Food dudette

On thishereblog post, I am going to talk about food. 

I've lost 20 pounds since November, mostly due to dental work, a retainer that I hate wearing, and not eating in public spaces or around people because of said dental work and retainer. 

I'm all about the weight loss, but I think it needs to be done in a healthy way. I don't know that losing a front tooth and having to take nausea medication to wear a retainer is the healthiest of ways that weight could have come off, but it is what it is and here we are five months and 20 pounds later.

That being said, I've been trying to eat more. 

Last night, I made honey garlic lemon salmon, rice and veggies. This morning I woke up like a true geriatric millennial and had avocado toast. 

Here is the recipe for the salmon that I found on Tik Tok. The recipe for the toast is as follows: Smush an avocado with salt, pepper, crushed red pepper flakes and lemon or lime juice, spread that magic on a piece of toast, top with cherry or grape tomatoes that are cut in half.

And that's it, kids. The salmon is one of the best things that I've ever cooked. One minor adjustment I would make is to substitute lemon juice for orange juice. I am not a chef or even that good of a cook, I just think orange would taste better.

Maybe?

Anyway, all is well in Monicaland at the moment. I'm trying to cook more, drink more water, see my family and the kids more, and just do everything in general more these days. 

I don't want to brag, I don't want to boast. I always tell them, I like toast. Toast!

One of the best things I've ever cooked. I ate every single bite of this salmon. 

Blood, sweat and tears...over Uno.

Picture this: There are six people sitting around an old kitchen table in western Kansas. There's a curly haired kid who is my favorite curly haired child ever, there's the youngest, who is my favorite youngest ever, and there's a pretty awesome red-haired kid who shares a middle name with me.

Each kid is literally my favorite kid on the planet.

My parents and I are also there, and we're all sitting at the table, getting ready to play some card games. I mentioned casually to my parents that my blog is 10 years old this year. (Happy birthday, blog!)

A few minutes later, we are deep into playing a game of Uno. A great family trait that we have is that we don't like to lose — the curly haired kid has cheated at card games since she was three years old, all to avoid losing.

So we're playing this vicious game of Uno, with 9-year-old twins and a 7-year-old, and suddenly, the baby starts crying. I did not see what happened, but she was hysterical. Whatever happened was a very big deal to her and she was sobbing. I invited her into my lap for some sympathy, and she gladly accepted.

The sandy-haired baby crawled into my lap and cried into my chest. I patted her back, rocked her, and told her it was going to be okay, and then I asked her what happened.

It turns out that middle kid, the curly haired one, punched her in the mouth. Over Uno.

(Full disclosure: I did not see the mouth punch. Middle child claimed it was an accident and not a punch, but instead just a "poke.")

I pulled down the baby's lip and saw blood. Over a game of Uno?

The baby got over it pretty quickly and want back to her seat, which was beside her curly-haired sister. Each time it was the baby's turn, she asked who went after her. Then, she grinned this little evil grin and spent the rest of the Uno game giving her big sister all of the 'Draw 2' and 'Draw 4' cards, and also some 'Skip' cards thrown in there for good measure.

At one point, middle curly haired child did not play a blue card. It was at that point that I asked her: "You have a million cards. How do you not have a single blue one?"

Middle kid was not having it and ended up with a million cards. There were dirty looks and attitudes and cards thrown everywhere.

She was ticked and the baby got her revenge.

Sometimes I wonder if I'll run out of things to write about, 10 years after I started writing on my blog. And then my family gets together and there's blood, sweat and tears during an Uno game, and then I realize that I'll probably never stop writing.

Also, please note that the red-haired child is introverted like her aunt and stayed out of the drama.

And for the next game that we played, the youngest one and the middle child did not sit next to each other.

Vicious. 😆

At the end of the night my parents asked me if I was going to write about this.

How can I not?

(Please note that all the kids in this story are fine and lived through it with no permanent injuries.)

On Church

Me: Hey Dad, I want to watch ESPN College Gameday.

Dad: I knew you’d finally get smart one day.

🤣

Other quotes: 

- He looks like a desperate man. 

- His heart is on fire for North Carolina basketball. 

❤️‍🔥 

I think that this is when it's over for me

I love me some petty drama, especially if it doesn’t impact my personal life at all.

On Valentine’s Day, a certain country singer released a break up album about her divorce. Please note that I’ve never been married (or divorced) and I pretty much gave up on dating since the last guy did me in, but more on that later.

For people who don’t speak country music: Guy and girl got divorced. Guy released a heartbreak song first, which made a lot of people, myself included, pretty much hate the girl in the scenario.

Justified? Absolutely not. But feelings are feelings and OMG, she broke his heart!

And then she released new music on Valentine’s Day. I love the pettiness of breakup music on Valentine’s Day. At the moment I decided to give her new music a listen, I had just read a Facebook update from a single friend, wishing everyone a very happy Independence Day on Feb. 14. 

I about died of laughter. It was a fantastic moment.

So this blog post is about the moment I knew it was over in one relationship.

Is this personal? Yes, but it needs to be told. Why? One, I'm pretty sure I have written about this moment in the past. Two, men need to know that it's not okay to cheat and to be on dating apps when you're dating a girl for six months and taking her home to meet your family for the holidays.

Not. Okay.

Third: When we write about the things, we heal from the things.

--

There are things I know now that I didn’t know then. At the time this happened in my life, I was very much in love and I wanted my relationship to work out. 

Hindsight is always 20/20.

It was late at night, or early in the morning, depending on your attitude about late nights. We hadn’t fought at all that day or night, and we were having a perfectly normal conversation. About what, I don’t remember. 

(I wish I remembered the last moments of that relationship, but at the time, I didn’t know they were the lasts. That’s probably another story entirely.)

I went to touch his hair, which was something I did often. This was completely normal to me. He slapped my arm away from him before my hand reached his hair. 

Physically, he slapped my arm away from him.

I immediately got up and left. 

The cheating and lying part did not make me leave. Why? I don’t know, but it probably has something to do with the fact that it didn’t happen right in front of my face. I never saw her or talked to her — she was just this imaginary, mythological creature that we fought about constantly. (Me: Please stop. Him: No. Me: But I said please. Him: No.)

I looked around his place and I knew that would be the last time that I would ever step foot in his apartment again.

I said goodbye to him and his things mentally, and then I got in my car in his driveway. As soon as I turned the ignition, I started crying as soon as I heard the song that was playing over my speakers.

It was Eric Church’s song Some of It. What brought me to tears was the part of the song that was playing:

What really makes you a man

Is being true to her

‘Til your glass runs out of sand

That was the moment I knew it was over for me. All it took was a slap on the arm, Eric Church singing about being true to a woman, and I booked it out of there so fast I could not leave fast enough.

The song Mountain With A View has been all over TikTok the past few days. Women are sharing their stories about the moment they realized it was over, and I think there’s a whole new generation of women who are just now learning, through this music, that leaving a man doesn’t mean that you failed. It just means that you love yourself more than the pain he put you through.

That’s a hard lesson to learn. 

I think that this is when I cut the tie loose

I think that is when I set myself free

One day you’ll ask, “When was it over for you?”

I think that this is when it was over for me.

--

So what happened to him? 

I don't care.

So what happened to me?

Short story long: I did everything that I wanted to do, and I did it on my own. 

Put some feel good in my soul

Random thoughts floating around in my head at the moment:

- It kills me how newsletters are back in. Like, I know painfully normal people who have a monthly newsletter. Do I subscribe? Of course I do. Do I think it’s weird? Of course I do.

- Taxes changed this year, and taxes are not like last year. I went shopping with my refund money and bought shampoo and toilet paper. I got kind of excited about it. 

- Speaking of things that are ‘in’ — all of the pants that I own are skinny jeans. Those are out, as we’re back to bell bottoms and wide-leg pants now. I found some updated pants at Target, got a couple pairs of tennis shoes (one purple), and suddenly I feel 10 years younger. I also went down a pant size, likely because I quit eating out/in public while I’m getting a dental implant. It’s a win-win all around, I think.

- I love that Gen Z made it okay to wear tennis shoes to work. I am all about that comfort. 

- Life is pretty stable and not that exciting at the moment, which is why I haven’t been updating. The update would literally be that I just bought toilet paper…which I just told you. 

- I googled the average lifespan of a blog recently. The results are kind of mixed: it’s either 100 days or two years. Regardless, my little Kansas Musings is turning 10 this year. Ten years of my thoughts is way too much, but it is what it is. Ten years of Pugs, country music and traveling? Let’s make it another 10 years, guys. We should do something to celebrate…

Things I didn't picture myself saying out loud 10 years ago.

 "Pickles, stop licking the couch."

Forward, March in February.

Once upon a time I slept on an air mattress in a temporary rental house that I lived in for two weeks. It's not a time of my life that I like to think about, but it happened while the sale of my almost house fell through. The sellers backed out 10 minutes before I was supposed to close on it.

It was not good times, but it was not the worst of times.

During the first night in that rental house, my bed deflated. I slept on the floor that night.

As someone wise once told me: You’re going forward, even when it feels like you’re not.

A few months ago I bought a new bed and a new bed frame, which resides in the cutest little house in the cutest college town in Kansas, without even realizing where I was 18 months ago — on the freaking floor.

Forward is forward and progress is progress, even when it doesn't feel like it.