Category Archives: nonsense

long weekends (a hypotenuse)

Posted on by

I have a theory about long weekends. I developed it just now while standing by the microwave waiting for my burrito to cook. I guess technically it’s not actually a theory but rather a hypothesis. Also, full disclosure, I DID just have to Google ‘scientific method steps’ to come up with the word hypothesis because I knew it started with ‘hyp’ but all my trash brain could come up with to fill in the rest of that blank was ‘hypotenuse’, for like the full 60 seconds that I was able to devote to trying to remember that word. Also I definitely just Googled ‘hypotenuse’ to make sure I spelled it correctly. My brain may be trash but I still have standards.

Anyway.

So, my hypotenuse is this:

Long weekends that involve a Friday off are FAR SUPERIOR to ones that involve a Monday off.

Think about it. What’s better, a normal week that converts to weekend a day early, or a weird week that doesn’t start when it should so you spend the whole week slightly out of whack? A week where the routine is already basically set and you just have to adjust to get stuff done one day earlier, or a week where you can’t wrap your brain around what fucking day it is because everything that SHOULD have gone on YESTERDAY is happening TODAY along with all the TODAY stuff and it’s all just very confusing?

Mondays get so much hate, but Tuesdays are already worse than Mondays to begin with, and then a long weekend like the one we just had essentially converts Tuesday to Monday, and that seems like too much shittery to pile into one workday. As much as I dislike Tuesdays, I don’t want them to have to bear that burden.

So that’s my hypoalgesia. My hippodrome. My hypotenuse. Now I’m off to try and figure out what work I can get away with putting off until later in the week when my brain finally catches up to my body in time and I know what day it is again.

Me bailing on today

six degrees

Posted on by

There’s a route I drive twice a day, pretty much every weekday. I drove it regularly many years ago, then I switched jobs and didn’t have to drive it for like ten years. Then my husband switched jobs and we had to drive it occasionally but usually went a different route. THEN we bought a house south of the towns he and I work in and we started driving the route literally every day. Then the pandemic hit and I started working from home but my husband is still learning to drive so he doesn’t take the car by himself, so I am still driving (or riding, if he’s driving) this route twice a day, pretty much every weekday.

It just occurred to me right now as I type that this information would probably be stalking GOLD if someone were motivated to hunt me down. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not going to become an issue. If I somehow end up getting famous and stalk-worthy at some point, I’m going to need one of the six of you that actually read my posts to remind me to come take this one down, ok? Ok.

So, on this route that I drive twice a day, pretty much every weekday, there’s several traffic lights. One stops at a highway off/on ramp, one stops at the entrance to a local high school, one stops near a bunch of sprawling manufacturing type buildings, and one stops at a cross-street that comes down from between the high school and a big medical clinic. That street passes in between two financial institutions on its way to the intersection. Those two financial institutions are where our story takes place. Sort of. Mostly it takes place in my head, but…you know.

One of the financial institutions is a credit union. The other is a small branch of a big regional bank. Both these places have big light-up signs with digital read-outs that flash back and forth between the time and the temperature. As an aside, why is this a service that banks specifically feel is important to provide? You never see a gas station or a McDonalds or a chiropractor’s sign flashing up the time and temperature in 2-foot-tall digital characters. Why have financial institutions taken up that mantle? Was it some sort of package deal that came along with the mini calendars banks give out every winter? Was the sales pitch to early bankers something like “here’s the thing: you give them a calendar to take home so they know what day it is, but if they wanna know the time or what the temperature is, they’re gonna have to come to…you guessed it! YOUR BANK!” These are fully rhetorical questions, by the way. I very much do not want you to email me the history of American banking. I know that of the six of you reading, at least three are unrelenting pedants, so I just want to make sure I’m very clear on that.

Get to the fucking point, Shelby. Jesus.

So these banks are right across from each other, separated by just a narrow two-lane side street. They both have the digital signs. The clocks on both digital signs are always the same.

But the temperature is not.

And it’s not just a degree or two of difference. You know, something you could attribute to maybe a passing breeze or a rogue shadow. No. The temperatures are a full SIX DEGREES different. And it’s not just an occasional thing. The one on the south side of the street is always six degrees colder than the one on the north side. I have driven by these banks, on average, 500 times a year (twice a day X 5 days a week X 50 weeks per year to account for vacations and whatever), for at least the last two years. That’s at least 1000 trips past these signs just in the last two years. Do I notice them every single time we drive through there? No. But every time I DO notice them, which is at least several times a week, they are ALWAYS six degrees apart.

And it bothers me. Clearly.

Now, rationally I know that it’s probably just due to difference in the sensitivity and/or location of the sensors. I have a rough grasp of science and I can accept that. What I have a harder time accepting is that likely the people who work in both of those buildings simply don’t care about this difference. They have probably noticed and just accepted the fact that one thermometer, less than 50 yards away from another, is reading a FULL SIX DEGREES different. I bet it doesn’t make their teeth itchy. They may, in fact…not even notice! I am mystified by this.

Instead of letting it gnaw at me that the temperatures are six degrees different for no good reason other than human ambivalence and/or possible electronic malfunction, I’ve made a decision: I am choosing to believe that the six degree difference is due in fact to a small furry rodent that has found its way into the space that holds the temperature sensor, and made itself a lovely cozy home there. Maybe it’s a clever red squirrel with bright eyes and a nice big cache of acorns. Maybe it’s a whole big family of tiny voles who each raise the temperature near the sensor just part of one single degree because they’re so wee. Maybe a possum squeezed its trash-smelling, tick-eating, screaming-at-their-own-ass heart of gold in next to the sensor for a long winter’s nap. Who knows.

All I’m saying is, this is how I’m coping with it. Things feel a little easier to handle if you can come up with a reason for them. Which is how we ended up with religion, of course, and look how THAT turned out. Hey, maybe my calling in life is to start a possum cult. Our central rituals could be going around to local banks to calibrate the thermometers on their digital signs, and screaming at our own asses because we exist.

why do my neighbors yell so much?

Posted on by

– They are trying to compete with my dog for the coveted title of Yappiest Yapface of 2019.

– Their apartment is filled with spiders and they react to spiders the same way I do: yelling until someone comes and rescues me the spider.

– They believe that he who prays loudest gets the most attention from Imaginary Sky Daddy.

– They’re actually a bunch of Siamese cats inhabiting human bodies, and it’s always ten minutes past feeding time.

– They were brought up in a cave behind a giant, roaring waterfall and had to yell everything just to be heard. The habit stuck.

– They have Fatal Ear Freezing Syndrome and have to wear ear protection at all times to keep from dying of the dreaded Freeze-Ear.

– They’re professional yodelers. Really bad ones.

– Their family hobby is acting out that popular meme of the Orange County Choppers guys yelling at each other.

– They all have terrible spatial awareness and keep stubbing their toes on every corner and piece of furniture they come near.

– Their carpet is full of tacks.

– They’re from Massachusetts and they’re also drunk a lot (not that people from Massachusetts are any more predisposed to getting drunk than anyone from anywhere else in New England (there’s not much to do here). But, in my experience, many people from Massachusetts DO seem predisposed to high levels of…personal loudness. NOT ALL, but many).

ocmeme

I didn’t make this meme, but I have lived this too many times to count.

victory

Posted on by

This one time, I got up from my desk to take a bathroom break after many (ok, one-ish) hours of soul-crushing data entry and left my headphones in because a good song was playing. I wandered down the hall and ducked into the bathroom. Turned around, unzipped my jeans, dropped trou for to get on with the peeing…and gasped in sudden shock as gravity, cruel mistress that she is, not only yanked the headphones right out of my ears, but also disconnected said headphones as my phone clattered from my pocket to the floor between my feet. There I was, hovering over the toilet with pants half down, panicking that everyone in the office next door would hear as Lorde’s ‘Royals’ blared its stirring crescendo in the echo-chamber that is the restroom. Instead of just turning the phone screen on and hitting pause to make the music stop, my brain decided the best course of action was to fumble around trying to reconnect the headphones that were now in a spaghetti pile of wires around one pant leg as my ass hung in the proverbial breeze. With a full bladder. Halfway sitting down onto the toilet.

That time was today, by the way. Like ten minutes ago.

No one ended up with pee on them and no one has yet come into my office asking why I was blaring Lorde in the bathroom, so I’m going to chalk that up as a victory. Gotta take ’em where we can get ’em.

 

trophy

Rhubarb Swank, winner of today’s Didn’t Pee Inappropriately Olympics.

seesaw

Posted on by

The company I work for moved offices last week. It had been in an old converted farm house in a tiny rural town for at least 25 years. A year or so ago, the rumblings about perhaps moving closer to civilization (such as we know it here in darkest New England, anyway) started getting louder. Then the building we were in had some pretty serious structural issues and that kind of sealed the deal, as no one really wanted to be around when the front wall of the place finally collapsed. Funny how that works.

Anyway.

So, the new office is pretty swish in a lot of ways. It’s in a big town / small city, and it’s near a bunch of restaurants, shops, and other businesses. The old place was near…a hardware store. The new place was built less than 25 years ago so it has modern windows that actually open and, even better, actually close. The windows in the old place were hit and miss on both those points. We have central air conditioning in the new building, so no more struggling to hear people on the phone over the roar of the nearest window A/C unit! Gone is the tiny, grotty, galley kitchenette that had barely enough room for the coffee makers and the sink. Now we have a big, bright, break room with two full sized counters…and cupboards! So many cupboards. There’s tons of storage everywhere in this place as well – we have closets, utility rooms, little knee-wall cubby spaces…so many spots to cram junk (that’s what she said). All the storage in the old place was in the basement, and let me just tell you in case you’ve never been in the basement of an early 1800’s farmhouse: they are, generally, fucking terrifying. There were spiders the size of my hand in that basement. I don’t even do small spiders, friends…so ones the size of my hand are nuke-from-orbit territory.  Having storage areas where I don’t feel like I’m about to be pounced on and dragged away by outsize arachnids gets a big A+ in my book.

Another fun feature of the new office is the bright, modern bathrooms. The bathrooms at the old place were tiny and terribly lit – one of them was dubbed “the coffin” because it was so narrow and dark. The bathrooms were also all very close to the kitchenette, so you could stand there making a cup of coffee and hear pretty much everything going on in the bathrooms. Even our bathroom upstairs by my old office, which was a little bit bigger than the downstairs ones, suffered from a distinct lack of soundproofing. I’m pretty sure my office mate was privy to at least a few of my louder sobbing breakdowns in the can. These new bathrooms, though! They’re down the hall, pretty much equidistant from all the offices and the break room, they’re single occupancy, and they don’t seem to share any walls with any of the work spaces. As someone who not only has regular bathroom-based crying jags but also an intermittent inflammatory bowel condition, I appreciate this feature perhaps more than most.

The new bathrooms do indeed have a lot going for them but there’s also something weird that I’ve noticed going on in them:

The toilets seesaw.

seesaw

Does anybody else see a slightly sinister raccoon face in this image? Just me? Paging Dr. Rorshach…Dr. Rorschach to the accounting office, STAT…

The bathrooms are situated back to back with a closet in between. I’m not sure, but I suspect the cause of the seesaw effect is that a sewer pipe that comes up through the wall branches off in a T shape to connect to the back of the toilets, which then drain down to the bigger pipe at ground level. Regardless of how, I’m quite positive that the stools are connected, and the WAY I’m sure of this is that I was sitting on one when I heard someone enter the adjacent bathroom, sit on that toilet, and I subsequently felt my throne rise a rather alarming inch or so.

Now, it wasn’t enough to pick my feet up off the ground or anything. I’m almost six feet tall so that would take some doing. But it was a very noticeable shift upward. I sat there looking slightly panicked, not knowing quite how to proceed. If I got up, would the person on the other side go down? Gravity dictates that in seesaw, the heavier end always goes down. But I’m the heaviest person in the office by some distance…easily twice the weight of all but a few of my coworkers…so why was MY side of the toilet see-saw going UP when someone lighter than me was sitting on it? I am entirely certain that they were not already on the stool when I first sat down, because I heard them enter the neighboring bathroom after I was already sitting.

I ended up just staying put, waiting out the other person so I could see what happened. After a short moment (clearly this was one of my older coworkers who doesn’t understand the importance of mid-day Instagram breaks. THIS IS HOW I SELF SOOTHE JANET, DEAL WITH IT), there was a distinct downward shift of my toilet and the sound of my neighbor flushing. The see-saw had come full…circle? No, that would be bad. The eagle had landed. That sounds bad in a toilet context too, actually. Whatever. You know what I mean.

After that initial seesaw experience my interest was piqued. Was it just a freak thing? Did I hallucinate it? Not that I normally hallucinate (at least, not that I know of. Oh god, we’re all just brains in vats aren’t we?!), but I believe in SCIENCE and SCIENCE says that if your hypothesis produces reliably repeatable results then something something quarks and neutrinos, and then you get the Nobel Prize. And since pretty much the last thing I’m interested in doing at my place of work most days is my actual job, I figured I might as well try to gather more data.

If that makes it sound kind of like I staked out the bathrooms for the next few hours,  trying to rush in to sit on the toilet of the opposite one every time someone went in to use the john, well…that’s not especially inaccurate. It wasn’t full on surveillance, though. I just kept finding excuses to wander up and down the hall, visiting the bathrooms all afternoon. Once I was in one, I’d sit around for a while waiting to see if someone would visit the neighboring one and seesaw me. So it differed little from a normal work day, to be fair.

Anyway.

I tallied three confirmed instances of toilet seesawing yesterday afternoon, and I’ve tallied a further one so far today. I really think I’m on to something here, friends.

In fact, I’m so confident about my impending Nobel Prize that I’ve started drafting a list of names for all the goats I’m going to acquire once I get that sweet million bucks and am able to buy my dream farm…

goats

We’ll start with Newton and Tesla. 

well, since you asked…

Posted on by

A coworker passed by my office on her way to get her lunch from the conference room fridge this afternoon. On her way back downstairs she veered left into my office. She leaned against the edge of my desk, balancing a plate of chain-restaurant Mexican leftovers on one palm, picking bites of food up and popping them in her mouth with the other hand as she spoke.

“What have YOU been up to lately? I haven’t seen you in FOREVER.”

I dug deep, didn’t mention the pointless hyperbole, and made what felt like appropriate noises in response…but I’ve been sitting here thinking of other things I’d like to have responded with ever since.

So, without further ado, I give you:

 

List Of Responses To Coworker’s Inquiry of What I’ve Been Up To Lately

I’ve been teaching myself Nepali so that I can negotiate better pricing with the Sherpas when I start putting together my Everest expedition.

I’ve been whittling a dildo out of teak wood.

I’ve been conducting interviews with the giant stinkbug that emerges from behind the filing cabinet every spring. Its name is Ferdinand and it has never left this office. I’ve not yet had the courage to ask what it eats.

I’ve been forcing myself to find new creative outlets in the hopes that they will help me better deal with this nagging feeling that I’ve wasted almost 11 years of my life doing a job I don’t like for money that I’m addicted to.

I’ve been teaching my dog to bark Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Jabberwocky’. We’ve been stuck on the word “vorpal” for a while now.

I’ve been knitting weasel traps.

I’ve been watching everyone downstairs work, which I have been achieving through an elaborate system of mirrors attached to the backs of my own private army of mice trained in the art of ninjutsu.

I’ve been hiding in the bathroom and crying. Or hiding in the bathroom surfing Instagram. Or hiding in the bathroom napping. Also, I had an inflammatory bowel issue a few weeks back, so for a while there I was doing actual bathroom stuff in the bathroom at least 75% of the times I went in there.

I just got back from a ten day trip to Mongolia, where I attended workshops on yurt design, innovations in yak-milk cheese making, and falconry. I settled for falconry because they told me I was too fat to ride the ponies. The Mongols are a harsh but fair people.

I’ve been lurking right behind you, lo these many weeks. My shallow breathing skills and lack of a reflection may have made it hard for you to notice.

I’ve been avoiding everyone because I’m terrible at small talk. You’ve been here like 7 years. I’m surprised you still ask.

I’ve been counting the tacks in all the bulletin boards in the office every day, just to make sure.

I’ve been memorizing a Swedish translation of the Gettysburg Address.

I’ve been setting fire to small pieces of paper with your name written on them, and chanting incantations to Kassogtha. Sorry in advance. Well, not really.

I’ve been mapping the capybara genome.

 

capy

“No you may NOT swab my cheek, you impudent rube. Good day to you, madam. I SAID GOOD DAY.”

tiny magic

Posted on by

The other morning I was washing some pots before breakfast. A tiny soap bubble landed on the leaf of one of my African violets and didn’t instantly pop.

IMG_20171010_065549003

See it? It looks kind of like a big water droplet, but it’s not.

I’ve always loved soap bubbles. If my mom ever wanted to get me out of her hair for an extended period of time, all she had to do was hand me a bottle of bubble fluid and point me outside. HOURS of entertainment. The shine of them, the flow of liquid rainbows over their surfaces, the idea that a whole other world could be contained inside those ephemeral little spheres of soap film – they’re magic.

The little soap bubble on the leaf made me smile. I admired it a few times while continuing my chore, knowing that one of the times I glanced up at it again, it would be gone. I finished one pot, I finished another, and the bubble remained, cushioned on the soft hairs of the violet’s leaf. At that point maybe five minutes had passed and I was pretty impressed with the bubble’s tenacity so I grabbed my phone and took some pictures to remember it by.

By that time breakfast was ready, and after that I had to take Mark to work. On returning to the kitchen for a second cup of tea after I’d run Mark to work and walked the dog, I happened to look over…and see the bubble still there!  It had been well over an hour at that point since the bubble landed on the leaf. But there it still was, its surface swirling madly with tiny iridescent storm clouds. Amazed, I very carefully picked the violet up off the windowsill to get a closer look. The bubble quivered with the movement but didn’t break. I admired it for a bit longer, then had to bid it goodbye because it was time to get ready for work.

That bubble clearly gave ZERO fucks about my measly human existence and flimsy preconceived notions of How Things Should Work though, because I shit you not, it was STILL THERE when I came back into the kitchen on my way out to work. It had made leaf-fall at approximately 6:15am and I took this video (linked – sorry, WordPress won’t let me upload it without paying them more money and I love you guys but god damn), just before I left the house at 9:15am. THREE HOURS that little bubble sat there, that I know of. It wasn’t there when I got home from work around 4:45, but who knows how long it actually lasted after I left. For all I know, it might have popped five seconds before I walked back in the door.

Now, listen: I don’t care what you want to tell me about humidity and surface tension and dust and whatever other cockamamie logical frigging math-doing mumbo jumbo (it’s always math’s fault. ALWAYS). This was straight up MAGIC. That was a MAGIC bubble with OTHERWORLDLY properties that landed on my MYSTICAL African violet in my SUPERNATURAL GOD DAMNED KITCHEN, and you will never convince me otherwise.

The world is a dumpster fire right now – it might continue to burn for the next twenty years for all we know – but as long as we can still find a little magic now and then, things aren’t completely lost.

Magic, motherfuckers. Hang on to it when you find it.

the surprise

Posted on by

A couple weeks ago I had a little Amazon shopping spree. There were a few books I’d been pining for, plus I had my eye on a set of fancy colored pencils (which haven’t yet made me a better artist, but I’m willing to give it time). I also bought some vitamins because I’m supposedly an adult. I had an Amazon gift card to pay for it all, which made the whole process even more exciting, because free stuff is best stuff! I got home that night and told Mark about it.

Me: Hey, I got a gift card from work so I bought some books and colored pencils, and also vitamins.

Mark: Sweet. I bought something today too, but it’s a surprise.

Me: What is it?

Mark: It won’t be here until Monday. You’re just going to have to wait.

Me: What IS IT?

Mark: It’s a surprise.

Me: How much did it cost?

Mark: Fifty bucks.

Me: Ok, but what is it?

Mark: Sur. Prise.

Me: Come onnnnn.

Mark: You’ll like it. It’s something for US.

Me: US? You mean like, a sex thing?

Mark: Not a sex thing, no. Welllll…I mean, I guess it COULD be a sex thing if you really wanted, but it wouldn’t be very comfortable.

I could see that I wasn’t going to be wheedling any useful hints out of him, so I flounced off to make dinner and basically forgot about the surprise for a few days.

Fast forward to Saturday afternoon. Junie and I were chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool when the mail guy pulled up outside our door and left a package on the stoop. I went out to retrieve it and, seeing that it had Mark’s name on it, realized it must be The Surprise arriving early. Mark was actually in the bath when it showed up, and I demand further adultiness credit for not instantly yelling up the stairs to him that he had to come down right that second and open the package. Instead, I placed it on his chair so that he’d see it as soon as he came back.

I was in the kitchen futzing with bread dough, struggling to maintain my hard-fought veneer of nonchalance when Mark finally reappeared. He opened the package up and brought it over for me to look at as he chortled with glee. I looked down at the contents.

“Jurassic World Inflatable T-Rex Costume”, it said.

What it SHOULD have said was, “All Rhubarb’s Dreams Are Coming True”, because HOLY SHIT, YOU GUYS. I love dinosaurs way more than any normal 37 year old non-paleontologist woman probably should. And those videos of people dressed up in inflatable T-Rex costumes doing stuff like pole dancing and ice skating? ENDLESSLY amusing to me. They’re my favorite.

Mark opened the costume up and started reading the directions while I cleaned the bread dough off my hands. The whole thing smelled exactly like a new shower curtain. After what likely would have proven to be a rather embarrassing amount of time had we been keeping track, we finally figured out how to install the fan into the costume, and how the battery pack attached to it. It was a muggy day (Vermont is GROSS in July. Don’t let the travel brochures (do they even make those anymore?) tell you any different), and he was still kind of damp from the bath, but Mark insisted on getting into the costume right then and there.

The whole thing is basically constructed like a big dinosaur-shaped bag with elastic cuffs at wrists and ankles. You get in via a long zipper up the front, and a little fan blows inside the costume to inflate the fabric around you. The head of the costume isn’t detachable – it’s fused to the rest of the fabric at the neckline, and there’s a panel of clear plastic in the dinosaur’s neck approximately where the average height adult’s face would be. Which is good I guess, because being trapped inside a dinosaur suit with no ability to see one’s surroundings is dangerous. I mean, how are you going to defend your turf if another dinosaur steps to you, you know? Safety first.

We unzipped the thing, got his legs through the leg-holes, he got one shoulder in…and then the plastic-y, nylon-y fabric suctioned to his sweaty back. There were several seconds of hilarious albeit futile flailing, wherein my terribleness as a person was reaffirmed several times over by the fact that all I could do was stand there giggling helplessly while my poor sweet husband was trapped in a vaguely dinosaur shaped straitjacket made of shower curtain material. Finally, we figured out that he’d have to put his head into the deflated, and therefore very floppy and claustrophobic, head of the costume before he could get his other shoulder in. The clear plastic panel in the dinosaur’s neck area fogged up with Mark’s breath almost immediately, adding yet another layer of awful hilarity.

Once we got the arms sorted out and the fan turned on, we zipped him up. During the frenzied flailing we had managed to create a little tear along one of the costume’s seams. There were several tense moments where it seemed like as a result the fan might not actually inflate the costume, but the T-Rex did eventually roar to life, and the posing commenced:

I especially like the fact that the progression of the four small pictures on the bottom there make it seem like he’s coming to eat the viewer. Well done snapping pics there, me!

After about five minutes of picture-taking, Mark mentioned that it was getting hard to breathe in there and that he’d like to come out. We got him out of the suit, laid it out to dry (it got really sweaty, really quickly), and set about posting the pictures on Facebook and enjoying the heady dopamine rush of validating like-clicks.

No one has gotten back into the costume yet, but I’ve been thinking up all sorts of applications for it once the weather gets less jungle-y. At some point I’d like to wear it to the grocery store, for instance. I’d also like to sneak up on family members with it, like peeking in their windows. It’s obviously going to have to be worn to work for Halloween (I’m the only one in the office who ever dresses up for Halloween anyway, so might as well go all-out). And, thanks to Haddaway’s “What Is Love” popping up on my Spotify station yesterday, I’ve realized that my true calling in life is to bring into this world the masterpiece that I will call…

…A Night At The Rex-bury.

And no, it won’t be a sex thing.

IMG_20170715_140442681

“KHAAAAAAANNNNN!”

re: peanut butter

Posted on by

Peanut butter is basically the perfect food.

Unless you’re allergic to peanuts, in which case, we probably shouldn’t ever share close physical contact because I’m basically 68% peanut butter. Plus I don’t like strangers touching me, and respecting boundaries is important. But mostly because of the peanut butter thing.

Peanut butter is one of those foodstuffs that I don’t buy very often because, if it’s in the house, it calls my name until I have consumed it. All of it. In as short a time as possible. I’m like a peanut butter Hoover. All I need is a spoon and some privacy, and I can actually do without the privacy if necessary.

This sudden and frankly uncalled-for exposition about my peanut butter habits, by the way, is being brought to you by my having an apple left over from something I was baking earlier in the week. Because you see, if an apple isn’t being cut up and incorporated into a dish or baked good somehow, then its only other purpose is as a vehicle for peanut butter. I mean…I know there are people who eat apples out of hand without slathering them in peanut butter first, and that’s fine. It’s WRONG…but it’s fine. More peanut butter for me.

Apples aren’t the only foodstuffs I’ll use as peanut butter delivery devices, oh no! Bananas, banana bread, biscuits, brownies, carrots, celery, crackers, cookies, dates, ice cream…I’ve gleefully smeared peanut butter on, or stuffed peanut butter in, all of them. I’ve put peanut butter on pancakes, muffins, even tortillas (both flour ones and corn ones. The corn ones were a mistake, but hey, mistakes are how we learn).

The most holy form of peanut butter consumption is on toasted bread, of course. I have a deep and abiding love for English muffins and I feel their highest calling is to be toasted and smeared with peanut butter. Second to English muffins would be a good whole wheat or sourdough. I’m not afraid to put peanut butter on rye toast if my hand is forced, though. You think I won’t do it? Oh trust me, I will, and it will be DELICIOUS.

The only person I know who likes peanut butter almost as much as I do is my dad. Maybe it’s a genetic thing? Maybe our DNA has made it so that our brains register the taste of peanut butter as a magical explosion of delicious joy? Maybe we’ve got some kind of peanut butter werewolf curse, where instead of turning into werewolves on the full moon, we…just really like peanut butter a lot. That one might need some work. BUT STILL. You get my drift.

My preferred brand of peanut-based crack is Teddie, preferably the super chunky variety. Teddie is just roasted peanuts and salt. No added sugar, no hydrogenated oils, 100% amazing. This post isn’t sponsored by Teddie, but I’ve never in my blogging life wished more that a company would see me promoting their product and decide to send me some.

Teddie, if you’re reading this, drop me a line. I’m sure we could work something out.

 

teddie

*heavy breathing*

 

good enough

Posted on by

I keep writing blog posts and then not posting them because they’re not good enough. In reality they’re fine, but in my head they’re not funny enough, they don’t make sense, they’re boring, they make me sound dickish (which isn’t untrue, but still)…and who the fuck knows what else.

This is the brain weasels talking. That stuff about not being good enough, I mean. Not this right now. This is me. The weasels haven’t completely taken over. At least, I don’t THINK they have. Maybe they’ve gone all dark ops and actually HAVE taken over and I just don’t realize it. Shit, that’s terrifying. Let’s back away from that one.

Point being…I’m still here and doing the thing. I’m just kind of lacking in my follow-through lately. And that’s ok. It’s not ideal…but it’s ok. It could be worse.

DSC03137

“Yeah, I mean, you could have some crazy lady with a camera stalking you like a fucking paparazzi when you’re just minding your own business, trying to get your clover munch on. GOD.”  *woodchuck huff*