you're a LOT of nuts

The problem with Facebook is that it's perfect for those of us with attention-span-deficiencies that haven't responded to traditional treatments. It's my best reason for why I don't blog as much as I used to.

"Best" meaning "worst".

Here's an example of why it's easier to Facebook than to blog:

I could go onto Facebook right now and type

I have twelve pounds of nuts in my freezer

and hit "post". If people believe I've provided a strong foundation statement, a "conversation" (if you will) will form almost instantaneously around my new status.

I really don't even have to form a complete sentence. I could simply write

Twelve pounds of nuts in the freezer, yo

and sixteen people would like my status, someone would demand to know what kind of nuts, someone else would want to know where I got twelve pounds of nuts and how come I put them in the freezer, a couple of people would list their favorite types of nuts, at least three wiseguys would crack off-color nuts-in-the-freezer jokes, someone might make a politically savvy comment about the relationship between nuts and presidential campaigns, someone would recall with bittersweet fondness something I did with a nut back in college, and, inevitably, someone would call me nuts.

I could be involved in the "conversation" or not, as I pleased. I could egg on the off-color-joke-making people or I could simply "like" their jokes and roll my eyes in secret. There would have to be no introductory paragraph, no citing of references, no moral to the story at all.  No story at all. People wouldn't question the veracity of my statement. They wouldn't require elegant segues between the discussion of favorite types of nuts and the questions about where I got the nuts or any logical conclusions as to the ultimate meaning of the nuts and why we should care considering the current state of the economy - which is good because we all know by now how bad I am at elegant segues and logical conclusions.

By tomorrow, people will have tired of making frivolous and/or political comments about nuts, and we'll all have moved on in a big, enthusiastic, lovable, galumphing herd to the next topic - for example:

"Why does my cat throw up on things a LOT?"

That's Facebook. Then there's blogs. A blog functions in Opposite Facebook World which is an actual place*.

Take every statement I made above and say its opposite. That's what it's like to have a blog. I have to introduce my topic, propel the conversation forward without the benefit of having other people's jokes to distract my readers or guide the post in more interesting and possibly hilarious directions, and write more than a single sentence and/or sentence fragment in any given sitting. In my blog, accurate citations usually are the least of my concerns since no one knows about the nuts in my freezer but me and my Guatemalan (Jenny, personal communication, June 3, 2012) and *I make things up a lot.  But I do have to come up with elegant segues and logical conclusions. Or at least I'm supposed to.

Here's how things usually go, blog-wise: An idea forms, usually while I'm trying to fall asleep. I let it simmer for a few hours (while I sleep) and when I feel ready - when my idea is fleshed out enough to commit it to screen, and I'm reasonably awake, I turn on the computer and get ready to write it down.

...But first, a quick peek at Facebook would be acceptable, right? Just a quick peek. Just to see who had their baby or whose horse won another prize or whose tomatoes are finally blushing red. Just a brief glance to find out what important changes have occurred in the lives of my friends and to say happy birthday to those whose birthdays it is, thereby rendering my obligation to be a responsible member of society complete.

And, as I scroll down through the hundreds of succinct and sometimes hilarious status updates and the bright pictures of flowers and babies screaming look at me I am beautiful and adorable! and all those images gleaned from the internet at large bearing their little perfectly written nuggets of internet wisdom ("It doesn't matter if the glass is half empty or half full. There is clearly room for more wine."), my brain switches into attention-deficit-mode, and whatever I was going to post in the blog instantly condenses itself into a single sentence (if!), and three seconds later the comments start coming in and I lose all motivation to expand. And instead of navigating over to the blog, I decide to stay for awhile and see where the "conversation" goes.

Awkward segue: And okay, so in conclusion, there are currently twelve pounds of nuts in my freezer. That's a lot of nuts. Eight pounds of walnuts, and, even better, four pounds of hazelnuts. Name one other person who right now has access to four pounds of hazelnuts. You can't do it!

Why do I have twelve pounds of nuts in my freezer? Oh, I'm sure we'll talk about that later! But right now I can feel my attention wandering...

...I'm gonna go ask Facebook if they know people with four pounds of hazelnuts in their freezer besides me.   And they better not.










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hugtreeging and rarty pocking

"Drop Dead Red" sunflowers.
I mean, flowsunners.

My first flowsunner ever.

Here's a funny Raphael story:

Yesterday evening, we were having a conversation about treehuggers. Or we weren't. I can't actually remember what we were talking about because shortly after the topic arose, Raphael inadvertently coined the term "hugtreegers".

Ever wonder what it's like to live with a non-native-English-speaker who also suffers from dyslexia?

Hugtreegers. That's what it's like.

The Guatemalan, by the way, is Done. With. School. For the duration of the summer. Party rocking!!

He'll go back in August for his final year of architecture, and after that everything will presumably go straight to hell - but good hell. It's so exciting! Who knows what 2013 will bring?! Hopefully more radishes, but I've learned to count on nothing, especially when it comes to root crops.

Let Summer commence.

"WE MUSTN'T PASS IT WITHOUT SMELLING IT!!"

Now that it's May and I'm again teetering on the edge of my Haven't-Posted-in-Awhile-Extreme-Guilt-Breaking-Point, I've decided to post something I actually wrote approximately nine months ago. In spite of what you think, I haven't been slacking off during all this not-posting I've been accomplishing. In fact, I've been faithfully and regularly writing many, many things that are much too terrible to release into the swirling  currents of the internet. As a result, I now have a powerful and mind-boggling collection of 76 drafts, one of which I am going to share with you today.

Although I've changed some parts of the following post to make it seem more like I wrote it this morning, I think the subject itself remains as relevant today as it would have had I written it a decade ago.

And so, hitherto and forewithal and with no provocation at all, I hereby present "Draft #61: Running with Dog".


I want to run with my dog Lila.

I can picture it: I'm all glowing with muscular calves and a bouncy blonde ponytail, running casually yet powerfully beside my sleek, obediant dog into the sunset. On a beach. Barefoot. With the leash hanging loosely from my hand. There's tons of sea glass, naturally, glittering upon the white sand. And there are dolphins.

Other people can do this. I'm not 100% sure about the dolphin-and-sea-glass part but certainly there are many people who engage in the symbiotic running part with their dogs. I witness it out the car window all the time. We left Lila with two friends when we went to California last summer, and they took her running every single day because they're inherently better people than we are and presumably also because she was driving them insane. (Lila lives her life with a lot of enthusiasm.)  Aside from a single Mysterious-Possible-Dead-Cat-Related-Whiplash Incident, Lila apparently ran with fluffy white angel wings strapped to her back and a halo stuck crookedly around her ears.

And so, in conclusion, I'm jealous. Other people can run with my dog, but I cannot.

Why?

Now I'm no pet psychologist, but I believe my dog's fantasy deviates significantly from mine, and therein lies the problem.  First of all in Lila's fantasy, there are no dolphins and there is no beach, because Lila doesn't care for water or large chittering sea-mammals. There is no sea glass, because what's the point? And there is no leash.  Fifthly, I'm not there either. And we're not actually running. And, finally, there's cat poop.

Extrapolating here, I figure our communication process goes something like this:

"Lila," I'll say, "We're going on a run today. And I'm going to wear a ponytail!"

And my dog will hear: "Lila, we're going for a walk during which we'll get to smell a lot of things today. A lot, do you hear me? It will be a veritable fiesta of smelling! You will have to abruptly stop every three feet for the purposes of smelling all the things! At least!" 

And then we'll be in the process of running and I'll say, "Good job, Lila!  You're running like a champ! Look at us get exercise! Look at my calves!"

And my dog will hear: "Lila!  Lila!  For God's sake, stop!  Stop now! There's something to smell! We mustn't pass it without smelling it!!"

And...WHIPLASH.

What's happening is that we're both attempting to fulfill our personal fantasies when we try to run together: I want the muscular legs, shiny ponytail, and friendly sea creatures; Lila wants cat poop and lots of it.

But what we've failed to realize up until now is that if we want to run together, we're going to have to compromise. Compromise is the backbone of any solid running partnership between woman and dog. And of course by "compromise", I mean I'm going to have to exchange Lila for a dolphin.

You can cuss out the tilapia and still call it domestic bliss, right?

Want to know what's in my freezer?

It doesn't matter, because I'm going to tell you anyway. Putting things in the freezer is a useful skill, and I've lately been slightly obsessed with it because I've been reading Country Living too much. I kind of want backyard chickens and something gingham, too.

1. Mom and I were talking about filone yesterday for some reason.  I'm almost certain that I'm the one who directed the conversation there on account of my freezing-things obsession. Mom was probably trying to talk about what to do re. World Peace or Starving Children because she's a better person than I am. I'm not sure how strongly she actually feels about filone.

Regardless of how we've arrived here, that's the first thing you'll find in my freezer. Trader Joe's sells par-baked filone bread loaves which I buy and keep in the freezer for when I want to have a slice of warm, delicious bread slathered with loads of good salty butter. Which is approximately every seven minutes. Consider keeping par-baked filone loaves in your freezer. It's the next best thing to homemade. I don't think the practice will sadden you.

2. I discovered recently and thanks to Facebook (Hello? Nicole W.? This one's on you.) that you can make your own vegetable stock and keep it in the freezer and...there it is. Next to the filone. For whenever you have a hankering. So...

3. ...I also keep a gallon-size Ziploc bag full of vegetable scraps in the freezer. This is super awesome.  Every time I have vegetable scraps - carrot peels, old desiccated onion parts that I intended to "use later", garlic ends and skins, wilty spinach, the wide parts of the celery and the leafy bendy parts that suck - I put them into the Ziploc which then goes back into the freezer. When the bag is full, I fill up a large pot of water and throw everything in, add salt, bay leaves, and sometimes other dried herbs, and simmer it for a half-hour or until I remember that I'm simmering things ("Oh shit! I'm simmering things!") (That's what I say.). Then I strain it and let it cool and measure portions into any available freezable containers. Which, I swear to you, my plastic storage containers and their lids are like the socks that disappear in the wash. Jesus.

Anyway, I like to label my containers with things like "1 1/4 cups veggie stock 3/15/12" so I'm more willing to use whatever's in that container when I accidentally find it later while looking angrily for the tilapia. ("Where the hell is the tilapia?!?") (We live in domestic bliss over here with our cussing and our fish.)

4. Okay.

You know how you buy a chunk of fresh ginger and you grate off, like, a teaspoon of it, and then you find it in the vegetable drawer three months later covered in green mold and all squishy?

How about this: grate off a teaspoon. Put the ginger in the freezer. When you go to use your ginger again, it's actually easier to mince. Because they always make you mince ginger. Nobody's ever like "just throw that sucker on in there, skin and all. Don't worry about mincing. Mincing is irrelevant."

Well. Once that happened. But mostly I have to mince it, and I hate mincing ginger with all its arrogant stringiness and its irritatingly complete sense-of-self. It's one of my things. I also hate the whole process of thawing chicken in the microwave and unrolling the cuffs of pants before putting them into the washer. Those are also my things.

5. Oh! This is a good one. I can't name even one recipe where I use egg yolks, yet I invariably wind up with  a carton's worth of egg whites in my freezer because whenever a recipe calls for yolks, I break the whites into an ice cube tray, freeze them, and then break them out into another Ziploc bag. Later, I can let them thaw and use them whenever a recipe calls for egg whites, or whenever I feel the need for a good egg white-and-sauteed-vegetable breakfast scramble (with a toasty slice of buttered filone and a good, strong cup of coffee) which is more often then you probably think. I might have that for dinner, now that I've mentioned it.

6. Oh my God. This is a good one too. This is my favorite one.

Tomato paste drives me nuts. Doesn't it drive everyone nuts? Yes. Because every time you use it, whatever you're using it in calls for a tablespoon, right? And you probably have a whole can of it. And you probably wind up throwing the remainder away because who uses that much tomato paste?!

So here's what you do. Use your one damn tablespoon of tomato paste. THEN, lay out some wax paper or parchment on a baking sheet. You probably could just use the baking sheet sans paper if your baking sheet isn't older than God which mine is. It used to not be chronically black and disturbingly sticky at the edges, but now I can't let food actually touch it because there's no predicting the results.

Anyway, scoop out the remaining unused tomato paste in tablespoon-sized increments and make little mounds on the baking sheet. Put the baking sheet in the freezer. Once the tomato paste mounds are frozen, pull them off the sheet and store them in your third and final Ziploc bag.Voila. You're welcome. Tomato paste problem solved.

The end.

divas & adorable carrots

Diva.

Guess who else fancies herself a princess?  And it's not Lila this time. Well...yes, it's Lila.  It's always Lila. But also it's this little cherry tomato plant.

I probably talk to my plants too much.

"You can grow up to be anything you want" (I say to my plants.) "Within certain parameters, of course."

I made the mistake of saying this to Raphael once and now look where we are. He took my affirmation of his potential a little too seriously, and did the whole vampire architecture student thing, and now he's all: "I build models until four in the morning. I live on coffee and pho soup. I have a drawing board set up in the Arizona room that I don't ever use because I'm always at the university building models and drinking coffee and slurping up pho soup."

The good news is that, even if my baby tomatoes grow up and decide to become architects, their practices will be confined to the garden boxes. I'll still have someone around to talk to.

Here's a picture of some carrots.

Carrots. My neighbor Kim made these sweet little carrots and, in the great tradition of people leaving sinister food items on our front porch, she came by last weekend bearing an armful of them and dropped them off with us, thereby inspiring me to go see if my own might be ready for plucking.

Here's a picture of the carrots I 

subsequently plucked from my own garden. 

Delicious grilled homemade carrots and tofu.

I decided to try grilling them. I soaked the green parts for awhile in water and used this recipe from The Vegetarian Grill by Andrea Chesney:

Honey-Ginger Glazed Carrots

1 lb. carrots
1 T. toasted sesame oil
1 T. honey
1 T. finely minced ginger
2 minced garlic cloves
1 tspn. soy sauce

Stick them on a lightly oiled grill rack (with the green parts away from the heat if possible) and grill over medium heat, turning frequently, until tender and grill-marked. Pour remaining glaze over carrots to serve.

The orange tree through the kitchen window.

The orange tree in bloom.

Other Plant News. The yard is in full bloom now. Besides carrots and diva tomato plants, the prickly pears and hedgehogs are all fluffed up with flowers and bees. The penstemons are almost taller than I am, and the palo verde is exploding in slow motion with its gorgeous yellow flowers. Until a few days ago, the orange tree looked like a wedding and smelled like...an orange tree in full bloom.

I love spring in the desert.

Penstemons, agave, desert bluebells, dogweed,
and miscellaneous purple flowers.

introducing...Princess Mara

I keep hearing rumors of a new baby in the family, but obviously I needed to double-check some facts and confirm these rumors before posting willy-nilly all over the internet about new people being born. You can't just go around saying things like that without evidence.

Although I haven't seen her with my own eyes, I feel pretty confident in my basic sleuthing abilities, and so I think it's time to announce the birth of my niece, Mara June. She was born two weeks ago to my sister Julie and my brother-in-law Graham, and she's obviously perfect. 

Below is a picture of how Mara would look if she were floating through space in a tiara:

WHY am I cursing so much?!?

Hi! You might probably not remember who I am!

Because it's been awhile. It's almost summer now I guess.  In Tucson, we're having what's technically known as a "late March pre-early late summer summer post-spring summer heat flash". It's terrible. It was about 90 degrees today and with some kind of "red flag warning" which I assume is wind-related  because that's basically all we get in terms of dangerous weather around here and also might actually be for tomorrow. NOAA. Who knows what they're up to over there?  Crazy bitches! I can't understand a word they say!  We're not like you folks in...basically every state east of here. No tornadoes or blizzards or freak spring floods here. We just get dust storms, heat advisories, and occasionally hail whose aftermath everyone immediately takes pictures of and posts on Facebook like it's actual weather. We also facilitate a fair number of dog fights, but I don't think NOAA considers those weather.

I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not ready for summer. Since I moved to Tucson, I've only been ready for summer once, and that was in July of 2001. The month I moved here. I moved here after grad school. I packed everything into my blue Chevy Cavalier, stocked up on books-on-tape, and drove for three-and-a-half days all by myself across the country to get here on what was largely a whim. ("I don't want to live in Ohio anymore!") It's still one of my proudest achievements. It's why I was completely ready for summer. Because it would be my first real summer not in Ohio and also the first summer during which I might find myself living out of my car.

I arrived in July, and it was incredibly hot. Like, almost as hot as it was the summer I was in Cyprus. Cyprus, if you don't know, is HOT. It's so hot in the summer that they have a siesta in the afternoon, during which everyone gathers half-naked in shaded lots to scrub recently excavated pottery and drink partially-frozen, slushy apricot nectar out of boxes and gossip about their peers. And later there's ouzo and wine in a jug...

Or possibly all that was just us, and the grandmothers of Athienou are clutching their bosoms in shock right now.  ("Half-naked Americans drinking wine out of jugs and engaging in gossip in our town and under our very noses! Something terrible in Greek!") I'm just trying to describe the heat I experienced upon arriving in Tucson in July. The heat. My God. In fact I'm clutching at my bosoms right now.

(Not really. That would be weird for all of us.)

Anyway, I clearly remember walking down the street by the University of Arizona and telling someone (But WHO? And WHY?!) that I'd just moved here (I was excited! And proud! And still mostly terrified!), and - remember, it was July - they said...."WHY?" And I'm not exaggerating this time. That was the first question this stranger, whoever it was, thought to ask. 

So, after I realized what this Tucson summer thing was all about, it became a badge of courage to, not only have moved to the Sonoran Desert, but to have moved to the Sonoran Desert in July.  Ask my sister. Who has vowed never to come here in the summer again. She'd sooner die. (I think she actually said those words.) Or my parents. Who kept checking the temperature on their iphones when they were here last summer so they'd know what temperature to brag to their friends about. They're tougher than my sister, let's just say. She was all like: "105 degrees?! I'm f***in' out." My parents were more: "105 degrees is for p*******!". (They didn't really say whatever it is you think I'm insinuating with those asterisks. I can't believe you thought that, even. My parents are respectable. They send me wine.) 


Lucky for me and my psyche, tomorrow is supposed to cool down to Perfect Patio Weather: 73 degrees. Let's just overlook the "areas of blowing dust" advisory, right? And get on with the m***********f*********** mojitos.


Also I didn't wind up living out of my car.

"Late Morning Backyard Hail".
By Raphael.