ONE decent cop in all of Virginia.

Today I picked Paul up from school, behind the school, near the Burger King, as always. When I turned left at the light though, I noticed flashing blue and reds in my rear view mirror and immediately pulled into the Taco Bell parking lot on the right. I couldn't for the life of me, figure out what I'd done wrong. The officer walked up to my front door and told me that he pulled me over for not having an inspection sticker- what?
Until today, I'd never even heard of that. The officer just looked at me for a minute after I explained that I had no idea what that was and he had me get out to see his sticker.
He then explained that it's mandatory for all vehicles to have one and replace it every year but that the DMV, which is run by the same government that requires us to have them, doesn't tell you need to have one when you register your car, or on the sheet of "new resident" things you need to do. No, they don't tell you that anywhere on any of the government websites except for the one run by the state police, because it's their jurisdiction. This means that unless a resident explains it to you or you have some inexplicable need to visit the state police website, the first time you'll get to hear about the mandatory sticker is when some cop pulls you over and slaps you with a ninety dollar ticket.
The cop stared at my license for at least two minutes and practically freaked out when he saw our registration and that we've been driving around for almost a year without anyone pulling us over but actually did something extremely nice, he didn't give me the ticket. We drove up main immediately and found a great place and got it done, I would seriously consider patroning their establishment again. It turned out to only run us 16 bucks, not bad considering it could have been 106 total.
Paul says this is the very first time he's ever been given a warning by a cop. Hooray! Hooray for blessings!

Regina has a new game!

So in addition to being ridiculously cuddly lately, Regina has found a new way to amuse herself.
Underneath our coffee table we have a bunch of different baskets to stay organized since our apartment is something like 600 square feet. One basket is for magazines, one is for computer cords one is for pens and pencils, etc. Regina has one for her brush and toys since I got tired of digging them out from under the couch (where she puts things when she's bored).
For the past week and a half or so, I've been finding a pile of six or so rawhides on the floor next to the basket on the floor. I thought it was funny that every time I put them back, she'd be over in a few minutes to take them back out and make another pile but she's much weirder than that.
Today I started putting them back while she was getting them all out. When I first did that, she stopped and looked me weird, then picked hers up and and put it back in the basket. Being the ridiculous mom that I am, I thought she was learning how to put stuff away. It turns out that she's just totally OCD and takes them out in the exact same order every time. I tried to mess them all up but she's just too bizarre. She's been taking them out and I've been putting them back in all afternoon. Talk about easily amused!

Down with Detoxing!

The detox only went downhill from that last post.
Lunch was a mung bean sprout, celery, endive salad with lemon juice dressing. I think it would have been better without the juice. Paul didn't eat much and because I was really scared that he'd crash blood sugar wise we broke down and got him some sushi- it fit within the diet restrictions, just not the detox. I looked forward to the next snack juice and made it. It was carrots, cucumber, celery, cabbage, and onion. Yes, onion. I gulped mine down because it was putrid and Paul did his best to drink it while gagging but we both ended up puking. SO GROSS!
That really made me mad because food that is supposed to be that great for you shouldn't make you throw up. I burped the stuff for at least eight hours.
An hour after such nasties, Angad invited us to go to the driving range with him and so we did. When we got our bucket of balls, Paul broke down and got a Sobe and I got a PayDay- man I love those things! I super suck at golf, I think I knew that before we got the clubs but... I also think that I was over stressed from food and the fact that, while Angad is a really nice guy, he's still very much an engineer and therefore not the most compassionate and understanding person. He tried to give me pointers but I do much better with praise for what I do right than "you're not doing it right!" Paul, however, did really well! He's a natural!
Regina is in full blown heat. She's not going to be this cuddly forever and it makes me really sad. I told her that she needs to stay in heat forever. Oh well.
I found my sisters on facebook! I'm so excited! I haven't talked to them in forever and it always makes me sad so yesterday I ran another search and found one and then all the others! I've missed them so much and I'm super glad they've forgiven me for being such a skeeze.
I got a super cute dress for under eight dollars! It's completely modest and comfortable and it's making a great day dress. I just want to wear it all the time. Kudos to Paul for finding it and picking it out.
We also found those Kinoki foot pads they advertise on TV and have been using them- soooo cool!
I'm no longer in a blogging mood. Sorry!

I know it's been a week...

... but last week was super busy. I decided not to write last week so that I could stay on task and devote most of my free time to the talk I had to give on Sunday. It was on the true church and gratitude for it. It was really daunting. I feel super behind on the spiritual learning curve anyway but this made everything worse. It was a pretty non-specific talk unless I wanted to read Henry B. Eyering's talk from the April 2008 General Conference- totally not going to happen. I'm not one of those people who can just write notes and then speak, I need it written out and memorized and it took hours and hours and hours to get enough minutes (12-15). I ended up with fourteen but then on Saturday night, I felt like it wasn't right and scrapped all but 3 minutes. I was up til 1:30am (a full three hours after my bed time) and still wasn't done so I got up at 6 to finish.
When church rolled around the youth speaker they had promised would be there wasn't and I began to worry about not having a long enough talk. I spoke as slowly as I could, instead of focusing on my words, I constantly checked my speed. Unfortunately, due to the unfortunately short sacrament and 2 verse songs and lack of ward announcements, by the time I finished my 14 minute talk, there was still half an hour left in the meeting. Talk about being mortified!!! Thankfully, the guy who went after me has a different speaking method and had more of an outline that he could expound on. There was still time left at the end for Brother Pope to share his testimony. I'm definitely glad it's over for a long time.
Last week I also had an interview with a real estate agent for a job. It was really really bizarre. I don't think they knew what exactly they wanted and pretty much needed to hire a psychic instead of a realist because I don't read minds and I felt that since I didn't, things would go pretty badly. They promised to call me back but haven't yet- I'm actually not too sad.
Regina went to the vet last week. She got four shots and was terribly lethargic and cuddly for a couple days. Paul wondered if the vaccines had addled her brains but slowly and surely, she got back to normal. I did make a nasty discoverey the day after the vet though- another flea. She had a flea on her when she got groomed in June but none since then. I figured that she probably picked up one from the mangy dog she'd said hi to at the vet's and that was it. On Saturday though, things got worse. I noticed that she had lots of little black poops all over in her fur on her back and on her butt and found another flea. It was too late to do anything about it though so she had to spend most of Sunday and Monday in the bathroom. I washed and de-flead her yesterday, she only had like four on her- thank goodness! I'm glad I don't have to worry about that anymore.
On Saturday, Paul and I went on a date. The CT suggested the drive-in movie theater for a good time and so we decided to go see Wal-E. Unfortunately, the address on the site for the theater was completely wrong and we wandered around sketch Christiansburg for almost an hour until we found it and then waited in line for quite a while. We were the last people they let in and we drove around for a little while until we found a spot but we found the most amazing spot and were only 5 minutes late. All in all, it was very fun. We love spending time together.
Today we started Gillian McKeith's detox and we're going to begin eating more with her diet. It's not that we want to diet or lose weight but Paul has had food allergy issues constantly and we both have terrible digestion problems. Eating fresh, non-processed food just makes sense. So far, so good. We bought a juicer and got to have fresh pineapple juice- sooooo good! The food takes more preparation but it's not too bad. It's super exciting!
We'll keep you updated to how that's going.
In a special update, Paul got an A on his first Statistics exam! He was really worried about it, but it seems he shouldn't have been!
I'm so proud!

Boring kids.

Last night, Paul and I went to dinner at our friend Pearl's boyfriend's house. It was a lot of fun outside of the fact that Regina was rotten. Sometimes, she's just so bad that I want to cry. She harassed their dog mercilessly and peed twice and pooped once. The worst part was that we took her outside and she would go a lot and then we'd take her in and she'd go even more.
It was a whole lot of fun talking with Pearl though. I like to think that she and I have somewhat similar personalities and Paul really liked Joe. It's nice to hang out with people who share our disposition and tendency to prefer to spend time as a couple and not drink or be wild. I thought that that would be a whole lot more interesting to write about, darn.
Today was even more boring for all of you, less so for us. Paul spent most of the afternoon working on stats homework. I did, however, make him watch Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. He spent half of the time laughing at me because I was quoting it even though it's been years since I'd seen it. His biggest problem with it was that it was "unrealistic." He really is a ton of fun. It's great to joke about that.
The only other thing I can think of mentioning is that Regina ate like a quarter cup of maple syrup. She's covered in it and licking herself constantly. We are bad puppy parents.

Quote of the day:
Paul: "I've got a surprise for you."
Kelsie: "You're a whore!"

Re-reading that makes it sound raunchy but really Paul just put his cold foot on my neck.

Happy Fourth!

This year Paul and I were really excited for the fourth of July. We've spent the past few days talking here and there about how neat our country is, despite all of the nay-sayers. It's been a couple years since I thought about the real reason we celebrate Independence Day and it was a nice change.
We slept in because Paul didn't have school (a fact I wasn't aware of until we got in bed on Thursday night). When we got up we received a text message from Penelope Mom asking if we were going to Paul's cousin Charisse's house (she lives in Charlottesville). We had no idea what that meant and made some frantic phone calls to find out that they had tried to call us all night on Thursday to see if we could come. After some discussion we decided not to drive up because President Bush was up there at Monticello so the roads would be packed and they'd be packed with at least some people that had been drinking (a daily driving hazard here).
Instead of going up to Charlottesville, we went to our Bishop's house for a pot-luck. They told us to bring whatever we wanted so I made this jello salad type thing my mom always made when I was little. It's one tub of cool whip and one of cottage cheese, powdered jello and fruit. I never liked it when I was little because of the texture but it was completely gone within ten minutes of us getting there and everyone asked for the recipe. It almost made me feel bad it wasn't more complicated. Paul also picked out a watermelon that was delicious. It was pretty fun to visit with all of the people that came. We had a great conversation with the bishop's oldest daughter who is going to BYU this fall.
There was supposed to be a Macy's fireworks spectacular on TV at nine and we planned on watching that but our cable is terrible. Absolutely terrible and the local channels are impossible to see through the snow so we missed out on that. About 9:45, we started hearing the fireworks the city was putting on. Because this is Blacksburg we didn't think they would last very long but got in our car and drove to where we could see most of them anyways. The fireworks lasted for at least half an hour after we parked the car. They were so awesome! We got to see several different kinds we'd never sen before. There was even a heart shaped one. We were somewhat disappointed that there weren't any cowboy hat shaped ones... HAHA but the tinkerbell ones and the planet ones were especially amazing. Even Regina liked watching the fireworks. SO cute!

All in all the day was wonderful. We hope all of our families had as good of time as we did.

Adventures in Vacuming.

When Paul went to his photography workshop in Colorado, he met a guy who is on the Engineering Board at Virginia Tech. I talked to Pat (the guy) a lot at the end of the workshop banquet and he offered to give my resume to people he knew and I invited him to dinner. He's going to come to dinner tomorrow so I started deep cleaning yesterday.
While we were gone, the apartment started smelling a bit musty so I moved all of the living room furniture and sprinkled carpet freshener and waited for a while to start vacuuming. When I started to vacuum, I noticed that there was no suction and figured that the bag was just full. We didn't have any more bags here and needed to go to Walmart anyway because we had no food so we locked Regina in the bathroom and went shopping.
When we finally got home (after some extra errands added by our neighbor), I changed the bag and it still didn't work. The belt was broken. It was extremely frustrating. We called Kroger to avoid driving back to Christiansburg but they didn't have belts so we called Walmart- no reason to make a 20 mile trip for no reason.
The phone desk patched Paul's call in to housewares and he put it on speaker phone. The guy that picked up was really helpful and said he'd be right back after he checked if they had the certain number belt (five) and less than thirty seconds later another man picked up the phone.
To give you the best recount of the conversation I'll put it in transcript form:
Hillbilly: "Housewares."
Paul: "Oh, I've already been helped. Thanks though."
HB: "What do you need?"
Paul: "Well, I called about vacuum cleaner belts but there's already someone going to go look to find it for me."
HB: "We have vacuum cleaner belts."
Paul: "I know, he's just checking to see if you have the right one."
HB: "Who's he?"
Paul: "When I called, someone else picked up the phone and he's going to go get check for us."
HB: "This is the first time I've picked up the phone."
************ yes, that's right, this man believed that he was the only person in the store and that we were trying to trick him by telling him that we had talked to him before we talked to him************************
Paul: "Yes, but there's someone else helping us already."
HB: "I told you this is the first time I picked up the phone."
Paul: "Well can you look for it?"
HB: Heavy sigh.
Paul: It's a number five.
HB: "Fine. I'll put you on hold."

He hung up. Actually hung up. I called back twice and was put on hold for twenty minutes and then told that I had not been put on hold but she'd do the same thing for me again (this time there was ringing) but no one picked up and we ended up driving out there anyway and picking up the belt and leaving within five minutes. Totally ridiculous but nothing could compare to that absolutely bizarre conversation with that hillbilly guy from housewares.
Maybe you don't find that as weird as I did but whatever.
I'm going to go clean some more. I've been getting distracted easily, especially with Regina laying on the back of the couch staring out the window growling at the other puppies outside as if it were all her territory (she didn't like the walk much this morning, it was chilly- 55 degrees and refused to walk at all most of the way back).