I’m a very disorganized person in some aspects. I hate to clean my room, or put away laundry and my car is usually quite messy. But there are somethings that I just can’t vary with. Before I had babies and I had time in the morning go to Starbucks and get a cup of coffee. I always went to the same Starbucks and since I didn’t have kids I could walk inside and not just shoot through the drive through. I always take a certain road to my destinations. It’s not always the fastest but it is the one I like the most. I only shop at one grocery store and on the rare occasion I try out a new one just to be sure I don’t like it, I always end up regretting straying from my store. For the most part I’ve always dressed the same way. Jeans, a tank top and slip on shoes. In fact as long as i can remember there has been at least one pair of Vans in my closet (well up until they got stolen from my locker at the thug middle school I went to).

With clothing sure I’ve varied, I’ve had a few different things in my closet but for the most part it’s easy to say I don’t follow the trends. In the summer for the most part I still wear jeans. They are comfy and go with any shirt.

When it comes to cooking I have one knife that is my old standby. I have one pan for certain things. I like comfort and familiarity.

I think it is because of this that I don’t keep a lot of people in my life. Because being a creature of habit means I need stable people in my life. I need people that I can rely on. My husband, Katie and Lisa are always on time. In fact those three also know that I go everywhere 15 minutes early and they figure that in when they come to meet me. My mom and Ginger are always at least 15 minutes late BUT they are reliably late. I know that if I’m meeting them I have a few extra minutes to go to the bathroom or browse the menu before they arrive.

There have been a series of people who have entered my life and then exited. I can give people a lot of chances but as soon as I can no longer rely on them, they have to go. I can’t say that I’ve never stood someone up, but I always call and tell them why, even if the truth is that I just don’t want to go. What I don’t do is tell someone I will come see them and then just leave them there waiting. Something I really NEVER do is make plans with someone and forget (with that one exception of the time I was pregnant and made plans with both Steph and Ginger, but dude I was pregnant and out of my mind and it all worked out). What I mean to say is I would never ever make plans with a person and then just forget all together and make new plans and then leave my old plans hanging.

Part of this rolls over into motherhood too. If I tell my kids I’m going to do something I do it. That is why I’m very careful what I say to Brandon. He may be 2 but his memory is better then any one of yours. This means if I tell him he can have gum if he eats all his dinner, then 6 hours later Brandon will want to know where his gum is and 12 hours later he is still going to want his gum. That also means if I say I will take him to the park I better be damn sure to have some coffee in me that night, because my ass is going to the park.

I feel like so many people take reliability for granted. People take their word for granted. They think throwing out some meaningless promises and not following through is acceptable. I can’t stand people who say sure I’ll come this weekend and do this and then never come and never even acknowledge they said they would and then I waste my entire weekend sitting there waiting around for them. And finally when I call them and say hey, gee remember when you said this, they treat me like an alien because I took their word as truth.

I guess it is all of these reasons that my life is always planned far in advance. I always know where I’m going and when, and if Friday approaches and I have no plans, well then my plans are just that, to sit and relax and do nothing.

That’s not to say I’m not spontaneous, because Ginger and Lisa can tell you they have been kidnapped for some random spontaneous trips many times. But even those are predictable. You can predict that if I have to go buy something I will call one of them. I hate to shop alone. Mostly because I like a second point of view. I have a tendency to see something I want and buy it. This is usually where Lisa comes in. We can spend HOURS picking out a purse, a knife, a pair of jeans, or something as simple as a rug. We look at it from every angle, we both try it on. I make her try on shoes so I can see how the shoe looks walking. Then we rationalize it financially. Is this something you will love forever Shannon? Usually Lisa can be right on target when she says, hey idiot your going to hate this in a week. This is why one of the most predictable things I do at the grocery store is stop 10 feet from the check stand and take almost everything back out of my cart because I suddenly realize I don’t want to spend the money. That means if you are at my local smiths there is a great chance you will see a box of Cheerios sitting in the freezer section because that is where I was standing when I got shoppers remorse.

At work I’m the most predictable. I only use one pen, it must be blue and it must have my little I am loved button on it. I only use one note pad and my mouse has to be just so. If I walk in your office chances are I’m going to rearrange your mouse to suit my needs and yes I will forget to put it back your way when I leave. I like to eat lunch at my desk. I like to eat my lunch with a plastic fork. I prefer my coffee in a mug but everything else in a water bottle or plastic cup. This is why my work always has paper plates, plastic ware and plastic cups. At work I also like things in a certain spot. My stapler has to be right over there, no not there, there to the right a little. My staple remover needs to be over there and for the love of God can you please make my paperclips not visible to everyone else.

I only carry a Coach purse because along with being reliable comes a sense of loyalty. I pick a brand and I stick with it. I tried to buy a Dooney once and I felt like I was having a dirty little affair on all of my Coach purses. I tried to buy a Henkle knife but I could see my Wusthoffs giving him dirty looks from across the knife block. I tried to hang a white picture frame but the black frames all ganged up on him and made me paint him black.

Are you a creature of habit? Are there things that have to be done just so? Do you have to pour your creamer before the coffee for it to taste right? What are some of the things that some would consider your quirks but you consider normal?

Come by and drop me a line. Tell me your funny habits, but what ever you do, do not touch my blue pen or your ass is grass!

THESE ARE GREAT

MY FAVORITES

• IDENTIFYING BIRDS
  When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.
• ASIAN RESTAURANTS
  Any Asian restaurant with the word “Lucky” in the name will have excellent, authentic food. It will also give you stomach cramps.
• Shivering produces as much heat as running at a slow pace or roughly the amount of heat generated from eating two medium-sized chocolate bars per hour.
• Always wash your car before taking it in for service. Mechanics are more likely to take advantage of you if your car looks like it needs “everything.”
• If you’re thirsty, you’ve waited too long. To avoid dehydration, drink water ahead of time. Put another way: If you’re thirsty, drink water. If you’re not thirsty, drink water anyway.
• One out of five items costing under $75 that you buy at a garage sale will end up in your garage sale within the next 1.5 years.

This will be one of those post that starts in one place and then takes a sharp left turn and then probably starts going uphill or something. What I mean is, I’m going to change subjects a little so try and keep up.

First of all some of you may know that I am doing the Tuesday Tummy Tuck (basically we are all on a low cal healthy eating lifestyle change and we weigh in every Tuesday, it’s not to late to join by the way). I’ve been feeling frustrated with my slow weight loss so last week I decided to pull a Babe Ruth and predict a home run. Or in my case I was predicting a 3 pound weigh loss this week. No more of this one pound a week shit. Step away from the chocolate Shannon. Because I was hell bent on making this goal and not looking like a fucking idiot who couldn’t abstain from junk food long enough to lose 3 lbs I’ve been very good this week. That means that big huge piece of strawberry tuxedo cake sitting in my fridge has done that all week SIT!

Back to the point of the story here. Last night we took Brandon to the indoor McDonalds play place because its freezing here and he WANNA GO PARK WANNA GO PARK really bad. Rob says he will take him when he picks him up from work but he has to stop by the bank first so we ended up being off at the same time. I told him I would meet him and Brandon there. This means that I go walking into McDonalds all alone (well I had Codi) and am hit with the giant wafting of FRENCH FRIES. Delicious greasy fries. Those are the only things I eat at McDonalds (aside from a salad now and then) and of course McFlurrys. I stop dead in my tracks and say to myself, it’s only a small fry, and it won’t hurt your weight loss any since you were super good all week. Yes thats right, one little wiff of fries and I was going to toss in the towel all together. THAT IS…until I remembered that McDonalds adds beef to their fries. FUUUUUUCK THAT! So for the first time in my life I was actually grateful for meat and I remembered why I had totally banished McDonalds from my life forever. So no fries for me, and instead I just went and played in the play land with Brandon and I actually got some exercise. It payed off because this morning I did my weekly weigh in and I saw that I had lost 4.4 pounds instead of just 3. Okay well for 4 pounds I can deal with a life with out fries.

Anyway this whole thing leads me to where I was really going with this all. An acquaintance (ahahahah it’s hilarious that I refer to them this way rather then a friend) of mine recently asked me why I became a vegetarian. I realized that I’m not sure I ever wrote about that on here. I’m sure I have but I really can’t remember everything I write so I wanted to tell you all again.

Becoming a vegetarian was a very slow long process. It was actually almost 14 years before I became a full on vegetarian and even now I still taste meat almost every night, because dammit a good chef tastes what they make no matter how much they hate meat.

Step one: One day in my old tiny kitchen on Toll Road I was enjoying a bologna and plastic cheese roll up. One of my all time favorite snacks. I was about 11 at the time. My cousin who is at my house looks at me and says, did you know they put pig ears and feet and noses and ears in bologna? I froze dead in my tracks and since I always took whatever my cousin said to be totally true (she used this to her advantage…just ask her sometime about the fucking pink bathrobe ghost) I threw away my bologna and gave it up for a long time. She also let me know that hot dogs were the same thing. I was so upset as those were actually my two favorite meats. Yes thats right you guys have no idea how ghetto this girl really is.

Step two: My mom likes to eat fish. She used to make me eat it. I hate hate hate fish. Aside from tasting like rotten trash, they swim in their own poop all day for goodness sakes. One night she made me fish and I wouldn’t eat it. She was like no your eating it so I had to just sit and stare at it. The fish got cold and she reheated it. Finally in an attempt to get me to eat it she let me pour some Mrs. Dash cheese powder stuff on it. I think that stuff was meant for popcorn and definitely not fish. This just made it worse. That one night is the actual reason I don’t make Brandon eat if he doesn’t want to. If he’s hungry he’ll come back and eat, but if he doesn’t like what I’m serving he doesn’t have to eat it. I can’t make his taste buds like something they don’t the same way I will never ever like fish or lamb. Back to the point. The next time my mom served fish I very matter O factly informed her I was now a vegetarian. It worked, I didn’t have to eat the fish. However, now I had to become a vegetarian because I had said it. Fuck what had I done.

Step three: After the fish incident I did good at giving up meat. I realized I actually didn’t like it. However I totally missed burgers. SOoooo me and my dad would often go run an errand, stop at McDonalds buy burgers and eat em before we got home so my mom wouldn’t know I ate meat and try and feed me more fish. But alas everything has to get ruined. One day I was about 15 at this point, my dad and I had went on a driving lesson in his jeep and he let me drive up to McDonalds (a story I should tell someday about learning to drive clutch in a 1970 jeep with no power steering up a hill..awesome). So we are up there and I’m enjoying my Big N Tasty and we are talking about me not eating meat and why and stuff and I look down at my burger and kinda see it for what it is and nearly barf. Have you every actually analyzed ground beef? If not don’t! I didn’t finish my burger and I have NEVER eaten a burger since.

From this point on I was mostly meat free. Only I would sometimes get reallllllly stoned and eat hot dogs or chicken strips. In fact that is how my guy friends knew when I was at my weed limit…when I requested they drive me to Raleys for chicken strips. I went about this way for 4 more years. Then when I was 19 I started the Atkins diet. Ummm have you ever done Atkins. The whole point of the diet is to eat meat. So I said, Self you can eat this meat if it means you will lose weight. SO for about 7 months I at meat. Mostly chicken and steak with a little ham and pork chops once in a while.

Step four: This is where all red meat suddenly started tasting like blood to me and I banished all red meat from my life. So now it was just chicken and pork.

Step five: Where I wake up grossed out by all pork besides bacon.

Step six: Where I discover I can no longer eat chicken that looks like chicken because chicken actually taste really fucking gross. I now realize that I hate chicken, that I’ve hated it all along and I don’t know how in the fuck you people even eat chicken. Excuse me while I throw up. The only chicken or meat I am now tolerating is of course my beloved hot dogs (like every 4 months) and McChicken sandwiches and spicy chicken sammies from Wendy’s. I could eat those because they didn’t’ actually look or taste like chicken.

Step seven: I get pregnant with Brandon and realize that all meat is the devil and quit eating it. Cooking it, seeing it and smelling it makes me sick. This is the point where I go pretty much off all meat with the exception again of my stupid hot dogs. (Dude could I have picked a worse meat to eat?). I still cooked it for Rob but I stood about 4 feet from the stove while doing it, and I had a coronary if I came home and my house smelled like bacon. (I burned a lot of candles then).

Step eight: Shannon gets pregnant with Codi and realizes that hot dogs taste like feet and gives up ALL MEAT FOREVER because seriously people this stuff taste like shit. Except bacon, bacon taste like pieces of fried heaven, but it is an animal so I make do with soy bacon. MMMMMMM soy bacon BLT (if I knew how to type out that sound home makes where he drools and his tongue sticks out of his mouth I would insert it here.)

At this point I think it is a combination of really thinking meat taste bad, and really not wanting to eat an animal. I’ve kind of tricked my mind into thinking of all animals as fluffy little kitty cats and such. I hate the idea of eating meat because all I see is the poor little animal as I’m eating it. Like I said I do taste my dinners every night, and by taste I mean I take the smallest teensiest bite you’ve ever seen. And last week when I tasted my beef lumpia I took a bite, chewed three times, got the flavor and spit it out. However since all good chefs taste their food, and I don’t ever want to be in a position some day where I’m finally at a culinary high and I get shut down because I didn’t taste the fucking chicken and notice it was undercooked, I taste the fucking chicken at night.

As a side note, when I was smaller around 11-12 I had bunnies, ducks and chickens. Because of this I always had a problem eating meat anyway. Last week I was watching Iron Chef and rabbit was the secret ingredient and I deleted the show immediately because it made me sad and I didn’t want to support killing animals for sport like that. This is also why I will skip over your blog if you talk about killing animals in any way. I don’t believe in it. I don’t fish, I don’t let my husband fish and I’m really having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that both of my kids grandparents want to take them fishing. It is against everything I believe in, and personally I think the whole world would just be better off if we were all vegetarians. I know we would all be healthier!

As a parent there are many things said to you that really drive you crazy. Most of those things are said right to your face. Things like:

• When my kids where growing up…
• You really shouldn’t…
• I heard….
• You should do it this way

But, there are also things that aren’t said directly. Those are the ones that bug me the most. I’ve been encountering this a lot lately. However I’ve been encountering this the most at work. I hesitate to write about this because you never know who is reading, but at this point it is driving me nuts.

Here is my favorite examples,
“Oh look how cold your little feet are, your mommy didn’t put any socks on you.”
“Oh your wearing that funny shirt again that rides up funny, I know that bothers you huh.”
“Oh your mommy has you upside down to help you fart. Isn’t that weird, yes look at you, your upside down.” (He was actually on my knees with his head tilted town about an inch so I could push his legs up to help him fart.)

This shit drives me batty people. If your going to tell me I’m doing something wrong, tell me. Don’t tell my 8 week old in front of my face knowing I’ll read between the lines that you think I’m being a fucking moron. I don’t understand why people do that. Obviously they know that I hear them, obviously I’m smart enough to figure it out, so why beat around the bush like a scared little bitch. Instead of saying, wears your jacket little one, just say Hey Shannon I think your kid should have a jacket. That way I can have a chance to respond that no it’s a hundred degrees in my car, he’s fully clothed and under a bundle me, a jacket would give him heat stroke.

So a word to the wise. If you think your mommy friends are fucking up, come right out and say it to their face, that way you at least give them the option to say back in your face, GO PARENT YOUR OWN KID AND NOT MINE! I’m doing just fine thank you very much! Because what I’ve noticed, is most of the time those people are telling you what your doing wrong, they have their own kid at home. However, their kid is usually some total screw up who they see nothing wrong with. Obviously lady your way isn’t working or your kid wouldn’t be sitting at home with their thumb up their ass being a lose piece of shit.

For those of you moms who encounter this, from now on try handling it like me.

“Why yes Codi you are upside down huh cutie wootie smootzie, thats because your mommy did the research and read and learned what to do to help you relieve the gas, isn’t that right lovey dovey moopie pie, your mommie is doing whats the very best for you isn’t she, isn’t she, yeah, you like being upside down because mommy is making your belly feel better. You love your mommy because she takes the time to read books and research and learn all about you, sweetie baby dearest!

THAT WILL SHUT THOSE FUCKERS UP HUH!

Rob: Babe come in here

Me: Why

Rob: Come see what came out of your sons butt

Me: Umm do I want to?

Rob: Yup just come see it

Me: Uhhh okay

Rob: Look babe it’s the biggest log ever. There man sized poops like I do babe, I didn’t know he made such big poops!

Me: Ummmmmm Hmmmmm!