How to Ruin a Weekend in 10 Easy Steps

If there's something I'm an expert on, it's ruining weekends. If you are worried about another successful weekend, please rest your fears and know that I'm here to rescue you with tips I've found helpful over the years. 1. Try to accomplish on the weekend every little task you wanted to do during the week and didn't manage to accomplish. Monday never seems quite as horrifying as it does when it arrives and your life has been so hectic you've never realized any days during the last week WEREN'T Monday. Clean the house, grocery shop, do yard work, cook for large groups of people and clean it all up. Chores, chores, chores-keep 'em comin'!

2. Let guilt be your tour guide. By mid-day Friday, bring to the forefront of your mind all of your weaknesses, failures, and shortcomings. Focus on each of those items and all the ways that your personal inadequacies are holding back the people you care about.

3. Overschedule. Nothing says making the most of the weekend like trying to make more of it than you are physically, emotionally, or financially able to do. You might think, "But how will this work? We also have X, Y, & Z going on?" Just schedule anyway. Things have a way of working out, even if it means instead of relaxing for a single moment, you spend those single moments driving, crying, apologizing for being late, and screaming inside.

4. Put pressure on the people you love. Even though they didn't plan to accomplish all that you unrealistically plan to accomplish over the weekend, doesn't mean they can't be dragged into the mess somehow.

5. Get easily offended. When stress abounds, being upset and snarky is just one way to slow down the weekend.

6. Make hasty decisions because you don't feel emotionally capable of doing anything else. If you try to think about things before making a choice, what will you have to feel bad about later? This is the time to cease the moment and create a little regret to savor later.

7. ALWAYS say yes to watching other people's kids. If they need their children watched, it means they're doing something fun. Live vicariously through them. The crazier their children are, the more vicarious living you really are doing!

8. Think a lot about giving up. Fantasize about just letting the laundry and dishes go for years and never taking out the garbage. Think about the house just piling up with junk and stinking...about losing your self-respect and eventually not being able to sleep unless you make a make-shift sort of bed out of trash. It feels like the second you give up, that's what life would turn into but you might find yourself much more compassionate toward hoarders.

9. Be there but don't be there. Physically be present but always keep your mind on your problems or what else you should or could be doing. Being emotionally unavailable in the moment is a little like a vacation, right?

10.Think about how life would be if you were alone and nobody cared about you. Now think about how many people are in your life and don't care about you. Ah, that's better, right? Instead of having nobody to care about you, you have lots of people to not care about you!

PLEASE KNOW THIS IS A JOKE!!! We all get down. (Clearly I do) Let yourself feel down once in a while but don't let it stay too long!!! People really do care about you! Life is just hard sometimes. :)

Hebrew National Hot Dogs

I recently saw a disproprtionate amount of commercials for Hebrew National hot dogs. I first want to say that it would be tough to be on a hot dog marketing team. Even Ballpark franks, perhaps the best campaign for hot dogs so far, could only come up with "plumps when you cook it." Why would we want our hot dogs to do that? Back to the Hebrew franks now...the commercial ends with the slogan "a hot dog you can trust." If you are at a point in your life where you're trusting a hot dog, you took a wrong turn my friend! You took a wrong turn.

Saladmaster's Special Night In

For the last 1 ½-2 years, my brother’s been pitching me this idea: “Hey! Wouldn’t you like to have your friends over for a meal that would be free & delicious? Your only obligation would be to hear the chef give everybody the option to purchase the pans that were used to prepare the meal.” That never did sound like something I wanted but eventually he caught me on a weak day (and actually not a weekday) and I agreed. The more I thought about it, I really did want to have dinner with my friends that I didn’t have to cook. Dinner with friends usually takes 1-2 hours, is fun, and full of food people typically enjoy eating. This dinner we ended up having was not accurately marketed. If it had been a truthful pitch, my brother would have said, “Hey! Wouldn’t you like to have your friends over while a guy invades your home for 4 ½ hours? He’ll cook for you AND as a bonus, he’ll cry and talk about his personal tragedies.” I would have answered, “No! I’d rather cook and then get the rest of that from half a year’s worth of testimony meetings!” He would have bantered, “That’s not even the best part though-chances are the food will not be anybody’s favorite.

It will mostly be vegetables and everybody’s likely to leave hungry!” Because I’m an optimist, I like to look at the bright side and that is that testimony meeting is going to seem so short now! And on top of that, nobody will even be asked to try four different varieties of poisoned water and another version of water that’s just plain yucky. As for making it up to our friends, I will have to make them a vegetable and mustard-free chocolate dessert to restore their faith in why we thought we liked chocolate in the first place and we will have to do chores around their house to make up for the time they spent at our home that they will never get back.

P.S. Of course we bought pans that cost as much as a car.

We went to a parade because it's our favorite game: yell and cheer for people you don't care about so they'll throw a piece of taffy at you.

Traffic School

As the lucky recipient of traffic school training today, I thought I'd highlight just a few of the details. FAILED TRAFFIC SCHOOL INTRODUCTIONS: ***Hi. My name is Kimberly. This is my first time here because I am usually a very safe driver. Also, today is my grandpas's birthday-he's not here or anything, just wanted to give a shout out anyway. ***The name's Trevor. Honestly, I had no idea this was traffic school. The cop told me to show up tonight and they'd remove the fungus I have. ***My name is Candace and I probably really belong here. I gotta admit, I'm a pretty bad driver!

TEACHING TECHNIQUE/WORST SURPRISE EVER: "Some classes are full of statistics. Some classes show gory videos. I don't do either of those things. Surprise, guys-each of you will be teaching part of this class!"

SOME OF THE MESSAGES WE GOT FROM THE TRAINING: ***If you're being tailgated, move out of the guy's way, dummy! ***If you aren't carrying a weapon in your vehicle, you have no business driving and you might not live through the next 24 hours. ***A DUI conviction runs you about $10,000...your $15 worth of alcohol can generate a LOT of money to help your city! ***There have been major public education efforts in regards to drinking and driving. Nothing seems to deter it. What would it actually take to deter it? (The class made a list!!! We were, after all, the surprise teachers) ---That creepy 4th grade teacher you still have nightmares about spends the night in your home ---Your 10 biggest enemies get to pick items to feed to you and you aren't allowed to refuse any of them ---A clown spends the night at your house ---You are locked in a room full of clowns ---In order to save you from prison time, your whole family must commit to a lifetime of clowning ***If you are in any accident that involves somebody losing their life, you can pretty much guarantee somebody will be drawing your blood. It's weird, too, because they put the hollow collection tubes in their teeth and draw from your neck... ***Cyclists are legally allowed to ride in the right traffic lane, even if there are clear bike lanes available. They can legally choose the part of the road you are driving on and YOU must give them 3 feet of space. To make this long story short, when your siblings are late for something, hop on your bike and give them a lesson in patience.

***85% of people speeding in your neighborhoods are your actual neighbors!!! Does that mean that 85% of the people flipping me off in my neighborhood are also my neighbors? ***If you cut in front of a semi, they might get a ticket but you might be dead. ***Distractions while driving seemed to be a big issue & we were told it's really important to stop for 3 seconds at every stop sign. Since I don't want to be distracted by counting Mississippis or programming my watch for the proper 3 seconds, I'd really like to invent a timer for driving. Every time you hit a stop sign, you just push a single button and it beeps after 3 seconds. Any investors out there hearing this? ***The instructor said he'd take a ticket any day over hurting, harming, or killing somebody. Ha! To me, that sounds like somebody who's never had a ticket before!

CONCLUSION: Maybe I'm not good at driving (especially when dark cars with their lights off drive by at 50 mph-I'm a real threat to society at moments like that). I'm okay at math though. There were 13 of us and at $55 a pop for an hour and a half, one teacher generated $476/hour. The only conclusion I can reach is that financially, I REALLY need to teach this class and then I can surprise MY students and tell them they get to be the teachers. That's what you get to do when you're making the big bucks!

What Would You Do? (Dog Edition)

I've been catching up on far too many episodes of What Would You Do? I got the great idea of testing the character of my dogs so here are some things we've tried and the results: ***I hired some actors and by hired I mean offered to feed dinner to and by actors I mean my boys. One had to pretend he was REALLY hurting the other and the other had to pretend he was REALLY suffering. I wanted to see what the dogs would do. They just sat down in front of the boys and watched with mild interest. There's no way those dogs will ever protect us in an emergency situation! ***I tested the patience of the dogs by feeding them dinner, one piece of dog food at a time. Those dogs are not patient AT ALL! They went ballistically crazy. They took turns trying to tackle me while the other tried to sneak behind my back for the rest of the food but lucky for me 12-pound dogs aren't that good at tackling me. ***I tested the honesty of the dogs by leaving opened treats out. All I can say is that those dogs don't have one speck of integrity or sense of self control either. Don't ever let them invest treats for you! ***I tested the athleticism of the dogs by setting up an obstacle course for them. Not only are they not athletic enough to complete each task correctly but they don't have a long enough attention span to do much more than start the course. ***I tested the dogs for classiness by seeing how they behave while humans are watching them and also when they don't think they are being watched. In both scenarios, they lick their crotches, lick the ground, lick the couch, and our male dog scoots his bum on the ground as if it is his personal roll of toilet paper. They are shameless in their pursuit of other people's food and the female barks a lot about nothing. They do not have one bit of class in them. IN SUMMARY: Dogs do not have good characters at all!!! They never do the right thing! They are sometimes cute and they are quite playful and our male in particular is ridiculously loyal but they could use some refining, that's for certain. If they'd just quit being so lovable, maybe their character would matter more.

January 16

From now on, when anybody stops by my house, I'm going to give them gas money for making the trip...even if they just drove half a mile.