Diesel Sweeties

Warning: Addictive Web Comic alert.

I found Diesel Sweeties from a link at the super-cool Questionable Content web comic's site.

If you could get into the smart-ass exploits of indie rock poseurs, heavy metal vegetarians and former porn stars (and their robot lovers), then Diesel Sweeties might just be for you. Three words: Crush. All. Hu-mans.

Holiday fun

Tonight we attended Woodmoor's Annual Tree Lighting Ceremony. It was a crack up. The whole neighborhood gathers (with SO many kids, it freaked me out), and at 7p they flick the lights on this huge tree in the center of our neighborhood. The lights were a bit sad... but it's the thought that counts, it's a sweet idea and the kids love it. Santa comes too. There's also supposedly a Hanukkah menorah that they light up, but I did not see it.
We put up our tree and we re-arranged the furniture so it could be in the center of our picture window. I decorated our front lawn/azaleas/rose of sharon bush/banisters w. white pin lights. We also have a reindeer on the lawn who is made of twig and pin lights (he's super cute). I heart him.
I think it's going to snow tonight which will make it all seem quite official.
What else, Sylvia now has the beginnings of TWO teeth. They began to emerge in the last few days and she has been quite a trooper. She's still eating a ton but just has moments of pain. Carrots are her new favorite. She told me.

And we have success

The turkey was so juicy, Joe thought something was wrong with it.
Here's the listing of final food mania list:
- 11 pound free range organic turkey -- check
- homemade gravy
- canned cranberries (sorry couldn't make anything else at this point)
- mashed yukon gold potatoes
- Stove Top stuffing
- baguette
- salad
- sweet pototoes
- homemade apple crisp
- pea cassarole
- Fetzer wine
I feel like I forgot something.

A Snowy Thanksgiving

It's snowing here in DC (well, Silver Spring, Maryland) and I am about to prep some of the dishes for our first official mini-family Thanksgiving. It's weirding me out not being in La Jolla. I associate warmish weather with Thanksgiving, not snow!
I will also miss my mom's totally yummy cooking. In honor of my mom (who LOVES Thanksgiving), I am about to make an apple crisp. She's the pie master-ette but I don't have the energy to make a pie, so I will make the crisp instead. Our friends Bill and Kim are coming over to join us and that will be fun.
Will report back tomorrow with the food news....

New Song on MySpace

Just wanted to let y'all know that I've added a new song up on my MySpace site. It's a jazzy type thing called "Standards Firmly in Place," about a lady on a rather unfortunate trip south of the border....

Check it out here

Long time no post....

Sorry to all for the delay in posting. I was away in NYC for a business trip, the folks were staying with Jenny, and things got hectic. What can I say? :-)

New York was cool, as it always is, and the weather cooperated well, with temps in the 60s the whole time I was there...nice. I had some yummy expense-account food, with a highlight being a fusion restaurant called the Mesa Grill. It was the best food I've had out in quite some time. I had the venison, which was Bambi-tastic.

This weekend I worked on storm windows, both making and reparing them. I am manly man. Grrrrr, as Jenny says.

Autumn is rad

It's so pretty here in DC right now. Our neighborhood is looking beautiful due to the trees all turning amazing colors. Sylvia and I took our walk yesterday and I told her about the trees and why they turns colors. She also got to wear her coordinating velour sweatsuit for the first time (thanks Grandma Joan)!

Deregulation sure is great, huh?

When the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) decided in 1978 that airline regulation was a bad thing and stripped pretty much all goverment regulations on fares and service, it was touted as the be-all, end-all to "save" the aviation industry.

The theory, not unlike most deregulation arguements, is that the increased competition would drive down fares and economic pressures would force airlines to provide better service to compete in the open market. And like most degregulation policies, that ideal has proven to be unattainable, due to the seemingly unquenchable corporate greed so cultivated in the American business culture.

So far as I can tell, fares have dropped, no doubt. So that part worked. But what else has fallen by the wayside in the name of corporate profits? Pay for pilots, mechanics, and flight attendants has fallen, service has certainly declined (when was the last time you got a free meal on a domestic flight?), and, most troubling, smaller markets have seen the number of service providers plummet.

With yesterday's announcement of Independence Air's Chapter 11 filing, many small cities, like Charleston, WV, where I fly often, will be left with few options and higher prices. Large cities will avoid this problem, but New York, L.A., and Chicago aren't the only places people want to fly in this country.

Poor Flyi, we barely knew ye.

I accept my nomination...

...to be the president of all babies for nations near and far. If you don't vote for me, I will squeeze your "you know whats" with my oh-so-powerful vice grip.

Republicans: the Family Values Party? Right.

It's no surprise to anyone that the country is going into ever more massive debt. We need to cut corners to turn this thing around, nobody is arguing that point. Where we differ, however, is which corners should be cut. Those natsy ol' liberals like me want to make up some of the difference by making the richest people in our society actually pay taxes again.

Those family values loving Republicans like our buddy, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert in the photo above? They want to take food out of schoolkids' mouths to save some cash. According to the article in today's Washington Post,

"The food stamp cuts in the House measure would knock nearly 300,000 people off nutritional assistance programs, including 70,000 legal immigrants, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Those immigrants would lose their benefits because the House measure would require legal immigrants to live in the United States for seven years before becoming eligible to receive food stamps, rather than the current five years.

"About 40,000 children would lose eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches, the CBO estimated."

Meanwhile, according to the article,

"Republicans move in the coming weeks to cut taxes for the fifth time in as many years. Those tax cuts, totaling $70 billion over five years, would more than offset the deficit reduction that would result from the budget cuts."

I wonder who will receive those tax cuts?

The amount of dickitude exhibited by the Republican party staggers the imagination.

By the way, we have spent $216,884,337,742 (that number has jumped by several hundred thousand dollars as you were reading this sentence) on the war in Iraq. Maybe that's why we can't seem to find any money to feed 40,000 children.

Boo again...

Boo!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!

Harmless but freaky

I cannot deal with these bugs. They're freaking me out. They are total spazzes and they jump AT you not away from you.

WHOA! Where did that Autumn come from?

This morning it was rainy and windy. Leaves were falling out of all the trees. Pumpkins and paper ghouls and goblins were on everyone's porches. It's undeniable: Fall has fallen!

But my how quickly it got here! It seems like just yesterday I was scraping snow off of my front steps and waiting patiently for an alien peanut to arrive. It blows my mind that time can move this fast. Oh well, to my good friend Fall, I say "Welcome"!

BTW, don't miss the first staple of the holiday season tonight on ABC: The Great Pumkin Charlie Brown is on at 8pm EST. He will come this year, I just KNOW IT! :0)

Don't need words for this post....

Will the word "mutilation" scar my daughter's psyche?

Sylvie loves it when I play my electric guitar and sing to her. She lays in her crib staring at my moving fingers, smiling and laughing when I do a particularly crazy high note or hammer-on. It warms the heart, no doubt.

Her current favorite songs? Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) by Hendrix and Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf) by the Pixies.

I love playing the Pixies for her, but it's a drag sometimes because I can only sing about half of the words without exposing her delicate ears to stories about someone boning their sister who is their daughter who is their favorite lover. Plus, they have no lips, they have no tongue. That could be scary for a three-month old.

So you see, it's a challenge.

What does green smell like to you?

Today we went to Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Maryland. It's a totally beautiful park with manicured lawns, many trees and tons of plants and flowers. It also has an arboretum. The arboretum smelled like Hawaii to me...insert big sigh here. See Sylvie's massive excitement about being out in nature... then as soon as we got home she woke up...

In search of....

...the perfect black and white cookie. When I was a kid I used to go to Tarzana, CA every Thanksgiving and I always seemed to have a black and white cookie while I was there.
They were perfect: cakey and dense, not hard, vanilla-flavored cake, not lemon! The icing was soft in the middle with a slight crisp to the outside of it... very hard to describe. The cookies were from a grocery store there called Gelson's. Wonder if they still make the cookies?
When my mom was here last week we were on a mission to find one here. No luck. They were all too hard. Blech. The upside is that we found a great Jewish deli with yummy pastrami sandwiches (they even have a lower fat version of the pastrami which was super yum) and a great matzoh ball soup. We also found a real bagel place, less than 10 min. from my house.

Getting ready for cooler weather

Here I am with Mom, modeling the hat that Grandma Joan knitted for me!
It has a matching cardigan and the cardigan also has sheep on it.
I think I look just FABU. Grandma is currently making me a sweater with faux fur on it. It is PETA approved.

"Keep everyone afraid and they will consume"

I've never been a big Marilyn Manson fan. I really did enjoy all the hysteria and righteous uproar he caused in his time at the top of the charts, and he does put on one hell of a show in concert, but the music never really captured me.

Still, one thing Manson said has stuck with me for years. In an interview with Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine, Manson touched on an aspect of American culture that I had never thought about before, but have been unable to ignore since viewing the interview: the culture of fear.

In the movie, Manson says, "...You're watching television. You're watching the news. You're being pumped full of fear. There are floods, there's AIDS, there's murder. Cut to commercial. Buy the Acura, buy the Colgate...And it's just this -- it's a campaign of fear and consumption. And that's what I think it's all based on, is the whole idea that, keep everyone afraid and they'll consume."

But it's not consumerism these days, now we've got the President on TV trying to convince us that we need to abandon the specific prohibitions provided in the Constitution and allow him to station military troops--in a law enforcement capacity--in our cities. Why would he do this? Why, bird flu, of course! Be afraid of the deadly bird flu! The bird flu is coming to get you! Bird flu! Bird flu! Bird flu!

WTF???? What about SARS? What about Anthrax? What about Smallpox? What about Mad Cow Disease? This bird flu thing is just the latest in a long line of irrational fears used by this administration as a blunt object to bash the country into letting it do whatever the hell it wants, Constitution be damned.

Well, I'm not afraid of the fricking bird flu. I'm afraid of losing the remnant shreds of freedom and democracy I still have in this country. With this administration in office, that's a very rational fear to have.