zonkered.net

Yesterday, I figured out that I may have a problem.

I was searching Piperlime for new black flats as mine are so stretched out that they slap against my feet like flip-flops, and instead of buying these Anne Klein shoes in the black patent, I got…dark pink.  This is on top of the green shoes I bought earlier this year, the purple ones I got last fall, and a pair of maroon ones.   In addition, Target has a pair of kitten heel Mary Janes coming out that I want in red.  Or blue.  When I finally pick out a pair of flat sandals for the summer, I have a sneaking suspicion that I won’t get either brown/tan or black, but green or red.

And in the meantime? I still need a new pair of black flats.

My cat’s latest effort to disprove this was by projectile-vomiting off the kitchen table.

Yes, he is very special.

The fair city of White Plains is holding a cherry blossom festival in one of the parks I ride past on the bus next weekend.  This particular park has no actual cherry trees, which makes me wonder how they plan on providing the blossom part, but that’s not the oddest part.  The oddest part is that there’s a rain location.  And where is this rain location? Another park.

Two blocks away.

I hate to break it to the planning committee, but if its raining in one park, its probably going to be raining in the other one.

So I have a food blog that I started last July.  It’s mostly pictureless, because I can’t take a decent food picture to save my life, and is full of my frequently and infrequently cooked recipes.

I haven’t posted to it since mid-March.  I’ve only posted to it five times since I started my new job – because I don’t cook anymore.  I get to work at 9 am, and I leave usually around 7 pm.  I might go to the gym after that, or I might go straight home but due to my commute the earliest I get home is around 8 pm.  At that point I don’t want to cook, so I end up only making myself dinner a couple of times a week.   Most of the time anymore dinner is either a Lean Cuisine tv dinner, or its a panini I bought at Grand Central before hopping on the train (and if its a panini, its always the ‘Milano,’ a tomato, mozzarella, and black olive pesto sandwich.  So good.  My addiction to brine-y olives is almost as bad as my addiction to vinegar).

The lack of cooking kind of makes me sad.  I like cooking, especially baking, but it seems like I just don’t have the time anymore.  I could move into the city and shorten my commute but then I’d have to deal with an even tinier kitchen (plus, New York City tax, which is yuck)  so I’m likely to just become a weekend cook.  I’ll probably get used to the idea in time.

Kind of want brownies this weekend though, so maybe that’ll be the goal.  I haven’t stuffed the boys at the office full of chocolate for a while.

Until I get my DSLite, the way I survive the forty minutes on the train surrounded by grumpy looking men in suits (in the morning) and half-drunk men in suits (in the evening) is by plugging in my iPod and reading.  A lot.  I read fast, so I’m usually almost finished with a book after I complete a round trip, and thus this week I have

• Read Saiyuki 8 and 9
• Re-read The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever, which is my absolute favorite Julia Quinn romance novel
• Re-read Reckless, by Amanda Quick
• Re-read both Dark Fire and Dark Melody by Christine Feehan.  The Carpathian novels are all written like crap, and yet I keep reading them
• Cooking Light magazine (well, it’s what I’m planning to read tonight)

Yeah, there’s a lot of re-reading.  I do spend a lot of money on books – A LOT -  but I also live in a small apartment and am in need of more storage as it is, so I try to reread my books as much as I can tolerate it – and some, like Secret Diaries, I just like so much I can read them over and over again.

There’s a couple of books I’m thinking of buying for my train trips that just came out:  Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner and I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley.  Certain Girls is the sequel to Good in Bed, which was probably the first book in my brief chick lit phase.   I Was Told There’d Be Cake is a book of essays, which is not usually my thing (I am possibly the only person who has tried and failed to finish a David Sedaris book) but one of them is entitled “Bring-Your-Machete-To-Work Day.”  This may be an essay collection I can get into.

Methinks a trip to B&N before I get on the train is on order.  Perhaps I can continue to avoid reading this month’s issue of Cooking Light.

I know it’s Starbucks, and my expectations of a natural-looking beverages should be limited, but my green tea latte looks less like something made from tea leaves and more like…distilled nuclear waste.  Or something.

Next time, stick with the chai.

Someone needs to explain to the “chefs” at Pret that porous sandwich bread is not the best medium for a hummus sandwich.  Learn to love the tortilla, people.

Dominick, my cat, is spending Sunday afternoon the way Sundays are best spent:

We should all lead such lives.

This is un-PC of me, but recycling is such a pain in the ass.

I agree with the idea in principle, sure, but the rules and regulations drive me up a wall.  This and this is recyclable, but not this! Must remove labels!  And here’s the one that really gets me: all cardboard boxes must be flattened and tied.

Okay, flattened I get, but tied? Someone’s just going to have to untie them when they get to the recycling center.  Is it so important to maintain employment for the dude that disposes of the string?

All these rules do is make it a pain in the ass for the people they’re trying to get to recycle, and making in mandatory – as in WE WILL NOT PICK UP YOUR GARBAGE IF YOU DON’T DO THIS – isn’t going to do anything other than make people (like me) twitchy, and most still won’t bother.  Especially those who live in large apartment buildings like me.  What do they care?  It’s not like they’ll be able to pinpoint who isn’t following regulations.  The point is that recycling will never be popular unless you make it easy for people.

So I’ll be buying string today so that I can tie up the boxes from my multitudes of orders this week.  I can’t wait until I move in August of this year.  More and more my goal is to not only get out of this undeniably crappy apartment building with the shit apartment management but also to get out of the county entirely.  New Jersey or NYC in September!

I need to just accept that I will never, ever, make it to one of the NY Metro Librarians Meet-ups.

My excuse when I worked in the ‘burbs was that the meetings were in New York (at Chipotle!) and I really didn’t want to get on a train for forty minutes to eat a burrito and mingle with other librarians.  In the middle of the week.  It was a valid excuse, I always thought.

My excuse now is that I would rather get on a train for forty minutes and go home/go to the gym instead of mingling with librarians.  (I might have gone, just for the sake of the burrito, except they moved it to some book/cafe)  It’s not so much a valid excuse now, so obviously, no matter how fun it seems in the abstract, I simply have no burning desire to talk to complete strangers in a cramped restaurant.

When I put it that way, it almost makes perfect sense.