"you have fun up there!"

i've been starting out a lot of posts with "remember when..." lately.

here we go.

remember all the way LAST june (2011. i know. forever ago.) and i was in a back brace and going to physical therapy and being an adult? and somewhere in there were a bunch of x-rays, an annoying MRI, a cavity filling, and a spinal injection?

never get a spinal injection. please. they tell you they numb your back. THEY TELL YOU. BUT IT'S NOT NUMB.

but anyway, that was my summer last year, remember that?

well if you don't, i certainly do.

so my cousin jessica started working full-time as this place called the woodhouse day spa, and our other cousin, adrienne is visiting this week from california, and we wanted a tour. from what we heard, this spa was like, super incredibly legit and practically built for royalty.

so last week we got a tour. an infinity pool. amazing spa rooms. an infinity pool. did i say that already? a quiet room to wait with your girlfriends before your massage. beverages. plastic surgery.


jessica, with her discount, booked adrienne and i for a fifty minute swedish massage today in the duet room. nothin' like gettin' a massage with your cousin.

i mean, i don't have a sister. so this was the next best thing. although i love my older brother dearly, i will not get a massage with him.

so adrienne and i showed up at two fifteen when jessica instructed, right when she got off work. then it was fun paperwork!

did i have anywhere that needed extra attention? my back.

did i have anywhere that caused me daily pain? let me think. my back.


after the paperwork was filled out, adrienne and i made a pact to leave on our underwear. it's customary to go completely naked underneath the massage robe, and jessica assured us that our therapists wouldn't see anything, but we made an underwear pact anyway.

sleeeeep time.
this is my only picture. sorry.

you don't break pacts like that, man. you just don't.

so we went into the HUGE changing room, found a locker, and slipped into our massage robes, which were white and fluffy. we held true to our underwear pact. then we were lead into a warm, dark room with cozy amber light that had a fire and relaxing music playing. it was labeled "women's quiet room" and i guess you sit there and be quiet before your massage.

adrienne and i sat on a couch. jessica joined us. adrienne and i each grabbed a pillow. and fell asleep.

then it was massage time.

my therapist's name was joe. he looked pretty good-natured. i told him straight up that under NO circumstances was he allowed to touch my heels, due to my heel breaking incident of 2008. you know, that day where i broke both of my heels at the same time and couldn't walk for five months.

i should blog about that.

when i told him that my back was nothing but a big mess of knots, he smiled. and i told him he could dig HARD.

the massage room was a small room with two beds, one for adrienne and one for me. we climbed on in, they dimmed the lights, and then suddenly joe was putting this weird night mask over my face.

and then he was massaging my head and i wanted to die of happiness.

i don't remember much of the actual massage, mostly because it felt so fantastic. it started with my head, then down to my shoulders, my upper back, and then each arm. then i got to roll over ungainly while trying not to reveal myself, and then it was my legs, and then my back.

so. i am not joking when i say that i have about twenty knots in my back, ten on each side of spine, one after another, from my neck to my butt. i just kind of live with it. my boyfriend has given me a three hour back massage on one specific area and he has not made a dent in these knots.

when joe started working on my back, you could hear him sigh. and i said, "have fun up there!"

after agonizingly wonderful pressure and knot relieving, they're still there, as big and as stubborn as ever.

once the massage was over and i felt oily, slimy, and exhausted, adrienne and i went back to the changing room where (separately!) we showered in this fantastically huge rainfall shower. it was like being in the greatest thunderstorm ever, but the rain was hot tub temperature and you were washing your hair.

"this is amazing! this is just like magic!"

um. i like gilderoy lockhart. he can always help explain easy to explain situations.

with my lovely friends and family discount and my tip to joe, who did not touch my heels and made my back feel about ten percent better, my total was seventy dollars.

so far, in the two weeks that i have been home, i have already spent a hundred and thirty on teacher clothes, and two hundred and sixty on my new ipod.

i am locking away my debit card where i won't find it until... until... august!


(i interrupt this blog to tell you that mufasa just died on my VHS. WHY DOES HE DIE EVERY TIME I WATCH THIS MOVIE. which is... about twice a day on average. WHY. we now continue with our regularly scheduled programming of emily blogging.)

so. i had my very first massage, i paid a bunch for it, now i'm broke, and you know what?

i am sore. as. hell.

at work tonight, when i was giving my older kids a breath control set (because i'm mean) my legs were extra super sore.

or maybe that was because my mom and i took a three mile power walk after dinner, where we saw three baby robins being torn to pieces by a dog and some crows.

then we found a dead fish in our flower bed.

must be the circle of life.

i'm just gonna leave this blog here. because it's kind of unsatisfactory, and mufasa is dead, and that makes me sad.

and my mother and i found a fish in our flower bed.