There Goes the Neighborhood, Ann Arbor edition

I had a long day yesterday. NB left town for the week so our morning departure was even more chaotic than usual, and coming back to work on Mondays is especially hard after being on call all weekend. I was inefficient and grumpy and not any better off for having forgotten to leave the house with my usual vat of iced coffee. I'll save for a another day the wonders of cold-drip iced coffee, and my musings about how in the world I forgot to drink it on a Monday morning. After work I decided to make my first solo trip the gym - inconveniently located all the way across town (which is a whopping 7 miles from my house, but by my new A2 standards quite remote), and then stopped at Target to by a record low FOUR ITEMS. I got on the phone with my mother on the way home (probably a bad idea for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that I failed to notice that NB's headlights don't magically come on when it's dark outside). You can imagine that I made a loud, bumbling entrance into my house, what with talking on the phone while bringing in the mail, while hauling all my stuff back inside. It was hot, so I had the front door open, and, thank goodness, the screen door latched.
I wrapped up with my mother after (in retrospect) loudly announcing to the entire street that NB would be gone all week and that I would be all alone, amenable to receiving phone calls. I got all settled with reheated pizza and the second half of the"You don't mess with the Zohan" (we checked out from the library...) when the doorbell rang. I hadn't heard anyone coming up onto the porch, but it seemed like the only person who could possibly be at the door was our nice neighbor S or her nice son T. I was dismayed to discover that it was neither S, nor T. In fact, it was a middle aged straggly-haired toothless woman, who tried to tell me a very incomprehensible story about needing help because someone was following her. She seemed very interested in seeing what was inside of my house, so while a more charitable person might have taken the time to figure out whether she was in real trouble, my priority was getting her off my porch. As she left, an idling car in front of the house reared to life and drove alongside her down the street. "Excellent," I thought, "malicious burglers are sending out their crazy meth-head decoy to case my house. Good thing I just announced to the entire world that I'm here all alone." I called NB, hoping he would talk me off my paranoid ledge. The advice about what kind of makeshift weapon I could keep under my pillow didn't do much to advance the cause, but we agreed that I would call the non-emergent police number to see if this person or at least this strategy were known entities, or, if not, if a car would come drive down the street to make sure I wasn't in mortal danger. *note: in the A2 phone book, the number for the police station comes after the diagram of the University of Michigan stadium*
Confirming that I have, in fact, moved to a small town, I didn't get a full sentence into my story when the dispatcher at the police station asked me, "Did a blond lady with a striped shirt just come to your door?" The story goes that the woman was not a panhandling meth head so much as she was an ESCAPED PATIENT FROM A MENTAL FACILITY who, mental illness notwithstanding, was, in fact, being followed. It seems the car was not driven by her accomplice, so much as by someone from her institution who was trying to keep track of her while coordinating with the police to safely collect her.
I'm really not sure what lesson to take away from this story. Any suggestions?

it's not worth it - trust me.

ok. i just don't understand those women at the gym who practically hang themselves from the rafters in the locker room, masochistically contorting their hair into the perfect, every-strand-in-place pony tail. it's true, those random strays can drive you crazy when you're trying to get away with pony-tail-instead-of-shower on one of those mornings that you just can't get your act together, but that's a totally different situation. it's the gym, ladies. it's all going to fall down and get all messy as soon as you get up on the treadmill anyway and i PROMISE, nobody cares. give yourself and your follices a break and succomb to the chaos.

getting older

since when does consumption of two reasonably sized alcoholic beverages cause me to wake up miserably hung over?

this sucks.

vocabulary

a few weeks ago i heard a story on NPR about some lexicon society's nomination for word of the year: bailout. i liked it, and also enjoyed the various runners up, like all the permuations of obama, and of course maverick.

inspired by my good blogmate's favorite pastime of keeping a little list of words said in class that she likes, i've been keeping tabs on my own favorites (reigning champ: collusion), and humbly offer up my election inspired word of the year:

jumbotron.

right where we left off...

my good blogmate and i have both found ourselves back in school this quarter, and as such we're back to making our usual snide observations about the maladaptive behavior of u of c undergrads.

i submit the following question: how can anyone think that it's a good idea to walk and read a book at the same time?

discuss.

ravinia

a word to the wise. it's just not worth going to sold out ravinia shows. even if it is robert plant and allison krauss. maybe it was the ravinia performance of the decade, but what difference does that make to you if you're sitting so far back on the lawn that you're nowhere near any of the speakers and you can't hear anything?
don't get me wrong, there's always something to be said for good food and good company... and it helps if your good blogmate brings out from reserve two bottles of last year's homemade white wine. and if she also brings an assortment of yummy cheeses. and if there is the promise that next time there will be home s'mores maker (read: tabletop fire).
but you'll still have to be one of the morons with a folding chair sardined into the metra train, inhale the clouds of desperate tobacco smoke emitted by hundreds of post-sardined, stressed out zeppelin fans, witness really awkward middle-aged festival freak-outs ("i just can't handle all these folding chairs touching me!"), get through the will-call bottle neck, and fight your way home through the one open lane of the inbound Edens.
not that i didn't have a lovely time... but can someone find me a less popular band next time?

addendum:

things i learned at the robert plant show: if you think you're alone in not actually being a zeppelin fan so much as you remember chasing a boy who loved zeppelin when you were in high school, you're wrong. apparently we all went through that.

and

things i learned after the robert plant show: even if your boyfriend was one of those boys in high school, and has more zeppelin knowledge than anyone else around the picnic blanket, don't assume that his assumptions are correct just because they sound plausible. so it's a nice story that robert plant used to sing the high part of "battle of evermore " but handed it off to allison krauss in his scratchy-voiced old age, but that's not actually what happened. robert plant never sang the high part.

you won't know unless you try

there aren't very many foods that i'm afraid of. for the most part, my experience has been that if you can get over the fear and dig in you'll be pleasantly surprised... or at least not totally disgusted. there are obvious exceptions, most of them in the organ meat family.

then there are the foods that you can't bring yourself to enjoy, even if everyone else can. in my case, these almost all fall into the stinky cheese variety. as it turns out, this impairment is a bit crippling socially. if you don't eat goat, blue, or feta cheese some menus can be pretty limited. plus everyone assumes that everyone else loves goat, blue, or feta cheese and as such tends to incorporate one of them into foods that i otherwise love as some kind of special treat. i've tried, i really have. it's not that want to turn down the delicious looking pork chop or salad. but i can't do it. at least my friends all know me well enough to anticipate my unpopular hangup.

aside from smelly cheese and a few other things i'm willing to try almost anything, especially if it's dessert. so imagine my excitement when nb's brother mailed him a bottle of what looked like some caramel version of hershey's syrup along with a yummy sounding recipe that involved roasted plaintains and nuts, all to be topped with this new discovery.

for the last few weeks we've been tearing through a few pints a week of haagen dazs dulce de leche frozen yogurt (for those of you who don't know, it's low enough in fat and calories that you can eat half the container in a sitting without hating yourself that much and it's quite tasty - i can only imagine what the full fat version tastes like). it seemed to us like cajeta would be right up our alley.

maybe anybody who is anybody knows that cajeta is basically caramelized goat milk and sugar. i had never heard of it before, and was a little surprised about the goat milk part, but once i examined the bottle and figured that if it was marketed in the united states by hershey's it was probably pasteurized i felt better about it. plus, if nb's brother loved the stuff so much that he had bothered to mail it across the country to us it was probably pretty good.

the dessert was beautiful. pretty roasted plantains with bits of walnuts sprinkled on top, capped off with pretty swirls of gooey, delicious looking caramel stuff. i dove in without restraint, uber pleased nb for presenting me with something so marvelous. but the warm sweetness was almost instantly washed away by the distinct vomity flavor that makes me hate all those stinky cheeses so very much.

i tried. i really did. it was so pretty and promisingly exotic... but so very disgusting. even with a good forkful of plantains and walnuts i couldn't get around the barfy back flavor. nb managed to put down a good bit of it, but in the end conceded that it was at very least a bit off-putting.

the experience wasn't a total loss. we laughed about it for a good long time, and, with the help of wikipedia i've since learned some rather amusing things about cajeta. i won't repeat them here. you'll have to see for yourself.