Day 4 - Favorite Color(s)

You will now learn two things about me.

1. My ultimate, all-time favorite color is hot pink. (But my favorite combo is pink, red and orange.)

2. My closet is color-organized.

So now you know.

Sunday Funday: Allison's Treasure Chest

I'm not a keeper.

I mean, I am a keeper; I don't keep stuff. Like many of my most lovable qualities, I get that from my mother. I think she's part Amish. She loved coming through our bedrooms regularly with Hefty bags and disappearing with anything that happened to be touching a surface - clothes, toys, homework, children...there used to be eight of us.

So aside from explaining the circumstances to my boyfriend, living for months with only an air mattress, a few clothes, and some paper plates wasn't that odd for me. But I do allow myself one Tupperware bin of random old crap.

Because Sol went home to New York for Thanksgiving, I spent today performing essential Sunday beauty rituals and cleaning my apartment. When I go out of town, he plays video games, shoots guns, and somehow manages to turn his apartment into a frat house. When he goes out of town, I watch chick flicks, eat Hostess cakes and turn my apartment into a salon.

While I waited for my honey and egg mask to soften my skin, my olive oil to condition my hair, and my nail polish to dry, I decided to clean out my junk bin.

You may know I am a bit of a pool shark. It really got going when I was bartending in Portland back in 2003. I joined the APA (American Poolplayers Association) and scored a sweet patch. For my denim jacket, of course.

That same year my coworkers begged me to join their bowling league. I don't think they ever actually let me bowl. I have a sneaking suspicion they needed an extra person.

Yeah I have a pager. What's up.

I guarantee this tape has The Cranberries and/or Sir Mix-A-Lot.

Let's take it back a little further. Now let me just explain that back in the day, my life consisted of exactly two things: breaking swimming records and making A's in school.

Nerd alert...

You're not seeing double. I was in the Academic Spotlight twice. I told the interviewer I was going to be an architect in North Carolina. Yeah, that didn't quite pan out.

Good thing I was also well on my way to being an entrepreneur.

But most of my celebrity has come from my swimming abilities.

You might notice the fine-looking hunk of teenage dude behind me and think, "Wow, I wonder what it would've been like to be a swimmer and hang out with hot, mostly-naked guys all the time?" Yeah, totally not that cool. Most of them were even dorkier than I was, and at 5 a.m. practice, they just smell like morning breath. The last thing you're thinking about is the fact that they're sporting banana hammocks. Also, they shave their legs and armpits several times a year. Point me to the soccer field.

Unfortunately, I was born with chlorine in my blood.

(OMG, Julia, you look so nerdy in this picture.)

So that's about the extent of the contents of my treasure chest, besides some old W-2s from Chili's and a couple of love letters from my mom. Wow, my life is infinitely cooler now.

Asphinctersayswhat

I know "Wayne's World" by heart. Including Garth's Foxy Lady dance.



You're probably asking yourself, "Why hasn't anyone snapped her up yet?" It might be my penchant for devouring french fries in socks and belt. Or my nasty feet. Or my love of onion dip and Jerry Springer. But probably not.

And now that my highly desirable Wayne and Garth knowledge is out on the interwebs, my phone should start ringing off the hook any minute. Aaannnny minute.

My name is Simon. And I like to do drawrings.

So you already know that I am an excellent dancer, singer, scientific genius, and ninja superhero. But you probably didn't know that I'm also kind of a Monet. Not this kind of a Monet...

Like, a real one?

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I totally won the school art contest in fourth grade.

And now I've decided to go back to my artsy-fartsy roots by taking a class at the most prestigious of all local community colleges, Brookhaven. To really get into the mood, I've essentially plastered the walls of my apartment with my pieces (that's art-talk for drawings).

Now, I haven't watermarked any of my pieces (see above for definition)...also they were taken with a crappy cell phone camera...BUT you might want to say you knew me when. Or at least followed my blog.

You love me! You really love me!

Ohmigosh! Warm fuzzies abound! Rad dudette Sasha at Things I Like to Eat (...and Other Nonsense) has given me my very first blog award!

Yes, I hear your cries of "speech, speech!" But sadly friends, my speech was totally ripped off a few years back. Here is exactly what I would have said:



I really still don't know how she got a hold of it.

In the grand tradition of blog awards, I'm passing this award along to some more awesome fellow bloggers:

Rachel at From Muffin Top to Six Pack Abs
Anna at Rooks Rundown
Sara at Sara In Le Petit Village

May the force be with you.

Happy Hands Club

Let's discuss my seemingly endless talent some more.

You probably already know that I'm an expert at The Sprinkler. However, you probably don't know the story of how I honed those mad skills.

Like most little girls, I took dance lessons. I started with ballet, then added tap classes, and eventually I progressed to...jazz. We spent a couple of hours in a second-floor mirrored studio with no air conditioning, practicing to craptastic 70s piano tunes on Mrs. Klagges' busted old record player.

I would typically be wearing something very similar to exactly like this, stirrups and all:

I can assure you, however, that I never did a standing split inside a tree trunk while I was wearing said get-up.

The shoes weren't much better. These are jazz shoes:

And these are tap shoes:

But around age 10, we graduated to high-heeled tap shoes. Which was soooo bad ass. Also, that's the reason I can totally walk so sexy-like in heels now.

Really the best thing about dance class was the location of the dance studio. It was right next door to an old-school candy store. Because I was blessed with my darling little sister, I would "get" to wait around for an hour before my class. Which basically meant that I spent an hour stuffing my face with Sour Patch Kids, Fireballs, Tootsie Rolls, Candy Cigarettes, and anything else that cost less than a dime.

All this tough practice led up to the annual recital, which was, of course, a major deal in Culpeper. It was always held in the high school auditorium (no need to specify, just one in the entire county at the time), which was super exciting for a fifth grader in a unitard and braces.

We wore makeup and itchy sparkly outfits with tutus and chokers:

Mrs. Klagges picked all the music. And let me tell you, it was almost never fair. For example, in 1989, my sister's class danced to this:



We danced to this:



But even though we got screwed with such a lame song, I got a solo. I got to arabesque (or something) myself all over the center stage. I was such a total prima ballerina, bitches.

After the show, my entire family informed me that I had some weird epileptic flutter-finger hands thing going on. Sure enough, upon inspection of the video footage, I took Mrs. Klagges' "soft ballet hands" instructions about 17 steps too far. I don't know what was going on, but those things were twirling and whirling like they were about to detach and take off. It was like I had a baton...but not.

So I quit dance classes after that. Stupid uncontrollably flailing hands.

Take Your Kids to Earth Day: The Musical

Today was both Earth Day and Take Your Kids to Work Day. A friend of mine had the idea that there simply must be a blog topic here.

There is. Kind of. Stay with me.

Back in the late '80s, I was a student at St. Luke's Lutheran School. I think I "graduated" from sixth grade with nine other kids, we wore knee-length dresses and attended chapel every Friday, and when I got busted for cheating on one little spelling quiz during the last week of my last year there, I truly thought (and kind of hoped) I was going to be brutally beaten and then assassinated by a firing squad. When I finally set foot in the public school cafeteria wearing red hairbows in my pigtails in seventh grade, "You down with O.P.P?" being shouted by some 13-year-old was truly music to my ears.

Anyway, back at St. Luke's, we were really into musicals. Not just any musicals, of course. One particular musical that comes to mind was called, "It's Cool in the Furnace."

Here's a sample. (This isn't my school, by the way, but this is pretty much identical to us 25 years ago.)


Now, I don't know why, but I somehow ended up with solos or lead parts in most of these things. Maybe it was because I ooze natural talent. Maybe it was because my mom was a kindergarten teacher at the school. Whatever. In the above musical, I sang a nasally solo about dreams...in a drop-waist diagonal-striped dress with Keds, of course.

In one production, "Androcles and the Lion," I was the rhyme-dropping lion.

One of the productions was some kind of Earth Day thing. We were actually pretty ahead of the times, us St. Luke's Crusaders (uh-huh), considering the holiday has only been around for 40 years now. I won't even go into the countless hours I spent outside with my classmates in the cold, crushing aluminum cans into little discs.

The part I landed in the Earth Day musical was Susie Soda Pop Bottle. Out of curiosity, I looked it up. It seems that "Susie Soda Pop Bottle is a 1950s rock 'n roll girl who loves to dance. She has a very bubbly personality." Well see, here was the thing about that.

Here was what I was wearing:

(Except I said "Soda Pop," of course.)

...plus a dash of...

Yes, I was a giant 10-year-old cheerleading, singing plastic bottle. I didn't want to come out of the bathroom. Once I was coaxed out of hiding, I was far from "bubbly."

So there you go, Grant, that's the best I can do tying kids and Earth Day.

Just because.

I feel like posting three hilarious commercials. It's my blog. So bite me.