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How I’ve Spent My Last Two Weekends

  • June 29, 2009

Remember in this post I said I might not always have time to come up with clever and funny blog entries this summer? That self fulfilling prophecy has turned out to be true because I find it almost impossible to construct a single sentence with all the fighting and attempting to beat the crap out of each other that starts the minute the offspring wake up which forces me to constantly get up off my chair and put the hammer down on one of them (It’s also why I had to suspend my “no drinking during the week” rule because if it were not for alcohol, I would slowly go cuckoo insane). So remember how I said I might just post about what I’ve been up to so my readers (and you seventeen people know who you are) wouldn’t click on the ‘don’t follow’ button and leave me in the dust?

This is one of those posts. And just so you know, my behavior and maturity level is sometimes akin to that of a seventeen year old boy (but I have a shitload of fun wherever I go so deal).

We kicked off the weekend of June 19th celebrating my neighbor Lisa’s birthday with a bunch of friends from the ‘hood.

We started off at Clive after Five which is an outdoor drinking thing in the ‘burb where I live. It was kinda lame and I think the turnout was low because there’d been a big rainstorm earlier in the day and maybe people thought they’d melt or something. Wussies. We still showed up and had a great time. Later we re-located to a bar super close to the ‘hood where we sang Karaoke for the next several hours. Despite my constant badgering, Dave refused to sing “Afternoon Delight” with me like he used to when we were dating. I sang “Let Me Be There” by Olivia Newton John and then Julie and I sang “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and “Convoy.” Yes, really. We pretty much had the bar and the microphones to ourselves because the place was dead. We finished up the night with all of us singing Madonna’s “Material Girl.”

I took a picture of this girl while we were at the Clive after Five festival because I thought she was a perfect example of what not to wear EVER.

My friend Janice was in town and she came to visit Dave and me the next night. Here’s a picture of us after we’d been drinking on the patio for uh, a while. Check out our shiny Chardonnay eyes.
It was super hot here in Iowa so I put together a buffet of cold food and made sure there was a bottle of wine in the ice bucket on the table in front of us at all times. I would have taken a picture of all the empty bottles and posted it here on this blog but there were so many of them I was embarrassed (♫ they tried to make us go to rehab but we said, no, no, no……♪).

Janice wanted me to make crack dip because she had never had it. She loved it so much we actually had it again for breakfast the next day, along with some leftover chicken salad from the night before. Side note: Even though I did reach my goal of losing 25 lbs. on WW (25.5 to be exact) back in April, my diet the last six weeks has included a frightening amount of cream cheese, mayonnaise, guacamole, and alcohol and now I’m too skeered to step on the scale because I’m afraid the spring on it will explode with a big boing! I totally plan on addressing this problem and getting back on track but not until after the fourth of July holiday weekend.

I gave Janice a jar of Archer Farms roasted pineapple and habenero dip to take with her, along with the recipe for crack dip. The following paragraph is an excerpt from an e-mail I received from Janice after she got home:

P.S. That fucking TSA whore took your jar of shit for the crack dip. I knew I was taking a chance but I thought hey, what can they possibly think I am doing with this? But, I also didn’t want it breaking in my suitcase since it’s glass. She better hope that I can get that stuff at my target!!!!

At least Janice was wise enough not to tangle with the TSA. Trish, not so much.

This weekend we kicked off the night by attending a friend’s birthday party at a bar up the street. My friend Stacy has been in town for her annual visit to Iowa to see her family and she, Amy, Trish, Dave, and I headed out to see what kind of trouble we could get in.

Somehow my shoe broke and Amy tried to McGyver a solution out of dental floss and a buffalo wing stained napkin. Fail. I’d rather go barefoot.

They were giving out plastic cups at the bar for everyone at the birthday party to write their names on. Just so you know, we are not grown up enough to have beer and a sharpie at the same time. And if you left your plastic cup unattended on the table when you went to the bathroom, upon your return there would most definitely be some dirty words written in big, black, permanent capital letters (cock gobbler being my favorite). I never let my glass out of my sight but I did write “Princess” under my name because it sounded much prettier than some of the other words.

That’s all I’ve got for today. I’m still working on some other posts so hopefully I’ll have something to put on this blog later in the week.

P.S. Sandy the Yeti walked by her sliding glass door while we were out on our patio Saturday night. In a nightgown. Shudder.

Flashback Friday – Smokin’ at the Condo Clubhouse

  • June 26, 2009

Happy Friday blogosphere! I’m a wee bit tired because Barbara, my roving photojournalist in the ‘hood, had a Silpada jewelry party last night and not only did I stay up past my bedtime, I had a little alky-hol too (weird, huh?). When Tracy and I were leaving (another Tracy who spells her name totally different than mine), Yeti’s husband was walking their dog Cody across the street to piss in someone else’s yard. And not only is there a new broom across their driveway, Yeti had her car parked at the very end of it lest one of Barbara’s guests try to turn around in it. But someone did anyway, ha ha! Yeti was probably cowering inside her home mainlining wine and Xanax to medicate herself from the fucking travesty occurring on her street.

Okay, it’s time for Flashback Friday. Here we go.

When I met Dave I had just bought my first place, a sweet little two bedroom condo with a pool and clubhouse. It had a few drawbacks, most notably the fact that the average age of my neighbors was approximately 107. There seemed to be a lot of strokes and heart attacks and the ambulance pulled up with some regularity. And those old people did not care for my stereo volume at all. If they’d chucked their miracle ears they wouldn’t have thought I was so loud but since they seemed to like those hearing aids I just sat back and waited for them to kick it.

Anyway, I found out you could rent the pool and clubhouse for parties and we had several during the five years I lived there. One was held in the summer and involved lots of drinking and skinny dipping and the other two were semi-formal holiday parties held in December.

Here we are at the first holiday party. What a nice group of young adults, all fancy in our semi-formal attire. I’m the one in back with the bangs. And bangs+me=icky. As always, click on any photo to enlarge.

Dave, me, and the icky bangs.

Oh so festive and silly.

Tom, Amy, and Dave.

This photo was taken at the end of the evening.

I guess the condo association felt we were responsible enough to have another holiday party a year later. Rookie mistake.

Look! I’ve grown out my icky bangs (but still have massive caterpillar eyebrows). And nothing says classy holiday party like a bunch of twenty somethings drinking keg beer out of red plastic Solo cups.

Wait, I don’t think we were ready.

Striking a pose.

I think someone spent some time in rollers at the beauty parlor!

How could you not swing from this chandelier?

Raise your hand if you think I’m over the legal limit. Ditto if you think Dave is.

Back then, everyone we knew smoked cigarettes and I think some people might have been smoking two at a time because the next day the geriatric manager of the condominium complex called me to ask if there had been a fire in the clubhouse. Apparently the walls were covered in black soot. Probably we should have cracked a window or something.

We blamed the massive smoke damage on a faulty fireplace, the manager bought our explanation, (thus proving there is an upside to senility and Alzheimer’s) and we escaped with nary a fine.

Neither Dave or I smoke anymore, and haven’t for a very long time. Almost everyone has quit and those that haven’t will be quitting SOON, right?

RIGHT.

P.S. Only 181 days until Christmas so start planning those holiday parties now. If you have a clubhouse, keg beer, Marlboro lights, and plastic cups you can party like it’s 1995.

You’re welcome!

(Please don’t smoke though – the surgeon general and I heard it’s bad for you).

I’m Not Worthy, I’m Not Worthy

  • June 25, 2009


Look what my long lost other twin Penne at Little Girl Big Glasses gave me! Not only were Penne and I separated at birth, she shares my love of seventies music, eighties fashions, and liquor.

Unlike Penne, who is a bona fide published poet (Highlights magazine, April 1973), my written words haven’t shown up anywhere except on this blog. I sent a few entries to Readers Digest Magazine when I was a young girl and they did not see fit to publish my literary masterpieces. Fuckers. Thank God for blogger.com ’cause I can self-publish my written words any old time I want (ha, loophole)!

I’m not even sure how I found Penne’s blog but I do know if I spent less time trolling the blogosphere looking for hilarious and entertaining blogs I’d have more time to write clever and engaging posts for my own. Pfft, details. And even though I blog about deep shit like my fake French manicure, crack dip, and my Jerry Springerish, white trash, Hatfield and McCoy-caliber feud with my neighbors, I somehow entertain Penne enough to keep her coming back. And she likes my Flashback Friday so much she’s thinking about doing it on her blog. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, I always say. In fact, I think all bloggers should do a Flashback Friday post so let’s see if we can get this idea to sweep the blogosphere!

Anyway, I think this post of Penne’s is the one that reeled me in and made me realize I had to follow this brilliant writer. Plus, I will never ever not think of Penne on every single Thanksgiving from now until the day I die (and Trish, substitute your regular relish tray assignment for rolls). Shortly after I started reading Penne’s blog covertly, I hit the follow button and made my presence known by leaving comments on her blog ’cause that’s how you make friends in blogger land.

Now that I’ve been bestowed with such a high honor, it’s my responsibility to pass this award on to other blogs I love. Therefore, I’d like to pay the love forward by giving the following blogs their virtual kudos:

That’s so Missy – I was doing an Internet search one day about why Dooce’s blog is so damn popular (because I couldn’t tell after reading it) and I stumbled upon Missy’s blog because she had wondered the same damn thing. And after reading Missy’s blog I had to send her an e-mail because even though she lived in Florida, I discovered she had gone to Iowa State, was a Midwestern girl at heart, and liked Gordon Lightfoot’s music as much as I did. And if someone can admit to liking “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” well, I need to know them better. Then Missy stalked me on Facebook and now we’re bloggy and Facebook friends. I have no doubt we’d be friends in real life too if we weren’t separated by geography (although she’s currently moving back to the Midwest as we speak so maybe someday we’ll have a face-to-face).

DG’s World by Big D – Anyone whose tag line is “land of the donut, home of the beer” pretty much had me at hello. I have been reading this blog ever since Jen Lancaster linked to her. Frankly, with the kind of traffic Jen Lancaster can generate, I’m surprised her followers are not in the thousands by now. I’ve only commented once but read her blog every day and plan on making my presence a little more known, especially since I’m giving her an award. Her writing is hilarious and I think she’s way smarter than I am so please check her out.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for today. And remember, tomorrow is Flashback Friday! Please join me in posting humiliating pictures of yourself, or someone you love. It’ll be a blast.

You know you want to.

Flashback Friday – The Flashdance Years

  • June 19, 2009

Hey blogosphere! It’s me, Tracey. Remember me? This week has been crazy busy but I have no fewer than 19 some posts all in a state of half completion that I hope to publish on this blog next week. And my long-lost, separated at birth other twin sister Penne even bestowed an award upon me because she totally doesn’t think I suck. I’ll be blogging about that too, I promise. And just so you don’t think I’m pretending to have actually written something in the last two weeks, here are a few of the blog post titles you’ll probably, see: The Trifecta of Weird, Henry, His Name Is Henry, and The Real Housewives of NJ Are A Hot Mess.

Ready for Flashback Friday? Let’s get to it.

I present to you Betty Hill Dance Studio’s 1982 Jazz class. This was during the height of the Olivia Newton John “Let’s Get Physical” years and someone over at Betty Hill had the bright idea to capitalize on our culture’s love of headbands and workout gear. I hated these costumes. I wanted to wear a cool getup like we did the year before when we danced to Kool and The Gang’s “Celebration.” We wore sparkly tops and MC Hammer-esque pants and we rocked the house yo.

Anyhooligans, for this performance we danced to a song by Diana Ross called “Work That Body.” The song kind of sucked, no one had ever heard it, and I can’t remember a single step of the choreography.

For some reason I don’t have an individual picture of Amy in her “Work That Body” costume. But I have this and I’m almost certain whatever dance she wore this costume for had a fuckin’ lot of jazz hands in it.

Remember to dance like nobody’s watchin’. We sure did.

Flashback Friday – Twins, Really?

  • June 12, 2009


First day of Kindergarten. I ♥ my snoopy lunch box.

Here’s Trish and I sitting on Santa’s lap (notice I’m still rockin’ the shag). Doesn’t Santa kinda look like he might belong on a sex offender registry somewhere? See the cast on my left arm. I attempted to do a penny drop off the chin-up bar on the playground. Fail. And lastly, who dressed you Trish? Your clothes don’t match for shit.

This is one of our senior pictures. We thought it would be fun to have our pictures taken individually and together. Psst, one of us loves Clairol Nice ‘N Easy.

This one was taken while we were sophomores at The University of Iowa. Hello spiral perm! And Brooke Shields called, she wants her eyebrows back.

Next week: Dance recitals!

Flashback Friday – The gestation years

  • June 5, 2009

Are you as tired as I am of the media firestorm surrounding Jon and Kate Gosselin of TLC’s highest rated reality show, Jon and Kate Plus Hate Eight? Whether it’s her business in the front, party in the back hairdo or his supposed philandering with a twenty-three year old, they are on my TV screen and newsstand every time I turn around.

I watched the original documentary about the Gosselin’s when it aired on TLC. I thanked my hoo-ha for only shooting out one baby at a time because, as a twin, I was a little worried I might also give birth to multiples someday.

Here’s Kate Gosselin shortly before she delivered her sextuplets. When I see this picture I think, “Wow, what would I do if I had that many little babies all crammed into my uterine clown car?

I needn’t have worried. At our ten week ultrasound we discovered there was only one little baby in there and we watched its heartbeat blinking on the screen.

I enjoyed being pregnant. Life was an all-you-can-eat-buffet and I no longer had to change the kitty litter lest I contract some heinous illness that would result in our offspring being born with paws and whiskers.

Pregnancy got a whole lot less fun as I neared my mid-summer due date. I had one pair of shoes that fit and stopped caring whether my maternity pants matched my shirt.

My due date came and went.

Every day after that, when I awakened in the morning and realized I had A)not gone into labor in the night and B) had to go to work, I became increasingly more pissed off.

Finally, 11 days past when my firstborn was due to arrive, Doogie Fucking Houser, who had joined my OB/GYN’s practice after graduating from medical school a scant two weeks prior, announced he’d be delivering our baby within the next forty-eight hours. We were instructed to check into the hospital by 8:00 PM that night so special medicine could be applied directly onto my girly parts and I’d finally go into labor. This picture was taken as we got ready to go to the hospital. I know I look like I’m about to give birth to sextuplets too but believe me, there’s only one in there.

We didn’t know if we were having a boy or girl but by 6:00 AM the next morning I no longer cared what we had as long as it was no longer residing in my body. At 1:00 PM I pushed for what seemed like hours and it still wouldn’t come out and since I was so tired I just screamed at them to use the vacuum. Once they saw the look on my face, they sucked Matthew out with a hospital grade Dyson.

He was 9 lbs. 7 ounces and 21 and 3/4 inches long. I can’t blame my inability to hold my pee-pee when I sneeze entirely on him because three years and four months later his 9 lb. 6 ounce, four days overdue sister came hurtling out of my baby box and ruined my bladder control forever. And, I gave birth to her without any drugs whatsoever.

Our household may not be reality show worthy but I don’t care. Unlike Jon and Kate, Dave and I won’t have to talk to the offspring about the time mommy and daddy’s marriage imploded on national television. There are also no cameras around to document me walking the offspring to the bus stop without a bra. Or to see me lying on the couch with my ipod turned up so loud I can’t hear them shouting “Mom!!” Or that time I pretended not to notice when they ate frosting out of a can for breakfast.

Thank.God.

The trifecta of Stupid, Self Administered, Totally Unnecessary Injuries

  • June 3, 2009

Many years ago, when I used to work outside the home, a co-worker and I arranged to meet at the Des Moines International (ha,ha) airport at the ass-crack of dawn to hop a flight to Pennsylvania for a completely boring and probably unnecessary business trip.

I got to the airport first and watched Christa stagger up to the ticket counter all hunched over. She had been making a pot of Kraft’s finest mac and cheese for dinner the night before and spilled boiling hot water all over her stomach when she tried to drain the noodles. Her midsection was covered in burn ointment and bandages.

“Seriously”? I thought to myself. First of all, who eats that for dinner past the age of fourteen, and second, what kind of a dumbass spills boiling water all over their own stomach? I couldn’t imagine how that kind of accident could happen unless it was 2:00 AM and you just got home from the bar.

That is, until the other night. Granted, I was making shrimp linguini with a fabulous butter basil sauce, and not Kraft macaroni and cheese, but boiling water is boiling water. It doesn’t matter if you’re cooking noodles or lobster, that water is hot.

I wasnt’ paying close eough attention to what I was doing. Plus, Matthew was following me around the kitchen and I was multi-tasking and trying to hold up my end of the conversation when I momentarily lost my concentration and splashed the boiling water on my stomach while attempting to drain the linguini. It seeped through my t-shirt and suddenly the fact that my tummy is un-tucked was the least of my problems.

I pulled up my shirt and realized I had a couple quarter sized second degree burns on my stomach. I grabbed a dish towel, ran cold water on it, and pressed it to my blistering skin. Dave googled “what to do when your dumb ass wife burns her stomach with pasta water” and told me to put some Neosporin on it and cover everything with a band-aid.

What’s remarkable about this incident is that it was the second food-related injury I’d given myself in as many weeks.

I was re-heating some Mexican lasagna because everyone in my family told me they liked it last time I made it but when I made it for dinner again, everyone hated it (really? really guys? Cause you all liked it last time and frankly you can have Kraft mac and cheese from now on for all I care).

Anyway, I decided that I would eat the leftover lasagna for the next couple of lunches because I thought it was pretty good. You know how, when you’re microwaving something and you’re supposed to make sure you stir it well so there are no hot spots? Yeah well, I didn’t do that very well and burned the hell out of the roof of my mouth.

I decided I’d better go see my neighborhood drug dealer, AKA Liz, the nurse practioner who works at the walk in clinic at the grocery store up the street. She told me our mouths have more germs in them than, you know, the other end. Wow, I’ll be the first to admit, and I think everyone who knows me would agree, that I’ve got a dirty, dirty mouth but until now I thought we were speaking figuratively and not literally. I firmly believe jamming a sharp tortilla chip directly into the burned spot on the rough of your mouth qualifies as a torture device (and also indicates you may be a bit of a ‘tard).

When Dave saw the back of my leg he freaked out. “Oh my God, what did you do?” “What?”, I said, as I spun around and tried to get a good look at the back of my leg. “Your leg is covered with a bruise.” I felt a bit guilty as I’d just returned from woofing down margaritas, chips, guacamole, and salsa at a Mexican restaurant with Louise and Bobbi and I thought for a moment I’d had a MARI (which for you sober types stands for mysterious alcohol related incident). But we were pretty well behaved (for the most part) and I’d probably done more damage to my morning weigh-in then my liver so I knew I hadn’t done something stupid. Usually when I have a MARI I can at least remember some sketchy details about how I got hurt (broken toe – coffee table – spring of 2006, swollen bruised knee – wiped out on XR-100 trying to show off – summer 1989, fell down stairs and broke leg at bachelorette party – fall of 1996 – wait! That was Trish’s MARI. And it was at a party celebrating the fact that I was about to MARRY someone and isn’t that funny! Hello? Hello? Is this microphone on????

Where.The.Fuck.Was.I?

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