This is Joy & Claire
Underrated TV characters, Joy’s love for Selling Sunset and Married at First Sight, Claire is on her way to Mexico, Miles wins a karate tournament, Joy gives a Joe update, and Joy opens up about her previous job ending.
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Secret caves and valium naps. That’s all you need to know.
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Claire’s spring break, Joe the puppy is here, and worst date ever stories.
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This is Joy & Claire Episode 120: Spring Breaks, Bad Dates and Puppies!
Episode Date: March 31, 2022
Transcription Completed: May 6, 2022
Audio Length: 56:52 minutes
Joy: Hey guys, this is Joy.
Claire: And this is Claire.
Joy: Welcome back.
Claire: Hi, everybody.
Joy: Happy spring.
Claire: I know, it’s so nice out. I hope it’s nice where you are.
Joy: I hope so too. But I did just see Laura Ligos and our friend Tina in the state of New York that were not so hot. It was very cold there. East Coast, not so fun.
Claire: East Coast, not as much. Although I will say, I am actually realizing winter is my favorite season.
Joy: Really? I just did a [sound of surprise]
Claire: Yeah, she did.
Joy: I know you like winter. I know you like snow. But the frigid cold, really? The freezing, frigid cold?
Claire: It just doesn’t bother me. I don’t love it, but it doesn’t bother me. But what does bother me is being too hot.
Joy: Okay.
Claire: I don’t mind being cold really at all. I actually feel like it kind of wakes me up. And I feel like, woo, it’s cold out. I feel like I get overheated so quickly, and it’s not an experience I enjoy. I don’t mind being cold.
Joy: Oh.
Claire: I know. See. I feel the way about being too cold as people feel about being hot. To hot people, being hot is sort of like, “Yeah, but you’re hot. You’re in the sun. You’re warm.”
Joy: Getting vitamin D.
Claire: Yeah. And I’m like, “You’re cold and you’re all bundled up, and the wind is blowing.” False. I don’t actually love wind. But the thing about Colorado is it’s still sunny, even when it’s cold. That’s the key.
Joy: That’s true. I feel very lucky about Colorado in that sense. Especially my friends in Arizona, they think it just snows constantly in Colorado. Which at least where we live, it does not. It’s just really funny because they’re always like, “It’s just so cold there.” We get so much sunshine. It is oddly not that cold. We’re just talking about weather now. I was going to say, does it feel like a pain in the ass to have to carry so much extra stuff? Like clothing things.
Claire: Summer is not all that different. In the summertime, you have water bottle, sunscreen. Kids are more likely to get dirty in the summer, so you have to have extra clothes. I feel like in the winter you have your own stuff too. You have your jackets. It just sort of adds to the pile. No matter where you’re going or what season or what occasion, you have to bring a bunch of crap. If anything, in the winter they always have pockets in their jackets. They can help. I remember though, when I was in college, I worked in a flower shop as a lot of you know. There was this woman who moved from San Diego. Her husband was moving to Boulder. They moved to Boulder, and she got a job with us. I remember one of her first days, she was like, “What do you do with all of your stuff? Like if you go to a restaurant.” I was like, “I don’t understand the question.” She was like, “Where do you put your coat?” I was like, “What do you mean, ‘where do you put your coat?’” It had never occurred to me to not know what to do with all your stuff. I was like, “Well, you put your mittens in your pockets and hang your coat on the back of your chair.” She was like, “Well, doesn’t that get in the way?” I mean, not really. But if you really weren’t used to just having all that stuff with you all the time. If you were from San Diego and all you had was a purse, I’d be like, yeah, what do I do with this huge freaking jacket and these big gloves, this hat. You where your boots everywhere? Yeah, you kind of always look like you’re getting ready to go chop down a tree. This is the look. I don’t know what to tell you.
Joy: I shudder at what I used to wear when I moved to Colorado from Arizona. I just didn’t have an idea of warmth or things that you should wear. I used to run in the most random sweatpants, things that did not keep you warm, not moisture-wicking anything. I think I had a J.Crew big trench coat that was like ten sizes too big, so I’m sure the cold air just went right through it. I drove a rear-wheel drive pickup truck. Real-wheel drive. So front-wheel drive? No, nothing. So when it snowed, I would just spin in circles. Trying to put sandbags in the back doesn’t work.
Claire: I’m just shaking my head.
Joy: I think the first time that it snowed, and I had to drive somewhere – first of all, I don’t know how I survived driving in the snow. I had no real idea how to drive in the snow. I must have just gotten so lucky, and I didn’t really have to drive that far. But the first time it kind of froze – I’m so embarrassed to say this, but this was me in my 20’s. Arizona girl didn’t know about windshields freezing and needing the deicer.
Claire: I’m just profusely shaking my head through this whole story. Like, no, no, no.
Joy: I didn’t know anything. My dad is a mechanic. He knows this. They actually lived in Colorado. I’m sure this was just something he forgot because I do not blame my father whatsoever. He has taught me so much about cars. But just that one detail. I got in my car. I was like, oh, my windshield is frozen. I’m so embarrassed to say the rest because it gets worse. So I go inside. I get a pitcher of water to just pour on the windshield to try to deice it, and it just freezes again. [laughing] Yeah, I was that… yeah, exactly. Your face is exactly how I’m feeling.
Claire: My face is just like, wow.
Joy: Her face is that face you do when you’re like, what the actual?
Claire: My face is the face you do when your friend is like, “I texted my ex.”
Joy: Yeah. Really bad decisions face. And judging. Bad decisions, judging for sure.
Claire: I will say – so we live in a neighborhood with a lot of families who have immigrated from Mexico. They, as the group, are so committed to not buying snow scrapers. These are people who have lived here for decades. I still see them all – I hate to make generalizations, but we’re talking about four or five families on my block where only eight families live. Out there with like a kitchen broom scraping the snow off their cars. I’m like, guys, get a snow scraper. You have lived here for 25 years. They have the credit card trying to get the ice off the window. I’m like, you are a permanent resident of this area. Why are you doing this to yourself?
Joy: You should buy them all, and just leave it like Santa. Just leave it on their stoop.
Claire: On their snowy card. Just like, “from your concerned neighbor.” Worried about you out there with your kitchen brook that’s now covered in ice balls. But I do love spring also. I don’t love allergies, but whatever. That’s fine. We have medication.
Joy: Are you starting to feel allergies? Because last week I started to get sniffly. Are you?
Claire: A little bit. Yeah, a little bit. Especially because we’ve been working in the garden. Part of our gardening is we do hay bale gardening. If you are into gardening, I would highly recommend. It’s great for any plant that needs a lot of drainage. We’ve had really good luck with peppers. I think this year we might try some potatoes in there. There’s a whole science to it. First you prep it with a bunch of fertilizer. Then you soak it and you let is kind of start to decompose a little bit in the inside of the hay bale. Look it up. It’s really fun. We’ve had good success. And the cool thing is at the end of the year, you’re left with this really great hay bale that’s partially broken down and you can break it apart and use it to mulch your garden over the winter. We very much ascribe to the belief – and this is not a belief. This is science – that little bugs and little critters hibernate and use your organic material in your garden, like wheat piles, bugs will live in there all winter. And the fact that we all scrape up our leaves all winter is completely unnecessary. Your leaves will break down by the end of the winter.
Joy: That’s really good to know.
Claire: If anything –
Joy: We spend way too much time raking our leaves.
Claire: So much time. And if anything, leaving your leaves will insulate your lawn a little bit. In Colorado, we get away with things a little bit more than elsewhere because it’s very, very dry so we don’t have to worry about stuff molding. But even then, the leaves in your area are designed to break down based on the climate of your area. Just reconsider your beliefs around raking leaves, everybody.
Joy: This is like breaking news.
Claire: Breaking news, reconsider your raking beliefs. But so we have these hay bales. We have been breaking them down and spreading them out amongst our garden beds, and that’s really giving me a lot of allergies.
Joy: Got it. I just put in an order for Allergena that my naturopath gave me last year. If you haven’t tried it, look it up. It’s the best. They go by zones based on what you’re allergic to, and that stuff saved me. Because sometimes with Zyrtec and all the other things that make me so drowsy, and whatever the nasal spray – doesn’t work for me. It makes my nose so dry.
Claire: My big thing are my eyes. My eyes get really dry, so I use the eye drops. I’m getting Lasik in two weeks, you guys.
Joy: Oh my gosh, I forgot about that.
Claire: I’m excited. But I am suddenly worried about getting Lasik in the peak of allergy season because you’re not allowed to rub your eyes. So I’m just going to be like eye drops, eye drops, eye drops.
Joy: Eye drops, yeah.
Claire: So excited.
Joy: So how was your spring break?
Claire: It was so fun. We went to Steamboat, which if you guys aren’t familiar, it’s a ski town about 3.5 hours away from the Denver area. It’s one of the farther away resorts. It’s actually north from most of the resorts. In between where we live and Steamboat, it is actually not that far as the crow flies. But the thing between us is the entirety of Rocky Mountain National Park. So you have to just hop over a few major mountains. So you have to go real around, and it takes you about 3.5 hours. But it was so fun. The snow was fine. It wasn’t amazing, but they got enough snow throughout the week that it wasn’t too icy. We somehow hit this middle ground that is very elusive. If you ever travel with kids, you know what I’m about to describe. When you’re traveling, it’s really hard to hit this sweet spot of keeping your kids entertained without getting to the point where they are so tired by the end of the day that you just have a meltdown every single night. And somehow, we nailed it. They melted down when we got home, at the end end.
Joy: Like, home home?
Claire: Home home.
Joy: Like your house currently. Yes.
Claire: But they did so good. We were able to keep them occupied during the day. We did some skiing. We did this mountain alpine coaster thing which we finally one day just bought the unlimited pass. I literally rode that thing 15 times. It was just really fun. This was our first real trip as a family where both kids were old enough to participate, and that feels like a big milestone.
Joy: Yeah, for sure. Did you do private ski lessons too?
Claire: Yes, and then I did some private ski lessons with my friend Amanda.
Joy: That looked really fun.
Claire: It was so fun. One of the days, we actually paid a little extra to go early before anybody else. It’s called first tracks. Other people can do it too, but it’s not very many. So you’re up there with maybe 30 other people, whereas opposed to the rest of the day you’re up there with like 10,000 other people. Not 10,000. I mean, it could get up to 10.000. You just feel like the only person on the mountain. And in the cold morning and the snow is so quiet.
Joy: Oh, that’s the best.
Claire: And you’re just out there skiing. Nobody else is around. It’s this crunchy sound and the trees.
Joy: Oh my gosh, I love that. That’s so fun.
Claire: It was great.
Joy: Do you feel more confident about your skiing abilities?
Claire: Yeah, I actually really do. The thing that’s funny is that I’ve been skiing since I was three. We’ve talked about this. I’m not a very good skier. But the thing I loved about taking a lesson is I “know how to ski,” but it’s so great to have someone really give you something specific to focus on. I think when it comes to skiing – or I think you could apply this to a lot of other activities if you’ve ever just casually grown up doing something, whether it’s like running or I don’t know.
Joy: Right. Where you’ve never had a professional coach watching you and giving you tips from day one.
Claire: Totally. Like maybe you’ve always been a recreational lap swimmer, but you’ve never been on a swim team. Or maybe you’ve always been a recreational runner, but you’ve never had a running coach. Or a weightlifter or skier or whatever. Biker. The list goes on and on. So it’s so nice to have somebody – it’s not like ground-breaking information but just to have them say, hey listen, on this next run, I want you to only focus on this one thing. And then you do it, and you’re like, oh. As opposed to the flip side of being that person who has only ever done something casually and never had a coach evaluate you, where when you try to go up a skill level, what you’re doing is just muscling through it until it gets easier.
Joy: Yeah.
Claire: Without really knowing what you’re muscling through. And then the other thing that was great was that Miles got on skis. Evie got on skis. She put her ski boots on like it was no big deal, put her skis on like it was no big deal, got on the lift. She’d been on there forever. I mean, you have to hold her. She’s tiny. But she could have cared less. It took us almost three years to get Miles to put a pair of ski boots on. There was a period in Miles’ life when he went to this fancy Waldorf school where they had to wear snow pants to school every day because they were outside all day. I have lost years off my life trying to put snow pants on that kid. To the point where we actually involved an occupational therapist. We were like, what’s going on here? Came to find that Miles had some retained reflexes. We worked with an OT for about a year on an every-other-week basis and worked him through a lot of stuff. I’m sorry if you’re listening to this and are like, “Oh my gosh I need to learn more information about this.” I don’t really have a lot of good resources on this. And this OT that we found – and I also don’t want to be defeatist, like I can’t help you. But this OT that we found was really a unicorn in that I actually had found her because she ran a group tummy time class for infants in our area. It was when Evie was a baby, so I went to one with her, just kind of for something to do when Evie was tiny. And while I was there, I was talking about Miles, and I ended up setting up an appointment for Miles while I was working with her.
Joy: Oh, okay. So it was this very kismet.
Claire: Right. It wasn’t like, oh, we decided to get Miles evaluated and blah, blah, blah. This unrelated experience led me to finding this great OT who then worked with Miles. We paid out of pocket. It was crazy expensive. But she worked with him through a bunch of retained reflexes and worked with him on his vestibular nervous system, which is the part of your nervous system that tells you where you are in space. And for kids, if that is dysregulated, it can cause a lot of sensory seeking. Sometimes it’s why kids won’t get off the swings or won’t get off the trampoline or won’t put a coat on. Because they want to feel that cold hair because those experiences help affirm where their body is in space and sometimes they just can’t really tell. So through that, we got to the point where we could put snow pants on him. So then watching Evie put her boots on and put her snow pants on and get on this lift was like, oh, this is why some of Miles’ peers are skiing double blacks. They didn’t just spend three years to get their ski boots on. And it’s just been so interesting. I’ve been thinking a lot about that comparison that we all do with everybody, that we all do with our kids and with other families and with other parents. And it’s so easy to do, particularly with young kids, where you look and see what are they skilled at. As a very active family, I always expected that our kids would just hop up on skis and always want to go hiking. The other thing is just this past weekend, Miles rode a two-wheeler bike for the first time. He is 6.5 practically, and he is 52 inches tall. So he’s a big kid. He could have, he has had the physicality to be on a two-wheeler bike probably for close to three years, and we just couldn’t’ get him to do it. And that balance was just too scary for him. It’s just been so interesting to have these two experiences back-to-back. He finally warmed up to skiing and then he finally wanted to get on a bike. Maybe they are related, but to have this reminder that our kids will really do their own thing in their own time. And sometimes the harder you push, the worse it makes it. And you really have to temper your expectations. It’s so easy to get into that comparison track and, oh, well, the other families must be doing something better because my kid can’t ride a two-wheeler or isn’t interested in going skiing or whatever.
Joy: Yeah, or they are excelling in one area.
Claire: Yeah.
Joy: And I wonder, there’s got to be so much pressure, even more so now with everything on social media of course, but especially with parenting. Or even just being pregnant. I talked to some pregnant friends that were like, I can’t even go – and you probably experienced this too. So much information that you kind of have to tune out and figure it out for yourself. Or not figure it out, but just not let other pressures or influencers be like “this is the best way.” How do you decide what you truly want when there is so much comparison? Or everybody being like, “I love pregnancy,” and you’re like, “I just really was sick.”
Claire: I hated being pregnant. I hated it. We’ve talked about this quite a lot, but as most of you know, my first pregnancy was great. My first postpartum experience was almost the last thing I ever did. Was horrible. Then my pregnancy with Evie was horrible. I was nauseous every day for ten straight months. And then postpartum with her was pretty easy. She’s just been a very different experience than having Miles. People will ask me sometimes, “What are your favorite baby books?” And I immediately, even before Miles was born, was like I am not going to read parenting books. If there is a specific issue that I’m seeking out guidance on, I will talk to professionals about that. Whether that be occupational therapists, educators, and yeah maybe other parents if there is a one-off like “I can’t get my kid to stop telling poop jokes. What did you do?” Or with potty training, “Did this work for you?” Those are close friends that I’ll reach out to. But I have never read a parenting book. I don’t think my parenting is worse off for it. If anything, If feel like it allows me to just go more with my instincts because I don’t have these other voices in my head. But yeah, it’s a lot. There’s a lot of people out there. What I want to get across is just that even for a family like us that’s very active. I consider us to be very involved in our kids’ lives. I consider us to be very communicative. We are very open and responsive to following our kids’ leads. It still looks really different than I thought it would. We still have these surprises all the time of having to take skills and milestones and life at our kid’s pace, instead of what we want them to do. Which is sometimes disheartening, but I agree with my body.
Joy: Right. Who are you? Well, I’m glad you had a good spring break. Did Evie jail break in your bed that you set up?
Claire: No. She was in a bunk bed on the bottom bunk, which I think really helped. She was against the wall. You know when you’re on the bottom bunk, the foot of the bed is also kind of contained? Because there is a ladder. Then we bought this little side rail from Amazon that made it look like a little hospital bed. So between the bunk bed at the foot of the bed, the bed against the wall, and then the side rail, and also the bunk bed being low, it made it feel so contained in there. It was actually really nice. I got in there with her a few times. It was cozy.
Joy: Bunk beds are super cozy. My brother and I slept in one when we were little. It always felt like a fort, a forever fort.
Claire: It totally feels like a forever fort, and the only reason I will never have one in my home is because I do not want to commit to making a bed in a bunk bed every week.
Joy: No. I don’t think our beds were ever made in those things. It’s impossible.
Claire: Changing the sheets is just horrible.
Joy: Impossible.
Claire: No, no. But yeah, so it worked out. It was better than I thought it would be.
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Claire: Alright, Joy, tell us about the puppy.
Joy: Man. So everybody knows… maybe, sort of? I think everybody knows at this point that we got a new puppy to raise for canine companions. His name is Joe. A few weeks ago, the puppy raising program contacted us and said, “Hey, we have a puppy for you.”
Claire: And let’s just once again remind everybody at home, Joy did not name Joe. They come with a name. We don’t know if Joe is named after anybody. But I did text the GIF of Kamala saying, “We did it, Joe.” And I’m just planning on texting that every so often for the next two years.
Joy: Which I really appreciate because that one really made me laugh. Whenever we’re on a walk now, I go, “We did it, Joe.” A few weeks ago, we got contacted by the puppy program department, and they said, “Hey, we have a puppy for you. Would you like to raise a boy?” And Scott and I were like, woah, we didn’t realize we were going to get one so soon. Back in November when Cadet turned into college, to advanced training, we got on the puppy raiser list right when we got back from turning her in, and they told us 6-9 months from then. Which is pretty accurate for the most part because they have such a long waitlist, they are like, there is just no way you are going to get one sooner. So apparently what happened is that a puppy raiser had to back out, and the puppy was slated to come to Colorado anyway. I don’t know how all the disbursing of the puppies work, but they had to keep this puppy in Colorado. So they are like, hmm, let’s try all of our Colorado puppy raisers. So they sent us an email, said, “Do you want one in a couple of weeks?” And we were like, holy crap. We weren’t prepared to have one this soon. We have a couple things coming up, but Scott and I were like, yeah, let’s just figure it out. In all honesty – I know this sounds silly. I would way rather potty train a dog when the weather is starting to get warmer as opposed to really, really cold weather. Because standing outside waiting for a dog to pee or poop in the cold. And with puppies, you have to be with them at all times, and you have to put them on leash so they get used to peeing and pooping on a leash. I was like, yeah, let’s do it now. The second we found out that we were able to get a puppy, I was so excited. Scott was like, “Let me sleep on it” because he’s had not a rough few months, but he’s just had some ups and downs with work in the past few months. He took some time off in March, and I’m like, look, if we get a dog during your time off, are you going to be okay? Because I don’t want you to be taking this time off, and this is a lot of work. So he’s like, “Yeah, let me sleep on it.” And then the next morning, he’s like, “What do you think?” And I really wanted it to be his decision. I know that if I was going to push for it, he would do whatever I wanted. And I did not want him to regret not having some time off during this month because he works so hard. So I was like, “This is all you. This is your decision this time.” I mean, it’s always been our decision, but you know what I mean. So he goes, “What do you think?” “Whatever you think.” He’s like, “I think we should do it.” I was like, “Yay!” So we got one sooner than we thought we would. His name is Joe, and he’s perfect. Let’s see, we found out the day before. We kind of had an idea – it’s funny, all these private Facebook groups that I mentioned before, everybody posts the puppies and the litters, and you try to find out which ones are coming to Colorado. It’s all very behind-the-scenes sleuthing that’s going on. But in the end, you never really know which one you’re going to get. So the day before we found out we’re getting Joe IV. The reason it’s the IV is they have other Joes in the CCI program, so they have to number them to keep track of which Joe is which. So we have Joe, and he’s so cute. He originally was supposed to arrive on the 18th. The flights changed, and they got a better flight, meaning it was just a shorter flight for these puppies. There was only two dogs. These beautiful, beautiful, amazing people who have private jets and are just independently wealthy were able to volunteer their time and their jet. Apparently, this family was just coming to Colorado anyway. And whatever ties they have to Canine Companions, they just allow these dogs to be on their private jet with them when they flew their family to Colorado. So we are at this tiny little airport. It kind of reminded me of when you and I went on Greg Glassman’s jet because we were like, “We want to fly like this all the time.” Like this family really flies like this all the time. I’m like, yes, this is the life. We go up to their private jet, and we’re like, “Do you have dogs on the plane?” We had the flight number, but we didn’t know for sure. We’re just walking up to this private jet on the tarmac. The sweet family comes off and they’re like, “Yes, we held them the whole time. They just slept on our chest.” I’m like, oh my gosh, these dogs had the best first start. They didn’t even have to ride in their kennel on the way. They just got the coziest, snuggliest ride on their way to Denver. Here I was all worried because I can’t think about little baby puppies in a kennel.
Claire: I mean, can you imagine being on that plane? If you know a puppy was on a crate on your plane, you wouldn’t just leave it in the crate.
Joy: Never in a million years.
Claire: Unless you have an anaphylactic allergy to puppies, which even still, I think I would risk it.
Joy: But they were so sweet. It was just the sweetest couple like, “Yeah, we held them the whole time, and they just slept on our chest the whole time.” I’m just like, this is so cute. So we took a bunch of pictures. I was just ecstatic. I could not stop smiling. It was just the cutest feeling when you meet your little puppy that you’re going to raise for the first time. So Scott and I have been in puppy haze for the past few days. But I think what I’m realizing is how much work Cadet was. Because Joe is real easy. Some of my puppy raiser friends, I’ve been texting with them. I’m like, “I know it’s only day three, and I don’t want to jinx it, but Joe is really easy.” I’m like, this is what was going on with Cadet. They’re like, “How come you never told us this? We would have helped you. We would have helped with this, this, this, and this.” I’m like, “I didn’t know!” She was the first puppy we raised. I didn’t know. And I’m not saying she was bad by any means. She was just very high maintenance for the first three months. She whined every night in her crate. She needed constant attention. Whereas Joe keeps to himself. He can settle in his little ex pen. He settles into his crate pretty quickly. If you put him in his crate, he’ll kind of whine for like five seconds, and then he’s like, “Oh, okay” and goes to sleep. It’s unbelievable, and I’m a little worried that he’s going to be a hellion as a teenager.
Claire: He’s going to wake up all of the sudden and be like, oh.
Joy: Totally. But he’s just so cute. He’s very snuggly. I think all puppies are cute, but Joe is just real quick. We really can’t get enough of him.
Claire: He looks so suedey.
Joy: He’s very suedey.
Claire: I want to rub my face on him.
Joy: He has the cutest little puppy belly. Yeah, and he’s very chill. He snores.
Claire: If you guys have not seen the reel on our Instagram of Joe snoring, just stop what you’re doing right now, pull over to the side of the road, and look it up.
Joy: That was the first night. He was just passed out. It was very cute. So we’ve been jokingly calling him Sleepy Joe, like how Trump used to call him Sleepy Joe. Anyway.
Claire: Love it. Joe Biden references will never end.
Joy: They will never end. Because Joe is sleepy and just very chill.
Claire: And he did it.
Joy: And he did it.
Claire: Aw. Oh, Joe.
Joy: So, we’ve been having a blast.
Claire: Love it.
Joy: So keep watching stories and reels because I’m trying not to spam too much puppy. I know people are like, “You can never do too much puppy.” I’m like, you kind of can though. There’s a limit, at least on stories. Here’s the thing. On stories, if I see someone has a hundred or whatever. You know the story thing, you can see how many stories are left to go.
Claire: Yeah, if it’s like, tick, tick, tick, tick…
Joy: I exit. I’m out. You’ve got my attention span for maybe ten tops. So when we do Q&A sometimes, I’m like, whatever, this is a wash. But some people want to see all that stuff. But rarely do I do that many. Who has that kind of time to spend sitting here watching my stories? I hope you don’t.
Claire: I don’t know, I spend a lot of time on Instagram.
Joy: I do too.
Claire: Speaking of which, in case you guys haven’t heard yet, Instagram now has the functionality to go into a chronological timeline. It does feel a little bit clunky. It defaults back to the feed that shows you just what Instagram wants you to see every time you open Instagram, but you can go to your feed, click the little Instagram logo. There’s a dropdown menu, and it will say “following” and “favorites.” You can add folks to your favorites to make sure that anyone you add to your favorites, they’ll always show you their posts in that stream. I haven’t done that yet. It seems like a lot of work. But you can also go to “following” and it will only show you accounts that you’re following, and it will show you their accounts in chronological order, the way God intended Instagram to be.
Joy: Praise the internet gods.
Claire: Praise the internet gods. Again, it redefaults back to the algorithm every time you reopen your account. And maybe it’s because we switch accounts back and forth. I switch accounts back and forth to my personal account and the podcast account multiple times per day. Maybe that’s why. But it just keeps switching back. But try it. It’s kind of amazing.
Joy: I’ve been really proud of our reels and our Instagram.
Claire: Me too.
Joy: I’ll save Joe reels – or not reels. You can always see reels. If you want to go back and look at them, you can look at our reels pretty easily in our little reels box. But highlights on our stories, if you go to “Dogs,” I’m going to be adding to that. There’s a lot of Cadet, but I’m trying to just pick the cutest ones so there’s not a million to sift through. If you have any specific questions, if you’re just interested – you may not be. I’m obviously interested – in just kind of knowing what it takes to train a service dog or if you just have specific questions about what I do to train and raise Joe, just drop a note in our DMs. Or there’s a post I did recently with Joe’s cute face. You can ask the question there. Because then I’ll try to focus on those questions so I’m giving you content that is helpful and/or interesting.
Claire: Alright. So we have a couple Q&A questions leftover from last week or two weeks ago when we did some Q&A. We are going to get to a few more right now. What do you think?
Joy: Oh my gosh, can I start with, what’s the worst date either of you have ever been on? Do you have one? Oh, wow.
Claire: I do. I have one.
Joy: Is this the boyfriend that… you’ve referenced one in the past where the boyfriend broke up… what was the boyfriend one?
Claire: Oh, I have been broken up with in an airport.
Joy: Yes! Yeah, that’s horrible.
Claire: That’s not this one. I’ve been broken up twice, once in an airport in New Zealand. I had traveled across the globe to visit my boyfriend who was studying abroad. He broke up with me on the drive back to the airport to drop me off to go back home. So I had to sit on an airplane for 14 hours having just gotten broken up with.
Joy: Can’t believe it.
Claire: And then, to top it all off, while I was there – first of all, Steve Irwin died while I was there.
Joy: Oh no.
Claire: It was like a national tragedy.
Joy: It was a national tragedy.
Claire: Literally. So I was in New Zealand when Steve Irwin died. And then number two, that was the same time frame where when I left – this was like prehistoric era on planes – you could still take –
Joy: The person to the gate.
Claire: No. Person at the gate hasn’t been since I was a child.
Joy: Oh, okay.
Claire: 9/11 was when I was in 8th grade.
Joy: I missed that.
Claire: No, you could still take more than 3 ounces of liquid with you. And then when I landed back at LAX, that rule, they were like, “You can’t have more than 3 ounces of liquid with you.” At the time, I was collecting snow globes, and I had this beautiful snow globe, and they were like, “You can’t take this with you.” And I just started sobbing hysterically. The security guard was like, “Oh my God.” I was like, “It’s not about the snow globe,” like snot ugly crying.
Joy: Did the guy?
Claire: No, he made me throw it away. Because it was like day one. He couldn’t let it slide.
Joy: Oh my gosh, yes. What did the boyfriend say was the reason why he wanted to break up?
Claire: Because he didn’t want a long-distance relationship.
Joy: Okay.
Claire: Whatever. And then another time, again, I got broken up with on the way back to the airport because of another boyfriend who didn’t want a long-distance relationship,
Joy: Okay.
Claire: Bad luck. And at that time, I went into the airport, was crying, called my mom. And I was sitting there on the phone with my mom crying, and a stranger came up and hugged me. She was like, “It sounds like you really need a hug.”
Joy: Aw, people like that are just angels on earth.
Claire: It was really sweet. I do remember that sweet lady for giving me a hug. She was like, “That guy sounds like a jerk.” Aw, thank you. No. Alas, those were not the worst dates because those don’t count as dates. The worst date I’ve ever been on, I went on a first date once in college with a guy who was my TA or something. So he was a grad student. I was an English major, and if anybody has ever met an English grad student – my apologies to all the English grad students out there, but they’re weirdos. You don’t get a master’s in English lit because you like to party. I feel like I’m allowed to say that.
Joy: I like to party.
Claire: These guys, I love, love, love to critically analyze books. But I understand that to be a personality flaw.
Joy: You’re like, “Don’t hate me for this.”
Claire: Don’t hate me for this all you English majors. I am one of you, and I understand that this does not make me cool. This guy, we go to the Dark Horse in Boulder, which if anyone has ever been there, it is this very dark bar. I don’t think there is a single window in there. They sell burgers and fries, and we got there to watch a Broncos playoff game. Listeners, never go on a first date to watch a playoff game. You are committing to minimum four hours on this date. By two minutes into the third quarter, I was like, I’ve got to get out of here. Because this guy very early in the date was like, “So tell me about the other classes that you’re taking.” Super normal question. So I tell him about this math class I was taking. I am not a math person. I took this math class called “Math for the Environment.” Which I don’t know how this professor got away with this, but it was literally this crazy hippie with all of these conspiracy theories. To this day, I don’t remember doing any math in that class. But the whole first week, all we did was watch Who Killed the Electric Car.
Joy: Oh my God.
Claire: How is that math? How, how, how, how? And then, he had an entire unit on how the CIA planned 9/11. So I brought that up.
Joy: That does not age well.
Claire: Boulder. This is real life at CU Boulder.
Joy: Oh my gosh, that makes so much sense. Yep, that’s Boulder.
Claire: This guy was buddies with the guy who got fired for making the comparison about 9/11 and the Holocaust.
Joy: Yes. Yes.
Claire: Remember when we used to compare about people making those comparisons, and now people can just get away with it any time they want. Anyway, that guy. So we started talking about my classes. And I’m like, “Yeah, I have this crazy professor who thinks the CIA planned 9/11.” And he’s like, “Well, they did.” Straight face, not joking. “The CIA did plan 9/11.” I was like, oh no.
Joy: You’re like, how can I drop this class immediately.
Claire: So here I am trapped in this dark bar with this guy –
Joy: Oh, the guy said that? Not your professor.
Claire: The professor said that, and it was weird. The guy I’m on a date with said that five minutes into a minimum four hour long required date. And then we get to half time and I’m starting to eye the exit, and he’s like, “So, did you drive here?” I was like, “Yeah. Did you drive here?” He’s like, “No, my friend dropped me off.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” “Because I got a DUI. Could you take me home?”
Joy: Oh my gosh.
Claire: So then I couldn’t leave early.
Joy: Oh no, you were his ride.
Claire: Now I have to drive him home. And then he did the awkward car hug. Everything about this date was just zero. Zero out of ten.
Joy: So bad. So bad. I don’t want to tell mine. I’ll tell it really quick. I… oh God, this makes me sound so stupid. I did this dating show on the radio in my 20’s. So I went on the radio –
Claire: How has this never come up before? You guys. We have known Joy for almost 10 years, and this is the first time we are hearing about this.
Joy: Yeah. I did a “Win a Date Wednesday.” So you would apply, and they would pick somebody to come on the show and then people would call in, and you would pick who you wanted to go on a date with. So I applied because I was young and sassy. If anybody knows the DJ’s Slacker and Steve in Colorado, they are my favorite. Do you know Slacker and Steve?
Claire: Yeah.
Joy: So I went on Slacker and Steve.
Claire: But it wouldn’t have been Slacker and Steve. It was like Greg and Bo.
Joy: It was Slacker and Bo.
Claire: Before Slacker and Bo, there was Greg and Bo in the 90’s. And then Slacker and Bo, and now it is Slacker and Steve.
Joy: Yeah. So Slacker and Bo, they were great and still are. And by the way, Scott and I, when we watch the 4 o’clock news, they do a Slacker and Steve cut to them in the studio, and it is always so cringy funny because they are such nerds. In the best way. Anyway, we love them so much. Whenever they come on, I’m like, “Slacker and Steve!” So Slacker and Bo, I went into their studio and went on a date with this guy. So this is where it all goes bad. A girl calls in and is like, “My best friend, he would be perfect for this girl.” Because I was telling everybody about myself. “I think he would really be great. He’s a doctor” and he’s this and he’s that. I’m like, alright, fine. So I think I picked him out of whomever called. And they’re like, yes, and we’ll pay for it. So you go to Cherry Creek Grill tonight at 7 o’clock. I meet him there. He shows up, and he could not have been less interested in me. He was nice, but you could tell that he was very uncomfortable with being there because his friend set him up to do this. He was very buttoned up, and I’m not. So I’m there with all my bright colors and my glitter looking like a unicorn, and he’s super buttoned up. I don’t know how else to describe him. Good looking guy.
Claire: Like the kind of guy who probably irons his jeans?
Joy: Yes. Yes, yes. And it was nice enough. It wasn’t a terrible date, but the whole time, I could be like, he wants to leave so bad. I could just tell that he was not into it. So I was fine. It wasn’t a great night, whatever. And the next day, Slacker and Steve call him on the air to ask how it went. And then I’m listening. I think I’m listening on the other line. So they’re like, “So what did you think? You want to go out again?” And he’s like, “No, she’s not my type.” And Slacker and Bo are like, “What? A really amazing, beautiful girl is not your type?” He got so mad at him. They were super sweet about it. Actually, the funny thing is, after this – I was gutted. Super embarrassed. I think this was kind of before text messaging was super big, so it wasn’t like the guy could just be like, “Hey, I’m going to throw you under the bus tomorrow.” I’m not sure he would do that anyway, but he was just like, “It was fine but not for me.” So I was super embarrassed. But after that, the producer of the show – what was his name? It doesn’t matter. He totally ghosted me. But he emailed me and was like, “Hey, that guy was a douche bag. If you ever want to go out, let me know.” And I was like, oh my gosh, cool. So I went out with the producer who was awesome, and we had a great time. But then he ghosted me and never called me back after one date. Yeah.
Claire: You could have been radio royalty this whole time.
Joy: I really could have with Slacker Bo and Slacker Steve.
Claire: Whatever that guy’s name is.
Joy: What was his name? Geronimo. That was his handle.
Claire: I was like, that’s not his real name, is it?
Joy: Not his real name. His real name is Mike. I think his name is Mike. But his handle was Geronimo. Yeah, he totally ghosted me. That, still to this day, I’m like [sigh] that was not a good date. It was so uncomfortable.
Claire: I am surprised that we both have such long stories for that answer.
Joy: I am too.
Claire: And how is it that we’ve never told them before?
Joy: Which just goes to show that after nine years of podcasting, there is still stuff to talk about. So if you’re going to start a podcast, if you’re worried about running out of things to say, you’re always going to get a question – okay, let’s turn the tables. What’s the first thing that you noticed about Brandon or Scott when you met. I know this about you because you met him when you were renting a boat or something, right?
Claire: Renting a boat.
Joy: And you were like, “That guy is really cute.”
Claire: He was really cute. I don’t know. I struck up a conversation. I actually didn’t want to strike up a conversation because we were running late and I hate running late. I was with my friend who was visiting. I was living in Moab. We friend was visiting from out of town, and we were renting from this shop where Brandon worked that rented out boats. He had a NOLS t-shirt on. Which if you guys don’t know what NOLS is, National Outdoor Leadership School. It’s like Outward Bound if you are more familiar with Outward Bound. I had done a NOLS trip the summer before. My friend Sarah knew that about me, so she struck up a conversation with Brandon. “Oh, have you done NOLS? So has Claire.” So that was kind of the first thing. I mean, I just noticed that he in general was so cute. But then he had this t-shirt on that we had something in common. I mean, pretty standard.
Joy: Yeah. I remember – I’m sure I’ve told some of this story. But the short version is Scott and I knew each other for years before we actually dated. We ran with the same group. We kind of knew the same friends. So whenever we would be at parties, I would see Scott. And after the fact, everyone would be like, “You should date Scott. He likes you.” And I would tell them, “Well, tell him to call me.” And he never called me. So the joke was that he did have my number, but he never called me. Mostly because he was either dating someone or I was dating someone, so whatever. But the party that we went to, we went to a friend’s engagement party. The thing that I will never forget. I remember driving to this party with my best friend. I was like, “You know, this guy Scott is going to be there.” I had been through so many bad relationships, or just those relationships where you’re like, I’m so tired of dating. I remember driving to this party being like, “Hey, if this guy Scott is there, I’m actually going to talk to him and get to know him better. Maybe I do need to get to know this guy.” That’s just kind of where my head was at. She’s like, “Yeah, I think you should.” So we get there. He’s there. This amazing couple friends of ours, we’re so happy for them. Everyone was there to just kind of party and celebrate with them, but no one brought them a gift. It wasn’t expected to have a gift. So here we begin, Scott’s gift giving. No one was expected to bring a gift, but I’ll never forget. Scott walks up to them. The groom is from Venezuela, so Scott had found a record of a Venezuelan artist to give to Miguel. He’s like, “This guy is really great,” and he gave Miguel and Lindsey this Venezuelan artist vinyl. I just remember thinking that is the most God damn thoughtful thing I have ever seen. I really like this guy. How thoughtful can you be? Then we started talking at the party. And one thing led to another, and the next thing you know we were scheduling our first date, and that was that. I just remember being so taken by his thoughtfulness.
Claire: Which is hilarious now because it’s almost too much of a good thing where you’re like, “Scott, stop buying stuff.”
Joy: Oh, for sure. The other day – here’s an example, a funny thing. I have a gift card from Nordstrom that I haven’t used yet from Christmas. I said it out loud, and the second I said it, I regretted it because I was like, he’s on the case. So I said, “I need a new pair of UGG’s” because the ones I have, I wear them all the time. They are so disgusting. They just get gross.
Claire: They just don’t age well.
Joy: They don’t. So I was like, “I just really need to get a new pair of UGG’s. I’m just waiting for them to go on sale. I’m looking at Nordstrom Rack.” He goes, “Alright,” and then I see him typing furiously. Next thing you know, I have a link and they were perfect, and I ended up buying them. Because I’m like, actually this is exactly what I’m looking for. But he is a dog with a bone. If you give him a task to do, he finds it.
Claire: You cannot utter a sentence.
Joy: Not even a sniff if I need something.
Claire: One time, I texted Scott because Brandon needed a suit for an interview that was going to be the next day. I was like, “Hey Scott. Where is your favorite place to buy suits? Brandon has a couple interviews coming up and he needs a new suit.” Within moments, I have multiple links. He’s like, “This is a sale coming up if he can wait a couple days, but make sure you go to the Park Meadows location because their sale is going to be higher.” I was like, I was expecting you to be like, “Oh, J.Crew Factory has some stuff,” not like, “Here Claire is my quarterly report on suits for tall guys.”
Joy: Unbelievably helpful in those scenarios. It’s really funny.
Claire: Unbelievably helpful.
Joy: He can’t not get involved for something to be found. He can’t help himself. That’s really funny. And that’s how oddly and funnily enough what drew me to him in the first place, and now we joke about it. Maybe we should do one more. When will Brandon and Scott come on the show? Never. Guys, they’re not funny like us. They’re funny in their own way, but they would just be… they would try too hard.
Claire: So hard. Brandon has been on the show.
Joy: That was first year.
Claire: Probably six or seven years ago at least at this point.
Joy: Yeah. We talked about men. Someone does want to know about your nose piercing removal.
Claire: Good question. Okay you guys, I got my septum pierced last summer in July. I took it out probably two or three weeks ago. Two reasons. The first reason is that I was over the whole aesthetic. I love it on so many other people, and I was getting tired of seeing it on my own face. Which whatever, that happens. The main reason though that I finally pulled the plug – no pun intended – is that the booger management was just getting out of control. I found myself constantly picking a slight bugger in the inner corner of my nostril. It was always there. And if I ever had to wear a mask, which was regularly, and it was cold out, I would get condensation on my nose ring. That was horrible. So it just got to the point where I always felt like I was messing with it, and I just didn’t want to feel like I was messing with my nose. So I took it out. I’ve had my nostril pierced. I’ve pierced and repierced it three or four times. So who is to say that I will never get my septum repierced? But it’s so interesting. If I push up on that part of my nose, I can feel where the hole was. It feels just a little bit different. It almost feels like –
Joy: Like scar tissue?
Claire: Yeah, a little scar tissuey. Which is odd because according to my piercer, your septum piercing never really fully heals again after you’ve had it for six months or so. But I did have to take my nose ring out for an MRI back in December, and I had to go back to the piercing place to get it put back in because I could not find the hole.
Joy: Oh my God. Did it hurt to actually get the piercing?
Claire: People always ask me these questions. They’re like, “Did your tattoos hurt? Did your piercings hurt?” A needle is going through your body.
Joy: It’s not pleasant.
Claire: It’s not pain-free.
Joy: Getting my ears pierced, compare it to that.
Claire: It hurts a little bit more than getting your ears pierced.
Joy: Because getting your ears pierced goes so fast where you’re just like [exclaims] and it’s over.
Claire: Right. I would say it was probably on par in terms of pain with like a blood draw that maybe is not your best.
Joy: I’ve been through many of those.
Claire: Where you are definitely noticing it the whole time. You’re not really enjoying it, but you’re not writhing away.
Joy: Okay, okay, okay. That helps. Side note. To all the nurses out there who do blood draws or Brandon, I have been through so many blood draws because of Graves’ Disease and because of the bone marrow stuff. Now I know that there’s people who are real good at it, and there’s people who are not great at it. I would like to know why some people can get my vein, and why some people take five tries and then they go get their nurse friend and they’re like, “Your veins are too hard.” I’m like, well the person yesterday had no problem finding this vein.
Claire: It’s totally different for every person.
Joy: They make me feel like I have bad veins. But then I’ll go to someone, and it’s like I don’t even feel it.
Claire: First of all, you might be dehydrated on the days where they can’t find your veins. That makes a huge, huge difference.
Joy: I try to drink water. Okay.
Claire: And then second of all, according to Brandon who hates getting his blood drawn and hates drawing other people’s blood –
Joy: Okay, he doesn’t like it.
Claire: Blood drawing is a very unique skill. And IV starting is a very unique skill. When you have to access someone’s vein in that way, it’s a very, very unique skill that certain nurses are really good at. And some of them, if you work in a certain field, you do it a lot more. And then there’s this whole other field of people who are phlebotomists and all they do is blood draws.
Joy: But here’s the thing. I really want nurses to weigh in on this because I really want to know. I don’t know anything about this. So if I go to Lab Corps, I assume that’s all they do all day long. And at Lab Corps, I’ve had some of my very interesting experiences getting blood drawn.
Claire: Not to say that being a phlebotomist is the same thing as being a waitress. But just because you wait tables all day long doesn’t mean you’re any good at it.
Joy: Yeah, that’s true.
Claire: Just because anybody does their job all day long, that doesn’t automatically mean that they’re good at it.
Joy: But then I’ll go to the lab at Kaiser to get my blood drawn, and they rock.
Claire: Miles has had his blood drawn, and I still remember that guy because it was so seamless.
Joy: Seamless.
Claire: And Miles was not even three at that point probably. So I think that there are just some people who have the touch. I also think that it’s something that a lot of people do a lot more often.
Joy: I guess my question is – it sounds ignorant, but I don’t know how hard it is. Should everyone be good at it, or how hard is it to do?
Claire: I actually think that that’s the key. For Brandon, he gets so in his head about it and he really worries about it.
Joy: Got it.
Claire: And he has a heavier hand.
Joy: Sure.
Claire: For some people, it doesn’t feel like a big deal. It doesn’t feel that hard. They’re like, “I don’t get it. Why is this so hard for you?” I think it’s just one of those skills. I agree with you. I’ve had blood draws where you barely even notice it. And then I’ve had other blood draws where I’m like, what are you doing? Something is wrong. And you come home with a huge bruise.
Joy: Yeah, a huge bruise.
Claire: I would say getting your septum pierced is on par with not the worst blood draw you’ve ever had, but a not-great one.
Joy: An uncomfortable one.
Claire: An uncomfortable blood draw. And then, it is uncomfortable to heal. Although it heals relatively quickly, about a month, you don’t realize how much you stretch out that part of your face. Move your lip around.
Joy: Yeah.
Claire: That skin in between your two nostrils gets moved around a lot. I didn’t really think about that, and then I got my septum pierced. That night we had nachos and I could open my mouth.
Joy: Oh, it hurt, yeah.
Claire: Imagine putting a giant nacho in your mouth without moving your upper lip.
Joy: You just have to do like a finger mustache to hold it in place.
Claire: Yeah, I should have done that. I didn’t do that. I just ate tiny little bites of nachos.
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Joy: Which is so sad because nachos are delicious.
Claire: Nachos are so good. But no, not if you have a new septum piercing.
Joy: Okay, can I end with like one minute of something really quick?
Claire: Yeah, Joy, I would like to remind you for the hundredth time, you may do whatever you want. This is your podcast.
Joy: Well I’m just looking at the time and I have to go attend to a puppy. But is there any opinion that you have so far about the Will Smith, Chris Rock thing. Here’s the thing, and I want people to weigh in. It just happened yesterday. We’re recording on Monday, the day after the Oscars. We’re going to release this on Thursday. I’m sure everything has changed by then. But Scott is convinced it was staged. Convinced.
Claire: I think if it was staged, it was a really stupid thing for Will Smith to agree to.
Joy: So dumb. Why would you stage something like that?
Claire: I don’t think it was staged. I think either way it was stupid. Whether it was staged or not, it was stupid.
Joy: I was just really disappointed in the Oscars this year.
Claire: I did not watch them, and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
Joy: It was so disappointing.
Claire: Even the outfits, none of them were like [gasp]. Yeah. I mean, I just feel like whether it was staged or not, it was a bad decision. It was toxic masculinity, and I hope that we are no longer talking about it by Thursday.
Joy: It was just so weird.
Claire: Move on. Let’s move on.
Joy: I have a lot to say about whether Chris Rock really knew about Jada Pinkett Smith’s alopecia, why would you make a joke like that? Will Smith, sure, maybe backstage have a little talk with him and say that was inappropriate. Scott is sending me all these articles and videos saying that it was fake and that they staged it. I’m like, you’re reading some really funny blogs. Please don’t go down the dark web.
Claire: You’re going to end up on Parler reading about Will Smith.
Joy: Don’t get on QAnon, please. Where is he going with this?
Claire: Right.
Joy: I’m done.
Claire: Alright guys, well thank you for joining us for another week. Don’t forget to check out our sponsor, Ned. That’s helloned.com/JOY or use discount code JOY. Today is your last day for the upgraded discount of 21% to celebrate Ned’s birthday month. March 31, the last day you can do it. So go order your Ned. Thank you for supporting the brands that support our podcast. Thank you for being here with us. You can follow us on Instagram @joyandclaire_. All the puppy content all the time. We’re not going to stop any time soon.
Joy: Yeah, not stopping.
Claire: You can go to our website joyandclaire.com. You can email us thisisjoyandclaire@gmail.com. Thank you, and we’ll talk to you next week. Bye.
Joy: Bye, everybody.
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This is Joy & Claire Episode 119: Like a Roomba
Episode Date: March 24, 2022
Transcription Completed: April 29, 2022
Audio Length: 49:47 minutes
Joy: Hey guys, this is Joy.
Claire: And this is Claire.
Joy: Welcome back to another episode of us talking to you.
Claire: I just did a little [sings a jingle]. That’s a thing. It’s called something. It’s not a perfect fifth. Perfect is CBS. NBC, tone, name.
Joy: Yeah, I think that’s [singsong voice] NBC.
Claire: It isn’t, but anyway.
Joy: The peacock.
Claire: It is.
Joy: Well, we’re recording this way earlier than we normally record our episodes. Just so you guys know, we normally record on Monday or Tuesday the week of the release of the episode. But we’re recording this one early because Claire is going on spring break.
Claire: Spring break, woo!
Joy: Party!
Claire: Just imagine me flashing you, except when I’m flashing you I’m wearing a base layer.
Joy: [laughing]
Claire: Because that’s where I’m going on spring break. I’m going skiing.
Joy: It just reminds me of MTV spring break days. That was the goal.
Claire: No, I’m thinking of Kitty from Arrested Development.
Joy: Oh, absolutely.
Claire: “There will absolutely be a margarita in my mouth!”
Joy: God, Judy Greer.
Claire: “Yes, there will.” She was such a good character.
Joy: Such a good character. “Saved by these, Michael.” [laughing] And if you don’t know what we’re talking about, I’m not going to explain it. You’re just going to have to watch it.
Claire: You’re just going to have to watch Arrested Development. Arrested Development is the only show that I felt like lived up to the hype after I got into it. I hate shows where people are like, “You’ve just got to get into it.” Arrested Development is the only show where I actually really stuck it out for the first couple of episodes and was like, oh, okay, I get it now.
Joy: God, it’s so good. So good. So spring break, party time. MTV spring break lives in my mind as the place that I wanted to go. But I wasn’t really cool enough. Actually, I wouldn’t say cool enough. Let me think how to say this PC. I wasn’t like…
Claire: I wasn’t like hot girl summer.
Joy: Yes, thank you. I don’t want to use the word slutty because whatever, slutty is fine.
Claire: I was not like hot girl summer.
Joy: I really wasn’t. I wasn’t that. There was a part of me that really wanted to be, and I just wasn’t. I would see all these girls on MTV spring break and all the fun they were all having. Anyway. So you’re going on spring break.
Claire: We’re going to Steamboat with my friend Amanda. I know I’ve talked about her on the podcast before. She’s my other podcast friend other than Heather. Hi, Heather, Hi, Amanda. And Heather is moving to Longmont. So all my podcast friends are living in Longmont now, which is great. Maybe one day we can have podcast meetup in Longmont. Actually, this really cute tiki restaurant just opened in Longmont.
Joy: Tiki?
Claire: Yeah. They built a big pirate ship, so when you go to the bar you walk into this big pirate ship.
Joy: Oh, that sounds fun.
Claire: Right. And it’s pretty good food. Like, they have poke bowls and stuff. It’s like island kind of, obviously. You can get yourself a piña colada in a pirate ship.
Joy: That sounds lovely.
Claire: So anyway. One day. Maybe one day we can all do that for the podcast. Anyway, the point of the story is we’re going to Steamboat with Amanda and her family. She has two kids also, her daughter is around Evie’s age, and her son is just a tiny bit older than Miles. So it actually is so perfect. We can hang out. And her husband used to be a ski patroller – like the parallels between our lives and our family members are very helpful.
Joy: It’s a little uncanny as well.
Claire: And she also likes to bake and eat soup. I’m not actually convinced that she likes to eat soup that much, but I do always feed her soup when she comes over.
Joy: [laughing]
Claire: She’s very gracious about it.
Joy: I do always feed her soup and she eats it, therefore –
Claire: It’s like, what’s that Parks and Rec line where it’s between Leslie and I can’t remember the other character. And the punchline is that she’s trying to explain to Leslie, “I don’t like Harry Potter. I was afraid to tell you when you made me watch all those movies.” And Leslie is like, “What are you talking about? You love Harry Potter. You’ve seen all the movies.”
Joy: It’s like, you made me watch them.
Claire: Right. What are you talking about? You love soup. I feed it to you every time you come over here. “You always feed me soup. I don’t even like it.” What are you talking about? So yeah, we’re going to go skiing and it should be really fun. We haven’t taken a trip like this… we went to Durango last year for a couple of days. Similar type of trip. My biggest insecurity about this trip, my worry is that Evie still sleeps in a crib at home. Which, she’s over 3 years old, the time is ripe for her to get out. But she isn’t climbing out of her crib. Why would I unleash my child at night willingly?
Joy: [laughing] It’s so true. And let me just say, side note, still to this day the funniest thing in the world is someone who posted something on the internet around, the scariest thing is waking up to a child standing next to you staring. The visual of that, you just don’t need – if you can avoid it, let’s keep her leashed.
Claire: Just keep them in there. And a lot of people do transfer their students around ages 2 and 3 because their kids are coming out. For some reason, Evie has just never gone down that path. Knock on wood. We moved Miles out of a crib so early. Like, way, way, way too early. He was barely even two.
Joy: I remember that.
Claire: Because – and if any parents are out there being like, “Claire, here are tips for getting your kid out of the crib.” Here are my tips. Don’t do it unless you have to. If your kid is climbing out, sorry. But what we did with Miles, he was in a Montessori and a Waldorf. Both Montessori and Waldorf use floor beds. They don’t put them in cribs for naps. So I thought, oh he sleeps in a floor bed at school. This shouldn’t be an issue. And when he was maybe right around 2 years old, he still was not potty trained at all – which is common. Two years is early for potty training. I give these annotations because I know it’s hard to know what age it is for kids to do things. Even if you have older kids, we forget. We had always had him in a pack and play because we had always lived in a tiny apartment with him. A pack and play is significantly smaller than a full-size crib. So we moved into our house and we kept him in the pack and play. One day during nap time, he pooped in his diaper and spread the poop all over the pack and play. And the sides of the pack and play are mesh. Just imagine that. I came into his room and immediately was like, well, this pack and play is trash now. Pack and plays are also only like $100. There was nothing on this earth that was going to get me scrubbing the poop out of the mesh of this pack and play. So I was like, it’s fine. He can just move into a floor bed. And then that resulted in close to a year of having to sit in his room with him while he fell asleep. Never again. I have some friends who have kids around Evie’s age that are still in cribs, and they’re like, “When are you transferring Evie to a bed? When did you transfer Miles?” I’m like, Evie will stay in a crib until high school if she’ll let me because of my trauma from baby Miles.
Joy: Because of that experience, yeah.
Claire: Anyway, so I’m worried about our trip because it doesn’t have a crib. She’s going to be in a queen bed, and we bought these –
Joy: Bumpers.
Claire: Yeah, like a hospital bed feeling. That’s my biggest worry is I’m not going to get any sleep because Evie is going to be knocking on the door all night.
Joy: Yeah, it’s going to be fun. You’re going to be having an unleashed toddler.
Claire: And she’s not the kind of kid that can sleep in your bed and just chill. If she’s in my bed, she’s sitting there poking me in the face like, “Hey mom. Hey.” I’m like, “It’s two in the morning!”
Joy: Well, good luck with that. So maybe not so much a relaxing spring break.
Claire: I am excited, yes. I mean, somebody said once, and I don’t know where this quote comes from, traveling with kids is not a vacation. It’s just a trip with kids.
Joy: Yep. A lot of managing. A lot of stuff to pack.
Claire: But I did buy like $300 of the primo snacks.
Joy: Oh, yeah. Because that is key for traveling with children.
Claire: Super key. We’re staying at this super nice Airbnb, which we got upgraded because our original Airbnb had a maintenance issues. So we got upgraded into this townhouse situation. It has a private sauna.
Joy: Oh my gosh.
Claire: I know.
Joy: That’s exciting.
Claire: When you guys listen to this, I will actually be back. We get back on Wednesday night. But I will have just spent, sometime at least, in a private sauna. Lounging.
Joy: I can’t wait to hear if it goes well.
Claire: My mind immediately went to, I should bring my starter because I bet I could really rise some bread in a sauna.
Joy: Oh my God. By the way, I’m just tickled – and I never use that word – about the response of people with the whole bread kneading thing from the last episode.
Claire: It really makes me feel so seen. Where people are like, this is a true Claire moment. It really is a true Claire moment. And it’s a true Joy and Claire moment.
Joy: Yes, exactly.
Claire: You knew what I was doing.
Joy: I was like, for sure she is kneading bread. What is she doing? She is multitasking. But not only that, when people reposted and said, “This is why I listen to this podcast,” I was like, yes, because no one ever in the history of podcasts, you’re never going to get this.
Claire: It’s true.
Joy: So thank you guys for supporting us.
Claire: For seeing our bread moment.
Joy: For seeing our bread moment and for seeing us for who we are. Yeah. You know when I was thinking about spring break, I was thinking about how much I miss scheduled breaks. You know, like back in the school day when you had scheduled breaks. And then in my mind went to let’s just take a moment and shout out to teachers. Just shout out to teachers. I wish you got like a month of spring break.
Claire: And like four times your salary.
Joy: Shout out to teachers, yes. Okay, quick update. I’m never going to say dates on this podcast ever again because they constantly move. So when we record this, the date could always change again. But we are supposed to be getting the puppy on the date this episode releases, on March 24. I hope that is still the case when this is released.
Claire: I can’t remember if we talked about this last week or not. But it’s a fluid process. It’s a lot of moving pieces.
Joy: It’s very Tetris. So with Canine Companions, yeah, there’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of arranging. There’s a lot of flights to get planned for shipping puppies. So there’s a lot going on. I understand why these things happen, and we just have to be really flexible. But we thought it was going to be the 18th. And we’re so excited. Not only that. We don’t know which puppy we’re getting until like the day before. So that just adds to the excitement of, which one are we getting? I am in a bunch of private Facebook groups, probably five or six Facebook groups, that are just dedicated to CCI puppy raisers or people in Colorado who raise puppies or whatever. You name it, there’s a Facebook group for it. And man are we nuts. We go crazy. Does anybody know of which litters are born that are coming to Colorado? Like, you try to find out beforehand. It’s really cute how much sleuthing goes on behind the scenes.
Claire: I was about to say, do you guys have a theory?
Joy: Oh yeah. And then there’s breeder caretakers. So just a quick fun fact. All the breeder caretakers, the people who have the dogs that help raise the little babies –
Claire: Like before they’re weened?
Joy: Before they are weekend, yeah. They are called the breeder caretakers. They are specific people that volunteer for CCI. They all have to be in California. I think within a certain amount of miles from Santa Rosa, the regional office, even. It’s very specific. But they’ll be on Facebook posting all the litters that are born, and you are just oohing and ahhing over these little babies. And then the breeder caretakers will see someone post about, “Oh, I’m getting a puppy next week,” and they’ll be like, “Oh my gosh, it might be from my litter.” So then you’re looking at their litter, and it’s just really cute how crazy we all go. Now I get it. Being in the CCI community. When I was just working with JT, it’s such a different experience just being a graduate. And now that you’re a puppy raiser, I’m like, yeah, I get it. And I also get why Canine Companions – bless their heart, I love them so much. They do such a good job of making sure they kind of keep the puppy raisers at bay because some can get a little too over involved. Now I know why they make such a good boundary between people who graduate with a Canine Companions dog. They don’t put pressure on them to keep in touch with the puppy raiser. Now, one would think, “Why wouldn’t you want to keep in touch with the puppy raiser?” But there truly are just people who can’t maintain communication like that. Or there’s a million different reasons. So CCI does a really good job of making sure that puppy raiser know that when you give this dog back to us, you may not get a lot of communication about it. It’s really interesting how they have to balance all of that. I see a lot of behind the scenes now that I’m in all these private Facebook groups of puppy talk. And how people get so into the lineage of these dogs. Posting pictures of the parents of these puppies. It’s so cool. It’s really cute. So anyway, so that is the update on when we’re going to get this new puppy. You really want to be paying attention to social media today if that’s the case because we are going to be all puppy extravaganza.
Claire: Yay. Oh my gosh, I’ve saved so many reels audios about puppies that I’m just going to make you send me consent videos of puppies and make all these soupy reels.
Joy: Great. Gosh, I can’t wait.
Claire: They’re the best.
Joy: I just can’t wait to snuggle the little baby.
Claire: This little baby belly.
Joy: Oh, I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. And we’re talking to JT. We’re like, alright, we will protect you from the shark teeth biting your face. We’re preparing the cats. Although one of the cats is so mean, she doesn’t care. She loves it. She loves to bully the dogs.
Claire: She’s like, “Yes, bring me another subject into my kingdom.”
Joy: Exactly her personality. That’s one thousand percent her personality. She’s like, “Yes, one more person that I can be mean to.” So the other quick update that is always fluid and chaining, but I think we have a date set for April for the bone marrow donation. I’m not going to give the exact date, and I’m not going to bank on it, but that made me feel better because I was really bummed out when it got pushed again.
Claire: I know last time that it was pushed a lot of people asked us what happened, is the person okay? The reality is you have no idea. All you know is it’s a go or it’s not a go.
Joy: Right. Yeah. And last time – and this is really where you just kind of learn along the way – last time, I did ask my case worker, can you give me any information why? And I told her, I said, I guess it’s not my business, but there’s a part of me that was so defeated again after three, four rescheduling that I just need something. I need some type of reason. And then I got over it because it’s really not my business. I didn’t find out why. I think it’s just mostly how I have to figure out how to navigate it emotionally and how hard it is to put your feelings on the side because it’s not about you. It is about you, but it’s not about you. So that’s kind of the thing that I went through. But if all goes to plan, it will be in April. I’ll be posting more from the standpoint of how easy it is and, knock on wood, should be fairly painless and how important it is to get on the registry for people. You can follow Be the Match on Facebook and Instagram @bethematch. I saw this post yesterday of a little girl whose donor didn’t respond. They found a full match, but the donor didn’t respond. And just how important it is to have maybe multiple options for somebody because it’s very likely that a donor changed their mind or you just never know and how sad these parents were because they were really excited about having a full match donor, and then they haven’t heard from the donor. It just breaks your heart when you hear these stories. Just to kind of be aware of that and how you can get on the registry.
Claire: Okay, so we have some super fun Q&As for the rest of the episode. We asked you guys some random silly questions and you really delivered. But first, let’s take a quick minute and talk about our favorite sponsor Ned. We love Ned. You know about them. You love them. These are the CBD products that we absolutely love and use every single day. I lately have been getting more and more into the balance products, which are really formulated around hormone balance. I find that they help me to feel throughout my cycle and throughout the day even, just to take the edge off of some of those natural swings that happen. I think that the beauty of CBD products is they never make me feel overly medicated. It doesn’t fully dull the things that I am feeling, but it just takes the edge off of things and the more difficult aspects of being a human and really helps you manage through those moments and manage the ups and downs a little bit more because it can help you take the edge off. That’s the product I’ve been loving a lot lately.
Joy: You know, we had – this is a real-life review. We had a listener contact us because the Sleep Blend is new and improved, and they really want you to check that out. We had a listener message us and say, “I’ve had problems sleeping my entire life, and the Ned Sleep Blend is the answer for me. I’m sleeping so well.” I’m like, yes, that’s so exciting. It really does work. Give it a try. They have a money back guarantee. No questions asked. We love them. And if you have not yet checked out the episode with Ret Taylor, please do so. It’s a wonderful, wonderful episode. He is such a good human. And after the episode, you will just feel good because he is just a feel good person to listen to. And it’s Ned’s birthday month, so if you’d like to give their new and improved Sleep Blend a try, Joy and Claire listeners get 21% off with code JOY for the month of March only. It’s the best offer of the year. Now is the time to try it. Visit helloned.com/JOY to get 21% off. Thank you, Ned, for sponsoring the show and offering our listeners a natural remedy for some of life’s most common health issues.
Claire: Alright guys, we have some really fun questions, so let’s dive in. Here’s the first one. The strangest item in your fridge?
Joy: Probably a green powder from six years ago that I can’t force myself to throw away.
Claire: This is so on brand for you.
Joy: Because it was so expensive, but I didn’t end up using the whole thing. But I can’t let myself throw it away.
Claire: Mine is probably, I have a lot of really random condiments. At my last job when I was working in the natural products industry, we constantly were sampling these random, random condiments. So I have this chili crisp, but it’s a Mexican version of chili crisp. It’s really sort of smokey flavored. That’s really good. I feel like my pantry is really where my weird stuff is, so not a lot of weird stuff in my fridge. I do have a lot of chicken feet in my freezer though. Okay. What is your favorite toothpaste?
Joy: I feel like you just glossed over chicken feet. I was like, woah.
Claire: It’s for broth. I get frozen chicken feet from the store. They make great broth. They are high in collagen. And it makes you feel like a witch [cackling] stirring this big cauldron.
Joy: Your goal is to live in the –
Claire: Cottage witch. Cottage with.
Joy: Live in a cottage and make soup.
Claire: Like a mossy cottage with a big soup pot all the time and I’m just sort of like [cackling] all the way around all the time.
Joy: I think that’s a great goal for you.
Claire: Thanks.
Joy: Sorry, what was the question?
Claire: What’s your favorite toothpaste.
Joy: Well I sound so old, but my teeth are really sensitive you guys, so I have to use Sensodyne. And I love it because it works.
Claire: I go back and forth between, I do sometimes still use those little tablets. The bite tablets.
Joy: I never tried those. You were the Instagram influenced.
Claire: I know, I was influenced by a late-night ad. I think this was back when I was breastfeeding Evie. Which shout out to all the breastfeeding people out there because there is nothing like a 2am impulse buy when you are breastfeeding. I feel like this is an affliction that we all have to deal with.
Joy: I laughed so hard when you described it – I don’t know if you remember saying this, but it’s still stuck in my memory because it’s so funny – is you’re like, “I feel like these Instagram ads target new moms who just need their life a little bit better.”
Claire: Yeah, exactly. Just a little incremental ad.
Joy: Just a tiny bit better.
Claire: I also have this really expensive – You can’t see it. It’s right out of the frame of my Zoom – this really expensive lumbar pillow that I bought during that time. Super cute. Anyway. So I do like the Bite, which are these dry tablets. They look sort of like a breath mint, and then you chew them up. And as your saliva mixes with it become toothpastey. Or you get your toothbrush wet. The one thing I never got used to though. I think just after a lifetime of using commercial toothpaste, I really want that sharp, minty feeling, and you don’t really get that from those toothpaste tablets. I typically just use Crest or Colgate, very standard. Whatever is on sale at Target.
Joy: Now, do you have good teeth genes? I talked to my dentist about this recently because I had to go in for a checkup. Historically my family doesn’t have good luck with teeth, meaning we get cavities easily, my dad has had to have a lot of dental work done. I have to be really on top of it. I was using those little pickers, those hand-held disposable pickers. Which probably aren’t the best for the environment. But I was like, oh, it’s convenient for me. Because I wasn’t sitting there flossing every day. She was like, “Actually, don’t use those because you can’t get under the tooth. Flossing, you can really get into the gums and under the tooth.” So, I’m really sad about that. I really have to pay attention to my teeth hygiene or else I get cavities like crazy.
Claire: I think I am average amount of cavity pre-disposition. So my dad played hockey when he was a kid and in college. He had a lot of teeth knocked out, so he had a lot of bridges and crowns and stuff put in. My dad is in his mid-late-70’s at this point. I just watched him my whole life go through these months and months long with tens of thousands of dollars of dental work. Even though his comes from a place of dental injuries, it does motivate me to not ever want to do that. That was a lot of information about teeth.
Joy: It’s important.
Claire: A lot of people asked for more marriage hacks. I don’t really have any marriage hacks right now. I don’t have a go-to right now.
Joy: I don’t have a go-to. I feel like Scott has been doing one on me, so I guess I can flip the tables. He does this thing where if I’m in the middle of something or I’m busy, he will come into the house – let’s say he’s doing yard work outside and he wants my opinion on something he is doing. He will come into the house. He’s kind of like the Kool-Aid man where he will just barge in and he’ll be like, “I need you. Come look at this.” There is nothing more frustrating to me than when I’m in the middle of something and somebody tries to yank you away and be like, “Hey, I need you for a second.” I want to be like, “I am in the middle of something. Can you give me five minutes?” So he does that all the time. It’s a pet peeve of mine. The irony is if I were to do that with him, he would be really flustered and annoyed. But when he does it to me, he’s like, “It’s just like 30 seconds.” He will literally come in and he goes, “Okay, can you help me out for just like 30 seconds?” He does it in this way of very gently trying to present it, not like, “Hey, I need you. Come over here.” He’s like, “I just need like 30 seconds of your time.” I look at him in a huff. And he stops and he goes, “How was my presentation?” I’m like, okay, fine. So then he turns it into a joke meaning he knows that I hate when he yanks me. And I will say that. I’ll say, “Don’t yank me around. I don’t like being yanked.” He now knows not to yank me around and say, “I just need 30 seconds of your time.”
Claire: And try to soften the blow by being like, “How did I do?”
Joy: Yes. Or some of the times he’ll be like… because it’s just very aggressive if I’m in the middle of something, it drives me crazy. I’m like, ugh. It’s really probably not a great characteristic on my part, but whatever.
Claire: You know, you like what you like. I don’t really have a go-to right now, and I can’t think of anything Brandon is really hacking me with either. I will say for transparency to make anybody else out there maybe feel a little bit less worried. The reason we talk about marriage hacks and the reason we sometimes sort of gripe about our husbands is to try and normalize the day-to-day griping that happens in marriages.
Joy: So normal.
Claire: Yeah, it’s so normal, and it’s not talked about a lot. I think you can really, particularly with your marriage, get in this place of, I’m the only one who nitpicks. That must mean that my marriage is doomed. It’s always really helpful for me. We always talk about this group text we have with Joy and Jess. I’ll text them and be like, “Does your husband do X, Y, and Z?” And they’re always like, “Oh yeah, all the time.” Okay, it’s not just my uniquely failing marriage. This is a human thing. In the spirit of that, I will say Brandon and I have been in couple’s therapy now for maybe four months. I feel like actually at first it really made things worse. Because it makes you sit down and really dig up all the stuff that you typically just sort of bury or gloss over. I’m hoping that we’re going to come out of a period where I feel like it’s making things worse pretty soon. I think there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Joy: Right. It has to get back before it gets better.
Claire: Right. You really have to sit there and be like, wow, this is a pattern, and this has been going on for a long time, and that sucks. Or oh wow, I tend to just push past those moments. But if I really sit in them, they’re painful.
Joy: Yeah, relationships are hard. I was talking to someone recently who was like, “I’m not in a relationship, and I really want to be in one.” I get that feeling. I’ve been in that feeling. I just always say, relationships are so much work. They are not a cake walk. Sometimes being single is real appealing to think about. But at the end of the day, working through tough stuff really does bring you closer. It is hard work, and it is constantly fed on social media, like perfect relationships and blah blah blah, look at how happy we are. And I never feed into that crap. Nope, it’s not real. It is not real. Or especially celebrities. Oh my gosh, the way they glamorize –
Claire: Like, “I fall more in love with you every day.”
Joy: Oh my gosh.
Claire: I don’t fall more in love with anyone every day.
Joy: There’s no way that happens.
Claire: Maybe my dog.
Joy: And especially right now. I was watching the Ellen interview with Kim Kardashian recently when she was talking about Pete Davidson… just, whatever. He’s got like four tattoos of her, and she’s like, “It’s really cute.” And I just want to be like, no, you’re just in the honeymoon phase. Of course it’s really cute. And she just had that new relationship glow. Which is great, but it doesn’t last forever.
Claire: It’s like Tom Hanks jumping on Oprah’s couch.
Joy: Tom Cruise, you mean?
Claire: Tom Cruise. Tom Hanks? I’m sorry Tom Hanks. I apologize for every confusing you.
Joy: Please do not ever speak ill of him again. But yeah, it’s exactly like that. That is meant to be like that for six months to maybe eight months, but then it dies off. It’s meant to die off because then you have to develop different intimacies. But everyone always looks at that piece of like, oh my gosh, if we get out of that, I’m doomed, our relationship is doomed. I’ve never done cocaine or anything, but the first time you do a stimulant or some type of drug that makes you feel super good, you’re never going to get to that point again. You’re just never going to reach that level. I don’t know how I just compared that to cocaine, but whatever. Next question.
Claire: Do you think about the order that you eat things in a meal? Like, do you take one bite of this, one bite of that? Or do you just go for it?
Joy: Absolutely not, absolutely not. I love to mix food.
Claire: Yeah, you are a chaotic eater.
Joy: Chaotic?
Claire: Yeah, there is no rhyme or reason. Because I do a little bit. I don’t plan out, but the closer I get to the end of a meal, the more strategic I’m getting because I don’t want to finish all of one thing and still have a bunch of something left. I kind of want to finish all of my items at the same time.
Joy: Yeah, I guess if flavors are supposed to be going together, I definitely want some sauce left for that chicken. But I don’t go in with a plan. I just want the food in my body.
Claire: I just want to eat it. Let’s see here. If you had to bake a bread sculpture on Great British Bake Off, what would you make? I love this question.
Joy: I feel like we answered this on the show.
Claire: On On Your Marks, Get Set, Bake!
Joy: Yeah.
Claire: I think we have talked about our signature cakes and pies. I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about bread.
Joy: A bread sculptures? All I can think about is that amazing, was it a lion that he made?
Claire: Yeah, it was a lion.
Joy: It was so amazing.
Claire: It was so good. There’s so many options.
Joy: I’m thinking more realistic. Because in terms of my skill level and realistic, we’re not going down a good place.
Claire: I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. And I’ll parlay this into another question about my bear tattoo with a croissant. So you guys know I have this tattoo of a bear holding a croissant. I’ll post another picture about it in our Instagram stories the day this is released because we always think people miss it whenever I post it. It’s just a big bear holding a big croissant. It’s maybe six or seven inches, and it’s right on top of my thigh. But now that that little tattoo is there by himself, I feel like he needs more little friends holding food, so I’m going to get an otter, like a sea otter, that’s holding a bowl of soup. You know how otters hold things on their tummies. So I’m going to get an otter holding a bowl of soup.
Joy: So cute. That’s so cute.
Claire: But I think that would be my bread sculpture. It would be an otter holding a little mini bread boule.
Joy: Okay. That just gives me an idea of putting a sculpture of bread, like a big pool or something, to put soup in. Because I do love a bread bowl.
Claire: Who doesn’t love a bread bowl?
Joy: Oh man, it’s so good.
Claire: Wouldn’t this be so cute? You could do a bread swimming pool with a little diving board and then put little bread floats.
Joy: That’s so great.
Claire: I think I would win the signature challenge with that one.
Joy: Yeah.
Claire: Okay, if you could live in another country, which and why? We also got asked if you could live anywhere in the United States, where would you live and why? Domestic and abroad.
Joy: Well, I love France from when I lived there. I do love France. But I also love warmth, and I love Costa Rica. I feel like that would be such a good vibe because it’s warm and it’s chill and the people are so nice. So I’m going to go with what I know, places that I’ve been. I would choose the warmth first, so Costa Rica. And then anywhere to live, are you kidding me? Venice, Los Angeles, Malibu, any of the Pacific Coast Highway.
Claire: Hollywood adjacent.
Joy: Yes.
Claire: My half-brother’s mom – so a woman that my dad was married to before he was married to my mom. She’s been in my life my whole life because she is the mom of my half-brothers. She is moving to Costa Rica with her husband. They’ve been down there for a month over the winter, and they just decided to buy a house.
Joy: That’s so great. I have a couple friends who moved there for a stint in their lives. So beautiful.
Claire: It seems like such a chill place.
Joy: So chill. Remember that? They were always like “pura vida.”
Claire: Yeah, no worries. Like, just, here, have a coconut. I just want to live somewhere where you’re walking down the road and you’re like, huh, a sloth?
Joy: You know what I loved the most? I don’t know if you remember this. But when we were driving around, everyone honks at each other. Do you remember this? And I was like, why are they honking? They’re just saying hi. So honking in Costa Rica isn’t, “Get out of the way.” Honking in Costa Rica is like, “Hey, what’s up, what’s up?” So everyone honks, and it’s so great, and I love it. We need to be more like Costa Rica.
Claire: I think if I could live anywhere abroad, current global issues notwithstanding, I have always been really curious about living in Germany. It seems like a cool place to live. I would definitely move to Iceland. And also, I would definitely move to Ireland or Scotland, although all of those places that I mentioned – my fatal flaw is I don’t know if I could actually survive somewhere with less than 350 days of pure sunlight, which is pretty much nowhere in the world other than Colorado.
Joy: Yeah. Yeah. I feel very lucky.
Claire: I know. It’s the best. I don’t know. I will definitely say, as I’ve gotten older, I feel more drawn to the days that aren’t sunny, verses than just enduring them. So I think I’d be okay. And then anywhere in the United States, Encinitas is my number one goal to live in. I love Encinitas. It’s so cute. I love it. Or I could see myself in the Pacific Northwest. Although there’s so many wildfires up there these days.
Joy: Yeah.
Claire: Weirdest food combo that you love?
Joy: I don’t know if I have one. Is peanut and bananas weird?
Claire: No, not really.
Joy: I love peanut butter and bananas.
Claire: I do too. Let’s see, I have a lot. But I don’t see them as being weird, so I’m not really sure.
Joy: I used to love as a kid – this is the only one I can think of. I did not like jelly as a kid. I love jelly now, but for some reason as a kid, I was like, no peanut butter and jelly. So my mom would make me peanut butter and butter sandwiches, and that was delicious.
Claire: Wow, that does sound pretty good.
Joy: It’s so creamy.
Claire: So creamy.
Joy: So soothing.
Claire: And probably the Jiff peanut butter too.
Joy: Totally. So everything was just cream together, just peanut butter and butter.
Claire: Maybe I should start doing that for Miles. It sounds like a calorie bomb.
Joy: So great. Yes, yes.
Claire: Weirdest food combo that I love. I’m just thinking of all the tinned fish that I love. I feel like I’ve talked about things on the podcast and you’ve been like, “What?” And now I can’t think of any. I love adding sauerkraut to things. I love adding mustard to things. Oh, oh. This to me is so good, but everyone freaks out when I say it. Honey on avocado toast.
Joy: That’s a little weird.
Claire: It’s so good, you have to try it.
Joy: So honey on avocado toast?
Claire: So avocado toast, honey, and then flaky sea salt. It’s so good. And in reality, avocado doesn’t have that strong of a flavor.
Joy: Yeah, that’s true.
Claire: So when you add the honey on top, it just sort of gives the creaminess –
Joy: It’s kind of how they make a lot of puddings with avocado and cocoa powder.
Claire: Avocado takes sweetness really well. Highly recommend. If you are an avocado toast person, drizzle some honey on there, a little bit of sea salt. Chef’s kiss. Um, what do you consider to be the most perfect weather?
Joy: I think of Hawaii where you’re in that beautiful breeze and the weather is probably 85 degrees. So it’s hot but not too hot, and you have ocean breeze to cool you off just a little bit. Perfection.
Claire: That’s a good one. We don’t get a lot of rain here in Colorado, but my favorite is when it rains overnight, the next morning when the sun is out, the air is cold, and stuff is damp, but the air is really still and the sun is shining. You can just smell everything. That’s my favorite.
Joy: Yeah, I love it. And it’s kind of still. That’s beautiful.
Claire: If you could have one superpower, what would it be?
Joy: Fly or be invisible. I feel like we’ve answered this one before. Yeah.
Claire: I would either want to speak every language or have the power to heal. Although I feel like that would be kind of intense.
Joy: Kind of intense, the power to heal.
Claire: Biggest pet peeve. So many. One pet peeve that makes me crazy that I’m dealing with a lot right now. We’re refinancing our house, and my lender ends all his emails with ellipses. So he’s like, “Let me know what you think…” It’s like, “I’ve attached these documents…” Just say it! It makes me crazy.
Joy: That reminds me of a pet peeve that used to happen at my old job where I had this person that would always message me. For example, “Are you here?!” Would do question mark, punctuation mark together. I’ve done that before. Like in text, yesterday I did it. I asked Jess, “How was Hamilton? Excited?” So I wanted to express “?!” Like I was excited in the text question. But it felt aggressive. “Are you here?!”
Claire: Yeah. As opposed to like, “How was Hamilton?”
Joy: Yeah. Question mark, exclamation mark. Any time you’re combining or doing multiple punctuation, such as two or three question marks, two or three exclamation points. Unless you’re doing it with people who know your humor and voice, stop it. Stop it. Can’t.
Claire: I agree.
Joy: Stop it.
Claire: I wish there was something between a period and an exclamation point, though. That was like, I want you to know this is more than the casual end of a statement, but also, I am [higher pitched, excited voice] not quite ready to elevate it to this level.
Joy: And they do that all the time with women in communication with emails where we have a hard time with the period versus the exclamation point. We’re trying to make sure we sound really happy.
Claire: I want you to know that I’m upbeat.
Joy: I think we got to let go of that.
Claire: I just go for the smiley face. If you could have lunch with any fictional character, who would it be? And where would you go?
Joy: Fictional character?
Claire: I mean, I think that could be a character on a TV show played by a real person.
Joy: Okay, alright. I’m immediately in the cast of Sex and the City. I am their best friend, and I am at one of the coffee shops that they all go to to eat. One thousand percent.
Claire: I love how you just immediately went into the role play. “I am their best friend.” I mean, my first instinct is someone from the Harry Potter universe. I feel like that’s got to be Liz Lemon and we go somewhere with some ham. [singing] Somebody get me some ham.
Joy: Liz Lemon is probably one of the best fictional characters ever.
Claire: Absolutely. If your hair could be any color, what would it be?
Joy: As I have pink hair right now.
Claire: Your hair is pink, yeah. Okay, I’m going to use this time to talk about my idea about wigs. So I have dark, auburn, almost brown at this point in my life hair. When I was a kid, it was little orphan Annie red, and it’s just gotten darker throughout my life, which is common. But I’ve always wanted to try out like platinum blonde hair. I know, however, that it will take me months and months and months and, realistically, thousands of dollars to get my hair to that point. And then, what do you do? Then you have to spend months and months and months and thousands of dollars going back the other direction.
Joy: It’s so much maintenance.
Claire: I don’t love my hair super short. That’s not a great option for me. So I feel like what I might do is buy myself a nice high quality super blonde wig and wear it whenever I want to be blonde. There are a lot of people who use wigs as an accessory, and I am trying to challenge my assumption that that’s not an option for me. I’m just trying to think of what I mean by this. I’ve had this thought recently of, why haven’t I felt like this is accessible to me as an option, that If I were to put on a wig and wear it to work that it would be weird. It’s not something that we see a lot. And I know that this is completely different for people other that white women. I think that wigs for Black women are used really as an accessory and used in a different way. But for white women, we think you have to have hair loss in order to have a wig. I have started to go, I don’t want to appropriate –
Joy: But also, you’re also thinking too – there is a lot of thought around if you’re wearing a wig, there is either hair loss or there is something health-wise going on with you. There’s other outside factors and opinions that come along with that. And because it’s just for a reason of you wanting to try out a different hair color, you’re trying to make sure that you’re not doing it for –
Claire: That I’m not trivializing something that is really profound for other people.
Joy: Trivializing is a good word, yeah.
Claire: But at the same time, I’m like – and if I want to go out, and also there’s a lot of cheap wigs out there. Even if I wanted to spend a thousand dollars on a high-quality wig, that would still probably be half as much as I would spend actually getting my hair to be blonde and actually maintaining that and bringing it back the other direction. So this is just something that I’m noodling on. If you are someone out there who accessorizes with a wildly different hair colored wig, I would love to hear from you. Because I feel like I can pull it off. Of all the people, I also feel like though, of all the people in my life, if I were to show up at work with blonde hair and everyone would be like, “Did you dye your hair?” And I was like, “No, it’s a wig,” I could say that more than a lot of people.
Joy: Go downtown to that Denver wig store. Try some on. You know what I mean? Maybe see how it feels too. But yeah, I’d love to hear from people, too, that have done that.
Claire: So the answer to me is surfer, platinum blonde.
Joy: Right. Because you don’t want to dye and it’s a lot of work.
Claire: It’s a lot of work to dye your hair that color. And I don’t know that I could get there. My hair doesn’t lift to blonde that easily. It lifts to yellow.
Joy: Oh then, yeah.
Claire: Right. Okay, favorite coffee order?
Joy: Simple. I do love a latte. I don’t really like anything fancier than that.
Claire: I like a latte, and I also like cortados.
Joy: You do love a cortado.
Claire: Okay, we’ll do a few more.
Joy: Okay.
Claire: What kind of topping did Claire put on her pumpkin pie? Whipped cream. Homemade whipped cream. Heavy whipping cream that I whipped myself. So good. That’s one of my main motivators in eating pumpkin pie is to eat just so much whipped cream. What would JT and River’s perfect days look like?
Joy: JT’s perfect day? Oh my gosh. We’ve had some really good days with him where we get up, we go for a walk. He likes to sniff things. It’s a sunny day, so he likes to roll in the grass.
Claire: He’s such a putzer. He’s just a putz.
Joy: He loves to roll in the grass when it’s sunny, so Scott and I will always joke, “Oh my gosh, JT, it’s prime rolling in the grass weather.” He loves to roll in the grass. I would say he also loves to play with friends, maybe have a doggy date with the neighbors or a neighborhood dog. Doggy date and give him a good bully stick because he loves bully sticks. Oh, and snuggling. And laying on the bed. So we don’t sleep with him in the bed, just because he is so big and we’d have no room to sleep. But in the mornings when we are just sitting in the bed reading or whatever, he gets to lay on the bed with us, so we get some bedtime. And he loves to cuddle at night, so then we would sit on the floor and cuddle with him at night.
Claire: Aw, JT.
Joy: He’s sitting right next to me right now snoring. I was laughing earlier because he was making his bed, and I love when he digs in his bed. Does River do that?
Claire: Not really. River is too much of a monster. River’s perfect day would be just unlimited amounts of destruction. She would love to take your house and just chew it into pieces. She is actually getting a lot better about it. She doesn’t seek out destruction quite as much anymore.
Joy: Didn’t she chew on your couch?
Claire: She ate the couch? She ripped the couch. She ate a cushion off the couch.
Joy: [laughing] I know it’s not funny.
Claire: We had to get a new couch. We had this couch where the cushions were sewed into the couch, like it was all one piece, because it was like a futon kind of thing where you could lower the back. It didn’t look like a futon. It looked like a couch, but it was all one piece. And she ripped one of the cushions. Thankfully it was a cheap ass couch anyway. I didn’t hate it. It was fine. But it was a cheap couch anyway. All that to say, she loves to destroy. A long walk. She loves playing with other dogs. She’s only one. She would get in it with some other dogs big time, and she would just play all day long. Like, when we send her to doggy day care, she just goes berserk the whole day.
Joy: You get to watch on cameras? I love that.
Claire: You know what, I don’t know if my doggy day care has a camera. I haven’t ever looked into it, which is shocking, I know.
Joy: I would like people to tell me what you’ve seen on your doggy day care cameras. It’s just the cutest thing, how much fun your dogs are having.
Claire: This gal Betsy that I work with, she has this hysterical brown dog. It’s about the size of a lab. It’s really scruffy, like it’s one of those dogs that looks like it has a beard.
Joy: I love that.
Claire: His name is Waylen, and he’s so dorky. He’s allergic to grass. He’s one of those types of dogs.
Joy: Oh, buddy.
Claire: Aw, Waylen. And she’s always looking at him at doggy day care. She’s like, “All the dogs are playing, and Waylen is in the corner.” Every time she’s like, “Come look at my dog be antisocial.”
Joy: I want to ask one more question from JK because he asked this last time and we forgot to answer it. Or maybe it was an Instagram question. But for The Amazing Race, us two versus the husbands, who wins and why?
Claire: Oh, no question, we obviously win.
Joy: I mean, JK, really?
Claire: Here’s the thing. Joy and I have this dynamic. We are very opposite in a lot of ways, but we really complement each other.
Joy: We are a well-oiled machine.
Claire: We are a well-oiled machine. Brandon and Scott, if I let them hear this, they will disagree with us, but they are opposite in ways that do not complement each other.
Joy: Right. Right. Right. They would just repel oil and water.
Claire: Scott would immediately get so annoyed with Brandon, and then Brandon would immediately think he was in trouble and start to feel bad. And then Scott would feel bad that Brandon felt bad.
Joy: Brandon would internalize it and shut down, and nothing would get done.
Claire: And nothing would get done. But then Brandon would want to play it cool and act like nothing is wrong, and then Scott would be confused.
Joy: Scott would want to start planning and fixing things, and it would just not go well.
Claire: No, not at all. The thing about both Scott and Brandon is they are both the types of people – I’m trying to choose my word every carefully right now. They are both the types of people who need a little bit of direction, lest they focus on the wrong part of the problem.
Joy: Right. Right.
Claire: So they are really good at solving problems and very helpful and motivated, but they both have a hard time prioritizing.
Joy: You know, like a Roomba?
Claire: It just bumps against the wall and turns like three degrees and bumps.
Joy: It’s so helpful, but it just starts going in one direction and then it hits a wall.
Claire: That’s a good analogy. We mean this in love.
Joy: So much love. They know this by now. I hope they do. For example, when we were doing our photo shoot last weekend, I was picking out a bunch of clothes. Claire and I do these little mini photo shoots you’ve seen us doing with all the reels. And Scott walked into the closet as I was putting a bunch of clothes together. We’ve been doing this often, so it’s not like I need to furiously grab very intentional outfits. I don’t have a lot of pressure on myself to pick the right thing, so I’m grabbing a bunch of things. I know it’s going to work, and I know we’re going to do this again. If we were doing a once-a-year photoshoot, I would have to be very intentional about these outfits. And Scott walks in and he’s like, “Is this a spring shoot? Do you need spring colors?” No. No, no, no. I just looked at him and said, “Do not get involved.” Because he wanted to help and he wanted to pick out outfits for me. And then he goes, “Okay, well if you’d like some direction or feedback, just let me know.” And I could tell his feelings were hurt. But I was in a hurry. If I was to stop and engage him and be a part of the process, it would be another 45 minutes. I’ve got to go in 5 minutes. I’m done, we’re good, I’ve picked it. He was like, “Okay.” I could tell he was a little sad about that. It’s funny.
Claire: Or like Brandon is the type of person who will – I mean, I see these TikToks or reels all the time about this. And this would be me and Brandon where I’m like, “Hey, we have guests coming over in an hour. Can you help me clean?” And Brandon goes out back to reorganize the shed.
Joy: Oh my gosh, that’s exactly what he does. [laughing]
Claire: I meant like, maybe unload the dishwasher. So that’s what I mean by you give them –
Joy: Roomba.
Claire: Yeah, uh huh. You’re not not doing what I asked you.
Joy: You just need to point the Roomba towards the kitchen. That’s really what I need.
Claire: So this is why Joy and I would win The Amazing Race.
Joy: There you go, JK. It was a long, windy answer.
Claire: Okay, we have way more questions. We barely got through half of them. And a lot of folks keep asking the same questions that we never get to.
Joy: We will ask. We will get to them.
Claire: In a future episode. Thank you, guys, so much for joining us. Don’t forget to support Ned, helloned.com/JOY or use discount code JOY. Get 21% off your order for the month of March in celebration of Ned’s birthday. Thank you for supporting the brands that support our podcast. You can find us on Instagram @joyandclaire_. You can go to our website at joyandclaire.com. You can email us, thisisjoyandclaire@gmail.com. Thank you for being here, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Joy: Bye, guys.
Claire: Bye.
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This is Joy & Claire Episode 116: Reel Life
Episode Date: March 3, 2022
Transcription Completed: March 19, 2022
Audio Length: 45:16 minutes
Joy: Hey guys, this is Joy.
Claire: And this is Claire.
Joy: Welcome back. It’s another week at the podcast.
Claire: It’s March.
Joy: It’s March. Someone mentioned last week on our Instagram page. I think you did a post around podcasting for nine years. Someone was like, “Oh my gosh, are you going to plan a ten-year trip?” I was like, we really should start planning that now. It would be summer of next year. Summer 2023, right?
Claire: Yes. Okay, before we get started, we do want to say that on this podcast we are not going to address the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We do not know enough about that issue for us to speak in a way that feels authentic, in a way that feels helpful or useful or like it would add anything to the conversation. I feel like right now there are some really great accounts you can be following. We will link a couple in our show notes. I just want to be very sensitive to that, to acknowledge that there is a huge global event happening right now. We are not trying to skate over it. We are not trying to ignore it, but we just don’t have anything to add to that conversation. We very much support the people of Ukraine. We very much are worried and –
Joy: We’re keeping up to date on our own of what’s going on.
Claire: Exactly.
Joy: I’m reading every day. I’m listening to a lot of podcasts of people that are actually there. If you haven’t listened to The Daily with Sabrina Tavernise, she’s doing real live updates of what’s going on. It’s heartbreaking. I think bottom line is because we are not posting about it or talking about it on the podcast at length, that doesn’t mean we don’t care. We are supporting Ukraine. We are sending all of our love. And also, we know that things are changing daily. We want to be responsible too about the content that we’re putting out about it.
Claire: I think the only other thing that I’ll add is that if you were looking for places to donate, the places I have donated are the UN Refugee Agency as well as World Kitchen. These are two organization that I either have personal experiences with or people close to me have personal experiences with working directly with those non-profits. So I feel pretty confident in those. I know there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and things are changing so quickly that it’s kind of hard to know how to help. Those are two orgs that I have a lot of confidence in. I can’t say I 100% know every single thing about them, but I do have high confidence in them. We will link those in the show notes as well.
Joy: Yeah, there’s a lot going on in the world.
Claire: So many things. Every day.
Joy: That’s really big right now, but there are other huge issues going on in the world. I am reading every single day about what’s going on. I try not to over flood my system with stress and news, but what I know I can manage is to make sure that I’m keeping up to date with what’s going on in the world so that I can appropriately act and donate to the right organizations. I think that’s something that there’s no right or wrong way to do it. That’s where it gets tricky is a lot of people can handle a lot of news. Some people can handle that. Some people can’t. So take your you. Stay informed. Shut it off when you need to. Fill your cup so that you can help others.
Claire: Okay, I know that this was not what we were planning on opening the podcast with, but I am curious, Joy, from your standpoint. I’m sure you’re hearing about this with your clients all day long. How can you practically set those boundaries and be guilt-free about that in terms of not feeling like you have to just be constantly – the whole don’t look away, don’t turn it off.
Joy: Right. And most of the time it has to do with comparison. I think we compare ourselves a lot to what other people are doing, what other people can handle. I think social media really needs into this. There’s always that dichotomy of, “We have it so well and I feel so guilty about that. We’re not suffering.” The main point to remember is if you feel depleted versus you have enough energy to help in small ways. Small ways could be, again, donating or just keeping eye son what movements are going on in your area that you could potentially help with. Like if you want to actually physically volunteer somewhere, keep an eye on that. Don’t get so depleted to where every single day you’re waking up feeling drained, feeling like you can’t handle any more information. I talk to a lot of people who will get so down the rabbit hold that they feel depleted. They just can’t think past any solution and then they go to this place of, “The world is shit, and there’s nothing I can do, so f*** it.” When you start to go down the case of the f*** it’s is when we you want to real back a little bit. That’s not helpful. I get it. It’s very scary. But we don’t want to get to the point where we just completely give up. Get to a place where you feel like you’re informed enough, but not to a place where you’re like, “Well, screw it. The world is burning, and there’s nothing we can do.” That’s not going to help anybody.
Claire: Yeah. And I think it’s also important in this case to realize that unlike a lot of the other issues that we’ve been dealing with in America recently, this is something that it’s really hard to address personally at this time. I think that’s something for me where I’ve been like, hey listen, my personal vigilance is not going to solve this problem. I am not nearly educated enough, nor do I understand the factors at play to even have a well-formed opinion, let alone feel like I’m adding anything to the conversation.
Joy: But I think the main thing that I think most of us can agree on, it’s a horrible thing that’s going on. It’s absolutely devastating. That is what feels so hopeless. There’s so many people suffering. We are so physically distanced from it. I think that with the right type of self-awareness of really educating yourself on something that is really serious of how we can help. Looking away because you’re so tired and you can’t handle it is not going to help the problem. We really need to make sure that we are taking care of ourselves in that way.
Claire: So I just wanted to start the podcast off with that because we did do a Q&A for this week, and we did have a couple people say, are you going to address the situation in Ukraine? Why aren’t more people talking about this? And first of all, if you are not feeling like everybody is talking about it, then maybe you could add some different types of people to your feed because I definitely feel like I’m seeing it constantly. So seek out some voices about it. But this is a situation in particular where – everything. Everything right now. Everything, everything, always. Check your sources.
Joy: Check your sources.
Claire: Don’t’ rely on the headlines. Read the whole article.
Joy: Yes.
Claire: Try to do your own – not fact checking, because fact checking involves typically research. But make sure that you can verify across a couple different news sources what you’re reading.
Joy: Right. Before you start to post things or repost. To quote Brene on a recent post, “read up before you speak up.” I love that. There’s so much flying around. Especially what’s going on, it can be potentially harmful to post something or repost something. This is just very, very scary.
Claire: So take care of yourselves. And if you are not in a place to feel like you can’t take yourself out of that mindset, then this week’s podcast episode might not be for you and that’s okay. If you do feel like you want to be in that mental space of really focusing and really taking in a lot of current events, then just know that that’s not what we’re going to be focusing on this week. If that’s not for you right now, that’s fine. But if you are sitting there thinking, actually, I do feel like I need a little bit of a brain break, then here we go.
Joy: Here we go.
Claire: Here we go. So we have a few life updates. One not so positive one, and one pretty positive one.
Joy: Yeah. And before I forget, I mentioned this at the very beginning and we just took a quick right turn to talk about the current events, which I appreciate. I also want to circle back and make sure people know that we are definitely considering a ten-year party of some sort.
Claire: Okay, yeah, I don’t want to overshadow that.
Joy: Let’s not overshadow that. That was kind of quickly glossed over. Let’s not gloss over ten years. So TBD. As for the updates, quick updates. One is at the end of last weeks’ podcast episode, I mentioned that I was donating bone marrow this week. That was again delayed. This has been about the fourth time it has been postponed. Certain reasoning behind it. But the bottom line is the recipient has to be in a state of health in order to do a transplant. This just keeps getting postponed for that reason, and that is all I know right now. I just want to keep sending that recipient love and prayers that she stays health. So that’s where I’m at with that. I think some of my friends who work either in the recipient side or the donor side are like, “Yeah, this is really emotional for you too.” I think the weird part about it is, sure, I had emotions when I found out just because you really do psyche yourself up the week of donation. And then to have it changed really last minute a handful of times now is pretty, woah. It’s just kind of whiplash. But at the same time, you have this space of – at least for me, I want to get over it pretty quickly. Because at the end of the day, someone needs me. It’s a life-or-death situation, and you feel like you can’t have normal human emotions. It’s kind of like that comparison… what’s it called? Comparative suffering. That’s just something that I think about. Yes, I’m allowed to have some emotions around it, but I also see the bigger picture. No question about it. It’s just a very weird scenario that you could never imagine. Like how you could feel about these things. But I just really hope that she’s doing okay. The second positive update, which oddly enough this was on 2/22/2022, so I really feel like something was going on that day. Especially because Slack shut down and everyone was having computer issues ae got all this very emotional news in one day. Not 20 minutes later from the phone call from my case worker at Be the Match, I get a phone call from Canine Companions. It’s the puppy raiser liaison. I know her very well. I’ve known her for years since she and I graduated. She called. I see Oceanside, California on my phone pop up. My heart just drops because it could either be good news or it could be like, oh, Cadet is coming home. Which also is good news, but you kind of hope that your dog doesn’t flunk out. So Becky said that Cadet has been chosen for the hearing dog program. That just means that after these three months of training, they have evaluated her skills and they’ve seen that she really thrives in a more energetic environment. The hearing dog program requires that the dogs have a little more energy. She’s also very food motivated. And the hearing dog training track does a lot of food-reward motivation for the skills they learn. So she will be joining two other siblings in her litter in the hearing dog program. That will still be at Oceanside, so she’ll stay at Oceanside. This doesn’t just guarantee that she is going to graduate. It just means that this is the track that she is going on. If all goes well and she passes through this program, that just means that she’s matched to a human, an applicant that is hearing impaired. She would graduate and move on to be someone’s hearing dog. It’s really cool. I was talking to my uncle, one of my mom’s brothers. My mom is one of six children, and she has five brothers. One of her brothers is hard of hearing. He knows sign language. He really cannot hear at all. So my whole life, he’s used sign language to communicate, and he also does lip reading. So we never learned sign language because he could kind of communicate with us, and he can speak properly. But he would always lip read. We text a lot, and he said he just lost his dog. I was telling him about Cadet. He was like, “Maybe I’ll get her. I’m hard of hearing.” I’m like, “You should apply for a hearing dog.” How has this never occurred to me? Probably because he’s also had a dog, but now that he’s lost his dog. I don’t know if he’s going to do it. I’m like, “You should apply for a hearing dog. That would be so amazing.” He’s kind of at that age too where he’s getting a little older. He has a partner, but wouldn’t that be cool if he actually applied and got approved? I don’t think he’d get Cadet per se, but just to get a hearing dog, that would be a nice full circle moment. So anyway. Great positive updates.
Claire: Two things. The first one is that I think it’s so amazing how the program really matches dogs. Because all of her evaluations have been like, “She’s a little high energy, but we’re working with it. She’s really food-motivated, so we’re going to work with that.” So the fact that there’s things that could be seen as an issue we have to work with is being channeled into, oh, we have a program for this.
Joy: Totally. It’s so cool how they do that.
Claire: The other thing is, I don’t know about anybody else listening, but now every time I see a CCI dog in the wild, I feel like I’ve spotted a celebrity.
Joy: That’s true. I still do it. We were at the mall with Cadet one day last year, and someone ran up to us and was like, “I raised a puppy too.” You instantly feel like you know the person because it’s this thing that only people know when they’ve raised a puppy. It’s really cute. Yeah, a lot of people have said that too. Or they’ll send pictures of a CCI dog that they saw.
Claire: Yeah, if I see a CCI dog in the wild, I send it to Joy. I’m like, “Look!” She’s like, “Wow, Claire…”
Joy: I get it. I get excited too when you see the gold vest.
Claire: Yeah.
Joy: I feel like that’s the one thing I’ve always found so amazing when they do match day. This is such a special day. So if you are selected to go to team training – and team training is that two weeks of on campus, you’re living there 24/7 to train and then get the dog matched with you. Either a service dog or a facility dog or a hearing dog. Match day is the third day that you’re there. So it happens on a Wednesday. Pre-matched just means after you’re matched with the dog that they think is going to work best with you, the trainers watch and observe to make sure it’s a good fit. They never want to say, “Oh, you’re matched” because they don’t want it to be this pressure situation where you have to make it work with this dog. They call it a pre-match. Because then they’ll watch you for the next week to make sure all is good. So pre-match day is this really big day at Canine Companions. The whole staff comes in the training room with all the graduates to see people get matched with their forever dog. It’s super emotional, and everybody cries. I will always remember that day when I was matched with JT, but also because you see how great these trainers are with matching people with the dogs and the strengths these dogs have and how well they match with the person that they’re going to go to. It’s never just a whoever’s next on the waitlist gets this dog. It’s so, so carefully thought of. That’s why I always get really adamant about people and service dogs and making sure the dogs are right for service or right for therapy, just depending on their temperament and what’s going to stress the dog out. So I just really appreciate that they take that into consideration. I’m really excited for Cadet, and we are just crossing our fingers to make sure that she’s going to keep going. I’m so proud of her.
Claire: So cute. Yay, dogs.
Joy: Yay, dogs.
Claire: I don’t really have any life updates. Nothing has really changed in my life in the past week.
Joy: Let’s give a really quick update, because we’re going to do a Q&A, but someone did ask how our new jobs are going.
Claire: Sure. So I’ve been at my job now, let’s see… November, December, January… I’m going into my fourth month. It’s been good. I really, really like my new job. It’s really flexible. I think I’ve talked about how I like having the option of being at home or going into the office. As things continue to open up more and more, I think going into the office will be a little more mandatory but still not every day. I still really like that. As you guys know, I’ve been feeling really cooped up for the last year. So my job itself is great. It’s definitely a growing team. So there’s always some hiccups to try and figure out what are the processes going to be? This team used to only be 12 people and now it’s like 30, so how are we updating the way that we work and working through those growing pains. But I’m really enjoying it. I have two people who report to me, and I really like both of them. And I hope they like me too, I guess. I know that’s not the goal as a manager, but I want to be a cool mom. Not a regular manager, I want to be a cool manager. Yeah. It’s a great location. It’s right in downtown Denver, which for me is a big deal because I get to have my time out on the town. Because otherwise I just live at sort of the edge of Longmont.
Joy: The end of the earth.
Claire: I live at the end of Boulder County. Literally the county line is a mile from the house. That’s my update. I really like it. In case you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, I work in marketing at a mid-size outdoor brand. The brand has a very large parent company. So it’s super fun. I’ve almost always worked in a situation like that where I’ve worked for a smaller brand that ladders up to a big company. It’s just a structure that I find I really like because you can have the agility of a smaller brand while having the resources of a bigger company, and that’s really fun.
Joy: Congratulations.
Claire: Thanks.
Joy: My update is I’ve been with my company for about three months. So it started with a smaller company, and then Headspace bought this other company right when I was getting hired on. So I work for Headspace. Which is a branch – they call Headspace Health because it’s more therapy. Headspace has traditionally been meditations in the meditation app, which is great. Highly recommend the app. And now, they offer therapy for certain types of funnels as far as contracts that they have, employers that buy them for therapy for their employees. So right now it’s not a BetterHelp where you can just call in and get hooked up with a therapist. But I’ve been doing full-time teletherapy from home working for that company, and I just love it. I love the culture. I love the people. I love the clients. They’re great. I like working from home, and I do like the flexibility of that. So I feel like it’s a really good fit. I just don’t feel, even with seeing patients all day, I don’t feel burnt out. I don’t feel the hustle and bustle of working in an outpatient clinic where they literally stuff you with patients all day, and you’re just so brain tired at the end of the day. They do a really good job. I love the CEO of this company. He’s just super rad. We do meditations before every team meeting. They’re just great. A completely 180 from where I was and the toxic crap I had to deal with. Karma has really thrown me a bone. So that’s really going well.
Claire: Alright, before we dive into too many more Q&A’s, let’s take a break to talk about our sponsor Ned. We love Ned. We love their CBD products. We have both been personally using Ned for years.
Joy: Years.
Claire: We started using Ned in… what? Would it have been 2018? And we absolutely love their products. Continue to love them even more. The more stuff they come out with is more stuff for us to love. This week, we are particularly excited about their sleep blend, which is new and improved. It’s going to get you an even greater night’s sleep. I love this stuff because I don’t have a hard time falling asleep, but I do have a hard time staying asleep. This really just gets me through that middle section of the night where I used to find myself awake randomly at 2 in the morning. I have not woken up in the middle of the night since I started taking this. I know that sounds like a wild claim, but I’m here to tell you that it is true. And then you wake up to your alarm and you’re like, oh my gosh, I did it. I slept through the night.
Joy: And you feel so good. When I use the sleep blend – you all know how I feel about it. My quality of sleep is pretty decent, but when I just really need to be like, look, I need to get a really good night sleep, the sleep blend is perfect. It’s new and it’s improved, and they are offering you an even greater night’s sleep. Who doesn’t need sleep?
Claire: So this new formulation blends CBN, which is a powerful cannabinoid that actually specifically promotes sleep, with 750 mg of certified organic CBD. Also has 24% more sleep-inducing botanicals by weight. So they are just adding more botanicals into the blend. As always, it is all third-party tested. So you can go online and check the batch number and see exactly what is in there. Not all CBD brands do this. They’re not required to. This is something that Ned does to go above and beyond to show you exactly what you’re getting when you take their product.
Joy: And I love here that they say, hey, it’s grown by Jonathan, who is an independent farmer. So when you’re buying their products, you’re supporting Jonathan in Paonia, Colorado.
Claire: Paonia. I just love saying that. Paonia.
Joy: Jonathan, he’s a farmer. Support him. And you’re also supporting the podcast. So here’s the other great thing. You guys ready? It is Ned’s birthday month. So you’re getting an even deeper discount by supporting the podcast and supporting Ned. It’s their birthday month. If you would like to give their new and improved sleep blend a try, our listeners get 21% off with code JOY for the month of March only. It’s their best offer of the year. Visit helloned.com/JOY to get access. That’s helloned.com/JOY to get 21% off. Thank you, Ned, for sponsoring the show and offering our listeners a natural remedy for some of life’s common health issues.
Claire: Yay. One last quick thing. I will also say, I take it with the mellow blend, and I just want to note –
Joy: Yeah, you’re really into that.
Claire: I’m really into mellow. I’m really into magnesium. It’s a great thing to combine. That’s not a doctor’s advice. But I did want to say after last week when I really promoted the mellow, was really excited about mellow. If you are not used to taking magnesium, it is the natural laxative. I just feel like I need to tell you that before you get surprised.
Joy: Just a little hot tip.
Claire: Just a hot tip.
Joy: If you’re going into a meeting, you might not want to take it.
Claire: Just don’t take it. It’s not like Colon Blow.
Joy: Wait for later.
Claire: You’re going to feel it in the morning, and you’re going to be like, “What did I eat?” It’s the magnesium, and it’s normal. Your body will adapt.
Joy: I really like the flavors.
Claire: Me too.
Joy: I like the lemon flavor the best. Alright. Thank, Ned. Love you. Love your stuff.
Claire: Let’s go into some Q&A’s. What do we got?
Joy: Oh my goodness. Alright. So I kind of laughed at this one. This one is from one of our favorite listeners, Mira. She says, “Hi, I’ve noticed a big uptick in reels in the past week. Is there a reason?” And I just wanted to laugh because the one today – oh my gosh, you have to tell that story.
Claire: It was like pulling teeth to get Joy to do this. I need you guys to understand. There’s two things you should know about Joy. The first thing is that the more mainstream something is, the less Joy wants to do it. Unless it pertains to reality TV. For some reason, reality TV gets a pass.
Joy: Yeah, that’s an asterisk. Yeah.
Claire: Everything else. Like Wordle, this woman will never do a World.
Joy: No. Stop posting about Wordle.
Claire: That’s right. Stop pushing Wordle on Joy against her will. This is a funny fact about Joy is that the more popular something is, and particularly in social media world, the more she resists it.
Joy: Yeah, I resist it. I will absolutely run the other way and avoid it and make fun of everybody who does it.
Claire: And the second thing that you should know about our dynamic is that for as long as we’ve had the podcast, one of the things that I’ve been the –
Joy: The voice of reason.
Claire: I was going to say “pusher.”
Joy: But this is also your expertise. So you know what the benefit, and I’m just like, “I don’t like it.”
Claire: So I work in marketing. My career is in marketing. I understand how important it is to have a presence on social media, to have a presence on our website, to do all of that stuff. So the answer and the reasoning is that we really were not active on social media in 2021. Things felt like there was too much going on. We did not feel motivated to really be super present or super active on social media for a wide variety of reasons. A lot of which had to do with our own personal lives. So coming into 2022, one thing that we have been talking about is, hey, how can we get more active on social media again? Because it is really the hub of our community. We love that you guys listen to the podcast. We know not everyone listens every week. We know there are some people out there that really only know us through Instagram. But the coolest part about it is there are long-time podcast listeners or even new listeners who the reason that we know you, just like Mira, the person who asked this question, I feel like I have a good pulse on Mira’s life because of Instagram.
Joy: I feel like I know Mira.
Claire: I totally feel like I know Mira.
Joy: I feel like I know so many of our listeners through social media. I love that too. I’m like – oh Donna! Donna became out friend through social media, and she also went to Camp Timeout. And now I Marco Polo her every day because we became friends.
Claire: Exactly. So it can happen. Real friendships can happen. That’s really the reason. So when we started realizing, okay, if we’re going to get back into the double Dutch rhythm of social media in 2022, we have to do reels. So we just hit the ground running. Because what we were doing before was posting, I don’t know, maybe two reels a month and it was getting us nowhere. So I’m like, you know what, if we’re going to accumulate ourselves, we’re going to have to do it every day.
Joy: Yeah, we just have to jump into that pool everyone has peed in.
Claire: Joy’s going to hate me for suggesting this, so sorry, Joy. If you guys see a reel that you think would be funny if we did it, please send it to us.
Joy: Yeah, why not? I mean, at this point – let’s just put it this way. I think the thing I get frustrated with is I’m just a lemming, that everyone is doing the same thing. It makes my skin crawl so, so, so, so bad. And also, I go to this weird place of, oh my gosh, am I just being a part of the problem? Because we’re just, like Iliza said, monkey see, monkey do. But at the end of the day –
Claire: You’ve got to think about the bigger purpose.
Joy: The bigger purpose. I get it.
Claire: Grow our community. Connect our community.
Joy: For sure.
Claire: Get to know people. Right. It just so happens we have to look stupid in the meantime.
Joy: We have to play the game. Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.
Claire: Right. Don’t be embarrassed for Joy. Be embarrassed for Instagram.
Joy: Yeah, it’s Instagram’s fault. I can get on board with that.
Claire: Okay, what’s next?
Joy: So that’s why we’re doing more reels. Okay. “If you could retire right now, what would you pursue?”
Claire: If I could retire right now… I mean, I think I would just do my hobbies more. I would ski more, I would garden more, I would surf more – which I am including as a hobby, even though I haven’t done it yet. [laughing] You guys know. You know how I feel about surfing. It’s a part of my personality, even though it’s not actually something I do. I would bake more bread. I would make more soup. Just do more of the stuff I really enjoy because I don’t get to do it all that often right now. I don’t want to have a wild, crazy retirement. I want to just live in a toadstool basically and eat bread and soup.
Joy: I wish everyone could see what you just did. You just did this little shoulder shimmy when you said, “eat bread and soup.”
Claire: I was imagining being inside my toadstool.
Joy: A toadstool shimmy. It was so great. It reminds me though that I was listening to this Audible podcast by Mell Robbins. She’s wrote a ton of inspirational books. Sometimes I’m just not in a place to listen to it where it’s a little too self-help, but she did have this great episode. You know that whole conversation we’ve had before about work your passion, do a job that makes you love work every single day? And she had a really good point that I think was just succinct and nice. Look, your passion shouldn’t be something that makes you super happy every day. That’s just completely unrealistic. Work a job that makes you grow. So I can get on board with that. That just makes me think of the whole, if you could stop working right now, what would you do. I still think I would look for things that would make me grow.
Claire: Yeah, great.
Joy: So I don’t know. For me, if I was to retire right now, I’d probably be raising dogs every day. I would probably be doing something active. I would probably be painting rocks in my backyard. I don’t know.
Claire: You took a taste of retirement earlier this summer.
Joy: I sure did. And it was great. I would sit in my chair in the sun, paint rocks, raise dogs. Alright, this one also makes me laugh a little bit. “Have you thought about joining a podcast network?” The reason I laugh is it’s almost as if we’re holding out.
Claire: It’s like, have you thought about going to Harvard? Not saying a podcast network is that helpful or exclusive or elite. But just more that you don’t just sign up for a podcast network. It’s pretty collaborative usually, like you know someone who is starting one. It’s not really – I think we did apply to the Gimlet network once.
Joy: We did at one point, but they don’t even take a look at you.
Claire: We have not heard back.
Joy: Crickets.
Claire: So the answer is we have thought about starting a podcast network but didn’t get anywhere with that either because it just seems like a full-time job that we are not willing to do. The few podcast networks, sort of smaller and niche podcast networks that have come into our radar as things that would be opportunities for us always felt too niche, so we just never pursued them. So I would say, never say never.
Joy: If the right one came along.
Claire: If the right one came along, totally. But I kind of like being the little Indie podcast, just here on our own doing our own thing.
Joy: Yeah. Not having to answer to the man. “If you won money that you had to donate, where would you donate it?”
Claire: Just to one? Should we just pick one. I have a laundry list.
Joy: I have a laundry list. The first two that came in mind to me were obviously Canine Companions, and the second one would be planned parenthood.
Claire: Yeah. For me, I try to donate typically to smaller, community organizations because I feel like smaller donations go further and I can’t really donate a lot of money typically. But even if I had a big donation, I still feel like it would go further. I always donate to the midwife group that I used when I had Evie, my pregnancy and birth with Evie. They are a non-profit, and they just do so much in our community for health equity for birthing people. I’m just a big fan of them. I feel like that is such a big part of women’s equity as a whole is healthcare equity. Let’s see, who else? Then I probably would donate either to Outdoor Alliance or a similar type of conservation non-profit that is focused on outdoor issues.
Joy: On a side note, JT is snoring really loud. I know you probably can’t hear it because of the microphones, they’re different. But it just reminds me of when we first got JT, and we would record his snore in the background.
Claire: Aw, JT.
Joy: He’s in here today. He wanted to spend some time with me. I like this one. “What is a simple, easy life hack that’s helping you make it through the week these days?”
Claire: Can I share my small moment of joy from last week?
Joy: Yeah.
Claire: I think it was Thursday or Friday, and I bought some shirts from Banana Republic Outlet that were on additional sale. So I got six shirts for $100. Highly recommend. Check out their sale. I don’t know if it’s still going on, but I feel like they always have a sale. And my small joy of the day was that they must have their email account set up where their first name is Banana and the last name is Republic because I got my order and then my mom also has the same problem as I do, which is we never buy stuff – I’ve talked about this before, where we talk ourselves out of purchases. So I forwarded it to her, and it showed up as an email from a banana. That was amazing. So that’s my answer is I’m looking for small joys.
Joy: [laughing]
Claire: Like emails from bananas.
Joy: My simple, easy hack – but I think this might piss some people off because people have different schedules. My simple, easy life hack is I try to do one easy chore a day to stay ahead of chores so things don’t pile up. Whether that be do a load of laundry or clean a toilet or whatever. I’ve never hired a cleaner. I have this weird thing that I clean the best, so I don’t want someone else to clean my house. I enjoy cleaning, so that’s something that I’ll do throughout the week. I also try to keep ahead of birthdays. So every week, I will think of whose birthday is it or what event is coming up to where I really want to plan ahead if I have to buy a gift or something like that. So I always try to keep that in the forefront of my mind so I don’t get two days before and I’m like, oh my gosh, I didn’t send somebody something. I’d love to hear people’s early life hacks because I think those are really fun. They’re always so different, just kind of depending on what’s helpful for them. “More details on surf camp, Claire. Are you going alone? Do you need prior surf experience?”
Claire: Okay, no. The organization I’m going through is called Surf with Amigas, and they have trips all over the world. Some are for different skill levels. Like some areas are just not good for beginners. The one I’m going to is in Mexico, and it’s all levels. The majority of their trips are all levels. Some of them are intermediate and above, but very few. So it’s all level. I am going alone, but it is a women-specific retreat. I’m going to have a roommate. So it’s very much like group travel. I’m not just shut up by myself on a beach with a surfboard. I want to say there’s maybe 12-13 people in the group, so relatively small. It’s pretty much surfing every day. There’s also a yoga component. Which fine, yoga. You guys know how I feel about yoga. I don’t love it, but I’ll take it. Mostly I’m just excited for tacos. I’m also really excited because – this is just a random additional fact. I’m getting Lasik like three weeks before I go. I’m just so excited to be in the ocean all day and not have to figure out my damn contact lenses, which is just another simple joy. I mean, not a simple joy. It’s a big deal. I’ve been wearing contacts and glasses since I was nine. So for 25 years, I’ve been doing this. I’m mostly excited about it. I have been meaning to get Lasik for ten years, and I finally was like, I’m getting Lasik for this freaking surfing trip. So yeah. Very, very excited. I’m going to – I forget the name of the town, but it’s about two hours outside Puerto Vallarta. So I fly in and out of Puerto Vallarta. You can fly directly from Denver, fun fact.
Joy: Oh, perfect. I love a direct flight. “How much do you plan your week in advance? Meals, workouts, fun things, etc.”
Claire: My weeks are planned within an inch of their life. Because I have no choice. I at the beginning of the week have to know who is dropping off the kids, who is picking up the kids, what are we doing for dinner, who is taking Miles to karate, when am I getting home, who is letting River out. Every single day is very planned. I kind of hate it. I don’t do a lot of meal prep in the sense that I don’t cook ahead of time. Some things I do. Maybe I’ll prepare proteins ahead of time, like I’ll pre-cook a chicken or something if I know we’re going to have it later in the week… which is pretty much all the time. If I know that what we’re going to have, I’ll defrost the meat ahead of time because we have a chest freezer with a half cow in there. Apart from not literally pre-cooking, I could tell you on any given hour of any given week what I will be doing and where my family members will be and who will be transporting who where at that time and forever and ever amen.
Joy: Yeah, I have the opposite. I don’t really plan much. I’m not really planning much these days. Obviously, the work schedule is set, but workouts, things I don’t really plan in advance. I have been thinking about doing more of a workout schedule, just to be more deliberate about – like in May, I think it’s May, I signed up for – I have a good reason. I’m doing it for Canine Companions because they needed a certain amount of runners for the race in Colorado in order to get a free booth. So I signed up for a ten-miler in May, which part of me is, okay, I can do ten miles. So I need to start setting a training schedule for that. But other than that, I don’t really plan in advance. “What food do you not like?” For example, this listener says, “I cannot eat a raw tomato or drink milk.”
Claire: I mean, I can’t drink milk. I don’t know if I would like to drink milk or not. But if I did, my body would just be so mad at me. Let’s see, I do love raw tomatoes though. The only thing that I will eat around are water chestnuts. I hate the feeling of crunching into them. I hate that watery crunch.
Joy: Oh really? So you don’t like jicama?
Claire: There’s something about jicama that’s okay. It’s not my favorite. To me, jicama is apple-like enough that my brain is sort of like, oh, this is an apple. Versus the water chestnut, there’s something about it that I just am not into. That’s honestly the only thing that I’ll eat around though.
Joy: That’s interesting. I was at a party a couple weeks ago, and they served very fancy food. One was this beautiful raw salmon. They were all like, “Oh, take a piece of this.” I felt obligated to take it, and I don’t like eating raw fish. I can’t. I cannot.
Claire: Oh, I love raw fish.
Joy: I can’t. So I was chasing it with other things. That’s the only thing I cannot deal. “What is something that you are particular about for completely irrational reasons?”
Claire: Oh my gosh, if you ask Brandon this question, he would say, “Everything.” He thinks that I’m so particular. I’m like, I’m not particular. There are just right and wrong ways to do things. He’s like, “That’s being particular.”
Joy: You’re like, “My way is the right way.”
Claire: Right. It’s not even “my way.” It’s the right way and the wrong way. This isn’t instinctively how I would do it either, but I understand that this is the correct way. I am pretty picky about things. I think that there is definitely a right and wrong way to load a dish washer. Not like down to the row. I know some people are super picky. But I definitely with rearrange the dishwasher if I come upon it and someone else has loaded it incorrectly. I feel very, very strongly that the first time you make a recipe, you should make it to the letter so you have a baseline to work with. I am not willing to take comments on that. This is my belief, and I’m sticking to it.
Joy: You’re like, it’s not up for discussion.
Claire: it’s not up for discussion. The first time you make a new recipe, you should do it to the letter. Otherwise, you don’t know what you’re working with. Let’s see, what else… I feel pretty particular about… I mean, so many things. There’s just so many options. What are some of yours?
Joy: Something that’s so stupid as I’m thinking about this are towels in the bathroom. They cannot be bunched up on the towel hanger because they’ll mold. Every freaking time for the past 14 years, Scott mounds his towel on the towel hanger. So I have to go out and straighten it after every time he showers. And he either doesn’t realize I’m doing it, or he just ignores the fact that I do it. So that’s something that I’m particular about. Hang the towel neatly so they can dry fully, and then they don’t smell. And then the other thing is I don’t need to have a very organized by color fridge, but I like things organized in my fridge. So I’m always rearranging. Like if Scott comes home with a bunch of groceries, I’m like, “I’ll do it. Let me do it. Let me put them away.” Because it’ll end up shoved things places. No, this doesn’t go here.
Claire: No, that’s where the eggs go. What is the salad box doing there? That is the egg section.
Joy: No.
Claire: Yeah. I get stuck with that. I completely agree.
Joy: Okay. One more. Oh, what does this mean, Claire? I don’t know if this is a real question. “I was wondering if Claire was liking her stepper?”
Claire: Oh, fun fact. I have a stepper. Right here.
Joy: What is a stepper?
Claire: You can’t see it. I was trying to angle it. So a couple weeks ago – oh, this is a fun crossover from my personal Instagram. It’s like a portable stair stepper. I need you to see this because this isn’t going to make any sense.
Joy: Like a stair stepper, okay.
Claire: Hold on a second. Pause.
Joy: We’re pausing. Okay, she’s holding it up. Okay. Alright. Little contraption`.
Claire: So it’s a mini stair stepper, and it basically is the size of maybe a…
Joy: It looks like one of those things you put on a bike if you’re using an outdoor bike to do indoor cycling.
Claire: Sure, yeah. It’s small. It’s got a footprint. It’s a bit as big around as a chair, like footprint-wise, and it’s maybe about ten inches off the ground total. It has two little foot pads that you put your feet in, and you do a little stair stepper motion. So a couple weeks ago on my personal Instagram, I was looking for a desk treadmill. Like a walking treadmill to put under my desk. Because days will go by where I get like 500 steps. And I’m not a big step counter, but I will sit `down at 8:30 and not get up until 4:30. It’s not uncommon.
Joy: Sure, yeah. And you’re like, hey, this doesn’t make me happy. I need to move around a little bit.
Claire: I feel like crap if that happens. And a lot of it, I am on so many calls. The one thing I will gripe about with my new job is that the meeting culture is out of control. So I’m on so, so, so, so many calls. If I could just have a little treadmill under here, this problem would be solved. Because rarely am I on a call that is so necessary for me to be talking the whole time.
Joy: Right, right. You can get away with a little bit of, like –
Claire: Yeah. So actually, Joy Jaro [UNCLEAR 00:41:42.22] who we’ve had on the podcast before recommended this. She said that her wife uses one. They were looking into it for the same thing of not wanting to spend $300 on a crappy treadmill but not wanting to spend $900 on a real treadmill and not really finding anything in between. So I bought this. And I really do like it, but I’ll say that I still think I might get a treadmill because it doesn’t really do what I want it to do. Think about a walking motion versus a stair stepping motion. This really does get you into more of a stair stepping motion. It’s not quite as passive as I wanted it to be.
Joy: You have to get it going.
Claire: And it’s quiet. If I truly was just standing here watching TV, that would be one thing. But I do need to be somewhat engaged in my calls. For the price – it was under $100 – it’s a really great little piece of equipment. But it’s not quite got me to where I want to go in terms of having a truly passive movement solution for my office.
Joy: Alright, keep us updated.
Claire: Is this like a code? What does this question mean?
Joy: I was like, what’s a stepper? What are we doing? That’s really cool though. And I think a lot of people can maybe give some tips of what they’ve purchased, if you want to send in recommendations.
Claire: Yeah. And apparently when I asked this question, I came to find – I don’t follow Melissa Urban of the Whole30 on Instagram. I haven’t for a long time. She is great, and also she was someone I unfollowed a while ago just feeling like I didn’t want to see so much restrictive eating content. I also know that she has some really interesting beliefs and opinions on things, and she also is really outspoken about a lot of opinions that I really respect. All of that to say, for what it’s worth, I don’t follow her on Instagram. But around that same time that I asked that question, she had done a blog post rating these walking desk treadmills. And basically what she came to was, yeah, they all have their pros and cons. There’s really no such thing as a really nice cheap treadmill. You get what you pay for. Some of them are worse than others, but none of them are a diamond in the rough, which is what I was hoping for.
Joy: Got it. Okay. Well good, alright. I think that’s all we got.
Claire: Alright guys, well, thank you so much for spending another week with us. You can find us online. Our Instagram is @joyandclaire_. You can find us at joyandclaire.com. As a reminder, all our episodes are streaming there. Many of them are transcribed. So if you want to go back through and just browse around, please feel free to do that. You can email us, thisisjoyandclaire@gmail.com. We love hearing from you. We love getting your emails. And if you find us on Instagram, fi you’re scrolling through reels and you’re like, “Man, this reel would be really funny if Joy and Claire did it,” please send it to us.
Joy: Challenge me.
Claire: It would really save me a lot of reels research.
Joy: I’m really just going to accept it and embrace it and hate it the whole time.
Claire: Really? Are you reel-y going to?
Joy: Reel-y. Aw, that was so bad. [laughing]
Claire: My goodness. Don’t forget to check out our sponsor Ned. That’s helloned.com/JOY. Check out their improved sleep blend. You will have some great sleep.
Joy: And be so rested. So alert. So happy.
Claire: So just pleased with yourself. Thank you for being here. We will talk to you next week.
Joy: Bye, guys.
Claire: Bye.
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This is Joy & Claire Episode 114: All Grown Up
Episode Date: February 17, 2022
Transcription Completed: March 5, 2022
Audio Length: 45:30 minutes
Joy: Hi guys, this is Joy.
Claire: And this is Claire. And you are joining us halfway through a conversation about how Bluetooth connection problems are the evidence we need that robots will never take over the world.
Joy: Claire was setting up her computer in her recording set up. She was getting off another call. And was okay, every time I get onto this computer – we have a different recording system for podcasts for a microphone – it always goes back to a different setting. I was like, yeah. I have a Bluetooth speaker light in my office. And every time I walk in here, my earbuds want to just pop over to the speaker lights. So everything I listen to now comes out – I didn’t want to change it. And if our 30-year-ago selves were listening to our conversation would be like, “What?” I was thinking about earbuds today. How when they first came out, everyone was making fun of them. The meme with – what’s the movie? Something About Mary?
Claire: Oh yeah, they do look like that.
Joy: They really do. [laughing] That’s not wrong.
Claire: It’s not wrong. It’s not wrong. And I also think Bluetooth technology does not seem to have advanced at all since it came out originally like 15 years ago with guys with their little Bluetooth belt attachment.
Joy: Yeah. Or remember the big ones that kind of like –
Claire: That’s what I mean. The huge Bluetooth headset.
Joy: Right.
Claire: With the belt hook for your cell phone.
Joy: Yeah, the belt hook for the cell phone – there’s a certain type of person that wears those and loves them.
Claire: That’s what I mean. I feel like the person who had the early-adopter Bluetooth microphone and the person who wore a cell phone belt loop, the Venn diagram of those two people was a lot of overlap.
Joy: A lot of overlap. Agreed. What’s the biggest phone that you had size wise?
Claire: I mean, my current phone is very large. But that’s not what you mean. You mean like the most brick size that I had.
Joy: Yeah, we’re not talking iPhone slim.
Claire: My first phone was a Motorola flip phone that had an antenna that pulled out.
Joy: Oh yeah, I had that too. Oh my gosh, it’s like Clueless.
Claire: Yes.
Joy: “What up, Dee?”
Claire: It did flip, so it wasn’t just the entire brick. But my dad had a car phone.
Joy: Yeah, I remember in elementary school one of our neighbors had a car phone, and that was beyond. That was beyond.
Claire: I could just call him in the car. He had a huge antenna on the top of his car that would always hit the top of the garage. It came in a carrying case, and you had to set it up. It was a whole thing.
Joy: I’ll never forget my first cell phone was in college. This always makes me feel so old, but whatever. My first cell phone was in college. My mom got it for me. The size – like the full length of my hand and probably three inches thick. It was so big. Oh, it’s so great.
Claire: Yes. I never had the Nokia. What’s the Nokia ring tone? I’m not going to get it.
Joy: [sings ringtone] That one?
Claire: No, there’s another one.
Joy: Which one’s that.
Claire: Somebody’s screaming at it right now. They’re in their car going [sings ringtone], like the Nokia. I’m going to have to look it up. But I remember –
Joy: Will Siri tell us? Is that cross-pollinating?
Claire: It’s too much cross-pollinating. Let’s see. I swear. [sings ringtone] That one.
Joy: [laughing] Like on Devil Wears Prada. That’s the one she hears constantly.
Claire: Yeah, that’s the Nokia original ringtone. The original ringtone.
Joy: Like “the,” the OG ringtone.
Claire: So I got my first cell phone when I was a freshman in high school. By my junior year of high school, it was all about your ringtone.
Joy: Okay.
Claire: But I remember having plenty of friends whose parents were like, “I’m not spending money on a ringtone. You cannot buy a ringtone.” My dad paid my cell phone bill. I just don’t think he ever looked at it, so I could spend whatever I wanted to. At like $3.99 a pop or something ridiculous. But I remember having a friend whose parents were like, “No, we’re not spending money on ringtones.” She had her little Nokia cell phone. One of the ringtone options was [sings ringtone].
Joy: Oh yeah.
Claire: And the way that you vibrated, if you stood it up so that it was balanced on its bottom standing all the way up, it would kind of rotate as it sang the song, and we just thought that was the funniest thing in the world. That’s a core memory. I think about it all the time. This little Nokia cell phone with a little purple sparkly cover slowly like [vibrate sounds]
Joy: Like doing a dance, yeah.
Claire: Rotating like [sings ringtone] [vibrate sounds] [sings ringtone] [vibrate sounds]
Joy: The good ole days. That’s the good ole days. And then when I was in my young 20’s, I got a pretty small Samsung flip phone with the antenna that made you really feel like Cher on Clueless. There’s nothing more satisfying than the slap of a cell phone close. Like with one hand. I really miss those days. Like when you get angry with your boyfriend, and you’re talking to him and you just slap the cell phone closed. There’s no anger hanging up these days. We’re really missing out.
Claire: We really are. I had a pink Razor in college. That was my college phone. Because I didn’t get my first iPhone until after college. I had a pink Razor, and then I had a Blackberry. I had a Blackberry when I met Brandon.
Joy: I had a Blackberry at my old job, like two jobs ago.
Claire: Yeah.
Joy: That was very satisfying. The keys were very satisfying on the Blackberry.
Claire: It was very satisfying.
Joy: Very tactile. And I will never forget when Scott and I first started dating, that’s when the first iPhone came out. Oh my gosh, we’re dinosaurs. And he of course had to have the newest of everything, so he got the first iPhone. I was so mad and so jealous because I was like, you’re always on your phone. That was like the first generation of being like, “You’re always on your phone.” Because when you didn’t have the iPhone, there were no apps. I will never forget, he was always on it trying to figure it out and play around with it. And he – I love this photo. I got to have him find this photo. There’s a photo of me that he took, one of the first photos with his iPhone. I was giving him the biggest bitch face. Because I was like, oh, you’re going to take a picture of me with your new phone? Because I was jealous of the iPhone.
Claire: I feel like iPhones are so ubiquitous and being on your phone all day is so the norm now that we kind of forget that less than ten years ago, you maybe had one or two bougie friends with iPhones. And everyone else, all your phone did was send and receive text messages and send and receive calls. Maybe you had a couple games. You did not have the internet on your phone until pretty recently.
Joy: I always think about that. What did we do with all of our time? What did we do when we were waiting at the airport? We read books.
Claire: We just sat there like idiots. Read books.
Joy: People watched. We got magazines, which I loved.
Claire: We bought a lot of magazines. Every time I go to the airport, I look at the magazines and I’m like, remember when I used to buy magazines to read on an airplane?
Joy: So many things. Okay, now we’re just going to go straight down memory lane. When I was dating in my 20’s and I went to visit my boyfriend, this was one that was in the military. I remember carrying an entire CD player, full on CD player, and I had Nelly Furtado. That was on repeat. But the things you used to carry. Huge books, big ole cameras.
Claire: Cameras. Oh my God, cameras. I used to take a full-on camera out to the bars with me every time.
Joy: Oh yeah. Didn’t you do that at your bachelorette party? That almost got lost. What got lost at your bachelorette party? Your wallet?
Claire: No, it was my phone. I had an iPhone by then. Because we used Track My iPhone to find it.
Joy: That’s right. That’s right.
Claire: No, the punchline of the story of my bachelorette party – have I told this on the podcast before?
Joy: You have, but it’s worth repeating. It’s been a while.
Claire: So for my bachelorette party, it was just me and my two best friends. We went to Paso Robles in the central coast of California. We went out. It’s not a really nightlife type of town. It’s all wineries. But there are a few bars, so we went to the one bar where you go that has a dance floor. We left all our stuff in the corner, and we came to check on our stuff and everything was gone. We were like, oh my God, someone stole our stuff. We talked to the bouncer, and he has us call the cops. We turn on Find My iPhone. We were able to track my iPhone down to a house in a nearby neighborhood. So we drive there. The cops follow us. Saying this out loud, it was so bizarre.
Joy: They follow you instead of the other way around.
Claire: They follow us. We park in front of the house. The people in there must have seen us. Who knows what happened? They got back in their car, drove back to the bar, and were like, “We realized we grabbed these jackets, and we didn’t mean to.” And we were like, uh huh, sure. You just grabbed a bunch of random jackets and took them all the way to your house. But whatever. So we ended up getting our stuff back, except for my one friend’s credit card. So we’re talking to the cops outside the bar. This is a 2–3-hour conversation. We were really drunk when it started. We’re not drunk anymore. We have been chasing down our belonging all night at this point. We’re talking to this cop. And he’s like, “I’m so sorry this happened. We’ll give you a call if anything turns up, but honestly what you should probably do is go home, cancel your card, and get a new one. It’s not likely that we’re ever going to recover it.” And my friend who has on a strapless dress, so therefore probably a strapless bra, takes this big deep breath, “Okay.” And immediately after she does that, she gets this smirk on her face. So the cop walks away, and she just bursts out laughing and pulls her credit card out of her bra.
Joy: [laughing]
Claire: And we all just lose it. We filed a police report, and this credit card was in her bra the whole time. Strapless bras have a lot of structure to them, so I’m sure she just assumed it was part of the underwire or whatever. She doesn’t have a particularly big chest, but we just thought that was the funniest thing in the world.
Joy: And she realizes it while she’s talking to the cop. Doesn’t want to be like, “Never mind.”
Claire: Exactly. Yes, exactly. So that’s the story of my bachelorette party.
Joy: Good stuff.
Claire: Okay, so speaking of getting old, Evie turned three last week, which is crazy. I feel like it has been a hundred years since her second birthday, but definitely not three years since she was born. I can’t believe she is so old.
Joy: It feel like time has flown.
Claire: Yeah, it’s bizarre. So I was listening to Brene Brown. We are recording this on Monday. Happy Valentine’s Day. Brene Brown had a Valentine’s Day podcast episode that she released on Unlocking Us where she shared an excerpt from Atlas of the Heart, the audio book. I haven’t read the book yet. I’m waiting for the audio book. I did go to the office today, so I actually listened to it. Which is rare for me to listen to podcasts, let alone the day they come out. But she has a part in there. She talks about being broken hearted, and she reads an excerpt from somebody where it talks about how a lot of things that will cause broken heartedness are kind of… well let me give an example. I don’t know how to describe it. But the example she gives is you don’t expect your kids to stay young forever, so it’s not like you’re disappointed. But as they grow up, it still kind of breaks your heart every time they leave a phase. So I was thinking about that as I was driving home because I have gone on record many times to say I do not miss the baby phase. I don’t miss having newborns. Newborn phase in my experience is far and away the hardest part of parenting. It’s isolating. It’s dehumanizing. It’s unendingly demanding. It’s relentless to the ends of the earth. And you get very little in return. I don’t like it. But as my kids get older, I enjoy them more and more, but I still am sad about them leaving those phases. And I think what it is, is that when they are little especially, you just love everything about them. They are hilarious. They are adorable. Their lives are just like a comedy of errors. And as they leave those ages, I think there is this sort of realization that I loved this person at this age so fully, and they’re never going to be that person again.
Joy: Right. You can’t go back there.
Claire: You can’t go back. Like, it’s a one-way street. And that is so sad. And while the way that we all do, you never stop being who you are. You just hold all of that more and more as you grow. The little words that she mispronounced or the ways that she did things because she wasn’t big enough to do them the real way or the things that she needed help with. All those little moments that made her one-year-old Evie and two-year-old Evie, you can’t get those back. And that’s sad. Because they’re so cute. I wouldn’t go back because those ages are also uniquely difficult. Really, I understand now what people mean when they have older kids and they’re like, “I miss that. I miss them being babies.” They don’t mean, “I want to go back there 24/7.” They mean, I miss that little person that they were.
Joy: And you can feel both of those emotions at the same time. You can feel like that was not my favorite phase, but also you have that heartache for that time of who they were at that age. And it is, it’s just like thinking back when you were younger, knowing you can never get that back, you can never go back breaks your heart a little bit.
Claire: Yeah, that’s the crappy thing about living in linear time.
Joy: I mean, it happens to all of us. We’re all on it.
Claire: We’re all stuck on this one-way road.
Joy: Such a weird thing.
Claire: It is weird.
Joy: But it’s hard. That’s hard. Because then it’s kind of like you go through that – because she’ll change so much in even the next year, and you’ll have that same feeling next year.
Claire: I think it’s a daily thing you have to deal with as a parent. Every day, even with Miles, even at his age. He just learned how to read. Or his two front teeth fell out, and now it’s not a gap anymore. The teeth are growing in. Those are the things where every single day, you are tangibly not as young as you were yesterday. I think as a parent you can’t dwell on that too much. Otherwise, you just cry all the time. But it does strike you on birthdays. Oh my gosh, how did we get here already? How are we already at three? How are you not just an infant anymore? When did this happen?
Joy: The picture was really cute of her in the unicorn onesie. What is she into right now?
Claire: Unicorns. Obviously. The thing about Evie, and I think I talked about this a couple weeks ago. Miles had all these – and still does – very special interests. When he was Evie’s age, it was Lightening McQueen and dinosaurs and rainbow things. When he was two, it was mostly just Lightning McQueen. When he was four, it was wildlife facts. On no, that was five. Five was wildlife facts. And right now he’s super into Star Wars and Legos and still into wildlife. So he’s always had these things you can point at when people are like, “What is Miles into?” Here’s a list of five things. As far as Evie is concerned, the whole world belongs to her. We are just here to support her life as the main character and the leading lady of the entire universe. So she doesn’t have any special interests because all things are for her. Shark facts are for her. Unicorns are for her. Rainbows are for her. She does like the things that Miles likes because he likes them. But everything else, she’s like, yeah, this is all for me. Why would I need to pick any one given thing? And it’s so hilarious. Maxine was like, “We are having a rainbow unicorn party.” I was like, okay, great. We thought about maybe having an Encanto party because she loves Encanto. But really, she just loves to dance. So anyway. Maxine bought her a rainbow unicorn onesie to wear for her unicorn party. It was a real hit.
Joy: She really just showed up in that onesie and embodied the unicorn.
Claire: She did. Evie understands the assignment every time.
Joy: She does.
Claire: That’s the thing, when you’re the main character of the universe, the assignment is your assignment every time. There is no assignment other than the one that you are performing.
Joy: It’s so great. I love it.
Claire: It’s so great. She’s so funny. She’s just like, no one is more Evie than Evie. Like yesterday, we went out to lunch. It was super, super nice out, and she still insisted on wearing these really fleecy Baby Yoda jammies that she has with a penguin beanie. She was eating a blizzard from Dairy Queen. Brandon took this picture of her where she was just head thrown completely back, giant spoon of blizzard dripping into her mouth, and sweating because she’s so hot but she won’t change her outfit. She’s like, this is who I am. I am eating a blizzard, and I am wearing my pajamas, and nobody can say anything about it.
Joy: Unapologetic. And it wasn’t like, oh, we just caught Evie in this moment. That’s her 24/7.
Claire: No. Yeah. 24/7. So yeah, we had a rainbow unicorn party. It was very cute. Maxine planned the whole thing, which she always does. If Maxine wasn’t here, we probably would not have birthday parties for our kids because we just aren’t that organized. It’s been great. But yes, time marches on. It’s bizarre. I think that also I feel so privileged to have my kids who are healthy. I try really hard to not take for granted. It’s impossible to not take certain things for granted. It think about that a lot too. We have to take things for granted. Otherwise, we could never get out of bed.
Joy: That’s not a realistic way to live. We’d never leave our house.
Claire: Never. If we really felt the enormity of every moment could be our last and everyone else’s last and that everything that we receive could be the last time receive it. If we really felt all that, we would just collapse every day.
Joy: Yeah, there’s no way that we could handle that. Our systems would shut down.
Claire: Absolutely shut down. A lot of my anxiety as a mom is around when my family leaves my house without me. Or if Maxine has both the kids in the car. Something could happen.
Joy: I think a lot of people feel that way, just in general, with their loved ones.
Claire: Right. So I sometimes have really acute moments of anxiety around that, and I have to remind myself – like, did I say goodbye to them? First of all, you go into that anxiety loop situation. But it kind of reassures me to think we have to take a certain amount of our lives for granted. Otherwise, we couldn’t function.
Joy: No, that happens to me every time Scott goes on a trip. Well, I hope you come back. Really, truly, you can’t live there. Or else you really will just be calling the person constantly. It’s so scary.
Claire: You would just live in a state of incredible panic and hypochondria. Some people do. But you couldn’t live that way. So I sort of find that reassuring to think – you hear people say, “I really took my health for granted before I was sick.” Or I really took X, Y, Z for granted before it disappeared one day. Yeah, but that’s the requirement. What I’m trying to get at is I try not to take for granted that I get to see my kids as they get older and get to know each new version of them because I know that’s not the reality for people who have experienced child loss. It’s always a both-and. But I do love each new age. It’s so funny. I think that there’s also a point – for me with Miles, it was closer to two. And with Evie, it’s been about three. Where finally around that birthday I started feeling like, okay, here I am again. Me/myself is back in the game. Not “back in the game.” That sounds a little too ready for action. But I’ve rejoined the chat. My needs and my individual goals and wants and moments to myself has sort of come back online or are starting to. And that’s really nice to feel like, okay, I can have some amount of presence in my own life again.
Joy: And that’s important.
Claire: It’s really important.
Joy: It’s a good time to – for a lot of moms that might be going through a phase where they’re like, am I ever going to get to that point? It’s important to know, yes, you will.
Claire: It comes back. And for most kids – and I say again, I am very grateful that my kids are not sick or do not have anything. They’re great. Whatever, you guys know what I mean. I think for me, with Miles it was around two, and for Evie it was around three. I think that was because with having two kids, it took a little longer with everything I was juggling. But you will think your own thoughts again. You will have space for yourself again. You will not feel like all you are doing is managing the lives and wellbeing and hopes and dreams and emotions of – when your kids start to be able to self-manage their own emotions, even moment to moment, it’s a huge game changer. Because man, that is really hard to have to be constantly so aware of how someone else is doing that your whole day has to revolve around their homeostasis. Zero out of ten experience on that one.
Joy: Zero out of ten recommend.
Claire: My least favorite part of parenting right there.
Joy: Well, happy birthday Evie.
Claire: Happy birthday, Evie.
Joy: We ready for a segue of wonderful sponsorship?
Claire: We are always ready, Joy.
Joy: We are ready for Ned. We are ready to destress. Have you been trying their destress blend?
Claire: If by trying it you mean I am pretty sure I’m their number one destress blend customer, then yes.
Joy: This is your nightly routine. You take it every single night.
Claire: Yes.
Joy: I’ve been taking it actually throughout the day because sometimes I want a little moment of Zen.
Claire: I will say, and if someone here is listening thinking, “Wait a minute Joy and Claire. You say to take CBD for sleep. I can’t take it in the middle of the day. It will knock me out.” I want to say to you that I thought that too. Then I did start taking it little by little during the day. Sometimes I’ll take it if I know I have a really stressful morning coming up. But I don’t take as much as I would at night. At night, I do two whole dropper fulls.
Joy: Just to be clear, there’s different types of Ned, and I do not take the sleep blend during the day.
Claire: No. But I’m talking about –
Joy: Regular.
Claire: Yes. Even the destress blend, I’ll take at night. But yes, the destress blend is great during the day. It has CBG in it, which is another one of the cannabinoids, as we talked about last week, that is really getting a lot more headlines. CBD was the first cannabinoid to take center stage. CBG is more up and coming as well.
Joy: “The mother of all cannabinoids.”
Claire: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Joy: “Because of how effective it is at combatting anxiety and stress by inhibiting the reuptake of GABA, the neurotransmitter responsible for stress regulation.” That’s something I learned in my first year of psychology. Not about CBG but about –
Claire: About GABA?
Joy: Well, one of my favorite words when I was studying psychology as a baby was the reuptake. When I was learning about neurotransmitters and medication, reuptake inhibitors. It’s the best word to say. Anyway, it inhibits the reuptake of GABA, CBG. Now you know.
Claire: Now you know. Well, go inhibit your reuptake of GABA with some Ned destress blend. You can go to helloned.com/JOY and/or you can use discount code JOY. It also has ashwagandha in it which is a great adaptogen. It’s super great at sort of mellowing out your system.
Joy: If you’d like to give Ned a try, Joy and Claire listeners get 15% off Ned products with code JOY. That’s helloned.com/JOY to get 15% off. helloned.com. Thank you, Ned, for sponsoring the show and offering our listeners a natural remedy for some of life’s most common health issues. Fun fact, you guys. We’re going to have the Ned creators favorite Ret and Adriaan on the show soon. So if you have really in-depth questions about CBD, please send them our way because they can answer everything. They are the experts.
Claire: And they’re just the best.
Joy: And they’re so cute.
C; They’re so cute. I was waiting for you to say that. I was like, is she going to say they’re cute? There it is.
Joy: They’re so handsome. They’re so cute. Someone got mad at me for saying cute about –
Claire: Daily Drills.
Joy: Yeah. Someone got mad that I called the girls cute on the Daily Drills. I was like, really? I can’t call someone cute? Come on. I’m getting mad.
Claire: I think that person, the thing they were coming from was, let’s not call them cute because that takes away from their professionalism. I would like to take it a step further and say let’s stop assuming that people can’t be both cute and professional.
Joy: Yes. Thank you. That’s my whole point. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. We can be so many other things. Go watch JVN’s Getting Curious. Get rid of all the binaries and get rid of all the – yeah.
Claire: We can be cute and professional. And in fact, I aspire to be cute and professional. That’s not true. Cute is not something I aspire to be. But not because I don’t like it. Just because I think that it looks better on other people. Okay, so how did you feel about the Super Bowl halftime show? Let’s talk about this for like two minutes.
Joy: Two minutes. I, as most of you know – most of you should know – I love a celebration. I love an event. I love an awards show. I love the Super Bowl. Don’t really watch football other than watching Scott watch football. So I have an adjacent knowledge of football, which I think is a pretty decent knowledge for someone who doesn’t like getting into sports. I thought it was great. First of all, it was produced by Roc Nation, which is Jay-Z’s production company. So he had all Black artists and all people of color. Like in the national anthem, the pre-show, all the artists before the game.
Claire: Okay, question. I didn’t watch a minute of the Super Bowl. What was Dwayne Johnson doing there?
Joy: Yeah, that’s a great question. He was just kind of ramping everybody up and getting ready to rumble.
Claire: So he was just the Super Bowl hype man?
Joy: Yeah, he was the Super Bowl hype man. You know what, in my mind, it was LA, and LA is so extra. Dwayne was probably like – Dwayne, like he’s my best friend. Dwayne was probably like, “I want to hype everybody up. Can you put me on somewhere?” And they probably were like, “Sure, Rock.”
Claire: We can do that for you.
Joy: “Your arms are bigger than my head. I can’t say no to you.”
Claire: What I actually want to imagine happened is that he got to the game and just walked onto the field and was like, “Can I have that microphone?” And they were like, “Uh… yeah.”
Joy: Yeah. Which I’ve heard through the grapevine of nobody I know –
Claire: He’s so great.
Joy: Yeah. I say “grapevine” as if I even know – like I have a bazillion degrees of separation.
Claire: Infinity degrees of separation.
Joy: That he is like the nicest guy. Any celebrity will always say how nice he is. So whatever you want. You are like the best human.
Claire: Take the mic.
Joy: So, who knows? But it was great. It was really kind of cute. I thought it was wonderful that Roc Nation produced it because you could see right away that it was awesome. We need all of the diversity, especially everything that’s gone on this past year. I don’t know if anyone is following the coach hiring and the history of Colin Kaepernick, of kneeling. There’s so many issues that surround football. If you really want to listen to an important episode of The Daily, today is February 14 that we are recording this. If you go to February 14 episode, they talk a lot about the NFL. I think it’s really important because they talk about how football in America is like America’s sport. So if you start to change things in America’s sport to include more diversity, then it could really have a change on the country. I’m like, that’s so brilliant. They go more in depth. I don’t go into detail about it but listen to that episode. And this was specific to hiring a Black coach and really comparing the numbers of how many white coaches are hired versus Black coaches are hired. It’s pretty fascinating. Anyway. So getting back to the halftime show, first of all, I’m loving all the pre-shows. This is amazing. Oh my God. I knew who was going to be at the Super Bowl show, but Scott and I were debating about how it used to be great when there was just one artist. Scott hands down will always be like, “Prince is the best halftime show of all time.” It’s not up for discussion as far as he is concerned. Of course, Diana Ross, hello. But he doesn’t love when there’s a handful of artists. That man does not love – what’s it called when they put multiple songs together?
Claire: Mashup?
Joy: Yeah, mashup or… there’s another word for it.
Claire: Medley.
Joy: Thank you. He hates a medley. Cannot stand. He wants a song from beginning to end. He does not want it interrupted. Don’t you dare cut off a song. He used to make fun of me when I would teach spin. If he would come to my class and I would skip to the next song, he’d be like, “Why did you do that? Everybody hates it when you do that.” Anyway. Do not interrupt a song with Scott Parrish. But I’m like, it’s cool because then it applies to a bunch of different people, and you have a huge audience. And maybe people don’t like Eminem, but they love Mary J. Blige. All I have to say in way longer of a time than I was supposed to talk about the Super Bowl halftime show is the second Dr. Dre started rising from the rafters, I was like, we’re done. This was the best show ever. It was so cool.
Claire: I haven’t seen it yet. I need to go watch it.
Joy: It’s so cool. It’s so cool. And the dancers were – Scott and I were like, look at the choreography. It is flawless. So the ground was the streets of Los Angeles and Compton. The details were amazing. Kendrick Lamar was great. I was just watching the whole time pumping my fists like, “This is amazing!” Then Eminem came out. Then he kneeled after his set in honor of Colin Kaepernick. Which by the way, there’s debate online that he wasn’t kneeling. He was honoring Tupac. No, no. There was actually on record that when they were doing rehearsals, they told him not to kneel because of that, and then he’s like, “I’m kneeling.”
Claire: Guys, I wish you could all see Joy right now. She’s literally tearing at her hair and her clothes in excitement to describe this to you. She’s clutching her face.
Joy: This is why I just really need to live in LA. I get real into political statements too. How people can use art to make a political statement and create a movement. Roc Nation producing this in a huge city that has tons of trauma and tons of turmoil and history with like OJ trial to the riots in LA. There’s all this stuff. And I read into that in a halftime show of course. I’m super picking apart everything. But the fact that all these beautiful dancers were on the streets of LA, essentially, on this platform. But then Snoop Dog, he hasn’t aged a day. Him and Dr. Dre, the second they started rapping together, it took everybody aback. And I know there’s a lot of jokes going around on the internet that Gen X or even older Millennials were having a moment for the halftime show. I’m like, yeah, we were. It was great. This music means a lot to us, and everyone is going to go through that at some point in their lives where they are going to be like, “This music meant so much to me.” That is super important. I don’t care if people are considered old or young, whatever. I thought it was beautiful and brilliant, and Mary J. just falling after her set on the ground just being like, she’s Mary J. It was flawless. Probably hands down one of the best halftime shows I’ve ever seen. And I love Eminem. I freaking love… I love them all. And then 50 Cent showed. Nobody knew that 50 Cent was going to have a cameo. He comes hanging down from the rafters like a bat upside down. Just like, “Hey 50.” It was so great. It was so great.
Claire: Wow.
Joy: So this morning, thank you to the listener who wrote in and said – because you know, guys, I love Peloton. Someone was like, “Oh my gosh, you have to take Alex’s ride. He did all music from the halftime show performers.” He did it like two days before the Super Bowl. So I got up this morning and I was just crying on the bike reliving it. Yeah. I get really emotional about this stuff.
Claire: I can tell.
Joy: I don’t know why. I think it’s just there’s so much – and I think I get this from Scott too. I have to give Scott credit. He really gets into art as a statement and how much it impacts race and community and social justice. It was a big statement if you really watch it from that lens, that there is a lot wrapped up in that halftime show. Especially with Jay-Z’s production company. If you know a lot about Roc Nation, you see a lot of that in there, and I thought it was great. Hopefully people watch it and, I don’t know, someone thinks differently and is nicer. I don’t know.
Claire: My only input on this is that my favorite tweet I saw about it, which was on Instagram, was basically, “This halftime show is really for the people who the only thing they’ve listened to in the past month is Encanto and they need to be reminded of a time in their life when they used to have fun.” Oh, that’s way too close to home for me.
Joy: Oh, man. Because you watch it every day?
Claire: Every day. Or we listen to it every day. That nailed it for the demographic. You probably have kids who are eight or younger at home. You have just been listening to Encanto since it came out. This halftime show is going to remind you that you used to have a fun life.
Joy: Yeah. The other thing is that I think about all the halftime shows I’ve watched in my entire life, I get really excited about. No matter who it is. No matter what generation. So I’m sure the young people, teens, 20’s are watching it being equally entertained. Kendrick is there. He’s representing more of the younger crowd, I guess. But who doesn’t love Snoop Dog? Who does not love Snoop Dog?
Claire: Who? Who among us?
Joy: But I did see Bennifer was there. They do the shots. So Bennifer was there. Matt Damon was there. Charlize Theron was there. The Rock was obviously there. The Rock’s biceps showed up. They had their own chair. I was like, “Scott, how are his arms so big?”
Claire: Because he works out for like five hours a day. And also, he is just a genetically big dude. He is Samoan.
Joy: Yeah, he is a genetically big dude. He’s so nice that I bet if we had a six-degree separation, we could get him on the podcast.
Claire: If you are listening to this and you are like, “Oh my brother’s wife’s dog walker used to know his mailman,” let us know.
Joy: Let us know. Yeah.
Claire: Oh my gosh, how amazing would it be to be a mailman in that part of LA?
Joy: I would love.
Claire: That would be your dream job, kind of.
Joy: Yeah.
Claire: Just to see their packages.
Joy: Yeah. I’m trying to think of another profession. Police officer.
Claire: An Amazon Prime delivery driver.
Joy: Yeah. Like the celeb sitings that you see.
Claire: If you were a Beverly Hills Amazon Prime delivery driver.
Joy: I wonder what they’re ordering. I mean, they don’t know what they’re ordering. But the sides of the packages.
Claire: What are their assistants ordering for them?
Joy: What codes do you have to get into to get into the neighborhoods? Oh, this is great.
Claire: You know all those details.
Joy: You know what, this is the new tour of the stars. We just need you to call up and tell us what you see in those neighborhoods. You don’t need to fly to Los Angeles and sit on a bus with people you don’t know. You just need to give us a little tour of what’s – I mean, yeah, this is the dream.
Claire: Amazon Prime people in Beverly Hills know what’s up.
Joy: Yeah.
Claire: Okay. So it’s also early spring. We’re starting a garden, and I wanted to give my little gardener corner.
Joy: Yes, gardener corner, let’s do it.
Claire: Okay, so my tip of the week – and this probably is not going to be a weekly thing. My tip for you is that depending on where you live –
Joy: I like how you’re like, “tip of the week – don’t expect this every week.” [laughing]
Claire: My one-time tip of the week. [laughing] So we live in Colorado. Obviously, you guys all know that. We have one of the shorter growing seasons in the continental United States. We are Zone 5B, which all you have to do if you don’t know your zone. Each area of the United States is zoned based on you last frost and first frost. So basically it just has to do with your growing season and how long your growing season is. Some places in the US, they don’t ever have hard frosts. So you can really grow stuff all year round. I think the shortest season we have in the continental US is Zone 4, which would be like northern Montana. But we’re in Zone 5B, which means our last frost is typically about May 15 and our first frost is typically about October 15. In Colorado, you can’t really put stuff out until – I mean, May 15 would be pretty early. It’s not uncommon for us to get snow at the end of May. But then the problem is that in the front range, we go almost directly normally from snow to hail, the threat of hailstorms. Are less than a month apart. From mid-May to mid-June, you could easily get snow in the first half of May – and not a lot of snow, but a single standalone snowstorm. And the first week of June or even the last week of May, you could easily get a thunderstorm with significant hail. The problem there is if your little plants are too little and you put them outside and they get hailed on, they’re going to die immediately. So you have to start your stuff inside. Even if it’s less than 90 days to plant from seed to harvest, anything more than 90 days you do have to start inside because you just aren’t going to have enough time to get there. But even if it’s less than 90 days, you still want to start things inside because they need to be a little bit mature when you transplant them. Otherwise they could be too susceptible to hail. So here is my tip for starting seed. A lot of times, you go to a Home Depot or a garden center or whatever and you’ll see these seed heating mats. Basically they are just fancy heating pads that you put under your seeds so that your soil is a certain temperature, so that simulates the outdoors in the spring. Here’s my hot tip. Buy a cheap electric blanket from Walmart and use that instead, and then you can put a cheap plastic shower curtain or a painter’s drop cloth if you’re worried about it getting wet. But that’s my hot tip is to use a cheap heated blanket as a seed heating mat. We have done that for the past couple of years and it’s been very effective. Sorry about the slamming doors. Evie is going in and out of my room. [laughing] So that’s my tip for you. I also would say, there is supposedly potentially going to be a seed – [Evie speaking] – going to be a seed shortage, so get your seed soon. Evie Joan, how are you?
Evie: This is my soft unicorn.
Claire: It’s your soft unicorn. [door slam]
Joy: I love how she pops her head in. She’s like, “[whispering] Hi.”
Claire: My favorite thing is Miles when he pops his head in, he’s like, “Are you on a call? Sorry.” And she goes, “Are you on a call? Okay,” and just walks in. Okay, good to know. Just for my own context.
Joy: Okay, that’s a good tip.
Claire: My other tip is that you don’t need as many starts as you probably think you do. And also, don’t stress out. If starting seeds feels like too much of a faff for you – starting seeds does take up a lot of space, so if you don’t necessarily have that much space or you have a small child or a dog at home who will destroy your seeds. We have had that happen. You can buy starts at almost every farmer’s market and the majority of hardware stores that have a garden center. Starting in May, they’re going to be selling plant starts. That’s a much more expensive route to go. But it is by no means a shameful way to start your garden.
Joy: No shame. Good garden corner. I think that’s all of our updates for this week. We had a lot of guests on this month, but we just like to have guests every once in a while, and sometimes it happens all in a row.
Claire: It’s true.
Joy: We never like to release them later. Little fun fact about me and podcasting, I do not like to pre-record things way in advance and then release them later. It just feels weird, even if people don’t listen to it for another month or two. If I don’t release it close to when we record it, it drives me nuts. So that’s why we’ve had a lot of really cool opportunities for interviews lately, and we love to take them.
Claire: Every once in a while, we’ll get some feedback about like, “Hey, this guest didn’t resonate with me. I wish your guests had more of a connection.” And we actually have the opposite mindset about it that we want to bring on guests from all different types of topics, all different types of backgrounds. We don’t see an inherent value in having guests that all have the same theme, given that our podcast doesn’t really have any one single theme. We do obviously skew very heavily towards female guests. That is something that we believe in. One of the main reasons why we started this podcast was to elevate female voices. Outside of that, we welcome and encourage and are excited to have guests from all different backgrounds with all different –
Joy: Interests and expertise and viewpoints.
Claire: Exactly. So from Gen Z entrepreneurs to Gen X manifesting gurus to coaches. I think that we really just get excited any time we have the opportunity to hear from anyone and hear their life experience and get a sense of how they look at the world. You don’t have to listen to all of our interviews, and we know that not all of them are for everybody, and that’s totally fine.
Joy: But even if you haven’t, to listen with an open mind because there’s so many times where you assume that you’re not going to like something, and then you’ll listen to it and be like, “Actually, I got something out of that.”
Claire: You know where to find us. We are on Instagram @joyandclaire_. We are at joyandclaire.com. You can email us thisisjoyandclaire@gmail.com. We love hearing from you. We love talking with you. We love being here every Thursday to hang out with you. We’re so glad you’re here. Don’t forget to support our sponsor, Ned. Go to helloned.com, discount code JOY or helloned.com/JOY. Check out their destress blend. Check out their daily blend, which is formerly known as their full spectrum hemp extract. Check out their sleep blend. And if nothing else, go buy yourself some Chapstick. Because man, that Chapstick is still my favorite thing on this planet.
Joy: It’s the best.
Claire: Alright guys, we’ll talk to you next week. Bye.
Joy: Bye, guys.
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