My Alternate Universe

This one's dedicated to Miss Clare Palmer, beloved cousin and new member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints! Saturday we shlepped out to Agoura Hills (a 45-minute drive in average traffic... a journey I had made earlier that day for a client!) to celebrate Clare's baptism. To summarize, it was a fabulous time, and if you weren't there... yikes for you! Now let me break it down for you. When we arrived at the chapel where the shindig was going down, Clare caught a glimpse of me and, as daintily and reverently as ever, yelled "LAUREN!!" and gave me a running tackle-hug in the middle of a crowd of well-wishers. The girl's a rockstar. So after the running tackle-hug, we sat our little tushies in the room with the font, but the crowd was so big (double baptism!) that we had to move into the chapel. From our family, we had Lance and Jen's crew, our crew, Grandmas and Grandpas Palmer and Browning, Mike and crew, and Liz with her little tyke Nathan. Triple that for total attendance...
Anyhow, it was a typical mormon baptism... a talk about the ordinance (by Auntie Liz) and then the dunking. After Lance had said the prayer and submerged an excited little gal, Clare gave him the same tackle-hug RIGHT DOWN IN THE FONT. If he didn't have such giant feet and legs, she probably would have re-baptized him right then and there! Then the other little lady was baptized, and we went back into the chapel. There was a talk on the Holy Ghost and the confirmations, after which Clare tackle-hugged everyone in the circle: grandpas, uncles... but I guess the Bishop and First Counselor didn't feel secure enough on their feet and held her off at an arm's distance. That was another hilarious sight.
A little 9 year-old boy who belonged the entourage of the other baptisee sang a primary song about baptism that I'm not familiar with, and it just about put me in cardiac arrest. My heart popped out of my chest at that little soprano and melted into a puddle on the floor. If he were a little older, I probably would have sponged it up and offered it to him. Take me I'm yours! After the baptism was over, we headed over to a park nearby and had food and chit-chatted and fawned over Miss Clare-bear. Her enthusiasm over her baptism was not only contagious, but utterly inspiring. Why can't I be so psyched to go to church every Sunday? Well, I'm working on it.


PS: Little girls love me.
PPS: Notice the amazing BCBG dress I'm wearing: I got it at TJ Maxx for 90% off the MSRP!!!
PPPS: Notice my hotness. Yes, I've lost 30 pounds. No, it isn't easy to be this ridiculously good-looking.

I'm going to go in reverse order of the title and start with the Cray-pas. For those of you who didn't go to Winn Brook Elementary school, you might not call all oil-pastels Cray-pas. I googled the word to get the correct spelling, and apparently it's a brand name of cheap oil-pastels for "junior" artists. I don't use that brand, but I still call all oil-pastels (and all pastels, really) cray-pas. It's like calling all tissues Kleenex... same deal. So lately, since my dad put my giant tub of oils somewhere I can't find, I've been using my cray-pas to assuage my artistic cravings. Here's the latest installment, though be warned that it's a really bad picture of a great little drawing... I took it with my cellphone and it's all weird and distorted. The gunk in the sky are little stars made out of tin foil.

When I asked my notoriously loving and supportive mother what she thought it was a picture of (before the palm tree went on) she said "smog?" Thanks, mom. I guess sunrise isn't too far off... it is pretty smoggy around here!
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Murder in the hood. Yikes. So after an uplifting weekend of General Conference, I'm thrust back into the harsh realities of life. As I drove to work, there were all these helicopters circling and the gated community that I was in was swarming with Police and security guards. Turns out, a man who was in dire financial trouble shot and killed 5 family members and then himself in his home last night... 2 blocks away from where I work. Here's a news truck that I snapped out of my windshield on the way home:

My mom told me when I got home that the headlines on the local news said "man kills family and self over economic crisis." Oh, the sensationalists. Great.
**
So when I was at Whitney's party ruining my life with some delicious homemade pizza, I talked to one of her friends about "The Master Cleanse" -- a cleanse where you basically flush the heck out of your bowels and intestines and eat nothing, but drink up to 1200 calories a day of a homemade lemonade mixture of fresh lemon juice, grade b maple syrup, cayenne pepper and water. Since I have some pretty gnarly IBS and my internals hate me, I decided to try it. A little over a week after the party (I hadn't pooped since the pizza at this point) I started the cleanse. Every night you drink a laxative herbal tea, then in the morning you drink a quart of salt water (which is like a laxative, only MUCH stronger and MUCH faster) and then you do the lemonade throughout the day, plus water. I'm at the end of day 4 out of 10 at this point, and I'm feeling pretty dang good! I'm not ridiculously bloaty like I am most of the time, and I just feel better in the tum-tum. I've kind of had enough of this whole no food thing, but I can make it a little longer. I've realize just how much I crave WHOLE WHEAT BREAD! All I've really craved is bread bread and more bread, even though I would have expected to crave mostly fruit and diet coke. Nope! Oh well, it's totally worth it. Apparently a lot of people use it as a crash diet, only drinking 500 calories a day of the lemonade and therefore losing 20 lbs in the 10 days. I've lost 2, probably because I'm drinking sufficient lemonade to stay healthy. Seriously people, 500 calories a day IS NOT GOOD FOR YOU! And on those crash diets you just gain it back anyway. Ridiculous.
**
So that's the update, sorry that I talked about pooping. It's on my mind a lot... IBS really sucks. Here's the token picture of Miss Hadley, the love of my life. It was taken during game 2 of the ALDS (GO RED SOX!). She loves to nestle herself in the pillows, and she wasn't about to let Caroline's leg get in her way!

Well, I went ahead and stole these from facebook. Here are a few pictures from Whitney's party... one of Whitney and I (I'm the one with the red hair, in case you don't recognize me) and one of Whitney and Goose! Soooo fun! (PS> I'm basically in love with Whitney's dress, from anthropologie.)