Banjo's Trail welcomes Wiz Khalifa

Belated Chicken Dinner Update

From your friend the worst blogger ever, I am here to update the riveted reader on a few things. Remember this post Meet Chicken Dinner ?  Well, if I could have a a moment of silence please, that would be great.  After settling back into the Banjos Trail home last summer, our little water babies were swimming around as if they owned the place. True happiness.  Well...#winteriscoming as they say....oh and it came. And brought strange goldfish diseases that made their scales paler and their eyeballs stop working.  Yes most of these poor dudes were eating their own poop at the very end, but this story does have a really moving detail.

We were down to just Loofa, a blind Tony Stark and Beefy Chicken Dinner (the clear leader of the freaks) and then, with no warning, Chicken Dinner was gone.  And here is the thing...you know those touching stories of the elderly couple -where one dies and then even though they are totally healthy, shortly after the other also dies (of heartbreak, of course)? Well....sure enough that is true in nature as well.  Within only days of Chicken Dinner departing that funky tank, his brothers did too. That is true love.

The ground was frozen...too frozen to even dig a shallow grave. So we left them all in paper towels on our patio, which is pretty unforgivable, I know.  (Remind me not to add any more things that are alive to my household).  So take a moment...lets remember them as they were....fair ground fishies that withstood fire, ice, near starvation and a whole lot of tank funk. Pour a splash of Old E on the ground for these brave homies.

#chickendinner

Live From Banjo's Trail: #Lovingrightnow

Live From Banjo's Trail: #Lovingrightnow: With all this negativity in the world.....people constantly complaining, overpaying for parking, not being able to eat like I did in my 20...

#Lovingrightnow

With all this negativity in the world.....people constantly complaining, overpaying for parking, not being able to eat like I did in my 20s, and don't even get me started (again) on Ebola.  I have been noodling with this post in my head - a happy post.  A post about the things I am loving right now. Lets start with today.

I am loving that today I was woken up by my son at 6am, like always, and realized it was only 5am and I could tell him without it being a lie that it was actually 5am and clearly not a civilized time to be getting up.  Then after 2 K-cups and half of a Philadelphia Magazine digested, I was actually awake enough to head to a hot yoga class.  Normally a 7:30am class is not a possibility because I am a monster in the morning, but since it was really feeling like the 8:30 I used to know, it was totally do-able! Boom - great yoga class in a new spot I had never tried (Empowered Yoga in Glenn Mills, PA). While I don't like HOT yoga (hot yoga + me=puke), I did like how clean the place was, and how they were all anal about where you put your mat and when/where you take off your shoes, etc.....ironically not Zen, which I appreciate.  Next stop - Whole Foods, which I could literally eat every meal from if I had a corporate sponsor or something.

OK here comes the best part...I got to NAP!!!  Yep #joy.  Well rested and ready for the next indulgence, I headed with my hormonal pre-teen lady to one of my favorite places on the planet: Terrain  If there is a Heaven for me it is there. So for you-three happy hints - order a pie from them for Thanksgiving, Get a Honey Tea au lait in the Cafe and if you lunch there, never miss the Mushroom Soup.  Being so close to the Mushroom capital of the World, I have tried it all and this here soup is the bestest.  Best time of year to go there is now when the are just starting with their holiday ridiculousness.  Get after it.

OK some other things I am loving right now:

• Quirky I am just thrilled with the whole idea that the power is truly shifting for reals.  From Etsy to ebay, Kickstarter to Indigogo....Power to the people! #ChuckD
• OpenSky OK so this deal based shopping site is likely not much different than the zillions of others you likely subscribe to, but for whatever reason this one sticks with me. I have ordered at least 5 times and have loved and used each item happily
• While searching online for some original art for my office, I came across this "Sunny Leo' and fell in love (see opening pic).  Cut to me like 3 hours later and I am still sniffing around the site. Check it out: society6  And while I'm on art, check out this really great Art Blog: Vandalog 
• Again, likely old news to you forward thinkers, but aside from Amazon Pantry, I am finding FreshDirect pretty freakin convenient.  Pssst - Don't tell them, but I would pay more if they charged it. And if you use Fresh Direct (some cannot, I get it,..) then install Pop It as a browser extension...then you can just drop whole recipe ingredients in your cart! (she says as if she ever actually cooked something that calls for a recipe...)
• Foo Fighters Sonic Highways Ever the musical genius,  DaveGrohl leads the way to a thoughtful album release so clearly not born in self serving marketing. Its refreshing to hear great music presented such a way that its storytelling, history lesson and entertainment all rolled into one.  As always #BravoFoo.  

OK....so this post is a happy one...cool stuff that makes me happy. And they say happiness can be contagious, and that the cool girl no longer props herself up by pushing others down but by influencing, leading, being a good friend, and sharing a good thing.  So these are a few of my good things. 

#officiallyscared

There are so many reasons being "connected" is the pretty much the best thing ever, but do you want to know what is NOT the best thing ever? Its Ebola.  Thing is, Ebola, and a ton of other frightening things that make me never want to leave my house have been around forever, but because we have access to so much information I know way to much about scary things.  If you put "Ebola" in Google you get 28,300,000 results.  Right. And do yourself a favor and do NOT Google it and click on Images. You literally might quarantine your family until the end of time. I wont even waste my time putting an image of Ebola under a microscope here because if you are a human living in the world right now you know exactly what that looks like.

So all this connectedness has seriously provided me with too much information.....all of it freakin' scary.  Sometimes I hear folks blaming the media for scaring us....After all, they do amplify the worst parts of being on this planet for the purpose of ratings, but I dare say we are worse.  The incessant posts from freaked out parents on Facebook, the tweets about cancer......by the way did you know that the death rate for the Flu (yes, the Flu) has hovered on average around 32k people per year for the last decade. The FLU!

My latest freakout is of course the Enterovirus D68.  My son has Asthma and so now I am that mom forcing him to carry hand sanitizer everywhere he goes,  likely planting some sort of OCD seed in his impressionable brain.  I have to tell you, I much preferred living in ignorance. So I do this thing where I try to distract myself.  Lets try it now.

So in other news. I have been excited since MAY about the Thug Kitchen cookbook...the weirdest part about that being the fact that I do not cook.  But anyway, I pre-ordered that puppy months ago and got very excited that it shipped. Well...turns out my BFFs at Amazon shipped it inside a box with our mattress pad and needless to say I'm pretty sure we recycled the whole thing.  Nice. So back on Amazon I just went to order again.  I highly suggest the Thug Kitchen Blog while you anxiously await my review of the actual book.

And We're Back!...Top ten reasons I love home.

Remember that SNL Skit with Jimmy Fallon as the all too familiar cheezed-out local radio DJ?  That soundbite keeps playing in my head...."and we're back!"

Don't waste your time trying to find any of those funny ass video clips on the inter-webs because Lorne Michaels has that shiz on lock down.... otherwise I would have grabbed it and plopped it here for your enjoyment. I digress...

We actually ARE back--in our home sweet home.  To recap....Jan:lots of snow, lots of power loss. Feb:more of the same....no power, lots of fires in the fireplace and next thing you know our roof is on fire.  Damn.   Cue quick move with nothing but the clothes on our back to a furnished apt.  I'm sure I will work up the courage to describe the 5 months in that apartment at some point because it will make for some hilarious posts but for now its all about celebrating being HOME.  

Here are my top 10 reasons I #lovemyhome.  Please feel free to comment on yours!

1. My big ass, upgraded, pillow topped, soft sheet having sleigh bed!! I wish I could enter a sleeping contest because I have been waiting to train for something like that my whole adult life. 
2. The pantry.  How lame that this is second on my list?  There is something satisfying about knowing I have a shelf space carved out for massive amounts of dill pickles, crackers, pasta, skittles and paper products.  Why is that a luxury?  Maybe I need to rethink what is actually exciting in this life. 
3. Dare I say the garage?  It took 16 years of street parking for this to inch  into my top three. but it has a solid place there. 
4. The mud room.  How was a mud room never a thing when I was growing up.  We all so desperately needed it...or maybe we didn't but how didn' t we??  Is it wrong that I look for pics of cool mud rooms on pinterest?  
5. Space.  I knew I liked to be alone; truly by myself sometimes. But it took living in a very small apartment to realize just how much I need to have alone time to maintain my sanity.  I didn't care for people in the kitchen looking at my boobies while I was getting dressed in the bedroom, those two areas being only about 4 feet apart. Yes, I know this is a FWP, first world problem.
6. My kitchen counter tops. Because they are sparkly and sparkles make me very happy.  And everything in that kitchen is gray....my favorite color. Gray is Perfection, PS can someone tell me whether its gray or grey officially?
   
7. My "gym."  Yep I have gym in quotes. I do workout .....I try for 6 days a week and I get in 3-4 (sometimes 5..sorry Tracy Anderson) I call this a gym loosely because its a room in the house that is unfinished...no ceiling or drywall...just some kid art to cheer things up. But its my space , which per above, I tend to love. 
   
8. My shower.  Who needs a tub?  Not this girl. One of my favorite hotels, in Boulder, CO (the St. Julian) has these great bathrooms where the showers feature beautiful river rock. That was my inspiration.  And bonus, it feels great on your feet.
9. My closet. Its huge. 3 Indian families could live in this space, which some days fills my cup with guilt.  But not enough guilt to sell our house and give India the money.   See above reference to FWP.
10. It's our home.  We worked hard to buy the raw land, we designed and built our home.  We watched it burn down and we built it again.  We live in the quiet pasture of a horse long gone called Banjo, and we love it.  

Meet Chicken Dinner

Chicken Dinner is our big ass goldfish.  His actions seem to indicate he is the tank ambassador.  He is an impressive guy, and I am considering elevating his role to apartment ambassador. I'll keep you posted.  

While Chicken Dinner often provides the most entertainment value, his tank-mates are also an impressive bunch.  Fellow fishies Tony Stark, Killer Shark and Loofa have proven their resilience time and time again.  Not only did they outlive all reasonable predictions for fish procured at a fairground game, they also survived a week of no heat in a snowy PA home, as well as a major house fire in said PA home!  

So here's to you Chicken Dinner.  You da man. #ChickenDinner