Next time I'm getting a double burger

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?

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!

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

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

First I made this:

Then I did this:
Then we ate this:

Big Stalks of Grass

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

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.