can't talk; eating

Gluten-free lemon blueberry muffins. Dudes, these are so yummy. I would not lie to you.



Here's some gluten free quinoa spinach stuff. It is also super duper yummy. It's based on this recipe from the Karina's Kitchen blog. I added feta cheese.



Everything's better with good wine.



Tomorrow there will be guacamole and black bean/sweet potato enchiladas.

gettin' german wit' it

I am going to another wine tasting dinner tomorrow, and this time I signed up to make the dessert. I said I'd bring German apple cake, and then this afternoon I got all nostalgic for German plum cake, so I made one of those too. It will be interesting to lug these to the East Bay on BART tomorrow night at rush hour, along with an overnight bag and a bottle of wine.



Did I mention that a couple of months ago we were tasting Portuguese reds, and I ended up volunteering to cook a dish called açorda de camarão for 10 people? In someone else's kitchen, and not having cooked said dish in well over a decade? Luckily it didn't suck.

There is no real point to this post other than maybe to make y'all jealous and/or hungry.

vodka snowclone

Last night James and I were playing the Extreme Engineering drinking game again, and there was an episode about an indoor ski park in Dubai. I swear to god, one guy announced that "Eskimos have 200 words for snow." That is when I decided/realized that if you are a linguist and playing a drinking game--and I don't care what it's based on or what the rules are--if someone says that Eskimos have n words for snow, you must drink an entire drink. In fact, I think that you need to drink an entire drink even if you are not currently playing a drinking game.

I predict I'll be sleeping in tomorrow

James and I have discovered the best drinking game EVAH. It involves watching the Discovery Channel's series Extreme Engineering. Here is an approximation of the rules. Take a drink any time:

1. Something's mass, length, weight, or other physical feature is described in terms of some other (often itself fairly inscrutable) measure, e.g., "X is enough to fill the Roman coliseum TWENTY TIMES," "Y is as heavy as TWO THOUSAND SUVs," "Z is as tall as THIRTY EMPIRE STATE BUILDINGS," "enough cable to reach from San Francisco to Kathmandu EIGHT TIMES," "enough for EVERY MAN, WOMAN, AND CHILD in JAPAN"

2. Someone mentions lasers

3. An imaginary worst case scenario involves a fire in a tunnel

4. Football fields or 747s are used as a measurement unit (subset of rule 1)

5. A painfully awful simile is invoked, e.g., "it grips the earth like Titan's fingers"

6. Anything is described as "the X-est Y in the world," e.g., "the longest tunnel...," "the tallest structure...," "the most advanced test site...," etc. (worth two drinks if they say "in the history of the planet" instead of just "in the world")

7. A painfully awful cliche is invoked, e.g., "the bigger they are, the harder they fall"

8. Someone likens something to a LEGO structure

9. An imaginary worst-case scenario involves an earthquake or a typhoon

10. Cheesy ethnic stereotypes are invoked, e.g., Swedish construction workers referred to eighty times as "Vikings"

11. Someone says "Disaster is averted"

12. An imaginary worst-case scenario involves a last-minute life-saving outcome (worth 2 drinks if they actually refer to this as a "happy ending," and 3 drinks if the "happy ending" involves something being able to proceed through a tunnel).

I'm sure there are more, but I am too fucking drunk to remember right now. The really beautiful and/or scary thing is that you can watch this series via Roku on Netflix, i.e., instant play, one after another, all damn night if you want...or until you run out of alcohol, whichever comes first.

is mah birfday w00t!

It's birthday week here at Casa de Phibetakitten: mine was last Tuesday and James's is this coming Tuesday. James showed up last Monday, and when I got home and saw this hugemongous box in my living room I thought I'd finally gotten that pony I've always wanted:


Turns out it was an iMac 24", which comes in at a very very very very very close second to a pony. Plus, as Jenny Jo pointed out, it's way better than a dead pony in a box. I have to give her that one.


I'm really wondering what James is going to do for Xmas this year, because I am running out of room for Apple products in my home. Maybe I really will finally get a pony!

April is a dangerous month for my pocketbook, because it turns out that I can justify quite a lot of things by telling myself they are "for my birthday." I don't exercise a lot of fiscal restraint during the remaining 11 months of the year as it is, so you can see where this attitude might get me into trouble. My favorite birthday present to me this year is this painting, which I got from a Romanian artist named Andrada Anghel:


It's called "Outer Space Landscape." (Click on the photo to enlarge it and get a better sense of the texture it's got going on.) I love it.

We spent this weekend in Santa Rosa, visiting one of our favorite restaurants (GG's Earth and Surf) and our favorite brew pub (Russian River Brewing Co.) and going on a geeky hike called the Planet Walk in Sugarloaf Ridge state park. I don't have anything particularly funny to report about any of this, but since I refuse to miss an opportunity to use my "inappropriate animals" tag, allow me to present to you two rattlesnakes I noticed hiding out under a bush:


We also saw two ridiculously large wild turkeys running down the trail and making ridiculous noises.

Even though James's birthday isn't till Tuesday, I was unable to resist giving him one of his presents ahead of time. This is handknit sweater #31:





And by that I mean it is #31 for JAMES, not the 31st that I've ever knit. I have no idea what that number would be, but particularly if baby clothes count it is easily in the many hundreds by now. I may need to get a life.

oh baby

It is my sad duty to report that if you want to feel old, there's nothing like discovering that the wee German infant you used to bottle feed and whose diapers you used to change while working as an au pair is now a 20-something college student with a profile on Facebook.


In one of her Facebook photos there are several empty beer bottles on the desk in front of her, and the first thing I thought was, "Well! Isn't she a little young to be drinking beer!?" And then I remembered (a) she is now a couple of years older than I was in the above photo, and (b) there is a glass of beer in front of me in the above photo. And trust me, that wasn't the only beer I am likely to have consumed that day. Hey, we were on vacation, alright? In Denmark. Of course there was beer.

Today I went for a nice long walk through Golden Gate Park down to the ocean, and just as I turned around there was this guy walking his dog heading in the same direction and walking pretty fast. I pulled out ahead of him, but 1/4 mile or more later I realized he was still right on my heels. I started getting upset. I mean, he was just out walking a dog, not decked out all race-walkerish or anything. Did I really suck that much, that a guy out for a stroll WEARING REGULAR PANTS FOR CHRISSAKE could easily keep pace with me?

Then a while later he actually passed me, giving me the chance to realize that he was one of those guys who is like 6'5" tall and three quarters of it is legs. That made me feel a little better, but I was still irritated. Then he turned around and started talking to me.

Guy: I was getting worried there.
Me: About what?
Guy: I thought you were going to be the first person I'd ever met in my life who could outwalk me.

everything except people

Tonight my friend Claudia reminded me of one of the funniest-because-it's-true things that James my robot boyfriend from outer space has ever said, which was "I anthropomorphize everything except people."

Speaking of Claudia, and people, on Friday we went to a champagne party with some of her friends/coworkers who do a monthly wine tasting dinner. I present to you the aftermath:


That might not seem particularly impressive until I tell you that there were only 12 people there, and two of them left early.

wool-gathering

Yesterday Casey said he wasn't going to run my corpus test for me until I posted to the blog, so you may hold him responsible for the following installment.

I mentioned that last weekend I was in upstate New York for a big sheep and wool festival, but mainly it was just an excuse to gather together as many of my MEOW kitties as possible (we managed to get seven, including me, which is exactly half) and sit around and drink wine, gossip, knit, and also drink wine.

Two of those MEOWers currently have infants, so they came along too. (Disclaimer: No children were harmed by drunken knitters during this event.) Henry and Alex are quite the little charmers.




I am a bit afraid of the terror they will start to wreak once they become mobile, however. Alex is already the size of a mini-fridge and clearly on his way to a successful career with the New England Patriots (much to his father's delight). Not that I know anything about baseball.

The thing about fun, hard-drinkin', hard-knittin' chicks after they have babies is...well, see for yourself:


(Update for certain mentally challenged readers anonymous trolls who need to be slapped: the kids were asleep. This thingamajig happened to serve well as a temporary side table. No one was leaving any kids with glasses of wine in front of them. No one was drunk. There's this thing, called hyperbole for comic effect? Look into it.)

The wool festival was beautiful in that it was crisp, cold, clear, and surrounded by fall-colored foliage, as you can see in the previous post's photos. What wasn't so beautiful was the sheer volume of knitters (and spinners and crocheters and felters and weavers and their spouses and their children) who descended on the Dutchess County Fairgrounds in search of lanolin-infused fiber crack. We were clever enough to arrive a little before it officially opened, and to head directly to the booth where they were selling Blue Moon Fiber Arts yarns, in particular their immensely popular hand painted "Socks That Rock" line.

By the time we arrived at their booth you already had to wait your turn a little to access the Wall of Yarn, and by the time we'd chosen our skeins there was not only a long line to shell out a week's hard-earned salary purchase, but also an even longer line just to get to the merchandise.

My friend Tiffany regarded this spectacle with an expression of mild disbelief and said, "It's like the Beatles, but with yarn."

The truth is, you can easily buy Socks That Rock online, but what you can't get online is their special edition "rare gems" colors and their discounted mill ends, of which the MEOW kitties picked up quite a few examples (mixed in with some standard colors):


By noon we were well ready to escape and head back to our lodgings, roll around in our new yarn, and declare that it was 5:00 p.m. somewhere. And so we did.

beer me

James drove up to San Francisco for another extended visit on Thursday, so I met him at Toronado after work. We arrived around 5:30 and settled in at the bar for our usual beers (Russian River Pliny the Elder for me, Russian River Damnation for him), not realizing that we were a mere 30 minutes away from the official unleashing of Oktoberfest. Toronado gets pretty busy on a normal Thursday, so once you toss in gallon-sized beer specials, free bratwurst, and an oompah band you are definitely asking for mayhem.

Looking back, I did find it odd that the woman tending the grill next door at Rosamunde had been wearing Lederhosen when we'd stopped in for a quick vegan sausage to go with our beers. She was talking to two other customers and one of them informed her that she'd recently discovered that Lederhosen actually means "song pants" and not, as she'd previously believed, "leather pants," because (she averred) it turns out Leder actually means "song." Now, usually I am the last person who would butt in on a stranger's conversation, but this piece of linguistic misinformation was so egregious that I found it in myself to set aside my introversion and general contempt for humanity in order to explain that Leder did indeed mean "leather," and that this word had evidently become confused in some poor person's mind with Lieder, which means "songs." To German ears, by the way, these two words sound as different as, say, later and leader do to a native English speaker.

Drinking Russian River beer at Toronado is always a little nostalgic for me, because it reminds me of possibly the most debauched wedding I have ever attended, as well as the ensuing possibly worst hangover I have ever endured. The connection is a little more convoluted than you might think. For one thing, there was no Russian River beer consumed at that wedding; rather, the wedding took place something like 18 years ago at the Cilurzo Winery in Temecula, and the groom was friends with Vinnie Cilurzo, the son of the winemakers (hence the location of the nuptials). Vinnie later got into brewing, and as I understand it he has since evolved into some kind of microbrewing GOD and in 2002 acquired Russian River Brewing Company and the rest is history or whatever. I have always loved Pliny the Elder, although I have to admit it pains me to order it because everyone, including Vinnie himself I believe, pronounces it where Pliny rhymes with "tiny," when actually Pliny should rhyme with "tinny" (and "Vinnie," come to think of it). The beer is so fucking delicious, however, that I am willing to defile the memory of my two years of Latin study under one of my favorite professors of all time in the whole universe just to get my hands on it. (Sorry, Eliot, if you are reading this. If it makes you feel any better I am still a huge fan of the ablative absolute.)

Updated to add--In honor of Oktoberfest I am going to subject you to a picture of me in Bochum, Germany in 1974 wearing a traditional Dirndl dress. That's my dad's dad with me.

for the love of ambien

My "day" today--it is now Saturday approaching midnight in San Francisco--started at 11:00 p.m. yesterday in Bombay (i.e., 10:30 a.m. Friday California time), when George came to pick me up and take me to Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, or as they say in airport code, BOM. My flight on Korean Air was not departing till 3:30 a.m. (I'm sorry, did I say "3:30 a.m.?" I meant THREE THIRTY FUCKING A.M.), but I felt bad making someone hang out later than 11:00 just to come and drive me to the airport. Not bad enough, mind you, to actually volunteer to go find a regular cab in the middle of the night, but bad enough not to insist on being picked up at a more reasonable hour, given the circumstances.

So I hung out for four hours in the understated luxury of BOM, then headed to Seoul, then got on a flight to San Francisco. I must say I prefer going over Asia rather than over Europe. It's shorter, for one thing, and also shorter. Plus it does not take as long, and the distance is not as far. (Someone please slap me for thinking that 25 hours total travel time is "not all that long.")

Did y'all know that the flight attendants for Korean Air are an army of spindly identical toothpicks in pale khaki and light seagreen-blue, down to the freakin' EYE SHADOW? This is not Jackass American over here thinking all Asian women look alike (although I am tempted to say that just to piss off Dan, who is a jerk). This is Jackass American saying that dude, SRSLY, all Korean Air flight attendants look alike. So much so that midway during the Seoul-SFO leg, under the influence of white wine and Ambien, I was for at least 30 seconds convinced that what was, in fact, a severe case of double vision was just two flight attendants going through very similar motions at the same time in the same area.

I was just now looking for an example of the Korean Air flight attendant uniform to show you when I came across an ad I saw in the in-flight magazine that at the time made me think "WTfuckingF?!?" but that I had in the meantime already forgotten to tell you about (see reference to wine and Ambien above). And I am pleased, in my very Western "Um, is this just me?" sort of way, to note that the ad was being discussed on a Korean guy's blog and the point of his commentary was also "WTfuckingF?!":


Please note the caption: "...only dignified service for our dignified guests." Ah, the comments just write themselves. Also, hello. Just about the last place I want to imagine a person hanging out before handing me comestibles is the floor of an airplane.

Anyhoooooo, back to California, which is where I am. Here are some tips for you, dearest readers. First, find yourself a friend who is a member of a snazzy wine club, like maybe Cakebread Cellars. It is helpful if your friend is gorgeous and possibly named Claudia. The most important part, however, is to make sure the friend doesn't really care for white wine, because that means you will regularly receive hostess gifts consisting of ass-kicking bottles of ivory-colored alcoholic goodness, which will then still be waiting for you in your fridge when you get back from, say, India.

Another tip: there is a time to cast on (that's knitting talk) for a brand new pashmina lace wrap, and that time is decidedly NOT at 10:30 p.m. when your day began over 36 hours previously and has involved white wine of varying degrees of quality, three (sub)continents, and multiple doses of Ambien. I will be casting on ::cough:: again tomorrow (the Luna Moth Shawl, for those interested).

more from the geekytown files

OK, if you have not yet had a chance to experience Blu-ray Disc, you have not lived. I don't care if you have summited K-2, fought off Brazilian piranhas with your bare hands while simultaneously wrestling a jaguar, or sat through an entire half hour of Rachel Ray. You. Have. Not. Lived. Tonight I got to see a couple of episodes of the BBC series Planet Earth on Blu-ray disc, and it BLEW MY MIND. For serious, people. Not that photos can adequately capture the fabulousness, but here are a couple:



Those of you who are familiar with my Crazy Shark Phobia will understand how incredible it is that I insisted on having that last sequence played back numerous times. Seriously, this shit makes you gasp things like "OH NO WAY!!" and "THAT IS NOT EVEN REAL!" and "HOW DID THEY DO THAT?!" at approximately four-second intervals. Every water droplet, every striation in the snow on the side of a mountain, every feather on a lunatic bird from New Guinea...it is all there up in your grille like real life on steroids.

And my amazement was not even dampened by half a bottle of Rubicon Estate Captain's Reserve 2004 Chardonnay followed by a lychee martini.


(Which, after this photo, I am going to start calling a "fetus martini.")

The Planet Earth series has the added bonus of being narrated by David Attenborough. Having watched approximately 94 million hours of his earlier series such as Blue Planet, Life of Mammals, Life of Birds, Life in the Freezer, etc., I was able to shout out things such as "Say GLASS-yer! Say GLASS-yer!" when the topic turned to glaciers, and so on. Endless entertainment.

snack attack

I am not a fussy eater. I mean, yes, I try to stay vegan, which means there are a lot of things (namely, any and all animal-derived products) I don’t eat, but it’s not because I am fussy about eating-- it’s because I have made a choice about not eating those things, and the choice has nothing to do with taste, texture, Germanic childhood memories of tongue sausage with gleaming white chunks of fat floating amidst the blood pudding filler (I’m not making this up), etc. That is why it makes me crazy like a drunken David Hasselhoff whenever I see, for the eleventy-gazillionth time, hostile comments from trolls on vegan/vegetarian sites asking why we think it’s perfectly OK to eat mock meat when we are supposed to be all, like, you know, anti-meat and stuff, and isn’t that totally hypocritical or beside the point or whatever? Dear troll: I do not eschew bacon because I think it tastes bad. Everyone knows that bacon is the crispy nectar of the gods, but unfortunately it also involves the extremely unpleasant life and death of a pig, and that is something I am not willing to condone just so I can have a cracklin’ good breakfast. Your ethical mileage may vary, but stop giving me shit about my own choices, and judging me for enjoying tempeh bacon or seitan chicken--because much like that unfortunate pig, you do not have a leg to stand on.

Anyway, so when I say I am not fussy, I mean that if something’s vegan, I will eat it. No “Eww, not green bell peppers!” or “Mushrooms are gross!” and so on. But this country is trying my patience, despite its large vegetarian population. Allow me to introduce to you the four Indian vegetarian food groups:

Plain yogurt
Mysterious green vegetables swimming in oil and spices
Yellow legumes swimming in oil and spices
White rice

Oh, and flour mixed with water and fried, sometimes also referred to as bread. So, five.

Since I can’t take this anymore, and because our kitchen equipment both sucks and blows (what’s that dark fleck? Oh, part of the “non-stick” coating! I guess I shouldn’t actually stir my stir-fry), my daily food intake for the past few weeks has consisted almost exclusively of some combination of the following:

Apples
Toast
Tofu
Peanut Butter
Bananas
Cereal with almond or soy milk
Vodka

There are two kinds of vodka here, by the way: locally produced versions of bottom shelf name brands (Smirnoff, e.g.), and Out of Your Price Range (a.k.a. Drinkable). Misti and I bought a bottle of local citrus Smirnoff last month and put it in the freezer. You know how vodka gets sludgy but not frozen, because of the alcohol content? Well, Indian vodka freezes. Solid. And to make up for the almost nonexistent alcohol content, it tastes like shit.

OK, I haven’t actually been drinking vodka for dinner, mainly for the reasons noted directly above (because otherwise I’d be totally on it). But it added a little pizzazz to the list, didn’t it?

Home in 8 days.

tonic

It's Friday night, we're home in our jammies watching the supremely ridiculous Bollywood movie Dhoom II, and we are drinking kiwi vodka tonics.

Oh yeah.

rugs and alcohol

Dinner tonight with Keri and Stephen:



Mango margaritas and a big bowl of guacamole. Fruit, vegetables, AND tequila?! If anyone out there can think of a better, more nutritious dinner, I'd like to hear about it.

That reminds me--this morning at work a couple of guys, David and John I think, walked by and were listing off types of alcoholic beverages for some reason. "Jaegermeister shots, straight vodka...." I bounced up from my desk and said, "Ooh, are we talking about breakfast?"

My rug finally arrived today from Agra, after a good month. I decided that since most of my time at home is spent sitting barefoot in front of Laura, my desktop computer, I might as well have a luxurious, hand-knotted, squooshy and beautiful merino rug at my feet. Because that, people, is how I roll.

more (different) home

I flew down to San Diego (my home town) for the day yesterday to visit my parents and brother. And I got to see my lovely friend Steph and her equally gorgeous son, Henry.



It wasn't all that long ago that Henry was a wee tiny preemie:



It is cuckoo crazy how brilliantly/quickly he has caught up to and (in Auntie Karen's humble opinion) far surpassed his age cohort.

After visiting Steph and Henry (and Steph's most excellent mom, Beth), my mom and I went to church:



I recently swapped some Visa card points for Macy's gift cards, so, really, we had to go. It was our duty to go. And I got a cute brown and cream retro-ish jacket.

On the plane back to the bay area I had everything a girl could want while hurtling through the air in a steel tube at 500 mph: Tom Waits on the iPod, some sock knitting action, and free vodka.



All in all, an excellent day off.