a layer of tile and a layer of subflooring, and called it a night.

The saddest part of this whole story was that the only thing I really did was shut off the water main and drain the toilet.... and pull up tiles. Me and crowbars and upper arm strength just don't really mesh well.

THANKS DADDY! 

(And no, I have no clue what flooring I'll be putting down, nor what sink/vanity I will be replacing the old one with. So there's that.)