Finny Knits

I am the Ultimate Level of Perfection. [RECIPE]

2012-02-13T16:20:00.000-08:00

I don't know whether I ever told you people about this, but a year ago I went to the doctor for a routine check up and got a blood panel done after which my doctor reported that I had high cholesterol.

Not like, "OH MY GOD IT'S SO HIGH THAT I'M DIALING 9-1-1 RIGHT NOW!" kind of high (which actually would have been more helpful than her actual response), but, like, higher than normal.

The fact that I had pulled pork tacos the night before my test *may* have had an impact on the results, but it depends who you ask and I'm done asking people since no one has the same answer.

Anyway, the result of this news was me minorly freaking out and majorly wondering WTF? because I couldn't get that doctor to do either of two things:

Give me the test results (apparently HIPPAA is the scariest monster on the planet)
Explain the severity and then tell me how to fix the issue

Which, in my opinion, are two things that doctors should do when delivering news of any kind - good, bad or life-changingly catastrophic. And if you're me and you're married to the BBQingest, bacon-wrappingest, meat lovingest man of all time - the news of high cholesterol is life-changingly catastrophic.

So, in lieu of my doctor figuring out how to aptly do her job and then help me in my quest for cholesterol truth, I switched doctors.

I just don't believe in miracles, y'all - you understand.

And that doctor immediately ordered a blood panel. Which I set out to have done except that one day I came home from work to find a letter in my mailbox telling me that Doctor #2 Who I Newly Loved was packing up his practice and moving back to North Carolina where, no, he will not be able to interpret any blood tests for me.

DAMN IT ALL.

So then I did what any potentially high cholesterol having person would do instead of make decisions based on actual information - I canceled our Bacon Of The Month Club membership (I know. Quiet, you.), heaped kale onto every recipe, got super serious about the supplements and did some good old finger crossing.

Come to find out, this method of self-healing was either SUPER EFFECTIVE or my original test results weren't that bad because I just got the results of my blood panel taken two weeks ago and BAM!

Super good cholesterol.

Like, stunningly good GOOD cholesterol and just average bad cholesterol which, when combined means SUPER GOOD CHOLESTEROL LEVELS.

My new NEW doctor (this is #3, if you're keeping count), after berating my #1 doctor for not sharing the actual number or a remedy for resolving the issue the first time around, told me that I should keep doing what I'm doing because my health in general and cholesterol levels, are ideal.

IDEAL.

AKA - Model. Perfect. Excellent. Exemplary. Conforming to the ultimate level of perfection.

So, on that note, I firstly texted Bubba to tell him that I was bulletproof and then set about crafting the world's most indulgent celebratory dinner menu.

Grilled Ribeye Steaks with Onion Blue Cheese Sauce
Baked potatoes with fixins (not all of them, just some)
A vegetable I can't recall

And I'd show you a photo of this creation except that I took it on my old phone and WHOOPSY didn't upload it before getting a new phone and I'll stop because no one cares about My Life With Cell Phone bullshit, including me.

But, you might be interested to know that my YAY! MY CHOLESTEROL IS GOOD! celebratory binging didn't end with the amazing dinner that was totally amazing.

It was followed by Pizza Night, a lunch bike to tacos, and four consecutive nights of cocktail hour. Then we ate noodles for the entire weekend (ramen one night, pho the other) and sourced the Grand Finale feast from Del Taco.

DO NOT judge me, people. I am The Ultimate Level of Perfection in my arteries and can do this kind of thing.

Meanwhile, this week's menu reflects the guilt (and potential fresh clogging) associated with the Del Taco coursing through my veins:

Broccoli soup and cabbage apple salad
Baked ziti with the Best Sauce Ever. Yep. and cabbage apple salad
Burgers with avocado and cabbage apple salad

The menu also reflects the status of my crisper which is: ALL CABBAGE ALL THE TIME.

And since I can't find a link to the cabbage apple salad recipe that I use ALL THE TIME, I will list it here. Without a photo because I suck today.

Forgive a girl, OK?

Cabbage Apple Salad

Recipe as recalled by moi

Probably from Sunset or Real Simple or some other recipe having magazine with a shitty search feature

Makes 2-3 servings
Ingredients
1/2 head of cabbage (red, green or both), shredded
1 apple (Pink Lady is my fave), cored and sliced into thin wedges
1/2 cup of cilantro, chopped
1 t honey
3 T olive oil
1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
Salt and ground pepper as you like it

To make
In a large bowl, whisk together the honey, olive oil, apple cider vinegar, salt and pepper. In the same bowl, toss the cabbage and apple until it's covered with the dressing and toss the the cilantro once to incorporate. Serve it right away, otherwise the vinegar makes the cabbage all soggy and it gets weird.

FYI: This goes REALLY well with BBQ, Mexican dishes and all of the other shit I have on the menu up there. Just saying.

First (and second) beehive check of Spring.

2012-02-08T17:44:00.000-08:00

Firstly, yes, I know it's early for a spring hive check. But, I'll have you know that winter is still hanging out elsewhere waiting to pounce on us and ruin my too early planted spring crops. Which I haven't planted yet because let's not be crazy.

But, it's been so effing warm (seriously, 70 degrees? Is it May already? No? Sad.) that the bees have been out and about doing spring stuff even though it's still technically, per the calendar, winter.

I thought it wise to do a spring check of the hive before things got serious though. Serious like the bees get too crowdy in there and decide to swarm.

I don't need that in my life again, people. Because you know that this time I won't be so lucky as to have them swarm on my side of the fence again.

Oh no.

They'll go over the wall and swarm around my neighbor's face. The shitty neighbor who hates me. And then - disaster. OR I'll get to broom bees off of her swollen face which would be fun for a minute, you know until she calls the cops or hits me with her tiny car.

Though I am legally allowed to have the bees...anyway, let's not go down that particular road. It's really more trouble than it's worth.

BUT - I will tell you that the first hive check of spring was successful.

In the sense that the hive is doing what it's supposed to be doing (cluster of bees has moved to the top of the brood chambers, there are babies in there, there are still some honey stores, there aren't any ants or beetles, it's not a fucking mess in there) and I managed to do all my bee chores including reversing the hive bodies because WOO I actually sat down and read my beekeeping books over the winter so I knew what I was supposed to be doing when I started sticking my fool head in the hive this spring.

Except it took me two tries to get it right.

Because I'm retarded and apparently have a hard time remembering more than two things when I have the din of thousands of bees drowning out my mental mind list.

As it turned out, on Try #1 I forgot to reverse the hive bodies, reinstall the Beetle Jail and I fucked up the GoPro so all I got was a couple thousand still frames of the hives getting worked on and no video. Which I am trying hard to do for you voyeurs.

Thankfully, on Try #2, I prefaced the whole ordeal with a trip to GoPro's online instruction guide (So THAT's what that button does. Oh.) and managed to get it sorted out. It's really not that complicated, I'm just that stupid.

Less thankfully, I was someone else when I did my second hive check and actually didn't mutter a single word (who AM I?) so the soundtrack is useless and I had to add a lot of annotations so that you know what the eff I'm doing out there.

At least Try #2's video covered the reversing hive bodies bit, which I found the most interesting out of the whole thing, though I imagine it would have been nice to show you the full frames of honey still lingering in the top brood box and all the babies emerging.

Aw, cute - little bug faces. Aw, pretty - shiny golden honeycomb. Oh well. There's always next time.

Meanwhile, there was one fucked up bee that I saw with mangled wings. Usually that's a sign of mites, but I dusted 3 times for mites in the fall and haven't seen any other bees with fuckered up wings, so I'm hoping that it was either a new bee (it was rather downy and small) whose wings weren't fully fluffed out yet or an anomaly that won't happen again.

I realize that last one is just false hope, so I'll be keeping an eye on the health over all so that I remedy the mite sitch sooner rather than later.

Imagine mites like fleas for bees. Not good. Also, ew.

Anyway, if you feel like watching a silent movie of me reversing the hive bodies, go right ahead.

And if you want to know WHY you'd do something as seemingly foolhardy as wrestling full boxes of bees around, I will tell you that it's because bees move up through the hive in the winter following the queen and eating the honey stores so that by spring they're all up in the top box and very little is going on in the bottom box.

Since bees work upward, reversing the boxes so that the top busy box is on the bottom and the bottom loser box is on the top, means that they'll start over on the bottom box and work upward through the boxes in a more efficient manner.

And when you reverse the hive boxes (bodies) and put a hive top feeder on top (which I did - see the video), you motivate them to go up and see what the hell is going on up there because they are hungry piglets in spring.

Just watch the video, then you'll see what I'm talking about.

...1! GARDEN

2012-02-03T14:53:00.000-08:00

Right now it's sunny, so I'm leaping into gardening even though spring is a technical ways off, even in these mild NorCal parts. I'm probably waving the naughty finger at Mother Nature again, without any regard for the implications of last year's missteps, but this is my way.

Learn nothing. Move on. Be all shocked when shit happens just like last time.

Or at least it has been my way, historically, for a particular facet of gardening that I have just refused to pay attention to with my fullest attentions so that I could learn something before moving on.

And now that I've gotten way off course with this post already, let me swerve wildly back to my original purpose which was to tell you all that I'm done killing tomato seedlings.

I'm just done with it. I'm done feeling like a failure when I grow my entire garden from organic, open-pollinated, heirloom seeds purchased from reputable local farmers and seed banks EXCEPT for my tomatoes which I buy as successfully hardened off seedlings ready to go right into my garden to grow 50+ pounds of fruit per plant for me.

Because I kill tomato seedlings. Like some pathological tomato baby hating monster even though that's really far from the truth.

People - you know I love my tomatoes. And not in the sexy way where all your minds just went.

Meeeeeeeeeeoooooooooooowwwwwww.

Filthy, you people. Honestly.

But of all of my plants and vegetables and trees and grasses and growing things, I love tomatoes the very super most.

*pinches cheeks*

And I should be able, as a self-respecting gardener, to grow them successfully from seed. Particularly since I live in a climate that is so forgiving and offers zero room for me to spread the blame beyond my own black tomato seed growing thumbs.

Maybe if I lived in a place that got snow and had short summers. Or somewhere that has really humid and hot summers. Or some place with really cool summers. Or bugs. Or tornadoes. Or if I didn't have access to every single tool and reference material and My Mom's Need To Know Basi s memory bank.

Maybe then. But the way things stand, I should really know how to consistently, effectively, 100%edly take a viable tomato seed and grow it into a big strapping plant that pushes forth 50+ pounds of tomatoes for me.

I see this like the knitting thing, in a way, since I didn't feel like I'd earned my knitting stripes until I'd knit a sweater. A sweater a real person would wear, too.

So, I feel now that I must master the art of growing tomatoes from seed in order to feel in my deep down gardeny parts like a real and proper gardener. Which means that the part of the process in which I am a complete failure - hardening off young seedlings - must be cracked.

But how?

I mean, it's not like I haven't tried growing tomatoes from seed. Or that I haven't gotten them to germinate and grow into spindly funky weird Tim Burton-esque beings in my kitchen window's weak sunlight. Or that I haven't, then, done the precarious DON'T BLOCK MY PATH, DOG/BUBBA/CAT/WIND/DOOR shuffle in and out of the house to the garden morning and night trying to get them to straighten up and fly right in the specially prepared soil with just so much water and big tons of love and not too much darkness or cold or frost or sun or wind.

I have.

But I've failed.

So, I've decided to suck it up, stow my pride and take a class on growing tomato seedlings.

But I'll only undergo this exercise with the expert of tomato experts, Ms Cynthia Sandberg of Love Apple Farms.

I'm not going to get all star-stalkery on you here, but she's my garden hero and I keep taking classes at the farm with the delusion that I'll somehow morph into a more foul-mouthed and less refined version of this classy gal.

She's classy. You just know that she is because HELLO and also watch her in the video with Mr. Classy Himself, Eric Ripert. I do so enjoy Eric. Though, I also very much enjoy Tony, and that's probably because he's got that foul-mouthiness with which I heartily identify.

Whatever - I don't have designs on becoming some super classy non-swearing garden maven, but I do have concrete plans to grow my tomatoes from seed this year.

So I'm going to the damn class at LAF and this spring is TOMATOES BY SEED OR BUST. Or, you know, by seedlings purchased at Yamagami's if I prove to be a complete failure.

If I prove to be a success of any measure, I'm going to have on the order of about 100 seedlings, so if you're in the Silicon Valley and want a possibly obstinate yet productive tomato plant, just say the word. Then cross your fingers as hard as you've ever crossed anything before.

Wow. That sounds kinda pervy.

Yup. There was some snow in Montana.

2012-02-01T22:00:00.000-08:00

Oh my WORD we are home now and MAN did we ski the PANTS off of Montana.

No pants in this picture. Only tongues and teeth. AND SNOW.

Also, I never want to get in a car again. Or truck. Because driving from NorCal all the way to Whitefish, Montana, which by the way is almost in friggen Canada, is like, a really long way to drive.

Around 24 hours each way when you take into account all the snow storms we'd been praying for and all of the ridiculous interstate closures that we'd been praying against.

Not that closures can stop the likes of us, four snow blind idiots with ski fever and a dog who's sick and effing tired of being super good curled up in her dog bed while we play endless games of Hay! and Cows On My Side and eat gas station delicacies without sharing.

If you have not had Cheddar Cheese Pretzel Combos from a gas station in the middle of nowhere YOU HAVE NOT LIVED. A life I'd want to live anyway.

Though she does get the occasional french fry and hamburger remnant. I mean, I'm not a total jerk dog mom after all. But the novelty of a few french fries wears off when your fuzzy ass has been wedged into the truck for 18 hours in a day.

I'm sick of sitting IN the dog bed, so now I shall sit ON the dog bed.

Poor girl, she worked really hard on her I'm The Best And Yet Also Sometimes Dragon Breath Havingest Dog On The Planet routine.

I daresay that, upon arrival, she was appropriately appreciative and excited for snow though.

I'M NEVER GETTING BACK INTO THE TRUCK YAY!

And, yes, we were quite excited ourselves.

Let's make with the skiing and riding and such already! Also, nerds.

It was difficult not to be out of our minds with glee all fucking week. Particularly since we arrived to find lots of fresh snow on the ground, zero people on the mountain and our cabin located ON THE SKI RUN.

Welcome to the skiing in and out place.

Bubba really kicked some magic ass on this trip planning, is what I'm saying. I mean, I think this guy - my beloved - can see the future, when it comes to snow anyway.

Because somehow SOME WAY he managed, last year in February after we returned from another mind-blowingly awesome ski trip to our as yet favorite place in the whole world to ski, Steamboat Springs, CO, to randomly and future seeingly book our 2012 ski trip to the Who's Ever Heard Of This Place Anyway Big Mountain Resort in Whitefish, Montana.

Well, that's not 100% true - we *had* heard of it in the sense that I'd gotten Bubba a hat from the place for whatever early on anniversary calls for cotton as a gift and we'd been sort of vaguely entertaining the idea of some time visiting there, BUT PAST THAT -- never heard of it.

Yet somehow, this snow future seeing man, booked a week at this magical place and then, when the rest of the continental US had FUCK ALL for snow, Montana managed to get FEET.

Good morning, Californians, this is what we in Montana call Proper Snow.

There was genuine excitement.

And genuine frosted mountains.

And genuine frozen faces.

Frozen into deliriously happy smiles, that is.

You can't tell, but she's smiling. BIG.

Bottom of the snow covered sign reads, "GO HOME".

And so, we skied. And rode. And basked in the glory that is fresh powder, beautiful mountains, nonexistent lift lines and a week with just good friends and the dog.

For one minute, we behave.

Super easiest couple to find on the mountain.

Even in the fog.

Jada just wanted to find chipmunks. ALL OF THEM.

Don't worry, there was silliness.

And some drinking.

And pretending that we're sober so they'll keep serving us...

...absinth.

And then there was some more silliness.

I think it's fair to say that we loved Montana and will be going back. Just as soon as we can justify taking another vacation. Which won't be super soon, but eventually...we'll be back.

And then he said, "Let there be snow for Finny and Bubba."

Meanwhile, I've ordered seeds for the garden and am planning on the first hive inspection of spring, so we'll be shifting our gaze from snow to garden in 5, 4, 3, 2...

I hear they have snow there. Let's go.

2012-01-19T16:10:00.000-08:00

Like I said, we're going back out into the world in search of snow and booze.

If you want to see what that looks like when we're in charge, follow right along as I intermittently add photos to this album.

Warning: They may all be photos of the dog licking her butt in the cab of the truck as we drive across three states during a giant snowstorm. Which, that could be fun, right?

Enjoy.

Censorship blows

2012-01-18T11:23:00.000-08:00

So read up on SOPA and PIPA and sign a petition to keep our internet open and uncensored.

IT'S ONLY SUPER IMPORTANT.

That is all.

We still eat around here.

2012-01-16T15:19:00.000-08:00

You may recall, from previous ski trip preparations, that I like to master plan our ski trip menu.

And, you may also recall that we go on an annual ski trip about this time of year. Even on the years when we are freshly back from skiing in another country.

Like this year.

Like awesome people who plan vacations so far in advance that they don't realize how they've managed to stack them up right on top of each other to the point where coworkers and bosses and clients are all, "Dudes. What the fuck? Weren't you, like *JUST* on vacation? And, hey, wasn't that a ski trip, too?"

To which we just say, yeah, and then bow our heads sheepishly while smiling crooked little knowing smiles and flipping them the bird.

Not until their backs are turned though! We're not animals!

Anyway, so yeah, we're going on another ski trip next week, this time to the great Only Place In The Continental US With Proper Snow state of Montana, where the forecast is calling for snow and snow and snow some more.

THANK YOU FOR HAVING WINTER, MONTANA. Unlike the rest of this place, particularly Tahoe, which has dirt for snow and cannons for storms and hiking on MLK weekend instead of skiing and other such nonsense.

It's sad, Tahoe right now, so we're extra psyched to see what Montana's all about for skiing and riding finally. Because Bubba's been wearing his Whitefish hat ragged over the last few years waiting for the chance to press his planks against their wondrous mounds.

You said Mounds.

YAY! That was probably the porniest thing I've written in a long time! About my man and his undying love affair with snow. And mounds.

Wow.

And this post was supposed to be about meat loaf.

Hey! Meat loaf! Let's talk about that.

So, you guys know that a part of master planning any ski trip menu is testing out new Sure To Be Awesome recipes, right?

Because it is.

This time when I drew up the menu, we had a bunch of old ski dinner standbys on there like Bubba's famous BBQ brisket, our friends' tortilla soup and lasagna and my meat loaf.

But, my meat loaf, while good, was put under scrutiny when I was leafing through old issues of Cook's Illustrated in my pajamas (What? You don't all this?) and came across their recipe.

I mean, we all know that if a recipe appears in CI, it's bound to be completely mind-blowingly incredible. Also, it will take a long time to make, dirty every pot, pan and utensil and require the construction of at least one proprietary tool.

This recipe for meat loaf did not disappoint.

Now, I'm not going to go into the whole science and What Are They Talking About? theory behind the recipe, because that's what CI does best and I won't be able to add anything meaningful to what they already say so clearly, but I will say that 110 loaves later (which is how many they made in order to perfect their recipe), this recipe is pretty fucking perfect.

And no veal or complicated meat mixture required. It's all beef and it doesn't just taste like a big burger log.

I like that.

Because I have a LOT of beef in my chest freezer from the split half we get annually and I can't be bothered to haul to the butcher for a half pound of ground pork and half pound of veal and oh this much of whatever part of whatever beast ground into whatever blah blah blah, I JUST WANT TO MAKE A SIMPLE MEAT LOAF.

Because, I don't know about you guys, but to me, I think meat loaf should be a simple and satisfying thing to make and eat.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that the CI recipe is simple, but it's damned satisfying, particularly when you make it for two of your ski buddies (one being Bubba) who'll be a part of the ski trip, and they go back for seconds while making comments about the awesomeness of it all.

Awesome Meat loaf. That's a beautiful thing.

Before I give you the recipe, though, I will tell you that one of the things that makes this recipe awesome is also sort of suspect. In the way that I saw it on the list of ingredients and, having not read the whole preceding article which explained its role in the making of awesomeness, sort of recoiled from the pages.

I was backing away slowly when I took this.

It's gelatin. Unflavored gelatin. Not a lot - just 1/4 teaspoon - but it's 1/4 teaspoon of gelatin. Which, I don't know, seemed weird.

But then I read the article which explains the why and how of it and I became soothed by the science.

Soothing science, that's what CI is all about. Or something.

Anyway, the loaf. It's below and a few of the steps that I caught on camera while making it are there, too. As well as my inventive packaging for the Master Planned Ski Menu Meat loaf and a picture of Bubba's hat begging on its deathbed to be returned to its homeland.

Soon, grody hat. Soon.

Cook's Illustrated's Glazed Meat Loaf
AKA Montana Loaf

AKA Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmeat loaf

AKA (singsongy voice) Meat loaf sandwich - Imma have a meat loaf sandwich (/singsongy voice)

The Test Loaf atop a handmade perforated foil tray atop a cooling rack atop a foil lined rimmed baking sheet.

The Amazin' Glaze. Sorry, had to say it.

When testing recipes, one must have boozy reinforcements. And sharp knives.

Bonus of the baking sheet apparatus: easy transfer to a serving platter and no pool of grease.

The most perfect loaf two servings from being gone. Read: MEAT LOAF SANDWICH MAKIN'S.

This recipe mixes up into the most loafable texture.

If only I hadn't punched a hole in the bottom foil, this would have gone perfectly.

Meet Dinner, 1/23/12.

Ski bound loaf.

So, what's on YOUR apres ski menu? Can I have some?

Old and weird

2012-01-12T17:38:00.000-08:00

Pretty sure that after our Movie Date the other DAY, Bubba and I have safely arrived in the Old and Weird category.

Because Young Finny would make unmerciful fun of the two of us, if the space time continuum would allow such things to happen. Thankfully IT won't because IT is something only available for fucking with in Star Trek and other similarly made up universes, so we're safe from that embarrassing moment, but only inasmuch as the non-existence of interstellar spaceflight will allow. Thank goodness for the Prime Directive.

See - that right there is evidence of Weird already.

Ugh. We're doomed.

Anyway, we were off work for a few days after all the kilt-flipping and snow enema fun of Scotland and Austria, respectively, and I thought it time for us to go to the movies so that I could watch my boyfriends Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law run dirty and in slow-mo in Sherlock Holmes II.

But because we're us, we don't go to see movies on a Friday night after having a dinner of over-sauced and unnecessarily chickened pasta at a local chain restaurant and then proceed to engage in a coy scene of clandestine making out in a crowded sea of strangers in a packed theater like we imagine some normal people might.

OH NO.

We go on a Friday MORNING at 11am for the $5 SUPER matinee. After showing up all early-birdish to the theater 30 minutes ahead of showtime where the manager (still unraveling his belt-mounted spool of ancient keys) tells us that the theater's not even open yet so please come back in half an hour.

Oh.

SO, at that point, we wandered off to search up 30 minutes' worth of entertainment in the dreariest and most hopeless looking strip mall a person could imagine.

Hopeless until we spied the Dollar Tree store, that is.

The fact that we immediately locked eyes and practically high-fived over this non-find should tell you something about us as a couple.

Firstly, that we are ridiculous people who have spent way too long in each others' company to be able to know that crossing a dollar store is a no-duh sign of guaranteed entertainment and secondly, that THANK GOD we found each other over a decade ago and later decided to marry because it's pretty obvious that no one else is going to take either of us freaks.

Because we basically high-fived with our eyeballs in front of the Dollar Tree.

I believe I said something to the effect of, "Oh hell yeah! We can totally piss away half an hour in THERE!"

After which time we proceeded to spend 30 bliss-filled minutes entertaining one another in their casually arranged aisles which were amply stocked with every toy, candy, holiday decor item, kitchen gadget and questionable wearable that's been pulled from shelves of more reputable stores due to health code, safety or NAFTA violations in the last 30 years.

Yep. CUH-lassy.

But, all Oldness and Weirdness aside, I know that I can't be the only one to find dollar stores FANTASTICALLY entertaining.

Out yourselves, people - tell the world what fabulous fun you've found in a dollar store.

Shy? Self-conscious? Afraid the world will judge you for buying sacks of Ring Pops and then putting them all on your fingers to lick and eat in one grand corn syrup binge?

Fear not! Allow me to provide a segue:

LOOK AT ALL THE COOL SHIT WE FOUND. Which, by the way, is probably no longer available (or never was) in normal stores.


Fun Dips were right next to these. Both are horrifying in their whimsy and nausea inducing in their nostalgia.

Gummy fruit flavored sharks candy on a stick. WHY DID I NOT KNOW THIS EXISTED?

To be truthful, I've never had one of these. But seeing them all stacked up like this made we want them. And the weird dollar candy next to them.

It took all of my meager willpower to NOT buy ALL of these. I only got one bag. And I've regretted not buying the rest ever since. I may be going back unsupervised so that I don't have to catch Bubba's questioning gaze as I load up a cart with their entire stock. And then ask if there are more "In The Back".

We batted around some suggested improvements on names: Bubba thought, "Batpoo" held merit, while I suggested a further refinement on his apt idea, simply "Guano." I'm all about truth in advertising, people.

I daresay there's nothing "REAL" about these snacks. Though that doesn't make me want them any less. In fact, the unREALness of them and the fact that the packaging is in both English and Spanish sort of makes me want them MORE. I guess I'm just a daredevil like that.

Unfortunately, those are all the photos I took because I was forced to end my exploration prematurely so that we could make it to the stupid movie on time to get a giant sack of popcorn (Which, did you know that if you go to the first movie of the day that you get the freshest popcorn? You do. It's amazing and wonderful and worth being the only person under the age of 85 at the theater at that hour.) and I still had three more aisles to explore before I could even consider leaving the store.

Before we left, we both made some purchases.

After careful consideration, Bubba got some movie candy for $.79 (Good n Plenty and Spree, from what I can recall - not too daredevily) and nothing else that I can remember and I got a metal strainer (like you'd use for spaghetti), a sack of Ring Pops (only one sack though! Sadness!) and another item I can no longer remember because obviously it was really awesome and necessary.

My plans for a return visit?

TO BUY ALL THE RING POPS THEY HAVE and then live out my life's dream of putting one on each finger and toe and driving myself over the edge of sanity by eating them all in one sitting. Potentially while nude.

Oh, and the movie was pretty good, too. Because we did end up going. And then we had the whole theater to ourselves because, did I mention that it was 11am on a Friday and we were in the smallest weirdest theater in all of America? And in this theater we had all to ourselves, we talked loudly to one another, just like we would have at home, kicked our feet up on the rail in front of us (because we were obviously sitting in the Cowboy Row) and, when Bubba found he was not man enough for his Medium sized popcorn (I had gotten a small because I'm obviously very dainty), he very aggressively "refilled" my popcorn by dumping it blindly from his bag toward mine.

There may have been some popcorn on the floor when we left, is what I'm saying.

Also, we ate all of our candy, drank a gigantic soda, criticized and commented on the movie as it went by and generally had an excellent date of it.

At one point, upon leaving the theater/scene of the crime, I told Bubba that it was the best date ever.

Then we went home, got our bikes and rode for tacos.

I'll tell you what, that guy sure does know how to show a girl a good time.

Kilt butts and weiners. No, really.

2012-01-05T08:47:00.000-08:00

Obviously we had an awesome time in Austria and Scotland.

Helloooooo Alps.

It's hard to smile bigger than this.

I mean, there was snow, beer, schnapps, Weinerschnitzel, skiing, lifts with heated seats and bubble covers, fries with everything, bacon wrapped wurst, kilts, castles, street parties, fireworks shows big enough to annihilate a small village, wedges of melted brie, Scotch, whisky and G&Ts in a can.

Also, haggis.

And just to get that out of the way before I get too deep into my recounting, YES I ATE HAGGIS. Also, black pudding.

Haggis = good. Black pudding = less good.

That's pretty much all I derived from that experience, so there you go. We all tried both and we all lived and no one retched. We all went back for a second try at the haggis and we all agreed that the black pudding, while edible, was sort of a worthless food. Like tofu, but from blood rather than soybeans, which - appetizing.

The kilts though...MEMORABLE.

AKA Hard to forget.

Perhaps you recall my not so secret wish for a Kilt Flipping Good New Year?

This guy did, too, and he was all about granting that wish. Generous folks these Scots.

Beyond the kilt flipping? Well, we decided that we love Scotland. Edinburgh so far, but we're going back for more, probably at New Year's 2012-2013 because we had just that much fun and left a lot of booze undrunk.

And that's just Scotch and whisky.

Like, for instance, did you know that in Scotland you can buy Gin and Tonic in a can? YOU CAN. And then you can, say, haul it around with you all premixed and ready to drink while you walk from castle to cathedral to cemetery and so on.

I mean, it's no Hendrick's and Fever Tree with a twist of Meyer lemon, but it's portable and sometimes that's enough.

Not that I did.

I mean, it wasn't necessary since everything we did involved a cocktail break before and after. Even if what we were doing was going to a pub.

Proper Hendrick's and tonic with a cucumber slice and rose petal garnish.

Prosecco with a rose petal garnish because WHY NOT.

So *maybe* there was some drinking.

Oh Edinburgh - we loved you so, you saucy bitch, you.

Before all that though, there was Austria.

For those of you in the US - don't worry, someone has snow right now.

Not sure if you've noticed, but we are very light on snow this year in the States. It's sad. Austria though? No problemo.

Welcome to proper snow.

Welcome to off-piste.

Welcome to D.A. making fun while you crash.

And welcome to a giant snow storm as we sadly headed to the airport.

As with so many of our ski trips, the storm held out until our final days, but that was actually fine because it gave us plenty of time to get the lay of the land in Arlberg which, by the way, is fucking massive.

And 120 euro gets you access to all of it. HELLO, TAHOE ARE YOU LISTENING?

Also, local folks wait around for the slopes to be "properly prepared", which means that you can go out and ski powder without too many people gumming up the works if you can catch the lift first thing in the morning before they groom.

And why wouldn't you when the lifts have bubble covers and heated seats?

It was lovely. Even though I wrecked my shoulder and we had to fight through a big old storm to get to the airport where we were LUCKY to get the last flight out.

Austrians know how to clear an effing runway.

Love you, Austria.

Missing you already.

So, yeah, Austria and Scotland were good times. Made even more so thanks to our travel buddies and their insatiable desire for all things snow, booze and food.

Happy Ski and Kilt Season!

2011-12-25T06:00:00.000-08:00

What thah?

Bubba and I are fleeing the building for the holidays to go find some snow to ski and kilts to...I don't know...in my case - FLIP.

Since there's no snow to speak of in the US, we're going to Austria to ski the Alps and then, because our friends swear it's an even bigger party than Oktoberfest (which you know we loved), we're joining them in Scotland for a three day long New Year's celebration known as Hogmanay.

Never heard of it?

I hadn't either. And most of the people I've talked to since booking this trip haven't either. So, I guess it's a Scottish thing.

And who doesn't love Scots? OK, I hear rumors, but whatever.

Anyway, WE love Scots, I suppose, and I love men in kilts and since Bubba has vaguely, sort of, with the right cajoling and number of beers, agreed to potentially entertain the concept of maybe getting and wearing one (his favorite color is plaid, after all), we're going to go see what this giant party is all about.

And then maybe jump in the river on New Year's Day. Though, disappointingly, we won't be getting into town in time for the torch parade wherein visitors from faraway places and locals alike can march down the main drags carrying real lit torches of FIRE for some reason I haven't figured out yet.

Too bad on that.

But first - we will ski, as is our Christmas custom. And thanks to the Real Winter Weather Having-ness of Austria, it will not be atop man made snow like so many of the resorts in Lake Tahoe.

And then I'll come back and share photos and we can talk all about how we're all fat from the holiday garbage we ate for six months in the name of Oh It's The Holidays Sure I'll Have Another Slice of Yule Log.

If you want to follow along as we ski and hunt for kilts, I'm on Twitter and Facebook and I'd love to have you along. Just don't hassle me on New Year's Day. I imagine I'll be feeling grotesquely unwell.

Happy whatever you have, folks! Have a G&T for me.

on the twelfth day of What the Effmas...

2011-12-23T15:47:00.000-08:00

...everything but candy canes.

at the 11th hour a snow wife throws herself to her death,
a 10 foot high train track makes an iffy descent,
9 candy canes contributed to a eyeball searing Christmas-themed rave,
8 cars were inconvenienced in the taking of this photo because OBVIOUSLY,
7 choices were set out for the dog's festive dumping,
a 6 foot polar bear kidnapped an unidentifiable inflatable creature,
5 snowmen taunted me from around this off-season May pole,
a 4 foot high elf busted in on Santa taking a merry crap in the most festive of outhouses,
3 deer randomly perched on the roof of this house and ate sprouting sky debris from the gutters,
2 bitches set this tree on fire,
and there was this traitorous douche with his infuriating countdown.

OK, so maybe you were hoping for something with the #12 in it. You know, to make the whole What the Effmas experience complete.

Well, if that's the case, I'm sure there are at least a dozen of those big glowing tree ornaments, or maybe those little fiber optic pseudo-trees or strings of lights wrapped around the door pillars, but that's as far as I'm prepared to go with this numerical succession thing because, at the end of the day, this is the house that haunts me most from all of the photos I've taken.

Come closer and just FEEL the haunting. Also, blurring. Sorry, the dog was pulling me.

Maybe that's because I see this house daily and fantasize about going hog wild ripping lights down from its eaves. Maybe it's because the pattern blinked out by the flashing snowflakes in the trees, net lights draped across the lawn and bulbs nailed to the roof top give the dog the shits. Or maybe it's because EVERY YEAR these psychos put up more lights and more craziness in order to compete with these other maniacs to win the neighborhood's apparently coveted Best Lights Display award based on votes from my more annoying neighbors.

Bubba and I tried, one year, to derail the voting process and discourage resource-melting displays and their corresponding neighborly competitiveness by actually taking part in the voting process and placing our votes for the house with the fewest lights (we were going to vote for a house without any decorations, but thought that our votes would be discarded), but that whole campaign didn't take hold and our votes were left in the "Who are these people?" pile when they were sorted into winners versus losers.

Yet again, the Decorated House That Inspires The Ass Sprays won again, and we were left to shield our eyes from behind the shuttered windows of our home, applying sunscreen to take the dog on her nightly walks.

But because I can't bear to disappoint you fine folks, who join me here in the later months with hearty encouragement for my holiday decoration hating rants, I gift to thee, the rest of the photos deemed eye-scorchingly criminal by my strict standards:

Blue rope lights should be outlawed altogether.

If only they had the inflatable Santa driving a motorcycle with the penguin in the sidecar, this would be perfectly awful.

Jada barked at that dog and then peed on it. Good girl.

Snowmen under the tree. Why?

I fought the urge to straighten that one candy cane because I knew I'd just end up ripping them all out in a passionate rage.

Santa in a helicopter. That's realistic.

Myth dispelled: Limiting yourself to only white lights does not guarantee a tasteful display.

These don't light up, so I took this with a flash and it STILL came out way creepy. I think Santa's buried under the lawn.

Fuck you, snowman.

And then this one house whose decorations I actually find appealing and festive without being too heinous or offensively stupid.

On the eleventh day of What the Effmas...

2011-12-22T14:10:00.001-08:00

...at the 11th hour, this snowwoman waited patiently on her bedazzled widow's perch for her long lost snowhusband to return from sea.

Or so I can only assume based on the inexplicable goings on with other decorations (see every post below.)

a 10 foot high train track makes an iffy descent,
9 candy canes contributed to a eyeball searing Christmas-themed rave,
8 cars were inconvenienced in the taking of this photo because OBVIOUSLY,
7 choices were set out for the dog's festive dumping,
a 6 foot polar bear kidnapped an unidentifiable inflatable creature,
5 snowmen taunted me from around this off-season May pole,
a 4 foot high elf busted in on Santa taking a merry crap in the most festive of outhouses,
3 deer randomly perched on the roof of this house and ate sprouting sky debris from the gutters,
2 bitches set this tree on fire,
and there was this traitorous douche with his infuriating countdown.

OK, so that's a long way to go to put an 11 at the beginning there, but I think you see why I had to include this photo SOMEHOW SOME WAY.

Every time I've driven past this thing I've wondered whether they're trying to make a statement with their haphazard arrangement or they're lazy or cracked out on an unorthodox blend of meth and LSD or actually have a snowman out at sea with a lonely snowwife left in their attic.

Or are they fans of dramatic suicides?

No, that'd be too crazy and disturbing.

Maybe they really want the world to know that they have something akin to a widow's perch even though they live in suburban San Jose? LOOK HOW FANCY WE ARE?

I don't know, people, I'm just spitballing, here. Obviously the people decorating this house are whacked out of their skulls. Though, their whacked out-ness has been increasing in the last few years because they used to only do this with their decorations.

As you can see, things have changed in new and terrible ways. Much like the rest of the crap that inspired What the Effmas to begin with:

A Christmas countdown machine OF DOOM
Pyromaniacal angels
Lost roof tile-eating wildlife
a Coprophagous dwarf
Pagan snowmen
Kidnapping bears
Laxative trees
Psychotic gumdrop forests
a Christmas rave
Non-standard railways

WHAT WILL THE TWELFTH DAY BRING?

You'll just have to wait until tomorrow for that one.

On the tenth day of What the Effmas...

2011-12-21T13:36:00.000-08:00

...a train chugged by 10 feet off the ground in the most nonsensical of holiday decoration arrangements to date.

9 candy canes contributed to a eyeball searing Christmas-themed rave,
8 cars were inconvenienced in the taking of this photo because OBVIOUSLY,
7 choices were set out for the dog's festive dumping,
a 6 foot polar bear kidnapped an unidentifiable inflatable creature,
5 snowmen taunted me from around this off-season May pole,
a 4 foot high elf busted in on Santa taking a merry crap in the most festive of outhouses,
3 deer randomly perched on the roof of this house and ate sprouting sky debris from the gutters,
2 bitches set this tree on fire,
and there was this traitorous douche with his infuriating countdown.

Trains are, apparently, the new *It Decoration* this year. I've never seen so many trains scattered across people's lawns, lining driveways or, in this case, stacked individually by car on the stair-stepped railing at this house.

Tell me, what kind of sense does it make to set up a train this way? No train could possibly run this way. Not even as a fantasy in the sugar-addled minds of young children under the influence of SANTA'S COMING and the intoxication of holiday break from school.

Yet, there it is.

And yet, there are all the other trains I've seen set up a hundred different ways that don't make sense. I wish I'd taken photos of all of them, but not until this house did I realize the alarming trend.

PEOPLE DON'T UNDERSTAND TRAINS.

Which, depending on whether you're my father (which, only one of you is, so I'm not sure why I expect you all to be on board with this.)(Haha - did you see the pun I just accidentally wrote in there? Yeah, I didn't even mean to, and I would have deleted it because I hate punners, but then I decided to write this long aside that will totally derail the rest of this sentence.)(Hey, did you see what I did again? Another train pun! Wow. This is getting out of hand. Phew! I seemed to make it through that sentence without another train pun. Thank gawd.), may or may not actually be alarming.

My dad is a train guy, is what I'm getting at. And, if he were to see all of these train decorations set up in all of these ridiculous ways, he'd probably have something to say about it, but since he's in Mexico doing what lots of Jews do during the winter holidays (other than eat Chinese food and wait for Hanukkah for their socks), he won't ever have to know. And for that we can be grateful because if you think that *I* bitch a lot, well, let's just say that I come by this trait honestly.

My dad is the King Ranter.

Regardless, the train thing has me confused.

Why wouldn't you, People Who Decorate Their Houses For Christmas With Lit Trees and Trains, wind the fucking train around the fucking tree like a normal person?

I mean, is that TOO OBVIOUS? Are you trying to be EDGY with your train placement? Don't want to be predictable and mundane by putting your giant glowing, tooting train decoration around the base of your flashing, bleeping tree like they used to in the olden days? Is that too old-fashioned? Are you trying to be cool for the kids?

WHAT IS IT?

I'll never understand you people. And by You People, I mean those of you who think that a train can run down a stair-stepped railing as though it's built on human legs instead of wheels that run on tracks.

You People also don't understand the meaning of "moderation", I see.

On the ninth day of What the Effmas...

2011-12-20T22:37:00.000-08:00

...9 candy canes out of ONE MILLION faced the same direction and stood straight on this one dude's lawn while the other 999,991 lit up this Christmas-themed rave.

8 cars were inconvenienced in the taking of this photo because OBVIOUSLY,
7 choices were set out for the dog's festive dumping,
a 6 foot polar bear kidnapped an unidentifiable inflatable creature,
5 snowmen taunted me from around this off-season May pole,
a 4 foot high elf busted in on Santa taking a merry crap in the most festive of outhouses,
3 deer randomly perched on the roof of this house and ate sprouting sky debris from the gutters,
2 bitches set this tree on fire,
and there was this traitorous douche with his infuriating countdown.

Look, my beef with these stupid never-installed-properly candy canes is well documented. They never look good. They're never straight. They never make sense. They never do anything other than provide odd looking runways for holiday aliens to land on people's lawns or provide unnecessary confinement for other decorations looking to potentially flee their blinking homelands.

These candy canes are apparently as unsuccessful at keeping deer out of the garden as the so-called deer fencing my mom wraps futilely around her rose bushes, but alas, there they are reigning in the flighty Christmas tree.

I just don't know why people bother with them honestly, or why they're not ever hung from the trees themselves, in a manner reflective of ways I've *actually* seen candy canes used during the holidays.

Don't people decorate Christmas trees by hanging candy canes from the branches sometimes? No? Have I been wrongfully educated on holiday traditions?

Why aren't there ever any of these stupid glowing things hanging from trees? Is that too predictable, now?

I realize I'm asking a lot of questions that don't have answers, but I hardly think that matters. If nothing else, I've proven that holiday decorations don't make a damn bit of sense except to call out which of my neighbors have lost all or most of their minds.

The sad part is that their sanity seems tied proportionately to the number of decorations setting their yards aflame and my block is positively blazing right now.

Does not bode well for the productivity of neighborhood meetings, I'll tell you that.

On the eighth day of What the Effmas...

2011-12-19T22:01:00.000-08:00

...8 cars waited and honked behind me while I feigned holiday merriment and enthusiasm by blocking traffic to take this photo because OBVIOUSLY.

7 choices were set out for the dog's festive dumping,
a 6 foot polar bear kidnapped an unidentifiable inflatable creature,
5 snowmen taunted me from around this off-season May pole,
a 4 foot high elf busted in on Santa taking a merry crap in the most festive of outhouses,
3 deer randomly perched on the roof of this house and ate sprouting sky debris from the gutters,
2 bitches set this tree on fire,
and there was this traitorous douche with his infuriating countdown.

I hope you know the danger I risked by taking this photo so that we could all sit here in a merry ring of holiday judgement and gasp in amazement that someone owns a full-sized sleigh and eight life-sized reindeer and then, when they're displayed on their front lawn, they're not even the most startling thing to look at.

No, that would be the gumdrop wonderland of bullshit leading up to the aforementioned startlingly huge reindeer.

I mean, the rickety facing-every-which-way candy canes would have been enough to get a second glance out of me, but the blue shrubs (why blue? WHY ANYTHING AT THIS POINT?), green tree trunk, rainbow sugar plum tree, nutcracker-esque guardsmen and far off Christmas tree put me over the top.

I had to stop the car. I had to roll my passenger's window down, tell them to move their GDF head back so I could take this photo while flipping the bird to the jackasses swerving around me into oncoming traffic because I'd stopped all forward motion to capture this eye-swelling delight of holiday horror to share with y'all.

Hey, these people are asking for it by dressing their house that way. Whores.

On the seventh day of What the Effmas...

2011-12-18T21:36:00.000-08:00

...I gave the dog 7 things to choose from when deciding where to take a dump,

a 6 foot polar bear kidnapped an unidentifiable inflatable creature,
5 snowmen taunted me from around this off-season May pole,
a 4 foot high elf busted in on Santa taking a merry crap in the most festive of outhouses,
3 deer randomly perched on the roof of this house and ate sprouting sky debris from the gutters,
2 bitches set this tree on fire,
and there was this traitorous douche with his infuriating countdown.

She sniffed around everything on this lawn before deciding to go with an old standby favorite - the tiny lit Christmas tree.

I swear, the dog's anus relaxes as soon as the holidays come around and people start putting these things out on their lawns. They're like a festive blinking laxative for her.

Which is handy for me, because that means I don't have to carry a flashlight or risk life and limb of all nearby kitty cats by stealing her blinking dog tag to locate her dump amidst the darkness of my neighbors' lawns.

Nope - we rely on these merry colorful poo finders for that.

Hooray! It's Christmas! Let's take the dog out to shit in a twinkling forest haunted by a disproportionately small man with a bag of stolen goods, an oversized puppy wearing the fat man's hat and some randomly dispersed giant boxes!

Sort of brings about a physiological reaction in me as well, come to think of it.

Wait! Are those more tiny trees around a much bigger tree and some unidentifiable inflatable object? Excuse me, my newspaper and I have some business to attend to...

On the sixth day of What the Effmas...

2011-12-17T21:31:00.000-08:00

...a 6 foot polar bear kidnapped an unidentifiable inflatable creature and held it captive on a lawn infested with red and white striped earthworms that had left their luminescent slime trails all over the front porch,
5 snowmen taunted me from around this off-season May pole,
a 4 foot high elf busted in on Santa taking a merry crap in the most festive of outhouses,
3 deer randomly perched on the roof of this house and ate sprouting sky debris from the gutters,
2 bitches set this tree on fire,
and there was this traitorous douche with his infuriating countdown.

Yeah, that was kind of a long ways to go to get a 6 at the beginning of that sentence and incorporate all the Wrong going on in that yard. And I didn't even manage to say anything about the too small Christmas tree lost in the shuffle behind all that other madness.

Ohp! There I go - I did get it after all.

So, yeah, this is a new fun trend I'm noticing that folds in neatly with the "Yards That Should Be Tended Before Receiving Decorations" rule -- the "Houses Should Come With a Size Limit For Decorations So That They're Not Larger Than The House Itself" rule.

That polar bear there, yeah, I have to imagine that they justified its size by ruling that once the holidays were over, they were just going to move into it and call it the new breakfast nook.

Like, "Hey kids, just take your cereal into the bear's belly and have your breakfast while I finish packing your lunch over here in its left thigh."

Too much? OK, I guess we could use it as a studio or tool shed or something. I have been needing a place to store all my paw shaped trowels.

Meanwhile, one last thing - why the fuck is a polar bear wearing mittens and a scarf? IT'S A FUCKING POLAR BEAR. They come with built in mittens and scarves - it's called FUR. And, of all things to provide for a creature to fend off the cold weather, why wouldn't you give him boots or at least another pear of mittens for his back paws, which, BY THE WAY, are the same as his front paws because bears don't have hands and feet -- they have FOUR PAWS.

Jesus. I can't make sense of this at all and all I'm trying to do is rationalize the damned polar bear.

I give up. For now.

On the fifth day of What the Effmas...

2011-12-16T16:16:00.000-08:00

...5 snowmen taunted me from around this off-season May pole.
a 4 foot high elf busted in on Santa taking a merry crap in the most festive of outhouses,
3 deer randomly perched on the roof of this house and ate sprouting sky debris from the gutters,
2 bitches set this tree on fire,
And there was this traitorous douche with his infuriating countdown.

Actually, the "Oh waittaminute now!' feature of this display is not the 5 (6, 7?) snowmen partying ironically around the Christmas May pole, but rather the plastic resin bench tied up and out of the way next to the house.

Go ahead and look, I'll give you a minute.

Yeah, see it there on the left? It's just perched atop their side yard gate all Trump-esque and fancy like challenging passers by to ignore the many snowmenned lawn light show beneath the May pole and instead meditate on what might have occurred during the decorating of the house to make the owners believe that, when a useful (albeit ugly) piece of furniture is in the way of another half dozen snowmen, it's acceptable to just jauntily toss it halfway over the fence.

Let it fall where it may! They said while inflating another snowman.
The real important feature is the May pole! We must have a Christmas May pole! Out of the way stupid bench!

And so on until the front yard was finished and sat aglow with just enough light emanating from the scene to draw even more attention to the bench than they probably intended.

I just don't understand why, when they were looking for yet more ways to stage their snowmen, they didn't think to just have some sitting on the bench.

Fictitious holiday characters need to rest their tired dogs just like the rest of us, do they not?

These people are not only slave drivers, they're also heartless and in need of a visit from OSHA before these snowmen join a union and hand them their asses.

On the fourth day of What the Effmas...

2011-12-15T15:58:00.000-08:00

...this elf busted in on Santa taking a merry crap in the most festive of outhouses.
3 deer randomly perched on the roof of this house and ate sprouting sky debris from the gutters,
2 bitches set this tree on fire,
And there was this traitorous douche with his infuriating countdown.

The fact that an outhouse was deemed worthy of inflatable-izing has me doubting the sanity and collective brain power of all those at work creating holiday decorations.

Just why?

Why, firstly, would an imaginative childhood holiday character taking a shit interest anyone?
Then, why would that be cause for celebration?
And then why would you want to immortalize that on your front lawn and call yet more attention to it with additional strings of lights and HELLO a giant inflatable Christmas tree?
And, finally (because I have to stop sometime), why would whatever maniac who invented this offense think that all it needed "To really make it sing!" was an elf busting in on Santa while he was dropping a deuce?

JUST WHY A HUNDRED TIMES?

If there is a greater holiday lesson, tradition or otherwise that I should be aware of, someone please let me know.

If there is a December risk of having small people barging into bathrooms afoot, also please tell me now so that I can start carrying a firearm to the loo.

But if this is just someone's holiday decorations gone horribly wrong, let us all join together to seek out and *disappear* the maker of this particular inflatable holiday fugliness.

Oh my! I think Santa snagged my copy of this month's Hustler!

On the third day of What the Effmas...

2011-12-14T15:44:00.000-08:00

...3 deer randomly perched on the roof of this house and ate sprouting sky debris from the gutters,
2 bitches set this tree on fire,
And there was this traitorous douche with his infuriating countdown.

I get that Christmas stories are rife with Santa's reindeer galloping along magically through the skies and landing on people's houses so that what's his toes can jam his fat behind into chimneys to deliver presents.

I'm not saying it makes sense, but I am at least aware of the stories.

So, I can see why people might put animatronic glowing reindeer on their roof so that their kids think that the reindeer are up there with Fat Ass and his sack of gifts. For the whole month. Just hanging out doing whatever and letting the reindeer shit up the joint.

I suppose I can understand this. Sort of.

But it's beyond my mental capacity to understand what kind of sense it makes to have three random deer perched precariously on a roof peak pointing all which ways without a Santa nearby.

Are they just the early arrivals and the rest of the herd is still huffing along hauling Santa's red behind from the North Pole? Did they escape the reindeer encampment only to realize they were lost without some overweight idiot in a flashy costume pointing them in the right direction so they just stopped wherever (AKA this guy's house) to have an unappetizing snack of fallen airplane debris and dry leaves before tromping off to better pastures?

Who the fuck knows, is what I'm saying, and who the hell knows what these people were thinking when they put these deer on the roof of their house because it's not like their whole front yard was full of inflatable penguins yet or anything.

Oh.

On the second day of What The Effmas...

2011-12-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

...these two bitches were still wearing their Halloween costumes as they set this tree on fire.
And there was this traitorous douche with his infuriating countdown.

See - I'm not the only one who thinks the whole FOREVER YEAR ROUND CHRISTMAS thing has gotten a bit out of hand. These girls were probably still swapping Fun Size Snickers for Butterfingers on their living room floor when their mom came dragging an offensively premature sapling across their trading grounds.

"Nice try, moms, we're not done with Halloween yet and we'll thank you not to ruin our sugar high with your 'Let's untangle all the twinkle lights' bullshit."

Which is when they used their free reign in the attic "looking for the lights" to dust off the emergency candles and hatch a plan to *disappear Christmas*.

Take that, woman! And we're wearing our Halloween costumes to the mall later when you force us to go with you to pick out stocking stuffers. We will not go quietly into the holiday season!

These are my kind of girls. Just...make sure you take them to White Castle.

On the first day of What The Effmas...

2011-12-12T13:23:00.000-08:00

...I saw this fucking guy like totally hanging out on my neighbor's porch mocking me with his prissy hat and crooked carrot nose.

"Look at me! I have a digital read out of how many days lie between you and the time when you'll be able to legitimately harass people for still having their Christmas decorations up! You can take that to the bank, too, because I'm wearing a top hat which makes me verrrrrrrrrrrry official!"

Yeah, that's right, I'm choosing to ignore the whole "'till Christmas" business on that sign so that it can serve a useful purpose. Otherwise it's just a fruity snowman cheating on his real station in life - being the mascot for the best winter holiday of all: SKI SEASON.

Fucking traitor.

(For the record: Yes, I realize I used this photo in the last post. Also, yes, I realize that it says "15" days 'TILL (Why do people insist on contracting, "until"? That one extra letter is not so cumbersome. And, yes, I know that U and N count as two letters, but they always add the extra L in the contraction and I find it all needlessly complex and cutesy and it makes the math work out weird, so just whatever. Why, this is an awful long aside, isn't it? Consider it a bonus. Merry What The Effmas.) Christmas, but I didn't have a chance to go back and retake the photo, so just go with me on this.)

And now you may look forward to approximately 11 more days of counting down to the tune of You Know What Song because it's all stuck in your heads like it is mine.

Hooray. Just FEEL that holiday spirit rising up the back of your throat.

Merry Freshly Shat Coil of Decomposing Hellfire!

2011-12-11T16:37:00.001-08:00

I learned the grossest lesson today while I was all up to my fucking ears in holiday baking:

Never crack eggs right into your recipe. Crack them into another bowl first, then drop them into your recipe.

Why?

Why dirty another bowl?

Why take the extra step when you're known for being a lazy short cut taker?

Because you may just drop a rotten egg right into your spinning bread dough and then have to watch (and smell) helplessly while its dark rank evil swirls ever deeper into your dough, ruining it forever.

No challahs were harmed in the making of this recipe.

And then you have to do two completely distasteful things:

Start over. There's no saving anything that's seen the likes of a rotten egg.
Waste everything that's gone into your recipe already.

I HATE WASTE. I HATE STARTING OVER. BECAUSE THAT'S JUST A FANCY WAY OF SAYING 'WASTING TIME'.

This is no place for rotten eggs.

There's just nothing good about that scenario, so now I will always crack all eggs into a small bowl first, to test their potential rottenness, and then I will either PLOOP them into the mixer or SPLACH them into the garbage disposal with a lemon rind and run the thing for a solid five minutes.

And then I will bake a batch of mini challahs that turned out not exactly "mini".

Then I may or may not light a match and blame the dog, but you know, every time can be different. That's the fun of my kitchen.

That, and coming into contact with a smell so hideous it can only be equated to a freshly shat coil of decomposing hellfire.

This, however, smelled heavenly. And nothing like hellfire or rotten shatting.

My one saving grace was that I'd only used one of my four eggs for the recipe when the filthy rotten HELL egg went in, so I could still make the other five billion egg-needing recipes on the Holiday Baking Doom List.

Specifically, another batch of mini challahs that aren't actually mini and a truckload of mini coffee cakes that are actually mini.

I love these mini loaf pans with plastic lids for JUST this reason: stackability.

And, I should say, that if you're ever in need of a method for ridding your house of an awful smell and replacing it with a HEAVEN smell - bake two batches of challah and then bake coffee cake.

Then experience Nose Joy that has nothing to do with coke or huffing glue.

Not that I'd know about that kind of joy. It's not my thing.

If one could ingest gin through one's nose, though, that'd be another story.

But enough about my fine collection of illicit hobbies - I made more stuff:

Remember the lip balm thing? They look more profesh now. Also, they're not hard as a rock. Hooray.

In all honesty, I made these over the summer when blackberries were in season. Oh summertime...I miss thee.

And then, I made some more stuff from the stuff I made.

Sort of like standing between two mirrors except this was more work.

By this point in the holiday gift gathering, "JOY" is the last thing on my mind.

Unless it's the JOY from being FUCKING DONE ALREADY GAH.

I can't wait to ship you away from my house.

And in a few weeks, I'll take those mini coffee cakes of HEAVEN and give them to my neighbors so that they know that I love them even though Jada poops next to their Christmas trees.

The ones on their lawns, people. Not the ones in their living rooms. BUT OH MY GAH WHAT IF SHE DID THAT WOULD BE AWESOME.

But no. I wouldn't let her. That would be wrong.

And, anyway, I pick up the dumps she leaves by their lawn Christmas trees, so they probably know I love them.

Well, except for these people:

Bet this thing has 3 digit capability. Asses.

I don't love them, but sadly Jada's tank was empty, so I couldn't express my true feelings about their little decoration, there.

We'll try again though.

Meanwhile, holiday baking is done, the house smells like a bakery and it's cocktail time.

Don't forget - DO NOT CRACK EGGS RIGHT INTO YOUR RECIPES. Or, you know, rotten hellfire shits and such.

Why I'm like this at the holidays.

2011-12-07T16:52:00.001-08:00

Want to know what's going on next door?

Yeah. OK.

Look a lot like last year's display only with a different annoying tune and a big new star over the door?

Yeah. OK.

And you wonder why I lose my mind at the holidays.

Well, wonder no more.

Everything's NOT a gift.

2011-12-06T06:22:00.000-08:00

I actually meant to start this post back in October when, during a morning run through my neighborhood, I saw the first sign of the forthcoming holidays - a banner whipping around the Valero gas station advertising "Gifts fit for the whole family!" with a picture of their gas cards below.

OH REALLY.

I wish I'd taken a picture, but I was still operating under the delusion that October was a month for pumpkins, fall races, fishing and at the very bitter end of the month - eating of too small candies. So, you know, I didn't have my phone with me to document such merry holiday harbingers such as the fucking gas station.

That's OK though, because it at least provides a good segue for this particular holiday peeve of mine: Stores that inappropriately advertise their wares as "Perfect for the whole family", "The right size for everyone on your list" or inclusive of "Everyone you know".

Because, outside of perhaps Amazon.com, which now sells every fucking thing under the sun, or eBay, which lets people from all over the world sell shit that no one wants alongside other shit that is either overpriced or being fenced from the back of a windowless van, no store has something that everyone in anyone's family wants or needs.

And this is not a new concept or realization either. I remember seeing a holiday ad (and it was probably one of those broadsheet paper fliers shoved into my folks' Sunday newspaper) as a kid for a hardware store advertising "Gifts for the whole family" with photos of a drill press, floral hammer, plain pink sweatshirt and rubber bands rendered as line drawings on its flimsy cover with the banner, "Gifts for the whole family" splashed across the top amongst red and green ornaments and similar holiday finery.

"Mmhhmmm..." I remember thinking doubtfully. "Who's 'whole family' are they referring to with this ad?"

Then I tried to match up the items on the cover with members of my own family in an effort to validate their "whole family" claim. It was a confusing and altogether unsatisfying process that only confirmed for me the hollow claims of holiday advertisers and also the ineptitude of hardware store marketing departments.

"OK...so the drill press is clearly for dad. The floral hammer is for mom? Or what about the pink sweatshirt? I guess that could be for my mom or my sister. Rubber bands? Are those for my brother? So that he can make a rubber band ball and throw it for the dog who will inevitably eat it and wind up with a trip to the vet when my mom thinks she's gotten worms but is actually just trying desperately to pass a wad of True Value's finest? I give up. Let's see that Macy's ad."

And so went the day.

I'll admit to being hopelessly attracted to the glossy ads folded into the Sunday paper around the holidays, making the thing so fat with BUY THIS CRAP BEFORE CHRISTMAS IS UPON YOU LIKE THE PLAGUE fliers that the paper guy couldn't roll the newspaper up compactly enough to fit into the oversize newspaper box bolted to the post beneath the mailbox. Instead, we'd find the paper stuffed into a thin weakling plastic bag and propped up against the post, straining for all its worth against the bag and physics itself.

Pathetic.

And I'm sorry to say that this trend of every store hawking its bullshit as "perfect gifts for the holidays" regardless of its actual gift-giving qualities has not changed. In fact, it has only gotten more pervasive as the years have gone by and the stores become ever the more desperate to sell whatever the hell it is that they have on the shelves to any passerby similarly desperate to buy something or gullible enough to believe that a tire store has a "perfect gift" for his aging mother.

Some things are just not gifts, people. I think that, during 11 months out of the year, almost all of us can distinguish between something that *is* a gift and something that is not. And this is coming from someone who has purchased tires as a gift, though not for my mother.

I just don't want this trend getting completely out of control, as seems to be the inevitable outcome. I mean, yes, now it's just the gas station, dry cleaner and local mechanic tying ribbon around gas cards, wire hangers and steel belted radials, but it's going to lead to the funeral home down the street trying to market its services as "Perfect for the whole family" and that is when I'm going to fucking lose it.

Businesses of the world - everything you sell or provide as a service IS NOT A GIFT. So, just put your ribbon away and stoppit already.

It's good to be an unprofessional jackass [RECIPE]

2011-12-02T06:29:00.000-08:00

I know you're coming here for holiday rants this month, and don't you worry, there will be plenty, but I also said I'd be talking about food we're eating, so here we go.

And I just hope that no one out there was hoping for super gourmet professional type dishes because, oh friends, that is not really what we've got here.

See, I'm a no-professional-culinary-skill-having home cook. I make stuff I know we like, stuff the magazines and internets say we'll like and stuff that either Bubba or I make up out of the weirdness in our minds.

This is a "Made Up Out Of The Weirdness In Our Minds" recipe, just so you know before getting all excited that I'm going to share something with you that you might make and serve to fancy people. Since I'm sure you're all embroiled in Fancy Dinner Party menu planning right now and then came to this blog for help.

Which would make you misguided and lost, but we'll just stop there with the assumptions.

For this recipe though, the Weirdness In Our Minds part comes from something cuh-lassy that Bubba and I call, affectionately - even reverently - The Big Bowl of Failure.

I'm not 100% sure that we ripped this off from a stand-up comedian we saw or whether it came to us by way of one of our wittier friends or maybe from Bubba's hilarious mind, but that's what we call it. And by "it" I mean the KFC Famous Mashed Potato Bowl.

In case you didn't know what a Big Bowl of Failure looked like.

Yeah, this thing - this atrocity of fast foodiness - has been haunting our household, particularly Bubba's part of the household, for some time. My beloved, he has an odd weakness for KFC, and although he's able to avoid its grotesqueness 99.99% of the time, every now and then he can be found elbow deep in a red and white striped box that's gone nearly transparent on the bottom and sides from the...ahem...goodness held therein.

He has not, however, ever gotten one of these heinous bowl things, even though every time he sees it advertised on TV, he begins making the yum-yum face and stares at me as if to plead, "Baby, don't you think it's time I sampled one of these sure-to-be-delicious items?"

To which I respond, with my no-no face, "That's fucking gross and I'm ashamed of myself for also sort of wanting to try one, too."

We both have weaknesses, is what I'm saying, and this monstrosity of food badness hits us right in the OH GOD NOT THERE spot.

I mean, come on, the fucking thing has fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn (ok, whatever with the corn), cheese and it's covered in god damned gravy. COME ON. I don't understand why they didn't go ahead and wedge a big fat rock of crack cocaine in the top there and and call it a day.

But whatever, I guess they have some limits over there at KFC, where we all know the F still stands for Fried and the other two words are mearly suggestions.

Regardless, neither of us can see our way to eating this thing. The shame in ordering it alone would be the end of us.

However, it has not been forgotten in our annals of I WANT THAT NAUGHTY IN MY MOUTH (whoa), and so, as I stood in front of my stove with a whole butternut squash, a whole smoked and crockpotted chicken and a giant leek, it became the answer to the What The Fuck Am I Going To Make From This Shit? question.

It was questionable at first, but after we both ate it (quietly and quickly, I might add), we decided it should be called The Big Bowl of Success. Both for its tastiness and for its not-going-to-send-you-to-an-early-grave-ness.

If you choose to make it, feel free to sub in your own items where you see fit because the other beautiful thing about being an Off The Reservation Home Cook is that you can do whatever the fuck you want in your own kitchen because Michelin rarely barges into residential kitchens on Wednesday nights to write up abominable home cooks.

And thank god for that.

Big Bowl of Success

Serves 2
Ingredients
1 Butternut squash - peeled, cubed and roasted in a 425 degree oven for 25 minutes
1 Giant leek - halved and trimmed of dark green parts
1 large breast from a smoked and roasted whole chicken (or one of those rotisserie bad boys from the grocery store), meat removed from bones, chunked and drippings held aside
1-2 T flour
1 T butter
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
White wine

To make
Butternut squash puree
In a large bowl, puree the cubes of roasted butternut squash and butter with an immersion blender (the stick kind, you know) until super smooth and amazing looking. Seriously, it will look amazing, and it is. Use a rigid spatula to incorporate as much salt and pepper as you like. If it's too thick and you want it to be less so, add in olive oil, more butter, milk or cream until it's the consistency you desire in your heart of hearts. Set it aside.

Gravy
Take the drippings from the crockpot (in which you've cooked this whole chicken for most of the day at 300 degrees) or rotisserie pan and bring to a simmer in a sauce pan with about 1/2 cup of white wine.

Here comes another example of my mom's secret genius and another time when I realized this woman truly has me on a need to know basis for important shit:

When incorporating the flour, for thickening up your pan drippings into a tasty roux, remove about 1/2 cup of your liquid into a small bowl, whisk in the flour a teaspoon or so at a time and then - once all your flour is mixed into that small amount of liquid, return THAT to your pan with the other liquid on low-medium heat.

The gravy looks on with great anticipation. "Come to me, Roux, I'm ready for you now." Sexy!

I should have turned the heat down on this. It was a tad high. Don't be like me! Low-medium is best.

This will make for a lumpless gravy because those little bits of flour won't stick together and refuse to incorporate. It's magic. It's amazing. It's another one of those things my mom has held back from me in order to reign supreme forever. Or because who really thinks to tell that to their kids? Probably not a lot of people.

Leeks
Chop them up. That's all

Then assemble the whole thing in one big bowl - butternut squash puree first, then chunks of chicken, then leeks, then gravy.

I'm sorry that these photos are in no way appetizing to look at. Also, I forgot the gravy in this photo. Boo.

Then...awesomeness.

Let's make it official. Starting with The Disappearing of Thanksgiving

2011-11-29T06:00:00.000-08:00

I really love your enthusiasm for my holiday rants. And not just because I love to rant (which hullooooo - is my favorite) but because it always feels good to not be alone in one's opinions of things. And there you guys are, all "Yay! It's Finny Rants About The Holidays time!", making me all warm and fuzzy inside.

And, isn't that what the holidays are really about? Feeling warm and fuzzy inside?

Yeah - I used to think so, too, until people got all full up with their retarded Holiday Crazy and began snuffing out the warm fuzziness that *could* be a part of the holidays if they'd all just stop being idiots and starting full scale riots over video game consoles and such.

Which is why I'm declaring December on this blog to be How Dumbasses Are Ruining The Holidays Month.

Because there are SO many ways that dumbasses are ruining the holidays beyond just the fugly-fying of their homes with absurd decorations when they should be spending that time and money, say, MOWING THEIR DAMN LAWNS SO THAT CHEETAHS STOP USING IT FOR CAMOUFLAGE.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

What I'm planning to do here is trot out all the ways in which dumbasses are standing between all of us and a warm, fuzzy holiday season, one post at a time. And, by all means, feel free to add your peeves to the comments so that I can fold them into the ranting to come.

We'll start with a post that I drafted up before Thanksgiving when I was in the throes of an enthusiastic happy hour with Bubba and all on fire about a sighting from my commute home on November 9th.

Remember that date, November 9th, because it sets the tone for the post below.

Hope you're all looking forward to a month of holiday ranting interspersed with ironical displays of my holiday endeavors because even though there are dumbasses out there intent on ruining my warm fuzzy good holiday times, I never stop trying to fight back with seasonal baked goods and some measure of good tidings.

For that post already...

I nearly caused a low speed traffic accident by slowing down to a shocked halt in front of a house a block over from mine when I saw that creepy telling glow of OH SHIT THE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS ARE UP ALREADY.

Net lights over shrubs, string lights hung all mamby pamby along the gutters, some horseshit wound around the porch columns. ON NOVEMBER 9th. Waaaaaaaaaayyyyy more than a month before Christmas.

Meanwhile, do people even celebrate Thanksgiving anymore? Because I think this country, as a whole, has forgotten about Thanksgiving in its ever hurrying rush to celebrate Christmas.

Not to get all, "When I was a kid" on you, like some crazy old bat (which I don't yet qualify for at my spring chickeny 33 years of age), but I do remember a time when we at least waited until the day after Thanksgiving to get all HOORAY CHRISTMAS IS ONLY 30 DAYS AWAY and shit.

Like, there'd be the mad dash to the mall on the day after Thanksgiving (though I will NOT call it Black Friday because I just will not) and, soon after, there'd be the lighting of some tree in Rockefeller Center in New York City, because it's super relevant to the rest of the country to light a tree in a city thousands of miles away, and the chorus of holiday stressing out would be set to annoying jingling music in every store, commercial and radio station.

AFTER THANKSGIVING.

But I think there's been some secret agreement made amongst those who really want Christmas RIGHT NOW to *disappear Thanksgiving* in some sort of mob hit so that they don't have to wait one additional hot second before dousing themselves in egg nog and running headlong into a Wal-Mart frenzy at an ungodly hour to maim people with shopping carts and also save, like, $2.50 on a Xbox.

I think they're trying to *wack* Thanksgiving.

I mean, when you think about it, what really stands in the way of Christmas anymore? Halloween? Pffftt. Certainly not.

I mean, I saw Halloween decorations in the stores for about two weeks and THE SECOND that shit was over, all that stuff got packed into boxes and shipped back to whatever storage facility holds it all for next year. The shelves weren't even cold before the Christmas stuff filled its place. Meanwhile the shelf space next to the Halloween stuff had Christmas stuff in it already, so it's not like the writing wasn't on the wall.

It was. Halloween is on shaky ground in the Obstacles Between America and Christmas department.

And what else is there between us and Forever Year Round Christmas? Hardly anything.

I mean, Easter gets a little play, and there's Fourth of July that people like because there are explosives, outdoor cooking and beer, but no one's getting up at 4am to race into a department store to buy an American flag or anything.

What I'm getting at, here, is that the holidays are fine things in themselves, but the Crazy that surrounds them is, like, totally gross.

So when I see my neighbor's Christmas lights up on November 9th, it makes me want to jam a pen in my eye and/or go on a killing spree with a giant candy cane.

Thankfully, there are already many stabby instruments making their appearance around my neighborhood, so at least I won't be at odds in my hunt for a killing instrument.

And nigh-night.

2011-11-28T23:33:00.001-08:00

50,326 words later, I have barely reached the turning point of this beast and will probably have to go back and hack off the first 35,000 words BUT WHATEVER.

Done for now. More silliness to come. Later. After sleeping.

Let us join together as one in our holiday pet peeves

2011-11-28T16:27:00.001-08:00

I just wanted to check in and make sure that you all survived the craziest holiday shopping weekend in history.

Crazy in the sense that people were nearly (or totally? I didn't follow up on the news stories because they were too depressing) killed attempting to buy waffle irons for $2 and such.

I just feel like the holidays have lost their appeal when celebrating them involves the use of pepper spray, rioting or handguns on fellow citizens of humanity.

Perhaps, in that sense, I am the crazy one, but I'm willing to accept that.

Meanwhile, sorry the blog has been so quiet this month. NaNoWriMo is nearly over (3 more days! 6,000 more words! I need to give myself constant pep talks and use a lot of exclamation points so that I don't shrivel up into a lumpy pile of despair! Forgive me!) and I really really want to be back with you guys, hanging out here, bitching about the aforementioned holiday insanity and also showing you pictures of things I'm making, eating, drinking and pointing at in horror.

Yeah, I feel renewed attention to my favorite game of Holiday Fugly coming on, so I hope you're ready for my Holiday Ranting A-Game.

Got some holiday rantings of your own? I totally want to hear them. It may even inspire me to go on a whole new rant of my own.

And wouldn't that be nice? Some togetherness, some camaraderie, some linking of arms and pointing of collective fingers during this season of holiday?

I think so.

So spill it in the comments: Holiday Pet Peeves...GO. And remember - you can say swears here and I heartily encourage it.

I just saw it happen

2011-11-23T14:15:00.001-08:00

I got up this morning to just go walk the dog and spend the day off doing whatever.

Like, I'd dick around in the yard raking shit or I'd prune something, look at the bees, ride bikes to get tacos with Bubba, whatever.

Not like it was a special day off, or a day that most other people would have off, and so I'd just go about my day off as though it was my own personal secret. Secret Finny Day Off! Let's go get drinks!

Or whatever.

I thought I was still safe from it. From the days off that aren't really days off because everyone else has them off, too, and so they're out there mucking up your own secret day off with their mutual day-offness.

Please do not act like you don't know what I'm talking about because I know that you do.

And really, while we're all *knowing* what I'm talking about - let's call this phenomenon of mutual day-offness what it really is - The Holiday Season.

Oh sweet mother, it is so ON. And I watched the switch get flipped.

Yep. Saw it happen.

I watched it go from "Oh, pretty. It's fall." to "OH SHIT. I HAVEN'T SHOPPED YET."

See, I was just freshly back from our bike to tacos, where I had just blasted through a pile of leaves on my bike with no regard for whether there was a cinder block hidden in the middle of it or more likely half a tree limb, and I was so pleased with Fall.

Oh, the neighbor's house looks so nice with the red leaves from the maple tree in front and oh it's kinda chilly I should maybe wear a jacket, and that kind of shit. All while just driving up to BevMo to get materials for tonight's Special Day Off Edition Cocktail Hour.

It was a rare peaceful moment in my world during which I didn't contemplate hitting anyone with my car.

Because I usually only get that way during a certain time of year and, hey, it's only fall, so there's no reason that people should be acting any differently than any other time of year but wait why is there a traffic jam in the BevMo parking lot IT'S NOT LIKE IT'S THE HOLIDAYS OR SOMETHING...

Oh.

I just saw it happen.

I watched regular people, who are probably only marginally insane and poorly behaved most of the year, flip down the visor of their steel helmets and let fly the Holiday Battle Cry.

"ARE YOU LEAVING?"

"SIR! IN THE YELLOW PANTS!"

"YEAH! ARE YOU LEAVING? OK, GREAT! THANKS! I'LL JUST WAIT HERE while blocking traffic entirely because I'm in the middle of the lane because I don't want anyone from either direction swooping in and taking MY spot because BITCHES I got here first and this is holiday prison rules parking so just sit the fuck back there and wait!"

I mean, I could have denied it at this point. I could have chalked that scenario up to the reassuring concept of this being, perhaps, a drunk driver in the booze store parking lot who had stopped by briefly to refuel before tearing back out on to the streets of San Jose on a one woman killing spree.

I could have, but it would have proven fruitless because immediately after parking my car (in one of the many spaces that were only a few rows beyond the cherished front four spots), I witnessed a series of Only At The Holidays events that broke me of my comfy cozy It's Not The Holidays Yet denial.

I walked into BevMo (FINALLY.) to find a 20 foot tower of Jim Beam Holiday Collectible gift sets
I checked out at the grocery store next to a big stand of Special For The Holidays Ivory Label Lanson Champagne
Came home to find the first Christmas card of the season propping open my mailbox. (Leave it to the accountant.)

Along with 8 different catalogs with holiday themed covers

I have the neighborhood kids racing about on the streets at midday because school's out for the long weekend and let's all tie our hair together and ride one bicycle out of sheer relief of being away from the four walls of school!
My neighbors are balancing on rickety ladders in their driveways and they ain't cleaning their gutters
I went to look up a recipe for tomorrow's dinner (which I realize is Thanksgiving dinner, yes.) and it was in the Holiday section of my good old fashioned recipe binder

There's really no denying the facts at that point. It's the fucking holiday season and I totally just watched it happen.

This morning, things were all fine and dandy and then I went ahead and pushed the issue flaunting my day offness right in front of BevMo and BAM!

The holidays are here.

Nice going, ass.

Meanwhile, Happy Thanksgiving, people.

FINE, I WILL THEN. [Tutorial]

2011-11-20T11:43:00.000-08:00

I finally gave in today and hatched a craft.

I've been staring at the leaves for months, here at home, in Arkansas, in Tahoe - I just keep staring at them and fantasizing about making wreaths, taking their picture, becoming ONE with them.

Stop staring at me, swan!

Because I'm obviously a psycho.

And then I saw Dig's post about Bleeping Wreaths and was all, Oh look how pretty! I want to make a wreath from leaves! but then I was all, But oh, Bubba hates holiday decorations and I could never hang one on our front door screen door because he'd totally poop but then I was all, I bet I can make one that's really lightweight and won't wreck the screen or I can put it someplace where he won't get all WHAT'S UP, HOLIDAY LOSER or whatever.

It was a whole thing.

So this weekend came along, when Bubba was going out of town and I was left unsupervised in the presence of leaves and fall and wreath making materials abounding just all over the fucking place, so after a lot of hemming and mental hawing over What If Bubba Hates It and I Have To Explain Myself For Making Something Holiday-ish, I shut up my mind and just did it.

And, really, there's nothing HOLIDAY-y about fall leaves, really. When you think about it. Which I did. Lots.

Also, there's so much other shit I needed to do, that I was having a hard time justifying taking time to make wreaths that might not be met with the warmest acceptance and approval. Until I realized that I was actually standing still, staring at the space on the wall where I wanted to put these alleged wreaths and had stopped all productive activity to do so, and so wasn't doing anything anyway.

Exactly what my mind was imagining.

I was just wasting time staring and wanting and itching to craft and so I told myself to stop being such a freak and just do what the crafting fingers wanted: Make a god damned wreath and shut the hell up, self.

So I did.

Yeah - take that, self.

Also, I went and took pictures of the pistache trees that are all aflame with fall on our street. They've been staring at me all week and I just needed to get them together with the camera for a quick second before they were barren from the windy rainy weather and I had to be all sad that I missed my chance and begin administering the mental beatings that would carry over until next fall.

Aflame, I tell you.

Sometimes it takes a lot of self flagellation for anything to get done around here, is what I'm saying.

See, that wasn't so hard. I don't know why I make things so difficult.

And then, after photographing the trees and collecting leaves in the rain from my neighbors' driveways while they looked out at me with pity from their living room windows (Hi, people - FYI: Pointing is not helping.), I took 20 god damned minutes and made two adorable wreaths that, when Bubba rolls his eyes and points to them in a few months when it's Valentine's Day and they're still hanging on the wall, will get thrown into the vegetable beds and composted because TAH DOW they are biodegradable.

Score.

Simple Ass Wreaths Tutorial

Makes 2 wreaths

Materials
A bunch of leaves of whatever colors are around
An old file folder
Hot glue gun with hot glue sticks
1 foot of ribbon, strip of cloth, length of twine - whatever tying implement you have lying about tangling up with other shit in your craft supplies
Scissors
Tape
Two different sized bowls that both fit on one half of the file folder

How to
(Sorry, no photos of the process. I was in and out of this project in about 20 minutes and thought I'd end up throwing it away in the composter, so didn't take any pictures. That'll teach me.)
Take your file folder, and keeping it folded, trace the circumference of the larger bowl onto the folder. Then put the smaller bowl inside that circle and trace that one so that you now have a nice O shape at least two inches wide.

Cut the Os out.

Heat up the glue gun and start gluing down leaves in whatever fashion suits you. I layered them up with their stem ends all going the same direction until the stems started getting in the way and then I just cut them off. And because I don't like waste - even wasting of shit that was going to be thrown in a heap at the curb anyway - I used all the leaves and just started gluing and stuffing them in wherever they'd fit when I got to the last few.

Make the other wreath just like I said, there.

Loop your tying implement (I used some 1" ribbon left in my wrapping supply box) over the first wreath and tuck it behind the leaves on the front. Tape it down to the cardboard O backing and tuck the other end over the other wreath and tape that down.

You're done.

Oh. Yeah. That was pretty fast.

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

I hung mine by hiding a tack behind the leaves on the top wreath and pinning it to the wall, but you could tie another length of ribbon or whatever to the top wreath and swing it over your front door (I tried this, but I knew Bubba would hate it so I stopped) or tie a bow in it and pin it to the wall from the bow or even loop it over the top of a framed picture and tape it to the back. You could also hang it from a suction cup hook to your front windows, like I imagined doing when I was in denial about Bubba's hatred for all things Holiday Decorate-y, but I'll leave it to you to determine how much of a scrooge your beloved might be.

The only other thing I did was go back to the wreath, after it was hung where I wanted it, and glued some of the floppy leaves in place so they wouldn't dry all wonky. But if you're using leaves that are already real dry, you won't have to do this.

Then sit at your bar, even though it's 11am and there's no need for cocktails just yet, and write a blog post about what a lunatic you are and how you should probably not be left unsupervised and how you should REALLY be writing all these words for NaNoWriMo since you have about 1500 to go for the day and you haven't even typed word ONE.

So, yeah, I'll be seeing you. Happy wreathing.

Pudding brain

2011-11-19T22:43:00.000-08:00

Oh dudes. This month is totally getting away from me and I hate just hate that.

Know what else I hate? Only blogging once a week. Seriously.

I have shit to tell you people and when it gets to the weekend and I sit down to tell you all of it, my brain numbs up and I have a hard time scraping together two coherent words that you might want to read.

But that's mostly because I've been spending all my words on NaNoWriMo.

So far, I'm about 30K words into the 50K goal and I'm on track to win again this year, for the third year in a row. YAY.

In even better NaNoNews (which is a thing I just made up. You should go use it as a hash tag on Twitter and get a trend going. I'll join in! Maybe.) I may be writing a novel this year that actually makes it to Stage 2: Editing. Which will be wholly unlike my previous two novels that will die a cold solitary death in the forever phase of Stage 1: NaNoWriMo Draft.

Now, granted, I'm not 100% sure that I'll edit this novel, but since I never made it this far into the month while still liking my novel and the characters therein, it at least has a better chance than either of the two stink bombs from years past.

I attribute this relative success to three things:

Scrivener
Seriously, having actual writing software that lets you put together character sketches, outlines, scene descriptions and so on, is actually as helpful as the Theys of the world say it is. Not that Scrivener is paying me to say that or anything. I just really like it and it's helping me not hate my book this year. Hooray.
I wrote an outline before I started writing.
Now, granted, I wrote two outlines and did research and wrote up chapter summaries and everything before doing my usual punt at the 11th hour by deciding to go with an entirely new, un-outlined premise, but then I wrote up a quick outline for that idea and it's been semi-smooth sailing since. In the sense that I have only rewritten the premise once or twice and the novel has taken only two or three major shifts since I started writing. OK, so it's not the same premise at all, really, but I haven't changed the title, so that's something.
@NaNoWordSprints
Ever had to sit down and catch up on 5,000 words in a day? Yeah. It's not the best. Particularly when your brain is filled with pudding and you can't come up with the brain power to order a burrito, much less write a novel in draft form.
But having the @NaNoWordSprints deal going on Twitter, where they have some nice NaNoWriMo person tweeting ideas, commands, prompts and silliness to get you writing as many words as humanly possible in 20-30 minute increments is EXTREMELY helpful when your fingers thud down on the keyboard and immediately freeze. What? I need to have a sudden and powerful weather shift occur in my story? OK. I can think of something for that. Or, an alligator or anteater needs to appear or be mentioned? OK. I can fit that in somehow. Give me 10 minutes. So, yeah, super helpful.

Mostly, I feel like this year's NaNoWriMo situation is an improvement over past efforts since I'm 10 days from the finish line and I haven't gone on a wordly killing spree inspired by intense hatred of all my characters.

Though someone will have to die soon. I have a chapter in my head all written up for that scene, so unless someone starts pissing me off, I'm just going to have to make up someone annoying to knock off so I can have them shoved carelessly into the back of an ambulance like so much bagged lawn clippings.

Anyway, that's what's up with NaNoWriMo. I'm going for my third win and no one has died yet. I'll let you know when I cross the finish line and we can do a body count together.

In other November news, I signed up for the Applied Materials Turkey Trot again, for the 4th consecutive year, and almost immediately after paying my $35 registration fee, decided I probably won't run it after all.

Why would I throw $35 in a hole like that?

Well, when you submit your registration, you end up on a thank you page of sorts, and this page has a hideous counter to tell you how many other idiots are running this race on Thanksgiving morning in some half assed effort to wish away the calories from the 16 pies they plan to eat.
And when that counter says 18,296 like it did when I was sent there after registering, I had to take a moment to get over nearly swallowing my tongue and then swiftly decide that my $35 would just be considered a donation to the food banks that benefit from the race as well as a little gift to myself in the form of a run through my vacant town on Thanksgiving morning while all these crazy fuckers are off running this race on the other side of town.

Yeah. Jada and I will be going for a solitary run around my neighborhood and, on our way home, will stop by a friend's place for Thanksgiving bloody Marys and ZERO race day bullshittery.

I'm pretty sure.

I mean, you know how much I love a balloon arch and race day jitters and all that shite, so I may give in at the last minute and subject myself to the throngs of insane morons dressed in costume pressed together in the name of extra pie, but it's likely that I'll opt for a quiet run through empty streets with the dog, followed by bloodies with a good friend and some race fries even though I didn't run a race at all.

Because I guess I'm just a cheater like that.

Also, the bees went nigh-night after their third sugaring, nearly all the fava beans have germinated and at this very moment I'm sitting in front of a fully functional gas fireplace that is giving me no guff whatsoever when I go to turn it on.

I feel like I should probably go buy a lottery ticket.

Garden fight!

2011-11-13T12:16:00.000-08:00

I don't know why I love the concept of my gardens fighting one another, but as I sat down to compare this year's garden and its final tallies to last year's I could only imagine pretty green tomato leaves curling into little garden fists of fury.

"My tomatoes are bigger than yours!"

"Yeah jerk? Well, my tomatoes are more numerous than yours!"

OK, so fighting tomatoes are kind of stupid. Let's move away from this bizarre concept.

What I meant to say was, the garden is done for the season. Including the volunteer potatoes and peppers, which held out way longer than I thought they would, but mostly because I finally tore the overgrown tomatoes out of their way so that they could see the sun again.

Someone get me some fucking sunscreen!

And then what happened? Well, the spindly little peppers which had produced all of an ounce of fruit for me, finally started doing some growing. In October, when it was basically too late for anything impressive to happen.

At least we're still wearing our blossom hula skirts.

I could be a pepperoncini. Put me in coach!

I double dare you to fry me up.

But still - we got some more peppers and AT LONG FUCKING LAST we got two NuMex Jalamundo peppers.

Two.

With which I *could* have made two very overwrought jalapeno poppers and thus fulfilled my fantasy of fried foods, but I did not.

I opted for some end of season salsa verde because of the abundance of the volunteer tomatillo plants and because the thought of firing up a pot of hot oil to fry two measly jalapenos seemed like a greasy waste of time.

Maybe next year! When I just sow them direct in the soil and back away from this delusion of mine that tells me that, despite many years of failure, I can actually start seedlings indoors and successfully harden them off to grow in the garden.

Look. I just can't do this. I suck so impressively at it, in fact, that it could be a new defining characteristic of mine. Seedling Killer. That's me.

Anyway, I did sow them directly in the garden *eventually* and, after a summer of growing in the shade beneath the aggressive tomatillo and cherry tomatoes, I harvested a big two jalapenos. That particular failure is all my fault and we'll try again next year when I'll endeavor to make more sense in my gardening. Like, I'll sow them in the spring somewhere where they'll see the sun. Maybe! But I'll also probably do something stupid somewhere else in the garden, so don't worry - we'll still be able to have this little end-of-season heart to heart about my stupidity in 2012.

Hooray for that.

In Finny-Doesn't-Suck news, however, this was a banner BLOW THE DAMN DOORS OFF year for the tomatoes.

Seriously, now.

I planted four plants - two standard (Better Boys), one beefsteak (Brandywine) and one cherry (Sun Gold) - and if you remember from my previous year's predictions, one tomato plant = 50 lbs of tomatoes.

50 POUNDS EACH!

GO!

That would mean, if you're following my predictions anyway (which, why wouldn't you? Do I steer you wrong? OK. Sometimes.), that I should have gotten 200 lbs of tomatoes this year.

But what of the cherry tomato? Certainly THOSE can't produce 50 lbs of fruit.

Or can they...

Did they do this, like, 35 times?

OK. No they can't. I mean, *maybe* in someone else's garden they can, but in mine they put out about 15 lbs of tomatoes. Which, frankly, was a bit much. I feel like I spent the better part of my summer sitting under that plant picking until my fingers and nails turned green.

And they never looked bare.

It was terrifying.

Anyway - the tomatoes did well and I owe it mostly to the Better Boys who, in collaboration with the Brandywine who was NOT as impressive as last year, put out 199 lbs of fruit.

Still though, prettiest fruits.

199 lbs of tomatoes. 15 lbs of cherry tomatoes. 214 lbs of tomatoes in total.

That's a lot of fucking tomatoes, people, especially if you only put in four plants.

It was a good year.

What of the rest of the place? Well, let's go through the fun exercise of comparing final numbers:

2010 vs 2011
Gardening costs: $56.26 vs $60.30 = -$4.04 : 2010 wins!
Total produce value: $1,059.45 vs $1,781.39 = $721.94 2011 wins!
Cost per pound to produce: $0.21 vs $0.23= -$0.01: 2010 wins!
Total pounds: 264.31 vs 263.62 = 0.69: 2010 wins!
Total pounds of tomatoes: 147.44 vs 214.04 = 66.60 : 2011 wins!

What the hell have I learned from this? Er...well, the 50# of tomatoes per plant rule works, but not in the way I imagined (the healthy producers make up the difference and cherry tomatoes are growers not showers - ha!) and pound for pound, tomatoes are more valuable than melons.

On an unrelated note, I've also decided that I'm cutting my green bean crop in half next year. We just don't need to go through the rampant bean frenzy that we do every year unless all my tomato taking friends develop a strong desire for green beans. Which I sort of doubt they will. So, unless someone will commit to taking 20 pounds of beans off my hands next summer, I'm cutting that situation in half. Maybe we'll grow cucumbers on the other half of the teepee.

Appreciate your enthusiasm.

But...sick of you.

Or maybe nothing. Or maybe sweet peas. Whatever - it just won't be all beans.

So, next year's plan, which is obviously already being formed in my mind even though I *just* took the garden down and planted the fava beans, will start with a half-sized bean crop, at least three tomato plants but NO cherry varieties and the peppers (both NuMex and Golden Greek) being planted in full sun starting in spring. And, not to spoil the experiment story, but I think I already saw the stupid cherry tomatoes germinating in their volunteer pot, so that may have been a bad idea since there's no way they'll make it through the winter with that behavior.

We misbehave.

Good thing I don't want to plant them again anyway! Take that, jerks.

So, now I'm waiting patiently for the seed catalogs to come out so that I can start my winter fantasizing about what I might plant next year while hopefully picking a lot of kumquats off the suddenly productive plant and staring the new Clementine tree orange because those big green orbs are the biggest teases.

I should be orange soon.


Me too!

Which I guess means it's time for winter, skiing, making abominations and behaving lewdly in my kitchen.

Hooray?

Well, that was weird.

2011-11-06T07:31:00.000-08:00

After all my WOE IS ME I HATE AIR TRAVEL griping, our air travel to and from Arkansas was the smoothest trip of my life.

And we connected through Dallas and everything. WEIRD.

No one snaked my arm rests (unless you count the 100 times Bubba did it to be funny HA HA HA.), no one smelled like a three day old deli sandwich, no one even kicked my chair.

I'm starting to think no one likes me anymore. Am I not part of the Flying Sucks So Do You Want To Fight Me club?

Whatever - there was some mad fishing in Arkansas and that's what you all really care about so why am I filling the screen with rambling about an uneventful flight halfway across the country? WHO GIVES A FUCK.

This is me giving zero fucks.

And this is The White River being all, IT'S FALL SO LOOK AT ME.

I swear, this is the prettiest time of year to stand out on a river and haul in fish. Although I will say that I was constantly finding myself distracted by the scenery, which normally wouldn't be a problem except that the pesky trout kept jumping on my olive woolly bugger and making the staring difficult to concentrate on.

I seem pissed don't I?

I mean, the friggen place was so IT'S FALL the whole time that I got exhausted looking back and forth from the leaves and trees to my indicator.


Oh fall, you're the cutest.

Oh trout, you're the squishiest. Sorry about that buddy, you were too big for my puny lady hands.

So, yeah, it was a rough time. The weather was perfect (60s, sunny), the river was slow moving (except when they were generating at the dam - bastards) and the trout were plentiful, hungry and in some cases laughably enormous.

Yer a big fucker ain't ye?

As close to catching a 20#er on a #20 fly as I've seen.

I shall name him Bruiser.

Rawr

And because no fishing in Arkansas story is complete without my recounting the local culture for your personal horror, please allow me to tell you another brief story about "Only in Arkansas".

As you can figure based on the name of this trip, it occurs over Halloween. Which is great for a lot of reasons that I outline in this post, the most important of which being the fact that we get to dodge out of all Halloween bullshittery to instead stand on a river and fish for trout.

But, sometimes, we have to abandon the safe and secluded confines of our rustic accommodations and quiet river to avail ourselves of the local amenities and fill in the gaps of our pantry which means that, in this case, the avoiding of All Things Halloween fell a little short.

Specifically, we needed more tonic. And limes. And beers because we killed three kegs (5 gallon ones, people! We're not alcoholics.)

So, because we had to go into town for beer, that meant that we got to come into close and scary contact with the local townsfolk. Now, I don't remember exactly which town we were in when this occurred, but it's somewhere in Northwest Arkansas and WHOA.

See, we traipsed into some hillbilly grocery store with a name I've never heard before, notable only because it has to be the only grocery store in all of Arkansas that's not a Wal-Mart, grabbed the few items on our short but crucially important list, and headed up to the cashier's stand.

And there I stood, mouth probably agape, staring unbelieving at the cashier.

The woman was large, but that's barely notable in the grand scheme of things. She was wearing her hair tied in a bun and tucked under a cotton bonnet, a printed cotton dress like you might see on the many wives of a polygamist, a cotton apron and an obscene amount of very poorly applied pancake makeup.

Like, there was a flesh to makeup line running from ear along jaw to ear that was so dramatic that the first moments of my incredulity were simply dedicated to how the fuck someone could apply so much poorly matched makeup (it was a good four shades darker than her actual doughy pale complexion) and then spend so little time trying to blend it in.

Looked like the woman had drawn that line from ear to ear and then just colored it in like a four year old might color in the face of Mickey Mouse in a coloring book.

But before I frittered away my wonderings and awe on the makeup's application, I happened to let my eyes fall on her handmade nametag (not corporate issued, although that would have been a nice touch), which brought a whole new level of disbelief to the situation.

Her nametag said, "Aunt Jemima".

The woman was in black face.

A giant white woman in Arkansas dressed up as Aunt Jemima for Halloween, painted herself in (an albeit poorly executed) black face and came to work.

AND NO ONE SENT HER HOME FOR BEING COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE AND DESPICABLE.

I was floored. But then I tossed my eyeballs around the bustling grocery store and realized that all of the faces in there (even hers with its odd coloring) were white, or some sun-abused shade of white, and that we were in Arkansas where apparently this is not a big deal. I also realized that she'd probably gone to the makeup aisle of said all-white grocery store and purchased the darkest shade of foundation they had in stock to complete her Halloween ensemble.

So, yeah. Wow. I mean, the other cashiers were dressed up for Halloween, too, and some in scandalously not big enough for their old sagging asses costumes, so it's not like this woman was there against the store's rules dressing up for Halloween in such a fashion to make a crude point, but still.

Black face.

So wrong.

And then we returned to our cabin and the river, vowing to never speak to anyone else outside of our closed group.

WEIRD.

Let's never speak of it again and instead just focus on the pretty pictures.

Ah, pretty fall. Nothing bad could happen in a place this pretty.

Innocent yellow leaves.

Angelic wooly bugger

Delicious trout.

Bacon, onion and potato hash stuffing. There's nothing wrong with that.

Hardly offensive.

Perfectly delicious.

Please stop squeezing the fish, ma'am.

Stranger danger.

Another one for the books.

Like I was saying.

Safe in the pretty wilderness where no one is in black face. Ah. Oh! Sorry. Never speak of it again.

Still, we'll be back. But we will not be going shopping. Ever.

Gone fishing. Again.

2011-10-26T17:07:00.000-07:00

Bubba and I are heading out again to the backwaters of Arkansas to see about some trout.

So, I won't be here filling your eyes with swears or false promises about beehive videos or updates on the sweater I'm knitting or flash freak outs about NaNoWriMo which HOLY SHIT, PEOPLE totally starts in five days.

Which means that on my flight home from Arkansas, I'll be tap-tap-tapping away on my laptop like an annoying douche and probably aggravating the crap out of everyone around me.

But, to that I say - SUCK IT - because they're always annoying me by refusing to honor the Rules of Air Travel by snaking the arm rests away from the middle person (which I always am) or by crying continually and loudly because they haven't learned how to chew gum or clear their ears yet or by kicking my chair, smelling like they've tucked an onion sandwich under their arms, using my chair back as leverage as they launch their big butts toward the bathroom for the fiftieth time or a hundred other tired complaints about air travel.

Shit annoys me, is what I'm saying.

But - it's worth it. Because in 24 hours I will be casting into a slow moving river surrounded by lovely fall scenery alongside some of my very favorite people in the whole wide world.

And then we will drink homebrews from the keg, eat homemade KC BBQ and catch up on miscellaneous bullshit while we try not to split our sides laughing at one another's tired and delightful jokes.

Then we will catch some fucking fish.

Hallelujah for that. See you in a week.

Other people's honey [NOW UPDATED WITH PHOTOS AND BULLSHITTERY 10/25/11]

2011-10-24T14:29:00.000-07:00

I alluded briefly to a honey harvest a few weeks ago and you can all thank Thimbleanna for keeping me honest with my report.

However, I must preface my report by saying that the honey I harvested was not mine. I mean, it was OK for me to harvest it - I didn't STEAL it - but it wasn't from my own home hive.

No. Those ladies are still in their inaugural year, during which time they get to keep all the honey they collect and I get none.

Sad.

So! Good thing I had my four other hives at work to harvest. Because, yes, we keep bees at work. And then, when we harvest the honey - me and the other half dozen beekeepers at work - we get to keep a bit for ourselves and then the rest goes to our cafes. And that's about all I'm going to say about work.

But - to stay true to my word, I will say that we had an excellent harvest, it was and is delicious, the local news videotaped me speaking incoherently on the subject and now we're all cracked out from ingesting so much honey.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch that is my suburban house that looks nothing like a ranch, I've taken off the honey super (the box on top where the bees would normally store honey but in this case just went to get away for the weekend when they were feeling stressed), added the entrance reducer back on at its widest setting and am watching the drones get carried out by their ears as the rest of the hive gets ready to hole up for winter.

Took this picture in the spring, but this is basically what it looks like again. Except without the inner cover stuck in the middle there. Just go with me on this.

I'd share a video of the closing up ceremonies, but I forgot to take one when I went out there in a frenzy last week to get it done before dark.

I apologize for being negligent in my video taking, but if Bubba would stop being so damned allergic to the bees, maybe he could take some fucking pictures while I work this hive.

He's so selfish, that guy.

Also, the GoPro camera is totally fighting me and going dead at the worst times (like, say, when I'm holding a frame of bees over my head), so I just don't trust its ass anymore.

Anyway - the girls are building comb out just the way they're supposed to - with babies (brood) in the middle of the frames and honey on the outside of the frames (for food), so I don't feel too horrible about the way they're going into winter.

Needless to say - it does not look like THIS anymore.

And, HOLY, are those brood boxes heavy (nearly tore out my shoulder trying to lift the second one off so I could get down to the bottom), so I know there is a good amount of honey capped off and ready to feed them during the cold harsh winter we're certain to have here in NorCal.

And that is sarcasm so please don't send me your comments about what a puss I am for thinking we have cold harsh winters here in NorCal. SARCASM, look it up.

Anyway, now that I've spent this whole post describing what's going on in the hive, I see that I really just need some pictures because this is retarded. I'll endeavor to take some when I'm out there this week sugaring them for mites.

What? You've not heard of beekeepers sugaring their bees?

Alright, I'll take a picture of that, too. Though I will have to take all these photos with my little point and shoot camera because my big girl camera isn't getting anywhere near all that mess.

Bee sugaring and photos of said event - coming soon-ish.

[10/25/11 UPDATE: It's "soon-ish"]

So, I had to go out and sugar the bees today, so I thought I'd drop my camera in the powdered sugar, take a few photos and come back here to tell you that getting cracked out on cough medicine before tending to a busy beehive is maybe not the best plan.

You probably could have guessed as much, but still, here we are.

It all happens so fast, my Crazy, that only upon reflection do I see where I've gone awry.

Anyway, for those of you who are interested in just what the hell "sugaring the bees" entails, let me tell you how I do it. And let's all remember that *I* do not represent all beekeepers, expert knowledge or anything related to "years of experience". The way I do things is a combination of bits of gathered knowledge from around the beekeeper circle of friends I keep/the Internets/beekeeping books, time on hand, how I perceive the situation at the hive and tools at my disposal.

Which is how I ended up deciding that I was going to apply the powdered sugar to the bees with my cake sifter.

I'm nothing if not a complete jack off.

See, people, the concept of sugaring bees is pretty well discussed around the web and the other knowledge gathering mechanisms I described. I think we even discussed it in the class I took a few years ago. The concept being that if you cover bees with powdered sugar, they will clean it off themselves and each other and, in the process, also knock off pesky mites.

When done weekly for about three weeks before they are wintered over, your mite problem should be solved without the employ of any gnarly chemicals and also your bees get to pretend that they are a creepy wiggling cake for a few minutes.

What I haven't been able to accurately glean from all my knowledge gathering is exactly *how* to apply the powdered sugar. Because "sugaring the bees" is like every other beekeeping topic in the known world, which is to say that it's frustratingly vague and incomplete and differs 100% from one beekeeper to another.

All instructions and methods for beekeeping, from what I've found, are not so much instructions as they are "guiding concepts".

Which annoys the fuck out of me.

Alas, I still needed to sugar the bees, and since no two beekeepers do it the same way, I decided to introduce yet another new way and employ my own method - the cake sifter. My thinking being that if the goal is to coat as many bees as possible with a nice even layer of powdered sugar, one might use a cake sifter since that is how one would cover a cake with a nice even layer of powered sugar and - hell - cakes and bees are the same, right?

OK, so my thinking didn't extend to join the similarities of honeybees and baked goods under one roof, but I think you get where I was going with the cake sifter's capabilities to cover things with a nice even layer of whatever, right? Just say yes.

So, yeah. I went out to the hive with my cake sifter loaded with powdered sugar and proceeded to smoke them lightly and then rock their world by taking the brood boxes off again.

Rock me, Amadeus. (Come on. You know you were thinking it.)

Unfortunately, I couldn't get the stupid GoPro charged up and working when I was ready to go sugar the bees, so I brought Bubba's camera instead because - hooray - my point and shoot is in Arkansas already getting ready to shoot photos of people catching trout in a few days.

Don't get distracted though! This is about sugaring the bees and me finally taking pictures of said event. So just remember that I apologized for not taking a video that would have better illustrated the wiggling cake phenomenon that occurs when you open a busy hive and then suddenly sift powdered sugar on their heads.

First, they're stunned. They all stop moving and, in my imagination, crouch down like the dog does when I put a toy on her head, as if to say, "SOMETHING'S ON ME. DO.NOT.MOVE." Then they all start wiggling around to clean themselves and their neighbor and they quickly disappear into the hive leaving the stop of the frames mostly empty.

The process takes less than 30 seconds, which is why the top of this box looks so sparsely populated - they'd already headed downward by the time I fished the camera out of the cake sifter WHOOPS.

IT'S ON ME. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Dude. Is there something in my hair?

After this, I promptly forgot to install the beetle jail (that'll be next week's fun task) and to remove a frame to show you the nicely built comb these gals have set themselves up with for winter with babies in the middle and honey and pollen on the outsides. It's quite impressive. I should really show you a photo.

Oh, right.

Maybe next time.

For now, I'll leave you with my flip-flopped feet at the hive, which I know amuses Thimbleanna to no end.

I need a pedicure.

Remains of summer [+Adopt a Crop Winner]

2011-10-21T15:32:00.000-07:00

I know I'm not the only one who takes a million pictures of shit and then never posts the pictures or talks about them, even if just to say Look at the awesome s'mores that I made in my backyard fireplace.

Good thing I didn't start avoiding sugar until fall.

Because there's definitely some added sugar in these.

Though there may just be more "Added other stuff" since it's more sugar than anything else. You know what I mean.

So, I'm doing a little fall cleaning of the summer photos to show you some of the good shit I shot while it was still warm enough for shorts around the firepit at night and naked butts in the high mountain lakes.

No. I will not be showing you naked butt photos.

Pervs.

This is close though. Go Lake Tahoe Derby Dames!

And here's a high mountain lake.

So, you can pretend I had a naked butt when I took this if you must.

And for those of you who just scrolled down to see who won the Adopt a Crop prize this season - you're in luck - I'm feeling generous and have bolded the winner: Mom Taxi Julie!

Shoot me your mailing address and real name (unless you like mail showing up as Mom Taxi Julie, in which case, right on) to finnyknitsATgmailDOTcom and I'll send you some randomness PLUS we get to be seed saving buddies next spring and summer. If you want. I mean, you don't *have* to. But - it'll be cool.

Come oooooooooooooon.

OK, back to the remains of summer.

I took approximately 100 photos of this volunteer sunflower. It was the prettiest. And the volunteeriest.

There were lots of bearding events with the bees and this wasn't even the half of it.

See those dots? Bees. All bees. Like the sky was vibrating. Awesome.

Volunteeriest sunflower some more.

All those wildflowers we saw while hiking in Tahoe. *wolf whistle*

Remember Kauai?

Yeah. Me too.

Oh, how I remember.

And then we had a bunch of BBQs.

Which double as dog parties. Obviously.

I'm sure there are a few photos I'm leaving out, but you get it - summer around here was short, sweet and we are lucky that we don't weigh a metric ton due to the eating frenzy.

So, with that, let's all give Fall a big hello while hoping it doesn't end up in our hair.

*Shiver*

My eyes are full

2011-10-17T17:38:00.000-07:00

I'm sure there's something I'm supposed to be telling you about right now, but instead I'm going to tell you about fishing.

People - I finally got a solid weekend on the river.

Solid.

AND IT WAS EFFING GLORIOUS.

And this wasn't the HALF of it. Fucking beautiful out there.

Now, yes, I did only catch the one beautiful rainbow trout, but that's not important.

That's me. Not catching my fish yet.

What's important is that I tromped up and down the west fork of the Carson river with Bubba and another good fishing buddy to the tune of Lake Tahoe winding down for winter.

Pretty soon we'll be covered with snow.

Folks, it's fall out there and GOD DAMN if it's not the most beautiful heart-swellingly stunning time of year.

I wish I could hug a river.

Which I didn't adequately capture in photos because:
1. I didn't have my big daddy camera
2. We weren't stopping alongside the road for one hot second to capture the really pretty spots because WE WERE GOING FISHING DAMNIT
3. WE WERE FISHING DAMNIT and lord knows I will drop a camera if it's not tied to my vest and since the camera tied to my vest died shortly after arriving on the river, well...there you go.

So I obviously stole Bubba's camera when he leapfrogged me at this spot.

Not a lot of pictures, not a lot of fish, but LOTS of fishing and fabulousness anyway.

Can you feeeeeeeeeeeeeeel the fabulousness? Thought so.

Plus, it was a great warm up for our trip to the White River in Arkansas in a few weeks, wherein I will fish for four days straight and see some more fall color and hopefully catch WAY more fish and also hang out with our other favorite fishing buddies.

This is what every picture of him looks like. The man is ON the fish at all times.

So, yeah. I had a great weekend of fishing the Carson river (caught my one rainbow on a grasshopper indicator with a pheasant tail nymph dropper, if you're interested) and I'm being gently encouraged to take up fly tying, so you know that will soon mean 101 hobbies, 0 free time and YAY MORE BITCHING.

I'm a treat.

The Death Clock of free time is at 18 days...

2011-10-13T07:41:00.000-07:00

You may never get sleeves.

Friends, shit's been busy.

Which, obviously, otherwise I'd be posting here a lot more often because HELLO I have things to tell you about.

Like the fact that we harvested honey from our work hives last week and that my hive is about to go nigh-nigh for the season and that the garden is about to come down and that I made an awesome potato and kale soup without a recipe but just from my own pea brain and also I nearly snapped off a toe during a drunken descent from my Adirondack chair on Girls Weekend and...

We harvested one million jars of honey. It was glorious.

White Trash Dinner Season is upon us.

I blame the champs for my unscheduled dive off the patio.

Potato Kale Leek Sausage soup. I'll have to give you the recipe sometime. Except that's basically it.

Yeah. But then this pesky thing called work/life/100 hobbies got in the way and so here I am.

I've begun knitting a thing. A thing that, in a few weeks' time, will likely end up sitting unmoving in its lovely WIP bag (as seen above) until December.

Because in a few weeks' time, NaNoWriMo begins. Specifically, 18 days, 16 hours, 36 minutes and ... seconds from now.

That countdown is like the deathclock of any remaining free time.

Yes! That's right! I'm still planning to carve out enough time on a daily basis to write 1600 or so words during November and, in a month's time, 50,000 or more words all pressed together in what is my new NaNoWriMo machine.

Sticker is not enormous - machine is just real small.

I wouldn't say I'm getting *too* serious about the NaNo business, but with Scrivener on Mac only (although I just saw something about it being available on PC soon - oh.) and us traveling back and forth from the mountains regularly and me needing to be able to AT ANY MOMENT write a word, I figured I needed a buddy.

So, a buddy I got. And thank you to a very good and nice friend of mine who loaned me her Apple discount so that this buddy could be 15% less wallet sucking.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say with all this is that even though I've been quiet-ish around here lately, I don't *mean* to be, but in a few weeks - if it gets quiet again - I *do* mean to be. Because I'm using all my words elsewhere.

In a novel that, for once, even has a vague outline and - TEE DAH - some research applied to it.

Weird.

Also, seed saving. I've been doing that. But won't be. In 18 days, 16 hours, 36 minutes and...

Saving seeds looks a lot like forgetting to do the dishes

2011-10-09T13:46:00.000-07:00

Yeah. That's not appetizing.

The process of saving seeds, particularly those that benefit from fermentation first (tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, tomatillos, generally any fruit with a gel around their seed), is just a bit nast.

I mean, firstly, you let that shit sit on the plant for evAR until it's all bulbousy (that's right, I'm bringing this Finny Original back) and sickly colored and attracting birds to peck at its grody soft spots.

FYI: *NOT* a lemon cucumber. Yeah. Wrong.

Then you bring it and its goopy ripeness into your house even though you pass the composter and it gives you a confused look, like, "Hey, isn't that for me?" and scoop out its grody innards while obviously calling Bubba in to check out the delicious lunch I'm making!

He was not amused. Or appetized.

And then you pour all the seeds and their gloppy grossness into jars and stir them around with tepid water until the seeds start to separate a little from the fruit and resemble vomit.

Not too bad...

Sun Gold, tomatillo and Solly Beiler cucumber vomit, respectively.

Then, while you're setting the jarred tomato, tomatillo and cucumber barf on the bar to ferment in front of your horrified neighbors' faces, you begin to noodle on how you better learn how to harden off seedling starts because all of this vomit-making shouldn't go to waste.

And then you think about you know it's way easier when the seeds start themselves as volunteers in the garden and you don't have to go through the vomit making process in the first place if only they'd just grow where you told them to grow jerks.

Which is when you decide to try another experiment because one's not enough when it comes to trying on a new hobby.

Just go with me on this, seeds.

See, I figured that I'd see about growing some identifiable, self-hardening off, don't need to be shuffled in and out of my house by yours truly pseudo-volunteers who also wouldn't crop up in the middle of next year's tomato hedge and hide from me until WHAT THE HELL IS THAT oh it's last year's tomatillo.

Not that that's ever happened.

And I'd just do it by planting the old fruits in the same soil in small pots and then planting that most of the way into the garden to get them to do what they do naturally except with the super fun benefit of me not having to grow barf in jars on my countertop.

And - hey - I wouldn't have to go through the soul-crushing process of destroying their tender shoots in the spring time trying to get them hardened off in the garden.

Nigh-night old fruits.

So, the seed saving experiment is now two-fold.

1. We save seeds the normal way and then try starting them directly sown into the garden because I suck at hardening them off.
2. We save seeds the abnormal way by just letting them *think* they're volunteers and leave them in the garden in safe little pots to start themselves and then WOO I move them wherever I want them to be in the spring garden as fully formed not-crushed seedlings TAH DAH.

We'll see.

For now, if you're trying the normal way of seed saving (which, probably a good plan given my not-knowing-dick-ness about the abnormal way), and you want to save some of these wet seeds, as they're called (nasty), here's your process:

1. Let the fruit ripen forevAR on the plant - until it's way past its prime.
2. Pick it, scoop out its innards into a jar with a few inches of tepid water and stir it up.
3. Let it sit around until it grows a very not-good looking layer of white mold and/or delightfully grotesque bubbles. (This is so that the germination-inhibiting protective gel will be removed before planting.)

4. Spoon the floaters off the top (these are the bummer seeds that won't germinate) along with the mold and other garbage and pour the seeds that settled on the bottom (winners!) into a fine sieve.

5. Rinse the seeds in the sieve until they're all clean and not gross and then lay them out on a paper towel or plate to dry for a few days.

6. When they're nice and dry (larger seeds, like cucumbers, should snap in half when you bend them), tuck them into a jar, tin, paper envelope or whathaveyou and set them in a cool, dry, dark-type place until spring.

Bonus: If you use a jar, like I have, you want to make sure that condensation and moisture don't develop and mold your seeds because that would completely fuck them up, so, if you insist on doing this because you have these super cute jars that are super extra perfect for this project and otherwise would be sitting around just begging to be used in a similarly perfect cute way, leave them somewhere that will let you keep an eye on them.

I have them on my craft bookshelf in the office so that every time I pass it to go lay down a beating on the printer or get some yarn to knit a thing, I will be able to check the seeds' status and crack the jar if anything suspect is going on.

Because putting them in paper envelopes is less cute. I know. I realize I'm ridiculous. Just go with me on this, people.

Then we just wait until spring and watch to see if any of the experimental pseudo-volunteers grow into viable seedlings and whether any of these seeds will direct sow into something viable.

And in case there's all around disaster, we also sit down with the Baker Creek catalog sometime in December and order up reinforcements.

Yay for seed saving.

Adopt a Crop Update: Team Cuke Officially Effed. Rematch in 2012.

2011-10-02T15:20:00.000-07:00

It's officially over, Adopt a Croppers - Team Melons has won out by a pitiful pathetic margin over the pitiful and pathetic cucumbers.

These two crops this year - they wicked sucked. Though the melons only marginally less so than the cucumbers.

I'm cute, but we didn't measure for cuteness.

Final tally:
Cucumbers - 3.97 lbs
Melons - Something vaguely over 4.84 lbs
Total - 8.81

Yeah, this year was not a good one for the cucurbit family in NorCal.

Unless you like to cuddle tiny melons. In which case, this was your year.

How not good, you ask? Well, run your eyes over last year's totals:
Cucumbers - 17.8 lbs
Melons - 68.63 lbs
Total - 86.43 lbs

Wow - a 77.62 lb difference. Yikes and LAME.

Though, the melons are still technically in the ground with one softball sized fruit lingering on its withering vines, so who knows, the melons may crest the big five pound hurdle before all's told. Hooray.

A watermelon the size of a tomato. Yeah - well done, watermelons. Pfft.

So, with Adopt a Crop done and the garden coming down in stages, there's only one thing left to do - send a random garden-type prize unrelated to the mostly failed Adopted Crop to some random and marginally lucky commenter. That could be you!

You could be marginally lucky and the recipient of some random things!

Hooray? Yeah - hooray - because this year the randomness is also accompanied by Be My Seed Saving Buddyness.

What thuh?

Yeah, because I've decided that this year's finally the year in which I save seeds from the garden to plant next year so I can be all full circle-y, the Adopt a Crop winner will receive a sampling of seeds saved from this year's garden via the methods I've shared/will be sharing in my quest to undertake my 100th hobby: seed saving.

Also, probably some jam, pickles, relish, salsa, tomatoes or other preserved item from my garden and pillagings and probably some other random shit, too. It might even be garden related. Though it won't be anything derived from this year's watermelon or cucumber crops. Sorry.

Because we've eaten them all. Because there were only, like, three.

Sound good? Great.

Leave a comment here by 10/15/11 and I'll announce the winner shortly thereafter and then send out the prize.

FYI to you potential winners: If I announce you as the winner and you don't claim your shit, I'm giving it to someone else. And that person might not be randomly chosen. They may just be someone I like a lot or someone who posts a picture of a cute dog or my neighbor who's never even seen the blog.

Oh I am just drunk with the power of If You Don't Like It, Then Suck It right now. Phew!

But on a less bitchy note - I have a post coming very soon detailing these seed saving exploits, including how I'm going to set up the Cucumber VS Watermelons rematch in 2012.

Look forward to iiiiiiiiit.

Let's talk tomatoes.

2011-10-01T20:02:00.000-07:00

Because who wants to talk turkey? Turkey's not that good. Particularly when compared to tomatoes.

180 pounds of tomatoes.

Gimme

Yeah - think about it - would you rather have 180 pounds of turkey?

*Doubting it*


Or you could have a turkey sando. Your call.

This season has been good to me in the way of tomatoes. Cucumbers...not so much, but tomatoes - yes.

Fatty. Beautiful fatty.

And since I'm still keeping up my Garden Tracker for the third year (nerd alert), I can tell you that we're 33 pounds over last year's final tally, and three of the four plants are still in the ground.

Producing tomatoes.

As we speak right here.

Yes, I know we're not really speaking, but stay focused, would you?

What the F is that?

So, even though I pulled the Sun Gold cherry tomatoes today because EW CREEPY, I still have this rogue pear tomato growing in with the Better Boys and maybe that will get us to 200 lbs before we call it quits later this month.

Farewell Sun Golds - you're a wild pain in my ass.

So much more Wild than Tomatoes.

Oh right - there are pepper plants under there.

Also, tasty.


Gold tomato relish. Mmm...smack

So now that I'm free of the marauding cherry tomatoes, I can focus intently on the peppers uncovered in the process. Which means that *maybe* I can make a single jalapeno popper from the jalapeno popper-specific peppers.

You remember.

We're hula-ing out of our blossom for you. Sexy.

But let's not get distracted from the tomato update with too many non-tomato subjects. Peppers are great, but when we're only 28 lbs of tomatoes away from the all time record, one must stay focused.

And by one - I mean all of us.

So, say it with me people - GO TOMATOES.

Also, you look creepy.

Think red, y'all.

Or pink. In this case, pink is acceptable.

1:38:05

2011-09-30T23:11:00.000-07:00

Yeah, who knows what that time is supposed to mean.

I mean, last year's duathlon time seemed pretty meaningless because I didn't have much to compare it to and now that I do have another duathlon to compare it to, it still seems pretty useless.

The distances were slightly different and OH BY THE WAY the courses were like night and friggen THE MOON or something.

Um, Mermaid Series people - publish a fucking elevation chart, you asses.

Yeah - I could try to get below the fold before launching into my tirade, but that would be so unFinny of me, why bother - I say.

This is on the way out to the ride. I had no idea. Which is why I'm smiling and not flipping the bird.

People, there were some not-messing-around steeps on the bike course. Like - for most people, it was Get Off Your Bike And Hike time. Particularly since the race organizers were all, "Oh yeah, lots of people ride mountain bikes and cruisers for the bike course!" and everything.

Which - not nice.

Though, the super low gears you get on a mountain bike would have been nice for the...um...climbs reminiscent of mountains we hit twice on the 12 mile loop.

To say that I had not geared down properly for the first climb would be an understatement. And to say that I nearly crapped my chamois when we had to, on the return, travel DOWN this Everest-like incline on a grade that taxed my brakes beyond their comfort zone would again be a liberal use of the words HOLY SHIT.

There were some wide eyeballs coming down that hill, to put it plainly. Shit was steep.

And, oh, what's up with the friggen SURPRISE beach portion on both the start and finish legs of the run?

Not. In. The. Race. Materials.

Dirty pool, people. I just hosed a pair of running shoes, thankyouverymuch, because now they're irretrievably filled with sand and annoyance.

But, despite all the bitching I just laid out for you right there - I had fun. I had fun and I ran strong and I biked well enough and Bubba found me on nearly every leg of the race and then he took a video which is weird to watch because it looks like I'm just AOK except that I know that I was cursing a thousand fiery deaths upon the crotch who decided that a beach finish would be a good idea for the duathlon course while slogging through the loose sand presented by the Capitola beach.

But, all is forgiven when the Finishers' breakfast is laid out beautifully by Capitola Whole Foods, complete with tablecloths, floral centerpieces, Good Belly and pancakes and an ocean view.

Who doesn't love freshly baked banana bread and some yogurt thing with a smiley face? Communists and assholes, that's who.

Meanwhile, after my WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT BEACH FINISH PLUS HILLS ON THE BIKE COURSEing, I finished 9th in my age group and 45th overall.

That's right. T1 is still full of bikes. SCORE.

Not too shabby for a girl who never did any official training and did the bike course on a yet to be named orange spicy roadbike.

Forgive me, friends, I just can't commit. I've tried out all your suggestions, and some not perfect ones presented by Bubba and some super not perfect ones suggested by yours truly and nothing's sticking.

Well, one always comes up, but Bubba is so Meh on it that I have a hard time being all, "Yep! That's the one!" because I guess it's not.

Her true name is out there. I guess we'll just have to keep guessing. And I'll keep trying them on her for size. And since I've now outfitted us for dark winter rides to work (got a sweet muther of a headlight and some not sexy clear glasses and some SUPER sexy arm warmers), I'll have more chances to find her a fitting name.

Keep trying, I know you can do it. Because I just can't keep calling her The Roadbike or The Cannondale because that is so lame and boring. Particularly when I can freely and easily call Tulip, Tulip and everyone immediately knows who I'm talking about.

She's the cutest. Though had I tried to ride the bike course with her, I'd be calling her FUCK YOU STAY IN THAT DITCH right now because whoa.

I'm still scarred from the bike course, I guess. Though Bubba thinks that with some proper hill training I can finish in the top 3. Or, as he put it so boldly - "Baby! You could WIN!" - which is adorable.

Thanks, Coach.

Adorable and delusional - this is how I like my mens.

We'll see how next year's duathlon goes. I imagine the finish time will be similarly meaningless, but perhaps I'll ride [Roadbike's New Awesomely Fitting Name] to glory.

Go on - keep trying with those names. And I'll keep trying to win a race. Hey - at least one of these things is possible to achieve.

Let's continue the tradition of pre-race audience participation.

2011-09-23T16:17:00.000-07:00

I have a duathlon this weekend, friends.

Yes, that one to which I've vaguely alluded over the past few months during which I've trained barely at all. Formally, anyway.

I mean, I have been riding my bike to work this summer, which is a combined total of 40 miles round trip, so that sort of counts as training for this event of 12 miles of cycling, and I have also been running my usual 3x/week schedule of 2 days of intervals and 1 day of distance, so that sort of also counts toward the combined 4 miles of running, but...no official training.

Basically, I haven't trained for the transition at all. And I haven't done any bike to run or run to bike training as proved so eye-opening during my first bout. And I didn't do that awesome I'm Going To Kick Some Mermaid Ass training of a 3M morning run > bike 20 miles to work > 2M run at work thing that I briefly mentioned to Bubba and, like, two other people when I signed up for this thing earlier this summer.

So, to look at my preparation from a traditional training standpoint, you'd probably expect me to impressively suck and also to mortally wound myself and/or others entering and exiting the transition zones this weekend. And, hey, you might be right on.

Or - you might just be totally wrong.

I think you'd probably be sorta wrong.

But, I'll stop laying this off on you as though you're all just sitting out there being big fat doubters, because this is not how I've raised you.

No, you believe in me. Most of the time (or all of the time), you believe in me more than I believe in myself and, gee, that's awfully sweet of you.

Me though - I think I'll be fine. I figure that I can definitely run the distance and I can certainly bike the distance and since I'm at least not heading into this thing with zero confidence in my ability to use clipless pedals (commuting in these shoes has done wonders for my confidence and notfallingoverness), I'm ahead of last year's abilities as I go out to packet pick-up today.

And then, on Sunday when I head to Santa Cruz, I'll also have my new bike rack all full of My Bike Who Still Needs a Name After Two Years and a bib number 716 spots higher than last year.

85? Am I doing this alone?

Oh. I guess the field is a bit larger for Santa Cruz than it was for Alameda.

What? You don't know immediately where Alameda is? Shocking.

Anyway - for audience participation!

Name the bike:

She's spicy. She's orange. She's a 2008 Cannondale Synapse F3 Carbon, for you technical folks. She *can* be fast as shit.

I feel like she needs a name, and for the life of me, I can't come up with a good one.

I didn't have this trouble with Tulip because my neighbor took one look at her and her Dutchie-ness and was all, "Aw! Tulip!" and we were done.

I mean, come on. Could you call her anything other than "Tulip"? No.

But no one looks at a road bike and goes, "Aw...[NAME]!" because road bikes don't have a cutesy bamboo basket or panniers or those rad handles that curve toward you all accommodating-like.

No. They are all carbon-y and clipless pedals-y and don't inspire a lot of sentimentality in passersby. But I'll tell you, after a summer of riding this sexy fast bitch to work on trails and roads and through parks and crazy intersections and falling on my face when I discovered its inability to maintain vertical when crossing loose debris, I have a new affection for it.

And I'm not always screaming as I ride. Truly.

An affection, I'm proud to say, isn't entirely composed of Fear.

This is a big shift, friends - believe me.

So - name her! You come up with a good solid name for this saucy, fast mama and I'll use it every time I talk about cycling or training for a race, which who knows how often that will be but still - cool.

Go on, name away. Meanwhile, I'm going to pick The Nameless One up from the bike shop and get my packet so that HOORAY! I can go off all untrained into the chutes.

I guess I haven't improved much at this racing thing, but I guess that's what happens after six years of this? Yeah, that's it.

Heirlooms can be pigs.

2011-09-22T07:34:00.000-07:00

When I sent an email to my team at work telling them I'd be out of the office for a dorky reason which I'd talk to them about offline, I immediately had six people at my desk.

Come on, dork. You can't just put that in an email and then *not* tell us. Freak.

Thanks, guys.

But then when I told them I was going to an heirloom seed expo, the looks went from anticipated awe to confusion and not a few raised eyebrows.

Apparently I'm the only one around here growing things from seed. Or interested in food not created in a test tube. Or keeping bees. Or not buying plastic wrapped tomatoes at Costco. Or hungry for a really good grilled cheese sando with local Gruyere, heirloom tomatoes and a mixed green salad with freshly pressed Gravenstein apple juice on the side.

I could eat this again right now. Like, five times.

WEIRD I KNOW.

But whatever. These are the same people who ooh and ahhh satisfyingly when I bring tomatoes into the office, so I forgive them for their name-calling. I mean, I barely ever punch any of them.

Though I have punched at least one of them.

But she deserved it. And, strangely, I'm pretty sure she liked it.

Who's the freak now?

And then...I went to the Heirloom Exposition and took pictures of squash.

People - they don't fuck around with squash at this thing.

We get it. You have a lot of squash.

We get it. Your squash are big.

We get it. Your squash wear hats made of squash.

We get it. Your squash are so plentiful, they don't all fit on the table.

We get it. Your squash look like they have a communicable disease.

We get it. Your squash look adorable in a big metal basket that's probably a plow of some kind.

We get it. Your squash need sunscreen.

We get it. Your squash need a shot of penicillin.

We get it. Your squash could take me in a fight.

Also, won't this make a nice holiday card? I think so.

These grey/blue squash (which *may* be Hubbards, but I don't really know for sure) are just lovely. And freaky.

You get the picture now, right? LOTS OF SQUASH.

Lots of HUGE squash.

Also known as Biggest Pumpkin EVAR.

Though I'm a fan of giant and plentiful and weird looking and adorable and albino squash (I mean, WHO ISN'T?), I need more in my life.

Specifically, tomatoes.

And, really, this thing was about tomatoes about as much as it was about squash. Though without the pointy tower, which I understand. Can you imagine? Messy. OR - with the right application of olive oil and buffalo mozzarella - delicious. But still messy.

Anyway - there were tomatoes aplenty for my hungry eyes to ogle.

Learned a new thing at the expo - big tomatoes go stem side down.

So that their juicy fatness doesn't smash their pretty asses.

Notice here - lots of buttside up-ness.

Though, who knows which is the butt side on this alien being masquerading as a tomato.

The tomato has a boner. I'm not even going to make any other inappropriate observations here. I can't do everything for you people.

One of so many tables of ONE MILLION TOMATOES. Buttside up.

They even made a little rainbow from the cherry varieties, which is ridiculously cute. Even though I'm sure I'm supposed to make a comment more meaningful than that.

What these guys are trying to say is: We grow a lot of tomatoes.

Tomato boner! Good times.

Wait...is that a pepper? Rip off.

Winner of the Biggest Tomato ribbon. Because it's big. The biggest even.

Probably the prettiest tomato at the show. Though it had not yet been ribboned because some people are assholes and don't do what I say.

*wolf whistle*

So, yeah. When I was done eye-fucking the tomatoes, we went over to the other heirloom things that were not vegetables at all.

Not vegetables! you say? Yeah. Pigs, goats, cows, turkeys, chickens, sheep...all heirloom varieties.

Heirloom hens with heirloom bandannas.

This was, from my recollection, an heirloom Shetland ram

An heirloom egg of some kind though IT'S HARD TO TELL WHEN SOME RUDE KID SHOVES HIS FOOL HEAD IN THERE.

Heirloom sheeps' wool.

And fleeces. Don't forget the fleeces.

Nuzzling heirloom cows of some variety I didn't note. Who DOESN'T love that?

Hello, lovelies. These were purported to be docile and good milk producers. I did not buy one because I want to stay married to Bubba.

Just try and tell me that this isn't the prettiest cow you've ever seen. JUST TRY.

Heirloom buns.

Heirloom monster.

Rumpless chicken. Seriously. It's a thing. A funny, funny thing.

This is the Best. Dog. In. The. World. Around hundreds of chickens and turkeys and no reaction whatsoever. I didn't know dogs like this existed.

Probably my favorite display of the whole thing. Even though the sign next to it said that keeping eggs in a basket is the worst way to store them. I think the irony added to my enjoyment. As did the funktastic handwriting.

Beeb.

So, yeah - I went to the Heirloom Expo, ate some fabulous all natural and local foods, listened to some farmers talk about the evils of GMOs and Round-up, ogled some cute heirloom piglet buns, tomatoes, squash and bees and then I sat on this pumpkin and pretended I was five.

MOM! Take my picture!

Me - at about 5.

Bubba - at about 5.

Our appreciation for heirlooms goes back a long ways.

All that shit I haven' told you about yet.

2011-09-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

My good buddy, Dig, has this great approach to blogging wherein she writes a few sentences or adds a picture or whatever when she has a moment and then, when she has enough moments pieced together, she publishes her post.

She calls it "nuggets".

I think I might like to try this approach, since I'm so totally not getting to the blog as much as I want even though I have two tons of shit to tell you guys about, so I'm just saying I might try this method. In the future. In another post. And I'll just assume you'll all deal with it OK.

For now, you get a shortish stilted post wherein I piece together what I remember about three separate events that I've been meaning to tell you about and I'll just assume you'll all deal with this, too.

You guys - you're so flexible. I so like that about you.

Firstly - I milked a goat.

That, in itself, probably deserves its own post because it was one of those things that I have never done but sort of assumed I would like. And I did! Which, obviously, because it didn't involve getting a kick to the face, which is what I was sort of expecting.

Goats are dangerous, people. Just ask Bubba. He hates those fuckers. Me though? I love them. Now even more so given the lack of face kicking.

And to bring the Goat Joy to a whole new level, I made cheese from her milk. Just right then and there.

1. Milk goat. (That's not actually me milking right there. As though I'd have a purple purse. Please.)

2. Make cute cheese. (Then make awesome smoked trout appetizer and eat it while getting blazing drunk.)

And for those of you who are interested in what Love Apple Farms looks like in their new location, I took a handful of not great photos because WHOOPSY I forgot my good camera.

Hazy photo from the deck.

The pumpkin's bench.

Monster tomatillo that would positively dwarf my retarded plants.

Cutest and orange-est squash.

Wee-rinkly tomato.

More wee-rinklyness.

Groovy hillside trellised hops. If I had a hillside, I would totally do this.

If you've never been to LAF, here's some pictures from another time I visited them and started a different new hobby that's not so new anymore, even though I haven't updated you guys on it in a long time. Confused yet? Yeah, me too.

So yeah, I made cheese. I'll post on how to do it in more detail when I actually try to make cheese at home. Sometime in the next century when I have five minutes to rub together.

Wow. That doesn't sound right.

And speaking of having no proper time - I am going to revise my previous statement about piecing together bits of nuggets and words into a grand post to publish at a later date and just give you this.

Because if I wait to add more stuff to it, the thing's never going live. I'll get too far past the things and I won't remember and then I'll just be all Oh fuck it, I can't remember anyway and then no one will hear about the Heirloom Expo or my philosophy on getting my hair wet when I go swimming or how awesome Roller Derby is and how I'm so super proud of my friend for finishing her first triathlon and oh, by the way, I have a duathlon this weekend which I've trained (ish) for and haven't even talked about in forever.

Do you see how waiting for all of this to get crammed into one post could result in no posts for one hundred years?

I think you do. So. Here you go. I'll hopefully be back shortly with another short post about one of those things I just said.

Who's effed NOW?

2011-09-14T18:22:00.000-07:00

Go BOOBS.

Yeah, probably Team Cucumber.

I mean, sure, both plants are still technically in the ground, but only one's still producing viable fruits.

The other is, well, not.

Not.

In fact, the watermelon's managed - with ONE fruit - to surpass the entire summer's production of cucumbers by nearly a half pound.

Seriously. So far this year - 3.18 lbs of cucumbers and 3.59 lbs of watermelon.

Says a lot, that.

Like, the cucumbers suck this year, mostly. Especially compared to years passed. Last year - 17+ lbs of cucumbers. Year before - 13 lbs. Though, last year I did have 64 lbs of watermelons, so this was a weird wager anyway.

Whatever - you guys were up for it - don't be pusses about it now.

And since there's another watermelon on the vine and, like, a few scraggly depressing looking small ass cucumbers on their vine - we could perhaps have a pathetic mini produce drag race to the end of the season.

Or we could start eHarmony for produce.

The cucumbers keep doing cute shit like this, so I leave them in the ground. Cuteness wins every time with me, you know. But you know what does NOT win with me? Grossness.

You're gross, beans.

Yeah, I pulled the beans. They were getting too spooky and ugly and cobwebby and giant bean-y.

I mean, really, there's a fucking FLY on the dried out bean. Nast.

Not appealing.

Thankfully, when the beans wave the We're Gross flag, it's actually them saying that they're ready to be hauled in and saved for Spring 2012 because, yes friends, another hobby is afoot -- seed saving.

If you're not swooning, I just don't know you anymore.

I've decided that it's dumb for me to keep ordering more seeds every year when I never use the entire packet of the seeds that I buy. And in the rare cases when I do (like in the case of the beans, for instance), having saved a bunch is just a way lot easier than ordering them online.

OK, well, it's not easier, but it's more fun? Economical? Old timey? Uh...a new reason to start another hobby?

Yeah. That's probably it. But still! Cool, right? Yes. I think it's cool. I think seed saving is cool. Because that's the kind of weirdo I've become. I save seeds and I take a day off of work in the middle of the week to go to an heirloom produce and seed event.

Like a total fucking weirdo.

But that's OK, because you guys are used to it. And I bet maybe one of you wants to learn how to save seeds. So, all one of you can hang out here while I try it out in earnest for the first time.

Just to give you a heads up - this year we'll be saving heirloom varieties (because hybrids don't produce reliably from their seeds as the hybridizing process leaves them incapable of reliably reproducing - see you already learned a thing) of green beans (Fortex), tomatoes (Brandywine, Sun Gold cherry) and cucumbers (Solly Beiler).

I'll walk you through the saving process for each, as I learn it. So, you know, there could be errors as I get drunk and maul the garden for good looking shit to save.

First things first though - beans.

The first step in saving beans is to let them grow to maturity on the vine, let them dry right on there like big dangling turds, and then pick them, husk them and store them in a cool dry container.

So far, that's all I've done. As you can plainly see. We'll talk more though as I harvest another tomato for its seeds and then when I figure out how to save cucumber seeds, since I haven't looked into that just yet.

Good weirdo times around here, friends.

Also - Team Cucumber - you're effed.

This is how I don't become an alcoholic. Or how I DO.

2011-09-09T06:34:00.000-07:00

It started innocently enough, this hobby stuff, back when I was a kid and someone taught me how to make friendship bracelets.

I forced my mom to take me to Ben Franklin (that completely unsatisfying hobby shop with 80 rows of balsa wood model airplanes and almost nothing else) so that I could buy String, as I referred to it with my sophisticated 3rd grader vocab, and then proceed to make one hundred fairly similar bracelets for friends and then, when I'd run out of friends, those who sat near me in class and then, my sister.

Sure - she's a friend NOW - but back then...less so.

I enjoyed pinching her. That's something.

Anyway, I think that's probably a good place to put a pin on my personal timeline of When This Hobby Bullshit Began.

The whole friendship bracelet thing lasted for a while, or probably something on the order of two weeks, which counts as "a while" in 3rd grader years and then, when I got tired of tying knots shaped like the number 4 with embroidery floss (thank you, 3rd grader directions), I set aside the String and moved on to other endeavors.

Like playing soccer, going to swim practice at dawn and school - which took up an oppressively large amount of my time.

Which, thank god, because later in my teenage years when my time wasn't nailed down by as many organized sports, I made a hobby of being the biggest bastard child a set of well-mannered hippie parents could imagine and fear.

Wow - I was awful.

So awful that I don't think my recognizing this fact in my 30s does anything to make up those years of sheer horror. I've stopped apologizing to my parents. We've agreed to just refer to those as The Dark Years and then also to never refer to them at all.

The never-er the better.

But then! I graduated from college and moved back to California where I began my life as a career commuter. What I was doing for work - which SHOULD have been the topic of convo and importance at that time - fell by the wayside as I recounted with great dramatic flair and arm flinging the soul-crushingness of my daily commute to and from San Francisco. And to and from Santa Clara. And to and from Livermore.

Oh god, it was grotesque.

But! Had I not spent the better part of my early twenties riding BART and CalTrain and MUNI (hate you still, MUNI.) and light rail and my fucking feet, I may not have begun my life as a serial hobbyist.

Because on the various train and bus-like modes of transpo, I learned to knit. And crochet. And actually read all the magazine subscriptions I'd amassed over decades of birthdays. Which ended up inspiring me to try new hobbies like sewing and cooking and reminded me that OH YEAH I could grow food if I so desired and OH YEAH my mom is a gardener I could ask her and so on...

So, whether it was the time on the road to and from work or the mind-numbing work or the subliminal magazine influence or the suffocating broke-ness (I lived on food swiped from executive luncheons for about four years) - I took up hobbies to entertain myself. Cheap ones.

I guess that's the best way to describe these years of hobbying - The Cheap Years.

Years of acrylic yarn, metal hooks (tink, tink, tink - I still hear that shit in my nightmares), poorly coordinated fat quarters from the $1 bin, plants ripped from my mom's yard (hey - she was the one doing the ripping), "Champagne" chicken made from Mumm's and so on...

Boy howdy, did I make some ugly, ill-fitting and offensive shit, people.

Thankfully, I also grew some pretty flowers and a tomato.

I think I'm starting to see how the gardening hobby stuck most effectively while other things like soap making (why? Soap is what? A DOLLAR. Just buy it.) and candle making (No one needs more candles. This is a fact.) were forgotten after only a single try.

Though I *just* threw out the soap molds, like, a month ago. Perhaps I should add de-stashing as a hobby. A hobby I stick to. Eh...

So yeah, that was all true until about five years ago when I started this blog.

Wow. Has it been five years? Wait! No! I just checked the archives - it's been SIX years. Yikes. Sorry people - that's a lot of salty language and poorly written tutorials to endure. You're champs.

Anyway, yeah, when I started this blog I also began reflecting on the state of my hobbies and, more importantly, reflecting on the state of other people with the same hobbies and I then decided to stop making crap.

Or, at least I decided to stop using crap materials to make what might or might not have turned out as crap.

So, like, wool yarn instead of acrylic, bamboo needles instead of metal or plastic, decor weight fabric rather than quilter's calico, foods other than chicken...you know.

Which I think, for the most part, has improved those hobbies to which I've stuck. The products of those hobbies has improved anyway. So, at least now when I finish a knitting project and SHOCKER it fits and looks decent, I have a useful clothing item instead of an itchy unwearable piece of synthetic garbage to add to the Goodwill bag.

Thank god for Goodwill, by the way - they save me from having to face my failures every day. Or at least from having to put them directly into the garbage, which is certainly where they belong and, likely, where they eventually ended up when the Goodwill sorters got a hold of them.

Short aside: Goodwill sorters - you do good work. Thanks for handling that whole wrap skirt fiasco. I really have no idea what made me pair narrow wale corduroy with blanket binding. It wasn't right.

Glad I got that out of the way. I've been thinking it for a long time. Knowing that Goodwill is there makes me a more confident hobbyist.

Not that they'll take a failed beehive, 40 tubes of too hard lip balm, cucumber plants with powdery mildew or my last two NaNoWriMo projects, but in some cases, they're a savior.

Which brings me to the purpose of this post - HOORAY WE'VE MADE IT! I need a Gatorade. - all my god damned hobbies and how, when recounting my weekend's activities to a friend, I realized that I've collected so many hobbies that I may find it hard to carve out enough time to join said friend for margaritas on Saturday.

This is my wake up call, friends.

My name is Finny and I'm a hobbyaholic.

Yeah, that makes no sense as a word, but I think you get what I'm saying. My hobbying has slowly and quietly gotten out of control.

And you know what broke the camel's back? Cheese.

I told my friend I was taking a cheese-making class and I got the look that many of you have probably gotten. The one that you usually only see on the faces of the family members during interventions when the addict is all, "No, really! I've got this under control! I can stop whenever I want!", as they scrape the white crust of their nostril.

Liars, those.

If I've reached the stage where afternoon cocktails on a sunny patio in fall is about to be eclipsed by a full schedule of back to back hobbies, I've got to pull back.

Right? Because otherwise when will I drink? That's a hobby, too, you know. You don't just start by having a top shelf Cadillac margarita with Tres Generaciones tequila. OH NO - you have to work up to it. You start with that sour mix crap in a bottle and some Albertsons brand tequila and then you learn first hand what a margarita *should* and should *not* taste like and go from there. Through many years of disastrous hangovers and awkward apologies. You know, until you're a discerning margarita drinker who can lounge on a sunny patio with friends for the better part of an afternoon without drinking too much, but also without ever running your perfect margarita dry.

It's an art, is what I'm saying - a hobby in its purest form.

But this hobby is in danger - because of the cheese making.

And beekeeping.
And running.
And canning.
And knitting.
And cycling.
And new book reading.
And fly fishing.
And NaNoWriMo novel researching.
And lip balm recipe refining.
And Japanese maple pruning.
And, and, and...

I guess this is just how I don't become an alcoholic. I take up so many hobbies that I just don't have time to drink until I've taken up so many hobbies that I'm so stressed that I MUST drink and then...whoopsies I become an alcoholic.

It's a fine line.