Snark Warning

Fair warning, I am on a snarky rant. Maybe not politically correct, but I'm doing it anyway.

Yesterday, someone in management used the term "drownding" near my tender ears. This came from someone who is a well read, talented writer who normally impresses me with her grasp of grammar and spelling. (We already know I'm a spelling and grammar snob, so don't look so surprised.) Sadly for me, bad grammar and spelling seems to be the norm or I wouldn't be so surprised when I see something written correctly. And no, I'm not perfect, and yes, I make spelling and grammar mistakes, but I'm mortified when I see them, because I know better.

I'm reminded of those Facebook pictures that pop up regularly stating something along the lines of "Some days my greatest accomplishment is keeping my mouth shut."  So I did.

 

 

It was so hard for me not to say something, but I knew nothing good would come out of that for either her or me. Instead, I entertained myself searching for the appropriate visual response:

 

 

I feel better now. Thank you.

 

Jeepers Creepers

We came home this evening after dinner and as I glanced through the mail, I noticed a brochure from Danbury Mint, publicizing a "dazzling" diamond pendant for only $99, so affordable in three monthly installments. I was about to toss it when I noticed something that totally creeped me out. The front, back, inner two panels, order form, and inserted sales pitch letter all had a sample engraving on the back of the pendant: "Terri, I Love You, Ronald".

I guess the Danbury Mint thinks this is an appealing way to draw buyers in but I found the personalization invasive. I showed it to Ron and he immediately said "that's creepy".

Hey Danbury Mint, are you stalking us? Are you parked down the street watching us? Peering in our windows in the middle of the night? Rifling through our mail?  Even if you just bought our information from some other mailing company, I don't like it!

Eggcentricity

Growing up on the New Jersey shore in the best part of the Garden State, close enough to the beach to enjoy it whenever we wanted, yet far enough away from it to be blessed with rich dark gardening soil, allowed us to have a back yard full of juicy Jersey  tomatoes . During those glorious Jersey summers, there was often a line of tomatoes on the kitchen counter just begging to be devoured. We had thick slices with dinner, wedges in salad, or we just simply bit into them like apples. Our Sunday breakfast was often bacon and eggs. I remember being 7 or 8 years old, frying bacon and scrambling eggs. My mother had taught me how to estimate the right amount of milk for each egg, how to beat the eggs, how to melt Crisco in her special little egg frying pan, tipping the pan to just the right angle to coat it completely, and then pour the eggs into the pan, waiting until just the right moment to begin drawing the edges of the cooked egg mixture in to the center of the pan. Scrambled eggs, crispy bacon, and buttered white toast with a few tomato wedges was a perfect breakfast then and it still remains my favorite breakfast to this day.

 

 

 

In my fifth grade class at Central School, Mr. Hooker taught us about atoms. We learned the different parts of the atom: electrons, protons, neutrons, and the teeny tiny center of the atom, the nucleus. The illustration in our science book was an egg.  There was a teeny tiny white spot in the yolk, which was referred to as the nucleus. This teeny tiny white spot in the egg, my science book explained, was the chicken embryo.  What?? That teen tiny white spot was a baby chicken?  My 11 year old mind reeled in horror.  I had been eating baby chickens??  Obviously, I knew eggs came from chickens, and chickens hatched from eggs, but I had never thought I was eating chicken embryos.  I loved scrambled eggs, but the thought of eating chicken embryos just seemed…..barbaric.  I also know where bacon comes from but I never experienced a similar horror when munching a BLT.

 

After that science lesson, I could not prepare eggs the same way again. I began removing those teeny tiny white spots (which I honestly had never even noticed before) with a fork and rinsing them away in the kitchen sink. Whether I was scrambling eggs, making a cake, or beginning my Christmas cookie marathon, I took those embryos out of my eggs.  Somehow watching them swirl away down the drain seemed more humane than actually eating them.  This idiosyncrasy is usually evident only when I’m cracking the eggs myself. Ordering eggs in a restaurant? No problem. Eating eggs that someone else has prepared? No problem - unless I’m watching my husband make eggs. He knows I’m watching, so he’ll remove the teeny tiny white spots for me.

 

For more than 40 years this has been my egg routine. Yes, when the kids were small, they asked what I was doing and I explained my reasoning to them, just to help them understand why I have this weird need to take those teeny tiny white spots out.  I never told them they had to make eggs the same way I do. I figure it’s my hang-up and my problem.

 

This past June my son Josh visited for a week and we met his girlfriend Kayla for the first time. Kayla told us a story about how she had made scrambled eggs for Josh when they began living together. He was very happy that she had made him eggs. Then he asked her if she had taken the teen tiny white spots out.  She said no. He said he couldn’t eat those eggs because his mom always took the teeny tiny white spots out.  So Kayla began her own teeny tiny white spot removal tradition.

 

Along with consciously teaching your kids to always say “please” and “thank you”, you never know what else you are unconsciously teaching them.

 

The eggcentricity lives on!

Deceptively Delicate

Recently, while mindlessly walking from the parking lot to the shoreline, lugging our usual beach accoutrements, I nearly trod on this lovely purple blossom poking out of the sand.

How odd, I thought, that someone would have just tossed some yard clippings onto the beach. I opened my eyes and noticed a whole sand dune full of these flowers and realized this flower was actually growing out of the sand.

 

It turns out there are many sand dunes on the beach, abundant with these little purple guys. An internet search revealed that this is a Railroad Vine, also known as a Beach Morning Glory.  They  thrive in hot, sunny, sandy conditions.

 

I'm from New Jersey, the Garden State, and grew up watching my father plant tomatoes and peppers in the rich dark soil. As an adult, I moved a little further south to an area that had very sandy soil and it certainly was a gardening challenge. I moved once again to Florida, where the soil in my young community can hardly be called soil. It is mostly fill (here I would normally insert the word "dirt", but that's not really accurate), composed of sand, shells, and construction debris. Trying to figure out the correct time of year to plant tomatoes, and then getting them to grow in this harsh Florida environment, is nearly impossible.

 

Finding this lovely flower growing on the beach, in hot dry sand, was a refreshing surprise. My gardening spirit has been revived and I can't wait to play in the dirt again!

 

Channeling Jeff Goldblum

This past weekend while moving about in bed, I caught a toenail in the sheets. The toenail just split in half and peeled right off my toe. It wasn’t painful but it’s not pretty to look at, and no, I’m not posting a picture of my toe.

What the heck? How does this happen? Are pieces of my body just going to start dropping off now, like a snake shedding its skin? I feel like Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle in “The Fly”, collecting prized body parts as they fall off and safekeeping them in the medicine cabinet.

I just love Jeff Goldblum. Wacky and wonderful Jeff Goldblum. I can quote his lines and imitate his hand gestures. Jurassic Park (“Think they’ll have THAT on the ride?”) and Independence Day ("Forget the  fat lady! You’re obsessed with the fat lady! Drive us out of here!”) are two of my favorite movies. And of course, everyone claims to love "The Big Chill", although, for me, that was eclipsed by the Brat Pack movies that followed. 

And while I love Jeff on the big screen, I don’t think I’d want to save his body parts in a jar like fireflies. 

Falling Frenzy

Ok, so I’m not a gazelle. I did take a few years of “jazz” dance lessons back in high school at the Marcia Anne Dance Studio, owned by our neighbor, Marcia Cooper. Marcia & Bill Cooper were friends of my parents and they would come over for parties all the time. I just loved Marcia. In her living room was a giant oil painting of Marcia wearing a frothy white ballet costume, standing in a graceful impossible-to-attain dance pose. She used to invite me over for spaghetti dinners to meet her nephews, in hopes that we’d all hit it off and get married. The Coopers had a huge black Lab named Mighty Thor who was a bull in a china shop. They used to tape his tail with white surgical tape because when he wagged it he would beat it against the wall until it bled. Marcia was the first woman I ever met who went to the beauty salon once a week, every Friday, had her hair done and then didn’t touch it again all week. I used to go to the dance studio with Marcia just to watch the other classes. Marcia wasn’t my dance teacher, however. The lovely Joanne was my teacher. Joanne was a former student of Marcia’s who became one of her dance teachers once she finished school. Joanne was an aspiring actress who used to tell us stories about her voice lessons (an actor from “Laverne and Shirley” was in her voice class) and acting lessons and modeling jobs (we found pictures of her modeling lingerie in the Sears catalog). One of the other girls in my class was over 18 and she and Joanne would perform their clubbing dance routines for the rest of the class. They looked so perfect I used to think I would be able to do that once I was 18 and old enough to go to clubs. Looking back, those lessons didn’t help me dance in clubs. Alcohol helped me dance in clubs. The dance lessons did make me very flexible, though, and I was able to pull off stretches & splits in my high school gym class during gymnastics season that were well beyond anything I had ever done before. I think there were only 8 of us in class. It’s probably a good thing that Marcia was not my teacher. One time she filled in for Joanne and she was SCARY. Marcia had a very different style from Joanne’s relaxed style of teaching. Marcia made us line up and leap across the studio over and over again. Our arms had to be that way. Our legs had to be this way. The number of steps had to be this many before we flew through the air. No matter, I thought she was fabulous. I loved the way she called her husband Coop and he called her Cobra. After my mother passed away, Marcia and Bill still came over to visit. And after my father remarried, Marcia and Bill continued to visit. However, my father’s new wife referred to Marcia as “that Cooper bitch down the street”. Apparently she didn’t care for her as much as I did. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that while I’m no ballerina, neither am I a complete Urkel.

About a year and a half ago I visited Alyssa at school and as we strolled across the grass to the parking lot on our way to the movies, I fell. I wasn’t pushed, I didn’t fall in a hole, I didn’t trip on a tree root, I just fell. I think I managed to stay on the grassy area and roll but I landed heavily on my right wrist and skinned my knee. No major injury, just embarrassing. I managed to clean up my knee in the restroom at the movies and I could still function in my daily life with no difficulty.

Then, one evening just after this past Christmas, Ron, Alyssa & I were walking the dog. I tripped, as I inevitably do, over a reflector in the street. Same reflector, same street, all the time. However, on this particular evening, I managed to tear my left ankle tendons with a hard inversion sprain and ended up laying on the asphalt in pain. I couldn’t continue the walk and Ron had to go get the car to pick me up. I went to work the next day and iced my elevated foot. For several days I couldn’t walk the dog and I had to wear flat ballet shoes. I even went shopping to buy an assortment of different colored ballet flats. After a few weeks, although most of the swelling had gone down, it was still puffy and painful. I went to my doctor and he reprimanded me for not seeing him right away to get a cast. He said it would be a few more weeks to heal but it would always be a weak spot for me. He also tried to tell me that flat shoes were nice. Mmm hmm, I’m not buying THAT.

Triple Play – the first weekend in March, after spending most of February packing and moving into a new house, Ron & I were moving boxes and furniture out of the garage into the house so we could finish unpacking and setting up the house. While I was moving a box, I tripped over a shelf and did a little jig to keep from falling, which turned out to be only semi-successful. I ended up doing a jack knife with my body (you know, like those flexible people who can bend over and put their hands flat on the floor without bending their legs), bending straight down from the hips to drop my box on the floor, and I heard and felt something pop in my hip. I let out a horrified yelp and rolled on to the garage floor, nestling my broken body between boxes and furniture. Endless images of ambulance stretchers, body casts, and hip replacement surgery raced through my head. I mentally checked off a hundred reasons why this would be very inconvenient. Ron returned to the garage to see what had happened and asked if we had to go to the hospital. I said no and just laid there a while, wiggling various body parts to confirm I wasn’t paralyzed. I rolled my hips and legs back and forth to measure the pain. I managed to scooch up a few inches and peered out between the boxes to the surrounding neighborhood, wanting to make sure I hadn’t attracted a crowd of onlookers. It appeared that no one was paying any attention to me. Still laying on the floor, I gave Ron some direction on where to bring certain boxes that I could see from where I was. I realized I couldn’t lay on the garage floor forever and made an attempt to get up. Easier said than done. I was able to roll over on to all fours, but I couldn’t apply any pressure on my hip to get into an upright position. I tried to lift myself up using a nearby shelf. Nope. I asked Ron to bring me a nearby ladderback chair and was able to stand up while leaning on that. I used the chair as a walker and made tiny baby steps to move across the garage to the laundry room. It was a little tough to get up that one little step but I succeeded.

Ron asked again if we needed to go to the hospital. I said no. My goal was to make it to the bedroom and lie down. I figured I might not be able to get up again for a while so I decided I should go to the bathroom first. I walked the chair into the guest bathroom and discovered I could not sit down. I couldn’t squat. Or bend. I could move the chair around but my body had a mind of its own. I wondered how long a person could go without going to the bathroom.

Ron asked again if we needed to go to the hospital. I said maybe. Let me take a shower and shave my legs. Just in case. I was able to take a shower, but shaving my legs was not an option. Fortunately Ron was willing to shave my legs for me (yeah, I know, big sacrifice on his part).

Ron asked again if we needed to go to the hospital. I said probably, but I had to go to the bathroom first. This time I tried our bedroom bathroom, which is much smaller than the guest bathroom. I discovered that if I braced my left arm on the windowsill, held on to the door jamb with my right hand, extended my right leg all the way out to the corner of the room, and contorted my body in a counterclockwise direction, I could get my left butt cheek on the potty. Sort of my own private aerial game of Twister.

After Ron helped me get dressed I crawled into the back seat of the car and off to Urgent Care we went. There were lots of xrays taken, (I even received my own xray CDs as souvenirs) and it was determined nothing was broken. Probably just a pulled muscle. I received a prescription for a painkiller and directions to apply ice for as long as I could stand it. I crawled back into the car and Ron drove home to put me to bed. He went out to pick up my prescription and also stopped at a local bakery to buy some delicious pastries. I learned that one of the painkillers would allow me to sleep for 4 hours. I looked through my old Rxs and found some leftover Carisoprodol and found that taking one of those would let me sleep for another 4 hours.

Ron stayed home from work on Sat & Sun to take care of me and do all the stuff I couldn’t do. Walk the dog. Cook. Laundry. Clean. I couldn’t do anything that involved extending my right leg, bending, twisting or lifting. Ron’s schedule permitted him to take me to work on Monday & Tuesday as I couldn’t drive. I simply could not extend my leg to the accelerator or put any pressure on it. I took my ice bag to work and sat on it continuously. There was no comfortable position. I fidgeted, put my foot up on a box, took my foot off the box. Mostly I stared at the clock, willing it to move to 5:00 so I could go home and lay down.  I did some internet searching and diagnosed myself with a torn hamstring. Stupid doctors. It was so obvious when I saw the description on Web MD. Their article could have been written about ME.

This put a little damper on what I had declared to be my birthday month. My plans to stretch out the March celebration from lion to lamb had to be adjusted. My routine became: 1. Go to work (Ron was able to drive me a few times and Shannon from my office picked me up a few times). Sit on an ice pack at my desk. Get up every hour to refresh the ice. Take lots of aspirin. Go home. Take a pill. Go to bed. Repeat. After my first week of being chauffeured, I finally had to drive myself to work. I practiced the night before and was able to drive around the block, awaiting terrible spasms of pain that never happened. The first morning that I had to drive, I left for work 20 minutes early, and drove very very s l o w l y. I braked with my left foot . I was so worried that I would have to stop short and would put sudden pressure on my foot. But I made it safely to work with no injury to myself or innocent pedestrians.

The unpleasant side effect of the hamstring injury was that because I was favoring my right leg, I was putting extra weight on my left leg, which caused my torn ankle tendons to flare up. What a mess.

Now it is five and ½ months later and my hamstring is much much better. I can still feel it if I do some unexpected stretching. My ankle, on the other hand, has turned into a wet noodle. Sometimes, I’m simply standing somewhere and my ankle gives out and I stumble to stay upright! And some days, it just throbs endlessly. I can usually wear non-flat shoes, just little wedges, but I think those days of heels and platforms are behind me.

Of course now I’m seeing all these super cute high heeled shoes that I would love to buy and I can only try on one at a time, because I can't balance myself on two!  Fortunately Alyssa is willing to help me out and let me buy those shoes for her.

Epicurean Endeavors

I make an effort to try a few new recipes every week, partially to justify my ever expanding cookbook collection and my constant perusing, printing, and creating binders full of recipes that I pull from Kraft, Pillsbury, BHG, and Pioneer Woman websites and partially because I think I can be Martha Stewart. Some weeks pass with no new recipes, depending on our work schedules and other commitments, but sometimes we can squeeze in 4 or 6 new dishes. We honestly assess the results and notate the recipe with a smiley face (liked it and would cook it again), an indifferent face (eh, was ok but too much work), or a sad face accompanied by a “yuk!” (self explanatory). We also make notes on changes we think will improve the recipes for our particular tastes.

Recently I was especially pleased because Ron made a mustard crusted steak. Yes, the dish turned out deliciously well, but my happiness came from the fact that he snipped off some leaves from the pots of herbs that I have growing on the lanai. This makes me happy, because every year I plant herbs, and water them faithfully, and brush against the rosemary because I love the smell of rosemary wafting up in the air, but I generally never snip or use them for cooking. It’s almost as though they are just ornamental plants with no specific purpose. Martha would be disappointed in me, I know.

Hopefully this year it will be different!