Best comic of the week

Luxury

What's better than a brand new mattress?

A brand new mattress covered with a 3 inch memory foam mattress topper!

Oh, was it hard to roll out of bed this morning...

After a long absence...

It's been weeks. WEEKS, I say. I just realized how long it's been since I posted.

I hosted my first ever Passover seder this year. I cooked for 10 hours straight and fed 10 people (with lots of lovely brisket for leftovers). I even got everyone to sing! Of course I have now been told that I must do this every year, so this is the beginning of a new tradition. Maybe next year some of my Jewish friends will be able to make it as well, and I won't be the only one who knows Daiyenu.

Spenderiffic weekend

A few weeks ago I decided to buy a new bed. Why? I have a twin bed that has been with me since I was a little kid. It's a good bed, but it's really really old and I think it's time for a big girl bed.

This weekend Jen and I went bed shopping. We started with the old standby - Ikea - and ended up at Sleepy's (with a stop at Famous Dave's along the way). After spending about two hours trying the beds at Sleepy's and becoming instant buddies with Julia, our salesgirl, I ended up dropping more than my monthly rent on a Kingsdown Emerald Crown mattress and boxspring.

Not only did I buy the mattress Saturday, it was delivered on Sunday. Not only that, I was given a 4-8 delivery window, and it was delivered at 4:15.

The first challenge, deciding where to put it. My room is a fairly decent size, but it is an awkward shape. And a full sized bed is a whole lot bigger than a twin. So now the bed kind of looms in the middle of the room with a bit of space around each side to move.

But how does it feel? I slept last night on it and I wasn't sure at first because it was so much softer on top than my old bed. But it was so comfy! I ended up sleeping through my alarm, so that might be a problem. Good thing I don't have to go to work until 12:45 today!

This morning on my way to work I'm going shopping for linens and a duvet cover and such, as I have to get everything new for a new sized bed. More shopping! My credit card is going to be hurting next statement.

Making choices

I make decisions every day. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, but ultimately they're mine. But if you've been following the news at all you'll know that in South Dakota I am evidently unfit to make one of the most important choices there is.

Recipe of the week

This weekend I felt the need to use up some of the bananas that are in my freezer, but I didn't want to make banana bread. I ended up stumbling onto a wonderful recipe for mocha chocolate chip banana muffins at allrecipes.com. I modified the recipe slightly and made the best banana muffins I've ever had. If you want to see the original recipe, click here

Here is the recipe with my few modifications:

INGREDIENTS:

* 1/2 cup margarine or butter
* 1/2 cup white sugar
* 1/2 cup brown sugar
* 1 egg
* 3 ripe bananas
* 1 tablespoon instant coffee granules, dissolved in
* 1 tablespoon water
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
* 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. Blend butter or margarine, sugar, egg, banana, dissolved coffee, and vanilla for 2 minutes. Add flour, salt, baking powder, and soda, and blend just until flour disappears. Add chocolate chips and mix in with wooden spoon. Spoon mixture into 15 to 18 paper-lined muffin cups.
3. Bake for 25 minutes. Cool on wire racks

Yummy! Enjoy!

Book of the week

Today at lunch I read Every Person on the Planet by Bruce Eric Kaplan.



This is a delightful little book that takes only minutes to read - it's a picture book for adults about Edmund and Rosemary, a couple who decide to have a holiday party and end up inviting every person on the planet. And then everyone actually shows up (except for the ones who got bad directions and couldn't find the place).

This is a great book if you've ever had anxiety about throwing (or attending) a party. And really, who hasn't?

A complete waste of 140 minutes

Last night I decided to watch Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. I'm amazed and appalled that so many reviewers gave it a good rating. This was, beyond a doubt, the worst movie I've seen this year. Possibly the worst movie I've seen since the last Star Wars movie. It's the usual suspects for me: badly written dialogue, wooden line readings, to many explosions and not enough character, and this time even the special effects felt fake and flat to me. It wasn't even fun in the "wow, let's watch things blow up" sense. I really like Ewan MacGregor, and I think, possibly, he was trying to do some real acting here, but it failed. I like Natalie Portman, but she wasn't even trying. A waste, I say, a total waste of time.

In order to cleanse my mental palate, I felt the need to rewatch one of the funniest Star Wars spoofs ever. It's an old one, but Troops always makes me giggle.

Tonight I watched the previous night's Amazing Race (Damn you, CBS, for running it an hour later this year and making me unable to watch it the night it airs. I refuse to abandon my precious lying in bed with a book time just because my favourite reality show is now on at 10 instead of 9) to wipe this execrable excuse for entertainment from my memory.

Treats from the street

I usually go to work every morning by meeting up with my walking buddy Rachel on Broad Street and heading up from there. This week, however, I've been meeting up with my backup walking buddy Micaela and then walking across Market St. Let me tell you one of the Market Street advantages (besides being about 3 minutes faster): Free food!

For the past two days there have been people giving out Quaker Oats Breakfast cookies to pedestrians.


Over the past little while, while walking along Market Street, I've gotten yoghurt shakes, coffee, granola bars, gum, and Quizno's coupons. And a group of us did get $5 Starbucks cards while strolling in Rittenhouse Square last year. Walking up Broad Street - nothing.




Nothing else really exciting, I just wanted to share my love of getting free stuff.

7 Stages of Falling in Love with an Author

This weekend I got hooked on Kelley Armstrong's "Women of the Otherworld" series. I've read the first four books in the last three days. If you like Laurell K. Hamilton and/or Kim Harrison you'll like Kelley Armstrong.

All things considered, it's quite brilliant that I received the following cartoon in my inbox yesterday morning:
























And now I must go read the last book (so far) in the series. Very slowly.

I think I gained 6 pounds...

It's Restaurant Week again in Philly, and last night a group of us went to The Melting Pot, a fondue restaurant. Oh my goodness, that was a lot of food! Delicious, delicious food. I felt like a big marshmallow trying to get my jeans done up this morning, but it was so worth it. If you ever go I recommend the Flaming Turtle chocolate fondue - pretty much a pot of melted Turtle chocolates flambeed tableside. We all got spoons when we ran out of things to dip so we wouldn't waste a drop of the chocolate (Oh yeah, we had pure dark chocolate fondue as well, but I'm more of a milk chocolate fan).

In honour of my eating my body weight in cheese and chocolate and meat and such over three hours last night, I give you this video. I remember seeing it last year some time, but it makes me laugh especially hard right now. Enjoy!

Reasons to learn a new language

I've been debating whether I want to take French again, and I have just discovered a good reason to learn a new language:



Maybe I'll take up German... Just in case...

Gold star for me!

Two fun Library patrons this afternoon:

I had a patron on the phone who, after a fairly long refernce question where we both ended up laughing, asked where I was from. When I said Canada, she started going on about how we had a commercial that made her cry. Evidently Canada used to (or still does, who knows) do tourism advertising on TV here. This lady then proceeded to sing me the commercial jingle, which she remembered after umpteen years, because she thought it was so beautiful. This is my first serenade while on the desk. I quite enjoyed it (plus, it made me laugh)!

Right after that I had a lady who wanted to read a book series by an author she didn't remember, featuring a character she didn't know the name of, whith titles she didn't know. I pulled out my super-librarian sleuthing skills and with the only clues being the character lived in Maine, solved myteries, and fixed houses, I found it in 3 seconds flat! Literally! Sarah Graves' "Home Repair is Homicide" series. The lady was thrilled and gave me a gold star (well, she said, "Gold Star for you!!" which I will accept as an acceptable stand-in for a real gold star). I'd like to thank Google, for making my ability to answer reference questions appear even more magical to the patrons.

All hail my mad research skillz!

The Illness

Argh - this month has been crap for getting sick. Everyone I know has been or is ill in some form or another. Last night was my turn (again, for the third time this year). I think I have the flu, or food poisoning, or something. It's 2:30 in the afternoon and I've finally made it out of bed into the living room. I'm now okay sitting or lying still (a big improvement from midnight to 7 am this morning). I'm still queasy, but it's not as awful anymore. I hate being sick! Hopefully I'll be okay tomorrow as I have a ton of stuff I really want to do this week at work. Plus, tomorrow is Girl's Night - What's a Thursday without gathering to heckle Project Runway?

But it's not all sickness, self-pity, and boredom. Check out the movie trailer below! I haven't seen Brokeback Mountain yet but oh my, is this funny!

Book suggestions from the Great White North

I had two books recommended to me from some of the Edmonton folks in the past month or so. I finally managed to get my hands on both of them.




First we have The Game: Penetrating the secret society of pickup artists by Neil Strauss. This was recommended to me by Susan, who thought it was brilliant. Me, not so much. I got 98 pages into it before putting it down for good. I figure if I'm going to read about some guy learning how to pick up women for quick one night stands, I at least want him to be funny, sympathetic, and/or sincere. This guy is none of the above. I didn't care about him, any of the other people in the book, or what they were doing. I guess Susan might have liked it because it was all about salesmanship, but I just felt vaguely icked out and bored. I suppose the one good thing about the book is that looks exactly like a bible. Faux black leather cover, gold trimmed pages, red ribbon bookmark. I felt very religious reading it. Ironic, really.




Secondly, my friend Dave's wife's brother bought a copy of Spin by Robert Charles Wilson for his father for Christmas. He showed it to me when I visited baby Zaara (and Dave and Gaia, of course). This science fiction novel begins when all of a sudden all the stars in the sky disappear. The flyleaf description sounded fascinating, and I made a note to pick it up from the library. I finally got it and read it this week. This is one of those books that you want to just keep reading. I resented anything that took me away from my book - work, going out, sleep. And to make the already interesting book even more fun, it had a subplot about fundamentaist Christians trying to breed a red heifer. A couple of months ago Mark explained the religious thought behind the whole red heifer thing, and we've been joking about it ever since. I really liked this book, which had interesting science, big ideas, and great character development. Thanks, Dave's wife's brother (whose name I'm blanking on, but for some reason I think it might start with an N)!

This one's for Liz

Mu friend Liz is what you might call a coffee fiend. This woman does not play well with others uncaffienated. She also loves chocolate (who doesn't?)

In her honour, I present to you -- CHOCOLATE JOLT (no, not the pop)

This seems to be the quick antidote to food coma if you like chocolate and coffee (and the associated massive influxes of sugar and caffeine). I wouldn't recommend taking this before you go to bed.

Mmmm... new bus smell

I never thought that a bus could have new bus smell, but the number 12 on my way home from work tonight had just that. Moreso, the seats were vibrant blue, the pull cord was shiny yellow, and the floor was relatively clean. It was lovely, and smelled like a showroom car. I give it about a day before the new bus smell wears off. I feel privileged to have experienced it.

And on the cat theme...

I'm Widget-sitting for the wekend, and today I (and my laundry) have been having a lovely time at Sally's. I get to play with the cutest kitten in the world, and I get to avoid the laundromat - how wonderful is my day?

Also, Widget seems to have acquired a new skill - impersonating a gopher.

R.I.P. Snoopy

I can top this one...

Snicker. But I can relate to poor Dewey here:



I can beat him, though. A few years ago I hurt my back by sleeping. I swear - I was fine one day, the next day I could hardly walk. Months of drugs and physical therapy later, and I am down to just twinges in my back. But seriously - sleeping broke me!