In which we say good morning to the peacock.
Me: (going out to start the jeep) Well hello there and good morning, peacock!
Him: *preen*
Me: Would you like some kibbles, then?
Him: *cluck-cluck*
Me: Hold on a sec. (goes inside, grabs a handful of dog food, goes outside and scatters it on the ground)
Him: *preen*
Me: Your new tail looks lovely, by the way. Nice work growing that, especially during the winter!
Him: (eating)
Me: Okay then, have a nice day!
= = =
1. Peacocks love to eat dog kibbles.
2. They also shed out — er, moult — their entire tail every fall, and grow a new one for the following spring. The average peacock sports about 150 “eyed” feathers in his plumage.
3. I got a catalog in the mail recently in which bouquets of peacock feathers were selling for $1.25 per feather.
In which we discuss diction and proper pronunciation.
Read the following aloud:
We now know the earth is round.
Now, did you say “thee earth” or “thuh earth”? This is important. Because it’s “thee earth.”
THUH is used before words starting with consonants: thuh cat, thuh door. THEE is used before words that start with a vowel: thee attic, thee elephant.
I bring this up because I just heard a PhD on NPR say “thuh earth,” with a totally unneccessary glottal stop, and it made me crazy.
(I just won’t even mention that I started doing this thuh-before-a-vowel crap myself about five years ago. Get me out of the Midwest, for the love of God!)
In which you update your virus signatures if you haven’t lately.
So tomorrow, February 3rd, an obnoxious little virus, if you have it, will delete your virus protection software and destroy a bunch of your data.
You’d best not let this happen.
Consider this a friendly reminder to update your virus definitions and scan your machine! Because you know I’d just hate it if you weren’t all on the ‘net tomorrow, my lovelies.
In which I have luncheon.
I had lunch today with three drop-dead beautiful blondes.
It was an accident. I’d gotten in the jeep and driven around idly, looking for something that sounded good. I ended up walking into Petit Paris and MissT, Mother of God, and Cheerleader were there and asked me to join them.
I felt like the chick with braces at the prom. The wallflower next to all that long, blonde hair. You have to understand that I haven’t brushed my own hair in two days, and I’m wearing the same clothes I wore yesterday — in short, I’ve felt prettier.
I had the soup, and a brie sandwich. I almost ordered a glass of wine but forgot the next time the waitress came by.
The beautiful blondes were planning Mother of God’s upcoming engagement party at Cheerleader’s bar. It’ll be fun. A real party. An occasion, by God, a reason to wear makeup and heels. It’ll be Friday after next, upstairs in the new restaurant above the bar. Appetizers, themed drinks, balloons and decorations. Hostesses in French maid costumes passing out shots.
Followed no doubt by drunken revelry downstairs, after. I’m so excited! A real party!
This recipe is based on the dish of the same name once served at Mondos, of Iowa City, Iowa, before it burned down.
Portabella Capellini
3-4 T. butter
2 large portabella mushrooms, sliced
6 oz. button mushrooms, sliced
1 small bunch spinach, cleaned, destemmed, and torn or roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 c. dry white wine
1-1/4 c. heavy cream
6 oz. bleu cheese (ideally gorgonzola if you can get it), crumbled
1/4 c. shredded parmesan cheese
1/2 pkg. dried capellini (fine angel hair) pasta
1 T. toasted, chopped pine nuts (or walnuts)
salt & pepper to taste
Cook the pasta according to the package directions, with a dash of olive oil, a Bay leaf, and some salt added to the cooking water, until al dente. Drain, and set aside.
Melt the butter in your pasta pan. Add portabellas and garlic, and sautée for 3-5 minutes. Add the button mushrooms and sautée until all the mushrooms are tender.
Add white wine and deglaze — use a dry white you’d happily drink, not a salty or bitter ‘cooking’ wine. When the wine has cooked off, remove the portabellas and set aside.
Add heavy cream and bleu cheese to the sauteed button mushrooms. (Note: If you’re using gorgonzola and it’s really strong, you may want to use a little less than the recipe calls for.) Stir until the bleu cheese is incorporated.
Add the pasta to the pan and stir into the sauce. Reduce the cream over medium heat, stirring constantly.
Add the spinach and most of the parmesan (reserving a little for garnish), and toss over heat until the spinach is wilted.
Turn off the burner. Add salt and pepper to taste.
To serve, dish up the pasta and arrange the portabellas on the top. Garnish with a few spinach leaves, grated parmesan, and the pine nuts.
Servings: 4-6
Cooking time: 20 minutes
In which I’m broke, ugly, and underexposed. And at work.
We’re so broke that I’m taking the change jar in today, to the only bank in town with a change machine. I’ll stand there nervously hoping I’ve removed all the cigarette butts and nails and rocks and roaches and pocket fuzz and other weird crap while the teller pours the money into the machine. Most of the change in our change jar comes right out of Bread’s pockets, along with all the other crap that his pockets hold, and the rest is more or less salvaged from the laundry-doing process. I sift through it before I take it in, and it’s probable that the tellers don’t even give a shit when there’s detrius in the coins, but it makes me strangely anxious anyway. With the bills I’ll get in exchange, I’ll buy food: dog food, cat food. People food. (Yes, we’re that broke. Hopefully Bread’s final check will actually come through this week so he can rent a goddamned snake already and I can take a shower sans the fear of getting shit on my ankles.)
I seem to be suffering a second adolescence. I have two gigantic blemishes on my face — one right on the bridge of my nose, and another above my right eyebrow. Bread mentioned them yesterday, asking, “Who’d you piss off to deserve those?” I didn’t tell him I have two more on my back. I’m thirty-seven, fer chrissakes! I’ve had bad skin all my life, and to this very day I bear both the scars and the huge pores. Aren’t I exempt yet? Haven’t I suffered enough?
I’ve only seen four five of the movies that received Oscar nominations this year. And one of those was Batman Begins, which hardly even counts. I’m pleased Reese got a nod for Walk The Line; she nailed that role. I’d like to go to an Oscars party with some cinephiles; unfortunately, I don’t think I know any cinephiles any more. I’d watch the Oscars at home but Bread probably won’t give me the clicker and even if he did watching all those beautiful people in their expensive clothes with their white, white teeth would probably just make me feel ugly, fat, and provincial anyway. But I do love me some Jon Stewart. Cute bastard, ain’t he?
It’s Tuesday, so I’m at work. Work kinda rocks now, what with my groovy new flat screen monitor and all. I wish I had a monitor like this at home!
In which I bust out a Phillips and unscrew some things.
Several months ago I rebuilt my home computer because I’d let my administrator password expire and I couldn’t get into Windows.
(Don’t laugh! It’s rude.)
Anyway, at some point during that little project, my CD-RW stopped working. Which meant I couldn’t install any software from CD. But I got most of what I need installed from files I’d copied from my external USB drive, and I could surf and that’s about all I do with my home machine these days.
Yesterday I decided I wanted my sound card to work. Actually, it’s onboard – not even a seperate card. So I busted out my canned air and blew half a pound of dust out of the tower and R&R’d my CD-ROM with one my dad had left me.
And then I found the driver disc that came with the motherboard and ran the installer. And still got ‘your sound card is in use’ and ‘there are no drivers installed’ errors. Bah.
So I went to MSI’s site and downloaded a K7 mainboard sound driver at random, which is dangerous because you really ought to be sure you’re installing the right drivers but WTF. And now I’ve got sound! Yeah!
Too bad my iTunes library is still on my work machine.
I take better care of my household garbage than I do my home computer. It’s pitiful, really. I leave the sides off the case and it’s always full of dust and I’ve never installed that auxillary fan it needs and all the wires are hanging out and my hard drive isn’t screwed in and it’s a total mess.
In other news, I broke down and brushed my hair last night because it was starting to itch.
In which I shamelessly read total trash.
Hi, it’s midnight. I’m awake because I spent most of the day dozing between bouts of Cramps From Hell™ and reading total crap.
I’m reading more My Little Pony porn.
And what’s My Little Pony porn, you ask? Good question! See, it’s like this. Last year we had an RAOK over at my knitting site, and my secret pal sent me a trashy paperback in one of her packages. It looked stupid and vapid so I let it sit around for months and months, but eventually I found myself with nothing else to read and, like the whore I am, I cracked the cover.
I read the entire thing in one sitting.
It was this weird combo of, like, elf fantasy and light erotica. With a touch of bondage. Oh, and blood sport. Nothing I would ever have purchased, ever, but I was hard up and just like a bag of cheesy poofs once I started I couldn’t stop. The heroine — magical, petite, drop-dead gorgeous and, of course, totally buxom — somehow ended up with this stable of sidhe men who were supposed to be getting her pregnant so she could inherit the unseelie kingdom or something, and they were all like 6’2″ and buff as hell and armed with swords and knives and totally hot with perfect physiques and outrageous costumes of laced-crotch leather pants and harnesses and capes and shit, and they all had tri-colored irises and hip-length hair ranging in color — and now you’ll begin to understand — from midnight black to sea green to lavender. (Don’t ask me how, but it worked. Maybe it was the near-gangbang scene in one of the first few chapters?) Anyway, our heroine gets laid in every single chapter, usually by two or three or more of her stable, and some of them even sprout wings (I shit you not) while gettin’ busy with her.
It was the weirdest thing I’d ever read, and since I read a few hundred books every year I read some weird shit.
So when I passed the book along to NLW a few weeks later, I dubbed it My Little Pony porn because I couldn’t think of a better way to describe it. All that long, colored hair. Once she’d read it too, the phrase stuck – it totally is My Little Pony porn.
Turns out the author had written several books in the series, which NLW and I both read because, well, it’s My Little Pony porn and it’s stronger than we are! And apparently there’s another series by the same chick only with vampires instead of faeries and which NLW — purely to punish me for giving her the My Little Pony porn in the first place — loaned to me the last time I saw her.
Don’t click on the links. I’m serious. My Little Pony porn is evil. EEE. VIL.
In which I have no plans.
It’s Friday. I would like to do something fun tonight, but I’m piss poor and I suspect I’ll have debilitating Cramps From Hell™ by the time cocktail hour rolls around.
Last night after work I sat in the bar and drank cocktails and read a book until I was almost drunk. Then I got drive-thru and went to see T. & R. in their new house on Madison. The draperies? Wonderfully hideous! Rache plans to rip ’em all right down. She had on rubber gloves and was scrubbing the inside of the kitchen cabinets.
At band practice, we ran covers for 45 minutes and then went upstairs for a band meeting that lasted until 11:30. I sat on the couch between PK and WTC all warm and cuddly — yum. We discussed sales cycles, products, markets, and recording scenarios. Sounds dry, but it was fun. Love my band.
Today I should be cleaning, but I don’t wanna so I’m not gonna. Plus BoSean’s here, so I feel exempt. He brought us burritoes from Los Portales: I LOVE HIM.
In other news, my hair. I quit brushing it, right? I just washed it yesterday morning and walked around in public with crazy rats’-nested hair. When I walked into the bar last night, P. took one look at me and said, “Rough day?” And the band got a kick out of it, too. I’ve been urged never to brush it again.
In which a toddler is totally cute.
My co-worker, Bucket [he hasn’t updated his site since the last presidency, so don’t bother clicking on the link], had his wife and youngest kid here in the office this morning. I adore Bucket’s wife, MrsS. She’s superior in far too many ways to list. (I forgot to order freakin’ Girl Scout Cookies from her daughters, though. I wonder if it’s too late.)
Anyway. Chance, their youngest? Is so adorable. Tow-headed and shy, but not too shy. He had a little toy train with him. He wouldn’t high-five me, but I got several very cute flirty grins and giggles. When his dad put him down he ran the eighteen inches to his momma’s legs and grabbed on. Then his dad picked up his big foot and tapped Chance’s little diapered butt with it, and the kid immediately dissolved into giggles.
“Hey! You kick him in the ass and he giggles! That’s hot!” I exclaimed.
MrsS took one look at me and practically collapsed into giggles herself. “‘Kick him in the ass and he giggles!'” she repeated. “‘That’s hot!'” she finished, and giggled even harder. It was adorable – cutest thing I’d seen this side of Cute Overload in months. (Then later she called me “a skinny thing,” which of course endeared her to me for-fucking-ever.)
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In other, totally unrelated news, here’s my updated Movies-I-Wanna-See (And-Ideally-In-An-Actual-Theatre) list:
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In other other news, on Tuesday PenLohP dropped off this device she’d bought her daughter for Xmas. It won’t work. Since then, half the engineers in the department have played with it and none of us can make it work. This makes me suspect the damned thing is just plain broken, which is bad news because it ain’t returnable. *sigh*
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Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
