« December 2005 | Main | February 2006 »
hoo-hoo! A new blog banner. Let me know what you think. Eventually, I'll get around to redoing the icons too, which have been absent while I work from the hubby's laptop most mornings. That is, when I get to post at all.
Be back soon with more funny tales from suburbia.
Update: okay, new icons are done. Phew.
very now and then I must devote a post to the endlessly beige span of desert known as the Inland Empire, since this is nominally what my blog's about, and it helps in the occasional non-porn Google search.
I live in a part of the world known for its cancerous growth -- the fastest in North America, if the newspapers are to be believed. More articulate and smarter people (who generally don't live here, almost by definition) can tell you all about what problems that generates. I care about all of them, but not right now.
Right now, I'm concerned that this population boom means my corner of the world now has the lowest per capita rate of vegetarian restaurants in all of herbivorous California. This is shocking.
Even though I've joined the legions of leaf eaters, I'd like to have the occasional culinary adventure just like other civilized people who throw caution and lower dress sizes to the wind. Imagine my delight upon hearing there is a vegetarian Chinese restaurant in my town. With some pluck and help from a site called the Happy Cow, I found Veggie Way (formerly Panda Wok) less than 3 miles from my humble, meat-free abode.
Last night, we ventured there, keeping our expectations low, which turned out to be wise. First, we had to find the strip mall, nearly indistinguishable from all the other fading, litter-strewn wrecks with gaping vacancies and cracked blacktop. We found it wedged between the Liquorama and a nail spa. Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know?
The restaurant was your typical greasy spoon, with a few creaky tables, dim lighting and crimson Japanese lanterns. A mirrored wall kept the baby busy most of the evening, and a TV console broadcast Chinese religious programming with English subtitles: "Find the person who knows God and let him enlighten you!"
Sure. Right after I finish my egg rolls.
We seemed to be the only people over 30 there, which meant we were also the only ones whose every last inch of flesh hadn't been given over to tattoos and piercings. It never fails to amaze me how many holes the human body can sport without leaking.
We shared chicken-less chow mein noodles and curried vegetables. I didn't die. Minitaur ate his customary brown rice and steamed tofu. You read that correctly. This is what my son has eaten in every Asian-themed restaurant he's ever been in, though sometimes it's soba noodles instead of rice. Poor kid. I've pretty much ruined him, haven't I?
As we ate, others filtered in who didn't seem as threatening: two gay college kids, a middle-aged European couple, and a few others of non-Anglo ethnicity. You would never have noticed any of them if we didn't live in Vacuous Fatso Land. Most people seemed in a good mood, especially the gay couple, who were all giddy with young love.
It took a while for the two women behind the counter to warm to us. We were clearly the interlopers here, us middle-class family types wearing jeans and sweaters and without any visible bodily alterations.
It isn't exactly our piece of Santa Monica or Laguna Beach, but it's not terrible, which is about what you expect in our part of the world. Sad, I know, but until someone offers one of us a job in a less carniverous part of the country, this is what we get.
y kitchen’s inhabited by a smelly gremlin who sucks food and gawd-knows-what-else into the crevices between my stove and the counters. I was going to write about him last week after he ate my favorite wooden spoon, but I had a cold and figured the monster could hang around until afterward.
But the situation bothered my husband. Not the spoon, mind you, since we figured that for a total loss. No, the smelly monster smelled like gas. Not the kind I emit, silly. The kind that can cause your house to explode. So he called the gas company, who broke the land speed record getting here to make sure we were okay.
Wow, sure wish the plumber felt that way.
The gas man was garrulous and cheery, the kind who probably uses his blue coveralls with their cute flame logo as a cover so he can invite himself into your home and hang out with your kids. The kind who would easily overstay his welcome if you didn’t cheerfully remind him he must have other gassy households to rescue.
The first thing he does – before I can stop him – is pull the stove out from the wall. Oh dear. Our house is about 16 years old, and the stove is original, which means the gremlin hasn’t been disturbed in all that time, and had a nice little treasure trove accumulating back there.
This gremlin’s a near-cousin of the entropy trolls I sometimes write about, the ones playfully eroding the house down to its pre-Big Bang state of indeterminate particles. And, of course, it’s of the same genus as the sock monster in your dryer. And he’s been one busy goblin.
How do I know it’s a he, you ask. Aren’t I being sexist? After all, “he” is no longer the default pronoun in our language, is it, Ms. Smarty Pants Copyeditor? Gosh, sorry, guys.
But no sooner had that stove budged than my son – who naturally was hovering millimeters away – shouted “a car!” And sure enough, there was a toy race car. And a tiny green plastic soldier. And a marble. And half of a yo-yo and something that looked like it might once have been a ball. Not entirely masculine, but in the absence of doll heads or Barbie accessories, my brain thought “boy.”
Beneath mounds of dust were also several metric tons of crusty food particles that had moldered beyond recognition. My wooden spoon had found a mate, a grimy wooden spatula, and there were two perfectly preserved pieces of soy bacon. I don’t know about you, but I find it somewhat disturbing that soy bacon doesn’t decompose.
While the gas man did his shtick and chatted about stoves and kids and his wife and kids (he liked kids, I gathered), I swabbed the greasier side of the stove, swept up the rubbish and cleaned off the toys for my son, who did his happy jump-up-and-down-and-wiggle dance by way of saying “thanks.”
My kitchen no longer smells. The stove has given up its secrets. The floor is semi-clean. I have my spoon back, plus a bonus utensil. With my luck, they will spawn toothpicks, which I will promptly feed like tadpoles to the gremlin.
don't have enough distractions, so I'm joining yet another blog. This one's a group blog called "Our Kids Speak" for parents recalling the charming/shocking/blunt things that pop out of our tots' mouths.
It was started by PsychoToddler and Pearlies of Wisdom. If you're as eager as me to humiliate your li'l darlings, see this post for details.
Blog on!
Okay, enough embarrassing confessions about my soul, etc. It's time I address a subject much nearer to my heart: my colon.
Normally, I don't think much about this part of my body. It does what it does. Shrug. But my husband seems to have realized he's spent seven of the best years of his life cohabitating with a large intestine -- not his own -- that functions, um, shall we say, less than optimally?
He thinks I have irritable bowel syndrome, or Crone's disease, or I'm lactose intolerant or maybe there's some weird, unexplained ailment that occurs in post-pregnant women, or in people who eat too much fiber, or not enough, or just what am I eating these days?
Now, if you ask me, there's nothing wrong. I feel fine. He still sent me a link, which I accidentally trashed, about a new drug that will hasten "intestinal transit time." Or slow it down, I don't remember. Sometimes I have one problem and sometimes the other. Mostly, though, I seem to contribute more than my personal share to LA's notorious air pollution.
This is not my fault. I like cheese and there's ice cream in my veins, so even though both my parents are/were lactose intolerant and several doctors have insisted I am lactose intolerant, I am in no way, shape or form unable to digest lactose. Lactose is good. Especially melted on toast, or smothered in chocolate sauce.
And I do not have an irritable bowel. Opinionated, maybe, but not irritable. Trouble is, that by the time it forcefully expresses its views on my diet, I have long since forgotten what I ate. And I don't keep track of the fiber content in veggie burgers or tofu, and I have no way of plotting "intestinal transit time" like it's a stop on the metro.
I'm not sure why I'm in high dudgeon about this, really. My husband is a fabulous human being, blessed with an exquisite sense of smell. If he'd married the woman he deserved, he'd be swirling a brandy snifter under that handsome, Semitic probiscus or burying it in the softly perfumed nape of her neck.
Instead, he crinkles it, makes a face and retreats to a better-ventilated part of the house. Or neighborhood. I know he deserves better, but I hate soy ice cream. Have you ever tried it? Or soy cheese? I mean, honestly, what's a few undigested enzymes between lovers?
There's a history here, naturally. I once emptied a dance floor at a party, and an entire train car, and you can't imagine how many public bathrooms. Mr. Dallas' seventh-grade math class was onto me, but everyone needed to cheat off my test papers, so they just gagged and passed notes about me and made the best of it.
I try very, very hard every day to keep my emissions to myself, unless I'm at home, where anything goes. Except I'm usually at home, so I've gotten a bit lax in this regard. Not Ex-Lax, mind you, just regular lax.
This has the bad result of teaching my son that farting and pooping are events that must be announced in a loud, proud voice.
Whatever the problem, I seemed to have passed it onto my daughter, who smells like she's decomposing. My husband tells people she's allergic to breast milk. She smiles blissfully. I grimace.
I am not sure why I'm telling the world this. Somewhere out there in the near future, some obsessive weirdo will be googling "Jewish boobs" and "fart" and will stumble onto my blog. I will make this person very happy. Isn't that reason enough?
In the meantime, I should get back to writing about poopy diapers or something more normal like that.
Recent Comments