Little Miss Muffet

Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider, who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.

We have all heard that nursery rhyme before…well that ladies and gentlemen was Happy Dance a few weeks ago. 

I had just left work and was at the first stop light before my turn to get on the interstate to go home.  I was jamming out to one of my favorite songs and then that’s when I saw it! This green little creature was slowly falling down from the roof of my car and then it hovered right next to the steering wheel.  I screamed, I waved my arms, I did what most girls do, I tried to get away.  But the thing is, I was in my car, I was buckled in (PSA announcement from Happy Dance, “Always wear your seatbelts!”), and there was nowhere for me to run. 

I took my lunch pale up and brought it up to try and hit the spider out my window, that I was quickly trying to open.  The little bugger climbed up his stringy backside mess to the roof, and then the light turned green and I had to turn onto the interstate.  The whole time I was thinking, it won’t bother me, it will stay right up there.  That’s when it came down again.  Mind you I’m driving, on the interstate, in crazy traffic.  Also I don’t like to kill anything, not even spiders, I always ask Bebe or someone near by to kill it for me.  I feel bad, it might have a family or something, and my killing it might cause huge issues for them financially (just go with it people!). 

I finally decide to take off my shoe and try and hit it.  I hit it with my shoe, and it falls to the floor.  I put my shoe back on and start stomping at the ground (I have no idea where it hit).  I call Kat up and tell her about it and ask her to keep my mind off of it and to see if she thought the spider forgave me for killing it, because I felt bad.  The whole time I felt like it was on my legs, or biting me out of revenge.  I have no idea if it was killed by my shoe or not.  The next morning on my way to work I remembered the whole incident and kept my eye out for it. 

I haven’t seen it since, I think it is lurking under my driver side seat, growing, and waiting for the right time to come out and try to step on me.  Just wait, you’ll hear about it on the front page of a newspaper or the internet, “Woman on way to work killed in car accident after huge spider tried to squish her to death”

My Not Good, Very Bad Evening

Yesterday I got off of work at 7 and had to be at Bebes and my last marriage preparation session at 7:30.  I got near enough to go and grab a bite to eat at a drive thru.  I hit a place that I could get a hot dog and just go.  I ordered it and said, twice, that I just wanted ketchup on it, nothing else.  I go through the line, pay for it, get my food, and park in a parking spot so I can gobble the food down in about 3 minutes.  This was my plan, and this is where it all goes wrong. 

I open up my food and on the hotdog there is mustard and relish.  WHAT?!?! I go inside the restaurant and tell the manager that this was suppose to be just ketchup.  Now at this point I am a little overwhelmed with my timing and not in the best of moods.  The manager tells me it will take 10 minutes and I told him that I am very busy and am in a hurry so I don’t have that long.  So he told me it would take 5. 

So I sit there and eat my french fries while I watched them cook it.  During all this a cop is watching me, and kind of intently…I think I looked like I was on the edge of breaking, and I sort of was.  I finally get my hot dog, and rush out of the place, back to my car, and hurry to eat my ketchup only hotdog. 

Two bites down I turn to grab my drink and the hot dog slips out of it’s bun and lands on my tan pants and a little on the car seat. SERIOUSLY!?!? At that moment Bebe calls to see where I am, it’s now 7:30, I’m late.  I tell him ketchup got on my pants and I have to rush home to change, tell them I am SO sorry and I will be there as soon as I can.  I then close up my hot dog case throw it in the bag and get out of the parking lot as fast as I can.  I get to the first stop light, and it just turns red. NO!!!! I wait and sit and patiently think it isn’t so bad, I will be like 5 minutes late or so, it’s not that bad, they won’t mind.  I rush through the light, once it turns green, and head towards our subdivision. 

I get through most of the community ok, not speeding and feeling like I am going to be able to do this and not be too late.  Then I get to the stop sign at the turn to our house, I can actually see our house from the stop sign.  In front of me there is a white van.  The guy in the van sticks his head out the door to yell at one of our neighbors and turns his van diagonally at the stop sign.  On one side of the van is vehicles parked on the street, so I can’t get past that way, and on the other side he is to close to the stop sign for me to get through without hitting him or the stop sign.  So I shout, “Excuse me! Hello!”  He doesn’t notice and gets out of his truck and walks up to the sidewalk to talk to this guy.  At this point I am just furious!  REALLY!?!? Today, of all days you do this? WHY!?!?! So I yell “Hey, MAN! I’ve gotta go!” and point to the direction that I would like to go and at his van blocking the whole intersection.  He says sorry and runs to his van and pulls up to the other side of the street. 

I zoom past him, while doing so wave at him in thanks for moving, run into my house quickly change into blue jeans and a different top, leap over Bella because she just wants me to pet her but I don’t have time, out the door, lock it, and then I am back in my car, pulling out of the drive way and zooming past the guy was in my way and waved again.  I get stopped at one more stop light and then I make it to the marriage prep house.  I am only 20 minutes late, but it feels like it took forever to get there.  The couple was fine with me being late and it didn’t seem like it was a big deal, but it took awhile for my nervous and heart to slow down.  I feel bad about being mad about a hot dog, and then mad about the guy in front of me at the stop sign.  But why is it when you are in a rush does something bad happen, and then once one bad thing happens a few more happens right along with it?

Flutterby experience

I have this horrible fear of killing things.  Like if I see a rabbit, I swear my car so I don’t hit it.  I won’t kill a bug because it makes me sad, instead I will call someone else to kill it, all the while yelling at the bug to run, flee, leave, but usually they don’t hear my plea and they get killed by Bebe or my mom or a friend.  So this experience is about me not killing things. 

Kat and I were in high school and I was in my old blue hatchback car that liked to eat people.  We were in the country, cruising around, on a gravel road.  The road was really curvy and, since I was a teenager, I didn’t feel the need to slow down much while on the gravel.  The time of year was after all the rolley polley caterpillars had baked in their cocoons enough to emerge and become beautiful butterflies.  I had just started going around a curve when all of a sudden a butterfly came out of no where and I was on the verge of hitting it with my car, so I swerved to miss it.  Kat starts to scream and I move the car back to going straight and she asks me if I have lost my mind.  So I told her, while making “the sad face” that it I couldn’t kill it, it might have had a family.  She told me it was just a butterfly, but I told her that if I killed it, then it’s babies would be without a father (because you know the butterfly had to have been male right?) and it would be all my fault, and what if he was the breadwinner and if he didn’t come home tonight they would all die! I would be in charge of multiple deaths, not just one.  She looked at me with the face of not believing what she was hearing and laughed.  This image is her rendition of the, what we now call, the flutterby! 

Now whenever I hit things people tell me the animal or bug was suicidal and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it.  That has seemed to stop most of my swerving around the road, but still it makes me very sad…what if they had a family!

It’s as Easy as Riding a Bike

We’ve all heard that saying “It’s as easy as riding a bike,” everyone says it about everything.  Well whoever came up with that saying is WRONG!  If anyone uses that in a sentence, those of us who have relearned how to ride a bike, should go up and yell “WRONG!” in that persons face.  Relearning how to ride a bike is not easy, not simple, and not something that I care to do again.  Now that I know how to ride a bike again, well still getting the hang of it, I plan on keeping at it and really riding it almost everyday.  Learning again would just be a pain. 

I wanted to ride my bike again because I am trying to live a healthier lifestyle.  Riding your bike is great cardio and plus it uses muscles that a lot of exercises don’t, and personally those muscles need a lot of workouts from me. 

I went home to visit my parents and while I was there I asked my dad to go and get my bike out of our shed so I could bring it home with me.  He sat it out on the back patio and told me to try it.  I got on and I was SO wobbly.  I asked him to hold on to the seat while I peddled, like he did when he was teaching me to ride with no training wheels.  My dad didn’t go for that idea and just watched me as I tried to ride it up and down the sidewalk next to our house. 

At first I just kind of scooted up and down the sidewalk with my feet on the ground.

Then I pushed off with one foot and put both feet on the peddles and tried to keep it going without falling over. 

Next I tried to break…which was extremely scary the first time.  My bike didn’t slow down like a car, and I quickly put my feet on the ground to catch myself before I fell over because I didn’t feel like I would stop before reaching the sidewalk in front of the house and I didn’t want people to watch me riding (well trying to ride) my bike. 

After that little experience I was done for the evening and I asked my dad to help put the bike in my car so I could take it home with me.  The bike was a tight squeeze but we got it in. 

The first stop we made was to the bike store so my bike could get new tubes and tires, the old ones were dry rotted. This took about a week.  This gave me a week to get my courage back up to ride it again, this time in front of Bebes and my house. 

Here is the thing about our house…I think the neighbors think I am weird.  I don’t get out of the house much other then to go to work or leave to go to a friends house or home to my parents.  I don’t like being outside usually, there are bugs outside and dirt which means there are germs!  I don’t like germs and bugs and dirt, so the easiest solution to not dealing with them is staying inside as much as possible.  From this I am really pale, like Twilight Books vampire pale.

 (I promise I’m not a vampire, but if I was this is what I would look like)

So my neighbors rarely see me and when they do I wave (if I notice them) and hurry off, not much time to talk.  When I am outside, to be outside, I am usually talking to Bella.  So I am that crazy women on the street who talks to her dog.  So riding a bike, and not riding it well, and possibly injuring myself on said bike in front of these neighbors who probably already think I am weird, not at the top of my priority list. 

I had a week to talk myself into it.  I got the bike the next Tuesday and decided that day was as good as any other and took off.  That’s when I realized the other issue with the house, it’s built on a hill on both sides.  Being a beginner biker, again, it is probably not a good idea to ride the bike up and down hills the second time around.  The only place I could ride the bike without speeding down a hill was directly in front of our house.  So I did that for ten minutes in 99 degree weather, started to sweat, which I also don’t like, and decided to call it a day.  Oh, what fun my neighbors probably had that day.  “Crazy dog lady is trying to ride a bike, putting feet down every few feet, screaming when she goes to fast, and she can’t even turn on the bike without stopping completely, while almost falling over, and turning the bike around with her arms, quick take a video and put it on youtube!” – probably what neighbors were saying to each other.

The next day I decided I wasn’t going to ride my bike again, some teenage kids across the street were outside and that’s all I needed to build my confidence of riding a bike without really knowing how to ride a bike.  So I waited to see if they would go inside, they didn’t.

Well I then thought of all the hard work I had put in yesterday, and since they probably already think I am crazy, I might as well try it again.  So I got the bike out, while Bebe was watering our plants, and rode up and down the little area in front of our house.  Bebe asked me if I was going to take the hill, and I told him he must be joking.  The kids next door watched the whole time and it started bothering me. What if I fell, what if I flew over my handle bars and hit a tree (no helmet), what if I actually make a turn without stopping the bike and get excited and then fall over due to not being balanced…they would laugh. 

So I decided to take the bike to the school near by, where no one was at, and ride it in the parking lot.  I did this for awhile and really got the hang of it.  I forgot how exhilarating it was to feel the wind in my hair and how peaceful the sound of the wheels were while riding.  I felt alive and free. 

I enjoyed this for awhile and then decided to go home.  I decided to bike home…oh yes over the gravel in the entry way to the school, through a stop sign on a road, and up a slight hill to our house.  I had ridden for a least 10 minutes at the park, I felt confident and I had this.  Everything was going well, until I felt a piece of my hair move up my cheek and close to my eye.  It was bugging me so I reached my hand up to flick it away and I lost my balance violently going to one side.  I slammed my feet on the ground, and although I didn’t fall off the bike or injure myself I was pretty torn up about it.  How could a little piece of hair get me down like that?  What if people saw? What if I would have fallen over like I was about too?

Once I got up the slight hill, I saw the two kids that were out earlier watching me ride.  Thinking they were thinking all sorts of odd things about me I was kind of confused when I saw what they were doing.  These two teenage high school aged kids were outside riding their bikes up and down the road having fun and laughing with each other. 

Had I inspired them to get out and be healthy and enjoy the day with their bikes? 

I don’t know why they were riding their bikes, but it made me feel good.  I rode my bike home (both hands on the bike – hair or no hair I wasn’t going to fall in front of those kids) and put it away. 

I plan on riding again tonight; we will see how that goes.  I will still probably be wobbly and, though I haven’t fallen yet, I might fall.  But I have gotten this far and I really am enjoying it.  My muscles in my legs are being worked like they haven’t been since I stopped riding my bike in 8^th grade.  My hands have some calluses being built up from holding the handles bars, probably too tight.  My pants have grease on them from the fresh grease the shop put on it.  How can I put all of this to waste just because I might look weird/crazy.  I am going to learn to completely ride my bike and be an expert in it again. 

Bebe and I are planning a bike ride sometime in the future.  I am hoping that we will both be better riders then and will be able to fully enjoy our time on the bikes.  For now though I am going to just pray I don’t fall off, or that a chain doesn’t break…I don’t like the grease. 

Working Out Isn’t Working Out…

So I have been working out and eating healthier for almost a year now. 

It hasn’t been easy and most of the time instead of getting soup like I should, I get the chicken fingers and fries like usual, BUT I am working out every day.  At first I just watched what I ate, and lost A LOT of weight the first month. 

Then I added in exercising and the weight just flew off.  Now I am in a plateau of weight loss.  After all that hard work I am now stuck at this stupid weight!  It’s annoying and frustrating and makes me not want to do anything else but sit on my couch, surrounded by chicken fingers and curly fries with a bucket of ketchup, watching my favorite shows for a whole month nonstop.  But since I can’t do that due to I would probably have a heart attack, I am still working out and trying to eat healthier. 

Since starting my journey, I have joined a weight loss website, and I have made a ton of amazing friends from around the world who have helped me through my journey and they are now putting up with me and my stupid plateau.  The website is free and very simple to use and lose weight with (All HUGE pluses in my book).  So now since I have been stuck at this plateau for a few months I plan on telling you about how my work outs haven’t/have been working out and my experiences with the different trainers I have used. 

The first DVD trainer I ever used was Heather*.  Heather is bubbly and fun.  She smiles and does the whole workout with you.  She walks 5 miles and after an hour you have completed them all.  That’s right ladies and gentlemen I walk 5 miles in an hour and love it!  I look forward to turning her DVD on and starting my relaxing, but fast paced, walk.  I just walk around the living room while doing the steps she tells me to do.  This means I don’t have to go out in the big wide scary world full of bugs and allergies that will make me sick or make me scream (sick = allergies, scream = bugs).  After the walk is over your legs feel all twitchy, but firm.  Your body is all sweaty, but you feel great.  You drink about 10 gallons of water (sarcasm), but it is refreshing and gladly drank.  Heather is amazing, it’s such a simple routine but she makes it fun and something you look forward too.  Heather encourages you to only walk one mile if you can’t do all 5, because any workout is better then no workout. 

Bella stars at me from her pillow while I do this.  I have no worries of her jumping on me or wanting me to play with her because I am not down on her level.  With Heather, and eating healthier, I lost 25lbs.  BUT with Heather I also felt like after a few months I wasn’t getting anywhere (hence the plateau). 

The second DVD trainer I have used is Sara*.  I just started Sara's DVD in early April, this was the first time doing any other workout DVD other then Heathers.  Sara is someone who pushes you to the extreme, but never does the whole workout with you.  She yells at you, and tells you she knows you are hurting but to shove through it.  She also tells you that pain is normal (umm what?) and that it will get easier each day.  She also doesn’t let you take any breaks.  It’s only a 20 minute workout so you have to take each workout to the extreme to get results.  There are different levels to the workout and each one gets harder and harder.  Through working out with Sara I lost 8 inches from my waist and hips and I felt my thighs toning up.  My arms also felt stronger.  I started Sara’s DVD during my plateau to try and break it.  During her workouts I can barely breathe and all I want to do is cry out at her.  I curse her and do the workouts out of hatred and stomp my feet and put more movement behind everything she asks us to do because I am so mad at what she wants me to do and I feel like I just can’t do it. 

She makes you do punches in the air while doing squats and that is one of my favorite exercise because while doing that move I imagine punching her in the face (I know really horrible here, but while you do this workout this is how you feel).  After the workout, all I can do is sit down and breath and hope I don’t get sick.  Then I can’t do anything else the rest of the night but watch tv and wait for bed. 

During the workouts, Bella, thinks I am playing with her.  She has jumped on my back when I was doing push ups, which made me fall flat on my face.  She has jumped on me while I was doing lunges which made me fall backwards.  When I go on the ground to work on the abs, she has pounced on my stomach with her duck in her mouth to try and get me to play. 

I never took my measurements with Heather, so I don’t know about that, but I did lose a lot of weight.  With Sara it gave me a new thing to do for a month, and I lost a lot of inches.  Bebe has been great through this whole thing with me.  He encourages me to eat in more (which I usually don’t), he tells me how great I am doing by working out, and he tries to keep Bella away from me while I am working out to my DVDs.  Overall this year has been a great success in my health and lifestyle.  

I have found out that with Sara it just isn’t working out.  I saw results, but overall I don’t like feeling angry at the trainer or hating having to go and workout for that day.  So I am breaking up with Sara and going back to Heather.  I feel like I cheated on Heather for a full month and I want her back.  I may pick a Sara DVD up again after a few more pounds are lost, and when I feel up to the challenge.  But for the moment I am missing my walks.

*All names of trainers have been changed since they are very well known, but you should be able to figure out who I am talking about just by the way I describe them

The Cell Phone

It was a wonderful Friday morning, a bright sunny day outside.  I was suppose to go to my parents house after work, and decided to call my mom after Bebe asked me to come home first so we could have supper together. 

I parked my car in the lot outside of my work and called my mom on the cell.  My phone has been with me for over 2 years…it does everything for me!  We get lost, I bring out my phone; we need a random fact about life, I bring out my phone; I need to text you a funny joke, I bring out my phone; I need to call you, oh yes, that handy dandy phone is put to use.  I touched my moms cell phone in my address book (it’s a touch screen) and it dialed her number.  This is when a great day turns horribly bad…the phone never rang, it just went to a noise.  The noise sounded like someone breathing heavily, and then mixed a garbled undertone of whispered nonsense, which would then return to the heavy breathing.  What in the world is this?!?

At first I thought, my mom must have answered with her purse (like a purse dial aka as a butt dial or pocket dial but instead of a dial it was answering).  So I waited a few more minutes for my mom to say something, and then I said “Mom?”  Then it went from the heavy breathing to a really loud and mad sounding garbled undertone of yelling nonsense.  Oh My Gosh I made it angry!

I had two options…(trying to think clearly as the noise on the other end went from being mad to whispering nonsense to heavy breathing on the other line)…

A.) I could rush in and tell my coworkers to listen in because it was just too freaky!

B.) Hang up and call my mom again and hope whatever was on the line now didn’t pick up again.

I went for option B, because I didn’t want to rush in and ask them all to listen in and the thing get really mad or for it to just shut up and then I look crazy.  And also because I needed to talk with my mom.

I dialed my mom again and it rang and she picked up.  I asked her if she had heard the noise too, and she said she had.  I asked her if she had called out my name to see if it was me and if it had gotten angry.  She had called out my name, but the noise did not get angry…so the thing must have had mommy issues. 

When I got off the phone with my mom and went inside to work I told everyone in my office about it…lets just say they all thought I was going to be abducted and because they knew me, they too, were going to be abducted as well.  It was aliens, a possessed phone, or an airplane mixing up the signals.

I made it through the weekend, and nothing happened…I am hoping it was just a misplaced signal…but it was weird and that misplaced signal had real mommy issues. 

Bella’s New Duck

I bought Bella a duck last year.  It is a plush stuffed toy duck and it squawks whenever you squeeze it. Anyway she loves it.  She picks that toy over any other toy that might be around.  You put your arms out for her to come and cuddle with you, and she will run to get her duck because the duck just can’t be left out of a good hug, now can it? 

After a whole year of her tugging it around everywhere she went (it’s like a security blanket) Bebe and I finally decided it had to go.  It went from a bright shade of brown and white to a nasty shade of gray over this time period and it had a hole near the neck where Bella held it most often.  But Bella can’t go a day without her Duck.  She goes crazy when she can’t find it, or she just gets depressed and sleeps all day (well she does that anyway, but when she can’t find her duck she has a very sad expression on her face when she sleeps and she has nightmares where she is running away from something…or maybe running to something…like her duck). 

She left it downstairs one day and spent all day looking through every room trying to locate it, and finally when I went downstairs to do laundry and she followed me and came upon it, you would have thought it was the best day in the whole world for her.  She jumped on it, and ran up and down the stairs with it in her mouth until I came upstairs to play with her and the duck.  So there was no way of getting rid of the duck totally.

So I looked everywhere to try and find a replacement duck…but it needed to be the same type of duck and it had to make the same kind of noise.  I got her a squirrel toy, and she didn’t play with it much, my mom got her a raccoon, and she played with it only because I forgot to bring her duck with us and then she tore the raccoon up, my mom bought her a skunk and Bella likes it, but she rarely plays with it she always picks her duck over it.  I have bought her bones and other toys and she never touches them.  The duck was nowhere to be found…it wasn’t at the original store anymore, except for in a much smaller size, it wasn’t at any pet stores, and it wasn’t at the hardware stores.  So where was I suppose to go?  THE INTERNET!  I got online and put in Dog Duck Toy, and BAM! There it was!  So I ordered it (spent $13 on this little toy) and it was on its way! 

When the new toy finally came, you would think she would be all pleased and forget about the old duck.  WRONG!  She now plays with both the old duck and the new duck.  She gets confused about which one she should play with so we get to play with both.  One duck is in her mouth, the other duck she is kicking along with her feet towards you.  I doubt we are ever going to get rid of the old duck now.