It was all about food.
Saturday, Jessi and I went to do our ethnic grocery shopping. First, Bill’s Imported Foods for our Greek and Middle Eastern stuff. I got chick peas and tea and mini eggplants and pistachios and orzo and some spices and zatar. Then Jessi totally turned me on to Egyptian feta. You don’t know feta until you’ve had double cream Egyptian feta. After that we went to United Noodle for all our Asian food needs, including the aforementioned rice crackers, red bean ice cream, green tea mochi, sushi rice, every kind of bizarre ramen I could find and steam buns (veggie for him, pork for me).
Afterwards, David and I went to a fundraiser dinner for a Samoan who needs a kidney. I was all excited about eating Samoan food until I got the food. It’s a lot of very greasy and salty meat. Sigh. But the evening was fun and the cutest little kids were running around.
Sunday, after a movie and chilling at the coffee shop doing the crossword puzzle (I’m better at crosswords than i ever thought I was. Go me) we came home and I made the most delicious stuffed eggplants ever. Ever. What I did not know about eggplant (I’d never cooked them before) is that you lose a lot of volume squeezing out the water and frying them. I pulped the eggplants, salted the pulp and drew out the bitter water. As that was going on I prepped the other ingredients and was suprised at the amounts, I figured there was too much stuff to fit back in the shells. I was way wrong. After you fry the eggplant insides along with the garlic and onion you end up with this very tasty frizzled concoction that is more flavoring than filling. You mix that with tomatoes, the magical egyptian feta and chopped mint and stuff it all back in the shells and back. So good, like crack.
and I discovered that Maddie can eat a bowl of tzatziki in about 3 seconds. Note to self, maddie is taller than ghengis and can get into more things.
People brought me wine during my housewarming, it’s a nice gift. Unfortunately, I don’t know who brought what, but if you were the person who brought me the Yellowtail Shiraz-Grenache, thank you. It was entirely too lovely with the eggplant and pilaf.
Category Archives: Blab
Persephone sinking
It is with a certain amount of dread that I watch the days get shorter, the leaves fall, the cold air seep in.
I know that logically I should face the winter with a positive attitude and hope for the best, but I know better. It’s so hard though. The bitterly cold mornings, the insanely short days where the sun stays firmly entrenched in the southern sky, the day after day after day of solid grey cloud cover.
I have special lamps, whether it is the science or the suggestion, they do help. I keep them on and I sit by them. They make crazy blue-white light.
David and I talked a bit about it. He went through it last winter, but I had other stuff going on at the same time, other things with which to explain my irrational anger or crying jags. He was understanding, willing to be proactive about it. It was good.
I figure that I’ll travel more, flying from place to place, outrunning the demons. I can afford it more now, and I have the vacation time. I’ll put the dogs in the car and go away. I’ll put the dogs and the boy in the car and we’ll go away. I’ll book a flight at the last minute and stand at the ocean and listen.
I’ll probably also be more insular, not talk to as much, not visit as much. My phone was fucked this week and it was nice.
Some day I will move to a warmer place.
corporate whore
I feel like I’ve been shopping a lot! Yesterday i ordered a bunch of clothes for fall/winter, everything was on sale too. What happens to your winter clothes? Where do they go? why do you need more and more every year? Anyway, forced myself to get colorful things, i’m on a lifelong quest to make sure I wear enough color.
My new cell phone came today. If I could get one piece of advice it’s to stay the hell away from Motorolas! I had a Motorola V300 and while it was not an expensive phone to say the least, it was a big piece of shit. It’s key problem was that it would just end a call after 30 minutes. No warning or anything, you would just suddenly be talking to air. After it did this a few times it would lock up and you’d have to reboot it. It also could not hold a signal, admittedly, this was probably due more to the dog eating the antenna (antenna is a word I can;t spell and I must look it up every time). I’m back to a Nokia, the 6101. It’s cute, it’s little, I like the flip phones. It has more features than I need (who needs video on a cell?) but it also has features I wanted. Go me.
I’ve also been buying birthday presents and other presents left and right.
And I went to Target and bought more dog treats than is morally responsible.
and to switch gears…
Yesterday on NPR they did a segment on aging. A man spent years interviewing his grandmother as she progressed into old age and into the fog of alzheimers. In the beginning I was struck by a statement of hers, it was early on in the recording sessions, she was still lucid. She said the thing that was hardest about getting older was forgetting your life, she’d said she had had a wonderful life but was forgetting the details. I don’t want to forget my life. I have had such great happiness, wonderful memories and adventures and friends, I don’t want to forget that. I don’t want to forget Ghengis, or being punch-drunk hysterical with laughter in a rest stop bathroom outside Chattanooga TN, I don’t want to forget 2am chili cheese fries at Ben’s or rollerskating an entire summer away when I was 7. I want to be able to sit around with my friends in 50 years and still be able to recount in great detail the horrors of the Precious Moments Chapel, or that time I went to the State Fair with David and I did all the things I ever wanted to do, including eating cotton candy and watching the fireworks. I want to sit there eating my shitty nursing home gruel and wow people with my descriptions of lunch at Len Bergs in Macon.
I don’t want to forget any of this. I hate the idea that I would know, much like the lady in the segment, that i’d had a good life, I just couldn’t rember it. She knew, she knew she was forgetting so very much and it bothered her a great deal.
Perhaps this is why I vomit so much of my brain onto these ephemeral pages. Perhaps I just want a record, not for you, but for me.
And it has been a good life so far these 32 years. So many people met, so many places visited, and there will be more.
If only we could be as tall as we are happy, I’d wrap myself around this earth twice to smile on such joys that are my days.
progress
Things are chugging along nicely at the new velvet. Tonight I edited the style sheet. Took me considerably longer than it should have because I was not grasping the overwhelming power of Movable Type. Do not go into the ACTUAL style sheet that you have set up on the server! Do not edit that style sheet, you will be painfully disappointed when you go to save something in the MT control center and it overwrites all of your work. Ouch.
I’ve kept essentially the same color scheme that I have here. I’d like something new, but 1) it’s kind of an identity and 2) I am far to functionally retarded to actually put colors together. I end up with atrocious mixes. None of you remembers the first iteration of this site, it was bad, all reds and purples. So, I’ve learned that if someone makes you a site with a good and solid color scheme, you keep that color scheme.
If anybody has any advice regarding exporting and importing MS Access data into MT let me know, otherwise I’m jumping in as soon as I hear from Keith (he has a pc with Access on it, I don’t).
I’ve got nothing good to say. I was supposed to go to Target to pick up sundries and put it off to tomorrow justifying the delay with the promise of doing dishes tonight. Except I ended up not doing dishes. And I ended up spending too much time trying to figure web stuff out. The only real thing I accomplished is purchasing a metric buttload of fall/winter clothes off the web.
So, I’m cranky, I ate no dinner, my dogs are desperate to go out which means I need to get dressed.
grumble grumble
weeeeeeeeeeebo
Set up my new domain host, setting up the movable type site, have a headache (but not from frustration, just tired from working on it). I need to figure out how to get my old posts in the new thing and also change the colors so it is not boring blue.
I will keep you updated, hopefully the transition will be smooth.
Also, let me say it again, you CAN get a reasonably priced domain hosting that has 24/7 in house tech support! I love Pavel. Pavel is real and speaks english and answers emails and does NOT use the word “Kindly” over and over again.
Okay, i’m off. I’ll be more interesting later.