Best laid plans

After a week in Seaside, Andy and I are back in our cozy apartment on Alki. He's assembling a shoe rack. I have a tea towel tied around my head like Rosie the Riveter (bowl cut has grown horribly long and is poking me in the eyes.)

I don't have any ideas for what to write tonight. I'm tired and my ear/nose/throat canals are unusually dry. Itchy dry. Uncomfortable.

So, instead of the usual highly entertaining post, I'm going to lay out my plans for the future. Here it goes.

Short term

• Put the duvet cover on the duvet (ugh - the worst).

• Get a haircut.

• Take the Amazon boxes out to the recycling. 

• Watch the latest America's Next Top Model. 

Medium term

• Continue to blog 'every day' after my Year-28 Challenge ends, except give myself the weekends off. 

• Buy a conehead Halloween costume, for old time's sake. 

• Buy a rug. 

• Buy a mini, indoor palm tree.

• Get a response from an A-list celebrity on Twitter. 

Long term

• Go to Japan. 

• Raise a litter of children, one of whom trains as a massage therapist. 

• Put sunscreen on Andy's bald head every summer until he dies. 

Monday tomorrow. Let's make it a productive one. Drink lots of coffee. Treat yourself to a chilled Kit-Kat in the afternoon. You know the drill. 

Love,
Margaret

P.S. Are you Team Miley or Team Nicki? I think it's obvious whose team I'm on. 

When Time Hop gets ugly

There's this app called Time Hop that shows you what you were up to (your online activity) on this day a year, five years, eight years, ten years ago, etc. OF COURSE, you already know that. I'm not trying to be patronizing. The Madgespace audience covers a wide age demographic, and it's better to over-explain than leave my older constituents in the dark.

Anyway, Time Hop usually uncovers a super cute photo from back in the skinny, no-wrinkles days. It's a heartwarming walk down memory lane.

Today, however, things weren't so rosy.

Today, my sister Anna's Time Hop decided to take this unfortunate Facebook status out of mothballs:

So many questions. 

What in particular did Sara Bareilles do to move Anna in such a profound way? Was it a certain song? A music video? A TV interview?

To be fair to Anna, people used to treat their Facebook statuses a lot more like Twitter. Remember that? You could just update your status with any innane thought that popped into your head. For a while there, back in the early days, every status had to complete the sentence "I am..." It was wild. People's statuses would be like, "hating life right now because I have a test in the morning and haven't studied at all!!!!!!!111" or "pooping - lol."

Welp, that's me done blogging for the night. I promised myself I'd do a seven minute workout before bed. Bring on the wall-sits!

LYMI, 

Margaret

Where are they now? Savage Garden edition

The dog across the street is neglected. His name is Radio (we think).

They (Annabelle's daughter and son-in-law) leave him tied up in the front yard all day and night.

I'm not a huge animal person, but COME ON! Take your damn dog for a walk! It's so sad. Don't they know, as Savage Garden once crooned, animals are supposed to be "careless and free"?

 CUE THE MUSIC——



——Hmmm. Apparently that song featured in a 1999 Juliette Lewis rom-com called 'The Other Sister'. That explains the music video.

Speaking of 'Savage Garden' — where are they now? Well, they broke up in 2001 and the vocalist, an Aussie named Darren Hayes, now has a bunch of solo albums. More importantly, he's currently studying at The Groundlings (LA improv school), has a podcast AND has three Twitter followers that I happen to follow:

Quite the ringing endorsement!

If you're not sure who Brendan Jordan is, he's that kid who became famous after this news clip went viral.

Well! That was so exhausting that I don't have time to Google what the other half of Savage Garden is up to. Sorry, whatever your name is. But I suppose you're used to this.

Love y'all,
Margaret

A tweet you can eat

Welcome to the stage, tonight's guest blogger: Anna Gorohoff!

---

Always looking to expand my dinner repertoire, I recently started following MaureenEvans on twitter. Ms. Evans rose to twitter fame in 2009 after becoming the Internet’s first “tiny cook”. She tweets out full recipes using only the given 140 characters. Not an easy task. But an even harder challenge, decoding those tweetcipes (my word, not hers).

Her tweetcipes range from everyday standards:

Pancakes: Melt3T buttr&brsug/c milk/3yolk. Whip3white. Sift2c flr/T bkgpdr/½t salt&soda&cinn. Fold all; +to grsdpan@med. Flip when bubbling.

To Google-worthy international dishes (at least for me):

Bisara: Brwn 6garlc/¼c oil; boil+c parsly&soakd fava/5c h2o/t cumin&paprka&chili&salt. Cvr,simmr h@low. Puree+lem. Top+olvoil&paprka&cumin.

Inspired by Madgespace’s can do approach to life, I’ve decided to attempt one of these recipe puzzles. Since I’m prone to cheating, I set a few simple ground rules for myself.

1. Can't be something I’ve ever made before
2. No Google searches, image or otherwise
3. Must have all ingredients on hand (more laziness, but we’ll call it a rule)

The first recipe I found fitting my requirements was the Skillet Pot Pie. I haven’t dined on pot pie in years and I’m sure I’ve never made one.

Here’s the tweetcipe:

Skillet Pot Pie: Brwn,rmv 6c veg/T oil. Brwn 3T buttr&flr; whisk+c stock&milk/T lem/t thyme&s+p. Mix all/4c cookdmeat; top+pastry. 30m@400F.

Hmmmmm . . . . let the decoding begin!

Step 1: Pick out hidden and missing items. In this tweetcipe 4c cookdmeat; top+pastry caught my eye. I precooked and diced chicken breasts and prepared a puff pastry top. Note, the ratio of butter to flour in a puff pastry is nearly 1:1 – so you’ve been warned. This is rich.

Step 2: Brwn,rmv 6c veg/T oil = Brown 6 cups of veggies in 1 Tbsp oil, remove. I used onions, purple and orange carrots, and peas.

Step 3: Brwn 3T buttr&flr; whisk+c stock&milk/T lem/t thyme&s+p = Brown 3 Tbsp of butter with 3 Tbsp of flour. Whisk in 1 cup chicken stock and 1 cup milk. Add 1 Tbsp lemon juice, 1 tsp thyme, salt and pepper.

Step 4: Mix all/4c cookdmeat; top+pastry. 30m@400F = Add veggies and cooked chicken back into the skillet. Top with puff pastry sheet. Cook at 400 degrees F for 30 min.

All in all, this was a pretty straightforward recipe. It took me about an hour to prep and cook not counting a quick latte and nursing break with my lovely sous chef. 

While it wasn’t the most beautiful dish I’ve ever made, it was tasty (all that butter!) and surprisingly really fun to make. It turns out it’s pretty delightful to cook without a strict recipe. I liked picking my own veggies (aka – whats in my fridge), not following dictated cooking times (you’ll know when the sauce thickens, just watch it), and making decisions based on tasting the food rather than known amounts. You feel quite footloose and fancy free!

My next challenge: pick a tweetcipe for a dish I’ve never heard of. Then we’ll really see how well my decoding skills are!

LYMI

Anna

Aging

Yo yo ma,

The other day I had the misfortune of viewing three of my idols, Joshua Lyman, Toby Ziegler and President Josiah Bartlett, in a YouTube video of a commercial they shot years after the West Wing ended. I was stunned by Josh's sagging jowls and Toby's sunken cheeks. To be frank, they looked like they had one foot in the grave. They looked over the hill. They looked OLD.

Here- check it out yourself.



Since watching the video the first time I have recovered from my shocked and realized that when the video was shot a significant amount of time had passed since their youthful West Wing days. It's the same as when you see any celebrity years down the road. I remember seeing a video of Judy Garland in her later years and being stunned by her wrinkles and gravelly voice.

Guess who this is?



SHIRLEY TEMPLE!!!

She's the last person you'd suspect would get old. But she did. We all do. And you know what? I am OK with it. I'm looking forward to aging gracefully like a wise old Japanese woman (better start drinking some green tea) and I can't wait to not give a rat's arse about anything because I've "been everywhere" and "seen it all." Exciting!

I have, however, laid out a few ground rules for my personal aging process. I advise you to follow suit.

1. Moisturize the face frequently
2. Never give up wearing colors and patterned prints
3. Play chess and do crosswords to keep the mind buzzing
4. Avoid wearing "young persons clothes" such as low-rise jeans after the age of 40, but never shop at stores solely aimed at the middle-aged, such as Talbots.
5. Remain open to learning new technologies
6. Never have hair longer than shoulder length after the age of 50
7. Smile as much as possible
8. Exercise, even if it just means swimming because the joints can't take running or walking
9. Travel to warm climates and soak up the vitamin D
10. Dance to tunes from the good ol' days
11. FLOSS and brush the teeth often. Toothaches are THE WORST

Well, I am going to scan the blogs and then hit the hay. Also, I am back on Twitter now. I didn't break from Twitter like Amanda Bynes or Miley Cyrus (both of whom are back on it now), but I simply forgot about it completely. I've been tweeting tonight and enjoying it. Look out for @grassyllama if you know what's good for you.

TTFN,

Madge