Is the Nerdist the cure for the mid-life crisis?

As our nine month mid-life crisis journey reaches it's third month, one thing Julie and I have learned is that our baby list is a living breathing thing.  We may not have written down that seeing the Nerdist, Chris Hardwick, was part of our mid-life crisis list, but it only took about a heartbeat for his name to get slapped on there the second we found out he was coming to town.

From left: Julie and Sunshine

We came to love the Nerdist when we discovered The Walking Dead.  Immediately, Hardwick became our zombie trauma grief counselor every Sunday night as we decompressed from the rotten flesh-filled stress fest that is Walking Dead.  Eventually, we started to realize that Hardwick wasn't just a slave to undead decompression for the living, but he was a stand-up comedian with so many irons in the fire that he was about to give Ryan Seacrest a run for his money.  Hardwick has a successful podcast, late night show, comedy tours, YouTube channel, is a magazine contributor, and has shown up in a little bit of everything.

From left: Julie and Sunshine

Last year, we found out too late that our weird litte city was a stop on the comedy tour he went on during the off season of Walking Dead.  Sadly, we kicked ourselves for not realizing sooner that we could see one of our favorite walker trauma triage specialists in person and vowed not to let another missed Chris moment happen.

Well, again, almost too late, we found out he was headed to Portland, and we quickly snagged ourselves a couple of tickets.  I've been to a ton of events where I've met the performers, so I thought maybe, just maybe, we could scratch meeting someone famous off of our baby list.  I also know that it takes about six weeks to get a press pass most of the time, and we were a week out from his show, so I couldn't even use my press magic to make anything happen, so we went in with a tweet and a prayer.

Red hot zombie guts

When we arrived at Helium Comedy Club, we soon realized that we should have sprung for the reserved seating, but still, there's not a bad seat in the house.  Our waitress was amazing, and despite the reviews that said we'd never get service more than once, she was very attentive to everyone in her section throughout the entire show.  We ordered the hummus plate, and it was amazing.  While we waited, we entertained ourselves and the tables around us by playing with our zombie finger puppets who exploded in red hots every time they fell over....because we stuffed them with Red Hots so they would have guts...don't ask, I can't give an explanation.  We're just giant children.

Tomatoes don't fit inside zombies

Jon Dore and Shane Torres tickled our funny bones so much that we totally lost it in a googol of giggles..  They were pretty funny in a strange awkward sort of way.

When Hardwick came out, we both felt like we were on the set of Talking Dead, except he made us laugh so hard that we were pretty sure we were going to die with jokes that pretty much had zero to do with flesh eating monsters.

Chloe Dykstra

Immediately, the most awkward of all things happened.  Someone threw a pair of red lacy panties on the stage...at the Nerdist...who obviously had no idea what to do about the situation.  Uncomfortably,  he held them up, tried to figure out what to do with them, and stared at them like they were going to explode.  Then we got a bonus!  Chloe Dykstra, Hardwick's girlfriend, bounded down from the sound booth to rescue him from the evil death grip of the red panties by whisking them far enough away that they lost their power over him.  It was like they had some sort of magic within them that prevented his ability to continue on with the show until they were destroyed by his heroin.  What do you think about THAT fairy tale?




We listened, we learned, we laughed hysterically, and being the nerd that I am, I took notes.  No, no, not because I'm a total weirdo, because I am, but because I hate that moment when you try to remember why a comedian was so funny and you can't remember a single thing.  I scribbled on my napkin things that you would only get if you were there...or maybe somewhere else watching him live.  Here's a rundown of the undeniable hilarity:

• Dancing Nerdist.  Enough said.  I will never be able to look at a dance floor the same.
• Weird virus baby.  As much as most people would love the idea of taking something that was once living inside of Hardwick and then having it live inside of them, I don't think a virus is what they might be thinking.
• Chris Hardwick, you ruined Finding Nemo for all of us....or did you make it better?  I can't decide, it's too confusing.
• Grameltoe.....I'm not even going to go there.
• Devil's Taffy.  I have actually replaced all curse words with this phrase.  If I am freaking out, I am going to yell, "What in the devil's taffy are we going to do now?"
• I don't want to play marbles....especially not six more times.
• 11 years
• Midwife
• I think I'm turning Japanese, but I"m not very good at it.
• That moment when Hardwick was having Deja Vu
• Face up on the raft son
• Balloon animals will never be the same.....ever.
• Flarb
• Did you read the comic...you know, the one I gave you last year?
• Don't just stand there, help our son!
• I'm sold on kigurumi
• Bonus mom

Purple Wolf Kigurumi

After reading over my nerd notes, I wondered if Hardwick would even remember what any of these mean.  

Sadly, our tweets to meet Hardwick fell on blind eyes, as perfect as it would have been to meet him AND Chloe, but we still have about six months to track down a famous person to meet and we weren't about to let that hamper the extraordinary experience we just had.  

As we drove home to our families who weren't laughing to death, we wondered how weird we were going to sound for the next six weeks or so that it would take for the giggling to calm down.  We laughed even harder when we realized nothing we repeated from the show would be funny to anyone but us.  

Even if watching Nerdist perform live didn't cure our mid-life crisis, I'm 100% positive that the amount of laughter we experienced knocked a couple years off.  Maybe next year, during our mid-life crisis' first year of life, we'll be able to shake hands with the man who both helped us grieve through the loss of Hershel and the realization of crazy Lizzy and who made us laugh so hard we started to wish we were wearing adult diapers...you know, the cool ones that the astronauts use.

 

Thanks for the memories Hardwick!!
-Sunshine O'Connor

OH NO! TIME IS A REAL THING!

Well, since the launch of this crazy mission, I have come to the realization that you don't get to spend a lot of time to relish turning 40.  Between my 4 kiddos and Julie's 2 kiddos, plus our husbands, work schedules, and life craziness, we have not had a chance to knock anything off of our list lately!

Turns out time is a real thing, and it just won't hold still to save our lives!

We did, however, add something to the crazy list of must-do's.

Neither one of us are happy with the way we let our bodies slide over the winter.  We went from such a crazy active lifestyle to a sort of soft and mooshy one.

New goal, 30 EXTRA minutes of activity every day.  To make sure we're good accountability buddies, we, the old ladies, have decided to learn how to use snapchat.  Silly, right?  So far, it's hilarious, yet we've  come to decide that snapchat is the new way teens keep things from their parents.  Excellent.  Untraceable information that disappears in ten seconds forever?  The thing that comes to mind is, "This message will self destruct in...."

Go, go gadget arms.

So, we have to send a snapchat every day of our extra activity to each other, otherwise we get to become Jillian Michaels until that 30 minutes is complete.

Our shapchats have gotten so rediculous that I'm glad we can't share them on social media hahaha!

Well, here's to June, and hopefully knocking some things off of the baby list!

And we paint....again

We're addicted.  Can't deny it, can't hide it, and we might need a 12-step program.

One of the wine and painting companies in Portland is called Wine and Canvas.  They schedule paining classes at different restaurants and you can sip on the beverage of your choice, eat some dinner, and paint a masterpiece.

After our first paining expedition, we decided to do it again.  This time, we went to the Old Spaghetti Factory to paint something called The Bench.  Julie and I met our good friends Summer and Daphne there, and were excited to slap some paint on a canvas!

We started the evening with some food and Carnival Martinis.  If you don't know what those are, I suggest you try one.  Like the headpiece of a Vegas showgirl, two large martini glasses filled with plumes of bright pink cotton candy and cherries were delivered to our table with smaller glasses of martini mix, which we were then instructed to pour over the top of the cotton candy.  It melted into the sweetest martini ever invented.

Then it was time to paint.  The teacher and assistant were fun enough people, and the painting actually

looked like it might be more simple than the one we did before, and we were right.....until the bench.

I'm not sure if it was the martini, slight delirium, or us just not understanding the words coming out of our instructor's mouth, but bench has become a curse word between the four of us who were there that night.  Even the zombies showed up to oogle at our terrible benches.  Songs were made up about them, we grumbled at them, and no matter what we did, none of us were happy with our benches.

Then it came time for the trees.  We all love trees, and it alleviated some of the pressure we felt about making our benches look like benches.  Grumbling turned back into laughter, whining subsided, and jokes about dancing trees took over the dialogue.

Something about painting a tree just seems to make everyone happy and inspired.

Enter the flowers.  How much fun do you think it was to cover our paintings with flowers?  So much fun.  So much that I got so carried away that my painting was almost nothing but a gigantic pile of flowers.  I did think about burring the bench in them, not gonna lie.  There was no shortage of whiny benches jokes.

When all was said and done, I was happy with the entire experience.  Good drinks, good friends, a hilarious group of people, and another masterpiece to hang somewhere in my house.  Even if I do hate the bench, I will always remember that evening every time I look at that cray bench.

All in all, it was a really fun night, and I can't wait to do it again.  Wine and Canvas staff are very professional yet very laid back and realistic at the same time.  They were happy to give help suggestions as well as praised our paintings even if they looked like a third grader painted them.


For more information about Wine and Canvas, you can find them on the web at wineandcanvas.com

Trust me, you're gonna love it.

It begins at Paint Night

As my birthday approached, the list of things we needed to accomplish before we turned 40 grew.   At the same time, my super awesome friend Bree booked a top secret birthday thing for me and invited Julie to come along.

Little did I know it was one of the things on the top of our list-Paint Night.

As we sat in front of our blank canvasses wondering how on Earth we were going to duplicate the painting at the front of the room, we were handed aprons and brushes.

Then the painting fun began.  The instructor was fabulous at taking us step by step through our painting experience, explaining why we were doing what we were doing, and how it was going to work in our painting.

There were a lot of laughs as we all fumbled our way through the steps, but even if we ended up with something that looked like it was painted by a second grader, we were going to love it.

For Julie and I, it was our first experience with paint, which is why going to a Paint Night event was on our baby list.  We don't expect to become master artists, but to have a few pieces of art that we created that symbolize our adventure is priceless.

The silly comments people made as they got to know each other a little bit from the other side of the canvas were hilarious.  The guy on the other side of my canvas was hysterical.

As our paintings began to take shape, we all branched off from the instructions just a little bit on our own as we got more comfortable with a brush in our hands.

Not one person freaked out that they hated the work they were doing.  The instructor wandered the room between each step looking at paintings, answering questions, and helping with technique.  As you can see from my masterpiece, I needed as much help as I could get.

Then we stood before our finished pieces, both impressed with ourselves, and slightly addicted to painting.

One of the best parts of the night was wandering around and looking at everyone else's works of art.  Some were exactly like the instructor's painting, and some went so far off the reservation that they were complete original masterpieces.  Some were so advanced that we wondered why they would spend their time at a Paint Night with a bunch of amateurs.  Then I remembered, oh yeah, because it was hilarious.

We not only walked away with a beautiful painting that can hang in our homes and forever remind us of this amazing night, but we got to check something off of the baby list, which made us feel accomplished, and we gained a special kind of confidence.

Now when I look at a painting or a project that I might be interested in doing, I'm not going to hesitate to try.  Thank you so much Paint Night for being the very first thing to get checked off of our mid life crisis baby list,  and thank you Bree, for unknowingly knowing that this was on the list.  I hope that we can revisit this night again!

Paint Night is hosted by restaurants all over Portland.  To learn more and find out what paintings are coming up, you can find them at paintnight.com.

-Sunshine O'Connor

The birth of a mid-life crisis

Call it an epiphany, or being touched by a muse, or whatever you want to call it, but the day Julie and I realized that the clock was ticking on our 30's.  There was so much we hadn't done!  We weren't ready!  Then it dawned on me that there are 9 months between my 39th birthday and her 40th, and the idea of a scheduled mid-life crisis took form.  We called it our 'baby'. 

For months we compiled lists of things we really wanted to do.  Then we had a hilarious delirious meeting (which is how our meetings always end up) and realized that we would need about a kabillion and a private jet to achieve everything on our lists.  After narrowing it down, we've come up with some crazy shenanigans including, but not limited to riding the sling-shot, going on a zipline, and meeting someone famous.

Oh, and then there are the beard pictures.  I don't know how the beard picture idea was exactly born, but we decided that we needed to convince everyone we can with a beard to let us take a picture of them with the little plastic zombies that go everywhere with us.  Oh, it's happening.

Follow along and see what craziness we come up with!  

Living life,

Sunshine