Cerebrate Good Times

I don't know if I would categorize myself as a  great  cook, but as the primary meal prepper for our family for 15 years I feel reasonably confident in my abilities. But there are some corners I cut. So here are my kitchen confessions. I often use regular vegetable oil instead of olive oil. I use paper towels for pretty much everything, including plates sometimes. I haven't purchased ground beef in... 8 or 9 years? We exclusively use ground turkey. It started as a cost-savings thing, but now we just like it and I feel it's healthier. My chicken parmesan recipe is super simple. I just bread it with a mixture of bread crumbs and parmesan. I don't even pound the chicken flat. I use Prego spaghetti sauce, but I add shredded cheddar and ground turkey. And parmesan, of course. It's really good. One of my favorite lunches is just plain spaghetti noodles with butter and parmesan. That's three parmesan items in a row. But can you ever really have enough par...

Full disclosure: I stole that title from an episode of Futurama. We've had a teenager now for about four months. That still feels surreal to me. In some ways it's what I expected, and in others it's not. Samuel is the same good person he has always been. He cares deeply about things, has a keen sense of justice, and makes intelligent observations about the world around him. But it does seem like puberty hit hime like a truck. He's already 5' 6", which I think is about 6 inches taller than I was at his age. He's struggling with terrible acne, as both his parents did, and we're in the process of getting him the industrial-grade meds to deal with it. His biggest challenge right now is that he takes FOREVER to do ANYTHING. When I was his age I was going like a maniac. I was still smart enough to get my homework done without too much work, or I at least did a half-hearted job at everything. But I got it done. Every night he seems to take hours to even ...

I love discovering new facets of my kids' personalities. That recently happened with Allison. She enjoys writing notes for people, and recently Katie's brother had sent the kids a bunch of Hot Wheels cars. So when she asked Katie to mail a letter she had written to him, it didn't seem that unusual. The odd thing was that she asked us not to read it. Naturally, Katie read it. It was a note telling her (single) uncle how much he has in common with her teacher, suggesting he should take her on a date. We decided to go ahead and let her mail the letter, although we don't think the match would work for a number of reasons. The next day Allison's teacher texted Katie a photo of a hand-written note she had received from Allison with a similar message. This is pretty adorable. Allison can be incredibly perceptive and wants everyone to be happy (unless it involves sharing her toys with Clara sometimes). She is focused on wanting to be a mom someday, and also currently ...

The other night I woke up around 1:30 with chest pain. I was mostly annoyed that it was keeping me from sleeping, and eventually I got up to take some ibuprofen. I kept tossing and turning, however, and a couple hours later when James woke up and came in I decided I better take it more seriously. I ended up going to the emergency room, which (as Brian Regan pointed out) is a nice, relaxing drive. Someone else was checking in right in front of me with chest pain, so I guess it's all the rage right now. I went back to the triage room and they got me hooked up to an EKG machine right away. It was normal. They took some blood to check for the marker the heart releases when it's distressed. That was normal. They took a chest X-ray, which was also normal. They repeated the EKG and blood tests a couple hours later, and they were normal again. After talking with me for a while, the doctor decided to have me get a CT scan to eliminate a problem with the aorta. That came back clean as ...

I normally eschew this kind of post because they don't seem very original, but it's been on my mind and it's my blog and I'll review a movie if I want to. First, check out the trailer  for Anna and the Apocalypse   here . You guys, it's a British Christmas zombie high school musical. Of course I had to see this. I was waiting for it for months. Now, I've mentioned before  more that once that musicals  aren't really my thing. And, oddly, this is a combination of things I'm not that excited about. Musicals, specifically of the Glee or High School Musical variety, are very much not meant for me. And I'm pretty done with zombie stuff. And while some Christmas movies are awesome I've never particularly gravitated toward them as a whole. So I don't know why, but I wanted to see this because the combination of genres was so weird. And it was fantastic. The music was really catchy, it made me actually care about the characters, and it was ...

People are stupid. Everyone knows that. But here's the thing. We're all people. We all try to deny it and think we're the exception, but we all do dumb things. How many times have you criticized a driver for something that you did five minutes earlier? "Well, yeah. But I was in a hurry ! It's totally different!" "You don't know that we had two different Roosevelts as president? Your so stupid! What's that? It's 'you're'? Whatever." I know I've talked about this before, but it's good to periodically remind myself that we all have holes in our knowledge that would seem silly to others. So we should try to give others the benefit of the doubt.

This was a really strange one. Katie had been out running some errands or something and met this kid in his 20s who asked her out on a date. She had decided to accept, and told me about it. I was really upset about it, of course. But I didn't try to stop her because 1) I decided it was a mid-life crisis thing and would boost her self-esteem, and 2) I knew she would realize I'm way better for her than anyone else could ever be. So this kid shows up to my house (which was some really weird building in the dream). He had long hair. And he was in pretty good shape but was 6 inches shorter than me. There were a couple other people there I can't quite identify, but it seems like they were friends of ours. So he was introducing himself, and asked me if I was Katie's brother. I said, "No, I'm her HUSBAND." He was kind of taken aback by that, so I guess she hadn't mentioned being married. But they went out anyway. He picked her up in some fancy car/plane hybr...