Tripping the light fantastic 8 February 2010

Um, actually, therein lies the problem.  We are certainly not tripping the light fantastic.

Our wonderful, super bright, lovely, illuminating, ancient (and no longer sold) halogen floor lamp has finally shit the bed.  Oh, sure, Kurt could jerry-rig a fix, as he’s been doing for at least the last two years, but I’m starting to be concerned about fire with this lamp.  When it started browning out last night after the Super Bowl (what a fabulous game, eh???), Kurt informed me that it was because it had suffered a charlie fire.

Hmph.

We are not among the idiots that leave flammable and inflammable (I love that those two words mean the same thing) things near the halogen, which explains why we’ve managed not to burn our house down, though this lamp has seen four residences of Kurt’s over the last fifteen years or so.  There’s never been any draperies or soft furniture nearby.  As a result, it has given us years and years and years of trusty service.

Oh, we’ve tried to replace the darn thing.  I, being the worry-wart that I am, am fully aware of why these things are never sold.  They get super, super hot, and are therefore a fire hazard.  But because they get super, super hot, they also give off this wonderful bright light.

Kurt and I are not moles.  We love lots and lots of light when it’s dark outside.  This is why Kurt installed a down light above my work station in the kitchen, and why I almost always also have the light on above the sink.  I want to see what I am doing, darn it!  I go over to my friend M’s house, and though she has the exact same house I do (same layout and everything), her kitchen is dark and depressing because she doesn’t have that extra down light.

Right now my living room is lit solely by two table lamps on either side of the room, and each features a 100w lightbulb.  Actually we have the squirrelly lightbulbs installed, so I’m guessing it’s more like 23w, but their output is rated to 100w.  I feel nearly blind in here.  It’s so dark!  It’s almost depressing.  Gah!

I guess I got used to having such bright light because I would stitch while we watched tv at night.  You can’t stitch in dim lighting and hope to keep your eyesight.  I don’t like watching tv in the dark, and I certainly do not like using my laptop without enough ambient lighting.  It hurts my eyes.

So after dinner tonight, which was a delicious modified rendition of Chicken Under a Brick, we headed off to the Christmas Tree Shoppes to see what was to be had.  I love the  Christmas Tree Shoppes.  My two table lamps came from there, as did my little coat storage rack with a storage bench underneath, plus countless little decorating touches.  The Christmas Tree Shoppes are sort of like a Big Lots, but a tiny bit nicer, and regulated to home decor with some weird food items thrown in.  It’s a great place to decorate on the cheap.

We knew halogen lamps were out of the question, unfortunately.  They haven’t sold them in the United States in years.  So I found this lovely glass-topped floor lamp for a mere $25.  I grabbed the box underneath the lamp, trolled the store for other unnecessary items, and checked out.  Then I ran by Walmart to grab a three-way squirrelly lightbulb.

It wasn’t till I got home that I started reading the box.  What was this “silver” they spoke of?  The floor model I saw had no silver.  It was black with an upturned glass shade.  But since the box also mentioned “glass,” I continued to open it.

The light  in the box did not look anything like the picture on the box.  And it looked not one whit like the light I thought we had bought!

Fortunately, I have a lovely husband who offered to go back to the Christmas Tree Shoppes to return it for me.  He couldn’t find the light we’d picked out, but the store employees offered to sell him the floor model — with a 20% discount!  He had to fix the darn light before they gave him the discount; apparently the employees had put it together wrong.

So now I’m here in my living room, with it feeling somewhat less cave-like, though it is quite a change to go from a 300w halogen bulb to a 150w-rated squirrelly bulb. At least now I won’t have to worry about the house suffering a major conflagration because of the halogen lightbulb spontaneously exploding into a ball of fire.

See??  I always find the silver lining.

The height of ridiculosity 5 February 2010

Can you guess what I got in the mail today??  I bet you cannot!  It was a package from my dear friend Beanie!  Inside were all sorts of goodies — toys for the kids, photography books for me, and treats for the whole family.  She made some really yummy candy, a chocolate-covered confection of some kind, plus caramel corn.  I appreciate the caramel corn so much because generally it has peanuts in it — and Beanie remembered that we can’t have peanuts.  It’s been so long since I’ve had caramel corn.  Yum yum yum.

Thanks, Beanie!  You’re the best.

Over on my Flickr forum, we’ve been discussing “weird shit you sometimes think.”  Ha.  Here’s my problem — I have a very oddly wired brain, so the weird shit I sometimes think is usually quite weird.  Here are some examples.

Sometimes I think Kurt is dead.  True story.  It only happens when we’re laying in bed, when he’s fallen asleep and I’m still reading.  He’s a very quiet sleeper, rarely snoring unless he’s sick or on his back for some reason.  Sometimes his breathing becomes so shallow that I can’t hear it anymore, so I have to touch him to make sure his chest is still rising and falling.  I guess it’s about once a week that I think Kurt’s dead, my penalty for having a husband who doesn’t snore.

One time I thought the dog was dead.  This was back in Virginia when we were first married.  I woke up in the middle of the night and saw the dog’s tail puddled between his rear legs.  I’d always read that a person’s bowels release when they die, so to my sleep-fogged brain I thought that the dog had died and poo’ed in the bed.  I shook Kurt awake with a great deal of trepidation and whispered, “Kurt!  I think the dog is dead!”

I’ve never seen him leave the bed more quickly.  He pretty much just levitated straight up and landed on the other side of the room, snapping on the light all in one motion.  The dog raised his head and blinked sleepily at us, and that’s when I realized that what I thought was poo was just his tail.

Oops.

This isn’t something new.  I’ve been having these weird thoughts my whole life.  When I was in the 5th grade, my father watched Ken Burns’s documentary on the Civil War.  All the photos of dead soldiers, both Union and Confederate, really affected me.  It was my job to take the garbage bin to the curb every week, which required me to drag it from the backyard along the side of the house that had no lights.  For some reason, I got it into my head that our house was built on a Confederate graveyard, and the dead soldiers would reach up with their skeletal hands to grab my ankles.  They were angry, you see, because I was a native Virginian but living in northern Illinois at the time.  That just proves how ridiculous that thought was, since there were no Civil War battles fought in Illinois.

It didn’t help that my parents dragged me to every Civil War battlefield in the Virginia and Maryland area.  Antietam, Bull Run, Fredericksburg — if it was near our home in northern Virginia, we went to see it.  I’m sort of amazed we never got to Gettysburg, except that I think it would have required a hotel stay.  My father isn’t fond of paying for accommodation; we never went anywhere unless we had a friend or a family member we could stay with.  We also never went anywhere unless we could drive there, which explains why my father drove the family from Nebraska to Florida to see my sister graduate boot camp, and then again within six months to see her married there.  I have never been on a plane with my parents; any time I flew as a kid, which was frequently to allow me to visit with my biological mother several times a year, I flew by myself.

I guess it’s mind-boggling nowadays to think of a six- or ten-year-old kid flying by herself, but it was a different world then.  I started walking to school by myself when I was four, and I can’t even fathom letting Grace walk to the local school by herself from here, though it’s not much farther than my walk when I was younger than she is now.

It’s amazing, isn’t it, how quickly things change sometimes.

Every time I try so hard 4 February 2010

I am so hyped up on caffeine right now.  I had three cups of coffee this morning, followed up with a specialty drink at the coffee shop, and then a cup of lapsang souchong tea.  I love that stuff; it smells So Good.  I had some for the first time at one of the tea rooms in Newport a few weeks ago.  It tasted like drinking a campfire, but in a totally good way.  I didn’t even add sugar, and I usually have to add the tiniest bit to make it more palatable.  So when I stopped in at the tea shop today, I had to get my own lapsang souchong.  It didn’t taste as strongly of campfire, though it certainly smelled that way.  I’m going to steep it for longer next time.

The specialty drink I got at the tea & coffee shop today??  SO GOOD.  Apparently they have this beverage called “caffeine addict,” which seems to be a cold-brewed coffee.  So they took that beverage and mixed it with milk and spicy hot chocolate.  The drink is called 3rd Degree Burn, with good reason!  It’s super spicy, but oh so good.  It’s my new favorite drink.

Considering the fact that I normally have just two to three cups of coffee a day, I’m really wired at the moment.  I feel like I can run a marathon, but at the same time I’m getting a wee bit of a headache.  I foresee copious quantities of water in my future.

At the moment I’ve got dinner in hand.  I’m making salmon croquettes, a new recipe because I’m kind of tired of our normal Cajun salmon cakes.  They’re really delicious, if the flavor of them raw is anything to go by.  I made them up already because the reviews mentioned that sometimes they fall apart as you cook them, and chilling them usually solves that problem.  They didn’t have any problem coming together, so I’m sort of surprised that others were finding that they fell apart.  Also on the menu is roasted zucchini (Mary Ellen’s favorite — no lie!), and parsley potatoes.  I don’t know what it is, but parsley potatoes are just delicious.  All I do is boil up diced potatoes, and when they’re soft, I toss them with butter and fresh parsley.  Super easy, yet super delicious.  It’s one of my comfort food items.  My real mom used to make parsley potatoes quite frequently, and every time I smell fresh parsley, that’s the first thing that comes to mind.

I sort of want to substitute cilantro one time to see if that would be just as delicious.  But another part of me doesn’t want to fix something that ain’t broke.

Hmmm.  Decisions, decisions.

Why is cilantro such a polarizing ingredient?!  Did you know there is a Facebook group devoted to the abhorrence of cilantro?  Me, I’m on the other end of the spectrum.  You can never have too much cilantro in my world, but I know so many people that cannot even stand the slightest taste of it.  It just tastes so fresh and green to me.

I can’t think of anything else that inspires such a love/hate relationship.  I know people who don’t eat meat, but I have yet to meet someone who loves meat the way cilantro fans love cilantro.  I know folks who don’t eat veggies, but I haven’t met someone who loves veggies.  You know?

Speaking of veggies, I don’t get the people who say they don’t like vegetables.  How can you say that?  I understand if you don’t like a particular vegetable, but how do you lump all veggies together when they taste so different?  A carrot tastes nothing like a potato, which tastes nothing like cabbage.  Heck, cauliflower and broccoli don’t even taste the same.  Green beans and peas are nothing like turnips or beets.  I haven’t really met a vegetable I don’t like, though I don’t really like to eat raw broccoli.  But steamed just this side of raw with a wee bit of butter and some seasoning — now that’s yummy!  Carrots I can do either steamed or raw.  Parsnips are delicious roasted or even just pan-sauteed and steamed with carrots, then dressed with a wee bit of sugar and butter.  Zucchini is amazing when it’s roasted and browned at high heat in the oven.  Yummm.

Look, I don’t like lamb.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t like meat!  (Sorry, Poolie.)  I do like meat; there are just some kinds of meat, some methods of preparing it, that I don’t care for.  So I stick to what I do like.  This means I only eat lamb when it’s part of a gyro, less the raw onions.  Nom.

Then again, I’m the non-pickiest person you’ll ever meet when it comes to food.  My dad likes to say he’s never met a food he doesn’t like, and I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.