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Category Archives: doing it wrong
Today’s Lunch of Too Much
Today I brought a thermos with freshly made tomato soup, a peanut butter and nutella sandwich, a little container with sliced cucumbers and a dollop of roasted onion and gruyere dip, a little container with leftover green bean salad with toasted walnuts and feta, a little container with a diced fresh pear, a baggie with celery, carrot, turnip and red pepper sticks and a half box of animal crackers that I never ate last week.
Also in my office I have a stash of pita chips, wheat thins (big) and two breakfast cookies. Also a bottle of wine.
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Beaten By Shelves
I don’t want to talk about installing the shelves.
Let’s just say if I ever meet the person who invented HangTrak ™ shelving I will skin him alive, draw and quarter him, light him on fire, pee on his ashes and then rinse them down the garbage disposal with sour milk and slimy greens.
On the con side I hated everything about installing them.
On the pro side I have tons of experience with the drill and have completely gotten over my fear of putting multiple holes in anything including my beautiful smooth and painted wall that I busted ass on in May.
At least they haven’t fallen down yet.
I had to take a break in the middle of the fiasco to make tomato soup so I could at least feel competent at something.
I didn’t even have time for the pirate pillowcase.
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Something New Every Day
I’m still getting new dahlias. Might even be one or two new varieties before summer is over.
I can’t wait to update you on all my projects this weekend. If doing projects means learning from your mistakes: I’ll be a gold medal winner soon.
The pirate pillowcase is a winner. The first instruction is: “remove selvage from each fabric.” WTF is selvage? Right there I had a 20 minute research project. Then I folded my insert strip and layered it with the right side of the pirates and wrong side of the cuff and carefully sewed my first seam with my the sewing machine. Success!
Except I had the folded insert seam upside down. Bob came in from downstairs and I announced, “Honey, I’m ripping out my first seam.” I very carefully pressed everything out and repinned. And did the exact same thing again! A natural.
Bob came in from an errand and I said, “Honey, I’m ripping out my second seam.”
We went to see Little Miss Sunshine (fantastic! hilarious!) that afternoon so I had to put my pillowcase aside. Who would have thought a pillowcase is a several day project?
This morning I picked up the stuff for my closet shelves. I bought a stud finder. And all kinds of brackets and anchors and supports.
Pirates and shelves. We’ll see how I do.
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Pirates!
Yesterday I went to Craft Warehouse to get some stuff for these little items I’m making (more information depending on how it goes) and I ended up finding all kinds of crap to buy. I got a little dizzy when she announced my total.
I’ve been wanting to learn to sew and have been dicking around trying to figure out how best to go about it. I wanted to take a class but that hasn’t panned out so far. At the craft store they had a kit for making a pillowcase.
(I know some of you are laughing right now. How hard can it be to make a pillowcase? I have to start somewhere.)
It’s going to have pirates on it.
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Vacation, All I Ever Wanted
Luis, Geena, Lillian, Josa, Annie and Jack.
The fire fighting helicopter filling up in the Klamath. Bob took the above two.
(L) Lyons Ranch, a lovely hike downhill through potential wild cat/bear country via (R) Bald Hills Road. These two by me.
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What’s for Lunch?
For some reason, when I make a lunch for the office, I’m paranoid I won’t have enough to eat. I always bring a ton of food and end up taking half of it back home.
Today I brought: a non-ass smelling thermos with lentil soup, a half of peanut butter and honey sandwich, a small box of animal crackers, a fruit + nut bar, a cucumber and tomato salad, a diced fresh pear AND a few tidbits of chicken from my dinner plate last night that I’m going to stuff into an espresso cup so I can feel special.
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Conquer the Ass
Every article on the front page of today’s issue of Dining In (food section, NYT) made me roll my eyes. (Okay, so everything makes me roll my eyes.)
There’s an article here letting us know that in the world of catered finger foods, pigs in a blanket (sometimes called franks in jackets) are “back with a vengeance!” (Exclamation point in original.) Yahoo. I’d been mourning the lack of baby hot dogs wrapped in pastry in my life and according to this article, pastry’s a good blotter for alcohol. If only I’d known that last Friday. (Sadly, I won’t be sharing the story of how drunk I was last weekend. At my age it isn’t funny. Just sad.)
Here’s another handy article about this woman helping her friend, set the table for a dinner party: “knife, water glass and wineglass on the right; espresso spoon horizontally above the dinner plate; espresso on top of the dinner plate.”
Espresso Cup?
I know, that’s what the author and I were thinking. But it’s not for coffee. It’s for the amuse-bouche.
Apparently you can puree an intense amount of something (vegetable, animal, mineral) and dollop it in the cup and your guests will feel special. Just putting some nuts in a dish doesn’t cut it these days. You’ve got to have some delicious bite before the meal. Another idea: arranging “lovely tidbits” of fish or meat on a saucer. This is the time for the chef’s artistry.
My next party everyone is going to get a pig in a blanket on an index card with a smiley face on it. Drawn by me.
The third article isn’t really so bad. It’s about this chef and his wife. Or maybe they’re both chefs, I’m not clear, and 1 or both of them is from Australia. I guess I should read the article before I roll my eyes and then write about it. The thing that scared me is something they serve called Moreton Bay bugs and the article says it’s some kind of small lobster but it sounds too Fear Factor for me.
And while we’re talking about fear factor let me tell you about my thermos yesterday. I like taking my lunch but I’ve resisted the thermos because it always ends up smelling like ass. And in this case when I say smells-like-ass I mean smells-like-something-died-in-it.
I finally bought one and I wash it immediately after use. I let soapy water stand in it overnight. I make sure it is completely dry before I put it away. And every time I take it back out: ass. So I put a few drops of bleach in it and more hot water, rinse some more and go off. Yesterday I did this routine but I could still smell a whiff of ass as I ate my soup. Not optimal for lunch enjoyment.
My tip of that day is that when I got home I immersed the entire ensemble in warm water and white vinegar. I think I’ve conquered the ass. At least for now.
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SHADOW!
Alright! I got my new card reader and got the photos off the camera. Many more to come.
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Effing Goat Trail
A week ago Sunday we went to Dillon Creek for kayaking. Just kidding. Check the link: those pictures blow my mind. I didn’t even know you could do stuff like that at Dillon Creek. We were around the campground. Here’s a link to the Forest Service website. And could someone help the Forest Service, please? That website could use a little pretty-ing up.
We went to Dillon Creek for Book Club. The book was A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous. Mom must have missed my post about how I didn’t want to read any heavy books in August and insisted I read it for book club. Turns out it’s fantastic. Hard to put down. Lots of food for thought and discussion. Really excellent not just as a book but as a piece of history.
But that’s not what this story is about.
We got there early and we decided to check out this swimming hole we’d heard about. We parked in the day use area and as we pulled in, we ran into Martha who’s married to Sonny, who’s a cousin. Or something like that. You get the idea.
Martha was also going to the swimming hole and was kind enough to point out the trail to us and off we went. As soon as I took my first step, I was concerned because I was wearing these clodhopper shoes I use for Orleans. This isn’t a good link because we weren’t there camping, we were at a big family gathering, some visiting like us and many who live there.
(ASIDE: omigod. I just put “Orleans, California” into a search engine so I could give a link to Orleans for the 3 people who might chance by this site and not know what I’m talking about and this was the first link that came up: American Singles. Classic! The second link is a splog that has to do with collection agencies. We need to improve Orleans search rankings.)
I decided not to take the trail but Martha said, “Oh, I’m sure it looks a lot harder than it is.” So I pressed on. But not because I believed her, but because she’s a relative and I knew if I wussed out that the entire town would know about it before the sun went down and for the next 40 years I would have to hear tales of Pam, the big fat ch-ch-chicken who couldn’t do the trail down to the swimming hole at Dillon Creek.
Except that the “trail” was a goat path scratched out of a vertical mountainside and covered with poison oak and a few wisps of tree root that you could hang onto for dear life as you slid down the rocks and dirt.
We were about two thirds of the way down when a friendly grey haired guy holding a beer and watching us slide down the mountain said, “That’s not the trail.”
Well, no shit. What are we going to do at that point? When we finally hit bottom you could see the actual trail, a smooth, clear path back up to the campground.
“A freeway!” Martha exclaimed when she saw it. Then she said she’d never been to that swimming hole before.
I got a scratch of poison oak on one leg and a mosquito sized patch on my foot plus a couple of dots here and there.
Lesson learned: don’t let Martha point out the trail.
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