Tag: middle age satire

It is Friday

Hi friends! This was one long week! I didn’t think we’d ever get to Friday. But we made it! Friday is here!! Fridays are casual Fridays here at Adulting – Second Half. On Friday, I list three favorite websites, songs, items, foods, etc. and I strongly encourage my readers to share their favorites in the Comments section. For more favorites, please check out previous Friday listings. Here are my favorites for today:

Chom-Chom – What can I say? Chom-Chom is the bomb-bomb! I love my Chom-Chom. We have two dark fabric couches that my dogs love to rub their backs on. They think that our couches are their own personal back scratchers/dry-you-off-rs (particularly for Ralphie, the ever swimming Labrador) I have never found a better pet hair remover than the simple, yet very effective Chom-Chom. I got mine on Amazon. By the way, isn’t it fun to say Chom-Chom?

Cherries – I bought my first cherries of the season just the other day, and despite buying pounds of them, they are almost already gone. A bowl of cherries in my house is almost as cherished as a bowl of Doritos. I LOVE cherries!!! I know that there is this old wives’ tale that says something about eating too many cherries will hurt your stomach, but that came from the same people who told you that swallowing a cherry pit would result in a tree sprouting in your gut. Ummm-hmmm. Keep eating as many cherries as you want, friends. You can’t get them all year round, unfortunately, so get ’em while they’re hot.

Schwan’s Food Delivery – I guess an upside to this whole corona mess, is that I have tried things that I have never tried before, and this includes Schwan’s food delivery service. I have found their Signature series fish (salmon and mahi-mahi) to be delicious and really nice-sized portions. When I can get my family to eat fish and even ask for more, you know that it is good stuff. The delivery people are very nice and come in that retro 1950s type refrigerated truck and they always wear masks.

Have a great weekend, friends!!! Let’s end with a giggle:

Just gonna put this out there now: nobody wants a 2020 “year in review” post (Betches – Instagram)

The Shape of Friday

As seen in one of my favorite boutiques . . . Target.

Yesterday I wore a sweater dress for the first time since probably the 1980s. Given that it is only a couple of weeks after Christmas (which, for me, was a time of highly overindulging in anything the least bit sugary), I decided to also break out what was once called a girdle and is now more commonly called a “Body Shaper.” BodyShapers/Girdles should be damned to hell, for all of the physical and the emotional pain that they inflict on women. There is NO way ever that a Body Shaper will make the Friday Favorites list here at Adulting-Second Half. That’s a promise and a guarantee. To add insult to injury, I noticed that my Body Shaper has stretch marks. Yes, stretch marks to match the originals, the stretch marks on my skin. Garbage Can, open your mouth, I’m about to feed you a Body Shaper. Wow, even you, Garbage Can, spit the Body Shaper out. Yucky!

Welcome to Favorite Things Friday. New readers, Fridays are frolicking and frivolous here at Adulting – Second Half. On Fridays, I list three of my absolute favorite anythings and I would love for you to share your favorites in the Comments section, too. I am always looking for more favorites, in my life. Here are today’s favorites:

Body Shapers – HA! Go back and read the first paragraph, in case you decided to just skip to the favorites part. I caught you.

Pollo Tropical – One of the best and most underrated fast food restaurants known to man. If you ever get a chance to eat at Pollo Tropical, take it. It’s one of those fast food chains that kind of tricks you into believing that you are actually eating relatively healthfully and wholesomely. (kind of in the way of Boston Market tries to trick you, especially if you get the broccoli, as one of the sides) Pollo Tropical is chicken and pork served Caribbean style. Their Cilantro Garlic sauce is so yummy that it is drinkable, but don’t kiss anybody for three days after eating it. Their iced tea is probably the best iced tea that I have ever drank.

Dr. Teal’s Foaming Bath With Epsom Salt – This bath wash is incredibly soothing. It comes in different scents like lavendar and eucalyptus, but it just so healing to use a little bit of it on tired muscles and dry skin. If you don’t have time to sit in a bath full of dissolved Epsom salts, just rub a little bit of this wonder into your skin while taking your shower. So soothing!

T-Rex Postal Forever Stamps – Do you know what lenticular printing is? I didn’t either. I had to look it up. This is how the postal service describes these mailing stamps:

“The Tyrannosaurus Rex Forever stamps are available in panes of 16 stamps with four designs. Featuring lenticular printing, two of the four designs show movement when rotated. See the skeletal remains with and without flesh and watch as an approaching T. rex suddenly lunges forward. “

They look so cool. The postal worker who helped me, apparently was as equally unaware of these stamps’ special features, as I was, so she kept trying to separate the thick sheet, convinced that several sheets of stamps were stuck together. My mother always taught me to never settle for “just the flag stamps” in life. These T-Rex stamps are so much fun and will make any envelope truly stand out!!

Have a great weekend, friends! Here is the fortune for the day:

“Our real personality is all light, all love, always shining.” – Upanishads

Adulting – First Half

I recently purchased a book for the two reasons that we are told never to buy or decide to read a certain book. The reason why I chose this book to read, is that I found the title intriguing and I liked the cover. (I’ve decided that I will focus A LOT on the cover and the title, if I should ever write a book.) I had no idea what the book was about.

The book is called Guac is Extra, But So Am I – The Reluctant Adult’s Handbook by Sarah Solomon. The funny thing is this book is all about Adulting – First Half. I’m feeling very voyeuristic reading it, because it is like peering into the young twenty-somethings lives of today’s world without having to ask for details from my 23 year-old son, who might be tempted to sugarcoat things that he would think that his “fragile mommy” wouldn’t understand – ha! I dare you to ask your kids what a “thot” is? (or just look it up on the Urban Dictionary website)

The book is hilarious, offering all sorts of advice, in every aspect of a young person’s starting out adult life, from practical issues, such as investments and house buying (according to the book, a new trend is for people to purchase their “vacation homes” before their real homes, because those homes are more affordable and can offer investment income later – hmmm, the economy is humming, I guess.) It offers advice on crypto-currencies, how to make mixed drinks with the complimentary drinks offered on airplanes, and why certain engagement ring trends may be too trendy.

Apparently, I missed the boat on the blog trend. Bloggers who started blogs in 2006-2010 hit the market at the right time, before the market got saturated, according to the book. Here is an actual quote from the book, highlighted in red:

“Another one bites the dust,” she muttered, seeing another longwinded FB post about someone quitting their jobs to focus on their, blog, seven years too late.”

There are a lot of the things in the book that are quite different than when I was starting out my adult life, in the early 1990s. Certainly, our trendy “early adulting advice books” would never have had whole chapters devoted to social media, and the etiquette and career ramifications surrounding social media. Hell, I didn’t spend much time at all, on a computer, until around 1998, when I was about 27. Of course, most of that time was spent waiting forever and ever, for an internet website to download, listening to the noisy dial-up connection doing its thing, as I changed a fussy baby’s diaper.

That baby, whose diaper I was changing, is now a twenty-three year old IT professional. Yesterday, he texted his Dad and I, a picture of his lobster roll that he is eating in San Diego, where he is attending a business conference. He has always loved to eat. I figure that when I am done perusing this fun, interesting read, I’ll pass it on to him. While reading the book, it struck me that while a lot of the advice offered in the book would never have applied to me when I was in my young twenties (there is a whole chapter entitled Personal Brand and a whole sub-chapter on Ghosting), the tone and the feelings imbued in the book, are the same feelings that I think that I felt, at that stage of the game – excited, scared, a little cocky (which most likely was a cover for a lot of insecurity), a little defensive and yet optimistic and hopeful about the wide canvas ahead of me. Interestingly, these feelings are not too different than the feelings that I feel now, as I am embarking on the new empty nest stage of my Adulting – Second Half. And what’s even better about this situation, is that all of the advice for 20-somethings, is written and contained in a beautiful, hardbound book (with a lovely cover, I might add). I take this to mean that books are classic and timeless and likely to be around, for at least a little while longer. Books are something that still connect us, no matter what generation we are from. And if that universal connection, that knowing connection that I am feeling right now, is the only thing that I get from purchasing this book (chosen mostly for its title and its cover) than it was worth every single penny that I spent on it.