I put my hand upon your hip. When I slip, you slip, we slip.

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I destroyed my body, mind, and spirit this weekend with sangria and the 100 foot slip and slide we built. I have one million scratches and scrapes. I look like I got into a fight with an alley cat and lost. The grass burns I have are so intensely painful. I feel like I’ve been ambushed by one thousand jellyfish. My skin is stinging so badly. I spent six or more hours on Sunday in the sun and did not apply a single drop of sunblock. I am severely sunburned. The burn coupled with the grass cuts are a real winning combination. I need a morphine drip.

As usual, the slip and slide battered my body and caused an unreasonable amount of bruising. My hip bones, elbows, ribs, and my left knee are swollen tender wounds. My muscles are in a bad way. I feel like I’ve been brutalized with a meat tenderizer. My core, triceps, and ribs feel like they participated in a P90X marathon of some kind that lasted for days. I’m so sore. I feel like I got hit by a bus.

Kelli goes big.

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It was a great time.

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Returning to the Midwest never loses its novelty. After spending a considerable amount of time in the eastern part of the country which is filled with wretched, grumpy, idiot people, coming back to Iowa is like being greeted by a million family members. Everyone is so nice, even strangers. Ahh, Iowa.

Iowa visits always mean countless consecutive nights of destroying my liver. I’m rather exhausted from the three day bender I just had. It will take a few days to recuperate.

Trent and I packed our bags and departed toward Kansas City for our 5 o’clock flight, only to arrive to discover that our flight had been cancelled. I would have known this had my cell phone remained alive so that Delta could contact me and let me know I had one more night to binge drink with my homies before heading back east. Unfortunately my Blackberry had a stroke and flatlined about 45 minutes outside of Council Bluffs, and we did not get this important notification about our flight cancellation, so we showed up at MCI ready to get onto our plane and were told we couldn’t fly to Pittsburgh until the next morning. Delta Airlines graciously comped us a hotel room at the Four Points Sheraton for the night. We were without wheels, so we were stuck in the hotel all evening, but there’s no better time to be stuck in a hotel room than Shark Week, am I right?

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Trent and I ended up cabbing it to the nearest Verizon store that afternoon and getting ourselves new smart phones. We entered the store intending on getting two iPhone4’s, but I got sold on the Droid X2 by the crafty salesman. It’s true though. The Droid does everything the iPhone does, except faster, and more for free. iPhone is just so freaking branded, people feel like anything else is a knock-off. Apple is really blunt about it, too.  “If you don’t have an iPhone, well….you just don’t have an iPhone.”  Right. The name makes all the difference. Functionality has nothing to do with it. Let’s not forget that Google is not exactly the Wal-Mart to Versace.

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Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Apple stuff, as I am a Macbook user myself. However, the Droid X2 has a duo-core processor so it is much faster, takes better photos and HD video, the phone is basically a flash drive that I can plug into my computer and drag and drop files into, almost any phone charger works for it, and pretty much every application I could ever want out there is free of charge. Mama likey.

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Effective starting now, Words With Friends will consume my entire life. I will stay up at night with red, glazed over eyes, glaring into my phone screen rearranging letters to hit the triple word score, biting my nails and welcoming the dawn with my addiction. It’s going to get intense. I become unnecessarily competitive with word games. They’re one of the only things I’m good at. On that note, if you wish to be made to look like a fool, I would love to engage in a violent round of Words With Friends with you if you do not have an archaic phone. My username is just Becca Switzer (super clever and all that). Bring it on!

Well, that’s all for now. It’s time for me to go consume delectable alcoholic edibles from my dear neighbor Bob. The man likes to bake, and I like to eat baked goods. It’s a good relationship.

Pie. I mean bye.

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“How many cups do you need?”

“None.”

Penetration in the least sexy way possible.

I’m talking about mosquitoes here, ladies and gentlemen. They piss me off. Bad. Why must they exist? The only thing worse than the sticky, stifling humidity during these hot summer evenings are the swarms of blood-sucking mosquitoes. They’re like miniature airborne vampires. Just hearing the high-pitched whine of an approaching mosquito drives me mad. I begin to flail about, screeching like a lunatic, waving my arms around in a sort of hallucinogenic tribal dance until the offender has flown away. I wish they didn’t exist. If any bat families nearby would like to move into my neighborhood and swarm in between 7 and 10 pm to “take care of business,” consider yourself welcome.

Today is the day that I am finally eligible for a new cell phone upgrade. Am I old-fashioned for using the term “cell phone” instead of “smart phone?”  I feel like I’m saying “automobile” instead of “car.” Anyway, my pre-historic Blackberry functions slower than a 90 year old in a nursing home. It’s outdated. I’m rolling around in a horse and buggy while everyone else is cruising in a Rolls Royce. It sputters, freezes, time-outs, makes noise when it’s not necessary, doesn’t make noise when it is necessary, and is overall a worthless piece of shit. Don’t even get me started on the inefficiency and slowness of the internet connection on it. I may as well be using dial-up. A carrier pigeon could deliver a handwritten message more quickly than I can send an email on that thing. It needs to be replaced.

The million dollar question remains:

Do I get an iPhone4, or a Droid X?

This is your invitation/request/plea for input. I need reasons. Don’t just say, “iPhone!!”  I need hard facts and comparisons. Go.

The choice is intimidating me. Choosing a phone nowadays is more complicated than choosing a toothbrush (have you BEEN down the toothbrush aisle lately? There are more varieties, styles, and options than there are species of birds in the Amazon). The pending decision is going to give me an ulcer. All I really use my phone for is taking pictures and video, a lot of text messaging, word games, email, internet, and….that’s the meat of it.

In other news, today is Trent and I’s one year wedding anniversary. We made it 365 days without stabbing one another. We spent the weekend in Farmington, Pennsylvania between the Summit Inn and Nemacolin Woodlands Resort. If you ever get the chance (or win the lottery), you must all visit Nemacolin Woodlands. It is one of the ritziest, nicest, most elaborate resorts I have been to yet. We enjoyed a relaxing couples’ massage, laid out by the pool (I finally got some pigment in my skin—well, at least the front half of me), had some drinks. We ate at a restaurant called Aqueous, and it would not be outlandish to claim that I had the greatest, most intoxicating food there that I have ever eaten. Scallops, wild mushroom risotto, heirloom tomato and house garden salad—I died. So delicious. They served me a piece of chocolate cake the size of a Smart Car with a piece of chocolate on top that had “Happy Anniversary” printed on it. Unreal. Amazing food, attentive service, delightful time.

Later tonight we will be busting out the cake topper from our wedding cake in celebration. That top layer of cake was frozen at my parents’ house in Iowa for 11 months, and then rode in the back of my brother’s Jeep in a cardboard box for two days halfway across the country to Pennsylvania where it was re-frozen in my own freezer until today. We’ll see how it looks. Probably not great. But that’s not what matters. It’s going to taste like a slice of heaven.

It blows my mind how birds build nests. Can you imagine having to build your house with your mouth? Unbelievable. The mud—how do they carry and paste that mud with those beaks of theirs? Impossible.

Girls, don’t wear high heels if you can’t walk in them without looking like a newborn baby giraffe with corns on its feet. Staggering around without bending your knees is not equivalent to a confident, sexy, stiletto strut. You look stupid. And drunk.

er.

Speaking of giraffes, what an unusual and exquisite animal. I mean, just look at them. They’re huge. They’re like dinosaurs. The modern-day brachiosaurus. And boy do I love their pattern.

WELL, I’m off to plunge into that wedding cake. I’ll let you know how it goes down.

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B:  It’s one billion degrees. That pool and I have a hot date. I hope there are no pubes, diapers, or bandaids floating about.

J:  Last night was swinger’s sex night in the pool but the filter has been running so it should be fine by now.

To bee or not to bee.

In lieu of the recent tropical rainforest-esque weather and onslaught of never-ending torrential rains in PA, the plant life here has been growing wild and out of control. People’s yards are starting to look like a scene out of Jumanji. You know what they say; April showers bring May flowers. In this case, it brings May dandelions. Billions of them. What little square footage of yard we have at our apartment here in Greensburg is being taken over by dandelions. They are sprouting up every which way, dominating the yard and choking out the grass. Even more concerning, however, is how many bees they are attracting.

I have not yet been stung by a bee in my life. I have gone 23 nice long years avoiding it. Unfortunately, the odds are against me at this point. The bee to person ratio on our property is about 150 to 5. I’m screwed. Making my way from my vehicle to my front door is like walking through a battle zone every single day. These are no tiny honey bees, either. I’m talking bumble bees the size of Smart Cars zooming around by the hundreds. Not only am I afraid to be stung by one, but I’m almost equally afraid of being impaled by one. They dart around like little black and yellow fighter jets. Loud buzzing bombs just ready to attack. I’m terrified.

What delirious artist ever decided that this was an accurate portrayal of a giant, stinger-wielding bumble bee? What kind of rave drugs were they taking? (Get at me about them). How many bees do you see frolicking around your yard with a silly little smile on its face, handing out hugs? No.

Worse than being stung by a bumble bee however would be being stung by a wasp. Wasps are detestable, nasty creatures. What an awful insect. They look like miniature Satans. It’s like hell’s version of My Little Pony. They’re so evil-looking. Those stingers? Those sharp, jutting wings? They’re wicked insects. I will go absolutely ape-shit if I find myself in a compromising position with a wasp or wasps. You will see a lunatic come out of me that you’ve never seen before. I will do anything and everything to avoid being attacked by these ferocious devils. Pass me the Raid. If I see a wasp nest in progress in, on, or around my home, it’ll be bombs away, motherf*@#&rs. Hasta la vista.

One of the recent search terms entered to locate my blog by someone out in the cyber universe was this: stupod people at the gym

…Let’s play “spot the irony.”

On June 12th, I am finally eligible for a cell phone upgrade. Thank god. I am seconds away from breaking my Blackberry in half and feeding it to a bear. It’s slow, spastic, unresponsive—really it’s a vegetable. I may as well be trying to send text messages on a cucumber. Ugh. I don’t know what I’m going to replace this piece of shit with though. A Droid? An iPhone 4? The new HTC Thunderbolt? I don’t know anything about any of them. I know that the Thunderbolt has 4G capabilities. But I don’t know what that means either. Haha. I need to go to a Verizon store and play around on smart phones for six hours straight and have a salesman talk me into one and out of the others. We’ll see how it goes.

What smart phone do you kiddies out there in the universe have? Give me your input. I need it.

Love, peace, my phone’s a piece,

Rebecca.

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“Can I request to see someone else?”

“Yes, that is your right.”

“Well can I see someone else right now?”

“No, this is a doctor’s office. You have to set an appointment. This isn’t McDonald’s.”