magniferous

What Cheer

2012-01-20T00:01:00.001-05:00

Okay, let's have a little geography pop quiz! Take a look at this list of cities and tell me which state each one is in.

Akron	Andover	Arlington
Aurora	Battle Creek	Bloomfield
Brooklyn	Buffalo	Burlington
Cambridge	Carlisle	Cincinnati
Corning	Cumberland	Danville
Decatur	Fairbank	Fredericksburg
Harper's Ferry	Hartford	Humboldt
Knoxville	Lansing	Lincoln
Little Rock	Manchester	Monticello
Ogden	Plymouth	Prescott
Princeton	Rockford	Scranton
Selma	Toledo	Vail
Williamsburg

All done? Okay, hang on while I check your answers...

Wrong.

They're all in Iowa.

As I've watched the Republican Presidential race heat up and the Iowa caucus gearing up, I've been struck by one thing repeatedly. No, it's not the other-wordly feeling that Iowa is Bizzaroworld where people like Rick Santorum can get 25% of the vote - neck and neck for winning the state's delegate votes. As astounding as that may be.

It is that everywhere in Iowa (with the possible exception of Iowa City, but I'm not too sure about that) seems to be named after somewhere else. Or at least there is some might liberal licensing of town names for such a conservative state.

In addition to the above, they've got their share of ubiquitous town names that seem to show up shore to shore: Bellevue, Centerville, Farmington, Garden City, Laurel, Mechanicsville, Middletown, Montpelier, Salem, Stratford, and Washington.

Austinville, Dallas Center, Delaware, Denmark, Jamaica, Luxemburg (sic ;) ), Macedonia, Madrid, Manilla, Moscow, Mount Vernon, Mystic, Nevada, New Virginia, Norway, Orient, Oxford, Panama, Peru, Volga, Wyoming, Yale, Yorktown.

Guttenberg,
Atlantic?? Smack dab in the middle of the country?
Altoona

I am glad I don't live in Correctionville. Yikes.
Or Gravity, IA. I wonder what I weigh there!

I might be willing to retire in IRA, IA, though...

But there is one Iowa place I can't help but cheer, "What Cheer, Iowa". Oddly enough, the town got this distinctive name after the post office rejected "Petersburg". I could hug that Post Master.

I Paid Cash: Unsubscribing Is Free!

2012-01-20T00:01:00.000-05:00

I'm about to divorce a blog No! Not this one! I swear I'm just absent and my heart grows fonder!

I read many blogs through an RSS reader. It's actually a pretty magnificent thing. You find people you like to read, and with a little click they are saved in a pretty little collection so you can leaf through their sites like magazines whenever you like. Hopefully I'm in your RSS collection.

A couple of years ago, a friend suggested I read a website devoted to thriftiness. There's lots of info on internet deals and coupons so I quickly added it to my RSS feed. After some time I noticed that the author had a pretty intense religious fervor brewing but I was not wholly deterred.

As the economy worsened, I visited my Thrifty Links collection more frequently. I found plenty of deals on photo products and groceries and coupons towards clothing and housewares. This one site began welcoming guest bloggers who told stories, much like the site owner did, of saving up and buying things with cash. As someone with more than my fair share of experience with credit card companies, it was -- for a time -- refreshing to hear of people bucking the system and prioritizing what mattered.

And then the economy continued to worsen. And I began to wonder when anyone could do anything frivolous ever again. But the kernel of frustration was just barely there.

And then there was the four-wheeler story. The &*@(&# &*(&# flibberty-gibberty I don't even know how to say how I felt about that story. It is a few months back so I will attempt to recall the details. Another guest blogger (by this point realize that guest bloggers are a way to keep your site current while you take a break but continue to make money...) had posted a "We paid cash" story. Only this one I found repugnant, irresponsible, and certainly not something that should be extolled in the virtuous "we prioritized to accomplish our dream" themed posts.

It was about an obviously financially-challenged family that had decided to buy an ATV for their seven-year old. My relatively new Mom-senses tingled. A what? For a how-old? Are you NUTS?!?! I understand that riding ATV's is a pretty popular rural activity. I even did it when I was a kid, but I am sure my age ended in "-teen". ALL of the comments on the site applauded the woman for her thriftiness. None raised the issue of safety, or the merits of the purchase, or of buying this thing before dealing with other needs. To me it seemed like a thought process made out of deep poverty - and not just the financial kind. I quashed my disgust and posted a thoughtful comment with the most gentle suggestion about safety.

And it was promptly deleted. And then I learned that other comments had been deleted as well. And then comments were locked down. But the post stayed. It's still there now. I added "Blog about ATV's" and "Find out about youth ATV safety programs" to my personal and work To Do lists. Time passed.

I started reading the blog less often. It was starting to get depressing. There were DIY solutions that were so time-consuming that the tradeoff with a ready-made solution was not worth it. (And these were not for superior outcomes like an eco-friendly cleaner.) The "we saved up" columns continued to be hit or miss. Great, someone saved up for a van to transport their family or the down payment on a house! But in-between there were stories of hardship and deprivation.

But tonight, a straw has broken this camel's back. A post about ways to make money and get rewards with your smart phone included a comment that broke my heart. The recommended strategies for cashing in on a smart phone included things like taking pictures of store displays and going on retail scavenger hunts and scanning bar codes for points or cash. Um, okay, I guess I'm okay with that. It's your time and if you find its value to be equal to 10 cents for 5-10 minutes I'm not going to shame you for that. And then there was that comment...

Her husband has a smart phone with a data plan which is justified by his business need. She's wondering if she could make enough cash each month to offset the cost of a data plan for her. She says they start at $15.

I just. I mean. I. WTF.

She explains that she "just wants" a smart phone. I click through from her comment to her website. She appears to have some sort of photography practice or business. She might be making money from it and/or her blog. (Discarding the obvious, that that's a reason right there to have a smart phone if you want one.)

I was taken aback. Is it 1950? Can a couple really say she needs to justify the expense and offset it while her husband is enjoying not only the "must have for business" aspect of this (admitted luxury) item, but also reaping its benefits in the not-so-work environment?

I have some bright, talented, educated friends who have taken a hot minute off to be a SAHM and I have even heard them start to wonder what they "deserve" and what they can "justify". I have even heard them refer to their husbands' salaries as "his". I just. I mean. WTF.

... An aside to give you a break from my hysterics but also to say that I am not referring to situations where luxuries are chosen in place of necessities. I respect cutting back on "wants" to provide for "needs" and more important "wants" great and small. ...

At the same time, these years of thrift, of want taking a big backseat to need came crashing down on me. I don't want to read stories of people who saved up for three years to buy some piece of shit van to replace a shittier van. I'm not saying I want them to finance a gold-plated Hummer they can't afford, but that there surely must be some middle ground where people can accomplish their goals without it being their life's work to get a cell phone.

So, at last I will unsubscribe from this terribly uplifting blog full of woefully inspiring tales of people who did without to make do. There. That wasn't so hard.

Holiday Greetings

2011-10-24T10:19:00.000-04:00

We have gone to pumpkin patches twice to try to capture the quintessential fall photo of Hac. So far, we've deleted many, many photos, but we've gotten a couple of decent shots. I print photos as quickly as I take them. I have a somewhat OCD system, too. Shocking, I know. I download pics to iPhoto after each shoot. Then, I am fairly consistent at naming, tagging and rating at least the best pictures in the bunch. It also helps to delete the duds ASAP. In the last year my active photo library has ballooned from about 4,000 to 18,000 pictures even with this system, thousands of deletions, and a bit of archiving.

The photos I flag - the best of the best- get immediately uploaded to my favorite photo sharing and printing sites. It has just become part of the process. This does two things: it keeps a steady stream of fresh photos available for family and friends and it has me poised to act when a good sale is happening on the photo printing sites.

In Hac's first year, I've printed greeting cards for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Birthdays and Thank You cards and his first birthday party invitation. I've also printed lots of photo books, enlargements and collages. I even have a magnet nestled in my photo stash for the holidays. I have tried all of the services out there and one of the best is Shutterfly. It consistently produces better pictures than any of the print and pick up places I've tried and virtually all of the online and mail photo shops.

Check it out for the holidays. You get 50 free prints when you sign up as a new Shutterfly member!

Some links to their products:

http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/christmas-cards
http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/holiday-cards
http://www.shutterfly.com/photo-books
http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/birth-announcements

Star Wars Pancake Battle

2011-10-19T14:54:00.000-04:00

We received the Williams-Sonoma Star Wars pancake set from a friend way back at the baby shower. I hadn't had the wherewithal to make them for a few months and then I decided we'd all sample them together so we waited until Hac was ready for them.

On Jac's birthday I set out on my maiden SW pancake-making voyage. Admittedly, I made some rookie mistakes. I was making pumpkin pancakes instead of plain ones so the consistency was a little different, but that wasn't the issue. No, I pretty much forgot about the existence of butter and/or cooking spray until I'd already poured the pancakes into their molds. Not good. Also non-stick pans and accessories are not as forgiving as one might hope. I tried to retroactively grease the wheels but it was not successful.

But, I gave it another whirl and the pancakes were passable. I know better now. Next time I will thoroughly grease everything before I go anywhere near the batter and I'll put a bit less in each mold so that the openings are more pronounced. Still, they were deliiiicious.

A Tale of Two Roses

2011-10-18T14:36:00.002-04:00

There is a rose plant in our back yard that cannot be thwarted. We have shown it no love and the only attention it ever gets is not good. Yet, year after year it surprises us with a few amazing blooms. I have been in a rush or having a @&*y day and looked up (while taking out the trash, no less) to spot a perfect flower in my face. Such was the case the other night after the rain. Yesterday I clipped the rose and brought it in and today it opened up nicely. I wouldn't usually say I am a "pink rose girl" but these lovelies have livened things up around here.

Yo Gabba Gabba Time

2011-09-28T08:36:00.000-04:00

As parents, we are obsessed with Yo GabbaGabba. It is one kids show that does not make us lose our minds. So we gave the little one a Gabba-themed birthday party and I made a colorful cake.

I'm thrilled with the way it turned out. I bought two boxes of whit cake mix and gel good coloring. I separated prepared batter into 6 equal bowls. I colored each layer to match the characters. I baked each layer in a 9" round pan until a cake tester cake out cleanly - approximately 15 minutes. Let each layer cool individually (also makes much sturdier for lifting. I used a basic buttercream frosting recipe (and it was white enough). Layer each cake in desired color order (I wanted it to look Yo Gabba and not Christmas or rainbow.) Frost in-between. Do a crumb coating of frosting. Chill. (I chilled overnight and finished frosting in the morning. First thing in the morning, I applied the decal. (I think the time helped it meld with the frosting.) There was no "papery" sensation to it.

Having a cake frosting turntable was... awesome! I finished the white frosting layer, filled a bag with yellow frosting and a star tip and slowly covered the sides with stars. I started with logs on top. They were great because I did not have to make a single, perfect ring around the top. Below the long ring, I made a row of stars, turning throughout. The hardest part of the entire cake is recognizing when the frosting has warmed in your hands and is getting less firm. Then it is time to take a 5-10 minute break while the frosting cools in the fridge and your icing hands get a rest. Follow each row of stars to the bottom. You could line the based with logs or beads of frosting, but my stars looked nice.

Refrigerate the cake again until ready to serve. When slicing, We sliced the first two pieces before removing the second one cut, which made for cleaner slices.

Yum!

Back in the Saddle

2011-04-15T22:03:00.000-04:00

What hiatus? Enjoy this license plate spotted in Arlington today.

Costco Madness

2010-06-30T08:14:00.001-04:00

This weekend we went to Costco -- when it opened, on a Sunday morning. We have officially lost our damn minds. I had been there recently scoping out baby items, but Jac hadn't been in years. We flooded into the store with the teeming hordes of Northern Virginians intent finding big box bargains. I was conscious of my desire to lag a bit rather than go with the frenzied flow in the store. If you just stay in the current you'll sweep around the whole floor in 10 minutes having made no strategic acquisitions. We were looking for a few specific things. Jac, of course, was drawn to the media department where he looked over the new releases and remainders while I pondered sheet sets.

As we left I spied this guy, three kids in tow, running with cart to his SUV. His children all but abandoned, they struggled to keep up with him as he flew across the parking lot (and traffic) without them. I'm pretty sure he was trying to set some kind of land speed record. Perhaps this was a misguided "let's race to the car" challenge. I don't know why Costco has to be such a horrifically bad experience, but I do know why I've been there maybe twice in four years.

Dog Daze of Summer 2010

2010-06-28T17:14:00.000-04:00

With temps 90-100 degrees every single freaking day, pretty much all Lexi and Kirby want to do is sleep. Sure they get all excited when we say it's time to go O-U-T, but after a quick run in the yard they want nothing more than to get back into the cool air and doze.

I can't say I blame them one bit. Now that I'm in my third trimester, my lifelong loathing of summer has reached new heights. I would like nothing more than to sleep (oh per chance to sleep - I can live without the dreaming at this point) for the next ten weeks or so until the little moosh arrives.

Unfortunately, Jac has his hands full moving, fixing, doing around the house to prepare some home repairs which have to be done so we can get our rooms ready for the little moosh. This has left me no choice but to appear useful by doing dishes and tidying up (just a little).

Two hours ago it rained fiercely and the temps dropped from 100 to 76 degrees. Relief? Nope, even though it's 5pm the temperature has climbed again to 86 degrees. Have I mentioned that I hate summer?

Parting Glances

2010-06-08T09:01:00.000-04:00

Probably the most emblematic anecdote I have about the splendor of Bedford Springs comes from our post-dinner stroll back to our room on Friday night. As we passed through the Game Room (not pictured here, come on this place has a million rooms I can't be expected to photograph them all I am on vacation.) I overheard a perturbed woman summoning one of the resort staff.

"Do you see this here? This is a Scottie dog," the woman explained, curling over one of the puzzles left out for casual assembly by hotel guests, "but there is clearly no Scottie dog in this puzzle!" She proclaimed this pointing adamantly to a puzzle box top image on the table. I couldn't contain my laughter. In a nearby hall I burst out into unexpected belly laughs. Jac ushered me away from the scene as he noted the woman's husband was keeping a low profile in that very hall.

It was rejuvenating to find my laughter. And its source was such a perfect example of why we found the resort so relaxing and comforting. When faced with perfection in accommodations, amenities, food, entertainment and experience, this woman was forced to adamantly point up the one fault she could find - the presence of a wayward puzzle piece where it clearly did not belong.

High-Falootin'

2010-06-07T08:54:00.001-04:00

We camped out in the Tavern at Bedford Springs to catch a Stanley Cup finals game. As we lingered in the bar area I was blinded by a light. Then there was smoke. When I turned to investigate I learned it was just this smokin' hot rhinestone six-shooter pistol shirt worn by a guy with a handlebar mustache. I think it's especially poetic that the handlebar mustache and the rhinestone pistol shirt exist on the same person.

Dinner at Bedford Springs

2010-06-06T08:38:00.002-04:00

The simple act of making a reservation for this dinner with the hotel's front desk had so transported me from my city desk that I'd missed the beginning of a conference call. When the time came to present ourselves for the reservation, we were already well-wooed by the resort's charms. Chef Konrade sent over a taste before our meal, melon and cream with a hint of Midori. (In which I gently induldged.)

Jac devoured the bacon wrapped shrimp atop a horseradish sauce.

For his entree he chose scallops (good thing I can now make them) with grits.

My chicken in a port wine black fig reduction with vegetables and mashed potatoes was extravagant and extraordinary. I queried Jac when we could have possibly had such a good dinner. Prepared to go back years, I was surprised to discover we'd just had a very good meal at Georgia Brown's. But this dinner was really wonderful.

A Culinary Risk

2010-06-05T08:01:00.001-04:00

When people learn that I spent my childhood in Maryland they invariably assume that I'm a huge seafood lover, crab especially. The deep, dark truth is that I can easily recount every time that I have consumed seafood since about age four. I never took to the stuff. To me, of all creatures, those from the sea were the least natural to eat. They were scary and mysterious. They often required strange and excessive tabletop hardware and effort. The only real upside I found to seafood was that it was often served with drawn butter and hush puppies.

But during this getaway to Bedford Springs, I'd set a "course for adventure" and was up for anything. When I learned that a slot was available for a Friday afternoon cooking class with the Chef d'Hotel for $20 I jumped at the chance. No curriculum was available, but I told Jac I just hoped it was something new to me.

And oh boy was it. Our small class of three was greeted with champagne in the hotel lobby. (No thanks, I'm drinking for two.) We were escorted through the recesses of the hotel to the main kitchen where we met the venerable Chef Konrad. He announced our course subject was: Seafood. I was trepidatious about the territory, but delighted that I'd learn a thing or two about a subject my husband holds so dear.

First up: crab cakes. Chef Konrad had us each sample the premium lump crab meat and then set about making his light and savory version of the beachy delicacy. We molded a mixture of crab, mayonnaise, dijon mustard, and panko breadcrumbs and cooked it briefly in a pan with olive oil. We made a rich sauce of soy, miso, honey and sesame oil. Then came the ultimate test: my taste. I ate a couple of bites and knew that without my historic aversions to the dish, it was tops in its class.

Next we made a tuna tartar atop a crouton, but what you see here is the cooked tuna presented to me to accommodate my delicate condition. I still only managed a morsel and felt guilty with each taste tossing fresh from the pan samples.

Jac is a big fan of scallops so I knew when this dish was announced that I not only needed to manage a taste, I also needed to pay close attention. The chef unveiled U-10 scallops which I learned were characteristically large. We cooked them with salt, pepper, honey and butter and I managed my taste, though this was the most difficult dish for me encourage my paltry palette to try.

Finally, our third dish was something close to home. I was called to demonstrate our preparation of spaetzle with a mushroom gravy. I have made spaetzle before but today we made it from scratch and used a large commercial sieve to extrude the nubs of pasta into a boiling pot of water. We topped it with a deeply flavorful mushroom sauce and parmesan cheese. Heavenly!

But Chef Konrad had one more surprise waiting for us, dessert. We headed over to the pastry section of the kitchen and found a chef happy to show us how to make chocolate-dipped strawberries with an intricate patten. The magic trick involved patterned pastry transfer paper and the chef showed us a catalog where we could order the supplies. We dipped lush berries into melted dark chocolate, twirled them, and plopped them atop the transfer paper. As we gabbed, the chocolate dried and we were able to pluck the berries from the page, now dressed with a stylish pattern. Even better, we each made a half dozen to take away with us.

It was a great experience and just the sort of diversion I'd sought to start off our weekend.

Taking the Plunge at Bedford Springs

2010-06-04T11:50:00.004-04:00

As I make my way through the parenting books, one thing is clear: to reduce conflict with your child you can give him the choice between two well-selected options. The child can choose easily, feels he controlled his fate, and tranquility is restored. When we stepped outside our room at the Bedford Springs resort this morning we could choose between a sun-bathed outdoor pool with a cluster of posh cabanas or...

an indoor oasis offering all of the splash without the SPF. We chose... both. First I worked in a cabana by the outdoor pool while Jac hit the driving range. It was heavenly to report to work overlooking the pool and mountains, definitely the best telecommuting I've done so far. Later, Jac joined me for a swim in the vintage indoor pool, one of the first in the US. We had the indoor pool to ourselves, an unexpected luxury.

Get Me Outta Here!

2010-06-03T23:32:00.002-04:00

As the weekend approached, my stress was reaching a fever pitch. Work, life, family, a baby on the way -- Calgon was not going to cut it this time. When Jac told me he'd arranged to take Friday off to sit at home and wait for the windshield repair guy that was my cue to get the heck out of town. Afterall, I could swap cars with him any day and we could put his leave to good use as, you know, leave.

Before I knew it, I'd pulled up an oft-browsed bookmark for the Omni Bedford Springs Resort in Pennsylvania. I'd discovered the resort a few months ago while searching for far away-so close getaways. With the heat building in DC, a two-night jaunt to the Pennsylvania mountainside sounded like an escape from the barometric pressure cooker that is DC in the summer.

My vacation state of mind kicked in while I was on the phone with the Reservations Desk. I'd called to see if there were any deals to be finagled for same-night accommodations. As she described the room options I was swept away to our nights of luxury. When she asked if she could make our dinner reservations at one of the hotel's dining rooms I plunged into thoughts of gourmet goodness. Only then did I realize I was late for a conference call and I hastily dismissed her with the confirmation to book that dinner!

I've Died and Gone to Georgia Brown's

2010-05-21T06:42:00.000-04:00

Two major crimes preceded our visit to Georgia Brown's tonight: first I left my camera at home and had to use my generation-behind iPhone in the dimly-lit room to take our dinner pix. Second, how on earth have we not been here before?

I've had a dinner at Georgia Brown's on my To Do list for ages. Every time I'm looking for a new place to try with Jac Georgia Brown's surfaces as a prospect. Yet, somehow it wasn't until a mutual craving for "really good fried chicken" got us into this DC haven of homey Southern cooking.

Our meal started with corn bread and biscuits. I am an avowed biscuit-hater (one of the few breads in the world I want almost nothing to do with), but I devoured those tasty morsels*. I guzzled sweet tea lightly flavored with peach. Jac and I, for perhaps the third time in the past decade, ordered the exact same entree. We each got the fried chicken with asparagus and mashed potatoes. For an extra degree of decadence we ordered a side of macaroni and cheese.

When our chicken arrived, I winced. Had they brought me two pieces of dark meat which my unsophisticated palette would reject? Oh no they didn't, they had partially deboned the white meat chicken they set before me. And wow, was that chicken tender and fresh.

Jac had suggested the macaroni and cheese side and I was happy to accommodate him, figuring I could easily avoid the extra side if I found it bland or excessively "foofy". I have narrow standards for macaroni and cheese. To me, mac & cheese must taste like cheese, not be overloaded with eggs, and is better when left unadulterated by bacon, mushrooms or herbs. Well, the mac & cheese at Georgia Brown's was right in my cheesy sweet spot. The dish is so good that, sitting here writing about it, I'm wondering if it would be feasible to drive into town just to pick up a side of it to take home.

We finished dinner with a heavenly pecan tart topped with good vanilla ice cream and surreptitious tastes of a heavenly bourbon sauce. We can't wait to go back. It will be hard to order anything else.

*It is possible the slow return of my appetite mid-second trimester had something to do with my newly re-found appreciation for all things "carb".

A Crime Against Vanilla

2010-05-15T07:21:00.001-04:00

Today the pantry revealed a violent crime against Pure Vanilla Extract. Her lid was smashed, her bodily contents exsanguinated at the scene. Bystanders did nothing. They stood, stalwart and silent, as Vanilla went down for the count.

The suspects:

Three prime suspects emerged. Pumpkin, Gus and Joe were in the vicinity, clearly had the means and opportunity, and were known to have a beef against vanilla.

After intense questioning and some very high-tech forensics that I can't show you here, Pumpkin confessed. It turned out saucy Vanilla had been stepping all over Pumpkin for years, making a mockery of it at holiday dinners and keeping it from stepping out in other courses. "America's Favorite Pumpkin" will be going into Cold Storage for a long, long time.

Tasty Tourist Trap

2010-05-12T07:08:00.000-04:00

When we walked up to Virgil's BBQ in NYC, my heart sank. Just steps away from Times Square I wondered if we'd gotten ourselves into a forgettable, touristy dinner - stealing away one of the few precious meals we would have in the city on this visit.

We were meeting up with a dear old college friend I hadn't seen in years and years so I figured the company would easily distract from whatever we'd find inside. There was a crowd and a long walk-in wait forming around our reservation time but we were seated promptly upstairs in a lively dining room. The menu resembled a lot of chain BBQ restaurants we've been to, but one thing stood out: "Ten Dollar Hush Puppies!" That's not how they were titled on the menu of course, but in the week leading up to our visit, that's how they'd come to be known in our house and on Facebook as we anticipated the dinner with friends. "I can't wait for the Ten Dollar Hush Puppies!" I exclaimed repeatedly.

My quick phone picture can't compare to the awesomeness that is a platter of good hush puppies, but there was no time for artistry with corny bread goodness waiting. We followed it up with platters of barbecue and my own plate of fried chicken which was cooked perfectly. We did giggle at the school field trip near our table as chaperones attempted to help 25 high school students to split a check, but the crowds faded away as we enjoyed delightfully comforting company and food.

Modestly Named 'Cafeteria' in NYC

2010-05-09T07:01:00.003-04:00

We needed a brunch spot to accommodate our shopping route and to fortify us after a night out on the town. My sister suggested Cafeteria in Chelsea. The menu was a perfect match for our diverse mid-day appetites. I ordered the Belgian waffle which came crisp, brown and loaded with fruit and creamy goodness.

A veggie burger and a salad loaded with shrimp and watermelon rounded out our romp through the menu.

My Perfect iPad Case

2010-05-08T06:29:00.000-04:00

Since we got our iPads I've been flummoxed by the protection and transportation of the precious new device. I've had scratched and cracked iPhone screens before and I want to preserve this little goody as long as possible. The initial offerings from the Apple store were big and bulky -- taking all the sleek out of my mobile computing.

Fortunately, while in NYC, I found this mini briefcase which fits the iPad perfectly and can go anywhere. It's from Muji, a wildly cool Japanese home goods store.

Delish Dish in NYC at Amarone

2010-05-07T20:19:00.000-04:00

I met my dear uncle for dinner at Amarone in NYC on the advice of a colleague. The recommendation was broad and confident and our experience was wonderful.

They were willing to modify the menu pasta to give me one of my all-time favorites, Angel Hair Pomodoro. We devoured an appetizer and salad, entrees, coffee and dessert but found the maitre d' hovering for our two top table.

Depths of Depravity

2010-04-10T09:57:00.001-04:00

After all the snow, salt, and now pollen, my car was due for a major
sloughing. I took it to the car wash where they clean your car inside
and out. I only get the car cleaned this way a couple times a year and
each time I thank my lucky stars that I am not a car cleaning person
by trade.

Even though I made my trip mid-week and mid-day the place was packed.
I queued up in lane 3 and waited. Sometime later an SUV (why is it
always an SUV?) barrelled into a new fourth lane. She then proceeded
to cut off everyone waiting in the first three lanes to he next in
line. It was infuriating and when I caught up with her inside I told
her she had cut ahead of at least four other people.

So I was a little ticked but feeling better. That is until I saw The
Ridiculously Demanding Customer. The RDC was a blob of a lady who
looked more like she'd just rolled out of bed than I did. (And that is
really saying something.)

She had asked the cashier inside for dollar bills to tip. That's nice,
but also where we diverge. Since I only get the car cleaned a couple
times a year and I generally find it a thankless job, I tip
generously. Usually $5 or $10 on my $10 wash...

Depravity still to come...

No Need for Familiarity

2010-04-03T15:24:00.000-04:00

A new movie is coming and no matter what you do, you can't avoid it. The publicity is everywhere. I don't even really know what it's about an already it makes my cringe. See, I really like Tina Fey. But Steve Carell makes me want to move to a foreign country with few American tv shows or movies. I didn't really dig him on The Daily Show, and it's taken me years to be able to tolerate 22 minutes of his character on The Office. So I find myself annoyed that someone I would watch on-screen, Fey, is paired with someone I know would drive me nuts, Carell. Of course, I'm also not a fan of movies that are about a single day or night (though River Phoenix totally made me forget that in A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon). I tend to feel trapped in those minute-by-minute protracted stories. (Think Adventures in Babysitting.) So yeah, Date Night is not for me, but I'll still probably experience 400 ad impressions for it by the time it settles into video rental obscurity.

Anticipation Straight Up

2010-04-02T22:52:00.000-04:00

We went to the dog park today. Kirby is still on the leash for each visit. It's our version of post-winter training wheels for him because he forgets his dog manners over the winter months and we're trying to ease him back into society. But there's one thing he can't hide his excitement about: WATER. Today it was 80 degrees. That's an amazing feat considering a month ago we had three feet of snow. Kirby loved playing in that snow. But now, he wants water in all its liquid glory. He wants to run with the big dogs. Nevermind that most of them are the "wash and wear" variety where Kirby and Lexi are decidedly not. At the dog park Kirby clung to the fence overlooking the creek where the dogs play. He hovered at the gates hoping a careless dog owner would leave one open and he could escape into his aquatic nirvana. We felt plenty mean for not letting him dive in with the other dogs. He will get to swim with the big dogs soon, but we have to prep the car with the Dog Park Bag which holds enough towels to keep the dogs foul post-swim wetness relatively contained for the car ride home. Then we'll have to give him the first bath he's had in oh, maybe nine months. Even if we half-ass it and hose him down in the back yard it's still quite a commitment.

But oh boy, is it worth it to Kirby.

Waffle-Odes

2010-03-25T19:10:00.001-04:00

Ever since I got pregnant* food has been a tough subject. The first three months I basically survived on Honey Nut Cheerios. Now I find I have some interest in food, but it's definitely quirky. So tonight when we went to the fabulous Metro 29 Diner in Arlington, I wanted a Belgian waffle in the worst way. Once we ordered, I had a moment of regret wondering if I should have ordered the easier to accomplish pancakes. I even imagined how I might cautiously request that an undercooked waffle might be cooked to golden crispy perfection. But I was delighted when a picture-perfect waffle arrived at our table. "I love this place," I told Jac.

*Oh, did I fail to mention that? It's a boy! And he'll be here in September. Over. The. Moon.

Toujours Les Crepes

2010-03-21T11:19:00.001-04:00

We've been spending a lot of weekends in the city lately and with the long, snowy winter, spring pick-me-ups are the order of the day. For months I intended to get a crepe pan for our city house, but always managed to forget. Finally, I bought the only one Bed Bath & Beyond had to offer. I could hardly wait to fire it up for Sunday Morning Crepes. Predictably the first one out of the pan was an aesthetic disaster, but it tasted amazing. The more I made, the more I wanted to make. We devoured our first weekend crepes of the year and the next weekend I made them again. This crepe pan is sublime. It is a little larger than my previous pans and it is slick beyond belief, allowing the crepes to slide right out of the pan and into our bellies!

Spring!

2010-03-19T18:04:00.000-04:00

Spring is here and the artichokes have arrived at the grocery store. Today I made my first one of the season. Yum! Pure decadence. I watched a chef on tv cull the heart from a fresh artichoke the other day and marveled that anyone would waste the leaves. Sure the heart is nice, but it's so much better to get there through the tender, precious leaves.

Season for Change

2010-03-10T22:52:00.002-05:00

Kirby came home with us two years ago. When we met him I was pleased to discover his coat hadn't "cleared" yet. He was still a dark black color. As we got to know and love him, I secretly began to wish his coat would never clear, that he'd just stay black forever. I watched for signs of change. About six months ago I started to see little patches of grey in his coat. My sister, the groomer, said he was dirty and ill-groomed (oh yes, he was). But as this spring arrived, his color change became more apparent. He's becoming a true blue Kerry. And I find, I couldn't be happier. Afterall, that's what he was born to be.

Amalah Helps Solve Oscar Mystery for Me

2010-03-08T12:56:00.000-05:00

Meet the Woman Who Kanye'd the Oscars

Out of the Closet on Cake

2010-03-07T17:26:00.000-05:00

I have a deep, dark confession to make.

I don't love cakelove. I might not even like it. And that's pretty crazy considering how many of my bells it rings.

Warren Brown, owner of cakelove was featured on Food Network eons ago, then got his own series. I liked the initial profile - DC guy leaps from the rat race to follow his passion for baked goods. Love that! Also, Warren's kinda hot. Also, DC!!!!!!!! And finally, and you know this is no afterthought, freaking CAKE! And FROSTING! I mean seriously, what is there not to love?

My first bite into a cakelove cupcake a few years ago, I knew instantly what was not lovable: graininess. Every cupcake I've had from cakelove tastes and feels as though it were made with coarse cornmeal. After my first encounter with a cakelove cupcake, I wrote off the unpleasant mouth feel to my overzealousness to chow down on the cake before it had come up to the right temperature.

That's where we get to Point #2: Rules. cakelove has some pretty peculiar rules about its cupcakes. It stores them super chilled. I gather this is some sort of food safety code, but I've had other cakes and cupcakes before and maybe those zany, raw-milk lovin' scofflaws are cutting corners with frigid food temps, but their cakes can be eaten in roughly the same decade as they are taken from the store. cakelove says you should wait until your cupcake has warmed to room temperature. That's just, just, just crazy.

"Hello ma'am, won't you have one of our beautiful if grainy cupcakes?"
"Oh yes, I'm starved and that looks spectacular."
(Sinister laughter as cake is supplied.) "Excellent, now just wait 45 minutes, would you?"
<<>>

And yet, cakelove still beckons. I mean come on, they're popping up all over the DC area. How can you avoid baked goodness at every turn? So it happened that I gave cakelove one more try. I was in Tyson's Corner. I was starving (more on that later). I really wanted a chocolate chip cookie. I noticed cakelove had chocolate chip cookies. I bought some, along with two cupcakes. The cupcakes were (well one was the other is languishing on the counter - a high crime of dessert waste) grainy, as usual. But who can't manage a decent chocolate chip cookie? Who I ask you?

You know the answer. It is, I am sad to say, cakelove.

Seriously, if you put a cakelove chocolate chip cookie up against a three-day old Pillsbury slice and bake cookie, Pillsbury would win. And that is shocking. cakelove's texture: fail, no chewiness, just stale crunch. Taste: extreme fail, no salt makes the plastic-flavored chocolate chips taste both sweet and hollow at the same time. Plus there's a feeling that you just ate cheaper ingredients than they have at The Great Cookie (which I would rate an 8 against cakelove's 2).

Sigh. Where's a woman to get a decent baked good in this town?

Quality Time with the TV

2010-02-14T08:40:00.000-05:00

I work in marketing and there are plenty of times customers think they know what is best. Sometimes they are very, very wrong. Sometimes they'll say, "Oh no, we don't need a professional actor our CEO will do the speech." I can only imagine that is what went down when Bare Minerals talked with their ad agency about the infomercial I accidentally saw the other morning. I was caught between rubbernecking and looking away in horror. The creator of Bare Minerals appears in the ad for her product, at once demonstrating the profound need for her product and its shortcomings. Sadly, this was the best picture I could get to demonstrate what an unfortunate spokesperson choice they were making. I just couldn't watch it long enough to get the really scary shots. For weeks a local car ad starring the dealer has been haunting me (they run it during every Caps game). The guy has the most powerful unibrow since Bert and I am committed to bringing that bit of local tv spectacle to you, the reader. Stay tuned.

snOMG Romp

2010-02-13T11:48:00.000-05:00

snOMG Romp from Elle Kasey on Vimeo.

Lexi and Kirby had a blast during Snomageddon, Snopocalypse, snOMG.

What I Did on My Winter Vacation

2010-02-11T23:53:00.000-05:00

or Tomorrow Could Totally Suck...

As has been well-documented, the Washington, DC region has been experiencing winter for the first time in years. It's roughly 6 winter drought years all spilled out over one snowy winter. I love snow and snow days so I am pretty okay with the arrangement, would just like to do something about the other 6 years.

Tomorrow, the Federal Government returns to work, and my email, which has seen mere flurries of business marketing emails for a week is gonna get hit with a blizzard of OMGIneedthisrightawaytodaykthanksbye messages. I can already predict the subjects. But there are still 36 minutes left in Thursday, the day of CLOSED, before "Unscheduled Leave" returns. I am going to cherish these moments. It's just you, me, Anderson Cooper, three feet of snow, and memories of the long weekend.

Things A Person Could Do During A Snowstorm of Undetermined Duration
1. Dig Out. Jac handled this. Repeatedly and beautifully. Massive props to him.
2. Make Chex Mix with Crispix. Crispix is becoming my go-to cereal snack mix brand. Sure, we paid lip service to the Wheat Chex for years, but it was just too sad seeing their flattened, unflavored wheat-y ranks filing into the trash when all the good stuff was gone. Long live Crispix.
3. Brush, de-mat, comb, clip, dry dogs. Repeat endlessly. Realize there is much more work to be done.
4. Scan, shred and recycle paper. Apparently before I lived on the Internet I used to print everything out and put it in notebooks. I have scanned and purged hundreds of pages. Now I just have to sort the electronic files I created...
5. Finally move recipes from web to recipe software. I have one remaining pre-digital habit I've yet to break. I love magazines, especially ones with big glossy recipes. When I read leaf through the magazines I often dog ear the ones I want to ... okay here's where it gets wild... go on the web and download. Because the print version is so wonderful to read peruse but the digital one is so much more versatile. But the volume of recipes and tchotchkes I like in magazines far exceeds my cutting and pasting capacity so I take the magazine, find the recipe online, create a temporary bookmark with Read It Later and then later I come back and copy the recipe into my software which requires some tweaking for each recipe. The upside is that nine times out of 10 I can get the recipe and the great photo into the software with a few clicks. The downside is that some magazines are quicker than others to post their recipes online so I have to hang onto some magazines for months creating a clutter conundrum.... So, yeah, I put about 100 recipes into my software. Need any?
6. Watch so much weather coverage that your biting criticism of the on-air talent reaches new lows in inventiveness and humor.
7. Religiously (mentally) catalog the most peculiar behaviors of your most peculiar neighbor.
8. Facebook. Twitter. Apparently now I have to Google Buzz? WTF.
9. Argue over things like whether the tissues are "too far away".
10. Seven. That is the number of days I must be cooped up in my home before I will tackle the task of cleaning the pantry - the pantry where spices have created drifts to rival those outside our back door. I spent about two hours on it today. I got two shelves one and a half shelves into some semblance of order.

Snowpocalypse Cometh

2010-02-06T16:04:00.000-05:00

Days before the storm arrived, Kirby and I were brimming with excitement. He was sniffing the air with the same intensity with which I was clicking the refresh button on the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog.

My anticipation and unwillingness to "settle" for anything less than a monster snowstorm grew with every snarky "ThinkSpring" comment I read on the site. Dominated my weather geeks and snow lovers, a few wet blanket anti-weather (and a couple anti-science) commenters tried to drag the conversation down. But as the snow began to fall, this was shaping up to be a very, very good snowstorm. The Federal Government boosted it's early announcement of Liberal Leave with the news it would close four hours early. A short while later a behemoth company sent me an email saying they, too, would close early. Jac took the whole day and I made the bare minimum number of email checks and responses.

As weather watchers waited for the snow to pile up on Friday, the Spring commenters were surpassed by the, "It's a bust!" naysayers on the weather boards. Adding to the distraction from SNOW SNOW SNOW was the endless parade of drop ins who wanted to know if they were going to have any trouble flying into DC at the peak of the storm and trying to fly out the morning afterwards. Um, go ahead and try that.

There were the parents. OH the parents! They wailed that they'd had enough of their children. They claimed kids would be in school until July. They pleaded for the chance to shove their kids off into the towering snow.

But when all was said and done. The snow came down, piled down, and a hush fell over the land.

Snow Day in Arlington

2010-01-30T15:01:00.005-05:00

Another fine snow day. This time in DC.

Broadview Security Wants to Scare You

2010-01-28T22:30:00.000-05:00

I had a whole rant ready about these awful, sensational, should be illegal, Broadview Security commercials. But thanks to the wonderful World Wide Web I found that someone had already said it much more eloquently than I would have.

For the Love of Snow

2010-01-23T00:12:00.000-05:00

Just before Christmas, an enormous snowstorm loomed for the DC region. That Friday night we made a difficult decision. We would leave the city before the storm. Haha that worked out so well. We left the city at 6:30. It should have been plenty of time before the forecasted "bedtime" start of the storm.

A little while out of town, the traffic on I-95 slowed to a crawl. It took five and a half hours to reach the Northern Neck. The snow was coming down in sheets. When we pulled into our invisible driveway, I almost felt like I never wanted to see snow again.

And yet here we are just a few weeks later and I am fretting over every drop of precipitation that is not frozen. I missed the biggest storm we've had here in years and my snow-loving heart will not let me forget it.

Compounding my sorrow at each day without snow, we watch a lot of shows on the DVR. Unfortunately, sometimes I forget that they were previously recorded. So on a Friday night when the weatherman chirps, "Could we be in for snow tomorrow and Tuesday?" I begin to pant with desire until I realize he exists in the past and he was hyping a rain event that happened days ago.

So there is no snow photo to accompany this post. The dogs and I are just praying that we didn't miss our chance for snow.

Attack of the Asshat Spambot

2010-01-07T22:51:00.000-05:00

Aaaaack! I just spent the last couple of hours deleting comment spam from my blog. It was a Google userid with a spam blog, with I guess more than a hundred spam comments posted on this blog, all the same string of Asian characters. I've learned my lesson and turned on comment verification (which I hate incidentally). When I can get my act together I will hire someone to move this whole enchilada over to a less spam-friendly blogging platform.

Oh, and if you happen to be one of my friends, family or any sane person who has stumbled upon this blog, how 'bout signing even the Anonymous posts (even just to give me a clue of who you are)? Because otherwise? I'll get a comment like this one:

And I will start thinking which of my crack-ass friends would write such a backhanded compliment. Thanks imaginary frenemy.

Happy New Year

2010-01-01T11:43:00.001-05:00

Maddie is still sleeping off her New Year's Eve revelry. Happy New Year to you!

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T19:36:00.000-05:00

This display of holiday lights is courtesy of some folks on Rte 200 we've affectionately dubbed "The River Tefts" after a family that used to make Bowie, MD glow with light.

Snow at the River

2009-12-19T07:57:00.002-05:00

Breaking: But I Don't Like ALL of Them

2009-12-13T07:41:00.001-05:00

Now the disclaimers... The photo in the previous post is from our family collection, but we don't know who it is. Nobody will claim that old, uh, person. I'm inclined to pause and wonder if it's even a living person as there was a time when you might very well be photographed like that post-life. Everywhere lately I've been encountering what I less charitably call "Unattended Elderly".

In Target the other day I quickly approached an employee stocking shelves to get help, get a manager for the love of God because there was an old woman screaming bloody murder at the pharmacy staff. I eavesdropped plenty but I still couldn't detect what exactly was causing the enormous temper tantrum. I could tell she was old, had a lot of prescriptions, and MAD. Whether she was mad-mad or just mad, I dunno. Eventually the worker came back to find me and thanked me for getting his attention. But the old lady was still givin' them heck at the counter. Maybe she was a smidge quieter, maybe. She was definitely still haranguing. That's when I started to feel really bad for the pharmacy staff. It occurred to me that this might be an on-going thing. That they might suffer this customer every week or worse. Truthfully, they suffer some version of this customer pretty much all day every day I would imagine.

And that is what both saddens and infuriates me. There are people who've graduated from the rat race and when they're forced to dip a toe back in to get groceries, go to the doctor, drive--you know--anywhere in the left lane with their turn signal on at 25 for three miles, they cannot keep up. And I know some of them are just fiercely independent. They cling to their carkeys and their houses. And why shouldn't they, they lived through the Big D, the Depression that makes our financial woes look like a run in your pantyhose. But, really, how many of them just have no one to take over? No one to straighten out the trouble with their prescriptions at the pharmacy or whip through the express lane for them with the groceries they need. And then, for many, as we experienced when Lexi finally made her way into Therapy Dog work, will end up spending their days rolling a wheelchair out into a nursing room hall for some kind of stimulation. Or worse, gazing into their food plate until someone comes to take it away.

So yes, I hope for us that our minds and bodies will be strong together until they're not. I hope that we can stay as quizzical, engaged, in love and warm-hearted as Junior and Etta Grey were.

Breaking: I Like Old People Pt1

2009-12-12T07:06:00.001-05:00

It turns out, in a development that shocks me, I like old people. A very, very particular limited elite hybrid of old people whose leaders are Uncle Junior and Etta Grey. No one really calls him Uncle Junior, just Junior but thanks to the popularity of the Sopranos I now find myself piecing together that he is Jac's great uncle. And great he is.

"Ohhhh Lexus!!" Etta Grey would exclaim each time she saw our dog Lexi. She is a dog-lover. She embraced Lexi and I could feel the sense of relief she had having a dog back in her life after an absence. Each time she greeted "Lexus" she was renewed. And when we brought Kirby to meet her, she immediately dubbed him "Curly". Junior entered his eighth decade by plunging into the Internet. He had Facebook, wi-fi, and a laptop before many who are decades younger. Last Christmas we gave him a custom notebook for keeping track of his favorite websites and passwords.

As Etta Grey recovered from an injury in 2008, she sat perched on the edge of her car seat to give us hugs hello or goodbye. In the hometown of Jerry Falwell, she spied our Obama magnet on our car and exclaimed, "Oh! Whose Obama sticker is that?" Jac copped to the potentially inflammatory decal. "Well, good for you!" she squealed with delight and a pat on the back. They've been married for 61 years.

And then quite recently, Junior fell ill. He had a blockage which required surgery. We hoped that he'd have that and be back on his feet. Then news came that there was an infection and he'd probably need some recovery time in a nursing home. Then word came that there was a problem with his heart... and people started talking about "arrangements".

When I think of what I really want out of life for Jac and myself, it is to get through everything as happily as possible and to find ourselves on the other end of the timeline as warm, loving and adventurous as this one particular old couple we've known.

OMG STFU FB

2009-12-11T07:50:00.006-05:00

Facebook you are totally blowing my mind right now. The trials and tribulations are really more than Days of Our Lives ever had to offer. Just saw an ad for DOOL and apparently Bo & Hope's marriage is under siege again. I mean come ON!

There are old acquaintances you agree to "friend" on Facebook and then you (at least I do) get sucked into piecing together the big picture of their lives from shards of information they (and sometimes their commenters) share. Maybe it is the culmination of our overexposure - from the paparazzi and media delving into once dark corners of celebrities and "15 minutes of fame" types that compels the oversharing.

I just read both Julie Powell's reaction to critics and Sarah Palin's Op-Ed on the environment and I continue to be amazed and impressed that in the world of the web everyone is entitled to (as they say) everyone else's opinions. The media has started linking the fame seekers as though they were part of a group. (How long until there is a syndrome?) I don't know how many news reports about the Salahi gate crashers I saw that featured footage of the Balloon Boy family, the theme being what lengths people will go to for microfame... and the chance at actual fame, even if it's not for some noteworthy achievement.

But Facebook is as much about figuring things out for yourself and documenting them, for yourself and whoever pauses while scanning over your post, as it is about declaring who you are. I've said before that I'm glad I grew up when I did and we had as much web as we did but not what we have now. I am sure this makes me as antiquated as the grocery store check writer (Seriously, at least use your debit card!) I would not have wanted to have high school on the social network. It was already such a complex world, add in friending, de-friending, and relationship changes right there in black and white and that is hell as far as I can tell. And college oh my.

I am silently (and sometimes not so silently by "liking") cheering news that several schoolmates and friends are working on their degrees past 21. I'm stunned how much the children they now have look like the friends I once knew. I'm rooting for the people going through the tough times. Elle Kasey is overanalyzing Facebook.

On Becoming Caps Fans

2009-12-10T08:46:00.000-05:00

As I've said before, DC is a tough town. Washingtonians are a fairly serious people, on the whole. We're constantly derided for our lack of fashion sense, choice of local politicians, atrocious traffic, (until recently) for our dining scene, our summer and winter weather (too much summer swamp, too pitiful when it snows) and on it goes.

Traditionally, being a Redskins fan was a badge of honor. True Washingtonians hailed the Redskins no matter what their record. But, the last few years a shift has been taking place, and not just in the stripe of politicians we host. The action has moved inside to the Verizon Center in DC. From Olie to Ovie, the fans like what they're seeing.

I think we were about the last ones to discover what all the fuss was about. I'd seen hockey on tv before but it seemed so chaotic I couldn't get into it. And then a little thing called HDTV came along and suddenly the ice came alive. It makes such a difference that we grouse our way through any game we're forced to watch in standard definition. SD games look like the local high school football "Clip of the Week" on the local news. There are cell phone videos with more cinematic appeal than SD hockey games.

But the team's winning ways are at least as compelling as the pixels. We started watching games sometime last year. I fully admit we hopped on the winning team bandwagon. Jac and I had dipped our non-sports-lovin' toes into the water about a year earlier when we started watching Redskins games when there was nothing else on. We didn't go out of our way to catch them, but I think we were both looking for a little bit of community.

And then along came the Caps. Games are fast and furious. Even if you don't know the rules you can generally tell when someone does something good or bad. The games are quick (compared to a lot of other televised sports) and usually they're over by 9:30. So you can actually do other things on a game night in addition to watching the game.

A funny thing happened when we started identifying ourselves as Caps fans, hordes of people we know welcomed us into their club. My Facebook stream features almost as many Caps comments as it does Skins woes. The Caps community is maybe the best kept secret in DC. Who would have thought people would be so friendly surrounding a game known for its fighting.

Boston Outtakes

2009-12-09T11:01:00.003-05:00

I would imagine it's simply THE place for cowboy boots in Boston.

Boston Outtakes

2009-12-08T11:04:00.000-05:00

The Upper Crust - For Eyes

Ewww, bad juxtaposition there.

I've got a million of them people. (The For Eyes shop was located in the space below the Upper Crust shop above.)

Boston Outtakes: A Fitting End

2009-12-07T11:09:00.000-05:00

As I was coveting the too precious Petit Bateau children's clothes from across Newbury Street in Boston, I was charmed by the suitably-attired window dresser.

Bistro Bis - but First

2009-12-06T10:27:00.007-05:00

When we asked our waiter the meaning of Bistro Bis (pitting him against the iPhone for speed and accuracy) he returned with the corporate answer that this was the chef/owner's second outing after the wildly successful Vidalia and Bis means an encore. It was a clever name. It is a well-known and regarded restaurant. I have a few little questions about things, but the location excelled for the reason it was chosen, allowing a long, leisurely, audible and intimate brunch for my family on my Dad's birthday.

I was surprised to discover that Bistro Bis had sprung up right across the street from the Hall of the States building where I cut my teeth on national and workplace politics right after college. It's inside a Kimpton hotel, a fact my sister missed completely when she wondered why there was a fitness center adjacent to the restaurant's restrooms.

I ordered this: Tarte Flambé, Alsatian-style caramelized onion and bacon tart with fromage blanc and it was definitely not lacking in protein.

Then I ordered the Onion Soup Les Halles, described as rich beef broth with caramelized onions, sourdough croûtons and gruyère cheese and it was beautifully presented...

Jac had the steak and eggs with pommes frites...

My dad had crepes stuffed with chicken, onions and mushrooms (I think, it was a special.)

My sister had the French toast which I would have enjoyed. (French toast is a dodgy proposition for egg foes like me. It can be one of the least egg-laden things at breakfast or one of the most.)

And D had the Croque Monsieur, graciously accommodated from the listed Croque Madame.

The food was good and the restaurant beautifully appointed, but at least from this outing I wouldn't compare it to the meals I had at Vidalia at its prime. We had dessert as well, I may revisit that course in another post so stay tuned!

Snow Frolic

2009-12-05T12:33:00.001-05:00

It's the first snow of the season and the dogs are as happy as can be.

Boston Those Wacky Outtakes

2009-12-04T08:58:00.001-05:00

Location... it's the name of the game of course. Naturally one would assume that a company called Newbury Prime Realty Corp. would have cornered the market on exquisite environs in Boston. I was surprised to find it lurking below street level surrounded by concrete and safety cones. I guess it is a really tough market out there.

24 Hours - All Whirlwind

2009-12-03T08:42:00.000-05:00

Woosh! My work peaks at the craziest times. Right now everyone's eyes are on the holidays. They are trying to crunch a 13th month into half of the 12th one. So whatever I need to give them needs to be done in half the normal month minus one full imaginary month. My mind is going a mile a minute. From old customers to potential new customers to reconnecting with all the people I hope will help us in the coming year, it is a busy time! So why is my brain filling every molecule of space with new puzzles? I've been exploring Google Wave, VOIP, trying to fix Firefox which wants to forget my bookmarks every day, stalking cyber deals, learning a new craft, devising a new shipping system for Santa's workshop over here, and other mfffph projects.

Google Wave is described as "what email would be if it were invented today instead of 40 years ago." I do sometimes run up against the limitations of email - like when an attachment doesn't do what it's supposed to on the other end or when someone muffs a distribution list. There's an 80 minute video just to explain what Google Wave is so you probably have plenty of time before it goes mainstream. That is, unless someone assigns it to me in the next two weeks...

Oh Yes, It's the Boston Outtakes!

2009-12-02T10:21:00.001-05:00

We both observed an unusual phenomenon during our trip to Boston - and the Northeast in general. Everywhere we saw construction it was accompanied by law enforcement keeping watch. We've all seen police shepherding traffic around intersections under construction, but these guys were hanging about ALL manner of civil construction including every open manhole. (Uh...buh dum bump?) Seriously, everywhere they were lingering. In Boston, I wondered if it was some sort of byproduct of the Big Dig or whether there might be some sort of color-coded alert I wasn't hip to, but nah, I think it's just the way things are done.

Edison, New Jersey is What Happens When Google Maps Does the Plan

2009-12-01T10:08:00.000-05:00

Whoa, I hope I didn't startle you! Our New England escape was winding down. We were returning to function over form. That's how I chose Edison, New Jersey for the last stop on our trip. I had been playing around with Google Maps for weeks and during our trip I tweaked the plans one last time - moving our last stay from Connecticut to New Jersey so we'd be a skosh closer to home for the last leg of the drive. We arrived during the continuing rain from the remnants of Hurricane Ida. Our Courtyard Marriott (trying to rack up the rewards points here people) was off the turnpike...just. We had simple needs that last night, edible food and a tv showing the Caps/NJ Devils game. We found both in lovely Edison, New Jersey.

After checking in we trolled for delivery options but soon surmised we'd have to venture out in the rain again. We found a mall-type area where I captured the two images that made this post so worthwhile. Yes, Jac had been on a seafood bender, but even he couldn't bring himself to sample the Chicago Pizzeria Uno lobster sliders. I was jonesing for pumpkin anything, but their pumpkin tiramisu was out of my league. After a fair number of screw ups from our bumbling waiter, we downed some pizza and headed back to the hotel.

The Caps lost badly and we were on the road before the hotel's coffee service started in the morning. In fact, we were out of New Jersey before the sun came up...

Travel a Little More with Us

2009-11-30T07:56:00.000-05:00

You know how delighted your dog is when you find that precise spot to rub her belly? The glee she has? That is how my husband tends to react when I reveal that a trip to a casino is on our agenda for the day. We were looping the Northeast and Foxwoods jumped out from the Google Maps. The largest casino in the world! The web exclaimed. If we bypassed the largest casino in the world and my husband found out about it, I think he would never speak to me again... or at least for an hour.

But visions of crusty Atlantic City still dance in my head so I wanted to do Foxwoods right. At one point in planning I thought we might stay overnight at the MGM Grand, but that conflicted with the Second Law of Jac - bite-size driving requirements. So we dropped into the MGM Grand at Foxwoods on our way south to New Jersey. He would say our trip to the slots was rewarding. I'd quietly remember that I had made that second trip to the ATM when my pockets emptied.

I had hoped to get a meal at Craft Steak at the MGM Grand, but they - and every other sit down restaurant save one were closed for lunch. That is how we ended up having lunch at Junior's, an offshoot of the original Junior's Restaurant in Brooklyn. It was lunch but I should have just ordered breakfast. I would have been a lot fuller when we left if I had. But it was kitschy and open.

22 Bowens in Newport RI

2009-11-29T09:15:00.003-05:00

Right about now, my husband Jac is realizing that our getaway to New England may have had three different stated purposes but was actually keenly planned to generate a month's worth of posts for Magniferous. He would not be wrong to deduce that.

In Newport, RI, after our tour of the town and The Breakers, we settled in for dinner at 22 Bowens on the waterfront. The restaurant was cozy and romantic - as demonstrated by the number of anniversary couples around us. After days on the seafood tour, I was ready to create my own steakhouse experience. Jac was just ready for more oysters and lobster. We each got precisely what we wanted. Every bit of our meal was sublime from the setting to the quality of our entrees. We had lulled ourselves into that sweet spot of vacation where you forget, for a moment, that a return to real life is looming.

I can usually produce at least a passable image of our meals with my flashless photography once I tweak it in Photoshop, but my shots from 22 Bowens are a lost cause. I hope the restaurant will indulge me in the use of their website photo since I'm relaying our praise-worthy experience in their cozy restaurant.

The Breakers in Newport RI

2009-11-28T15:31:00.000-05:00

In all of our outings over the last (almost) decade, I can count a handful of resounding successes in planning. Our first year I somehow chose the most temperate and lovely dates for an evening Orioles game in Baltimore and a weekend there and in Annapolis. On our honeymoon, I insisted on braving the line at the original Lady & Sons (Paula Deen) restaurant in Savannah and our reward was a heavenly meal. On our return from Boston, I suggested we offset the rainy, yucky afternoon with a visit to The Breakers, the Vanderbuilt mansion. I guessed it the most grand of the town's palatial residences and we popped in out of the rain with just a few other visitors.

The estate had already been dressed with some holiday decorations. There was a strict no photography policy backed up my security cameras in each room. The tour is conducted on individual audio players. I haven't taken a tour like that since the ancient corded phone tours of the Smithsonian and was pleased that the experience has been significantly upgraded. You could spend hours and hours on the tour if you listened to all of the optional "for more information" tracks.

It was a grand house, very aptly named. The sound of the sea breaking against the shore on the veranda inspired some very good branding. Although I treasure the life I have, I did swoon a bit with envy over the idea of life in that fine home. If I had to live in a time before wi-fi and central air, then I would take The Breakers, happily. The dining and kitchen areas were extraordinary and must have supported the most lavish dinner parties this Martha-wannabe can imagine.

It's opulent and over-the-top to be sure. Any "home" with gold walls falls into that category. I had to appreciate the foresight of the home's owner when the audio tour mentioned one room's walls were bedecked in platinum. You can have my platinum card, I'll take the platinum walls.

Anyway, the visit to The Breakers was a perfect diversion for that blech, rainy day. We were transported from bleak and grey to a world filled with marble, velvet, silk, platinum and fine crystal. And the gift shop was well above average for that type of landmark.

Happy Thanksgiving: Slacker Edition

2009-11-27T21:12:00.000-05:00

Work and play were so frenetic leading up to Thanksgiving that we fell into our holiday non-plan plans. Returning from our trip to New England I had a mad deluge of work stuff to tackle so it was all I could do to email Jac lists for the grocery store to stock the house for a Thanksgiving feast for two. I was able to work ahead a little bit because in the 50-50 gamble of whether Thanksgiving Eve will be a day of completely insane customer demands or a complete cricket sound-filled ghost town, this year I wound up with the latter.

Our menu included favorite dishes for each of us: turkey*, mashed potatoes, drunken sweet potatoes, green been casserole, Nana T's stuffed mushrooms, gravy (totally from a jar I confess I haven't mastered gravy), fluffy rolls, stuffing, Nana T's cranberry conserve, canned whole cranberry sauce and a perfectly overspiced pumpkin pie. (I laid on the ground cloves a little heavily but it woke up the standard pumpkin pie recipe quite a bit.)

Turkey*: I would be chopped from any cooking show that required me to cook turkey for chef judges because the words "moist turkey" are anathema to me. It's not that I want to consume turkey jerky, but in the weeks before Thanksgiving the words "moist turkey" roll off the tongues of tv food personalities with such frequency that I start to see soggy undercooked turkeys dancing in my head. The less resemblance my bird has to slimy deli meat the better. Afterall, what better way is there for gravy and cranberry devotees to ply their preferred condiments?

A Day in Newport, RI

2009-11-26T08:13:00.001-05:00

My travel strategy is complex and littered with personal preferences we've learned about traveling together in the last (almost) decade. He will want seafood, good beer, magical "finds" that have been carefully staked out on the internet. I will want a steady pace of new things to see and do, reasonable walking demands, a general PLAN of what the day holds. I've also learned that Jac is happiest when our driving is minimized. So our trip to the Northeast was broken up with stays up and down the coast. On our way back, everyone said we should stop in Newport, RI. I was trying to get us to Mystic, CT as well, but our driving day coincided with the arrival of the remnants of once-Hurricane Ida.

Newport was utterly charming. We checked into the Newport Marriott along with Aunt Chatty and a screaming baby who were part of a wedding party that had descended upon the unsuspecting town. All the way up in the elevator Aunt Chatty made me want to claw her eyes out, but once we were settled in our room, our new neighbors, the screaming baby, encouraged us to get out and explore.

It was chilly and raining so we ducked from shop to shop in the tourist end of town. Jac picked up a ducky slicker for cheap and then we could explore a bit more. We grabbed lunch at a little spot that might have been forgettable except that it was Andy's fourth lobster meal of the tour. For some reason it had the best lobster sandwich from Edison, NJ to Boston and back. I'll take his word for it. You can try it out at The Wharf Pub & Restaurant For me the culinary highlight of the afternoon was getting four slices of fudge (including the delectable, elusive penuche). I also ordered maple walnut fudge that somehow got swapped for plain chocolate when she boxed up our order.

Flash's Cocktails in Boston

2009-11-25T16:57:00.007-05:00

Flash's Cocktails and our evening in Boston with my cousin E gets its very own post. I had searched for an interesting bar in Boston (one that didn't have tee shirts that claimed everyone knew my name). I found Flash's Cocktails and when we arrived I was pleased there was a 20-30something mix. Okay, it was skewed a little toward the Gen Y set but we didn't feel out of place dragging our aged carcasses in there after a long day in the city.

I remember well when my cousin E was born. She's 12 years younger than I am so it's kinda wild when you meet up again as grown ups. Our clan of cousins spans a range of about 30 years so we have lots of mini-generations among us. We had a great time catching up and getting to know each other again - Facebook and IM can't hold a candle to downing a couple of drinks together.

And the drinks, they were fun and tasty. E says she's still wondering where else she can get a drink with gummy bears in it.

Boston and Onward

2009-11-23T09:41:00.000-05:00

By now we were in full vacation mode, shamelessly photographing tourist sites and contemplating the purchase of fanny packs. ;) (Trust me, the emoticon is the best way to convey that sentiment.) We wisely made a driving tour of some of Boston's best sites to save time, our feet, and because our little Garmin Nuvi made it fairly straightforward.

We went shopping on Newbury Street where we found a few Christmas presents. Jac again found himself wrapped up in Newbury Comics so I wandered the street and texted him my coordinates as I made my way to DeLuca's Market on Newbury Street. When we'd passed it by car I thought it looked like it was cool inside and when I got there on foot I was delighted at the array of goodies inside. It's tiny, but there are lots of unusual foods inside.

And we had dinner at Dino's an Italian restaurant whose primary selling point (initially) was that it was near our meet up spot with my lovely cousin E. Like most of the places we dined in Boston the house was pretty empty, which was all the better for us.

I finally got to plunge into pasta will Jac was able to continue his one man seafood tour. I would go back to Dino's. Everything was good and the waitstaff was exceptional.

Boston: Still!

2009-11-22T07:13:00.000-05:00

We intentionally traveled mid-week at an off-peak time so we could have a laid back trip. We wanted to enjoy our trip and weren't desperate for MAX VISITS as much as good visits. Since I was already frazzled about the pitiful internet situation at our hotel, I was delighted when we settled in for a leisurely breakfast at Brasserie Jo.

Jac had a tasty omelet with home fries and toast.

I had granola with fresh fruit and was a little surprised that someone would pair pineapple, melon and grapes with granola. I ended up having it as two courses - first the fruit salad and then the tasty granola with milk. We happily could have returned the next morning, but we wanted a meal on the go then. I was instantly jealous of the restaurant's wi-fi though I notice the Colonnade Hotel (home of Brasserie Jo) website makes no mention of wi-fi in rooms...

Boston: Part Three

2009-11-21T08:59:00.003-05:00

The View from our room at the Boston Radisson

I am going to whine. We've already returned from our trip and I am now surfing the web from the comfort of my easy chair sans wires, but I still can't get over the nights I spent at the Boston Radisson tethered to the wired in-room Internet. Never again will I book a hotel without ensuring they have (preferably "free") in-room wi-fi. The hotel write up said they had wi-fi and in-room Internet and so I subjected us to a couple of days without a major creature comfort. I am so used to this amenity, and I was expecting it, so when I found I had to constantly rejigger things so that a) we could both get online and b) I could get in some remotely comfortable position, I was extremely annoyed. It's insane that it's 2009 and every Starbucks (and many McDonalds) in the country has wi-fi but for $200 a night I can't get it at the Boston Radisson. When I panned the connectivity in the post-stay survey I got a response from the hotel that wi-fi is coming to rooms in 2010. (They should have color tv in 2012.)

Seriously, as 2009 begins to draw to a close, I am starting to get amazed that high-speed Internet access isn't MORE readily available. If you asked me in 2000, I would have said that I would be certain by 2009 we'd have high-speed web everywhere. Sure, I have my iphone...

A Trip to Boston: Part Two

2009-11-20T17:54:00.001-05:00

We arrived in Boston a little earlier than our hotel check in so we made a beeline to Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market to check some tourism off our agenda. Quincy Market is so similar to Baltimore's inner harbor shopping I thought I'd traveled through time and space.

But we went to Durgin-Park and had the obligatory Boston dishes - Boston baked beans, lobster roll, and oysters.

Oddly enough, the first dish of beans the waitress brought me were black and brown and undercooked. She came out a bit later and replaced that dish with a fresh one that seemed a lot more like baked beans. She was sent out with the new beans and was curious what the heck they'd done to produce that odd dish. It's kinda wild that they'd get a signature dish wrong. Our meal was good, but reliably touristy. The highlight of our lunch for me was that we were seated to the back of the room where the waitresses gathered to gossip. It was a treat to eavesdrop into their world for a little while.

We wandered around the market. The Crocs store was probably my favorite spot since I've never seen that many Crocs in one place and I still love Crocs despite their uncoolness. Jac enjoyed Newbury Comics.

Plowwwww Through It

2009-11-18T19:04:00.003-05:00

We had a lovely trip to New England. Unfortunately my blogging ability has been hindered for ages - first by a crazy primitive form of wired Internet connection and then when I returned from our trip with outrageous back pain. I went to the doctor the day after we got back and she said I had a trapezius muscle spasm. Any motion from the left side of my body evokes a stern, "WTF do you think you are doing?" from the knife between my shoulder blade and spine. Finally, work is really, really busy. It's a good thing, but a bit difficult when I'm operating without the most effective 20% of my body. (I'm left-handed.) And don't even get me started about having the moxy to lean forward! What am I out of my mind?

I had an appointment with a doctor on Tuesday. I drove to the hospital complex where the office is located. There are four parking garages - they are by color, but let's just say they're DC, Chicago, San Francisco and Honolulu. I figured my appointment was in San Francisco, so I headed into that garage. I wound down floor after floor behind one of those guys who wants to check every single spot is full until I reached a detour to the Honolulu garage. I entered Honolulu and wound down a few more floors into some dark recess in the Earth. The clock was ticking, I was either supposed to be there 15 or 30 minutes before my appointment to do my paperwork, but I had pre-registered online (even filling in the most complicated info twice after a spontaneous reset of the page), so it should be a breeze...

So I get out of the Honolulu garage and look at the paper (yes, that antiquated form of data storage) and now I think my appointment is in Chicago. But when I ask, "You can't get there from here," was the honest answer I received from a desk clerk. Getting to Chicago involved going upstairs, crossing through a breezeway while the girls behind me discussed the fact that it was a breezeway, getting into another building, going down the stairs to get to an elevator to the third floor... Where I discovered that my appointment was actually in DC, not Chicago. Now it was back down the stairs and outside - eff this crazy maze.

That's when I started thinking I would just bail on the appointment. I mean if it is THIS hard to get to her office! And my next appointment was at 3:00. I was starting to doubt there was anyway I could get to the next time zone, fill out paperwork or read People magazine, meet the doctor, and then get all the way back to Honolulu in time for the 3pm meeting. Huff, I pushed on, as my left shoulder felt like it had detached from my body entirely the two parts held together only by the blade of steel that seemed to be wedged in my back.

I got to the office and announced I'd pre-registered. "Did you bring your print out?" What?? You computerized everything to get rid of the paper and now you want a print out? Didn't I just put all the data in your computer system? So, unbelievably, she handed me six pages of blank forms and set me to work again.

Now I will digress even further, because you see, I used to love my handwriting, but now I would rather type than write. I loathe filling out forms because I always over think them, "Responsible Party?" What does that mean? "Policy Holder?" You mean that's NOT me? But I have a card with my name on it? So the writing that went down on those forms after I'd hauled my hind end all the way from DC to Honolulu was full on Resentment Handwriting. I was triumphant when the nurse, upon receiving my scrawl, said to the other woman behind the Wall of Glass, "Can you make this out?" Ha! Ha! Take THAT!

Anyway, the reason this picture is here is that our trip to New England pretty much began with Jac declaring, "OMG, they put the road right through that mountain! Instead of going over it, they just went right through it!"

Knitty Kitty

2009-10-29T01:27:00.000-04:00

Today was a day where I stayed up late working, went to bed and couldn't fall asleep - in some ways aided by other creatures in my bed who were dream destroyers. I then needed to wake up early to get back to work. Suddenly I have to write three kind of important documents in the next 5 days. When I am in the midst of them the work is kind of fun, but I am the type who has trouble cracking the book open, and no trouble plowing through he work when I get in there since I do enjoy this type of work.

I went to knit night tonight and was so glad. Those ladies are just lovely and our evenings are so comfortable and free of stress. We even had a dizzying selection of gourmet cupcakes to make it super super great. I arrived with a hat and left with a scarf. The hat I had been knitting would have fit Dumbo and I am aiming a bit more for items that will actually fit my friends and family for this holiday season.I love the pattern I've cast on and hope the recipient enjoys it too.

I am eager for the arrival of sleep tonight -- too many nights of too little sleep. But there's just one more pair of hurdles to get over tomorrow and I will be sailing into the weekend.

Requiem for a Decent Meal Part Two

2009-10-27T11:15:00.001-04:00

Sometimes, when you blog, you can paint yourself into a bit of a corner. My multi-post stories can be a little like that. Best to be pithy and succinct. Get it all out but try not to use a million words. But when I last talked about dinner in the Northern Neck, I was right there in that corner staring out at confining paint all around.

See, "the River" is worthy of nurturing. Our beloved escape is so wonderful in part because it is undiscovered and unrefined. We bemoan the silly snobby "Come Heres" who fret about not being able to find a "decent meal". You didn't come here for the meal, trust us, it was something else.

So when someone makes an effort to do something new (for the River) at the River, it's a big deal, and one I think everyone hopes will succeed. But when those ventures fail, oh how we long for what they could have been.

I have been spending a lot of time reading Chowhound reviews of Boston restaurants and the snooty foodies on there decry Boston dining as positively backwater since everything on earth is better in NYC. I just chuckle and add more Boston gems to my trip plans. If those Chowhounders found their way to Seven in White Stone they would never ever stop snarking about it. (Uhh kind of like I'm doing now.) Our meal at Seven has been so memorable that I am fearing every bite of meat now that it could be as atrocious as the last bite of Beef Stroganoff I had at Seven. I am pretty picky about where I'll eat meat, so I only remember one other time that I've had beef that dreadful. It was a refrigerator section ready made pot roast that I served Jac years ago and it was gross. I think the Seven bite was worse. I will try to spare you the worst of it, but imagine wrapping several sheets of unflavored gelatin around a bland slimy piece of beef. I warned my waitress that I'd spit out (what I could) into my napkin.

What ensued at our table was a lengthy discussion of Sysco Foods - the provider of supplies and prepared food items to food establishments everywhere. I am certain most of that Beef Stroganoff came out of a food service bag, but I don't know who to pin that bad beef on. So Seven isn't on my list of places I want to go for dinner in the Northern Neck. (My dessert was barely thawed cake.) Unfortunately there aren't many other choices there for now. To the experienced, adventurous restauranteurs out there I say: Beat a path to the Northern Neck as soon as possible please. And when you get here keep those Sysco orders reasonable. Make us most of what you serve, don't re-heat it.

Butternut Squash Pasta

2009-10-26T09:48:00.001-04:00

Jac is definitely a hunter, not a gatherer, when it comes to food. He'll take fruit of the sea over fruit of the tree any day. The Atkins Diet would be like a wild bender for him rather than a hellacious nightmare (as it would be for me). So squash night isn't too frequent. I try to space them out until the memories of the last one are just faded enough that he can't protest, "But we just had squash on Wednesday!"

But I love butternut squash. I didn't have it until college. I even secretly think the first time I had it was at a Golden Corral buffet. It came in the form of a fried nugget. The insides had turned into creamy golden goodness. Butternut squash is so decadent I can scarcely believe it doesn't come with a hazard warning.

I made us butternut squash with pasta in an herb cream sauce. I didn't measure as I cooked (bad blogger!) but for two servings I would estimate: 1/2 butternut squash, cubed and roasted until soft (about 45 minutes at 350 degrees); 2 tbsp butter; 1/2 cup milk and/or cream (I mixed skim milk and half & half); 1/2 cup ricotta cheese; 1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese plus topping; 1/2 tsp parsley; 1/4 tsp rosemary (but I would have preferred sage); and salt and pepper to taste. I cooked the pasta and drained it. In the pasta pot I warmed the milk, butter and cheeses. Then I returned the pasta to the pot and coated it with the cream sauce. Lightly toss the squash with the pasta and top with freshly grated parmesan cheese.

This One Commercial Part 2

2009-10-25T19:50:00.001-04:00

When we last met I was rambling about the Chase Sapphire commercial where Molly spends an awful lot of rewards points on a stupid dress while her husband is fantasizing about touring the Cote D'Azur by boat.

I was just about to confide that last week we got a letter from Citibank raising the interest on Jac's Citibank card to 29.99% otherwise known as thirty percent! We carry a balance which is a good thing for a credit card company - they make money from us! We pay on time. We have been customers for a long time. And now we're closing our account.

Twitter was all aflutter about the Citibank rate hike. (#badcitibank) I watched breathlessly all week as the news nets decried "fees" from the credit card companies we all just bailed out. I waited for a story about this insane usury but there was none. (Lo how twitter is so much more relevant...)

Anyway, we had been on a mission to use points as we earned them for a while. Credit card companies have been slashing benefits and devaluing points by upping the exchange prices for a while. When the letter came in we began to abandon ship. It is infuriating that closing the account will have a negative impact on his credit score.

So the economy is in the tank, and credit card companies are going bananas in advance of the enactment of the Credit Card Reform Act. Chase is legendary on Consumerist for its abusive practices. Americans are taking staycations and supposedly discovering that "less is more". But in Chaseland there is a beautiful and magical couple who only have opulent desires. I mean, haven't they seen Real Housewives? All the Real Housewives are downsizing, getting evicted, filing bankruptcy, not marrying Big Papa...

The Chase Sapphire ad is the most wildly off-tune ad I've seen since McDonald's declared, "I'd hit that!" They've got Americans over a barrel right now, but eventually things will turn around and I hope we all remember then what insanity they put us through now. And then we go buy ourselves foofy dresses with cash.

This One Commercial

2009-10-25T19:32:00.000-04:00

Something about the Chase Sapphire commercial that has been running for months has really chapped my ass, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Actually, I was putting my hands all over it. Every time I saw it (which was often because I watch a lot of basic cable) I found something else to dislike about it.

Breaking News 24/7 says "Chase Card Services, a unit of JPMorgan Chase & Co., said Wednesday it will now offer a rewards card designed for wealthy customers.

The new card, called Chase Sapphire, is designed for the top-earning 15 percent of U.S. households. It offers travel services, access to round-the-clock customer service and a rewards program." A scant bit of research puts a goodly number of dual-earner Washingtonian households in that target audience. In a fit of craziness it might even theoretically include mine. (Laughing uncontrollably.)

First there was the nagging question: Who is that woman? WikiAnswers had had the incorrect answer -- Julia Roberts. Someone corrected it to say Molly Culver of VIP (with Pamela Anderson) fame. I thought she was a model. Anyway, there's that vague familiarity breeding a little contempt.

The premise is a whole lot like a Cyalis ad only substitute a hella expensive dress for a suspiciously handsome middle aged guy getting his schwerve on with his wife on Saturday afternoon.

Molly prances in like a second-grader with her new Easter dress. She is tilting and hinting at her pricey smock. Meanwhile, like the disembodied head from so many drug ads, her husband is recounting the finer details of Chase Sapphire. See, her husband wants to tour the world with the points they racked up at Le Bernadin and she's giddy about her secret -- she blew their points on a dress. A freakin' extremely ordinary dress. Am I the only one who thinks this is completely effing crazy? Fortunately the Internets had the same response.

So Molly has a new dress and that is stupid. Point One. But also, this commercial is a perfect example of stereotyping by opposites (I just made that up) that is so rampant in advertising. It's when you see some characters interacting and they're clearly playing (a very intentional) opposite to some historic cultural or advertising stereotype. In today's commercials the wife is always scolding the stupid oafish husband about cleaning/health/travel, the black guy is always the informed best friend cluing in his doofus white dude buddy, and the woman is always the doctor giving credibility and weight to the value of the pharmaceutical product. It's the archetype of Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens, Family Guy... It's not that the wife, buddy, doctor wouldn't have authority in real life; it's the heavy-handedness of the roles.

I automatically reverse the roles in my head when I hear them and am often startled at the idiocy they imply. Doing it backwards doesn't make it right. How about being a little more clever and developing some new paradigms for advertising?

But back to Chase Sapphire - which is airing this very moment - Molly has blown all their points (Enough, her unsuspecting husband thinks, for a sweet vacation involving motorcraft.) on a stupid dress. Molly's done this behind her husband's back - like the Drapers would do. They must be the modern-day Drapers ("You have everything! And so much of it!"). Chase Sapphire offers all the standard credit card rewards - gift cards, travel, badly priced shopping options. Who, in this suckalicious economy, is blowing their rewards points on a dress? We just cashed some of ours in last week on our dreadful (and soon to be closed) Citibank card...

The Not-Nice Girl

2009-10-22T02:15:00.001-04:00

When I was a little girl, someone from school remarked to my mother that I was just the most cheerful thing. I smiled and said hello to everyone. I still have some of that girl, but these days I can find it more difficult to warm up to someone I know than someone I don't.

Our neighbors at our old house were the devils incarnate. They pushed us around and we were young and polite and put up with more than we should have. I wanted to like my new neighbor but soon found that they shared the "my property rights extend as far as my eye can see" philosophy in the middle of the city that my old neighbors had. I was polite and laid low. A thousand disturbances and inappropriate "requests" were met with pleasantness and civility. When they crept across the property line, we gnashed our teeth but decided not to start World War III over it. When they nudged us to pay for a pricey upgrade that was somehow on the property line they'd just squatted right over, we complied rather than get into it with them.

And so today, when I got home and discovered that Amazon had utterly inexplicably shipped an order of tea to my house with signature required and that the delivery had been attempted during two of the whopping four hours I'll be away from the house this work week I was peeved. Knowing I will miss the second delivery attempt was extra special. When my stamp printer ran out of labels and "ate" a couple dollars worth of postage and forced me back into the endless line at my post office, I steamed. When I couldn't watch either news channel because they were both so inane and third hour of the Today Show-esque, I sighed.*

Cut away to a scene three weeks ago when our other neighbors who have a monster gardening fetish and matching contract had a gardener walking around with a leaf blower. Gardener fine. Leaf blower fine. Gardener who uses leaf blower in 100,000 on/off pulses in an afternoon you are going to destroy that thing, but not soon enough. Jac and I remarked to each other about how unthinkable it was that a leaf blower could be made exponentially more irritating, and that this guy had somehow found the way. (Aside to the aside: I am not talking 30 second pulses while he moves a pile and goes to gather more, I am talking about a rhythmic pulsing of the leaf blower like a blender gingerly cracking one ice cube at a time - for an entire afternoon.)

So when our nearer neighbor hired that same pulsing leaf blowing guy, I didn't even have to look out the window, I knew. And when Jac got home from work I thought just commiserating with him would be enough. But for the 100 other little inconveniences this day it might have been. I opened the door just to peer out, to see when the hell this madness might end. Before my head knew what my feet** were doing I was out the door on the way to kindly suggest to the gardener that he might be ruining his equipment.

Only I was sort of charging apparently and I had failed to notice the neighbor standing in her yard (duh of course I believe we have covered the fact that the neighbor lives in her front yard how could I forget that even for a moment) and I traipsed right past her. "What's wrong???" she demanded. Shit.

I kind of suck at artifice. I mean I can tell a good story but I generally have trouble concealing the truth. Particularly when it is sweating out of my pores like garlic. I told her I had never heard a leaf blower operated in such a manner and it was driving me kind of nuts. I was dumbfounded when she responded with all the entitlement I'd always presumed she had that it was only once a year and he was almost done and no (of course mother earth goddess that she is) she does not like leaf blowers and no she hadn't heard anyone use a leaf blower quite like that either but effyouverymuch (implied). I looked at the leaf blowing gardener. I stammered something non-noise related at my neighbor. I walked home.

And the thing is, for all the thousands of times I have wanted to change the behavior on my neighbor's property, this is the first time I have ever said a word and yet I was received with all the indignation of a perennial pest. So my intuition is validated. My resentment is redoubled. There are some people on the playground who just can't be won over with that little girl's cheery disposition. I hope they get an irresistible job offer in Timbuktu.

And I come away from it like a clumsy lover who knows she accomplished nothing. I had no sense of relief or victory, only the feeling that it had unfolded all wrong.

*Not that hours one and two are remotely watchable. Is there a fourth hour? Hell I don't know. (Avarice with Kathy Lee!)
**Odd since generally my head must make numerous increasingly threatening demands to my feet and ass in order to get them to go forth boldly.

It Was a Long Day in October

2009-10-13T23:24:00.001-04:00

Right now the sight of Logan from Gilmore Girls, Christine Baranski and Julianna Marguiles on my tv is one of the most delightful parts of this long, long day.

I went to bed late last night, too late. I thought I'd sleep in since my commute to work consists of the living room floor. But Jac's day started off rough - he'd misplaced his keys. He usually does all of his morning stuff and gets out the door with me none the wiser. Not this morning. Holy moly those keys were so elusive. Finally I turned on the lights and there they were. He dashed off to work, but sleep was gone.

I woke up to wall to wall Rush Limbaugh on the morning news shows. You would think MSNBC had stock in the man. Blech. That's not a good way to start the day. Then a customer who'd recently tried to find greener pastures emailed all in a tizzy over something their boss had determined while we were working for them. I sent off a response and haven't heard back. Then I tried to print postage for some stuff we'd sold on Amazon and wasted some cash.

It'd be nice to have that cash though, because Jac recently acquired some phat dental work. I'm talking about his second gold crown. Seriously! That freaking dentist put a gold crown in the man's mouth a year or so ago and Jac went back for more. I am married to Flavor Flav. I could point out that this is the same man who nearly ripped his own dental work out when he discovered a dentist had given him a silver filling instead of a white one. Now he's chewing with gold nuggets and he isn't outraged. Our lovely dental bill arrived today and I got the damage for the well, damage they did to my husband.

Without going into detail, I also got my own confirmation of the state of the economy and lending crisis today when we learned tapping into your equity is not the free-flowing party it once was. That was another fun part of the day.

I also had to begin plotting my revenge for the utterly outrageous Virginia driver's license I received in the mail yesterday. Curse those terrorists (real ones not DMV people) for screwing up our driver's licenses. Now we have to have these crazy "no smiles" black & white "natural" pictures. Next time I am wearing a burka. The DMV chick had chatted with her co-workers the whole time I was there, taking a good twice as long to do each task as it would have taken me, completely un-oriented, if I'd hopped behind the counter to do it. I know there are good, hard-working DMV employees but lo you were not at the South Arlington DMV last week. So out of nowhere DMV Lady says something chuckle inducing. This prompts me to lose my perfectly practiced sleek chin pose and scrunch up my face and nose, blow out my cheeks and turn my eyes toward her. I know this because I will have a lasting image of that for the next TEN YEARS. Thank you deranged slacker shecky DMV Lady. Thanks soooo much. I look like Joan Cusack in Sixteen Candles.

Since I'd had little sleep and I needed to be on top of my game for a late afternoon marketing meeting, I thought I would try to sneak in a cat nap. You would think working from home napping would be a common thing. But it's far more common for Jac to come home and find that I am still wearing yesterday's clothes. I have not been to the bathroom since 10 and hell no I have not touched the dishes or the laundry -- I'm woooorking. So it was with an almost clear conscience that my head graced the pillow and my eyes closed. Of course six minutes later when my cell rang my boss wanted to chat and schedule a redundant meeting for later in the week, I sprung into instant wide-awakeness.

So I put all the Amazon stuff out for the mailman. I was doin' all that risky home postage printing for the sheer and utter joy of handing off packages to the mailman instead of hauling them to the post office. But no, he left all my packages sitting on the front porch untouched. I was in for a trip to the post office at the crossroads of the world.

I love my neighborhood. I love living in a diverse metropolis. I do however wish that we had an orientation system for the post office. I feel like I never go to the post office, but when I do, the same people are always there. There's the guy who wants stamps, wants to know about the future of stamps, wants to get stamps that are not kept out front but in some secret cache in the back under a heap of postage due fruitcakes from 1987. There's the woman who is not going to understand what he means by "Do you want to require a signature?" no matter how loudly or slowly he says it. There is the guy who just moved who goes to the counter empty-handed for a change of address form who will fill it out standing at the counter. And I will be waiting behind all of these people with something that simply needs to be handed to the postal clerk. (All set, postage, labels, good to go.) And while I am gnashing my teeth at how there should be an express lane for handoffs only, someone will charge to the front of the line to ask a couple dozen questions and then end up filling out a form next to the address change guy. And yes she wants stamps. What do you have in a Love stamp? Are there any new designs out?

Requiem for a Decent Meal

2009-10-09T21:06:00.002-04:00

It was my dear husband, Jac's birthday. My parents invited us to Seven, a martini bar. I had apprehensions about Seven from the first I heard of it. Seven is inside the White Stone Events Center in White Stone, VA. I am telling you this now because I doubt you're going to want to find out where it is later.

Seven just looked wedding reception-esque. (Not my perfect reception or that of any of my friends or family whose weddings I ever attended, ours were all perfect.) It looked like a community center hall, rented by the half-hour and loaded with 8-top rounds covered with cheap but durable tablecloths.

See here's where I start to feel guilty. I feel guilty because my beloved Northern Neck is determined to field a home team. We don't have Applebee's (thank all that is holy). We don't even have a Starbucks. The Northern Neck is homegrown to the point of suspicion of all things "Come Here". It is at once charming and bedeviling. I love it because there is one stop light in my county. I love it because the biggest traffic jam I'll be in all day is two people deep behind a 147 year old lady who can't find her bonus card in Food Lion. Indeed, I even love the absence of the dining scene that inspires my cooking and blogging the meals I make at home.

But when we do want to go out, say to celebrate Jac's birthday. It is a dreary endeavor. For a bit more than a year, the "scene" (if you can call it that) was boosted by the presence of Swank's on Main. It was a little outsider. It was definitely pricey for what you got. It was pretty and clean and new and gourmet inside. And now it is gone. To be continued...

Planning a Trip to Boston?

2009-10-04T22:08:00.000-04:00

I am and let me tell you, we'll be heading straight to Ristorante Toscano because "A TripAdvisor Contributor" has taken many females there.

A Wonderful Wedding in the Palmetto State

2009-10-03T15:00:00.001-04:00

Hmm, I don't think I'm down with the Palmetto State as a moniker but maybe that's just because palmetto doesn't feel conversational. But South Carolina, you are a lovely state. You are also edging ahead of Virginia in progressive state symbols after all we still have a bizarre 1850's minstrel song as our "state song". Headdesk.

We went to South Carolina for cousin JJ's wedding and it was a beautiful day and she was a beaming bride. I think my favorite sights of the day were her kids tearing up the dance floor and my cousin Joe getting hopped up on OJ from the OJ Fountain! OMG an OJ Fountain has to be the best thing in the world to a four year old. Heck, if it were Coca-Cola or champagne I'd install it in my foyer. Or as Jac would say in my fwayayyyy.

She Said We'd Like it None of that Tex-Mex Junk

2009-10-02T09:34:00.002-04:00

To be honest, I love Tex-Mex. Give me white meat chicken and goopy cheddar cheese and I'm a happy girl. I'm sorry I know I'm ghetto. But I'm proud ghetto.

We went to Rosa Mexicano in National Harbor. It was a bright respite on a cool and rainy afternoon.

Half the fun of coming to Rosa's is the table-side preparation of guacamole to taste. As a child to who dreaded the annual (and very public) gym class skin-fold test I learned that avocados contained lots of fat. Back then there was no distinguishing between "good fats" and "bad fats" like there is today. I tasted avocados and rejoiced - it was a "fatty food" that I could very happily live without for the rest of my life. It was like God had taken spinach and pureed it with 2/3rds warm ice cream. Blech.

Fast forward 20 years and now there are "good fats" only they happen to exclude the fun fats in most cases. But I now had a free pass to re-examine avocados. Okay, not so bad, and you get to surreptitiously nosh them with chips or tortillas. I can support that.

In addition to the tortilla soup and guacamole above, our party tried the enormous and tasty short ribs: Tablones / Short Ribs, 18 oz. of grilled boneless beef short ribs served with a mestiza sauce (tomatillo-tomato-chipotle) and rajas (slow-cooked Mexican peppers).

We tried the Alambre de Camarones / Shrimp Brochette Grilled shrimp marinated in a garlic vinaigrette over house rice with onions, tomatoes, serrano peppers and roasted tomato-jalapeño-caper sauce.

We had to have sides of plantains but I find queso fresco wildly forgettable.

I ordered the beef Mole de Xico / Beef Two soft corn tortillas filled with shredded chipotle beef, topped with Veracruz mole made with raisins, plantains, hazelnuts, pine nuts and mulato, ancho and pasilla chiles. Garnished with crema and queso fresco. This elicited a quizzical "Have you ever had mole before?" from my waiter. What do you read my blog and know that I like Hershey's chocolate and cheddar cheese and therefor have a completely unrefined palate or something?? Yes, I'd had it before. This mole was spicier than I remembered but that just meant Jac was happy to devour the leftovers for lunch the next day. It was one of the most beautiful dishes I've ever been served. (Don't be deceived by the poor lighting.)

Rosa Mexicano is a beautiful restaurant. It was getting dark out by the time I remembered to snap these pics so you can't see the lovely views of the Potomac here. You'll have to go there yourself.

Autumn - A Love Song

2009-10-01T16:11:00.000-04:00

I am a Fall fanatic. What is not to love about autumn? The temperature has regained its civility. The days are not too short and not too long. The food is a-may-zing! The arrival of October means our birthdays are on the way and the best holidays of the year - the Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas trifecta are just weeks away.

We have Halloween plans for the dogs of the house, but they'll stay under wraps for now. What? Oh dressing up our dogs? Yeah, but only once in a while and only if there's a compelling reason like All Hallows Eve.

I've already made apple crisp and it was so heavenly I can't wait to make it again. I was inspired to toss a couple of waning graham crackers into the crust and I was transported back to the delectable apple treat Roy Rogers used to serve up in a little red tin when I was a child.

Ahhhh, Fall. You are here. Stick around. Stay awhile. We've missed you. It's been far too long. Sit a spell. Have a cup of cider.

Boulevard Woodgrill

2009-09-30T07:00:00.012-04:00

I had lunch with a colleague and I got to pick the spot. Jac and I always mean to go to Boulevard Woodgrill, but we often end up somewhere else. I like the ambiance - it's got an open kitchen and it sits on a corner in bustling Clarendon. I'm not always in the mood for city chaos, but it was perfect for a long leisurely lunch.

I had the woodgrill steak salad. It's not often that I order something exactly as written but it was just as I'd make it - greens, steak, blue cheese and ranch (Is that even legal?) and what is that? freaking fried potatoes on top!

My dining companion had uhhh wrap that is not listed on their online menu. Do I have to start writing things down? It's not enough to subject everyone I ever dine with to photography of their meals now I have to write down what they are eating too? I think it was a tuna wrap but there's only a chicken and avocado wrap on the menu. It's purty in any case.

Desperate, I'll Say!

2009-09-29T09:15:00.000-04:00

Yikes! I'm all for mature women in Hollywood getting lead roles. I don't know if it is the faces themselves, the makeup or the composition of this promo for Desperate Housewives, but they are looking downright scary. Is ABC turning the once (still?) popular show into yet another show about vampires? I thought only teen vampires were supposed to be sexy.

I Got Buns Hon'

2009-09-28T08:20:00.001-04:00

I would rather bake bread from scratch than go to a grocery store in the city on a Sunday. Fortunately these buns from AllRecipes are absolutely fabulous. I made them a few weeks ago and then again this week. They complement Jac's request for Sloppy Joe's perfectly.

Instead of actually following the recipe, I just melt the butter and throw everything into the bread machine to form the dough. Then I remove the dough, separate it into rolls and let it rise for an hour or so. Then I bake them as suggested. The leftovers are delish the next day warmed with butter and a drizzle of honey.

Das Vettest Oktoberfest

2009-09-27T12:49:00.001-04:00

We had tickets for Das Best Oktoberfest this weekend. The forecast called for a 70% chance of rain during the day and a 100% chance of rain Saturday night. The forecast did not disappoint.

We've been to several events at National Harbor this year and I think Jac and I both give the notion of a day at the harbor two enthusiastic thumbs up. The event website said "everything is tented" which was encouraging if a complete and utter lie.

We met up with the lovely D and wended our way through OMG IT'S RAINING traffic to the harbor. We arrived and entered a long line for entrance, but were pleased that the organizers had their act together and it moved pretty quickly. Once we got in, we were pleased to see a lot of tents since it was raining by this point. Unfortunately they weren't linked in anyway so we got out our umbrellas and proceeded to begin juggling the desire for beer and food with the desire not to be soaking wet. That was pretty much how the day went. Fortunately people are very gregarious once sated with beer and mass quantities of German food (though it may have been the other way around.) We made our way to a big tented hall and made merry with strangers.

I take a lot of pictures of random people and scenery for Magniferous and my prodigious tweeting habit. I hate it when people catch me in the act. Then I come home with a picture like this where she is clearly thinking, "WTH are you taking my picture freak girl?"

Best Little Furniture House in North Carolina

2009-09-26T15:08:00.001-04:00

Jac is a "make good time" kind of traveller. Even when we are walking around some new destination I have to remind him "This IS what we came to see!" We were headed to South Carolina for my cousin's beautiful wedding. I started perusing The Google for interesting places to go weeks before our journey. But Jac would have none of that. "It's already a seven hour drive, isn't it?" Also, we were going to have two fluffy but needy dogs with us so he planned an all business drive.

The day before we left, a funny thing happened. Jac said there was one place he wanted to visit on the way. I braced myself for the name of a comic book store.

"I would like to stop at Red House Furniture in High Point, North Carolina." What? A furniture store? Then he showed me this: GO TO YOUTUBE. (Do it, you really need to.) I agreed it was good viewing, but wasn't too sure about the stop at the furniture store.

We walked in and headed straight to the counter. A couple of the guys from the commercial were there and they were happy to offer us tee shirts and other goodies for sale. We shook their hands. I wanted to buy a sofa, strap it on the roof of our car, drive it to South Carolina, attend a wedding and drive home. I liked the furniture store that much. Alas we had to settle for tee shirts this trip. Next time though.

An Afternoon in China

2009-09-13T21:49:00.000-04:00

I confess to not being the most adventurous eater in the world, the house, or possibly even this chair. But this weekend I felt like branching out a bit and giving a new (to us) Chinese restaurant a try. I have very bizarre criteria for Chinese food. I am, as previously disclosed, obsessed with Chinese pancakes. I checked out Chowhound and perused the posts labelled "Authentic Chinese Restaurants" for somewhere new and discovered a mountain of praise for Hong Kong Palace in Seven Corners.

Hong Kong Palace is one of two Chinese restaurants in one small row of a strip mall. When we stepped inside all signs pointed to good food ahead. It was nearly two in the afternoon but the place was packed. The clientele was buzzing in Chinese. They had those zodiac calendar placemats.

The specials on the wall looked impressive if completely indecipherable to us. The specials wall is the most ornate decoration in the cozy restaurant. Our waitress nodded approval when we declined an offer of utensils and picked up the Chinese menu over the American take out version.

I knew I wanted to try scallion pancakes.

I'm always on the look out for good vegetable dumplings.

Jac is a wild and crazy guy so he'll order something like "Spicy Wonton" without any description. We're thinking pork.

He does have a favorite dish though - Kung Pao anything. So he got Kung Pao Shimp & Chicken.

And then I discovered possibly the most incredible of all Chinese dumpling foods I've had in my life, the mythical Sesame Ball which I will now commit to memory by its proper name Jien Duy because when you hang with people like you guys you don't go around saying "I love Sesame Balls" lest you be mocked for all eternity with witless puns.

Our waitress asked if I'd had them before and then explained that they are served at New Years celebrations and told us how they are made with rice flour and white and black sesame seeds. I will try Stir-fried Green when we go back.

She also told us she is from the town in China "where pandas come from" which www tells me is Sichuan. I gave her ... oh hell, confession...

There are business cards for Magniferous.com. They were inconceivably cheap from Vistaprint.com. I give them to anyone who will willingly put their hand out. Panhandlers sometimes do not like this.

I gave her a Magniferous card which has yarn on it because in theory I am a knitter not just a clever observational humorist. (P.S. Wishing a speedy recovery to Garrison Keillor.) She asked if I knit and then told me that her mother used to make her panda sweaters which was about the cutest thing I could imagine. I told her that my mother made me panda cupcakes when I was little because of Ling-Ling and Sing-Sing who were the pandas at the National Zoo. She liked that a lot. There was a lot of bonding going on. Jien Duy will do that to you.

Nine Nine Oh Nine

2009-09-09T13:33:00.000-04:00

Jac's mom had hip replacement surgery today. It was a repeat performance. Last winter she was put under for the surgery and had a major complication, heart failure. Fortunately they fixed her up and after many months of physical and drug therapy she was ready for Round Two. Early this morning they took her in and swapped out some parts. The surgery went quickly and smoothly and they'll try to have her walking this afternoon. We are all grateful and relieved.

Jac and his sister saw a blood drive at the hospital scheduled for tomorrow and they both signed up to "pay it forward". He is a heckuva guy. He's type A- but I'd give him an A+. Awww.

Back to Work

2009-09-08T23:58:00.000-04:00

It was another glorious holiday weekend in the Northern Neck. We had friends down for a visit which meant floating in the pool and marinating in the hot tub and playing Foodie Fight and having general merriment.

We took the dogs to the Irvington Farmers Market. As usual, Lexi was delighted to be in the company of Brand. New. People. Kirby was, well, less enthusiastic. The highlight of the trip for me was just before we left as we stood at a booth and Kirby lay on the ground panting. Suddenly, children approached! With grabby hands. And he had nowhere to go! So he laid there and took it pretty much like a man. He got petted by little people! And he did not melt like the Wicked Witch.

Now that is a good day in the land of the rescued Kerry Blue Terrier just after his second birthday.

Spectacular Flop: Kitchen Fail II

2009-09-02T09:16:00.000-04:00

I have had a yen for plum cake all summer long. I suppose I've been seeing them on blogs. I'm pretty sure I saw one in Everyday Food this summer. Plums just sound heavenly, you know, atop cake and all that.

But I didn't have the wherewithall for cake making. Or even pie making. What I did have was a box of rolled pie crusts. Oh, I know, I'll make a crostada.

Before

After

I do not entirely blame myself though, for as this was baking my mother says, "Oh, a plum crostada. That sounds fattening!" So you can see, clearly, there was subterfuge at work.

A Book and a Cover: Kitchen Fail I

2009-09-01T07:52:00.001-04:00

What are you making for dinner? My sister IM'ed. Simultaneously I said, "I'm making minestrone for dinner." I blame this meal, that Jac described as "interesting", on my Kolbe tendencies toward being a planner and a quick-start with poor endurance for solid follow through. (Really that's what it said! Right before it said I should be a creative organization's leader. Then I liked it again.)

I had garlic, carrots, onions and asparagus and broth. I had two kinds of beans and a couple cans of tomatoes. I picked up shell pasta especially for the minestrone (though it's not technically a requirement). The first sign of culinary laziness emerged when I decided to chop the onions and carrots in the food processor. I did at least pulse them and not process them into oblivion. The goal was to create an especially small amount - say 2.5-3 portions. That was the rationale behind using only a bit of the beans from each can. That is why I boiled what seemed like just a smidge of pasta... But then, just as the soup started to come together, I must have thought about updating my status on Facebook or catching up on Twitter because when I got down to business I found I had a too-small pot full of pasta, a tiny bit of beans, a gloppy sauce, indiscernible onions and carrots and uncooked asparagus. I attempted some remedy, declared it pretty, took a picture, gave it to Jac.

Interesting.

I admit I felt the same way. I carried the remainder of the heaving pot to the compost bin and willed it to break down quickly.

Happy Anniversary Vol VI

2009-08-31T08:05:00.000-04:00

Six years ago today, on this bluff overlooking the Great Wicomico River, Jac and I were married. Where on earth does the time go? I feel lucky that the memories of that day have crystallized and are forming a warm patina.

Today we are more of what we hoped to become and it seems this is so with each progressing year. Life reminds me daily how lucky we are to have each other. And, when I still manage to forget, he is there with a knowing smile, a well-timed IM, or the willingness to let the dogs in/out for the umpteenth time today.

DC Restaurant Week: Art & Soul

2009-08-30T09:13:00.001-04:00

The lovely Lisa invited us to join her and husband for a Restaurant Week dinner at Art & Soul. It was planned a couple of weeks in advance so it was wonderful to see a decadent night out pop up on the calendar. Art & Soul is the creation of Chef Art Smith, known for his relationship with Oprah and a recent too-short stint on Top Chef Masters.

Art & Soul is in the Liaison Hotel. Now I shall plunge into full-fledged fan mode and say that at least from the peek inside Liaison looks like one of the more ideal places in staid Washington to have a liaison. It's like a different world in there.

We stepped into Art Bar in Art & Soul and it had the kind of comfy, cool vibe, even earlyish on a Monday or Tuesday night, where I'd actually hang out. The food was very good. Jac and I were a little disappointed in the entree because we had somehow psyched ourselves out for fried chicken and a baked chicken threw us both off a little.

Pull-Apart Herb Bread

Capitol Hill Salad

Grilled Shrimp with Succotash and Chili Lime Sauce

Chicken with Goat Cheese Drop Biscuit,

Roasted Vegetables and Chicken Gravy

Chocolate Cheesecake with Chocolate Sauce

We were happy to check it out and I'd gladly return to the hotel, bar or restaurant. I am going to have to deconstruct that herb bread and make some soon.

P.S. I just noticed I dined with Ghandi over my shoulder. It was prix fixe for RW, but on another night he might have inspired some restraint on my part, mayyyybe.

A Saturday Kind of Thing

2009-08-29T13:14:00.003-04:00

I think I have seven open windows in Firefox right now. I have to blog from Safari because it's just easier with the account I use. Right now I'm watching mourners leaving Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's funeral. I just spent an hour trying to figure out who was engaged in a Mommyblogging fight last June (08) because all the people who commented on a fight where Sweetney tweeted about Mrs. Fussypants being "parasitic" wanted to veil the identity of the parties involved. I'm still not done investigating what went down but it seems pretty ridiculous and exclusive that all these bloggers were concealing the identity of the accuser. I started looking at this craziness because I was reading Dooce's post today where she mentioned that she had once wound up in a spat with another mommyblogger and I couldn't figure out WTF she was talking about so I had to search for her and a fight and voila it's a year ago and someone else is tweeting about another someone else.

Oddly enough, in my digital adventures, this little bit of cliquish research immediately followed me watching the Kennedy funeral while reading the tweets about it online. Way back in the 80's I think I thought Sen. Kennedy was a punch line, a caricature. But I have developed a deep respect for his life's work while being amazed that it ever took place because of the egregious and seemingly insurmountable moral and ethical failure of Chappaquidick. It's a very foreign notion to me that he would have been able to just go back to work after that. In today's world the scrutiny and pressure would seemingly mount to push him from office. I say seemingly because Larry Craig is serving out his term, and Gov. Sanford is still in office as I write this, and John Edwards allegedly had an affair and a child and that wasn't what derailed his political campaign. Clearly, Sen. Kennedy benefitted from his family's influence and affluence. He got breaks "mere mortals" wouldn't have.

But I was struck, throughout these past days by the number of people who said he had called them on the telephone. I hate the telephone. I cringe when it rings rather than reach for it in anticipation. But he was from another generation where the telephone was an indispensable tool as the web is to me. He called everyone and in his government service he believed he was working for the good of everyone. So as I read the tweets during the service this morning I was "following" those who had something insightful to say and "blocking" a few who said outrageously hateful things.

Last night I was frustrated and handed out the same sort of "pats & darts" as it was known at JMU reading comments on websites about the heinous crimes of Phillip Garrido. I physically felt ill when I read that in 1976 Garrido had abducted a woman and taken her to a mini-storage unit, walls lined with carpet and filled with sex abuse accoutrements. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison PLUS 5 years to LIFE for various crimes. This was at least his second trial - he had been convicted of some felony a year prior but no one yet knows what crime. After 11 years, he was released from prison.

Then a slew of prostitute murders and the murder of one young girl occurred and the bodies were dumped near where he worked but he was not investigated. They are now researching a connection. Then he abducted the unfortunately named Jaycee Lee and kept her in bondage in his back yard. And yet, people knew. It was reported to the police that girls were living in his back yard. He had a parole officer who apparently never looked at the property where he lived. He was called "Creepy Phil" by the neighborhood. His customers and family knew he was "off". He committed a parole violation, was caught, and instead of being returned to prison for the rest of his original term PLUS the new offense, he was released in just a couple of months. Police had come to the house at one point and interviewed him on his front porch, never exploring the property when his conviction stemmed from hiding a woman in a box! He had a blog where he claimed superhuman powers. He was a registered sex offender, which his neighbors knew, but as delusional as he was, he was able to keep his demented set up for 18 years. God only knows what other crimes he committed. I am outraged at the failure of our justice system in this case. I wonder how many other people in this country are held in captivity. It truly makes me ill.

So where does all this rambling leave me? We all think we know what justice is. It is as plain to us as the nose on our faces. It is the denial of truth, honesty, freedom, security. Yet accusations of mimicry or intellectual property theft on the Internet provided plenty of room for interpretation and defense on both sides. A case of manslaughter so clearly seen by one side is as ludicrous to the side that focuses on a man's life's work as their beliefs are to their opponents. And I read with astonishment the diversity of opinion about fault and criminality and causality for the heinous crimes of Phillip Garrido. Where one would decry the state of the justice system another would insist that the miscarriage of justice was intentional, political. It is dizzying, and heavy.

I return to my refrain that it is August in Washington, for the love of God. We cannot take heavy. Our air is plenty heavy with heat and humidity. I have a nice light but fattening restaurant visit to detail in an upcoming post. I'm looking forward to a return to our regular programming.

Guy's Night

2009-08-20T18:33:00.005-04:00

Jac is out with a friend which means I have the house to myself tonight and dinner on my own. It's a strangely liberating feeling when it comes about which is crazy because I usually work from home. Nonetheless with an empty house I indulged in one of my ultimate guilty pleasures - roasted brussels sprouts.

What? You think a plate of vegetables is not an indulgence? Well then you, clearly, cannot smell my kitchen or feel the temperature in this house right now. Roasting vegetables on a 95 degree day is most certainly a guilty thing. When done right their intense King of Vegetable flavor gives way to a sweet nutty taste that I cannot resist.

So I am munching on sprouts and angel hair with Gruyere and watching last night's premiere of Top Chef. That's just how rowdy it is on Girl's Night In.

Sprouts: quartered, tossed lightly in olive oil and salt, roasted at 400 Convection for as long as it took to boil 2 cups of water for the pasta.

August is the Boring Month

2009-08-20T08:12:00.001-04:00

Somebody should have told My President's administration that August is not "debut a new initiative across America month". It is HOT. People are out of vacation time. They are grouchy. They are running out of three day weekends. My old boss used to take the month of August off -- and she worked in Public Policy! (That's government people!)

I don't know how the mythical beast of Obama communications has fallen so low. I mean health care is a sticky wicket but this is some crazy ess going on out here! The message has been so manhandled and the people who are supposed to be communicating it all seem to be in Argentina looking for trails or something. I mean granted, when the fringe are claiming the president isn't an American and carrying guns to rallies, and comparing the notion of providing healthcare to people who don't have it to Nazis?!?!?! Where do you go from there? I mean what can you possibly say.

So I have to admit, after what's already been a long, frustrating summer politically, when I saw Barney Frank tell a woman toting an Obama as Nazi drawing that he had no interest in talking with her because it would be like talking with the dining room table, I laughed. And then I smiled. There is so much fervor being drummed up to make us afraid, angry and hostile. That laugh expelled a bit of built up venom and drew in just enough light that I could remember that we are among the luckiest people in the world to be able to fight freely over whether or not to provide health care. We are very, very lucky. Most of us are, anyway, and hopefully we'll remember that when the instinct is to guard our kitties and fend off any threat of change. And a grand round of thanks to Barney Frank for saying what so many of us feel, but in far more polite terms than I would, that these screaming fringers are non-sensical and aren't advancing the conversation.

These last couple of weeks when my dog was diagnosed with Cancer, my unswerving determination was that she would have the best care, that I would find a way to pay whatever it took to help her, and that we would get through this thing. I think everyone who encounters a life-threatening illness feels some version of that, "I am important! I want to live! I want whatever there is that can help me!" I remember the privation, many years ago of not being able to take extraordinary measures to heal the heart of my then kitten. When life and money are put up against one another, for me, at least, money seems so trivial.

Earlier this year I provided some technical assistance to a Facebook friend who was trying launch a campaign to help fun the treatment that her friend's son needed because he was having many seizures and heart failures. The insurance company deemed the needed treatment "genetic treatment" and not covered. The needed funds were less than $35k at the time if I remember correctly. That would cover the treatment and some continuing care. They should have that treatment and my heart broke at the thought that they had to resort to cyber begging to attempt to fund it.

We are Americans. We're not Europeans or Canadians. We're going to have American health care. We're going to fight it out and something will come out of it. And when we get sick we are still going to believe, "I am important! I want to live! I want whatever there is that can help me!" and that's not going to change whether we're dealing with a shitty HMO bureaucrat or a shitty government HMO bureaucrat. And when we can't get what we want, we will do what Americans do, we will make a huge stink about it and fix it. We'll use our three branches of government to end up with a system that serves us. And if BOTH the commercial health industry and the government option fail us, we will come up with an alternative. That's our nature.

I Vote We Lose Wednesdays

2009-08-19T23:00:00.003-04:00

It feels like another long week, but it's only Wednesday. It really feels like tomorrow should be Friday, but alas, it's going to be a fairly busy Thursday. At work this week I had to learn about wild futuristic technology and then write a 20 page white paper on complex techie stuff (hello non-science person) in about 36 hours. What I wrote about is totally not classified, but I think it calls for a drink or five anyway.

That said, I do kind of love that next week I could be plunging into basically any subject matter. I have researched and written about so many things sometimes I think I'm still in a 300-level essay-heavy class. It's both fun and tedious. They tell me (har har) that after exercise one experiences a high - like gee that was hard work, but now I feel great! I think this is like that but also think that the exercise people were high to begin with the whole exercise business in the first place.

What is sure to be the highlight of our week was my trip to the vet with Lexi yesterday. She had her stitches removed. Now all the Cancer and all the stuff that was around the Cancer is gone. She is gonna make it. She could not be happier. I could not be happier. Kirby cannot sniffing the vet smell on her. We will be vigilant. We will watch for other peas that do not belong under her skin. We will love her and she will have fun. So, yeah, pretty great.

But Not TOO Mad, Okay?

2009-08-16T21:44:00.000-04:00

Tonight we welcome back our sterling acquaintance, Mad Men. I don't know when Sunday night TV became such a big deal, but it is. As a kid Sunday night meant a Disney movie, scrambling to finish neglected homework, and collapsing into bed.

As an adult it means re-setting the house from whatever went on over the weekend, finding something clean to wear tomorrow, debating whether to pre-empt Monday morning email bombs by checking in on Sunday night or letting them blow their fuse on time, and wondering how many weeks there are, approximately, from now to retirement.

It also means tv. Since at least the Sopranos it's meant the treat of quality tv at least one night a week. Something new, above the fray, riveting. Sopranos episodes always ended with me feeling three things: OMGdidthatreallyjusthappen?, wow 54 minutes went by fast, ugh it's time to go to bed we have to work tomorrow.

For us, then came Six Feet Under where we found characters gruesomely twisted in a whole other way. For what should have been a depressing subject - afterall every episode started with someone's demise, it was a show with light and depth and quirks and humor. The actors were so riveting they seemed larger than the show.

From that we leapt to Big Love. I was instantly intrigued by the concept of a fundamentalist sect of Mormons who were still secretly practicing polygamy. I was compelled to watch by the presence of the brilliant Jeanne Triplehorn. Alas, the characters were so real, and Chloe Sevigny's deceptions and manipulations so toe-curling that I found I was stressed watching each episode. There were crushing debt, and manifest lies, and layers of complexity of truths and alliances and a lot of characters. It was kind of like being in a really stressful office on a Sunday night. When I stopped asking to tune to it, Jac didn't even ask why.

He merrily pounced over to Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Criminal Intent was less stressful because hey, they usually show you who did it in the first minute, and it's not the tough, gnarly crimes my man Ice-T is tackling over on SVU. So, a little hint of smartness (you know when Goren is all omnipotent and Eames lets him explain to her, an experienced and venerated detective, the criminal mind). But then Bobby had a story arc with his mother being sick and with the evil and omnipresent Nicole Wallace. It was...the dreaded...dramatic tension!

Dear TV:

I hate Dramatic Tension. I think she has no place on your show and wish you would ship her out on the bus with Paula Abdul. Of course even Ryan Seacrest's pointless pregnant pauses exist simply to create dramatic tension. Dramatic Tension stresses us out! If Hawkeye and BJ could have just hung out in the swamp with occasional visitors instead of wet blankets Frank and Charles, we could have had a little respite from the travails of the 4077th.

If Bubbles had just BEEN a competent assistant providing Edina and Patsy with what they needed instead of leading them into predicaments we could have just had a fine old time having some drinks and finding things to get us into our trousers.

But really, I have to go back to Nellie Oleson and her meddling misanthrope mother. If we could have JUST let them pass through Walnut Grove there would have been a good deal less strife all around!

I suppose you will say that we wouldn't appreciate the characters if they didn't have moments of great peril and exposure thanks to these difficult people, but I'll admit they stress me out on a Sunday night when I already can't imagine that the weekend's winding down.

This year in Mad Men it's 1963, there has been a heap of tumult going on at Sterling Cooper and all hell's about to break loose out in the real world which they've largely been able to avoid. The teasers say this is a season of change. Change is a tricky word because its connotation is subjective and incidental. I hope it's as painless as changing my oil or we could resort to changing the channel. Oh who the hell am I kidding, we'll be there for every deep drag on the cigarette to numb the insane reality moment of it. But we might need one of Roger Sterling's double cocktails to get to sleep after each episode.

Our Kitty's a Winner

2009-08-13T08:13:00.000-04:00

I'll get that mouse if it's the last thing I do!

It's quite hard to believe since we tell her 836,487,815 times a week to quit crying, to get down of that counter right now and to wait until later for breakfast/dinner/treats, but apparently our little Maddie is quite a winner.

We got a call that our picture of her dangling over my (old) monitor has won the Northern Neck Animal Welfare League photo contest. She is a cutie, a crazed, lunatic cutie.

Queen of Spain Rocks

2009-08-12T12:50:00.001-04:00

I should have known the Queen of Spain would have just the right things to say on this health care scare-a-thon:

Read her here.

Dog Days of Summer

2009-08-11T12:36:00.002-04:00

My outdoor thermometer says it's 90F outside right now. I wouldn't know because everything over 82F seems like 100 to me. I truly loathe these days of the year. In Washington hot comes humid and I've contemplated running for Congress for the simple luxury of leaving town in August.

When you are a "grown up" as apparently I am these days, summer is such an odd entity. We don't have kids yet so the traditional markers of "the end of school", "back to school shopping" and "the first day of school" are completely absent from our timeline. They give the summer some context. We've temporarily replaced them with trips, visitors, and concerts. They help as little landmarks to get through the long, gross summer, but there should be MORE.

At least after summer as a kid I got a heap of new school stuff. Since I had a mad affinity for all things organizational and pen and paper it was a wonderful windfall. I think that was part of my thinking in choosing a wedding date at the end of the summer. Our anniversary is August 31. So after a steamy August we have an excuse to spoil ourselves and celebrate.

Still, if you gave me the opportunity to skip ahead to the first cool, crisp autumn day I would without hesitation.

A Weekend with Family

2009-08-10T08:10:00.002-04:00

Ina Garten (the Barefoot Contessa of Food Net fame) is so lucky. She has producers to coordinate the constant stream of visitors to her awesome Hamptons haven. We are not so fortunate. We have been known to resort to begging. We can't provide the Hamptons, but I promise to feed you and entertain you or let you entertain yourself. I promise that once you cross into the Northern Neck traffic will seem like a foreign concept. We have issued a standing invitation to our friends and family: come join us for a weekend or more!

So it was to my extreme delight that Jac's sister and her family took us up on the offer for the first time since our wedding this weekend. We were doubly lucky that my Aunt and Uncle and the red-headed duo had planned a visit as well. It just so happened that both pairs of kids were born in the same years - heading into driving for one set and teetering toward tweendom for the other. We were granted great weather for Friday and had a little daylight and the chance to grill out.

Saturday rain threatened but we managed all kinds of stuff from tickling the tchotchkes in town to playing pool and splashing in it. There was a fair amount of Wii-gaming taking place as well. I was tired Saturday night, but the good kind of tired that comes from a satisfying day instead of a hard-working one thanks to the many hands that pitched in on everything that needed to be done. I had compost-haulers, corn-shuckers, dish-loaders, and table-setters galore. What I did not have was a seat at the dinner table. We were one short for a total of 11 seated. I have got to remember to rectify that!

Instead of dreams about work, I dreamt about where to store my wine glasses. That is bliss for an organizing fiend.

Sunday morning I deployed my new secret weapon: The Belgian Waffle Breakfast. The fruit was so delicious that I, ME, Elle Kasey, I did not even touch the whipped cream. I brought a bag of it home and it's going to be a heavenly breakfast today. As it turns out pretty much everyone loves The Belgian Waffle Breakfast. It's been a hit a couple of times now so I think it might be time to add that second waffle maker to the pantry. Where on earth I will fit it I do not know.

We'd had THREE Cancer encounters in our family during the week ranging from potential to excised and the word had been good across the board. That kind of news makes a sweet, relaxing weekend with family all the more enjoyable. It made Sunday all the more bittersweet.

So I guess I don't exactly need Ina's life, but a visit from Jeffrey and T.R. now and then would be quite welcome.

Up Dog

2009-08-09T17:00:00.000-04:00

Finally, after many phone calls, on Friday afternoon we got an answer... of sorts. Lexi's second biopsy came back negative -- all of the margins around where her tumor had been were clear of Cancer. The vet said that this, combined with the fact that the tumor was low grade, small, and had a low mitral count suggest a good prognosis for Lexi. There is a chance of recurrence and we can't pinpoint exactly how high that chance is because it's not absolutely clear how close to the skin or how deep in the subcutaneous layer or where in between that tumor was located. So, the vet said, we are her first line of defense, feeling for future lumps that don't belong there. Additional treatment or testing isn't needed now. We can resume our normal breathing schedule. Whewwwww.

Our girl still spent the weekend in the infirmary. She has a big row of stitches holding together a gnarly wound. The vet's orders are no stairs, running or intentional exercise. As much as I wish those were orders for ME, they are for the fluffy one and she dislikes every one of them. Imposing them at the river was practically torture for her. At one point she pushed the envelope and took a good run down to the dock. Then she came back and asked me in her best Irish terrier brogue if I had any of those pain meds left. I did. She got them. She enjoys the dope from time to time.

Far Away So Close

2009-08-06T23:14:00.004-04:00

In a fierce bolt of independence, Lexi just got up from the chair-and-a-half we share approximately 18 hours a day and crossed the room to curl up in her once-favorite chair. I think she's starting to feel a little better. And the drugs aren't hurting either. She is taking the stairs again outside to potty (against doctor's orders but she was flinging herself out of our arms in a far more destructive way than three little steps would do). Yes I know that sentence doesn't make any sense but it is 11:30 at night and this has been the longest week in decades.

We were supposed to get the results of her second operation today, but instead a vet tech called and said the vet had to leave before calling today. I am hoping that means that she has good news for us, not that she's reached the end of her veterinary oncology rope and just couldn't bear to call one more person to tell him about his dog.

Tomorrow is Friday and we are headed to the river. It will be a big challenge to keep Lexi from running in the fields with Kirby. Jac's sister and her family are coming to our house for the first time and I don't know whether Jac or I am more excited. I love having new people to the river. I'm hoping we get good weather and they find lots of fun things to do.