Few things are worse then hearing your name paged over the airport speaker system informing, “Salt Lake City passenger, ‘Loralee Choat-ay’, please come immediately to gate E15. Your flight is holding and is ready for departure.”, when you SWEAR that you have 35 minutes until your flight leaves.

That is, there is nothing worse unless you are hearing aforementioned announcement at the asscrack of dawn after getting zero sleep the night before due to anxiety of dying while flying in a plane the size of a Diet Coke can and/or missing your flight, and you are in the ladies room simultaneously having a panic attack and peeing like a racehorse and realize seconds after the announcer hideously mispronounces your name that THERE IS NO TOILET PAPER IN YOUR STALL.

THAT is much, much worse, my friends. You’ll just have to trust me on this one.

As my flabby ass jiggled and my feet thundered as I ran and panted down the concourse to my gate, I kept cursing my decision to not continue with boot-camp classes because then I might not feel like I was inhaling hydrochloric acid into my lungs. I was still confused about my departure time, so while I was running I pawed through my purse to get out my boarding pass and saw that YES, I was right about the time. I should have still had plenty of time to board my flight.

When I finally got to the gate, I couldn’t even speak to ask, “WTF, yo?!”. I just stood there gasping, sputtering and clutching my pounding chest in a manner that probably looked like I was feeling myself up.
I mean, I love my boobies, but even I have some amount of public restraint.

Sometimes.

Where was I?

Oh, yes. Sputtering, gasping, turning white and purple and spewing ropes of mucous at the gate attendant.

He guessed who I was.

“Oh, we just wanted to leave early. No problem. You’re fine.”

I AM? Try telling that to the very unfortunate guy who had to endure my mucous-infested coughing and wheezing for half of the flight as I tried to get enough oxygen to not pass out on him. Heart rate induced asthma can be a real bitch sometimes. I should have brought my inhaler, dammit.

I lived through the flight and on my way back to Cache Valley, I stopped in Salt Lake and met my beautiful, sassy, blogging friend, Sarah, for lunch at a restaurant that had a dessert case so glorious I considered raping it when I passed by on my way to the ladies room.

There was a lot of peeing going on with me today.

As I said, Sarah is gorgeous. I look like a homeless person (asscrack of dawn flight, remember?) but that is ok. If you look good all the time people expect too much of you. Personally, I am fond of getting a standing ovation for bothering to comb my hair.

The funny coinkidink about having lunch with Sarah is that is pretty much how I kicked off my whirlwind trip over a week ago. And yes, you are going to be subjected to it all. I will try to be brief, but try not to stick a fork in your eye, ok? I’ll sum up into brief paragraphs, if it makes it easier. I’ll even put in pithy little titles so you don’t get board.

“Who the hell knew that Diet Coke isn’t organic???”

As I was saying, I had lunch with Sarah and two fabulous bloggity friends, Jon Deal (Ransom Note Typography) and Brad (That One Guy). I didn’t have my stupid camera charged, so I don’t have a photo of the four of us, but I loved that lunch. We all got along like peas and carrots.I could lunch, talk, laugh and just be totally myself with this group of people until the end of time.

Indeed, the only drawback was when the waitress at the very tasty organic restaurant we dined at informed me that they only served “Organic” drinks and Diet Coke DOES NOT QUALIFY?!

WTF?

I plan on petitioning an organic hippie compound in Berkley to change that. Email me if you want to join in my quest.

“Fat cat in a little coat”

After lunch, I met Mandi and Jen for Jen’s baby shower. I heart them both. Mandi flew in from Georgia to throw the shower and Jen just looked radiant and adorable.

Plus, she has the fattest, most adorable, luscious, fatty fattakins cat on the planet. He is bigger than a huge watermelon and HIS name is “Abby”. Considering my female cat’s name is “Wilbur”, this just makes him rock even more.

The next morning I flew to Minneapolis to be with my brother. I already talked about some of the fun things we did in the previous post and I am going to add photos now that I have access to my photos.

The trip was a blast, even though we had no furniture in the house and I forgot my blowdryer. I guess the trip could have been titled “In which Loralee’s hair perpetually looks like a frizzy crap sandwich”, but I was just so happy to be in Minnesota that I didn’t care. (Too much).

“Loralee was here”

One of my favoritest things about this trip was hanging out with bloggity friends, both new and old. First off, I met Gretchen, who was so fun, vibrant and talented. She mainly blogs about her crafting, which she is ridiculously talented at, but she has the most fabulous personality as well.

We hit it off so well that we set up a second bloggity date where she braved my bad baking gene by teaching me to make rolls. I will post the whole recipe and photos plus directions at a later time, but these are the VERY BEST ROLLS I HAVE EVER SCARFED DOWN.

I want marry them and have little roll babies. Of course, this might be awkward as it would mean that I would totally fall into that category of “Those that eat their young”

I loved them and so did my brother, Brad. He has now commanded that I am in charge of roll making at all family gatherings (even if we’re not eating anything else. I still have to make the rolls.). They were soooo yummy.

And? To illustrate her personality, she posted this blog post with this photo after I left our “Roll Afternoon”. It is simply titled, “Loralee was here”.

You can see WHY I laughed my ass off. I so love the empty Diet Coke cups. HEE!

“Is an Amber Alert needed??”

Speaking of amazing baking and hilarity, I also got to hang out with “The Over Thinker”. OT has such snarky, witty comments on my blog, I love her. She is a million times better in person. Let’s add to the fact that she made me a tub of vanilla cupcakes with vanilla bean buttercream frosting and that she has glasses very similar to mine and that just makes her perfection in my eyes.

Because she is anonymous in her blogging I can’t tell you THE COOLEST THINGS ABOUT HER, but I will say that she is an ordained minister and is going to marry her friend this summer in the Teatons. How awesome is THAT? I could have spent DAYS with her and not gotten board. She rocks the house.

I did force her to stay in my brother’s basement and look for a photo that I had “Somewhere” in the millions of unorganized files splayed across my computer. Her husband didn’t send out a search party, but it was close.

“Deep, lovely waters”
Meeting Tasha and Amber for sushi was also lovely. I love talking to them. They are secure, intelligent, ambitious young women that are going to do some amazing things in their lives. Both of them have been reading me since the first few months of my blog and are Bemidji state alums. They are wicked smart and I love listening to them and their conversation. I am so very fond of everything about them. We had a lovely lunch and whiled away the time walking, shopping and talking. Every minute was relaxed, familiar and much needed moment for my soul.

Here are the lovelies. I would post a picture of all three of us, but I kept cutting off half of Tasha’s head in the photo.

I mentioned that I LOVED hanging out with my brother, Brad, right? He is very similar to me in his sense of humor, as illustrated here:

“The taco champion of Minnehaha*”

“Brad, I cannot eat one more taco. Two is my limit. You’ll have to eat the last one.”
“What? You can’t eat three?”
“No.”
“You’re sure???? Not EVEN if I turn it into a taco eating contest????”

We are the weirdest family I know.

Speaking of Minnehawhaw Falls, they are pretty, are they not?

I ended up seeing Jessie the day before I left.

I love Jessie so much. She is like a sister to me. She is one of my Bemidji readers and she has had the coolest, most varied life, living in India, a lean-to in the woods, hopping freight trains to Alaska and she just successfully defended her thesis. We went to lunch and coffee and talked and talked and talked. One day I hope to have half of the inner-peace that she does. She is amazing.

While I am SO GLAD to be home, I love Minnesota and the people in it. I am sad my brother moved from there, but hope, hope, HOPE that I can get there again.

As long as I don’t have to fly in a freaking tiny plane while needing to pee.

**Ok, this conversation didn’t REALLY occur in Minnehawhaw, but it is just SUCH a great name to say. And it sounds way better than “The taco champion of Apple Valley”, you know?

This was supposed to be Sunday’s post and my fridge and pasta post was supposed to go up Monday. I wrote them at the same time and must have transposed the publish dates.

Boo.

Oh, well. This way I can talk a bit about Easter, so I’ll just do two posts on Sunday. It never killed anyone, right?

Right.

How is your Easter going? Good? Are you having food and fun with family? Awesome.

How is my Easter?

Weeeelllll…

Easter suckasuckaSUCKS.

It just does so far.

It sucks a duck. Or a goose. Or quite possibly even a turkey.

Due to some highly emotional things that occurred last night, I totally made some Easter boo-boos and dropped the ball.

I had the kid’s baskets (full of candies they like, and these books, which I was excited about getting for them.) hidden on the lower shelf of our mobile island. You can see it next to the fridge in the post below. I was up crying a lot of the night and so I forgot to move all the Easter stuff to the table before I curled up in the fetal position in my bed around daybreak. (Can we please just ignore this part in all ways, shapes, and forms? Thanks. I appreciate it. It’s only applicable because there was a major reason I forgot to actually put the baskets out on the table.)

Jon and I don’t get a lot of Easter stuff. I splurge on REALLY high quality chocolate bunnies that I look forward to all year, some Russell Stover’s marshmallow chocolate eggs for me and some peanut butter eggs for Jon.

That’s it.

I stacked them on top of the island and because they are big, we but the boys “Carrot baseball bats” next to them.

My kids came running in to our bedroom and I was curled into a ball in the fetal position (yup. Still crying.) and I told them I forgot to put the stuff out and that it was in the island.

They were thrilled and ate it all up.

Problem?

They ate up the wrong pile.

So, I had no Easter candy. Not a big deal, it’s just a small example of the suck of the day that I feel like talking about. We aren’t even having Easter dinner with anyone. Jon and I thought the other was making arrangements and I didn’t get any fixings to make an Easter dinner.

So, anyway….The day just blows thus far.

Now that this cheeriness is all done, let’s move on to awarding the Peep of the Week.

The award goes to….

ADAM from the blog, Shadowy Figures.

Holy cow, this former lurker is comment gold!! Try clicking over to his blog and seeing the post about selling a saltine that looks like the state of Wyoming or how his dog, Floyd, should be cast as Tzeitel in an upcoming production of Fiddler on the Roof. It’s a crack up. He’s hilarious, yo.

Adam immediately caught my eye with his first-ever comment on my blog when he was commenting about my kitty, Wilbur and her whorish ways.

“Wow. Hey Loralee. Long time lurker, first time commenter. I was coming here to comment on yesterday’s post, which I may still do. But I just had to say, holy jeez! Our cats must be doppelgangers. Mine looks EXACTLY like yours.

And another freakish coincidence, HER name is Otis! (Thankfully, she is not the trollop yours seems to be. I chalk that up to my raising her Catholic. The whole “fear of God” stuff we lay on the kiddies (see what I did there? kiddies kitties. ).

Just wanted to say. Great blog. I’m working my way through the early archives, even though you’ve expressly wished that we not. Nyah! (You’d have to look very hard to see it, but I’m sticking my tongue out at you right now.)”

Then today he cracked me up with his commentary about my fridge.

“You just couldn’t resist bragging about your incredible fridge, eh? Now how am I going to go on, knowing that my fridge could be measuring out for my water bottle?

And I stand there eyeballing it, like an IDIOT!”

Thanks for the smile, Adam. It was appreciated.

If you want to give a commenter a shout on your blog, feel free to post a link to it below:

James, I am so glad that you talked to me tonight, but so sad that you are hurting. I want you to look at me and really listen to what I am saying and trust me, ok?

Ok.

You just told me that you think that I don’t understand how you’re feeling because I have ‘Lots and lots of friends’, right? I want you to know that I absolutely understand how you are feeling. You are heartbroken because after struggling so hard with not having any friends at school, the one and only friend you finally made ditched you for someone he thought was better, right?

Right.

Honey, I do have friends now. Lots and lots of friends that I cannot even say how grateful I am to have in my life.

Do you know a big reason WHY I am so grateful for my friends?

I am grateful because I didn’t have many friends at all when I was growing up. I could count them on one or two fingers most of the time. People not only made fun of me every single day of my life. It was so painful and hurt me so much that sometimes I can still feel exactly what it felt like all these years later. It hurt me for a lot longer than it should and made me think less of myself because I thought something must be wrong with me because I didn’t have friends.

I know that you don’t understand why kid A, B, C & D are so mean to you. I know you don’t understand why no one will stick up for you when people are teasing you, even though you stand up for them when they are being teased.Do you want to know something?

Most of them don’t understand why they do it, either.

You know better than anyone how mean kids can be to other kids just in order to fit in, not stick out, to be accepted. To stand up and face a crowd that is picking on someone takes an awful lot of courage. It’s one reason I am SO proud of you. But…a lot of kids just don’t have that at this stage in their lives.

I AM sure that at least ONE person has wanted to stick up for you in their heart and hated what was happening, but they were too afraid of everyone turning on them if they stood up and said ‘Stop’.

At some point in their lives, they will grow up, be stronger, be less afraid to stand alone. They will also regret the way that they treated you. They WILL. They will wish that day in the cafeteria had gone differently.

You and I are so much alike. I so wish you didn’t have to go through this, but if I could undo anything about my past it would be to change how hard I was on myself. I would want to see me like people who loved and cared about me see me.

How I see YOU.

You are a wonderful, wonderful person. You have such a fun personality, so much energy and kindness. You DO know how to be a friend, you are just in a tough place. This age is so hard on most people, son. Everyone else needs to catch up to YOU. You will see. For some it happens in High School, but it didn’t happen for me until college.

Suddenly, people got to college and everyone was on a level playing field. People were less worried about what the kid sitting next to them would think of their friends and more about how much they actually liked being around the person in question.

And guess what? I was a person people wanted to be around. I looked around a room full of fellow Choir-geeks and realized that every single person in that room LIKED ME.

They liked me because I was funny, smart, talented and kind.

JUST LIKE YOU ARE.

It was a wonderful, wonderful moment, James and I know you will have something similar if not better.

I can see it, son. I can see what you can be. I absolutely know without a shadow of a doubt that your life will be blessed with friends that love and care about you just the way you are.

You have to trust me that I KNOW IT.

You are an excellent brother and I couldn’t ask for a better son.

Now it’s time to try and get some sleep.

Hopefully, things will be better tomorrow.

I love you with all my heart.

Goodnight.