Sunday, April 22, 2007

Not-so-lazy Sunday

I'm usually a sloth on weekends. Lots of napping, bad cable TV, more napping, and laundry started far too late in the day. But I have been on a spring cleaning binge (helped along by my need to eBay a lot of possessions to fund grocery shopping and all that good stuff) and I'm trying to devote at least Saturday or Sunday to the effort. Yesterday I was fairly sluglike, but today I've been a tornado. Got up, colored my scary grey roots, did some writing, ran some errands, did some fabulous home cookin', and sorted out some more stuff for Salvation Army and eBay. Eventually, my apartment will be clean enough that I won't be embarrassed to have folks over.

That will be a Good Thing, as Martha Stewart would say. Of course, Martha would never allow her home to become an utter pit like I do on a pretty miserably regular basis. She would have me flogged for the state of my living room. And my bedroom would bring her to tears, poor thing. Guess it's a Good Thing Martha will never be dropping by. Bullet. Dodged.

When I went out in the gorgeous day to run a couple of errands, I was totally floored by the fact that the crabapple trees in front of my building were blooming. First time in over a decade that they'd flowered. When I first moved in here, I used to love taking a book out on the balcony and reading in relative privacy behind the one tree's large blooms, but some freak weather about eleven years ago seemed to shock the trees into a dormancy. Right now, there are deep magenta buds covering both trees, slowly opening into light pink flowers like a flower girl's bouquet. I'll try to snap a photo or two before they fade.

The primitive, superstitious side of me can't help but think of this as some good omen. That things are getting better. I'm inspired to gather some pennies together and pick up some bright pink portulacas for the balcony. I've been hooked on those funky succulents since I got some at the wedding reception of two friends a few years back. They'd used the flowering plants as centerpieces on the reception hall tables, and I ended up with several to take home afterwards. Those suckers bloomed and bloomed for ages. When I've been in the mood in the years since then, I've picked up a few for the spring & summer at a local nursery. Cheap and colorful.

And when I saw my hair reflected in the visor mirror in my car, those same three words came to mind again. Cheap. And. Colorful.

Ooooh, Nice 'n' Easy 116A, Lightest Golden Brown... what have you done to me this time? Ain't nothin' light or golden about this. More like Deep Henna Reddish Dark Brown Something. Yikes! I wonder if these guys really check their dye lots carefully. I mean, it's not a bad color - it's simply not what I was planning on. As the Sasquatch said this evening, "...It's dark... but this isn't very good light..." At least that made me laugh about it.

I took some of the random food products over to the Sasquatch for dinner, as he has been slaving away over his online MFA homework. He's too busy right now to actually sit and eat with me, so this was a "hit and fade" dinner delivery. (I'm like Takeout Taxi without the outrageous fees and the surly drivers looking for a hefty tip.) I made my traditional "chicken glop" as well as banana bread and my mom's friend Helen's guacamole. Yes, these are things that don't really go together. But I had: 1)chicken that needed to be cooked; 2)overripe bananas; and 3)overripe avocados. I have enough leftovers for a small army, which is good. At least I know what I'm having for dinner for the rest of the week.

By the way, Helen Hansen's guacamole dip kicks ass and is ultra easy to make. Helen used to have a modest cattle ranch with her husband outside of Winnemucca, Nevada. Winnemucca, interestingly, has a large population of Basque sheep herders. You can dine with the old guys in the ramshackle hotel in town, when they lay out plates of various sheep parts and big jugs of wine. It's a little like visiting Georgia or Armenia - with legal brothels.

But I digress...

Helen made her guacamole dip for Mom and a small group of us when we went to visit her many years ago. We loved it, and we've been making it ever since:

Helen Hansen's Guacamole Dip

Ingredients:
4 ripe avocados
1 standard package of cream cheese
1 small jar salsa/picante sauce (heat level - your choice)

Peel the avocados and put them in a mixing bowl. Add the cream cheese. Mix with a hand blender until smooth. Add the jar of salsa. Mix well.

Refrigerate.

Eat with chips.

Eat some more.

It's good.

And I'm tired and going to bed. Adios, muchachas!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hair color twins! No, seriously, that's the same brand and shade I've been using for ages, and I could have told you that it is neither light nor golden. LOL It is, as you've now found, more auburn than anything else, and for me, it works since that's the shade I'm going for. The good news is that if you shampoo often and don't try to preserve the color, it'll fade out to both light and golden in a coupla weeks...just in time for the gray to start peeking through. Sigh. Whatever you do, don't switch to the Gray Solution, because it isn't. It is all the original is, only more so. Good luck finding your shade!