YESSSSSS x2 (different reasons)

YESSSSSS

The Bees Knees Birthday Bash

My friend Bridget and I had a joint birthday party on Saturday night - her birthday was July 1 and mine was July 21. We both turned the big 2-7 and decided that we should turn 27 in 1927, so we sent out invites in Prohibition-speak (it was the cat's pajamas, baby bear cub) and told all of our friends that they needed to come in their best gangster/moll attire. Some of them listened to us and some of them didn't :) Anyway, here's the skinny, with some really terrible pictures because I forgot to take any and my mom manned the camera most of the night without really understanding how to work it.

This was the bar - it's actually a bed! Our office has a bedframe and mattress in the ceiling - it's called a mother-in-law bed - and there is a crank in the wall that lowers it down to a point where you put metal feet on it. It's pretty cool, but we have never really had a use for it. Not only is it probably too old to let people sleep on, that room is all windows so you would be blinded by the sun at about 5 a.m. if you were to sleep in there. Anyway, this is the first time it has seen any use, and it was really the perfect use for it! We had lots of booze and cards that told people how to make old drinks like Old Fashioneds, Gimlets and Mint Juleps (except I forgot to put the mint out). I stuck to Templeton and Diet, myself.





And this was the food. The menu, in case you're curious (and I know you are): Tomato bites, cucumber sandwiches, pita chips and spinach/artichoke dip, stuffed mushrooms, deviled eggs, cheese, meat and olives with crackers, pineapple upside down cake bon bons, and Charleston Chews (get it?).



This is Paul and me. You can see he was staying true to the era by drinking Hamm's... ::glare::



Me and the besties! Our heads are cocked at funny angles because we were encouraged to show off our hairpieces...



The highlight of the party was when this small person - we thought it was a little kid at first - came busting in the front door with a Tommy gun, and started pointing it menacingly at everyone in the living room. It took us a minute to realize that it was my grandma!!! This is a terrible picture, but you can see she's all in character, chomping on her cigar and everything. Apparently she went to the mall wearing that suit :)

Here's me with my nephew and Al Capone. Oh, speaking of which, that picture on the wall is of a flapper who used to actually hang out with Capone. She is my neighbor lady's aunt and got arrested for hanging out with his gang. She spent some time in jail, but they got her off by telling the police that she was just a hitchhiker they had picked up. My neighbor lady even has the newspaper clippings and everything.

The lovely Person family with Gangsta Grunt (I call her Grandma Grunt normally... hence Gangsta Grunt). Starr was born to be a flapper, I think.

Two of my very favorite boys: Paul and Sully! Sully was a milkman; he had a little bow tie painted on his onesie and everything.

Sooo... that was the Bees Knees Bash, sorta. I wish I had gotten pictures of everyone, but I failed miserably. Paul was supposed to stand and the door and demand a password from everyone like it was a speakeasy, but I believe he shirked that duty after the first person walked in. The password was "Orchid," by the way.

It was a lovely time, I think, and now I have a ridiculous number of Ball jars and nothing to do with them. :)

I guess I just want to be clean

I'm going through this huge Lush phase right now. This happens to me when I find a store that I love and don't have access to, and then when that store ends up coming to Des Moines, I find I'm not nearly as obsessed with it (case in point: Sephora). So that's where I am with Lush. Those of you who know me know that I have no sense of smell, so the apparently mouth-watering aromas these products emit have no effect on me. For me, it's all about the visual. They're so pretty. Look!
Does that not look like a slice of cake? That is a piece of a Buttercream, which is a moisturizing soap that smells like oranges and chocolate. I believe it. I'd eat it too, if I didn't know I'd be having a Ralphie moment from A Christmas Story.

Here's another buttercream, made with orange blossoms and mangoes and wrapped in vine leaves. It's called the Emperor of Ice Cream after a Wallace Stephens poem.

That's soap. Pineapple soap, to be exact.

Oooh, doesn't this just look refreshing? I feel like after a long run, this would be just the thing to scrub all over your sweaty body. It's peppermint, which I also love, because it's one of the few scents I can actually get a whiff of every now and then.

That could be an expensive truffle, could it not? It's cocoa butter, honey, almond oil and orange oil, and it's called a massage bar. I use the Wiccy Magic massage bar after runs and it's delightful, but I suppose this one would serve a somewhat different purpose. :)

Porridge soap! Oats and orange juice - it's like breakfast for your body.

"Demon in the Dark" soap might be my favorite, because of the name, because it looks a little ominous, and because it's minty! Spearminty AND pepperminty, actually, with apple juice and cloves.

OK, that's all. Lust session over. Please return to your regularly-scheduled blog. I'm going to go spend an obscene amount on pretty soap that would keep me stocked up in Dial or Zest for the next five years.

Can you tell I do all of my writing sitting on my couch?

Three stacks of books sitting on my coffee table:

• The Encyclopedia of Useless Information
• The Hollywood Book of Scandals
• From ABBA to Zoom
• The Great Gatsby
• The Last Days of Dead Celebrities
• The Hollywood Book of Death

• On the Road
• At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf
• The Seven Lady Godivas
• The Man Who Was Dr. Seuss
• Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel
• The Seuss, the Whole Seuss and Nothing But the Seuss
• Dr. Seuss: American Icon

• Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How we Die
• The Wordy Shipmates
• 5 People Who Died During Sex
• A Great and Terrible Beauty
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• The Secret of Lost Things

Couple of fiction books in there, but largely trivia and research. And an alarming number of books about death. Hmm. I am creepy.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation by Stacy Conradt

...Or my Fourth of July long weekend, anyway. Boating? No. BBQing? Nay. Setting off fireworks? Not even. This is how I have spent the last three days:

First there was this:

Then there was this. Please note the two bottles of wine on the counter and the small, curious dog in the doorway.

If you look in the background on the landing in the next one, you can see the piss-yellow linoleum that used to cover the kitchen floor as well. Literally piss-colored. If one of the dogs peed on the floor, you wouldn't know until you stepped in it because it blended right in. Underneath the nasty linoleum was another layer of linoleum that was supposed to look like faux marble, but it wasn't fooling anyone. Underneath that was a layer of subfloor, and underneath that was a layer of black glue/tarpaper-y stuff which we have spent the past week scraping up off of the floor. My fingers are still sore from being bent in the scraping position for like eight hours at a time, so please forgive any typos.

This one was taken from the other direction - looking into the breakfast nook from the dining room. That thing that sort of looks like a stationary bicycle is actually a giant floor sander.

The floor of the breakfast nook, sanded (mostly) and pretty!! Oooh. Suddenly the back-breaking hours spent hunched over the floor breathing into a hot dust mask seem worth it. Seriously, I am now intimate with every square inch of my kitchen floor now, and not for fun reasons.

My quarantined husband. It looks like Outbreak or something, doesn't it? And I would like you to know that I didn't just leave him in there to do the kitchen himself. I promise I was in there sanding and scraping and sweeping and injuring myself too.

That big gob of tape you see at thet bottom is my pathetic patch-job... one of our dogs (the small, curious one) could no longer stand that we were doing something in the kitchen without him and barreled right through the plastic.

I tried to convince him that laying on the couch and napping was seriously a lot more fun than what we were doing in the kitchen, but he wouldn't believe me until he saw it for himself. [shakes head] Kids.

"But Stacy," you're saying. "If that's your kitchen, where is your refrigerator? Where are all of your utensils, where's your toaster, your cookie jars, the booze you keep on top of the fridge, the glass jars of flour and cocoa and sugar?" Oh, I have an answer for you:

Obviously, it's all in the dining room. I'm not going to lie, sitting at the table and reaching over about 12 inches to grab something out of the fridge is sort of convenient. But, I think you'll agree, slightly out of place. It still needs two coats of polyurethane but here it is: stained and pretty floor!

Stained and pretty husband!

The best part is, as far as house-remodel stuff goes, this was dirt cheap. It was $100 to rent the floor sander for the day, including the sandpaper and accessories. And we probably spent $40-$50 on sandpaper for the small sanders we already have so I could get in the little side spots along the wall that the big floor sander couldn't get. We bought stain and polyurethane for like $35, but we're taking that back today because we found some leftover from when we did the bathroom and it was more than enough to cover the kitchen. So, for $150 and a LOT of time and effort - new kitchen floor!! :D