Ratfoot

Next time I'm getting a double burger

2007-05-16T19:39:00.000-04:00

Things have been pretty busy in Chez Ratfoot these days. During my absence from the blog, I went to California for a few days. Javert and I spent the weekend driving around Carmel and the Big Sur, and then during the week he went to work (in his company's headquarters) while I rented a car and drove up to Willits to visit my friend who is a farmer.

This trip was exciting for a few different reasons. First, I went to In N Out for the first time ever. How is it possible that I have been visiting my family in California for 24 years and had never been to In N Out? I just don't know. I was so excited that I mapped out the location of the airport, the location of our hotel and the closest In N Outs before we left home so we'd be prepared when we arrived. I looked at the menu and the "secret" menu and picked out what I wanted. When our flight was delayed by 30 minutes I started getting anxious--what if we got in too late to go to In N Out? Javert told me not to worry since the restaurant is open till 1:30 am and our flight was scheduled to land at 9:30, but still, one can never worry too much. At least that's my philosophy. And last time we flew that particular airline we were 8 hours late, so I had some reason for concern.

Anyway, we landed on time and all was going well until I realized there might be wild teenagers at In N Out late at night on a Friday! Teenagers are scary! And they have nothing else to do late at night, especially in suburbia, where we were (yet another reason why suburbia is bad.) Turns out I was right. There were packs of wild teenagers loitering around the parking lot and inside the restaurant, they were probably all drunk and they were taking up all the booths, and everyone knows the booths are the best places to sit. We stood in line and ordered and I tried to look cool and teenagery, but the wedding ring and engagement ring make that rather difficult, plus I generally try really hard NOT to look like a teenager. I was wearing all the wrong clothes, I had on jeans and a shirt instead of leggings and a mini skirt and I had decided against the ballet flats and worn my keens instead. We found a place to sit far from the counter and when Javert left me to go pick up the food I was scared a teenager might come over and harass me, but it was all fine and he came back with the food which was so delicious that eating was almost a religious experience. Actually, it was a religious experience because Javert pointed out the tiny creepy bible notations on the food containers and when we got back to the hotel I looked them up in the bible in our nightstand. One was scary and from Revelations and the other had something to do with sharing food. I didn't know In N Out was run by religious zealots and I'm kinda glad I didn't know before I ate there...

It turns out that in the end I was TOTALLY RIGHT about the packs of wild teenagers being a problem though, because one of them broke the mirror on our rental car! We'd gone a total of 8 miles from the airport and it had been maybe 2 hours since we rented it. Javert was naturally upset about this but kept his cool so I wouldn't worry. (Guess what? I worried anyway. Duh.) We spent the rest of the weekend discussing which insurance would cover what and estimating how much it would cost to repair it.

[I wasn't SO worried about the mirror because I had bigger things on my mind, specifically driving the car BY MYSELF on the highway (which means merging!) to Willits and then on a one lane two direction dirt road along the side of a cliff for 12 miles in an area with no cell phone reception and populated only by suspicious and unfriendly marijuana farmers. That will be the topic of my next post.]

In the end the rental car people didn't even notice the giant bite taken out of the mirror, possibly because we returned the car after dark, so we didn't have to pay anything at all. I hope. I can still worry about them tracking me down, but I guess I can just deny everything.

Do You Ever Do This?

2007-04-16T13:31:00.000-04:00

Javert and I were in a little coffee shop this weekend, a place where I continually try to go for lunch and can never get a table and therefore rarely actually end up going. I tried last Tuesday when I had the day off, but even at 2pm on a random Tuesday it was full. On Saturday we were there at 6pm and took the last empty table. I ordered a latte and Javert got a chocolate chip brioche, and we sat and read the paper.

Except I didn't read the paper. I held it up and pretended to read while I noticed the two women sitting at the table next to us were speaking to each other in Hebrew. It was fast Hebrew and I couldn't understand it, so I then turned to eavesdrop on the people sitting on the other side of us, a couple and a girl who I presumed was in college and possibly their daughter or niece or something. They weren't terribly interesting, so I turned my attention back to the Hebrew speakers and now here's the weird part--I pretended to understand and eavesdrop on them. I admit I was tired. But I don't think that excuses a weirdo who pretends to eavesdrop on people whose language she can't understand.

Along the same lines, I often put on a show for people who I know are eavesdropping on me. Saturday, before the coffee shop incident, Javert and I had lunch at a bistro-type restaurant nearby our apartment. There was a street fair outside and it wasn't cold out, so we sat outside for the first time since the fall. Halfway through our meal, a boy sat down at the table next to us, ordered a latte and french toast, and then got out a book about or possibly by Freud and pretended to read while actually listening to our conversation. Either that or he is a REALLY slow reader. Javert and I were having a good time discussing the "puzzler" feature on Car Talk (meaning Javert would give me a puzzle and I would fail miserably trying to solve it) and then trying to guess the color order of the letters in his company's name (Initech, remember?). I did better than Javert on that one, which is interesting since he sees the logo way more often than I do. Anyway, I had a good time exaggerating for the benefit of our little audience. I hope he enjoyed the show!

Not a T-Rex this time!

2007-04-12T15:18:00.000-04:00

Hurrah! Passover has ended! I spent the last few days of the holiday sick, which was terrible, because who wants to be sick on vacation AND when you can't even have chicken noodle soup? In addition, I suffered a terrible bout of insomnia on Sunday night, which also cut into my vacation enjoyment. Between 12 am and 6am Monday morning, I did some of a crossword puzzle, read the newspaper online, read creepy religious blogs, and freaked myself out thinking we had bedbugs. Mostly though I lay awake in bed or on the sofa (depending on where I thought the bedbugs were) repeating the Golden Girls theme song and wishing I had 3 elderly roommates and cheesecake to keep me occupied. At 4:30 am I drank some port, which is what my grandmother does when she can't sleep (except she drinks Maneschewitz). Javert will tell you that I freaked out as he was leaving for work on Monday morning. I don't know if I've ever cried out of sheer exhaustion before.

Tuesday I celebrated the end of Passover by going to Le Pain Quotidien and taunting myself with glimpses of what I could eat later on in the day (I had a salad there.) Then I went shopping for ladies undergarments.

Can I just say that I will no longer be shopping at Victoria's Secret? How can a store this big and with so many locations not have ladies undergarments in my size? Not to brag (or complain, it depends on how you see it), but I do share 'certain' attributes with the models they feature in catalogues and on billboards. How come they can't accommodate people like me? Am I really that freakish? I went to two other ladies shoppes along Broadway and found a great selection in my size. For around the same price too!

The only downside of shopping at these other stores is the return policy--at one shop you can return only for store credit, and the other will give a refund only within 15 days. They also note that items with animal hair on them will not be accepted for return. Of course when I got home and put my purchases on the bed for further inspection the cats went STRAIGHT for the items from this store, as if they knew (maybe the store sprays eau d'catfood around?). This is a weird policy, because wouldn't you be MUCH MUCH MUCH more disturbed if your new undergarments had human hair on them?

Here are some photos from our Easter dinner Sunday night. Do you see how artistic my eggs were? The ones in the top say "Zolie" and "Paxwell" on the other sides. I must have been overcome with a pre-insomnia burst of artistic talent, because usually everything I draw looks like a dinosaur.

In Honor of Passover

2007-03-28T23:10:00.000-04:00

Oh cookies, how I yearn for thee.

This Passover has been going pretty smoothly. I went to my parents house for the seders, I saw my friend from home and her new baby, and my other friend from home and her baby, and my grandmother and uncles and our family friends. It was nice. We got ourselves invited to a wedding that's sure to be fun and I also learned a juicy family secret. We had 80 degree weather and slept with the windows open and ate LOTS of matzoh ball soup and green mold (the good kind).

Back in NYC, its snowing and I don't have any soup. I do, however, have quinoa, which I recently discovered is sort of kosher for passover. Kinda. Kosher enough for me at any rate, and I think it just might save me from becoming the monster I usually turn into around this point in the holiday.

So far, we've eaten two seders which included gefilte fish, hard boiled eggs, matzoh ball soup, turkey, brisket, potatoes, vegetable kugel (quite possibly the best food on earth), asparagus, chopped liver, broccoli, matzoh, charoset, and horseradish. And flourless chocolate cake, almond macaroons, apple cake, mondel bread, and kfp brownies (blech). Then we ate chicken salad, potato chips, olives, and fruit and then a meal of baked sweet potatoes and raw broccoli. And then we ate broiled chicken on baby spinach, quinoa salad, and more broccoli. And I had salad and matzoh ball soup for lunch. And also lots of matzoh with butter and cream cheese and jam.

I'm about out of ideas! I don't know what to make for dinner tonight. We'll make matzoh ball soup and more kugel for dinner Saturday night, and we're having a kosher for passover vegetarian Easter meal Sunday night (Ashkenazic too, which means my friend gets TONS of credit, this is her third year in a row doing this for us and she is amazing) and then we have Monday night to get through.

I'm not sure I can handle more meat, and egg salad, while tasty, will put my egg consumption way off the charts for this week, considering there were 5 in the kugel, 8 in the cake, 6 in the macaroons, god knows how many in the matzoh balls, and of course all those hard boiled eggs. You may argue that since these eggs were divided among a whole kugel and a whole cake and many macaroons, that I didn't really eat as many as it seems like. That would be a good argument only if I didn't eat nearly the entire kugel by myself, and most of the macaroons, and a large portion of the cake. Nice try though.

Anyway, if you have any dinner ideas I will be happy to consider them. Probably I'll reject them though, cause I'm mean like that when its the 4th day and its snowing and I don't have any readily accessible boursin cheese.

Gooey

2007-03-24T10:08:00.000-04:00

First I made this:

Then I did this:
Then we ate this:

Big Stalks of Grass

2007-03-21T23:17:00.000-04:00

Dinner last night. I want to work on taking better pictures, especially of food. For some reason, most food porn photos don't turn out right, even though I'm using the appropriate type of lens and shutter speed, etc. I think the dark colors of my plates and counters play a role--combined with the dark blue kitchen walls, it's just too dark a lot of the time to make for a good photo. I've bought a new white plate, we'll see if that helps. In the meantime, you can enjoy looking at this wonderful plate of chicken, Israeli couscous, asparagus and bread. Not pictured is the cranberry-grape relish for the chicken and couscous.

Privacy Policy

2007-03-15T22:40:00.000-04:00

Today my co-worker "Dena" and I went to get lunch and noticed a whole lot of police on our street--like 8 officers just on our little block. The sidewalk was also cordoned off, lined with those metal police barriers they use for parades. I figured it had to do with St. Patrick's Day, but I forced Dena to ask some cops and they said it was for a health care workers rally.

Back in the office after lunch, I headed to the ladies room, which I've written about before. Now there's an open ceiling panel in there, which means we can hear everything the construction workers renovating the floor above us are saying. I assume this also means they can hear everything we do in the ladies room. I try not to think about this too often. The open panel also means that the ladies room is much colder than the rest of the floor, and alternately smells like cigarette smoke or electrical fire. Today someone put a sign up on the mirror directing "someone" to stop leaving the toilet seat covers on the toilet, as the bathroom "belongs to everyone." This is in addition to the signs on the back of every stall door directing us ladies to clean up the toilet seat area after we are done. Sometimes the faucets turn on spontaneously, and won't turn off. And I've spotted cockroaches multiple times. But I suppose it could always be worse.

Anyway, out in the hall in front of the ladies room I encountered a female police officer. As I unlocked the bathroom door she said to me, "Oh, my partner's in there." I said "Okay." And continued to open the door. (Also I was hoping that she didn't arrest me and that if I went into the locked bathroom she wouldn't be able to follow me and put on the handcuffs. Seriously.) She said "Yeah, my partner went in there because the other bathroom was locked," referring to the bathroom for disabled people located next to the ladies room. Again, I said "Okay." The police officer said, "Well, the other one was locked..." and I said, "That's really okay, this is a multiple stall bathroom so it doesn't matter." And then I opened the door and came face to face with Raoul, a male police officer. "Oh, Raoul, there you are," the female officer said. And I said "Ooooh, I see," as I ran at top speed into the bathroom. Really there was nothing else I could do. It took me a couple minutes to recover enough to be able to pee.

Dena was not surprised when I got back to my desk and told her this story. Probably you weren't either. I guess this makes me pretty clueless. But I like to think it makes me progressive--not only did I automatically assume that the woman's partner was also female, I also refrained from running out of the bathroom screaming.

Last night he dreamed that he was being chased by lions!

2007-03-13T13:42:00.000-04:00

I occasionally have dreams where I'm really, really mad at Javert, so angry that I try to hit him, but in dreams (and probably in real life too) my punches won't work and I can't ever hurt him. Then I wake up and have to remind myself that I'm not actually mad at him, that it was all just a dream and that I should be nice to him when he wakes up. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Unfortunately I have been known to start the day angry at poor Javert for something that he didn't even do.

The other night he had a dream where he was angry at me! I can't remember why, but it was nice to be on the other end for once. Because Javert gets upset when I tell him that I wanted to kill him in my dreams, and now I had the right to be upset. I have to admit that it did feel a little weird to know he had been angry, even if it wasn't real.*

*This reminds me of my imaginary conversations with people sitting next to me on the subway, and how I get into fights with them (in my mind) and then glare at them until my stop. Sometimes I talk to them (in my mind) but my body doesn't realize that the conversation isn't real, and my hands move as if I'm speaking. People must think I'm crazy.

Stand clear of Emil, please.

2007-03-08T12:07:00.000-05:00

What is with these people on the subway who stand up waaaaaay before their stop? I was on the train this morning, already angry after being shoved in by some woman behind me. I was the first person standing in the seating area, near the corner pole where the doors are (I have to be near one of the long poles because sadly I am too short to reach the top pole. SO MOVE OVER, STUPID TALL MAN.) Javert stood next to me, holding on to the high pole. As the train got to 59th street, a full two stations away from the next stop, the woman sitting on the bench right in front of me stood up abruptly. This meant we were face to face, about 6 inches apart. Surprisingly I was slightly taller than she was, so we weren't in danger of kissing on the lips by accident if the train jerked, but it was still mighty uncomfortable. I was blocking her exit towards the door area of the train, and if I had let go of the pole she could have squeezed past me. But I have a rule: I will not let go of the pole if the train is moving.

The woman stood there for a few seconds as the train slowed down to pass through the station (the express trains have been doing this lately and are barely faster than the locals). I am SURE that at this point she realized we were still two stations away and that she stood up too soon. But she was too stubborn to admit that, and I was too stubborn to let her through, so we stood face to face for the next five minutes. I think Javert, who was standing next to me, was getting jealous. Sure I could have let this woman though, but every other time I've let go of the pole so other people can move the train jerks and I end up falling on top of someone else, usually a dirty person or a small child or some weirdo carrying a giant plastic bag full of other plastic bags. Plus I enjoyed making this woman uncomfortable. And I didn't want her getting to the train door before me. That's part of the trade-in for getting a seat--the people who have to stand get to leave the train first. You cannot have both a seat and easy door access at the same time.

I'm happy to report that I exited the train before this woman. Success!

Next up: Passive-Aggressive techniques to use against business-people in livery cars!

Too Hot to Handle

2007-03-05T16:39:00.000-05:00

On Friday night I went out for dinner and drinks to celebrate a friend's birthday. Dinner was fine, then we went to a bar in the Meatpacking District called APT (or Apartment). We knew we were headed to a good place when the guy walking down the street in front of us stopped and asked a bouncer at a nearby club where "Apartment" was. After getting an answer, the guy then shouted to his 'buddies' across the street to "keep going dudes, its down there." Oh I knew this would be fun.

APT is the sort of place that believes its so cool that it doesn't even need a sign to let people know its there. I suppose that makes sense, since if you keep walking down the street past it you'll fall into the Hudson. Or maybe not, maybe there are a ton of even cooler places in the two buildings to the west and I'm just too boring to know about them. Only a little stone above the nondescript door said APT and the building number on it. Had I not been with cool people who knew about this place, I would probably have given up on finding it and gone home.

We walked in and had to go through a couple more doors before it was clear we were in a bar. It's called APT for a reason--it looks just like a real apartment. There's wallpaper and a long hallway with some doors on it, and then an open room with a bar, a bed, some sofas and tables and another little room I didn't venture into.

We settled into a sofa and coffee table arrangement and looked at the menus. The first page had a list of some pretty normal fancy drinks on it. The second page had food made up of foie gras or caviar or a combination of the two. The last page was a list of bottles of liquor. You could get a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka for $300. Or perhaps you'd rather have a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin for $350. I ordered one of the cheapest drinks on the menu, which was $11. I can't remember what was in it, but it didn't taste all that good.

Lets discuss how creepy the bed in this place must be. When we got there it was empty, but when we left (just as it was getting busy, at 11pm--yes, we are HUGE losers) there was someone either sleeping or passed out on it.

Second, I couldn't locate the bathroom and was not about to ask the scary looking waitress if she could help me out. So I asked one girl in our group, and she pointed me to two unmarked doors down the long wallpapered hallway. I tried the second door but it was locked, so I went into the first one. And saw the blood. Little juicy drops of it, on the toilet seat and even more disgustingly on the floor around the toilet, like a woman had had a little 'accident' and had to hobble around the room till she found her 'supplies.' I can deal with nasty toilet seats (what woman living here cannot? You MUST master the hover!) but things get much more complicated when you also have to watch where you're putting your feet. Of course when I left the bathroom some man was waiting to go in and now he probably thinks I'm the one who did it.

When I got back from the bathroom, I saw that in the corner towards the back of the room a man and a woman were sitting together and the woman was sobbing into the man's shoulder. This made me feel uncomfortable.

APT's website describes the bar's decor as suggesting "an almost naughty sense of voyeuristic intrusion." APT "cross-references high style with homey comfort." If this means that people feel at home enough to bleed all over the bathroom (perhaps thinking they'll clean it up later?) and cry uncontrollably while other people watch, then I guess the place lives up to its description.

Here's the main thing: If I wanted to sit around drinking a bottle of Stoly in a dirty apartment, I would go to the liquor store and pay $25 and then go home to MY apartment and drink it.

Besides the fact that we look like twins, you'd never guess we were related

2007-02-27T11:33:00.000-05:00

On Sunday night my brother was supposed to come over for dinner. At 5pm I called him to confirm he was still coming, and he said he'd be over but that I shouldn't expect him for dinner. When he said this I was relieved because he is a VERY picky eater. Here is a partial list of things he does not like...remember, these are only some of the things he won't eat: anything with tomatoes (except ketchup), salad greens, nuts, carrots, celery, peppers, most fruit, blue cheese, sweet potatoes, mushrooms, pesto, most hard cheeses, most pasta. He basically subsists on a diet of meat, poultry, potatoes, broccoli, shellfish and granola bars. Besides broccoli, I eat pretty little of the things on his "likes to eat" list (I like everything but the shellfish, but we just don't eat carnivorously very often) so it's sort of difficult to plan a dinner that both of us will enjoy.

I've not been in a good cooking or eating mood lately. Nothing's been appealing to me. So when Javert suggested fancy grilled cheese sandwiches, I was happy and excited. Finally, something I actually WANTED to eat and therefore cook. And I didn't have to worry that my brother wouldn't like it, because he wasn't coming to dinner! These sandwiches consist of blue cheese, honey, chopped walnuts and thin apple slices on sourdough bread. We cook them in the frying pan just like regular grilled cheese and they are delicious. I decided to make a side dish of roasted sweet potatoes and mushrooms.

Now, maybe you didn't notice, but my ingredient list for dinner overlaps almost entirely with things-my-brother-does-not-like. That was okay, because he told me that he was not going to eat with us. Until he called as we were walking to the supermarket and said "Actually I will be eating dinner with you." Those of you who know my brother know that this is totally typical behaviour from him. He had invited himself over in the first place, then declined dinner, and then requested it 20 minutes before actually arriving on my doorstep. I asked him "Ooooh. Do you like blue cheese?" He said "Don't worry, I'll eat whatever you have." Thinking he was being honest and that maybe he'd become more open-minded about food, I did not change my plans. We bought the appropriate ingredients and went home and made dinner.

Suffice it to say that my brother did not like dinner. He ate a slice of plain bread and two Oreos that a friend had for some reason left in my kitchen. I offered to make him a sandwich without blue cheese (out of all his dislikes, this one is the most understandable. Probably more people dislike blue cheese than like it. These people are crazy and one of them is probably near you RIGHT NOW.) He said no, make me a normal sandwich, and I did and of course he hated it and proceeded to disect it and then eat only the crust. He said he would have liked it if it hadn't had the blue cheese. He didn't touch the sweet potato dish, but I didn't really expect him to.

I feel kind of bad about this, because I should have known he would probably end up eating at our place, but frankly I was surprised that he actually showed up. Last time he said he was coming over he went to Baltimore instead and didn't tell me!

Insomnia 2: My Brain Foams Over

2007-02-23T05:11:00.000-05:00

This must be happening because last night a friend asked if I still had insomnia and I said no. Apparently I'm a liar. Anyway....

So I got home last night and waiting for me in my mailbox was an issue of Knife Merchant catalogue. It was addressed to me, not Javert. Did I order this? No. You all probably don't believe me and now think I'm some sort of creepy knife enthusiast who enjoys war or an unhappy 13-year-old boy making plans to do away with his teachers. I assume I got on the Knife Merchant list through Cooks Illustrated, because the knives all had to do with cooking (Javert was considerably less excited about the catalogue when I told him this), and because there is a section devoted to pots and pans and kitchen tools, and because CI recommendations are highlighted in pink. This is just yet another way in which CI cannot get their act together. Yet I continue to use their recipes.

Unfortunately the last thing I attempted to cook was not featured in CI. Perhaps I should have understood that as a reason why I should not attempt it. Here's the story: I made polenta on Tuesday night and Wed. was looking forward to turning the leftovers into fried polenta. I had mashed the polenta into a baking pan and refrigerated it overnight and then planned to fry it in the smaller of our two cast iron pans (we do not use non-stick pans). Now you need some back knowledge...Javert likes to save our frying oil and reuse it at least once. The last time we reused oil was to fry tortillas into taco shells and everything worked fine. But the time before that, when we used old oil to fry falafel, disaster occurred! All the oil in the pan foamed up, to the point that we couldn't find the falafel balls anymore and they all fell apart as we searched for them. I worried that we'd never be able to make our own falafel, but after yelling at Javert (sorry Javert!) I tried again with new never-been-used oil and things worked as they should and we had a delicious dinner. Incidently, I had leftover falafel for lunch the next day, and then we drove to Baltimore to see my parents who offered us yet more falafel for dinner.

Anyway, on Wednesday night Javert used old oil to fry the polenta and almost killed us. He put about 1/2 an inch of oil in the pan and added only one little square of polenta and it foamed up and all the foam overflowed onto the stove and burner, which was still lit till quick thinking me screamed at him to turn it off so we could avoid an actual fire. The oil continued foaming over the edge of the pan for a good five minutes, maybe even longer, after it was removed from the heat.

This incident scared us but we were determined to eat fried polenta for dinner. For some (idiotic) reason, instead of trying again with fresh oil in the bigger frying pan--a proven solution to the foaming problem--I decided I'd oven-fry the squares on a baking tray. I heated up some fresh oil on a tray and when the oven was ready I put the squares on the tray and returned it to the oven. Mere minutes later smoke was pouring out of our oven and we had to deactivate the smoke alarm so as not to wake the neighbors. The polenta was completely uncrispy. In fact it was downright soggy. Turning down the oven did not help in terms of crispiness, but we had to if we wanted to avoid having to evacuate the building (it was A LOT of smoke). Finally we gave up and took the now greasy and goopy mess of polenta out.

Javert got a little scared of me at this point, since normally I get angry when things don't work out in the kitchen, and since this oil thing was his fault AND the second time it had happened he had good reason to be concerned. But I'd had a glass of wine so I was considerably less mean than usual and I simply suggested that we have pasta instead. Luckily we have an emergency supply of dried pastas so we decided on elbow macaroni and forturnately it cooked normally and tasted good. I did yell at Javert a little, because he is so damn optimistic about these food disasters and was trying to salvage the polenta way after it was clear it was inedible. We did scrape off the mostly ungreasy top layer and eat it though, before throwing the rest in the garbage.

I've never almost had a grease fire before and it was a little exciting. I was on the phone with my mom right after this happened and she said "Oh, you better keep the baking soda out to put on the fire." I felt very smug when I told her it was already out. (She doesn't need to know it's out just because we bought it at Shop Rite and havent put it away yet.) Javert then yelled "We have a fire extinguisher and we'll use that in case of fire" or something equally logical and slightly annoying but my mom is now sufficiently relieved that we have multiple ways of putting out various small fires in our apartment. I'm sure using a fire extinguisher would be MUCH messier than using baking soda, but probably is more effective. But honestly I didn't even remember that baking soda goes on a grease fire. I distinctly remember thinking as I yelled for Javert to turn off the stove that if flames did occur, I would smother them with a dishtowel. I think we can all be happy that I didn't need to put this plan into action.

My friend said she'd ask her sister who is a chemist if she knows anything about foaming old oil...but if anyone else knows I'd be excited to hear why it occurs.

The one where we go to NJ and get dishwashing detergent but not lightbulbs.

2007-02-20T14:33:00.000-05:00

This weekend, Javert and I went to New Jersey to see some of his family. In keeping with our tradition, we went to the supermarket after our visit, to get a fuller taste of the suburbs and to buy some products (namely Turkey Hill Choco Mint Chip Ice Cream) that we cannot get at our local supermarket. Again we picked the Shop Rite in Bloomfield.

As I mentioned before, this store closes at 10:00 pm, even on the weekend. As usual, we arrived at 9:30. The whole time we shopped the store kept making announcements--"The Shop Rite will be closing in 20 minutes. Please make your selections and head to the front of the store to check out. The Shop Rite will be closing in 10 minutes..." etc. I spent the entire time in a rising state of anxiety, telling Javert to "HURRY UP! They're going to close. HURRY!" This frenzy caused me to forget to buy three-way lightbulbs, which were the one thing we actually needed. I don't know what they'd really do to a person who wasn't quite finished shopping at 10:00, but I also don't really want to find out, because I have a feeling it would be embarrassing.

Because I was rushed, I couldn't fully appreciate the Shop Rite's vast product selection. This store is SO BIG. They have 3 different kinds of Frosted Mini Wheats, and it took forever for us to find the "real" version (which we ended up not even buying). They carry Rachael Ray's magazine, which I almost purchased for my mom. Side story: My mom called me up the other day and asked "Who is Rachael Ray and why does every food product in my kitchen have a picture of her on it?" I momentarily wondered how I can consider myself close to a person who a. doesn't know who Rachael Ray is and b. doesn't know of my hatred for Rachael Ray. I then tried to explain who she is and that she must have had some kind of deal with Nabisco. And then my mom said "Well she's on all the food here and it's freaking me out." Which has to be the coolest thing she's ever said, ever, so much so that I had to stop talking to her and tell Javert immediately.

Back to Shop Rite. They also carried multiple sizes of the dishwashing detergent capsules I mentioned in a previous post. I received a request for an update on that post, so I'll give you the full story here: Shortly after writing that post I bought the capsules. They come in a zip-top bag and they smell FANTASTIC. All that smelly goodness is contained within the bag, so that each time you open it you're hit with that delicious odor. As for the pellets themselves, one side is all hard, packed with detergent powder, but the other side is this plastic-encased smooth blue gel that I want to rub all over my face and then bite down on. Sadly I have not yet done so, because I'm the type of person who follows the directions on the package, and these tell you to use dry hands when handling the capsules and to spend as little time as possible touching them.* There are also detailed instructions on what to do if you ingest the insides by accident. If not for these warnings, I'd be holding (caressing and/or nuzzling) one smooth pellet right now.

Clearly this was the best purchase of the night. We bought a 28 pack, which means we now have about 38 pellets at home, waiting to be fondled and smelled and this sounds like I have a real problem, doesn't it? [editor: yes. She does. It's one of many.] I'm not even sure if these things work any better than the powder did, but there is no way I'm switching back.

* Javert actually read these instructions out loud to me when we opened the package for the first time, to reinforce them and make sure I don't kill myself.

Insomnia

2007-02-16T03:31:00.000-05:00

I thought about this a few days ago when I woke up at 4 am and couldn't go back to sleep. Tonight its 3:30 and I decided what the hell, I might as well do it. It's insomnia blogging! I know the reason why I can't fall back asleep, but I'm not going to discuss it here. Instead, I'll talk about something else, ANYTHING else, to get myself back to sleep, maybe bore you readers to sleep, and we'll see if anything I write makes sense in the morning.

This keyboard is seeming awfully loud right now. I hope I'm not bothering Javert! I can hear rustling from the bedroom but unless I want to sit on the toilet, I can't really go anywhere else in the apt.

Let's talk about my experiences the other day in the Super Fresh in Timonium, MD. Javert, my mom, my grandmother and I were forced to go there when our trip to Wegmans was unfortunately rendered impossible due to traffic. After sitting in traffic for nearly an hour (and going all of 4 miles) we decided to get off the highway and find the nearest grocery store. It was 5 pm and I was making dinner for 7 people. We needed a green vegetable, carrots, chicken broth, eggs, and whole chickens.

First of all, this store was almost empty. I think there may have been 20 other people shopping there. That's not a lot. It's always kind of creepy to be the only people in the market at any given time.

Second, my grandmother is not so great at walking these days and so she requested a wheelchair from the shopping cart attendant. Instead he brought her one of those motorized scooter shopping carts. You may remember this device from a certain Seinfeld episode, or you may have used one yourself. My grandmother, however, had not used one before and got a little power happy driving it. Maxing out the speed at 1 mph, she told the 3 other customers we encountered to watch out. It was really funny watching her, I'm not sure why because she is fine to drive a car and was manuevering just fine...but maybe anyone riding these things is funny?

Third, the store did not have any plain whole chickens. Okay, they had Purdue oven stuffer roasters but neither my mother nor I will buy Purdue (yay mom!). The only other choice was already seasoned chickens (a product which I did not know existed) or frozen birds (unacceptable for a dinner in 2 hours). My mother asked the butcher if there were any chickens, and the butcher looked at us like we were out of our minds crazy. I mean, we were in front of a giant refrigerator case full of chicken and were asking her where the chicken is, so that pretty much makes sense.

SuperFresh did have Silly Putty, which I saw and commented on. I still remember fondly the time my family was in Rehoboth Beach at the toy store and my mom said to me and my brother, "Pick out a toy." We were like "What are you talking about and where is our real mother?," but she said "No, I'm in a good mood, pick something out." I choose blue silly putty and singlehandedly began the 5th grade silly putty fad at my school! Anyway, at Superfresh my mom said "Oh you want that?" and I was like "Of course," and moved on to the chicken. She said "Seriously, do you?" and I said YES and she went back for it and bought it for me! Too bad I don't have any way of starting a fad now. And I have to keep the putty locked up so it remains free of cat hair and also because my hands and wrists hurt like hell these days (I am sure typing lying down on the sofa is not helping this.)

We ended up having to go to a second supermarket (Hello Giant!) to get the chickens. This entailed me and my mom yelling at Javert, who was driving, and forcing him to make at least two illegal turns. He was not pleased. At least the Giant had chicken.

Dinner was great. I made butterflied roasted chicken with a mustard gravy, roasted potatoes, wilted chard, glazed carrots, and fresh challah (I made this a few days in advance). Unfortunately my plans for dessert did not work out--I forgot to get butter and flour, and my parents didn't have any, and I was NOT going to any more supermarkets. So on his way, my uncle bought a cake that turned out to be delicious and also had actual squares of Ghirardelli chocolate on it.

The dinner was for my dad's birthday. He's not so young anymore. After dinner Javert called his own dad, because guess what? Our dad's have the same birthday (day, not year.) They LOVE this and try to out-do each other with cards and phone calls.. It's adorable.

After dinner I curled up in front of the fire in my parents living room and fell asleep. Yes I did, and man do I wish I could fall asleep right now.

Perhaps You Can Tell that it's Only 20 Degrees Outside?

2007-01-24T11:14:00.000-05:00

I am generally cold. People like Javert like to joke about it. For example, in Israel we went to the En Gedi nature preserve, where we learned about and saw an animal called the hyrax. Reading the sign (which was geared towards children and therefore written in the first person, from the perspective of the various animals) out loud, Javert replaced references to "hyrax" with references to me. As in: I am Emil. I have difficulty regulating my body temperature. In the morning you will often find me laying in the sun to stay warm.

My proclivity to get colder than other people prevents me from wanting to do certain activities, like skiing or swimming. I think I was never colder in my life than the day I went white water rafting in Maine, wearing an ineffective half wet suit. I was so happy to get back to camp that day, and I hated that camp more than anything.

But here is another reason to avoid cold water--and wet suits--which I found on BBC News today. The headline was Shark Survivor Speaks of Battle. Eric Nerhus was almost eaten by a shark--here's how the article describes his experience:

"His head, shoulders and one arm were inside the shark's mouth during the attack, off south-east Australia. Mr Nerhus, 41, says he survived by feeling for the shark's eye socket and stabbing with his fingers, prompting the shark to let go....'Half my body was in its mouth,' he said...Experts have said that there is a possibility the shark mistook the wetsuit-clad Mr Nerhus for a seal. 'Normally they feed on seal [...] so it's bitten in on this guy thinking he's a seal,' shark specialist Grant Willis said. He said that when the shark realised Mr Nerhus was not a seal he may have spat him back out again."

I'm very glad that Mr. Nerhus was all right in the end, but I also think this is super funny. He tried to better regulate his body temperature while diving and it led him right into the mouth of a shark.

Also, do you really think that sharks care whether they are eating seal or humans? Both probably taste delicious to, as the BBC video puts it, these "killing machines."

Beauty and the Geek

2007-01-19T10:06:00.000-05:00

I've been hiding a secret--I've been watching a reality tv show. It started because Javert's coworker went to her senior prom with one of the contestants and we wanted to see what he looked like. Unfortunately, I am now addicted to this program. Basically they pair up a male "geek" with a female "beauty" and both individuals compete against other similar teams to try to win at tasks designed to improve their coolness (for the men) on their intellect (for the women). Each episode has two tasks, one for the men and one for the women, and the two winning teams get to select two other teams to compete for the chance to remain on the program (the losing team gets eliminated.)

The thing is, most of the "geeks" aren't geeks at all. Maybe I'm biased because I married someone who went to MIT, have a brother who went to MIT, and have a father-in-law who went to MIT, but most of these guys seem pretty normal to me. Yeah they might be a little obsessed with Star Trek (although that one guy NEEDS to get rid of that uniform) and a little self-conscious, but who isn't? I have been known to watch multiple episodes of Star Trek myself and I may or may not have the complete TNG episode guide on my bookshelf at my parents house. (And maybe I am a geek too.)* They all seem like more-or-less interesting people who happen to have made socially unacceptable clothing or hair decisions. I guess they could learn to focus more on girls' personalities rather than their bodies, but I feel like almost every guy alive needs to do this, so these particular ones are not any exception.

Now to the women. I wouldn't consider most of these women beautiful, but apparently some people do since they all seem to work as models. Most are tall, blond, skinny yet "womanly," and presented as totally stupid. I don't think that having big breasts means a person is stupid (duh!) or beautiful but I do know about how they turn a normal person into a sex object, and it's easier than you might think to get sucked into that impression of yourself. But it's hard to tell at all what the women on this show think about themselves, because they're only ever shown cuddling in bed or sunbathing or cheering on their teammates. You don't hear about their "transformation" like you do with the men. Their tasks have them memorizing facts so they can act as museum guides or reading snippets of Freakonomics so they can interview one of the authors. So far, these tasks do not appear to have affected them at all--these women appear to be quite happy with their (intellectually vacant?) lives. I'd like to say they have started to appreciate the "geeks" more--and they do seem to now appreciate the guys personalities--but I don't see any of them dating these geeks anytime soon despite the guys' (appealing?) personalities.

I hate that "geekiness" is something that the men need to overcome when really they just need some self confidence and a change of clothes. I also hate that "beauty" means "no brains."
I think the show would be much more interesting if both groups were the same gender. How great would it be to have "geeky" guys pair up with "cool" guys, or ugly girls with wolf-dog shirts pair up with models?

*I took the Are You a Geek? quiz on the show's website, and the result: I'm Very Geeky.

Econo-Wash

2007-01-10T09:18:00.000-05:00

Let me tell you how crazy I am.

A while ago Javert and I ran out of dishwasher detergent. We didn't like our old brand because it made spots on our glasses, so we did some research to find out the two top rated detergents. I went to the store and found both and compared them. One box was full of little pellets that you place in the dishwasher and said it would last 25 loads. The other box was the standard powdered detergent. They were the same price.

Using my 4th grade math skills I decided to buy the powder because it looked like we'd get more than 25 washes out of it. But I needed to be sure. Therefore I instituted the dishwashing detergent checkmark policy. Every time you fill the dishwasher with detergent, you need to make a tick mark on the back of the box. That way, when it's finally empty, we'd know how many loads we got out of it.

Javert has problems complying with my policy. He forgets to make the tick marks sometimes, or he'll purposely "forget" to put the powder in so that I'll have to do it. Recently he's gotten mean about it--he won't tell me whether or not he's made a tick mark, which drives me insane. Last night we stood in the kitchen for 10 minutes while he taunted me. Had he put the mark on? Maybe he did and maybe he didn't. I still don't know the truth.

So far we've gotten over 30 washes (maybe more due to non-compliance reasons) out of the powder box, and I think there's at least enough left for one more load. The thing is, I'm still curious about the pellets. Maybe they wash better. And I'm yearning to hold one of them--all plasticky and smooth. I bet they smell good too. And so I will be purchasing them when we run out of powder, even though they are less economical.

I miss the Bisli

2007-01-04T14:21:00.000-05:00

All the blogs I read are full of New Years Resolutions. I don't do that sort of thing so you aren't going to find any of it here. I just hope to be happy in 2007. That is all.

I just got back from a family trip to Israel and Jordan. When I say family, I mean my immediate family plus 6 cousins. We had our own minibus. 7 out of the 11 of us were under 26. The trip actually wasn't as crazy as it sounds, and we had a good time and stayed safe and all that...

I want to talk about an incident that occurred during our one night stay in Eilat, which is a small city at the very southern tip of Israel, on the Red Sea. I was so excited about going there because it's supposed to be a beachy resort where Israelis go during the winter. WRONG! There was a beach, but there wasn't anything "beachy" about Eilat besides the sand and the crappy boardwalk vendors that we have in Ocean City. And I heard way more English than Hebrew. Also, it was FREEZING. Colder than it is in New York! How does one reconcile wearing a down jacket (and still shivering) and being surrounded by palm trees and turqouise blue water? Last time I was in Eilat, which was in May 1998, the sand was so hot I couldn't walk on it, and I went snorkeling and thought the water was too hot.

Anyway, we checked into our hotel, the Eilat Holiday Inn Patio. We had been warned about this particular hotel, but the warning came from an unreliable travel agent and contradicted what we'd read in our guidebook and on trip-advisor (can you see where I'm going here?) We picked it mostly because all the other hotels required a week-long stay and cost over $200 more per night.

Among the various problems at the Eilat Holiday Inn Patio: First, the hotel rooms are atrium style, opening onto a central area featuring a pool table, a ping pong table, a koi pond, and a tv. This means it is LOUD in the rooms. The cups and mugs in my hotel room were all filthy. There was foreign hair in the shower. The bed was clean, but there was a cot set up in the room for unknown reasons. The reservation was listed for 15 people instead of 11, and it took us around 30 minutes to check in because of this error.

Then there is the location: The Eilat Holiday Inn Patio is adjacent to BOTH the bus station and the Airport. To get to the boardwalk, one must walk past the bus station, turn the corner, walk through a red-light district (okay, there was one store called Sexy Shop or something like that, but it adds to the effect here), and then go around the airport to the beach. It takes about 15 minutes unless you are one of the over-age-26 members of your group, in which case it takes all night because you will get lost.

Javert and I went to dinner with my parents and a cousin and then walked around the promenade. We contemplated getting coffee (we contemplated this at just about every single place they sold coffee in Israel, but only ended up getting it like 3 times because we are lazy and cheap) and walked to the end of the promenade and back and then decided we were bored. I'd heard that Eilat was so much fun and so I called my brother, who'd gone to dinner with the other 6 people in our group, to see what he was doing. Unfortunately for me, he was about to go to sleep and said Eilat was "less fun than advertised."

As we headed to the hotel, I said to Javert "You know, I'm going to sound old, but that music is just too loud!" Javert responded with a crotchety "It's eardrum damaging loud." (And I knew I had picked the correct spouse.) The music emanated from a tent set up on the sidewalk near a mall and around it were bunches of drunken American teenagers (maybe they were older, I'm terrible at guessing ages). Clearly we had come across the advertised fun.

Deciding that watching Spider Man II in the hotel room was more fun than partying with these people, we went to a minimart to stock up on bottled water and Bisli. We also decided to buy a Goldstar beer, which we'd seen advertised all over the place. In the minimart were at least 10 drunken Americans actually-literally--screaming about how they needed to buy more beer or more mixers ("the mixer is for you, Debbie, I have my own mixers.") or more vodka or the cleverly designed vodka and red bull combo pack.

I am usually not embarrassed to be an American tourist. I live in New York City and see that most tourists, no matter where they're from, are stupid. You can't help it. You don't speak the language, the culture is foreign and different, you don't know the area. And I get annoyed, but most of the time I just think it's funny. I like to watch tourists on the subway trying to figure out if Times Square is the same as 42nd street. I happily give people directions. I like living in a place that attracts tourists from across the country or from halfway across the globe.

However. I was terribly embarrassed to be an American tourist when I was in that minimart. Luckily I wasn't dressed like a skank or screaming about liquor, but I still fumbled with the Shekels I needed to pay for the groceries and spoke in English to the cashier (I don't know why I did this since I speak enough Hebrew to get by--and this happened the entire trip). I suppose it's a combination of being on vacation and being too young to drink at home and being surrounded by Jewish people of the opposite sex (meaning mother-approved for dating and marriage) that made these people act this way. But it still made me want to kick them.

Back at the hotel, we realized that neither the heat nor the hot water worked. I consoled myself with half the Goldstar beer--which incidently we opened using the bottle opener attached to the bathroom wall, which I guess was the one good thing about this hotel--and with the pizza flavored Bisli.

Luckily both Javert and I slept well despite the cold. I woke up early enough to have a lukewarm shower and warm up with fake coffee at breakfast. Unfortunately, my parents and cousins had not had as comfortable a night. My mother wore every item in her suitcase in order to stay warm. One of my cousins saw a cockroach in her room (which thank god she did not mention until we had left the city altogether). We all piled into the minibus after breakfast and waited for 30 minutes as the four over-26'ers argued with the front desk about a refund for our crappy night. I think they ended up getting 10% back which if you ask me was not worth 30 minutes of sitting on a minibus, but it's their money so I can't really complain.

Anyway, I won't be returning to Eilat any time soon. The rest of the trip was great, but really who wants to hear about how wonderful someone else's vacation was?

Join the Club!

2006-10-18T12:13:00.000-04:00

So after about two months, 'management' has finally fixed the broken bathroom stall lock. This means they've installed a crappy second lock on the door, which is already loose and will probably break by the end of the week. After my previous post, I'd started using the broken stall--I'd go in and just hold the door shut while I did my business. Not only did this make using the bathroom more interesting (and challenging!), it also freaked out the other bathroom users, which I enjoyed.

In case you were wondering, my grandmother loved the rugelach despite their odd shapes. She actually confiscated the container I brought, hid it in her purse the entire night, and then took it home and hid it there so no one else could get any. This probably makes her seem crazy, but really she is the most sane 85 year old woman I know. And I know quite a few, actually.

Since my last post, I've acheived an office milestone! I vomited in the office! It was much less scary than I'd expected, and now I feel like a full-fledged member of my department (I'd been the only one not to have done this at work). Unfortunately, the vomiting incident also involved an embarrassing encounter with two male coworkers who saw me lying on the floor next to a trash can containing vomit, moaning and holding a hot water bottle on my bared lower-stomach-area.

Not so much, this time

2006-09-21T11:32:00.000-04:00

Last night I attempted the rugelach again and basically failed miserably. I had minichips this time, and my dough was cold, but somehow all my rolls totally fell apart. The recipe was supposed to make 16 cookies, but mine only made 13, and 7 of those were big piles of goop when I took them out of the oven. I was making them to bring to my parent's house for Rosh Hashana dinner tomorrow night, but I guess that's not going to happen. Or I could bring the 6 good ones, but we'd have to divide each one into 3 pieces if everyone wanted a taste and thats not really polite. Good thing I'm supposed to make a chocolate cake tonight too. And a pecan pie. And a sweet potato casserole. And spiced nuts. You think I'm joking but I'm not!

Another thing. The women's bathroom at my work has three stalls. One of these stalls is currently out of commission. Apparently you can get locked inside and as this is one of my worst fears, I'm not going to mess around with that. Also it's the stall with the toilet that's peeling, so I try to avoid it anyway. But now every time I go to use the facilities, both functioning stalls are occupied and I have to wait my turn. Not optimal! Last time I finally got to use the toilet, I reached for some paper after finishing my business and saw there was poop on it! How does a person get poop on the toilet paper thats still in the dispenser?

A tasty but ugly treat

2006-09-14T10:23:00.000-04:00

Last night I decided I'd make rugelach, which is a cookie-like pastry consisting of dough wrapped around chocolate and nuts or fruit. You spread the filling on a circle of dough (like pizza) and then either roll it up into a log and cut it into inch long pieces or cut pizza slices out and roll them up into crescents. Someone once told me its really hard to make good rugelach, but after looking at a few recipes I thought I could handle it. As usual I was mostly wrong, but thats not a surprise.

So first, I left out the sour cream when I was making the dough. I forget a crucial ingredient almost every time I bake, so this is not surprising. This was especially annoying, though, because its a difficult dough to make, the type that you have to get to just the right consistency and then STOP before overdoing it. Javert calmed me down after I realized my error and then helped me mix in the sour cream with my hands. The dough consistency ended up being okay in the end, but I felt pretty stupid till I tasted the final result.

Second, I couldn't find mini chocolate chips at Fairway. The downtown store has a pretty shabby baking aisle, and although they probably put the minichips somewhere, I really didn't think I needed them. Instead I figured I'd just cut up regular chips. Except that didn't really work--too many chocolate slivers--so I ended up using normal chips. Which I discovered are way too big for rugelach.

I decided to make both crescents and rolls so that I could compare the two. My crescents look terrible. Javert had a momentary lapse of spacial awareness and rolled the first crescent up backwards. Having read the directions, I knew the right way to roll, but still they look like little albino turds flecked with....Anyway, the rolls look better, except that the gigantic chips kept falling out and shoving them back in messed up the roll's shape.

In the end they tasted pretty good, but I'm going to try a couple variations next time I make them (which will be soon, since I froze two pieces of dough). At least they tasted good, right?

Seriously, I'm actually back this time

2006-09-13T11:16:00.000-04:00

Well now. I seem to have taken a very extended holiday. But now I feel like getting back into the swing of things and that includes Ratfoot. So hello again. To nobody, since I'm sure the 4 people who read this blog before have long since stopped checking for updates.

Many things have happened since I last checked in here. Clearly none of them was important enough to write about, however.

So instead, I shall write about the television show Numb3rs. I hate this program. Yet I am absolutely COMPELLED to watch its stupidity. I'm actually totally against the entire concept of the show--You CANNOT solve every problem using math! Not even with the fake math featured on the program. And even if you could I'd still be required to hate the show since I hate math. I don't watch it every week or anything like that, I simply hoard episodes on the fake TIVO until I can't stand passing by them any longer, and then I watch one episode while knitting (which is math related, by the way, so I feel like I've done some sort of math activity and that makes me feel angry yet smart at the same time.) Sometimes my brother comes over and watches with me. My apartment seem to be the meeting place for watching dumb television (this includes Numb3rs, Criminal Minds, and my personal favorite, The Unit).

The main thing is that I pronounce Numb3rs as "Numbthers." Clearly this is how it should be pronounced. You don't put a number inside a word without wanting people to pronounce the number, right? And I've got my brother into doing it also. He's all "Can we watch Numthers tonight" and I'm all "Yes! My powers increase!"

And we're back

2006-05-24T15:00:00.000-04:00

First of all, the grass is open! This means summer has started.

Second, I have to tell you about my experience yesterday in the Goodwill on 23rd St. It's no secret that I still shop at thrift stores. I hardly ever find anything anymore now that Goodwill has upped their prices (and we won't even talk about Housing Works.), but thrift store shopping is still a good way to spend a lunch break.

There was a bit of a commotion going on when I got there, but it's Goodwill and you have to expect that sort of thing. You do not have to expect that POOP will be ALL OVER THE FLOOR. Obviously this was the source of the aforementioned commotion, which I could ignore for only so long. The employees all claimed it came from a dog, but I think they were lying. Most dogs of the size allowed in Goodwill (think handbags) do not produce the quantity or size of poop present when I arrived. I suppose a seeing-eye dog could have been the culprit, but usually seeing-eye dogs are trained well enough that they don't have "accidents."

Not only was the floor covered in copious amounts of poop, but the employees simply began directing customers around the soiled area, which was like a third of the entire store. After I'd been there for fifteen minutes, they finally started cleaning up.

The real issue here is not why there was poop all over the floor in Goodwill or who produced said poop, but instead WHY I CONTINUED TO SHOP THERE. Oh yes. I continued browsing through the jeans section, searching for the elusive $7 pair of mavis that I know are out there. And then sidestepping the poop to get to the dressing rooms, I tried on 4 items (breaking the 3 item rule, and I didn't show any of the items to the employees either, not that they were available since they were all cleaning up the poop.) There is something very wrong with me.

The Last Passover Post, I Swear (I think)

2006-04-21T15:43:00.000-04:00

Are you sick of Passover posts yet? Well TOO BAD! You can't possibly be as sick of them as I am of the holiday itself. Thank goodness it's over. My first post-Passover meal: a hamburger and fries, plus wheat beer. I feel like wheat beer is an especially good choice, sort of like a two-for-one type thing. I was so full after this meal that I couldn't eat the waffle I'd bought earlier for dessert.

Can I tell you what happens when, in a fit of rage, a person leaves a matzoh ball alone for five hours in a pot from which all the soup has been removed? You get a congealed, dense mass of yellowed grossness, which elicits a "yuck" from Javert. (Unfortunately this is not actually saying much; while Javert is not as picky as, say, Phil, he does think certain things are disgusting, like canned cat food, which I say is just food and probably not even as gross as some canned meats meant for humans.) Anyway, the point is that you get something that even I consider disgusting and let's just be happy I didn't photograph it for you all.

My abandonment of the matzoh ball was my only breakdown during Passover. I don't really know how I managed not to go crazy...Probably it has more to do with not having to go to work for all but 2 days of the holiday than with the food itself. And with the incessant bags of chips and the Turkey Hill Choco Mint Chip ice cream which in my opinion is the best in the world (not ice cream in general, but mint chip specifically). You can't find this ice cream in New York, unfortunately, at least not this flavor. I bought mine at the Shop Rite in Bloomfield, New Jersey, on Saturday night.

Let me tell you something about the Shop Rite in Bloomfield, New Jersey (or maybe it was Clifton?). Its huge. It sells 6 different types of Krazy Glue. There is an entire section devoted to socks. The extremely muscular shopper in front of me in line was purchasing 6 or 8 quart-sized Prego spaghetti sauce containers, the kind that are so big that they come with a handle, and equally large quantities of eggs. He wore a "Department of Homeland Security" tee shirt and he scared me. You know how if you see a cop you suddenly start to act more legally, even if you weren't doing anything illegal before? Rather, I guess you become more aware of the legality of your actions. I certainly did and immediately stopped speaking to Javert lest I say anything vaguely incriminating or offensive to government and get carted away by this dude (who is probably going to come after me due to this post).

The grocery bagger must have noticed the dude as well and asked if he really worked for the DHS. The dude said "Yes" in this deep voice and the bagger looked frightened and said something about "just asking." Then, when it was my turn to check out, the bagger made an unnecessary comment about Jews and Bar Mitzvahs when he saw we were buying Egg Matzoh (my first and last experience with Aviv egg matzoh...blech). His comment, which was a story about his brother or cousin and how he always mispronounces Mazel Tov at Bar Mitzvahs, totally embarrassed the cashier, who told the bagger he hated working with him. I wasn't sure how to interpret it...was the bagger trying to tell Javert and me that he was Jewish and understood why we were buying matzoh? Was he just making a joke? How was I supposed to respond? ("Silly Hebrew, I can't pronounce that either" or "Christian baby's blood sure tastes good"??) Why did this even bother me? Thankfully just as this happened the loudspeaker announced that the store was closing (at 10 pm!) and Javert and I avoided the Jewish issue by making a comment about how glad we were that we lived in New York where stores stay open later. Good thing the suburbs suck so much, they totally saved the day!

Back in the parking lot and invigorated by my successful avoidance of confronting the bagger, I saw the Homeland Security dude loading his giant canisters of spaghetti sauce into his giant SUV. I became momentarily obsessed and wanted to stop and talk to him about his job and ask why he lives in New Jersey and did he hear the Jew comment and why was he buying so much sauce and so many eggs (Easter?) but I'm shy and feared arrest, so I kept quiet and consoled myself by eating ice cream when I got home.

The Only Incident So Far

2006-04-18T15:33:00.000-04:00

I started this post last week on Wednesday morning and was too busy to finish it till now. Here's a sampling of what last week was like:

It's not even Passover and I've already had a food-related meltdown. It happened last night, around midnight, after I'd been cooking for 6 hours.

I got the turkey after work, but of course D'ag had no other ingredients I needed, including horseradish! What kind of store located on the Upper West Side doesn't carry horseradish the day before Passover? A shitty one, that's what kind. So I had to lug the turkey home and go back out to another supermarket, and to the liquor store to buy a giant bottle of creme de cacao so I could use 1 T for the chocolate souflees for tonight's seder.

I also realized that I hadn't made enough chicken broth, so I bought yet another chicken to suck dry for the sake of soup. I started the soup immediately after I got home. It's not the actual cooking that's hard, its the cleaning and santizing and more cleaning thats involved with raw meat. And since I had to hack up the chicken, there was more santizing to do than usual. But I did it, quite rapidly I might add, and told myself I didn't have to make any more chicken soup for a LONG time.

Then I made the chocolate souffles. These were a lot harder to make than I'd expected, and also need to be frozen until they get baked, which means I had to make even more space in the freezer. Usually I'd get Javert to do this, but he was at a co-op board meeting for our apt. building, so I had to use my best spacial relations skills to maximize freezer capacity. Once I rearranged the freezer I got down to work. You need 6 egg yolks and 8 egg whites for this recipe. This annoyed me. I'd already had to separate eggs the night before last, and ended up having 3 yolks left over (which are now taking up valuable space in the fridge.) So I decided to use 6 egg yolks and only 7 whites, to save an egg. I followed the instructions, otherwise, but at the end I had barely enough batter to fill my 8 ramekins, 4 of which are only 6 oz instead of the recommended 8 oz. Which means I had even less batter than I was supposed to have. I couldn't start over at this point, so I decided to freeze the souffles and try one out after the requisite 3 hours in the freezer, which I calculated would be at midnight.

Then I used part of the newly made chicken broth to make squash soup for tonights seder. At this point Javert came home with 10 chairs borrowed from our neighbors and helped me strain and bag the rest of the soup. I put it in the fridge, since I'll be using it tonight and tomorrow and also have NO MORE ROOM AT ALL in the freezer.

Now here is the disaster part. Javert closed one of the ziplocks and I closed the other, so we don't know who is at fault, or if its the ziplocks themselves. I do know, however, that when I opened the fridge to get the milk out, one of the bags wasn't closed entirely and was leaking. A lot. And when I went to close it, it slipped out from my hands and fell on the floor and soup went everywhere. My newly made, last minute and very necessary soup! Gone!

I screamed for help and Javert cleaned the floor while I cleaned myself, since I too was soaked in soup. And then I kinda lost it, a little bit. I couldn't believe that I'd just spent 4 hours cooking this soup which I really needed and then lost half of it. I was devastated, which in itself is an overreaction, especially when one has a box of storemade chicken broth in one's pantry. For some unknown reason I hadn't used all of the chicken I bought--I'd saved one raw breast--and also hadn't thrown away all the bones I'd used. After much discussion, I decided to use these remnants to make more soup, which I did after eating dinner.

And then comes the real melt-down. I still had the charoset to make, according to my list of what needs to get made when. I don't really know why I decided that I HAD to follow my list even though it was midnight and I was tired. But I did. And I totally pureed it. For those of you who don't know, charoset is NOT supposed to be pureed, its supposed to be more like extra chunky salsa. My charoset looks like vomit. Lavendar colored vomit with little specks of brown it in.

So I had a mental breakdown. Javert had to calm me down, otherwise I'd still be standing over the vomitous charoset (although it tastes fabulous) crying into a dish towel. Mainly he cheered my up by reminding me that we have a box of kleenex in the kitchen. This made me feel much better because I hate dirtying dishtowels.

The only saving grace was the souffle. I had to test one, because if it also got screwed up I was going to have to take drastic measures and totally revamp the seder plan. Luckily it was fine and I had a nice bedtime dessert treat before collapsing into sleep.

And you thought the Kosher-for-Passover stuff tasted bad...

2006-04-10T16:52:00.000-04:00

Today at work everyone brought in their chametz (all the food you can't eat or even own on Passover--I don't do this, since I'm too poor to get rid of my chametz and can trust myself not to eat it, thank you very much god) for a sort of pre-Passover food fest. It was a junk food extravaganza in the microwave room, with granola bars and pretzels and candy and chips and cookies....specifically Girl Scout Cookies, and more specifically, THIN MINTS. I stole a box for my coworkers and we spent the day bingeing. Your mouth is watering right now just thinking about it, huh?

I found out about the free food when my boss brought in a box of white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies for my two coworkers and me to share. They looked promising; they were organic, and preservative-free, and in a very attractive package. I opened the foil wrapper and thought I smelled something weird-- Phil described the smell as "like carpet cleaner." Undeterred, I tried a cookie. BAD DECISION. It tasted like poison. Naturally I made Phil take a bite too, which he promptly spit up into his garbage can. Then I spit into mine, and we made a big show of washing our mouths out with whatever liquid we had on hand (coffee for me, tea for him). Two hours later I still couldn't get the taste of poison out of my mouth.*

Of course this didn't stop us from rummaging through the other food set out. Hence the Girl Scout cookies and pretzels. But it made both of us wonder if our boss or someone else is trying to kill us.

*This makes me think of those "Mr Yuck" stickers. In kindergarten or maybe first grade, I was assigned "homework," which consisted of me having to put Mr. Yuck stickers on 5 of my favorite household poisons. I wish I could say I chose cool ones, but I think I picked shampoo and hydrogen peroxide. Poisonous? Probably. But it would be much cooler to have chosen something really deadly, like roach bait or drano. I guess I wasn't so evil as a little kid after all.

Gimme Some of That Shank Bone, Baby, Part II

2006-04-09T21:53:00.000-04:00

Today I got up at 8:30 so I could go to Fairway and do a big pre-Passover shopping. For those of you who live in New York, I'm talking about Fairway Uptown, in Harlem, not Fairway downtown on the Upper West Side. Everyone drives to Fairway Uptown, and thus buys entire shopping carts of food, which seems really weird to me, since I usually go to the store every day and have to take the subway home, which means not buying more than I can carry. Anyway, Javert and I went to our garage, got out our car, and then drove the .5 miles to Fairway. We then spent 1 hour with the rest of the car-owning Upper Manhattan living Jews buying things like matzoh meal and parsnips for our seders.

Fairway is so great sometimes. They totally expect us Jews to mob the place this weekend, so they put the horseradish root and the parsnips outside, where we'll be sure to see them. I had a nice little incident in the cold room (Fairway Uptown has entire ROOM that is refrigerated. They used to have coats you could borrow, since it gets pretty cold in there, especially if you try shopping without a list.) when a woman asked me where she could find the chicken to make soup out of. I told her that Fairway downtown has chicken bones for sale, but that Uptown rarely did. We then discussed the merits of using an entire chicken for soup versus chicken parts. We definitely disagreed about the two options, but I was in a rush and also didn't want to use up my cold room reserve heating supply arguing over how to make chicken soup. But my way is obviously better. Duh!

The best part about my shopping trip? The free shank bone! I can't remember if it was free or not last year....I do remember cooking it, however, and can recall with disturbing accuracy the absolutely horrific smell that permeated my apartment that afternoon. The bone smelled so bad that the next night during the part of the seder when you're supposed to "point to the shank bone," (or whatever), we pointed to the garbage can, where the shank bone had met its doom. God that thing was nasty! I'm sure this new one will be just as gross, but at least this year I'm prepared.

I didn't end up buying a turkey though, because I noticed kosher turkeys at the supermarket around the corner from my apartment (the evil D'agostino, you may recall). This may be D'ag's one chance to redeem itself. I'll just buy one there on Tuesday, or attempt to and then freak out when they don't have any left.

Javert totally helped me out yesterday by eating a bunch of old crap from the fridge, so now we have room for things like kugel and 6 dozen eggs (not really, more like 4 dozen), and gefilte fish. And he rearranged the freezer, because all my bags of chicken stock had somehow morphed together into one frozen blob that almost took over one entire freezer drawer. He made room in there by eating up all the ice cream.

Gimme Some of That Shank Bone, Baby

2006-04-06T21:56:00.000-04:00

Another way less interesting article appeared in today's Washington Post. It's about how much some people love matzoh. I don't know who these people are, and I find it kinda hard to believe that that many people would voluntarily choose to eat it. Although maybe if I didn't have to I would too--but doubtful. However, when the article states, "Among 1,000 respondents in a 2004 independent online poll who identified themselves as "non-Jewish," 24 percent had purchased a Manischewitz product. Matzo was at the top of the list," I think we all know what product is probably at the very top of that list. (Hint: It goes into the red mold and is another reason why certain elderly family members prefer the red to the green).

My chicken soup stockpile had an unfortunate casualty last night. I put the soup bags into the freezer while they were still warm and while I was thinking about it, because I'm notorious for forgetting to put perishable foods into the fridge or freezer (this only ever happens to things I've cooked but am not ready to eat yet--like last year's infamous Matzoh Lasagna that I spent all night cooking in preparation for the next night's dinner, and then never got to even taste since it spent the night out on the counter. This was the worst--imagine an already monstrous Emil, craving carbs like crazy, discovering that she's ruined her lasagna when she goes to make coffee in the morning. I think I roared in frustration.) Anyway, I must have put the warm chicken stock bags right next to the chocolate chocolate chip ice cream, because when I got it out to eat for dessert, half of the container was liquid. Luckily I like ice cream soup, but Javert was less than pleased. Too bad for him. I also totally forgot to refrigerate the chicken drumstick I was saving for the cats' breakfast, but surprisingly it was untouched in the morning even though it spent the night on a plate on the stove. Either my cats are idiots, or we've successfully put the fear of god into them regarding jumping on the stove. (Probably the former, since Paxwell continues to attempt to get into the oven when I'm using the broiler.)

No hot sex tonight. Sorry.

One Week Left

2006-04-05T22:25:00.000-04:00

As per request, here's the next Countdown To Passover post.

Tonight I made yet another batch of chicken broth. Usually I use kosher chicken bones from Fairway, but this time they were almost totally sold out, so I could only buy one package and had to substitute drumsticks for the second package. I'm getting increasingly concerned about both the quantity and quality of Fairway's kosher meat selection, since I need to buy a big turkey for next week and don't have enough room in my fridge to buy it early--I really hope they don't run out. Also, last time I was in Fairway, on Monday, a bunch of chicken packages were ripped open, which is gross, and the kosher area smelled overwhelmingly of bleach, like they're trying to cover something up.

I also happened to notice this article in the New York Times, which relates to what I wrote yesterday. Apparently I'm not crazy--Rabbis really are lifting restrictions on what we can eat. I never did understand why we can't eat things like corn and rice, I mean it's not like I have a mill and I'm going to grind them into meal or something. Since I'm a total dork, I printed the article and plan to pass it around the table at the seder the second night, to elicit "controversial" opinions from various family and quasi-family members (and maybe start some friendly or even not-so-friendly interfamily fights!). It's not exactly an interpretation of the Hagadah or anything, but it's right up my alley, and since it's MY seder, I can decide what we talk about. And also what we eat.

Which brings me to the next issue. My grandmother always serves a jello mold at every holiday meal held at her apartment or my parent's house--either a lemon/lime mold made with cool whip, which we call--get ready--green mold, or a cherry/raspberry mold with bing cherries and pineapples suspended in it, which we call red mold (much less disgusting sounding, but much, much more disgusting looking). As much as I am the domestic housewife type, I think jello mold is just a little too retro for me. But I know if I don't serve it, my entire family's going to be asking "where's the mold?" and "why didn't you make a mold?," especially my grandmother, in her best guilt-tripping Jewish grandmother voice. So I'm going to make it. I just can't decide which one. I might be able to shock Javert's family with the green mold, but it is sort of an acquired taste...plus the red mold goes well with turkey, since its sort of similar to cranberry sauce (although much sweeter). On the other hand, I made the red mold last year, so maybe it's time for a change. I'll definitely keep you informed about this very important decision.

In totally unrelated news, my upstairs neighbor was having VERY loud sex as I was writing this post. What an excellent soundtrack for Pesach ramblings!

T minus 8 days and counting...

2006-04-04T11:54:00.000-04:00

For the second night of Pesach next week, Javert and I invited my parents, my uncle, my grandmother, my brother, Javert's parents, sister, sister's boyfriend, brother, and the CSL. This is one person less than we had last year (we'll miss you Steph!). And this is basically the most people we can fit into our apartment and still have a reasonably coherent seder.* I'm very excited and can't wait to start cooking! (Actually I've already started stockpiling and have amassed 6 bags of frozen chicken broth in my freezer so far--last year I made about 15 qt of soup in one day, which I do not wish to repeat this year, so small increments is the way to go. One of the batches looks exceptionally like urine.)

As I did last year, I instructed my mother to bring the Tulkoff horseradish, since I think it's only sold in Baltimore. Here stores seem to carry only Gold's brand, which I think is highly inferior. So what does my mother do? She goes and buys Gold's brand in Baltimore! Luckily she mentioned this to me on the phone last night so I was able to impart to her exactly how important the correct type of horseradish is. She claimed all the stores in Baltimore were out of it, but I didn't believe her. As I suspected, today she managed to find some non-kosher for Passover Tulkoff horseradish (red, not white, which is WAY too spicy) and she bought two bottles. I hope no one at the seder gets annoyed that its not labeled kosher-for-passover, but I haven't paid attention to kosher-for-Passover product labeling ever since I found corn syrup in the ingredient list for a certified kosher-for-Passover product (ring jells, I think) along with an explanation that Rabbis had decided that this was still okay to certify (I swear I'm not making this up! What a racket!)

Which brings me to what I can assure you will be only the first in a series of Passover Food rants. I am not looking forward to Passover. I love the foods we eat at the seder...but 8 days of limited carbohydrates is enough to drive me insane. Really. You can ask Javert, I turn into a maniac around the 4th day of Passover, and have spontaneous crying fits or worse, and I just can't handle not getting to eat what I want to eat. I'm not a bread or pasta person really, but then you eliminate rice and corn also (this is the dumbest rule EVER) and I can't take it anymore and I lose control.

I'm going to try really hard not to let that happen this year. I like the foods I make for the seder, so I'm just going to make more of them during the rest of the holiday. So what if the kugel has a half a cup of oil in it--it tastes good and it satisfies my carb lust. I've refrained from making egg salad since last Passover so I can look forward to it for this year. I'm not even making brisket for the seder, mostly so I can enjoy it later on in the week and not share it with anyone (and also because kosher briskets cost like 100 dollars if you want enough for 12 people). And for when the carb lust gets out of control? Unlimited quantities of UTZ potato chips, I promise.

But be prepared, people! My little plan, which sounds great now, is certainly not foolproof. I'm sure to break down at least once, and when I do, you probably want to be far far away from me. You should probably start preparing your emergency readiness kits now, just to be safe.

*I have more to say about the seder re: who's coming and what that means, but I'll wait till closer, to get myself even MORE excited (or frightened, as you will learn).

Where do you want to be 10 years from now?

2006-03-22T16:14:00.000-05:00

In my last post I said I felt like I'd spent the weekend with my parents. But after thinking about that, I realize that my description wasn't accurate. I feel like I spent the weekend with my mom/best friend and one of her friends who I've known forever but still don't know too well.

My friend's husband is old, not so much in age (although he is older than we are by not a few years) but in personality and demeanor. He wears a suit to work, with a tie, and clips his flipphone onto his belt. He looks like a dad. He wore a bright red sweater to dinner, the type that my grandmother buys my dad for his birthday and I try to stop him from wearing in public. He takes everything seriously, knows a lot about a lot of different topics and isn't shy about sharing his knowledge with you. He consults waiters about wine lists and says please and thank you. In sum, he's old-fashioned.

This contrasts SO greatly with how I remember my friend, who was always the "bad girl" in high school, sneaking off to drink on the weekends and misbehaving in class--stuff I never, ever did. She's so serious now, not in a bad way, just in a different way. We still get along the same as always, maybe even better, because I think she's now more like me, in terms of personality, than she ever was.

But their friends have kids. They have shabbat candles set up in their house, and a breakfront showcasing their wedding crystal, and an extra freezer in their basement, and a fenced-in yard for the dog to run around and poop in. They seem so happy, and so intent on "The Future."

Very few of my other friends are like this; we all seem to live in the moment and while we have jobs and responsibilities, we still go out drinking and stay up late and use curse words. I always thought I was the progressive one among my high school friends, deserting the conformity of cliques and dress codes for a liberal lifestyle unheard of in the insular world I left. And I still think I was. But now I wonder if I've continued on in that world while the others have bypassed me (and maybe that lifestyle, partially if not entirely) and moved into actual adult lives, while I'm the one conforming to some sort of mid-twenties hipster profile (I'm really not a hipster though) .

My friend and I were talking about having kids, and she said that while she was ready, I wasn't because I wasn't "settled" yet. When she said this, I wondered what "settled" meant, and if I wanted to classify myself as such. I'm married. I own an apartment. I have a stable job. But she's right--I'm not "settled" in the same way that she is.

Nevertheless, their "settled" life seemed so comfortable--jobs, volunteer groups, sisterhoods, dinner clubs, etc., but also perhaps too familiar. When I imagine the future, it doesn't always feature breakfronts and dining room sets. I still can't figure out if it's a taste of the life I've been escaping from for all these years, or the life I want for the future, or both. At any rate, it was definitely a novelty and made me feel homesick--maybe nostalgic is a better word--for something I seem to have (deliberately?) lost over the years.

Gateway to the West

2006-03-21T11:08:00.000-05:00

I spent this weekend in St. Louis, visiting my best friend from elementary and high school and her husband. They moved to St. Louis a year and a half ago, bought a house in the suburbs and got a dog and are, as my friend fully admits, "settled." I feel like I spent the weekend with my parents, which is fine since I like my parents, but also kind of weird and disturbing.

Anyway, the highlights of the trip (besides seeing my friend) were a visit to Penzey's, where I bought all kinds of spices including a horseradish dip mix that I cannot wait to try, and a trip to Teavana, a tea store where I bought a fruity tea and a chocolate tea, which I also can't wait to try. The restaurant food in St. Louis wasn't up to par in my opinion, but we all know that I'm snobby when it comes to food so perhaps I'm being too harsh. I did, however, have a fabulous chocolate martini that ranked much better than the one I'd had at home.

The St. Louis arch was much much bigger and cooler than I'd imagined, although the Lewis and Clark museum bored me. I also saw the Mississippi for the first time, but declined to touch it for fear of contracting a disease. It seemed quite muddy.

Everyone there was so friendly--it almost scared me how nice people were to me. Every single person I encountered smiled and made conversation, and instead of wanting to punch them in the face, I wanted to act nice back! Maybe I was just happy to be on a mini-vacation, or maybe there really is something different about New York, something that blackens our souls until we leave.

But the best part of St. Louis was my experience at the airport, on the way home. I left myself only 45 minutes to check in and go through security, since I just had carry-on luggage. The security line looked pretty long though, and I was, as always, worried about missing my flight. As much as I had enjoyed the two days, I was definitely ready to go home (I always feel ready to go home when my vacations are over. It's great, I have some sort of internal meter that resets itself a few hours before I leave to make sure I can happily say goodbye. If only everything else in my life worked as well.) Anyway, I got out my id and my boarding pass and got in line, and the TSA official directing us looked straight at me, so intensely that I got concerned. Do I look like a potential terrorist? Was she going to confiscate my new spices? She said to me, "Have you been here before? Do I know you?" Shaking a little, I said "No..." And she said, after a very anxiety-producing pause, "Were you on TV?...You were, you just looked so beautiful"

Good lord, I'm famous!

Another Dog Experience

2006-03-15T14:16:00.000-05:00

I used to work on 8th Avenue, in a particularly sketchy part of town with at least 5 methadone clinics in a 3 block radius (I know this for sure because I wrote a paper on the neighborhood). Every day while walking to work, I'd see really crazy people. Like Birdman, who never wore a shirt and would yell 'Ca-Caw' as he walked down the street. One time someone cawed back, and Birdman turned around, indignant, and said "You can't do that!"

Then there was the woman who didn't have a nose, who'd wear a bandage over where her nose should've been. There was the man who asked my African-American friend "What you doin' with Whitey?" and the guy who told me "Nice jugs, momma!" Steph overheard an entire conversation where two people each insisted that they were Juan Carlos: "I am Juan Carlos." "No! I am Juan Carlos." "No, I am Juan Carlos." Etc.

None of these people comes close to the couple Steph and I encountered yesterday in Madison Square Park, on our way to the dog run. It's all Steph's fault--her dog is so cute that she can't walk more than 2 feet without people stopping to pet him and ask about him. It's annoying, frankly, and I wanted to go to the dog park so bad--probably as much as Ollie wanted to go, and that was A LOT.*

So these two crazy people passed us on our way there and of course had to comment on how cute the dog is, ask how old is he, etc....except they didn't stop asking questions at the appropriate time. I don't really even know how to describe how drug addicts speak, but it's quite distinctive and these two fit the profile perfectly. The man, who slurred most of his words, told us a horrible story about how he paid $1300 for a purebred dog that his ex-wife gave away after they separated. Apparently the dog was aggressive because the wife kept him tied up all day. The man seemed to be more upset at the loss of $1300 than at the loss of the dog. The man's companion, a female wearing way too much eye makeup, bent down to pet Ollie. Except she couldn't really bend down--she slowly jerked downwards, groaning: "Eh, eh, eh, eh." I had to get out of there! But there was nowhere to go--we were already outside, and we were on our way to the dog park.

I'm not quite sure how Steph managed to disengage from these people, but she should be commended for doing so. I was so incapacitated by their creepiness and by my frustration (and by the mandatory interaction with some other deranged individuals we'd run into immediately prior to these two--sorry guys, but I can't describe this situation although it'd be mighty entertaining) that I'd probably still be there now, trying unsuccessfully not to listen to their slurred stories and moans.

* I don't understand these people who stop strangers on the street to pet their supposedly cute dogs. Ollie is cute and all, but I'd never interrupt a total stranger to play with their animal...maybe I'm just purely anti-social, but I feel like that's rude. Just because you happen to have a dog doesn't mean that you're free to converse with crazies or even normal people at their convenience. Maybe Steph will disagree with me, but it's another reason why I won't have a dog in the city. (Although I guess having an ugly dog would be okay)

Arf!

2006-03-08T14:02:00.000-05:00

On Monday afternoon, I fulfilled one of my New York City dreams. I went to the dog park with an actual dog! Okay, it wasn't my dog, it was Steph's. And it's just a 4 pound puppy, so we had to go to the adjacent small dog enclosure--and we were the only ones there. But that ended up being a good move, since a fight broke out in the big dog enclosure, initiated by a tall, muzzled greyhound-type dog wearing a blue turtleneck.

We got to the dog park at a particularly busy time. At least 15 dogs were running around in there. Ollie, Steph's puppy, had never been around so many dogs before and was EXCITED. He didn't even care that he was by himself in the small enclosure, because he could smell the other dogs (anyone, human or canine, within a 20 foot radius of the dog park can smell them quite clearly) and that was enough.

Rather, it was enough until another small dog and his owners joined us, and then Ollie went CRAZY. He's so small that his legs don't really work right--he's kinda slow--so the other dog really put him in his place. They played, but Ollie knew who was boss--not him--and definitely showed it. The other dog used her front paw to direct Ollie, and let him chase her around, and Ollie yelped with pleasure or maybe with frustration.

This story isn't really exciting until you consider that I, Emil, was in the dog park with dogs around me. I don't think anyone from my childhood reads this blog, but if they do they're probably wondering if it's really me writing here. I've been scared of dogs since I was 4 when two German Shepherds knocked me down at Windy Valley while I was eating strawberry ice cream and waiting for my turn to ride the pony. They stole my ice cream right out of my hand.

From that day on, I hated dogs so much that I completely blocked out the fact that we HAD a dog until my brother was born. I only recently discovered this while looking at an old photo album. Fear was further instilled when I was about 9 and my parents, foolishly considering adopting a dog, took us to the pet store to look at potential adoptees. The pet store locked my family in a small room with a hyperactive white dog who caused me extreme mental trauma by jumping on me and licking me. We got a cat instead.

Javert can tell you that until recently, I really believed every dog that looked at me on the street was thinking to itself "I would like to eat her." And maybe they are. But I don't think so. I'm not really sure when this transformation occurred, but I definitely like (most) dogs now.

I doubt I'll own a dog anytime soon though, because I want a big one and my apartment can barely contain two crazy cats. Plus, I can't imagine really going out in the cold or late at night or really any time at all to walk the dog--I'm way too lazy for that. I don't even clean the litter box, I make Javert do it.

Therefore, until I have a yard where the dog can go out alone, I must remain content to watch shows like Underdogs and Dogs with Jobs and hope that this newfound fearlessness continues.

Emil 1, Boxed Rice, 0.

2006-03-01T14:05:00.000-05:00

I am happy to say that I have regained my ability to stand up to the lure of processed foods.

Yesterday at work I decided I wanted chicken for dinner, probably due to Phil's suggestion that a protein deficiency may explain my unrelenting afternoon tiredness. I don't know if it's true or not, but I've wanted protein-rich food ever since. So Javert and I decided we'd have skinless, boneless chicken breasts coated in breadcrumbs and baked in an apricot sauce. I got the recipe from my grandmother, and its one I've been making for a long time. I've changed it a little, but to me its a homey meal that's supposed to taste a certain way, regardless of how unhealthy or unnatural it is. Kinda like how when I make my mom's teriyaki chicken recipe, I have to use Uncle Ben's rice, even though its crap.

Anyway, my mom made the apricot chicken dish all the time and usually served it with Uncle Ben's Long Grain and Wild Rice, until she discovered Near East brand, which she currently uses. I love this stuff. It's something in the spice sack--I was pretty sure it contained powdered crack in addition to the other flavorings. In an attempt to find out what's actually in there, I looked up the rice on the Near East website and discovered that it's not crack, but approximately 33% of your daily allotment of sodium that makes this rice so delicious. (and thats if you eat only one serving, which is humanly impossible as far as I'm concerned.)

But...I love it and I was making a homey meal. In the past, I've made my own version of wild rice, but it never quite measured up (probably since I don't put 800 mg of sodium into each serving). So using the conveniences of Google Chat I asked Javert, who in the past has scoffed at my rice's ability to stand in for the boxed kind, which rice to choose. He said it was my choice. Foolish move, Javert.

Predictably, I said "I feel bad, with easy mac and rice in one week."
Javert: "I won't tell anyone."
Me: "I'll still know. But if you want it, it's okay, I can blame you."
Javert: "Ok, I can live with that. Since I'm the one that wanted easymac. Cough." (his fatal remark)
Me: So you want the boxed rice?
Javert: If you say I do, then yes.
Me: What are you saying?
Javert: You are supposed to choose. If you don't want to admit that you want it, and want to say I do, that's fine.
Me: Well I'm not going to choose the boxed kind unless you want it. I stick to my principles damnit, unless it involves easymac.

And I made the wild rice from scratch, and for the first time, it was delicious.

M, Making Macaroni

2006-02-27T10:26:00.000-05:00

I can't believe I am so gross sometimes!

On Friday night Javert and I went out to dinner and then to our friends house to hang out. I'd eaten a ton at dinner, so I passed on the mini-cheesecakes offered for dessert. When we got home at 1 or 2, I was horrified to find that I NEEDED to have some Easymac. Why? I have no idea. All I know is I needed it SO BADLY and was not pleased when the bodega didn't carry it. All the supermarkets were closed since they suck and the closest thing I could find at the bodega were cheese nips. Unacceptable. I thought for a while about breaking into my emergency Cheetos supply but knew that I wouldn't be satisfied even if I gorged myself, and that I'd never be able to purchase a resupply (I didn't buy the emergency pack either, I conned my brother-in-law into doing it). I would have totally depleted my emergency supply in a non-Cheetos emergency.

So instead I ate something inferior that I can't remember now and went to sleep. I got up bright and early to work with the CSL, went to the farmers market and purchased some excellent zucchini turnovers, homemade doughnuts, and apple-corn salsa, and got on the subway to come home.

The stupid weekend subway took hours to come, and I was really hungry and thirsty. But I was determined to find Easymac, which I still desperately needed despite having purchased delicious and fresh farmers market food. At 96th street I should've gotten out of the train and walked to Gristedes, gotten my fix, and walked the rest of the way home. But I was tired and opted to wait for 20 minutes for the local train. 20 minutes! Then I went to D'agostino, the worst supermarket in the world, where they make foodstamps users go in a separate line and where all transactions must take at least 15 minutes (I'm totally serious here), to buy my Easymac. This 4.99 purchase took approximately 20 minutes also, even though I was in the express line and the 5 people in front of me each had only 3 items. I don't know how a supermarket can be so disfunctional and still be in business (oh wait, I do know. When there aren't any normal supermarkets for a half mile radius in Manhattan, the one remaining market can be as shitty as they want and still have customers.)

Anyway, I went home finally and made my Easymac and it was SO GOOD and I've been thinking of making more ever since. That's what happens when you eat preservative laden crap--you get addicted. Did I eat my zucchini turnover or the doughnut or the salsa? No. (ok, I ate the salsa. It went well with the easymac.)

Can you believe it? Who knows what might come next--perhaps I'll bring some Lunchables to work tomorrow. Yum.

Proboscis

2006-02-15T18:04:00.000-05:00

On Monday night, Javert and I watched the movie Mimic. The plot is thus: A creepy disease spread by cockroaches is killing Manhattan's children. An entomologist develops another type of cockroach that will kill all of the deadly ones and then die itself, since it's genetically engineered to have no reproductive capacity. Three years later, the entomologist discovers she fucked up majorly and the genetically engineered cockroaches are (of course) reproducing like crazy in the subway system. They're 6 feet tall, can fly, and the best part--they have a human-like head they use so as not to immediately scare off their prey (humans). When they're close to a victim, the human-like head splits down the middle, revealing their giant cockroach head and mouth which they use to devour the target. The entomologist and her team, consisting of her husband (some sort of infectious disease expert) a stereotypical NYPD subway cop, an immigrant man who shines shoes in the subway station, and his autistic son, spend a night getting chased around the subway tunnels by hoardes of these giant cockroaches.

In case you were wondering (please tell me you were) I was not just sitting watching this movie, I was also busy doing other stuff at the same time. Nevertheless, I knew this movie would scare me. Despite how incredibly ridiculous the idea of giant Cockroach Men taking over the subway is, I still managed to convince myself that not only did they exist, but that one had also gotten into my apartment and was going to eat me when I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

I kept making jokes about the Cockroach Man all night long to try to alleviate the inevitable fear I knew I'd feel around bedtime. I failed. It wasn't completely my fault--just before we turned the lights out, they flickered in a really creepy way, and a siren went off simultaneously. Sure enough, in the middle of the night, when I had to go to the bathroom, I woke Javert and told him I was scared of the Cockroach Man in our hallway. He told me I was being ridiculous, but I still turned on the nighttable lamp before I got up to do my business. Needless to say, the Cockroach Man did not get me, although Javert managed to scare me in the subway station the next morning by pretending to be him.

I bet you thought this story was going to end with me finding a real cockroach in my apartment. Hah!

How Ratfoot Got Her Name

2006-02-07T17:45:00.000-05:00

I found this post on the now defunct PodBlog...I thought some readers of Ratfoot might enjoy it.

Yesterday I left the office after a rousing 2 hour game of Motherlode, walking to the 1/9 via 28th Street. I was on 28th between 6th and 7th, aka the plant-store block, as the store owners were taking in the plants for the night. I'd just had some excitement on 5th and 27th, as that block was totally filled with police vehicles due to this situation. It was about 5:30 and it was raining slightly.

I felt like something was walking next to me, so I looked around for the cat who lives in one of the plant stores. This summer, the cat's entire body (except for its head and paws) was shaved, and I wanted to see if the hair had grown back properly and if it was still as cute as it was last spring. But sadly, I couldn't find the cat. My suspicion was right, however, as I did feel something brush against my left foot. It felt just like a cat. Unfortunately, as you may all have guessed, it was not a cuddly feline, it was A HUGE RAT THAT WAS TOUCHING MY FOOT. About 8 inches long with a similarly long tail, the rat had grayish brown fur. After colliding with my foot it ran off into the street.

I didn't scream or jump or do any of the typical "girl" responses. Instead, I almost passed out. I thought about amputation, but ruled it out as the rat hadn't actually touched my skin. I'd have to burn my clothes though, and do something terrible to my favorite shoes. All this made me want to die. But I comforted myself knowing that I could write about it today on the PodBlog and that made me feel a lot better. Javert called me Rat Foot all night yesterday. I probably shouldn't have posted that tidbit here.

Update

2006-02-07T11:43:00.000-05:00

I went back to the coffee shop on Friday after work, and the owner remembered me! And then made me the best hot chocolate I've had in a long time. I sat and read my book and successfully ignored a friend of the owner who brought his two extremely aggressive pit bulls into the shop. Maybe it's because I was in a really good mood (for once!) and it felt like spring, but I loved that place on Friday. I didn't feel like I needed to kill anybody (the dogs are a different story, however).

Then, on Sunday, I sent my brother there to study and he came right back with this description: "There were a bunch of people and it looked like they were having a party and they were talking about really weird stuff." I asked if it involved alien abduction, but he didn't know. Plus they were out of hot chocolate.

I think I'll go back today and try it once more.

An Impossible Dream

2006-01-30T13:52:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Javert and I went to a coffeeshop around the corner from us while we waited for our laundry to dry. This particular place has been open for about a year but for some reason we'd never gone in till yesterday. It's so close to our apartment that we don't even need to cross a street to get there. It's tiny, and it's also a bar, both of which mean the annoying Starbucks set won't be tromping through disturbing me.

So probably a full third of the other patrons were working on Powerbooks (not ibooks, just Powerbooks). Javert and I were both reading, but the point is that everyone in the coffeeshop was working, presumably on school-related stuff. Except for Javert, who was reading The Bourne Supremacy.

When we first got there, I noticed that cappucinos cost $3, which seems a bit unreasonable, especially for someone who has a cappucino machine at home, which is only 30 seconds away. But I decided to splurge, since it was rainy out and since I was cold because I stupidly wore pants with holes in them. Javert chose regular coffee, because he "never has that anymore."* The cappucino was excellent; the coffee tasted like dirt slightly flavored with skim milk. (It contained neither of these items).

Anyway, usually I discover that in any coffeeshop, there's always one person who I want to murder. When I get so annoyed that I start fantasizing about torture methods, I leave. Yesterday was no exception.

The owner of the coffeeshop and his employee continually left to stand outside and smoke cigarettes. Which is fine with me, except that this meant that anytime anyone came into the shop, one or both would hurry back in to serve the customer, allowing billows of smoke to blow in the shop and around me. As I think that cigarette smoke is one of the most disgusting smells on the planet, I was less than pleased.

When they weren't smoking outside, the owner and the employee were talking loudly inside. At least 5 people came in to talk to them during the hour I was there. These people neither bought coffee (or anything) nor sat down, they simply stood around conversing LOUDLY with the owners. I know--I know coffee shops aren't libraries, although the fact that every single paying customer seemed to act that way maybe should maybe signal something. But I'm sure it must get boring to wait on people all day and I'd probably appreciate the interuption too.

But then they started talking to ME! As we know, I'm not a talkative person when strangers are involved. I happened to mention to Javert that the building across the street was creepy, and the owner heard me and proceeded to tell me everything I could ever need to know about said creepy building. When I was really thinking about how creepy the owner was in comparison, and how I would like to go back to reading about public policy. I was forced to participate in this ridiculous conversation in which I had very little interest (creepy building--alien abduction--scientology--scary Tom Cruise--sexy George Clooney).

The end point came when a friend of the owner came looking for a cellphone charger. Right away I knew this man would be a problem for me, because he appeard to have a Hitler mustache. He didn't, at least I don't think he really did. It seemed as if he just hadn't shaved that day or maybe was trying to grow a beard and the hair grows faster on that area of his lip, but still! Even an unintentional Hitler mustache is unacceptable for anyone, ever.

I have no idea why this person couldn't go home to charge his phone, or why he had to charge it RIGHT THEN, but after rummaging through their collection of chargers (who keeps a collection of cellphone chargers behind the counter of their coffeeshop??), the owner sent him to the cellphone store next door. But this store was closed, so the friend came back and proceeded to discuss his life story with the owner. I could have handled all this...except this man had the MOST ANNOYING LAUGH I'VE EVER HEARD, EVER! Almost anything anyone said elicited this series of short, loud barks that made me want to ram hot espresso grounds down his throat. Just thinking about it makes me angry and annoyed.

The laundry had finished by this point, so we left and I ranted about the annoying laugh for the short walk home. Of course mild-mannered Javert hadn't noticed the laugh or the mustache (how is this possible??) but allowed me to complain nevertheless.

The thing is, I'm sure I'll go back to this coffeeshop. And I feel really mean and petty even complaining about these things. The poor guy can't control how his facial hair grows or that he finds everything ever spoken to be hilarious. And the coffeeshop owners aren't horrible people, they're just bored and addicted to nicotine. Sure, they seemed crazy, but at least they weren't mean (like some other coffeeshop employees around here). And I need to try to be more accomodating of crazy people, seeing as I live in Crazy Capital, USA.

It's just that one time, I'd like to go to a coffeeshop and not have to fend off weirdos. I'd like to sit in peace, either privately conversing with my companion, reading, or knitting, without having to dodge celebrities or neighbors/servers, without being told to leave since I've finished eating (but not drinking (that's another story for another post)), without some guy trying to pick me up by asking me what I'm knitting, and without being interrupted by Hitler-look-alikes or paranoid alien-abduction victims.

Basically the only place I can accomplish this is right inside my own apartment, which makes me happy I have my own espresso machine but at the same time makes me extremely worried that I'll emerge in 20 years with a few cats in tow, wondering why people are giving me funny looks on the street.

*spoiled brat! Although who am I to complain, since I paid $3 for something I can get for free?

Nightly News

2006-01-25T14:12:00.000-05:00

Good news everyone! Paxwell's biopsy came back negative for cancer. The lump was actually composed of FAT. I really wish I'd asked the vet to save it---how cool would it be to see a big ball of cat fat?

In other news...no, wait, I don't have any other news.

Instead: Here are some 'exciting' things that have happened to me this week:

1. My mom finally mailed me the bra I left at her house over Christmas. I'm very happy, because having it doubles my collection of wearable bras. Not that I don't wear the "unwearable" ones, because I do, but they start to inflict pain after a few days. I can't seem to find a way to make even the fancy ones last longer than a few months. And I just don't understand how such a basic item can be so expensive and also so crappily made. I've even gotten custom-made bras tailored just for me, and they STILL fall apart quickly.

2. Javert baked chocolate chip walnut cookies after I casually mentioned that he might want to consider doing so. He put in too many eggs by accident, so we doubled the batch and now have a cookie log in the freezer! Therefore I removed (permanently) the emergency reserve pilsbury cookie dough log from the fridge. I'll thank you never to speak of it again.*

3. A friend, Javert and I made the meatloaf recipe featured in this month's Cook's Illustrated. It was delicious. Honestly, I thought it was better than the cookies.

4. I bought a pair of poultry shears so I can butterfly chicken. I wonder what sort of scary fantasies I'll have about that?

I have nothing to report because classes started last week and I've been busy reading. The professor had apparently assigned reading for the first class, which of course no one did since we hadn't had the class yet (duh). So he just added it on to the assignment for this week. Last night I fell asleep reading on the sofa at 7:30.

*I know! Why was this even in the fridge? How did I come to ever own such a thing? We bought it at the beach in September, because we wanted some hot cookies and couldn't bring ourselves to buy all the ingredients that go into normal cookies just to have to leave them in a beach apartment for 6 months. Once we tasted it, we immediately realized our mistake, but kept the remains of the log just in case. Javert once made 1 cookie using it, late at night after he'd eaten every other sweet thing in the apartment except raisins.

A Disgusting Story

2006-01-17T10:22:00.000-05:00

On Friday afternoon, my younger cat, Paxwell, underwent surgery to remove a lump on her back. She'd had two similar lumps removed last year; the vet thinks they were caused by vaccinations (which Paxwell no longer receives for this reason). We're still not sure about the contents of this particular mass--we'll know more soon, when the test results come back.

Anyway, Paxwell needs to wear a plastic head collar so she doesn't bite open her stitches. We found this out the hard way last year, when she tore open her stitches and required emergency surgery (on my birthday, no less). That was horrible, especially because it was my fault--I should have been watching her more carefully, and never should have trusted her alone without the helmet, no matter what the vet might have said about the wound being mostly healed.

We're still allowing her some time each day without the helmet, so she can eat and groom and relax. We just make sure to watch her every single second that she's uncollared, so that she can't make any fast moves. Which means she wears it most of the time, like when we're sleeping or at work.

Paxwell's a sick cat. She has other medical conditions besides this, and also vomits very frequently, mostly immediately after eating. So I shouldn't have been surprised at what happened last night/this morning.

In the middle of the night, Javert woke up and removed Paxwell from the bed, since she was making the "I'm going to vomit now" sound. I can imitate this quite well--it's a kind of coughing she does while backing up quickly. When she starts making this noise, you have about ten seconds to move her to a vomit-friendly location. I don't know how Javert managed to hear this, wake up, and move Paxwell off the bed, but he did. I half woke up and asked if she'd vomited. Javert said he didn't know as he got out of bed, and I went back to sleep.

This morning we woke up to an apartment filled with cat vomit. Javert had no recollection of Paxwell's or his own nocturnal activities. Paxwell's helmet and neck were crusted over with vomit. She must have thrown up into her hood and then trailed little vomit droplets everywhere as she wandered around the apartment for the next 6 hours. It was everywhere--on three carpets, the floor, the bed, a chair, etc.

The whole incident reminded me of one time when I was sick as a child and felt the urge to throw up in the middle of the night. For some reason, I was scared I'd get in trouble if I called for my mom, so instead I vomited a trail leading into my brother's room. When I got there I was done, and went back to my room to sleep. In the morning, my parents couldn't figure out which of us had done it, or why we'd feel the need to hide being sick. The finally found me out when they saw some crusty vomit on my blanket-sleeper.

So as not to end on that extremely disgusting note, I decided to include a picture of Zolie, who probably feels very left out due to all the fuss we're making over Paxwell. On Sunday night she decided to dress up at the Caped Cat Crusader: (I swear that this was not posed!)

Thwack! Pow! Bam!

2006-01-12T10:00:00.000-05:00

This morning at the 96th Street subway station, Javert and I were waiting to change to the 2/3 express trains heading downtown. It was really crowded--about 3 people deep waiting, and I figured we wouldn't get on the first train.

I, however, did get on the train, next to two almost-middle-aged white men. We were all standing right at the train doors, where you have to kinda hold your body inward till the doors shut, at which point you can relax. Both men next to me wore business-casual type clothes, and one was bald while the other had lots of red hair and a beard.

Now, if you've never had to take the subway at rush hour you might not understand just how crowded it is and how people feel that they MUST get on the train NO MATTER WHAT. Everyone pushes and surges and forces themselves onto the train, but the people already on the train do a sort of defensive feet-planting, refusing to give up their spots and move further into the middle of the car, so a ton of people end up squeezed into the train areas near the doors while the middle of the train is crowded but still relatively roomy. This happens almost every morning and sometimes in the afternoons too.

I guess the bald guy thought he was the only one being crowded, and thought the bearded guy was the only one pushing, so he pushed right back. And he used both hands, forcing the guy off the train and halfway across the platform. Of course the bearded guy decided to push back, and so a subway train fight broke out right next to me. The fight was on my right, so I threw myself into the woman to my left, who kept saying "Oh My God" over and over, disgusted with the fight. Even though Javert was on the platform, I couldn't get off the train because I thought I'd get swept up into the fight and get knocked over. Luckily the train car happened to have a conductor box, so the conductor came out into the car and said Not on My Train a few times till the fight ended. At which point I left the train and Javert pulled me to him. Oddly enough, the bearded man, who kept getting pushed off the train, took my place right next to his enemy and the train left.

I've been on the train with lots of crazy people, like the guy who was standing up and vomiting near the doorways, or the drunk guy who refused to move away from the door even though there were actually seats available, or the other really big guy who refused to move away from the door, instructing the woman who needed to get off to "say excuse me, bitch." I've even seen a man take a running start to better force himself onto a packed train car. But this was my first close-up fight (well, more like altercation since there was no blood involved). Exciting. An insider's look at how people can get so angry that they do irrational things. Its just a subway, people!

And the next train came about 2 minutes later, maybe even sooner. This city gets crazy sometimes. I definitely get annoyed at other subway riders; sometimes I even imagine getting into arguments with pole-leaners or seat-hoggers. (I mean, how hard is it for men to sit with their legs together?) But I'd never actually push someone off a train! Maybe I haven't been here long enough. But I think that when that sort of thing happens, it's time to leave the city and start perfecting your road rage. You can do a lot more damage with a car than with your bare hands....

Someone Get Me a Band-Aid!

2006-01-11T16:42:00.000-05:00

First off, apologies to vegetarian readers, this post talks about cooking meat. Sorry, but I crave it and like it and therefore I eat it.

Whenever I think about cutting up a chicken for soup (I make the pieces really small, like 2 inches, so that all the flavor comes out quickly), I get all paranoid that I'm going to also cut my hand or my fingers off. Yesterday I was walking to the post office and thinking about dinner, and actually clenched my hands into fists in my pockets as I thought about using the cleaver on the meat. What would I do if I cut off four fingertips with the cleaver? I get chills and my heart races just thinking about it. Sometimes I also think about making a mistake and cutting up the cats by accident. Like if I just grabbed Paxwell by the foot and....That's even scarier.*

I also get paranoid that the meat is bad, even though its not. Like last night, when I was making the soup, I started smelling the chicken really carefully, in case it was rotten. Because my friend The Car Seat Lady had told me a story about how she'd bought rotten chicken at a certain local, well respected 'organic' grocery store, and she figured out it was rotten because it smelled bad. What if my meat was bad too? Even though I'd bought it at a different store, and it was packed on the same day, it could still be spoiled. Why did those people at the meat section with me decide to buy beef instead? Could they smell something I couldn't? I decided to cook the chicken instead and find out the hard way if it was spoiled (sorry Javert). Turns out it was fine. Big surprise there!

You vegetarians (if you are still reading this) probably think these fears are just my body's way of trying to avoid eating meat. Maybe you're right. But until I lose a body part or fall prey to food poisioning, I'll probably keep doing it. Because it tastes GOOD.

*I get this way about knives a lot. I cut myself recently with the 10 inch chef's knife, while I was cleaning it, and now I get a little nervous every time I use it, which is every day. Especially when I'm cleaning it. The place where I cut myself tingles, even though its totally healed, and I get a little jittery.

What Else Happened on New Years Eve

2006-01-04T14:44:00.000-05:00

About an hour before Javert and I were to go to his office for New Years Eve, we were watching tv and making dinner when the lights started to flicker. A lot. Like, we-are-in-a-horror-movie type of flickering.

Typical New Yorkers that we are (aspire to be?), we looked out the window and saw the apartment building next-door to us also had flickering lights. So Javert called Con-Ed. As you may have suspected, Con-Ed told us they hadn't gotten any other reports (impossible!) and promised to alert their "emergency" division, which means they promised to send someone out in the next year or so. As Javert was on the phone, we heard a lot of sirens, and after hanging up with Con-Ed he went down to see if they were coming from our block. I had to stay upstairs to finish dinner and also corral the cats into cages should it turn out to be an actual emergency.

Which, thank goodness, it wasn't. At least not for us. The building two doors down from us had been evacuated due to an electrical problem (Hello? Con-Ed??), and thats why our lights were flickering like crazy. There were at least 5 fire trucks outside (but no fire that we could tell) and an ambulance, and a big hole in the street with tons of steam pouring out, and the whole thing was very creepy (New Years Eve + Lights Flickering + Sirens = Apocalypse?) but the lights went back to normal before we left home.

As predicted, Con-Ed emergency called the next day, which means that if it had been a real emergency, we'd have been dead.

Ravens 30, Vikings 23

2005-12-29T11:14:00.000-05:00

On Sunday, I went to my first live football game ever. I've watched football on tv plenty of times but I'd never seen it in person--going to sissy schools or girls schools can do that to you. The experience might have been a disaster, since it was cold, and Christmas, and rainy, but it turned out to be fabulous! I can't believe I'm writing this, but I actually kinda wanna go to another game.

My dad bought the tickets in October from a coworker who owns rights to the seats. I had wanted to go all along, but I didn't realize how excited I was until the night before the game, when I dreamed about it. (I dreamed that my dad procrastinated getting ready and we missed the game, and I was so angry at him in my dream that in the morning I was still upset.) Plus I got depressed when I woke up Sunday morning to the sound of rain hitting my window. Although the weatherman had predicted temperatures of around 50, it was actually much colder out, like 40 or maybe even 35.

Luckily walking to work during the strike had prepared me for dealing with prolonged exposure to the cold, and luckily it stopped raining about an hour before we left for the game. My dad and Javert both wore pajama bottoms under their pants, (because I'm rational and a good advance planner, I wore tights and long underwear that I'd brought from NY) and lots of sweaters. My dad also brought a huge bag filled with extra clothes and blankets, just in case, and I brought a book, also just in case.

We parked in a garage downtown and walked to the Ravens stadium, which is new and gigantic. To get in, men and women must line up separately to get searched. So I was separated from the boys, and since football attracts relatively few women, I got in a lot quicker than they did. Ten minutes later, I was still waiting around with all the other women, about to call Javert's cell phone, when I saw him. Apparently my dad's bag of extra clothes was too big to bring into the stadium (cause all bombs are big) and he had to go back to check it at a booth half a mile away.

Of course, since I had never been to a football game before (or probably even seen the start of one), I didn't care that we might miss the kickoff or whatever its called. My dad finally got back and we went to our seats, which were very close to the field and near the 40 yard line. I'm not sure if we missed anything or not, but it didn't seem to matter much.

Football is much more exciting in person than on tv (even sped-up tv). It's faster paced than baseball, which I'm used to seeing in person, and the fans are much more interesting. Even though I didn't really understand what was happening in the beginning, it didn't matter because the guys in back of us had a running commentary going the whole time. And who doesn't enjoy seeing fat men take their shirts off in 40 degree weather? (Actually this only happened near the end, and only involved really drunk people, so it ended up being entertaining anyway).

I felt kinda out of place, since unlike 99% of the people there, I wasn't wearing any Ravens paraphernalia and I wasn't drunk. Had my dad not been with us, and had beer not cost $7.50 a cup, things might have gone differently, but--alas--I had only the one obligatory beer to warm me up halfway through the game. I told Javert to get some food when I sent him for beer and he returned with french fries. Bravo, Javert! Also, my dad left at some point and returned with hot pretzels, which was fantastic. There's nothing like steaming hot food and cold beer to warm up a person who has been sitting outside for 4 hours on Christmas night.

Anyway, the Ravens won after a pretty exciting game that was tied for a long time. By the end, I could watch the game and understand what was happening, which impressed me. Apparently the game is less fun when the home team loses, but since their record was so bad this year I doubt it would have mattered too much had they lost. After the game we had to race back to the bag check tent, and then back to the garage which claimed to close at midnight. We got there with 4 minutes to spare.

I know all the excuses about how professional sports suck, and I generally agree with them. I hate that athletes make millions of dollars and that the game is geared more for television advertisers than in person fans. I hate that the recent transit strike paralyzed the city and directly affected livelihoods of millions of people, yet still attracted far less attention and far less passion than did the 1994 baseball strike. I hate how athletes are heros and teachers aren't, and I hate that Americans spend so much money on sports games and equipment.

But somehow I could ignore these feelings for the duration of the game. Maybe I bought into the sports hype? Maybe it was peer pressure from all the other fans? At the game, people seemed so happy, maybe because that morning they'd opened a bunch of presents, but maybe because they just had some way of taking a break from normal life and a way of becoming passionate about something, that in the end, they know doesn't really matter to anyone.

Note: I also got to see real live cheerleaders! Oh yeah!

Happy Birthday, Emil's Grandmother!

2005-12-28T09:57:00.000-05:00

Was it really worth it to get up at 8am on Saturday so that I could go to Wegmans? Yes, it was.

This store is amazing. Not only do they have a bazillion types of foods, but the people in there are SO nice--customers and employees alike. We left home so early that I didn't have time to have coffee, so that's the first thing I did at the store. I was fumbling with my cup and couldn't find the lids, and a man handed me one. Cheerfully, too. Then, the coffee urn ran out, and I turned around to find a store employee to fill it back up but he was already right behind me, with a new urn of fresh coffee. When Javert tried to strangle me (in jest, of course...or was it?) a Wegmans employee said "No strangling in Wegmans!" And a bakery employee insisted that we wait for her to go get some fresh french bread when we were discussing which kind to use for bruschetta. Then, due to a miscalculation on my mom's part, we lost our cart, but the bakery lady happily got us more bread even though we'd been idiots. Finally, in the parking lot, I asked a man where Walmart was, and he answered me like I'd just told him he'd won the lottery. Maybe I've been in New York too long, maybe it was the "Holiday" spirit, I don't know, but people were super nice.

Anyway, back to Wegmans. They have candy in bulk, like at candy shops and movie theaters. There's a toy train that goes around the whole store on a track near the ceiling, tooting its horn at intervals. There's two kinds of basil, and a cheese section that's probably bigger than my apartment, and get this---MINI MORNINGSTAR FARM CORN DOGS! It doesn't get any better than this!

We went to Wegman's to get last minute things for my grandmother's 85th birthday party which was that night. She's depressed about her age, so she just invited her next-door neighbor, her sister, and her best friend to my parents house for dinner. I made most of the food except the turkey (my mom made that): olive paste, bruschetta, turkey gravy, sweet potato casserole, asparagus and tomato salad, stuffing, spiced pecans, and apple pie. My dad made cranberry sauce and my great aunt made jello mold and something that vaguely resembled green bean casserole. The grocery store made a strawberry shortcake birthday cake that my mom ended up getting for free. It was all delicious, but conversation was rather lacking. The elderly folks sat close together at one end of the table, leaving the rest of us far enough away that we could hear them but they couldn't hear us (this isn't difficult, as they're all quite hard of hearing.) My grandmother has a hearing aid that makes a constant high-pitched beeping noise, which made for great entertainment, and my great aunt refuses to admit her hearing loss and therefore shouts everything she says, which is a lot. The elderly faction spent most of the night discussing the food options, Ambien, and Social Security (which, being lifelong Baltimoreans, they pronouce "SocSecurity"), and confusing the champagne with the sparkling apple cider (this was VERY amusing).

We bought a princess crown for my grandmother to wear, and a pin that said "Aged to Perfection." She put the crown on immediately, but she was afraid to put the pin on her blouse because she thought it might damage it. Instead she attached it to her glasses chain, where it hung all night.

For her birthday, we gave my grandmother a fleece-lined robe and a phone for people with hearing problems. My great-aunt gave her this purse, best described by a word I never use: "bling." This purse almost blinded me, it was so shiny. I'm sure it will be great fun when my grandmother forgets which of the 49 zippered compartments she put her keys in and freaks out, thinking she lost them.

More on my trip home later, including: my take on an NFL game and how I freaked out a Walmart employee.

The Inevitable Transit Strike Post

2005-12-23T10:52:00.000-05:00

Number of miles walked in 3 days: 18.7

Number of slow-walking tourists whom I shoved: 39495

Lowest temperature (real-feel) during strike: 8 degrees

Number of layers on my legs: 3

Number of layers on my torso: 6

Number of times I almost cried in public because my feet hurt and I couldn't find a cab: 1

Number of cab rides: 2

Number of times I sat in vomit: 1

Number of sofas I sat on while unknowingly wearing vomit-covered pants: 1

Amount of time it took to realize the vomit was real and not imaginary: 2 hours

Do I Know You?

2005-12-19T14:36:00.000-05:00

I have been to Bed, Bath, and Beyond way more times than a person should in one week. I was there last Saturday to buy sheets and curtains, last Sunday to exchange one of said curtains since it was defective, on Tuesday to buy a humidifier, and on Saturday to return both curtains since they were two inches different in length (and neither was the 84 inches they each claimed to be). And I have to go back again to return the hooks for the defective curtains, since I didn't have them with me last time.

On our way to Bed, Bath, and Beyond this past Saturday, Javert and I stopped at Fairway Cafe, since we wanted to more fully participate in Upper West Side Living. We sat down and after our waitress took our orders for coffee, she said, "Uh, do you guys by any chance live on Our Street?" We were like "yeah..." and she said "I live in number Our Building Number." She lives two floors down from us. How weird is that? Javert now says he remembers her from a building party this fall, but I didn't recognize her. She's extremely pretty and I definitely think I would have remembered that someone that attractive lives 20 feet away.

Later on during our coffee in Fairway Cafe, we saw Ed Koch, the former mayor. We'd seen him on Thursday night on TV, standing behind Reptile Bloomberg during TRANSIT STRIKE WATCH 2005 (stay tuned for up-to-date info! Don't change the channel! PLEASE!) Koch looks much older in person.

Obviously I didn't recognize him in the cafe, since I NEVER recognize famous people. Lucky for me there were a few normal people there who managed to both notice Koch and then talk about it at a reasonable volume level loud enough for Javert (but not me) to hear, and then Javert told me.

A few minutes later my mother called from the mall, since we've been in nearly constant communication regarding what to buy my grandmother whose birthday is Saturday and who owns everything there is to own, ever. After discussing and rejecting the 499th birthday present idea my mom came up with, I couldn't resist telling her that Koch was sitting a few tables away. She asked "Is he with the former Miss America star?" (what is she talking about?) and I said "No, he seems to be with a family," at which point Javert forced me to leave the cafe.

These incidents raise interesting issues, like how do you relate to your server in a restaurant/neighbor if she also happens to live in your building/be your waitress? Or how come we get a little crazy when we see famous people? Or what exactly is the difference between what/who we see on tv and what/who we see in person? And most importantly, will I recognize the next famous person/neighbor I see?

Its Like Having a Snake in Your Mouth

2005-12-15T15:27:00.000-05:00

Just now, my friend and co-worker Phil was at his desk and made a funny noise, so I turned around and asked what was wrong. Apparently, he was trying to peel a banana and the top wasn't coming off right. Afraid that if he continued trying to open it that way, it would get all mushy, Phil used his mouth to pry the top off, and the banana's outside skin tasted disgusting and felt rather reptilian, causing him to make that noise. Here I must point out that Phil has very strict standards as to the fruit he'll eat, which is why he was trying at all costs to avoid causing mushiness. In order for him to eat it, Phil's piece of fruit must have no blemishes and must be firm, which in my opinion causes him to reject many perfectly edible delectables.

I told him I'd never put my mouth on the outside of a banana since you didn't know where it had been. I mean, we're talking about bananas here. They come from halfway across the world, god knows who has touched them and done god knows what else with them. They're BANANAS. The same goes for zucchinis and cucumbers and any other vegetable or fruit with that shape. Phil said he was more concerned that they'd be poisoned by pesticides, but since his was organic that didn't matter. And furthermore, he added, his particular banana had come attached to a bunch of 3 or 4 other bananas. That made me feel slightly better about the situation and I'm no longer worried that Phil might have contracted mouth herpes from his banana.

Still, I find it strange that anyone--especially someone with such particular requirements for the fruit he eats--would be willing to put his mouth on the outside parts of said fruit, especially a fruit that is not customarily washed. Has anyone else ever thought about this? I hope you people aren't sitting at home reading this while chomping on unwashed banana peels or unscrubbed cucumber skins.

Blech!

And yes, clearly I have a 12 year-old's sense of humor. And the fears of a crazy person.

In Which I Attend a Holiday Party

2005-12-14T09:54:00.000-05:00

As you already have learned, Javert started working at a new job about two weeks ago. I've been forbidden from revealing the exact name of the company or even using the very clever alias I came up with, so I'll just call it Initech. (It's not like Initech, but so what?)

Initech had their Holiday Party on Friday. I was looking forward to this party for weeks (okay, for the one week that I knew about it) and even went shopping in The-Car-Seat-Lady's closet for something appropriate to wear (didn't find anything). Conveniently, my mother was coming to visit on the night of the party, and since we didn't think it would be right to bring her (Javert: Hello new Initech friends. This is my wife, Emil, and this is my mother-in-law) we had to do some arranging to keep her occupied during our absence. In the end, my brother ended up babysitting her.

Anyway, since my mom was at my apartment, she helped me get dressed for the party. After rejecting almost every item of clothing I own, she finally accepted a pair of brown and sparkly gold Old Navy pants (an old donation by The-Car-Seat-Lady) and a black sweater, coupled with a scarf I had made and pointy Bruno Magli shoes (yet another CSL donation). I worried that I'd be underdressed, but really didn't have anything else.

My mother also forced me to wear makeup. I wore concealer (or foundation? it came in a bottle) and rouge and eyeliner, plus chapstick. I have to admit that I did look good. But there's no way I'd spend 10 minutes doing that every morning.

Javert showed me the tickets he'd received for this party. They were laminated and said Initech's Winter Party 2005 on them and had a picture of a snowflake. My first thought: I spent all day trying to find money so that Holocaust survivors can afford to buy food, and here we are with a pair of laminated tickets to get us into a party. This company obviously has money to burn. Which I already knew, but I can't tell you why or you'd figure out what company it is. Anyway, this company has a reputation for being benevolent and friendly but very exclusive, so I didn't really know what to expect from their party. I guess I did expect a goody-bag, since my friend who crashed last year's Martha Stewart holiday party ~~got~~ stole one.

Initech's party was at a club/event space downtown. When we got to the door, Javert flashed the laminated tickets and the bouncer moved a red velvet rope aside so we could enter. Inside, we had to hand over the tickets, have our names checked off on a list (even my name was there, not just "guest") AND have our hands stamped. We checked our coats and walked into the party room.

I don't even know what to describe first. I guess I'll start with the ice sculpture in the middle of the bar area (well, one bar area, since there were like 29), which said INITECH. But it was a technologically advanced sculpture with hollowed out sections where bartenders would pour drinks in one side and catch them on the other. We both ordered gin and tonics, which turned out to be 99% gin. Hmm, I thought to myself, maybe Initech is okay... Then we found the people Javert knows, who were in line for food. Which was little tiny veggie burgers (think bite-sized), equally small pieces of pizza, french fries, and some other stuff I didn't eat.

By this time I had noticed that I could divide the people at the party into two groups based on their clothing. Group 1 men wore nice pants and button down shirts with ties, or shirts without ties, or sweaters. Group 1 women wore things similar to what I wore, or the skirt equivalent. Group 2 men wore full suits with pink or purple ties. Group 2 women wore fancy dresses. Based on this, I concluded that Group 1 were tech people, and Group 2 were marketing and MBA types. Meeting these people confirmed my assumption. Group 1's seemed nerdy and pretentious but mostly normal, meaning I could communicate with them. Group 2's seemed overly smarmy and pretentious and on a different social plane from me.

A Group 2 male and female were ahead of us in line for food, totally making out the entire time. While attempting to stare at anything else to avoid looking at them, I noticed that EVERYONE IN THE ROOM WAS UNDER 30! I'm not kidding here, there were probably 20 people out of the 300 or more at the party who were older than 30. Really!

When the dj started playing Madonna, I realized I was actually at a high school dance. Except this high school dance allowed alcohol (and LOTS of it) and had unkosher food and I only hated about 3/4 of the people there instead of 7/8.

Every girl I met, no matter what her Group designation was, told me how she'd heard the dj was famous and had been engaged to Nicole Richie. Too bad that a. I don't care and b. he sucked.

The most embarrassing incident at the party: I went to sit down with Javert and his friend, and my chair collapsed and I FELL OFF. I'd not even finished my first drink at this point, so it wasn't that I was wasted or anything. Of course both men jumped to help me, and then I made Javert sit in that chair, but still, super-embarrassing.

In the end, I had a good time, but mainly because Javert's friends are funny and nice (and older than me), and their spouses were there to moderate boring/pretentious job-related conversations, and because of the copious amounts of free alcohol and butter-cream frosted mini-cupcakes. Regarding the company, I came out with the same impression I had gone in with: its got way too much money for its own good, and pays its (immature) employees way too much. I guess I'd hoped the employees would be more like me, but if they were they wouldn't be working at Initech.*

Also, no goody-bags. What's up with that?

*Actually I have lots more to say on this company, but this post is too long already. I'm confident that I'll have plenty more opportunities to share my views.

If you decide to kill the rat, turn to page 49. If you decide to let it live, turn to page 59.

2005-12-08T10:20:00.000-05:00

When I was little, I loved reading Choose Your Own Adventure books. I had a complicated way of reading them, though, because I had to read every possible ending. Probably there's some sort of math related calculation a person could do to most efficiently get through every story, but since I hated (and still hate) math, I went the liberal arts route and used paper clips and torn pieces of newspaper to mark the spots where I had "choices," so I could go back in an orderly fashion. Here are some endings I remember: you are eaten alive by red ants; you are raped; you run out of oxygen while scuba diving; you die of a high-pressure related brain problem while scuba diving. Probably these all didn't happen in the same book, although I suppose it is possible. I don't remember any of the happy endings.*

Last night, while lying awake (for hours) in my super-new, hole-less bed,** wondering if I was itching because of bedbugs or because of crappy $3 sheets, I thought about Choose Your Own Adventure and how I sometimes wish that I could live my life as if I was reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Its not that I'm dissatisfied with my life, but it would be really nice to go through all the possible outcomes before deciding which life I wanted. If I knew the outcome of certain decisions I've made, would I make them again? It's dangerous to start doing this, because every decision after becomes null. But then you can turn around and ask which decision is THE decision that made the others necessary or possible?

*I must add here that these scary endings only happened in the longer books. I also read the ones for "younger readers" but thought they were wimpy and stupid. Give me killer ants over happy endings any day!

**Not a good sign, people! Also, they delivered this bed at 10:45 last night. How sketchy is that?

Good Night, Sleep Tight.....

2005-12-06T10:03:00.000-05:00

After sleeping on his college futon for way too long, Javert and I finally bought a bed. We'd been talking about it for months, we'd gone mattress shopping at least twice, and on Saturday we finally found The Mattress. Because he had a delusion that we'd be able to negotiate the price based on comparison shopping, Javert did not agree to order The Mattress immediately. But of course we couldn't comparison shop, because each mattress store has its own brand names and there's no way to tell what compares to what.

Almost spontaneously, we ordered The Mattress yesterday morning and set delivery for a 6pm to 10pm window last night. We rushed home from work, rearranged the entire apartment to accomodate a huge futon in the living room, vacuumed, cleaned, and waited for delivery. They came at around 8, and carried the big boxspring up the stairs. That's when we noticed the big rip in the bottom of the boxspring. Now I'm pretty much a perfectionist, but because a boxspring is basically a box with fabric around it, and because we REALLY need a new mattress, I was willing to let it slide. I wasn't about to let slide the HUGE HOLE in the bottom of The Mattress, however. The delivery people swore the hole occurred at the warehouse (the result of some sort of forklift accident) and actually said "That mattress is no good" and called their manager for us. They will remove the damaged bed and deliver our new, hopefully hole-less mattress during the same time slot on Wednesday.

Now I need to talk about the new bed, which is HUGE. Seriously, its almost 3 feet high when placed on the bedframe. I am only a little over 5 feet tall. Paxwell was scared to jump on the bed and had to make several false starts before succeeding. Plus, it's basically about half the size of the bedroom. I started feeling like we'd made a mistake because it looked so huge....but then I laid down for a minute. Who cares what a bed looks like when its this comfortable?

After Javert convinced me that the floor is more supportive than 3 metal sticks, we removed the frame and now it's only 2 feet tall and looks more normal. But that pillow-top adds so much height that I wonder how we're going to find sheets that fit. We're using our "guest" sheets that I bought at the corner store for $3 each, and by morning they were already coming off. Also, my back hurts a little bit, but I'm hoping it's just surprised at the quality of the mattress and is coming back into shape, sort of like how braces hurt for the first few days because they are realligning your teeth.

Luckily, if we decide we don't like the mattress, we have two weeks (or more? I have to find out) to exchange it for free. But now I'm wondering what they do with all the rejected mattresses they must get back. I mean, ours has a hole and can't be used. At least I hope no one would accept it like that. But what about the 2 week guarrantee (or whatever it is)? Do these mattresses go back to the warehouse and then wind up in other people's bedrooms? Should I start worrying now about the bedbug epidemic currently plaguing New York?

Of course I should!

Back to the Beginning

2005-12-01T12:50:00.000-05:00

This morning, standing in line to buy coffee at the coffee cart, I noticed that the man in front of me looked kinda sketchy. He was wearing a tan trench coat with the collar turned up, and then he turned around a little and I saw that half of his face was all scarred, like he'd had a skin graft. Clearly he was a spy! This was proved when he did some sort of trade-off with the coffee cart guy--seriously, he said "Hi, I'll have coffee and a glazed doughnut...and I have something for you," and then handed him something with his money. I hope this post doesn't blow his cover!

In real news, why was I even in line to get coffee at the coffee cart (as I am sure you asked yourself already). Because no one started the espresso maker this morning, that's why. The alarm went off at 7:18, I finally forced Javert to get up at 8:15, and he just didn't start the machine. This is because he got a new job, at a place that has free espresso at all times of day (No, it's not Starbucks. Nice try though.) Yesterday we woke up way too late to make coffee, so he had his espresso at work, and I guess he got used to it.

I said to him, "Why didn't you make the coffee?" And do you know what he said?? He said "Cause you woke me up so late."*

This is proof that I am indeed his mother (god help me) and that if I wish to proceed with my plan from my first post, which he now knows about, I'd still have no trouble at all.

*my response to this was What the Fuck, or something along those lines. It was a completely different sounding What the Fuck from the one I repeatedly recorded into my computer last night while testing its recording device.

I'd say it was more angry-sounding, as if someone just realized she'd have to wait 45 minutes to have any caffeine, and that said caffeine would come in the form of coffee. Which would, unlike the gentle soothes of espresso, wreak havoc on both her bladder and her bowels.

Does this count as a Mitzvah?

2005-11-29T15:37:00.000-05:00

Last night I visited a client in her home. This is something I usually don't do, but when I was talking to this client on the phone I noticed she lived in my old neighborhood and mentioned that fact to her. She immediately invited me over to meet her, and I decided to go. She thought I'd come at 2 or 3 pm, and was very surprised when I said the earliest I could come was at 6. But she seemed excited and said she'd make us something to eat.

When I got to her apartment, she brought me into the dining room where she had prepared dinner for us. She said "When you said you work till 5, I thought oh, I can't serve her tea, we have to have dinner since it's so late. I can't serve tea at 6 o'clock!" I had not planned on having dinner with her. I thought I'd be fed some cookies and maybe a piece of coffee cake, and actually had brought her flowers instead of candy because I figured there'd already be enough of that.

And what was for dinner? Tuna salad. And did I eat it????

YES I DID!

I ate the whole helping she put on my plate, and I ate all the mayonnaise-coated normal salad, and a roll, and I drank two cups of tea and ate two cookies for dessert.

How was I supposed to refuse to eat this food that an elderly, recently widowed woman had made especially for me? I felt so uncomfortable needing to please her, yet so happy that I was able to keep her company and listen to her stories. She's so nice, and she's had an amazing life, but age and experience have taken their toll and unfortunately she seems rather paranoid and depressed. She really didn't want me to leave--she asked if I wanted to spend the night--and I felt very sad that I was going home to Javert while she was going to be all alone.

At the end, she mentioned that she had no one to go with her to a memorial service at a synagogue here in April. Of course I told her I'd be happy to take her. She seemed happy to hear this. Then, right before I left, she said to me "Do you know anyone who would come to a wedding with me?" I knew she was asking me to go with her, and I also knew that I couldn't (I'll be out of town). So I pretended that I didn't understand what she meant and said that I didn't know anyone.

Did I do the right thing by visiting her? By eating food I don't like and didn't want? By listening without protest to complaints or opinions that seemed unreasonable or possibly even prejudiced? By ignoring the meaning behind her wedding question? Is this just my general social ineptness combined with anxiety or was I wrong?

More on Crime and Shopping

2005-11-22T17:03:00.000-05:00

The Owings Mills Mall was the place to go on the weekends when I was growing up. I went on dates at that mall (I remember one particularly horrible date with my first boyfriend, where I refused to let him buy me candy at the candy shop because I had my own money and didn't need him, a boy, to give me ANYTHING--what an idiot I was, turning down free candy that my mom wouldn't let me buy anyway), I spent entire weekends there shopping, I went mall-walking with my grandmother. My mom and I used to go on Saturday morning and shop all day, taking breaks to eat hot pretzels or turkey sandwiches. My dad would take us to the mall for dinner on nights my mom had to work. I got my ears pierced at this mall!

But times change and the Owings Mills Mall started declining. First, Saks moved out and JC Penney moved in. That was the first sign of trouble, and everything went downhill from there. Cool kids now spend their weekends at Towson Town Center, which boasts a Nordstrom and a Coach and a Delia's and some other cool stores that I'm too old to know about.

At the same time, the neighborhood around the Owings Mills Mall also started to change. A woman was raped at the Metro stop near the mall. A man was fatally shot in a drug dispute in the mall parking lot.

My mom and I (when I'm visiting) still go to this mall, but we're careful not to park too far away, and we try to leave before dark. Sometimes we drive from the Macy's side to the Hecht's side if the mall seems particularly emtpy.

So on Sunday, my mom went to the Owings Mills Mall Macy's to buy a new leather coat. She found one she liked and bought it, but decided not to take it to the car while she continued shopping, because she'd brought the Outback and didn't have the mat that covers the stuff you have in the back. She thought someone would see her new coat in the back, break into the car, and steal it. Because that's the sort of thing that might happen in the Owings Mills Mall parking lot.

Instead, my mom took her purchase with her to JC Penney's, where she tried on more leather coats in case she found one she liked more. She hung her new coat on a rack, tried on another coat, rejected it, and turned around to find that voila, her new coat was gone. Of course she didn't find it, despite checking with customer service and various sales people. I told her she should've filed a police report, but she said she didn't think of it.

She's positive that someone was following her in the mall, that someone marked her as a target and waited for their chance. This is really scary to think about, so I prefer to think that someone saw the coat hanging there and couldn't resist taking it. It's a great way of stealing, actually. The coat was already paid for, the security thing was removed, and it wasn't even in the same store.

My mom's upset at the robbery, but she does acknowledge that it could've been much worse. Someone could've hurt her, or carjacked her, or god knows what, for whatever reason. She told me to let it be a lesson, to put your purchases in the car and don't carry them around with you, but the real lesson is not to shop alone at declining malls in dangerous areas.

Caught!

2005-11-21T16:40:00.000-05:00

On Friday, Javert and I went out to eat at a newish crepe restaurant on 109th and Columbus. As we walked in, we passed a group of guys gathered around the entrance--typical for this neighborhood. But during our meal, all of the sudden, a police van sped up the street the wrong way and stopped in front of the restaurant. At the same exact time, 5 or 6 men were led out of the building next door in handcuffs, arrested by undercover cops. I'm not sure if the men we saw outside our restaurant were the cops or the villains, but it was definitely good dinner entertainment.

When I told my parents this story, they reminded me of the time they were seeing the movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape and the police burst into the theater and arrested everyone sitting in the back row. I was around 8 or 9 when this happened and for probably 5 years afterwards thought that my parents had been watching porn.

Well I'm Certainly Not Watching Their Damn Parade Now!

2005-11-18T18:19:00.000-05:00

After work today I went to Macy's. Not that it's a surprise, but the whole store is decked out for Christmas already. And full of cheerleaders and other jacket-wearing teenagers who I suppose will be performing in the parade next week. So I and probably 3/4 of all the tourists in New York for the week were all in Macy's at the same time, and it was hot and loud, and I was looking for socks.

Specifically, I wanted knee highs or tights to wear with my new boots. I headed straight to the place on the main floor where the tights always are. But I was out of luck, since the entire main floor has been completely appropriated by what I assume are "stocking stuffers," like wine glasses that each hold an entire bottle of wine, and by those intrusive perfume spritz people (who NEVER approach me, and I can't decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing...do they immediately notice my lack of makeup and write me off as a lost cause or do they immediately smell my natural 'scent' and feel that perfume would simply ruin that with which god has blessed me?).

Determined to locate the sock section, I consulted the store directory near the main escalators. It said women's hosiery was on Floor 4. On the fourth floor, I found the shoe department, promptly ascertained that YES my new boots were indeed ten times better than anything sold at Macy's, and wandered around looking for the sock department. How logical, I thought to myself, they've finally put the socks with the shoes! It makes total sense.

But no, in fact I couldn't find any socks. So I asked a Macy's employee, who told me he "thought" they'd been moved to the Juniors section on the other side of the floor. Reluctantly I entered the Juniors section, where I was immediately harassed by deafening music and the noxious odor of Auntie Annie's pretzels. Again, large shoe department with slightly less sophisticated though cheaper shoes, but no socks. So I asked another employee, who told me that hosiery was on the main floor.

Where I had already been. At this point I was really hot and really annoyed and ready to kick the next slow-walking tourist who got in my way. But then I thought of this blog and how much I'd like to save that entry I'd thought up earlier for another day and write about this instead. So for you, dear blog, I persevered.

Back on the main floor, I asked another Macy's associate where I could find the women's sock department. He told me it was on the Lower Level, so I took the escalator down there and wound through the men's athletic department to the men's hosiery section. After a brief episode of paranoia where I managed to almost convince myself that Macy's had switched over to a unisex sock department and how stupid was I for not being able to tell men's and women's socks apart, I approached yet another sales person for what I promised myself would be the last time. I told her I'd been to the main floor twice, and to the shoe section, and to juniors, and to my surprise she said "Oh honey they've been moving those socks all around the store. Let me find out for you--stay right here till I find a manager." Which she promptly did, and then she yelled across the floor for them to HOLD THE ELEVATOR and proceeded to personally escort me to floor 1 1/2 (who knew?), where the manager thought the sock department had been moved.

On Floor 1 1/2 we found the stocking section, but no socks. So she asked two more sales people, who directed us way in the back, past the estate jewelry, along a balcony overlooking the main floor, to--Hurray!--the sock section. Where I bought two pairs of over-the-knee highs (again, who knew?) and two pairs of tights for less than $30. (This stuff was on sale, but of course nothing was labeled as such, so I ended up even more annoyed at Macy's for their indiscriminate pricing and labeling). Also, do you know that there were at least ten different sorts of LEG WARMERS? Can I even wear these? Not that I know how exactly you're supposed to wear them--but really, LEG WARMERS?

Thank goodness for that wonderful sales associate. I wish I'd asked for her name so I could call Macy's and report how nice and helpful she was. Of course I thanked her profusely and told her that without her help I would've left, but her bosses should know too....Actually, now that I think about it, there's no way on earth I'd attempt to navigate through the Macy's phone system. Maybe I should write a letter....

What I really want to know is, if you ran a world famous store that attracted 3/4 of the tourists in New York City at any one time during the Pre-Christmas season and that was about to sponsor a parade featured on national television in less than a week, wouldn't you want to let your customers (and your employees!) know where merchandise is located and how much, exactly, it costs?

Do You Know Where the Brussels Sprouts Are?

2005-11-17T13:52:00.000-05:00

My parents called me the other day to tell me the big news: They'd gone to Wegman's. I had no idea what they were talking about. They couldn't believe I hadn't heard about it (even though I live 200 miles and 3 states away) but the fact is that I actually had heard about it, I'd just forgotten. I'd heard about plans for the superbig supermarket chain opening a store in Hunt Valley (20 minutes on the highway away from my parents house) when I was home 2 months ago, because people were ALREADY anticipating it then.

Apparently this store is so big that according to my mom, "you could fit the entire Giant (another rather large supermarket) into the cheese section." The store offers 5 different kinds of shopping carts: regular, baskets, carts with a seat attached so that your shopping companion can push you, motorized vehicles with small baskets attached, and wheelchairs with baskets attached.

I CANNOT WAIT TO VISIT THIS STORE!

I love grocery stores. When I go someplace new, I always visit the grocery store or market first. I love how different cultures have different ways of arranging and selling foods, I love watching how people select what they're going to buy, I love how people in New York shop in very different ways from people in Baltimore.*

So as you might imagine, I spend quite a lot of time in the various supermarkets here on the glorious Upper West Side. My favorites, I think, are Fairway (both locations, but the uptown one is so much more pleasant--in fact, I have on multiple occasions sworn off shopping in the downtown Fairway because it's just insane in there sometimes), Zabars (for the people, not the food), and of course my very own Garden of Eden.

The thing is, I'm becoming a regular at Garden of Eden, so much so that other shoppers have started to ask me questions. I can't go there without having a conversation with some stranger about produce. For example, the other day I was shopping for ingredients to make enchiladas with tomatillo sauce. I was selecting tomatillos when this hippie-looking woman wearing a tunic came over to me and asked "What are those?" I explained that they were tomatillos and she said "Oh I've never seen those before. They're like tomatoes?" I tried to explain what they tasted like (and its not tomatoes) but before I could, she started repeating, "Oh I've never seen those before, Wow, What are you making with those?" When I said enchiladas, she looked at me like I was from a different planet and backed away slowly. (When I went to pay, I had the exact same conversation with the cashier, which made me feel like maybe I was on a different planet)

And a week ago, a man asked me if the carrots that were clearly in the non-organic section were organic. I said no, the organic ones are in that area labeled ORGANIC. He asked if I'd ever eaten an organic carrot and did it really taste different from conventional carrots, to which I replied, Yes, if it had been picked recently, which I later realized made no sense at all since recently picked anything will always taste better than old anything.

And yesterday, a man asked me where the broccoli and brussels sprouts were. And of course I knew the answer, I told him that there was no broccoli, at least it wasn't in its usual location, and that the big brussels sprouts were for some reason pre-packaged and in the herb section. He then chose a mesh bag of "baby" brussels sprouts which were RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM WHEN HE ASKED ME WHERE THE BRUSSELS SPROUTS WERE. (Also, they looked like little green eyeballs.)

Maybe these are just examples of Upper West Side crazy people...but why do they all come to me asking these ridiculous questions? I'm afraid to speculate...but perhaps it's because I too am slowly descending into the world of Upper West Side crazy lady? Do they flock to me because I am one of them?

Gak!

*Of course I feel superior to other people when I see what they're buying compared to what I'm buying. And don't deny it--I know you do too!

In Which I Take Charge of my TV Watching Habits

2005-11-16T16:24:00.000-05:00

In January, Javert and I got TiVO. Except that it's not TiVO, it's actually something called a TV tuner card which Javert installed into our computer. After about two frustrating (for him, not for me) weeks of trying to get it to work properly, we started enjoying watching what we want, when we want it.

It works just like TiVO except it's better. For example, we can program it to skip commercials completely. When the commercial break starts, it automatically skips and you don't have to sit through any interruption at all. Which is great, although I'm starting to wonder if later in life I'll regret not watching the commercials, like I'm missing out on a cultural phenomenon or something. I picture a repeat of how I used to feel in college, when my friends would talk about the shows they'd watched as kids and I'd have to sit silently, since my parents allowed me to watch TV only on weekends. Shows what an influence that rule had on me, since now I have a sophisticated fake TiVO system! That'll show my parents (who now own a 37-inch flat panel television).

There are some problems with our sophisticated system, though. The first concerns the wonderful Javert. He's great with computers--really great, and he likes them so much that I joke that his first and true love will always be the cpu under our desk (instead of ME). He's always willing to work on the program to improve it and to fix it when it breaks. However, I know very little about computers, either because I don't have to or because I'm lazy, and when the fake TiVO simply stops working during a crucial moment of, say, CSI, I am helpless to fix it. But this usually works out since Javert will go and fix it and I can do something much more interesting, like knit or sleep, till it's functional again.

Second, and perhaps more important: the program we use allows us to watch shows at a faster-than-normal speed. It adjusts pitch and whatever else usually gets messed up when you speed up, so people don't sound like chipmunks, they sound normal. Most of the time, we speed things up by about 20 percent--anything faster becomes a little silly. I think this is great since it saves all sorts of time. A normal hour length show now takes like 35 minutes (maybe less? I haven't timed it). But some of my friends are concerned this habit will make me into a robot who gets used to the speed increase and then can't handle the pace of normal life.

But normal life doesn't move like life on television! Who moves that slowly? Who talks that slowly? I mean, have you heard the narrator on Desperate Housewives? Maybe it's just me, I know that I talk fast, my grandmother tells me so all the time. I don't think that we should have to conform to the desires or needs of the television industry, whether it means not sitting through commercials or not suffering as David Caruso oh-so-slowly puts on his stupid sunglasses after solving yet another crime. For the first time in my life, I'm in charge of my own tv watching and I love it!* Yay for watching sped-up, commercial-free TV on school-nights!

*I realize that I'm not in charge, since I rely on Javert to arrange things on the fake tivo and computer, but he does whatever I tell him so basically I am in charge.

A First Post

2005-11-15T14:22:00.000-05:00

Because I'm starting this blog mainly since Stephanie is leaving work, I figured I'd better get things going a week early so that I don't go overboard when she's finally gone. And it only makes sense that the first post be a recounting of one of her favorite stories.

Javert and I got married about a year and a half ago. We lived together for about 2 years before getting married, and I thought for sure that marriage would not mean a big change. The only thing different about my status as Married was that I got to refer to him as my husband, which was and still is really weird. On Sunday, for the first time ever, Javert's brother referred to me as his sister-in-law and I almost choked on my piece of the deep fried Mars bar we were sharing. Anyway, I guess being married did somehow change my life, because I started acting, well, like a married person.

In the morning, I always get up first and take a shower. Javert is supposed to get up and start the espresso machine. Then, he takes a shower and I steam the milk. This is much more complicated than our mornings before marriage, when we didn't have things like espresso machines and steamers and had to use archaic appliances like the tea kettle and french press to make coffee. I would put the kettle on before I got in the shower and basically make the coffee myself, since it was ready when I got out and dressed and since it doesn't really need much human assistance to operate. This story takes place right when we had switched over to the espresso machine and weren't really into our new routine. No, instead of getting up and starting the coffee when I was in the shower, Javert would sleep and sleep, not bothered at all by NPR, only waking up when I said, or more likely barked, "Aren't you going to get up today?" He'd be groggy and roll out of bed and into the shower and I had to make the coffee by myself.

Now I don't know if you've ever used an espresso machine and also been lazy like me (us?). Of course I'm not going to clean the machine after using it, or even at night when I clean up after dinner. No, I leave it for the morning. And it is VILE. You have to bang the thing that holds the espresso grinds against the trash can in order to get the grinds out (you can't put them down the sink, according to Javert, because it is bad for the disposal which we aren't supposed to have anyway and therefore if it broke we'd be in Big Trouble). Then you have to wash out the remnants of old damp coffee and pack in new coffee, attach it to the machine, put the (probably dirty so you have to clean them too) cups underneath, make sure theres enough water inside, turn on the machine, wait for the light to come on, and then turn on the coffee making part, count to 30, turn it off, and wait again for the machine to heat up. During this time you are also washing the milk frother, which since it sat there overnight is completely crusted over with dried milk. When the light comes back on, you can steam the milk which makes what is quite possibly the worst sound in the entire world. Then you mix it into the coffee, remember to turn the machine off, ponder cleaning up immediately, reject that option, drink your coffee, and go to work.

So I had to do all this myself, and didn't like it. Meanwhile he got to sleep and laze around the bedroom or shower. Thus, one morning, I decided to just not wake him up. I thought to myself, probably he'll wake up at like 11 and be really embarrassed, and I'd have such a nice feeling of satisfaction. I got up at the first alarm, turned it off (can't be too safe, right?), took a shower, and then got dressed in silence. Which is hard, since the dresser and closet are about 3 feet from the bed. But I did it all, creeping around the apartment like a burglar, and didn't make coffee since that would make way too much noise. I got my bag to leave and then realized my coat was in the bedroom. I went to get it and damn it! the coat hanger jangled and totally woke him up. And then of course I had to pretend that I was just finishing getting dressed and was all, I couldn't get the coffee machine to work and Aren't you going to get up, its 8:45? My plan was ruined! But he never found out, which means I can totally try again sometime.