Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Monday, May 24, 2010 Like a Grown-Up in a Candy Store Last weekend, when we met Tara and Dave in Austin, there was one afternoon when they and Trash went shopping/exploring while M. Edium and I hung back at base camp. This worked out well, because Trash came back with a giant haul. OF CANDY. As you know, I always like to try out new and unfamiliar kinds of sweets, especially when we travel. And Trash had some making up to do after the Razzles. Things admittedly got off to a shaky start for the weekend. The first local delicacy I tried was something called a peanut pattie. It was shaped a lot like a cookie, but was really a disk of peanuts contained within some kind of sticky-sweet medium. It's more off-putting than it sounds, because that medium was bright red. It looked like the footprint if an elephant in a human being, if you were to carve away all the not-stepped on parts. But that just came from the HEB supermarket. The real motherlode was the candy store, where I understand Tara and Dave helped with the selection. And nothing that follows is intended as a complaint against them, just to be clear. First came the Paleta Payaso. Imagine if you will a chocolate Dilly Bar, but instead of ice cream on the inside it has a giant marshmallow. And then instead of the little coil on the front it has a cluster of gumdrops. I'll just say that M. Edium finished this one, although normally he's more discriminating. Then there was the Buba Luba. This was at least shaped more like a traditional candy bar, and it even looked like one, with its chocolate shell. But then you bite into it and discover that you have a mouthful of marshmallow crème and strawberry-flavored inner tube. M. Edium finished that one for me as well. The Old Faithful Peanut Cluster looks good on paper. It's peanuts and chocolate around a nougat core. But because it's almost completely shapeless, it doesn't look good on the counter. At all. In fact, it looks a bit like somebody flash-froze a loose stool. Which didn't stop me from eating it. The very name of Doscher's Famous Banana Artificially Flavored French Chew Taffy contains at least one word that's a lie, and I think you can figure out which one it is. It's like a giant plank of banana Laffy Taffy, only it has better texture, flavor, and overall quality. It refuses to dry up and go stale, even though I've been working my way through it for a week. The only downside is that unlike Laffy Taffy, it doesn't have old jokes in the wrapper, so I had to provide my own: Q: What's black and white and red all over and can't get through a revolving door? A: A nun with a spear through her head. Chewy Extinguisher is packaged in the form of a dare. The label literally includes the question, "How sour can you take it?" According to the front, the tangerine flavor is merely "tangy." The lemon is "sour." The lime is "SUPER SOUR!" And then, in its own separate little partition like it's a candy DLT, the berry is supposedly "sweet relief!" All four taste almost exactly the same to me. I think I'm doing it wrong. There was also a "Big Kat." It's a Kit Kat that doesn't come in the familiar modular segment form. Instead, it's one large ingot of solid Kit Kat goodness. I think that's so that when some annoying person comes up to you and says, "break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar" you can brain them with it instead. But I have to say that my favorite was "Lion." I'd never heard of it, so I had to take the package's word for it that it was "new and improved." But whatever the improvements were, they worked, because this was a tasty candy bar. A perfect combo of chocolate, chewy, and crispy. It was one of the few rare, exotic candies I'd seek out again. Except I'm not sure how rare or exotic it actually is, because it's made by Nestle. Which I guess is the lesson of this candy store run. Maybe some rare candies are rare for a reason. posted by M. Giant 5:47 AM 4 comments 4 Comments:
I learned to love Lion bars in Ireland! They are from across the pond and are very very good - as you now know.
By Lion bars are pretty common in the UK. They also did limited edition peanut lion bars, which were pretty great.
By was interesting . good luck .
By No one got you a Lamme's praline? Awww. You'll have to come back.
By Thursday, May 20, 2010 Houston, We Have No Problem We only throw M. Edium birthday parties for his odd-numbered birthdays. For the even-numbered birthdays, we get out of town. Literally. But we bring him with us, so that makes it better. This year, M. Edium requested Houston as his destination. The siren call of the Johnson Space Center is irresistible to a space nerd like him, especially since he found out it has a Space Shuttle where you can climb into the cockpit. Of course he's been in a Space Shuttle before, at the Kennedy Space Center, but you can't get into the cockpit there. So Houston it was. Since there's no time to waste, what with M. Edium's birthday coming up in a mere five months, Trash started researching details last week. Hey, guess what's going on at the Johnson Space Center this summer? Clone Wars. Through September. Oops. Obviously, Trash called right away to find out the chances of it being held over at least into mid-September. Equally obviously, those chances proved slimmer than Taun We. So Trash started looking for alternative travel dates earlier in the year. While she researched flights, I called the visitor center back and talked to the same sweet lady Trash had. Among the questions I asked was whether there was a hotel nearby. She said yes, and referred me to a brand-new one that the JSC employees had recently toured. Amenities include a big saltwater pool, full breakfast, and a movie room where you can play your own DVDs. I even think she gave me someone's direct line. A few minutes later, I was on the line with an expatriate Minnesotan, who was so happy to reminisce with me about her hometown (which happens to be this one) that she gave me a fantastic discount on a room. I'm sorry, a suite. Sweet! By this time, Trash had found us a cheap flight down, transferring in Chicago. Unfortunately, it did one of those things that online air fare so often does, which is to disappear at some point between the finding and the reserving. But then she locked down better flights, with no transfers, for a difference in price no more than the cost of a hardcover book. In 1983. So it wasn't so unfortunate after all. We did run into one glitch. I was in such a hurry to get a rental car that I gave the Houston airport code only the most cursory of Googles and ended up reserving a car to be picked up at Hobby instead of George Bush. Rookie mistake, I know, but then I've never been to Houston. No wonder the car had been so cheap. Fortunately Trash figured it out that same day, and although I seriously considered taxiing from one airport to the other, I was able to correct the reservation. Even more fortunately, the right airport has even cheaper rental cars, which I didn't think possible. In fact, on a per-item basis, I think I'm paying less to rent this car than I did some movies when we were on the old Netflix model. As Trash said, there are just times when the universe is telling you to go for it. And even if it's the Star Wars universe, who are we to argue? Here's Trash's favorite part: she's busy that weekend, so she doesn't get to go with us. And she was so looking forward to the space and the Star Wars and the summer heat and everything. Not to mention three airfares instead of two. That only leaves the question of where to take him on his actual birthday trip, now that Houston is going to be covered. So far he's requested Madagascar, Australia, and the Sahara Desert. I think any one of those three would be easier than throwing another party like the one we threw last year. posted by M. Giant 8:21 PM 8 comments 8 Comments:
Having moved OUT of Houston last summer, I offer this piece of advice:
By
I'll add to the above:
By sounds exciting! may the force be with you ;)
By
Courtney is SO RIGHT. I can't believe I forgot the three car rule. Although, I did like the bus when I was doing the park and ride to work downtown.
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Ellie is right about the restaurants, although as a native Tennessean I take exception to her slam on pork BBQ. :) Try Pappasito's for some good Tex-Mex.
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I'm not sure how much time you are here, but you might also want to check out the Children's Museum - it is awesome and was just renovated last year!
By Australia in September is quite nice actually. And certainly easier to get to than Madagascar. (Not sure whether the Sahara would be easier or not, although if M.Edium gets into Ancient Egypt at all I'd certainly recommend the Egyptian part of the desert as an option.)
By And I know you're unlikely to do it, but if you come to Melbourne in September I'll take you to the footy finals and generally show you a good time...
By Sunday, May 16, 2010 Dentally Unbalanced You hate the dentist, right? Everybody hates the dentist. More accurately, everybody thinks they hate the dentist until they hear about Trash. Then they realize they merely don’t care for the dentist. Trash is one of those people who have notes in their file about what kind of patient they are, with special instructions. These include things like “Confiscate car keys,” because otherwise she’ll just get up and leave in the middle of an appointment, paper bib and all. But then when they took her keys, she’d just walk or take the bus. So the instructions were amended to “Confiscate coat.” And a summer visit resulted in the additional note reading, “Confiscate purse.” I think the next step would have been “Five-point restraints” or simply “confiscate feet.” I don’t want to get into too much detail on why this is. Suffice to say that it involves a long, painful procedure performed by a sadist who refused to believe that he hadn’t numbed a young girl enough to feel anything he was doing to her, let alone everything he was doing to her It’s not my tale, and I don’t think I could safely walk the narrow line between “supervillain origin story” and “James Frey rip-off.” So cut to the present day, when she has found a dentist who specializes in working on challenging individuals like Trash, young children with panic disorders, and people with profound developmental disabilities. And she has figured out how to keep Trash there for the duration of her appointments without committing felony kidnapping; just drug her. About an hour before her appointment, she was supposed to take one of her two five-milligram doses of Valium. But then a half hour after that, she still was pretty nervous. So she took the second five-milligram dose. Twenty-two minutes after that I poured her into the car for the fifteen-minute drive to the dentist. Now, the only two things she hates more than going to the dentist are being late and dealing with traffic, but even this magical conjunction of three of her least favorite things didn’t wind her up even a little. In the car, she had a meandering cell phone conversation with her boss (who asked to talk to me so she could ask me to make sure Trash didn’t go back on our work IM system after the appointment), and then I dropped her off outside the building while I parked the car. After she got out and I put the car in reverse, the transmission jerked with a grinding of gears and the tires gave an indignant chirp. I don’t think she noticed. The Valium more than held up. “This was the shortest twenty-minute dentist appointment I ever had,” she told the dentist at the end of the hour-long visit. The dentist even skipped the fluoride treatment, and sent her home with a do-it-yourself kit. Halfway into the explanation of how to use it, she realized, “I can see I’m going to have to write these instructions down.” Trash said, “No, I’ll be fine.” Three minutes later, when she met me in the lobby, she didn’t remember a word of it. In the car on the way home, her plan was to call her boss while still in this condition and tell her about the conversation she’d just had with the company’s CEO. Unfortunately, the Valium made her forget to do that too. All ten milligrams of it. It’s good to know that as low as her tolerance is for dentists, her tolerance for Valium is even lower. posted by M. Giant 8:46 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Valium is awesome. That 5 mg dose that my dentist gives me is just enough that I'm aware of everything that is going on, but I don't care even a little bit.
By Thursday, May 13, 2010 March Madness Trash will often ask me, "You want to know what song's in my head right now?" I don't know why, but I always used to say yes. Then she'd tell me, usually by singing the part that was running through her brain whether she knew the whole thing or not, and then it'd by in my head. Which was of course exactly her intention. This wouldn't be so bad, except for how the song in her head on these occasions is always absolute dreck, dross, doggerel, or all three. This is not to say that she has bad taste in music. Quite the contrary. She hates the songs she dumps into my frontal lobe as much as I do. When she has a good song in her head, she keeps it to herself. At least that's what I have to believe. I can't accept that I actually married someone who likes "Midnight at the Oasis." By the time I realized I could say, "No, I don't want to know what song's in your head," it had somehow stopped being a yes or no question, if it ever had been, because she sings it to me anyway. Which I guess makes it a yes or NO LA LA LA LA LA LA question. Now, a certain other of the family is also prone to having music in his head, but hasn't yet learned that you don't have to sing it out loud when that happens. So he's been incessantly humming, singing, and in other ways interpreting "The Imperial March" music from The Empire Strikes Back so often and so long that we've started having to send John Williams royalty checks. Back on Easter, we were visiting Feb and TeslaGrrl and their new baby, and ten minutes after we showed up. Feb heard what I never even hear any more in any real sense, which was M. Edium in the next room blaring, "Baaa, baaa, baaa, baa bapaah, baa bapaaa." "That's awesome," he chuckled. "Yeah, it is at first," I agreed. I few weeks later, M. Edium and I were at the doctor's office, getting my allergies checked. He had to visit the loo, and I waited outside for what seemed like a long time. A grumpy-looking nurse was sterilizing the exam room across the hall, but she laughed when she heard, " Baaa, baaa, baaa, baa bapaah, baa bapaaa" coming through the closed door. "A little Star Wars, huh?" she remarked to me. "It never stops," I said. And it hasn't. In fact, he has branched out into other media. He's made me pick out the first phrase of the melody on the piano, just for starters. He's begun experimenting with tapping out the rhythm on and with random objects, like a branch on the metal railing of our front stoop: Clang, clang, clang, clang c-clang, clang c-clang… But I think the apex of this is when he started kissing it on his mom's cheek: smack, smack, smack, smack sm-smack, smack sm-smack… Sometimes it gets too much for Trash, and she begs him to hum something else, anything else. If she complains hard enough, he'll switch briefly to the Main Title Theme ("daaaah, daaaah, dat-dat-dat-DAAAAH, daaah") or the Rebel Fanfare (dadaaah dat, dadaaaah dat, dadaaah, dah dadadat-daaah") before switching right back and giving her an aneurysm. To be honest, I don't even hear the humming any more. It's just background noise. All I really hear is Trash's protests. They sound like karma. posted by M. Giant 9:01 PM 6 comments 6 Comments:This just cracked me up, because it's been stuck in my head for weeks. For some reason, I have started brushing my 3 year old's teeth to the Imperial March music -- when he has to open wide, I sing it with "ahs," when I need to do his front teeth, I sing it with "eees." Now he's started singing it everywhere. While his 6 year old sister has seen and loves Stars Wars (I'm old school; none of this "A New Hope" crap), he hasn't, but is still a big fan of the Imperial March.
By A nice breakfast treat for M.edium? http://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/star-wars-pancake-mold/
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Touche! Revenge is yours - I now have The Imperial March firmly stuck in my head. That totally makes up for Lady Gaga and Bad Romance.
By Heather - you will sooooooo regret that request. I HAVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER!!!
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I'm not scared! Bring it on! 'Cause I have YOUR phone number *and* a child who will gladly sing a medley of Eye of the Tiger, Who Let the Dogs Out? and the Veggietales' Pirates Who Don't Do Anything for hours. At top volume, so no cackling "but I'm deaf in one ear so nanny-nanny-boo-boo to you!" either.
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Uh-oh. My 3 year old little boy has taken to singing Imperial March all of the time, and even adding words, and I've been loving it. I have a feeling I will be in your shoes in a few years....
By Tuesday, May 11, 2010 Heavy Metal It's impossible to see, let alone review, a sequel without comparing it to the original, but I'm trying to get around that by comparing Iron Man 2 to the last superhero comic book film I saw instead, which was Kick Ass. By that standard, Iron Man 2 holds up much better. Yes, the protagonists of both films were guilty of spiraling into self-pity, but since Tony Stark a) solves his problem more or less on his own, b) manages to confine most of his destructive impulses to his own house, c) is not insisting on narrating all of it for us at punishing length, and d) is actually dying, Tony's is more forgivable. And obviously it doesn't hurt that Robert Downey, Jr. is a hell of a lot more charismatic than that Kick Ass kid whose name I can't even remember (and I'm freakishly good at names). To the point where RDJ's obnoxiously babbling on in lame self-justification like his character in Two Girls and a Guy at poor, implacable Gwyneth Paltrow and I'm thinking, "Come on, give him a break, lady." I enjoyed the rest of the cast as well. Sam Rockwell was perfect, except for how he made me wish he was still in as many movies as he used to be. Mickey Roarke was believable even as a guy who wielded plasma whips that can cut through anything but Iron Man and whatever ground surface they happen to be resting on at the moment. I'm glad Favs gave himself a little more to do. Even ScarJo gets to play to her biggest strength, which is being a complete blank. I didn't really follow the behind-the-scenes controversy about the recasting of Rhodey, especially since the role is so undemanding it doesn't really call for a Terence Howard or a Don Cheadle in the first place. They could have gone with Ernie Hudson as far as I'm concerned, if he'd fit in the suit. My half-baked theory about the success of the Iron Man movies is that they go out of their way not to remind us we're watching a comic-book adaptation. I read in advance that this film would feature characters like "Whiplash" and "Black Widow," but if those character names were ever spoken aloud, I didn't hear it. The only comic-booky parts, aside from other, more unavoidable character names like "Pepper Potts" and "Nick Fury," are the action scenes, and every other action scene in every other action movie is comic-booky anyway, so they don't really stand out here. The main problem, obviously, is that Iron Man is indestructible. The comics bill him as "The Invincible Iron Man," right? That makes it hard to generate a sense of jeopardy in the action scenes (I'm going to depart from my lede here to say that the boss battle in the first film was a lot more tense than this one). As a result, things feel a little upside down due to the fact that Tony's biggest battles are internal. In fact, the scariest thing in the whole movie was the terrifying spectacle of the Botox-balloon that Garry Shandling's head has become. That shit's eerie. In short, I think it's a decent sequel, even if it suffers from high expectations when the original probably benefitted from low ones. There's definitely one clear winner, though, and that's AC/DC. * * * I've been considering the idea of giving these movie reviews some kind of catchy name, like the recurring feature I'm trying to make them into, but all my ideas are dumb. So I'm opening up the suggestion box -- use the comments to post your dumb ideas! If I use yours I'll…uh…review a movie of your choice if it's still playing in theaters by the time I get around to it. I know, my generosity is making you weepy. One caveat: yes, I know The Room is playing at the Uptown this weekend, but I'll be out of town then. posted by M. Giant 9:08 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:M.ovie Reviews.
By Velcromovie
By Cinemeter
By Sunday, May 09, 2010 Happy Mother's Day With summer coming so early this year, Trash hit on the idea of going camping for Mother's Day. "Are you sure?" I said. "It might be freezing." Since we were having this conversation while walking through our neighborhood in t-shirts, in April, my argument didn't carry a lot of weight. "But remember that time we had a Mother's Day picnic in the backyard?" I reminded her. "We were out there for like ten minutes and you wanted to go inside." "It was colder then. We're camping." So she scouted out a campsite -- only a half hour away from our house, just in case -- and made the plans. For the week before Mother's Day, we watched the forecast with increasing dread. I mean, 50 is perfectly nice when you're close to home, and have access to all your sweatshirts and double-hung windows and a thermostat and blankets and a chiminea in the back yard. But I kept thinking back to our first night camping in the Black Hills last September, when it was too cold to sleep for more than ten minutes at a time. 50's bad enough, but a forecasted low of 34 is worse. So on Friday night, at a time when we had originally been planning to be drinking wine around the fire, I was assembling our old camping gazebo, the one that goes over the picnic table when we camp. Except this time it was going to go over our backyard garden to keep the SNOW off of it. On Saturday evening, when we were out walking again and it was nearly 60 degrees, Trash said, "This isn't so bad. I could have camped in this." I reminded her that after multiple hours of being outside in below-fifty temperatures, it would take a lot more than edging over sixty at six o'clock to eliminate the chill that would have set into her bones. After all, this is a woman who sometimes has to take naps in the middle of the day due to minor spells of hypothermia. We obviously made the right call. Trash didn't spend Mother's Day weekend freezing, and neither did the vegetables in her garden, thanks to the gazebo and the blankets and the space heater I brought out there (okay, I'm kidding about the space heater). Which is good, because the new gardening bench I got her for Mother's Day would have been kind of a kick in the teeth had she only been able to use it in what would have become a vegetable morgue. And that would have been a lovely thing on a day celebrating those who give us life and help us grow, right? Happy Mother's Day, Trash. From me, and from someone else: HAPPY MOMS DAY LOVVE M. posted by M. Giant 10:01 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, May 06, 2010 Pipsqueak No More I heard some insane howling noises when I was in bed the other night. Unfortunately they weren't coming from my wife. She heard them too, although being deaf in one ear, she was unable to determine the source. The first few times, she thought it was coming from inside the house -- M. Edium emitting some blanket-muffled moans, maybe as a result of nightmares in which he was competing on American Idol -- but I was certain the source was feline, and outside. Our cats are strictly indoor, even more so than our previous generation. Unlike Strat and Orca, who would run to any door that opened (and in Strat's case, find ways to get out through doors that didn't), they're not even interested in the outside beyond crashing out on a windowsill once in a while. The next-door neighbors' cats, on the other hand, are not indoor-only. Except for their newest one, a two-year-old who's too cute to be allowed outside, we're used to other people's cats being in our yard, garage, cars, etc. Moonbeam is all black and about 17 years old, because the eight-year-old girl she belonged to when we moved in is approaching her two-year wedding anniversary. Fievel was all white, like Strat, but we could always tell them apart, even when their weights coincided, because Fievel never let us get within twenty yards of him. Most fearful cat I ever tried unsuccessfully for over a decade to meet. More like a squirrel really, except for the time I saw a squirrel letting Fievel chase it at a slow jog. Fievel's replacement, to the extent a cat can ever be "replaced," is pretty much his opposite in temperament. I keep forgetting what gender Pipsqueak is, and at this point it seems rude to keep asking (it's been like three years). Pipsqueak is almost exclusively an outdoor cat, except for when it sees me or Trash outside. Then it meows, stretches appealingly, and goes up to the neighbor's back door, watching us expectantly the whole way. If the door's unlocked, we open it for Pipsqueak and it goes straight inside and downstairs, where its litter box is. More often than not, it's outside the next time we are, even if it's been less than a minute. Maybe it just doesn't like peeing outside (which, unfortunately, makes him the opposite of M. Edium in that sense). This is not to say there aren't interactions between our cats and theirs. Occasionally, when Exie or Phantom is camped out in the bathroom window, Moonbeam or Pipsqueak (usually Pipsqueak) will come up onto our back deck. Our cats view this as a blatant invasion of their territory, and protest loudly. Whereupon a noisy argument ensues through the screen. Sometimes these arguments start to get physical, but again, screen. They can hiss and spit and scream at each other all they want, but they can't do much damage to each other beyond the psychological, as severe as the psychological damage may be. That's why I didn't think much of the howls I was hearing at first. For one thing, the noise was only coming from outside, so I was pretty sure our cats weren't involved. For another, the wall joists weren't shaking. After a while, though Trash chased me out of bed to go make sure things weren't getting out of hand. What I saw when I went out the back door was Pipsqueak locked in single combat -- mostly verbal, but still -- with an even larger black-and-white cat I'd never seen before. I told Pipsqueak to knock it off, but the other cat was already being run off. In fact, it bounded over a five-foot chain link fence to get away. This display of aggressive defense of territory reminded me of the time I'd encountered Pipsqueak in our front yard, late one night when I'd forgotten to roll the trash bin to the curb. He let me pet him for a minute, but then he spotted not one but two giant fucking raccoons two yards up and took off after them. I tried to call him back, but you know how cats are. They don't listen to anyone, least of all the neighbors, especially when they're determined to commit suicide by wildlife. But on the other hand, those raccoons disappeared into the bushes and I haven't seen them since. Whereas the next time I saw Pipsqueak, he was fully intact and not a dispersed cloud of wheat-colored fur. Pipsqueak, the neighbors call it. It's not really appropriate to rename another person's cat, I know. But I'm considering installing some iron grillework outside our bathroom window. posted by M. Giant 8:26 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:We used to have an awesome grey and white cat named Grey. He would chase huge dogs out of our yard, which was always awesome. People would walk their dogs on the other side of the street, so as not to make him think they were getting in his territory.
By Tuesday, May 04, 2010 Smooth Move I can't stand most fruit. As Woody Harrelson says about coconut in Zombieland, it's not the taste, but the texture. It's just the way fruit bursts and squishes in my mouth all juicy-like. I can't chew a grape without imagining a freshly excised eyeball in my mouth, or a strawberry without visualizing a short, fat, sweet grub. I don't even like to touch raspberries or blackberries, which have so much give in them it's like handling the fingertips of a mouldering corpse. A simple orange section, which normal people find cool and refreshing, feels to me like biting into the heart of a refrigerated guinea pig. This is my cross to bear, and I bear it with dignity. This is not to say that I don't like any fruit at all. I love bananas, and I like apples, and I'll eat a pear if I must. But for the most part I'd just rather take the scurvy, thanks. The point of all this is that after we hosted a big breakfast at our house the weekend before last, we had several big containers of fresh strawberries left over that were going to go bad (or, in my opinion, worse)before Trash and M. Edium would eat them on their own. I realized I had to step up. No, this isn't going to turn into a heroic tale of me overcoming my gag reflex, or a funny one about it overcoming me. More a triumph of lateral thinking. My fruit-block is in fact so intense that once I walked into a Jamba Juice, looked at everything on the menu in search of something that didn't contain something I hate, and coming up empty. Every single item had something to be avoided. I don't know what I expected -- maybe something with bananas, chocolate milk, and a frosted donut -- but it just wasn't there. And yet, last week, when I needed a snack and found myself looking at what seemed like a whole shelf full of short, fat, sweet grubs glimmering redly up at me from their clear plastic boxes, I questioned my assumptions. What's in a smoothie? I wondered. I could blend a pitcher for myself and Trash both, using bananas, ice, yogurt, and yes, some of those strawberries. I decided I was up for it. After all, even though I can't abide an actual strawberry, I certainly enjoy candy, soda, Froot Loops, and other things with fake strawberry flavor. And I don't like yogurt much better than I like strawberries, but let's face it: I'm not going to sit down and eat a bowl of flour or shortening, but both are in cookies, and I'll happily sit down and eat a bowl of those. So I sucked it up and dumped all four ingredients in the blender and then spent about ten minutes grinding it up into a uniform pink paste. Here went nothing. And I loved it! I've been making them almost every workday since then. Trash tells me they're super-healthy, and after I got over the initial nausea of having consumed something that was actually good for me, I could only agree. For yesterday's smoothie, I even jazzed it up a little with some fresh raspberries and a little vanilla extract. Last week, I made a special yogurt run, unasked. And now, for the first time in my life, I find myself concerned whether there is enough fruit in the house, where in the past the amount of fruit in my house always seemed to be "too much." I don't even know who I am any more. But I do know that with all this fruit I'm consuming lately, I feel justified in eating a lot more bowls of cookies. This is win-win. posted by M. Giant 9:36 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:
I’ve never heard of someone who rejects fruit on the basis of its texture. How intriguing.
By This is the weirdest thing you have ever written. My mind, it has been boggled.
By @Andy Oysters? Bleaargh! Ack oop ptui!
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I absolutely get the texture thing. While I don't have issues with fruit necessarily, it does impair other food areas. I mean, what is the point of water chestnuts? Ever? I don't need something squeaky and crunchy in my food that makes me think I bit into a bug!
By I this was going to be about constipation. I hate the texture of oranges, too.
By Monday, May 03, 2010 Schooled Carnival With M. Edium officially starting kindergarten in the fall, we've got his possible schools narrowed down to two. One is a highly ranked school in a highly ranked district and is six blocks away. The other is more highly ranked in a more highly ranked district, but is six miles away. So it's a tossup, and if we go with one, we can't switch back to the other, or even back to the other districts when he gets older. So the choice affects which middle school he goes to, and which high school, and which college, and which officer training school, and his ability to get into NASA and become a Space Shuttle pilot like he wants to when he grows up. Already we're in danger of ruining his life. The fact that the Shuttle only has a few missions left before it's permanently retired only adds to the pressure. In an attempt to rise to this pressure, Trash agreed to work at the annual school carnival at one of these schools last week. She thought it best to show an interest and support the school community just in case that's where he ends up, especially in light of the increasingly desperate and personalized requests for help that were turning up in her inbox. Messages that began with "Dear Occupant, please consider volunteering a couple of hours of your time" evolved over a matter of days into, "Dear Trash Q. Alexander: Decades ago, when your mother was struggling to raise you and your two younger siblings as a single mom, they didn't need you as much as we need you now. We look forward to seeing you in room 201 at 7:00 PM sharp, and maybe you could wear that tan sweater and put on a little makeup. It won't kill you." She was up for it, but any hope she had that she might use this as an opportunity to network with some faculty and other moms proved a vain one, as she was posted at the "Duck Pond" event. What this was is a game where a dozen or so rubber ducks floated in an inch of water in a long, low plastic storage bin of the type you fill with tax documents (or a human being, if you're on Law & Order: Sex Police) and then stuff under your bed. Some of the ducks had a red circle inked in the bottom in marker. If you picked up one of the red-circle ducks, you got a prize. If you picked up an unmarked duck, you got to try again until you got one, and then you got a prize. As you might imagine, this was a popular attraction at the carnival among the younger set, even those who, unlike M. Edium, did not also get a kiss from the pretty carny at every visit. M. Edium and I circulated the carnival as much as I could convince him to, but he kept gravitating back to the Duck Pond. And his mom. But that was partly because she couldn't come to him. She was stuck in that room for an hour and a half, a preschooler-sized chair holding up about three-fourths of her adult-sized keister, and never got more than a thirty-second break between players, not even counting M. Edium. I tried to get her some food from the cafeteria, but wasn't allowed to carry anything out (although I did sneak past the "no food or drink past this point" enforcer with a bag of chips), which meant I got to sit down and watch M. Edium take his time putting away a Slider and a Dilly Bar for about a half hour. Trash's shift ended and her game closed down at 8:30 p.m,, but M. Edium closed down closer to 8:15. At that point, he stubbornly stationed himself at his mom's side to supply "tips" to other players and be near her. I probably could have pried him away, but it would have required physical force and a bit of screaming, and M. Edium wouldn't have been quiet either. We just didn't want it that bad, and I had a bunch of tickets left that I needed to go try and burn in the cafeteria. I stuffed down a pair of hot dogs as fast as I could. I didn't have water to wash it down, but the mustard was runny enough to be the next best thing. At 8:30, I helped Trash carry her Rubbermaid duck pond over to the classroom sink to dump it down the drain. But M. Edium wanted a drink from it. There are times when Trash and I have to look at each other before we give M. Edium permission to do something. This time, we were in perfect sync as we thought of all the thousands of tiny fingers that had been thrust into that water in the last ninety minutes, and we said, as one, "No!" Clearly I hadn't realized how thirsty he'd gotten, so we immediately decided to find him a refreshment that would be a little less germ-ridden. Like a nice, fresh urinal cake to suck on. posted by M. Giant 9:31 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:Sorry to be nerdy and slightly obsessive, and I hope you won't mind this comment, but I was wondering if you'd thought of looking up the individual science teachers M. Medium might have in each district, and using them as some sort of metric for comparison. Obviously there's bound to be turnover, but far more than "highly rated district" or "highly rated school" sometimes it's that one amazing teacher you had in junior high that turned classroom chairs on their backs to simulate rockets launching and brought rocks in to class so you could actually see and feel them instead of just reading about them that has the real impact on a kid. By "a kid" I specifically mean me, but I can't be the only one who made it as a scientist despite coming from a semi-crummy school due to a couple of amazing teachers.
By Great idea, MAL. We'll do that! (or Trash will)
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