Category Humor

What I Do On Business Trips…

Lauren

So, as I’ve mentioned before, my day job is a traveling sales rep. Traveling sounds cool until you do it- it’s mostly quiet, and you aren’t out living it up or seeing whatever local highlights there are to see and do in your destination. (“So what’s there to do in Port Lavaca, TX? Be sad and breath in carcinogens? Oh. Okay…I’ll just stay in my hotel room then.”) Mostly it’s just time you are aware, every single second, that you are away from where you want to be. I turn into Dorothy when I travel: “There’s no place like home! There’s no place like home!” Maybe if I got some red glittery heels off of a corpse that would work, because it sure didn’t work with the snow boots I wore on this last trip.

So when I do travel for more than a few days I take along a couple of my daughters’ stuffed animals and write stories about them. Making these lets me feel- from very far away- that I’m still participating in my family. I’m contributing. Connecting. It’s totally worth an hour in a hotel making something for my girls to laugh over while I’m gone. And I always call my husband IMMEDIATELY after I send it and ask if he read it. “Did you read it? What did you think? My favorite part is…” and so on. Because I’m THAT person, I guess.

I don’t buy them anything on my trips usually- as a wise Snapple cap once told me: “The more you own, the more that owns you”- but they have binders of these stories from me. I hope it’s something they remember- that Mom sent them effort and some chuckles instead of a magnet or keychain. I hope they remember. But even if they don’t… writing these stories for them made me feel better when I travelled and I needed it. Oh! And also, I feel like I grow as a person each time someone gives me some side-eye for being a grown ass woman walking around  taking pictures of stuffed animals. Pride is a sin, so they say- so those occasions help me overcome my not insubstantial personal share.

(So- Baby Tiger is the big eyed one here. Stripeless USED to be called Baby Tiger until the new Baby Tiger came along- at which time the name was changed by my oldest daughter to Stripeless- because she’d been so well loved by that point her stripes had rubbed off. They are both girls.)

The Adventures of Baby Tiger and Stripeless in Canada, eh?!

plane

“Well, here we go! I’ve never been in an airplane before, have you Stripeless?”

“No, I never have, Baby Tiger! I’m so excited! I sure am glad we got to come with Lily and Noelle’s Mommy on this trip. I bet she is too- I’m sure their Mommy would have been lonely without us. We have a very important job to do- keeping her from missing Lily and Noelle too much!”

“That’s true, Stripeless… but we are here MOSTLY to have fun, right?”

“RIGHT!”

snow

“Canada! It wasn’t the quickest airplane ride, but we finally got here. I wonder if Lily and Noelle have looked on the globe to see where we are in Winnipeg, Canada? This snow sure is cold, how does it taste, Stripeless?”

“It tastes freezing! The world is one big snow-cone up here- lets go back inside, Baby Tiger!”

print

“Run quicker- we’re not snow Tigers!”

fire

Whew! A hotel fire- that will warm those cold tigers up!

“Ahhhh… it sure was nice to warm up in front of that fire, Baby Tiger! It’s been a really long day… I think it’s time to go to bed, don’t you?”
“I sure do, Stripeless. Do you think if we shouted loud enough that Lily and Noelle would hear us tell them goodnight?”

2nd bed

“GOODNIGHT LILY AND NOELLE!!!!!”

Part of me can’t believe I just wrote a blog post about stuffed animals. And part of me totally, totally can.

Coq au Vin

Lauren

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(Image by Silke Rabung)

This recipe has a special place in my heart because it was on my Maternity Leave Bucket List when I was home with my second daughter. I decided to have a list to accomplish during that time with the second one because with my firstborn it seems like I pretty much didn’t leave the house for nine weeks and watched Magnum P.I. three times a day. (LOT of sitting around when you’re nursing a newborn; turns out.) A nice, involved recipe is good for getting you sane through a variety of trying times, not just new parenthood;  such as every single Sunday afternoon ever.

This is an old French recipe, and I’m sure about 65,350,000 French citizens will think I am royally jacking this up. But they put rooster feet and a cup of blood in theirs; so I can live with the French contempt. (With more French contempt.) And you need one bottle minus one glass (for le chef, of course) of red wine for this recipe and make it a middling to good one. Why go to all this trouble and have bad wine ruin the whole thing? Go ahead. Indulge a bit.

My least favorite thing about this recipe is peeling the pearl onions, but just consider it a lesson in patience. Feel free to watch a whole episode of Magnum P.I. while you do it- it makes the time go by faster. You won’t get tips like that from Julia Child! But don’t skimp or shortchange the quantity of them- you’ll thank me. And besides, Magnum P.I. is total gold. I will tell you, though I found it a pain, that if you boil them for 2-3 minutes and then put them in cold water immediately the onion jackets should slide right off. I must have done that one wrong though because it didn’t turn out that way… I’ll stick with the Magnum P.I. method, myself.

6 skinless, bone-in chicken thighs

1/3 cup all purpose flour

Salt and pepper

6 slices of bacon

8 oz Cremini mushrooms, cut in half

2 carrots, cut into 1 inch pieces

2 stalks celery, cut into 1 inch pieces

12oz beef broth

1.5 Tbsp. tomato paste

25-30 small white pearl onions, peeled

3 cloves garlic, sliced

1 fresh bay leaf (or 1 dried, if fresh unavailable)

4 sprigs fresh thyme (1.5 tsp. dried, if fresh unavailable)

1 bottle (minus one cup) quality red wine – Pinot Noir preferred

1 package Egg noodles (12 oz.)

*small handful minced flat leaf parsley for garnish

In your biggest pot over medium low heat cook the bacon, being careful not to burn. While that is cooking mix the flour, salt, and pepper together on a plate and then dredge each piece of chicken in the flour mixture. Remove the bacon, once it is cooked, and then increase the heat to medium in the pot. Brown the chicken pieces in batches in the bacon grease, and remove to a plate. Add 1 tbsp butter, if needed to any remaining bacon grease and sauté the pearl onions, carrots, garlic, mushrooms and celery. Remove vegetables from pot. Pour off any remaining grease or oil, carefully. Place the pot over medium heat again and deglaze the pot with a cup or so of red wine. Add chicken, vegetables, thyme, bay leaf, remaining wine, tomato paste, and beef broth to barely cover the chicken and simmer for 1.5 to 2 hours.

Cook the egg noodles in a separate pot, drain and return to pot. Place one chicken thigh on a bed of noodles in individual bowls and spoon sauce over the top. Garnish with the minced parsley.

From the Paper: Chaos Theory

Lauren

I find the opinion pages of my small town Texas newspaper to be a daily lesson in patience. Most of the time I can be that water-resistant backed duck. But sometimes… Perhaps it’s simply that any kind of nationalism (yes, even our own) strikes me as a bad idea.  Odd to hear coming from a Texan? Who loves her state yet realizes calling it “the best” is an opinion based on bias and lack of knowledge on the others? Yup. Hi there, that’s me! Extrapolate that out to all nations, cultures, ethnicities, and races and that there is my world view. So anyone claiming to be “the best!” gets my back up, and strident whining about how everyone else should appreciate said bestedness even more so. Toss some twisting of historical fact and thinly veiled Hitler praise in there and I get all fired up. Same as the last time I wrote a post like this I’m not posting the letter to the editor I responded to here… due to possible issues with my local newspaper and because I’m not giving the author a forum for his words to go one step further in the world so maybe this is a bit cryptic. I’d like to think it can standalone in this way though let me know if not and I’ll work the next one differently.

newspaper

Chaos Theory and that thing Mr. O said about 1941

Let’s talk “Butterfly Effect” briefly- and I’m talking chaos theory, not the 2004 movie with Ashton Kutcher. It gets oversimplified into this: the possibility that a hurricane in North America may be caused by a butterfly flapping its wings in China, and all of the aftereffects that result from that small action. Now, there are some problems with this theory, I’ll admit. One of the main ones: Could you really say with certainty, after the fact, which butterfly was responsible for a specific result? The other problem with the theory, as I see it, is that due to such rampant pollution I’m really not sure how many butterflies are left in China. Come to think of it, it has been a pretty quite hurricane season…

When this concept is taken out of the realm of just butterflies and applied to man it basically boils down to this: every action has an effect on the present and therefore changes the future. I’m not going to pick apart each of the claims Mr. O makes about the German influence on history… except for one. (We’ll get back to that.) I’ll just state that his assertion that “there would be no USA or Europe as we know it today (without Germans)” is only accurate if we realize there truly would be no USA or Europe as we know it today without every single action of every single one of the people of the world. Chaos theory. Butterfly effect. The past changes the future. It is a beautiful way of seeing the world and is one of the main reasons I love history as much as I do.

Now…let’s talk the German invasion of Russia in 1941 that Mr. O states was to protect Christianity. Go ahead and look up who ordered that action, called Operation Barbarossa and why it was ordered… no don’t do it on Wikipedia! Sheesh, use a reputable source… go ahead. I’ll wait here. Found who ordered it? Little bit shocked, aren’t you, that anyone would have the absolute chutzpah to trot out anything that guy did as heroic, protecting Christianity, or anything worthy of praise? Yeah, me too. And for anyone who didn’t look that up- here’s a hint: he’s wiped a specific form of mustache off the list of acceptable facial hair for well over six decades now. Was it done to defend Christianity?  Do butterflies flap their wings to make hurricanes? Or do they do it to preemptively invade Russia to defend the Third Reich from a perceived threat on its Eastern front? Now, the cause of the invasion can actually be proven (there is, not totally unexpectedly, a plethora of very well-organized notes and directives concerning it) but the final effect is what is up for some interpretation from us today. So there you go, that gives you free reign to interpret and have opinions on the results of factual events in history… just not to misinterpret the motivations or to be piecemeal about the facts themselves.

(Image courtesty of Jean Scheijen)

Random Picture Friday

Lauren

Low on inspiration for blog posts? Or have SO many things to possibly write/think about; surgery, new carpeting, health insurance decisions, phone plan decisions, real estate decisions, vehicle decisions, work decisions… that you just want to take a nap instead? Well have I got the blog post for you! Here’s how it works: Press the Random Picture generator on a free images website. Press it repeatedly until you get to a picture you cleave to, but pretend you only take the first one that pops up.Write zippy comment(s) about said picture… and you’re done! Without further ado, may I present to you:

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Image courtesy of Gölin Doorneweerd – Swijnenburg

A load of carp- first time ever that has been typed and not been a typo. We’re making history here folks!

I’m scraping to bottom of that carp barrel, so you’ll just need to give me a pass on this one.

Happy Friday!

First World Problems from 2014

Lauren

Things I unfortunately said in 2014:

“This new car smell is hurting my eyes.”

car

(image by Naeem Mayet)

“I want backyard chickens, but do I want that many eggs?”

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

(Image by Iwan Beijes)

“I worry about all the food in our fridge going bad while we do this juice fast.”

fridge

(image by tim and annette)

Happy end of 2014!

From the paper: Where Would America Be Without Everyone Else?

Lauren

Sometimes I write guest opinion columns in my local paper. I know the easy quip would be that I do it because I don’t want anyone to read my writing or that doing so means I should apply to AARP. I don’t give a crap though- I love it. Seeing my face and my few small words in newsprint… not to get all Hank Williams Jr about it, but it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy because it’s a family tradition. And now that I think of it, Hank Williams Jr. would probably love my local paper… his beliefs are all OVER that opinion page even if my own are usually not.

newspaper(Image courtesty of Jean Scheijen)

My guest column, titled “Where would America be without everyone else” is in response to the shark-eyeroll inducing original letter titled “Where would America be without Germans”:

I will give it to good Mr. O. and agree with the first two sentences of his recent column that stated (in summary) that October passed with little acknowledgement of it being German American History month. I’ll agree with that statement mostly because I had to look it up to make sure that was a real thing. Kudos! It is. Though it’s also Polish American History Month, Filipino American History Month, Dwarfism Awareness Month, Auto Battery Safety Month, Italian History Month, and Gay, Lesbian, Bi-Sexual, and Transgender History Month. You want to talk about the makings of an awesome Month Awareness Parade! Let’s commit, as citizens, to making that happen next year.

And I’ll agree with another statement in that column as well: that (in summary) no German Americans perpetrated any sabotage on American soil during both world wars. But let us also not forget that they were not alone in that fact. No Japanese American or Italian American was accused of nor convicted of sabotage during WWII, as well. So let’s not claim sole credit for what seems to have been a bit of a fad of loyalty to the stars and stripes during that period by the American citizens who just happened to be of ethnic descent from our enemies.

And yes, I’ll give you that there are notable inventions by Germans that you listed in your column. Kudos again! Only thing is this: everything else was invented by…everyone else. The car was invented, yes, by a German in 1885 (Karl Benz) but electric brakes were invented by Mexican inventor Victor Ochoa in 1907. Squirrels and street-ball players salute you, Mr. Ochoa. And that must have been a pretty nerve-wracking 22 years in the interim. The telephone was invented by a Scotsman. The weather balloon by a Frenchman. The list of literally every other invention is pretty extensive so we’ll leave it at that.

But the picnic?! To have stated that the picnic was invented by German Americans?! How is that even possible? I’m pretty sure the prehistoric humans had many a picnic- which is provable by the fact that neither houses nor tables were invented yet! But even discounting that- the word picnic itself is French and dates from the early 1690s. There is a French painting by Lemoyne of a picnic in 1723 that is titled the Hunt’s Picnic.  That is years before America even became a country for there to be citizens of German descent living in. I could go on, but that claim certainly has a whiff of Gore inventing the internet to it.

If you’re special then we’re and they’re all special is my point. All cultures. All ethnicities. All nationalities. All batteries. Okay, maybe not that last one, but you get the idea. All of us are special and deserving of real respect, and so one shouldn’t presume to try to set themselves above others. And the real greatness of that fact is that it puts us all on the same playing field. We are all and walk among giants everyday that way. But the question to ponder is does that make us all giants or just raise the height of normalcy? Not to be insensitive to our fellow citizens with Dwarfism. Dwarfism Awareness month taught us that back in October.

Fruit Flies of Destiny

Lauren

There was such a problem with fruit flies  in my office last… let’s say Thursday… that I feel I should have captured them and started experimenting; to do otherwise was really a wasted opportunity. Somewhere, somehow, there should be 10,000 fruit flies with green eyes and a willingness to do my bidding waiting to be born. Next time, my future minions… next time.

fly

(image courtesy of teslacoils)

Did you know the Latin name for fruit flies translates to Dew Loving? Should be Coffee Loving. You damn little f*ckers…