Grey matter keeps on churnin'

As much as I hate to admit this, gasp, I'm still learning. I'm not all-knowing. I'm not the wise genius that you all probably think that I am. I know, I know...I probably should have warned you to sit down first. I know. So a few things that have seeped into my grey matter:

1. "Fade" is another word for "drunk".

2. Experion no longer allows consumers to buy their credit score. So businesses can use it to determine if you're elligible for crap, but you can't find out in advance. At best, you can get a copy of it when businesses run your credit check. This blows my mind, I seriously think the whole thing is shady (like if they f*ck up, and i get stuck with a crappier loan and later would have to pay to refinance again once the mistake is made, THEY should be accountable for that).

3. Patience is just not my thing. I can say i'm patient...I am not. I should just own it, rock it, and be done with it.

4. Hungarian Paprika is NOT the same as regular paprika. It should be called "Paprika on Steroids".

5. If you don't have a wine fridge, you can store white wine in your regular fridge, but red wine you should just pop in the fridge before you serve it.

6. Lasers do NOT fix everything. They don't fix really bad scars that will turn white. Which is fine for 99% of the population that i'm around, but being half brown that poses a big, big problem.

7. Kickball is surprisingly harder than it looks.

8. Strawberry-rhubarb pie is not easy to find in orange county.

9. Synthetic oil is better for your car than...well whatever hell else you normally get with an oil change. it's worth the extra $20.

10. For all my impatience and bitchiness, I don't really give a crap about Octomom. I think she's got alot of nerve to want help paying for her Masters degree since I can't afford to go out and get my own, but I really don't give a crap about her, her whacked out doctor, or her bizarro lips. There's alot more issues I have with where my tax dollars go than to her...i can handle the 10 cents a paycheck if it pays for a lifetime of seeing her 8-fetus-belly forever on the internet.

11. It's very, very easy to let time fly and become a bad friend without realizing it. I owe so many people emails, cards, you name it. My apologies to the peanut gallery...my mind has been elsewhere the past few months. No excuse, but rather, an explanation.

12. How we view ourselves in highschool seems to carry over into the adult world...if you felt like a nerd in highschool, you still feel that way now. Its kind of crazy because i get compliments now that i never, ever got in highschool/college but they're very hard to accept because conventional thinking is that things were better/looked better when we were young. But then again...I look at J Lo in her Fly Girl era vs. her...well her "hey my name is J Lo" era. Even Angelina looked better in Mr & Mrs Smith than she did in Hackers (granted, she also had a nose job. but either way, girl is looking ROUGH now).

13. What matters in your potential life partner at 20 is different than at 30. I wonder if it'll be different at 40. Hopefully at 20 you're mature enough to have foresight to what you MIGHT want at 30. Hotness matters at 20. Good job and stability matters at 30.

14. The wedding industry has changed ALOT in the 6 years since I got married. The bar has been raised big time.

15. There comes a point in your life where you have to accept that you aren't as low-maintenance as you think you are. Unless you've been slumming it the same way you did in your early 20s, there's no way in your 30s you're actually okay living a lower quality of life. We all like to think that it's an option, that we could totally suck it up if we had to...um yeah time to wake up sistah. Once you've been in the working world for a good number of years (REAL working world, i.e. post-university, not post-McDonald's), you can't function without things that have become regular-yet-luxury staples, like department store foundation (Cover Girl? F*ck that orange crap!) or Woolite.

16. I am much more addicted to tv than even I'm willing to admit, and I admit that i watch ridiculous amounts. I straight up just need a DVR hooked up to an IV.

Cooking with that ghetto free Costco cookbook

Over the holidays Costco gave away this cookbook using, naturally, costco-specific products (which isn't too hard to substitute). Cookbooks are like serious food porn...i could pour over the pages, salivating, oggling, for hours...and repeat it frequently.

I decided today to give two recipes a whirl: the meatloaf and the apple-cheese soup.

The soup (link to cookbook, go to page 77): it's actually pretty tasty, except I added extra mustard powder and tabasco, since I generally think recipes are very bland in flavor (I feel pretty confident in my spice-skills, since a coworker pointed out that whatever I bring in always has the right amount of spices...which I tend to triple in a given recipe). Oh and I used that fat-free oil (Enova) instead of butter, since the whole planet knows I've got an aversion to butter. Only problem is that I was cooking while reading and missed hte part that said to peel the apples before putting them in...ahh well, it still tastes pretty spiffy.

You wouldn't think a cheese-apple soup would be good, but you gotta use granny smith apples which makes it very tangy.

Healthy Mini Meatloaves: (link to cookbook, go to page 147) this is my first ever meatloaf, to be honest I've never really had meatloaf before (unless a bite off someone's plate once counts). It's good, VERY easy to make, except this is what I would change:
- don't bother with the muffin concept...i dunno, maybe i'm weird, but i think a traditional old skool meatloaf format would be better.
- I added like 5 times the thyme and i would definitely not hesitate to be liberal with that. Plus I would add even MORE pepper than the boatloads that i added. Turkey's not exactly the most flavorful meat.
- I would really, REALLY chop finely the mushrooms and onions...even maybe puree them (if i had a mini food processor...not worth whipping out the big one...heh heh that sounded perverted), i don't like big chunks of stuff in my food.

Overall, considering it's Costco, it's a very good cookbook. Instructions are clear, recipes may look like they take alot of ingredients but they're all basic stuff nothing crazy (One thing I hate about Rachel Rey's stuff is that they usually need some white whine...wtf i don't keep white wine laying around, let alone waste the rest of the bottle...not a white wine fan)....

Time to get my Girls Next Door and Snoop Dogg's Fatherhood on...

Movie Review: Au Revoir Les Enfants

I have no idea why I added this movie to our Netflix queue, I think I read somewhere that it was really, REALLY good.

Ummm...riigghtt.

Maybe part of the problem is that I turned the subtitles off, and the last time I saw a movie in French without subtitles was in high school. I speak (or at least, have the caveman vocab skills) Quebec French, not France French, which makes it harder in general to understand the movie. Also doesn't help that I moved from an English/French country 7 years ago to an English/Spanish country...lord help me if I had to speak French under duress, i'd be hosed.

So the movie is about a kid (Julien) who has to go to some private catholic boys' school during WWII. While there he befriends a Jewish kid (Jean Bennet). Then the germans come and take the kid away. That's it. Seriously. THAT'S IT.

Oh did I ruin it for you?! I don't see how this movie won all sorts of awards. The scenes were too long and there was ALOT of scenes that were pointless. Julien gets lost in a forest...i swear that was half the movie. How many scenes of a frightened kid with a camera circling him do you need to make to convey the point that he's lost?!

At any given moment I was waiting for the Germans to come in and do some brutal shooting (doesn't help that i saw Smoking Aces the night before, so my brain was in full-on Gratuitous Violence mode) but it didn't happen. I thought maybe one of the Catholic priests was gonna have his way with the boys, but that didn't happen either. There wasn't even any Boy On Boy action (at best, two boys were scoping out some porn before taking a shower).

If you're in the mood for a slow-paced foreign movie with little point, then I guess I recommend it.

Note: This movie is based on the director's personal experience. Personal experiences don't always make for good movies. You know what I did today? I woke up, had a cookie for breakfast, checked out my email, took a shower, went grocery shopping, prepped dinner, then watched the movie. You don't see me making a frickin' movie! HA or maybe I should...i'm sure i'd win some foreign movie for what is otherwise known as My Random Sunday.

I resolve to create a resolution

The year is coming to an end...and its time to start thinking of NY's resolutions.

There was the year where I vowed to be more refined...didn't really succeed. Suck it.

Then I believe last year I decided to do "monthly goals" which I really liked, but then it got sidetrakced with the goal of getting my PMP certification (which I did get, so I achieved that yearly goal).

Now i'm sitting here wondering what to do for 2008. I'm inspired by AJ Jacobs who went a year trying to follow the bible as close as possible (A Year of Living Biblically...i've got his other book on how he read Encyclopdia Brittanica cover to cover, he's hilarious) so I wondered...what is something that i should do for one year...like my own social experiment?

The only thing I could think of would be: no clothes, shoes, or purses for all of 2008. That's doable, and it goes into the next part of the goal for 2008: I need to pay at least $15K extra towards my home equity loan or else we're in a world of hurt. Yay for the housing debacle. Anyway, back to the no clothes purchase for 2008. For any weddings I have to go to I've got plenty of things I can wear, and I guess if my black boots wear out then I can pay to repair them because I truly do love them.

But...then I remembered that I really wanted to take advantage of spring ski sales and I do need a ski jacket and ski pants...well by "need" i mean, "I have skis and i've only gone skiing ONCE in the past 7 years and to do that i had to borrow someone else's apparel which isn't gonna fly anymore".

So now i'm wondering...can I just say i'll go the entire year not buying shoes, purses, or clothes EXCEPT for one ski jacket and ski pants? That's not exactly an impulse or frivolous purchase, I've been meaning for years to do that.

However, if i truly want to be frugal I could wear the coat and snowpants (oh yes, they're "snowpants") that I had when I was like 14, which is this bright purple and blue coat with bright purple snowpants. They're not stylish, but they're what i wore skiing as a kid (then again, i also wasn't that warm in them...but i do have my old Columbia ski jacket but the zipper broke...but that's also an excuse, i've got workarounds tot he zipper situation you can still zip it up...just not easily...anyway).

So...that's one thought to consider.

The next part is what I already mentioned...$15K has to be paid down on the home equity (i.e. $30K over two years according to my COuntrywide guy)...which is no easy task when you need to spend your year saving $6K just for flippin' property taxes. And that's not really a "resolution" as much as a "fo' sho' you better pay down that loan or else you're homeless"...

OR...i could go back to the monthly goals. Like as a result of the PMP certification there's something that goes along with that (that i won't post) that i'd LIKE to get accomplished at the very latest by end of February, but that's not necessarily up to me...but like one month to paint the kitchen cabinets...another month to paint the upstairs hallway...another month to paint the kitchen itself...another month to do something once and for all with the garage (although i'd like to epoxy the floors, buying that stuff will take away from the $15K that needs to go to the equity), another month to read all the french books i keep meaning to read, another month to truly clear out the spare bedroom (i'm working on it, it involves ALOT of ebaying)...

I also found this website (Weekend Cookbook Challenge) that inspired me...basicallyt he gist is that you gotta open up a cookbook of yours and make one thing in a weekend. As someone who's got a desk job, that's not an easy task...heck, my biggest challenge is going grocery shopping because I can't stand doing it after work, and there's only so much you can buy in advance without it getting spoiled (and becuase it's just kraig and I, lots of times i waste stuff...like 1/4 of onions leave 3/4 to get wasted pretty easily). But i really do enjoy cooking, and I'd like to do more of it.

I could also take Nicole's advice and add to this NY's resolution list to "Join forces with your brother to better manage parental unit guilt trips." which is a fantastic idea...

Stay tuned. The key to a successful NY resolution is to not make it too big where it's easy to fail, but important enough to where you'll want to stick it it.

Kahhh Toe Mahhh Tayy!