The Neighbors Must Hate Me

Because I have had the 25th anniversary concert of Les Miserables on repeat all day.

And singing along.

Loudly.

To ALL THE PARTS.

Even if I think Marius is sort of a pantywaist and Adult Cosette next to useless. Team 'Ponine all the way...

And then there's this bonus

Goosebumps.

(Could have done with out the Jonas Brother as Marius, though....)

Musical Interlude

Am on a Joan Jett kick lately.

That is all.

Jiro is not the only one dreaming of sushi...

*drools*

Om nom nom

Last night's chicken pot pie at Olive's house.

I'd start doing more cooking themed posts, but 9 times out of ten I cook by the seat of my pants: a handful of this, a pinch of that, use what's on hand etc etc.

The peas draining in a colander on the sideboard were tragically forgotten, though. C'est la vie.

A New Subject...

..for this here blog:


Cooking.

Without being fauxly modest about it, I am a damn good cook. There's the family recipes & comfort foods. There's the improvisation with whatever I have on hand. There's the experimentation with new recipes found on various cooking blogs.

When I cook, people start slavering for days beforehand. My Bastardised Tex-Mexican is famous (rightly so, as it's taken years of yummy experimentation to figure out how to make do without cheddar & jack cheeses...) and I get requests to make this or that for potlucks or picnics.

Easter Quickies

Inappropriate Pigtails: Getting me mistaken for ten years younger. Also the name of my new band.

---

To my girl friend (who will be getting a nickname soon, I promise! :) Olive

"Cosa faresti se ti scopo così tutto la notte, fino l'alba."

Fuck, that was hot.

And yet the snarky section of my brain made me think "Probably pass out cold, considering I am currently a gigantic puddle of mindless quivering goo."

---

Upon the Ex-BG suddenly appearing on Facebook:

Wherein I Anthropomorphise Books

I have always been a huge bookworm. One of my earliest memories is reading the cover of a Hallmark card out loud to my mother from the wriggly metal uncomfortableness of the grocery cart kiddie seat. It was as if a switch had been flipped and oooooooohhhhhhh look at all the words everywhere! From that point on I was a goner.

I read whatever I could get my grubby little paws on; I think at one point I might have precociously asked my kindergarten teacher if there were any more books as I'd already read all of *these* in the bookshelf. I ripped through the collection of excerpted stories stored underneath the home encyclopaedias, a set of 12 two inch thick hard-covers in various jewel tones, each a reading level higher than the last, and over the years I would frequently return to my favorites. There was the complete annotated set of Shakespeare to stumble over, and if I was really bored and out of fresh reading material, I might randomly flip through the encyclopaedias. Or the dictionary.¹

Kitchen Geek

One of the coolest things my mom ever did was make a family cookbook for her daughters. She printed up or scanned the handwritten index card of favorite family recipes, put a photo of the relative above the recipe, and slapped 'em into a type of photo album-cum-binder with plastic covered pages.

And today, prompted by a metafilter post about various foodstuffs, I've got another 20 bookmarks of recipes I'd like to try out. Which prompted me to search for recipe management software as the recipe folder of my bookmarks is getting unwieldy.

Recipe software recommendation have been requested numerous times on ask.metafilter. Problem is, I don't want to download and assload of free-trials to see if they that special feature I'm looking for:

Conversion between American & metric measurements.

Every time I'm cooking from a recipe, I have to hit GourmetSleuth and 'translate' each ingredient and temperature. Pain. in. the. ass. Sometimes I can 'eyeball' it, but I only do that when making stuff I know by heart, like Grandma's ragu. Anything involving baking or dough from scratch, I need measurements.

A bonus feature for this dream software would pull info from the Cooks Thesaurus - because buttermilk & cheddar cheese can be neigh impossible to find here.

So, for all five of you who still read this blog, know of any decent recipe software?

I'm not really limited to a specific OS, as I have Linux & WinXP, while the Fiancee's laptop is a Mac. But I would like to avoid the latter as I don't want to have to steal his laptop every time I want to stick in or look up a recipe.

Wherein I Become Una Nonna Italiana

I haven't done the Thanksgiving-in-Rome thing for three years, mainly because living with Mr. Pervy Bear during those times was not exactly conducive to throwing dinner parties as he'd squick out and/or annoy everyone, me included.

So with a new flat to baptise, Thanksgiving provides the perfect opportunity to throw the first of many parties, piss off our nosy doorwoman, and shove my face full of turkey and stuffing, banishing any forms of pasta from the evening's repast. And I can't wait for the turkey-stuffing-mayo leftover sandwiches that are part and parcel of Happy Kill an Injun day. *drools*

But in shopping for foodstuffs this morning, I have taken an irrevocable step towards becoming a stooped, sensible black shoe wearing Italian nonna. As the street market closest to my flat doesn't have butcher stalls, I made the trek over to Mercato Esquilino on the other side of the train station to buy the all important bird. Around 18 people for dinner means a rather large bird is necessary, plus all of the various side dishes and trimmings. There's no way in sweet Dante's hell that i could carry a 8.5 kilo turkey (almost 19 lbs) plus other assorted crap all the way back across the station to the flat.

I was forced to buy one of those little grocery trolleys. In a sensible red plaid pattern. No black. No rhinestones. No perverse sayings stencilled on the sides. Sensible tacky red plaid. Ick. I have never felt more like a domesticated dork; walking home i felt like everyone was trying to guess how many kids i had at home and where my husband was.

Don't ask why I was thinking this; my nearest guess was an inferiority complex induce by too little caffeine this morning.

Happy You-Give-Us-Food-We-Give-You-Syphilis-and-Smallpox Day

Bite Me PETA

I'm making clams again tonight.

*POP!*
*POP!**POP!*
*POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!*
*POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!*
*POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!**POP!*

Wheeeeeeeeee! Die you succulent little morsels of seaflesh!

What I've Tasted of Desire

While searching for the exact wording of my favorite quote from Neil Gaiman's graphic story What I've Tasted of Desire (from Sandman Endless Nights, illustrated by the fabu perv Milo Manara; I double dog dare you not to become aroused by his work), I ran across the Robert Frost poem Fire & Ice, which seems to have inspired Gaiman's title and of which I had completely forgotten about.

Sometimes I wonder what other knowledge has petulantly skulked out from between the grey cells as the years pass...

Anywho, I give you Mr. Frost and then Mr. Gaiman as food for thought.

---

Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

- Robert Frost

---

Most people want things like a candle-flame, flickering, shifting. You, on the other hand, want like a forest fire.

I should warn you, getting what you want and being happy are two quite different things.

- Desire, What I've Tasted of Desire, Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman

Insomnia and Teddy Bear Crack

Having not been in a long term relationship (or even a short term relationship) for around three years, I have gotten used to sleeping alone, sprawling across my bed without a second thought to the possibility of a warm body lying next to me.

Sleeping alone is probably one of the nastier Things One Must Readjust to After a Nuclear Relationship Fallout. It certainly didn't help my insomnia at the time. Hugging a pillow did next to nothing. And I'm really going to embarrass myself here, but one of the few things that did help me sleep was my ancient stuffed teddy bear, schlepped over from the States along with some other stuff that had previously been in storage.*

After a couple of weeks of sleeping 2-3 hours a night tops, I was curled foetal style around my teddy bear one night, alternately cursing and sobbing over the insomnia and life in general when a miracle happened. *cue heavenly choir*

I fell asleep.

Currently Creaming my Panties over and Impatiently Waiting for...

...The Company, Robert Altman's latest movie when it comes out here on the 26th. Having purposely repressed the memory of looking up the Italian premier date ("MARCH 26TH?! Shit that's like 3 months away!"), I saw publicity posters up yesterday and immediately scurried off to look up (again) the opening date.

Granted I've only see the internet trailers, but already I am impressed with the clips of the dancing. Ballet* is damn hard to catch on film, be it still or moving film. I think one of the greatest photographers to ever capture the movement of ballet in silver gelatin print(?) was Max Waldman, and I like a few others that I can't remember off the top of my head. But filming ballet? Pfffft. I can think of precisely ZERO films (even performance films of the greatest dancers and companies in the world) that truly capture ballet.

You'd think that moving film would be more conducive to filming ballet than stills. Bzzzt. Wrong. You get either:

The answer is "A New Liver"

What is "What I want for My Birthday Today" Alex.

Nothing quite like being in an alcoholic haze for around three weeks. The end of December 'till the beginning of January is Par-tahy Central. We have:

• Christmas Eve
• Christmas
• The Best Girl Friend's Birthday
• New Years Eve
• Befana (Epiphany - Big deal here)
• My 3rd Annual 25th Birthday

Plus all of our regular nightly excursions. It's almost enough to make a girl hang up her stilettos and swap the white pleather pants for sweats and a nice cup of tea (note the word 'Almost') Highlights include:

• Drinking half a bottle of expensive Tequila as well as spumante brings out my Inner Lap Dancer. As I was attracting more attention than the nude dancers on the stage, the bouncer came over and asked us to stop having sex with our clothes on in the middle of the dance floor.
• Getting a swinging door slammed in my face and then having to give a friend first aid three minutes later as he knocked over a bunch of glasses, jumped on the Best Girl Friend, knocking both of them over and ending up with him landing with his hand in the pile of broken glasses.

I'm attempting a quiet b-day, but I just know it's not going to happen. I'll delve into the recent weirdness of my life after I recover from the massive fecking hangover that will ensue tomorrow. Toodles.

What do you mean I can't smoke in the office anymore?

Fucking hell. Coding without cigarettes is like scuba diving without a tank. I hate Mondays.

So the decision was made (by who I have no idea) that from today we can't smoke in the office any more. I could see that if there were some non-smokers in the office, but there aren't any. Silly. Not to mention that "not smoking in the office" only means that we hang our heads out the window to puff on our cancer sticks. Irritating, as many a Camel Light has helped me figure out where I forgot to close some tags or other such web nerd nonsense. Instead, I get to haul my ass out of the chair and over to the window where my train of thought is derailed by thoughts along the lines of "Damn, it's nice and sunny out, wish I was at the beach..." Arrrrrrggggg.

Yeah, I know. Big fucking deal, right? But come on, man, this is Italy. A "no smoking" sign is like an open invitation to light up. I can't count the number of times that I've seen some wizened old man exhaling underneath a vietato fumare sign in the metro. Recently a law similar to those in the states has been passed, which bans smoking in certain public places unless the ventilation systems are up to spec. More on this in a bit*. Ponder this little blurb for a minute: