Month: January 2006

It’s all about lies this week, isn’t it? Arlen Spector lies about receiving Ted Kennedy’s letter, Alito lies about knowing he was a member of CAP at Princeton. (Dude, don’t put anything on your resume that you may not want to come up in the future. And don’t join an organization without at least checking to see if the prime directive is bigoted. Okay?) And then we have my favorite, the fray about James Frey. Oprah’s pal couldn’t sell his book as fiction so he called it non-fiction and made a kazillion dollars.

It occurs to me that there are plenty of things I could say in print that any number of people could probably refute. And if I got a lot of money and fame from saying it, you’d bet they would. If I said that I was once the Mayor of Leominster, I’m sure people would jump up and say something. They’d be wrong, because I was once Mayor of Leominster, but they’d still jump up and down. (See, I won an essay contest to be Mayor for a Day in high school. I was also the chief of police for a day, and the vice principal for a day. Man, I should have entered some REAL essay contests with that track record). But I have the certificate somewhere that says I was mayor, and there is probably some written record at city hall or the high school.

So you need to know that the book I’m writing, the one that you’re all going to buy? It’s going to be non-fiction. But it’s not 100% true and I would never say it was. There will be some fiction in it. I will be proud of that fiction. This is not going to be my biography, because I’m just not that interesting. And apparently, neither was Mr. Frey.

A huge hit! Even Junior had some of the meat, and he said it was great. This is a big complement from my little pasta eater. Mr. Dump said it tasted exactly like his mom’s old recipe, even though it’s not made the same way. Who knew?

I’m looking forward to tonight’s leftovers. Leftovers rock. Not as much as having a crockpot full of hot food waiting for me when I walked through the door last night, let me tell you.

The recipe gathering is going well. Right now I have 10. One of them came from Friend of the Dump Cindy, who says she’s been reading for years even though I have never heard from her before. The nerve!

Okay, so here’s my potroast recipe, for anyone who cares. I’m sure it’s the same as everyone else’s.

Dumptruck Pot Roast
2lb pot roast
1 can low fat/low salt cream of mushroom soup
1 can of beef broth
½ cup red wine
5 or 6 medium potatoes, quartered
carrots (I used the bag of baby carrots)
half an onion, sliced
garlic salt

Put the veggies on the bottom of the crock pot, and put the roast on top of them. Sprinkle meat with garlic salt and add soups and wine. Cook on low 8-10 hours.

Note: You can put the potatoes in halfway through cooking if you want them more “al dente”. I work all day so I don’t have that option. The other “issue” is that the potatoes absorbed the red color from the wine, so they tasted fine but looked odd. If this is a problem, you could use white wine (or no wine) but the “sauce” won’t be as dark.

According to www.disneyworld.com, it’s only 100 days until my vacation. Yes, that’s right, we’re venturing south again this year. Once more, we’ll be a “magical gathering” group. I don’t know if I’m going to have t-shirts made up. I’ll have to talk to the rest of the crew to find out if they’re interested. We did get a lot of attention, though, which is always nice. That’s because our group is called the “Monorail Breakfast Club” and Disney cast members who saw the t-shirt always had a comment. Prince Charming was talking to us at the Princess dinner at the Grand Floridian and said that he knew most everything about his “kingdom” but did not know they served breakfast on the monorail. (They don’t. And you aren’t supposed to eat on it. We called ourselves that after our first planning session, when Mr. Dump said he wanted to stay at one of the monorail hotels (Contemporary) and my dad said he didn’t care where we stayed as long as they had breakfast. Even the people on the phones at Disney got a giggle out of our group name. I think they are tired of people going with “Smith Party” or whatever. If you can’t sprinkle your life with creative, fun stuff, why bother living, really.

This time we’re trying out the Animal Kingdom Lodge. My sister’s family stayed there before and had nothing but good things to say about it. I have been down there enough, and know I’ll be going again, that I really didn’t care where we stayed. My preference was probably the Contemporary, but only because I really adore the convenience of the monorail being right there. But it’s also more expensive, and we’re taking the step-kids this time around, so AKL was slightly more affordable. Sure, we could have stayed offsite or at a lower level hotel, but
a)I didn’t want to and
b)it’s harder to fit 5 in a room at lower level hotels.

So where was I going with this? Oh, right…100 days. That doesn’t seem like a very long time, does it?

Oh, and for the mundane crowd, today I have a pot roast in the crock pot. I’ll let you know how it turns out. (I am gathering crock pot recipes from friends and putting them in a document that I’ll make available on this site. If you have a recipe that you love, preferably one you have modified so that you can really claim it as your own, drop me an email. I’m actually thinking of including these recipes throughout the “book” that I’m putting together, so see, you can be published and that way you’ll buy even more copies of the book. [See Bill?])

If the guy calling WXLO is to be believed, Noah Wylie owns a house in Leominster. I will admit I’m not sure I believe this. Look, I like Leominster. I have lived here almost my whole life (aside from college, I’ve lived briefly in 2 other towns).

But I wouldn’t live here if I could afford to step up to something a little more upscale. So no, I don’t think Mr. Wylie would choose Leominster. Lunenburg even, I would believe. But Leominster?

You mean I haven’t posted anything since Thursday? Shame on me. Well, I can put part of the blame on me trying to be tidy at home. In an effort to make the house presentable so the family could come over to sing Happy Birthday to Junior, I put away my laptop and all it’s various appendages, and I still haven’t taken it back out of the bag. So actually, I had a lovely computer-free weekend, which is shockingly unusual for me. So sorry, I’ll try to never let it happen again.

Yes, Junior is now 8. I resisted the urge to pull out his birth video and force him to listen to my screaming. I did that once (well, we fast forwarded past the bad audio…that’s all there was until he popped out, and by popped I mean “took his sweet time seeing as he was shoulder breech (facing left) and 8 pounds 12 ounces and he didn’t really have a burning urge to exit”) and he was more than a little distraught. Heh.

His “party” this year was for 10 family members to go to the Hibachi grill at Chopsticks in Leominster. MMmmmmmmm. A great time was had by all. And to top it off, a crushing win by the Pats on Saturday night. No wonder I had no need to entertain myself with the computer.

I will be pulling it back out this week, so don’t you fret. I started noodling around again with a book idea. Not a big “On sale everywhere” thing but maybe something a small press would pick up. And each and every one of you who promises to buy a copy will be mentioned by name in the book, just so you’ll have to buy multiple copies so that you can give them to people and say “Look, here is my name in print! I am somebody!” I should be in marketing, don’t you think?