If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it

6 Comments read Mountain, Nevada, Travel, USA, West

On Sunday, the boys got all suited up in anticipation of a swanky bachelor party at Treasures. I debated going with them, but ultimately decided that they’d have more fun without someone’s watchdog nanny girlfriend presiding over them while they have boobies rubbed in their faces, and besides, I was entirely too full to enjoy a $95 steak. And at $95, I would feel price-tag-compelled to cram every last morsel down my throat whether it’s delicious or full of gristle. And I already looked gut-tacular in my clubgoing dress (note: ruching is not a technique that works for every fat girl. I am one of the fat girls on whom it just emphasizes the “gunt” area, which is just about as attractive as it sounds.) and the addition of an entire $95 steak would have just exacerbated the issue. So instead, I got changed into something a bit street-and-fat-friendlier and merrily skipped along the Strip to spend Jason’s money. The first place I stopped was The Pearl Factory, in the Miracle Mile shops next to our hotel. I’d spotted the place on the way in, and its siren song had been luring me the whole weekend. At The Pearl Factory, for fifteen bucks, you can crack open an oyster and keep the pearl inside. It’s like a surprise present! I like surprises. And presents. Seeing The Pearl Factory also dredged up a vague memory of my mom doing something similar on a family vacation to Florida; namely, she cracked open an oyster and immediately the sales staff would not allow her to keep the pearl because it was special in some way. I think it was a special colored pearl and wasn’t supposed to have ended up in the “you choose” bucket, and I remember both of my parents arguing with the staff that they’d made a deal and couldn’t renege, but I don’t recall the outcome. I’ve since queried both my parents and my brother on the topic and none of them remember what happened though they, too, vaguely remember the incident. My mom says she definitely doesn’t have the pearl, but other than that? No idea. It’s amazing how a visual cue brought up a memory of something I had completely forgotten/stored away for something like twenty years; what else is hidden down there? Secret formulas? Directions to hidden treasure? My checking account number? At the Pearl Factory, you choose the oyster you’d like to have cracked open: the uglier the oyster, the better the pearl, or so I’ve been told. I picked out what I felt was the ugliest of the bunch, though beauty is so subjective, and the woman running the stand tapped on the shell three times, we cried aloud “ALOHA!” and she then wrenched it open to reveal my pearl.

Pretty good! This is when the hard sale began, picking out a setting. After I indicated that I was interested in rings rather than pendants, she started in with her most expensive setting, white gold with diamonds. “Honey, treat yourself, you deserve it!” “What if I deserved a little less?” She pulled out something about five dollars less. “Real diamonds! Honey, treat yourself, you deserve it!” “What if I deserved a lot less?” She pulled out something fifty bucks less but still a hell of a lot more of Jason’s money than I was prepared to spend. “Honey, treat yourself, you deserve it!” “What if I deserve the same as a person who shakes babies?” This is when she gave me a look, put away the expensive ring settings, locked the case, and dusted off some merchandise hidden under a crumpled Cheetos bag. We were officially inside my price range. Gone were the “honeys” and all other endearments. In their place was naked contempt for cheapasses in rhinestone-encrusted shoes. Still, I’m pretty happy with my ring-design-reserved-for-babyshakers-and-other-miscreants.

After The Pearl Factory, I made my way to the Forum Shops in Caesar’s Palace as they have both a MAC Pro store and an Inglot store. Because while I need more makeup like I need a hole in the head, honey, I deserved it. I tired of shopping sooner than anyone might have ever guessed, and since the plan was to go as a group to Gameworks when the strip club portion of the evening was complete, I decided to go to Treasure Island and wait for the boys to get back, while having a cocktail. One cocktail turned into a few, which turned into me making fast friends with some strangers at the next table who were in town for a poker tournament, which turned into me hanging out with them at a different, outdoor bar at Treasure Island (where I had the tastiest strawberry mojito of my life), which turned into one more drink which turned me into quite an exuberant drunk. It was at this precise moment that the boys arrived and informed me I’d made the right decision as the forty-five year old strippers were like used car salespeople, but for boobs, and the whole escapade was slightly less fun than a barrel of monkeys. Rather, less fun than the barrel of monkeys GAME, which no one has ever had any fun playing, ever. They also announced that it was far too late to go to Gameworks, and we’d all be going our respective ways until the wedding the next day, giving me less time to sober up than I’d anticipated. On our walk back, I succumbed to my natural urge to ride all things outside the Mirage by climbing aboard a cement lion.

I dare you to look at this picture without hearing a “WOOOOO!” in your head. Dare you.

I woke up several times during the night, and each time, I was still drunk. As the sun came up, I became so very, very sick. Honey, I deserved it.

Adventures in Trashy Cooking

Comments Off on Adventures in Trashy Cooking read Masticating With Mellzah

Special K Bars

Aaah, there’s nothing like a recipe that involves the addition of premade, processed foods, particularly if it’s a “diet” food, because as everyone knows, its inclusion automatically makes the final recipe a diet food. In fact, the massive gutache you get after eating a bunch of these and little else is just the diet working for you. Who wants to cleanse with lemonade if they can do it with chocolate?

1 cup sugar

1 cup light Karo syrup (Light=healthy)

1 cup crunchy peanut butter (The more processed, the better. None of this “natural” peanut butter crap)

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. vanilla

5-6 cups Special K

1 large package chocolate chips

1 package butterscotch chips

Boil the sugar in the light karo syrup. When the boil begins rolling, stop and mix in the peanut butter, salt, and vanilla. I find it’s helpful to have the PB, salt, and vanilla premeasured and set aside so you spend less time dinking over skin-melting levels of hot sugar. Then, mix in the Special K and pat into a 9×13 pan. Melt chips together and pour on top. Make some sort of swirly design on top with a spatula if you want. It’s your diet! If you’re taking if off very soon to some sort of pot-luck gathering, it can be put into the fridge for a while to set up the chocolate. Otherwise, the chocolate will set up just fine at room temperature. Cut into bars, or eat with a spoon. It is cereal-based, after all.

Crow my god!

1 Comment read Everything is Terrible

On the day we came home from Vegas, Jason was suddenly overcome by illness. Feverish and still delirious the next morning, I made him stay home from work, and put him back to bed. I then set up shop downstairs to avoid disturbing his sleep, or more selfishly and accurately, to avoid as many of his germs as possible. I’m no saint. I also avoided getting sick myself, so my methods work. While settling in to watch some streaming TV shows on Netflix, I heard some unusual scritching sounds coming from the vicinity of the door to the room. I thought that perhaps my dog had overcome his fear of the stairs, made his way down, and was now tapping and scratching outside the door to be let in. I walked across the room, opened the door, and nothing was there.

The sound came again. Scriiitch. Scriiiiiiiitch. Tap. Tap. Scriiiiiiiiiiiitch. I looked around, puzzled, trying to figure out the origin of this unsettling noise. It was definitely coming from that area of the room, but where? My gaze fell upon the fireplace. Was something in there? Nah. Couldn’t be. If anything, it was a bird on the top of the chimney, and the noises they were making up there were reverberating down and playing tricks on my ears. But still, it sounded awfully close. I stuck my head up into the fireplace to hear more clearl–CAW!!

I screeched, smacked the back of my head against the top lip of the fireplace in my rush to get out, stumbled backward and tripped over my own feet. There was definitely a bird inside our fireplace. My aching head was immediately flooded with “hows” and “whys”. Why? Why would it go in there in the first place? Why would it continue all the way down to the basement fireplace? More importantly, how were we going to get it out? It sounded quite lively, large, and pissed off for good measure. An angrier bird than any of the so-called “angry birds” on the iPhone. Now, maybe I’ve seen “The Birds” one too many times, but I had no intention of enduring Tippi Hedren levels of bird-induced trauma for any period of time, so instead I backed up the stairs and did some research on how to remove the bird without removing an eye. Many web posts suggested opening the flue, luring it further down with a flashlight, and letting it fly out into the room to be captured. I immediately took a strong dislike to that idea. The wildlife center suggested we lure it down, and then throw a sheet over it to transport it outside. I didn’t particularly feel that a crow would respect my threadcount and just chill out in the sheet until I managed to get it outside, so that plan was nixed, too. Many helpful friends on Facebook suggested smoking it out, which seemed less like a way to rescue it and more like a way to kill it, so that was a no-go as well. Then I started watching youtube videos. One woman had managed to capture a bird out of her fireplace with the aid of a garbage bag. This seemed like a more manageable and less bedsheet-destructive plan. So I woke up Jason, and we headed downstairs to try and catch ourselves a crow.

As it turned out, the opening of our fireplace is much larger than the opening on a standard garbage bag, so we boarded off the majority of the fireplace and taped the garbage bag on the rest. We lit a flashlight in the bottom of the fireplace to lure the crow down, left a small hole for Jason to reach in with a fireplace poker and open the flue, and waited. And waited. We had expected that once the flue was opened, the bird would drop down, or fly down, and the garbage bag would explode with motion, and the whole thing would be over in a flurry of activity. But we waited. And waited. Eventually, Jason said he was going back to bed, and left me alone with the crow. The flue was still open, so it could fly down at any moment it chose, if it so chose. This made watching TV more unsettling than usual. The wind would blow through the chimney, grabbing the garbage bag, making it float upward, and making me nearly jump out of my skin. Any time I heard activity coming from the fireplace, I’d put on Jason’s gloves and crouch nervously next to the bag, waiting for a crow to burst through the bag like a Ridley Scott Alien through a chest. Thinking on this analogy did nothing to soothe my expectations of the crow’s behavior. Curiosity would overcome me for a moment, and I’d peek through an edge of the garbage bag with another flashlight, trying to see if the crow had descended. But with a “cluck-cluck-CAW” and a fluttering of wings, I’d be a gibbering mess again. Tremulously, I called up the stairs. “J-J-J-J-J-Jason? Jason? I think something is happening. I need you. AIEEEE!”

…nothing. When I got over my knee shakes, I went upstairs to find him playing Dragon Quest on his DS. “Didn’t you hear me calling you? I could have died down there. That crow could have flown out and blinded me and killed me, and wouldn’t you be sorry to have been level grinding instead of coming to my aid?” “Actually, I’m pretty fine with that*.”

I stalked back downstairs, poked the flue closed, and called the landlord, who called the zoo. The zoo suggested she call back when we have a lion trapped in our fireplace, so she called some chimney sweeps. The chimney sweeps said they could not or would not deal with a live animal but would be happy to clean up a dead one. I might not be fond of the bird in my chimney, particularly if he’s the little bastard who has been eating my strawberries off the plant, but leaving him to starve or dehydrate to death while I play Xbox a few feet away didn’t sound like a winning plan.

This is when we called in an expert: Emily. Emily is the bird-whisperer. Emily has caught birds ranging in size from hummingbird to heron, has a passive-aggressive relationship with a bald eagle, and has a most excellent seagull story which I am not allowed to recount here. Suffice to say: she is no slouch when it comes to bird capture.

Emily came over with a large roll of plastic sheeting, some pizza, some beer from the Black Raven Brewing Company, and got to work. First, we removed anything small, knick-knack-y, or breakable from the room. Next, we opened a window and covered everything remaining with plastic, just in case the crow did decide to blast out and scatter soot all over everything. Third, she removed our handy handiwork from the front of the fireplace, and opened the flue. Fourth, she just reached up there and grabbed it out. Just like that. None of our gibbering or shaking or even any gloves. She couldn’t see it, and I think both she and the crow were surprised when her hands closed around it.

The crow was in a pretty bad way when Emily got him out. There’s no way to tell precisely how long he’d been trapped in the fireplace–we’d been gone for the four days prior, so it could have happened at any point during that time period and there was no one present to notice. He seemed quite dehydrated and weak, and when his head dipped down toward his chest, Emily became concerned about his welfare, and asked us to call the wildlife center to determine the next steps in his care. While we dialed, however, the bird came to and gave Emily a savage peck on the arm, which bruised immediately. Again, this was not her first bird rodeo, and she determined that if he could open his beak to squawk and peck, he could open up for some water.

After she dribbled water into his gullet, she set him down to see how he would behave, and he just strolled out of the garage like being trapped and manhandled ain’t no thing and he can’t believe the rest of us got so worked up about it.

Yeah, no biggie, crow. Just stay the hell out of my strawberries. AND my fireplace.

TL;DR? Here’s the whole post summarized in one minute of video:

*This may have not been the exact quote.