This is my life and musings and whatever else I decide to write about in a day.
Pure Imitation Maranie
Wednesday, June 19, 2002
Yay me. I managed to do everything on my little list in the previous post, and it's still early for me. (Hey, it's still in the PM). So because I have a little spare time, I want to share with you all a phenomenon that I really don't understand:My mother orders me catalogues. For what purpose, I do not know. All I know is, every now and again, I'll be on the phone with her and she'll say,
"Oh Maranie, guess what?"
Yup, this gets a build-up.
"I don't know Mom, what?"
"I sent in for you to get the *insert ridiculously overpriced store here* catalogue, have you gotten it yet?"
And I'll ask, every time, "Why?" because I'm hoping for a reason that MAKES SENSE this time, only to hear, "Oh, so you can look through it!"
I get shit from Spiegel, J. Crew, and numerous other places where I'm not going to buy the stuff because it's too expensive and it probably doesn't come in my size, anyway. Victoria's Secret finally caught on that I'm not the sort of person to buy pricey lingerie without trying it on first, so at least I'm no longer baraged with half-naked supermodels on a bi-monthly basis. And yet the catalogues keep on coming, and I don't know why. Does anybody else's mom do this, or is mine just more nuts than we'd originally suspected?
The above tirade was born from my exasperation in opening my tiny mailbox today and finding inside, crammed with all the other junk mail, a stupidly wholesome anorexic girl in a bikini smiling at me on a J. Crew catalogue. She's soon going to be smiling from the inside of my garbage can, thus wasting my time and J. Crew's money, and for what? Just thinking about all the possibilities as to why my mother does this is enough to give me an aneurysm. So please, if anyone at all has a good explanation for this, I'd love to hear it.
posted by Maranie on 6/19/2002 11:35:00 PM
And the roller coaster continues...
Woke up at 8:02 this morning. Normal wake-up time: 7:11 a.m. Needless to say, I was fucked. Calls to the office, to people who would need to know I was late, ended up fruitless, as those people showed up late too. And even though I was late and should've missed rush hour, I STILL encountered people unfamiliar with certain concepts of traffic lights and lane lines, making me want to teach them seminars of "The White Stripes: Not Just a Band" and "The Green Arrow: Not Just a Comic." And as you can tell by the lame humour here, the extra hour of sleep still wasn't enough. :-P
Now I'm caught in the dilemma of Things to Do This Evening, categories being:
A) Productive Things
B) Unproductive Things
C) Sleep
D) Eat
Or more importantly, which to do FIRST. As I'm typing this, the answer's obviously B, but what to follow up with.....
posted by Maranie on 6/19/2002 06:19:00 PM
Monday, June 17, 2002
Three things I learned while baking some low-fat brownies tonight:1.) Recipes suck.
They're always chock full of vague directions and/or never turn out right. This one in particular was quite unclear on how much sugar to use. They're cream cheese brownie swirls - sounds yummy, right? - and it says "3/4 cup sugar" and, farther down, "2 cups sugar." Jason and I looked over it later and agreed that what they meant was just 2 cups total - 3/4 for the cocoa mixture and the rest for the cream cheese. As it was, the cream cheese mixture was gritty as a sandbox, because it had - natch - 2 cups of sugar. They said to drop small spoonfuls onto the chocolate in the pan and use a knife "to make a decorative pattern." Yeah, that was happening. Maybe with a jackhammer. The final result was muchos carmelization on top of the pan, lots of bubbling and looking like some sort of swamp creature from a '50's B-movie. Let's hope it tastes OK, 'cas it has way too much sugar and it looks like hell.
2.) Cocoa is messy.
Don't believe me? Spill about a tablespoon of it on a countertop someday and watch the fun in trying to clean it off. First attempt was with a dry paper towel. This spread the cocoa uniformly and made beautiful chocolate skidmarks. Seeing as this wasn't condusive to actually cleaning up the place, I wet a paper towel down and tried that. I found that the result of this undertaking is only to moisten said cocoa, so now there is gooey chocolate everywhere. I wiped until my arm nearly fell off, and I swear I still didn't get it all, to the point where someday archeologists will dig up my countertop and conclude that people baked a lot of brownies in the early 21st century. It's that awful. How could something so wonderful as chocolate be so, so evil?
3.) Don't mix batter with a whisk.
Unless you want said batter to STAY in the whisk, in which case you can just pop it into the oven to produce a lovely dough ball entrapped in wire.
At any rate, I'm beginning to realize why I don't cook to begin with. I suck at it. I fear dinner tomorrow night. I fear pizza-making this weekend. Anything past Hamburger Helper and I'm fucked.
posted by Maranie on 6/17/2002 11:13:00 PM
So this is shaping up to look like another Work Week from Hell, because not only do we STILL have someone in our department on maternity leave, but now we have another woman on vacation and one of our guys training the new girl. This means that we will all need to pick up loads of slack, and that I'll be exhausted.
To add to all this are the two guests we have coming in this week. Not that I mind, in fact, I'm looking forward to seeing both of them, should be a hoot, yada yada. But it means cooking and cleaning and being sociable, and of course running around in underwear or whatever else is comfy, convenient, and totally unacceptable socially is right out. And none of THAT would bug me if I wasn't doing shitloads of legal work, schmoozing with clients, etc.
So off to the grocery store we go to pick up more supplies. Perhaps the shopping cart will prop my ass up, and lord help the cashier who moves too slow tonight. :-P
posted by Maranie on 6/17/2002 07:39:00 PM