these boots were made for .....erm. Snow :o(

Screen in the sink

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All the time in the world....and I did it to myself!

So, I won't go into the details but growing up in my house Thanksgiving was always greeted with trepidation. Something ALWAYS went tits up. Illness, broken bones, fires, mental breakdowns and subsequent removal of breaking down party by the police: you could always count on at least one of the above, and in many cases several of the above concurrently. I'm not even exaggerating.

Anyhoo, it's a bit of a running joke in our family. "watch out, Thanksgiving's coming" Gobble gobble has an entirely sinister connotation in our family. Like make a dracula/giant monster "I'm coming to kill you" motion and say "Gobble gobble" Welcome to my family.

So this year my sister is talking about her grand plans. She's having the outlaws over for dinner, got a giant bird, blah blah blah.

Me? I have no plans. I am PLANNING to have NO PLANS, which may or may not consist of awesome spontaneous things like not leaving the house, eating mac and cheese, sewing, walking dog and not showering- all to be done in due course if/when I feel like doing them. HN is planning to go home to his family, I opted for staying home alone with my sewing machine, a pile of projects and a spinning head full of ideas. Yahoo right?!

My sister calls me last night to tell me her oven just broke. They ordered a new one, and it will be in Monday. We have a good, relieved laugh. When you know the shoe is going to drop, it can all get a bit tense waiting to see who will get hit with the shrapnel and I was glad it was her and she was glad it was not involving safety of loved ones (seriously. this is how we roll. Pack of hot, neurotic messes we are). She can use her neighbor's oven and so keep on keeping on while at the same time maintaining the family curse. MULTI-TASKER!

So then (and this is the part where it's my fault), at about 9pm I see HN off onto the road, take a deep breath and sit down very well pleased with myself to begin to sew. Let me back up. I do a little dance about me being home alone with all my sewing, and the twilight zone episode from whence my title comes pops into my head. I even do a little "I have all the time in the world" dance and then I immediately clap my hand over my mouth because I HAVE JUST TEMPTED FATE. F! I know this rule!! This is another big one in my family, indirectly related to when people say things like "What else could go wrong?" and then Bad Things Happen. I think we have a direct pipeline to the ears of the fates because whenever someone says it, they inevitably find out in rather short order so as a general rule noone says it, and when someone does everyone yells at them and takes 5 steps back until we see what the damage will look like. (this is actually most excellent when done in my sister's presence. She gets angry, bonafide.)

I digress. Back to me babbling about all the time in the world. I immediately regretted my error, but it was too late so I began to think about what might go wrong. I do a little sewing, hit upon the idea I was looking for and forget my sorrows. I prepare a few pieces of fabric, so I can increase productivity and do my night's work assembly line style. I line everything up, insert a test swatch into my machine to check thread tension and KABOOM! The worst noise I've ever heard my sewing machine make, followed by a little rain of metal from above. NOT GOOD.

Now it's just me, my busted glasses and a back up plan.


Backup plans. That's what I'm thankful for this year.

Gosh! are you all dumb! MOM!!!

I have a new hero. See below, I copied this from a tech forum. Background unnecessary, this cheese stands alone.

JW has asked that NT Batch questions are not asked in an inappropiate forum.

You can not use the MSDOS in XP as it does not have any, will never have any and I would be pleased if everybody got this into their skulls. XP is based on IBM OS/2, NT3, NT4, W2K and therefore a 32bit O/S with an intergrated GUI, totally unlike MSDOS

Even Linux in command line looks similar to MSDOS, but it is Linix, please will all you NT users please read and digest the following article as it explains why NT is not MSDOS and MSDOS is an emulation:

http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/103161.html


So would you do this guy a favor and just get this into your skulls???

Adventures in awkward

Schematic of the incident

I don't know how I forgot to tell this story.

HN's mother and her husband were in town for a week or so and I took an afternoon to take them to the mall to pick up some ipods for their grandchildren blah blah blah. Anyhow, it was raining, and we're driving home, down a road that has 2 lanes in either direction. The car in front of me moves over to avoid a large puddle and I consider doing the same, but then somehow I'm all super smart and smarmy and thinking "I have all wheel drive, I won't hydroplane. That dude is a p*ssy" so I keep on in the same lane, and just as I'm about to hit the puddle I see this little old lady, more specifically I see her huge eyes and her big "O" of a mouth as she and I both realize she is about to get the puddling of her lifetime. I didn't at this point have time to switch lanes and hitting the brakes on water is just not good, so I just went for it and *really* hoped that on top of it I wouldn't hydroplane, because really, how embarrassing would that be. The speed limit on this road is like 45, really I had no time to do anything safely. So I did it. I hosed this lady down for DAYS.

Then I bit my lip, then I burst out laughing because HONESTLY 1) that's bad karma and now I know I have a puddling or something coming my way 2) I was so smug in my all wheel drive-ness and 3) your boyfriends PARENTS in the car when you pull shit like that? That's going to go far....

So I proceed to laugh somewhat hysterically, because it's all so weird and I'm so uncomfortable right now, only it's that crazy laugh where your eyes are telling the story of how weird you feel while your mouth kicks it up a notch by opening wider and being louder. So that goes on for a few minutes, with HN's mother just staring at me and my brain rapidly trying to close down everything that I am doing right now. I finally get myself under control, ensue awkward 5 minutes of silence and then HN's mother ends it all with. "Well. Shall we go somewhere and get some lunch. Perhaps you would have a glass of wine."

Indeed.

what is is

I have finally accepted that my bonsai tree is gone.


Making a quilt for my dad. Too busy?


Kitty is feeling better.

The good, the bad and the not very flattering

So the good is that I have a reasonably normal week ahoy. By that I mean I am not traveling this week, there are no out-of-towners to entertain and there is also something else that provides relief that I am currently unable to think of, but I'll let you know. But I know there were 3 things.

The bad is that I am still sick-ish. I can't even actually decide if I'm sick or if it really is allergies like I keep telling people - if I say it enough will it become true? Please? And if so, what am I allergic to exactly that has lasted this long? Fall? Baltimore? Wine? MYSELF???!

I guess if you look at me (this is where the not so flattering (but ugly would be a stretch) comes in) I might appear to be sick. At least this is the message I'm getting based on the fact that HN keeps looking at me and knotting his eyebrows together in concern and going "awwww". Whatever, we all express desire in different ways and I'm not here to judge. My chapped nose is quite probably considered sexy in many cultures, and I know women who sleep in wool hats and sweaters and cotton sweat pants with their faces buried in a handkerchief are also quite the turn on (although, I don't think if I were to wave and drop this particular handkerchief that HN would gallantly race to pick it up without a biohazard suit on).

Essentially this is what HN has been coming home to every day: Wild hair, because I can get through the shower part but I really just don't have blowdrying/styling in me right now so I pretty much trade in my hair towel for a hat and praise the fact that wool keeps you warm even when wet, bloodshot eyes with big sexy bags under them and a nose area which is just a hot mess of chapped skin/mucosal egress right now. Fuck, I think I've turned into my mother.


But I can still cook. Or at least I could 3 days ago and for now, we're still living large on leftovers.

Saturday HN's mother made this, which he seemed to like so I then duplicated it on Sunday because I had a pound of shredded chicken going nowhere fast in the fridge due to a slight miscalculation in whether I was making soup for 2 people or 10 last week. It turned out to be 2 and I was left with a ton of shredded chicken just waiting for me to do something with it. I had already made empanadas last week for company (empanadas de pino, using the recipe from cook's illustrated;big hit) and then used the leftover dough from that venture to make Moroccan spiced butternut squash empanaditas (fucking good) the next day. Anyhoo, I made the aji de gallina sunday, adding some Jalapeno powder and cumin but otherwise sticking mostly to the recipe. Solid dish, good use for the meat but I don't know that it's going into heavy rotation as a destination. I'm not a huge fan of chicken and cream based things. Meh.

Anyhow, I had a long solid day of doing nothing yesterday and am feeling like I could almost be on the mend. For dinner last night I ate a bowl of shredded beets and carrots as big as my head with some vinegar for good measure, and today I'm on a program of even more veggies (stuff is starting to go soft in the fridge while I convalesce) plus a shit ton of pickled hot peppers; vitamin C plus hellfire and brimstone and this cold/allergy/parasite doesn't stand a chance. I'm supposed to have an onsite meeting today and I'm on the fence. On the one hand, it would be nice to get out of the house and perhaps even to see people but on the other, the novelty of those things tends to wear off after 10 minutes or so, and then the actual meeting continues on for another hour, so this could backfire. I have 4 hours and a jar of hot peppers between me and the time of decision. I'm also contemplating in some area of my brain getting exercise, thinking that if I just start acting like I'm fine and everything is good then my body will fall in line.

Being sick is boring I guess is the bottom line. BO-RING. and also, I'm lazy, so I can never decide if I want to stay in bed/dog bed/house because I'm lazy or legit tired. Then I think of those germy posters on the subway, you know the ones: "If you're sick keep your broke ass at home" or whatever they say and I try to compare myself to the dude in the picture and wonder if they're talking to me. Maybe I'll call the person with whom I was supposed to meet and cough for her, let her decide if she's up to the risk. Caveat emptor and all that...