I’ll be walking in Memory Walk 2010, a fundraiser for Alzheimer’s care and research, in October. This is where I e-mug you and take your money. Normally. Today, I’m going to just direct you to where you can donate if you have extra cash and are feeling generous in a tax-deductible kind of way.
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Memory Walk 2010
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010Lame like Vanilla Ice
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010Either I need to start working out again, Devon is the Nerd Commander or both.
Over the weekend, I made vanilla ice cream — the best vanilla ice cream you’ve never had, by the way. It was creamy, thanks to one part whole milk to two parts heavy cream and five eggs, blended into a sweet vanilla custard that was left overnight to chill before I mixed it into ice cream. And it tastes like real vanilla, not crappy vanilla flavoring. But I digress.
I had just gotten out of the shower when the ice cream finished mixing, so I dropped my towel to scrape it out. Of course, I needed a taste-tester. For some people, this is the start of a lame porn flick, but my version was produced by NERDoVision, where the dude is playing World of Warcraft with his peeps. So I ended up naked and feeding Devon ice cream while he complained through his headset about his lousy DPS. You win this round, Elite Boss Nerdloc.
Waldbaum’s now run by Guilt, Inc.
Monday, May 10th, 2010Before dad went into the hospital, I did his grocery shopping online. I have to say, Waldbaum’s online grocery service is quite bitchin’. Good selection, reasonable prices, all delivered to my Dad’s door so I don’t have to go to the store. Rock on, Waldbaum’s.
So I was a little stunned when I got this email from Waldbaum’s today:
“We miss you! Where have you been? Was it something we did?
We are always listening to our customers and would like to ask you a few questions about why you have stopped using our online service.
Please take a minute to complete a brief on-line survey and tell us how we can make this service meet your expectations.
We hope to see you soon.
Waldbaums of Valley Stream Customer Care Team”
My actual response:
“Give it some time, dudes. I was buying for my father, who has dementia and doesn’t do his own shopping. He’s in the hospital now after major surgery and eating crap like individual-serving applesauce.
Way to run your business like an Italian grandmother, with all the guilt, by the way. I promise, I’ll start buying from you again when Dad gets home from the hospital. And I’ll call home more often and visit on Sunday, too. Just don’t give me with switch!
Thanks.”
Settle down, Parenting
Thursday, May 6th, 2010Not married for three weeks yet, and already I’m getting copies of Parenting magazine delivered to my apartment. Pushy fuckers.
I must have bought something for a pregnant friend and ended up on a mailing list, since I’m 32 years old, and all my friends are pregnant, recently pregnant or about to be pregnant.
Look, Parenting magazine, in high school, I was voted “Most Likely to Forget My Baby in a Hot Car During Summer.” I don’t need you getting all up in my uterus/grill.
Where the hell are my keys?
Sunday, April 25th, 2010Three minutes after getting home from the airport, I realized I couldn’t find my keys. We were in the apartment already, since Devon had opened the door, but I launched the epic hunt for my apartment keys, which I couldn’t remember taking out of my bag. I spend more time looking for shit than just about anything else. It’s an Olympic event for me.
During the hunt, I cleaned my desk, which was covered in crumbs, and found our long-lost paring knife. I found it in a baking cookbook. At some point, I must have used it as a bookmark. Because I do things like that. This knife had been missing for three months.
I turned the apartment upside down, but I still haven’t found my keys.
When I start doing this shit at 60, people are going to think it’s Alzheimer’s. If I’m still friends with you guys in 30 years, promise me you’ll remember I’m just retarded, not demented.
Just Mauied
Friday, April 23rd, 2010Those sexy mo fos above are me and Devon, freshly married off the beach and eating a spectacular dinner at Spago at the Four Seasons Hotel. It is one of those places that serves meals in very small servings with very fancy presentations, but we got to try lots of different things, including the best cream of mushroom soup I’ve ever had. Also, chocolate ooze and ice cream, below. The sauce (aka, ooze) took 10 years to perfect and about five minutes to eat. I made that chocolate my bitch.
Other highlights: SCUBA diving for the first time. It turns out a weight belt and an oxygen tank are FREAKIN’ HEAVY. Add that to sand and a strong wave, and the sky got a great shot of my ass as I flipped over on the beach. No harm done, though. A lot of SCUBA diving was overcoming the very primal fear of drowning, especially when the dive master asked me to remove my mouthpiece underwater and insert his extra mouthpiece, and I was all, “Dick, I need that to breathe. Hell, no.” But they won’t actually let you go any further unless you can overcome the natural terror involved in parting with your only source of oxygen. I got over it and was rewarded with views of pretty coral, fish and sea turtles.
Other activities included ziplining, which involves firing yourself 650 feet in the air at 50 mph in a harness attached to a cable; climbing; hiking; snorkeling; sleeping; and drinking margaritas. Drinking margaritas was very important to us.
We also visited Hana, a remote section of Maui where the roads are only sorta paved and they have trees that look like this.
We found some guy and his wife living inside, and they told us to have fun storming the castle, but we had things to do, people to see, so we declined.
Touchdown in Maui
Saturday, April 17th, 2010Thanks to a couple who missed their plane, we made it to Hawaii. Continental overbooked, but we caught a break at the expense of the misfortune of others. I sit here now listening to the sounds of the Pacific Ocean and drinking a margarita as Devon marinates the fuck out of some chicken for tomorrow’s dinner. I’ll make some brownies later, because this is the sort of stuff we do on vacation.
I wasn’t sure we’d make it. Last Thursday, I spent the night in the ER with Dad, whose colon decided to go rogue and strangle his small intestines. That’s the way colons are sometimes, going bad when you least expect it. Dad survived the surgery and is recovering fairly well, minus part of his colon and sporting a colostomy bag. He had a pacemaker put in today, since he has also developed a heart condition. The time in the hospital is not doing good things for his cognitive function. Most of our travel plans seem to be up in the air until we actually leave.
I spent part of the 10-hour flight falling in love…with Walt Whitman. Few people make me as happy to be alive as Whitman. Dude was actually fired from his day job for writing Leaves of Grass. People thought he was a big ol’ perv. I’m not a big fan of poetry in general. I spent too much time in college listening to too many emo kids whine about their pain, I guess. But Whitman is the shit, y’all.
We’re getting married on Monday (me and Devon, not me and Walt Whitman), and I’ve suggested Devon run from the crazy lady while he can. He is marinating chicken instead. He can’t say he wasn’t warned.
Bathroom conversation
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010I admitted to my friend Toni that I talk to my mother sometimes when I’m using the bathroom. It’s a great place for that sort of crazy. I’m alone, so no dirty looks to deal with, and it’s not like I can do anything else anyway. When I asked Toni whether this was crazy, she made me promise I wasn’t going all Joan of Arc.
Mom would never ask me to kill the English. She’d just bitch that I wasn’t putting enough salt in the gravy.
Then she said: “I’ll talk to my dad sometimes. I wouldn’t think yer crazy or nothing, less you started going all Ophelia in Hamlet with gravy recipes. ‘She says it needs more salt, must add salt. She promised me the recipe. Where is it???’”
My peeps are funny sometimes.
Daybreak in the spare bedroom
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010“I can finally literally touch the back wall. That hasn’t happened in a long time. It’s like a fat man seeing his penis after a decade.”
– Devon, on clearing some boxes out of the spare bedroom
– Devon, on clearing some boxes out of the spare bedroom
Now that we can see our figurative penises again, we should be able to get the back room into shape. We both want a well-ordered, domestic home, but we are not particularly well-ordered people, which is why we still have unpacked boxes after six months.
We have too much stuff. WAY too much stuff. The amount of stuff that would be appropriate for people who have been married for a decade and are living in a large house. In fairness, we were married for about six years total, just not to each other.
Mentally, we do not accept the fact that we live in an apartment in New York City. Devon just bought me a freezer for my birthday. A freezer. Because the one that came with our fridge just wasn’t good enough. The freezer will be going in the spare bedroom, which is why Devon was clearing boxes. We have a juicer, an espresso machine, a coffeemaker, a bread machine, a deep fryer, a pressure cooker and more pots and pans than you could shake an infrared thermometer at, and we have two of those.
We haven’t decided to toss much. We rented storage space so we could move some out. In other words, we rented an apartment for our stuff. We hope to have a house someday, but for now, we pay rent for our things.
But damn, that freezer is gonna be awesome.
Don’t bash the ‘stache
Friday, March 19th, 2010I was reading a blog post about women with femstaches today and was reminded of my mother. Right before one of the last surgeries of her life, she asked me to shave her beard. (It’s one of those things postmenopausal women don’t really talk about.) I laughed. She didn’t want the doctor who was about to see her intestines to see her beard.
Mom’s vanity was just enough to be endearing.
I’m growing my nails long(ish) for the wedding, and hopefully beyond. She was always on me about biting them down to bloody stumps. I wonder whether she would be pleased with them now or pissed that I waited until she kicked it to let them grow.
Miss you, Mom. Wish you were here.
