Doh!
Archive for the ‘Humor’ Category
Oh where, oh where has my measuring cup gone?
I am so confused. So very confused.
I cannot find my 1-cup measuring cup. I have a set of four nesting cups and I even keep them on the stupid annoying ring so they all stay together. And I just went to put away the 1-cup cup that I used earlier when I was preparing dinner, and I noticed as I put it back on the stupid annoying ring that it was actually the ½-cup cup. Which makes no sense, because I haven’t used the measuring cups in days and there is nothing else in the dish drainer or the dishwasher and I have no clue where it is.
It also means that in my haste this afternoon, when I was throwing ingredients into the crockpot, I only used one cup of something instead of two.
Sigh……
Dinner….let’s figure that out first. I think if I throw in the other cup now, it’ll be ok. It’s still got at least an hour to go and instinct says it’s ok for this particular recipe. (Instinct. Ha! This is the first time I’ve ever made this, so we may be ordering pizza later. I already told Klondike we don’t have to eat it.)
Done.
Now. Where is the freakin’ cup?
I have no idea. I have looked in every logical place and some illogical ones.
Here’s what’s super annoying and weird.
I bought these measuring cups because I had a set I really, really liked, except after I moved into my house, I couldn’t find……
THE 1-CUP MEASURING CUP!!!!
And to this day, I still haven’t found it.
I think maybe my ex kept it.
(I don’t really think that. But where the fuck is it?)
And now, another cup grows feet and takes a hike and AGAIN IT’S THE 1-CUP CUP?????
Sigh……
I know. I can use what I have to achieve one cup. But it’s kind of annoying to have TWO SETS BOTH MISSING THE SAME STUPID CUP!
I will keep looking. And I will buy another set if I have to, because I use the 1-cup cup a lot.
Wherever they are, I hope the missing ones are together, having some sort of party or something.
Because seriously. WTF????
Aside
My mom is the Rain Man of the grocery store
Klondike says this will be our million dollar idea: the “ask Fran” grocery app.
A Farewell To Latkes
So, yeah, Happy Hanukah. 🙂
My family came over for brunch on Sunday for our annual Chanukah gathering. Noshing of food, exchanging of gifts, airing of grievances…..wait, scratch that last one, this isn’t Festivus.
Tangent: holy CRAP, there are a lot of websites for Festivus, including one where you can get your own Festivus pole. Are you freakin’ kidding me????
Anyway, back to Hanukkah! I offered to host, and I like to do brunch; it’s the meal I feel most comfortable making special occasiony. I can rock a couple of brunch dishes, yes I can. And conveniently, traditional Chanuka latkes, a.k.a. potato pancakes, work nicely for brunch.
All latke recipes are essentially the same: shred some potatoes and onion, stir in some egg and flour, fry them in oil. Fried potato Chanukkah goodness. What’s not to love?
Hmm…..lemme make a list.
Let’s begin with my own stupidity. I always shred too many potatoes. Always.. Nobody could make or eat that many latkes. Seriously, it’s like the potatoes double in quantity in the process of grating.
One of the things I like about making brunch is I have a slew of recipes where you do all the prep the night before, stick it in the fridge overnight, pop it in the oven in the morning, and it’s fresh and awesome and delicious with little effort the morning of. Latkes do not afford this luxury. Theoretically you can make them in advance and reheat them, but there’s no way they’ll be crispy. (Please tell me if you have successfully accomplished this!) And you can’t do the prep in advance. Once you start shredding those taters, you’d better get to cooking or they’ll turn brown and/or gray and disgusting. Nobody wants gray food.
So it’s almost time for company to arrive, I’d prefer to be tending to final details and on the ready to greet people, but instead I’m in the kitchen getting sweaty and disheveled with a pan full of hot oil (I hate cooking with oil) and a ridiculously large bowl of latke guts. I put one test latke into the pan. It does not hold together. I add more flour to the bowl. I put another test latke into the pan. It’s holding together, but when it’s time to flip it, oil spatters my hand mid-flip and my reflexive jerking away causes the latke to fall into a clump in the pan.
Fuck. That.
I consider that all of my company has arrived, the caramel french toast in the oven is almost ready, and I have yet to make a successful latke.
I look at the bowl of shredded potato. The bowl of shredded potato looks at me.
I dump the entire bowl into the pan to prepare the not-yet-as-widely-celebrated Hanuka hash browns. Next time I’ll try to get them a little crispier. What I will not do next time is bother trying to make latkes.
And I haven’t even mentioned one of the worst parts yet, not directly anyway. Fried. In oil. My house reeks. Days later, my house reeks. It’s almost as bad as cooking bacon. (Bacon, not so much a traditional Channukah food.) And to exacerbate the situation, I don’t have an exhaust fan in my kitchen.
Hence, I believe I am done with my latke adventures. Food should not stress you out, in my opinion. And I’m pretty sure my family can successfully and joyfully celebrate Chanukka without them.
(I confess, I might just be looking for opportunities to work Hanukka into sentences.)
I have come to accept that there are certain foods that I’m not going to master, and that’s ok. Even if they’re really basic things like latkes or cutout sugar cookies (shut up, cookie cutters are tricky). Maybe someday I’ll try again, who knows. But life is too short to get bent out of shape over a potato.
Happy Hannuka! I mean Hannukkah! I mean Chanuqa! (Ok, not that last one.)
Ruby Dogwonkafonka wishes you a very Happy Chanukah!
(I was going to look for some fun pic of the Muppets or something wishing a Happy Hanukah and then I realized I already have something much more fun, courtesy of my friend Mark Lahey from last year’s Great Photoshop Smackdown. It’s time to do that again!)
It works both ways
Awwww, my mom sent me a note in the mail!!! How sweet is that?
Apparently she reads the blog. 😀
And dig it, she used a totally cool Griffin & Sabine card, which is also completely appropriate.
If you’re not familiar with Griffin & Sabine, I highly recommend you check it out. I’m going to read it again right now. Although I swear I had the entire trilogy, yet only one book appears to be on my shelf….curious. It better not be a casualty of the Great War. I didn’t really inventory my books when I packed. Anyway, it’s a charming book of correspondence between two people who have never met, and it consists solely of their letters and postcards back and forth. The art is lovely, and some of the letters are actually in envelopes mounted in the book, and you take them out to read them, and it’s great fun. Thumbs up. You can borrow mine if you PROMISE to give it back in pristine condition.
OMG, why is WordPress suggesting “Cuban Missile Crisis” and “Soviet Union” as appropriate tags for this post?
Ok. Going to read. Right now. Ciao!
The Handwritten Mission
Last week my friend H stopped by to surprise me with a “just because” present.
I’m a big fan of “just because” presents, both giving and receiving. (Duh, who doesn’t like presents?) Just a little something to brighten the day. And what did she have for me? Muppet note cards. (I. Love. That the world knows I love Muppets. Because I do. Because they are awesome.)
She said, “I don’t know if you would use these, but I saw them, and they were cute, and I know you like the Muppets.”
Cool.
And then I thought about putting them in my antique secretary with the many other note cards and lovely stationeries I have accumulated there, and what a waste that was.
And then I thought about how much I love getting a handwritten note in the mail. Don’t you? Mail these days is boring. Bills and junk mail, with the occasional charitable solicitation. Birthdays and the holiday season are so much fun because the mail might come with colorful envelopes and sparkly cards with messages from friends and family. It’s lovely. Maybe you get lucky every once in a while and receive a thank you note or some other off-season communication from a friend.
It’s definitely a sign of the times. In college my best friend and I sent long, chatty letters back and forth between Bloomington and Ann Arbor. I kept a supply of funny cards on hand to mail to out of town friends for when I wanted to catch up. Now we are super connected with Facebook, and texting and email are faster and cheaper and more efficient than mail. So doesn’t it make you feel a little special when someone goes to the trouble to write a note, to rustle up a stamp, to actually be able to produce your address?
And the thing is, it doesn’t actually take that much time and effort. I know this because after H left, I took my new Muppets cards to my desk, sat down, and used one to write her a thank you note. It took all of five minutes to write, address, stamp, seal, and pop into the mailbox. I thought to myself, “I should do this more often.”
This would require overcoming my graphophobia. Holy shit. That is a real thing. Did you know that? I did not. (As previously mentioned many times, the internet is effing amazing.) Once again I’m feeling a wee bit of remorse for what sounds like I’m making light of something that might actually be a serious affliction for someone. Although as I’m perusing some of these sites, I do probably fall somewhere into this. My handwriting is atrocious. And I am extremely self-conscious about this. Unreasonably so. If I were to write you a note, I would freak the fuck out about my sloppy penmanship. I would be mortified by my inability to write in anything resembling a straight line, and how I can’t actually write in cursive, and instead do this weird hybrid that is mostly printing, and also, as a southpaw, am afflicted by smears and blots. It would look like a first-grader wrote the note. A first-grader with bad penmanship and really good spelling.
However. I recognize that everything I just said, while true, is also ridiculous. And that you might be willing to overlook my first-gradeness and simply appreciate the wonder that is the unexpected piece of mail that merely wants to say hi and make you smile. Which is a very wordy way of saying that I am embarking on a mission.
I am going to write more handwritten notes.
I am going to do it on a regular basis. Like, say, once a week. That will be my goal. It’s not going to be hard & fast – I don’t want to miss a week and beat myself up about it and let it derail me and declare it a failure resulting in abandoning the mission. I want it to be an enjoyable project, not a task. Writing to your friends should be fun.
This will allow me to use all the fun note cards and stationeries I already own, and then get more. A fringe benefit is shopping? Suh-weet. I am a sucker for pretty papers and fun cards.
Tangent: While we’re talking about stationery, can we please take a moment to discuss the correct spelling? For the last 10 or 15 years I’ve been on a quest to get the entire world to learn this. “Stationary” means immobile or having a fixed position, like a stationary bike at the gym. “Stationery” is writing paper. And here is a silly mnemonic trick: stationery with an “e” goes in an envelope.
Ok, let’s sum up:
- I have horrendous handwriting, and this causes me anxiety.
- However, my desire to make you smile supercedes that.
- Hence, I am going to send you surprise notes.
And if you want a note, make sure I have your address – if you leave it here, or send it to me because of this post, I promise I will write to you. I don’t know when, I don’t know why, but that note will come. And I’ll give y’all updates from time to time by way of a loose sort of accountability, so that I stick with it.
Who is shoe fan?(A story in pictures)
Ok, so something fun happened the other day. And a little odd, but mostly fun.
I got a package in the mail. I wasn’t expecting anything. The return address simply said, “shoe fan”. Hmm, curious.
Inside, I found a custom-printed card.
With a lovely, mysterious message.
And underneath the card I found this.
Which caused me to do this.
And then this.
But mostly just this.
Here it is in its new home.
Hoops & YoYo sure seem impressed by it.
I wish I could tell Shoe Fan
This will have to suffice. But know that you made my day with your funanigans. 😀
Be daring!
I had the deodorant-breaking-into-a-million-pieces experience the other day, so I grabbed a new one from the closet. And I just discovered that the scent of my deodorant is “daringly fresh”.
To which I say….WTF, Lady Speed Stick?
Daringly fresh????
Isn’t that the whole fucking point of deodorant? To smell fresh????
I would like to think it’s the status quo.
How about “appropriately fresh”?
Or “everlastingly fresh” – that might be a selling point for me.
I can even see “astonishingly fresh” – you won’t believe how long this shit keeps you smelling….um….FRESH.
But daringly? I double dog dare you to wear this deodorant? Um. This makes no sense.
If your deodorant DOESN’T smell fresh, I’m not sure I’d call that a good idea, but it might be a daring marketing move: “Daringly damp”. Ew, yes, but more legit.
Clearly I am in the wrong line of work…..right?
Ew, squishy!
I lean on my elbows a lot. I know this about myself. I have been aware for the last couple of weeks that my left elbow has been more….sensitive, or something. Like, bruised feeling. But apparently I haven’t actually LOOKED at my bruised-feeling elbow until last night, or I would have noticed that it was 2-3 times larger than normal. And not really elbow shaped. Much more bulbous than usual.
Gingerly, I touched it.
Not only did it not look like an elbow, it did not feel like an elbow.
It felt….squishy.
Ew.
I am extremely squeamish about such things. I touched it again. Why, I don’t know. Because I’m like that. But the fact that it did NOT feel hard and bony and elbow-pointy made me freak the fuck out. (It made me think of that scene in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when Gilderoy Lockhart removes all the bones from Harry’s’ arm. Ew.)
Clearly I had elbow cancer. I knew this because many months, or maybe a year ago, Sunshine (my non-biological twin) had wrist cancer, which ended up being a ganglion cyst, but when all she knew was that she had a bump on her wrist, she was convinced it was wrist cancer. Hence, squishy, bulbous elbow = elbow cancer.
We might have a tendency to overreact to things in my non-biological family. Maybe.
And apparently my elbow has been deformed for quite some time, because when I texted Sunshine to tell her about said elbow cancer, she responded with, “You know, I thought your elbow looked weird in yoga [on Saturday] and I forgot to ask about it!!”
But this is typical for me. I am accident-prone and a klutz and I frequently have bumps and bruises and scrapes that I don’t know where they came from. Yesterday I ran over my foot with my own chair. Today my foot will be sore and I won’t remember why. That is standard operating procedure for me. So I have no idea what I might have done to my elbow, if anything. Perhaps it just happened, got inflamed.
Once I stopped hyperventilating over my squishy, bulbous elbow, I took pictures of both the normal and the abnormal elbows and sent them to Klondike. Perhaps so he could prepare himself for my demise. Or so he could talk me off the ledge.
Normal elbow
Scary elbow
I knew it was serious when instead of texting me back, he CALLED ME. (Have I mentioned that we pretty much never talk on the phone? Maybe three times in eight months.) Obviously the situation was dire.
“It’s not cancer. Stop freaking out.”
Klondike’s assessment was that something was going on with the bursa in (around? who cares.) my elbow joint. After he talked me down from my panic, he suggested that I send the picture to Pandi, my nurse friend, for a more professional second opinion. Her response was similar to his, and she assured me I could wait till normal office hours to seek medical attention. She also asked that I not sue her, should her long-distance diagnosis via iPhone pictures be inaccurate.
My biggest concern/reason for going to the doctor is that I am getting on a plane soonish for a quick trip for a wedding and I want to make sure it’s ok to get into a flying pressurized capsule and that it won’t make my elbow explode. Cuz that would just be gross. And fluid doesn’t really go with what I was planning on wearing to the wedding. Unless it’s in a wineglass. And we’re going to call THAT wine or liquid instead of fluid, because now I’m just thoroughly grossed out.
Fortunately, my doctor was able to squeeze my bulbous elbow and me onto his schedule this morning. Bert, the nurse, took my blood pressure. Typically she uses my left arm, but today she used my right. I’m pretty sure this was so my elbow wouldn’t burst, although she did start laughing when I asked if that was why.
Bursitis.
I have bursitis. That just sounds like something an old person would have, right?
My doctor insisted that young people get it, and that old people get things like osteoarthritis.
He and the nurse did wonder how it happened, though. Did I whack it on something? Who knows. As I said, that’s just how I am – I bump into things. In college, I duct-taped a rag around the sharp corner of my bed frame because I got tired of the bruises and gashes on my leg where I walked into it on a regular basis.
Back to the bursitis….
In case the yoga has been exacerbating it, the Y kindly scheduled a two-week break (boo!), so the elbow happens to get some time off. And the doc prescribed some Prednisone. My elbow should be normal sized and bony again before you know it.
In the meantime, I’m going to use it as an excuse for everything. “I’m sorry, I’m late, but I have bursitis.” “I can’t serve on that committee because of my bursitis.” I may even need a support group. 😉
Note: a quick web search reveals there actually are bursitis support groups. Apparently it can be much more severe and painful than my mildly uncomfortable lumpy elbow, and I mean no disrespect to anyone experiencing pain. ♥
WONKAFONKA 
Written
on January 20, 2013