Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and the Black Plague

Thanksgiving was a rousing success. My in-laws showed up on Wednesday, and we ordered pizza from a local Italian restaurant... we're never buying Domino's again! Great pizzas, awesome Greek salad, and they delivered it in under an hour. After dinner I brined the turkey and packed it in ice to sit overnight. Oh, and beer. For a change, I didn't try to keep up with my father-in-law, which is why I had five beers and he fell asleep on the couch at 8:30.

Thursday we had turkey, stuffing, the whole nine yards. The secondary benefit of brining a turkey, besides making sure that the meat is moist and flavorful, is that the pan drippings make the most delicious gravy imaginable. Holy crap that was good. My wife made corn muffins and sweet potatoes and helped with everything else, which was cool because it is the first time I've had someone do part of the cooking. Later, my wife's brother and his family showed up and we had a good old time watching the Punkin Chunkin World Championships.

 

Friday we got up at 5AM to hit the stores. I got a couple of movies for really cheap, and my wife got a really fancy handbag for half price. The in-laws went off around 11AM to the local car show, and we took a nap. When I woke up, I felt a little icky. By the time I woke up Saturday morning, I was full-on sick. Sunday I spent the whole day on the couch wrapped in a blanket, and I wound up sleeping in the spare bedroom so my coughing wouldn't keep my wife up all night.

Here it is Monday, and I'm coughing up lovely little gobs of yellow-green nasty... sort of like soft-cooked quail egg yolks. Delightful, right? I hope I'm better before I go back to school tomorrow, but it is looking iffy. Very iffy. I'm off to take some Theraflu, some Advil Cold & Sinus, AND some Nyquil. If this doesn't work, I'm drinking a bottle of Drambuie and crossing my fingers.

It is possible that I bought my wife too many birthday presents

Yeah, really. No kidding.

I guess the stereotype is that the woman wants a ridiculously expensive gift, and the man has to sell his soul to get it. In this case, my wife had a huge Amazon.com wish list full of books and movies. I bought... most of them? Enough of them that about a week and a half ago we started the first annual "12 Days of Birthday" celebration. All I know for sure is that there's a giant stack of books on the end table next to where she sits on the couch. Also, 4-5 movies on the shelf. Not even her birthday yet.

I mean, cool and all... but how do I top it next year?

Oh, the pain... the pain!!!

Just got a flu shot. Literally just got one, my wife got me a shot from work and gave it to me a few seconds ago. I already feel like I'm going to die, just from the pain. Oh. Oh. The pain.

Makes me think about the stupidity of the anti-vaccine crowd. Sure there's a pinch of mercury in a flu shot, but there's also plenty of mercury in a can of tuna. We haven't banned tuna, but there are people who claim that we should ban vaccinations. Ugh. I'd rant more, except I think I'm going to go faint now.

BTW, I've had a full set of shots at least three separate times in my life. Somehow it didn't make me autistic.

Appreciating the little things

Seriously, friends and far-off neighbors. On this Friday before the Thanksgiving holiday week, I'm already feeling thankful. Thankful for the fact that I'm done with major school activities until after the holiday, including a 1500 word history research paper that I wrote this morning. Thankful that I have some ice-cold beers waiting for me to start drinking them. Thankful for my awesome wife who will humor me while I'm drinking the ice-cold beers.

That stuff seems small, but I can appreciate things that are even smaller than that. Like for instance:

Yeah. I went and spent like $550 on groceries and beer and gizmos and gadgets and a new roasting pan for the 15 pound turkey I am cooking next week, but I'm really most excited about light bulbs. We've got one of the chandelier deals in the dining area of our house. Five 40W bulbs in it. One of them burned out. I replaced all five with 60W bulbs. The change is almost literally night and day... like dusk and day maybe. I wish they'd had 100W bulbs, but I doubt they make those. It is so BRIGHT! I love it!

You've got to understand: I want to put 150W bulbs in every room, like every 5-6 feet throughout the house. My dream is for the inside of the house to be just slightly dimmer than a summer day outdoors. I guess I'll settle for a little bit of extra brightness, and appreciate the hell out of it.

Let's talk cooking!

Continuing from yesterday's entry, let's have a little powwow about your kitchen. Yes, you. :) Here's a quick list of things that everyone should keep around in their kitchen just because:

• Crock pot and rice cooker- if you've got these two things, you can always have a good, cheap meal with minimal work. Meat in a crockpot with spices, toss in some veggies halfway through the cooking, serve over rice. You can't burn it, you can't screw it up. 
• 11 herbs and spices- you've got to have flavor. FLAVOR! Its OK to use the Gourmet Garden herbs in a tube, it saves you time and mess. Buy some Adobo to replace the garlic salt. Buy some pre-mixed dry rubs for meats.
• Stock- chicken, beef, and vegetable stock is a must. Replace the water in your rice with chicken stock. Dump some beef stock in your crock pot with your beef roast. Make your own gravy with stock, salt and pepper, and some flour.
• Canned diced tomatoes and tomato sauce- Believe me, you're way better off using this stuff and a couple of squirts of herbs and garlic from the tube, instead of Prego or other corn syrup-based pasta sauces. 
• Onions and potatoes- They go with almost everything. 
• Flour and bread crumbs- two kinds of flour: Regular all-purpose, and the extra-fine stuff for gravy. I prefer panko to the sort of Italian bread crumbs most people use. You can bread chicken and fish, you can use the bread crumbs for meatloaf and meatballs. 
• Sauces- Just buy random sauces. Just do. In a pinch you can dump a jar of salsa over pork chops and it is good. Buy weird Asian and Indian sauces, marinades, BBQ sauces, grilling sauces... and you'll find about a half-dozen that you love. That's basically a week's worth of home-made meals right there.
• Microwave steam bags- this is a new one I've recently discovered. Saves time, there's no clean-up, and once you learn how much time food takes in the bag, it comes out as perfectly as the rice in the rice cooker.   

You can throw together what will taste like a gourmet meal in less than an hour with minimal clean-up, and look like a kitchen master every time. Here, watch, I'm going to make up a meal right now, with stuff I have in the cabinet... which should be impressive since I'm just two days away from grocery shopping and my pantry is sort of bare. I have some boneless pork ribs, and a big sack of rice, and some lime juice. I can make...



....wait for it....


...wait for it...


Tandoori pork over rice, with a black bean and corn salsa. Take the pork, trim off the fat and chop into bite-sized chunks. Sauté the pork over medium heat until you get a little browning going on. Mix a couple of spoonfuls of tandoori paste into maybe a cup and a half of chicken broth, and pour over the pork. Reduce heat and cover. Put on your rice at the same time, replacing the water with chicken broth and adding a couple of pinches of curry powder.

Mix a can of drained and rinsed black beans, a can of drained diced tomatoes, and dice up an onion and toss that in too. Squeeze in a shot of garlic and a double shot of cilantro from your tubes, salt and cayenne pepper, and some lime juice. Maybe... a little bit of sugar or your sweetener of choice. Not much, mind you. Jam in the fridge until it is time to eat.

When the rice cooker goes off, uncover the pork and raise the heat to cook down the sauce a little bit. Five minutes of constant stirring later, you should have a fairly thick sauce. Put your food on a plate, and you're eating. I have no idea how it is going to taste, since I made it up sitting here. Might be awesome, might need a little more garlic. *shrugs*

Improbable Joe: International Man of Cooking!

So...

My wife is having "International Food Day" at her job tomorrow, and of course I've been drafted to cook. I'm making the puerco pibil that I ripped off of Robert Rodriguez who directed Sin City and Predators... and even the Spy Kids movies. Here it be, with NSFW language:




Since I'm cooking for a million people, I've doubled the portions. I ignored the tequila bit because it is for my wife's job. I used equal parts lemon and lime juice, and added a little bit of brown sugar. I am cooking it in a crockpot on low overnight to completely render the fat from the meat, so I lined the crockpot in banana leaves. It is going to be INSANE!

My awesome dog!

You know her, you love her, she's GINGER!!

She's so smart that it is a little scary. Smart, and weird. For instance, she knows what time it is when it is time to go to bed. Not just in the sense of "oh, it is late go to bed." No, she knows that plus the sound of the TV turning off as a signal, PLUS she seems to recognize the end-credit sounds of our favorite TV shows. That last one I noticed this past week because we've been watching all of our shows a day or two late on the DVR. Once it is dark, when she hears the credits start on our shows, she hops off of the couch and runs to the bedroom, even if it is way too early to go to bed.

She's also unfortunately learning to "spell". She loves chasing bunnies, and if you say the word while she's outside she immediately stops and goes on high alert. She's also started to recognize when we spell out "b-u-n-n-y". Same goes for naps and going outside and other verbal cues she gets. We've started saying "do the thing with the thing" while pointing fingers, trying to trick her. I'm afraid that she's starting to figure that one out too... not good.

Right now, my wife is at her boss's house. Poor Ginger is out of sorts, because she knows Mommy doesn't leave the house on Sundays! She's alternating between laying on the couch where my wife sits, and sitting up on the couch with her head hanging over the back staring at the front door. It is so pathetic and sweet.

MOMMY, COME HOME!!!!!!!

Happy Veteran's Day

I'm a Veteran. My father and grandfather and several aunts and uncles are/were Veterans. My father-in-law and brother-in-law are Veterans.

Don't thank us.

Start doing better by us, and our active-duty and reservist brothers and sisters. Repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell.   Reject any politician who wants to balance the budget or reduce the deficit on our backs. Stop sending us tio fight pointless wars over oil and fear.

A different view on the rape joke thing.

Cross-posted from a comment on this post that was inspired by this post about a sexual assault at a tech convention. You'll have to at least skim that to know what I'm talking about.

As a man with a man’s perspective, I think that ultimately the answer to this is going to have to come from a change in the way men interact with each other when it comes to abusive attitudes towards women. I keep running across these stories about women being victimized by men, and I’m proud to say that I’ve never been one of those men and I’ve gone out of my way to prevent other men from being in a position to attack women.

What I’ve come to realize from the negative comments about women who speak out is that I haven’t done anything like nearly enough in my life, and have even participated in what I think is part of the foundation of the issue. I’ve been a part of conversations where women have been talked about in a dehumanizing manner, laughed at and told the sort of joke that you know I’m talking about. I’ve watched movies with friends and made comments about the actresses. I didn’t mean anything by it, and I wasn’t out to victimize anyone, and there’s nothing wrong with most jokes, and yet…

…I get the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that I was part of creating a certain atmosphere. An atmosphere where people who think that abusing women is acceptable found some sort of implied agreement and approval of their attitudes. Since I played along and participated in the less obviously harmful behavior, I likely gave some people the impression that I would participate in more openly aggressive behavior as well. And since we all know that people tend to “follow the leader” and “give in to peer pressure”, and knowing the numbers and odds, I am faced with the near-certainty that one of those guys I was sharing an atmosphere of ugliness with has gone on to assault or harass women.

Is there a support group for that? Not for the bad feeling I have, I deserve it and should hold onto it to remind me not to participate in the future. I mean, is there a resource out there to catch young men early, and teach them to show respect for women, and let them know that those locker-room jokes might lead to someone getting hurt? Because I was “raised right”, I’ve never wanted to hurt people, I’ve gone out of my way to help people, and I STILL screwed up big time. Shit.

Portrait of a Meth House

I just thought I would share... HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Note the religious messages spraypainted onto the garage door. Note the sign to the left of the garage door threatening to shoot trespassers. The dog in the driveway is fake, but actually sort of realistic looking from a distance.

The cops are there at least once a week. A few weeks ago, a firetruck showed up late on a Sunday evening. Every month or two there are piles of trash and furniture and old rugs set out on the street. Sometimes the garage door is open for weeks on end, with a random assortment of bedsheets and plastic tarps draped across it.

I'm assuming drugs, or schizophrenia, or both. I'm also a little concerned, since my wife uses dog-walking as an excuse to smoke a cigarette a few times a night, and I don't want her outside after dark. So I guess I'll either be walking with her, or walking the dog for her while she stays near the house and smokes. The only alternative is to convince the city to condemn the house and bulldoze it?

Drug house in my quiet little suburban street... who would have believed it?

I hate being sick!

Somehow, I picked up a bad stomach flu something or other and it is seriously kicking my ass. Sweats, muscle aches, nausea, diarrhea, the whole nine yards. It started yesterday, and it isn't any better this morning. I woke up around 5AM doing that weird mouth-watering burp thing that comes right before puking, followed by a round of pooping that I'm very glad was NOT followed by a round of puking. I took an anti-nausea pill, and while I wait for that to kick in, I figured I would get up, email my professors, and tell a story. :)

This one time when I was in the Marines...and that's how all the best stories start... my roommate and I managed to contract the same stomach bug at the same time, and I think it was this time of the year too. I remember it was very cold and damp out, which is relevant later. This is mid-1990s, and the barracks we lived in was like an old dorm room. Two rooms with two people in each room, sharing a single bathroom with one toilet and two fairly large shower stalls. The obvious problem is that we're sharing one toilet between four people, two of whom are pooping and puking every few minutes. And you really don't want to puke where someone has just been pooping out their spleen not five minutes earlier.

Not pleasant, and much Pine-Sol was expended that week.

Anyways, the Marines have this weird sort of thing with the doctoring, mostly involving the fact that there are few actual doctors involved. It is a little strange getting your medical care from a Navy Corpsman someone who is the same rank as the guy who makes your omelets at the chow hall... but I digress. Point is, the standard move is that you go to formation at 6:30-7:00 in the morning where they make sure you showed up and pass on the game-plan for the day and week and a bunch of other stuff that sensible people do indoors by email, then after formation you go to "sick call" and get someone to take a look at you. So that's what my roommate and I did Monday morning.

And here's where it gets stupid, as it so often does in the military. Instead of giving us the week off of work,they gave us one day and told us we needed to be reevaluated the next day. Instead of checking on us at the barracks, where the Navy Corpsmen lived a couple of doors down from us, we had to go to their aid station. And instead of going to the aid station, getting evaluated, and then going back to bed, we had to go stand in formation first.

Did I mention it was winter and cold and damp out? Did that happen to come up earlier?

Monday we're standing in a 6:30 formation for 20 minutes in the mud and 40-degree weather, before we're allowed to go inside and get permission to go back to bed. Tuesday we're standing in the cold mud, water soaking into our boots, for thirty minutes of a 7:00 formation, before being allowed to go to the aid station to get one more day off. Can you see why we're having a hard time getting better? Wednesday we're standing in the cold and drizzling rain for about 15 minutes when my roommate starts puking in the formation. The smell hits me and I start dry-heaving and coughing like crazy. No more formations that week, and they gave us the rest of the week off.

Compared to that, this is a cakewalk. We have two bathrooms, no waiting. I don't have to stand out in the damp and the cold. And it is Florida, so it doesn't get that cold anyways. So, the drugs are kicking in, it is close to 5:30AM, and I'm going to get back into bed for another 6-8 hours. And, since I love life so much right now, here's some pictures of my pets:

Am I the only one?

Here on a cloudy, miserable-looking Monday morning, the first day of November and all, I was looking around the house on a mission to do some straightening and cleaning... I clean when I'm bored and anxious, when I'm not making giant messes in the kitchen. :)

Anyways, I was thinking about the boxes in the closet, because it is also trash day and the guys should be here to pick up the garbage by 11-ish. I keep the packaging from electronics in my closet, sometimes for six months or more. I don't know if I'm the only one who does that, but I do it and I'm not ashamed to admit it! I'm always afraid of things breaking and me not being able to return it or get warranty service because I've lost the receipt. So, that goes in the box, and the box goes into the closet.

One of the other benefits is that if you have to send something in for repairs, it is nice to have the correct packaging to send it off in. The last thing you want is for your package to get to its destination only to have the company claim that you didn't pack it right and it got damaged in transit. I'm not saying that they'll lie so they don't have to fix it, I'm just saying...ummmm... OK, maybe that is EXACTLY what I'm saying.

But, there comes a time when you sort of have to throw the boxes away, right? Well... not necessarily. It would have been smarter of me to save all the boxes from my guitar effects pedals. I think you can convince people to pay a few dollars more for them if you have the original packaging. I could be wrong. It doesn't matter, because I throw those away too... eventually.

Someday.

Right now, I'm thinking about tossing the boxes from my computer build this summer. I'm out of the store return time-frame. On the other hand, the meth-heads down the street might see the boxes and decide to rob my house. Did I mention we have a drug house on my little suburban street?