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.