the week in review: aug 10-16

a whole lot of homebody time. puttering about taking care of things that need taking care of. too much time on hold. i hate the phone! a knotted, twisty kind of ick that finally got kicked in the arse and a weekend with the mister running errands and being home. we're back in the swing of things. click here for more info on the week.

ain't no tears on me

it is safe to say that i enjoy chopping up things. fruits, vegetables, magazines...but when it comes to onions, i am not a fan. it is as if those pungent onion fumes like to take up residence in the space between my eyeballs and the lenses of my glasses. you would think that since i have no sense of smell, i could chop an onion free of tears but i swear the glasses wearing traps it all in. here's a photo tutorial for how i chop up an onion. mind you, this may be old news to you or it may have been in a famous mag or something, i wouldn't know. i came up with this about ten years ago when i got fed up with the boo-hoo-i-ness of onion chopping. here ya go: remove one end of your onion victim and make shallow vertical cuts from one end to the other.rotate your onion to the right (or left, either way just make those lines face a different direction than your knife.) and make a second batch of cuts across the surface so that your onion looks a bit like a checkerboard.hold onion in your non-cutting hand so that the flat end faces your prefered side and slice downwards.viola! happy little onion pieces for your soups and salads and no tears or mascara trails on your sweet little face!

i only cut as much onion as i am going to use. the rest is stored in the fridge in a container that has a lid. (i have lots of containers though finding a matching lid is somewhat of an adventure.) if you want larger onion bits, make fewer slices.

**recipe for the corna, basil & onion salad can be found here.

snit faced

i'm having a bad day. an alexander & the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day kinda day. a mean soup kind of day. a day where there is a snarled ball of ick ricocheting around my chest and the only thing i can do is growl and hiss and stomp. i'm not proud of it but there you go. just call me oscar.

but then i see people i lurve and i feel giggle-faced and chirpy. we eat sweets and chat and unload and chat some more. where small warm people snuggle up to me and smile and stare and glom all that wee love. wee love is a surefire solution to ick and snit and snurfle-y scowls. it sings about my head and flutters around my heart and for a moment the day just ain't so bad.

and of course it ends when i get back into the car to drive home. braking and dashing and swerving from the clueless frazzled drivers that make up a good portion of los angelinos on the road and the snit comes roaring back. i yell at myself to let it go. i attempt to charm myself into good cosmic thinking and then someone swerves into my lane chasing it all away again. so i hum and lalalalala to myself and attempt to self soothe and urge my thinking to good and happy thoughts until i see a parade of tiny, skinny women jogging along with their tots leading the line. great. along with the snit my filters are throwing mockery into the pot. once mockery is in, the stew brews up a giant bowl of self-pity and i'm a goner for the day. might as well accept it. the problem with that though is that my filters go all kablooey and instead of filtering the bad stuff out they work overtime to cram it all in, in UPPERCASE even. doom doom doom. blah blah blah.

i arrive home, to a package on the doorstep and inside i find a trio of soothing sounding teas and a letter from my aunt. a little bit of something to cross the snit of my face. tea may not keep me from wanting to move to australia, but it sure does soothe when you take the time to brew a pot. if that doesn't help, maybe serving it up in a giraffe-happy mug will.

sigh. there's always tomorrow. right?

it is best to choose

the moments you live by as allowing a bad moment to define your day is really stupid and feels quite icky. today i am anti scrumdilly. i'm just not feeling it and would rather throw myself on the floor and kick and scream myself to oblivion only to be soothed by a cookie. yeah, it's one of those days. what makes it even better is that today marks seven years since mr.a-go-go and i met. sigh. we decided to celebrate yesterday with a rootbeer float and a viewing of the perseids but somehow that didn't quite work-out. hence my stupidity in allowing the ick to define the day. here's hoping tomorrow will be better. or friday. how about a pretty picture to soothe the soul?

two more weeks in review

vacation editions:click here and here for more info on my adventures.

when on vacation...

we a-go-gos make sure to JUMP!

at mono lakein a ghost townin renowith flickr friendsnear thermal vaporsand in lassen