kdiddy.org

I would like to state publicly and for the record that PNC Bank is the worst bank ever and I deeply regret ever getting involved with them. If you work for PNC or know anyone who works for PNC, you should consider finding new employment rather then be associated with crooked thieves who have the brass balls to harass a working mother for months on end. For shame. Seriously.

My CSA subscription continues to be awesome. However, I am failing one important piece of produce. They keep sending beautiful bunches of green leaf lettuce. And I guess once summer is over, I am just done with salad for the year. The lettuce sits in the fridge while I go, “Uuggghhh, I really need to wash that lettuce and eat it but graaarrraghhhghhhg it’s October! Don’t wanna!” And the husband and the baby aren’t really lettuce eaters, period.

I’m ashamed to tell you that I’ve thrown out at least 4 heads of lettuce. I’m determined to use this one because letting veggies rot in a landfill is sort of antithetical to some of the reasons I subscribed to the CSA in the first place.

But if I can find some preserving agent, I can just convert this week’s lettuce into some sort of mantle decoration.

Isn’t it fancy? I don’t know why it’s so spread out like that, but I had a hell of a time stuffing it into a bag for the fridge.

Also, these:

Oh, man. I’ve had three since I’ve been home and I’m sure I’ll have at least one more before the night is over. I’m going to have to start going to meetings for these shits.

It’s been awhile since I mentioned any of my cooking adventures, no? Last night ended up being all about pumpkin. For dinner, I made Pumpkin Pasta. Really yummy. I added an extra teaspoon of hot sauce and some curry powder just for an extra flavor. Also, I didn’t have sage so I just used some dried rosemary instead.

I told the sister-in-law that I would make pumpkin cookies to take to D.C. with her today. So I made those last night which spared me from watching most of the debates.

(By the way, my favorite Twitterers are the fake people that I follow, which now includes most of the characters from Mad Men. Case in point: this nugget of awesome from Betty Draper.)

Anyway, those cookies are so, SO good. I make them at least two or three times every fall, a fact which Frank used to mock me about and yes, Frank, I used the special pumpkin-shaped spatula last night because I am just that rad.

I made them for a party a couple of years ago, and near the end of the night, Jwan and I were collapsed on a couch, somewhat, er, incapacitated. We ate cookie after cookie and Jwan kept turning to me and very solemnly saying, “Thank you so much for making these cookies. I love them.”

I considered bringing one or two with me to work today so I could snack on them later, but decided against it and now that’s all I can think about. Like, “Okay, only 7 more hours until I am in the same building as the cookies. I can do this.”

Sometimes I think me and my family are being directed by some omnipotent force with a seriously sick sense of humor. God? I don’t know. Maybe if god is a drunken Woody Allen, then his direction for last night’s comedy of errors would be something like this:

Okay, Greedo (cat). You haven’t knocked anything off of any surface in months. Now stare deviously at the cactus on the mantle in the baby’s room. Lick your lips and jump onto the mantle. Tiptoe to the cactus. Now touch…touch…push! Now hide! They’re going to be pissed!

Kelly, grab Greedo, call him an asshole and give him to the husband, then carefully pick up the cactus with an oven mitt.

Cactus, stare up at Kelly with a “What did I do?” look. Great!

Husband, start your futile attempts to re-pot the cactus with the dry-ass soil. Wiggle the cactus to see if it will stay put. Once it starts to fall, grab it with your bare hand! Perfect! Now swear! Keep swearing! Tell the cat you’re going to kill him. Amazing. This is great stuff, guys.

Enter neighbors across the street! Alright, 3-year-old daughter, start screaming and crying! Keep going! Parents! Don’t make any attempts to comfort her. Repeat this process for the next two hours.

Okay, now we’re at the bar. Kelly, order a gimlet and some potstickers. Order another gimlet. Burn the roof of your mouth on the potstickers. Order another gimlet….aaaaaand one more. Great! Talk to Jwan about some stuff. Talk to Karen about vegetables. Show Maria your iPhone and then slur to her about graduate school.

Alright, let’s go home. Husband, curl up next to Kelly and attempt to make some moves. Kelly, be waaaaayyy too tired and breathe vodka breath into the husband’s face.

Oh, it’s 4:50 a.m.! Kelly, it’s time for your sneezing attack. And the baby, it’s time for you to get up and need some help turning the light on in the bathroom. Yeah, you guys do this every night. You know the drill.

Kelly, it’s 6 a.m. Your alarm is going off. Press the snooze button. Repeat this action 15 times. Alright, now it’s 7:15 and you really need to get out of bed. Note that your hangover seems to reside solely in your knees. Check the weather on your phone and wonder why you were reading the Wikipedia page for William F. Buckley, Jr.

We’re heading to Kelly’s in a little bit to wish the sister-in-law bon voyage. She’s being TOTALLY ORIGINAL and moving out of Pittsburgh now that she’s done with college. Gee, no one’s ever done that before. Yes, jump right into my diaspora, the water’s warm.

I just wanted to pop up really quick and let you all know that The Search for the World’s Most Useless Hospital Gown is now over. I found it at Magee. It features 9 straps, none of which are able to meet and tie at any point. Four of these straps are, bafflingly, around the neck and the rest dangle like undercooked fringe around the waist. I also wowed the nurse with my prowess when I backed into and nearly knocked over that flashlight that they shine in your vag. See, if they had just let me have my appointment yesterday none of this would have happened.

Later.

…now I just need testicles, a wallet, and a watch and I’ll be able to make the sign of the cross! Also, bonus stuff for you lucky ducks: post-Wal-Mart stringy hair and pimples! Don’t say I never gave you nothin’.

I’m still getting used to them, but I think I’m pretty happy.

With my 30th birthday quickly approaching (17 days!), I find myself in some sort of nesting mode. Sure, 30 is just a number but if all things go according to the loose plans that we have for life, this next year is going to be a pretty big one. So, in a way, I’m preparing to give birth to a new phase in life…to be all corny and new age about it.

I’m taking baby steps in getting our house in order. I’m taking care of long-overdue tasks, like getting new glasses (which I’m going to go pick up in a little bit eeee!). I’m trying to dig myself out of a stress and depression induced slump in which I totally let myself look like I was stressed and depressed. I bought some new clothes and shrugged my shoulders at the larger size and am also subscribing to the philosophy that a little lipstick can make you feel a lot better. I’m still no big fan of makeup but I’ll indulge it more often.

Am I sounding like a Cosmopolitan issue yet?

Anyway, another big thing is that I’m actually keeping a calendar. I have a pile of abandoned day planners and good intentions. But the calendar on my iPhone is actually the right tool for me. I make note of any event that I need to remember, thereby lessening the strain on my poor brain.

I knew that I had my annual gyno appointment today at 9 a.m. and got myself all prepared. The baby slept at the mother-in-law’s house last night since he is off school today, making our departure much more streamlined. I got to the doctor’s office a good five minutes before my appointment and went to check in, but the receptionist couldn’t find me on the books. That’s because my appointment is TOMORROW at 9 a.m.

I really, really had to restrain myself from asking if I could just have my appointment then anyway, since I was there and ready to face the stirrups. But I guess they don’t cushion the schedule for nitwits who show up 24 hours early.

No matter. I went to CVS and bought Claritin in the hopes of reclaiming my head from the depths of these horrendous allergies. I keep hoping that they’ll just go away but I’ve been hoping that since, like, February.

By the way, if you’re in Pittsburgh and looking for a haunted house to visit, you can go ahead and skip ScareHouse. The wait to get in ranges between 1 and 4 hours and it really is not that scary or even very interesting. There were some parts that were alright, but I really don’t know how it got all of the accolades it did. Tom Savini’s various haunted houses were much better and you’re probably better off going to whatever cheap local thing you have near you.

Oh, dudes. Rough, ROUGH day yesterday. There was the mid-term and that really didn’t go very well, and then some other stuff happened that I don’t want to get into just yet, but suffice it to say that you may find me more morose than usual for awhile. I’m okay, but I really have to hike my big girl pants up and…well, honestly…I know that the strength needed is in me somewhere, but it’s hard to remember where I put it.

Sigh.

For right now, I’m trying to be all serene and accept the things I cannot change and looking forward to spending the weekend at home. I think the husband and the sister-in-law and I are going to a haunted house tonight.

Last night, I was seriously in need of some quality TV and we finally finished catching up on our Sunday night shows, namely True Blood and Mad Men. I am just completely ga-ga over Mad Men, but True Blood has been slow to grow on me. Whenever we watch it, I always enjoy it, but I never really look forward to it and am never DYING to know what’s going to happen. Plus, I honestly find Anna Paquin’s character to be really annoying. I think her dialect coach needs to work with her a bit more. Her vowels are too round or something. And they need to tone down the color of her hair. Poor thing. Her vowels and her hair dye make her the object of my ridicule. Truly, everyone should tremble in the face of my judgment.

ANYWAY, this week’s episode of True Blood really and truly blew me away. It was so great. Lots of really funny moments and just a fantastic rush of development in the story. Also, Lafayette, who up until now has been mostly a side character, got some more screen time and had the honor of delivering one of the best smackdowns I’ve ever seen. Behold:

As I just said when I shared this on Google Reader, “There’s an Ice Cube ‘It Was a Good Day,’ ‘didn’t even have to use my AK’ joke in here somewhere and I just can’t get it out.”

Why, yes, I am avoiding thinking about my Grammar mid-term that starts in an hour and a half. Why do you ask?

One of the best parts of my day is coming home after work and school, kicking my shoes off, combining ingredients to make a nutritious, home-cooked-with-love meal, sitting down with my family, digging in and hearing, “Ehhhh, this has too much garlic! Why is there ricotta in here? I hate ricotta! This is too hot! Waaahhh!” And that’s just from my husband.

To be fair…if I had a cooking advice column and someone asked me, “kdiddy, if I need two cloves of minced garlic for garlic bread and have a jar of minced garlic that I want to use up, can I just use that for the bread even though it equals 6 or 7 cloves of garlic?” my answer would be, “Absolutely. Especially if you want to have the garlickiest garlic bread that ever garlicked.” I honestly didn’t think it was that bad, but I love garlic so whatever. *breathes on you*

I didn’t really watch the debates last night. I was being a good student and studying for my Grammar mid-term that’s on Thursday. I appear to have a serious problem identifying phrasal verbs and some other shit and oh my god, I really can’t wait for this class to be over. It’s fascinating, sure, but I hate hate HATE tests and I seriously will not take another one after this. Except for my driving test. I really need to get on that. But that’s a whole other panic attack.

I did hear about McCain referring to Obama as “that one,” which, you know, smooooth move, Ex-Lax. I also really liked the part where he started talking about speaking softly and carrying a big stick and how Obama speaks loudly…and presumably carries a small stick and, hey, let’s just call this whole election thing off and have a dick-measuring contest!

I also skipped all of the punditry and relied on play-by-plays from Sarah Palin, John McCain, Joe Biden, and, of course, Biggie Smalls.