Melted electronics smell bad...
My laptop adpater inexplicably fried itself last week, so all the pictures that I have that I want to post are sitting on my laptop, which is about as functional as a brick. I ordered a new adapter on ebay, so when it gets here, there will be pictures galore!
Until then, here's a bunch of recipes I keep meaning to link to:
Labor day end-of-summer menu:
Start out with some mint juleps (recipe to follow tomorrow - I've got to get it from my dad again...)
Grilled, Marinated
Flank Steak
for the creole seasoning, use Emeril's
Essence (ew.) but replace the 1 Tablespoon of Cayenne with only 1 teaspoon, otherwise it just tastes like Cayenne.
Grilled
Eggplant with spicy yogurt sauce -- great technique for grilling eggplant, in general
Serve with corn-on-the-cob and potato salad
Finish off with a yummy
berry pie
Some excellent baked goods you can try at home:
Awesome
ginger cookies
Crispy Almond
Biscotti
White-Chocolate Lime
"Blondies" - Don't worry about all the craziness in this recipe with the foil, and cutting them in half, and filling them with strawberries or whatever -- I just make the blondies in an 8 x 8 pan and eat them.
Time to move, for real
It is a beautiful bright day in Chicago. After staying over at T & L's last night, I have been walking around through some of the various neighborhoods on a quest to find Chicago's best coffee places. Today's goal was to find someplace with free wireless access, so that I can "do work."
Having found a place with free wireless, of course, I've just been reading J's
trip to Australia non-blog, sending emails, and contemplating but dreading trying to get a haircut.
I think I could measure my feeling of impermanence in the world by how I feel about getting my hair cut. Right now, I'm still living in Ann Arbor, haircut-wise. I haven't been able to bring myself to find a place here to go -- not that I have a special place in AA to go either -- the whole thing is just fraught with frustration for me. Even after three years of having shorter hair, the kind that requires someone other than me to cut it, I still feel strange paying for a haircut. My mom cut my hair the whole time I was little, and then I cut my own hair until I was 23 or 24, so I don't think I ever developed the right vocabulary for talking to haircut-people. The decision between the $12 and $30 or $40 cut is one I wrestle with, since I don't really care THAT much about my hair, but I also don't really trust a cheap haircut to be good.
Ideally, I would develop a relationship with a haircut-person that I could trust, but I've moved so many times in the last few years that I have never gotten around to doing that. Even though I have lived near Chicago since January, I haven't gotten my haircut here once. I waited it out, then when I was in Cleveland for something or other, my dad and E intervened and sent me off to their trusted haircut-place... see, I can't even use the words. Salon. Stylist. Whatever. Maybe I will just type the word haircut a few more times for good measure. Haircut. Haircut. Haircut.
Having moved so many times, and somewhat reluctantly each time, I notice that there are certain events that mark my mental adjustment to the new place. For example, when I was moving from SF to Ann Arbor, I remember that my black Dr. Martin's needed fixing. I made a mental note to bring them to SF on my next trip back to visit spoons, so that I could take them to the shoe repair shop near the Powell St. BART stop. I caught myself, though: taking my shoes to SF to get them fixed was just ridiculous refusal to really move to a new place. There was a small shoe repair place a _block_ from my house in Ann Arbor that I walked past every day. It was silly of me to bring shoes to California to fix them, when I could do so near my own house, in the the Place Where I Actually Live.
Right now, I'm in that state for the haircut. I guess I'm slower to adapt to new places than I sometimes think. Therefore, today shall be the day. I will now venture out in search of a haircut. In Chicago, where I live. (Well, almost. I live in Batavia, but Chicago is close enough. :) )
