Cardiogirl: 19% body fat 100% fun

Oh boy. There’s a 19-year-old girl in Mexico who is jonesing to go to the Royal Wedding. Estibalis Chavez went on a 16-day hunger strike back in February in an effort to get to the wedding. Eventually a lobbyist bought her an airline ticket to London. Yay!

Side note: She had to drink water at least, right? Can you drink chicken broth and still consider yourself on a hunger strike? What about sucking on breath mints? Does that negate the strike?

Turns out British Immigration sent her packing because she couldn’t give an address to show where she would be staying in England. Boo!

Oh yeah, she didn’t have any money on her for a hotel, either. As of today she’s staying at a youth hostel in Madrid which is where she had a stopover when they sent her back to Mexico.

But she’s not giving up.

She’s outside the Mexican embassy in Madrid right now, trying to get back to London for the wedding. That chick is holding on tight to her dream.

She said “a new-found Facebook friend, who wanted to remain anonymous, had promised to wire her money to buy a ticket back to London and she had also found a place to stay with a Mexican citizen in England.” London’s Immigration spokesman has remained silent on the issue.

I have to admire her moxie.

Her story was posted at 6:44 a.m. EST today and guests are slated to arrive at Westminster Abbey tomorrow at 8:15 a.m. BST/3:15 a.m. EST. Kate Middleton is scheduled to walk down the aisle at 11 a.m. BST/6:00 a.m. EST. So Estibalis has less than 24 hours to get there.

I don’t think she’s gonna make it, but the two halves of my cup are fighting.

The half full side says it would only take a dime from 50,000 residents of Madrid to make her dream come true. Can’t they spare ten cents to make this chick happy?

The half empty side says why should anyone give a rip about sending her to the wedding. Can’t she hang out at Best Buy in Madrid and watch it on TV?

Thoughts, opinions? Are you going to watch Kate become Mrs. William whatever-his-official-last-name-is-since-they-don’t-seem-to-have-last-names-in-the-Royal-family?

As you may know, I have three daughters who range in age from 60 months to 132 months old.

Epic side note that includes a story problem: When I had my first kid I was so into the details of her age. Instead of saying she was a newborn I gave her age in days: “She’s 16 days old.” When we passed that first month I changed it to weeks so everyone had to do the math: “She’ll be 11 weeks old next Thursday.” At 16 weeks I upgraded to months until she turned two.

Anyway, when my oldest kid started learning multiplication she spent a lot of time figure out how many months old she was. In the months just before and after her birthday, her math skills hit a fever pitch. And since I like to exercise your brain over here, I decided to write out their ages in months.

Bonus riddle: I am 15,774 days old. When is my birthday?

Back to the topic; now that I have children I’ve learned a few things about Easter.

1. If you send your kids to a Catholic school they will eventually ask what the Easter Bunny has to do with Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.

I still don’t have an answer for that one. Can anyone connect a rabbit to Jesus for me?

You can employ the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon method if you want and if you can go from rabbit to rabbi in six steps or less I will bow down to your superior brain power.

2. Unless you have a fantastic memory and you’re a huge fan of egg salad sandwiches you should skip coloring and hiding Easter eggs.

It’s a fun concept but it’s messy in more ways than one. It’s difficult to boil eggs without a few of the shells cracking. Once they crack you’re screwed. The egg dye is messy. It doesn’t stain as much as it used to, but something is gonna get ruined along the way.

If you make more than nine eggs — and you don’t want to throw them away because you’re a cheapskate — you’re going to get really tired of coming up with ways to prepare and eat hard boiled eggs.

If you don’t create a detailed map of where you hid the eggs, you will lose at least one of the eggs and the house will begin to stink until you find the missing egg.

3. Easter dresses tend to be expensive and impractical.

Oy, I don’t like shopping for Easter clothes. If the dress is too fancy my kids will wear it once or twice and then it goes into storage until the younger kid can fit into it.

When I shop for myself I get really frustrated. The people designing dresses seem to believe that when Easter rolls around it will be in the low to mid-80s (that’s roughly 27° Celsius for my friends outside the US.) Why must they make and sell sleeveless dresses for Easter? They never include a cardigan that goes with the dress.

It’s cold in Michigan (but not nearly as cold as it is in Minnesota, thank God.) Unless Easter is going to arrive on August 8th every year, a sleeveless dress is not going to work for me.

4. Cadbury Creme Eggs are only sold between January and Easter Day.

I have never been a fan of that egg; I don’t like the goo inside. I do think the yolk in the center looks cool but the taste of it is too sugary for me.

Two of my kids like them; the youngest kid shares her mother’s disdain for that confection.

Guess how many calories are in that egg. (Listens to the theme of “Jeopardy” while you formulate your answer.)

There are only 150 calories in that egg, gingah.

Highlight the text above this sentence to find out if you guessed correctly. I was surprised at the calorie count; I thought it was much higher.

Recently I wrote a comment somewhere that said something like, “I should try to see the cup as half full.” I’m not sure if I wrote that on my blog in reply to a comment or if I left that at another person’s blog but the sentiment is the same. I should try to be more optimistic.

So instead of adding to my list of things I think would suck, I’m going to make a list of things that would not suck.

Side note: I recently met 2Commentaristas through Tribal Blogs and they have a fun feature called i Wish. This post looks like I stole the idea from them, but I swear this post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a few months now. It really was born out of a desire for a yin to my things-I-think-would-suck yang. So my apologies to the 2Commentaristas; your i Wish feature is da bomb.

Being able to temporarily pause a cold

This feature would be available once during the calendar year. It would allow you to opt out for one day in the middle of a nasty cold/flu. For instance, your illness starts on Tuesday night and on Thursday you have a big presentation at work. You would be able to pause that cold on Thursday morning so you could focus at work and then resume the cold when you got home that night.

That would be really cool but I’m not sure who would police it because you know someone would figure out how to game the system. There’s always one asshole who ruins it for everyone else. Why is that god?

Being able to eliminate a computer virus with one click of a button.

And because we’re talking about things that would be cool, this feature would be available at anytime after the start of the virus.

For instance, let’s say the Trojan Horse arrived at 9 am on Saturday and you didn’t realize that things were FUBAR until Tuesday morning. You’d just hit the No Trojan Horse key and things would go back to normal.

And no computer hacker in the world would ever be able to write a code to disable that key. Ever.

Being able to block chain letters from your email account.

It seems like someone could write a code to flag — and immediately delete — emails that have the following phrases in the body text:

“send this on to …”

“send this back to me …”

“this chain has not been broken …”

“powerful novena …”

“please do not break this chain …”

“five minutes after you hit send …”

That would be cool.

Total nostalgic side note: Remember the good old days when chain letters came in the mail? For the first three or four times I was thrilled to get a chain letter. I really can’t remember what the content was except to say that I had to send that letter on to five, seven or 10 other people within a week.

I remember the whole process: I wrote out that same letter, over and over, on college-ruled paper, addressed the envelopes and licked all of the stamps so I wouldn’t be responsible for breaking the chain. Because really bad stuff was gonna happen if I did break it.

And just in case you wondered, the links of those chains never once touched the ground at my house. That sucker blew right through my mailbox and gathered steam on its way out.