The Big DumpTruck

Holy cow, scary wind! Scary destructive wind! I hope the lack of leaves makes it harder for the wind to blow over a tree in my yard, but I guess I’ll find out when I get home.

We lost power here at work for about 30-40 minutes, so that was exciting. I assume it was wind-related but I suppose someone could have run into a pole. They haven’t actually told us why it was out.

But other than that, it’s 50+ degrees outside and that’s just how I like my January. Junior’s ski lesson last Saturday was postponed because of the weather (i.e. rain and 50 degrees equal slushy foggy conditions that aren’t particularly safe when you have 7 year olds careening down a mountain. Those trees are just hiding in the fog waiting for one of the little buggers to wander by.) Looking ahead, I see we’re due for 50 degrees all week. I’m going to stick my neck out and say that it doesn’t sound good for skiing this coming weekend, but I could be wrong. If today’s rain doesn’t melt everything, that is. It doesn’t look like it’s going below freezing at night, so they won’t be able to make snow either. Tough winter to own a ski resort.

Let’s see, what else do you need to be told? Hmmm. Nope, I’ve got nuthin.

Oh wait, yes I do. New Red Sox blog over in the blogroll. www.redsoxsoul.com Cause you know you can’t wait for spring training.

I love that word – Interweb. It goes in the same mental pile as “waitron.”

In the “well, small world but you already knew that” department, I went to my yahoo home page, upon which I have several feeds and news from various sourses. One of my modules is a list of “Leominster News” via a feed at Topix.net. It’s not the most accurate module, and half the time I can’t figure out why the links are even there, but yet, I leave it. Today there was one and I clicked on it and was surprised to go to a blog. And the blog entry in question refers to a “Christine from Leominster”. And I poked around a little and realized that yes, it’s our Leominster Christine. And to close the loop, I am not writing about the site that wrote about Christine, who is a regular here. Now it will be her turn to write about me, if I’m following this correctly.

You know, just when I started to get over the whole Spears-Federline media frenzy pregnancy, we’re faced with a few more pregnancies that will keep People Magazine in overdrive in 2006. Angelina Jolie. The Tom Cruise Spawn. Gwen Stefani. And now Gwyneth Paltrow is pregnant again. Will our pain and suffering never end? We may as well just face the facts now – the clear winner in this horse race is going to be the Jolie-Pitt pregnancy. You won’t be able to shake a dead sheep without seeing a photo of Angie. The Cruise Spawn won’t get that kind of coverage because Angie is way more interesting to people than Katie or Gwen. Now if it was Tom vs. Brad with a big baby belly, I’d put my money on Tom because everyone likes watching that train wreck. Gwyneth is “been there done that” until she names the baby something odd. Again.

Related to this idiocy is the bigger idiocy of the local paper running a front page story about how local people feel about the Jolie-Pitt thing. Are you kidding me? Are you out of your minds? There is NOTHING ELSE going on in this area that you can write about? I can yammer about it here on my website because I AM NOT A FREAKING NEWSPAPER. That’s it. I am so done with them. Whoever edits that paper should just turn in whatever brain cells are still rattling around.

Where was I going with this? I don’t remember. I’m in a daze ever since reading the news that CMonks met a Danish woman named Trinka playing Blokus and moved to Køgehoffenborg Denmark to live with her and her three stepsisters in a home overrun with mutton but lacking a television set. I have, as he said, broken into a million little pieces. I certainly hope he’s not putting any fiction on his completely non-fiction website. If he says he obtains food by running over sheep with a jeep, who am I to question his honesty. As Oprah would say, that would be much ado about nothing.

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.