Thursday, March 19, 2009

Benji the Hunted Traumatized

This afternoon I was poking around in my Google Analytics (where I can spy on what people are searching for to get to my blogs) and came across a very interesting search term: "benji the hunted traumatized." This immediately excited me because I have seriously been holding on to this Benji the Hunted thing for like 20 years. I'm so glad to know that there's someone else out there who was traumatized by this devil of a movie!

What happened was one day, when I was approximately 4 years old, my mother thought it would be a great idea to take me to a movie about animals dying. I'm not sure that she knew there would be so much bloodshed, but there was. All at the beginning. So we had to leave like 5 minutes after it started. I truly was traumatized.

This horrific event has never left me. To this day my mother makes fun of me for it and on occasion will threaten to force me to watch this terrible, painful, disgusting movie. I've never hated a movie so much. Obviously.

Anyway, now that I've realized that there are others out there who were also traumatized, and have also not gotten over it seeing as they're just now doing a Google search for it, I figured I'd make a post about it. Hopefully other traumatized people will find this post and we can discuss our experiences. Kind of like a Benji the Hunted support group.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

St. Patrick's Day

I had a lovely St. Patrick's Day, as usual.

It started out with a very fun day in Chicago on Saturday to see the green river and the parade. I'd never actually gone to check out the river which is unfortunate, because it really is quite cool! Even with the huge mass of people, we managed to get a good spot and spent some time taking pictures.



The parade was good, but not quite as easy to see. We finally sneaked around to a decent spot except it wasn't exactly legal and the cops on horses kept yelling at us. But we persisted and ended up getting to see quite a bit. Then we almost got killed by some unruley horses and a giant Leprechaun balloon/float that almost fell on us.




On Sunday we enjoyed a traditional Irish dinner with some of the family. I don't have any pictures of the actual food, but I do have pictures of some cute kids:





On Tuesday, I celebrated the day by wearing some green (and my awesome big green ring) and getting a free Shamrock Shake at McDonald's with my coworkers. Except I got chocolate because, let's be honest, the Shamrock ones are kind of disgusting. Later in the evening I celebrated with the bf (Scott) by watching the St. Patrick's Day episode of The Simpsons and drinking Green River. Pretty much perfect.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Root Beer Barrels vs. Blender

Last week through a series of emails involving my love for root beer floats and cookies, Scott (the bf) and I were basically challenged to create root beer float cookies for a get together with some friends on Saturday. Of course, we couldn't pass that up so we found a recipe online for them. I was a little surprised that a root beer float cookie recipe actually existed, but I shouldn't have been; everything exists on the internet.

Anyway, the recipe we found called for crushed up root beer barrels to be mixed into the dough so I ran to Walgreens and got like a 2 pound bag. We first tried to crush them up in a ziploc bag but it turns out that when they break up they become extremely sharp and the bag broke in 2 seconds.

Our next option was the old stand-by: the blender. Scott threw a few barrels into the blender and it seemed to work rather well. We were getting them down to a powder, so we went with it. After a few minutes, however, disaster struck when the root beer barrels blew a hole straight through the blender. Not a crack, not a ding; a full on hole. I had no idea these things could be so destructive. They're practically a weapon!


Luckily, God provided when we visited an estate sale the next day and found a mixer from the 1970's that included a heavy duty glass blender attachment. I don't think we'll have any problems with that one. Hopefully.