I know I haven’t posted in, oh, a decade or two, but I’ve been rather busy between sleep, work, and cuddle-time with the most wonderful man I’ve ever met…and now we’re engaged! (*pause for short happy-dance and rapid clapping*) I’m so happy that I sometimes have a hard time wiping the smile of my face.

I’m now hip-deep in bridal magazines and books….I have business cards for everything from ice sculptures to cake decorators….and at least 30 pictures of me in various wedding dresses (to be scrutinized, squealed about, and oogled over by every female in my life). We got engaged on Christmas Eve and I’ve been proudly and ever-more-expertly displaying my left hand every day since.

Like every little girl, I always dreamed about my wedding day, but I never realized that it’s a full-time, non-paying, high-stress job to plan one! I also have never had to make so many decisions in my life. I officially decided, given the hours I’ve spent looking at color wheels trying to pick a wedding color scheme, that I hate every color (literally, all of them!). I had no idea that there were upwards of a 100 different kinds of silk. I’ve never been more psycho-observant of every floral display I run across. I can’t believe that cakes come in every conceivable shape including round, square, bundt, and off-balance Who-ville towers. I still don’t understand how invitation paper could cost more than my wedding dress.

I have also never had so many opinion-givers in my life, with an opinion about the lace on my dress, the ribbons on my favors, or the absolute necessity of a wedding videographer. And I’m feeling slightly unpopular now having made my guest list and recognizing less than half of the invitees (apparently I have fewer friends than our parents’ lists of old friends, church members, and long-lost relatives).

I know that this is possibly one of the most fun moments in my life, being the one who is pointed at when a dress shop owner asks my entourage who the bride is. I get to play dress-up in a gorgeous gown, have an awesome party, and marry the love of my life. And I plan on documenting all the splendor (read: laughs, tears, squeals, near-bridezilla-moments…) here on this blog….stay tuned….

So I left out option  f) I’m suffering from a minor health problem.  I wasn’t just certifiably insane or hypochondrical.  I went to the doctor last week and I have gastritus: irritation of the stomach lining causing nausea and bloating, usually brought on by chronic worrying.

The doc gave me some drugs that I have to take for a few months (at least), and she ordered me to give up carbonated drinks, spicy foods, and chocolate (which means no more Dr. Pepper, Bajio, or Snickers, at least for awhile….so not fair).  So I’m not dying, but I wasn’t perfect either.  I’m supposed to be mostly better soon, but it takes awhile for the stomach lining to heal so I still have to tread lightly when it comes to food for the next few months.  The pills are definitely helping…I’m no longer sustaining life on my usual afternoon cocktail of Pepcid, Tums, and Mylanta.  Now I’m basically just driving my boyfriend crazy begging for a coke every time we eat out!

I’m sure most of you have known this for awhile, but there is an extremely high likelihood that I am now totally crazy.

I’m nauseas pretty often, but it’s been worse lately (and no, weasels, I’m not pregnant…don’t be stupid), so I have spent most of the last few days convincing myself that I am dying of a million different diseases. How many can you name? Because I can name a lot: leukemia, breast cancer, hepatitus, meningitis, lupus, stomach cancer, aneurysm, Lou Gehrig’s disease, AIDS, Ed’s disease (that’s lack-of-sleep-from-too-much-dating-disorder), syphillis, generalized anxiety disorder, etc. I’m driving my mom and my boyfriend nuts by constantly asking, “Am I dying? What if I have fill-in-the-blank?” 

To make matters worse, I have an extreme phobia of doctors, so until I am tied up and physically dragged to the doctor’s office (which my boyfriend keeps threatening to do), we’ll never know the answers to those questions.  I actually crossed the line into totally-irrational-land yesterday when I asked if there was such a thing as tongue cancer.  Yea, I know.  Crazy.

So since I am considering seeking medical attention, we will now start the betting:  I am either a) dying of a horrible disease, b) suffering from simple ulcers over all the worrying about dying of a horrible disease,  c)  dying of multiple horrible diseases, or d) certifiably insane……or e) all of the above.  Place your bets. 

So check out my new page, “The Monkey is a Nazi!” (at right). Let me know if I need to add the context for each quote, or if they are funny enough on their own.

I know. I know. I’m terrible. You all must have thought I abandoned by kick-ace new site and fell off the edge of the Earth.

I didn’t.

I have been existing quite happily on Earth, far from the edge. Well unless you count Nashville. (Kidding, guys.) I spent two glorious weeks there this month, recooperating from my particularly hectic life lately. And I have been going at ninety miles a minute since….

Work is awesome; the last few months have been busy, but lucrative. I’m taking over as President of a local business organization in two weeks, which will add more chaos to my life…small sacrifice for the honor and recognition. Family is doing well…all partying in happy valley currently. I’m spending the precious few remaining hours with my new boy, who has been so amazing to put up with me and my craziness lately. And I think I’m somehow managing to get a few hours of sleep…..somewhere in between the pop tarts and vitaminwater.

I promise I’ll be back with more fun soon, but until then, sneak a peek at this video I saw today.  This dude actually won the competition, the cash prize, and a record deal. What an inspiration! We should all find our inner diamond.

I have a tendency to get a tad too focused on a random mission.  I seek something special, and I will search the ends of the earth to find it.  Anyone unlucky enough to be subjected to my singular-mindedness would surely rather give up and move on to other easily-found objects, but I am relentless, and I will drag you into the hunt with me.

Am I talking about seeking treasure? jewels? holy grails?  No such thing…typically only something shockingly ordinary.

This happened last weekend as I got into my head an overwhelming desire to watch the 80s flick, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”   The title came up during dinner, and I decided (without vote, I’m sure) that we stop at a nearby store so I could buy it and we could watch it.  I still don’t know if my dinner companion embraced this idea wholeheartedly, but he went obediently along with it.  As we stopped at not one, not two, but three stores (and I thought Wal-Mart carried everything!), we resorted to running to a Blockbuster and simply renting it or something else. 

As we pulled up to Video Rental Store #1, I joked that they would stock it (unlike the stores) but it would be rented out.  Of course, I jinxed us right there…it probably disappeared in a puff of smoke the moment the words came out of my mouth.  I have been on one too many late-night trips to the video store during marathon 24 sessions in a desperate hunt for the next disc…I’m used to the disappointment of coming up emptyhanded. Naturally, my prediction was correct (turns out, sometimes I do hate it when I’m right!), so we had the clerk call another local store…out. 

Convinced that we were now committed to the quest, we hit a different video rental chain to seek out the elusive, cheesy-yet-entertaining flick.  Out.  Informing them of our insane search, they willingly called another location.  It was in that store’s computer, but (miraculously) stolen.  The clerk offered to call the last location in the county we hadn’t searched.  As this latest development was the most fantastical explanation for our shortage of fun-having-girls thus far, we said, “Why Not? May as well try one more….”  Eureka!  They had the apparently-recently-very-popular film and held it for us.  We watched, we laughed, satisfied with completing the quest, yet laughing ourselves silly at the complete absurdity of it all.

 Heaven help you if you are in a five-mile radius the next time I start a ridiculous quest….

Ever feel like you have stumbled into the Twilight Zone? Something inexplicable happens, and you find yourself in a stupor, desperately racking your brain for a reasonable explanation.  Given the governing “Allison Law” in my life, I’m usually not too surprised when events like this occur (in real time…natch).  I just shake my head in disbelief and move on, recognizing that some things will never have a reasonable explanation.  I have recently fallen victim to these bizarro events…none life-changing or astoundingly miraculous. Really just more …….weird.

Example #1: On the way to a friend’s wedding in Salt Lake (an hour away), I dropped my bluetooth headset into my bag, thinking I may make some calls during the drive, and then stashed that bag into the trunk of my Jeep.  I ended up zoning out and never actually made any calls during the trip.  I also never moved the bag from the trunk until I got home (I had a little handbag that went into the wedding with me).  The next morning I fished around in my bag for the headset, and it was gone.  Vanished.  Now I’m tormented by the fact that I (like that red ring of mine) own an item to which I am clueless of its location. 

Giving up the search of every nook and cranny, I succumbed to the fact that I had lost it for good, when one day, I open the door to my jeep’s backseat and there, in the floor, is the bluetooth headset.  Here’s the weird part: There is no nook or cranny between the back seat and the cargo space.  So how did this little electronic device migrate from inside my bag which was in my trunk where there is absolutely no path to the backseat and land in the floor board there?  I cheered for finding it, yes, but then sat for a moment in that stupor I mentioned earlier, unable to explain what happened.

Example #2 (and this one is a doozy):  Last weekend, I’m in California Pizza Kitchen with a friend.  We ordered, received our drinks , and then both proceeded to the bathroom, leaving the table briefly unattended (which granted, isn’t a bright idea, but it was late, the restaurant was quiet, and I figured our drinks weren’t in any real danger).  We come back to the table, and everything is a little bit…..off.  The glasses have moved, lost their straws, and the bread plate (which was previously stacked with slices of sourdough) is empty, leaving only a small trail of crumbs.  What exactly happened here?  The best explanations I could come up with were that either they started clearing the table thinking we left or some stranger at the next table thought it would be funny to make bread and straws disappear.  We sat in shock, unable to explain the bizarre occurrence, had the waiter replace the drinks, and polished off dessert. 

Once back in the car, we started freaking out about the sheer weirdness of that whole experience.  Did everyone else in the restaurant witness the straw/bread thiefs?  The worst part (even worse than becoming aware of a lost thing) is that we will never actually know what happened….

It’s all just…weird…..

**doo do doo do doo do doo do**

Hello all!  Welcome to my new blog!  Doesn’t it look awesome?!!

For those of you who noticed my lack of posting lately on my old site, it’s because I was waiting for this new site to get pretty before I sent you here.  But, now that it’s done (and sufficiently pretty), I expect I’ll be posting with reckless abandon!

Please subscribe (click on link at right) and you will get emails when I post anything new.  In the mean time, I’m seeking help in creating categories for my posts.  Random suggestions are fine, given that most of my blog is fairly random.  Just leave a comment or send me a note.  The more creative (or tailor-made) for me, the better.  I may be talked into rewards of some kind for the best one.

See you again here soon!

Those of you who know me personally know that my life is governed by a little thing I call “Allison law.” It’s sorta like Murphy’s Law: anything bad that can happen, will happen. In my world, it’s more like “anything insanely frustrating, irritating, inconvenient, semi-gross, mind-numbing, or of the highest unlikelihood that can happen, will happen.” I have countless stories of evidence for this law, but my most recent I feel obliged to share.

I have a slightly unhealthy love for my Jeep. It’s royal blue and (I believe) so freakin’ cute. However, I had an incredibly strong desire last night to drive it into the lake. On a few occasions in the last few months, the car alarm on my Jeep has sounded off at random….usually only once or twice in a row and always in mid-afternoon. I usually just hit the alarm button on my remote and turn it off when this happens. However, this futile exercise was of no help as my typically-freakin’ cute Jeep proceeded to sound its alarm constantly for about two hours straight at 3am last night. No jeep thiefs, way-ward cats, or crazy people in sight….it just apparently decided to make a lot of commotion for no reason.

Ya know how everything is more intense at night? Like, hearing a little noise can have you convinced that the world’s worst serial killer is breaking into your house. Well, flashing headlights and a siren that would wake up people in Spain is a hundred times worse at night. I laid in my bed, remote in hand with finger poised on the only temporarily-silencing off button and pleaded with any available higher power to cease the insanity and allow me and everyone in my complex (whom I’m certain now hate me) to get some decent sleep.

There are two parts to the Allison Law that apply here: one, naturally my jeep’s alarm decides to become positively unstoppable in the middle of the night, when nothing can be done about it. (If someone else was here that could have given me a ride back, I would have at least driven it out to the lake and left it there to beep it’s freakin’ heart out til morning.) Two, of course this inexplicable error occurs just three months after my factory warranty expires. So it will now cost me some crazy amount of money to fix/disable/remove-and-crush this annoying part that essentially serves no other purpose than to drive everyone in earshot to the brink of their sanity.

Car alarms should be outlawed. I’m starting a petition…

I have decided that supermarkets and grocery stores are officially “no man’s land.” This is, apparently, the hangout of choice for the people that time forgot…when they are not, ya know, hanging out at the post office or the DMV.

During my last trip to the market, the dude in line behind me started interrogating me on “where the party was”…I bought 4 12-packs of coke (they were 4 for $10!) along with chips and a jar of salsa, which he kept inexplicably referring to as bean dip. “With all that bean dip (read: salsa) and coke, there must be a party going on…”, he kept insisting. I”m not sure if this guy was attempting to flirt with me or something, but all I wanted to do was remove myself immediately from the checkout line with the creepy bean-dip-and-party-obsessed dude.

While at Costco last night, I found myself in an aisle with two other sets of people. One on the left and one on the right…thus blocking my way through. I was always under the impression that at this impasse, someone must take intiative and shuffle to allow for a clearing. Now, the lady on my left is off the hook for being oblivious because she was simultaneously shuffling a two-year-old and a gigundo case of applesauce. But chick-on-the-right…her ability to speak in some unidentifiable foreign language to her hubby is not reason enough to be oblivious to my need to pass. Granted they were in a pretty heated debate over tomato juice, but how long should I be required to wait for her to move her shopping cart to allow usually-polite-me to pass before it’s acceptable for me to clock her with a nearby two-ton jar of pasta sauce?

While we are on the subject of shopping carts, I stumbled on this article on MSN the other day ( http://health.msn.com/dietfitness/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100165289). It states that the number one thing your grocery store doesn’t want you to know is that the shopping carts have cooties. More cooties than public bathrooms, public phones, and escalators. Yuck. And while I have been known to push elevator buttons with my elbow and use all means possible to avoid touching public bathroom door handles, there is apparently no way for me to avoid the goo on the necessary-for-gathering shopping cart.

Note to self: Must look into online grocery delivery services….