Quality Time with the TV

I work in marketing and there are plenty of times customers think they know what is best. Sometimes they are very, very wrong. Sometimes they'll say, "Oh no, we don't need a professional actor our CEO will do the speech." I can only imagine that is what went down when Bare Minerals talked with their ad agency about the infomercial I accidentally saw the other morning. I was caught between rubbernecking and looking away in horror. The creator of Bare Minerals appears in the ad for her product, at once demonstrating the profound need for her product and its shortcomings. Sadly, this was the best picture I could get to demonstrate what an unfortunate spokesperson choice they were making. I just couldn't watch it long enough to get the really scary shots. For weeks a local car ad starring the dealer has been haunting me (they run it during every Caps game). The guy has the most powerful unibrow since Bert and I am committed to bringing that bit of local tv spectacle to you, the reader. Stay tuned.

snOMG Romp

snOMG Romp from Elle Kasey on Vimeo.

Lexi and Kirby had a blast during Snomageddon, Snopocalypse, snOMG.

What I Did on My Winter Vacation

or Tomorrow Could Totally Suck...

As has been well-documented, the Washington, DC region has been experiencing winter for the first time in years. It's roughly 6 winter drought years all spilled out over one snowy winter. I love snow and snow days so I am pretty okay with the arrangement, would just like to do something about the other 6 years.


Tomorrow, the Federal Government returns to work, and my email, which has seen mere flurries of business marketing emails for a week is gonna get hit with a blizzard of OMGIneedthisrightawaytodaykthanksbye messages. I can already predict the subjects. But there are still 36 minutes left in Thursday, the day of CLOSED, before "Unscheduled Leave" returns. I am going to cherish these moments. It's just you, me, Anderson Cooper, three feet of snow, and memories of the long weekend.


Things A Person Could Do During A Snowstorm of Undetermined Duration
1. Dig Out. Jac handled this. Repeatedly and beautifully. Massive props to him.
2. Make Chex Mix with Crispix. Crispix is becoming my go-to cereal snack mix brand. Sure, we paid lip service to the Wheat Chex for years, but it was just too sad seeing their flattened, unflavored wheat-y ranks filing into the trash when all the good stuff was gone. Long live Crispix.
3. Brush, de-mat, comb, clip, dry dogs. Repeat endlessly. Realize there is much more work to be done.
4. Scan, shred and recycle paper. Apparently before I lived on the Internet I used to print everything out and put it in notebooks. I have scanned and purged hundreds of pages. Now I just have to sort the electronic files I created...
5. Finally move recipes from web to recipe software. I have one remaining pre-digital habit I've yet to break. I love magazines, especially ones with big glossy recipes. When I read leaf through the magazines I often dog ear the ones I want to ... okay here's where it gets wild... go on the web and download. Because the print version is so wonderful to read peruse but the digital one is so much more versatile. But the volume of recipes and tchotchkes I like in magazines far exceeds my cutting and pasting capacity so I take the magazine, find the recipe online, create a temporary bookmark with Read It Later and then later I come back and copy the recipe into my software which requires some tweaking for each recipe. The upside is that nine times out of 10 I can get the recipe and the great photo into the software with a few clicks. The downside is that some magazines are quicker than others to post their recipes online so I have to hang onto some magazines for months creating a clutter conundrum.... So, yeah, I put about 100 recipes into my software. Need any?
6. Watch so much weather coverage that your biting criticism of the on-air talent reaches new lows in inventiveness and humor.
7. Religiously (mentally) catalog the most peculiar behaviors of your most peculiar neighbor.
8. Facebook. Twitter. Apparently now I have to Google Buzz? WTF.
9. Argue over things like whether the tissues are "too far away".
10. Seven. That is the number of days I must be cooped up in my home before I will tackle the task of cleaning the pantry - the pantry where spices have created drifts to rival those outside our back door. I spent about two hours on it today. I got two shelves one and a half shelves into some semblance of order.

Snowpocalypse Cometh

Days before the storm arrived, Kirby and I were brimming with excitement. He was sniffing the air with the same intensity with which I was clicking the refresh button on the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog. 

My anticipation and unwillingness to "settle" for anything less than a monster snowstorm grew with every snarky "ThinkSpring" comment I read on the site. Dominated my weather geeks and snow lovers, a few wet blanket anti-weather (and a couple anti-science) commenters tried to drag the conversation down. But as the snow began to fall, this was shaping up to be a very, very good snowstorm. The Federal Government boosted it's early announcement of Liberal Leave with the news it would close four hours early. A short while later a behemoth company sent me an email saying they, too, would close early. Jac took the whole day and I made the bare minimum number of email checks and responses.

As weather watchers waited for the snow to pile up on Friday, the Spring commenters were surpassed by the, "It's a bust!" naysayers on the weather boards. Adding to the distraction from SNOW SNOW SNOW was the endless parade of drop ins who wanted to know if they were going to have any trouble flying into DC at the peak of the storm and trying to fly out the morning afterwards. Um, go ahead and try that.

There were the parents. OH the parents! They wailed that they'd had enough of their children. They claimed kids would be in school until July. They pleaded for the chance to shove their kids off into the towering snow. 

But when all was said and done. The snow came down, piled down, and a hush fell over the land.