Author Archives: metamegan

The Unofficial Start of Summer

If there is one thing I love in life, it’s to turn over a new leaf. Or, I should say, I like to read about how to turn over a new leaf. 12 weeks to be bikini ready, or a 3 day cleanse, or basically every month of O magazine. But something always gets in the way of completion of my self improvement. (The main thing that gets in the way of completion is that I do not start.) For example, Dr. Oz’s 3 day cleanse lost me at sauerkraut. The most recent thing I read was the Jerry Seinfeld productivity method. The gist is, you get a giant calendar, and you do your thing (for example, exercise, or writing, or flossing your teeth, or meditating) and after you do your thing that day, you put an X on the calendar. After you have a string of Xs, you don’t want to break the chain. Then once you are doing something every day, yea for you! I printed a thing that just had squares that started at 1 and ended at 365, and I told myself I could put an X through the day if I did one of three things.

1.) wrote a blog post
2.) worked on my book
3.) did a writing exercise from a book that I have.

I lasted around 16 days straight before I missed a day, and then another day, and then the next thing I knew, there was no way I could figure out where I was because the dates weren’t on the calendar, and if I started on March 3rd, then I’d have to add 3 days to whatever day it was, and let’s just forget the whole thing.

But it’s a Monday, and it’s the unofficial start of summer, which is a perfect time for starting or restarting a project so here I am.

And where am I? Sitting on the patio, thinking of the potential unofficial drink of the summer. Remember when I discovered Hendrick’s gin? Then, last summer or so, I had a few gin drinks with my good friend, and I asked for the recipe at least thrice, and all that I remember from it was “gin” and “cucumber dry soda.” Alas, more ingredients than that=too complicated. Hendrick’s is sometimes recommended to be garnished with cucumber, so I had a brainstorm a few days ago that Hendrick’s and Cucumber Dry Soda could be the drink of the summer. But I only like to buy Hendrick’s on sale, and the Memorial Day ads led me to believe that no sales were imminent. Also, I hadn’t seen Dry Soda anywhere, but their website led me to believe it was at Whole Foods and King Soopers. I struck out at Whole Foods, and King Soopers, and was very sad and frustrated. Summer is supposed to be relaxing and carefree. Had I picked the wrong potential drink of the summer? Maybe it wasn’t meant to be? But if it wasn’t meant to be, then why did I keep thinking about it? Well, last night around 5:00 pm, I called King Soopers and yes, in fact, they do stock Dry Soda, and it’s on the top shelf of aisle 4. By the time I got off hold and had my answer though, it was 5:49 and the liquor store closes at 6:00. I pedaled so fast, I was just a blur on a cruiser bike. I stopped only when I was in the gin section and I took some heaving breaths and thought at first that they didn’t carry Hendrick’s. Turns out there was one bottle left, but I couldn’t reach it. Yes, top shelf liquor. So top of the shelf, that I, and adult woman, was not capable of reaching it. I must have looked forlorn, and possibly dangerous, like the type of person who was considering climbing the shelves, because someone asked if I needed help. I did, in fact, need help. And before I knew it, I was on my way to King Soopers with Hendrick’s in my backpack. (AND IT WAS ON SALE!) And of course, the reason I couldn’t find the Dry Soda at King Soopers the first time I was there, was that they were on the very top shelf, where I couldn’t see or reach them, in the “healthy” drink section. Once I had gotten to the coconut water I guess I gave up. So I found the Dry Soda, angels were singing, the sun was shining a beam straight down onto me, harp music was playing, until there was a giant scratch of the record and all my dreams came crashing down to earth. There are 7 flavors of Dry Soda, and King soopers stocked 3 of them. Note, cucumber was not one of the three stocked flavors. Curses were uttered. I just bought the darn blood orange dry soda, and a cucumber, and I made a drink with Hendrick’s and blood orange Dry Soda over ice, and garnished it with some cucumber slices.

It was the most anti-climatic delicious cocktail I have ever had.

Rhetorical Questions about Caramel

I’d like to take a time machine back to Saturday at the farmer’s market when I said, “Oh hey! We should get together because I am going to make caramel and I am sure I will have way too much, because seriously how much caramel can you eat? Anyway, I should give you some caramel, because, what am I going to do with all that caramel?”

I mean how much caramel can you eat? And what is it good on besides ice cream? Well, so far I have come up with: coffee, oatmeal, spoons. But that was just as of this morning.

If I could prevent myself from saying that, I wouldn’t be so embarrassed about my sink full of spoons. See, the thing is, I don’t like to double dip. And I am pretty lazy about putting dishes in the dish washer. So there we are. Turns out, caramel doesn’t last that long.

Related: I am taking a cooking class. Everyone wants to know how it’s going so I should probably put some thoughts together. The day after the first class I said to Dave, “Is it OK if I start every sentence from now on with, “Chef Michael says…” and then sort of trail off and stare dreamily into space?”

He said it was fine.

A Long Time Coming

When I found out that we needed to be at a baseball tournament at 7:15 this morning, I suddenly felt so sorry for my parents and all the early Saturdays they went through for me. When I shared my feelings with my mom she said, “Well, that was a long time coming!”

This is a picture if Jack and I this morning – it was windy and 35. Jack is hidden under the sleeping bag that we luckily had in the car.

It warmed up quite a bit though – Here is Jack a mere 6 hours later. He’s still not interested in posing.

Dave and I both brought a sweatshirt and a jacket for Jack and he wore all 4 layers.

427

This post is about 420, but since it’s a week late, I am calling it 427. I live in Boulder, and last year 10,000 people gathered on campus to smoke marijuana at 4:20 pm on April 20th. This year, the police and school closed the campus to all but students, checked ids, rode around on motorcycles, blocked every intersection and got the crowd down from 10,000 to 300.

And guess what else? I was required to take a drug test sometime between 4/20 and 4/24. I love irony, and I hate waiting in lines, so I went to the lab on 4/20. The boys were both home that day and they had been fighting, so I made them come with me, as a form of discipline. Those boys hate to run errands. But they are naturally curious, so they wanted to know what was going to happen. I said, “You’ll sit in the lobby while I pee in a cup in the bathroom.” BORING! So I thought a little harder and I said, “Well, actually I don’t know. Maybe they’ll take some of my blood to study, or some of my hair, or scrape the inside of my check, or put me in an interrogation room with really bright lights and give me a lie detector test.”

Then I shrugged and said, “Who knows?”

Jack has said he wants to be a scientist who works in a lab, or a doctor, or make movies, or write stories, so he was excited to go to the lab. We walked in, and the guy asked for my paperwork, which I did not bring because I had all the info on my fancy phone. This caused a lot of eye rolling and scowling to happen, while I read 8 numbers out loud instead of killing a tree so the guy at the lab could read 8 numbers off a piece of paper.

Next, I left the boys in the lobby and went into a room a few feet away. This room had one of those chairs that you sit in to have blood drawn, and needles, and vials, and a bright light, but no lie detector test. I started to wonder if I was going to have my blood drawn after all, and I was also wondering if the boys would be interested in seeing such an event, or if that would scar them for life, and also, was it a good idea to leave them in an empty waiting room that at any moment could be full of suspected drug users such as myself? (Note, my drug test was a work requirement, not some sort of court ordered thing.)

So I said, as the guy with the elaborate neck tattoo was snapping on some rubber gloves, “Oh! Am I going to have blood drawn?”

And he sneered, “No, but I am not touching your URINE.”

And that is when the experience of having to pee in a cup became really awkward.

I think I just stood there, stunned, for several moments, with my mouth hanging open. I didn’t bother to explain that I wasn’t asking about the blood because of the gloves, but because I had worked my imagination into a frenzy. Plus the first thing that came to mind to say was, “I was just asking because I thought my kids might want to see how blood is drawn.” Because, I realized, that sounds crazy.

Then he handed me the jar and said, “The bathroom doesn’t work, so head to the one at the end of that long hallway.”

I walked past the kids with my jar, and past a lot of offices with big windows that looked out into the hallway, and then I walked back with my jar full of pee. And I was a little sad that my ironic story of the 420 drug test became the embarrassing story of a sneering lab technician that assumed I thought my pee was worthy of being touched by his bare hands.

Baseball Mom, Baseball Pants

Upfront Disclaimer: I have no complaints about doing laundry in general. Dave and I have a pretty egalitarian marriage, in which I completely do not feel that I do all the chores, or more than 50% of the chores. So I am having a hard time with this blog post because I want it to be about how annoying it is that laundry detergent commercials are targeted to women, and how annoyed I was that all the information about the laundering of baseball pants was directed at me. But in real life I do the laundry. And Dave wasn’t even at the baseball meeting where they talked about the pants.

So what is going on with me? I am writing a blog post about how I feel about writing a blog post about laundry. Meta-MetaMegan.

Let’s start at the beginning. I have always been annoyed at the way laundry, and cleaning products in general are marketed towards women. Like waaaay back when I could first articulate a thought it was, “Why does the TV woman have to do all the laundry and cleaning?” I was going to explain the whole thing – but come on. Who doesn’t think those commercials with the one dimensional mom whose emotional life ranges from mock-exasperation-at-her-family-of-stain-generating-knuckleheads to pure-joy-at-the-removal-of-a-stain? Plus, it’s already been done, and better than I could do.

So here we are. I married a great chore-doing husband, my life is perfect, I only watch TV on netflix and the DVR so I don’t even see commercials anymore. In fact, when I tried to find an image for this post, all I could find were scary pictures of some man with oxyclean. And yet. And yet…

When Luke was ordering his baseball uniform, I was giving a very long, very intense lesson on the laundering of the white baseball pants. My eyes glazed over, I went to another place in my mind where I am someone other than “baseball mom in charge of laundry” and I contemplated responding with, “Um yeah. Thanks. Laundry isn’t really my “thing” if you know what I mean. I have a very challenging job, I read, I sometimes write.” And, “Why are you telling all this to me?” (Reminder:Dave wasn’t there.) Instead, I mumbled “Oxyclean? Got it. Your wife drip dries the jersey? Good to know.” Then I proceeded to joke about the laundering of baseball pants for a month, and laughed and laughed about it. And by that I mean, I became obsessed with whether or not I would win at getting the pants as white as possible.

At some point during all this, Luke tried on his entire uniform several times and was unable to stop smiling the entire time he wore it. Dave mentioned that maybe the pressure to maintain the baseball pants came not from other moms, but from the kids. Laundry obsession went up to 11.

Game time came this past weekend and I made Luke hand me his pants as soon as we walked into the house. I rinsed in the sink, then made a paste of oxyclean and put it on the stain. Then I started making dinner (more women’s work! Disclaimer – I love cooking, and Dave does more than I do, and he does the grocery shopping.) Then I googled “white baseball pants” and read a million things about what to do to get the stains out: rust cleaner, carpet cleaner, dish soap, zout, oxyclean, some purple thing, bleach, etc.” For every blog comment about what worked, there was one that said, “that didn’t work at all for me.” And every once in a while someone would say, “The kids want their pants to look dirty!” Big relaxed sigh. Then Luke popped his head in to see if I had any luck getting the stains out. Wash, rinse, repeat! I decided to forget everything I read online and just go with what I had been told in baseball pants meeting. Oxyclean. I may have thrown in some Palmolive for good measure. I may have started to hallucinate from the fumes. I may have reached some sort of inner peace, but that is only because I try to turn chores that I don’t want to do into opportunities for meditation. I read a lot of magazines, and according to Oprah and Real Simple, I need to be meditating, and I like to multi-task.

The only instruction I didn’t follow was to soak the pants overnight in oxyclean. And that is because our bathtub doesn’t hold water for that long because the drain won’t stay closed, and all the other sinks are required for hand washing or cooking, and I can’t figure out how to soak something in the front load washer.

Long story short, the pants are perfect. Me on the other hand? I am a mess, but I win at white baseball pants. This week at least.

I don’t think that word means what you think it means

Jack and I were shopping at Costco this weekend and as usual, I looked at the dog beds. As usual they were too big and too ugly. I said, “I wish the dog beds here weren’t so fat and ugly.”

Jack was appalled at my language. “It is NOT NICE to say FAT and UGLY.” I told Jack that I was not talking about a person, and that the dog beds knew they were big and ugly, because I mention it every time I look at them.

Still fuming, I heard him muttering to himself. “Not nice, mumble mumble. When you SAY THAT it makes me think you are… no I am not allowed to say that.. mumble mumble.” Then he looked up at me and said, “You are STUPENDOUS.”

I said, “Aww, Jack, you are such a sweet boy.”

He looked surprised.

I’ve Still Got It

So I was sitting at the Southern Sun today, reading my Martha Stewart Living, and waiting for my family to arrive, and I ordered a beer. I was so happy that the Jah Mon Ginger reappeared on the menu, and Martha had her newest egg decorating tips, and I had ridden my bike to the sun without falling on a patch of ice, and I just sighed and thought “Spring is almost here.”

And then I was carded.

And for one brief second life really was perfect.

And then I thought, “Why would they card someone who is here with her family at least once a week, if not more, for the past 6 years. Am I, as I have feared in the past, invisible? Is it because Dave is the friendly one?”

And then I thought again. “I’ve still got it.”

Spring is in the Air

I signed up for a CSA this year, I am going to hire some landscaping help for the yard, and I planted some seeds yesterday in a little teacup. Two years ago, I had a very bad spring, and since then the garden has been in decline, and I am happy that this spring will be full of life.

The seeds on the windowsill are in the vintage teacup planter kit that I got when I donated to a very cool kickstarter project by domestic-construction.

Jack: Why is that teacup over there?
Me: I think the seeds will germinate best on the windowsill.
Jack: You are growing seeds in a teacup?
Dave: You know what germinate means?
Me: Do you know the word “germinate” or did you get it from the context of the sentence?
Jack: I looked it up on my computer.

For the record, Jack’s computer is just a keyboard with the cord cut off. It’s not connected to anything.

The Pancake Story

You know when you volunteer to bring in food for a class party and you get there, and there is a ton of food and you know the kids are just going to take a bunch, eat some, and then a lot of it is going to go to waste? And then you think, “ugh. What a waste. And who brought donuts? And can I silently judge that person and eat one of the donuts at the same time?” Then there all these moms standing around, and you know there is work to be done, but you can’t quite figure out what you are supposed to do? Or all the easy jobs are taken and you don’t want to do the hard or complicated or boring ones? NO? Is it just me?

~~Big redacted section on the reason for this particular breakfast and why I thought the idea wasn’t that great and why I volunteered to make whole wheat pancakes.~~

I volunteered to bring in pancakes for a class breakfast. And in my mind, I was one of many parents who would be bringing in pancakes or something. I didn’t write down the date of the breakfast for some reason, so I was glad and horrified when I got the email saying to be at school on a certain day at 7:45am to start cooking so all the food would be ready for 60 kids by 8:05. (Side note – there was one other mom cooking pancakes that day.) Between when I volunteered and when the day arrived, I found out I would have work to do between 8:00 and 8:30, so I asked if I needed to stay and help, which I am sure was expected, but I thought I could shirk it because there would be so so so many other volunteers, but at least I was planning ahead when I said, “I am going to make the pancakes at home, and how long exactly do I need to stay and help because Mondays are crazy at work…?” I didn’t hear back.

Now, I would never complain about Dave, especially on my blog, so this next section is really about me, and how awesome I have become after 14.5 short years of marriage.

I tried to pawn the pancake helping duties off on Dave. There was a miscommunication.

Monday morning, we had this conversation:

Me: Here are 80 pancakes. I don’t know how long you’ll have to stay and help out.

Dave: I don’t have time to stay and help out. I have to work.

Me: But when we talked about it, I said, “I have to work Monday morning. I can’t help out with the breakfast.” And you said, “Why don’t you let me handle everything?”

Dave: Yeah. That’s what I said. And then I said I was sure I could drop off the pancakes. And then you said. “Well if all I had to do was drop them off, I could handle that.”

Me: Yeah. That’s what I said.

And scene.

Well actually, then we argued about whether or not he should take a half full bottle of syrup “just in case.”

Then Dave left to drop off 80 pancakes and 2 kids.

I sat at home working. And thinking. I thought about how I was extremely worried about how 4 teachers could possibly manage to feed 60 kids pancakes. What if there were no other parents to help? WHO WOULD WIPE DOWN THE TABLES AFTERWARDS? Of course, maybe the tables wouldn’t be sticky if there was no syrup? I started to imagine myself getting really mad at Dave, and then I thought, who cares? A younger MegaMegan could have been angry for weeks about this. But really. Not worth it. I have officially grown as a person. When Dave got home, I found out which moms were there and I txted them my thanks for covering for me. Those moms know what to do at class parties. I probably should buy them each a glass of wine.

So now that I am so mature that I can recover from a miscommunication/argument in less than an hour, the next step is to not be a freak show in the first place. But that would make for pretty boring blog posts.

Missing: One Paddle Attachment

At some point over the holidays, (Christmas – it was a while ago) I read a lot of recipes for foods that contained fresh cranberries. So I bought a bag of cranberries while they were still prominently on display at the grocery store. Then for the next two weeks, on and off, I flipped through my many stacks of magazines looking for the elusive recipes, and I never found them. So I turned to my trusty friend google, and found this recipe for cranberry coffee cake. But yeah, it has to cook for 75 minutes and cool for half an hour. I could never quite figure out when it would be made and eaten. Would I prep it the night before, and then get up really early to bake it so we could eat it for breakfast? Would there ever be a lazy Sunday where I could lounge and bake and have a late brunch? These are the thoughts that assailed and reproached me for over two months every time I opened the crisper to get a vegetable. I pretty much had to stop eating fresh vegetables for a while or else suffer the guilt of the uncooked cranberry coffee cake. Are you starting to wonder how long cranberries last in the refrigerator? Well, I can tell you this: at least 10 weeks. The recipe calls for 2 cups of cranberries, and the bag holds 3 cups, so I just picked out the two cups of non-shriveled one and composted the rest, good or not.

Jack slept in until the late hour of 7:30 this morning, so I got up with him and decided today was the day! And I made him help me, which means he had coffee cake batter as his second breakfast (oatmeal was first) and he’ll be having coffee cake for lunch. Take that childhood obesity epidemic!

Despite Jack’s help, the cooking process was fraught with problems. Well, just one major problem. I couldn’t find the paddle attachment for my kitchen aid mixer and I had to use the handheld mixer like some animal. It was a total nightmare. And by that I mean, I got sort of bored standing there holding the mixer all that time. I blame all the pies I have been baking that do not require the use of my kitchen aid. The last time I needed the paddle attachment must have been when I made my dad’s traditional spice cake with chocolate icing, so who knows where it could be now? (Seriously Mom – did you put the paddle attachment somewhere weird when you were cleaning the kitchen?)

Since the cake had to cook for so long, and lazy, lounging Sundays aren’t really my thing I guess, I managed to do the grocery shopping while the cake was in the oven. I gave Dave instructions, but I also set the timer on my phone, and made it home with plenty of time to spare.

The verdict: The cake is pretty good. It might have been slightly over cooked. A little too buttery for my taste. The cranberries are nicely tart. But I know have a guilt free crisper, and that’s all that really matters.