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The trip to Barbados for our first anniversary was fantastic.


We hung out with old friends from our last trip and made a few new ones.

clearly that ten pounds hasn't budged since the last time I posted about it.

We went ziplining in the rainforest.


We went sailing on the catamaran and snorkled over coral reefs and a sunken ship. We swam with enormous, friendly sea turtles. (We'll see if any of my pictures from the disposable underwater camera actually come out. I petted one. Its back was surprisingly mossy.) The view was gorgeous.


And the boat had an open bar for the whole trip.

What ten pounds?

We had many romantic dinners.


Isn't the decor just awesome?



I chased reluctant crabs with my camera.


We did plenty of lounging around, too.


The cats were happy to see us when we came home.



Since we've been home, I have done approximately one thousand loads of laundry, made meringues and puttered around with the container "garden", aka a couple of tomatoes and a few hanging baskets on the porch that I'm desperately trying to keep alive. Also I dyed my hair blond.



And that's all the news I've got for now.

Date Night

I was complaining on Thursday that nothing had gone right for me, and it was true. But maybe the universe felt bad or something because all the stars aligned for last night.

I picked Dave up at the T around 7:30 and we headed over to Highland Kitchen for dinner. The staff said there was a 20-30 minute wait (they don't accept reservations) but they explained they were erring on the conservative side, so we havered a bit - Dave was REALLY hungry - and ultimately decided to wait. We got a drink at the bar and were seated in about 7 minutes. Our appetizer of calamari with hot peppers was delivered super fast - maybe 10 minutes after we'd ordered it? I have no idea how the kitchen managed that - and it was delicious, crispy fried calamari in a spicy batter with some kind of sundried tomato emulsion for dipping.

Dave made me try a hot pepper ("they're not that hot, really" = fucking lie) and luckily by that time the bread had arrived so I slathered my bread with butter and took a big gulp of beer and that put the fire out. Heh. His tolerance for hot food is way higher than mine, I'm wimpy. Then our main courses arrived - he had a coconut goat curry which was delicious (and also spicy; the top of his head was beaded with sweat by the time the meal was over; he was psyched.) I had a mushroom sandwich with Jack cheese, which I thought would be a portabello mushroom in between hamburger buns, but it was actually a mix of different mushrooms in between hamburger buns. Delicious, although so heavy on the Worcester sauce I couldn't really taste much actual mushroom. But I like Worcester, so no harm done. And the fries which accompanied it were sublime - homemade and hand cut. Om nom nom.

My dad is going to be in town soon and I'm taking him here - Dad will love the spicy high quality food and unpretentious atmosphere. And almost the best surprise of the night was the bill - fifty bucks. Holy crap that's cheap (for my area), especially given the quality of the food; normally a meal like that would end up running about $80. So I'm thrilled to have such a great local joint.

After dinner - the timing here worked out perfectly - we headed over to the Abbey, one of my favorite music venues in the city (it's kind of a dive - sticky floors and totally not hipsterized - but they have some great bands and I love that it's just one step up from a garage.) We saw The Sneaks, which is headed up by Johnny, our wedding photographer. (Johnny, if you're reading this, the new site is gorgeous but I can't link directly to our stuff because it's flash! Waah.) I loved The Sneaks' music, plus it was nice to meet Johnny's wife, who recognized us from the wedding pictures. The band that followed was Buttercup, and they were a tight trio, with great vocal harmonies and - my favorite part - a chick on bass! Rock is so male-heavy, it's always a surprise when a woman is an integral member of the band and this lady definitely was.

And then it was after 10 and we were fading, so we headed home and were there in ten minutes (oh, the rapture! Patronizing local places means you don't have to trek to kingdom come to get home.)

When we got home I gave Zoe her painkiller and her antibiotics - she struggled mightily to avoid these but to no avail. I told her she was "struggling her way to the grave" (Dave's line originally) but I got it all into her eventually. She's not mean about it and doesn't go for me, I think she just really dislikes having anyone mess with her mouth, which with infected rotting teeth is understandable. She growled and squirmed a lot but once it was over, she settled right down and ate her treat and forgave me right away. Same scenario this morning. Gee, only two more weeks of this!

Her appetite seems to have increased already, so while this makes dental work more likely (urgh, expensive) it also makes the prospect of a recovery more likely. We'll still go cat shopping today (for a HEALTHY one, jesus) but this takes the time pressure off a little. I just wish Zoe would quit trying to die already.

Necessity's sharp pinch

Following up:

So, Zoe has decided to accept the diabetic food. She's pretty thin, though and her coat is looking ratty. She's also developed a sore on her spine which I hope doesn't turn into one of those diabetic lesion things that won't heal. She's seeing the vet monday for the sore and for a blood curve to see if the food has stabilized her blood sugar. (Thank you, vet, for being open on Martin Luther King day. I know it's less nice for staff but I adore you for it. And I adore my own company for giving me the day off. Also happily I am seeing my prescribing psychiatrist on Monday - good to go and good not to have to juggle work stuff with driving an hour each way for the shrink.) Zoe's 13. She might just be starting to circle the drain. I do hope she doesn't die 2 days before the wedding but humans outlive most pet animals and I'm realistic. Right now she's a little droopy but her quality of life is pretty good, so we're still looking at treatment. I don't want her to go any sooner than she has to.

Re: Dave's craziness, he is actually taking steps now to deal with it. The mental health system in the United States (and what I saw of it in the UK, too) is FUCKED UP. If he had a life-threatening wound, the receptionist on the other end of the phone would treat it like the crisis it is, but if you call and say you're having mental health issues, they're all, "not taking new patients ... don't know anyone who is ... click." Best case scenario is, "well, I've got a new patient slot open in three months, do you want that?". No, fuckers, I want some assistance TODAY. And it's goddamned discrimination, frankly; there's a widespread perception that if you just pull yourself together, you can fix yourself. It aggravates the crap out of me.

Relatedly, I bought William Styron's Darkness Visible: a memoir of madness and read it before Las Vegas. It's basically a long essay, and I thought 15 bucks seems like a lot for not so many words but it's totally worth it. I've never read a better description of what it's like to be suicidally depressed. Styron, like me, was unipolar (he described it as "you go straight down", heh) and he does a brilliant job articulating how extremely painful depression is, and how it tricks you with the sine waves, so maybe you feel better in the mornings but by night time or two later later you're always in a terrible state again. Dave is reading it now. I can't recommend it enough.

Since I mentioned Las Vegas, I'll talk about it.

Poor Dave - the night I flew out, there was a blizzard. (My flight left before the blizzard arrived.) Also the much bitched about hot water pipe in the kitchen actually burst, which meant he came home on monday to a flooded kitchen. So pretty crappy for him on top of his other stuff, but the pipe is fixed now. Heh - Dave said to me, "did you notice the cold water tap is now turning the other way?" and then immediately corrected himself and said, "although since you can't tell your right from your left, I suppose you didn't notice." As a matter of fact, I felt like there was something a little confusing happening when I tried to get water but I couldn't pinpoint it. Now that he's pointed it out, though, I notice more.

And the company trip was pretty fun. Mostly I work with some smart, cool people and it was good to get to know them, since my particular job doesn't involve a lot of interaction with other people outside my team. We went on a terrific hike to Red Rocks - I can't recommend the guide enough, they took us on "rock scramble" so we went up a mountain using our hands and feet. Gorgeous views, really fun exercise.

That's one of my coworkers in the picture.

I'll download mine this weekend, hopefully (no really cool shots like that though) and post a link to flickr or a photoblog when they're ready.


The food was okay - portions were often crazily huge, which is not a great thing if the food is mediocre, and I thought everything was overpriced ($14 cocktails! $16 for a glass of champagne!), but we did have some good sushi at one of the Wynn restaurants one night.

And I did gamble! I put a dollar into a slot machine and pulled the handle and my dollar was gone, and then I found penny slots and put a dollar in and made 100 bets and lost every single one. So, I lost 101 bets in a row. I'm pretty happy that two bucks is all I donated to the city, but pretty much everyone in the company lost money.

I was just surprised, really, to have my dire expectations about the odds of winning in vegas come true. 101 bets in a row. Also, slot machines are BORING. And casinos are smoky. But! great people watching, if you like watching slot machine zombies and seeing people lose money very fast (I saw a man lose $2500 at craps in about 20 minutes.)

We also saw le Reve, which was very good. Kind of like I understand Cirque de Soliel, except with water. Amazing feats of acrobatics, gymnastics, dance and diving. but it's very hard to describe a show like that if you haven't seen one. At first I thought the show was really white and heteronormative except with a lot of homoerotic tension, but at the show progressed it was clear that the homoerotic tension was a deliberate element. My favorite part was the ringmaster (male) wearing a pair of fake breasts, which wasn't pointed out or made a big deal of, it was just kind of a nod to the dreamlike quality of the show and the fact they they're fucking with you a little. The whitebread criticism is true there was ONE black female dancer and ONE asian male dancer, and everyone else was white.

Also, very depressing, they have real lions in the MGM hotel (where we were staying). Supposedly they have a bunch of lions on a lion retirement farm somewhere and they swap them out, but this is what I noticed about the lions I saw:
1. the "habitat" was tiny and very loud with rushing water and lion-roaring sound effects and people yelling to get the lions' attention
2. the habitat also had a bunch of humans sitting around texting (employees of the MGM), so I'm thinking the lions were probably sedated
3. I have never seen lions with such clean fur and no fly bites or anything, it was like they had been to the groomers
4. the two lionesses were sitting well apart from each other. Prides in the wild sleep all over each other, so to see them isolating themselves seemed like another bad sign
5. the lioness I observed closely was panting and looked pretty stressed

I bet the life expectancy isn't very good. I had a pretty big lump in my throat watching the lions. I don't know what their life span is but I bet it ain't great. I know zoos do conservation work and some zoos are pretty great, but the MGM just isn't one of them. Nothing like watching a rhino stomp around a tiny muddy paddock or an insane panther lunge at plexiglas over and over and over again to make you wonder who, exactly, is regulating these zoos? (To clarify: the rhino and the panther weren't at the MGM, they were at a zoo in Scotland. The MGM just had the sad lionesses.)

Although some animals seem to do pretty well in captivity - giraffes roam a ton in the wild but seem pretty content on zoo lawns, and elephants and of course monkeys and apes are all pretty good candidates for zoos.

That's it from me, really. The wedding venue cancellation did turn out to be a mistake and it's all sorted now, so I'm happy about that. And I'm looking forward to relaxing a little this weekend, although as usual we're overscheduled with errands and chores and social stuff. At least there's a third day.

Summer Slack

I hate punny titles but the flesh is weak sometimes, you know?

So yesterday Mom was in Boston for a big flower arranger’s convention (if you have to ask … you probably don’t want to know. But I linked it anyway, just for the hell or it.) And since Mom’s not in Boston that often these days, we decided to get together for dinner. Her choice, since it was her treat, and she wanted to go to Jasper White’s Summer Shack..

Okay, I’d been there before – at the Cambridge one (it’s a chain) with Dave and we thought the food was good and the seafood fresh but it was pretty damn pricey, considering what you got. I shared these concerns with Mom but whatever, fried oysters are one of her favorite things and the Summer Shack almost always has them – plus, did I mention she was the one paying? So I was kind of psyched, actually, since the Summer Shacks get a lot of press locally and are generally regarded in a pretty favorable light. I was hoping that Dave’s and my slightly disappointing experience was because we were eating out when we couldn’t afford to, which colored our experience, rather than the place itself being sucky.

Alas.

I wouldn’t say it was a disaster, but I sure as hell wouldn’t go back there, even if it is on someone else’s tab.

For starters, the service was friendly and prompt. This is good, right?

Well, not so much when they are so eager to clear the table that the busboy has your plates in their hands before you’ve answered.

“Hey, I’m not done yet!” I said, and he reluctantly took his hands off my plate. (I wanted to eat my fucking corn on the cob, for chrissakes.) So the busboy went to clear Mom’s plate.

“Hey, I’m not done eating her fries yet!”

Granted, that one might have been a little counter-intuitive, and I think he did wait to see Mom nod before he had her plate, and it’s probably not a comment I could have gotten away with at all if I wasn’t a skinny bitch


but … dude had the plate in the air and his back to me when I said something. Which, given my protest from a moment earlier AND the fact that Mom’s plate was still pretty full, seems like it’s a habitual offense and not so much a one-off.

It’s not like it was a Friday night pre or post Red Sox game and the joint was hopping and they need the table; it was a Tuesday and I don’t think the restaurant was even half full – we’d been seated for probably 40 minutes, which I don’t think is unreasonable for a two-top.

Also, I wasn’t super pleased that when my lobster arrived, I had to flag someone down and ask for a bib (c’mon… I’m wearing a cashmere sweater and work clothes. How hard is it to think that maybe I want a bib? Lobsters spurt everywhere when you open them up – insert early ejaculation joke here – most people who’re lobster-experienced know this.)

Although, props to Jasper White’s for thinking ahead, since when the bib arrived it also came with a nutcracker (no, not the kind that’s like the bearded dude from the ballet) – which was good, since the “claws which come cracked for you”, as the waitress assured me, arrived sporting a delicate hairline crack across the top. And like many New Englanders, I like to enjoy my lobster – ALL of it. It’s sofa king expensive, how could you not? And the bib also had a couple of wet naps for cleanup afterwards, which was a nice gesture, although no substitute for going to the ladies’ and properly washing my hands.

So the lobster itself was nice and fresh, not particularly sweet but fine, I’m happy as long as the claws aren’t all horrible and shrunken and floppy. (Lobsters held in a tank for a long time will eventually lose weight and the claw meat will shrink.) And the corn was fine too, and my mom’s fries were more than fine, they were delicious. Good thing I made that busboy leave the plate behind. As were her fried oysters (although I still miss the big fat fried oysters I used to get in New Zealand. At, I believe, Ponsonby Fish and Chips. Somewhere on Ponsonby road, anyway.)

I can’t speak to Mom’s wine but the Australian Cockatoo chardonnay I had was not bad – and for 6 bucks a glass, not bad for a restaurant price, either. We each had two glasses, so I think Mom’s pinot grigio was also probably acceptable.

Also, okay, in a place called a shack I’m not expecting much in the way of ambiance, and I can’t say I was bothered or put out to see the giant fry-o-later ventilation ducting criss-crossing the ceiling or the painted walls. But: place is giant, like a cave, and with all the echoey acoustics of a natural ampitheatre. Would it be too much damn trouble for them to carpet the ceiling or something – it’s not like it’ll ruin the décor - to try to deaden the sound a little? We were yelling at each other all through dinner, although unfortunately not loud enough to drown the hoots and hollers from the group of bike couriers 40 feet away at the bar.

(Psychodrama aside: You know that as soon as Mom shouted, “You look so thin! Your face is gaunt!”, I started eating like I’d seen the locust cloud on the horizon and needed to fatten up for the coming famine.)

For dessert, I had something called Tollhouse pie, which was about what you’d expect: a big slab of undercooked cookie-dough-ish stuff inside a leaden pastry crust, topped with “chocolate sauce” – you know that weird black, almost gritty hot fudge sauce you see at make-your-own-sundae bars at hotel restaurants at brunch? That stuff. It came with “icecream” which, I foolishly, thought might be a scoop of vanilla. Nope, it was a big pile of soft serve, complete with little funnels from the machine. Ah, just like TCBY. I ate it anyway.


Mom had rhubarb-strawberry pie for dessert, which looked a little pale and gummy to me (for me, when I use rhubard and strawberries together, half the joy is seeing those fantastic garnet-colored juices bubble up) but she said it was good, although she left the pastry untouched as it wasn’t worth it.

Anyway. I probably wouldn’t have actually bothered to write all this up and trash the restaurant online if we hadn’t had one final insult added to injury. Upon receipt of the check, mom realized her reading glasses were missing, and, thinking back, thought that the too-eager busboy had probably rolled them up with the napkins and disposed of them. So she caught our waitress and asked her to have someone take a look. Waitress was back at our table in a remarkably short amount of time saying, “I looked in every trash can and there was nothing!” Uh huh. She wasn’t even gone long enough to locate the trash can, much less bother to look anywhere. So, fine, Mom should keep better track of her glasses, right, and not presume to, say, leave them on the side of the table we weren’t using?

Guess who also discovered this morning that her sunglasses were missing? I, too, had foolishly placed them within the busboy’s reach next to my purse on the table. Which, taken along with all the other things, made me think … yeach. Maybe it was just the fault of a shitty, hurried busboy. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be working that night or had been screwed with double shifts three days in a row. Maybe the waitress really did look for Mom’s glasses. Even so … all of this together did not add up to my idea of a hundred dollar dinner. Even if it wasn’t my hundred dollars.

The breakdown of the bill, if you’re curious and still reading (hahahaha, I make myself laugh):
$80.33 on the bill plus $16 for the waitress. All for a one pound lobster, a fried oyster dinner, four glasses of wine and two desserts.

Summer Shack will henceforth, in my mind, be known as the Summer Suck. The Overrated Summer Suck. I have no idea how Jasper White acquired his reputation but dang, it ain't deserved.