2 fried eggs topped with shredded cheese, an English muffin, a bowl of Irish porridge, and a cup of coffee. Hopefully this will wake me up sufficiently to feel like driving home for 3 hours.

The lake is glass-calm this morning and the sky is overcast (PERFECT for driving, so long as it doesn't rain and slow down traffic.)

I had hoped for a chance to drive into North Conway and go to a few shops (nothing expensive, just a couple of simple and cheap things, for example some fudge from the Bavarian Chocolate Haus, and some burner covers for the stove--we have limited counter space and that makes all the difference to add some space...) but I don't think that I'm going to go 30 minutes out of my way for that. I haven't decided yet though. I'm coming back next week so I can always do it then.

I have sores on my tongue from talking too long with Rob this evening. Sometimes (I think this is a symptom either of my general stressload or of my Tourette's Syndrome) when I'm in a conversation and I'm not talking, I sort of create a vacuum in my mouth, and the edges of my tongue get sort of vacu-sucked in between my upper and lower teeth, causing friction and irritation. I end up with a rim of sore spots all around the edge of my tongue. It is all hurty.

Probably it will be gone tomorrow, though, and it was worth it because we had a great time. We had a couple of drinks and played Ravin' Rabbids 2 on the Wii--a hilarious game--then spent probably at least 2 hours just talking about everything from family to politics to TV. It is always great when he comes to visit because we get to catch up so much better than just the random phone call or text message or email... I wish he lived closer :(

Sparky devoured one of the cats' toy mice tonight. I hope they forgive him for it. They took all of 5 minutes to adapt to having a 130-lb golden retriever behemoth in the house and have been passive-aggressively picking on him ever since. Earlier today I had to rescue him from Ronon, who had cornered him on the stairs. Ronon was sitting at the bottom of the stairs oh-so-innocently, while Sparky was trapped on the third step, whining, too scared to come down the rest of the way. The big bully. (This video is of Ronon already picking on Sparky when he was still only just an itty bitty kitten. Meanie.)

In other news, tonight Dan put a cup of water in the microwave to make some tea. Nothing happened. The microwave is less than 2 years old. It appears to be completely useless now. At first if you pushed the start button, it would light up inside for a second, but now it won't even do that. It just shows 88:88 on the display and none of the buttons respond at all. How the hell are we supposed to eat now!? Do we have to start eating bark off the trees and rooting in the yard for grubs and fallen berries?!

Let's just say that I'm highly disappointed with the Chinese 'vegetable soup' that was just delivered, which is essentially a few pieces of broccoli and green beans floating around in some hot water. Sheesh.,

I used to order the gingerbread latte. It was my favorite. Now you order a gingerbread latte and they give you a "gingersnap" latte. It's the same as a gingerbread latte except that it has chunks of actual ginger in the bottom of the cup. Ok, so that sounds nifty conceptually, but it is so unbelievably disgusting to go to take a swig of coffee when you're getting close to the bottom of the cup and have a bunch of chunky debris fill up your mouth. Even though I know what it is, it still takes me by surprise every time because I forget they changed it, and even knowing what it is, texture-wise it's so gross that it makes me nearly gag and spit out the coffee. Yuck.

I had the munchies and wanted a snack. I considered pretzels (my default) and then eyed the Christmas cookie stash and the peanut brittle...

...and then I realized what I really wanted was Brussels sprouts. We have these single-serving steam-in-the-bag frozen ones that are just so easy and perfect. A little butter, a little salt, some thyme, and I'm happy!

Today only (Sunday, Nov. 23) go to drpepper.com and register and they will email you a coupon for a free can of Dr. Pepper. This is because of some sort of wacky challenge that Dr. Pepper issued earlier this year that they'd give everyone in America a free can of Dr. Pepper if GnR released their looooong anticipated album by the end of the year. Well, "Chinese Democracy" has been released, so the deal is on!

So we ordered pizza tonight. I had about $4 cash on me (I have to make a deposit, so I keep not getting cash figuring I'll do it when I'm at the bank anyway) and the card that is stored with my account on the Papa John's website expired on 10/31. I was going to enter a new card, but I hate typing in all those numbers... so when I saw there was an option to pay by check, I picked that one.

When the pizza arrived, the driver said "we don't accept personal checks."
"Um, your website offered it as an option."
"We haven't accepted checks in over a year."
"Well, I don't have the cash. I could pay by card, but I don't know how we go about that."
(About then I located and showed the driver the part of the label on the pizza box where it said the payment method was "CHK" so I proved that it was in the system that way.)
So after a long and convoluted phone process, including the part where he couldn't figure out why his phone wasn't working, then realized it was still connected to his Bluetooth headset, which was in the car, we finally got someone on the phone who could process a card payment for an already-delivered internet order.

But still... a year after you've stopped accepting checks is long enough to have removed the option from your website, don't you think?

I ran out of my sleep prescription yesterday, so last night I had to try to sleep "naturally" which never works very well. I finally fell asleep around 3am, but woke up about 6 and had to read for a while to fall back asleep. I woke up again around 8, and then slept fitfully, waking up at least every 30 minutes or so, until I got out of bed around 11. Which would have been 8 hours if I had slept through the whole time, but it wasn't even close.

I came out just as Dan was cooking eggs for himself and Dominic for breakfast, so he cooked me breakfast as well. That was nice! Nobody ever cooks for me--well, rarely--so it was a real treat. We spent a lot of the day cleaning the house, and then I fixed an experimental dish for dinner that I made up as I went along, but had actually somewhat planned in advance (as in I'd actually bought specific groceries for it). It came out well, I think.

After dinner, Dan watched the rest of the UGA game while I nodded off on the couch after giving up on trying to read an article for my art history class.

My classmates are coming again on Monday to work on our group project on Amiens cathedral. I've made a lot of progress on the PowerPoint presentation. I think it will be fun. I just hope it plays ok on the computer in the class. It has some complex stuff and it's lots of pictures, so it's a big file. And I always worry when I create something on the PC and then have to export it to be played on a Mac. I'll have my laptop with me just in case--worst case scenario we will just have to hook my laptop up to the projector instead of theirs. I think I'm going to bring a CD of Gregorian chanting to play softly in the background.

I just made cucumber sandwiches for the first time. I always see them on TV and in movies and read about them anytime anyone wants to make sure you know that it's a proper English tea going on, and I always liked the sound of them, but never made them. I started a thread on the SDMB asking people how to make them (I already knew bread and cucumbers, obviously) and got a lot of different ideas. I didn't have much on hand so I made one each on Pepperidge Farm Very Thin white bread: cucumbers + cream cheese + salt, and cucumbers + butter + salt. I liked them both and so did Dominic. I will be experimenting further in the days to come.


On an unrelated but depressing note, the pain pill from earlier didn't last very long at all and my tooth is being very mean to me right now.

We went to a Mexican restaurant the other day and afterward we stopped at Walgreen's. This is our tradition, since we realized we could pay 25 cents each for York Peppermint Patties at the restaurant, or spend $2.50 and get a whole bag of them at the other end of the parking lot. Anyway, I went in and was faced with a decision I could not make. I ended up buying a bag of York Peppermint Patties, a box of Andes mints, and a bar of Ghirardelli "Dark & Mint" chocolate, described as "dark chocolate with white mint filling."

Been mostly eating the Andes mints so far, but tonight I decided to try the Ghirardelli. I love dark chocolate, I love mint. I was very hopeful.

Blarg! It tasted like the unholy love child of armpit stench and plastic manufacturing! I had to go get a different mint just to get the taste of that one out of my mouth! DISGUSTING! Holy crap I haven't had chocolate that nasty in... well, maybe ever! I think they put poison ivy in it instead of mint or something. That was some nasty shit.










I'll make Dan try it tomorrow to see if it's just me.

The first step is admitting that you have a problem, right? I'm pretty sure the next step is posting about it on the internet.

*deep breath*

OK so here goes: I am addicted to Thai coconut tofu soup. There, I said it.

I crave it all the time. When we go to eat Thai, or pick up carry-out, I get an extra soup "for later" every time. I actually caught myself thinking today "hey, I could go to the Thai place and pick up five soups to go and have one every day for lunch this week!" and I found myself getting really excited about the prospect.

I am so ashamed.

Once again I am reminded of the crack-like addictive properties of ginger snaps. Somebody take these things away from me!

This scene played out at the dinner table tonight:

[SETTING: DAN, OPAL, and DOMINIC are sitting around the table eating cream of broccoli soup]

DAN: Dominic, can you pass me a Kleenex?

[DOMINIC passes Kleenex to DAN. DAN blows his nose.]

OPAL: [to DAN, while pointing out the location on her own lip] You have something on your lip--

[DAN licks his lip.]

OPAL: --err... I guess I won't finish that sentence...

DAN: What?

OPAL: Err... [nervous giggle]

DAN: What??

OPAL: Well I was about to say '--I think it is from when you blew your nose.'

DAN: Um.

OPAL: Yeah, uh, I don't think that was soup. I think it was, um.

DAN: [beginning to laugh] Couldn't you have maybe started out the sentence with something like 'hey Dan you have a booger on your lip...'?

OPAL: [getting serious giggles now] It might have been a little piece of Kleenex.

DAN: [laughing harder] I mean what did you expect me to do when you said that?

OPAL: I guess this is how we learn. I will try to remember for next time. Note to self...

DAN: [general giggling]

OPAL: It *may* have been soup! I mean maybe it was. It could have been.

DAN: [laughter]

OPAL: ...but I don't think it was...

By this time all three of us were laughing so hard we could barely speak. I actually had tears on my face. I think you had to be there but it just all happened so fast and then we were giggling about it so much... ah man.

So my mom came to town on Tuesday, and just left today. It was cool having her here for Thanksgiving. I cooked stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, a broccoli casserole (for the rest of us--my mom is afraid of broccoli) and a flourless chocolate cake. My mom got some sliced turkey breast at the store so she and Dan had Bird but I didn't have to sit there with Carcass on the table, which was a nice holiday change. We had a store-bought pumpkin pie (again, for the rest of us; my mom is also afraid of pie). It snowed on Thanksgiving, and Friday morning when we woke up there was snow all over the ground (though much of it melted by today). That was awesome. I can't wait for more snow. I heart snow.

I have my finals next week. Monday morning at 10am I have Statistics, then I have History, Geology, and Philosophy on Tuesday. I did it this way because I needed the lead up time to study for Statistics (math is hard!) but I figure I can do most of my studying for the other subjects Monday and Monday night (those are subjects I only need to review--Statistics I have to re-learn).

So right now I'm sitting here studying math, taking breaks to eat pretzels and learn how to play guitar. Oh yeah, that's the other thing. I'm learning the guitar--finally. Dan's classmate Ben showed us a little bit last week, and my mom showed me the chords to a couple of songs while she was here. So now my fingers are all hurty, but it's ok because I've wanted to do this for a very long time.

Blah, back to math. I don't heart math at all. I frowny-face math.

My microwave is awesome. It does a great job on lots of things. But it sucks for popcorn. My old microwave was great for it--push the popcorn button and come back when it's done. Simple. This one burns it to a crisp if you use the popcorn button. And so we've been trying to figure out the magical setting to do it manually. We've tried adjusting both the time and the power settings, but it seems that it will either burn or leave a zillion unpopped kernels. We did two bags in a row once on the same power setting. There was a 2 second difference in how long they were left in. One was burned, the other was full of unpopped kernels. And sometimes it burns AND has unpopped kernels (yes, I know there will always be some but I'm talking about a lot). I think it may be a Communist conspiracy.

As to the other equally grave matters, I lied about those. There are no other matters as grave as my popcorn situation.

This weekend we were hoping to Get Things Done, but we didn't get much done. Dan and Dominic did go get haircuts, though, which they both needed, and they went to Sears and got a leaf blower/vac thing because it takes about nine billion hours to rake the leaves on our yard (1/3 acre, lots of trees) and the leaves have just started to fall... our raking season has just begun. Oh, and we did get to the gym and rode the exercise bikes for a while, so that wasn't useless.

I made a quite tasty broccoli quiche for dinner a few nights ago. I've been fiddling with the recipe to get it where I want it and I finally have something written down now that is accurate. See, traditionally for things like that I just toss stuff in without measuring, so when I go to write up a recipe, nobody else can get the same result because they have no idea how much of this or that to put in. So I've been making an effort lately to measure stuff as I'm making it up, and jot down the measurements. Then the next time I make it, I may add or subtract depending on how I think it came out last time, and when I have a set of measurements that is actually what I think tastes best, I consider it the final recipe. Of course I may still not follow it, but at least I can give it out if anyone wants it. (I did post it on my website, by the way, in the Food section.)

Last night I took my sleeping meds to get to sleep--I've found that two works pretty well to knock me out in about an hour. So sometime about 11:30ish I fell asleep. The benefit of Restoril over things like Valium is that it doesn't stay in your system for very long, so you're not groggy in the morning. At about 3am Dan's phone started beeping. It was a mistakenly-sent text message from a (probably drunk) friend. It woke me up. Now, the sucky thing about Restoril is that it doesn't stay in your system for very long. Try as I might, I wasn't able to really get back to sleep for the rest of the night. I dozed here and there but never for longer than about 15 minutes, and even that was fitful. I read my book for a while, and I lay in the dark for a while, and I tried really hard to sleep even after the sun came up, but around 10am I gave it up as a lost cause. Crap. Well, what's another day on just a few hours of sleep? I'm used to it, right?

Except that I have karate class tonight, and that's gonna suck if I'm tired. Sigh.

I use a griddle now and make 8 pancakes at once, so technically it's "First 8 Pancakes Syndrome" but whatever you call it, why is it that the pancake(s) that gets cooked first on the pan or griddle comes out different from the ones that come after? The subsequent pancakes will have an even brown color, but that first one will be all splotchy looking. Why is that? Is it because of the butter? There is less butter on the pan for the next pancakes, so maybe that's something to do with it? I know it's not an issue of how hot the griddle is because it's totally heated before I start.

I made some dinner rolls recently that used buttermilk, and you can't just buy, say, a pint of the stuff. So I had a lot left over that I wasn't quite sure what to do with. My grandmother used to drink the stuff, but I can't even stand the taste of regular milk, so that's right out. The obvious solution was to make buttermilk pancakes. I found a recipe online that looked promising and made them. Recently I'd been using Hungry Jack mix (the kind that you have to add egg to, not the "just add water" stuff, which is pretty gross) which isn't bad or anything, but man.

These were way mo' better.

I think I'm going to buy more buttermilk this weekend and make up a huge double or quadruple batch and freeze them. It's so easy to just nuke a couple of frozen pancakes in the morning and honestly, they really don't seem all that different from when they're fresh off the griddle. I do that from time to time with the pancake mix, and it's not like it's much more effort to make the real batter as to make the mix, except that the mix uses only ingredients that I'd have on hand anyway, whereas I don't keep buttermilk around "just because". But once the batter is made, pouring a couple dozen pancakes is pouring a couple dozen pancakes--might as well make them the good ones, no?

I went to Dominic's school this afternoon rather than having him come home on the bus. We'd gotten a two-tier locker shelf that wouldn't fit in his backpack, so I went to help him put that in. They have full-height lockers in 6th grade! Taller than me! Anyway I got to meet his friend, Paul, who is the one who has called the house a few times. I'm glad Dominic is making friends. Today his friend Jack came over for a while, and they also went out and rode bikes for a while. Good stuff.

Also today, Dan showed Dominic how to hold and blow into his trumpet. Dominic is starting band this year and he's using one of Dan's trumpets (rather than us buying a new one). He seems to be picking it up! It will be interesting to watch him learn to play, and very handy for him that Dan is an excellent trumpet player, kind of like having a tutor in the house.

It's been really nice having family dinners, I must say. And sometimes even family breakfasts and lunches, too. Last week one night I made a pasta with veggies in cream sauce and steamed artichokes with garlic butter. Then I made enchiladas and beans and rice (we had that for two nights). Tonight I made broccoli casserole, grilled cheese sandwiches, and cream of mushroom soup. I made enough soup to freeze a bunch, too. I have stuff in the fridge to make stir fry later in the week. I love cooking, when I know other people are going to eat it. :)

Tonight we went to one of Dan's friends' apartments for dinner. He is from India, and his mother is visiting him and so he invited us over to have some home cooked Indian food. I really enjoy cooking and have a little bit of experience cooking Indian food but I want to learn more. Over dinner we chatted about a lot of things, and they were both surprised that I already had some of the spices that they used in things (amchoor powder, kala jeera, ajwain, etc). The food was amazing and they gave us all of the leftovers! His mother wrote out the recipes for me (ahead of time) but he hasn't had a chance to translate them to English yet so I don't have them yet.

We were initially unsure how much English his mother spoke based on some things he had said before, and so we weren't sure how smoothly the evening would go. By not smooth I don't mean anything negative, just that it's not as convenient to have a conversation if everything that is said has to be translated back and forth. As it turns out that while she is self-conscious about her English, we actually had no problems at all. The only confusion was a couple of times when we were discussing food ingredients, trying to figure out what they were called in English sometimes took a little while because we were going based on descriptions. We expected to have a pleasant evening but it was actually quite a bit more fun than we were even anticipating. His mom is really cool and the conversations were very interesting. We went over at 8pm and didn't leave until almost 11!

There were some funny moments due to some Indian customs. For example, he had ice cream and offered us some, but it turned out that his freezer was having issues and it had all melted. In sitting around after that we were discussing Indian sweets and he insisted on getting us some that his mom had made (don't remember what they were called) because apparently in his culture, if you talk about sweets, you have to eat them. I like this custom! He said even if you just eat a few grains of sugar, you have to eat something (he described it as a superstition and I don't know how widespread this is--I know India is diverse). He said that even if you are walking out the door, if someone talks about food, you have to eat something even if it's tiny.

As it turns out, I became hopelessly addicted to this sweet that his mom made. It's made with...uh...urad flour, almonds, some other stuff I can't remember... oh man it's really good though. He said that growing up his mom made him eat it in winter to keep him healthy. Not sure what's in it that's supposed to be so good for you but they both insisted that it was so. She's going to write down the recipe for that stuff too. Yay! Bringing out the sweets turned into a sort of parade of little nibbly bits coming out of the kitchen to taste. It was awesome.

Once we got home we pretty much got ready for bed right away. We both read for a bit, then turned the lights off. I fell asleep! But it was only for about two hours. Then I woke up and haven't been able to fall back asleep. In addition to the whole brain-won't-turn-off thing, I'm also really itchy. This happens a lot when I try to sleep. My hair tickles me. The sheets tickle me. I get random, roving itches in places that I have to move to scratch, so I end up thrashing around a lot. Since Dan has to get up for clinic early tomorrow morning I decided to spare him my tossing and turning and came out here to the sofa. Hopefully eventually I can get sleepy enough to go back in and fall asleep in the bed. Last night I didn't sleep more than about 10 minutes, and then got about 2½ hours of sleep in the middle of the day. I should be exhausted and sleeping easily! I HATE INSOMNIA!