Spice Up Your Life

Oh sweet merciful gods of music, my prayers have been answered at long last. Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, the moment we have been patiently waiting for is here. The Spice Girls are reuniting for a world tour. Seriously.

Can you contain your excitement?

Number Four Can't Take The Heat

Part of Number Four's amazing ability to irritate the crap out of us was her struggles with food. One of our main problems was that whenever one of us went into our tiny ass kitchen to get a snack or a drink, she would soon join us for a similar reason. This is somewhat linked into her copycat behaviour, but that is an entirely different post that I will need much more energy for. Her issues with food I can handle now.
It began seemingly innocent enough; she mentioned that she liked to bake rather than cook. At first we thought, "Great, she will be baking lovely things for us to eat!" However. We were soon to discover what exactly that entailed. The first thing that we noticed was that Number Four had a lot of cookbooks. A lot. We had quite a lot of space on the shelf unit thing outside our tiny kitchen, so it wasn't much of a problem. It was more just odd for Orly, Pamala and I to see so many cookbooks in the possession of someone our age. The three of us are much more throw-things-in-a-pan-at-random cookers. We had very little experience with recipe-followers. Over the course of the year, the number of cookbooks increased. Number Four continually lamented that she had all of these recipes that she never used. We continually wanted to punch her in the face. Maybe that was just me...
The next thing that happened was the gradual expansion of her designated area of the pantry. There were four separate shelves in the pantry. We originally designated them by height; Number Four being the tallest, she had the highest shelf. Then Pamala and Orly shared the next highest, and then me. We reserved the lowest shelf for larger community items or heavy things that needed to be accessed daily, like soda. Pamala and Orly were fine with sharing a shelf since neither of them kept a lot of things in there. I took up the majority of my shelf with various boxes of tea. I had a lot of tea. At first, Number Four didn't have that many things on her shelf. Then her crazy mom (again, an entirely different post) began to give her various item that had been purchased at Costco. Huge boxes of all manner of food, which she didn't even eat. They just stayed up there, taking up space. In spite of her protests, her crazy mom continued to foist huge boxes of things on her, so she ended up taking over the lowest shelf too, as well as a goodly portion of the floor. It was kind of hilarious to look in our pantry and see two shelves with hardly any edible items on them, and then the other two shelves overflowing with gigantic boxes cereal, granola bars, those 100 calorie pack things, I don't even know what all. At one point she was looking in the pantry and comparing how much she had to how little we had, and she said, "What do you guys eat? You don't have anything that is actual food!" (Looking back, what the hell did we eat? We never had our areas in the pantry or the fridge full, but we sure did eat a lot.)
This isn't to say that Number Four did not eat. She regularly cooked random slabs of meat by putting them in a pan until they were brown and tough. She never used any sort of seasoning or sauce, just meat cooked to death in a pan. She ate the meat by itself too, no side dishes whatsoever. It was baffling, as well as making the kitchen and living room smell gross. She would occasionally be struck with the urge to actually cook something, and this was almost worse. The most memorable of these times was after she somehow acquired a crock pot. I don't remember if she had it to begin with or if she got it while we lived together. Now, I love me some slow-cooked food, make no mistake. However, the things that came out of that crock pot were beyond disgusting. There was some sort of chicken vegetable stew thing she made once. It ended up just a big vat of multicolored mush. The carrots melted. Literally melted. Into liquid. And it tasted like cardboard soup. Nasty.
By far the worst thing though was when Number Four baked something. It never ended well. She would invariably leave the kitchen with a fine coating of flour, in addition to which it took her days to wash the dishes. She made cookies, but she didn't let them cool before she put them on a plate and they all stuck together to create this giant cookie mountain. Those actually tasted alright, but it was incredibly difficult to eat them. You could either break off tiny pieces, or a giant group of like five cookies that had been glued together by their chocolate chips. One time, her weird brother was coming to visit, so she decided to make him a sweet potato pie. I don't know if y'all've pick up on it, but I have certain Southern predilections. I know from sweet potato pie. So I was a little excited that she was making one, because I would get to eat some. Well, it turns out that Number Four doesn't know how to make sweet potato pie, per say, so much as mashed sweet potatoes in a pie. I was very disappointed. Then came the Worst of the Worst. Pamala and Orly would on occasion make cornbread from a box. Normally, I do not condone box-food, but real cornbread is damn hard to make and this was fast and still tasted good. One day Number Four decided that she needed to show us how cornbread-from-scratch was superior to box cornbread. Which was kind of a moot point with us, but whatever. So she made a huge pan of it. I tried it first, and I can honestly say that it was about the worst thing I've ever tasted in my life. I made Pamala eat some of it, because if I have to suffer, she does too. She put a tiny piece in her mouth and immediately spit it out, screaming "It tastes like Death just crawled in my mouth and laid eggs!" For about a week, we took turns cutting pieces off and throwing them in the trash until we finally dumped the whole thing.

I've Got To Admit, It's Getting Better

I got back home about two hours ago. I had quite an unusual weekend, as only one spent visiting The Ex can be. It wasn't as awkward as I had feared, but the odd thing was that I was much more comfortable with his parents that I was with him, in particular his mom. She talked as much as ever, but I found it much more endearing than irritating, like I used to. I wasn't even all that irritated by his dad either, which is highly unusual since he used to make my head hurt. In fact, the only person I was irritated by was Chris himself. He just seemed to be in a funk the entire time I was there, always whining about something or other. All he wants to do is move back to England. He hates the heat, he hates the traffic, he hates California, he hates the U.S. He is only waiting on his funding to go through, and then he's headed back to England. Which, ok, fine, he can be a little depressed when he is stuck in that hell hole we grew up in when his girlfriend and most of his friends are in England, but come on. At least make the best of the situation you're in. I mean, I drove my ass three hours down there to visit him for the first time in a long time, and he was bitchy and whiny the whole time? No thanks. At least it did serve one good purpose, which was to completely and utterly destroy and vague lingering romantic notions I might have had toward him. We can be the kind of friends that email each other randomly and chat online occasionally, but that is it. What I find most amusing in all of this is that the only reason we are even friends in the first place is because he was adamant about remaining friends. It took me a long time to come around to the point where I am even able to be his friend, and now that I'm there, he could apparently care less.

Where is My Mind?

The other day I was talking to my ex Chris online when a funny thing happened. There was kind of a long pause in our chat, and then this popped up, "Hi Sarah, it's Cynthia..." There was more, but here's the thing. Cynthia is Chris's mom. Chris and I dated for three and a half years, so I got to know her pretty well. I always felt a little sorry for her; she lives in their house up in the mountains, a half hour drive from the nearest town, and her husband is gone a lot, and Chris and his brother are both living far away. So she's all alone a lot of the time, which would drive me bonkers. She's understandably a bit of an odd bird, as well as being very talkative, but as long as I can keep the conversation away from certain topics, she's kinda fun to talk to. Her favorite things to talk about are horses, birds, plants and sewing. And I pretty much have nothing to say one any of those topics. So she started chatting with me, but I could tell she didn't chat very much, because she was writing me paragraphs. At first she was telling me all kinds of stuff about some horse show in Vegas. A couple of crazy things did happen with that. She bought two tickets from two different people on ebay for the horse thing, and it turned out that the tickets were for seats right next to each other. And then one of the people that they sat near recognized Chris's dad from some class that he taught. I told her that I would have bought a lottery ticket or hit the slots, being that they were in Vegas.
Then we moved on to talking about this coming weekend. See, I've been trying to get Chris to come up and visit me before he moves back to York, but, Chris being Chris, he kept hedging and putting it off and now this weekend would be the only time for him to come up before he leaves that I will also be here, which is kind of an important part of him visiting me. So. Cynthia suggested that instead of Chris coming up here, I go down and visit them. I pointed out that part of the reason I wanted Chris to come up was to show off my beautiful apartment and how successful I am (it was a running joke between us that I would always make more money than him, silly History major), but then she started talking about "we could all go out for dinner" and "I've got the guest room all finished" and then offered to give me money for gas. It turns out that in spite of myself, I am a nice person on occasion. I could tell that she really wanted some company other than Chris and the horses. So guess where I'm driving to tonight? At least it won't be exactly the town I grew up in, it will be the town next to it. And up in the mountains too.
I must admit that I'm a little nervous about seeing Chris this weekend. We broke up almost two years ago, and we've talked and managed to become friends in the time since. However, I have actually only seen him once in those two years. I'm afraid that it will be awkward, that I will be awkward. Do I hug him? Shake his hand? Stand there and wave? Dance a jig? I guess we shall see when the moment arrives. It doesn't help much that I will get to his house after a full day of work and then driving four hours with only my thoughts for company. By the time I get there around midnight, I'll be a little delirious. And that could make for some awkward times.

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

I'm so excited right now! Pamala and I are planning a trip abroad next year. I really want to take her to places in Ireland, even if she isn't all that keen on it. Of all the places I've ever been, Killarney was honestly the greatest. I think it had something to do with staying in the tiniest little hostel, which was run by a crazy Polishman who did Batman impressions. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that Killarney has the highest concentration of pubs in Europe. Seriously. Five streets, eighty six pubs. It's amazing. And then we have to go up to Doolin, which is the opposite. Lots of sprawling countryside cottages, and three pubs. But they have amazing live music every night and the guy who runs the hostel sounds like Bono, and even though I hate Bono with a raging passion, dude does have an awesome voice.
We also obviously have to spend a great deal of time in London, doing London-y things. Museums and bookstores and Towers, oh my! Maybe I'll even get to go to Dali-world like I wanted to but never got to. Oh, and the parks!
Also high on the list is heading back to Italy, since I only got to spend four days there. Two of those days were spent getting lost in Venice, which was awesome. I would love to do Rome and be all touristy. And maybe we could hit up Nicole's family, they have a house in Tuscany.
Which brings me to Greece, where, wouldn't you know it, Nicole's family also has a house. Hhhmmm...
If we can get Orly to come with us, she would be great in Spain. After all, she did live there for a while. Who better to show us the best places? And I bet she still knows people there and we could crash on couches for cheap.
And Paris. We have to go to Paris. I never made it before, even though I lived in fucking Brighton for three months and could have swam to France. Because cheese...wine...bread...I need to go to France.
I also really want to go to Prague. I don't really know why, other than that it looks so beautiful.
So we are going to start saving our dollars and planning and narrowing down our plan and harassing Orly even though she probably won't come with us. I cannot wait to go!