enjoying my hump day

i woke up yesterday and was ready to give up. quit. evaporate. it's so damn hot i can't even think and i'm just done.

but as luck would have it, i ended up having the best day. since i'm pretty sure everyone else is getting as sick as i am of baking in this never-ending pre-heating oven, i will kindly pass along to you my plethora of activities yesterday. i highly recommend them all as things to do to get your mind off this:

1.) my brother and i work about 20 feet away from each other, so if i'm ever needing to feed my sweet tooth, i wander down to his office for a handful of marshmallow jelly bellys. yesterday the beans just weren't cutting it. we both needed more and we knew only one thing would do the trick. enter: my personal heaven.

2.) austin farmer's market! it has been so long since i have been to one and i just love the atmosphere of these little local nuggets. the only one during the week is on wednesdays from 4pm to 8pm at the triangle. after my hibiscus-mint tea lemonade (!!), i visited the 5 s ranch and farm booth and bought a pound of vegetables i didn't even know existed.

white squash. i got a great recipe on how to fry them in cornmeal and was also shown how to grill them. are you impressed, little kitchen?!

3.) chedd's! a new eatery in the triangle shopping center where all they serve are grilled cheeses. i'm not too big of a cheese person, but grilled cheese sandys, i can definitely do. the bread is awesome, the cheese flavors and "extras" are too numerous and yummy to count, the outcome is delicious. who would've thought.

4.) 500 days of summer. i think i would've seen g.i. joe: rise of the cobra at this point. anything to get me inside a dark, air-conditioned environment for an hour. but seeing as how g.i. joe doesn't come out until this weekend, i went to a mid-week showing of this cute, kinda corny, rom-com instead. the best part was that wednesdays are matinee-all-day prices at the arbor theater! what a Wink. i'm not going to say anything about the movie, so don't worry, babs. let's just say a VERY special surprise makes a cameo at the very end! and i love hall and oates.

sounds like a pretty fun day, right?! i think i've decided to go on living. and then, wouldn't you know it, it actually poured liquid from the sky this morning. things are looking up.

i have two words for you

pear. shaped.

finally... some awareness!!!

i hope that through this blog you have been enlightened on several different subjects. but no subject more than what the

video below is about. i have been praying for media attention on this matter for years now and am VERY relieved to know

this SERIOUS HEALTH CONCERN is getting proper light shed on it. i speak for myself and those who suffer with me when i

say- THANK YOU, NATALIE MORALES...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

and here is an actual wall street jounal article about it!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124830850199074223.html

i mean, this is kind of funny, right? why didn't the producers do a google search for "cankle" and see this blog pop up?! or what if we did pop up and the nbc intern thought our site was dumb? this could be my strike #2 against nbc morning programming. (strike #1 being ann curry.) one more mis-step and i might have to switch it to saved by the bell re-runs on tbs... or worse... fox and friends. at least that would mean my grandpa and i would always have something to talk about.

soooo, anyhoo...

it just occured to me i have never shared my story of how i came to have:

...cankles.

i was a senior in college, working as a very serious sales girl at scribbles in waco, texas. scribbles, as i'm sure you can tell by the name, was a prestigious stationary company with demanding hours and a lot of responsibility. for instance, in the 2 days a week that i had to go in (for 4 hours), i had to make sure all the displays were dusted and the money added up correctly when we closed. luckily i had this lady to share the burden with me.

so one day, i got there a tad late, and i ran in and abby and i immediately started acting like we were working so our boss wouldn't glare at us, but we were really probably just going over the latest greek life scoop (awesome...) and all of a sudden, abby goes, "um, sarah? what's wrong with your ankle?"

i looked down and my left foot was twice the size as my right and was completely red and tingling!! we kept looking at it and blinking a lot, making sure we weren't just seeing things, and after careful consideration (and pressing our thumbs down on it, only to have the thumbprint STICK), we decided to call the baylor health clinic. i rushed in and surprisingly, they did not tell me it was mono (which was their diagnosis for anyone with any symptom whatsoever)... instead, they basically just said it was nothing and to get over myself.

thankfully, the redness subsided after a day or two, but the swelling did not. we also noticed a small red bump on the side of my ankle, which i then concluded must be a brown recluse spider bite. you see, the night before the revelation at scribbles, i had been traipsing around an open field looking for a rigor mortis corpse for my csi class and all of a sudden, it made sense that it was a bite and the venom would run its course through my bloodstream and my foot would be back to normal in no time.

that was six years ago.

i've been to umpteen different doctors and they all say, "yep. it's swollen alright." but that's it! so after reading the article above and watching the today show video... is my only hope getting cankle liposuction?!?! and the weird thing is that now my other ankle swells sometimes, too. especially after long days in heels. what is the problem here??? bad circulation? genetics? gluten sensitivity? has anyone had to deal with this and found a cure? oh i would just love you forever if you would pass on any helpful information.

so there you have it. you have now read the story of how sem got her cankle. that's five minutes of your life you'll never get back. but you are most welcome.

forever

i heard bobby bones this morning talk about how he had huge "alligator tears" after watching this... i don't know if it's because i miss chris breezy so much or what, but i'm sitting here like a big ol' sobbing reptile now, too. so cute. love it when people are so in love.

Maddie's 1st Mani

got to watch mad pie last night while couple friendships were flourishing over at houston's. em, z, and i played tea set for a good hour... watched some baby einstien... made elephant impersonations til we were blue in the face... read bath books in the bath... and...

gave madyson her first manicure!

look how serious and still she is! as soon as she saw that bottle of pink nail polish, she would barely breathe as we applied it to her tiny tot nails... she was completely concentrating on the situation at hand and even got a kick out of helping us blow them dry. she is a priss pot, period paragraph. aaaaand i love it.

abby and jay, you are welcome for your little surprise this morning :) thanks for letting us come play!! i'm pretty sure fun was had by all...

Really?

Church last night was all about how, unlike early Christians, people in our generation don't think in terms of today being our last day of life, or the last day before Jesus comes back. The whole time the preacher was speaking, I kept thinking... Actually, more than once I have gone to sleep thinking about how I hope hope hope Jesus is coming back tomorrow. And I'm pretty sure most of my friends are sick of me talking about it every time something doesn't go my way or I have to sit through the credits of 'The Hangover' or I get fed up with it being so freaking hot around here.

Well, allow me to start off my Monday saying it once again- Please, LORD, come back soon...

This is what I found while perusing MSN this am.

The beginning of the end, people. The beginning of the end.

lovey dovey

in honor of lovey dovey coming to austin this weekend, i skeezed this sweet little website off her blog. who is lovey dovey, you might ask? weellll, she is friends with my sister and i think she is just adorable and so i'm passing on her blog to you so you can think she's adorable, too. she always posts items of interest- like this jewel above. don't you just love stuff like that?! i could spend the rest of my life downloading cute fonts, coming up with cute sayings, and pasting it onto cute photos. happy friday, kids.

hey janis? great talk.

let's talk about blind dates for a second. as luck would have it, i've actually had to go on a couple of them in my life time... one several years ago at an irving, texas putt-putt course... one pretty recently... and i dread them. but the more i've mulled it over, the more i have concluded that maybe i can take the "blind" out of the equation and just go with: i dread dating new people in general. i think my point of view is best summed up in the words of our old friend baba ganoush...

i, much like the big guy above, get so worked up and feel there is such an immense pressure put on a person while he/she is getting to know "possible suiters" that it honestly gets to the point where it's not even worth it. if it was a business lunch or a random friend dinner or anything other than a date with a stranger/might-as-well-be stranger, where the sole purpose of the meet up is to see if there is an instant love connection... i am down for the count.

so i was talking through this with a friend of mine (who i may/may not pay bi-monthly to help sort myself out) and she informed me that while i might think these vulnerable situations are awkward, most people think it is normal. she, in a very kind and loving and patient way, let me know that just because i think something doesn't necessarily make it truth.

and that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a breakthrough.

without a doubt, i have lived my life based on what goes on in my head. never having the realizations of, "maybe i should think this through more?" or "maybe i should stop that thought?" or "hey genuis, maybe there is a possibility i could be incorrect on this certain subject matter?" who. does. that. this way of thinking and living has clearly limited experiences, not to mention completely shut off some experiences before they even began.

so welcome to the new and improved sem 2.0! along with my it's new to me iphone i received today, i'm also installing a new perspective and way of life. no more closed-ness, only open and breezy, expecting the best and not trusting in my brainwaves alone. not controlling, yet still engaging. totally bril, right?

so in honor of this new found terrority AND america's birthday, here's to locking it up, sno cone stands and letting freedom ring!