black friday and beyond

Alfred made a pretty good purchase this year for Black Friday: a new TV! It's a 46 inch Samsung flat screen, and he got a really good price. He actually bought it on Wednesday night, but that's just a minor detail. It apparently already shipped, so we should get it this week! Very exciting! In order to rationalize spending the money on a TV, Alfred returned his fancy camera last week. He hadn't really used it since our trip, and we'll probably use a TV a little more, so I guess it all works out.

I had to work on Friday, unfortunately. It kind of sucked not having the day off, but at least we had quite a few customers so I was busy outside doing tours almost all day. It made the day go by quickly, that's for sure. After work Alfred and I met up with Kevin and Gara for the evening. We started out at Claude's, which is always awesome, and then went to a wine bar for some dinner and drinks. This place was a total cougar den, we were the youngest people in there by far. Alfred liked that, seeing as how he's getting all old and stuff. (kidding, honey!)

This weekend has been the epitome of laziness for me. I've had a bit of a cold, and Alfred informed me that I need to watch and delete everything on the DVR that I care about before he gets a new HD one this week, so it was like a perfect storm. I have literally been sitting on the couch watching TV (and occasionally knitting) all weekend. There's probably going to be an imprint of my ass on this cushion for quite some time. I did manage to step outside today for approximately 1 minute, so that was good. I've been following my usual regimen of Cold Eeze and orange juice for 2 days straight, so hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow. I actually really like to have these totally lazy weekends sometimes, and it was probably good since I'm sick, but Alfred has definitely reached his limit.

My thanksgiving grades

I contributed a few dishes to our thanksgiving meal with Alfred's family, and have had a couple of days now to reflect on my performance. Let's see how I did!

Baked brie: this is pretty hard to mess up. It could have used a bit more jam, but other than that, it was good. Grade: A-

Cranberry sauce: I almost forgot to add the sugar, which would have been disastrous, but managed to pull it together in time. Unfortunately, no one under the age of 28 liked it, although the grown ups all did. Grade: A-

Dressing: Alfred volunteered me to make this the night before, so I called my mom for the recipe she uses and got from her mother. It was pretty good for a first effort, but now that I've made it once I'm sure I can improve on it in the future. Needed more seasoning. Grade: B

Ice cream: another last minute addition. We somehow had a lot of extra egg yolks to use up, so we decided on vanilla ice cream. It was really delicious, nice and creamy, but it's pretty hard to screw up ice cream. Grade: A

Pumpkin pie: I was going to use a recipe from the food network with fresh pumpkin and pecan streusel. Unfortunately we couldn't find fresh pumpkin, and Max isn't crazy about nuts in desserts, so in the end I just went with a standard pumpkin filling. It was good, nothing spectacular. Excellent crust though, maybe my best effort (another family recipe). Grade: B+

Peanut butter pie: this was supposed to be a chocolate crust, peanut butter custard filling, and meringue topping. The crust and meringue were fine, but the filling didn't thicken up right. It tasted ok, but looked awful. It was basically peanut butter soup in a chocolate shell with a meringue island floating in the center. Bad news. Grade: C-

Overall grade: B- Better luck next time.

happy Thanksgiving!

Buddha the puppy says happy Thanksgiving! He loves his little Pilgrim hat.

He likes Crookshanks the cat as well. He likes to bark at her, anyway. She does not like him.

He also likes to run through the bushes when you take him outside to pee.

He's very good about letting someone know when he has to go out. He goes to the front door and kind of bats at the bells that are hanging from the doorknob and then whines if no one responds immediately. He's also extremely cute. Alas, he is not our puppy. Robyn managed to get him the other day in some sort of shady back-alley deal. Someone whose dog had 10 puppies was getting foreclosed on and had to get rid of the puppies, so a bunch of their neighbors took one apiece, and somehow Robyn ended up with one. I'm a tiny bit fuzzy on the details, but that's the gist of it. Not too shady after all, really. He's 14 weeks old. Right now his name seems to be Buddha, but since he's only been around for a couple of days we'll see if it sticks.

Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone!

open letter

Dear men,

How are you? I am well. Now that we've exchanged pleasantries, do you mind if I get a little personal? Lovely, thank you.

Now, I'm a girl, so I pee sitting down. But I hear that most of you tend to void your bladders while in the standing position. I also hear that you have a nifty little appendage that you can aim towards the toilet, which presumably makes it easier to hit your target. So why, pray tell, do I find myself cleaning up puddles of urine on the men's bathroom floor at work on a regular basis? Maybe it's just the younger members of your species. Today, for example, I went into the men's restroom after several classes had eaten lunch. There was a large puddle on the floor, directly between the urinal and a toilet. It was such a large puddle that I actually used paper towels to push the fluid into the urinal instead of just soaking it up (I was wearing rubber gloves). In other words, it was disgusting. Unfortunately, today was not an isolated incident. The men's room regularly reeks of urine from the young men visiting our fine establishment. And I can always tell when some of them have been in the unisex, wheelchair-accessible stall. Puddles, puddles everywhere, cause they've had too much to drink. I'll save the non-urine messes for another day. And to be fair, those aren't always the boys.

So, gentlemen. If it's really that far of a distance from you to the toilet, or your aim is really that poor, perhaps you should consider taking a seat. There's nothing to be ashamed of. Parents, please feel free to teach your young charges the fun in aiming for the center of the toilet bowl. Yeah, the rim can be fun, and the floor's always a blast, but hey, why not the water? Peeing in the toilet: it's the gift that keeps on giving.

Thank you for your time.

d'oh

We're getting close to the end of the year, and we've only been to Universal once so far this year, so Alfred and Ilya decided we needed to take advantage of my other four free tickets before it was too late. So off we went yesterday. It was much less crowded than when we went last month; this is totally when we should go every year. It was great, the longest we waited for any ride was maybe 15 minutes. Also, I have a new favorite ride there: the Simpsons ride! It was so fun! It's a motion simulator ride that makes you feel like you're on all these different types of rides in Krustyland. The ride itself is really cool, a lot like Spiderman, but there's a lot of little jokes in there too that makes it better than Spiderman, at least in my opinion. We actually went on it twice. So fun. I didn't even really mind waiting in line because they show clips of Simpsons episodes while you wait.

Later, when we were on our way to go on Spiderman, a couple of Universal employees came up to us and asked if we wanted to go on Spiderman. They took us in through the exit and got on and rode with us, so we didn't have to wait in line. Then after we got off, they gave us 4 free express passes to skip another line later in the day. It was awesome! We used them for the Jurassic Park ride, although we should have saved them for the Dr. Seuss trolley thing. We tried to go on it 2 or 3 times, but decided not to wait in the line each time. Oh yeah, and we were drunk by then. Because, you know, Universal has 2 bars that have Happy Hour. I had at least 1 too many drinks. We rode the Dr. Seuss carousel like 5 times. We apparently sat in traffic for an hour and a half on our drive through Orlando, but luckily I kept falling asleep. I slept through most of the drive back, which is probably really good because I kept feeling nauseous. Anyway, good times were had all around. Thank you for driving us back, Mercedes!

Quote of the day

Alfred (to me): and you wonder why you're old and fat

let's be serious

Yes, a serious post. I had a meeting today with the state attorney's office that's prosecuting the guy who tried to break into our house. I got to leave work early, which is always a plus, and got searched and wanded by security at the courthouse. They confiscated my camera and nail clippers. For realsies. Because I might have used the metal file on the nail clippers to shank a judge or something and then taken a picture of it as a souvenir. I got a little ticket to reclaim my goods on my way out. My meeting went well, it didn't last that long. I basically corroborated the statement I gave the police the night of the incident and answered a couple of additional questions. Apparently the guy our thief tried to rob earlier in the day hired the guys who beat the crap out of him later that day. They cut his neck so deep it looked like they tried to cut his head off, and then tried to cut off his genitals. Somehow he was able to kick enough to keep them away from his goods. He has enough of a prior record that he may go to jail even with the attack. I may have to go in again at some point, so we'll see. Neat.

I was reflecting the other day on how much that guy has effected (affected? I'm drunk) me. I used to feel like I was basically safe. Like I could walk around outside after dark, or just be in the house with the door unlocked, and feel like I was ok. Now I don't go outside after I get home from work if I'm by myself unless I really need to for some reason. I lock my car doors the second I get in, whether I'm at home, at work, wherever. The other evening I walked from the house we were staying at to the restaurant where I was meeting Alfred. It took me about half an hour, and for all but the first 3 minutes or so I was on a well lit, busy road. I not only brought my pepper spray, I carried it the entire way with my thumb on the trigger, ready for action. It's kind of sad that my basic sense of security and really, my underlying feeling of trust in the world at large, is pretty much gone. Some guy randomly tried to break into my house while I was inside. It was totally random, had nothing to do with me, and if it happened once, who's to say it won't happen again? It's probably good that I'm safer now, but it's not like I was picking up hitchhikers and behaving in an unsafe manner before. I'm sad that I feel unsafe. It sucks.

p.s. Alfred made some hard apple cider the other day and we sampled it tonight. 3 sips in, we were both tipsy. Craziness.