Win Lose

I found a scratch off ticket in my coat pocket and scratched it off: lo, I did not win anything. I am baffled - baffled, I say - by my persistent failure to win the lottery. The only lottery I ever win is some foreign lottery in either Nigeria or the UK and, doubtful soul that I am, I kind of don't think I ever entered those lotteries anyway, despite those oh so official misspelled emails that come in to my alterego Info. Info is apparently lucky as hell; Felicity, not so much.

Poor S has the cold from hell as does my coworker J. I feel like Typhoid Mary, guilt, guilt. It figures that the only early adapter fashionable thing I can do is colds: I had it first and now everybody is copying me! Sorry about that, y'all. Next time go for the 10 year old leggings look.

However and meanwhile, A is back in town and he has cut a huge hole in the wall between the kitchen and the living room and it looks AWESOME. So that is a win as, I hope, is the duct taped pack of Camels in my purse, since it is the Quit Smoking Plan Day One, whereby I only get 10 cigarettes a day in my special duct taped box for this week and then 9 a day next week and so on until I have quit painlessly and without barely noticing it. Sort of like the idea that you can boil a frog slowly without him noticing - probably just as painless. Yeah. Or the Milo of Crotona thing with the bull - start with the calf, lift it every day, as it grows so will your strength until you are lifting a 700 pound beef on the hoof (who hopefully is still fond of you despite your strange habits) - which I believe does not work either although I have never had occasion to try it. This had better work. I am tired of sore throats and coughing and gasping my way up hills. Goodbye, oh so cool crutch! Goodbye nihilistic punk rock 1940s glamor! Enough of you. We had fun and now, or, well, in 10 weeks, it will all be over.

In other news I had no internet all day at work, which ATT&T swears is our fault and our IT people swear is their fault; eventually, we just gave up and went home. I have no phone at home because Sprint hates me, so there's a sort of almost complete communications breakdown going on here. Oh well. Send a smoke signal or something if you absolutely must contact me; I'll be home for another hour or thereabouts and then going to H's birthday dinner! HAPPY BIRTHDAY H!!! I GOT YOU A VERY AWESOME PRESENT SO YOU HAD BETTER SHOW UP AT YOUR BIRTHDAY DINNER!! And that, I believe, is the news from Riverview.

Another Weekend Survived

Finally it is Sunday night and I regret exceedingly to report that I am almost done with the very last Aubrey/Maturin book: Blue at the Mizzen. I hate hate hate coming to the end of books I love and coming to the end of a whole series of books I adore is just that much worse: now what will I do? What will I do with myself now that I'm not hoisting aloft and belaying a line and beholding a snowy petrel on a great ice mountain as I round the horn? Maybe fix the vacuum cleaner. Also, Netflix, on whom I was relying to fill some gaps by sending me The Tudors, sent me discs 3 and 4 instead of 1 and 2. Not cool, Netflix. I am wroth.

Anyway, it was a pleasant weekend. Yesterday I woke up fairly early and cleaned up the house and then took the QOB, finally recovered from her cold, to the Frugal Framer where they are going to stretch six of her canvases. She actually liked the Frugal Framer and even though she began to balk at the price she told me later that she actually thought it was going to be more. Then we went over to True Blue Art Supplies, best place EVER, and bought some art supplies. It was a pleasant outing and after I took her home I fiddled around and created this drawing, which obviously still has a ways to go but I am kind of fond already of these two beings. I'm planning a big monster mural for the side of the garage and the house and to that end I am going to be drawing a bunch of creatures until I find the ones I want to make huge and big. Look out, neighbors! I also made a whole bunch of little glass tile magnets and then gave some away last night, being as how it was Forcibly Be Reminded of Your Pathetic Single Status Day.

I hate Be Made To Feel Inferior and Inadequate for Being Single Day with the heat of a thousand suns but every year it rolls around like a particularly unpleasant piece of clockwork and this year was no exception. H and my daughter A both brought me chocolate covered strawberries, which sort of softened the blow, but still. So then S & J & I, the leprous singles, and also K & J who kindly went slumming with our leprous single selves, went to Tollivers. We wanted to go to the Admiral, but fuck the Admiral, they had a special Valentines Dinner night and they wouldn't even let us sit at the bar. And there was some kind of benefit going on at the Westville, so creepy Tollivers it was. And Tollivers was duly creepy, particularly when the music started and the bar cleared out like lightning. Then we went on back to S house and today poor S has got a horrible cold. I know this because I left my car at S' last night and walked home at 1:30 in the morning and then went to fetch it this afternoon. I hadn't been for a walk at that hour in a long time and everything was dark and silent and beautiful; it was fun.

Today I have done pretty much nothing. A is in town and he came by and we discussed further plans for the house - the wall comes out this week, yowza yowza, and he got the washing machine working, which I am highly embarrassed to report was a simple matter of turning a valve. Yes, I suck at plumbing. He also gave me a full report on young M, who is pretty much his apprentice and seems to be doing well at it. Young M will soon be Grown Up M, which is sort of terrifying but there you have it: time marches on. So does my waistline and that combined with the fact that I got all winded walking home last night has convinced me: I have to quit smoking and start exercising with a vengeance. So I'm going to quit cigarettes very, very slowly, planning to be all done by early May and I'm totally going to start dieting and really exercising and going to the gym and everything. Tomorrow. Or possibly the day after.

It's Friday and I'm Tired

Well, the week of beer is just about over and my horoscope today told me to diet. That is fairly rude in a horoscope, really - it's supposed to say nice vague things about my nonexistent lovelife, not get all personal with the Lose Some Weight Now Chubbette stuff. Oh well; I'm ignoring it by eating chips from Greenlife and giant cookies leftover from the board meeting last night. That will show you, horoscope! Ha ha!

Yesterday night after the board meeting I went on over to the Asheville Twestival which was a sort of twitter meetup slash charity fundraiser slash networking event slash cheap beer drinking party with silent auction. I have this evil desire to tweet away about how much it sucked just to see how much righteous anger I could stir up among the Asheville twitterers but that would be wrong and anyway, it didn't suck. Well it kind of sucked at first, as many parties do, but we are experienced partygoers, my friends and I, and we stuck it out until the cheap beer kicked in and it got to be quite fun. I actually talked to a few people I didn't know well, which is something of a small triumph for me and a very nice girl gave me a tampon in the ladies room: thank you, generous fellow sufferer in the menstrual wars! They had a machine in there but of course it didn't work - they never do, never - and the coin slots were really skinny, as if it was made for some other form of money that we don't actually have. Anyway, besides the tampax talk, the party was nice. The food was great and there was plenty of it; the beer was, as mentioned twice already (I have my priorities straight) cheap; the music was good and I won a T-shirt & bottle of hot sauce from some BBQ place called Smokin' Js at the silent auction. And then we all went on over to S' house and drank more beer and played "music" which was totally fun but I am, again, tired today.

Oh and I have breaking political news: my friend G is running for city council and I actually gave him some money, my first ever political contribution, so y'all had better vote for him. I don't care if you live here or not; mail it in or something. He will be awesome on city council and he lives in my neighborhood and we can bug him to put in a light at that ridiculous corner where Haywood does its 90 degree turn thing and I fear for my life every day. Also, speed bumps on Riverview, abolishment of annoying people, open source hemp fields on Patton Avenue and some other great things I can't think of right now since I'm too damn tired.

I was tired yesterday too because the meeting with beer I had at the Westville rapidly turned into more of a beer with meeting if you know what I mean. Well, some weeks are like this and actually it beats the pants off staying home with the flu and being miserable. It's even better than staying home and being psychologically tormented by my cat and that's saying something. But now I am tired as hell and I have a sad feeling that all the lime flavored expensive hippie potato chips in the world are not going to wake me up. Ah well. My friend J just called to say that she's not up for our usual Friday Broadways beer drinking ladies night, thank Dionysus, and I will cling to the vain hope that the animals will let me sleep past 8:00 tomorrow morning.

Paranoia the Destroyah

It is one of those weeks when I have to drink beer every night. Such things happen once in a while and when they do there is nothing for it but to plunge straight ahead and remind yourself that you really don't need a waistline anymore anyway and isn't that a relief? Thus it is that on Sunday night S & I walked from her house to the Admiral for a couple beers (the walking burned off the calories) and then on Monday I had work to do at home which necessitated the drinking of a couple of beers while I stuffed and stapled (you can't stuff and staple alcohol free, for pity's sake) and last night, which was purely going to be a virtuous night, A came over to eat dinner, chat, check her email and make crafts. Tonight, or, actually in like an hour, I must be at the Westville for a meeting (yeah, yeah, it is a meeting, a meeting with beer!) and then tomorrow night is the hideously named Twestival that I am determined to go to in case I get to meet some new friendly geeks as well as the geeks I already know who are going to be there. Plus it's for a good cause. You should go too. I'm still trying to figure out what to wear.

However, that is just a week of beer and not what I was going to blog about at all, which was paranoia. Every time A comes over we seem to manage to work ourselves into a small yet vaguely justified paranoid frenzy. Last week we heard some mysterious thumps right outside and then Theo barked like crazy, so we were convinced there was a burglar out there. He kept on making random thump noises for a while and finally I pointed out that if somebody really was coming in to stalk or burgle or cut you up into little bits, they wouldn't fuck around with making thump noises for an hour or two first. No self respecting psychopath bothers with a whole hour of thumping unless there are a fair amount of teenagers to be gone through first and my house is currently rather delightfully teenager free (although I am missing young M something fierce lately and am ready for him to come home; I wouldn't even mind his friends, no, seriously.)

Last night my worries centered first around the furnace and then around the cat. It got really hot in the house for some reason so I started fretting that the washing machine (R2 as we affectionately call it for its plaintive beeps) had been somehow hooked up not to the hot water pipes that run hot water to the sinks and tub and dishwasher but to the hot water pipes that heat the house. This, I think, would be very bad. I also think it might be impossible or at least supposed to be impossible but at my house, which has a creepy control room so you can watch whatever is going on in the glass room (just in case it's too inconvenient to stand outside any one of its walls which are, you know, made of GLASS) anything is possible. Anyway, the furnace, which goes through propane at a ridiculous rate anyway and has been mysteriously a lot louder lately, has been on my mind a lot, as in, I hope it doesn't either blow up or give me carbon monoxide poisoning or just die: I do not trust my furnace. Therefore, last night when there was a sudden extremely strong smell of propane - well, propane or fuel oil or kerosene, something like that anyway - I went into full paranoia mode and so did A. We went all over inside and outside the house sniffing like beagles but the strange smell vanished as quickly as it had arrived, so who knows? My nose was starting to hurt with all the sniffing and I just gave up and concentrated on the brain cell destroying odor of the A 600 glue we were using for our crafts.

A pointed out that I should get a new furnace, because I worry about mine too much. "Yes," I said, "But remember, I am neurotic."
"Oh right" she said, and we left it at that, which is good because then Pebble got out by wiggling through the screen and she didn't come back until 3:30 this morning, which time I mostly filled by lying in bed thinking about how sad I was going to be when I found her small cat corpse and wondering if the thumping psycho from the other night was still around and would notice the door being open so Pebble could get back in and then wondering why it was that I have dogs who, while they would totally notice another dog trying to break in, would probably not even worry about a person unless they made the mistake of knocking loudly on the door and yelling "Anybody home?" really loud. Ah well.

Car Washes and Dark City

Yesterday, I washed my car. Not only did I wash my car (here's the thing: I can't actually remember the last time I washed my car. And by can't actually remember, I mean that as far as I can tell, it's been more than two years. Possibly quite a lot more than two years.) but I went to one of those vacuum machine things and cleaned the whole damn thing out and vacuumed it. I can't get over it, which I grant you has a certain pathetic quality to it but here I am, driving around in my car (not at this exact moment in time; friends don't let friend drive while blogging) and it's clean and I can see out of all the windows. It's comparatively clean even though I did take the dogs to the river this morning and then drove their soaking muddy selves back home, sigh. And, as you can tell from the masterpiece on the right, there, I took pictures in the carwash. That has to reach some hitherto unrealized level of dorkdom in my life, right there.

Last night I watched the movie Dark City. It was really pretty good and nicely creepy and I liked it, so that was fun and Pebble & Theo & I sat there and enjoyed it while I worked on yet another hideous knitted hat that nobody will ever want. If you don't know this movie, it's a sort of sci fi type dark dark movie where it turns out that basically everyone is living in a horrific alien experiment - sort of like the Matrix except without Keanu Reeves and martial arts. There are still long leather coats, though, so all good, and also William Hurt, with whom I am somewhat in love, even more, frankly, than I am in love with Keanu, who I have not loved wholeheartedly since Bill & Ted. Then I came upstairs to go to sleep and as I sat on my bed I looked over at the poster of the Buddha which has been on my bedroom wall since time immemorial and freaked way the hell out because there was no Buddha there. The frame was there and it said Cheap Poster Frames something something in big letters and I thought, oh holy shit, my memories have been replaced and/or somebody crept in and stole my Buddha poster right out of its cheap poster frame which is pretty fucking weird no matter how you cut it and oh my god I guess this means I'm living in some kind of creepy noir sci fi film now: I always suspected as much.

After I had calmed down, however, I remembered that I live in a house inhabited by strange beings, in particular a strange being named Pebble who has recently become unduly fascinated by framed posters on the wall. I know this because she's been trying hard to get my other framed poster (which is one I got from Qoop, of this image and which looks, btw, amazing, so amazing that actually it's almost tacky because you can't tell that I made it and it looks kind of like I went to Ikea and bought a poster) off the wall. So what she apparently did was work hard all day to get the bottom part of the frame off - these are those super cheap poster frames that just have plastic strips all around holding them together - and then the poster, which was just on top of the old label in the cheap frame, slid gently down and behind the bookshelf which is, in fact, exactly where it was. Well. Either that or my memories have been replaced by aliens in long black coats.

Oh Cheese, Thy Name is the Sci Fi Channel

I have had a very lovely peaceful weekend, slightly upset by a phone call Friday night from M. He is okay. Everyone is okay, however, it was a bit traumatic for me: the boy is growing up and there would appear to be little or nothing I can do about it. I would vastly prefer that he was swaddled in cotton wool and safely ensconced on some remote island inhabited only by saints, but unfortunately he's in East Baltimore living the tough life. It's good for him, I know it is, but oh, lord, do I worry. Then, because I'm still working my way through Patrick O'Brian, I remind myself that if this was 200 years ago he would have been at sea already for 9 years or so. I also remind myself that while I may drink too much, I totally do not drink as much as a British naval officer in 1809. Nowhere near. Why I find these reflections comforting, I couldn't tell you but there you are.

Last night I settled down in front of the TV to watch a movie. I have several Netflix movies waiting for me but I had some vague idea that there was something actually on TV that I wanted to watch and lo, I was not disappointed: there was a Sci Fi Channel original movie loosely based on Journey to the Center of the Earth only not Victorian and involving an entire small military group of young women in revealing, sweat soaked wife beaters. Actually, the whole production was apparently secretly funded by the wife beater lobby: that's all anyone was wearing. The wife beater lobby ran out of money about three quarters of the way through the movie, too, and they went quickly from tyrannosaurs and pterodactyls to really, really lame giant spiders. I'm always delighted to find out that there are open savannas and mountains and entire vistas that look a lot like southern California deep in the center of the earth and of course, they're always populated by dinosaurs who apparently fell down there at some point. After all, why not? This one was strangely devoid of freaky human tribes practicing human sacrifice, though, which was a sad oversight, and there was only one river of lava. Lame.

I got comfortable enough to watch the first half of the next movie, too: it was all about some future corporation trying to colonize a remote planet for nefarious motives. The planet was named Oxygen, which I guess will happen in a few years when the names ABC, CNN and Lifetime are already used up. It also looked a whole lot like southern California except that the monsters were all just giant bears. Giant bears suck as monsters, I must say. I find it difficult to really get into blowing bears away and, while I too have a sensible fear of bears, they are still cute, no matter what you do. Anyway, since they never showed the humans and the bears in the same shot, I couldn't quite grasp the giantness of them no matter how many badly written lines emphasized their enormous size and scariness. It might almost make you believe that the whole reason for the movie was that someone had lucked into a whole lot of free bear footage and thus decided to fulfill a lifelong dream: a movie that cut from bear growling to head flying off and rolling down a slope (that was pretty cool and so was the part where the bear swiped the guy's whole midsection out and he just stood there like a Cylon for a few minutes with a photoshopped hole where his side used to be.)

I don't know why I like these movies so much - they're abysmal and even to my non scientific ear, I can tell that they make no sense. "The laser is set to alternate cold and hot which builds up an incredible oscillation which eats it's way through solid rock and lava with no problem!" Huh? What? No. No, sorry, not even an art major will agree with that one. "This entire planet/cavern beneath the earth that looks just like the Hollywood Hills is inhabited by predators only with absolutely no prey species apparent!" Yeah, I don't think so. That many big predators argue that you'd see at least a squirrel or something. "Giant cave bears hunted in packs and their only predator was prehistoric man!" Nope, no, they didn't. "This bear is a cub!" No it isn't. No, it's a sad old bear skin you got from the props closet and the whole muzzle is full of white hair, you idiots. And there you go, I think I just summed up why I like bad movies so very, very much.

Me and Mr. Clean

Last night I cleaned the kitchen and bathroom. Yeah, okay, this is not an earth shattering experience and not all THAT rare, even - although back in the day if I started cleaning up my son would excitedly ask me who was coming over - but I would just like to take this opportunity to shamelessly shill for Mr. Clean. Mr. Clean is The Man, y'all, he is The Shit, he is as a god with his cute little twinkly earring and all. Mr. Clean works. He gets the floor actually clean, which is way more than can be said for the hippy green cleaner I used last time, and his magic erasers actually erase stuff off the stove and all in all my kitchen is so clean that I probably shouldn't ever go into it again. Ditto the bathroom. The rest of the house, not so much, but perhaps this weekend I will find the strength to fix the fucking vacuum cleaner AGAIN and get everything all sparkly nice.

In other news I'm still coughing and blowing my nose and so is the QOB. I went over there yesterday morning to see how she was faring in our 2" of snow blizzard and while she is better, she is also still coughing and blowing her nose. I gave her some turkey casserole and a couple of chocolate banana cookies and she was happy. One of these days I am fairly confident that this sickness will all just be an unpleasant memory (she said while knocking nervously on wood.) This is a good thing when you consider that last week, while I was confident of living in my house for the rest of my life, it seemed eminently possible that the rest of my life would be, like, 36 hours long. Barring the unforeseen proverbial runaway bus type thing, I think now it might be more like 36 years. Well, maximum anyway.

Oh and the washer and dryer are working, almost! The dryer is perfect. The washer is unhappy because there is no cold water going into it. Why is there no cold water going into it? I do not know; it's just another one of those plumbing mysteries. It's a fairly important and annoying plumbing mystery, because I tend to dress in persnickety black cotton clothes that respond to hot water by becoming 1/2 their original size, which is really bad for somebody who has been making way too many cookies lately but I think it is a solvable and please please not too expensive problem. However, my amateur opinion is that it probably will involve cutting more holes in the drywall where we cut holes before. Perhaps I should just give up on having drywall at all and call that whole area a plumbing art installation.

Another Snow Day!

pebbles first snow 2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I love this winter. Well, okay, I don't love the fact that it's been less than 20 degrees way too much but I do love all the fabulous snow days we're getting and how they remind me of what winter used to be like in these here mountains back before Al Gore invented the intertubes and global warming or something. I may have my facts a bit muddled on that. I might love winter a bit more too now that I live in a house with this modern thing called insulation, of which I had previously been completely ignorant. Insulation: it's not just for suckers after all! Who knew?

Last night was perfect, too, because I actually really knew that it was going to be a snow day - it was hard not to, what with all the, you know, snow - and S came over and we drank some beers and I made cookies, the recipe for which will be at the bottom of this post. They are amazingly good cookies. It is an amazingly good snow day: I have just made an executive decision to stay in my pajamas. In theory I would like to take the dogs out for a walk and take lots of pictures but in reality, fuck that. It's cold out there and I am not taking off my fleecy bathrobe and leopard print slippers, no, not even for art or dogs.

Speaking of dogs, on Sunday A & I went shoe shopping (I bought some amazing boots I can't afford and I love them) and on the way back on Brevard Road we fell madly in love. The car next to us at the light was an old white car with a bumper sticker that said "My mastiff is smarter than your honor student" and the mastiff in question was just completely beautiful and grinning happily out the window at us with this huge giant happy mastiff grin. Even better, the owner of the car in question had a shaved head and the wrinkles on the back of his neck exactly matched the wrinkles on the back of the dog's head and A & I were just completely tickled by this guy and his lovely beat old car and his wonderful dog. Then, unfortunately, the light turned green and he proceeded to drive like an asshole. Damn, dude. You had two women ready to marry you for the sake of your dog and you had to speed off and weave in and out of traffic on Brevard Road of all places? Bah.

However, here it is another fabulous snow day; everything is white; I might just do something weird like grab an icicle and take close up pictures of it on a piece of black velvet, or possibly not. And here are the cookies, because it is cold outside and you need an extra layer of fat to combat it. Yes, yes, you do and besides these have fruit in them which automatically means they are in fact good for you.

These are adapted from an old book by Maida Heatter. She is a genius but extremely anal. I am not so anal; therefore, these cookies are way easier to make than hers.

6 oz semi sweet chocolate
2 cups + 2 tbsp flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 or 3 very ripe bananas
1 1/2 sticks (6 oz) butter
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar
2 eggs

She also adds white chocolate chunks and walnuts and the note from my friend in the margin of this ancient recipe says to add some chocolate chips as well. I did none of these things. The cookies were great.

* Oven: 375.
* Line cookie sheets with aluminum foil. Maida says to use 2 cookie sheets on top of each other but, yeah, right. I am not bothering with that.
* Combine the dry ingredients. You should probably sift them. I did not bother with that either, given that I made these on a beer drinking it's gonna be a snow day tomorrow night.
* Melt the chocolate. Note: wash the spoon & bowl afterwards if you nuke it. I woke up this morning to a perfectly impregnable chocolate covered spoon.
* Mix the softened butter, sugar, vanilla & bananas.
* Add the melted chocolate. Mix.
* Add the eggs. Mix.
* Add the dry ingredients. Mix just until it's all together.
* Add the chips & nuts & chunks if you're going there.
* Use an ice cream scoop to put the cookies on the cookie sheets. Yes, they are very huge. Make sure they're at least 2" apart.
* REFRIGERATE THEM FOR AT LEAST 15 MINUTES. Even I did not skip this step. You must not either or they will just sort of gooily melt and then what will you do?
* Bake for like 20 minutes. They're done when their tops sort of spring back when you touch them. Careful, here, because they have a short window between underdone and burnt bottom.

They are huge and amazingly delicious. Yum snow & cookies!

Snow and Laundry

I was hoping to have a gritty, urban, snowy type photo up here but unfortunately the gritty, urban, snowy photo I took yesterday at the loading dock where I smoke on Mondays just looked stupid and you couldn't see the snow. You couldn't see the snow all night, actually, probably because there wasn't any. I have higher hopes for the snow tonight, except that everybody is all hopeful about it and that usually means it won't happen. As long as it doesn't disrupt the delivery of my washer and dryer, I do not really care. Yes, I am shallow and consumerist and all those bad things, but fuck off, whatever, I am going to be doing laundry in my own home tonight! It's completely pathetic how excited I am about that but hey, you have to figure that it's going to cut way down on the time I spend sitting at the Westville drinking PBR while the laundry tumbles across the street and that has to be good. Right?

Meanwhile, I'm still sniffling and coughing but it's really not that bad anymore. I'm better, basically. Thank the gods. I was going insane - god help the world if I ever become a serious invalid; I don't take well to it - and also, staying bed all week made me finally notice that my house is right on the road and my bedroom is right at the front of my house and, hmmm, maybe it's time for some new blinds. So on Sunday I put up a bunch of pebbly plastic film on the window glass that's supposed to block the view and which sort of does. I cut it in a nice curvy mountainy shape at the top, too, which made me feel crafty and creative. It doesn't really block much, though, just enough so that I can't tell if there's snow on the ground in the mornings, which is a drag, and, I guess, it makes me look far more attractive. When you're as old as I am, a blurry amorphous shape is really all you want anyone ever to see. I should walk around with a whole pebbly glass shield at all times. I also put up new bamboo Roman shades (the Romans, apparently, were way into these things. No vinyl mini blinds for Cassius Caesar!) which are probably less curious eye blocking than the damn ugly vinyl mini blinds were, plus they took me several hours of cursing to put up. However, they look classy as hell. Classy is good. Classy is what we are aiming for, here at the new house with the pink flamingos and the troll dolls in their broken purple reflecting ball and all. Super classy.

And The Cold Does Not Falter

Here I am after 9 fucking days of this worst cold in the history of my personal universe. I swear, this is exactly what I feel and look like now and you don't even want to know what I sound like as I trundle wearily around the house trying to summon up the energy to get into the shower and get myself over to Lowes where I am going to by god buy a brand new washer and dryer so that I can bid farewell to the laundromat forever. Somehow, though, I can't seem to get out the door, probably because I have to cough up - redacted; you don't want to know what I'm coughing up and neither do I - and then make horrible glorp florp eeegghrr hrungh noises and glare at myself in the mirror and possibly, just possibly, pick a bit at the peeling chapped skin all around my nose, or what's left of my nose. It is just fun fun fun around here where we are busily reenacting Asheville's past as a grim 19th century tuberculosis sanitarium and at any minute I fully intend to put on some kind of scary 19th century outfit and fling myself across a chaise a la La Boheme, except that I can't get my Victorian clothes on over my giant tentacular self. Hrumph glorbe eeecklhrgjum.

I Own My House

i own my house
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Well, I'm still sick - in fact, celebrating the other night made me far, far sicker and I'm deeply ashamed of myself to boot, but more on that later. For right now, I'd just like to say: I OWN MY HOUSE! IT IS ALL MINE AND NOBODY CAN TAKE IT AWAY FROM ME UNLESS I DO SOMETHING REALLY MONUMENTALLY STUPID - EVEN MORE STUPID THAN USUAL LIKE NOT PAY MY TAXES OR FILL IT UP WITH DRUGS I MEAN MORE THAN USUAL OR, ACTUALLY, I GUESS THAT'S IT! So now I can do whatever the hell I want and since I think I want murals, hee, watch out neighbors. Yes. Murals and more gardens and yay, hurray, my god, what a long impossible insane thing this has been.

It only - only! hah! - took six months from initial offer to final settlement. I haven't been blogging much about it because I was afraid I would either jinx something or get sued - my temper ran rather high there a few times - and so only a very few people know the whole story. I was also afraid because one psychic told me that I would never live here and another psychic told me that if I lived here it would be nothing but terrible horrible endless lawsuits forever, so all I have done has been flying in the face of psychic advice and even the I Ching was not completely helpful.

It is a long story and I don't really feel like telling the whole thing, but in synopsis form, I offered to buy this house in July, the offer was accepted, the deal fell through the day before the closing in September due to several unpaid mortgages that the seller had sort of forgotten to mention. Well. Then there was much flurrying about by everyone while the agents attempted to mastermind something called a short sale, which is when you get the banks to accept a bit less money than they are actually owed in the interests of the damn deal being closed. In the middle of this, as you no doubt recall, the economy collapsed. You would think that this would make the banks more anxious to close deals but alas, you would be wrong. It just threw everything into even more confusion. The banks were slow and horrible and every day the numbers changed.

In October, I talked at great length with a lawyer and then I went ahead and moved into my house with an odd lease which put all my "rent" money into an escrow account so it could be used against the purchase of the house. And I got ready to buy the house on the courthouse steps in that delightfully medieval ceremony called a foreclosure auction. For the next several months there were occasional sudden bursts of activity on the part of the banks but nothing ever amounted to anything and frankly, I had given up hope. In the middle of all this I got several sets of foreclosure papers which scared me since it was always possible that I could suddenly get evicted and, in fact, if I went to the auction and got outbid, I'd be summarily kicked out. I am not a gambler by nature - no, I have every other damn vice in the world, but not that one so much.

However, this did not come to pass, because 48 hours before the foreclosure auction was scheduled to take place, both the involved banks suddenly announced that yeah, okay, they would take the short sale, but it had to happen by the end of the day or their offer would no longer stand. Yes, that is ridiculous but there you have it and everyone ran around like a maniac, including me, newly risen from my sickbed and heavily medicated. I went off downtown to the banks and to the lawyer's office clutching my kleenex and there I found my friend and real estate agent D who gave me a big package with nifty glasses and a bottle of vodka in it and the seller's agent who gave me a bottle of wine and the paralegal, who gave me a cup of coffee and a lot of papers to sign. And they took all my money away and wired it to these banks and ta da, ta da, that was it and the house actually finally totally and truly belongs to me.

I duly went out and celebrated with friends and of course I hadn't eaten all day or really for a couple of days and so drinking very heavily was very dumb and I hereby apologize for my total drunkenness and general revelry and oh god, oh god, I paid for it yesterday, oh yes I did and it wasn't until about 4:00 that I was well enough to walk the dogs down the hill to the Admiral and get my car. Huge thanks to J who carried me home and to my long suffering friends for being there and yes, yes I have, I swear, learned my lesson. And as soon as the weather warms up, I'm painting big murals, hurrah.

Not Better Yet

They might as well bring around the dead cart: I'm apparently not going to get better. I've tried everything - emergen-C, homeopathic ColdCalm, Zicam, echinacea tea, gypsy cold care tea, lots of water, lots of juice, sudafed, ibuprofen, tussin cough syrup, robitussin night time cough and cold, nyquil, breathing in boiling steam laced with Vicks, squirting saline through my sinuses - and nothing works. I can't sleep and I can't breathe and this is completely horrible and, what's worse, I might run out of kleenex soon, which would be completely disastrous. That's four boxes gone through since Friday. Four. I have watched Jurassic Park 2 and the first four episodes of Day of the Triffids and I have finished a really terribly hideous hat and I have reread the first two volumes of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books (which reminded me that I was then, am now and ever shall be in love with Stephen Maturin) and I have watched the clock slowly, slowly tick over from 3 am to 4 to 5 and then do it again 12 hours later. And I still feel like death on a stick. I would like to lodge a protest with whoever invented colds, the flu or whatever fucking terrible germ thing I have right now: this is too much and unfair.

N.B. In keeping with my my naval reading habits (I'm onto the third book now) and general early 19th century malaise - I believe I feel a touch of pleurisy coming on, galloping, galloping, oh my word - I'm treating myself with rum, since I'm unclear on what, exactly, grog is. The rum is helping. The kleenex situation may be becoming dire. And I gave the dogs each a bone and the cat some plastic balls with bells in them to reward them for being good while I've been on my deathbed - or, which is more to the point, bribe them to please, for the love of god, stay good while I'm on the deathbed. They haven't been entirely good, because the cat is often bored and when she is bored she likes to stand on my stomach and wail and when I throw her off the bed she simply takes up position on the dresser (tactically situated out of range of flying wadded kleenex and bad unfinished fantasy novels) and wails some more. She doesn't much like the plastic balls with bells in, either. She wants a bone, because the dogs have one, even though it wouldn't keep her interest long. The dogs are opposed to her having a bone and actually, they'd like to have those balls, just on the off chance that the cat was getting something worthwhile. Poor dogs. I am a bad dog mom. If they were kids I could just let them explode their brains with bad TV, but it's harder with dogs. Django watched me squirt salt water into my nose over the sink with fascination and barked at me for doing it, which was interesting. Maybe someday I'll walk them again.

Still Really Sick

Well, that's a weekend blown into kleenex. I'm still really sick. Sicker than I've been in months. Sick enough to lie in bed miserably clutching my kleenex and whimper. Bah. I've been having weird fever dreams and strange thoughts too, of course, and here they are. I think I made them up. I'm not entirely sure, but I think they came straight out of my subconscious. Or hell, or something.

1. A long conversation with my friend G in which he told me that he'd never known the name of the NC state senator. "He's been senator forever," said G dismissively, "Why would I bother? That's like homework. I never know any of that stuff."

2. A long essay I wrote about the horrific sexism and dearth of female role models in science fiction and fantasy throughout the sixties, seventies and the first half of the eighties. Partly in response to a metafilter thread about Dave Sim and Cerebus, who for some reason I feel compelled to defend and partly to point out again to a whole new bunch of indignant nerds that there is only one woman in the first three Star Wars movies, yes, fuck you, one and doesn't that seem a little unjust?

3. Summerproofing my house: it can be done with space age materials.

4. If I burn all the blankets and furniture, perhaps all the germs will die. But is that too drastic?

5. Is my cat the most annoying cat in the universe or only the second most annoying? Should I get another cat to keep her occupied? Should I saw a hole in my bedroom door? Why is the cat tormenting me so? Why does the dog keep farting under the bed and waking me up? Why am I out of dog kibble and what can I do about that? Can I make it to Ingles? No. No, I cannot.

It Finally Got Me

You know how I said this cold just wasn't getting any better but it wasn't getting any worse? Well, it didn't get any better, this is true. But now I'm really sick and it's Saturday and my Netflix movies - I am awaiting Jurassic Park 2 and Day of the Triffids, because that's just the sort of overly intellectual cinephile I truly am - aren't here yet and I just spent over $100 on sickroom supplies which is completely unfair. Then I had to get the computer up so I could check to see if Lexapro was an MAOI inhibitor or not (it's not, I think) to see if I could even take any of those sickroom supplies, to wit, cough syrup and sudafed. And, from earthfare, lemon ginger echinacea stuff and homeopathic cold calm and more emergen-C and some sushi and oatmeal raisin cookies because nothing else in the world seems edible, somehow. Also, and this is so embarrassing, I just realized I'm almost out of cigarettes and since, obviously, I am way too sick to be smoking, I can't bring myself to beg somebody to bring me some and yet I don't think I can get myself out of the house again either. Ick.

I'm reading some dreary detective novel starring Ambrose Bierce and laced with turn of the last century Hawiian history. This is only interesting because I just finished another, better book - The Bones of Time - that is also focused on Hawaii. Very random and synchronous and a bit odd when you consider that previous to this almost my total knowledge and background on Hawaii was the Brady Bunch episode where they go there. Possibly about 15 minutes of Don Ho one time when I was really stoned and 15 years old. So Hawaii. Well. Whatever.

I'm going back to bed. I hate being sick on Saturdays when the rest of the world, or the part of it that isn't at Earthfare clogging up the aisles, is walking by the house with their dogs enjoying the nice weather.

Yeah We Did

Well, in case you've just come out of your cave high in the Himalayas, we have a new president and I, for one, am completely thrilled. Yesterday, I did not have to go to work because Obama, with his mighty powers, ensured that it would snow and get icy and really cold in Asheville and thus I got a snow day, weather be praised. Therefore I was able to sit in the newly habitable downstairs TV room and watch about an hour and a half of the inauguration which made me feel very citizenish and virtuous and also teared me up a bit. I also got worried about everyone in the cold without hats - 80% of your body heat, people. 80%! - and wondered if I mailed the hat I was knitting to the White House whether somebody would ever wear it but I decided that the symbolism was a little heavy handed - it's a black and white striped hat - and I'm totally sick of all the symbolism/race/etc stuff. Yes, it is a historic occasion and now if we could all just move on and stop pointing it out I would be thrilled.

Well, they seem to have survived the whole inauguration without hats at any rate. My GOD it is nice to have people you like and respect in the White House and also my god, was there ever a first lady who disappeared into the woodwork like Laura Bush and what the hell is the backstory there, she really is a Stepford wife or what? and also also my god, I really hope I never have to see the Avatar of Evil, aka Dick Cheney ever again; how is it that being in a wheelchair, which would elicit sympathy for any human person, only makes him even creepier?

Then in the afternoon I went over the laundromat with the five giant bags and baskets of laundry I had accumulated by cleaning the downstairs. The laundromat was packed and, what is worse, it was packed with coughing, sniffling children. So I got the washers going and beat a hasty retreat across the street to the bar where they were showing the inaugural parade and yet again I managed to get teary eyed and just a little indignant about their lack of hats. I mean, my children have had this hat thing dinned into them for years. Was it all for naught? Am I wrong here? Whatever, the Obamas both looked so wonderful walking together. You know, I've never watched an inauguration before or paid any attention to it whatsoever but there you have it: there's never been a president and first lady I felt this way about before either. Oh and my entire house is sparkling clean and all my laundry is done and, hey, I am ready for the new administration.

Cleaning Teenage Wasteland

The weekend has somehow come and gone and every time I look out the window to admire the snow and subtly encourage it to keep on coming and snow the city in tomorrow it stops falling, so I have closed the blinds. I feel like I've achieved a lot this weekend, which is completely not true: all I've really gotten done is the cleaning of Teenage Wasteland in the basement which was, admittedly, a Herculean task and full of socks. There were socks everywhere. Every stroke of the broom brought out more socks. At any rate it's done now and young M, when he comes back from Baltimore (where he is apparently doing well, although it's hard to tell from his monosyllabic phone calls) will be shocked. There's a real living room and a real bedroom down there. With posters on the wall and organized furniture and made beds and a dresser full of his clothes and everything.

Not just posters, either, but also a strange and slightly disturbing fabric applique piece from Haiti that the QOB found at the thrift shop for 98 cents and gave me this morning. It says on the back in sharpie cursive on a piece of cotton that it is La Femme de Damballah par Hector Hippolyte, realize par someone whose name I have forgotten at the Centre d'Art et Couture in Haiti. It's a snake. With a face and wings and, after googling Damballah, I'm thinking perhaps I should put a small cup of rum and an egg down there for it so Damballah doesn't get mad at me. I'm also a little worried that all the teenagers hanging out down there will get pregnant - Damballah is a life force god and snakes are an old, old fertility symbol, of course, thanks Sigmund - which will be way entertaining because they are pretty much all boys. Perhaps I should leave a bowl of condoms on the coffee table - now that it's clean down there, they might actually be able to get some girls to visit. I also dug out all my old masks (the ones I've painted) and hung them on the wall in the other room, which should discourage girls - and houseguests and, well, pretty much everyone - rather effectively since en masse they're a bit scary.

Let's see, what else happened this weekend? J & S & I went to Broadways Friday evening; then S came over here; A was depressed but cheered up; my brother & C & I all met to discuss the QOB and talked about how thrilled we are by her recent progress and I went to a lovely dinner party at J & K's. Oh, and I got two fabulous new to me chairs and I am all patting myself on the back for having a great eye for mid century design and stuff because it turns out that they are these chairs. They have Knoll labels that say 1979 on them and I'm pretty sure that that's the original upholstery as well. Now my living rooms are both elegant in their own ways and I even dragged my mother's cast iron lounge chair out of the yard and into the solarium and then I lay on it and listened to Jethro Tull and watched the snow fall and cracked up at how very 70s everything is becoming around me in this house.

Cold

snowy morning backyard theo and django
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

It is ridiculously cold here. Twelve, in fact. Zero this morning. You already know that, but I feel compelled to add my voice to the frozen chorus of stunned Ashevilleins. Yesterday since young M has gone off to Baltimore to seek his fortune or something (and I miss him horribly, already) I was faced with the quandary of what to do with the dogs in the sub 20s (look, we're nominally in the South. Sub 20s is to us as sub zero is to more winter hardened Yankee types) weather. I opted to leave them outside and fret about them all day, even though they have a covered porch, an even more sheltered spot on that porch under a big table, the remnants of an old sleeping bag and my mother's ugly summer bedspread to curl up on. I felt horribly guilty even so and when I got home I was all freaking out and afraid that they would either be small frozen dog mummies like the Iceman or at the very least have frostbite. They were fine, if exhausted, and Theo was acting all tragic, which effect he achieves by holding his treat getting paw up pathetically, but they were fine. I couldn't live through the angst again, though, so today they're in the house while I'm at the office for the afternoon and I'm just hoping that I won't go home to shredded mayhem. Oh please, oh please, but I couldn't leave them outside when the thermometer was sitting there at zero.

Because it is so cold, I'm having something of a fashion conundrum that is compounded by the fact that I haven't done laundry in a little too long. There were some vague rumblings that sounded like I might finally actually own my house (one of these days I will explain this whole mess, but not today) and since I have sworn that the first thing I'm going to do when that happens is get my own washer and dryer, I delayed on the weekly laundromat trip. Also I'm lazy. And cold. At any rate, I solved this clothing problem by staying in my pajamas on Wednesday and on Thursday, wearing my purple woolly argyle tights under an ankle length black skirt with several layers over it. I have come to the conclusion, by the way, that I am just too old to wear purple argyle woolly tights out in the open where they are visible. It's a sad but true fact of life. They're incredibly comfortable and warm though, so under the skirt they go. Today, I was a bit stymied but finally layered myself satisfactorily in heavy tights and heavy thigh high woolly socks over those and a heavy dress and a sweater and Aunt Claire's coral beads and so on. Then I bethought myself of my ankle length black coat. Did you know I had an ankle length black coat? No? I tend to forget it myself. It is soft and fleece and sort of shapeless and very warm and, as noted, ankle length and black except for all the cat & dog hair. I put it on and looked in the mirror. Apparently I've never looked at myself in the mirror while wearing this coat before. I looked like the Angel of Death and/or an escapee from an extremely Goth sanitarium in a very cold country, possibly Mars. So it is still in the closet collecting a new coat of fur because, honestly, downtown Asheville is weird enough without the Angel of Death - a soft, fuzzy, shapeless Angel of Death but still - striding around in it.

In other news, young M is in Baltimore, A is recovering from her kidney infection just fine, I am all better from my cold although I had a really hard time waking up this morning which was weird but may have had something to do with the very, uh, interesting dream I was having about somebody named Bernie, and I don't even know anyone named Bernie. I think I'm turning into that Charles deLint character whose dream life is more real and more interesting than her waking life. Scratch that. I think I've been her for a while now. O has returned safely to California, my brother N is moving to Albuquerque, the QOB's heat has been fixed and Pebble is completely fascinated by the printer. Oh and I still hate Facebook but there it is, inescapable.

snowy morning through the bathroom skylight

snowy morning through the bathroom skylight
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

It's A's birthday again and it would be a wonderful day except for the fact that she has a bad kidney infection and I have some kind of horrible cold virus type thing. So it's the infirmary around here and even the fact that it was a snow day didn't really lift our spirits. I managed to stagger as far as the bathroom skylight to take this groundbreaking photograph and I even took a couple out the living room window before I went back to bed. I've been fighting this cold for days and today I lost - it sucked, because before today I'd been naively thinking how great it would be to be sick and stay home without guilt. I forgot about how the being sick part is just not fun by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm better off than poor A, who spent half the night in the emergency room last night and is now on massive scary drugs which have us both all worried because we made the inevitable and tragic mistake of reading the side effects on the package from the drug store. The terrifying side effects - oh, excuse me a second -

"A!"
"Mom?"
"Are you having any suicidal thoughts yet?"
"Yeah, a few."

Good, she's normal. Everyone has suicidal thoughts on their birthday even if they aren't on suicidal thought inducing drugs like this one. Anyway, the terrifying side effects package also mentions that this is a good drug for anthrax, which is handy to know and, which is unsettling, that it shouldn't be taken by kidney patients. We are unsure then, if it should have been given to A who has, after all, a serious kidney infection. Naturally, by the time we figured this out - I had to get out of my pajamas at last and take A to the drugstore to fill her prescription and then we had to stop at the used furniture/slot car race track place on Haywood to check out this red velvet chair I'd had my eye on (and by the way, that place is excellent and has great stuff and I recommend it highly) it was too late to call and ask the doctor WTF she was thinking. A is going to see her tomorrow, though, so with a little luck all will be put right and she won't commit suicide or start bleeding from various orifices or have her tendons dissolve. We hope.

To cheer her up, I'm taking her and her boyfriend out to that creepy Frank Sinatra themed restaurant in South Asheville. I wanted something dark so nobody could see me with my flu-ish pallor and knotted hair from crawling in and out of bed and A, who is staying in her pajamas, didn't want to run into anyone she knew either. It is tough to celebrate birthdays when one is ill but we are going to do it, by god. I didn't go through 24 hours of labor 26 years ago to just sit idly by with my suicidal thoughts, sniffly nose, sore throat and general malaise. By god, no. We'll eat out if it kills us. Just not somewhere anyone might see us.

Sunday and So

I was going to go to bed, but young M is leaving for Baltimore in the middle of the night and we have ascertained that there is apparently no way to keep the music that's already on his used iPod there and also add new music to it. By no way I mean that I tried my utmost for about 40 minutes and gave up frustrated. I suppose it is possible. Barely. But considering that he was asking me this yesterday while I was making food for the big Capricorn birthday party at the QOBs and simultaneously scrubbing the bathroom, it didn't happen. That is why I am now sitting here importing all his CDs into his very own iTunes. I am not a big iTunes or iPod fan, actually, at the moment for while I love my iPod, I have also noticed that it flat refuses to play all my old MP3s and I am angry. That is a whole nother story.

Meanwhile, my stepcousin O is here. She is extremely awesome and, just as I had feared, far more glamorous than me. That is okay. It is not, after all, much of a stretch to be more glamorous than me and she manages it with total aplomb and also she is completely cool and very fun and even smokes cigarettes and wickedly disapproves of the American edicts against smoking inside. In short: I like her enormously. So we have had big fun and even took the QOB to Earthfare where we discovered this great natural makeup that O likes which led to all of us giving ourselves fabulous tester makeovers in the Earthfare cosmetics and vitamin aisle. This is good times.

The party was a hit and everyone had a wonderful time. The Greek potroast was even better than usual - it's a recipe I've had forever. No, we're not even remotely Greek (I got it out of some random cookbook Mom gave me years ago) but I will put the recipe at the end of this post because it really is good - and my attempt at my mom's potatoes was less of a failure (she used a whole stick of butter for each batch. I can't, somehow, bring myself to that so I used a half stick. It was not, of course, as good. But jesus.) than usual. So the food was good, the company was great and O showed a film she edited together of a bunch of Deia old super-8 movies. That was beautiful and thoroughly amazing and I'll put it up on Youtube just as soon as I possibly can.

A lot of you who read this blog may not know the history behind this. You see, my aunt, my mother's sister, the QOB is a brilliant painter who spent the majority of her life as an expatriate in a small artists' colony on the island of Mallorca called Deia. When I was in the middle of a bunch of utterly predictable teenage trouble - drugs and wildly unsuitable boyfriends, hee - my parents gave up on me and shipped me off to live with the QOB in Deia. I lived there from, pretty much, age 16 through age 18. Then I came home and sort of promptly got pregnant but that's yet another damn story. Anyway, Deia is an amazing place and many many brilliant people have lived there over the years making a lot of amazingly brilliant art and, to tie it to the real world, the one who more or less began it all was Robert Graves. Yeah, I Claudius Robert Graves. At any rate I lived there as a teenager and had massive adventures which I will at some point chronicle and etc., etc. There is a lot to chronicle. Through the QOB and O I am suddenly re-meeting and reconnecting with a whole bunch of people I knew as a teenager when, by the way, I had changed my name to Lisa. Okay, okay - but I was 16 and found Felicity not only unwieldy but hideously reminiscent of my parents who, of course man, did not at all exist because I was on my own in Spain.

O is a Deia child through and through and she has put together this wonderful film of all the Deia people at different times. And I am in it, which I didn't expect. Yeah, there I am, my face painted all up with glitter and a third eye, holding my friend Sylvie's baby, Shaman, and looking stoned and 17 entirely. Also, fuck, gorgeous. Yes, gorgeous and it stunned me a bit and made me step back. I mean, damn. Amazing what 30 years can do. It's been great having O here - the QOB has been so happy - and also we've had big fun. And then, too, it reminds you that your life isn't disparate episodes but one connected whole. Do you know, some of my old friends and boyfriends from those years are on, god help us, Facebook? Eeeep. Small world gets smaller. It's okay - hell, it's good like Greek potroast.

Greek Potroast
4-5 lbs beef roast (I used eye round last time but I've made it with whatever's on sale.)
4 tbsp butter
4 tbsp olive oil
2 onions quartered
5 cloves garlic, smushed
3 stalks celery, chunked
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp allspice (actually I never have ground allspice so I just use the whole thing, about 8 of them or whatever)
4 bay leaves
1 cinnamon stick broken in half
28 oz. can whole tomatoes
1 cup red wine
1/2 cup water
Sprinkle roast with salt and pepper or, shit, use Montreal Steak. Tons of it. That's what I do. And then brown it in 2 tbsp of the butter in a big heavy pot. When it's brown pull it out and theoretically you're supposed to drain the fat but depending on the meat there may not be any or much. Anyway then put the rest of the butter and the olive oil in the pan and then saute all the veg and the spices. It will smell fantastic. When it starts to look sort of soft and all, put the meat back in, pour the tomatoes & the wine & the water over it, cover, bring to a boil, take down to a simmer and then let it go for about 2 - 3 hours. Depending on the size of your pot you may need to add more water or some tomato sauce or something.

When the meat is done, pull it out and put it on a platter. Take the sauce and veg that is left and put about half of it, heavy on the veg, through the food processor. Mind the cinnamon stick; it can fuck up your motor. Melt 2 tbsp butter in a cast iron pan and then add 2 tbsp flour and get a nice roux going. Add the pureed liquid bit by bit to make the sauce/gravy. If you use all the sauce increase the roux and so on.

This is very delicious. You can also toss in some feta cheese towards the end for even more yumzers factor.

Capricorns and So On

Yellow
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday was the QOB's birthday: she turned 80. It was a momentous occasion but she kept telling us that she didn't want a party or any celebration and in fact she said she had never, ever had a birthday party or wanted one. I doubt this highly but I know better than to argue with her, therefore, my brother B and daughter A and friend C and her boyfriend M and I all showed up at the QOB's bearing a dozen cupcakes from the Sisters McMullen and bottles of champagne and she was delighted. I also gave her the five disc set of Planet Earth - I really want this myself, so actually I'm hoping she gets bored with it very quickly and I can "borrow" it, heh heh - and she was excited. And she told us many hilarious stories and we all had enough of a good time that we're going to do it all over again on Saturday.

Saturday, you see, is my brother B's birthday and then next Wednesday it will be A's turn. I am surrounded by Capricorns and Sagittarians, go figure - it must be another piece of fallout from my previous life as the Grand Inquisitor or Hannibal Lector or something - and it means that December and January are always chock full o' birthday fun. Actually, the Sagittarians in my life are getting further and further away - my brother N is probably moving to Albuquerque to go to school and I am trying desperately to send my darling son far away or at least to Baltimore for a while so that I can stop pulling my hair out and banging my head on the wall. I've been attempting to work out a kid swap, actually, whereby A & D get young M and I get R, which I think would be brilliant since she is still not quite a teenager and far more tractable, but damn if they aren't balking. Would anyone else be interested? Will trade teenager for toddler or tween, no questions asked.

In other news, the QOB's stepdaughter O, who is also, clearly, my stepcousin, is arriving tomorrow from California. I have never met her and I am nervous and excited, because when I was a teenager and heard about her everything she did sounded incredibly glamorous and cool and I felt glumly that I could never possibly catch up. This is almost certainly still the case, sigh, but hopefully she will like Asheville, which isn't difficult and maybe even my kitchen, which is apparently tougher, since the rest of my family have made various uncomplimentary remarks ranging from "Haggard." to "Oh my god, when did you move to Santa Fe?" to "The last time I saw something like this was in the slums of Nassau." to "I would go crazy if I tried to cook in here." They are all philistines with no appreciation for cutting edge kitchen paint jobs. I must be doing something right.