Workin' for the weekend

And now I have that damned Loverboy song stuck in my head. But I digress.

I realize that it's only Thursday, but I'm already looking forward to the weekend. Here's what's on tap for our weekend.

Friday
Our book club is meeting to discuss our latest read, "Self Made Man" by Norah Vincent. The book is an account of the author's year and a half that she spent dressed and living as a man in order to find out how men think. It's a fascinating read and I would really recommend it even though I'm not typically into non-fiction books. I'm looking forward to discussing it with our (all-female) group.

Saturday
Avitania emailed and asked if we would be interested in going to the Buttrock Suites show with them on Saturday. Ever since we've been playing Rock Band, butt rock has abounded in the Lynch household. I've heard more Iron Maiden and Rush in the past week since high school. Cole is also buying all of the songs on iTunes so I'm forced to listen to Enter Sandman at least once a day. I hope the show has some Judas Priest or Scorpions at the very least!

Sunday
We're headed to a Super Bowl party on Sunday which is really quite funny since neither of us like sports - especially football. I'll occasionally watch part of a Seahawks game with Cole, but only because football looks really cool in HD. Seriously, looks like little tiny men are walking across the screen - in tight football pants :) Chris and I will probably stand around and gab with the other wives. I'm sure alcohol will be involved as well.

I'm sure I'll be working on homework as per usual. Since my dad's surgery is next week, I'm desperately trying to get ahead so I can be there for him. That's it on our list. What are your plans for the weekend?

I'm a bad mom...

... because I've never made Cole a lunch that looks like this.

Seriously, this is one lucky kids' real lunch. Looks like his mom spent hours dying the rice blue to make a sky, crafting Canadian geese in not one, but TWO different poses. Don't even get me started on the "grass" and the little eggy yellow sun.

Bitch, please...


I thought I had seen it all in the "I will out-mom" you competition. If you're a mom, you'll especially relate. It's not good enough that you make your child a healthy lunch anymore, you have to actually style the damned food!

One of the message boards that I read has a weekly "bento box" thread. Thinking it was about Japanese food, I opened it only to discover that moms are out there making beautiful lunches like this that I guarantee their children won't appreciate. They sure get the oooh's and ahh's from other moms though. Whatever floats your boat...

Now that Cole is a teenager, he's just lucky that I even get up with him in the morning. On the rare occasion that I actually make a lunch these days, it certainly doesn't look like that. I do try to cover all the important teen food groups, however. There's the "crunch" group - Cheetos, the "sweet" group - Oreos, the "obligatory sandwich group" - tuna. Occasionally, there's even something somewhat healthy such as a banana or apple, all packed in PLASTIC sandwich bags in a brown PAPER lunchbag.

I'm probably so going to mom-hell but I'm sure I won't be alone :)

Obey!

A gift from Avitania

Kala wants to meet this pug but only if he obeys her.

The Weather-Boy

I always find it interesting to discover what people are into-where their obsessions and passions lie. I've always been a bit of an obsessive myself. When I like something, I REALLY like it. I want to know everything about it from top to bottom. I'm like that with music, and I always had little obsessions as a teenager.

With a teenage boy, you'd expect that his obsessions would run toward girls and cars, and while Cole definitely likes those things, he has but one true obsession

The weather.

Seriously, no kidding. The weather. His internet time isn't spent so much spent on myspace as Weather.com. He knows the temperature etc., of most major cities. He loves to check to see if they have the local weather "correct" as per his observations.

Lately, he's been obsessing about whether or not we'll get snow. Snow isn't a big occurrence in the Seattle area so he's certainly not the only one to get excited at the prospect. I have a teacher friend who gets downright giddy at the possibility of a snow day, and as a student myself, I certainly love a day off!

Snow is in the forecast for the next few days. We had about 10 minutes worth yesterday and then it quickly melted. When he got up this morning he asked me if anyone had gotten snow. I told him that there wasn't any outside but I hadn't really given any thought to any other areas. Sleepy as he was at 8 a.m., he was immediately on weather.com to see if there was any measurable snowfall in the area.

He claims that he wants to be a pilot when he grows up, but we shall see. Who knows, maybe you'll see him on tv in a few years discussing the snow forecast :)

Txori - heaven on teeny tiny plates

Since Chris "worked from home today" (read: played Super Mario Galaxy), we decided to go downtown for drinks and an early dinner. One of the joys of having a teenager is that we can set him up with a pizza and a friend and he's good for the night. So we ordered some Papa Johns for him and headed to Txori in Belltown.

Txori (pronounced chor-ee) is a Basque pintxo bar that I've been really anxious to try after reading all the rave reviews on Chowhound. it's the "little sister" of The Harvest Vine, a tapas restaurant in Madison Valley, and also one of the best restaurants in the city. While Harvest Vine serves small plates of tapas, Txori serves pinxto which are basically one or two bites. But what these two bites lack in volume, they make up for in taste.

The space is tiny. Literally a hole in the wall that we would have walked right by if we didn't have the address. When we got there, there was only one other couple so we had the place to ourselves for a short time. The menu is small, but somewhat daunting. We've been to tapas lots of times but I knew this was a bit different. Same with the wine menu. Luckily the bartender was really friendly and helpful. He sat down right next to us and walked us through the menu. Of course, everything looked so good that we could have ordered one of everything and been just fine.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I'm trying to overcome innate pickiness so this was a great way to test my palette. I made some surreptitious notes on my iPhone so I could remember what we loved (and blog about it of course).

Here's a sampling of what we dined on:

Wine

Me - Protos Roble tinto 2005
Chris - Lansaga 2001

Pintxo (most all of these come on a small sliver of toast)

Grilled pear, blue cheese and walnut toast (amazing!)
Chorizo cocido
Braised oxtail tartlet
Duck confit salad with orange (yum!)
Veal and pork meatballs with sherry sauce
Monkfish and rice
Vinegar cured anchovies with jamon crab sauce
potato tart with bechamel sauce
cured tuna with caviar
chocolate mousse

I think we may have had a few more but these were the best of the bunch. The grilled pear was my absolute favorite, and now I can't wait until August when our pear trees start producing. My least favorite was the anchovy toast. Not so much for the flavor but the texture was weird.

So if you're in Seattle, you must check it out! They're open from 11 a.m. - 1 a.m. so you can just drop in and savor the wonderful flavors.

Halp!

I has antlers!

DO NOT WANT!

Hoping to redeem myself a bit

I found out I made a major faux pas yesterday and I'm hoping to redeem myself a bit today.

Last week, I was supposed to spend the day with a friend going to lunch, scrapbook stores and what not. Well, I canceled because I just had too much on my plate. I felt bad but she knows how it is during "school time" so she said no biggie and that was that. Fast forward to earlier this week-I emailed her to see if she wanted to go to lunch and she said that Friday would work out for her. She also said that she was another year older and wiser.

Heh, ooops.

So I surmised that I had forgotten her birthday. I emailed and wished her a happy belated birthday and said I would take her out on Friday to celebrate. So yesterday, I ran into her and asked her when her actual birthday was so I could put it on my calendar.

You guessed it. The day I canceled out on her.

I felt horrible! I literally got teary-eyed because I felt so bad! Ugh. I wish she had said something when I canceled because birthdays are way more important than school! So now I'm on my way to take her to lunch and to the casino - one of her favorite things. I hope she'll understand and forgive me.

I'll let you know!

Be careful what you wish for

I've had a fairly easy class load my first two quarters at the "big" college. I had the same teacher for all of my classes and his schedule was extremely predictable - lectures followed by three tests. Same exact formula for every class. AND a review session before each test with 98% of the answers IN ORDER! Too good to be true, right? Well, as is my nature (and possibly human nature to an extent), I was pretty bored. Not enough of a challenge for me, and I found myself (stupidly) wishing I had more work to do.

Let me just say: Karma is a beyotch!

Fast forward to this quarter. I'm busy. Way too busy. I've got assignments, papers and tests coming out of my ears! I'm sure some of the added pressure is because my dad is having a double knee replacement in a couple of weeks so I'll be spending time shuttling my mom back and forth to the hospital. I'll be helping out around the house as well so February is going to be a crazy crazy month.

I'm sure wishing I had my easy classes now. I hate you, Karma!

Twoo Luv 4Ever

So today is the 11th anniversary of the first time Chris and I "met." I say "met" in quotes because it was the first time we met in person. Real life. Face to face.

I think most everyone knows that Chris and I met online in an IRC chat channel about industrial music. We met back in 1996 - way before the general masses were online. Also back in the days when the general masses thought that the people chatting online were either perverts or predators. Ah, the good old days.

In addition to our relationship, we know several people that are either married or in a relationship from the #industrial heyday. We also have formed some really good friendships with people from all over the world. Today there's Match.com and tons of other dating services, but I think our experience was definitely unique.

We started out as nicknames on a screen, then friends, and eventually really good friends. I had just gone through a divorce and I was back in the dating game. After I'd go on a date, I'd either chat about it with Chris online or as our friendship progressed, I'd call him on the phone and we'd talk for HOURS!

I think we both realized after a time that the friendship was developing into something more, but logistically, it didn't seem like it could ever work. After all, he was in Ohio and I was here in Washington. Throw in an age difference and it just didn't look feasible "on paper." The odds were pretty much stacked against a relationship going any further.

That didn't deter us though and 11 years ago today, he stepped off of the plane and we've been together ever since! We did the long distance dating thing for a year which was a very expensive and frustrating experience. After a year, Chris moved out here and we were married 10 months later. We'll be celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary this year :)

So here's to you, my online friend/boyfriend/husband. So glad I "met" you :)

Oscar time!

You know you've turned over a new year on the calendar when movies start vying for top honors at awards shows. The Golden Globes this year was basically a non-event due to the writer's strike, but the big kahuna of award shows is just around the corner.

The Academy Award nominations were announced this morning and you can read the complete list here. Chris and I are big movie buffs and try to at least see all the top nominated pictures, which usually include another category such as director and original and/or adapted screenplay.

Of the top 5 movies, so far we've seen "No Country for Old Men," There Will Be Blood," and "Juno." I wasn't really that interested in "Michael Clayton," but I might have to check it out. "Atonement" also didn't hold much appeal and friends who have seen it weren't all that impressed.

The Best Actor race also looks pretty interesting although I think that Daniel Day-Lewis will take the Oscar. I really loved Viggo Mortenson in Eastern Promises and I was surprised that it wasn't nominated for either Best Picture or that David Cronenberg wasn't nominated for Best Director.

Chris always ends up watching about half of the telecast and then stomps off in frustration because so and so didn't win. We've had Oscar parties in the past but then we end up not paying attention to the show and I end up missing half of it. The past few years, we've just had a few movie-buff friends over to join us and we may end up doing the same thing this year.

Oh, and I love to be catty about the outfits :)

Welcome!

So I decided it was time to make a move. I've had my .mac account and blog for almost two years and I've finally outgrown it. It was fun to post pictures, make movies and play around with all of the templates, but I think the concept of a personal website is somewhat outdated.

Most everyone I know uses a blog reader of some sort now to navigate through all of their sites. I use Bloglines myself to read the 30 or so blogs on my list each day. Unless I want to comment, I rarely go to someone's actual site, and I know that people do the same with my blog.

I'm going to use my Flikr account more so you'll be seeing new pictures going up soon.

So, Welcome! Let me know what you think - leave comments!