Thursday, January 31, 2008

Dream a Little Dream

Seen today in Carrollton on a silver Dodge Neon with a dented back fender:

FOR SALE
2002
120K miles
$9,000


keep dreamin'...

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Don't Be So Possessive

Snapped these pics of my menu during brunch with friends last week. Apparently their waffles are Blegiun, and their eggs are possessive. (Brownie points to anyone who can tell me what restaurant this menu is from.) To their credit, there was a small print line at the bottom where they acknowledged missing and misspelled words, poor grammar, etc. But it still drives me crazy that they are aware of it yet don't correct it!

Sorry for the blurry pics - my camera needs a "half flash," in my opinion.




Friday, January 25, 2008

Hot Stuff

The infamous gold curling iron that sent me to the ER with second degree burns back in college died this week. (And if you know me well enough, you know the entire hilarious story.)

It simply refused to heat up.

RIP Hot Tools, RIP.




Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Three's a Crowd

When it comes to cavities! I haven't had one filled since sometime before 1997, and suddenly three! sheesh.... But if you're gonna be in the chair, make sure to have a dentist that gives you nitrous oxide for just about anything but a cleaning.




Tuesday, January 8, 2008

a Little Bit of water

Little Bit has a bizarre feline obsession with the bathroom sink - specifically the water that flows in it. As soon as I turn the faucet on I hear her zooming across the hardwoods for a front row seat on the toilet seat. She bats at the water, staaaares as it drains down the drain, inquisitively looks up at me (where does it go, mom?), then ventures in the sink, licks the faucet, and sits there staring at me until I turn the water on and the whole routine repeats itself. I have to say, giving her a bath is pretty easy. And she is equally intrigued (though not as brave) when it comes to the bathtub faucet. She cries loudly after I have been in the shower for about 30 seconds because I seem to have suddenly disappeared behind the curtain. "I'm in here!," I say. And then she falls sleep on the bathmat, waiting for me to step out so she can lick my wet feet. (I know, she's an odd one.)

She even figured out the kennel water-feeder I bought for the dog in about 10 seconds. Maggie of course, has yet to figure it out. I still think cats are smarter.












Saturday, January 5, 2008

CHEE-AHS!

2007 was a complete bust and a waste of my time (and for that matter, so was 2006). Here's to 2008!


The Real Thing

re·al1 [ree-uhl, reel]
–adjective
1.true; not merely ostensible, nominal, or apparent: the real reason for an act.
2.existing or occurring as fact; actual rather than imaginary, ideal, or fictitious: a story taken from real life.
3.being an actual thing; having objective existence; not imaginary: The events you will see in the film are real and not just made up.
4.being actually such; not merely so-called: a real victory.
5.genuine; not counterfeit, artificial, or imitation; authentic: a real antique; a real diamond; real silk.


It's funny, because no where in the dictionary do I find the definition of real to be "curvy" or "a size 10 and up." And I am so sick of, and offended when, the term "real woman" is used on television or magazines or anywhere else in pop culture. There is no one real woman.

Let me rewind.... Today I was watching a show and a woman was asked her opinion of another woman's body. The woman she was looking at was maybe a size 10 or 12, and very curvy (nothing wrong with this, of course!). The woman said "This is a real woman. THIS is what real women look like!" And the video of her saying this was played twice during the show to reiterate that point. Was she a "real" woman? Did she "exist or occur as a fact?" Yes, obviously. Is this "what real women look like?" NO! This one person with this one particular body shape is not an accurate representation of ALL WOMEN.

When I was a teenager, and was growing faster than my body could keep up; I was rail thin. Rumors (spread by people who didn't know me well) swarmed through school about my eating habits. This, while I was taking two trips though the lunch line, but the girls around me where nibbling on a single bagel with low-fat cream cheese and drinking diet Coke (and our food for the year was included in our tuition, so it wasn't because they left their lunch money at home). I detested my body...it was the typical story of the thin teenager - long, lanky, teased mercilessly about my weight and my lack of curves. Perfect strangers, men and women and boys and girls of ALL ages, seemed to think that because I was thin it was perfectly fine for them to point it out to me, because it's alright to tease skinny girls to their face, but not overweight ones. Women in their teens through their 50's told me that someday I would be "normal" like them, scoffed when I asked my mom for a smaller size, asked if I "ever ate," and countless people told me to "put meat on my bones." This obviously made me crazily insecure and sent me into a frenzy of eating and obsessiveness, while my self-confidence plummeted. I made my mom buy whole milk and Ensure to try and pack the pounds on to my bones (which didn't work), while she reassured me that in my twenties I would fill out (she was right). My feet looked even bigger than they actually were in comparison to my bird legs, and my hip bones stuck out much farther than my stomach. And I wondered why no one else seemed to look like me in the media.

Enter the "grunge era" and Kate Moss, my savior (you heard me, savior). When I was feeling depressed about my knobby knees and flat chest, in bursts someone whose body looked just like mine, and she was plastered all over fashion magazines as a symbol of beauty. Whoa. The time had come...out went the era of the curvy girl-next-door models I could never look like - Cindy Crawford, Christie Brinkley, etc - and in came the waifs. *queue the hallelujah chorus* Although it took years and pounds for the insecurity to fade, suddenly there was someone else in my corner, and when I was getting teased I would think about those fashion magazines, and remind myself that (thank God) high school wouldn't last forever.

I'm not writing this for pity or to make it seem like it was some sob story that I grew up with a high metabolism. I am writing it to make a point; women of all sizes are "real." Do I support the Dove ad campaign? Hell yeah, because they show women of all shapes and sizes. Do I think Hollywood has become far too obsessed with being a size 2 (or smaller)? Hell yeah. But let's not forget that some women can eat all they want and no matter how hard they try, not gain a pound, and others have the opposite problem. Let's be inclusive and not exclusive. Let's not show hate or resentment to thin women to their face while talking about overweight women behind their backs.

Love, acceptance, and understanding for all women...now that's real.


Thursday, January 3, 2008

Everybody's Plastic

Many of you know that over the past year or so I have tried to do everything I can to eliminate the use of plastics in my life, specifically in my cooking/eating. When the docs thought I had endometriosis, I quickly learned about the "feminization of the planet" caused by the dioxin leaching from plastics that mimic estrogen, and that this can affect fertility rates, cancer rates, etc. Plastic is not inert, hence the leaching. But glass IS inert, and is entirely safe.

If the creatures in the sea, and the landfills filling up are not enough for you to give your use of plastics a good hard look, then maybe I can appeal to your narcissistic side:

"On land, things are equally gruesome. “Fertility rates have been declining for quite some time now, and exposure to synthetic estrogen—especially from the chemicals found in plastic products—can have an adverse effect,” says Marc Goldstein, M.D., director of the Cornell Institute for Repro-ductive Medicine. Dr. Goldstein also notes that pregnant women are particularly vulnerable: “Prenatal exposure, even in very low doses, can cause irreversible damage in an unborn baby’s reproductive organs.” And after the baby is born, he or she is hardly out of the woods. Frederick vom Saal, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia who specifically studies estrogenic chemicals in plastics, warns parents to “steer clear of polycarbonate baby bottles. They’re particularly dangerous for newborns, whose brains, immune systems, and gonads are still developing.” Dr. vom Saal’s research spurred him to throw out every polycarbonate plastic item in his house, and to stop buying plastic-wrapped food and canned goods (cans are plastic-lined) at the grocery store. “We now know that BPA causes prostate cancer in mice and rats, and abnormalities in the prostate’s stem cell, which is the cell implicated in human prostate cancer,” he says. “That’s enough to scare the hell out of me.” At Tufts University, Ana M. Soto, M.D., a professor of anatomy and cellular biology, has also found connections between these chemicals and breast cancer.

As if the potential for cancer and mutation weren’t enough, Dr. vom Saal states in one of his studies that “prenatal exposure to very low doses of BPA increases the rate of postnatal growth in mice and rats.” In other words, BPA made rodents fat. Their insulin output surged wildly and then crashed into a state of resistance—the virtual definition of diabetes. They produced bigger fat cells, and more of them. A recent scientific paper Dr. vom Saal coauthored contains this chilling sentence: “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year.” Given this, it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that America’s staggering rise in diabetes—a 735 percent increase since 1935—follows the same arc."

enough said. CLICK HERE for the full article.

A Bumper Crop

So I went to REI today before work. mmmmm...REI. I picked up my order and did NOT let myself kill the extra 30 minutes I had by roaming around the women's section, so instead I let myself browse the dog section which was right by the checkout. And, to my surprise, I saw that REI carries Katie's Bumpers! What are Katie's Bumpers you ask, and why was I excited to find them? They are dog toys made from recycled fire hoses, and are tough, they float, and they are brightly colored and patterned so dogs can see them easily. I had bookmarked the website a month or two ago but didn't want to pay shipping, so I was glad to find them at REI and discounted. Score! I bought the one that has 3 squeakers in it, so hopefully Maggie will appreciate it.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008