Today at Costco I bought:

2 1/2 pounds strawberries for $4.49
4 pounds Goldfish crackers for $7.89
2 1/2 pounds Kashi cereal bars for $10.69
2/3 pounds Buffy Season 2 for $16.99

It's fun to weigh things on a kitchen scale!

PS: I may need about 2/3 pounds Buffy Season 3 as well...

PS 2: The Food network is currently at 111.5810. Did I watch it all evening yesterday? Yes I did.

Medium did this?

I thought that I burned off all my tastebuds long ago with hot salsa. Tonight I was enjoying a bit of medium salsa with blue corn chips. I was drinking ginger ale, chomping my chips, and watching the idiot box. After a few minutes, I realized that this salsa was pretty hot! I actually had Donald get me a glass of milk. I tell you I wasn't expecting the spicy-spicy from a medium salsa. Now I can't taste anything properly. Maybe tomorrow. :(

More melty cheese

Following the last post, Donald and Mike and I had more Mexican food. We went to Don Chilito's for the first time. It's a place that needs an introduction at the door, to tell you what to do. It's loud in there and a little mystifying for newcomers. You are first presented with a choice of doors to enter, one for take out and one for cafeteria line. Cafeteria line? After entering the cafeteria line door, we found that you are to look at the menu on the wall, then tell your order to the (white) person behind the cafeteria counter. Next you stand and wait to be handed a plate with food on it. While waiting we wondered about chips and salsa, and if they were complimentary. Then you scoot down to the cashier at the end to pay. As we headed to fill our cups at the self serve drink station, we saw what looked like a salad bar. Me being me, I went to check it out. Turns out that's where you get your chips and salsa, as well as sopapillas. The food was adequate, and pretty tasty. I'd eat there again if I was in the area.

Yesterday we made our own Mexican-style food. We made tostadas with beans, seasoned meat, cheese, sour cream, tomatoes, red onions and lettuce. Those turned out very tasty. We also tried making our own queso blanco, like the delicious melty white cheese you get in Mexican restaurants. That was less of a success. It was certainly melty, but not nearly as good at restaurant cheese. Probably due to the quality of melting cheese available at Price Chopper in KC, MO.

I am weak

Last night I told Donald I felt like something with melty cheese for dinner. We went to Manny's, which is a Mexican restaurant the size of a small city block. As I looked at the menu, all I really wanted was nachos- so I caved in to my cheese craving and had nachos for dinner. I still feel silly about it, but they were damn tasty. And it wasn't just cheese, there was beef and beans and tomatoes and sour cream and guacamole. (Mmmm, guacamole.)

Been awhile

I got all manner of tied up with tech for about a week. It was a fairly normal tech. We did discover a major downtown improvement very close to the theater. It's a lovely new restaurant dealing out tasty hamburgers known as Chef Burger. You may have guessed, but they specialize in burgers. They also have hot dogs and even a few salads. I will surely branch out in the future, but right now I'm hooked on the sweet potato fries. ( I looove sweet potato fries.) We went there about 4 times during the tech process. They also specialize in milkshakes, and for an extra fee you can have yours spiked with booze. I'm looking forward to trying one.

Droool- BBQ

We went to Oklahoma Joe's yesterday with my folks. Sigh. So tasty. Donald and Mike agree, it's better for all that they don't deliver, and that they're not closer to home. We'd eat way too much. Man I love barbecue. I'd eat there 3 times a week if I had the chance.

We're hooked on Hellgate London. It's made by the same people who made Diablo 2, but not the same studio. You can download a demo from the website. You must fight the forces of evil in a futuristic London. Like D2, there are several classes of character to choose from. You can use swords, guns or magic, and there are 2 sub classes of each. I haven't gotten very far into the game yet because I have about 4 different characters going, 2 offline and 2 online. Unlike Diablo 2, you have to create completely separate characters to play online. Playing online, you can play with your friends, which is cool. You have to know their exact character name, and go through a few steps to connect with them. (I let Mike and Donald tell me what to do there.) Then you can join forces to kill the beasties, and swap loot once you get back to town. As Donald can attest, I'm all about the loot. If there were a game called "Loot" when all you do it smash boxes and get loot, I'd probably buy it.

birthday/ tech

Since I had to work last night, Donald and I celebrated my birthday Monday night. We went out to eat at Carmen's in Brookside for the first time. We were in no hurry, so we relaxed and took our time. Donald had a chicken dish and I had a very tasty pasta. For desert we shared a very good tirimisu. The restaurant was pretty dark, which always bugs me a bit, but otherwise had an inviting ambiance. We went home very full, and carrying leftovers.

Yesterday I went out for brunch with the rest of my family. Donald was unable to ditch work, so we went without him. Eggtc has really good waffles, if you wanted to know.

Then there was rehearsal. Last night was the final dress rehearsal. I got there at 5 intending to do about half an hour's worth of work notes, and found that none of the lights onstage would come on. They worked when I left Sunday night, but it seems that every time I show up something else isn't working with the lights. Sunday morning, all 4 moving mirrors weren't working. After much climbing around, phone calls, and ladder dragging, it turned out that in 3 separate places, vital things had come unplugged. Guess what was wrong last night? If you said "something was unplugged" you are a winner! The TD knocked things loose when he was working. Again. The DMX running from the dimmers in the booth to the dimmers backstage had come undone. Kind of important if you want the light board to turn the lights on. With the massive piles and knots of cables everywhere, I don't know why the place hasn't burned down yet. I didn't get any of my notes done, so I'll try again, and hope to get them done today. And tonight is first preview.

Fun fact: The Unicorn has SIX different kinds of dimmers. In three places.

dinnertime moment

The Hamburger Helper was almost ready to eat.

Donald:

"I'll go clear off the table. And by table I mean coffee table. And by clear off I mean move the computers."

It was funny to me. :)

More tasty dinner, and not too funny

I cooked again! At the theater we decided to do an Italian- themed potluck on Sunday between shows. Yesterday, my mom and I made spaghetti sauce and meatballs. It was fun to cook together, and delicious too. Afterwards, my hair smelled like meatballs. My hair seems to absorb food smells very easily. I smelled delicious. So now I have delicious sauce and meatballs to take.

After the show last night I caught the end of UMKC's production of Noises Off. Verdict: I'm not sorry I didn't see the beginning. One major element that the movie does better than the stage production is focus your attention. I saw the last 10-15 minutes of Act 2, where there is a lot of chaotic running around. In the movie, they put the camera on what they want you to see. On stage, there's so much mess that you don't know where you should be looking until you realize you've missed something. This is more of a problem with the staging then the actual show. I'm sure that professionals can (and have) pulled it off nicely.

Next there was a ridiculous little, I dunno, intermission show or something while the set changed. They played Mission Impossible music and a guy dashed around playing commando or something while the turntable turned and the set revolved around to the front. It was the single most amateur thing I've seen on the Spencer Stage. I was kind of embarrassed, actually.

Then there was Act 3. Another issue I have with this production is the voices of some of the actors weren't strong enough to project the dialogue. Act 3 isn't funny if you don't know how much they're doing wrong from Act 1, and you can't tell how much they're doing wrong if you can't hear what they're saying. They also seemed to have cribbed a lot of blocking straight from the movie, which was even more obvious in Act 2.

Verdict: Watch the movie. It has Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, Christopher Reeve, John Ritter, Marilu Henner, Julie Hagerty, Mark Linn-Baker, Denholm Elliot and young Nicollette Sheridan running around in her underwear. It is hilarious.

P.S.- The lighting wasn't any good either.

Tasty dinner

I actually cooked today. From scratch! I bought the cookbook Macaela recommended, Cheap. Fast. Good! and today I tried my first recipe from it. First I made the Thai-Style Peanut Sauce, then I used it to make a pasta dish. The sauce was made in my blender, so it was easy and fast. The longest part was chopping up the fresh ginger. Oddly enough, this peanut sauce used only 1/2 cup peanut butter to make about 2 cups sauce.

For the Thai Spaghetti Toss, I cooked chicken pieces in my wok. Next I added onions and snap peas, then bean sprouts and half the peanut sauce, then mixed in the pasta and added crushed peanuts. I'm pretty damn pleased with it. Donald thought it was a little bit bland, which could be fixed by merely adding more sauce. (The other half of the batch of sauce went in the freezer for next time.) It made 4 good sized servings, and Donald even had seconds. Success! And now I have 2 dinners to take to the theater with me. If anybody's interested, I can post recipes.

Still here

After I posted on Friday, I FINALLY got ahold of the doctor's office and FINALLY got my hands on a new prescription and FINALLY put it in the mail on Saturday. Finally. It really really shouldn't have been that difficult. I'm certainly not planning to go back to St. Luke's Internal Medicine again. They were astonishingly unhelpful.

As for our rent, we decided to get a 9 month lease. We had an appointment to go over the new lease, but it got canceled and we don't have a new appointment yet. So we've gotten nowhere with that. Donald's going to go ahead and pay the rent for next month at the same rate we've been paying, since there's no way we'll get a new lease signed by Sept. 1. Plenty of time to argue about stupid crap details in the sample lease Donald picked up.

Donald and I decided we should eat out less. We're spending too damn much money on delicious but unnecessary meals. Or maybe I just decided it- at least it seems that way with all the crap Donald's been giving me about it. :P In the time left before I'm sucked into tech rehearsals, I've been trying to cook more. For dinner Wednesday I broiled us a steak. KC Strips were on sale, so I got a great price. It was mostly a steaky success, but ended up overdone because somebody thought it was too red in the middle. Next time I won't listen to somebody, and he'll eat the damn steak however I cook it. I also made instant mashed potatoes and frozen green beans. For dinner last night I reheated the sides, and baked breaded chicken tenderloins. While the food I prepared was certainly not cooking from scratch, it's at least a step above frozen pizza. (Which we had Monday.) Gotta start somewhere. :)

Last Saturday Donald completely and totally surprised me by making me breakfast in bed. He said he was worried that I'd hear him and wake up. I've gotten so used to sleeping through the noises he makes while getting ready for work every morning, that I had no idea what was happening until he walked in with a tray. He made me scrambled eggs and toast with jam. It was great. :) It was also a little weird to be eating right after I got up. I've gotten in the habit of getting up and puttering around on my computer for awhile before eating breakfast. Just like I'm doing now!

Absorbent and yellow and porous is he!

Friday I got to play with icing again. Lucy wanted a pineapple cake this year. Mom baked the cake in 2 round pans, and I took it from there. I got out the food coloring and the good ole' Betty Crocker icing and had a good time. It turned out nice and pineapple-y. The whole time I was making it the Spongebob song was in my head. ("Who lives in a pineapple under the sea!") The real pineapple was very useful to have as a reference. Mom cut off the top and stuck it on the cake before serving it Saturday.




When I went out to water my plants yesterday I heard rustling under the bushes. My first instinct was to squirt the sound with the garden hose, assuming it was a squirrel. Turns out, it was a teeny baby bunneh. It was cute, so I got my camera. It was also terrified, being a bunny, but too stupid to actually run very far. It was gone, or at least better hidden by the time I finished watering.

Yesterday I managed to drop a Rubbermaid container of Chinese leftovers on my right big toe, causing a great deal of pain. The edge managed to just hit the cuticle, which has now turned very purple. I couldn't even yell in pain properly, just sort of croak. It amazes me how much something so small can hurt. It just throbbed all the rest of the night, as I limped around at the show. (The preview went fine, I took many photos.) It feels better this morning, but I'm still going to keep it elevated as much as possible. Sigh. I decided not to post a toe picture, but I have one available on request! It actually doesn't look like much. :)

Time for an audience

Our little show is ready to go. We ran through the whole play last night and the night before, and it went pretty great both times. We have our preview tonight, and the performance tomorrow. Yay! I'm glad to get to the performance, and yes, I'll be glad when it's over. I'm looking forward to not inhaling any more dust. We're bringing in fans to try to keep our audience as comfortable as possible. Oddly enough, we all agreed that it didn't seem as hot lately. Either we're getting used to it, or there's some inversely proportional temperature thing going on with the outdoors. It's probably the first one.

I spent a few hours yesterday afternoon helping the set designer make masking. Using only the finest in materials- we made blacks out of black plastic paint tarps. :) It worked surprisingly well. I cut them to size, then sat and put grommets in them, and Dave hung them. Then we made a backdrop with the same technique. The backdrop has fabric "buildings" attached. Dave laid them out, then I took over making them into buildings. It was a lot of fun actually. The sound designer watched me do it, making suggestions. So it ended up being a truly collaborative effort. For once. All the talk about collaboration in theater is usually just talk. It's very rare that 3 designers do ANYTHING together. So, it was fun!

Speaking of dust, I started getting a sore throat a few days ago. I'm sure the excessive dust doesn't help, even though by this point we aren't really stirring it up. By today my voice is nearly gone. I'm thinking about making myself a button that I can just point at to avoid unnecessary speaking.

For dinner last night Donald and Mike and I tried out the Westport Flea Market for the first time. I give them 2 thumbs up. They have 2 sizes of hamburger, A Little Too Big and Really Too Big. Both sizes are delicious- flavorful and juicy, and reasonably priced for the size. They come with a side of fries, and you help yourself to a condiment bar. There are a lot of other sandwiches on the menu, but I'm pretty sure that the next few times I go there I'll be getting another delicious burger. Tasty tasty.

Dinner adventure

For dinner tonight I made "homemade" pasta sauce. I say "homemade" because it's actually just doctored Ragu. :) I browned hamburger and onions, and cut up zucchini. Then I added the Ragu, and various spices, and left it to simmer. I started to do some dishes. When I turned back to the sauce to give it a stir, a sauce bubble popped up and burned my hand. I squawked, swore a little, and ran it under cold water. Then I went back to washing dishes. After a few minutes, the water didn't seem to be draining, so I gave the disposal a spin which usually sucks the water down. This time it didn't. In fact it kept filling. Great. Then it came back up. Ew. I thought maybe some food was caught, so I stuck my hand in to check. Again, ew, but nothing. Crap.

I washed a few more dishes, having to stop every couple of minutes to wait for water to go back down. Naturally, it was 6:45, well after the time anybody would be in the landlord's office, so I left a message. About 7:00 I started the pasta. Donald got home when it was just about ready. I was getting pretty hungry, and he's usually ready to eat as soon as he gets home. I took the pasta to the sink to drain it, held the lid on the pot and turned it over to let the water drain out like I always do-- then dropped the whole thing in the sink. As I stared at my pile of pasta in the sink, it quickly slithered into the garbage disposal. And I just watched it go, as my stomach grumbled.

So my dinner has literally fallen down the drain, and I could do nothing but fill the pot with water again, and put it back on the stove to make more pasta. Then I had to get the old pasta out of the garbage disposal, because it chose today to not work right! I pulled the trash can over to the sink, sighed, and stuck my hand in the garbage disposal AGAIN. I immediately yanked my hand out of the garbage disposal because that pasta was still very hot! Slimy and hot! About half of the pasta came out through my ingenious idea of using a fork. Then I ran some cold water to cool off the rest, and dug it out with my hand. Several minutes and a new batch of pasta later, we got to finally eat dinner.

Moral of the story: fuck cooking.

Here's the pasta after entering the disposal:

Here's the payload in the trash:

And the cat just sat there, not helping at all:

Delivery. Or not.

Donald and I were going to be lazy and order wings from Pizza Hut last night. Very lazy. Donald called at 7:30, and was put on hold for about 5 minutes. He comes into the living room at 7:40 and tells me that the wings will be here at 9pm, and the drivers only carry $3 in change. What the fuck? We're hungry right now! I expect a half hour wait for delivery, but not an hour twenty. Only $3 in change? Our total was $13, so I'm supposed to tip $7?!? No way. Donald called back to cancel the order, which took another 5 minutes on hold as they transferred him to customer service. I got in the car and drove to Sonic. Sonic took a kind of long time, but I was still back in my house and eating at 8:30. What a ridiculous experience. :P

Breakfast pt 2

Monday's breakfast food was only a tease. It only made me want more. So I made waffles for lunch yesterday. They were tasty, but I still want bacon.

As I was making the waffles, I decided to make cookies too. It was my turn to make something to take to the theater. I went with chocolate chip cookies because it's the only cookie I actually know how to make, and I had all the ingredients. You may think that shouldn't be a factor, but I don't always have eggs. I did half the batch with milk chocolate candy coated bits and the other half with semi-sweet and peanut butter chips.

I dropped my dough by rounded spoonfuls onto my ungreased cookie sheet, popped 'em in the oven, and waited. And waited. And waited. They took FOREVER to bake! I checked the temperature to see if I'd set it wrong. Nope, 375º. I looked at the bottom of the cookies, not brown yet. The directions say 8-10 minutes, and I must have baked them at least 15. They never did get as brown as I thought they should. In my previous experience, I'd have to keep a very close eye on the cookies to keep them from burning, and I'd usually end up with the first tray burnt anyway. I've never had to put them back in for several more minutes! I gave up on brownness and went on with the baking. I ended up with 3 1/2 dozen cookies. I like to make them small so you can eat more than one. Everyone said they were yummy, so it was a success. I still don't know what was up with the baking though.

I wish I had some bacon right now

It rained all day yesterday. It was sunny the day before, and it'll be sunny today, but on my actual "day off" it rained all day. Well screw you, rain! I went to the grocery store anyway. That sure showed it.

Donald went to work early yesterday, so he came home early too. We decided to make scrambled eggs and potatoes o'brian and sausage for dinner. Our lovely "new" nonstick pan works great for such things. The problem was the sausage. It had been in the freezer for awhile. It looked normal and smelled just fine while cooking. Then when you took a bite, expecting sausagey goodness, it tasted kinda like plastic and cardboard and generally tasted the way the freezer smells. So damn disappointing. The eggs and potatoes were fine, if a little dull. I still need to figure out a way to make them tastier. We got done eating around 7, and watched Hell's Kitchen at 8. They cooked breakfast food during the show, which made Donald and I hungry for pancakes and bacon. We suffered through it and did not go to Chubby's. but we really wanted to.

snackies

Studio 60 was good tonight! I always said it needed more Allison Janney, and it delivered. I also said it needed more guy-who-played-Toby, but you can't win 'em all.

One benefit of working at the downtown theater is the chance to mooch food. They have some kind of reception about once a week, sometimes more. And yes, they are catered. Usually, the people who the reception is for are going to see the play, so we can sneak in and get some tasty leftovers just before the show starts. Yesterday I snagged a stuffed mushroom, some veggies, and 2 different kinds of tasty cheese on toast, one pesto and one sun dried tomato. Today was even better, because they held a reception, and nobody came. The catering people (who are getting to be like our best friends) said they'd have to throw it all away, so we dug in. We had just enough time to get someone from backstage to come up and grab some plates to take down to the crew. I happily helped myself to spinach artichoke dip and chips, roasted vegetable crostini with goat cheese, and some damn good apple crumbly cake. It was a good night. :)

14 layers? wow!

Last night I made 14 layers of dip, and Donald helped. Okay, actually we made two seperate 7-layer dips but it's more fun to say 14 layers. We're having another potluck at the theater today so I made one to take and one for home. The show continues to go on, in a dull manner. I continue to get a lot of reading done.

Lately at Muddy's I've been enjoying melon Italian sodas. A barista suggested it, and I'm getting very fond of them. They're a pretty pale green color, and don't taste like any specific melon. It sounds kinda gross but is surprisingly tasty. The melon flavor isn't too strong, and combined with the fizzy soda water it makes for a very refreshing drink.

I walked 40 minutes Friday morning. It felt good to stretch my legs again. It hurt a little because I'm out of practice. I decided I need to walk earlier that I did Friday. I got home about 10:30 and it was getting pretty warm out. I can achieve this if I do not turn on my computer first thing when I wake up. If I eat first, then walk, then shower, THEN waste time on computer I should be able to finish my walk before the firey thing in the sky gets too hot.