I was at Dunkin Donuts this weekend (I know, I'm on a diet) and while eating my donut in the parking lot (don't judge), I noticed a sign on the building that read:  DUNKIN DOUNUT'S PARKING ONLY.

There is so much evil in the world. Just so much. 

I then thought, "No one will believe this." So I took a picture, but the sunlight was so bright and my windshield is so dirty...well, at least you can see that I'm not making this crap up.

Not this particular crap. I do make lots of other crap up, though.

Wow. High-five, Dunkin Dounut's. Misspelled and an improper apostrophe? That's worth a free pink donut, don't you think?

All I really want in life is for everything to be perfect. Is that too much?

I didn't think so.

Really, though, I don't think it's asking too much for people to try to tone their stupid down so I can go to work, do my job, and then leave without having to do someone else's job.

Does that ever happen? Nope.

In my spare time, as I'm developing all of these amazing inventions in my basement (not really, and I don't have a basement), I will work on a de-stupidizing ray. I don't have a science background, so I'm pretty much going to have rely on my magic skills, or, excuse me, skillz, and my love of all things that are not stupid to get me through the project.

If my husband will let me, I'll also need to borrow a can of WD-40, some duct tape, and a vise grip. You can do almost anything with those three tools.

Especially if you're willing to pull out all of the stops and use them with.......PAPIER-MÂCHÉ! (Yeah, I used the Frenchified spelling. Deal.)

I think I can do it. I think I can solve the problem.

If not, I will have a lovely set of hand puppets with which I can politely shame others into getting their shipoopies together.

That is all.

We decided we needed to go on a real, serious, diet. Well, we didn't actually decide. The largeness of our pants sizes convinced us. I've been on a diet my whole life, but I haven't lost anything substantial in a couple of years, and my husband's been taking some time off from the whole diet thing, so we felt like it was time to get back into it.

We looked at several options, but most of them included way too much processed food for our taste, and, while I don't mind having a meal replacement bar or shake periodically, I don't want my entire food intake to consist of a bunch of stuff I can't make myself. Not to mention the fact that we can't afford to live off of those things for too long. Holy crap! They cost twice as much as it would if we went to the health food store and bought all organic everything. Sheesh.

Anyhow, we decided to buy these Body Media devices, and they arrived yesterday. You just wear this armband all of the time and it tells you how many calories you're burning and other things like that. This is what they look like:

Pretty cool, right? Well, they are kind of a pain in the butt to set up, and their food monitoring software is not as good as the free one we've been using, but they are still pretty flipping cool.

It's really awesome to see how many calories you burn in a day, and I'm especially excited to see how many steps I can take in a day. I realize this is a lot of money to spend on a pedometer, but the sleep monitor is really cool, too. It even showed the 45 minutes I spent tossing and turning last night. IT KNOWS WHEN YOU'RE AWAKE.

Creepy.

So I think the sheer gadgetry of it makes it fun and maybe it'll be more like a contest for both of us. Except for the part where all we can eat is stuff that's good for us. That part isn't starting until Monday, so I guess I still have a few days in which to drink and eat the rest of those Girl Scout Cookies in my freezer. And get a hamburger. And have a stuffed sopaipilla.

Like that, except with red chile. I think red chile just doesn't photograph as well as green. It probably looks like someone bled all over the food unless there was enough light in the room. Not that I don't enjoy the green; I'm just going through a red phase right now.

So, yeah, going to track how many calories my body burns and all of that good stuff. We'll see. I'd like to lose a little more weight before jacket-wearing season is over. Jackets just hide so much stuff.

But, still, stuffed sopaipilla. Like, soon.

Okay, so I went shopping a couple of days ago. I actually found some clothes I liked that I could afford, so that was great. What was not great about the whole thing was that I bought this jacket, a beautiful-fantastic-amazing jacket, one that I'd like to wear to work today to help me forget the fact that I am, in fact, at work, and I get home from shopping (in a town two hours away, mind you), only to find that a security tag is firmly attached to my new jacket.

SERIOUSLY?!? Urgh.

What to do? So I go online and I look for answers. Apparently, lots of people have this same thing happen, but I'm guessing that most of the time they didn't actually pay for the clothes, because some of this stuff sounds super sketchy to me.

Yeah...not willing to ruin my jacket so I can wear it right now. Even though it's making me die inside, just a little bit.

Therefore, my mother is taking it to a store in our town today, while I'm at work (although, really, I could've done it myself but I was embarrassed), to see if they'll remove it since she has the receipt and the bag and all of that good stuff. I sure hope they do.

It is a grand and glorious piece of clothing and if I don't get to wear it, my brain will explode.

See? Ah, it's so good. Except I don't exactly look like that in it. If I did, I'd have bought 50 of them, just so I could wear it every day for the rest of my life. That would be magical.

I finished my second really big doily yesterday. Kind of proud, because it looks just like the picture (except the picture was made with white thread and mine was made with green thread). Now for the big dilemma:

What do you do with a doily? 

I suppose I could put it in my Etsy shop and try to sell it, but the amount of work I put into it would make me really unhappy with almost any amount of money. I don't know if I want to use it, though, because I don't want my house to look like somebody's grandma lives here.

I realize that someday I will be grandma-aged. I just don't want to get there too soon. I'm still trying to cope with being an adult, which is hard enough.

So, this is the pattern:

Nice, right? Not too old ladyish, right? Welllll, maybe. The thing is, I've discovered that I really like making stuff with crochet thread because it is really careful work and every stitch shows and...well...you can't really have a lot going on in your head while you're doing it. It sort of clears out my brain.

Maybe other people can have deep thoughts while they're keeping the right tension on their thread and counting all of their stitches. I don't know. Not me.

Anyhow, I guess I'll figure something out. I should take a picture of it, as it is much more magnificent in green (which, as we all know, is the best color on Earth). I think maybe I'll use it. I can figure something out.

I mean, I found a place for the unicorn chair, didn't I? Yes, yes, I did.

Yesterday, something happened at work that made me glad I grew up as a fat kid. I've never really thought about it before, but my easily-hurt feelings would be ridiculously easier to hurt if I hadn't gotten used to being teased about my fat.

Seriously. I think that's why I have a sense of humor.

So this lady comes into my work and is looking at our magazines and making small talk and she mentions this article in one of them that says it has a miracle diet plan in it and a person could lose a bunch of weight in only a month by following it (or some such type of thing). She brings the magazine to me and says, "Could you make a copy of this article for me? You should make one for yourself, as well!"

Yep.

I think if that had hit me differently, it might've hurt my feelings, but, really, it just made me laugh. I do need to lose ten pounds (more like fifty, but whatever), and I guess maybe that person was trying to be helpful, and was generally pretty nice, other than her apparent foot-in-mouth disease, which I have suffered from, as well.

The funniest part, though, was other people's reactions when I told my story. One person, in particular, was kind of shocked that that sort of thing would happen.

That was the thing that got me and made me realize that if I hadn't had my fat kid life experience, I would probably not have the warped and twisted sense of humor that I have. And that would be a sad, sad thing for me.

Not really for anyone else, but for me.

Happy Friday!

People, I totally notice everything. It's a curse. I notice it when you smell funny and I notice it when you're in a bad mood. I notice it when you start using a new slang term (and I usually mock you for it), and I also notice it when you're having trouble at home and you're thinking about that so much you start to suck a little bit at life (don't worry...we've all been there).

Did you think I wasn't going to notice when you posted something on Facebook that so goes against the grain of everything you've been posting since we became friends a few years ago?!?

Because I did, buddy, and it annoys me.

Now, I consider myself to be an open-minded person who is trying to be even more open-minded as I go along. I really do love almost everybody, and I'm trying to rid myself of that "almost" as soon as I can. The people I have the hardest time with?

Yep, it's the "religious" people who spout off about the Bible while they're actively hating everyone who isn't like them. Drives me nuts. I mean, we're all hypocrites, to some degree and in some situations, but come on. Really. I have read the whole Bible. The whole thing (I didn't even skip the chapters about such-and-such begetting such-and-such...that was rough). Mostly, I did it so when I hear people say, "Well, it says in the Bible that..." I can proceed to tell them they're wrong. That's my favorite. Even though I don't really remember all of it because I kept falling asleep during the boring parts.

Anyhoo, when I take all of what I read and I look for just one overarching message from the whole book (there are a lot of little things, but I'm just talking "big picture" here), what I get is this: God loves you, so love each other. And stop being such big babies.

Okay, I added that last part, but really, love is a key part of the book.

I think some people forget that and so they write all of these weird statuses on FB about stuff that so offends me that I want to de-friend them (but I don't because then I can't look at their weird family pictures...it's like awkwardfamilyphotos.com).

Then they post something that says something like, "In order to be a good American, a person should accept other people, and not be afraid of other cultures or lifestyles."

WHA?!? Now I'm totally confused. Last week, you were talking about how mad you are at all those [insert random ethnicity here] people for trying to take away your right to [insert random "American" right here], and now you're loving mankind? What's that all about?

Crazy, man. Just crazy. If you're going to start being one of those people who loves everybody else and doesn't mock other people's personal life choices, I don't know if we can hang out.

Because then how can I laugh at you?

Yesterday evening, when I got done with all of my work and such and I was in the kitchen, working on the food situation with my husband, we looked out the window and saw a stinking miraculous sight.

I swear, it was way cooler than it's going to look on your computer screen.

We have these plant pot bottoms that we prop up on tables and fill with water for the birds and there were something like fifteen robins, all drinking water at the same time, kind of like this:

Like this, except that our robins aren't scrawny like these ones, they are ginormous and fat. And we had two birdbaths full instead of just the one.

Oh, and our birdbaths aren't nice like this one, they are ghetto. Like us.

Anyhow, it was so pretty, you could almost throw up. Really. Like watching puppies playing with kittens on a rainbow. Then, these two pigeons came walking along. We love these pigeons because they live in the crabapple tree in our front yard and they are in love. For realz.

So they come walking along (they frequently walk around the yard as a pair, and they look like they're talking to each other), and they stand there, staring at all of the robins drinking water. I heard the one pigeon say to the other pigeon, "Crap. We walked all the way back here, and those stupid robins are hogging all of the water. Should we eat their faces off?" Then, the other pigeon would say, "Now, darling, calm down. Remember the last time you tried to eat someone's face off and then halfway through, you remembered that YOU'RE A PIGEON. No teeth." And then they looked at each other and chuckled.

That last part was a lie. They didn't actually talk, they just stared at the robins for a few minutes and then walked (sadly) away. I think they were sad. It's hard to tell with pigeons.

So, yeah, my evening was pretty magical.

It's the day I wait two long weeks for...my lesson day. I get to drive an hour and a half, have a one-hour lesson, and then drive back.

And it's the best part of my whole week.

I realize to some people it seems like a hassle, but it gives me something to work towards and it also keeps me moving forward. If I didn't take a lesson, I would probably just get sloppier and sloppier until I finally collapse on the floor in a heap of goo.

Or I'd find myself only singing in the shower, which is fine for a lot of people, but not for me.

Anyway, it's finally that day, and I'm having some massive sinus issues. Great. Last time it was my day, I'd been crying all morning so I sounded like crap. Today I also sound like crap, but mostly because the juniper has been attacking my nostrils with a ferocity that is unmatched even by ninjas.

Ninjas, I tell you.

So, yeah, I may or may not shoot something out of my nostrils while singing.

But at least I'll be singing.

Especially in the car on the way home, which is pretty much the only time I ever sing along to the radio, and let me tell you, it's off the hook. Like, crazy amazing.

Not really. It's like my mom, singing to the Beatles, all over again, except that I sing to everything, even the commercials. Oh, well. It's pretty gosh darn fun. 

Which brings me back to ninjas. I guess I'm like a singing ninja. With ninja allergies. Watch out for my ninja powers, which consist mostly of being hyper-emotional and being pretty quick with the, "That's what she said"s. Yep. That wasn't random at all...