cat named pig

If you follow Matt on Twitter, read his status updates on Facebook, or have simply had a conversation with him in the last few years, you will know that he is obsessed with Surly beer. (And with good reason; it kicks a lot of rear end in the beer community.)

So recently I’d been noticing an… umm… accumulation… of tall Surly cans lined up by the sink in our basement. Since this seemed to involve more deliberate effort than simply forgetting to recycle them, I decided to ask Matt what was going on with the Surly cans.

Me: So, what’s going on with those Surly cans?

Matt: I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with them yet.

Me: You haven’t…  decided… what you’re going to do with them yet?

Matt: [shrugs]

Me: What, like, you’re going to build a raft with them or something?

Matt: Yeah, you wouldn’t need to use as many cans as with a regular beer because these are bigger….

I might have to help him with this project. I do love the Furious. And the Abrasive Ale.

Hoo boy. I think this is the longest I’ve ever gone without updating. And I’d like to say that I’ve been busy doing important, life-dream-fulfilling and community-bettering types of things with the time that I normally use to blog, but in reality, all that time has gone to vampires. Seriously, all of it.

I seem to be having a sort of mid-life (one-third-life?) crisis that makes me act like a teenager, staying up waaaaay too late reading first the Twilight series and then the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries (HBO’s TrueBlood is based on these). I made Matt reopen our long-expired Blockbuster account to rent the movie version of Twilight, because I just couldn’t wait for it to come in the mail from Netflix. (I had to watch it before I went to the theater to see New Moon, obviously.) And then all this week, we’ve also been watching the Vampire Diaries Marathon on the CW.*

Needless to say, I am not proud of any of this.

A year ago, I would have totally made fun of anyone over the age of seventeen who was this thoroughly on board the Vampire Train. But I have to admit, this stuff takes up exactly the right amount of brain space at the end of a long day of bundling Elliot in and out of his snowsuit, playing Goodnight Moon the board game (seriously, who turns a soporific bedtime story into a game, for crying out loud, and expects it to be entertaining? Yet Elliot, strange child, seems to enjoy it), and trying to peel clementines fast enough to keep up with the demand.

The holidays are definitely the Busy Season in my job as a housewife (the very funny Julia used the phrase “Housewife Midterms” a while ago and I keep thinking of it as I add yet another item to my To Do/Buy/Wrap/Clean List). But it’s fun to be busy with gifts and cookies and making the kids’ holiday decorating look less, well, less like it was done by kids. I might even mail some holiday cards as early as tomorrow, which would be a personal record. (Although, now that I wrote that, it is equally likely that I will watch TV for two hours tonight before reading Club Dead into the wee hours, willfully ignoring the pile of unaddressed envelopes until New Year’s Eve.)

So that’s what’s going on with me. What have you been up to this December?

…..

*To give you an idea of just how teenager-y I’ve become, I actually found myself complaining out loud this week because So You Think You Can Dance and The Vampire Diaries were on at the same time. This is not a problem I would have had a year ago.

(I shouldn’t have used that title, as I now have the incredibly grating Little Einsteins theme song in my head and probably will for the rest of the day.)

But the fact is, Siena and I are on a mission this week. Mission: Ratatouille.

We have the Pixar movie and Siena’s been on quite a kick of watching it during “Rest Time” every day lately. (Her Rest Time this summer is Elliot’s Nap Time, both of which could just as easily be called Mama Needs A Break Time, but that doesn’t sound as nice. So Elliot sleeps and Siena watches a movie and/or asks me for a snack every 6 seconds, and we all just chill out a little [during the moments when I am not fixing snacks]. It’s great.)

Anyway, Mission: Ratatouille came about when Siena asked me, after her umpteenth viewing of Remy’s culinary triumph, if she could try ratatouille sometime.

My inner monologue jumped into hyperspeed with excitement at this request. [OMG my daughter wants to try something new*! A dish with multiple different ingredients visibly touching each other! And it's made of vegetables that are in season at this very moment! We even have most of them in our fridge!]

I did a little happy dance and got busy researching recipes. Since there’s only a slim chance that she will actually eat this once she sees how very much the ingredients all touch each other, I knew my only hope was to find a recipe resembled the elegant ratatouille served in the movie. And then I found this recipe at Smitten Kitchen. Perfect.

I’m off to the kitchen to start slicing veggies. Place your bets now on whether or not Siena will allow a single bite to cross her lips tonight. (The smart money’s on NO, but hey, I’m excited to eat it.)
…..

*Siena has become quite the picky eater this summer. Two or three years ago, we were those annoying parents who bragged about their toddler eating sushi and whatnot, but now she gives us flak for anything outside the holy trinity of pasta/sandwiches/Mexican food (and even the Mexican food better not “look weird” or contain too many ingredients). Sigh.

[Update: The ratatouille turned out great -- I thought. It resembled the dish in the movie and it was a great way to use up some of the veggies we got from our friends' CSA box, which they asked us to pick up while they're out of town. Siena, however, was devastated when she saw it and realized that is was just. vegetables. It turned out she had thought the disc of parchment paper Remy lifts from the dish in the movie was a tortilla, so she had been expecting something very different. That still doesn't address what she thought the obviously vegetable-looking things were under the "tortilla," or why she thought she wouldn't mind all those different things touching each other. It turned out she did mind, to the surprise of absolutely no one.

Elliot, on the other hand, ate a couple bites quite happily before he realized that his sister deemed this food unfit to eat; then he wanted nothing to do with it. Fortunately, I had accidentally opened a much nicer bottle of wine than we normally drink (read: more expensive than $4; I hadn't realized Matt had been saving it) and was so busy saying things like, "Wow, this wine is really good. Is this from Trader Joe's?" to care whether the kids were eating the ratatouille. And thus concludes the saga of What We Had For Dinner Last Night. The end.]

8:30 p.m. on a Saturday night, and my beloved husband and I are on two different floors of the house, curled up with separate laptops and at least eight internet browser windows open (each).

Is this sad? Is this modern marriage (with children)? Is this exactly what I want to be doing right now?

The answer, perhaps to all three but certainly to the last question, is yes.

Would it make things worse if I told you our last conversation was a raging argument heated debate calm and logical discussion about Twitter?*

Yes, it’s a pretty dorky state of affairs over here, that’s for sure.

…..

*A calm and logical discussion in which I was absolutely and undeniably right, and during which my rational arguments and compelling rhetoric left Matt’s position as little more than a smoldering wreckage of ideas THAT WERE NOT RIGHT.

I mentioned yesterday that I had a Trader Joe’s story to share. It’s not really about Trader Joe’s, but it took place there. It could’ve happened anywhere, but the fact that we were at Trader Joe’s at 5:30 p.m. on a Tuesday night made the whole scene that much more hilarious.

Why? Because the St. Louis Park Trader Joe’s, what with its close proximity to Uptown, at 5:30 on a weeknight, is pretty much jam-packed with Uptown hipsters stocking up on cheap organic dinner ingredients and cheap wine. You see jeans so trendy you didn’t even know that was a trend yet, save for the number of people in the store wearing similar ones. You see young couples holding hands as they decide on the right appetizers to serve their friends who are coming over for a drink later, before they all go out to the bars at 10:00 p.m. You see, as you’re pushing your shopping cart full of chatter-y kids and granola, lots of people who make you feel old and uncool.

Which is fine, right up until the kids start singing.

And what are they singing? Their favorite song, of course: “Battlefield,” by Jordin Sparks. Yes, Jordin Sparks of American Idol fame. And yes, they first heard this song when you played them a clip from So You Think You Can Dance, because you thought they would enjoy the part where the guy jumps and the girl rolls under him. And you were right — they did enjoy this, so much that they asked to watch the video nine billion more times. Not only do they like the dance, they are also in love with the catchy music.

(This is how an obsession is born.)

Every time we’re in the car now, Elliot will request “Battlefield.” He doesn’t understand that the radio is not an iPod, and that we can’t just play it for him on command. (We have not gone so far as to download the song, nor have we told them that this is an option.) Siena understands how the radio works, so she simply requests that we try to find the song. Which means we drive around listening to a lot of cheesy pop music while waiting for it to come on.

We had heard it in the car right before we got to Trader Joe’s that night (Siena made us wait in the car until the end of the song before going in) so it was fresh in their minds. So naturally, they both started belting it out like they were singing for their lives in front of Simon Cowell. I mean belting it. Full volume, full intensity.

The looks we got from other shoppers who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to this stuff were priceless. May their children some day embarrass them by singing a song not recorded by a hip new indie band so obscure no one has heard of them yet. May they sing it loudly. And with feeling. In public.

Laura and I haven’t been to a movie theater in a few years. Harry might have been in Year Three at Hogwarts. And we haven’t been to the theatre since early 2008. It’s possible we have Netflix to thank for this, as we’ve watched countless movies, finished six seasons of Sopranos, five seasons of Six Feet Under, and four seasons of Weeds while the kids were sleeping.

Usually, however, when we have time to ourselves outside the house, we get a glass of wine somewhere with a great meal or hang out with friends without having to make sure someone isn’t running into the street.

This doesn’t mean we don’t get our share of artistic entertainment and a meal chez CatNamedPig. Behold our Friday night:

Dancing…

…and Dinner

A fine evening. Bravos for the entertainment and the meal.

Note: Siena’s outfit provided by Laura’s friend Heather and her sister, from when she was a dancing little girl. Sweet Corn bought at the small farmer’s market held at Sabathani Community Center on Wednesdays from 3:30-6:30pm.