Two Blind Cats

Clomid

2012-01-26T08:01:00.000-05:00

I've finally moved up to the next level of fertility drug. I was on Metformin for a while to try to regulate my periods, but that didn't work at all. Then we moved, then I had to find a new doctor, then the holidays, blah blah blah. I've started the first round of Clomid, and the new doctor (who is funny and wears bow ties) is optimistic.

Which is good. But I'm not sure how I feel about the possibility of getting pregnant, you know, NOW.

That's how smart I am

2012-01-20T07:41:00.000-05:00

Last night was our first real snowfall in New England, a good three inches. I was working last night, and watched as the snow kept piling up. They hadn't scraped the roads yet, so I was really worried about getting home safely, as I had a big hill to navigate.

I got home fine. I was so worried about driving home in a snowstorm that I did it with my lights off.

That's how smart I am.

Momofuku Ko

2012-01-19T07:04:00.002-05:00

On Tuesday, I managed to snag a reservation at Momofuku Ko in New York.

For those who don't know, Momofuku Ko is one of David Chang's restaurants, has two Michelin stars, and is consistently the hardest restaurant in New York to get a reservation to. There's no phone--there's only an online lottery for reservations, and since the restaurant only has 14 seats, and only takes reservations seven days in advance, the 14 seats that become available every day at 10 am are immediately gone. I've been playing reservation roulette with them for FOUR YEARS, and this is the first time I got lucky.

Amazingly enough, I was planning to be in New York on Tuesday anyway to see friends. So that worked out really well.

The food was incredible. There's no menu, you just take what the chefs--who are working right in front of you--give you, and everyone gets the same thing. You can choose a beverage pairing; my friend and I split one, and it was fine, but they charged us $95 for one beverage pairing which was almost as much as the food cost ($125). Verdict: not worth $95. (Mostly wines, a couple of beers, a sake, the best one was the first one, a huckleberry negroni.) Stick with the food.

They also don't allow you to take pictures. So no pictures.

Here are the courses, in order: (The chefs spoke quickly, so I'm sure there are key ingredients missing for each of these. But you get the general drift.)
1. Salsify puree with black truffle
2. A chiccarone (pork rind) with salt
3. Oyster with green apple and coconut vinaigrette
4. Fried whole shrimp with some kind of mayo
5. Shortbread with chicken liver mousse
6. Curry fish consomme with shrimp
7. Spanish mackerel with ginger pickled shallots
8. Gruyere consomme with brioche, bone marrow, candied lemon zest
9. A soft-boiled egg with caviar and chips
10. Ricotta cavatelli with fried beef tongue and horseradish
11. Trout with rutabaga mayo, panko, radishes
12. Shaved frozen foie gras with pine nut brittle and lychee
13. Duck with pomegranate glaze, braised pumpernickel, spicy greens
14. Some kind of crazy Asian citrus fruit sorbet with Earl Grey panna cotta
15. Passionfruit meringue, coconut custard, Thai basil

I couldn't even begin to finish all that food.

I liked the ambiance, too: very chill and casual, but with high-class food, and I got to watch the chefs work, which I really like.

Would I ever go back? Probably not, but not because I didn't enjoy myself--only because it took me four years to get a seat there. But you should definitely try for a reservation. The $125 is totally worth it.

Sometimes you just gotta take the bull by the horns

2012-01-15T09:15:00.000-05:00

Not much to report this week--I had a friend from work over for dinner Monday night. We had alligator gumbo, a raw winter greens salad, and a nice bottle of wine. Work has been slow, as it historically is in January. I'm worried about money, and especially worried that we're going to owe a big pile of money to the IRS this year, as restaurant paychecks are miniscule (we live on tips, you know) and federal withholding only comes out of the $2 an hour I officially earn, not out of the tips. And yes, the credit card tips get reported.

I'm taking my one day off this week and going into New York for the day to see some friends. It's been too long, my day off never coordinates with my hubby's days off, and so rather than wait any longer, I'm just going there by myself. It's way easier that way, even if it does mean I'll be driving home in the middle of the night after a very long day of socializing.

Oh, and you'll be glad to know my mashed thumb has finally stopped hurting, though it's still navy blue and fairly garish.

Ow!

2012-01-07T07:44:00.000-05:00

The other night at work, I closed a large heavy door on my thumb.

Not intentionally, of course--it banged shut, on my thumb, before I could move my hand completely out of the way. But now my right thumb is swollen, exceptionally painful, and my thumbnail is a particularly vivid shade of navy blue.

So, it may be a while before I can use that hand fully again. I'm afraid I'll have a completely disfigured fingernail for a while. Fortunately, the pain is tamping down to a dull roar. When it first happened, it hurt so much I actually got queasy. (And then still had to work a regular shift, opening wine bottles and carrying hot plates and writing things down. I popped six ibuprofen in as many hours.) Today I can at least type without wanting to cry. So hopefully I'll be able to cook and clean and button my pants properly and all those things you sort of need working thumbs for.

In other news, I've invited a couple gals I work with over for dinner Monday night--it'll be my first attempt at entertaining in the new place.

A holiday retrospective

2012-01-01T08:28:00.000-05:00

It was a good Christmas this year. No one got sick, no one went into premature labor, and we had a good long visit with my stepson. It was the first time we'd had an actual Christmas with him, by ourselves--I think all his previous Christmases were spent at my in-laws' in Missouri.

To cut down on the travel this year, we spent a week at home in Providence, and another week with my family in Virginia. I spent the entire week in Providence working, as did my husband, so my stepson didn't do much besides play video games all day. DH took him to see a play one night, and they both enjoyed that. We opened presents on Christmas Eve, I worked that night, and the next morning we drove to Virginia.

Highlights from the week:

1. Shooting lessons. My dad, who has enough weaponry and gun knowledge to fend off the zombie apocalypse, got us all out on a skeet range for a first gun lesson. Me, DH, and Stepson. Yes, folks, I shot a gun. For the first time in my life. And I got the second skeet. My stepson was a little more leery of the whole thing, but he loved the BB gun in the backyard. We may get him a BB gun for Christmas next year.

2. The family, natch. My sister is pregnant, my two nieces met each other for the first time, and we spent several days with the extended family in the mountains. Unfortunately, my grandmother has been in poor health for some months; I'm afraid this may very well have been her last Christmas with us. There were no shenanigans from her this year--no racial epithets, no funny stories, no getting drunk on hooch.

3. After much debate, we decided our future family compound will be located in Austin, TX. We needed some place near a tech center and gaming center both (so my husband and brother-in-law can find jobs), but also a place where land is cheap and it's warm. We debated the upper Rockies (Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado) simply because it's so beautiful, but ultimately those would have been too cold. There's too much traffic around Atlanta and DC, I'm not a huge fan of Raleigh/Durham, and it's not New Orleans is either a tech center or a gaming center. Austin was the only place that fit the bill. So we'll summer in the upper Rockies instead.

Now, after spending the week eating and drinking, playing cards with my uncles and giggling with my baby nieces, I'm ready for a day or two of reading and relaxing before going back into my crazy work schedule on Tuesday. I've eaten more junk food this week than I usually eat in a year, and I need a couple of big salads to make up for it.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

2011-12-25T02:23:00.000-05:00

I hope it's awesome, whatever you're doing!

A bowl of ice cream solves a lot of problems

2011-12-22T12:09:00.000-05:00

It's been a trying week. I lost my ATM card Monday morning--fortunately, I was able to cancel the account before any money disappeared, but it still screwed up my banking abilities for the week. Then the plumbing in our downstairs bathroom burst, flooding the downstairs neighbor, so we've had plumbers traipsing in and out of the apartment for two days. My 12-year-old stepson is visiting, and so far I don't think he's consumed anything besides dry Cheerios and hot dogs. Maybe a bowl of spaghetti. Definitely anything not, you know, either junk food or a carb.

And I've been working all week, and by that, I mean ALL WEEK. I finally broke down and scheduled myself a massage for this afternoon, because my shoulders are so tight that they're starting to weirdly tingle all the time. I've been having an ongoing dispute with my former landlord about the return of our deposit, and I finally got resolution (sort of); he returned $450 out of the $1000 he owed us. It's a long story. I'm happy just to see any money.

I'm really looking forward to a) a week off, b) seeing my friends and family next week, and c) sitting down. A lot. Sitting is my favorite.

This morning I got up, looked at the laundry, packing, and cleaning that needed to be done, and instead headed directly into the bathroom and took a long, boiling hot bubble bath. Then I ate a ginormous bacon egg and cheese sandwich for breakfast, followed by a ginormous bowl of ice cream.

I'm all ready for my massage.

Gracie's, Providence, RI

2011-12-17T02:51:00.000-05:00

One of our Christmas presents was a gift certificate to Gracie's, a top restaurant in Providence. It had been a while since we'd had a real night out, just the two of us, having dinner, no one working.

I'm happy to say it was a great meal. I let them know I was a fellow restaurant worker, on a rare night off, and they lavished me with a good table, an extra course, and a super-attentive staff. And I came away with the inspiration for pickled cranberries.

We got the full-bore seven-course tasting menu, plus wine pairings. (I didn't catch the wine names for the first three courses; sorry.)

First course: Olive-oil poached tuna with capers.

Second course: gnocchi with foraged mushrooms and rabbit confit.

Third course: foie gras! with sugar pumpkin and pickled cranberries.

Fourth course: bacon-wrapped monkfish with crispy leeks. Wine: Domaine Eden Pinot Noir.

Fifth course (no picture): sweetbreads, with quail egg and truffle reduction. Wine: Kermit Lynch Cote du Rhone.

Sixth course: duck, with duck liver and duck heart. Wine: Beronia Rioja.

Seventh course: cheese! With white port! I hadn't had white port in forever. I ran right out and bought some.

Eighth course: root cake (carrots, parsnips, beets) with a Broadbent Rainwater Mediera.

Yes, that was eight courses on a seven-course menu. Every once in a while, working in a restaurant pays off.

The service and the food were all exceptional. I totally recommend it.

Turkey! And another sprint to Christmas

2011-12-15T10:15:00.000-05:00

Isn't that a pretty turkey? I made my holiday dinner last night, complete with turkey, stuffing, taters, cranberry sauce, and sweet potato pie.

Why did I do that last night, you ask? Instead of, say, next week when my stepson will be here and it will be closer to Christmas?

Because last night was the last night I'll have off between now and Christmas. I'm working every night, starting tonight, until we leave to go to Virginia on Christmas morning. Yes, even Monday, because the restaurant has a special party that night.

That means two things: 1. Lots of money, 2. Lots of exhaustion. Plus I won't really see my stepson for the week he's here, because I'll be working constantly. But that's okay; I'll make lots of money, and I'll see him for the week that we're on vacation, in Virginia.

All the Christmas shopping is done, all my errands are run, all that's left is to work a lot and do laundry periodically so I have something to wear to work. I have a new supply of all-black work clothes, thanks to an Old Navy sale, I have a pair of shoes specially calibrated for restaurant workers, my back is killing me all the time but I can't do anything about that.

More news: went to the liquor store yesterday and bought a bunch of stuff. Working in a restaurant with a craft cocktail program will do wonders for my home bar--I get so many ideas, and I'm being exposed to all these crazy brands I never knew of before--but it won't be so great for my wallet, or my liver.

I've decided that as soon as we're rich and famous, I'm hiring a housekeeper. And getting a massage every week.

I'm sure this last ten-day stretch between now and Christmas will fly by, since I'll be working all the time. If you don't hear from me between now and then, that's why. Besides, my blog posts would probably read something like "Ugh. My feet hurt. My back hurts. I only got five hours of sleep last night. Rinse and repeat."

Still better than being a corporate drone, though.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Workin' hard for the money, part 2

2011-12-07T15:34:00.000-05:00

I forgot when I did the budget for this month that it's December--which is bad, in a sense, because there are all those Christmas expenses. But it's also good, because I now work in a restaurant.

December is a great month for people in the service industry. Everybody eats out a lot and everybody tips well. This past weekend was a good one, tip-wise--I busted my ass, and was running on fumes by Sunday night, but for once the money was really worth it.

Bitching about how my feet hurt all the time aside, I actually really like working in a restaurant again. I like the food, the cocktails, the energy, the passion. I come home with all sorts of food and beverage ideas (though, granted, I'm usually too tired to do anything about them right away), and I like the weirdos that are drawn to restaurant work.

I got a different temp job, too, this one right downtown in a law firm. It's just three days a week, 9 to 1, within walking distance, so I can bring in some extra money without killing myself by literally working all the time.

So I'm working, finishing up Christmas shopping, and keeping my fingers crossed that we'll end the month in the black. If tips continue to be good, and nothing else unexpected happens, we should be just fine.

Costa Rica

2011-11-30T11:58:00.000-05:00

It rained the whole time.

Other than that, it was fine.

Oh, except that right before we left, we discovered a dear relative has prostate cancer, and just before we came back, the State of New York extracted $1700 from our bank accounts, to pay a tax bill from 2007 that I didn’t even know existed.

But otherwise, the vacation was great.

Here are some things you should know about Costa Rica:

1. Most everyone speaks some degree of English, and there are English-language TV channels.

2. Central and South American plumbing is…let’s call it inadequate. You can’t flush toilet paper, it will clog up the antiquated plumbing. It’s only designed to dispose of, you know, human wastes. So you have to wipe, and then deposit the used toilet paper in a wastebasket next to the toilet. (It goes without saying you can’t flush anything else, like feminine products or tissues or anything.) It also goes without saying that the contents of the wastebasket don’t really bear close examination.

When I told my husband that, he thought I was joking. He’s still convinced it’s all an elaborate prank on Americans.

3. The dry season is January through April. The rest of the year, it will rain at least once a day. Sometimes it will rain for two weeks straight and flood everything. Not little-bitty drizzly rain, either—that tropical rain, where it doesn’t so much rain as the skies just open up and vomit water.

4. The roads are dreadful. And all the bridges are one-lane.

5. But the animals are fun: I saw all kinds of birds and lizards, monkeys, even some caimans.

We arrived toward the end of rainy season, and spent most of our time at Arenal Nayara, a fancy-pants resort in the mountains, overlooking Arenal Volcano. Which is all very well and good, but we never got a clear view of the entire volcano, thanks to the rain and fog. In fact, the only times we saw the sun were when we took a day trip to a wildlife refuge near the Nicaraguan border, and in San Jose on the day we left. That’s it.

So there was no sitting in the sun, and we only broke out our bathing suits once.

At least it was warm.

The resort was very nice, if overpriced. Each room is actually a private hut, with its own Jacuzzi, hammock, outdoor shower, and view of the volcano. Of course, no one bothered to inform me that we wouldn’t actually be able to see the volcano, it being rainy season and all. There were full amenities, great landscaping, and a swim-up bar. Everyone was very helpful, there were pool boys to take your order at the outdoor hot tubs, there was full cable, free wi-fi, and free calls to the US.

But they nickel-and-dimed us for everything else—and at US prices, not at Costa Rican prices. Want water with your dinner? Flat or sparkling, $5 US a bottle, no tap water option. Want a massage at the spa? They start at $80 US. Want a bottle of wine at the wine bar? That’s $28 US for a bottle of Yellow Tail. (YELLOW TAIL. And that was the cheapest wine available. The rest of the wine options were South American, overpriced, and frankly no better than plonk.) Want transportation to and from the airport? $120 each way in a private van, no van-sharing option available. Breakfast was included (thank God) but dinner was at least $35 a person, with no booze. We never paid less than $100 for dinner, and I’m positive there weren’t any locals coming up the mountainside to eat $100 US dinners. The food was good, but it wasn’t $100 good.

Also, they were super-sneaky when it came to drinks: the drink menu listed most drinks at $6, but that didn’t include obligatory tax or 10% service charge, and the bartenders would never tell you what the house liquor was. There were several times when we’d order, say, a margarita, and the bartender would hold up a random bottle of tequila and say, “OK?” If you said OK back, chances were excellent you’d just ordered yourself a $26 margarita. You had to specify, “House is fine,” or else they’d automatically upsell you the expensive stuff. Caution: the local Costa Rican rum was apparently the expensive stuff, which we didn’t discover until we got our bill at the end of our stay. It’s the only place I’ve ever been where the local stuff WASN’T the house option. I don’t mind being asked if I have a preference for booze, but I really mind not being told what things cost up front.

This all makes me sound like a crank, I know. It actually was a very nice vacation—we got away, and spent five unbroken days with each other, with no work, gaming, computers or phones to intrude. Costa Rica is a beautiful country, even with the rain, and we’re definitely planning to go back at some point (to one of the coasts this time, rather than the mountains). And even though the food was overpriced, it was good. I ate my weight in ceviche and fried plantains.

I’m just cranky because the GODDAMN FUCKING STATE OF NEW YORK STOLE $1700 OF MY MONEY WITHOUT WARNING ME. WHILE I WAS OUT OF THE COUNTRY AND COULDN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. Which meant all our vacation cash had to go to pay our rent for next month, and then the vacation had to be charged to a credit card, which makes me exceptionally cranky because the whole point of the vacation was that we could pay cash for it.

Right before the road trip in 2009, I got a bill from the IRS informing me that I’d filed my 2007 taxes improperly and I owed over $3000. (Some paperwork apparently never got mailed to me, so I never included it.) I freaked out, called them, and worked out a payment plan to pay it back. I finally managed to pay off the last of it this year.

Yesterday, while dealing with the IRS and the State of New York, I was told that in the fine print of that original bill, I was supposed to contact the State of New York MYSELF within 90 days so that my state tax return could be reworked. Naturally I never saw that provision, it being buried in the fine print, and no one at the IRS bothered to point that out to me. When I never contacted NY, they reworked my tax return themselves, and have been sending bills for said tax return to my old address in California—which never got forwarded to me, because I haven’t lived there for over a year. When they never heard from me, they issued a tax levy on my accounts, which meant the bank had to empty various savings accounts and send them $1700 on my behalf.

Now, let’s recap. They were sending bills to my California address, but I never got anything while I lived there, which meant they’ve only been trying to contact me within the last year. For a tax bill that’s now four years old. And yes, my address has changed, but my PHONE NUMBER AND EMAIL ADDRESS ARE EXACTLY THE SAME. Also, clearly they had no trouble digging up my current bank account information, so why couldn’t they be bothered to, you know, maybe CALL ME AND TELL ME I OWED THEM $1700?

I spent all morning on the phone yesterday, trying to figure out what happened when and what I could do about it. Short answer: I’m screwed. That money’s gone.

So now we have less than $500 left in emergency money, on an already tight budget, with Christmas coming up. Good times.

I wanted my husband to have an upscale vacation. By myself, I was always perfectly happy to stay in the local illegal Craigslist B&B and wander through the bars and restaurants the locals frequented. That way, I could spend my money on one or two really nice four-star dinners and museum admissions and the like. But I figured he’d want to be eased into international travel, which is why we opted for an expensive resort in the mountains—nothing to do but relax and be pampered, right? With no worries about being robbed in our sleep or getting Montezuma’s Revenge from the water. So, we had the upscale vacation, and thanks to the extra food and beverage charges, paid through the nose for it. Which I wouldn’t even mind, if it hadn’t been for that unexpected tax bill.

So, the moral of the story is: don’t bother with the upscale resorts. Stay in the cheap hotel, eat with the locals, really get to know the country. I can hang out with English-speaking white people at home for free, I don’t need to pay extra to do that somewhere else.

Also, be sure to have a healthy emergency fund, no matter what.

Pictures from Costa Rica

2011-11-29T17:11:00.000-05:00

The view from our room at the resort. That's Arenal Volcano. That's as much of the volcano as we ever saw, thanks to the fact that it was rainy season.

The volcano at sunset.

Thoughts on Thanksgiving

2011-11-22T10:55:00.000-05:00

Long-time blog readers will know that I'm not much on Thanksgiving.

That's not to say that I don't appreciate the holiday, or that I don't enjoy a turkey-stuffing-mashed potato-cranberry sauce sandwich from time to time.

But I've never really celebrated it on my own.

For years I did the "are we celebrating Thanksgiving or Christmas this year?" dance with my family. Since I was single, and living in New York, I had to travel to them--no one was going to visit me and sleep on the floor of my studio. (Not that I blamed them.) But that meant all the travel expenses were on my end.

Finally I got tired of it, and started my own tradition: traveling elsewhere for Thanksgiving. And by "elsewhere," I mean "internationally."

As I'm sure you know, domestic airfares around Thanksgiving are atrocious--easily three or four times what they would be normally, and the airports are packed. But international airfares--from America to anywhere else in the world--are super-cheap.

Why? Because no one travels outside America for Thanksgiving, it being a purely American holiday.

So, 1. Incredibly cheap airfares, 2. Deserted international terminals at the airport, 3. Still good weather in Europe, 4. Fewer tourists than usual (because all the Americans are at home), means A Great Time to Travel Internationally.

And I'll see everyone at Christmas anyway.

What am I missing by fleeing the country for four days? I can eat turkey at Christmas, see my family then, and I wouldn't dare set foot out of the house on Black Friday anyway. (I do all my Christmas shopping online.)

Speaking of Christmas shopping, I did a wee bit yesterday, to take advantage of the pre-Black Friday sales (since I'll be out of the country on Black Friday). I picked myself up a replacement camera--$180, marked down from $300--the Canon Powershot Elph 300HS. Essentially the new version of my old camera.

The last couple of years, due to moves (first to California, then to Massachusetts), I wasn't able to take advantage of this lovely tradition of travelling internationally. But this year, I'm reviving it.

So while you're listening to your in-laws griping, trying to defrost the turkey in time, and fighting stampeding crowds at Wal-Mart on Black Friday, I will be soaking up the rays in Costa Rica, drinking things out of pineapples.

Lots and lots of drinks out of pineapples.

See you all in December.

I miss having a day off

2011-11-15T14:21:00.000-05:00

Sorry for paucity of news/updates lately. I've been working almost literally non-stop; temping during the day, restaurant at night. It's exactly like I'm 20 again, working two full-time jobs. Only, you know, I'm not 20 anymore.

I've been temping at a large drugstore chain's national headquarters for the last week or so, and that will probably continue for the next week. I remember exactly why I went back to the restaurant industry in the first place. I hate offices. I hate cafeterias, I hate cubicles, I hate office politics, I hate PowerPoint, I hate driving to a corporate campus every day. To add insult to injury, none of my corporate clothes fit anymore--I've lost probably 20 pounds since I started waiting tables, which is great, but now none of my clothes fit. To add further insult to injury, they're paying me $19 an hour. Which may sound like a lot, but I haven't made less than $20 an hour in an office since 1999. I was making double that temping in New York. Hell, even in San Diego, when I had to take a 35% pay cut just to work, I was making close to $23 an hour.

But it's still $19 an hour more than I was making during those hours, so I suppose I should quit griping.

So as soon as that's done, I rush right over to the restaurant and spend all night on my feet. Doubles on the weekends. Which means I work 8-5 Monday through Wednesday, then 8 am to 11 pm or midnight Thursday through Sunday. Which means I never have a full day off, and Thursday morning through Monday night is basically one long shift, with six-hour sleeping breaks.

My husband is like, "Who are you again?"

Fortunately, in a week we're going to Costa Rica. So I'm pushing through, because there'll be an awesome vacation at the end of all this.

When we get back, I'll reevaluate finances. Hopefully at that point I can drop the day temping, and cut back on the brunch shifts at the restaurant, leaving me to work only Thursday through Sunday nights.

In the meantime, though, it's a slog. I remember feeling like this when I was 20, thinking "Once I get a degree, I'll never have to work like this again."

Heh.

More pictures of the new house

2011-11-14T07:24:00.000-05:00

Entryway

Foosball coffee table!

Built-in wet bar

Guest bedroom

Master bedroom

And check out this tub!

Goodbye, little camera. You've served me well

2011-11-11T08:07:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I killed my camera.

I spilled half a bottle of water in my purse, and my camera was in the bottom of my purse.

Of course I frantically took it apart to let it dry out. I even put it in a container of rice overnight. But, in the words of the camera shop pro I took it to, "it's fucked."

(I did get a flicker of life out of it this morning, after sitting in the rice all night; but only a flicker. I'll wait another day and try again, but I'm not optimistic.)

I suppose I should be grateful I didn't ruin my phone as well. And to be honest, I've sucked my money's worth out of that little camera. It's served me well. The road trip, all the moves, all the sightseeing, and all the food photography over the past two and a half years, and not once has it disappointed me.

So farewell, Canon Powershot SD780 IS with 12.1 megapixels. Bless your little camera heart.

So this means I'll be using my iPhone for blog pictures in the immediate future--they won't be as good, please forgive me, I apologize in advance.

I'll be in the market for a new camera; I have my eye on a Canon G12, but I'm open to suggestions. Any pros/fellow food bloggers out there, what camera do you use and why? Any recommendations?

Birthday summary

2011-11-06T08:11:00.000-05:00

I DID have to work a double on my birthday.

I also got fired on my birthday.

Those two things, however, are not related.

Here's the story: I love the restaurant I'm working at in Providence. I'm hoping to get more shifts there in a couple of weeks, but because it's so small, I have to wait for one of the other four waiters to give up shifts. So I'm usually available if one of them wants a night off.

They asked me on Friday if I could work Saturday night, in addition to my already-scheduled brunch shift on Saturday. I didn't really want to, seeing as how Saturday was my birthday, but I found out Saturday morning I had to, because no one else was available. Fine, I like money, they threw in a bottle of wine to sweeten the deal and let me off early last night, which was very nice of them.

However, somewhere in the middle of all that, my other job called me. The upscale pizza/wine bar in Massachusetts, that I've been driving 40 minutes each way to a few times a week, trying to make a little more money before I got more shifts at the Providence restaurant. I've been wanting to quit there for a while, it's often not worth it to make the drive, but I was trying to wait until the last possible minute to do so.

So old job called me, wanting me to come in Saturday night as well. "Can't, sorry," I said, "my other job called me in, too."

I thought that was the end of the story, until I was checking my online schedule last night--and discovered my account had been deleted.

That's how they fired me--they didn't actually TELL me I was fired, they just reassigned all my shifts for next week and deleted my account from the online scheduling app.

"Fuck 'em," said my husband, "you were going to quit anyway."

"True," I said, "but my goodness, how tacky."

We ended up going to a party our landlords were having, so the very end of my birthday was quite nice, much better than the working part. I'm back in for another double today--so perhaps tomorrow I'll actually celebrate my birthday.

Happy birthday to me!

2011-11-05T08:15:00.000-04:00

In celebration, I may have to work a double. To be continued!

Venda Ravioli in Providence, RI

2011-11-03T08:26:00.000-04:00

My in-laws got me a gift certificate to Venda Ravioli for my birthday, Venda apparently being a Providence institution, in the heart of the Federal Hill Little Italy. (If any other readers want to get me something, my birthday is Saturday!) Being still new to Providence, I went to check it out yesterday.

I was expecting an Italian restaurant--and there is one--but Venda Ravioli is also a gourmet food emporium, complete with meat counter, cheese counter, and pre-made Italian yummies.

So, that gift certificate got spent in a hurry.

I got a few things I wouldn't normally get--dry-aged beef, veal osso buco--but I also got some standards: cheese, olives, cured salami, proscuitto. (Look for blog posts about how I use all this stuff soon.) Naturally, dinner last night was a cheese fest.

I'll be back for sure, and now that we're settled in to the new place, perhaps I can start exploring the city in my spare time now.

Pics of the new kitchen

2011-10-31T12:45:00.000-04:00

Pics of everything else in the new place to come soon, I promise!

My Kevin Bacon number

2011-10-24T09:02:00.000-04:00

In a minor brush with celebrity, I waited on Kyra Sedgwick last night.

For those of you who don't know who Kyra Sedgwick is, she is a) Kevin Bacon's wife, and b) a movie and TV star in her own right. Their daughter apparently goes to Brown, because Kyra and her daughter came into my restaurant for dinner last night.

Everyone in the restaurant was super-excited because we thought Kevin Bacon would be coming in, too. He didn't; but still, I waited on a celebrity.

For those who care, she ordered the chicken.

My Kevin Bacon number has just skyrocketed, to 2. Which means I am only one degree of separation away from the Bacon himself.

Side note about photos

2011-10-20T08:31:00.000-04:00

You probably already know that I'm spending my free time decorating the new house, primarily by hanging things on the walls (to cover the holes in the walls left by the previous tenants), hanging curtains, and getting some new furniture.

I thought I was being pretty clever by getting new things to hang on the walls, to avoid a huge spackling/repainting project; I hung what we already had, of course, and then (to avoid spackling/repainting) I started getting creative.

I hauled out some old posters, got some cheap poster frames, and hung those.

Then I got a couple of vintage liquor posters on ebay, and hung those. (We now have a vintage liquor them in our entryway, which is way cooler and way more French than it sounds.)

Then I decided to print some 8x10s of some of my old travel photos, frame those, and hang those around.

Here is where it gets tricky.

Naturally I started with the road trip, and went from there. I selected some photos from Rome, one from Buenos Aires, and some from my very first trip abroad, to London and Paris, lo these twelve years ago. I don't think I'd looked at those pictures in the better part of a decade.

Naturally, looking at all those pictures has precipitated a massive wave of wanderlust.

Of course, you're thinking that now I really want to pack up and go to Europe, after looking at my pictures of Rome and Paris and London. You're right, partly--I always want to pack up and go to Europe.

Mainly, though, right now I want to pack up and go out west. Utah, Wyoming, and Montana.

Bear with me here.

The greatest pictures I took on the road trip were in Utah, with a close second in Montana. (Wyoming ranked right up there in terms of scenery, but my photos didn't capture it.) I also got some great shots at Badlands National Park, in South Dakota. Looking at those photos makes me want to return, to really explore those places rather than just zooming through with a camera.

This is not the time of year to go to Wyoming and Montana, I know. It doesn't matter, I won't be going there anytime soon. We can't afford it, and we're going to Costa Rica next month. That should scratch the travel itch, at least for a little while.

Still. Look at that photo. How could you not want to go there?

New home update

2011-10-18T09:27:00.000-04:00

I was going to post a diatribe about how the DMV is secretly run by Satan-worshipping assholes, but I'm feeling sluggish this morning. So I'll leave that for another day, and instead let you in on what's happening around here.

As you may know, my husband and I recently relocated to a big, twisty Victorian home. For the first time in my life, I'm in a place with a) high ceilings, b) big windows, c) lots of rooms. And room, in general. I suddenly have an extra room to fill with furniture--and that's after we purchased a new sofa, for a total of three sofas.

All that room space means lots of wall space to cover, too. The previous owners had a love for bright color; one room is painted hot pink, one is a kind of bluey lime green, the office is silver with broad purple stripes, the entryway is fire-engine red. (It looks better than it sounds.) But that also means that the holes they left in the walls, from pictures, curtain hardware, etc., can't really be spackled over, since those particular batches of paint are long gone. And that means I have a lot of holes to cover over.

So I'm spending my days figuring out what I can hang, for a minimum of money. I've printed some of the travel photos I've taken over the years, and pulled out some old posters. (Cheap poster frames are tacky, I admit, but I don't have the energy or the money for a custom framing job right now.)

I'll also be furnishing that empty room on the cheap. I've already gotten a rocking chair on craigslist ($35), and we'll need another coffee table and another nightstand. I've repurposed some other furniture into a entertainment center; it's not quite the right color, but I hope some spraypaint will take care of that.

So if any of you have any old furniture, or pictures, you're looking to get rid of, let me know.

Everything's unpacked, that's the good news. I may rearrange a few things, but that's minor. I'm not working as much as I would like, but my new job tells me they would like to give me more shifts in the next couple of weeks. If that's the case, then maybe I can stop looking for another job, and just work there. That's what I'd really like--I love the people and the menu there, and if I could add on the money-making shifts (Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights), I could potentially make enough money to live on there. Keep your fingers crossed.

Slowly but surely

2011-10-12T08:49:00.000-04:00

It's hard to get settled in when you have to work all the time.

But the house is slowly coming together. We've gotten the boxes unpacked and most everything put away. We can now concentrate on the finishing touches, like curtains, hanging pictures, and distributing lamps.

AND my pot rack is hanging! I haven't been able to hang my pot rack in either of the last two places we've lived--that thing hasn't seen the light of day since Brooklyn. We got it installed last night (I love high ceilings) with the help of our new landlord, and it's spiffy. Really spiffy.

It almost offset the fact that my food processor isn't working.

I'm not sure why--it worked perfectly before the move. If I have to buy another one, on top of all the other new stuff we need (new entertainment center, probably some new curtains, all the other miscellaneous crap you need when you move), I'm going to be very upset.

Moving once is like dying twice

2011-10-07T09:40:00.001-04:00

...as the Germans say.

We're here, we're moved in, I'm cranky. The end.

The movers were actually much more helpful this time around--they didn't damage anything, and we managed to get almost all the furniture inside.

The new apartment is very cool, tons of character, but it does have two very twisty and narrow staircases. We already knew most of the furniture wouldn't fit up to the top floor--what we didn't count on was that some wouldn't even make it in the front door. The entertainment center had to be completely abandoned (it's in the basement, awaiting its fate), and all the furniture we'd intended for the top floor is now stuck on the lower floor, as none of it will fit up the staircase.

As usual, the entire moving process has been an exercise in frustration.

1. Bank of America fucked me. They charged me a $12 "monthly maintenance fee" they'd never charged me before, then charged me a $35 overdraft fee for the privilege. Conveniently, they waited until the only day last month when I didn't have $12 available, necessitating a $35 overdraft fee. Then when I called to complain, they said they "couldn't help me" and that I "didn't qualify to have the charges reversed."

Translation: you don't make enough money for us to care about keeping your account. Even though I've had that account for ten years.

So I closed that account, and opened a new one at a new bank. Even more conveniently, my funds are now tied up while I wait for the new debit card and PIN to arrive separately.

2. We bought a new sofa, but half of the ottoman wasn't delivered with the rest of it. So there's that.

3. We tried to switch our Verizon cable/internet to the new place, only to be told that they wouldn't be able to get out to connect everything for TEN DAYS.

So I had to close that account, and open a new one with Cox Cable. That was three hours of my life, gone right there.

4. Then my computer couldn't connect to our new network. Another two hours down the drain.

5. The house is in a state of chaos (predictably). I can't find anything, and everything I unpack presents a new logistical challenge. ("Where the hell am I supposed to put the potato ricer? I can't even find my shoes...I'll just throw it over here...now where the hell did I leave the boxcutter?" and so on.)

6. Also, John is working late every night, and I'm working all weekend, so nothing will get accomplished for the next couple of days.

7. Alarmingly soon, I'm going to have to turn the last of the tomato harvest into a batch of tomato sauce. I'm not sure that can wait until Monday. It may have to, though, as I still haven't unpacked all of the kitchen things I'd need for that.

And I'm covered with bruises from bumping into unfamiliar corners and boxes.

Did I mention I'm cranky?

At least I wasn't the one that had to wrestle the furniture inside. There's that, at least.

Gardening update: no more garden

2011-10-01T18:58:00.002-04:00

Well, that's it, folks. The Great Gardening Experiment of 2011 is officially over.

We move out of our house, beginning on Monday, so this weekend I'll be ripping out the last of the tomato and pepper plants. Everything else has already been harvested and ripped out, and I've been removing tomato plants as they die/stop producing. It's a shame, I think I could get a few more weeks out of the pepper plants if it doesn't get too cold, but oh well.

Here's my verdict: tomatoes were the clear winner. I harvested bushels, all different kinds, all exceedingly delicious. Herbs were the runner-up. Out of everything else, here's what I got:

Corn: 2 spindly ears, maybe the size of a finger. I don't think they got enough sun.
Squash: Several zucchini, 3 baby-sized butternut squash. They were doing well until Hurricane Irene, but all the water killed them off.
Green beans: A few handfuls' worth, nothing of note, and they never got very big. Not sure what happened there.
Kale: Lots of baby kale in the beginning; the groundhog ate it down to the ground in August and I pulled it up at that point.
Cauliflower and carrots: Lost to the rabbits.
Cucumbers: Several baby ones. Ditto Hurricane Irene (see squash, above).
Peppers: Coming along very nicely. None of the bell peppers got very big, but perhaps that's just because I've been impatient and have been picking them as soon as they get bigger than a golf ball.

Lessons for next year: Well, next year we'll be in a city apartment with no yard (okay, there is a yard, but it's a bricked-in patio), so it'll be all about the container gardening again. But I will expand the container garden to include tomatoes, more peppers, and more types of greenery. I'll also keep some of the herbs inside this fall, to try and keep the basil and such alive as long as possible.

It's a small world after all

2011-09-29T09:01:00.000-04:00

I ran into my new landlord at my new job last night. The one guy I know in Providence, and he shows up at my restaurant. Turns out he's a regular there. Cool, huh?

Speaking of the new job, things are looking up. My first day, Sunday, was dreadfully slow, and I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to make any money there. I'm still not sure exactly what my earning potential will be there (I'm training, and therefore not eligible for tips), but I really like the place. Great food, great cocktails, and best of all, they treat me like an adult. I get family meal, a shift drink, the chef says "try this" when he's experimenting, the bartenders say "try this" when they're experimenting, it's small enough to be intimate so I'm never running around like a chicken with my head cut off, there are no kids/teenagers, and the menu changes every night. In short, fine dining.

In other news, we begin the moving process this weekend. Pray for us.

Back to fine dining

2011-09-26T09:24:00.000-04:00

I found a new restaurant gig in Providence, not far from our new apartment. It's a highly rated gastropub, small, intimate, with a constantly changing fresh local menu and craft cocktails. It's almost exactly the kind of place I would have, were I to have my own place.

I started there last night--and while I love the place, it was a very slow night. I fear for my money-making potential there. I'm worried about money in general these days; last night I dreamed that I was hired for another administrative/corporate job, started, and was promptly fired. I realllllly don't want to go back on that particular firing line, but neither do I want to be making no money. (And my darling husband, whom I love more than life itself, insists on leaving all the lights on and waiting until the last possible second to buy gas--you know, the kind of behavior that costs money.)

Once again, I seem to only be interested in low-paying gigs.

The moving process continues

2011-09-20T08:33:00.000-04:00

Sorry for lack of posting, I've been, you know, getting ready to move. We've signed a lease on the new place, and will begin moving in earnest in two weeks. I've been getting the house ready for the movers/packers, and working as much as possible.

But I haven't been earning nearly enough--I think once we move to Providence, I'll need to get a job at a fine dining restaurant, where I can make more money. We're also considering getting rid of one car--Providence has a decent enough public transportation system, and ridiculously high car insurance/property tax rates. With the car payment, gas, insurance, and new property tax rates, we're spending $600 a month on the Camry (more on the Prius, since its payment is higher) and that doesn't include maintenance. While I appreciate convenience, a $60 bus pass costs a lot less than $600.

Otherwise, nothing to report. Trying to wrap up gardening for the season; packing; working; getting excited about my upcoming trip to Virginia to see friends and go to a high school reunion thing.

Speaking of which, the dress code for the reunion thing is "party casual, no jeans." What the hell do I wear?

Well, that was fast

2011-09-12T06:57:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, DH and I went and looked at an apartment together.

We were offered it last night.

So it appears we'll be moving to a new city in short order, to a really kick-ass apartment.

Yes, it is an apartment. I had hoped for a house. But it's a great apartment (and half a house). 9 rooms, 3 bedrooms, 2 full baths (one with rain shower and separate full-size Victorian clawfoot tub), with a built-in wet bar in the dining room. There's a patio backyard, which is a bummer for me, because it means all my future gardening will be of the container variety--but there is a pear tree and grapevine back there, so at least there's free fruit. It's fully enclosed and a little overgrown, but trimmed back, there should be enough sunlight for the containers. It's the upper half of an old house, so there are hardwood floors throughout, twisty stairways, an additional deck off the front, gabled roof in the upper floor, and big kitchen. Plus storage in the basement and washer/dryer. The closet space leaves something to be desired, but there is a cedar closet.

We'll lose the fireplace and the backyard, but a year's worth of snow shoveling/lawn maintenance has apparently convinced my husband that he will be an apartment dweller for the rest of his life.

Once we get the moving details/dates situated, I'll be sure to keep everyone updated.

Now, on to getting rid of the furniture we won't need there (fireplace equipment, possibly china cabinet, one dresser, oh, and the outdoor stuff) and accumulating the new stuff we'll need (more bookcases, probably more things to sit on). If anyone's in the market for anything, let me know.

Good moving news

2011-09-11T08:41:00.000-04:00

We're going to look at a couple of apartments in Providence today. I spoke to the movers yesterday (my husband's company is providing movers, free of charge), and they can pack/load/unload everything, and we'll get it all the next day. Hopefully this will be a MUCH easier moving process than last year's, in which we had two and a half weeks to pack everything/move cross-country. I don't ever want to have to do that again. *shudder*

But if we don't have to pack this time around, that means I can spend my time looking at apartments/working instead of worrying about moving logistics, which is fine with me. Still waiting tables, my feet still hurt. Last week was abysmally slow, but last night was jumpin', so I'm hoping this upcoming week's tips will make up for last week's lack of them.

Side rant: you DO know to tip 20%, right? That's 20%. Not 10%. Or even 15%. It's 20%. If you can't afford to tip 20%, you can't afford to eat out.

Also, for whatever reason, I've been getting a lot of teenagers in my restaurant, and NONE OF THEM KNOW HOW TO TIP. Seriously, I'll get maybe 4 or 5 bucks on an $80 tab, all of which is cheese pizzas and soda.

Parents, PLEASE TEACH YOUR KIDS HOW TO TIP. I do not work for $2.83 an hour to provide constant Sprite refills to giggly teenagers, only to get stiffed on the tip.

Thank you.

Anyway, there's not much else to report. My husband will be working pretty much constant overtime between now and Christmas. I was planning a visit home in October for a high school reunion thing, but it looks like I'll be going solo, since he won't be able to get away. I'm working as much as I can, trying desperately to get at least one credit card paid off before my severance runs out. The garden is full of tomatoes, I'm hip-deep in tomatoes, I love tomatoes but damn.

Also, I know what day it is. I'm not talking about that. I'm going off-grid, like I do every year on this date, so I can (hopefully) avoid sobbing like a child. I hope you can, too.

The house is quiet again

2011-09-05T08:02:00.000-04:00

Everyone left this morning.

By "everyone," I mean my stepson, who's been visiting us for the last month, as well as my BFF and her kids who were here this weekend. We've had a steady stream of visitors this month, to take advantage of stepson's presence on the East Coast, and while it was great seeing everyone, I'm looking forward to a) quiet, b) free bathrooms, c) being able to watch R-rated movies again, and d) no longer having to keep a steady supply of Cheerios, hot dogs, and peanut butter in the house.

Although right now, the house looks like the laundry-and-dirty-dishes fairy exploded, so I have that to deal with.

Did you know ice cream cakes now cost $30?

Power has been restored!

2011-08-31T10:19:00.001-04:00

That is all.

Hurricane Irene

2011-08-30T12:27:00.000-04:00

Hurricane Irene blew through Massachusetts this weekend, and it was largely a non-event--except that we lost power.

We still have no power.

In a way, it's not a big deal. I've been through hurricanes/extended power outages before. I had all the necessary supplies--batteries, flashlights, lots of candles, a propane camping stove, lots of non-perishable food. I hauled out the coolers and filled them with ice. We're currently in the process of eating through what was in the refrigerator, so that we lose as little as possible if the power is out for an extended period of time.

And we still have water. Trust me, no power is a cakewalk compared to no power AND no water. We even have hot water, thanks to the gas-powered hot water heater.

We didn't have any damage to speak of--lots of fallen branches, a few tomatoes blown off.

However, my stepson has apparently never been exposed to a power outage of any kind, much less an extended one. The good news is that he's reading a lot more. The bad news is that he keeps complaining of being bored. (I finally got tired of it, and sent him into the backyard to pick up all the fallen branches. He was very helpful at that, if by "helpful" you mean "running around the backyard flapping your arms at all the fallen branches and yelling 'I'm a robot!'".) I promised him s'mores tonight, roasted by candlelight.

Also, I have a freezer full of meat that I'm worried about. Everything in there was frozen solid, so it all should be good for another day or two. But if the power still isn't on then, I'm not sure what to do about it all. It's too much to eat all at once. I can handle losing some of the eggs and the chicken broth that was in the fridge; I can't handle losing alligator sausage and crawfish.

The power company claims I will almost certainly have power by 10 PM on Saturday.

Which is supremely unhelpful.

But I saw a power company truck perusing the neighborhood today, and the guy told me this was the largest block without power in my town, so I'm hopeful we will actually get power back within the next day or two, and not have to wait til Saturday.

My BFF and her kids are visiting this weekend, and I'd really like to have power for them.

Earthquake!

2011-08-24T09:39:00.000-04:00

By now I'm sure you've heard of yesterday's 5.8 earthquake in central Virginia that rattled buildings all over the East Coast. My husband claims to have felt it at his office in Rhode Island (I didn't). Everyone I know is fine, no injuries or damage.

My parents, oddly enough, were in Gettysburg when it happened. They visited last weekend, and decided to stop off in Gettysburg to do some sightseeing on the way home. It was a lovely visit--we did some sightseeing in Boston, drove to Newport, RI to ogle the mansions, and ate a lot. My mother brought me approximately 12 metric tons of food, which she always does. I'm still working my way through it all.

In other news, waiting tables is going well--I should be able to actually earn money by the end of this week (as opposed to training). My BFF and her kids are visiting next weekend, which I'm very excited about. I seem to have reached the end of the chipmunk infestation; so far the Death Buckets have gotten 15, the tomato carnage has stopped completely, and I haven't seen or heard a live chipmunk in a couple of days. The tomatoes, incidentally, are ripening beautifully.

Plans are going ahead to move to Rhode Island in pursuit of much cheaper rent. Our current landlord seems willing to negotiate our rent down, perhaps considerably--but my husband's work is offering moving assistance and cash in hand. I've been poking around the closets, culling a few items, getting things ready for the inevitable packing.

The economy strikes again

2011-08-19T14:14:00.000-04:00

Well, loyal readers, I am once again the victim of corporate layoffs.

On Wednesday, I was involuntarily relieved of my job and given a month of severance in its place. I had to sign a bunch of confidentiality agreements to get the severance, so let's just stop there. I don't want to talk about it anyway.

But you know what? I don't even care anymore. I care very much about losing my paycheck, don't get me wrong, but that's the only thing I'll miss. I've done this before--been laid off suddenly, regrouped, etc.--and my life was better because of it. Remember the road trip? (Sigh. Good times.) So fuck 'em.

I take this as a sign from God that I'm done with corporate America. I was burned out on the business world, anyway. Instead, I'm going headfirst into the restaurant industry, to see if I can turn that into a much more intellectually stimulating way to make a living.

Yes, this means I'll be waiting tables again. (So tip your servers well, please.) But frankly I'd rather wait tables at a nice establishment (or two) than sit behind a desk all day, trying not to look bored. I've already been hired on at two upscale joints near me, one of them very upscale, with a great wine list. They were impressed with my food and wine knowledge, and impressed that I knew my way around the restaurant industry--all those previous years of waiting tables, plus dining at some of the world's finest, plus all my involvement with underground restaurants, plus the fact that I know how to cook and pair wines--meaning, I hope, that I can eventually leverage a simple serving position into a) enough money to live on, the most important thing, and b) restaurant management and/or bartending/wine buying.

It's a good thing I already had one serving job lined up when I got laid off--I was able to transistion into it right away. It'll take a month or so before I start to earn real money at both places (training, you know), so I hope that by the time the severance runs out I'll be earning enough tips to replace most of my former salary.

However, we are taking cost-cutting measures. I think we'll be moving closer to my husband's job, letting go of the house we now rent when the lease runs out in November. We're hoping to get at least a 30% rent reduction by switching cities--his city is much cheaper to rent in than Boston. I'll then wait tables there--possibly we'll even be able to get rid of one car. I fear we'll have to give up a backyard, which means I wouldn't be able to garden next summer. But then, at least I wouldn't have to worry about killing chipmunks. (I'm up to 14, by the way.)

We might also cancel the vacation to Costa Rica (which is already mostly paid for, largely with points, so keep your fingers crossed it doesn't come to that).

So, lessons learned:
1. You can't depend on anything. Life can, and will, change on a whim.
2. Every time I think I'm starting to get on top of the debt repayment situation, something like this happens. It drives me nuts.
3. But this time, I have a loving, supportive husband, and enough of an emergency fund cushion to keep me from panicking.
4. I will find a way to be successful at this, to do something I actually want to do.
5. If my back and my feet don't give out first. It's been five years since the last time I waited tables, and trust me, five years in your thirties means the next time you start waiting tables it will HURT. But it also means I'll lose 20 pounds like that, and have a firmer ass to boot.

Gardening update (warning: with death)

2011-08-18T05:58:00.000-04:00

I've declared war on all rodents.

I discovered, just as the tomato harvest was coming in, that squirrels and chipmunks were devastating the harvest. They were stealing and eating as many green tomatoes as they could carry. So far I estimate I've lost at least 25 big beefsteak tomatoes and who knows how many cherry tomatoes, and that's just counting the tomato carcasses I could find.

I mean, just look at those big beautiful heirloom tomatoes up there. Those are MINE. That I've labored over since FEBRUARY. Those squirrels and chipmunks can SIT AND SPIN, and that's putting it nicely.

Here are the bullet points:

1. Squirrels and chipmunks will eat all your tomatoes.
2. Repellents, mothballs, cayenne sprays, and individually Ziploc-ing all the tomatoes will not stop the slaughter.
3. The only thing that works is to kill them.
4. Rat traps and Death Buckets work best for this. (As an added bonus, I've been getting some mice, too. The fact that there are mice around outside mean I will very soon be putting mousetraps back out inside the house.)
5. Death Buckets = fill a 5-gallon bucket about halfway with water. Float about an inch of black sunflower seeds on top. (They float.) Place a board running up the side of the bucket to the top. The chipmunks (and mice, apparently) will run up the plank, see the sunflower seeds, think it's a solid base, and jump in. Then they drown.
6. So far I've nabbed 10 chipmunks, 2 squirrels, and 4 mice. The tomato carnage has dropped precipitously (though it still continues).
7. Don't worry, I brought all the rat traps inside when children arrived. I've been relying solely on the Death Buckets since then.

Unfortunately, rat traps will not automatically kill squirrels--just slowly suffocate them. My husband, bless his heart, obliged by putting them out of their misery with several well-placed shovel blows to the head. That took a little piece out of both our souls. I was hoping to find a more, erm, efficient way to dispatch them, but in the absence of the rat traps, the squirrels are getting especially brazen. They chewed two big holes through a metal mesh screen to get inside the sunroom, whereupon they devastated the bag of sunflower seeds. They're also eating all the seeds out of the Death Buckets (even when there are, you know, bodies in there--ewwwwwwwww), and generally being a giant pain in the ass. I think I will have to put the rat traps back out, and just drown them after they're caught.

(And no, I can't humanely catch them and re-release them somewhere else. That's illegal here.)

The good news is that my cat killed a snake. My blind cat. Killed a garter snake. He was so proud of himself. He finally earned his keep.

The other good news is that things are finally starting to come out of the garden. Tomatoes, a little, but also zucchini and tons of herbs, including the long-awaited basil. The cucumbers and peppers are coming along nicely, I should have something from those plants soon, and the corn is starting to tassel out.

Here's part of the tomato garden, shored up with extra twine:

Here's part of the squash patch and some peppers:

More peppers:

A baby butternut squash!:

A baby pepper!:

Next year, to prevent this kind of wholesale carnage, I think I'll plant one big garden patch (rather than lots of locations all over the yard), plant onions all around the outside, and continue the trapping throughout the winter. If I'd known the chipmunks were going to cause such a problem, I would have done something about the exploding population a long time ago.

Other things I'll do: not plant so many beefsteak tomatoes. They seem to like those way more than the sauce/cherry varieties. Not plant cauliflower or carrots (I lost those to the rabbits first thing). Not plant so many peppers--it doesn't seem to get hot enough here. Plant more kinds of squash and green beans. Get a dog.

The economy sucks, so I got another job

2011-08-17T07:27:00.001-04:00

That is to say, I got an additional job.

Waiting tables.

I don't doubt that we are headed for a Lost Decade just like Japan's. Another recession, no growth, massive unemployment. The shenanigans with the debt ceiling have only solidified my opinion that the government will never pull its head out of its collective ass long enough to shore up education, infrastructure, and healthcare, which means we will slowly fall farther and farther behind the rest of the world and they will blame it on terrorism, or gay marriage, or abortion, or possibly a combination of all three, rather than just, you know, not being dumb-asses.

So, given that, I'm really really nervous.

Not about our two jobs, per se. Just that we're still carrying so much debt, and that if God forbid something should happen to one of our jobs, we're not yet at the point where we could live on one income. So I want to make that debt go away as quickly as possible.

So I got a part-time job waiting tables, at a wine bar/upscale pizza joint just down the street from my day job. I don't mind waiting tables again, as all the money I make doing it will be purely extra money. All that will go straight to debt repayment, along with all the other money we're throwing at debt repayment. It's not like we need it to eat or anything. And I don't mind working my ass off for a year or two, if it means that then I won't have to work at all.

I'll report back, once I start. My feet and back are a lot older than they were the last time I did this, and I shudder to think of next year's tax bill, but the thought of paying off a bunch of stuff in short order makes me very, very happy.

Update

2011-08-16T07:11:00.001-04:00

So, since we returned from vacation:

My stepson has arrived for a month of summer visitation. I've laid in a supply of hot dogs and juice. He's grown several inches since the last time I saw him (and, thankfully, all the extra weight he was carrying has now translated into height), gotten a deep California summer tan, and--most exciting of all--has actually deigned to try new foodstuffs. In my presence.

Not a lot, mind you. But he tried homemade bread, cinnamon bread, zucchini cake (I was shocked, normally he wouldn't touch anything with visible green flecks) and chunky tomato sauce. He's also eating salad and carrot sticks. It's so great to watch him eating, and actually enjoying eating. It's a long cry from the days when he would literally go 24 hours without eating.

Speaking of Stepson, we opened a 529 for him. I feel so grown-up and responsible and stuff.

My sister-in-law and her family visited. It was great to see them again, and great to see my stepson playing with his cousins. The house was loud, and messy, for several days, but who cares. We ate, we drank, we wore deep grooves in the lawn with a Slip-n-Slide. Good times.

Speaking of family, my parents are coming to visit this weekend. They'll be able to spend some quality time with Stepson while he's here.

I'm getting some more pre-cancerous bits cut out of me. Wear sunscreen, people.
I've declared war on all rodents. I discovered, just as the tomato harvest was coming in, that squirrels and chipmunks were devastating the harvest. They were stealing and eating as many green tomatoes as they could carry. So far I estimate I've lost at least 25 big beefsteak tomatoes and who knows how many cherry tomatoes, and that's just counting the tomato carcasses I could find. I'll post a longer, more detailed garden update, but here are the salient points:

1. Squirrels and chipmunks will eat all your tomatoes.
2. Repellents, mothballs, cayenne sprays, and individually Ziploc-ing all the tomatoes will not stop the slaughter.
3. The only thing that works is to kill them.
4. Rat traps and Death Buckets work best for this.
5. Death Buckets = fill a 5-gallon bucket about halfway with water. Float about an inch of black sunflower seeds on top. (They float.) Place a board running up the side of the bucket to the top. The chipmunks (and mice, apparently) will run up the plank, see the sunflower seeds, think it's a solid base, and jump in. Then they drown.
6. So far I've nabbed 10 chipmunks, 2 squirrels, and 4 mice. The tomato carnage has dropped precipitously (though it still continues).
7. Don't worry, I brought all the rat traps inside when children arrived. I've been relying solely on the Death Buckets since then.

My cat killed a snake. My blind cat. Killed a garter snake. He was so proud of himself.

New Orleans, Part II

2011-08-15T09:11:00.000-04:00

Phew! I think that covered all the restaurants we hit in NOLA. :-)

Though I'm an old pro in Gulfport/New Orleans (I think this was my fourth time there), it was my husband's first. His verdict: steamy (in the humid way) but fun. The swamp tour was a lot more fun than I thought it would be. The steamboat tour, however, was exactly as touristy and boring as I thought it would be.

The highlight of the trip, of course, was seeing my family and my now-one-year-old niece. Next year we'll have to work in an equivalent amount of time with my in-laws.

New Orleans: Cochon

2011-08-12T06:17:00.000-04:00

And last but not least, Cochon.

This was our first meal in New Orleans and my husband's favorite. Cochon and I go way back, I've eaten there every time I've ever been in the city. (It was my second favorite meal of this trip, next to Patois, but Cochon will always be my favorite NOLA restaurant in general.)

The best way to eat there is to split a bunch of the lovely appetizers. Here's what we shared:

fried rabbit livers with toast and pepper jelly
fried alligator
fried boudin balls
pork cheeks with spoon bread
rabbit and dumplings
peach pie

Seriously, doesn't that all sound divine? It was, too.

One of the things I like most about Cochon (other than their devotion to all things pork) is that they have whisky and moonshine tastings. That's right, moonshine. As in that stuff that normally comes out of a Mason jar and tastes like paint thinner. I grew up in Virginia and I guess naturally assumed that all moonshine was illegal, since it was there--but it turns out moonshine, at least in Louisiana, is perfectly legal and in fact comes in a) flavors and b) actual bottles (not just Mason jars).

So I got a moonshine tasting, featuring--what else?--Virginia moonshine. Specifically, Virginia Lightning from Culpeper, VA, which ironically enough cannot be bought or sold in Virginia. I also had a cocktail with cucumber vodka, strawberry moonshine, and Barritts. My husband, having lived in Culpeper for a time and still being scarred from that experience, opted for the whisky tasting and proclaimed the George Dickel #12 the best.

Random notes: we both split a cocktail called the Swinekiller, with Hendricks gin, rhubarb bitters, and limeade. Our favorite cocktail of the trip.

Also, Cochon has opened a deli just around the corner called Cochon Butcher, featuring a meat counter and sandwiches. We got sandwiches to go on our way out of town and they were, of course, really good. (Their pickles are surprisingly tasty, as well.)

New Orleans: Coquette

2011-08-11T06:04:00.000-04:00

We didn't actually have a meal at Coquette, but I'll make sure we do next time. We stopped in as we were walking through the Garden District, as a thunderstorm was threatening to blow in. We spent a lovely couple of hours lingering at the bar, sampling their wine list and artisanal cocktails and enjoying a lovely cheese platter and plate of beignets. What better way is there to pass a rainy afternoon?

New Orleans: Patois

2011-08-10T02:42:00.003-04:00

Patois, I think, was my favorite meal of the trip.

Here's what we ate (in order of photos):

sweetbreads
grilled octopus
charcuterie plate
rabbit
quail
Creole cream cheese semifreddo

Along with a bottle of Emeritus pinot noir and a martini made with pickle juice.

Isn't that just, like, the most awesome menu ever?

Seriously, I love menus like that. The food was great, needless to say, but I really appreciate when a restaurant is willing and able to feature the more esoteric ingredients like sweetbreads and octopus. It means they're not afraid to tackle the weird stuff, and more importantly, that their clientele isn't afraid of it, either. (A restaurant wouldn't list octopus if no one ever ordered it.) And a clientele that isn't afraid to order octopus, is a clientele that is probably cultured, well-educated, and hip to good wines. Which means a) a great restaurant, but also b) a fun neighborhood to go out in and c) interesting people to talk to at the bar.

The inside was pleasantly casual, with two stories and a wood floor, our waiter was so accommodating it was almost funny, and the courses were perfectly timed. My only quibble is that we were whisked away immediately to our table, so that we didn't get a chance to linger at the bar. I do love lingering at the bar and chatting up the bartender, to see what he/she knows about their craft. (I tried that at Cure, only to be offered a drink already on the menu and then ignored. Great drinks there, but not the chattiest bartenders--which I wouldn't have minded, if we hadn't been the only ones there.) But that's a minor point.

Verdict: Go. Then go again.

New Orleans: Brennan's

2011-08-09T06:09:00.000-04:00

Brennan's is one of the old French Quarter stalwarts, still serving turtle soup and bananas foster after all these years. We stopped in for their traditional breakfast, which was a) expensive, b) nothing but tourists, and c) really delicious.

I started with a baked apple in cream (top photo), accompanied by a "Creole" Bloody Mary with pickled green beans. Note: it's hard to find a really good Bloody Mary. I've had too many Bloody Marys that were merely vodka with tomato juice and maybe some Worchestershire--not spicy, not complexly layered with flavors, definitely not tasty. Brennan's is one of the very few Bloody Marys I've had that were up to my own standards. It was spicy, complex, and I wouldn't have changed a thing about it (except maybe the price).

(Speaking of prices, they had the balls to charge us $4.95 each for coffee and hot tea. Now, I can understand charging for the Bloody Mary. But really, shouldn't coffee come free with the meal, especially if it's three courses for $45 a person? I mean, come on.)

Then I had the Eggs Sardou, which is poached eggs in artichoke husks on a bed of spinach with hollandaise sauce. The eggs were divine, but that broiled tomato in the middle? Was a hard, tasteless, barely pink supermarket tomato. In Louisiana in the middle of the summer, and they can't get a better tomato than that?

Dessert was--what else?--bananas foster, flamed tableside.

Verdict: generally excellent. Too obvious they're catering to tourists with the breakfast, what with the high prices and charging for coffee and crappy tomatoes and all. Next time, I'll get breakfast at a diner--it probably won't be quite as delicious, but coffee won't be $4.95, either, and who needs breakfast to be a gourmet meal?

New Orleans: Bacchanal

2011-08-08T02:27:00.002-04:00

We were only at Bacchanal long enough for a couple beers and a cheese plate, before heading off to Elizabeth's for dinner, but it was still fun. I love the concept of this place: retail wine shop in front, hang-out joint in back. The retail wine shop sells cheese and beer, as well; you can make your selections and then consume them in the backyard, which is filled with mismatched tables and chairs. Most nights there's live jazz back there; many nights there is also a guest chef, cooking up something hot and delicious.

Like I said, we were there in the afternoon, so I can't speak to the jazz or the guest chef. But just look at that great selection of beers we were drinking!

New Orleans: Elizabeth's

2011-08-07T02:21:00.000-04:00

Ah, Elizabeth's. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

First, you are the home of praline bacon. Second, you are the home of praline bacon. Third, you are casual, hip, delicious, and cheap. Fourth, you have a bar and free parking.

Did I mention the praline bacon?

OK, I've visited Elizabeth's before, and had the praline bacon, and the New York Times has written about them, and blah blah blah. We went back for dinner with my sister and her husband and you know what? Still delicious.

Unfortunately, I did not order the most delicious thing at the table (my brother-in-law did), which was the andouille-and-shrimp crusted drum. I had the fried green tomatoes and the soft-shell crab stuffed with crab, which was lovely, but covered with a Sriracha-based sauce that was so hot it overpowered the delicacy of the crab (deep-fried though it was). Also ordered: the scallops and the rib-eye. No disappointments.

Also, there was praline bacon.

New Orleans: Bayona

2011-08-06T02:12:00.000-04:00

We had an excellent lunch at Bayona (chef/owner Susan Spicer is, btw, one of the food consultants for my new favorite TV show, "Treme" on HBO). Not sure it was worth the price, but lovely nonetheless.

The best part of the whole meal was the pork belly salad with watermelon (top picture). Pork belly with watermelon, avocado, red onion, arugula, and a balsamic thingey. Really, really delicious, and one of the better salads I've had in recent memory.

Next came scallops with crawfish dirty rice. Dirty rice is traditionally made with chicken livers, but here gone uptown with crawfish. Also yummy, though it only had two scallops.

Dessert was a lemon-lavendar semifreddo with a rolled almond cookie thing. I also had a cucumber julep.

So, the takeaway: go for the pork belly salad. Have two, in fact. I think I will add "scallops with crawfish dirty rice" to my home cooking rotation, to ensure I get more than two scallops, so that's a win in the "recipes for later" department.

New Orleans: Crescent Pie & Sausage

2011-08-05T02:13:00.001-04:00

This was one of my favorites. We stopped in for a late lunch with my family; I wish we could have spent more time there.

Crescent Pie & Sausage makes their own boudin. That in itself is enough reason to stop by, but they also make a variety of other sausages. And they have a great bar--a lot of craft cocktails and infusions, rare beers, that sort of thing. In short, right up my alley.

I had the homemade boudin and merguez (lamb sausage) along with their housemade parmesan-and-truffle-oil chips. Wins all the way around. I also tried their bacon-infused-bourbon Manhattan, complete with bacon garnish, but I couldn't pick out any overt bacon-y-ness. A little smokiness, but nothing that was like "hey! bacon!"

But a minor point. I loved the rest of their menu, I'd really like to go back one day and sample more.

New Orleans: Acme Oyster Bar

2011-08-04T09:58:00.002-04:00

Different kinds of oysters taste different.

This may seem obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people think an oyster is an oyster is an oyster. Case in point: ocean oysters vs. Gulf of Mexico oysters vs. Chesapeake Bay oysters.

(Note: these taste differences are only really apparent when you're eating them raw. If you're not eating them raw, well, you might as well be eating fish sticks.)

Ocean oysters (and yes, there are differences between Pacific and Atlantic oysters) are dense, pale, meaty, and taste like the ocean. Ideally, anyway. Like a faintly sweet mouthful of ocean water. These are the best.

Chesapeake Bay oysters (what I grew up on) are smaller, browner, and not very briny at all. They taste more like a mouthful of seafood; sweeter than ocean oysters. (But "sweet" in an oyster way, not in a dessert way.)

So while in Louisiana, I decided to get some Gulf oysters at Acme Oyster Bar.

I was disappointed.

Now, I know it's not oyster season. (You're only supposed to eat oysters in months with an "R" in them, because during the summer they put all their energy into reproduction and not into tasting good.) But hey, these were fresh, right out of the Gulf that morning, so I gave them a shot.

They were brown. Not oyster-colored. Brown.

And they tasted like mud.

Not like the ocean. Or like seafood. Or even really like an oyster. Just like mud.

Fortunately I was able to eat a crawfish po' boy instead.

Anyway, I still highly recommend eating raw oysters. Just stick to ocean oysters, and preferably cold-water oceans at that. (Maine/Massachusetts/maritime Canada/Washington State produce the best and most delicious oysters.)

Acme Oyster Bar itself is a bit of a tourist trap, as evidenced by the huge line of tourists at the front door waiting for seats starting at 5 pm. Go in the off-hours, sit at the bar, drink some Abita beer, and watch the oyster shuckers first-hand. If the oysters look muddy, get the crawfish po' boy instead.

New Orleans: The Joint

2011-08-02T15:57:00.003-04:00

I ate at a lot of restaurants in New Orleans. Fancy places, oyster bars, gastropubs, you name it. But one of our favorite meals was the most unlikely one, at a hole in the wall in a questionable neighborhood.

On our last night, we went to Vaughan's to see Kermit Ruffins play. We were there for the better part of two hours before we learned he wasn't actually playing that night. And Vaughan's isn't a bar you'd go to for any other reason. It was smoky, grimy, cash only, and the building looked like it would fall apart with a strong wind. You had to be buzzed in, for goodness' sake, you couldn't even just walk right in. Anyway, disappointed, I didn't want to have wasted the cab ride all the way out to the edge of the Ninth Ward (yes, that Ninth Ward), so we decided to walk two blocks down to The Joint for a second dinner.

My sister had recommended this place; otherwise it would never have occurred to me to go inside. This building was similarly ramshackle, with a bunch of mismatched chairs out front, with an open dumpster to the side, with empty 40s of malt liquor scattered around. Classy. But man, it smelled good. So we went inside to tackle the barbecue.

Best. Barbecue. Ever.

And I don't say that lightly, having lived (briefly) in Memphis. I had the ribs, my husband had the pulled pork, we both got Abita beers and ate until we were sweating barbecue sauce. Then I got a piece of homemade peanut butter pie to go (I had it for breakfast the next morning), only because I was too full to eat it there. The ribs were tender, juicy, and I had to debate for a couple of days whether I liked them better than the dry rub ribs at Rendezvous, but eventually these won. Cheaper, too.

So if you're going to New Orleans, go to The Joint. Eat the barbecue. Ignore the neighborhood. If you're there on a Thursday night, go to Vaughan's and see if Kermit Ruffins is playing. Otherwise, go to Bacchanal and see what they have going on. But go.

New Orleans, Part I

2011-08-02T15:56:00.000-04:00

Whew! So much vacation to tell you about!

Seriously, it's a lot, so I'll be posting in batches. This week we're uber-busy catching up at work and prepping for a batch of houseguests.

We had a great time. My now-one-year-old niece is the cutest ever, and I got to spend lots of quality time with my parents and my sister and her husband. The one downside was the weather--it POURED every day. But we were still on vacation, rain or not, so whatever.

The 24-hour drive there and back was grueling, as usual. Our ability to do that kind of balls-out driving is going to be severely limited soon, we're both just too old and creaky to be able to do it for more than a couple more years. But we were able to bring back a carload of goodies (Abita beer, gator sausage, Zapp's chips, etc.), and for close to 3,300 miles in driving, we spent $239 in gas. Way cheaper than two plane tickets.

I've already posted about the swamp tour; I'll be cross-posting from Broke Foodie throughout the week, as I write about all the restaurant experiences there. Stay tuned.

Swamp tour, with gators

2011-07-27T08:33:00.000-04:00

As part of my vacation, I went on a Cajun Encounters swamp tour with my family. The pictures really say it all.

My one-year-old niece, all suited up and ready for the swamp tour.

Headed into the fire swamp.

Swamp near the Pearl River, Louisiana.

Gator.

See the gator?

There he is.

Meet Big Al.

I would just like to point out that the alligators completely ignored the marshmallows the tour guide used as bait, ate the hot dogs with disdain, but really went nuts for pieces of raw chicken. Let this be a lesson to us all: even large reptiles with brains the size of peanuts know the difference between junk food and real food.

Also, that's about as close as I ever care to be to a ten-foot alligator.

No, I'm not dead

2011-07-19T12:49:00.000-04:00

I know I haven't posted anything interesting in a while, but nothing particularly interesting has happened. Work, garden, etc. DH has been working late quite a lot. My tomatoes are starting to produce, and I should have ripe ones in a couple of weeks. Got a zucchini and a handful of green beans out of the garden over the weekend. I know, yawn.

BUT!

We'll be on vacation very soon...so expect hot and sexy posts from N'awlins, dripping with hot sauce and Abita beer. If we don't both gain 20 pounds by the time we return, something has gone very wrong.

I got a haircut!

2011-07-11T14:11:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I chopped six inches off my hair and I totally love it.

I also learned something important about my hair: any longer than shoulder-length, and it gets so heavy that it pulls all the curl right out. Its previous length (middle of my back) had just enough wave to make it unruly, but was otherwise bone-straight. I was tired of it, and bored, and wanted something different, and so went into the hair salon where they gave me two suggestions: chop it to shoulder length and let it do what it wants, or go with a straight-hair-with-heavy-bangs thing.

I opted for shoulder-length, and I'm so glad I did. Immediately my head felt 10 pounds lighter, and today all the natural curl has returned: a beautiful loose beach-wave curl that is exactly as low-maintenance as I wanted it to be.

Vacation, here I come!

Mystery mushroom

2011-07-04T07:14:00.000-04:00

Does anyone know what kind of mushroom this is? I found three of them, in different colors, under a bush in the front yard. They're HUGE--the size of my head. Don't worry, I won't try to eat them unless somebody tells me they're edible.

Finally, some actual travel on the horizon

2011-06-28T12:36:00.000-04:00

"Actual" meaning "not a long weekend," "not related to moving," and "not involving family obligations in any way."

In late July, as I've mentioned, we'll spend a week at my sister's on the Gulf Coast, with several days in New Orleans. So, okay, some family obligations there, but note that the days in New Orleans will be in a hotel, on our own, eating/drinking/sightseeing to our heart's content. So more vacation than family.

But! Also! We'll be going to Costa Rica in November!

How awesome is that?

Even more awesome is that we cashed in a bunch of miles, so the airfare was essentially free.

That will be a) the first time my husband has ever been out of North America, b) the first time I'll have been out of North America since my trip to Buenos Aires, and c) a blessed return to the "travel internationally for Thanksgiving" tradition I started some years ago.

And as you also know, I've long had a pipe dream of cashing it all in and going to live in a container house in Costa Rica and raising chickens or something. Our vacation there will be like research.

Another snake

2011-06-23T09:07:00.000-04:00

I saw another garter snake the other day, alongside the garage. He slithered away before I could chop him with my snake-killing hoe.

But I also saw the first little green tomatoes on my tomato plants. So that was pretty exciting.

We're taking our first major vacation next month. ("Major" being defined as "more than a long weekend.") Granted, it does involve family, and a place I've been to many times--but hey, it'll be ten days. We're driving down to New Orleans for my niece's first birthday. We'll spend some of that time with family at my sister's house (my parents are coming down, too); and some of the time in an actual hotel room, exploring New Orleans.

I love the Big Easy, but my husband's never been. So I'm excited to take him around to my favorite spots. I've got a whole list of restaurants and bars I want to hit while we're there. We'll also stock up on all the Gulf Coast specialities I can't get in Boston (gator sausage, grits, Abita beer, Zapp's potato chips, and so on).

Maybe I'll have harvested some actual tomatoes by then.

Gardening lessons

2011-06-19T06:21:00.000-04:00

Check out my guest post on gardening at Get Rich Slowly!

Here's a slightly different version of the same post (basically, more pictures and different captions):

Gardening equipment is expensive.

But gardening itself doesn’t have to be.

This is my first attempt at full-scale gardening. This is the first year I’ve lived in a house, with a yard; previous gardening efforts were limited to containers of herbs, and the odd tomato plant, on windowsills or apartment patios. To complicate matters, it’s my first year living in New England, so the climate is new (and frightening). We had an intensely bitter winter, in which my backyard was buried under five feet of snow from January through the end of March; and then an intensely rainy and chilly spring.

The container garden tradition continues...

So I knew this first year would be an experiment, and I approached it as such. In February, I began collecting seeds (heirloom and/or organic when possible), with the idea to plant one or two of everything and see what took. Here’s what I bought:

Tomatoes (several different kinds, including Jubilee, Amish Paste, Cherokee, and cherry)
Peppers (habanero, jalapeno, Thai, cayenne, Serrano, and bell: green, yellow and purple)
Cucumbers
Green beans
Zucchini
Butternut squash
Pie pumpkins
Cauliflower
Peas
Watermelon
Corn
Kale
Arugula
Spinach
Swiss chard
Sorrel
Beets (regular and striped)
Mache
Carrots
Brussels sprouts
Leeks
Onions

(Some of these I won’t plant until late summer/early fall, like the beets and Brussels sprouts.)

And herbs:
Rosemary
Parsley
Cilantro
Sage
Tarragon
Oregano
Marjoram
Thyme
Borage
Nasturtiums
Dill
Basil (regular, purple, Thai)
Lavender
Mint
Chives
Catgrass
Chervil
Hyssop
Strawberries

Ambitious, I know.

The seeds cost around $100 total, although I got quite a few tomato seeds from my sister. I had a lot of one-time start-up costs; I had to buy a hoe, a rake, a shovel, a pitchfork (for the compost pile), a hose, and four florescent shop lights to start the seeds indoors. I also needed quite a lot of potting soil and seed-starting mix. I still had all the plastic containers from my various container gardens, which I used to start the herbs.

But I also learned what I didn’t need to spend money on.

Due to the climate, I knew I would have to start most everything indoors. (Because of the very rainy/chilly spring, I didn’t get the last tomato seedling in the ground until June 4.) I have a sunroom attached to the back of the house, walled almost entirely in sliding glass doors. It’s lovely in the summer, but bitter cold in the winter. I closed off the heating vents and kept it unheated through the entire winter. It was the perfect place to start seedlings (lots of light, out of the way), except for the cold—at least twenty-five degrees colder than the rest of the house, far too cold for delicate seedlings. I put a space heater in there for the seed-starting project—which promptly doubled my electric bill.

DOUBLED it.

So next year I’ll wait a few more weeks, until things warm up slightly, and skip the space heater.

I kept the florescent lights set on stacks of bricks, just above the seedlings, so I didn’t need to install shelving.

Note the variety of containers the seedlings are in...

And the repurposed silver dinner tray.

The bricks were free—the house came with two random piles of bricks in the yard. I bought special seed-starting kits, but quickly figured out that I had plenty of things around the house that I could re-purpose for seed starting. All of these things can easily be used, most of which you probably already have, all of which I used at some point:

Yogurt/sour cream containers
Egg cartons
Grapefruit and orange halves (eat the fruit first)
Bottoms of milk jugs
Paper cups (these actually worked the best of anything)
Toilet paper tubes (fold the bottom under to make a little cup)
Paper towel tubes, cut in half (see above)
Cleaned out food and coffee cans (any size)
Cleaned out soda cans, cut in half
Those plastic tubs mushrooms and lettuce come in
Plastic take-out containers
I even repurposed some random, lidless Tupperware.

(Just make sure you cut/punch holes in the bottom of everything, for drainage.)

Instead of drainage trays, I used box tops. Instead of row markers, I used a Sharpie and extra bricks. Instead of purchasing nine zillion tomato cages, I used sticks and twine. (All those winter storms brought down a lot of big tree branches; I simply went to the piles of deadwood in the back of the yard and stripped out large branches which I stuck in the ground, one for each tomato plant. Ditto for pea trellises.)

Exceedingly high-tech stick method; but the tomato plant seems to like it.

The previous occupants had left a small garden in one corner of the yard, maybe six feet by six feet. Obviously too small for everything I wanted to plant! But renting a tiller to plow up a section of the yard would have been far more expensive than I thought it would be. So I didn’t.

Instead, I took a hoe to the lawn and chopped out additional rows. For the tomatoes, I chopped out one hole at a time, in various locations around the yard. I filled in the vacant flower beds with herbs. I planted edible flowers around the mailbox. Every square inch of usable yard real estate was reappropriated for gardening; and when I’d filled in the edges, I chopped out grass and planted everything else in the lawn.

If I had my way, I'd plow up the entire lawn and turn it into a giant vegetable garden. Less grass to mow.

Now, maybe this method will work against me. Maybe lawn grass growing between the rows will end up stunting the growth of my plants. But so far, everything is growing really well. And the grass will grow back, if it turns out this method doesn’t work.

One note: it’s far easier to chop up the top layer of grass with a hoe, and use a trowel to dig up the dirt, than it is to try to dig an actual hole with a shovel. Grass is tough to dig through, but surprisingly easy to pull up.

The only other costs have been Miracle-Gro and rabbit repellent. My yard backs into a nature preserve, so it’s like Wild Kingdom out there. I’ve seen rabbits, raccoons, skunks, snakes, groundhogs, foxes, turtles, deer, and any number of birds in the yard. It also appears that I have an entire chipmunk colony tunneling under the yard. I can't shoot them (I live in the 'burbs) and I can't trap them (too many). So I have to coexist, somewhat uneasily, and hope they don't eat my garden. The homemade repellents (typically a mixture of cayenne pepper or hot sauce sprayed directly on the plants) didn’t prevent my cauliflower and corn from being nibbled. So I’ve been spraying commercial rabbit and deer repellent around the yard, and so far, so good.

Not including the $100 for seeds, I’ve spent around $600 on gardening so far this year. But of that, I think I can safely budget no more than $200 total for next year, for seeds and potting soil (and possibly more rabbit repellent). I won’t need to buy a hoe, shovel, pitchfork or hose again, and I know I can start my seeds without special seed trays and equipment. I also have a lot of seeds left over, which I can save in the back of the refrigerator for next year, cutting next year’s seeds costs down to probably $60 or so. (And frankly, I won't be planting all of that stuff again next year; only what's most successful this year.)

For the rest of this summer, the only reoccurring costs will be the Miracle-Gro (which I can eliminate next year, as my new compost pile will be producing compost by then) and more rabbit repellent (stupid rabbits).

Will the garden turn out to be more cost-effective than my CSA? ($475 for weekly boxes, May – November) That remains to be seen, but it’s looking good right now. If the rabbits don’t eat everything, and we don’t get a freak tornado or hailstorm, I should have a bumper crop of tomatoes and peppers. The green beans are shooting up, the squash is coming along nicely, and the container herbs are getting close to the point where they can be harvested regularly. I’ll be sure to report back at the end of the summer.

That old Boston standby, Legal Seafoods

2011-06-16T10:46:00.000-04:00

It rained all last weekend, so I couldn't get any yardwork/gardening done. Having no other plans, I was a little stir-crazy, so eventually my husband and I decided to go out.

Normally, "going out" is an event, budgeted and planned ahead. This is perhaps the first time in our marriage when we've had the money to even consider "going out" as an option when bored, and not as a special occasion.

We went to a new, upscale outdoor mall near where I work. There's a Whole Foods, several upscale restaurants, lots of upper-end shopping (Aldo, Williams Sonoma, J. Crew), and a big movie theater. We started at The Yardhouse, which featured a gazillion different kinds of beer. Between us, we sampled Dead Guy Rogue Ale, Arrogant Bastard, and Delirium Tremens. Clear winner: Arrogant Bastard.

For dinner, we went to Legal C Bar, which is the upscale bar version of Legal Seafoods, a Boston-area stalwart. We had some cocktails, and discovered Absolut Brooklyn. What does Brooklyn-flavored vodka taste like, you ask? (Not like asphalt and hipsters, which was my first guess.) Red apple and ginger, actually.

Then we had the raw seafood tower (oysters, clams, shrimp, crab legs). Of those, the oysters were, and always will be, the clear winner. I like raw oysters far better than I like raw clams, the crab legs were messy, and the shrimp--despite the waitstaff's assurances that the shrimp were fresh--were previously frozen and in fact were so cold they may as well have been still frozen. So now you know: when eating raw seafood, save your money for oysters, sushi, and ceviche. Skip the rest.

We wrapped up the evening with The Hangover II at the multiplex. (Not nearly as good as the original; but then, sequels never are.) A couple of weeks ago we saw Bridesmaids at that same multiplex; that's two movies in a month, and prior to Bridesmaids, I don't think I'd seen a movie in the theatre since...my road trip in 2009? Frankly, the experience doesn't do anything for me. It's $22 just to get in the door for the two of us (plus popcorn, since apparently my husband is physically incapable of watching a movie without popcorn); I'd much rather just wait for Netflix and watch at home for practically free.

But hey, the point is that $22 + popcorn is not the huge budget-buster it once was. Nor is a day of "going out," which, happily, was less expensive than I'd feared. Largely because I was mentally pricing beers and cocktails at New York prices ($14 each) instead of at suburban MA prices ($6-8 each). Even the tower of seafood for two was a reasonably priced $47, and not the $80+ it would have been in NY.

I guess there are some advantages to the 'burbs, after all.

OMG, I killed a snake

2011-06-14T08:28:00.000-04:00

I killed a snake.

See picture above. You can't even tell it's chopped in half.
I went outside to check on the garden after I got home from work yesterday afternoon, and I let the cats out to play while I did. One was terribly interested in a particular bush, he kept smelling it and dancing all around it, and I ignored it for the first few minutes. But he kept smelling and prancing, this from a cat who normally bounds all over the yard, and finally I went over there to see what all the fuss was about.

About that time a snake slithered out of the bush.

It wasn't big, or poisonous. A little black-and-yellow garter snake of some variety, I imagine. It would have been hard-pressed to swallow anything bigger than a cough drop. Nevertheless, I certainly didn't want it getting inside the house. And, you know, it was a SNAKE. So I scooped up the cats, deposited them inside, and came back with the hoe. And chopped the snake in two.

Then I ran back inside and called my husband to come home and remove the corpse.

I'm about equal parts proud of myself and grossed out. I also feel a little hillbilly for chopping a snake in two with a hoe. (My dad had a good laugh at that one.) Nevertheless, I feel like I've earned my Wildlife Badge.

So, let's recap. So far my backyard has hosted chipmunks, squirrels, groundhogs, rabbits, foxes, mice, a raccoon, a turtle, deer, about 900,000 different kinds of birds, and now a snake. I've even heard owls. We've seen every kind of wildlife present in the eastern half of the US with the possible exception of bobcats and bear. I wonder if my neighbors are seeing this much action or if it's just me.

If I have to kill another snake any time soon, I may hyperventilate.

The final plants are in the ground!

2011-06-08T12:23:00.000-04:00

Which means the gardening prep work is done. All I have to do now is water, weed, and watch everything grow (I hope). It took longer than I thought to get everything transplanted, but hopefully next year a) it won't be so rainy, and b) I won't need to create new rows/gardening space from scratch like I did this year.

We're in the process of firming up vacation plans (which should include a week in New Orleans/Gulf Coast next month) and possibly a trip somewhere fun over Thanksgiving.

But these days, going into my backyard after work, looking at my garden, and having a nice cold drink on a hot day is enough of a vacation for me. ANY nice weather after the last nine months or so is like a vacation.

Neptune Oyster

2011-06-03T10:35:00.002-04:00

While roaming through Boston last weekend, we happened upon Neptune Oyster and decided to give it a shot, based on the recommendation from a guy working a high-end wine shop in the North End. (When in doubt, wine and cheese shop employees will almost invariably have good restaurant recommendations.)

It didn't disappoint.

We gorged ourselves on fresh seafood, starting with a round of Wellfleet oysters. I also discovered the Kusshi oysters, from British Columbia, and Summerside from Prince Edward Island; the Kusshi were very meaty, and the Summersides were almost lemony. The Wellfleets were terrifically briny, as always, but I may like the Canadian ones better. We paired with a LaCryma Cristi Dei Feudi 2009 from Campagna, which was delightful--it had an almost salty aftertaste, which went perfectly with the seafood.

Next came a hamachi ceviche with a jalapeno pesto. I could have eaten a huge plate of that--it was really good. (I had to explain the concept of ceviche to my husband--raw fish or seafood which is marinated in citrus juice, so that the texture changes and becomes similar to the texture of cooked fish/seafood, even though it's still raw. Very light and refreshing. Yum.)

I moved on to P.E.I. mussels in a Thai curry sauce (which I sopped up with a side of fries, moules frites-style); my visiting friend had seared scallops with a black bean-corn thing, and my husband had the lobster roll.

One of the things I missed most in Southern California was good, fresh seafood. You'd think Southern California would have good seafood, but you'd be wrong. That was one of the (few) saving graces of moving from there to Boston--I knew I could finally get good seafood again. Restaurants like this are perfect for scratching that itch--super-fresh seafood, small, inviting ambience, good wine list. We'll definitely go back.

Summer's finally arrived

2011-06-01T13:12:00.000-04:00

I think we had three Marches in a row, skipped April and May entirely, and went straight into June. After weeks of rain and more rain, it's been sunny, mostly clear, and in the 80s for the last week or two. We got a picnic table and citronella torches so that we can eat outside, and I'm scurrying to try to get the last of the seedlings planted (all tomatoes and peppers, at this point). Everything that's already in the ground is growing wildly; I swear I can sit and watch the green beans grow, they've shot up three inches in the last three days. I hope this means a really hot summer, and a bumper crop of vegetables.

Memorial Day weekend was very nice. An old friend from college came up to visit. The last time I saw her was at the wedding, and the last time I'd seen her before that was probably my college graduation, lo these many years ago. We had a great time catching up. Saturday night I had a dinner party with a bunch of people, Sunday we went into Boston and had a great meal (separate blog post on that later), and Monday we recuperated. I didn't get as much gardening in as I would have liked, due to hanging out with my visitor, but at least I managed to get the knee-high grass cut before she showed up.

I also got a credit card paid off. It was just a little one, but I finally feel like we're making progress with debt repayment. I cancelled it right away.

Wedding quilt

2011-05-27T10:42:00.000-04:00

This is the quilt my mom made me, in honor of our first wedding anniversary. The topside of the quilt has a bunch of personal references; the red is for my red wedding shoes, the dogwood blossoms in the middle are for Virginia, where my husband and I met; there's an Ohio design in each corner, since he's from Ohio; and so on.

The backside of it is handwritten blocks from the wedding itself; all the wedding guests signed a big piece of material in permanent marker, and that was woven into the quilt. Here are a couple of selections:

Gardening update

2011-05-26T14:19:00.002-04:00

Tomatoes, squash, and cauliflower seedlings. Note inventive use of lawn as grassy garden patch.

Rain. That's the update.

For about two weeks straight here in Boston, it rained. Every day was cloudy, grey and overcast (when it wasn't actively raining), and late May temps struggled to clear 60 degrees. For several days, there was standing water in the garden, because the ground was too saturated to absorb it.

I'm really, really pleased to report that it looks like summer has finally arrived. The forecast is rain-free and sunny for at least the next 10 days, and temperatures are in the 70s.

Early morning shot of actual non-lawn garden. Note vigorous kale in far left row.

Which is good, because I still haven't transplanted all the seedlings yet. I've been transplanting the tomatoes, a few at a time (the ones I transplanted right before all the rain started are on the verge of dying--they're all limp and yellow, so I'm holding some seedlings in reserve to replace them, if the sun doesn't perk them up). The rest of the garden is planted (green beans, corn, cucumbers, etc.), and the early stuff (kale, peas, spinach) is finally showing signs of life.

I'm hoping to get the rest of the tomatoes and all the peppers transplanted within the next two weeks. I'm hoping that's not too late.

Tomato seedlings, in lawn.

More tomato seedlings, in lawn.

Containers moved outside and finally showing actual greenery.

Eat: Dinner at the British Consulate, a Pop-Up

2011-05-24T09:56:00.000-04:00

There's a blurry line between "underground restaurant" and "pop-up restaurant," though one of my fellow attendees at this past weekend's pop-up opined that "underground" is technically illegal, and "pop-up" is just in a non-restaurant venue--i.e., legal.

Whether legal or illegal, it was awesome. Eat hosted a pop-up dinner at the British Consulate, featuring a British-inspired menu. This was my first foray into the underground/pop-up world in Boston, and it was a smashing success.

First, the British Consulate. I've no idea how they got that space, but let's just say that the Brits have their conference room lighting down to an art. The meal was held in the lobby and a large conference room, both equipped with automatic chain-mail curtains and automatic lighting worthy of a Pink Floyd concert. It was full dark outside, but the lighting stayed at a perfect 9-AM-sunlight-just-coming-through-the-curtains setting the whole time. Sometimes pink, sometimes blue, but always bright-daylight-esque. Everyone was impressed. James Bond jokes abounded.

Second, the meal itself. Cocktail hour featured a local Berkshires-made gin, Greylock Gin, in Tom Collinses for everyone. Appetizers were haggis on toast, grilled cheese sandwiches with mango chutney, and boar sausage wrapped in puff pastry. There was a string quartet playing Beatles songs. There were quite a lot of people there, I'd say at least 60 or 70, far more than I was expecting. But that's the best part of this kind of dinner--being able to interact with all the strange new people. It's much more fun, and intimate, than a restaurant meal.

First course: Seared foie gras on a crumpet with maple gel, HP powder, and pickled berries. Imagine breakfast, with foie gras. A crumpet is sort of like a cross between a waffle and an English muffin. Best of all, the lady beside me didn't want her foie gras, so I got a double portion.

Second course: chicken korma soup with fiddlehead ferns. The lighting changed to a blue setting for this course, which is why the soup looks blue. It wasn't actually. They added a dusting of fenugreek to give the whole thing a curry vibe.

Third course: a riff on bangers and mash. An Earl Grey-smoked duck sausage with egg, grilled tomato, brussels sprout, and local fried egg. The sausage and the egg were the best parts.

Main course: locally-caught hake (not cod as per the menu) wrapped in a sort of pastry shell, with basil tartar sauce. The fish was excellent, light and flaky, and I really liked the basil tartar sauce. My husband said it was the best fish he'd ever had. Note pink lighting.

Dessert: Sticky toffee pudding, sort of deconstructed. The plates were fun, but beware of serving food on a sloping plate. A good portion of everyone's dessert ended up sliding off the plate onto the table.

The wine was by Bear Flag, which I'd had in California, so it was good to see a wine that I was already familiar with.

It's heartening to see such a lively alternative restaurant scene in Boston; I'm looking forward to attending a lot more of these, now that we're settled in. Maybe I can finally get my own underground restaurant up and running.

Theatre review: The Comedy of Errors

2011-05-23T10:37:00.003-04:00

I first saw Propeller Theatre Company at BAM in New York in 2007, when they presented Twelfth Night and Taming of the Shrew. Propeller is a UK-based all-male Shakespearean repertory troupe, and as I pointed out four years ago, their graceful and delicate handling of the play belies the all-male casting. Indeed, the actors are so skillful that after a few minutes, you almost forget they’re all men. These aren’t simpering drag queens or men bent on making a point about gender relations; they are simply very, very good actors.

Also very, very funny actors.

Comedy of Errors is one of those lesser Shakespearean works, “lesser” in the sense that it relies heavily on those old comedy chestnuts, mistaken identities and bumbling servants. (And those were chestnuts 400 years ago.) We have identical twins separated at birth, both with the same name—Antipholus—who have identical twin servants separated at birth, both named Dromio. Got that? So when they find themselves in the same city, the two identical twin brothers and their identical twin servants, with the same names no less, naturally everyone mistakes one for the other and high jinks ensue. Each pair is blissfully unaware of the other’s existence, until the very end of the play, when they are all reunited with their missing brothers and parents. In between, there are a lot of double-takes, pratfalls, and at least one naked man with a lit sparkler in his ass. (No, really.)

It’s to Propeller’s credit that they never stoop to making jokes about men in drag, and that they don’t allow the physical comedy to overshadow the complex Shakespearean language. Their production is set “south of the border,” in a modern-day version of a Three Amigos Mexican town; with graffiti-covered sheet-metal walls, haphazardly-strung Christmas lights, and sombreros. The best part of this concept is that the cast doubles as an impromptu mariachi band; in fact, should their acting careers ever lapse, I daresay these guys could make a decent living as a mariachi band. The pace is crisp, the ensemble is tight, there’s just enough shtick to keep the audience amused (but not so much that we start rolling our eyes). Director Edward Hall is to be commended for perfectly balancing the production on that particular tightrope.

Propeller is running Comedy of Errors in repertory with Richard III. I didn’t get a chance to see Richard III, but I have no doubt it’s just as good, and innovatively staged, as their Comedy of Errors. Propeller has become my new favorite Shakespearean troupe; at this point, I’d pay to watch them dramatize the phone book.

Written by William Shakespeare; adapted by Edward Hall and Roger Warren
Directed by Edward Hall
With Richard Clothier (Duke), John Dougall (Aegeon), Dugald Bruce-Lockhart (Antipholus of Syracuse), Sam Swainsbury (Antipholus of Ephesus), Richard Frame (Dromio of Syracuse), Jon Trenchard (Dromio of Ephesus), Robert Hands (Adriana), David Newman (Luciana), Wayne Carter (Balthasar), Thomas Padden (Angelo), Dominic Tighe (Officer), Kelsey Brookfield (Courtesan), Tony Bell (Pinch), and Chris Myles (Aemilia)
Design: Michael Pavelka
Lighting Design: Ben Ormerod
Original Music: Jon Trenchard
Running Time: Two hours and fifteen minutes with one fifteen-minute intermission
Boston University Theatre, Huntington Theatre Company, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA
Tickets begin at $25
Presented in repertory with Richard III; schedule varies
May 18 – June 19, 2011

Happy first anniversary to me!

2011-05-22T09:48:00.000-04:00

Just think, a year ago today I was getting married. What a fun wedding that was!

And married life keeps getting better and better. Yesterday we saw Comedy of Errors in Boston, then had dinner at a pop-up restaurant (more on those later), and even did a little shoe shopping. For the both of us, not just me. I bought the first pair of heels I've bought since the wedding shoes.

The weather, as you may know, is dreadful. Cold, rainy, not spring at all. Did I mention the rain? I'm trying desperately to get some action out of my garden, but it's hard with no sun. I keep transplanting tomatoes into the yard, only to watch them turn yellow and shriveled. If we don't get some sun soon, I fear for my sanity.

Possibly the weather is affecting my cat, too. He's better, but still not 100%. I think it's hairball trouble.

We got the dates for my stepson's visit this summer hammered down, finally. There was quite a bit of drama around that. His mother and grandmother insisted that he had to participate in Junior Lifeguards, the dates of which took up most of the summer. They were trying to make us take 10 days with him instead of 38. I finally stepped in and took over negotiations--the threat of a lawyer was enough to make them knuckle under, I think. We'll get a month with him (early August to early September) and another three weeks at Christmas. It's also time to get a more specific visitation agreement in writing; I've drafted something, and if she balks, then it's time to lawyer up regardless. We're both tired of the endless back-and-forth with them.

So today I'll fix us a nice dinner, with a really good bottle of wine, and try to forget the weather.

Spending money apparently cures sick cats

2011-05-19T04:35:00.001-04:00

My cat Steiff got sick the other night.

He threw up three times and was uncharacteristically lethargic. He didn't move much at all, and snapped at me whenever I tried to pick him up. Naturally I was very worried--he's never been sick like that before.

The next day I checked on him at lunch and he still wasn't any better. So I made an appointment at the vet's. His only previous trips to the vet were for neutering and periodic rabies shots.

When I got home from work to take him to the vet, he seemed a little better, at least a little more energetic. But I took him anyway.

The vet poked him and prodded him and said he'd give my cat extra fluids and an appetite stimulant, to make sure he didn't get dehydrated, and he'd do some bloodwork, just in case. Then he charged me $265 for the privilege, and sent me home.

Of course, the minute I got in the door, Steiff ran directly to the food bowl, and returned to his normal, energetic, nosy self. Maybe it was the fluids that made him feel better, but I maintain he just needed someone to pay him $265 worth of attention before he'd deign to act normally.

I also want to point out that getting him neutered--actual SURGERY--only cost me $35.

Island Creek Oyster Bar

2011-05-18T06:24:00.000-04:00

On Saturday night, my husband and I treated ourselves to a rare night on the town, by going to the new Island Creek Oyster Bar on Commonwealth Ave in Boston.

I confess it wasn't in our budget. But we'd had a bad couple of days and desperately needed a pick-me-up. This was money well-spent.

We had a bottle of Honig Sauvignon Blanc with our meal, as it featured oysters (naturally). The waiter wasn't much of a sommelier; I asked which bottle, of the many on the wine list, would go best with all the different kinds of oysters and he said, "Sauvignon blanc." Well, yeah. Duh. I could have figured that out myself.

A couple of cocktails to start. I don't remember what was in this, but it was good.

My husband had the lobster roll.

I had the scallops, with asparagus, tasso, and celery root puree.

Mmmm...scallops.

Dessert was heavenly: a rhubarb and blackberry crisp with basil ice cream.

Of course the highlight was the oysters (which we did not consume after dessert, don't let the order of the pictures fool you). We had two of each kind:

Island Creek, from Duxbury, MA
Rocky Nook, from Kingston, MA
Chatham, from Chatham, MA
Moonstone, from Point Judith, RI
Umami, from Narragansett Bay, RI
East Beach Blonde, from Charleston Pond, RI
Wild Belon, from Harpswell, ME
Misty Point, from Pope's Bay, VA
Hama Hama, from Lillywaup, WA
Blue Pool, from Lillywaup, WA
Shigoku, from Bay Center, WA
Kumamoto, from Puget Sound, WA
Cape Spear, from New Brunswick, Canada

Contrary to previous findings, the East Coast oysters were all much brinier and meatier than the West Coast specimens.

They were all good, though.

Who needs retail therapy, when you can have restaurant therapy?

It's just Wild Kingdom out there

2011-05-12T14:13:00.000-04:00

Now I have a GROUNDHOG, too. (Insert swearing here.)

The rabbit at least had the side benefit of being cute (and eating dandelions). I haven't seen an ant inside the house for a couple of days, so maybe the ant bait is working. But a f*%#ing groundhog has absolutely no redeeming value whatsoever--and is a lot harder to get rid of than a rabbit.

For the first time in my life, I wish I had a shotgun. (More to the point, I wish I lived in a place where I could actually fire it at a groundhog--there's a strict no-gun-firing rule in the 'burbs.)

Short of setting the groundhog burrow on fire (not recommended) or pouring concrete down all the tunnel openings (difficult, as I suspect his burrow is in the woods), I can't really kill him without a gun. And there isn't such a thing as groundhog repellent, like the rabbit repellent spray I bought. I'm going to double up on the rabbit spray and hope that the groundhog, being a rodent like the rabbit, will also be repelled. I'm also going to scatter various other smelly substances around the back fence, to include ammonia, mothballs, and cat poop (I read somewhere that the smell of a dog, or at the very least dog poop, will keep a groundhog away; all I have is cat poop, which may not work, but hey, it's not like I have any other use for it).

But if I find anything in my garden nibbled, I'm getting a shotgun anyway, 'burb laws be damned.

Call me the Tomato Queen

2011-05-08T15:09:00.000-04:00

I've started transplanting my tomato seedlings outside.

It's a bit early still, but I have to.

You see, I realized I have 57 tomato seedlings.

57. Individual. Tomato plants.

If all those take, I'll be swimming in tomatoes this summer. I could start my own tomato factory.

And that's not including all the other seedlings--peppers, squash, herbs, etc. And all the other seeds that have yet to get started at all--corn, beans, cucumbers, etc.

You're probably thinking, "You bit off way more than you could chew," but no! I refuse to admit defeat! I will find a place to put all these plants, or die trying!

Oh well. It's a good problem to have. It was all an experiment, anyway; I wasn't sure if the growing-seedlings-indoors thing would work at all, given my limitations (climate, unheated sunroom), so I know for next year that I can halve the number of seeds and still come out ahead. If you guys want any, you're welcome to them.

But still, I have all these plants, many of which are getting root-bound in their little containers, so I have to do something with them. I certainly don't have the room (or money, or equipment) to plow up an actual garden, and I don't have the money to buy a bunch of large containers and dirt, so I will just dig up holes along the sunnier edges of the yard, stick a tomato plant in each one, and see what happens.

If they all die, I still have plenty to spare.

In other news, there is a bunny rabbit in my yard. We watched him eat up all the dandelions one night. I think that could be a great cottage industry, actually--training domestic rabbits to eat dandelions, then hiring them out to people who want to get rid of their dandelions. Cheaper than pesticides, and cuter, too. But then one morning I caught the rabbit hanging around my containers of herbs and greenery, and while I don't mind him eating dandelions, I mind very much if he starts eating my garden. So I got some of that deer-and-rabbit-repellent stuff. I haven't seen him since; not sure if it's because of the repellent, or for some other reason, but as long as my spinach doesn't get nibbled, I don't care.

And we have quite the carpenter ant population, some of which have found their way indoors. I'm pretty sure there's a colony in the woodpile, which is along one wall of the house. I was going to move the woodpile to the far corner of the yard--until I discovered that our chipmunk has taken up residence inside the woodpile. Remember him? With the snow tunnel? Now he's inside the woodpile, making friends with all the ants, no doubt.

So I got some ant bait, too. Stupid ants.

My 9/11 story

2011-05-02T11:31:00.000-04:00

I woke up last night to the sound of the TV blaring in the next room, and stumbled out to find my husband watching the news. "Bin Laden is dead," he said, and I stumbled back to bed and went to sleep. I thought it was a dream until I woke up this morning and saw the headlines.

Well, Bin Laden is finally dead. Yippee. I'm not sure how to feel about that--I mean, I'm glad and all, maybe this means we can finally get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, where we shouldn't have been in the first place. Then again, maybe we can look forward to more terrorist attacks as retaliation. Who knows.

What I do know is that it is impossible to not think of 9/11 today.

So here's my 9/11 story, for those of you who don't know it already.

On 9/11, I was at work. I was working at Barnes & Noble Publishing at the time, on 17th Street and 5th Avenue (just around the corner from Union Square, and about a mile and a half northeast of the World Trade Center). Someone came into the office and said they'd heard a plane had just crashed into the WTC. "Dumbass," I thought. "It's not like they're hard to miss." Like everyone else, I thought a little prop plane was involved, maybe a pilot asleep at the wheel.

So I tried to log onto http://www.nytimes.com/ and http://www.cnn.com/, to no avail.

That was my first clue.

Then I started getting emails with subject lines like "Are you ok?" I think I got an email from every single person I ever knew that day.

More people were coming into the office, with bits of news trickling in after them, none of them good.

I called my boyfriend at the time. We were living together in a high-rise apartment in Midtown. On a clear day, you could see the towers way off in the distance. He was working from home. I thought perhaps he could turn on CNN and tell me what was happening.

I woke him up. "Turn on the TV and tell me what's going on," I said.

"I'm sleeping, that's what's going on," he said.

"Look out the window," I said. There was a pause.

"Oh my God, the World Trade Center is on fire," he replied.

"Duh! That's what's going on! Now go turn on the TV and tell me what's happening."

So for the next hour, he dictated the news to me and I relayed that to everyone in the office.

My boss finally showed up--she'd been stuck in traffic on the West Side Highway. From her unmoving car, she'd watched as the second plane plowed into the towers.

Someone found an old radio, and we turned it on just in time to hear that the Pentagon was on fire.

"Oh my God, we're being attacked," said my boss.

"Fuck this shit," I announced. "I'm going home. Clearly no one is getting any work done today."

At the time, I walked to and from work (it was a little over a mile each way), so I was prepared to hoof it rather than getting on the subway. I called my boyfriend back to tell him I was on my way.

"I'm coming home," I said.

"I can't see them anymore," he said.

"What do you mean? The towers?"

"I can't see them anymore. I think they fell down. I THINK THEY FELL DOWN."

"If I'm not there in an hour, come looking for me," I said, and hung up.

If you've ever been to New York, you know how loud it is. And how busy. The streets are always filled with people, who are talking. There are sirens, horns, traffic noise, helicopters and planes overhead, the screech of subway trains coming up through the vents, birds, dogs barking, cell phones, you name it. Even at 3 am, it's noisy.

When I walked out onto Fifth Avenue, it was deathly silent.

There were no people. No cars. Nothing. Even the birds were silent and unmoving.

That's when I got scared.

What few people were on the sidewalk, were just standing there. Looking toward downtown. There were lines 17 deep at the few working pay phones, and everyone was waiting patiently. Silently. All the cars had pulled over to the side, many with people inside, listening to the radio and crying. The only sound was the occasional siren, of yet another emergency vehicle screaming toward downtown.

I rounded the corner, to where there used to be a view of the towers. There was nothing there now--just an enormous plume of dust and smoke. And more people watching, silently. Crying.

I rounded another corner, and almost collided with a woman running full-tilt toward downtown, her shoes gone, tears pouring down her face, her cell phone clenched in her hand.

When I got home, I parked myself in front of the TV and didn't move for two days.

My dad called me every day for two weeks, wanting to know when I was going to move back home.

I didn't sleep through the night for months.

I had a friend who worked on the 7th floor of the south tower. She was late to work that day (thank God); she got there just in time to turn around and go right back out again in the first wave of evacuations. She got turned around in the subway and ended up going south, instead of north. When she went above-ground to change directions, she was far enough away to actually see what was happening. She saw the jumpers.

She came to at Park and 57th, half an island away, still wearing her WTC ID badge. She'd walked all that way in shock, in a complete daze.

On September 12, I ventured outside to buy a newspaper. That's when the silence really hit home. Still no people, no cars, no planes. It was like being inside a zombie movie. All the newspapers were sold out--I had to go the New York Times headquarters to buy one, and stand in a line of at least 40 people.

I opened the newspaper, and saw the photographs of the jumpers. I read the entire thing, start to finish, closed it, and put it in a box. I haven't opened it since.

Two or three days later, the wind shifted direction. Even with the windows closed, the smell got into the apartment. It smelled like burning plastic, and bodies.

I think the NYC skyline is one of the most beautiful sights on earth. But I still can't look at the skyline without seeing a hole there.

Every year since then, on 9/11, I go into full media hibernation. I don't turn on the TV, don't read the newspaper, don't listen to the radio. I don't want to be reminded of the anniversary. It'll just make me cry all the tears I never shed. This year, I have a feeling that won't work. It's going to be especially hard the next few days, as 9/11 gets full media rotation in the wake of bin Laden's death.

At the risk of sounding trite, I can't believe it's been ten years.

Aunt Lucy's funeral

2011-04-26T10:04:00.000-04:00

(Technically, Great-Aunt Lucy's funeral.)

Driving to Virginia was a bitch. What took me 9 hours on Sunday, with no traffic, took 12 hours on Friday. Some asshat decided that the Friday of a holiday weekend was a good time to do construction on the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which means I sat--SAT--in traffic for 2 hours, to traverse 2 miles, because they took 6 lanes of traffic down to 2.

The swearing inside my car was epic.

I made it to Grandma's in one piece, eventually, took a long hot shower, and drank the rest of Grandma's hooch from Christmas with my mom and dad. The funeral on Saturday was very nice; there were probably at least 150 people there, including a bunch of extended relatives I hadn't seen in years. Saturday night we all went out to dinner with my brother so that I could meet my new niece, Aislynn.

She's a cutie--and she makes faces in her sleep, which is just about the cutest thing I've ever seen. Almost as cute as a basketful of kittens, yawning.

One day of socializing, and then back on the road, back home to Boston.

Remind me the next time I decide to drive 9 hours each way for a three-day weekend, that it's not a good idea.

Then, predictably, all hell broke loose at work on Monday because I'd missed Friday.

Fortunately, there are three things to cheer me up:
1. Spring weather.
2. Book club tomorrow night, which means martinis.
3. My friend L and her new boyfriend are coming over for dinner Saturday night, which will be AWESOME. I may even break out the good wine.

My hubby flew his son back to LA while I was at the funeral, and somehow the rental car gods smiled on him while he was there: he got magically upgraded to a Mustang convertible.

He described it as "awesome, and growly."

I'm so jealous.

The end of an era

2011-04-21T09:52:00.001-04:00

The last of my grandmother's sisters died this week. She was one of eight, born in the living room of the house she grew up in and that her brother lived in his entire life, the house that has been in the family continuously since 1600-whatever, still with the original root cellar. Grandma's taking it hard--because her sister died, duh, but also because my grandma is now The Last One Standing. The two brothers that are left are both younger than she is.

I think I'm going to drive down for the funeral this weekend. Not because I was particularly close to my great-aunt, but because all my uncles are coming in for it and it occurs to me that my grandma's time left on earth is now probably pretty limited. It will be the end of an era when she finally goes, and I'm hoping she hangs on with tooth and nail to these last years and does not go quietly into that good night.

I hope that for everyone, actually, that we all suck all the juice out of life right up to the last minute and that our last thought is not a pain-filled, weary acceptance of death but a "Goddamnit, who drank the last of the margaritas?" before keeling over of a heart attack in the middle of the conga line.

A blast from the past, part 2

2011-04-19T13:18:00.001-04:00

Remember that post I wrote about fellow alum Adam Kaufman? Turns out he read it.

*blush*

I went back and re-read it, and I realized that most of my memories of him were shaped entirely by hearsay. I had very little personal contact with him (outside of the hot drunken makeout session), and I don't mean for that to sound like I wanted very little personal contact with him.

On the contrary--most of what I heard from other people made him out to be some sort of acting legend, The Guy Who Is Obviously Way More Talented Than Any of Us Who Will Become Rich and Famous, and so in my brain, he was transformed into the Untouchable Hot Guy Who Will Never Have Anything To Do With Me.

Until, you know, we made out, which if I didn't make that clear in the last post, totally blew my mind.

It blew my mind because the guy who never should have noticed me, did.

And that small pebble set in motion a chain of events that eventually led to me acquiring some measure of self-confidence.

Only some, mind you. I'm still amazed when hot guys hit on me.

But the point of the story is this: hearsay can supplant actual memory. I'll be the first to admit that the intervening years have washed away large chunks of my collegiate memories, so I may have had more contact with Adam than I remember now. But outside of the makeout session, I'm not sure I remember much else about him. I don't think we were ever in any shows together, though I saw him in several. (He was excellent.) I do remember doing a show with Renaissance Theatre, after he had done one there, and being regaled with stories about him. I also remember my fellow theatre majors regaling me with stories about all the auditions and parties he was going to in New York--which, as it turns out, were completely false.

So let this be a lesson to us all: second-hand information may not be accurate. Memories may not be accurate, either.

I went back and rewatched the episode of Mad Men he was in ("Indian Summer," first season, he played the air conditioning salesman). It was really good. He was really good.

So Adam, in case you're still reading, congratulations on your career and your baby and feel free to email me at brokefoodie@hotmail.com if you want to trade war stories about Renaissance sometime.

And the rest of you that know me from college--my God, what else is my brain harboring that's completely inaccurate?

On second thought, don't answer that. It's probably a lot.

I heart NY

2011-04-18T13:07:00.000-04:00

...and Tortilla Flats.

On Saturday, we took my stepson H into NYC for 24 hours or so of...well, NYC. We saw downtown/Ground Zero, went to MoMA, saw the view from the top of Rockefeller Center, and had dinner with friends at Tortilla Flats.

When we finally settled on the dates for the visit, I emailed my friends in NY and let them know we were planning on dinner there at 6 pm, and to meet us if they could. Normally, when I email 20 people and tell them I'll be at a certain place at a certain time, I'll get a return rate of maybe 3 people. Truthfully, I was expecting less than that--Saturday night was very stormy in NY, with thunder and lightning and strong winds and pouring rain. Not the kind of weather people go out in. But lo and behold, suddenly we needed a table for 13 (with 2 additional kids).

The maitre d' managed to accommodate us (with a few dramatic eye rolls) by squeezing us into the outdoor area, which was cordoned off with heavy plastic flaps. Normally fine, but a bit blustery in stormy weather. However, it turned out to be one of the best dinners I've had out in quite some time.

I need to sidetrack a little here and tell you the history of Tortilla Flats. My grad school program at Columbia was small--there were five of us in my graduating class--and every month since graduation, we've gotten together for drinks to talk shop. (Well, not all five of us every month, these days, since two of us live in the Boston area, but that's beside the point.) The first time we went to TF was February of 2007. We were celebrating Maria's birthday, and it just so happened that night was the annual Ernest Borgnine Look-Alike Contest. Bob won, in a dance-off, getting the table free t-shirts and a few rounds of free tequila shots.

My mother was also there that night--she was helping me move into a new apartment, and came along for the evening out. Brian, a TV producer, plied her with the neverending margarita pitcher and stories about producing TV shows. I was worried she'd be out of her element, but she had a great time. She called my dad after we got home that night, and I overheard this part of the conversation from the next room:

"I had a good time, they're a lot of fun." Pause. In a quieter voice: "They drink a lot."

Ever since then, my dad has been convinced that margaritas are somehow my mother's downfall, and every time she drinks in front of him, I hear, "Don't give your mother any margaritas!"

Anyway, so that first visit was an epic evening, one that immediately earned a soft spot in my heart for TF. I've been back a few times since then (none quite as fun, although the next year we reprised the evening and watched a drunken Maria get spanked by one of the waiters "for her birthday"), and because it's a loud, raucous, very casual Mexican restaurant with cheap food, I figured it would be a good place for adults and children alike to have fun.

I was right, and Bob was in rare form. He set the tone for the evening before we'd even ordered--as a group of women decided they didn't like the outdoor seating and took the party inside, he proclaimed, loudly, in front of them, the kids, and everyone: "Someone got their twat hairs in a tangle!" Later he waxed rhapsodic about the gay porn collection he'd once had on his Palm Pilot, and announced that the hand dryer in the men's room was so forceful that it "blew his piss sideways."

I haven't laughed so hard in months.

For a table of randomly assorted friends, most of whom didn't know most of the other people, it was a great time. Everyone had fun, the kids seemed oblivious to the adult conversations (thankfully; I was sure they'd be scarred for life), and we got a couple of free rounds of tequila shots out of it.

H announced his favorite parts of the trip were the subway and Rockefeller Center. I was worried about what he would think (we were staying in Bed-Stuy, traditionally a run-down neighborhood, and the subway was looking dirtier and more decrepit than usual) but he took it all in stride and helped me find subway rats while we waited for the trains.

The one downside was not being able to spend quality one-on-one time with each of my friends. I promised them all individual dinners next time I'm in town, which I hope is soon. This weekend made me painfully aware of my mostly self-imposed suburban isolation. I think more trips, and more weekend time out of the house, will have to be arranged.

Special visitor!

2011-04-14T08:28:00.000-04:00

Tonight my stepson comes to visit for the next ten days. My hubby left yesterday to fly out to the West Coast and pick him up (everyone except me thinks he's too young to fly by himself). So last night, in the absence of my better half, I had a slice of ham and a bowl of peanut butter ice cream for dinner. And went to bed early. Hot stuff, I tell ya.

I've laid in a supply of kid food (Cheerios, hot dogs, white bread) in anticipation of his arrival. I'm already horrified by how much more crap food costs than regular food, and I'm also horrified that a loaf of premade bread a) costs 16 times what it costs to make a loaf at home, and b) requires at least 37 separate ingredients, when my 25-cent-homemade loaf required only 4: flour, salt, yeast and water. But what can I do? He won't deign to eat homemade bread, and I'm tired of fighting the food battle. If he wants to subsist on hot dogs and PB&J while he's here, fine. At least the hot dogs are kosher and the buns are whole wheat. I'll report back after he's gone.

We're taking him to NYC for a day this weekend, which I'm very excited about. I've asked all my friends to meet us for dinner--it'll be great to see everyone again. Tomorrow night the neighbors are coming over with their boys, one of whom is my stepson's age; we'll have pizza and let the kids play video games. I'm hoping he makes a friend.

A blast from the past

2011-04-10T09:51:00.000-04:00

So last week, I went to the mailbox after getting home from work and found the alumni magazine from my undergrad alma mater, Lynchburg College (my hubby went there too, you may remember). It was a slow mail day. Anyway, I was flipping through it as I walked back up the driveway, and my eyes landed on this article (on page 42).

It's about a semi-famous theatre alum, Adam Kaufman. You'll know him from a stint on Buffy, The Vampire Slayer and a few indie movies. I know him because a) we majored in theatre at LC at the same time, and b) we made out after a party once.

It's not much of a story--even at the time, he was The Untouchable Lead Actor, skipping classes so he could go to New York for auditions. His disdain, for the small college and for everyone in it, was palpable. Well, whatever. I wasn't an acting major, so our paths weren't going to cross much anyway. But he was awfully cute.

I don't remember how exactly it happened, but I do remember we started talking at a party one night and that turned into a drunken make-out session back in my dorm room. It never went farther than that (I was seeing someone else at the time, and he was The Great Adam Kaufman, you know, and I'm sure he didn't even know my name), and the story would end there--except that I gained a small amount of notoriety in the theatre department for a week or so afterward, because I Made Out With Adam Kaufman.

And then I promptly forgot that it had ever happened, until I opened the LC alumni magazine 15 (16?) years later and landed on his picture.

His IMDb bio tells me he was in an episode of Mad Men, too, which I think I will have to watch again, so I can pick him out of the crowd.

I shared the story with my husband (if I remember correctly, this happened before he and I ever met/started hanging out), and he gave me an expectant look after I stopped talking. "What?" I said. "That's it?" he said. "That's the story?"

Yep, that's it. Slow mail day, slow news day. Another minor brush with celebrity, shared with you, o my patient blog readers.

11 things I hate and 10 I like. Those numbers were chosen completely at random.

2011-04-08T16:04:00.000-04:00

Things I hate:

1. Unexpected bills.

2. Unexpected bills delivered in a completely unethical way. For example: our student loan company raising our monthly payment from, let's say, $500 a month to $1,200 a month, TEN DAYS BEFORE THE NEW PAYMENT IS DUE. Then claiming, it will take 10 days to process any change to the payment plan, then claiming that because any change to the payment plan won't take effect before the due date, there is nothing we can do and we have to cough up $1,200.

SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE FUCK?

3. See Number 2, only this time, it's the township we live in, delivering two personal property tax bills within five weeks of each other (claiming, "one is for 2010 and is prorated, and the other is for 2011--sorry it's so much higher than the 2010 one, but we only operate on a 30-day billing cycle, so you have to pay us in 30 days whether you like it or not because we don't offer payment plans.")

4. #2 and #3 happening AT THE SAME TIME. Isn't sh*t like that illegal? Aren't we supposed to be, you know, WARNED about 600% payment increases in a timely fashion? It's not even the money at this point, it's the principle of the thing.

5. This stupid goddamn weather. Where's spring, for the love of God?

Sorry, all the ranting about bills makes me want to swear. I'll try to contain myself.

6. Politics.

7. Politicians.

8. Busy yet unproductive days at work.

9. Hauling my tired ass to bed at 9:30 thinking, "Why am I so tired at 9:30? Why can't I do something productive after 6 pm, like, you know, finishing my book?"

10. Dealing with numbers 1-9 without a decent vacation.

11. Or a pretty new dress.

Okay, that's enough. Here are some things I like:

1. The smell of tomato plants.

2. Watching my cats frolic in the yard.

3. I just finished a wreath that I hung over the fireplace. I made a wreath!

4. Vintage Tom Hanks comedies.

5. Wine with #4.

6. The fact that my husband will cuddle with me quite often when I drag my tired ass to bed at 9:30, instead of staying up to play computer games until 2 am, which I know is what he really wants to do.

7. A good martini.

8. The idea that one day the universe will quit ambushing us with unexpected bills and we'll be able to go on vacation.

9. Hey, next month is our first wedding anniversary! I think I just realized that.

10. Even if we can't afford to go anywhere for our anniversary, or even go out to dinner for pete's sake, I will at the very least put on the sexy red shoes from the wedding and crack open a good bottle of wine. That's a good way to celebrate, right?

I could use some hugs, I think.

Y'all send me some blog love. I was all set to take my stepson to NYC next weekend when he's here visiting, but I fear all this bill nonsense has blown a trip to New York completely out of the water.

I guess I will have to go fix a martini, bury my head in the flats of tomato seedlings in my sunroom, and remind myself that it's just money and there are worse things in the world.

I heart Steve Martin

2011-04-02T04:11:00.002-04:00

My husband and I saw Steve Martin, and he was awesome.

Of course he was. He's Steve Martin.

Just a couple of things: he has a new CD and a new book out. There was a scandal recently involving the 92nd Street Y; because of that, he was on Stephen Colbert.

Miss O

2011-04-01T04:24:00.002-04:00

I generally equate "high school" somewhere between auto-cannibalism and being eaten alive by fire ants. That's one of the reasons I left at 16--another year of that would have turned me into a tower killer.

But there were two good things about high school, and both of them were teachers. (Okay, my Latin teacher was pretty entertaining and we might be able to count him as #3. But that's another post.)

One was Mrs. C, my biology teacher. She had a Ph.D. (what she was doing teaching high school biology in the backwoods is beyond me), and more importantly, she knew how to engage students. While I could care less about biology, I had a great time in her class. She turned me onto all kinds of books I never would have considered on my own, including St-Exupery's The Little Prince and Stephen Hawking, and was one of the very few adults in my life at that time that didn't talk down to me or make me feel like a freak for being smart. She's not teaching anymore--last I heard, she'd dropped off the grid and was living in a cabin in the woods somewhere. Good for her.

The other was a teacher I never actually had as a teacher: Miss O'Hara.

My freshman year of high school was what you might politely call "awkward." Puberty hit my face hard and left the rest of me alone, so I was a tall, gangly, accident-prone stick with no figure, bad skin, bad hair, an unfashionable hand-me-down wardrobe, and Coke-bottle glasses. The only thing I had going for me was that I no longer had braces.

And because I grew up in a small town, I'd acquired the reputation of the school nerd in first grade and it had never gone away. If I'd blossomed overnight into Cindy Crawford, I still wouldn't have gotten a date.

So I had no real friends, no prospects for dating, and I was bullied and harassed constantly.

Fortunately, that was the year I discovered theater.

The summer before ninth grade, I got involved in the local community theater. The most controversial thing they ever put on was "South Pacific," but I didn't care. I fell in love hard with it all--the acting, the backstage stuff, the camaraderie, everything. When I started high school, I gravitated immediately to the drama club, which almost single-handedly saved me from contemplating suicide.

Miss O'Hara ran the drama club. She was young and brash and insouciant and for all those reasons was forced out the next year, despite being an excellent teacher. (This is why I don't live in small towns anymore.) She taught English; I wasn't in her class, but I wanted to be. My freshman-year English teacher was approximately 147 years old and insisted on calling me "Sandy" all year long because she couldn't remember my name.

Miss O was another one of those rare adults that didn't talk down to me or make me feel like a freak. Even better, the drama club was filled with people that never would have given me a second glance otherwise--popular seniors, a couple of cute jocks, several class clowns. In short, the cool kids. And we hung out all year long.

Well, the next year she was gone. But by then I'd somehow managed to acquire my first boyfriend (he was older and didn't go to my high school; thereby cementing a lifetime habit of dating older men), a couple of friends, and more importantly, the assurance that this town was not the entire world. That escape was possible. That one day I might not be an outcast.

So imagine my joy when Miss O'Hara floated back into my life several years ago. She lives in New York now and writes a fantastic blog about teaching.

This story didn't really have a point, except that I wanted to shill for her blog.

So go read it.

And if you've ever had a mentor/great teacher or two, write them an email and thank them.

La Laiterie in Providence, RI

2011-03-31T09:24:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, my husband and I treated ourselves to a rare dinner out, at La Laiterie in Providence, RI. La Laiterie is my favorite type of non-fancy restaurant: a gastropub.

"Gastropub" gets thrown around a lot, but I use it to signify a place which is casual, makes their own charcuterie and artisanal cocktails, and probably has really good cheese (bonus points for foie gras). La Laiterie is, conveniently, attached to a great cheese shop: Farmstead.

Naturally, we ordered cheese and charcuterie. All excellent (though I have to admit I've had better charcuterie plates).

Charcuterie:
bresaola
a kind of ham
handmade bourbon-fennel sausage
a beef/pork/foie pate in a pastry crust
chicken rilletes

Cheeses:
Winnemere
Kunik
Coolea
Twig Farm Mixed Drum
Cashel Blue

I stopped into the cheese shop on our way out and purchased more of the Winnemere, along with some wild boar proscuitto, some Mountaineer (from Virginia, from the same people that make my favorite stinky cheese), and some Virginia bacon.

Tomorrow we're going to see a friend of mine from college play in a band in an Irish pub. I'm looking forward to a draft Guinness.

Mushrooms and Steve Martin

2011-03-29T07:58:00.000-04:00

I spent most of the weekend repotting my tomato seedlings. You can see a full gardening update, with pictures, here. I also have a new shittake mushroom patch, which my husband is convinced is actually some sort of evil alien being.

Speaking of my husband, we went out to dinner Saturday night at La Laiterie in Providence. It wasn't in the budget, but I was feeling restless. We hadn't been out of the house on a Saturday night in quite a while. Cheese, charcuterie, wine, husband: all the elements of a good meal out. I'll write up a full review later in the week. I've been feeling particularly whipped for several days now; I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm trying to get my husband's cold, or maybe it's a seasonal malaise thing. Maybe both.

We're going to see Steve Martin tonight! Woo!

More workplace malfeasance

2011-03-24T02:30:00.002-04:00

After yesterday's post about my former workplace shenanigans, my friend J reminded me of another Workplace From Hell. This one was long, long ago in a city far, far away, but yielded plenty of other horror stories.

Without naming names, this is when I lived in a city that started with an L and worked in a nonprofit capacity. Last week, I learned that the CEO of this nonprofit was finally being forced out, after 30 years, for public bad behavior (and a history of being an asshole.) I was only surprised that it had taken them 30 years to force him out. I could have told them 15 years ago he was an asshole.

Anyway. That was a messed-up time in my life, and it was my first professional job. My screwy personal life affected my work more than it should have, but I was also too young and naive to realize the depths of the politicking and assholery at that place. I thought all workplaces were like that.

Now, the key word in "nonprofit" is "no profit." I was making a lousy $21,000 a year, trying to raise money for chronically underfunded artistic organizations from low-paid blue-collar workers. I made pitches at 5 am to third-shift cops and factory workers, people who were making less money than I was, asking for them to please give something, anything so that their kids could get free field trips to art museums and theater matinees. What money they did give was hard-fought and hard-won, and I begrudged them none of it.

Meanwhile, the executives at this nonprofit drove Porsches and Mercedes-Benz convertibles.

It is true--to a certain extent--than in order to make money, you have to spend money. I understand that in order to schmooze a million-dollar donation from Mr. Bank President, you need to wear a nice suit to the sales pitch, and it doesn't hurt if you already go to the same country club. However. When third-shift factory workers making $8 an hour stood up in the middle of my sales pitch and said, "Why should I give $5 a week to you when [name redacted] drives a Porsche?", I had no answer for them.

(I did tell them to make sure to write on their donation that it should be earmarked for a particular group, and that way it couldn't be used for administrative costs.)

Mr. Porsche, at that point, made more than 10 times what I did. Now, to give him the benefit of the doubt, his was not an easy job. No one ever sees the value in funding arts organizations, and corporations would much rather earn community goodwill by giving money to children's hospitals or cancer research than to the opera. He managed to increase donations every year, by hook or by crook, though I don't like to imagine what went on behind closed doors. And hey, if my salary was that high, I'd be tempted to buy an expensive, high-powered sports car as well.

But not if I worked at a NONPROFIT.

He also liked to imagine that he wielded supreme executive power over the presidents of the various organizations we funded, that if it weren't for him, they would all go bankrupt overnight. He liked to yell at them, to strut during the meetings, to throw what little weight he possessed around like a blunt object, to style himself Lord Of All Fundraising.

Small Penis Syndrome, for sure.

It goes without saying that our administrative costs were higher than they should have been.

Because he was the CEO and I was the lowly whatever-my-title-was-at-the-time, we didn't have a lot of direct interaction. There was one instance when I was driving back from a weekend away, visiting friends, and got caught in a freak snowstorm. I had to get a hotel room for the night, off the interstate, and wait it out. This was a Sunday night. I called work, let them know I would be in late Monday morning, explained the circumstances, and then got to work on Monday morning as quickly as I could.

He waited until Friday, then left a message on my voice mail (hello, passive-aggressive?) explaining that he would let it slide this one time, but in future I was to make sure I did not get caught in any more snowstorms and would make it to work on time on Monday mornings. Being late due to snowstorms was unacceptable.

Did I mention I'd been making 5 am pitches to shift workers?

Did I mention that was the only time, the whole time I worked there, that I was ever late?

When I announced that I'd been accepted into graduate school, that I'd be leaving to move to New York that coming August, he sent a vice-president to inform me that since I was leaving anyway, I could just go ahead and leave right then and save them paying me through August.

When I protested, he told me--through the vice-president--that he had a "policy" of not keeping people on who wouldn't be there for the entire next fundraising season.

Then he said I hadn't worked there long enough to qualify for either severance or unemployment.

I'd been working there two years.

The next week, he bought a very expensive vintage poster to adorn his office. The cost of the poster would have easily paid my salary through August.

In tomorrow's edition of Workplaces From Hell: my boss calls me a dike! In front of the whole bar!

A little story about a place I used to work

2011-03-23T13:27:00.002-04:00

But first, a tangent.

Yesterday I got something in the mail for DH's student loan, claiming that his monthly payment was suddenly going up by about 250%--to over $1,100. A month. I freaked right the f*#%! out.

A couple of phone calls later, we worked it out. The monthly payment is still going up, but only by about $100.

But it still put the fear of God into me. Yes, we are working actively to pay off all our debt (so that things like that don't happen). We're not there yet, though. I was hoping to take a three-day weekend in a couple of weeks and go into NYC to see my friends. Now I wonder if we shouldn't stay home and knuckle under, give that money to the debt-repayment cause instead.

The good news is that I sat down and did the math. On our current payment schedule, not including any potential raises or bonuses, we can have all the credit card and private student loan debt paid off in two years. That sounds like a long time, until you realize we'll have paid off about $68,000 worth of debt in those two years.

After that, we'll just have the two car loans (currently at 0%) and the two big student loans ($70K and $80K, respectively)--but then we'll be able to pay all of that off in another two years. Gotta love the debt snowball.

Fingers crossed there are no major setbacks between now and then.

Anyway, so money's been on the brain more than usual. I've switched to a cash payment system for gas, since gas prices are so high, and I've quit running out at lunch for errands (savings on both random spending, like milk and trips to the Salvation Army, and in gas). I've also been putting in pretty regular overtime at my job, which helps a lot.

Which brings me to where I started. I like my current workplace. It's not the job I really want, and once we get to a point where we can live on one salary, I'll happily leave it. But as sustenance jobs go, it's not bad at all. The money is good, my boss is nice to me, and they give me a lot of responsibility and autonomy. I've worked at plenty of places where I didn't get any of the above three, for less money. Plus, there's pretty regular overtime, which I actually don't mind, since the place doesn't suck my will to live.

I was emailing with my friend T earlier, discussing plans for the (maybe) upcoming trip to NYC. She and I used to work at the Workplace From Hell--the one I got laid off from in February '09, the one that sparked the roadtrip. Remember that? Anyway, she worked there for several months after I got laid off, until she got fed up and quit. And she didn't just quit--she just never showed up one morning. She went in over the weekend, cleared out her desk, and left her keys and badge on the office manager's chair, without so much as a goodbye note. Her boss was livid. It was awesome.

She's been my source of gossip about that place ever since, and let me tell you, there's been some good gossip. She told me today that my former boss just either left or was hustled out. (Schadenfreude city!) I could regale you with work horror stories from that place for days, but I'll confine it to two:

1. The Office Christmas Party. Wherein one of the partners (not my immediate superior) grabbed my ass. Intentionally, and in front of people. It started with a conversation at the party itself. The conversation was pretty innocent, but he was standing weirdly close to me, and ended it with, "But look at you now! Successful, and gorgeous!" A compliment at face value, but I'm sure he was hard-pressed to remember my name. Fine, whatever. I chalked it up to alcohol and steered clear of him for the rest of the party.

Until it came time for the after-party, when a bunch of people decamped to a bar in Midtown. I was standing in a big circle, talking to several people. He was one person over from me. Without any warning, without me even acknowledging his existence, he reached around the person between us and grabbed my ass. Hard.

I looked over at him, dumbfounded, and he was talking to the person on his other side, pretending that had not just happened.

I left immediately.

Doesn't sound like much of a story, until you realize: he had a long history of this sort of behavior, which the other partners either flatly ignored or tacitly encouraged. Secretaries were constantly complaining, and nothing had ever been done. After the layoffs, after a disastrous reorganization, I guess someone lit a potential-sexual-harassment-lawsuit fire under the office manager, and he was actually fired.

For two weeks.

The partners protested so loudly, he was rehired. At his former salary and title.

He picked right up where he left off. So much for dealing with the sexual harassment.

2. The Phone Call. As you may have guessed from the above story, the partners were almost all male. The secretaries and office managers were almost all female. When I was hired, I was told in no uncertain terms that as a secretary in that firm, I could never be anything else. I would never be promoted out of the ranks of secretary to any other department or title.

I didn't care because it was a day job. I did my freelancing on the side, at night, and used that job as a paycheck. I wasn't interested in any other position, so I didn't take umbrage.

What this meant, though, was that the partners formed a boys' club. There was breathtakingly bad behavior on a regular basis. I don't mean the "treat the secretaries as peons" sort of behavior, though there was plenty of that, too. There was yelling. Throwing things. Actual temper tantrums. Underhanded politicking. Misappropriation of funds. Open and obvious sexual harrasment. A lot of passive-aggressive stuff like forcing existing meetings out of one particular conference room because "I have more powerful clients than you do, I can only meet them in the good conference room." Overtly aggressive stuff like bragging about "bagging some broad on the train from London to Paris"--in front of your secretary, who just ordered birthday flowers for your wife. Because there was such a clear line drawn between "partners" and "everyone else," the partners got carte blanche to act like two-year-olds.

During my first month or two on the job, I neglected to set up a conference call for a meeting. I was busy, there were several things going on, and I just forgot. Ooops.

Now, a normal person would have done one of two things: either dialed into the conference call himself (like an adult), or calmly walked out of the conference room to my desk and said, "We're ready for the meeting to start. Could you dial us in now?"

Instead, my boss waited ten minutes, then flew out of there in a red-faced frothing rage and SCREAMED at me. For five solid minutes. I don't remember exactly what he said, but the jist of it was that I was retarded pond scum and that if that ever happened again, he would make sure that I was homeless by the end of the day. And he did it at my desk, which meant he was shaming me in front of the entire office. I wanted to curl up like a potato bug and die.

When he was done unloading, he turned around, went back into the conference room, and dialed himself in.

Why couldn't he have done that himself, ten minutes ago, you ask? Without screaming at me? Because then he wouldn't have had an opportunity to publicly belittle his underling, thereby cementing his (imaginary) seat of power. Oh, and because he was an asshole.

Let us contrast that to today's workplace. Here, I'm in charge of several projects. I have a laptop, and a cellphone, and a corporate AmEx card. My boss dials himself into conference calls. I'm allowed to work from home on snow days. No one yells. No one throws things, or grabs my ass, or gets off on humiliating the support staff. No one micromanages how much I spend on office supplies, or what font I use in spreadsheets, or what food I order for meetings. In short, everyone acts like adults. With manners.

Now, is it any surprise, then, that here I willingly put in overtime, that here I'm much more invested in my boss's happiness and well-being? Any surprise that the other place is going down in mismanaged flames?

You catch more flies with manners than with yelling.

CORRECTION: Apparently some of the gossip was incorrect! That guy from the first story was NOT actually rehired. From another former comrade-in-arms: "There was talk of it [rehiring] until he 1) verbally attacked the secretary who brought charges against him in her new workplace (a client of the firm's) and 2) threw several partners trying to help him out totally under the bus in an attempt to justify his grotesque behavior."

Still a jerk, though.

I have been doing things other than gardening, and thinking about gardening

2011-03-18T13:36:00.000-04:00

OK, not really. My life's been pretty routine lately, which is why there hasn't been much of note on this blog. I go to work, work is good, I come home, I eat dinner, I watch a movie or something, I go to bed. Rinse and repeat. I'm ready for spring, but I think I've covered that. I'm hoping to get the cold crops planted outside this weekend; but the temperatures are supposed to drop into the 40s, so maybe that will have to wait.

We had the neighbors over for our first dinner party, which was very nice. Lovely people, and I felt so civilized, eating good food with fellow adults, using matching silverware and wine glasses. I spent all those years in New York building up sets of 12, in hopes of one day doing the kind of entertaining that would require sets of 12: china, red and white wine glasses, dessert wine glasses, champagne flutes, silverware, napkins, napkin rings, ramekins, espresso cups, steak knives, blah blah blah, not to mention the serving bowls and platters and pitchers and candlesticks and whatever to accompany all that. Naturally it all collected dust under my bed in New York, as I did not have the space for such entertaining.

But now! I do! With a table that will seat 12!

So seriously, please invite yourself over for dinner at your earliest convenience. I'll be tickled to use all that stuff, we'll all eat and drink well, and it's not like I have anything else going on these days.

A few updates:

I think the snow has now, finally, all melted.

Still taking the hormone-regulation pills which are supposed to lead to regular ovulation which may one day lead to pregnancy. So far as I can tell, neither regulation nor pregnancy has occurred. But at least I'm not having crippling stomach pains from the pills anymore.

My hubby went in for an invasive but routine medical test yesterday. Everything was fine. (We weren't worried, just one of those things you have to do when you get old. Still, glad everything was fine. I love my hubby.)

We have movement on the debt repayment front! I was able to officially cross two debts off the list this month, and God-willing-and-the-creeks-don't-rise I'll have another crossed off the list by this time next month. We were treading water for so long that even this small movement, with small debts, is very encouraging. I'm allowing myself to now daydream in earnest about the family compound, because maybe one day we'll actually be able to afford something of the sort.

(Granted, my daydreams involve buying a big piece of land and then inviting everyone to come build their own house on it, not buying an expensive Kennedy-esque thing with houses already built.)

I want my friends to come visit me.

That is all.

I have sprouts!

2011-03-15T10:01:00.000-04:00

My little garden is finally showing some action! Check out pics here.

In addition, I noticed some action from the peppers this morning. Hopefully my cheap-ass, thrown-together system of shop lights on bricks, a heated mattress pad, and a space heater scrounged from work is doing the trick. I didn't want to have to sink money into a professional seed-starting setup.

I am finding that there are a lot of one-time start-up gardening costs. For example, I'm now the proud owner of a hoe. And a 100-foot hose, with spray nozzle. And a shovel. That's cutting into my budget more than I thought it would, although I guess I won't ever have to buy a hoe again.

Vote for me!

2011-03-11T09:15:00.000-05:00

On a whim, I entered a Recipe Redesign Contest, and it seems I'm one of 22 finalists. Be sure to check it out and vote for me!

I know my hand-drawn picture looks like kindergarten crap next to the other entries. Seriously, I had no idea professional graphic design would be involved. I took "recipe redesign" literally; looks like everyone else concentrated on the "design" part of that statement, rather than the "recipe" part.

Oh well. Vote for me anyway?

The garden has begun!

2011-03-06T07:12:00.002-05:00

It's still not quite spring here in Massachusetts. There's still (STILL) snow on the ground, and although daytime temperatures are now consistently above freezing, night temperatures remain mostly below freezing.

But spring is coming.

The days are longer, the snow is melting off, and next weekend will be Daylight Savings Time.

So, because I can't wait for concrete evidence of spring any longer, I started my garden this weekend.

It doesn't look like much. Several containers of herbs and cold-weather crops in my chilly sunroom, thoroughly watered and awaiting germination. I turned my downstairs bathroom into a seed-starting greenhouse of sorts, by jacking the temperature up in there and laying out flats of tomato and pepper seeds. Next weekend I'll rig up some cheap metal shelving with lighting, and move the tomato and pepper seeds under the lights.

Once the snow has melted and the ground has thawed enough for me to work it, I'm going to plant more cold-weather crops (kale, spinach, arugula, chard, beets, butternut squash, cauliflower, cilantro, leeks) right away. And in May, once the danger of frost has passed, of course everything will go in the ground, including all the herbs and seedlings.

In the meantime, I've got my container garden to cultivate. Kale, spinach and arugula, plus all the herbs except for basil and dill (oregano, thyme, tarragon, chervil, sage, parsley, chives, rosemary, etc.).

I hope I'll have a little army of sprouts in the next 8-10 days. I'll keep you posted!

I have a chipmunk

2011-03-01T16:05:00.000-05:00

He's apparently made a little burrow under the snow. Every morning I see him poking his head out of his snow cubbyhole. Right outside the sliding glass doors in the den.

He's super-cute.

Of course, he's probably nesting inside my wall.

And he'll eat up my whole garden this spring.

And yes, there's still a good foot of snow on the ground.

But the good news is that the daytime temperatures are above freezing now, so I'm hoping the rest of that snow is not long for this world.

In the meantime, Mr. Chipmunk is super-cute.

Montreal

2011-02-23T06:48:00.000-05:00

My husband and I spent the long weekend in Montreal, making the trip 1) our first vacation, by ourselves, not involving family, since we got married--which really makes it our honeymoon, and 2) his first trip out of the country. Yes, he lived in San Diego, not 30 miles from Mexico, for all those years and never made it across the border.

We had a great time. It was bitter cold (I don't think the temperatures ever made it into the double digits), but we expected that. And there was less snow on the ground there than there still is in my backyard. The highlight of the trip was, of course, our two dinners out. We did the touristy stuff, saw the museums, walked around the old part of the city, but it was too cold for more than the bare minimum of aimless wandering, and the meals really were awesome.

Things to Know About Montreal:

1. You don't need to know French. It helps, of course, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover my husband remembered enough high school French to be able to tell the waiter that I was probably going to order him the rabbit. Also all the signs are in French. But everyone also speaks English (though usually they'll start off in French, and keep going unless you ask them to switch), and a stop sign is a stop sign, even if it says "Arret" instead of "Stop."

2. The US dollar and the Canadian dollar are about the same. There may be two cents' difference.

3. It's really cold in winter. But they keep the streets crystal clear.

4. We stayed at the cutest B&B, Absolument Montreal. Our room came with a kitchenette (including mini-fridge stocked with free sodas and water), a vestibule, and a hot tub. (Which was outdoors, so I didn't use it. I wasn't about to brave zero-degree night temperatures, even for a hot tub.) Best of all, the room came with a full three-course breakfast, served to us in our room, personally, by the owner. Tea and coffee and fresh orange juice, with a cheese/charcuterie plate to start, followed by something hot--eggs benedict with smoked salmon on day 1, a croque monsieur on a croissant on day 2--followed by fresh fruit and yogurt and pastries. In our room. At whatever time we wanted. So that was pretty awesome.

5. The dining really is top notch.

Warning: during our two dinners, we ate things that may offend squeamish readers. If you're one of those, stop here.

Dinner 1: DNA

One of the Top 5 meals of my life. Definitely #1 with my husband.

This is exactly the kind of restaurant that I love. Hip, great vibe, relaxed, great wine list, amazing food. And none of those things suffers at the hands of any others. DNA has one of the best wine lists in Montreal, specializing in Canadian wine. For some reasons, Quebec hasn't yet caught on that Canada (particularly British Columbia) is making some world-class wines. Their wine lists and wine stores stock a great selection of French wines, but not much else. DNA is trying to change that, and I noticed that their wine list included one of the wines that I fell in love with in Vancouver during my road trip (see blog post about that wine here). Naturally I had to go there, and drink it.

Awesomeness, in order:
1. Decor. Red and orange with really interesting lighting. Sounds tacky, but they did it just right. And they had these great orange bowl sinks in the bathrooms.
2. Bottles of Canadian wine were half off before 7 pm. We got there long before our reservation at 8:30, to hang at the bar, and so I was able to get the bottle of wine I really wanted at a reasonable price--only a few dollars above retail. (See aforementioned blog post.)
3. They seated us early, because we were there.
4. The menu. We ordered:

Pig's ear. (really a pate)

Horse heart tartare.

Housemade charcuterie.

Cornmeal-encrusted rabbit, baked in a cast-iron pan.

Piglet.

Let's take a pause here to appreciate, and celebrate, the fact that we ate horse heart tartare. That is exactly what it sounds like: raw horse heart, chopped fine and served with herbs and things. You can't eat horse in the US for a variety of reasons (even though it's perfectly legal), primarily because for most people, the idea of eating horse is repugnant. Similar to eating dog, or cat. But horse is eaten widely in most other parts of the world--it's usually considered a delicacy, and in fact, much of the world's horsemeat comes from the US. Slaughtered here, and exported. It's much lighter and leaner than beef, softer, tastes sweeter, is a beautiful brilliant red color, and it's free of tuberculosis and tapeworms, thus safer than beef to eat raw.

And it was delicious.

(If you're offended by that, I'm sorry. Take comfort in the fact I won't be eating more horse any time soon.)

That, and the cornmeal-crusted rabbit, were the culinary highlights. The rabbit meat was very light and delicate, almost white--it was definitely farmed rabbit. I've eated wild rabbit before and it was far stringier and gamier. My piglet (really part of a piglet leg, slow-braised and served with parsnips and turnips) was moist and yummy, but paled in comparison.

Our second bottle of wine was nearly as enjoyable as the first: Road 13 Pinot Noir.

At the end of the meal, there were surprise fireworks.

Day 2: Au Pied du Cochon

When I planned the trip, I thought Au Pied du Cochon would be the best meal, and DNA merely a warm-up. In reality, it was almost opposite.

I say "almost" because our entree catapulted an otherwise unmemorable meal into the storytelling stratosphere.

Here is a picture of our entree:

That is an entire pig's head, roasted, with a lobster shoved through the top.

The entire pig's head. Ears, tongue, nose and all. To eat it, you have to cut into its face.

Here's another view:

Yes, we ate pig face.

It was served on a big wooden cutting board, with a steak knife impaled through the top of its head, anchoring it to the board. Half a lobster was then impaled on a wooden skewer, and also shoved through the top of its head. The lobster claw was arranged coming out of its mouth, along with an artfully arranged smear of mashed potatoes. The effect was as if a mutant lobster had attacked the pig through its brain and out its mouth, while the pig bled and vomited mashed potatoes.

Served with a bowl of pig head and lobster juice for dipping, of course.

We couldn't eat it for at least five minutes after it was presented. At least half the restaurant stopped eating and came over to us to take pictures.

Then it took us another five minutes to figure out how to eat it. (Remove the lobster parts; start with the cheeks. Leave the knife in.)

I have to admit I didn't eat much of it--I was too fascinated with the presentation. I played with it more than anything. It was delicious, and fatty, and tender, and crunchy-burnt on the outside, but I was preoccupied with the various technical challenges eating such a thing presented. (What happened to the brain? Did they take out the eyeballs, or did they bake away? Ooh, look, the jawbone comes right out! And there are teeth still attached to it! Is that the tongue? Gosh, the ears have a lot of cartilage. Do I eat that part? I wonder how you eat the nose? Should the nose be eaten? And so on.)

I got the world's largest doggie bag to take the copious leftovers home with me--I asked for everything, including the bones and lobster shells (so I could make stock, but also so I could completely deconstruct the dish at home).

Here's the carnage of leftovers:

Other things to know about Au Pied du Cochon:

It's crowded, small, and loud. Definitely not the laid-back, hip, fine dining atmosphere of DNA. We also had the duck charcuterie and a buckwheat-pancake-maple-syrup thing with a big hunk of foie gras on top. I have to say neither one of those dishes impressed me. Also the waiter assured me that the pig head for two was not an abnormal amount of food. That was SUCH a lie.

I would go back, but only if I got an earlier reservation, at an actual table instead of at the bar, and I would order more foie gras-laden dishes, and not listen to the waiter when I asked for recommendations.

Anthony Bourdain ate here.

The Other Place Worth Mentioning:

Dieu Du Ciel, which makes its own craft beers. All of the ones we tried were delicious.

And Marche Jean-Talon, the city's big farmer's market.

The Moral of the Story:

We'll be back. It was only a five-and-a-half-hour drive, meaning much of Eastern Canada is well within weekend road trip distance (everything from Toronto to Newfoundland). The dining in Montreal is world-class, and it's a very European kind of city. And I wasn't made to feel like a retard for not being able to speak French.

I also found one of my most favorite wines in the whole world, Laughing Stock, which is not exported to the US and can only be bought in Canada, so I'll have to go back to get more of it.

When presented with the opportunity to eat weird things, I will. Bless my husband for completely going along with that and eating everything that I did. (He liked all of it as much as I did.) I married a good one.

I really love good wine. And eating. I really love eating.

The end.

Gardening

2011-02-16T09:25:00.000-05:00

We're having a heat wave here in MA--it might get all the way up to 50 degrees by Friday. I never thought the sound of melting snow would be so glorious.

I still don't think I'll see grass in my backyard before April, but it's a relief to see the tops of the stone pillars and scrubby bushes again.

So this has got me thinking about gardening.

My sister sent me some leftover seeds from her garden last year--several different kinds of tomatoes and peppers, cucumbers, and various herbs. I filled that out with a seed order for the rest of the herbs, some additional tomatoes and peppers, greens (spinach, arugula, kale, chard, mache, sorrel), corn, peas, bush beans, beets, pie pumpkins, carrots, butternut squash, zucchini, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, leeks, scallions and strawberries. The full complement of herbs will include three different kinds of basil (regular, purple, Thai), oregano, sage, rosemary, chives, mint, borage, chervil, cilantro, dill, marjoram, tarragon, thyme, catnip and catgrass, two different kinds of parsley, and lavendar. I threw in blue hyssop and nasturtiums, as well. Blue hyssop will attract bees and butterflies, and the nasturtiums are edible flowers.

A good all-around garden, no? Plus I still have all those containers from my patio garden in San Diego, so the herbs can go in there for close-to-year-round harvesting.

So, my first question is:

Should I continue my CSA membership through the summer?

Logic would dictate yes, since if the garden doesn't take off, I'll still have fresh fruits and vegetables all summer long. (And the membership runs from May to November.) But it's an additional cost, obviously, and I fear being up to my eyeballs in greenery and vegetables by July. Perhaps I'll continue the membership for this year, see how everything does, and adjust accordingly next year.

And the next question is:

How and when should I start all these seeds?

The sunroom is the obvious choice for seed starting, since it gets the most direct sunlight and it's out of the way. But it's COLD in there this time of year. I'd either have to heat the room (an exhorbitant cost, given the three glass walls) or keep the seeds on heating pads constantly--and I don't know if that would be enough, given the 40-degree ambient temperature. Also, given that I couldn't put the plants into the ground until (I'm assuming) late May at the earliest, do I start those now? Or wait a bit, and hope the sunroom warms up a tad?

Either way I'm starting the herbs and the cold-weather crops now.

Any gardeners out there, feel free to weigh in...

We're finally going somewhere!

2011-02-10T15:26:00.000-05:00

Montreal, to be precise!

It's been a long time coming. Not Montreal per se, but just the idea of the two of us going somewhere. Somewhere new, that is, and preferably out of the country. I suppose since it'll be the first time we've traveled together since the wedding, to a place not involving family or friends, you could call it our honeymoon. :-) (Though it's only two days, so maybe I'll save the "honeymoon" moniker for a longer trip.)

We'll get a little bit of money back from the IRS this year, and we're finally getting to the point where we'll have a wee bit of breathing room in the budget. Naturally, my first thought was, "OMG, we have to go someplace f#*&%ing WARM!!!!!!!" Then I thought, well, really I should be fiscally responsible and put that money toward debt repayment. Then I thought, f*ck that sh*t, I'm going someplace dammit. Then I realized that our vacation time for the year is already spoken for, so we wouldn't be able to take a week or even a few days to go on this magical IRS-refund-funded journey. And I should really be fiscally responsible. Then there was more swearing.

And I despaired, because I didn't want to break the string. Every year since 2004, I've gone somewhere. 2004: Jamaica, Las Vegas and Aruba. 2005: A banner year, Brussels, Germany/Italy/France/Switzerland, and Hawaii (and that was enough to count into 2006. Also 2006: San Francisco). 2007: Rome. 2008: Mardi Gras and Buenos Aires. 2009: road trip. 2010: We got married, and we'll count that as a trip. So 2011: had to go somewhere.

But given the lack of vacation time, it looked like we would just go into NYC for the long weekend and see some shows. Which is an excellent way to spend both time and money, don't get me wrong, but would not scratch the travel itch.

So instead, we'll drive into Montreal for the long weekend. I mean, it can't be any colder or snowier than it is here right now (and we'll get off-season rates that way). And we can drive there, and we can stay in a really nice B&B and have a couple of great meals, and see new things, and be all cultured and whatnot, and Canada counts as a different country. (Barely, I know, but we'll have to bring our passports and speak French, so I'm counting it.) And because we won't have to fly and it's just a couple of days, we can go somewhere AND be fiscally responsible.

I really need to get out of here for a couple of days, and I'm sure my hubby will second that. Work is hectic, the weather is brutal, and we're both getting a bit of cabin fever. A long weekend away from it all will be just what the doctor ordered.

If the weather screws this up, I'm stealing a tank from the National Guard and going anyway.

There's still nearly five feet of snow on the ground.

2011-02-05T10:28:00.000-05:00

And that's all I can say about that without screaming.

Two bright spots: I've recently discovered Groupon. Love. It.

I've also recently discovered Travel Hacking Cartel. It's a paid subscription, which I'm not too sure about, but I love the idea of collecting bajillions of frequent-flier miles (and not by flying). I'll be testing it in the upcoming weeks, to see how many frequent-flier miles I can accumulate without getting new credit cards. Goodness knows I could use some free travel right about now.

Meanwhile, I'll be saving up for this house. This will be the family compound.

Theatre review: Afterlife: A Ghost Story

2011-02-01T08:10:00.000-05:00

"You can’t reckon with me."
--The Ocean
“There’s something about looking at what’s left.”
--Connor

Steve Yockey’s Afterlife: A Ghost Story at New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, MA, has a pitch-perfect first act. The second act is so different as to be almost an entirely separate play.

I loved the first act. Connor (Thomas Piper) and Danielle (Marianna Bassham) are a young married couple, boarding up their beach house before a big storm. We know something is very wrong—Danielle is brittle and strange, Connor desperate to draw her out of her shell but failing on every level. Slowly, we figure out that their three-year-old son has recently drowned—in the very ocean their house overlooks. They’re boarding it up largely because Danielle can’t bear to live there anymore. And as she starts hearing her son’s cries on the wind, we fear she’s losing it altogether.

The production gets the grief exactly right, both in the couple’s tension and their raw emotionality. That’s how deep grief feels—the world seems fantastically remote. You can’t engage on any level with anything meaningful, and yet everything feels raw. Every emotion gets buried out of sight, pushed away, because if one strays and gets to the surface, the fountain of grief will erupt. Danielle holds it together because she’s largely anesthetized herself. Connor, however, wants to reengage with the world; Danielle resists because she knows how much that will hurt. The act is a tug of war between them, and eventually, that fountain of grief and anger does erupt, just as the storm hits.

Oh, but then. The second act.

For the second act, the carefully constructed realism disappears (both literally and figuratively, as the house set is rolled back). The stage is divided into three playing areas, consisting of a young man who may be the grown-up version of Connor and Danielle’s drowned son; a blindfolded and immobile Connor, washed up on some snowy beach; and Danielle, who has found her way from a storm into the home of two strange ladies, one who sews constantly and the other who drinks a lot of tea. The three of them (Connor, Danielle and son) are each in some separate, individual, timeless version of purgatory, I suppose. The son tries to write letters to his parents, but the postman rips them up every day; Connor is visited by a giant talking black bird, who urges him to “let go”; and Danielle realizes the tea-drinking old woman is actually the embodiment of the ocean that took her son. And they’re all trapped in their own spheres, with no way to move on or find the others.

Got all that?

I appreciate what playwright Yockey is trying to convey, and I also appreciate the lyrical language and lush, dreamy imagery of the play. But I would have much rather seen a longer version of the first act. He seemed to do so much better with characters and a story grounded in realism. The second act, with barely anything to anchor it to the first act, offered nothing in the way of either character or story development, and felt fractured from the start.

That being said, it’s worth sitting through the second act just to see the first. It’s been a while since I’ve seen such a moving and accurate portrayal of anguish. Actors Thomas Piper and Marianna Bassham have a great chemistry together, and director Kate Warner keeps that first act on a razor’s edge. The set, lighting and sound designs (Cristina Todesco, Karen Parsons, and David Remedios) are all equally lush and dreamy, providing a beautiful counterpoint to the heavy emotion of the first act and keeping the second act from being completely nonsensical. Dale Place as the mysterious Postman, is also noteworthy as the giant black bird (using an ingenious giant puppet designed by Pandora Andrea Gastelum).

Overall, I enjoyed the play. It was my first time at New Rep, and I loved the space. (Free parking didn’t hurt.) I’m excited to see their next offering, Theresa Rebeck’s DollHouse beginning February 27th.

Afterlife: A Ghost Story Written by Steve Yockey
Directed by Kate Warner With Marianna Bassham (Danielle), Adrianne Krstansky (The Proprietress), Georgia Lyman (The Seamstree), Karl Baker Olson (Young Man), Thomas Piper (Connor) and Dale Place (Postman/Black Bird)
Set Design: Cristina Todesco
Lighting Design: Karen Parsons
Sound Design: David Remedios
Costume Design: Frances Nelson McSherry
Running Time: Two hours with one fifteen-minute intermission
New Repertory Theatre, at the Arsenal Center for the Arts; 321 Arsenal St, Watertown, MA
Tickets begin at $28
Thursday 7:30 pm, Friday 8 pm, Saturday 3 pm and 8 pm, Sunday 2 pm
January 16 – February 6, 2011

My mailbox

2011-01-29T08:44:00.000-05:00

I'm really, really over this winter.

Theatre review: R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe

2011-01-25T15:09:00.000-05:00

If you’ve ever been to Epcot, you’re familiar with the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome. Fuller, though not a household name, was one of the great scientific minds of the twentieth century. He was a bit of a Renaissance man, which may be why he’s not a household name—he simply did too much to become truly famous in any one area. He was a writer, philosopher, mathematician, geometer, poet, architect, designer, environmentalist, and inventor. Though he invented the geodesic dome, he taught poetry at Harvard—after being kicked out twice in his youth.

He was probably sixty years or more ahead of his time in his one true passion—eliminating waste, and protecting the earth from the ravages of men. He invented a showerhead that gave a full-body cleansing with only one cup of water, a fuel-efficient car that sat 11, and an energy-efficient, inexpensive pre-fab house. He wrote and lectured extensively on sustainability, before the concept really existed.

So, okay, a pretty interesting guy by all accounts. If, like me, you’re new to R. Buckminster Fuller, you’re probably wondering if this show is a good introduction to the man. (So many one-man shows can be more about the actor in question than the subject.) To which I can offer you an unqualified yes.

For me, ART’s production was a more whimsical and much more delightful sort of documentary on the man, less about presenting facts and more about presenting the true nature of Fuller. Actor Thomas Derrah plays Fuller with a cheeky, subversive sense of humor (his abrupt “I have to go to the bathroom” as intermission segue brought the house down). He perfectly captures Fuller’s manic energy and constantly spinning brain, and utilizes that energy to push the show at a breathless pace. Though it clocks in at over two hours, hefty for a one-man show, the time flies by.

The exquisite design aids in that pacing, while paying tribute to the design capabilities of Fuller. David Lee Cuthbert’s set is anchored by a circular platform, covered with a dreamy blue spiral, underneath a geodesic-inspired proscenium arch, with an absurdly tall ladderback chair. Around that are Fuller’s classroom accoutrements—a chalkboard, an overhead projector, a table with a scroll of paper. Derrah moves effortlessly between the real elements and the surreal ones (sometimes literally—Fuller was apt to dance publicly in strange ways in his later years), while Jim Findlay’s video design gives us an integrated look at Fuller’s drawings and plans. Overall, it’s a production rich in sensory detail.

I do wish there’d been a little more about the man’s non-geodesic dome inventions. But that’s an incredibly minor quibble about what was otherwise an intellectually and visually stimulating play. It made me want to run out and read a book about R. Buckminster Fuller, buy his Dymaxion globe, and live in his energy-efficient house. Not a bad result for an evening’s entertainment.

R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe
Written and directed by D.W. Jacobs
Performed by Thomas Derrah
Set and Lighting Design: David Lee Cuthbert
Composer and Sound Design: Luis Perez
Costume Design: Darla Cash
Video Design: Jim Findlay
Running Time: Two hours and fifteen minutes with one fifteen-minute intermission
American Repertory Theater; Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street, Cambridge MA
Tickets begin at $25
Tuesdays through Sundays at 7:30 pm; Saturdays and Sundays at 2:00 pm
January 14 – February 5, 2011

I heart secondhand furniture

2011-01-23T08:01:00.000-05:00

The last couple of days have been a home decor bonanza. Best of all, I didn't pay retail for any of it.

The bad news is that my husband and I found ourselves the proud owner of a solid cherry entertainment center, purchased at the Salvation Army for the low low price of $70. Why is this bad, you ask? Well, I didn't realize it was solid cherry until we had to move the thing. I thought it was pressboard/veneer. So my husband and I, by ourselves, had to wrestle a six-and-a-half-foot-tall, solid cherry entertainment center into a van, along an icy walk, into the house and up seven steps to the living room. I swear to God that thing weighed at least 700 pounds. It took us 40 minutes just to navigate the seven steps (with a complicated system of blankets and big books), and even then we gouged the steps and the living room floor (since fixed with wood polish). I thought my husband was going to have a stroke. I thought I was going to give myself a hernia. Fortunately, somehow, by the grace of God, we managed to get that thing inside and situated. And we're never moving it again. Next time we move, movers are tackling that thing.

Sore muscles aside, it is a very nice piece of furniture. A little cleaning, polishing, WD-40 on the hinges and tightening of the screws made it practically brand-new. Here it is:

I found lots of other furniture at that Salvation Army. In fact, I found all the rest of the furniture that we needed. A sofa for the fireplace room (which we'll put a slipcover on), a desk and dresser for the guest room, and a cute chair. Also for the fireplace room.

It all needed a good polish, but then, I paid less than $200 for everything.

I was so emboldened by my excellent Salvation Army experience, that I continued my shopping spree at Fiddleheads, the most excellent local furniture consignment shop. I picked up several non-furniture household goodies:

This great old picnic basket,

this big glass beverage dispenser (perfect for sangria at parties),

this big wooden bowl,

and (drum roll please) this Waterford crystal decanter.

I am now the proud owner of a real live Waterford decanter, for $50. Not bad, huh?

(I also got a full set of martini glasses.)

Now that the spending/decorating spree is over, I'm going to take a hot bath and soak my weary muscles.