Category Archives: nonsense

fruitcake chronicles: in the beginning

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In the beginning, there was booze.

Two kinds of booze, to be precise.

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The much-coveted Screech was on sale. IT WAS A SIGN!

There was also an ass-load of dried fruit, but that’s nowhere near as exciting as the booze. Also, ignore that random onion in the background. I don’t know. This is why I’m not a famous food blogger. I can’t control what’s going on in the background of my pictures. Or my life.

Anyway.

I made fruitcake on Sunday and also managed to get pretty well schnockered in the process. It wasn’t my intent to get wasted while baking AT ALL, but that Screech, man. It’s so good. And so smooth. And I just kept sipping it..and sipping it…and mixing it with apple cider and sipping THAT…

…and about an hour later I realized, quite to my surprise, that I was fucking LIT.

I feel like I kept things pretty well under control, though:

  • I didn’t burn the fruitcake (or the potholders or the walls or anything else).
  • I didn’t cut myself AT ALL even while handling multiple knives (none of which are especially sharp, to be fair. Kind of like me).
  • I even managed to construct a truth be told quite magnificent turkey pot pie after the fruitcake, all without maiming anyone, poisoning anyone or blowing anything up.

However, I DO wish that I had taken before and after shots of my kitchen cabinets. I went to grab the potato starch tonight while making dinner and basically had to take everything out of the baking cabinet to find it. Similarly, the kosher salt was buried all the way at the back of the bottom shelf when it’s usually front and center. The bag of sugar was precariously balanced on top of a leaning tower of plastic containers partially full of various dried fruits, and there was a box of currants leaning at a 45 degree angle on some of the shorter jars of spices. My cabinets aren’t organized to an anal degree or anything, but I try to kind of keep sections – dry goods section, spice section, oils and vinegars section, canned goods section. You know…just sort of a basic semblance of order so that I’m not, for instance, swearing and throwing shit left and right in the middle of making gravy, trying to find the stupid fucking potato starch at the last second.

Also, valuable lessons about day drinking were re-learned on Sunday… chief among them, the reason why I don’t usually day drink. You see, when you drink yourself stupid at night, you can just go crash on your comfy wonderful bed, close your eyes and fall blissfully into a deep and dreamless stupor. You awaken the next morning, if not refreshed, then at least usually with a modicum of functionality. The drunkenness becomes a thing of the past and you move on with life.

When you day-drink, you’re fully conscious and aware of the sobering up. At least, unless you’ve REALLY gone overboard, in which case you may have bigger problems. Point is, being awake and aware of slowly becoming less drunk is basically no fun at all. It’s like the polar opposite of all the fun you had getting drunk, but with added ennui, guilt, and quite possibly shame. Being aware of moving back up through those layers of suckitude on the way back to sobriety is pretty depressing.

That’s how it seems to work for me anyway. It’s quite possible that there are plenty of people who handle day liquor better than I do. I decided on Sunday that I didn’t really want to learn that skill, though.

I’ll just stick to evening drinking and going to bed at relatively appropriate times to sleep it off, thanks.

I married a cookie licker

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I made peanut butter cookies this afternoon. That was a mistake, since both my husband and I are weak, weak people…who really like cookies. Especially peanut butter ones. I doled out a few over the course of the afternoon, then bagged the rest up and stashed them in the microwave in the hopes that out of sight really WOULD equal out of mind (which is hit and miss with us, at best).

About half an hour ago, Mark started edging toward the kitchen, looking sketchy. Just as I noticed what he was doing, he caught my eye and put on his “hopeful” look, which is kind of a cross between puppy-dog eyes and a guilty grimace. The following exchange occurred:

Me, suspicious: “What are you doing?”

Him: just standing there silently, contorting his face further to try and make ‘the look’ more convincing, presumably.

Me, laughing now: “Do you have to crap? You kind of look like you’re clenching to keep from crapping your pants.”

Him: “Can we have cookies?”

Me: “We had cookies earlier. We don’t need more cookies.”

Him: “Right, but I want cookies.”

Me: “Fiiiiiiine…”

Him, scurrying out to the kitchen, yelling back over his shoulder: “Did you want one?”

Me: “Well, YEAH.”

He came in a couple seconds later and handed me a single cookie, sheltering his other hand against his body, clearly hiding it and the cookies (plural, I’m not stupid) it contained.

Me: “How many cookies do you HAVE?”

Him, looking slightly panicked: “Three.”

Me: “THREE?!”

And then, with a look of sheer panic on his face, he took the stack of three cookies and LICKED THEM. Then, with a note of triumph in his voice he said, “And now I’ve LICKED THEM so no one else can HAVE THEM!”

I completely lost it – the kind of heaving, uncontrollable laughter where you don’t make any sound and you can’t breathe. He started laughing too, which only served to further feed the hilarity. I seriously haven’t laughed so hard since the pterodactyl incident. Half an hour later, I’m still sitting here having random outbursts of giggles over it.

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“I’m surrounded by idiots. Help me.” – Junior

 

fuck Kokomo

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When I was in elementary school, music class was basically my everything. Some kids live for recess…I LIVED for music class.

We went through a few music teachers during my years in school (which, after a brief stint of thinking I wanted to be a music teacher myself and spending a very small amount of time in a classroom with a bunch of howling banshees…I mean, children…I can totally understand why). My favorite by far was an exotic (for late ’80’s rural Vermont, anyway) Latina woman named Maricel.

I’m not sure how old Maricel was when she was teaching us, but looking back on some of the songs she taught us, I have to figure she was probably fairly young. She taught us some traditional Spanish-language songs, but her main thing was pop music. For instance, for the spring concert circa 1989 or 1990, she had the 8th grade class learn and sing Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. I was a lowly 4th grader at that point and I was so impressed because geez, that song was like, EDGY. To a ten year old, anyway.

Maricel’s song selection for MY class that year was “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys. I was kind of obsessed with the Beach Boys at the time (mostly their older catalog – I was snob even back then), so “Kokomo” was right up my alley.

Or so I thought.

Part of the problem was that even as a young kid, I had a good ear for music. I could usually sing a melody back accurately after hearing it just once or twice. If you’ve ever heard “Kokomo”, you know it’s a very simple melody with a ton of repetition. So basically, I learned to sing “Kokomo” in one 45-minute class period.

Enter the second part of the problem: I was (and still am) very, VERY impatient. I didn’t understand why we had to keep beating the “Kokomo” horse after the third or fourth class because it was very clearly dead to me at that point. The horse, I mean. I are phrase good.

Anyway – you can probably guess how it went. Because we were performing the song at the big spring concert, it had to be PERFECT, so we rehearsed it SUPER EXTRA A LOT TIMES A MILLIONTY…and I got really fucking bored, really fucking quickly.

A bored Shelby is not generally a disruptive Shelby – I wasn’t the kid who would start singing a different song or take off running around the room or something. I’d just kind of slip off into la-la land and do my own thing inside my head until something more shiny and interesting came along. The thing about daydreaming though, is that you often absorb bits of what’s going on around you in real life even though you’re essentially off with the fairies. So the whole time I was standing there going through the motions in class while secretly planning out my unicorn ranch, my brain was still being subjected to the song “Kokomo” being repeated over and over…and over…

…and over…

…and 25(ish) years later? I CANNOT FUCKING STAND THAT SONG. It annoys me to an irrational degree. All I have to hear is that first breathy phrase, “Aaaa-ruba, Jamaica…”, and I’m scrambling to switch the station. Gah, it made me twitch even just hearing it in my head when I typed it just then!

By the way, did I mention that my co-worker listens exclusively to the Margaritaville XM Radio station at work? EXCLUSIVELY. Not on headphones, either. Margaritaville refers, of course, to the Jimmy Buffett song of the same name, and the station’s playlist is comprised of similar beachy, laid-back, Caribbean-feeling tunes.

Like, for instance, “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys…

minion

#Iwokeuplikethis

Sundays with Junior

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There are certain things I do on Sundays.

I grocery shop on Sundays, because that’s when the week’s flyer goes into effect.  I like to go early before the godly post-church crowds clog up the aisles.  It’s less about the fact that they all just came from church and more about the fact that I don’t like seething masses of humanity.

Sundays are laundry day, too.  I’m capable of doing laundry other days of the week but frankly, why wash today what you can put off until Sunday?  I have a carefully curated supply of clean clothes (all laid out on the spare room bed, in fact!), that will last me the whole work week without needing to do laundry so long as nothing, uhhh, untoward happens.  Like random pants-shitting.  Which I’m NOT in the habit of doing currently, I feel it necessary to point out.

Sunday also involves trying to appease our tiny white overlord, Junior.  As much as I would love for him to be, Junior is not work-dog material.  The last time I tried to take him to work with me on a weekday when the office was fully staffed, he peed on my office-mate’s chair leg, barked incessantly any time someone came up or down the stairs adjacent to my office, and growled at my boss.  So, Junior stays home instead of coming to work with me.  It probably breaks my heart more than it breaks his, but none the less, Sunday is the day I usually try to make it up to him ahead of having to leave him home alone for 40 more hours in the coming week.

As far as appeasement goes, Junior is generally a pretty simple overlord to work for:

He wants walkies, during which he will exert his authority over the world at large by peeing on any upright structures he encounters and barking at the neighbor cats.

He wants bites of whatever anyone eats, especially if it’s almond butter.

He wants a warm lap to curl up in if he so chooses, but he will be neither forced nor cajoled into cuddling, no sir!

He wants a car ride of appropriate length (none of that “once round the driveway” nonsense he used to settle for as a puppy), and there will be bonus virgins for you in Heaven if the ride happens to be punctuated by a visit to Nana’s house.

And, above all, he wants to play.  Acceptable games include “Chase Junior Around The Apartment”, “Throw This Thing That Junior Has Brought You”, and “Try To Get This Thing From Junior So You Can Throw It But End Up Mostly Just Chasing Him Around The Apartment”.

"Quit lollygagging and throw that thing, Mahm!"

“Quit lollygagging and throw that thing, Mahm!”

"Look, if you're not going to throw it, then at least put your hand in it and wiggle it around enticingly." (That's what she said)

“Look, if you’re not going to throw it, then at least put your hand in it and wiggle it around enticingly.” (That’s what she said)

"ANG NYANG NYANG, FINGERS, NOM!"

“ANG NYANG NYANG, FINGERS, NOM!”

puppies are the answer

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I’m meant to describe an ideal day off for today’s post.  Thinking about the ideal day off immediately gave me Ferris Bueller on the brain, so now all I can think about is hijacking a parade float and singing Danke Schoen.

Which, to be fair, is something I’d at least attempt if presented with the opportunity.

But anyway…

I’m finding this a lot harder than I thought I would, possibly because what I like to do with my free time varies wildly depending on my mood.  Some days I just want to be left alone with a book or a video game and some frozen pizza.  Some days I want to have people over, cook a big dinner, and sit around drinking wine and laughing.  Some days I want to take off to a beach and just chase seagulls and pick up shells all day.  Some days I want to get in the car and just drive and drive, seeing what I can see along the way.

On the other hand, if I could somehow line up a day-off gig where I got to just hang out with a whole bunch of puppies all day long, that would be pretty sweet and would probably take precedence over anything else anybody invited me to do that day.

“Oh hey, did you want to fly on this private jet to Paris with me to check out the Louvre this afternoon?”

“Nah, man.  I’ve got plans to lay on the floor in the middle of a bunch of puppies and just let them jump all over me.  It’s going to be amazing.  But thanks for thinking of me!”

Yes.  Puppies are definitely the answer.

Rescue team deployed!

Rescue team deployed!

morning, schmorning

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Back to the NaBloPoMo prompts today! This one is kind of lame, but hey…you get what you pay for!

Prompt for Monday, November 9:

What is the first thing you do every single day (I mean, after you hit the snooze button)? When did that step in your routine begin?

My alarm clock, usually, is our dog Junior:
"Mahm? You in there?"

“Mahm? You in there?”

He starts whining just about the time it starts getting light outside.  He doesn’t have a snooze function per se, but sometimes I can quiet him down for a few precious minutes by petting him, which I usually do while picking up my phone and squinting to see what ungodly time it is.

So I suppose technically the very first thing I do most mornings is pet the dog, which certainly isn’t a terrible way to start the day.

Dog-petting, pants-putting-on and stumbling to the bathroom aside, the first actual functional thing I do every day is either make breakfast or walk the dog.

If it’s my turn to walk the dog, that has to happen before anything else because the poor little thing has been holding it for like 12 hours and I feel horrible making him wait any longer than that.  Back before I lived with my husband I was the ONLY dog walker, so walkies always happened before breakfast no matter what.

If it’s not my turn to walk the dog, I’ll go downstairs and start breakfast.  I’ve always been a breakfast person, even when it was just cereal and milk as a kid.  I am mystified by people who can skip breakfast and still manage to function.  I think they might actually secretly be aliens, in fact.  It’s the only reasonable explanation.

Breakfast at our house is usually eggs, bacon or sausage of some description, some veggies, and tea.  Sometimes I go through phases of having steel-cut oats for breakfast (I make them savory, with cheese and black pepper and maybe an egg on top), but my husband is of the opinion that any meal that does not include meat is not actually a meal (and further, that eggs do not count as an adequate meat replacement no matter WHAT literally the rest of the world except maybe people who are allergic to eggs say), so even when I have oatmeal I end up cooking him eggs and meat anyway.

what price good hair?

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The last few days, my hair has been feeling kind of…crispy…but not like, dry crispy.  More like…sticky-crispy?  Like when you’ve been swimming in salt water and then you let your hair dry without washing the salt out, sort of.  The first day I noticed it, I was totally blaming it on the fact that my bastard-ass plumbing was on the fritz and I had really poor water pressure in the shower, the logical conclusion of which was that my shampoo wasn’t rinsing out of my hair entirely.  Last night I managed to semi-fix the water pressure issue in the shower though, and this morning it felt like all the shampoo definitely rinsed out fine.  And yet, here I sit with sticky-crisp hair once again.  I’m forced at this point to suspect the culprit may be the new shampoo I bought on Saturday.

Buying new shampoo is one of the quickest ways I can think of to send myself into analysis paralysis.  There are all these boxes to check: must be sulfate-free, must smell nice but not too strong, must not cost a crap-ton, must not make my scalp itch, must not make my hair look terrible.  Some of those are pretty easy – I can read the bottle to find out if it has sulfates in it.  I can sniff it to see if I like the smell.  But how do I know if it’s going to make my scalp itch or make my hair look terrible?  I don’t until I buy it and try it.  That’s the part I super DUPER fucking hate – the not knowing or even being able to make an educated guess.  It’s a total crap shoot.  I detest crap shoots.

But anyway, back to my current hair issue.

The real mind-boggler is that my hair actually looks pretty good despite feeling super weird.  It makes no sense.  My hair is very fine so it gets weighed down by product residue or oils ridiculously quickly.  Usually if I have enough gunk in my hair to cause it to actually FEEL gunked up, then it will LOOK gunked up too…but that’s currently not the case.  It looks fuller and thicker than usual (which is great since this formula I bought claimed to be thickening. Score one for truth in advertising), and it’s fairly shiny.  Things seem pretty good until I touch it, then the facade crumbles and I am left wondering why I can’t run my fingers through my hair and why my roots feel…well…sticky-crisp.

I can’t return the shampoo, so I’m stuck with it.  Do I just keep using it and hope that I eventually get used to it, or that it eventually makes my hair look so fabulous that I’m able to let go of the sticky-crisp issue?  Do I run, not walk, to the nearest store and go back to the previous brand that didn’t do much for me volume-wise but that smelled ok and didn’t make my hair feel weird?  Do I foist it off on some unsuspecting friend who quite possibly is more well-adjusted and has way less weird sensory issues than me?

It’s a conundrum, man.  I don’t know.
I want puffy alpaca hair. Is that so much to ask?

I want puffy alpaca hair. Is that so much to ask?

sock-mergency

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The weather app on my phone lied to me again this morning.

It claimed that the temperature was supposed to be around 55 degrees and there was supposed to be sunshine.

Currently, it’s 46 degrees, overcast, and gusting wind.  Which, to be fair, is a lot more common weather for Vermont this time of year than the whole “55 and sunny” scenario.

Unfortunately, rather than listening to my realist brain this morning, I listened to the weather app, and dressed for 55 and sunny.

And now I’m fucking freezing.

Now granted, I do work in an office so it’s not like I’m not sheltered from the elements, but my office is in a very old farmhouse so the term “sheltered” is used…somewhat conditionally.  There are, for instance, 3/4″ gaps between the window casings and the frames of the crappy old removable plate-glass windows.  You can see a sizable strip of daylight between the two, and wind certainly has no problem gusting right in as well.  More than a couple times in the past eight years I’ve actually seen rain or snow driven through these gaps when the wind has wheeled in just the right direction.

I do have a small cache of knitted goods in my office for exactly this reason.  There’s a pair of finger-less mitts and a big fuzzy stole / scarf / lap-blanket thing currently, and supplemental scarves will be added as winter grinds on.

What I do NOT have, which I clearly need if today is any indication, is a pair of emergency socks for the days when my idiot self listens to the weather app.

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Hi, I’m Shelby and I like to torture myself.

this is payback for something, I’m sure of it.

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My dog wants to go out for a walk.  Normally this wouldn’t pose much of a problem, except I currently look like this:

 

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Fetching…

It’s not even so much that I give a fuck what my neighbors think of how I look – it’s more that my hair isn’t dry yet and it’s really blustery out. Also, I am utter shit at putting my hair in rollers, so literally ANY application of force via air movement is going to make this delicate balance of hope and fuckery all come crashing down.

But…I can’t let the dog piss on the floor (not that he would anyway, he’s a good boy). So fucked-up hair, here I come!

la la la, can’t hear you

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My office-mate has this Pandora station that he listens to every single work day.  It started out as a Led Zeppelin station, which I was definitely A-OK with because I very much enjoy the Zep.  There were a bunch of other classic rock staples on the station too – Grateful Dead, The Doors, Pink Floyd – all good bands that I enjoy listening to of my own accord.

Now, if you’ve been living under a rock for many years and are unfamiliar with the way Pandora works, here’s a quick run-down: you search for an artist you like and then Pandora plays you a song by that artist.  You can either thumbs-up the song to tell Pandora you liked it and would like to hear more of that type of music, or you can thumbs-down it to tell Pandora it’s on the wrong track for your tastes.  Pandora then uses some fancy algorithms and like, I don’t know, fucking internet gnomes with ESP to build a radio station for you based on your musical tastes / preferences.  As such, it’s entirely possible to start out with a very specific genre (say, classic rock, for example) and, through thumbs up / thumbs down-ing songs, manage to make your playlist drift in some spectacularly odd directions.

Which brings me back to office-mate’s Pandora station.

Like I said, it started out as your basic classic rock station.  Over time, I started to notice that a lot of the same songs were being played over and over again.  That’s not uncommon with Pandora – basically, it tries to stick to what it thinks you’ll like, even if that means playing different versions of the same song over and over.  We went through a phase for a while where we’d hear three versions of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” and at least two different versions of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” every day without fail.  Which, while annoying to my weird OCD brain, was still bearable.

That was about six months ago.  Apparently office-mate has spent the last six months thumbs-upping every Jimmy Buffett, Bob Marley, Steely Dan, and steel-drum instrumental track that Pandora has spit at him because today, I can predict with frightening accuracy at least twenty-five songs that I’ll be guaranteed to hear over the course of the seven hours we’re usually in the office together.  Probably more than twenty-five if I really tried, honestly…the first twenty-five are just super easy ones I could come up with off the top of my head.  On days when I don’t listen to my own music over my headphones, I end up going home with songs stuck my head that I would never willingly listen to on my own – mostly Steely Dan. I fucking detest Steely Dan.

So, this morning, after an entire weekend of not having to hear office-mate’s classic rock cum island getaway Pandora station, you can’t even imagine my annoyance at waking up to “Kid Charlemange” by STEELY NUT-SUCKING DAN running on loop in my head.

I had to sing “Bohemian Rhaphsody” to the dog just to break the cycle so that I could function again.