Everything I See Is Red

Today is not a good day for my sister to be a controlling bitch.

Let Alone An Egg

Good kitties...good kitties...


Sharkey bought a house that came with concrete outdoor cats.


Anyone know a garden center where I can pick up a concrete ball of yarn?

Be Running Up That Hill

Pete's a DIY guy. Yesterday, he sanded half the porch and re-stained it a lighter, warmer color. He'd carefully planned it so an upstairs tenant would get home after 10 p.m., well after the stain would have a chance to dry. We went out briefly to look in where we're housesitting, and to pick up a bottle of wine. When we got back, Pete noticed a familiar car and ran to look at the steps. A tenant we haven't seen in two weeks had left footprints in the stain. We went in through the back door and found him in the kitchen.

Dude, we said, Did you notice the stain on the porch was wet?
Yeah, he said, I noticed my shoes stuck to the porch. Don't worry about it.

You will be pleasantly surprised to learn neither of us shellacked him.

On Sunday, Pete and I found a couple of food-related questions answered on one shelf in the Goya section of the Milltown, NJ Acme. They're proud of their double coupons everyday! policy, but better for my purposes was a whole shelf of cornmeals ground differently. On the left, fine. On the right, coarse. In between, degrees of fine and coarse. The bags cost $1.39 apiece. We bought one of each - for SCIENCE!

Tonight, I made polenta with the coarsest grind. Every first attempt is fraught with tasty peril! I started with water. Next time, I'll start with chicken stock, but I wanted to get at the flavor of the corn. I like the texture, which is more like minced, dried corn than the fine cornmeal I've always used to make polenta. This is also a completely different beastie than the instant polenta my grandmother used, because why not?

A fine thing to do is make more polenta than strictly necessary for dinner because - you know - you're going to eat breakfast. You have two options: fried or toasted. We had fried for dinner. The polenta had a buttery texture but lost its significant corniness. Clearly, more SCIENCE! is in our future, and by that I mean in the toaster for breakfast.

This weekend, Pete plans to sand the other half of the porch and re-stain that. A quick glance at the long-term weather report hints that rain will never stop falling. We should ditch the porch and build an ark. I doubt the cats will be amused when we fit them with tasteful booties and floatation devices.

They Think They're Heroes

One hilarious side effect of working your tush off to - y'know - work your tush off is that your middle-aged weight shifts. Weight doesn't melt off the way it used to. The pants that fit last week droop here and tug there; one or the other is vexing but both wreck your chances of putting together an outfit you don't throw on your cubicle floor before lunch. By you I mean me, and of course if my clothes are on your cubicle floor, someone's got some 'splainin' to do. Thus, my bras snapped like rubber bands, and by the grace of Foundation Garment Goddesses, replacements arrive on a UPS truck. About half usually fit. Back go the others. Replacements arrive. It sounds like an unending pain in the ass, but it's miles better than the frantic public humiliationfest that is a Saturday afternoon trying on clothes in a department store dressing room with bad light and mirrors in Sensurround. Jesus Christ, remind me to do that if I need a shove off the ledge.