Slammin' with Sam

A little while back I was ranting about the Immigration Law in Arizona to Brent.  That made me rant about more and more and more until I'm sure my face was super red and veins were sticking out on my forehead.  I told Brent I was going to start doing "Slammin' with Sam" on our blog every now and then so I can rant about stuff that pisses me off or gets on my nerves and he doesn't have to hear about it.  I figured I'll say a few things that bug me and then I'll give a Slammi award to something that REALLY annoys me.  I'll try to keep my offensiveness to a minimum and the really un-politically correct things I'll make sure I only share vocally so no one can hold it against me in writing.  So here we go (and yes I'm in the mood to vent).

-Unflushed public toilets.  Oh I'm sorry.  I didn't realize it was so hard to lift your foot off the floor and push down on the handle to flush it.  Don't worry about the person that uses the stall after you.  I don't mind seeing whatever surprise you left in the toilet and then cleaning up after you so I can use the bathroom. 

-Story toppers.  I can be pretty shy (especially in crowds) and it takes a lot for me to tell a story.  So it seriously pisses me off when I start getting in to one and there is a story topper around. 
Sam: "So the other day I went to the Mariner game the coolest thing happened.  This guy started to..."
Rude interrupting story topper (in a much louder, look at me, I want attention voice): "Oh my goodness!!!!!  I can't BELIEVE I forgot to tell you guys this!  The other day I bought stock in the Mariner team and now I'm a part owner!!!! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?!?!?!"
Not only do I not believe it, I don't care.  So go away and stop talking over my story.

-When people lick their fingers and touch a paper they're going to give to me.  Come on now.  How hard is it to separate two pieces of paper?  I do not want your saliva and germs covering the paper I'm going to read.  Not only do I have to make sure my fingers don't get within 6 inches of that spot, I have to make sure Brent's fingers don't go near there either, if he's going to be reading it after me.  If you really have that hard of time with paper, maybe you should be handing out something that's easier to separate and leave that job to the professionals.

And the Slammi Award for the Day goes to:
-People that wear something (a shirt, dress, hat) that is the same color as their hair.  No one drives me as crazy about this as the current Bachelorette. 

When she was on the Bachelor, I swear every single article of clothing she owned was yellow.  IT IS TOO MUCH FREAKING YELLOW with your blonde hair!  You wouldn't wear a yellow shirt with yellow pants (actually, she might).  That would be tacky.  So why is it ok to have your yellow hair hanging all over a yellow dress/shirt??  It's yellow overload!  And Monday's episode was the worst because she had a yellow hat on.  It drove me crazy.  There was actually a joke on 30 Rock about how a character had on red lingerie with her red hair and it was too much red and I freaked out because I have said that forever!  Too much of the same color is not a good thing.  I'm not sure if my hair is considered blonde or brunette right now, so I'm just going to avoid both colors and call it good.

The story of Maggie and Emma

Today is our kitties 4th birthday!  I thought I would share the story of how they ended up in our family.

Our first year and a half of marriage we lived in a little apartment in Provo while I finished college.  For the first eight months I was content being a newlywed and having Brent all to myself.  We were married in May of '05 and the following February of '06 I was offered a great job from a company based in Seattle where I got to work from home.  The first few months were great.  But then I started getting lonely (uh-oh...).  I knew what I needed.  I started craving the pitter patter of little feet, and my beta fish, Lucky, was not cutting it.  I wanted a kitten!  However, my husband said that he would NEVER have a cat.  So I tried to put it in the back of my mind.

By the time August rolled around I was going crazy.  One day I just happened to be perusing the Utah Humane Society website when I saw they were having a special on kittens.  What luck!  Brent happened to have a random Wednesday off for some reason and I buttered him up by suggesting we go to the Jordan River Temple (which happened to be strategically located near the Humane Society).  After the temple I suggested we should go look at all the cute animals.  Brent fell for it that time, but after he learned that "look at the cute animals" means look, find, cuddle, fall in love with and bring one home.  We got there and it was cats galore!  After a few minutes of looking I saw the most adorable kitten I had ever seen.  I took her out of her cage and she snuggled up to Brent (smart kitty).  After a long discussion, talk, disagreement, whining, pouting and extreme happiness we decided that this kitten was going to be our new addition!

We got up to the front to get her and the people reminded me of the deal they had going on.  It was Buy 1 Get 1 FREE!  I quickly remembered the kitten had another brother or sister in the cage with her that had been sleeping.  I walked up to the cage and at the risk of sounding like a bad mother, I know I made a face when I saw the little cat.  We all know Emma is a gorgeous cat and is so sweet and adorable.  But if you are not expecting to see what baby Emma looked like, you would be shocked, too.  Now I REALLY felt like I was saving a cat.  Emma had a really funky head.  And it made her look special.  I was scared no one would want to buy the special kitten.  Plus, who am I to separate two sisters?  So we got Emma, too.  As we were walking out of the Humane Society the lady yelled, "Enjoy your new babies!"  I couldn't wait.

Oh, I forgot to mention the apartment we were living in did NOT allow pets.  100% absolutely no way, no how, no if's and's or but's about it.  People had tried, had gotten caught, and had to get rid of them.  But I'm not someone that likes to be told what to do.  So we got our girls home and had to make a few adjustments to our apartment so we didn't get caught.  First of all we had to move my piano about 3 feet away from the window so the kitties couldn't get on to the window sill.  We could never open the window blinds, because we were scared one of them would jump on the ledge (this caused Emma to crash headfirst, at full speed into our front window at our new house the first time she saw it.  Sorry Emma!) and we had to put blankets down all over our floors to try and pad the little kitty paws running all over the place.  Our neighbors had to suspect something.

We only had a few close calls.  One time they had to paint the door to our apartment. This wouldn't have been a big deal, except for Brent and I were in Vegas that weekend.  So our friends offered to babysit our illegal family members.  The other time still makes me sick to think about.  I was NOT in the mood to go to class that day (that was normal, but I still usually went) and for some reason I decided to skip.  Not 10 minutes into the time I would have been in class we got a knock on the door.  Our apartment manager was there to change the furnace filter.  Lucky for me, I wasn't dressed appropriately to have a guy come in so I said give me a few minutes and come back.  I was freaking out grabbing the litter box, food dish, scratching post and every ball, mouse and fish toy I could find.  I threw everything, along with the kitties, in our bedroom.  He came back and I found out our furnace filter happened to be right next to our bedroom door.  So I sat in front of the door and had to have a completely normal conversation with this guy, while I was silently hoping no crash, meow or little paw sticking out from under the door would give me away.  Somehow, we managed to get away with it.  A couple weeks later we bought our house.  Oh, and Brent saying he'd never have a cat... well, he's still never had A cat :)

I can't believe the kitties are already 4 (and I still can't believe we got away with getting them!).  They have been such a cute addition to our family and we've loved every second of having them.  Happy birthday kitties!!

The actual first picture of Maggie taken at the Humane Society (Brent has his temple tie on to prove where we just were)

Baby Emma.  Enough said.

The grown up, adorable Emma

Grown up Maggie

Maggie's still not a fan of Chip (especially when he's lurking).  But she deals with it

Screw you, stupid jeans

A couple months ago I had surgery that made me gain and lose some crazy lbs (the water weight, bloating, medicine I was on, and the fact that I slacked off on working out a little while before it) and I had to get a new pair of jeans because my old ones were too snug.  Not to mention I am VERY anti-muffin top.  So I had to find a new pair before the sides started creeping over my old jeans. 

Well after everything was said and done I felt gross and wanted to try to get into shape again (and I needed to get out the aggression of my inner she-Hulk).  I've been busting my butt for the last 6 weeks.  The only problem was I've been wearing comfy pants most of the time (housewife perk) and I had no idea how my jeans would fit. 

Today I had to run some errands to I got ready and threw my new jeans on.  What would you know, but the stupid things were snug.  Not snug like, woah there camel toe, but snug like parts of me are becoming more muscular and filling out parts of my pants that had not previously been filled out.  This still really bugged me.  I mean come on, I ran 4 miles yesterday.  I'm not saying that to be like "oh good job me" but who works out like that and their jeans get TIGHTER?!?  Oh, I also refuse to weigh myself because I don't want the number on the scale to have any impact on my self-worth.  So I have no idea what is going on with my annoying body and if anything I'm doing is even helping.

Later after I was changing to get ready to take Chippo for a jog.  I looked down at my jeans and realized I had my old pair on.  Like the pair that I could no longer button a couple months ago.  And they freaking FIT.  Talk about an awesome surprise and extra motivation to keep working out!  And a perk for Brent is now he'll probably see me in actual pants rather than my sweats :)

Whitewater Rafting on Memorial Day Weekend

Back in January when we did the float trip on the Skagit River our guide was telling us about whitewater rafting on the Wenatchee River.  My wild child of a mother was all gung ho and ready to take on the rapids.  Well, as luck would have it about a month ago we got the Groupon deal of the day and it was for Orion Whitewater Rafting tours.  So not only did we get to go whitewater rafting, we got it for half price!! 

We made our reservations for the Saturday over Memorial Day weekend because that's the earliest you can do it.  Well let me tell you, the river was WILD!  Since it's so early in the season and there was still snow melting in the mountains there were crazy rapids!  I was pretty freaked out when we hit our first rapids, but by the end I was sad to be done.  Here are pictures of the fun day:

We met up in Cashmere which is 15 miles east of Leavenworth.  We were an hour and a half early, so we had time to walk around town

Getting ready to go with our wetsuits on!  I still don't know how to flip the picture so flip your head!

The bus drove us back up to Leavenworth where it dropped us off

We went with a couple of my mom's crew buddies, Larry and Sam.  They are so fun.  Sam is so freaking hardcore.  She just got back from New Zealand a few weeks ago where she went bungee jumping.  She's always doing adventurous things and has been whitewater rafting a ton.  Oh yeah, and she's 70.

Waiting to set off!

I said if Larry had been in the middle, it would have been a Sam-wich :)  My mom rolled her eyes at my cheesy sense of humor

I couldn't really take very many pictures on the river since it got crazy, but I took them when I could!

About halfway through we had to get off and take our rafts around a dam.  Here's my cute momma waiting to get back in the river!

People would stand on the side of the river where the crazy rapid parts were and take pictures.  Then they put a thing on your windshield that said go to this website to get your pictures.  It was seriously like paparazzi.  So I went and of course you can't copy the pictures to your computer.  But no one can stop me from taking pictures of the pictures :)  So here are some of the pictures they got of our raft (crappy quality of course since it's a pic of a pic!). I'm on the right side behind Larry.  You can see his hat and sunglasses and I'm right behind that.  My mom is the second one on the left side.

Ok, you can't even see Larry in this one because there's a giant wave going over him.  So I'm the first person on the right side

I'm the only one in the raft not wearing the yellow jacket (besides our guide in the back)

I liked this one because you really can't even see our raft in the picture :)

We are officially hooked on whitewater rafting and are planning on going in September to do the Tieton River, which is supposed to be the fastest river in Washington to go whitewater rafting on.  I can't wait!

Oh, and I fell in the freezing cold snow melt river when we were taking the raft out to walk around the dam.  Well Sunday I woke up and felt sick.  Right away Brent blamed the river.  I wasn't convinced it was from that (or I didn't want to believe it :)) and on Monday when I woke up I couldn't swallow at all so I went to the doctor.  Turns out I have strep.  So HA to my cute hubby who tried to blame it on the cold water :)  They put me on antibiotics and steroids to help and I feel a million times better today.  Now Brent just has to deal with my roid rage.