wink wink nudge nudge say no more

So I'm wandering around this great big internet of ours, and I end up on wikinews (which isn't quite as cool as wikipedia but is still cool just because it's wiki-) where I'm reading about two guys in Texas who recently got the go-ahead from the Texas Court of Appeals to sue a couple of strip clubs. Apparently these businesses were in the habit of overcharging guys who paid for lap dances with their credit cards, and Texas law says you can't do that, and so on and so forth.

I really could care less about this case. (I could care less about most lawsuits, actually, but let's not get into America's unhealthy fascination with the lawsuit just yet.) I only mention it to you because I'd like to know where you swipe your credit card when you're using it to pay for a lap dance.

More food porn

Gotta support the troops!

Appetizer
Shrimp Gazpacho

Entree choices
- Lamb Chop - Grilled spring lamb chop served with asparagus risotto and wild mushroom ragout
- Chicken Wrap - Grilled breast of chicken wrapped in a sun-dried tomato tortilla with lettuce, tomato, smoked gouda, and peppercorn vinaigrette; served with seasoned waffle fries
- Atlantic Salmon - Grilled Atlantic Salmon filet served with Catalan vinaigrete and home-made tabouleh

Dessert choices
- Orange Cheesecake - Flavored with Grand Marnier, orange juice, and orange zest; baked with a gingersnap crust
- Fresh Mixed Berry Plate - Sprinkled with Grand Marnier and powdered sugar

Did you notice that everything is grilled? Yeah. It is. Working the grill was, um, slightly busy this morning. It might have actually been work if it hadn't been a slow lunch day.

And while Marcus made the cheesecake batter and the crumb crust before he headed to Michigan last week, I assembled and baked the cheesecakes myself Friday morning, and they turned out freakin' perfect. Nice and golden brown on top, no cracking or settling, perfectly done, just beautiful. And delicious! I was quite proud of them.

Dude, where's my weekend?

That was too fast. Of course, I had lots of little errands to run and things to do and so on and so forth, which always seems to make the time go faster. So now every single thing I own which can be laundered is, my kitchen is full of groceries, my dishes are clean, my carpet is vacuumed, another two boxes of my comics are bagged, my DVDs are almost completely catalogued, I used some of my credit at Blockbuster to grab some things I needed like Shaun of the Dead and House of Flying Daggers and Shaolin Soccer and the recent remake of Salem's Lot, and all in all I had a rather productive go of it.

(If you're looking for a highly amusing way to spend a Saturday evening, you can do a hell of a lot worse than a Shaolin Soccer/Shaun of the Dead double feature. With lots of popcorn. Movie theater style, with extra butter. Good times.)

Anyway, it's nice to be temporarily on top of everything for a change, so I guess I really can't complain about the weekend flying by. I'm on top of it all so rarely that I ought to just enjoy it while it lasts, but instead I find myself thinking about the fact that at this rate I'm never going to finish Final Fantasy Origins. Sigh. Sometimes being a cynic is kinda depressing. ^_^

Dinner, which it's just about time for me to get actually serious about, will be pork chops, oven-roasted potatoes, and vegetable medley. Hello, childrens.

This week at the bank

(for Stef, who likes to be kept up on what we're serving)

Appetizer
Gougères (cheese puffs, but the French name sounds so much classier, so "gougères" it is)

Entree choices
- Surf and Turf - 10 oz. rib eye steak (topped with wild mushroom ragout) and two jumbo beer-battered shrimp served with cowboy ranch beans
- Club Sandwich - Classic triple-decker of ham, turkey, bacon, swiss, cheddar, lettuce, and tomato on country egg bread with Yukon Gold potato salad
- Lemon-Thyme Chicken - Marinated and grilled chicken breast served on baby spinach with artichoke hearts and cherry tomatoes in a chicken brodo with parmesan curls

Dessert choices
- Chocolate Peanut Butter Toffee Bar - served with rich chocolate ice cream
- Fresh Mixed Berry Plate - sprinkled with Grand Marnier and powdered sugar

It's a yummy menu, if maybe not quite as fancy as I really have fun with. But grilling giant hunks of meat is always a plus, so don't think I'm complaining. And we did have a function at the bank this evening, so I also got to spend some time playing with prime rib, crab cakes, bacon-wrapped scallops, spicy meat pies, and lots of cheese and fruit and taaaaaaasty desserts. Food is so much fun. (Although I'll still be glad when this week is over and I can stop working long days for a little bit, because I'm sleepy and have a couple of new DVDs that I really want to watch.)

Weird dreams

I had a night full of 'em, but at this point they've all pretty much faded back into the mists. One stuck with me all day, though, so I'll share it with you.

Gary and his daughter and I were all sitting on the couch, and she was playing with some sort of stuffed animal. I think it was a bunny, but it could have been something else. We'll call it a bunny. It was one of those stuffed bunnies that does things - it moves around, it sings songs, it says stuff when you press on its tummy, etc. Well, she's having a grand old time watching it move around, pressing its tummy and laughing every time it says something, you know the drill. So she presses it one more time and the bunny turns its head to look right at me, and in that cheerful stuffed animal voice it says, "I have a knife and tonight I'm going to use it!"

My subconscious is such a strange place.

Currently

• In my CD Player: Stevie Wonder, Innervisions
• On my TV: Family Guy (Mr. Griffin goes to Washington)
• In my mail slot: A bank statement, the cable connection invoice from when we moved in, a photocopy of a recipe (well, it's more of a really cute strawberry Santa garnish than a recipe) that I need to take with me to the bank later this week
• In my belly: Fettuccine Alfredo with chicken and mushrooms
• In my pop can: Diet Coke with Lime
• On my body: blue plaid shorts, this t-shirt
• On my couch: a short box of Uncanny X-Men that I just finished rebagging (including my newest acquisition, which made me happyhappy, thanks ebay)
• In my table lamp: A new 60 watt bulb, which means that it seems dim in here tonight because the bulb that burned out earlier this evening was 100 watts
• On my coffee table: the debris from the comic rebagging exercise, which I really need to pick up before it gets too late and I get too lazy
• On my mind: "I need to water my plants," "I should pay a couple of bills while I'm online," "Do I have any cookies?"

Pain is still funny.

You know, I thought I was was past that whole America's Funniest Home Videos thing. But I still laugh every time I see that guy get pegged in the face with a basketball in the Dairy Queen commercial. Although for horrifically guilty pleasures involving basketballs gone awry, nothing holds a candle to this little gem.

And oh yeah. Go Cubs.

Y'all come back now, ya heah?

(noticed at Binah's place)

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

15% Upper Midwestern

15% Yankee

10% Midwestern

0% Dixie

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

This makes me happy. I grew up in Iowa, but for years and years I've been slowly moving farther and farther south. Which is weird, because the south and I don't really get along - I'm not religious, I'm not conservative, I don't like country music or pickup trucks or big hair, I don't eat everything fried in Crisco - so for a long time I've been actively fighting against picking up a southern accent or southern ways of speech. I'm a Yankee, dammit. I don't claim the South. It's nice to see that I'm fighting a winning battle (but then, we Yankees started winning battles against the South well over a hundred years ago). Heh.

If I were Hank, this is where I would put a disclaimer, saying that I like plenty of southern people and that any who happen to be reading this shouldn't take it the wrong way, but that stereotypes do exist for a reason. But I'm not Hank, so go ahead and get offended. :op

Dear Smallville:

See? That's what I'm talkin' 'bout! More of that, please, and less of teh suck. Much less of teh suck.

Don't get me wrong. I've loved you since day one and I still love you today. I've always been there in front of my television for you. I've bought your comics and your DVDs. I've gone out of my way to share my love for you with the world and tell others how neat you are. But you know as well as I do that it hasn't always been easy. Not that I like to point fingers, but you have to admit that you've put us through some very trying times with your actions. It can be a bit difficult to stay focused on a relationship when the one you care for consistently fails to make any kind of coherent sense, but I've perservered and continued to believe in the greatness that I know exists at your core. And tonight you showed the world that greatness again, and I'm just so proud of you that I could burst.

(BUT STOP PLAYING THE "I DON'T REMEMBER A THING" CARD! grr.)

I hope that you can take my comments for what they are - not an attack on you, but an expression of my desire to see you be the best television show that you can be. You mean a great deal to me and I truly want that for you.

love, Todd

busy busy busy

And I thought things would get back to normal once the move was done! Silly me.

Not that I'm complaining, really, because a lot of the busy busy busy has been fun. For instance, a couple of the greatest guys you could ever hope to meet came down from Springfield on Thursday for the Cake show and then crashed here for the night before heading back. Hey Carl and Ryan! It was freakin' great to see you both. And Gary and I apologize for not being able to pull ourselves out of our respective beds at the crack of dawn on Friday to see you off. We're getting old, I guess, because 6:30 AM comes a lot earlier than it used to - especially when we were up until almost 4:00 the night "before." ^_^

Let's see, what else has been happening? I bought the last new bookcase I needed and got my library put back together and re-organized. I took the old stereo shelves I've been using as a sort-of entertainment center (console TVs, in addition to being annoying because they're super heavy, are also annoying because you can't use a real entertainment center with one) and added another shelf and a new back to it so that it can hold everything it needs to and look good while doing so. I'm about halfway through the long and arduous process of cataloguing my DVDs, which I put off for way too long. I did a little comic shopping with some unexpected bank money, filled a few holes in the collection (did I mention I found a Giant-Sized X-Men #1 at a garage sale a few weeks ago for $5 that's worth about $600 based on its condition? w00t!) and then finally got all of my comics completely in order - the cataloguing and rebagging, however, is another matter entirely. I've spent a good deal of time at Target, partially because I've needed to pick up a lot of stuff and partially because Target is just plain cool and it's nice to live really close to one and thus be able to completely ignore the existence of Wal-Mart.

And so on and so forth. But my to do list has finally become tiny, and today there's absolutely nothing meaningful on the agenda. Even if there was, it would be ignored, because it's the final day of the Masters and my ass isn't straying too far from my couch until the last shot has been played. I'd love to see Phil pull another one out, but this tournament is looking more and more like Tiger's. Seven straight birdies during his third round at Augusta, including birdieing Amen Corner? That's just sick. He's not human, folks.

*snif*

Well, Earline from the bookstore died last night. She was a really cool old lady, well-read with an acerbic wit and a great attitude toward life. She hadn't worked at the store in a good while, and even when she did she didn't work too much, as she was retired and did it more for fun and to be around some of her friends than for money - while the place was already a little bit empty without her, it's a lot emptier now that we know she won't ever be there again. She had cancer, you see, and it spread from here to there and then to everywhere. She fought it tooth and nail, because she was a scrapper and that's one thing that never changed, but you know how it is with that damn dirty-fighting cancer. So it wasn't really much of a surprise in the end, although it's not like that makes it better somehow. We're hoping the owner will close the store for a couple of hours Thursday afternoon so we can all go to the funeral, because there's not a one of us who doesn't want to say goodbye.

Rest in peace, darlin'. We'll miss ya.

Burger King is stalking you

It's true! Have you seen their new commercials? He's in your house watching you sleep, putting his hand on your leg, lurking around peeking in your windows, watching your house from afar... how, exactly, is this supposed to make me hungry for a Croissan'wich? A stalker who brings you breakfast is still a stalker. And the fact that he looks like a cartoony hydrocephalic Jesus makes him even creepier. Dude. If I looked out my front door and saw the guy standing a hundred feet away watching my house, turned around for a couple of seconds, then looked back to see him calmly standing on my porch? I might pause to kick his ass into the bushes before running screaming through the house and out the back, but I don't know that I'd bet on it.

Well, at least they're not trying to turn chili into a finger food. Heh.