Wake up sleeping bloggers!

So I thought I'd shock the crap out of you and blogg about something kind of food related.  I call it the cheeseburger bird.
Why you ask?
Well Tommy, because when the cheeseburger bird sings  one of its many songs  (and they are all incredibly fabulous,)one stands out more than the others and that one , THAT ONE, sounds to me like the bird is calling  " cheeseburger cheeseburger cheeseburger consecutively"
I first heard the cheeseburger bird before I saw the cheeseburger bird waking up one Saturday morning I'd say 15 years ago.
More recently, maybe 5 years ago, I noticed this crazy gray bird calling out all these amazing different and unique songs on top of the telephone pole starting at dawn and  into the dusk hours....
It really got my attention more last summer when this bird began to harass my cat Jenny .
Now Jenny has had a rough life, lived in a cage in a shelter for two years and was from who knows where in Camden NJ before that.  She's not had it easy and in my opinion she finally hit the cat jackpot and came to be with us one night after I decided that our other cat needed another feline around the house.  Eventually Jenny discovered "outside" and has been loving life ever since.  She's harmless, only hunts moles and mice, minds her own business as the most beautiful flower in my flower bed.
Until the cheeseburger bird discovered her last year and chased and squawked and swooped at her day in and day out.
Summer came and went...I admit I did take the hose to the damn bird a few times on the electric wire(just now realized that could have killed the damn thing butttt) truly I was just trying to break its   hyper focus on my cat.
Fall came and then winter we did our thing forgot about cheeseburger..... As the leaves were growing back on the trees , damn if this bird didn't appear again and start up right where it left off only this time out front.  Poor Jenny couldn't frolic freely and lay on the walkway without this stupid ass bird attacking her.   I began busting out the front door Suddenly every chance I could , chasing it away and making loud noises at it.... Yelling back into its nasty prehistoric bird face.   I began wishing terrible things to happen to it.....  Like death by Colin Powell , our other cat and how fitting of a name for the little orange hunter that he is.  We always thought it was odd that cheeseburger never harassed him but only Jenny from the block.  It deserved it! Jenny wasn't doing anything to this bird.
I began to put Colin out WITH Jenny and whispered unthinkable things into his little cat ears like one of those murderous women on the ID channel who get other men to kill their husbands for them...
Colin was quite amused by the cheeseburger.  We imagined him saying things to the cheeseburger  like( loved that swooping move you just did, do it again closer this time, s. o I can really see how you    do it) like the cool Cheetos cat in the commercial. ..        


One morning quite uneventfully.....  Cheeseburger was not at his usual post on the electrical wire.  He didn't sit on my shepherds hook.
Bill though he saw Colin walking into the brush with a gray bird in his mouth but we couldn't be sure he got the cheeseburger.
This morning there was a gray cheeseburger squawking his many songs like crazy.  I can only assume this is Mr. cheeseburger.  Seems he's over his grieving and searching for a new mrs cheeseburger.  Maybe this time he won't choose mrs OCD hyper focus lady bird.
No I do not feel terrible for my thoughts.  I do not miss her.  She was unbalanced.  She was never going to get the therapy she needed or take her meds.

Mid-Holiday Blog

This is the downtime I've been looking forward to, as I know Christine has, for a very long time. We need it, we crave it, we love it. We savor it. We use its time well. It's too short anyway.

As for me, I love the day after Christmas and the rest of the days leading up to New Year's Eve. I have been starting to train for my next 5K, which I have vowed to do intelligently this time. I run/walk for 1.5 minutes on and off for 20 minutes total, sandwiched between 5-minute warmup and cooldown. Seems to work. I have to remember to stretch afterward or my shins will splint and calves contract. I'm old, remember.

Then there is crocheting, which I've started to use as a stress-reliever. Sometimes it works and other times it just makes me more stressed out. But it's sort of fun and an excuse to just sit motionless on the couch for long periods of time.

Finally there is the old book-reading marathon holiday ritual. I love to pile up books and see how many I can read. I love curling up with a good book -- TV, Internet, and phone turned off -- under a throw blanket (soon to be one I've crocheted maybe).

On the cooking front, all the invitees to our Christmas soiree brought dishes they made, and I brought spanakopita, a spinach-feta cheese-phyllo dough item I had just learned to make. The first time I made this dish I made it as a pie with phyllo dough on the bottom and phyllo dough on the top. But for Christmas I wanted to make it the "right" way, in little phyllo dough triangles. To make it this way you brush melted butter on a strip of dough, plop a spoonful of spinach mixture an inch or so from the end, then start folding it over like you would fold a flag. I remembered how to fold a flag from Girl Scouts. It has finally had a practical use.

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday!

Procrastinating

So instead of reading/studying for my Critical Inquiry final, I decided to give you all an awesome blog post to read.... and maybe this will allow you all to procrastinate too. This week is finals week for me, so this weekend I did a lot of sitting on my ass. I never noticed until I started grad school that my attention span is terrible. This is going to annoy some of you, well probably not because most of you are very smart, but I could pretty much not study before and I'd do fine. In high school I would say I was going to study for finals, and fall asleep about 15 minutes into it... those were the days. Now here I am trying to think of things that I did other than study and not much is coming to mind. My parents had their annual holiday fight... glad that's over with. It's beginning to freak me out how much I act like my mom, and how much Dan acts like my dad. I could have sworn that it was us fighting. It's not very reassuring that the same fights go on 25 + years later. Speaking of being married, another one of my cousins got engaged. Blah Blah Blah, now onto food..
Breakfast: waffles, syrup, butter
Lunch: Chick-fil-a, nuggets and fries
Dinner: not yet.. last nights was spaghetti, meatballs and sausage.

Wednesday Dan and I are going to Reading Terminal Market for lunch after my final. I could spend all day in there eating. We will definitely let you know how that is... because its good eats. Maybe, just maybe I'll take some pics of my sandwich for you to salivate over.

I just don't feel like it

Bread with Butter That is what I just ate.

and coffee.

Last night Eggs bacon and toast. (which was made more fun because suddenly we began to speak in Medieval proclamation fashion in the kitchen as we made the bacon and by the end of this preposterous conversation, we decided we would be very entertaining for us if we emailed the manager of the shelter we got our beloved cat Jenny from and tell them we had to beheaded Jenny for not producing an Heir for the king) You people who have been at our house can understand how these things escalate into the ridiculous, as we go one step further with words to top the other. We would NEVER do anything to harm our pets. I have simply been watching a few movies on Queen Elizabeth and her mother Ann Boleyn was indeed beheaded for not producing an heir for the king. Clearly this has permeated into my thoughts.

Onto more food.

Lunch, Chicken salad on more bread.

Breakfast special K the plain boring kind and some slivered almonds sprinkled on top and some greek vanilla yogurt. coffee

This is what it would be like if we really just wrote about what we ate.

Thank God we have lives outside of our food because this is boring.

Tomorrow, building management is providing us with a Holiday Breakfast Buffet. I am already excited about it because I have yet to food shop this week, due to not feeling that great all weekend with a Migraine (and fighting something off, maybe a cold trying to jump on the bandwagon OR my liver was recovering from all the Excedrin Migraine meds I over took )

and then there was that rain Anna spoke of.......for two days....ending in monsoon conditions. How is a person supposed to have energy after all of these things. Oh and my sister getting a Pulmonary Embolism in her lung.(this was a big energy drain as this was stressful)

And work because suddenly, now that were at the end of the year, I have been slammed with so much work that I cannot do enough in a day to complete the never ending article requests and I am far to brain fried to go in early or stay late. My neck hurts.My wrists hurt. I am hungry.

wait, this is boring too.

Okay I did go to a cool dinner party but I am just to tired to write about it and describe it.

It's the 8th of December and I have not yet decorated my house and I don't feel like it and no one has noticed and now I am actually contemplating how long I can go before someone asks about the Christmas tree or if they ever will. I don't think they actually care at all.

Then there is this giant plastic rat and rubber snake at work in the cubical of my co worker Matt, who so graciously news papered my cube in September so that I needed scissors just to get into my cube. Under normal conditions, if I were myself, I would have already not only decorated my cube for Christmas but I would have assisted in dressing these creatures up while he was out at meetings yesterday and I promised Mel I would go home and get my giant roll of red felt and help her to make Mr Rat and Mr Snake Christmas like.

but I just don't feel like it. Perhaps I need to stop at the CVS and grab a couple of 5 hour energy drinks.

Just don't feel like it.

This is my life and after re reading this blogg....it sounds literally......... bizarrely boring

If All the Raindrops were Apple Pie and Meatballs...

It's been a rather long hiatus for me, so I'm sorry but truly I do little than sleep and nom on pizza.

Anyway, I woke up at 1 pm today by my roommate walking in and asking me if I wanted to go grocery shopping with her. Now, last night I had contemplated redeeming my free pizza from Papa John's to last me the rest of the week, but didn't have the necessary $2.16 delivery fee. So I just ate leftover rice which (despite my ethnicity), I hysterically hate. Going to the grocery was necessary, because unless I lost a tooth, I still wouldn't have $2.16 in the morning.

Grocery shopping was feasible because of the cold, shiny plastic my parents left me to use for emergencies. Thinking hunger was a valid excuse, I went to Pathmark and bought Coke, pie, meatballs, and mozzarella sticks. All the necessities.

Munched on mozzarella sticks, while watching Park and Recreation, until I had to go to work. Walking to the shuttle is no joke in the rain, although in general, I love walking in the rain because everything smells cleaner and the steady rhythm of raindrops is very soothing. Plug in some rainy day music and it's altogether a good time. Only having flats to wear: not so fun. Wet shoes, wet socks, wet feet, wet jeans are very disagreeable, especially if you have to work in them for 3 or 4 hours.

I'm at work now, and maybe once I get home, I'll watch more Parks while nomming on pie. Or listen to orchestral music while watching the rain fall. You can't ask me to do work when it's raining because I'll only half-ass it in my drowsiness.