I been framed, yer honor!

About 30 years ago, in the dead of winter, I was a very sick little boy. I had a horrible wasting disease. I could do nothing but lay on the couch and watch TV with a pillow under my head as the worst blizzard in years raged outside.
It was a nasty cold.
Somehow, though the snow was piling against the house, a small squad of ants made their way inside and into our living room. They picked up a discarded purple crayon and, in a great show of teamwork, carried it up the couch, past my face, and proceeded to color on my pillow case. I tried to stop them or at least to cry out an alarm, but in my weakened condition I just couldn't manage.
Then, quick as they came, the ants dropped the crayon and skedaddled back into the bleak winter night.
When my father asked who had colored on my pillow I tried to explain what had happened. He didn't believe me and wrote it down in my Baby Book as "My 1st Lie."
This accusation so shattered my self esteem it sent me on a lifetime spiral of lying, cheating and petty theft.*

*    *    *    *    *

Yesterday morning I was at the computer, doing my daily job searching, and my daughter was in the kitchen rustling around.  She came quickly back out to the living room and plopped down to watch Elmo or Super Why! or whatever.

A little later I went back to the coffee maker to refill my mug and noticed that a cup of melted ice and tea remnants had been spilled across the kitchen table. 

I confronted my daughter, "What happened?"

"Nothing."

"Did you knock over the tea?"

"....no."

"No? Who did then?"

"....a dog."

"A dog?" She nods. "You're saying a dog came into our house, jumped on the kitchen table, knocked over the tea and then ran back out?"

"...a small dog."

"Mmm-hmm."

Needless to say, though we don't have a baby book, I'm sharing this story with the entire internet. I've shattered her self esteem and am sending her on a spiral of shame and degradation... 

...or I showed her that I'm not buying her crap anymore than my dad bought mine. 

*ok, not really, but it sounds more fun that way. I'm a good boy, honest!

I'm the baby, gotta love me!

I've seen it happen on TV and heard about it through other parents, but I'd hoped it wouldn't happen to us. It has.

When you have a kid who's just out of toddlerhood (like ours) and are expecting another one soon, sometimes your kid can have some infantile regression issues. They wanna be the baby just that much longer.

They've spent 3 years growing and learning and being proud of the things they can do for themselves and suddenly they just want to whine and suck a nük and all that. She's dry all night and then she's willfully peeing in her Pull-Ups when she gets up.
She is finally big enough to help put things away in the fridge, but she refuses to feed herself.
It's a magical time. (barf)

Well, a couple months ago a well meaning friend of ours (who's a mommy blogger and is inundated with free stuff) gave us a fancy-pants bottle for the new baby. It bounced around the back seat of my wife's car for a while until our daughter found it.

For a while she used it to feed her baby doll, until the regression kicked in about a week ago. Suddenly she's sucking on it and pretending to be the baby again.

It stayed in the car until yesterday when I brought it into the house fully intending to throw it out. Somehow our daughter convinced us to even put water in it so she could drink from it. (Sometimes you 're so blinded by whining and pestering you do dumb things. You gotta pick your battles.) She proceeded to pop the nipple off and spill the water all over her floor. Lesson learned.

When she went to bed last night I put the bottle on the top of my desk, again, intending to throw it out.

I forgot.

This morning, soon as she got up, she was asking for it. When she saw it on the desk the whining amped up even higher. This was getting to be a problem. She'd run around with it hanging from her mouth like a dog with a raggedy chew toy.  How the hell was I going to get rid of this thing without traumatizing her even more?

So, this afternoon, I'm sitting at my desk and hear her at her potty. Knowing the signs point to "poopy" I intercept her (bottle in mouth) and redirect her into the bathroom to perform the proper "post-potty cleanup."  She dances ahead of me, shaking the bottle in her teeth like a proud lioness with a gazelle... the nipple slips...

plop


...the bottle drops right into the toilet.

"Whelp, there that goes," I said, pulling it out of the bowl.

"But you got it out!"

"Nope. Into the trash."

"It'll dry off."

"Yes, and then it will have dried potty water on it. Into the trash."

"Oh. Ok." And she scampered off totally over it.

I pat myself on the back for solving that problem so easily. Parenting is easy.

Is overreacting covered by my HMO?

Imma try not to get heated here, let's see how I do...

I held my previous job for 5 years. The last 3 of those 5 years I was miserable. My hours got cut to the minimum. Raises were frozen company wide. Health insurance went up every year and the plans got worse and worse.

I made less than I could've made working at McDonalds full time because of these things, but I stayed. Why? Because I had healthcare coverage for me and my daughter. My wife's healthcare is so wildly expensive that if we were on hers she'd make half her paycheck each week.

Flash back to March. I get laid off. COBRA (Continued health insurance) is more than I make on unemployment, making my income negative dollars. Because of my wife's job and insurance we're having a very hard time getting my daughter on Medicaid until I find a new job. So we're both uninsured right now. We just can't get sick or injured. We're not allowed. My wife can't leave her job in a terribly hostile work environment until after our new baby is born ini August because of the healthcare.

You can throw around words like Socialism and Communism or just say reactive bullshit like "Fuck America" or "I gotta go somewhere else!" all you want. (Try Canada.. oh wait, they have socialized healthcare too. Ok, Mexico... oh wait, you'll get a staph infection if you go to a Mexican hospital for a paper cut...)  But I think this is a great plan and only wish it'd go into effect faster so I can worry about one less thing at night.

I have enough on my plate.

What I've Been Up To

Hey, long time no post!

Not that there's much to report on here, of course.
The wife is still pregnant. I'm still unemployed. The kid's still a kid. Oh-bla-dee. Oh-bla-dah.
I figured I'd share this spring/summer's project, though... the "garden".

See, we live on the second floor of a duplex. While we technically have full access of the whole yard, our relationship with the downstairs neighbors is less than stellar... so we keep to our own side.
Sadly, our side has very little sun and no real space for a garden. So we did what apartment dwellers have done for years... we took to the sky! (or something)

I already had a window box that I've used with varying degrees of failure, so I went out and got one of those "Suspended Tomato" jobbers and got a couple more container planters from my mom.

Then we got some seed starters and dirt and some green bean & basil seeds.

I thought it would be a fun project with my kid to grow our own veggies from seeds. Every day we'd check their progress, bla bla bla....

She was more interested in growing sponge animals in warm water.

Lousy instant gratification.

So after a while I was able to transplant our basil and beans to our window box along with a free (mostly dead) flower from HomeDepot. (They were giving away free flowers for Mother's Day. The bud fell off in the parking lot and the leaves were mostly withered, I didn't have much hope, but I humored my kid by planting it anyway.)

Around this time we started our hanging tomato plant. I've never seen one of those things actually work before, but I figured I'd try it out.

I also "repurposed" one of our two mailboxes into a planter for parrots beak. 

Add to those a hanging basket of Mother's Day impatiens, a small planter of petunias, and mom's old strawberry planter full of blue ageratum, creeping wire vine, and mint, and a window box outside the kitchen for Lemon Balm and Oregano and I was spent! (Oh, and some on-a-whim sunflower seeds for the yard itself.)

Flash forward a bit...

Things are established.... the beans grew like crazy, had about a dozen beans total, dried up and haven't done squat since.  The tomato plant started slow, but is now weighed down with green green tomatoes. (They take sooooo long to ripen!)

The dying Mother's Day flowers exploded under a little TLC....

...and the basil is three times bigger than it was in this picture. 

The kitchen window box (on a shelf I made myself, thankyouverymuch) is doing well, though it doesn't get as much sun as I'd hoped. But whatever, I have fresh oregano and lemon balm I can pick right out my window! 

The sunflowers are growing, despite the constant attack of either beetles, slugs or both... even the ones my daughter planted under the porch are doing ok.

So.... yeah. This was just a really long, picture heavy way of showing off my mad green thumb skillz.

See, even in a cruddy duplex you can make something green survive... just make sure you water the living shit out of everything every day.

Cheese Fondue

Yesterday we enjoyed a Fondue party with some friends. I remembered I had a recipe for a beer cheese soup that was too damned thick to be soup, but works great as a dippin' sauce.

It was a hit and I was asked to share the secret, so here it is for everyone!

 Ingredients

• 3/4 cup butter
• 1/2 cup diced celery
• 1/2 cup diced carrots
• 1/2 cup diced onion
• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon ground dry mustard
• 1 (14.5 ounce) can chicken broth
• 5 ounces shredded Cheddar cheese
• 5 ounces shredded Monterey Jack cheese
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 (12 fluid ounce) can or bottle beer

Directions

1. In a large saucepan over medium high heat, melt butter. Cook celery, carrots and onion in butter until onion is translucent. Stir in flour and mustard to coat vegetables. Pour in chicken broth and simmer until slightly thickened. Puree mixture in a blender or food processor or using an immersion blender. Return to pot.
2. When pureed mixture is hot, begin to stir in Cheddar, Monterey Jack and Parmesan, a little at a time, alternately with the beer, until all is fully incorporated and melted. Serve at once.

 I didn't blend the veggie mix, it's cooked down enough to be squishy and soft, so if you get some on your dippin' bread it's no big deal. It's one less step and less clean-up later. We transported the mix to the party, reheated it right in the fondue pot and added the cheese and beer then.  It fed 6 adults and 3 kids pretty well. 

Great with apples!
 
 
 

7 Days of Uncomfortable Snuggling

Anyone bother watching that 7 Days of Sex show on Lifetime last night?

We did, because we're suckers for awful television. And while the premise is decent, the execution was pretty terrible.

The premise (if you don't feel like clicking the link) is that couples that are having relationship problems pledge to have sex every day for a week straight. They figure that the forced intimacy will rekindle their relationship and revive their love.  I understand the idea behind this, of course. When you don't "do it" for more than a week or so you can get very crabby and grumpy and, after you have sex it kinda hits the reset button and you reconnect and makes everything better.

But here's the thing... when you know the effect having/not having sex can have on you, you don't let it go that long. These couples have grown so distant that they can't even remember the last time they made love or even wanted to. I've been in a relationship that got that bad, and there were bigger issues at hand than just not having sex. If me and my ex tried doing it for a week straight a) we never woulda made it for a whole week, b) yeah, after a week we would've felt connected and happy and all that, cuz that's what sex does, (endorphins and all). But 3 months later, when we haven't had sex in 6 weeks, we'd be back to square one. I'd love to see a "where are they now" for these folks.

Another issue I had with this show is the way these folks went about this undertaking. These people haven't had sex in how long and they try to jump right into it hardcore right out of the box. The one couple we saw last night tried experimenting with hot wax the first night. Why not start slow, idiots? Knock some dust off it first. Work out some of the kinks (no pun intended). You can't just run a marathon without doing some stretching. Then they move on to feathers and vibrators and crotchless body stockings. Either they really didn't have a problem to begin with, or they're really overcompensating.

I think a better idea would be to enlist a professional therapist to slowly up the intimacy/kinky levels while helping them deal with the surrounding issues that the weeks worth of loving inevitably brings up.  Have them start with just touching and kissing and reconnecting. Not the willy-nilly pouring of burning hot candle wax on everything.

Anyway, check it out if you wanna. You can laugh at their idiotic expense and shudder at the creep factor that comes from taping an average gross couple in the afterglow of scheduled lovemaking.

Pulled Pork, Take 1

Since Lulu's Mexican closed we've been in dire need of an excellent pulled pork recipe.
Being unemployed (have I mentioned that yet? No? I got laid off. Moving on.) I figured a good thing to do with my time is to try to make a reasonable replacement for it.
Here's the recipe for my first attempt. I got it from the Fix-It & Forget-It Cookbook.

3 lbs pork, cubed (I bought three 1lb packs of "pork" from Shoprite. No specific cut was given and I didn't ask. It was the cheapest way. Good color and marbling. Came out fine. Whew!)
2 cups chopped onions
3 green peppers, chopped
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup vinegar (I used apple cider vinegar, it's what I use in my taco mix)
6 oz can tomato paste
1 1/2 Tbsp. chili powder
1 tsp. dry mustard
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp. salt

Throw everything in a slow cooker on Hi for 8 hours. Mix it around now and again. After 8 hours, shred the pork that hasn't already fallen apart on it's own. Mix it around some more & serve.

This is a pretty good jumping off point, but I think it really needs some more Oomph. The flavor is good, just kinda flat. I'm thinking more vinegar? Maybe some molasses? Use smoked pork?
My wife cut through the hassle and suggested throwing in some store bought BBQ sauce towards the end. It'll make the liquidy sauce a bit thicker and add some smokiness and depth to it. So next time we'll try that.

If you try it at home and decide to tinker with the recipe please let me know how it turns out!! There's still work to do, people!