conquering the csa while sitting in front of the tv

Did you know that my one-day-a-week job is now two days a week? It goes without saying that I am not cut out for such a rigorous schedule.

The yachtsman appears to be growing a huge mustache (pronounced moose-TASH).

All I want to do right now is watch TV.

But first I'm going to tell you how to roast some little plum tomatoes. As if you didn't already know.

Cut off the ends, then cut them in half the short way, place them on a baking sheet (lined with parchment paper for easy cleanup, if you like), douse them with olive oil, sprinkle with salt,


and roast them in the oven at a very low temperature (200-225 degrees) for a very long time—several episodes of Mad Men, a couple of Friday Night Lights, a Party Down or two. Until they're shriveled, basically, but before they're overly chewy.

Toss them with pasta, serve with a salad, eat as a salty-sweet snack.

They can be refrigerated in an airtight container in their cooking oil, plus some extra, for a week or two, or stored frozen for much longer.

That mustache has got to go.

Please pass the remote.

where i've been

Cozying up to the space heater at a frigid, over-air-conditioned office.


Among other exotic locations. Speaking of which...look, it's Chester!


Cozying up to the yachtsman's boot at a different over-air-conditioned office.

We're living the high life, obviously.

you may say it's hoarding, but i call it being prepared, like a girl scout. a girl scout who is trying to earn her merit badge in hoarding.

What I brought to my one-day-a-week job for lunch today. And by lunch I mean

lunch,

Roasted Beet Salad With Almond Butter and Gorgonzola

afternoon snack,

Fruit and yogurt

dinner,

Greens with red-wine vinaigrette

A roasted-vegetable tart I plan to tell you about later this week, assuming I make it out of here alive.

dessert,


and midnight snack.


You may laugh, but if the apocalypse occurs while I'm at my one-day-a-week job and we are all trapped indefinitely in this office, my coworkers will be forced to live off the rotten leftovers polluting the staff fridge while I eat...well, nothing, because my food will be gone well before Armageddon and, come hell or high water, I am not touching anything in that nasty-ass refrigerator. Next week I think I'll supplement my lunch spread with MREs and powdered milk. Just in case.

for whom the bee stings

I'd intended to write and post something here tonight, but it's 1:30 a.m. and I just got home from my one-day-a-week job (I need to ask for a raise). So apropos of nothing I'd like to share with you my new favorite poem, the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which my friend (and cocktail-boat captain) Kate D., who's taking a beekeeping class, recently sent me.

Schmidt Sting Pain Index
1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.
1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
4.0 Pepsis wasp: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

provisions

I've been a real workaholic lately. (If saying that implies I have some kind of work ethic, let me rephrase: I've been an indentured servant lately.) No time to watch the Olympics for hours with the yachtsman each evening, no time for my usual 9.5 hours of sleep at night, and no time, obviously, for cooking. So it's good that a couple months ago I rediscovered the freezer.

For my entire adult life I've used the freezer to store ice cream, ice cubes, vodka, and frozen burritos. It never occurred to me to freeze gruel. But when I recently complained to my stepmom that I'd made a huge batch of soup and was sick of eating it, she suggested I portion and freeze it. The woman is a genius! And I am now a modern Laura Ingalls Wilder!

Instead of canning vegetables and salting pork or whatevs, I've been pouring gruel into Ziploc bags and saving it for...well, I'm not sure what I was saving it for, but it's going to come in handy this week as I continue my indentured servitude. On the menu for tomorrow: bread-less ribollita (the recipe for which I plan to share with you soon) and my brother-in-law's delicious chili. For Tuesday, vegetable soup and vodka.

d-o-u-g-h-n-u-t

Sent from my iPhone, bitches.

The blurry pastry pictured above is called a donut muffin (I just tried several times to properly spell donut in that last sentence but ultimately could not figure it out and settled on the convenience-store spelling. Seriously though: Donought? What makes this especially ironic/pathetic/frightening is that the photo above was taken a couple hours ago at my one-day-a-week proofreading job. Dounghut?). Do you know what a donut muffin is? It is delicious. It is cinnamon-y. It is sugary. It is cake-y, yet also fluffy. It is one hundred times better than the whole wheat muffins (which I just spelled m-u-f-f-i-n-g-s, but that was more of a typo than a complete loss of mind) I made this weekend and will tell you about later when I have learned to spell. For now, I'm going to bed, where I'm pretty sure visions of donut muffins will dance in my head.

hard times

I'm fairly certain that in a past life I starved my way through the Depression -- I cannot stand not knowing what my next meal is going to be, and when I don't know, I start hoarding. For example, today I didn't have time to go the grocery store before my one-afternoon/evening-a-week job, where I usually eat dinner and approximately fifteen snacks during my seven-hour shift. In a panic, I ransacked our cupboards, packed the following in my little hobo satchel and tied it to my walking stick, tucked a sharpened screwdriver in my pocket for protection, and hopped a boxcar to work:

1. A jar of salsa
2. A bag of corn chips
3. Three different kinds of cheese (two for snacking, one for salad)
4. Two different kinds of nuts (almonds for snacking, walnuts for salad)
5. A bag of lettuce (I almost took a bag of lettuce and a bag of arugula, but at the last minute decided this was excessive)
6. A jar of salad dressing
7. Two hard-boiled eggs
8. A bunch of carrots
9. A chocolate bar

Now, finished with work and well fed, I'm going to build a fire in a tin can and ride the rails into the sunset. By which I mean, pour myself a glass of pink wine and watch some trashy TV before bed.

i'm still talking about the sunburn -- it's THAT BAD

If I had the kind of job I could call in sick to, I would have called in sick today. But I don't. So I didn't. Instead I went in and waddled around the office. That's right, I waddled. Because my knees are so sunburned, I cannot straighten my legs. So instead I walk like a duck -- knees bent, butt sticking out, tiny steps. A duck with a limp, in fact. A matronly, splotchy duck with a limp who sits at her desk with ice packs balanced on each thigh and groans audibly when forced to lift herself from or lower herself into her chair.

I would like to tell you more about my fascinating life as a matronly, limping, groaning duck, but I just got home from work and still have to finish a freelance job. Tomorrow I hope to post something about (a) the yachtsman's strawberry shortcake (the dessert, not the doll), (b) the pros and cons of reading trashy mystery novels, or (c) my plans to begin referring to myself in the third person as "the duck." But the duck is not making any promises.

me kathy, you dilbert

Mondays are very hard, in that I must put on pants with a non-elasticized waistband and go to an office and try to act normal. Acting normal is exhausting. How do people work in offices? How do people act normal every day for eight hours?

The answer is that they don't. A couple of years ago when we lived in DC, one of my freelance clients asked me to fill in for an editor on maternity leave and for four months I went to an office five days a week, during which time I had to pretend I was an anthropologist studying a strange culture in order not to scratch my eyes out in my cubicle. I actually took notes every time I had an interaction with one of my temporary, not-normal-acting coworkers.

Anyway, between the old age and the non-elastic waistband and the pretending to be normal for eight hours straight today, I'm a mess. I was going to write tonight about Tommy's Grill, which the yachtsman Rain Man and I went to for the first time on Saturday morning and really liked, but I'm not up for it, so here are a couple photos and the yachtsman's Rain Man's comments.


RAIN MAN: It's yummy. That guy, Tommy? He's nice. And the potatoes were delicious, just the way we like them.

ME: How do we like them?

RAIN MAN: Grilled. Perfectly grilled. Muffin? Grilled.

ME: What else?

RAIN MAN: Egg was delicious. The seats were a little uncomfortable. I was in that booth with a huge hole in it. You could fall into that hole and never come up.

ME: What else?

RAIN MAN: It's true that Tommy never heard the first rule of business: Location, location, location. Maybe he needs to partner with Starbucks. Or Radio Shack. [THESE ARE TOMMY'S NEIGHBORS IN THE STRIP MALL WHERE HIS RESTAURANT IS LOCATED.] With every remote-control-car purchase you could get a free egg sandwich. He's not thinking about creative marketing.

A moto photo of Tommy's Grill's strip mall.

ME: What else?

RAIN MAN [TRYING TO WATCH HOUSE HUNTERS WHILE I TALK TO HIM]: Should we move to Miami?

If you live in the non-Miami/Burlington area, you should check out Tommy's Grill on Shelburne Road. For now I can only speak to the egg sandwiches (everything I want from an egg sandwich, plus not too greasy and with a thick, grilled English muffin) and home fries (real potatoes, hand cut, nicely seasoned), but Rain Man and I will be going back soon to try the fish tacos (homemade tortillas!). Until then, Rain Man will be driving slow in the driveway while I slip into a nice pair of sweatpants.

the taxman is still gettin' me down

Like usual, we filed an extension instead of our taxes back in April (I'm assuming if there was a reason not to do this every year, our accountant would let us know). So we're doing our taxes now, which is, of course, taxing. And complicated. Yet boring.

But the hardest part is the teeny tiny bits of math I must do before I can take all these scraps of paper over to the accountant and let her start dealing with them. For example, I need to figure out the square footage of my office, and I have no idea how. My hunch is that I multiply the length by the width or something, but who the fuck knows for sure?

I really, reallly wish my friend Chas would start his bl*g about math and golf, so I could post questions in the comments. But so far he's all talk and no long division.

i'm in the wrong line of work

I went online yesterday to make a credit card payment and decided that I'd like someone else to pay my credit card bill for once. Namely, the person who charged $1500 at a Home Depot in Ozone Park, New York, to my card but is not me.

I'm mad at the Ozone-Park-Not-Me not only for stealing my credit card number and buying a super fancy grill (or whatever the Ozone-Park-Not-Me purchased), but also for making me so late I didn't have time to make food or go to the grocery store before work (unlike Ozone-Park-Not-Me, I have a [albeit very part-time] job, and because I work from 2 p.m. until 9 or 10 at night, I have to bring dinner with me or I'll die of starvation cry). Flustered and late after my long conversation with the credit card company, I grabbed random food items from my refrigerator and left the house with the following:


So while the Ozone-Park-Not-Me spent the evening grilling steaks on the Cadillac of gas grills, I sat in a windowless, fluorescently lit room proofreading classified ads and eating hard-boiled eggs and pudding.

Did you hear that, Ozone-Park-Not-Me? PUDDING. Jealous?

i have a personal shopper, now i need a personal chef

For the rest of you it may have been Memorial Day, but in my world it was bring-your-prepared-food-dinner-to-work day; please meet my mediocre burrito, supplemented by fresh avocado.


But I did come home tonight to a farmers-market bounty -- microbasil, radishes, a multitude of beautiful greens, rapini, basil plants -- courtesy of my stepmom, who shopped for me on Saturday while we were out of town. So tomorrow will be make-yourself-something-delicious-for-lunch-at-home day, which presents its own set of problems, namely the part where I actually have to make something for lunch.

the tax man is gettin' me down

There's a link on the IRS website called "What's Hot in forms and publications." I clicked on it, and it is pretty hot.

Why is it that April 15 finds Chris and me utterly unprepared to file taxes? Every year. And you know this hot IRS website will distract me for hours -- all those steamy forms and naughty publications to download. We will once again be filing a sexy little extension.

lunch on a busy day with empty cupboards

Take a little bite of chip, take a little bite of cheese, chew, swallow, and repeat.

allez cuisine!

Chris and I recently joined our local co-op, which is actually a big, fancy natural foods store that also sells Fluff and Cheez-Its and exclusively hires cashiers who refuse to bag your groceries. But if we work four hours a month (either at the co-op or in the community), we get a 12% discount, so I spent this afternoon helping to prepare for the Junior Iron Chef competition, the theme ingredient of which seemed to be root vegetables. Let's just say that at 2:00 this afternoon I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between a rutabaga and a parsnip, and now I know that neither appears to be edible. I do not envy the Junior Iron Chef competition judges.

kitchen stadium, champlain-valley-expo style

SVG + GG

While in many ways Chris and I exemplify the expression "opposites attract" (he glides through his day singing little songs, I shuffle around swearing under my breath; he has an iPhone attached to his hand, I know where to place a stamp on an envelope), it's nice when our interests dovetail. For example, I love Gossip Girl and Chris has a job, so this intersection of Lily van der Woodsen and Seventh Generation is very meaningful to both of us.


You can expect that we will spend hours together reading and discussing the interview, after which, Chris will go to work and help create environmentally friendly cleaning products that famous people use, and I will turn on the TV to see whether Serena and Blair are talking to each other again (those girls are so fickle).