Category Archives: life

Goo removal

You know that sticky icky goo you get on your baking pans when you use non-stick spray? It’s really hard to get off so I try hard not to use it.

But I made my roasted carrots last night and decided to use the spray since the last time I made them, they stuck just a little bit to the glass baking dish which created a different sort of mess that needed to be scrubbed off.

I wasn’t even thinking of the icky sticky goo when I stuck the dish into the dishwasher last night. But I sure was when I grabbed it this morning as I emptied the dishwasher.

Ick!

I remembered that I had seen on Pinterest that you could use a dryer sheet to remove this goo.

I didn’t repin this particular tip because I had tried something from Pinterest that didn’t work and was skeptical that this would.  I really wasn’t sure how to proceed.

I went and got a dryer sheet and started scrubbing. Nope.

I thought about it and realized that maybe it needed water since you place the dryer sheet in the dryer with wet clothes to make it work.

So I filled the sink, put the dryer sheet in, and then placed the baking dish on top of it.

I was going to let it soak for hours (hee hee) but the sink drained within a few minutes. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, I picked up the baking dish and, Voila! Most of the icky sticky stuff was gone!

Woo hoo!

I used the wet sheet to scrub off (easily) the remaining goo and I now have a nice clean baking dish.

How exciting is that? 😉

Baby shower!

I had so much fun preparing for Aniston’s baby shower! Nikki asked me if I could design the invitation first and then the thank you cards. Her sister and mom had decided on a pale pink and leopard theme so I went with it.

I love the way both items turned out!

I asked if there was anything I could bring and Nikki said I could bring anything. Her family knows me well enough to know that I major in sweet treats.  It was really fun to scour Pinterest and the Internet to come up with ideas for what to make.

In the end, I decided on chocolate and pink popcorn

Pink chocolate covered Oreos

Pretzel snacks

(Super easy and delicious! Place pretzels on waxed paper line baking pan, top with Hershey kisses, place in 170 degree oven for 6 minutes, push M&Ms into the tops.)

Candy skewers

Cookies that I painted and bagged with matching thank you notes attached for people to take home

and strawberry cream cheese jelly bellies.

I also labeled water bottles to go along with the theme.

Of course it was overkill but I haven’t figured out how to make “just enough”. I didn’t want anyone who was there not to get something because there wasn’t enough.

They brought a cute cake!

There were lots of presents.

Lyndzee came.

bringing the chair she re-covered for Nikki.

It was great and I really loved watching Nikki’s face when she opened the gifts I had made for Aniston.

The Chucks

and the little Rott-I-Tude outfit.

I made a wall hanging for her bedroom, too, but I need to get a photo of it when it’s hanging on the wall in her nursery for full effect. 🙂

Lyndzee brought me my Christmas present she made for me which I adore!

I’m so excited to be Glammie. 🙂

I’m a bubblehead, it’s true.

Yesterday was a day filled with shopping. And not for shoes. Even moving into a corporate apartment, that is furnished, we still needed a lot of things.

I arranged my trip so I could leave right from breakfast, drive up to where we had been staying in the hotel and the Whole Foods was located, make a big circle and get home as soon as possible.

I wanted to shop at the Kroger closer to our new place but, because I had time to kill before a  9 a.m. opening, I went to the Kroger by Whole Foods – 20 minutes away from where we are living.

I bought a ton of stuff, you know how it is when you’re first moving in. I was happily waiting in line for the one cashier when a very friendly lady suggested that I come down and do the self check-out and she would help me.

I told her I was new in town and that this was my first visit to Kroger. She was right there with me, showing me how to do the check-out.

Eventually, I had too many things and started taking them out of the bagging area and putting them into the cart. This made the self check-out hooker freak out. “Please place the items back in the bagging area”.

Ummm. No. There isn’t any room.

“Well,” the nice self-help lady said, “you need to put them up on top.” Where there was clearly not enough room for the quantity of groceries I had. Oy.

I got everything scanned, bagged, and then I paid and went home.

When I got ready to make salad for dinner last night, I noticed that I had no salad dressing when I had purchased two. I also couldn’t find the olive oil. I had opted for a bigger, more expensive bottle. Ack!

I called the store. They hadn’t found these items in the self check-out but told me I could come and they would replace them. I did that this morning. It wasn’t on my way, it was 20 minutes from home.

When I got home, I started thinking about dinner. I thought I would put one of the English roasts I had purchased into the new crock pot I bought. I looked in the freezer.

No roasts.

I looked in the fridge.

No roasts.

Dang it.

I called the store and explained my situation. She said I could come and get my money back. I told her never mind. I was willing to let it go but please don’t ask me to use the self check-out ever again.

Until I decided the pork loin would be a nice thing to have for dinner.

I looked in the freezer.

It wasn’t there.

I looked in the fridge.

Not there either. Oy.

I called the store back. She told me I could come and replace the meat.

So off I went, 20 minutes one way, to get to the Kroger in another part of town.

When I got there, the girl at the Customer Service desk told me to go grab the meat to replace the ones I didn’t get home yesterday which I did.

After she was done, I told her that I really appreciated them doing this but that when someone has as many things as I did, they really shouldn’t try the self check-out. I explained to her briefly how I thought I had left them and she said, yes, the nice self-help lady had found the meat and put it back on the shelf.

Okay, well that made me feel marginally better that I wasn’t taking all that stuff twice and paying for it once.

I felt like a complete bubblehead for not being able to manage the self check-out.

In the future, I’m going to leave grocery check-out to the professionals.

Now, I’m going to have a glass of wine.

PS – I still need wine glasses.

The hooker

Before the 2010 pageant season began, David encouraged me to get in my car and drive. Go around the state, meet people and tell them about what I was doing. To help me with this, he bought me a Tom Tom GPS for my car.

He had a nice voice, Tom Tom, and he got me where I needed to go.

One day, David borrowed my car and when I drove it next, Tom Tom’s voice had changed. He was a woman!

And Tam Tam was born.

Tam Tam had a definite personality. And a speech impediment.

She was obstinate and it was either her way or the highway. Her inability to pronounce words she didn’t know cracked me up, though, and kept me from throwing her out the window.

I was in Chicago with Mrs. Oklahoma International 2007, Brooke Good, the summer of 2010. She noticed Tam Tam’s personality and stated, “what a hooker”.  This gave us something else to laugh at. Every time Tam Tam did something rude or obnoxious, we called her a hooker. And laughed.

One day I was trying to to get to the River Spirit Casino in Tulsa for a networking event. I knew that I needed to turn left at Riverside Drive and, yet, Tam Tam told me I needed to turn right. Then her screen was nothing but blue lines. She had clearly melted down.

The hooker.

I went to Best Buy and purchased Tam Tam II.

She came with the same voice, the same personality, the same speech impediment. This Tam Tam became much bolder, though, as she began not telling us which way we needed to go until we had either missed the turn off or, if we knew where we were going, told us after we were already on our way. She’d say turn left while pointing right.

Last Friday, I was packing up the car to head to Oklahoma City to have my hair done.  As I put water bottles on the front seat, I noticed that all of the receipts that had been in my console were on the seat. I looked to the right and Tam Tam was gone!

Someone had stolen the hooker.

I managed to get to Oklahoma City without getting lost. I promptly stopped at Best Buy and bought Tam Tam III.

I thought I was getting the same model as before but when I opened the box, I saw that it was very different. I couldn’t even figure out how to turn it on.

I finally got her turned on and was happy to have the familiar Tam Tam voice in my ears. But, wait! This Tam Tam was not the same Tam Tam. This Tam Tam was precise and had perfect diction. Wow!

She knew how to say International when directing me to Tulsa International Airport. I could hear sharp Ts at the ends of words.

I felt like I needed to say, “Ma’am, yes, ma’am!”

I call her Sergeant Tam Tam.

I will miss Tam Tam the hooker. I will miss her directing me to Ahkla City (Oklahoma City) and Weaverside Drive (Riverside Drive). But I like the new Tam Tam. I think she’ll do a great job. 🙂

I don’t eat stems

I love nothing better than fresh spinach. When we were growing up, my mom served us spinach out of a can and I thought that was what spinach was. Eeuuww. Slimy.

When I was 14, I got my first job at the Magic Pan, a restaurant in Woodfield Mall. I was hired as a bus girl but eventually learned every position in the restaurant except server and bartender because I wasn’t old enough. I was even added to the opening team to help open new restaurants. It was so much fun. But I digress.

Back to spinach.

They served a spinach salad at the Magic Pan. One of the jobs of the salad department was to pick the spinach. i.e. pick the stems off each leaf. There were days when I went to work and that’s all that I did for hours.

So imagine my complete horrification to go into a restaurant, any restaurant these days, and be served a bowl of stems.

See them?

Ick.

I rarely order a spinach salad in a restaurant but if I do, I leave a pile of stems on the table when I leave. LOL!

And so I confine my spinach eating mostly to home where I am in control of those dastardly stems. They never make it into my bowl and go in the garbage where they belong.

If I found a restaurant where they picked their spinach, I’d shout their name from the rooftops. If you know of one, let me know! I’d love to order a spinach salad in a restaurant and find it stemless. 🙂

Thanks for thinking of me

I think it’s so funny how you can have an impact on someone you’ve never met. People (often people I’ve never met IRL) tell me all the time they thought of me because of something they know about me from social media.

I’m honored that anyone would randomly think of me like that.

Sometimes the things are super funny. Like this one from facebook today:

Hilarious! I wonder if they were WANTED posters.  LOL! 🙂

Thanks for thinking of me. It’s really sweet. 😉

Coastering

One of the very first things I pinned on Pinterest was this:

I’m not a crafty person but I looked at that and thought, “I can do that!”. And, the beauty of it was, if it didn’t turn out it wasn’t going to be like I wasted a ton of money on it. It was a pretty economical project.

I decided I would make the coasters for the kids for Christmas using Brandon and Vanessa’s wedding logo and the design theme of Nikki and Geoff’s house. I gathered all of the things I needed to make the coasters and then I froze.

I was so afraid of making a mistake. But finally I got my courage up by telling myself that it’s no big deal if I DO make a mistake because they aren’t expecting the coasters and if I mess up, it will be okay.

So I cut the artwork out and started the modge podging. Is that a verb? 🙂

And it looked good!

I got all of the coasters created and put the felt circles on the back.

And then I was stuck. How to package them?

I went back to Hobby Lobby and wandered around looking for something I could put the coasters in. I eventually found these:

I thought all the way home about what I would do to them. I was clueless.

I painted the boxes black.

But that didn’t seem like enough.

I googled decoupage cardboard box and the instructions said that you could use anything to cover a box. Tissue paper, newspaper…ah ha! Newspaper!

Brandon and Vanessa met when they were working at the Tulsa World. So I covered their box with the Tulsa World and modge podge. I love the way it turned out!

For Nikki and Geoff’s box I was a little more stumped and I ended up just painting it with leopard spots.

I then wrapped the coasters in gold (Brandon and Vanessa) and cream (Geoff and Nikki) ribbon and put them in the boxes.

I added black drawer pulls that I attached with shorter screws and voila! I was finished.

I hope the kids like them. I had fun making them and was so happy that my first foray into modge podge without adult supervision turned out so well. 🙂

Born on date

I feel like beer.

hee hee 😉

I woke up this a.m. to a tweet telling me it’s my third twitter birthday.

I clicked the link and it brought me to a page with a birthday certificate.

Cool. I don’t remember getting this last year so I’m guessing that by @starbucks being my Godfather, it’s probably the first person that I followed or who followed me back. For a coffee achiever like myself, that seems appropriate. But if I were choosing my Godfather, it would be my friend @ScottMTownsend.

@ScottMTownsend walking to work

I had heard of twitter before December 24, 2008 but I didn’t really get it. That day, I was here alone. I’m not sure which Muslim country David was in that year but I had time on my hands and Scott was nice enough to help me to figure out how twitter worked.

A couple of email exchanges and a monster was born. LOL!

To say I love twitter is probably an understatement. When I think of all of the amazing people I have met and all of the cool opportunities that have come to me in the past three years, it just blows my mind that twitter could be the cause of it all.

I love my twitter friends. I mean, I really love them. Many of the people I met via twitter are now my dearest friends IRL (in real life).

Two of my earliest twitter friends were @patrickallmond and @jonfisher. They remain my twitter friends but they are also amazing real life friends.

Through them I met their incredible wives @allographics

Angela and I riding the train at Cecil's first birthday party

and @a_fisher. And I am honorary grandma to the precious @cecilfisher who truly feels like family to me even though he doesn’t really know me. 🙂

Afton and Cecil

I have friends all over the world. I love that. And my goal is to meet all of them when I come to their state or country.

People come and go on twitter and I miss the ones that go. But there are always new friends to make and new relationships to form.

So, happy twitter birthday to me. Thank you to all of my friends (followers) for making my twitter experience so awesome!

Now, let’s eat cake. 🙂

Just be yourself

Last night while I waited for David to get close to Tulsa so I could go pick him up, I was perusing my twitter stream. This is what I saw:

First I saw my friend Erin Patrick say that it takes courage to become who you really are. I barely even had time to let that roll around in my brain when I looked further down and saw my friend Bernice’s tweet about letting go of perfection.

And it hit me.

That was when I finally had the courage to be who I was always meant to be. When I finally let go of perfection.

No one is perfect but I spent so many, almost tortured, years of my life trying to be just that. It was only when I finally realized I wasn’t, and would never be, perfect that I was able to be me.

And guess what? I like me! 🙂

If you struggle with trying to be perfect all the time, you might want to read Bernice’s blog post. It’s good.

One of my favorite songs is The Middle by Jimmy Eat World. Some of the best words are:

Live right now, yeah, just be yourself
It doesn’t matter if it’s good enough for someone else

True, true, true!

Take it from me, letting go of the stress of feeling like you need to be perfect is such a relief. And it gives you the courage to be who you’re really meant to be.

Now go forth and be you! 🙂