So, here is to one year of blogging. One year of making friends in you. One year of thoughts and giggles, and rants, awards, sponsorships and giveaways.

Here is to all the thank yous I owe all of you for your support and love.

Here is to many more.

It ignored me and did what phones do. Glad to see someone around here has a work ethic, because this week I want to crawl in bed with a hot man and a bowl of soup and watch The Golden Girls while I lament about how our bodies break down and it’s not fair that mucus comes out of so many orifices of the body at a rate that is unequal to the rate of liquid I’m putting into my body.

I picked up the phone and saw that it was mom, which was good because I’ve been wanting my mommy for days. I answered and was immediately accosted with the accusation that my son was NOT responding to text messages.

Let this sink in for a minute.

My 9-year old…is not responding…to his grandmother’s text messages.

Now I get to explain why this is a huge deal.

AJ has a cell phone. He’s had one for almost 2 years of a 2 year deal. He does extra chores, beyond his regular ones, to help pay for the $10 his contract costs us every month. He takes his phone with him to his friend’s house and it has come in very handy. His phone has music on it and games and it keeps him from getting too bored.

Recently, Leon and I had made the decision to allow him to have text messaging. He is only allowed to text me and Leon and those who are in his address book. Those people include family and close family friends. He may only text them with their permission and ours. This is a strict rule. He is learning sentence structure and proper communication skills as well as spelling and it seems to be helping.

When I told my mother that AJ was getting unlimited text messaging (to avoid any potential charges and because we have it on a family plan), she groaned. My mother has held out on text messaging for years. In fact, when anyone would mention text messaging, she would groan, glare at us and say “Well, don’t you dare text me. That costs money!”

My mother is not an old woman. She is not yet 50. However, she is incredibly frugal and does not buy anything that is not on sale. She gets angry about how Abercrombie has their name on all of their shirts and that my sister and I do not necessarily share her ideas on thriftiness. She has held out on the peer pressure for text messaging from friends and other family members for ages. My sister and I have begged her to get text messaging for years.

Nope. It wasn’t happening.

3 weeks ago, I mentioned that AJ was getting unlimited messaging and that he would be sending her messages.

Say what you want about the woman, but she’s a devoted NeeNee.

She called last night TICKED that she’s been text messaging AJ like crazy and he won’t text her back.

Love. It’s a funny thing.

Besides being awesome and supporting unknown bloggers, they also do fun things such as giveaways to the faithful readers of said unknown blogs. It is another way of supporting this blog and rewarding the people who spend time here and I am incredibly grateful for their support. As such, I’d like to direct you back to their amazing home page and ask you to give them a whirl.

They are offering a great line of Skinceutical Advanced Brightening products, as well as all of the amazing skincare stuff you love. The Advanced Brightening products are particularly good for damaged skin, as they decrease the effects of that damage as well as protect your skin. If you aren’t using skincare, now is a good time to get started. I can tell the difference in my skin on the days that I use skincare versus the days I don’t. Soap and water isn’t enough, especially with the pollution we encounter daily in the air around us. I’m a fan of even toned skin, as mine tends to be blotchy, and this particular set helps even out the skin tone, as well.

My favorite product in the set is the sunscreen. I hate sunscreen. I hate the way it feels. I hate applying it. I hate having it on my face and stinging my eyes. I actually tried this brand a couple of years ago and it’s the only sunscreen I’ll use on my face because I can apply it with a makeup sponge and it feels like there is nothing there. Ok, enough gushing about the skincare. You want to know about the prize, right?

You don’t have the money to invest in skincare? This is where I come in and SkincareRx.com helps you out. We’re offering a giveaway for my readers! It is the largest prize I have ever offered and I’m thankful to them for sponsoring it. A gift card to SkincareRx.com is up for grabs in the amount of $150! This is NOT just for women. Men have skin, too, that needs protection. Even if you aren’t into your skin, I’m sure you know someone who is. Mother’s Day is coming up. What better gift than a $150 gift card to a great site? It’s pretty easy to enter, too. Here’s what you do:

As the sponsoring blog I will track and validate all entries. So when you post here that you posted or retweeted. I will check to see if you did. The winner MUST provide me with their full name, email address and a mailing address. Those are the rules. If you can’t do it, you can’t win.

How can you enter?

SkinCareRx Giveaway Entries

1) One entry for becoming a fan of SkincareRx on FaceBook
2) One entry for following SkincareRx on Twitter
3) 2 entries for retweeting any one of my tweets about this giveaway
4) 7 Entries for a blog post with a link directed to Skinceuticals Advanced Brightening System. This blog post must have a minimum of 100 words and use the words “SkinCeuticals Advanced Brightening System.”

That’s up to 11 entries! Post here when you have completed all of the entries you’d like to complete and I will keep track of them. The contest will run for 2 weeks and the winner will be posted March 22, 2010. Good luck everyone!

Hat tip to icanhascheezburger.com!

When she decided to start her blog, I was incredibly excited. I love her children desperately and couldn’t wait to hear about her life on a regular basis. She and I don’t get to talk enough and this was a great way for me to stay in touch when we don’t get to talk on the phone. She has awarded me the Sugar Doll award that I now get to pass on to some ladies who make me happy! As part of the award, I have to tell you 10 things you don’t know about me. Eep!

I’m passing the award onto two of the first bloggers I read. I don’t do favoritism, but these two have kept me in stitches for almost a year now, so it’s only fair that I send it their way. So, to Barefoot Foodie and Happy Meals and Happy Hour, thank you for making me so happy. I am passing on the torch. Thanks, again!

10 things you don’t know about me:

1/There are times my eyes look green, even though they are clearly brown. It is because the iris is green surrounded by brown. My mom’s eyes are greenish.

2/I hate to have lotion on the palms of my hands. I hate the way it feels and would rather have nasty, ashy, flakey skin than apply lotion.

3/I also hate to have anything on the pads of my feet. I wear socks almost constantly because we have wood floors in our house.

4/I met Bryan, my male best friend, in my masters degree program. We look like siblings, are both German, brown hair, brown curly haired and grew up 90 minutes apart. There is no way that we know of that we are related. However, we can sit in a room with each other quietly for hours and just chill and be happy. Friendships should all be like that.

5/I can’t grow out my fingernails. I bite them when I’m nervous AND when I’m happy AND when I’m thoughtful. They have no shot.

6/I have played instruments including the flute, piano, trumpet and trombone. I have played none of them very well.

7/I don’t have any tattoos, but I think they are incredibly sexy-hot.

8/When I was little, I had a dream about a house with small pond and a weeping willow tree. I have it in my head and I want to live there someday. I have no doubt it is in the town where I live now, I just have to find it.

9/Fall is my favorite season mainly because the trees in Nashville are amazing in the fall. I love Halloween, I love the scents of the season and I love the way everything seems to come together in the fall.

10/Fart jokes make me laugh. Harder than anything else. But I refuse to fart in front of others. Including my husband.

Now you know WAY too much about me.

We’d moved to a larger room in the back of The Dubliner and our group was gaining people like crazy. By this time, many in the group were inebriated. I was drinking my Coca-Cola (yeah, yeah, I’m drinking caffeine again–I’ll pay for it later) and enjoying the show.

It’s not my job to tell you everything that they did or said. It’s really not fair to them. Truly. They desperately need to be tattled on, but they all have their own blogs and if they can remember, more power to them. What I remember most keenly was our waiter. In an Irish pub, anyone with any kind of European accent sounds Irish. This is particularly true when everyone in the room is inebriated. What happens is that everything is much funnier than it really is.

Because of this situation, when it came to conversing with the waiter, I thought that it was hysterical that he wasn’t really Irish (look, he SOUNDED IRISH–if it looks like a Lucky Charm and walks like a Lucky Charm–yep, I’m kidding and yep, someone is gonna take that personally and yep, someone is gonna call me names). If you’d like to call me sauerkraut, go ahead.

Anyway, I made it my mission to discover the heritage of our waiter. As such, I refused to give him my order until he would disclose. What? I was in Washington. Disclosure is the name of the game. You can’t live there and not carry around your birth certificate, right?

Eventually, he gave it up to me and my friend Sarah that he was English and French. Sarah is French so this was an incredibly delightful conversation that ended with us holding our waiter up for ten minutes while we compared family histories and had a new best friend who was now required to serve all of our food “with love” because it was inevitable that we were somehow related (me being 1/4 English and Sarah being French).

And yes, I required him to say that everything had love in it.

This was much better than the experience we had at a bar later in the week where they wouldn’t allow us in because Caleb’s license had expired and they refused to believe he was over 21 even though he was supporting a full logger beard and it was clearly him on the license. And then when the guy who refused to let us in mouthed off to Caleb and Ben and made the situation ten times worse… Oh, you want to hear about that, too?

It was a long weekend. And I met a girl named Beer.

However, there are times that even the thought of travel isn’t so daunting that I feel like I need to avoid trips. This is especially true when I know that I will see many of my friends and that the people I’m spending time with are those that have similar belief systems to mine. Well, that and I LOVE a good hotel room. Don’t you? All the little soaps and clean towels and beds that are made and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Leon and I had been looking forward to our trip last weekend for months. We were heading to CPAC and it was our first real trip ever without AJ. The plan was to be gone for 5 days and to leave AJ with our friend Bryan. AJ was thrilled because for him this meant: No bedtime, all the soda he could drink, video games and hanging out with the coolest person he knows. For me this meant: coming home to a spoiled child, worrying about whether he was getting enough to eat and wondering if his eyes were going to rot out of his head from playing video games.

I got over it and we went to D.C. There are so many things to blog about and they overrun everything I truly want to say. What this means is that you are going to have to deal with me blogging about it in spurts, as it comes to me, instead of a nice block of cohesive posts.

Washington D.C., from the point of view of someone whose city has little traffic issue, is a beast. I have never had to pay so much money to go such a little distance in my life. I will never, ever live there. Luckily, both Leon and I decided that there will be no politicians in this family. For the first two nights, we stayed outside of the city in a complicated little place called Silver Spring, Maryland. It was full of older homes and streets that are similar to something a 12-year old Sims player might put together. The goal was to make it to the Dubliner in D.C. Even the Jesus phone that our friend Allen had was confused as to how to get there from where we were. The miles of snow piled upon the cars and on the sides of the street didn’t aid in getting us to food any faster.

Remember when I said I don’t travel well and I get angry like the Hulk if things aren’t perfect? I was hungry. And I’d just realized I left my phone charger at home. My driving companions were fearful, but Allen is very laid back and Leon was looking forward to seeing his friends at The Dubliner. I’m pretty certain both of them were ignoring me because I was in the back seat, too, but neither would cop to this.

When we arrived, around 8pm on a Wednesday night, the place was packed. Luckily, a friend of ours thinks ahead and had reserved a whole area for our large group. Unfortunately, the staff at the Dubliner didn’t take us seriously because we had about 5 stools for 20 or so people. This led to copious time at the bar.

Which means no one remembers what happened the rest of the night.

I kid!

Or do I?

To be continued…

Take care of my crops on Farmville.

Read my twitter feed.

Check my email.

Go through my Google Reader.

Eat some chocolate.

Blip some songs.

Instant message.

Call my friends.

Ignore my statistics homework.

Cuddle my pets.

Love on my son.

And not in that order. But don’t think for a minute that those crops on Farmville weren’t taken care of immediately. My watermelons are in top condition, thank you.

A lot of my blogger friends have, at some point, expressed remorse at taking a blogging break due to life events. I’m not that girl. I’m just not. My online life is important to me, but it’s not my only gig. Yet, I understand that there are certain expectations and that maybe I’m not fulfilling them for everyone. It’s cool. I came across a review of my site on my Google Reader (still have over 500 posts to read on that baby). Overall, it was quite complimentary and I wanted to say thank you for that.

To be quite honest, I don’t think anyone buys my blog on Amazon.com to read on their Kindle, but the fact that you would endorse me truly means a lot to me. The fact that you want me to write more means even more. Sometimes people need to be told they are missed to be motivated. I appreciate it.

I’ll see what I can do. Thanks again. You made my day.

Frankly, I knew it was coming. I’ve been a bad girl and I was due. When it came, it came and hit me horribly. Without going into all the details, life came crashing down and the effects are long-lasting and hard. Sickness and horror upon friends and acquaintances, hard times, school frustration, you name it. The business of life has been quite a lot to bear lately.

However, I’ve taken my licks like a woman and not a child and I think that I have just about had enough. Tonight, we’re in the black, karma. In. the. black.

I just went to take a shower. I was stank. Truly. My hair was greasy. I have been inside with the dogs all day due to snow and I just needed to feel clean. I leave tomorrow for a conference and if I don’t shower tonight, my long, thick, wavy hair will never dry in time for me to make my flight. It’s why I take my showers at night unless I want to have a bad 80s perm all day.

After making my way upstairs, I gathered my pajamas and went to the bathroom where I noticed that one of my two major sources of light was out. This wouldn’t be a problem but I needed to shave my legs. I know this is too much information, but bear with me. You have to know this part of the story. I’m 5′11″ and my body is all legs. I need that light to see and, quite frankly, I’d been waiting to shave until the night before the trip so I’d be silky smooth. Ladies, you know what I mean.

With a dubious look to the light, I started the water and figured I’d soldier on. How difficult could shaving be in the semi-dark? I could still see the legs, just not the hair.

This is the part where karma laughs at me loud and long.

We’re all good until the shaving part. I’ve put my conditioner in to set while I shave. With the first stroke, I know I’m in trouble. My blade is dull. It’s the last blade I have left before a trip I’m going on tomorrow and all I have is a dull blade, hairy legs and a dark bathroom. I make the unwise decision that if I shave MORE SLOWLY the blade will still do the work of a sharp blade.

I’m a smart person. This was not a smart moment.

I cannot see the leg, so I shave some areas and not others and then shave over some parts and make then sensitive and tender to touch. Nicks are everywhere.

This is when karma and I become even.

Someone in my house, either the 9-year-old or the 32-year-old, makes the unwitting decision that I need to be put in my place once and for all: They turn the water on. As I’m sliding the dull blade up my leg, yet again, the water goes from luke warm to scalding in about 2 seconds. I jump, the blade skips up my leg and…you can see where this is going.

I still have conditioner in my hair.

I’m hurt.

I’m angry.

And this is not funny.

Eventually the water turns lukewarm and I throw the razor across the bathroom and wash my hair out.

We are even, karma. Even Stevens. Do you hear me? It’s over.

Originally, the tone of this post was going to be about how beautiful and amazing the snow is and about how we only get snow once a year or so and how that is such a shame. I was going to tell you of my amazement and how my mouth dropped open last Friday when it snowed all day long and I felt like I was living in a snow globe and I saw the utter beauty of the snow.

I was going to tell you about how my dogs romped through the snow like puppies, or at least Molly did. The little ones think it’s too cold and have decided to pee in the freaking house instead of being good dogs and going outside. They are so little and the snow was so high and they don’t like falling down into snow. With the exception of Prudence, who has made a pact with the Devil to not fall through snow so she can run through our fence, get out of the yard, run down the street and around the corner and force me to run after her in my pajamas. My neighbors loved that one. Truly.

You were going to hear all about how AJ was mystified and played outside for hours with his friends. How snowmen were plentiful and the children were happy. Instead, AJ played outside a couple of times and proclaimed it “too cold and icy” and has been in the house driving me crazy.

I was going to tell you, with pride, how people in Nashville really aren’t as bad as I’ve led you to believe. I know I’ve complained about how they drive in the rain, but they did so well with the snow! Nope. Everything shut down to the point where the only things open were McDonald’s and the liquor store. Thank goodness. Leon warned me that I “really shouldn’t drive unless I had to” and therefore I have been here. At home. Since Thursday night. Home. Where I have placated myself with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, lots and lots of napping and doing homework. The weather has kept friends away and made me a lot of fun. I have spent an inordinate amount of time looking at online goods and it is to the point where I no longer want anything because I have looked at everything so much that I am already bored with it.

I am not a happy camper. No, Sir. Not this one.

I grew up in Illinois. This piddly amount of snow and ice is par for the course. The idea of places shutting down and school being closed for this is crazy to me. I have things to do!

But…

It’s pretty. It’s glimmering, shimmering and shiny! And I’ve missed it. It’s not the snow’s fault that people around here react like we’re all getting smallpox because there is a little snow and ice. For one week a year, I get to pretend that I live in a Winter Wonderland.

It’s worth it.

Those in my life that know me best know that I’m generally quite apathetic on most issues and due to my profession, I support people as to their decisions. With that said, I am adamantly pro-life for many personal reasons and many well thought out ones. As a humanist, a scientist, a mother, a woman, a friend, a social science major and someone who cares deeply for others…I can be nothing else.

My husband wrote a post today, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I’m linking it here. My personal whys will remain unsaid… Sometimes it is better that way.

In Memoriam

Really, there are other things going on and school is starting up again, which means I’ll be back and blogging. Not even the top 10? Pshaw.

People from Tennessee do not share this sentiment with me.

In fact, I would say that the term that applies to the fine folks here is “scared to death of snow and ice.” Last night, before a single flake of snow had fallen or flurried, the mere thought of snow had schools cancelled. This is how it has been here for the duration of the time I’ve lived here.

Schools have been cancelled tomorrow due to the threat of refreezing. Logically, I understand this. There are plenty of winding roads and hills and valleys here. Buses cannot safely travel them and if you can’t get kids to school safely, school should be cancelled.

What I don’t understand is the mad rush to the grocery stores to buy necessities? At most, the snow will last one day. I don’t know of anyone that doesn’t have a days worth of food in their home. Those that don’t have food don’t have the funds to mad rush Kroger.

When I lived in rural Arkansas, storms knocked the power out for days and it couldn’t be restored. They had a genuine reason for fear. In the Metro Nashville and surrounding areas, we generally don’t experience this phenomenon.

I’m not knocking my TN folks. I love living here and the people are second to none. I’ve just lived in different conditions. We’d go to school in 6 inches of snow. Teenagers, myself included, drove in it. Nothing was canceled and even when there was little heat in the schools, we went. No, I didn’t walk in 3 feet of it, smart alecks. But we did have the old school radiators and it was cold!

I just think it’s kind of…wimpy.

There. I said it. I think it’s wimpy.

I want enough snow to make forts like we used to when I was a kid and lived across from a church. They would plow the church and the entire small neighborhood would choose a side of the plowed area, dig into it and we’d have serious snowball fights. We’d sled down the 8-10 foot forts for hours. When we were done, we’d go into the house, have some hot chocolate, warm up, and be back out within the hour.

As I got older, and had older friends, we took it to the next level. There were bigger sleds and bigger hills at the park. One friend had a house in a rural setting and four, yes four, of us went down a hill at a time. I remember being between Rich and Chad and the sled tilting as we crashed into trees. I had a huge scrape on my cheek, but I couldn’t stop laughing.

Or Dave and I power sledding down what we thought was snow, but was really ice on the largest hill in the park. That was a huge mistake.

Or James and I attempting to snowboard down the hill behind his house and me biting it and vowing that I would never faceplant again because I was “never doing this crap snowboarding” again.

Or Jenny and Rachael throwing snowballs at me while I tried to get in the fort more quickly.

Or Olivia sprinkling Reindeer food on the snow so Santa would come.

Yes, please let it snow. I want my son to have memories like mine, too. Even if it’s just 2 inches of snow to make angels in or some flurries.

A new year can be a blessing or a curse. For some of us, myself included, a new year is a chance to white the slate clean and start anew. A time for cleaning out the old issues and opening doors to something new seems to be a fresh start in what feels like a time of old hat dilemmas. In the last year, loved ones have been lost, children have been added, jobs have been lost/gained/relost/regained, personal misfortunes have been overwhelming and the kindness and generosity of others has been a beacon of light for those who are feeling lost.

This year, I wish for kindness. For all of you. In whatever form you may find it.