Tag Archives: good times

Momma I’m comin home…

We are coming back home for the weekend because my Nana isn’t feeling well. We want to see our families, engorge ourselves with good Chinese and Pizza and possibly go here:

Our jobs are being so super cool about it and we are so grateful for that. Also it’s another example of all the synchronicity that’s been happening in our lives lately. If I hadn’t gotten this job right when I did, there’s no way we could have come home to see Nana right now. And how lucky that I got a job that values family over business. I worked at a job just a few years ago where my boss gave me a hard time over these following things:

1) She wouldn’t allow me to go to my Aunt’s funeral.
2) She was mad because I took time off to sit with my Dad in the hospital.
3) At another job, I had gotten a call that my Mom had had a heart attack (she didn’t) but was in the Emergency Room. I ran out to take the call and this guy CHASED ME OUT of the building and demanded to know what I was doing WHILE I was on the phone with my panicked family. I told him what was happening and he said he didn’t care, to get in and answer the goddamn phone and not to leave my desk again without asking him first. Yeah I quit that bitch haha.

Anyway, all of my bosses and all of Krissy’s allowed us to take the time no questions asked and I am SO grateful and thankful for that.

So we’re still in the planning stages of this because we just finalized the tickets yesterday. If you are one of our family members, please don’t stress out if you can’t make it to see us or anything. We couldn’t have planned this any differently so this trip is less about seeing everyone that we can and more about spending quality unrushed time with just a few loved ones.

We had toyed with having dinner in NY but when we woke up this morning, we realized it would be a waste of time. NY is (probably) not going anywhere and we couldn’t think of anything to do there that we haven’t done a zillion times before or would really want to do again. I mean there are a lot of NY performers we’d like to see and we looked into it but they all happen to be somewhere else right now, some of them actually in LA haha.

So that’s that. I’m still gonna post pictures every day. If I thought I was tired from the late night at GLAAD Awards, how am I gonna be next week? We are landing at LAX at almost 10pm after a six hour flight and then I have work in the morning! OMG.

And for any robbers out there:

Don’t even try it, we have people watching. Yeah that’s right.

Day One Hundred and Two

I can’t even get into how awesome the GLAAD Media Awards were right now because I don’t have the time but we had so much fun. We laughed, we cried, we accidentally rubbed elbows with Mondo from Project Runway. We didn’t have cable during that season so therefore had no idea who he was. Nice guy though!

Anyway, all I will say for right now is:

Dolly Parton
Amy Poehler
Rashida Jones
Craig Robinson
Sean Hayes
People from the cast of Modern Family
People from the cast of Parks and Recreation
Kristin Chenowith
Joel McHale
Marlee Matlin
Meatloaf!

The list goes on, I mean there were just so many people there that I am such a big fan of. Also, we escorted the girls from “Pretty Little Liars”. They were really nice.

Kristin Chenowith received an award and her speech made us cry. Kristyn found it on YouTube and cried all over again. I’ll find it and post it later. She’s so damn amazing.

Anyway, I said I wouldn’t go into it and here I am anyway: Going into it. I’ll stop, I have work to do. Later.

I am STILL dizzy from the champagne I guzzled. I have seriously learned that:

Coleen + Alcohol = Broken Toy

I guess I’m lucky that I don’t have a hangover cuz I really don’t. I don’t feel sick or headachey, just fuzzy and sort of euphoric. Definitely NOT the way I want to feel at work. Drink some more Joe Coleen. You can do this!

Raunchy Oprah

There's no part of this picture I don't love.

Lately I’ve been having really vivid dreams. Last night I had this really long dream where I went to a garage sale in someone’s house. I went to buy two dresses and the family that was running the sale was really cool and friendly. The dresses were really pretty vintage dresses from the 60’s and about my size. One had a little stain on it. When I went to pay, the woman kind of wouldn’t let me leave. She wouldn’t let me pay and took one of the dresses from me. I said, “Fine if you don’t want to sell it, that’s cool, just let me pay for the other one.” She took my money but held onto one of the dresses and wouldn’t give me change. I had to get out of there because I needed to go to work. I had intended to go to the garage sale, come home, shower and then go to work. It was already past the time I was supposed to be at work, so I was like, “Fine I’m going.” Then she gave me the dress and I left.

I guess I didn’t care about my job because I decided to keep shopping. I walked down a main drag which I think was Kearny Ave and went into a shop. Inside there were all these 60’s Go Go dancers and it was decorated like Laugh In inside. It was a furniture store. It was pretty cool in there so I decided to look for bedsheets. When I got to that section, Oprah was there hosting some kind of event sale. She started talking to me and was REAL raunchy. Talking about how she always has safe sex and kind of just being the Oprah you NEVER get to see. I was so riveted but still kind of distractedly looking for bedsheets. Midway through talking to her, I realized that I knew she was gonna be there because I WORKED there. Her sleeve came up a little and she had a tattoo on her forearm. That was when my boss came up. I guess he forgot I had to work OR thought I was there to work OR was caught up in the excitement of Raunchy Oprah being there because he didn’t seem to notice or care that I’d mistakenly blown off my shift. I was trying to figure out what to do next when Kristyn bellowed:

COLEEN!!!!! WAKE!!!!! UP!!!!!

Then I told her the entire convoluted story and she barely pretended to pay attention though she’s told me some whoppers of convoluted stories in the past. Haha.

Anyway, here is my favorite YouTube Oprah video. This shit never gets old for me. Also, how do you work for OWN? I want to work for Oprah.

The Jerri Blank Chronicles

 

Guys, I realized today that when I start school in the fall, I will turn into Jerri Blank.  Before I get into that, let me tell you what my plans are.
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Know what I did last night?

Last night we went to the supermarket after I picked Krissy up from work to pick up some cat food etc. I was in a cookie mood but also totally irresponsibly indecisive. I agonized over my cookie choices until Kristyn said, “THEN DON’T GET ANY!” (To be honest this was after me dramatically -and rhetorically- wailing, “Maybe I don’t even WANT cookies!!!” FYI, I don’t ever not want cookies.) So I said, “OMG YOU’D DO THAT TO ME?!” At this point she turned on her heel and shuffled out of the cookie aisle.

An hour and forty-five minutes later (give or take an hour and forty minutes) she came back and found me lying on the ground holding two packages of Mother’s cookies, one Macaroon and the other Chocolate Chip and staring soberly into space. (An aside: If you live in California, it is considered a hate crime if you don’t immediately shout out “MOTHER’S COOKIES!!!” when asked what your favorite cookie is. Fact.)

So Kristyn played some head games with me trying to suss out which one I wanted more. (Another aside: I don’t even like chocolate chip cookies, I just WANTED them. I DO however like macaroons a LOT and therefore didn’t want to buy them. This would make a lot more sense if we were all PMSing.)

So what happened next was a choose your own adventure type mystery without any of the choice and all of the mystery. Kristyn told me she was gonna choose FOR me. This made me happy and I decided to walk away so as not to interfere with her choice. I set off in a brisk clip toward the register and looked anywhere but at the groceries. I wouldn’t even rest my eyes on the computer as he was ringing stuff up. I carried the groceries out but swore not to even look at the bags lest I see through it to the package of cookies. We drove home and I decided to take it to another level. With my eyes closed I tried to find the cookies on the table. Unfortunately I was rummaging around in the wrong bag and I had to peek to find the right one. When I did, I closed my eyes, took out the package and held my breath (for fear I’d smell the answer). I put one in my mouth AND…

To read the rest of this click the jump.

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An interesting thought

I want to start by saying that I am sorry if these every day posts with our faces and the mundane elements of our day to day are seriously boring haha.  Well I am and I’m not.  My original intent was just to take a picture of my face and this was because:

1) I think it would be interesting to see how and if my face changes over a year.

2) I’m not comfortable in front of a camera so it’s kind of nice to let go of that insecurity.  Maybe next year I’ll do full-length body shots.  I need to be comfortable that way too.  Baby steps.

I added in the “what we did today” stuff because:

1) It was just a natural step.  Why not?

2) I think it would be funny to see exactly what we DID all year.  Like were we lazy?  Were we busy?  Was this a good year or a bad one?  I think we tend to paint a year with a broad brush “good” or “bad”.  I’m pretty sure this is going to be a tough year so I’ll be tempted to paint it with a “bad”.  But if I look back on the days I’ve had so far, they’ve all been “good” or “nice” with only like one or two “bad”.

The interesting thought I had was this:

Me and Kristyn were talking last night about how it’s funny that you forget so much stuff in your life.  The only memories you ever really hold onto are kind of stored in your brain as a picture and then the events are kind of words around that picture.  Okay well let me back up.  Kristyn was reading an article about Susan Sontag and in it, Susan was talking about the power of photography. She was specifically talking about war photography. How powerful of a medium it is. Like when wars are going on, on other people’s soil, if there isn’t a picture of it, we can’t feel it or imagine it. And how even one picture of one moment in time can encapsulate a moment and so perfectly sum the moment up AND give you an understanding of what happened.

So then we started talking about how your life is reduced to a series of small pictures in your head of events that took place. Conversely, we tend to hand onto the memories that we actually HAVE physical pictures of. Because the camera is doing the work that our memory does. Like if our brains are a filing cabinet for memories stored as images with words attached, photographs are like forcing your brain to recall a memory. Even if you forget that moment because it didn’t make that big of an impression, if there is a picture, you will be drawn right back into that moment and (for the most part) remember that day.

So I don’t know that a picture of my face a day will bring back startling vivid memories of me watching Buffy and playing Harry Potter Lego but in a way, I will have at least one year of my life that I know what happened every day. One year with a light shined on it. One year that doesn’t go hazy with memory. That’s kind of a nice thought. That said, I really need to get a job if I want this “memorable year” to be any kind of good memory haha. MOMMA NEEDS MONEY AND TO GET OUT OF THE HOUSE SOME!

Th’sall.

P.S. Speaking of shit that happened, a woman just tried to walk into my house. Our apartment is on ground level and we don’t have a lot of windows so I keep the front door open with just the screen door closed. My front door opens out into our courtyard. SO if you walk into the courtyard, you can see right into my apartment and me sitting here. These two women came into the courtyard, came up to my screen door, talked to my cats and went to open the (locked) screen door to walk right in. I was like, “Can I help you?” She said, “Here’s an invitation to you from the Baptist Church!” I said, “Okay, you can leave it right there” so she stuck it in the door haha. *sigh* We need to move.

I suck/rule at life

Reason why I suck at life:

I just remembered NOW. 39 minutes into it starting. That I was invited to an informational meeting for a school I applied to. Specifically for a program I applied for that I do not know how it works and really could have USED and informational meeting for. Kristyn has to be at work at 11 so I remembered as she was pulling away. I actually RSVP’d that I was coming to this event. I actually marked it on my calendar and day planner. Then as Kristyn was leaving, a nagging feeling hit me like maybe there is something important I am supposed to do today. A quick check of the ol’ day planner lets me know I am a chucklehead. Coleen, you suck at life.

 

Reason why I rule at life:

This morning I bounded out of bed effortlessly and was in the kitchen making breakfast (bending, reaching, grabbing, doing) for about five minutes before I realized that I EFFORTLESSLY BOUNDED OUT OF BED AND WAS STANDING IN THE KITCHEN MAKING BREAKFAST. I’m healed! Man the past week was full of me slouching around like a 90 year old. There was a gutteral sound I had to make to do anything. Kind of like an “AAAAAAARGH!” Kristyn called it my “lifting weights” sound. Like I already said, my back was hella sore in the morning and today? Just bounded out of bed and made breakfast with ease. I feel like goddamn Cinderella (not the wenchy one, the princesa one). Kristyn gave me a hug and then a high five and said, “Way to heal!” I think that says it. Also, I think, “Coleen you rule at life” also says it.

Peaches Christ Superstar

* AHEM: This is another post that has been lounging in my draft folder since mid-December. Go here to check out Kristyn’s review of Check Yo Ponytail and here to check out her review on Peaches Christ Superstar!

Right now I am at the Echoplex in Echo Park at a party called “Check Yo Ponytail”. Kristyn is covering the bands for LA Music Blog. I am chilling on a couch. The bands are good but it’s kid of nice to go see a band I am not invested in for once. I always envy the people who can relax in chairs while I frantically have to be right up against the stage. On one hand I always want the total front and center experience and on the other, who’d ever turn their nose up at taking a load off? So it’s nice to enjoy the music and blog. Two of my favourite things uniting! Oh and sorry if my spelling reflects the Queen’s English, I somehow put my phone on UK English and am too lazy to turn it off. Oh also, we went to see Peaches do a one woman rendition of Jesus Christ Superstar the other day. It was called, you guess it, Peaches Christ Superstar. I am here to say that it was the bomb. The last time I saw Jesus Christ Superstar was in CCD and I barely paid attention. And going into this, I honestly wasn’t sure if Peaches was gonna do it tongue-in-cheek or not. BUT SHE DIDN’T. She was dead serious and it was AWESOME. I love Peaches in all of her incarnations but I had no idea she had such a killer voice. I mean usually what you like about her is her humor, dirtiness and attitude. Not that she isn’t a good singer but she doesn’t like belt anything out. With this she did and she was great. So good. Kristyn is gonna post a review on LA Music Blog so I won’t say any more other than it was awesome and now I want to see the movie. What else? Oh here are some iPhone pictures from Peaches Christ Superstar. If you have an iPhone you know they take crappy lowlight photos but THIS is something else. She was dressed all in white and had bleached blonde hair. The light on her was also white. She got so washed out that she looks like she got cut out of the picture. OR like an apparition. Spooky Peaches, spooky.

On the Road, Day Five, SD & NE, part five

Okay, I’ve slacked on telling you the rest of this day. Here are parts
One
Two
Three
Four

 

Once we left Wall Drug and the Badlands, we had to kind of figure out where we were going to go next.  This many stops in one day was kind of unheard of for us because we liked to keep cruising.  BUT we were kind of ahead of schedule and there was a lot to see over here.  We didn’t have to be anywhere particular until September 8th (tell you why later) and from checking the map, we had more than enough time to get there AND take a look around.

We happened to be in the area of another major destination and we didn’t expect the town surrounding to be so populated and touristy.  It was so cute though.

Here is where we went!  This is our first sight of Mount Rushmore from the highway.  It’s mesmerizing.

I don’t know if it’s our city showing but we were kind of dumbfounded to find this place teeming with people.  I guess it’s because you always see a picture of this quiet mountain with it’s carved Presidents so stern and majestic.  I certainly wasn’t expecting this:

But that’s silly because this is obviously a tourist destination and not a desolate forest area haha.

Anyway, it also turns out you have to pay to get in but you can only pay cash.  (WTF.)  We didn’t have any so the nice man just let us in for some reason.  It’s good to be an American?

Here is sort of a close up shot of Mount Rushmore.  Can you even imagine that someone painstakingly DID that?

I mean look at that detail?!  How can you even tell if you’re doing a good job?

Here is Kristyn doing an obligatory pose in front of Mount Rushmore, natch. Isn’t she the cutest?

And here’s my fathead posing with our Nation’s forefathers.

I’ve included a picture of the soda machine at Mount Rushmore for two reasons:

1) It made me giggle at the time.

2) I figured it’s kind of a curiosity.  I feel like it’s akin to wearing a tshirt with your own picture on it (which I have done before and totally do not judge as a life choice).

After that, we drove into Nebraska.  We wanted to cover as much ground as possible to keep on track, especially since we took so much time sightseeing.  In reality, we probably only took about an hour or so sightseeing total but we DID take a detour to get to Mount Rushmore.

Oh AND, remember how I told you that I would tell you something about Buffalo?  We saw one REALLY up close.  We got kind of lost in the woods around Mount Rushmore and ended up on sort of a rural road.  We didn’t see the Buffalo until we were right up upon it.  It was standing on the left side of the road.  A motorcyclist passed within three feet of it and swerved screaming.  We did the same.  The reasons for swerving and screaming around the Buffalo are:

1) They are like six feet tall (at least in my mind they are) and like HUNDREDS OF POUNDS.

2) Therefore they can probably kill you with their MIND if they want to.

3) There are hysterical signs everywhere warning you about your life expectancy should you encounter and piss off a Buffalo.

4) These hysterical signs tell you that in no uncertain terms, you are on Buffalo Property and if you do something to make them kill you, you are on your goddamn own because you have been warned.

That being said, ENTERING NEBRASKA!

See that sign above and the one below?  That’s Nebraska.  Open fields and flat land everywhere.  Nothing around.  Well at least where we were.  We kind of goofed and took what we thought was a highway (and was according to our maps).  It was actually like a SERIOUSLY RURAL AND DESOLATE country road.  Never. Doing. That. Again.  So terrifying.  When I say there was nothing, there was NOTHING.  No houses, no gas stations, no phones…just empty fields.  Now here’s the predicament:

1) The sun is going down.

2) We don’t know where we are.

3) Will we have enough gas to get to wherever it is we’re going? (a side note: we tried to set up hotels in advance but it logistically didn’t work because we could plan to get somewhere in time but what if we didn’t make it and ended up paying for the night in that hotel because we couldn’t cancel until the last minute?)

4) We’re in a rural area so our phones have dropped cellular and internet service.

We were really scared and pretty screwed.  We, for some reason, thought we were getting on a highway that was a more direct route to “somewhere”.  Because in NJ, when you turn off a major artery like the Parkway, there are always a lot of populated alternative routes to drive on.  BIG MISTAKE.  HUGE.

On this road you see below?  We saw a town that you could actually SEE COMING.  A cluster of houses with a sign that told you the population.  The population?  18.  Yes 18.  18 people.  And honestly I doubt that shit.  It was so abandoned looking.  And like Christine pointed out, you KNOW every single one of those bastards probably owns a gun.

But that isn’t even the crazy thing.  The crazy thing is that we came upon another town.  It had a sign that read “Population 1”.  I didn’t take a picture because I didn’t want to stick around.  I’m not trying to be city-dweller biased against country dwellers because I grew up spending my summers in Upstate NY where it is pretty damn rural.  I have nothing but love for the rural life.  But Population 1 just chills a bitch to the bone.  You KNOW that if a town has one person in it and they advertise it as such, it is because that person WANTS it that way.  Motion is not denied.

We eventually came upon a really cute little town that was not freaky at all. I guess they considered themselves a city because the rates for the hotels were outrageous for such a backwater. I could spend the same and get a cheap room in LA or NYC. But we found a clean place that I cannot for the life of me find pictures of. Shame too because it was one of our better rooms. It had a motel door opening but the room itself was gorg. The animals loved it and it was so comfortable. We were so tired and so hungry and full of adrenaline for being scared for so long that we were just excited to get the funk out of the car. We went across the street and got subs from Subway and housed them. We called our parents and siblings and friends to tell them we were definitely not dead. We gave the cats baths and clipped their nails after days of sweating in the car. We figured they would probably appreciate it once it was overwith and we were right. Everyone was snug as a bug in a rug and we were just happy not to be stuck on the side of the road in the dark.