I was behind a Ford Ranger XLT in that bluish-green color that I despise when I found something even more disgusting than the bumper sticker that said something to the effect of "My other 4X4 has 4 legs". Well, first off, the Ford Ranger XLT is not a 4x4. Seriously, how dumb.
Secondly, I was both horrified and nauseated by the rest of the truck. In the back window I could see a tension rod stretched across with little curtains hanging from the rod. The curtains appeared to have frogs on them. The back of the seats had frogs perched as if to kiss the back of heads of the driver and passenger. If they actually needed to use the head rest, say if they were in a collision, those weird little stuffed animal frogs would probably pile drive right through their skulls.
I had to have a stiff drink when I got home.
I went to a meeting this morning and I don't usually have high hopes for these monthly meetings but still I go hoping for some news I can use. I perked up when a project manager started talking and said he hated to throw this acronym on us. Since part of my job is to know about specialized acronyms, I got the pen ready and then the doofus dropped a metaphor on us.
There was no sign of an acronym and that's when I decided the guy is a moron and whatever he says should be examined closely.
I guess I shouldn't have expected much since he told us last month that he didn't know what the letters SACWIS stood for. This is something he's been working on for years.
I just finished reading the final Harry Potter book and I refuse to be one of those people who ruins it for anyone who hasn't read it yet. I only want to say I liked it. And thank you, Ms. Rowling.
Yesterday afternoon the better-half, I and a couple of friends made the drive to Kinsale, VA to eat at the Good Eats Cafe. The cafe is a converted gas station and the seating is limited. When the better-half called earlier in the week, he was told that reservations are only accepted for parties of 8 or more and that we should get there early since they expected to be busy on Saturday as the restaurant down the road was going to be closed for a private party. We arrived at 5:30 and were seated promptly. The cafe is only open Thursday-Sunday and the hours are limited to 5pm-9pm. The food is worth the hour and fifteen minute drive.
We started with cocktails, crab pot stickers and cheese panatelas. The crab pot stickers were crab dumplings served with a sauce that is made on site and is just called the crab dressing. We put on our food detective hats and have decided there's curry in the dressing as well as mustard and other ingredients that remain mysterious. Spicy and very good. The cheese panatelas were fried wontons that were flavored with cinnamon and filled with a mild cheese. The dipping sauce for those was a sweet Cuban barbeque sauce. I couldn't begin to figure out what was in the sauce but it was dark and sweet.
We each had a cafe salad with three of us opting for the sesame tahini dressing and the better-half opted for the parmesan peppercorn dressing. The salads were fresh but pretty standard and the dressings were made on site.
The entree menu is heavy on the seafood (as should be expected given Kinsale's location) but there was the usual steak and chicken items. The specials list was all seafood. My friend and I ordered from the specials list. She ordered flounder with backfin crab and I ordered the soft-shell crabs. The other orders rounding out the table were the crab cakes and Mediterranean tuna. The crab cakes and the tuna were very good. When I saw that the tuna came with a mixture of pine nuts and capers, I leaned over to the better-half and said you're going to get that right? He did because he's a sucker for pine nuts and capers.
The star of the table was the flounder and I am unable to tell you what the waitress told us about the sauce for the flounder. It was excellent. We all snitched pieces from my friend's plate. Only my flounder-eating friend wanted a piece of soft-shell crab and so I happily ate all three crabs. That's the bonus of ordering soft-shell crab not many people want to taste it. I love every crunchy, gooey bite. All dishes came with a medley of fresh vegetables, a choice of jasmine rice, roasted potatoes or french fries. Two of us opted for the jasmine rice (which the better-half said had hard cheese flecks mixed in) and two of us opted for the fries which were dressed with the right amount of salt.
We all opted for dessert. I ordered the chocolate ice cream and I'd be surprised if it was anything other than something we could all buy at the neighborhood grocery store, but I like that so it was OK with me. The other options were a key lime pie which was reportedly excellent and a chocolate peanut butter pie which was eaten quickly. One of us ordered the happy coffee and the happy ingredient in our table's coffee was kahlua.
After dinner, they don't let you linger, it was still light so we drove down to Lewisetta so I could show our friends were my grandparents used to live (a pretty prime piece of waterfront) and the old schoolhouse that my family bought and began the renovations. I have to say that subsequent exterior renovations have really finished the place off. My family saved the building from being torched. The local fire department had plans to practice their skills on the schoolhouse. I learned a lot of my mad skillz working on that house.
I can honestly tell you I will never pull asphalt shingles off a house and then pile them into the back of a Gremlin to be hauled to the dump again. Now that I have my own monetary resources, I'll pay someone else to rip shingles off the sides off a house and haul them to the dump in their own Gremlin.
We had a really big storm blaze through the area late yesterday and into the evening. At work we felt the building sway in the wind. It was kind of scary considering we’re sitting in a two-story row house.
When I got home there had been a little rain but nothing much to worry about. The better-half made a pizza run and then we watched Children of Men while eating pizza. The movie and pizza were good but I didn’t realize how much violence was in the movie when we put it on the Netflix list. As a result, I put another movie in between this one and Reservoir Dogs, which was the next one the list.
As the credits rolled and I found out the movie was based on a PD James novel, I began to feel as if I had read the book. But the movie and the memory I have of the book are very different, so perhaps I didn’t read the book after all. Or the adaptation was very different. If we’d ever unpack the book boxes from when we moved two years ago, I could probably answer that question.
After the movie, another storm kicked up and the power went out. The way the power went out was without so much as a flicker so we knew it was going to be a dark night (although isn’t night usually dark). The storm itself didn’t end up being much but as we found out this morning, a power pole snapped in two down the road from us. I suspect it will be late tonight before the power comes back on.
The generator was cranked up at 6 am (sorry neighbors) so I could take a shower and go to work. Normally, we aren’t those obnoxious people who crank up the generator at the first sign of a power outage and then let it run day and night. I hate that—generators are raise-the-dead loud and who wants to listen to that all the time? But, at our house no electricity equals no water so we had no choice because there is no way I’m going to work without showering. My hair alone would be enough to make me a social pariah.
So, things at work are weird. I'm one of the lucky ones who gets to stay. The few of us who will remain at the place of employment are feeling a little bit of survivor guilt. It doesn't help that we have one person on the professional staff that was in such a snit about her non-staying status that she's decided not to talk to our supervisor. I think maybe she's getting over that but who knows. It helps she's on vacation for a few days.
Today there was hardly anyone at work with people beginning to take their leave. The building was strangely quiet until we unearthed an old Best of the 70s cassette tape from an old course box (the things we find in old course boxes). As the raspy tape started up, we were all cheered to the point of hysterical laughter and then we broke into song. Singing along to Captain and Tennille and The Partridge Family somehow makes things a little better.
This is a picture of the better-half with his new t-shirt.
You wouldn't know this, but the better-half doesn't wear many t-shirts or anything with slogans, emblems, whatever on them. So, when he said he needed this t-shirt I ordered it ASAP.
Yes, he has no head in this picture on purpose...you know how we roll here at F&G.
Did you know that a garden left unattended will produce an ass-load of vegetables? We had cucumbers so big that they had to go right into the composter. They were franken-cucs. Lots of cherry tomatoes that taste divine--I once read an article about how cherry tomatoes are a joke as far as flavor is concerned. I guess that writer has never eaten one of our cherry tomatoes.
On the agenda for today: canning some squash and I need figure out what to do with a bunch of eggplant.
Also? A pool left covered for a week fries itself. Who knew? We're working like mad to uncloud the water. I can't see the drains in the deep end it's that cloudy.
On the plus side, the USPS has a handy-dandy feature on its website that lets you stop and start mail (I know the postal service has been able to stop and start mail for years--but you can do it online and never have to interact with a person-HOORAY). Yesterday when we got home there was a box of mail on our front steps. I've been one to rant about poor service from the USPS so now I give them their props. Everything worked just as it was supposed to and the mail carrier put the box right near the front door so we wouldn't miss it. Thanks big government agency.
You know when you're on vacation and while you are having a nice time, it's time for the trip to end? Sometimes when this happens you feel a little like you are betraying the people, place or thing involved, but in reality it is just time to go home.
I reached that point this morning when one of the damn toilets stopped up. If there is one thing in this world I hate more than anything is hearing that the better-half has been summoned to his mother's house to un-stop a toilet. This happens more often than you might think. So, when it happens to me, I'll be damned if I'm asking for help. It isn't a hard thing to do but it annoys me to no end. I always feel like it is such a waste (heh) of my time standing there with the plunger wailing on some bit I can't even see.
Since now I've broken bad on the situation here, I'll continue. The house we're renting this week is perfectly pleasant but since I'm now in a mood (and it is still early), I'm going to bitch and moan a little. The house is outfitted in what some people might call crate furniture, but being from the Richmond area I call it This End Up Furniture (I don't know if that store existed in other cities or not but it was kind of big for awhile and then went bankrupt). The furniture is semi-blonde and very sturdy. I think you could pitch one of the love seats off the second story balcony and only the cushions would fall off. I suppose this is the sort of thing you look for when furnishing a rental unit. I don't know about you, but while sturdy appeals to the practical side of me, the comfort level does nothing for the part of me that loves to lounge while reading. There are two love seats and one couch. I'm five foot six and a love seat is not a good place to lounge. The couch has been co-opted by the better-half and he has to make a nest so that his long legs have somewhere to go.
Now that I'm on the uncomfortable aspect, let's move to the master bedroom. The bed is also This End Up and has drawers under the bed for storing a bunch of nothing. Again, I understand the practicality, but the sounds that bed makes when you roll over are like something out of a horror show. It is impossible to sneak into or out of that bed. Last night I woke up around 2:30 and heard the better-half snoring loudly upstairs (on the long couch also akin to a medieval rack). Normally, I may have crept up the stairs to convince him to come to bed, but instead I just moved over into the lumpy middle and silent part of the bed. I woke up again at 3:33 (from a dream involving a creepy devilish man--no doubt the creaking bed helped conjure that image) and at 4:30. When the A/C unit comes on it is like a truck just pulled into the room and that's what woke me at 4:30. At 7:11 (the clock is right next to my pillow), the better-half was taking his sinus medicine in the master bath and I asked him if it was time to get up. He said no and rolled into the creaking bed. I laid around for a little while but there's just no silence when there are two of us in the bed so I got up and told him to try the middle.
I've been reading for a while now and thinking about how what the house really needs is someone with a can of WD40 and a screw driver. The bar stools at the kitchen counter are wobbly as are the fading Adirondacks on the porch and deck. The WD40 will fix all the creaky doors and, hell, I'd spray it on the bed even though I know it wouldn't actually help the bed, only my thinking about the bed.
Tomorrow we begin our trip home and although I love being here, it is time to go.
This is the view from the house we're renting this week. That's the sound. The ocean is to the right of the sound. We can barely make it out but late at night can hear the surf.
There was a brilliant thunderstorm last night and we climbed up to the crow's nest of the house and watched the lightning surround us.
I was at the doctor's office this morning and a patient went into the bathroom and then came out and clipped her nails. Yeah, she sat in the small-ish waiting room and pulled out the nail clippers. Wasn't that something she could have taken care of while she was in the bathroom?
I shot her a dirty look but she was too busy with nail clipping that she didn't see me.
1 year and 203 more days of this crap.
On Saturday we drove to the Harrisonburg area to buy some books to take on vacation (which is, blissfully, next week). The book fair used to be a favorite haunt of ours and we'd go several times a year. Our trip on Saturday was the first visit in two years. The better-half observed the books are really slanted towards women. I tend to agree with him. Women who are large and stand immovable in front of shelves for so long that other people just give up and go to other sections to browse. I’m talking to you women who wouldn’t share the Southern Writers section, thanks for nothing.
We found a few good buys and there should be plenty of reading material for next week. On our way home, I remarked we should just go to one of the local used book stores to stock up for vacation instead of driving a couple of hours away. We did get some books for The Niece and her sister--classics at a very good price.
As an aside, I think I may call the newest niece Little Elvis on these pages. She has a whole lotta shaking going on -- in a very cute but not palsied way. This may come to embarrass her so we'll see.
On our way home, we stopped at the Whole Foods in Charlottesville. As we entered the store and came to rest in the olive oil area (it's not too far in from the front door and it's a good place to form a plan of action), I told the better-half that I felt like I was back in civilization. We mostly spent our money on cheese and one of those cheeses was the Stinking Bishop.
We haven't seen the Wallace and Gromit movie so we only bought the cheese because it stinks. Now, I'm ready to hunt down that cheese because in addition to the stink it tastes so good. So good, in fact, that the Stinking Bishop is but a memory.
Our screened porch building project is nearly complete--what? it's only been going on for two years. The ceiling is in and we were able to install the fan. The better-half decided to go ahead and install the speakers even though they'll have to come down when the last of the trim boards go up.
We relaxed in the comfort of our chairs and enjoyed some wine:
We watched as the clouds finally pushed out of the way so the blue moon could peek out from behind the trees:
While standing outside trying to get a picture of the moon, I decided to take a picture of Jupiter:
We listened to the radio and I knew it was really late when we got to the local show The Electric Croude. It's a great show but way past my bedtime.
