patience & potatoes

I don't know if all pictures are worth a thousand words, but I do have one that tells a story.

I had seen a million people pinning the heck out of this "Better than fries!" pin.

So simple, slice a potato, stick some butter in some of the slices, drizzle olive oil and slap that sucker in the oven.  Bam, delicious and easy, right?

Is it ever that simple?

No.  No it is not.

So I decide I am going to do this.  The pin I had (which I cannot find because apparently I did not repin it!) says to "stick a bamboo skewer through the potato so that you don't accidentally slice all the way through.

Yeah, I tried that.  They forgot to mention in the ingredient list that you need the Hulk because I dunno how the doddle you could shove a bamboo skewer through a RAW potato if you are all Bruce Bannering it up.

So after fighting a bamboo skewer a third of the way in I pulled it out and just cut carefully.  I deserve points for not messing this part up at all.

Then we get to the "place some butter in between every couple of slices."  Simple, right.

Well here is where my lack of patience comes into play and the picture that tells a story does the work for me.

*Ahem*  In other words ...

I was willing to TRY with potato number one.  Potato number two I was like "okay this is a bit tedious" and by three I was thinking this idea sucked.  The fourth potato was just where I gave up and I only did it because I had taken the time to slice the biotch.

Frankly, it was messy, tedious, and not even that tasty when I was done.  Between this and the whole vinegar "no 'poo" lies Pintercrack has been telling me lately I am feeling a bit disenchanted with the whole credibility of my pins.

the Moron + the Overachiever

My dog is a moron.

Cute, very loyal and great with kids, but for the purposes of this post I want to really focus on what a moron he is.

My husband is an overachiever.

He is an overachiever who likes "survival stuff" and transferred all his hemp knot knowledge from high school into paracord knots for all kinds of supposed practical stuff.  I have yet to see any of these things function in their secondary way (i.e. a bracelet that can come apart and be used as rope to repel down a mountain or something) but I am sure they would be usable in a pinch.

Just a few examples.
Seriously, we have hundreds of these.

Combine the overachieving husband and the moron dog and what do you get?  Me, praying over dog poop.

Paul Bunyan has made more paracord bracelets, key chains, zipper pulls, and knife handle cover things than I can count.  We have all sorts of colors including the natural camo looking ones and neon ones too.  *eye roll*

This one is mine.  I won't complain about this one ;)

Well a few weeks ago he made one, with like 40 feet of freaking cord in it.  Black and yellow.  It looks like a normal bracelet and everything, but if you unravel it you have some crazy long colorful rope.  Well he left it on his nightstand, which was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Cue the moron, but cute dog.  This one.

He got bored, and by the time we got home all that was left were two black clips with teeth marks in them.

So somewhere IN my dog is like 40 feet of paracord.  It is possible for it to, um, pass on its own.  So now here we are two days later and suddenly Furry McMoron is wanting to poo a lot.  But he doesn't actually poo a lot.

Here is hoping it is still small enough to pass and hasn't unraveled ... I shudder to think of 40 feet worth of cord unraveled.  He is acting fine and has another 24 hours before I resentfully drag his booty into the vet and fork over a small country's worth in vet bills for them to say "he is a moron" and take care of it.

I'm a vinegar masochist

Vinegar.  I have such a love hate relationship with the stuff.  If it could only smell more tolerable I would amend that to a "love love relationship" but no.  Instead vinegar smells like a 16 day-dead-jock-strap.  And yet, I clean my house with it.  Go figure.

A few weeks ago my husband, who is still living by the way even after this, talked me into trying some brilliant idea.  Lured by the promise of "it is cheap" and "it is green" and the promise that he found the idea on Pintercrack -- therefore lending it complete credibility! -- I agreed.

The idea, my friends, was to give up shampoo and conditioner and trade them in for baking soda and vinegar.

Oh. My. Gawd.  Yes, I was that stupid.  I took hair care advice from a dude who takes style cues from Mr. Clean.

Uh huh, bald dude told me what to do with my hair ... and I listened.  I must be some kind of masochist.

Anyway, there isn't much to blog here.  I tried it.  It was gross, as it turns out Bunyan and Pintercrack are not 100% reliable.  I tried to document it for the purposes of blogging but seriously I was so repulsed by myself that I only have one picture and I shudder to share even it.

Not a great quality, I know, but it felt like an oil spill happened on my head.  The picture really does it no justice at all.  It was such an odd combination of clean and filthy at the same time.

Proponents of this (seriously, search it on Pintercrack there are a LOT of people who swear by this) rave about how soft their hair is.  Uh huh, my hair was uber soft.  Slick even.

They call it "no 'poo" and I am not even going to touch that one with my immature sense of humor.  But here I am at the moment I decided the experiment was over and I was going to just wash my hair with REAL shampoo and conditioner.

I am sure I sounded like those old Herbal Essence commercials for that exceptionally long shower where half of a bottle of shampoo was used.

But I have to counteract this hideous and repulsive tail with a vinegar-that-works story.  Brace yourself, because this time I didn't bathe in it ... I drank it.

At this point you are either thinking "oh my gosh she is a total bad ass!" OR you are mortified that I can be this stupid and still survive.  Maybe a combo of both.  But desperate times call for desperate measures, my friends.

I had a sinus infection.  The Death Bug of 2014 had struck and slowly claimed everyone then really took me down.  It was a weekend and in my blurry desperation I searched for home remedies.  I found two, one I will share later because it was worthless to me then because it has to sit in the fridge for a bit to work.  The other was Apple Cider Vinegar.

I followed this recipe the first time and nearly hurled, which would have probably helped with the congestion temporarily but was not what I was hoping for.  The second go round I threw "healthy" to the wind and seasoned the hell out of my drink until it was tolerable-ish.  The end result is this recipe, keep in mind I am not a doctor I just play one on blogger in name only.

2 tablespoons unfiltered apple cider vinegar (don't use the crap that looks like apple juice because it won't work and you will needlessly suffer!  I used Braggs)
3/4 cup apple juice
1/4 cup (or there abouts) of water
As much cinnamon and honey as it takes to make it tolerable (I use an obscene amount)
Ice (because if it ain't cold you will never get it down)

Mix it all together and I drank it twice a day ... and seriously I felt better within 10 minutes of the first drink.  No joke, I had to see remarkable change after that first drink to even consider trying again.

Apparently ACV has tremendous health benefits, so since I can choke it down (though I may develop diabetes in the process) I have kept up the drinking to see how it goes.  I am not very good at remembering the twice a day thing, but I have pulled off once a day by making it ahead in a jug and shaking that mofo like mad when it is time to drink.    

Cuz that's a great message!

Sometimes I go against the grain.  Not in a cool, edgy way, more of a comes off as an asshole kind of thing really.  I don't mean to be, but I am.

Kid shows tend to bring out my inner asshole like nothing else.  Particularly Disney things.  Not all Disney things.  But some.  So while it will be no surprise to anyone who knows me that I am about to express disappointment in a Disney show, I was deeply surprised by the level of "duh" I think Disney expressed.  

Jake and the Neverland Pirates is a very popular show with the Beans.  I am, myself, a big Peter Pan fan and even in spite of the glaring inappropriate stuff in the original Disney film happen to have a weak spot for it.  But this episode has come up at least twice now and I am just as horrified on the second watching as I was the first.  

I will summarize the deeply engaging plot for you and provide background first.  The Pirate Princess was once turned into a gold statue by the Sea Witch but Jake and his crew --primarily Izzy in a carefully constructed girl powerish episode -- saved her.  In this episode, however, the Sea Witch is at it again so ultimately they decide they need to change her from a bad witch into a good witch.  

Simple enough, and they do just that.  

So what's the problem?  Simple.  Here is the Bad Sea Witch ....

and here she is after she has become the Good Sea Witch.

Not only has she lost some weight and gone from green to a lovely tan, she also had a voice change and is ever so lovely now.  

Because fat, ugly people are ALWAYS evil and skinny, pretty people are ALWAYS good!  You can pet their puppies, take their candy, and why the hell not, go ahead and get in their vans with blacked-out windows because they can't possibly be BAD if they are good-looking!!!!  They must be trustworthy if they are are easy on the eyes! 

I mean, I was willing to try to accept that they were trying to overcome some of the glaring gender bias in the original Disney-take on Peter Pan.  I mean, it is surely unintentional, and I am clearly over-reading a children's show, that the only girl pirate has the pixie dust and therefore relies on the power of someone else rather than her own physical abilities (as Jake does) or intelligence (as Cubby does).  Surely the whole flamboyant use of the word "emergency" is just me being uber sensitive and a total goober.  

The show buys me peace and quiet in thirty minute intervals and is now on Netflix, lessening my outrage at them but only marginally.  So I try to overlook things.  But hello, can you make the message any more superficial and misleading?!  She is fat and ugly, so she is the bad guy ... little bit of magic and she is skinny and pretty so now she must be good!  Yay for pretty people, fat ones are all soo baaaaad!  They could have changed her from green to any other color, altered the way she spoke, changed her clothes ... it all would have been enough.  But they had to remove 20 lbs and make her dramatically prettier to really drive the bad to good transformation point home.  

So bravo Disney.  I am so glad that you can figure out how to continue to subtly perpetuate superficiality, sexism, and gender bias in a candy coated way.