European Tour

For anybody who was wondering exactly where and how Ross and I made our way around Europe last fall, I made a little map.

We flew in to London, rented a car and drove all over England (where Ross had to flush for me)

From there, it was:

• Bus to Paris (where I accidentally went to Amelie's cafe and finally saw the Eiffel Tower)
• Bus to Berlin, Germany 
• Bus to Krakow, Poland (where I cooked at the hostel)
• Train to Bratislava (missed our stop and had to go to Budapest)
• Train to Budapest, Hungary
• Train to Ljubjana, Slovenia (where the toilets flush right onto the tracks)
• Train to Split, Croatia
• Bus to Dubrovnik, Croatia
• Bus to Kotor Bay, Montenegro (where I kayaked and later got dumped by the kayak man)
• Train to Mostar, Bosnia
• Train to Sarajevo, Bosnia (where I bartended)
• Train to Belgrade, Serbia
• Train to Sofia, Bulgaria
• Bus to Istanbul, Turkey (where I ate two fish sandwiches because I'm a pig)
• Bus to Cappadocia, Turkey (when the mean man wouldn't let me recline my seat)

In two months, we spent every minute of every day together. We went to 15 countries. And we only had one kind-of fight (and it was because I was very tired and crabby). And we're still cousins and more importantly we're still friends. I think that's pretty cool.

ENJOY THE MAP

Map!

Kim Jong Hal?

Remember when I noticed a disturbing resemblance between my dad and a certain female British pop star?

Well, today I noticed a disturbing resemblance between my dad and a certain unpopular North Korean world figure.

Yikes.

If at First You Can't Do Math...Tri Tri Again

If you're a fan of this dumb blog, and obviously, you ARE...you'll remember that I once lived in Costa Rica and had a pool in my backyard and it was super hot weather every day and the only respite from the heat was a daily swim in that pool and along with that story came a story about how I'm really bad at judging distance in meters and thus I thought I had been swimming a mile every day when really I wasn't.

You'll also remember I'm a sucker for punishment and have done a couple of triathlons in my recent past. This year, I decided I hadn't been punished enough and signed up for the International Distance, which is like forever longer than the Sprint Distances of yesteryear and now I'm stuck trying to train for it. Well, I got nothin' else goin'.

The International Distance carries an almost 1 mile swim. 

I went to my gym today...*

*This was embarrassing: I was about to leave when two gym-rat dudes from my man-filled office were leaving to go to the gym, I presumed together. I asked if I could ride with them, but then realized after it was too late that they were driving separately. So I ended up riding to the gym with just one of them. Alone. Honestly the gym is so close we could walk but it's just a little bit too cold out still...

...with the goal of swimming maybe 400 meters which means I-don't-know-what in miles. But it's 16 lengths of a 25-meter pool. I set my goal pretty low because it would be my first time in the pool in a while. Well, I did that in 10 minutes. It's not that big a deal. It's just four lengths each of the crawl, the breast stroke, then the backstroke and then the sidestroke. So, I kept going. I thought maybe I could make 800 meters. And it took me a while, but I got that done too. Then I thought: (and what is there to do while swimming besides think? And count? And do math? And predict lengths? And convert meters to miles? And be embarrassed that I didn't just drive my own car?) I should just do a half-mile. "Well", I thought, "2.2 kilometers is a mile, and so 2200 meters is a mile. If I do 1100 meters, that's a half-mile".

And so I did. And it took me 40 minutes. This made me nervous, because during the triathlon I need to swim almost a mile and 40 minutes for a half-mile means an hour.twenty for a mile. Oh well, I'd work on my time later.

But I was excited to have completed a half-mile! My first time back in the pool! It made me feel like I wouldn't be so bad off in July for this dumb triathlon. Then I sat in the hot-tub for five minutes and then showered and...*

*This was embarrassing: I realized I had agreed to meet the dude from my office out front at a certain time for my ride back but I forgot to budget time for the shower after swimming and getting ready and of course was running late and there was no time for makeup or drying my hair and so I met him with goggle-eyes and wet hair.

...after I got back to the office I converted 1100 meters to miles. It was actually .68. In other words, I almost swam three-quarters of a mile today! My first time in the water in a million years. PSH! International Distance. Whatevs. I got this.

And for your information:

2.2 kilometers is NOT a mile. 

2.2 pounds is a kilogram.

DUH.

1.6 kilometers is a mile.

DUH.

Yes I wore the nose pincher.

Hal-isms, Vol. 35

Me and Hal. Grading the driveway.

"You're livin' here free. Show some respect."

"Kady! You look like crap!"

"This isn't a wedding. This is a sham."

"Your loneliness. Your perverted language on TV."

"It's the crawling on your belly and the sand and the shards on your crutch that ruins the 'biance of it."
(after I told him how romantic I thought it was that he had a wine cellar under the house.)

(oh, and: crutch = crotch)

Homeful?

 

 

"Homeless girl finds home. Suddenly unsure of what to call herself."

I am not complaining. I have had the best three years ever. But since I moved out of my house in January 2010 I haven't had a home. I haven't bought groceries and put them in my fridge. I haven't had a mop let alone an address. The longest I lived anywhere was in a basement for seven months. Other than that, the longest was my parents' place for several weeks. And other than that, I haven't stayed anywhere longer than a few nights for THREE YEARS.

It was time to get serious in life again (read: out of money) and so I took a job with my old company and moved back to Minneapolis. I got a new apartment on March 5th and have been living with no furniture. This Tuesday I finally got some. On Thursday my buddy Neal hung all my art, and on Saturday my stored dining room table and chairs arrived. (Thank You, K and J).

 

Wanna see some pictures of my new place?!?

 

Table is on loan from my mom and dad. I grew up eating cereal with five other kids on that thing, y'all.

 

 

I'll leave the kitchen and bathroom up to your imagination. Bathroom is white and has no door. Kitchen has no fridge because the fridge is in the stairwell. Office has some built-in shelving. This place is just perfect and I love it. It's so good to be HOME!

 

So good, in fact, that this 35-year-old woman called her mother, happy crying. Something about having closets of her own and a mop.

 

 

Sunday Favorites: Judgy McHypocrite Runs Out of Toilet Paper

New to A Lady Reveals Nothing? You've missed SO MUCH. Not to worry. Every Sunday, I dig through the archives to repost an old favorite. Mostly because I'm too lazy to come up with new content every single day. This story originally appeared on October 28, 2009:

I have no idea how this happens, or WHY SO OFTEN, but I run out of toilet paper all the time. Sometimes I resort to such measures as the half-empty kleenex pack from my purse, and sometimes, if I'm very lucky, I'm saved by the basement bathroom, and find a partial roll. One such night, as I was cleaning in preparation for a visit from family, I remembered I was out of TP minutes before they were set to arrive. That half-roll wasn't going to cut it.

I booked it to the grocery store located a block-and-a-half away.In my haste, I forgot that I was wearing threadbare pajama pants over leopard print underwear, and a sweatshirt.

When I was heading down the aisle, with the MONGO MEGA pack of 12 triple rolls, (and some coffee filters, popcorn, and french bread) I saw some pathetic lady fingering the sweatshirt rack. "What a nerd," I judged and laughed to myself, "who buys a sweatshirt at the grocery store?"

Before the mean haggy thought completed itself in my brain, I remembered the sweatshirt I was wearing. The Lake Nokomis sweatshirt. That I bought from that very same rack. Then I really laughed out loud. An old man looked at me, and obviously wanted to know what I was laughing at, but it was too hard to explain.

("Hey Kettle, this is Pot.  You're Black.")

Privacy Shmivacy

I don't like shutting the bathroom door.

I grew up in a family of eight, and we shared one bathroom. There was no such thing as private time in there. While one kid showered, one kid used the toilet and two kids brushed their teeth and Dad was always lingering in the shadows to make sure the kid on the toilet only used one square of toilet paper.

These days, it's not like I try to pee in front of people, but I don't shut the door. It may be from my childhood, or because I don't want to be left out of the conversation, or sometimes I'm too lazy, but mostly it's because I feel claustrophobic being shut in a small room. My friends and roommates HATE this. 

Especially Summer, who grew up not being able to say the word fart.

Anyway, in my new apartment, there are too many doors for my liking. It's just me in here and there's doors on the office and my bedroom and the bathroom (which is inside of my bedroom). There are doors on my closets. I don't want any of the doors. I hate them. I wanted to take them all off of their hinges but decided I better leave the bedroom door on, in case I have guests and they want privacy. (But why? I don't understand privacy or people who need it. But: I'm a good hostess. And so my guests can shut my bedroom door if they are sleeping over and I give them my room or if they need to use the bathroom.)

I'm just happy I don't have a bathroom door to not shut anymore. Which is exactly how I like it.

Tonight Summer came over. We were talking and she went into the bathroom to use it. I followed her and asked her opinion about something. She goes, "I don't know. I'm BUSY."

I was like, "Oops. Sorry. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! This is so US." And then I left her alone.

We're not THAT close.

Spin the WHAT?

Moving into this new apartment got me thinking about old apartments. I once lived with my friend Shanna on Franklin by Rudolph's and when we moved in we of course scoured the entire apartment probably with toxic combinations of bleach, ammonia and Windex to get rid of the gross people dirt most likely left behind by previous tenants.

I happened to be elbow-grease scrubbing out the hallway closet when I felt something in an out-of-the-way corner tip over. I jumped! I used my rag to reach and find the item. And then I really screamed.

It was a pink vibrator (I'm so sorry) shaped like a you-know-what (I'm SO sorry).

I was so grossed out and so was Shanna but we were laughing so hard at the disgustingness of it all when Shanna got the great idea to see if it still worked. She turned it on using two paper towels.

Yep.

We died laughing. She put it on the floor. We died laughing some more. It started to spin. Then we really lost it. Because it was like, at times pointing at me and then at times pointing at her like a game of spin-the-bottle. And of course when it was pointing at me I felt ashamed and Shanna laughed at me and when it was pointing at Shanna she felt ashamed and I laughed at her and round-and-round it went.

I don't know if I've ever laughed so hard again in my life, except maybe when Cory put on my stretch pants and did ballet poses in them.

Summer-isms, Vol. 49

"It's not an accent it's a drunkcent."

"I was 23. I wasn't slutty yet."

"If I eat those eyelashes will they become mine?"

"I wanna wear wigs."

"Is doing back hand springs always...faster than...just running backwards?"

Backpackers. But Not on Purpose.

Summer and I both started our trip like fancy ladies in Europe, what with the wheeled suitcases and cute outfits. And then India happened. You can't really wheel a suitcase through India. Sometimes you can, but mostly you can't. So the backpacks happened. (I bought mine in Istanbul and sent my wheeled suitcase home with cousin Ross and she bought hers in Mumbai and threw her nasty wheeled suitcase in the garbage can.) Wearing every last piece of warm clothing layered five and six times on our bodies happened. Freezing train rides happened and the subsequent necessary buying of blankets and then wearing those blankets as clothes happened.

I'm embarrassed to admit that it never occurred to me that it would ever be cold in India. Well. We froze in the hill town of Ooty and the bus rides that took us to and from, we froze in Bangalore, and we froze somewhere between Mumbai and Jodhpur and every day after that. So basically half the time we were in India it was not "India hot", but rather "wet cold". As a result of this ignorance, I sent home most of my cold weather gear inside of the wheeled suitcase I sent home with Ross. I figured I'd be in Nepal for just a week and would only need a couple of things and I could always buy stuff there.

Oh, Nepal. Freezing, freezing Nepal. It's not like you can escape the cold by going in your heated hotel room and taking a warm shower. There is no heat. There is no warm water. And it's not like you have warm pajamas for 30 degree nights (0 Celsius) with no heat in your room. So there is no changing your clothes for bed. I wore all of my clothes at one time all day long and slept in them too -- 24/7. The outfit you see in the photo below did not leave my body for the last four weeks of my trip. I changed my underwear every once in a while and that's about it.

SO MUCH TO DO...

I have an entire houseful of furniture being delivered on Tuesday. (Who is this fancy person I've become?) Which means I have tons of stuff I need to get done. TONS. 

I need to clean my whole house again, measure my doorway, take the screen door off the hinges, make decisions about where things go, get my mattress up and out of the way and up against the wall...

AND...

I really need to learn this entire Robyn dance routine before my furniture screws up my awesome empty dance-floor apartment. It should be easy. She's totally using my "Kady Hexum Punch-Dance" move at 3:12 and I've already mastered the backwards somersault/butt-push-up she does at 1:27:

p.s. I do not endorse stealing other people's boyfriends OR her weird sweater but I love the pants.

Sunday Favorites: The $20 Bill

New to A Lady Reveals Nothing? You've missed SO MUCH. Not to worry. Every Sunday, I dig through the archives to repost an old favorite. Mostly because I'm too lazy to come up with new content every single day. This story originally appeared on December 28, 2011:

When I was growing up, my family managed an apartment complex in South International Falls, Minnesota. All of us six kids had chores to do, including mowing the lawn, shoveling the sidewalks, picking up trash, etc. As a family we painted each unit between renters. My job was to scrub with a Brillo pad the plastic baseboards to remove any paint splatters that happened while the older kids paint-rolled the walls.

In addition to all of that, once a week we were each responsible to tidy the common areas of one of the buildings. This meant picking up cigarette butts, vacuuming hallways and stairs, sweeping and mopping the laundry rooms and wiping walls and laundry machines as needed. You can read about our compensation for this work here.

One day my dad came into the house, brandishing a fresh, crisp $20 bill. "Kady!" he called, "Look what I found behind the washing machine in your building!" I immediately began spending saving that money in my mind. For an actual minute I really thought he was going to give ME the money he found in MY building. Ha!

Instead, he folded it slowly and dramatically placed it in his wallet. "If only you had done a better job of cleaning, this could have been yours", he said, and shrugged his shoulders as if it really weren't his decision to make. (Remember that $20 when I was eight is the equivalent of about $1,000 today.)

You better believe that for the rest of my tenure as a cleaning person at the South Falls Apartments, I was scouring that laundry room with a toothbrush, hoping for another cash money windfall that never came. It was only last week that I asked my dad on the way to ice fishing if he really found that $20 bill behind the washing machine in my building.  

"I never found a $20 bill in my life."  He said.

Now THAT'S good parenting.

"Just take out your anger on this target Kady while I protect my hearing."

Dudes at Work

I'm back at work. Same company, different job, different branch office. This time, an almost all male office. I was wondering what it might be like to work between all of that testosterone, since historically I've worked in an office with mostly women. I've been fortunate in that there wasn't too much gossip or drama amongst all of those women, but was expecting to see even less of that with these dudes.

 

Nope.

 

They gossip all right. A lot. The difference? Dudes don't whisper. They talk about each other and they don't care if the person they are talking about is standing right outside my office! This puts me in a strange position because when you're listening to somebody talk about somebody else it makes you an accomplice to the gossip and I sure don't want to be involved in the loud kind! Don't get me wrong: I love the whispery kind.

 

Some of the other differences I've noticed:

 

Fantasy Basketball: Our office has a flatscreen TV that is usually on some financial news updates channel but now it's on basketball. I'm all up in it. Not really. But I did make my picks and it wasn't that hard, guys. You just pick the name of the team based on your enjoyment of the spelling of that team (go Gonzaga!). After the first day, five of my six picks ended up moving up in the bracket. I got a little cocky about that (I couldn't help it) but then my luck seemed to run out. I'm now ranked 22 out of 38 of us. I was really hoping to take it all.

 

Crying: I got a little teary the other day while listening to a Leonard Cohen song as one is wont to do, and put it on repeat as one is also wont to do and then I had to cut it out because you don't really want dudes to see you crying and right away assume you have your period.

 

The Gym: Everybody goes. Everybody. It helps that we have a Lifetime Fitness exactly 300 yards away from our office. The other day I had a free personal trainer session, and the man was sticking his fingers in my stomach to touch my spine and I was hoping not to fart and every time I looked up there was another dude from my office doing sit-ups ten feet away.

 

Lunch: Hardly anybody brings a lunch and they all go out in groups and we have all these great restaurants nearby so on any given day you can go with these guys to that place or those guys to that other place. So far I have just brought my lunch (nerd) but I'm dreaming big.

 

Fridays: Everybody leaves at 3:00 on Fridays! I haven't yet but that's gonna be fun this summer.

 

 

Just one of the guys.

 

 

So far I don't think any of my coworkers know that by night I'm a bookie and I also write this dumb blog, so I'll leave my observations there in this sterile and generic place.

 

Remember That Time I Was in a Band?

I was once. For two whole months. It's kind of a cute little best friends story:

I was with Nancy and Beata at a house party of our early 20-something friends' house. Maybe we were all feeling a teensy bit old. Nancy was nowhere to be found and so B and I went searching and found her in the basement, in the sound-proof music studio playing the drums. She normally plays guitar but was having fun just messing around. B picked up the guitar. She sort of plays drums but whatever. I picked up the bass. I normally play guitar but whatever. We started messing around and by the end of the evening we had written three songs.

The joke was that we should call ourselves "Rome In A Day" because that's kinda what happened. But that didn't sound as cute as "Ramona Day" and there you go.

Summer's little brother Ben helped us record and produce our three songs before I left the country. Sadly, tragic circumstances led to the loss of two of our songs, but we did get one up on Sound Cloud. Not too shabby for three girls playing unfamiliar instruments and only a couple practices before laying it down, eh? 

Hey you! by Ramona Day
 

Nancy on guitar
Beata on drums
Kady on bass and vocals


Nancy even made T-shirts. Here is our buddy Davey modeling:

I call for a Ramona Day reunion!

Elsa's! House! of Sleep!

Why yes, I need a mattress!

How could I NOT get on down to Elsa's House of Sleep and ask for Fancy Ray's $50 discount? One of its two locations is just one block from my house (but I made them deliver anyway) and now I have a NAME BRAND mattress! Also could somebody get me Fancy Ray's phone number? Because I think I'm in love.

Sunday Favorites: Beer in Bed

New to A Lady Reveals Nothing? You've missed SO MUCH. Not to worry. Every Sunday, I dig through the archives to repost an old favorite. Mostly because I'm too lazy to come up with new content every single day. This story originally appeared on September 21, 2011 when Summer and I were living in New Orleans and for some reason I got in the bad habit of drinking beer in bed:

I guess if I'm going to choose to drink beer in bed...

I done had a accident.

...I really should use the nightstand and not set the bottle on the volatile soft cushion-y surface of the mattress.

(Yes that's a can of Dr. Scholl's foot odor spray.  Yes, that's a hilariously huge pair of underwear I've got on.  Not sure why I'm embarrassed of those things, when it's clearly a photo to be embarrassed of for other reasons.)

Tonight, I figured out a solution at the Verdi Mart.  Beer with a cap on it!!  (Yes that's Miller High Life and yes it's 32 ounces.  What?)  

This kind of reminds me of a Facebook thread between my mom and me:

D Hexum Are you making your bed every morning, sweetheart? Sunday at 5:43pm ·  Kady Hexum Mom, why do you have to always embarrass me in front of my friends? Sunday at 6:27pm ·  ·  2 people D Hexum It wouldn't embarrass you if you were to say yes, would it? But then if you were to say no, I guess you would be embarrassing yourself...sorry. Luv ya, Mom Monday at 9:17am ·  ·  2 people Kady Hexum NO mom I haven't made my bed. In fact, last night I found a bowl with a chicken leg in it somewhere near where my HUSBAND isn't. Monday at 9:55am ·  ·  4 people

I still haven't made my bed, Mom.

A complete list of the items in my bed besides me, the Miller High Life (and the bowl with the chicken leg) in it:

Dr. Scholl's foot odor spray.

A bra.

My laptop.

2 t-shirts.

An external hard drive.

My camera.

A New Orleans guidebook.

Headphones.

My mom's travel hairdryer she lent me for this trip.

Bookbag.

3 books.

2 magazines.

A calendar.

1 pair of pants.

A watch.

Two bracelets.

A bottle of nail polish.

Phone charger.

iPod charger.

My purse.

New Digs

I'm sorry I haven't posted in four days. Sue me.

I've been busy taking new fancy lady important jobs in which people think I'm really "knowledgable" and my job title includes the words "Branch" and "Operations" and "Manager" and I should probably not say things like "Poop" or "Tampon" or "how do you spell..." (insert easily spelled commonly known word here).

I also moved into a new apartment. It's perfect and adorable and almost makes me forget that I own a really great house just three miles away that somebody else is living in until August of 2015.

The only problem is that I currently have no furniture. None. I'm sleeping on an air mattress (thank you, K and J, I owe you big) and watching movies with a friend you may know as 'Summer-isms' in the following fashion:

 

Yes that is wine that is not in wine glasses. The movie? Spiderman. With Emma Stone. Sue us.

 

Want a Summer-isms, do you? Here you go:
"I think it's kind of bold for a 17-year-old boy to call himself SpiderMAN, don't you?"

 

Sunday Favorites: The Albatross and my Laziness

New to A Lady Reveals Nothing? You've missed SO MUCH. Not to worry. Every Sunday, I dig through the archives to repost an old favorite. Mostly because I'm too lazy to come up with new content every single day. This story originally appeared on March 6, 2012:

So in my Forbes interview, (did I mention my Forbes interview?) I talked about how one of the benefits of traveling alone is that there's nobody to judge you for holing up in a hotel room and watching TV for 48 hours.

That actually happened.

On the South Island of New Zealand, I was staying with friends of friends of friends of friends (I told you, don't be afraid to invite yourself!)  When I suggested to my host Kiri that she join me as I rented a car and toured the South Island, she lamented that she couldn't make it but instead gave me her car, a cooler, a woolen hat, a map, a 9-day itinerary and sent me off to see the Island by myself.  

I drove and drove and toured ancient breweries and floated down fjords and hiked icy glaciers and rode the famous Queenstown Luge and by the time I made it up to a little city named Dunedin I was a little exhausted.

Learning the proper pour, Montieth's Brewery, Greymouth

On the chairlift on the way up to Luge, Queenstown

Hiking the glacier, Franz Joseph/Fox

Dinosaur Egg Boulders, Moeraki

In Dunedin, Kiri hooked me up with two nights in a free hotel room courtesy of her employer.  I was excited because I had been staying in hostel dorm rooms with sometimes stinky and snore-y girls and boys from places like England and Israel -- in fact it had been two months since I had spent a night alone.  I was totally ready for a little privacy.  

I could never have been prepared for the scene as I turned the key and opened the door to my room.  White crisp linens.  Down duvet.  Flat screen TV.  Cable.  PRIVATE BATHROOM.  Fridge.  Microwave.  Coffee. 

As I put my backpack down, I said out loud, "I will not leave this room until it's time to check out."  And I didn't.  (Fortunately I had the cooler with food.)  I watched TV.  I blogged.  I checked Facebook.  I  took hours-long luxurious showers using every free product on the sink, shaved my legs and then checked Facebook again, in case anything happened.  I napped.  I Skyped all four of my sisters and my mom.  It was delicious.

Yes, I missed the Albatross. (Dunedin is one of the only places in the world where the Albatross can be seen from mainland.)  Oh yah.  And I didn't care.  Instead, I googled Albatross* and looked at photos of them in my underwear as I deep-conditioned my hair for an hour wrapped in a hot wet towel.

The scene of the crime.

*According to http://www.albatross.org.nz/:

The latest Lonely Planet publication 1000 Ultimate Sights features the Royal Albatross Centre alongside the Taj Mahal and Grand Canyon. They say of us: Here at one of New Zealand's hottest attractions the draw card is the birdlife. Taiaroa Head is the site of the world's only mainland royal albatross breeding ground, where you can observe the spectacle of the albatrosses with wingspans of up to 3m coming in to land like a succession of 747s.