Bockety

2011-01-13T00:31:00.002-06:00

I met Rosemarie today. (Not the one from Dick van Dyke, silly; she's dead.) She was standing at the bus stop and we struck up a conversation. It was 22 degrees out. She wasn't wearing a coat, just a hoodie. The hood was pulled tight around her face. I thought maybe she was homeless or something but when I thought about it later it realized homeless people usually have coats. I gave her my scarf. She declined it at first but eventually took it and put it in her bag. I felt kind of like a dick, then, for forcing this scarf on this lady, implying she was too poor to buy that $2 scarf I'd just handed over. Or maybe it wasn't an implication. Maybe it was a loud and jeering statement of fact and she was too embarrassed to admit she needed it.

We talked about the bus, how unreliable it is, how friendly or unfriendly the drivers can be. We talked about kids today and agreed it was a whole different ballgame for them than it was for us. I said, "When I was in high school, I thought my friends and I were really the end-all, be-all of rebellion and acting up. But compared to a lot of these kids, we were saints." She agreed. She and her friends had been quite the hell raisers too, and they were doing it about fifty years before my friends and I were even thought of. We had to lean in towards each other to hear over the traffic. There was a three-inch long chin hair that I couldn't take my eyes off of. Later, at the appointment I eventually made it to, I couldn't get rid of the thought of pulling that hair out with my bare hands.

Still waiting for the bus, I showed her my phone and the app that said when the bus was supposed to come. She kept thanking me for pulling out my phone to check the app every few minutes. I didn't tell her it was just a nervous, time-wasting habit. The bus came. We didn't sit together; I am not a people person. But I'm not a jerk, either, so I took a seat behind her. We kept chatting. Our bus driver was nice. Rosemarie was concerned about the well-being of a small, local business. I assured her that one of the employees was a good friend of mine and they were doing well. She seemed genuinely relieved.

I felt bad, cutting her off mid-sentence two miles later when the bus reached my stop. I had only 15 minutes to make a 20-minute trek to my destination. I should have gotten her number, suggested a game of rummy or something. I shuffled along the snowy sidewalk and told myself I wanted to hang out with Rosemarie because she was nice, and no one else will play gin with me, and we both seemed a little lonely. And I pretended it wasn't because I chance to rip that whisker out of her chin.

DING-ZING-THWACK, the sweetest song

2010-06-15T11:21:00.003-05:00

A year ago I came across a typewriter on ebay. A whopping $10, plus $10 shipping. I thought, "How cute! I'll use it to write my great American novel!"

It came in the mail a week later. I immediately started pounding away on the old keys, the THWACK of each keystroke felt like I was using some brand new power that only I could possess. The power, unfortunately, didn't extend to making words appear on the paper - the dry ribbon was my Kryptonite.

I went to a local shop had ribbons cheap and typewriter advice even cheaper. I bought two ribbons, so great and sure was my dream to write my best-selling novel that I figured I'd need two ribbons, maybe one for the original and one for the editing. After all, the box wasn't that much smaller than the box most Inkjet cartridges come in, so it must be good for a few thousand pages, right?

I came home and, fool that I am, whipped the old cartridge off the machine and threaded the new one in. I didn't take a picture of how it was supposed to go, and had no idea, and in fact didn't even really glance at the set-up before I took the old reel off. It was two hours and six Google searches before I got it back the way it should be, or at least close to it. It still fights me on some letters, and double-taps others until at the end of a page it looks more like the crazed manifesto of a violent lunatic than a simple short story.

After a few days of sporadically typing away on the old machine the novelty wore off. I put it back in its case and stored away where it gathered dust and cobwebs for the better part of a year.

For a few weeks in the following year I was desperately trying to write something - anything - that would pay my bills and put food on the table and maybe afford me the opportunity to go out with my friends once in a while.

Typing on the computer held so many distractions - email buzzing, Facebook and Twitter and all kinds of other super-connected crap was going off all the time. I just wanted everyone to shut up a minute and let me finish my thoughts, but every time I tried to disconnect my computer, it resulted in endless "network error" pop-up messages. Hissing at the computer, "Yes, I know. I unplugged it! Shut up and go away!" as I jabbed at the little yellow error box was more than enough to make me lose my train of thought.

And even when the connectivity (or lack thereof) problems were at a minimum, there was the problem of the writing itself. I am a lazy typist. I leave my wrists on the desktop, inviting Carpel Tunnel syndrome to my wrists and endless fatfingered typos to my writing. If something is misspelled, I immediately fix it just to make the little squiggly line go away.

This instant editing issue doesn't just apply to typos but to poorly developed paragraphs, sentences that didn't carry the subtle nuance and sly wit that will get any editor anywhere desperate to publish anything you ever write, ever, right down to your grocery list.

And so you go back and fix it. And fixate on it. And delete and backspace and cut and paste and undo for an hour. And then you realize you've spent an hour writing one stupid sentence while the endless, heartless blank pages of your word processing program stretch on without any concept of "end."

Suddenly you realize that you could write a thousand pages - a million - and it would never be enough for this program. You will always be either one third or two-thirds of the way down the page. The beginning and end were melded seamlessly into the middle and it all runs together in one pristine, white window on your screen.

I was talking with a friend of mine about the problems of writing on the computer. She said something along the lines of getting a typewriter. I took a sip of my rum and coke and nodded. Typewriter. Sure. Spoken by someone who obviously didn't know what a hassle it was to type and edit on a machine, and how much White-Out costs. Whatever.

That night, full of rum and vigor and questionable tacos, the typewriter was the best idea in the world. And of course it was my idea - always had been, always would be. Sure enough, after pulling the plastic case out of hiding and setting up on the dining room table, the old giddiness came back as my fingers danced across the keys. Danced is probably the wrong word.

The keys had to move a few inches to meet the page so holding the classic home keys position was out of the question. My wrists no longer sat idly on the desk. I had to use force to put words to paper as my fingers bounced around the keyboard. I imagined myself a great piano player, knocking out one of Rachmaninoff's trickier Opuses. Things were really on a roll.

The force of my typing ignited the force of my progress. Going back to fix a typo or re-write a line was out of the question. White-out took too long to dry. Correction tape stuck to the letters and left the offending, unwanted type exposed and helpless on the page. So, I barreled on. Re-typing the word with the correct spelling got to be cumbersome and time-consuming, so typos littered each page like a swarm of locusts. (Or locsts, according to the typewriter.)

It wasn't just unedited typos. Sentences that hadn't ended up the way I expected went unchecked. And before I knew it, I was at the end of one page - two pages, three; my progress was finally tangible. The DING-ZING that separated each line of type was like a miniature cheer squad: "DING! You just finished a line! Try another! ZING! Way to go!" The cheers faded into the background as the manual line advancement became second nature and I found myself at the bottom of the page with little nor no memory of the thirty DING-ZINGs that had gotten me there.

Was there anything in life more satisfying? Something more than maniacal pounding of the keys, my own DING-ZING cheer squad, and a pile of proof that I was moving forward and making progress? Well, sure, the world is a big place full of awesome things. But at two in the morning, very few things compare to that THWACK-tastic concert on my dining room table.

At some point, it might be helpful to actually sing along to the music

2010-05-20T09:55:00.002-05:00

I first saw this lady on the Red Line a few weeks ago. She was standing by a speaker, apathetic towards the music tha-tha-thumping across the platform at such a ridiculous early hour. She wasn't singing, she wasn't dancing, she was just pacing back and forth jabbing the screen of her cell phone and looking like she had better places to be.

I thought maybe she was supposed to meet some people for a flash mob, and I felt bad for her because I mean who gets ditched by a flash mob? Either she was a total loser or her flash mob menagerie was nothing but hooligans.

Today she assaulted my sleep-deprived eyes with hot pink leggings, which themselves sported two-inch slits from ankle to ass. She showcased her intrepid apathy towards the speaker again, and seemed relieved to strike up a conversation with the woman on the left, wherein DJ Pink Leggings spilled her story (predictable) and talked about going back to LA. An actual quote:

"Yeah I'm going back to LA soon. Not now though, I got too much going on right here."

Whether she was referring to her outfit or her hard-core apathy dedication, we may never know.

Container Vegetable Gardening: A City Dweller's Adventure, Part 2

2010-04-24T13:03:00.001-05:00

There are great resources to cut down on the cost of supplies. This is what I did to get around those hefty price tags:

Containers: you don't need to go to the store and buy planters. Any container that can hold dirt and survive the weather is fine. This includes:

Buckets (like the $5 paint buckets at places like Home Depot)
Wine crates (most liquor stores are ok with handing these over for free)
Reusable cloth shopping bags
The bags that the store-bought dirt comes in. Just open the top of the bag, plant your veggie, and recycle the bag at the end of harvest
Old, broken wagons (these are best for shallow-soil veggies like lettuce)
Drawers from a dresser that's being thrown out
Trash cans

I mean, really, anything that will hold dirt and won't be destroyed by water will work. Just remember that they need to be able to drain. This means have holes in the bottom (which you can make with just a hammer and nail, or an ice pick, a drill, whatever) and it needs to sit at least an inch or two off the ground (you can set the container on bricks).

If these options aren't for you, try looking Craigslist.org for free planters, or try Freecycle. I complained about the price of containers in my Facebook status, and a friend told me to come get her old containers that her husband bought but was never going to use. You can also find really great deals on planters after Labor Day. As soon as you see Christmas decorations going up at stores, run right over to get great deals on containers, dirt, all that stuff. Those deals won't help you if you're looking to start gardening right this minute, but they're great money savers on stuff you'll use next year.

As for dirt, there are endless possibilities. First, getting dirt from a public park, forest preserve, etc is actually illegal in most places so don't bother. Next time you see a construction site, go talk to someone there to see if you can haul off a little dirt. They usually don't care, but you have to ask first.

My favorite source of free dirt came to me every other week at my boring desk job. We had a company that cared for our office plants, and every other week they changed out the small flower pot on my desk. I asked the guy if they were just throwing out the flowers and he said, "Yeah. Why? You want this? Here take it. Enjoy!" So every other week, whether I liked the plant or not, I took it home and lovingly nurtured it, watering it, talking to it, giving it a good home. None of them lived longer than two weeks in my apartment. So I threw out the plant, but saved the dirt in a shopping bag. I also saved the plastic container the plant came in to use when my seedlings sprouted. From November to March, I managed to get one and a half shopping bags of dirt for free.

So go now, and get your reused containers and dirt. Ask your friends, relatives, and neighbors who garden about their gardening tips. Seasoned gardeners are usually pretty excited to help out novices and sometimes they'll throw some freebies your way - food spikes, gardening gloves, planters, etc. I'll post more on this as the season goes on.

Container Vegetable Gardening: A City Dweller's Adventure, Part 1

2010-04-24T11:54:00.005-05:00

I'm lucky enough to live in a city that embraces green living. Chicago embraces green living, from a sprawling public transit program to the environmental programs at city hall, and even our beloved Museum of Science and Industry, we embrace our environment.

Another wonderful part of my life is my back porch. I live in an apartment building that has shops on the first floor and apartments in the upper floors. Right outside my back door is a large rooftop that gets lots of sun all day long, and this is where I grew a tomato plant in a large container two years ago.

This year I'm really branching out. With the patient help of Maria at Green Home Experts, the knowledgeable folks at Home Depot, and the endless info from the web (GardenWeb is a vast fount of info), I'm going to plant tomatoes, eggplants, and sweet peppers in containers this year. Almost all of it will be experimental. This post is for those considering growing veggies on a balcony or similar settings. After a lot of reading and asking the sort of questions that exasperate people, here are some basics:

First, gardening is expensive. A self-watering container (where you can put the water in the bottom and the soil slurps up the water from the reservoir in the bottom) are usually $25 each. You have to pay for dirt. Dirt. As in that stuff you track in on your shoes and sits around largely unused in parks everywhere. And dirt is expensive. Then there's the cost of plants (or seeds and seeding trays), plant food, and all the superfluous crap everyone tries to sell you that you don't even need.

Second, unless you have a really stellar situation, you're not going to grow enough food to cut down significantly on your grocery bill. At least not in the first year. In fact, if you're growing enough plants in containers to really supplement your grocery bill it will be a few years before you save enough at the grocery store to cover the costs of supplies.

Third, the dirt you get from a bag isn't as good as dirt from the ground. The ground has whole ecosystem in place with great bacteria (no, really, it's good) that really help your plants thrive. Try to get some garden dirt if you can. You don't need to fill up the whole container with it, but it's good to have some in there. The great news is that gardening in containers really, really cuts down on the weeds.

Lastly, please don't go hog wild at the nursery. Figure out what you'd like to try, keep in mind what you're really willing to take care of (if carrying water out to your balcony for eight plants is too much work, cut it down to something manageable), and ask lots and lots of questions about what you're planting and your plants' needs. Make sure you know how much sun your gardening area gets, because if you don't know that then your questions are really hard to answer.

Don't let gardening intimidate you! Some plants will flourish and some won't, and each time you learn something new. Just keep one thought in mind: "There's always next year." With the diverse resources available online and likely around town, you can get really great advice from people who are excited to teach you things. I'm a novice myself, and in this blog I'm going to bring together some hints and tips I've found to help ease others into the wide, wild world of container gardening.

Welcome to the 21st century, Archie Andrews

2010-04-23T13:24:00.005-05:00

So Archie comics is introducing its first gay character, one Kevin Keller. The press release says it's to keep the franchise current, which makes sense. In this digital age it's hard to compete with online comics, and keeping "Archie properties reflective of the current world of teens and teen media" is a smart move.

According to a CNN article, Kevin catches Veronica's eye after he beats Jughead in a burger eating contest. Veronica tries to snag "the new hottie" to no avail, and Kevin confides in Jughead that he's got nothing against Veronica; he's gay. There's a glaring problem here for fans of the series: anybody who beats Jughead at a burger eating contest doesn't catch her eye, he catches her disdain. However, he's presented as a hunk so it's likely that Ronnie would overlook his gluttonous behavior and go after him anyway. I'm sure she only redoubles her efforts to get him when he spurns her advances. I digress.

It's good of Archie Comics to inlcude a gay character, even if the introduction is made in an edition of "Veronica" and not "Archie." This makes me wonder if he'll be an occasional character they throw in once in a while for a taste of diversity, like Chuck and Nancy.

I've thought about this press release all day because it seems like coming out of the closet or having a gay character in a popular series just isn't a big deal any more. When "I Love Lucy" approached the subject of Lucy's pregnancy sixty years ago, it was a big deal but now it seems quaint. Sixty years from now, sending press releases about a gay character will also seem quaint, and our grandchildren will giggle and shake their heads at what prudes we are. We can only hope.

Nate Games Escape the Room Walkthrough

2010-04-17T11:58:00.008-05:00

Ridiculously frustrating. Hard is fun, stupid hard is no good.

Notes:
To separate an item, click on your bag, then go to the separate tab. Double click item to separate.

On the hammer screen: swipe right to left until the power bar gets to the blue area where the arrow is blinking. When it's in that area, click "break". If you don't have the reflexes for that, keep hitting the hammer til it's past that point and wait for it to go back down.

Room 1:
Get:
Keys (in side table with lamp)

1.Separate the keys (click on your bag, go to the Separate tab, double-click the keys).
2.Use the purple one on the door.

Room 2:

Get:

Note (on desk)
Knife (in right cabinet in second room)
Hammer (from safe - code is on note and changes with every game)
*Don't worry about the waste paper in the trash can. You can get it and separate it to find a key, but I don't know what the key goes to so don't bother.

Use the knife on the poster in the second room. In that game, move the circle through the path without touching the sides. It's a different path every time you cut the poster. Use the hammer to break the brick. Take the small key.

Use the small key on the box on the lower right corner of the second room. Click again for the baseball game. This is a real hassle.

The code changes every time it starts. So if you fail the first time and try again without closing anything, you have a new code. You have to guess the numbers and put them in the right order. The lights tell you when you have something right. They don't represent the position of the number. For example, if you have two lights on the S row, it doesn't mean the first two numbers are right it just means two of the numbers are right. You have to figure out which two.

The first row of lights (S) stands for correct numbers in the correct spot. Let's say you get two lights and you have:

317

That means two of those numbers are right. So you decide to change the three, and there are still two lights - GOOD! That means 1 and 7 are in the right place. If you only get one light, that means 3 is one of the right numbers so change it back.

The second row of lights (B) stands for correct numbers in the wrong place. Let's say you have the same numbers again:

317

Three B lights means you have them in the wrong order, so it might be 173 or 371 or some other combination of those three. What a damn hassle.

Winning that game opens the door.

Room 3:

Get:
Water bottle (shelves on upper right)
Hammer (by chairs)
LP Record (under rug)
Capsule (on table - the red one)
Camera (under window)
Lighter (between shelves on lower left and the wood pile by fireplace)
Sodium (in safe - see below)

Separate the camera to get film. Put film in fireplace. Use lighter to light fireplace. Use magnifying glass to read the words above the fireplace. Note the red letters. This is the code to the safe. Get sodium.

Combine sodium and capsule. Combine sodium capsule and water bottle. Put the bottle in the hole under the clock. Once the wall blows, use the hammer to open up the wall and walk through.

Get cheese from glass cabinet (upper right). Use LP record on record player to scare the mouse (in the glass case, lower left) back into the next room. Go back to the first room, use cheese on the small hole to get mouse key. Separate mouse key for key, go back to second room, escape!

Room 4:

Get:

Batteries (from metal cabinet in second room)
Remote Control (from safe - see below)

You remember when you used to type 58008 into a calculator and turn it over and it spelled BOOBS? This is kind of like that, but you're spelling LOSE. Upside down, that's 3507.

Combine batteries and remote. Use remote on door to exit. I don't know why you have to get the pliers or the dust cloth, but if you want to go ahead.

Room 5:

Get:

Hammer
Chalk (from spiderweb to the left of the stairs)
Key (from desk)
Screwdriver (from cabinet, use key)
Knife (from box under the computer screen)

You have a lighter and candle in your bag. Combine those and use those around the room until the candle goes out. You're looking for a place where there is wind to blow the candle out, so if the candle is out you've found a part of the floor to break through. Play the game once, then hit the hole again with the hammer and head downstairs.

When you get the screwdriver, use it on the red dot on the box under the computer screen. Get the knife. Combine knife and chalk for some fingerprint dust. Use this on the upper part of the door (where the buttons are). See the numbers covered in chalk? Those are the ones that people press (leaving finger prints) so it's some combination of those numbers. There are 24 combinations, so get clicking! Once you find the code, open the door to escape.

Room 6:

Get:
Hammer (shelves on the upper right)
Tape (cabinet in the upper left)
Valve (break glass on left wall with hammer)
Pipe (the smallest one on the right wall)
Put the tape on the blue spot on the window. Hit the taped spot with the hammer, get the electronic card. Use the card on the door.

Get 3L cup (on shelves next to the door) and 5L cup (on table, bottom right). Put the valve on on the nozzle (yellow circle by the table) and fit the pipe on the pipe with water leaking out of it. Fill the 3L cup, combine with 5L cup. Repeat (fill, combine) and now the 3L cup has 1L in it. Dump out the 5L glass ("use" it on the table is fine) and combine the 3L and 5L again. Now the 5L glass has 1L of water. Fill the 3L again, dump it into the 5L, and now the 5L glass has 4L in it. Got all that? Great.

Put the 5L cup in the freezer (upper part of the fridge). Close the door, open the door, and it's ice. Separate the cup and the ice, put the ice on the scale and get the heck out of there.

Room 7:

Get:
Poster on right wall
Magnifying glass (under clock on upper left)
Wire (in right most locker

Use the magnifying glass on the door. Oh no it's blocked! Put the poster under the door. Use the wire on the door lock, then grab the poster again. You've got the key, and you're on your way.

I don't know what the magnet is for (table, lower left) but grab it if you're partial to magnets.

Room 8

Get:
Ruler under cabinet (middle lower wall)
Key (under metal shelves - use ruler)
Empty note and pencil on table (bottom right)
CD case (bookshelves)
Wall clock
Screwdriver (in toolbox; use key from under metal shelves)
Combine screwdriver and wall clock. Look at all those numbers! Combine the pencil and empty note. Go back to the Use tab and read it. "The key is piece of wall clock"? English teachers everywhere just shivered. Go to the papers on the left wall by the door. So...three short beeps is three, one long one is five...ok, got it. Separate the CD case. Put CD 1 in the computer (box to the right of the keyboard) and listen. How many short and long beeps? I got 3, 7, 11, 2. For those of you not hip to Roman numerals, that's III, VII, XI, and II. So put those in the rectangles on the floor from left to right and hit the red button on the floor. You're free!

Room 9:

Get:

Medals box (drawer on bottom right)
Torn tube (bottom shelf on the bottom right)
Tape (cabinet, right wall)
Gift (metal locker)
Soda (desk)
Sharp knife (box on floor)
Air pump (floor, bottom left)
Sunglasses (cabinet on bottom left)
Hammer (in box on bookshelves, left wall)

Separate the sunglasses and put the lens in the contraption by the desk. Specifically, in the hole that's kind of above the plant. See where the laser points? Hit that with the hammer. Oh look, a medal!

Flip through the book on the desk two or three times. There's another medal. Separate the gift to get the teddy bearCombine the knife and the teddy bear. Another medal!

Now look on the left wall between the cabinet and the bookshelves. See that piece of gold? It's the last medal, but you won't be able to reach it. Combine the tape and broken tube. Put the mended tube between the cabinet and the bookshelves. Use the air pump on the tube to separate the furniture, then grab the medal. Combine the medals and the medal box, go to the Use tab and click again to open a puzzle.

The code is 0064. (16 sections x 4 rows) You get the rusty key. Combine it with the soda to get the regular key and try not to dwell on what sort of sick mind came up with this game as you exit the room.

Room 10:

Get:

Toothpaste (drawer to the right of the door)
Wire (in plant by window)
Cane (by desk, second room)
Screwdriver (metal cabinet)
Magnet (in hole in wall; use cane)

Combine wire and magnet. Use on fireplace to get rusty iron plate. Use screwdriver on plate above door (first room) to get memory card if you feel like you need it. For this level, you don't. You also don't need the axe above the fireplace or the beeswax in the cabinet in the second room. Combine rusty iron plate and toothpaste to clean the plate and get the code to the safe, where you will find a fire extinguisher. Use it on the fire and exit through the fireplace.

Room 11

Get:
Hammer (on floor)
Claw hammer (in drawer, lower right)
Flashlight (desk)
Diary (bookshelves, the left part of the bottom shelf)

Use hammer to smash the face of the statue on the left to get copper wire. Use the claw hammer to grab the nail out of the wall above the purple chair. Separate the flashlight to get batteries. Combine copper wire, batteries, and nail to make a magnet. Drop that mess into the pit in the middle of the floor to get the small key. Use the small key on the little panel on the upper right side to get the red electronic card. Put that card in the red slot by the door. Open the diary to see a note. Santa? Oh, Christmas. Sure, because everybody celebrates Christmas so of course everybody would get this clue and not have to look up when Christmas is...sure. So the code to the safe is 1225. Get the blue electronic card, stick it in the door and shake a leg on to room 12.

Room 12

Get:

Sharp knife (cabinet, upper left)
Small key (second cabinet from the left, second room)
Hammer (in pipe, third room)
Cutting machine (in chest, use small key)
Teddy bear (under bed)
Note 1 (trash can)
Note 2 (in teddy bear; use sharp knife)
Note 3 (in glass cabinet above desk in first room; use hammer)
Note 4 (in crate in second room, use hammer)
Note 5 (behind poster in second room; use sharp knife and hammer)
Note 6 (in smaller part of machine in third room; turn wheel by machine to open)

To get to the third room, use the cutting machine to snip the wires on the pipe next to the chest in the second room. Gather up all the notes then pull out your calculator. Oh, but there's something missing, right? What does Z equal? Take your sharp knife and cut that ugly picture by the door in the second room, then use the magnifying glass to get some haps on Z. Plug your final number (4268) into the door and take a deep breath: here comes room 13.

Room 13

Get:

Note (bookshelves)
Yellow iron plate (glass case)
Blue iron plate (in box by window)
Green iron plate (in green vase on desk, lower right)
Red iron plate (kind of under the desk in upper right...click by the drawers)
Black iron plate (on couch, between the two white and red pillows)
Lighter (in drawer under phone)

The note isn't very well written. In clue B (yellow and blue are at the end of black), think of it as book ends. I kept trying to start off with black and put blue and yellow at the opposite end. But they actually are just on either side of black. Also, "smallest on the left" means "left" if you're standing in the room look at the wall. Since you aren't, put the plates in the opposite direction (with smallest on the right). Still stumped? Start with yellow closest to the wall cabinet, then go black, blue, green, red, so red is closest to the bottom wall. The cabinet opens and you get a key.

Use the key to open the chest and get an orange-scented note. Combine this with the lighter to get the code for the door. Enter the second room.

Get:

Glue (left cabinet on upper left)
Bottles (on shelf on right wall)

Fill 7L, combine with 3L. Dump 3L, combine 7 and 3 again. This gives you 1L in the 7L bottle. Dump this into the 10L bottle and repeat. Now you have 2L in the 10L bottle. Fill the 3L again and put that in the 10L - now you have 5L in the 10L bottle.

Now, take the 3L bottle, fill it and dump it into the 7L bottle 3 times. This gives you 7L in the 7L bottle and 2L in the 3L bottle. Dump the 7L bottle, combine 3L & 7L bottle, then fill the 3L again and dump it into the 7L. Now you have 5L in the 10L bottle and 5L in the 7L bottle. Holy crap that hurt my head.

One bottle on each side of the scale opens the scale's door; take the red book. Put it in the bookshelf on the right wall, where the red books are missing a volume. Oh look! A hole in the wall. Get me out of here!

Third room

Get:

Tennis ball (cabinet on right wall) Combine glue and tennis ball. Go back to the second room, put the sticky ball on the air pressure machine nozzle (middle of top wall) and turn the wheel on the machine. This is where things start getting really stupid.

Use the super magnifying glass on the tiny little speck next to the mess you made with the air compressor. Who the hell would think to use the magnifying glass there? That's a great example of why this game is more obnoxious than fun - who thinks to look at a speck that you don't even notice until someone tells you there's a speck there? Whatever. It's a diamond. Go back to the third room and use it on the glass.

Then you're done. Where's the mad scientist? What, no "good job" at the end? Whatever. Why expect a payoff in a game that's meant to make you angry instead of entertained? I'm so sick of this game that I'm not even going to go back over this walk through and check for grammar, spelling, and layout errors. Suck it, Nate Games. Enjoy my $3. Jerks.

How I Met Your Lame 5th Season

2010-04-16T09:06:00.004-05:00

I was reading this article about How I Met Your Mother today, and I'm starting to wonder if the show's writers are forgetting one thing: while the title of the show makes it sound like the show's purpose is for Ted to meet his wife, the actual purpose is to entertain us.

The problem with this season of HIMYM is they're focusing on one character trait of one character in a show whose strength comes from the ensemble. While not as narrow in scope as the Barney Stinson problem, a similar situation happened with Monica on Friends by the end of that show. She was just nuts. Neurotic, addicted to cleaning, and not the witty and fun woman we met at the beginning of the show.

Barney is the sort of character that is best left on the side, checking in with his deviance as the other characters go about their multi-faceted lives. While it's true that he's a crowd favorite, he's basically got one interest - getting laid - and that's not much of a story line for him. Other great shows have had great kooky characters that were stronger when they were kept in check by the other more stable characters. Think JJ on Good Times (before they killed James) and Kramer on Seinfeld. They were great as part of a strong ensemble. Also, Jack and Karen on Will & Grace. These people were hilarious foils and friends in their shows, but they wouldn't be fun to watch all the time.

Just like that guy you know who is always saying something funny, no matter what, and even though what he says is actually funny, after a while you get tired of having to keep up with him all the time. Every other sentence he says is a demand for a reaction from you - a giggle, a guffaw, a smirk - and after a while it's just tiresome. It's the same thing with Barney. Yes, you get laid a lot, yes you have a lot of opinions about dating and women (and I completely agree about the Lemon Law), but it's enough.

HIMYM is turning into the Barney Stinson show, and a show like that can't sustain the humor and warmth that we've come to expect from HIMYM. It's like I'm tuning in to watch Friends, but instead I'm stuck watching Joey.

The writers don't want Ted to meet the mother of his children because that would mean the end of the show. It makes sense that they want to do filler shows to prolong their paychecks. But don't turn this into Scrubs, which was loved and lauded at its start and has since become a down-and-out lame and limping old gray nag; a shadow of its former self and a prime example of a show that has well outlived its relevance.

If you can't deliver lively, interesting story lines about five lively, interesting people living in New York, it's time to call it quits and go out on a high note. Even Barney Stinson would agree it's the classy thing to do.

AT&T U-Verse vs Comcast

2010-04-03T10:24:00.004-06:00

Here is a summary:

Price: Uverse charges more for HD channels, Comcast has free broadcast HD channels

OnDemand: AT&T's is pathetic, Comcast has lots of free movies & shows

Phone service: similar for both

Internet: no noticeable difference

DVR: AT&T is good for non-HD users (see below), Comcast let you record only two shows at once

I had Comast for four or five years and it was good but it was kind of pricey. There were also some small things that were kind of annoying (like not being able to watch OnDemand while two shows were recording). U-Verse came to the area claiming lower prices and sweeping me off my feet with the promise of recording four shows at once. Switching to U-Verse was on my to-do list but when a co-worker said they were handing out $300 Visa gift cards to switch I got on the horn and got the ball rolling.

In late February, I took half a day off and waited for the tech to come out. He was due to be there by 5:00 but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and didn't call to check on his whereabouts until 5:30. Nobody could tell me where he was or if he was coming. I called back six times between 5:30 and 8:30. The fifth time I was transferred to an office that had closed for the day. I called right back and told the first person who answered the phone, "Just cancel it. This is ridiculous. Cancel the whole damn thing." The guy said, "Great," and hung up on me.

I called back the next day to make sure they were canceling the order and the rep told me there was a technical issue and they apologized for the inconvenience and promised to cancel it.

A few weeks later I got eight calls in five days from them asking me to call them. Whatever the problem had been, they fixed it. I wrote that day in Feb off as a one-time snafu and gave them another try. The guy was prompt, friendly, knowledgeable, and professional. There was some wiring issue in my apartment building's phone box so he had to call out a special tech at 4:00 to fix it. The first tech stayed as long as he could but he had to leave at 4:30. The lineman came out and fixed the box later that evening and the first tech was back promptly the next morning and everything was installed properly.

While he was cleaning up his tools and things I was playing with the remote and trying to set up recordings. When I tried to set up HD channels to record, it said "doesn't allow recording." That's when I found out it's $10 a month extra to have HD, even for broadcast channels like ABC, NBC, CBS, etc. What the hell? These were all included with Comcast.

The tech left and I went online to program my TV from my computer. This is a useful feature that I wish Comcast would offer. I couldn't use my existing Yahoo address to set up my account so I had to open another Yahoo address via AT&T, an annoying process that should be eliminated for people who already have a Yahoo account.

When I tried to set up HD recordings, it kept telling me that there were conflicts even though there were only two recordings set in one time slot. I didn't understand why it wouldn't let me set up the promised four recordings at a time so I called up customer service again.

Apparently you only get two HD lines at a time. So you can still do four shows, but not four HD shows. I was irritated because I paid for the whole TV and I wanted to watch the whole TV, not just the middle of the screen which is what I have to do when I'm watching non-HD media. But whatever, I could live with that.

Then it got to where it would only let me set up one HD show at a time. What the hell? I mean come on. It turns out the DVR starts recording one minute early and stops recording one minute late and there is no way to change this. It's a default setting.

So say you have one show set to record at 7:30 and two shows set to record at 8:00. The 7:30 show records until 8:01, while the two 8:00 shows start recording at 7:59. So that's three minutes that you're recording three HD shows at once. but you only have two HD lines so you can't do that. Which means you can only set one show to record at 8, since the 7:30 show is still recording. You can still record up to four shows, as long as they're not HD. So at 8:00 I could record one HD show and up to three non-HD shows. This is what an extra $10 a month gets you from AT&T.

Yesterday I looked at my bill online. There was a $57 charge listed as a "prorated charge." So I called them up again. It turns out your billing cycle has nothing to do with when you signed up, it's on an established cycle for your neighborhood. Also, they pre-bill for the next month. That $57 was for the ten days in the last cycle that I had service, and then I also have to pay for a month that I have not yet used.

$57 isn't a lot to most people but it sure is to me, and by the time they added taxes and fees and all that crap it was $80, which is a big chunk of my budget.

So my bill that was supposed to be $157 is now $235, which is going to mean I'm washing my clothes in the bathtub for a while because $80 is two months of laundry at the laundromat.

I know a lot of people complain that Comcast is expensive and they have bad customer service. I've never had a bad customer service experience from Comcast. Their prices are about the same as AT&T, but they have lots and lots of free shows and movies on demand, while AT&T has no free movies and not a great selection of shows. I can't find any regular broadcast shows on their "Free on Demand" at all. They want to charge me $5.00 to watch the super shitty "All About Steve." I wouldn't watch that movie even if they were the ones paying me to watch it.

They don't even carry CLTV, Chicago's local news channel. With Comcast you can only get it if you pay an extra $10 for a digital box, but at least it's available.

I'm sticking with AT&T just long enough to get my $300 gift card and then I'm running back to Comcast as quick as I can. I'm sorry, Comcast! It was a weak moment! Let's never fight again!

Book review: "Then We Came to the End" by Joshua Ferris

2010-02-22T06:42:00.001-06:00

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I picked up this book for two reasons: one, it was written in first person plural and I was interested in seeing what a novel in that POV would be like, and two, it was set in Chicago.

It dragged on a bit at times and there were a lot of characters to keep up with. The author captured the ennui of corporate office life perfectly and by the end of the book I didn't like anybody except Joe, and for the most part I've found that by the time I leave a job (with one or two exceptions) I don't like anybody at the job, so I was as glad to be done with this book as I was to be done with at least 25 of the jobs I've held. The end was also kind of depressing, which also parallels most endings in life.

View all my reviews >>

In defense of Archie

2009-08-17T21:57:00.003-05:00

People almost nerdier than I have been all aflutter about the revelation that Archie Andrews is proposing to venemous Veronica Lodge instead of sweet Betty Cooper.

Oh, poor Betty! Long these 50 years has she pined over and fought for the attention of young Archie, the red-headded boy-next-door who is constantly torn between her and her snide, conniving, uber-rich best friend. She's sat idly by while Veronica lures Archie away with money, vamp, cold shoulders and warm embraces.

And all this time, Veronica has treated Archie shabbily, basically treating him like a lap dog she only wants when she can't have anyone else, and when it means taking him away from Betty. She's a tramp, a backstabber - in a word, a bitch.

But I don't feel bad for Betty. In ten years, at the Riverdale High reunion, Archie will be a beaten man and a shadow of his former self. He will be forced to give up his spine for this woman, who will give only terse, barked orders for him to fetch this, take care of that. He will have to give up his best friend, Jughead, because his eating habits and wardrobe aren't "Lodge" enough for Veronica or her father. He will never leave Riverdale, except on the rare occasion that Veronica lets him act as her valet when she travels.

Veronica, having finally won the Archie prize, will grow bored with him three minutes after they leave their wedding reception. She will have a torrid affair with Reggie, and when Moose comes in to town with his NFL team, she will pay off a few security guards to let her into his team's locker room where she will throw herself at him to no avail. She will have men falling over themselves to get at her, and cheat on Archie more times than she can count, and none of those men will fill the void left in her soul that used to be occupied by her best friend, Betty.

Speaking of Betty...

Betty will go on to college, out of state. Brown, perhaps, or Yale. There she will learn to forget Archie and that hussy Veronica, and will throw herself into public works and social science. At a rally for gay rights, she will meet a woman and do a little experimenting. After that falls apart, she will go to some hip little used book store and engage in a long conversation with a handsome young man. The conversation will start with universal health care and end in true love. Over the next few years, they get married and become respected - no, beloved - members of society. She gets a job with a public aid law firm and he works as a doctor treating the poor. They have a few kids and are happy. There is never any question about their love for each other, she has bliss at her side and that sniveling Archie in the far, dim reaches of her past.

So I don't feel bad for Betty. In fact, good for the writers for letting her off the hook to find something better. Had Archie proposed to her, she would have had to work twice as hard to get him through college. Writing his papers, helping him cram for tests, etc. He's a moron, a slow learner. She never would have been part of a healthy relationship. Veronica would always be lurking in the shadows, trying to sabotoge everything. Instead of working with the poor, she would end up working as a law clerk for fifteen years because helping Archie dragged her GPA down to a 2.5, so she never could get it together to take the bar.

In the end, Archie deserves Veronica. He's as rotten as the woman he married. Birds of a feather writhe in misery together. These three have known each other all their lives. If in all this time Archie can't see what a catch Betty is, then to hell with him.

Or maybe he does know. Maybe he's letting her off the hook himself, knowing he'll never be good enough for the likes of her anyway. I'd like to think so. Maybe Jughead pulled him aside and explained it to him, or maybe he got food poisoning at Pop Tate's and had a feverish epiphany.

No matter the means, the end is that the right girl won. And what better prize than to be free of petty fools?

It's more about the action than the standing around looking sad

2009-07-14T21:49:00.002-05:00

Five days a week I drive along about four miles of road that is flanked by cemeteries. I hardly notice them on the drive in because traffic is pretty light; we all glide right by. The drive home is a different matter.

We are bumper to bumper, no hope of getting around the 301 bus, sullen about our jobs and stymied by the traffic. Quite a few heads are turned towards the grave stones that dapple the grassy knolls on either side of us. Large monuments, modest head stones, and plaques flat on the ground that are only noticeable because of the plastic flowers standing vigil over them.

Every day my eyes slide across names, birth datess, and death dates of strangers. I wonder the usual questions. What kind of life? What kind of person? How the hell do you pronounce that name?

Then the news broke about the Burr Oak Cemetery fiasco. I noticed fewer people were just casually glancing at the cemeteries and more people were peering across the lawns to catch a glimpse of any wrongdoing. I didn't. Even if these cemeteries were caught up in the same dispicible practice, they'd have sense enough to cut it out until the whole thing cooled down.

Today something caught my eye. Various colors dotted the marble gardens and there was more movement among the trees. People were coming to these cemeteries to make sure their loved ones were resting in peace. Or, just as likely, to see if this cemetery was also up to no good, and to get money for it.

My skepticism was gearing up to reach 11. I shook my head, thinking of how quickly people try to capitalize on everything - even the death of their loved ones. All these people coming to check if they had a case against the cemetery's caretakers, under the guise of paying respects to Aunt Betty.

But I suppose there are some out there who are genuinely checking in on their families' remains. People who were reminded that even the dead could use our attention now and again, even as an afterthought. People who felt hindsighted love for the buried and nearly forgotten. People who cherished memories in private and were now forced to wonder if the last memory of that loved wouldn't be a kind smile or a fond funereal farewell, but the long and laborious fight to make sure the ones they love really do get to rest in peace.

And deep in my skeptical heart, I know that if I were to find out someone had desecrated my grandparents' graves, I wouldn't sue anybody. I'd fuck them up, but I wouldn't bother to sue them. My grandfather was buried in the mid-80's, my grandmother in the mid-90's. They both rest in Kansas, in adjoining plots that I haven't seen since the day we buried my grandmother.

So I'm trying to see the good in people, trying to see each new boquet of flowers scattered around the cemetery as an example of people who love the dead enough to leave the saddest memories alone and keep with them every day the best moments and sweetest thoughts.

I cook with my grandmother's bowls and pans, I keep my towels in a cabinet my grandfather made. I remember playing cards and watching Johnny Carson with the two most stable adults in my childhood. I'll hold on those memories. I'll remember those good, strong, healthy times instead of counting the years that I haven't stood beside their headstone to say words that don't mean as much as I want them to mean.

And I hope each person coming to check on their parents, grandparents, children, and friends will understand that in the end, it's still the thought that counts.

Why "Drop Dead Diva" doesn't reel me in

2009-07-13T18:06:00.002-05:00

Sure, the show was on Lifetime, but I figured I'd give it the benefit of the doubt and see how it was. After all, Margaret Cho was on it.

"Diva" is the story of some waif who dies and comes back as a fattie. Not a blunt, just a "plus-size" gal. When is Hollywood going to stop giving us this story? "Shallow Hal" tried to throw that same shit down my throat and it was just as disgusting coming from Gwyneth Paltrow. Is this supposed to make skinny people stop making fun of fat people, or is it supposed to make fat people feel ok about themselves? It fails at both goals.

In one scene, Jane (the plus-sized, smart one) is having a small meltdown in her office. Her assistant, played by an almost unrecognizable Margaret Cho, sternly tells Jane to sit down and put her head back. Jane begrudgingly obliges, and Cho sprays Cheez-Whiz in Jane's mouth.

What the hell? You've just told America that fat women only get upset because they want cheese! Which means any valid reasons we might have to get upset will be met with "here, honey - have some Muenster and relax."

Don't get me wrong, I love cheese and have beheld its healing powers. However, don't women of any size have problems enough having their opinions and feelings being taken seriously? Don't we already have to work hard enough to make sure people know we're upset for a valid reason and we aren't just PMSing? The next time I'm lodging a valid complaint with anyone - the car repair place, the landlord, the guy with the teenie peenie - I want to be taken seriously. I don't want to hear "psht, lady, eat a fucking donut and calm the hell down."

So will it keep skinny people from making fun of fat people? No. Nor will it make fat people feel OK about themselves.

It's made clear that you can only be pretty OR smart. None of this pretty smart girl nonsense. And forget finding a fat girl in the city who can't quote Shakespeare, it's just not done. So, fat ladies everywhere, embrace your arcane knowledge of the Civil War and proper preposition placement! It's ok that you're fat because you're really good at crosswords!

There are other things wrong with this show - for example, how come Jane went immediately back to work after taking a bullet for a co-worker? Why would her company let her come back that same day? I tell you what, if I took a bullet for a co-worker and I had to come back to the office for something important (house keys, whatever) and my boss and co-workers were cool with me staying the rest of the day I would fucking quit. "Oh, hey, Meg - how's the flesh wound? Oh I don't mean flesh like you're fleshy, I mean you are fleshy, but I mean...anyway, can you fax this for me?"

Also, how come Jane hasn't been back to her house? I'm guessing the writers on this show have her living with at least three cats.

But the biggest problem with this show is that it wants fat people to both be and feel accepted. If you make a show where being fat is the focal point of the show, then you will never achieve that goal. Just make a show that has some fat people in it, some skinny people in it, and so forth. Like in "Gilmore Girls," where Melissa Murphy played Sookie St James. Nobody ever mentioned her being fat. She never had a very special episode about heart disease. She just went around being Sookie - funny, cute, good at her job. Not the fat girl, just a friend.

So does it make fat people feel better about themselves? Not really. The skinny girl who is "trapped" inside the fat girl (anybody else see the poorly hidden Richard Simmons lesson here?) is constantly bitching about the fat girl's body. When Jane goes to visit Deb's old friend, the friend tells Deb that if the two went out for the night, Jane's body wouldn't get past the velvet rope.

Sure, there's a nice little lesson in there about standing up for yourself and being proud of who you are ("shoulders back, stick out the rack" or something), but really - there are better ways to get that point across than to bombard us with fat stereotypes and two-dimensional characters.

After all, we fatties prefer more robust fare - both on our plates and in our TVs.

Up your nose with a rubber hose, Mr. Network Exec

2009-05-20T20:07:00.003-05:00

Dear TV execs,

I understand that you have good reasons to pull shows after they have only aired five episodes. One good reason is low viewership. In this fast paced world where everyone's thoughts, actions and opinions can be broadcast to the world in a nanosecond, you are giving the world exactly one nanosecond to decide to watch the show and then you are giving the show the boot.

Some examples? Pushing Daisies. The Unusuals. Life on Mars. OK, so Pushing Daisies got about three nanoseconds, but you know what I mean. You don't give anyone a chance to know the show, you don't bother to look at how many people are really watching the show (on DVR, online, on their mobile devices), and instead of letting us make a decision on our own you just cram more CSI, Law & Order, and American Idol down our throats. Do those shows sell advertising space? Hell yes they do. But you are just shooting yourselves in the foot. You're missing out on whole demographics of people who would like something more filling.

Next season I'm not going to bother watching any new shows. If they're good they'll get canceled and if they're bad I'm sure they'll be on for four seasons and I can spend some quality time ignoring those shows while I watch Mary Tyler Moore, Good Times, and Bob Newhart.

Speaking of Mary Tyler Moore - did you know they weren't sure if they were going to have more than one season? They did, of course, have many seasons. The network decided to find a good time slot instead of just giving it the boot. Imagine what incredible shows we might have today had you folks not pulled the plugs so early: Freaks & Geeks, for one. It might have run its course by now but it would have found its way into the hearts of millions of viewers. What about My So Called Life? What about Dead Like Me?

And to the writers of the shows that are being picked up for this fall - what the hell were you fighting for in that contract strike a few years ago? The right to get royalties from Two and a Half Men? That show sucks. That's the legacy you want to leave? Next time you strike, ask for something good - like a guaranteed 12 episode run of a show so it has a chance to gain a following. Why are you letting them shit all over your hard work by yanking it so quickly? Some of you work very hard and very well and all you ever get is unemployed. But I digress.

Network heads, stop and ask yourselves why you are picking up a ninth - NINTH - season of Scrubs (which has long since lost its luster) and letting shows like The Unusuals fall by the wayside. Seriously? You're giving Samantha Who the boot and keeping Desperate Housewives? Seriously? Even after that season finale? And you're giving me three new episodes of Pushing Daisies after taking the show away so suddenly? Quit yanking my chain! Either giving me quality TV or don't - but don't keep tricking me into thinking you've come to your senses when obviously you haven't!

How about this - why don't you give bubble shows a summer run? I know most people don't watch a lot of TV in the summer, but that's because everything is in reruns. I would watch summer shows. I'm already looking forward to Monk and Psych. And I know I'm not the only TV addict who would be happy to curl up in front of the air conditioner and get to know a new cast and storyline. After all, what is DVR for if not to record the new stuff in the summer and watch it when you're ready to come in from the heat? But you don't have enough sense to use DVR to your advantange. This leaves me with one option.

I'm done with you. I'm not watching your new drivel this fall. I'm not going to watch something called Cougar Town. I'm going to fill my days with the current shows that I already watch and all the shows you'd never air these days: All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Golden Girls, and all the rest. Play your stupid nano games, I'm gonna go watch TV.

This means you

2008-11-05T20:43:00.002-06:00

I've been trying to figure out how to say this without sounding like it's just another post complaining about my mom. I feel like it's something that needs to be said, and, unfortunately, she is being made into an example. Well, that's her problem. Here goes:

Last night as I watched the numbers rise, as the networks, one by one, announced the winner, I had one thought repeating in my head:

"It's over."

Not just the election (though I'm glad to be rid of that as well) but the eight long years of the ignorance and arrogance of the Bush regime. The dark times were over. It's over.

I watched McCain's concession speech with my jaw agape and tears in my eyes. My mom, a staunch Republican, stood in the kitchen, eating her dinner. Of all the places in the kitchen where she could have stood, she made sure to stand where I could see her. Her back was to me. After McCain's speech I was walking through the kitchen, and she moved as I moved - she made sure her back stayed toward me.

When Obama told his daughters that they had earned a puppy, she scoffed, "Oh, geez." All night long she was making sarcastic comments, following each one with, "Oh, I didn't mean that. I'm just in mourning."

Look, this has to stop. Republicans, don't turn your back on this country. Don't turn your back on this president. Don't wallow in your party's loss when you can be celebrating your country's future. I know you don't see it. You see every bad quality, every evil - real or imagined - all packed into one skinny black senator from Hyde Park. You see in him likely what the rest of us saw in McCain. But look beyond that. We need you.

Democrats have a majority in the Senate, in the House, in the voting booths. But we need you, now more than ever, to make sure that another voice is heard. We need to know that when we are out there making a change, you are out there changing with us. Not because we want you to give up your life's philosophies and turn blue, but because we are all Americans and we are all depending on each other to get this country through these tough times.

Don't turn your back on us, Republicans. We are still one nation, we still share one hope. We still have a common dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The nation can't heal and won't thrive without you. It won't get done on any one party's terms, and it won't get done if we can't work together and face the problems of this nation as a nation united against ignorance and hate.

Don't give America the cold shoulder. It's your America, too. Help us make it something to be proud of again.

And to all of you who went out yesterday and make history in the voting booths, you aren't done. You and I everyone else all have a lot of work to do. Your commitment to this country cannot end after the acceptance speech. Get out. Make a better life for us. Democracy is not a spectator sport. It's time to get in the game.

Hate is hate

2008-10-28T13:21:00.008-06:00

'Hanging Palin' causes Halloween display uproar

Freedom of speech is pretty awesome. I'm all for it. But I know ignorance when I see it and those of you who are championing this guy, saying "it's just art" and that it should be left up there because you hate Palin, too, should consider this:

What if it were an Obama doll?

What if someone prominently displayed a mannequin resembling the man who might be the first black President of the United States hanging from a rope? Oh, the outrage! Oh, the condemnation!

Two years ago, at Louisiana's Jenna High School, the discovery of nooses attracted the attention of the FBI. Yes, that FBI. Just for the presence of nooses with nothing in them.

But because Palin is a white woman, nobody is batting an eye. Is implied violence only offensive when it's against racial minorities or gays? Those of you rallying around this display, would you be able to hold your tongue and call it "freedom of speech" if, across town, someone had Obama "surrounded by flames" as McCain is in this same display? I doubt it. Hating white people is no better than hating black people.

Are you free to believe and say what you want? Why yes, of course. But I have to ask: when your hateful statements are basically the same as their hateful statements, who have you become?

Re-COUNT

2008-09-21T22:41:00.003-05:00

I live in Illinois. We're a blue state, have been for ages. Our state is going to go to Obama, no matter what I do. Recently I overheard some co-workers talking about how it's not even worth it to go to the polls because our votes wouldn't matter (we're going to Obama), and even if we were a swing state, our votes wouldn't matter because of the electoral college. And I know it's true, but it still pisses me off.

What can I do at a polling place that matters? I don't trust either one of those rich fuckers. According to opensecrets.org, McCain has raised $230 million and Obama has raised $454 million. They're both elitists. They are both richer than I will ever even hope to dream of being.

Neither one of those rich fuckers will ever know what it's like to sell possessions to put gas in their cars. (I had to do that three weeks ago). Neither one will ever have to take a jar of coins down to the CoinStar and lose 8.9¢/dollar just to get money to turn into quarters to do laundry. (That was two weeks ago). And you can bet your sweet ass that neither one of them has ever had to use to a windbreaker as a winter coat (in Chicago, no less) and sat around on the el trying not to cry because everybody else looked so warm and cozy. (That was ten years ago.)

So I'm doing something different. I am going to count this year. I am not voting for either one of those over-funded, over-polished, under-hearted jackasses. I'm putting my vote in for a third party. "No! Not another one!" you're thinking. "That's how we lost in 2000, you ninny!" you might be screaming at your monitor. No, no. You don't understand. My vote won't elect Obama or McCain. My vote will, however, get us one tiny step further on the road to eliminating the two party system. It will not be lost in the millions of other moot votes, it will not be just a drop in the ocean running towards the pockets of American politicians and the corporations that pull their strings. My ancestors didn't fight for my right to sit idly by and be another brick in the wall. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Susan B Anthony, and all those forgotten others, did not fight so that my vote could be cast in vain.

To the disillusioned millions out there who think their votes do not count, I say you're doing it wrong. You're voting for the leaders of Corporate America, not the leaders of our America. You're voting for bailouts for the rich and the legislation of motherhood, death, and love. What does John McCain know about women that gives him the right to say if we can have an abortion? What right has Barak Obama to tell the millions of terminally ill Americans that they can't die a dignified, peaceful death at the mercy of a needle? What right does anybody have to tell us who to love, and how, and whether we can be married? None. Absolutely none.

You have got to stop voting for the candidate who had the best stories on Letterman or the guy who did the funniest skit on SNL. You have got to stop that NOW. You have to stop voting for what's cool and start voting for what is right. The two party system isn't right. The electoral college isn't right. But the absence of your voice is your permission for this mess to continue. You cannot sit on your ass, stuffing your face and watching "America's Next Top Model" and expect anything at all to change. YOU are the change. YOU have the right, the power, and the responsibility to vote for someone who doesn't speak for Corporate America. The problems of our nation, of our world, rest on your shoulders.

Stop doing what the TV tells you to do. Be somebody you can be proud of. Turn off your fucking iPod and stand up to count for something. Start a revolution.

Lipstick? Pigs?

2008-09-10T20:33:00.004-05:00

That's what you fuckers want to talk about? Lipstick on pigs?

Shut the fuck up and fix the economy. Stop fighting with each other and get a damn thing done. I mean jesus h christ on a pony, why do you act like you matter when nothing you've ever one is worth a damn?

I mean, seriously: fuck you.

My tomato plant is PMSing...

2008-06-29T14:10:00.002-05:00

I got a tomato plant from the farmers' market a few weeks ago. It shot up like a weed, got a bunch of blooms, and now it's got little green bulbs on three of the blooms. They're not actually tomatoes yet, they're swollen ovaries. Yeesh. Sounds like something out of 7th grade health class.

But this is so much better:

I find guilt in the most ridiculous places

2008-06-03T21:53:00.001-05:00

Due to unexpected popular demand, here is a generic picture of the car I got (picture stolen from cars.com):

Except my sister-in-law (who had the car before me) had all the windows tinted, so be sure to keep that in mind. That's the paint color I have, though.

No road trips yet (gas is $4.25 for fuck's sake), though I did take it out for my favorite drive on Sunday night:

Down the highway to Lower Wacker Drive (an underground thoroughfare that has changed quite a bit since it was featured in the big chase scene in "Blues Brothers"), over to Lake Shore Drive (where I get smacked in the face with a stunning view of the lake), up to a kind of up-scale neighborhood, around a waste of space called the Nature Museum ("Here are the types of grass you'll find in Illinois" and they don't mean the fun kind), then racing back down again. There are few things in the world that calm me down as much as that drive does.

My old car, Dox, would die when he was idling so I'd sit at red lights with my foot on the gas. I still find myself doing that. Also, if I found myself driving a nice car in the past 5 years or so, it was a car that I had borrowed that had automatic transmission. Dox was a stick, and so is the Kia (tentatively named Trixie), but I forget that I'm driving a stick with Trixie and sometimes find myself going 35 in second gear.

I'm having to re-learn how to drive stick. Trixie has four working speakers and no broken engine parts, and no dial on the dashboard telling me my current RPMs, so I have to really pay attention to know when to switch gears. Also, Dox's transmission was in such poor shape that I could switch gears with just one finger. Trixie has a good transmission, so I have to actually have my hand free to switch gears.

Trixie doesn't have power steering, so every time I turn I say to myself, "Gun show. GUN SHOW!" trying to really put some muscle in it so I have something to bring to the (you guessed it) gun show.

Trixie is clean, doesn't smell funny, has no rust or dents, has four working doors and five working seat belts, a fancy flip-down stereo, gets a modest 26 miles to the gallon (Dox got 9...that's not a typo, he got nine), and doesn't reek of gas for ten minutes after you kill the engine. There is no cause for embarrassment when I drive her, and people at the bus stop no longer look in my direction with hope and then disappointment after realizing it's not their bus, it's just Dox's muffler. In every way (except air conditioning) she is a vast improvement.

But in my heart of hearts, I miss Dox every damn day. If I didn't have an audience around me when they put him on the junk yard's tow truck, I honestly would have been in tears. He was my trusty steed through some of the most amazing and scary years of my life, and I loved him like an old friend.

Even when he was broken down, even when his expired tags got me arrested, I still loved that car. There have been very few times in my life that I have felt like a completely unredeemable asshole, and selling him to the junk yard for $150 is definitely in the top 5.

The guy who put him on the flat bed didn't understand that his brakes didn't work and that he'd have to pull Dox up the ramp with the chain. When he realized it and brought Dox back down the the street, he scraped Dox's muffler. I wanted to punch him.

Friday's (late) Feast

2008-05-26T16:47:00.000-05:00

Appetizer

What is the nearest big city to your home?

Chicago. Sprawling, wonderful, intricate, lovely Chicago.

Soup

On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being highest, how well do you keep secrets?

Pretty well. Of course, about 40% of the time I forget I even know the secrets I'm told. The fact is, people tell me secrets, and then it turns out the secrets aren't interesting at all, so I forget about them almost immediately.

I'm pretty good about keeping the juicy ones, though.

Salad

Describe your hair (color, texture, length).

It's brown, ramrod straight, falling past my shoulders. Nothing useful can be done with it. Whatever you try, it just straightens itself right out again. Color from the home coloring kits won't stay in it, neither will curls or clips. It's obnoxious.

Main Course

What kind of driver are you? Courteous? Aggressive? Slow?

I am the only person in the tri-state area who knows how to drive. I have a news flash for you bitches: at a four-way stop, the right of way goes like this:

1. People turning right.
2. People going straight.
3. People turning left.

So the next time I'm turning left and you just sit there staring at me, don't look all shocked when I cuss you out.

Other than four-way stops, I'm pretty laid back. I cuss at people a lot, but I'm not aggressive. I like to play cribbage on license plates. I let people in to "re-shuffle" my hand.

Dessert

When was the last time you had a really bad week?

Early April, whenever that trip to St. Louis was. That was pretty awful. But my noggin is finally all healed up!

We don’t need no education

2008-05-22T10:22:00.003-05:00

I read an article today talking about how education isn't look at as a way to broaden your horizons so much as it is a way to stay out of minimum wage jobs.

Part of it said:

"Most of their talks inspire, but many have also adopted an underlying message that links education, graduation, and material success. It's a message that unwittingly reduces the worth of an education to the expected wages it can bring. It sees tuition not as a ticket to a liberated mind but as a down payment on future income. In our excitement for the graduates, we've put the emphasis in the wrong place."

Look, this is 2008. It has been years since I've met anybody who wants to actually debate an issue. Everybody I meet thinks that any issue more serious than the latest episode of "Lost" is boring, or they have an interest in the important topics but lack the ability to debate. They just want to yell.

I've been working on my 2-year degree for three years now. I didn't want to go to college for the learning; I wanted to go to college so I could get a job that didn't involve cleaning toilets. That's it.

The art of debate and the importance of democratic debate are lost on our citizens. Basically, nobody gives a shit.

Why do you think gay marriage is suddenly being talked about again? Because nobody really thinks about real issues, and everybody understands gay marriage. It's a valid way to win voters.

Why does Congress keep calling the heads of the big oil companies up to discuss gas prices, and then not doing anything about it? Well, if you were bothering to learn all you can about the situation, you would know that these prices are being driven by investors who have no place else to put their money.

On May 6th, oil prices went up based solely on the speculation that oil prices would go up. What the hell does the oil company have to do with any of that? Nothing. That's big business. Wall Street, free trade.

If you bothered to use your education and the resources around you, you would notice that nearly every day the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P are down, even though nearly every day the price of oil hits a new high. The other stocks are falling fast, and oil is the only sure thing around. Congress - college graduates, all of them - should know this. This parade of oil tycoons is frivolous and pointless, and they know it. But they're banking on us to vote for them because they called the oil execs in to talk to them. Because none of us really uses anything we've learned to find out what a bunch of morons Congress takes us for.

Everybody living in poverty now who is thinking "man I really wish I could afford college" isn't going to college to learn about Schrodinger's cat, world history, or the Pythagorean Theorem - they're going so they can make money and get out of poverty.

When a kid brings home a bad report card, the parents say "What about college?" Not because they're concerned that Junior is going to vote for the wrong politician, but because they're concerned that Junior will never get a job and move out.

We are a country built on capitalism. We love it, we embrace it. We are addicted to it. We love our credit cards and our shiny electronics and our fast cars. All we want is more toys. We have no interest in the goings on around the world unless it's dirty laundry or dead people. This is why we know a lot about the lives of the members of the Royal Family, but most of us don't know how to find Myanmar on a map. And the only reason we are bothering to wonder where Myanmar is is because there are a lot more dead people there lately.

So yes, we go to school for the wrong reasons. We retain little, if anything, of what we learn there. But we get our degrees and buy our toys and raise our kids to go to college so that they, in turn, can buy nice things. This shouldn't be surprising. If we could make more money any other way we would. An education is the next best thing to a guaranteed higher income.

Look at all the people will college educations who can't even grasp the difference between "there," "their," and "they're," people who don't know what's wrong with the sign that says "10 items or less," and people who think Benjamin Franklin was a President are making more money than me. Why? Because they have a degree. They don't really know anything, they just have a degree. And they're doing great.

This is America. We don't need no education; we just want to be able to afford our rock n roll lifestyle.

Intro to Introverts

2008-05-13T22:06:00.000-05:00

"Introvert" is defined as "a person who tends to shrink from social contacts and to become preoccupied with their own thoughts."

That's what I do. Some people mistake it for being shy, but it's not the same. See, when you're shy, you really want to meet new people and talk to strangers who seem interesting, but you're scared to. With introverts, we don't really want to meet those people or talk to those strangers. Hell, even people we know and like aren't always people we want to talk to.

For introverts, hell is having to talk to people at breakfast. For introverts, small talk is a form of torture that should be covered under the Geneva Convention.

We don't hate you, and we are not being anti-social. We're just a special shade of indifferent. We prefer thoughtful silence to constant yammering.

Yes, we get bored of it and we go out. On occasion we can fake it and make it look like we are not the social retards you've known us to be. And then we run home and spend hours by ourselves doing whatever we please, and reveling in it.

We are not the wallflowers who are wishing people would come over and talk to us, we are the wallflowers who are enjoying watching other people talk. It's not that we have nothing to contribute or nothing to talk about - no, quite the opposite. I will sit and talk about some subjects with total strangers til I'm blue in the face. Chicago history is one of those subjects. So is juicy gossip. But sitting around talking about the weather or stocks or other boring things, well, I tend to tune that out. And if you want to make me hate you, then by all means let's start a deep discussion about spirituality or our feelings.

Alone is not the same as lonely. If I wanted company, I would call people and go see those people. And I'm not just staring blankly into space when you do corral me into going out, I am pondering things that I don't feel like explaining.

I'm not being uppity or elitist, I just...well, I just don't feel sociable. That's a pretty basic explanation of introversion. I'm not depressed or upset or in need of special attention, I just am not a big talker around people I hardly know, and I have no interest in entertaining people.

I don't go out on Friday nights. By 5:30 Friday afternoon I basically can't stand anybody. I have talked politely to every moron, cheapskate, and lunatic that has walked past my desk. Of course there are nice people who come to my desk, but these respites are brief and only make the slack-jawed morons seem more unbearable. There is a very short list of people I would even bother to pick up the phone for on a Friday night, and most of those people know better than to call me when they get off work.

That's not to say I just sit home and stare at the walls. Sometimes I go downtown, or go for a walk or a drive. I can be okay in a crowd where nobody knows me, because nobody will strike up a banal conversation with me. I can't be out with people I know and like, who know and like me, because they will expect me to be chatty and sociable, and I just don't have that in me by the end of the week.

It's how introverts are.

So don't be offended if we don't come out very often. Don't get huffy when we leave your party early or turn down invitations to just hang out. Don't get all upset when we do come out and we don't have much to say. It's just who we are.

And face it, you wouldn't have us any other way.

Goodbye, June! Hello, teen angst!

2008-05-07T21:54:00.001-05:00

My mom's coming to stay with me June 6-28. This is kind of a big deal. She's in town for a series of three classes she has to take to keep her law license current and it's easier to just stay with me instead of flying back and forth three times. Yeah, she's a lawyer. And that's the least of my problems.

See, my mom's crazy. Now hold on, I know you're thinking, "No, MY mom is crazy!" but seriously, my mom is nuts. Level two borderline personality nuts, according the shrink she used to share with my sister. And she's in a cult. By "cult" I mean group of people who make sure only certain people are allowed in the group, and the group is insane. The cult, among other things, doesn't like the colors red, black, orange, and grey. When one of their flock fell over at a restaurant after Temple, they prayed for his ascension (read: death) as he lay there with his heart attack and his new found faith. They don't eat meat (Mom's a vegan), they don't like "bad" music and movies. By "bad" I'm not talking about Lords of Acid and "Debbie Does Dallas," though those certainly count as well. I mean shit like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Stand by Me." I tried to watch "Stand by Me" with her when I was in high school and she had a panic attack about ten minutes into the movie.

Oh yeah, did I mention the panic attacks? The screaming, crying, throwing things, punching herself in the head panic attacks? The Joan Collins ("no wire hangers!"), gut-wrenching, always-ends-in-suicide-threats-or-a-pity-party panic attacks. She's anemic, too, so when she's hungry these come out in full force.

Oh, her medication? She won't take any. It's against her fucking religion. She also thinks I'm a straight up bitch for asking her to get help. Her current living situation is in my sister's basement that she shares with my sister's eight year old daughter, and the rest of the house is occupied by my sister's other two kids, my sister, and my sister's boyfriend. That house is too small for her drama. She doesn't have a job, though she finally had an inteview last week. It went well.

She still sometimes thinks of me as the lying, mischievous brat I was when I was a kid, when we last lived under the same roof. She didn't get the memo that I grew up, that I know now what I didn't know then, and that I'm well aware of the things that I still don't know. She doesn't say this, she doesn't have to. She's my mom, I know what she's thinking.

She cries at everything. Part of the problem with her coming in is that I have to hide all the stuff that will make her cry. This includes books (Palahniuk, Bukowski, "History of the Devil," etc), music (Lords of Acid, Frank Zappa, Johnny Cash), and DVDs (all the horror movies, the "Arrested Development" set, "Harold and Maude"). I have to hide the red carpet I was going to put by my bed. I already bought a blue comforter for her, since she can't use my orange or red ones.

My siblings don't do this for her. They just do whatever the hell they want and if she can't handle it, it's her problem. We all know she's crazy, and they are always surprised when she acts like she's crazy. Then, when it comes time to have a Serious Talk, she's already wound up and nobody can get through to her.

Me, I like to pick my battles. For the month of June, my battles won't be about "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "Joe's Garage." I won't come home to find my mother has "accidentally" spilled something on my red rug and threw it out. I won't reach for "Ham on Rye" in mid-July and wonder where it's gone.

We are going to have Serious Talks. We are going to answer the questions "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" and "Why do you think it's appropriate to act like that?"

And that's the part that really gets me down. I don't want to have those talks with my mom. I don't like seeing that look of disappointment that I always brought to her face when I was a kid.

I didn't get the good part of her when I was growing up. I didn't get the carefree era of regular paychecks and a steady boyfriend. I grew up so clenched up and stressed out that I started to just tune her out, tune everybody out. In high school, when my brother was off at college in Alaska and my sister was off married to the wrong man, I got a little bit of Good Mom. She introduced me to classic movies, something I have and will always be grateful for. She showed faith in me, and never once said "Oh, you can't do that," when I wanted to try my hand at anything.

When I was eighteen and my left leg was gripped in unfathomable pain, she held me and cried with me and tried to feel my pain for me, tried to share my burden. She held my hand when we walked down the street and didn't pity me when I was doubled over in pain, walking with my hands down around my ankles because standing up straight was excruciating. She didn't make a big deal about the tears I watched drip off the end of my nose and land - splat - on my oh-so-hip Doc Martens.

I didn't get Good Mom when I was growing up. I got her when I was seventeen, eighteen years old and had her all to myself. I got her when everything was going so wrong in each of our lives, when the world kept hitting each of us separately with the one-two punch of real life and real loss.

My brother and sister didn't get that Mom. They didn't stick around to see how it turned out. That's the Mom I want back, the one who gave me Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and "The Universe Song." That's the mom I'm packing up my stuff for, that's the mom I want to have here in June. Yes, there will be Serious Talks, and there will be crying and fighting. But for a few days at least (hopefully, most of the days), there will be "Operation Petticoat" and "Meet Me in St. Louis." There will be sewing lessons and family stories and (dare I say?) cooking lessons. There will be my mom, my secret mom that my brother and sister never had the patience to know. All this for a month of doing without some of my favorite things.

And to me, that's a bargain.

Friday's Feast

2008-05-03T23:41:00.001-05:00

Appetizer

What was your favorite cartoon when you were a child?
Oh, there were so many. I loved Scooby-Doo until an incident with my kindergarten teacher that was inexplicably embarassing. She pointed out that "Maggie" (the name I went by then) rhymed with "Shaggy," and giggled in such a way that made it clear that she was making fun of me. Bitch.

I liked Thundercats, Transformers, She-Ra, and Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman figured into my Plans for Being a Grown Up. (These plans, in my mind, deserved capital letters.) I was going to marry Maxwell Smart, and I knew this just as surely as I knew Monday followed Sunday. We were going to live in the city, and we would live next door to the A-Team, and Wonder Woman and I were going to Hang Out and be Best Friends and she was going to be nice to me. (This cofession, whispered at the tender age of six to my favorite great-uncle, was met with a grave and understanding nod and best wishes to my future marriage. This is why he was my favorite uncle - he never laughed at my dreams.)

Soup

Pretend you are about to get a new pet. Which animal would you pick, and what would you name it?

I nearly got two parakeets this week. They were offered - along with a cage, bowls, toys, and food - on Freecycle on Thursday. I sat at my desk and daydreamed about having two little parakeets, teaching them to say "I pity the fool" and "Psht bitch please." After a doctor staying in the hotel stopped by my desk to bitch about the price of the internet, I added "I gots to get paid, son!" to the list. I would name them Laurel and Hardy, and teach them to sing along when I played my uke. (There was a lot of time for daydreaming on Thursday.)

I looked up what it took to take care of them, and the grand plans for Laurel and Hardy flew the coop, if you'll pardon the expression.

I don't want another cat, they tear things up. I'd love a dog, but my place is too small. Fish are boring, I have a poor history with hamsters and gerbils, and I would never find anyone who would take care of a pet lizard if I went out of town.

So, I started small. My neighbor and I went to the Garfield Park Conservatory today; they were having a sale on herbs and flowers. I got a little geranium that smells like lemon. I named her Gladys and plan to get her a hanging pot tomorrow. If I can make this work, I might try fish next. Wish me luck.

Salad

On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being highest, how much do you enjoy getting all dressed up for a special occasion?

Ok, here's the thing about me dressing up. I am always the most inappropriately dressed person around. From weddings to court dates to just regular dates, I am always over dressed, under dressed, or just wrongly dressed. I can't get fashion; dumb-ass me always takes into consideration things like "Well there's no way I'm going to make it tonight in shoes like that," and the outfit sullenly follows.

I would love to get dressed up, but there's no place to go and I would do it wrong anyway, so rating this a 10 would be moot.

Main Course

What kind of music do you listen to while you drive?

Depends on my mood. I like loud music, though, so I don't zone out and forget to turn when I should.

Dessert

When was the last time you bought a clock? And in which room did you put it?

I don't remember exactly, but it was probably a CD player/radio/alarm clock and I put it in the bathroom. I like to listen to the radio when I'm taking a shower before bed, and in the morning when I'm getting ready. I don't have one in there now, though. Instead, I torment my neighbors with my atrocious singing at night and in the morning I listen to the news from the bedroom.

That came out wrong. Well, you know what I mean.

Lemon Chicken

2008-04-30T22:29:00.003-05:00

Lemon Chicken

My mom sent me an email from SavingDinner.com for lemon chicken. It looked pretty good.

I basically see cooking as a circus (those of you who have seen the mess I can make in a kitchen will see the sense in this), so I see components of a dish in rings. This dish was a three ring circus. First, I had to get the chicken together, then the dipping sauce, and then the email (which came to my mom via FlyLady.com) mentioned at the bottom that I could throw some cauliflower in a food processor and then toast it up to serve with the chicken.

So, I start with the first ring. It was a dipping sauce that involved chili garlic paste. I was way too lazy to go find a store that sold that, so I found a recipe for it. I didn't write down what kind of chillies I needed for the recipe, I just wrote on the back of a piece of paper that some asshole had left on the floor (by the trash can) of the computer room at the hotel, "2-3 oz. chillies" and left it at that.

Well I got to the store, and there were all kinds of chillies. I usually shop at a tiny little grocery store across the street, but I needed some stuff that they don't carry so I was at a great big grocery store, and I had basically forgotten how big that place was. There were all kinds of dried chillies to choose from. After getting opposing information from around the country from the people I trust to know about chillies, I was about to give up.

Then a guy and his wife walked up to the chili display and started talking in rapid-fire Spanish. I decided to ask him which chillies are the mildest. I retained enough of my two semesters of Spanish to get out, "Pardone me, necissito chillies pero no me gusta caliente. Err....help? Por favor?" This was the wrong thing to say. He started in with me in Spanish like we were old amigos from Ecuador with shared fond memories of being weened on pablanos and fried rice. Oh hell no. I stopped him with, "That's all the Spanish I know."

He said, "okay. Okay!" and smiled and handed me a bag of little chillies. "Caliente!" he declared proudly. I said, "Um...gracias. Pero, no me gusta caliente." And I held my stomach and tried to convey to him with pantomime what would happen with caliente. His wife giggled. He took the bag back and handed me a bag of great big chillies. He said something that I told myself was along the lines of, "Ok, nice lady, here are some nice, mild chillies. Have a great day!" but was probably more like "Alright, you bland, unimaginative, gringo, here are your bland-ass chillies. I hope you choke on 'em." Given his wife's ensuing guffaws, I'm sure it was the latter. I digress. Here are the chillies:

I finally did find a jar of the chili garlic paste, over by the soy sauce. Here is what I found:

It was only $1.50 and I figured I could definitely use a back-up.

So I got home and started in making the dip, an ingredient of which was the chili garlic paste. First, I soaked the chillies in boiling water for half an hour:

While that was going on, I went to pummel the chicken. I don't have one of those...you know, the mallet things, so I improvised:

Just trust me, that's a half an inch. Boy, that was fun!

The chillies still had some time left for soaking, so I went on with the second ring of the circus: the caul-rice. This sounded kind of gross to me, because a caul is actually a...well, it's not pleasant, and there's no need to bring it up. Here, it's short for cauliflower-rice, which is basically chopping up some cauliflower in the food processor and then toasting in a wok. And so:

Easy.

The chillies were done soaking, so I drained the water into a separate bowl and cleaned the chillies. This basically meant taking off the stems, cleaning out the seeds, and rinsing off the chillies. This was boring and seemed to take forever. I'll cut to the chase:

I went from this:

to this:

to this chili/oil/garlic concoction:

So the paste was done. Now I needed to make the rest of the dipping sauce. That was easy, just throw some stuff in a bowl. Don't even have to cook it, just stir it up with a fork.

So, one ring down, one ring nearly finished, and one ring to go.

Instead of dipping the chicken into the bowl of marinade, I poured the marinade into the Ziploc baggie and shook it up. Then I heard a commotion outside and went to go see some drama! It was a false alarm. That extra time with the marinade probably did the chicken good, though. Right?

So I threw the first chicken breast in the pan, set the timer for five minutes, and went to start cleaning up the horrendous mess this meal had created. After a minute or two I went over and started messing with the chicken. I didn't want it to burn, so instead of letting it cook for five minutes on one side and then flipping it like the recipe said, I started flipping it and kept doing that for the next ten minutes, in between washing dishes.

That one seemed done, so I put in the next piece of chicken. As that was cooking, I started to toast the caul-rice. That was pretty boring. So I made a second dipping sauce with the pre-made chili garlic paste. That was a shitload easier, since it was just opening a jar instead of all that soaking and cleaning.

Anyway, the second piece of chicken was starting to look pretty well burnt, so I put it on a plate with some caul-rice.

I took both dipping sauces and tried each of 'em. The one with the home made chili paste was pretty damn bland. I didn't put any of the seeds in there, though, so that explains it. The dipping sauce with the pre-made paste had a lot more kick but the vinegar was way too strong.

The chicken was okay. I guess I don't understand chicken. I can't get it to cook right. My friend Ed said I should poke holes in it with a fork since I'm too cheap to buy one of those things that injects the flavor into the chicken. Maybe I'll try that next time. Or maybe I'll start making the kind of friends who go out and buy that shit for me.

In all, it took an hour and a half to prepare, half an hour to clean up, and it wasn't worth it. It had real potential, but only part of the chicken - the outer part, naturally - tasted like anything. It was good, but it wasn't worth the trouble.

The caul-rice was fucking awful. Maybe I didn't let it toast long enough, because every bite became a mouthful of caul-water. Nasty.
Next time I'll poke holes in the chicken, let it marinate overnight, and use cous-cous instead of caul-rice. Also, the email I got said to serve the dipping sauce on the side, but I think it would have been better on the chicken. I honestly think that in this instant glory world that we've created, there is probably a pre-made marinade for this. I'll keep an eye out for that for the next time. I mean, this didn't even taste like it involved lemons, and the whole point was that it was lemon chicken.

Whatevs. The kitchen is clean now and I'm heading to bed with a heart full of disappointment and a belly full of cous-juice. Whatever horrid dreams may come, I know I've brought them on myself.

Friday's Feast

2008-04-25T20:12:00.000-05:00

Appetizer
Name something you would categorize as weird.
My family.

Soup
What color was the last piece of food you ate?
Multicolored: Jack's thin crust with pepperoni and sausage.

Salad
On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being highest, how much do you enjoy being alone?

9.5

Main Course
Fill in the blank: I will _________ vote for ___________ in _______.

try to, the lesser of two evils, November.

Dessert
Describe your sleeping habits.
I like to sleep with my arm curled up under my pillow, which is why my shoulders are bothering me lately.

Friday's Feast

2008-04-19T17:41:00.000-05:00

Appetizer

Name a color you find soothing.

When the sun has just dipped down over the horizon, leaving us to our own devices for the evening, and half the sky is a dark and mysterious blue and the other half is a lighter, more hopeful blue, there's a blue that binds them together. I guess it's closest Crayola name is Royal Blue. But it's more than just royal to me, more than the stuffy pomp and circumstance that that word intones. It's the color I think of when I hear "My Blue Heaven," the color I tried so hard to dye my hair when I was young and easy to please.

Royal, rambunctious, lovely blue. It's where my peace lives.

Soup

Using 20 or less words, describe your first driving experience.

Don't remember exactly, but I do remember my mom freaking out when I got the car up to 30 mph.

Salad

What material is your favorite item of clothing made out of?

Cotton. The commercials are cheesy but they don't lie.

Main Course

Who is a great singer or musician who, if they were to come to your town for a concert, you would spend the night outside waiting for tickets to see?

Paul Simon and Tom Waits.

Dessert

What is the most frequent letter of the alphabet in your whole name (first, middle, maiden, last, etc.)?

Erm, with my legal name it's A, but with any of my nicknames it's M.

Friday's (late) Feast

2008-04-06T09:54:00.001-05:00

Appetizer
Invent a new flower; give it a name and describe it.

The Megret flower has a thick stem and slighly opaque, blue petals. It's shaped a little like a ukulele.

Soup
Name someone whom you think has a wonderful voice.

My friend Kristi has a great singing voice. My friend Heather has a great speaking voice, but both of these women already know that about themselves.

Salad
On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being highest, how clean do you keep your car?

1 is the lowest I can go? Because I'm thinking -23.

Main Course
How do you feel about poetry?

Most of it is superfluous. I like Bukowski, though, and I'll never turn down a good limerick.

Dessert
What was the last person/place/thing you took a picture of?

There's a door to the stairwell of the parking garage at the hospital where I was on Saturday morning that had some, I don't know, graffitti (or maybe it's just peeling paint) that looked like Sloth from "The Goonies." I got home and uploaded the pictures I took, and now it looks to me more like if Sloth and Jabba the Hut had a baby.

Still just a rat in a cage (or, "Why does my comptuer freeze when I Google the candidates?")

2008-04-05T00:50:00.004-06:00

I had my computer playing music while I cleaned tonight, playing through all my songs at random. I sat down for my scheduled break of Diet Coke, a single cigarette, and all the Tri Peaks I could fit into that cigarette. (Don't hassle me, I'll quit again when math class is over.)

The line that caught my ear was, "And what do want? I want to change." To me, it sounds like he's singing "I want change." Which suddenly turned this fantastic song from my misspent youth into a political track.

We do want change. But it makes me cringe when I hear people talk about whether they're going to vote for the black guy or the white lady. Even fewer people talk about voting for the white guy, but that's beside the point.

I just got done reading "Assassination Vacation" by Sarah Vowell, which was recommend to me by a good friend whose opinions I respect (though I can't say the same of his puns). The author had gone on a few trips to see places and pieces associated with the three assassinated Presidents who were linked (however loosely) to Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln. I've had the Presidents - past, present and future - on my mind all week while tearing through this book. So sitting here at two in the morning with a kitchen and a bathroom yet to be scrubbed, I decided to sit down with you a minute and talk about the election.

Yes, we can make history this year. We can elect a woman for president. It's been stirring for years, this idea of a woman running the country. The speculations about what a woman in the White House would mean have run to each end of the spectrum, from "Finally! Someone in charge who can show some compassion and bring a little ladylike dignity to the White House," to "That's all we need! Women are crazy! Especially post-menopausal women!"

We could also make history with the election of a black man. We are two hours past the 40th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and this weighs heavily on the minds of voters as well. The speculation here is also far-flung from one end ("A man who knows what it's like to be a working man!") to the other ("He's gonna ruin it! I don't want a damn [n-bomb] in the White House! He'll be up there listening to his damn rap, poppin' a cap in a ho and then where will we be?"). I won't even discuss the whole "He's going to turn us into Muslims!" theory, which is beyond absurd for many, many reasons.

Nobody talks about the issues. Nobody talks about what kind of change Obama would bring. Nobody talks about what Hillary's experience can do for this country. Nobody I know even talks about McCain, but that's groupthink at its finest.

Have the politics in America become so redundant and insipid that they no longer factor into the politics of America? Have we become so jaded, so ready and willing to accept failure as our leader, that we can't be bothered with issues?

Well, yes, they have. We have.

All I hear about the candidates lately is that they're trying to woo Super Delegates. They don't care about us, they don't know you or I. None of them. And the way things are going, they never will. I'm furious about my useless vote, irate that nothing I do will matter and these rich, privileged, snot-nosed jerks are going to be in charge of my life - my money, my privacy, my body - for the rest of my irate years. I'm irritated that people only want to vote for a gender or a race, and not a qualified leader.

I guess that's why this old song hits home so hard for me. There's nothing I can do. I want change. But, despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.

We all eventually become our mothers

2008-03-13T21:39:00.003-06:00

Chicago's temperatures soared into the high 50's today. On the street, everywhere, people were walking around in t-shirts and jeans, smiling and happy. The sun was out. The dawn of spring was nigh. It was the first day of the year that people felt guilty for wasting away hours at their jobs and chores instead of going outside to breathe the seemingly tropical air and feel the sunlight on their arms.

Tonight I pulled into a gas station and some guy was standing around the corner from the front door, skulking in the shadows and looking around expectantly for someone. He kept staring at me. I was going to call my friend Ed, who I always call just so that I'm on the phone if something happens so he can, I don't know, freak out or something. I knew he was on another call (his phone was ringing when I left), so I just got out of the car. The skulker had been peering at the only other person at the pumps, and that person was gone now.

He approached me, this skinny black guy dressed too warmly for a night like this. He started with his pitch. I said, "No," a little too loudly. He backed up. He gave me some story that his car was out of gas. I didn't see any car. I told him I was out of money ("Hey, man, I'm a college student, I'm on my last dollar too. Look at my car," trying to make a joke.) I got inside and told the fella behind the bullet proof glass about the skulker. He walked back out with me, two wary souls out for a fight on the first nice evening of the year.

The skulker was chased off, and the clerk stayed outside with me while I pumped a whopping $10 into my poor car's tank. The clerk was in his 50's and shorter than me by four inches, easily, but his face showed creases that spoke of hard days past. As we watched the skulker flag down people across the street, I thought about my chances of taking on the clerk in a brawl, and the skulker's chances of taking us both. Whether through bizarre curiosity or basic self-defense ("always be aware of your surroundings") I don't know, but this is a question I often ask myself whenever I lay eyes on people. It's just one of those weird tics that makes this monkey different from all the other monkeys crawling around on the planet. The skulker was heading back across to our side of the street, heading for the fast food place next door. (He would fight from his shoulders, lightening fast punches delivered by taut muscles that hugged young bones. His center of gravity would be higher than the clerk's, but he would still be hard to knock down.)

I thanked the clerk (he'd have taken me once he knocked me down; he looked like he fought with his torso, low to the ground and strong like oak, squeezing the life out of his opponent) and I drove off into the shimmering night. I cringed as I pulled up to the only traffic light between me and home, realizing I saw in that guy's eyes was simply worry that some stuck up white lady was going to call the cops when he wasn't doing anything. Maybe the skulker's car was broken down two blocks away and he was really desperate for some cash. We're in a recession, after all. And here I was, being a stereotypical suburban white woman acting a fool because a black man was talking to me. At night. At a deserted gas station.

Maybe some other driver, kinder and richer than I, got him his gas and the skulker made it home safe. Maybe he's still skulking around that fast food joint. Maybe he's given up on this stuck up, predominantly white town and hoofed it home.

If so, he's lucky. It's a nice night for a walk.

The times they are a-changin'

2008-03-13T21:05:00.002-06:00

As in daylight savings time. What, you wanted something deep? Try the Pacific.

I got new hours at my new gig, but since they started the same week as daylight savings, it's still a lot like getting up at 5. The new job is very strange, all of the freedoms and restrictions have been swapped. I can now wear whatever I want (as opposed to those ratty old uniforms), get up whenever I want to go get some water, state my opinion without being treated like a moron, and actually enjoy talking to my co-workers.

I can't surf the net, do most of my homework (because of the net restriction), have free reign over the Business Center, or really do my job. I used to be able to quote a price for a job, create and print all kinds of useful cards (business cards, name tags, post cards, place cards for tables), and be a back-up hand for the hotel's office staff. Everything is run on credit cards now, so the prices are already set and I can't do anything about it. My printer is just a little black and white printer that can't make all the fancy cards and can only make half-decent non-fancy cards at a very slow rate. Three times today I let the hotel staff down because of the credit card situation or because of equipment problems. I am redundant. But at least I'm employed.

Carbonite.com

2008-03-05T13:58:00.003-06:00

About a year ago, I was introduced to Carbonite.com via bzzagent.com. It cheaply and efficiently backs up your files. It does this automatically in the background, so you don't have to spend time doing it manually. I got a free trial through bzzagent.com, and when I heard back from other "agents" I decided to pay up for a whole year - about $50.

Everything was going great. I knew I had to go through and specially set it to backup my video files. This isn't written in bold red print, but I found it in the fine print and set it up to backup videos. No biggie.

Then I got a virus. It wiped my whole hard drive. Pictures, music, video, word documents, notes for class - all of it, gone.

I was more irritated than worried because I have the Carbonite backup and I knew all my files were fine.

I re-installed my hard drive and went to log into carbonite.com. It didn't accept my password. I clicked "forgot password," and was told to fill out a form to send to their customer service department with basic information. They asked for the last four digits of th credit card that I used to buy my subscription. I couldn't remember which card I put it on, and told them so. I submitted the form and got an email auto-response. Apparently it was going to take 72 hours to get back to me.

72 hours. To recover a password.

So I called their support line. Nobody was there, they only support people between 9 am and 5 pm, Eastern Standard Time. Because everybody knows that's the only time computers crash, right?

So I called back today. The recorded voice said I could get something like preferred customer service for just $20. It said I was 9th in line for regular service. I kept my $20 and waited. Every minute, the recorded voice interrupted the horrible elevator music to tell me I could also contact customer service via email. It gave me the email. After 45 minutes, I got really pissed.

I wrote:

"Hi,

I have been on hold with your company for 46 minutes. You have my $50 and all of my backup files. I would like to get back either my $50 or my files. I refuse to pay an extra $20 just so you will pick up the phone. You keep asking me to hold. I guess you think I am going to hang up.

You are wrong.

Meg"

Half an hour later, it was a similar email. When I hit the 90 minute mark, another. I wrote to their CEO (his email is listed on the site) as well. Still nothing.

At one hour and 45 minutes, someone finally got on the phone. His name is Chris. He had an email sent out within minutes.

When I went to check for that email, I saw that I got a reply from someone named Roseanne. This was in response to the email I'd sent to the CEO. She sent a link to reset my password and apologized for my hassle. I clicked the link while I was on hold (very briefly) with Chris. It didn't work. I'm guessing that's because it was being re-reset by Chris. I clicked on the link from Chris's email and it worked perfectly.

I won't be using this service again. I'm going to get my files back, put them on removable storage, and get that McAfee program that backs up my stuff.

Yes, it was my fault for not writing down the password and keeping it in a safe place. However, the customer service at this company is so ridiculously difficult to access that it would be stupid to keep trusting them with my files. It shouldn't take five angry emails and two full hours of my daytime minutes to get access to a program that I've already paid $50 for.

For you bookish types (a meme)

2008-02-25T21:20:00.001-06:00

Yes, a meme. Get over it.

Here are the Rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people & post a comment here once you post it to your blog, so I can come see.

I reached behind me and without looking put my hand on a book. I yanked it out (don't get excited), and it was my text book from my composition class last year. "The Critical Edge: Thinking and Researching in a Virtual Society" by Emily Thiroux.

Page 123, sentences 5-8 read:

"He said that many gentlemen of this kingdom, having of late destroyed their deer, he conceived that the want of venison might be well supplied by the bodies of young lads and maidens, not exceeding fourteen years of age or under twelve; so great a number of both sexes in every counrty being now ready to starve from want of work..."

Okay, you know what? That's still just the first of the four sentences. This is pretty boring. Let me try this again...

Ah, "Ham on Rye" by Bukowski. An old favorite.

"We could hear each person's name as they walked across the stage. They were making one big god-damned deal out of graduating from junior high. The band played our school song:

Oh, Mt. Justin, Oh, Mt. Justin
We will be true
Our hearts are singing wildly
All our skies are blue...

We stood in line, each of us waiting to march across the stage."

Sounds pretty boring, I know, but it's a really good book.

Tag! You're it. All of you. Get on it.

Ukulele Lady

2008-02-23T23:46:00.006-06:00

I have a friend back east. She and I met when we were working a shitty job together, and she's one of the few friends kept in touch with after a move. I've known her five years and I'm reminded fairly often how glad I am that she held on to me after I left Maryland.

She's one of those friends that makes you get out and live your life, who makes you feel like a better person when you're around her. You know the type. She glows, and it makes you glow. She makes a person feel like there's more to life, whatever your life might be.

We trade text messages throughout the day, small notes that often mean nothing more than "I'm thinking of you, I miss you, I wish you were here." We play games with song titles, or word games that I can't explain. I'll think of her laugh, or consider what she might think of an outfit I'm buying, and I'll text her with our inside joke: "What's he building in there?" If I'm melancholy, it will be another inside phrase: "How does it end?"

I'm proud of her. We've had our differences, and they are sometimes big differences, and I'm proud of the woman she's become in this short time I've known her. I'm proud of the mother that she is becoming, and the grace with which she bears the crosses in her life.

We frustrate each other in small ways. I frustrate her, anyhow. I'm a stick in the mud, a fuddy duddy, and I try not to wonder why she talks to me at all. She has good friends who treat her better than I can, both in tangible gifts and sheer entertainment value. I try not to think of these things and just be grateful, but there are days when it's hard.

Like tonight. I got a call from her, and in her slightly southern accent (which tells me she's in a wonderful mood) she told me she was in Hawaii. I asked her if she was physically in Hawaii, or if it was just her imagination running west. These are the questions I have to ask her, because either could always be true. She was in Hawaii, physically, with a girlfriend who works for an airline. The friend had gotten free tickets to a wild blue heaven in the middle of a dreary and droning winter. My friend was calling because she had become aware of how little she knew about ukuleles and she wanted to send me one straight from Hawaii.

I, in my stuck-in-the mud, let's-be-rational mode that I'm sure drives her up a wall, took five pictures and a short video on my cell phone. I sent them to her, a 1.3 megapixel crash course in ukulele buying. In her infinite, wonderful patience, she refrained from heaving an exasperated sigh or laughing at my thorough descriptions. I offered to find a good uke store on her island so she wouldn't have to keep going from shop to shop.

I had given up on finding anything when she sent me this:

The one on the left will soon be in my clutches. She even had the guy working at the shop play me a tune on it. I sat in my favorite rocking chair in Chicago, listening to the dulcet sounds of a bored shop keeper playing a uke for a tourist, as he likely often does. I was thinking about how much she was doing for me, as she always does.

I can't wait to play a concert for her. Maybe a jumping flea boogie, or some old tune that warms her heart and sounds perfect on a ukulele. I want to give her back some of the joy she's given me through all these years. I hope she likes it.

I'd better start practicing.

Green Home Experts

2008-02-22T08:35:00.004-06:00

There's a new place in Oak Park that's opening tomorrow called Green Home Experts. They have all the stuff you need for living a greener life. Their website is here, and their store is over on Oak Park Ave right by the Ale House.

The lady who runs the place is very nice (I've spoken to her a few times), and her dog is adorable. But that's not the point of the story.

The point is we all know Spring is coming, and with it Spring cleaning and Spring projects and all that fun stuff. Since I know a fair number of you are Greenies, roll over and check out the new place on Saturday between 10 and 4.

They don't just have cleaning stuff and furniture, they also have cloth bags and other environmentally friendly day-to-day stuff. Bonus: it's a local small business, so you're keeping your money in the community instead of sending it off to Arkansas for the Walton clan to add to their pile.

Extra bonus: If you go to the opening on Saturday, they're raffling off a bag of goodies.

And...they have cookies.

Friday's Feast

2008-02-22T08:33:00.000-06:00

(Play along here.)

Appetizer

Have you ever played a practical joke on anyone? If so, what did you do and who was your victim?

Nothing big, just little things. I'm not good at practical jokes. I'm not a very practical person.

Soup

What do your salt and pepper shakers look like?

They look like they're cheap. They were. I used the pepper one once as a juicer for a lemon. Remeber?

Salad

Where is the next place you plan to visit (on vacation or business)?

I'm going to see Rachel in Indianaplis on March first and I'm pretty excited about it!

Main Course

What kind of lotion or cream do you use to keep your hands from getting too dry?

I usually just get whatever's in the "samples" section of the Walgreen's. You know, those little lotion, um, bottles I guess that fit in your purse. I go in October or November and grab 5 or 10 of one kind so I have enough for the whole winter (including the ones I know I'm going to lose.) This year it was some lovely smelling thing, Curel I think. It's February so I've lost them all. I do have a tube of CVS brand hand lotion with aloe. That stuff works pretty well.

Dessert

Make up a dessert, tell us its ingredients, and give it a name.

Man, you know I can't cook! Umm...all I can think is Fondue. There is going to be some fondue madness on Sunday at Ed's Oscar "party," so I kind of have it on the brain.

Chicago/Art Institute pics

2008-02-17T21:40:00.002-06:00

More pics of Chicago, added to the Chicago collection:

Ironically, we were coming from the Museum of Modern Ice when we came upon this installment of frozen cubism:

They apparently have a gallery inside that's open for free when there's anything to show. I had no idea. The story they had posted of the haunted water tower was a lot more interesting than the exhibit they had on display:

We were just strolling down the street when this caught my eye. I like how the lamp lines up with the overhead light. I think it was a design gallery or something:

This looks like if Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski had a party and invited all of their friends, this would be ground zero for the ruckus that would ensue:

I coulnd't get a shot without the flag. It's Chicago, can't do anything about the wind. *shrug*

And pics from the Art Institute:

Museum of Modern Ice

2008-02-16T23:28:00.002-06:00

There's a sculpture at the Millennium Park called Museum of Modern Ice I heard about it and expected it to be sculptures of people, animals, castles, etc. My neighbor and I showed up and it looked like this:

And basically it looked dumb. But we figured, what the hell, take a few shots of some colored ice and go get some lunch. As we were taking our shots, we started to get kind of excited because the longer you stood and looked at it, the more there was to see. Other peoples' comments ("Look, Mama, it looks like the blue and red from the police," and "Is that supposed to be the skyline? That's a very interesting take on it.") made me see it in a different way. There were guides leading people around the exhibit, explaining little bits of it andthat helped, too.

The slabs of ice are expected and, indeed, intended to melt. As they melt, more colors and textures are shown. When one piece melts completely, it's replaced by a new block of ice. The fact that it changes color as it melts and sometimes reveals swriled textures is what really appealed to me.

I guess it didn't appeal so much to this kid who walked up and just shoved one of the blocks over. I didn't get a shot of it, but we were laughing about it all the way to Potbelly's.

More (non-ice-sculpture) pics to follow.

Friday's Feast

2008-02-15T10:30:00.003-06:00

(Play along here.)

Appetizer

Name one thing that is unique about you.

I have had 23 jobs.

Soup

Fill in the blank: My favorite _________ is __________ but I like _________ too.

painter, Enrique Tábara, Van Gogh

Salad

What type of wood do you have for your home’s furnishings?

Whatever I can get. I think I only paid for three pieces of furniture in my apartment (the bed, futon frame, and book shelf). The rest (coffee table, rocking chair, futon pad, buffet, dining table and chairs, computer desk,bedside tables, dresser, wooden table by the front windows, chairs by the front windows, cabinet in the bathroom, toy chest (now home to my blankets and sheets), were all either gifts or stuff I salvaged or got from freecycle.com.

Go ahead and judge me. Lord knows I've probably judged you twice today.

Main Course

Who do you talk to most often on the phone?

Eddie. Although you would have to make a distinction between "talk to" and "get harassed by."

Dessert

What level of responsibility do you have in your job?

I show up and help guests make copies. I refrain from throwing things. I cuss at the computer. I wear a worn-out, tattered uniform. That is my job, and I have two and a half more Fridays here before I can burn this fucking uniform and stop caring about the pot holes on River Road.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Drops

2008-02-08T08:02:00.000-06:00

So there's this site called Supercook.com where you can put in the ingredients that you have on hand and it tells you what you can make. Holy crap, what a great idea!

I was craving chocolate, but the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips said it would make 5 dozen cookies. What in the sam hell am I gonna do with 60 cookies? I suppose I could eat them (lord knows I would enjoy every morsel) but really I have no place to keep 'em, so fuck that noise, you know?

So I go to SuperCook and tell it I have some semi-sweet chocolate chips. It comes up with this recipe (from another site, actually) for "Quickest Ever No-bake Chocolate Drops."

Half a cup of chocolate, half a cup of peanut butter. Well dang, even I can do that. So I got on it.

Naturally, I left my purse at work, and with it my camera. So tonight we're going to do something a little different. Since this whole recipe is a hell of a shortcut, I'm going to shortcut the pics and use my cell phone's camera.

This should be fun...?

I took a picture of the chocolate chips in the bottom of this bowl. I forgot that you have to hit "save" if you don't want the picture deleted, so if you were looking for some lovely pic of chocolate chips you're outta luck.

You peanut butter fiends are in luck, though:

My microwave tends to blow a fuse more often if I let it run down to zero and beep. So for melting the chocolate I set it for 4 minutes and stood around watching it for about a minute and a half. I stirred it and it looked like this:

Looked pretty gross to me. I was having evil brownie flash backs.

My shoulders hunched forward and I took a quick breath, ready to throw down some noble cusses at the chocolate.

With rigid limbs and a heavy heart I scraped the peanut butter out of the half cup measure and stirred the two together. I saw the peanut butter loosen up the chocolate and I took a deep breath and relaxed, loosening up a bit myself.

Holy shit does this look awful:

I rolled my eyes. Always one more fucking thing. This stupid recipe had two damn ingredients in it - TWO! - and I'd fuckd it up somehow. This didn't look at all edible. Well, I figured I might as well finish making 'em since I started 'em and all, so I plopped them out on to a plate and took an embarrassingly poor quality picture:

This is where I realized I didn't have any wax paper. Oh well. Into the fridge they went.

And then I completely forgot about them until this morning when I opened my email and saw the pics I'd sent to myself from my phone last night.

See, after I dropped the mix onto the plate, I licked the spoon. It tasted okay and basically sated my craving for chocolate. So I was satisfied and forgot to go back to get more.

It tastes like an intense and proud Reese's cup. Maybe like a Reese's cup that was trying to overcompensate for a small...sense of self worth.

I'd probably melt the chocolate chips a bit longer, but I worry about burning them. Also, this mix would probably be fantastic on some pretzels, or with some toasted oats rolled up in 'em. Ooo! Or some Grape-Nuts! Just something to give them a bit of shape, you know?

Snow!

2008-02-03T20:09:00.000-06:00

Enough already! GEEZ!

I know this is a fact of life in Chicago, but damn! Enough!

*sigh*

Maybe I'm just getting too old.

French toast

2008-02-03T14:31:00.000-06:00

Possibly the most boring cooking post ever, even for this blog.

First an update. Remember that sun dried artichoke chicken that I hated so much? I sliced it into strips and sauteed it with the tomato/artichoke mix that was on it, and put it on some rice. That was delicious! Man oh man, if it had been that good the first time around I wouldn't have thrown away the recipe! Anyhow...

French toast, in the beginning:

I put the nutmeg in the picture there because when I was a kid, we put nutmeg in the French toast egg mix. Then I reread the recipe and it didn't call for any. I know we did, though, because we had a cat named Nutmeg and we'd joke about putting the cat in the French toast. We had a very discerning sense of humor, back in Kansas in 1982.

Side note: Nutmeg only ever had one kitten. His name was Patches and he was born in my hair. Remind me later to tell you that story.

Anyhow, I put a pinch in, mixed it up, and used some store bought bread because I didn't trust the bread I made not to crumble.

The recipe said to put some butter on the griddle/skillet and cook it up. My dad said never to do that because the butter burns, so I used Pam.

It was going pretty well. Nothing was burning, getting fucked up or anything.

So...um...it turned out fine. It was kind of bland. I don't have any syrup so I put some apple butter on it. Nothing interesting to report at all. But I want to take a minute to talk to you about something I hear about all the time: apple butter.

I know some of you haven't heard of apple butter, and others have heard of it but haven't tried it. I know it looks weird. I had a roommate once who threw out a brand new jar of apple butter because "it looked funny, like whatever it was it had gone bad." I know it looks like apple sauce that's gone bad, but trust me: it's delicious. Try to get it from one of those farms where you can go pick your own apples or something, or if you live near an Amish community go get it from there. It's usually better than the store-bought stuff. And you all have the good fortune to have never tried my grandma's apple butter.

That sounds bad, I know, but listen to the whole thing here. My gramma was an excellent cook. Everything she made, from her own jams and jellies to her own bread, as well as just regular dinner stuff, it was all wonderful. Every time I have any apple butter at all, I always compare it to my grandma's apple butter. None of it measures up, all apple butter everywhere is only just OK compared to my grandma's, which was fantastic. I'm going to live the rest of my life knowing that I will never have apple butter that good ever again.

But you, dear reader, can go run out to your local farm (hell, probably even your local grocery store) and find apple butter that you consider to be the best, and you can enjoy that brand for decades. And there you're lucky. You don't know what you're missing, so you're not even minutely disappointed in what you find. Sometimes, it turns out, ignorance is bliss.

Still life with green pepper

2008-01-30T21:18:00.001-06:00

My blog, my camera, my rules. And so:

Meatloaf

2008-01-29T19:33:00.000-06:00

Damn. I went right ahead and made a meatloaf tonight and completely fucking forgot to blog about it.

Erm...

Here is a picture of it after I already had some and the leftovers were sitting the fridge for about half an hour:

Honestly it's not really that pink. Sweet jesus that looks awful.

It was extra greasy. I was going to use this ground turkey I had, but it turns out it had gone bad. I already had an egg, some onion, green pepper and a piece of bread in a bowl, and fuck all if I'm gonna waste some food, so I got the cheapest pile of ground meat I could find. Man oh man was that greasy.

I chopped the green pepper & onion too coarsely. But it was decent. After I drained it...twice.

Summertime

2008-01-29T14:19:00.001-06:00

Close your eyes. No, not tight, just...relax. Close your eyes. Do you feel it? The heat from the sun-soaked grass wrapping around you? The cool breeze of the dusk on a balmy July night tracing the curves of your face? No?

Listen. Take a deep breath. Listen. Can you hear it? The sound of a mosquito near by, ice clinking in a glass on the night stand, the sound of your lover's heart beating next to your ear. The sheets stick to you, the summer heat makes sleeping hard. The lights from passing cars race across the walls and ceilings and peek through the blinds while you study your lover's sleeping profile. Do you hear it? No?

Breathe. Can you smell the grass around you? The distinct summer smells of fresh air and hot concrete that waft in through the window? Maybe the warm breeze that traipses across the woods and cools down the front porch as you spend the afternoon swapping stories and gossip with the people who know you best, and love you anyway.

Listen.

Friday's Feast

2008-01-25T08:20:00.001-06:00

(Play along with Friday's Feasts here.)

Appetizer
How many times per day do you usually laugh?

Depends on the day. I laugh more at work than anywhere else. My job sucks, don't get me wrong, but I can chat online all day with Scottie and Rachel, and sling witty banter back and forth with Ed & Tasha. Sometimes I make myself laugh, like with that poem I wrote yesterday. That made me giggle.

If I'm low on laughs, though, I'll go watch this.

Soup
What do your sunglasses look like?

They look like whatever $2 will buy at the gas station when I'm in a really bad mood. I only buy them when the sun is in my eyes and giving me a headache, and I hate spending money on them because I always lose them.

Salad
You win a free trip to anywhere on your continent, but you have to travel by train. Where do you go?

South! It's -4 here right now. Of course if I'm going to go south on the train, it's better to do that in the spring or summer when everything is in bloom.

Main Course
Name one thing you consider a great quality about living in your town/city.

Just one? Holy shit. I like that we're the Second City. Nobody pays us any attention, and we can just do what we want. But we're not the third or tenth or 50th city. I've never been to NYC, but I've been to other cities and none of them holds a candle to Chicago. They're all tiny little things with depressing streets and morose citizens. The skylines aren't impressive and the sight-seeing is nothing at all to brag about. Chicago's not so big that every asshole on the planet is coming in to fuck it up, and it's not so small that I'm left dreaming about someplace big like NYC. I love it. It's home.

Dessert
If the sky could be another color, what color do you think would look best?

Another color? Oh no, no, that wouldn't do. All the colors that the sky takes on in a day - the early morning gray that greets the glorious, golden dawn. The technicolor dusk that grabs every warm color you could dream of and flings it out across the heavens, giving us one last magnificent light show before the horizon greedily gobbles orange flames and purple waves from the clouds and leaves us with a proud, stoic, dreamy blue that oozes into the sultry, slippery night.

And all of this is wrapped around the ordinary blue daytime sky. The kind of blue that when you stop and look - really look - you're reminded of what it's like to feel hope and wonder, what it's like to feel infinite.

What other colors are there? Green, I suppose. I hear that right before a tornado the sky turns green. You can keep that for your sky, I like to keep my green on the ground to lay on and climb in, where I can sit back, relax, and watch the sunset.

Sappy love poem

2008-01-24T11:16:00.000-06:00

The day ticks slowly by with no word from you,
and the minutes slither across my desk like so many ants marching uphill.
You are somewhere, dreaming of adventure and glory days gone by,
and I'm sure you're not dreaming of me but I can have dreams of my own.

The air outside is well below zero, and
the space you've left in my heart is even colder.
I gleefully await the day we meet, the day I can
trace my fingers over every lovely crevice, the day we're finally
together as we always were meant to be.
I'll hold that hope and dream this dream,
and until that day I'll keep your picture
right here,
my love,
so you'll know that you've found me and
know that you're home.

Hurry, dear - adventure awaits!

Friday's Feast

2008-01-18T23:36:00.000-06:00

Appetizer
What is your favorite beverage?

Diet Coke.

Soup
Name 3 things that are on your computer desk at home or work

At home: My ukulele, my camera, my fake iPod (charging).

Salad
On a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being highest), how honest do you think you are?

8. And I'll save the other two points for white lies to get a job, refrain from making someone cry, and keep my mom from worrying too much about me.

Main Course
If you could change the name of one city in the world, what would you rename it and why?

I would call Gary, Indiana "Stinkerton" for reasons obvious to anybody who's driven through it.

Dessert
What stresses you out? What calms you down?

Stress: family, money, school, my car

Relax: Play my uke, play a game online with Rachel, go for a stroll, go on a photo spree (taking pictures...usually only calms me down when I'm with other photo addicts and/or taking pictures of inatimate objects), and dancing in my living room to anything my little heart desires.

Sun Dried Tomato Artichoke Chicken

2008-01-18T08:41:00.000-06:00

I was wandering through the grocery store trying to find something better for dinner than mac & cheese or frozen pizza when I found this package of Knorr French Onion Recipe Mix. There were two recipes on the back. One seemed kind of long and involved, the other one was Sun Dried Tomato Artichoke Chicken. And so:

I forgot to put the olive oil in this picture. Such is life:

I put all the stuff in, but because it's hard to walk with these glasses on I had them perched on my head when I was reading the instructions. I am going to use that as the excuse for draining the artichokes when the recipe said to not do that. After I realized my mistake, I added some water and extra olive oil. That was basically just to make the mixture more liquid, since the directions said to pour the mixture on the chicken.

It still wasn't very liquidy:

I smeared it all over the chicken, even tucking it between the pieces. It was a sun dried tomato extravaganza all over that chicken. I'm never going to eat four pieces of chicken, but that's what the recipe called for. I'm horrid with numbers so it's easier to just do the whole recipe than to try to figure out the math of just one serving.

I threw it in the oven, crossed my fingers and wandered off to practice my ukulele. With five minutes left to go on the baking, my neighbor dropped by for some chit-chat so when I took the chicken out of the oven I didn't get to inspect like I usually do with chicken. I'm always worried about under-cooking it. After my neighbor left, I cut open a piece to check it and it seemed fine. That was a relief because I didn't want to put it back in after it was sitting out. I don't know why, but it seemed like a bad idea. I don't understand chicken, so maybe it's an unreasonable worry.

I had some rice on the side. Thank goodness because holy shit was this stuff gross. It just tasted like the sun dried tomatoes. And they didn't taste that great. Until I had this dish, I loved sun-dried tomatoes. Now I'm not a fan.

Here's the thing about chicken: when I make it, it never takes on the flavor of whatever I'm cooking it in. I tried twice to make this orange chicken dish, and it was bland and tasted like plain chicken. Plain, sad, tragic chicken. What's the haps with this? The last time I made that dish I marinated the chicken overnight, and still it tasted awful. Should I, I don't know, poke holes in the chicken to get the flavored dressing or whatever in there? Am I not baking it long enough? Is the chicken angry that I'm a chicken snob and won't eat chicken off the bone? I don't understand.

And for this recipe it didn't really matter since I didn't like it anyhow. Maybe I'll scrape off the sun-dried tomato topping, cut up the chicken and put it on a sandwich or something. Damn.

Four eyes!

2008-01-16T22:12:00.000-06:00

So you know how you go to the pharmacy or other places where they have those spinning racks of barely prescription glasses?

I was bored today and I tried some on. And I could see better. Well, to read, anyhow. So this is being thirty, eh? The joke is on me, I guess. I digress. I got the frames for free (long story), and I think they're a little too wide. Maybe I could use that optometry insurance I have and go get some decent specs.

Wheat Bread

2008-01-12T23:20:00.000-06:00

Man oh man, my grandma made the best bread. I mean, her bread was so good that getting a loaf of her bread was like getting a little loaf of gramma love. That sounds cheesy. Fuck you if you don't like it.

Anyway, I emailed my brother up in Alaska for Grandma's bread recipe, but he's trying to raise four young kids and can't be arsed to get back to me. So I had to make do with the recipe from the Better Homes cookbook.

And so, wheat bread. I thought there would be more ingredients:

That's not double vision there, that's two different kinds of flour:

So anyway, mix some flour and yeast in a bowl. Real exciting. Then I had to mix all the wet stuff and cook it just til it was warm, 110 or so, in a sauce pan. I'm no good at knowing how hot stuff is without a thermometer, so I just kind of guessed. Then I poured it in with the flour/yeast mix. Mmmmmm doesn't that look tasty?

This is right about where I started to mentally kick myself for not reading the whole recipe through before starting it. Turns out I was supposed to have my hand mixer all ready. Oops. Anyhow, got it mixed, added the wheat flour, and got ready to wrestle that ball of dough down. This was not going to be walnut-filled bread part 2. I got ready this time: old towel near by to scrape dough off my fingers, some warm water for the same reason, and a small bowl of "fuck you" flour. As in, "fuck you, dough. You're gonna do what I tell you to do, and you're not gonna turn into glue and make it impossible to scratch my head when it itches. Have some damn flour, dough! You're my bitch now."

As you can see, the dough came around to my way of thinking:

So anyhow, let it rise to twice the size. I have one of those things on my stove that carries heat from the oven up to the stove top, so I had the oven on warm and set the bowl right by the, um, oven heat vent thing. It rose pretty nicely, and punching it down was much easier than when I had to deal with the walnut bread.

I kicked myself again here for not reading the directions all the way through. Turns out I needed two loaf pans, not just the one that I have. So when it came time to divide the dough, I put one loaf in the pan and the other loaf got balled up and put in a cake pan:

Let it rise a bit more and threw it in the oven. The book said to let it cook for 40-45 minutes, but since the walnut bread was such a bitch and cooked so fast, I set the timer for half an hour. I tapped the loaves after half an hour, they sounded kind of hollow. I took 'em out.

Mmmmm that looks pretty good!

So I had a little bread smorgasboard. A very little one. I was kind of sleepy.

Mmmmmm marmalade. Mmmmmm apple butter. Oh hell yes.

Well, the crust was done. It was crunchy and if had been in there much longer it would have burned. The middle of the bread wasn't as light and fluffy as it should have been. I don't know if this is from under cooking or if I fucked up the part where I was heating up the liquids in the sauce pan. It's edible, though, so whatever.

Oh, a few weeks ago somebody posted a comment asking why the little black flashlight is in a lot of the cooking shots. I hit the wrong button and deleted it. Oh dear.

Anyway, the wiring in my apartment is shit. I'm always blowing a fuse by doing crazy insane shit like making some toast while brewing some coffee while watching the news. Since I have to go out the back door to get to the circuit breaker, I leave the flash light by the toaster oven so I can always find it. It's a mini Mag light, and it fits in that area well, so that's where I keep it.

What, that answer isn't sexy enough for you? Fine. It's in all of my shots because I am a giant and I want to show you how big my possessions are in comparison to a damn serious police-baton-size Mag light. You puny people could not handle the splendor and vast flatware in my kitchen, so I put a Mag light in my pictures to remind you of my awesome powers of being 100x bigger than you.

Friday's Feast

2008-01-11T09:38:00.000-06:00

The fest from today kind of sucked. I didn't like it. So I went back in the archives and got one from 2005. And so:

Appetizer
What is a word that your family uses that would not be considered common?

Onomonopiea. It's a real word, and it's not considered common.

Soup
What theme of calendar do you have on your wall this year?

None yet, but I still have last year's calendar of old maps up because I like it.

Salad
Name 3 people you speak with on a daily basis.

Ed, Scottie, and...um...well, I don't even talk to the two of them on a daily basis. Nearly, but not exactly. Marie, maybe. Or Brandi.

Main Course
If you could put a new tattoo on someone you know - who would it be, what would the tattoo be of, and where would you put it on them?

I guess I'd give my big sister a cute little dolphin on her ankle.

Dessert
What is the last beverage you drank out of a glass bottle?

Probably a Snapple.

Friday's Feast 1/4/08

2008-01-04T12:54:00.000-06:00

Appetizer

When was the last time you received a surprise in the mail, and what was it? A few weeks ago a friend back east sent me a box with various things including a framed photo of her baby. A few months before that, she sent me a box with various things, including a monkey that does flips.

Soup

If you could have a summer and/or winter home, where would you want it to be?

Someplace beautiful, probably down south. Savannah maybe.

Salad
Pick one: pineapple, orange, banana, apple, cherry.

hahaha. What, in general? Pineapple. Fuck I love me some pineapple.

Main Course
Describe the nicest piece of clothing that you own.

A have a dress that I've never worn. It's pretty nice. I have some nice tops. All of my shoes are shit, though.

Dessert
If you could forget one whole day from your life, which day would you choose to wipe from your memory?

Well, it's been 15 minutes of trying to think of one, and I haven't come up with anything yet, so I'm going to have to pass on this one. I mean, yeah, there have been bad days, but I learned from them, so I'll keep 'em.

We wouldn't have it any other way

2008-01-02T11:50:00.000-06:00

It started snowing sometime on New Year's Eve, probably in the afternoon. It kept snowing all night and on into dawn. I was going to walk home from my friend's house and get some nice shots, but I was offered a ride. These are what I got before I got in the car:

More here, and more to come. It's 12 degrees outside right now. Fuck photography on a day like this.

Happy anniversary!

2008-01-01T13:12:00.000-06:00

Last January first, I was walking home from a friend's party. It was after midnight, I was drunk and happy, walking down the street with my headphones on. Somebody behind me started shouting, I took an earbud out and turned around. It was some shady looking guy, he wanted a cigarette. I told him I was out and promptly put my earbud back in my ear. I turned off the mp3 player, though, so I could hear where he was and what he was up to.

I ran into the same guy two more times, each time asking for a cigarette. Once I was trying to get on the el to get to work, and he was standing there asking for a smoke.

I: You know, it seems every time I walk down the street you're there asking for a cigarette.
He: You want some of my donut?
I: No, I don't want your donut.
He (shrugging and smirking): Well, whaddya want me to do? I'm homeless.
I: You look pretty smug for a homeless guy.

So the year went on, and I see him up and down the street begging for change and bothering people. He's in his late twenties or early thirties, though his cockiness hints that he's a young guy who just looks like he's lived every day twice. He wearns nicer clothes than I, and he always has a haircut and a trimmed beard. His clothes aren't filthy and he doesn't smell, but there's an air of the homeless life on him. A quiet, carefree desperation that comes with a life where you don't have to stress over work and bills, but you do have to wonder where your next meal is coming from.

He met up with another regular guy on our street who always claims to be collecting for an AIDS walk. Well, really, they met each other one day when they were both hitting up my block for money, and they shook hands and introduced themselves. I haven't seen the AIDS walk guy since.

Today at the laundromat, a woman walked up to me (there were two other people there) and said, "Do you have a cell phone?" Turns out there was some guy who had been in the bathroom for about an hour. He looked, in her words, "Homeless. Matted hair. Dirty clothes."

I said, "He's probably getting high, or he passed out or something." I went back to taking my laundry out of the washer, unconcerned.

She seemed pretty pissed that I wasn't leaping up to take care of the guy in the bathroom. She insisted that we should call someone. "Who do you suggest we call?" I asked. She had no answer. She was getting quietly upset that I was so nonchalant. My good deed for the day was not telling her about the incredible amount of coke being snorted in the bars nearby.

She kept buzzing around, flapping her mouth about the situation. I asked where the employee was for the place. She said the employees had left. I shrugged. I didn't care. If I needed to pee, my apartment wasn't too far away. I went back to my laundry.

She said something to the effect of, "I live in this area and if there's someone shooting up in the bathroom I want something done about it." I don't know why I didn't tell her to go home and call the cops if she was so fucking concerned. I didn't point out that it was dumb to say she lived in the area, it's not like she's going to drive her clothes two miles to go wash them at this shitty laundromat. I'm off my game today, I guess. A bad way to start the new year.

I don't know why this woman walked up to me to solve her problem. As you might have heard, I'm sick of calling the police. I guess she didn't get the memo. I ignored her, decided to let her and the other lady sort it out. I didn't care. I am that kind of person now, it seems.

So half an hour goes by, and surprise, surprise - there's my old friend with the donut. He can barely stand. I'm on the phone with a friend who knows all about this guy and the situation at the laundromat, and I start laughing at the guy while I'm telling my friend who it is. The donut guy is swaying, his eyes are rolling in his head and his day seems to be off to a good start. Well, in his definition of good.

The other woman who had also bristled at my disinterest had decided to sit out in the car rather than stand around listening to me talk on my cell phone, asking what the fuck they expected me to do about it. Right now the only people there are a woman who won't stop using her speaker phone, the donut guy, and yours truly. I look him right in the eye and laugh low enough that he knows it's at him, but not enough to get him too riled up. In his drugged out haze he knows I'm there, and he knows I'm laughing at him. He gives me a sneer, lights a cigarette, and leaves.

Half an hour later, waiting for the last ten minutes to pass on my dryer, I'm standing by the back door to the place watching the snow fall. I'm right by the bathroom and I nearly choke on the stench of cigarettes. (I'm a smoke snob now, it seems.) I turn, and the donut guy has left his arm tie on the floor, with some wet toilet paper. I go back and stand by my dryer, and it occurs to me that today is January first again, and I met the donut guy a year ago today.

I get home and hear sirens. Maybe they've found him in an alley, splayed out in the snow, overdosed and done for. I doubt it, though. Guys like him don't get off that lucky.

It's Christmastime! There's no need to be afraid?

2007-12-30T14:06:00.000-06:00

Random things I found the day after Christmas while trolling a mall in Maryland. Before you judge me, you should know that there's nothing really to do in Maryland but troll malls and drink. Fact.

Singing pigs. Much creepier in person, but here's the gist of it:

I don't know what the manufacturer was thinking with this monkey:

But I know that the folks in charge of making this turtle dance to "Mister Roboto" were thinking "awesome":

Fat babies! Come get your fat babies! They're gonna grow up just like you, fat and angry and stupid!

Why, you might ask? Well, here's a thought:

My sister took me to some huge grocery store to, apparently, agree with her that it was a huge grocery store. They had truffles there at the bargain price of $999.99 per pound. No, I'm not kidding:

And last but not least, some miscellany:

Blah blah blah

2007-11-28T08:48:00.001-06:00

It was always just the two of us, Mr. Binky and I. A girl and her monkey against the whole wide world. We devised a delightful plan, and dreamed of the days that lay beyond the fences and walls of this hellish hovel. He left first, and when he made it out he was going to come back for me.

His plane flew far and true, over the horizon, his tattered scarf waving in the wind. I waited for years for his return. I finally escaped on my own one day, out of the blue and much to my own surprise. If I ever catch Mr. Binky in a dark alley, it'll be curtains for him for sure.

Damn dirty ape.

Signs of desperation

2007-11-27T09:07:00.001-06:00

I love getting gift cards. I fucking love them. Unless it's to someplace shitty, like the Hallmark store or something. I'd rather get a $15 gift certificate to Borders than have you spend $15 on some shitty wall decoration that I'll hate but have to display because it's manners.

Gift cards are awesome because you're giving people want they really want - a shopping spree. Sometimes food gift cards are a great idea, such as cards for Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts, if you happen to know that the recipient likes those places. But here is where you cross the line between "Something you might find useful and fun to treat yourself with" to "I have completely given up":

That's kind of trashy, FYI. And even if you're giving it to someone who LOVES Burger King, you're doing more harm than good. "Yes, tubby, go eat a big juicy burger. Have some greasy fries, too, that's right. Ask for extra mayo on that burger, because it's a gift card and what better gift can I give you than a fucking coronary?"

Do both of you a favor and just give a Wal-Mart gift card. Same level of trashy, but you're not responsible when the recipient (after having spent the card on donuts and soda) has a myocardial infarction.

News?

2007-11-27T08:47:00.000-06:00

So last night I'm toddling around the apartment about to go to bed and suddenly there is a mess of lights and sirens flying by out side. Cops mostly, but also two ambulances. They were heading south, and the fire station is south of me, so I don't know if there were fire trucks. It was quite a ruckus at any rate.

So today I went to see what happened. I checked both of our weekly, local (Oak Park centric) papers' web sites, and I couldn't find anything. So I wrote to one of them:

"I live on Oak Park Avenue, and last night there were about six squad cars blaring by, alarms and lights going. It sounded like there were more coming from a block or more west of OP Ave, too, but that might have just been a Doppler thing. I also heard two ambulances. What happened?

Why isn't this newsworthy? I'm not trying to be a smart ass here, I just don't understand why all the news on oakleaves.com is old news, not new news. I understand that you publish every Wednesday, but does that necessitate a completely block on current events throughout the week?

Meg"

And this lady writes back,

"Meg,
Who said it’s not newsworthy? I heard the sirens too, around 10 p.m. We don’t work overnight. When we find out what happened, we’ll get it on the web.
Cheri"

What the fuck? She's the editor of this paper and she hears all these sirens and can't be bothered to put her damn coat on and go get the haps? Yes, it was cold last night, but if I had a press pass I'd be running down there like a hooker to a ho convention, half because I'm nosy and half because it's my damn job.

This shit is why she's always going to be the editor of some shitty local weekly rag instead of working at a real newspaper.

Ho ho ho

2007-11-27T07:59:00.000-06:00

Black Monday! Time for shopping! I went to the Toys R Us site yesterday and I was greeted with this:

What the fuck? So I went to see what kind of games need a girls-only version. And here we go:

Monopoly: Pink Boutique Edition

"This is Monopoly like you have never seen it - dressed up in pink and all about things girls love! Buy boutiques and malls, go on a shopping spree, pay your cell phone bill, and get text and instant messages. You and your friends will adore the funky tokens, cool buildings, and cute illustrations. Best of all, the game is stored in a beautiful keepsake box which doubles as a jewelry box. Cool game features include: 8 collectible tokens just for girls, keepsake storage box with removable tray and mirrored insert, pink gameboard with fun properties, pink and purple translucent boutiques and malls instead of houses and hotels, Instant Message and Text Message cards instead of Chance and Community Chest, pink Title Deed cards, redesigned Monopoly money, flocked banker's tray, 2 pink dice, and instructions. Paint the town pink with Toys R Us Exclusive!"

(Because girls only ever want shopping sprees and funky tokens. By the by, any girl who wants to be this game's idea of a woman probably never actually has to pay her own cell phone bill.)

Jenga Girl Talk

"Gather your girlfriends and get ready for a twist on this classic wood block game. Jenga GirlTalk has a cool new look and a fun new element - pull out a block, then answer a question, such as: If you had one wish, what would you wish for? or Who is your closest friend? It will have you and your friends stackin', askin' and laughin', but remember - don't let 'em topple! Includes 54 precision-crafted solid wood blocks, each with a different question, an ultracool, stylish microfiber stacking sleeve, and instructions."

(This is actually a great way to start a bitch fight. I can see it now, 11-year-olds all throwing their Capri-Sun pouches at each other, shrieking about "Suzie is MY best friend, you fucking cunt!" and "What do you mean, you'd wish Steve would kiss you? I AM CARRYING HIS FUCKING BABY!")

Oh, and let's see what you can get if you're not comfortable with these choices:

"Oh, here you go you big fat fatty, Merry Xmas. By the by, don't eat the game. Fatty."

Even if you're giving this to a perfectly healthy girl, this is what she will hear. And it will scar her for life, FYI.

Actual non-sarcastic pro tip: When shopping for kids, go two years above what the item recommends. For example, if you're shopping for a 12-year-old, look for stuff in the 14-year-old's section. The recommended ages are basically lowest common denominator suggestions. Unless the kid you're shopping for is the lowest common denominator, in which case just get a box with a ball inside, and duct tape the box all over. This is more for your entertainment than the child's, but the child will never know.

Misc

2007-11-26T07:59:00.001-06:00

I cleaned out the memory card on my camera yesterday. Here are some random shots:

911

2007-11-25T15:48:00.001-06:00

In the past year, I've had to call 911 three times. The first time, last December, some lady followed me into my apartment building and tried to fight with me. She thought my neighbor had stolen her coat and wanted me to move so she could go, I don't know, fight with my neighbor or something. She was drunk and wouldn't leave, so I called the cops.

The second time was a few months ago, I was at a friend's house. His neighbors were fighting, which wasn't a big deal, but I heard the lady scream (in answer to her live-in boyfriend's question, which I couldn't hear), "Because you fucking BEAT ME. THAT'S WHY." Then there were a series of thuds and bangs that basically sounded like someone was getting their ass kicked. My friend didn't want to call the cops, I never really understood why, but he asked me to, so I did.

Just now, I was turning from Madison onto Oak Park Avenue behind a big white van. I was in the middle of turning when the van stopped and the driver opened the door to puke. Or something like puke. I could only see his head and then see something splat on the ground. He started driving again, weaving all over the road, going 17-25 in a 30 MPH zone, and when we pulled up to a red light he leaned out to puke again. The he started to drive but stopped because nobody else was going (the light was still red). When the light changed, he didn't go. Then he swerved his way another half block before I just pulled over to call 911 to report him as a drunk driver.

A few years ago, I thought some girl was dead behind the wheel of an older mini van. She wasn't responding, her van looked fucked up, I called 911 after asking her repeatedly if she was okay. It wasn't until after I was giving the operator our location that I hear, "I'm fine. Jesus Christ!" And I looked up and she's staring at me with eyes that certain shade of blue that look creepy no matter where you see them.

Earlier that year, I called 911 because a semi had run over a minivan in its blind spot and kept going. A few years before that because I got mugged.

I guess the whole point of this list is, you'd think a life with this much police activity would be a lot more interesting, but here I am, just loading up my MP3 player, eating raisins, and wondering if "Pushing Daisies" is new this week

Friday's Feast

2007-11-20T08:35:00.001-06:00

It's late. Such is life.

Appetizer
What was your first “real” job?

I worked at a camp for people with disabilities when I was 15. I learned all about working with people in wheel chairs, on crutches, deaf people, blind people, people who were playing quite a few cards short of a full deck. I took the job because it was an overnight camp and it meant I wouldn't have to spend endless, agonizing hours stuck at my dad's place with my step sister. Everyone says what a great first job that is, and how I'm a wonderful person for doing that for three summers, but basically it was just because I wanted to get the hell out of the house.

Soup
Where would you go if you wanted to spark your creativity?

I get on the el. Go downtown or just ride around.

Salad
Complete this sentence: I am embarrassed when…

I realize I've zoned out in public and I have no idea what I've been doing for the past few minutes. For all I know, I was scratching inappropriate places while standing in line at the grocery store.

Main Course
What values did your parents instill in you?

Don't be an asshole. Don't beg.

Dessert
Name 3 fads from your teenage years.

Big, big bangs on girls. Tall more than big, I guess. The "grunge" look (AKA the "Look! Maggie's finally in style!" era). Salt n Peppa. And now I have "What a Man" stuck in my head.

Darjeeling Limited

2007-11-12T08:24:00.000-06:00

I saw this yesterday with a friend, and I didn't like it as much as I liked "Life Aquatic" and "Royal Tenenbaums." Two of the metaphors they used were handed so heavily that I nearly dislocated my eyes from rolling them so hard, and I think they took out pieces of the movie after Owen Wilson's fiasco a few months ago. Things that I read that were going to be parts of the movie before that mess weren't there in the version I saw yesterday. Maybe they'll have them in the bonus features on the DVD.

The friend I saw it with hadn't seen "Royal Tenenbaums," but I'd watched "Life Aquatic" with her and she liked "Darjeeling Limited" better. I've heard other people say that Bill Murray was in there basically because he's always in Anderson's movies, and that certainly seemed the case here. The few minutes he's in the film it's like he's trying to be extra funny because that's his job, but he's obviously not trying very hard. I still love Bill Murray, though, and those four fleeting moments of film won't tarnish that. He only had one line, two if you count screaming, so it's not like he had a lot to work with.

I hope this is the last time Anderson makes this movie (let's face it, it's so far along the same lines as the other two that it borders on insulting the audience's intelligence), but I know I'll go see it again if he gives it another go.

All in all, I'd recommend it if you liked "Life Aquatic" and "Royal Tenenbaums." If you hated those, though, don't bother.

Oh, and I took some pictures and video while I was downtown:

Beef stew & Cornbread

2007-11-09T10:15:00.001-06:00

I found an old CD I put together years ago. It was like a little time capsule, and I was listening to it while I made the beef stew & cornbread, so there was a lot of dancing and singing. Not so much with the picture taking, though. I digress.

Beef stew, in the beginning:

The instructions said "put the flower in a plastic bag and use it to coat the meat," and honestly my first thought was the grocery bag I brought the ingredients home in. It had been a long day, I wasn't thinking clearly. Anyhow, flour in a bag, in case you needed a visual:

Coated meat:

And this is right about the time I realized I forgot to cut up the bigger pieces into smaller pieces:

I let that cook with all the spices for an hour, during which time I did dishes and danced. Don't be jealous, it's no way to live your life.

Then it was time to make the corn bread. I think we all know how this goes. Dry ingredients, wet ingredients, pan:

Meanwhile, I cut up some veggies for the stew. I know that sounds like a bit too much excitement for some of you, so I'm going to skip posting those pics.*

So anyway, finished cornbread:

And finished stew:

Looks pretty good, right? Wrong. The potatoes and carrots in the stew weren't done, and the cornbread was kind of grainy, like the corn meal hadn't, I don't know, mixed right. Instead of melt-in-your-mouth good, the whole thing was kind of crunchy. I put the cornbread in the bottom of the bowl of stew (like normal people do) so it wasn't as noticeable, but the crunchy potatoes and carrots were still kind of shitty.

So, next time I'll add those much earlier, and then the frozen stuff for the last half hour.

Meanwhile, I need a better cornbread recipe.

Friday's Feast

2007-11-09T09:47:00.000-06:00

Friday's feast (via VH)

Appetizer
Which snack do you like to get when you go to the movies?

Reese's Pieces and a Diet Coke. Sounds redundant, right? I just like how Diet Coke tastes, so fuck off.

Soup
What year did you start using the internet? Um, maybe 1990. My brother put Norton Commander and Prodigy on Mom's computer and
viola, suddenly the computer wasn't just for video games any more.

Salad
What is your first name in Pig Latin?
Egmay

Main Course
Name something you are picky about.

Ketchup. When I got arrested last November (didn't have my insurance card on me) I was a little irritated that my big-ass bottle of ketchup was going to freeze while the car sat in impound. Dammit.

Dessert
Fill in the blanks: I _____ ______ yesterday and I ____ ____ today.

Made stew, got paid.

Oh Mickey You're so Fine, You're So...WTF

2007-11-08T07:42:00.000-06:00

I was getting ready for work today and I noticed the throw rug by my bed was kind of folded. No big deal, it slides around a lot. I went to straighten it out and I see something odd on it. I reach down to see wtf is on my rug, and it moves. It was a mouse. A fucking mouse snoozing in the folds of the rug by my bed.

I yelped and ran into the kitchen, emptied out a Pringles can and put it over the mouse. He wasn't moving much, but he was moving, and I was freaking out. I slid a DVD case under the rug and wrestled with the problem of throwing him off the balcony. The problem wasn't throwing the mouse - the further the better - the problem was that I wasn't fully dressed yet. I had on my blouse and skirt, but the skirt wasn't zipped up or anything. I was looking down to zip up the skirt when I noticed the rug/mouse situation. I didn't want to take my hand off the Pringles can because the mouse could easily knock it over and run.

I finally decided, fuck it - it was 5:50 in the morning, anybody on the street at that hour can't focus their eyes well enough to even notice me on the balcony, so I went for it. I threw the thing off the balcony and heard it land one story down on the sidewalk. I didn't stop to see if it scampered off, I just ran back inside and into the kitchen.

I pulled things off the shelves of the pantry at random, seeing what had been chewed into, looking for signs of droppings or a nest. There was nothing. Cereal, pasta, sugar, cake and bread mixes - all that stuff was completely intact. I think it ran in the door when the door was open last night - my hands were full and I was standing in the open doorway for a bit while I tried to put down the stuff I was carrying. Really, the only sign I could find that a mouse was in my apartment was the mouse in my apartment.

So anyway, I initially touched the mouse with the index and middle finger of my right hand. I washed my hands after I threw the mouse out, and again after I checked the pantry. And again at work. I can see now what Lady Macbeth was going on about - the feel of that mouse is still on my fingers.

Given that the mouse hardly moved when I touched it and didn't run when I ran to the kitchen for something to catch it in, I think it was injured. But I stepped right over it three times today when I went to hit the snooze button on the cell phone's alarm. And I wouldn't have noticed it if I had been putting on my skirt anywhere else in the room. I'm lucky it didn't turn and bite me, I'd be having to drag it in for rabies testing and shit.

And then on the way to work it sounded like someone threw a rock at my car, and it bounced off the roof and down the back window. I checked it when I got to work, and there are marks in the rubber seal above the back window, very uniform looking marks. I don't know if that's related to the sound I heard, but damn, what the fuck is with today?

Let the games begin

2007-11-04T14:44:00.000-06:00

So, unofficially, the holiday season has begun. Christmas music in stores, Christmas decorations, Christmas commercials, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas. I ducked into a Wal-Mart yesterday to use their facilities. When I was there, I remembered I needed yarn, and decided to save myself a trip. I wandered through the store and found the most ridiculous things that, I fear, will be significant pieces of the holiday game this year.

Among them was the creepy mechanical horse:

The reason it caught my eye was that as I was coming around a corner, I saw its tail swish. I thought "Oh, a big stuffed horse. Some kid must have brushed past its tail in passing."

Then it turned its head and looked right the fuck at me. I actually took a step back, it was so creepy. I could only take a quick, 15-second video with my camera. Wal-Mart (like all national chains) frowns upon in-store photography, so I had to be covert.

I can see the "neat-o" factor in the toy, but really - what does it do? I saw no evidence of it walking or doing anything remotely interesting, besides going through its pre-programmed twitching and whinnying. Turns out it's called the Fur Real Butterscotch Pony, and apparently it's been around for years. They have a whole line: Cuddling Chimp, some kittens, and even a polar bear.

All of which is a parent's way of saying, "I can't be bothered to give you unconditional love or to even hug you when you need it, so here is some fake fur and a bunch of batteries. I am giving you this in exchange for your love."

Not a new sentiment by any means, but this mechanical doll crap certainly adds an element of creepy that wasn't there before.

And the beat goes on...

2007-10-24T08:24:00.000-05:00

Suntimes headline:

Man wins $2 mil. for false arrest
'THEY RUINED MY WHOLE LIFE' | Chicago Police allegedly framed suspect in case

Former Marine disarmed a drunken, belligerent, off-duty Chicago cop. Suddenly, he's up on attempted kidnapping charges. The court says he was framed by the cops, so he gets $2 million in Chicago tax dollars.

The part of this article that needs a little more explanation is this:

"Tuesday's verdict comes a week after another jury found other Chicago Police officers guilty of assaulting a teen with a screwdriver, resulting in a $4 million settlement against the Chicago Police Department. The teen was represented by the same firm."

Sounds kind of scary, eh? Like they were smacking this kid with a screwdriver, or maybe even stabbing him.

Yeah...no. That was sodomy. $4,000,000 worth of sodomy, courtesy of Chicago's finest.

So $6 million just this week has gone to cleaning up the messes made by our boys in blue. While one of my favorite blogs certainly makes a good point about people filing false complaints against the CPD, the fact is that there are probably more than a few completely power-crazed, insane, violent people on the force.

By "more than a few" I mean more than you would find in your average group of non-cops. Every group of people has a population percent that includes power-hungry, crazy jackasses. The CPD seems to just have more than its fair share.

If Daley is really going to turn this mess around, the discipline has to start now. And yes, bring in someone from the outside. Don't put someone who already owes favors all over town in the top spot of a corrupt system.

Relax, Daley - I meant the new chief, not you.

A flow chart to your friendship

2007-10-22T12:35:00.000-05:00

CTA Credit Card Theft

2007-10-22T07:48:00.000-05:00

One of the many Chicago-centric blogs that I persue on a regular basis has spilled the beans on a little CTA-related scandal. This is from Second City Cop:

"From the comments - shouldn't this be front page news?

* OFF TOPIC: On Thursday a CTA employee was in Area 4 under arrest for identity theft. She was charged Friday with felony identity theft for stealing the credit card numbers of riders paying for their monthly fare card with credit cards. Gave the numbers to her boyfriend and they then went and bought all kinds of nice things for themselves. While she was up in Area 4, we had a "reverend" arrive and demand to speak to her. The bosses told him no, so he then pulls out his CTA identification. He's a CTA board member, and he got her the job. The best part, Huberman himself called Area 4 and asked that this be handled quietly. Did not want any bad publicity since he's now asking for more money for the CTA from riders and taxpayers. After the holy man/CTA board member started making more waves about talking with his wayward subject phone calls were made to the CTA bigshots by Area 4 bosses. They told the CTA to get this guy out of Area 4 or this arrest was going on the 24 log and there would be a press conference. He walked out shortly after that and it was not put on the 24 log which is for 'newsworthy events". A CTA employee stealing from riders gets charged with a felony while the CTA is asking for more tax money and that's not newsworthy?

Hey media? We could use a break from our scandals. How about picking on CTA for a bit? Of course, if this is true, we'd have another scandal on our hands for not putting noteworthy news on the 24 hour report and covering for the west side reverend association.

Seems like the reverends are at the forefront of a number of scandals. Hmmmm."

---

Basically, this is why I don't sign up to give the CTA my credit card number. Why give information like that to a company that's basically about to have to file bankruptcy? Sheesh.

Lemon Bars

2007-10-12T23:54:00.001-05:00

Or Look! Something Worked! Maybe This Cooking Stuff isn't Bullshit After All!

I love lemon desserts. Cookies, cake, lemon bars, lemon, I don't know, pudding, whatever. Damn, that is tasty stuff! So, lemon bars.

Make some dough - butter, flour, sugar. Done. Mash it into the bottom of an 8x8 pan. I only have one shitty disposable one, but it's better than none, so....done. Lemon sauce mix: gotta get some finely grated lemon peel and some lemon juice. Got a lemon. This is where it got fun.

I don't have a zester or a fine grater. I have one grater and it's basically standard size. But it grated that peel up pretty well. I was making this while the oven was heating and while the squash was burning, so I was a little distracted and didn't get a shot of the grated peel. Cry me a river.

I needed three table spoons of lemon juice. Oops! I don't own a juicer thingy. Like the rolling pin thing, I improvised. I took the top from my pepper shaker:

Cleaned it really, really well, and used it as a juicer thingy:

And it was full of pulp and seeds, so I grabbed a coffee filter and filtered that stuff out.

The trick is when you're draining it, you press it (don't squeeze it) very gingerly with your fingertips so the filter doesn't break. Then you have some fine lemon juice:

It doesn't look like much, and I don't know what you're supposed to get from a lemon, but I got the three table spoons I needed with about half a table spoon left over. I drank it in victory, and regretted it immediately.

I couldn't cook this with the squash because it needed a 325 oven and currently my possessed, crazy ass oven was at about 425...ish. So I put the lemon mix in the fridge (it had eggs in it and I didn't know how long that squash was going to screw around in the oven before I could get the lemon bars in, and I didn't want it to go bad.)

I put the dough in to cook, it came out fine. I'm setting the timer for half what's recommended, then checking on it to see if my oven has vetoed my food.

I poured the lemon mix on the decent dough bottom, and it came out okay:

I wasn't expecting the dull crust on top, but when I cut it open, it was nice and custardy. Also, when I cut into it I realized I'd forgotten to grease the pan. Oh well.

It's also pretty sweet, but that might just be me. They were pretty good, though. If I can tone down the sweetness of it and buy a real 8x8 pan, I'd make these more often. They're pretty easy and quick.

And I'm basically really proud of myself for thinking of that juicing trick.

Acorn Squash

2007-10-12T23:26:00.000-05:00

Or, It Turns Out My Oven is Possessed by the Ghost of Julia Childs's Jealous Sister, Melba Childs, Who Could Never Get Her Creme to Properly Brulee, and is Taking Her Sister's Taunts of "Mebla Can't Toast" Out on My Fucking Oven

I got an oven thermometer because obviously, given the nut bread fiasco, the knob on the oven doesn't really know what goes on in my oven.

So I set it for 425. Took about 45 minutes to get there. I put the damn squash in, 15 minutes later, the oven was at 510. I'm going to just throw some pictures up here because I know you're smart enough to figure out how this went down, and I'm pretty excited about the lemon bars that I still want to post before I get to bed.

I wasn't at all surprised to discover that the squash wasn't cooked all the way through and the brown sugar hadn't quite dissolved. It was way too sweet. It was okay, though. I guess. Maybe I just can't take sugar like I used to. Maybe that's what being 30 and feeling 45 means. I love acorn squash, though, so I'll try a different recipe in the future. Also, I had to quadruple the stuffing mix (walnuts, raisins, brown sugar, butter) to get enough to fill all four squash halves.

Walnut-Filled Bread

2007-10-12T23:12:00.000-05:00

AKA Where You Goin' With That Flour?

OR What a Colossal Fucking Waste of Time

Look, I got this hand mixer on Tuesday, and I was basically trying not to spend any money til Friday when, you know, I was planning to get some money. So I chose the one thing that I had to buy the least amount of shit for. It was this loaf of bread with some walnuts baked in, and you braid the bread. I just needed some yeast (about $2) and some apple jelly (about $2).

I apparently also needed a fucking Pope-sanctioned miracle, a stove that doesn't suck, and a team of cooks to make sure I didn't fuck this up.

What I got was a 4-hour long ordeal that I never want to go through again. This is gonna be quick, kids. I've been putting off posting this for four days because I'm still pretty pissed about this.

Look! Very active yeast! (Very active yeast reminds me of very active politicians [feel free to insert your own fucking joke here. I'm serious. I hated this stupid bread. I hated it so much that I can't even pretend to make jokes when I'm typing about it.])

The apple jelly I bought was very interesting to the 16 year old who rang up my order. She was pretty impressed with how you could see right through it. The people at that store are pretty nice to me, even though I give them every reason to think I'm an escapee from the psych ward that's not too far from here, so I'm not going to make fun of her. Anyhow. Jelly:

And look, I used the mixer on the dough:

And the dough would not stop sucking up more and more flour. Every time I put the damn flour away I had to get it back out to make the dough not be a sticky, runny mess. I fucking hated it. Serious. Here is the before:

And the after:

I was pretty pissed off by this point, so after I let it rise for the prescribed amount of time, I tried to cheer myself up:

Apparently I succeeded in pissing off the dough. The dough and I were not friends at this point, we were mortal enemies locked in combat to the fucking death.

Anyhow. Stuffed it with the walnut stuffing:

Ran out of walnut stuffing:

And improvised:

(If you have to ask why the fat girl who is trying to quit smoking has a seemingly endless supply of Reese's peanut butter cups, you should be commended on your ability to navigate The Internet all on your own.)

Braided the nut-filled bread:

Made the other two strips of nut-filled bread into my first initial, in my futile attempt to make the bastard shit dough bow down and obey me:

The balls of dough are the ones with the Reese's cups inside.

So I set my oven for whatever the book said, and set the timer for 20 minutes. The book said to bake it for 30, but cover it with foil for the last ten minutes, so I set it for 20 "no-foil" minutes. This part basically still pisses me off.

I came back 20 minutes later and my bread looked like this:

Fuck you, dough. Fuck you. You too, stupid oven. You conspirital bastards. Fuck.

So anyhow the Reese's balls were gross, the nut bread braid was gross, and I threw the whole thing out. Damn. The bread was cooked through, but it tasted gross. It tasted like if you have a mouth full of stale, generic white bread and a mouthful of rotten walnuts. Fucking nasty. It looked good, though:

But damn. Damn.

Lesson learned: A "scant" tablespoon (of the nut mixture) means a not-full tablespoon. Also, dough is an asshole.

Disgusting

2007-10-12T07:56:00.001-05:00

So I got yelled at - again - for being rude to the guests. I thought some lady was asking me my name, and I said, "It's Meg." Apparently that's not what she was saying. I don't speak mumble-ese so I got written up.

My district manager - the tool with the goatee - says that I come off as mean and rude. So I smile more at people. Sometimes it's a maniacal smile because the guests do shit like walk off when I'm trying to give them directions, or ask me where the bathroom is and then act like "Straight ahead, it's on the left" is the stupidest answer they've ever heard. But I smile, so whatever.

This morning this lady comes in - obviously a crazy cat lady, with the pet products show across the street - and she wants to use the code to get into the computer room. I explain to her (with a smile on my face) that the code is only for after hours, and from 7-5 I'll let her in, she can check in at my desk and I'll walk her down there.

She comes out of the computer room to get a note pad and pen (not a big deal at all), and I get up to walk her back down to let her back in (not a big deal at all), and she says "Oh, well, I know the code, I can use that," and rattles off the code. I said, "That doesn't work during the day. From 7-5 I'm happy to let you in there." And then she says that she thinks I'm mad at her. She seems to take it as a personal affront that I stand in the doorway a second to make sure her computer is logged in and ready to go.

What the fuck? What the fuck did I do to this fucking bitch to piss her off? I apologize profusely, not because I'm actually sorry but because I don't want her to complain about me. She's the kind of bitch with nothing better to do than write mother fucking complaint letters. Fuck.

So she comes out of the computer room, and I apologize again. I said, "If I seem a little rude, I apologize, please let me know what I did or said so I can improve my customer service." And then she sees that I have my human genetics book out, and suddenly she wants to dote all over me with, "Oh, you're going back to school! Oh, isn't that wonderful? I'm so impressed! Oh, you're getting your degree!"

I would put up with this shit from my mom, because I love my mom and I know this is how she talks, even if it gets on my nerves. This lady was way over-doing it, and she was actually kind of doing it like you would talk to a child: "Oh, you put your shoes on the right feet today! It's that wonderful? I'm so impressed! Oh, you're growing up!"

And I had to sit here and be patronized by this stupid bitch for seven or eight minutes like this. She was cutting into my Friday morning appointment with Kathryn Tucker Windham, and I really wanted to quit talking about going back to school for some shitty associate degree that won't mean much more than my 10-year-old GED when it comes time to find a new job in February.

I was disgusted with myself. It made me feel gross and dirty, sitting here letting her speak to me that way instead of sending her off with my usual firm but polite, "You're all set. Let me know if you need anything else, here's my card. Have a great day!" And the more she talked the more I felt bad for her. I was getting paid to talk to her, I wasn't really interested in anything she had to say. And sitting here acting like I did give a shit was basically lying to her, but I had to do it so I could keep this shitty, thankless job until February.

I'm disgusted with myself now. If my shitty fucking bank decides that I can actually have the money I deposited last week, I think I'll take a cab after work to pick up my car instead of waiting til Tuesday. I could use a nice, relaxing drive right now.

Quiche Lorraine

2007-10-06T19:28:00.000-05:00

So I was reading this article about feeding yourself on $15 a week. He mentioned quiche. I've never had a quiche before, but my friends speak highly of it. I wouldn't know a quiche from a bag of caviar. But I had some eggs, and my handy dandy Betty Crocker book, so I had a go at it.

First up was the crust. Flour, salt, shortening, water. Easy! And so:

I don't have the fancy tools that normal people have, so sometimes I have to substitute. Here, I substituted the "cutting shortening into flour" trick that I watched my gramma do, and my mom showed me eons ago:

Lo and behold, after adding some water and getting kind of nervous, it became dough:

Now, like I said, I don't have the nifty tools other people do. Here, I substitute a pint glass for a rolling pin:

Worked pretty well, eh?

Well, I had to roll all that dough back onto the glass to lay it on the pie pan. That wasn't going to work, the glass was way too short. So I substituted again:

And now the crust is trimmed up and looking fine:

And I used the leftover crust to make some, um, cinnamon sugar squares or something. I don't know. It seemed like a good idea at the time:

While the oven was heating (because God forbid I should remember to turn it on before shit is ready to go in it), I started cooking the bacon. I can't fry bacon, I have some sort of deficiency. So, I substitute. I love my George Foreman grill:

While the bacon was cooking and the oven was heating, I mixed the eggs, milk, and, um, something else. It called for a dash of nutmeg, but it's cheaper to buy spices bagged instead of in a jar, so I got the bag. You can't get a dash from a bag, so I just took a teeny pinch. Like so:

And the oven's heated (you can tell when it stops making the popping noises. Also, there's sometimes a "fwoomp" noise.) So, in with the pie crust and cinnamon sugar squares. Meanwhile, the bacon's done!

So I take the bacon drippings and cook the onions til they're soft but not brown. I was going to stop about three or four minutes before I actually did. I was worried I might start browning 'em. But I figured, hey, I kind of like brown onions, so I'll keep cooking 'em. Most of my problems with cooking comes from worrying about over-cooking, and as a result, under cooking. I digress. Onions got cooked. Bacon got crumbled into the egg/milk mixture. Cheese and flour were added, and though the onions looked like they might be a bit much for the amount of mix that I had, I threw them in there anyway. Would Betty Crocker lie to me?

Ding! The crust is done. I don't want to get crazy here, but I think that looks like a damn fine crust:

The cinnamon squares, however, looked pretty shitty. They tasted even worse. Lesson learned: don't be putting the sugar on some dough and blithely throwing them in the oven. In the future, maybe put some butter on there and then sugar 'em when they get out. These were basically gross.

So one thing led to another, you know how it is. The whole shebang went into the pie pan, and it looked like it could actually be something resembling dinner.

Betty Crocker suggested that I use some foil to cover the crust so it doesn't burn. Well, the most important ingredient when I cook is "holy shit, please do what you can to not fuck this up," so the crust was foiled.

Now, my oven is kind of, well, bockety. The numbers on the knob are mostly worn off, and I don't think they actually correspond to what's going on in the oven anyhow. So I set it for what I hoped was 325, and set the timer for 35 minutes. It was supposed to cook for 35-40 minutes, or until a knife inserted near the center came out clean. The timer went off, I checked on it, it was still in a fairly liquid state. I set the timer for five more minutes and checked back on it. I did this about six times. For serious. It took an extra half hour.

But lo and fucking behold, it was a quiche.

It was a little undercooked. I think I need to get one of those oven thermometers. But it was fantastic, cheese and onion and bacon bits - holy crap,it was the best thing I've eaten all week. It more than made up for the mashed potato casserole from last week. I'm going to try it with tomatoes next week, but first I have to figure out how to roast 'em, since that would just add to the liquid. I think it might be good with some bell peppers, too, but I don't want to get too crazy here.

I'm getting my hand mixer this week, so there will be some mad crazy frenzy of whipped things forthcoming. That's fair warning.

Stupid hat

2007-10-06T14:31:00.000-05:00

So it's October in Chicago, and despite our high of 88 today, winter is going to be on us quicker than TMZ on Britney's panties, so I decided this year I'd be prepared. Instead of struggling from place to place playing chicken with frostbite. A nice scarf, a cute hat, some gloves. You know, winter stuff.

Since I quit smoking, I'm knitting like a crazy woman these days. So I figured I'd start with making a hat. Nothing fancy, just an easy peasy knitted hat. So I got my old copy of Stitch n Bitch, found a hat pattern, and got to work.

This is what I ended up with:

Which is fine for a newborn, but it's too dinky for my noggin:

So, I tried again. This time I added 20 stitches, so it was 84 instead of 64. It was a bit of an improvement:

But still looked kind of silly:

After all, I'm a pretty far cry from your average skate board hero.

So I'm trying it again, this time with 100 fluffy blue stitches and little more attention to detail on the stars. Third time's the charm, and all that.

Deep down inside, though, I think I could totally pull off wearing that dinky hat.

Vanilla Pudding

2007-10-03T07:52:00.000-05:00

Last night I decided I wanted some kind of dessert to reward myself for having to choke down the mess I made on Monday. I flipped through my handy dandy Betty Crocker cookbook and found that I had the ingredients for vanilla pudding.

Oh yes. It was pudding time.

Seemed pretty straightforward, didn't need a double boiler or anything fancy, just some eggs, flour, sugar and vanilla extract. So, I got to work.

Now, I know you folks think I'm screwing stuff up all the time, that maybe I'm not following directions or I'm taking shortcuts. This isn't the case. So I took pictures of each step so show you what was going on. Some of the pictures were re-created after the pudding was done, because there's a time for stirring the pudding and there's a time for taking pictures, and those two don't always coincide. Some were taken as I was cooking, because there are some things that can be done one-handed, and done well. Amiright, fellas?

Fist up: dry ingredients. Flour, sugar. Easy peasy:

Add three cups of milk:

Cook until bubbly, then cook for two more minutes. I don't really know what they mean by bubbly. The reasoning was, if they wanted it boiling or simmering, they would have said that. So I figured they meant when the little bubbles come up around the edges, like so:

Add one cup of this mix to two beaten eggs.

Done. Add this mix back into sauce pan. Got it. So, add one tablespoon of butter or margarine and 1 1/2 tsps of vanilla extract:

Pour it into a bowl and chill for four hours.

Yeah, that looks pretty gross. But it doesn't really look any worse than the picture in the book, so it must not be so bad.

Well, as we all know, patience is just another virtue that I don't possess, so I took a taste of it before I got it in the fridge. It wasn't very tasty. Kind of bland, really. I didn't have anything interesting or appropriate to put in it, so I broke up and melted a Reeses cup and cooked it in there.

It didn't taste any different at all, so I put in two more. I was feeling pretty good about this idea, but it still didn't really taste different, so I just put it back in the bowl and back in the fridge.

Two hours later I decided to try some.

Mmmmmm.

I got about halfway through what I had there in the bowl and started getting sick to my stomach. Way, way too sweet. Still didn't taste like chocolate at all, or peanut butter. It tasted like sugar free, fat free, generic pudding mix that might have passed its expiration date.

The good news is, I put some Parmesan/Romano cheese stuff on the mess I made on Monday, and it tasted fine.

Cavemen. No, seriously.

2007-10-03T07:29:00.000-05:00

We have a cafeteria here in the hotel. It has a TV, and usually at lunch time it's playing CNN. For the last two weeks, it's been playing Maury Povich. I would change it, but the glazed expressions of the hotel employees at they stare at the screen trembling with excitement to find out the paternity results makes me think that snapping them out of their semi-comatose state wouldn't be safe.

So, I sit and try to read my history book while the trash on the TV screech and holler and point accusing fingers at each other. For two weeks. I can actually hear my brain cells dying. They make little popping sounds, something between Rice Krispies and bubble wrap.

I mention Maury Povich because I think those missing brain cells are what made me decide to watch "Cavemen" on ABC. You know, the guys from the Geico commercials. The half-hour insurance show.

I thought I should watch it basically so I could bitch about how awful it is. It's fun to bitch about things when you're bogged down with work and school and life and the only time you get to vent is on your stupid blog that nobody reads.

I'm shocked and ashamed to say that the first episode was actually pretty funny. There was no talk of insurance. There was talk of cars, but only because one guy, Nick, was leaving the gym and one of the other guys needed a ride. The plot was that Nick was dating a homosapien, which is apparently huge in a bad way, and there was a lesser plot about one of the other guys (who had just moved to town) who wouldn't get off the phone with is ex-girlfriend.

Doesn't sound like much, but the one-liners and wit here well played and there are tiny injustices toward the cave men that echo injustices toward certain races and cultures in the world today. The landlady yells at Nick because his roommates are making "that primal grunting noise." She keeps calling him Joel, he keeps insisting he's Nick. She says, "Oh, hahahaha. Really? You guys should think about wearing a colored ribbon in your hair or something."

Doesn't sound funny, but it's delivered flawlessly and actually got a smirk out of me.

Pilot episodes don't always account for what a show will be (see "What About Joan"), but this one was pretty decent. There's nothing else on at 7:00 on Tuesdays, so unless you plan to *gasp* read a book on Tuesday nights or something, this would be a safe bet.

Mashed Potato Casserole

2007-10-02T08:08:00.000-05:00

So, in the popular Betty Crocker Cookbook, there's a recipe for something called Mashed Potato Casserole. Pretty straightforward, mash up some potatoes, brown some meat, cook some veggies. This is the sort ofA thing I could handle.

So I got a bag of potatoes (on sale - 8 pounds for 99 cents, a fucking bargain and a half) and peeled and cooked up three of 'em. I made mashed potatoes. I want to make it clear that I did not screw up some mashed potatoes.

The recipe said to use frozen green beans, but if you don't have that just some mixed veggies will do. So I cooked up about half of a 17-oz bag of veggie medley (carrots, cauliflower, and broccoli) for about 10 minutes like it said. I browned some meat. It said to boil some stewed tomatoes with other ingredients like Worcestershire sauce, the already-cooked veggies, and, I don't know, other stuff from the recipe. Nowhere in the instructions did it say where to put the meat, so I put it in with the tomato mixture. It seemed to make sense.

I thought I had tomato paste, but it turns out it was tomato sauce, but fuck - it's all just pureed tomatoes so I put the sauce in. I also thought I had a regular casserole dish, but it turns out that went where ever my potato peeler went, which essentially is someplace called "not my fucking kitchen where it belongs." So I put it in a kind of lasagna-type dish. I guess it's a casserole dish. Depends on who you ask, I guess.

Anyway, it said to put the mashed potatoes (which I did not fuck up) in dollops on top of the tomato mixture, and said "add paprika (optional)." I don't have any paprika, so I opted out of that. I turned on the oven (I'd forgotten to do it earlier) and that's when I realized I forgot to put the onions in the tomato mixture. I just kind of drizzled them on top, tried to poke them into the mix but damn! I'd just gotten done boiling that mess, so that was basically painful.

I threw the mess in the oven for 20 minutes, cleaned up all the dishes, and awaited my delicious not-from-a-box dinner.

Holy shit, what a waste of time. It's bland, the veggies (cooked for 10 minutes as instructed) were still hard in the middle. Not crisp, but hard. The onions on top thing kind of worked - they were the best part of the dish. The mashed potatoes, cooked uncovered as they were - got a crunchy and chewy outer texture. The stewed tomatoes were still cold inside, despite having been boiled and then baked for 20 minutes.

Maybe next time I'll double cook everything. Maybe next time I'll triple check all the ingredients, and stop cooking as soon as I realize that I don't have the proper stuff. Maybe next time I'll figure out how to cover the mashed potato peaks in foil.

Maybe next time I'll just heat up a frozen pizza and hope it doesn't set my apartment on fire. Lower goals = higher chance of success. Win.

We interrupt this blog for a slightly embarassing poetry moment

2007-09-25T20:17:00.000-05:00

>

It's not what I want
But it's where I want
The edge of the ocean, the deep blue lip of the world
Away from you, away from them,
just old dilapidated me in this old dilapidated place.

3 hours a day makes me a professional's professional

2007-09-25T20:06:00.000-05:00

Strolling down Jackson in the bowels of Oak Park, I can hear the roar of the airplane overhead and the roar of the blue line behind me. To the untrained ear it's the same noise, the same roar, the same swift, onward motion.

There are subtle differences. The airplane soars over, going somewhere - running away and leaving it all behind. Just like your daydreams, or the latest love of your life. Full of escape and possibility and perky attendants, the plane has had enough and is leaving for better climes.

The el clatters along, rattling, jarring you to the bone like roller skates on old sidewalks or the fathomless pit of your soul when you realize you've made the biggest mistake of your life. The el, cranky and ornery and mean, rumbles through the night. Staying its ground. Getting the last word in.

Woodstock!

2007-09-23T12:54:00.000-05:00

Some friends and I went to Woodstock yesterday. No, the one in Illinois, where they filmed "Groundhog Day." We made some other stops. More pics here.

Here's the flash show:

Grand & Milwaulkee

2007-09-17T16:18:00.000-05:00

There's a strange blue building on the corner of Grand & Milwaukee that seems to attract some interesting graffiti. I took some pics of it & the surrounding area. I have a whole thing here that I wrote to go with it, but it'll have to wait til tomorrow:

Here's the flash thing:

The little things

2007-09-14T10:45:00.000-05:00

So every time someone needs to access the internet at my hotel, I walk them down to the computer room. On the short walk down the hall I explain to them the price for printing, that they can come to me with any questions, etc.

Just now this complete tool came by and I told him how much we charge for printing. He said, "You guys are RAPING me." I ignored him completely and just kept talking.

We got to the door and I was in the middle of saying, "The first computer on your left is ready to go online." I got as far as, "The first-" and he pulled the door. It's locked. I had the key card in my hand and refrained from explaining to him that I'm walking him down there specifically to unlock the door. He dropped his arm to his side. I continued, 'The first comp-" and he pulled the door again. I stopped talking and looked at him out of the corner of my eye like maybe he was some sort of imbecile who needed help putting his pants on the right way every morning. He looked back at me like I was giving him some sort of quiz full of trick questions. I reached across him and held the key card up to the reader to unlock the door, but it was pretty hard to keep from laughing right in his face.

Oh, yes, it's one of those days when the little things are everything. Real coffee from Dunkin Donuts, a $5 tip from some jackass customer two hours ago, being able to watch the WGN news in the break room this morning - these are the things that are making this extended weekend the finest kind that it can be.

Oh, no! Not Uncle Ben!

2007-09-04T19:12:00.000-05:00

Well, apparently I'm not one of those people who learns from my mistakes. Remember those brownies that I FUBAR'd? Well, kids, tonight it's Uncle Ben. Not just plain old Uncle Ben, but Uncle Ben Boil-in-Bag - the easy stuff. The stuff made for morons who can't figure out how to cook rice. Morons like me.

First, let me explain. I used to measure out the water to make mac n cheese. I mean, if it called for 6 cups or quarts or whatever the hell, and I couldn't find the right measuring cup, I didn't make mac n cheese. This went on until I was seventeen, and my best friend at the time explained (very slowly) that the water is drained so it doesn't really matter how much water you use, as long as it's enough to just cook the noodles. It was another two years before I quit cooking them in a big pot like you would use to make chili for six people. For serious. To this day I get kind of nervous making it in a sauce pan.

So, when the directions on the box said "In a 2-qt. saucepan, submerge unopened bag of rice in 4 cups of water," I figured - fuck it, you're just gonna drain it. So I got the biggest sauce pan and I filled it up with water, let it boil, and I put in the bag. 12 minutes later I took the bag out, opened it up, and poured the rice on a plate. Then I covered the rice with some of the sauce from the frozen Sesame Chicken mess that I was making and settled in for a delicious dinner. I scooped up a nice forkful of saucy rice and I was absolutely crushed when every grain in my mouth crunched between my teeth.

Stupid rice. So I just ate the chicken. Then I noticed something. The rice, it looked like it had little...well...look for yourself:

Doesn't it kind of remind you of that scene in "Lost Boys" where first it's rice, then it's maggots, then it's rice? Yeah, this basically looks like a maggot with a full stomach to me. Sorry, but it does.

So much for sesame chicken. If I get any kind of appetite back, it's gonna be Pringles for dinner.

Fraggle lady

2007-08-24T11:17:00.000-05:00

Riding the el to and from work is, if nothing else, the best cross-section of humanity available in any one place or time. This is what happened last night:

This lady gets on the el over by County Hospital. She has blond hair, curly, with hot pink stripes it in. She hasn't brushed it today, she looks like a Fraggle. She's on her cell phone. Apparently she'd been sitting at County all day in the hard, straight-back chairs and she was in pain. They had been giving her a hard time. She'd been waiting 13 hours. On the phone, she wails things like:

"They keep running these TESTS. They can't see the problem with TESTS. They have to see INSIDE MY BODY."

And I smirk because it's funny to see a Fraggle talking about people having to see inside her body. Next to where she's sitting, there's a jittery man standing in dirty jeans and a torn t-shirt. The shirt used to be white but now it's covered in the grime and grit of life on the street. He's either jacking off or peeing on himself, which is better than my first thought, which was he was cracked out. Having a grown man pee himself while a Fraggle says things like "I'm going to go home and self-medicate. I will medicate myself. Today is Wednesday, right? Thursday? What the FUCK happened to Wednesday?" is funnier than you'd think.

The man sits down, squeezes his knees together but the telltale smell of piss fills the train car. The lady is saying, "I can't...no...I can't use the phone during the day when I'm not in Texas." Does she realize she's in Chicago? And these are daytime minutes? The fact that she could mistake this blue line train for the Lone Star State makes me giggle quietly to myself, my face turned toward the window, hoping she can't see.

There's a mom and two little kids - one maybe 2 years old, and the other an infant - and the 2-year old is looking at the Fraggle with wide eyes. The Fraggle says, "They run tests but they won't get them back for a week and after a week I'll be gone - gone!"

The man with the wet crotch and jittery hands gets up and exits the train. It's been raining hard for about five stops now. The Fraggle is saying, "I'll just go home tonight and I think I should be blond again. I'll go get some hair dye on the way home, wherever. Whatever."

As if dying her hair will cure all of her medical woes. I have my face buried in my satchel, trying not to laugh out loud because you don't want to laugh at the crazies when you're on the train. There's nowhere to run when they come after you.

The mom and the two kids exit the train, holding up newspapers to protect themselves from the wind and the rain. The little girl shows no signs of fear as she and her mom and sibling march into the night. The storm swallows them up as our train abandons them to the lightening and thunder that are infesting the sky.

Fraggle ends her call, walks up and down the train once, twice. Halfway through the third lap she stops and her head whips around to the windows and the weather outside. "OH MY GOD!" she wails. "OH MY GOD! I DON'T EVEN HAVE AN UMBRELLA OR ANYTHING! OH GOD! OH GOD!"

She leaps off the train at the next stop, presumably to color her hair or trek back to Fraggle Rock, or maybe to melt as the rain touches her skin. After the doors close, my eyes are wet from giggling and the prospect of walking home in the rain and wind doesn't seem so bad; the giggling keeps the gloom at bay. It's a miniature euphoria that keeps me grinning all the way home.

Is there nothing those Fraggles can't do?

CTA Rally

2007-08-23T07:15:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite blogs, The CTA Tattler, mentioned that there's a rally at the Thompson Center on the 28th. It's at 11:30. That's 11:30 a.m., on a Tuesday.

I don't understand. Do people not have jobs? Who the hell can just roll out to the Thompson center at 11:30? Maybe if you work near there, you can take your lunch really early and go down there, but you'll only be there about 15 minutes before you have to go back to work.

Hold a rally when the people who are affected the most by the service cuts can be there. People with no alternate transportation, people who rely on the CTA to put food on the table or pay a family member's medical bills. People who work 10, 12, 14 hours a day and can't afford a car because they're working 14 hours doing all the dirty jobs that you don't want to do, and they're doing them for minimum wage.

Damn. Use some sense when you're putting together a rally, for fuck's sake. Get together a 24-hour rally, where people can come before or after work, or on their way to school. Make a rally that everybody can participate in, not just the lucky few who have dwaddling time around 11:30 every day, or who have enough sick days that they can call in. It's our CTA, too. Our designated driver on those late nights, our carpool to and from work. Let us rally around her success, too.

Poor Doxology

2007-08-21T08:25:00.001-05:00

Remember that scene in "Neverending Story" where Atrayu had to watch his trusty horse, Artax, sink to a miserable death in the Swamp of Sadness? That's basically what's going on with my car.

My poor car, Doxology. Named after Sam Hamilton's horse, which is a reference to Steinbeck's "East of Eden" for those of you not in the know.

I know it's stupid, it's just a car, it's not a horse or a family member or even alive at all, but damn - it's Doxology. That car has been there for more with more consistency and grace than anyone else I've known in the six years I've had him. He's moved me more times than I can count - sometimes across town and once it was to Maryland. On the drive back from Maryland, with 90% of everything I owned crammed into every available inch of the car, a blizzard chased us through five states for two days. Doxology held on, though - we got through just fine.

When we got t-boned in that hit and run, he still ran. You couldn't use the passenger door at all, and ever since then the wind might catch that door just the wrong way and give the car an unexpected tug, but he could stil get from point A to point B. He wasn't pretty, but I'm not a proud person, so it didn't matter.

I have this family that isn't my family. I call them my adopted family, which is close enough and not really the point of the story. The youngest daughter in the family, she and I are pretty close, like sisters. At least, we were when she lived here. On warm summer nights she and I would ride around in Doxology - through lower Wacker Drive, up Lake Shore Drive, around that park across the street from Lincoln Park Zoo, then back home. Just me and my sister, blaring music and joyriding. I miss having her here, miss her fucking with the radio and throwing trash out the window, no matter how much I yelled at her for it.

Sometimes when I drive along now, I remember when I was in Maryland and my sister's kids were in the car. The youngest would crawl up to her car seat and say, "Aunt Maggie, you have to clean this car!" And I'd laugh and tell her to make a car payment and I'd think about it.

I remember driving with all three of my sister's kids one day after there had been a lot of snow. My back window was caked in snow. I warmed up the car but couldn't find the snow brush, so the snow stayed on the back window. As we rounded a corner, the kids were all turned around (as best they could, being buckled in) trying to watch the patch slide off the back. It slid a little one way, sort of teasing the audience. It slid up when we hit a bump, then back down; its audience was captive and brimming with excitement. When it finally slid off into a ditch, the kids cheered like it was some great accomplishment. Their cheers still ring in my ears sometimes, when I need a reason to smile.

Doxology has been there for me when I'm scared, or excited, or crying so hard I can barely drive. It's helped deliver me and countless friends home safely. Most of those friends are now scattered and gone, but Doxology and I still muddle through.

Long gone are the days when I'd drive down to Kankakee just for the sake of going for a drive in the middle of the night. Hell, for the past three weeks I considered myself lucky if I could make it over the bridge at the end of my street. Gone are the days I'd spend waiting to get back to my car, where I had the day's only guaranteed air conditioning or heat, depending on the season.

Poor Dox. I changed his plug wires last night, it made everything worse. I tried to drive around the block, he froze up on me. The steering wheel locked when I was in an intersection with moving traffic. I had to re-start him four times just to get back around the rest of the block. He's twelve years old, with 122,000 miles. That's pretty good for an Escort that's been through what he's been through. A friend of mine back east says it's time to do the respectful thing and just let him go out with some dignity. She's not the one facing a 90-minute commute (each way) now that Dox has two tires in the grave. She's also not the one who has only been able to count on Dox and Dox alone all these years. Friends, lovers, family - they came and went. Dox held on. Dox got me where I needed to go. Dox was my 2-door sanctuary with a hatch back and a busted dome light. Dox was my Artax, and my empty wallet is his Swamp of Sadness.

Get it together, LPZ

2007-08-20T10:47:00.000-05:00

I went to the Lincoln Park Zoo on Saturday. I could have gone back to the Brookfield Zoo to try to re-take some of the pics I lost when the old camera was stolen, but that's like $20 + parking and shit. LPZ is free, so fuck that Brookfield noise.

Rain reared its ugly head while I was waiting for the #22 bus to whisk me away. I thought, "Nah, it's not going to rain. Tom Skilling said no, so...no. This'll pass by the time I get to the zoo."

I got to the zoo and it was just a drizzle, so I headed indoors to the monkey house. The monkey house wasn't big, and each display area (for lack of a better term) seemed cramped and crowded compared to the spacious primate digs at Brookfield. The monkeys, usually a source of mirth and frivolous laughter, were pretty depressing. They were just sitting around. One or two of them got the gumption to run around, but then they settled down.

The outdoor monkey area was awash in a horrid stench that was hard to take even in the cleansing rain. Green, scary looking water flowed down the waterfall there, and I didn't linger. It was depressing. The baboons out there couldn't even get out of the rain - there was no shelter there. They sat slumped against fake rocks looking dejected and unamused. The most depressing part was how resigned they looked to their current state of affairs. If I were a 400 pound baboon stuck in that shitty habitat, I would hell of make some noise about it. Rip open some fake rocks, start hurling some rock facade at those fucking kids who won't shut up. I would get down to business.

The poor fish, they were all jammed up together. Every fish display I saw, they were packed in like sardines. One display had a hippo in there, too. The whole display was probably smaller than my apartment, which is two rooms plus a bathroom and a kitchen. That's it. And it's bigger than the place where this hippo has to live with all these fish. 90% of the display is water, poor Hippo has two little dry areas at each end of the water. Fucking depressing.

Blurry pic of hippo:

Hippo comes:

Hippo goes:

Look at this, you can see the back wall. It's painted blue so as to fool the casual observer, who might not notice the shadows of the fish on the wall:

The cat house was only half full. The cats that were there looked emaciated and sad. One of them jumped into the gully between the habitat and the place where we all stand around leering. He was pretty pissed off when he got down there:

There was one lonely polar bear. He actually had quite a nice enclosure. I couldn't get a decent shot of it because of the rain, but he had a nice rock area and a big swimming pool. But he kept just swimming around in a circle in one little corner of the pool. It was as if he knew full well that there was no point in going to the other end of the pool because it was the same depressing scene over there, so it was better to save his energy and just hang out in his corner.

The camels all stood together as if they were scared to be more than five feet from each other. One of the camels had a bockety hump:

All in all, a pretty fucking depressing day at the zoo. It was fun to watch the ducks, though. And the kids were kind of funny when they were standing by the bat display and the bats would come flying right at them, sense the glass then fly the other way. It would have been depressing if those kids weren't screaming bloody murder and running away.

It wasn't the rain that made it depressing, it was the lack of happy animals. What the hell kind of zoo doesn't have a fucking elephant?

You get what you pay for, I guess. From here on out, it's Brookfield zoo all the way.

Oh, here are some of the pics I took there. I'll add more later:

Adventures in Cooking!

2007-08-14T21:15:00.000-05:00

So, I had this:

But not this:

So I added water instead.

For those of you unfamiliar with my cooking history, I have been known to screw up Hamburger Helper. No, I'm not kidding. So the results of my willy-nilly ingredient substitutions are a surprise to only me. But I digress.

I tried to get a shot of the mixture as it actually boiled in the oven, but my slumlord doesn't think a kitchen needs much lighting and the flash from the camera seemed to scare the concoction and send it scurrying further back into the oven. So, here's a shot of what it looked like when it came out of the oven:

If you want to know how that watery bit tastes, suck on a tootsie roll and wash it down with a 60/40 mix of water and oil. Don't forget to use the water from the rusty tap down in the basement!

Mmmmmm what a morsel!

Looks almost good enough to eat, eh?

For those of you wondering what a treat like this tastes like, I have put together this helpful montage of what happened when I tried to actually eat this tasty treat. Please to enjoy:

Voyeurism

2007-08-12T19:47:00.000-05:00

It didn't look like much, but it was my green castle in the vast and spectral sky. Night after night I'd watch you from my perch as you scuttled by on your way from point A to point B and all stops in between. Your loves, your mundane petty arguments, your grief - I saw it all. And you saw naught of me, hidden as I was in my green castle, above your heads and beyond your secrets.

And then the day came, it was time to make myself known. The day none of you will ever forget: when I stormed out of my castle, wielding a shotgun and a purpose.

Sunflower field

2007-08-12T19:44:00.000-05:00

The smell of dew settling on grass in the wee hours of the night - the darkest part of night before the dawn sheds some light on the subject - that's the smell that always takes me back to this field.

Sweet sunflower field, it held my childhood dreams and adventures. It was where I hid and sought, where I brought my private thoughts and public tantrums. A few years later, it was where I brought the boys who claimed to love me, and we'd make love under these white stars and yellow petals and for a few hours, at least, I could believe them.

Oak Park

2007-08-12T00:05:00.000-05:00

Went for a stroll today around Oak Park, a little hell of liberal town that starts where Chicago leaves off, geographically.

Book fair

2007-08-04T15:41:00.000-05:00

I went to a book fair today at my old high school. I haven't stepped foot in this place in eleven years. I expected to have old, fond memories rush back to me as I stepped foot in the door. Old drama, old love, old friends were supposed to fill my nostalgia deprived mind as I made my way through the glass doors and sauntered through the entry hall.

But it wasn't there. None of it. Not a lick. I was with two friends who I didn't know when we were students here. It was a big school. We pointed out some differences in the place, but nothing really sat with me and said, "I remember seeing Rob F. over by those doors every day at lunch," or "Isn't this where Amy punched Jody because of Adam?"

This was no longer a brick-and-mortar harbinger of my youth. This place held no solace for me, no great inspiration of what it means to have gone out in the world and live a life of my own for ten years. My youth is now held in my mind, and in random messages on MySpace from old schoolmates who track me down from time to time. The friends I had when I was in high school have blown to the four winds. Even the ones I kept in touch with regularly are no longer a part of my life. I let the last one go down his alcohol-induced rabbit hole six months ago.

But the books! Oh, the books brought back memories. "Yellow Raft in Blue Water" was on every table in the room. It was required reading for sophomores at the school. Other titles from English class peered at me between broken spines of less nostalgic tomes to remind me of this teacher or that class, or that fight I was in where I lost this book.

The smell of the old books brought back years and years of memories, from books handed down to me from my mom or libraries where I spent my time with books that didn't harass or make fun of me like my siblings and classmates. Most people describe it as a musty smell. To me, it smells like youth and weary happiness. Flipping through an old hardcover with a spine that always makes that old hardcover noise that's half-squeak, half-pop - that's where my youth lives. In Dicey's Song and Behind the Attic Wall and myriad other stories that swept me out of my humdrum life and took me everywhere I needed to go, that's where my solace lives.

Spending an hour in that old cafeteria among the yellowed pages of homeless books was like my own little Saturday afternoon heaven in the adolescent hell that I've too many grudges against.

No, you can't go home again. But sometimes, unexpectedly, your home - and your youth - can find you all too easily.

Venetian Night & Updated Chicago Album

2007-07-30T09:44:00.000-05:00

I'm sure you're all glad to know that I went to Venetian Night on Saturday and got some interesting shots:

I also added to the Chicago album:

Please try to contain yourselves!

Venetian night flash show:

Updated Chicago flash show:

In non-digital news, I've started the book that I've been meaning to write for about 20 years now. It seems to be going okay as there are myriad resources at my disposal via the internet and other writers. It's my non-writer friends, the ones I've known ten years who don't seem to understand (or maybe they don't care) what a chore writing a book is. They don't seem concerned with the fact that my lifelong dream is suddenly in my grasp. They just want to know why I wasn't there for dinner on Friday.

And it's a good sign, it shows that my friends find no excuse acceptable when it means I'm not spending quality time with them. But to hear the absolute lack of interest when I say, "Well, I've been writing. I've finally started that book I've been meaning to write since I was 8." Said it to four people last night, not one of those people even asked what it was about. Maybe it's egotistical to think anybody would - or should - care, but damn...I've known these people ten years, they could ask least ask, if only for the sake of being polite.

Grateful or greedy?

2007-07-12T21:12:00.001-05:00

I got a digital camera for my holiday bonus. A nice one, shiny, lots of features. Spring sprung, I started taking my camera out just to take interesting shots. It became a little more than a hobby, a little less than an obsession. An excuse to get out of the house, a conversation piece, a way to express myself.

I took pictures of interesting outings, and pictures of mundane outings. I recorded people's lives to satisfy my own curiosity. It became a part of me, my right arm. When I could find no one to go to things with, I went alone and took my camera for company. The camera justified my presence. I was a photographer, a semi-professional flaneur, I wasn't just some weirdo who stood out of place.

The camera got lost. The camera and a gigabyte worth of pictures from the zoo, on a sweltering Saturday afternoon. Heartbreak, honestly, as silly as it seems. I'd finally found an outlet that suited me better than writing. Writing was a chore, I always use too many words and, in my own eyes, all of those words were contrived, inadequate and poorly placed.

But a picture - a picture is worth a thousand words. Maybe more, maybe less, but a contrived picture is more appealing than a contrived essay about a bridge from my childhood. And so, visually mute, I prepared myself for a mundane return to writing as my only creative outlet.

And then there was hope. A woman living in Rhode Island with whom I'd talked online for over a year (but never personally met) offered to get me a replacement. I'm not a fan of gifts out of the blue, I'm not a fan of taking things I haven't earned. I turned her down, she persisted. I chose a decent camera, sent her the information. She came back with the shinier model, the one I was saving to get myself for a graduation present.

And I'm grateful. The kindness she showed me and the swiftness with which she bestowed it was shocking. I can't know how to thank her, I can't know how to earn this. I feel like a swindler, a cheat. All of the problems in the world, and here I am acting like the gift of a digital camera is the greatest thing to have happened in decades. But it means something, to my ego and my heart, to know that people out there give a shit.

I'm grateful. I have my voice back, I have things to look forward to again. This weekend is the Chinatown Festival. I'm looking forward to taking colorful pictures of dragons and traditional costumes, exotic food and crowded streets to post to a billion strangers on the internet. Maybe it's pathetic, to find so much faith in humanity in such an act. "Oooh, I got something shiny, there must be good people in the world after all." And it's probably pathetic to get excited about taking pictures for strangers. But we each have our own joys in life, though it may take years or decades or an entire lifetime to find them. This is mine. She gave me back my joy.

And this Sunday at the Chinatown festival, I'm going to start earning it.

Blah blah blah

2007-07-11T10:13:00.000-05:00

It didn't look like much, just two ramshackle buildings set out in the middle of nowhere.

We didn't look like much, a bunch of dirty twenty-somethings planting organic food, selling turnips on the side of the road. Trying to make the world a more peaceful place. The townsfolk stayed away from us, called us "hippies" and "tree huggers." They didn't like our kind.

They didn't know about the guns. They never looked in the bottom of our well to see who was living down there. Well, "living" is kind of using the term loosely.

This was the perfect cover, this stupid hippie compound. And the turnips weren't half bad, either.

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2007-07-05T08:52:00.000-05:00

The sun drooled down over the horizon, over that field of dandelions and lightening bugs. The cool night air kissed our skin and eavesdropped on our great plans. We were full of plans that day, my love and I. We were full of plans, of vim and vigor and all the passion that youth can consume. It seems a lifetime ago, in another world, in another heart that beat with more ferocity and reckless grace than the heart I now have.

Our youth was nothing but frolic and adventure, our future became nothing but heartache and bloodshed.