WWHPD?

Scratch what I said the other day about my future as a pioneer woman. Not gonna happen, obviously. When I pulled into my driveway tonight, my garage door opener wouldn't work. I thought maybe the clicker had died (which would be no great surprise, given that the Scotch tape holding it together may actually be older than I am). I got out of my car, unlocked the side door, and pressed the opener button inside. Still no luck. At this point, it occurred to me not that my ancient garage door opener was broken, but that my power might be out. I plugged in the work light above the table at which I do no work. No light. Yep, no power.

At this point, my thoughts went as follows:

1. Crap. I have to leave my car outside, tonight, of all nights? Tonight, when it's already rainy and blustery and unpleasant and when the "wintry mix" in the air is sure to turn into solid ice on my windshield, which I'll have to get up early to scrape, if I can even get out of my driveway anyway after the six inches of spring snow the weather people are predicting? I have a garage for a reason, and I'd like my car in it, thank you!
   
   
2. Crap. No power means no TV! And The Office is finally new again tonight! Nooooooooooooooo!!!
   
   
3. Crap. I just went grocery shopping yesterday. (Yes. Again. Eating healthy is expensive, dammit.) I wonder how long that chicken will be safe in my fridge.
   

And then I got inside and remembered something else that's rather important relies on electricity as well. My furnace. It may be "spring" (ha), but it was 56 degrees in my house. Brr.

I called the power company to report the outage. While I waited for the automated voice named Amy to confirm she had entered my complaint, I thought about Laura Ingalls Wilder. I considered that I might have to spend an entire lonely evening with no TV, no Internet, no furnace or microwave. I wondered "What would Half Pint do?" I was quietly resigning myself to a night reading by candles or flashlight, telling myself stories to pass the time, and going to bed at a reasonable hour for once, for lack of anything better to do. And then Automated Amy came back to inform me that my power would be back by 7:20. The one analog clock in my house said it was currently 6:15. I would have to live in a simpler age of no electrical conveniences for a mere hour and five minutes. And all I would miss was 20 minutes of My Name is Earl.

Five minutes later, just as I was pulling on a polar fleece and digging up a pair of gloves appropriately thin enough for indoor wear, my microwave started blinking its "Power Failure" light and my refrigerator started whirring again.

Five minutes. How did they even do that? Is there a little red "Reset" switch for my address on a wall in an Xcel Energy building somewhere? Is there an emergency team of electric company superheros who were able to whisk themselves to the power lines behind my house at a moment's notice? I do not know, but I do know that my car is safety stored out of the elements, I can still eat the chicken in my fridge likely without acquiring a bout of food poisoning, and I was able to see Michael and Jan's disastrous dinner party in real-time. And for all of those, I am rather grateful.

The simple life is overrated, I say.

I'm not as funny as I think I am

Apparently in some future life I intend to be a pioneer woman. I've not yet finished hand-stitching the binding on my quilt and already I'm in another crafty grandmotherly class. This time I'm learning to knit socks--something I've not yet attempted in all of my knitting thus far. (Note: Those photos do not represent all of my knitting. They represent only the knitting that I've completed since I bought a digital camera and that I was able to find on my hard drive the day I uploaded that album. I don't know why I feel compelled to clarify this, but obviously being generous with the details is my thing, so it shouldn't really surprise either of us, should it?)

ANYWAY... So I'm taking a sock knitting class. And it's not at all a grandmotherly sock knitting class; it's a pretty hipster-heavy group and it takes place in a very hipster-friendly shop. I wasn't at a Quaker knitting bee; I wasn't in a church basement with a group of mild-mannered lady parishioners. Know your audience, right? And that's why I'm still surprised this joke went so awry.

Instructor: My dad can knit two mittens at the same time, one inside the other. I'm pretty sure he's the only person who can do that.

Me: Your dad knits? Wow. My dad reads the paper and drinks. I suppose we all have our hobbies.

Crickets. Slight nervous laughter.

Seriously, people? Nothing?

Tough crowd.

If you weren't hungry before you started reading this, you will be by the time you're done. I'm sorry.

First off, how about a hearty round of applause for NPW on last week's Choose Your Own Blogventure game? Wasn't that fun? I know it was no small feat organizing all of us wily bloggers into formation for such an undertaking, but NPDubs did it presumably with all fingernails still intact. Well done, my friend. I won't dare ask you when the next CYOB will be, but I do believe you have started something that must happen again. Good luck with that. And by the way, as a brief side note, is it just me, or do the rest of you see "CYOB" and want to turn those letters into "Carry Your Own Booze" or "Cover Your Own Butt" or some other similar distortion of another semi-well-known acronym? No? That's just me? I thought so. Moving on.

Friday after work I spent an absurd amount of money on groceries. ("Absurd" = $161, which, eerily, is the same amount that Poppy spent on groceries this weekend as well. As we both live alone, we were equally dismayed we managed to rack up that total.) In my defense, I had not gone shopping for weeks, and I was essentially down to spaghetti sauce, Kraft singles, pudding cups, and Triscuits. Sometimes I think it would be fun to host an Iron Chef-esque reality show in my home. In my version, though, there would be no secret ingredient. Instead, the catch would be that the chefs have to make a delicious meal using only ingredients I have on hand. I would love to see what inventive and remarkable things could be accomplished with no staples such as bread, eggs, or vegetables. Don't worry, chefs... I have flour! And condiments! Surely you can do something with those! (Incidentally, have I already written about this idea before? It's entirely possible I have. Carry on.)

So anyway, I went grocery shopping so that I wouldn't resort to having Kellogg's All Bran crackers dipped in cream cheese for dinner (or, to be more honest, resort to having Kellogg's All Bran crackers dipped in cream cheese for dinner a second night in a row). Rather than filling my cart with my usual boxes of carb-heavy, preservative-laden frozen and packaged foods, however, I did what the experts have been telling me to do for years: I focused nearly all my shopping in the outer areas of the store--the produce, dairy, and fresh foods area--and made only a few forays into the inner aisles. I bought fruit! And not just bananas! I bought a papaya and a mango and a bag of oranges! I bought lettuce! And jicama! And cherry tomatoes! I am entirely more proud of myself for this than I should be. I felt like the cashier should have given me a gold star when I piled my selections on the conveyor belt.

I've tried this "I'm going to eat real food" thing before... several times, in fact. It never sticks, largely because I am lazy and I do not like going to the grocery store as regularly as is required when the food you're buying is food that can't be stockpiled for weeks. Also, real food requires assembly and preparation. Theoretically, I'd love to bring a healthy snack such as baby carrots and hummus to work, but that requires divvying the carrots up into a little bag and finding a handy travel-sized container to hold a serving or so of dip, and making time for these bothersome tasks in my morning routine would require that I hit the snooze button a time or two less, and that, friends, is a battle I just can't seem to win. So we'll see how long this healthy eating kick lasts this time. I did rather well all weekend, if you don't count the many pumpkin oatmeal cookies I have eaten (Did anyone else make these after Noelle posted the recipe? If not, why not?? They are damn tasty.) or the three spoonfuls of peanut butter that I for some reason ate straight out of the jar, drizzled with honey, about a half hour ago. Oh, and also, the ridiculously over-the-top dinner I had last night. So really, I suppose I didn't actually do so well at all. Baby steps, as they say. Baby steps indeed.

Last night's dinner was, however, delicious. I don't know why I haven't been here before, it being rather conveniently located for me and having gained rave reviews in several publications around town. I am glad I finally went, though, if for no other reason than I now have a perfect "date place" in mind, should I ever actually go on a date again. Or, more specifically, should I go on a date with a rugged man's-man sort of guy who thinks dinner isn't dinner without a big slab of meat involved. (A note to my vegetarian friends: You might want to avert your eyes through this paragraph. Think fond thoughts of tofu and move along.) This restaurant is like a classier, urban, foodie-friendly version of our famous local barbecue chain. Their chicken is so juicy, their pork so perfectly seasoned that it makes me think those redneck bumper stickers have a point: if God didn't want me to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them so damn tasty. This place is so serious about their meat that they even put it in their vegetables. Yams topped with chorizo... collard greens with turkey. You can have your meat with a side of meat. I am telling you, boys would love this place. Or, many of the boys I've known would, anyway. I'll test this theory out eventually and report back.

But back to my grocery adventure. I mentioned listening to the "experts" and shopping primarily in the produce section. I haven't admitted that the "expert," in this case, is Montel Williams. Yes, that Montel Williams. Did you know he wrote a book? He wrote a few of them, actually. The one I have from the library at the moment, however, is this one. I don't even remember how I came across it, but I read the summary and somehow got sucked in. I do want to transform my life and feel spectacular! I do want to look better, feel better, have more energy and fewer aches and pains. But can Montel really make that happen? Maybe he can and maybe he can't. I'm only about a third of the way through the book, and so far I can sum it up thusly: "Vegetables are good for you! Eat more of them! Fish is good, too! I'm 51 years old and I look and feel great! I can wear a Speedo if I want to! Vegetables! Yay, vegetables! Superfoods!"

I may have taken a few liberties with the exclamation points, but I think you get the point. In any case, he does offer some fairly useful advice for incorporating those pesky vegetables into my life by encouraging me to blend them up into tasty drinks. I haven't yet tossed a head of Romaine in the blender with an orange and some ice cubes, as he recommended, but I did make a tropical fruit smoothie yesterday that was so good I almost forgot it was good for me.

So anyway. Healthy eating. Routine consumption of fruits and vegetables. It's my new (old) goal right now. I give it until Wednesday before I'm baking a frozen pizza again, but at the moment, I have high hopes, anyway. Wish me luck, because I will need it. Luck, and tips, actually. Have you figured out a way for complicated salads to miraculously make themselves? How about a way to make broccoli or cauliflower taste good without being slathered with cheese or salt? Anyone? Anything? I'm all ears.

It's Choose Your Own Blogventure Day!

Note: This post is my portion of NPW's soon-to-be-famous Choose Your Own Blogventure game, which I mentioned last week. What follows won't make much sense unless you end up here from the segments that precede it. So don't read this just yet. Instead, head over to NPW's blog to see how it all begins. If you make the right choices, hopefully I'll see you back here again soon.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Click here to start the story.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(If you've ended up here, you likely came from here. The story proceeds as follows.)

Emma considered turning back. How badly did she really need those cupcakes, anyway? Besides that, even if she got past this zombie, who knew what awaited her inside? Maybe behind the front doors to that convenience store was a whole pack of zombies shuffling their way through the aisles, seeking brains but settling for beef jerky and pork rinds?

"NO," resolved Emma. "I am going in. I will have my disgusting orange cupcakes, and I will have them now."

As Emma walked towards the groaning man, she grasped her keys tightly, wondering if a sharp blow to the forehead with her long, pointy ignition key would be enough to do the creature in. After a few more steps, she raised the key in her hand, ready to strike with all the force her malnourished arms could muster.

"Woah!" the zombie cried. Except it wasn't a zombie. Emma could see at this range that what she thought was a member of the living dead was really just an unusually pale and slightly doughy kid whom she remembered from her freshman year psychology class. She took a closer look at the would-be blood stains smeared across his face and shirt.

"Is that... cherry pie filling?" Emma asked.

"Um... yeah," the not-zombie replied. "I know they're revolting, but I can't get enough Hostess Fruit Pies." He sheepishly reached his hands in his pockets and pulled out several crumpled red and white wax paper wrappers.

Emma smiled. "I understand. No one understands why I like orange Hostess cupcakes. Everyone says..."

"...that the chocolate ones are better," the not-zombie finished.

"Yes!" Emma replied. "You too?"

"Me too," he smiled.

Emma softened a bit. It wasn't every day she found a kindred spirit, even one who thus far shared only a penchant for late night snacking on convenience store foods. But there was still the matter of the strange groaning, the shuffling, the inability for a grown man to eat a neatly contained, hand-held snack without requiring a bib or drop cloth.

"Don't I know you from the U?" Emma asked. "Psych 101. Professor Taylor. I think you sat near me."

"Good memory," the man replied. "I'm Jake. Jake Ryan."

"Emma," Emma answered.

She looked the man in front of her up and down. "Jake Ryan??" she thought. "How did I sit two feet away from that guy for an entire semester and not know he shared a name with a man every girl in the 80s fantasized about?" Suddenly, in her mind, Emma was a 16-year-old Molly Ringwald, sitting face to face across from Jake in front of a picture window, a birthday cake with 16 burning candles placed between them.

"Do you bake, Jake?" Emma asked, a faint but wistful smile suddenly spreading across her face.

"What?" Jake looked confused, partly because of the abruptness of the question and partly because he hadn't realized they'd decided to start speaking only in rhyme.

Emma snapped out of the fantasy in her head and focused again on the cherry pie filling smeared across Jake's chest. Jake's suddenly very manly looking chest. She felt her face turn red.

"Look, I know it's late," Jake said, "But are you doing anything right now? I live just around the corner from here. I don't have any orange cupcakes, but I do have microwave popcorn and a bottle of wine. Care to keep a fellow insomniac company for a bit?"


If you think Emma should go with Jake, cupcakes and good sense be damned, click here.

If you think Emma should politely decline and proceed in to Store 24, click here.

Not everyone in Boston knows my name, and it is not always sunny in Philadelphia (but I had fun in both places anyway)

All right then. Spring vacation recap. I promised you one of those, didn't I? Of course, by now, NPW, Noelle, and Lara have it pretty well covered, but I'd feel remiss in not posting my version anyway.

I had a lovely long weekend, and I hope the lovely ladies and gentlemen with whom I spent it did as well. There are those who might say the Internet is not real life, that I'd be insane to plan an overnight visit at the home of a blogger I'd never met in person in real time (or moreover, that said blogger would have to be insane or downright foolish to provide her home address and invite me to fly to her city and stay with her). But as Lara, NPW, Noelle, and I chatted in NPW's living room in our pajamas Friday night, I looked at each one of them and couldn't help saying, "I don't feel at all like I just met any of you tonight!" In our case at least, who we are online translates quite accurately to who we are in real life, and I feel like crying "No fair" because I don't get to hang out with them again any time I like.

I have a hard time summing up the past few days in any sort of coherent narrative, so instead I'll recount the weekend photo essay style, with random and possibly incomplete and incohesive segues in between. Sound fun? I thought so. Let's go.

Lara and her husband Rob picked me up at the Philadelphia airport early Friday afternoon, and I got in their car to drive several hours to Boston with them immediately thereafter. One might think a road trip into New England rush hour might be a surefire way to unravel an Internet friendship in record time, but luckily, we made it to NPW and Chris's house in Boston still excited for the weekend of togetherness ahead. Unfortunately, Aaron bailed on our group dinner plans due to an alleged stomach bug, but the rest of us had a fine time enjoying noodles and ice cream anyway.







The next morning it was off to Harvard for Noelle's swim meet. After my brief visit to that campus, I'm pleased to think about how I can now casually drop the line "Yeah, I went to Harvard. No big deal, really..." into future conversations. Noelle, on the other hand, gets to say she not only went there, but swam there, so I'm very excited about that on her behalf.







From there, we commenced our sightseeing adventures, but we didn't make it very far before we realized it was after NOON and we'd not yet had a drink, which, while on vacation is simply not right. So off to John Harvard's Brew Pub we went.



You'll note that I had a cider rather than a beer, which I'm sure is some sort of travesty within spitting distance of Sam Adams's grave. Luckily, Lara and NPW had greeted Sam with a hearty "Thank you, Sam!" moments earlier, so I felt a bit better about betraying Boston with my beverage choice.



Besides that, while Boston may be a notably beer-centric town, it is also home to the Omni Parker House, which, in addition to having invented the Boston Cream Pie, had the ingenuity to bring us the Boston Cream Pie martini as well. Should you make it to Boston at some point, I highly recommend you sample one of these.







If you could also try the pumpkin martini and report back to me on your thoughts, that'd be great. We have a tendency to neglect the pumpkin from December through September, and I'd like to do whatever I can to remedy that.



When NPW first pointed out the Omni Parker House (hereafter known to me as, simply, "the hotel with the delicious Boston Cream Pie martinis), it was actually too early for a drink. Not too early in our view, mind you (we did have our first drink of the day at 1:09, after all), but those crazy folks at the "the hotel with the delicious martinis" seemed to think a bar need not open until 4:30. To keep ourselves busy in the meantime, we walked to Mike's Pastry for Florentine cannolis--a detour I highly recommend should ever you find yourself in the area (or within reasonable distance of it) yourself. If you've read NPW's and Lara's recent posts, you may think the cannolis have already been well documented to an unnecessarily thorough degree, but you would be wrong, my friend. You know that guy in The Godfather? The guy who says, "Leave the gun; take the cannoli"? If that was a Florentine cannoli from Mike's Pastry, I can say with resolute certainty that he made the right choice.





Once we started drinking and snacking, I had an even harder time than usual focusing with any sort of reverence on things of historical significance, so instead we just made friends with statues and curbside mascots around Boston.







After our sightseeing eating and drinking adventures, we were a tad worn out, so we retired back to NPW's house to rest up for dinner. That is, if your definition of "rest up" means cracking open a bottle of wine and playing Wii tennis and bowling. Nothing says "down time" like getting your ass kicked in fake bowling; wouldn't you agree?







Eventually, we did tear ourselves away from Chris's giant TV long enough to walk to dinner, where we met up with the hilarious and charming Red of The Cupcake Tent fame (along with her lovely friend Carly) for late-night burritos and drinks. I think a fine time was had by all, even if the restaurant did run out of guacamole before we arrived. Seriously! A Mexican restaurant with no guacamole! I was at least as verklempt about the news as Red was, but no one captured a photo of it in my case.



Luckily, Red's friend Sam was there to soften the blow. And clearly the rest of us managed to cope as well. Lack of guac didn't prevent any of us from enjoying our fine meal.





All in all, we had a lovely time together, as evidenced by this post-dinner group photo.



(Sing it with me now: "One of these things is not like the oth-er"... Red, perhaps you'll want to invest in some eyewear before you hang out with us again. Obviously in this group, being a four-eyed brunette is the way to go.)

Sunday morning we had a lovely breakfast and said our goodbyes to Noelle, Chris, and NPW, and then Lara, Rob, and I headed off back to Philadelphia. It would be entirely too boring to go straight to Philly, however. Instead, we enjoyed a detour in Marblehead (where I bought a book, saw a lighthouse, and met Rob's mother) and another stop for dinner in Salem--home to the expected witch-related museums and trinket shops but also to a gem of a liquor store named "Bunghole." Seriously, I couldn't make a name like that up. (Or, I could, but I didn't. See?)



Hence, we arrived at casa del Guinness Girl and Wilman well after midnight, a fact for which the "high-compliance" Rob (note: his word, not mine) apologized at least 17 times. For the record (even though I know he will not read this): Rob, I absolutely did not mind stopping in Marblehead so you could see your mom and grandfather, and I was not seething that you left me waiting at the airport for an extra 20 minutes earlier in the weekend either. Internets, I assure you: Rob is one of the nicest and most considerate men you will ever meet, but it is a good thing he did not accompany Lara and me on our rainy day adventures in Philly Monday, because I am 100% certain he would have spent the day apologizing for the weather on the city's behalf.



By this point, Lara had already figured out that I generally require little more in terms of a sightseeing plan than "let's just walk around and look at things (oh, and maybe stop for wine and snacks several times)," and she had no problem being my tour guide with that in mind.

I couldn't justify being in Philadelphia and not seeing the Liberty Bell, so we popped over for a quick photo there. In case you haven't heard, it's a big bell with a crack in it. And that's still just about all I know about that.



We also tried to go to the U.S. Mint, for no other reason than it was right there and we'd both heard it was a worthwhile tour (and one Lara hadn't yet done). If ever you happen to attempt this yourself, here's a tip for you: the U.S. Mint does not allow cameras or camera phones carried anywhere on your person. The man at the door will be very official and adamant about that rule, but he will offer no solution as to where you might safely stow or check your camera, and he will act as if this is a problem that has never come up or occurred to him before. He will also not do much to sell you on the interestingness of the U.S. Mint tour, though (Us: "Well, what does the tour involve, anyway?" Him: "You see how money gets made."), so you could probably just do what we did, which was say "Screw you, Mint" and go get a Philly-style soft pretzel instead.





From there, we went to the Mutter Museum, at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Although they did not confiscate our cameras nor force us to leave them on the street for a vagrant or hoodlum to walk off with, they also do not allow photography within the museum, so this is the most I can show you of our visit there.





Suffice it to say that "Disturbingly Informative" is an entirely apt tagline. I made it through the conjoined twins, the wall of skulls, the wax model samples of encephalitis and other infections, and the rows upon rows of babies in jars, but when we got to the tumors and skin diseases, Lara and I both agreed we'd seen about enough. Oh, and also, surprisingly, we said, "I'm hungry. How about lunch?" and we headed off for a cheesesteak at Jim's.





Are you tired of my lengthy play-by-play yet? Don't worry. I assure you; I am almost done. Most of the rest of the afternoon was spent posing as and near statues and public art, because I am apparently six years old and that sort of thing is still amusing to me. Luckily Lara is still six years old as well, so we had great fun with it, obviously.



















That last one, of course, is the Rocky statue outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where I had to run the steps just like Rocky did. There are 72 of them, in case you are curious. Perhaps that will help you out in a game of bar trivia some day.



We finished off the day with a tasty Thai meal in Lara and Rob's neighborhood and then retired to their gorgeous old house in Manyunk, where I nearly died when I forgot Rob's warning that the bathroom is the BROWN door, not the GREEN one. "Be sure you don't open the green door!" he stressed when they first gave me the tour around their house. I thought maybe they just didn't want me to see that their basement was haunted (or possibly is where they store illicit substances), but it turns out it's just an abrupt and unexpected pit of death. So. Should ever you visit Rob and Lara, word to the wise: BROWN door, not green. Remember that.





After my luckily not-fatal fall, we had some more wine and played some more games, which is when I discovered that Lara is not only a Wii bowling savant but an unbeatable Boggle pro as well. People, I swear to you, I am tremendous at Boggle. I think most of my real-life friends will attest to that. But Lara could beat Peggy Hill in Boggle tournament play. It was a humbling experience that was good for me, I suppose ("This must be what it's like for other people when they play Boggle with me," I said), but not so secretly I'm actually a little glad Lara lives so far away, so I don't have to face her as competition again any time soon.

And that about wraps up the trip, I think. I had a fantastic time meeting everybody and like I said, I am sad that I can't go hang out with them again next week. I very much hope this blogger meet-up was not the last. Meanwhile, I'll be brushing up on my skillz with my electronic Boggle and killing time reading all the books I acquired from my generous and bookwormy friends. When I left on Friday, I had one book with me (the one that's been in my sidebar entirely longer than it should be). When I returned yesterday, I had crammed ten more in my luggage and carry-on. I'd better get reading, hadn't I?



Thanks, Noelle and Lara, for giving me ten more reasons to stay up too late. Thank you NPW, Chris, Lara, and Rob for your generous hospitality in your fair cities. And thanks to all of you plus Red for being just as awesome in person as I'd hoped.

What I did on my spring vacation, minus all details about what I did on my spring vacation

Hello, friends. I thought I'd best pop in to let you know that I did, in fact, make the trip to and from New England without any adverse incidents, and while I'm working on a photo essay-style recap, it's taking a bit longer to assemble than I anticipated. So meanwhile, you can read NPW's, Noelle's, or Lara's follow-up posts on our excellent weekend (if you haven't already done so). Also, feel free to peruse my Boston/Philly photoset on Flickr, provided you promise to pretend all the photos are new to you when I include them in a post here later this week.

And with that, I'm off to bed in the hopes that my body will somehow recover from sleep-deprived, liver-soaked, stomach-stuffed vacation mode in time to return to real life bright and early tomorrow morning. Wish me luck on that, obviously.

I hope you all had as lovely a weekend (and start-of-week) as I did. More details (with pictures!) to follow shortly.