the everyday adventures of sabrina

so i like to cook. i like to make things from scratch. i have cake flour in my kitchen. multiple types of sugar. that sort of thing.

yesterday i got this insanely compulsive desire to have nachos. i’m not really much of a nachos person generally — if someone has them, i might (will probably) eat some. i, like everyone else, will try to strategically steal the chips with all the cheese. but i don’t generally go out of my way to acquire nachos. i mean, they’re just not very good for you and it is my patriotic duty as a not-svelte american to feel guilty if i so much as look at a waitress carrying nachos to someone else’s table. so it was a little uncharacteristic for me to want to go forth and fetch nachos. or, nacho-making supplies as, of course, it would be cheating and unworthy to not actually make the nachos. fortunately, i have a lovely little supermercado almost literally around the corner (i have to walk to the end of my block, turn, and go half a block) and they have everything i need, down to the escobeche. so i just started making my nacho accessories. i soaked my pinto beans overnight and fried them up today. (damn, bad idea: it’s too hot-slash-muggy to be cooking!) it turns out that it’s really stupid easy to make refried beans. it’s also pretty damn easy to make really tasty fresh salsa. i’m feeling pretty good about this so far. i even invented a delicious tasty drinkie to go along: fizzy water + framboise liqueur + lime + ice. plus non-optional paper umbrella. sip and relax. contemplate your avocados. (of course the unfortunate bit of making the refried beans came after i realized that the company i’m having over tomorrow is at least nominally jewish, and of course i used bacon fat. (no lard. i could not bring myself to buy a whole pound of manteca. bacon at least seems slightly justifiable. also it smells fantastic while cooking.) great, so now i’m not even going to have any help with the approximately eight thousand pounds of frijoles refritos i now have. way to plan that there, sabrina!) now i just have guacamole to make up, but i ran out of tomatos and it’s over ninety degrees out there, and i’m not sure i’m willing to give up my tasty drinkie, even just to walk around the corner, to fetch one. ridiculously, stupidly easy recipes beyond the jump.[MORE]

one of my favorite musical sounds ever is funk bass guitar.

i mean, i love guitars, i love percussion and a nice throbbing bass, but really, funk bass is one of the best developments ever. it gets in you and if you don’t at least want to bop your head along you are sincerely broken somehow.

hich brings me to today’s topic of self-indulgent rumination: the grateful dead.

i used to dislike the grateful dead. i thought it was annoying hippie crap. then, in ‘87, they released the single “touch of grey,” which i not only liked immediately but continued to like a whole lot. as a kid, i didn’t have an allowance and therefore never had any money to buy albums (a contributing factor to my modern-day insatiable music-buying lust? no doubt), so i never bought in the dark, but i’d call and request KZ93 to play it for me and dance and sing along every time it came on the radio. i still disliked the dead, but i really liked that song. the contradiction of the relentlessly cheerful music and the way jerry sang the song with the apparent insouciant pessimism of the actual lyrics was always hugely appealing to me, and it still is. (it’s the same reason that i really love outkast’s “unhappy,” which i think is a brilliant fucking song. it’s probably just coincidence that both songs take a ridiculously perky cliche and make it snarky, but i do dig the snark, it must be said.)

a few years later a friend — when i got annoyed at being told of all the things i “should” know about, and demanded that he give me a list to work through (i still have it, incidentally, and i believe that i’ve accomplished nearly everything on it except watching Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which just never really sounded interesting to me) — made me a mixtape (remember mixtapes? i miss mixtapes.) which had “ripple” on it. and then i discovered that i liked that song too.

around that time i finally had a music budget, so at some point i ended up picking up american beauty, which i of course now acknowledge as one of my favorite albums. okay, yes: annoying hippie crap, but it’s a good album.

don’t get the wrong idea. i haven’t entirely reversed my position. i have no dancing bears stickers on my car or tie-dyed grinning skull banners on my walls, i’m not particularly sorry jerry’s dead or that i never got to stalk the dead from hallucinogenic stop to stop, and truth be told i still tend to listen to what might be charitably characterized as “less-than-perky” music most of the time, but there are a number of occasions which, quite frankly, call for one to put on a dead cd and just chill out for a little bit. it’s not going to change the world or anything, but it might make your day a little better, and that’s cool.

this morning was a good time to break out shakedown street. now, shakedown street is not my favorite dead album (of the three i own — the last is workingman’s dead, which is pretty decent), but it features another favorite dead song, the title track. the funk comes in to play around here a little bit, since it was the seventies — god bless the seventies — and even muzak came served with funk standard in the seventies, but that’s all right. it’s a silly little song that never changed the face of music, but that ba da da dat dat WOO! bit gets me every time. i am physically incapable of not singing along. seriously, if they played it at jewel while i was grocery shopping after work, surrounded on all sides by bitter hipsters and bitchy trixies i’d still be going “WOO!” at all the appropriate times, smirking gleefully at the people who stared at me, and also kinda surreptitiously boogying with my basket of groceries. it wouldn’t even matter if i’d had a shitty day at work or if it was a full-on blizzard outside; the bass would eat my good sense and leave nothing behind but a crazy white girl dancing around in the yogurt section.

and so that’s what i’m up to this morning. relaxing, drinking a cup of coffee, and singing along with the grateful dead on “don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart; y’just gotta poke around.” ‘cos that’s the sort of day today is, and the sort of song the sunshine and breezes coming in my windows are crying out for. it’s hippie crap, but maybe it turns out that i’m a hippie crap kind of girl, sometimes, after all.

i changed web hosts recently, and so things may be weird. if you notice anything broken, let me know.

well, you know — anything broken that used to not be broken. … there seems to have been some issue related to my hotlinking-prevention rewrites. let me know if you are not able to see images from someplace you used to be able to see them from (unless, of course, that is a forum in while someone posted one of my more popular hotlink targets, because i actively enjoy thwarting that sort of thing, and you wouldn’t want to rob me of my joy, would you?).

I hate you and your mythical number two bus that never fails to lure me in with its convenient route-having ways and then completely fuck me over by FAILING TO SHOW UP.

my shitty cameraphone picture of the Snakes on a Plane poster at the River East the other day is famous!

(it’s sans attribution, so i am not famous, only my picture. but these are the sacrifices one makes to climb one’s way up the blogfame ladder! at this rate, i expect to be within sight of the first rung within only a few more years!)

all day today, sunshiny shine shine shine, dark clouds, dark, boom, rain, RAIN, clear blue skies, sunshiny shine shine, clouds, dark clouds, THUNDER!, rain, RAIN! RAIN! RAIN!, light fluffy innocent clouds, clear blue skies, sunshine, sunshine, BOOM!, RAIN!, sunshine!

dammit. stupid weather: PICK ONE.

apparently there’s some sort of random wednesday thing going around. so here is a photo i took at random a few minutes ago while thinking “i really ought to clean this out at some point”:

my car’s trunk is entirely too full of shit. at a glance, this photo shows you:

1. A dead APC 1600 VA UPS that I need to haul to the recycling place, if only I could remember where it was (somewhere on the north side!),
2. My “shammy” (I cannot bear to spell it ‘chamois’ considering the pronounciation), which I last used when applying Rain-X to my windshield in the middle of a rainy roadtrip and which then dried into this wacky shape because I’d draped it over the UPS to dry,
3. A Trader Joe’s shopping bag full of papers I need to destroy, and had in the trunk in anticipation of going to a bonfire at a friend’s house (which I didn’t make it out to because it was the day after the wisdom tooth extraction of doom),
4. A bag full of clothes to donate to the Brown Elephant, containing the single ugliest authentic vintage dress anyone has ever seen in their life (which I bought for Halloween one year and could not, not, not bring myself to wear because it is so ugly — bright blue and silver argyle, if you can believe it),
5. A copy of Microsoft Windows Server 2003, which I got for free when I took an Exchange class, and have had absolutely nothing to do with since then, so I was going to donate it to the Brown Elephant last time I went up there, but then I was unsure about the legality of them selling it and didn’t want them to get busted by the Microsoft police so I ended up not donating it, and so there it sits, in my trunk,
6. A snow shovel,
7. My emergency winter blanket, because with where I live and all it’s highly probable that I’ll be stranded in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter,
8. A bottle of windshield wiper fluid, because I am addicted to a squeaky-clean windshield and go through it like nobody’s business,
9. My ice skates,
10. And a yellow heavy-duty extension cord, because you never know when you’ll need one.

i should really clean that out at some point.

Was not feeling entirely sanguine about the site of the recently deceased freaky mutant shark tooth, so went back in for a checkup. Arrived at 1340. Got called back at 1640. Pronounced healthy and on a #9 bus at 1652. So glad I had nothing to do at work today–I really think they should have at least given me a token dose of sugar pills as a reward for being willing to wait so long only to discover that the only thing wrong with me is hypochondria.

Taking the green line, transfering to blue at clark/lake–it felt so odd; I realized I hadn’t taken that particular escalator route since, at least, it’s gotta be 1996, commuting to InterAccess via blue to green.. and it’s precisely the same, except for the ipod ads. odd. also odd that my own obligatory ipod chose that moment to crash and reset. hey, I was listening to that!

i keep thinking of things i should post to lotd, but i keep forgetting them before i get around to it.

fortunately, sometimes i get a reminder, like this one, to post Dear NSA:

From: sabrina downard
To: Dear NSA
Subject: Question! Dear NSA: I’m contemplating installing a small towel rack on my bathroom wall. However, I’m not sure if I should get wall anchors for plaster or drywall. Do you know which I should choose? thanks!

From: Dear NSA
To: sabrina downard
Subject: Re: Question!

Your neighbor George has humidity rot problems with wall anchors. We recommend a floor mounted device.

who says government can’t help the little people!?

i mean, it’s not that i didn’t already know that you were the evil empire and all, but seriously, it’s totally not cool of you to lie to my DSL provider and tell them you can provision me because i’m only 11,000 feet from the central office, and then after a month of dicking me around admit that i am, in fact, over 20,000 feet away and DSL is not an option.

PIGFUCKERS. of course at&t can provision DSL for me. they can, in fact, have a technician on site next monday. because if they’re provisioning my circuit, they can pick and choose which central office to provision me out of, and so they can use one that’s only 11000 feet away, as opposed to the one they force covad to use. i say again: PIGFUCKERS. i hate you.
i hate you so much.
no love,
–sabrina. (p.s. no, cable modems aren’t an option.)

1. i swear to you that, while listening to the radio on my way in to work, i heard “the moviefone guy” on 97.9FM refer to Ron Howard as “pwned” in regards to Cinderella Man. pwned! i am not prepared to have wacky irc-originated internet slang in fluent use by radio morning-show deejays. i’m just not.
2. perhaps in reaction to radio-related language shock, i switched to the iPod shortly thereafter, which was conveniently loaded with hip-hop. near the very end of my commute, as i was coming upon the workplace parking lot, it happened upon a song i particularly like, and so i’d turned the volume up really loudly. (i don’t have an external subwoofer, so it wasn’t into ‘rattle the license plate’ decibel territory, but it was vibrating damn near everything else. i love my speakers.) i turned into a spot, pulled back out slightly to adjust the angle, pulled back in, and realized that i was hearing someone else’s music over my own. someone else’s “music” — because of course it was not actually music at all, it was smooth jazz. it was loud enough that i could hear the melody and figured out that the song it was supposed to be (but of course was not, because it was smooth jazz and therefore not actually music at all) was “Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing.” i could practically have sung along with it. then i got out of my car and realized further that the music was coming from inside the car in the spot next to mine, which had the engine turned off, the doors locked, and the headlights on, but no one was anywhere near. either that was the world’s most offensive car alarm ever, or some sort of freakish urban nightmare of mine come to life. seriously, SMOOTH JAZZ. (i must admit that i really, really wanted to go in to the security desk at work and ask them to page the owner of a beige monte carlo that their smooth jazz was on. if only our building had a PA!)

$50 ticket on top of the $160 towing fee. Good thing I didn’t spend money on those cute shoes yesterday, after all.

Apparently I parked in a tow zone at the vet this morning. Tiger is not very happy about this situation. Neither am i: MY COFFEE AND BREAKFAST WERE IN THERE, YOU BASTARDS!

What’s more awesome than a successful impromptu shoe shopping expedition on the way home from work? $14.72 including tax, that’s what! (now, no one snicker when I fall over trying to walk in four-inch heels, ‘kay?)

If thy fire alarm doth offend thee…