jack vs. jack o'lanterns

I was in Chapel Hill, NC, this past weekend for my cousin Vanessa's wedding, and naturally I have about 8 million pictures (mostly of Baby Jack - but a few of the bride) to prove it. Instead of posting them tonight, however,I'm going to post some pictures of pumpkins. Feel free to hold your breath, though, because the wedding, in all its fabulousness, is coming soon to a monitor near you...

for a grade

it's a dog's party

Boy, have my Saturday nights ever changed. For one thing, they're now held on Sundays. And the giant plastic-bag-lined trash cans full of Delt's Mystery Punch are nowhere in sight.

Also, it is no longer unusual for me to spend a "Saturday" night at a birthday party for a dog. And come home with an AWESOME LOOT BAG.Lila's old nemesis Zoey turned two today. She and Tami hosted a low-key and relatively classy party (Blue Moon beer and Trader Joe's sun-dried tomato hummous!) which was attended by:

me
Raphael
Lila (in her rhinestone-studded fancy party collar, of course)
Ari
and
Ari's middle-aged dog Sammy

A pretty respectable turnout for a fourteen-year-old, I think.


Hilarity and enthusiastic jockeying for position, of course, ensued from the moment we arrived.
There were goodies, too. The men of Delt certainly never offered such crudites as we enjoyed. In addition to the more human-oriented spread, I baked star- and heart-shaped peanut butter cookies for dogs (The Guatemalan: "Finally! Something Lila and I can share!"), and Ari, the resident smoothie-place owner, brought canine-inspired peanut butter smoothies (The Guatemalan: "..mmm, smells gooood!")
The girls in action

The only thing missing was the Mystery... Actually, no. We had a pretty damn good time with the heart-shaped peanut-butter dog cookies.

a picture of my dog

ahhh-lacran!

I found a scorpion in my office yesterday afternoon, lurking casually behind my chair, all innocent-like and elitist ("What, me? Sting you? I should think not."). He freaked the living heck out of me for a second, I'll tell you that. I envisioned all sorts of eight-legged running and leaping that of course never ensued. I don't know how fast scorpions can go, but I'm reasonably certain they seldom leap on things.

Anyway, I was perhaps understandably nervous as I quickly upended over him a giant plastic Youngs' Dairy cup (yes, decorated with those wacky cartoon cows - Barnabus and Cowtherine and their adorable calves, Cowvin and Calfleen - for all the Youngs' fans who are wondering).

You all remembered those were their names, right? Am I the only die-hard ex-Youngs' employee out there? Julie? Julie? (And, uh, Betty? You should probably know this too. No excuses.)

Upon returning to reality, I screwed up my courage (bolstered, of course, by my experience with Burro Creek's scary mountain lion population) and flipped him into a bin usually reserved for artifact-washing to give him a looksee but also because I figured at some point I'd have to, you know, somehow dispose of him in a more ethical way then leaving him to suffocate under Barnabus' bland yet smiley cow-ey face.

I took a few pictures, of course, to prove to you how brave I am ("Oh for heaven's sake dahling, that's so not my good side. Let me curve my stinger a bit, like this..."), and then made the first available manly faculty person take him outside for - well, first, for pranking of the IT guys next door and then eventual disposal of a shady sort which was not discussed in detail. Although I assume he was dumped into the bushes somewhere. I'll probably see him tomorrow.

One good thing came of all this: I learned from Eva, who cleans the Centre on a semi-regular basis and who has inexplicably made it her pet project to get me to a point where I can communicate basic ideas in Spanish (such as: "Hey! I saw a scorpion in here today! Hide the women and children!"), that scorpion in Spanish is alacran. Which seems slightly more appropriate.

So from this point on, when I whirl my seat around and my eye falls on a scorpion lurking nearby, I will yell, "AHHHHHHLACRAN!" And then yell for an available faculty person.

bed or food? you decide

Lila got a new bed this weekend.

She loves it, but not quite in the way I expected. As far as I can tell, she thinks it's a giant ravioli, most likely stuffed with chicken. Or peanut butter. Or a cow.

This is Lila trying superextrahard to not chew on her new bed while I'm watching:

baby island, arizona

As a kid, I owned a book called "Baby Island".

The things I remember about this book include the cover, which featured a drawing of two befrocked young girls cavorting amidst large tropical leaves while playing with no less than four babies, and...well, not the actual plot, assuming there was one. Although I'm pretty sure I remember a twist wherein a coconut entered the scene at one point.

What I have retained is a vague notion of a shipwreck (in which, not to give too much away, everybody ultimately turned out to have survived) and the ensuing frivolity of unchaperoned and befrocked young girls playing with babies on a tropical island. But that's pretty much it. I don't remember large cats or cannibals or anything. I'm pretty sure the inclusion of those things would have strengthened the plot and probably jogged my memory. But of course, you can't rewrite history - or cause it to be retroactively removed from bookstore shelves.

So here we are, and thus we segue inelegantly into:

The Tucson archaeology scene. Which has lately morphed into my very own personal Baby Island.

Except that I'm not often as befrocked as I'd like to be, and technically I've never actually been shipwrecked...although I did fall out of a canoe during a church trip once and also into some very scary cataracts during a whitewater rafting excursion in college - not winding up on an island loaded with babies on either occasion. Also, although I am currently surrounded by babies, their mothers do not sustain them on coconut milk, as far as I know, and also would be unlikely to let me expose them to large cats or cannibals, no matter what the nature of the situation.

So...yes, you astute readers you, this whole thing has been nothing more than a clever lead-up to more pictures of babies.
Sara +
Joe =
Baby Elliott

Welcome to Baby Island, Eli! Watch out for crocs!

lesson learned

You know that song where the guy talks about how you should never spit into the wind? That apparently goes double for tossing out day-old coffee on the way out of the office.

and now for the news, such as it is

My small and adorable nephew Jack apparently has many hobbies. They include:

1. spitting up
2. sleeping
3. drinking milk
4. spitting up
5. headbanging
6. crying
7. spitting up
8. eating
9. burping
and
10. explosively pooping
11. on his mother

He also enjoys sea turtles and boobs.


My dog got jewelry for my birthday. It's a sparkly St. Francis bottle cap medallion. But I don't know if St. Francis is technically able to protect her from herself.


And, finally: I went with a chocolate hazelnut raspberry torte. But it wasn't that good. Shoulda stuck with the marzipan.

unabashed cakeporn

Not to ram too much domesticity down anyone's throat, but I need to make a cake on Sunday morning. Because 1.) the Guatemalan doesn't bake, 2.) it's not going to make itself, and 3.) I may have sort of (cough) inadvertently invited a bunch of people over for cake on Sunday evening for a grand birthday hoorah. And now I have to make a cake.

This isn't really a problem, as anyone who actually knows me is aware. I like making cakes and I have never minded making myself a birthday cake here and there. When you make your own cake, you get to pick out any. thing. you. want. My mom made me a beautiful doll-cake for my birthday when I was about 7, with a plastic pseudo-Barbie emerging out of a blue, flower-spattered cake shaped like the full bottom of a ballgown. Oh my God, I loved that cake. If you make your own cake, you could even make a doll-cake if you want.

No, the problem I'm facing is much deeper than having to make my own birthday cake.

The problem is that I haven't yet been inspired by anything I've seen. And God knows I can't make a random cake. Cake-making requires commitment and a certain level of fanaticism. Who the hell makes a cake? Fanatic cake-lovers who don't fear intimacy with baked goods, that's who. Personally, I can't make a cake at all until it starts burrowing into my dreams at night, lingering enticingly behind my closed eyes as I'm waking up, all tall and sweet and fluffy and gorgeous, murmuring things like: "Go ahead, baby, run your finger through my thick, glossy frosting...slice through my three velvety layers...come on, you know you want a big slice of me washed down with a cold glass of milk..."

So for me, it's obviously all about cakeporn if you need it spelled out for you. And frankly, I'm not having dirty dreams about any of the cakes I've seen lately (while flipping through the seductive pages of the Epicurious website, bosoms, such as they are, heaving and all that).

In the absence of a suitably alluring frosting be-decked centerfold to draw my attentions, I have at least been working to narrow it down to cakes I will not make this year. How this will actually help me come Sunday morning, I do not know. But that hasn't stopped me.

Top Ten Cakes I will not make this year:

1. The delicious strawberry number we had for the Guatemalan's birthday. Too recent. Also, looking to be become too much of a tradition. I anticipate that we will enjoy this particular cake many times in the next few years.

2. The obscenely rich and fabulously decadent chocolate-chili-fig cake I made last year. Really, really very yummy and amazing. But way too dangerous. Almost killed several people. So there's that to avoid.

3. Molten chocolate mini-cakes of any variety. Too early-2000s.

4. Cheesecake. Not, sadly, Guatemalan-friendly. Honestly, sometimes I wonder why we're together at all.

5. Lemon poundcake. Too much of a staple. Also, too wicked.

6. Spice cakes. Not enough frosting. Not appropriate for a birthday. Too "holiday".

7. Pie. Not cake.

8. Fresh pineapple upside-down cake. Is pineapple in season? Is it? I don't know. I love this cake, but I am not making it.

9. "Best Birthday Cake". Made it once. Not bad. But not the best.

10. Rocky Road Cake. Marshmallows.


So you see, I'm making progress.

I am currently considering a chocolate cherry torte, which is somehow different than a cake but not in any way that I can define. I made it a couple years ago for a good friend's birthday. So timing-wise, we may be ripe for another shot at it. Let me spell it out for you: sour cherries, ground almonds, and bittersweet chocolate shrouded by a paper-thin sheet of buttery marzipan, all draped with a silken glaze of bittersweet chocolate melted into heavy cream...

And there you have it: cakeporn.

clafoutis good

I'm making a cherry clafoutis, only without the cherries and, insofar as I know, without the clafoutis. To be honest, I know a clafoutis is something French and that's as far as I've gotten with a definition. I don't know if they have to contain cherries or turn out round. In fact, all I really know for certain is that mine is going to be neither of those things.

I am using blackberries and a square pan. I am, however, also using a real vanilla bean, which I find rather impressive. I could eat my fingers right now instead of waiting for the dessert.

The hardest part about making a clafoutis as far as I can tell is:

A. finding the cherries,
B. waiting for the browned butter to cool,
and
C. waiting for the stove to preheat.

In fact, you should all go make clafoutises right now. It's that easy. And it smells that good. It's seriously a five-minute process, if you subtract the considerable amounts of time consumed by the above three activities.

Go ahead, try telling your friends you've just made them a clafoutis, even if it's not strictly true. Unless they're French (and until they realize you're lying to them), I guarantee they'll be totally impressed. After all, they have no idea what a clafoutis is. It could involve Capoeira or laser thermodynamic fusion for all they know. Or both. It does involve a vanilla bean. And that's enough for me.