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Best of 2008

Ah, the year-end top ten list. A yearly tradition that reminds me what the hell happened over the last 12 months. Without further ado, and in no particular order:

• Best Answer to My Taco Dreams: Taqueria El Amigo. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a taqueria: hole in the wall, Spanish-speaking, TV tuned to Telemundo, fantastically fresh tacos, and is five minutes from my house. Since we discovered it, we’ve gone pretty much every other week, which will continue for the foreseeable future.
• Best Time Suck:Facebook/Twitter. I finally gave in and signed up to the social networking phenomenon and now understand what it’s all about. Sort of. I guess. Hell, it’s just a great way to kill time and pretend that other people really care what you’re doing right now.
• Best Thing That Makes Me Hate Winter Just a Little Bit Less: A Snowblower. I’ve only been through one storm with this, but I can’t tell you how much happier it has made me. I don’t know why we waited to long. Shoveling is stupid.
• Best Thing That Makes Me Hate Vacuuming a Whole Lot Less: Rosie the Roomba. Vacuuming on a weekly basis has always been my chore, and I pretty much hate doing it. Rosie has taken that evil job away from me, happily cleaning the house while I do other things. I love her.
• Greatest Invention Ever Created: iPhone. It’s pretty much everything that a cell phone should be, and it has lived up to every expectation that I had. I seriously can’t imagine living without it now.
• Vegetable of the Year: Kale. We started getting it in our farm share this year, and I don’t know if I had ever made it before. It quickly became a favorite, and we now buy it every week, whether we think we need it or not. The recipe that really did it for us was these kale chips that might be the easiest and best things that we made all year. Trust me, it will be the brussels sprouts of 2009.
• Best Reason to Wear a Suit and Take Up Smoking: Mad Men. Best show of the year, without a doubt. We picked this one up before season two started and went back and watched all of season one and caught up just in time for the finale. Just fantastic.
• Best New Lunch Spot that Opened Near Our House and We Quickly Became Obsessed With: Sofra. Go get yourself a mezze platter and some flatbreads and a couple of chocolate earthquakes and just try to tell me that this place doesn’t rule. When they first opened, we went about six times in four weeks. OK, so we OD’ed a little bit, but it’s still a favorite even though the prices have gone up and it’s always packed with fancy Cambridge folks.
• Worst Unexpected Home Renovations: Bathroom ceiling/exploding furnace. Isn’t home ownership fun?
• Best Way to Relive My Junior High Days: Wii. Yes, video games returned to our lives and we found ourselves staying home on Saturday nights to eat Chinese food, drink beers, and play Wii. So much for maturity.
• Best Way to Get Your Veggies: Our CSA. It was the first year that we bought a share, and we could not have been happier with it. I’ve never eaten so many different kinds of vegetables in my life, and I can’t wait for next year’s to begin.
• Best End to Years of Wishing: Finally getting a new HDTV. I could never justify spending thousands of dollars on a TV, but with prices dropping so far this year, it was time. I am a happy boy.
• Worst Dining Trend of the Year: Getting sick at restaurants. It happened twice this year. Getting so sick that the mere thought of food made me nauseous, it wrecked big meals that we had planned for and were really excited for. It’s like I was jinxed or something. Hopefully, that trend is in the past and won’t return for 2009.
• Best/Worst Way to Eliminate All Free Time in Your Life: Going back to school. Yeah, it sucks right now, but I know it’s worth it. Still, I miss my life.

Happy Holidays

12/15/2008

• This was the big sauce making weekend for us. For five years now, we’ve done this every year for the holidays, jarring up batches of tomato sauce for friends and family. We always make enough to give away along with hopefully enough to last us an entire year. Well, more people seem to want it, and we’ve been using much more than usual, so we decided to make an extra large batch this year: 40 jars. We figured out last year that it was easier spreading it over 2 days, especially now that the Lovely Tess is in the picture. So Friday night we (and when I saw “we”, I mean the Lovely Suse. My contribution was opening cans and lifting heavy pots) made the sauce, it was done cooking around 11pm, and I set my alarm for 2am to put them in the fridge after letting them cool completely. Saturday night, we spent 5 hours doing the actual jarring. Sterilizing everything, processing everything, and trying not to burn ourselves on scalding water takes time. In the end, it’s all worth it. Hopefully, the recipients think so too.
• I like being done with Holiday shopping early.
• The Lovely Tess is obsessed with Elmo. I don’t know how or when it happened, but after seeing one of those Elmo Live dolls over the weekend, she spent the next hour saying “Elmo, Elmo, Elmo…” over and over and over.
• We invaded Taqueria El Amigo with a bunch of gringos on Saturday, including 3 kids under the age of 3. Needless to say, there was potential for disaster, but it went off without a hitch. Everyone behaved, everyone enjoyed their tacos, and I think we’ll be welcomed back. Because we will be back.
• We got back from grocery shopping yesterday and noticed that one of the yogurts that we bought was extremely light. It seemed to be almost empty. Weird. Then we realized that this was the yogurt that the Lovely Tess had insisted on holding for the ride home, and that there was a small hole on the side of the top. She had managed to put a hole in it with her teeth and suck the yogurt out without us even noticing. Well, I guess there are worse things she could have eaten. She also tried to eat a block of cheese through the plastic. You’d think that we didn’t feed the kid or something.
• Homemade granola is back in the house. Nice.
• I really need to start writing down our meals so on Sunday morning, we can actually think of some stuff to make for the week. Perhaps another Twitter account is a good way to do this…
• I have this habit of buying clothes, dumping them in my closet, and the discovering them 6 months later. And then wear them constantly after that. I just found a pair of jeans that I paid $12 for back in the Summer, and I can already tell that they will go into heavy rotation in a hurry. Especially since all of my favorite jeans develop holes in them from overuse.

12/8/2008

My original post got lost this morning due to my system crashing, so let’s do a very abbreviated version…

• Tree is up. Lights are dead. Definitely getting LED’s next year. Still love my Krinner tree stand.
• Made fish and chips this weekend. Mmmm, deep fried stuff. Luckily, the smell of the tree overwhelmed the smell of the oil.
• Two more weeks until my holiday shutdown. And yes, I am counting the days.
• I got a watch for my 10 year service award at work. I chose that over a toaster. I made a good choice. Now I have a watch that I’m not worried about banging up when I’m getting all handy around the house.
• The Lovely Tess sure does like Indian food. We are very happy about that.
• I didn’t get laid off last week. That was nice.
• It took a while to figure out that swoopo.com was not a cheap auction site but essentially a lottery game and brilliant business idea. Before you check it out, let me warn you, do not even think about bidding. You will most likely just lose money and not win anything. Just like the lottery!
• Speaking of which, I’m looking forward to winning my $170 million tomorrow.
• New show: Whale Wars. These people are pretty kooky, whale-loving, hippies. I just like saying “Whale Wars” in a deep, ominous vaguely British sounding voice.
• I’m not ashamed to admit it: I dig me some good holiday music.

12/1/2008

• Ah, nothing like getting back to work after 5 days off, right? I’m already looking forward to my 2 week holiday vacation at the end of the month. Hey, at least I have a job. I’ll find out by the end of the week if I still have one. Aren’t economic downturns fun?
• Pepe’s never disappoints. Never. I think it’s my favorite pizza in the Northeast.
• After much research, deliberation, and preparation, we pulled off our holiday card project yesterday. The Lovely Tess was an excellent model, and hopefully we’ll be able to finish it up this week to send it off to be printed. We knew we wouldn’t be able to match last year’s card, but we think that this one will turn out nicely.
• I currently have $1 in my wallet. How long do you think I can go without going to an ATM?
• My life got a whole lot happier yesterday. The reason? We finally bought a bad-ass snowblower. I love knowing that I’ll never have to shovel ever again. My back is already thanking me.
• I can’t for the life of me remember what I got the Lovely Suse for Christmas last year. That must have been some gift, huh?
• I can’t figure out if my pants are fitting tighter because I’ve gained weight or my pants have shrunk. Obviously, I’m going with the shrinking clothes concept.
• We played some Trivial Pursuit with some friends for the first time in years on Saturday. The Lovely Suse had banned me from playing against people because I know too much stupid crap and I always win and I piss people off and then we lost all of our friends. Well, I lost. I guess we get to keep these friends.
• George did not have a good weekend. For reasons that will not mention, he had to get baths and get combed out every day for 3 days. We also had to do about 40 loads of laundry. Not fun.