Oh, my stars and garters!

Who wore it best?

Apparently my new Thursday night activity is watching my sister watch "So You Think You Can Dance?"

Drought

It is possible that I am getting tired of spending my Wednesday nights babysitting the sprinklers--we can only water two days a week right now, and I'm damn sure not spending every Saturday night hauling hoses around if I can help it. It's an evil waste to use water on your lawn, I know, but it also makes me feel like a sad and terrible person when I watch our big trees get stressed and die in the heat, so for now, I water. This weather is a slow-motion disaster. I feel a lot worse for the farmers and ranchers, but then I always feel worse for the farmers and ranchers.

Wave

Fans of the metro section know this has been a strange week:

A perfect couple was shot to death over a drug-dealing dispute.

Some guy (probably) killed his mother in her home.

A priest wrecked his car, flipped into a shallow pond, and died. 

Cars reported stolen decades ago are being recovered from the badly depleted lake.

A man threatening suicide closed down MoPac for three hours this afternoon.

And a mom killed her baby in San Antonio this weekend. (I'm warning you, the story is so gruesome I gagged.)

I don't know if the heat is making everyone a little touchy, or if once I start paying attention to these kinds of stories I become more aware of them and try to see patterns where there aren't any. Probably a little bit of both, but at any rate I have this mild horrified fascination with the front page of the Statesman site these days.

Flop

We usually swim laps on Sunday evenings. Today I said, let's go early! We can be sure to get a lane and get it out of the way and go on to do something! Then I listed a just a few of eight thousand potential projects that are not even that hard that we haven't gotten around to yet. Like hang some more pictures, because we've been living in this house for over two years now and it's recently occurred to me it might be nice to have something to break up all those beige walls. Which we swore would not be beige for long, but let's get real, beige they are and beige they will stay, until we sell the house or die of laziness.

So anyway, we managed to leave the house before two p.m., which believe me, is a fairly big deal. We were so excited, and because we had the whole afternoon ahead of us, we could swim as long as we liked.

It turns out we liked to swim for an hour* and then we liked to play around in the deep end for another 30 minutes. It turns out it was 103 this afternoon. It turns out that when we got back from swimming and lunch, we were a little tired. So we put in an episode of Planet Earth and sat down to watch some relaxing nature footage until we got our second wind.

At some point I moved to the floor to get more comfortable. Two hours later I woke up to the Planet Earth theme song. It felt like it had been playing over and over for a long time. And by then there was no more afternoon, and I was disoriented and in a vile mood and had nap breath that in hindsight I should have used to remove the beige paint from the walls. And then all of a sudden it was time to go to the grocery store and give up on everything else.

So that's why I didn't do a goddamn thing today. At least this time I have an excuse. Sort of.

*There are not nearly enough lap lanes in this city, so usually there are a bunch of uberjock swimmers with high-tech gear anxiously going all vulture on the occupied lanes. They look so serious with their silver caps and timers and streamlined little leg floats and swimsuits that weren't designed primarily for sitting around in the shade reading a book and don't ride up inconveniently over their torsos. They make me feel like a huge flailing lane hog and an impediment to their exceptional fitness and maybe even their very reason for existence. I know, whatever, I paid my three bucks too, but it's still intimidating. But today it was early enough that hardly anyone was there and we felt no pressure whatsover to finish up and make room for athletic excellence. Which was marvelous but ultimately turned out to be our undoing.

Cicada

I got jealous watching everyone else post their cicada pictures, but now I have my very own.

Before dinner

After dinner

Welcome to the world, little cicada! Now get out there and make a lot of noise. Like, a whole lot of noise. Constantly. Incessantly. No, please, don't ever stop. We never get tired of your monotonous, metallic chirring. Really. You guys are doing a fantastic job out there.

Heet

I am sitting perfectly still outside at midnight, and I'm sweating like crazy. That's because, I shit you not, the heat index is 96 degrees right now. Midnight! The sun set three and a half hours ago! I know it is boring and rude to complain about the heat, and I know I live in Texas, voluntarily. Gladly, even. But seriously, fuck me. Fuck us all.

I checked out the Planet Earth series from the library this week, and tonight we got to the ice episode. We watched it like porn, moaning bug-eyed on the couch as penguins shivered together and polar bears slumped with hunger on the cold, cold rocks.

Yesterday I booked a ticket to visit Vickie and her family in Rochester, New York, in two weeks, where it was in the 70s today. "Oh! Well! You have a real good time there," Eric said with a trace of uncharacteristic bitterness when I told him what the temperature there was this afternoon. I think I will refrain from drawing the parallel to the female emperor penguins, who have enough sense to spend the winter on the coast loading up on fish while the males huddle miserably inland through blizzard after blizzard with their eggs.

Whetherwoman

How come stupid Fredericksburg always gets all the rain? What have they done lately besides provide the world with tea rooms and gingham-topped jars of peach preserves?

Things I have learned this weekend

Going off the diving board with a hangover is actually insanely fun. Cats make decent pillows until they start licking their junk. Televised drag racing is stupid. It really is never going to rain again.

Unassailable logic

This is maybe not the argument I would have chosen in the middle of the worst drought in a generation.

But hey, they're saying rain this weekend! Maybe.

Eric dictates tonight's post because I am tired!

I don't know. I'm on the spot. I don't know nothing.

It's crap; I work and slave all day, I have to come home and write your post now? Double-u Tee Eff.

You should get Sweetloaf to dictate you a post. If Sweetloaf dictated a post it would go something like this: Green bottleflies are delicious. But they are hard to catch, and I am dumb and lazy. So I ain't eating no damn green bottlefly tonight.

Um...the end?

Sometimes I fear I will never stop secretly being 17.

Since 8:00 this morning I have been trying to be many good things--responsible homeowner, professional lady, understanding friend, engaged citizen, nice wife, happy fun beer girl--and I fear I have done a crummy job at all of them. I'm sure tomorrow will be better.

Out eating

I had a slight, quick cold. I attempted to slay it with kao soi at Madam Mam's new north location yesterday. It sort of worked. The new one is nicely decorated and the food is prepared with a little more care than the campus location. It's on Anderson, across from the Alamo theater. I say go there. Tonight a two-meat barbecue dinner at Mann's finished off the last remnants of my malaise. At least I hope it did. These things have their cycles. Anyway, I say go to Mann's too.

Gentle self indulgence

I just had a weekend where I pretty much didn't do a single thing I didn't want to do. I should try that again sometime. Not that my weekends are usually packed with agony and toil, but you know how it is.

Vegetable parade

I'm rediscovering my love for the pen pad/painter program combination.

Aguas frescas malas

The cucumber drink turned out horrible. Horrible, horrible. Bitter as hell, even after I added extra limes and sugar. At first I thought it was because I hadn't bothered to take out the seeds, but then I thought, well, I eat cucumber seeds all the time and they don't taste like that.

Looks so pretty, tastes so ugly!

I sampled a wedge of cucumber that didn't make it into the blender, and it tasted like poison. I stood there for a few seconds, fully expecting to start tripping or stop breathing. When neither of those things happened, I sighed and dumped the whole pitcher into the sink.

An Oh, My Stars and Garters cooking tip: Before you start making a gigantic batch of something, first make sure the ingredients don't taste like strychnine. I am still convinced this will be a good drink, but next time I have to make sure I don't buy the puke cukes.

Loafy v. Mr. Machine

Sometimes Eric gets presents from his bar patrons.

I never had one of these--they were probably a little before my time anyway--but I very dimly remember coveting a friend's. I also always wanted those cool rubber octopi that conformed their tentacles to the shape of your head. Does anyone remember those, or did I make them up? I'm sure they have all disintegrated by now.

Full

Eric and I made this chicken and pineapple soup tonight because lately I have been obsessed with pineapples and I also happened to have all the herbs in the recipe growing in the backyard right now. It was a bit of a pain to make but turned out really tasty, with that sweet-sour-spicy-salty flavor that always hits me just right. I would use more peppers--we subbed a jalapeno--and less oregano next time, though.

Also, we didn't realize until it was too late that the instructions just sort of peter out and never tell you what to do with the remaining ingredients. We just dumped everything that was left into the broth when we ran out of recipe, and it turned out fine. 

It's dawned on me that it's not going to cool off anytime soon, so it's pointless to avoid things doing things I ordinarily like but make it that much hotter. Stuff like riding bikes, working in the yard, and cooking big meals. Hopefully this realization will make me less cranky, if sweatier. Anyway, I bet the soup would be pretty good cold.

Fizzle

Yep, I pretty much wasted the bonus weekend. I did go to a party, cook, go swimming, and eat sushi with Mr. Eric. I also made pineapple aguas frescas, which are my new favorite drink. Next time I'm going to use cucumbers. Oh, and I bought a kiddie pool for future weekend wasting.

I think I may lack direction or something, but I'm too sun-dazed and swim-weary to think about that now.

Surprise three-day weekend

I don't what what I'm going to do. Make elaborate drinks in bulk for all my friends? Redecorate my bedroom? Sleep the entire time? Invent a time machine? It is a bonus weekend--I was fully prepared to work the entire time--so I am free to spend or waste it as I like.