When I grow up, I want to be...

An engineer. Of the locomotive variety. No, really. If I didn't have a family and could do anything I wanted, I'd go to work for the railroad and drive trains. 


Everyone wants to be something when they're a little kid. And astronaut, a doctor, a fireman... I always wanted to be a locomotive engineer. I had the hat and the whistle and everything. I got my first electric train set when I was ten, and someday, if I ever get rich, I would love to take an entire room and build a giant to-scale model train system like the kind you would see on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.


I recently moved to this small town in Arizona that happens to have train tracks that run through it, and the first thing that EVERYONE told me when I started looking for a house was, "Don't buy a house south of the tracks!" 


Well of course I ended up buying a house south of the tracks. I didn't do this intentionally, it's just that I looked at a million different houses and the one I fell in love with happened to be south of the tracks. True it now takes me a lot longer to get anywhere because I'm always stuck waiting for a train to pass, but I never really mind. Just like a little kid, when those red lights start flashing, I get all excited and about fifty percent of the time I still sit there and count how many cars go by. 


I love being in a town where I can see trains all the time, and I live just far enough away that I can still here the whistles blow, but they aren't loud enough to wake me if I'm sleeping. (It's an insanely busy track and I've heard two trains since starting this blog.) 


Anyway, I'll stop boring you with this because according to my husband trains are lame and I'm the only one who cares, but I've just been thinking about it a lot lately since I am around them so much. And seriously, I really would get a job driving trains, and I would love it!  Here. I'll post a couple of pictures just for kicks...


This is when I took my family on vacation and actually made them travel by train...

And here's one from when I made my family go to the train museum in Sacramento...

And, of course, the picture that shows how my husband feels about trains. This is what he looked like the entire time we were at the museum unless being instructed to smile for the camera... He gives me that same look every time I see a train and get excited.

All I want for Christmas...

is apparently a ceramic flat iron. How's that for random?

Ok, this is me at the mall last week.

Tra la la, shopping with my mom!
And my sister!
And my daughter!
And my neice!
Just us girls shootin' the breeze...
Looking for some baby clothes... (For my sister, not me.)
Minding our own business...
Everything's great...
then WHAM!  "DO YOU WANT A DEMONSTRATION?"

You know those middle kiosks in the mall with the crazy-aggressive sales people? Well I always take extra care to avoid eye contact because I hate their in-you-face attitude. I hate being sold. DO NOT try to sell me. If I want something, I will come to you, and if I can get it on the Internet where I don't have to talk to a sales person at all, even better.

Anyway, so this lady practically tackled us to the ground. She jumped in front of us and was just RIGHT THERE. What other choice did we have but to watch her demonstration? She was practically straightening my mom's hair before we stopped walking.

But then she dropped that single strand of hair and it fell so pristine against my mom's head that we all did a double take. I literally jumped into her chair chanting, "Do mine! Do Mine!"

I kid you not, maybe two minutes later I looked like I'd stepped off the set of a Pantene Pro-V commercial. Normally, I would not be so excited about this, because my hair is usually pretty shiny and sleek on it's own, but since I moved to Arizona it's sort of staged a revolt. It's so dry here and no matter what I do, my hair is frizzy frizzy frizzy and completely unmanageable. Which, for a red-head like me is very unfortunate because you end up looking like BoZo the clown.

Now I've used flat irons before, and they never work very well and they take forever and they pull your hair and rip it all up. But this one... It was like magic. Can I just tell you, I WANT ONE!

I fell in love and the woman, seeing a glimmer of hope at a possible sale, stopped me from getting out of the chair and said, "You haven't even seen the coolest part yet." Then me, Little Miss don't sell me crap, was all, "You mean it gets better?"

That woman took that magic flat iron and proceeded to curl my stick straight hair into perfect ringlets and she did it as quickly as she'd just straightened it. And the curls lasted ALL DAY! They were still there until I got in the shower the next morning.

Never, in all my life that I can remember, has a beauty product rocked my world. Kudos to you ceramic-flat-iron sales girl! You definitely sold me. Well, sort of. I didn't actually buy one because the stupid thing was a hundred bucks and my husband would have killed me. Oh, but I want one! And the day will come when I have an excuse to spend that kind of money on something completely trivial and than I am so there!