I just finished the seasonal closet purge, and I heartlessly ditched suits I bought just this spring - not even because they no longer fit, or had worn out - because I had grown to hate them.
I can't turn my back on old jeans, though. You see here a progression of jeans, from 16w to 20w. This is several years worth of jeans. I think I must look back on them like old photos. See those18Ms? I wore that to Niagara Falls.
A confession: I kept my size 8 jeans from college for years.
Check this out. After six weeks of illness (and a few weeks of laziness preceding) I finally re-hung some prints Gary knocked down.
Don't worry, I just straightened out the second from the left.
The thing is, this means I am returned to health.
I have missed my health, such as it is. Before the Wild Boar Plague began, I was thinking of a friend who just lost a terrific amount of weight due to a balanced diet and exercise, and then she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Whenever the people suggest diet and exercise will make me healthy, I think: Ship has sailed. Sailed, boarded by pirates, plastered with barnacles and sunk.
I know I am returning to what I call health because Gary has segued from fellow sufferer to bitter sufferer. "GET ME THE BENDY STRAWS WHY DON'T YOU EVER BUY THE RIGHT TYPE OF COUGH MEDICINE STOP TOUCHING ME." That's okay, I know what he's going through. In fact, he's worse than I've been, and I am thrilled. Because I'm on immuno-suppressant drugs for the clinical trial and he is my Control. I expected to be so much worse than he is.
Granted, those frames took me the entire day, with three naps. Still, I fell better. I hope none of you ever get whatever the hell this has been.
Oh! And speaking of restored health ask me about my labia! Peachy and pink and perfect, thank you. No swelling, no bleeding this last month, and no new holes. So, diagnosis: strange virus. Don't know where I got it, so. don't rub your crotch across anywhere my labia have been. This PSA brought to you by the Missouri Crotch Council.
So these thoughts crossed my mind this afternoon:
"So evidently someone's made a movie out of this children's book, Where the Wild Things Are. Must be after my time. I know that the made the Narnia books into a movie, but that's really more of a young adult book. Isn't this wild things book like a bedtime story book? I'm assuming that it must be, because I'd never heard of it before this year. I might have seen it in a book store, and the name Maurice Sendak is familiar, but I don't know why."
My childhood bedtime books were, Pat the Bunny, Pat the Cat, The King the Mice and the Cheese, Go Dog Go, and the Richard Scarry Dictionary.
I looked up Where the Wild Things are on Wikipedia and found it was first published in '63 when I was one (count it! one). Since I could read The King the Mice and the Cheese when I was four (not bragging, it had elephants, which is almost my name) I think I missed the Wild Things generation.
I totally missed Goodnight Moon, and that would have been well before I was born. Until I just looked it up I thought it was a '90s book.
While I found the Storybook Dictionary delightfully literate, the Pat The series was woefully lacking in plot.
What children's books do you remember?
Last Saturday I fell asleep in the nest and woke up dreaming of chocolate babka. I assumed I must have fallen asleep during that episode of Seinfeld, but the tivO denied that it had switched to that station. I can only guess NPR or CNN brought up babkas.
"I could make a babka," I thought, "I can cook anything." I looked up babka recipes. Way too hard.
"I could buy a babka," I thought, "I can buy one on-line." Then, whoa. Thirty bucks for a babka! And twenty for shipping. More research found a ten buck babka. With forty dollars shipping.
"I could make a babka," I thought, "It would save fifty bucks."
"What is it with you and this babka obsession?" Marcia asked. "I've never even had a babka. I think it's a New York thing."
I should have shown her a photo.
Chocolate in bread. I read up on a few more recipes and noticed many of them talked about the "paddle" and how one should beat the dough until there are strings from the bowl to the "paddle." I assumed this strange "paddle" came with one of those fancy stand mixers like a KitchenAid.
The cheapest one cost six babkas with shipping.
"Marcia," I asked, "Do you have a stand mixer?"
"I used to have my grandmother's stand mixer until it finally burned up. It was a KitchenAid."
I specifically didn't want to buy a KitchenAid, because even though I have been on a good food run this past month (egg tartlets, beef stroganoff, chinese pork ribs), I'm not usually a good cook. I rely on luck. The food gods smile sometimes. And I don't want to be the yuppie middle-aged suburban professional who heats up fishsticks in her Gaggenau oven.
But I am. So I found a recipe and a KitchenAid for only three babkas with shipping at the Best Buy. And today I used it. Look at me all fancy with the dough hook.
That thing made amazing fluffy egg whites, too.
I would show you the step-by-step but I got caught up in the continuing failure-by-failure. First off, I did roll out a giant square and spread chocolate filling and egg whites on it. Then I rolled it up like a jellyroll, only imagine rolling nacho cheese dip up in tissue paper. Then I was supposed to twist the big soggy mess in my hands five times? I twisted it once and dumped it in the pan. But I still had hope. And I had another chance; I was making two loaves. I confidently baked them.
Here are The Babka and its twin brother, lesser babka.
I was so excited! I let them rest and then carved one in half.
Sooooooo disappointing. I did everything right. I even bought a KitchenAid. It looks nothing like the photo at the top.
I think Babkas are one of those things you have to have a heritage to be able to cook, like Chinese fried rice. Perhaps other people can't cook fishsticks.
How to make tonight's dinner:
Then, you will have this:
Which, I would like to say, are finely nuanced tasty hash browns with cashews, chicken, and proscuitto. I would like to say that but I can't. It's really awful. It's oil suspended in a potato emulsification.
So, three dishes. Pea Soup: one chuck up. Steak with Sake and Shiitake: great, seriously great but yes, fatty. Potato Salad ("A Great Light Dish for a Summer Evening," ha) unspeakably bad.
It all started with this sign:
Does the phrasing of these grocery signs not imply there is an assumed contract that one only gets the deal if one purchases ten packages? The sign does not say, "Each package is a dollar." The cashier usually gathers them up so they can ring them up together, and you know they count them. Usually the signs expect me to do hard math, like 15 for $12, and I have no idea if that's a good deal.
So I bought my required ten packages and went up to the self-serve checkout, where I rang up the first package of blackberries.
"1 @ $1.00," said the screen.
Wha? I thought, how does the machine even know I bought all ten packages? It's like - It's like they're just one for a dollar! Still, I thought, someone might stop me at the door and make me pay a surcharge. Better to get all ten.
When Gary saw the ten packages of blackberries on the counter, he squawked, "TEN packages! We'll never eat TEN packages! What made you buy -"
"They were ten for ten dollars."
"Ellen, you KNOW you don't HAVE to buy all ten."
Well, no, thank you, I didn't really know that (though I have long suspected.) Of course when faced with 60 ounces of blackberries Gary immediately found blackberries very off-putting, so instead of letting them rot I made a pie. A ten-dollar pie. Which, six hours later is half-gone. That's five ounces per hour at 85 cents an hour. Maybe. I have no idea. But, pie!
I seem to be slowly piecing together my perfect weekend out of all the weekends this month. The Scooba cleaned the floors this morning, there will be a thunderstorm here in about ten minutes, and there was some Breaking News (even though someone did die). And and now I've had a ridiculously good dinner at an unusual place.
Anyway, Friday we were heading for Casa Gallardo at Westport when we saw a "Fusion Tapas / Vodka Bar" named IceKitchen (the K is backwards). We plunked our plump little selves down in a booth and begged the waitresses patience. I haven't had very much in the way of tapas, but I've had dim sum more than once.
More important, I haven't had fusion food ever, as far as I can tell, because even though the vodka ice bar was made for the rangy West County females, fusion tapas was made for me. ME the middle-aged woman who eats anything now as long as I haven't tasted it before.
A warning - damn - we have never spent that much money at a restaurant, ever. This might be because I had a Dreamsicle martini and Gary had so much Sangria I had to drive him home. (That would be 1.5 Sangrias.) In addition, we had a mad amount of tapas.
We started with three things from the light tapas menu.
First, a "flight" of soups. On the left: elephant garlic, on the right: corn chowder, in the middle: tortilla soup that Gary picked up and DOWNED LIKE A SHOT. To be fair, this was after I placed dibs on the corn chowder. The chowder had corn and leeks and sweet potatoes and was full of things I've never had with corn.
Then, since Gary had started the evening demanding asparagus, we had Asparagus Prosciutto salad:
Okay, these are the ingredients I'm sure of: asparagus and prosciutto and fried quail egg. Then there was some vegetation and other materials (yellow stuff, green stuff). I don't know, but it was great.
Then we added flatbread.
Okay, that's a very thin crusty / chewy flatbread, with broccoli and flank steak, carrots, and then - rice noodles on top! I am putting rice noodles on top of everything I make in the future. It'll be like the time Mom served chicken breast with Campbells Cream of Mushroom topped with Pepperidge Farm Herb Dressing paired with green beans topped with Pepperidge Farm Herb Dressing. I was ready for anything next.
I stopped taking photos and we just charged into all the rest of the food. (Speaking of charged - yes, I think we were only at 15 bucks apiece. Except for the drinks.)
The next plates we moved from the light tapas menu into the signature tapas menu. The portions were the size of entrees elsewhere. For example, next we had bison fillet with Guinness (?) and honey (?) and lobster and quinona. And maybe, I don't know, strawberries. Hell. Could have been.
Now, Gary ordered this one: Pig Belly with flash-fried cabbage and potato cakes annnnddddd ...... buttermilk tuna puree? Something weird. Gary nibbled a bit on the pig belly.
"Tastes kind of fatty."
He carved off a minuscule sliver of Edge du Pig Belly and claimed the edge was crispier. Then he ate the cabbage and I ate the potato cakes and we apologized to the waitress, because six perfectly good slices of pig fat went untouched.
We finished up with dessert, because Gary claimed he was drunk on pig belly. (There is an actual disorder called pig belly. I think it's a reaction starving people have to protein.) So we had the chocolate banana carmel strawberry crepes, and those were good but I'm sorry, I've tasted those flavors before. Now, a chocolate pig belly asparagus sorbet, that would have been tasty.
Finally, we had something Gary called "Bread pudding wrapped in Phyllo dough," and that's precisely what it was, and it was wonderful.
AND it's open for lunch. When I go back for lunch, I'm having the soup flight and the purple peruvian twice baked potatoes. The Signature Tapas menu is replaced by sandwiches for lunch, so I can't imagine if they are conventional sandwiches or leftover pig belly and peanut butter on challah bread.
I'm all over this fusion food movement now, which is appropriate because it hit the coasts ten years ago, and that's when coastal fashions get to the Midwest. (I understand you'll be sending us incest soon.)
Ridiculously good meal. It made up for us celebrating our 24th anniversary at Cracker Barrel. Then again, every plate was approx 15 dollars.
P.S. Incidentally, if you want another take on the same place look at .75's entry: http://michelleamarcus.blogspot.com/2009/05/icekitchen-at-westport.html
The Question of the Internet over the weekend was: "What Would You Consider a Perfect Day?"
6 am to 10 am: Little magical pixies flit through the house singing as they dust and wipe and scrub. You know, those little cleaning slave creatures. You people have them; I think you call them children.
10 am to 12 noon: Breakfast in the clean house. Eggs Benedict, assembled the night before and just needs to be heated. Annnnnd at about noon ...
CNN breaks in with BREAKING NEWS. Good breaking news, no death, but something with high drama. Oh, here you go: remember that month people kept try to assassinate President Ford? Highly dramatic, but no one was hurt, and worse there was no CNN. (Breaking news without CNN. Can you imagine?)
12 noon - 2 pm: We watch President Obama make assassination witticisms until it seems the news rush slows down, then we switch to a TiVoed marathon of both seasons of Homefront (the US Version).
We do that until the lights go out at ...
4 pm: ... because there is a major thunderstorm. (Because this is a fantasy, the dog is unaffected.) We have much to do, so we finally take off our pajamas, shower in the dark bathroom and get ready to go out.
5 pm: We drive to downtown Saint Louis for dinner, and on the way we have to navigate past a herd of farm animals or wild turkeys or bison.
5:30 pm: We eat at some extremely unusual place downtown. Does anyone remember those restaurants that had phones so you could call the waitress and place your order that way? Something like that, but with good food. A cross between that place, and Casa Bonita, and Dante's, the fondue place in Atlanta.
7:00: We go to a rock concert WHICH IS INDOORS IN THE AIR CONDITIONING, with SEATS ONE CAN SIT ON, not that one will sit on them but they give the impression that one lives in civilization and has personal space. And we listen to a personable band that has more than one frontman.
11:00: We arrive back home, where I perfectly play all the bass parts from the concert from memory and Gary changes the toilet paper. Then we go to bed and I am polished to a shiny finish by my husband who evidently IS made of sandpaper.
I know. I could make this all snooty and talk about gardening, or jetting to Venice Italy, but really my idea of a perfect day does involve a lot vegging in my pajamas in front of a television. Judge me if you like, but my perfect day is closer to my average day than yours is. (Nyah, haters. Go make your kids clean something.)
Today, during a business discussion of door-to-door canvassing, I admitted if I'm alone in the house, I follow my latch-key kid instincts and I open the door to no one.
Man with a hurt kitty? Bye, bye dead kitty.
Ed McMahon with a big check? Call me, Ed, we can set up an appointment.
If Gary's home he invites the strangers in and by the time I get to the living room they're all sharing a Dr. Pepper in the foyer.
A man joined our discussion and asked if I had grown up in a dangerous city or a bad neighborhood. No, I'd just known of two cautionary tales about strangers and didn't want to be the third.
Wilma tells a story of when she was at home alone and a Bible salesman came to her front door. Somehow he finagled his way into her kitchen, pushed her up against the fridge and had the nosey neighbor not been spying on her, worse would have happened. When the neighbor let herself into Wilma's kitchen the "Bible salesman" fled.
But, you say, she let him into the house. That's where it all went wrong. No one opens the door and then lets the stranger in. As if the threshold of the front door was an invisible barrier like the kind that comes with teh Roomba.
I counter with the other cautionary tale: sometimes the strangers have business in the house. Another relative was in town purchasing a house for her and her husband and family. The realtor showing her the house raped her. She didn't report him any more than Wilma reported the "Bible salesman." You might say, "Well, I can see why Wilma didn't report the 'Bible salesman;' he knew where she lived." As it turns out, my relative bought the house the realtor had showed her. Weird? No, she didn't remember the incident.
Not even after her belly started to grow. "Are you pregnant?" family would ask. "Why no," she said, "I haven't had relations with my husband for two years. Must be a tumor."
So possibly:
1) She had traumatic amnesia
2) She was in deep denial
3) She thought you could only get pregnant by your husband
I'm quite literal myself, and if my mother had explained, "Babies come when a husband and wife love each other very much and have marital relations," I would probably assume you needed a husband AND love to grow a baby.
I can't imagine 4) She happily consented - because 9 months later the tumor had grown to such a degree that she had to take to the bathtub and have a baby in the middle of the night, and she was quite surprised. She had had three children already, and (according to reports) was outraged when the tumor began to push out of her.
The next day was a busy day in that household, with my Granceil and every relative showing up to welcome Baby Tumor and to get the details of exactly how this had happened. Baby Tumor was raised by that family and was remarkable in that he could drag the claw-foot table he was tethered to across a dining room and would have made it into the kitchen had the doorway been wider.
So hey. You can talk to me through the sidelight window, door to door solicitors.
I tried to avoid the ClusterConstruction that is now Highway 94, and I took the back way to work Friday. I was tooling along happily (drugs!) listening to Carbon leaf (rock and roll) and I saw a motorcycle cop up ahead. Zoom! I whizzed past the officer. "He's out here looking for some teenagers to catch," I thought cheerfully, "So they can raise revenue for the Cluster. I just learned that for Series 7. Hey. He's following me now. He can't be following ME. What? Flashing lights!? No way! I'm TOO OLD to be pulled over for speeding."
"Hello!" I chirped, "I must have been speeding!" He didn't look at me. I smiled at the thought of his face when he looked at me and my middle-aged self.
He looked right at me. "License and registration."
Handed that right over. I thought about calling him "Sir," then, "Why would I call this child sir? I could be his mother. Besides, he's going to laugh when he looks me up and sees my spotless reputation."
Still, he came back from looking me up and gave me (ME) a citation for going 55 in a 40 mph zone. "Ha!" I thought, "What's that going to cost? Three lattes?" And it struck me, as I cheerfully accepted my ticket, that this whole experience would have destroyed me before I turned forty. I remember apologizing tearfully to traffic cops for rolling stops, or going to traffic court and announcing my guilt. (Though Friend #3 says there's something you can do where you pay some strip mall people and your guilt is washed away, as if it never happened. She also claims there will be a big insurance hit if I don't. Really? I'm forty-six!)
His parting words were, "That's your speedometer. Use it."
I laughed a big belly laugh and thanked him, then I tooled off, even happier than before.
Not good with money. Not good with math.
Don't know nothin' 'bout securities, don't know much economy.
But, see these big empty boxes? I'm supposed to absorb 70% of the volume of information that was in these boxes to pass what is essentially the stockbroker's version of the bar exam, the Series 7.
First of all, no one told me I'd have to do this. I heard about it from the former boss at Elliot when I gave him my resignation. "So, you'll be taking the Series 7, then, and getting your stockbroker's license?" my ex-boss asked with a bemused chuckle. (Or, rather, "sneered.")
I rolled my eyes and snickered, "Yeah, sure," and THEN found out on my first day of work that yeah! sure! they didn't tell you? Oh, wow! That's what you'll be doing sometime in the next two years. (To be fair, I rushed them through the usual interview process because I had a cruise to get on and get naked. Or maybe I wasn't listening.) Oh, they said, it's easy, it's just a bunch of formulas. Akin to saying, "It's easy, it's just in classical Arabic." "It's easy, you just have to flap your arms and fly." "It's easy, you just have to develop a new LOBE in your BRAIN."
Formulas, you say? I have found I am not where I should be with formulas. I just discovered that if you have two sets of numbers next to each other in parentheses you are supposed to know to multiply them?
Seriously, (800)(100) equals 80,000. DID YOU KNOW THIS? Why didn't you tell me? Why do you want to hurt me? Where is the times symbol? I'd take an X, or a *, or a dot. And, more important, WHEN did this happen? When the FUCK did they establish THIS rule? I was an English major back in the eighties, and the last math class I had was Remedial Algebra in High school except for the three days of textbook-cramming I took to pass Finite Math in college, and we had an asterisk, I know we did. This is some millennial bullshit. You dern kids and yer new-fangled ways.
You know what else changed? I just read that "[blah blah incomprehensible blah] is significantly easier now that stocks are calculated in pennies not in eighths ." Oh, yeah, and when the HELL did you change that rule, turdbunnies? Oh! 2001! OH! OH! Thank you for telling me! (And actually, thank God you changed that rule, because I would be flat-out doomed. I didn;t understand it when my Dad explained it when I was 12. It is probably what killed the securities neurons in my brain. Probably some lesion can be traced back to that very day:
Dad:"[incomprehensible reasoning related to Pieces of 8 and the South American stock exchange]"
My Brain:"[Zzzzt zzzt]" Brain shorts out.)
AND DID YOU KNOW They changed the start time for Saturday Night Live from 10:35 Central to 10:30 Central? Yeah? How did you find that out? Was there an announcement? It's not related to corporate finance but it's another example of the old folks being left out of the loop. You know what? It's probably broadcast in that frequency only young people can hear, except no, I just clicked that link and that is a really obnoxious noise. Don't click that.
I am reminded of when I had to turn to the juvenile section of our local library (where they kept the books about farting - no, no, seriously, it was the section for years 5-12) and checked out Our Friend the Sun so I could pass College Meteorology. So I could learn that the sun is closer in winter than in summer! (Are you shitting me? Did you know that? News to ME! When did THIS happen?)
However, I can tell you right now that if you are studying for Series 7, and you see an acronym, the O stands for Options. That's a little bit of knowledge I am secure enough to pass on. Because I don't keep secrets like the Stock Exchange and you dern kids do.
Wow, I almost made it through the whole season without seeing American Idol once. We made a point of watching the finale, though. I don't know the background of any of the performers, not even Big Pointy-Haired Guy or Little Pointy-Haired Guy. Neither's voice made me want to know more about them. However I read later one of them is gay. That made me think of Elton John.
In the early '70s, Elton John had one place in my neurons: he was the guy who came out. He said, on the record, that he was bisexual. A few years later he stepped on to all gay, all day. I loved that bit of information about his sexuality, especially since I was cripplingly shy at that time. How can a shy person not love someone who owns who he is enough to tell Rolling Stone?
In the '80s I heard the effect of flashbulbs on his photosensitive epilepsy is what led to the giant sunglasses, but that wasn't as impressive as his casual honesty about his sexuality.
And of course, all talks of music and honesty and celebrity come around to BNL. BNL2.0 is breaking my heart. First of all the BNL blog is down "temporarily." Twitter is new, though, and they have been twittering several times a day about their new album.
"Hello from the studio! Tweaking things, and getting ready to record our first song. "Summertime" is the jam. Gigs were nuts."
"Wow. Got that one! On to "Hold On"... we gotta change some titles! Kev's turn to sing. 2 guys walk in to a bar... and ROCK!!!!"
"Day 2. Jim is punching in some bass on the chorus cause he's a little on top. Ty is fat in the pocket. Blood Red Moon. Locusts Buzzing."
"It's a 2 bed day! MPW is going to cut something together. Holdin it down for the BOOF BOOF BAFF BOOF BAFF"
"Studio Computer CRASH!!! Yikes. We're preparing for A Creeggan joint. "On the Lookout". Killer vibe, me on Bass! Mac... please come back"
I should be excited. And grateful. But I feel like I'm a business stakeholder getting my daily status report.
Ed: Yeah. We need to ROCK!!!! Did you get that memo? Tyler: Yeah. I got the memo. And I understand the policy. And the problem is just that I forgot the one time. How many exclamation points is it again? Jim: (distractedly) Guys, I'm trying to rock here. Kevin: We need to talk about the TPS reports and the level to which they do or do not rock.
Granted, they also supply video evidence of the rocking. And I do love seeing how the sausage is made. As long as it isn't Ed's sausage, because I've seen it and the possibility of dying of internal injuries is a huge turn-off, thank you.
On the other hand, Steven counters with photos of his ass crack as he tries on his girlfriend's clothes.
Status updates, ass crack, status updates, ass crack. Ass crack wins. Oh, and make your own crack joke here. At the end of last month Steven Page and the girls made it through six months of passing drug tests and were officially de-convicted of any crime, and the air was thick with the silence of the un-ringing of the bells.
Ass crack wins every time.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
I love you guys.
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