06. Hold a tarantula - I worked at The Pet Company in Gwinnett Place Mall where we sold tarantulas as pets. My boss would put them all over his back and scare the pretty girls. Random memories.
08. Say “I love you” and mean it - I've said this numerous times to many people, and I actually meant when I said it to a lot of those people.
09. Hug a tree - The first time I did this I was getting high with some friends in the woods when one of them accused me of being a "tree-hugging hippie." Yes, I've always been a smartass, so I followed through.
13. Stay up all night long and watch the sun rise - I've spent plenty of nights completely sleepless. I remember staying up all night in Cocoa Beach, FL when I was 17 and on spring break with a bunch of girls. Christine and I were on the beach at sunrise and she took a picture of me with the sunrise behind me.
15. Go to a huge sports game - I've been to several "huge" sports games. Including: Atlanta Braves, Atlanta Thrashers (even playoff games) and Jacksonville Jaguars games.
16.
19. Sleep under the stars - Camping several times in tents, but one time I slept on a trampoline in the middle of nowhere. A rooster woke me up.
20. Change a baby’s diaper - I have a six week old baby. I change 15 diapers every day.
22. Watch a meteor shower - When I lived in the desert, they were a lot easier to watch than on the east coast. Out in the desert, you can see so many more stars at night, and there's hardly ever a cloud in the sky. Also, because of the time difference, meteor showers happen earlier on the west coast, maybe. I'll have to look into that.
23. Get drunk on champagne - Once I discovered that I enjoy champagne, I decided that every Tuesday should be "Champagne Tuesday." What a brilliant idea. Who says you need an excuse to get fancy? Wait... what do you mean Andre' champagne isn't fancy?
26. Have an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment - My best friend, Tifany, and I have always identified with Beavis and Butthead. When Tifany and I started working at Atlanta Gastroenterology Associates together, a doctor decided to give (just the two of) us a class on the GI tract. When the doctor got to explaining the sphincter to us, we simply looked at each other and that was it. We were both red in the face trying not to laugh. To make matters worse, the doctor was writing all of this on a dry erase board and she didn't know how to spell sphincter, so she kept mouthing and saying the word "sphincter" over and over again. . . I had to leave the room.
29. Ask out a stranger - Not a proud moment at Eclipse a while back. Enough said.
30. Have a snowball fight - In Atlanta, we had snow slushy fights because we rarely got enough snow to make an actual ball. However, this never stopped every single person in Atlanta from making a dirty ass snowman whenever we got an inch of snow.
31. Scream as loud as you possibly can - Roller coasters. Concerts. Moments of insanity. I've done it all.
33. See a total eclipse - In elementary school we watched a solar eclipse through colored filter paper. In the middle of the woods somewhere around Atlanta, Brent and I watched a lunar eclipse with a deer. Really, it happened.
34. Ride a roller coaster - I've done this at: Six Flags Magic Mountain, Knott's Berry Farm, Disneyland, Six Flags Over Georgia, The Santa Monica Pier, Universal Studios Hollywood, Universal Studios Florida and countless county fairs.
36. Dance like a fool and don't care who is looking - This is the only way I can dance, but more notably, my days hanging out at Higher Grounds Coffee Shoppe.
38. Actually feel happy about your life, even for just a moment - I'm doing this one right now!!
39. Have two hard drives for your computer - Since I started college.
41. Take care of someone who is drunk - Tifany was the first. There have been many others since. I've also been on the other end of that.
42. Have amazing friends - Jeremy, Liz and Tyson have all been amazing friends at one point or another. They were my core and now we've all gone our separate ways.
45. Steal a sign - This was, for lack of a better word, a fetish of mine as a teenager. I had everything from street name signs, to construction signs, to shoplifting warning signs, to address signs from mailboxes. Getting rid of these things was no easy task, either. I had to cut them up into small pieces and hide them in the trash. Stealing street signs is a federal offense and I destroyed them like I would murdered bodies.
47. Take a road-trip - from trips to the beach to trips through the mountains to trips through nowhere trying to get lost. I'm a driver at heart and love to be on the road. Damn gas prices and responsibility keeping me from doing that now!
49. Take a midnight walk on the beach - Every time I was on vacation at the beach.
52. Be heartbroken longer than you were actually in love - My heart has been broken for 10 years from a four month romance.
53. In a restaurant, sit at a stranger’s table and have a meal with them - Fat Matt's Rib Shack in Atlanta. It's hard to sit down at your own table there.
54.
56. Alphabetize your CDs - I am a perfectionist and I have been since way back when, when CDs were still relevant.
58. Sing karaoke - I have terrible stage fright to the point that I almost passed out while waiting for my name to be called at my graduation ceremony. Karaoke is fun with friends only, and something I never wanted to do in public. Somehow, after several drinks, my friend Liz talked me into signing "Date Rape" on karaoke night at our favorite dive bar, The Dumpster.
59. Lounge around in bed all day - More times than I'd care to admit
62. Kiss in the rain / 63. Play in the mud / 64. Play in the rain - All three on the same day. I skipped school with Tim and we went to Lenora park. The weather thought we should be at school, and tried to (literally) rain on our parade. We showed you, weather.
68. Fall in love without having your heart broken - I fell madly in love with my husband the day we met. I'm talking heart-racing, palm-sweating, nerve-racking, insane, die-for-you love. Its a big deal, which brings us to #72. Get married (December 18th, 2009)
73. Be in a movie - I'm 16 and on summer vacation when my mom calls me from work and asks me if I know who Tom Green is. Now, this was the late 90s when he was still relevant. She then informs me that he is shooting a movie at her work (Emory University) and they're looking for extras. So, I ran down there and signed up to be an extra in the award winning film, Road Trip.
74. Crash a party - Bar-hopping in Snellville, of all places, led to me attending a bachelor party by mistake. The boys were disappointed when I kept my clothes on.
77. Make cookies from scratch - a few times. This is not an interesting story.
80. Get a tattoo - I got my first tattoo when I was 15 at a flea market. It is a black widow spider on my lower back (no, it is not a tramp stamp) that matches the one on Tifany's shoulder. We were flipping through the flash art book and decided to go with the black widow spider because it was "bad ass." Neither of us has covered it up yet, but I'm pretty sure we both want to.
83. Get flowers for no reason - 2004 - Flowers with tickets to see Mindless Self Indulgence. A lovely surprise on a Tuesday afternoon.
84. Perform on stage - The plays put on at South Gwinnett High school, thanks to Mr. Buis (who was later fired for slapping a student), working my magic at Blood Oaks Haunted House (I didn't mean to kill him), and singing karaoke at The Dumpster.
88. Kiss on the first date - I think I've kissed on every first date I've ever been on.
89.
96. Raise children - I'm working on this one right now and it is, by far, the greatest thing I've ever done.
98. Pass out cold - This has happened several times.
100. Pick up and move to another city to just start over - 2008 - I felt like I was doing nothing with my life and needed to make a change very quickly. I moved down to Jacksonville Beach from Atlanta on a whim with only a few pieces of luggage (see picture). Originally, it was going to be a temporary move to "clear my head" or "find myself" or whatever. After a terribly lonely three months or so, I started to enjoy my new life and decided to stay away for a while longer. I hope that I'll get to do this again, but with my family in tow.
102. Sing loudly in the car, and don’t stop when you know someone is looking with the windows open - Tyson and I went to a Snow Patrol concert at the Gwinnett Arena (I know, really?). I don't know what the hell possessed us, two kids that normally went to the Masquerade for punk rock shows, to go see this catastrophe of a concert, but it happened. After the show, ahem, concert we got in my car where I blasted NOFX and sang "Linoleum" as loud as I could with the windows down. I'm pretty sure I confused a lot of those Snow Patrol fans as they were finding their ways to their cars.
106. Lose over 50 pounds - After high school or after moving out of my mom's house or after I turned 21... I don't know what the cause was, but I gained over 100 lbs over the course of a couple of years. I don't really remember it happening. I woke up one day and looked in the mirror and wondered who that fat ass was looking back at me. I got up to about 220 lbs from my weight in high school of 103 lbs. It took me moving to Florida and completely changing my lifestyle to get rid of a lot of that weight. [just before moving and three months after pictures below] I got down to about 140 lbs before I got pregnant. At full term, I was still under 190 and am currently working to get back down to the 130 range.
109. Touch a stingray - Seaword and the Georgia Aquarium both have "petting tanks" where you can touch stingrays and even sharks, but I've gone a step beyond that. Summer of 2007 I was in Gulf Shores Alabama with Jeremy, Tyson and Laura. On a perfect summer day we were swimming in the perfectly clear gulf water (way back when, before the oil spill) when we noticed a group of about five stingrays swimming all around us. Because the water was so clear, we could see them perfectly. They looked like birds flying below the surface. The were dancing all around us, swimming back and fourth. I thought they were amazing until they took a turn straight towards me. [ Now, this was shortly after one of these things killed Steve Erwin, so I was a little apprehensive. ] When I noticed they were swimming my way, I did my best to get out of the way but they swim faster than me and one of them grazed my leg.
110. Break someone’s heart - MH - Sorry.
113. Break a bone - I was 8 years old swimming in my uncle's pool with my cousins and we decided to have a race from one end of the pool to the other. I kicked off the side of the pool to get a fast start, but slammed my foot into the concrete step. Over a year later, I hit the same foot on the side of my bed. I complained to my mom that I "hit the foot that always hurts" and she took me to the doctor where we learned that I had been walking on a broken foot for a year. I was then put in a cast for two months and not allowed to swim for most of a summer... when I lived in the desert. Ugh!
115. Have a facial part pierced other than your ears - I pierced my nose myself when I was 17... twice. Both times, I got infected and I had to take it out. I got my tongue pierced at Infamous Tattoo, a shop in the middle of the scariest ghetto in Atlanta, where they tatted up and pierced anyone under age if the price was right. I got my nose re-pierced at Good Clean Fun by a skinhead and the piercing was ripped out at a show at the Masquerade three days later. I went back to Good Clean Fun to get it re-done and they did it for free.
119. Have major surgery - I had my first and only surgery at the age of 26, when my daughter had to be born via c-section. That terrifying story is worthy of a blog all it's own.
122. Sleep for 30 hours in a 48 hour period - I think everyone has done this when sick at one point or another.
127. Eat sushi - One of my favorite foods. Unfortunately, my husband refuses to eat it (or anything else you can get at a Japanese restaurant) so I have to find other "foodie" friends to go out with when I get the craving.
128. Have your picture in the newspaper - In 1996, I went to the 99x Big Day Out concert where I enjoyed great 90s bands such as The Offspring and The Goo Goo Dolls. Moshing and crowd surfing were in their prime at this all day music festival, and a shot of me crowd surfing made it into the 99x newspaper, 'Creative Loafing'. This was a very big deal, considering I was only 14 at the time.
132. Touch a cockroach - Not by choice, but it has happened.
133. Eat fried green tomatoes - I live in the South, duh.
135. Select one “important” author who you missed in school, and read one of their books - That same summer I went swimming with stingrays I decided to read The Great Gatsby, a book I rightfully ignored my freshman year of high school. Turns out, that book really is frightfully boring and not really worth my time. ...and let the hate mail begin.
146. Dye your hair - Red, black, blonde, white, pink.
148. Shave your head - For some weird reason, I was voted onto Homecoming Court my junior year of high school. In high school, I was part of the "goth" or "punk" crowd; not the popular homecoming court type. I wore my pretty dress and walked down the football field at halftime of the game with all the pretty girls in their sequence gowns. I obviously didn't fit in, but I guess my class wanted something different that year: me. Anyway, after the game my friends and I stopped at a nearby gas station, where I plugged my clippers into an outlet below the pay phone and shaved my head right there on the sidewalk.
149. Cause a car accident - I'm the only person that has ever caused $8,000 worth of damage to two cars when neither of them was even running. Oh, and to add to the amazingness of this collision, it all happened in my driveway.
64 out of 150. I have a lot to do over the next three years.
