Happy

Smearing the greasepaint
Over his malingering sneer
He slathers on a veneer
Of forced gaiety
So his depravity only shows
In cracked shards
When his eyes glint
Like blood-drenched steel
And he twists the balloons
His gloved hands wrenching
Necks, limbs, and swollen abdomens
Rubber screaming in agony
As the children laugh,
And clap,
And scream
For more.

On the Plus Side

My legs are so smooth and silky soft (new razors and the best lotion ever) that they are irresistibly touchable. Not to mention that with all my time in the sun today they are emanating a slight heat.

I want to feel them up. I mean, come on.

In other news, Charlie's favorite fireworks were the ones that "looked like a shoe." Plus his $1 tank fireworks. Take note, City of Hailey.

Fourth of July

At the Rodeo

They both got licorice ropes as long as Charlie is tall

Can you spot the buckin' bronco?

Yeeeeeehaw!

Charlie at the parade today

At the kid's carnival after the parade. Charlie looks closer to the water action than he was.

See? That is him, WAY over on the right edge. He didn't want to get wet.

We've gone to the rodeo and the parade and a kid's carnival so far. We live on the bike race route, so there are bikers going by the house at crazy speeds, an announcer about a block away, and live bands playing at four separate places within three blocks of our house. This, combined with the fact that we live one block off the parade route, means that our house is parked in.

Also, strangers parked in our parking spots in front of our house, and also in our driveway, right in front of our garage doors. WHO DOES THAT. I want to call and have their cars towed, because it is MY fucking driveway, but I guess I'll give them 'til tonight to get their asses off of my property. I don't know what it is about strangers using your yard and driveway for parking, but it is one of those things that tips me from "normal human being" to "raging beast" within seconds.

I keep telling myself, "Self, it is a holiday, let the people have fun." But then I think, "Even if I were parking in some strange town, I would have the common decency and courtesy not to park in someone else's DRIVEWAY FOR GOD'S SAKE."

Hmph. Maybe I need a nap before the fireworks start. Literally and figuratively.

Thank You

Thank you for making my day, today.
Your talent for poetry blows me away.
I could be mired in the deepest of shit,
Moping and drowning and wanting to quit,
And here you have written it out in your mind,
Crafting with poesy your friendship and mine.
And suddenly, sunshine and rainbows appear
As you make the gloom and the glum disappear.
Yours is the smile that's all over my face--
You are the one who put it in its place.

To All of My Fans in Malaysia

So tired. So... one and a half bottles of wine tired.

Also, I just discovered that Blogger keeps very few statistics, but you can check your stats to see, for example, what links your readers followed to visit your blog.

Except Google's Blogger, in its what-we-thought-was-infinite wisdom, has only these two sites for me there:

iteethwhitening.com and onlinedegree.4wd.info.

I am basically positive that neither of those is free of spyware/malware/trojans. I'm also pretty certain they're not among the three readers of this thing, or that they have linked here to share with their adoring public my teeth whitening facts or my vast wealth of information and success culled from a career in online scholarship. Those sites sound like the kind of thing manufactured in Malaysian techno-ghettos, linking crazily to any site on earth in hopes of trackback traffic.

But I kind of like to think that maybe, just maybe, there is an errant cubicle dweller, locked away from the sun for umpteen hours on end in some Malaysian cubicle-city building, in the bad part of town if you know what I mean, who finds solace in the underwhelming content of this, my journal. And they read it faithfully, escaping the dismal repetition and dreary gray of their insignificant time on earth with the irregular chronicles of my own life. And they made the conscious decision to link to my little place on the internet, in hopes of sharing this ray of sunlight with others just like them.

Hey, you. Trapped in your foreign cubicle, lassoed to your phone, talking to an over-privileged American in accents as incomprehensible as the flowchart of your chain of command,

This Bud's for you.

I know, this is why you love me.

Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day

Like this, but worse, and not just in primary colors

Today was a pile of suck.

I hate that Tony has cancer, and that the chemo and radiation makes him so strangely fragile. He is a beast, but he is being slain by this poison. And there is nothing I can do about it.

Also, there were other things. I don't want to go into it. Suffice it to say, tomorrow, you are preemptively on notice. If you are anything like today, I will see to it that you are fucked in the ass with a cantaloupe.

Catty Bitch

Gratutitous Cat Shot

Sometimes, I am such a catty fucking bitch.* I get into one of these moods, and it is like the evil stepsister in me rears its ugly head and devours villages. I just can't help myself. Snide comments and rude insults present themselves to me. I don't even have to think of them, they just pour out of my brain.

And when I get in one of these moods, I try not to say all the things that I want to say. I try to keep them in, because in reality, I am not a cruel witch. But the things are in my head regardless, all of those pointed comments, like a prickly cactus garden.

I think it usually stems from one tragic flaw in myself and one major fault in others: my impatience and others' manipulative behavior. I really, really, really hate manipulative people. My mom is the Queen of Manipulation, and having suffered under her regime for years, I bristle when I stumble upon controlling people in the wild world.

And I have almost zero patience for those who use manipulation to get their way. I know that I should be gracious to them, that they probably have a host of personal and psychological problems that have created this monster manipulator, but I just can't do it. It pisses me off that they think I'm so stupid I won't see through their attempts to control my mind. I mean, at least if you're going to try to assert your will over my own, do it in such a way that I feel like I'm doing it for my own sake, not because of your cheap attempts at manipulation.

HMPH. Anyway, I am just holding my tongue over here.

*Isn't the phrase "catty bitch" kind of oxymoronic?

Sometime After Midnight

Crowding my head
Like drunks at a ball game
Possibilities
Probabilities
And all of the things in between.

It's usually after midnight
That my fancy takes flight
Refusing to sit tight
Preferring not to act right

And that's when I wonder
Lay awake to ponder
The path that I'm on
And the one I could be on

This or that
Here or there
Now or never

But we all know that
It's not a path
It's a moving walkway
And there's no way to get off.

Shitshow Kitchen: German Chocolate Cake Extras

OK. You should already have finished a cake of some sort, unless you are a straight-up hedonist just eating the filling and frosting by themselves or mixed into ice cream which, I am not going to lie to you, would be amazing.

Here's how you make the filling and frosting for my version of German Chocolate Cake.

Coconut Caramel Pecan filling
4 large egg yolks
One 12-ounce can evaporated milk
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 6 pieces
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 1/3 cups sweetened shredded coconut
1 1/2 cups finely chopped pecans, toasted
1 shot rum

Put the pecans on a cookie sheet and toast them in a 350 degree oven for about seven minutes. SET A TIMER THEY WILL BURN and pecans are expensive, yo. I usually start this while the oven is heating for the cake. For real, no more than seven minutes. MANY a time have I had to throw out a blackened mess of them and light candles to hide the smell.

We are nuts. Teehee.

While you're waiting for the pecans, get out the pan for the filling. I searched for mine for like ten minutes, then found it in the fridge full of rice from the other night. DAMMIT. Wash it, put it on the stove. Measure out your sugars and butter.

These are like magic beans... sugar and butter make anything spectacular.

Put the coconut in a kind of largish/medium bowl.

It's like angel pubes

Separate your eggs (I do it in my hand) and put the yolks in a saucepan.

Hands are the best egg-strainers ever

 Whisk them up and add the evaporated milk, whisking it all together.

That's right, I use NAME BRAND evaporated milk, bitches

Then throw the sugars, salt, and butter in and turn the heat on to medium.

Pre-whisk action

Whisk it up. Once the butter is getting melty, start whisking until it boils. You can kind of casually do this, like I got my dishes washed while I was doing it without burning it. But... beware. It can burn to the bottom of the pan and then you are fucked.

C'est parfait

OK. When it starts to boil, turn off the heat, and throw in the vanilla and rum. If you're taking it to an AA meeting or something, you can skip the rum. It will bubble up ALOT, it's ok. Then pour it into a bowl with the coconut and set it aside to cool.

Resist eating it all right now. RESIST!!

Stir the pecans into the coconut stuff right before you fill the cakes.

Chocolate Ganache Frosting
12 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped
2 ½ tablespoons light corn syrup
2 ounces unsalted butter
1 ½ cups heavy cream

I use Gihrardelli 60% cacao chips and a little unsweetened chocolate.

Use quality chocolate or you will be sorry.

Throw the cream and butter into a pan, and heat it until it starts to boil.

Fat and more fat

Once it's boiling, throw it into a bowl with the chocolate and corn syrup.

This is where the magic happens.

Immediately stir it until it's all smooth and looks something like this.

Heaven in a bowl

Let the coconut-pecan filling cool at least two hours (or until room temperature). Leave the chocolate ganache out until you frost the cake (put plastic wrap on it if it will be overnight).

Shitshow Kitchen: Buttermilk Chocolate Cake

So I realize I didn't include a recipe for my lasagna last time. I am going to edit it in. In the meantime, here's the cake I made yesterday. OMNOMNOM. It is kind of my signature cake, in that once someone tastes it, they ask for it for any/all holidays.

OK! Here is the recipe:

Chocolate Buttermilk Cake
3 C flour
2 1/2 C sugar
1 1/2 T baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 C unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/3 C vegetable oil
1 1/2 C buttermilk
3 eggs
1 1/2 C hot coffee
1 T vanilla extract

Grease two 9" cake pans, line them with wax paper, grease again, then dust with cocoa powder (flour will show up on your cake). Get cocoa powder everywhere. Swear. Turn oven to 350.

The pans are not dirty, they are READY.

Put the dry stuff together and mix it up a little.

Dry stuff

Realize you have no coffee brewed. Brew coffee. Putz around while coffee brews.

Brief interlude

OK, the coffee should be done. Moving on. Add the buttermilk and oil, then mixalot.

Baby got back

Add the eggs one at a time, beating just enough to incorporate them and scraping down the bowl between.

Eggs are photogenic

Then add the coffee and vanilla. It will be super runny and sloppy, so turn your mixer on REALLY LOW at first, or you will regret it during cleanup. Actually, just mix it in on low.

Slow looks fast on film! MAGIC!

Pour into your pans, pop into the oven, set the timer for like 28 minutes (it should take 30-35).

Slightly fucked-up looking DELICIOUS cake

My cake looks a little fucked up because of the buttermilk powder I used in place of real buttermilk, which kind of did not dissolve properly. I think it may have been not necessarily "in date" still. Um, don't tell anyone.

Let the cakes cool about ten minutes in the pan, then invert them onto wire racks. There is an easy trick for doing this but this post is already a mile long, so if anyone wants it, ask in the comments and I will oblige.

Fuck yes.

Congratulations, Cake Champion Achievement unlocked.

I will post the filling/frosting part later...Mmmm, German Chocolate Cake.