The end of party food

Ugh. I feel sick. Do you think it's because I ate the last of the party food for lunch today? I'm going to choose to blame PMS and the lack of coffee this afternoon. Why is it only 4:15? This has been the longest 3-day workweek ever! Thank goodness I'm taking tomorrow off.

Gripe, gripe, gripe.

Sandwich dream

I had the strangest dream last night...(and isn't that opener always a cue to zone out or fake a head injury to end the conversation immediately? Because no one's recap of their dream is ever nearly as interesting as they think it is. Dreams basically are ineffable--no one will ever truly grasp the fucked-up imagery specific to the little mental corner of your world.)

Anyway, in the dream I was eating a sandwich. It was a steak sandwich, or possibly a patty melt. The point is that the bread was incredibly hard to chew and there was a great sense of frustration that chewing and tasting didn't seem to be working well, although the sandwich looked really good. I woke up face down with my mouth wide open, tongue dripping all over the sheet. That would explain the difficulty in chewing.

I had been reading Everyday Food just before bed--the steak/grilling issue.

The season of craving

Yay for me, I just scheduled a massage for my day off on Friday! It's another excessive expense, but I've been ignoring the alternate numbness and tingling extending from my shoulders to my hands for several weeks now. Yes, someone needs to address this problem.

Also, there's a Cold Stone Creamery a few doors down from the spa place, so I like to stumble over there in my post-massage daze and get a big vat of mocha-and-brownie ice cream. Even if I weren't PMSing, it would be a near-religious experience.

Yes, it's the season of craving. For instance, I am craving the Rescue Me Season 1 DVD. That Fox network, they're getting savvy and expeditious with their boxed set releases. I would also spring for The Job DVD set. That show one me over despite my determination to hate it. Denis Leary and his creative partners just have the knack for drawing human, sympathetic characters that suck you in even if you think they're assholes. Also, I have a strange fascination for Denis Leary and his scary, psychotic hotness.

Meatballs revisited

I forgot to update earlier on the party meatball situation. I freaked out and bought way too much food for the party, including a huge bag of meatballs. Luckily, much of it is designed for freezing. I predict that anyone who comes to my house for dinner in the next six months can expect meatballs of the world--spaghetti, teryaki, swedish-style. You might as well just tell me your preference before you visit.

A weekend to remember

They came, they ate brownies, they didn't sleep very much....

Sounds like the makings for a festive weekend, no? Friday night, JoJo and MC arrived from parts distant to help me prepare for my house-warming party on Saturday. MC drove, and we picked up Jo and our friend AI, who was returning home from a business trip, at the airport. There was much gorging on Mexican food (which was not dampened even by spontaneous vomiting at the table by AI's young toddler) and then a sleepwalk through the grocery store to get the last provisions for the weekend.

MC reported that she slept better in my guest room than she has in several years. I credit the soothing blue tone. Jo later reported similarly sound sleep on her last night in town.

Have I mentioned how awesome my friends are? My girls did major work prepping food and keeping things well-stocked during the party. My man-friend came over once the party had started, and he brought wonderful home-made food and later helped with clean-up. The whole party was a pretty major event with some serious worlds colliding: work folks, my sometimes eccentric family, my oldest friends and newer ones.

It made me very happy that my girlfriends liked my man-friend. It hadn't occurred to me that they wouldn't until that one split second just as they were meeting. The same feeling overwhelmed me the first time my parents came to see my house. The lesson here is to trust your intuition; things will be fine.

Everyone seemed to have a lovely time. The entertainment turned out to be AI's and another guest's toddlers having a Baby Meeting of the Minds. Their ritual, not unlike dogs sniffing each other, was for each to poke a finger into the other child's mouth. Then they exchanged purses and got along beautifully.

Another highlight: some dear friends from college, Dave and Page, have just moved back to town. They came to the party and then Sunday we checked out their new house and played with their 2-year-old son, who is dangerously cute.

Really, it was all quite perfect. I'm already considering the next party. Will it be a brunch with MC's killer cheese grits and mimosas from the several bottles of champagne people have given me? Or perhaps this fall, a dinner party on the patio. I need a little more recovery time. Haven't been this tired since college, I think.

OutRAGEous accent-AH

I think I'm having a bout of social anxiety, but only when I'm in the office. I think this means it's time for a vacation. I was on a big, anonymous conference call today, and when I asked a question, I totally got embarrassed and tongue-tied.

It didn't help that the operated pronounced my name "Short-TIE-na." Come on, my name is not that hard. People are dumb. So, I was half-distracted by that and almost corrected her to the 30-some-odd people listening, but I just let it go. Then I stumbled through my question and thanked the answerer abruptly before he was finished. And it turned out I wasn't as anonymous as I thought. My snarky sales rep was listening too, and called me up shortly afterwards to "address my concerns."

Actually, it was fine. The main dude on the conference call addressed the question wonderfully. The companies involved are scattered all over the world, and all the speakers had, as Monty Python would say, "outRAGEous accent-ahs." (http://www.intriguing.com/mp/holygrail.asp--look, FRENCH.WAV under "Sounds."

Quiet office

Do you ever have those days when humanity is just a little disappointing? I've been having a spell like that. It started, not surprisingly, during a trip to Sam's Club on Saturday. Something about the crush of people, swarming to gobble up the french toast stix samples and then jockeying to cut in line in front of you, it just gets a little disheartening. I know I'm being overly thenthitive, but the last few days seem filled with moments like this, where you think maybe you should just go form your own one-person country.

It's probably just summer-office funk. Last summer was quiet for a few weeks, but I stayed busy with a couple of big projects. This summer, I'm in a serious lull (that will eventually pick back up into a full-blown hurricane of activity, at which point I'll look back with envy on these boring days), and I find myself thinking I could get much more accomplished at home. Like cleaning. Cleaning has become a major part of my life. I shudder at the amount of water I use between dishwasher, clothes washer and lawn sprinkler. Good thing we have those fancy Artesian wells.

There must be meatballs

I packed a lunch last Friday, then left it at home. Happily, I left it in the refrigerator and it kept perfectly. I went to a restaraunt more than a week ago, and the nice waitron gave me a big vat of the salad dressing I love. It's honey-grapefruit vinaigrette. She said it keeps forever, so I'm seeing how long I can stretch it out.

Once again, the weekend came and went in a blur. I finished putting away everything in the office, and now there's only the mess of a guest room. I'll probably end up stuffing boxes in closets in preparation for next weekend's big shindig.

Made calls for big shindig. Sounds like some people will be out of town, but lots will be coming. I managed to track down my long-lost (well, since January) friends Dave and Page, who just moved back to town--like, five days ago. God bless 411-directory listings. Also, I made the important decision that there must be meatballs at my party.

Job interview from hell

I get to be on a panel interviewing someone for a job tomorrow. Actually, it's kind of cool--I don't think I've ever been on a full-blown panel. Once a co-worker and I team interviewed, but this time there will be five of us. Should be interesting. A couple of my co-panelists can get pretty grumpy. And my boss (my other boss, the one not on vacation) amused me by stating, "I'll likely invite the candidate to lunch if he doesn't frighten me." I guess there's always that possibility that we'll find ourselves with a raving maniac.

Friday, friday, friday

Friends,

There is no more bitter realization than waking from a deep sleep to your alarm, thinking at least it's Friday and I'm almost home-free, and then remembering no, it's only Thursday. And I agreed to help the Development staff call people today and remind them they'd pledged to donate money to our institution (and ask them to pay up, pronto).

Sigh. Otherwise, life should be fine. It's a gorgeous, slightly cooler day and I'm not overwhelmed at work right now. Quite the opposite, it's quiet to the point that I'm finding it hard to stay motivated. Apparently, I don't work well alone. Also, I'm somewhat caught up in the intricacies of planning my first party. What if it's lame? What if no one shows up? What if too many people show up and they don't have a good time? etc, etc.

But at least I know a few close friends will be there (hell, they're traveling some miles to get there), so I can think of nothing better than spending time with them. To hell with everyone else, whether or not they come to my stupid party. Yes, I will make a model hostess!

Summer skin

Well, summer is definitely in place on campus. It's dead, dead around here. People are taking weeks-long vacations and long lunches. The only folks you see around are high school students at the summer writing program and international executives here for training in the cotton industry (strange combination, I know).

The high schoolers just arrived yesterday. You can tell the difference from the college students because these kids are cleaner-looking and more passionate. They're here to write and make grand proclamations about themselves and Their Views. They're full of nervous, peer-pressured energy. They want to fit in even more than the freshmen at the beginning of fall semester.

I say all this with a good deal of sympathy, because I've been there. It's just interesting to recognize that kind of vibe from afar and have a vague stirring of memory. I'm glad I'm 31, and mostly comfortable in my own skin. Except when it's hot as hell, like it is today.

Shepherd's pie

Today I feel like the T.V. when reception isn't good--lots of static and a blurred picture. Perhaps it's a migraine. Maybe it's just that I nearly killed myself with yardwork Saturday and then flooded my dehydrated body with alcohol. Still, I had a lovely afternoon yesterday drinking beers on the patio of a "pub" (in a strip mall with a direct view of the Target, but still a nice-looking place outside and in) with my Irish-American man-friend. We had an early dinner of shepherd's pie and bangers & mash (respectively). It was a good way to spend a Sunday evening that otherwise would have been frittered away with hand-wringing because I didn't get enough done. So I didn't paint the shelves, unpack boxes, or haul the mountain of crap to Goodwill. It'll keep.

Went to a strange wedding party on Saturday night. The bride is someone I've known since junior high, and our mothers have remained friends. This, her second marriage, was precipitated by an unplanned pregnancy. All together, the new family will bring together five children. I hadn't met the groom before, and he turned out to be a 40-year-old frat boy who told me I looked familiar and then exclaimed, "Oh, I hope I haven't met you in a bar sometime when I was drunk. Did I say something offensive? Well, I apologize, etc. etc." In fact, I'm pretty sure that hadn't happened since I don't usually have random episodes of drunkeness in bars where I don't know people, but his paranoia makes me think it's par for the course with him. Whatever. Not a charming introduction.

At this party, I noticed there were a lot of women ranging from 20s to 50s that showed an alarming amount of cleavage, especially for a crowd drawn largely from the happy couple's Presbyterian bible study group. These are not the Presbyterians of my father's ancestry, nor of my college's founders. But, I guess parts of the Presbyterian church have become quite liberated, unlike us stodgy Catholics. The particular Presbyterian church in question has a reputation in the deep suburbs as quite the singles' magnet. It's God's meat market.

Luckily, I ran into a friend I've known since I was five, and her husband who I hadn't met before. The hostess, the bride's sister, has an amazing house, so we got the grand tour and enjoyed the terraced patio looking down on the pool (it's the rare hilly neighborhood in the area).

Saturday morning was a time warp of weed-pulling, and I have the spotty sunburn to prove it. I went out at 10 and after a while thought, "I'm a little hungry, it must be almost lunchtime." It was 1:30.

Good omens

Let the record show I believe I just heard the first cicada of summer. It may have been some kind of garden machinery, but I'm sticking to my guns. The timing is about right, anyway.

Because I like cicadas, and their rhythmic buzzing is the hallmark of childhood in the South, I will count them as a good omen for my friend Tammi, who has very happy news today. Congratulations, dear!

Friday lunch

I just had an awesome meal at one of the best restaurants in town. My boss took the department out as a celebration/yay us type of thing. She knows how to do things right. As if the Caribbean/Southern food weren't wonderful enough, it was all served on Fiestaware, which means I got an up-close sampling of all the available colors. Very helpful as I compile my wish list on Amazon, because you know the little photos they show you on the web are never very accurate color-wise. I've seen "cobalt" that looks near-black in some images, electric blue in others (it's near-black in person).

Speaking of Fiestaware, if you're interested in American ceramics/dishes, check out Laguna Pottery in Seattle. We wandered in there last summer while doing the tourist thing (it's right on Pioneer Square), and the owner is an expert and also a very nice human being. I'm kicking myself that I didn't buy more than just one piddly container when I was there, but I didn't have a house back then. Of course, Laguna ships, too. I can see a dish addiction taking root.

Psychic spam

No, no one is spamming my thought waves (though I'm certain it's soon to come), but this morning I received spam titled "large thighs please go away." How did they know I say this daily? I say it politely like that, too, hoping cellulite will listen to a kindly tone.

Queen of leftovers

Seems like a lot of stuff has been floating around in my head lately (how's that for the teen-angstiest sentence ever?). A lot of it is good stuff, like working on my new house and spending time with people I care about, but some of it is scary stuff, like the woman who was murdered about 10 blocks from my house and some of the spending time with people stuff because of its potential to lead down a painful road of long talks and hurt feelings that I've been down before.

That was quite a run-on sentence, no?

But one amusing thing that's been on my mind is a friend of a friend who has bizarre leftover-food habits. It's been known for some time (and is openly commented upon in front of the woman in question) the my friend's friend doesn't cook, no exceptions. She subsists in three ways: 1) eating in restaurants 2) taking restaurant leftovers home (including those belonging to her dining partners) and 3) collecting home-cooked and -tupperwared dinners that her mom makes for her.

So, according to my friend, this woman's freezer is a wall of little tupperware bricks. Food pyramid, indeed. That's all fine and dandy, but more recently the woman has begun to examine some extreme behavior. When invited to friends' houses for dinner, she loads up her plate with a disproportionate amount of food (and she's a small person), takes just a couple bites, and then asks to take the rest home. Apparently, this has gone to the extreme where the woman got a little hostile when someone reached to have another helping of something, even though her plate was still overfull from the food she'd already loaded on there.

Mostly I'm amused with this (and let me add that the woman is fabulously wealthy, so don't think I'm making fun of some poor, starving ragamuffin), but if someone looked in my fridge they might think I was the same way. My parents keep giving me so much food I don't even have time to eat my own leftovers. I hate throwing things out, but that's what it's coming to.

Weekend in suburbia

The summer heat finally settled over the suburban landscape this weekend. I haven't perspired this much since, well, last summer. A few minutes in the yard, and I was drenched. Inside, with a/c and ceiling fans going, I still worked up a sweat if I did anything more strenuous than sit on the couch.

But, it was a fine weekend. Saturday I had my first formal (not really formal, but planned) dinner guest. We celebrated his birthday with a meal of salmon, Greek potatoes and Armenian green beans--the ethnic recipes courtesy of a Moosewood Cookbook. (I have to digress here and say I love Moosewood's recipes, but sometimes find their proportions and cooktimes wildly inaccurate. My friend explains that "the original recipes were probably like 'saute these beans until you're finished smoking your joint....'" He has a point there.) We also had a lovely cheesecake courtesy of Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, in a waspy counterpoint to the crunchy main meal.

It's been a long time since I cooked a whole meal for anyone but myself. The timing went off without a hitch and everything turned out very well (there's usually one dish that could have been better, no?). The birthday boy was pleased, and it was a great little evening. After dinner we went out in the yard and saw an albino raccoon sniffing around my compost pile. I spotted one ten or more years ago in the neighborhood, so maybe this is the offspring. What is the life expectancy of a raccoon? Aren't albino animals considered lucky, or is it the opposite? Well, I took it as an auspicious sign.

Unfortunately, Sunday morning brought some disturbing news. A woman about a mile from where I live was murdered in her house, an apparent victim of a robbery. It appears to have been a random, unlucky event, which makes it all the scarier because it could have been any of us.

Glorious rain!

After about a month of drought, we finally got a good, twelve-hour, soaking rain yesterday. Everyone I talked to was thrilled with the prospect of not watering the yard. One friend reports making up a rain song on the spot, which he and his kids sang in celebration.

After hearing the news this morning, now I know where all our rain has been going. Laguna Beach holds fond memories for me, of trips to visit Miss Tammi; what a gorgeous place. On NPR this morning, one resident described her house as a "small cottage." I wonder if that cottage isn't pictured in the news link above, because all the houses make my own moderate dwelling look like a shanty. But I guess all things are relative in the world of over-priced real estate.

Changing topics, I had a dream the other night that my job was expanded from tending the school web site to also maintaining and preparing frog brains and other embalmed animal parts for biology classes. Everyone was mad because I apparently was supposed to have set out trays of fleshy animal bits in time for class, and I had totally forgotten.