In celebration of the Chinese New Year Valentine’s Day I decided to stay completely OFFLINE for the weekend because I just about can’t even take the ridiculous amount of posts, pictures and updates that people write. I mean it, people. Some of you are downright jerks with all that noise. “Oh, I was spoiled rotten with a seven course meal” and “Jacob is the man of my dreams and he finally bought me that condo I’ve been wanting in the Carribean!” and “Woke up to crepes and espresso and then my hubby sent me to the spa for every imaginable service!” Quite frankly, I want to wring their necks for taking pictures of crap and posting it.

That’s probably why I’ve always loved Hilly’s idea of a Self Love Day.

Except I decided not to do one again this year due to time constraints and a full house over the weekend. Even though it wouldn’t be considered “traditional”, I had a pretty good day, too. Take that, filet mignon and lobster eaters!

7:30 a.m. woke up with a migraine headache. Fingers were swollen. Made the assumption that I needed to drink more water today.

8:00 a.m. did my normal Sunday routine of watching CBS Sunday Morning, reading Post Secret, and entering to win the HGTV house. I enter every day, actually. Because that house? With all it’s amenities and the green living lifestyle and being out in the desert where I can actually breathe easily? It should be mine. I want it to be mine. I love that house and have already named it but I won’t tell you the name unless I win the house.

9:00 a.m. pushed on my temples and wished for the Pancake Fairy to visit so I could feed my sons and my sister and her son and his friend from college. Lucked out and got an awesome sister who took everyone out for breakfast.

10:00 a.m. heard from my sweet Valentine that he wanted to come over and cook for me in the new deep fryer he bought. I won’t tell you his name either. Not unless I win that house. Decided to take the migraine medicine after all because what I was doing was NOT working.

The rest of the day was spent at a cheerleading competition my niece was in and let me say, there’s nothing like getting rid of a migraine and going to a convention center where thousands of girls are screaming and stomping their feet and clapping and squealing and MY GOD, THEY ARE LOUD. They are also weepy. Lots and lots of crying. Oh, and fake hair pieces. Those curly snap on pieces that look incredibly silly bouncing on top of their heads. Somewhere around 4:15 p.m. I wished for the Pancake Fairy to wrap me up in a giant pancake so the sound would be muffled. When it was all said and done we came home where my sweet Valentine and my son decided to deep fry a Twinkie. I’m not even kidding. They got Twinkies and Snickers and Mounds candy bars and deep fried the hell out of that stuff. Then we settled in to watch that graphic masterpiece Inglourious Basterds because hey! I’d already spent the day with screaming teens and artery clogging goodness and why not?

Who needs the Pancake Fairy on Valentine’s Day anyway? I had migraines and deep fried Twinkies and a sweet Valentine who spent the day with my family.

You’ve gotta be a little bit crazy to do all that.

I was waiting for this.

Not really all that safe for work. You know, the work that the men in the Dodge commercial were sooooo upset about going to for fear that they’d be, like, responsible or something.

Well, I’ve just gotten over quite the hot wing hangover. All I have to say is that the next time I say, “No, let’s not BUY PRE-MADE stuff for the Super Bowl Party. Let’s do it all from scratch!” then someone needs to stop me. Because there’s a new fryer in the house and the biggest jug of canola oil I’ve ever seen. Does some small country want to use the rest of it? I have plenty left over. But there are a few things I’ve learned about making hot wings and they are as follows:

1. Do a salt-soak marinade. Do this accidentally the first time and then by the time you get to batch four you’re all THESE ARE THE BEST BATCH YET but you can’t even speak those words. They are spoken in your head as you have two thoughts going on at once: one, about the best batch yet and two, about how your stomach ‘feels funny’ because you haven’t bothered to put a vegetable in it for the entirety of the day.

2. Don’t screw around with fake hot sauce or bourgeois hoity toity crap you get from a gourmet place. Hot sauce. From Louisiana. Otherwise? You’re doing it wrong.

3. Crispy wings is the key. So is butter. Butter is the key to so very many things in life. Crisp up the wings, mix up the sauce (with butter) and then put them in a frying pan with more butter and cover each individual wing with the sauce.

4. Cure cancer. You just might do that with this little magical recipe. Wouldn’t that be grand?

One of my new apps for my phone is the Hipstamatic. I blame listening to other people wax poetic about their apps for buying this one. It’s just retro photography stuff. I took this picture this morning of my back patio covered in snow. Kinda weird and freaky looking colors, but I like it.

So! This year for the game I actually watched it and paid attention. DO YOU HEAR THAT, ADVERTISING JERKS? I’m not at all thrilled with the ignorance with which the commercials were played nor was I happy with their lameness. LAME. I got up more times to check on the hot wings than I cared to stick around to find out why some football player I’d never heard of wanted to throw a thinly veiled opinion about my healthcare out there.

Mallory is a Colts fan. It’s weird, but she comes by it honestly. Her boyfriend is a Colts fan. So, naturally, when she’s home on a Saturday and there is a Colts game on, we’re watching it.  In any case, I was enough of a fan to be paying attention to the game that it’s taken me 25 years to understand. Because I now understand it I make up fully one-third of all football fans. I’m pretty sure the NFL knows this data, but can someone send that information over to the neanderthals in marketing? Anyway, this was a particularly difficult game to watch because my family are New Orleanians. (Is that the word? Or am I just supposed to call them ‘heathens’?) (Ha! Ha! I joke!) (No, really. I have to put that in there. My family owns guns and I shouldn’t joke about them.)

Speaking of owning guns, I sorta wished I did so that I could shoot the person responsible for that horrid Dodge commercial during the Super Bowl. I wouldn’t hurt them, because I’m not a violent person, but I would surely shoot them in the buttocks a la Forrest Gump for this. The best roundup of the ads was on Salon and I particularly liked this description of the that purposefully emasculating ad:

“I will shave. I will clean the sink after I shave. I will be at work at 8 a.m. I will be quiet when you don’t want to hear me say no. I will take your call. I will listen to your opinion of my friends. I will put the seat down. I will carry your lip balm.” Oh you will, asshole? Wow, I didn’t realize being a grown-up was soooo challenging. And as you glumly stare at the camera until your eyeballs look like they’re about to explode, all you demand is that you can zoom around to some fucking James Bond music in your dumb Dodge as you boldly take “Man’s! Last! Stand!” Way to stick it to us. The Charger: delusional masculinity’s reward for having to put the toilet seat down.

Oh, and have you read Margaret and Helen this week? Simply delicious. I should have snacked on that instead of 52 hot wings.

It was more like 58. Or 15,000. It was a lot.

I’m embarrassed to admit something: I haven’t updated my laptop in a year. Yes. A whole year. That’s because I would try to do the normal, daily work things on it and I could function. I haven’t updated to the newest email for work. My iTunes was frigging ANCIENT and my version of Safari and Firefox would no longer let me watch any videos on Hulu because it was so badly dated. So this weekend, after learning how to do it myself and not having to take it into the computer services division at work (have I mentioned that I don’t own my own laptop except for the one I got when doing the giveaway and that basically my children have absconded with it to their loft upstairs and that I rarely see it?) I finally got an upgrade.

Beyonce’s song about upgrading was in my head.

I was giddy with joy.

It occurred to me that I might think about trying to do some videos and maybe a vlog for my Beauty Hacks series for my articles at BlogHer (stay tuned, I have an article to get published this week!).

Me! Finally, in this century! With all the other geeks!

It was so exciting that I got online and did one.

And it ended up looking like something that could be used for a tampon commercial.

I deleted it.

I will never publish that sucker.

And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go back to living in the dark ages where I chisel messages into rocks.

The messages are not about tampons. So shut up, y’all.

SUPER RE-TARDO

Growing up, we weren’t allowed to say the word “retard” or even “shut up”. Repressive Catholic parenting did that to me but we also never talked about sex and we all know where that lead. In any case, the other day I was at the store and these two brothers were fighting and arguing and punching each other in the side of the head and one of them called the other a “Super Retardo” and then the mom laughed and stopped scolding them and they pretended to wear capes and become some strange sort of super hero and then I laughed along with them and the mom gave me this warm smile that said, “Aren’t they cute? And don’t you kind of want to take them home with YOU instead so that I don’t have to wonder about what kind of missile range it would take to pick them off from afar?”

At least that’s how I interpreted it. In my own superheroiness (Jaysus! That’s not a word AT ALL and my English Lit. degree betrays me more and more!) this week I’ve made some observations:

1. I had to kill a mouse with my bare hands. By “bare hands” I mean wearing gloves and putting it in a plastic bag and slamming it on the ground to put it out of its misery. This was enough scarring to my soul that I went and put a ten dollar bill in a jar that I use for therapy.

2. The guy at the front desk at my work sounds just like Matthew McConaughey every time he answers the phone. It’s bizarre and wildly entertaining to call him to for ridiculous things like, “Did I leave my pen at your desk?” or “Are you Team Jacob or Team Edward or Team Shirtless?” You know who else does a mean impersonation of Matthew McConaughey? Matt Damon.  

3. My Christmas shopping was finished in two days. I’m online-shopper-ninja-like that way. But I did have to go to Target for some things and realized that I couldn’t pay my $300 bill because I hit my limit for debit that day so I left the store, went to the bank to get cash, and returned where I decided to park right in front of the store because, yes, sometimes I am that jerk and I had my limit with stupid people that day anyway. It’s possible and even probable that I stuck out my tongue at a few drivers when I did it, too. Yes. Totally probable. Also probable: excessive use of the eff word.

4. You know what doesn’t get old? Ross the Intern. Who is no longer Ross the Fat Intern, but Ross the Skinny Guy With His Own Show. Also? This doesn’t get old. It’s my favorite video of him. All day now I’ll be saying, “Pineapple! Pineapple! I’m not kidding!”

5. My Christmas present wrapping is the shit. No lie. So long as you don’t worry about how crooked the lines are underneath all that stuff. The more bows on a present the more I am trying to distract you from my wrapping skills. 

BONUS: There is a Christmas song on the radio that uses the words “baby momma” in it. If there were a Super Re-Tardo award I would bestow it on that idiot. CHRIST, PEOPLE. Ok, so admittedly, Joseph had a baby momma but it came after the birth of Jesus. You know why he weeps? He weeps for horrid Christmas songs that glorify the ghetto, folks.