My celebrity look-alikes

Visiting my hometown

I have been homesick for more than a month. When one of my best friends from college invited me to her wedding, and I found a really good deal on airfare, I had to grab the opportunity to go back to my hometown, Houston, TX.

When I flew in and looked around, it was like old times, version 2.0. Some things had changed, but it was still a breath of fresh air visiting my old haunts and chatting with my college buddies. It felt so good to be back.

I was disappointed to find that the coffee shop we went to all the time to hang out was shut down, and a few other cool places I used to like went under. But my absolutely favorite place to go and soak up the atmosphere and write was still there. And it still had the same funky/cool vibe that I fell in love with in college.

It was so great to see my old friends again. Apparently, very few of the people I hung out with back in the day are still single. The group dynamics had totally changed. At the wedding reception, I ended up in the Single Girl Corral -- a small, sad corner of the room where the unattached huddle together to watch all the happy couples waltzing blissfully to Frank Sinatra. It was like junior high school dances all over again: All the popular, pretty people are having a good time while the painfully awkward, shy girls are holding up the wall. (And if a painfully awkward, shy boy ever asked us to dance, we inevitably declined because we had no idea how to dance. But I digress.)

Hanging out is a different event altogether when you're single and almost everyone else you used to hang out with isn't. You're like, "Hey, let's get together!" And they're all, "Oh, hey, I'd love to, but my husband and I have to go shopping for doorknobs." And then you're like, "That's cool ... I just realized I have this ... uh, well, considering I'm completely single and don't have anything that even resembles a boyfriend, or a pet, or even a houseplant, I guess I don't have anything going on. I'll, uh, just go home and think about what my life would be like if I actually had one."

You say your goodbyes, then think about getting a houseplant. Unfortunately, it just wouldn't be the same. Houseplants don't cuddle.

Pretty Prisons in Pink!

Random thought

"Slow and steady" wins the race. That is, unless "slow and steady" has A.D.D. -- in which case, slow and steady winds up studying the different flowers growing wild on the side of the road ... 

then painting her toenails ...

then mentally organizing her sock drawer ...  

then counting the clouds in the sky ...

then getting lost in deep thought about the current state of world events ...

then finding herself somewhere in the next state, realizing she forgot completely about the race. At this point, the hare has completely finished the race, celebrated with his friends and gone to bed for the night.

"Slow and steady" shrugs, figuring she may not have won the race this time, but at least her toenails are painted.

Kristin vs. That Awful Smell, round 1

Little more than a week ago, my friend Cheryl and I moved into a new apartment. It smelled.

Apparently, the previous tenants smoked like chimneys. The apartment had been cleaned and was a huge improvement over a few days before we moved in.

But it still smelled.

Unfortunately, the layout we'd selected was hard to come by, and we might have more luck getting a monkey to recite Shakespeare from memory than getting another unit. I decided to make this apartment my home whether it liked it or not. This apartment may put up a good fight, but it's no match for my determination ... my tenacity ... my ability to buy massive numbers of candles and candle accessories.

I went on the offensive. I went out and bought Glade Plug-Ins. For the living room and hallway, I purchased Clean Linen. For my room, Berry Blast, which was apparently a misstep on my part -- who wants their room smelling like Crunch Berries? But I didn't stop there. I bought Febreeze and Odor-Cide, and enough candles to fill a Catholic altar.

I then scrubbed every inch of the foyer with bleach. I washed the grate on the intake and sprayed down the insides. That seemed to do the trick, I thought.

Unfortunately, I thought wrong. The next day, when I came home from a long day of work, I stepped into the putrid smell of cigarette smoke in the foyer. I was appalled. I sprayed the hallway down with Odor-Cide and went into the living room, where I was blissfully bathed with the scent of Clean Linen.

No matter how much I sprayed the foyer, the smoke smell kept coming back. I would come home from a long day of work, only to be brutally attacked with the offensive smell of smoke. I wasn't ready to give up. I went to IKEA and got more candles, and a palm tree with hopes that it would filter the air (even though I've never been successful in sustaining anything green) and named it Fred. I tried to put Fred in the foyer (to be honest, it's more of a foyerette), but he was too big. I went to Linens & Things, and bought more candles.

I sprayed the foyer and the inside of the intake once more with bleach. Then I went to Wal-Mart and bought more candles.

It was at this point I realized, nasty smoke smell or not, that I had developed a serious addiction ... an addiction to buying candles.

I determined that I needed to get to a support group, and fast! Unfortunately, I couldn't find one for impulsive candle purchasers, so I recruited Cheryl to be my accountability partner to help me to stop buying candles. Not a second too soon, either -- a candle commercial nearly had me running to the store, but Cheryl talked me back from that point of no return. I can proudly say, I did not buy those candles.

I can't say it's been easy, but it's been two days since my last candle purchase. I say the serenity prayer daily. I know that if I just focus on every day, taking it with baby steps, little by little, those two days will turn into weeks, which will turn into months. And I will eventually have beaten this horrible (but wonderful-smelling) addiction.

Today, I managed to go to the store without buying a candle. But as I was walking around the produce section, the wonderful scent of cinnamon drifted me off to a heavenly land of hot apple cider, crisp autumn air and huge, red and orange maple leaves. The source of this wonderful smell was not candles; it was bushels and bushels of cinnamon brooms.

I have to say that I bought one. I'm not necessarily proud of what I did. But hey, at least it wasn't a candle!

I brought home the beautiful bundle of cinnamon-scented twigs and placed it in the foyerette. As I euphorically inhaled the cinnamon-scented air, I had to wonder: Will the spoils of my latest consumer voyage be any match for the nicotine nastiness that once had the run of this abode?

Only time will tell.