What Oscar Saw: Fashion Report from the 2012 Academy Awards

If you were hoping that glamour and style would  res-erect it's self at this years Oscar's then you were vastly disappointed. It was such slim pickings on that carpet a hound wouldn't even point. (If you do not understand that reference I suggest you bone up on your Andy Griffith Show re-runs.) I wanted to do a line up of the best and worst dressed, 5 each, but their were so many bad decisions and so little actual style that I had to improvise. So here you go. The best...and worst of the 2012 Oscars...

                                                                 Cameron Diaz: Worst. 

Why: What ever happened to people paying attention to color and fit? This dress completely washes her out. Its like it fades against her skin, its too tight across her middle and distracts the eye. Number one rule of dresses. They MUST flatter at all angles. This sorry excuse for formal wear is better off on a Salvation Army rack. Her hair and make-up look way too every-day  for the Oscars. And will sombody please tell these stars that your roots should match the rest of your head or else you look like you forgot to finish your dye job. The skunk look is so heinous. 

                                                                   Meryl Streep: Worst. 

Why: As if it needs to be pointed out. She appears to be wearing a drawing room curtain from the Scarlet O'Hara fall collection. Heavy, durable, and sturdy, this dress easily converts to fashionable window treatments when the night is over. Good thing she won or this night would have been a total bust for the stunning (but horribly) dressed star. 

                                                             Shailene Woodley: Worst. 

Why: Priscilla called, She would like her night gown back. This dress is wrong on so many levels. While she picked up points for color (Very nice shade of white for her skin tone and hair) The overall make-up of this is confusing. I mean what is it? Its got so many details you need shovels for eyeballs just to dig into all of them. The cleavage window is just ridiculousness. The buttons down the front would have been nice but not in addition to the rest of what is going on. And again with fit! It looks to small in some places while it drowns her in others. The drastic hair brings to mind the bride of Frankenstein. If Frankenstein was a cradle robber. 

                                                                 Maria Menounos: Best. 

Why. While I think this dress is a little over-done style wise the color is beautiful and it actually fits her. It flatters her shape at every angle and the fabric falls in just the right ways. Her hair is up, nicely showing off her shoulders and strap design. The earnings and bracelet complement the outfit as well. When you look at this picture she is the whole package. Everything flows and is easy on the eye.

                                                                 Jessica Chastain: Best 

Why: Let me repeat: This dress fits her. While being a little on the busy side in regards to color, this dress clearly shows off her figure and supports her without strangling her. Her hair isn't too over done and her make-up contributes without over-doing it. Simply put, this outfit has nice lines. I like how she kept her accessories simple. There just wasn't a need for them with so much print.

                                                            Milla Jovovich: Very Best. 

Why: Perfection. Perfect balance of all the things that make a stunning outfit: Great color, fit, style, flow, and accessories. Her hair and make-up were spot on. She looks like a movie star. Plus she looks like she owns a bar of soap. So often these stars come out all greased up, spray tanned, and dewy faced with stringy hair, clothes that look like that shrunk in the dryer, and a hungover expression. Thank you Ms. Jovovich for taking a bath and bring some much needed beauty and glam to the Oscars...

I Hope There Are Peanut Butter Sandwiches In Heaven: A Rottweilers Story

As if the internet isn’t overrun  with stories and tales of special dogs that for some reason or another left their paw print on history, here is another one. 

Now sue wasn’t a famous dog. She never pulled a child out of a well or saved a family from a burning house, but she was special all the same because she was ours. The first time I ever saw her she was a little black and tan ball of fur in the back of my uncle’s truck. Somebodies Rottweiler had had a litter of puppies and my wayward uncle could never turn down a dog. Plus he always named them some variation of the name Susan. He also never kept them longer than a few weeks before he dropped them off with us so when she came to stay with us in the fall of that year and it wasn’t long before she was a regular fixture around our neighborhood.

She quickly grew to mammoth proportions and strangers were terrified by her sheer appearance. We tried to explain that she  just looked mean but they just couldn’t get past her face. The air condition repair man wouldn’t even get out of the truck unless mama came and put sue in the house. It did work out for us sometimes. As long as sue was around we were never bothered by salesmen or Jehovah’s Witnesses.  One night during the winter it was supposed to get below freezing so mama brought sue in to sleep. Instead of staying by the back door on the blanket we had laid down for her, she pranced upstairs and curled up at the bottom of my baby brother’s bed were she promptly fell asleep and slept until 10 the next morning when the two labs from down the street showed up at our back door. Mama opened it and my little brother hollered “Sue! You’re friends are here!” and she gracefully descended the stairs like a starlet to her awaiting public.

I taught her to come when I clapped my hands and she did it most of the time. Once she got missing and didn’t show up for three whole days. My siblings and I were terribly upset and we spent each evening looking for her and praying she would come home. Then at half past midnight on the fourth night, daddy got a call from the only neighbor who didn’t like our dog. He informed us that he had her tied to a tree and that she and her entourage had woken him up because they were playing tug of war with the boots he had left outside and had turned over his trash can. She was returned to us with a very sheepish look on her face.

Sue was just so endearingly sweet. She never snapped or bit. She would let my little brother ride her, she attended all my outdoor tea parties, and was the only dog in audience at the funeral we had for one of our kittens. She absolutely loved peanut butter sandwiches. During the summer she helped us chase fireflies, jumped through our sprinkler, and followed us to our tree fort in the woods. In the fall she sat in the leaves we raked up and ate all the charred marshmallows that fell off our sticks by the bonfire. I will never forget how she looked wrapped in a scarf the time it snowed six inches. She loved us and we loved her. She might have been ugly but she was ours.

As she got older we noticed that her back legs were getting a little weak.  As it turned out she had this condition that Rottweiler’s are prone to called hip dysplasia and the vet said that if she ever had puppies she might not be able to walk again. So daddy decided to get her fixed and had set up an appointment but it was too late, she was already pregnant by the Alaskan Husky(Jake) that had just moved in next door.  The vet told us just to watch over her and bring her in before she went into labor so that they could help her give birth, so we did and a few weeks later daddy made an appointment for the following Monday.

That weekend mama and daddy went out of town and when they got back Sunday night we couldn’t find sue anywhere. When we woke the next morning Jake was going nuts in his pin. Daddy went over to check on him and found sue lying in front of his cage. She and her puppies hadn’t made it. Jake was distraught and had torn up the ground in his cage trying to get to her.  I won’t ever forget standing at the porch and seeing daddy tell mama what had happened.

We were devastated. Daddy wrapped her in a quilt and buried her in a clearing under a huge oak tree that she had explored with us just the summer before. I promised myself after that that I would never let an animal get that close. It was just too hard to watch them go.

ut if there is one thing I learned from Sue’s life its: dogs have it right. They don’t care if you are ugly, too old, or too little they love you just the same. So Here’s to you old friend, I love you. I hope they have peanut butter sandwiches in heaven.

New Addition to Honey Sweet Links: Pinterest.com

Source: etsy.com via Susan on Pinterest

Think I may have found a new treasure...Check out this website called Pinterest.com. It's chock full of awesome stuff from fashion, food, decor, and so much more...

Comfort Hot Out The Oven and Martha White Approved...

I think that with all the sarcasm going on here it is high time for something a little comforting and savory...and nothing is more comforting and undeniably southern than a made from scratch biscuit, hot from the oven and dipped in syrup...or jelly...or butter. Mmm.  My mama has been making these biscuits since I can remember and I think she can do it in her sleep. I can remember watching her make them up at the counter when I was little. It was such a simple process but the results were so very good. So without further ado, here is my mother’s biscuit recipe that she got from her grandmother and then taught me:

You should know before you attempt this that I have no measurements for any of the ingredients. It’s so simple that you really don’t need any. Just trust me here.  

Ingredients:

Self-rising flour (Martha White and Southern Biscuit brands are two of my favorites)

Crisco (You can also use butter-it has to be a little colder than room temp. though)

Whole Milk (Water works just as well in a pinch)

You will need:

Large mixing bowl

Fork

Tinfoil or baking sheet

Preheat the oven to 350. Take the bag of flour and pour about three cups worth into the bowl. (Gauge your flour amount by how many biscuits you want. More flour =more biscuits) scoop out about three tablespoons worth of Crisco and dump into flour.

Using your fork press the Crisco into the flour and continue to “crumble” until the flour sticks together when you take a handful and squeeze it together.

Next pour a splash of milk into the crumbled-Crisco -flour and stir together. Mixture will be gummy and sticky. Add milk as you need it.  Now, spread a little flour over a sheet of tinfoil and dust your hands with it. Next take a handful of the biscuit dough in your hands and roll it  like a ball of wet play dough.

Press the ball down onto a floured cookie sheet or new sheet of tinfoil. Repeat until the dough is gone.

Bake at 350 until brown around the edges. About 10-20 minutes depending on biscuit size.

Serve hot with syrup, jellies, butter, or honey.

So there you have it. There really isn’t anything like a good hot biscuit and a glass of tea. It’s what comfort food dreams are created from. Try making them next time you just want something good. I know their fattening but they are so worth the time and the calories. Besides, calories eaten at home don’t count right? Right. That’s what I thought :)

Thank You For Not Posting.....

You know what would be good? If people kept their mouth shut more often that’s what- particularly on Facebook/twitter etc. I cannot stress to you enough how aggravating it is to have my newsfeed, phone, and email blow up with every possible combination of wasted words that exist. I do not care about your fish tank, I will not like your status so that in your boredom you can “rate” me, and Jesus will still love me if I do not forward that fluffy “super Christian” e-mail. (For one that’s not even Jesus. He was a Hebrew. Not some girly looking white guy with green eyes.)  And before you go off on me for running my mouth I would like to remind you of two things: One, I have never written about what I had for breakfast or chronicled my recent visit to the doctor/grocery store/therapist. And two: you are reading my blog. If you don’t like mine you may start your own, it’s free and actually quite simple.  I am not harping on free speech. I adore free speech. It’s what gives me the right to say what I say but I draw the line at saying something just for the sake of having something to say. Words are valuable things; they should not be cheapened by slack usage and careless organization.  Words have the power to create a movement, topple a nation, inspire peace or hate, and bring people to tears. It is an insult to my brain cells to read idiotic musings on stupid things like “haters” or long paragraphs on why you can’t understand why people can’t just get along. News flash: If you are aware of just how many haters you have then you are paying way to much attention to what people think and until the good Lord comes back there will never, EVER, be peace. So get off your rainbow colored soapbox and get back to living your life. You know, working your job, spending time with your friends and family-what we used to do before we had “wall’s” to write on and the constant need to update our status every three hours. I mean my God man, the only people that should be updating their status that much are soldiers in the battle flied. Have some integrity people. Start using that super computer in your cranium and strive to have something to say. If you’re upset, take a day before you vent your frustrations on the keyboard. Give that anger some time to settle down from red hot blinding fury to steadfast anger at injustice. Contemplate before you comment. Take care to get all the facts before you make that quick remark on someone’s status or photo thereby saving yourself from looking like a moron. If you find the need to delete someone it does not have to be announced that you did so. We can all plainly see that you are no longer friends; we do not need the reason. It’s really not a hard thing to keep yourself from being a moronic web user/word abuser. Just be smart and think before you click. The world will thank you.

Komen Pulls Funding, Planned Parenthood Throws A Hissy Fit...

As I am pretty sure the world has already heard, Susan G. Komen pulled its Planned Parenthood funding this past week. Planned Parenthood immediately stomped its foot and the funding was given back with a lukewarm apology. Sort of like when your mom makes you give the last Capri-Sun back to your little sister because she’s the smallest, but you don’t want to because you know that she will not drink it and probably leave it in the sun to get hot and sticky, and thereby wasting it’s delicious goodness. But you give it back because it’s easier than dealing with the stomping and crying and whining.  Or at least that is the way it looks from this end. Now I know I am not making any friends in the pro-Planned Parenthood camp-but quite frankly I don’t really care. I think they use disease prevention/treatment, birth control, and helping people with low incomes has a sugar coated front to mask their genocide agenda. I have no problems with disease prevention and treatment, birth control, or helping people with low incomes. I do have a problem with killing a human for not being “wanted.” But really the reason behind the funding tug of war had nothing  to do with the abortion/birth control/STI prevention/treatment aspects of the agency and everything to do with the fact that the agencies were not doing anything more for women than what they could do at home in regards to breast exams. That’s it. That was the giant issue. The clinics do physical “lump checks” and if they suspect something they send the women to specialists. So truly they weren’t doing a darn thing more than a lady could do for herself and Ole Susan K didn’t think that deserved funding.  DUH. I saw nothing wrong with this. Send the money to the clinics that are actually doing ultrasounds and mammograms. Seems logical, but then again Planned Parenthood as never been accused of using their common sense. (You know the same common sense that says it’s wrong to kill a human that has not done anything to anyone...) Yep they just couldn’t take they fact that the baby killing funding was being taken away so they instantly used the media to turn the whole issue into a supposed attack on women and their rights. For instance take a look at this quote from an article written on the subject at Yahoo.com,

"The insult to women -- that if females were forced to think about what they are doing before having an abortion, the exercise would surely make them change their minds -- is overwhelming," Milligan writes. "Women who believe abortion is wrong won't have one. Making it harder for them to get an abortion won't make a difference. Women -- devout Catholics and others -- who don't believe in birth control won't use it. Refusing to cover birth control as basic women's health, or defunding organizations that supply birth control, won't mean anything to those women."

This is the worst comeback I have ever laid my eyes on. Here you are, in a high position of power and influence, probably get paid in the triple digits each year, and supposed to be a voice for woman everywhere and this is all you can come up with? The belief that you cannot change someone’s mind is an empty fallacy. It might be harder to persuade some more than others but it can be done. It’s the whole “Their gonna do it anyway so what’s the difference?” excuse. Which seems ironic because isn’t Planned Parenthood all about changing the way the world looks at Parenting and womens health?  The article also had  this jewel,

“While Planned Parenthood does not provide mammography services in-house, an analysis published late last year in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that the number of women helped by mammography are lower than most people think, and some medical experts feel that the emphasis should be on prevention and treatment rather than mammography, The New York Times reported.”

                So you’re saying that Susan G. Komen shouldn’t even really be funding screenings because treatment and prevention are more effective? Well awesome Planned Parenthood! Good job for pointing that out. Now Komen knows where to put the funding they took from you, seeing as all you do is screenings!....The stupidity is just so abundant.

Here’s the gist. Susan G. Komen did not say anything about abortion and contraception. The media did. But Planned Parenthood wants you to think so because bad press makes waves and gets the word out. Therefore encouraging people to donate to them, talk about them, and in-directly support them by giving free publicity. They are nothing but a bunch of morons with media outlets and keyboards and are blowing the issue into a tornado when it’s really just a small dust cloud.  So news flash Planned Parenthood (more like communist population regulating commission) How about getting off your soap box about abortion (Which is completely and utterly wrong by the way) and actually do something for women and let Komen have the funding to put into places that are really doing something. 

The Family Life

If anybody ever tells you that living in a family is easy, you just go on and slap them because they deserve it for spewing that ridiculousness. Living in a family is one of the hardest and best things that will ever happen to a person. It can feel like a certified three ring circus. It’s like the deep fried version of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. There are crazy times. Like when you are 16 and talking on the phone to your first boyfriend in the closet because privacy doesn’t exist in a house with so many people, and there seems to be an echo when you talk. So you start looking around and realize that your little brother has put a microphone in a shoe and is broadcasting your convo to the entire household. (True Story) Or when you wake up with your six year Old cousin’s little stinky foot in your nose and her impossibly-tiny-big eyed- evil-Chihuahua is snarling at you from your pillow where he now sits. (Also a true story) There are sad times-like when somebody gets dumped and needs a chick flick-some chocolate-and new pajamas or a family member passes away and we all need to cry and laugh and remember. Then there are the times when you want to strangle someone, like when you need to get a bath but that one family member uses up every bit of the hot water in the 80 gallon yes, 80 gallon, tank.  Even though she only weighs 102 dripping wet. What is she washing anyway?!-Her soul? Or when someone washes your best sweater with their hunting clothes so it comes out smelling like the “dirt” scented laundry soap and your walking around smelling like a giant pile of leaves.  (How could this stuff be made up?) There are the embarrassing times like when the family informs your boyfriend about how much of a slob you are or your cousin tells the entire Church softball team that you hang your bra from the ceiling fan (it wasn’t the fan...please...it was the treadmill for crying out loud) or your sister gets in a fight with an Aunt at your Great Grandfathers funeral about the middle east. There’s the continual fight over the washing machine, the last can of tuna, the bathroom, and the TV. A thousand people come in and out all day long. The refrigerator door is on an endless swing and there is never enough ketchup.  Sometimes there isn’t a room in the house that doesn’t have somebody occupying it in some capacity. Everybody is in each other’s business and yet no-one seems to remember anything and only a metal concert can come close to the noise levels. No one does anything the same and you can’t ever find your clothes/purse/keys/shoes/etc and you can forget privacy. No one knocks and that one person is always naked.  But on the flip side, you are never bored. When you’re sad there are people to talk to. Laugh with. Eat with. Living in a family is hard. Everybody from the baby to the grandparent is growing up in some way and it’s an ever evolving process of trying to make sure everyone feels respected, loved, and important. It’s a heck of a ride, this life. And at the end of the day your family is still your family- no matter if their bald, skinny, loud, clumsy, childlike, zany or crazy. They come in all sorts of packages with all sorts of ideas and problems but love puts on her big girl pants and moves over to include them all because...quiet simply....life would suck without them.

It's Okay Charlie Brown...Valentines Are Over Rated

You know, it always upset me that Charlie Brown didn't get any valentines. I remember watching the

special and thinking that his school teacher must be a dunce (at 7 "idiot" was still a no-no word) for letting

her students completely leave out poor Charlie. Every year the same special would run on TV and every

year I sat and endured through poor Charlie getting only a pitiful used valentine at the end from Violet. A

used Valentine! What heartless writer came up with this crap? (At 11 crap sounded very tough.) Yes I

always felt sorry for old Charlie, especially when every year my Dad always made sure my siblings and I

each had a card and candy. But it wasn't until the year that I received a Budweiser teddy bear 10 days after

the 14th that I truly felt Charlie's pain. I remember the exact moment too, I was standing there looking

into the dark plastic eyes of that teddy bear that had "This Bears For You" written in the Budweiser script

on its little hat, thinking why in the world would a man give a lady who had never had more than three

sips of champagne at Christmas time, a alcoholic-beverage-pushing plush toy! And 10 days late to boot!

Why even bother. And that’s when it hit me: Valentine’s Day was seriously overrated. Think about it.

Every year people go crazy over the 14th. They rush around trying to get the perfect gift, or they feel

lonely because they are without anybody, women get mad because their boyfriends/husbands forget or

get the wrong thing, and men forget and run out to the nearest rite-aid and get some stale candy and a

half deflated balloon all so that we can prove our love to each other. Why should we have to have a day to

show the ones we love we care? If that person truly means something to you it shouldn't matter what day

of the year it is. A rose on a Tuesday means just as much as one on Valentine’s Day. Now I am not knocking

Valentine’s Day completely. Before the mass-media-monster got ahold of it, it was a pretty good holiday.

It meant something. It was a day to celebrate the deep connection between two people, not be a giant

marketing ploy to line the pockets of Wal-Mart and Hallmark. I say all this but I will be doing something for

my man even though he looks at Valentine’s Day the way I do. But it will mean something and not just

take up space on his dresser....so maybe Valentines isn't that overrated....maybe it’s just nice to be

thought of on a day when it’s the thing to be thinking of people....ah shoot. I am one of the masses. Oh

well, it’s off to Walgreens...I need to buy a certain little bald fellow in a yellow shirt a Valentine. A new

one! :)