A Snowstorm? Let's Party!!!

What a weekend! It definitely did what Minnesota does and dumped about a foot of snow on us. Beautiful! Many people have been grumbling about it, but you know, I don't mind at all. These days we don't get enough snow as it is. I always feel like, hey, if it's gonna be cold, we may as well have some pretty white stuff to go along with it. It's not 20 below like it was for so long. It's nearing the end of winter, so it will melt soon. And as I always say, it's really easy to like the stuff when you don't have to shovel/snow-blow it. Thanks to Coreman! (and as I've also said before, the only good thing to come out of a gimpy back.)

The snow really started kicking in early Saturday evening, as we were getting ready to head over to Stephanie's for her belated 40th Birthday Bash. She was really bummed about it, understandably, as there were sure to be some folks that couldn't or wouldn't venture out in the slip and slide to get there. But no, not us! I will not let a little snow keep me from celebrating with my peeps. I told Steph I'd be there if I had to walk over in my snowshoes! (ok, I don't own snowshoes, but I'd get some from Hoigaards just up the street.)

The party was amazing, as I knew it would be--definitely the highlight of the weekend. Stephanie looked beautiful in her fabulous forty glory, and she has wonderful, interesting friends that are definitely fun to chat with. Plus it's always fun to hob-nob with a few local celebs like Andrew Zimmern and Rudy Maxa, who are just as fun and interesting as you think they would be. The highlight of the evening was definitely giving Steph a special birthday surprise--Mod Hair Ken. Stephanie had brought him up a few times when we'd touch on childhood memories--I'm sure it all started with the Dirty Barbie story. (those of you who have listened to the podcast know just what I'm talking about. If you're curious, check out Episode #4 from our early days...) Kim thought of the wonderful idea of finding one for her, and good ol' ebay provided once again. The presentation was hilarious--since it's near-impossible to find Mod Ken complete with box and facial decals, we just had to make our own. I cut decals out of brown felt and labeled each one--of course I had to make up a few of my own. Ken just had to have a merkin. Kim's hubby Brian made an incredible box to put him in, complete with original 'artwork' and an open display window. The funniest thing was the card we gave along with it--we did a photo shoot of Ken and a random lucky Barbie and posed them in all sorts of compromising positions--then Brian photoshopped Stephanie's face on the Barbie. These we put on a self-made card that said, "You're Never Too Old to Play Dirty Barbies!" The gift definitely got the response from Stephanie that we were hoping for...but of course I wasn't counting on everyone at this glorious party taking a gander and seeing just what Kim and I are made of. Ha! Ah well, I can only fool people for so long. It's not long before they start to see the real me. Like as soon as I open my mouth....

So! Into a busy week. Vivian has one more little thing to shoot for her commerical thang today at Fallon, so I'll be dropping Sullivan off to hang with Cory at work, picking Vivian up early from school and heading downtown. It will be a lot of rushing, but there are worse things to do than hang out at a rockin' internationally known ad agency on the 28th floor of a building in downtown Minneapolis.

Frigid Fun

Yay, Saturday. It's been a busy couple of days here and all I can say is, THANK G-D. This frigid weather is making me cooped up and crabby, I've needed some diversions. I am so ready to breathe in the spring air! Heck, I'd be happy with 30 degree air at this point. Grief!

Thursday afternoon Stephanie brought her adorable little nephew Cooper over to hang since he didn't have much of a nap. (now that's the kind of Coop-ed up I like...!) We've been trying to plan this for weeks now, but little Coop was not Coop-operating. Ah well, I guess it IS about the child getting his nap and not about us. MAN, what a little cutie-pie. We all wanted to eat him up, especially Digby. Poor Digs, he over-played his moves and had to go in the crate. He clearly knew he did, too, because he didn't make one peep when I put him in there! The cutest was when Sullivan came out to say hello. Cooper immediately crawled right over and pulled himself up on him. The sweetest! I'm tellin' ya, that kid is almost enough to make me drop an egg. ALMOST. (sorry the photos are so out of focus. Not quite sure why...?)

Yesterday afternoon it was another jaunt over to Fallon, where Vivian did some more 'work' and we hung and watched the rough-cuts of the commercials. That place is a blast, complete with pool table, ping pong table, putting green, (well, the hallway, but still.) snacks galore, a glorious view. Almost makes me want to be corporate again. Again? Okay, I guess I never WAS corporate. And I suppose they really aren't, either...which is what makes them so great! We had a great time once again hanging out with everyone. It will be sad to see it all end when the project is truly finished!

This morning was Digby's play group at the Humane Society--thank goodness--and now it's just doing stuff around the house until it's time to head over to the choich for 'Adult Night Out'. I'm looking forward to this, mainly because I can't wait to see my husband participate in those cheezy 'getting-to-know-you' games they undoubtedly have planned for everyone. Tee hee!

Hello, Associated Press!

A loud and resounding shout out to the Associated Press, who I found out actually read my blog. tee hee. Char from Fallon called me yesterday informing me that poor Neel Lattimore was called and questioned by them, asking about his commercial shoot in front of the Whitehouse, and was that about Hillary Clinton?? Eeeek! I guess it makes sense, with her campaigning people are going to be looking for anything. I feel badly that Neel was questioned because of it, but I do love the fact that the AP has read the Metal Mommy Diary. Maybe they need a Metal Mommy to do some writing for them? Daily gripes and blessings of parenting and suburban life, my oh-so-important view of this crazy world, Metal. Now that's interesting news. :-)

And speaking of surburban life, I must rave once again about Byerlys. I know you guys are probably sick of me going on about a grocery store, but you know--it's the simple things. As I was paying at check out, my oh-so-nuritional head of iceberg lettuce rolled onto the floor. The cashier could not be more apologetic that this happened, and vocalized how thankful she was to me that I just waved a hand at her apologies. Does a head of lettuce bruise?! I'm not too worried. But that's just the way those folks roll there at Byerlys. Then I drove up to have the groceries put into my car. As much as I love this feature, I always feel a bit funny about it...especially when it's "-4 feels like -16" frigid degrees out there. Here I am sitting in my warm car, and this guy with what's exposed of his frozen red face sticking out of the small hole in his hat/scarf combo is telling me he's not going to open my hatch until my groceries have shown up on the belt, so as not to let the cold air in. I'm tellin' ya people, that place may be a little more expensive than your average grocery store, but they make a little suburban Metal Mommy like me feel like a rock star. And when you are getting milk for the umpteenth time at 8:30 AM and not feeling so glamorous, that is a wonderful thing.

DC and Back Again--Day One

Hey there! Here I am, back from a whirlwind week out in Washington DC. We were living large, let me tell you. First the Upper East Side, and now this. Two high-falootin' trips within 6 months, how lucky am I?! This one was courtesy of my amazing daughter, who landed the role of spokesperson for a very important campaign and it involved 3 days of filming for some upcoming commercials. That my friends, is all I can tell you about it...but it could very well be a pretty big-time thing. It's very exciting! Since we really had 5 jam-packed days I won't try to cram it all into one post, but go day by day instead. (knowing how much I can blab I'm sure all of you are wiping your brows and saying, "whew!")

So! Let me start by saying that he flight into DC was uneventful...and that is wonderful news. As many of you know, we tried flying with Sullivan 2 or 3 years ago and it did not go so well. Let's just say we were on the plane maybe 10 minutes and had to convince the flight attendant to open the door back up and let us out. You can imagine that they frown upon that, so in turn you can imagine just how freaked out Sullivan must have been. I swear I could hear a silent cheer from the other passengers as we carried our screaming panicked toddler down the aisle and out the door. The poor guy. But that is all in the past now, as he flew like he'd flown all his little life. No problems at all-- in fact, he had a ball. He got his flight certificate, his wings, even a free bag of trail mix and the pilot's autograph to boot. I also had a great flight. I was a ball of nerves up until I got on the plane. Then upon sitting down I had the weirdest calm just come over me. I don't know what happened, but I'm not going to question it! It was great!!!!! We landed and I was feeling pretty spunky indeed.

We flew with Char, one of the many wonderful Fallon team members that went along on the trip. (Fallon is the advertisting agency) There was a van driver there to meet us and we got our luggage lickety-split. Before I knew it we were at the Madison Hotel, on 15th and M Street. We met up with more Fallon people in the lobby and then went up to check into our room. I have to say our room was quite small, especially for the 4 of us. But no matter, we weren't going to be in the room much anyway! Overall it was a very nice hotel, and the people there were fabulous.

After getting unpacked a bit and taking a peep at the production office, Vivian and I met the studio teacher down in the lobby. Vivian was required to have a certain bit of schooling each day, and the first order of business was to get over to some office building to get Vivian her work permit which I guess is required of any under- aged child about to do some kind of work. Teacher Lorena Bow was fabulous. I knew I liked her right away. A retired school teacher from right there in DC, she had never done anything like this before...but that didn't stop her from taking care of business and being right on top of things. She was amazing. We found our way around the building and it took a while to get the permit. Meanwhile Lorena's hugging just about everyone we passed by, she knew everyone! We got back to the hotel and by that time they only had a little time to get some studying in before Vivian's fitting. They went down to the lobby and got to work while the rest of us just hung out in our room.

We all went up to the 15th floor of the hotel for Vivian's fitting, which was basically in a hallway right outside of a meeting room! Vivian would dart into a nearby bathroom to try on different outfits for Ellen, the wardrobe person, and then she'd take her into the meeting room where everyone from the production was talking about the upcoming shoot. That was the first time I got a glimpse of Barbara Kopple, the acadamy award winning director that was working on the commercials! Very exciting!!! After they decided what would work best we went back up to the room and ordered room service for dinner. Nice! Nothing like sitting on your bed and eating delicious expensive food on silver platters. You gotta love it. We all tried to get to bed early, although sleeping was not easy. Not only were we in a new place, different beds and excited about the days to come, our gassy boy made sure we were all down-wind, so to speak. Never a dull minute in a hotel room with a family of four, that's for sure.

My next post will be Day #2! I will let you go with this revelation...for whatever reason I can honestly say that my Fear of Flying is completely gone. I don't know what happened, but I was not even nervous one bit before the flight home and it was the easiest thing ever. ?? I feel like a new person, FREE! It's the best feeling ever.