Since April Fools’ Day is coming up in a few days, we decided this post from two years ago is worth a Second Glance...

It’s finally here.  The day when I get to release my pent up immaturity…the day when it’s perfectly acceptable for me to feel mischievous and sneaky…the day when I get to be all the things I try to teach my kids not to be.

I must confess, when I was writing yesterday’s ridiculous story, I kind of creeped myself out.  Talk about a prank gone awry.   I’m still paying for that one and will be for many, many more years. Just kidding about the whole awry thing.  It’s a prank that went wonderfully right.  (See yesterday’s post)

Anyway, here’s my prank for this year. I decided to play is safe and work with food.   It’s a TV dinner of a drumstick, mashed potatoes & gravy, peas & carrots, corn on the cob, and a brownie with sprinkles for dessert, all in a disposable store bought foil tray.  Here’s the catch…it’s all made of cupcakes.

Here’s how I did it…

Brownie – It’s just a cupcake frosted in chocolate swirled frosting with sprinkles on top.

Peas & carrots – It’s a cupcake frosted in green frosting.  The peas are green runts and the carrots are orange starbursts cut into 4ths.  Just place both randomly on top of the frosting.

Mashed potatoes and gravy – It’s a cupcake frosted with white frosting with a dip in the middle like real potatoes would have. .  The gravy is caramel ice cream topping.  The butter is a yellow starburst.

Corn on the cob – This is 2 cupcakes frosted with yellow frosting.  The kernels are various yellow Jelly Belly’s placed in rows.  The butter is another yellow starburst.  Finish off with corn picks in the ends.

Drumstick – This one is a bit more tricky, but still doable.  Put a donut hole on top of the cupcake then cover the cupcake top & the donut hole with the frosting, filling in the spaces.  Then cover the frosting with crushed graham crackers.  The bone is white chocolate.  Just melt some white chocolate chips in the microwave and put into a zip lock baggie.  Cut off one tip of the bag and squeeze the melted chocolate onto waxed paper in the shape of a bone.  Once it cools,  just stick it into the cupcake.

Have fun fooling your family with this one!

Also, check out this other fun April Fools’ Day Food Prank:

More April Fools’ Day Food Pranks

- Kate

It’s pretty easy to write optimistically from carb-laden bloat. Easy to imagine giving up something for Lent – especially pancakes. But yesterday was Fat Tuesday after all.

And while pancakes may seem an item I can give up for the next 40-some days, I must make a confession. I don’t like giving things up. Not by personal choice and not by force. But especially not by force.

So when it comes to Lent, I start with ideas of grandeur. I’ll give up meat on Friday. How hard can that be? I do it every year, declaring fish for dinner every Friday. But that’s a given for me. Enter the slacker.

To redeem myself, I’ve thought about things i could abstain from, but it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, quite frankly. (And for those of you who might jump on the it’s-not-supposed-to-be-fun bandwagon, get off my back okay?)

I have, as a slacker, decided to ad something to my list of things to accomplish over the next six or so weeks. I’ll be drinking more tea because I really am not a big fan of water. And with this tea thing, I’m agreeing to at least 32 ounces a day.

For you who say to the slacker, “Say it aint’ so! Tea isn’t the same as water!” I beg to differ. and add that you may want to see <”>this article.

Is’nt that a sacrifice? Take it as you will. It’s the best I’ve got. And for a slacker, I think it’s not half bad.
-Liz

Tag along with Kate as she makes an attempt at being cool, hip and trendy.

Oxygen bars are all the rage these days among the young trendy yuppie types. While I’ll be the first to admit that I am neither young or trendy, I do occasionally try to be hip. My latest attempt at “hipness” involved putting pink plastic tubes up my nose and breathing  the scent of an orange grove, all while trying to relax and not look ridiculous.

Now in case you are reading this and thinking, “What in the sam hill is an oxygen bar?” here’s the Wiki definition:

“An oxygen bar is an establishment, or part of one, that sells oxygen for recreational use. Individual flavored scents may be added to enhance the experience. The flavors in an oxygen bar come from bubbling oxygen through bottles containing aromatic solutions before it reaches the nostrils.” ~Wikipedia

So my thinking is, ‘Why would someone pay good money to breath in scented oxygen?’ I mean, I can plug in an air freshener and breath all the scented air I want…for free. But never one  to be a party pooper, I tagged along with my daughter, her boyfriend and my husband. We made the trip because the boyfriend got injured in a wrestling match  and was having some trouble with his lungs. My husband (who always tries to be among the hip and trendy) heard about the injury and went straight into Dr. mode, telling boyfriend that the oxygen bar would help him heal more quickly.

We went to a salon called Solace. (You can typically find oxygen bars in salons, health clubs,tanning salons,resorts and on practically every corner in Las Vegas.)

First up at the oxygen bar, my daughter and her bf.

My daughter is looking at me with her “I can’t believe you are about to take a picture of me with plastic tubes up my nose” look, while the boyfriend is looking at me with his “Look how cool and trendy I am” look.

While they got their fill of oxygen, my husband and I got 15 wonderful, luxurious minutes in high tech full body massage chairs, each placed in a darkened quiet room. It was 15 minutes of pure heaven. In fact, I”m sincerely hoping that in heaven we each get our own personal full body massage chairs.

My 15 minutes were up much too quickly, as they pulled back my curtain and I was jolted out of my reverie. I mean really, you can’t put a busy mom of 7 kids in a dark quiet room for 15 minutes and think she’s going to leave willingly.

So off to the oxygen bar I headed. I sat on a stool and put the pastel pink oxygen tubes up my nostrils. They felt hard and plastic-y. Thinking I must have them in upside down, I took them out, turned them over and tried it again. Even more hard and plastic-y. Then as instructed, I put the tubes around my ears to hold it in place.  The right side, however kept slipping off. I now am thinking maybe my ears are lopsided?!

Anyway, I decided to push forward and attempt to relax and enjoy, first with the scent of lavender.  Not bad. A quick re-adjustment of  the tubes which were digging into my nasal passages and then on to the eucalyptus. Too medicine-y and hospital-like for my taste. ( With the twist of a switch we were able to control the scent of our oxygen.) Next scent, and my favorite by far, the orange groves.

I tried to relax, breath deeply and feel the oxygen flowing into my body, truly I did.  But I just could not get past the hard plastic up my nose enough to relax. However, my husband seemed to have no trouble in that department, as he appeared to be practically asleep on his stool. In fact, I thought he might just doze off and fall to the floor.

Here are the claimed benefits of breathing oxygen at an oxygen bar:

-Heightens concentration, alertness and memory

-Oxygen gives you energy!

-Oxygen is vital to your immune system, memory, thinking and sight

-Promotes healing and counters aging

-Strengthens your heart, reducing the risk of heart attacks

-Calms your mind and stabilizes your nervous system

-Speeds up the body’s recovery after physical exertion

-Provides a natural remedy for headaches, migraines and hangovers

-Relieves temporary altitude discomfort

-Improves digestion and cell metabolism

-Relieves muscle stiffness, support pre-athletic performance

-Lessens chronic fatigue syndrome and gives you better sleep patterns

Our verdicts:

The boyfriend: loved it. Thought the oxygen made it much easier to breath for the rest of the day.

The daughter: liked it, but not as much as the boyfriend. She was concerned about looking silly. But she said it made her feel good.

The husband: swears by it. Says he would go every week if he could. He says it helps him when he over-exerts himself.

Kate: ummm…maybe I’m just not cut out to be cool, hip and trendy.

Want to learn more about oxygen bars? Check out All About Oxygen.

I also found this…

“Scientific data says that purified oxygen does very little, as our blood is already saturated with 99% oxygen. Any effect that may occur would dissipate within a few minutes, as the blood re-circulates.

Although oxygen bars offer a respite from the many air pollutants found in large cities, many believe that it’s the same as stepping into any building or car with an air filtration system.

To quote an expert, “If your lungs are healthy, and you have no breathing difficulties, your body has all the oxygen it needs,” says George Boyer, MD, chief of pulmonary and critical care at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore. “Taking in more is like going to the gas station and trying to fill a tank that’s already filled.”

The Truth About Oxygen Bars

Check out Kate’s other Adventures…

Kate Goes on an Adventure: with New Moon’s Laurent and Caius

Kate Goes on an Adventure: The Quest for a New Moon Mall Tour Wristband

Kate Goes on an Adventure: Demolition Derby

Kate Goes on an Adventure: Hot Air Ballooning

Kate Goes on an Adventure: Bonneville Salt Flats Speed Week

Related articles

• Increases Your Supply of Oxygen to Rejuvenate You at the Cellular Level (smarthome.com)
• 14 Interesting Facts About Oxygen (femaleimagination.wordpress.com)
• Beauty Byte: OGO Oxygenated Water (fabsugar.com)
• Oxygen discovered surrounding Saturn’s icy moon Dione (slashgear.com)

Rid the World of Fad Diets and Gimmicks Day follows on Jan. 18. While I think the originators of this day probably had the best of intentions, I don’t see this one ever happening. Fad diets and gimmicks have been around since food itself. Might I suggest that the best way to celebrate this one would be to drop any fad diet just for today – and dream of a world where you could eat whatever you wanted and dare anyone to stop you.

On Jan. 22 we celebrate Answer Your Cats Questions Day. In truth, I’d be more inclined to turn this one around on all the cats of the world. While I don’t presently own a cat, I do babysit the neighbor’s cat from time to time. And I have a few questions I’d like to ask. Things like:

• Why must you fly past me as I’m walking down the stairs? Do you really want to see me fall and break a limb? Is it that important that you’re always first to reach the first floor?
• Why do you jump on the counters when you are clearly aware that such activity is not tolerated?
• Why must you root through my cabinets every time I open a door? That’s just gross.
• Why must you always get into things you aren’t supposed to get into, then dash off with a look of feigned innocence as soon as you see me coming?
• Why don’t I trust you? Hmmm???

I suggest holding interrogations with any cats on your list on this day. I may even borrow the neighbor’s cat for a little celebratory fun. Anywho…

We round out the week with National Handwriting Day on Jan. 23.  In fact, Jan. 17-23 is National Handwriting Analysis Week. I think we can have a little fun with this one, too. Since I’d never urge you to do anything I wouldn’t do, I set out on a mission to find a good, free handwriting analyzer on the internet.

After going through several of the analyzers, I found this rather painless (and free) test that you may want to check out for fun. There are a slew of free handwriting analyzers on the internet, so if you have time, do a little surfing and use more than one analysis.

While I really learned nothing new, it did underscore some of my personality quirks with great accuracy. And since this holiday has its own week, you’ll have plenty of time to change your penmanship, should you feel so inclined.

That’s about it for this week, so until next week, get your party on!

Sometimes, even that ritual visit to see Santa gets put off until the last minute. So this year, I figured I’d be one step ahead and actually plan the day for our visit. We headed to Lexington Green before 9 a.m. on Saturday. The plan was simple: I’d pick up a few things from the bookstore, and by the time we were done there, Santa would be arriving, Colton would divulge his wishlist, and we’d be outta there before millions of other Lexingtonians were even awake. (OK, so there are a million people in Lexington, but that’s hardly the point. Any city that has to put up “Caution: High accident risk. Do Not Block Intersections” signs in this area lends the appearance of having at least a million people in the vicinity of the mall.

Just so we’re clear, the Santa at Lexington Green is not your average run-of-the-mill, typical mall Santa with a fake beard and suit stuffed with a pillow. Oh, no. He’s the real deal. You can even pull on his beard. If ever there was a Santa who more closely resembled Miracle on 34th Street, I would be shocked.

My scheduling was working without a glitch, and by 10 a.m., we were walking toward Santa’s temporary headquarters.

“Here we are!” I said to Colton. “Ready to go see Santa.”

“Nah, I’m good.”

“What?!? What do you mean, ‘you’re good’? We’re here to see Santa! Christmas is a week from today!”

“No thanks,” he said, while peeking in to try to catch a glimpse of the old man. Santa’s “organizer” overheard the conversation and tried to help out, while getting the first of the GOOD little boys and girls – the ones who WANTED to talk to Santa, lined up for their turn.

“Are you kidding me, Colton?? You aren’t going to talk to Santa?”

“Nah – maybe tomorrow. Besides, I don’t really want toys like the little kids. I want cool things, like a bluetooth for the PS3.”

“So you don’t think Santa makes those too?!?!”

“Yeah, it’s just that I’d rather come back tomorrow.”

I wondered if he really meant that. Or if, in a dark stroke of fate, it meant he deemed himself too old for the Santa stuff. To hear him talk about it, he’s the last true believer. But how can that be if he doesn’t want to go see him? Is the age of innocence over and gone? Never to return??

Well, maybe for him (although I’m holding out hope). As for me, I’m headed to Lexington Green to get a couple of last minute requests to Pere Noel. I’m no fool… Santa’s Coming!

President Truman with the 1947 turkey, who wasn't lucky enough to be pardoned.

Yep, this is it – the day of days for the gobblers out there. The day when one lucky bird gets the ultimate gift: a pardon. Meanwhile an estimated 45 million will be landing on our dining room tables. For that, I am thankful.

Anywho, the presidential pardon will be given today. This whole pardoning thing began in 1989 with the elder George Bush, and has continued since. And two turkeys are pardoned, not one. (Think of it like the Miss America contest or something – if the winner can’t fulfill her duties, the alternate takes over…).

-Liz

I am away on vacation this week…woohoo!yeehaw! While I’m away I’ve left a few of my favorite summertime posts for you this week. Enjoy! ~Kate

I have survived yet another family vacation. My family (minus one kid, plus 2 friends – for a grand total of 10 people) spent a glorious week in southern California. We had a blast spending 3 days at Disneyland, 2 days at the beach, and we even spent a day enlightening our minds at the Getty Museum.

One of the highlights of every family vacation is adding to our family quote book. Perhaps this is where I should warn you that the collective sense of humor of my family is a little off center, bizarre, random, quirky…well, you get the point, we find odd things funny.

A few years ago we realized we say some pretty wacky things while vacationing together. We started jotting them down so we would remember them. We continued it the next year, and the next, and now it’s become one of our favorite parts of vacation. The key to our vacation quotes is that they are all ridiculous and taken completely out of context. The more ridiculous the better.

So without further ado, here are some of our favorite 2010 vacation quotes…

"Not now! I'm burying a young girl."

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

"Disneyland is no fun unless there's projectile vomiting."

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

"We'll melon-ball their eyes out."

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

"I laughed myself into an asthma attack."

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

"Will you jump on my back like a 12 year-old Japanese gymnast?"

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

"They made me stay as collateral."

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

m

"I'm so dehydrated my spit is like silly putty."

m

m

m

m

m

Yes I know we’re a bit nutty, but hey, we have a lot of fun. Maybe you’d like to start a family vacation quote book also? Give a try, it’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys, I promise.

Check out last year’s quotes - On the News a Family Dies

Related articles

• Still A Chance At Disneyland Tickets! (now100fm.radio.com)
• Disneyland (disneymemoriestravel.wordpress.com)

As is typical with my daughter, she arrived in North Carolina making quite the grand entrance. I should’ve seen it coming I guess. The first sign that she was off to a rocky start came before she’d gotten out of the county: she’d forgotten the “welcome home” sign that she’d worked on so diligently. So she’d just have to hope Adam could pick her out in a crowd.

The night of Hannah’s arrival in North Carolina, she somehow managed to fall off the hotel room bed and wedge herself between the bed and the wall. Thankfully Lee and Cheryl were there to pull her out of the predicament. How she got there to begin with is anyone’s guess. And quite frankly, we’re probably better off not knowing the details…

All seemed well on Sunday, though. Until my phone rang about 6:30 p.m.

“Whatcha doing, Mother?”

“Um… nothing… what are you doing?”

“Um, well, I just got out of the emergency room.”

I’m sure you all know that in that moment, my head went wild with possible scenarios. Jelly fish? Sting Rays? Shark bite?!?!?! No. She’d been too calm for that one.

“I passed out,” she offered before I could start rattling off my theories.

They’d just left the beach after a day of fun and sun and made it as far as the outside shower area when Cheryl felt Hannah grab her shoulder. As Cheryl turned around, Hannah hit the wooden boards hard and fast, face down and out cold. Heat exhaustion.

Enter the stretcher, a neck brace and joy ride in the ambulance. I’m tellin’ ya, no one knows how to kick off a vacation quite like my daughter, huh?

Now awake and regaining her senses, she felt a tug on her hair, where the EMT was attempting to pull something out of her hair.

“You have a bird feather in your hair,” she told Hannah, who laughed and replied that she’d actually paid someone to put it there. (True story – and just for the record, dear reader and friend Niki says it’s a ring-tail lemur. You be the judge.)

She arrived at the emergency room in her swim suit (as did Cheryl and Lee) leaving enough sand along the trail for a decent castle. Some vital-sign testing, blood drawing and three hours later, she left the ER with orders to drink more water (who knew? right?). A lucky little soul she was that the fall didn’t knock out every tooth in the front of her braces-straightened pearly whites. That would’ve been a real sight for Adam’s homecoming…

Nevertheless, she’d (hopefully) reached No. 3 in the rule of threes. And about 9:15 p.m. Monday night, the moment she, Cheryl and Lee had impatiently waited on for months came, as Marine Lcpl. Adam H. arrived back home on U.S. soil. All was right in the world for my baby girl. Of course, they still have almost a week left in North Carolina, though. Let’s just hope Ms. Entertainment has done enough for one vacation.

-Liz
Follow @lizrants

I am away on vacation this week…woohoo!yeehaw! While I’m away I’ve left a few of my favorite summertime posts for you this week. Enjoy! ~Kate

Okay guys (and by guys, I don’t mean people in general, I actually mean guys, as in the gender laden with testosterone) this post is basically meant for you.  But if you fit within the estrogen half of the population, I think you might just want to read along for kicks.

Guys, do you believe in the vacation fairy?  You must, right?  What other explanation could there possibly be for magically getting from point A, where you pick your vacation destination, to point B, actually arriving at said destination with everything you need for an enjoyable, stress-free trip?

That’s all it takes, right?  Just pick a location, drive  there, and relax and have fun.  No worries, the Vacation Fairy will do the rest.

Here’s the typical scenario.

In March, wife says to husband: Where should we go on vacation this year?

Husband says to wife: How about a fun trip to California; maybe Disneyland, Universal Studios and the beach.

Wife and husband then proceed to pick a date for the middle of July (for argument’s sake, let’s pick July 16)

The morning of July 15 arrives (22 hours before departure) and husband says to wife: Wow! Vacation is tomorrow. That just snuck right up on me.   I guess we need to start packing and plan out our trip. And by “we” we all know he does not actually mean “we”, he means anyone but himself.  (Men, I freely admit that I’m generalizing here.  If you don’t fit within the 98 % of the male population to which I am speaking, feel free to quit reading and go get yourself a snack…maybe one of those DingDongs Liz is so fond of.)

All I have to say is, “Thank goodness for the Vacation Fairy.”  Who else would wash the mounds of laundry and neatly pack it up in suitcases without forgetting to add the swim suits, beach towels, sunscreen and flip flops?  Who else would make sure the papers are all cleared from the driveway and the junk mail is not over-flowing the mailbox in your absence?  And what about an itinerary for the trip, places to stay, sites to see and snacks for along the way?  And the pets…thank goodness the Vacation Fairy feeds and waters those pets, and lets them out to do their business while you’re away.

(The whole fam plus 4 extras who tagged along on the vacation…well, except for me – someone has to shoot the pic.)

And when you return from your glorious, relaxing break from the humdrum routine of life, the best part of all is that your under-appreciated, and often un-noticed Vacation Fairy just waves her magic wand and all traces of  the trip just disappear. (You know – unpacking suitcases, washing dirty clothes, cleaning smashed cracker crumbs out of  the crevasses of the car…you get the gist here)

So guys, pardon me if my post is a bit shorter than usual today.  I’m going on vacation on Saturday.  I’ve got to go stretch out on my sofa, read a juicy novel, drink lemonade and eat some bon bons  while my Vacation Fairy gets us ready for the trip!

~Kate

Enjoy your Coffee Break!

Related articles by Zemanta

• What Do You Do When Leaving for Vacation? (apartmenttherapy.com)
• The best vacation ever (3quarksdaily.com)
• On vacation (beliefnet.com)
• Study says men rewear their underwear on vacation (timesunion.com)
• Last-Minute Vacation Deals (turbotax.intuit.com)

Me either. But apparently, someone with North Carolina plates in a central Kentucky WalMart who didn’t speak a lick of English was faced with just such a scenario this week. According to bystanders, the chickens were left in the car for about 30 minutes before police arrived on the scene and paged the car’s owner:

“Attention WalMart shoppers. Will the customers with the dozen live chickens in their vehicle please come to the customer service desk?”

…

“Paging the chicken car people.”

…

The sounds of crickets chirping was broken only when the store paged the customers in Spanish, to which they responded, only to be greeted by the police. Because the whole chickens-in-the-car fiasco was now the scene of a murder. That’s right. One of the chickens had fried. Who could’ve predicted that outcome?

In the end, police didn’t press charges, choosing instead to leave that to animal control, who confiscated the remaining chickens currently being nursed back to health – assuming they didn’t suffer brain damage from the extreme heat.

Needless to say, this story of a chicken murder in the Bluegrass leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Namely, who drives around with a dozen live (well, they were all alive when they went into WalMart… presumably…) chickens in their car? Had they won them at the Lexington Lions Club Bluegrass Fair?

“Step right up! Try your hand at the spinning table of goldfish! Ring three fish bowls and you could walk away with a Dodge Neon, pre-loaded with 12 live chickens!”

Oh wait. That’s not why the fair comes to mind.

The fair comes to mind because of the Casey Anthony dunking booth. That’s right. Clearly, no standard was too low for fair organizers, who thought it would be cool to make money off a woman who, even though acquitted on charges that she murdered her own child, remains a despicable excuse for a human at best.

Set up just inside the entrance to one of the largest fairs in the Bluegrass, the booth was garnering quite the attention as one might expect.

By Tuesday, fair organizers had received more than enough complaints to warrant a shutdown of the dunking booth. Now there’s a shocker for ya. Not.

The way I see it, fair organizers have but one option if they want to save face at this point. Set up a table of spinning goldfish bowls and offer a Dodge Neon filled with chickens to the lucky winner who rings three bowls in a row. I’m just sayin’.

-Liz

Follow @lizrants