I made this last night. It was good. Here’s the recipe. Sometimes I feel like I’m a freakin’ soup-makin’ goddess.
Pea & Carrot Soup
1/4 c. butter
1/4 white onion, diced
1-2 rib(s) celery, diced
2 c. carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
1 c. frozen peas
1 tsp. thyme
1/2 tsp. basil
1/2 tsp. paprika
1 clove
2-3 c. broth
1+ c. heavy cream
salt & pepper to taste
Continue reading »
Wallflower no more, y’all.
Tonight I’m going to rehearse with a band that’s thinkin’ about hiring me. Monday night I’m going to sit in with another band that’s thinkin’ about hiring me.
It’s damned exciting to realize that within weeks of announcing my intention to start singing again (if you can call telling my friends and letting the grapevine handle it “announcing” anything), people are calling me up at work and offering me gigs.
Here’s the skinny on my two upcoming ‘auditions’:
- Tonight Greg’s band is an established band that’s been gigging around for awhile, but they’re in some kind of new members/new material phase so I’d hire on initially as a backup singer. I don’t really know anything else about them, their book, their gig schedule, or anything, other than Greg said they were going to try doing some Steely Dan covers (which speaks well for the players’ chops). They seem to have a “we’re in the process of becoming a slightly different band than we were before and it’s very exciting!” vibe.
- Monday night Randy’s band is new but made of players with histories and good gig contacts and it’s all but ready to gig – they’re learning five new R&B covers a week, and their current book is already a few minutes shy of four sets. If I love them best I’d be fronting. They seem to have a “let’s gig a lot and make money” vibe.
Now, I’ve never seen or heard either of these bands so I don’t have any inkling which one I’ll like better (or which one will like me better), but let me tell you the idea of being in a working band again is really appealing! What the hell have I been doing these past several years?
In other news, if I read your blog and you haven’t updated it since September, I hate you.
In which I absolutely gush about an electronic device you don’t give a shit about.
I haven’t been doing much with the blog these past two days because I’ve been playing with my new iPod. Doin’ stuff like finding missing music and putting it back in my collection, adding album art, updating tags, putting anything redneck into a folder to go on Brett’s iPod (he got my old mini) etc. etc. etc. It’s fairly labor-intensive.
Oh, plus work’s been busy too, but whatever. RDSL installations, cross-connections, DSLAM ports, customers wanting to have me walk them through changing their damn email settings (LOOK IT UP ON THE FUCKING SUPPORT SITE, THAT’S WHAT IT’S THERE FOR!), employees calling me to look port numbers or circuit IDs up for them: whatEVer. Back to iTunes.
My music library is so hot. It’s all organized and tagged and shit ~ I can hardly stand myself. (Good thing there aren’t any busses in this town, because I’d probably get hit by one the minute I step outside: that’s how nice my ID3 tags are.)
In which you’re amazed.
This is how much of a dork I really am:

I actually own a hampsterdance.com coffee mug.
——–
In which it’s actually my own damn fault.
Apparently I let my computer auto-dial the long distance number to my ISP from 8/21 through 9/10.
This is so unlike me. I mean, I work at an ISP, I know better than to call Fairfield when I can call Douds for free. I only ever dial the Fairfield POP to troubleshoot connectivity problems!
Anyway, long story short: my phone bill, usually less than $30 per month, is $225.45 this month.
Fuck. Me.
In which I eat like there’s no tomorrow.
Since the weather has turned, all I want to do is eat.
I had full-on greasy breakfast both Saturday and Sunday last weekend, and I never do that. (Hash browns! Scrambled eggs with melted cheese! Veggie sausage! Toast with real butter! OMG!)
Saturday I ate pasta (alfredo primavera, with generous amounts of cream, butter, and parmesan) for dinner, and then again as a late-night snack.
And yesterday I ate Mexican food twice. (Note to self: never, EVER eat an entire box of taco filling in one day again. Good God, what were you thinking?!)
The thing is, I’ll be perfectly round by Thanksgiving if this shit doesn’t stop. Please tell me I’m not the only one who apparently thinks she’s changed species and is fattening up for a function her body doesn’t even perform!
OMGOMGOMG! It’s here! My new iPod!
I’m so geeked out.
I’d thought about not keeping it, but of courseI’m going to. It’s new, it’s shiny, and best of all – it’s here in my hot little hands. The other one, the 6th gen, the one I should have purchased, well, it’s not here. See what I mean?
For no reason whatsoever.

Buz and Shiva
One orange cat, yawning, and one yellow dog, curled up, on an old blanket in the corner of the livingroom.
In which we do all kinds of redneck stuff.
Late this morning we went out and towed my dad‘s RV out of the ditch where he’d gotten it stuck on his arrival Friday night. It was pretty exciting, really – his rig is huge and the road was about three inches deep in nasty, sticky, clay-like Iowa mud.
If you don’t know about Iowa mud, let me tell you. It’s not like any other mud you’ve ever seen. It’s gooey and sticky and unforgiving, and it will coat your tires in three inches of clay so that you get absolutely no traction. It’s terrible stuff. And my dad’s RV weighs about a bajillion tons and has street tires on it with no tread. Furthermore, the rig was perilously close to sliding into a very, very, very deep ditch. (Like, maybe 20 feet deep. Although the trees probably would have stopped it from actually making it all the way to the bottom if it had gone in.)
Brett hooked a tow chain to the RV’s frame and got in his truck. Dad got in the RV. I stood freezing on the side of the road, charged with screaming like mad if the “ass end of that thing starts heading toward the ditch!”
Brett’s truck was spinning all four tires at first, but he got the RV pulled out. Yay! Then he traffic-copped my dad for a bit as he backed the thing up the road and back onto gravel. Work done, we drove back to the house.
Dad’s rolling home is now safe (and level!) up top, plugged into power and everything. He feels so much better. (Having your home stuck in mud about fifteen inches from a giant ditch is probably a little nerve-wracking.)

Brett and Jim
After a bit of self-congratulation we went out into our woods, where Brett and Dad chopped down three dead trees and cut them into pieces. Then the three of us loaded the pieces into the back of the truck while the dogs ran around chewing on logs and rolling in dirt and munching the last of the grass of the season.

Happy dogs
We’ve unloaded the wood into a big pile next to the garage and are inside warming back up. We’re thinking about some kind of football/cocktail excursion for the remainder of the afternoon.
In which I do a dumb meme. (Sorry. You can skip reading this post.)
Do a search with your first name and needs in quotes – i.e. “Saddam needs,” and post the top 10 results…
MUSH NEEDS:
- Mush needs sympathy from Bush
- mush needs to put his size into his hits
- MUSH needs greater staff involvement than most other systems
- MUSH needs a policy for governance
- MUSH needs background maintenance to be done and improvement of coded systems
- Mush needs to stop skipping
- mush needs some new music
Continue reading »
Recent Comments
Friends
- Barn Lust
- Blind Prophesy
- Blogography*
- blort*
- Cabezalana
- Chaos Leaves Town*
- Cocky & Rude
- EmoSonic
- From The Storage Room
- Hunting the Horny-backed Toad
- Jazzy Chad
- Mission Blvd
- Not My Rabbit
- Puntabulous
- sathyabh.at*
- Seismic Twitch
- Stevers
- superherokaren
- The Book of Shenry
- the doctor
- The Intrepid Arkansawyer
- The Naughty Butternut
- tokio bleu
- Vicious, Unrepentant, Bitter Old Queen
- whatever*
- William
- WoolGatherer
- zigzackly


