i am not catholic

It's true.  I'm not.  I never will be either, I'm afraid. 

I grew up Methodist and while I appreciate all religions, I secretly am kind of glad that I'm not Catholic...I get so confused attending Catholic weddings--especially the ones with full mass...I never know when to sit, stand, kneel, sing, let alone pray!

My friend Colleen got married this weekend and I pulled double duty: coordinating the wedding and lighting the candles at the front of the church prior to the ceremony.

My other friend Jess (who also happens to be Methodist) and I were candle-lighters and we were told before walking down the aisle during the rehearsal to bow before we went up to light the candles.  We did that and we rocked it.

We, however, weren't told that we needed to bow after lighting the candles too, so as we were walking down the stairs and getting ready to head back down the aisle, all of our Catholic friends scolded us for not bowing. 

So, what do we do?  We bow. 

To the crowd.  FAIL. 

We should have bowed towards the alter again as we did before lighting the candles. 

This little mishap was of course, the joke of the weekend and everyone warned us before lighting the candles at the wedding to bow towards the alter...oopsie!

While this wasn't my first Catholic wedding and I'm sure it won't be my last, I realized a lot during this ceremony for some reason:

• In addition to the bowing rule, there were so many times that I wasn't sure if I should be sitting, standing, or kneeling.
• They like to sing prayers
• If I had to kneel in a wedding dress for an hour, I would cry
• Kids probably don't enjoy Catholic weddings

Speaking of kids not enjoying Catholic weddings, my good friend, Monica encountered this first-hand at last weekends wedding.

During communion at a wedding, typically the Priest asks that only Catholics participate in the actual receiving of bread and wine...this little tidbit was left out and while most non-Catholics didn't participate, there just happened to be a few (one being a child) who decided that their first communion should take place at this wedding. 

Bad idea. 

Especially in a church full of devout Catholics, most of whom attended Catholic school.

My dear friend Monica could tell from the get-go that the family walking in front of her had no idea what they were doing. 

The little one (maybe about 2) even partook in communion. 

He, however, did not eat the host upon receiving it and instead dropped it on the ground a few times, waved it in the air, and did all things possible not to eat it.

Seeing this happening, Monica approached the mom and explained the importance of the bread and asked a few times that the boy eat it immediately.  Monica explained to the mother that if he didn't eat it that she would have to take it away from him.

He didn't eat it.

Monica is mean.

OK, ok, not really...she was just doing her duty as a faithful Catholic; the bread is viewed as Jesus' body and the wine as his blood.  The bread and wine should be consumed and treated as just that...not dropped all over the floor and waved in the air.

Prior to Monica stealing the kids bread, the mom told her that if she did take it away that he would cry.  Which he did (but most likely because the mom said he would...duh).

We all saw a little commotion going on as this was happening sitting at the back of the church but we weren't prepared for the onslaught that took place afterwards by like every. single. family member of this kid!

DURING THE CEREMONY(!) the grandma of the little boy came up to Monica and asked that she go out and apologize to the child and his mother.  Which she did.

After attempting to apologize, the mom told Mon that she would make a horrible mother, and that she ruined the wedding for their family.

The mother in law came back and later apologized for making her do that during the ceremony...but still: NOT COOL, GRANDMA, NOT COOL.

At the reception, the child's dad, who was also a groomsman, again attacked Monica and explained to her that they weren't aware that they weren't supposed to take communion and blah, blah, blah. 

Lesson: if you aren't sure...don't do it, duh.

After everyone was able to give their two-cents to Monica regarding her communion decision, we were all able to enjoy the reception. 

Colleen (the bride) ended up finding out what happened and called Monica to let her know that she would have reacted the same way--by removing the host from the little boy and apologized for the way the groomsman's family reacted (apparently the wife is a drama-queen anyway...so it wasn't surprising that all of this went on). 

Moral of the story: if in doubt, sit it out (at Catholic weddings, that is....)

i burp a lot. like, a lot a lot.

It's true, and it's gross, but I burp. 


Like not a little, lady-like, delicate burp.  This is like a huge manly, beer drinking burp. 



But I can't help it.  A wise woman once told me: "Better to let them out than to bear the pain" and I couldn't agree more.  (Of course, this wise woman also has a slight burping problem herself...but who's asking.)



My dad used to tell me when I was interviewing for jobs a few years ago that no one would hire me because of my burping problem.  Luckily for me, I found a job where the people that I work with might just produce a little more gas (and by gas, I, of course mean burps) than myself. 



It doesn't seem to matter what I eat or drink; these monster burps just escape me for no apparent reason. 


Drink Water: burp
Wake up: burp
Go to the Gym: burp


Even with nothing in my stomach! Gaw!


I went to the doctor for it thinking they'd be able to give me some miracle drug to make it stop, but they said that I was healthy and my eating habits are healthy and that there really isn't much they can do.  UGH.



Even when I try to muffle the sound, it still sounds like a lion.


If I were to enter some kind of burping contest I would burp easily win.  Hands down.  I am that talented. 


I'm so gross!


Anymore though, the burping has become a little bit of a trademark for me. 


At a wedding reception recently a party-goer talking to one of my friends referred to me as "that girl who had the loudest burps ever on the dance floor."  Pure classiness right there, folks.

My mom and dad are so proud.

i've been busy.

Painting and stuff.  And travelling. 

Also, my computer at home doesn't like the Internet.  Which poses a small problem in trying to write a blog post.

Anyway, I thought you'd like to see some of my painting skillz.

I finally got around to painting my office.  It was a project that I started about a month ago...and then I decided to change the color of the room completely.  So that took some time to figure out.

Anyway, I was lazy and didn't take the covers off of the outlets in my office and just taped over them.  It worked when I did this in my basement...so why wouldn't it work this time?  It appears that a small child snuck into my office while the paint was drying and then removed the tape from the outlet cover and finger painted all over the cover. 

That, or I'm horrible at painting.  It's probably the latter now that I think about it...

I'm happy with the color and still have to move all of my crap back in, but here's what the color looks like on the walls (this makes it look a little neon green...it's not, I promise.  It looks gooood). 

When I opened the paint can a little spilled out on my hands and when I wiped it on a paper towel the color looked like baby poop.  But it doesn't on my walls I don't think. 

Anywho, I'm alive and kickin, I just am slacking on posting stuff.  But don't you worry, I'll have something up real soon.

so, my dog peed on my lap last night.

Awesome.  That's all I have to say about it.


You see, I think what happened was she was just really excited from playing with other doggies last night that when we got in the car (yes, she rides on my lap; and, no, I don't want to hear about how this is a bad idea...she just sleeps the whole time...er most of the time and then the other time she's looking out the window) a little excited pee just slipped out.  Twice.


That, and she drank over half of her weight in water last night from running around like crazy.


She even went to the bathroom 2 times before getting in the car.


Laila has a tiny baby problem of excited peeing.  She just gets so wound up whenever she meets someone new, or old, and greets them with a little squirt of pee.  I'd take it as a compliment if I were you...


I mean you can't get mad at this cute little face for too long:

Cankle.

So there was this one time in college when I used to drink too much. 


OK, let's be real.  All of college I drank too much.  I was a very responsible drunk though; I always made it to class, I got very good grades, and I worked quite a bit as well.  I just liked to have a good time after I was done with work and school. 


I was in a sorority so we had too many date parties to count.  In my four years of school, I'm pretty sure that I only missed one.  I love playing dress up, what can I say?!

The thing about date parties is that if you're under 21, you had to drink enough before hand to last you through the entire night.  This is what got me into some serious trouble.  (Ok, not really serious trouble, like there were no cops involved.  There were a handful of times where I probably should have been kicked out of the house...like when I brought alcohol into our dry house and then that other time when I puked at formal and my date had to go by himself...)


Anyway, my sophomore year we had a date party with another sorority and the theme was salad dressing.  Weird, right?  There were four different kinds of salad dressing that you could choose from: Italian, Ranch, Thousand Island, and French. 


Of course I chose Thousand Island because that meant that I could make a fruit hat and be the chiquita banana lady.  I was going to look awesome. 


SO I got to work on the fruit hat which turned out to be way more time consuming than I originally thought.  Trying to attach plastic fruit to a straw hat with flower wiring is not easy.  After finally getting all of that assembled right before the date party, I figured that the perfect way to finish off the outfit was with a Hawaiian printed sarong.  Hawt.



The infamous fruit hat post fall...

We always had big pre-parties before the actual party and that was no different for this particular date party.  I have no idea what exactly we drank, probably something tropical to go along with the rest of the theme... 


After getting in a sufficient amount of pre-partying in, it was time to load up the school bus to go to the Holiday Inn. 


Once at the Holiday Inn, I made my way off the bus and patiently waited for my friends to go inside.  This is where things start to get a little blurry...on my way inside I missed a few steps and tumbled down a few stairs thus ruining my beautiful fruit hat.  Nevermind that my foot is throbbing; I was more concerned with collecting all of the fruit that fell off so that I could attempt to reattach it for party pics. 

The alcohol that I consumed that night apparently served as a buffer to the pain that was beginning to take place around my ankle.  I danced all night long and I vaguely remember throwing my (c)ankle up on the table that the DJ was using and explaining to him why my foot was turning black and blue.

I went home after the date party and smartfully elevated my foot above my heart for the night.  And probably put some ice on it or something.  I woke up in a LOT of pain the next morning and decided to hobble on over to the campus Dr.'s office.

After convincing the doctor that was on call that Saturday morning that I, in fact, did NOT need a pregnancy test (FYI-this was a standard question that was asked to everyone who went to Lafene (the campus health center)...even if you went in with a cold or a broken foot for that matter), I had an X-ray done on my foot.  Apparently I should have been in a walking boot at the very least, but that would cost money...so I just decided to walk it off.  They said I'd probably be fine trying to walk off my brokenness.  Very smrt.

Eventually the swelling went down, the bruising disappeared and my foot was semi back to normal.  Of course at every chance that I could get I would take off my socks and shoes and show everyone my giant foot.  It was a good conversation starter at parties. 

This isn't the greatest picture but you can at least see all of the bruising that was starting to form that night as well as the swelling around my actual ankle bone. 

My bum foot. (also both of my feet look gargantuan in this picture...I'm blaming this on the freshman 15, weight gain can go to your feet, right?)

Unfortunately with age that little fall is coming back to haunt me; the ankle just doesn't quite work like it used to...damn the luck.  Oh, and also for the record, my feet don't look quite that big anymore and I do not have cankles.



call before you dig. they aren't kidding.

One afternoon a couple of years ago, my mom and I decided to go tree shopping for my back yard. I took pictures of the areas that I wanted to put some trees or bushes in, had a few ideas of what I was looking for and then we set off for the tree place.  I was so prepared!!


Mom and I picked out 4 larger bush things or are they trees? What constitutes a tree, really?  Anyway, we picked them out, loaded them into the SUV and went on our merry way.  When we got back to my house, we placed each tree in it's spot and stepped back to make sure it looked as good from far away as it did close up.  Once we confirmed the spots we decided to start digging away. 


My mom asked me if I had called the U-Digg people and I think I probably mumbled something back to her that may have sounded like maybe...or something....  Anywho, we start digging and digging and my mom starts complaining about Johnson county dirt and how it's so hard compared to her dirt at home.  Apparently the dirt at home is like water....dirt around my house is apparently like cement though. 


So we're digging and digging and digging and my mom hits something.  It's hard and black.  Sh!t, it's a snake!  I start squealing because that's what I do best and running around like a crazy person.  But she keeps poking at it.  Sh!t again!!  It's really not a snake, it's some kind of wire thingy.  (also, do snakes live below the ground like that?  Ew, it just grosses me out even more...)


Being the smart people that we are, we keep poking at it to try to figure out what it is.  No worries that it could electrocute or really really hurt one of us...  So I run inside to see what things might be off and what the line that we just sliced in half might be and realize that my TV is off.  That's weird, I think to myself....how would that just turn off on it's own?  I know Laila wouldn't turn it off, her favorite soap was on. 

I turn it back on and the picture is all fuzzy and black and white.  Weird....

CRAP!  We cut the cable line in half.

I go back outside to give my mom the news while I'm on hold with the cable company; and while we're relieved that it wasn't anything bigger, we're still both a little freaked out. 

Finally, the cable company comes back on the line and I think the conversation went something like this:

ME: "Hi, my TV picture is fuzzy and black and white"

Cable: OK, I'm not showing any activity at your address.  We don't show any other outages, did something else happen?

ME: Um, well, we were planting some trees and may have hit a wire.

Cable: You may have hit a wire or you hit a wire?

ME: Oh, um, welllll, we might have hit it just a little.

Cable: Ok, did you see the wire when you started digging up the dirt?

ME: Yup. 

Cable: Is there a chance that you would have cut it in half?

ME: Could be....

Cable: Ok, we can send a technician out tomorrow, they'll call you before they come.

ME: Perfect.

Phew. Not as big of a deal as I thought, but I was dreading how much it was possibly going to cost to have them come out on a Sunday.

Not having a TV in the house makes things sooo quiet!  I mean, I don't watch a ton of TV myself, but I generally have it on for background noise at the very least. 

Sunday morning rolls around and it just happens to be Mother's Day weekend (which is why my mom was in town).  So, my mom and I go to church, meet my dad, sister, and brother in law for lunch and then the cable company calls.  Perfect timing guys!

Luckily we were about finished with lunch and we were eating close to my house so we could get back to my place quickly. 

We get to my house and find a big white conversion van parked in front and two guys just moseying around waiting for us to arrive.  I reluctantly show them where we dug up the cable line and they start chit chatting with my dad.  Long story short, they fixed it super quickly, didn't make me pay for anything, and said that it happens all the time!  Apparently in newer subdivisions they only bury the cable line like 4 inches below the sod=DUMB. 

After all of the weekend festivities concluded, I called U-Digg and made an appointment for them to come out and mark all of my buried lines.  We managed to pic one hot spot in the yard.  There were a few things buried where we decided to dig.  Good work, eh? 

Here's that little spot that we dug up.  See all of that orange?  Oh yeah, those are all wires of some kind....

We did get some landscaping done without digging up any wires.  Looks good, right?