Monday, July 27, 2009

Weekend

Had a nice little weekend here. We played a game of poker on Friday night, a tournament for a new ipod touch my coworker got free with the purchase of a Mac. Liz exited early, leaving me to match wits with the field. It came down to me and a relatively inexperienced player who had a substantial chip lead after knocking out the last few players on a single hand. I went all in on an open ended straight draw after the flop which included an ace. I figured she didn't have an ace and would think I did, but like an idiot, she called me, winning the tournament on a jack high. She was pumped and I'm glad she won.

Saturday we checked a new state off our list--Rhode Island, America's Tattoo...



not...

We took our bikes and did a nice ride on a path along Narragansett Bay. It was nice, lots of tidal marshes and some rocky islands. Providence seemed nice and even had a brew pub. We had some wings whose superbly crafted sauce almost overcame the slightly overdone nature of the meat itself. All in all they were highly noshable but hardly life changing. The beer selection was not large, maybe 5 brews available. I had their imperial IPA which was nice and hoppy but served out of a cask. Its temperature was not ideal for post-bike ride refreshment. Liz's spicy blond ale was better. Here's a picture of Providence's skyline that I stole off the internet.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Do You See A Trend

As I type up this blog I am realizing that most everything I blog about has before and after pictures. I blame it on HGTV, What Not To Wear, and all those other shows that are about taking something and fixing it up. Well, if you like those shows and my posts, you'll like this post.

Every week I am amazed at our yard and garden. It re
ally is beautiful. I have to give the previous homeowners props on all the perennials and how everything is scheduled to come up and bloom at different times.

Here is a pic from our front garden in March:




Our garden just a couple days ago:







The New Do

Liz - Before Cut




Liz - After Cut



Wow! I was a ghost before I went to the beach on Sunday. I'm glad that it looks like I have a nice tan in the photo (in real life it's more of a burn).

Bathroom Re-do

As many of you know, the previous owners of our house loved red and shades of red. One of the last rooms in our house screaming for me to cover up its embarrassing shade of pastel pink paint was our upstairs bathroom. I thought this would be an easy task, boy was I wrong...painting cabinets is not as easy as you would think. I started the project with less than a week before our friends Erin and Jon were scheduled to arrive. The night before their arrival the cabinets were still a bit tacky and I had Rick feverishly putting on new hinges and knobs. Everything looked great until we tried to close the cabinet doors. Turns out I may have put a little too much primer and paint on the insides of the doors and the cabinet base. Good thing we've got some tools. I took the wood plane (that's right, this was a job for a plane not some wimpy sand paper) and got rid of the cabinet I felt we no longer had a need for. So when you come to visit, don't snoop in our bathroom cabinets, they are not as pretty on the inside as the outside.

Upstairs Bathroom
Before







After









Fun Food Facts

We made baba ghanoush last night. It's pretty much pureed roasted eggplant, lemon juice, tahini, olives, and garlic in which we dipped toasted pitas. We enjoyed it; please don't tell homeland security. We had it with pork so we should be fine. The pork was infadelicious! Crap, the pork was spiced in a middle eastern fashion so maybe that cancels out the porkiness. But wait, we had wine with it too so we're probably not in imminent danger of landing in Guantanamo Bay.

And now for the fun fact--the molecule that makes us taste mint and the one that makes us taste black licorice are identical except they are mirror images (stereoisomers) of each other. Everyone knows this. What most people don't know is that due to this fact, if a left handed person drank a Jaegermeister mojito they would die instantly. The exact scientific reason for this is not easily explainable to the layperson, but it has to do with the way lefthanded people's deviant, twisted brains are wired to their tastebuds...which have horns. The same thing would happen to a right handed person in the southern hemisphere, of course. The good news is that anyone can enjoy a refreshing Jag mojito while standing on their head. The more you know.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Return of the Coons

After our friends left, lobster shells were plentiful in our uncovered garbage can. Thus, Monday and Tuesday nights saw the return of the marauding pack of raccoons (Procyon lotor, the rabid, chattering scavengers of the urban wilderness) who visit our backyard periodically. The first night I believe they were just scouting and creating caches of food for later consumption. We watched them out our window with a Mag Lite. The next night, our beam revealed a flurry of masked glowing eyes and pink lobster carcasses. As Liz was transfixed on the feeding frenzy, Phoebe the cat suddenly jumped up on the windowsill in front of her face, giving her a hilariously bad fright. I told her I could solve our neighborhood's coon problem once and for all if she let me get a sweet air rifle (with an infrared scope, of course); the catch being we have to eat any and all coons killed, possibly in some sort of unholy stew. Liz reasoned that garbage eating city coons should probably not be eaten, unlike the clean rural coons sold for consumption at the St. Louis farmers market. I reasoned that these coons eat lobster. We never decided for sure, but I think the coons will be left to their scurrying. For now. The last few nights have been peaceful, but they'll be back. They always come back.

We played softball last night on the neighbors' team. I'd sort of forgotten how much I loved playing. The team is terrible (winless until Liz and I joined) so there's zero pressure to perform. Which makes it doubly awesome to see their surprise when you make a running catch, take an extra base on a lazy throw back to the infield, back up an off target throw or a missed play in the outfield, or even just slide into a base. We lost last night 17-8, through no fault of Liz or I. It was a ridiculously fun game. While we were waiting to play, there was an altercation in the parking lot which culminated in someone attempting to run down another person with their car. The nearly hit person then threw a bat at the fleeing Jeep, landing a solid shot. I was on the lookout for a retaliatory drive by during our game.

And finally, Liz continued her "transformation" into a no-nonsense-east coast-in-your-face-type person on Monday as she once again berated unsupervised children, this time for messing with the treadmills in our community center. I was proud and only slightly embarrassed.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Good Friends, Loose Lips, Tall Ships, and Attitude

Erin and Jon, our good friends from Alabama, St. Louis, and now Alabama again were in town last weekend. They brought do rags for us and a lady bug do rag for Phoebe, which she was ecstatic about.







We first took them to the Barking Crab, a restaurant we'd seen on the TV show Man vs. Food. I guess we shouldn't have been surprised that the food sucked at a place we heard about on a program where the point is to conquer the food rather than enjoy it, but it was an overpriced tourist trap featuring eight dollar "bowls" of clam chowder containing exactly two clams, soggy crab cakes, fish and chips where all the breading falls off after the first bite, bland fried shrimp, decent fried scallops and calamari and chips, and sticky communal picnic tables. Neither man nor food won this contest, one got grease induced gut rot and the other got unceremoniously turned into excrement. Liz did yell at some bratty kid with inattentive parents for sticking his grubby little brat hands in the communal silverware bucket. Tres Bostony.

The weekend picked up from there since it almost had to. We looked at some Tall Ships and then hit the North End for some Italian dessert and coffee, then took them to the oldest continually operating pub in North America. It's called the Bell in Hand and it's not all that cool. More of a "so you can say you did" type of thing. Then we went home and were in bed by, oh, let's just say 10:45.

The next day we forced them to walk part of the freedom trail, just so they could say they did. We're very particular about people actually doing the things they say they did. Then we went to a place called Eastern Standard near Fenway where we had awesome oysters, probably the best salad I've ever had (poached egg and lardons over frisee) and a tongue sandwich. A cow's tongue, not my own tongue disguised with a bun and mustard like in cartoons. After that, we saw the Red Sox play the Royals.



The Sox won one to nothing, which makes for a pretty boring game when you don't have a horse or a Twin in the race, Big Poppi notwithstanding. Then we came home and allowed ourselves to stay up until, oh let's say 11:30.

Saturday we decided leaving the house was a horrible idea so we had an all day tasting menu. We started with Liz's famous buttermilk waffles, moved on to watermelon, goat cheese, arugula, and sesame salads, then fried manchego pucks with spicy honey, then scallop and tuna ceviche, and finally venison gorganzola juicy lucy sliders. Liz, who is currently sitting behind me studying vocab for the GRE, says it was ambrosial and metamorphosed our appetence into satiation.



Then we put on do rags and hung out with the neighbors until, oh probably about midnight. We were feeling saucy. Sunday, we ate some lobsters and put them on a plane back to AL. Pretty nice weekend, all things considered.