Dulywed: Year 3

Dear Mack,

I was watching Top Chef on Tivo today and the challenge was to create a dish using the hotels of Las Vegas as inspiration. The Bellagio and Mandalay Bay were among the featured hotels, and the whole subject took me back three years ago when we spent the weekend at the now-demolished Frontier hotel, to that fateful night when you and I went to the courthouse and promised to be best friends for the rest of our lives in front of three complete strangers.

I remember wearing cowboy boots and picking the most ridiculous bouquet in the little chapel. I remember the minister pushing the play button on his tape player and cuing me to walk down the 6-foot-long aisle. I remember thinking how silly this whole show was and how tragic that some of the other couples there were actually taking this seriously. Our wedding, the one that legally bound us, was a joke.

But then, standing up at that ridiculous alter wrapped up with silk roses, something happened. Since no one else in the entire room mattered, I became fixed on you. I robotically uttered familiar phrases about sickness or health, richer or poorer, and looked into your eyes without being distracted. When I was told to say that I would be your best friend forever, I was jolted. That was a serious commitment, one I naively hadn't considered before that moment, and I had to make a decision right then and there. Staring at you in your grandpa sweater with your big smile and dangerous eyes, I agreed. I promised to be your best friend.

I know that there have been days, weeks, maybe even months in the last three years that I haven't been your best friend. In fact, it's possible and likely that at times I've been your worst enemy. But even in that darkness, in that indifference and carelessness, I'm still glad that I made the promise of friendship. It's created a bridge that keeps our marriage from going under, that gets us over the bad times and back to the good ones, that binds you to me and me to you.

This past year has been full of ups and downs, just like the roller coaster ride we went on at the New York hotel moments after we got married. You graduated from college and I got laid off from my job. You started med school, I started nursing school, and we both stopped doing dishes. We moved away from your family and came closer to mine. We traded endless sun, weekends at the beach and a constant state of poverty for rainy days, mosquitoes and feeling like millionaires. You lost judo the way you liked it and I lost fire dance as I was just falling in love with it, but you gained a judo friend who loves it as much as you do and I reconnected with the arts activism that gives me a sense of purpose. We got my older sister back, we left your baby sister behind. You had your issue with ProstaStrong and I had mine with Metamucil. We drove across the country in a state of delirium, shared the discovery of shadow people, almost died trying to move in and then sat on the porch swing swilling cold beer and getting bored of unemployment. I built a dollhouse, you dissected a human body.

I guess you could safely say this year has been unlike any we've ever had.

A few weeks ago when you were about to burst from resentment for a state narrowed by its dominant whiteness, we escaped to the cemetery to sit by the pond and preserve your sanity. In that small afternoon, while you held my hand so I could hang over the pond and get garbage out of the water, while we watched the fish have a feeding frenzy on bread, while that super fat ugly bird waddled over to our bench to get some attention, I felt like we were best friends, like we are appropriately balanced between helpful and hurtful, between together and apart, between supportive and disruptive. I felt like I did that day at Shakertown, when the whole world fell away and it was just me and you and cartwheel practice.

Of course I love you. Of course I care about you. Of course I think you are deliciously handsome and sexy and smart and funny. But as we spend more and more time together, the thing I value most about you is your friendship.

Thank you for the last three years and for the one we're starting today. Happy anniversary, Mr. T.

Things I Am Thankful For (in no particular order)

1. My family being so close.
2. A husband who knows how to download movies and tv shows.
3. Having friends all over this country.
4. The chance to go back to school.
5. An interesting, centrally located apartment.
6. Babies.
7. The Lexington Art League.
8. In-laws that I actually enjoy.
9. Being smart.
10. Having a gym membership that includes access to treadmills with televisions attached.
11. My mom's turkey with cornbread leek stuffing.
12. Radishes and beer cheese.
13. Beer.
14. Bourbon.
15. Cheap but cute Christmas cards at Marshall's.
16. My bicycle.
17. 40% off coupons at Banana Republic.
18. Tall boots.
19. My silky.
20. New underwear.
21. Hair cuts and curling irons.
22. Poi.
23. The UFC.
24. The Internet.
25. Student loans.
26. Fake down comforters.
27. Tivo.
28. The library.
29. Not getting tickets even though I speed all the time.
30. The snails that come out when it rains.

America's Next Top Models

While in NYC, Heather and I decided to do an impromptu photo shoot in our hotel room to showoff our new threads. Having watched every season of America's Next Top Model, I knew we had to focus on our body angles and smiling with our eyes.

And now, our portfolio.

Transformation

I realized while we were on the plane to New York City for our No Nonsense Between Friends trip that Heather and I started our friendship on a plane. She had a bag of O'Boises potato chips on a flight back to Louisville after our 5th grade day trip to Washington, D.C., and she offered them to me not knowing that I had/have a chip addiction. As I looked at her this time, 20+ years later, I felt a whole new gratitude for her... and it had little to do with the mommy snacks I knew she had in her bag.
Our trip to NYC was incredible. From the moment we walked into our hotel room and discovered a gift basket that put the Easter Bunny to serious shame, the trip just got better and better.

We met with a stylist, were allowed to pick something from his suggestions rack, and then went to eat some of the best pasta I've ever eaten. Then we slept above Times Square in a swanky hotel room and woke up to a view of the Hudson River and a day filled with shopping, with trying on beautiful things without the slightest regard for the attached price tags. We dropped hundreds of dollars without a thought and came to adore the women who fit you for bras at Macy's. Then it was off to another extraordinary dinner, this time sushi that literally melted in your mouth, followed by Mamma Mia on Broadway. Sunday was just more of the same upward trajectory. We donned our new threads, headed to a salon and were treated to a facial and a hair experience unlike any either of us has ever had.
Did you know that lurking under this mass of confused waves and supernatural frizz there is supermodel hair? It was too beautiful to be mine, but there it was attached to my head.
We had our makeup done to complete our new looks, and I can't really describe how this whole makeover experience affected me. I haven't felt this good about myself ever. And I haven't seen Heather treating herself so well our entire lives.

I think that's what's most precious about this whole experience. Seeing someone I love dearly reconnect with who she is, beyond who she is to other people, was the best gift of all. I'm so grateful I was able to play some small part in getting her to that place and that I got to see it happen.

Our trip just kept getting better and better and better, and when it finally hit me how wonderfully lucky I am to have won this, how incomprehensibly blessed I am to have such an astounding friendship with someone who is so extraordinary, how delicious my life is, well, when all those realizations finally settled on me during the stillness of a carriage ride through Central Park, I cried. And I have never in my life been more grateful to have Heather at my side than I was in that moment.

The Cure

Here's what I know.

Betsy was born with hip dysplasia that left her with medical bills so long and impossible to pay that my parents, who had three other kids, just started wrapping her up in them and taking her picture. There she is, in a body cast on the couch, and a bill no less than 12 feet long swirls around her. My dad worked full time, and when he got home my mom went to work until 10 or 11 at night. Sometimes he had two jobs. Sometimes after Betsy's surgeries, my dad couldn't stay at the hospital with my mom because he had to get back to those jobs.

Jennifer was diagnosed with CLL in 2005 after having surgery to have her adenoids removed. Fortunately she was employed at a fabulously supportive accounting firm, one that helped her relocate closer to home to pursue chemotherapy and one that gave her time off during her treatments. It was also one that came with incredible health insurance. And it is exactly that health insurance and the chronic nature of her disease that keeps her in that job. She knows her disease will flair up again at some point, she knows that she will need treatment, and she knows that the only way she can get the treatment she needs is to have health insurance. Which means that even though she wants to try a new career, wants to stay home with her future babies, wants to have the life she chooses rather than the one the health insurance industry forces on her, she can't.

Heather has two sons. The older son has a sensory issue of some kind. He has been to therapy to learn how tricks for how to deal with it. Because of this issue, he was traumatized while trying to pottytrain and had to be admitted to the emergency room. Heather is a stay-at-home mom who has worked as a nurse and an insurance assessor. She told me once that when you put bandaids on a patient in the hospital, the patient is billed for the entire box of bandaids even if they only use two. Same thing for gauze. Some thing for fluids. And the sticker price of these drugstore items are hugely inflated because, hey, it's not the person we're charging, it's the insurance... In trying to get her son the intervention that he needs, she has had to hound insurance companies for thousands of dollars. Normally a financial genius with a safety net that makes me jealous, Heather and her family have gone into debt trying to bridge the gap between paying for the therapy and being reimbursed by the insurance company, which sometimes doesn't happen.

Charles and Shannon were living in England one year and they came home for the holidays. Normally they buy traveler's insurance, but this time they forgot. This was the time that Charles would get appendicitis and spend Christmas Day in the hospital. He came home after one day, back to his old self, except now his old self had a $20,000 bill attached to it. With no way to pay it, they went back to their country, where if I was visiting I could have surgery for free, and hoped for the best.

I have lived without insurance at several points in my life, as has Mack, and fortunately my politics allowed me to take advantage of Planned Parenthood and the services they offer, which come with fees based on your most recent pay stubs, my health allowed me to stay alive, and my luck kept me from drowning in debt. I eat pretty healthily, I exercise at least once a week, I maintain my weight within 10 pounds, I do regular breast exams, I take vitamins, but I am not invincible to disease or illness.

Thanks to the representatives who stepped outside of politics and looked at what Americans need, I may not have to be. The United States may just catch up to other first world countries in providing this basic service to our citizens. We may just be able to stop worrying about how we're going to take care of our parents and how we're going to afford having children. We may just start taking responsibility for our own health, which is something that, like it or not, insurance companies do not let us do.

It's going to be collectively expensive if we get it, one of the biggest barriers to the public health option, but it's no more expensive than paying the overinflated costs we're personally paying now. (Insurance for me and Mack was $400+ per month at my last job... imagine if I donated that money instead to universal health care and it didn't matter how sick I or anyone else got!)

This really isn't about politics. It's about people... Betsy, Jen, Heather, Charles, me, Mack, our parents, the babies we love, you. It's completely doable, it's long overdue, it's anti-American to let people die.

Click here to find out how to nudge your congresspeople to be brave and forward-thinking. And here to educate yourself on what's really at stake.

Scary

Sometimes, when I have my camera out, I get kind of demanding about everybody making the same face. This is probably because my friend Giovanni, the cutiest Italian-American filmmaker ever born, introduced me to crazy eyes.

Crazy eyes are where you take a photo as you would normally but you open your eyes just a little too much, just a little bit crazy.

My mom, Betsy and I will demonstrate. Here we are doing crazy eyes during the Murder Mystery train ride we took. Sometimes my mom confuses "crazy" with "stroke," which is common when you are first mastering this fine photographic pose.
Annnnnyyyywaaaayyyy, on Halloween I got into another mandatory photo fit and made everyone do their best scary face. This may become a new Halloween tradition, so consider yourself warned.

The Dollhouse Saga... also Why I Was Accused of Being a Hoarder

Back in July, in the throes of unemployment and with entirely too much time on my hands, I started thinking about Halloween. And then I started thinking about my party. And then I started thinking about a dollhouse theme. And then I went on Ebay, bought a dollhouse, and officially bit off more than I could chew.

I thought, oh I'll just glue it all together and it'll be easy. Nope.
I started gluing door adornments together. Then I glued windows together. Then I realized I should be painting all these things before I assemble them because painting them once assembled would be impossible... unless I was miniature. So I went to buy stain and paint and proceeded to step 2.
Which is when I realized, holy crap, building a dollhouse is H.A.R.D. First I had to give myself a crash course in dollhouse building language, which is a lot of RPs and Gs and numbers on wood pieces that fall apart and make you wonder if it was a 4 or an 8. Then I had to look at these strange drawings and squeeze my brain into knowing what partition 1 is and how exactly is should line up with slat 97.
After I got the thing mostly built, or at least built enough that I could tell what was going on, I was just about to burn out on the Dollhouse Saga of 2009. I wanted to get to the fun part of decorating it with cute miniature things, but no. Instead it was time to decide if I wanted lighting. And if I wanted lighting, I had to know where I wanted it so that I could then make sure that my flooring or wall covering would cover it... if I lived long enough to get to the part of putting in flooring and wall covering.

I had to splice electrical wires together to make them longer and magically keep everything from short circuiting. I learned about transformers and power strips and found some very adorable blogs by people who have made several dollhouses and are still not institutionalized!
Finding my fellow miniaturists gave me a good little push, but rather than work on finishing the inside of the house, painting and wallpapering and carpeting, I decided to do some siding work. Mainly because I realized I had none of the supplies necessary to do the flooring or wallpapering work I needed to do -- except painting. I could have painted but painting meant laying on the floor with my face mashed into the ground and getting hand cramps from trying to paint miniature inside spaces.

So, instead of heading to Hobby Lobby, which I discovered is a social destination for Pentecostals, I started gluing down some creep siding. It was colorful and came with an instant gratification factor that was necessary at that point.
You see that? You see that workspace up there. Well, it just so happens that the corner of our living room started looking like this right when the A&E show Hoarders debuted. Mack and I would watch Hoarders and look over at that corner and I had to swear to him that it was a craft project for Halloween and NOT a compulsion that would take over our lives. At least not for forever.

After the siding, I got to build the porch, and the porch was fun... once I consulted to dollhouse translation dictionary to discover what a porch roof was called.
The last major hurdle to building the house was putting on the third floor walls and dormer windows. That required a magic trick using wet paper towels and finger muscles I didn't know I had. But once that was all done, it was finally finished!
Almost. (Look, I warned you this was a saga.)

With the outside finished, it was time to look inside. I had to furnish my house. Which meant I had to go back on Ebay and look for beds and chairs and tables and couches and art and books and a Ouija board and a crystal ball and a microscope and tarot cards and plants and magical money to fall out of the sky to pay for all of this crap that I got addicted to because it was miniature and cute.

While I waited for the furniture to arrive, I set to work hiding electrical cables underneath door moldings and carpet and wallpaper. Good miniaturists take care to cut out little channels to recess their wires. I just put electrical tape over mine to create a ramp up and down from the bump they cause.

And then, when the goodies arrived, it was time to finish my vision. To make the dollhouse I'd dreamed of come to life. To see the fruits of my labor. To finally make tiny dolls commit suicide.
And with that, the saga comes to an end... until next year.

Pumpkining

Renee and Ben came to Auntie Am's scary house to carve pumpkins last week.

Like all good babies, they abandoned the carving process and left that to their aunt, but when it was time to blow out the candles, we couldn't lure them away, even with M&M bribes. We must've relit the candles a dozen times, and they'd count and blow them out again and again. Renee would count to 3 most of the time but sometimes she'd go to 8, huffing and puffing all the way.

Pretty much, it was adorable. And just one more thing to make me love Halloween.

It's getting scary in here...

I am not blogging because, in case you haven't noticed, IT'S FREAKING HALLOWEEN!!!

Also, we went to the lake house last weekend. And I had a test today. And tonight I'm carving pumpkins with two of the best babies in the entire world. And I've been very busy putting spider webs on everything with a sharp corner. And it's horror movie month on SyFy. And something happened to Billy Bell and he isn't on So You Think You Can Dance and I want to know what illness he got exactly...

To tide you over until next time, ponder this.

Changing Perspective

Several years ago my mom got a print of the painting Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth and gave it to Shannon for her apartment. I really liked it, and in a yard-sale gift from the universe, my mom found another framed print of it and gave it to me. I'm not sure exactly how, but Leiah also ended up with the print.
Christina's World is like an artwork thread that keeps us all connected. I can't help but think of my mom and my sisters when I look at it, but I also like it because it reminds me of being at my Grandma Scott's house growing up, looking back at her farmhouse from the distance, a tether to safety. In the suburbs you couldn't get too far away without losing sight of your home base, but in the country, especially the flat fields that make up the country in Indiana, you can wander far away and still feel like you're in the front yard. Leiah said it reminds her of the times we used spend afternoons laying in corn fields trying to trick the buzzards into circling us, being out in the middle of nowhere, trying to maintain the same stillness that Christina mastered for the painting.

Turns out, we're both clueless.

Dr. Mack came home the other day and schooled me on the painting. Apparently, as his teacher told it and as I later confirmed on Wikipedia, Christina is not looking back on her home in quiet reflection. She has not tried to run away and is lurking on the perimeter to see if anyone notices. She is not trying to trick the buzzards.

She is paralyzed on the lower half of her body due to an undiagnosed muscular deterioration and she is dragging herself across the field to get home. Because that's how she gets around. By dragging herself.

Wyeth, whose summer home was across the field from the house you see in the painting, was friendly with the real life Christina and her brother and used them as inspiration for many paintings.

It's kind of cool to know the truth behind the painting, the one that hangs in our bedroom, but it's also kind of a bummer. I mean, the fact that it has a twisted secret matches our artwork tendencies pretty well -- I was recently told some of my favorite pieces are "morose" and "bleak" -- but I actually liked that it wasn't as cryptic as my other stuff.

For instance, Christina's World does not have a single stick figure in it, something Mack claims is in most of the artwork I buy. And it's of a girl who has clothes on. And there's no blood or obvious anguish. And there is a natural space just waiting to be planted with thoughts. And it, technically, could qualify as a landscape, and I actually don't like landscapes in art all that much (I much prefer the real things).

But I guess it's just not meant to be. If something really was all sunshine and rainbows, I probably wouldn't like it. Unless it was an UMBRELLA.

The Bright Side

I had to walk to school today because riding my bike in the rain leaves me more soaked than just walking, and since I don't have a big gay umbrella, I was in a bad mood from the minute I walked out the door.

There was just too much cold paired with too much wet. Which is also the definition of miserable.

Halfway through the walk, my toes were frozen, my nose was running and my middle finger kept shooting out of my pocket in a blind rage. Then I realized I was below a canopy of the most beautiful color orange I'd ever seen, something the color of pumpkin mixed with the electricity of wet grass and dusted with yellows of sunshine from a couple days ago. I felt myself soften with appreciation.
And after class, Mack picked me up and we bought a Wii. Take that, rain.

Homecoming

Five years ago, Shannon decided, in the span of about two months, to get married and move to England.

We were living together at the time, and by we, I mean me, Shannon, Mack and Charles, all of us in a 2-bedroom house with one bathroom and a shotgun kitchen. Outside of our childhood, when we shared a room until she was 14 and I was 12, I have lived with Shan twice in my life -- once in 1997 for a couple of months and then again in 2003 when she came back from her first experience in Cuba . That time when she came back to Cuba made me fall in love with her as a person, not just as my sister.

She would leave little bits of half-noshed snacks laying on an end table or on the counter. And she would go into marathon baking sessions and whip up 5-6 blackberry cobblers. I would leave to go to work, and when I'd come home, the surface of every wall would be covered with Charles' artwork, like I had my own private art gallery.

Shannon dives headfirst into things I'd like to do but that my Taurus need for control doesn't allow. Also, I am a fraidy cat and don't have the courage.

She is as fearless about living abroad as she is about plastering walls with paintings, and for our entire lives, she has blazed paths for me that she has no idea about. When she was 14-17, she had a best friend named Krista... and I had a Krista's little sister Erica as a best friend. When we moved to Kentucky, Shan worked at the dollar movies... my first job (which I kept for nearly 2 years) was at the dollar movies. Then Shannon worked at Billy's BBQ... and so did I, and she worked at Atomic Cafe... and so did I.

Her global pursuits, living in Spain and France and England and Cuba, made me more comfortable with the world we live in, comfortable enough to travel to places that are "scary." Those experiences have shaped me more dramatically than all the years I've lived the suburban American dream in this country.

When Shannon left, with her new husband who I also love, and went to England, I got her out the door, waved good-bye, went into our kitchen, and fell apart on the floor. I physically collapsed, broke down, broke apart. The pieces of her that I needed, the bright spot in my daily life was gone, and I would never get it back. I was never going to discover an abandoned snack or come home to any dramatic surprises like an enormous garden in the middle of the yard. I was never going to wake up to an enormous hand-made banner of encouragement when confronted with a professional challenge. I was never going to watch her pull up in her rinky dink car after a long bike ride with a 40oz. in a paper sack. There would be no more Summers of Abandon or arguments about who has the tightest ass.

She was married and gone, and the bond that allowed us to simultaneously and intensely love and hate each other, reinforced by constant physical proximity, was uncertain. We'd never been through long distance, like the kind where an ocean separates you, for a long time, and I just didn't know what would happen. I mean, I knew I would love her fiercely and miss her every single day, but I didn't know how hard it would be to call each other, how easily our conversations would go. Without her lead, I didn't know what I was supposed to do.

So I followed her. I decided to grab life by the horns and move to Los Angeles... and I loved it. I missed my family, but I had Mack's family to bridge the gap between trips home. And I missed out on birthday parties and little weekend events, but I was always home for the big stuff... the stuff Shannon and her clan come home for. We were both missing links in the tangled chain that is the Hensley family, but it seemed easier to miss out when you knew someone else was missing out too.

Well, in less than 12 hours and for at least the next 4 years, none of us will be missing out. Shannon and Charles are coming home, bringing their sweet English rose Renee back to her kindred spirit Auntie Am, and putting roots down where the rest of their family tree is. I can't wrap my head around how happy I am, how full I feel, how perfect this is, how grateful I am to be in Kentucky right now, how much I love my family, how special I feel to be one of us.

This Little Piggy

A couple of nights ago Mack decided it was time to go to bed and I absolutely was not ready. There were several episodes of the 2005-06 season of Grey's Anatomy on the Tivo and I am on fall break from school and I just felt like staying up retardedly late and flexing my "I'm a grown up and can do what I want when I want" muscle.

But he was not having it. In physically dragging me to bed, he also dragged/drug/dragguged the sofa and coffee table into the hallway.

And then, during the final hoist of his far-from-waiflike wife into the bed, my not-quite-baby toe hooked on his lobster claw toenail and... bad feelings happened.

He did emergency bandaiding, and I figured it'd be better by morning. But then last night I had volleyball and ground my ouchie in the sand for an hour and then today I put on socks and tennis shoes and went for a jogalk. Now my not-quite-baby toe is really made at Mack's lobster claws.

How can I somehow milk this situation for this...

Hallo-freaking-ween

In honor of the boobies...

Saturday, at 8:45 a.m., Leiah, Ben, Lisa & I, all in different shades of pink, met under the awning of Taste of Thai to do the Race for the Cure.

In the pouring rain.

It ended up being an alright time, except that my shoes are still drying out and will likely get that ruinous mildew smell reserved for shoes soaked once in their lives. Lisa is a running champ, and once she started going, she didn't slow down to a walk at all. I jogged probably a total of 1.5 miles and then, overheating from my wet hoodie and with a creeping sour mood from being drenched, shifted into walking mode once we were safely past the crowds of people. I couldn't look like a wuss with an audience. For the home stretch (where the crowd picked up again), I did muster one final jogging push, doing that special kind of bouncy walk/jog that old ladies (and out of shape 30-year-olds) do, and hit the finish line at 41 minutes.Then I walked back to meet up with Leiah and Ben and jogged with them across the finish line 5 minutes later.

If a 5K was made up of multiple finish lines, I could probably talk myself into jogging the entire thing. That finish line thing is a blast.

But the rain, the rain sucks.
(No, I'm not having a stroke, that's just a side effect of exercise apparently, and no, Leiah did not style her hair with pin curls, that's just a side effect of running in the rain with glasses on your head. This is no doubt the sexiest picture we have ever taken together.)

Just say no to life lessons

A few weeks ago, Leiah and Ben stopped by for a visit while Intervention was on. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity for learning and teach Ben to say no to drugs.

I was inspired in this way about 15 years ago during an episode of Oprah that featured toddlers who had been taught to call 911 in an emergency and ended up saving someone's life. In this instance, Betsy was my pupil. I explained to her that if something ever happened that made her afraid and there was no grown up to help her that she should call 911 and even went so far as to point out the numbers on the keypad of the phone and pair it with a nice jingle. Sure she had learned the lesson, I pushed it out of my head and proceeded to strut my big sister stuff.

A couple days later the phone rang.

"This is 911. We got a call from this number. Do you have an emergency?"

After soothing the 911 operator, I asked Betsy if she called 911. Of course, she insisted that she didn't. We had previously convinced her that we had a ghost named Arthur living in our house, something we proved thanks to water on a counter and the sliding effect that suction gives to Tupperware containers, so she suggested, with an eyebrow raised and the cutest fake detective voice allowed, "Maybe Arthur did it."

You'd think with the way that backfired I wouldn't be using television as a platform for life lessons anymore, but fool me twice...

So Ben is running around acting crazy and I, his serious aunt addicted to shows about addiction, interrupt his playtime to teach him not to do drugs.

"Ben, if someone ever asks you to do drugs, you tell them, 'No way. I don't do drugs.' Got it?"

He looks at me like I'm on crack and resumes running circles around the couch. A few laps in, I catch his arm, hold out my open hand and offer him some invisible drugs.

(I did not teach him to punch the dealer. That's just a genetic response we have.)

Feeling pretty awesome that he got the message and added a very relevant-to-his-life reference about the potty in his rejection, I released him and off he ran. Leiah and I refocused our attention to the meth heads on TV, when a few minutes later, Ben stops his marathon, holds out his hand and says, "Hey, Ami. You want some drugs????"

Next I plan to teach him cuss words, starting with the phrase "Dammit Joan."

BONUS VIDEO BECAUSE IT'S FUN TO DO THIS TO KIDS

Shifting gears to hating Kentucky...

A couple things have happened in the last four days that have really made me want to throw my hands up and scream, "This is what I mean!! This is why I hate Kentucky!!"

First, a person that I have never met in my entire life decided to call a client of mine and defame me. To say that I acted criminally and am a liar. To say that I personally caused irreparable harm to his endeavor. To say that I am not fit to do the job I've been hired to do because he refuses to receive correspondence from me.

Like I said, I have never met this person. Nor have our professional paths ever crossed. He is simply acting on a grudge held by others that is approaching its 10-year-mark. It is ludicrous, unprofessional, out of line. And, it's just plain small town high school pettiness.

I wish this town and the people who live here really had problems so I wouldn't be such a powerfully destructive force in my volunteer efforts.

The other thing to really piss me off happened yesterday between 2pm and 8pm... you know, when it's daylight outside. Some fucker came right up on my back porch, while Mack was home studying, and broke our porch trellis to steal his bike.

In L.A., two of our bikes were stolen in the course of three years. In Lexington, we've had two stolen in three months.

In L.A., we rode our bikes for pleasure most of the time, mainly because Mack's school was too far away and I didn't like getting to work and being all sweaty and gross. But since we've been back and living in downtown Lexington, we've become everyday bikers. We ride to school, we ride downtown for events... we rely on our bikes as our primary mode of transportation. And then some social disease just prances up onto our back porch, breaks it apart, tramples my vegetable plants and then steals Mack's bike.

Add to that the rain, and Kentucky gets an F- for the past few days. If it weren't for the good falafel with my parents, the snuggles from my nephew and the pineupdown crack silliness from Leiah yesterday, this move wouldn't be feeling very worth it right now.

Test Day

Today is my first exam since hitting the books again. My study skills have gone a little into the realm of Crazy Freak, but somehow that seems to be working.

The British are coming! The British are coming!!

These things are moving back to Kentucky. In one month. Thank you, Jesus.

The Endorsement Series (Part 10 in a lot)

I'm cheap. There, I said it.

My whole life I've been a frugal experimenter... always open to trying the generic brand just to see if it really is the same as the name brand. In some cases, such as those involving shampoo, rising crust pizza, scented candles, tampons and toilet paper, the generic brand can't hold a candle to the name brand. But in many cases, such as those involving jalapenos, aspirin, tortilla chips, sparkling water and canned beans, the generic option is just as good as the fancy and more expensive one.

Yesterday, while Mack and I were driving around with the cosmetic mirrors on the sun visors open, we started an open discussion about how our teeth had become seriously yellow. In my case, the bottoms and the pointy one just to the left of my incisors were particularly shocking. I had started to notice mine looking a little stained a couple weeks ago, so last weekend I asked Leiah what she recommends since she works with dentists. She said Crest White Strips, so I told Mack we should get some when we got to Target.

We walked back to the white strips section and whoa. Do you have any idea how many options there are?

There is the Classic version for $20, which you wear twice a day for 14 days. I don't do anything twice a day for 14 days. Then there is the Premium for $25, and you wear those twice a day for 7 days. Then you've got the Pro Effects for $40, which give you lasting results and give you a noticeably whiter smile in 3 days. I like 3 days... I don't like $40. Finally you've got the Advanced Seal option for $45. This one whitens in 14 days, only doing it once a day, and it lets you drink water while you whiten.

My head was spinning in that white strips section. I wanted to get rid of the yellow, but I didn't want to take two weeks to do it and I didn't want to spend more than $20. Hello, my little generic friends.

Target had an off-brand of the Premium version, one step up from the Classic, for $15. We bought two of those kits, one for each of us, and hurried home to try them out.

I put them on, checked the clock, piddled around on the computer, went to feed the stray kitties up the road, came home, took them off, and HOLY WHITENESS!

Just one use and my yellow spots were mostly gone. It was amazing. I'm doing my second treatment now, and then I think I'll be good on the whiteness. Which means I have 12 more whitening sessions left in my box alone. Which is definitely making me smile about being cheap.