Yummy

While I was at the market I actually saw some beautiful eggplant and so I made this.

It was pretty good with a glass of pinot noir.

Finally

I have found a way to enjoy the supermarket.

Today I was about to leave and saw my brother walking in. He didn't see me.

I hid behind a pillar and when I saw his feet I charged out with my shopping cart like I was going to run him over. It was awesome to see the look on his face.

Carly(via Blackberry)

Overheard

In my room, this dark morning.

"I don't want to go to work todayyyy."

(Silence.....)

"...you are a big girl now and you have to go."

I was alone in the room, of course.

Ps to Scrappy - I was sitting at the head table and could NOT walk away to go get cake (while most of the coaches were giving awards to their own children - one even SAID "We let all of the parents vote and then we make it right." Aieeee. He then added "well, we always agree with the parents". Yeah, ok pal.)

Carly(via Blackberry)

Help

I am trapped in an unending sports banquet.

I must smile at people I'm really not all that crazy about.

I can not drink any more than the one glass of wine I had long long ago.

I am very sad.
Carly(via Blackberry)

Creating a monster

the guy who is going to do the addition on my house got me thinking about remodeling the kitchen a little (not the cabinets, jsut fixing the crappy walls, and replacing the lighting...

So my friend got a hold of me and we found the tile mural above (one on either side of my stove, with beige tiles filling in the extra space...)

and this

and of course... this would go nicely with a new tile floor in the kitchen....my linoleum IS 13 years old..

I think I'm going to be eating a lot of Kraft macaroni & cheese when I'm done.

A vid to replay a thousand times

Edit - OK, fine, go here and watch, while I try to learn how to use this Internets thing. This is a video featuring John Krasinski and George Clooney discussing their new movie, Leatherheads, which opens NEXT FRIDAY. (As in, the day I already have two places to be, and the day before I have 3 places I have to be. I can't go see it until at least SUNDAY, people. This really sucks.)

Hopefully this will work for you. Probably not.

Kudos to Give Me My Remote for her great site about tv and her unquestionably good taste in leading men.

how to

...freak out your paranoid family members:

1. Sit them down at a pc

2. Bring up Google maps

3. Type in their address

4. Look for "street view" and click on it. Look for a little gold person. If necessary, click on the gold guy.

By now you may be looking at a photograph of the front of their house. One that you can zoom in on.

Mine was taken in approximately September or October. Because I had a certain vehicle I don't have now, and it is showing in the photo, (license is blurred out) but I don't have the pink breast cancer awareness .magnet on the back of it.

Eggs

It's been a long afternoon.

I just realized I completely forgot about Top Chef. WTF? The show completely vanished from the list of things my DVR was supposed to record. #$%&*!

Then I just took a load of laundry out of the dryer. It's been in there a day or so since it dried.

At the bottom of the dryer I found a tiny, marble-sized ball of foil. With the remains of a chocolate egg.

The clothes? They look like the Pre-laundry basket of something who's enduring a very unfortunate ailment.

After looking through the entire basket, and using up half a stain stick, I will be rewashing those clothes next.

Happy happy happy. Oh yes I am.

There will be wine tonight, my friends.

Various bits

This and that...

• Mothers and their toddlers argue 20-25 times per hour on average, a new study shows. Sorry, Amelia.
• The builder came to my house last night, and we talked about ways to exponentially increase the cost of my addition. Joy, joy. Oh, and my 'kitchen light' is a hallway light. No wonder it sucks.
• Shamus is back :::::Carly glares at Shop D, wondering what his excuse is :::::::::
• Three blogs I check every day: perezhilton.com/ , bossip.com/ and lately, jezebel.com . I am not proud. Just honest.
• Maya Angelou is 80 today. Laila Ali, who is preggers AND MARRIED, ARE YOU LISTENING HOLLYWOOD, SHE GOT MARRIED FIRST... is 30, but today is not her birthday. So don't send her a card.
• I have, uh, NINE weeks to prepare for the 5K. It would be helpful to find my sneakers soon.
• I stabbed a bunny in the eye this morning at my house. OK, it was a white chocolate rabbit, and yes, I know that "white chocolate" is not chocolate. Don't want to hear it, thank you.
• My kid is sick. One of those random speed bumps that child free coworkers can be so pissy about. No, I won't leave her home alone in bed to sleep it off... Yes, I'm sitting on my couch most of the day when I work from home, but that doesn't mean I WANTED to do it today... I had plans for tonight, and now we can't go.
• (note to my boss and coworkers, I'm eating lunch....)

Fish and rain

The light and the dark sides of my brain:

I realized this morning when I was putting MORE ammonia reducing drops in the fishbowl that the reason they get so agitated when I do that is that they think they're getting FOOD. I don't think he's been feeding them. So sorry, Finn. Welcome to your new home.



I heard Purple Rain this morning on the way to work. Stop and think about the vast number of songs you have heard in your lifetime.

Funny, isn't it, how any one specific old song can take you so far back. PR was playing while I had that last horrible conversation with my first college boyfriend. (So cliche but strictly bad timing and the fact that I played the entire soundtrack every day of my sophomore year.)

When the song was over, we were too. It was LITERALLY half a lifetime ago but when I listened to that song today I could still feel it, the first time my heart got broken as something of an adult. Not talking about high school crushes here. This man was about to graduate and I wanted to build a life with him.

So it sucks - that moment when you realize that all of the dreams you had are crashing down around you because that other person just does not feel the same way.

No point in dwelling on it any more. Another song came on, and then another.
Carly(via Blackberry)

Tandem

So, I have this friend. I like him, but he's gullible. He's in his 30's and we call him The Kid and we regularly put one over on him.

Today at lunch we were talking about kayaks and someone mentioned a tandem kayak. The Kid asked what that was.

I was halfway to convincing him that it's a kayak where one person sits on a platform above the other. When I could see him start to think about the physics of balancing the weight, I burst out laughing and ruined all the fun.

Pretty much the highlight of an otherwise boring day at work.

Sunday Art a day late

This is just a small part of one of our windows. You wouldn't see it during mass unless you turned your head WAY around to one side; it's practically over the choir loft.

Why do I like this frame so much? I don't know. I like the flower vase, and that the stone arched windows that are quite a lot like the building I'm standing in. For whatever reason, on Sunday mornings when I'm waiting to sing something, I often glance over at this window; my eye is drawn to this segment.

If I ever had a garage, and converted it to a studio, I would want something like this in one end, where the morning sun could stream in and scatter the colors around the room.

(so, I guess that's #42 on the list of ways I would squander any lottery winnings...making a replica of this part of the window...)

Not already

Did you hear that primal scream just now? That was me; baseball season is starting already.

Happy Easter

One of the many I'll be singing AGAIN today.... one of my favorites.

I won't joke about cellphones and crying babies and people who only come once a year, but... Oy. I prefer the Tenebrae service, actually. All of the attendees really WANT to hear us sing.

Last night at the Vigil mass I was singing the communion hymn and I noticed the distinct draft coming up from the stairs - people who run out the nearby exit right after they receive communion let a blast of cold air shoot up at us. Yay. Thanks, see you next year. Um, find a church you actually like going to??

Love it or leave it

Love it

• new song -- I'm yours -- Jason Mraz apparently went to Jamaica, mon, but it's all good.
• Quarterly dividend checks are awesome. Just saying. Mad money for our Big Apple trip
• So is making the LAST payment on Thing 1's braces!!! (alas, Thing 2 needs them at some point...)
• J-Lo's babies are cute. So there. Good thing they look like Momma.

Leave it

• It's still COLD. The e-bunny will freeze
• I thought I killed my daughter's new puffy down vest because I don't HAVE tennis balls to stick in the dryer and what could that possibly have to do with it? Sigh. It still amazes me, all of the things I just don't know.
• Forgot that I put eggs on to boil... um, they are DEFINITELY hard boiled now. For sure. Doesn't really matter. We don't actually eat them... they sit out on the kitchen table for a few days. One of those stupid things to fight about, ya know? Seems like a waste to me.
• No new episode of Lost until April 24? Bastards!

As if I don't have anything else to do

The fish saga continues. No, he didn't die (even though I figured out that "Ted" was named after Ted's Fish Fry that we used to go to - not funny, that Mr. Carly).

Yesterday I went to PetCo. The young woman there who "helped" us answered most of my questions by paraphrasing "I dunno". Do we need a filter? Welll, probably not. Should I put something in the water? Oh, I don't think you need to do that. I wanted to dunk her in the tank to wake her up.

She was pretty blunt about Ted being on his deathbed. Way to be nice to a ten year old kid, beeyatch. He came home and put his head down on the table and cried. "He never even made it into my room." (Ted's been on the kitchen table.)

So while we were at the store we bought Finn, to make up for what we thought would soon be an empty tank. Yes, not being content to cause the impending demise of one, we brought home a second victim. Kid decided that all Ted needed was a friend.

We dumped in Finn and his water (OMG, the water went in the tank and FINN STAYED IN THE BAG. I HAD TO SHAKE THE POOR LITTLE BASTARD OUT.) Then we moved the tank onto Kid's dresser.

I'm thinking the 1" of foam on the surface today is either medicine that was in Finn's water, or they're getting a little too much light even though the shades are down, or... I don't even know what... but Ted is looking pretty damn good this morning. Swimming around midheight in the aquarium. WTF? I am soooo bad at this!

Kid is convinced it's an easter miracle. I'm not sure God listens to prayers about goldfish. Does he? is that the problem? Kids with sickly fish are jamming up the lines? We could have whirled peas if we all stopped buying goldfish???

This Fish

So in lieu of an actual status report, I will provide an update via song, with apologies to Faith and all of the songwriters in the world who posess actual talent at writing lyrics...

This Fish (tune from This Kiss, as recorded by Faith Hill)

(v1)
I don’t want another headache
I don’t need another kid to cry
I don’t want to learn the hard way
Poor fish: oh, no, goodbye

Tries to swim up to the surface
Sinks right back down the bowl!

(chorus)
It’s the way he's floating
He's flopped over like THIS
It’s the lack of motion
It’s a sickly fish
It’s that pivotal moment
It’s impossible
This fish, this fish (so flushable)
This fish this fish

(v2)
Ariel said to Nemo
How do fish die overnight?
All I wanted was a goldfish
With a small bowl, air pump, fake plants

Drive me off to the pet store
Mommy has to buy some more...

(repeat chorus)

You can feed him in the daylight
(But not too much or he will die)
You can feed him in the nighttime
(Not too much or he will die)
Feed him in sweet slow motion
Smelly flakes fall from the sky

The Fish is floating, you overfed him!

(repeat chorus)
This fish, this fish (it's criminal)
This fish, this fish....

The photo

here it is... not the perfect portrait, technically, but one I would never throw away. This is the picture I mentioned the other day.

I took a day off from work today, because all of the singing I will do this week means I need a bit more rest than is usually possible in my frantic life. I feel out of sorts, as though I've forgotten something important that I was supposed to do today. It's driving me crazy.

My kid's $50 free fish

And yes I did use distilled spring water, Pol.

When we put him in here and turned on the light he freaked out a little. I gave him some food and said Good Luck.

This morning he's still hiding most of the time.

Now I'm going to have to get him some friends, I suppose
Carly(via Blackberry)

I give him a week

So the cherry on top is that some teacher gave my kid a FISH.

In a bag.

I was at choir, trying not to smite my nemesis, who frankly sounds a wee bit like Kermit the Frog. (We are in church. Think Kumbaya, Carly.) I came home from a LONG rehearsal, and found Squirt. Oy. He already has a name. Dead fish swimming, folks. The name ain't gonna help.

The fish can't stay in the bag. (I assume.)

I don't have a fish bowl. I have various bowls that I don't think would work. I have no fish FOOD. I have no fish-pertise in any form.

I wanted to dump him into this big glass candleholder that was vaguely fishbowl shaped but, I could not figure out if I could just POUR the whole bag in. It seemed like I would end up bonking his poor little fish head on the glass, no matter how gently I pour.

While the stupid boys of the household who brought this to my home fish are off to Walmart, I have the bowl in a dish, but I just went over to check on it and he was kind of stuck in a corner. Great. So I have a fish that wants to be sushi.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not) he freaks out whenever I go over and peer at the bag to see if he's gotten stuck in another corner again.

Poor Squirt.

And no, I haven't had any wine yet. I have to deal with the fish first.