25 Tidbits of Information

ok, to help you gather a little more information, a few more details about who we are, we decided to make a list of things about us that might prove interesting.  i mean, aren't you all dying to know more about us?? we know. it's riveting. just thinking of you guys. and you're welcome.

1. i dislike rodents. but only certain kinds : mice and rats seem to be ok, it's the gerbils, hamsters and guinea pigs that i hate.


2. when i was 5 one of my hamsters ate the other during the night. i awoke to the carnage the next morning. shall we go back to number one?


3. i believe in ghosts, aliens, creationism and evolution and i see no conflict in this. bring it on.


4. i jumped off of a cliff and into the sea while in hawaii just to say i did it.


5. i'm afraid of heights.


6. i once had to be rescued by a lifeguard in the middle of july on ocean city's beach. as an adult. humiliating.


7. i'm so grateful that i've been able to stay home with my kids while they were little. but while i love being at home, if i don't get out of the house at least once during the day i get cabin fever. can't do it.


8. after spending the last _ yrs home with young kids, i have now become completely addicted to taking naps.


9. my brother likes to say that when we were young, i pushed him on the ice, making him fall and hit his forehead on the ground, resulting in 5 stitches. he slipped.


10. i want to learn how to play the piano, speak russian, do the tango, fly a helicopter, restore art, bind books and analyze handwriting. i'd better get moving.


11. i have several stories that i've begun writing which are just sitting and waiting for me to finish them.


12. i love books. i get attached to the books that i read and want to keep each and every one. i do not lend them out and will never give them away.


13. i have so many books that i have run out of shelving space.


14. i have recently realized that some of my most favorite things are those that remind me of my grandmother. bright red cardinals, sweet, hot tea, old board games, toasted peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and her use of the word deary.


15. i am obsessed with possible apocalyptic events. i even had an emergency backpack in my car for a time that held extra clothes and shoes for my kids and a first aid kit as well as food and water. i know...


16. i once had a dream in which my sister was being attacked by a shark and i was so paralyzed by fear that all i could muster up the courage to do was throw my slipper at it. she's still upset with me about that.


17. i love smells. the smell of freshly cut grass, the smell of winter in the air, the thick, heavy smell of summer on humid nights, the smell of rain from a sudden, summer thunderstorm, campfire smells and the individual smell that each of my people has.


18. i see numbers in patterns and associate colors with names and different words. not sure what this means exactly, someone once told me the name of this phenomenon (syndrome, i believe they called it) but i've forgotten it now.


19. my memory sucks.


20. i've had the good fortune of having two jobs that i absolutely loved. one was years and years ago as a clerk in a bookstore and the other was giving educational tours at the historic houses in germantown. it has something to do with the perfect mix of people as well as your interest in the task at hand i suppose. whatever it was/is, it was a wonderful time in my life.


21. i am a terrible contradiction of responsibility and procrastination. if i could explain it, i would. maybe some other time....


22. my brother also likes to say that one day, while playing outside, i pulled his bigwheel out from under him and made him hit his front teeth on the sidewalk. he fell.


23. i love shoveling snow. it's true. it makes me happy and gives me great satisfaction.


24. i'm embarrassed to say that at 38, i have only been out of the country twice. however, that is being remedied as we speak.


25. ok, so maybe the bigwheel incident could be true, my memory sucks remember? but, i also single-handedly scared off two boys who were picking on my brother at the beach one summer (nobody messes with my little brother). i'd say that makes us even.


L

25 things about claudia

1. i love color. i hear music when i see color.

2. i love music. i see color when i hear music.

3. i have no retention skills. none. for instance, i know that wuthering heights is one of my favorite books but i can't remember why. i know i've read it like five times and i know that i love heathcliff.
and i only remember his name because kate bush wrote a song about him.

4. i'm scared of chipmunks.

5. my favorite shape is a circle or sphere. there is just something about them. soft edges, never ending, fragile and strong all at the same time.

6. organization used to be a huge thing for me. i don't necessarily thrive on it anymore. it takes a lot of time.

7. i'm a scatterbrain. i switch subjects without warning. my brain is always one-gazillion steps ahead of my mouth. which leads me to...

8. i don't sleep. ok, so that's not totally true. i sleep the best and most deeply between 8:30am-10:00am. that's doable, right?

9. this is very hard for me to write. i don't care to spend this much time thinking about me! maybe i should go nap.

10. owls are amazing. i love them. they've now become mainstream. i hate that.

11. stephin merritt is my most favorite musician and lyricist. no one will ever top him. i adore him.

12. i've been told many times that one could get lost in my eyes.

13. i asked my husband out on our first date. he didn't pick up that i was crushing on him. he also didn't pick up that 4 other girls were crushing on him as well. good thing i asked him out first.

14. i used to think the ocean was the most amazing thing ever. until i saw the tyrolean alps.

15.  my first flight was when i was 32. to london. xanax was my friend, so was champagne. it was quite eventful and involved 11 hours, assumed terrorists and a lady having a massive panic attack. we missed our connecting flight to zurich and spent 6 1/2 hours in heathrow. since then i don't need the xanax.

16. i really would love to have a harlequin great dane.

17. i have a lot of fabric. it makes me look like i know what to do with my sewing machine.

18. i despise seafood. actually i really don't care for meat in general.

19. i love the fact that i will be 45 when my "baby" graduates from high school.

20. i adore my car. his name is boomer. i spend a lot of time with him.

21. my actor crushes are robert downey jr., javier bardem and benicio del toro.
 laura says you can contract syphilis just by making eye contact with benicio. one of her actor crushes is gerard butler...

22. fall is the best season. i wish every season was fall-ish.

23. i love the addition of 'ish'. i use it frequently. i bet next year it will become mainstream.

24. i lip-read. my hearing is not the best. please refer to number 2.

25. my math skills are abysmal. numbers don't make sense to me. 25 is as far as i go.

the infamous el vez with our blood orange margaritas...no i didn't get sick this night

your guess is as good as mine whether it's spring or fall! 

way back when...this looks like the summer of 2010 judging on our hair and outfits...we started a food/exercise journal together.  it has now evolved into this blog. we may have moved away from the food/exercise aspect a bit but really it was our banter that we enjoyed the most.

shanachie's tipperary salad

mmmMMM! our favorite. field greens, shiitake mushrooms, apples, strawberries, walnuts, crumbled bleu cheese...you should try it sometime. 

Birds

I was driving my shortcut home the other day (some say it's not a shortcut, but it most assuredly is): a long stretch of road that is divided almost equally in half by a single stop sign. I love this road, by the way, because this is the road where I often find my treasures that I restore (or plan to anyway) on the night before trash pickup. People throw away the best stuff. Anyway, I'm slowly (ok, maybe not slowly) approaching the stop sign (likely put there for people like me) singing my song along with the radio when i see the tiniest, frailest little old woman i've ever seen, in a pink chenille robe, pushing a walker. There is also a woman in scrubs just a few inches in front of her walking backwards and gesturing her on with her hands, so naturally I assume that this woman is a caregiver and is taking the littlest woman alive out to get a bit of exercise. She's is so little. I mean SO LITTLE and so sweet and really pushing her walker along and as I come to a stop at the stop sign I look out of my window at her and smile encouragingly. I mean, everyone needs some encouragement from time to time, right? She pushes forward a little more as we make eye contact and there I am smiling at her and probably stupidly nodding my head like "good job, cutest woman ever! you're doing a great job! keep going, don't give up!" She stops, looks right into my eyes for a moment and.... gets a disgusted look on her face, flips me off,  then continues to push on towards her caregiver. Wait, what?! This little, sweet old woman just irritatedly gave me the finger. My jaw hit the steering wheel. I couldn't believe it. I drove away quickly, embarrassed by the scene and thought about it for the rest of the drive home. And i came up with this: this poor woman is out busting her ass in the street, in her bathrobe, where she likely doesn't want to be, doing something she doesn't want to be doing and here I come staring all the way down the street. Actually being presumptuous and condescending enough to be giving her some sort of encouragement as if she were this frail little bird. Who knows what this woman has lived through? Has accomplished? Maybe she was a well respected archaeologist who traveled the globe (I'm rooting for this one). Maybe she wrote volumes upon volumes of children's literature. Maybe she was a biologist who found the cure for something that we don't even know about, but should be thankful that she took care of before it took care of us (ok, i'll root for this one too). Or maybe she was just a spitfire of an old woman who was pissed that I was rudely staring at her in her bathrobe and just wanted to tell me to f - off. 


Either way, I kind of want to be her when I get to that age.


L




FACT: that is not a shortcut. i know what road you are speaking of......not a shortcut.
FACT: a picture is worth a thousand words.
OPINION: i go with spitfire.

driving home on 309 the other night L regaled me with this fantastic story and its companion imagery. as she's describing this seemingly sweet, tiniest old woman flipping her the bird, which already is a picture of perfection, i can't get out of my head laura's face mimicking the woman's gesture.

i now know what i will be looking at when we are in our 80's! the mere thought of that face sends me into a fit of giggles. at one point i will need to post a picture of this. i will also need to insure that this will indeed become one of her standby faces from here on out. it's like a secret handshake, to be used to no one's knowledge. the description  of her emotions was funny enough already, going from "aww", "sigh", "OH!", "meh", "yes!" but then she shows me this face and the finger and quietly exclaims afterwards, "i so want to be that woman when i am that age". *snort, chuckle, snort*

there is no doubt in my mind that this will indeed happen. none at all. and honestly? at that age you kind of have a right. i can see us sitting on one of our porches, drinking our blood orange margaritas at this age and doing the exact same thing...with laura making that exact same face while flipping the bird, while i use my most favorite expletive ever with aforementioned hand gesture. we may just end up like statler and waldorf adding our two bits but in an old italian "aunt" kind of way.

and while i would've paid money to see this whole interaction with L and this crotchety dear one i'm pretty satisfied with the image i do have.

click on the hmmm because i can't figure out how to just pop up!

hmmmm

stalling moments

i found myself on the bathroom floor.

of el vez.

and no, it wasn't the tequila, i was the designated driver after all.
so while i seemed like i was madly drunk stumbling from the outside, through the bar, down the stairs trying to make it to the bathroom, i lost my hearing and gained tunnel vision.
the first stall had no toilet paper so i moved to the next, fell into the toilet, righted myself and then woke up staring at the ceiling.

i'm sure most peoples' first reaction would be freak out because they passed out. my thoughts, of course, did not work this way. in typical claudia fashion i breezed through,
"ohmygosh, where am i?"
*turns head to the right*
"i'm pretty sure that's a toilet touching my face"
*looks back up*
*looks back to the right*
"ewww, that IS a toilet touching my face."
"thank goodness i'm wearing long sleeves and jeans."
"thank goodness i didn't bother washing my hair today."
"i'm really glad i have long sleeves and jeans on."
"am i dreaming?"
"oh. oh. oh. this is el vez. i'm on the bathroom floor of el vez."
and then it dawned on me. where was laura? and then it really dawned on me WHERE IS LAURA?!

i managed to stand up and sit on the toilet. i couldn't walk. i realized i was profusely sweating and knew i'd lost my color. a girl came in and i tried to speak to ask her to go find laura. i couldn't.
then, just as if she knew,  laura came in looking for me. she was concerned i was gone too long. i told her what had happened. she helped me walk a few steps until i was able to get to the "rubber sofa that we dare not sit on". i sat down...with both of us audibly gasping, "ohhh" but i couldn't help it.

she told me i needed to take a pregnancy test.
i told her i'm never eating bazooka limon guacamole again.
she told me i really needed to take a pregnancy test.
i told her if i was pregnant that this was not a bad dream but a nightmare.
she told me it would be awesome if i were to have a baby.
i told her i wasn't pregnant.

we agreed it surely was not the blood orange margaritas.

she told me i couldn't drive home.
i told her she had to drive home.

laura was not the designated driver.
we stayed at el vez for a bit more time.

needless to say, i'm getting tested for an avocado/latex allergy. third time is a charm! and while i'm lamenting the loss of avocados, i'm super relieved it's not the tequila.

and the pregnancy test was negative.
phew.

***claudia

yes, sadly, it was negative. i'm extremely disappointed. and no. no way it was the blood orange margaritas. not our precious life's blood! i know it was not the blood orange margaritas because i clearly remember a previous incident surrounding said guacamole....


a month prior to the cleaning of el vez's bathroom floor by claudia, we were out and having a lovely dinner, once again, at el vez. now, i can already hear some of you out there ringing in my ears, yes, i do know there are other places to go. i'm sure there are many others, but my thoughts on this are: if it ain't broke, why fix it? i'm not a 'grass is greener' type of person as 99% of the population seems to be these days (ok, i won' go off on that tangent. for now.), if i find something that pleases me, that never lets me down, i stick with it. hence our monthly outings to el vez for mexican pizza (with extra cilantro, thankyouverymuch), bazooka limon guacamole, blood orange margaritas and a few extras that are always wonderfully entertaining to top off the night. i mean, really? who could pass that up just to try something new that likely won't provide the delicious food and often shocking scenes that we have become so accustomed to? not me. 


anyway, we were happily eating our guacamole and drinking our margaritas, some of us were even making inappropriate comments about other patrons, ahem. we had finished our food and used the aforementioned ladies room, then went outside when claude turned and said to me, "i'm not feeling well, can we sit out here in the fresh air for a moment?" she said she felt like she was going to lose her dinner. i reminded her ever-so-gently that i told her not to eat so much avocado, it's too rich. she nodded her head and mumbled something about it being too good not to eat and we sat on the little wall just outside of the restaurant. and sat. and sat some more. being the awesome friend that i am, i began to tease her: "don't think about pistachios, claude. and definitely don't think about all that avocado you ate. man, that was a lot of guacamole!" at which point she said that just hearing those words made her want to puke and could i please stop? i turned to say something else thoroughly snarky, i'm sure, when i looked at her face. it was grey. and her lips? even greyer. they actually matched the color of the pebbles in the rock garden behind us. so i stopped being the insensitive friend that i am and left her in peace. and we sat some more. then i said, "do you want me to drive us home tonight?" (yes, it was her turn to drive, again.) to which she feebly nodded, yes. on the way to the car, claude looked at me and said, "are you ok? do you need some more time before driving? i'm sorry we sat there for 20 minutes." i just laughed and told her it was more like an hour. 


she made it through the night that night without passing out OR puking. but that was the start of her brand new avocado allergy. which i'm completely confident her tests will show, by the way. because, honestly? we're not giving up our blood orange margaritas. i'll just incorporate an extra stop at the ER on the way home into our el vez routine if need be.

laura