Nerdy

I've been reading so many books written or set in pre decimal Britain (pre 1971, that is) that I went to the trouble of writing out a list of the currencies. At last, I know what farthings and tanners are! (The authors are Joan Aiken, Charles Dickens, E.F. Benson, P.G. Wodehouse and Thomas W. Hanshew. What? Job hunting leaves a lot of leisure for reading.)








Also, and only tangentially related, while I don't know if this lap pillow counts as merely nerdy or weird and actively creepy, I'm going to go ahead and guess that this isn't what the popular kids have in their living room.








Update: I don't have one of these pillows myself. My original wording was a little unclear.




















(H/T to geekologie)

chocolate chocolate peanut butter peanut butter ice cream

I made triple chocolate ice cream the other day and it was reeeeaaally good. I used a David Lebovitz recipe and it worked almost perfectly. The texture was a little, uh, dense - a bit more so than normal for even home-made ice cream. It didn't quite freeze in the machine because I did two stupid things. I got impatient and cooled down the custard in the freezer, AND I didn't let the melted chocolate chips cool enough. (Melted chocolate chips aren't specified in this recipe but every ice cream that I make is stracciatella. It's a compulsion.) So next time I'll avoid that particular scenario, because it was confidence-wrecking to look at my churned ice cream reverting back to custard as fast as it could. Also I might throw a little aged dark rum in there to help prevent it from getting quite so hard; now that I've tasted the chocolate, I think it'll go well with rum. (I wasn't in *that* much doubt about the rum but I've never before met a chocolate ice cream that I actually liked - they all seem to have a little bit of a rough edge to their taste.) Speaking of taste, this is the best ice cream I have ever made (although I usually say that about each new recipe.) But there's no edge to the chocolate flavour at all - it tastes exactly like good chocolate mixed with good cream and rich egg yolks ought to taste. It's an excellent recipe, although kind of a pain in the ass.

However. David Lebovitz's recipe is not a recipe which requires a lot of faffing about. You don't have to bother with separating eggs and cooking very cautiously over very low heat while you wonder what coating the back of the spoon means, really. Just throw some dairy and sugar and cocoa into a pan, bring to a boil, dump in some peanut butter and you're almost done. But of course I'm unsatisfied with a simple recipe like that - something deep at the bottom of my soul cries out in pain until I've turned every recipe into a huge, time-consuming project.* So I've marked up the recipe with the changes I would make. Truthfully, the chocolate ice cream base isn't good enough to stand on its own, but I'm also not up for making the triple chocolate thing that I talked about at the beginning of the post just so that I can dunk some Skippy into it. That triple chocolate number deserves respect, and Skippy is just not a respectful ingredient. So my suggestions are bolded. (To make me feel important!)

Ice Cream:

Ingredients:

* 2 cups half and half [I went ahead and used a 2:1 mixture of whipping cream and whole milk. The extra fat means it won't freeze quite so hard. Also more fat means more deliciousness for me.]
* ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
* ½ cup sugar
* Pinch of salt
* ½ cup smooth peanut butter [Don't even both trying to use Teddy or some "healthy" hippie brand. What you want here is Jif or Skippy, with all the added salt and sugar and stabilizers.]
[I'd add 1/4 tsp of instant espresso to the cream mixture - I find that a little bit of coffee underneath chocolate flavor can make the chocolate flavor seem stronger and more complex without being identifiable on its own as coffee.]
[I'd also throw in a slug of dark rum at the end to try to lighten up the texture of the end product.]


Recipe:

1. Whisk together the cream, milk, cocoa powder, sugar, and salt in a large saucepan. Heat the mixture, whisking frequently, until it comes to a full, rolling boil (it will start to foam up). Remove from the heat and whisk in the peanut butter, stirring until thoroughly blended.
2. Chill the mixture thoroughly, then freeze it in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. [It's the easiest ice cream I've ever churned - the peanut butter gives it body and stiffness so it's really easy to transfer into the container you'll freeze it in without making a big mess. It's actually so nice, texturally, that it makes me think peanut butter is a really underrated ingredient.]
[3. At the last minute of churning, I added 2 ounces of melted cooled chocolate chips to the "batter" - it's the easiest way to add chocolate chips ever, and you avoid having too-large, rock-hard lumps of chocolate which threaten your crowns when you bite down unwarily.]

Peanut Butter Chunks

Ingredients:

* 6 tablespoons peanut butter (smooth or crunchy)
* 2 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar
[Next time I am going to add some salt to these guys - maybe 1/2 or 1 tsp of kosher salt, just to see what that's like. I am a salty-sweet person.]
Recipe:

Mix together the peanut butter and sugar in a small bowl. Line a dinner plate with plastic wrap. Pinch off small pieces of the peanut butter mixture, about ½ teaspoon each, and drop them onto the dinner plate. [It would be a bigger pain in the ass, but next time I'd go for smaller chunks, like 1/4 of a tablespoon, so that you got smaller bites of the chunks more often.] Once you’ve used all of the mixture, freeze the chunks. [It occurred to me that once frozen, you could dip the chocolate balls into melted chocolate to make them extra irresistible. But again, you're almost talking project at that point when all you're really trying to do is make yourself a fucking bowl of ice cream already. So maybe not.]

Mixing them in: Fold the Peanut Butter Chunks into 1 quart of ice cream as you remove it from the machine.

If you do decide to make this recipe, I assure you it will be delicious even if you slavishly follow David Lebovitz's instructions to the letter and disregard my chatty commentary.

Also, no pictures because the only pictures I can ever manage of chocolate ice cream are the kinds of pictures that make you think, "That dog was sick!".

*Ice cream, by the way, is pretty simple to make, especially if you make "philadelphia" style ice creams which don't involve an egg custard. Ice cream should not be a Cook's Illustrated-style project with twenty seven ingredients and an active cooking time of four hours. That I need to make ice cream harder for myself says a lot about me - none of it good. If you were keeping track, I suggested seven modifications to the recipe, and none of them were shortcuts. The life of a perfectionist is not all wine and roses, you know!

Aftermath

I had the privilege of interacting with a charming and well-mannered bachelor party recently - the groom's note says it all.








































(No, seriously, they were actually charming and well-mannered, hence this thank-you from the groom. Sure, they all came in loaded and loud, but I wasn't asleep anyway. My only annoyance was that since Dave failed to warn me that he was bringing the entire party back to our house after the bars closed, I was wearing my giant disgusting bathrobe when a dozen dudes trooped through the door. No one cared but me, of course.)

Unbelievably Short-Sighted Idiocy of the Day

I went to go fill a prescription today and lo and behold, my insurance maxed out at a 30 mg/day dose - whereas MY DOCTOR has me on 40 mgs/day of this medicine. I have to APPEAL IN WRITING to request that the company makes an "exception" for me. This is so fucking outrageous and short-sighted on the insurance company's part - do they WANT me to need to go back in the hospital? Because my last stay (with the same insurance providers!) cost about ten thousand dollars for every day I was in there, which is a lot more expensive than ten fucking extra milligrams of medicine.

I cannot believe I need to jump through this many hoops to get a fucking prescription filled.

None of the customer service people, by the way, could tell me anything about WHY this policy has been enacted. And guess what else? The appeals process takes 30 days and I only have enough medicine to last me for 22.5 days. Really, I would gladly become 25% less crazy, but the customer service reps couldn't tell me how to do that, either.

And I'm one of the lucky people who has healthcare at all!

Jesus fucking H Christ. Do I write to my senator about this, or what? How can I get a class-action suit started? I'm totally pissed and totally powerless.

School Gaze

Remember how you had to line up by height for elementary school class pictures? That's what these three remind me up. And of course, they are studying the habits of one Mr. Squirrel, who enjoys taunting them from his leafy fortress. He's probably farting in their general direction, too.

Arnolfini Marriage

Another Dispatch from the Pinko Commie Front

So, the health care bill. I agree, it's not perfect and it doesn't address all the issues I would like it to*. But I think it's a start.


Not all that long ago, I got really sick. (I haven't mentioned it here before - among other reasons, I've been recuperating rather than blogging about recuperating.) I was really sick. I spent a lot of time in hospitals while people worked to save my life.

Without health insurance, these would have been my options:
1. Death
2. Treatment - at the cost of $40,000 of debt


This is why I believe that health care is a right, not a privilege. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right? Which part of having to go $40,000 in debt in order to save your own life constitutes liberty or the pursuit of happiness? And I didn't even have something complicated and expensive like cancer!

Although I was lucky enough to have health insurance when I got sick, not everyone is as lucky as me. And it *is* luck. I had no input into being born white, which is a huge privilege - and that's just for starters. I've had lots of other privilege in my life, and I agree with Luke that "unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required". Dave and I are solidly middle class - ostensibly the demographic getting "screwed" by this bill, and we both agree that we are HAPPY to have to pay a little bit more in our taxes so that fewer people have to decide between life and crippling debt.

For the record? When I was sick? If I'd had to make that choice? I would have chosen to die. I'm not saying that's what everyone would or should choose, but it would have been my choice. I was pretty motherfucking sick and I felt pretty motherfucking bad. So if you read this blog, you probably know me. Know that without health insurance, you would not be reading this right now, because I would be dead.

Thousands of Americans have to make non-hypothetical versions of my choice, and they not only have blog readers, they have friends and families and people who love them - but who aren't in a position to spot them $40,000. Just pause for a second, and let that idea sink in.




* I am most unhappy about the rabidly oppressive Stupak provisions, and second-most unhappy that the issue of the cost of health care hasn't been directly addressed. But my friend Jodi, an economist, wrote a great post about the way the bill works from an economic point of view, and she's a lot smarter than me more coherent than me on the issue.

I used to work for an insurance company, and at this job I learned that, in Massachusetts at least, no driver, no matter how risky, could be denied automobile insurance. If a driver is rejected from insurers via the traditional channels, he can get insurance via a secondary pool that all of the insurers have to contribute to. These premiums are higher than in most other cases, but at least there is an insurance option for people who want to operate a car. This seems to work pretty well, so why not have the same for health insurance?

In a way, that’s pretty much what we are ending up with. (For the record, it costs about twice as much to insure me as it costs to insure my car. This ratio is lower than it probably should be because I am a bad driver.) Insurance exchanges are being set up to serve customers who cannot get insurance from private companies directly. People are even being treated better than my car since they are getting subsidized if they have an income such that regular health insurance is “unaffordable.” (I hate that word, since it really has no good meaning, but you get my point.) And yes, this works in some fashion as a transfer from the more wealthy to the less wealthy, since it has to be paid for somehow and we have a progressive income tax. (See below for more on this point and deficit neutrality.)

Go read the whole thing, though; it's worth it. Plus there are cartoons!

Weekend at Bernie's

The cat we call "Pig-Bear" got up onto the kitchen counter, using the dishwasher as a springboard and ate enough food for three cats. I called and called and she didn't show so I thought maybe she had just exploded somewhere, like at the bottom of the stairs where I wouldn't have heard the bang.

So I shut the dishwasher and refilled the bowl on the counter for the three who AREN'T too fat to jump up there, and she shuffled out from somewhere as soon as she heard the ping of nuggets bouncing off stainless. I have never seen such a guilty-looking cat.

Babies really do say "Wah!"

So, I recently had the privilege of spending time with my sister and her new baby. (3-4 days old! We are both baby novices so it was actually really fun trying to figure out what the baby wanted and why she was crying. Fun, and also loud. That's the great thing about being an aunt, though - I could just be all, "hey, I'm heading out to meet a friend for drinks" and leave for a while, and then come back drunk after the baby was in bed.) Anyway - newborns are amazing, which is not something I had ever noticed before. It's like they have some kind of magical power so that you can just hold one and stare for hours and not get bored. Sort of like taking drugs, but with more control over the experience. And more barf and poop.

Anyway! I took about a thousand photos (really only about 300) and here are some of my sister, the baby, the baby-daddy (who is not only really handsome - way to go, Sue! - but is also an excellent baby-whisperer) and the baby-daddy's two kids (who are freaking adorable. I got to bake pink cupcakes with the little girl - she is 4 and a half and her brother is 2 and a half. I love kids at that age, they're so much fun to do stuff with. Plus they can talk, so they can tell you what's wrong. And the occasional melt-down is par for the course.)

So, pictures, now that you've gotten the cast of characters.

How sweet is that little mouth?


The baby whisperer ...


to the rescue!

(Seriously. She cries and he immediately flips her upside down or does some other kind of baby gymnastics and she calms down instantly.)

The kids are soooo into the baby, it's really sweet (when they aren't poking out her eyes by accident):


Everyone gathered around the baby for a worship session.


All her little outfits are too big since she's still an infant.


This is my favorite photo, out of all 300:

TRIGGER WARNING - You Fit Into Me

Note: the following photos are about abuse and may be triggering to you. Please be sure to read my disclaimer underneath after you've looked at the pictures.





Disclaimer: My kitten gave me the black eye. For real. He got his claw hooked in the skin under my eye and must have burst a blood vessel in freeing himself. That was how I woke up, by the way - naked, screaming, and with blood and tears streaming dramatically down my face. (No pictures of that, but how's that for a Monday?) The incident seemed to be playing out a poem by Margaret Atwood which I have always loved:


You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

-Margaret Atwood




Also, I would like to add that Dave helped me take these pictures, which was excellent of him, especially since it was past midnight when I wanted his help.

In any case, the dramatic black eye (courtesy of Bob T. Cat) and the way it was incurred got me thinking of that Atwood poem, which I have always thought is about an abusive relationship. These pictures imply a fairly typical abuse scenario (heterosexual male-on-female violence). It's probably what most people think of when they hear "abusive relationship". But I'm trying to get at a bit more than that (you can tell me if you think I succeeded): abuse happens in secret, and a whole family will collude in maintaining the fiction of normality, even though something very different is happening behind closed doors. And so for the abused, it's incredibly crazy-making because terrible things are happening - sexually, verbally, emotionally, with violence, or a combination - and not only does no one outside know what's going on, no one inside the family will talk about it either. So the fictional story of the happy family or the happy couple is polished to a high gloss and given all the trappings. Underneath the accessories of success, it's a totally different kind of story. And that's why I wanted to use the black eye with the fairytale wedding dress (yes, it's my real wedding dress).

Okay, enough rambling. How about some pictures of kittens?

Notice Bob's claws:


King of the World:


Bob sleeping with Lucky:


Bob sleeping with Whittles, his sister:


Whittles and Bob are very close:




Both kittens are very curious about new food. This is pureed sweet potato.


Yes, she's eating flour. Bob was sneaking molasses yesterday but I didn't get a picture.



Whittles supervising:


Whittles and Bob with Pip, for scale:


I just plain like this picture of Pip:



Whittles looking innocent:


Whittles making lace:


Whittles doing her thing:


For those of you keeping track at home, you may be thinking, "hmmm, there's Lucky, Simone, Pip and Inty and now TWO kittens? SIX cats?"

But no, we don't have six cats. We have five. We lost Inty on New Year's Eve this year. She would have been 10 on April 11th. I was really fucking glad to say goodbye to 2009.

Doin' it fer the lulz

moar funny pictures

With thanks to Katharine Weber for the Cheeseburger Magic 8 Ball.

even more belated

The mysterious case of the disappearing fish

Another gruesome little tale from the Aquarium of Death.

I turned on the aquarium light early one morning last week and noticed there was a dead one floating at the top. These things happen. It must have died sometime in the night because it had already been about half eaten by its tank mates. So I yelled for Dave to come look (as you do) and then I hopped in the car to drop Dave off at the T station (ten minute round trip in the car, but a 15 minute walk, and at temperatures below freezing like they have been all week, it's just not that big a deal to take ten minutes out of my morning at 7 am to drop him off.) Lengthy backstory aside, what I'm trying to get across to you is that ten minutes elapsed, tops, between when I first noticed the deader and when I got back from dropping Dave off.

The fish had disappeared. I don't know if the other fish in the tank had a feeding frenzy or if they are always such efficient little cannibals (maybe it only died ten minutes before I noticed the body) or if they stashed the body somewhere in the fake plants to eat later like a lion with a gazelle carcass, but maybe I'm just not meant to be privy to all the secrets of the Tank of Doom.

Needless to say, they didn't get fed that day.

belated

Decorating the cookies is my favorite part.

Wonder Woman: the Lost Years

photos courtesy of the fabulous Jeff Beene

It's hard to keep your feet dry when you're kicking in a skull

In other news, it's hard to keep up with your blog when most of the month has been like this week: by the time I go home tonight, I will have spent 32 hours in the office. I have an hour commute each way.

More areas of excellence for me: my husband arrived home at 2 am Monday morning after 10 days away. I have since seen him for a grand total of 4 hours. (Not counting sleeping time, of course.)

Yes, I am typing this from the office at 8 pm - while I'm on hold with Bing's search support center.



If you are baffled by this blog post title, check here for the reference.

Words Cannot Express ...

... how much I love this video.


via Swiss Miss

Obvi, I am not a graphic designer but I do get requests like this (for my industry) all the time.

"So my buddy has this website about cardboard boxes, just a hobby. Tell me for free how he can make big bucks without putting any work or thought into it?"

"I want to start a website about chicken farming. How do I go about becoming a powerful thought leader in the chicken farming industry? I only want to post new content once every three months and I'm totally resistant to any suggestions you might have about ways to build an audience or interact with others in the industry."

"I'm interested in starting an online business selling yoga bolsters. How do I get started with an e-commerce website?"

... go fuck yourselves, people. There's a reason you don't already know how to do what you're asking me to do for you: it requires a lot of time, a lot of technical expertise, and a lot of effort - and that's before you get to the money you'll be required to invest in your online venture (and not including the money you didn't offer me.)

Note to my brother (who I don't think actually reads this blog, but anyway): I was totally happy to consult on your side business website (and I'll update this post with a link including great anchor text, if you like) because you approached it like a normal business project. So the above comments are NOT directed at you.

Rambly

I have the day off and it's gorgeous fall weather. I took today off because we went to New York this weekend. New York was great. It sort of breaks my heart a little every time I go because there is just so MUCH available. It helps that we always either stay with my sister or friends, so that is like a built-in guarantee of a worthwhile trip. I would move there in a heartbeat IF the cost of living wasn't so high and IF I didn't already really like my life in Somerville. I mean, I know I bitch about cat barf and being tired a lot, but apart from being so damned busy it's a pretty good life. (Inty barfed on my laptop keyboard while we were gone, by the way.)

Anyway, whenever I go on any kind of trip, even if it's only an overnight in New York, I like to take the day off after I get back to get caught up on things. I usually just end up with a migraine from the stress if I don't take the day off anyway, so planning for it is better.

So instead of having a migraine and feeling bad about missing work, I'm guilt-free and ready to do some yardwork (gotta start getting the garden ready for winter), baking (a James Beard fresh fruit pie and some espresso-chocolate shortbread cookies - that's a Dorie Greenspan recipe adapted by Smitten Kitchen. The James Beard recipe is from his American Cookery, a copy of which was given to me by my wonderful friend Lysne, and I'm going to be making some of my own modifications to it.) And other stuff - grocery shopping, laundry, vacuuming, catching up on some stuff for work. Dave took the day off too so I bet he will help with the yardwork and the shopping.

Maybe I'll take the camera out and try to get some pictures in the pretty september light. I haven't made much progress lately on the photography front, technically - don't think I have time for that today but we'll see. I'd better tear myself away from the Wire soon if I'm going to get any of that done, though. (I really like the Wire, but I wonder how accurate it is. Most of the time when I'm walking around in bad neighborhoods, there aren't millions of cops around like there are in the show. That's partly what makes it a bad neighborhood - no cops.)

Vietnam, redux

Who swapped my Tuesday with a Monday? It's not bad enough that Lucky saluted the morning today with vomit, I also got to work a 12 hour day, listen to some drinky-smelling cabbie's hard luck story on the way home (which of course resulted in my giving him a 50% tip), get home to hungry cats, one of whom has barfed AGAIN during the day, scoop the litterboxes, and the clean up the welcome-home barf that Lucky produced, this time selecting Dave's lyrics to throw up on. Simone also followed her usual starving-alley-cat routine. This time I wasn't as fast and she helped herself to a pretty sizable serving.

Just by barfing twice (possibly thrice) today Lucky spent $50 bucks; he's diabetic and vomiting can be a sign of high blood sugar so I'm going to have to take him into the vet for a blood sugar stick so we can see if he's become unstable. It's going to suck if he has to go back on insulin, less because of the expense than because it's a pain in the ass to give him a shot once or twice a day and time it with his meals. We do have a diabetes testing kit at home but for some reason getting blood out of Lucky is like getting blood from a stone. Maybe I will make the vet tech let me practice drawing blood when I take him in. Refill strips for the blood glucometer are a lot cheaper than a vet visit.

It fucking stinks like Simple Green in here because that's what I used to clean up all the barf with. I can't open a window because the windows in my office have their storm windows down; Dave went around putting storm windows down on Saturday and of course the weather warmed right back up on Sunday. I could open the storm window but I don't think I have the strength, after a meagre dinner of Chex Mix. Lucky thing my fingers are still working well enough to type.

The only positive outcomes for today are that at least I'm not driving a cab and Dave seems to use waterproof ink for his lyrics. THANK GOD.

Good Morning Vietnam

Sometimes I like having a blog because it's not a place where anyone can tell me, "that's not an appropriate story for this audience" or "way to overshare." So you've been warned.

I was sitting at the computer a few minutes ago when I heard the pre-barf wail coming from one of the cats. Inty - usually the culprit due to her IBS - was right there next to the computer, so it wasn't her. No, it was Lucky, pacing on the living room rug with his tongue out. Pip and Simone had rushed to his side, which was sweet in the case of Pip and gross in the case of Simone, since I could see her sniffing around eagerly before Lucky had even tossed his cookies*.

And then he did barf, and Simone barely waited until he was done before rushing in to bat cleanup. She was gobbling so quickly that she was snorting because she's got a permanently blocked nose and couldn't breathe through it. But why let breathing distract you from a hot meal? She grumbled when I cleaned it up and settled back to lick the carpet a little. Happy Tuesday to me!

And now I need to shower before work. If only a shower would clean my brain.




* yeah, wet food for diabetics really. I bet you knew that we didn't actually feed him cookies.