Is it the same thing or slightly different? In my new house, which has a dedicated scrapbook room, I have found I am not spending as much time scrapbooking. I haven’t done any of my album for 2004, and am stuck on December 2003. Maybe it’s the whole Christmas in July thing — a little early.

At first I thought it was about the lack of entertainment. I was used to scrapbooking at my kitchen table with a clear shot at the TV and my new room didn’t have cable, or a tv. I tried listening to music, which was a good thing, but missed my TV. After a yard sale, I had enough $$ to go to Target to buy a Polaroid TV which came with a DVD player. (I think it was kinda cute that I was buying a Polaroid television set for a scrapbook room — get it??!!! Who knew Polaroid even made TV’s?) So I played DVD’s, and did some more scrappin’.

You know what was good for scrapping? Believe it or not, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. It’s 3 hours long, and it works whether you’re listening to it or not. You know what’s not good for scrapping? Love Actually. I always watch it instead of doing my albums.

I can’t figure out what it is about that movie, but I love it. Actually. I can watch it over and over. In fact, after my 10th or so time seeing the whole thing or pieces of it, I found its fatal flaw. They edited one scene too early. I remember seeing it and thinking “how cute” and then when the song it references comes on, I thought, how odd, but I didn’t realize that something was wrong until I really looked at the wardrobe. It’s the scene with the movie “stand-ins” after their date. Only, what you don’t realize until later, (or until I spoil this for you. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!) is that although you see the end of their date at this point, you see the beginning of their date about 10 minutes later when everyone’s going in to see the kids’ Christmas show at the school. And then her line “All I want for Christmas is you” makes perfect sense. This hasn’t ruined it for me … but now I revel in my keen-eyed perception.

Since I’m on the subject, I’ll tell you about my other amazing blooper that I figured out all by my ownself in 10th grade. Subject: Raiders of the Lost Ark. When Harrison Ford is in the map room with his staff of Ra, it extends a foot above his head. Well, if you remember that the medallion had two sides, the old guy who translated it said the side the Nazi’s didn’t have said you had to take back one kadaah (unit of masurement) to honor the Hebrew god, and Indiana and Sallah said the staff would be six feet tall before he told them to take back 1 foot, then the staff would be five feet, wouldn’t it? And with Harrison Ford being 6 feet tall, the staff would hit somewhere below his chin and the sun would not penetrate the crystal, and he would not know where the Ark of the Covenant was. But thanks to movie magic, the staff is proudly taller than good ole Harrison, the sun shown through, the crystal lit up, pointing a laserlike beam of light right smack dab onto that map and sure enough that’s where they found the Ark. There are more bloopers in that movie (I saw it a bazillion times in 10th grade due to my major crush in Harrison Ford) but that’s the big one for me.

Okay, so if I can remember all this stuff, why can’t I remember that I like to scrapbook and I have a year or more’s worth of pictures up there for me to get down in an album? Why did I read 3 or 4 scrapbook magazines this month? Why do I surf Two Peas, but don’t do my albums? Maybe I need to make a to-do list and put scrapbooking on it!!

Oh, and my brother turned 38 today. Happy Birthday Ray!

I confess that I am a huge Coca-Cola fan. I used to drink close to 2 liters a day. Or three cans, which ever came first. I really try hard not to drink Pepsi, even though it was born in the Carolinas. At UNCW, I did a research paper on Coca-Cola advertising for an English class. I have Coca-Cola signs in my kitchen … or I will when I hang them in my new house. They were up in my old house!
In 1985, I told two of my friends that the Cokes we’d been buying at Buffalo’s on Wrightsville Road (I think that’s the name of the street) tasted funny and just weren’t the same. I wondered if the bottles had been washed properly. Two weeks later, New Coke came out with fanfare and when I tasted that one, I knew why the Cokes we’d been buying in refillable glass bottles (sigh, remember those?) tasted different. They’d been filled with New Coke. I hated New Coke, along with most of the free world.
A few years ago, I switched to Diet Coke thanks to Weight Watchers. An 12-ounce can of Coke is what, three points? I had to stop spending my points on Coke. Diet Coke is zero points, and I loved it when they added Vanilla, but my favorite is Diet Coke with Lime!!! Ah, rapture.
So imagine my surprise when I stopped at the Kangaroo mart on my way into work this morning and saw a bottle of Coke with a black cap. The label was kind of silverish. Was this a Diet Coke contest (sometimes they change the cap color for contests)? I pulled it out of the cooler. Coke Zero it said. Zero calories.
Well, zero calories is zero points, fer sure so I nabbed that Coke Zero and a Diet Coke with Splenda just in case I hated it. (For the record, I did try Coke2 and thought it was okay, but tasted kinda flat. And it was still 1 or 2 points. Diet Coke is zero and I’d gotten used to the taste, especially the lime.)
But I digress!!
I whipped off the cap and took a sip. Oh, honey! This stuff tastes a heckuva lot like good old Coca-Cola!! I mean it. It’s not just some new version of Diet Coke. I mean the Diet Coke with Splenda tastes good, but it still tastes like Diet Coke. The Diet Coke with Lime is yummy, but it still tastes like Diet Coke, with a little splash of lime.
No, we’re talking this tastes so much like my all-American friend in that red can, that curvy plastic bottle with the red cap and label, that if I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine that’s what I was holding.
Now, if my husband (another Coke afficionado, thank heavens. Can you imagine what it would be like if I was Coke and he was Pepsi?) were to try it, he might be able to taste more of a difference then I can. NOT because my tastebuds aren’t as sharp … I thought I proved that with the New Coke story above … but because he drinks the fully-sugared Coca-Cola Classic all day every day, and I have switched to unleaded — Diet Coke.
How come I haven’t heard anything about this??? Is Coke sneaking products onto store shelves these days thanks to the New Coke debacle? I mean, I have seen no DC with Splenda ads. I bumped into that product in a convenience store before it came to my Harris Teeter shelves. Now to have the miracle of Coke Zero just suddenly appear, why, it’s as if I were Aladdin, rubbing the genie’s lamp. Treasure beyond compare.
I’m so looking forward to my drive to work tomorrow morning. And yes, I will just have to make one teensy tiny stop on the way in. Lookout Kangaroo Mart … here I come!

Saw this meme challenge on my favorite scrapbooking website Two Peas In A Bucket. I even remember seeing the layout in a magazine that inspired it. So what ten things do I wish I knew when I was in high school?

10. Jill Conner Brown, the Sweet Potato Queen said it best in her book SPQ Big Ass Cookbook and Financial Planner Something to the effect of: “If you are under 30 you are a precious darling thing and if we were you we’d take our clothes off and go running down the street” — this is not an exact quote. I spent so much time in high school worrying about what size I was. If you showed me a picture of myself then, I’d think “what a cow!” but if you showed me that picture now, I’d shout “What a teeny petite thing I was!” Who knew perspective could work on your body image retroactively?

9. Buy the typewriter with the largest size type for college. (I can’t remember, is it pica or elite?) Anyway, I had the smallest version. I suppose I thought I would cram more great thoughts on a page that way, but when you’re writing papers by the page, big margins will take you only so far.

8. Combining a spiral perm and living at the beach makes you have blonde hair until the perm grows out. Then you have roots. Then you have to color the roots. And get another perm. I do love being a blonde today though. And strangely enough, I grew up to have curly hair. I think it was a Darwinian evolution, for which I am grateful.

7. Spray starch will make your polo shirt collar stay up. (I thought I just had low ears or something!)

6. Hairspray makes the Farrah work. Lots and lots of hairspray. Hairspray touchups throughout the day. It doesn’t work with beach humidity, a curling iron, a spiral perm and NO hairspray.

5. Pleated pants made everyone look like they have a belly. I’d like to thank Trinny and Susanne of BBC’s What Not to Wear for making that perfectly clear, more than 2o years later.

4. No one looks good in that 80’s shade of green eyeshadow.

3. It’s okay to bend the rules, maybe even to break them.

2. Contact lenses don’t hurt your eyes the way your dad (who had hard lenses in the 70’s) said they would.

1. Well-behaved women rarely make history!

This is me in high school, a teenage disk jockey at an AM radio station. Look — turntables!