home alone 3: the sandwiching

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Oh, hey. Remember when I used to write shit here a long time ago? I should probably do that again. Right now seems like a good time since it’s a gorgeous day out, I told like three different people I’d visit them today, AND I have a list of Chores I Wanted To Get Done. So obviously, the best course of action is to procrastinate like a motherfucker.

Anyway.

The last couple weeks have been weird. My husband has been having to work later shifts than normal so I’ve been home alone for dinner like 3-4 nights a week lately. On the one hand, that means less dishes to wash and not having to watch Judge Judy while we eat (don’t ask). On the other hand, I get weird when I’m home alone.

I mean, I’m definitely weird anyway, but Home Alone me is…weirder. More weird? Whatever. You wouldn’t think it would affect me much, considering I was an only child who was alone a lot growing up and then I lived by myself for like seven years before I got married. But, yeah. Home Alone me is an odd duck.

Basically, I forget how to feed myself when I’m home alone. Not in the sense that I run around smearing pureed squash on the dog instead of eating it (the squash I mean, not the dog. He’s kind of an ‘it’ because he’s neutered, but I definitely wouldn’t eat him. Wait, what? Jesus, reel it in Shelby. Gahd.), but more in the “let’s eat three bites each of several disparate foodstuffs, or just a generally inappropriate amount of any one thing and call that dinner” sense. One night last week it was smoked cheese, maple creme cookies and chicken soup. Not all together, but like…a few bites here, a few bites there. One other night I had like four pieces of bread and butter, and a beer. NOT AN APPROPRIATE DINNER ON ANY LEVEL.

It’s not just dinner. Pretty much any meal where I don’t have to feed another human being other than myself, I end up eating strangely. This afternoon, for example, Mark is out doing a thing and I’ve managed to eat: four dates, a handful of salt-and-vinegar almonds, and a “sandwich” for “lunch” (picture me air-quoting those). The “sandwich” consisted of a piece of steak left over from last night’s dinner, stuck between two pieces of the Cheddar Parmesan sourdough bread I made yesterday. No dressing, no veggies, no accoutrements of any kind. I didn’t even fucking slice the steak or warm it up first!

You think I’m kidding but I’m not:

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Seems legit.

 

I guess throwing a steak between two pieces of bread and calling it a sandwich isn’t THAT weird in the grand scheme of things, but still. For someone who actually really likes to cook, you’d think I could have come up with something a little more ambitious to gnaw on.

 

 

a walk in the wet

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The dog needs walks. I need walks too, but I’m a dumb human and I often manage to convince myself otherwise. There are other things I think I could / should be doing – things I’d rather do than leash up the dog and spend fifteen minutes stopping every five steps while he sniffs the latest intensely mysterious whatever. Again, I’m a dumb human and that’s what I convince myself of.

Some days are different, though. Sometimes I find a brief respite from myself. I can go not just out of doors, but truly outside.

The smell of mud.

The humidity rising off of the rapidly melting snow.

The rhythm of my and Junie’s feet on the tar.

The dingy quilt of lowering grey clouds.

The near-constant sigh of traffic on the interstate a short distance away.

These sensations all become amplified when I start to let myself notice them.

The dog doesn’t care where we go. He doesn’t care how fast we go. He only wants to GO. And some days I am in the right frame of mind and I understand.

It’s not about how far or how fast or what direction. It’s the going itself that matters. As long as you can keep going, you’re doing alright.

 

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You’ll have to use your imagination for the mud smell and the satisfying squishing noises.

 

I don’t get it.

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This is my favorite dog in the whole world other than Junior. Just FYI.

You know how sometimes someone shares a link to something, saying things like “OMG, you have to read this, IT’S HILARIOUS”, and then when you click on the link and read the thing it’s…not that funny?

Or worse, you click on the link, read the thing, and find it to be not only NOT funny, but actually pretty dumb and/or ignorant?

And then you sit there thinking back on all the past interactions you’ve had with the link-sender, trying to figure out where things went so wrong in your relationship that they picked up the impression that you would think shit like THAT was amusing?

And because you’re now well down the hyper-analytical rabbit hole, you then start wondering if you even really know ANY of your friends AT ALL, and wondering if anyone truly knows YOU at all, and what’s the point of even trying to interact with anyone socially in a world where it’s technically not acceptable to sit someone down and make them fill out a pre-screening friendship questionnaire because fuckin’ A man, life is short and ain’t nobody got time to waste laughing politely at jokes that aren’t funny?

And further to that end, are all these people who are laughing at YOUR OWN jokes just laughing politely because they’re normal and well-adjusted and don’t get annoyed when things with a build-up of “this is really funny” don’t actually pan out to any amusement whatsoever?

No? Just me? Fair enough. I kind of suspected as much.

Carry on.

showering with ghosts, aka: you can’t go home again

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I spent this past weekend at my parents’ house. They had planned a trip out of town and we were staying at their house to keep their dogs company.We live three miles down the road from them so it’s not like we had very far to go to get there, but it was an interesting experience none the less.

Sleeping in my old room was weird but not terribly so. It’s funny how quickly you become reacquainted with things – traffic noise from the nearby road, the way the neighbor’s outside light shines in the bedroom window just so, the sounds of the house creaking and popping in the cold (it was 15 below on Saturday night, not including the wind chill). I wouldn’t say that I slept great while we were there, but it felt pretty familiar even so.

What really threw me off though, was taking a shower at their house. The shower isn’t any different than it ever was – same grey tiles, same black grout. Same creepy drain cover that isn’t actually attached but rather just sits there over the drain hole and slides off if you hit it with your toe. I read too much Stephen King as a teenager to ever be ok with anything other than firmly affixed drain covers, for what it’s worth.

Anyway – point being, nothing about the shower itself had changed appreciably since the last time I showered there many years ago. And really, it’s not like I’ve changed all that much either. But there was just something about standing there smelling the slight sulfur funk of the water, looking out the frosted glass door into the grey and blue bathroom, touching that damn drain cover with my toes and getting creeped the fuck out by it all over again. It wasn’t nostalgic as much as…just wrong feeling. It felt like I was intruding – like I had walked into a stranger’s house and gotten into their shower, but at the same time it was all incredibly familiar because I’ve done it thousands of times before.

It was like I remembered the shower, but the shower didn’t remember me. And that was a little bit sad-making.

But then I got over it because the alternative was to start taking showers at my parents’ house more often and I’m sorry but that drain cover is just WAY too fucking creepy. NO THANK YOU.

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Here’s a sassy baby skunk picture I found on Google after I did an image search for “creepy drains” and scared myself so badly that nothing other than a cute animal picture palate cleanser could make me feel better about life. Baby skunk says GOOD DAY TO YOU, SIR!

a bone in hand is worth two in the…WAIT…

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I’ve had a big raw-hide bone sitting around in my office for like, a year and a half.

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ang nyang nyang

Originally, I brought it in for my boss’s dog, Remy. Remy started coming in to the office with my boss a few days a week because the other family dog (who had been Remy’s side-kick for his whole life), had recently passed away and Remy was having some separation anxiety issues. He was a big, goofy, friendly golden retriever (is there any other kind?), and he liked to rest his chin on my lap while I was typing. I’d have entire conversations with him (like I do with my own dog), complete with “Remy voice” answering my questions to him, etc.

As an aside, if my office-mates were at all iffy on my level of crazy before (which…doubtful), I’m sure that seeing the way I carried on when the dog was in the office PRETTY MUCH cemented it for them.

Anyway.

So, my one beef with Remy was his amazingly foul breath. He was an old dog and had some sketchy teeth. Plus dogs like to eat gross stuff and Remy was no exception. It was summer when he was visiting us so with the combination of his long flowing coat and our suck-ass air conditioning, it made for a lot of panting. Bad-teeth-scented, “I cleaned the catbox for mom and dad right before we came to work and I don’t have thumbs so I think you know what THAT means”-tinged, eye-water-inducing panting. With his chin in my lap. Often for upwards of 10-15 minutes at a time. Usually while looking up at me in that angelic way that made it impossible for me to tell him to go away because I am a SUCKER.

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“Sure, I eat poop. You’re still going to pet me, though. Come on, pet me. DOOO ITTTTT.”

Brushing Remy’s teeth was kind of out, because I wanted to actually keep all my digits intact and also it wasn’t really my place to start doing hygiene maintenance on someone else’s dog (although knowing my boss, he probably would have been all for it and may have even offered me money to do it). The next best thing I could think of was a rawhide bone. I was hoping that if I brought one in for him, he’d gnaw on it a little and scrape a couple layers of olfactory horror off his chompers before coming to rest his chin in my lap for scritch-time. I talked to Boss to make sure it was ok, then I went out and procured a nice big golden retriever sized rawhide bone.

As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, Remy gave nary a single winged fuck about that bone. He barely sniffed at it when I presented it to him. I left it on the floor by his snooze spot for a full week in the hopes he might get curious and give it a try.

Nope. Not one nibble. Not even another sniff.

Sighing and steeling myself for afternoons of smelling catshit-flavored death-breath from then on, I picked the bone up, set it on a shelf behind my desk and basically forgot about it unless someone came in and made a comment or joke about it.

Fast forward to today.

The guy that rents the office across the hall has a big, elderly black lab mix that he brings to work with him most days. He keeps the dog shut up in his office with him for the most part, but sometimes he doesn’t close the door tightly so the dog noses it open and goes on walk-about around the second floor. The guy is usually very quick to herd the dog back into his office but today I guess he was on the phone or something because Neighbor Dog was standing at the top of the stairs wagging his tail happily as I made the steep and arduous trek back up to my aerie (seriously, these stairs are fucking brutal. It’s like Frodo’s climb up Mt. Doom every morning when I get to work).

I stopped at the top and gave Neighbor Dog some well-deserved skritches, then continued on to my office, dog following closely behind. Guy Across The Hall popped his head into my office shortly there-after and apologized for the dog bothering us. We said no, of course it wasn’t a bother, we liked the company, etc. Then all of a sudden I remembered the rejected rawhide bone. I held it up (the dog had his back turned) and raised my eyebrows questioningly. Guy smiled and nodded, saying, “sure!”, so I stepped around the partition and presented the bone to Neighbor Dog.
Neighbor Dog sniffed it once and looked at me, slightly puzzled. I offered it again, saying “it’s ok, you can haz”.
He sniffed it again cautiously, then gave a big wag of tail, chomped onto the bone and bolted across the hall with it, much to my joy (and not a small amount of relief, honestly. I didn’t know if I could take another bone rejection).

So, moral of the story I guess, is to always keep a rawhide bone at your desk.

And that even if one shit-breath dog doesn’t want your bone, another one will eventually come along who does.

And most importantly, that dogs are awesome. Even the shit-breath ones.

Also, I ramble. But you know that by now.

drum roll, please

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We’re officially in business!

And when I say “we”, I mean…me. Which includes the voices in my head, so I can get away with “we”. Are you really going to argue the point with someone who just admitted to hearing voices? I DIDN’T THINK SO.

Anyway. Back on track, Shelby.

I finally got around to making a real cross stitch pattern and opening an Etsy shop yesterday: How Bad Can It Go Designs !

If you’ve been following along on Instagram (@ealachan), Twitter (Alpacalypse5, or check out #howbadcanitgoblog) and admiring the recent pictures of the “Piss Off” piece I was working on, you can now buy the pattern and make one yourself for the low, low price of just $5. Sweet, right?

Here’s the finished piece in all the glory that my crappy fluorescent kitchen light can muster:

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Don’t let the border scare you off. It looks way more complicated than it really is. Says she who stitched most of it in varying states of inebriation. Ahem.

I’ll be putting more patterns up soon – I have one for a cheeky bookmark all ready to go, and I’ve got an ever-growing list of snarky sayings, suggestive song lyrics and nerdy movie quotes that I’m plotting designs for. If you have any specific requests let me know and I’ll see what I can come up with! I’ll eventually start selling finished pieces as well, for those who admire irreverent cross stitch but don’t want to / can’t be arsed to stitch it themselves. I may at some point start offering kits as well, but that’s still kind of a nebulous needs-more-thinking-on-and-probably-requires-more-planning-than-I’m-capable-of-and-how-long-can-I-make-this-sentence-now-that-I’m-on-a-roll type thing.

Wheeeee, commerce!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

sometimes a plane is just a plane

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Saturday morning Junior was at the groomer getting his hurr did and I had two hours to kill. I knew that if I stayed in town I’d end up living out one of several scenarios:

  1. I’d go to WalMart and spend way too much money on a bunch of shit I didn’t need, including but not limited to make-up that I end up never wearing,
  2. I’d go to Sephora and end up blowing half the rent money on buying all eleventy billion colors of Kat Von D Tattoo eyeliner which is my new most precious favorite thing ever,
  3. I’d eat my way through half the fast food joints on the strip because clearly I hate not only my circulatory system but also my liver, brain and colon,
  4. I’d go to Pier One and spend a small fortune on wooden giraffes (you can TRY to explain to me why I don’t need like seven of those motherfuckers but I will never believe you. NEVER.)
  5. I’d go to SuperCuts and get a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad haircut.

All of these scenarios ultimately end with tears…usually mine. I know because I’ve actually done all of them, with the exception of buying the wooden giraffes.

So, instead of subjecting myself to the clearly unmanageable temptations of downtown West Lebanon, N.H., I decided I’d drive up the hill and hang out at the airport. Not like, the inside of the airport where people are waiting around for flights (though that holds a certain appeal as well, though probably better done in larger airports where more than like six people are in there at any one time and people will get creeped out by the fat lady with no plane ticket doing cross-stitch in the corner for two whole hours), but rather out in the observation…area? Parking lot? Basically, it’s the back side of the airport. There’s a big chain-link fence to keep dingbats like me off the runways, but you can park up and watch the one or two planes an hour take off / land. There’s almost never anyone else up there, at least not in the winter, so I can sit in my car cackling at ‘Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me’ and doing my cross-stitch in relative peace.

When I got to the place I normally park up, there was a jet sitting just on the other side of the fence. It was a smallish jet, what I later learned was a Gulfstream 5. I learned that by, out of sheer random curiosity, punching the registration numbers emblazoned on the tail of the jet into Google. Not only was I able to find out what kind of plane it was, but I was able to see who it was registered to and, after a little dicking around, could actually find a cataloging of all the recent flights this plane had taken.

WEIRD, RIGHT?!

This is probably a good time to remind you that my run-away imagination is built for conspiracy theories. I wish it was built for like, writing enormously popular novels or screenplays because that would be way more lucrative and life-improving, but no. It’s pretty much all conspiracy theories all the time up in my ol’ cabeza.

So, when I was sitting there seeing all these details for the flights of this plane come up (on my PHONE, no less. We live in the future and it’s a magical place, people!), of course my brain was starting to rub its figurative little hands together, going “Yes, I can work with this. YESSSSSS.”  Pretty soon I was Googling the company that the plane was registered to (some kind of crazy hedge fund investment firm thing in Manhattan), and coming up with all kinds of far-fetched reasons why rich Manhattan-ite investment bankers would be flying a private plane to East Desolation, N.H. in the middle of January (which, trust me, is NOT the time you want to be here unless you’re a skier. Or a polar bear. And even then, your judgement is suspect). Everything from shady investment deals to covert extra-marital get-aways to a corporate team-building workshop (‘come survive the wilds of New Hampshire in the middle of January with nothing but the clothes on your back, a book of matches and three tins of Alpo’) bubbled up from the dregs of my imagination and it was altogether entertaining.

Later on when I got home and told Mark about my adventures in low-level phone-based Internet sleuthing, and questioned why all these people on Internet message boards would be talking about THIS SPECIFIC PLANE unless it was A VERY IMPORTANT PLANE, he totally burst my bubble. Turns out plane-spotting is a big hobby, just like train-spotting – people hang around airports and take note of the tail numbers of planes they see on the tarmac, then post the details on the Internet so that other people can “track” the planes. There’s even an app you can buy that lets you input the tail numbers and plot all the plane’s flights on a map.

So, fuck it. Next time I have to wait for the dog to get his hair cut, I’m totally buying myself a wooden giraffe. Maybe two.

 

giraffe

You cannot even fathom the dog-propelled chaos that would ensue if I brought this home. Junior would alternately try to hump it, chew on it, and refuse to come into the room where it resided, out of sheer terror. I need like…three.

 

 

 

 

Mexican candy

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The other day one of my co-workers sent an email out to the office saying that there was a bunch of Mexican candy in the kitchen if anyone wanted to try some.

My first thought was, “I wonder if that’s a euphemism for heroin”.

My second thought was, “That’s probably insensitive. Good thing I didn’t say it out loud”.

My third thought was, “Why am I still sitting here talking to myself when there’s free candy?”  And with that, I was off down the stairs like a shot.

Turns out co-worker was being extremely literal – it was actual candy from Mexico that a family member had sent him for Christmas. There were little chocolate chew things, some rolls of fruity gummy stuff, and these quite lovely caramel disc things that were sandwiched between Communion-esque wafers.

There were also some crazy peanut butter marzipan things that looked for all the world like peanut butter fudge, except that really they were just compressed powdered peanut butter and marzipan, so when you’d go to break a piece off it would crumble into a pile of delicious dust in your hand. I completely do not understand the logic.  If you want to sell tons of candy, shouldn’t you make it easy to consume, especially on the fly? There’s no way you could eat one of these peanut butter things on the go. You’d get covered with sugary peanut marzipan dust and everyone would look at you super weirdly when you sat there at a red light trying to lick all the delicious candy dust off you arms on the way home from work. And don’t even get me started on kids trying to eat a candy like this. No sane parent would ever let their kid into the house with loosely compressed clods of sugary peanut butter dust that disintegrate with merely a stern look. You’d be finding thin films of peanut butter dust on every surface for weeks. Which, I guess if no one is around to see you lick it up then you have nothing to worry about, but still.

Anyway. Back on track.

There was one other kind of candy in the pile. These things:

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Mmm, hot and salted. Two qualities I always look for in a candy. And life, really.

The description on the wrapper was so weird that I couldn’t resist it. Like a moth to a flame, I grabbed one and peeled back the wrapper. The texture was something like a less chewy version of fruit leather. I broke a little piece off the corner and sniffed it. Hmmm, raisin-y! I was super skeptical of the whole “hot and salted” thing advertised on the label, but in true How Bad Can It Go spirit, I popped it into my mouth anyway.

At first taste, I was screwing my face up and saying I didn’t like it. It was sour and weirdly salty and sweet all at the same time (though I didn’t get any heat from the chile in it at all, and usually I’m overly sensitive to chiles). I totally wasn’t into it. I didn’t spit it out, but I set the candy aside and kept kind of side-eyeing it suspiciously for a while.

However, not one to be bested by a confection, Mexican or otherwise, I eventually broke off another little piece and tried it again.

And now, I might be addicted. These things are bizarrely delicious. There’s something about the sweet-salty-sour combination that ends up giving the impression of savoriness. I mean, it’s not like eating a piece of steak type savory, but all the flavors end up balancing each other out and it’s just…good.

Weird.

But good.

(Like me! Heh.)

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.

 

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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.