Lunch Time Dilema

Problem: your husband is using the only apron in the house, and you are in dire need of another.

SOLUTION:



The Rock graduated on Friday, and I believe this problem was a fine test of his skillz. Plus, now you've seen my Pirate Face. (but I left my eye patch in my room for the photo so I cropped the top of the picture to spare you the awkwardness of seeing me without it.)

Christmas Cheer

Have you seen the Merry Mix It commercials from gap? There are famous people dancing and singing. And unabashed commercialism at it's best. Now with festive colors and upbeat holiday music.

Red Rock Thanksgiving

The Rock and I spent Thanksgiving in his hometown with his family and some friends and my Dad. I ate enough food for three people, then topped it off with some whipped cream. (Ho Ho Ho! I love whipped cream!)

The day after Thanksgiving, we took my Dad mountain biking in Sedona. The trail was populated by groups of Asian tourists taking pictures, which makes for a different sort of obstacle. I'm used to rocks, cactus and critters, but not tourists.

Although my Dad didn't come with us when we branched off on another trail (he went back to the parking lot and volunteered himself as a picture taker for the tourists. He told a group from Guatemala "Listo? Queso!" (he said thought about telling them to say "pickle-pie" but decided the meaning might be lost in translation...), I was really glad he came.

The trails were pretty easy, and without tourists, would have let us do some fast riding. The Rock commented on the "grippy dirt" (as compared to the not grippy dust of the Tucson trails). Nice, red, grippy dirt. I hope you notice my black socks...I bummed them off my Dad that morning by telling him how cold my ankles were. And I was glad to be wearing them too--it was cold out there, my ears were froze! And my throat was froze. But mostly my ears.

Back in Phoenix, my dad took us to The South Side for lunch at Carolina's. It was a dive, but the food was tasty, refills were free, and atmosphere was aplenty. They caught my whole eating experience on camera (surveillance camera trained at my head) and it was MESSY--can you eat a tostada and NOT be messy?!

Also of note this weekend was a visit from my BFF Marge who added some sparkle to the weekend. Happy Birthday Marge! --Lu

MishMash: Luxe, Attolia, Bus Speech, Cavemen and John Pinette

I read this today. It's theme is: Luxury is Out because if you are rich, flaunting that in hard times is distasteful. I can't help thinking: I've been living like I'm in hard times BEFORE the hard
times hit. Those purses and luxury cars...I didn't buy them. But maybe I should now. They're gonna hit the clearance racks soon. The question is: Is it poor taste to flaunt luxe items in a recession if you are in the lower class? I say: Cadi SUV here I come!

***
My favorite books of 2008. The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia. Bear with The Thief, it's definitely juvenile fiction. The characters are young and immature. Stay with them. Once you start The Queen of Attolia it will be adult enough for you. It's intense. It's interesting, and it takes some brain power to follow along. The Rock and I read them together. We even stayed up late reading them. I'm the only one who ever does that at our house. The Rock was willing to be tired the next day for these books.

(and take my advice and DON'T read the summary for The King of Attolia before you've read The Queen of Attolia. Maybe you won't care what information they give away but I was distraught.)

***
Random (and probably not very entertaining) Bus conversation:
Guy one: yeah, on that movie you could tell the actors were hammered.
Me: (thinking to myself, Well, if they were playing like they were drunk, then DUH!)
Guy two: They were slurring their speach?
Guy one: Yeah. Slurring their words together. They were HAMMERED! heh heh heh
Guy two: Hmm.
Guy one: But me, even back when I was younger, and I got hammered, I didn't slur my speech. You couldn't even tell I was hammered. Heh hehheh.
Guy two: (awed (or bored) silence)
Guy one: But I don't do that now. I can't do that anymore. You know drunks, they drink too much and they open their mouths and their speech is slurred.

***
The Rock and I went to Peppersauce cave with some friends on Saturday night, and I got all muddy, even in my hair, because my hair was falling in my face, but my hands and clothes were all muddy so I had no way to clean my hand before pushing back my hair. At least it stayed in place after that. I had a hard time after a while in the cave because my back was really sore that day, I don't know what happened, but I was hobbling around like a little old lady (you should
have seen me wincing as I was leaning on my shopping cart at Walmart). So I had gone to the chiropractor earlier in the day (he made my back feel much better), and his parting words were: "Take it easy, okay."
Yeah. Right.

So I was having a struggle in the cave, and I took a little breather, and while I was waiting I heard voices approaching, when I finally saw the people: two guys, wearing only what seemed to be black bike shorts. The first thing they said to me was not, "Hey, how's it going?" instead, they said, "Yeah, um, we wore wet suits because we thought it would be wet. But it's just hot in here, and hotter in the wet suits, so we had to peel them off." That's why they were running around half naked in a cave at 9 o'clock at night. And it's not an easy cave to run around in, my back got scraped up and I WAS wearing clothes. Then they wanted to know where the "lake" was. Haha. Have you been to Peppersauce? Have you seen the "lake"? I wouldn't touch it even if I was wearing a wet suit. There's probably dead bodies at the bottom of that. What else would make the water look the way it does? But don't take it from me, afterall, I'm the one with mud in my
hair.

***
John Pinette. Youtube. Laugh your guts out. And isn't laughter the best cure for so-called recession blues? Skip the NYTimes today, I'll sum it up for you: things look bad, hard times, the government should hand out more moneys, and Twilight is an obsession that some girls (and their moms) can't deny. Spend your time with John Pinette instead.

Taste Test

Powdered milk.

Did you shudder? I did. I hate the taste of powdered milk. At least, I used to. My mom couldn’t pay me to drink that stuff. She had to sneak it into Real Milk. Pure Milk. Yummy Milk.

But, in looking into my food storage, I realized that, yes, I like milk. And if there were a crisis, and I couldn’t get to the grocery store to buy Real Milk, I would need a substitute. Short of owning my own cow, powdered seems the best option. (the cow isn’t really an option. Can you imagine?! I don’t even water the things I fondly call My Plants. I don’t remember to do it. I rely on The Rock to do it. Poor little starving moo-moo. She wouldn’t give much milk.) So powdered milk it is.

Thankfully, in the time since I was a kid, other people have been diligently searching for something not quite so toxic tasting as Powdered Milk. Right now, I’m looking at my very own number 10 can of Milk Alternative. It’s whey based. I bought it at this great little food storage store in Mesa. You should go there. The have stuff that looks pretty yummy. (read: Freeze Dried Raspberries in a Number 10 Can! CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW GOOD THEY ARE? HOW MANY THERE ARE??? A WHOLE BIG CAN OF THEM! Sweet, sweet goodness. I would eat yucky oatmeal every day if it had raspberries in it. My food storage attitude did a 360 when I saw that sweet can full of goodness.)

So. The Milk Alternative. It still tastes like powder. But it must also have MSG because I can’t stop drinking it. No joke. I had a mug of it an hour ago. (and no, it doesn’t have MSG, but if it did, one would expect me to want to drink it the way I want to drink it right now.) If you want to try some, let me know, and I’ll give you some. But don’t say I didn’t warn you that it still tastes like powdered drink. In a taste test, there would be NO confusion as to which was the Real Milk. But maybe, you wouldn’t mind drinking the Alternative.

In other food storage news, did you know you can buy real true cheddar cheese powder? Another thing that made food storage a reality for me. I eat cheese every day. I love cheese. I'm guessing that powdered/dehydrated cheese doesn't quite live up to Real Cheese, but seriously people, this is stuff that can be stored for years without spoiling, it's probly ok if it doesn't quite taste like the real thing. I haven't bought the cheese yet. But when I do, I'll tell you.

Random note: to the person who dared to spell the word "really" as "rilly"--I hate you. You have changed the way I think the word. And I fully intend to hold you responsible when I make a fool of myself sometime, in some official type document when I write "rilly" instead of the real "really." And while I'm on misspellings, how about "ima" as in "ima go to the game tonight" Grr. It's so PERFECT! and so low class--and yet you can get away with saying those misspellings and not be thought a moron. Until you joke about it too much. Like me and Moo. When we joked about being Joe-say (instead of Jose). And then, in a moment of weakness, blind, unthinking weakness, I read a sentence aloud in Spanish class. And mispronounced Jose as Joe-say.

Did you shudder? I did. --Lu

News from The Long Lost Moo

Guess where we went this morning?
I'm going to try and attach the picture [editor note: photo to come later], but the large smoking volcano behind us is Mt. Merapi, one of the world's most dangerous and active volcanoes! Yay! We went there with Carolus, The Geologist's adviser's student from 10 years ago---who's now a professor at the second largest university in Jogakarta. The last eruption was in 2006, and so we're standing on the reminants of the pyroclastic flow (the 'avalanche' of super heated ash, and gas and rocks and boulders). Jojakarta was originally built several centuries ago by the first sultan here in a way that it has never been in direct danger of the volcano. The Geologist asked Carolus if it smoked all the time, and he said "Yes.If it is smoking, we are happy." I take that to mean that a lack of smoking volcano indicates something is wrong and going to happen? The Rock, the mining engineer will now fill in with suitable knowledge. I will pester The Geologist later.

Ah, you should see this place. It's crazy. They drive better here than in Ambon or Saumlaki or even Kisar. Ambon driving is enough to give me anxiety attacks. Drivers honk to keep you from walking in front of their cars, but they like to wait until they're right behind or next to you. Then it's like playing live human Frogger to cross the street---not here though, so don't worry---since there's no such thing as pedestrian right-of-way, and no one exactly uses their headlights after dark. It's fantastic! They also drive on the left side of the road, so I have to remember to not look the wrong way. And to think I used to make fun of my British trainer [editor note: trainer as in, missionary trainer].

So, here, the average price for a whole pineapple is only 5,000 rupiahs---or 5 cents. It's amazing. We had to go buy shirts for church last Sunday and, a tshirt I bought was 2,900 rhp ($3) at full price. CRAZY! It's good quality too. KFC is the big restaurant here. They have several within a few city blocks of each other, and each seats 100+. They're much larger than the typical American KFC, and there's no mashed potatoes---just rice and french fries. The average person orders the rice though. They also have a lychee fruit float, and ooh tasty.

We're doing great. We have lots of stories for when we come back. Right now we're being hosted by the university, and Carolus put us up in a 'homestay' hotel--which is a bed and breakfast/grandma home typehotel in a large old Dutch house in the middlish north part of
Djojakarta. The only really lasting influence of the Dutch here is in the architecture. No one speaks it anymore. Only Muluku, the eastern province we were in, sympathized really with the Dutch, and nearly all of the Indonesians in the Netherlands are from those islands. The
Church isn't there yet, but the majority of the people are Protestant, and are ready for the gospel.
Ok, I best be off. We're going to see the basement rock for the island in the morning along with one of the largest of the Buddist temples here. Or it's Hindu. This city has a complex history. I recommend reading about it. Forgive my mixed spellings of Djojakarta. They spell it at least 3 different ways for various purposes. It's the 'Boston' of Indonesia with 100 universities.
We're coming back on the 4th.
I have been writing now for 30 minutes, and The Geologist has shut himself up in the wardrobe. He says "no." as in no I haven't. He needs attention. So I'm off. --Moo

Cards in the Camper

A few nights ago my friend Em pulled out her family’s card games (they were tucked inside an old, metal Sesame Street lunch box) and we headed out to her dad’s camper. If you haven’t been in a camper in a while (I hadn’t) they’re pretty nice. This one has a full size bed, a fridge (not full size), oven (more like the little Princess Play Oven for kids), stove, bathroom (the whole bathroom is the shower!) and a sweet stereo system. We explored every nook and cranny and ended up fighting over who would get to move in there first. Imagine: no space, so you have to live with just the essentials. Imagine: trailer park life (so much blog fodder!). Imagine: you live in a camper (your coolness factor jumps 10 points or more instantly). Imagine: the bathroom, the WHOLE bathroom, converts into a shower, so cleaning is a SNAP! AND Imagine: your bed is not just in the dining room, it IS the dining room.

***
Random transition: have you heard that couples who do new things together have the same hormones going off in their brains as when they first met and fell in love? (if you haven't, then see this article from the New York Times, "Reinventing Date Night for Long-Married Couples" by Tara Parker-Pope, Feb. 12, 2008). I would call them New Love Hormones. What this means, is that no matter how old you are and no matter how long you’ve been married to the same person, you can still have that Newly In Love feeling (or, if not that, then at least the same hormones that you had when you felt that Newly In Love feeling). All it takes are new experiences. For example: you could move from a regular house into a camper. That would be a new experience. Or, maybe you try out a restaurant you’ve never been to before. Or, you let your spouse give you a ride through the parking lot in a shopping cart. Or, you visit a new town together. Or, you explore the town you already live in—there’s a lot more to see than you may think. (Such as the fence made out of bowling pins and other “found” items. Have you seen that one?).

I used to have a list of things I’d never done but wanted to do (it ranged from vacationing in India to trying eggs Benedict). Making that list was quite enjoyable and doing things on it was even better. When I was feeling stuck in a rut, I would check my list and inevitably, there was something new for me to do. (which is why, eventually, I had to get away from things like vacationing in India and focus on things that I could do in the city I already live in. Such as going to the top of the tallest building in town. Or visiting the quirky little museum downtown. Or riding a bus to the way south side. Or learning to knit. Or making homemade marshmallows. Or growing my own basil for pesto.)

I’ve decided that article about how to keep long term couples feeling Newly In Love works wonders for everyone (in love or not). Because, isn’t the world a more exciting place when you’re trying new things no matter who is trying them with you? And along with that thrill of doing something new, there’s something amazingly creative about thinking of all the things you have left to do in this life—talk about adding a little spice to your life. Imagine what it does to your perspective! Suddenly, the tire that just blew out is one more thing you’ve never done before, so you start to get a kick out of the fact that you are now stranded on the side of a road. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll think about waving at the passersby because, hey! You’ve never done that before.