And boy did they suck. What the hell was up with the sets? Some of them looked borrowed from Sesame Street circa 1979. At one point I thought the audience was sitting on folding chairs. The whole thing was really low budget and I had no idea I was so hung up on glitz and glamor but apparently I am. The only highlight was Sean Penn calling out all those fuckers who voted yes on California’s prop 8. That was dynamite.

I did watch them with a bunch of my favorite people, plenty of booze, and good snacks so it’s not like the evening didn’t kick ass, but really what was up with the really lame production values? And the Jerry Lewis homage? I’m confused. And why wasn’t Heath Ledger included in the Dead People Montage? He won Best Supporting Actor for crying out loud. Truly puzzling.

Ever wanted to make vegetable broth the color of menstrual blood? Beets are your (monthly) friend in this. All the dicing, slicing, mincing, chopping, and peeling that I recently engaged in as part of my weird obsession with filling the freezer left me with oodles and scads of onion skins, celery ends, pepper insides, bendy carrots,sprouted garlic, wilty spinach, and yes beet peels. So I did what any depression era hash slinger worth her weight in food stamps does, I made stock. Then I used it to fake a gruesome scene in the bathroom. Not really. That wouldn’t have been thrifty.

The beets didn’t impart much flavor, which is fine. I don’t think I would care much for a sweet vegetable broth. Most of my stocks are primarily celery and onion flavored but I tend to throw in whatever I have on hand. I’ve got a milk carton in the freezer that I dump odds and ends into when I remember. It really should be a much larger container because we generate a lot of vegetable trimmings, but I’m lazy and haven’t traded up. Most of the time the plant scraps go into the compost or get fed to the Pinkertons. Every so often I dump the frozen contents of the milk carton, and whatever’s headed for putrefication (but not there yet) from the crisper into the stock pot, cover it with water, and let it simmer away for a few hours. Then I strain out the goop, let ‘er cool, and pour the broth into a couple of quart sized freezer bags. I don’t salt beforehand but when I go to cook with it I have a liberal hand.

Making vegetable stock is a pretty fool proof endeavor unless of course you use a whole bunch of brussel sprouts and old woody broccoli stems. This produces something gross and if you then water your houseplants with the fetid liquid because you can’t bear to waste all those nutrients, your house will smell like eggs rotting in the water that collects inside old tires. Just fyi.

Sw_Erdna is 36 today so in her honor I’m going to drink 36 beers. I kid. I don’t even have 36 beers. I’m going to drink the rest of this bottle of white wine I found in the back of the fridge behind the expired sour cream though. It tastes like honey. Next time Sw_Erdna visits we’ll drink 36 beers for sure. We’ll need an early start and probably a nap midway through, but I bet we can do it. It’s important to create new traditions once in a while. This can be our anthem.

I see now it’s about wine. That’s Ok. Speaking of traditions, today I tried to recreate Grandma Wann’s pasta salad with mayonnaise, cubes of cheddar cheese, peas, other vegetables, and some mysterious deliciousness which eluded me. Later I learned that said deliciousness was a can of Veg-All.

Damn. I’ve got to pick up a can of that stuff. Sub par pasta salad is not the only dish I’ve cooked recently. As a matter of fact, in the past 2 days I’ve made spaghetti sauce, 15 bean soup, refried beans (from dried beans), black bean chili, deviled eggs, bread, borscht, vegetable stock, and I outsourced the production of apple muffins and banana bread. I’m not done either. A grass fed top round steak is marinating in the fridge for a beef and broccoli dish I’ve a hankering for. I’ve been overcome with an urge to put food by, so much of the haul went straight to the freezer bypassing my mouth for now. With Spring right around the corner, I have no idea why I’m moved to lay in supplies. It could be that we are about to experience some sort of weather calamity unheard of this time of year that my animal brain senses, you know like dogs predicting earthquakes. Or maybe I stepped in a pile of Betty Crocker.

This morning I ate a really delicious cookie that my mom ordered from Grand Central Baking Company as a Valentines Day treat. It was both buttery and sugary. Now I’m going to Best Friend’s for dinner and I’m not grouting the sink at all. Because really, who grouts sinks on Valentines Day? I’m going to drink wine and talk about Battle Star Galactica instead.

Due to a Roger Miller marathon at work I have been singing this song quietly to myself, in my head, all day long.

I’d like to stop now.

The weekend isn’t shaping up to be a the glorious sunny pea planting occasion that I’d hoped. It might even snow on Sunday, or so I hear. Rumor has it the basement is stuffed to the gills with crap I haven’t looked at in 8 or 9 years so maybe an inside project is in order. Teen Angst is always going on about some sort of broken window, really cold down there, gripe so maybe I’ll check that out. Or I could grout the sink. Gosh life is fun.

If you live in Portland, get your butt over to Reading Frenzy and buy this book. I insist that you walk there if you’re coming from the east side because the city looks divine from atop any of the 8 bridges entering downtown. Actually I don’t think you can walk on the Fremont or Marquam so use one of the others.

I am a big fan of walking. Why just the other Saturday when my mom and sister were in town we trekked out to IKEA on one of those rare blindingly bright and frigid days because I do so love a nice urban hike. So I was pretty excited when Burly Girly told me she was co-writing Portland Companion Walks with her friend Briar who has mad graphic design skillz and is super nice to boot. I picked up a copy tonight at the release shindig and it’s a delightful little read. A bunch of groovy jaunts are mapped out and the illustrations are just capital. Also there’s a madlib in the middle! How can you beat that?

Pinkertons, it turns out, can fly. They can fly up on fences and then hop down into yards where pitbull mixes named Nina live, and then they can end up a bloodied mess of feathers without a pulse. Luckily my neighbor was home and able to prevent this. I can’t believe Nina released that juicy plum of a hen. What a good girl. My dogs don’t have a taste for chicken, but that which they do enjoy (squirrels, sticks, balls, tampons, loaves of bread, garbage, dead animal carcasses) is pretty damn hard to get away from them. Generally they run away while simultaneously wolfing down the take or, in the case of sticks or balls, I’m expected to give chase in my ludicrously slow bipedal fashion while they taunt me from just out of reach. In the midst of actual bloodletting, there is no way I could free the hostage.

The Pinkerton, although missing quite a few feathers, is fine. She doesn’t even appear traumatized. I guess chickens really are stupid. Because I in no way believe she learned her lesson, this morning Bagpipe Man and I chased her down and clipped her wings. We did her sister too, just in case this kind of suicidal bullshit runs in the family. The older Pinkertons are too heavy to fly so we spared them the humiliation. Because I couldn’t quite remember the operation from back when Scooterboy and I kept chickens as kids, I found these Instructables. Step number 2 is “Invert and calm the chicken” which made me laugh. After chasing the old pea brains around for a while, they were anything but calm, however turning them upside down really did seem to help. With a quick snip snip, we rendered them flightless and hopefully that’s the end of the sightseeing.

I visited The Marvelous Plot of Awesomeness today to see if the red clover I planted as a cover crop had come up. It has. There’s also a wee bit of spinach eking out a living and some pitiful chewed up cabbage like thing that I don’t even remember leaving there. It was exciting to see all that space ready for more awesomeness. President’s Day is right around the corner, which is when I’m planting snow peas. This time the lucky little sugar pods are getting their very own trellis and won’t be trailing all over the ground making me look bad. 2009, the year I stake things. Last summer the tomatoes at the Marvelous Plot of Awesomeness fell over, intertwined themselves, and hid a bunch of fruit from me which I later found rotting at the end of the season. Jerks.

Now I’m off to see a band called Chickweed. I can’t wait until the weed chickweed comes up in the yard. That’s when I’ll know it’s really time to start planting. I thought I spotted some the other day but it turned out to be either peppergrass or baby arugula. Of course if either of these characters have made an appearance, I can probably go ahead and put in spring greens.

Mr Meyer has outdone himself. I counted 25 itty bitty lemon nubs today and unless they shrivel up and fall off like last time, lemon drops are in my distant future. Soon he can move back outside so I expect some of them to make it.

I was worried that all the flowers would get knocked off by Stringer Bell squeezing past to look out the window but judging from the amount of pollen lodged between his ears on most days, I’m pretty sure I know what’s been going on.

All week long I have had a cold which has kept me from enjoying the false spring Portland sees every February. Wouldn’t you know it, today when I am much improved, the sky is gray again. While hacking up phlegm and holding down the couch, I finished Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor which I wanted to like, but didn’t. Not at all. Too much mental illness contained therein, is my biggest beef. It is possible that I do not enjoy reading about about crazy people. I started A Clockwork Orange next but as soon as I figured out (on page 1) that I would need to learn a whole new fake language I set it aside in favor of another Ishiguro book, A Pale View of Hills which was quite lovely. Ishiguro has a light touch and really does the minimalist thing well. After I’m done with The Plot Against America I may just go back and read the rest of his books.

I guess he saw his shadow. I’ve always subscribed to the belief, however, that if you get up on the morning of February 2 and there’s a Pinkerton at your window, winter is nigh over and you can begin planning a Spring Garden. That’s “planning” by the way, not “planting” because you can only do that on Feb 2, if Al Gore is at the window with more good news about global warming.

Yesterday I watched the Stupid Bowl which only got exciting at the very end, and was otherwise quite a long and boring game. I did enjoy the interview with our CBP (Cool Black President) before the game, especially the part where his on the fly witticism resulted in unintentional commentary on Jessica Simpson’s “weight battle". I took a quick peek at her on The Superficial because I couldn’t remember which blond-celebrity-I-couldn’t-care-less-about she was and she looks like a barbie doll. I can’t believe US Weekly misled the American People this way, weight battle my ass.

Speaking (as I was earlier) of chickens, check out The Bodhi Chicklet’s chicken art and click on the picture to see all the awesomeness up close. Tres cool don’t you think? She nominated me for the The Marie Antoinette,
Real Person, A Real Award

which I am happy to accept and I wish to thank Gaia, the Pinkertons, Bagpipe Man, the staggered quadruplets, Sunny OHS, the dogs, the basement cats, Bodhi Chicklet, and my legion of adoring fans, especially those of you searching for weed pizza and goumi enemas. The conditions for this award are, cutting and pasting of rules and the Marie Antionette pic and the passing of it on to other bloggers, but because I am shy and don’t talk to many people on the interweebs I’m skipping this part. Hopefully The Bodhi Chicklet won’t send goons to my site to repossess Marie Antoinette, for I love her.