On Becoming a Person

In no particular order…

1.) He walks around the house singing real songs in funny voices but then interjects random phrases such as “This trash smells bad and I don’t like it,” to the tune of the song he is singing.

2.) His arms and shoulders are perfect for cuddling me!

3.) He leaves his Dairy Queen Blizzards uneaten in the freezer for so long that I get to eat them myself when he isn’t home.  (And then he is mad, but that’s beside the point, hehe…)

4.) He takes me to feed the ducks and get ice cream, over and over and over and over and over and over…(well you get the point)…again and doesn’t complain.

5.) He likes animals a lot and often says hilarious things to them (especially the ducks) like, “Where are you going, goose?” and “Are you just going to take that?  Aren’t you going to fight back?!”

6.) He genuinely affirms that I am pretty in all the ways that he can and never lets me think otherwise.

7.) He would let me have a kitty, if we were allowed to have pets.

8.) He is really awesome at his job.  Like, so awesome that often he is the only one who knows how to do certain things.  I guess this can also suck because then it means sometimes he has to work late, but at least I know he works hard and always gives his best.

9.) Time and time again he has suffered through eating Arby’s and Burger King because I love them both.

10.) He has a very, very clearly defined system for organizing his wardrobe.  Woe is me if I mess this up when putting laundry away!  But yes, I actually do like this.  It is cute and really quite efficient when you think about it.

And a bonus…He wears that awesome camouflage sweatshirt after work like all winter long!!!  Just kidding…about liking that.

<3 <3 <3

Because it is summer and I have a little bit more time, I have been spending some of it in the kitchen, trying to cook new things.  I have gone through all of my cookbooks and dug up over a dozen new recipes, some of which I have already tried; all of which have been a success.  I am realizing that it is totally fun to cook something new and watch how it turns out.  Waaaay more fun than cooking the same things week after week.

But.  I have been doing a lot with chicken, and can anyone please answer me this question:

What the CRAP are these white tube-like things that run through each piece (shown above)?  They are soooo hard to cut through.  Even a Cutco knife struggles to do the job, and sometimes I get so frustrated that I end up ripping them out with my hands.  Are they veins?  Tendons?  Whatever they are, they are GROSS!  This almost makes me want to become a vegetarian.  Almost.

Anyway, here is what happened to this particular chicken after I cut it:

 
1.) Steamed it in chicken broth

2.) Let it cool

3.) Cooked up some shell noodles and peas

4.) Added some shredded carrots and chopped celery

5.) Mixed all of the above with mayo, a dash of mustard, and a squirt of lemon juice

6.) Mix, mix, mix…

The result = freaking awesome chicken salad

The other dinners so far on my list (which I do not have pictures of, sorry!); all successes though:
**Ham and spaetzle
**Cheeseburger pie
**Cheesy chicken strips
**Spaghetti pie
**Santa Fe stew (like chili)
**Spaghetti pie

Still to come:
**Broccoli cheese chicken (tonight!)
**Pizza casserole
**Chicken marsala
**Homemade macaroni and cheese
**Meatloaf

(These are the ones I have the ingredients for… there are like 6 more still marked in the cookbook)…

I think my cooking style is very Hungarian… I love stews and casseroles, as you can see.  Anything with noodles and a ton of sauce and vegetables is good with me!

Lastly, I will leave you with this beauty: Christina and the Giant Peach

 
I found it at Acme and took it into the department, where my colleagues and I made some very interesting comparisons with it!

July is national ice cream month.  This is a true fact.  I read it on a sign at Grinders (restaurant chain in Canton area), and the internet confirms it.  In honor of this magnificent celebration, I decided to document all of the ice cream that I have eaten this past week-ish.  And so, as promised, here are the results.

Day 1: I begin with a cherry (yeah, just plain cherry) Blizzard from Dairy Queen.  Meduim sized.  I asked the guy behind the counter if he thought that ordering a Blizzard with just cherry sauce in it was weird, and he said, “I’ve seen weirder.”  Well thank goodness.

Day 2: Since I do not finish the entire Blizzard on the first day, I finish it the following day.  It isn’t quite as good after being frozen, but ice cream is ice cream, you know.

Day 3: One of those individual-sized ice cream cake cups.  Also from Dairy Queen.

Day 4: This is a bowl of Pierre’s Homestyle Cupcake flavor ice cream.  It tastes just like confetti cake.  Delicious.

Day 5: My very favorite ice cream from my very favorite place—Stow Cone!  Vanilla soft serve with rainbow sprinkles in a dish.  When I went there, I forgot that they only take cash and I had no bills on me whatsoever, but I managed to squeeze out the $2.40 in change.  It was sad, but quite a triumph.  Quite an amazing triumph indeed.

Day 6: Betsy, Myriam and I go to Italian Fest in Cuyahoga Falls.  There is a Stoddard’s truck.  This, of course, is the natural result: one pistachio cone (Betsy), one vanilla cone (Myriam), and one vanilla cup (me), all with rainbow sprinkles.  Like a boss. 

(Photos courtesy of Betsy)

Day 7: Miraculously, there was no ice cream eaten on day 7.  But there was birthday cake for my brother Greg.

Day 8: The last ice cream of the documentation—from Rita’s in the Squirrel Hill district of Pittsburgh.  Greg, John, and I stopped there during our visit.  Once again, the unfailing vanilla with sprinkles.

So…

One very important question has already been asked by my mother: “Is this normally how much you eat or is this just for the special occasion?”  John’s response to her question: “This isn’t that far off.”  He is right.  Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.

by Mary Oliver

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?
This isn’t a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on.

So I went on Amazon.com and ordered a new Nikon battery charger yesterday—yesterday!—to replace the one I couldn’t find anywhere.

Today I was riding in my car on the way home from Akron with John, and I opened my glove box to get something for him, and there it was.  In the glove box.  I was right—I had taken it out of my camera bag before we went on our anniversary trip, but apparently, I took it out in the car and not at home.  I think, in retrospect, I even hear myself saying, “Don’t let me forget this is in here,” as I was closing the glove box.

Once again, I suck, but this time it is kind of funny.  As I was telling a friend just the other day-- “Watch, I’ll order a new one and then it will turn up.”  And the dang thing didn’t even wait 24 hours to do so. 

In other news, we did set up the new bistro set today, since the rain seems to have stopped.  I originally wanted to put it in the corner of the patio closest to the building to protect it from the elements, but John said it would get covered in bird crap if we put it there.  He is right.  Yesterday I swept a bunch of dried bird crap off of the concrete.  Delicious.  So it is in the other corner instead.  Right where that horrid bush used to overlap.  Thank goodness John already chopped it down.  This must have all been part of the plan :-).

My mom and I had originally planned to go to the beach today, but those plans got ruined when it decided to rain all day.  No matter though.  Since we had both set aside time in our schedules for today, my mom came down to visit me instead.

We are quite the pair when we are together.  Like two peas in a pod.  We first went to the thrift store downtown and looked at a bunch of clothes.  We occupied the two dressing rooms and we were just yelling all these random utterances back and forth through the wall, like, “Ooooooh,” “Niiiiice,” “Ehhhhh,” “Oh no, oh no, these are not the ones,” etc.  People on the outside probably thought we were nuts, but it made sense to me.  I walked away with two new shirts and a pair of dress capris for The Counseling Center in the fall, as well as a grey lifeguard hoodie.  Not bad.

We had lunch at Olive Garden, and the waiter kept calling us “ladies.”  We had him grate like an entire block of cheese on our salad.  He didn’t mind; he said cheese was his favorite food.  Since we didn’t order dessert, he brought us like a mound of Andes candies instead.  Good man.  Good, good man.  He got a nice tip.

I think we kind of stuffed our faces, because as we were walking in the parking lot my mom was like, “My waist is gone!” and “Oh, I’m so flubbery!” John says this is where I get it from—making up words that don’t really exist but seem to make perfect sense anyway.

We also went to Marshall’s and I bought an adorable bistro table and chairs set for our patio.  I have been looking for one of these for a loooong time and finally found the perfect one.  I called John and texted him a picture of it to see if he would let me buy it.  I got the sense that he didn’t really like it at all, but he let me get it because I really wanted it.  He spoils me like that :-).  So my mom went to find a sales associate while I guarded it with my life looking all mean to keep the other shoppers away from my prize.  When the manager came back to take it up front and hold for us while we finished shopping I was like, “Don’t let anyone else have this!  It’s mine!”  And it was mine, suckas.

  (It looks better in real life!)

Then my mom and I went to feed the ducks at the park.  They were insane today, all fighting for the pieces of bread we were tossing them and biting and chasing each other and stuff.  We stopped at a gas station and bought the cheapest loaf ever—it was like $1, and fed them the whole thing.  We figured out that if you toss a bread crumb onto one goose’s back, like five other ducks will jump on it to get the bread.  Completely evil, I know, but we discovered it by accident.

It was getting ready to storm while we were out there, and the wind picked up heavily, so we started throwing whole pieces of bread in the water to finish out the bag. (that was fun to watch—what a frenzy!)  We picked up all of our stuff and started screaming and running for the car.  I was like, “We’re going to die!  We’re going to die!” and the wind actually blew the rubber band out of one of the pigtails in my hair.  So then I was screaming, “My pigtail is gone!” and my mom was like, “We’re not going back for it!  Run!”  Yeah.   Once we got in the car my mom was like, “How are we going to get out of here?” It was like, “What?!” but like, “I don’t know!” at the same time.  It started raining but we were already on the way home so I think we were safe.

I haven’t set up the bistro set yet because of the rain, but maybe later John will get it out of the trunk and put it up for me.  It is perfect. I wish my mom could have stayed longer though.  But she had to go home to cook dinner.  I don’t know what, if anything, I will be cooking tonight.  I might get a special date to Taco Bell.  That would be sweet.

~*~*~

Us…

Today, I re-discovered this website: Let Them Sing It For You .  I had found it a while ago and completely forgotten about it’s glory until I re-found it when I was going through my huge list of bookmarks.

What you do: enter any words/phrases you want in the box and then click on the red play button at the bottom.  The site uses clips of existing songs to sing each word you wrote (if it has the word in it’s collection; if not, you get something that sounds truly awful in place of the word it can’t find).  It kind of reminds me of how Bumblebee communicates in Transformers.

I can’t post links here to any of the songs I created because it would be embarrassingly inappropriate, but I will just say that the site recognizes the “proper” names of body parts.  Not slang terms though.  But I think it is actually funnier this way.

I have been laughing until I cry on and off tonight.  Let me just say too that I love the fact that my sense of humor is that of most guys rather than girls.  I am not really a doctoral student or a mature wife ;-).  We should have a contest for whose song is the funniest.

This is one of those things you put in water and wait… the package said it grows up to 600 times its’ size.  I had one of these when I was little—it was a blue alien and my brother and I grew it in the bathroom sink.  Same concept but better since this is a duck.  And I grew it in a glass pitcher.

Day 1:

Day 2:

Day 3:

Day 4:

Day 5:

Day 6:

Day 7: The end!

Yeah, save it, I know I am a dork, but I love ducks!!!

After living in this too-small apartment with John and all of his/our (but mostly his) stuff for over a year now, I decided that I could write an article titled “Big Storage in Small Spaces” for Good Housekeeping or a similar magazine.  It would be a winner.

Check it out…

Our Bedroom Closet

This is a walk-in closet, but it contains all of our clothes (for every season—winter, fall/spring, and summer), some of our shoes, most of my purses/accessories, all of our linens (towels, sheets, blankets, etc…), as well as some of John’s sporting gear.

Our Kitchen -- Entryway

We have a coat rack that holds most of our coats for the season (the rest are in the tiny front closet that could never hold all of the coats at once), as well as this shoebox thing that I rotate our shoes in and out of depending on the season (the off-season shoes are in a box in the top of the bedroom closet).  That rack thing above the shoe shelf is for our keys so that we always know where they are!  The wicker basket has stuff I usually grab on my way out—garage door openers, sunglasses, iPod, etc…

Our Kitchen – Other

This is probably my least favorite part of the entire apartment, but even if it is an eyesore, I do think it is pretty useful given space constraints.  We don’t have enough cupboard or pantry space to hold this stuff (plastic bags, trash bags, disposable cups, etc…), so this cart triples as a toaster-oven stand, shelf, and towel rack.  Above it there you can see the dish drainer full of dishes, so the towel is really convenient there.  Much to my dismay, our kitchen had no other place to hang a towel so I am thankful for this improvision!

Laundry

We are incredibly thankful to have laundry in our apartment!  It is housed inside a closet, which is totally awesome because the top shelf holds all of our laundry and stain-removal products, and the little rack is the perfect place to use clothespins to hang small items to dry.  Best part is that I can shut the doors and the mess is gone!  John installed that other hanging basket for smaller products; it also has hooks on it to hang more stuff.

Front Bathroom

This set of shelves is a lifesaver too.  It holds fingertip towels, washcloths, extra bathmats, and guest towels.  Super, super convenient, and good because there wasn’t enough space in my makeshift bedroom linen closet for these items!  The only downfall: imagine for a moment me singlehandedly trying to drag this contraption out of the bathroom when our toilet overflowed.  Yeah.  That’s not so convenient.

Office

All right, so the only cool thing about the office is the bulletin board hanging above the supply desk.  But this is nice because we can tack up invitations, important mail, reminders, etc… so that we always know where to find this stuff!

This one still needs work…

This is the closet in our office room… mostly it holds our big cleaning supplies like brooms, mops, vacuum cleaner, ironing stuff, etc…, as well as some school supplies for me, some camping gear for us, John’s music gear, spare computer parts, and indoor tools.  I am still figuring out how to make the most of this space because everything in here is big and bulky, but this is the start.  Also, it is supposed to be another walk-in closet, but as you can see, that hasn’t happened for us yet.

~*~*~

So maybe I am a freak for being excited about these things, but I am proud of myself for finding some stuff about this apartment that I like.  I am happy that I have found creative ways to deal with lack of storage space.  I think perhaps I became good at this after sharing a shoebox-sized room with my little sister growing up.  I can stash a lot of stuff in a small space.  If you ever want help in your own home, give me a call ;-).

Maybe if this whole becoming a psychologist thing doesn’t work out, I will go into business organizing people’s homes instead.