A manly man

Got this email from a single friend today:

"Saw a psychic who told me I would know my future husband because he would somehow remind me of the Manwich guy. Every vegetarian's dream come true."

Anatomy lesson

Emerson is fascinated with the bathroom at the moment, probably because we don't let him in there to explore and play. But if you don't shut the door all the way he knows how to open it and he takes every chance he gets to do this.*

He let himself into the bathroom the other day after Eric had taken a shower. He stood there looking at Eric (who was naked) and then pointed at Eric's you-know-what and smiled and laughed.

Later that day after I had taken a shower and was in the bedroom getting dressed, Emerson comes in and sees me naked. He gets this look on his face like he has just figured out something really major. He points at my you-know-what and laughs. Then he looks out the bedroom door at Eric sitting on the couch and points at him, then looks back at me and points at me again, with a look of confused delight on his face.

So that's that milestone!


*We will be playing in the living room and suddenly he will just stand up and bolt out of the room down the hall on the off-chance that we have left the bathroom door ajar enough for him to get into.

There's always one

On my bike ride home from work I got stopped at a red light next to the Bay Quackers duck tour. For those who are unfamiliar, the "duck tour" is a tour done in an amphibious vehicle called a duck which drives all over the city checking out sites and then drives into the water and cruises around the bay. To make the experience more memorable the tour guide hands out little yellow quacker noisemakers at the beginning of the tour that you blow into to make a quacking sound.

So I'm at the red light and I hear the people in the duck chatting and quacking. And there's this one woman, maybe mid-thirties?, who is just quacking and quacking and quacking. It's like "quaaaaaaack" (quick inhale) "quaaaaaaack" (quick inhale) "quaaaaaack" (quick inhale) "quaaaaaaaack" (quick inhale) and on and on and on. We're talking serious compulsive behavior here.

The red light is starting to feel a little long and I am admittedly often a little grouchy when riding home especially on really windy days which it was and I am started to get seriously irritated at this woman.

"quaaaaaaack" (quick inhale) "quaaaaaaack" (quick inhale) "quaaaaaack" (quick inhale) "quaaaaaaaack" (quick inhale)....

Finally a seven year old boy on the duck shouts out "Aghhhh Mom can you please make that lady stop doing that!"

And the light turns green. I ride off with a smile.

Empanada update

I made empanadas for dinner last night. They turned out great! And I learned that the length of the recipe instructions is not a good indicator of how long it takes to make the recipe. One short paragraph can, quite deceptively, turn into several hours, especially when one is also feeding and caring for a one year old child.

I won a prize

I recently won another prize at work. An actual prize this time, not just a round of applause for being an unfortunate-looking child.

I won the prize for writing good marketing emails. "Good" in this case meant two things: they communicated the marketing message and they didn't actually sound like marketing, they sounded like actual, normal emails to people that I know (which is also what they were).

There were three prize-winners in this contest but I was the grand prize winner and the other two were the runners-up, which is a term that will always bring back memories of watching Miss America as a young girl.

My prize was called "I like the way you work it. No diggity, I got to bag it up." And the prize itself was reusable produce bags. This was, at first, kind of a let down because one of the runners-up had gotten chocolate and that just seemed kind of backwards and unfair.

But when I got home and opened them up I realized they are the perfect innovation for someone like me who simply refuses to use the plastic bags at the grocery store when buying produce. I hate those things. And rather than use them, I precariously pile my produce onto the little belt and try to prevent it all from rolling off when the belt moves. This works pretty well for most produce though I do actually recommend using a bag for mushrooms and green beans or else you get really dirty looks from the cashier.

And now I have bags I will actually use, thanks to my ability to sneak attack marketing on unsuspecting professional contacts.

New flavors

We've gotten a little stuck in a routine of eating the same five or ten meals again and again and this week we're trying to break out of it and eat some new stuff.

On Sunday we pulled two cookbooks down from their dusty, unvisited home: Rachel Ray's Big Orange Book (I swear I have no idea where this came from) and International Family Favorites, which features unique local dishes from each continent and full color photos of each recipe ornately staged in a culturally appropriate setting. I think these two just happened to be at the top of the stack.

As a result, our menu looks a bit different this week. It includes:

Sunday: RR's "Popeye" Risotto was aptly named as it was bright green and extremely spinach-y, mostly in a good way though it was one of those dishes that was so thick your mouth gets exhausted trying to move it around and swallow it. But all in all a pretty good new flavor (that spinach-nutmeg combo is not something we do often around here).

Monday: 11 Bean Soup. Eating this soup for dinner Monday and then lunch on Tuesday had Eric talking about his butt so much I suggested we should use a code word in from of Emerson, now that he is starting to really understand words. So now the word "jiminy" refers to all thing poo, butt and fart related. Because we then took this way too far, we now call the bathroom the "jiminy closet."

Special treat on Monday: Pecan Pie. We are still working our way through the huge sack of pecans we got from a Texas billionaire via my friend Sarah because he misspelled her name and sent her two by mistake, and I have gotten over my 'no corn syrup' reflex, so we made some pie. Yum!

Tuesday: "That's Shallota Flavor" Spaghetti (yes, from the orange book). Tasty enough but eh, not so special.

Still to come:
Wednesday: Handmade Salmon Burgers on Kaiser Rolls.

Thursday: Homemade empanadas!! (from IFF). We are going to do mushroom and potato & corn. I think if I was a different person the chances of these coming out looking very pretty and consistently shaped would be high. Being me, I am expecting a third-grader-playdoh aesthetic.

Music review: last Friday's symphony

Eric and I went on a date to the symphony last Friday night. Our favorite Chicago pizza spot is just a few blocks from the symphony hall and if you get there by about 6:20 you can get a free parking spot and a deep dish pizza and still have time to wait in the line for the women's bathroom before the show.

This past Friday the show was great for a lot of reasons. First, the conductor for the evening was named Osmo, which I spent the better portion of the performance thinking was the same name as that funny little floating guy in the He-Man cartoon from my childhood, but it turns out that was Orko.
Another great thing about the evening was that Alexander Barantschik, an SF symphony regular who Eric and I refer to affectionately as the "Russian bear," was playing a Mendelssohn violin concerto on the actual violin of the guy who is was written for all that time ago (it turns out that's the violin he plays all the time, on loan from a museum).

And a third neat thing about the evening was that one of the three performances was a world premiere of a work commissioned by the SF symphony. We couldn't help but giggle a little bit when we noticed on the list of instruments a few unexpected items: metal foil, sandpaper blocks, light paper, and "jingles." It immediately made me think that perhaps this was Iron Composer, the symphony equivalent of the Iron Chef in which a serious composer must write a brilliant piece of work using an orchestra plus some crazy random stuff someone picked up out of the dumpster down the block. In spite of rolling my eyes when I saw it had been written in 2010 (myself, I am not your biggest fan of the atonal cacophony car crash know as modern music) I actually quite enjoyed it.

One review of the piece commented: "The sound was never overpowering, even when two of the trombone players hit their instruments with sticks."

Eric and I exchanged a meaningful glance when the sandpaper blocks were employed to great effect during the piece.