I do this weird thing where I read while I blow dry my hair in the morning. It’s really the only chance I have to just zone out the world and read. I finished my latest book last week and since then I’ve been forced to read countless catalogues. Until this morning, when I was able to read the entire People’s Sexiest Man Alive issue.

(Matt Damon, you are the sexiest man alive! Next to The King, of course.)

There was a whole section in the magazine about George Clooney, the outgoing Sexiest Man Alive. By the world’s standards (and my standards) George is a sexy man. He seems smart, talented and distinguished.

And yet, he’s got a head full of gray hairs.

In the elevator at work this morning I stood next to a nice looking guy. He was wearing a suit (on a Friday!) and fancy shoes. The collar of his coat was flipped up and he was, by all accounts, a dapper man.

He was also rocking the salt and pepper hair.

Which leads us to my own head of hair. Which, I’ve recently noticed, is also scattered with it’s fair share of rouge gray hairs.

I know better then to pluck the gray hairs that are now outlining my face. I’ve tried to cover them with a quick swipe of my mascara wand. I’ve tried tucking them under my normal hair. I figured nobody noticed them. I found I was kidding myself when a (male) coworker pointed them out to me.

(What is up with my clueless male coworkers?)

Why is it that my own gray hairs make me distinguished like Mr. Clooney’s do? Why is it that my gray hairs make me look older and tired?

Last week I informed The King that I thought it was time I start coloring my hair. I hate this and I don’t know why since I spent the better part of years sixteen through twenty three changing my hair color on a monthly basis. But now, it just seems so much more, since now I have to color my hair.

The King told me I should go for something totally crazy and bleach the underside my hair stark blonde. While that would look cool, I’m not interested in the upkeep of that style. Plus dude, I’m too old to do anything too crazy to my hair. I think for now I’ll just run to the drugstore across the street and buy the Nice and Easy brand, like all the other old ladies do.

And then I’ll call my dad and thank him for the gray hair gene he so lovingly passed on to me.

Yeah, thanks a lot Dad.

So tell me, I’m not the only one with gray hairs, right? And what do you recommend I do with my gray hairs?

My dad and my new nephew, born last week.

The King and I recently splurged on some things that will hopefully make our lives better. And by splurged I really mean that they were on super clearance and dang it, we wanted them.

We bought four new pillows. Two for each of us. And I’m in love.
(These aren’t just any old pillows. These are Ralph Lauren pillows that we got for $7 each. Dude, that is one sweet deal.)

I’m pretty sure this new found appreciation for awesome pillows came on suddenly during my pregnancy with my Sweet Babboo. My huge belly demanded being surrounded by even huger pillows. Unfortunately we didn’t own any such pillows. Life sucked for me at this time.

Thankfully during our vacation to Europe, smack dab in the middle of my pregnancy, we were fortunate enough to splurge on a decent hotel our last few nights in Berlin. (If you are even in need of a hotel in Berlin, may I please recommend you stay at the Ku’Damm 101. You will thank me.) This particular hotel had the best freakin’ pillows I had ever had the pleasure of using.

That year I asked Santa for pillows just like the ones at Ku’Damm 101.

Santa did not deliver.

I hate to say it, but I don’t usually have such good luck with hotel pillows.

That same trip to Europe we stayed at a crappy (crappy!) hotel in Paris that used a single ply piece of paper and tried to pass it off as a pillow. I wasn’t not amused.

See the purple fleece jacked in my backpack in that picture? Yeah, I rolled it up and used it for a pillow each night. It didn’t help much.

As crappy as that Paris hotel was, it wasn’t nearly as crappy as the Paris hotel we stayed at the year before. We weren’t ever sure what they were. As you can see by the picture I’ve artfully annotated, the pillows were attached to a pole on the wall. They could not be removed. Which I took to mean they weren’t being removed to launder.

Gross.

You can also see that we did not use these pillows. Instead we rolled up a blanket and used that. Needless to say, this sucked.

Of course sometimes there aren’t even pillows to complain about. Like the one time we took an overnight train to Munich. Dude, I would have killed for any type of pillow. Or a place where I could privately change into my pajamas.

And sometimes you’re feet are too sore from all the walking to even worry about the type of pillow you have. In times like these, you are thankful, very thankful, for a place to lay your weary head on.

And sometimes your bed is so full of backpacks and coats and hats and more stuff that you can’t even see if your pillows are sufficient.

While looking through all my vacation pictures to find sufficient proof of crappy hotel pillows, I discovered that hotel pillows only suck in Europe.

Canadian hotel pillows are awesome. (Again, after last year’s trip to Canada I asked Santa to bring a new hotel grade pillow for Christmas. And again, he failed.)

(Also, I got a new laptop yesterday and photoshop has yet to be installed on it. So I’m using ghetto microsoft paint for the time being. And reusing pictures I’ve posted before.)

Hotel Huts on the beach in Mexico also have pillows that are pretty freakin’ cozy. Even if you do have to encase your (newly) pregnant body in netting to avoid being eaten alive by bugs and rats. Cozy pillows and nekked bodies rule.

And unlike Europe, if you don’t have a pillow while you’re at the beach in Mexico, it does not matter. Nobody needs a pillow if you have this view.

What I’m saying is that I love the new $7 pillows on my bed. Every night when I lay my overly tired head down on them I’m reminded of just how much I love them.

And every night The King turns to me and says, “remember those crappy pillows in Paris? They were attached to the wall!”

Yep, I remember. And they sucked.

So tell me, am I the only one that have this much love for an inanimate object?

(Mrs. Squirrel, don’t answer that.)

I must preface this post by asking you to please not roll your eyes and click away from this page when you read that I’m going to blog about Rhett Miller. Again.

I know you’re all sick of me gushing about my love for the band the Old 97’s (of which Rhett Miller is the lead singer for). But dude, I visited their website this morning and was thrilled to find a review and a link to a clip from Rhett’s latest solo show (Murry was also there, but Rhett mostly did solo stuff).

You must watch THIS CLIP of Rhett performing an awesome Elvis tune. It will make you fully understand my deep, dark love for Rhett and his music.

Seriously, go and watch it now.

(Photos credit to Dr. David Welsh, who I hope doesn’t mind me posting his picture of Rhett. But if he does, I hope he will nicely ask me to take it down. Because I will, if he wants.)

Did you watch the clip? Now do you understand why The King and I are such big fans of his and why we have taught Babboo how to do Rhett’s famous “windmill”?

On our walk to school this morning Babboo and I were able to finally find the Paul McCartney nutcracker. Dude, the Paul nutcracker is even cute then the John Lennon one we found last week.

Remember how my best friend May deserted me moved away to Reno, taking her husband, her daughter and her unborn bebe girl with her? Yeah well, along with Frema, she’s about ready to pop her new bebe out of her belly (or her v*gina) any day. I’ve been begging her for months for a picture of her huge belly and she’s refused. REFUSED.

Until this morning when her very pregnant belly shot was delivered to my inbox.

As punishment for her taking so damn long to just send me a picture of her belly already, I am posting it for the entire interweb to see.

I think she looks yummy. And also, it makes me miss her that much more.

So tell me, should I also punish May by making her send me a belly shot that actually includes her face or do I let her off the hook with this one?

——-

It’s Wednesday. Which means I posted at my column Double Duty, One Paycheck.

And also, go check out my latest New Thing. Which, unfortunately, wasn’t a success.

The summer before my senior year was spent like most of my summers before. I sat in my backyard with a thick book and a pillow and turned my body a lovely shade of dark brown. Hey, it was the early 90’s. Nobody had heard of skin cancer back then. Or rather, we didn’t care about it.

Naturally this drove my parents batty. They wanted me to get a summer job. They wanted me to be a productive member of society. I thought reading and getting the best tan ever was being productive.

I was seventeen, what did I know?

My mom called me one extra sunny day and asked me to drive to her work and have lunch with her. Of course this bugged me as I was just getting ready to get my sun on. She told me if I’d just make the twenty minute drive to her work she’d make it worth my while.

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but I went along.

I hopped in the shower and quickly got dressed and ready to go. The phone rang again. And again it was my mom. She decided to come clean with the real reason she wanted me to come and have lunch with her.

My mom, the nurse, had a hot patient.

And he was just my age.

Of course I wanted to know what he was doing in the hospital. My mom told me that he was there because he had shot himself in the leg. Totally on accident. Totally. He was out in the mountains cutting wood for furniture (he worked for a furniture maker) when he started messing about with his boss’s pistol.

The gun went off. And he was down.

I may have mentioned before that I was stupid when I was a teenager. The thought of meeting a hot guy who was laid up in a hospital bed should have excited me. Any other normal seventeen year old girl would have gotten all giddy and turned into Florence Nightingale. Anybody but me would have walked back into her bedroom and changed out of her ratty cut offs and maybe run a comb through her damn four foot long hair.

But no, not me. I just rolled my eyes thinking about what was to come and drove over to the hospital my mom worked at to eat lunch and meet a strange boy.

My mom and I ate lunch in the cafeteria at the hospital and then she said, “you ready to meet him?”

I figured I might as well get it over with.

My mom took me into his room and as soon as I saw Dweezil (not his real name, thank goodness) I was in love with him. Or rather, pretty much in love with him. (What teenager truly knows what love is?)

My mom was right, Dweezil was hot. Way hotter then any other boy I’d ever talked to in real life. He was funny and sweet and we all agree that he had good hair. Best of all, he seemed to really like me. I think he liked me because we lived in different cities and went to different high schools. So he had no idea what a loser I was at my own high school.

It was like Dweezil was my gift from the Universe for being such a nerd for so long.

And I liked it.

I spent the next week driving back and forth from the hospital to visit Dweezil. After he was released I’ll admit that I got a little nervous we’d never see each other. Like maybe he only liked me when he was stuck in a hospital bed with nothing better to do then play card games with his nurse’s daughter.

I patiently waited for him to call me. It only took a few days before my phone rang and Dweezil asked when I was going to drive up to his place to visit him*. He said he missed me and I vowed, silently, that I would stay by his side forever.

And thus began my courtship with my mom’s hott patient.

Of course my vow to stay by his side forever didn’t really take. We dated for most of our senior year, but it ended.

They always do.

What I learned most from this experience is that set-ups aren’t so bad. Believe it or not, even set-ups by your parents aren’t so bad. From then on out I didn’t shy away when someone said they had the perfect guy for me to meet.

I mean, we all remember that I met The King on a set-up.

So tell me, have your parents ever set you up with someone? And did it go as good for you and it did for me?

*Apparently a gun shot wound to the leg takes a long time to heal. He wasn’t going to be driving anywhere for a long time.

I don’t remember how it started, but right from the start of our marriage The King and I started our own little tradition of leaving the country for Thanksgiving. It’s not that we have anything against Thanksgiving, per se, it’s just that having a four day weekend makes for the perfect chance to get the hell out of dodge.

Okay, so we’ve spent Thanksgiving in America. There was the one time we went to Vegas. Mostly we go to Canada. That’s what we did last year. Although sometimes we go to Europe. That’s what we did the year before. But yeah, mostly we just go to Canada.

This year we invited a few different couples to join us up in the Great White North. None of them could go. And since I wasn’t too anxious about spending money on a hotel room in Canada while we could stay at our own apartment in Seattle for free, we decided to stick around for Thanksgiving.

For the first time in seven years.

We weren’t really sure what to do with the Holiday. We woke up early, like usual, and The King went and worked on the new house for a few hours while Babboo and I made a few dishes for dinner with The King’s family.

Does not compare with fun in Canada.

By the time The King got back from working over at the new house, Babboo and I were bored. Extra, extra bored. Dude, all the stores were closed and daytime (holiday) TV sucks. We needed to get out of the apartment.

But where were we to go, and what would we do once we got there?

We totally ended up walking over to a nearby hotel to check out their gingerbread Holiday display.

Holy crap, looking at gingerbread houses is way better then a vacation in Canada.

(Okay, it’s not really better then Canada. I’m trying to be positive here.)

The gingerbread food houses structures were awesome. I was impressed. The King was impressed.

Babboo could have cared less.

He just wanted out of the darned stroller so he could run all over the place. And eat candy that wasn’t for eating!

After killing like seventeen minutes being impressed with other people’s ability to turn food into Holiday art, we headed to The King’s sister’s house for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. It was yummy. We feasted on just about anything that you can cook with butter. And gravy. It was good.

After we stuffed our faces The King and I sat on his sister’s couch while the kids ran around like possessed animals and took pictures of ourselves together. Except The King had a lot of zits from all the bad food he ate. So he tried to cover them. And then I used my awesome photoshop skillz to fix the one he couldn’t cover.

I’m nice like that.

The King and I both agree that next year, we’re leaving town for Thanksgiving.

So tell me, was your Thanksgiving weekend more exciting then ours? I know it had to be!

—————-

Want to read about what I did the day after Thanksgiving? Then head over and read all about my latest New Thing.

Hey everyone! It’s Carrisa guest posting for Isabel today. She’s busy running around Canada the local shopping malls having a great time. So not fair.

So here we are, the day after Thanksgiving. Maybe you are one of those people who has the day off and yet you get up even earlier than usual to do some of that Black Friday shopping. Or maybe you are still in bed for a couple more hours because you have to go to work. Hopefully you aren’t one of those that has to get up at 3am to go work retail because there are crazy people out there getting up at 4am to go shopping. I would hate for you to have to deal with all that.

But if you are the luckiest of the bunch you not only have the day off, but you actually use it to sleep in and watch tv. And eat leftovers. You have your priorities in order. And while eating a leftover bowl full of turkey with gravy and mashed potatoes sounds delicious, I’m here to offer you another alternative for that leftover meat.

Chicken Turkey Corn Chowder

Ingredients:

• 1 small onion, chopped
• 1 lb boneless skinless chicken turkey breast (you can use dark meat as well)
• 2 14oz cans of creamed corn
• 1 14oz can of chicken broth
• 1.5 cups milk
• 4 tablespoons of butter
• 2 8oz blocks of cream cheese (don’t be one of those fat free cream cheese users. it’s not right.)
• 1/2 cup of chipotle salsa. (you could use regular salsa, but the chipotle is so much tastier)

If you are using leftover meat you obviously don’t have to boil it first. But if you decide to keep this recipe and use it later on with chicken then yes, throw the meat in a pot of boiling water until it’s cooked. Probably about 20 minutes for white meat.

In a large pot melt the butter and stir in the chopped onion. Saute on medium high heat for a couple of minutes. While that’s going on, take your blocks of cream cheese and cube them up. And I really do mean it when I say don’t use fat free cream cheese. Maybe 1/3 less fat would be ok, but the fat free I just can’t see it being able to melt as well.

Once the cream cheese is cubed throw it in the pot. Reduce the heat to medium. We are wanting to melt the cream cheese into the onions, but not scorch it. It’s going to look like a big ole blobby mess. When the cream cheese is mostly melted add in the 2 cans of creamed corn. Keep stirring. As the corn heats up it will help the cream cheese along. Then add the chicken broth and the milk. Keep stirring it all so that everything just kinds of melts together. You can even get out a whisk if you’d like. Then add the chicken and the salsa. If your chowder seems too thick you can add more milk or chicken broth. It’s technically a chowder, but if you want it to make into more a soup you go right ahead.

Now you want to be careful not to scorch the chowder. So medium or medium-low heat is best. And also stir often. Once the chowder has had time to simmer and get all hot and stuff it should be ready for eating. Start to finish I can make this in about 30 minutes.

This soup is best served with tortilla chips. Lots of them.