A quiet night, a stack of books, a tuna melt on rye

I just bought Creme de Methe for the first time.  It's always seemed kind of useless, and one of those things you buy once for a teaspoon or so and then never use again, but which takes up precious real-estate in a cabinet or on top of the fridge.  I made this terribly *eyeroll* monumental purchase because I've been invited to a pie party tomorrow.  After much deliberation I decided to make a Grasshopper Pie.  Which of course uses a half a cup of Creme de Menthe. 

I don't think I've had Grasshopper Pie in 18 years.  Not since Pop-pop died, which was in Fifth grade, so I must have been ten.  When I was little, we'd periodically go to my Grandparents house for Sunday dinner (my father's parents, who lived on the opposite side of the Philadelphia area from us, meaning they were in New Jersey and we were in Pennsylvania).  Every singe time we had baked macaroni and cheese, broccoli (and I still appear to be the only person who likes the trunks better than the leaves), and grasshopper pie for dessert.  I remember it being very good, so here's hoping that the recipe I found on-line is up to snuff. 

So what are other people's favorite pies.  I must admit to being a pretty big pie fan, simply because I really don't like cake.  Pie is often a good compromise when your mother is despairing about what to serve at a birthday party when the birthday girl doesn't like cake.  Particularly when said party is splitting the difference between Christmas and New Years and every one is royally sick of treats anyway. 

And I am back in Pennsylvania again.  Let me tell you haw I am so over the really long car trip thing, possibly because I drive up to 10 hours at least once a week (Monday or Wednesday depending on which side of the 4-day I'm on.)  Of course, I'm still not over the long car trip enough to suck it up and transfer my car registration to Louisiana because I still don't want to be from Louisiana.  Call me a Yankee (plenty of people do) but nothing good comes out of Louisiana. 

Yesterday as I was driving through Florida, Georgia, and the various Carolinas, South Eastern PA had some ridiculously strong storms that resulted in my squirrel tree (the tree outside my window that always had a squirrel sitting in the closest branch -- no seriously always) landing on the roof.  Looks like I get to spend my vacation unlocking the door for various contractors.  At least there wasn't too much damage.  Only three holes, two of which didn't really let any water in, and the third which only impacted my mother's closet.  Clothes = rather easy to wash. 

Finally, tomorrow I'm supposed to attend a sleep over bachelorette party.  Can I say how much I had hoped to leave sleepovers behind as part of high school.  There is a reason I don't go camping.  Sleeping bags and hard surfaces hold very little appeal.  I've been kind of stressing over this party for awhile leading to the following conversation with my brother.

Does anyone else use Goodreads?  I like it as a way to keep track of the books I read each year -- much better than my old word document method.  Anyway, I've been a member of the Adults reading Young Adult Fiction group (called Wildthings) for about a year now.  I think I'm in the minority in that group due to the fact that I am neither a teacher nor a mother, but reading through the messages has prompted me to thank my mother numerous times over the last year for the way she raised me. 

Many of the people (mostly women) who post in the group do so because they read every book their child reads in order to  make sure the themes are appropriate.  Now, I'm not a mother, so I can only come at this situation from the view point of the child, but I would have stopped reading or I would have become the biggest sneak imaginable -- hiding every book I found regardless of how "appropriate" it might have been.  Then again,  I am and have always been a very private person. 

I come from a huge family of readers.  We trade books all the time.  No family get together is complete without an exchange of books accompanied by an "I think you'll like this,"  if fact every time I visit my parents I am greeted by a new stack of books in my childhood room, things my parents have read since the last time I was home and think I might like.  My grandmother does the same thing but with articles which can be sent through the mail.  Still, all through my childhood I can only remember reading two things around the same time as my mother: Christy when the television series came out and Anne of Green Gables and its sequels right before we went to Prince Edward Island on vacation.  The first book even involves an instance of Statutory rape, but there was never a sense that I couldn't read it or that we needed to have a "very special" discussion about it.  I was allowed to read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and trusted to get things or not get them. 

So, once again -- thank you Mom (and Dad) for your hands off approach to my reading material growing up.  Thank you for taking me to the library often, and for letting me check out anything that looked interesting. 

So back in October (or was it late September) of 2003 I left to study abroad at the University of Sussex.  I had backed all of my favorite CDs and was thus listening to the second tier right up until I left.  I departed with Annie Warbucks in the CD player.  Nine months later, I return to find my CD player has taken up residence in the bathroom (apparently my brother was unable to take a shower without musical entertainment) and my CD nowhere to be found.  Annie Warbucks is not a great show by any stretch of the imagination, but it does contain my favorite love song of all time, It Would Have Been Wonderful, which isn't really a love song at all, and which probably says a lot about my psyche.  I look everywhere for that CD

Anyway, I'm sharing this because this weekend, I went home and there it was sitting on my brother's desk.  I've been looking for the CD for seven years (trust me, if it were available in iTunes or your standard CD store I would have re-purchased it many times over by now) and there it was, just sitting there.  Of course, the second half is all scratched up, but my song survives.  Yay!

Well I'm back to work not, and have been for four days, so I guess the "Wow! I've been rather busy over vacation-type days round-up post" is sadly over due. But, I am nothing if not sadly over due.  So here we go:

• Pennsylvania snowed for me.  Twice.  And it managed to do it the day before I came home and two days before I went back so that none of my planes were canceled.  Yay!  I really meant to go sledding at some point, but somehow I never got around to it.  Much like I never got around to seeing Sherlock Holmes with my father. 
• The luminarias went so much faster this year than any previous year.  Apparently assembly lines where my brother and I take jobs without speaking to each other work better than any other kind.  Also, possibly the only leaving a certain amount of time by going to a movie that only gets out about two hours before Christmas eve services. 
• We succeeded in convincing my mother to go to the 5:30 service -- the one with all the little kids being cute and performing.  Now, if we could just convince her to go to the 3:00  for the unrehearsed Christmas Padget, where you can wear whatever costume you want.  Ryan and I want to be first and second lobster. 
• I got to school my family in Rock Band Christmas evening!  Yay! being the singer.  I even got told by my youngest cousin "you have to play on medium or hard, if you play a lot"  He didn't believe that it was my first time playing.  All those years of sight singing in choir paid off for something. 
• After never having participated in a Fandom Secret Santa, I volunteered myself for two.  It didn't turn out too badly.  I got a lovely Guy/Marian fic from ladyoneill and a bunch of Glee icons from setentpet.  Plus the people I made graphics and one fan-mix for seemed to enjoy them.  
• On the 27th Toenails (or the British ex-pat's Indian food eating club of which my parents are members despite not being ex-pats) came for the People's Light and Theater panto and yummy dinner at the Himalayan.  The lady who sat next to me at dinner seemed to think she had to walk me through Indian cuisine despite the fact that I had chosen all the food that she was eating.  It was weird.   The panto was great as usual -- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  This year they strayed further than usual from the fairy tale. Making the show about making a movie of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which I'm not sure I liked as much -- but still really, really funny. 
• Went down to see glowwormtu in DC for three days.  We acted like the 1776 geeks that we are while viewing the Declaration of Independence.  The docent told everyone which case it was in by referencing Richard Henry Lee in a picture, so we had a bit of a "Lee's of Old Virginia" squee.  Then there were pretty gems, forensic anthropology, and Ruby slippers at the various Smithsonians.  All-in-all a good day. 

I was so not ready to come back to work on Monday.  And judging by the shear amount of mistakes I've made this week (today I surveyed a segment east-to-west instead of from west-to-east simply because I never noticed that I was walking in the wrong direction.  I didn't realize until I got back to the hotel and the property lines looked different on the Trimble than they did on the map.  Thank God for the rain. 

I'm thinking about making something along these lines for various relatives, but I have a tendency to have very different taste than the members of my extended family, so I'm looking for some additional input.


Therefore, I bring you my first poll ever:
[Poll #1499562]

I went to my cousin's college graduation last weekend and meant to talk about it earlier - possibly while I was there in Memphis or certainly while I was in Georgia for work this week - yet it never seemed to pan out.  Anyway, the graduation was in Memphis which I had been to once before.  On that occasion I was attending the national conference of my fraternity (Phi Sigma Pi - yeah, I know, I'm a girl.  It's co-ed, and yes it's stilled called a fraternity).  For some reason that I no longer recall, we were considered the trouble making chapter - and spent the weekend trying to live up to that reputation (and failing miserably).  Somehow there wasn't a lot of time for sight-seeing. 

This time, in between official graduation activities and family meals, I actually got to do some touristy things.  Friday afternoon after we all arrived, a group of us went to the Civil Rights Museum.  I realized that I would need another trip to take in the museum by the time I was in the second room.  There is tons of exhibits and information - two whole buildings in fact - and we got there only an hour or so before closing time.  It's sad really.  There we whole rooms I missed because I was chasing after my mother who insisted that we make the second building.  For the first half I was struck by two things: 1.) How much I had forgot from my time at school.  At least in my school district, most of the civil rights information came in Elementary and two some degree Middle School, when you still did projects for Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month.  By high school, the curriculum is so set that you don't follow those kind of calendar themes any more and American History Part II (1865-present) takes the carbon dating definition of the present. 2.) How much of the south I've been to in my job.  Logically I know that I've done survey work in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Tennessee which constitutes the majority of the south, but I was still surprised by the number of signs I read and thought "I stayed there or I surveyed that area".  The second building I thought was much weaker.  It is housed in the building from which James Early Ray shot Martin Luther King and the exhibits there focus on the man hunt in the aftermath of the shooting.  There was a lot of looking at guns and passport photos.  I also got the interesting moment of turning a corner and thinking "why is there a picture of Bono on that wall". 

Saturday, after the graduation, I went with my mother, aunt, and youngest cousin to the more frivolous tourist location of Graceland.  Of the four of us, only my Aunt was in anyway an Elvis fan.  In fact, on my last trip to Memphis we had driven out to Graceland, saw it cost $30 to get in, took a picture with the sign and decided to drive to Arkansas instead.  I think our families greatest moment at Graceland was when, right before we walked in the door, my aunt told my mother to look closely at the lamps in the first room because they looked exactly like those in the house they grew up in.  Other than that my mother was apparently the only person left in creation not to know that Elvis was a twin and that he started off singing religious songs.  Sometimes I want to know what she was doing during her childhood.  Also, the pool room was the most hideous thing I've ever seen.  Why would you cover all the walls and ceiling of room in fabric with an extremely busy pattern and then cover all the couches in the same fabric.  *shudder*

Then Saturday night was the great adventure.  My Uncle is the kind of person who likes to party.  So, of course, Saturday night after all the official ceremonies were finished we had to go out for a night on the town.  We ended up at some bar which I thought was called Sucky O'Sullivan's, but I think I may have read the sign wrong and the first word was really Silky - it would make more sense.  There they have some awful drink that involves everything behind the bar and comes in a bucket with 10 or so straws which we had to try.  I left with the adults after the first one, but my brother and oldest and middle cousins stayed and drank two more - blech.  They then all got to pile into my hotel room with the tiny beds to sleep it off.  Wow does my brother snore.  I'm glad I travel with earplugs in my purse or I wouldn't have gotten any sleep at all. 

Sunday I got back to New Orleans only to fly out again on Monday at 6:25 am for work.  I flight my co-worker and I almost missed because apparently Louis Armstrong international is way busier at 5:45 in the morning that it is at any other time during the day. 

Scene: Conversation over breakfast this morning

Dad (really excited): I got you lot of fruits and vegetables. I got Parsnips!

Me (bursting out laughing): Parsnips?

Dad: You keep saying you like root vegetables.

Only my Father would be quite so excited about the parsnip, which is now what we are having for dinner tonight. I'm excited. I do like the root vegetables.

I have the house all to myself this weekend, because my parents went to undy_niable's A-day this weekend. I was going to go but he said he'd rather spend the time with his girlfriend since she was the only one he was interested in seeing. That and the sole source of entertainment was going to be watching football practice. People that play football find watching practice boring, so there was no way I would find it otherwise. So, I looks like I will wait for an actual game to go up to West Point. Le sigh, but not really.

I fell like I haven't been on the computer for years. This whole working thing really takes up a lot of time! And waking up at 5:00 am to be at work by 6:00 = harder than I thought. Yet, I am still much happier than I was watching the bananas rot.

I've been watching a surprising amount of high school football recently since, apparently, undy_niable is the offensive line for his team. As you may imagine this means they spend a lot of time being massacred, not because he's bad ('cause he's really not, or so I'm told (I really know nothing about football)) but because there are like six people on the offensive line (there may be more than that, like I said I know nothing about football). Also the defense isn't much better, and possibly worse. Anyway, the announcer at the game last night was the absolute worse. What he announced : amount of time in each scoring drive i.e. information which does not interest me. What he did not announce: what each penalty was. I don't know about the other people watching, but ref sign means nothing to me (except holding, I can recognize the sign for holding, and of course the sign for a good score.) Grrrrrr!

Blackbird came on my Ipod. This song will now always remind me of the tulane choir. I did a little cringe because our version not so good.