Rock Girl '13

I would LOVE to be the one to choose which woman gets to represent the local rock station,  103.9 the Bear, as the next "Rock Girl". I skimmed through the contestants this morning, and the majority of them are the quintessential female rocker...from Indiana ("I'm on the look out for my next baby daddy"), or mistakenly submitted their application, thinking they were going to be representing Sunny 101.5. There are far too many bathroom and selfie shots, and although there is a surprisingly minimal amount of duckface (I counted three), one duckface is always too much. I don't want to spot this chick on-line or at a venue and be reminded of why I dislike going to the mall, why I rarely listen to the radio, spark a discussion of balancing substance and appearance. She should be a representative of hard rock; a genre of music that evokes a very strong emotional experience. Granted, she should also be easy on the eyes, but this should not be an absolute requisite. In short, you should want to party with the broad.

Here are my top picks:
#1
#2
#3
#4


(I don't personally know any of those women, and my opinion is based solely on their looks, their typed submissions, and the amount of typos within their submissions.)

One of Gage's first accomplishments in Minecraft: killing all the cows and pigs, and eating their corpses. While doing so, he unknowingly makes the character slow walk, and wants to know what the crap is wrong with the guy (his butt sticks out when he slow-walks). As proof as to how unaccustomed I am to being around virgin ears, I replied "He either has to poop from eating too much, or he's a prossss.." -that's where I realized that the word "prostitute" was probably not yet part of my nephew's vocabulary, and I did not want to be the one credited to that downward spiral.

It has been six months since I last saw my mother. I am not making a practice of counting the days, or plan on holding a candle-light vigil at 10:25am on the 4th of every month; Mom would say that was sweet, but also obsessive, crazy, a waste of time, and then tell me I need to go pluck my eyebrows.

I've heard people say that things get worse as time goes on, and a small part of me expected to start my morning with a huge emotional melt-down that only Chernobyl could rival. That has yet to happen, and I refuse to sit around and wait for it. My sister might label this as being cold and too logical, but I know how to tell when I’m lying to myself-today feels much more like a milestone than anything else. I suppose I might feel differently on December 4th, but I really don’t want to recognize the 4th-whether it be 6, 12, or 24 months since she passed-as one would recognize a holiday or a day of remembrance.

I remember the crap out of my mom with every single passing day and I think with anyone who has lost someone they loved, they shouldn’t dwell on the negative. That sounds incredibly cliché, I know, but it is what I believe. Today, I took an honest evaluation at myself and realized how well I have carried on. Sure, there are moments when I re-realize that I’ll never, ever see her again in my lifetime, and there are the more frequent moments when I re-realize that the majority of my family is far away, and that outside of family, I only have a couple of people that honestly and truly care about my welfare.

That feeling of loss is the worst part. It took me a while to figure it out, but it’s losing someone who has been there your whole life that hurts the most, second only to knowing that she won’t be there for any major or minor events in my life. I have no one to call mom. I have no one asking me how things are going at work. I have no one asking me for my opinion on the newest coat of paint on the kitchen walls.

I miss the role that she played in my life. The only way to carry on is to learn how to live each day without her presence and to recognize that all of the good qualities I found in her-strength, love, comfort and care-can still be found in the people around me.

Late at night, usually the evening before a very early work shift, my home is plagued by weird and creepy noises coming from outside. The year before last, (pardon my French…) they scared the shit out of me. I’ve grown accustomed to them now, and after some investigating, deducing and actually once spotting the source of noise last year, I still jump at the sounds and have to wait several agonizing minutes before hearing it again and realizing that it is just my downstairs neighbor: Mr. Opossum.
I saw him once last spring, when going to put some garbage out. My trash cans are kept right beside my back door steps, making it incredibly easy to “take out the garbage” – it involves opening the back door and flinging the bag into the can, as the wind has already claimed EVERY trash can lid that I’ve own. Or maybe Mr. Opossum has them in his home, knowing full well that even with the convenience of the stairs; he wouldn’t be able to get into my garbage with a locking lid. Or would he? I really wouldn’t put it past him. Anyway, last spring, I found him trapped in the bottom of the huge green trash bin. After jumping back 10 feet in mid-air, my heart exploding out of my chest and all of those other fun cartoony things, I ended up grabbing my broom, tipping the can over, and he walked out. It was a little heart wrenching, it was obvious in the way that he moved that he had been stuck inside the can for quite some time.

Over the months I discovered a little Opossum sized hole near the trashcans and for a while all I could think was “AMG I have this huge R.O.U.S. living underneath my home, digging through my trash and terrorizing me at 4 o’ clock every morning! How can I get rid of him?!”

^_^
But Opossums are not rodents. They are not hostile or aggressive and most of them are really cute!
I have looked into ways to get rid of it, but my heart won’t let me contact even the most “humane” of services. Not only has Hollywood distorted my initial opinion of the marsupial, it has safe guarded this guy from being released in a strange, new area where he may or may not find food and shelter from this coming winter.


If Bambi can chill out with them, so can I.

I occasionally fight with the two separate views on Opossums;

1. They are ugly, hairy creatures with fleas, pointy teeth, nasty claws and can spread diseases and germs. They live off of your garbage and are a nuisance because they don’t know how to pick up after themselves and re-tie the garbage bags.
2. They are adorable, yet wild and dirty creatures. Yet, they are still a being and going out of the way to provide it with fewer hardships in its life would not be a terrible act. And while he does dig through my trash, and probably helped harvest my garden, he also enjoys munching on real pests, like cockroaches, rats and other really gross things. Removing him would also probably mean more skunks hanging around, and we have enough in this area.

I think until he starts stealing food from my fridge or pumpin' the jams at 4 am (he lives right underneath my master bathroom, adjacent to my bedroom) I will live in harmony with Mr. O. Possum.

Having a sneaky nature isn’t necessarily a bad thing...just as long as the person is good at heart. I can’t hide the fact that I am sneaky, growing up in the shadow of my sister and mother’s stronger figure and bolder personality, (not literally; that sounds like I spent my childhood camping out by their ginormous stone statues…) I was given many chances to hone my skills as a raccoon..er..tiptoeing around. Now that I am older, and possibly matured, I use those learned skills for the good of my friends and family.

I have a lot of fun surprising people with monetary, practical, completely silly, or edible gifts. I enjoy spending time and putting love into something, and taking someone totally by surprise when I give it to them. You may mention a need for an item and it gets stored in my brain’s filing system as “things to watch out for while shopping or cleaning out closet for Goodwill”.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not boasting about all of the wonderfulness that I possess and how lucky you should be to consider yourself my friend, but more so about the wonderfulness that is giving. See a need, fill a need. Whether you subscribe to good karma, the Golden Rule, or paying it forward the act of giving almost never leaves both parties unhappy. And it’s simple mathematics; You’re hungry and I love to cook. Or you need groceries and gas, I can either hand over $20 for my own personal happiness for the week, or give it to you and we both get a little happiness for ourselves.

I really do get a lot of enjoyment out of giving. Unfortunately, in my nephew’s case, I need to back it down a notch. When I come to visit and I happen to be carrying a bag (which is almost always) he suspects that there is a gift waiting for him inside. I’m still on the fence as to whether or not this is a good thing. Since I only see him, maybe twice a month, it is a good thing. But on the other hand, it’s almost to the point where if I show up without something, what I would get is “Auntie Naaeee, where’s my present?” Bah…that’s what family members (non-parents) are for! Spoiling!

On the topics of giving, food, and general sneakiness…I have a friend. Yes, I do. 90% of my friends’ meals come from every fast food joint in the area, and the other 10% would be PB&J at home…but that’s only when there are 2 slices of bread in her cupboards. Now, I never eat breakfast, even though our mothers and women’s health magazines tell us that is the most important meal of the day. I don’t eat it because of two reasons: I’m rarely ever hungry in the morning and two, if I put something in my tummy other than coffee before the sun has been up for a few hours, I get sick to my stomach. Maybe it’s the coffee…

Back to the story, I decided to make a breakfast meal for my friend. Or it could have been the other way around; I received in my daily email from allrecipes.com, a recipe for Ham breakfast braid.


This is a breakfast deserving of a real plate! Paper plates be damned!

Wanting to try it out, I chose my friend as a guinea pig. Whichever one works best for the story, I prefer to call it divine confection. This recipe, like most are after the fact, is super easy and the ingredients are incredibly basic. Allrecipes.com did not provide a step by step photo montage though, and if you learn visually, like myself, you can check out this chickadees blog instead.

Bakingwithbeth also follows a smaller serving size than Allrecipe, but I didn’t realize that until after the oven had preheated and I was beating the eggs…but what is good cooking without mistakes? And yummy mistakes and “ooo lemmie try it this way” ideas?
Meat! Any will do and I suggest using the most flavorful of the choices. Spam, Baconbits, and 88c hot dogs are some options to avoid.

I had the needed ingredients; Eggs, cream cheese, milk (I used canned milk and it was just fine), shredded cheese, and 2 tubes of crescent roll dough. (I just realized that frosting is really the only food that sounds decent coming from of a “tube”.)



An example of how to take unappetizing photos. This was the beginning formation of the dough, later I added additional dough to cover the complete top surface.

You really only need enough dough to make a base for the eggs to sit in and some more to cover them up a bit. I noticed that, while a lot of photos show an equal baked dough/egg ratio on the top, there were a lot of photos that made the whole thing like a human torso with its skin flayed and its innards showing.


Place 2 eyes and a menacing mouth on this and viola! you have the cutest Halloween breakfast mummy!

Nomnom. I chose the modest path and went complete coverage, using all but 4 crescent triangles of dough; I made the base, piled on the goodness and then covered it with “braids” of dough. I forgot to brush the top with butter, but if you forget too, it does not make it less yummy!

This is what a baked braid looks like. Don't do drugs kids.

Another mistake that I made was beating the eggs with the milk and cream cheese, all at once and without an actual blender or beater of any kind. I used a spoon. I am only admitting this because it just shows how hard it is to screw up this recipe. My concoction left the eggs and milk whipped, of course, but with the occasional bit of cream cheese. I would like to try it again with an adequate beater, but I am not dismissing the enjoyment of taking a bite and hitting a pocket of SURPRISE - CREAM CHEESE!

The cream cheese melted during both the frying and baking process, so if you make the same mistake I did, no worries.

Additional touches to the mid-morning nap inducing breakfast included these bad boys (sliced) and a sprinkling of tarragon.

Do not ask me what I am up to at 6 o’clock in the morning. If you did, I would have to tell you that I woke up at 5am, with my mind set on doing some not-so-much reading accomplished for my history class and thinking “I went to bed at 10-ish, that’s more than enough sleep!”. I can’t recall what spurred the google search, but I started reminiscing over fashion fads of the 90’s, like flannel shirts, grandpa sweaters, and chokers. There were very few fads that I was interested in as a child of the late 80’s-early 90’s;


Neon Lycra bike shorts. Every other girl wore these shorts, usually with an equally neon skirt, and I wanted them. The “sausage casing” metaphor was something I learned years and years later, but looking back, I’m somewhat pleased with my parents’ decision to refuse both my sister and myself the opportunity to wear these shorts. I’m not sure of their reasoning, whether it was based on wasting money on a fad item, if they were aware of our chubbiness and just trying to save us from the agony of ridicule and chafed legs. Or maybe it was due to modesty and not having to deal with photos of their two loverly daughters at the 1989 family reunion sporting the dreaded camel toe. I do remember devising a plan, with my sister, to get our hands on these shorts though. Our preacher’s two daughters had a huge collection of these shorts, and no, we were not going to raid their closet during a sleepover…putting 2 and 2 together, I deduced that if our own father were a preacher, then of course, we would be allowed to wear the shorts. Childhood logic is so beautiful in its simplicity.


With the recent “come back” (my inner child is reluctant to accept the fact that I have to now use phrases like that, along with “kids these days” and “back in my day”) of fads from my childhood, I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the cute little plastic charms. Unfortunately, the plague of the late 90’s removed the part of the brain that reminded parents to both keep an eye on their children and accepted responsibility for allowing such hazards in their household. If only we could blame biology instead of psychology! On that note, toughen up and bring these charms back! Even if it’s just in Canada, I would gladly cross the border for a bracelet or two.


It might be strange, but I can remember the very first time that I wore a flannel shirt. I suppose it is so memorable, because it was one of the first “fashionable” steps (using that term VERY loosely here) that I took as a teenager. It was my father’s blue flannel shirt, one that he had owned for probably 10 years. I remember the elbows being thread bare, but wasn’t that also fad? I also remember walking down the sidewalk on the top of the hill in Madison, Indiana, past JC Penny, and Video Towne, and I felt cool. We kids were treated to a clothes shopping spree at the local K-mart, usually around the changing of the seasons, and with $100 budget, I felt like I millionaire at the time. The sea of flannel, earth tones and faux fur were enough to drive a teenage girl clothes crazy! Unfortunately for the photo memories, I was taken over by my inner tom-boy by my early teens and wore nothing but basketball shorts and t-shirts that were covered in either Looney Tunes characters or, if I could get my hands on them, my favorite bands. “Dressing up” became wearing jeans with mysteriously weak fibers in the knees…Oh crap, look at those holes, I should patch that up with some flannel!...and a clean white t-shirt.
I am really hating using the word “fashionable” when I mention perms, but it has to be done. It was a fashion statement at some point in history, and my sister and I worked it. But boy, did we work it wrong. I thank God that I cannot get my hands on a photo of either one of us at this moment, the embarrassment at trying to describe our teased bangs and how, at the end of my perm’s life, I would walk around with wet hair in order to keep the curl.



Equally offensive – the slouch sock. My sister swears up and down that she invented the slouch sock. I’m sure if you asked her today she would still stand by her claim. And heck yeah, we all layered them, and I can finally place blame on something for the poor circulation in my feet.


Until this morning, I had no idea just how many freakin’ Barbie and Barbie accessories that my sister and I owned during our childhood. Magic Dance, Fashion Jeans, Jewel Secrets, Tropical, Perfume Pretty, and Loving You Barbie, Bath Set for Two, and the complete Heart Family set, to name just a few. Google image search has allowed me to spend this morning repeating “Oh my gosh! Yes!” at every photo of every Barbie I played with as a youngin’. It also reminded me of the belief that the Barbie dolls led girls to see her as the perfect female figure, and develop eating disorders. Let me slide myself into my skinny jeans for a second... there were no comparisons of her body to mine, or any other female in my life. As a kid, the only recognition her body received was “How the crap am I going to get this homemade dress over her head?” or at the worst, “hehehehehe those are boobies!” If a dolls figure was supposed to have such a major impact on my ideals of what a woman was supposed to look like, what about the bean bag dolls, female Fisher Price people or even better, Ken? Imagine my surprise when I saw my first male crotch and found out that men actually have something between their legs other than a smooth surface.

just one more coffee for the road..

Sometimes I wonder if I could get away with having a coffee machine in every room of the house. It's one of those things that were brought to us by invention that we can absolutely live without but only our weird, hippy friends or parents actually do live without...much like a television or computer. Notice that I didn't include the laptop in that very short list, as the laptop is a must have, much needed invention that every household should have, a lot like the refrigerator. I must not be a real "household" though, because I do not have one.

This will be my daily theme song for the next 2 weeks...



Today, I am going to see how long I can get by without having to fall back on my pain medicine. I've quite a few left, but my surgery date is getting closer and closer, and I really just don't want it in my system come that time. I remember reading, on one of the many message boards that, it can take up to a week for the WD's to end. That's a scary thought, but also for people who take 4 times as much as I do. And aside from that, I've just noticed that I become -extremely- irritable around a particular time of taking it, and also experience the "in a dream" feeling. Where things are cloudy, you're not all quite there, and for me personally, my body just prefers to go slower, there is no turbo or even normal speed. You know the dream where you have to run faster or else the X will eat you up, but you just can't make your legs move any faster? That's what I feel like on this. So it was a toss up between perfect pain management and feeling constantly drugged up and not in the good way, or living normally, but with occasional spasms. Tuesday, I am going with the spasms..and 3 ibuprofen. I'll let you know how Wednesday goes.

Books like these make me want to scoop them up, buy them, and quit my job, so I can spend hours with a needle in my hand, recreating each and every pattern.
I am in no way a great or even good seamstress, but if I enjoy creating, one way with a needle and thread. And I wish I could survive on just that.