A Blustery Weekend - On Friday, Kim (Amya) and I went on a "laundry date" which is a just a cheap way to hang out and socialize with friends you haven't seen in a while. She drove, I had the soap, and we both got our laundry chores done while chattering and catching up for over an hour. We did spend a tiny bit to get hot drinks at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on the corner, plus I splurged on a little apple tart. And we gave in to the stereotype that Californians drive everywhere and cannot handle a little bit of weather, by driving to coffee rather than walk across the shopping center and brave the light rain and wind. (We did at least chide ourselves for doing so, while the East Coast [and most of the country?] was being buried under snow, and part of CA was being buried under mud.) But we had fun chatting and folding (warm! clean!) clothes, and determined we should probably do this every 2-3 months together, so we keep up on each others' lives. Maybe we should find a laundramat near her place, so that I can drive up there next time. You know, share the burden of driving and gas money and all that.

Saturday, I decided I just wanted to stay home and relax. It was cold and blustery, so I snuggled up in a sweater and fuzzy slippers, determined to be productive on my computer. In addition to the work I needed to get done, my house guest gave his try at fixing my old laptop to get it working again. I'd been in the middle of just a standard "wipe the drive clean and reinstall Windows" task about a year and a half ago, when I gave up. I couldn't get the laptop to find the wireless router, and I got frustrated. In the following months, I had replaced both the modem and the router, and never returned to the laptop task. Marcus managed to re-do the Windows reinstall. I found the requisite service pack installation files online and handed those over on a thumb drive. And we both sorted through my dusty notes, over 18 months old. We managed to get the laptop working in general, and only online with a direct ethernet line to the modem. This is NOT a good long-term solution, since the modem resides in my roomie's bedroom, so this work-around requires running a cord through both door frames at the moment. I need to take another hour or more, plug one or the other laptop into the router directly, and see if I can finally solve the problem. Not exciting.

Finally, on to Super Bowl Sunday. My houseguest never found a SuperBowl Party to attend with friends in the area, and my roomie already had plans to be at a different SuperBowl Party. Rather than feel lonely at the prospect of everyone "abandoning me," my guest and I decided to make a small party of it at home. We bought fresh produce at the Farmer's Market, my favorite chips at Trader Joe's, and some cheap staples at the standard grocery store. I made the spinach dip (photo in link), which came out way better than I expected, when I liberally laced it with cayenne pepper. I'm not normally a "hot spices" kind of girl. I lean towards preferences that run sharp, tart, tangy, vinegary, or salty for flavors. But I mixed 16 oz sour cream, a dollop of ranch dressing (because we had no mayo), dried ginger, serveral large dashes of cayenne pepper, almost a tsp of crushed garlic, close to 1/2 tsp white horseradish, a package of Lipton onion soup mix, a veggie boullion cube, about a 1/3 cup of parmasean, and some dijon mustard with a large bunch of spinach (steamed/wilted and drained), 1 large carrot (julienned/slivered and then steamed), and a can of sliced water chessnuts (sliced again into slivers). I carved the medium loaf of sour dough bread, and served it with fresh broccoli and carrots. Round one for superbowl snacks: Excellent! Round two: Classic Lipton onion dip with chips. Round three: Dinner after the game -- turkey kielbasa, onions, red beans, and cajun spices, with white rice. We picked the red-beans-rice combo, in honor of the Saints, before they won. So it was kinda nice to enjoy the meal afterwards, while seeing news clips of Bourbon Street celebrations. We finished up the evening with several episodes of Ace of Cakes and some various shows from Comedy Central.

I actually enjoyed the game (and the commercials) better by reading aloud from various comments on the internet. My favorites were the comments posted on Wil Wheaton's Twitter, although by the end of the night, my Facebook friends and family were chiming in, too. I was less than impressed with the commercials this year: I don't think I'm alone in thinking these were exceptionally boring and/or misognistic this year, right? Ugh. But I did like the appearance of Betty White and Abe Vigoda in the Snicker's commerical, the not-new-but-I'd-never-seen-it Google ad (Search Stories: Parisian Love), and the FloTv: Moments (a history montage to The Who's "My Generation"). But so many of the others were either boring, lame, or beyond offensive, that I was glad to return to my habit of "forward through commercials" after the game was over.

I also managed to edit some photos during the game. Please enjoy some long overdue images from the first "Night at the Inn" fundraiser for the Crimson Spade. There's a ridiculous number of pictures of me (seriously, Raz? You had to take that many pictures of me?). But I was amused to see how many different facial expressions I seem to go through in my songs and stories. I remember really enjoying Elisheva's dance. It was nice to hear Sir Charles of Dublin performing some older works that we don't hear very often anymore. Don Lot entertained us, Lord Gideon sang us a very well-received piece, and Baron Thomas closed out the show with a number of founding pieces from years ago. He had a bit of an interruption in his set, as the local helicopters were drowning out our experience for a while, and there's one photo that captures that moment nicely. Overall, it was a great first show, and I was glad to finish the images after so long.


A Night At The Inn: A Fundraiser (April 2009)
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Today's Blessing That I'm Thankful For: Kim, for being such a good friend