I recently came across this blog and the very first post I read made me choke. On wine. And the thing about wine is, that shit burns. Anyway, Eden is very funny. And very much disturbed. Which made me think, AHA! She fits in perfectly with this group! Make sure you check out her blog. But don’t blame me if you have nightmares about clowns. I am not responsible for that. ~Shauna

I’m going to need therapy  and after you read this, so will you.

You see, I entered the words ‘creepy old doll collection’ into Google images and I am now traumatized for life.

WTF?

But wait… there’s more!

Am I the only person on the planet who was unaware of Gay Doll Porn?

I saved the best for last. I also blurred the totally anatomically-in-correctness to protect the innocent (a.k.a. anatomically inferior) who may view this.

Do you think we can find the man who modeled for this doll? Not like size matters... just curious!

Again. I’m traumatized. FOR LIFE.

Becca’s site, DasBecca, is easily one of my most favorites to read. It’s one I find myself visiting without waiting for Google Reader to tell me there’s a new post. Her writing is nothing short of perfection. She makes me laugh, she makes me cry, she makes me want to be a better writer. Also, she’s a kick-ass designer, because the beauty over at alimartell.com?? It’s all her. And, also, she is ridiculously beautiful. I’m so completely honored that she agreed to share a post for our Three Day Weekend. ~~Ali

My mom turned a certain age today, one I’m not allowed to disclose but it’s obviously older than me and younger than Oma. She and Michelle went to get pedicures, and drink Long Islands ice teas with an outdoor lunch. I couldn’t make it to the party, but they brought the party to me at about 3. I could hear them coming up the stairs: still giggly-tipsy and glowing.

“Look at our toes!” Michelle greeted. They had matching mauve. I approved. My mom added, “Oh, isn’t my pedicure gorgeous? I love it.”

We relocated to the couch, and then a short time later, my mom piped up: “Oh, did you see my toes?”

BECCA: …Yeah, you showed me yourself.

MOM: I did?

BECCA: Yeah, about seven minutes ago.

SHELLY: Remember, you were saying how gorgeous it is?

MOM: Oh, I don’t know. I was making a joke.

BECCA: No, you weren’t! You totally forgot!

MOM: Well, I think I might be going a little deaf, so…

BECCA: Oh my gosh. Mom. How could going deaf affect your ability to remember things?

MOM: I just meant that– oh, shut up.

We all laugh.

MOM: I worry about that, seriously. You guys would tell me if I were going deaf, right?

SHELLY: I’ll tell you, but you won’t hear it.

More giggling. I don’t have an explanation for the silliness, since I don’t drink. My mom goes to work (even though we try to talk her out of it– it’s her BIRTHDAY! Do you know she’s never called out of a day of work? In her life?). The kids wake up, and Michelle and I get this Super Brilliant Idea to carry them across the street to the supermarket, and get Mom a cake.

BECCA: It’s only like a block, but it’ll show Mom how much we care.

SHELLY: She knows how much we hate moving.

Both the stroller and baby carrier are in the car with J, so we have to carry Addie the whole way– and Elias across the busy street. We pass Blockbuster first. Go in. Get candy and a movie for Eli. Gosh, I forgot how lousy some children’s movie titles are. There’s a whole section of Blockbuster Michelle and I haven’t heckled yet.

Walk past the dollar store, the dry cleaner’s, the barber shop. Good old grocery store. We buy some Diet Pepsi, since I’m out. Pizzas, for during CSI. We stand in the middle of an aisle, and Michelle says, “I feel like we’re forgetting something.”

Me: “I think it’s chips.”

Chips, cheese and bean dip– added to the cart.

We’re checking out and talking to the cashier, who is a teenage boy named James. I’m big on using people’s names once I learn them. It can be either endearing or creepy. He bags our stuff, and I make sure to say, “Have a great day, JAMES,” and then Michelle freaks out: “OH CRAP! We forgot the cake!”

Me: “Oh, well… you want to go back and get it?”

Her: “Eh, I guess not.”

Me: “We’ll put candles on the pizza.”

We’re walking out, and Shelly announces, “Oh– you have to be kidding me.”

Across the wall is a poster that reads THURSDAY IS CAKE DAY! AT 20% OFF, DON’T FORGET YOUR CAKE!

She sighs. We carry the kids back, and halfway through our return journey, Michelle and I agree that we are so stupid, and what were we thinking?, carrying two heavy children plus groceries in 90 degrees, in the sun, this is terrible, why do I live on the third floor?, whose idea was this?. We make it home without dying. We deserve that WHOLE BAG of chips.

Pop in Eli’s movie, which is about Clifford the Big Red Dog. (I voiced, “Gosh, I would’ve loved to hear that sales pitch.”) The movie is awesomely hilarious. I have to run to the bathroom, and when I come back, I’m all, “What did I miss?”

Michelle says, “Okay, well, Clifford eats too much food. And then this neighbor guy who was a real jerk came over and he was all, ‘Your dog eats too much. He’ll probably eat you out of house and home.’ And Clifford’s owners are all, ‘Yeah, we had to take out a second mortgage– but we love that dog! He’s part of the family!’ Then Clifford decides to run away and try to win a contest.”

“Let me wager a guess. The prize is–”

“Yep. A lifetime’s supply of dog food.”

BECCA: Man, look. He left a flier under his pillow. If you ever run away, I’ll look for a clue under your pillow. It’ll be like a picture of Chris, taped to an ad about free elopements for $2.

MICHELLE: Free elopements for $2? Did you hear what you just said?

BECCA: I’m sorry. I’m going deaf.

MICHELLE: You’re so deaf you can’t even hear the things you’re saying.

Clifford joins a circus troop of really, really terrible performing animals. Basically, Clifford’s job is just to catch them when they all fall, and make it look like it was on purpose. They have their first performance, and all the animals are like, “Oh man, we did SO AWESOME!” The the Killjoy Ferret is like, “Um, no we didn’t.”

MICHELLE: “Yeah, you guys sort of need work. Let’s review– you exploded,your tail came off, and you’re a cow on a highwire– that can’t be a good idea.”

BECCA: Man, I hope that cow doesn’t fall on any kids in the audience. Can you imagine the headlines? FREAK BOVINE ACCIDENTS INJURES TEN. POLICE DEEM SHOW “LAME”.

Michelle and I gorge on chips. Movie ends, Elias starts playing MouseTrap. CSI is a rerun, and the kids are still awake, so we switch to ‘American Inventor‘. Mom shows up. We apologize for lack of cake. She’s like, “I didn’t want cake anyway,” which is a nice thing to say regardless of being true or not. ‘American Inventor’ is good. We root for Erik to win. He does. Everyone kisses Eli and Addie good night, and Mom and Michelle take off.

And here I am– expecting the nightly phone call from Jason any second– and willing myself to work on various website-related things. Our finances are probably going to take a hit soon, and I’m toying with the idea of putting ads on the site. I’d rather not, but it might be between that or getting a part-time job. And, like Shelly said, I really don’t like moving. Heh.

Do you guys read Emily over at Not That You Asked? If you don’t, ohmigod, you are missing out. She kills me with her posts about her adorable kiddies, Asher and Lucy, and her love of things that I love…like HGTV, and you know, things like her husband getting INTO a little tykes car. Oh yes she did. Read her. You won’t regret it. Tell her I sent you! ~Ali

So Dave and I were lying in bed watching television the other night when, out of the blue, he asked me if the pants he’d put on me the other night were the right ones.

Um. Excuse me? What now?

“You know, the other night,” he said. “When you woke me up and told me to take your pants off and get you some different ones.”

Now, I don’t remember this happening, but Dave insists that it did. Apparently I got all hot and sweaty in my sleep, and couldn’t figure out how to get my sweatpants off, and all the noise and the kicking and thrashing woke him up. And I wasn’t fully awake, but I was groaning and complaining about my pants and how I wanted them off and how I wanted to wear DIFFERENT PANTS and wouldn’t you know? Luckily I married the nicest, kindest person in the world, because he actually DID IT FOR ME. He took my sweatpants off, GOT OUT OF BED, went to the closet, turned on the light, found another pair of pajama pants, and PUT THEM ON ME. In the middle of the night. In the dark. While I guess I just lay there, like a big, sweaty, sleeping, boneless blob of uselessness.

“You did that?” I asked him, astounded. “You… you got me another pair of pants? You DRESSED ME in the middle of the night?”

“Well you TOLD me to,” he said rather matter-of-factly. “You woke me up! What was I supposed to do? What would you have done?”

Well, I’ll tell you what, Internet. If he’d woken me up in the middle of the night insisting I change his pants for him? I’d have woken him out of whatever creepy, freakshow dream he was having and, in my very best could-you-possibly-irritate-me-ANY-MORE voice, told him to GET HIS OWN FREAKING PANTS, because I’m trying to get some SLEEP here, OKAY? Remember me? Your wife? The one who still gets up with the BABY every night? I have no time or energy for this crap, okay? Wake up. CHANGE YOUR OWN PANTS. Also, LEAVE ME ALONE. Then there would be some heavy sighing and some harumphing and some angry pillow fluffing and then I would have gone back to sleep. Facing the wall.

And yet, the shame of knowing I am married to someone who is 1000 percent nicer to me than I would be to him in a similar situation. I’m working on that, okay? I’m really good at making sure the laundry is done and keeping the cabinets stocked with Veggie Booty and Yuengling and forgiving people for never ever closing cabinets after they open them (I WORKED HARD FOR THAT ONE) but as a general rule, I lack empathy. I am about as empathetic as a truckload of sod. Doesn’t it count for something that I know this and am trying to fix it? DOESN’T IT?

Anyway, a couple of days later, Dave got dressed for work in one of two new pairs of jeans I’d bought him at Macy’s over the weekend. (Something else I’m good at is keeping my family clothed in relatively recent fashion.) I was pretty excited that I’d found at least one pair that he liked without having to drag him along with me, where he would refuse to try anything on until we bought it and brought it home, leaving me to return it all the following week. Lather, rinse, repeat. Also, Dave is afraid of descriptive denim-related words like “boot-cut” or “rinse” and I always think he settles for a safe pair when he could do so much better. Anyway, he came downstairs wearing them and I gave them a glowing review.

“Wow, they look really good!” I said enthusiastically. And then, “Do you like them?” He replied that he did, and after one more quick once-over, I commented that maybe, although I thought they looked great, that maybe they were a little short? Should I have gotten a longer length? But he said no, they were fine and if I wanted to return the other pair and get him a duplicate pair of the ones he was wearing, that would be great. I agreed and he left for work. It should be noted that later that same morning (foreshadowing, FTW!), I was unable to find the pair of jeans I’d worn the night before to dinner at his parents’ house. After a quick search, I assumed I must have thrown them in the wash with the load of darks I’d started after breakfast.

He wore them again the next day. That afternoon, I was cleaning up our bedroom while the kids were napping when I came across the Macy’s bag with the other pair of jeans in it. I picked it up and set it by the door so I’d remember to take it downstairs with me when I saw… wait, what the…? WHY ARE THERE STILL TWO PAIRS OF JEANS IN THIS BAG? If there are two pairs of jeans in this bag, then Dave isn’t wearing the ones I bought him…
Which means it is entirely possible that he is wearing… NO. Please, God, NOOOOOOOO.

Naturally, I got myself right over to the computer and pulled up Twitter. Let’s see… 140 characters of shame? I guess we’ll go with, “I am wondering if my husband accidentally wore my jeans to work.” Aaaaand… update!
And then I called him.

“It seems that I am,” he said. We laughed. And laughed and laughed and laughed and then he came home and changed into his OWN JEANS and we discussed who this might be more embarrassing for, him for wearing women’s jeans to work (Express brand)? Or me, the wife whose husband FITS INTO her jeans, with room to spare?

Yeah, pretty much a toss up.

I have never met Nikki in person, but I feel like we could be twins. We both have a shit load of kids and we’re both chronically constipated. If you’ve never had the privilege of reading Nikki’s stories before, please make sure you don’t have anything in your mouth–for fear of spewage. Oh. There will be spewage. You have been warned. ~Shauna

There are a lot of people in the world who measure happiness
by their financial successes. That may mean money or a powerful
and good-paying job or how many cars they have or how big their
houses are, etc. There are some not-so-materialistic folk who
measure happiness by the size of their families and how much love
they share. Personally, I’m with a third group of people who thinks
both of the first two groups are nuts. Happiness is found in regularity.

I pray regularly. I eat regularly. And when I poop regularly, you can
actually SEE the little cartoon birds chirping around my head as I
smile and sing through the daily “regularity” of my life. Pooping is
nature’s way of helping you start anew each day. People who have
regular BMP (bowel movement patterns) are less likely to abuse
children and old people, less likely to suffer from road rage, and are
capable of more than a mere 35 minutes of shopping in the toy section
at Target on Black Friday before having an electonic-talking-doll-
shortage-induced-brawl with a housewife from Saginaw, TX who
drove all the way in to shop in Dallas-proper because she’d heard that
Dallas girls were wussies!

You NEVER see regular women plotting the deaths of their teenage
daughter’s stiffest competition for cheerleading captain or bludgeoning
someone to death with the receiver of a pay phone for wearing white
shoes after Labor Day (like Kathleen Turner’s role in Serial Mom…
I LOVED that movie!)

When I poop regularly, my family is happy. I get constipated and life
with me is miserable. So here are some suggestions to keep life with
Mother pleasant:
1. Do NOT knock on the bathroom door and ask the whereabouts of
your shoes, socks, backpack, cellphone or ask how much longer I’ll
be. Considering my schedule and your inability to find anything not
attached to your shoulders without a compass and a roadmap, I’ll
probably be out momentarily and if you knock again you may be
beaten senseless with a toilet brush.

2. When Mom says, “I need to use the bathroom,” Do NOT race in
ahead of her, lock the door, and yell, “I won’t be long!” This could be
detrimental, not only to her probably already impacted bowels, but
to your ability to chew solid foods without the aid of a blender and
a straw.

3. If Mom asks for a cup of coffee in the morning, GET IT FOR HER.
And make it per her specifications. Moms don’t usually ask for stuff
unless they need help. So, if she’s asking, she’s needing. And if it’s
coffee she’s asking for- then get it double time. She’s probably in need
of a good kick-start. It may be that her head is still cloudy and unfocused
even after a good solid 3.76 hours of much needed beauty sleep that she
got after a full day of housework, homework, chauffering kids 1-5 to
whatever the hell extra-curricular was scheduled at the same time as
ballet the day before. Then again, it MAY be that she was too busy to
poop yesterday and if she doesn’t get the caffeine boost for the daily
cleanse, someone’s head is going to roll….LITERALLY.

SO GO GET ME THAT DAMN CUP OF COFFEE AND GET IT NOW! I
HAVE THE COMBINATION TO THE GUN-SAFE AND I’M NOT AFRAID
TO USE IT!

I fell in love with Moose in the Kitchen years ago. And I am certain you will fall in love with her too. I mean, all you have to do is watch this video and you will sold. For the record, she’s not really a moose. She just plays one on the internet. Her real name is Amber and she’s awesome. ~Ali

Stare blankly at the dollar bill you’ve just been handed. Be informed that it’s not for you, it’s for the girl on stage who’s actually earning it. (Because anyone who can do that with nipple tassles deserves a dollar.) Register your suspicion that the owner of the dollar bill really wants to do it himself but is being a big, fluffy chicken. Be told, “I want to watch you do it.”

Gamely grab the dollar before understanding that he probably expects teeth or cleavage to be involved. Specifically, your teeth or cleavage. Decide you’re not nearly drunk enough for that kind of nonsense and try to fight your way back to the bar for another drink. Weave dangerously as you attempt your first step and admit that you are, in fact, quite drunk enough. Drunk enough to put a dollar in a go-go dancer’s g-string and maybe (maybe) even drunk enough to consider putting that dollar between your pearly white teeth for the dancer to grab in a mercenary tribute to the Male Lesbian Fantasy.

First rule of putting a dollar in a g-string: Don’t approach the stage just as the dancer turns her back. This will leave you standing awkwardly at the foot of the stage, holding a dollar bill, and watching a butt swing back and forth in a proximity that is just a wee bit too close for comfort considering the immense task it is to simply stand up straight. Possibility of passing out headfirst into a go-go dancer’s swinging butt = Too Horrifying To Contemplate.

Wait for her to turn around.

Wait for her to turn around.

Idly contemplate the glitter adorning the swinging butt. Wonder how it got there. Does it come in a spray can? Did she spread it on a chair and sit in it? Do all the chairs backstage have sparkly butt prints?

Wait for her to turn around.

Ages pass and civilizations fall as you wait for her to turn around.

She turns around.

Begin frantically waving the dollar bill. She approaches. You realize that her scanty outfit leaves you with only two choices, as no large corduroy pockets have magically sprouted in her bikini. Wish for large magical corduroy pockets. Drunkenly rubbing her butt in hopes that a genie will emerge and grant you corduroy pockets is a sure sign that far too much vodka has been consumed.

Vow never to drink vodka again. Ever.

She’s waiting for you to give her the dollar. Decide that the gold string on her hip is a good deal safer than going anywhere near the nipple tassles. Gingerly tug the string and shove in the dollar bill.

She graciously winks one large, glitter encrusted eye and says, “Thanks, baby doll.”

Stumble back to your seat and send a quick thanks to the patron saint of Tipping Mostly Naked Girls that you didn’t stumble into her and grab something X-rated or put a dollar bill between your teeth.

Because, really. Do you know where those dollar bills have been?

If you aren’t reading Kerri Anne, you are missing out of one of the blogosphere’s greatest treasures. She’s funny, she’s smart, she uses the word rad and it sounds right, she is a pop-culture junkie, she takes the most breathtaking photos, she brings me to tears when she writes about her dad, she’s just one of the most lovely people on this planet. I love her, even if we disagree re: Shia LaBeouf. ~Ali

The first and last haiku ever written for and about me was penned in fifteen minutes, in the middle of an undergraduate collegiate course
 that was so long it never ceased to inspire me to write during the three hours wherein I should have been paying rapt attention to gods and goddesses, endless illustrations of heavenly jealously, and women who mysteriously became trees to explain a particularly devastating season of drought.

I remember how he was counting syllables on long fingers that matched his long and lean frame one Monday night, Dr. Steiner’s wit and favorite bow tie center-stage. Dr. Steiner noticed, too, and asked him–the rest of us pretending to be studious, aloof–what he was doing. “Counting syllables for a haiku,” he answered honestly and without a moment’s wavering. The professor seemed to
 be momentarily taken aback by his candor; then, his stern and inquisitive look turned into a warm and affectionate
 smile. “OK, then. Proceed.”

Kerri bred the rain,
falling like a crest of waves
washing over me.

He always knew how to charm the professors, even the ones who assumed he was wasting talent, and thus were
 vocally frustrated with him on a daily basis. He laughed off all concern the way he laughed at me 
whenever I told a joke that probably wasn’t as funny as he would lead me to believe it was. He was great for confidence
 boosting, when he wanted to be. He was also great at two-sentence emailing, and lengthy letter-writing. He could always be suffocatingly
 affectionate and present while simultaneously maintaining a noticeable disconnect. It was an interpersonal gift, one as annoying as it was beautiful.

From the moment he met me, he saw me, watched me, studied me. He let his heart dance toward me even while I didn’t know how to talk to him, 
didn’t know how to act around him; he continued to look at me longingly even after I shirked his repetitious and heartfelt 
advances for months. He wrote me more letters than all of my friends and family combined. He wrote them because something reminded him of me. He wrote them to pledge his affection and to ask for second, third, fourth chances. He wrote them to share poetry. He wrote them for no reason.

Every day I received one in the mail, every day a slender hand-written envelope was waiting for me on the table when I returned home for the day, was a better day. Because of him, because of his words.

I never once wrote him back. Not once. I never expressed how grateful I was to know him. How grateful I was to have had his affection, if only for a time, even though I could never return it the way he wanted me to. I never told him how worthy he made me feel, and how I needed his friendship more than I ever realized.

A year earlier he had accepted a teaching position in Middle Of Nowhere, Alaska. Before that trek he had moved back to his hometown, some four and half hours away from mine. Home of tulip farms I had once coveted and still hold in my head fondly, a cherished memory of a favorite day-trip. That day, visiting carefully crafted rows of fauna, I took so many pictures I thought I would never stop developing tulips. Pink, and yellow, orange and red: vibrant tulips showcased their pretty petals on roll after roll of film.

I missed him when he left, like I missed the tulips when I left them. I can’t find any of those original pictures; they were probably lost years ago, but their colors still dance brilliantly in my head whenever I ask them to. So does he.

He mailed our first wedding gift. A bake set off our Target registry. $9.99 plus tax. Was it ironic that years of friendship and curtailed intimacy had led to sheets modeled to perfectly suit cookies I have never been skilled at baking? It probably should have been.

I kept the card to remember who I was in his eyes; I remember how graceful and strong and competent he always saw me, even when I felt like I was perpetually flailing. Dr. Ladish, it read. It made my heart flutter in my chest each time I read it, just like it did the day I opened the bake set I had no intention of really using.

For years after the first time he ever uttered it, before he ever wrote it, I would have fleeting fantasies of acquiring my PhD just to see my name officially written as such, just so I could show him, on letterhead I would mail, and he would laugh, and I would laugh, and we would remember how we smiled at each other the first night we met and there were tulips in both of our eyes.

If you haven’t read Stacy from Apathy Lounge you need to go there NOW. OK, well maybe wait until you’ve read this story first. She’s funny, she’s irreverent, she’s from Texas. Nuf said.
~Shauna

This has been a trying week for the Lounge in so many ways, and I think it most likely that none of those reasons really warrant listing here. That is, unless you count the fact that I live in a house with three PCs ( plus two laptops currently residing in College Station) and a still-new Mac Book Pro, most of which were rendered functionless after my modem/router suffered a technological myocardial infarction. Luckily for me my enterprising husband was able to MacGyvver together the new router with an old (and as yet undiscarded) modem using duct tape and a coathanger and now my old computer–which is hooked up to my printer–is working fine. For the moment. It will not, however, send a signal to my Mac Book.

Oh well. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

It has been a great week and a half back in the work saddle…or it was…until yesterday’s field trip to something called Pizza Ranch which, unlike a friendly Facebook warning someone posted, was–in fact–NOTHING like Chuck E. Cheese. Or a ranch. As a mother of three, I’ve logged a fair number of hours at Mr. Cheese’s fine establishments and I’d like to say right here and now that I would have rather spent an afternoon trapped in Chuck’s ball pit with a case of atomic diarrhea than ever again help herd six classes of fidgety kids through an old rodeo arena filled with more of the same…all of whom were battling the bad accoustics and the sound of their own voices in order to hear a Florence Henderson lookalike talk about wheat germ. Lunch was sponsored by Domino’s Pizza and served with chocolate milk and an ice cream sandwich. I shudder involuntarily for the lactose intolerant among us. Also? The pizza tasted like ass, though that might have been because I was breathing through my mouth inside a building which had been recently vacated by animals of the bovine and equestrian variety. Animals who poop whenever and wherever the mood strikes. Not that I’m judging.

In other news, today’s Cinco de Mayo program at school was pronounced a rousing success, mainly because it featured the volunteer work of parents who mostly don’t participate in the academic lives of their children. Even when we threaten beg ask and say “pretty please” and then send notes home in a language that we don’t speak because they’re not interested in learning ours. Not ever. Not that I’m bitter. There was music and fancy footwork aplenty…sort of like Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance set to mariachi music. And performed while drunk, of course. The last set was executed by elaborately costumed young girls whose choreography consisted mainly of twirling their ruffled skirts and all was going fairly well until one of the younger Frida Kahlos suffered a sudden and heartbreaking wardrobe malfunction of Janet Jackson proportions when her skirt fell off.

Luckily she was wearing pants underneath. The end.

If you don’t know about Poobou, you are truly missing out. She’s a southern girl who is funny as hell. She potty trains, she runs, she listens to Lady Gaga and, ahem, she had an iPad. And if that doesn’t get you pouring through her archives for days, the pictures of her ridiculously cute daughter will.  ~~Ali

Yesterday, I didn’t get up early to exercise before work, so I decided to go for a run in the evening. Dave was picking up Catie from daycare, so I thought I’d squeeze in my workout before dinner. The couch-to-5K workout is only 30 minutes, after all. No biggie, right?

So I set off on my usual route. And it was fine. On my second running interval, I came to an intersection – although, “intersection” seems like the wrong word because it’s really just the place where a residential street meets another residential street; it’s not like there are stoplights or traffic involved. But anyway, since there was a street crossing, the sidewalk dips down a bit as it leads to the road, making the sidewalk accessible for wheelchairs, strollers, etc.

And even though I’ve crossed that particular road a thousand times with no issues before, this time I somehow lost my footing, and I went sprawling into the concrete. I was carrying my iPhone (since it has my couch-to-5K app on it), and in my effort to try to save my iPhone, my elbow took most of the force of the fall. I also managed to skin my wrist, one of my knees, and part of my stomach. (Nothing hotter than skinned belly flab, let me tell you.)

It was a pretty epic wipe-out.

I quickly got up and assessed the damage, saw that I was bleeding from more than one place, and I cursed loudly. (Sorry, neighbors!) I turned off the couch-to-5K app and tried to call Dave to tell him to come pick up his bleeding wife on the side of the road. Alas, his cell phone was off and he didn’t answer the home phone. I knew that likely meant that he was playing outside with Catie, so he wouldn’t be able to hear the phone ring. (I found out later, I guessed correctly.)

So, I had to hobble back home – about 3/4 of a mile from the site of my humiliation – dripping blood on the sidewalk the whole way. I’m sure the people who drove past me were horrified.

And you know, I’m FINE. I am. It’s just some cuts and scrapes, and they’ll heal eventually. But I’m just SO ANGRY about it. I’m mad that I had to cut my run short, and I felt like I was just getting started. I’m mad that this means I probably can’t work out for the next few days, and I’d really been enjoying my workouts. I’m mad that all these scrapes will probably continue to sting and keep me from sleeping well at night.

And on that last note – my elbow was really the worst of all of my injuries. We’re talking several square inches of skin missing. (I’d post a picture, but… no. I don’t need to gross y’all out.) And of course, we don’t have any large gauze bandages and medical tape in the house, because, OF COURSE WE DON’T. Our first aid kid is pretty much limited to a tube of Neosporin and some Hello Kitty band-aids. I knew that when I went to bed, my elbow was going to wake me up every time I moved and it brushed against the sheets.
So, since necessity is the mother of invention, I stuck my arm through one of Catie’s Pull-Ups and used it as a makeshift elbow bandage. It totally worked too! Except when Catie saw me this morning, she got all upset and said, “HEY! That’s mine!!” Well, sorry kid, it’s mine now.

Let’s sum up:
* Knee, wrist, stomach: mild scrapes, should recover quickly.
* Elbow: bad scrape, will take some time to get back to 100%.
* Pride, dignity: damaged beyond repair.
* Gracefulness: never had it in the first damn place.

This was the post that made me fall in love with Allie over at Hyperbole and a Half. This was the post that turned the night of March 15th into the biggest timesuck in the history of me, because it was spent stalking poor Allie’s archives. And then I shared my love with the rest of the Aiming Low team and they were all, “OH MY GOD, I want to hump her a little bit too!” We have good taste in reading material over here, folks. We are honored that Allie agreed to be a part of our Three Day Weekend. We love her, and we know you will too. Also, you will probably want to eat some pie. ~Ali

I love cake. Cake is wonderful. But it is too easy to get caught up in the idea of cake. When you compare the data, it is clear that pie is a better choice.

1. Ability of enjoyment to be sustained over time

The first few mouthfuls of cake are almost magical, but as eating continues, enjoyment drops off precipitously. The enjoyment curve for pie appears to be much more stable over time.

2. Unequal frosting distribution is a problem

Pie exhibits much greater homogeneity than cake. In cake, the highest concentration of awesomeness is found in the frosting. The act of decorating a cake can polarize it and cause a dangerously uneven distribution of frosting, leading to discord and animosity during serving time.

3. Pie appears to contain a greater relative volume of enjoyable substances.

4. Pie is more scientifically versatile:

5. Pie is relevant in a greater variety of situations:

Cake is appropriate in a very limited number of situations, whereas almost any day is a great day to have pie.

6. Cake has much more severe, longer lasting consequences than pie:

UPDATE: It’s too early to tell whether this hybridization is the best idea ever or just dangerous and foolish:

Most likely it will either solve all the problems in the world or end humanity in a hyperglycemic blaze of glory.