Archive for the 'friends' Category

My apartment is great and awful

Published
by
ashley
on November 10, 2008
in apartment, friends and top five
. 0 Comments

Top five things that annoyed me about my apartment this weekend:

1.  I hate when the weather outside is a brisk 58 degrees and then I walk into my 70 degree apartment and my glasses fog up and I immediately get hot and annoyed at the temperature, so I turn the thermostat down or off to compensate for temperature differences and then thirty minutes later, I am shivering.

2.  I had to wait for the dishwasher to finish its hour-long rinse cycle (okay, it’s not really an hour long, but it felt like it) before I could take a shower because I was concerned my apartment would run out of water.  I don’t know if that would happen, but it’s a concern of mine that I will be in the shower washing my hair and then the water runs out and I have shampoo-head.

3.  Although I generally don’t really mind my 30 minute commute into downtown, this weekend we contemplated going somewhere, but the thought of having to sit on the metro for 30 minutes was like torture in my head.  During weekdays, I like my commute because it gives me a chance to actually physically wake up.  I am not what you call a morning person - I don’t even have to be at work until like noon (journalism clearly still the best career path for me) and I still struggle with that.  I usually wake up at the last possible minute, then rush into the shower, throw some clothes on, eat a bowl of cereal while checking the weather online, put my shoes on, grab my bag and start walking to the metro.  Thirty minutes from bed to door, less if I skip some things like eating or socks.  Then once I get to the metro and get on the train, I can pop my earphones in, read the paper, take a nap and get myself ready for the day.  But on the weekends when everything is in slow-motion, I can’t bear to think about spending 30 minutes+ on the train.  No thank you.  I will just stay here and do some laundry.

4.  This morning I woke up very groggy and grumpy.  I looked around our bedroom and immediately decided it was un-feng-shui-ish so I hopped online to look up basic principles of feng shui.  Our bedroom fails in every inch of the word of failing.  I promptly sketched out a plan in my head for furniture placement but was quickly foiled by the lack of cable outlets.  Unless I want to watch television while lying on my side, or unless I want to spend the next 8 months tripping over a stray cable cord running the length of our room, our bedroom has to continue… failing.

5.  There are two aspects to our apartment that are, quite frankly, ginormous.  We have a ginormous pantry and we have a ginormous bathroom.  However, we do not have a linen closet.  When I have a monster laundry marathon day and do all the laundry I can find, when I try to put towels up on the rickety ladder shelf we bought from Ikea specifically for towels and other beauty products I don’t use (see number 3 and my streamlined thirty-minute mornings), they don’t fit.  We also have another rickety shelf in our tiny washer/dryer room that holds our sheets and blankets that is also quite full.  I don’t understand why the designers of this apartment could not have made the pantry smaller and added a linen closet, or why instead of the monstrous open area in the middle of the bathroom, they couldn’t have added some sort of storage system.  But it is annoying.

I realize that complaining about these things (dishwasher!  giant bathroom!  pantry!  laundry area!) makes me sound like a horrible person.  Here are the top five things I like about my apartment:

1.  The dishwasher is clearly necessary.  Marques and I spent a year and a half in an apartment without a dishwasher.  We never fought as much or as hard as when we fought over who had to do the dishes.  He usually lost.  I am also thankful for the counter space I have, which is good when I enter baking mode and feel the need to ice 48 sugar cookies.

2.  The washer and dryer are also important - if there is not a washer and dryer in close proximity, we have a tendency to let the clothes pile up into Laundry Mountain, and then we get so overwhelmed by Laundry Mountain that we start febrezing everything and create piles of clothing based on dirtiness.  We don’t do that anymore.

3.  I am within walking distance of a Target and Old Navy.  I’m very close driving-wise to a Trader Joe’s.  Twenty minutes to Wegman’s and Ikea.  I don’t understand how we can be in a recession when it seems like I do is spend money at these fine establishments.  If you look at my bank statement, it pretty much goes like this:

TARGET - 11/06
TRADER JOES - 11/06
WEGMANS - 11/07
TARGET - 11/08
IKEA - 11/08
TRADER JOES - 11/09
TARGET - 11/09
OLD NAVY - 11/09

Throw in rent, student loans, exorbitant cable bill and you’ve got my spending down pat.  Also yes, I really do go to Target that much.  Don’t judge me.

4.  My bathtub is awesome.  It is rotund and giant.  I will miss this bathtub when we move out of this place.  This bathtub is the kind of bathtub that little girls can swim in and pretend they are mermaids.

5.  Lots of cabinet space - there’s a whole set of cabinets I haven’t even USED yet.

So there.  Pros and cons of my apartment, based solely on this weekend.

Also, happy birthday, Ruth Ann!  I’m going to mentally dedicate my morning commute playlist to you tomorrow and jam it full of Iron Maiden, Queen, and Slayer.  Nothing says getting ready for work like some metal.  I miss your face.

Bacon-palooza is not approved by your doctor

Published
by
ashley
on October 30, 2008
in baking, friends, life and work
. 1 Comment

I will say this now - I am not that big of a fan of bacon. I don’t like eating it by itself (I don’t like breakfast meats in general) but I love it on pizza and hamburgers.

And, I suppose, now brownies.

This madness started two weeks ago when I posted the link to bacon cinnamon rolls. I was telling my co-worker Scott about them and he got overly excited. He does that and it’s cute. It was a late evening, we were the only ones left in our department. When it’s just us, there’s lots of food talk.

Scott’s reaction to the bacon cinnamon rolls pretty much went like this:

Oh. My. Gosh.

(revered silence as he stares at the picture in awe)

This. Sounds. So. Good.

So we started perusing the Bacon Today website, just checking it out. And I found their post about bacon brownies.

Holy. Crap.

A plan was immediately formed. I would make the bacon brownies and Scott would make the bacon cinnamon rolls. Team Bacon is go!

I did not make homemade brownies. I was tired, I had already made pizza, and my entire apartment smelled like bacon. My best baking sheet had a half-inch thick layer of bacon grease on it. So I pulled a mix out of the pantry. Mixed it right up, poured it in a pan, and crumbled some cooked bacon on top of it.  It looked like this:

Ignore that tiny little unstirred chunk of brownie powder.  Also, this looks kind of disgusting.

I baked them for 30 minutes then took them out to cool.  The bacon pieces had kind of sunk down into the brownies, but you could still see them.  I was hoping the time in the oven would cook the bacon pieces into crunchiness, but unfortunately, they were still kind of chewy.  Here’s what they looked like after baking:

I thought they were okay.  I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I would’ve used more bacon.  The bacon definitely added a nice salty, smoky taste, but it was odd to eat a brownie and hit…. meat.

Scott really enjoyed the bacon brownies - he ate most of them.  Everyone liked trying them, though, and a lot of people who thought they would be grossed out actually liked them.  So bacon brownies = semi-hit.

This week, Scott made the bacon cinnamon rolls.  He just took a can of refrigerated cinnamon roll dough and rolled some turkey bacon up in it, then baked them.  Scott is clearly more health-conscious than I am because I used thick-cut fatty fatty bacon.  The bacon cinnamon rolls were good, too, even though Scott slightly burned them.  I’m the queen of burning things, so I had no problem there.  The turkey bacon had a lot more bite-give too - if he had used actual pork bacon, I think they would have been really chewy.

I couldn’t take a very good photo of the rolls, but here’s a photo I took on my camera phone:

So bacon-palooza is finished for now.  We might try to make bacon cupcakes, perhaps, but I think we need to give our arteries a good rest first.

Maybe I should just drink more

Published
by
ashley
on October 30, 2008
in apartment, books, friends, i am ridiculous, marques and no thanks
. 1 Comment

There are, naturally, certain times each month where I become unbearably cranky and downright difficult to deal with.

I do realize that I whine a lot in general, even when I’m not the mayor of Crankytown, but those are usually things like having to walk home from the metro or we’re out of butter pecan ice cream.

Today was a cranky day.

It started in the morning, where I had a difficult time waking up.  Marques woke me up at 5:45 a.m. while banging around in the shower.  I then fell back asleep until he woke me up at 10:10 a.m. where I growled at him, saying things like, “If you don’t leave me alone, I will eat you.”  Finally, I woke up at 10:45 (YIKES) and I rushed to get in the shower, go to work, etc.

Walking to the metro sucked.  It was cold and windy and my head hurt.  When I got to the metro, the train was too hot and I had to take my jacket off.  Then a guy who smelled like cinnamon rolls got on and sat in front of me.  Normally I would want to lick the back of that guy’s head, but cranky me kept thinking, “Did this guy bathe in cinnamon roll cologne?  Perfume that smells like baked goods should be outlawed.”

Work was fine - work is always fun for me, actually.  Though I opened my egg sandwich to find moist sticky bread (gross).  Amanda brought us cupcakes from Hello Cupcake which gave me a brief five minute vacation from Crankytown.  Though eventually I started complaining how their cupcakes are too rich.  Seriously.  If you were around me today and managed to not punch me in the face, I commend you.

(sidenote:  It’s strange that I thought their cupcakes were too rich as I am never the girl who thinks things are too rich.  If someone is all like, “Oh, woe is me, this macaroni and cheese is too rich for me to finish!” then I’m always like CHOMP CHOMP YUM.  I have no “rich” tastebuds.  But maybe I am growing some.)

On the way home, no problems.  I’m re-reading the classic graphic novel Watchmen, but was actually slightly embarrassed to pull it out in front of all these middle-aged women and men who are reading Jim Webb autobiographies and Nicholas Sparks novels.  Then I got cranky because I was afraid I would be embarrassed and inside, I’m thinking things like WHO ARE YOU, MAN, TO JUDGE MY READING MATERIAL?  Oh, “The Kite Runner”?  Yeah, welcome to 2006.  Way to be a late reader.  (I say this while reading comic books from the mid-80s)

I decide to walk home and realize that my legspan sucks.  I’m comparing my tiny bird-like steps with those of the people walking next to me.  It takes these normal people 1 and a half steps to clear a sidewalk square.  It took me 3.  I’m a pretty tall girl, 5′8″ish, and I wear a size 10-11 in shoes.  Yet I’m walking like I was forced to undergo foot binding as a young girl.  Then I became self-conscious about my tiny steps and tried to make efforts to make my steps bigger, which made me look very odd, I’m sure, to the cars driving past me.  I probably looked like a fat drunk toy soldier on weekend leave.

Home.  Marques is sleeping.  This immediately annoys me for no good reason.  I turn on Unsolved Mysteries, eat a bowl of Frosted Flakes.  There is an odd mildewy smell in the kitchen, possibly from the washer/dryer.  Get annoyed.  Attempt to throw empty box of Frosted Flakes away, but trash can is full.  Is Marques’s job.  Get annoyed.  Get annoyed at having to scrub cast-iron skillet so hard although it’s my fault for letting it sit unwashed for three days.  Get annoyed at emptying dishwasher.  Get annoyed that the first thing Marques does when he wakes up is turn on the television to Sportscenter.  Try to make Marques eat goat cheese on a Triscuit.  Get annoyed that he doesn’t like it.  Spend 30 minutes cooking dinner while Marques watches the World Series.  Get annoyed that he didn’t offer to help do anything even though he doesn’t know how to cook.  Marques didn’t offer to get me another bowl of pasta or another glass of water.  Get annoyed.  Log onto internet, read e-mail, have 3 of the same e-mails from random liberal organization.  Get annoyed.  Buy bridesmaid dress for Lorrie’s wedding, get annoyed that my coupon code didn’t work and had to buy 2 more things (jeans and a bathing suit in a size too small in one of those “Oh, by the time bathing suit season rolls around I’ll be able to fit in it” attempts) to get it over the deemed amount.  Finished “Julie and Julia”, get slightly annoyed and jealous that I don’t get to have a job where I work in my pajamas.  Marques goes to bed early.  Get annoyed.  And bored.

It would be in your best interest to stay away from me.  I either need to be punched in the face by Don Draper or I need to start drinking three glasses of wine with dinner.

Full size candy bars = wealth and beauty

Published
by
ashley
on October 22, 2008
in family, friends, i am ridiculous and marques
. 4 Comments

Do you remember when you were a kid, how awesome trick-or-treating was?  Walking around the streets of your neighborhood and knocking on people’s doors for candy, watching as your pumpkin bucket filled up?  I’m pretty sure my Halloween candy stash contributed to my childhood obesity in a tiny way.

My favorite house was always the house who gave out full-size candy bars.  It never failed.  Every year, full-size candy bar.  I always thought those people were rich in my head even though they lived in a little Sears Craftsman bungalow.  For some reason, full-size candy bar equaled wealth.

My second favorite house was the one that always gave out little styrofoam cups of hot chocolate.  Some years, the fickle weather patterns of central West Virginia would make Halloween super cold, to the point where I would have to wear tights under whatever costume I was wearing (though I never participated in Slutoween).  I remember one particularly cold Halloween where I cried for hours because my mom made me wear my coat over my costume.

Costumes ranged.  I can’t remember a lot of them, but I remember one year I dressed up as an Indian princess.  I think I was Raggedy Ann once.  And a Hershey kiss.  And Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.  My costumes were very unoriginal.

When we got home from trick-or-treating, my favorite thing to do was to dump all of my candy on the floor and immediately start sorting it out into piles.  Piles of Tootsie Rolls, fun-size candy bars, Smarties, Double Bubble and caramel creams.  Then I would give half to my mom - she is a big fan of any kind of caramel candy, so she would always get the little square Kraft Caramels or the Sugar Daddies.  Then I would count how many I had of each particular candy and keep inventory so I knew when I was running low on any particular kind.  I was very meticulous about my operation.

We lived on a dead-end road, so we never got any trick-or-treaters in my later years.  After I turned 11, my mom wouldn’t let me go out for trick-or-treating, and on Halloween night, she would turn off all the lights and we’d watch a movie.  One time we got two brave kids who knocked on our door and we had to give them candy from my Halloween treat bag from school that day.  I think we gave them like one Hershey kiss and a roll of Smarties.  After that point, nobody ever stopped at our house again.  Also I think the neighborhood kids probably think my mom is a witch, since she’s a woman of a certain age who lives alone with her cats.  Also she wears a lot of black.

This year, I want to dress up, but I have nowhere to go.  My costume idea is pretty awesome, though - I want to go as the Utz girl and I want Marques to go as Natty Boh:

Pros to going as the Utz girl:

1.  Not a hard costume.  All I need is a red bow, lots of blush, a red shirt and a bag of chips.

2.  Holy crap, I get to walk around all night with my hand in a bag of chips.

(Ashley fact-of-the-day:  Did you know that Halloween 2007 was the day of my interview for my current job?  I didn’t even realize it was Halloween until I got off the metro and ran into a girl dressed in a skintight black leotard with cat ears on.)

Tell it to the mountains

Published
by
ashley
on October 14, 2008
in friends, life and marques
. 0 Comments

What does one do in the country?  Let me show you.

So aside from the depressing subconscious acknowledgments, I had a really nice time with my friends Lorrie, Jasmine, and Lorrie’s sister Stephanie.  Here’s a rundown of the weekend:

On Friday, Marques and I drove down through Charlottesville because we wanted our trip to be more scenic.  All we saw were Arbys and roadside barbecue stands, so that didn’t work out in our favor.  Plus it added like a half-hour to an already ridiculously long trip.  Marques was on a hunt for the Cheapest Gas Possible and so passed all of the stations that said $3.09 and $3.19 until we got to a tiny place called Troutville, where we were forced to stop because we were running out of gas.  When Marques saw that the sign said $2.99, I swear I don’t think I’ve ever seen him happier.  Maybe when the Cardinals won the Series.

So I get out and stretch my legs and contemplate a bottle of water from the gas station.  I go inside and what do I see?  A pan of homemade blackberry cobbler, warm and gooey and delicious.  Without thinking, I immediately buy a chunk.  It’s a small consolation that I happen to love food that comes from gas stations, especially nachos and Slurpees.  My gas station blackberry cobbler was really, really good.  Check it out:

Doesn’t that look delicious?  And not at all covered in botulism or any sort of gas station bacteria?  I thought I would regret eating this cobbler but you know, I actually didn’t regret anything of that sort.

We get to Floyd, I’m dropped off, kisses and hugs, and Marques goes on his merry way.  He went home to visit his family while I was visiting my friends.

After 80,000 pictures and a house tour and marveling at how incredibly dark it is in the country, we pile into a car and go to this place called The Pine Tavern, which pretty much caused me to gain 5 pounds.  It’s a restaurant that serves nothing but country-fied meals, and in large quantities.  We all got the family-style dinner, and we stuffed ourselves on roast beef and mashed potatoes and dumplings (dumplings = my favorite food that ends in -ing) and I even ate a small piece of fried chicken (I normally don’t eat meat off a bone except in the case of polla a la brasa) and brownies and sweet tea and it was pretty much like Cracker Barrel on steroids.

Then we went into the tiny town of Floyd, which has one stoplight.  Floyd’s got kind of a reputation as a hippie town, and since we passed by a table of ladies selling Obama merchandise, I kind of agree.  We grabbed coffee drinks at the coffeehouse and then sat and talked.  You know how ladies do.  After we got too cold to stay outside, we went back to Lorrie’s house and proceeded to play Rock Band for the next four hours.  I did a remarkable job singing Bon Jovi “Wanted Dead or Alive” which only confirms my suspicions that I should sing nothing but Bon Jovi songs.

On Saturday, we woke up to fill our tummies with even more country cooking - this time I ate a pork barbecue sandwich, more mashed potatoes, and a piece of pecan pie.  And then we drove around the Blue Ridge Parkway for a good three house, looking at the mountains and the sights.

Like this:

And this:

And this:

And we took about 85,000 pictures of each other in which I looked completely horrible in all of them.  Like I’m some wild tiger girl who doesn’t own a hairbrush or any kind of makeup and my eyes were always squinting at the sun.  Like this one:

(sidenote: I am wearing that shirt again today.  Don’t worry, I washed it and it’s clean)

And I took a lot of photos of leaves, because I love the fall.

Saturday night, we ate some Mexican and went back to Lorrie’s, where we all promptly fell asleep like grandmothers.

Sunday, we went down to the pumpkin festival in Christiansburg, where we made Jasmine go on a hayride because she had never been on (which is honestly ludicrous) and we were stranded in a pumpkin patch, with hay and pumpkins:

And then we all pretty much ate our weight in homemade kettle corn:

And then, alas, our trip was over, and Marques and I spent another 6 hours in the car.  Well, I fell asleep and woke up when he slammed his brakes on the entrance to I-66.  It was an enjoyable weekend, one I needed, one that refreshed me, but I am glad to be home in the city where there is Thai food and Target within walking distance.  That’s all one needs in life anyway.

All the comforts of home

Published
by
ashley
on October 13, 2008
in family, friends and i am ridiculous
. 0 Comments

This past weekend, I was surrounded by cows, mountains, leaves, and trees.

I went to visit my best friend Lorrie in Floyd, Virginia.  She moved there in late August and it was a surprise to everyone considering she lived in Brooklyn for two years.  How do you go from Brooklyn to Floyd?  I don’t know.  I felt a bit out of my element there.  It felt weird to have to drive 30 minutes to get to town, not to mention 45 minutes to get to Target.  Any place where it takes me 45 minutes to get to Target, I pass.

But it reminded me a lot of the area where I grew up.

When I was a wee girl, my mom and I lived with my grandfather in a tiny town called Red House in Putnam County, W.Va.  Putnam County is sandwiched between Kanawha County, where Charleston is, and Cabell County, where Huntington is.  It’s now one of the fastest growing counties in the state - it’s become like the new suburb of Charleston.  Lots of expensive McMansions are built there, and traffic has become almost unbearable.  People moved there to escape the city life for the country life, but now it’s almost become the city life there.

But when I lived there, it wasn’t like that at all.  It was definitely country, with rolling green pastures with cows and hayrolls and red barns.  My grandfather worked as a mechanic for a brick company, but he tended a garden during the summertime.  There were three gardens - one was for vegetables like cucumbers and tomatoes and squash and lettuce.  The other was for fruit like watermelon (my favorite, and he always planted plenty of them for me) and cantaloupe and honeydew.  There was also a smaller section for corn.  We always had bushels of vegetables and fruits outside our door.

There were also fruit trees - apple and plum and peaches.  Blackberry bushes lined the barbed wire fence that separated the farm from the forest.  Behind the garage, my grandfather planted blueberries and raspberries and sometimes strawberries.

Driving up the mountain to get to the farm, you were surrounded by trees and mountains and farms.  It’s a beautiful, scenic drive, one that takes about 30 minutes from the bottom to the top, with lots of spots where the mountains seem to go on for miles, fading to a dusty blue in the distance.  It is, of course, particularly beautiful in the fall, when there are rows and rows of red and yellow and orange trees as far as you can see, in every direction.

I was really young then - young enough that I didn’t notice anything about the way we were living.  I didn’t realize we were only living there because my mom couldn’t afford to live anywhere else, and after my grandmother left my grandfather, he wasn’t able to take care of himself.  When I was younger, I favored my grandfather for the sole reason that he favored me.  I followed him everywhere, in the garden, helping water the plants, picking apples from the trees, shucking corn on the porch, playing kitchen in his garage and making him drink imaginary cups of coffee.

My mom saved money, and she bought a house and I moved away when I was around 6 or 7 years old.  And as we both got older, the garden shriveled up.  He was too old to work in it anymore.  He remarried a woman that I didn’t particularly like, but tolerated and occasionally had a nice time with.  They divorced a few years back and then my grandfather was left alone in the house he had built himself 25 years earlier.

And then he died this past March, and it was enormously sad, like all deaths are.

My family has an annoying habit of scheduling important things without checking dates with everyone.  For example, this past weekend, they scattered my grandfather’s ashes at his farm.  I considered skipping out on my Floyd weekend, but I felt that since those plans had been made months in advance and the scattering plans had been made, oh, I don’t know, weeks in advance, it would be unfair for me to throw everything into upheaval.  So I went to Floyd, and had a nice time, and ate delicious food and laughed with my friends.

I felt guilty, naturally, but the guilt subsided a bit when I started to draw parallels between the area and the area I grew up in.  Mountains and trees and leaves and cows and barbed wire fences and gardens and corn.  Surrounding myself this weekend with the things that surrounded him in his life was actually very nice, even if these things were 3 hours away.  Even if these things weren’t home.

Good thing Congress isn’t in session

Published
by
ashley
on October 9, 2008
in friends, i am ridiculous and work
. 0 Comments

If they were, we wouldn’t have time to make graphs about each other.  You might have to click on the graphs to make them bigger to see all the text.

Here’s a graph I made about Amanda’s distribution of time during her workday:

Here’s a graph I made about Scott’s workday:

Here are two graphs Scott made about me:

It’s true.  I love dinosaur chicken nuggets and I hate the gold dome on the W.Va. state capitol.