My Drug of Choice

One of the constants in my life is that there will always be way too many good books than there is time to read them. After my recent trip to Florida, where I read for 4 days straight, I spent a goodly amount of time trying to figure out how I could retire immediately, so that I could read non-stop for the rest of my life, and still eat and have a roof over my head. All I came up with was divorcing the Mister and finding an already, much richer man to marry instead, or winning the lottery. I'll keep buying tickets, because the first plan is way to energetic for me, plus I'm not sure I will find a rich guy who's willing to hook up with a someone who really doesn't want to talk to him. Besides,I like the Mister.

Anyway, employment notwithstanding, reading is one of my very favorite things of all to do. I'm not sure what people who don't read do with themselves....if you're not reading, what are you doing? Computers and television are fun, I should know, I spend enough time on both of them myself, but you can't just whip out your laptop in line at the passport office to pass the time.

Whether it's on a plane or in a doctor's office or in a line at the bank or during my lunch break, my immediate action is to pull out my book. Because I always have a book on the go. Always. And it's always with me....one of the things I learned from my father is "never leave the house without a book". There are very few times in my life where I've said to myself "man, I should never have brought something to read with me!". And believe me, there have been plenty of times I wish I had some sort of diversion along with me; there was more than a few mind-numbing parties I've attended, and one profoundly boring date I was on, where I wished I had brought along my book.

No matter what trials or tribulations I've encountered in my admittedly blessed life, I've always had reading to take my mind off things, or to remind me that other people in other times had it way, way worse than me...."that husband of mine is really pissing me off, but here's a woman who's husband had her declared insane and committed to an institution so he could steal all her money. Okay then!"

I don't know what I'd do without books. They've taught me and consoled me and entertained me and warned me and enlightened me. I love the idea that I can be inside someone else's head, even someone who's been dead for 200 years. It never ceases to amaze me that someone I've never met can speak to me so vividly and candidly, and sometimes that person isn't even real.

One of my co-workers once said to me "wow, you reading another book? You just read one last week!" Luckily, there will always be another one next week, too.

Colour Me

Every occupation has it's hazards: dentists have problems with their upper backs, waitresses have sore feet and apparenty game keepers have dodgy thumbs. Hairdresser's suffer from stiff shoulders, bunions and lower back problems, and we tend to cut ourselves a LOT. (I always carry band-aids, and a tetnus shot is just part of the routine.) But the real hazard when you are a hairdresser is the relentless and dramatic change in hairstyle....it's impossible to be satisfied with whatever you have for very long, there's always something newer and better and brighter and shinier coming at you all the time.

After 2 years of being having boring brown hair (which initially seemed "so natural" and "more classic", but eventually descended into "so mundane" and "lacking originality") I dyed my hair red and then I blow-dried it straight. I like a change now and again, and I'm used to the schizophrenic nature of my hairstyle, but it seems to have caught everyone else off-guard, and one person even said "you should have warned me", like I had sneezed on her or something.

I've had my hair almost every colour on the spectrum, from my natural dark brown, to blonde, to jet black to red. I've had it short, really short, kind of short and shoulder length. It's normally fairly curly, but I've been known to spend inordinate amounts of time straightening it. (When I was in high school, I think I spent more time getting my hair straight than I ever did on my academics. Probably why I ended up a hairdresser.) I went through a time in the '80s when I had a chunk of hair at the front that was an incandescent fuschia colour. (I had people ask if it was natural. Like that colour naturally occurred in nature anywhere, let alone on a human head.)

When I turned 40, I decided that I had spent enough time and energy colouring my hair, and it was time to let nature take it's course and allow the grey to grow out. In an effort to speed things up, I cut it really short, with the result that I had plenty of people ask if "everything was okay". I went back to colouring it, and mused that perhaps 50 was the age to let nature take it's course.

But for now I am a redhead, and happy enough with it. Until I see something I like better.

A Liver Runs Through It

I have long maintained a policy of "accept all invitations", as well as "try everything once". Usually these work out in a most pleasing manner: Kalamata olives, skiing and marrying the Mister, for example, have all been overwhelmingly positive. (Disney on Ice, roquefort dressing and the "bullet"water slide at Canada's Wonderland, not so much.) In that spirit, I accepted Big Liver Girl's invitation to attend the local fly-fishing society's monthly meeting last night. Just in case you are wondering, it fell into the "glad I did it" category, not the "please put a bullet in my head before I do that again" category.

Big Liver Girl has a place in Quebec, which I love going to very much. Since she and I and a bunch of other ladies from the hood (and I use the term "ladies" loosely, believe me) will be spending a weekend there in late May. Big Liver Girl got it into her head that she wants to take up fly fishing, and I would be the perfect companion for this sojourn. I'm not sure why she chose me, other than she is familiar with the above policy, and I can't help feel that she is taking callous advantage. Anyway, I was certainly game to give it a whirl.

Now, I've been fishing before, but with a rod and lure, which, apparently, is the appallingly low-rent cousin of fly fishing.....the Taco Bell to fly fishing's Cordon Bleu. I realized I had a LOT to learn. (For example, Big Liver Girl told me the cautionary tale of her own folly, mainly, she had mentioned at the last meeting that she planned to eat her catch, which resulted in a hushed and horrified silence, and then a polite change of subject, like she had farted loudly or something.)

Anyway, the talk at last night's meeting was all about common mistakes that even seasoned fishers make, like: know your hatch and mending your mend and watching the rise. It was all very interesting, until I realized that I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. But, since I am such a keen student, I found myself trying to remember it all, and then I would snap out of it and realize that it meant absolutely nothing to me.

Big Liver Girl took the plunge (heh) and and became a member, for only $30 for the year. (She got a patch for her jacket, to boot.) I hope Big Liver Girl can learn the basics and then teach me, because I LOVE the idea of the two of us out in the river in Quebec, casting flies and catching trout, and generally creating a River Runs Through It scenario in which we look fabulous. I'm just not sure I can commit to actually learning the ins and outs of it. We tossed around the idea of hiring a guide, who would show us what to do, and would carry the beer, and maybe do the driving so we wouldn't have to. I also like the idea that I finally will have an excuse to wear hip waders without apology.

All in all, I think I will like fly fishing very much.

Actually, I Could Live On This Alone

When I was a kid, one of the constants in our house was Irish Soda Bread, more commonly known as "brown bread". My parents grew up on the stuff, and so my mother made a couple of loaves every week, and it was just.... always around. There's nothing pretty about brown bread, it's coarse and heavy and plain, but it's also filling and hearty and utterly comforting. I love it, and make it myself regularly.

Of course, my oh-so-sophisticated children will have nothing to do with it, preferring the glamor of Wonder Bread and baguettes, and the Mister isn't much of a bread eater. (I marvel, sometimes, that we managed to ever hit it off at all.) So I end up eating all of it by myself, which is a-okay by me; brown bread with marmalade for breakfast, brown bread with cheese for lunch and brown bread with jam for a snack after dinner with a cup of tea is almost a perfect day, if you ask me.

You can't buy brown bread, you have to make it, which makes it all the more enchanting to me. I've seen recipes for it all gussied up, which is entirely the opposite purpose of brown bread. (I once saw a recipe for "Porcini Mushroom and Apricot Soda Bread"....oh, the humanity.) And I also love it because, from pulling out the big bowl to tossing the whole thing in the oven takes about 15 minutes. Of course, you can take longer to put it together, making it an excellent activity for small children, who can bash the tar out of it and it will still bake up just fine.

Mrs. O'Sullivan's Soda Bread:

3 cups whole wheat flour

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon salt

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1 1/2 cups of milk

Preheat the oven to 400°F, and lightly grease a baking sheet, cake pan, pie pan or whatever you want.

Put everything but the milk into a big bowl, and stir with a whisk. (The recipe actually says to sift all the ingredients, but I just give it an enthusiastic couple of turns with the whisk and it seems to work out just fine.)

Add the milk, stir with a wooden spoon and add whatever additional milk necessary to make a slightly sticky but fairly dry dough. It should come together into a ball.

Knead the dough a few times to make it come together a bit, or untill you can form it into a loaf.

I prefer to bake it on a cookie sheet, sort of "free-form", but my mother puts it in a 8x8" pan, because it looks a little neater. Pat out the dough until it makes a circle roughly 8 or so inches across and an inch or two high, on the cookie sheet. Now, this is the important part: with a bread knife, slash a cross into the top of the bread, about a half an inch deep. (It won't look right without that cross, believe me.)

Bake in a 400° oven for 40 minutes, or until it's nice and brown on the top. When the bread is done, it should sound hollow when you thump on the bottom with your knuckles, the preferred testing method of Irish mammies everywhere.

Amazing Race 14, Ep. 7

Another nice team gone....I was enjoying Mel and Mike very much, and had hoped that they would be in the finale. But they didn't have much of a chance of gaining time after that cabbie debacle, and it was their own fault for not questioning the location of the gorilla more.
Another Rule of The Amazing Race: when everyone else is going in one direction and you are going in the complete opposite, ask around a bit more.

I went from liking all the teams, and not particularly wanting any one team to win, to not liking The Tweedles and The Redheads very much, and now I'm down to wanting Tammy and Victor or Margie and Luke to win.
Damn, the Tweedles constant self-congratulations is wearing very thin, don't you think? And, seriously, if you are so unspeakably superiour to everyone else on this race, is it really necessary to mess with their equipment? Why not just let them fail as nature clearly intended? I think that, in addition to the 30 minute penalty, the people who had to pull the rickshaws with the flat tires should be able to give the Tweedles a good ass-kicking, too. The pretty Thai greeter didn't seem to impressed with them, either.

And after her giggly confessional and subsequent foul treatment of the shopkeeper, Jamie is dead to me. I think he was going slower and messing with her because of the shreiking. I know I would. So, she doesn't like foreign languages and dislikes people? What a surprise this Race must have been!
When Jamie said that she would happily live with animals rather than deal with people, I was all "but....animals don't speak English, do they?"

I wonder what the locals must have thought of all that..."Honey, you're not going to believe what happened at work today! I was standing in front of the shop, minding my own business, when about 4 taxis full of screaming Americans descended on us like a flock of locusts, and waved around a picture of that gorilla statue from the zoo, and shreiked and carried on like lunatics, and then they all took off. It was bizarre."

That whole sneezing in the cab scene by Keisha and Jen had me howling with laughter....I must have replayed that about 10 times. The hilarious sound of the sneezing was bad enough, but when Jen snarked "shut up" I really lost it.

If that tiger handler was banging me around the face with a stick, I'd have bitten off his arm, too.

Favorite Exchange of the Night: Mike: Do you speak any Thai? Mel: Yes: Mai Tai..... That was a pun. Mike: (staring straight ahead) I know." My children and I have this exact conversation all the time.

Another addition onto the List Of Things I Really Don't Ever Want To Do: Have an elephant jiggle my butt fat. (Also on the List: Attend any sort of car racing event, swim under ice, be abducted by aliens, see Paris Hilton ever again.)

If I was Margie, I would consider suffering heat exhaustion and dehydration to be totally worth it if I got to swoon in Phil's arms just once.

Until next week!

And The Card Attached Would Say....

It's been another "treadmill week" here at Chez Loudshoes....I feel like I've been running very hard just to keep up. I've worked almost every night until 6:30 or 7, and there has been very little room for error. ("I can only sign your pizza lunch form if you slip it under the bathroom door.")

On Friday morning I don't have to be at work until 9:30, a precious half-hour later than usual. (But the toilet broke at work just before we left last night, so we had to stop off at the hardware store before we went in, resulting in a precious 15 minutes respite, instead of a half hour.) Usually I spend my time wisely on that morning, namely, logging onto Television Without Pity to see what everyone else thought of last night's "The Office", "30 Rock" and "Grey's Anatomy". Good times. But I cannot bypass checking my e-mail quickly, and also sneaking into Facebook to see if anyone wanted to talk to me since I went to bed 8 hours before.

This morning, as I was quickly skimmed through the status updates (because that is very important) I noticed that Big Liver Girl was kvelding that she had "made wickedly good lunches today" for herself and her four children. I was downcast, because I knew that my lunch today was going to consist of an All-Bran Bar, some past-it's-best-before-date yogurt and a banana deemed "too spotty" for consumption by the rest of my family. (Mostly this situation was due to the fact that I was surfing Facebook at 8 in the morning, instead of getting a better lunch together for myself.) I quickly fired off my own status update, specifically "Mrs. Loudshoes wishes Big Liver Girl had made her lunch today". And then I went off to fling some not-actually-ironed clothes on myself and slap on some makeup to make myself fit for meeting the public at work.

The Mister and I took off for the hardware store on our way to work to pick up the bit for the toilet. (Very important....9 staff, 40 clients, one bathroom. You do the math.)

When we got into work, the receptionist and the rest of the staff were all gathered around the front desk, because Big Liver Girl had dropped off a freshly hand-packed lunch for me. I nearly blacked out with delight. The rest of my co-workers were thrilled, jealous and entirely agog. It was marvelous. And it got even better when I opened the lunch....a mortadella sandwich on homemade bread, some cut-up veggies, an apple and a gingerale. Honestly, I couldn't have been more thrilled if it had been bacon-wrapped scallops and fiery pork.

Because a true friend, your best friend, knows the importance of having a lunch to look forward to. Big Liver Girl....thank you. Really.

Lightbulb Moment.

I was making Hamburger Helper tonight for dinner, which, don't get me started. I can cook almost anything, and I actually LIKE to cook, and what does my family want, crave and swoon over? Hamburger Helper. I dispair.

(When we were in the States last week, we found a sale at the grocery store: Hamburger Helper on for a dollar a box. And if you got 10 boxes, you got the 11th one for free. I refused to get 10, because as far as I was concerned we were careening dangerously into White Trash territory, and 11 boxes of Hamburger Helper was going to cross the line entirely.)

Anyway, I was looking for a large enough frying pan to make it in, one with a lid, because that's what it calls for, and after bashing around in the cupboard for upwards of 10 minutes to see if someone in the family had bought a 12 inch, non-stick skillet with a lid without telling me, it hit me!.....the big soup pot is 12 inches wide, and had a lid....it's a really a big, TALL skillet!! I was beyond thrilled with myself, I tell you. It was like I had discovered cold fusion right there in my own kitchen.
And then I made the Hamburger Helper. Which, believe me, brought me right back down to earth.