Magical Adventures in Pudding

Yesterday, I ate a unicorn.



No, not that unicorn. That's the unicorn skull I bought at the grocery store on clearance after Halloween, and then stuck on my bookshelf like any other normal, grown adult. No, yesterday, I ate this unicorn:



I was at the grocery store, where I bought juice but somehow left the juice in my cart in the parking lot and now will die of scurvy, and as I was sliding down the snacks aisle looking for something else, I saw that pudding. The colors stood out in the middle of the pudding display, a wall of browns, beiges, and sometimes pale yellows, and then when I got closer I saw, "Naturally flavored".

"What natural flavors taste like unicorns? What does a unicorn even taste like? Maybe I could ask that guy from Harry Potter?" I thought to myself, and then thought, "I should buy this."

So I did. It turns out that the pudding cups are not actually that terrible for you, as prepackaged entirely processed foods go. They don't contain high fructose corn syrup and they're only 100 calories per cup, so you can eat one and feel like you had a decent little dessert. Although the ingredients don't say so:



the unicorn pudding is also made with fairy dust and princess kisses (Am I going to get princess mono from eating this?), and tastes like joy and rainbow sparkles:



Oh, there's also star dust in there:



Since every atom inside us, and inside the unicorn pudding, was once part of a star, this statement is actually correct.

Anyway, after dinner, I decided it was pudding time:



and the pudding was sort of interesting.

The pink:



smells like Play-Doh. So does the blue. Neither of them has a specific flavor that I could isolate, but my notes say that they tasted vaguely of some sort of berries. The taste is either very slight, or the Indian food I had for dinner destroyed my taste buds and everything was numb.

This morning, since I have to take my morning medicine with food and I decided to pretend that this was food, I turned my attention to the dragon pudding. While it claims to be made with "dragon magic":



it is apparently made from rocks. Rubies and emeralds, to be more specific.



No fairy dust or princess kisses here.

The dragon pudding is aggressively colored, and would not look out of place at Christmas:



Before you start to think, "Why would you even eat something that color?" you need to know that the clear plastic cup is muting the green. Once you open it, it's even brighter and greener (more emerald?) than it looked:



My body's natural response to that color was "SHOULD NOT GO IN MOUTH", but let's face it: if I listened to my body, I wouldn't keep getting on the treadmill, so I ate it anyway. I ate the red pudding first, though. Like the unicorn pudding, the red pudding was vaguely fruit-flavored in some way. My brain kept telling me it might be artificial cherry, but I also wondered if my brain was just suggesting that because of the color, and it was really just "Undefined Fruit #77" flavor from a chemical plant in New Jersey.

The green was even less flavored. It smelled of nothing, and initially tasted of nothing, but as I spooned it into my gaping mouthhole there was a little bit of an aftertaste. It was sort of like mint, but also sort of like a menthol cough drop. Either way, it wasn't very strong. Maybe these taste differently if you have youthful taste buds?

Either way, I now have two packs of these to finish.

And I have to go back to the store for juice.

Blasted Crust Pizza Rolls

You know how people say you should never go to the grocery store on an empty stomach?

You also shouldn't go to the grocery store after a long, mentally exhausting first day back at work from vacation. You shouldn't do it because those two factors, the empty stomach and the fried brain, could lead to you making some poor choices in the grocery store.

Impulsive choices.

EXTREME choices.

The kind of EXTREME choices that leave you unable to even type the word without doing so in all caps.

The kind of EXTREME choices that lead to this:



I ate Totino's Blasted Crust Pizza Rolls for dinner.

They weren't terrible, but I won't buy them again. I bought the ranch (possibly RANCH! or even X-TREME RANCH!) flavor rather than the cheddar flavor, and I guess they taste sort of like ranch. They taste kind of like you took a slice of thin crust pepperoni pizza and crumbled up a handful of Cool Ranch Doritos on top of it. They left my fingers a little greasy, they exploded on the plate a little in the microwave, and I can't stop burping, but who knows? That may appeal to you.

What appeals to me, on the other hand, is that webpage about them. It reads like the cat from Paula Abdul's Opposites Attract video wrote it himself with his biggest crayon. (As a side point, what was actually happening in that video? Was Paula Abdul dating an anthropomorphic cartoon feline? Does Paula condone animated bestiality? No wonder God cast her out of the Bratz movie.) It's not a "Saturday Night Live" parody of Guy Fieri, though. It's a real, actual webpage. Someone got paid to write that.

AND IT IS A GODDAMN GLORIOUSLY EXTREME PIECE OF WRITING.

We’ve got four words for ya: BLASTED. CRUST. PIZZA. ROLLS.

Oh. God. there. are. periods. between. the. words. And only three of those words have to do with food. One of these things is not like the others, and that thing is BLASTED. What does this all mean?

We took regular ol’ pepperoni filled Pizza Rolls, and THREW THEM IN A VOLCANO.

A volcano? Shouldn't they be BURNED CRUST PIZZA ROLLS, then? Or was this maybe a volcano... OF FLAVOR?

But instead of lava and ash or whatever these volcanoes had MAGICAL RANCH powdery stuff and EQUALLY MAGICAL CHEDDAR powdery stuff.

Magical powdery stuff? And it wasn't an EXTREMELY large pile of cocaine? I'm starting to think that "volcano" was a food additive factory in south Jersey. Kudos to Totino's on the vocabulary words, though. "Powdery" makes me think of "powder", which is another word for "snow", which makes me think of snowboarding, and dude, bro, snowboarding is WICKED EXTREME, like these pizza rolls.

Those rolls got all covered in that powder business and blasted out of the volcano like “LOOK AT MEEEEE! I’M A PIZZA ROLL EVOLVED!! BOW TO ME, LOWLY UNDERLINGS!”

True story: That's how I start most of my staff meetings. Including the part about being a pizza roll.

Then we ran each of them over with a tiny car a few times to make those cute little ridges.

A tiny car? Full of tiny clowns, perhaps? An EXTREMELY tiny car? Full of EXTREMELY tiny clowns? How did Totino's get inside to even drive that thing?

We dunno, just seemed like a good idea.

At least as good an idea as buying these was.

In stores in February! Get flavor dust on your fingies!

Fingies.

My fingies.

I can't even type anymore, because my fingies are too EXTREME.

Everybody Talks

Since I started talking (or, more accurately, writing) about my weight loss journey, people have wanted to talk about it with me. I'm fine with talking about it, especially if you want to talk about my steps. You could even say that I invited people to talk about it by being so open and sharing it with the internet, which is the same as sharing with the world. Despite all of the talking, though, I've discovered over the past few weeks that some of my friends (I'm not naming names, because I hope we're still friends after I write this) are still a little unclear about why I am dieting and exercising.

One friend said to me just yesterday, "This is really a lot of effort just to wear smaller clothes, isn't it?"

Another said last week, "You wrote this blog entry about how you're big and fat and now you hate yourself and I think you might need to talk to a therapist because you're obsessed."

This is partially true. I did write a blog entry about being big and fat, and in that entry I mentioned being depressed about my weight and about not fitting in chairs and having to buy a lot of bigger shirts and using the seatbelt extender on an airplane (which may be the most humiliating thing that's ever happened to me, at least from my perspective; I felt completely without dignity and fully ashamed even though the flight attendant was very nice about the whole thing), but I realize now in rereading it that I didn't talk enough about what else is going on, so I wanted to take a moment to clarify.

In July, when I wrote that first blog entry and started all of this, I weighed 295 pounds. I was leading a mostly sedentary lifestyle where I spent most of the day sitting down and, based on the first day I wore my Fitbit, walking less than two miles over the course of the entire day. I was using less than 2000 calories a day, total, including the number of calories that you burn just sitting and being alive, but eating between 5000 and 7000 calories a day based on the food diary I kept for a few weeks last spring. Just to help you conceptualize what that looks like, 5000 calories is about 16 Dunkin' Donuts Boston Kreme donuts.

Occasionally, especially if I was stressed or sad, I stopped at Dunkin' Donuts on my way home from work (after eating breakfast, candy all day, and a lunch that included a 32 ounce non-diet soda) and picked up a half dozen of those and ate them for dinner over the course of the night while I lay on my couch reading and playing video games.

Back to the point, though, I was eating about 3000 calories more a day than I was burning, which is how I ended up weighing 295 pounds.

And I was still gaining weight.

I mentioned in that first blog entry that I was having trouble just walking across campus. Walking up the flight of stairs into my apartment was leaving me short of breath if I was carrying something. I haven't been hiking in the Smokies in over a year, because I no longer had the stamina to walk the distance required for any of the trails. (I probably do now. I need to try that.) At the end of the day, my feet and ankles were swollen to the point that I could not see my ankle bones, and every night I had to put my feet up so that the swelling would go down. And then there's the thing with my shins:



See those brown spots? Those are not freckles. That's venous stasis. It means that my heart can't pump blood down to my legs and then back up to my heart. It's an early warning sign for diabetes. It can also lead to ulcers on your legs, slow wound healing, and amputation.

Let that sink in for a moment.

I let myself get so fat that I might have to have my feet cut off someday because my heart couldn't circulate blood to them.

I say "let myself" because I do not have a medical condition that makes me gain weight. I do not have physical limitations that prevent me from exercising, other than my weight. I just didn't feel like exercising. I was lazy. I enjoyed being lazy, and making jokes about it, and this is what happened. I didn't talk about a lot of this because no one wants to admit that they partially destroyed their own health through sloth, and also because my mom has a nursing license and I didn't want her to worry about me more than she already does. Everything in that first blog entry was true, but I left out discussion of the actual health issues and focused instead on the self esteem. This has, as I said at the beginning of this entry, apparently led to some misconceptions about what's going on here.

So, in July, I weighed 295 pounds.

I was presented with four options:

1) Become eight and a half feet tall. My doctor said this in jest as an option if I wanted to stay at my current weight. The height is actually a guesstimate, as most human height and weight charts top out around seven feet. I'm obviously done growing, so this option was off the table.

2) Die. Maybe I was going to finish developing diabetes. I'd already started, and people hate a quitter, right? Why not go all the way? Or, maybe I was going to have a heart attack. Or a stroke. Maybe I might even get my feet cut off. Or I could go blind. Something was definitely looming on the horizon, and it was a tombstone. I was eating myself to death, and it was only a matter of time before that caught up with me.

I haven't turned 40 yet. I want to go to Venice someday, and when I do I want to walk around and take photos and eat Italian food. I want to outlive several people.

In short, I'm not ready to die.

I reject Option 2.

3) Lap-band or gastric bypass surgery. I am not judging anyone who has done this. If it worked for you, and it was the best choice for you, then I salute you in doing what needed to be done. I rejected this option immediately.

Doctors scare me. Surgery carries risk. There are a number of frightening possible side effects.

Mostly, though, I rejected it because I was horrified by the idea that I was eating so much, and possibly so incapable of changing my habits, that the only way to keep myself from eating too much food was to surgically alter my body to physically prevent it. Coming to a point where that wasn't just an option, but was apparently considered my best option, was frightening and filled me with shame and disgust. I did this to myself.

When I said no, my doctor offered to put me in touch with patients who had the surgery and could "help with some of your fears and concerns", and I realized that my doctor did not believe that I would be capable of Option 4:

4) Serious commitment to diet and exercise. If you've been reading this blog for the past couple of months, you know how that's going. I am walking about 7 miles a day on an average day, and last week I was down 35 pounds. Part of that weight loss is the exercise, but part of it is also that I am on a 2000 calorie a day diet, which has been a struggle for me. I am now confined to a fraction of what I used to eat in a day, and I am extremely careful about my 2000 calories and where I allot them. I say things that sound terrible to other people, because I am focused and, many times, because I have to say it out loud to myself to remind myself that a 750 calorie milkshake from Cook Out is almost half of what I am allowed to eat for the entire day.

"I can't eat that. It's too many calories."

"I can't go to lunch. I want to have dinner tonight."

"I had a Slim Fast for breakfast."

"I wish I could have that donut, but I'm fat."

Five of my friends in the last month have accused me of developing an eating disorder.

I would like to reiterate that I am eating 2000 calories a day. I am not starving myself. I haven't cut out everything I love to eat. I have been to McDonald's. And Pizza Hut. I've even had the potato skins at Calhoun's, which are stuffed with pulled pork and then topped with melted cheese, bacon, and sour cream, and I have enjoyed every bite. I can stick to my diet without denying everything I enjoy about eating, but I have to make wise choices. At McDonald's I had two cheeseburgers, but only a small fries. If I get a personal pan pizza and breadsticks, I don't get a brownie, too. At Calhoun's, I put half of the potato skins in a carryout box, and when I ordered the banana pudding afterward I only ate half of it. I still get to eat things I want, but I have to plan my entire day around it if I really want something, and sometimes I get a much smaller quantity.

Last week, for example, I explained very excitedly to a friend that I had eaten half of a single serving ice cream cup one night with dinner, and then I ate the other half the next night. I got to have ice cream, two nights in a row!

My friend was horrified.

Let's look at this, though. See this ice cream?



That little tiny ice cream cup is 310 calories. That's more than I give myself most days for breakfast. That's three average sized apples and some calories left over. Ice cream is nice and all, but it's not worth 300 calories to me when I only get 2000. It is worth 150, though. After dinner, I got to have five spoons of ice cream. It was cold, and sugary, and sweet, and good. I carefully spooned out each bite and let it melt on my tongue, and thought, "Jesus, this is awesome."

Am I aware that obsessively counting calories and creating elaborate rituals to eat my food are warning signs for an eating disorder?

Yes.

So let me reiterate, again, that I am eating 2000 calories a day. You can get a lot of food out of 2000 calories, and feel very full, if you are careful about what kind of food it is. And I have to be careful, or I am going to die. I have to change a lifetime of eating habits, or I am going to die. If I choose the ice cream over the apple, that's fine, but I have to understand that the ice cream is an indulgence rather than something I can sit with a pint of and eat directly out of the carton with a spoon, or I am going to die.

And I don't want to die.

I want to go to Venice some day.

I've come a long way in two months. I've walked over 500 miles. I've increased my walking speed from a thirty minute mile to a twenty minute mile. I've lost 35 pounds. I can do this, but I'm not even close to finished. The 35 pounds I lost? I have to lose that much weight again. And then some more weight on top of that.

I'm going to Venice.

Even if I have to walk the entire way there with a Goddamn rice cake in my mouth.

Food I Dislike the Most and Why

On Day 13 of 30 Days of Blogging, I've decided to answer a question that Mom asked, since I spent the day with my parents:

Food I dislike most and why

At first I was thinking, "Why would my mom ask that? She knows the answer," but then I realized that ever since I went away for college my mom has heard some odd, previously unheard phrases relating to food come out of my mouth. For example:

"Yes, I'll have salad with dinner."

I ate traditional, pile of lettuce with other things on top and dressing, salad for the first time when I was about 24. Salad was always a part of the meal that I greeted with horror and refusal, as it contained a number of things that I don't like: tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, sometimes mushrooms, and lettuce, just for starters. But then this one time I was at Pizza Hut with my friend Karen for the lunch buffet, and there wasn't any pizza out for a few minutes because they were kind of bad at keeping the buffet stocked at that particular Pizza Hut, so Karen was like, "Let's just get the Caesar salad until the pizza's ready," and I was like, "Yes. Let's do that. We'll... eat... salad. Yes."

And it wasn't terrible.

I still didn't like tomatoes, cucumbers, mushrooms, or onions.

"We don't have to get a white pizza. I'll just eat one with sauce on it."

I never had tomato sauce until I went to college and had it on pizza. When you're pooling your money to order pizza, you can't really force everyone else to go without sauce because you hate it. Half the time you're lucky just to get the toppings you want. By the end of my freshman year, I was eating sun-dried tomatoes (yay for 90's cuisine!), regular pizza, and dipping breadsticks and cheese sticks in marinara.

And it wasn't terrible.

I still didn't like cucumbers, mushrooms, or onions.

"Mmmm... pickles."

The year is 1984. The family is at a diner in the nothern part of the Yukon Territory. They have been in a Dodge Ram Charger for days on end, all four of them and two dogs, one of whom hates being around most of the family and the other of whom weighs over fifty pounds. They have been homeless for weeks, because they are moving from Kentucky to Alaska and have somehow turned it into a road trip where we drive from Kentucky to New York to Colorado to Alaska. We miss our stuff, we miss having our own beds, we are tired, and the younger child, me, is refusing to eat a hamburger that cost about $10 Canadian because it came out with relish on it. Mom has scraped the relish off, but just knowing that it touched the meat has sent eight-year old me into a hunger strike tantrum where I am only eating the fries and Dad is visibly seething across the booth from me. I have also loudly informed my family, and probably the rest of the diner, that all of the food in Canada is "wrong" and that they (the Canadians) ruin everything.

I don't remember when I started eating pickles, but it was sometime in college, and even though my parents have never mentioned it again I still remember refusing to eat that burger and being a total brat about it.

I still didn't like mushrooms or onions.

"I need to get some mushrooms for Christmas dinner."

That one was fairly recent, when I made my friend Scott's coq au vin for Christmas dinner 2010. I've eaten mushrooms since then, not very often, but a few times. They haven't killed me, but they're not a favorite.

I still hate onions, though.

Oh, God, do I hate onions.

They're slimy and crunchy at the same time, and no matter what you do to them, they only get more crunchy or more slimy unless you manage to cook them down out of existence.

So, that's the answer. I hate onions, because they are disgusting.

Write About Something While It's Happening

Tonight, while I wait to help work admission at the drag show upstairs, I have decided to embrace my friend Steph's idea for 30 Days of Blogging:

Write about something while it is happening

Welcome to my dinner in the university center.

I have chosen to eat at Subway tonight, as my options are limited here. I cannot at the Chick-fil-A because I don't hate myself, I've never eaten at the Asian Express because the food always looks greasy when other people order it, and I don't feel like Sbarro's or Petro's.

One of the boys at the table at two o'clock is chewing with his mouth so far open that I feel like I'm watching a carnival game where his friend has to try to pluck the half masticated food from the Jaws of Doom before the teeth come back down. Five bites wins you a teddy bear.

I'm currently chewing the Italian BMT and thinking about how it's not a Cold Cut Combo. I stopped ordering the Cold Cut Combo at this Subway because they keep leaving one of the meats off. When I point out that it's missing the staff tells me that "extra meat costs extra", and when I point out that it's not extra and that it says right on the sign that it should be there they just shrug and say that this is the way that they have been trained to make the sandwich. After having the same argument three times, I now just order the one that they know how to make correctly. My energy is better spent elsewhere.

The table at ten o'clock just got up and left. They left a cup behind.

A line of four girls just walked past, singing along to the overhead music in low voices, smiling. I smile, too, because they are clearly enjoying themselves and the smiles are infectious.

A boy at the table at eleven-fifty-five is wearing pants that are cartoonishly green. They are not lawn or moss or hedge green, but bright primary color green. Somehow he is making them work. I would look like a circus extra in these pants, although I have been known to wear hunter green pants on occasion.

And yes, those are totally shades of green. You should buy a J Crew catalog if you don't believe me.

I have finished my sandwich and am opening my Doritos. I'm not sure how to eat them and type without getting orange stuff on my screen, but I will figure it out.

I am wiping my fingers on a napkin after every chip.

Someone behind me just ordered two kinds of cheese on their sub. Extra cheese also costs extra.

The boy and girl at the nine o'clock table are carrying on a conversation in low voices while eating, not making eye contact. Both are texting every time I look up, their attention focused on their phones. I sometimes think about leaving the table when people that I am eating with do this.

A Dorito splintered weirdly in my mouth and poked me right behind my front teeth. It was painful for a second.

The crowd here has thinned out. A tanned employee with long, sun streaked hair is refilling the napkin dispensers. It occurs to me that the tan and streaks both may be fake, but from over here they look real. She is mouthing the words on the overhead music, but not actually singing.

A boy who was eating alone at a table between two and three o'clock is leaving. He stared into his food he entire time hat he ate, without a book or a phone or a computer or anything, and I wondered how people eating alone do that.

A girl over by Asian Express is fist-pumping along to Kelly Clarkson's stronger. She sees me looking and I up-nod her, smiling. She laughs and continues dancing, waiting in line with her friend.

I am out of Doritos. Dinner is over unless I get something else, but all I want is a milkshake and they only have them at Chick-fil-A, so I will go without.

Soon I will go upstairs and read while I wait for it to be time to report for duty.

In the meantime I will finish my soda and curate my social media on Facebook.

Culinary Adventures

The other day my friend Holly asked what I'd been cooking lately.

"I feel like you're always cooking something, like something fun and different."

That's not true, really, since most of the time I'm cooking something basic, but then another friend asked why I don't write about food on here anymore, and I realized it has kind of been a while since I cooked something and wrote about it. To make up for it, here's a pair of simple things I made last week, and then we'll talk about the adventure I went on where I ate chicken.

Chicken that had a bone in it.

But first, look at these tiny mini calzones I made:



They were stuffed with cooked, crumbled turkey bacon and crumbled blue cheese, and they were delicious and easy. You'll need:

1 8-biscuit tube of premade biscuits
Whatever filling you want to put in there

1) Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

2) Open the biscuit tube. Take out a biscuit and press it flat with your fingers so that you have a flat circle of dough.

3) Spoon filling onto half the circle. Fold the other half over, then pinch the bottom edge over the top edge all the way around. Be sure it's pinched closed all the way around, or your filling will leak out.

4) Poke holes in the top with a fork:



5) Bake for 10-12 minutes, until they look done.

The pea and artichoke gratin I made, from a recipe in "Food Network Magazine", took a little more effort. It started with a roux, and I've mentioned in the past that I have trouble with roux, because I either have the butter too hot or I add the flour too fast, or both, but I think I've finally figured it out. When I had to add the milk, my roux was smooth and slightly yellow, like I think it's supposed to be:



After that I had to add the peas and artichokes:



and simmer for a while. If I make this again, I need to simmer a lot longer, because my sauce stayed kind of thin and didn't reduce down. The recipe in the magazine just said to simmer, and didn't say how long you should simmer for, so I kind of blame them.

The recipe also said that you should make the whole thing in an oven-proof skillet and then put it under the broiler to crisp the cheese on top, but I don't have an oven proof skillet, so I poured the gratin into a baking dish for the broiling, and it came out fine:



Except for the part where it was too watery, but, like I said, I can fix that by simmering longer before the broiling.

We also went out to eat this week, and that's where I had the chicken with bones in it. I've mentiond before that some foods gross me out, but I don't know if I've ever mentioned the problem I have with chicken. I don't like skin, and I don't like meat that comes with a bone in it, so normally I only eat boneless skinless chicken breasts.

This is continuously baffling to my friends:

"What about chicken wings?"

What ABOUT chicken wings? Did you not hear me? Bones! Skin! I don't eat ribs, or t-bone steaks (I don't really eat steak at all, actually), and I think I've only had a bone-in porkchop once, at a fancy restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, down the street from where I saw this horse statue in the back of a truck:



And that was in 2006.

I often say I've never eaten chicken with a bone in it, but I think I have maybe once or twice, if I was out somewhere and no other choices were available. Probably at a wedding or banquet, but it happens rarely enough that when we went out this week for Ben's birthday to Wright's Cafeteria I took a picture, mostly to prove to my mom that I really did eat chicken with skin and a bone:



That was listed on the menu as "BBQ Chicken Breast". Clearly, that's not just a breast. There's a wing or something sticking out of the top there, and it's covered with skin under that crispy BBQ coating. They also had chicken and dumplings on the menu, and I normally would have ordered that instead, but when I leaned over the cafeteria line and smelled the BBQ I had no choice. I was compelled to order the chicken even though I could see that it was horrible and wrong and filled with bones.

And it was so good.

After I peeled off the skin and carefully dug the chicken out:



We're not going to make a habit of this or anything, but I ate chicken on a bone, and it was good.

Pop Quiz, Cupcake Edition

Pop quiz!



This is:

a) A snail
b) A butterfly, in profile, with one wing up
c) Not a specific animal; it's just cute
d) Shambling toward my apartment on stumpy, cupcake legs to eat my soul in the dead of night

Five Days Off

Today is a holiday (Happy Labor Day! Sorry I didn't send any cards.) and I decided last week that a three day weekend just wasn't enough, so I put in for Thursday and Friday off, too. I didn't have any exciting plans or anything, but it suddenly seemed like I just needed a few days to read and watch TV ("Law and Order" and "Chopped!" are tied for most episodes seen in the five day stretch), so I asked for them. As the days off got closer, it looked like I wouldn't be taking Thursday after all because someone was sick and I was worried the office would be short staffed, but my boss called while I was driving in and told me to take it anyway.

He really had to twist my arm on that one, let me tell you. I considered my options for an entire two and a half seconds before I said, "OK" and sped off in the opposite direction.

Here's what I did with my five days off:

Thursday: I lied. I didn't actually speed off in the opposite direction because I was already almost to campus when my boss called. Since I was already up and dressed and out of the house, I decided to swing by the university gardens since they were right there, and I got to watch the sun come up over the plants:









Since no one else was there, I took my time walking around and enjoying the quiet of the morning. I stopped to examine some tiny flowers:



and then the bugs started waking up, too:





so I decided to head out before the bees really came out in force. On my way home, I stopped by the office to pick up my two boxes of picture frames, which were packed in an absurd amount of material:



Those twelve plastic frames came in a box half the size of my couch, and there were two boxes! I drive a Bug! My couch doesn't fit in my car! Not only do I have to feel bad about ordering frames from Wal-Mart, allowing them to continue squeezing out Mom and Pop stores and outsourcing jobs to foreign countries and not paying their employees health insurance by making them work 39.5 hours a week, but I feel like they also cut down a forest and a half just to get the frames to me. People with kids, I'm sorry that they will be both unemployed and shadeless in the barren future I have helped to create, but Wal-Mart was the only company that came in under my budget.

Friday: On Friday morning I slept in a little, and then got up to go downtown to the Museum of East Tennessee History. It was smaller than it looked from the outside (it turns out that there is a whole floor devoted to geneological archives), but filled with interesting things:



I saw one of Dolly Parton's dresses:



and flags celebrating Oak Ridge's revelation to the world:



and I got to leave my comments on the wall of Post-It's:



The highlight of the day, though, was my lunch downtown at The French Market. My coworker, Angie, has mentioned for months (mostly because she had a couple months of maternity leave between the first mention and the more recent one) that she ate there and it was wonderful and that I should try it, but it always managed to stay off of my radar until I walked out of the museum and it was directly across the street.

The French Market only serves one kind of food: crepes. My experience with crepes is mostly of this variety:



They're always filled with fruit and/or chocolate, and there's something sweet drizzled or, more often, gushed across the top. I've never had a crepe that's intended as a meal, rather than as a dessert or a replacement for a pastry, so I was a little dubious. I trust Angie, though, so I ordered the turkey and cheese crepe:



It was so good I want to go back and get another one right now. The inside was stuffed with shredded smoked turkey, Swiss cheese, and Gruyere cheese. That's it. No mustard, sauce, vegetables, or anything, and it was still so good that I practically inhaled it. I hope and pray they're open for the last Roller Derby home bout, because I'm pretty sure I don't want to eat anywhere else downtown again, ever.

God, it was so good.

Saturday: Football came to Tennessee again, and the carpool and I had to work at Gate 23. On our way across campus, since we have to park a bit of a hike away from the stadium, we stopped so that Anna could grab breakfast at Chik-Fil-A and found ourselves in a sea of orange:



If you're not dressed for football, it's best that you not leave the house on game days. Someone might cut you.

Sunday: I slept in, and when I woke up I suddenly felt like the idea of leaving the house to do anything was more than I could cope with, so I stayed in and read, watched more TV, and played games on the computer.

Monday: Today I framed my pictures and took them to work to hang on my walls. Using a yardstick and a level, I think I got them pretty even, and I'm happy now to have some color on all four walls instead of on just one:



I also swapped out the frames from the pictures I had up already, so everything matches. I know that my pictures aren't always good, but I like having them on my walls instead of random school art or posters. It makes the office feel more like it's mine, and the cleaning people probably won't steal my pictures like they did the Superman figure I used to have in there.

food show

Yesterday Jeannie, her family, and I went to the "Food City Food Show", where we paid six dollars to get in and left with about thirty dollars each worth of sample groceries, not counting the amount we grazed at the show itself in place of lunch.

This is one bag's worth:



I came home with two bags, and there were tables we skipped.

The baby seemed to be having a great time staring at people, listening to music, getting extra things just for being a baby (possibly the only time I've wished I had one; next year I may borrow someone else's for a couple hours), and meeting mascots:



Eventually he got fussy, though, so we brought him home. That was, of course, after he vomited on Jeannie, reminding me that I don't want one of those after all.

Three F's

I kept meaning to update this week and kept not getting to it, so I decided to do a weekend roundup instead. Think of these as mini-updates, I guess.

1) I Drank It For Science

Last week I was at the grocery store and noticed that now that Halloween has come and gone, we’ve ventured into the Christmas retail season. When I was little this never used to happen until after Thanksgiving, but now the trees and garland and lights go up in the stores on November first, and that means they have eggnog at Food City. I was getting milk anyway, so I glanced at the eggnog section and stopped in my tracks when I saw this:



Pumpkin is a strange food. Pumpkin pie, by itself, is delicious, more so with whipped cream on it. Pumpkin seeds are also delicious. Pumpkin anything else, though, tends toward the sketchy. There’s a reason why they don’t have pumpkin candy or pumpkin pudding or pumpkin soda (Jones Soda Company doesn’t count, since they only make it this season). It’s because, for every delicious pumpkin filled vegetarian ravioli, there is also a Starbucks Pumpkin Latte that tastes like a regular cup of coffee with a can of pumpkin pie filling poured in to make it extra-vile.

With this is mind, I was skeptical of the pumpkin pie spice eggnog. I mentioned it to a few friends, and the general consensus was best expressed by my friend MegaBigEye, who said, “Probably disgusting. With the off chance of being delicious.” Confused and curious, I finally bought it this week because I decided that I just had to know.

And it was delicious.

2) Fire?

I feel bad for the people at my apartment complex office sometimes, because our emergencies always seem to come in pairs or trios.

Last year, for example, lightning hit my building right before Easter. The power went out, and stayed out for several days because the lightning bolt fried the meters at the end of the building. They put us up for a week in a nice business traveler’s motel with suites and DVD players and kitchens in the rooms, and one night I was laying in bed in my suite, waiting to have power in my apartment again, and saw, “Meth lab found in local apartment complex” on the evening news. As I watched, I thought, “That complex has balconies that look just like mine.”

That’s because it was my complex. Fortunately the meth lab was at the other end, and, oddly enough, meth labs are pretty much normal neighbors in Tennessee. I was worried that it meant I’d moved to a really shady apartment complex, but my coworkers assured me that, no, it happens to everybody.

Anyway, this week we had a huge water main break. I don’t know if it flooded anyone’s apartment, but it wrecked the landscaping by the exercise room, and they had to shut off the water for a few hours on Thursday and Friday to work on it. Wednesday night, though, the same day it broke, we had terrible thunderstorms, and they set off the fire alarms in the building next to mine:



Thankfully there wasn’t a real fire, and I didn’t miss “Top Model”.

Or, you know, lose all my belongings in a cloud of flame and smoke.

3) The Last Home Game

Today was our last home game, so it was my last weekend working at the gates. I usually get to mine a half hour or so before we’re supposed to open, but today I was running a little late and didn’t get there until five minutes before, which meant the parade had already started and I had to push through the crowd to get to the stadium.



Next year I’ll be on time more.

the pain of eating out

Oh God, I think I'm dying.

My parents wanted a Friday's gift card for their anniversary, and I thought I would get myself some dinner while I was there. I haven't been to Friday's in several months, and never in Tennessee, but I figured it's the same everywhere and I could just get chicken fingers and be fine. And I would have been, if I just had the chicken fingers.

They have this deal right now where you can get an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert for $12 something, and that seemed wonderfully simple. I opted for the fried macaroni and cheese (“Top Chef” has informed me that reinvented versions of old classics are hip and fun; I guess they forgot to inform Micah), the chicken fingers (when faced with a menu where I don’t immediately want something I tend to go for the chicken fingers as an easy default), and the mini mousse desserts, which allow you to pick two different shotglasses of mousse. I chose peanut butter and orange cream, comforting flavors of childhood that seemed to go with chicken fingers and mac and cheese.

The fried mac and cheese was good, coming in hot little nuggets of crispy batter with creamy macaroni and cheese inside. Alone, they would have been wonderful, but the sauce that’s drizzled under them on the serving plate is disgusting. I thought it might be some sort of mustard since it was yellow, but the flavor was so offensive I ended up scooping up a forkful by itself, just to evaluate it. It tasted like onions and fish, without a hint of mustard. It actually tasted like they took the grease that they fry everything in, mixed it with a little cream, and drooled it over the plate. It was vile, and I ate the rest of the nuggets as carefully as possible, to avoid getting them anywhere near the sauce.

The menu at the restaurant or online makes no mention of this bilious concoction, by the way, so this may be your only warning.

Next came the chicken fingers. You get a choice of barbeque or honey mustard sauce, so I picked honey mustard. I wasn’t totally committed to either sauce, but then it came out with a little cup of barbecue. I didn’t want to stress the waitress, though, since she was probably stressed already, and wouldn’t have said anything if she hadn’t said, “Oh, you wanted honey mustard. Don’t eat those yet!” Instead of taking the barbecue away, she brought a little cup of honey mustard, too, and then sailed away. Now that she’d gone to the trouble, I felt obligated to only use the honey mustard, and attempted to do so. It ran out before I ran out of chicken fingers, though, just as she walked by.

“Do you need another honey mustard?”

“Oh, no, I’ll just use the barbecue.”

Her smile said love, but her eyes screamed betrayal.

The meal finished with the pair of mousses that almost finished me. While waiting for them, I heard a waiter describing them to a couple near me with the kind of brutal honesty that I’m sure the TGI Friday’s corporation, a division of Kraft Foods, would prefer that their waitstaff not employ.

“Well, they’re shotglasses, so they’re not really filling. And they’re really sugary. Like too much sugar. The chocolate raspberry might be ok, but the rest are kind of, I don’t know, so sweet you almost feel sick. And it’s mousse, so it’s like, kind of like ice cream, but not really cold, and sort of thick but not really thick. I don’t really know what it’s made out of, but I think there might be dairy in there somewhere.”

I actually peered over the top of the table divider to see if he knew how loud he was being, but the sight of me, eyebrows raised, did nothing to slow him down. I imagine he won’t be at Friday’s for much longer with those kinds of sales skills.

When my pair of mousses arrived, I tried and tried to take a picture, but the waitress wouldn’t leave me alone.

“You need a refill? How do those look? Did you taste them yet? I love that orange one? I’ll be right back with that gift card.”

More than anything I wanted a picture of the orange cream one, because it just looked bizarre. The mousse was about the sherbet color that you would expect orange cream to be, but it was decorated with these weird orange and white lumps, too big to be sprinkles and too small to be chips, that looked exactly like aquarium gravel. They turned out to be lumps of pure sugar with a little bit of citrus flavor, and actually paired well with the mousse. I ate the entire thing and then used the tiny spoon to scrape the sides and make sure I didn’t miss any.

The peanut butter cup, on the other hand, is the reason that I’m sitting on my lounger holding my belly and erupting with explosive burps that feel like projectile launches. It looked like peanut butter mousse with tiny little chocolate chips in it, and I love peanut butter to the point that I will eat it out of the jar with a spoon, so I eagerly dug in.

I made it through two bites.

It was not mousse. It was a shotglass full of peanut butter, but not just peanut butter. Something thick and sweet was added to it, possibly sugar syrup. Whatever it was caused the peanut butter to coat my mouth and throat like that melted candle that Homer Simpson drank at the chili festival. I’d barely finished coping with the giant first bite I’d taken when I decided to give it another chance and not make any snap judgments. The second bite confirmed that, no, I was not mistaken and it was wretched.

It was so bad I tried to cough it up out in the parking lot, to the alarm of a family nearby. I continued trying to dislodge it all the way home, and now I can feel it twisting and bubbling inside me like a culture in a Petri dish.

Next time I’m just getting cake.

letter to "Top Chef"

Dear “Top Chef” contestants:

Please refrain from ever again referring to food as “sexy”. I don’t like to think of my chicken as vaguely sweaty, a little bit sticky, or unwilling to sit in the wet spot on my plate. Likewise, unless my vegetables are curled on their sides in the fetal position the next morning practically falling off the edge of the plate they’re shamefully trying not to share with a meat whose name they can’t remember from the night before, they don’t have much in common with sex, either.

Also, Tre, this isn’t “Memento”. You don’t need to tattoo instructions on your arm.

In closing, please develop a challenge for this season that incorporates Twinkies.

Thank you.