And that's the reason not to sleep away your Sunday

There's a lot to be said about the pleasure of sleeping in on the weekends. However, as walking has proved more effort than I am willing to expend this weekend due to the injury I incurred in the beginning hours of Thursday, I've been going to bed early and waking up equally as early. Waking up at 8:30 AM on a Sunday morning gives you a whole lot of time that I am frankly just not accustom to having. While I was going to the bathroom at 8:30AM on Sunday, I noticed how dirty the sink was. So I cleaned it (clearly I'm usually too busy to see that, but early on Sunday, it's totally obvious). Then I went downstairs -- had a mild flashback to trying to get down them on my butt in the late hours of Wednesday -- and noticed how much animal hair was on the steps (not to name names or anything, Sam and Bessie). So I vacuumed them. And since the vacuum was already in-hand, I vacuumed the hallways and rest of the rooms as well.

When I went to go clean out the vacuum, I noticed the trash was full. Now's a good time to take that out. And oh what,  let me grab that box of trash from the bottom of the stairs that has been sitting there for three months.

When I was putting the vacuum away in the pantry, I noticed we had a pile of toilet paper, which I knew would serve a better purpose being stored in the bathroom. So I brought it upstairs. Then I was going to lay down on my bed (you know, cleaning for fifteen minutes really takes a lot out of you), but then I remembered that I couldn't remember the last time I cleaned my sheets, so I stripped my bed and brought them downstairs to do laundry.

Now I have 40 minutes to waste until they'll need to be dried. Mine was well wash up the dishes, right? Yup, and now that all the dishes are gone, it's really obvious how dirty the countertops are. Just going to scrub those off a bit.

And then I was going to be perfectly content to lay on the couch and wait out the rest of the 40 minutes unproductively, but Sam was outside and I remembered how gross our backyard is. Can't say I weedwacked (or weed-walked as we call it in this household), because my dad once weekwacked and weedwacked his leg on accident and I just didn't want to risk that, already having one leg currently being held together with stitches. But I did at least throw out beer cans and cups from our housewarming party (which was in August).

So then the sheets were washed, and another 40 minutes on the clock until they'd be dry. I was going to sit still and watch some more tv, but I recalled how I'll be in and out of the doctors this week for my stitches, and I didn't want them to accidentally vomit into my wound on account of how gross my toenails are. So I nicely trimmed them and repainted them. You are quite welcome doctors.

Once the sheets came out, I made my bed, and was going to take a nap because I had been so busy all day, only to realize that it was but a mere 11:30AM. Hello, all day, I've still got you. And that's the reason not to sleep away your Sunday.

Perks of Having a Work Mom

So I’ve probably mentioned before that I’m one of the youngest employees at work (I can no longer say youngest because we just hired someone younger than me). Sometimes being young means that you lack authority, or it means that no one listens to you, but on the bright side, it puts you in perfect position to have a work mom! And, let me tell you, work moms are great. I started on the same day as one work mom, who would give me advice (not limited to work advice), bring me snacks, remind me about mom-ish things and even bought me lunch or breakfast from time to time.

But what’s even better is having multiple work moms. Everyone chips in to make sure I feel taken care of. And they complement me on my outfits because I’m so in-style, which is actually hilarious because nothing I wear is in style, but I have them fooled because they figure that must be what the kids are wearing these days.

My work moms also understand when I bring in cheetohs or brownies to our monthly breakfast, because "at their age they weren’t cooking either". Off the hook! And yes – I really did bring in brownies and cheetohs before to our breakfast.

Balanced with the fact that my work moms do actually trust me to do my job, and respect me when I am doing my work, being mom-ed is actually endearing. When I was talking about it with another younger co-worker, she said she didn’t like it. I get that they don’t treat anyone else this way, but let’s be honest; my work moms took care of me on my birthday when we barely recognize anyone else’s birthday at all. I’ll take the special treatment.

When Wednesday Bleeds Into Thursday (literally)

Editor's note: This is going to chronicle probably the goriest event that has ever happened to me. Get ready! A perfectly normal Wednesday was wrapping up. I had done some Zumba (poorly, I may add), cooked a chicken-based dinner (extremely typical), watched some television with the roommates, took a shower and lounged in my bed for a bit.

I was ready to go to bed at this point. It had been a long day and my hair had basically finished drying. So, like I do every night of my life, I went over to my closet door, pulled it open and reached up to hang up my towel. Then there was a bang, I look down.

The mirror from the front of the closet door is laying on the ground next to a bloody piece of meat. No wait -- that bloody piece of meat is my leg. I shit you not I saw bone. Huge drops of blood are hitting the floor every second. And huge drops are hitting the rug my mom explicitly told me not to ruin. I knew I had to move off of the rug, but my leg is limpy. I focus in. I absolutely need to go to the emergency room. My roommate next door is asleep already, so I'll crawl to the stairs and call for the one downstairs.

Nope, my leg won't make it. I yell downstairs, "I need to go to the emergency room." Both roommates materialize like they are wizards straight from Hogwarts. Everyone is calm, like we have a prepared emergency response plan. One roommate collects my and her belongings so that we can leave. The other wraps a towel around my leg and goes for gauze and pre-wrap. I sit applying pressure. Not crying. Just planning. I need shoes, id and my insurance card. And a bra. Can't leave the house without a bra.

She comes back with the supplies, and I squeeze the two halves of my leg together, while she applies gauze and then tightly wraps the pre-wrap around my wound. (The next day, I find out that she has experience splinting horse legs, so she was ready to put that skill to use). The other roommate comes back with our to-go supplies. We work out that one goes and one stays to clean the blood. What more can you ask for in a friend than someone who will mop up your pools of blood for you? #BloodSisters

I slide on my butt down the stairs, slip my boat shoes (they ended up being a casualty of the night. The entire left shoe is caked in blood beyond cleaning) on, and we are off. It was a quick drive (thank god) down just a few blocks to the ER. I get dropped off and hop on one leg inside. The greeting nurse takes down all sorts of information, as I internally contemplate whether I should call or text my parents. I decide text, because it's late, and they'll think I'm near death if I call now. Plus, what can they do when they're eight hours away, anyways right?

So then I'm led back to my bed. And then I sit alone, with just the sounds of the EMT's gossiping, the click of the heart rate monitor for the patient to my right and every now and then a squeak of a shoe. And I totally lose my shit. What if it actually broke my bone? Or ripped a muscle? Or it gets infected and they need to amputate? What if they just leave me sitting here to bleed out?

I sob. And sob a bit more. Nurses come and go, but I sit alone sobbing.

Eventually, one comes over and compliments the nice dressing on my wound (thanks, years of horse splinting). I still can't compose myself. They go to get my roommate. No one comes back.

I freak out a bit more. They just wheeled someone away for higher-grade attention.

Then, a lovely, nonchalant nurse comes over. She tells me I'm doing well, ask me how it happened. Then she asked me if I think I could have Ebola, if I was trying to hurt myself or if I was assaulted. All no.

She cracks a few jokes, and my tears subside. Shortly thereafter, I text my other friend and he comes running (more like brisk walking) from his house to the hospital. Once there, I feel much more calm. He's not nervous about all the blood. He handles it. He talks to me and takes my mind off of it.

"You really went big on this one," the nurse muses. "Go big or go home, right?" I quip back. When you're in pain, freaking out, there's nothing like a good wound joke to break the ice. We get some x-rays and praise hallelujah no broken bones, chard's of glass or ripped muscles. While getting hit by a falling mirror is a total unlucky fluke, at least hearing good news like that is calming.

So then begins the time to stitch. My friend snaps a picture (which I swear if he shows that to me before a years time, I will vomit. Not that I actually need the picture to remember how my leg looked. I'll probably carry that image with me to the grave. It looked straight out of a horror film.), and the doctor begins. Oh pain. So much of it.

But damn, do I have a good friend. He talks about nothing for the entire time. He explains his graduate school classes, which meant nothing to me. Except for the real fact that it meant everything to me. He had a midterm the next day, but he chose to help me out when I needed him most, and was able to talk to me enough to distract me from the mangled mess that was my leg.

After a long evening of waiting and stitching, my roommate and I head home. She's GOT to be drained, as she drove our other roommate to the airport at 5:30 that morning. She hates blood, yet still sucked it up and brought me to the hospital. What more can I say other than she's a leg-saver.

I'm spent too, except for the fact that I can't sleep. Maybe it was the drugs they gave me, maybe it was the pain or maybe it was replaying the way my leg looked when it was about to become stuffed chicken. But I was very much awake.

I then decide that I should blog about it (the nurse did say this would make an awesome story), and I should do it immediately before I forget. Right -- because I can forget this trauma so quickly.

So instead of trying to blog about the night at 4am, I roll over, thank god for the three most helpful, amazing people a girl could ask for, and do my best to go to sleep (and waited til daylight to share the gore with you all. Happy Halloween!)

Over or Under

So Cazey discussed his commitment issues in his recent post, In defense of singledom, and it made me reflect on my own commitment style. Generalizing across life in general and not specific to relationships, my commitment issue isn't so much that I don't do it, but that I either way over-do it, or totally under-do it. On the side of over-commitment, I tend to get wicked excited about something and go waaaaay overboard. For example, for little work campaigns, someone may ask if we can support with a tweet or two. Next thing they know, I am committing to weeks of content just because I think it's awesome.

Or, I totally under-commit. I help out with a canned food drive that's a competition pinning all Virginia school alumni chapters against each other. We had a meeting and were discussing the date we'd like to do have it again next year. When we settled on a date, I had this slightly constricting feeling in my throat. What happens if a work commitment comes up that date? What happens if someone comes into town to visit and I'm already busy? What happens if I move out of Richmond? Now I've got this commitment that is just hanging over my head. Now I'm tied down to something that is a really good cause, only four-hours long and minimally difficult, but it feels like a bowling ball of commitment.

And this commitment style also carries over to my general reactions to things, often either way too casual or way too dramatic.

For example, there was a fire in a pot and I casually asked my roommate to grab the pot holders because there was a huge fire inside. She then grabbed the enflamed pot and carried it outside. As it's burning, I'm googling if baking soda or powder can put it out. Then I realize we have a fire extinguisher and we just put out the fire like it's typical. Total under-reaction.

But then there's a bug on the ground and I'm hiding in a different room in the hopes that he'll make an exit on his own time. Over-reaction.

Life is like

Life is like the spaghetti test. You just throw a handful at a wall and see what sticks. Take applying to a job. You write a resume and then send it to anyone who may hopefully read it. Well -- maybe not anyone, but when I was applying pre-graduation, it actually felt like I applied everywhere. I wasn't sure where I wanted to live or what I wanted to do, so that essentially left me applying to anything to which I was somewhat qualified.

Then, one of the noodles stuck to the wall, and I ended up with a social media contracting job in Richmond. And just like a done piece of spaghetti, it eventually fell off the wall. Sadly, that job fell off way too early, but at least I had found a place to live.

It may be the least scientific method to solving problems, but it the spaghetti method works. While you're spraying options everywhere, you'll eventually figure out what it is that you're hoping actually sticks.

The Antithesis of the Megaphone of Media: Social Media

I suspect that social media is popular because it gives everyone a form of expression, regardless of what platform(s) you decide to use. If you're a shutterbug, you've got Instie to play on, if you have half baked quips, you can tweet your heart out, and if you like collecting people, there's Facebook. But what's even better is that every now and then, people take a few moments from self-promotion to respond to other's people inane thoughts. The inspiration of this statement was my dining experience this week. As some of you may remember, I've been fine-dining in jeans and a t-shirt before, so it shouldn't be that shocking that I'd decide to go out to dinner immediately after working out. But then there's a wait, and my two roommates leave me by myself to go pick up one of their credit cards. So now I'm looking slumpy AND alone.

So I take out my phone to look busy, and decide to tweet, "Alone and sweaty @CapitalAleHouse. #LifeIsGood #rva."

Then I put my phone away and people watch a bit. My roommates make it back, and we eventually get a table. We dine on $2 burgers and ginger ale (okay, so the ginger ale was only me). And then we go home.

I hop back on Twitter, like I do most nights before bed. AND THEN I NOTICED THAT CAP ALE RETWEETED AND FAVORITED MY TWEET! Lawd, I was cracking up. I tag people constantly in tweets, and everyone ignores me. Except for the one time I tweet something minimally embarrassing and rather silly. Being listened to is fun.

And I would go as far to say I'm not the only one that thinks so. Part of my job is monitoring our social media accounts, so I run searches multiple times a day with various spellings of our names. And I respond to people that are talking to us or about us. And it usually catches people off guard, and I love it. Most of the time, people appreciate it, but every now and then people are just complaining and not actually looking to engage in conversation with me.

But let's focus on the good: people genuinely seem excited when I reply, favorite or retweet them. They thank me for listening, they throw us a follow, or shout us out. And I like it because it's content I don't have to produce. So let's do that more often: listen. There's a lot of good stuff happening on social media, if only we all actually listened to each other.

What happens in my head when I forget headphones

I typically have three sets of headphones in my work bag. Why? Great question, I don't know either. But somehow none of them were in my bag today, and I was left headphone-less for an entire day at work. Here's exactly what happened in my head throughout the day:

It won't be THAT bad, right? I've forgotten my glasses before and found ways around that (scrolled in so close an old man with glaucoma could read), so I can handle it...yes.

Yes, I can do this. Here we go on our unintentional day of silence.

Phew, it sure is quiet.

Is that me typing so loud? Crap, I sound angry. People probably think I'm mad. Lighter on the keys, girl. Get yourself together.

Oh my gosh, people can actually probably hear me sighing all the time! They're going to think I'm fatigued. Well, I am so that's not that bad...

Wow, it's really quiet. I can't get over how quiet it is. I wonder what people think about all day that don't have music on usually.

Jeez, someone's breathing really loud. No wait -- that's just me again. I clearly have no cubicle decorum.

OH MY GOSH! I MAY HAVE MY HEADPHONES IN MY CAR.

Let me go check. No wait, I'll wait to lunch. Get yourself together, you can do this.

Everyone else sits in silence all day, you can do this.

Phew silence is pretty silent. It's making me tired. I need more coffee. Is three cups of black coffee bad? No, I've read about it and it's not.

Okay, I will definitely get my headphones. This is making me stir crazy. Maybe I can play it really softly and no one will hear it.

Yup, definitely playing it out loud. And it's really loud. I need those headphones.

I don't know how people do this all the time. Screw it...going to get my headphones. I don't need to prove that I can do this to myself. Someone invented headphones for a reason.

Bye silence. Until next time. Oh wait, no-- I hope there isn't a next time.

My First Food Review & It's Fall Themed

I've always wanted to be a food blogger because it combines my two favorite things: food and writing. I even went so far as to sign up as a food blogger from some offer on Craigslist. Shocker that one didn't work out. But I'm not taking no for an answer, so here's my first food review. In celebration of the first week of fall, it's pumpkin flavored.

I'm reviewing Dairy Queen's Pumpkin Pie Blizzard.

So if I were to give this pumpkin blizzard a rating, it would be a one out of five stars. And here are all the reasons why:

• The pumpkin pie is composed of two elements: the pumpkin pie filling and the crust. I know this because that's what a real pumpkin pie consists of. But here's what it tasted like in blizzard form:
  • The crust tasted like, shaped like, looked like, and probably were oyster crackers.
  • And the pumpkin pie filling tasted like (if I had to guess), looked like, and had the exact same consistency of pumpkin baby food.
• So pause while you picture those two elements, wrapped up in some melty vanilla ice cream.
• Then, add in the excessively sour taste of the baby food, coupled with the stale cracker crust, and it's just a depressing combination of food.
• The worst part of the whole experience was that this isn't even what I wanted. They had run out of cookie dough. And they ran out of chocolate ice cream the previous time.
• So clearly it's not meant to be, but let's get back to the most depressing thing about this whole bit:
• I have been trying pumpkin everything lately, except for the fact that everywhere runs out of it. I went to Dunkin Donuts and they ran out of pumpkin flavoring for coffee. Then I went to Starbucks and they ran out of pumpkin scones. So by the time I make it to Dairy Queen and they actually have pumpkin flavored foods, and it's terrible.

But let's be honest, this set-back won't stop me on the quest for pumpkin flavored everything this autumn.

Tis the season: Sweater Weather

As the roommates and I went for a brisk walk last night, we took in what would be the final walk of the summer. And while typically I'd feel upset about the end of summer, this year, I can't but only be a little sad to see the summer sun set. Because autumn is officially here. A time for jeans, plaid (is plaid still a thing, I hope so because I love it), boots, sweaters, scarves and hats. Well, not so much hats because I'm not a hat person, but I like the idea of being able to wear a hat.

I have a special place in my heart for New England falls, but last year's Richmond fall was equally wonderful. And with the plethora of fall-themed activities I have in mind, this autumn will be sure to top it all. Pumpkin flavored everything, carving pumpkins, picking pumpkins, taking pictures next to pumpkins, and thinking about pumpkins only comes second to apple picking, cider drinking and perfect fall weather walks. And changing leaves. And falling leaves. And the scent of fall. There's really nothing better.

Plus, the perfect fall weather means that you don't have to worry about your toes looking good all the time, a headband is an easy way to make your hair look presentable, and if you gain a few extra pounds, who cares? No one is seeing you in a bathing suit anymore.

So if none of that made any sense, I get it. I'm so excited for fall that it's almost impossible to prioritize which reasons are most important.

I hope you all share in my enthusiasm, dive your feet into your boots and enjoy the perfect temperate weather.