1. On Thursday my back seized up like WHOA. It was in the exact same spot as when I hurt it kickboxing. This time I was doing something even more heroically magnificent: I was putting a new bag in the trashcan.
I crawled to the living room floor like a spazzy snake and managed to call my babydaddy. Who had just finished his hour-long commute. They love that, you know. Fighting to get to work and the coming back home again immediately.
So I was lying there on the floor, clutching my cel phone. I had talked my tiniest slave into bringing me a pillow and my book. I had just changed Strudel and snacked her up before my back spazzed, so I knew she’d be okay for an hour walking around my carcass.
“This isn’t so bad, as long as I don’t move,” I thought. “I can make it for an hour.”
Strudel came to stand over me and looked down into my face.
“Mama? Mama? Mama? WAAAAA-CHOOOO!”
BAM! Pasted with snot. And what ho, I’ve got a cold this week. It’s a mystery.
Companion asked me how I was feeling with it, and honestly, I am just so thrilled not to have the flu I’m pretty happy.
Moral: Never get lower than a mannerless shortie with a cold.
2. This weekend, for the first time in my twenty-nine years, I made gingerbread houses. I tried a few years ago, using real gingerbread, but I think I didn’t cook it long enough and there were some structural integrity issues. I seem to recall drinking the leftover wine from marinating grapes and then having a serious Godzilla moment. The ginger-citizens were terrified, and I think I deservedly got slivers of Lifesaver glass lodged in my giant lizard hand.
Whippet and her kids came over, and before they were due to arrive I made little graham cracker houses with royal icing. Does anyone know why it’s called “Royal Icing?” Was it used to seal up those little inbred lads in the Tower of London? Is it because it’s, like, royally disgusting? And yet I couldn’t stop unconsciously licking my fingers and then going “YEEEW.”
The graham crackers were being naughty and had baked crookedly in the factory, so I had similar difficulties this time. I repeated the phrase that came up endlessly in library school: “WUT ABOUT THE CHILDREN,” who were waiting to receive the bounty of tiny, prefabricated housing. Thus I was able to calm the fuck down without getting the neck veins and windmill arms. I hardly ever smash things anymore, which my parole officer says is progress. I am about the most impatient, useless crafter who ever lived. A few weeks ago I applied the “donkey knitting a poncho” metaphor to someone else, but now I realize there are four fingers pointing back at me.
Apparently I likes the neck veins because I’ll probably do it again next year.
3. Now I have a cooking extravaganza coming up. I think this is the year I have cooked the most things ever. Halo, my grad school accomplice, is back in town and is coming to dinner on Saturday, and Supa and her girls are coming on Xmas eve. And then my sister and her Jakeums are coming on Xmas proper. There may be some Euchre playing, because that’s how the Midwest transplants roll out here in the S-E-A.
I am considering serving raw oysters on Sunday for the grownups. Has anyone done this at home? Are the shells easy to pop off? So if I don’t write again after that ever, you can surmise that I died. Hack into my website, and then turn this into a repository of inspirational quotes. But please, nothing about ham. No one with a case of the Mondays wants Hamspiration.
Or maybe everyone gets Mexican Velveeta poppers for dinner. We shall see.
4. ALSO, the steadfast Manuel dug up this old picture of a hippie down in Ballard and sent it to me. He says: “Is this a picture of your dude I randomly took three years ago in Ballard?”
AWWW, why so sad, Hippie? Mean ol President needlessly killing thousands of people?
Here, now you have something to be sad about.
That’s better.
I love this picture, because it’s before Manuel met my babydaddy but after I met him, and before I got together with him and we aged ourselves ten years in three months by spawning Hurricane Strudel. SNIF.
What I really like is that he was out protesting the war, and I was at home making a crater in my back. YESSS! Cue “Odd Couple” music. (Hint: I’m the shallow one.)
5. Tyrone, my beloved and majestic steed, leading me hither and yon in my search for mongoose porn, is having problems. I got a message the other day saying that my hard drive was almost full. It made me a little sad, because this computer is like 0.00000005% my resume, and the rest is the scary crap that falls out of my brain. HOW HOW HOW did I fill this thing up with Photoshopped pictures of Kevin Federline? I should have my license taken away. I couldn’t even properly defrag the other night, because I didn’t have enough free space.
Of course, me talking about this was like open season for Companion to come in and poke around, being the resident Uber-nerd, having completely surpassed my negligible skillz by recently buying a scrotum-flattening tome on C#, reading the whole thing, and seeming to understand it. I concede to The Great Nerdini.
“Well,” Companion said in that “OH NOES talk slow for the noob” voice. “First you should empty your recycling bin. It is really full.”
“NOOOO,” I said. “You can’t!”
“Why?”
“I’m keeping stuff in there.” This was met with the “this is much worse than I thought” look. I saw him eye his abandoned C# book and sigh.
“Okay, why are you keeping stuff in your recycling bin.”
“It’s stuff that I don’t totally want, but I am afraid that if I ditch it I’ll want it,” I said.
“Look through there. Rar some old files. And then we’ll talk.”
I emptied my recycling bin, which was very hard for me. And I zipped stuff down, but I am still at 6% left. I have looked through the properties of every folder–1 GB here, 2 GB there. So it’s not just one area. I have just collected a lot of stuff.
“This is why your games are running slowly, you know,” he said.
I think I just need a new computer. I’m sure I’ll get right on that, since my computer is so critical to my…three hours a week when I actually get to fuck off on it. HAW!
Has anyone done this at home?
No, I have not. I also have never eaten raw oysters. In a couple days, however, I am going to be doing both, at the home of my father-in-law-to-be. I am a little scared. I will pray to Andy Samberg for you if you will pray to Beyonce for me.
DEAL!
I want to live in your technicolor house.
Please stop posting pictures of my hippie brother in law in Ballard to TEH INTERNETS!
Give me the hamspiration now.
Go Christmas, yay.
Well… not to talk anyone out of getting a new computer, but it’s awfully cheaper to just buy one of those nice USB hard drives and put all of one’s illegal emmpeethrees on it:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7955224&productCategoryId=pcmcat33200050002&type=product&cmp=++&id=1152837300414
That MIGHT clear up some space.
Signed,
Your other nerd
Well, you’ve done it again – people walking by think I’m insane or having seizures or something. You make me laugh SO HARD!! LOVE YOU!!
Oysters at home can be done. If you don’t have the proper oyster shucking knife, use the kind of can opener that makes the triangle hole in the big metal cans. You use it on the “hinge” part of the oyster shell. I saw this in the food section of some newspaper once and it works well. Still, wear protective gear.
Oysters on the half-shell at home are a pain in the ass. Kinda dangerous too if there’s going to be booze served prior to shucking. Not something I’d do for the first time with a house full of company. But then…I know that if you DO serve them, we’re all going to get the joy of a great post out of it!
You’re little houses are so cute! I love that you called yours a clusterfuck! ROFL I would make some with crackers as well instead of the home made stuff. My daughter made one last year and came home and scarfed it! I only snagged some candy off of the exterior! Check out my MAD BAKING SKILLS!
Hee hee, yeah Sara Sue, my crash and burn is your gain.
Thanks, everyone.
Awe, Hippie is seriously hot in that shot.
Dude, just buy an external hard drive for all your crap. Then continue to collect until you need to get another one. Tyrone is too young to die, but he might enjoy more RAM as well. More power!
I can’t wait to see you and your squirrely/awesome family!
My family so squirrelly. You may be making a guest appearance, since we never got to start “HEY JERKS!”
See, this is why I post crap like this, in the hope that a techy person and a bossy librarian will come in and tell me what to do. :D
MMMmmmm…raw oysters, Stimpy. I only eat them once a year at our office holiday party, which this year happened to be last night. Beware the shucking knife, my dear. My boss, a freakishly strong former rock climber, cannot move his thumb today. The shells, unfortunately, are not easy to pop off. Maybe that’s what makes them taste so good when you finally get those MFs open. Have at the ready: cocktail sauce, lemon wedges, and horseradish. Heaven in a beautiful slurpy little package, I tells ya.
Oysters at home = Hells Yeah!
It can be tough to get them open, but it is worth it. You’ve got to get the balance right. It doesn’t need to be the most sober person. it needs to be a person that combines relative sobriety with a little manually dexterity with tools. Also, use a butter-knife. With a butter knife you can chip away at the outer edge (thinnest point) of the shell until you can find the groove that’ll allow you to pry it open. If you wind up with an oyster on the half-shell that has shell-fragments in it, rinse it out–it won’t hugely impact the flavor.
If you don’t have leather gloves clean enough to deal with food (motor-oil, etc) a nice thick oven-mitt will suffice. With a butter knife.
And if no one there is experienced with raw oysters, get four or five open, and then don’t eat any that might be on the last page of Highlights “Which one of these is different?” for the rest of the evening.
PS Horseradish makes oysters perfect. It also prevents anything bad. Anything.
Yeah, I am bossy.
“Hey Jerks” will be born one day. I say it shall be so.
Long time lurker here – we made these graham cracker gingerbread houses this year, too! To avoid the nasty falling-apart-and-making-kids-cry issue, we icinged (?) the crackers directly onto a wee little single serving milk carton. Perfection, and less tears!