Tag: Herself

On (and off) the job

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Snowpocalypse, the sequel.

Never tease the Snow Gods. They will take a frosty dump on you from a considerable height.

True, it wasn’t much of a dump; just a few heavy, wet inches. Still, during round one on Thursday the roads got so slick that Herself refused to take me back down to Reincarnation to collect the Fearsome Furster after its semiannual pulse check. And even I could see the wisdom in not tackling the trip on two wheels, especially after I nearly faceplanted on an icy spot while shoveling our ski jump of a driveway.

Round two overnight was strictly a broomer, but the icy bits remained, and I checked my footing as I swept this morning.

“I break a hip and she’ll put me down for sure,” I mumbled to myself. “She’s a sensible woman, albeit a bit ruthless, won’t let the Medical-Industrial Complex suck the nest egg dry rehabbing an ill-tempered ould villain who’s months away from the brain fleas even if he gets back to limping around the property, acting out all the parts in whatever noxious play he’s producing in that scabby, hairless head. Hire some 19-year-old stud-muffin to handle the shoveling and other personal services. …”

Speaking of jobs of work, I see Joe reared up on his hind legs and talked some smack, so I guess he wants to keep the job after all. Christ only knows why. He has to have enough tucked away to sweep Jill off to a white sandy beach somewhere, let the SS boyos fetch the umbrella drinks and fajitas, take the weepy calls from Hunter in gaol. No, no newspapers, thanks all the same. And keep that TV turned off.

Meanwhile, Wayne LaPerrier, that fizzy little firearms fancier, is stepping down from the NRA to spend more time with his lawyers, guns, and money, because the rest of that wonderful Warren Zevon lyric.

And I guess Doug Lamborn finally got tired of being the King of El Paso County. Surely some worthy Democrat can finally snatch that House seat from the cold, cruel clutches of the GOPee hee hee hee haw haw haw haw as fuckin’ if.

The Duck! City may have frozen over but Hell hasn’t. I just checked The Weather Channel.

Sweet Christmas

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
Aebleskiver, a.k.a. Danish pancake balls.

Happy happy joy joy to yis all, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Satanists, pagans, atheists, agnostics, the lot.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla made it a very meowy Christmas about 12:45, blasting us both out of bed with her air-raid siren of a morning voice, a symptom of advancing age and p’raps a bit of related hearing loss. “Arise and serve Me!”

No matter. We fell back to sleep, arose at a more suitable hour, and for reasons known only to Herself — “Well, I had this pan, you see. …” we broke fast with strong coffee, mandarines, and aebleskiver, some delicious little balls of sugar, flour, and fat, fried in butter on the stovetop. Miss Mia got some cream. We don’t hold grudges.

My stepgrandfather, John Jensen, was a Dane, but I don’t recall either him or Grandma Maude making aebleskiver for us when we would visit them in Sioux City. When the blood kin were otherwise occupied John would sneak me hits off his cigar and sips of beer, though. Baby steps. You gotta start ’em young if they’re gonna stick it out.

As we noshed we gave ear to the traditional holiday musical fare — “Merry Christmas from the Family,” Robert Earl Keen; “The Bells of Dublin,” The Chieftains (and friends); ”The Christians and the Pagans,” Dar Williams; “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” Tom Waits — you know, the classics.

Then we unwrapped gifts — AirPods for Herself (she spends a lot of time on the iPhone/iPad, talking to friends, family and colleagues, listening to music or podcasts, watching “SNL,” Stephen Colbert, cute animal videos, etc. — and a couple graphic novels for Your Humble Narrator, among them the complete “Bodies” by the late Si Spencer, a time-traveling whodunit that got turned into a miniseries by Netflix.

Also, an official Guinness Extra Stout T-shirt in medium, because (a) I am no longer extra stout, and (2) a man of any gravity (or its opposite, comedy) can never have too many beer-related garments.

At some point there must be time for fat-burning exercise, because Santa knows we’ve been very, very bad, if only in a strict dietary sense. Also, I want to be able to wear that shirt.

So, go thou and do likewise. Mind the aebleskiver. Also, and too, the Guinness. Though I bet they make that T-shirt in an XXXL, too. Call it an inspired guess.

Trying to cough up some laughs

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

Tea time.

Whenever I skip the second cup of strong, black coffee for a tall, steaming mug of tea with honey, you may be certain that I am unwell.

Herself picked up a bug (not The Bug) about 10 days ago, one of those raspy coughers that keeps everyone in the house awake, and come Thursday I was quietly congratulating myself for having dodged it when I began to sense a disturbance in the Force during a short trail run.

By Friday it was me hacking away like a lunger with a three-pack-a-day habit, chain-smoking Luckies through the port in my windpipe. Kane didn’t make that much racket when the baby Alien did his “Heeeeeere’s Johnny!” number at dinner on the Nostromo.

I hit the couch early on and stayed there, and when that proved exhausting I went to bed, around 7:30. And I stayed there until 7:30 this morning.

The fun part about having a bad cough is trying to find a position in which you can grab a bit of shuteye between eruptions. I usually sleep on my left side, but that was right out. So was the right side.

The only position that worked for me was flat on my back, just like Kane on the galley table.

The good news is, there was no blood on the sheets this morning and no midget Aliens chasing Miss Mia Sopaipilla around the house.

The bad news is I don’t feel up to throwing out a few half-baked zingers like “Rudy the Mook should be tossed in the sneezer until he can remember his bank balance,” or “The U.S. House of Reprehensibles resembles a legitimate legislative body in the same way that a tank-town dog pound resembles the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show,” or maybe “How is it that we still care more about Matthew Perry than anybody in Gaza?”

Denuded

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Leaf me alone.

Must be December.

God left Her leaf blower on high all day yesterday and the trees got stripped faster than an Escalade with Texas tags parked overnight at a Duck! City Motel 6. Now they look like backgrounds from “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” which was just selected for the National Film Registry.

It’s beginning to look a lot like … Dec. 14.

Overnight the rain swept in, nearly a quarter inch of it, followed by the fabled “wintry mix” and then actual snow this very dark morning. Sort of a heavenly apology to the trees for pulling their bloomers down, I suppose.

In her office Herself is sipping some vile tea that recalls the scented-candle section at a Nordstrom, staffed by a retired exotic dancer who applies her eau de parfum using a power washer.

But she can drink whisky neat for breakfast if that blows her dress up, because she makes all the money around here. Herself, not the stripper. Though a stripper would too. Don’t ask how I know.

The private sector — Herself’s little corner of it, anyway — pays a damn sight better than anything I’ve got going on, especially if we’re talking about stripping. If we had to depend on the spare change Uncle Sammy drops in my tin cup or the singles drunk bachelorettes stuffed in my G-string we’d be fighting the cat for her kibble, and not just for fun, either.

Meanwhile, it’s 9:30 in the morning, but outside it looks like 9:30 at night, and if I had the sense God gave a stripper I’d start taking off clothes and … go back to bed.

Blank Friday

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Chicken cacciatore with succotash.

Another Thanksgiving feast has come and gone (though leftovers aplenty remain) and here it is Blank Friday already and I haven’t snapped up a single solitary bargain, not one.

Herself had requested Emeril Lagasse’s chicken cacciatore for dinner, and I decided to add the traditional accompaniment, Martha Rose Shulman’s stir-fried succotash.

Butter cookies.

Somewhere along The Path for reasons unknown we got detoured into butter-cookie construction, and as a consequence I was a wee bit tardy getting started on my own preparations, which are extensive.

These dishes are not complex — the succotash needs just four minutes in the wok — but they involve more than a few ingredients, among them Emeril’s Essence, a spice mix with eight components.

The cacciatore itself has 20 more. The succotash? Eleven. Many cups and bowls for the mise en place, many, many of them.

For the cookery I needed a large Dutch oven, a pasta pot, and a wok. Knives, spatulas, spoons, graters, cutting boards, colander, oven mitts, rubber gloves, yadda yadda yadda. Clean as you go, etc. Stand back, gimme room, and so on.

A memory with fewer holes in it would have been nice, too. For some reason I had it in my head that the simmering phase of the cacciatore would last only 20 minutes, which was 40 minutes short of actuality. This put a slight hitch in my culinary gitalong and thus we were late sitting down to the actual eating, which annoyed Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who is a stickler for schedules (her own).

Didn’t matter. We’d lunched on eggs over medium and pan-fried potatoes, so we weren’t drooling and ravenous. We didn’t have two-legged guests waiting, growing surly with drink, reawakened memories of past slights, and plans for vengeance. And we didn’t have to drive home afterward.

During the final cleanup, which was extensive, we sang along with Arlo, singing loud to end war and stuff. We hope yous all did likewise. There’s a lot of it about.