(the) Jebbica

Okay, so I thought the Oscars were today.  Sue me!  I will just have to rework that post to publish next week.  But, you might not ever get any winners from me, since I am supposed to go to Florida next weekend (yippee!)  So, since I am very small town, and anything good happening around here is pretty rare, how about a lazy Sunday post with a few commendations?

Ben Honeycutt:  Famous in my area, and he didn’t even have to be a wife-killing cop or a body-dumping crematorium owner to achieve celebrity status!  Ben is a singer-songwriter from Ft. Oglethorpe/Chattanooga area who auditioned this year for American Idol.  He got cut during Hollywood week for forgetting the words to “Carry On, My Wayward Son”.  He is playing a show at the Colonnade on 2A in Ft. O/Ringgold on March 14.  It’s pay-what-you-want.  Check out my interview with Ben here.

Lafayette Underground: Someone from Lafayette can spell besides me?  Cool!  LU is funny, outraging, mysterious, and overall a very good read!  Go for the articles, stay for the comments!

Paws Pet Supplies:  I ::heart:: Paws.  I can go and get my doggies’ corn-free dog food, and I don’t have to drive 45 minutes to get it.  They can answer any question about animals.  Their products are competitively priced.  They give free samples.  I hope they never go out of business!

‘You Know You’re From Lafayette, GA’ Facebook Group:  Started by my little sister’s friend, I think it started as kind of a joke and became an overnight hit.  The group currently has over 2300 members, not bad for a town of 6000!  It’s become a wonderful place to both poke fun of where you’re from and wax nostalgic about the “good old days”.  It’s more connecting than any real-life group I’ve ever been in here, more informative than the local papers.

Mama Mia’s Pizzeria:  They don’t use iceberg lettuce in their salads.  That’s enough to sell me right there.  Combine that with the fact that their portions are HUGE, they offer a little different fare than other places around here, and they’re cheap.  There are a few things I look for in a restaurant:  Great service.  Decent prices.  Fresh ingredients.  Mama Mia’s goes above and beyond expectations.

Got a local business you like or would like me to plug? Leave a comment!

Breakfast is generally the hardest meal of the day for me to stay on task.  Half of the time, I skip it altogether, and the other half, I’m tempted to just swing by McDonald’s on my way to work and grab a $1 Sausage Biscuit (Lately, I’ve switched to the $1 Sausage Burrito, since it only has 300 calories or the $1 Fruit-n-Yogurt Parfait, but making it at home is always a better option!).  I used to read in diet books that the Egg McMuffin was the best thing to get at McDonald’s for breakfast, which has 12 grams of fat.  So then I found some Egg Muffin frozen knockoffs at ALDI that had half the calories and half the fat.  They were better looking and tasted better.  The problem for me was, though, I don’t really like Egg McMuffins.  I think English muffins are kind of strange with their powdery texture, and I just cannot eat an egg if I can see that the yellow is separated from the white.  I’m a weirdo, I know.

So, in trying to alter my eating lifestyle, I have tried to make breakfast the “most important meal of the day”.  Here are some healthy options I have been eating lately:

Peanut Butter Banana Whole Wheat Pita

How I make it:  Cut one whole wheat pita in half.  Spread insides with Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter.  Slice banana in half, then in half longways.  Place two quarters into pita.  Toast in toaster oven on “light” setting.  I squeeze a little natural local honey onto it when it’s done.  This has become my new favorite breakfast because it really stays with you until lunch! (more…)

It’s funny the topics of conversation that come up among drunken friends.

We were at a friend’s house after Saturday karaoke, as has become typical of our weekends.  Sing karaoke, then play Rock Band.  Only this week, it was strange, because once we got to our friend’s house, he decided he wanted to go to the gay bar with my BFF’s sister, who was celebrating her 21st birthday, and her friend.  “It’s cool, y’all can totally hang out here while I’m gone!” he assured us.  Which, I totally think is weird.  Especially since I’m always accusing him of being a serial killer because his house is so neat.

So here we were, my best friend, her husband, The Boyfriend, and me, at someone else’s house.  Left all alone to snoop through his things and drink all of his liquor.  Which we said we weren’t going to do, since my cousin’s birthday party was the next day, and I was in charge of orchestrating it.  “ONE beer”, we said before we ever went over there.  And a  Blue Moon with orange (my ultimate favorite) was all I had (well, that and a splash of Bailey’s in milk, but that doesn’t even count).  Rock band got old after one song.  My BFF fell asleep instantly.  I was wired from karaoke, but very bored. There were no playing cards in the house, so we tried to play Quarters.  Turns out, Quarters is even more boring than Rock Band when there is no one to play with you.

Eventually, The Boyfriend and Husband of the BFF  knocked back about half a bottle of Maker’s Mark, and conversations turned to religion, people we knew, this, that.  Isn’t it funny how small town we are?  Isn’t it funny that the person whose house we’re at was Jessica’s first kiss, and his ex-wife used to date Jessica’s ex-boyfriend? And then, of course, we had to go there.  The place I try to avoid.  My life is in a better place now.  I don’t want to revisit that time and be reminded of the fallacies of man, especially these fallacies, which if thought enough about can cause me to totally lose my faith in humanity. Oh, what? We’re going there anyway? Shit.

The Ex.  It’s something I try not to think about. Things did not end well.  But, since this is such a small town, everyone knows everyone, everyone has dated everyone, and you cannot go into Wal-Mart without running into at least one ex-boyfriend.  Now, this is not to say I’ve dated a lot of guys.  I’ve dated like…four guys seriously.  I’ve been on a couple of first-and-last dates.  I can count the guys I have kissed on my fingers.  I have been in what I considered love twice.

The first time, I was nineteen.  We met at a church hayride. We both worked at Wal-Mart.  I had never met someone who seemed so pure and good.  He made me feel like a princess.  We always did inventive things on dates.  Nine-and-a-half months into our relationship, I lost my virginity.  I was waiting for marriage, but I was convinced that this was The One.  I was sure that he would ask me to marry him.

He didn’t. (more…)