I can't even think of a witty title right now.

Okay,
We had an interview today and I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I feel very flushed and light headed. It could have been because I was expecting someone older and shorter, and chubbier like I’ve gotten used to bringing in for this position, but I had before me someone who didn’t look over 30, very tall, slender, dark brown hair, I even did the ring check.
I took him to the testing room and I got a little flustered, but not too noticeable I don’t think, and considering that it’s Monday and I’ve been like this all day I personally didn’t even think about it. I noticed his high school when going over his application and he went to my rival high school so I joked with him about that, I joked with him! I don’t joke with interviewees too much. So my face is red I’m sure and it feels pretty warm. I went to the receptionist after he started his test and said, “Yeah he wasn’t bad looking,” and she laughed and said, “And he was tall.”
What the heck is wrong with me, so unprofessional.

Pizza, Pizza

So, last week my roommate and I ordered a pizza from Papa John's. We split it in half, she had her toppings and I had mine. We ate for a bit and then my roommate got up and asked if I wanted another piece before she put it in the fridge. I went to grab a slice and noticed something just off center. At first it looked like a glob of spices but I looked closer and it looked more like a medium sized mosquito (sp?). So I had my roommate check it out, sure enough it was a bug. So she called Papa John's and explained what happened the guy who originally answered the phone was nice but then he handed her off to what I supposed but hoped wasn't a manager, Emily told her we had a bug on our pizza and she said, "Well we don't have any bugs in here"...yeah, well, there sure is a bug on our pizza. Anyway, so she asks Emily if there was anyway she could bring it in...um, so first she says it's not possible that we would have a bug from there and then she wants us to bring it to her. So Emily writes an e-mail to the main Papa John's so that they would know. I don't know, customer service is big with me. So after an unsatisfactory experience with the Papa tonight when I decided to order a pizza I went with someone else. I went to Pizza Hut first but their website was being stupid. So I went to Domino's, found a good price and ordered. Then the coolest thing happened: a screen came up...a tracking screen. It went step by step, order placed, preperation (Melissa prepared my pizza by the way), it even told me what time they put it in!! Then after the oven time was done it told me that William, their delivery expert was on his way...three minutes later he pulled in front of my house...it was the coolest pizza ordering experience ever!!! I will definitley be doing it again!
Plus I answered a survey on the webpage and it asked if I would tell my friends and family, and this is me, telling my friends and family, it's the coolest way to order a pizza, and they have that 30 minutes or less deal and they are wonderful. From now on I think I'll be ordering from Domino's

Did you miss me?

It's sad when a week long break feels like too long a break to take from your blog. It's not so much that I intended to take a break, but man, life is sure busy for me right now. For example, the only night that I didn't have something planned this week was Wednesday night. Then my sister came in town on the fly so my gaps were of course filled with visiting with her and my two adorable nephews. Then last night, Wendesday got some pencil markings in my planner. So now, it's everyday this week. It's not that I mind, I do like being busy, but sometimes I just shut-down when I'm too busy. I don't return phone calls, or I skip out on something, or I show up late. I don't know if other people are like that, but I sure am.
Anyway, so what's been happening this past week? Friday night I went to Evan's Jurassic Park Party. I love that movie and I remember being maybe 8 or 9 when it came out and going with my brother. I was scared at 8 or 9 and therefore annoyed my brother thus leading to the terrible night when he wouldn't take me to see Hocus Pocus. It obviously scarred me. I have to admit, the movie is still intense, not as scary as I remember, but there were certain parts that I was clenching my fist to keep from jumping and embarrassing myself. There was one time I jumped, and I can't tell if it was because it really surprised me of if it was because the girl two seats over screamed. We all know she was surprised.
Sunday night I was putting my movie, The Baxter (I put the name because maybe you should watch it) back on the shelf because my friend finally returned it and as I went to put it with the 'B's where it so rightly belonged I saw a giant bug of some sort move! It was right above the movies. I couldn't go anywhere near it for fear that it was a giant spider (wouldn't be the first time I had a run in with a giant spider in this house, I'll try to find the picture of that sucker). I was home alone so I couldn't call an unsuspecting roommate in to take care of it (yes, I would sacrifice a roommate, I don't see anything wrong with it). I didn't have a flashlight either so I couldn't shine the light on it and determine if it truly was a spider or not. Could have been a camel cricket, and while I hate those little suckers they are nearly as scary as the thought of a spider that size. I sat on my bed, pondering how to take care of this, I wouldn't be able to sleep if I thought it were a spider up there. Finally it hits me, take a picture! The flash will go off and you have a digital so you'll be able to see right away!


Here's the picture of what it was. Just a camel cricket, but if you can imagine the dark crevasse this guy was in, the only reason you can see him so well is the flash that went off. Imagine it darker, those look like 8 legs to me in the right lighting. I don't know where the little camel cricket ventured off to after I got it's photo, and I don't care as long as he is no longer haunting my movie collection.

Tuesdays are the New Mondays

So last night I had a leadership meeting down on Southside, I am what we call a West End Snob, this means I look down upon the Southside for many different reasons. The number one reason I dislike the Southside though is fear, fear of getting lost. I don’t know the Southside at all, why should I? What does the Southside have that the West End doesn’t? Now South-siders may make the argument that they know the West End, but I don’t feel bad about not knowing the Southside, they don’t really know the West End; they know Short Pump and all the major parts of the West End. They know enough to get around, well; Southside is just too big to know all the major parts of.
A long time ago I was able to help a friend understand why I don’t like Southside when we went to a friend’s house. This friend happened to live in one of the many Southside ghettos. We were hungry so we stopped by the Wendy’s right before we got to her house, we waited in a relatively short line only to come up to a cashier who may not have had all her marbles with her. I ask how she’s doing because I’m a big customer service freak (remember, I used to train teenagers to do this stuff). So she proceeds to tell me all the things she shouldn’t tell me in our customer/employee relationship. Then she hits the wrong button, mumbles some swear words, yells at one of the other workers to come over, and keeps swearing about her mistake. I told her it wasn’t a big deal. Then we finally finish with me and it’s my friend’s turn, pretty much the same thing. We get in the car and I turn to my friend and say, “Welcome to the Southside.” Then we went on to our destination and I was able to relate the story to Rub, who truly thinks I’m a West End Snob, and why shouldn’t I be?
Anyway, back to last night. So I print off the directions to get to the Bishop’s Storehouse from my house. Everything looked pretty easy, relatively few turns involved and not as far away as the drive seems. So I start on my way at 10 to 7, first mistake. If you are ever going anywhere on the Southside you should leave at least 20 minutes if not more, before you have to be there, but hoping traffic would be light, and having my map tell me it’s only a 20 minute drive, I thought I could get there in 10. So I’m driving down Chippenham Parkway and I take the exit for Ironbridge Rd. I look at my map, every other direction had how long I would be on that road in the “miles” measurement. This one however suddenly converted to feet. Feet? How the heck am I supposed to know how far that is? So stupid me, I think possibly they put it in feet because it was so short a distance they couldn’t even put it into miles (475 feet by the way for those of you who are less numerically convertibly challenged than I am). So I’m driving along and I’ve gone quite a ways and I call up Natalie, the RSP, and leave her a distressing voicemail about how I’m not all too surprisingly lost. After I leave the voicemail I turn around, thinking that at 475 feet I’ve already passed my turn. Then Natalie comes back, I’m sticking to my 475 feet idea that the my turn is near the exit I took from Chippenham and I’m asking her if it’s near the shopping center there, she’s never heard of the shopping center (turns out she came from the opposite direction). She tells me it’s on the same road as the Chesterfield Airport….I didn’t know Chesterfield had an airport, much less where it was! She gets one of the volunteers at the Store house to get on the phone and give me directions. The lady asks where I am at, I tell her and then she says, “You want to head East.” Lady, I don’t know my east and west from my north and south. So I tell her, “I don’t know which way is East.” As easily as it was said, it was tough for me to admit. So she finally just tells me to go away from Chippenham, we call that taking a right. So then I drive back in the direction I thought had been wrong. I go past my turning around point and get to the Chesterfield Airport. I take the turn and head down the road (my directions are back to the “miles” measurement at this point). I turn into the building that has the address I’m supposed to be looking for. I pull into a parking spot and look at the door, “LDS Family Services” that’s not the Bishop’s Storehouse. But I get out and walk towards the door anyway; there are a lot of cars in the parking lot. So I walk up to the door and then I feel certain it’s the wrong one. I look around, I see Natalie’s car and console myself that I’m in the right spot. But who isn’t to say that someone else in the world actually drives the same car? So I get in my car, pull out of the spot and go back to the road and follow the sign that had an arrow pointing ahead towards the Bishop’s Warehouse. I follow the signs only to loop around the building and come in on the other side of the parking lot. I look for a spot but it’s pretty packed, I keep driving on and suddenly, I’m parking in the very same spot I had been in only moments before! I get out of the car, wanting to scream and I walk around to the other door. I walk up and through the glass it looks like a little grocery store, that can’t be it, I thought to myself. There are a million doors all the way around this building! So I call Natalie again, she doesn’t pick up, I hang up and am so tempted to throw my phone at the wall, I believe I kept saying, “I hate this place, I hate this place,” and then I took a couple deep breaths, considered signing myself up for some anger management class, and tried the glass door. It opened without a problem, but there was no one around! I saw a clipboard and tried to see if I was supposed to sign in on that, I didn’t; I started to walk through the store, trying to hear people talking so I could find them, but it was so quiet. Finally a lady in a purple sweat suit sees me and comes up, “are you the one I was on the phone with?” That made me feel good, I knew I was in the right place. She pointed me to the room I needed to be in and I sat down. I was in an incredibly horrible mood at first, I was missing institute for this and I couldn’t figure out why I had to come. I calmed down enough until a guy across the aisle was rude to me when I tried to pass him the “attendance” clipboard; he got some ugly thoughts directed at him. I was thinking that the meeting would last an hour and half tops, but as an hour and half trickled past, then an hour and forty-five minutes, I started to get annoyed again.
Suddenly, I see this man two rows up from Natalie and Mary and I think, “From behind that guy looks just like my dad!” and then I realize, it is my dad! So after the meeting I went right up to him and gave him a big hug, so even if I still don’t know why I had to be at that meeting I was sure glad I got to see my dad. I hadn’t realized that it’s been over three weeks since we last saw each other. I was in North Carolina one week, the next week he and my mom were and then this past weekend was Conference and I was going to go over but feel asleep around 5:30 and when I woke up I was cranky, best not to see my Aunt (who for some reason lives at my parent’s house) when I’m cranky, I might tell her how I really feel. Anyway, so the meeting finally ended around 9:30 and it took me half an hour to get back home because I took a way that I thought would be faster. Glad it’s over; I think I’ll tell Natalie I can’t make it to the next one though.
P.S. 475 feet isn't even a quarter mile, heck, it's not even an 1/8 of a mile! (there are 5,280 feet in a mile, I googled it).

Memoirs of the Masochistic Couch Potato

Yesterday I ran in the Monument Avenue 10k race. This is my third 10k, unfortunately for me my last one was when I was still in high school. The picture above is from the paper today...yeah, you won't see me. There were over 24,000 people in this run, so they divided us up into "waves" based on the time that we thought we would take to finish it. This is wave "A", they started at 8:30; I was in wave "N" we started at 9:30. The weather was cold and rainy. While I was waiting to begin the run I noticed someone with a shirt that said, "This sounded like a good idea three months ago," Amen to that! I was nervous! It wasn't a competition for me, but I was still nervous, that's a long haul! I was determined to run all 6.2 miles too. In all my training for this 10k though I never ran in the rain...I should have though, because for most of the run(a good 5 miles) my shirt was getting wet by more than just my perspiration. Every time I tried to wipe the moisture from my face I remembered that my sleeve was wet with rain and therefore pointless. At the designated water spots I wished they offered towels to dry our faces with rather than cups of water.

To your left is the winner, the picture is not the same day, but it's the same guy as last year, his time here is better than yesterday, but only by about 15 seconds.

You know what this essentially means don't you? He's a wave "A", he started at 8:30 and finished it in under 30 minutes. He was done, before I even started. It's a little disheartening, the winner is always a Kenyan too.
Overall I only stopped twice to walk (speed walking at that) and that was after the turn around (3.1 miles) to drink some water without spilling (though I swallowed the wrong way the first time) and the other was right after the 5mile mark because my toes felt like they fell off and I just wanted to check on them, other than that I ran the whole time. I checked my time this morning, 1 hour 9 minutes and 1 second. I don't know why that 1 second bothers me, but it does.

I think considering the rain, the lost toes, and the perpetually wet face I did pretty well. Better than I thought I would and faster than I run it on the treadmill. We'll see if I can beat the Kenyan next year!

I've made a lot of mistakes, but I never make the same mistake twice

Name that movie. This should be fun.
So, interesting thing happened yesterday. I was in the break room talking to a friend about her recent speeding ticket, which of course lead to driving improvement school, which I’ve been to a couple of times, I think two but something in the back of my mind tells me that I’ve been three times. Oh, yeah, that would probably be my memory. Yeah, it’s been three times, once in high school, once in college, and once post-college. Anyway, so we’re talking and this older guy from IT comes in and he’s getting a soda, quite possibly eavesdropping and then he looks right at me and says, “Now you don’t let your son borrow that big car you drive do you?” I had no idea what to say, I had no response to that. My friend says, “You must have her confused with someone else.” His response, “An Altima, right?” My response, “Yeah, but,” I was in shock, do I look like I can have a teenage son? How much has this job aged me? When I was a trainer and people found out I was 24 I got the, “You don’t look that old.” Granted these were 16 and 17 year olds, but still, none of them would have ever thought I looked old enough to be their mom! This guy never conceded that he was mistaken, he just checked the type of car. I informed him that even if I was old enough to have a teenage son no one drives my car besides me, no one. It’s true too. I’m the only one who’s driven it except the guy at Pep Boys who changed my tire and oil. And of course anyone who test drove it before I bought it, but that doesn’t count, I wasn’t there to protect it back then. I know that I don’t look old enough to have a teenage son, but I still had to check with people after that just to boost my self esteem. Not that there’s anything wrong with having a teenager, but I would have had to be 9 years old max in when I had him in order for my “son” to be old enough to drive. How old do I look?

I'm an Albino Black Person

Sorry for two in one day, but this is technically from yesterday at the dentist.



So, I have problems with being Caucasian, the first being that my old roommate, Marianne, decided it would be funny to mess with me and make me believe that I didn’t look Caucasian. One night as we’re falling asleep she asks, “So, do you mark the Caucasian box on things?” and I said, “Uh, yeah, why?” and she said, “Because you aren’t Caucasian.” A few weeks later a guy who has never met Marianne asks me in the middle of conversation, “So what ethnicity are you?” I didn’t know how to answer, at first I was wondering who put him up to it, but Marianne honestly had never come into contact with this guy, finally I said, “I’m just white”. So it became kind of a joke for us and since I have a cousin who’s Caucasian-ness is also constantly in question it continues here at home.
Lately the concept of an Albino Black Person has been raised. I think I know what they are talking about, but to be facetious I said, “Isn’t that a white person?”
But other than that, I do get bored sometimes with the idea of being Caucasian, or as we like to call ourselves, white, so I think I will begin to refer to myself as an albino black person.
I find it especially interesting when I’m at the dentist office and am perusing the covers to all the magazines. Not only is my dentist office one of the only dentist offices in the state where you could read the Ensign or Book of Mormon while waiting, or if you so desired grab a pass along card (this is what happens when your dentist becomes a Stake President) but he’s probably the only white male Mormon who subscribes to Ebony magazine. Yes, I have thought that possibly someone else in the office is the subscriber, but his name is on the cover and the staff is all white except for one Latino woman.
Yes, this magazine interested me, and I wanted to pick it up and flip through the pages and read a few articles but I felt as though a middle class white girl isn’t allowed to do that. So I read the cover more than once. One little headline read, “How to be a rich, black woman.” I thought to myself, “I don’t think that article can help me.” Sure, it could help me learn to be a rich woman, but not a black one. Then there was another article, “Black men talk about what gets them to commit.” I didn’t realize that it took different things to get a black man to commit than a white man, but you see I could easily be wrong. The point is, I wanted to read these articles but didn’t feel like I was allowed to because they were very race specific. I think that it’s interesting that if you saw a magazine with headlines such as, “How to be a successful, rich, white woman” or “How to get a white man to commit” those magazine editors would be in a pot of boiling water. But maybe if I were on the other side I would think that those magazines that seem Race-neutral are really just the magazines for white people, maybe we can’t get rich the same way, maybe we don’t have the same type of problems with guys. I don’t know, I claim to know nothing and that’s my safest bet…

Would You Like to Order the Right-Handed or the Left Handed Whopper?

Happy April Fool’s Day.
Thinking back on the pranks that have been pulled on me in the past one always stands out above the rest. This prank was meticulously devised, bringing in characters of varying trustworthiness, and had excellent conditions. It is a prank that in my heart of hearts I would one day like to exact revenge, but unfortunately cannot think of a way to top it. What is the prank you might ask?
Here’s the story. One year for Spring Break my friend and I decided to drive to Washington to visit our friend Tami (say ‘hello’ Tami). After a long drive we finally arrive at her house and she immediately whisks us away to run errands. While we are driving around she mentions that she’s dating this really great guy and how she feels that he is the one. In this small part it backfired a little because I, being a good friend, asked her if she was sure, because she thought that about the guy she was dating the year before. She let that slide and continued to talk about this guy. That night we got to meet him as Tami keeps you constantly running around when you go to visit her (and there’s nothing wrong with that!). This guy, whose name I can’t remember, found a couple minutes (when Tami’s mom wanted a replenishment of electrolytes I believe and sent Tami out to get her some Gatorade) and it was just him, my friend, and me and he pitched an idea to us. He wanted to propose to Tami that night and wanted us to help make it happen. So he had another one of her friends drive us to the park and we hide out behind a building with a candle and bouquet of flowers until the right time when we joined the two lovebirds. I remember it was pretty funny because my friend was in charge of coming over with a lit candle but the wind was so bad she couldn’t get it to stay and she was getting frustrated and was really worried about it. I picked the bouquet because I couldn’t really screw that one up. So he proposed and we took lots of pictures and my friend got teary eyed.
Then they were going to hang out in the park for a little while longer and we were totted off to another friend’s house to hang out and watch a movie. So while we were waiting everyone was talking about how crazy it was that Tami was finally engaged and yadda, yadda, yadda. Tami and her fiancé finally show up and I ask to see the ring and I remember thinking when I saw it that it looked like a Wal-Mart ring but I didn’t want to say anything because that would be rude and I figured the guy hadn’t been home from his mission long so maybe he didn’t have any money. Really, I tried to justify the Wal-Mart ring for this guy instead of picking up on what was really happening.
We start to watch the movie and before it’s over Tami and her fiancé come into the room and they stop the movie and Tami said, “Do you guys know what day it is?” and the moment she asked it I was hit with the realization that it was in fact April 1st otherwise known as April Fool’s Day. As you can tell, I’ve never really forgiven Tami for that one.