Garden Timez!

This time last year I was going crazy with seed starts and pie-in-the-sky backyard planning. By the end of the summer, the most important lesson I'd learned was that I'm not very good at gardening. I'm not very good at homeownership either, but gardening is a bit much for me to stick my head in when I can barely be bothered to mop my kitchen floor on a regular basis. I should never have children.

 

So I have a plan for the summer. It does not really involve me doing a whole lot of work, mostly paying other people to do the work for me, because apparently that's the way I roll (bourgie).

 

Here's what I'm gonna do in my backyard this year:

 

1. Have the fence repaired, the one between my yard and the abandoned foreclosure. Part of it fell down last summer. I'd feel better with the fence back up. Also it will look less like I live in a suburban tenement!

 

2. Level the greenery. Just plow down the whole backyard and start anew. I don't care if I don't have grass for a season. The yard is an effing mess. It was a mistake to let my quasi-permaculturalist ex play garden laboratory back there four years ago, and it was a mistake to not pay decent $$$ to have it restored three years ago. Or two years ago, or last year. I've tried to make the best of it, but I think it's much better if it's just scratched and we call it a do-over. Only one real way to fix it: bonus points if it involves fire.

 

3. Build a raised bed. One. Just for some tomatoes. That is about all I can handle, and chances are still pretty good that the tomatoes will die.

 

4. Plant some herbs in the eensy bed next to my back porch. No mint, because mint goes insane and takes over everything.

 

5. Fix the back door that leads into the basement, so it's functional. I would like to be able to exit and enter through that door, because it leads to my patio! Which is otherwise known as a concrete slab!

 

6. Patio furniture. For the slab!

 

7. Grill. So I can cook outside! On my slab!

 

Clearly I'm ranking these things in order of importance, although maybe plowing the whole motherfucking yard is the actual #1 priority.

 

I'm also getting estimates on a new roof because when I bought the house, the inspector told me 1-2 more years max on the existing roof. It's been almost 4! I can't believe I've been in this house for four years. It feels like a lifetime.

 

OK So I Didn't Like Bridesmaids

Yesterday was International Women's Day! I have to admit I did not know this holiday was a big deal at all, or even existed, but apparently in Eastern Europe they treat it all official and everyone gets off work. Funny, that. I had to work!

 

Anyway, in honor of how awesome women are, I thought I would write up a little rant about Bridesmaids. I finally got around to watching it last weekend. I barely noticed when it was out in theaters, since almost all the hype was about Kristen Wiig and, well, I find her really milquetoast and boring. But once it got nominated for a bunch of awards I thought maybe there was something to it, something really brilliant and deliciously funny and worth spending a couple hours on.

 

Nope!

 

Really, I laughed at pretty much nothing in the movie, which is unusual for me. I liked the scene where Wiig trashes the bridal shower because, really, haven't we all wanted to do that, and also the scene where raccoons eat a cake her character leaves on the doorstep of her knight in shining armor. I can't not laugh at woodland creatures. However, I literally and honestly cringed several times during the bridesmaids' dress shopping scene, and I'm usually not really bothered by...poo jokes. But other than that I mostly rolled my eyes and groaned.

 

First of all, can we talk about Kristin Wiig's character? She's a proverbial failure. No boyfriend! Her cake shop failed so now she yells at people buying engagement rings at the jewelry store because she is so embittered! She lives with awful roommates! She's completely neurotic and exhibits signs of borderline personality disorder!

 

She is pretty much the worst person ever, the friend you would choose to distance yourself from if you knew her in real life, yet we are supposed to empathize with her! Gee it's tough being a single gal in this economy, right girls? In short, she is like almost every single female character in a major Hollywood film. I know a lot of people don't see it this way, but I really think the subtext to Bridesmaids is that she's miserable because she's single and everyone around her is getting OMG married. I think that's the message in almost every romantic comedy out there: you need a man! The moment you meet a man you will stop fucking up and will bathe yourself more frequently! 

 

Ladies, we're supposed to want to get married! When is my wedding! WHERE IS THE RING, HEN. That's the reason she falls in love with the hot cop and in the end, there he is, despite the fact that she was a real jerkface to him! Waiting to save her from herself!

 

I would like to see a movie where, guess what, the main character doesn't give a fuck that she doesn't have a boyfriend because at the end of the day it is really nice to just go home and sit around in your yoga pants eating takeout out of the box and watching whatever you want on television and falling asleep whenever you want. And I say this as someone who is in a very happy and fulfilling relationship! Being single just isn't that bad.

 

But I guess that would be a boring movie to watch because without all the neuroticism and insecurity it's harder to eff up your best friend's wedding shower.

 

Point two: Melissa McCarthy. On the one hand, yeah, it's cool to see a woman play a character who doesn't give a shit what other people think about her. It's cool to see a female character who isn't image-obsessed, even though in Hollywood not-image-obsessed means sort of masculine apparently. Despite this, I still had a hard time digging her character, mostly because I was so eye-rolly over everything else in the movie; as the fat girl, she was just the foil for all the silly-girl antics, and we weren't supposed to take her seriously because her character never developed into anything at all. I don't think her role was ground-breaking or completely well-played, either, so I have a hard time understanding where the awards nominations came from. Clearly McCarthy is talented and funny, but there was just nothing compelling about her performance here.

 

If I am to be honest, I'm pretty tired of wedding culture, too. So I mean, yeah, I get the futility of picking out a movie about wedding culture and not expecting to be full of rage and vitriol at the end, but seriously. There's just so much pressure to make everything dreamy and unique when in fact almost every single wedding is the same as the last. Bridesmaids doesn't really hit on this, though; the fancy, over-the-top nonsense is just what you do. That's what weddings are all about!

  

I tweeted* some of my reactions to the movie as I watched it and it seemed people (ladies!) either agreed with my observations, or thought I was taking a fluffy movie way too seriously. Now, I get that Bridesmaids wasn't supposed to be The Second Sex or The Beauty Myth adapted to the big screen. THOSE WOULD BE REALLY BORING MOVIES. It's just good dumb fun, supposedly the ladies' version of the Hangover movies, which incidentally I really liked. Maybe it's because I've trained myself to look out for feminist red flags in movies about women, but I had a really hard time just laughing at the tomfoolery (again because it wasn't super-funny) instead of thinking too hard about the really bad messages the film contains about being a woman -- both in terms of our relationships with men and with other women.

 

And that's the other thing. When I say I really liked the Hangover movies but hated Bridesmaids, am I being sexist? Am I buying into Hitch's argument that women aren't funny? I would argue that women are totally funny, just not in Hollywood, where corporate entertainment keeps them from being anything more than stereotypes or caricatures because that's what sells television shows and movies. There are a lot of women who have the ability to write excellent humor. But the funny women I'm thinking about are writers, not really comedians, and not actresses: Lindy West, Sloane Crosley, Susan Orlean. Amy Sedaris comes to mind -- she does all three.

 

What do you guys think?

 

------

 

*Yeah, I know it's probably highly ironic that my Twitter handle is an abbreviation of Always a Bridesmaid.

Look at this gross thing I made for breakfast

Overnight oats in a jar! 

 

 

 Sorry, there is just no way to make it look appealing.

 

Good old OOIAJ! Beloved by healthy living bloggers the world over! An easy way to use up the dregs of peanut butter at the end of the jar. I figured why not, I had a little peanut butter left and some time to kill on Sunday night, and my breakfast routine has been one whole-grain waffle with a schmear of peanut butter every single morning, so why not try something a little different?

 

I can't remember where I pulled the recipe but here's what I did:

 

1/3 cup oats

1/3 cup milk (the original recipe called for almond milk or something healthy-living-bloggerly. Guess what, I don't drink special milk).

1/3 cup Greek yogurt (plain. I suppose you could also use flavored yogurt too)

sprinkle of cinnamon

peanut butter dregs

 

Combine above ingredients in peanut butter jar, give it a stir, put in fridge overnight.

 

In the morning, top with whatever you like. I chose raisins. You can also use cereal or literally anything that might be hanging out in your cupboards, but anything more than raisins seems like overkill to me.

 

You can warm your oats up in the microwave if you'd like, and even transfer them to a real bowl like the kind adults use, or you can just cold eat them out of the jar like me!

It was actually sort of delicious and turned out to be my breakfast for three days this week. I typically eat my oats after commuting to work so it has about 45 minutes from fridge to office to warm up a bit in my lunch tote. It's not frosty but it's not piping hot either.

Also the work microwave is down a flight of stairs.

 

Thoughts:

 

1. Not visually appealing AT ALL. See above.

 

2. Probably odd to people passing by my office: why is Camilla cold eating out of a jar! At her desk!

BENTO HAPPINESS EXPLOSION FUNTIME

You probably also know my pal Carrie, who writes the Little Big blog and twitters at @exlibris. She is one of the most delightful Internet strangers I have ever had the pleasure to "meet." She is really cool, wickedly funny, an awesome mom to a sweet little girl, a fellow librarian who takes good pictures and has great taste in home decor. To top it all off, she also likes to send things in the mail!

 

I recently won a giveaway on her blog! Carrie was cleaning out her bento collection and decided to turn her decluttering efforts into a blog contest. I entered because, like most people, I generally dig the joy of just winning stuff. However, in this case I was super-psyched because I've kind of wanted a bento kit for a while. I like the idea of making lunches fun and reducing portions by shaping them like frogs' faces or the like. Wheeee!

 

My package arrived in the mail on Monday. Here are the full contents, all splayed out on my kitchen table:

 

 

 

Super. Psyched. I really wasn't expecting so much stuff to be included in the package. Kudos to Carrie for making it extra special.

 

Wee condiment bottles:

 

 

 

Tower o' containers:

 

 

Off to the side? those are Hello Kitty sandwich bags in TWO sizes: regular sandwich and snack-sized! There are also Hello Kitty takeout/grocery bags. That might not be their official names because I can't read Japanese. Not totally sure if I'm going to use these yet. They're so special and cool! What occasion could they possible be used for!

 

Also there was the syringe:

 

 

 

I was perplexed by this item most of all because, uh, Carrie, is this actually for Jupiter's anti-psychotic meds? No! Actually it is for getting condiments like soy sauce into the wee condiment dispensers without incident. Which is brilliant. It never would have occurred to me.

 

My bento has two separate boxes and is red. Here's a closeup of its charming Engrish copyright statement:

 

 

 

LUBE SHEEP. Oh I wonder what kind of hits that is going to bring to this blog! Hello weirdos!

 

Here is Maggie digging into the tray of little things. She was especially interested in the fake grass Carrie sent, which is used to decorate and separate components of the bento. THIS IS FOR ME MAMA.

 

 

I excitedly rinsed things off and packed a lunch for Tuesday. It's not fabulous since it was my first time bento-ing and I didn't have a lot of time to get fancy, but here you go:

 

 

We have a wee bottle of salad dressing; two "turkey rolls," which are really just rolled-up lunch meat; spinach; string cheese; grape tomatoes.

 

On the side, for my late afternoon snack, I packed plain Greek yogurt with raisins. I didn't take a picture of that because yogurt with raisins looks a little gross.

 

All in all, I am really jazzed about making lunch fun again with my new bento and related accoutrements. Thanks, Carrie! Dreams really do come true on The Little Big blog!

Ranting, Rambly Thoughts on Books

Sometimes I get in the mood to listen to podcasts when I run rather than music and my go-to podcast is The Splendid Table, because they don't play it FOR SOME REASON on the Cleveland NPR affiliate. They do on the Kent affiliate, but I always forget about it until the show's almost over. So inconvenient for me.

 

Anyway, a couple weeks ago Lynn's guest was a woman who took a year off writing to become an oyster farmer. And it was kind of an interesting story. You don't hear about, or even think about, oyster farmers every day. The writer's ultimate conclusion was "I am happy enough being a writer, and this life isn't for me, but oyster farming is a very noble profession."

 

Guess what, she wrote a book about her year harvesting oysters! Despite my initial interest in the subject, the whole interview basically got big eyerolls from me because of all the privilege that seemed rolled up in the project, especially after the "lessons learned" segment of the interview. It seems like it was was a very Eat, Pray, Love experience and those navel-gazing types of activities, undertaken by moderately wealthy white women, always, annoy me like whoa.

 

Having not actually read the book, I can't really say for sure whether my thoughts are totally accurate or justified; her on-air descriptions of the life of an oyster farmer were interesting enough, and I'll bet most of the people who do that for a living probably aren't going to have the time or the leisure to write a book, so that's one way to experience their work and their world, without having to take a year off my job to do so. I guess my hang-up is that I don't understand why taking a year to research an industry, a profession, whatever, has to be this personal growth experience. Well, I do, that's what sells books and gets movie deals!

 

I don't have a hard time understanding people who take a year off their "regular" job to do something different, especially writers. If you're reporting or planning on writing a book you have to do field work. But this notion that any kind of activity like "going to work on an oyster farm" or "traveling in Asia because I have some money to spend" has to also have a spiritual, life-affirming meaning is a little over my head. With the former, it's this romance that the upper class has with poverty, or what the working class does. Guess what, I grew up in what you would call a working-class home, and it wasn't fun or romantic! It was a little depressing sometimes, and you're lucky you're making upper-five figures in New York, working from a cushy apartment and worrying about whether that flashy Nanette Lepore skirt will ever go on sale! I'm living in Cleveland worrying about similar and guess what, it's a whole lot better than what my parents were worrying about: how to pay medical bills with no insurance, etc. I'm lucky! So are you! Stop romancing the poor! The end!

 

Now, I also checked out a book from the library called Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the Way We Eat, One Hunt at a Time. The author is a classically trained chef who ventures into hunting in its various forms -- legal and illegal. I thought this was a cool concept for a book because I've always thought killing your own food is destined to become the next thing the food-obsessed will go nutty over. And I think hunting is interesting. I grew up in a family of (male) hunters, and although my dad kind of bowed out of hunting when I was a kid, some of my female cousins went hunting with my uncle on a few occasions. It's interesting to see a woman writing about hunting, even though it's nothing really revolutionary in my mind (although I'll admit none of the women in my family hunt -- it's all the men, so maybe it is really revolutionary). 

 

In some ways Girl Hunter is a riff on the elite-meets-knuckle-dragger tale -- former Wall Streeter, classically trained chef goes out into the wilderness with a bunch of different gun-toting dudes -- but the tone is different. And although clearly there's a sense of elitism at play here, I just can't dislike the message. Maybe I would feel differently about the oyster lady if I read her book, though. 

 

I haven't quite finished Girl Hunter but I recommend it. I really hate that Pioneer Woman and Gluten Free Girl have review blurbs on the back cover, though. Please.

February 2012 Birchbox Haul

This month's contents:

Jouer Luminizing Moisture Tint Dermalogica Daily Microfoliant Eye Rock Designer Liner beautyblender double

A lot of the ladies on one of the makeup boards I read (in order to cheat and find out the box contents ahead of time -- yeah, I'm the worst) were very excited about the beautyblender. Basically it is a little pointy-egg shaped sponge that is supposedly really great for putting on foundation. I don't wear foundation, so although this was a score, I guess, I wasn't totally excited about it. Then I realized the Jouer sample is actually a foundation, so ha ha Birchbox I guess you win this round. However, I discovered the Jouer foundation was not lip gloss after squeezing out a generous portion and trying to smear it on my mouth. I do not read things, you see, like the little card that comes in the box. So I'll try it out with the beautyblender, but I don't see myself buying either full-sized. Unless it makes my skin look amazing.

The eyeliner tattoos are just silly, but I can see their appeal. On the one hand, I do not have the manual dexterity or skill to make intricate designs on my eyelids freehand, but on the other, I rarely have occasion to leave the house looking like Amy Winehouse:

I will play with these for sure (although I probably won't wear them out and about unless they are really awesome) but meh, not something I'm really interested in. Some of the boxes this month included lip tattoos, which is even less appealing to me than eyeliner tattoos.

The microfoliant has potential. It's a powdery exfoliant -- you wash your face, then apply it, then wash it off. I'm always on the lookout for new things to wash my face with, so I'll gladly use this.

The bonus items included a heart-shaped nail file, which is useful, if not a cop-out for a freebie, and a download of a free song by Green River Ordinance. Pretty sure that is not a band I would like, plus OMG BIRCHBOX JUST GIMME PRODUCTS I CAN PUT ON MY FACE.

So clearly, I'm pretty not jazzed by this box, and I think it kind of settles the debate I'd been having over whether to cancel or not. It's been fun getting these boxes each month, but all in all I think I've received more stuff I would never use vs. stuff that actually reels me in. I like the excitement of waiting for the mail to come but honestly, if I purchase something at Sephora every couple months, I'm likely to rack up decent samples of stuff I actually like or am interested in trying, and more often than not things I can actually work into my budget.

What I'll Cook This Week

I'm on a soup kick, so these three are on slate for this week:

15-minute creamy tomato soup and swiss chard and pasta soup (Serious Eats)

A variation on this leek and potato veloute (Honest Cooking)

You might be asking WTF, how are you going to cram all that soup into one week's worth of menus? Well, I'm halving the recipes. Smaller quantities = no burnout. Plus none of these are super-complicated. I'll do the leek and potato on Sunday when I have the most time.

We don't have any real plans for Valentine's Day, so I'm going to suggest we do taco night. I don't think we're doing gifts, but I'm going to bake Hen a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies, because those are his favorite. I should probably also take a treat in to the ladies at work.

If I get ambitious, I'm considering making this dark chocolate mocha tart for V-Day dessert. It really doesn't look that complicated, so why not, right? And I might bake a loaf of bread tomorrow. That would be a nice companion for the soups. Maybe this cheddar peasant boule?

I signed up for Pinterest months and months ago, but kind of got back into it this week. It's very good for saving recipes I like from Google Reader. I star them and save them in the reader, but inevitably forget them because they get lost in a sea of posts about beauty products or blog posts I want to read not-on-my-work-computer. Apparently I get more excited about trying things out when I see pictures, because almost all of these recipes are things I've posted on Pinterest in the past few days.