no one wants to play?

i love name that tune. probably because i am GOOD at it. :) anyway, out driving to meet some friends today and this song came on.


it was the first record(thats right, i said RECORD. a 45 that i played on my barbie record player)i ever owned. my dad bought it for me at kmart. the b side was "love is thicker than water". odd,random memory brought on by hearing the above song on the radio today.
the video totally cracks me up. andy gibb was considered to be a real FOX(70's speak for hot)back then. pretty hilarious.

posted earlier:
Guess the title & artist of this song:

'open up the heaven in your arms and let me see the things you are to me & not some puppet on a string'

another flash back

this song came up while i was watching "men of a certain age". i have never really listened to the marshall tucker band, but mr ex man sent me this youtube and well...you know. its like never being aware of a specific car and when someone you know gets one, you suddenly see them all over the place.
the same with some of the songs mr ex man would send to me. before he brought the marshall tucker band to my attention, i never would have noticed them. it doesnt come up very often, but when they come on the radio or in the soundtrack of a tv show i am watching. it catches my ear.
heres a sample:

I'm gonna find me a hole in the wall,
I'm gonna crawl inside and die
'Cause my lady, now a mean old woman, Lord
Never told me goodbye
Can't you see, oh, can't you see,
What that woman she been doin' to me
Can't you see, oh, can't you see,
What that woman, she been doin' to me

thats just the second verse. it was the first of what i called his "f-you songs". he HATED when i called them that. he claimed the song demonstrated his deep love and the anguish of how things were not going right between us. whatever.
sigh. i was just enjoying a few days of uninterrupted, not thinking of mr ex man time. then here come the marshall tucker band. thanks. thanks a lot.

more c.s. lewis

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.” (C.S. Lewis)

necessities

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”
―C.S. Lewis

ho ho horny

“What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.”
— Stanley Kunitz

maybe not the cheeriest of topics. well, maybe if you are actually sexually active(all righteous and legal of course)
msof and i would always come home after spending Christmas morning with our families and hit the sheets. usually a few times throughout the day. holiday sex is kind of up there with birthday and anniversary sex. the details make it sexier. more fun. more than likely you have had the day off and you are happy from all the delicious food and the gifts you received.
i have always maintained that celibacy is not only feasible, but easier than most of the whiny cry baby(mostly men)people out there claim it to be.
wellllll....today i am the whiny cry baby. i want my holiday nookie!(imagine me stomping my foot, crossing my arms, and pouting).
i slacked off on my airborne for a few days and now i am sick. nothing major. cold and flu symptoms. low grade misery. add that to the general malady of Christmas as a single person and being alone in the house sick(i tend to get emotional when physically weak),
i would be happy with a ncmo, but the only guy i have on deck(damn dating hiatus)wants sex. yes, i am talking about mr jack mormon. he wants the whole thing. making out is not enough. not very condusive to the spirit of giving. while i get what i would consider a satisfying connection, he would walk away, shall we say, uncomfortable. sigh. happy freaking holidays.
its the cold talking. i swear. i will probably delete this tomorrow from the shame.

light and shadows

“In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.”
―Blaise Pascal

just because

i love this song. randy travis turned this metal chick to a country music lover. this song was on the first album(cassette)i ever bought of his. i wore it out playing it in my car over and over again. to this day i could sing every song by heart. i have mentioned in the past that i dont normally like covers, but i think carrie underwood did a great job. i love how randy comes out to surprise her at the end. he is so generous and kind to her and i think she was grateful and so lovely to him.


ok-i was a dork and didnt notice that the embedding was blocked on the grand ole opry version i was referring to above. click here to check it out. its worth a look. i like the american idol version too. i never saw it before and i get a kick out of how she obviously star struck singing with randy and he looks so proud as she is singing his song.
i meant for this to be a quick post-not feeling so hot(slacked on my airborne consumption), but i just drug it right out, didnt i?
i planned a fun post about holiday sex, but couldnt finish it due to the bug that is plaguing me.

may all of your wishes come true

“What is Christmas? It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, hope for the future. It is a fervent wish that every cup may overflow with blessings rich and eternal, and that every path may lead to peace.”
— Agnes M. Pharo

blessed

“The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other.”
―Burton Hillis

gotta love Mother Teresa

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
―Mother Teresa

stress zit

OHMYGOSH! adsense set up an AARP ad on my blog. are they crazy?!?!? i feel a stress zit coming on right in the middle of my forehead. good thing i can combat this with an easy and natural remedy. what you will need is:
cleanser
baking soda
honey
band aid
at bedtime, pour your normal cleanser into your hand and add 1-2 tsp of baking soda. cleanse as normal, paying a little extra attention to the area where the blemish is. the baking soda acts as a gentle exfoliant. rinse well and pat your face dry. put a DROP, just a little bit, of honey on the white pad part of a band aid and place it over the offending pustule(the technical term for a zit, but i think both sound equally bad).
when you wake up the next morning and remove the band aid-voila! the zit will have either disappeared or been reduced so dramatically that you can successfully cover it with make up. why does this work? it sounded ridiculous to me, but i tried it and was pleasantly surprised. apparently the honey clears up the bacteria and helps with redness and inflammation.
dont let a glaring, angry, zit ruin your glamorous holiday look this season, try this easy zit cure. let me know if it works for you.

smc cooks spinach-dont run away!

i think spinach has lost a lot of the stigma from years past. growing up we ate all different vegetables, but spinach was not one of them. i was mainly exposed to canned spinach which looked disgusting and my friends that were forced to eat it confirmed it was as bad as it looked.
i was turned on to fresh spinach via delicious salads, many of them dressed with an incredible hot bacon dressing, but i stayed away from cooked spinach until i saw a simple recipe that i ventured to try and ended up loving it. it goes a little like this:
grab a bag of fresh spinach from the produce aisle in your grocery store-the brand i get packages it in a 10 oz bag(looks much bigger, but spinach is light)and for me, that makes 2 lunch size servings of sauteed spinach.
drizzle about 2 tbs of olive oil in a skillet or sautee pan and heat over medium heat. Once the oil is hot, add a little minced garlic and sautee for just a few seconds before you add about 1/2 the bag of spinach. at this point, things will move fast. keep stirring the spinach and watch it shrink before your eyes. it goes from a big pile of green to about 1 cup of wilted yumminess in 2-3 minutes. add a little kosher salt and a few cranks of fresh cracked pepper. delicious and so healthy. check this site out for some of the amazing benefits of spinach. i love how the experts say it will keep you and your brain YOUNG. me and my cougar ways need that added benefit, believe me.

wise man

The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

— Nelson Mandela

the nudge

i wonder sometimes if everyone thinks in a stream of consciousness style like i do. i worry about how random some of my thoughts seem, but they truly follow a logical pattern. to me, anyway. s-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o while driving in the car today i hear

which makes me think of mr ex man. he sent this song to me after one of our many break ups following one of his many freak outs. it melted my heart. i can be such a sucker, but when you love someone you want to forgive, right? anyway, this led to a whole 10 miles of driving and thinking of all things mr ex man. if you have read this blog more than once, you know i have droned on and on about him, but there is one thing i dont think i ever mentioned. "the nudge". this is something that came up with our first split. while arguing, he yells out "you dont love me, you NUDGE me away!" now i am thinking he is meaning emotionally or something deep like that, but no. he meant that i literally nudged him away. i demanded he explain further and what came to light is probably the biggest example of misinterpretation i have ever dealt with.
picture it: we are laying on my bed making out. its heating up pretty quickly and everything is going exactly right. i am tall, but mr ex man is considerably taller and when it comes to the horizontal make outs(and other things i am sure, but i have no experience with that. msof was my exact same height)this physical detail added a lot for me. i was laying on my back and he was on his side, slightly propping himself with his arm so he could lean over me as we kissed. at first my arms were just lightly around his neck, but i pulled him closer as he used his tongue to gently open my mouth and enter in for the best french kissing i have ever experienced. i pull my arms from around his neck and wrap them around his strong back, pulling him even closer as i turn towards him and wrap my leg around his hips. i start kissing over his face towards his ear. he is turning his head and kissing my neck and down onto my upper chest which is showing the evidence of my quickened heart rate(are you appreciating how i didnt go all harlequin on you and said something like "heaving bosom"?). i take his earlobe between my teeth and tug it gently, then use the tip of my tongue to trace around the outer edge of his ear. one of his hands makes its way down to where my lower back slopes up to my butt and he pulls me roughly towards him making me softly gasp against the cool skin of his neck. i continue to kiss,lick, and suck along his neck and jawline until i get to his chin. i start moving down nudging his chin up so i can kiss underneath it and down his throat. WE INTERRUPT THIS TOTALLY SEXY, AMAZING, AND SATISFYING MAKE OUT TO POINT OUT...dumb mr ex man thought i was nudging him AWAY. i found that so preposterous that i figure he is lying to distract from something else. its been so long that the details are fuzzy, but he was able to convince me that he truly thought i was pushing him away, telling him to stop. the actual pulling him close, heavy breathing, and the kissing southward didnt convince him otherwise. of course this discussion was long distance. weeks after the fact. when he initially told me, i laughed because it seemed so ridiculous considering all that went on. all the facts. he was pretty pissed off at me for laughing at him, but i really thought he was joking. who sabotages like that? mr ex man, thats who.
ps- sometimes i think that buck cherry guy might be in the neighborhood of creepy sexy, but he never actually leaves creepy town. just watching that video gives me the willies.

amen!

"If love is the answer, would you please rephrase the question?"
—Lily Tomlin

sexy or gay?

i was watching the saturday night live Christmas special and they were showing a skit with steve martin where he is sitting in a big arm chair with his legs crossed at the knee. i started to wonder why steve martin(not repulsive by any means, but no real attraction either)manages to look attractive and manly with his legs crossed like a woman? the gay kid from glee always sits with his legs crossed at the knee and he just looks like your every day twinkle toes , emitting no masculine sexuality at all. trying to go over my dance card and remember if any of the guys i have dated(or been married to)ever sat in such repose. definitely not msof. no way. not tgws-i think i can actually remember him and his friends doing their gay guy impressions and crossing their legs in an exaggerated manner and making their wrists go limp-and speaking with a lisp. why do so many gay impressions include a lisp? i know quite a few gay guys and none of them have a lisp. weird. anyway, back to what i was droning on about. why do some guys look totally sexy with their legs crossed and others just look gay?

smc chic in 5 min

lots of parties going on this time of year. you might get a last minute invite and you want to look your hottest, but dont think you have time. trust me, you do! even if your hair is dirty and you dont have a stitch of makeup on, its all possible. first of all, pull your hair back in a low ponytail. always chic and very forgiving if your hair is not freshly washed. apply eyeliner to make your eyes sparkle and lip gloss to enhance your smile. put on a pair of dangling or sparkling earrings. voila! you are chic in 5 minutes.
say you have a a little bit more than five minutes. you can do a few simple things to make your fast party look even hotter.
1: the messy bun. a girl at church turned me on to this hair style that looks so complicated, but it is soooooo easy. as you put your hair in the ponytail, dont pull the ends all the way through on the last pass creating a loop of sorts. separate that loop into several smaller loops pinning each one with a pretty bobby pin around the ponytail. i have fine hair, so i do about 6 or 7, but you could definitely do more. the effect is really nice. if you use sparkly bobby pins with rhinestone flowers or butterflies on the end, it really adds some glamour.
2: add a little shimmer to your makeup: sweep a little light colored shimmery eye shadow just below your eyebrow and a few strokes of black mascara. it will highlight your eyes and make them sparkle.
3: a little blush on the apples of your cheeks will make it look like you just came in from building a snowman. so cute.
hope you are having a fun holiday season and have that special someone to kiss under the mistletoe.

pretty and popular

as they often do, the guys over at the mormon bachelor pad got me to thinking. calvin posted about his school days and how he was picked on and kind of a nerd and how that has changed somewhat now that he is all grown up.

i think just about every kid gets teased at one point during their school days. i didnt get too much. mainly i got teased for being tall or my unusual name. by junior high and high school, that kind of teasing was a thing of the past. i wasnt popular in the traditional sense. i wasnt a cheerleader or the prom queen, but i had many friends from all the different cliques that most schools traditionally have. once during my freshman year a good friend told me that she hated to walk around the school with me because we got stopped every two seconds by someone saying hi or wanting to chat for a few minutes. i think she said, "you are too popular!" which came as a surprise to me because i never considered myself popular.

i never really had an ugly complex like many girls go through. i had great parents that always told me i was beautiful(followed with wise words like: pretty is as pretty does), but looking in the mirror i never really saw it. oh sure, there were times i was pleased with my reflection, but beautiful? nah.

i know i wasnt a troll and i definitely had boyfriends, but it wasnt until after msof and i got together that i got some surprising feedback. apparently(according to him and there was some other backup)i was quite a catch. i was the topic of a few discussions during high school and even after. this was a complete shock to me. even after the fact, it was nice to know i had been admired from afar.

the point? there really isnt one. calvins post just got me thinking about these things. i think the why i'm still single girl talked about it as well. as women, its kind of frowned upon to brag about our superficial beauty. especially as women in the church we are taught and encouraged to cultivate the inner beauty and let that shine through. you know-be a sweet spirit ;-)

i intended to go on about the whole hot vs beautiful debate, but...

President Hinckley

"I believe in the family where there is a husband who regards his companion as his greatest asset and treats her accordingly; where there is a wife who looks upon her husband as her anchor and strength...The cultivation of such a home requires effort and energy, forgiveness, and patience, love and endurance and sacrifi...ce; but it is worth all of these and more." - Pres. Gordon B. Hinckley

tis the season...

for colds and flu, but i have managed to avoid both! its truly a Christmas miracle and i give all the credit to airborne. if you have never heard of the stuff check out their website . they will give you the 411 on this AMAZING product, but the jist is that a 2nd grade teacher developed this all natural combination of 17 vitamins, minerals, and herbs to ward off colds and the flu. it totally works. they have a couple of different flavors-none are disgusting, but i like the new very berry flavor. everyone i know has gotten sick so far this year. not me! i usually get the flu by thanksgiving, but NOT THIS YEAR! can you tell i am happy about this? of course i do all the basics like wash my hands a lot and run in the opposite direction of anyone coughing or sneezing. you know, common sense stuff.

the gift of love

“There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert

man friendly appetizer

i went to a party last night and brought this delicious appetizer . everyone loved the little bundles of bacon wrapped pineapple. all the guys loved them and several of their wives asked me for the recipe. if there was even one single guy there, i bet i could have gotten a proposal from this recipe alone. you know what they say....the way to a man heart, blah blah blah

true giving

“To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.”
―Max Beerbohm

my arizona friends...please help!

a dear friend of mine who lives in the phoenix metro area of arizona told me this tragic story a few days ago.

it is truly a horrible thing to happen at any time, but is intensified by the Christmas season. if you live in the phoenix area, please go to chili's and mention the stock name and they will donate 10% to the stock family. heck, even if you dont live in az, maybe if you ask, your local chili's will donate too. never hurts to ask.

Christmas spirit

“Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love!”
— Hamilton Wright Mabi

good quote

Although the world is full of suffering,
it is also full of the overcoming of it.
~ Helen Keller

cherry chip snow ball cookies

i had illusions of grandeur, thinking i was going to go all food blog and take pictures of me making these step by step. i got over it really fast when life intervened and insisted i pay attention to the crisis at hand. that being said, this is a quick post that i can share with you guys and maybe help a little this busy Christmas season.
i stumbled across this recipe on a completely unrelated website. i wanted to try it because it was so easy and i love to try new recipes. one of my best friends asked me to bring dessert to her Christmas dinner and i picked out an elegant and fancy dessert to make. turns out i was short one very important ingredient(that never happens to me)and did not have the time to run to the store, make the dessert, and get ready to go to the party. i decided to take the batch of these cookies after a long mental debate over what was worse, going empty handed or taking stupid cake mix cookies? i took the cookies and apologized profusely for my lame offering. my friend doesnt bake at all and thought anything was great. i didnt think anyone would touch them. they were scarfed down like crazy! everyone loved them and asked me for the recipe. to think i was ashamed of those little cookies. they were the hit of the party!

1 cherry chip cake mix
1/2 8oz tub of cool whip
1 egg
powdered sugar

stir the cake mix, cool whip, and egg together. it will be very sticky. take out spoonfuls and drop into a bowl of powdered sugar. once coated, roll int a ball between your hands, then roll in the powdered sugar again.place about 2 inches apart on a greased cookie sheet. bake at 350 for 8-10 min. really watch them becasue they burn fast!

so i lied. SUE ME!

ok. i stand corrected. james taylor puts his spin on my favorite(and classic)Christmas song and I LOVE IT.

and one more

i really think this is it for my favorite Christmas songs. i dont listen to the station that has been playing all Christmas songs since before thanksgiving. i dont do caroling. i KNOW its sounds so grinch like, but i really am not. just hate all the hype. i heard the most AWFUL version of my all time favorite today in the car. the voice was somewhat familiar, but i couldnt place it. i listened to the whole train wreck just so i could tell all of you who decimated that beautiful song. of course they didnt say. who would want to take credit for not only singing off key, but 2 octaves too low?

2nd favorite Christmas song

heard this on the radio today.

dollar store cure

i couldnt find my burts bees lip balm the other day so i ran into the dollar store and picked up two tubes of oralabs chap ice. cherry flavored. my lips have never been so smooth. 2 tubes for a buck. lovely, smooth, and kissable lips for me. what a deal.

my favorite Christmas song

a small effort to balance out my scrooge attitude from a few days ago. i am not a judy garland fan, but i love her version of this song. i also love "meet me in st. louis", it brings back a lot of fond memories of my dad. researching recipes for Christmas treats and posting this song....maybe the grinch didnt bite me in the ass after all.

freeway makeovers

the one sentence post over at seriously so blessed got me to thinking about a period of time when one of my best friends was dating tgws's roommate so we would drive over to their house together. we both had worked all day,so we brought clothes to change into and our makeup bags to touch up our faces to look our absolute hottest. or in 80's speak "finest". the drive between where we worked and their super cool(they had a hot tub)bachelor pad was about twenty minutes. mainly by freeway, but being the young and invincible hotties we were, we managed to do full wardrobe changes and complete makeup while driving a minimum of 75mph down a busy freeway. i have vivid memories of shimmying off high heels and nylons from work and pulling on 501's and flats as we sped down the highway. we would toss mascara and lip gloss back and forth to each other, primping and painting as the street lights sped by. seriously, it is a MIRACLE that we never got in a wreck or at the very least pulled over for speeding and unlawful makeovers while operating a motor vehicle. the things we do for love. not to mention vanity. that friend and tgws's roommate have been married for over twenty years now. see? sometimes it works.

love

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.” Elie Wiesel


i love when i read a quote like this and i can see the truth of it in my own life. to think of msof, our troubled marriage, and our ugly divorce, indifference was a much needed respite. i love that when he does eventually cross my mind that i am pleasantly shocked how long its been since the last time i thought of him.

i think i am getting to the indifference stage with mr ex man. its a huge relief to be moving away from all of that heartache and drama. its been a long time since we have talked, so i am thinking the last break up finally took.

fingers crossed.

the ever shrinking circle

my father used to call me a social butterfly and it used to really offend me, but i am not sure why. i guess i was. i had a ton of friends and socialized a lot. i had a lot of fun throughout high school and the few years after. my circle of friends suddenly shrunk when i got married. we moved away and i entered into the new social world of military wife. they were nice women, but due to the transient nature, no one got really close. once msof was out of the military and we moved back home, the circle expanded a bit, but not too much. there werent too many that could tolerate msof and only a few that i knew loved me enough to deal with him on any sort of regular basis. after i invited msof to leave our home and our marriage, the circle, once again began to expand. and continued to do so until i had a huge circle of relatively close friends. good friends i could count on. we socialized. we traveled. it was a good time. then they started dropping out. for the most part, it was normal life stuff. moving away or just interests changing. no ugliness or animosity. a few got married and a few made more dramatic departures. like the facebook friend's sister i mentioned in my previous post. it started out kind of like a scene from "mean girls", but since i am pretty much beyond those type of antics, she stepped up her game. the accusations and lying began. it was some crazy stuff. she drug her parents into it. attempted to bring other friends in. major drama, the likes of which i had not seen since my freshman year when tgws's sister accused me of using her to get to him. it was horrible. it really was a sucker punch that sent me reeling. i recovered pretty quickly, but it really made me take stock of who was the most important to me and why. now my circle of friends is tiny, but i dont mind at all. i know i can count on them and they will never pull the crap i dealt with previously. getting the facebook friend request from that ex friend just got me thinking if the shrinking circle of friends is a normal part of growing up and getting older or if its just my reaction to a series of icky events.

facebook strikes again

so if life isnt weird enough right now, i get friended by a very old friend that "broke up" with me about five years ago. it was a crazy scene. i was very good friends with her and her older sister. her sister kind of freaked out and started accusing me of random and bizarre things that were so obviously false, but the friend and her entire family were in such a co dependent mode with the older sister that they chose not to call her on her bs and i simply withdrew. there have been a few recent lame attempts to reach out, but the facebook friending is the first real attempt. i was wary. still am. i mean, how do you deal with this? pretend like it never happened? take the bull by the horns and say "WTF?!" i accepted her friend request and she immediately emailed me a lovely note catching me up on her life and asking me about mine and my family's. i wrote back a pretty generic letter. friendly, but not all together forthcoming. she really wasnt the evil one(her older sister was)but she let it all happen without saying anything. i guess that isnt a fair statement. i dont know everything she said,but i do know that we were no longer friends and it was over lies and ridiculous childish behavior from her camp. so high school. i hate it. also, my life is somewhat in chaos while hers(as she reports)seems to be in lovely order. sigh. i was nice, wrote back. we will see what happens.