Category Archives: pterodactyls

potential pork disaster

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I’ve explained before why I chose to call this blog, “How Bad Can It Go”. The short version is that, basically, I have two modes:

  • Hyper-analytical super overly cautious mode, where I come up with every completely unfeasible nightmare scenario imaginable and either completely talk myself out of doing everything or just totally paralyze myself with doubt, and
  • Impulsive mode, where I just DO shit (usually weird and/or inadvisable shit), with the mantra “how bad can it go?” playing over and over in my head.

The impulsive side of me is definitely the more creative side. Impulsive me starts a blog, for instance! Impulsive me randomly embroiders rainbow pterodactyls and makes up narratives to go with squirrel pictures. 

When I’m cooking, sometimes the impulsive side of me takes over and I end up creating masterpieces. Other times, I just create messes.

Tonight’s cooking, I fear, could go either way.

I got an Instant Pot for Christmas. It’s an electric pressure cooker, essentially. It does a bunch of other stuff too, but the part with the steepest potential learning curve is the pressure cooking part. Cooking under pressure doesn’t work like regular cooking. There are adjustments to cooking times, ratios of liquids to solids, and all kinds of other happy horseshit that I frankly haven’t bothered to read up on yet (which, if you know me at all, does not surprise you in the least). Point being – you can’t just take a normal recipe and put everything in the Instant Pot exactly like you would a regular pot and expect it to actually, you know, work.

So, tonight when I started just randomly throwing things into the Instant Pot, I may have set myself up to find out just how bad it CAN go.

I don’t think it will blow up. Let’s get that cleared up right now. I also don’t think it will catch fire…definitely another plus.

Am I entirely sure whether the 3lbs of pork I put in there with two cans of tomatoes, half a can of green chiles, a whole bunch of spices and a little water will actually turn into chili in the randomly selected time I set it to cook for, though?

Mmm…not so much.

But like I said, I’m pretty sure it won’t blow up, at least.

 

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“Mahm, don’t wake me up unless it’s edible. For serious.”

 

 

 

things I’ve told myself recently

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This is also known as my “some day list”, because most of the time when these things pop into my head they’re prefaced by the phrase, “SOME DAY when I’m (rich / famous / in better shape / truly run out of fucks to give / drunk off my ass / fill in the blank)”.

  • Some day I’m going to hire a maid to come in two days a week and clean my house.  I wouldn’t ask her to do gross stuff like clean my husband’s hairballs out of the bathtub drain or exorcise the science projects out of the back of my fridge, but everything else would be fair game. The problem with this plan is that Junior The Dog would lose his sweet tiny ever-loving mind from stranger danger if someone he didn’t know came to the house while we were gone. Or even while we were here. So basically, if I ever want a maid for real, I’m going to have to figure out how to take my dog to work for a half day twice a week (not happening – last time he went to work with me he shit in my boss’s office), or I’m going to have to start tranquilizing him twice a week (probably also not happening. Probably.)

 

  • Some day I’m going to own a house of my own rather than renting, and I’m going to paint the rooms whatever weird-ass colors I want. To be fair, our landlord is pretty easy-going and he probably wouldn’t balk if I wanted to paint walls weird colors in our apartment – the last tenants had blood-red walls in their bedroom, in fact. When we came to look at the place, everything looked totally normal and chill until we got to the bedroom and then it was like, instant bordello. But not in a good way. If you see what I mean. Anyway, I want my own house for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is usually my desire to have things like a lime green bathroom and blue living room walls and stuff.

 

  • Some day I’m going to live somewhere where the driveway is not an icy death trap of doom every winter. This one is pretty much wishful thinking in New England, honestly – even the nicest, most well-maintained driveways end up with a layer of frozen slush and hate caked to them at some point in the winter here. Unless I want to cough up beaucoup bucks for one of those crazy heated-driveway setups, I’m destined to always be disappointed on this front.

 

  • Some day I’m going to develop good habits, like washing my face before bed, writing every day, not automatically adding “fuck” to every other sentence when I’m speaking aloud, cleaning up after myself as I cook rather than just piling all the dirty dishes in the sink and pretending I don’t seem them for the next three days, exercising on a consistent basis, not drinking as much…they all sound good in theory but none of them are very fun in practice so I’m basically doomed to never achieve any of them.

 

  • Some day I’m going to hang up a coat rack so that we stop just dumping our coats and sweatshirts and other outer-wear paraphernalia on the kitchen chairs when we come inside. This one is probably the most do-able of the whole list, to be fair.

 

  • Some day I’m going to go through all my dishware and silverware, take an inventory, figure out what pieces I’m missing and buy them. I literally have three soup bowls to my name, only two of which match, and one of which is structurally unsound and will some day crumble and dump boiling hot soup all over me. Also, another example of how bad it is: my mom actually bought butter knives and put them in my Christmas stocking this year because when my folks were over for Thanksgiving and mom was setting the table she could only find two butter knives. I replied that yes, we only have two, and she just couldn’t wrap her mind around why we didn’t have a full set of them. I explained that, you know, sometimes things need to be pried out of other things and butter knives get bent and then they have to be thrown away. Or like, sometimes you REALLY need to chip the ice off your windshield and you can’t find your scraper and you’re already late for work and the butter knife is the first thing you think of and then you forget to take it back inside. Stuff happens, and butter knives sometimes pay the price.

 

eye

Some day I’m going to remember to shut the bedroom door before I do my eyeliner so that things like this don’t happen when the dog starts barking at a squirrel out of nowhere, making me jump and stab myself in the eye. And worse, screw up my eyeliner.

thirty-six

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Today’s my birthday. I’m thirty-six years old, as of 4:32-ish this morning.

Thirty-six sounds weird to me.

It doesn’t sound bad or scary or anything. Just…weird. It might take some getting used to the sound of it, the feel of the words.

The only “milestone” birthday that has bothered me so far was when I turned twenty-five. You’d think that on the spectrum of possible age freakouts that twenty-five would be way closer to the “foot-loose and fancy-free” end than the “oh god, I’ve wasted my life” end of things, but apparently not in my case. I actually straight-up lost my shit shortly after turning twenty-five. I had a series of panic attacks that got increasingly worse until finally, one night in early February I called my parents around midnight and asked my dad to take me to the emergency room because I was quite sure I was having a heart attack. The ER doc didn’t do a whole lot to comfort me, other than to say that even a severely obese twenty-five year old like me probably wouldn’t be having an actual heart attack unless she’d been doing cocaine or something. That was followed by a very pointed look full of unspoken questions to which I replied, “if I was doing coke, don’t you think I’d be skinnier?”

Anyway – point being, twenty-five pretty much felt like rock bottom to me. While everyone else around me was partying and living it up, having adventures, making new friends, traveling the world, I was spending most nights and weekends (and no small number of days) hiding under the duvet, literally afraid that I’d drop dead at any moment. I got some help in the form of antidepressants and a wonderful dog that friends helped me adopt, and I started to slowly claw my way out of a very deep, very dark hole.

I talk about this today so that I can look around myself and more fully appreciate just how much has changed for the better in my life in the last eleven years. I’m not cured of depression, anxiety or any of the other brain fuckery that  started rearing its ugly head when I turned twenty-five. I never will be, and I’m at varying levels of peace with that – but the older I get, the better I become at accepting that this is who I am and that there’s no shame in it. I’ve learned that I don’t have to pretend to be OK just to keep those around me comfortable, and that’s a valuable lesson indeed.

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sugar therapy

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This week has been kind of shit-tastic. Mass shootings, Republicans trying to de-fund Planned Parenthood for like the 85th time, bad weather, fuckery at work, on and on.

Normally my strategy for dealing with stress like this is to drink, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’m not saying it’s a GOOD strategy…but, you know, it’s better than some.

Anyway.

I had already decided this afternoon that an adult beverage or two was in order this evening. Then, on the way home, a brilliant plan struck me: why not drink…AND build a gingerbread house! My husband was going to be out playing cards with his buddies so it was a perfect opportunity to have a dinner that he’d totally hate, then crack a bottle of wine that he’d also hate, and make a huge sugary mess on the kitchen table.

SOLD!

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Sugar and wine! How bad can it go?

It should be noted that this kit came with directions. I didn’t READ the directions until much later in the process…but it DID come with directions. Good for Hasbro, trying to make things easier for people. The kind of people that read directions before getting halfway through something and realizing they might have fucked up, anyway.

It turns out that what you’re SUPPOSED to do is apply the icing and construct the house first, THEN use the rest of the icing to apply candy decorations.

My problem with this plan is as follows: who the FUCK other than professional bakers who work with piping bags on a regular basis can pipe icing decorations onto a surface at a frigging 90 degree angle?

Not THIS bitch, that’s fo’ sho’.

So, rather than follow the prescribed order of operations, I applied Shelby Logic and did what I fucking wanted. Incidentally, this may be a large part of why I failed Algebra three times in high school as well.

Shelby Logic says that decorating the walls of the house while they’re still flat on the table makes WAY more sense, so that’s what I did. I decorated THE SHIT out of all four walls, then I went to stick them together in the little tray that comes with the kit…and started to realize the possible error of my ways.

It turns out that the reason they have you stick the walls together in the tray first is because you can’t lay an already-decorated piece of gingerbread decorated-side down in order to apply the frosting for the joins, and it’s actually surprisingly hard to apply the frosting evenly with one hand while holding said piece of gingerbread up with the other. Especially when one has been drinking. Also, there’s the fact that if you do it the “right way”, the joints have time to harden up before you put the roof on, which saves a lot of panicking about the whole structure caving in when you insist on trying to spread icing flat across the roof parts later on.

Ahem.

Anyway, I channeled my inner Tim Gunn and made it work:

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As Tim would say, “that’s a LOT of look”.

It’s a little rickety in places, but it’s not like I’m gonna be playing Gingerbread Barbie with it or anything so I think it’ll be ok.

And you know what? People are going to be dicks, stuff is going to go wrong, bad things are going to happen…but it’s ok. Life goes on.

And gods willing, I won’t have a hangover tomorrow.

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

 

on heredity, crafting and keeping (relatively) sane

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I forgot to post yesterday.  I meant to do it when I got home last night but then I got waylaid cooking dinner and doing work baking.  Then, I sat down to watch TV with my husband and, as usual, picked up the nearest craft project to start working on.

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Tiny baked goods and kitchen implements, hooray!

 

At that point, any chance of getting some writing done went straight down the drain.

Crafting, or as I like to call it, “making shit“, is something that I’m genetically predisposed to.  My dad’s always been a builder, making everything from birdhouses to, well…people houses!  My paternal grandmother was a talented knitter, quilter and seamstress, and even designed and sold dress patterns as a young woman in the early 1950’s.  Her mother before her also made braided rugs as well as knit, crocheted, sewed, and embroidered.  My great-grandmother’s specialty as a young woman was crocheted lace.  I have many examples of her very fine handiwork on the edging of finished embroidery projects like table runners and antimacassars, as well as some doilies and even a small fabric book full of swatches and motifs she did as she learned new patterns.

Making things is clearly in my blood – it’s something I can’t (and wouldn’t want to) fight – but it’s also something that helps keep me sane, a form of meditation for me.  When my ADD-and-anxiety-plagued imagination is bombarding me with a million bajillion completely unfeasible scenarios of how badly everything can go, knitting or stitching give me a way to step out of that crazy feedback loop for a while and just focus on one stitch at a time.  When I’m so, so sad or angry and I feel like I can’t do anything right, making little lines of stitches with a needle and thread or yarn shows me that actually, yes, I CAN do at least this one tiny thing right in this one moment.

Moments eventually build up to minutes, which pile up to hours, and suddenly I’ve made it through another day.

Many mental health problems are hereditary, just like other traits and predispositions.  I know my grandmother suffered from bouts of anxiety and depression throughout her life, though it was not something that was considered appropriate to talk about when she was elderly, let alone when she was my age.  I didn’t know my great-grandmother well enough to know whether she had similar issues as well. But, it does sometimes make me wonder if these women’s legacies of prolific crafting and fiber artistry may have stemmed not just from a need to express themselves creatively but also a need to self-soothe or to step out of their own mental feedback loops for a time like I do now.

 

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.

easy come, easy go

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This morning while I was cooking breakfast, Husband was harnessing up the dog for the morning constitutional and said something to him about being “just a poor puppy”. In my head that immediately turned into “I’m just a poor pup, nobody loves me”, which in turn lead to me singing Bohemian Rhapsody in dog-voice while Husband made the dog dance along.

That was quite possibly the sanest thing I did all morning.

It went downhill quickly after that, with stops at “surely I’ll have time to watch an episode of Jeopardy without being late for work”, and “this sweater with giant horizontal stripes doesn’t look THAT bad on me”, before reaching the near-inevitable nadir of me choosing to fully line my eyes with black eyeliner a la Jared Leto circa 2006:

30 Seconds to Mars, indeed. It almost works in a goth-lite type of way in this picture but trust me, it's much more ridiculous in real life.

30 Seconds to Mars, indeed. It almost works in a goth-lite type of way in this picture but trust me, it’s much more ridiculous in real life.

And I’ve still got bloody fucking Bohemian Rhapsody stuck in my head, four hours later.

“Scaramouche, Scaramouche, WILL YOU DO THE FANDANGO?!”

hear me roar…quietly, and mostly to myself…

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Yesterday evening while walking the dog, I got heckled by a stranger.  I had scolded the stranger for driving too fast down our quiet dead-end road (by way of yelling “SLOW DOWN!” and waving the mail I was clutching in one hand while I tried to keep my small and exuberant dog from getting run over with the other hand).  The stranger pulled into the neighbor’s driveway and stood making what I can only assume to be entitled commentary on my physique while I made my way up the road toward where he was parked.  Once I came into earshot, he shared some choice opinions with me, to which I replied with a few of my own, all the while not slowing down my pace.  The words themselves are not as important as the intention.  This guy, whether drunk, high, or just an asshole, had decided that since I was a woman and/or a person of significant size, that I could be bullied.  In that split second he judged me as someone who would take his bullshit, but he was wrong, and it got me thinking.

I am someone that prefers to be quiet most of the time.  I am bookish and nerdy, I like to knit, I am often lost in my own daydreams.  I detest small-talk because I’m terrible at it. I am confrontation-averse because I have a hard time arguing / debating – my brain is usually going in 47 different directions and I struggle to settle on a point, let alone the language to convey said point, unless I am at a keyboard where I can go back and edit myself continually (and even then, I’m generally far from eloquent).

None of these things, however, mean that I’m easily scared or intimidated.  If someone says something I don’t agree with, I will most definitely speak up.  I sometimes regret having done so after the fact, but I’m by no means afraid to speak my mind.  Also, possibly because I have always been physically large my whole life and grew up around many other large people (genetically, I couldn’t escape being big even if I wanted to. If I lost 150lbs of excess weight, I’d still be built like a linebacker because that’s just how everyone in my family is built), I am not very easily intimidated physically either.  My mom and I used to soda-bottle sword-fight or milk-jug box in the kitchen for fun when I was a kid.  Those activities are exactly what they sound like – hitting each other with empty 2-liter soda bottles or gallon milk jugs until someone legitimately got hurt and stopped playing or we were both laughing too hard to continue.  I doubt she was doing it on purpose at the time, but my mother basically taught me via goofy semi-violence in the kitchen that I was a fighter.  I’m never going to be the one running TOWARD a fight (unless a loved one is in trouble), but if a fight comes to me, I’m not going to run AWAY from it.

I’m made of far harder stuff than I sometimes give myself credit for.  I bet you are, too.  Let’s remember we talked about it so that the next time we need a boost, we can come back and remind ourselves that we’re actually bad-asses who don’t take anyone’s shit.  Deal?

pterodactyl troll attack

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Our xBox (which is what we use to watch Netflix, among other things) has a Kinect…unit? Camera? Thing.  One of the functions the Kinect thing can do is operate the xBox via voice command.  If you say, “xBox!”, a little menu of things it can do for you (none of which involve putting away the laundry or emptying the dishwasher, much to my disappointment, but I digress), will pop up on the screen.  You can tell it to play the next episode of the show you’re watching, exit to the main menu, shut the console off, etc.

Ever since we got the xBox and Kinect thing a few years ago, my husband has been kind of fixated on the voice command feature.  He has a British accent and the xBox doesn’t always seem to pick up / understand what he’s saying…so I think part of the fixation is that he maybe wants to prove to the xBox that he is, in fact, in charge.

Now, I’m an asshole.  I like to fuck with my husband by trying to talk over him while he’s talking to the xBox because he gets all exasperated when the xBox doesn’t recognize him or doesn’t do what he tells it to do.  Consequently, any exchange he has with the xBox while I’m around usually goes like this:

Husband: “xBox!”

(xBox chimes and pops up the menu)

Husband: “Mai…”

Me, cutting him off: “xBox, nooo!”

Husband: “Main Men…”

Me: “No, xBox, noooo! Cancel, cancel!”

Like I said, I’m an asshole.  He knew this when I married him.

Anyway – so this morning, we were sitting around watching The League on Netflix before Husband had to go to work.  The last episode ended and true to form, Husband piped up with his “commanding” voice:

“xBox!”

The xBox chimed and popped up the menu. The game was afoot.

Husband: “Exit Netflix!”

Me: “Nyerrrrrrhe!”

The xBox went to the main menu.  I was going to have to try harder.

Husband: “xBox!”

Me: “WAAAHHHGGG!”

The xBox popped up its menu like an obedient little robot.

Husband: “Main Menu!”

Me, talking over him loudly: “Raaaah! No, xBox, noooo!”

The xBox didn’t respond.

Husband, louder: “MAIN MENU!”

The xBox popped to the main menu with a happy little chime.  At this point, I knew I was going to have to bust out the really big guns if I was going to win this game. I took a stealthy deep breath, readying my diaphragm. I used to be a singer – if there’s one thing I can do, it’s project my voice.

When my husband opened his mouth to give the xBox the “Settings” command, I unleashed what was later described by him as a reasonable facsimile of a pterodactyl cry.  Husband screwed his face up in the most precious display of bemusement I’ve ever seen on another human being and I just completely LOST it.  I went into one of the longest bouts of no-breath silent-wheeze laughter I’ve ever experienced.  I finally managed to claw my way out of it long enough to gasp for air only to get sucked in again just as hard because the whole time, I could hear Husband in the background STILL trying to talk to the fucking xBox!  The xBox must have picked up my wheezing gasping laughter, (possibly it’s programmed to pick up signs of bodily distress?), because it just sat there with the menu up, still waiting to be told what to do next even though Husband was booming “SETTINGS!” at it in what I can only imagine is his best impression of a British headmaster.  This, of course, made the entire thing all the more funny to me and I remained incapacitated, wracked with sobs of laughter, for a good five solid minutes after Husband had finally got the xBox to shut itself off and had stomped upstairs.

Moral of the story:  Even when pterodactyl doesn’t win, it always wins.

BA-KAAAAAAAAAHW!