Monthly Archives: September 2009

12 Steps to the Bacon Vodka Experiment

Before I got distracted by Kanye West, and Joe “You Lie” Wilson, and other entertaining news happening on the Interweb (and I guess, also in the real world), on August 30 I got inspired and decided to make my own moonshine based on a recipe I got from, where else? the Interweb:

“Add cooked bacon to a clean pint sized mason jar. Trim the ends of the bacon if they are too tall to fit. Or you can just throw in a bunch of fried up bacon scraps. Crushed black peppercorns can be added for a real zing, but check your zinger scale of tolerance first.

Fill the jar up with vodka. Cap and place in a dark cupboard for at least three weeks. Then place the bacon vodka in the freezer to solidify the fats. Contact local authorities to be on hand before opening and then strain out the fats through a coffee filter. The yield should be clear, pale yellow bacon vodka. (If it is any other color, check with health officials.) Decant into decorative bottles and enjoy.”

(I naturally blogged about how I came to this madness: here, and also my shopping trip & prep for the experiment, called “Step 1” here. My apology for having lied: there’ll be no post called Step 2 as you might have expected…)

Step 1: Cook bacon. Open the bag of raw bacon and gingerly remove them one by one from the said bag while thinking,

Yew. This is so disgusting!

Step 2: Wash hands so as not to get grease on microwave oven when you “cook” the bason

Step 3: Cook bacon for, hmm, how long? Your guess is as good as mine. How about 2 minutes since you have no patience?

Step 4: Open microwave to check on bacon. Yew. Still raw. Continue to zap bacon in microwave.

Step 5: Bat off hungry kids who are hungry because you forgot to feed them, for the sake of SCIENCE, y’all! “I smell bacon? Is that bacon? Mom, can we have some bacon?”

Step 6: Admonish children for calling Perfectly Edible Food “disgusting” by saying, “There are starving children in China, you know?”

Step 7: Gingerly transport the grease-soaked paper towels to the trash, mindful not to drip any grease on the floor. Oh, and take a picture of the bacon ’cause you know you are going to blog about it. (Only you don’t know that it’ll take you more than 2 weeks to actually blog about it because you are lazy that way).

Step 8: Curse yourself when you open the fridge and see this:

Then immediately comfort yourself with the conviction that YOUR bacon vodka is going to turn out so much better ’cause you used the REAL, raw, greasy, fat-dripping bacon. Oh, yeah.

Step 9: Add cooked bacon to mason jar and fill jar with vodka. The good kind! Another sacrifice you’ll make for SCIENCE…

Cry when you see the bottle of vodka more than half gone because the mason jar is deceptively roomy…

And remember: You are doing this for SCIENCE!

Step 10: Try and think of something quickly to explain to your children:

“What the hack is that?”

“Don’t use that kind of language.”

“Mom, what is that? Is that your bacon vodka?” “Are you really going to drink that?” “That is so disgusting!”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Mom. Why?”

The final step: Wrap it in 3 layers of plastic bag because you are not sure whether it will have some chemical reaction and either ooze goo or worse, burst open the glass jar. Leave it in the cupboard. And wait…

p.s. Do NOT forget to tell your husband about it before you leave for a business trip. Imagine his surprise when he finds it…

How come others got a long letter from a Nigeria princess and I, this?

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MY spammer / con-man is NOT even trying…

“I want to be different. Deal with it!”

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This came from my 6 year-old boy last night when I was putting him to bed.

“I want you to know that you are very special, and I love you very much.”

“Even if you hate me sometimes?”

Alarmed. Pause. Deep breath.

“Why do you think mommy hates you?”

“When you are mad at me and yell at me,” he said, matter-of-fact-ly.

“Oh, sweetie…” Another deep breath. Think. Think quickly. What does the parenting manual say as a proper response to this? Oh, right. There is NONE! So we have to make it up as we go along…

“Oh, sweetie. Even if mommy is mad at you sometimes, it does not mean that I hate you!”

Musing on this, he turned his back towards me. After a second, which felt like an eternity (cliche alert!), he turned towards me again,

“Well. I want to be different. Deal with it!”

A non-sequitur response. One that made me laugh out loud and hugged him even more tightly.

“I want to be different. Deal with it!”

I have been thinking about this the whole night and this morning.

Here is a passage from Almost Moon by Alice Sebold that, together with my 6 year-old’s infinite wisdom, will be haunting me for a long time…

“I walked to the center of my front lawn and lay down, spread-eagled. I looked up at the stars. How did I end up in a place where doing such a thing marked you for crazy, while my neighbors dressed concrete ducks in bonnets at Easter and in striped stocking caps at Christmas but were considered sane?”

In addition to the Pre-nuptial agreement, draw up a chore chart and sign on the dotted line!

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The following is a rant against men who do not help out around the house. You have been forewarned…

I hesitate in calling myself a feminist. Because I am embarrassed. Not because of the label, but because I would be living a lie if I call myself one. I am the woman that Feminists hold up as a bad example.

An enabler.

The truth is: I still do most of the housework around here. I work full time. My commute is over an hour each way. I travel for business. I make as much money as my husband. (Even though this is not supposed to make any difference?) I have a Ph.D. (I regretted putting this here: it was not my intention to brag. But rather a perpetual regret that I have wasted the best five years of my life getting a degree that has proven to be quite useless. And oftentimes a burden on my soul. I have let everybody down, myself especially).

Other couples fight about money, or so the myriad of studies showed. We fight over who is doing what how much when with which one of the children for how long. We fight over fairness.

“If you care about the house being neat, you should be the one that cleans up. You are the one that’s anal. I don’t care.”

I guess I can’t say anything about that if I don’t want to live a bachelor’s life. And, seriously, I cannot expect everybody to want to get up in the middle of the night, like 3 am, to do the dishes, pick up the house, vacuum the carpet. I am like Mr. Monk. Mrs. Monk. Ha.

I am one of those crazy women that get turned on when their husbands do the housework. I am not making this up. One of those women’s magazines did a survey and an overwhelming number of wives selected “My husband doing the household chore” as the thing that arouses them the most.

“How can you complain about doing housework if we have a cleaning lady?”

The cleaning lady comes every other week. I guess it never dawns on him that ours is not ALICE from The Brady Bunch who lives with the family?

Hey, if they don’t mind a disgusting toilet bowl, why should they be the one to clean it up? I can see the logic in that one too.

“If you spend less time on the Internet, you could have finished doing the dishes already.”

Oh. That. Is. A. Good. One. Let me write it down for future references.

I have walked out many times in a fit of rage. Oh yes, believe me. Because I have a chip on my shoulder.

PSA to Men: You seriously don’t want an over-educated wife. Just sayin’ Especially those that have taken Women’s Studies.

Most of the time though, I just swallow things that I want to say. Because, when it comes down to it, do you divorce your husband if he does not pitch in a fair share of housework, on your mental scale? Do you deprive your children of a father because you are tired of being the one responsible for doing the dishes, folding the laundry, picking up the house, and oh, everything related to the children?

Yes, he mows the lawn. And he fixes things when things break inside the house.

Am I asking too much for some sort of help?

“I am going to clean up the house now. I am going to turn on the music. Do you mind moving somewhere?”

“Can I listen to the music too?”

“NO. To be honest, it annoys me to no end to clean up the house while you sit here and read your book. So, it really would be better if you move somewhere else. Just get out of here.”

He moved upstairs. I turned up the music. Way high.

Who is the Queen of Passive Aggressiveness??!!

p.s. Depiste my lament, I am relieved that I don’t have a daughter. I don’t know what kind of an example I would be setting for a girl: “Don’t bother. It doesn’t matter whether you get an advanced degree or not. Probably worse. Because now you know to feel resentment AND guilt when you do everything around the house.”

We found a “weed” in our backyard that’s almost 17 feet tall!

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We found a “weed” in our backyard that’s almost 7 feet tall!, originally uploaded by The Absence of Alternatives.

CORRECTION: The weed measured almost 17 feet tall. Not 7. Duh.

The boys marched around the house with the weed and its “branch”, (Seriously. If a weed has a branch, doesn’t that negate the definition of a weed and hence it is no longer a weed?!), singing,

“The Weed! The Weed! It’s a very tall weed!”

At that moment, two things popped in my head:

1. Michael Phelps

2. 420

Who wouldn’t love a giant pink puff that squeaks?

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We don’t have cable (not because we are so chi chi, la di da, holier than thou, but because we are cheap… frugal, and know that we have no will power whatsoever when it comes to moving images on the screen and we will just sit in front of HBO all day and yell at the kids to take care of themselves realistic) so our poor kids LOVE Saturday mornings.

My 6 yo boy commented loudly, with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, to nobody in particular:

Kirby is really cute, isn’t he?

For some reason, that made me smile. Later he made me laugh out loud, when apparently Kirby was in trouble because I could hear this voice pretending to be a little girl when in face it is probably a 50-year-old voice-over actor who does all the voices for Saturday Morning cartoons imported from Asia, pleading, “Kirby! Kirby”, my 6 yo commented to the TV screen,

Just pick him up! He is the size of your head!

No wiser words have been uttered on Saturday mornings…

Remember to say I love you every time you say good-bye to your kids…

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One thing about being a parent is that it is probably one of the most universal experiences to relate to people around you. Complete strangers in the street. Writers speaking through printed words. Bloggers on the interweb. Folks you see on the news.

Everybody is somebody else’s child.

This is sappy. I know.

Today is 9-11.

I watched the taped replay of the first plane on the news in a hotel in Boise 8 years ago. With utter disbelief, while I was calling my husband to wake him up, “Go turn on the TV, now!” I watched the second plane fly into view of the news video camera…

Every year, on this day, we heard the stories from parents who lost their children on that day, and I couldn’t stop crying the entire day. I would pull myself together. And then the thought “what would I do if it happened to my children?” would trigger another fit. I don’t presume that I understand the heartaches these parents go through every moment. Judging by the pain in my chest as I type this, I don’t think I will ever be able to imagine the intensity of it.

I left the house at 7:44 this morning. That was 2 minutes before it was 8:46 am on the East Coast…

NPR played the interview of a fire fighter who lost both of his sons on 9-11-2001. I steeled myself against the impact.

Mr. John Vigiano Sr. is a retired firefighter. One of his boys was a policeman, and the other, a firefighter. When John became a firefight, he received his grandfather’s badge number, 3436.

“We had the boys for — John for 36 years, Joe for 34 years, ironically. Badge number 3436.”

This was when my tears started and they have not been completely stopped yet. I had to pull my car off to the side of the road after what Mr. Vigiano said about their unimaginable loss:

“I don’t have any could’ve, should’ve or would’ves. I wouldn’t have changed anything. It’s not many people that the last words they said to their son or daughter was ‘I love you.'”

Again. I know this is probably unbearably sappy. But, please, remember to tell your children you love them every time you say good-bye to them.

You can read the NPR Story here.

Or listen to the StoryCorps recording: Firefighter Father Recalls Losing Sons On 9/11

Afraid to ask: What is the point of HCR without a public option?

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I don’t set a lot of rules in the house for my boys. The Golden Rule, of course. The “Be true to yourself”, remnants from reading Hermann Hesse in my youth. And then there is my very own:

Whatever you do, don’t do a half-ass job.

(I know. I am all brevity…)

So here I am, 2:17 am 2:58 am 3:14 am on the Thursday morning after the POTUS’ address to a joint session of Congress, the one where he laid out the general principles of the Health Care Reform plan that both sides have been fighting on for months, wishing I were a better writer, because I am about to explode, wordlessly.

This headline sums up what everyone, on either side, has figured out, probably has even anticipated, at least subconsciously,

Obama avoids the details on divisive issues to keep his healthcare goals on track

The point of contention is the so-called “Public Plan”.

With all due respect to the freedom of speech, blah blah blah, I sincerely don’t see how anyone who opposes the option of a government-backed insurance plan for ALL can look at themselves in the eyes, be 100% honest, and say, “I oppose this because I don’t feel like paying more taxes for people who do not earn it. If they cannot afford health insurance now, it is their own damn fault. I work hard, and I pay taxes ONLY because I have to. It has nothing to do with being selfish. In fact, I am NOT. I donate to charities. I am good.”

Actually, scratch that. I think that’s how most people justify their opposition to the Public option. I can see it, I just cannot understand it. Richard Dawkins must have regretted that somehow his seminal book got it so right, literally.

Not wanting to count on the innate selfishness that we were born with, GOP has augmented the horror story of a Public Option by playing up to people’s fear for an invasion by illegal immigrants. “Their kids will get accepted into colleges before your kids are. Now your hard-earned money is going towards to paying for their health care too! Where is the free handout for YOU?!” So much so that Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) yelled, “You lie!” after POTUS countered the fear mongering that the health care legislature as proposed will provide free health care to illegal immigrants.

Here you can witness the historical moment that turned Professional Heckler Joe “You Lie” Wilson into a GOP “Atta boy!” Martyr:

I appreciate that POTUS is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

L.A. Times:

“And so, though some liberal Democrats have threatened to revolt if Obama does not insist on a new government insurance option — the so-called public plan — the president told the joint session of Congress that he would consider other approaches to making coverage affordable for the uninsured… At this point, Obama seeks to remain flexible because the House will not pass a healthcare bill that does not include the public plan, and the Senate will not pass a bill that does.”

I pity the fool that covets Obama’s job after last night…

I know somewhere I must be over-simplifying things. I must have missed something. Even though I do understand that POTUS has to be the Über diplomat in order to push this thing through, to help it see the light of day, I cannot help but wonder, screaming aloud inside my head, at the same time feeling guilty for not being supportive, being a sort of “backseat driver”, or worse, like one of those parents that never volunteer yet always the first ones to complain… I just have to ask out loud:

Really. What is the point of a health care reform without a public option? (That is not Medicare, thank you very much.)

Whatever you do, don’t do a half-ass job.

Apparently, in politics, this laughably simple rule I set for my children, is difficult to follow.