Anger Burger

I’d like to draw your attention to the ad on the sidebar over there to the right for Little Big Vintage – it’s a shop that I adore, and I’ll not hide the fact that when offered actual dollars for the ad space, I asked instead if I could have shop credit.   And even more specifically: I have a mug fetish.  The only reason I didn’t already buy these ones is because I have a strict personal rule against buying sets.  Because you know, I’d have 1,000 mugs by now instead of just 250.

I hope that Carrie Anne will also not mind me mentioning that she has Crohn’s disease (haaay), is a trained librarian for the CIA and is married to some sort of scientist/warlock¹.

¹ Other people might call this “working with math.”

This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever written.

Atmo the Amazing Suborbital Dog, Planet Eater, Prince of ‘Mos, beloved furbaby of my dad’s, has passed on.

he once watched a cooking show on PBS for 20 minutes

This dog was loved in a way that I cannot articulate right now, and perhaps not ever.  I don’t talk about him much here at Anger Burger, but  Atmo and my dad were each other’s bestest friend ever; weird, bickering, idiosyncratic and deeply loving friends.   I’m blasted dumb with shock that I’ll never see him again.

We love you, buddy Momo, for ever and ever.

The set-up is as follows: Mike the Viking sets a sack containing two loaves of my dad’s bread on the hall table at my mom’s house.  We’re going to take them to the Grandma River’s memorial.  That evening, my stepdad returns home from work and find a sack in the spot where he sets his cooler.  He moves the sack to the floor, puts his cooler in the usual spot and no one takes notice.  The next day, I leave the house for about 30 minutes to go to the grocery store, return home and discover that ThinkTank aka The Thing That Lurks has been biding her sweet little Boston Terror time and waiting for the moment I leave the house.  Because it hasn’t escaped her notice that there has been pumpkin and banana bread on the floor for 24 hours.

I can’t even get angry at her, honestly.  She waited until I was gone, politely ate her fill of pumpkin bread and plastic wrap, and then set about her business laying in sunbeams and farting mustard gas.

Unrelated, I don’t know if you’ve ever driven up the west coast of America, but there’s a point in northern California where you come over the mountains and suddenly Mt. Shasta is in front of you like this impossible monument, and though Mike and I were feeling a strong case of the sads¹, Shasta’s weird energy vortex never fails to cheer me.  Maybe in part because we talk about meeting there after the apocalypse since it’s almost exactly halfway to my hometown from L.A..

Speaking of weird energy vortexes, I know what you’re thinking: that crucifix isn’t big enough for a grown man.  Maybe it’s for children.

Once home, I was alarmed to discover that my garden has thrived in my absence.  The tomato plants I was 100% certain would be dead upon my return were instead in the same shape, but their fruits had actually progressed toward ripening.  Impossible!  And better yet, my passion flower vine had been busy:

Passion flowers only  bloom for one day and the quantity of dead blooms revealed the plant had probably started the day after I left for Washington, but that’s okay.  There are enough left for me to enjoy the frazzled wackadoodleness of them.

I was sort of looking around the vine wondering how many blooms were left when I saw this:

Motherfucking fruit!  Holy shit!  I had been told and had read all over that passion flowers do not fruit on the first year after planting, that many people wait three years to see fruit.  Well!  Further proof that my family is contrary just to be contrary.

Lastly, a gift from the Viking’s mom, Jane:

SHE MADE IT.  It’s so awesome!  She goes to thrift stores and buys old glass plates, bowls and votives, drills a hole in the middle, stacks them and then cranks it all together with silicone and a marine bolt and voilà!  Glass flower!  She had literally dozens of them, none of them even close to being the same shape or color, and I picked this one to bring back.  They were also all over the forest outside Grandma River’s house at the memorial, and Jane invited guests to “pluck” some glass flowers to take home, one of the coolest, sweetest gestures I’ve seen at a memorial.  It’s pretty much the Viking’s mom in a nutshell: clever, industrious and not afraid to drill through glass for the sake of beauty.  Meanwhile I’m hiding in an air-conditioned house and knitting.  Some of our gentle arts are more gentle than others.  By which of course I mean I am a wiener.

¹ There were a lot of things about our brief trip that were not fun, and combined with a large bowl of Home-Sickness Cereal for breakfast, we didn’t so much drive as mope our way back to California. Like I told Mike – it’s not that I want to move back to the NW, it’s that I’d like a magical doorway that goes back there.  Like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe wardrobe, but instead of Narnia I step out into my mom’s backyard.

OKAY.  So.  That was a little hairy.

Certain programs are still missing from my computer, but I think I’ve gotten my Photoshop back under control.  Except!  I lost all my actions and forgot how to optimize color for the web, and if you don’t know what that means then you’ve probably got a life outside blogging.  Anyway, test image:

So!  I’m sitting on a heap of photos and at least one recipe to share with you guys, so thanks for your patience and stand by.

Well!  That could have gone better.  I realize that radio silence on blogs is a death-knell, but I assure my readers that the exorcism is working, there’s just a lot more head-spinning and pea-soup vomit than expected.

Speaking of vomit, I got one of those hilarious little kid flus¹ where I basically woke up, jettisoned everything inside my body and then hallucinated for a two days while I nursed a jar of applesauce and seventeen bottles of Smartwater.

ALL WILL BE WELL SOON.

¹ Flus? Is that plural for flu?

There was a time when we endeavored to remember to take the trash out because of the fruitflies.  That was before ThinkTank, aka The Thing That Lurks.  To be fair, it wasn’t kind of me to leave a chicken carcass (see that empty tinfoil up there?), garlic bread and watermelon in the trash.  Tellingly, the watermelon was thrown away because it was an especially bad one – crisp and juicy, but almost totally without sugar.  You’ll notice the dog didn’t bother with it, even though she loves fruit.

We punished her by baking a peach pie and then eating it in front of her without sharing.  According to the SPCA, this does not qualify as abuse.

Later her only dog friend, Vivian, came over for play time.  Vivian is very sweet and good-natured, and therefore the only dog that can tolerate Tank’s excessively troglodytic bullying.  In all seriousness: Tank’s method of engaging another dog in play is to run up to them, punch them in the butt (as seen below) and then bark 1 inch from their face.  Leave it to us to find a dog even more socially retarded than we are.

In news that has resulted in my declaration that I am not going to waste money on plants next year, this happened to my tomato plants:

The internet seems to think that it is caused by bacteria, and that the only way tomatoes get it is through physical contact.  Since I planted them in fresh garden soil and new pots, the prevailing belief is that the tomatoes were infected from the plant nursery.  Which makes me pretty cheesed, let me tell you.  I used to like gardening, but I’m starting to think I like catching the subway to the farmer’s market more.

This is a terrible photo, but the best I can get of the neighbor’s tree that fell over onto their gazebo on Sunday during a wind storm.  It was a beautiful day, warm and blue-skied, but windy.  We had been playing Portal 2 for something like 6 hours when there was a loud crack, the ground shook and the lights flickered.  The Viking’s response?  “It was just a trashcan or something.”  I swear he said this.

We’re talking about a man who once reached for a weapon when he heard the mailman put mail in the box.  TRUE.

I had been trying to grow my bangs out, and I think that everyone can agree that it was not a success, as evidenced by a photo of what I look like first thing in the morning:

No matter how carefully I do my hair, it reverts to these amazing screwball cowlicks within a few hours.  (Also: who has tie-tie face?  I do!)  If I struggle, I can wrangle it into this horrible skullcap/toupee business:

Last night I was sitting in our livingroom, minding my own business and watching Deadliest Catch with Mike the Viking (who gets genuinely ecstatic every time Sig “Also A Norseman” Hansen comes on) when I suddenly sat up in my chair and said “I GOTTA CUT MY FUCKING HAIR!”  I waited until morning just in case it was hormones.

It wasn’t.

Shazam!  Oh man, that feels better.

Next time I say I’m going to grow my bangs out, please for the love of unicorns, someone stop me.

I’m so exhausted that I shall limply offer forth these links while I lay here on my fainting couch.

• Like Game of Thrones? I haven’t seen the TV show, but I read all the books a few years ago, and consider them to be the height of delightful junk-food fantasy.  What could possibly make them better?  SOME CRAY-CRAY BLOGGER WHO SETS OUT TO COOK EVERY FOOD MENTIONED IN THE BOOKS.  This is one of those moments where the internet is by bestest friend in the whole wide world.  Even if you haven’t read the books or watched the TV show, it’s still a great blog in that the recipes are based on real 14th and 15th century recipes which the bloggers also update and offer as a second recipe for each posting.  I’m into the food and all, but I’d also like some of those uppers they’re on, because I can barely manage a single, familiar meal a day.

• The Viking and I had some leftover Indian takeout from the other night, and I was worried that it wouldn’t be enough food.  To bulk it out, I panfried small cubes of tofu in a little olive oil and salt until all the sides were golden brown, and then mixed it into the various curry dishes.  This isn’t a recipe or anything, don’t get excited.  It’s more of an epiphany: fried tofu acts a lot like paneer in curry, which sounds really damn obvious when I write it out like this, but had never occurred to me before.  Now I feel way less bad about our habit of picking out all the tasty bits from the curry.

• I got Neutrogena SPF 100 sunscreen and I hate it.  It goes on fine but leaves a very waxy white film that never goes away.  I primarily use sunscreen on my tattooed arm, and I take care to keep the tattoo fresh and vibrant.  I exfoliate the dead skin off and use potent skin moisturizers all to keep my DARKS DARK and my WHITES WHITE.  Which is why I was so deeply irritated to notice an hour after wearing it that my arm looked like the contrast got turned down by 50%.  I wiped a finger hard across the skin and was squicked out to see the white film just move around, not wipe off.  NO.  But!   The Neutrogena Liquid is great!  I think somewhere on the package it implies it’s for your face, but I’ve been using it on my arms.  And it’s a tiny bottle that is going to need replacing several times this summer, but my sunscreen madness knows no financial bounds, so whatevs.

• I pulled an old sweatshirt out of my closet today to wear and I’ve been deeply distracted by the odor of it on my body all day.  It’s clean – but I washed it when I used a different brand of dryer sheet, and as my body warmed the fabric it slowly poofed scent out, and I keep getting whiffs of it and thinking that I can smell someone else’s perfume.  I admit that it made me wonder if I’m crazy.  Okay, getting crazier.  But the same thing happens when I switch hair conditioners, so I guess I’m being consistent.

• Cheesesteak: Whiz or no Whiz? I fall into the Whiz category, and I made the mistake of looking up a cheesesteak purveyor on Yelp and finding that half the reviewers were furious that someone would put liquid cheese on their cheesesteak.  Some of the choicest quotes were “WHAT ARE WE, FIVE YEAR OLDS?” and “IF I WANTED FAKE CHEESE I’D GO TO ARBY’S.”  I’m not from Philly or nuthin, but I’ve always been under the impression that you either wanted Whiz or provolone.  Period.  And you know, if you didn’t want the Whiz, that’s fine, just ask for provolone.  I had no idea it was a fightable offense to prefer Whiz.  But also: why would you not want Whiz?  It’s salt sauce.  What could go wrong?

I haven’t been feeling well and have only eaten oatmeal and tater tots in the last 48 hours, so here’s a photo of my dog wearing my bra:

Last week I ate a banh mi from Nom Nom, who are hugely famous due to being on TV but whose sandwiches I find to be mediocre at best.  The baguette was dry and shredded the roof of my mouth, and proportions were all off.  There were only two slices of jalapeno for the entire sandwich, and even though from the photo it looks like enough salady-bits, it was like 75% bread.  I ate at Nom Nom once before and had the same experience, and this time asked for extra veggies and the girl at the truck said “Okay, but it’s $1 extra.”

For reals?  I can buy a pound of jalapenos for a dollar at any Vallarta grocery store in L.A..  Grump.  Let’s go back and look at that bra-dog some more.

Ignore for a moment the guilty expression and focus on the small dot of white below the left eye (her left, not yours).

It looks a lot like a strawberry blossom petal.   And upon checking the strawberry beds, it is confirmed.  Where once were strawberries are now little mangled nubs covered in micro-teeth marks and slobber.  I’m going to go out on a forensics limb here and say that someone has been a bad dog.