Proper rice and beans

Here is the recipe for my grandma's rice and beans, updated by yours truly!

Puerto Rican Arroz con Gandules

The only type of beans and olives I use are Goya.  For tomato sauce, I use Hunt's; my preferred brand of rice is Carolina.  Just in case you were wondering.

Wii off!

Also known as Dance Off, Tennis Arms, Soccer Head, or Hula Off.  I'm actually leaning toward Hula Off.  One thing I will never call it is exercise!!!  If you're curious, do read on.

Oh, you're still here?  Cool.  *smile*  Ok.  So I came up with the bright idea of putting together a little contest for me and Niecey.  I have just got to get moving, and if I have a little girl urging me along, I figured it would be more fun.  We'll each do something either daily or several times a week, and tally it up, and then when I visit we can do some in person.  Maybe even make each other prizes!  The activities can be anything, but I figured we could start with indoor Wii stuff first.

For example, DDR/ITG or Just Dance; how high a score can we get with the tennis game, soccer head thingy, or hulahooping; boxing; or even (un-Wii) skipping around with that thing that fits around your ankle and you have to keep running around to get it swinging!  (I forget the name.)  Anyway, I started tonight.

I'm putting together a matrix and will share more soon.  Hooray!  Wii to the rescue!  (And it's good thing too, because my fancy schmancy metal dance pad was covered in dust.  Poor Cobalt Flux!  Don't worry.  Me love you long time!)

CC's list of therapies

Liquid therapy 1, 6:45 AM.  Check!  Light therapy, 8 AM. Check! Chocolate therapy, 2:30 PM.  Check!  Dance therapy, 5:30 PM.  Check!  Creative writing therapy, 6:15 PM. Check! Game therapy, 6:30 - 7:30 PM.  About to be done.  Liquid therapy 2, 9 PM?  I patiently await you, liquid therapy 2...

I also worked a full day, will bake cookies, and do a laundry.  This year will be full of fun things and I will take good care of myself.  Anyone who treats me poorly will get dumped.  Fair warning!

Glossary
Liquid therapy 1 = Hot shower
Light therapy = My new Lightphoria LED light to reset my Circadian rhythm
Chocolate therapy = Candy
Dance therapy = Dance Dance Revolution
Creative writing therapy = Blogging
Games therapy = Games!  Any kind will do.
Liquid therapy 2 = Wine or something mixed

Dream a little dream of Chief?

I had some very strange dreams this past week. But first, here’s background, some of which you no doubt already know:

• I suffer from depression and mild social anxiety, for which I take meds. Yay meds!
• I had three holiday parties to go to last weekend, which is a pretty big deal for someone with social anxiety, even if they are on meds.
• Vitamin N’s lovely big eight-year-old border collie Chief died this week, from some type of aggressive doggie cancer. He was feeling ill on Saturday and they took him to the vet on Sunday, and surgery was scheduled for Monday (for his spleen which had burst) but he never made it to Monday morning. I loved that dog too, and he loved me. Boo doggie cancer!
• Her eldest son (whose dog it really was) decided to have Chief cremated. Yuck cremation!
• The crematorium does their service by the pound. Chief was 93 pounds. Wow bigdog!
• I am of the soft and cuddly body type, myself. Some would call me thick, some would call me fat, but I just call me pretty cute. Sexy, sometimes even! *winkwink*

Okay. Now for the dreams.

After the parties this past weekend, I had to attend three more parties. Then, three more parties. Three MORE parties after that. The parties were blending into each other. Were they different parties, or one gigantic never-ending, anxiety-inducing “party”? Suddenly, I was a veterinarian in an operating room. I couldn’t see my hands but they knew what they were doing. But it was super duper hot in my white scrubs and I could see worried people peering in the little window in the door. Then I turned into the pet! I was big, not like a cat, but maybe a cat. Or maybe a dog. Maybe a big, furry collie. I had long hair like Chief. I was in a metal cage and my thoughts were all muddled. I was really hot and breathing slowly, but not in any pain or anything. Then suddenly I was human and THREE MORE PARTIES!!! THEN THREE MORE PARTIES. THREE MORE THREE MORE THREE MORE… etc. etc. until I awoke. At 8:15. I’m supposed to be in the office at 8:00. That was Monday morning and quite a shitty day.

Monday night I dreamt I was going to be cremated and I was ashamed and felt guilty because I was going to cost so much. I may have been a pet or human. I just felt really big and I seemed to take up a lot of room. If I reached out my arms and legs a little I could touch the sides, but I didn’t want to for some reason. I was sooooo hot suddenly! I was in the oven!!! I woke up sweating unbelievably with Butch and Twinkie totally snuggled up around my top half, purring contentedly.

Tuesday and Wednesday nights, nothing. Alevai! (sp?)

Thursday night. Some worry dreams about money and the heat getting turned off. But I still had electricity so that was ok. I reasoned that I could just plug in the electric heater and make tea from the electric kettle.

Anyway, sheesh, right? All hot and cold and anxious and pets and money. You know what I miss? Sex dreams. Damn meds...

I love ornaments

I mean, really love them!  Especially the glittery, colorful, festive ones.  So jingly and jangly, sparkly and spangly, like gigantic exotic earrings from the Far East.  And I'm not the only person in my family who likes them.  My mom does, too.  I really like the ones that look like ice.  Some of the loveliest ornaments I have ever seen were fancy, long, hand-twisted, delicate, clear glass icicles that we bought for my grandparents’ tree one year as part of a house present.  I loved those icicles.  I wonder whatever happened to them.

Anyway, each year I try to put up at least a few ornaments on someone’s Christmas tree, or help them decorate.  This year I was quite pleased to have two separate opportunities - at both houses, indoor AND outdoor!  (Although I am totally uninterested in decorating the tree at work.  I am utterly unentranced with that tree.)  This is why I loved decorating the sukkah so much.  The wackier the better!  *smile* I just plain love ornaments.

But since I'm Jewish, it feels, well, wrong to hang ornaments in my home.  Don’t get me wrong - I decorate for Chanukah... with chanukiot, with dreidels, with kachol v’lavan (blue and white, for my readers unfamiliar with transliterated Hebrew), with boxes, with signs and with wonders (heh).

So.  What’s your take on the Chanukah bush?  Or maybe I should get a side job decorating trees for people who actually pay money to have someone else set theirs up.

I have lots of ideas for decorating.  Picture this: all green lights in a green tree with glittery golden balls of differing sizes.  Or all white lights in a green tree with shiny red and purple ornaments.  What about a white tree with colored lights and matching ornaments in tiers, rainbow-like?  Or a tree with all one color ornaments, but different shades of color?  Changing from either the top down, or interspersed.  Or, no lights at all!  Instead, vertical stripes of color!  Or all paper ornaments!  Or all clear glass!  Or!  Or!  Or...

Fashion strata

Tonight I cleaned my bedroom.  Well, actually, I cleared -- changed my sheets and remade the bed with an actual duvet and cover; cleared off the nightstand; returned items to the closet; and especially cleared off my dresser from its months of accumulated and laundered-but-not-put-away clothing.  The pile was was about four feet high.  Why?  I've been dressing out of the dryer.

I'm not ashamed of this, and I'm certainly not Foul Bachelorette Frog (though messy, my apartment is rarely truly dirty, and my body is always clean.)  But I do seem to have become a much less snappy dresser than when I first moved to Massachusetts.  What the heck happened?  But never mind that for now.

You know, dear Reader, It's fascinating to see what was stylish several seasons ago.  It's like geology.  Picking away at the earth's core.  Garment gravity.  Fashion sediment.  I realized it this morning when shifting occurred and re-orientation of the clothing strata took place due to tectonic forces as I joyfully attempted to free a certain pair of underwear from deep within the pile.  The original horizontality let go, and... AVALANCHE!!!  Butchie was nearly buried alive.

So I took action.  And I have been trying to get to it for weeks... ok, months.  But there's always something much more fun to do!  Can you blame me for putting this job off?  I can't.

There's still more to be done, but seeing the top of the dresser is a good start.  More cleaning tomorrow.  Ta!

Mighty Morphing Power Starbursts

New candy taste sensation!

Starbursts has come out with “morphing” candies – cherry morphs into cherry-lime and orange morphs into orange-strawberry. Worth a try, yes?

Unwrap a candy… it looks like a regular Starburst except for tiny little flavor-changing beads studded through. Chew enough and eventually you find one of the flavor bbs and bite down on it. It will pop and out comes a teensy bit of flavor.

I like the idea, but in half of the pack there were nowhere near enough bbs. Also, throw another flavor in there. 2 flavors in a whole pack is just not sufficient. How about lemon to lemon-cherry?

In a nutshell: these are interesting, but I prefer California fruits. And even better than California fruits are GummiBursts. Sorry, Starburst! I won’t be buying these again.

Tashlich cancelled

On account of rain!

Okay, I’m exaggerating a teensy bit. It was only postponed until 5:00 PM tonight. But, but… postponed? I thought it was to be done the first day of Rosh Hashanah, no matter the inclemency of the weather. You know, kind of like the mail. Jews don’t melt in the rain, so it makes no sense anyway to attempt to reschedule.

But no matter! Me and my fam went yesterday, traditional-style with umbrellas just in case. It was NOT raining, and in fact we saw an enormous egret, so still along the banks of Plug Pond that we thought it was a statue. Then it took flight and what a wondrous sight that was. They are HUGE! Like pterodactyls. So beautiful. We were all alone except for an occasional car and it was very nice.

After we finished casting away our sins, we sang a non-traditional song (Row, Row, Row Your Boat) round-style since we couldn’t remember the song the rabbi always makes people sing. We did NOT tell the overdone jokes about what bread to use for certain “sins” (i.e. For the sin of bad jokes, corn bread). Then we returned home to enjoy teatime with apple turnovers and honey cake with friends. A great start to a great new year. L’shanah tova, everyone!

Tuesday Muse Day

My lovely fog-blue la-dee-dah J. Jill button-down is made of the softest, most narrow-wale corduroy you could ever hope to wrap yourself in. However, it’s cut in a swing-coat style, and I resemble a pregnant blueberry. Adios, button-down!

How long is too long?

My great-uncle died last Thursday, September 1, 2011 in the Bronx.  He was old and sick, so not exactly a surprise death.  The wake is being held tomorrow.  That's ten days.  Ten days of laying on ice, only to have your wake held on the tenth anniversary of the Twin Towers Tragedy.  In New York.

What do you think?  Here's what I think.

Gross!!!  It's tooooo long.  It's summer, the ground isn't frozen, and the people who would attend are basically local.  If they are coming from P.R., that's just a short flight.  Then he has to hang around another day and a half before being carted off to somewhere in Maryland.  Logistically, it's really nasty.

Finally, who deliberately schedules a wake in New York on a such a day?  Why my uncle planned things this ways I will never know.  I'm not complaining about the travel from Massachusetts, but come on!  What in absolute fuck was the reasoning behing this?  And it's not a safety issue, either.  Timeliness of the death process of my great-uncle aside, the people of New York can have their mourning day for the millions.  Alone, and in peace.

He was not Jewish, so no big rush about getting him back into the ground, but twelve days without a funeral is way too grisly.  The whole thing makes my stomach turn.  I'm so not looking forward to this...

Medicinal banana

I hate bananas. But I love the idea of a naturally creamy nutrient-packed fruit arriving in its own package that also takes care of flip-flop tummies and the result of said tummies. The flavor is what I can’t get past. Yuck! Bananas.

Anyway, I ate it this morning for its restorative powers. And it helped! Which is great. But inspecting the banana led me to ponder. What are those strings inside the peel? And why is there sometimes a “Y” at the end of the fruit?

I can remember my gramma telling me when I was little that the Y meant I would have good luck. But we never talked about the banana strings. So I looked it up. It turns out that the strings are phloem bundles, which carry nutrients and sugars wherever they need to go. Imagine the banana peel like the bark of a tree. Same thing.

So. I have decided that we should engineer a new fruit. It will look and feel like a banana, be nutrient-filled with the ability to grow in all regions and even in the home.  Even the shape is fine.  But the taste -- the taste will be of chocolate pudding.

Scientists, how about it?