Arizona Day!

Hmm... That title is only clever if you know the rhythm and melody that I have in my head. Sorry. If any body wants to guess what song my sad, tired brain is trying to reference, I'll give you a hint: I'm in a You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown mood, but it still doesn't really work.
Well, now Ashley gets it; everyone else is still lost though. Sorry friends, go brush up your theatre and you'll get a lot more of my references. (There was another really vague one in there: think Kiss Me Kate.)

Anyway, let me tell you about my Arizona Statehood Day adventures.

Chelsea and I decided that this year we were going to celebrate modestly and just do a cake. In years past we've gone to wal-mart and bought Arizona-themed paraphernalia (the only thing I really remember buying is a bag of chips, and we only bought that because it had a picture of a saguaro cactus on it), but we're lazy now, so a cake suffices us.

I was in charge of the frosting, and Chelsea was in charge of the cake mix.

Well, Chelsea never picked up the mix, so after the show we went to wal-mart and got the essentials of cake-making: a cake mix, eggs, vegetable oil, and cooking spray (if you haven't guessed, Chelsea's family doesn't bake much, so every time we want to bake anything, we have to buy EVERYTHING, I still love them though).

Let me tell you of our little adventure in purchasing these items:
We approached the self check-out lane, and Chelsea, who was in front touched the screen to select the English option. Well, she thought she did, but then the nice, automated voice started speaking Spanish to us. I figured that she had just accidentally pushed the Spanish button, but that it didn't really matter because we both know how to self check-out without instructions. Seriously, if it were an Olympic sport, Chelsea and I could probably go pro.

Hi. I'm Brigette, and I get distracted easily and go off on tangents.

So I'm thinking that we can just ignore the Spanish voice and do what we always do, but for some reason the unexpected language really, really flustered Chelsea, so she exited the screen and went back to the one where shoppers choose which language they prefer. This time I saw her push English, but that nice, automated Spanish voice was there again. Weird. But again, we didn't really need to be told how to do this, so I convinced Chelsea to just ignore it and start checking-out. We get to the point when we have to pay and I'm thinking, "Okay, we can still do this, there are pictures so we don't really need to be able to read the screen, but she was really startled and still more than a little flustered by the Spanish, so this could take a while." It is at this moment that Chelsea turns to me and blurts out, "I didn't live in Spain for nothing!" and she finishes the check-out process with amazing gusto. Maybe it was just a "you had to be there" thing, but for some reason, her bold proclamation of "I didn't live in Spain for nothing!" was really amusing to us, so we were still kind-of laughing about it as we walked away so that another nice lady who didn't speak Spanish (we know because she looked at Chelsea like a crazyface when Chelsea said something to her in Spanish) could purchase her items. We were a few feet away when we hear the same lane that we just had such a problematic experience with say, "Welcome to Wal-Mart; please scan your first item." We turned to each other and both practically yelled out "How did she do that?!" Then we were able to amuse ourselves the entire way home with re-creating the whole experience. We're now considering making a movie reenacting it, so watch for it on Youtube. :-D

Anyway, that was the shopping experience. Then we got home and made the cake in Chelsea's amazing microwave. Please don't think we're both insane for putting a cake pan in the microwave; it's not a normal microwave. It can function as a microwave, or as a convention oven. Because it's still microwave-sized, though, we have to make to small, round cakes instead of one normal-sized rectangle one. The first one took forever to cook, because we couldn't find the little rack to put the pan on, so the heat wasn't able to fully surround the cake, but we eventually got that done. As we were cooking the second cake, we sang "Happy Birthday," and cut the first cake and let Chelsea's family begin to devour it. After a few minutes though, Mom (aka:Sweet Mary) said, "Girls, why is your cake sparking?" OH. POOP. We turned off the oven when we took out the first cake, then accidentally put the second cake in on microwave. Oops.


Here's what we learned this year, on our beloved state's birthday:
Sometimes, the self check-out lane at Wal-Mart just knows when somebody needs to brush up their Spanish.
It is always good to have a video camera on Chelsea, especially when she's with Brigette, because weird things just happen.
If you microwave a cake for about 15 minutes, it turns out fairly well, provided you cut off the 2 small burnt patches on its bottom.