either she is preggers...

or is really happy to see brad-boy...

you can stay at the...

you knew the retaliation was coming...

100 things.

so i have been reading other peoples blogs as of late (thank you boss-a-roo for a continuance in the nothing to do department), and have been coming across more and more people who have a post of 100 random factoids about themselves…which spearheaded my inspiration to write a list of my own. so, without further ado, me:

1. i am the youngest of four children.
2. i have one sister, the oldest, and two brothers.
3. i am the loudest of four children.
4. i use fact #1 to explain fact #3.
5. i was born in texas...
6. but moved to massachusetts when i was 4 so i don’t have an accent (sorry to disappoint).
7. i had the idyllic childhood on the outside...both parents, a 5 bedroom house in a small town where the median family income was around $75,000...the town was rated by boston magazine as the healthiest of 146 towns in eastern mass...i was surrounded by trees, national landmarks, protected forests, conservation land, cranberry bogs and one of the state’s top ten school systems...my siblings and i perused the town all day on our bikes and never had to check in at home...
8. but things behind closed doors painted a much different picture.
9. i learned at a young age what it is to work for something.
10. i learned at a young age that you can only count on yourself.
11. it took me a long time to change my mind about fact #10…and i still have trouble with it at times.
12. i haven’t seen or spoken to my father in over 13 years.
13. those have been the best 13 years of my life…
14. and it just dawned on me that that’s half my life.
15. i was a total tomboy growing up…
16. but also loved barbie, care bears, and my little ponies.
17. i swam year round on a junior olympic swim team for 12 years…
18. and quit after my senior year in high school turning down $ to swim in college.
19. in addition to swimming, i played softball for 9 years, field hockey for 5, track for 3 as well as dabbling in soccer, ice hockey, ballet, and gymnastics.
20. i told you i was a tomboy.
21. i am now described as ‘a girly girl who doesn’t take s*it from anyone’.
22. but am still a total health freak.
23. i loved pretty much everything about my high school experience...
24. and the things i didn’t, i’m glad i can look back on and realize how ridiculous they really were and laugh.
25. in high school my friends and i were kind of goody-two-shoes…we didn’t drink, smoke, or party…until the summer after my senior year…and even then it was tame in comparison.
26. i think when i go back for my 10-year high school reunion people will be surprised that i’m not a lesbian (see facts #15, 19, and 20).
27. it was in high school when it started that i would hear a song on the radio and could envision a video montage of my life to the music.
28. that still happens to me all the time today.
29. i decided that i wanted to get far away from massachusetts for college...
30. so i went to clemson in south carolina.
31. have you ever been to south carolina??? if not, DON’T GO!!! at least not rural south carolina…mind sets haven’t changed since 1957.
32. when i left for clemson i was a young, naïve, and had never been kissed.
33. when i got to clemson, i kissed a lot of boys…
34. but did a division l sport so didn’t have a life.
35. then i got hurt and couldn’t compete anymore…
36. and when i went back for my sophomore year, i realized i hated the school…
37. so i came home…
38. and felt like a huge failure.
39. eventually, i transferred to northeastern university in the heart of boston…
40. and LOVED living in the city…
41. but didn’t love living on another college’s campus since my college had run out of housing for transfer students.
42. so to get involved, my ‘friend’ who lived across the hall made it her mission to convince me to try out for the club volleyball team.
43. i assured her that even though i am tall (5’11”), i had never played…
44. she didn’t believe me…
45. and proceeded to beg, beg, and beg some more for me to accompany her to try-outs since she had played since 8th grade.
46. i finally gave in…
47. and my life changed forever on the first day of try-outs…
48. i met my future husband (who we will call frank).
49. and made the team…
50. and now continue to play and coach volleyball…
51. which makes me think how much better i would be if i had been playing since i was in high school…
52. and then i realize how much time everyone wastes worrying on ‘what could have been’s’…so i look ahead…
53. and then realize that i’m getting married in 161 days as of this posting…
54. and am totally excited, stressed, and terrified.
55. all of my friends are already married, many with a baby on the way (if they don’t already have one).
56. this has jump started my biological clock.
57. seriously, it’s like big ben in my head.
58. but at the same time it makes me feel like i need to get out and enjoy my youth while i can.
59. and when i try that, i am reminded how much of a lightweight i am.
60. and remember that i have never been hit on at a bar…ever…no one has ever even asked me for my number…
61. and now i bet you’re all thinking that i’m hideous because clearly i have a killer personality.
62. most nights when i am not working or coaching i am at the gym (see fact #22).
63. and when i get home i watch one of my favorite shows: law & order svu, the office, lost, or pretty much anything on the food network…
64. reading that, i feel totally lame.
65. but that is also the only time of day that i really get to see frank.
66. so a lot of those shows are playing while he and i chat…
67. so i DVR them to make sure i don’t miss anything…
68. this also may or may not allow me to pause the tv when l&o svu is on to ogle christopher meloni.
69. i root for all things boston even though i have been wanting to leave here since the day i graduated college in 2004.
70. sometimes, i wish i lived in nyc…actually, i wish that all the time.
71. frank is not a fan of the idea.
72. but that’s okay, i will break him eventually…
73. frank and i are quite possibly the whitest people in the world but have a lot of conversations where we make fun of each other, use a lot of slang, or use a various accents…i’ve been told it can be quite hilarious.
74. our friend justin, a frequent visitor of this blog, asks us if we’re like that all the time.
75. i don’t know if this is a compliment or if we are just weird.
76. sometimes i have blonde moments.
77. the worst blond moment in the history of blonde moments was when justin, his wife, frank and i were on the way to the beach. we were discussing chartered helicopter tours as justin and his wife had gone on one during their honeymoon in hawaii. justin commented on how it was cool but kinda scary since there were no doors on the helicopter. i piped up from the back of the car with, ‘if there are no doors, how does everyone get in the helicopter?'
78. your IQ just dropped 5 points after reading that…
79. mine plummeted 50 for saying it…
80. but it still makes me laugh.
81. i wish i could elongate the day so that i could sleep more than 5-6 hours a night.
82. i wish i could elongate the day so that i could spend more time with frank and my friends.
83. i read a new book every week.
84. after reading people.com, instyle, or catching a few minutes of ‘my sweet sixteen’ on mtv, i wonder if celebrities and spoiled kids have any idea what it’s like being poor?
85. i hope my kids never have to worry about it…
86. but are grounded enough to appreciate what they have.
87. i have been saying forever that i want 5 kids, but now i think i may have changed that to 3.
88. i want a dog.
89. i want the following stores to realize that i have helped them immensely in their last quarter sales and allow me shopping sprees as compensation: j.crew, gap, nordstrom, macy’s, and barnes & noble.
90. i wish i could have met my mother’s father since all of her siblings tell me i look like him.
91. i hate all of my jobs right now with the exception of coaching.
92. i can’t wait to go to grad school to become a high school guidance counselor and enjoy what i do and feel like i make an impact on someone…anyone.
93. i love that frank is in full support of me returning to school and getting on to something that i want to do.
94. i love that frank is also in full financial support of this quest…
95. because i am still bitter that frank got to go to undergraduate for free (his mom worked at the university)…
96. and i am still tens of thousands of dollars in debt even after many scholarships.
97. i am greatly looking forward to getting into my career…
98. and furthering my career to work with adolescents with eating disorders and body issues
99. and am also looking forward to reading other peoples lists of 100 things about them…
100. so get cracking!

ummmmmmm...

i think i just threw up in my mouth:

*click on image

it is safe to go back in the water...

swift-boating the sharks

there’s a sad irony in the news today, following this week’s death of roy scheider, the shark-hunting cop from the jaws movies. the International shark attack file, the unofficial scorekeeper on worldwide shark attacks on humans, published its death toll for the year 2007.

all of the sharks in all the world’s oceans barely kept pace with mr. scheider’s movie accomplishments. they killed one of us last year. one.

certainly that one death is no laughing matter. she was a vacationing nurse, snorkeling in the waters off new caledonia in the south pacific. there were also 71 reported shark attacks that did not result in a human death last year.

george burgess, the university of florida researcher who runs isaf, performs the grim task of counting up the incidents. but he does so with his own sense of irony. popular culture, he says – from the big screen to magazine cover stories to cable news channels (!) – have pumped up the drama of shark attacks, in the process creating the impression that they’re far more common than they truly are.

burgess’s numbers, as well as a few pulled from other studies, put the shark frenzy in context:

– from 2000 to 2005, isaf reports there were eight domestic shark attack deaths. the international hunter education association reports that 385 u.s. and canadian hunters were accidentally killed by other hunters in that same time frame.

– the new england journal of medicine reported that from 1990 to 2006, there were 16 deaths on american beaches caused by digging sandholes till the sand collapsed, smothering the digger. isaf counted a dozen u.s. shark deaths in the same period. clearly, you’d be safer in the water, with the sharks, than you are in your own sandhole.

– florida is the most prolific state for both boating and shark attacks. over a two-decade period, the u.s. coast guard reported 764 boating-accident deaths in the state. the sharks took four lives in the same years.

– a decade ago, a consumer product safety commission report tracked vending machine deaths from 1977 till 1995, thirty seven americans were killed when they got overly aggressive, toppling a vending machine to get a reluctant quarter or cola – an average of about two per year, or twice the number killed by sharks in the u.s. just when you thought it was safe to get a dr. pepper…

finally, here is how the other animals of the kingdom stack up:

- deer - the very symbol of the terrors of nature – take between 130 and 140 human lives each year - usually just after they’re in your headlights.

- the cdc estimates an average of fifteen u.s. deaths per year from snakebites.

- but the all-time champion animal nemesis for the human race doesn’t have a scorekeeper, and will likely never get its own series of movies or saturation news coverage (note to hollywood: this is not an invitation to start a 'war of the worlds' series of movies starring mr. scientology himself). we don’t know for certain how many people are killed by mosquito-borne disease but the horrible toll easily reaches the millions each year.

roy scheider’s immortal line from the first jaws movie was, upon first seeing his great white enemy, “you’re gonna need a bigger boat.” but in the world’s eye, the sharks are getting swift-boated. and we’re not working very hard to find the real killers.

GET OFF THE ROADS...

SHE'S O-U-T!!!

brit brit was released early from ucla medical center's psych ward because a court representative found "no just cause" for the hold...ma and pa spears believe her life is presently at risk and do not agree with the the decision and released this statement:

as parents of an adult child in the throes of a mental health crisis, we were extremely disappointed this morning to learn that over the recommendation of her treating psychiatrist, our daughter britney was released from the hospital that could best care for her and keep her safe.

we are deeply concerned about our daughter's safety and vulnerability and we believe her life is presently at risk. there are conservatorship orders in place created to protect our daughter that are being blatantly disregarded.

we ask only that the court's orders be enforced so that a tragedy may be averted.

personally i would be more inclined to worry about the risk she imposes on everyone around her...not so much herself...

hi-larious

so sarah silverman gave bf jimmy kimmel a special present for his 5th anniversary last night on his show (the whole matt damon thing is a running joke on jimmy's show - jimmy always makes jokes about not having time for matty boy)...