July 2009 Archives
…okay!
Phone: *ring*
Me: [trophy shop], this is Sarah, how can I help you?
Man On Phone: Good morning, I was calling to see what brand of phones you have.
Me: …we don’t carry phones, sir, this is a trophy shop.
MOP: No, no–I was calling to see what brand of phones you use. Do you have Panasonic or–
Me: …ooookay, we have several different phones here–
MOP: [sounding way too excited] Ah! Okay, so–
Me: Can I ask why you’re asking me this?
MOP: …I’m just calling to find out what kind of phones the trophy shops use?
[silence]
Me: Look, we just get plain old phones from Best Buy or whatever.
MOP: Oh. Okay. Thanks. *click*
*DEAD*
Possibly the best thing to ever float across ONTD_P.
Someone either a) had no idea what that bear means or b) knew exactly what that bear means.
In other news, yesterday I came home from work fighting off a cold or something, played Animal Crossing in a daze for about an hour, went to bed around 7ish, and did not move again till about 8:30 this morning.
I finally caught a fucking blue marlin, at least! Now if I could just get a birdwing butterfly I’d be happy. I have seen one. ONE. And couldn’t catch the damn thing.
note to self: never do that again
So I went out to do my second-to-last day of Couch To 5K today. I made it. That’s not the problem.
No, the problem was… I have one of those things that’s like a teeny tiny fanny pack just big enough to hold the three mandatory items: my ID, my cell phone, and my apartment key. Especially my apartment key.
So off I went, chugging along my route. I heard some sort of noise at one point about half a mile out, like something small and metallic hitting concrete, but I didn’t think too much of it–I kick small metallic sidewalk debris all the time and besides it could not possibly have been anything important like say my apartment key, because of course it was safely tucked in my little pouch which of course was zipped securely.
I finished my run and plodded on home–twenty minutes earlier than usual! Great! Getting out of the apartment earlier sure was nice, now I’d have plenty of time to lie around with bags of frozen peas on my shins but first I needed to feed the downstairs neighbor’s cats who were gathered around my door mewing as cutely and pitifully as possible even though they and I both knew they were not starving to death because I’d just fed them before I went to bed. But they still needed food, so let’s just hop up the stairs and open up the door and–
–and discover that the little pouch at our waist, the one we were so sure was zipped… wasn’t.
Uh oh.
ID? Present. Cell phone? Present. Key?
…Key?
……KEY!?
I felt the blood drain from my face.
“Oh fuck,” I said.
“Meeeeh,” said the cats. The little fluffy orange girl cat sat down and licked my ankle.
Back down the stairs I went. See, I could have called the apartments… but the office didn’t open for half an hour, and they would have sent a locksmith, and they would have charged me $30 for that plus whatever it would cost for a new key and possibly a new lock and they just loooooooove to nickel and dime me to death on piddly shit like that, this is the same management that tried to charge me $80 in late fees on a water bill I accidentally underpaid by $2 and paid as soon as I found out two days later, you know they would have a field day with a lost key and well fuck a bunch of that.
At this point, I was pooped from my run and still not entirely awake, so my brain kept coming up with all these ideas that sounded great at first but fell apart as soon as I realized that they involved things that would have required me to, y’know, get something out of the apartment I could not get into.
“Hey, I’ll just get on the bike and pedal along the route I took, and–crap”
“Hey, if I dropped it in the street it’s good as gone anyway, I might as well just go inside and get ready for–crap”
“Well, before I run off looking for my key, I should probably feed the neighbor’s cats, they–crap”
As I walked, scanning the ground for shiny things, I remembered the little noise I’d heard. Oh please, I thought, OH PLEASE LET THAT BE WHERE IT LANDED AND NOT THAT HUGE MUD BOG WHERE THE WATER MAIN BROKE THE OTHER DAY.
Sure enough, in the general area where I’d heard the noise, there was my key on its little dog tag. I’d gotten this little dog tag from one of those machines at Wal-Mart where you put $5 in and get a little engraved tag out.
I should note, as a punchline of sorts, that I’d had this tag engraved with the immortal words “WITH IT OR ON IT.”
I returned home in triumph with my shie–er, key and went on about my business. And I still got to work on time.
what is this I don’t even
We appear to have a serial gluer in town.
I just… I don’t even… okay, well, if we must have someone in town committing random atrocities with small hand tools I’d rather it be someone spooging hot glue on peoples’ ponytails than other things like maybe say involving a Dremel but seriously come on now what the fuck
[ETA: Looked at the other article, OSHITSON THAT'S THE WALGREENS IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD]
WHEW
And I’m signed up for the EP5K! \o/
…in case y’all think I might have been exaggerating my worries of not getting to register before the damn thing sold out: the Chevron Houston Marathon and Aramco Half Marathon, which the EP5K goes with, both had caps of 11,000. Yes, eleven thousand dudes in each.
Remember: the 5K has a cap of 4,500.
When I went to sign up–just a little over 24 hours after registration had opened, mind you–the marathon was down to 1,850 spots and the half was sold the hell out.
But it’s all good! …well, except that they don’t mail packets and I’m going to have to bribe someone to schlep me downtown to pick mine up, but whatever. \o/
we are punchy today, oh yes
Spam subject line of the day: “Make your pecker your trump wassail semipellucid”
…I don’t know what a “trump wassail semipellucid” is, nor am I sure I’d want one, nor am I sure that if I had a pecker I’d want it turned into one.
Today and Tuesday I ran for 28 minutes without a walk break. On Sunday I do it one more time, then I move up to A WHOPPING 30 MINUTES WOOOO eh lol ok.
It’d be kind of anticlimactic if it weren’t for the whole “holy shitballs y’all I can run for half an hour now” thing.
And now I engrave stuff on little cedar plates and make the shop smell like fire as I wait for my paycheck and hope like hell the EP5K isn’t sold out by the time I change some money into plastic to throw at registration. yeah I have not even run my first race yet and I’m already wanting to sign up for another one.
oh my God what the HELL are you doing
Let me paint a little picture for you here.
It’s about 4-5 in the afternoon. In the middle of July. In Texas. Not the! hottest! part! of the day, but still hot enough to where I wouldn’t want to run or even powerwalk or really even gently mosey around the track at the park even if I could do so naked with a lawn sprinkler on a very long hose attached to my head. Because it’s fucking hot.
It is so hot that I do the “fill water bottle halfway with water, put in freezer at angle all day, fill rest of way with water just before use” trick, I ride the two and a half miles home, and if I’m using an uninsulated bottle the ice has almost completely melted by the time I get home.
It is so hot that the expected number of active sprinklers on any given street is a major factor in route planning.
It is so hot that every outside cat you see is sprawled out in a shady spot and panting. When a cat sprawls out and pants, you know it’s hot.
You step outside and immediately your sweat glands open the floodgates and your exposed skin bakes to a rotisserie-chicken-like golden crackly brown and your lips attempt to peel themselves off your face and escape to cooler climates. And because the humidity is something like 80-90%, your sweat does not do its job because it cannot evaporate because there is nowhere in the air for it to go. It just clings to you and makes you even more miserable. Your sunglasses fog up on the inside if you stop moving for even an instant. Every stretch of asphalt laid down in the last three years or so reeks of hot tar.
Are you getting a good picture of this in your mind now? Good. Because there’s one more thing I would like you to add to it: at least two people jogging or powerwalking around the track at the park in this Godawful inferno wearing those silver or black thick plastic sauna suits.
I’m not even talking about people who look like they might be martial artists or boxers or whatever trying to make their fighting weight, I’m talking about, like, grandmas.
And I see these people chugging along the track in their horrifying silver-or-black thick plastic suits and I–I just–sauna suit grandmas, could you come over here a minute, can I ask you a question, can I just ask you one tiny little question…
WHY
It is a million degrees out there and they are huffing around in wearable saunas, some of them going full-tilt boogie around the track without so much as a drop of water with them, seriously, head-to-toe black or silver thick plastic suits at the hottest time of the year in the hottest hours of the day, I think I know what they think it is doing (melting off fat) and I am not a personal trainer but I am pretty sure it is not doing what they think it is doing.
But y’know what… if those suits actually did melt fat? And all I had to do was walk three miles a day in a 105-degree heat index in one of them?
I’D RATHER JUST KEEP THE FAT, THANKS
I don’t have enough DO NOT WANT macros in my entire macro folder to express just how much I DO NOT WANT. Seeing the sauna suit grandmas just makes me want to pick them up over my shoulder, carry them to the snow-cone stand across the street, and bury them up to their necks in shaved ice and fan them with giant palm fronds until their faces lose that alarming tomato-ish hue. Someone is going to die out there one of these days.
Tonight’s dinner
The other day I was sitting at my mom’s house watching the Food Network while some clothes went through the washer, and Giada was making this farfalle with broccoli in a really simple olive oil-butter-garlic-red pepper flake-anchovy sauce.
A word about me and broccoli: when I was a child, as most children do, I would not have eaten broccoli if held at gunpoint and ordered to do so. Sometime in my teens, I acquired a taste for broccoli-cheese soup–but there would be a pile of stalky bits at the bottom of the bowl when I was done, as I could not deal with any broccoli parts that had to be chewed. And then this past Thanksgiving I was steaming up some broccoli to throw into the broccoli-rice casserole and all of a sudden it was all I could do to not open up the steamer and just start shoveling broccoli into my mouth. And ever since then, this has been me when faced with a plate of freshly-cooked broccoli:
Seriously, I don’t know what the hell happened, but all of a sudden the smell of cooking broccoli makes my stomach go OH HOLY SHIT WHERE IS IT SEND IT DOWN NOW NOW NOW.
…anyway, you can imagine my reaction to a dish involving pasta, broccoli, and parmesan cheese being prepared on TV right before my eyes.
The problem: this dish contained anchovies.
I do not do anchovies. Are they in Caesar dressing? I don’t know, but if they are I can deal with it in that form because there’s nothing that looks like fucking anchovies in it, but I do not do anchovies.
Also, I don’t have red pepper flakes. And I have goat cheese, which melts down into the most wonderful creamy sauce when it touches something warm.
So I altered the recipe. And added some things. As is always the case in the Chaobell Test Kitchens: serves one really hungry person or two nominally-hungry people, fuzzy measurements, add or omit shit to taste, your mileage may vary.
Farfalle with Veggies and Chicken in a Goat Cheese Sauce
- A cup or so of farfalle (bowtie pasta, or whatever kind you like)
- Two big handfuls of broccoli florets
- Plenty of salt or chicken soup base to add to the pasta water (I use mostly kosher salt, with a couple wee scoops of this neat sea salt with Italian herbs I found at Target–it has a teeny metal scoop in the jar)
- A few tablespoons of olive oil
- A pat of butter (or suitable substitute–for once my precious Brummel & Brown’s yogurt-based fakebutter actually works pretty well here)
- A clove or two of garlic, chopped up
- A small handful of chopped onion
- One diced Roma tomato
- About 1/4 – 1/2 cup crumbled goat cheese
- A sprinkle of fresh grated parmesan
- Meat, or not (preferably pre-cooked)
Set your pot of water to boiling and add plenty of salt or chicken soup base. When it’s at a good rolling boil, dump in your pasta. Let it boil while you chop up the broccoli–not too finely or it will sort of disappear, leave it nice and chunky. When the pasta is about five minutes along, dump in the broccoli.
While the broccoli and pasta boil, chop up your garlic, onion, and tomato. If you’re using a precooked meat like the rotisserie chicken Kroger had for $2.50 today, go ahead and chop that up too. If you need to cook your meat, now is the time.
When the pasta is tender, get it out of the water. The broccoli may still be a little crunchy. This is fine. It will finish cooking in the sauce. Save about a cup of pasta water.
Now throw the olive oil and butter in a pan over medium-high heat; when it’s nice and hot, add the garlic, onion, and tomato. Cook till the onions are clear and the tomatoes are bright and mushy, then dump in the broccoli and pasta. Cook till the broccoli is nice and tender, then turn the heat down to low and dump in the goat cheese and any meat you might be using. Watch as the goat cheese magically melts down into lovely sauce. If things get too stiff, add a splash of pasta water.
Dump into a bowl, sprinkle with a little parmesan, and eat.
Public service announcement
The next person to send me a logo in any of the following formats after I’ve asked for an .eps, .pdf, .tif, or .jpg…
- a .gif or .png (invariably 50×50 or smaller)
- a Word document
- a Powerpoint presentation
…gets to drink from the fire hose.
This goes double for the next person who does not have his or her logo in some acceptable electronic format and needs us to redraw it and attempts to FAX US A FULL-COLOR LOGO TO WORK FROM.
victoly~
Twenty-five minutes.
No walk breaks.
Not.
even.
one.
Having the stopwatch running actually helps on these last few weeks of interval-less runs, because as long as I resist the temptation to look at it until I pass the halfway mark or so distance-wise I can peek down and go “eh, only 8 minutes left” or “oh good God you dweeb there’s only three minutes left, why would you even bother walking now”and so on.
Soooooooo seeing as how I’m coming into the home stretch of C25K I guess it’s time to start thinking about what comes next. I know I’m going to switch to a 4-day-a-week schedule–right now I’m running Friday-Sunday-Tuesday, and after the unofficial Week 10 that’s going to change to Monday-Wednesday-Friday-Saturday or Sunday. And I think I’m just going to move right on to Gateway to 8K on the weekdays and do whateverthefuck for an hour on the weekend.
At any rate, running a nonstop 5K in October sure does seem a hell of a lot less monumental a task than it did eight weeks ago. Or even two weeks ago. (obligatory pledge page plug tiems nao, ‘scuse me)
…how sad is it that I have picked out a medal at work to buy myself when I finish C25K, seriously
……it’s a pretty medal, though?
