La Vida Loca

Hey Bloggers! It's Friday and today I will attend the wake of a way too young member of my extended hometown family. The news of her passing threw us all for a loop here because she was/is each and everyone of us. Mother, daughter, woman wife, friend and confidant. I'm not going to say much more about it. What I will say it was the C word and I hate the C word. A lot.

I have chosen to live life and celebrate that I am living, breathing and trying to be healthy. I am celebrating that I am happy, in her honor.
I know this is so cliched and over played but I choose to keep it as my weekend mantra:

Happy weekend bloggers! Be happy we are alive!

A Little Nonsense Now And Then Is Relished By The Best Of Men..

Got some bad news yesterday and I feel like laughter would be the best medicine today...

Opening Up Pandora's Box

Oh, I know I'm gonna get a ton of flack from Bama and Heff today, but I don't care. I'll ask them to reserve judgement and please know that everybody is different and has different tastes in music.

Sat night, I'm out with some high school friends having fun. We are at one of our friend's bar for a mini reunion type get together. After hours we are lucky enough to have the joint to ourselves, and someone puts their iPhone in the music system and puts on Pandora.

The requests start pouring in. Since the girls were in control of the music, "Donna Summer Radio" was added to Pandora and the party immediately started. We heard disco hits that brought us back to our carefree days of our high school youth. It was like a karaoke parade of music we hadn't heard in years. Things might have gotten a little "Coyote Ugly", and ketchup bottles were center stage as our stars were shining bright. Haven't had that much fun in a long time.

And just so you know guys, there was also ZZ Top, The Monkees, Bon Jovi and Judas Priest playing on up in there too!! I even added a few to my personal playlist. Never know when you might need a Donna Summer song to get you through a tough workout.

The music was great, but the time spent with old friends? It was priceless.

Good Friends Are Chicken Soup With Red Wine

So I spent Friday night with some of my girl friends from high school. It was a great time, just hanging out, laughing and talking. The weather was not very cooperative, but we still managed to pull of some summer fun.

We had our best friend, red wine, along with us and before we knew it the wine and fun made us late for dinner. So late, in fact, we missed it all together. Who would have thought that a tourist community closed their kitchens at 10 pm? But with the help of our trusty iphone's we managed to find a pizza place that delivered. It was some of the best pizza I ever ate.

The thing about good friends is that they know you better than you remember. They have memories of things that you don't and they never let you forget how you were back then. They share in your triumphs and they worry about the same things. We talked a lot about our kids, and it was refreshing to know that they go through the same things that we all do.

Before I knew it, our time had ended and it was back to reality. We had managed to sneak in some bonding time, but the memories linger on into today. I wanted more. I needed more, but I am content in the knowledge that they will always be a phone call or a text message away.

That's the thing about chicken soup. You may not know at the time how much you need that valued home remedy.

Top Ten Reasons Why An Entire Weekend Of Drinking After The Age Of Forty Is Never A Good/Bad Thing

To kick off the joyous holiday season, I spent the weekend with a group of my high school girlfriends drinking, shopping and reaking havoc on the shores of Cape Cod. Did I also mention that after the age of forty this may never be a good thing. Here's why:

10. Old age is a bi*ch! Hanging out with the girls and drinking WAYYY too many is a constant reminder that you're no longer eighteen and invincible. Grow the F-up! (Although, somewhere we must get "brownie points" for giving it the old college try and getting it somewhat right).

9. Two Advil just doesn't do "the trick" any more. Forty-plus'es need at least three or four and, having to remember to take the Advil before, during and after the drink fest is key. God forbid you forget this all important detail, cuz if you play-you pay!


8. A gaggle of dazzling, hot, drunk, loud and obnoxious "cougars" attract the most undesirable male following. The Cape Cod "townies" thought they had died and gone to heaven and became our fan-club for the weekend. Lucky for us, a little more than a few of them had ALL of their teeth. Good times.


7. Drunk shopping puts impulse shopping to SHAME. You wake up the next morning to find your $300 in cash is gone, and you've got more than a few shopping bags full of unnecessary Black Dog apparel and Cape Cod hoodies and t-shirts to show for it.


6. Being the only make-up artist in a group of seven gorgeous women is not easy. Forty plus women see this as a free spa service for the weekend and will most definitely take advantage of this fact. Trying to get your own make-up on and everyone else's in a timely fashion is a not an easy task-especially when they are lined up and waiting outside the bathroom door.


5. No matter how "skinny" you think you are-there's always someone else in the group that leads you to compare yourself to Shamu The Killer Whale on his best day.


4. No one can see. I mean really-everyone is fighting this fact in one way or another. Some have gone the contact lens route or have reading glasses, while the rest of us drunks are pretending we can read the menu and ordering all kinds of obscure shit no one ever heard of because we just can't see the fine print. (The good thing here is we are all in the same boat)


3. There's always one. Yup, one of us overindulged in party mode and ended up spending the wee hours of the morning on what I can only compare to "a bad trip". The thing is after Forty, instead of realizing that you are just plain sick, you think that you are either having a heart attack, a serious allergic reaction, or someone slipped you a mickey in your drink. Contemplating a trip to the emergency room becomes a lot easier after forty than if you were a kid in high school and the panic that ensues becomes debilitating. While we took turns holding her hair as she prayed to the Porcelain God, she would utter things like, "Tell my kids I love them." Good thing for her we were all there to get through it, consoling her and taking care of her. We had her back.


2. Drunk over 40's are smart. No one wanted to be designated driver so we hired a local cabbie with a mini-van to lovingly be our "bitch" for the weekend. I think he had more fun than we did and turned out to be a great guy who watched out for us.

And the number one reason Why Drinking After the Age of Forty Is Never A Good/Bad Thing:

1. It takes two days to recover from a full weekend of drinking with the girls. Waking up on the Monday morning after a weekend bender with every muscle, ache and pain intensified, serves as your notice that the weekend's activities go against every law of nature of your forty year old body. But the memories, bonding and time spent with people you love like crazy and love you the same way are well worth it.

For sure, we will most certianly do it all over again. It's just that now, we need at least six months between to recover!