When I was growing up we sort of celebrated Halloween. We didn’t go nuts by decorating our house and my mom never dressed up. I was allowed to go trick or treating but I wasn’t allowed to be anything bad or super scary like a ghost, goblin or witch. I really wanted to be a witch for some reason. One year I was supposed to be getting dressed at my grandma’s house for trick or treating and my mom was going to take me out when she got home from work. I told my grandma that I really wanted to be a witch not Strawberry Shortcake. So my grandma put a witch hat on my head, gave me a broom and smeared lipstick on my face and told me I was “Strawberry Shortcake Witch”. I was probably the first and last person to wear that costume.

We’re getting ready to get ready for Halloween here in the Whitlock house. I found a really cute Dorothy costume at Goodwill last week  in Zoe’s size. She’s never seen the Wizard of Oz and I think it might be my least favorite movie ever but, I think she would be adorable as Dorothy. I told her she’d get to wear red sparkle shoes and she quickly gave in. Who can resist red sparkle shoes? Well, a few days ago, out of nowhere she tells me that she decided she wants to be a banana. A banana? Who wants to be a banana? I told her I thought she wanted to be Dorothy and wear sparkle shoes. She told me she thought a banana would be more fun. I told her I’d try to find a banana costume in her size and guess what? I found one on some costume website. I’ve never been to a costume website but have I been missing out on some crazy. There are your normal costumes like princesses, cartoon characters, “scary” things and slutty things, but then there costumes that make me wonder who in their right mind would wear out in public. Here are a few of my favorites:

S**t Costumes: Who knew so many people wanted to dress up like poop. There are many variations which include the “Crock of S**t”, “Chicken S**t”, “No S**t Sherlock”, “”Bull S**t”, “Holy S**t” and my personal favorite “Poo Poo Platter”. There are actually more versions but I couldn’t bring myself to type them all out. 

Oops costumes: Above you have the “goosh pants”. Here’s what they have to say about these: “The Goosh Pants tastefully (or not so “tastefully”, depending on your appreciation of toilet humor) display a yellow spray down the front – vibrantly indicating that you have urinated on yourself. Not enough for you? Flip ‘em around to showcase the excitement of “sliding into third”. I can’t believe these are on clearance! Another “oops” costume tells you to “Squeeze the hand pump and watch everyone run. Looks like real poop!” What can I say? SOLD!

The “I have a peen” costumes: Apparently there is a huge population of guys who want you to know that they have a peen. The picture is of one called “Longuini and meatballs”. I think it’s my favorite because the guy looks so proud. Like the S**t costumes there are many variations including the “snake charmer”, “genie in the bottle” and “hot dog vendor”. There is even one for the guys who don’t want to be quite so subtle called Erectus the Fantastic Schlong. I’m positive that if you’ve chosen one of these costumes you will find yourself on Tool Academy soon.

I’m such a man, I will dress up like a woman: Please meet Anita Waxin and her friend Camille Toe. One person who had dressed up as Anita reviewed the costume and thought that it might not be a good costume to wear to church. Really? I’m pretty sure that the guy modeling these is the same as the guy with the longuini. He’s still so proud.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Pulp Fiction. When the movie was in the theaters my mom and I went to see it, literally,  almost every weekend. When it was realised on VHS we owned 2 copies of it, one that we won in a contest and one that we actually bought. I thought Quentin Tarantino was amazing. I’ve watched a few of his other movies but none were as good as Pulp Fiction. I had come to the realisation that he would never make another movie as great as Pulp Fiction.

I was excited to see Inglourious Basterds because I love Brad Pitt. I also love Nazi/WWII movies. I hadn’t read anything about this movie on purpose. I wanted to watch it and have no idea what was coming. I’m so glad I made this decision.

From almost the moment it started I was on the edge of my seat wondering at first if Perrier LaPadite was really Jewish or if he was hiding the Dreyfus family. I wondered if he would crack under the questioning of Col. Landa. I wondered where Shosanna went, would she get captured, would we see her again?

There was so much violence in this movie it was overwhelming. After the big scene of the theater burning down and the remaining basterds shooting everyone they could, the entire audience let out a collective sigh. I hadn’t even realised how emotionally involved I was until it was over and I could think about what had just happened. I was shocked when the movie didn’t end there. I had completly forgotten about the other 3 characters that were still alive.

The more I think about it, the more I loved this movie. I can’t wait to see it again. I don’t think it was as good as Pulp Fiction but it was darn close.

Now, a question for those of you have seen the movie. Do you think that when the Col. is having stressul with Shosanna in the resturant, he knows who she is? I ask because he didn’t seem to do anything without a reason behind it. I found it quite odd that he would order her milk to drink and make her wait to eat until the cream was brought out. Did he really “forget” the last question he had for her or did he decide he would catch her at a later time? I feel like he knew it was her but I don’t know how he would know because he never saw her face. What do you think?

Verdit-A- Go see this movie now!  Be aware that there might be moments you won’t want to watch because it’s so violent, but you won’t be able to turn away because you might miss something that will come into play later. Also, history has been re-written, which normally I can’t stand, but in this case you almost forget this isn’t what really happened because this history is better, or at least faster.

I can’t believe it’s been 7 months since I updated. A good friend encouraged me to write a review of Julie & Julia so I thought I would. Thanks for the inspiration, Slick.

I’m not much of a book reader. I like Harry Potter. Ok, am obsessed with Harry Potter. I have the first Twilight book but haven’t read it yet because I’m afraid I’ll become a lunatic over those too. So, it kind of goes without saying that I hadn’t read this book before I saw the movie. I’d never even heard of Julie Powell, so I obviously hadn’t been a fan of her blog. I did like to watch Julia Child on TV when I was little but I didn’t actually remember anything about her. I also thought she was a big lush.  They never mentioned her being a drunk in the movie and she didn’t act drunk so I’m guessing I made this up.I also like Amy Adams (mostly because she has a great name because when she’s just out and about she seems to have the personally of a box of hair) and I like Meryl Streep. My husband says that Meryl Streep looks like she’s always in the middle of a hot flash and she makes him want to vomit. He really hates her in Mama Mia because she’s “old, frizzy, singing Abba, liberated and having sex”.

Needless to say I didn’t know too much about this movie before I saw it. I knew it was about some chick who was depressed with her life and decided to cook her way through the Julia Child cookbook and blog about it. I knew it also told the story of Julia Child’s career and somehow went back and forth between the two ladies lives. Well, guess what? Spoiler Alert: That’s all that happens. Nothing else happens! Nothing! I can’t even imagine that this is a book that someone would actually finish reading. At the end Julie gets told by some reporter on the phone that Julia Child doesn’t like what she’s done and thinks that she is kind of making fun of her. She gets all sad and cries all night long.  I figured that somehow Julia Child would have ended up being misquoted and she would then call Julie to tell her this and they would live happily ever after. No. Julie just decides she still loves Julia Child and is going to go to some museum that is set up like her kitchen was and have her husband take pictures of her with pictures of Julia. I suppose if I had read Julie Powell’s blog I would’ve known this so it might not be a spoiler after all. (This reminds me of a quick side story: The week after Titanic came out a bunch of my friends and I were talking about it and how cool it looked when it finally sank. One of my friends said “Oh, no! Don’t spoil the ending! I haven’t seen it yet!” I may have just become her)

I suppose the movie was ok. I didn’t have anything else to do that night, I was bored and nothing good was on TV. I don’t think I’ll ever need to see it again though.

Verdict- wait until it’s on TV to see it for free and only if you really want to see it. Also make sure there is nothing better to do (make sure to double & triple check to be sure) and you won’t be mad if you waste 2 hours on a movie that goes nowhere.  C-

I’m trying to get into the holiday spirit so I thought sharing one of my all time favorite Christmas stories might help.

About 10 years ago my mom and I had just moved into a new house. We were excited to have our first Christmas there and we decided to go all out for the holidays. We had never had a real tree but in honor of our first Christmas we decided to head down to Mr. Tree where you can “Chuz & Cut” your own tree. At Mr. Tree they also have pre-cut trees but thought it would be much more fun to cut down our own. So we get this item that is supposed to be some sort of saw but really isn’t sharp enough to cut anything and head out into the field of trees. So there we are laying on the cold snowy ground trying to saw our new tree down. I don’t know how we actually ended up getting the tree cut down but we did.We draged it to the check-out, they wrap it up and we drive home.

When we get home we take it inside and set it up in our new tree stand but we’re having a really hard time getting it to stand up straight.  Our new house had cathedral ceilings so we thought we should get a really tall tree since we had so much room. Now, you know how when you pick out  furniture at a store it’s hard to tell how big it is because it’s in this huge room and when you get it home it looks huge. Well, when we unwrapped this tree we noticed that this tree was about 15 feet wide and about 6 feet tall. It looked kind of silly because it took up so much room width wise and hardly any length wise. But we loved our fat tree and at this point we decide that we can’t put our old stupid looking ornaments on this new “beautiful” tree, we need to go out and buy fancy new ornaments. We went shopping and my mom probably spent about $200 in new glass ornaments.

When we got home we walked into the living room and the tree was laying on the floor. We apparently hadn’t gotten it up straight. So we tried again but it was really hard this time because it wasn’t tied up anymore. We finally got it up again and we started decorating with our new ornaments. Our tree was so pretty when we were done. It really looked like a store display. We were so proud of ourselves.

In the middle of the night we were both awoken by a loud crash and the sound of glass breaking. Of course the tree had fallen over again but this time it had fallen right on top of our coffee table breaking most of our new ornaments.

The next morning we had called some guys from our church to come over and help us get the tree up straight because we obviously needed some sort of intervention. They came over and quickly told us that the reason that it wouldn’t stand up straight was because the trunk was completely crooked. An I mean, really crooked. Half of the trunk went one way and the other half went the other. Our beautiful display tree was now a hot mess complete with broken ornaments and big gray cinder blocks around the tree stand just to get it to stand up. It stayed up for about 3 hours before it crashed back into the coffee table breaking the rest of our new beautiful ornaments.

We finally realised that maybe we should’ve just gotten a pre-cut tree and this tree was never going to stand up for more than a few hours at a time. We decided to get rid of it but of course the nightmare continued. We tried to get it outside but it wouldn’t fit out the door because it was so stinking wide. In order to get it out of the house we had to start sawing off branches. We sawed away for 2 hours before it would fit out the door. In the end it looked like the Charlie Brown tree.

We decided to go to Lowe’s after that and buy a pre-cut tree that had a straight trunk and to just use our old ornaments. It was also the last year we ever had a real tree.

Merry Christmas everyone!

I love High School Musical. I love the cheesy, but darn catchy, songs, the fun dancing, the clothes, the predictable story lines, everything. I’ve of course been looking forward to going to see the new movie in the theater. I didn’t want to go see it by myself, so being the awesome mother that I am started to watch clips from the movies on YouTube whenever Zoe was in the room. I knew she wouldn’t be able to resist the catchy songs and dancing. I figured she was my best bet at going to see the movie on opening day. I figured anyone that saw us at the movies would never think that it was me that wanted to see it so badly I could scream. They would think it was her. She loved watching the different scenes on the computer. She was even singing the songs around the house. When we saw a commercial for it on TV and she said “Mommy, I have to see that!”, I knew my perfect plan had worked. So yesterday, on opening day, Zoe and I went to see HSM3.

There were 2 groups of people in the movie. Moms that had brought kids and cougars. They showed a preview for a new movie called 17 Again. This movie has Zac Efron in it. Now, I love Zac Efron. He’s probably my favorite part of the HSM movies but these women were crazy. They showed his face and they lost their minds. They started screaming and clapping and giggling. They continued to do this through the whole movie. In the movie that is this great song that the two leads, Zac Efron and Corbin Bleu, are singing in this junk yard. They are all dirty and sweaty and humping the air. Sure it was great but, I thought they were going to pass out.

They were so distracting with their constant purring that I’m pretty sure I need to see the movie again. You know, just to be sure I liked it.

I love fall. We have so much going on in the next few weeks that I’m sure will make for wonderful stories.

In about 2 weeks we have a surprise party for my grandma’s 80th birthday at Bucca di Beppo. I’m sure that will be night full of excitement. Later that week we are having pub night at our church. This also happens to coincide with Rae’s 30th birthday.

Zoe has her last soccer game of the season this Saturday. She made 6 goals last week which brings her season total to 15. I might be biased but I think she’s the best soccer player ever.

We’re getting excited about trick or treating this year. Zoe will be going as Little Red Riding Hood. Her costume is so cute and I will be putting up pictures. (Or Rae will on his blog.) Rae is going to dress as Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable. I found him a Cosby sweater at Goodwill last week.I think that it will be quite cool.

This post is really boring. Hopefully I’ll have some more exciting posts soon.

My grandma bought a new stove. Her old stove worked just fine however, she thought it didn’t work because she tries to cook 8 things at a time at 350 for 30 minutes. When the food isn’t cooked in 30 minutes she freaks out. She doesn’t ever actually look at the recipe to see if it should be cooked at 350 or for how long. I mean, why would you do that? She also doesn’t understand that the more stuff you cram in there the longer it’s going to take to cook.

Anyway, she bought this new stove that looks like it part of the little helpers complete kitchen (see picture at the top of the post). Well, instead of having it delivered they cramed it into their car and called us up to help install it. While Rae and my grandpa were wheeling it inside my grandma was trying to give me her old stove. I asked her why I would want a stove that was exactly the same as mine except that (according to her) it didn’t work? I thought this was a brilliant question that she would have no answer to. Wrong. She told me she thought I would want her old stove because it was clean and she was sure mine wasn’t.

After she realised that I wasn’t going to take her stove she told my grandpa and Rae to put it in the basement because she wanted to use it down there. This doesn’t sound safe to me. It doesn’t matter though because my grandpa didn’t want to put it in the basement. He said it wouldn’t fit. My grandma told him to “may-zhure” it. To which he responded, perhaps my favorite response of all time, “MEASURE YOUR BUTT!!!”.  Ahh, it’s never a dull moment here in Caitlan Ct.

A few highlights (or lowlights) from the last few weeks and one of my favorite picture ever….

A few weeks ago after church we couldn’t find Zoe. She just kind of disappeared. We checked everywhere we could think of. She was no where to be found. One of our friends started looking around outside and found her on the side of the building. When he asked her what she was doing she said that she was “singing to the moon.” Of course she was. She loves the moon. She loves to sing to the moon even more.

I’ve been sick the last few days. I was taking a nap this afternoon and woke up and looked at the clock. It was 2:30. I was glad because I still had 45 minutes before I had to pick Zoe up from school. Well, apparently I fell back to sleep because the next time I looked at the clock it was 3:45. Zoe of course was scared and though we forgot her and weren’t coming to get her ever. Luckily an older girl she knew was staying after school for some reason and stayed with Zoe and helped her feel better.

Tonight I went to Kroger for a few things. When it was time to pay I ran my debit card and the cashier told me that it said it was declined because there were too many pin number attempts. I told the guy that was fine. I would just go to the ATM inside the store and take some cash out and I’d be right back. Well, I try that and it spits a receipt out at me telling me that there were too many pin number attempts. Then the kicker. It kept my card. I had to call Rae to come to Kroger to bring me his card so we could pay for our food. He in turn got to wake up Zoe and drag her to Kroger to bring me his card. We aren’t sure who had more fun tonight- me being embarrassed, getting my card taken by a machine and then having to stand in the front of Kroger looking like a moron waiting on him.  Or him getting to wake up Zoe, dress her, drag her to Kroger and carry her in asleep. I think I win.

I was cleaning out the old cereal in our pantry tonight and noticed that an old box of Golden Grahams said it had a free Bee Movie spoon inside. I was excited because I really like that movie plus, it was free inside a cereal box. Well, It is the crappiest, cheapest piece of crap I have ever seen. I didn’t expect the spoon to be the best spoon ever but it wasn’t even functional. What a let down.

I bought 2- 5 lb canisters of tropical punch kool-aid on amazon a few months ago. I have used it all up now and they don’t have them in stock anymore. I am constantly checking their site to see if they are in stock yet because I don’t want to have to buy the little regular containers. I suppose I’m going to have to break down and do it.

Don’t you love that picture of the guys at prom. It gets better everytime I look at it. Enjoy.

I had the unfortunate opportunity to watch the Video Music Awards last night on MTV. The VMA’s used to be my favorite awards show. I loved watching the awesome performances. I loved rooting for my favorite videos. I loved voting for the viewers choice award. I loved seeing the seemingly random pairings of celebrities, like Martha Stuart and Busta Rhymes. I loved knowing that were going to be surprises and speculating when those surprises might happen.

Last night had none of those things. Every performance was worse than last. I don’t think I had actually seen more than a handful of the videos actually up for awards. There is no viewers choice award anymore to vote for. The people present with the exact person you think they are going to present with. And there was no not one surprise. We all knew Brittany was going to open the show but not preform. We knew that Kanye was going to close it. It was even completely obvious who was going to win. It was so incredibly obvious that MTV made a deal with Brittany’s people that if she came back to the awards this year so they could have ratings they would give her every award she was up for and not show her hideous moments from last year.Russel Brand was really poor. He wasn’t the worst, *cough* Christian Slater *cough*, but he was pretty bad. He couldn’t shut up about the Jonas Brothers and their purity rings or Bush. (For the record I’m not fond of either, but come on.)

The worst performer of them all had to have been Lil Wayne. I cannot stand Lil Wayne. He grosses me out with his tattoo’s, hair, clothes, pimp attitude and teeth. Usually one of those things alone won’t disgust me, however, all together they make me want to puke. I’m pretty sure that one of his many tattoo’s on his hands says “Skeet”. If you don’t know what skeet is you probably don’t want to. I’m not sure why anyone would want to tattoo that on themselves. Anyway, about half way through his performance I realized that I hadn’t understood one word he’d said so far so I decided to pay more attention to figure out what he was yelling about and why everyone there seemed so excited to hear it. Well, I still didn’t understand. However, I did notice that he was bleeped at least 10 times and that he must think his crotch is something spectacular. I only say the later because he couldn’t keep his hands off of it. He would take his hand off and almost as if there was a strong magnet attached to his crotch, his hand would snap back to the previous position.

Well, the performances used to be good. People used to put thought behind them. They wanted to have the best performance of the night. They actually tried and cared what the public thought. So please enjoy my top 5 performances from VMA’s past.

5-Mc Hammer- U Can’t Touch this. This was my jam. I actually think think was everyone’s jam in 1989 & 1990. I love everything about this performance from the 100 people on stage, to the costumes, to the white people in the audience loving every moment of this song.

4-Brittany Spears- I’m A Slave 4 U. Ah, back when Brittany was publicly sane. I loved this song. My roommate at the time, Deidre and I used to jump on the table in our dorm room and do this dance. I remember watching this with Deidre and us swearing that her top was going to fall down. I still don’t know how it didn’t.

3-Madonna- Vogue. I remember watching this live and thinking how great this was. 18 years later it is still great. Everytime she snaps the fans open I want to squeal.

2-N*SYNC-TIPY, Bye Bye Bye, It’s Gonna Be Me.- Nsync sure knows how to put on a show. The TV screens were brilliant, the dancing was brilliant, the singing was brilliant. I hate that Nsync does not exist anymore. I’m still holding out for a reunion.

1-Bon Jovi-Wanted Dead or Alive. This obviously has to be at number 1. It was so great that MTV decided to do a whole show around the “unplugged” concept. Not to mention I was so in love with Jon Bon Jovi at the time. I had life size poster of him in my room and my goal in life was to go see them in concert.

I haven’t written in a while. A lot has been going on but none of it is really interesting.

Zoe started Kindergarten last week. She was so scared. When it was time for us to leave her the first day she was trying so hard not to cry. It was extremely pathetic. A part of me wanted to smuggle her out of the room and back home where she wouldn’t be so sad and scared. Of course when I picked her up she was all smiles and loved it and couldn’t wait to go back.

A few weeks ago we bought an XBOX 360 and some games. We got Rock Band and have both been slightly addicted ever since. We’ve been having Rock Band night at our house Tuesday nights and having a great time with our friends. (Of course, we would love to have more friends stop by and play anytime).

One last thought for the night….

The other night I went to Kroger to pick up a few things and on my home I pass Goodyear Tire. Check out the great sign. We all better hurry in.