On Voting...or the Lack Thereof

You guys I have a secret I've been keeping for about the last 24 hours. I've been keeping it a secret because I feel shameful and quite frankly, it's a little embarrassing.

...I didn't vote on Tuesday.

There it is. You can start judging me if you want but you need to hear me out. Here's the thing, I actually tried to vote three different times on Tuesday. THREE TIMES. All to no avail. This kills me because voting is my jam, you guys. Like, I'm that annoying person that continuously reminds my friends they need to go vote and I sometimes (read: always) take selfies with my "I voted" sticker.

I love voting so much that I never mail-in an early ballot because it's just not the same as physically going down to my polling place and casting my vote. I've voted in every election I could since I turned 18 - primary, presidential, local, gubernatorial you name it I've made sure to vote in it. Ever since Twitter created the voting/poll feature, I vote in any poll that comes up in my feed cause dammit I just wanna vote. "Who should the Suns draft as a lottery pick?" No idea but I'm gonna vote on it. "Which proposed change from the NFL owners' meeting would bother you the most?" I don't really know but yolo I'm gonna vote anyway.

But I digress. So anyway, Tuesday morning like I usually do, I stopped in at my usual polling place on my way to work only to find it wasn't there. It took a page out of Harry Potter and like some Platform 9 3/4 shiz, it just disappeared. "That's weird!" I casually thought to myself. No biggie, I'll find somewhere to go after work.

Throughout the day I get texts from both my mom and my dad sending me pictures of the lines they waited in in order to vote. "Geez, I hope there's no lines by the time I get off work" I thought to myself. I proceeded to leave work a couple hours early to not only vote but also because I was going to a spring training game with Nate that night. As I'm driving home on the freeway Nate calls me, "I'm at the American Legion and the line is wrapped around the building three times. I'm not waiting in it." "This isn't looking good," I thought as I kept driving and began praying I could find a polling place without masses amounts of lines.

The short of it is - I couldn't. I stopped at two more places and found nothing but traffic jams, hoards of people, never ending lines, and not a parking spot in sight. If this were any other normal night I would wait in these lines but I only had about an hour before Nate and I needed to leave for the baseball game. So, as it pained me - I decided to go home.

This really hurts me because as much as I understand it's not technically true, I tell myself that every vote counts - including mine, and so since I didn't get a chance to go cast my vote against Donald Trump I'm gonna feel personally responsible if he gets elected. I feel like I let my country down, you guys. Nothing else makes me feel as guilty as not voting. Eating a whole box of mac and cheese in one sitting? Nah. Drinking a whole bottle of wine by myself on a Friday night? Never. Eating all of the chips I bought for Nate before he gets to have any? Nope. But not having voted? Killing me.

So if the general election is anything like this primary - that is, if Arizona decides to only keep 60 of what was 200 polling places open (SIXTY out of TWO HUNDRED)(H8 U, AZ), I'm gonna have to just pack it in the night before and camp it out. It'll be like P Diddy (is that still his name?) and "Rock the Vote" except this time it'll be "Camp the Vote"... cause that'll be the only way you'll actually be able to vote.

Thanks, Arizona.

Choosing Post Titles is Hard: Sunday Night Edition

Hello and welcome, to the Sunday night edition of T is for Townsend. This is the portion of our show where I drink red wine and blog while simultaneously trying to catch the gnat that keeps flying around my head because I'm overly concerned about it going in my wine glass. Wine glasses are where gnats go to die, I'm sure of it.

Anyway, before I get into weekend shenanigans which, now that I'm thinking about it could be summed up like so: brunch, bridesmaid duty, antiques, wine, grocery shopping, and a Fixer Upper marathon, I just want to take a moment and acknowledge that this Snapchat face-swap thing is getting a little out of hand and maybe even a little annoying but please just look at how perfect this is:

I'm Randy Johnson you guys. RANDY JOHNSON. ...If face-swapping is wrong I don't wanna be right. 

Also, live update: I killed the gnat before it could fly into my wine glass and so now I can blog in peace. I know you're all as relieved as I am. 

So anyway, this weekend was a good one. A busy one. Actually I take that back only one day was busy and the other was not. Saturday was the busy day and it started with brunch (because how else should you start a Saturday am I right) with my frans Kailey, and Brianna, and Carlin. And also mimosas. Mimosas are my frans too. From brunch we went bridesmaids dress shopping for Brianna's wedding which was super fun, but in hindsight, what's not super fun is gorging yourself on brunch and mimosas and then having to go get measured and try on dresses. It's not good for the self-esteem. 

After dress shopping came antiquing. There's this antique show in Phoenix that's only open like, the third Thursday-Sunday of every month or something like that and conveniently I found out about it the week before and was able to plan a trip out there. So after a pit stop at Dutch Bro's for an afternoon pick-me-up we arrived at Sweet Salvage and channeled our inner Joanna Gaines.

There were two warehouses plus like, an outdoor area all full of treasures. 

And when I say "treasures" I truly mean treasures like for example a big huge sing that says Wine:

I didn't buy it because as I mentioned, it was big and huge and I don't have a big huge space for it in my house. In my soul, yes. I have space in my soul for wine always. Wine is my soulmate (besides Nate I guess), but logistically I have nowhere to put in my physical household. I was however, in the market for a vintage-y headboard and/or nightstands for my bedroom because I do have physical space for those in my household but alas, I didn't find any. I didn't walk away totally empty handed though because I found this awesome Insta account - Twenty6 Designs a few weeks ago and she happened to be at the show this weekend so I bought this awesome tank from her:

Go check her out (and her Etsy shop) she has some awesome stuff!

After I finished my day with these lovely ladies I met up with my friend Sarah for dinner and wine. We not only tried a new place but we also used Lyft for the first time. I went to call an Uber at like 6pm when we were trying to leave and there was already a surge charge for Uber. At 6pm. In Chandler. I was so annoyed I was like this is stupid and I downloaded Lyft and decided to give it a try. When you download it for the first time it gives you like, up to $50 in ride credits to be used within your first two weeks so I'm already a fan. I Uber/Lyft everywhere nowadays because my husband is a cop and I get the drinking and driving/DUI/ZERO TOLERANCE lecture often. I shouldn't say "lecture," "lecture" has a negative connotation and I know it's coming from a place of love and concern and caring, so maybe I'll use "discussion" instead. We have the drinking and driving/DUI/ZERO TOLERANCE discussion often. So, I figure I'll skip it altogether and just get driven around everywhere if I plan on having a drink. It's a win win, really. 

Sunday I only got up from the couch one time to go grocery shopping and the rest of the day I spent watching a Fixer Upper/Flip or Flop marathon. For the record, Fixer Upper and Chip and Joanna Gaines IS LIFE. 

And that brings us to this lovely Sunday evening. Now that this blog post is finished I'm gonna go catch the end of the Coyotes hockey game, then probably scroll through instagram a few more times, maybe check Twitter, then try and go to sleep but probably end up just laying there until 1am like I always do on Sunday nights. Is it just me or does anyone else have issues falling asleep Sunday nights?? 

Have a fantastic week, friends!

Twenty-Nine and Lots of Wine

So I sat down this weekend with my dear friend Brianna and we were gonna blog together all afternoon (and drink too cause duh, day drinking and blogging on a Saturday). I had all these ideas in my head of posts to write and I kept saying, "Do I start out with a catch-up post? It's been almost two months since I blogged I feel like I need to start out with a catch-up post." But the truth is, I'm kind of tired of doing catch up posts. I feel like they can be boring. And quite frankly, that's the part of blogging that I've always struggled with a little - I just don't really think people care that much about what I do in my life. So, let's skip the "catch-up" shiz and just get right to the most fun thing that happened since I last came around these parts: my birthday. ...cause it's my birthday dangit and I wanna write about it.

I turned 29 (twenty nine holy smokes) at the end of February and to celebrate I took four of my BFF's up to Cottonwood and Jerome and we went wine tasting. ...cause if you had to guess really, what else would I do for my birthday other than drink wine? So we piled into one car on a Saturday morning and made the trek about two hours north of the valley.

We arrived in Cottonwood right in time for lunch (and lunch means it's socially acceptable to start drinking so yay for that). I was all worried about transportation because I've never been to Cottonwood and I wasn't sure how close all the tasting rooms were, like if you could walk to all of them, and I didn't want anyone to have to drive because then hello, then you can't drink as much wine but I didn't know if there's Uber in Cottonwood and there isn't because Cottonwood is like 3 square miles (I'm being dramatic it's bigger than that) but have no fear - there's a taxi service in Cottonwood, Arizona (I realize that was the longest run-on sentence ever but that's the beauty of a blog - no one's grading this).Yes, A taxi service. Singular. So we called her and she took us to downtown Cottonwood to get the party started. We asked her how late she works to make sure we had a ride back at the end of the day and she said "Oh yeah, call me and I'll make sure and pick you girls up. Maybe you'll be more talkative after some wine tasting." ....which is basically the understatement of the year.

So we had lunch at this place called The Tavern, shared a bottle of wine amongst the five of us, then walked to our first wine tasting stop - Fire Mountain Wines!

This place ended up being our favorite out of the three tasting rooms we went to - we loved the atmosphere and the wines tasted the best! Although that could be because we were the most sober at our first stop but whatever. We stopped by on our way out of town to buy a few bottles!

Stop #2 was a place called Pillsbury Wine Company.

After tasting six wines at Fire Mountain, we decided to go with five more at Pillsbury because yolo it's my 29th birthday right?

Needless to say we were feeling pretty dang good at this point in the day...so good that we invited the guy sitting all by himself in the chair next to us to play Cards Against Humanity with us. He obliged and probably immediately regretted it. We also talked to the two elderly women sitting on the other side of us, who were BFFs and on a girls trip themselves, about all the places they travel together and how that's their "thing"...and then immediately we got all emotional and we're like "omg guys can that be us when we're 70 you guys can we do that can we grow old together can we be friends forever" You know, how drunk girls do. 

It was clear that at this point in the day we were in definite need of some food, so we found the nearest pizza place, sat down and just started ordering pizzas...you know, how drunk girls do. Pizza in the belly, a little water in the system and onward ho to the next tasting room.

Our third and final stop, was the Arizona Stronghold tasting room. The wines were "eh" but I'm not gonna lie, that's probably because the whole time we were there it was a little bit of a blur.

It was only at this time did we really stop and add up all the wine we drank throughout the day. It was a lot. Enough to make me drunk text my husband. He's all working, fighting crime, being a cop stuff and his wife is drunk texting him. I'm so annoying.

I swear, he loves me. 

After stop #3 we were smart enough to call it a day and call our cab back for a ride home. 

While we were waiting, there was a man (possibly homeless but whatever) that walked by with a bird on his arm. Like, a pet bird. So naturally we're like "Look that man has a bird!" and then he came over and talked to us and let us hold his bird and then when I tried to give it back to him he put it on my head. And I was like, a bird whisperer or something, you guys. All of us were. We were wine-drunk, bird whisperers in Cottonwood, Arizona. New life skill for my last year in my twenties.

We finally saw our cab arrive after what felt like 30 minutes of waiting. And by "arrive" I mean drove right past. And then turn around only to drive right past us again. So we were left with no other options (obvi) other than to literally run after this minivan in the street (it's fine, there's not much traffic in Cottonwood) yelling her name because hello, how else would she know who she's picking up right? She probably saw us in her rear view and kept driving to get away from us but hey, we may be drunk but we work out ok? And we caught up to that minivan. ...you know, like drunk girls who workout do. Anyway, we requested a trip through Dairy Queen and she happily obliged. For that reason, we bought her an ice cream cone. Because people should be rewarded for transporting five wine-drunk girls in one mini-van. From there we ate our ice cream and serenaded her with Justin Bieber's Love Yourself because don't lie that song is the jam, all the way back to our hotel. 

We finished our ice cream, ran around our hotel room for a while, drank a little more wine (oops), and eventually decided it was time to walk across the street to the gas station for Cheetos and some water. We all got the same gallon jugs of water, so to distinguish whose was whose:

Eventually we fell asleep, woke up Sunday morning, packed up, and headed up to go see Jerome! Jerome is a huge wine tasting area too, but since Sarah was driving us back home that afternoon and couldn't drink, the rest of us can't really drink either because we stand in wine solidarity. If one person can't have wine, the rest of us shouldn't either right? We cruised through the town, found a cool spot for lunch, then checked out all the cool shops.

Before we knew it it was time to head back home - always the worst part of vacations/birthday weekends/girls trips...but probably the best part of blog posts because you're probably like oh my gawwwsh she has carried on for toooo long with this post. Maybe so but, it was the best weekend I've had in a long time and so much fun (and wine) was had by all. If you wanna see Kailey's vlog of the trip check it out here.

If the first weekend of the last year in my twenties is any indication of how the rest of the year will go - it's gonna be a good one! 

2016 New Year's Resolutions (A month or so late but who's counting)

I'm gonna start this post off and just come out and say it...I realize it's February and I'm just now posting new years resolutions but 1.) Forgive me cause I'm lazy, and 2.) It's a good excuse for a blog post right?? Also, my friend sent me this and it re-inspired me to write this post even though I'm a month late:

Yolo right?...I've gotta stop saying that so much. ..But not enough to put it in my new years resolutions cause yolo, I kind of like it.

So, without further ado, here are my top ten New Year's Resolutions for 2016...in no particular order:

1.) First and foremost, I resolve to not drink less wine

2.) Secondly, eat less cheese and bread to make up for the not drinking less wine

3.) Blog more

4.) Stop biting my nails...but only in front of Nate so I don't get yelled at

5.) I'm committing to washing my face better this year so as to avoid getting face wash in my eyes so often. Face wash gets in my eyes at least once a week you guys and I don't get it. Am I not good at washing my face? Am I doing it wrong? Using the wrong technique? Am I not being careful enough? Whatever it is, it really burns and I'm tired of it. I need to be better at washing my face.

6.) This year I resolve to being a more aggressive driver. If you drive on the 60 in the far right lanes that you know are ending, just to cut everybody off and get ahead...I hate you. I mean, I don't hate you I'm being dramatic, but I really don't like that and I'm not letting it happen anymore MMK?? So cut the shit, I won't let you over.

7.) Be less afraid of bees

8.) Make more money so that Nate can be a stay-at-home husband. .....he told me just right now to write that...

9.) Learn the actual words to a Sia song. Does anyone really know what she's saying?

10.) Lastly, in 2016 I resolve to take back my spot on the bed. For some reason Gunther thinks that spot somehow belongs to him but dammit, that's my spot and I want it back

Happy new (and slightly already used) year friends!

Another Catch-up Post

I'm a little embarrassed because when I sent out Christmas cards this year I was like, "oh if you want to keep up with us throughout the year check out my blog!"...but really when I said "keep up with" clearly it only meant semi-annually (I'm being dramatic, but still) because as I look at when my last post was, it was all the way back before Thanksgiving. Oops. But I mean, the holidays come and you get so busy, and then the holidays leave and you get so lazy...or maybe that's just me, I dunno. But either way, here I am to dust off this 'ol blog and catch it up.

Thanksgiving was good this year, except there was no Nate because he had to work and be cop and all that stuff...so it was just myself and Maycee and Gunther representing the Townsends at Thanksgiving:

After Thanksgiving was also good because for Black Friday my parents and I decided to head up north and go for a day hike. We crossed the creek a few times, found tons of huge Cottonwood leaves, and all the walking helped aid digestion as we were all still so full from Thanksgiving (it's actually pretty incredible how much food a person can eat in one day).

I said "Dad you're in my picture can you scoot over please" and this was what I got:

I also told him he should't wear that hat anymore because it makes him look Russian and because, communism. And this is America. 

Then it was time to celebrate Christmas. We got our Christmas pictures taken, which I'm subsequently obsessed with, by my dear friend Jennica at Amaes Photography:

We picked up our tree:

Then once we got it home Nate threw these on it and said "There it's decorated. Don't ever say I'm not festive."

Ok Nate.

We Christmas Eve'd by drinking Christmas-y cocktails and playing Christmas charades/Pictionary/name that tune with the family....Nate still working:

Opened presents Christmas morning...before Nate went into work in the afternoon (literally worst schedule ever). Gunther helped:

Later Christmas day I made the best decision I've made yet, by getting my parents on Snapchat. Now I get selfies of my mom, endless pictures of slippers snuggled underneath blankets, and snaps of my dad's shoes wherever he may happen to be at the moment (foot on the desk at work, foot on the floor in a restaurant for lunch, foot on floor in office, etc. etc.). Seriously it's the best and I'm not even being sarcastic. Please, get your parents on Snapchat.

After Christmas came New Years, and then after New Years came January 2nd (duh right?) and with that came the Cactus Bowl and I went with my sister and her BF and my dad to watch ASU play at Chase Field.

I was SO EXCITED because for Christmas Nate got me the throw back Pat Tillman jersey I'd been wanting for so long and this was the perfect place to break it in.

As the game progressed my dad kept pointing out people's hats and jackets and ASU gear and he's like, "I think I need to update my ASU stuff." I'm like yeahhhhh, because you're wearing the shirt I got you for Father's Day back when I was still in undergrad. YOLO though, I like that he still sports it.

So then after January 2nd comes other days after January 2nd (duh right?) in which one of my BFFs finally moved home from Montana...hallelujah!

She got engaged while in Montana and once she came back home we didn't waste time doing wedding-y things. For example, the bridal expo:

The whole time we were there vendors kept asking, "So are you guys the bridal party?!" And we'd look at Brianna and be like, "Welllllllll we haven't officially been asked yet but..." So then later after the expo we were officially asked and we laughed and laughed and drank our mini bottles of wine right there on the spot.

And then one of my other BFF's in the whole wide world Charlene, finally got engaged and so we celebrated her and Colin this week and the wedding planning is already underway!

So if you're counting that means two weddings this year I get to help plan and do wedding-y things and go to bachelorette parties and wedding showers and drink lots of mimosas and I'm really excited about it. A good time will be had by all, surely.

So, to conclude this catch-up of all catch-up posts: Thanksgiving was good, Christmas was good, Nate worked literally every single holiday this year but yolo it'll get better, go Devils, yay weddings, and while my east coast friends are buried under feet of snow we're out here in AZ on top of mountains soaking up the sunshine:

Can't complain.