How I Spent My “Wedding” Day

As most of you know, yesterday was the day I had spent over a year stressing out over and planning every meticulous detail about. Therefore, I was concerned that it was going to be a huge letdown to not have any of that happen and would be moping all day. Not because I think that we should still be getting married (I do realize that it’s for the best, and I am over the heartbreak for the most part), but because so much time, energy, money, and excitement was put into something that just wasn’t going to happen. Luckily, my best friend Sabrina had other plans for me.

She showed up Friday night, with a bouquet of tulips in hand.

Then we went and hung out at the Opryland Hotel. A local high school’s prom was apparently that night, so we ate dinner and commented on the prom dresses we saw and joked about going to put on fancy clothes and seeing if we could pass for high school students.

The next morning, we headed down to Franklin, where we had lunch at Logan’s. (By the way, their mesquite grilled chicken is really good.) She had told me before I had gotten ready to make sure my legs were shaved, and I discovered why next. She was taking me to a spa! I got a 30-minute Swedish massage, which was great and relaxing. Afterward, she took me out to Chili’s for molten chocolate cake.

It was a pretty great day.

Later that evening, I went out to the art crawl with Wayne and got lots of free (albeit, cheap) wine. I was pretty exhausted after all that, so I just came home and went to bed.

I’m thankful to have great friends to keep me distracted. And I will note that it would have been raining and we had no backup plan for the outdoor wedding, so I’m sure I would have been more stressed out if the wedding hadn’t been called off, haha.

Taste Tripping Party

About a month or so again, I was reading an article on CNN about miracle fruit. They are small berries that confuse your taste buds into thinking sour and bitter foods are sweet. This, of course, sounded awesome, so I purchased some miracle fruit tablets off of ThinkGeek.

For food items, we had lemons, limes, strawberries, and sharp cheddar cheese. For drink items, we had a variety of beers (stout beers were supposed to taste chocolatey, from what we had read) such as, Guinness draught, Guinness extra stout, Newcastle, Hefeweizen, and Rouge chocolate stout. We also had cabernet sauvignon, Sauza Gold tequila, cranberry juice, and grapefruit juice.

We all took one tablet each. ThinkGeek’s site said to take half a tablet, but the box said to take a whole one. We weren’t in any danger of running out of them, so we each took a whole one. The tablets weren’t terrible tasting, which was good, since they took a couple minutes to dissolve. Someone said they tasted like Fruit Roll-ups.

Jonathan’s was the first to dissolve, so he decided to try a lime. He said it tasted like it had been coated in sugar.

Kris was next and went for a lemon. He highly approved.

Here is our general summary of each item:
Lemons - Tasted like they had been coated in sugar. Ben thought the lemons were the items that changed the most, and Kris thought they had the most intense flavor.
Limes - Similar to the lemons, although most of us thought the lemons were better. The limes were Jason’s favorite item.
Strawberries - So sweet and a popular item. I said that they were the best strawberries I had ever had. Jason thought they were delicious, and they were Becka’s favorite item.
Sharp cheddar cheese - This was sitting off to the side, so I don’t think most people tried it. Wayne thought it tasted like sweet mozzarella.
Guinness draught - People were divided on this. No one really thought it tasted like chocolate at all. Kris really liked it (but admitted that he really likes Guinness normally). Jason thought the taste changed the least of all the items he tried.
Guinness extra stout - I don’t seem to have any notes for this one, but I’m assuming it was similar to the regular Guinness.
Newcastle - Both Ben and Wayne said this was their favorite of all the beers.
Hefeweizen - Everyone was pretty much in agreement that this was the item that had its taste least affected by the tablets, although Jonathan said it “tastes like coffee, sweet coffee.”
Rouge chocolate stout - This supposedly already had a chocolatey taste, although to us non-beer drinkers, it just tasted like beer normally. This was one of Kris’s favorite items, and Wayne liked it as well.
Cabernet sauvignon - This was interesting and divisive. I normally think most red wines are too bitter, and the tablets made the cab taste sweet. Which was weird. Because if you smelled the wine and then drank it, it didn’t make any sense. But it wasn’t bad, in my opinion. Ben really liked it, but Wayne hated how the sweet taste didn’t fit.
Sauza Gold tequila - I think very few people tried this (I know I was not one of them), but Jonathan did not like it at all.
Cranberry juice - One of the most popular items. It was SO GOOD. Probably my favorite item of the night. Jason said it tasted like fruity syrup.
Grapefruit juice - Kris thought this was the item that changed the most. He thought it tasted like pineapple juice. It was also one of Jonathan’s favorite items. However, it was Ben’s least favorite.

To anyone considering having their own taste tripping party, here are our tips:

• Try all the food items before you try the liquids. We thought the liquids washed our tongues off too much and dulled the effect.
• Lemons, limes, strawberries, and cranberry juice were our must-have items.
• If you don’t like beer normally, the tablets will not make you like it. It still tastes like beer.

Also, make sure you have Tums on hand because of all the acidity in the things you’ll be consuming. (On a side note, we thought Tums tasted like Smarties…)

I think the effect lasted for about 15-20 minutes for most of us.

Fondue night!

Ben, Wayne, and I had a homemade fondue night last night. There are pictures in the photo section, but here are some highlights.

Items to dip: For the cheese fondue, we had broccoli, celery, bread, and summer sausage. For the main fondue, we had chicken, beef, tortellini, and lobster. For the chocolate fondue, we had strawberries, marshmallows, brownie bites, and cheesecake.

The fondues:

Two days + two concerts - sleep = *yawn*

I ended up going to two concerts this week at the Ryman. I bought a Ben Harper ticket a month or so ago when I saw that he was going to be in town, planning on going by myself. And then Chance and Wayne decided they wanted to come too, so they got tickets as well. Thus, none of us were sitting together. The show was good, thought I was slightly disappointed that he didn’t play more older stuff, since that’s what I know. I think I only recognized about two or three songs, and he didn’t sing any of my favorites. But the performance was great. I was sitting on the main floor, toward the right, in the next to last row. While seated, my view was absolutely perfect with no heads in the way, but while standing, I couldn’t see. Luckily, people remained seated throughout the majority of the show.

The next night, the three of us returned for Damien Rice. He is one of Chance’s favorite artists, so Wayne and I decided to get tickets for Chance for his birthday. However, when we decided this, the show was sold out, so we weren’t sure if we would be able to get any. The day before the concert, I somehow lucked out and got three tickets for less than face value, so we surprised Chance with them right before the Ben Harper concert. Now, I hadn’t listened to Damien Rice a whole lot, just one or two songs here and there, but after last night: huge fan. It was one of the most spectacular shows I’ve ever seen, maybe second behind Blue Man Group. You know a concert is awesome when you experience an entire range of emotion while there. I know what my first purchases at McKay’s are going to be……

Anyway, I ended up staying up till 3-4 am both nights, so I’m going off of very little sleep right now. So if this post is incoherent, I’m sorry.

Taking a break at work to say: Waiting is not fun.

I put another offer on another house on Monday, and I was supposed to hear back by noon today, but so far NOTHING. I guess I will call my realtor when I get off work. This is incredibly frustrating.

In other news, I am apparently going to Six Flags this weekend to roast in the hot sun of Atlanta. Luckily, the line for Batman: The Ride is mostly indoors, and that’s all that matters. But Ben, Wayne, Wayne’s brother, Chance, Kelley, Jon, Faithe, Matt, Karen, Sam, Brent, Chad, and maybe a couple other people are all going as well, so it should be pretty fun. Haven’t been since Fright Fest ‘05.

Then in two weeks it’s back down to Atlanta for Dragon*Con! Yay! I never did work on any new costumes though….