There’s a park near the place where i’m temping that has a giant bronze statue of an acorn in the middle of it.
Big Bronze Nut!
I think my adopted state is growing on me.
Breakfast:
Half pack of peanut butter crackers
Lunch:
Chocolate Peanut Butter Clif Bar
Afternoon snack:
Remaining peanut butter crackers
Half a pack of cream cheese & chive crackers
Dinner:
Last 3 slices of leftover Dominoes chicken bacon ranch pizza
2 Tums (is it sad that I got those out of the medicine cabinet as I heated up the 3rd slice of pizza? An ounce of prevention…is worth a pound of heartburn)
Tumbler of watered-down Dollar Store juice (yes, I water my juice down like an old man. I like a ratio of about 1/3 juice, 2/3 water, give or take)
Glass of wine (mmm, riesling!)
Handful of chocolate chips
Pinch of shame
Apparently spending all day entering data has not improved my typing skills. I tried to go to msn.com and got here:
Sorry, we couldn’t find men.som
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We have plants on the porch in snazzy window-boxes. They include basil, oregano, sage, lavender, a couple of jade plants, a spider plant, a tomato plant, and 2 kinds of mint!
Whenever I think of mint, I recall how my plant-smart friend once told me that unfortunately mint is extremely invasive.
But I can’t help loving our two little kinds of mint for the way they flourish and put out sprigs every which way.
Mint! You have invaded my heart.
Took a trip to Family Dollar today. I will not deny that close proximity to a Dollar Store is a deciding factor when I look for a place to live. For real. I love dollar stores. They make me feel all warm and cheapy inside. Why buy juice for $3.69 at a reputable grocery store when you can get Happeez Brand Liquid Fruit-like Drink for $2 at the dollar store? Why indeed.
They’re a good place to stock up on cheap, disposable home goods as well, for those folks in transition who’ve found an apartment but lack a job– and a dish rack, and a bath mat. Family Dollar will sell you a $1 shower curtain made of the lightest gauzy whisper of faerie wings and clouds; one that becomes airborne and billows to the ceiling, or wraps itself around your soaped up showering form at the slightest hint of a breeze. If that doesn’t give you the impetus to start job-hunting so you can afford a nice $12 dollar shower curtain that obeys gravity, nothing will.
I do have my limits though. I was dismayed to learn that the Family Dollar near my first apartment in Boston carried a Family Dollar Brand Pregnancy Test– a bargain at $3 a pop. (No pun intended. Ew!) Anyhoo, I would not trust a $3 pregnancy test not to do one or both of the following:
a) actually MAKE me pregnant or
b) then give me a crazy bat baby.
“Mom, where did I come from?”
“The Dollar Store.”
Nobody wants to have that exchange. Some items are best purchased at your local CVS.
So before moving to North Carolina, I tried to set up some sort of job working for Obama’s campaign, but one of the places I contacted would only take me on board if I relocated to New Hampshire to work on the campaign there. Damn it, I was just IN the northeast! I wanted to work for change in North Carolina!
Well, who’s a swing state now? Apparently it’s neck-in-neck in NC– a few scant weeks after I moved here. I’m sure this is all because of me.
You’re welcome, America.
If Brian didn’t want the kind of girlfriend who would force him to watch The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, he would not be dating me. End of story.
PS it is so sad! And French! And subtitled!
PPS I cried at the end. He did not.
At this point I think it’s been fairly well-documented that I want to crown Sarah Palin as prom queen and then dump a bucket of moose blood over her at the Vice Presidential debate.
Fortunately, I don’t have to watch alone tonight. Brian is going to be home late, and I was worried that if I spent 45 minutes watching the debate by myself, I’d bite my pants in half and drink all the bourbon. Luckily I found a local town where they’re showing it in a movie theatre. A movie theater! Full of similarly tweaked-out liberals! What could go wrong?
I’ll let you know what happens.
Brian and I have a lot of differences, but fortunately we have similar feelings about food—particularly when it comes to buying it.
We both looooove grocery shopping. Wandering through the aisles together trying to remember if we already have that kind of mustard or not; campaigning for and against certain salad dressings, and debating whether we can really continue eating chicken twice a week, or whether I might go crazy if I have to eat another chicken taco. We’ve grown respectful of each other’s strange food proclivities. I look the other way when he grabs a box of soluble protein powder; he shrugs when I add a box of SpongeBob and Friends macaroni and cheese to the cart. But it’s shaped like SpongeBob! And his friends!
If there’s something we eat regularly, we tend to stock up on it. I think we like knowing that if there is a hurricane, we will have the ability to reinforce the windows with bacon. We like knowing that behind that jar of pasta sauce in the pantry is an army of other jars of pasta sauce. There is something comforting about a well-stocked kitchen.
Indeed, Brian’s Costco membership has brought new meaning to the phrase ‘stock up’. Costco does not kid around when it comes to economy sized offerings. It’s a little intimidating, even now. I ventured into my first Costco a couple of years ago when we started dating, and it was a disorienting experience. It was like that Super Mario 3 World where everything is giant. At every turn there were cracker boxes that shared my sweater size. Huge bags of almonds stared me down; I picked up a bottle of juice and realized, too late, that I should have lifted with my knees. I felt like a hungry garden gnome. I know that buying in bulk is more cost effective and saves on packaging, but it’s also not for the faint of heart or the uncommitted. “I like pickles,” I found myself saying, “but do I like ten pounds of pickles?” Fortunately, Brian eats in bulk. The idea of buying block of cheese that I could hide behind became less frightening once I discovered that it was usually gone in a week or two.
I particularly like to stock up on random foods. I tend to see meal preparation as food roulette, and the more filled your pantry is with strange odds and ends, the higher the chances are that you can piece together a meal without having to send out for grocery reinforcements. The last time I went shopping, I picked up a bag of dried split peas, so that one day when I am struck with the urge to make split-pea soup, I will recall with a thrill that I already have the main ingredient. I know that’s probably not normal.
When I was growing up, Mom would make huge shopping trips once a month or so, and have the groceries delivered to our apartment. We walked to the grocery stores in our NYC neighborhood, so what you couldn’t carry home yourself had to be delivered. To this day, grocery shopping with a car that you can put all of your groceries in instead of carrying them home fills me with delight. Anyway, as a kid, when those dozen or so shopping bags arrived, it always felt like Food Christmas. My younger sister and I would prance around digging through the shopping bags, ostensibly to help put things away, but really, we were looking for Keebler Elf cookies.
My problem right now is that I need to cut back on those two-faced little ‘one-stop’ trips to the supermarket by myself. You may know the ones I’m talking about. Where you think, ‘Oh, I need milk, and eggs. I’ll just run in.’ and you come out twenty minutes later with milk, and chocolate chips, and a giant bottle of wine, and a breath-freshening bone for the dog. You just spent twenty dollars more than you had planned, and you forgot eggs.
Those are the trips I need to avoid, and yet, they are often the most fun trips. It feels like I’m just dropping by the supermarket to check in; just seeing what’s new and kicky in the world of food I like to eat. What could be the harm in that? In this economy, with my state of employment (or lack thereof), they’re probably not the best trips to make.
I am working on making a list before I go shopping, and just sticking to that list once I’m in the store. Ideally I will be too embarrassed (or will forget) to add things like, ‘day-old bakery donuts’ and ‘scrubbing-bubbles-shaped nightlight’ (what? It made me happy) to the list, and then I’ll be tricked out of picking those items up along the way. I’ll let you know how this goes. In the meantime, I need to go pick up some day-old bakery donuts.
Our apartment complex is very fancy pants, but unfortunately it doesn’t recycle. I kind of figured that out on the day we moved in, when the residential director told us everything we needed to know about everything…except what to do with bottles and cans.
Still, hoping against hope, I visited him in his office a few days after we moved in to ask about recycling. He’s a nice guy, but his response was basically a verbal shrug. He suggested that I could bring recyclables to the local high school. I found this concept frightening. How do you approach a local high school in a town you’ve just moved to, when you hated high school and you’re scared of new people and situations? Do you call the principal? Do you just show up with a case of empty beer bottles? I dithered about this situation for a few days (ok, weeks), unsure what to do.
Meanwhile, we washed and saved our bottles, cans and plastic containers until we had enough to fill a small closet. In fact, a big bag of them was in the front closet. More were in the spare bedroom, and the biggest pile was in the corner in the kitchen. It was starting to make us look less like the fairly neat, sane housekeepers that we are.
When my roommate and I lived together in Hawai’i, we faced a similar problem. Our apartment complex didn’t recycle. Not many places on the island of Oahu appeared to recycle. It seems kind of strange for an island to not bother doing what it could to reduce trash, when there were clearly limited places for it to put its waste. I mean, I suppose there was plenty of room in the delicate ocean ecosystem surrounding the island. I guess I should have thought of that. Anyway, she and I would save empty bottles and cans, stacking them precariously on top of the refrigerator, and when the piles got too high, we would resignedly throw them away with the rest of the trash. It was not a great system, but then again, we were short on apartment space, and we didn’t have a car to drive our empties anywhere if we’d known where to take them, so there was little else we could do with our bottles except collect them pointlessly, out of habit, and eventually sigh and throw them out.
In any event, I had to do some internet sleuthing and call the local town hall, but eventually I found a recycling center nearby. The woman I spoke to advised me that the high school no longer accepted recycling materials. She also said that a number of people from my apartment complex had called her asking for this information, which was encouraging. She suggested that I go back to the residential director and request that they implement a recycling program for residents. Brian did just that (thanks Brian!).
Yesterday, I piled all of the recyclables into the back of my car and drove fifteen minutes away to the center. It was abuzz with activity (and yellowjackets). Cars similarly brimming with bottles and cans were lining up in rows, and the crash and tinkle of comingling materials was deafening.
It was a heartening sight on a Saturday morning. Bottles in North Carolina are not eligible for deposit, and gas prices are at an all time high, but still people were saving up their empties, storing them, and driving them to the recycling center instead of throwing them away, which doubtless would have been much easier. It was a nerdy weekend pick me up.
I Heard Tell 