2 days with no boss and no meetings

It's like my holiday weekend has started early!

We have no plans for the weekend. We won't have the kids. We'll grill most of our meals, go see fireworks, and relax. Our new deck is almost finished; we'll probably get the railings up tonight. I'll post pictures when it's all ready. Here's one of the view when you lean back in your chair at about 9 AM:



I went to the library today to stock up for the weekend; I should have no shortage of reading material. Here's what I picked up:

3 books by Alexander McCall Smith - the first of each of 3 series: 44 Scotland Street, The Sunday Philosophy Club, and Portugese Irregular Verbs. I am enjoying the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency but the next book in that series wasn't available today, so I grabbed one of everything else.

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman - I got this because the description reminded me very much of Dr. Horrible. So it will rock, right? I'll let you know.

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus - The story of a couple going through a nasty divorce when 9/11 occurs, and each one thinks the other was killed in the attack, and celebrates a little too soon. I read the first couple pages of this at lunch, and the reaction of the wife as she stands in her Manhattan office watching the second tower fall, trying so hard not to smile because her husband works on the 86th floor & she was sure she was watching his demise, got me hooked.

The Big Girls by Susanna Moore - About 4 women whose lives intersect in a prison in upstate New York. The clincher for me was this line from a review: "Reading this heartbreaker is like watching a train wreck while dialing for help on your cellphone. You can't turn away." Who can resist that? Actually I like a good depressing book now & then. I balance it out with Lisa Lutz.

A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood's Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports by Brad Snyder - A rare non-fiction choice for me, but it sounds like a very interesting story. Curt Flood was a baseball player who got traded against his will, and so refused to show up for work for his new team. He took the fight to the Supreme Court. He lost, in a 5-4 decision, but the case influenced professional baseball forever.

So, that should get me through 3 days. What's everyone else doing?

New Comfort Food Recipe!

I work with this guy Jerry, who is the biggest curmudgeonly teddy bear you could ever meet. He comes off as very gruff when you first meet him, and many people take a while to get comfortable even talking to him. But once you get to know him he's really awesome. He is a Vietnam vet with a gravelly voice and a repertoire of hillbilly sayings I haven't heard since my maternal grandmother was alive. He calls everybody "bub". And he loves to cook, and loves to tell you what he's planning to make this week.

A while ago he started talking about this pierogie casserole he had discovered. The recipe was on the back of a certain flavor of frozen pierogies, and once he tried it, he started making it every week or two.

I love pierogies, but somehow I managed to marry a man who won't take one bite of one. So I've been waiting to try this new dish out until J was out for the night. I finally got my chance tonight, and it was worth the wait. Here it is:

Take a box of Mrs. T's Potato & 4-Cheese pierogies.
Lay them in a single layer in the bottom of a baking dish *
Add a 14.5-oz can of Italian-style diced tomatoes, and an 8-oz can of tomato sauce
Add some sliced pepperoni, diced green pepper and shredded mozzarella cheese (amounts not given on the box; I used a layer of pepperoni, half a pepper and a couple handfuls of cheese)

Jerry suggested adding hot Italian sausage. I picked up zesty breakfast sausage instead, browned it, and added it before the pepper/cheese.

Bake at 350 until it's hot & bubbly - like 30-40 minutes.

*The box says to use a 9x13 dish. One box of pierogies isn't quite enough to cover this size. Jerry adds part of a second box. I used a smaller dish but still used a full pound of sausage. I'd use less sausage next time - this was too much.

Anyway, that's it. Almost no prep time, especially if you aren't adding the meat. Another co-worker made it for his kids, and they devoured it. I won't be making if for my freakishly non-pierogie-eating family but I would make it to take to someone's house or something. And it was a nice therapeutic meal to start my weekend.

Pitch Perfect

This ad came out early this year, and it quickly became one of my all-time favorites. I was at a bar the other night where I saw part of a Phillies game, and it got me thinking about the commercial again... to the point where J asked me a question & I was so engrossed in remembering Jimmy Rollins taking a pitching machine to the chest that I had to have him repeat it.

Here's the ad; I'll rave about it after you've had a chance to watch it.

OK, here I go.

A), the first shot is such a complete surprise that even if you weren't paying attention to the first seconds of the commercial, you're immediately drawn in.

Secontively, there's the move he makes with his hands like he's somehow absorbing power from the force of the pitch. The deep sniffs, the puffed chest, the unbroken eye contact.

(I'm out of Arrested-Development-inspired list counting, so I'll just switch to bullets.)

• The long pause between the last two pitches is the best. He never stops staring these guys right in the eye, but you can see him trying to anticipate the next hit. If you didn't catch it the first time, go ahead & rewatch about a hundred more, LIKE I HAVE. When the last pitch finally comes, the slow "Yeahhhh" is awesome.

• At the very end, behind the Dick's logo, one of the guys gets nailed in the crotch by a pitch. When he doubles over in pain, Rollins SLAPS HIM ON THE ASS.

There is nothing about that commercial that isn't completely wonderful. The whole thing is amazingly well-executed. I didn't know who Jimmy Rollins was before I saw this (I'm in an American League town, and not in Philly's market). Now, I am in love with him.

Newt Gingrich Eyebrows?

So I started this new book on the bus this morning. It's called The Godmother, by Carrie Adams. I picked it up in the library last week because the cover looked good. So anyway, it's set in England. The opening scene is the main character getting picked up at Heathrow Airport, and she's talking about her best married friends who met "at university", and there are all kinds of other obvious indicators that this is an English story. So that's established.

So 8 pages in, there's this sentence that says "He knitted his Newt Gingrich eyebrows."

Newt Gingrich eyebrows? His eyebrows are internationally renowned? I don't remember ever seeing him on TV and saying "Wow, he's got some serious brows" or anything like that. When I see someone on the street I don't think "Jeez, that dude's got some Gingriches growing on his face."

In fact, I just looked up a picture of Newt, and his brows are big, but they're nothing remarkable. They're groomed, anyway. Certainly not chick-lit-reference-worthy.

The only thing I can figure is that in the British edition of the book, some other public figure is used, but then they changed the name for the US publication. That makes some sense, I guess, but I would rather read a name I don't recognize and think, eh, must be some Brit with big brows.

The Newt thing just jarred me. And now I probably won't read the rest of the book.

I did just finish a book I enjoyed, though. Monster by A. Lee Martinez. If you like Christopher Moore, or if, like me, you liked Christopher Moore the first time or two but then he got to be a little annoying and when you picked up his newest book you had to quit 5 pages in, then this is worth a shot. It's about a guy who makes a living as a Crypobiological Containment specialist. Kind of like Animal Control for yetis and trolls, which dwell among us, but most humans aren't aware of them. It's pretty cool.

Fun Fact Friday

It's been quite a while since my last post - I didn't realize how long. I must have started & abandoned a post or two in the last week to make myself think I was being all productive but nothing was getting published. So, a quick bullet-point wrap-up of what's going on.

• Despite the presence of a cat, my house is apparently a lovely habitat for many mice. Pal is 14 years old and has killed one mouse. She is much more likely to play with them than kill them. Mice die of old age in our house. They seem to be well-fed, warm, and obviously very safe there. Last night I was looking for something in the basement and found an alarming amount of evidence that the spring weather has not drawn them outside, so traps will be lain laid set.
• That was the first time I'd used strikethrough font on my blog! I kept forgetting to look up the html code for it until now.
• We have several small fruit trees in our yard. We bought them 4 years ago or so, and they produce dwarf varieties of the fruit - one peach, one pear, and one apple. The peach tree has been the most productive by far, and I eat a few pieces every summer, but the pit-to-flesh ratio is a bit frustrating. The squirrels LOVE them, though, so at least it's not all going to waste. The pear tree gave us one pear last year. One dwarf pear. And it grew at the very tippy-top of the tree so we had to wait for it to fall on its own. We should have more this year since we didn't have a late frost to kill all the blossoms. The apple tree has apples on it for the first time this year and I am so excited! It looks like we'll have a lot of them too, so I am looking forward to making dwarf apple pie, or something like that.
• Amy is still not speaking to J. The other kids haven't really been affected, but Nicole has a definite lean towards Amy's side. I know J's ex-wife is probably encouraging the cold shoulder, but even if it lasts all summer, I'm confident that some kind of detante will happen by fall. When I repossess the fridge I bought for her dorm room.
• I don't have any time off work scheduled until BlogHer. That's coming up soon, but I need a mental health day. I might have to get sick sometime next week.
• We have had a real, honest-to-God Spring this year! We NEVER have a Spring! We haven't run the furnace OR the AC in 6 weeks, and we expect to get at least another week of good open-window weather. This is awesome.

That's all for now. I have NO plans for the weekend. Was supposed to go to a baby shower for a college friend tomorrow, but I found out last night that the only other college friend who would have been there can't go, and it's going to be a bunch of old ladies, and it's like 2 hours from my house, and my car's not running. So that's scrapped. Which frees up my day for The Sims 3! And maybe some time spent outside.

What a waste of lost sleep

We stayed up to watch the Cavs game last night. It sucked. Unless you're reading from Florida, in which case I imagine it rocked. Or you don't give a shit about basketball, in which case it sits right smack in the middle of the Sucks/Rocks Continuum. I believe that area is called "Meh."

Anyway, the game ended just before midnight, and I was so upset there was no way I was going to be able to fall asleep, so I turned on an episode of Medium that's been sitting on the DVR for a while. I don't know what time I went to sleep, maybe around 1:45.

Today, my eyes feel like two piss-holes in a snowbank (I don't know how I would ever convey that feeling so accurately if I didn't have hillbilly ancestors). I've been dragging ass at work all day, and for what? A fricking loss.

Next game is tomorrow, and by the time the game starts, I'll have been drinking for about 3 hours (we're having a farewell Happy Hour outing for a co-worker who's heading down to work in our Atlanta office). So staying awake for the entire game is going to be rough, but I'll give it the old college try. And I will feel exactly like this again on Friday.

I need to post something I'm happy about to push Amy down off the top of the page.

I'm crabby. 2 days of my 3-day weekend were shitty, and even the non-shitty day had an air of stress over it. On top of that, I couldn't sleep last night; I must have had one too many Coke Zeros too late in the evening. I need to get myself in a better mood, so I'm going to write a quick post about something that makes me happy: my new bed.

Last weekend we were outside when a neighbor walked by the house, carrying a rolled-up rug over her shoulder. She told us that a couple around the corner was having a garage sale & we should go check it out. She said they had lots of good stuff they had to get rid of because they were moving. It was a nice day so we decided to head over just to see what they had.

When we got to the sale, one of the guys there was my co-worker Kevin. His brother was half of the couple who was moving. We looked around, but there wasn't really much we were interested in (plus neither of us had any money). J bought some resin lawn chairs for a couple bucks. They told us they had a king-sized bed they needed to sell. It was used for a short time in the woman's previous house, but had been in storage for a while. Very comfortable, still in good shape. They were asking $150 for the whole thing - mattresses, frame, and cherry headboard.

We looked at it - we sat on it. We really really wanted it but at the time I had about $6 to my name and J wasn't too much better off. So we went back to tell them we really liked the bed but couldn't do it, and she knocked $25 off the price. We explained that we just didn't have the money. She checked with Kevin to make sure he trusted me, and then told me I could just give him the money on payday.

Done.

We spent the next 6 hours moving furniture. The houses in our neighborhood were apparently built before the invention of double beds, so getting the mattress up the stairs was a considerable effort requiring 4 adults pushing, pulling, folding, and cramming. But we got it up there. Thank God for split box springs. Then we had to move our queen-size pillow-top mattress into the attic. Our attic door is tiny, as most are, so it was another 4-person job, but it's done.

Our old bedroom furniture is obnoxiously large. The headboard is taller than I am - I'm 5'6". And it's bulky. In switching from the old queen bed to the new king bed, getting rid of the footbard and slimming down the headboard, we gained a foot of floor space between the door & the bottom of the bed. The last major effort was getting the headboard downstairs. We scraped the wall a couple times but we got it down with no injury or sniping. It's currently on our front porch - KLASSY, right? - while we decide how to get rid of it and the rest of the suite.

We went to Kohl's for some sheets, came home & washed them, then laid in our new huge bed watching basketball. We slept so fricking good that night. We still haven't gotten over how awesome the bed is. The best part is that J's snoring does not bother me anymore! Because it's not right in my ear! If he is facing away from me and we have the fan going, I can barely hear it at all. The night before last, I did hear him and I went to nudge his leg, and I couldn't even reach him. Which means he's not being kept awake by me anymore either. Awesome!

On a final note, I want to make it clear that I do not endorse buying used beds from garage sales, especially when the asking price is ridiculously low. I only even considered this because I knew the brother of the fiance of the girl who was selling it (actually I'd met her sister a few times before too), so I figured I could trust its cleanliness. And I haven't been waking up with any strange itches, so I think we'll be OK.