Cooler Than You and Your Mom

Tuesday

09Mar2010

Me and My Mouth

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 9:02AM

by sylvia

Ok, y'all - I did something crazy recently. I subscribed to a toothbrush and a tongue cleaner.

I know, I know - you can hardly believe it. Me either!

But seriously.

Do you have a Trader Joe's near you? I love that place. We just got one recently, but I've been to them in other cities when traveling. I guess I didn't know how great it was until I had the opportunity to spend more time there on a regular basis. (If you know something bad about Trader Joe's, please tell me. Bianca told me recently that IKEA uses sweatshops, so that destroyed my love for them. Plus, I could never get anyone to make the 4 hour trip with me to our closest one, so our love was fading nonetheless.)

Bianca mentioned yesterday that she's going to change the way she looks at food, but honestly - the both of us have been talking for awhile about how we want to stay away from additives and preservatives, etc. And that's one of the reasons why I love Trader Joe's, but not at all what I wanted this post to be about.

Since the Trader Joe's in our area is close to work, I decided to spend a lunch break there while Bianca was doing something else other than being in the office taking me to lunch. It's not a very big store, so you can make it through every aisle in under a half hour, if all the rich, snobby people aren't blocking all the areas you are trying to get to.

I didn't realize that Trader Joe's sold toiletry type items, and I was in the market for a new toothbrush for work. I saw this toothbrush called "Preserve", which is made from recycled yogurt cups.

Now, I'm not as good as a recycler as I should be. I do try to recycle as much as I can at home, but let's just say there's room for improvement.

And I'm a stickler for catchy, cute & clean marketing and packaging, so I bought the toothbrush. When I got back to the office, I looked them up and found out more about them. You can do that here.

Turns out, you can subscribe to their toothbrush and tongue cleaner programs. Basically, for about $11/year, they will send you a new toothbrush or tongue cleaner every three months. You can choose the color or select "assorted" which is what I did, so I can be surprised every quarter. Plus, I love scraping my tongue to get rid of the grimies.

When all is said and done, you can return the toothbrushes (I think they already pay for postage), and they recycle them.

Now, I try not to think that the toothbrush I am using has been in someone else's mouth (and yes, I know that's not how that works), but the Mr. Sylvia popped that idea into my head, so I thought I would share it all with you, to try and scare it out of my head.

So I got my goods in the mail a few days after subscribing, and was pleased with the colors!

My teeth are happy, too!

And in the style of toothbrush and toothpaste commercials, here's a picture of me brushing my teeth with no toothpaste and wearing lipstick!

*I have not been compensated for any part of this post. I am merely talking about Trader Joe's and the toothbrush and tongue cleaner cuz I think they're awesome! Oh, and good for the environment, too.*

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Monday

08Mar2010

Changing the Way I Look at Food

Monday, March 8, 2010 at 9:17AM

By Bianca

Yesterday started as a nice day. My family went to the gym and had a great work out. But, I apparently pissed some lady off about five minutes after we got there, but I am pretty sure she was one of those annoying high strung chicks, who doesn't want to wait a whole two minutes for you to finish using the pull down machine, and decides to passive aggressively sigh loudly, which made me take my sweet ass time finishing my second set, which caused her to sigh even louder and then flounce off to another machine. Oh yeah, did I mention there were about 10 other open machines in the circuit we were using, and the gym had just opened, so she had not used any of them yet, but thought it was perfectly acceptable to come over to where I was sitting and be a bitch just because I did not immediately jump up and let Her Highness have the machine? Yeah, fuck her.

After we got home, my husband and I decided to start working on our tub garden, since it was such a nice day. We had a garden last year, which was semi-successful, so we are hoping it will be even better this year. We would like to start everything in tubs, then move them to a nice spot in our back yard, and hope the rabbits don't get to them.

We planted broccoli, several kinds of lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, bell peppers, pablano peppers, squash, zucchini, and more! We are also going to plan an herb garden. I am really excited, and hope the plants grow and flourish. There is a big taste difference between what we grow and the crap we buy at the grocery store.

After planting, we ate lunch, and then decided to watch Food Inc, for no reason other than it was in our NetFlix queue. And oh my gosh you guys, you know I hate to be dramatic, but it totally changed the way I look at food.

I always knew that there was some hinky stuff going on with the companies that produce the majority of chicken, beef and pork in this country, but I never really thought about the total impact it has on not only the environment and the animals themselves, but on the farmers themselves who have contracts with these companies.

And did you know that corn is in almost everything? And has like 800 different names. I had no idea that xanthan gum was a derivative of corn. I clearly need to educate myself about what I am eating.

My husband I have decided to make some major changes to the way we eat. We had already decided to cut out as much processed stuff as we could. Now we are also committed to eating as much organic, free range, grass fed, local meat, dairy and eggs as we can. Obviously this is more expensive than supermarket products, but we are willing to make the sacrifice, eat less meat, and focus on a more vegetarian type of diet.

We have also decided to support local farming as much as we can, and shop at farmers markets to support farms that follow organic or sustainable farming. We have found a local CSA that we will be signing up for. And as I mentioned, we are already planting our own garden.

We can't be perfect, but we sure as hell can be way more aware of where the food we are eating comes from.

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Friday

05Mar2010

The Art of Being Happy

Friday, March 5, 2010 at 1:28PM

by sylvia

I don’t know what got me thinking about this, but maybe it was the conversation I had with my niece on her 20^th birthday. See, she was beating herself up for not being where she thought she would be when she turned 20. I was like “OMG. WTF. SRSLY?” except that I’m SURE I was way more eloquent and junk than that.

She’s 20. She lives at home and going to school for fashion design. That’s pretty damn good. She’s probably doing better than most people she went to high school with. I told her if she was 30 and she was in the same situation, then she should be concerned. And I’m pretty sure I doled out this awesome piece of advice:

“Enjoy your youth, but always have your goals on the horizon.”

Yeah, it’s schmaltzy. And it was coming from me, someone whose goals may have been on the horizon, but I was looking at the vertical horizon when I should have been paying attention to the horizontal one.

Plus, I’m not sure I really ever enjoyed my youth after age 12, as my primary concerns became boys liking me so I could somehow feel like a normal, validated, person of worth. In case you are wondering, the boys - they didn’t like me. But that’s a story for a whole other therapy session post.

So that got me thinking. Should I be beating myself up for not having loftier goals? I think the only real goals I had for myself were to finish college and be happy. And I accomplished those. Sure, we want to have kids, and we’re going to – one way or another. But I gotta say, I’m pretty content right now.

When I was younger, I was always looking for something else. A different place to work. A new career. A new city to move to. I guess I felt like the happiness I looking for was somewhere else. Any place but where I was.

But as I got older (and admittedly less pretentious), I got over my need to do something different. I guess. I got comfortable with myself and stopped trying to be something I’m not. I mean, I know it is dangerous to get too comfortable in whatever you’re doing because then you don’t really grow as a person.

But is it really that wrong to not have higher aspirations than to just be happy?

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Thursday

04Mar2010

Half Nekkid Thursday - The Lips Have It

Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 12:00AM

I suspect that in a few weeks we will be recycling body parts (not literally! we got out of that business a long time ago) so we hope you don't get tired of us doling out the other fabulous parts of ourselves. Hey, we're not just beautiful bellies and boobs, you know! At least one of us has a nice ass!

Enjoy, and don't forget to check out all the other participants here! Share the love.

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Tuesday

02Mar2010

My Bestie is Way Better Than Your Bestie

Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 8:16PM

By Bianca

A couple of months ago I had my 29+noneofyourdamnbusiness birthday, and Sylvia was kind enough to babysit Zeta, so my husband and I could go to a fancy adult restaurant and ignore each other like all good married couples do, rather than going to some crappy chain restaurant and listen to my daughter babble on and on about...well...I don't actually know, because I have perfected the uh huh nod while she is talking, without actually listening to a single word she is saying. Parenting is really tough, let me tell you.

So I was all dressed up, with my hair and make up did, and Sylvia, being the cool friend that she, didn't want me going out without enough sparkly pink things, so she gave me a bag full of AWESOME! She also gave me a card, but I, um...lost it, so I can't tell you what it said.

Wanna see what I got?

An awesome pink feather boa. I sleep with it every night.

A super fun sparkly headband. I save this for nookie time.

A cell phone full of glitter! My husband was not amused. Probably because I always manage to get glitter everywhere. I told him glitter makes everything look better, but he seems to think that having sparkles in your hair and on your tie during a very important business meeting is unprofessional. And that's when I told him maybe he should win the lottery already, so he can quit his job, and I can have the east wing of our mansion for my glitter collection.

But wait, it gets even better!! Because Sylvia lied to me when she told me that she would rather eat her own pubic hair than read my posts on this blog. And how do I know that? Because clearly she read this post, and last week surprised me with most awesomest birthday present ever in the history of birthday presents!

That's right bitches! New Kids on the Fucking Block! In concert!

Jealous? You should be.

It comes with not one, but two discs of 80's cheesy pop goodness. It's like buying a package of bacon, and finding out it comes with chocolate dipping sauce.

And a little poster of the whole group. The one on the left is mine ladies, so keep your fat mitts off him thankyouverymuch.

It also came with OFFICIAL NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK MERCHANDISE! I am sure this is an immediate collector's item, and I will be able to sell it on Ebay in about 10 years for $2.00. Who needs a 401k, when you have a piece of cloth that came off one of the New Kids on the Block's rear end, and quite possible has butt juice on it?

It also came with some NKOTB dogtags, that fit perectly into my cleavage (much like the hand of God), but I lost them some mean evil person at work stole them from my desk, and I have not seen them since. I am sure they stole them because they are jealous that I have so many awesome things, and not because they wanted to show them to everyone else at work, and now they are all laughing about me behind my back for being such a loser.

Which is unfortunate for you, because there will be no picture of Bianca's cleavage with New Kid on the Block dogtags snuggly nestled between my ample breasts.

Oh, what the hell. We need the page views, so I'll post a picture of my ample breats anyways.