It’s one thing to roast the body of a bird in an oven or a crockpot. It’s entirely another to prop it upright and stick a can up its hind end. I was afraid the carcass was going to do a little song and dance when I turned my back to do the dishes.
The south and ten inches of snow? No road crews and winter clean-up? Equals one giant mess. As Jeff discovered in the gas station yesterday, everyone is under the impression that the snow will melt and be gone by one in the afternoon. But ten inches of snow takes a bit to melt, so this morning the snow that melted yesterday is a nice compact sheet of ice. It’s been good for my entertainment, however, clutching a cup of tea and watching from my third-floor perch man and machine struggle against the icy elements.
Really, though, with a dose of caution, getting here and there isn’t too bad. We got out for church yesterday to discover that every church in North Carolina was cancelled. Missed that memo. So we drove around trying to find a place for breakfast simply to discover that when churches close, everything closes. Except Cracker Barrel. We hadn’t been to a Cracker Barrel for a long long time, so we had a nice slow breakfast and eased our way into the rest of the day. I feel like Cracker Barrel has that reputation - that they’re there for you through thick and thin.
Today is supposed to be in the 40s so I’m sure most of the snow will be gone by then and we can all go back to playing tennis and proclaiming how unusual this weather has been.
When it comes to eating and bathroom tasks, my husband is a multitasker. Which I think is gross. He will readily drink coffee or eat a sandwich or munch on a snack while in the shower. As for me, I spit out gum if I even think about crossing the bathroom threshold. The simple thought of bathrooms sends me on a mental race through the entire digestive process and whatever is in my mouth suddenly becomes incredibly unappetizing once I reach the end. HOWEVER, since I’ve embarked upon this whole new career path sort of thing, I’ve found taking a shower has become a monumental task. With an unstructured day, nowhere to go, and no one to meet, the point of showering gets a little fuzzy and I have to trick myself into making the effort… I know… Yesterday, at about 3 p.m. I still hadn’t showered and actually needed to get cleaned up to go out to dinner with Jeff’s boss. Nothing could motivate me from leaving the computer, so I made myself a cup of tea, put it in my handy dandy to-go cup, stared at it for a couple of seconds, and took it with me in the shower. Rocked my world. Not only did it make showering a very pleasant experience, but it got me past the gagging thing, which, it can be argued, wasn’t that big of a deal in the first place…anyway, so the moral of the story is, if you’re finding yourself stinky and unmotivated to change, try installing a minibar near your shower. You might find that change is just a beverage away.
For high school graduation, my mom made a really fantastic cookbook filled with all of our family’s favorite recipes. She typed them up, printed them out, and then organized them according to type in a three ring binder covered in pictures. So whenever I pulled out a recipe I’d see:
Jeff and me at senior prom on the spine of the book
a demented looking picture of my dog on the front
a picture with me and all my grandmothers (my great grandmother is the lady in the white) taken on graduation day, also on the front
and on the back, a giant 8 1/2 by 11 picture of Jeff and me before the graduation ceremony (by the way, ACK!)
Since one of my dreams for when I grow up is to be one of those people who are able to take pictures, print them off, and display them in frames around the house, I’ve really enjoyed this cookbook since it’s the only thing I have to show new friends pictures of my family. But, alas and alack, the plastic three ring binder has succumbed to its 9 year beating and has begun to fall apart. As a result, the recipes don’t stay in the rings very well anymore, so any additional recipes I print off, I just throw on top to save the notebook the hassle of coming undone and freeing dozens of well-loved recipes into the great unknown.
Notebook, I love you, but I’m afraid I have to retire you.
So, when I received my THIRD mortar and pestle for Christmas, I took it back to Sur La Table and found this:
This, is a brand spanking new recipe organizer book, marketed and manufactured by Bon Appetit magazine. I was dismayed that they used a personal cookbook organizer to be a mini-billboard, but, besides it being the only one they offered, the features were amazing.
First, there are sections for every aspect of meal-making, complete with a pretty picture and a corresponding recipe. They also have places for notes, folders for odds and ends, and inserts for new recipes.
But, the major selling point, is that it supports itself in the kitchen. The cover kicks its legs out and stands up for you! If that’s not service, I don’t know what is.
So, the other day, I held a memorial service for the old cookbook, stripped it of its contents, and laid it to rest. The new cookbook just barely contains the recipes, but it works, it’s beautiful, and extremely convenient to use. (In case you were wondering, the bottom half-inch stack of recipes is desserts. My mom’s answer to world peace is a stick of butter and a cup of brown sugar.)
And as for the photos, I’m thinking I’ll buy some frames and display the pictures around the house. But I might need somebody to direct me to the frame aisle…
I am glad to announce that my life is now complete. As you might recall, I received an ebelskiver pan for Christmas. I had poked a bit of fun at them since filled pancakes have never been a major part of our diet. I now recant my fun poking, as it was simply a manifestation of my emptiness without filled pancakes. The other night we made a whole meal of it. I grilled up a steak, cut it into bite sized pieces and made steak and cheese ebelskivers. And then, to prove that Nutella can do no wrong, we made Nutella filled ebelskivers. Holy. Cow. I never knew you could hold joy in the palm of your hand.
So, the pan is pretty nifty. You put a tablespoon of batter in the bottom, quickly put the filling on top, and then top with another tablespoon of batter. Cook it until it looks like a pancake does when it’s ready to flip, and flip them over.
When both sides are cooked, you just pop them out of the pan and there you go!
It’s a good thing the background of the photo is out of focus - after the first couple of batches, you stop caring where batter and ebelskiver innards fall and let them do their own thing on the counter. The kitchen was a disaster by the end.
But it was worth it.
That, my friends, is my very first web page. It had a picture, but I spent an hour trying to get it to center so I gave up. For the record, I don’t particularly love monkeys more than any other species of animals, I just like to call Jeff one when he’s in trouble. And, when everything on the screen on the right looks Russian, it would be depressing to have it say HEADER HERE. Monkeys are better for morale.
Today is the first day of league tennis. Why I’m doing this, I don’t know. After two and a half hours of hard playing in the sun, my body reminded me I’m not in high school anymore. So I promised it a Big Mac for lunch. Instead of a Big Mac, however, I made it home and haven’t been able to move since. Jeff’s team practices tonight. Is it mean to hope that he’ll hurt afterwards? Because I think it’ll make me feel less out of shape and more just old. I can live with old better than out of shape. Although I’m sure many people over the ripe old age of 26 would disagree.
It occurred to me the other day that if America ever lost its marbles and became a totalitarian state and ordered books to be banned and burned, I’d be in quite a pickle. Because my book collection has been exponentially increasing over recent years and my addiction to acquiring them has yet to be satiated. It started in college when I was tired of feeling stupid when other people would talk about books I didn’t know and has snowballed even through three big moves (which probably hasn’t been much of a deterrent for me simply because I’m not actually the one lifting boxes of books up three flights of stairs…). And now, as people are catching on to my mania, they’re feeding it. Before we went home for Christmas, my book buying had reached a stasis. It had reached that point where I had acquired more books than I could possibly read in a reasonable amount of time. Then, Christmas happened. And suddenly I had these to add to my line up:
Now a large chunk of those are my favorite box sets that I’ve already read, but what I love about the others is that they’re books that wouldn’t have been on the radar since they came from my grandma’s library. And the four books on the bottom came from my parents who got to meet Stephen Lawhead.
But those are just my books. Jeff also came home with these:
Which, are completely fantastic. The used book store back home has so many great, old books, and the owner was wonderful to give these books to Jeff for Christmas. They’re trade handbooks from the early 1900s. There’s a reference for steam engineers, window trimmers, businessmen, stenographers and correspondents, chemists, and other professions. And, of course, everybody needs a midwest farm handbook.
Fortunately I’ve figured out that I can work out on the elliptical machine AND read a book, so I might be able to get through them all before next Christmas. Ha! Right. As if me and the elliptical spend that much time together…
My favorite part in the movie Annie is Carol Burnett’s drunken song about little girls. I mostly like that when she says ‘girls’ it comes out ‘gurls’ like in gurgle, which is very fun to say. And when I was a freshman in college I had a friend who was also very short and blessed with girlish good looks and charm, and we’d tend to attract a few comments questioning our age and ability to attend college. One day, when we happened to wear overalls the same day, we both realized how absurdly young we looked and ran, arms and legs flailing, to change. At that moment, all I could think about was Carol Burnett and her gurgling little girls and I haven’t been able to get the song out of my head ever since.
But this post isn’t about little girls, it’s about little boys. More specifically, my cousins.
Little boys - charming, sweet, docile, who knew they could be so angelic?
Ha! Right. That was a joke. They’re docile for about a half a second. And I happened to click the picture during the other half. That’s why it’s blurry. For the other seconds of the day that they’re not docile, they are at least charming and sweet. The littlest one is a full body hugger. The biggest one is 7 years old, about to turn 18 and attend MIT on a full ride scholarship.
But don’t forget, they’re not just little boys. They’re supermen:
Rock climbers:
Wrestlers:
And babysitters?
Ch’ya right. They’re probably initiating my cousin’s son into the little boyhood secret society. Within weeks, the little guy will be kung fu fighting and superman flying all over the place. By the way, notice my uncle’s right eye? Yep, that’s mister Halloween shirt’s tiny knee to the eyeball.
Despite their little boyhood status, I love them to death and we’re excited to see them every year, even for a few days. But afterward, I have to take a long, hard nap to make up for being a little boy side kick and wrestling partner. How in the world did my grandmother survive four of them?
Yesterday was Jeff’s birthday. We started the day with a jolly ‘Happy Birthday!’ at 5:30 a.m. when the horn of a car in the parking lot malfunctioned and blew for a solid 30 minutes. There are no conditions under which one can go back to sleep with noise like that, so we got up, showered and went to Ihop for breakfast. Did you know that nobody goes to Ihop at 6 in the morning? But we got a hearty breakfast and an endless pot of coffee and had a remarkably good time. I dropped Jeff off to work a little after 7 and almost went to run errands, but decided I didn’t want to waste an enormous amount of caffeine on errands. So I went home and had the Christmas decorations put away, the house cleaned, and the laundry nearly finished by 8:30. And then I crashed on the couch and couldn’t make sense of the world and fell asleep.
I surprised Jeff for dinner with creamy enchiladas. It was a surprise because it involved sour cream. As in the sour cream that stops a heart a-beating and never graces the insides of my kitchen and is Jeff’s favorite ingredient on the planet, aside from steak. And then we topped it off with Spanish flan, because it’s Jeff’s second favorite dessert. Apple tarts are his favorite, but they didn’t quite fit with the theme.
Then Jeff had to make an 8:30 conference call to Indonesia and the party was over. But we did do some celebrating over the weekend and saw Sherlock Holmes on Saturday, which was immensely entertaining. Happy Birthday, love!
Besides celebrating birthdays, the other subject occupying my attention lately has been a baby blanket for a new friend whose due date is January 16th. I started the project on our long car ride back to NC and I had thought I was making great progress until I went to her house last Thursday and learned she had been up all night with contractions the night before. Panic! I spent Friday and Saturday knitting like crazy and left the blanket to block over Saturday night.
The blocking is supposed to stretch the blanket out into a proper, even square, but, it being my first blocking experience, I was too ginger with getting the blanket wet, and it didn’t quite go according to plan, as you can see below.
Next time, the thing’s getting dunked and hopefully then it won’t look like a slim fast commercial (you know, skinny in the middle…). But, I got it to her at church the next day and squarely before the baby was born. Success!
I had no idea living two years without a car would radically alter my psyche towards driving. Somewhere between feeling enormously safe on my own two feet and zoning out when taking an hour bus ride, it had occurred to me that driving a car is operating heavy machinery of which I know very little about. And then, as I was walking safely on the sidewalks, I became appalled at how much drivers taking driving for granted and the resulting carelessness - Come on people! You wouldn’t operate a back hoe like that! You’re operating HEAVY MACHINERY! And then I got behind the wheel two years later and could barely break the speed limit and Jeff had to pull my white knuckled fingers off of the steering wheel.
So now, I’m having to experience a series of firsts and have to cowboy up every single time. Our drive out to North Carolina - cowboy up. Driving in pouring rain - cowboy up. Driving through the Smokey Mountains - cowb…ok so I made Jeff drive. And yesterday, driving to Charlotte alone - cowboy up. I haven’t driven more than 20 minutes alone since July of 2007. I used to drive the five hours to Denver alone without breaking a sweat, and now I was finding myself losing sleep over one hour. I woke up yesterday morning and I was nervous. Nervous! I couldn’t remember what to do in a car by oneself. And what if I get lost? But I had to go - I had to get a bridesmaid’s dress for my brother’s wedding and they’re fazing the style out within the next week. So I got my ipod ready and laid my maps out on the seat next to me and prayed like crazy. And, of course, I did just fine. The traffic wasn’t bad and I navigated through Charlotte’s messy interstate system without anybody flipping me off. A great success. I did, however, dream all night last night that I was going to have to make the 20 hour Nebraska to North Carolina drive by myself. I’d wake up from it and have to remind myself that I was already in NC and fall back asleep to the same dream. Seriously? Am I sixteen again?
Regardless, I am infinitely pleased with our car and will make every effort to never again be without. It’s just going to take some time to find my cojones again.