Month: October 2005

I don’t know if it’s officially Beef Stroganoff Week…my calendar only mentions Columbus Day and Yom Kippur (have an easy fast, everyone). But Sunday I made homemade beef stroganoff. (It was good, but not as good as the last time I made it. I suspect part of the problem was using fat-free beef broth instead of good old American fat-full broth. And the cut of meat, while good, wasn’t the same was the one we used the last time. Shame on us for trying to cut fat and expense from our meal!)

Then Monday, the hot entree in our cafeteria was beef stroganoff. And Mr. Dump just emailed me to say that it was the entree in his cafeteria today. What are the odds? You could literally go months without even thinking about it, and this week it’s being shoved down our throats.

Mr. Dump said his work stroganoff was nasty. So I win the cook-off! Go me!

In honor of the holiday, I will eat foods native to Columbus, Ohio today. I should probably try to figure out why there’s a whole holiday honoring a midwestern city, but hey, who am I to judge? What’s that, you say? It’s not honoring Columbus, Ohio? Well what the hell! Just for that, I’m going to work instead of taking the day off.

Oh all right. I had to go to work anyway. Junior had the day off, and Mr. Dump is staying home with him. Phantom thought that was great, and to show his appreciation, he crapped all over the hearth. Mmmm. Doggie diarrhea on brick. I am thanking God, Allah, Mother Nature and anyone else who wants to be thanked that it wasn’t my job to clean it up.

We also saw the Wallace and Gromit movie on Saturday. Great movie, I loved it. I’d say parts might be a little scary if the kiddies are skittish or younger than 5 or so. Nothing bad happens, but there’s a guy threatening to kill bunnies with a gun, etc. etc. And of course, the scariness of the unseen until they reveal the Wererabbit. So fresh from the glow of seeing this movie, I read with horror that all the Aardman archives were destroyed by fire last night/today. Oh my goodness, that is so completely heartbreaking. Nick Park was wonderfully philosophical about it, I hope that were I in a similar situation, I would be the same way. It’s just sad to think that they lost everything, the entire history of the company, and Wallace and Gromit (all the sets, the characters, the awards, everything). You’ve gotta shake your head when you read that one phone call tells them they had the #1 movie in America over the weekend (our showing, by the way, at the Solomon Pond Mall? Completely sold out), and the next phone call is that they’ve lost everything that was stored in the warehouse that burned. (Let that be a lesson…never keep everything in one place. When I make backups from my computer, I take copies and store them in my drawer at work.)

Anyhoo…time to dip into the Red Cross fund for the Pakistan earthquake victims. Good God, I cannot fathom that amount of death and destruction.

I wish I’d had my camera this morning on the drive in to work. There were two places that I wanted to stop and take a picture. One was of this house with about 15-20 wild turkeys in the front yard. (I think they were wild turkeys. Coulda been turkey buzzards, I suppose. I was going by at a pretty good clip, so I couldn’t stare into their beady little eyes to try to determine what they were.)

The other was of this really huge, nicely shaped maple tree. All green, except for this little clump of maybe 5 or 6 leaves that had turned red. It was just so funny, seeing a big green tree with this spot of red. You know by Monday, when I’m driving by again, there will be more than that one clump. But it looked great and I’m mad at myself for not having the camera. Not that I have a lot of free time in the morning to just pull off the road and start snapping pictures.

Oh, and to celebrate Friday, here’s a recent picture of Phantom. He gets his jingle bells removed in a week and a half…don’t tell him, though, we want it to be a surprise.

Before I forget, the best part of last night’s game happened in my living room, when Junior referred to Tek as “the C Captain.” Okay, so for the rest of the night, we called him the Sea Captain. Cause, you know, he’s the captain and he has the C on his uniform. Get it? Get it? I need a drawing of him piloting a boat of some kind now.

And hats off to Edgah, by the by, for showing up and getting busy. He gets a lot of crap from Red Sox Nation (Hey, Bill, wanna see our RSN card? We paid for it and got it in the mail, dude!) but he was in tip-top shape last night.

I never got that eye of newt, so I never got my brew made and sent out to the Red Sox. Of course, my potion was going to be for pitching, and it turns out that maybe what I needed was a “don’t let the ball roll past you” potion. My bad.

What are the Boston area bloggers going to talk about if the season ends in a night or two? My God, football is only played weekly. Baseball gives us a reason to bitch and moan and scream and cry on an almost daily basis.

I just noticed that my watch was a day late, because there were only 30 days in September. But I’m not complaining…it’s WAY better than my old Timex “let’s show 32 through 39 and 00 as valid dates” watch. This one, a Christmas gift from mom and dad last year, is my first “nice” watch (a Citizen) in probably 20 years. One day off, I can handle.

Juniorism of the week: Well, it happened a few weeks ago, but my sister didn’t tell me about it until we went out for her birthday/girl’s night out on Tuesday. Apparently one evening when they were watching him for us for a couple of house, the Amazing Bob built one of his patented “cooking fires” and the kids were going to do marshmallows. Deb has actually spear thingies she uses, but the kids wanted sticks. Bob told Junior not to head over to a certain area because it was full of poison ivy. Junior’s response, with hand raised in a stop-sign kind of thing: “Don’t worry Uncle Bob, I’m good at science.”

He then proceeded to come back over to the fire with a perfectly useless “stick” that was actually more like a floppy poison ivy vine covered with leaves. Oh ya, he’s good at science. I will note for the jury that the reason I didn’t hear this story until Tuesday was because they didn’t want to say anything and were waiting for me to tell them that he’d “somehow” gotten poison ivy on his hands. Which he never did. It was evasive maneuver #16 – “Don’t tell them you broke the lamp until they notice the lamp is broken…”