Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Lovely wedding, hot return

I promise to complain slightly less about the heat. Actually, without the humidity here, it would be quite nice. But it's like 50% humidity. The weather sits on my chest and won't let me get up. Well, just for this second to blog/complain about the heat and recount the wedding.

P'swedding was so beautiful with the big falls right behind her. Z did a pretty good job of being a flower girl except that she, in true Z fashion, went to clean up the petals after she dropped them. "Ah oh" was the chorus to the song of the falling flower petal. After the petals were cleaned up and 5 zillion pictures were taken of the beautiful newlyweds, there was some dancing, some fine food and some hearty drinking. All hail the destination wedding!

I'm trying to write this afternoon even though it's a hundred degrees out (if you do my math of humid plus temperature plus complaining efforts) BUT the guy painting the house next door is listening to classic rock. Bad Company until the day I die, Watch what you say, you'll be calling me a radical, political, When I'm sixty-four, Mean mean Sawyer, mean mean pride. Plus commercial. And, did I mention we have no AC so if I shut the window I would surely die? I think that yes, yes I did.
At least they're painting the house a color (blue) better than its original beige.

ETA: I could update class rock songs all day. Best day of my life.., was the last heard. but now Fleetwood Mac's Golddust Woman is on and now I can't complain. Except I do want to go download Hole's version.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Great week with mom

We've had tons of fun here with Maestra (that's what my mom wants her grandkids to call her) and her boyfriend Bart. We've been shopping and to the lake and to an arts festival. We've grilled brats and trout and chicken and pork chops--all tasty with their respective sides and sauces. You pair them up: Corn, red cabbage, radish-carrot-snowpea-scallion salad, cous cous, asparagus, mashed potatoes, fried potatoes, roasted potatoes, green chile, pine nut butter.
It was a lot of cooking: breakfasts, lunches, and dinners but my mom makes cooking easier because she's always getting the napkins and forks and things together that I always do at the last minute. Then she cleans the whole kitchen. She also did a ton of laundry! Woohoo!
Our friend who is riding his bike from NYC to SLC made it in time last night for Brats and we had local friends over too which made for a lovely party-like evening. Hoorah for summer, and house-guests.
We leave for Niagara Falls tomorrow morning for P's wedding. It should be fabulous, except for, as I mentioned before, the car ride. Onward to Canada! (Did you know Canada is only like 2.5 hours from here? Now if only my passport that I ordered over 4 months ago had arrived......)

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Thank you for voting

Thanks everybody. I think I have a plan. It involves none of the suggestions I listed but a combination of them and yours. Or, as Lisa B. says, I'll go back to the old title. I couldn't have come up with this idea for a new title without you so very cool and thank and thanks. (I'm taking that post down to preserve what's left of my barely concealed anonymity.)

In other news, my mom's in town. We're having fun. It's kind of hot but I think I've acclimated to the humidity. Plus, it hasn't been nearly as humid as that first hot day here in May. We leave for Niagara Falls for P's wedding! on Thursday. We're driving and we have no idea how we'll fit:
2 of mom's boyfriend's rolly-suitcases.
1 of mom's rolly-suticases
3 of mom's they're-not-really-suitcases-because-they-don't-roll suitcases.
5 of Z's required bags.
Egg and my suitcase that may or may not roll.

Wish us luck!
Happy Father's Day!
Today, we're making for Erik: Green Chile Sauce. His favorite food. We'll put it on corn and potatoes and pork chops. I'll also make him chicken salad. He loves that too. Z made him a present at school and I'm going shopping now for what will be some seriously boring but useful gifts.

Thanks again for all the titular fun. Or titillary fun. Or titling fun though I prefer the double-meaning of the first two....

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Ala Mode

In the Style of Hightouch, Dr. Write and ErinAlice, I bring a list of the days.

Since the last post, some of us:
  • Bought new kitchen cabinets because one house demolition disaster is not enough.
  • Edited blog to include new links.
  • Rode our bicycles around Reed's Lake.
  • Played disc golf four out of the last nine days.
  • Cleaned out the fridge.
  • Went on the swing four-hundred and seventy-two times.
  • Wrote some number of words of novel.
  • Contemplated getting an MBA.
  • Wrote some number of poems.
  • Watered the new outdoor plants.
  • Read some of the Pynchon.
  • Continued with bed-making propensity, flattening sheets, clothes, napkins.
  • Went downtown to Local's Only Festival.
  • Finished one essay.
  • Made plans for crazy week of housesitting and wine-tasting and going-to-fancy-dinner with friends.
  • Made rib-eye steaks topped with most delicious habenero and red bell pepper vinaigrette (OK, that was last week but it needed mentioning. Best food I ever made).
  • Went downtown to nice restaurant. Like a slightly fancier Red Rock.
  • Started the cleaning process for upcoming visit from the mom.
  • Stayed up past 9:30 every night.
  • Went downtown to arty street.
  • Learned how to count.
  • Made turkey burgers with green chiles, shitake mushrooms, bacon and pepper jack. Best food I ever made.
  • Contemplated giving up on the Pynchon.


And conversation with the Z:
Do you want to swing?
Swing!
Do you want to go on the slide?
Slide!
Do you want to go on the swing again?
More.
OK. That's enough. Let's go in.
No. (In the most pleasant of tones. As in no, I'd rather not.)
Come on, we have to go.
No. (Ditto the pleasantries).
Do you want to go to time out?
Out! (Whereby, she walks to the vestibule which has the front door and also a French door. She opens the French door, walks in, closes the French door and waves.)

She has taken our only ammo and turned it into her own good idea. "I do indeed believe I need a break from you people."

Saturday, June 09, 2007

Neighbors

To make up for a Memorial Day faux pas (I bailed on a neighborhood bbq in favor of one at our every-day friend's) Egg and I hosted a dinner party for 7 adults and 7 kids. The 7 kids part was unnerving. As usual, I cooked way too much food that was also perhaps too unusual for a neighborhood-party with kids. I made salmon with raspberry vinaigrette (raspberry jam, white wine vinegar, cumin, salt, pepper, olive oil and a little water), Greek Salad, baba ganoush, hummus (Egg made the Hummus) and this yogurt-cilantro-cardomon-caraway seed concoction that no one liked (I liked it!) And we roasted potatoes on the grill in foil which would have been great, had we not burned the crap out of them.
Our neighbor next door has a great yard for kids and she invited them over to play in her yard--which was OK--but then the party was split in two. The guys over here, drinking beer and the women-folk over there, watching the kids. Later, the guys went over there but I was annoyed at the splitting over the party and the division of labor. But I was happier to be annoyed than if all the kids were running around our small, flowery yard or if they were bored to tears asking to go home. So it really did work out, though the labor had to be divided. I kept running back over here to get appetizers and more wine to take over there and to roll my eyes at the guys. Only Egg had a clue what I was rolling my eyes about. These folks, except my neighbor, have a much more traditional understanding of labor and division than we do which I find difficult to understand. I don't understand how the division develops. At what point did it become clear to them that he would work and she would watch the kids? That she would take the kids to the bathroom? That she would be the one to make sure the hot dogs (I did not force my salmon or weird yogurt on the kids--although I made enough for 27 of them) were eaten? Even were Egg and I to come to that decision, we'd have to argue and pontificate and be stubborn and relent for eight to ten years and by then, Z would already be able to find the bathroom and cook her own hot dogs. That it was assumed that that's how the labor would be divided was fascinating, if also disturbing, to me.
Our next door neighbor is a single mom and she makes more sense to me. One of the kids asked her daughter where her dad was and the daughter said, "I don't have one. It's just me and my mom," in the most confident of manners. Under her breath, my neighbor said, "and if I did have a husband, he'd be inside doing dishes." A dig at the division of labor or a comment on her own cleaning skills, I'm not sure.
And, finally, the woman with three kids asked if we were going to have another baby, which everyone always asks, to which I said, I don't know, one seems so manageable. I hope I didn't imply that they weren't doing a great job managing their kids. They were. I was just commenting that it takes both me and Egg ninety percent of our concentration to manage the Z. More because we prefer Z management to other activities, but still, it is a big job.
All in all, a fun barbecue that left me thinking I could possibly invite near-strangers over again although I felt terrible about the one neighbors we didn't invite who kept looking over from their deck with left-out-itude in their eyes. That sucked and it makes me think it might be too hard to be friends with some neighbors and not others.

Friday, June 01, 2007

hot in the city

Um, it's 84 degrees outside and I think I may be dying of heat exhaustion. Me thinks I've never encountered humidity until this week. To continue the sorrow of the last post, I miss my old house with its old swamp cooler. How cool I was. And how little humidity. Here, we have radiant heat. Radiators. So there's no duct work. So no air conditioning. So I can sit here on my high-horse and save the planet by not using so much energy while I sweat to death. It's a short life-expectancy, up on this high-horse.
In other news, Egg is out of town so it's just Z and me. We went on a bike ride. It was death-defying. Now we're trying to decide what to eat/where to go for dinner. I thought I'd eat a bunch of foods that Egg hates: feta (which I did eat), Pho (but I'm really not quite up to cooking it or seeking out the one Vietnamese restaurant in town) and it turns out, I don't think I actually like chicken drumsticks as much as I thought.
My grill is broken so it's possible we will starve to death even off the high-horse. There's no way I'm roasting chicken legs inside when it's the ridiculous degree of now, 85.