Does "flying by the seat of my pants" count as a plan?

Ok, now that I feel like a complete pervert after my last post (although I'm willing to bet some of you would have made the same mistake!)

Anyway, I was just heating up my lunch (leftover homemade macaroni and cheese) and I mentioned to my co-worker that I had accidentally made it, but it had turned out pretty well.

"What did you mean to make?" she asked.

"Chicken," I replied.

See, this is how it is when you live 4.2 miles from your best friends. You get home from work with no plans for the evening and begin staring at the contents of the refrigerator and pantry to try and figure out what to make for dinner. Your husband (or, in this case, Pretend Husband) calls and asks you to start thawing chicken and he'll make something out of it when he gets home (sometimes you go ahead and make it so you don't starve and sometimes you let him come home and cook for you like the queen that you are).

Then you get an email from your BFF describing how she made the best chocolate cake ever and it's at her house right now and seriously, best.chocolate.cake.ever. Oh, want to come over and try it? And we can give you dinner too. We'll have, uh, boxed macaroni and cheese and leftover meatloaf.

Which is how I came to not make the chicken the PH was planning on, but instead made homemade macaroni and cheese to contribute to the neighborhood revitalization dinner at SJ's. But let's be real, the mac and cheese was just a warm-up for the best chocolate cake ever (which I can totally vouch for-- it was delicious!)

I highly recommend convincing your best friends to move as close to you as you can stand it because sometimes the best times together are the accidental ones.

It seems I'm the one with the problem...

Last night, I was one of the adult leaders at a church group for middle school students. I've learned that I really have to be on my game with that group. Seventh and eighth graders are the type that will find a loophole in any instruction and will come up with the craziest things to say.

But I may have over-prepared myself last night. It began when the kids were supposed to label body parts with things those parts could be used for to help others. As one group wrote, "Give a hand to people who need one," I jumped in with, "Your answers need to be serious." They just looked at me because-- duh-- they didn't mean saw off a hand to give to someone who doesn't have one (like I was thinking). They meant give someone a hand, as in, help them out. Oops.

Then, as a different group of kids were trying to come up with something for the nose, I suggested they think about things they smell in church. Trying to get them to think of incense, I said, "Think about things you might smell during the holidays."

That's when one girl piped up with, "Semen." I just stared at her, not having a clue how to handle that one and wondering if she had meant something a lot more innocent (but, seriously, semen?) Before I could say anything, another girl jumped in and said, "Candles." And that's when I realized the first girl had actually said, "Cinnamon." Which, you know, is a perfectly acceptable answer to my question. Oops.

I'll give you $10 to scratch my back... lower... a little to the right... ahhhh

I know this blog makes it sometimes seem like SJ and I live these fabulous lives filled with hilarity without a care in the world. And it is like that... most of the time. Other times, I wake up with a serious medical issue and spend my weekend on the couch fighting it off.

Take Friday, for example. I woke up and was scratching my elbows, which have been dry from the winter weather. Noticing large bumps on my elbows, I told the Pretend Husband to take a look at them. That's when he glanced at my face and said, "Your face is really broken out." Reaching up to feel tons of bumps all over my face, I ran to the mirror and discovered I was covered in hives (and the PH thought it was acne? If it had been, it would have been like taking every break-out I ever had as a teenager and putting it on my face all at once).

Anyway, as bad as the hives were on Friday, they were worse on Saturday. Laying in bed that morning, I felt my chin and thought, "It's definitely getting better." Then I tried to open my eyes... and could only get them open half-way. The rest of the weekend is a blur of going to the walk-in clinic, doping myself up on Benadryl, laying on the couch and hoping the hives would clear up before I had to go back to work.

And the cause of the hives isn't clear. I hadn't eaten anything unusual and I didn't switch detergents. The only theory that might fit is one my co-worker has about why her husband broke out in hives recently. As strange as it sounds, he had been eating a lot of citrus. And I have too, including at least an orange a day and orange juice every morning. Needless to say, I'm sticking to coffee for awhile.

The Cut

I probably have more important things to blog about, and I realize that I have been absent for like. a long time.

And I have really important updates like the concert via Karaoke Revolution for the Wii that the PH gave last week to KAT on Saturday night when she was exhausted from working all afternoon and evening and we were... well, drunk.

But instead, I'm going to share what I did most recently to my hair.

The Before:

(Although in truth that wasn't immediately before... that was after my last hair cut).

The After:

It was about 7 inches in back, 5 inches in the front.

I'm saving a boatload on shampoo. 

I will be sending out resumes to Internet companies this afternoon...

I had a work meeting this morning in which the topic of whether my company should develop more of a presence on the Internet came up. A lot of the people at the meeting are-- ahem-- quite a bit older than I am and don't really "get" the Internet. They use it rarely, if ever, and don't understand how it's used and why people prefer it over, say, a newspaper.

That's when I chimed in, giving examples of a search I did for a piano tuner, how I read the news not only on my computer, but on my phone, and how it's an easy way to look up local businesses. Then I said, "I never pick up a newspaper. I do everything on-line. I can't remember the last time I read an actual newspaper."

That's when I remembered I work for a newspaper. "Uh," I stammered. "I mean, a newspaper other than ours, of course." We'll see if I still have a job tomorrow.

Welcome to our home. Want to borrow a sweater?

The Pretend Husband and I are notoriously frugal people, especially when it comes to spending what seems like bajillions of dollars on heating oil. Basically, we don't like to do it. So we keep our house at a temperature that we seem to have gotten used to, but leaves our guests blowing into their hands and cutting short their visits. We generally keep our thermostat between 60 and 64 and only bump it above that if people are coming over (although sometimes we forget and have to amuse ourselves by watching everyone's breath until it warms up in the living room).

Anyway, I've been told having the temperature of our (large, inefficient, hard to heat) home kept in the low 60s is crazy. But we put on extra layers, always wear socks or slippers and deal with it.

Except when the PH and I got into bed to take a nap yesterday afternoon and I just.couldn't.warm.up. I had on extra layers and yet my feet were still ice-cold enough to wake the PH out of a deep sleep (he pretends to be angry when I do that, but I know he loves it). After 20 minutes of shivering and not being able to sleep, I decided our bedroom had probably gotten below 60 degrees and I would turn up the heat just a bit. That's when I glanced at the thermometer in our room and noticed it read: 56.

Fifty-six. Although the thermostat was set for 61, our room is far enough away from it that having it get that cold doesn't necessarily kick the heat on. So, I jumped out of bed, ran to the thermostat and, to make up for my misery, jacked it all the way up to 66.

My dreams are now sound tracked by the Super Mario Brothers music....

SJ and I consider ourselves to be fairly classy, mature women. Uproariously funny sometimes, but still, we try to stay classy. And mature. And I think we succeeded...

...until SJ and her husband, J, got a Wii for Christmas. On Sunday, after holiday festivities, too many work hours for yours truly and waaaaaaay too many Christmas cookies, the Pretend Husband and I decided the day was ours to do whatever we wanted. After breakfast with friends, it turned out we wanted to stop by SJ and J's house, rouse SJ out of bed, make fun of her bedhead and mock her as she played some game on Wii (I remember the phrase, "This is a game for 5-year-olds and you're losing" being uttered somewhere in there...)

Then, since we are the proud owners of two Wii controllers while SJ and J are still trying to find a second one, we invited them over to play Super Mario Brothers. Which, oddly enough, SJ and I started playing while the guys watched football in the other room. But the men (10-year-old boys at heart, those two) couldn't resist for long and our game turned into an eight-hour Super Mario Brothers marathon that included SJ's character going through 95 lives (she'll tell you the guys played her character part of the time...), me taking a break to bake cookies, the PH taking a break to make dinner and a short break for all of us to eat dinner before we played one last hour of the game.

We can make fun of the guys all we want for being immature, video game-addicted children, but it turns out that if you give us a chilly Sunday with nothing to do, you're likely to find these two classy, mature ladies right there on the couch next to them.

In case your resolutions are as trite as mine...

I received the best, best, best piece of cleaning advice ever the other day. Which, normally wouldn't make the blog except for A) One of my resolutions for the new year is to keep the house cleaner and better organized and B) This is the only cleaning tip that has ever changed my life. So, on my scale, it's worth sharing.

The Pretend Husband was in complete charge of choosing our appliances (seriously, the first time I saw them was when they were delivered) not only because he's the cook in the family but because he likes to research the crap out of things and appliances bore me (I bought myself a couple of Saturday afternoons of bliss while he stalked appliance salesmen). Anyway, like everyone else in the world, he bought stainless steel appliances. Which drive me crazy because they never look clean, what with all the streaks, fingerprints, etc.

And here's the advice that is going to change your life too (uh, but only if you actually own stainless steel appliances...) Here's how you clean them. Buy a microfiber cloth. Spray water on the face of the appliance. Wipe with the cloth.

That's it. So not only do you get shiny appliances, but you don't waste your life cleaning. Since I hate to clean, any other amazing tips are welcome.