The weekend got off to a rousing start with the Lovely Tess being sent home sick from school. Let’s just say that they used up all of her backup clothes before making the call. Lovely.
I’m not quite sure how the math worked out, but we somehow ended up purchasing about $800 worth of clothes from JCrew for $15. No wonder these places are in the crapper these days. Needless to say, I am well on my way towards restocking my sorry looking sweater arsenal.
Two words: whoopie pies.
A ton of caramel corn has appeared on my desk (OK, I got guilted into buying it from a coworker’s boy scout son. really, can you say no?). This thing is dangerous. As in, I’m afraid of actually opening it because I know what will happen soon after.
We will be traveling down to CT for Thanksgiving this year, which ultimately means a visit to Frank Pepe’s. I’m not complaining.
I am determined to not have to visit a single mall this holiday season. They just make me angry. Unless you do like we did and get there for when they open, so you can get rock star parking, have the entire place to yourself (along with the other parents of young kids), and get out of there before the riff-raff show up. Oh, and it helps if you can pick up some Sel De La Terre potato chips on the way out. Those make it worth the hassle.
I think we’ve given up trying to come up with ideas to top last year’s holiday card. I think we set the bar waaaaaaaay to high last year, making it pretty much impossible to top. Hopefully, inspiration will strike sometime in the next week.
I get the feeling that there won’t be another season of Everest: Beyond the Limit this year. That makes me sad. We spent New Year’s Eve 2007 watching a marathon of the first season and we got completely hooked. They were back at it again this past year, but I can’t seem to find any new information about it. That would be a shame.
My attempt at making homemade raisins was a complete bust. After 24 hours in the dehydrator, it looked as though they needed another day or two to completely dry out. And they didn’t taste very good. Don’t try this at home kiddies.
I think in the latest issues of GQ and Esquire, there are approximately 14,847 watch ads. Gee, are they trying to tell us something? Speaking of which, I had to choose a gift for my ten year service reward at work. It was between a watch and a toaster. I went with the watch. The Lovely Suse claims that I will never wear it, but I will prove her wrong. Sometimes, a guy just needs to wear a watch he doesn’t care about breaking.
Today is the first day in about 15 years that I haven’t received a morning newspaper. I decided that with the amount of time I spend in front of a computer on a daily basis, it was a waste of time and paper to actually have a paper delivered to my front door. The entire paper is online anyways, so it’s not like I’ll miss anything. Although the people who come to my office specifically to flip though the paper might miss it more than I will. We’ll see how it goes.
To continue with the changes, after complaining about it for years, we finally dumped our regular phone line and signed up with Vonage. It just pained me to pay over $60/month for a phone that we barely used. Now for $15/month, we get all of the features we got before plus even more. Voicemails get emailed to us, we can continue to use all of our regular phone jacks and phones, we get to keep our old number, and there’s even software so that when somebody calls our number, it pops up on the screen with the callerID and I can actually answer it from anywhere. Very cool.
After a summer in hibernation, our dehydrator has been brought back for some action. Plenty of just-past-their-prime apples and pears have been dried, along with some zucchini. Those zucchini were a surprise hit. I’ll definitely be making some more of those. Up next: an attempt at homemade raisins with some older grapes in the fridge. Yes, it’s been well-documented that I’m nuts. It’s ok.
Speaking of raisins, my car has become a rolling Snack Shack. There are cheerios and cheddar bunnies and raisins and craisins and animal crackers and dried apple chips and who knows what else ground into every nook and cranny of the backseat. It gets so bad that I have to take the carseat out and shake the whole thing out because it’s so nasty. All of this is a result of trying to bribe the Lovely Tess into her seat, which she hates lately. No, I’m not above trying to bribe my child with food to do stuff. That’s parenting, right?
There’s something about grilling outdoors when the temperature is in the 30’s and 40’s that warms me up. Oh, that would be the piece of chicken that’s on fire. Whoops.
If anyone’s trying to figure out what to get me for the holidays, look no further: I would like one of these. I’ll even share some with you!
I’ve been trying to get people to sign up on Twitter, but you people are all no fun. It’s even easier than blogging or updating your Facebook status. Plus, you can do it while driving. Not that you should.
I think I’ll “share” the rest of the leaves in our yard with our neighbors. After all, they’ve certainly shared plenty with us. Slackers.
It was a momentous week last week. I try not to espouse my political beliefs too much, but it should be blatantly obvious which way I lean. Needless to say, I am very happy with the results. Hey, the guy has a Twitter account and a Flickr account, so he’s ok in my book.
Please go home and make these right now. You will be completely addicted to kale. The Lovely Tess could not shove them into her mouth fast enough (and compeltely cover her face, body, and floor with shards of kale). We will be making these continuously for the forseeable future.
I finally got my hair cut over the weekend. It was really shaggy. I kept it on the long side, not that I really had a choice. I think the guy cutting my hair said about two words to me: “trim?” and “OK?”.
I got sick of paying $60/month for phone service that we barely use. So we made the leap into the VOIP pool and signed up with Vonage. Luckily, we get to keep our same phone number and since we have FIOS, we should have decent bandwidth and quality. We’ll see how it goes. Expect some hair-pulling in the coming weeks.
The best part of Halloween leftovers? Whopper ice cream.
I’m usually not a fan of biscotti, but the almond ones at Russo’s are something special.
My idea to create that leaf compost bin didn’t quite work out. Faced with a mountain of leaves, limited time, and a setting sun, I bagged up 10 bags of leaves by hand. I’ll have to do it next year.
Chocolate Brownie has officially replaced Chocolate Almond Fudge as my chocolate Clif Bar of choice. I don’t know what they did to the recipe, but they really did something bad to the Almond one. I’ll miss it.
Somehow, the time change hasn’t really affected us very much. This is mostly due to the fact that the Lovely Tess was nice enough to sleep in until 8AM on Sunday morning. Which means that she slept for 14 hours straight. Needless to say, we were all very happy when we finally got up yesterday.
The Lovely Tess was a chicken for Halloween. Not that we actually saw her in her costume. We tried for two weeks to get her into her outfit, but every time we tried, it was if we had tried putting on a suit of snakes and razor blades on her. She just freaked out. We even taught her how to do the chicken dance and cluck. Oh well. So we resigned ourselves to the fact that she probably wouldn’t wear it at all, so we sent her to school in a black and orange outfit and her chicken outfit in a bag. Generally, her teachers have better luck getting her to do stuff than we do. And much to our surprise, the Lovely Tess spent her Halloween dressed like a chicken. The only photos of it we have our cameraphone shots of printed out pictures, which needless to say don’t look so great. But at least we have evidence that it happened, which is better than nothing.
I must say, I’m really excited for election day. But I have the same feeling as when the Red Sox were up 3 games to none in the 2004 World Series. You’re hopeful, but you always expect something bad to happen. Not until the final out can you finally feel at ease and celebrate.
We had our first-ever babysitter on Saturday night. Not a relative or friend, but a real live babysitter that you actually have to pay. I must say, it was a completely painless and worry-free experience. Everyone had fun, especially us.
I thought that I killed our ice cream maker yesterday. The motor overheated and the thing just shut off. It would be completely justified as that machine has probably been used more than any other Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker in history. At least once a week for 5 years is more than we could have asked for. But miraculously, it started working again after I let it cool down. Still, I’m not expecting it to last too much longer. Maybe we need to buy one of those heavy-duty industrial ones?
Oh, our stupid oven died again last night. I hate, hate, hate this oven. I also really, really, really don’t want to spend $3k on a new one.
I’ve made the executive decision to not bag leaves this year. There’s nothing a hate more than bagging leaves (other than shoveling, which will soon be a thing of the past), so I’m going to just blow them all into a corner behind the garage next to the compost bin and create a big giant compost bin. That should work, right? I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner.
The Lovely Suse is in possession of one of the slick new MacBooks, and yes, I’m extremely jealous. They just feel so nice and sturdy nd sleek compared to mine. Oh well. Maybe mine will explode and Apple will have to give me a new one to replace it. Ah, a boy can dream, right?
We made a recipe last week that I’m a little embarrassed, but really excited about. This Pulled pork sandwich recipe took all of about a minute to prep and 10 hours to cook in a slow cooker, and let me tell you, I was shocked at how good it turned out. it’s a little trashy with the only ingredients being pork shoulder, water, an onion, and a bottle of BBQ sauce, but we’re soooooooo making this again. But not for a little while. I think I got the meat sweats last week.
Wondering if my Wii bowling prowess will translate into the real thing. 3 days ago
Chocolate mousse chilling in the fridge. Prep for rack of lamb, braised artichokes, and fennel gratin to follow. A new year's eve tradition. 5 days ago
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