Prime of My Life

 Every dang year with the birthdays, that's me. I'm really getting up there.

Sometimes I feel like my life is one big party, like the universe is arranged for my delight, and this weekend was one of those times. My friend Erika came and visited from LA, and our grad school friend Dan was in town for a conference, so we took this opportunity to get all up in each other's business.

We didn't really do that much. When I go visit Erika, we undertake all kinds of LA things and see lots of people and go to complicated yoga classes and get professionally groomed and all that jazz. When she comes to visit me, we sit around my house and sip coffee, we talk, we sleep eight hours a night. We decorated the Christmas tree, we had random margaritas in the middle of the day, we Christmas-shopped.

With Dan, we ate downtown at one of those places where they fold your napkin for you every time you leave the table. Everything on the menu was a Southern classic that, through a minor tweak or two, had been rendered really expensive. Highlights were: The waiter trying to convince Erika that the cracked peppercorns floating in her very complex drink were a good thing; Dan explaining his tickbite-induced mammal allergy to the waiter; Being served moonshine in a mason jar and recalling that the last time someone handed me a jar of moonshine, I was standing in the middle of an actual dirt road, and it was free; Getting the waiter to fold the napkin into a paper airplane; The waiter getting sick of our shit, probably. Also there was when we parked the car in a little hole-in-the-wall downtown lot, and I said, "Are we going to get murdered in this lot?" And Erika goes, "Well we're not going to get murdered right now."

Which struck me as funny.

Then we had dinner and cake at home one night, and Hank gave me a card that said, "Since it's your big day, I'm giving you this present! PS: Dad paid for it." And Laura gave me some makeup and a Christmas ornament that looks like a pretzel, which she said was the "most you" of all the ornaments. I don't know but I do love it. I said, "Because I love Bavarian snacks so much?" And she pointed out that we do have a pickle ornament so okay. And Matt got me a fitbit wristband, possibly to offset all the Bavarian snacking.

It rained the whole whole weekend, and it was lovely to sit inside and look at the gray outside. It was a wonderful birthday, and if I have to get older, this was a fine way to do it. Today all the friends are back in their places and it's just the four of us, and we are heading into another busy, chilly December week. I am just hoping to to be able to give everyone what they need and to keep the good times rolling.

I wish the same for you. xoxo
B

I Don't Think We Are Four Loko Material

Scandalamitous beverage events:  I had never heard of this Four Loko drink until three days ago and here it has already been banned by an entire state.  Saturday, we went up to the mountain house, and our in-the-know friend Sloan produced a can.  It was tall and purple, and it featured the words, "Contains Alcohol" as a prominent design element.  I was like, "Wah?" and he was all, "We picked this up on the way, it's been banned," and I was like, "Okay, I'll try it."

Banned, baby! Like Lady Chatterley's Lover!

The gist is that it's a caffeinated energy drink that's also 12% alcohol, and it costs $2-$3 for a 24 oz. can.  College campuses are freaking out about this and several teenagers have ended up in the hospital.  I guess the theory is that the caffeine keeps you so alert that you don't realize how screwed up you're getting, so you stay up and drink instead of falling asleep the way nature intended.  And it's cheap, so cheap it's like, loko.

Night fell at the mountain house, and Sloan popped open the huge can, poured a little into four glasses, and carried them to the table.  We picked them up and eyed them like we were at a wine tasting.  I was already thinking that maybe we weren't cut out for Four Loko, with our little bistro glasses.

We took a swig.

Someone started moaning.  Oh my God it started like an injury and then got worse.  Everyone began talking at once.

"It tastes just like Dimetapp from when I was a kid!"
"It's really bad, right?"
"I'm not young enough to drink this."
"I'm not poor enough."

Upon sipping, the initial impression is merely cough syrupy, then in the middle things start to get strident, and then the finish rolls around, and it's like a grape boot stamping on a human face forever.

And oh, the terrible sweetness.  I had to fight several hummingbirds to finish my ounce of liquid.  I think only Sloan and I actually drank our tiny portions of the stuff. Matt poured his out and made a real drink. And Becky (another Becky!) took two sips and got jittery.  I think that could have been the Red  #40, though, even more than the caffeine.

Matt summed up what we were all feeling when he said, "I just have no desire to eat or drink anything ironically anymore."  Yes.  I remembered that there is a name for that phenomenon.  The great Douglas Coupland calls it "nutritional slumming":

[The eating of] food whose enjoyment stems not from flavor but from a complex mixture of class connotations, nostalgia signals, and packaging semiotics: Katie and I bought this tub of Multi-Whip instead of real whip cream because we thought petroleum distillate whip topping seemed like the sort of food that air force wives stationed in Pensacola back in the early sixties would feed their husbands to celebrate a career promotion. (page 120) 

I had forgotten that there was a Pensacola reference in Generation X. Awesome.

It's possible that our crowd was doing it wrong, because this guy drank a bunch of Four Loko and liked it and had a hilarious evening.  We just played spades and then got in the hot tub and then went to bed.  It seemed like we were having a pretty great time, if not actually Loko in the strict sense.

Oh Goodness

Well, we're safely back home tonight from our North Carolina Family Mountain Free-for-All Aquatic Fun and Summer Bookworm Extravaganza. I am rather tuckered and will have more to say about the adventure of my sensibilities, but just now I was taking an inventory of the unfortunate turn taken by my eating habits the last ten days.

This morning I noticed that my capris were rather snug in the tum. And I thought, "Hmm?" And then I thought, "Vacation food." Yes, there were lots of fresh fruits and veggies from curb markets, but there were also cheese grits, hamburgers, ice cream cones at the general store (what am I doing) and, God help us, white russians. White Russians. The hecks? Who even drinks those in the summer? What is wrong with me? I blame my sister-in-law, whose drink of choice is Kahlua and milk. Gentle thrills, yes. But it is delicious. I noted this concoction and thought, "Well, that's two-thirds of the way there." So along comes vodka and bing bang boom, white russians in July.

There was also the fact that yesterday, Hank and I sat in the back of a convertible and shared a gallon-sized bag of party mix. (Party mix is an artisanal tradition in that family.) It seemed to me that snacks eaten while taking in beautiful scenery are part of some special permissive food pyramid. And the scenery was so pretty--along the Cullasaja River gorge into Highlands. Munch munch.

Austerity program begins tomorrow.

I leave you with a recommendation that you go read my sister's latest two posts. She writes about a harrowing travel snafu--I was on the edge of my seat and I already knew how it turned out. First part here, satisfying conclusion here.

Bon weekend, my buds.

That Holiday Sweatshirt Again

It is fair to say that I might have overdone it last night. Overdone it with the imbibing. We had the Hamiltons over for what was supposed to be low-key pizza and Scrabble. Then, around midnight, my brother and sister-in-law turned up, having made it out of DC and driven south at probably the last minute anyone could leave the city before it became a total whiteout. They were heading for the mountain house, but they heard it was unreachable, so they came to Atlanta. Their account of the roads between Richmond and Charlotte was scary--cars all over the sides of the interstate, stuck. If you are up there in that storm, my heart goes out to you. Stay safe at home! So they came in and the low-key gathering kinda got a second wind, and some pitchers of cosmos were consumed, and we played Cranium, which Matt and I both remembered that we hadn't played since New Year's Eve of 1999. So we partied like we did in 1999, and the next thing I know it is 4:30 in the morning and we're standing in the kitchen eating crackers and griping about the Senate.

I'm not feeling too steady today.

Seeing Dave reminded me of his famously awesome Christmas sweatshirt. Which if you weren't reading me last December (where in hecks were you?) you may have missed. It made its debut in this post, excerpted below. Please enjoy it while I go sip some diet pepsi.

A few years ago, while they were still in college, my brother Dave and his roommate decided to make a Christmas sweatshirt. I don't really know what area of human knowledge we can draw on to help us understand that. Just two dudes, creating festive holiday garb. Their particular brand of college hipster culture was so complex that it can't really be known how sincere their efforts were. They certainly weren't snarky about it, but were they making the sweatshirt or quoting the sweatshirt? I think that, perhaps, postmodern irony really has given way to The New Sincerity. Maybe. It's possible that there are young twenty-somethings all over the country who are lovingly crafting that Tampon Turkey centerpiece. But here is the sweatshirt.

Lest you think that this was the half-assed work of a moment, I refer you to the 3D tiny wrapped packages under the felt Christmas tree, which they have decorated with little lightbulbs. My favorite part has to be the cheery and vague "Holidays!" leading up to the pom-pom poinsettias on the shoulder. This thing wants a wider audience. Surrender to its cheeriness. Holidays!

Eating the Pantry

A series of rash pronouncements have been made. The first came Friday night after I got home from a big grocery shopping trip. I was astounded at the food already crammed in our pantry and freezer. I said to Matt and the kids, "What if we just don't buy any more food in August? Like nothing except fresh milk and some produce? Let's see if we can eat what's here for three weeks." Matt was like, "Cool." It had the ring of a bold experiment to him. Laura said, "Is my life going to change in any way?" I said, "No, honey, it won't."

Then this morning, Matt took it upon himself to clean out and reorganize the pantry. I know. I walked right up to him in the kitchen and told him how hot he looked. When he was finished, he sought me out and said, "New rule: everything in the pantry must be visible. Nothing can be hiding behind anything else. I have to be able to see all the labels." I was like, now I'm totally Sleeping with the Enemy and I don't think I can swim that far. And he was all, huh? And I told him about the label thing in the movie and he was like, well maybe that guy wasn't all bad.

So I come out to the kitchen and there's a big array of boxes and pouches of food sitting out on the counter, not in the pantry at all, and I'm like, "What's this?" And Matt says that stuff won't fit into the pantry under the New World Order, and that we have to eat it. Not eat the exact stuff on the counter, not before everything else, but we have to eat some combination of the stuff on the counter and the stuff inside the pantry before we can put anymore in there. If we're eating the pantry, he said, this is how we do it.

Rewind: Last night I had pan-fried a couple of steaks. And they were not very satisfactory. I dunno why. I can grill my way around a steak, and I like them cooked on the stove too. But I didn't have the heavy cream and wine to go the whole steak au poivre route, so I improvised a little, and they wound up tasting kind of minute-steaky. Also maybe because they weren't the cut we usually get. But whatever, we had a lot of steak left over and neither of us was excited about it.

So come evening he says, "How do you feel about this steak?" and I was like, what can we do with it that will totally disguise its unlovely flavor? And we briefly discussed stroganoff, but I realized that that sounded gross too. He seized two packets from the Countertop Gallery of Extra Food, and said, "Let's make these instant mashed potatoes and cover the steak with it." And I was like, "What are those and who bought them?" We wound up making a kind of shepherd's pie affair with the steak cut into tiny pieces, frozen peas, shredded cheese, lots of pepper, and a can of cream of mushroom soup (the foundation of Southern cooking as I have learned it), all topped with the mashed potatoes and baked. It was definitely edible. We agreed that it reminded us of when you're a kid and you mix everything on your plate into one big pile. No doubt I will have a contract for a cookbook soon, so look for that.

As we ate, Matt commented that this was way better than the night two weeks from now when we have to eat the box of instant pad thai. Sweet Lord. Seriously, isn't it like there are food items in your house and you have no idea where they came from?

***

Eating the Pantry continued at nighttime cocktail hour, when Matt suggested we take drinks up to our bedroom while we put away laundry. I know. He looks hotter by the minute. So I said, "But we're out of vodka." Only I kind of wailed it. No matter, we googled the ingredients on hand, and discovered that indeed, tequila, orange juice, and grenadine make a Tequila Sunrise. I've never had one of these before, and sassy molassey, it's good. Tastes like the polícia will be showing up soon.

So that's what's on the menu here. I'll let you know how we go.

Where in the World is Vanuatu?

Vanuatu is an archipelago about 1000 miles east of Australia, which makes it an easy destination for Aussies and New Zealanders. They make up the majority of tourists there, by far, because it's an easy 2-3 hour flight for them. We didn't meet any other Americans during our five day stay, even though I hear that more Americans are visiting ever since "Survivor: Vanuatu" aired in the US. Matt and I knew absolutely nothing about this place before we booked our trip, but now I think it is a really fascinating little corner of the world. Vanuatu has only been an independent nation since the 1980's, and before that it was ruled jointly by the British and the French. That made life really confusing for a hundred years or so, but things seem to be sorted out beautifully now.

That's the capital city, Port Vila, on the main island of Efate. There are something like 80 islands in the archipelago, some of them uninhabited, and only a small handful have any kind of tourist infrastructure. Port Vila is a good-sized town, actually it's really the only town. The locals call everyplace else a "village." We stayed our first two nights at a place on the little island you can see in the harbor up there.

Here's the ferry coming to collect us to take us to the hotel on that island across the way. The boat ran between the resort and the mainland at any hour. You could summon it from the other side by stepping out onto the dock.







This is the Iririki Island Resort. We had a little one-room bungalow that I loved. Following in my tradition of blogging hotel bedscapes, I offer you these. Actually, I loved the decor, and could not get enough of those bed sconce lights (which dimmed, perfect!), and the cute throw pillows everywhere. I believe, if you liked it then you shoulda put a pillow on it. (Except for on the actual bed itself. Odd, no?)

The view from our little porch. At night the sound of the water was lovely.

This was kind of the plush part of the vacation. (The other part, to be shared in a future post, was more like mosquito nets and no ice cubes. I loved that part even more.) But for now, it's mai tais at the Bali Hai pool!

Here's a view back to Port Vila from the pool. This was the "no kids" section of the resort, just for mama and daddy time, don't you know, and it was a relaxing place any time of the day. We sat here and read a lot. We ate ridiculously huge meals in the adjacent restaurant. Like, crepes-set-on-fire at your table ridiculous. One night we came to the pool bar at last call, and sat down by the water until midnight, watching the harbor.

There are newer and bigger resorts in Port Vila, but I loved this location. Watching the water and the boats never got old. The town was just a three-minute ferry ride away, but we felt like we were on our own little Fantasy Island. And here's my Ricardo Montalban.



I'd ordered a beer on this occasion, and the waitress set down the tall fancy drink in front of me instead of Matt, then we corrected her, then we all laughed. He's sipping defiantly in this photo.

Okay, is anyone still scrolling besides my mom? I'll stop now! But there will be more, because we did do stuff besides drink and laze around, I think.

A Tiny Bit Glamorous

I've been meaning to tell a little about the trip I took to San Francisco right before New Year's. It was a great time. If you have kids, you know how important it is to get away from them once in a while, and this trip turned out to be the perfect parenting intermission. I went out there to go to an academic conference and to interview for a job (more on that below). All of that was fine, but I really loved the chance to be with friends and bustle around in the city. There is nothing like gorgeous weather and a good hotel in San Francisco to make you suspect that you are secretly a Queen of the World. (You probably are.)

So, here's Where I Went and What I Drank There:

1) You may recall my tale of how I wound up in first class on the way to California. It was everything I ever dreamed, in the sense that it did not suck like economy class. After I settled into my huge seat, the nice lady brought me a very robust gin-and-tonic. Then, THEN, there were warm nuts. Like, a little ramekin of mixed nuts that had been magically heated.

Yum. So that's what's going on up there in first class, besides the free booze. Warm nuts, y'all.

2) My dear friend Erika and I roomed together at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. When I checked in, the clerk told me that we'd scored an upgrade on our room. It was my day for upgrades. Lucky duck!

A total dump, right? Yeah, it was beautiful. It's the kind of place I could never stay in without special conference rates.That brick-looking facade on the left is a huge gingerbread archway, which made the lobby smell wonderful. It would be so great to take the kids to a good, big city hotel at Christmas sometime, I thought. Here was the view from our floor.

Turns out the UN charter was written here, and Orson Welles ran into William Randolph Hearst in a elevator after making Citizen Kane (awkward!), and all the presidents have stayed here, and several cocktails were imbibed by me here. Off the lobby there was a very pretty tea room/bar where they made a delicious pomegranite and cucumber mojito. I didn't think those things went together, but now I'm a believer.
Totally worth the $12. I think I wound up in this bar three separate times. But it's all in the name of professionalization, right?

3) My interview was in a corner suite at the Fairmont. The search committee's view was truly jaw-dropping. They could see Alcatraz, Coit Tower, and the bay bridge. (I didn't think it would be appropriate to pull out my camera and take pictures though.) So it went fine, but not a slam-dunk. There were three interviewers, and they were very nice and said some complimentary things about my work, and asked a lot of questions. I think I said everything I wanted to say, but I didn't sound all that sharp to myself. Still haven't heard anything from them about the next phase, which is probably not good news at this point. But as my advisor keeps telling me, it was really good to get a conference interview at this stage in my work. Definitely a good learning experience, and I'm at peace about it. A successful first go-round on the market. And I looked cute, which is of course what really counts. I wore a tan suit from Banana Republic with a top that looks like this, only it was silk instead of poplin. (That is not me in the picture. It is a poor headless model.)

What I drank: Ice water, which was free. And when we were saying goodbye, one of the professors said, "Thanks for walking up the hill." And I said, "I'm on the 21st floor, so I just had to come down the shaft." Then I thought, "That sounded dirty." Whatever, y'all! I threw a handful of warm nuts at them and fled.

4) One night I went out with David, Michael, Veronica, and her fiancé Patrick. They took me to Ti Couz, a Breton crêperie in the Mission. Fun and delicious. Leave it to San Francisco to have not just French restaurants, but an authentically Breton one.

And there they had a cocktail which I think was just called the "Ti Couz," which had I-know-not-what inside of it, except I do remember a lot of berries. Veronica should be able to tell us, because she had two. I also can't remember what that set me back, except it was less than $12. I only had one drink because I was saving all my love for the banana and nutella dessert crêpe.

5) Then late that same night, we went up to the Top of the Mark, the top floor of the Mark Hopkins hotel, which is next to the Fairmont. It's kind of a San Francisco institution, I guess. It was too dark to take pictures of our party, but here are some more glamorous and better-hatted people from different eras.

I love the kind of tourism that consists of sitting in a beautiful location and talking with good friends. As my sister-in-law Kate says, you feel like you're doing something even if you're just lounging and holding a drink. I had a Hendrix gin martini with cucumber. It was $12, which seems to be the going rate. And because I know you want every detail, I wore this silk top, in emerald green, with a little black jacket.

I looked better, because I had a head. (A lot of my weekend wardrobe wound up being Banana Republic, because of some last-minute stress shopping coupled with after-Christmas sales.) Also, I wore kind of a lot of eyeliner. Dramatic eyeliner, not whorish eyeliner. Here's hoping.

So I also went to some great panels and learned stuff. You know how it goes. But mainly it was just a great time to see friends I love, and to feel renewed by a beautiful city. By my last morning there, I could feel that the invisible rubber band that joins me to my house and family had stretched to its maximum, and I was ready to snap back into place. But boy, I loved being there. Attention fellow moms! You've got to get away by yourself, even if just for a night. Go stay with a friend. Anything. If you know me, you know I preach this all the time.

In other news, Matt's LASIK went well, he's convalescing, it will not stop raining, and we're watching North By Northwest on PBS. I hope y'all having a great weekend. Here's to lots of warm nuts for everyone.

Election Night Mixology

Friends, spirits are high tonight at my house. And maybe I've had too many cocktails, 'cause it looks like Anderson Cooper is interviewing a hologram? Whatever. Matt and I are drinking mudslides, but we're calling 'em Landslides:

1 oz. vodka
1 oz. Kahlua
1 oz. Bailey's Irish Cream
1 oz. milk (the usual cream is too much for me)

Shake with ice, pour over ice, and enjoy while waiting for Obama's speech. And God bless America.

I Am a Lot Like Thomas Edison

The Thomas Edison of mixology, that is. In the Suburban Matron tradition of sharing my cocktail inventions with you, I give you the Briar Patch. (The Briar Patch is my parents’ nickname for their mountain house, where this drink was born.)

It’s still summer, but you’re sick of G&T’s. Check into the Briar Patch:

One shot of vodka over ice
The juice of half a lime—a few bits of pulp would be good too
Shake gently
Pour in a little Coke (or Diet Coke for the skinny version); as much Coke as you like.

Now drink while sitting under the stars. Or while watching a hummingbird. Or in the hot tub with your sweetie. Or just waiting for your pasta water to boil. I’ve tested it in all these situations with good results—it may have other applications as well. Further research is needed.

To your health!

Cue the World's Tiniest Violin

Due to some fiscal reprioritization around here, we decided to stop paying for a housecleaner. For almost two years, Bobbi has come every two weeks. She would start at the very back of the upstairs, and clean her way down the stairs and eventually out the door. She straightened, changed beds, dusted, vacuumed the carpets, cleaned the bathrooms, damp-mopped the wood floors, and cleaned the kitchen. This started out costing $65 a visit and then moved up to $75. She was also interesting company and I liked chatting with her. She always did a good job—though perhaps not an A+ white glove job—and I was happy. A lot of this relationship, I realized, involves non-cleaning issues like personality and compatibility. We were a great fit in those respects. I know because for a couple of months before I found Bobbi, I used a friend/protégé of Frenemy Neighbor, and this lady would stay for six hours, giving me childrearing advice and trying to sell me the Amway products she was using. No, no, no.

It isn’t that I never had to lift a finger, of course. Two weeks is a long time in a house with little kids. There’s always something to do. I never did deep cleaning of the bathrooms, though, and I only spot cleaned the floors—I didn’t mop. To me, those are the two big jobs that she took off my hands. A major thing for me, too, is that having someone else clean the house is intensely pleasurable. It just is. I’ve heard people say that having another person working in their house, doing chores that they themselves could do, makes them uncomfortable. Not me. When Bobbie was ready to do the floors downstairs, Hank and I would go upstairs to play in the freshly cleaned and fluffed bedrooms. I would sit in my room and drink coffee, listening to her bustling around downstairs, and feel total happiness and serenity. So even though we’ve decided that that our $75 every two weeks has more urgent uses, I am really going to miss that feeling.

Matt and I agreed we needed to cut this expense, and I was trying to be a big girl about it. I said that I would rather have Bobbi than cable TV or a cell phone. Or electricity. So Matt said to make a list of everything Bobbi does, and we would build a routine where we each do half of it. Last night, we made the first big push. Today is the first Bobbi day that we’ve missed, so some chores on the list had come due. We might need to work on our scheduling a bit, because we didn’t start until after we’d put the kids to bed AND put in a little time on our own projects. So it was about 11pm. I cleaned all three bathrooms and mopped the bathroom floors. Matt did a deep kitchen cleaning, cleaned the cabinets, corralled toys, straightened the living areas, and vacuumed all the carpet and hardwood downstairs. It got too late to damp-mop, so he’ll do that tonight. I must say that we did a better job than Bobbi does. And it was actually kind of fun. While I was working upstairs, I could hear Matt blasting some techie podcast (he calls it his Nerd Radio) while he worked, and that made me feel happy and serene too, to not be tackling everything alone.

Plus, I invented a cocktail. I’m not sure what to call it, maybe the Tidy Up? At around 1:30 in the morning, we were wrapping up, and I realized we were out of both vodka, for cosmos, and tonic water, for G&T’s. So I improvised:

Over ice, pour some gin, a few fingers.
Add a dab of triple sec, then add another dab.
One squirt of lemon juice.
All the lime juice you can muster.

Shake gently, and drink standing at the sink. Tastes like a new tradition!