kdiddy.org

S’mores cupcakes, my friends. I made these for my co-worker’s birthday because I’m the nicest person ever. In making these, I learned that I should not bake after 10 p.m. because I tend to do shit like leave the vanilla out of the cupcakes (I’m rationalizing that the chocolate chips in them will be sweet enough), completely lose my ability to separate egg whites, thereby wasting 9 eggs and having to stomp to the corner store to buy a new dozen, and I also tend to accidentally flick meringue onto my face, into my hair, and onto the wall behind me.

This ad is a perfect example of why it is always a good idea to have a copywriter and/or editor who is totally immature when you are working on the script for a new commercial.*

In case you missed that, Shawn Johnson actually uttered the sentence, “It makes my taco pop.” WHO DOES THAT?????

* hiring parties should contact me at kdiddy.org@gmail.com. I’ll send you my resume!

I found this while looking up a recipe. I chuckled heartily.

Stiff greetings to you this morning. I pulled my neck in my sleep last night and am now rocking the “I have no movable parts!” look. I rolled over around 5 a.m. and The Pain hit. I started yelping and my very sweet husband, thinking I was having a nightmare, spoke such concerned and comforting words as, “Hey! HEY! What. Is. Wrong. With. You?” Since it was 5 a.m. and I was still grappling with the searing pain, I explained, “NECK. PAIN. FUCKIN. BAD THING. OWWWW.”

And because I am the universe’s bitch, right after the neck spasm, I launched into a sneezing fit. It felt SO GOOD.

Not much else to report. Tracey visited me this weekend and Snarky Amber was in town, as well. On Saturday night we had something of a slumber party, though slightly different from the slumber parties of my youth. We were all passing out by 11:30, no one’s training bra found its way to the freezer, and I had a bit of a hangover in the morning.

Because I’m awesome, I didn’t take any pictures of our antics.

Anyway.

I bent the husband’s ear for a few minutes this morning explaining my conspiracy theories surrounding the McCain/Palin campaign.

I know I don’t delve into politics too much on here, and that’s on purpose. Mostly I just don’t have the energy to get into it with internet people but I’m also just not that compelled to write about it.

But dude. Something is UP. This whole election is such a circus, more so than usual, and the GOP’s decisions are just bizarre. It’s really starting to freak me out that they seem so willing to just throw this election. What are they up to? What do they have planned? What is with this soap opera shit? SOMEBODY TELL ME WHAT’S GOING ON.

Or don’t. Maybe I don’t really want to know. I suppose it says something about me that Joe Rogan totally gets me. But dude:

Wednesday night: 4-alarm fire
Friday night: another huge fire
2 a.m. Friday morning: random drunk dude walks into our house while the husband and I are watching a movie in the living room.
Saturday night: dog across the street attacks random pedestrian
Currently: unspecified domestic disturbance somewhere in the distance

I can has quiet neighborhood now, please?

(L to R: first day of pre-K 2006, first day of kindergarten 2007, first day of first grade 2008)

First grade. The baby’s never been too traumatized by starting school. On his first day of preschool, waaaay back in 2004, I cried the whole day. How could I not?

Last year, when he got on the bus to go to kindergarten, I cried. I was used to the whole school thing, but that was the first time I had, you know, put my kid on a big vehicle with a stranger.

This year, all systems go. No tears. No anxiety. We’re old pros. The only hiccup was that we have a new bus company and a new bus driver this year and they apparently do not believe in the dry run. They were a half hour late and apologized profusely but dude, you could have scoped this all out yesterday don’t you think?

So, I was late for work and the husband was late for class AND we had to swing back past the bus stop because I left my coffee mug there. Which is funny because as I was setting it down I thought, “I’m going to forget this here. NO! I won’t. I will force myself to remember it.” Which I did. When we got back home. I would have been distraught if it was lost forever since my dad brought it home for me from Caffe Ladro in Seattle and he made a big deal about it.

But all is well.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the first day of school that I had back in 2001, when I was about 6 months pregnant. It was rough. I was 22, grappling with a lot of emotional difficulty, on top of feeling not very cute. I remember walking past the clothing stores and lamenting all of the cute fall clothes that I was missing out on in favor of some barfy selections from JC Penney’s lackluster maternity line.

I stuck out like a sore thumb at school, squeezing myself into writing desks and letting my professors know that I was due right around finals. I huffed and puffed up and down the steep stairs of the Cathedral of Learning. The other students stared or ignored me.

The next semester I could be spotted toting my baby with me to my advising appointments or frantically trying to stop my milk from soaking my entire shirt.

Obviously, the baby can’t remember any of this. But I think that in some unconscious way he remembers me sucking up my usual fears and social anxiety in the face of a really awkward situation. I hope that that courage will stick with him through many more first days of school.

Husband’s classes started yesterday. Mine started today. The baby starts first grade (the FUCK?!??!) on Thursday. So far, so good.

I’d forgotten how relatively awesome it is to only take one class per semester. I looked at my syllabus today and didn’t have a total breakdown. That seems like a step in a healthier direction. I felt so relatively unstressed about the whole thing that I got all cavalier, like, “Pssshhh! I’m practically AUDITING this shiz!” and then realized that the prof had asked a question and I am, in fact, taking this for a GRADE for my MASTER’S and daydreaming should mayhaps cease for a few hours a week.

We went to the baby’s school tonight for their “welcome back” thingy that they stupidly scheduled to begin at 5 (hello? jobs?) and met his teacher. Weirdly enough we went to high school with her. She is actually two years younger than me which is a little wild. And she has a gigantic engagement ring.

This is pretty much all I know about the woman who will be educating my son this year. I win.

With all of this stuff going on this week, I’ve been a little more frazzled than usual. I’ve had to go to these interviews for candidates for this upper-level admin position at my job and today I successfully made an ass of myself in front of the candidate by a) showing up at 3:45 when I was scheduled for 3:15 b) busting into his previous meeting thinking I was a few minutes late and startling the woman he was speaking to c) smugly asking a question about something on his CV and then realizing that I had grabbed the wrong CV.

I should have just rolled with it. Been like, “Tell me about this initiative that you started…What do you mean ‘what initiative?’ You don’t have an initiative? Aw, man. That’s a problem. You should really have an initiative.”

I shall perfect my mind games.

My department had orientation for the new graduate students yesterday that ended with a happy hour, mixer type thing at a local watering hole. It was nice, but I was really worn out from readjusting to regular life after vacation.

This morning, when I woke up, my brain finished dumping its dregs of thoughts and dreams and for some reason I recalled snippets of conversations from last night. A number of people asked me when I would be done with my master’s and with quite a great deal of embarrassment, I realized that I told everyone some variation of, “I have two years left, so I’ll be done in May 2009.”

Yeah. May 2009, for those of you playing at home is in 9 months. Not two years.

But if I made a hefty deposit into the karmic bank of cringe-worthy moments with that nonsense, I think I redeemed myself somewhat with the exchange that I had with the husband when I got home. He spent his evening downloading iPhone apps and was particularly excited about Shazam, which he demonstrated to me with a great deal of geeky glee.

After attempting to trick Shazam with some obscure artists and squeeing at its continued success, the husband declared, “This is the greatest thing ever.”

I retorted, “No, the husband. Hyperbole is the greatest thing ever.”

See? I’m smrt.

mamasaidno tagged me for a meme a few days ago and (in my head) I said, “Oh, sure, I’ll totally do that.” The only problem was that the meme required me to list six quirks of mine and I couldn’t think of a single one, which is bullshit, because I am nothing if not quirky.

So, quirk #1: I forget all of my quirks.

But I was fooling around on Twitter last night and noticed that my number of followers had changed. So I opened up my Twitter Excel spreadsheet and…

Wait, did I just say “Twitter Excel spreadsheet?” Yes. Yes, I did.

Quirk #2:

I keep an Excel spreadsheet of my Twitter followers and followees.

Since then, I’ve been trying to think of other quirks and consider “picking my lips” as quirk #3, but couldn’t decide if that was a quirk or just a really bad habit. It’s mostly an unconscious act, which suggests habit, but the degree of comfort and weird satisfaction that I derive from it suggests quirk. Then again, it’s physically damaging, if only on a minor scale, but, like, at the more extreme end of that scale is something like, say, self-mutilation. And holy shit maybe I should see someone about this.

See what I did there?

Quirk #3:

I argue semantics with myself.

But I have a good fourth one.

Quirk #4:

I suck (SUCK) at math. As in, I had to take College Algebra for Jocks, English Majors, and Other Assorted Dumbasses THREE TIMES. I’m not even shitting you. But I love numbers and the patterns that they create. The Fibonacci Sequence? Yes, please! And sometimes, I’ll pick a string of numbers, say 7285020 and will add up the various digits until I get to a single number.

Quirk #5

I quote movies constantly. This might be annoying, but people always seem entertained when I bust out with shit like, “You ARE the brute squad.”

Quirk #6

I don’t drive. And I’m turning 30 in October. I don’t know if the husband or my other assorted chauffeurs family members would call this a quirk or “a fucking pain in my ass,” but I’m going to go with quirk. I can drive. Like, I know how to do it, but I don’t have my license. I’ve taken the test a number of times but failed each time after my nerves got the better of me and I swore at the DMV guy. (Quirk #7 tests of any kind give me panic attacks.) However, the husband pointed out that I will probably have to figure out a way to pass the test since he’ll be working next year and someone will need to pick up our kid from school. Bah.

So, there’s 6…well, 7 quirks and probably more information than you needed. The other part of this meme is to tag 6 suckers to do the same. Argh, I hate this part, but I will tag Amber, Tracey, Jive Turkey, Black Hockey Jesus, Angela, and The Gay Housewife. Do it. Or not.

I haven’t posted much recently about my cooking exploits. A possible reason for that is that I haven’t actually been cooking. A week in Conneaut with some overattentive grandmas and two weeks in OBX with caterers and other assorted foodies means that I’ve just been being fed.

While my stupid kitchen certainly isn’t as ideal as the beach house kitchen, it was still very nice to stock my fridge on Saturday and get back to the business of cooking for me and my dudes.

I think I’ve mentioned before that this summer I subscribed to a CSA that delivers to my campus. I am completely addicted to the amazing produce that I’ve been getting from them every week and I wish I could afford to subscribe to their fruit, dairy, and meat boxes. Maybe next year.

Quick, idealistic rant: I’ve read both The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan this year. I don’t think I need to tell you that our food systems are totally messed up and how sad it is that simple, good, healthy food is a luxury in this country. Big food companies, even many of the so-called “organic” companies, do not care about you or your health. They care about profit and are simply not concerned about what their business practices do to the people that they employ, to the people that they feed, to the ecosystem, or about how things operate on a basic level in the food chain. And after reading Pollan’s books, I’m fairly convinced that consumers will always lose out, particularly with the USDA’s shady regulations. I think we’re going to have to start kicking it old school. Producing what we can on our own and buying from farmers what we can’t, resorting to a trip to the grocery store for whatever is left.

I do want to start a garden, but finding the time to get our yard in shape before even a seed can be planted is tough. So I’m just doing what I can for now.

That said, let me tell you about the grub that I’ve cooked since we’ve been home.

Not surprisingly, I had some zucchini and squash in my CSA box this time. The husband does not like either (he’s stupid) and the baby is just picky about everything. I love the stuff, though. As luck would have it, a recipe for seasonal ratatouille came through Google Reader. I cooked this on Saturday with some of my fresh peppers and zucchini and tomatoes. I’ve been lunching on it all week. It’s delicious.

On Sunday, I embarked on a little experiment: baking bread. I’ve never made regular bread before. I mean, I’ve made dessert breads (banana, etc.), but not the actual stuff that you eat sandwiches with. My friend, Missy, recently bought a bread machine. Since I’m a sucker for gadgets, I started thinking about getting one, too. There were two problems, though. 1) They’re $120ish and 2) I have NOWHERE to put such a thing. But the prospect of throwing some ingredients in and having fresh bread a few hours later was still very tempting. So I decided to try making a loaf on my own to see if it was a total pain. If it was, I would consider the bread machine more seriously. If not, awesome.

I did a quick search for whole wheat bread recipes and found this one. Verdict? Dude, bread (well, basic bread like this one) is easy and I felt like a total superstar when I had two loaves of seriously scrumptious bread. The only flaw was that I didn’t realize that I really needed to shape the loaves, thinking that they would just spread out like other baked goods. My loaves resembled Mr. Potato Head bodies, but whatever.

The best part is that this is not what Pollan would call “imitation” bread, aka the bread that you buy in the grocery store that has tons of stuff added to it. It is quintessentially Bread and you can really tell the difference. I’m pretty confident that I can bake one of these every weekend and that it will be cheaper than the stuff from the store.

Monday night, I made lighter tacos from the latest issue of Everyday Food. (Doesn’t look like the recipe is online yet.) We eat tacos once or twice a month because they’re quick and easy and everyone likes them. But I’ve been wanting to move away from the crappy packets of taco seasoning. This recipe used onions and green peppers, chili powder and cumin. So simple and so good.

Last night, I had wine for dinner. Whoops.