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I don’t know what I think about fate and powers greater than us and whatnot. I know that the universe is not something that I can comprehend but that sometimes it seems to work for a minute or two.

With me trying desperately to get out of the emotional k-hole that I had been in, the husband suggested last week that we take a quick trip down to D.C. There were a number of things that made it the perfect time to go: I had already planned to take a day off on Friday, two DJs that we like were playing there on Friday and Saturday, and the sister-in-law’s birthday was on Sunday. Unable to come up with a decent excuse not to (and believe me, I tried, because it’s too hard to wallow in unfamiliar environments), we set off on Friday afternoon after a stop at the baby’s school for a quick good-bye and supplies for his weekend with various grandmas.

We were there for less than 48 hours, but I haven’t had that good of a weekend in awhile. All we did was stay up all night, eat amazing food, and take naps.

Friday night, not long after finally arriving at my sister-in-law’s apartment, we headed to the Warehouse Loft to see Ron Trent. The space was really cool: dark, low-key, open, and an amazing view of the city. I had had to employ the tried-and-true vodka and Red Bull elixir since I had been up since 6:30 and the event was supposed to go until 4 a.m. I was a little rowdy, but mostly just danced and goofed off and tweeted things like

and

At the bar, the SIL and I met a guy named Ezra who hadn’t purchased enough drinks to close out his tab and offered to buy us some. I immediately invited him to come to Detroit with us in May. (Note: I am easy.) This round of drinks…if I were somehow in the position of instructing a blindfolded person how to pour it, I would probably tell them, “Okay, VOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODKA redbull.” The sister-in-law provided much needed commentary on my reaction to this concoction.

Classy. However, we both agreed that this was still a better performance on our part than the time we went to some art thing downtown and I exited the bathroom proudly holding a drink that I had found on the sink, which we then shared while looking at a Blackberry that the SIL had found on a chair and intended to keep.

The husband and I were somewhat dismayed to realize that D.C. isn’t really a late-night kind of town. 24-hour eateries and ATMs were kind of scarce, but we did end up at Georgetown Cafe, where we had really REALLY good food, including the best chicken shawarma on the planet.

I spent part of the next day recovering but we headed out to Ray’s Hell-Burger in Arlington upon the insistence of the sister-in-law and her boyfriend. I’ve been thinking about the burger that I had there ever since and both the husband I resolved to never eat another burger ever again unless it’s at Ray’s. Or Five Guys. This is a good resolution, I think. We don’t eat burgers often, but this should keep us down to a strict allowance.

We had a really ridiculous encounter with one of DC’s notorious motorists. Some jackhole in an SUV attempted to merge/cut us off by just basically driving into the side of our car. We yelled and when the jackhole had an opportunity later to pull up beside us, he started screaming at us and then called us white trash because we had a donut on our wheel. We were actually on our way to the AAA to get our flat tire repaired. But, that guy was probably right. That nail found its way into our tire because we’re white trash. Nice attempt at insulting us without stopping to see if it would even be offensive. The husband sometimes seems to exist in between episodes of road rage, so the situation escalated and soon other motorists were cheering us on. I begged the husband to stop, noting that we were in DC and chances were good that the dude was a gun or finance lobbyist or something and could very well shoot us and/or manufacture some kind of foreclosure on our house.

Anyway, we went out to see Theo Parrish that night at…some place…that was like an ethnic club or something? It was near a lot of Dominican hair salons. It was fun and the space was also very cool. The crowd was weird. They seemed somewhat taken aback by the stuff Theo was playing, then a bunch of people left around 4:30 a.m., leaving the grimy devotees.

Sunday we went to Lebanese Taverna. My god. Also so amazingly good.

We managed to avoid any chaos that might have been present in the city because of the looming health care reform vote. It was weird to think of us just chilling on the sidelines while this big fucking deal went down (tip o’ the hat: Biden). Health care is a sensitive issue for me. I was on Medicaid when I had the baby because that was my only option. If we hadn’t had that…I can’t even begin to think how utterly ruined we would have been. I know that it’s complicated and it goes far beyond my anecdotes. Just…let’s try not to be assholes about something that people NEED, alright?

Anyway, the trip made me feel better. And spring is helping, too. Anytime that the husband and I get a chance to be on our own, I always feel super re-connected to the dude. I’m lucky. I know.

Me and the husband, who may or may not be from Pittsburgh. I can’t tell.

Failure One: Mousse

I made a cake for my co-worker’s birthday. Specifically, this Chocolate Overdose Cake. I’m not really exaggerating that the cake has made me something of a legend at the office. (And, perhaps, alienated my co-worker for stealing the spotlight on her birthday. Sorry. Am jackass. But with tasty cake.)

Also, Abby (I think) reports that people will never take you seriously if you’re the person who brings in baked goods to the office. To which I say, “Fine. Don’t take me seriously. Enjoy your grocery store cake. Nyah.”

Setting out, I realized that I didn’t have any round cake pans so I convinced the husband to let me cross the threshold of Sur la Table. Oh. My. God. I actually forgot one thing and had to go back the next day. Getting into the car, I said, “I really should be commended for the restraint that I showed in there.” A whole wall of small appliances. Every kind of spatula you could imagine (Spatula City). A stack of shelves with cake pans that I could barely see the top of. It was heaven. And also why I have thus far avoided any restaurant supply stores. I would absolutely break down and chain myself to one of those big KitchenAid mixers. Pictures that I’ve seen from others’ trips to such places nearly had me in tears.

Anyway, to make the mousse layer, the recipe tells you to make the whipped cream in a chilled mixer bowl, melt the chocolate, and put the chocolate in a separate stainless steel bowl. Then, take 1/4 cup of the whipped cream and whisk it into the chocolate to temper it, then fold the rest of the whipped cream in. In an effort to avoid cluttering my tiny kitchen with more bowls, I just left the whipped cream in the mixer bowl, tempered the chocolate, and then put it into the whipped cream. I quickly found out why the new bowl was necessary.

That is not cookies and cream ice cream, but whipped cream with tiny bits of melted chocolate that were shocked into solid pellets upon their meeting the cold whipped cream. It tasted okay, but the consistency was too weird. I left the bowl of failed mousse with the husband and baby so that they could pick at it, and tried again.

MUCH better.

I don’t have any pictures of the finished cake because the “decorating,” if you can call it that, looked worthy of Cake Wrecks. And I made the ill-advised decision to write “Happy Birthday [Name of Co-Worker]!” with one of those Cake Mate “easy to write!” tubes. Here’s the honest to dog truth: any product that claims to be for home chefs and easy-to-use is full of crap. Take some extra time and learn how to use the real thing. Because “Happy Birthday [Name of Co-Worker]!” ended up looking like, “Hbbbj Bbbbby Vcccccc!” with random lines and dots scattered throughout.

Those snafus aside, it was AMAZING. So delicious. Make it. Or have someone make it for you to prove their love.

Failure Two: Our child evokes one of the characters in Idiocracy

I mentioned recently that the baby is very grumpy about school right now. We haven’t gotten to the bottom of that, but in the meantime we’re still working with him on our own to make sure that he’s learning stuff.

Last night, while sitting in horrendous traffic, the baby asked us what the capital of Pittsburgh was.

“Cities don’t have capitals, buddy. Countries and states do,” we explained.

“Oh,” he said.

“So, what’s the capital of Pennsylvania?”

“Harrisburg.”

“Right. And what’s the capital of the United States?”

“Washington, D.C.”

“Right! And what’s the capital of San Francisco?” we asked, checking to see if he was paying attention.

“Um…Philly?”

“What? No. Philadelphia is a city in Pennsylvania. San Francisco is also a city in California. And cities don’t have capitals, remember?”

“Noooo! PHILLY is in San Francisco!”

“Buddy, no, “Philly” is short for Philadelphia, and it’s in Pennsylvania.”

“Man, I HATE Biology.”

Oh, dear. So, when we finally got home and after the baby had finished his homework, the husband went over some biology geography with him. It hadn’t really been a focus of ours, but we had hoped that he was picking up some useful knowledge from this interactive map game that the husband’s grandmother gave him a while back. Of course, upon closer inspection, perhaps we shouldn’t have handed over some of our teaching responsibilities to this thing.

It has a bit of a Kerouac ring to it, yes? Packing up the jalopy and driving across the America. Wait til we be lovers in Frisco.

Failure Three: The pesky need for air

I seem to have caught some of the Man Cold that the husband and baby were fighting a few days ago. And it really hadn’t crimped my lifestyle until last night when I went to do the 30 Day Shred. I was kind of excited because it was my first attempt at Level 2. I was getting bored with Level 1 and had been eager to move on, but achey knees prevented me from doing so sooner.

Here’s the thing about strenuous exercise while congested: Don’t. Do. It. Seriously. Very bad idea. I nearly died during one of the cardio portions because I had to exercise while mouth-breathing, which caused severe mouth dryness, which caused a malfunction when I tried to swallow and catch my breath without the benefit of a functioning airway.

While Jillian screeched, “I WANT YOU TO FEEL LIKE YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!” I wheezed and coughed and tried desperately to rehydrate my mouth.

When I finally finished, the husband said, “Do you feel like you’re going to die?” I replied, “I nearly suffocated and saw birdies.” Then I sneezed on him.

My mind is many places today. It flits back and forth from work to the ickiness that I’m feeling (sour stomach and slight headache, most likely due to wine from last night) to Haiti and especially the family members of a friend of ours. He hasn’t heard from them yet. There’s also some stuff brewing at home. Nothing bad, just stressful, and hopefully I’ll be able to talk more about that later.

When I was in the throes of grad school, I would often “stress bake.” Things would get out of control and overwhelming, so I would bake so that I could control something, accomplish something. Even if it didn’t have anything to do with anything pressing in my life.

A few times a semester, I would show up to work and announce, “I MADE CUPCAKES!” as my face melted off. My co-workers enjoyed the fruits of my stress…or maybe they were just afraid to say otherwise.

So, in the interest of focusing myself, I want to tell you about a few food successes that I’ve had recently.

Remember when I told you about all of the stuff that I made around the holidays and how the batch of cranberry brownies that I made didn’t come out quite right? Well, I let the brownies sit out for a few days until they were nice and stale so that I could turn them into bread pudding.

Dude.

If there’s a Heaven and when I die the bouncer isn’t quite sure about letting me in, I will bring up this bread pudding.

I searched around for a basic bread pudding recipe and just swapped out bread for brownies and added some stale dinner rolls that were languishing in the fridge. But it got me thinking that something like stale brioche or challah would be really yummy in this, too.

After I made it, I actually found a recipe for brownie bread pudding and it was pretty much the same one that I used, so if you’re interested in trying it yourself, follow this.

The crew at MamaPop is doing a group weight loss/fitness thing and since I needed to eat a little healthier than I did over the holidays, I made some stuff that I can take to work for lunch everyday. One of the things that I made was a Hearty Winter Veggie Pilaf that I got out of the Rachael Ray magazine that consists of quinoa, brussel sprouts, dried cranberries, mushrooms, and parsley. It’s yummy and hearty, though I think it would do really well with a little rice vinegar.

I know that this is kind of a vapid post, but our continued lack of computer and internet at home has killed any regular posting habits that I may have had. And I don’t care too much about hits and whatnot, but when I glance at my sitemeter…yikes.

I just groaned imagining all of the times that that headline has been used for promoting or reviewing The Chief. But I’m unimaginative and I recognize this.

I bought the husband tickets to see the aforementioned one-man play about Art Rooney for Christmas. Because I am awesome, about two days after I purchased them, he spotted a billboard for the play and mused, “I’d kinda like to go see that.”

Our interest in the play went beyond the fact that it was about Rooney. The guy who was performing in the title role was Tom Atkins, a Pittsburgh native who has starred in a couple cult-ish horror movies, in particular Halloween III, Escape from New York, and The Fog, which are favorites in our house.

As we were heading to the theater last night, I realized that, despite the Steelers’ season ending in a whimper, there would probably be plenty of people wearing their jerseys. Well…not only were people wearing jerseys, but they were selling Terrible Towels in the lobby. (Sadly, no one twirled one during the performance.)

We sat in our seats and waited for the lights to go down and the theater piped in every popular song that was about or referenced or was even remotely related Pittsburgh, including Mister Rogers’ “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” which made me tear up because I’m a sap.

Atkins is a fantastic actor, capturing minute mannerisms and rambling on with stories about Rooney’s upbringing in the North Side.

The play itself wasn’t the most staggering work of genius. And it seemed safe to assume that many audience members were drawn to the theater simply for the fact that the play was about Rooney. And the play was obviously written with a very specific audience in mind, designed and timed to hit certain pressure points. There was nothing universal about it. For a second, I thought that maybe this should bother me, but, as the husband so eloquently put it, “It’s Pittsburgh shit for people from Pittsburgh. Who gives a fuck about anyone else?”

At one point, Rooney shows the film of the Immaculate Reception. I whispered to the husband, “That’s kind of cheating.” For Steelers fans and for most native Pittsburghers, that catch is legendary, part of the lore handed down from generation to generation. It’s almost not fair to show it during a play, as it’s guaranteed to stir emotions in the audience. But watching it was just as thrilling as any other time and hearing “Rooney” describe how he fatefully missed the whole thing and how it sounded like a tornado had hit when the elevator doors opened and he realized that the tide of the game had turned was simply magical.

Near the end, Rooney’s emotions swell and he describes what the Steelers have meant to their fans. I’ve rambled about it myself many times. He described circumstances that were just as relevant today as they were 30 years ago. People out of work, clear skies but dark outlooks. But the Steelers, there, reminding us with every hard-earned victory and every crushing defeat, that Winning. Is. Possible.

Tears stung my eyes as I sat there, in the dark, next to my husband. We’ve been through a lot and we’ve made some mistakes and we’ve landed ungracefully. But it’s possible we can win. Still.

We exited the theater and scurried to the parking garage in the bitter cold, soggy snowflakes covering us. We needed to eat and tossed several options around before settling on Fiori’s, the pizza place near our house that feeds us at least five meals a month.

We sat and ate our cuts and our wings and talked about the play, laughing at some of the anecdotes that we remembered. Soon enough, we had to head back out into the cold to pick up our son.

I grabbed the husband’s hand as I teetered across the slippery cobblestone street that had been around since smoke from steel mills darkened the sky and the Steelers were still a punchline in the world of professional football.

Earlier in the day, I had been sad after hearing about a fantastic career opportunity in California. But I can’t go to California. I must stay here, where the job prospects are much dimmer, because this is my home.

Forget New York. If I can make it here, I’ll make it anywhere.

Dinner and a show, Pittsburgh-style, with football and pizza. When we pulled up to our, big, old, drafty house, I felt like Pittsburgh royalty.

There was this skit on Chappelle’s Show that detailed some historic gang war that eventually brought about the advent of crack cocaine, with one gangster, played by Mos Def, advising his minions to get some cocaine and some “buh-king soda.” I can’t find it anywhere but now any time I say “baking” it comes out “buh-king.”

Anyway, even though it is, as Amy correctly noted, incredibly pretentious to utter the phrase, “my holiday baking,” I’m going to tell you a little bit about My Holiday Baking. And I don’t really have any pictures because my various internet and computer situations are just stupid.

My friend Mary and I have several times made plans to do a joint baking blowout at her house since she now has that counter space stuff that I hear so much about, but we haven’t made it happen yet. So, this past weekend, I went to town.

Final stats:

– Two batches of Cinnamon Rolls – delicious as always. I made two batches because the husband always whines when I give most of them away. However, I fail to see how three people eating 50 cinnamon rolls is at all a good idea.
– One batch of Bittersweet Cranberry Brownies – I think i took these out of the oven too soon. Not sure how I feel about them. Will probably eat all of them anyway.
– One batch (two dozen-ish) of Eggnog Cookies – I don’t know where I got this recipe, but these are yummy cookies
– One batch of Mexican Chocolate Cookies
– One batch of Snickerdoodles
– One batch of Chocolate Crackle Cookies
– One batch of Eggnog Cheesecake Bars
– One batch of Pomegranate Chocolate Chunk Cookies

I also made the dough for Chai Shortbread Cookies, but haven’t baked them yet. Don’t know if that will happen.

My dining room table is covered with baked goods. I can’t say that I mind.

In less glamorous baking news, the baby’s school is having a Navidad Fiesta today and asked the parents to donate some food stuffs. They sent home a list of foods and recipes to use. I signed up to make banana bread and taco dip, figuring that many potluck type events are dessert-heavy and could use some balance.

I could have used my own recipes, but I can be a very by-the-book person so I used the ones the school sent home. The banana bread recipe was pretty basic. So was the taco dip, but it was one of those recipes that contains instructions like, “open…dump…spread,” which sounds kind of disturbing when you put it that way. This particular taco dip consisted of two packages of cream cheese spread in the bottom of a baking dish, topped with two cans of beanless Hormel chili and two packages of shredded cheddar cheese, then baked for 15 minutes.

As much as I’m a wannabe foodie, I also have a gigantic soft spot for the less sophisticated foods and I’m a big fan of canned goods. However, even this was a bit much. I mean, I really like canned cranberry sauce and while those ridges look downright charming on a tube of jellied cranberries, they look really disturbing on extracted chili.

Also also wik: I watched Julie & Julia last night. Loved the Julia part. Not so much the Julie part.

Hi. I’ve just returned from the ridiculously overpriced on-campus convenience store where I procured Pepto Bismol because things have gone all wrong in my stomach. I’ve been grappling with what I can only describe as extreme hunger since early this morning and the only explanation that I can come up with is that since I’ve spent the last four days eating (and doing little else), I’m on some weird new digestive schedule. If the Pepto doesn’t help, I may have to call my HMO to see if they will cover an IV of liquefied mashed potatoes.

I could tell that this mini-vacation was going to be rad when my son came downstairs Tuesday night looking like this:

And said, “Take my picture in this outfit and put it on Facebook!” Um, no. But I will put it on my blog. This is why I don’t really let him on the internet and as far as he is concerned, the series of tubes begins and ends at cartoonnetwork.com.

Wednesday, I got out of work early and the dudes and I went to the museum to see the whale exhibit, which features a replica of a blue whale’s heart and apparently blue whales are really big because the heart was the size of a Volkswagen. Kids were able to crawl around in it and the baby invited me in. Because I possess the ability to identify Spaces In Which I Will Get Stuck, I declined but stuck my head in to take a look. From what I could smell, someone in the recent past had not made it out of there in time to make it to the bathroom, which is probably the only instance in life where you could close your eyes and be unsure of whether you were on the bus or a plastic blue whale’s heart.

After that, we went to see Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was pretty great and then rushed home because I had pie-making and potato-mashing duties to tend to.

Thursday morning I made the executive decision to make 5 more pounds of mashed potatoes and this made the husband very nervous. But I don’t have time for girly-men when it comes to Thanksgiving, so I shushed him and we piled into the car and headed to my mom’s.

YES.

My dad and his cancer-free ass showed up to bring the appropriate level of cheer to the event.

If you ever wondered where I get my sunny disposition, look no further.

This portion of Thanksgiving went off relatively without a hitch, and I couldn’t help but think of one Thanksgiving in 2003ish, during which we got into a huge fight about I don’t even remember what and all of the pictures feature my red eyes and puffy nose because I don’t understand why you have to be such a bitch MOM. Anyway, the only tense moment was when I realized that my grandmother and I had both made pumpkin pies and my grandmother said something about passing the torch and I detected a note of bitterness.

Look at her giving me the stinkeye. Your applique sweater fools no one!

After we were adequately stuffed, we rolled out to my mother-in-law’s house for the second shift. That culminated in lying on the couch, groaning and farting, while watching The Godfather on AMC. This is a torturous activity because The Godfather is several hundred hours long as it is. When you add 300 commercial breaks, you begin to have the urge to shoot Vito and blow up Appollonia yourself just to get on with life.

I am pleased to say that spending time with my family and getting to visit with Frank over the past couple of days has greatly improved my mood. I’m still sad about stuff a lot of the time (which has had the fortunate side effect of a clean entryway), but our people really do rally around me and my little family and they’re not going to let us smack the bottom. They’ll at least help us to land softly.

The next week and a half is going to be an exciting one. The baby turns 8 (EIGHT!?!?!) on Sunday and then next Tuesday I give my final presentation as a graduate student. Effectively, I will be done with my MA a little over a week from now.

Also, I made the executive decision that the husband and I needed to re-watch The Wire from the beginning. I think he was a little surprised, especially since we just started watching Deadwood (a couple of years after the fact, but whatever), but he didn’t really resist. Being able to watch the whole thing over again is so fun. I highly recommend it.

I just want you all to recognize that I made the extreme sacrifice of peeling myself off of the couch and trudging over to the desktop to write a post. The wireless router in our house died so I can’t use my laptop and I started to tap out a post on my iPhone until the little voice in my head whispered, “You are stupid.” For all of its loveliness, the iPhone is not quite a computer. Whenever they work out the holographic projection of a keyboard and a display, then it is so on.

Prior to this, I went to the kitchen to first finish cleaning up and make myself a cup of tea, when the husband chose that moment to barge and declare that he was making popcorn. He also suggested that I cut up some pomegranates, because he knows how much I like squirting purple juice all over the kitchen. What a doll!

Anyway, I finally have my tea. And I need to have you guys over at some point because I made a Bundt cake this weekend that I think is pretty yummy but the husband and the baby aren’t interested.

This actually brings me to the, erm, point, such as it is, of this post. The Bundt that I made is a Pumpkin Apple Spiced Bundt and I got the recipe from The Food Librarian. She is doing 30 days of Bundt cake recipes and I’m going to type Bundt here just to bring the Bundt count of this post to a healthy six. The 30 days of Bundt cakes are part of her participation in “I Like Big Bundts,” (sung to the tune of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s seminal composition, “Baby Got Back”) leading up to National Bundt Day on November 15th. Did you know there was such a thing? The Food Librarian is rad in general, so I recommend checking her out, Bundt or no.

Every time I see the accompanying graphic of two Nordic Ware Bundt pans suggestively posed, I start giggling and can’t stop. Also: BUNDT.

Anyway, I find myself in the awkward position of being responsible for consuming the Bundt that I made, because I feel like going to work and saying, “Here’s a 3-day-old Bundt that I ate half of. Can I have a raise?” is kind of rude. So, please come over. My jeans beg you.

When I was at the grocery store on Sunday, I was paused at the tea section, hunting for a certain kind of iced tea bags that the husband uses. I couldn’t find the iced tea, but my eye stopped on the boxes of Constant Comment.

In my informal observations, the varieties of teas available to the general public have greatly increased over the past 10 or 15 years, with popularized versions of things like green and chai teas becoming commonplace.

I go through periods of being really into tea and will buy many different flavors, though I remain a devoted coffee drinker as part of my morning ritual.*

My mom drank tea all the time when I was little and one of her favorites was Constant Comment. Seeing the familiar red and black box at the store, I suddenly craved the spicy orange flavor. I bought a box and last night, I drank my first cup in years while thumbing through the JC Penney Christmas catalog and scratching my head over some of their jewelry items. (Ahem.)

Did you know that Ruth Campbell Bigelow created Constant Comment in 1945 and was so named because the recipe received nothing but “constant comments?”

*I make it sound so peaceful, when my “ritual” involves gulping 3 or so cups in a most crackheaded and fiendish fashion after stumbling out of bed and before shoving my kid out the door with a hearty, “LET’S GO! COME ON!”

We were standing at the bus stop yesterday morning, staring at the shattered glass in the street that must have been from an earlier traffic accident, and cringing every time a car drove over it.

Daylight Savings had made the morning just a bit more bearable, gifting us with light and an extra hour the day before.

At our house a block away, an obscenely large pile of Halloween candy sat, waiting to be slowly devoured.

“Can I tell you a secret?” I said.

“Yeah,” replied the baby.

“I’m kind of excited for Christmas already.”

“Is that really a secret?”

“Well, kinda. When you’re a grown-up you’re not really supposed to get that excited for Christmas, and you’re definitely not supposed to get excited for it at the very beginning of November.”

“Oh. Well, I’m excited, too.”

I feel kind of weird not joining in with the groaning about the holiday season and the shamelessly early marketing. But that stuff’s not even really on my mind. Since money will most likely be extraordinarily tight this year, the stress of shopping isn’t even an issue.

I’m just so looking forward to having some time off and being with my guys. I hope it snows and is so cold that hot chocolate becomes an hourly necessity.

I can’t wait to bake a ton of cookies. I’ve been somewhat accidentally stockpiling flour, buying a few sacks at a time whenever I spot a sale, and have signed up to receive the Cookie Countdown emails from MyRecipes. Seriously, starting around mid-December, if you’re anywhere near my house, stop in and grab a dozen or two. It’ll be silly.

Every year since 2001, when the baby was still officially The Fetus, we’ve made a trek to Trax Farms right before Halloween. We fully recognize that driving out to the country for the day to do country-ish things like hay rides and corn mazes and pumpkin picking and cider guzzling is some total City Mouse behavior, but whatever. It’s tradition and I’m pretty sure it’s written in one of my algebra textbooks that after two years, a tradition is never to be questioned.

And every year, the atmosphere at Trax has become increasingly circus-like. I think they’re pushing their fall festival theme a little bit harder and so they keep adding attractions that depart further away from the farm theme. This year there was a Moonbounce and a large inflated Titanic…thing. Because the Titanic crashed in rural Pennsylvania dontchaknow.

And, of course, the number of people making their annual trek to the country from the city and the suburbs has steadily increased. All of these things combined have made our annual trip less and less pleasant.

(I also stopped buying the Trax Farms brand products in the store when I had the revolutionary idea to look at the labels and realized that none of these products were made at Trax Farms, but rather somewhere else for Trax Farms. I guess I had this adorably naive and urban idea of a bunch of ladies draped in, I don’t know, doilies and aprons, toiling somewhere in the back of the farm making apple butter and applesauce from an old family recipe. Yeah, not so much. I’m not sure exactly where their stuff is made, but I don’t think there are any grammies involved and I’m fairly certain that old family recipes don’t include high fructose corn syrup. So, there’s yet another fantasy quashed. Also, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny don’t exist, God hates you, and your elementary school teacher did not, in fact, think that you could be anything you wanted to be. She always knew that you were an idiot.)

A few weeks ago, I suggested that we go to Trax the first week of October. I had several reasons, mostly having to do with our weekends being packed all of October. The husband staunchly refused, saying that that was too early.

Somewhere around mid-October, faced with a frigid and rainy weekend, the husband mused that we should have gone to Trax at the beginning of October. “OH, REALLY?!?!?” I squawked, and he quickly backpedaled and said that my reasons were not freak-weather-related and so therefore I was still wrong to suggest the early outing. He has since relented a tiny bit, and last night declared, that I was “right, but not right-right.”

We decided to sacrifice the first half of the Steelers game and head out to the farm right after the baby’s soccer game. Of course, everyone else had this idea, too. (Note: if you want a peaceful grocery shopping experience, go during a Steeler game. The aisles will be gloriously empty…but you might have a tough time finding hot wings or sandwich rings. Just FYI.) We parked far away from the entrance and had to go through the back entrance of the store, past a Christmas display.

Now, I can’t complain too much, because the crowd did disperse a little, and the pumpkins were still plentiful. However, three things get a huge boo from me:

– Now that I am officially a Soccer Mom, I got the urge to decorate my front porch with some of those hardy mums in gorgeous fall shades. There were about six or seven hardy mums left and they looked as though they had gone on a bender, culminating in a fistfight with the cornstalks.

– The animals in the petting zoo were so overfed from everyone marching in and out of there all day with their cups of grain and baby bottles, that they barely acknowledged our cries of, “Here, goat. Here, goat. Have some dried corn and stuff. Come on.” However, the alpaca obliged us and didn’t seem to mind that I called him, “Mr. Sweater.” Also, some hipsters gave me the stinkeye when I mocked the goats for not having thumbs. Whatever, man. I’m circling the bottom of the food chain. I need to feel superior to someone.

– The corn “maze.” I don’t know if there were budgetary constraints this year or not. But the maze was not tightly packed rows of undulating cornstalks, but rather cornstalks spread out and tied with twine in such a way that I could look through the maze and see most possible routes. And the entrance was also the exit, meaning that if we were competing, I could just go in, hide for a few seconds and then emerge and claim that I had completed the maze in record time. Really, really anticlimactic and not nearly “Shining” enough.

But we acquired pumpkins and a bushel of apples. After watching the glorious Steeler game, the husband made some beef vegetable soup with the help of one of Trax’s soup bags. It’s his annual foray into the kitchen and is like one giant, stereotype-laden sitcom episode, as he yells out to me asking where the knives are and drops things and burns fingers and overflows the sink with dishes and uses the most profane language. The soup was good, though.

Being Harriet to his Ozzie, I made an apple pie. My pies are always delicious, but aesthetically I’m terrible. I have some difficulty with rolling out pie dough. Last night, the dough for the bottom crust was thick in the middle and nearly translucent on the edges, while the dough for the top crust was the opposite.

I also took the requisite picture of my kid in the pumpkin patch, but I haven’t gotten it off of the camera yet. That reminds me, that we managed to avoid that Kodak onslaught. Last year, I was standing next to a woman who plopped her six-month-old on a pumpkin and he was all overstimulated by the crowd that he wouldn’t look at the camera. Instead of just grabbing an equally precious profile shot, the mom was insistent on getting a toothy grin, and kept saying, “Anthony! Anthony! Anthony! Look at mama! Look at mama! Look! Look! Beep beep Beep! Anthony! Anthony! Beep! Boop! Anthony!” I was torn between wanting to fist bump Anthony for not bending to his mother’s inane will and grabbing his head and turning it toward her EasyShare just to make the noise stop.