I think I want to dress up as my blog for Halloween. I could coif my hair, do my makeup, carry around a cup of coffee and some yellow roses and then just rig up some paper behind me that I’ll paint brown plaid.
It could work, no?
I don’t know how I would explain that to people, though.
“What are you supposed to be?”
“My blog.”
“Hold still, I’m going to punch you in the face.”
I really like reading the cooking portion of Pioneer Woman’s blog, since I feel she and I share similar culinary challenges: picky eaters and a lack of “fancy” ingredients.
The similarities end there. PW takes very pretty pictures as she cooks and in the background, you can see her gorgeous kitchen, complete with big fancy appliances and stainless steel and, holy shit, counter space.
For serious, every time she posts a new recipe it looks like she’s on the set of a Food Network show.
On the contrary, here’s how I throw down.
Let’s see, we have Wal-Mart rice, some of which has spilled on the cookie tray, peanut butter, salt, salt…a waffle iron.
Of course, there’s a decent amount of evidence as to what I last cooked sprinkled on the stove top. You know, in case I want to recreate something and want to know what the ingredients were.
Ahh, my favorite. The knobs on my stove are organized in such a way that I don’t think is very intuitive. As I alluded before, I don’t have any counters, so one day while I was cooking, I set a Rubbermaid bowl on the stove and then turned what I thought was the front burner on to cook something. Yeah, it wasn’t. So, some of the bowl is still there. Coincidentally, that night was also the night we came to the dramatic realization that the baby had a tree nut allergy. It sucked, too, since I made this really yummy green curry with ground cashews. Not only were the leftovers cold and worthless when we got back from the hospital hours later, they were also deadly. Yay!
Also, this guy comes in and judges me.
For the record, I’m making apple butter pork tonight. Yum.
I won the Photo in Search of a Caption on MamaPop yesterday because I’m all witty and shit.
I’m going to print that page out and put it on the mantle next to my Oscar (when I get it).
I guess since I go to school for writing and occassionally receive monetary compensation for stringing words together about some topic, I tend to analyze writing and trends within it. This sounds way more fancy-pants intellectual than it really is. If I were to go on to get a PhD, which I so fucking wouldn’t because I am so over school at this point, one of the 500 different areas I would be compelled to dissertate on is the styles of writing that bloggers employ and the little trends that I tend to notice. Other dissertation topics would be “Willie from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Why Does She Suck So Much, Especially Since She Was Probably Already Diddling Steven Spielberg?” “Eli and Paul Sunday from There Will Be Blood: WTF?” and of course, “Dissertations: Why Must They Always Have a Colon in the Title?”
Anyway, back in the Bronze Age of blogging (2003ish), I complained about a phrase that was running rampant, and that phrase was “le sigh.” It started out kind of funny and cute and suddenly it was everywhere and I got really sick of reading it. Now, I don’t ever see it. Le sigh went out of style.
Nowadays, the blogging tic that is really driving me crazy is breaking normal sentences up into a question and its answer. A rough example of this format would be, “Because blah blah? Is blah blah blah.” Or “And also? Blah blah blah.” I feel kind of bad pointing this out because practically every blog that I read and enjoy employs this tactic, but it’s just not cute anymore and it needs to stop. It’s overused, plain and simple.
See, if I were a good critic I would offer an alternative tic to glom onto while the mid-sentence question inflection died a dignified death. But I? Got nothing. ;-P
I make with the writing at MamaPop. Today, I threw my Lasso of Pissiness* around Clay Aiken.
I’m telling you this because you need to go visit that site ON THE REGULAR. Ya heard?
*It’s like Wonder Woman’s Golden Lasso. ‘Cept it’s made out of angst.
Edited 10:14 p.m.: Uh, I wrote this at like 5:30 and apparently didn’t hit “publish.” Dur.
On the phone with my mom earlier:
Mom: “I think the store over here has tea lights” *
Me: “No, they don’t, I was over there this morning.”
Mom: “Oh yeah?”
Me: “Yeah, I had to go buy cranberry juice because I got a UTI for my birthday.”
Mom: “Augh!”
Me: “And a stiff neck. Again. It’s like I just woke up OLD.”
Mom: “Wait til next year.”
Me: “Can’t friggin’ WAIT. I think I’m just going to start drinking now.”
Mom: “Well, that won’t cure your neck or anything.”
Me: “No, but I’ll be too drunk to notice.”
I’ve actually had a very nice day so far, aside from the pain in the various polar regions of my body. The folks at work gave me bagels, some flowers and a nice card and I’ve received so many happy birthday wishes today I could burst.
Tomorrow begins NaBloPoMo. I’m not feeling too optimistic about my chances of success, but we’ll see. Regardless, I’ll be kicking things off in grand style as I tell you about my trip to city court to testify against the *#!@)$#)( that broke into our house. It’s a kicker.
*We, of course, are not currently in possession of jack-o-lantern illumination devices.
It’s Blog Action Day. My action item for the day was emailing Turner’s Dairy Farm, home to ubiquitous Pittsburgh milk (sounds gross), the most delicious, cheap, sweet tea and the awesomeness that is Turner’s tea-shirts, to find out if they had considered reviving their home delivery service. My rationale was that there would be a lot of interest since attention has turned back to the environment, reducing waste, and buying local.
They wrote back.
“Dear Kelly,
No.
Love,
Turner’s”
Well, they weren’t that brusque, but costs are a huge roadblock to this service ever returning, which isn’t surprising.
Okay, so no home delivery of milk. Drat.
Other things that I’m trying to get going with include composting (and if anybody can steer me in the right direction on how to get started with that I would really appreciate it), gardening with said compost, despite the fact that my brown thumb is probably deadlier than any smog, and my latest obsession has been making my own yogurt.
I eat a lot of yogurt nowadays and have been buying it by the quart. However, the quart containers aren’t accepted by the recycling folks here. So, I’ve been saving them…but now I just have a bunch of containers cluttering up my kitchen. It makes sense to me to refill them with yogurt. I know Alton Brown has poo-pooed yogurt makers, but I’ve been eying them. I am lazy and am always fond of a machine that can do for me what I can do for myself in a more low-fi way (see also: my big ass rice cooker).
My friend ladycakes over at LiveJournal did a meme and I am to return the favor.
The official directions are: Comment on this post. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.
Obviously, this makes for a chunky translation into this realm, since people don’t generally have an interests list. So, if you would like to participate…uh…I don’t know. Tell you what, if you want to participate, just post and explain seven interests that you have.
Anyway, ladycakes wanted to know about some of my interests, namely:
chapped lips – I constantly have chapped lips because I have a horrible habit of picking at them. Whenever I see someone else with chapped lips, I immediately feel a kinship to them.
fear of driving – I’m terrified of driving. I am 28 years old and I’ve never been able to successfully procure a driver’s license. I haven’t totally given up, but I’m not sure how I’ll ever be comfortable enough to take to the roads myself.
Gilda Radner – she’s amazing. I see so much of her in me, what with the frizzy hair and the goofy, quirky humor.
only children – I’m an only child and the baby is an only child. I think only children are a pretty interesting group. We’re loners but we long to have companions.
Shel Silverstein – I was never into Silverstein that much when I was a kid. But as an adult I came to really love all of his books. I love the look of his illustrations and his books are all so fun to read aloud. And do I really need to mention The Giving Tree?
sprawl – this refers to urban sprawl. There’s something very sad about the unlinking of communities in the interests of consumer desires. While I’m not suggesting that the old tenements should make a comeback, I’m generally confused by the leaking of human environs out into every available space. No one seems to feel that nature should have space to itself. The new houses that are thrown up in these communities are dull and apart from one another. Most of them do not have front porches, which makes it hard for neighbors to sit out and simply experience one another. I don’t get the mindset of “I need to have a new house in a new neighborhood in a new area. This is what I want and therefore I deserve it and therefore I will have it.”
Television Without Pity – I don’t read that site that much anymore, but I started reading it waaaaaaaaaay back when it was still called dawsonswrap.com. They obviously started with Dawson’s Creek recaps and then slowly added a few other shows to their repertoire. It was some of the funniest shit I had ever read. In recent years…I don’t know. It’s changed and I don’t look forward to recaps like I used to. But I do unabashedly try to emulate those early recaps in the stuff that I post on MamaPop, so they definitely deserve a tip of the hat for that.
You know what I watched last night for the second week in a row? Don’t Forget the Lyrics. It stars Wayne Brady, who I think I’m kind of in love with. Partially because he makes Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X, and partially because he makes little comments like, “The Isley Brothers, ‘For the Love of You’…all skate,” and nobody really catches them, but they’re great. The show itself is kind of stupid, but I get to scream stuff like, “WHY WOULD YOU PICK LIONEL RICHIE?” which is something that I don’t get to do nearly enough in life.
Thanks everyone for commenting the other day! There are way more lurkers than I thought, which is cool and also a little creepy, especially when I think of the people who didn’t take the invitation to delurk. For my part, I know that I slacked on commenting. Sorry about that. I’m a bad person, what can I say?
We have our parent-teacher conference with the baby’s teacher on Monday, which is just one of several things I dropped the ball on this week. On Monday he had a field trip, but I thought it was on Tuesday, so he was dressed in uniform even though he should have worn regular clothes. The kid he sits with on the bus informed us of my mistake. Meanwhile, Tuesday was picture day, which I totally forgot about. The kid he sits with on the bus informed us of that mistake, too. I’m thinking that kid needs to come live with me and keep me on top of stuff. I also missed the sign-up sheet for conferences, so I sheepishly emailed his teacher all, “I’m crazy busy. It’s amazing that I have pants on.” She was cool about it and even said we didn’t need to have a conference if we didn’t want to since the baby’s doing so well. That’s always nice to hear, but I need to talk to her anyway since the baby can “never remember” what he does during the day. I don’t know why he has to be so aloof. But he told us yesterday that some kid has been punching him during lunch, so we need to discuss that, for sure, despite the fact that one of his friends has been defending the baby. That’s awesome, but I’d rather the teachers be aware of that and put a stop to it.
This parenting stuff is hard.
Oh, well. Nothing much else to report, other than the really awesome news that our friend Ike passed the bar exam and is now a lawyer. Ike Jones, Esq.!
I am going to steal a cue from Angela and post a Friday Random Twenty, courtesy of the iPizzle.
Today is one of those unofficial blog holidays, namely The Great Mofo Delurk. It would be awesome if you would comment if you read here regularly, especially since I’m still new in this space and insecure.
I’m trying to do the same.
To facilitate your commentage, I’ll give you a question to answer: How awesome is Roseanne?
