quadruple burger

Last night was kind of an odd one for us. It's not unusual that I have a closing shift at the craft store, but it is unusual that I don't have the car as my own. It was handsome husband's day off yesterday and he felt he needed the car all day. Consequently he had to take me to work at 2 and then pick me up again at 9:30. He really had done a lot and had been busy running errands all day so that when he came to get me we were both pretty hungry.

I have a problem about eating at work. Or maybe it stems from my grocery shopping. Either way, we don't have much 'take with you' kind of foods. We've got breakfast cereal and dinner stuff, but not too much in between. I never have been a very good lunch eater, ask my mom, I was her nightmare in high school. I am sure she had visions of me passing out by way of famish every day after lunch hour. I just have a hard time with lunch foods, with sandwiches in particular. Therefore handsome husband has to put his own hands in the fridge and cupboards and put some high-sensored feelers out for lunch foods to take with him. As for me, I go without. I know, don't give me a lecture, I know all about it. I also know all about skipping breakfast, another one of my traits. So you can save it.

Anyways, back to my story. We were both hungry and Steven was telling me about his day, which was a rather distracting process so we missed our I-15 exit. We quickly took the first exit which led us down-town salt lake. And what do you know? There was a Wendy's. I have been craving their new sea-salt fries that are cut with a little bit of the peel still on them deep-fried golden and soft. I am a sucker for potatoes. As most Nancy Drews would be able to conclude by my past post.

We pull up to the window and it takes a little while to order, 'cause let's face it, I am a McDonalds lover of all things fake. Especially the meat that reminds me of the cardboard play stuff I used to have a kid. I know. Don't judge. I don't frequent any other fast-food joint as much as I frequent McDonalds, and even there I always get the same thing. So put in a new environment, expected to just 'order' is quite the decision for me. 'Cause let's face it, not all hamburgers are created equal.

The new guy at the drive-through window saw his chance to do a great selling technique on us when we asked what was on the 'regular hamburger.' He proceeded to tell us not only what was on the regular hamburger, but the double, the triple, and everything with cheese in between. Under my breath I asked if they had a quadruple burger that perhaps he was missing. 'Cause seriously, at the end of a 5 minute list, you don't expect it to stop at triple. By this time you're into the rhythm of it all and want it to keep going to an octuple burger. (that's probably not the right word. Math was never my strong subject) That's all handsome husband heard in that 'under my breath question' and proceeded to order me a quadruple burger. I thought it was for him, until he asked what else I wanted. I was horror stricken. What was I going to do with 4 beef patties and a truckload of garden on top? If this were McDonalds it would be no catastrophe. Their thinner-than-the-eye-can-see and thinner-than-the-tongue-can-taste patties would stack up as 4 no problem to create one regular patty and the garden on top would be small. But Wendy's. No. They cut no corners. Literally.

This was a problem. I had to act fast. We changed our order, but like I said, the drive-through guy was new and never could get that luminous quadruple burger erased from the screen. We had to re-order our order at the paying window when he had someone there to show him how to erase and add and all that. It was a learning experience for us all.

And, may I add, that I still love McDonalds. That double patty was too big for me and I only ate half and all the 'extra stuff' on it was distracting. My all-time favorite will forever be a McDonalds regular hamburger with extra ketchup. I love the diced up onions and the added tang of a little mustard with a couple of pickles thrown on. That there is a good hamburger, nothing distracting about it. Unless it's the wrong season for pickles and the edges are a little chewy. They should really consider slicing their pickes with stripes.

Jo-Jos or bust was a bust

Sometimes a person just needs to carb load. Sometimes a person just craves a seasoned potato dipped in some creamy ranch. And sometimes this craving comes at 10 o'clock at night after watching a movie.

Being the awesome jo-jo hunters that we are, we brainstormed the sketchiest place in Farmington. 'Cause everyone knows that the best jo-jos comes from the shadiest of places. The places where music is playing outside for the enjoyment of those pumping gas, or really for those groups of people who don't fit anywhere else and have to congregate under the eaves of the local pump station. And consequently are the sole reason the place doesn't shut down completely because of their addiction to sipping on rockstars and monsters while lighting a ciggy.

Now, you wonder, is there such a place in Farmington? A country town where sycamore trees reach their branches from the sides of the streets, stretching and meeting in a canopy over the yellow, double-lined tranquility of main. Where side streets have no painted lines and are wide enough for two horse-drawn carriages. Could there be jo-jos in a place like this?

Yes.

We reached the top-stop and didn't waste any time searching the 20x30 ft establishment but went directly to the sleep-deprived tenant. Just looking at him for the 15 seconds we were there it was obvious that he was working 2 jobs, had a wife and a few kids who barely knew him as their father due to him keeping bread in their bellies. But he understood our jo-jo situation. Bless his heart.

We had been correct in our assumption, this local location had jo-jos, but only from 7am-3pm. Not good enough. We needed them now. We checked two other gas stations, neither of them carried them, ever, and the grocery store, which was nearing closing time, and had everything put away. Terrible, terrible, terrible.

After we giggled about the grocery store receipt printer farting out our receipt for soda and chips we got another red box movie and called it a well-done night. Our jo-jo cravings will have to come earlier in the day if we're to find what we need.

Beat the Chub

Looking at Steven yesterday I saw a handsome boy. The boy that I fell in love with, but had always had remodeling projects in mind for. I remembered clearly one weekend that I had gone to Rexburg last summer to spend some time with him and had started bawling when I saw him. See, I had a problem. Being engaged to such a fabulous guy and only being able to talk on the phone for most of our relationship I had a tendency to make him into whatever shape or form I wanted. The voice on the phone was so kind, so strong, so built. And then when I came back to reality and realized I was not engaged to a Joe Montana look-alike, minus the 80's hair, I was an emotional wreck. My own doing, I know. I should have been adding poundage instead of taking it off.

Not joking. I am pretty sure he gained 30 lbs those two semesters we were apart when he was supposed to be losing it as part of the lgn diet plan. For those of you who need to be up-dated, lgn stand for Look Good Naked. Needless to say, I had renovation plans for him even before we were married.

I've done the best I can to make sure that we eat healthy. I mean, my serious downfall is mayonnaise. I can't give the stuff up. Not even a little bit. Luckily Steven doesn't like it, so as I am adding inches upon inches of the white stuff on my hamburgers, pasta salads and egg sandwiches he is carefully not letting the knife touch his side of the meal. But in all honesty, we eat a lot of fresh foods. Which is actually kind of a rotten deal since I have noticed in my frequent grocery trips that number one, fresh foods go bad long before the canned and boxed and frozen stuff and number 2, there aren't as many sales on the fresh stuff. Hamburger Helper and Riceroni on the other hand are always on some big door buster add.

So here I am, right, being the perfect housewife. Cooking dinner every night from scratch and making sure that it is done when Steven gets home so that he doesn't have time to huck a whole bunch of snack food down his gullet before dinner is ready to be consumed. But then he still LOVES going out to eat and has a rabid addiction for Nielsons concrete icecream. I have a hard time saying no, to anything, and so we often got one, or both, of the following a week. I've adapted a little more, but when we first got married I was in denial that I had married someone who loved food so much. I had a hard time dealing. So we had to make a pact. Whatever money Steven spent on food, other than the regular meals, he had to match and I got to spend that money on house decorating stuff. That worked fairly well and now we've come to an agreement of sorts that leaves us both happy. I guess we've both just toned down our wants and now we get along just perfectly. Except for the fact that Steven is still an emotional eater. And still eats more than he probably should. So... we're going to work a little more diligently on this diet thing. Even more fresh fruit and veggies and less consumption of everything. No fats and sweets and a healthy dose of meats and breads. We're going to try a rigorous plan for a month and see what happens. And when I say rigorous, I mean jump on your horse, put your feet in the stirrups and hold on for dear life. Rigorous like give you a stomach ache and wear you out kind of deal.

No more of this 'healthy lifestyle' stuff. It can work for some, and should work for all, but sometimes when you've just been big for so long your body needs a little bit of a wake-up call. A call of 'get this added weight off. Now' I love myself a big guy. Always have. Strong arms and some bulk makes me feel small and safe. Two things every girl wants. I have no problem with big guys. But when things could be changed, and should be for health reasons, I am the first to jump on and throw a whip.

Our new plan also includes 2 hours of working out. They say every human being on the face of the earth should have a hour of exercise a day for health reasons, like maintaining weight. However, for losing weight, that hour should be bumped up to two. Now, the best part of working out for two hours is that you can have some gatorade at the end because your body has lost some essential nutrients. Otherwise gatorade should always be consumed with water so as not to burn anything in your body. I mean, it's not like fertilizer or anything, but really, it kind of is. And if your plant of a body doesn't need it, than yeah, it needs to be dilluted with water. Just some advice from a health minor.

Together, as a team, we are going to beat the chub.

People and their bread

Our landlady is what I would consider to be my newest grandma. She is the sweetest, most ancient, thing I have ever talked to. She was raised in Layton when Hillfield and Antelope (busy roads now with a mall on one and a huge shopping center on the other) were dirt roads and she would watch the cows eat grass along the side of the road while making doll furniture out of sticks and burs. She has lived an adventurous life filled with a lot of character building experiences and she was telling me all about how Farmington used to be. How everyone knew everyone and all their business and was always looking for a way to help out. Sounds like an old movie, right?

Well, what makes her such a sweet heart is that she was raised when there was a regular school bus that left at 3 and another activity bus that left school at 4:30, but that she is so up-to-date on what all is going on around her and while she remembers the good ole days, she's not stuck in them. They're just memories, not something that society should go back to.

I dropped our rent money off after ringing the bell and walking around to the back to leave it under the mat and was turning the key in the car to leave when she opens the door and waves out to me. I always love talking to her, so I was glad that she was home after all. I jumped out of the car and she ushered me in. Her pajamas were strewn around the living room and it reminded me of what I will be like when I am old. If no one is coming over, why be careful about where you get dressed at? She laughed and apologized as she gathered everything up. She had been snoozing in her chair when she heard the doorbell rang and remembered that she had to go to the bathroom. She couldn't very well answer the door doing the potty dance so she used the washroom and caught me just as I was pulling out. This is just the kind of lady she is. So funny.

As I talk to her, the more I realize that our life reaches a peak in the mid 30's early 40's and then we start going back downhill and all the things that we thought we had left behind start coming around again. For instance, today it was dating. I thought I would go on my last date with another guy the day I was engaged to Steven, but I realize, this may not be the case. She was telling me about how a lot of the men she had known in high school or had met some other time in her life were losing their wives. Her first husband has been gone for 10 or so years, and then she remarried just for company's sake. He is also gone at this point, so she's back on the dating market. She was telling me how there's one guy who keeps asking her out and keeps dropping hints about getting married and she just tells him that he needs to find someone else to take care of him 'cause she can only take care of herself. If he ate what she did than he would starve to death and the added fact that if they got married he would pass away within the next five years 'cause she has a running list of putting men in the grave. She said it, not me.

After laughing until tears came out of my eyes we started talking about the new grocery store they have just put in and about the great deals they have and how those deal would compare to the previous existing grocery store etc. etc. She started telling me about this bread that has white chocolate chips baked into it and is ever so good. She kept on raving about it and so I decided to give it a try. After two and a half hours of talking I gave her a hug goodbye and went to get myself some bread. And yes. It is that good. When I got there I bought the last loaf and the bread man said that the bread usually doesn't make it past 12 o'clock before it's sold out. Lucky me. I also bought some strawberries for 98 cents. Sweet deal, even if they're Californian strawberries and don't taste nearly as good as they look.

While I was getting bread the man behind me in line was raving about how good the rolls were. And when I say raving, I mean that he asked the bread man to cut me up a roll so that I could sample it he was so sure that I would love it and buy a million rolls of my own. Must be the bread. People love their bread. Here I was, being advised to buy custom bread twice in one day! The funniest part about this is that when the guy left and the bread man and I were talking about breads he asked if I knew the roll sponsor guy and I had to admit I had no idea who he was. We both laughed, 'cause he was so personable both of us were sure that he knew the other. People and their bread. Too funny.

Got ripples?

I've never had a 'gym membership.' All of my gym goings have happened within the last four years of my life where the gym and pool was attached to my college tuition and to use the most of my money for MY cause I tried to go. Some months were better than others. Frankly, I was a little intimidated by the beefy guys lifting 50 lbs like they were carrying butterflies. So I would stick it to the elliptical to furnish all of my work out needs because that was safe. I got really good at reading with a swaying motion and finished up a lot of homework while sweating out of my palms. Those pages probably still have salt on them.

As I got comfortable with that I began to notice that the upper level gym equipment (the BYU-I gym is a split level gym) were all mechanical weight machines and for some reason they had 'black plague' written all over them, according to the gorilla men downstairs hurling free weights in between shooting the breeze. Something I have gathered from upper-body working out is that there is a lot of sitting time. Or so the pros downstairs showed me. 6 reps and 10 minutes of sitting. Well, those mechanical weights sat up by the cardio stuff and gathered dust until I figured it out. These were the girl machines. These were what made upper-body exercise less intimidating, and therefore less manly.

I went to the counter and gathered up my spray bottle of cleaner and a rag and went to work figuring out this new world. Lucky for me there were pictures on every machine with the muscles that it was supposed to work-out in red. The semester I took anatomy the foreign language of muscles and bones combined with the pictures really clicked with me and I think I even felt one of the muscles that was supposed to be targeted doing what it was supposed to. Meaning, that probably, most of the time, I didn't do enough reps or have enough weight to feel any of the other exercises that I did. But that's 'cause I am a long distance runner. We like endurance more than speed and so weights don't really work out for us so well 'cause we're used to being in the same place for at least a hour at a time instead of going to machine to machine like a bee gathering nectar. My idea of a work-out is a 3 mile run followed by a sudden stop (this is my favorite part, where you can practically see your chest move 'cause your heart is beating so fast and hard and all of a sudden there is no need for so much oxygen and your chest kind of pinches as if the brakes are being hit on a car) and some crunches or push-ups. Sweat running down all pieces of your body, including your legs, where most people don't even know you have pores to sweat out of. Yes. That is a work out. So lifting weights is kind of hard on my attention span. It's a lot of moving when you could be moving out of the gym.

As I mentioned before, my tuition has always payed for my exercising, so when I graduated and found myself left with some tenni-shoes and a paved road I toyed with the idea of getting a gym membership. Maybe at that one place where only girls are allowed so that I wouldn't have any intimidating men. But then there are always the intimidating women. You know the kind. That are already stick thin, and have their pin-straight hair pulled up into a perfect swishy-ponytail that you watch gracefully slide side to side as you are bumping along, your own ponytail bouncing and shaking. Definitely not sliding. Those girls make me want to puke. I mean, it's good that they're exercising for the sake of exercise rather than to lose weight, but the rest of us look like ostriches put on the moon in their environment of comfort.

I know a bargain when I see one and when I heard of exercise for $10 I knew I had met my match. You don't get much cheaper than $10 a month for a gym membership. So I drove the two miles, instead of jogging, and signed up. I thought about signing Steven up, but went against it 'cause I wasn't sure of how often he would use it since he's always so worn out from running at work. I got my swiper card and attached it to my key ring and was all prepared to go by myself the next day. Well, Steven did want to go with me, so we went together, payed $5 for him to get in and went our separate ways to get our sweat build-up.

As I was jogging along I was watching some of the other members and a couple of teenage boys caught my eye. Bless their hearts. They were probably sophomores in high school and probably had big plans on having a 6-pack to show off at the pool with a tan that they will have to get elsewhere. Probably while working on their sweet of a deal jeep or something. Well, one in particular wanted to see some results. As I nonchalantly watching their routine, he would do a few reps and then lift up his shirt, searching for ripples, no doubt. Do a few more reps of something else and test his biceps. I had to stop watching to keep myself from busting a gut. So, word out to all of those who exercise. Anyone got some ripples they want to share with the poor guy?

sold on KSL

I was taking a load of frames up to the cash registers yesterday because every once in awhile we have to hold frames for people. Like group projects where they need 21 of a certain size and color, or in this instance, all of the 20x30 shadow boxes that we had on hand. The customer had already cleaned out the surrounding stores and was still looking for three more. After excusing myself down the isle of crowded craft supplies and kids in shopping carts and moms hmmming and hawwing over if they should choose pink or orange I got called over the speaker to take line one.

"I just moved into my new home and the previous owners left some frames behind. Would you buy them from me?" I had to explain to the customer that we do our own custom frames and that perhaps she could post them on ksl. Well, there were two guys standing in the check-out line and when they heard KSL they perked right up and asked me what someone wanted to sell. When I gave them the answer of 'frames' they promptly asked if there were any 16x24s that she was trying to get rid of.

I was just going to ask when Steven's voice came across the wires, "Bahaha, it's just me." Funny. Not. So then I had to explain to the guys that it was a prank call from my husband, asking me what time I got off work that day. They thought it was hilarious. So I took myself back to the framing counter and the manager was all compliments about my husband. How he was so sweet to ask, "I am looking for a girl named Jessica. Brown hair, cute smile, do you know her?" I then had to tell how he had asked such a ridiculous question, in a woman's voice, when I had answered and we all laughed. A lot.

no holiday hater

I am no holiday hater, but I do have a really hard time decorating for something that is going to be out of style a day later. Namely, Christmas decorations, easter decorations, 4th of july decorations, halloween decorations and depending on how you do it, thanksgiving decorations. No one likes a rosy santa after the 25th. And I never really thought too much about it, but I am finding that the decorations really change the mood of the home and prepare one's mind to think of that of which holiday it is.

I skipped over easter. Bunnies and chicks have never really done it for me... unless they're real and you can hold them for hours on end. And pastels aren't my deal. And candy wrapped in pretty wrappers in the shapes of bunnies or eggs aren't what I enjoy eating. So we basically skipped easter all together. My sweet heart of a mother made sure that Steven and I had easter baskets, but that was the extent of it all. I have decided that I will do what I can for the rest of the holidays this year, but I think what I really need to motivate me is a child. They make everything so much more colorful. There's nothing like the excitement of a youngster to get you excited for something. I do enjoy a good easter egg hunt, but you can't get into one of those without some dirty looks if you don't have a child accessory. So, on the checklist for next easter is a child. And if that is not an option, than we need some sweetly awesome traditions to make this celebration of christ's resurrection a little more party-like. No more of this coming home from church and eating cereal 'cause it's convenient. And no more not bothering to set up some bunnies and jelly-beans. There is no excuse.