Month: November 2011

  • The post where I use the term “sock bun” and more random things

    This is one of those times when I LITERALLY have not one thing to write about. Or maybe I do have something to write about but I’ve forgotten it. Either way, I’ve sat here next to P for the last hour and griped and moaned about how I have nothing to write about (as opposed to the riveting expose I wrote on the You Curl curling iron yesterday) and he’s looked at me, shrugged his shoulders and gone back to watching the Outdoor Channel as if that’s the most important thing.

    The problem is I spent all day at home doing laundry and trying to create an air of organization before I haul out all the Christmas decorations and my living room becomes a study in chaos. Although I did try out the sock bun curl technique that was mentioned in the comments on my hair yesterday, so there’s that. I wasn’t thrilled with the results but the YouTube tutorials specifically say to leave it overnight and I only kept it up for about four hours.

    However, I put Caroline’s hair up in a sock bun for the night so I’ll report on that tomorrow.

    (I know you won’t be able to sleep until you know how it turns out.)

    (The suspense is killing me.)

    It would be such a score if it actually looks good because she is in the midst of a hair crisis and doesn’t even realize it. She’s so thrilled with her long hair, but it’s very fine and I prefer it in a ponytail or braids. She prefers to go to sleep with it wet and then wake up and wear it down to school. Which makes me cringe because it is full of crimps and random indentions and OH THE STATIC CLING. The other day it was cold outside and I asked her if I could blow her hair dry and she said, “Oh, I’ll just wear a hat until it dries.”

    Because everyone knows that’s the secret to good hair.

    But I really didn’t mean to talk about hair. Again.

    Here are a few other interesting things that you might care about:

    1. Burger King announced yesterday that they are making their french fries thicker. I don’t really know what that means and I really don’t care because I can’t remember the last time I ate at a Burger King, but I found it fascinating that someone actually did the research and determined their fries need to be thicker.

    2. Beyonce announced her baby is due in December. I’m not sure why this interested me but it did and I might as well own it.

    3. A sweet reader named Whitney emailed me to let me know that she’s selling Stella and Dot Jewelry and is donating all of her commissions (25% of sales) to Compassion International, specifically to their Clean Water, Unsponsored Children and Disaster Relief funds. It might be a great place to do some Christmas shopping and help Compassion at the same time. You can check out their jewelry here.

    4. On that note my friend AJ’s organization, Arise Africa, has a Christmas catalog this year where you can give friends and family the gift of knowing they bought school supplies or meals or classroom textbooks for kids in Zambia. You can check it out here.

    I don’t know that there’s a better gift than that.

    5. Lastly, I am sad (and embarrassed to admit) that I’m almost finished with Army Wives on Netflix. Yet I feel that there are still plenty of good T.V. times to be had, especially considering that we are early on in the hunting season and I will have a lot of time to watch whatever I want on T.V.

    Any suggestions for a great T.V. series? I already watch or have watched Friday Night Lights (obviously), Mad Men, Gilmore Girls, Grey’s Anatomy (though I quit watching about two seasons ago), 30 Rock, The Office and Veronica Mars.

    I’m sure there are others but those are the high points. Or the low points depending on your perspective.

    Y’all have a lovely Wednesday.

  • It’s the you in the you curl that’s giving me problems

    So about a month ago (or maybe longer but I can’t really remember because the last two months have been a crazy blur and wasn’t it just summer and why do people have Christmas lights in their yard when it’s surely only August?) my sister called me with the news she’d found a hair product that had changed her life. Because in my family we don’t believe in simply stating that something is really good, we like to go straight to IT CHANGED MY LIFE.

    Naturally I couldn’t wait to hear about the new hair product because, in the words of Truvy, there is no such thing as natural beauty. Amy told me all about a new clampless curling iron called the Conair You Curl and said it creates the best curls of your life. She informed me it doesn’t make regular hot roller curls or normal curling iron curls, but curls that look like Kelly Ripa or Taylor Swift or Kim Kardashian.

    Yes. I’d like to go to there.

    Because Kim Kardashian may not know much about marriage but she has some good hair and Taylor Swift is just darling and Kelly Ripa kind of has a lollipop head but I do like her hair most of the time even though Regis and Kelly don’t come on in San Antonio anymore because I guess our local affiliate is too cheap to pay for it. And I feel like I’ve watched celebrities on T.V. for the last year or so and thought their hair was doing something that I didn’t know how to replicate, but couldn’t figure out all the follicular logistics. I just chalked it up to a good stylist and maybe some tricky way of using velcro rollers.

    But now Amy was telling me that she had created those curls for herself. And, not only that, the curl had lasted for two days. TWO DAYS. She warned me it was a little hard to use at first but that YouTube was full of video tutorials demonstrating how to use it and create fabulous hair in the comfort of your own home.

    (I promise this isn’t a paid advertisement or some kind of infomercial. I feel like I sound like an infomercial.)

    (Buy one now for a limited time for only $29.99! We’ll bill you in two easy installments and guarantee your money back if you’re not completely satisfied after thirty days!)

    So I drove to Target THAT VERY DAY and bought a You Curl for myself. But I didn’t have time to try it out until the next day after I dropped Caroline off at school. I came home and watched a few of the tutorial videos on Youtube and decided it didn’t look that difficult. It was just a matter of pinning up sections of my hair while I curled the back and sides.

    This is where I need to interrupt myself to explain that I am a die hard hot roller girl. I have never been one to have the patience to curl my entire head with a curling iron. Why go to all that trouble when you can put in eight rollers at one time, do your makeup, take out the rollers and call it a day? I’ve always just used a curling iron as an auxiliary curling device to add some volume around my face.

    However, there was a time in the late 80s when I may have used a miniature curling iron to enhance my spiral perm. And also to create bangs that were then curled and teased into oblivion. The 80s were a cruel hair time.

    See what I’m saying?

    Anyway, I opened up the You Curl box and was so pleased to discover it came with a heat-proof glove for me to wear while I curled my hair. Hair styling while rocking a glove on one hand like Michael Jackson? Yes, please.

    And then I spent the next thirty minutes trying to emulate the curling technique I’d observed on all the tutorial videos. Only to discover that I am highly uncoordinated and couldn’t keep the stupid Michael Jackson glove on my hand and that a ceramic curling iron heated to 360 degrees really hurts when you touch it with your fingertips.

    All I managed to create were a few sad looking waves that were completely straight on the bottom because I never could figure out how to wrap all my hair around the clampless curling iron without it all sliding off before I curled the bottom. Granted, my hair is really too long right now. I’m in desperate need of a haircut and one chorus of “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” away from Crystal Gayle. So maybe that was part of my problem.

    But I tried it on Caroline’s hair the next day and managed to create some flawless, beautiful waves. This is where it would be so great if I’d taken a picture of it but I failed to document her perfect hair day and she hasn’t sat still long enough to let me try it again.

    And so the You Curl has sat on the shelf in my bathroom, taunting me with its promise of good hair and third degree burns, for the last few weeks.

    Until Saturday night.

    P and Caroline were at the ranch for the night and I decided I could take a break from my Army Wives marathon to make another hair-curling attempt. After all, it’s humiliating to know there are videos of ten-year-old girls demonstrating how to use the clampless curling iron all over the internet when I couldn’t even manage to get one lousy curl that wasn’t reminiscent of the days when I’d crimp my hair with a waffle iron and throw it up in a banana clip.

    So I washed my hair and blew it dry. Then I heated up the You Curl and didn’t even attempt to use that stupid glove this time. And I’m proud to report I managed to create fabulous waves on ONE side of my head. For reasons that I don’t totally understand but lean toward a diagnosis of hairstyling dyslexia, I couldn’t quite manage to get the curls on the left side of my head to go the right way.

    (I think a large part of the problem is explained by my need to tell you that I mean the left side of my head when I’m looking in the mirror. As opposed to what? The other left side of my head?)

    But the results on the right side of my head gave me hope for the future. A belief that, with some work and perseverance, I can create a better hair tomorrow for myself.

    And I think we all know that’s what Kelly Ripa would want.

  • We came, we ate, we turduckened

    It is so cold in my living room right now that I’m finding it hard to concentrate because my nose is so chilled. I have on flannel pajama pants, a sweatshirt and am wrapped in a blanket, but, alas, there is nothing I can do for my nose.

    And, sure, I could turn on the heat except I hate the way the heat makes me feel. Once the heat comes on I immediately feel claustrophobic, like I’m trapped under a pile of blankets that smell like burned tires.

    By the way, I’m not complaining about being cold because I vowed this summer when it was 193 degrees outside that I would never, EVER, complain about the cold. It’s just an observation. My nose is cold. And yet I’m thankful for the cold, seasonal weather, especially considering that I spent much of Thanksgiving week sweating profusely as I insisted on wearing sweaters even though it was 85 degrees outside.

    Anyway, how was your Thanksgiving?

    Ours was lovely. As it turns out we are all big fans of the turducken. Who knew that all that layered poultry could be so delicious? Of course I never knew if I was eating turkey or chicken or duck or some combination therein, but it was delicious nonetheless. There’s nothing wrong with a little mystery.

    I also made cornbread dressing, broccoli rice casserole, sweet potatoes, corn casserole, cranberries, roasted Brussels sprouts, pecan pie, and chocolate ice box pudding. And I would do all those things all over again with the exception of the corn casserole. I wasn’t a big fan. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the corn casserole, it just seemed like one carb too many at the Thanksgiving table. A superfluous carb if you will. But I’m glad I tried it because I don’t ever want to get caught in a Thanksgiving rut.

    (I don’t know what that means. Like cooking a turkey and making dressing once a year constitutes a rut?)

    As it turned out I made way too much food for our Thanksgiving crowd of five people, but the good news is I may not need to cook again until sometime around mid-December. Sure, we may get tired of constant meals of cornbread dressing and various duck/turkey/chicken parts but think of all the trips to the grocery store I can avoid. I might even have time to learn a new hobby or constantly stalk the Anthropologie site in search of new sale items.

    So the Thanksgiving meal was delicious. And then we went to watch the A&M game with some friends.

    The day went downhill at that point.

    I would say more but the language wouldn’t be appropriate and I try to keep it family friendly around here. Poor Caroline burst into tears after the game was over and I tried to console her by letting her know that disappointment is part of being an Aggie. It’s our heritage. It makes us stronger, more resilient in the hard times or bad coaching life can bring. I also may have tried to teach her a valuable lesson about how you can’t base your happiness on a bunch of twenty-year-old boys. It doesn’t work when you’re twenty and it doesn’t work when you’re forty.

    But I think by the time I got to that point in my lecture on life lessons she was already over it and had moved on to her repeated request for a puppy for Christmas. She never misses an opportunity to ask for a puppy. In fact, we even met some friends for lunch before we left Houston on Tuesday and as soon as we got in the car after lunch, she asked, “Was I good enough to get a puppy?”

    It’s turned out to be such an effective motivational tool that it’s going to be hard not to hold out on the puppy thing until she’s about nineteen. Is her room dirty? Well, that doesn’t really demonstrate that she’s ready for the responsibility of a puppy. Did she forget to brush her teeth? You can’t forget to feed a puppy. Did she stay out too late and talk back to her mother? NO PUPPY. The leverage is exhilarating.

    And someday she’ll read this and the jig will be up.

    In reality I love the idea of getting her a puppy for Christmas and the whole LOOK AT THE PUPPY SANTA LEFT UNDER THE TREE thing, but Scout and Bruiser are old and set in their ways (Join the club. It’s an epidemic at our house.) and I’m not sure if they would welcome an energetic youngster to the mix. Poor Scout is already on the verge of some type of nervous breakdown half the time. A puppy might push him right over the edge.

    (I don’t know how this veered off into my internal debate about the puppy thing. I apologize for dragging you into it.)

    So on Friday we all woke up with a touch of disappointing football game loss hangover. P and Caroline packed up and headed to the ranch for the weekend. I sat on the couch and debated getting out and joining in the Black Friday craziness, but resisted the urge until about 5:00 that evening when I ventured to Pottery Barn and the lure of 20% off Christmas ornaments.

    But then I got overwhelmed at all the choices and the pillows and the coffee tables from the days of yore and the 30% off all throws and ended up leaving empty-handed. I drove straight to the pedicure place and treated myself to a holiday pedicure. My toes are now a sparkly red color called “Meep Meep” that’s part of the OPI Muppets collection.

    (The details. Oh my word. ALL THE DETAILS.)

    (Then I filled up my car with gas at Chevron. And debated going into Gap. And even made a u-turn and then changed my mind again. But then I regretted it later because they were having a big sale.)

    (Then I came home and put on my plaid flannel pajama pants and gray sweatshirt. And watched six episodes of Army Wives.)

    (I AM SO SORRY. I CAN’T STOP.)

    The rest of the weekend was spent in a totally constructive manner. I alternated between watching episodes of Army Wives, Real Housewives of Atlanta, and Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Which may explain why I dreamed last night that Claudia Joy Holden died and I was embarrassed because I showed up at her funeral in a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader uniform and a man in a top hat drove me away in a horse drawn carriage.

    That dream will absolutely make sense if you’ve watched all those shows. Otherwise you’ve never been more confused.

    It probably didn’t help that I gave into the temptation to eat leftover broccoli rice casserole at 10:45 p.m.

    And now Thanksgiving break is over and it’s back to the real world. A world where I haven’t even thought about my Christmas cards and am slightly panicking about it. A world where I’ll eventually have to get out Christmas decorations and put them up. A world where I’ll need to get those rotten pumpkins off my front porch.

    The good news is I don’t have to factor cooking dinner into the real world equation, thanks to all the leftovers. The turducken is the gift that keeps on giving.

    At least until the salmonella sets in.

  • Happy holiday of the turducken

    I have big plans to spend the next two days in the kitchen cooking all manner of carbohydrates in various forms to serve to my family on Thanksgiving. Thankfully Mimi and Bops are providing a turkducken for the main course so I will not be forced to deal with poultry of any kind. Sticking my hand inside a dead bird doesn’t even show up on my list of life goals.

    Largely because birds of all kinds and I are on very shaky territory these days.

    But I’ve never had a turducken so I may feel compelled to try a bite if I’m feeling adventurous and can erase the thought of that pot of chicken parts I had to serve while in Ecuador.

    And the bought turducken goes completely against the turkey recipe Caroline provided to her third grade class. Most of the other children wrote recipes that read, “Go to HEB. Buy a turkey. Put salt and pepper on it.”

    Caroline’s recipe read, “First, you go to the ranch and shoot the turkey. Then you get the meat off the turkey and cut the head off.”

    I’m raising Bear Grylls.

    In all seriousness, I hope you all have the best Thanksgiving and eat delicious food and have time to reflect on all your blessings.

    So, from my turducken to yours, HAPPY THANKSGIVING Y’ALL.

  • Some stuff that relates to Thanksgiving

    Yep.

    6:45 a.m. yesterday morning. That’s what time Caroline woke me up by shaking me and saying, “I’m supposed to go running with Bops and he forgot to wake me up!”

    And I looked at the clock and growled, “IT’S ONLY 6:45. GO BACK TO SLEEP.”

    She didn’t listen to me.

    Instead she jumped out of bed, put on her running clothes and ran downstairs to make sure Bops still planned to take her for a jog around Memorial Park. Honestly, the exercise first thing in the morning gene must have skipped a generation.

    Because I rolled back over and tried to go back to sleep. I’m not sure I ever did, but it makes me feel better to say I was successful.

    So, yes, we’re in Houston. Mimi and Bops bought a little place in Houston over the summer and we decided to come visit them for a few days. They still have a house in San Antonio, this is just like a vacation home. And, no, I don’t know why it’s not on a lake like most vacation homes. They missed the big city with all its restaurants and shopping and I have to say after spending most of yesterday walking around The Galleria and eating incredible Italian food for dinner that they may have a point.

    But we’re headed home in the morning because it will be time for me to begin all the slicing and the dicing and the chopping for Thanksgiving dinner. I’m also sad to report that it’s inevitable that I’m going to have to make one more trip to HEB.

    Here are just a few quick notes of interest:

    1. Beth is sharing some Thanksgiving cooking tips over on the LPM blog and giving readers a chance to leave comments with tips over their own. It’s totally worth checking out right here. I’ve already learned that Williams-Sonoma makes the best base for turkey gravy and that’s the kind of information that can change your life.

    Or at least your mashed potatoes.

    2. The Aggies and the Longhorns are meeting on Kyle Field for the last time this Thursday night at 7:00. And I want the Aggies to win so bad that I even dreamed about it last night. I also looked online and debated buying a way too expensive ticket at the last minute and hauling down to College Station to see it in person.

    I’m sick that the rivalry is ending for now. What are we going to do in Texas next Thanksgiving?

    For now I am consoling myself with one of my favorite renditions ever of the Aggie War Hymn by my friend Shaun Groves.

    Beat the hell outta t.u.

    3. Several of you asked for the recipe for my broccoli rice casserole. I also have a recipe for dressing and a recipe for cranberry sauce that doesn’t come from a can. You can find all those recipes and EVEN MORE on this page that lists every recipe I’ve ever posted.

    Apparently I used to cook more than I do now. When was the last time I posted a recipe?

    I guess no one needs to know that you take the pizza out of the wrapper and place in oven.

    4. I think I may have mentioned this years ago, but I have a family goal. I want us to become a family that plays games. Like card games or Trivial Pursuit or something. Do y’all have any favorite games that will provide hours of fun for the entire family until someone decides to be a sore loser and throws their cards across the table? (Bops, I’m looking at you.) Please fill me in.

    5. That’s it for today but I hated to end with just four things.

    Have a lovely day.

  • It would appear I have found my words

    So here’s something great. Caroline’s out of school for this entire week to celebrate Thanksgiving. Which means I won’t have to be up at 6:45 a.m. packing ham sandwiches and carrot sticks in a lunch box.

    Instead I’ll be up at 6:45 a.m. growling, “GO BACK TO SLEEP. IT’S ONLY 6:45 IN THE MORNING. WHY ARE YOU AWAKE?”

    I know this to be true because it’s what I did on Saturday and Sunday morning and I see no reason why it should be any different at this point. Even though it’s 10:33 p.m. right now and she’s still awake playing some game involving a barking Chihuahua on my iPhone.

    I’ve never wished more that I didn’t own an iPhone.

    Anyway, I picked her up from school on Friday afternoon and we went straight home to finish packing our suitcases so we could meet up with Gulley and her boys and hit the open road. We’ve had tickets to go see the Aggies play Kansas since August when I was naive and optimistic enough to believe the Aggies would be going into that game undefeated, ranked in the top ten and about to win a final Big XII Championship.

    Bless my heart.

    Hope springs eternal.

    But we were still excited because it’s become a tradition for us to go see Honey and Big the weekend before Thanksgiving and it was going to be Caroline’s first Aggie football game and she doesn’t care if they’re ranked. She just cares if there will be popcorn and large snow cones.

    We ended up taking two cars because Gulley’s husband was going with us and Caroline and I planned to drive to Houston on Sunday instead of home to San Antonio. (I realize this post is chockfull of unimportant details but we all know I have a fondness for over-explaining.) This led to much debate about who was going to ride in which car and with whom. For some reason Gulley’s husband didn’t go for our suggestion that he drive the car full of kids and let us ride together and so the journey began with me all by myself in the stay wag and Caroline in the car with Gulley, Gulley’s husband, Will, and Jackson.

    It was a blissful forty-five minutes full of much loud singing to whatever I wanted to listen to.

    (On a side note, I can’t explain how disturbing it is to me that I can remember ALL THE WORDS to any song by Juice Newton or Alabama even thirty years later. Yet I threw away my car keys in the trash last week. The human brain is a mystery.)

    (Just call me Angel of the Morning.)

    (Just touch my cheek before you leave me.)

    We made a quick pit stop in San Marcos because Gulley and I are both at a point in life where we have to go to the bathroom every hour. It’s very glamorous. And while we were taking a bathroom break, Gulley hopped in the car with me along with Will and Caroline. Unfortunately Will had spent the previous forty-five minutes eating an entire bag of gummy bears and began to feel a little queasy right as we got to Bastrop.

    Which led to Gulley having to climb into the backseat of the car and hold an empty bag of Doritos while he threw up in it. Needless to say the entire experience caused me to suffer from post-traumatic Ecuadorian bus syndrome. The bag of chips, the car sickness, the crying. It was a dark time for me. And I had to MIND OVER MATTER myself to not pull over and get sick right along with Will.

    I called Gulley’s husband to let him know we needed to stop again, chiefly to dispose of the offensive Doritos bag but also to procure a Sprite to settle Will’s stomach. We pulled over at a Shell station and Gulley and Will got back in their own car. Caroline chose to stay with me because we both know that once Will blows there’s a good chance it will happen again.

    When we finally pulled up in Honey and Big’s driveway an hour later, Gulley told me that she’d sat in the back seat with Will the rest of the trip and stroked his hair until he fell asleep. He woke up about five minutes outside of College Station, lifted his head from her shoulder and said in an accusatory tone, “Next New Year’s Eve if we go to the ranch I wish you’d remember to bring my jacket. I was so cold last year because you forgot my jacket.”

    Isn’t motherhood full of special moments that warm your heart and make you consider throwing your own child out of a moving car as you yell, “I JUST HELD AN EMPTY DORITO BAG FULL OF VOMIT FOR YOU. YOU CAN REMEMBER YOUR OWN JACKET.”

    Fortunately, Saturday brought a day full of great memories and good football. The game started at 11:00 but the kids got up early to go to their first tailgate party with Gulley’s husband.

    They practiced sawing Varsity’s horns off before they left.

    And then Gulley, Honey, Big, and I met them at Kyle Field right before game time. I’m all about tailgating, I just prefer to do it at an hour that I don’t consider the crack of dawn. The Aggies had a 35 point lead going into halftime and, even though we’ve shown we can blow a halftime lead like no one’s business this year, I felt like we were probably safe.

    And then, to our great delight, the entire Aggie band plus the Corps of Cadets formed a block T on Kyle Field for the first time since 1956.

    After the game we all decided we were up for a little tailgating and were so excited to meet up with AJ for just a little bit.

    And our friend, Michelle. Even though my hair is so unfortunately windblown in this picture. Easy on the hairspray, Nancy.

    I cannot explain why my hair appears to be the only one affected by the wind. But that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Michelle was kind enough to say it was a windblown look like in a magazine, but it’s rare to see a magazine featuring hair that looks like it could make a nice home for a small bird.

    We eventually made it back to Honey and Big’s house. Honey had cooked a huge dinner and Gulley and I went to pick up Nena so she could join us. Nena lives in a retirement center that’s full of activities and she asked to live there about two years ago because so many of her friends are there. They are constantly getting together plus Honey visits her almost every day whether it’s to take her out to lunch or to do her laundry. Nena is self-admittedly a social butterfly and even enjoys happy hour at the retirement center on the days when Mrs. Herzog doesn’t kill the mood by coming in and playing hymns on the piano.

    But Nena decided that she was going to serve up some guilt along with the ham and beans Honey made for dinner. And as we sat around the dining room table we were talking about someone who was all alone. Nena said, “That’s like me. I’m all alone. All the time. I’M JUST ALL ALONE.”

    Honey piped in and said, “Mother, that’s not true. You have friends all around you. Your children visit you almost every day. Most days you eat three meals a day in the dining room with all your friends.”

    Nena replied, “Yes and it’s exhausting. I feel like all I do is dress for dinner.”

    Which kind of contradicts her earlier statement about being all alone.

    And that’s when Gulley looked at Honey and said exactly what I was thinking, “”Next New Year’s Eve if we go to the ranch I wish you’d remember to bring my jacket. I was so cold last year because you forgot my jacket.”

    Because guilt really is the gift that keeps on giving.

    No matter how old you are.