Nothing good happens after midnight.

Last night, I made a series of bad decisions. It was my 29th birthday, and I was celebrating pretty hard, so I guess it is excusable, but I am certainly regretting it this morning. Here comes the confession: last night, in a celebratory stupor, I slept with three men at once. And two of them weren't even human.

Let me back up a little bit. My mom (the vicodin-hoarding, blackjack-cheating woman I'm sure you all remember from previous posts) came in to town this weekend for my birthday. We did lots of fun stuff, like go to tea and hit the clearance sales around town. Nothing nearly as hairy as the things I've done in the past few years (I'm talking to you, mechanical bull at Cadillac Ranch!), but mature, adult birthday things that most 29-year-olds do with their mothers, I'm sure.

Anyhow, they left yesterday afternoon and things just got wild here. Tony and I took a nap with the dogs and then I got up and ate leftover birthday food for dinner. I had a slice of pizza and a handful of pastries from tea at the BonBonerie. Oh, and a single beer. I know, I'm crazy!

After an hour or two of TV, I was exhausted and decided to call it a night. It was 10p.m. That was when the bad decisions started. I agreed to let the dogs spend the night sleeping in our room instead of in their kennels. Things started off badly. Beau and Sarge were so excited to be sleeping in the big room that they wouldn't settle down. Sarge, who sleeps on the bed, kept jumping off to assault Beau, who because he weighs a trillion pounds, sleeps on the floor. If you've never heard my dogs fight, it's unnerving, to say the least. Add Sarge air-assault tactics to that, and you have quite a mess.

Then, Beau discovered that the fringe-y trim on his sleeping blanket made a great snack and had to be relieved of the blanket before he ate the whole thing, noisily. Once everyone had finally settled, I turned off the bedside light, only to discover that SOMEONE (me) had left the hall light on. So, Tony got up to turn it off, which resulted in EVERYONE getting up to check out the problem and us starting the settling-down process all over again. This is when I should have decided to put them downstairs, but I didn't.

For the next six hours, I was woken up approximately every 30 minutes by Beau heaving himself into the floor, wheezing, sneezing, snoring, licking, eating our down comforter and sticking his face in mine. He's tall enough to put his face even with yours on the mattress, which is really freaky at 3 a.m., when you feel warm, wet breath on your face and open your eyes to Beau's hairy, stinky face. Staggered with Beau's thrashings, I had to deal with Sarge stepping on my stomach, back, feet, legs, hair, mouth and eyes. This tiny dog takes up more room on a king-size bed than my husband, who outweighs him by more than 200 pounds.

At 5:45 this morning, Sarge woke up, rested and refreshed, and decided to start licking my face. I do not like having my face licked by anyone at 5:45 in the morning, so I punched him in the neck and rolled over. At 6:41, Beau woke up, rested and refreshed and started to lick my face. This is how he lets us know he's ready to go outside and potty. (This is better than his old method, which was to potty on the floor and look surprised.) I punched Beau in the neck, then punched Tony in the neck and told him to take his dog outside and leave me alone. He did. At 7, the alarm went off. I turned it off and tried to go back to sleep. At 7:05, the paving truck showed up outside my house, and the dogs lost their minds barking at it. Tony brought them in the house, where they spent the next 45 minutes standing in the dining room window, barking at the paving truck and fighting with each other over who got to bark first the next time it passed our house. I briefly considered going outside and punching the driver of the paving truck in the neck.

I got up at 8, demanded coffee and punched all three boys in the neck. Just to remind them who's the boss.

Moral of the story: If you ever hear me say, "I think it would be fun to sleep with the guys tonight!" please, punch me in the neck.

This cooking thing has to stop.

Too tired to write much today. Spent the day elbow-deep in one kind of batter or another and learned a couple of key things about baking.

1. Vegan baking is for weenies. Tony tried to bake me a dairy-free cake for my birthday because he's allergic to dairy. It never set up and tasted like crap. We threw the whole thing out and I baked brownies that used a whole stick of butter and two eggs. Take that, vegan weenies!

2. It never ends. I started at 8 this morning and just took my last batch of lemon muffins out of the oven 32 seconds ago, at 6:45 p.m. What was I thinking?!?!

3. I always forget that my brownie pan has some sort of thermonuclear core that makes it bake everything twice as fast as the recipe calls for. I always have to lower the oven temperature 25 degrees and shorten the bake time by 10%. I now have brownie hockey pucks. Brownie jerky. Brownie buffalo chips. It's amazing how fast "chewy" can become "tooth-shattering."

4. My dogs love to eat anything that falls on the floor. That's not necessarily just while baking, but it is important to remember when you are splattering your whole kitchen with a variety of foods, ranging from meatballs to strawberry ice cream base. Sarge drank close to a quarter cup of coconut milk today when Tony loaded the dishwasher. And because Beau can now reach his head onto the counters, food doesn't even have to reach the floor to be in danger. The minute I see him wander off with a full pan of brownie pucks is the moment he starts sleeping outside.

5. It is exhausting. There is something about baking that puts too much pressure on a woman. You feel like your brownies have to be moist, your muffins delicately strueseled, your cake frosted to glossy perfection. Frankly, it's enough to make me start drinking.

6. Once you start drinking, everything gets much more approximate, so make your most complex items first and then end with something simple, like toast. Or scrambled eggs. Don't save the 42-step jumbo muffins that constitute your entire breakfast tomorrow for last, like I did. You'll be in the weeds, tipsy and unable to pour lemon glaze in the tiny holes you just poked in hot muffins. Your kitchen will end up looking like a lemon murder scene. I've strung up some of that (appropriately yellow) crime-scene tape in mine just so I don't have to clean the counter off again. I figure tomorrow I can come back with a putty knife and scrape up the rest of the lemon detritus.

Well, now that I've blogged, it's back to the kitchen for my second glass (bottle) of wine and dinner. Oh, I didn't mention that? Yes, I still have to cook dinner. What on earth is wrong with me?

Slip'n'Slide for Jesus

Driving home from the grocery store the other day, I passed a giant church on the side of the road with a rather strange arrangement of plastic tarps and straw bales in the front yard. After passing it a few more times, Tony and I were able to ascertain that this was, in fact, a homemade, gargantuan slip'n'slide. Like most yards in Kentucky, the front yard of this church is a steep hill ending abruptly at the street (the other variations are steep hills ending in a body of water, and steep hills ending in ravines).

And this was no ordinary hill, either - this was a doozy. Fifty or 60 feet of precipitous drop and nothing to stop you from rolling out onto busy Route 42. In the construction of the enormous slip'n'slide, the church had solved this by placing three straw bales at the end of what looked like 45 straight feet of roof tarps or those really heavy duty painting drop cloths. Along the sides, the tarps were held down with more straw bales at regular intervals.

My first thought on seeing this monstrosity was, what on earth are those Baptists doing now? Speed baptism? Baptism by slide? As the minister says his words, you slide down a hill, scared out of your mind, but more receptive to the healing power of Jesus because you might just die at the end of this and you want to get right with God before that happens?

Maybe it was an outdoor church service and altar calls were now held at the bottom of the hill. You slide down to receive Jesus...and well, experience the same scenario. I wonder if "OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODDDDDDDDD!" really counts as a prayer. I'm not sure.

Finally, though, it became clear why there was a giant slip'n'slide when I saw the Vacation Bible School sign that was hastily erected in the front yard. At the end of the slide. So, obviously, as part of the VBS festivities, there would be some summer water-slide fun. I was immediately jealous because the most fun thing I ever did at VBS was make macaroni art that my mom deemed "wretched work created by a talentless hack" and threw in the trash. (Now you know why I'm a writer instead of a painter.)

I guess other VBS programs are picking up their game, too. In the past few weeks, I've seen the Tastee-Freeze truck outside many churches, as well as those fantastic blow-up jumpy moon bounce things in the shape of pirate ships and jungle trees. Nothing says bringing Jesus to the masses like a pirate ship!

However, I do appreciate how the baptist church was rocking it old-school. No fancy soft-serve, no expensive moon-bounce for them. Nope, just a poorly designed and slightly moist slide to your death.

I don't have any problem with water slides, per se, just the ones that seem destined to result in much maiming or death. Let's review the slide at the church for a moment to see the design flaws:

1. The slide is so long, the amount of speed you would pick up by the bottom would have to approach terminal velocity, which is unadvisable for most eight year olds, I would assume.

2. The amount of water necessary to prevent third-degree plastic burns from sliding down the aforementioned quarter-mile of plastic sheeting is either impossible or just plain environmentally irresponsible.

3. If, at any point on your trip down the slide of death, you veer off course, you will either shoot out into grass, adding long-lasting grass stains and the probability of horribly broken bones to your experience, OR you slam full-tilt into a straw bale, adding stabbing injuries and the probability of horribly broken bones to your experience.

4. At the end of the slide, assuming you make it that far, you arrive with all your exposed flesh in plastic-burn induced flames that are only fanned by the extreme speed you've acquired, you slam, full-tilt into a straw bale. See above for the results of that scenario, with two possible variations, face-first (meaning loss of vision, broken neck or nose, concussion, etc.) or feet-first (sprains, ACL tears, loss of feet, legs sheared off by the incredible force of the impact, etc.).

5. In the entirely likely scenario that you miss one of the end-of-slide straw bales or push it out of the way with your broken, mangled feet, you will launch directly into four lanes of traffic on Rt. 42, allowing you to be run over by any number of coal trucks, RV's, motorcycles or the Tastee-Freeze truck on its way to another, less deadly VBS.

In my mind, I see all of these options and the scene that will inevitably unfold when, on the last day of VBS, after having spent five long, hot days making macaroni art and memorizing bible verses, the children run outside, dewy-eyed and expectant, waiting for their first turn down the biggest homemade slip'n'slide in the world. The carnage will be incredible - tiny bodies writhing in pain, shooting blood from every orifice, cars swerving manically on the highway to avoid crushing children who have shot cannonball-like into the flow of traffic. The screams are terrible.

Someone should get those kids a Tastee-Freeze.

Tony's Magic Math

Anyone who knows my husband knows he's a pretty intense guy. People who used to work for him always joke about the shouting, the bouts of selective deafness when he's focused on a task important to him and his unfailing ability to focus solely on one goal to the detriment of all others.

They should be married to him.

In fact, he's interrupted me 15 times while I was writing that sentence to send emails that are important to him but that I don't give a crap about. Even though he has a working email account and the ability to type.

Tony's favorite pastime when we're driving is forcing me to do mental math. Now, I was a journalism major in my undergrad. That should explain everything you need to know about my mathematical abilities when a calculator is not present. (Before the mathematicians get all up in arms about that last statement, thinking that I'm taking the easy, wimpy way out, read my writing and tell me if you would focus on math with a mind-blowing talent like I have. Well, sure you would, but it would take a lot more effort than just vomiting out your thoughts on paper or a screen. I've never said I was ambitious.)

It works like this: Tony will be driving along (He always drives because he's convinced I'm trying to kill him every time I get behind the wheel. He's right.) and out of nowhere, usually while I'm in the middle of a sentence, he'll say, "What's 6 times 7?" I'll give him the answer, usually wrong the first two times and then correct after I've done some serious thought and a few, smaller multiplications in my head (if 7 times 3 is 21, then 7 times 6 must be twice that, yep 42.).

But it doesn't end there. He'll continue.

"Okay, then plus 136?"

"Ummmm 175. 166. 179. No, 178."

"Okay, plus 215?"

"Jeeezus! Okay, um, 451." (It literally took me two minutes to do that just now and I'm LOOKING AT ALL THE NUMBERS. Imagine how stressful this is when I'm flying blind and carsick.)

"Alright, and 122."

Sigh. "537."

"Okay, that's how much money we'll have left in the checking account 20 years from now if we never earn another penny and we average 6% return each year."

"What the hell are you talking about? Where did you get these numbers? What numbers were you possibly using? How do you expect me to believe that when I've just multiplied and added up a random string of bullcrap that you just pulled out of your giant domey head?"

And so forth. Our car trips often end in punching matches, with me trying to gouge out one of his eyes, and him trying to keep the car on the road. Or at least as close to the road as it ever is when he's driving.

You see, Tony is a numbers guy. Nothing gives him more pleasure than "running the numbers," no matter how fictional or approximate or crazy they are. I dubbed this unique study of budgets, pricing and returns "Tony's Magic Math" some years ago and the name stuck. I know that at least once a day, he's going to come up with some cockamamie formula for our budget or our spending, or our investments and subject me to the task of adding it all up for him IN MY HEAD until he's satisfied.

Why in my head? Because he ambushes me when there is no calculator present. In the shower, when we are falling asleep at night, when I'm sick as a dog in the car, while we're out for our evening constitutional. Wait a minute! These are also places where I'm trapped and can't get away from him. He's a cunning bastard, that's for sure.

Well, gotta run. Tony needs me to figure out his waist-to-hip ratio so he can figure out what he'll weigh in 40 years.

Vegas, Baby!

So, yesterday I mentioned that my family (mom, Jack, Tony and I) are going to Vegas in about a week and a half. This is a trip my mother has been talking about for years, every Christmas and New Years spent cajoling me, my brother and whatever husband I had at the time to spend the holidays next year in Sin City. It has been her dream that joining thousands of Japanese tourists blowing their hard-earned Yen on hookers, coke and gambling would really help us understand the "Reason for the Season."

However, I feel that Christmas is no time to travel, so we decided to go this summer as a joint birthday venture for mom and I and also because Tony and I are so mind-numbingly bored that we'll agree to any trip, anywhere. (World's largest ball of string in Spokane, Washington? I'm there!) Plus, I've never been to Vegas, and I've always wanted to get married there, but none of my husbands would agree to this. Something about violating the sanctity of marriage, which I found particularly touching this time around, since it marked the THIRD marriage for both of us. I told Tony that we weren't going to be the poster couple for Focus on the Family, no matter where or how we got married.

I digress. Mom has been hysterically excited ever since we booked the hotel room two months ago. She watched "The Hangover" the day it came out, and called Tony and I as soon as she'd left the theater, gushing about how it was the perfect movie to watch to plan our trip. Tony and I immediately rushed off to see it, after which I phoned HER and said that if anything remotely like that movie happened while we were in Vegas, I was going to leave her and anyone else I could behind and start over in Spokane. (I hear they have a great ball of string.)

After her obsession with that movie faded, she started reading The Unofficial Guide to Vegas and decided that she was going to learn how to play craps and become rich by "beating the system." I know, I know, at that point we should have had her committed, but she was so excited about the trip. For weeks I told her I would not stand by and watch her bet away her retirement at a craps table and that she should spend $20 on slots and then go to the buffet. Finally, a few days ago, she called, practically in tears. Seems she'd been reading and re-reading the craps section of the book and still couldn't make heads or tails of it. Now, I'm not one to rejoice in the crushing of the dreams of a senior citizen, but I was very happy to hear this.

A little backstory so you all don't think I'm a horrible daughter: the same night we made our reservations for Vegas, Mom, Jack, Tony and I played blackjack (or 21, for you purists) for a few hours. During that time, Mom managed to mis-count her cards several times, betting heavy on a 23 at one point, and continuously tried to "bluff" us when she had busted. In addition, she was making wild bets on crappy hands and nearly caused Jack to have a heart attack with the randomness of her game. His comment was that it was impossible to play with people who were this bad at blackjack. (He was including me in that statement, but I was being reckless on purpose. Stick it to the Man, I say!)

So, what I was looking forward to as a lovely, quick jaunt to a city known for its culinary delights (not even joking), where I could eat my way from one celebrity chef's restaurant to another without ever stepping out into the 3 billion degree heat has turned into a nightmare of epic proportions. Mom and Jack are coming this weekend and while she is out trying to catch and tame a turtle in our lake - her favorite Kentucky pastime, I'm going to call a group meeting whereby we set out gambling limits, a medication schedule and determine who carries Mom's money at all times.

Vegas, baby!

Tiny Bubbles

I finally went to the hairdresser today. It has been three months since my last haircut and and two months since my disastrous, painful and traumatizing run-in with a home bleaching kit. (Note to my readers - I know the three of you are waaaayyyy too smart to ever assume that because you can read directions and look truly professional in those latex gloves they put in the box of home-haircolor, you are in no way capable of bleaching your own hair bright white. Don't even try.)

After the home bleaching, and the second home bleaching, and the home toning with a darker shade of haircolor to please God make my hair not gold, I had giant, bleeding scabs all over my head. I decided that the color was good enough to live with and besides, if I did anything else to my scalp, I'd probably be bald, so I would let my hair "rest" for as long as possible before going to the salon again. I'm also trying to grow my hair out from the buzzcut I received at a very prestigious and expensive salon in New York City, so I had two motives for running around with two inches of black roots in my mullet. (I looked like a sunflower at one point - black in the middle, yellow on the outside.)

Today, however, Tony and I walked in to a salon just up the road from us to make appointments before we go to Vegas in a week and a half. I didn't feel comfortable rocking the hillbilly sunflower 'do any longer, and Borat needed a trim. We were looking for appointments later this week, but the extremely bored staff (I guess thunderstormy Mondays are the day to go to the salon - free tip of the week!) begged us to stay and get our hair done IMMEDIATELY!

So, we threw caution to the wind and went for it. Tony's stylist Candy trimmed his hair for about three hours, so I'm a little suspicious. Either she was really bored and had no other clients for the day, or she thought my husband was cute, at which point I will cut the bitch. (However, she gave him a very nice haircut, so I'll have to do it anonymously in a dark alley or something. And be sure to leave her hands out of it.)

My hairstylist, Bambi (All the names have been changed to protect identities, mostly mine.) was a perfectly nice 15-year-old who weighed about 12 pounds. She was very pleasant, so I chose to overlook the fact that her hair training must have happened at Boone County Junior High and trusted her with my mess of a hairstyle. Much to my relief, she did not laugh out loud when I showed her my roots OR my mullet, but got right down to work placing 35 million foil strips on my head. I have so much hair that the stylist inevitably has to leave me, mid-foil, to mix up more haircolor. I'm a gorilla.

Now, I trusted Bambi because she had a very nice, very natural style. Her hair was brunette, didn't even look highlighted (her parents probably wouldn't let her color her hair until she was a junior in high school) and was perfectly straight, no crazy spiky stuff, no hairspray. So, I assumed that when she was done cutting and coloring my hair, she would give me something similar, especially because I told her that I like to let my hair air-dry and I don't use any product and I'm low-maintenance, etc.

No such luck. Bambi, just like every other hairstylist in the known world, gave me the bubble. She dried and fluffed and root-lifted and back-combed and ratted and sprayed (and did I mention I told her I was going straight home after I left?) and moussed and picked and placed my hair into a perfect helmet.

Keep in mind, I staggered into this salon with serious two-tone hair that hadn't been washed that day, hooked behind my ears and not even parted straight? What part of that look said that I had a political fundraiser to attend for my husband later that night? Did she really think I was 45 years old and a bank branch manager?

The worst part is, because my hair was colored, I can't wash it until Wednesday (gotta let that new hair color settle over my formerly banana-yellow locks.) So, I'm stuck with bubble hair, slept-on bubble hair or a hat for the next day and a half.

I swear, next time I go to the salon, I'm going to look my stylist in the eye, and say, "Put down that comb, because if it even comes near the crown of my head, I will cut a bitch."

Hyper!

Well, I'm two kinds of hyper today. I had a latte on an empty stomach, so I have caffeine jitters, plus Tony and I tried our hand at hypermiling today. I know, I have to slow down this crazy rock-star life I'm leading before I burn out!

For those of you who don't know, hypermiling is driving in a very specific way to get huge mpg numbers out of regular cars. I learned about it from a Washington Post article many years ago and had never really tried it. For one, you have to drive much more slowly than I normally do - hypermilers recommend staying around 40 miles per hour. I like to drive about 90. For another, you have to accelerate very slowly after braking and Tony likes to red-line the throttle every time. He would hit third gear before he got out of the driveway if I let him.

The hypermiling started innocently enough. We filled up a bone-dry tank at the local Kroger (we got 10 cents off a gallon, in case anyone cares), which is about three miles from our house. Between there and here, we hit four stoplights and some serious hills, all of which are anathema to hypermilers the world over. Any time you have to stop or step on the accelerator, the terrorists win. When we started out from the first stoplight, I reset the miles per gallon counter on the car - the Mini has real-time digital information available. When I saw that we were starting at 66 miles per gallon, I challenged Tony to get to the house with the counter above 50 mpg, a comfortable 16 mile per gallon cushion.

And so it began. Ten tension-filled minutes of Tony driving s-l-o-w-l-y along the highway, cars piling up behind us as we pretended to sight-see. (Who gets mad at tourists?) Every light was against us, though, forcing complete braking and accelerating from a dead stop. We watched the counter slip slowly below 60, then lower, finally dipping below 50 in front of the high school that is still a good mile and a half from our house. Desperation set in and the flop-sweat started. We revised the bet. I told Tony that 40 miles per gallon was still admirable and well above the 26 city we were used to getting.

We shifted to and from neutral, willing the car up steep hills and free-wheeling down the other side, only to inch up the next one. As we finally coasted into the entrance of our neighborhood, we were sitting pretty at 46 mpg. The last hill is a doozy, though, and we nearly stalled in front of a neighbor's house. With the a/c off, and windows down, we cheered the Mini down that final hill, only to roll into the driveway at 43 mpg.

When we pulled into the garage, Tony summed it up quite neatly. "Well, at least that killed the last 10 minutes."

God, we're bored.