Doggone Cute

Here's a Buddy UPDATE: My boy is still wearing a cone of shame and we added to the humiliation by buying him a shirt. It's made for small dogs and it says "Doggone cute" on the back of it. We think it makes him look like a sausage link. Hey, whatever. His dignity is shot as it is. He's still my gorgeous baby boy!

DOUBLE SNOW DAY!

They're calling it the blizzard of 2010. I'm calling it a double snow day: an unprecedented event for my school. Not only was it called in advance, but it snowed all day and then overnight again. Out landscapers came Wednesday night at shoveled our driveway and walkway, only for mother nature to fill it all back in with new snow during the night! Uggh! The pictures below of the backyard are from Wednesday. I went out on Thursday and took pictures of the front. It was beautiful out on Thursday, as one can see in the clear blue skies in these pictures.

So did I accomplish things with my two full days home? Nothing out of the ordinary: cooking, cleaning and laundry. And a nap with my sleep-partner, Tula.

Food!

It's everywhere: supermarkets, restaurants, fast-food joints, parties, the office, bars, our homes. You can't avoid it. Every six seconds on TV we see a commercial about the next readily-available delicacy that either costs a dollar or can be delivered to you from your phone or lap top within the half-hour. It sickens me and saves me at the same time. I do order food from my laptop and phone- I do eat from a dollar menu. Some of my favorite shows have the words Kitchen and Cooking in the title. I also love to cook. I'm not talented at cooking or anything, but I do have my regular repertoire of dishes that are crowd pleasers. Just last night I made the classic steak house dinner: NY Strip, mashed potatoes, garlic spinach, and green beans. I was in heaven. Today I made Gorgonzola bread like my favorite steak house has on its menu. I love bread more than freedom. To put it simply: I'm screwed.

I know exactly what I SHOULD eat to be a healthier person. I should restrict my intake of sugars- from breads, baked goods, fruit, drinks, everywhere sugar can be found. I should increase my intake of lean proteins: chicken, fish, turkey, eggs, nuts, etc. I should also season my food with something other than the chef's standby: salt and pepper. While I love pepper, I can't use it alone. And while I don't think I add an enormous amount of salt to my food, something tells me there's so much in our food already, I shouldn't add any.

I love water- and I pretty much only drink water. My other beverages include my daily morning coffee, an occasional diet coke and an occasional diet iced tea. I also drink hot tea with honey when I'm in the mood.

Sweets. Um, yeah. I am a cookie junkie. The comedian Brian Regan gets it about cookies. He says he can't believe the serving size for Fig Newton's is two cookies, because he eats them by the sleeve like he's a wood-chipper. Yep. He gets it. My mom used to eat a sleeve of Chips Ahoy watching TV. The serving size for the box as my family interprets it? Two. Share it with someone you love.

Cake and coffee. I get it when people say that sweets are not their downfall, because they love real food. Yeah, I do too. But, I'm not talking about a love for NowandLaters or Twizzlers- I'm talking about cake. Cake qualifies as real food, doesn't it?

Anyway, when I do examine my food intake and people ask me if like vegetables, I have to say Yes. My two favorite vegetable dishes are artichoke and spinach dip and carrot cake. Kidding- I love a nice salad, love steamed broccoli, and I'm a huge fan of the green bean. So where does that leave me?

Moderation is the answer, I know. It just doesn't taste as good as "seconds."

Nobody's favorite Beatle's song is Octopus's Garden

Movies have a profound effect on me. I just watched 500 days of Summer and I was blown away. The casting for the roles of Summer and Tom was dead-on, the structure of the film was different, exciting, and effective, the soundtrack was lovely; it has humor and heartache- in perfect amounts. I loved it. The 500 days are the duration of their relationship- from meeting at work to going their separate ways. They meet in an elevator while he is listening to the Smiths- they break up over pancakes in a diner. We've all done it.

I loved seeing their relationship from Tom's perspective most of the time, and then only getting to see her perspective later- as he realizes it in retrospect. She didn't believe in love when she met him- and she didn't fall in love with him. But he fell hard, and couldn't realize why it wasn't mutual. But she never said it; she never even considerfed them a couple. She was young and having fun- and she never intimated anything different.

What kills him is that she fell in love with the next guy. After hating her for a few minutes, the viewer (and TOM) realize that he did play a special role in her life: he was the one to make her think it was possible; he was the one who helped to break down the wall she had around her in the beginning. She tells him later that once she had fallen inlove, she kept thinking "Wow, Tom was right."

It's bittersweet to hear her say this to him, because the viewer wants them together. He met her while working for a card company and during their relationship he wrote a card that said, "I LOVE US" on the front. The audience agrees. We love them. The way they pretend they live in IKEA and go around saying "Honey, our sink is broken" when no water comes out in the kitchen. The way they talk about their lives sitting up on eachother's beds. The way he draws the achitecture in his imagination on her arm when he doesn't have paper. Viewers long to know: Why don't you love him?

And when life just happens and puts her in a diner reading The Picture of Dorian Gray and her future husband walks in and talks to her- we are crushed along with Tom.

For me the film honors the mystery of love and life without simplifying it or over-packaging it for the big screen. It prepares you from the start. The voice-over tells you that while it's a tale of boy-meets-girl, it is not a love story. How perfect. With allusions to the Beatles, Sid and Nancy, and The Graduate it is so much more than that. And they were open about it from the start.

(He shoulda known something was up when she said her favorite Beatle was Ringo).

Drinking Problem

Not my cat, but I love her anyway.