you didn’t ask for it, and it’s not a toyota, but you got it!

Remember the Swiss Chard Incident? Well, I chopped up the rest of the faux rhubarb and sauteed it with some eggplant, mushrooms and garlic tonight and it was deee-licious!

(on a scale of one to ten in the Who Cares Department, this rates about a negative fourteen and a half.)

When I go on a date with someone, it's easy to tell when he's a YES! or a NO! (or as a friend of mine says a "JesusGodNoooooooooo!") However, it's that middle ground that gets tricky. One thing I've been working to remember is that just because someone is not a NO! (or a JesusGodNoooooooooooo) doesn't necessarily make him a YES! (It doesn't necessarily exclude him either, but I'm trying to deliver the nutshell version of this theory.)

(on a scale of one to ten in the Slightly Cryptic But Mostly Vague Department, this gets about a six.)

Speaking of dating, I think it is only polite to tell someone I've actually met face to face that, if it so happens to be the case, I'm not interested in him. Not returning calls or emails (or simply "disappearing") is not my style, and I'd like the same consideration in return.

(on a scale of one to ten in the Passive Aggressive Department, this rates a solid ten -- assuming said offenders are actually reading -- and on a scale of one to ten in the Hey, I'd Like To Date Kate But Don't Know How She'll Feel About Me Not Letting Her Know I'm Not Interested Department, well, I'm not even going to rate that one.)

(The Russian judge, however, gives it an eight. Bad dismount.)

more miscellany than you can fit into a barrel of monkeys

My boss is going to Norway in May, and as such, she's been practicing her Norwegian. This, of course, means that I get to pick up a phrase or two in a great nordic tongue. This morning, after a meeting, my boss walked away and I said, "Tahk for yelpin" which apparently is kind of close to "takk for hjalp," which, in Norwegian means (take a guess) "Thanks for helping."

My favorite Norwegian word so far? "Lunch." Go ahead, guess what it means.
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Similarly, I think that people from Iowa should be called "Iowegian."
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When you brush your teeth, do you start in the same quadrant of your mouth every time? Yeah, me, too. I start on the lower left. I noticed this, though, and decided to make a conscious effort to start on the upper right. Toothpaste drool came pouring down my face and I was so discombobulated I almost fell down. Try it. It was like trying to stick my elbow in my ear (while walking, whistling and chewing gum at the same time).
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Fernando has recently taken to calling me "Gata" or "Gatita" or, this morning, "Gata Pequena." I'm not sure why, but I dig it.
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I went to the psychic again while I was in Boston, and something really creepy happened. She was laying out my cards and said a lot of stuff about "men in my life" (which I thought was a bit of a stretch, since I'm not really seeing anybody at the moment, thus making it hard to classify people as "men in my life") but two thirds of the way through the reading, she told me I was going to meet a man in uniform. Nothing special there, except that it's EXACTLY WHAT THE OTHER PSYCHIC TOLD ME LAST TIME! Creepy. She told me I'd meet him by August, and when I told her I had heard of him before, and that the other psychic told me to stay away from him, she flipped another card -- the devil card -- and said, "Oh yeah, stay away from him."
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stuffernutters

Stuffernutters: (n.) Half "stuff and nonsense" and half "fluffernutters." Used by geniuses (who don’t believe in the word "genii") to convey that a blog post will be about nothing at all.

I. So remember when I wrote about the tanning salon in my hood called Alaskan Tanning? (see dispatches from the peanut gallery for clarification) I walked past it again last night and noticed a big shwarma sign downstairs from it. You know, rotating meat product on a stick?That tickled my fancy."Frank, we got another overdone one. Send it downstairs again??"

B. Unrelatedly, I periodically get a stray, long peach fuzz cheek hair on my face, and I got one yesterday. Now, there’s longer-than-average peach fuzz hair, and there’s absurdly EPIC peach-fuzz hair. What I want to know is how mine went from normal to epic overnight. It was, and I’m not exaggerating, the length of one knuckle! Enquiring minds want to know.(Well, at least one does.)

(iii) I work as a trainer and part of my job is training new hires on the computer system. I worked with a woman on Monday (who had excellent computer skills, if not somewhat iffy people skills) and she just up and quit today! No explanation, no complaints, just resigned and took off. Which would have been fine, if she hadn’t taken my handy-dandy-(and-super-pain-in-the-ass-to-make) computer manual with her!

grumble grumble grumble.

4.0 I had lunch today with one half of a very unhappy couple. I don’t ever want to live that way. Just talking to her made me tense. Please, Universe, send me someone whole.

a culinary mistaken identity

I bake a lot. (If we haven’t established this already, it’s probably worth mentioning it again. I. Bake. A. Lot.)

Saturday morning I sat down with my cookbooks and plotted the best way to make some stuff I had never attempted before. I selected an orange and rhubarb coffee cake (not knowing the first thing about rhubarb), banana cupcakes with peanut butter frosting (because I knew my friend would like them), and peanut cookies (because a tub of peanut butter is a dangerous thing to leave me alone with). I headed out to the grocery store with my list, and procured everything I needed. As I headed to the produce section, I followed the sign to rhubarb, and saw a picture of a red-stemmed leafy vegetable, so I picked it up, put it in my cart, bought it and went home.
Now, I don’t know rhubarb’s ass from its elbow. How do you clean it? Cook it? Trim it? I consulted a number of resources online about what to do with the leaves (theirs didn’t seem to have any, but mine did, so I just cut them off and chucked them -- they smelled really bitter anyway). I chopped up the red, veiny stalks, tossed them in with the rest of the ingredients, baked it and gave the cake a try when it was done. Delicious!

The cupcakes, too, were terrific, and the peanut butter cookies (with rice krispies in them) were a great hit.

Then today, while on a stroll down a major street in my neighborhood, I passed an organic food market, that had rhubarb in it (that matched the pictures I had seen online). They also had the vegetable I had chopped up and put into my cake, which was decidedly NOT rhubarb.

So tomorrow at work, I will be serving Orange and Swiss Chard Coffee Cake.

(I’m thinking of calling it Torte a L’orange et Chard. Hey, if it’s Fronch, who are they to question it?)

In my defense:
Rhubarb:

Swiss chard:

dispatches from the peanut gallery

1. My dental floss calls itself "hi-tech" floss. I think it should prove that to me and reprogram my DVR, just on principle.


2. My spaghetti squash’s sticker claims that spaghetti squash is "the fun squash!" I’d agree. (It’s waaaaay more fun than dumb old butternut.)


3. Why do catalogs insist on selling bathing suits that make the models look dumpy? A woman who is five foot twenty seven inches and 108 soaking wet looks like my grandma in that suit... I think I’ll buy it!


4. My floors are cold and occasionally coated in yuck, so the last thing I take off before I go to bed is my socks. As such, I started to accumulate quite a mountain of socks next to my bed. I almost took a picture of it, but decided instead to sweep the mountain into the laundry, which I’ve now renamed Mohammed.


5. I’ve been running a lot lately, and have discovered a charming thing about myself: when I run, I give myself a double thumbs up! When I try to tuck my thumbs in and run like a normal person, I get all discombobulated and trip over my own feet. So... who likes to run??? THIS GIRL!


6. The milk they provide us for our coffee at work is "Growth Hormone Free.*" I was kind of alarmed by that asterisk, so I scanned the jug of milk until I found the two-and-a-half point font that read "no statistical difference from cows treated with growth hormone." Excuse me, but when did we start teaching cows statistics??


7. I totally clocked a little girl in Grand Central the other day. I was on my way to the turnstile and this woman was standing there with what I thought was a duffel bag, so when she swung it in my way, I didn’t dodge it with great effort. Except it wasn’t a duffel bag, it was a three year old girl, who promptly went sprawling onto the floor of Grand Central. And then set to howling. I asked the mom if she was ok, but the mom wouldn’t even look at me (or at the kid, either). Luckily, the sister figure (whoever she was) told me the girl was fine, and I went on my way.


The lesson? Clearly, don’t dress your daughters like duffel bags!


8. There’s a tanning salon in my neighborhood called "Alaskan Tanning." Maybe it’s just me, but can that possibly conjure up something other than the image of a goggle tan?9. There’s a hospital near that tanning salon that has one of those automatic revolving doors as its front entrance. But instead of being a regular revolving door (cut into equal quarters, and pushed by the people using it), this one’s a little off kilter, rotates automatically and ceaselessly, and in the smaller sections, there are plants. Plants that do nothing but go around and around and around in circles all day long. (For their sake, I hope they’re plastic.)

And we now return to your regularly scheduled nonsense.

ooh! news!

Ha ha! Suckered you back here again!!

But now that I’ve got you, I have some things to discuss with you.

Like...

1) The indescribability of modern dance.
Saturday night I went with my friend Avery to an evening of dance (a "dance show"?) by a Brazilian troupe, Grupo Corpo, which was just amazing to watch and surprisingly hard to discuss. I mean, I’m at a disadvantage. I can talk to you until the cows come home about theatre or Microsoft Word (and please god, if I do that, send the cows home quickly!) but dance? Waaaaay out of my league.

Me: I loved that part, where they were all cockroaches on the upper wall!

Ave: You mean, when they were slow-motion gazelles?

Me: That was so cool, how they were doing the backstroke out of the water!

Ave: Yeah, that death flop was pretty awesome.

Me: That part at the end? I totally loved that!

Ave: The part where they were having violent sex?

Me: Oh, is that what they were doing? I thought they were just fighting for the cool spot on the bed. (because we all know how awesome it is to find that cool spot in the middle of summer...)

2) How, when you date online, you really have to meet three distinct people. (And like them all.)

The first person you meet is the person in the profile. For me to be interested in this person, he has to be cute enough to spark my interest and he must say at least one thing that makes me crack a smile. You send some sort of communication to Person One, and hope that he’ll like your Person One in return.

The second person you meet is the person who sends you emails. These emails must be charming, witty and have mostly good spelling and grammar (unless suitable excuses have been made in advance). Ideally, Person Two is the same as Person One, but I have yet to find more than three people for whom this is the case. This is all OK, as long as I like both Person One and Person Two.

Then comes Person Three. The guy you meet at the coffeeshop (if you’re me, and still adhering to your First Date Should Involve No Drinking Just to Make Sure You’re Not Just Enjoying Getting Tipsy With This Guy rule). This guy is almost never anything like Persons One and Two, but if you’re lucky, the only thing that will matter is whether or not you like him and/or hit it off.

(The more I date, the more my life resembles a Dr. Seuss book.)

3) The mass quantities of baked goods that have passed through my oven doors recently.

Let’s put it this way: I baked vegan pumpkin raisin cookies (from a recipe), a pumpkin bundt cake (also from a recipe) and mint chocolate brownies (kind of from a recipe) on Saturday. I spent the rest of my life in the gym.

4) It’s my blog’s 2nd Birthday!
Well, it was, about three days ago. I meant to celebrate. I just couldn’t because I was so busy eating cake.

5) Our Office April Fools’ Joke

My boss reminded us that today was, in fact, April Fools’ day, and in honor of that, she sent out the following email (with our help and suggestions):

Just a few words about the new copiers being installed today, April 1st.

When we moved into the building, some of you thought it was odd to have coffee machines in the same rooms as the copiers. That was actually the beginning of a space-saving project that will take a huge leap forward with the new copiers. On the new models, the coffee machines are actually built in to the copiers (now known as "Coffiers"), which makes all kinds of counter space available for storing abandoned copy jobs and, starting this June, for summer associate work space.

If you click the "Coffee" option on the coffier screen (see below), you will be able to save your settings for cream and sugar and charge the appropriate client at the same time.


The new copiers will play a big role in our Records Retention policy, too. By adjusting the retention settings on the copier, you can have your copy and print jobs sent directly to an off-site shredder. We anticipate that this will considerably reduce the amount of paper being stored on the 13th floor.

And this just in. . . Lexis-Nexis has just announced its acquisition of Xerox and its name change to Lexeroxis. Starting today, April 1st, all Lexeroxis copiers will automatically Shepardize all cases and cite-check all briefs being copied or printed unless users go through a simple 37-step process to disable that feature each time they print or copy a brief.

The new copiers’ scanners also boast an improved OCR feature that will not only recognize handwriting and foreign languages (including Cyrillic and simplified Chinese characters), but which will automatically detect any inappropriate anatomical copying and forward the copies to HR along with a DNA sample of the offender.

In terms of integration with our other systems, the copier will be hooked into Meeting Room Manager, and can automatically re-route copy and print jobs to the 11th floor after meetings where food has been served, so that people will actually have a reason to be down on the 11th floor at those times. Speaking of the lunchroom, copier upgrades being considered for the future include a toaster attachment, which should help clear the bottleneck on Bagel Fridays.

Please let me know if you have any questions about these features.

Thanks,
Carol

i really should have vacuumed this weekend

When a girl has dust bunnies that could deliver full-sized, hard-boiled easter eggs, it goes without saying that she should have vacuumed this weekend.

I didn’t.

Instead, I let my dust bunnies grow into dust Harveys. We hold conversations. We drink tea together. We baked a pumpkin cake today.

I think my Harveys may even have an eating disorder, as they seem to consume nothing but hair.

I think it’s a good thing the Harveys are eating the hair, and not my pumpkin cake. (And by that I mean I’m glad the Harveys are eating the hair, and that the pumpkin cake is not.)

I REALLY need to go to bed.