Second Blooming

RTT: Birthday, Corned Beef and Graffiti

Oh hello there! Yes, I DID have a happy birthday, thank you very much for asking. It was a lovely, lazy day. Jimmy made me breakfast in bed...

 

He needs a little work on his plating technique, but it was tasty. And yes, I broke the old "never eat anything bigger than your head" rule.

...then he set up a spot for me in the living room - complete with roses and a fire in the fireplace. Jimmy does good birthday.

 

View from my spot.

What did I do in my little spot? Well, as I may have mentioned before (mmm...possibly a number of times), I have given up my video games for Lent. HOWEVER, as every good little Catholic child who was unfortunate enough to be born during the Lenten season knows, it is absolutely fine and dandy for you cheat on your vow on your birthday. That's what my Mama taught me anyway. I'm not sure if this is actually written somewhere in Catholic dogma, but I choose to believe it is correct. So...I played me some games. Hehe.

 

In order to share my day more efficient, I have created for you a pie chart, a la Becky...

 

How I spent my birthday...

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How was everybody's St. Patrick's day? I made the best damned Corned Beef and Cabbage that I have ever made. It was like butter, I tell you, like BUTTER. I just mixed up a bunch of recipes I found on the internet and I am gonna tell you the recipe because I'm afraid that if I don't write it down here, I won't remember it next year! Also, I'm pretty sure that one reason it was so tasty was because of that homemade Sweet & Hot Honey Mustard I made for Christmas gifts. So check that out too. And then stow this recipe away for next St. Paddy's.

Corned Beef and Cabbage

2 - 2 1/2 lbs. corned beef

little packet that comes in the corned beef package

1 large onion, sliced into wedges

10 cups water (I was gonna pour in a bottle of beer, but decided tlo drink it instead)

10 baby potatoes (halved)

3 carrots (peeled and cut into 1 inch pieces)

1 small cabbage, sliced into thick wedges

Remove the corned beef from it's wrapping, and rinse it well in a colander. Place in a large Dutch oven with a lid. Arrange onions around the beef, then sprinkle the top with the package of seasoning. Pour water all around it. Cover, place on top of the stove and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for 2 1/2 hours.

Remove lid and add the potatoes and carrots. Simmer for 15 minutes more, then add cabbage and simmer for yet another 15 minutes.

Slice across the grain, and serve with au jus and vegies plus some of that good mustard.

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Jude and I went and saw Oz the Great and Powerful the other day.

I was pretty disappointed. I don't know what I expected. I mean it wasn't as bad as the dreaded Space Chimps (the thought of which still makes all the muscles in my neck convulse) but I wasn't impressed. I mean, the special effects were pretty outrageous, but seriously, I am SO BLOODY TIRED OF 3D!! It just gives me a stinking headache! Hate it! James Franco was horribly miscast. He's very cute and charming and all that, but he just couldn't wrap his mouth around the dialogue. It was sort of embarrassing. And Mila Kunis was so terrible it was startling. At one point I actually said OUT LOUD "She's just horrible!" and people turned around and looked at me and nodded. Michelle Williams and Rachel Weisz were pretty good though, they both had the chops to pull off the style of the piece. But it all just seemed like a kind of sacrilege. They should have just left The Wizard of Oz alone.

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These cracked me up - 15 Signs Improved By Hilarious Graffitti. My faves...

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And I LOVE this! Detailed Floor Plans Reveal Apartment Layouts of Fictional New York Characters. This artist has accurately and artfully rendered floor plans for tv sets...

 

No way she could have afforded that!

She should have drawn in the cereal boxes.

 

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That's all the random for today! Go see Stacy!

Spin Survey

In an attempt to better serve you as your Spin Cycle hostess, I have created a SURVEY! Don't you just love surveys? No? Oh come on, who doesn't love a good survey?

No, don't go away! Believe me, your opinion matters to me. I value your help! Really.

Just click the link below, and it will take you to a Survey Monkey survey. It is anonymous, and will only take you a minute. Really.

I'd love if all of you could take the survey, whether you are a reader/blogger or a reader w/o a blog. Whether you are a regular Spin Cycle participant or not. In fact, participation from non-spinners is even more helpful to me. Really.

I welcome any and all input - good, bad or indifferent. Please be brutally honest. It won't hurt my feelings. Well...it might hurt my feelings, but I can take it. I'm an actor, I have a thick skin. Really.

Thank you for your participation! Please, PLEASE participate! Help me!

Click here to take survey

 

RTT: Joker, Elves and Elvis

 

Looky, looky, looky! I figured out how to change my banner to that new Christmasy poinsettia picture up there! I never change my banner pic, so this is rather a big deal for me. Clearly, I'm in the Christmas spirit. Last night, we all cuddled up, drank hot chocolate and watched The Polar Express. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

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The Most Complex Venn Diagram Ever Created to Summarize a Steve Miller Song:

(Tangential comment: Willie Nelson is spelled wrong. This bothers me. Bill Hicks was best friends with one of my college boyfriends. Just saying.)

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Yesterday I went to Target to do a little pre-Christmas stocking stuffer shopping. As I was pushing around my little cart, I kept crossing paths with a woman and her cute little daughter. The woman, who was clearly, because of her clothes, an Orthodox Jew, was doing her best to be patient with her little girl, who was about 4, and was gaily singing at the top of her lungs the entire time. What song was the little girl singing? Silent Night. Poor woman.

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I'm seriously thinking of having Santa give Jude one of these guys...

 

It's an Elf Magic Boy. Check out the link. They come with a whole story of how to take care of your Elf, how to bring him to life with the enclosed Magic North Pole Snow, and a little bag that I guess you're supposed to put little presents in every night. Like a big, expensive, gimmicky Advent calendar. But still...it's pretty cute. I keep seeing these Elf on the Shelf things...

 

 

Which are also pretty cute. But I fear...Jude is already 8. How much longer is Santa gonna be happening? Yesterday, one of the nastier little boys at school told him that there was no Santa, that it was just the parents sneaking around. Jude told me he thought this was ridiculous, because why would Daddy and I sneak out on Christmas Eve after cooking that giant dinner to buy presents? I love his logic. I guess, if he's smart, he'll milk it for a few more years, even if he is no longer a believer. But he's such a painfully earnest child. He may not be able to handle the deceit. And it seems like the Elf Magic Boy would remain fun even after belief has stopped, but the Elf on the Shelf would not. What do y'all think?

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And speaking of elves, I just remembered a true story I heard years ago, which I always loved. My friend, Kaaren, had some friends, a couple who were both musicians, who had a little boy, probably 5 or 6 at the time. The dad, being a kind of hipster musician type, constantly schooled the little boy in rock and roll - the kid knew his rock history. On Christmas morning, the little boy opened all his presents, and became particularly taken with a present which his mother had labeled "From the Elves".  I can't remember what the present was, but the boy carried it around with him everywhere - just really loved it. Several days later, the little boy casually told his dad "Santa can talk to people in heaven, you know." "He can? How do you know that?" his dad asked. "Well, how else would he have known what Elvis wanted me to have for Christmas?" Yes, the boy had misread "Elves" and was certain that The King himself had sent him a Christmas gift from beyond the grave.

 

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So in honor of that little boy, I will start my annual random Christmas carol posting with a little something from Mr. Elvis Presley. Definitely the sexiest Christmas song I know...

 

 

 

Alright everyone, sleigh ride over to Stacy's for more randomness.

Camp Mama 2011 Week Three: Camping Lite

We've camped!

12 moms, 28 children. 2 nights.

I really love camping with these women. You know I love camping with my Cub Scout dads too, but there's something relaxing and easy about camping with a group of women. Everyone looks after each others children. Everyone takes care of each other. It's sort of a Sister Wife thing.

And this was really, REALLY a particularly laid back trip. As the only mom there with only one kid, I had a particularly easy load. We got there, pitched our tent, arranged our stuff and...I pulled out my 1 gallon Coleman jug of margaritas...

 
Yes, much time was spent sitting around the campfire with an adult beverage in hand. The kids ran wild like kids should do when camping, scampering on the rocks in the creek and catching tadpoles, while we moms sat around and enjoyed ourselves. Not a bad way to spend a couple of days.

It was all so easy. We had divvied up the meals, so all I really had to do was warm up the taco meat I'd precooked for tacos one night, and flip pancakes one morning. That's about it.

The most brilliant thing about this campground we went to is that it's attached to a small water park- just a lazy river and this giant water thingy...

 

...but enough to keep those kids happy and occupied.

Yes, I know, it's kind of a wimpy way to camp. Maybe cheating a little. Camping lite. But it allowed me to just sit there in a my swimsuit in a lounge chair for two days straight. Amazing.

There's really very little to report because the trip was so laid back. So I will attempt to sum it up with a pie chart...

 

 

Well that just about sums it up. Oh, and Jude had fun too. Did I forget to mention that? Silly me.

 

Invasion of the In-laws Part I: The Invasion

The Invasion of the In-laws is over! And it was rather successful, I must say. I am slowly recovering.

In order to share the experience with you all, I am providing this handy pie chart...

 As you see, much time was spent on food. And on worrying. Not MY worrying. THEIR worrying. They worry. And fret. And second-guess. Much stress is caused by this worrying. And much medicinal alcohol is consumed due to worrying. Oh, and "the mouse" is...Disneyland. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Since this was such a large occasion, and the family is such a wealth of material, I will be sharing the experience in parts. Please indulge me.

Part 1: The Invasion -

They all arrived on Thursday.

My BIL, Tony, and SIL, the amazing Niki, got here in the morning and rented a car.  Tony, by the way, doesn't understand why Niki is "the amazing Niki" and he's just plain Tony. I told him it's because she is part of this entire crazy family by choice, and puts up with them up close, while I have a 2443.79 mile buffer. The old ones came in about 4:00, and Jimmy picked them up at the airport.

It was then that the worrying about food began. Where should we eat? What should we eat? Who wants to eat? Who needs to eat? Will they eat that? Did you eat? Did he eat? He didn't eat. Did you eat? When are we gonna eat?

While Jimmy took the old ones to our house, Tony took Jude to baseball practice, and Niki and I went to the grocery store, because it had been decided that we would "just get some cold cuts". While I had prepared by filling our home with much, much, much food, I had failed in purchasing an adequate amount of cold cuts. The in-laws are cold cuts people. Lots of cold cuts. I'm afraid that I'm not much of a cold cuts person, my people pretty much believed that cold cuts were to be eaten exclusively on picnics. But I've adapted to the cold cut thing, and Niki and I loaded up on meats and cheeses and breads and store-bought potato salad. Mama was rolling in her grave, never having bought store-bought potato salad in her life - she made a mean potato salad.

We also stocked up on foods to be kept in the hotel. Because God forbid there was a moment in the day when food wasn't available. Water, seltzer (these people love their seltzer), cereal, yogurt, cheeses, crackers, orange juice, chocolate. Everyone in the family is a chocoholic, but no one admits it. Almost everyone keeps a secret stash of chocolate to nibble on through the day. I will name no names. Mommy.

I realize that all this food talk makes it sounds like the family eats too much, which isn't true at all. They really aren't overeaters, in fact Mommy and Aunt Grace eat very little (well, except for the chocolate thing). They're nibblers. I think they just need to always be prepared for every possible need that anyone might have. It's sort of preemptive worrying. And it's a pretty damned high-maintainance group.

Everybody seemed okay with the hotel. I'm afraid it wasn't anything special, but it must have been clean enough, because Mommy didn't sent me to buy more Lysol or anything. And honestly, they spent very little time there.

On Friday, Aunt Grace stayed home with me to cook/prepare for the First Communion party on Saturday, and the others went out to eat. Grace always wants to help. When she first started coming to visit us, I never let her, I figured it was her vacation, and the idea of a houseguest doing housework was against my upbringing. But I have come to understand that work and chores actually make Aunt Grace happy. She likes to be useful. So I've started saving little tasks for her, and I must say, it's a huge help. I set up the ironing board for her in front of the tv so she could watch her stock market news on CNBC, and let her do all the ironing. She's an excellent and enthusiastic ironer. She particularly enjoyed ironing Jude's little white dress shirt for his First Communion, which is really very dear. She also polished all the silver and swept the porch.

Everybody else went to eat at a little cafe in the Hollywood Hills, near where we used to live before we bought our house. Which is nowhere near where we live now. But they had been there before back when we used to live in the old place, and as I mentioned before, Pop doesn't like to go anywhere he hasn't already been. So despite the fact that there are about 2000 cafes in the City of Los Angeles that are closer to the hotel, they chose to go to this one. While there, Mommy went a little crazy, and ate a plate of silver dollar pancakes AND drank an entire huge egg cream. Mommy l0ves an old-fashioned egg cream. Unfortunately, the old-fashioned egg cream didn't love her, and she spent the rest of the day in the bathroom at the hotel. I will say no more. Sigh...

Jimmy then took them all down to The Actor's Studio, which was apparently pretty exciting. They got to meet Martin Landau and Mark Rydell, who are the artistic directors. And Niki said she got kissed on both cheeks by an exotic Italian actor. Grace and I were still at home ironing and cooking, respectively.

Then that night, we all went out to eat AGAIN (well, all of us but the poor ailing Mommy). Remember the many concerns involving picking a restaurant which I described HERE?   Well, Osteria Mamma turned out to be a good choice, and I think Jimmy's palm greasing didn't hurt. We got a nice table, and lots of attention. When we got there, Jude immediately asked to see Mamma, who is the owner/chef, and is in fact the owner/manager's mamma. Mamma came out right away to see Jude and meet the family, and they all talked to each other in Italian, which was pretty cool. It's sad that Mommy didn't get to meet Mamma, especially since she'd been "dreaming about" Mamma's pasta, and that's why we went there in the first place.

Based on the farewell we got as we left the place, I'm pretty sure that Pop did his over-tipping thing. We practically got a standing ovation from the waitstaff.

Did I mention how happy Jude was to have his family with him? He was so happy. Absolutely over-the-moon happy. He truly adores then. And honestly...so do I. So don't give too much credence to my complaining.

Coming up on Second Blooming...

Invasion of the In-laws Part II: The Communion

Cold

I have a cold.

A stupid, stinkin' cold. How did that happen?

I had a cold yesterday too, but chose to ignore it. I had two auditions that I had to focus on, so I doped myself up with DayQuil (NyQuil's red-headed stepchild) and soldiered on.

This morning I dutifully woke up when the alarm went off, dragged the child out of bed, fed the child breakfast, made the child's lunch and drove the child to school.

It was during my drive home from the school, wheezing and sniffling, that I realized I had no business being out of bed at all, and that my lazy-ass husband should have woken up and helped me out. And  then that I realized that if I had actually woken my lazy-ass husband up and ASKED him to take the kid to school he would have, so I really only had my martyr-like-my-mother self to blame.

So today I allowed myself to stay in bed until Jude needed picking up from school. Which seemed very decadent, until I realized that staying home in bed is really terribly boring. Long ago, in my pre-motherhood days, I used to lollygag in bed all day all the time, and it seemed so restful. What on earth was I doing all that time?

In honor of the fact that Becky from Suburban Matron has arrived in Los Angeles and I'll actually get to hang out with her on Saturday (aren't you jealous?), I will express my sick day activities to you in a pie chart.

This is what I did...