Disappointment - "Green"-style

Recently, I had mouth surgery and so my eating choices and methods are severly limited, so I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to enjoy the special treat from McDonalds that only comes around once a year - in March..........THE SHAMROCK SHAKE!


I was looking forward to this minty delight for about a week before I made it to the McDonalds by my house (where Maggie got her first ice cream cone!). I even went into the store (not the drive-thru) to enjoy my special treat since I cannot drink with a straw right now and I knew I would have to eat it with a spoon this time.


So, I walked confidently up to the counter and ordered "a small shamrock shake," please. The girl looked at me like I was from another planet! She had NEVER HEARD OF A SHAMROCK SHAKE!! This is a travesty - total outrage! What?!?!?

Planning Ahead

I have been a "planner" all my life - very Type-A personality. It just comes naturally and to me, it brings order to the chaos of the world. I know that not everyone is like me and that's a good thing! We need both Type A and Type B people in this world.

However, I find it both amusing and somewhat annoying that Type B'ers have made fun of my organizational skills, style and habits all my life (in good fun)......but yet they don't mind reaping the benefits of things that affect them being taken care of or their needs being met. Take, for instance, packing for a group trip. I am a person who plans for a lot of "what-if's" - multiple styles of clothes for all types of weather, comfy and dressy shoes, books to read if I'm bored, batteries, etc. I err on the side of being 'over-prepared' rather than 'under-prepared'. That's just my preference and instinct, but I know others are more of the fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants kind of people and figure that whatever they forget to pack, they can buy or borrow at their destination.

All of this is well and good, but it seems that those people give people like me crap for overpacking or being very cautious, but then when they forgot a nail file, Advil, extra socks, a blow dryer, a safety pin, etc.........who do they turn to? People like me. We become a post office (because we actually go and buy stamps so that we have them when we need them), a convenient store, a first aid kit, and a salon all in one for the Type B-ers. Why would they ever change their ways when they have the Type A-ers around?!

I don't mind helping people out most of the time, but sometimes it just gets on my nerves that they just 'don't feel like' taking the time to plan or think ahead....but then just expect that I will have everything they need and I won't mind lugging it all around AND taking crap for packing heavy.....

Thoughts??

PS - This 100% DOES NOT apply to visitors coming down to Texas - since they are coming to my house and the whole thing where airlines are charging for luggage, etc., I absolutely want them to pack as light as they feel comfortable with to avoid that ridiculous cost. This post is about traveling as a group or just life in general.

PASSIONate Kisses

A friend of mine had a quote on his Facebook page recently, and it really struck me. It is about living with passion and having a feeling about things, rather than indifference.

Here it is:

"An expressed feeling, positive or negative, trumps indifference."

I guess because I am a very passionate person, I just don't understand people who aren't. I don't think there's anything wrong with all of us being different and on different places on the 'passion spectrum', but I have a hard time relating to people who are indifferent or do not show/express true passion about anything.

Even if a person's passion is, for instance, cats. I do not particularily like cats all that much - primarily because I am allergic to them, so they represent discomfort. I am definitely a dog person, but I can TOTALLY respect people who are passionate about cats because I am equally passionate about dogs (especially cute wiener dogs!). Get where I'm going with this one?

I might be on the more extreme end of the spectrum (really?? No, that couldn't be... hahaha) and so when I love something/someone, I REALLY LOVE them. For instance, I LOVE the color red, dill pickles, my wiener dog Maggie, massages, Texas, Europe, etc. I ABSOLUTELY am passionate about loving those things. But in the past, I have talked to people who don't seem to have passion for anything in particular - not even just different passions than my own. I DON'T GET IT!

Thoughts????

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines!

Another adventure that Beth, Stacie and I went on during their recent visit was a tour of Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth. Stacie is a big NASCAR fan, so she was all about this tour, and Beth was not so much in favor of the tour and I was somewhere in between the two. I am not an avid fan and I don't have a favorite driver, but I'm a tourist and I love tours of cool places, so I was TOTALLY game! Beth took one for the team and was a trooper. :)

We were supposed to get to take a few laps around the track (in the tour van) as part of the tour.....but alas, there was a Richard Petty Driving Experience event going on, so only professional drivers were allowed on the track. DANG! Oh well - it made for some great photo ops with all the cars coming and going in and out of pit row.

This is a shot looking down the cement wall in pit row - separating the drivers/cars from the pit crew:

This is the inside of pit row - where all of the crew would be with the extra tires, fuel, etc. I guess the rule is that they have to be totally contained between the blue line and the white cement wall during the race.

Here's a picture of their "gas station" on the inside of the track - where the pit crews fill up their gas containers to bring over to pit row. It was so weird to see this - I just figured it would be something more technical - just looked like a regular Sunoco station that they dropped in the middle of a massive racetrack! Of course, the fuel is much higher octane than a regular gas station....

Here are some cars getting ready to take off from the starting line - part of the Richard Petty Driving Experience (you get to be driven around the track by a professional driver at high speeds):

This is when I love the 10x optical zoom on my camera! Here's a shot of the dash in a car that was just about to take off:

That big tower thing shows who is in what place as the laps go by......

And down in Victory Lane, I noticed that the stones on the ground were weird shaped....and then I figured it out - they are made specially in the shape of Texas - the tour guide confirmed it!

As part of the tour, we got to go up into a suite and look down on the track - this place is MASSIVE!! I just never realized how BIG the track is - TV doesn't do it justice AT ALL!

That little area in the middle with the stripes is Victory Lane (with the Texas shaped stones!):

Here is the finish line (and look how fabulous that grass looks - I need the name of their landscaper!):

When I first looked out from this suite, I thought the track was the small ring around the pretty grass, but that's just a tiny inner track - the main track goes all the way out to that big black long building in the back of the picture!

Our tour guide said that they made a huge mistake once and decided to hold an Aerosmith concert here and they had more than 600,000 people at the racetrack! It was insane trying to get out of there, and the bathroom situation was precarious to say the least. He said that days after the concert, they had little kids that were still there, lost and separated from their parents! And the layer of garbage on the ground was feet thick! NASTY!!

And a close-up of the flag guy waving the green!

Here's a side view out of the suite - they are about a million times bigger than the suites at the old Texas Stadium (where the Cowboys play). VERY NICE.

And of course, the necessary evil......PARKING! This is a view from the upper level of the building that holds the suites out onto a MASSIVE parking area for cars & RV's - it goes all the way back to the horizon line in the picture - past all of that grassy area and then some. Just incredible......

Kitchen in RED

Over the past week, I have been slowly transforming my kitchen from plain white to BOLD RED! I was originally going to hire people to paint the interior of my house, but after Beth & Stacie's visit, I decided to do most of it myself and save the money for countertops! They motivated me and made me believe I could really do it on my own.....and they were right! I'm definitely a novice at house painting, but I learned as I went and I did it all myself!

The kitchen was a hard room to start with - lots of moving appliances, lots of outlets, nooks and crannies, windows, blinds, return air vent, etc. So that just means that it gets easier from here, right? It took 2 coats of the bold red color ("Caliente") and I LOVE it!

Here are the "BEFORE" pics from this past year:

And here are the "AFTER" pics! I still need to go and get window treatments/curtains, but that will happen sometime later this year when I do them for the whole house after all rooms are painted...

Maggie was pretty well-behaved around all of the paint (especially considering she is baby-gated into the kitchen whenever I'm not home - she was probably high from the smell!). She only had a little bit on her right ear by the time I was done - pretty impressive! She got a bath last night and we removed the remnants of the red paint. :)

What's In A Lipstick??

During Beth & Stacie's visit, we decided go to Dallas and tour Mary Kay's manufacturing plant. On their website, it described the tour and it sounded very interesting (on 'the line', they call lipsticks "bullets" because they look like bullets......but we didn't get to see any on our tour) and I will admit - I'm a 'tour junkie'!

It was very interesting to see the other side of the make-up world - the more industrial side. Here is a worker getting a 'batch' ready for the mixers. They have a special area in their warehouse that is for measuring out ingredients. If they are going to make foundation, they will measure out each ingredient for that batch of foundation and then put it all on a pallet for that production cycle. Here's a picture of a worker taping up a pallet of all of the ingredients for a batch of lotion:

Here is the label on a big barrel of "work-in-progress" Day Lotion w/SPF 15!

They have laboratories in the plant where scientists take samples of each batch and test it chemically to make sure it's uniform with their standards.

And if you ever wondered how mascara is made....at Mary Kay, machines fill the mascara tubes, but an actual person sticks the brush/applicator into each tube manually (see below)!

And here is the end of the mascara line - they are coming out of the 'boxing machine' and are being put into packages to ship out.

Here is the cologne department - they are filling perfume bottles and they are manually screwing on the sprayer caps just to the right of where this picture was taken.

Here is a picture of the pump-putter-iner machine with some sort of lotion/moisturizer bottles!

This is Stacie, Beth & I by the foundation vats!

Some finished product moisturizer - straight off the assembly line!

One of the most annoying/hilarious parts of the tour was a renegade beauty consultant named Janet Jones that basically was SOOOO obnoxiously excited about the product and the company that I thought she might actually explode from her enthusiasm! Now, when you think of Mary Kay beauty consultants, you usually picture women that are dressed to the nines and totally made up perfectly with Mary Kay products, right? Well, this woman was very odd personality-wise, but on top of that, she literally had NO makeup on, hadn't combed her hair (Beth coined her 'hairstyle' as a 'rooster tail'), was wearing casual clothes with a floor-length black wool coat, along with royal blue/black WATER SHOES! Yes, I'm serious, AQUA SHOES! REALLY?! After the tour, we couldn't stop talking about crazy Janet Jones - it was absolutely hilarious!