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Cooking Cement

All of you doubtless are already aware of this, but evidently I’m not — you can’t use the “cut” and “paste” commands in real life. Yeah, I really did try to circle words I’d just written on paper in preparation for pasting them onto a different page of my notebook. Maybe I should try to take a week off from the computer…

Yesterday I left a message on Sarah’s answering machine asking if she wanted to watch the X-Files and she called back and left a message saying that her boyfriend was going to be there (he’s been living in a different state for the past few months), she was making black beans and rice and yup, she definitely wanted to hang out. I felt a bit weird about it, because I’d only ever met her boyfriend once briefly over a year ago and didn’t really know what he was like. She asked if I wanted her to come and pick me up, she thought it was going to rain and didn’t want me to be caught in it — I said that I really really didn’t mind walking in the rain but she insisted. I hate asking for rides, I hate imposing on people like that. It’s one of the things I’m most looking forward to when I have my driver’s license again, never having to ask for another ride. Anyway, I realized that if she came and picked me up she could come in and cuddle Karma and see the collage photos, so I said that okay, she could come and pick me up but she had to cuddle Karma, she laughed and said that was fine with her. (Karma was crushed when he realized Sarah wasn’t staying for the evening — he tried every flirty trick he knew to keep her from leaving and *grin* most of them worked, she was there for about ten minutes after we’d gotten our coats and keys and were going to walk out the door.)

The beans and rice dish was delicious, Sarah’s boyfriend suggested toasting coriander seeds and cumin seeds and then grinding them up, that was definitely what made it so yummy (he’s a chef in a four star restaurant — he told us about the “ten second rule”, which is that if you pick up food you dropped on the floor within ten seconds, you don’t have to throw it away, ICK) so we’ll have to try that next time we make black bean burritos. Sarah had also made key lime pie, to give to everyone who took care of her cats while she was gone. She’d doubled all of the ingredients so that she could make two pies, but forgot to double the graham crackers for the crust, so while the crust looked okay, it was like cement to cut through. That sort of thing is my experience when it comes to baking on a good day; I remember in high school I was really on about making lemon meringue pie (I’ve tried eating it a few times in the diners around here, but it’s invariably sort of frozen-and-defrosted tasting — the last time I had truly good lemon meringue pie was when I was sixteen and Kitey and I made it together). Given my cooking style, which involves replacing ingredients that I don’t have and completely forgetting two or three ingredients altogether, you can imagine what a goopy, gross disaster the pie was. I had one piece and then threw the rest away, and found out a week later that the reason Ruth had been pissed off and hateful for seven days was because she thought I was “selfish for not sharing the pie I’d made” which (Pun not intended!) really took the fucking cake. If she’s taken a second to ask me how the pie had turned out she would have found out that it was inedible.

I expected to dislike Sarah’s boyfriend; given what I’d heard about his personality from Sarah I didn’t even understand what she saw in him. Was quite pleasantly surprised to find that he was a truly nice guy, the three of us got along quite well and ended up having a great time watching the X-Files together. Sarah is as grossed out by cigarette smoke as I am, and her boyfriend smokes, so I was a little worried about spending time in a closed room, but he was super considerate and even went into another room to smoke — the smell didn’t bother me a bit, strangely, it just reminded me of Kitey. Sarah drove me home and I stayed up waiting for Todd to call, watched The Name of the Rose and either I was really tired or the movie was truly as creepy as it seemed, because I ended up all scrunched up in the living room chair with the comforter tucked in around me, feeling jumpy and nerve-wracked.

From the silliness file:

(Todd and Sage are on the phone — Todd’s called from his hotel room to say he got there and is settled in.)

Sage: So what’s the room like?
Todd: Actually it’s way nicer than the one I had last time I was here…hey. That’s weird.
Sage: What?
Todd: There’s a video game controller hooked up to the tv.
Sage: That is weird.
Todd: And speaking of weird, my rental car is a kind that I’ve never heard of before. You know how there are Ford Tempos and Volkswagon Jettas? This car’s a “Kiwi Sunrise” or something equally bizarre.
Sage: I dunno, it sounds like you went to Pluto, not Georgia…

not quite the song it used to be

scatterbrain scatterbrain scatterbrain