I Am Stepher

I love to buy super expensive face lotions that promise to get rid of wrinkles.  Well, I don’t really love it but I do it so much that you would think I love it. 

While visiting Colorado, a friend told me that she uses olive oil at night as her face moisturizer.  I have super dry skin here in humidity central so you can imagine how bad it is at 8,333 feet elevation.

Last night instead of my La Mer Concentrate, eye cream and moisturizer, I tried something different.  Plain old olive oil.  I woke up with the softest skin that I can remember.  I am going to try it out for the next week and see how it works.  I will keep you posted.

The second gift was given to me tonight from Andy’s mom.  Every once and a while Andy’s mom and I will show up wearing the same boots, jeans, purse, etc.  We have completely different styles but somehow always pick out the same key pieces.  I really value her fashion sense which made todays gift even more special.

While going through old boxes she came across her wedding day send off outfit.  This is the outfit you change into after your wedding dress and then get in the car and go off to your honeymoon.  Her outfit was handmade and is so beautiful.  It’s a silk dress with the cutest pattern and a matching green driving jacket with a lining that matches the dress.  I was a little nervous about it fitting and could not believe my eyes when I tried it on.  Not only was it the perfect fit, but it was almost as if it had been custom tailored just for me. 

I am thrilled and plan on wearing it as soon as this St. Louis weather cools down.  Check it out!

In the past week I have been given two of the most special gifts of my life.  The first was given to my by my grandmother on Saturday.  My Grandma is 83 years old and had always been very modest when it comes to jewelry.  Until a few months ago, I had no idea that she had a stash of her grandmothers old jewelry from Mexico tucked away in a little drawer. 

I received a call from granny a few weeks ago asking if I would have any interest in her grandmothers old cameo necklace.  As I was speaking to her I happened to look up at an old black and white photo from her graduation day that I keep at my desk.  Would you believe that she is wearing a cameo in it?!  I asked her if there was any way that it was the very same cameo and she said without a doubt it was.  I drove up to Iowa a few weeks later and it is even more beautiful than I could have imagined.   It’s a soft pink coral with a gold trim.  This picture does not do it justice, but here it is.

I have noticed that I use the word amazing far too much in my daily vocabulary.  I realized this morning while eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I refered to as being amazing.  This is when I decided that not only has the word lost all meaning to me, but it has completely stifled my vocabulary.   The peanut butter and jelly was good, but not amazing.  It was tasty, delightful, delectable, palatable, yummy and even delicious, but not amazing. 

I am going to try my best to use the following synonyms in place of amazing for one week:  astonishing, astounding, remarkable, wonderful, incredible, startling, marvelous, miraculous, surprising, mind-blowing, mind-boggling, staggering.

Wish me luck!

This is a picture of my grandma from the 1930’s.  It’s amazing impressive that even people with very little money could have high quality photo’s taken back then.     It’s also amazing  interesting to me how much older people looked back then.  She was 15 when this photo was taken.

What will photos look like in 70 years????

Including the Japanese part…..

As many of you   the few of you that read this may know, I had a pretty bad experience with my last Lady GaGa concert.   I am a huge fan of GaGa and  missed her when she was in St. Louis in 2009.   In a casual conversation with a friend I mentioned that  I had a ton of  frequent flyer miles and Marriott points and had never really used them.  We thought it might be fun to do something  spontaneous so we looked online to see where GaGa was performing in the next month.

We decided on London and booked our flights and hotel right away.  Because our trip was basically free we thought we should splurge on tickets and bought the best seats we could through StubHub.

Our first night in London was perfect.  We had dinner at an amazing restaurant, met some cool people who offered to show us the town and stayed out all night seeing the sites.  The next night was GaGa.  We had to pick our tickets up from a record store that was open until 10.  The concert started at 8 and because GaGa had already been in London for a few days playing shows, we were able to find out that she usually started around 9:30.  We spent the day shopping, having lunch and then came back to the hotel for a nap.  We got ready slowly and decided to get to the record store around 7 to get our tickets.  If only we knew then what we know now.

1) Make sure your train line is  actually running that day

2) It is almost impossible to get a cab in downtown London at 6:00 PM on a Saturday Night

3) If you walk out of your hotel and see that it is raining, don’t skip going back inside to get your umbrella just to save a few minutes.  You might really need it.

On the way to the train station we realized our line was not running that weekend due to repairs. We tried to get a cab for 45 minutes before we finally decided to take the bus.  It was raining and we did not have an umbrella. We were so concerned with missing the opening act but as it turns out, we had bigger things to worry about.

We arrived at the record store at 7:30 and got in line at the cash register.  We told them our names and asked for our tickets and they said “oh, the ticket booth is in the back, and it closed at 7. Sorry.”  WHAT!?!?!  I will keep it short – the girl working the booth took our tickets to sell to her friends  “destroy them”.  We went to the O2 arena anyway to try to scalp tickets but they were sold out and there was nothing we could do.  In the end, we did get to see the last few minutes of the show from a nosebleed section.  We were completely devastated and StubHub did not seem to care.

After a few weeks of negotiation and us threatening to go on the BBC news with our story, StubHub did give us our money back and a credit to buy a new set of tickets when GaGa came back to St. Louis.  After this weekends concert, all is forgiven.  We had the best seats and the best time I could have imagined.

I heard this on Howard Stern this morning. Alexa Ray gave a great interview and I already love this song.

As it turns out, there is a lot more to the double rainbow guy then I originally thought.  The article below is even better than the video he made about the rainbow and a must read in my opinion.   The voice behind the video is a true mountain man who goes by the name Hungry Bear.  In addition to being a mountain man he has also dabbled in cage fighting, firefighting and puppy breeding.

http://www.urlesque.com/2010/07/08/double-rainbow-yosemitebear-interview/

One last treat: While Bear wasn’t high in the famous rainbow video, he says he and his son were totally high in this one: