get me to the church on time (because it will be very crowded)

If it’s true that we eat our feelings, then I guess I ate lots and lots of joy last weekend. That is when my cousin Mary Henry married my new cousin-in-law Brad at Kanuga. I am pretty happy about this arrangement, to the point that if anyone had objected during the ceremony, even as a joke (something I often daydream of doing), I would have fought that person right then and there. Especially if that person was my arch-nemesis.

Yes, I managed to acquire a new arch-nemesis at the wedding, even though the whole festivities only lasted a weekend. Hey. What can I say. You get on my bad side and you are dead to me. But let’s not dwell on the negative. Let’s dwell on the positive. The most positive thing was that Mary Henry and Brad got married.

The second most postive thing was that there was a TON of food. For the rehearsal dinner on Friday night, there were specialities from Buffalo, NY, which is where Brad’s family is from, including hot dogs, roast beef and wings. As well as two kinds of cake! Then, on Saturday morning, my side of the family had sausage biscuits from Bojangle’s because we couldn’t wait til 10 am for brunch. Then we had the just mentioned brunch; I had french toast with strawberry topping, sausage and egg bites and bacon, among other things.

Then a few hours later was the reception, where I feasted on spinach and artichoke dip, meatballs, ham biscuits, cheese straws, cheese and cake. I had more than one piece of cake at the reception, for which my first cousin once-removed Sophie chastised me, but I pointed out that she didn’t have much of a case because she was eating sugar straight from the packet at the time. I guess that was just a snack to tide her over before dinner, which included roast beef, chicken, potatoes, green beans, and salad..and that’s just what I remember. And poundcake with fruit for dessert.

Then the next day we had a breakfast that included eggs, biscuits with sausage gravy and also sausage on the side. There was a lot of sausage. And that’s not even including all the food there was in the hospitality suite, which is where my family hung out between mealtimes. In the hospitaly suite there were goodies including cookies, pretzels, M&Ms, cheese straws and spinach dip. As I said before, I ate lots and lots of joy this weekend.

But the wedding weekend wasn’t all about food, of course. It was also about drinking. My brother William showed up with his custom beer pong table, and many a good game was had, including one monumental game that had three overtimes. At one point my cousins and I ran upstairs to Brad’s family’s hospitality suite and took them on in a game of flip cup, which we won, thanks to a little bit of cheating. I would like to take this opportunity to say that I was not aware that I was cheating at the time. I was just unsure what the game was.

This was a multi-keg wedding, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t wine and spirits as well. And the younger folks had lemonade and soda available, but what they really loved was water. That’s because they played water pong for most of the weekend. Stylistically, water pong is very similar to beer pong, but the scoring is much different, particularly if you play against a child. Children tend to give themselves half-points for a lot of things, such as being close and for cool throws. At one point I was down 7 ½ to nothing despite the fact that I had gotten several balls into cups and my opponent had gotten no balls into no cups. But such is life.

Other than eating and drinking, I guess there was the wedding itself. That was an extremely nice event that is too difficult to explain in blog format. But everyone looked wonderful and everyone in the whole chapel cried, but in a good way, and everyone was very happy to be there.
I’m trying to think if anything happened that didn’t involve eating or drinking or a wedding ceremony but I’m coming up with very few examples. I took a nap. My cousin Worth played music. I looked at the pictures my first cousin once removed Maggie drew. We all played with Baby Sarah. I conspired against my arch-nemesis. Mainly, though, I think I will remember the eating. And so will my waistline.

an unacceptable practice

I don't like to talk about work on my blog but I must tell you about something distressing that has taken place in the office. It concerns the vending machine. We have a small little vending machine in the break room. It is nothing fancy and usually it has some combination of trail mix, nuts, crackers and candy for sale. It sits on the counter and you can see into it. They probably just buy the stuff that goes in there at a bulk food place and restock it as necessary. Items are priced at 50 cents which is actually pretty reasonable for a pack of M&M's.

Now, the vending machine is not something I really rely upon at work. I have used it approximately four times in almost a year when I just got too hungry and needed the aforementioned bag of M&M's. So I don’t really know if I have a bone to pick in this fight. But something disturbing has happened with the way the vending machine is stocked. You know how each column of a vending machine has the merchandise, and when that column is selected, by turning a lever or inputting numbers on a digital thing, a mechanism releases the merchandise found in that column? Well, someone has gone through and ALTERNATED the merchandise available in one given column.

This means you only have a 50 percent chance of getting what you want. The column normally reserved for Snickers now has Snickers alternating with Paydays. I can see why this might have happened -- both have nuts -- but Snickers have CHOCOLATE thus making them completely different than Paydays. And the M&M's are alternated with Reese's peanut butter cups. While I like both candies, I usually have a craving for one or the other.

Now, upon first inspection, I thought maybe the vending machine dispensed from the front, so that you could wait to procure a snack until your desired item was in view. Though of course that would be an inconvenient wait for anyone dying for a Snickers. How many people buy Paydays in a given day anyway? It seems like you'd spend a lot of time just waiting around in the breakroom asking people if they wanted a Payday. Or you could suck it up, buy both and save the other item for later. But we're in a recession, people! We might not always have a dollar in quarters to spare for 2 food items. How decadent.

But actually, the vending machine is not even as easy as waiting for your favorite item to be displayed! The vending machine dispenses from the back! Which means you can't even see what's next on deck back there. It will be a total surprise! I do not like this system at all, even though I did manage to get M&M's and that's what I wanted.

I suppose I could speak to the office manager about this. He was probably only trying to offer more variety. But I tend to avoid confrontation and would prefer that he find this entry through Google and determine on his own that I am probably talking about him.

of dogs and ice cream

I don't think it's fair to say I have a sweet tooth. I do think it's fair to say that all my teeth are sweet tooths. God help me, I love sugar. If a diet of candy, cake and ice cream were enough to keep a person alive and breathing, I'd be interested in that. Maybe I would take occasional breaks, for a turkey sandwich or nachos, but ultimately, I would be happy to survive on sugar.

But if any young kids or my parents are out there reading this, then you should know that I absolutely DO NOT survive on just sugar. For one thing, I would like to keep my original teeth, and for another, diabetes is not appealing to me. But honestly, if I ever get some other awful painful disease and I'm given months to live, I'm just going to eat sugar. Maybe that way the sugar will kill me before the disease does. Please, again note, I am not advocating just eating sugar.

Even though I know sugar is bad, bad, bad, I still sometimes, occasionally make sugar-rific impulse buys when I've had a crappy day. I think that's how I came to buy a little ice cream called Birthday Bash, which won me over with this winning description: "cake flavored ice cream with confetti and blue icing." HOW COULD YOU PASS SOMETHING LIKE THAT BY? I certainly couldn't, especially because the confetti made it look pretty similar to my beloved Funfetti cakes. It's Kroger brand ice cream, and I don't know it's meant to be a generic rip-off of something else, and I'm not going to investigate that too much, because than I'd want to try the original as well.

So anyways, I bought this ice cream, but it's been sitting in my freezer for awhile, almost like a fine wine. I figured I'd break it out when things got really bad, or conversely, when I had a real reason to celebrate. And that point came this weekend.

As I mentioned in the last entry, I worked from home this past week. Working from home allows you to realize that sometimes it's a good thing that you're not around in the daytime, because there's lots of leaf-blowers going, and garbage trucks coming by, and dogs just barking their heads off. The dogs were the worst part for me. There was this one dog that would not shut up. It just barked and barked and barked. I'd never noticed it before, which I thought was due to being shut up in an air-conditioned pod for the past few months (I just turned the AC off and went back to natural air last week), but Katie reminded me that it was probably just that the owners were at work and the dog was lonely.

But then the weekend came, and that dog still wouldn't shut up. It barked so much that it stopped sounding like a dog and started sounding like a donkey. It was just braying away. I felt I was going insane. While I don't condone animal cruelty, I would like to take that dog and drop-kick it to kingdom come. At one low point, I was holding two pillows over my head and also my comforter, and I could still hear that fucking dog. Though maybe it was just the sound of the dog ringing in my ears.

That's when I had an epiphany. No, the epiphany was not talking to the apartment staff or talking to the dog's owner directly, or anything mature like that. The epiphany was that I would break out the box of Birthday Bash ice cream, and that I would probably feel much better because of it. So after a few bowls of Birthday Bash, I thought I'd share my review.

First of all, it does kind of taste like cake. Not a Funfetti cake, sadly, but nothing could touch the perfection of that. But it doesn't cross the line into ice-cream cake territory, which is good for me because I don't really love ice cream cake. Is that surprising? It kind of is to me too! You'd think ice cream cake would be right up my alley! But I just don't like it! It's weird! I prefer ice cream on the side of the cake, not in it!

Unfortunately, Birthday Bash can't quite replace cake on its own. For one, the icing is not evenly distributed throughout the ice cream box, which makes it a little too hit-and-miss for me. Each time I take a bite of Birthday Bash, I can't help noticing how good it would be WITH cake, ON THE SIDE of it. That would be a double cake bonanza, but again I'm stressing that I don't want an ice cream cake. I want two things that both taste like cake, but of different textures and kept separately.

While these very specific cake requests make perfect sense to me, I'm well aware that they may not make sense to anyone else. For that, I blame that barking dog, which, drove me to the crazy house. The dog has been quieter today, so maybe it's okay. But if that dog were still barking, this ice cream would be pointless. I would need real cake. Administered via IV.

On another dog-related note, when walking to the library this weekend I saw a sign that advertised that a dog was missing. The sign listed the dog's name but said the dog answered to "here girl!" Now, call me crazy, but don't about half of the dogs out there probably answer to "here girl!"??? I just don't think these people will find their dog.

On another Birthday Bash-related note, my eyes have been able to carefully avoid seeing the caloric and fat content of what I'm consuming. But I did briefly glimpse the fact that this box is supposed to contain 14 servings. Uh-oh. I think I'll be lucky if I break double digits. Particularly with the presidential debate about to start.