The Duckling Drinks Beaujolais-Villages Blanc

Louis Jadot, Château des Jacques
Grand Clos de Loyse
2001 Beaujolais, Villages Blanc
Central Market, $15.69

The first whiff of this stuff was discouraging to say the least. Some tasting notes I found on the internet described it as "pure chard." I describe it as canned green beans.

However, if you can hold your nose long enough to take a sip, the flavors are wonderful. This wine was sweet and creamy with tastes of peach and vanilla with a hint of the brightness of lemon and a little bit of toasted marshmallow. I couldn't stop rolling it around in my mouth tasting all the different aspects.

As long as your nose isn't too sensitive to get over the scent, I'd definitely recommend this one.

Random Photo Friday - Wilderness Edition

Today's Random Photo was taken by The Husband as we drove down Mt. Scott at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in October 2005.



We spent about four days tromping around in the wilderness, eating s'mores, and looking at hairy animals. I know the photo above doesn't hold much visual interest for anyone who wasn't there, so let's spice up this post with the hairy animals.

Prairie dog: small and cute

Buffalo (Bison?): big and kind of intimidating

Anyway, we spent one day hiking and got terribly lost. The trail map provided by the refuge was a joke, but even if we had bought a topographical map, I'm not sure either one of us would have had much luck reading it, especially since we forgot to bring a compass. We still had fun climbing around on the rocks and eating our lunch while overlooking a majestic Oklahoma vista.

Once we'd had enough fun and lunch and majestic vistas, we gave up trying to relocate the trail and started heading back. We weren't 100% confident where "back" was, but we had a vague notion that we were walking in the right general direction. As we were starting to get frustrated, knowing we were close to the path to our car but still not able to find it, we both suddenly stopped and looked at each other. The Husband and I had both recognized the same weed in an entire grassland and were able to use it as a landmark to navigate back to the parking lot.

I guess we developed some sort of botanical marital mind-meld when put to the test. It was a good thing, too, because I was really starting to worry that we'd have to spend the night with the buffalo/bison.


Majestic, huh?

Pain in the Neck

Last Saturday, I gave myself whiplash while towel drying my hair. Previously, I have injured my neck during such strenuous activities as sleeping, walking, and driving a car. The pain always goes away by itself, although most days I have at least a minor crick in my neck. I've tried a new pillow and stretching exercises, but nothing has made any difference.

My neck still hurt pretty badly on Monday, and I didn't have anything interesting to do that day, so I decided to go to the urgent care clinic and have them take a look. I figured at the very least, I might get some good drugs out of them. My Vicodin stash from last year's ER visit was running low, so it was time to stock up. I'm not a drug abuser, but for some reason I am a habitual drug hoarder. Also, Vicodin is the very best hang-over cure ever.

After quite a wait, I finally got to see a doctor with a very handsome accent. I felt like a fraud complaining about neck pain and was sure I would quickly be identified as a pain-killer addict and kicked out on the street. But, the doctor took one look at my neck muscles and started making impressed noises about how swollen they were.

He said to me, "Tell me if this hurts," and suddenly everything went black and stars starting bursting out of my eye sockets. Evidently he was able to determine the most jab-worthy spot on sight. "Yeah, that hurt," I told him.

To be on the safe side, he sent me down the hall for X-rays. Two rather bumbling techs fiddled with gadgets and argued about the best angle from which to shoot me with radiation for what seemed like forever. Finally, they concluded that my neck was not broken, although my spine was rather bendier than it should have been. Overly-bendy as in, I have scoliosis.

They put me back in the exam room, and the doctor came in with prescriptions for Vicodin and muscle relaxers (score!). "Do you have any questions?" he asked. So I brought up the whole, Surprise! You have scoliosis! thing. The exasperated look on his face made it abundantly clear that bumbling X-ray techs are not qualified to diagnose me with scoliosis and they really shouldn't have brought it up.

The radiologist was supposed to have reviewed my films and called me by now. I also left a message at the clinic this morning, which no one has returned. I'm not sure if that's a good sign or no sign at all. I actually hope I do have some spinal issue that's causing my achy neck. At least then I would have a specific problem to work on fixing. In the meantime, I guess I'll just have to follow doctor's orders and pop a bunch of pills. Oh, well.

Random Photo Friday: One Day Late Edition

Why am I posting the Friday photo on Saturday? Just because I can! Bwa ha ha! Anyway...

Here is my lovely mother-in-law at our wedding.



I am blessed with a pretty awesome family, including the one I married into, and my mother-in-law is no exception. Despite the fact that she's been through some real crap since I've known her, she always seems to be smiling and looking for her next big adventure.

She has always made me feel welcome among her family and circle of very cool friends. One New Year's Eve she and my sister-in-law taught me how to knit. In less than 6 months, she altered my wedding dress and two of the bridesmaids' dresses and still found time to sew her own outfit.

I know this isn't how mother-in-law stories are supposed to go, so if guess if I had to complain about her I would say that her energy and creativity sometimes make me feel a little lazy and boring in comparison. Of course, I'm totally lazy and boring so the fact that she only makes me feel a little bit that way still speaks to how awesome she is.

Evidently Casual Friday Is Now Kind-of-Freak-Me-Out Friday

Our Vice President of Business Services is wearing a Marilyn Manson t-shirt.

Yay Boobies!

The best thing about getting kind of chubby is the bonus boobies. When I was skinny, I was skinny all over, but now I can actually put those bras I've been buying all my life to good use.

Unfortunately, I've had a conflicted relationship with cleavage. As a feminist, I want to reject everything that sets women apart as sexual objects, especially in the workplace. After all, it would be considered weird and absurd for a man working in an office setting to show his bare legs or arms or chest. So why is it normal for women's professional clothing to reveal so much of our bodies?

But, my breasts are nice. I like them. I want to enjoy the way they look, and everyone else can just stuff it. Why should this feel like a violation of my principals, dammit?

However, I don't want anyone feeling entitled to objectify me or judge me sexually because some percentage of my breasts are visible.

On the other hand, women's bodies shouldn't be shameful or strange. We're half the population for goodness gracious. It hardly seems like a feminist position to hide my femaleness for the very sake of it being female.

Is this what the saying, "The personal is the political," means? Does my choice of shirt really have wide societal implications?

However, here's where I get to relax and get over it. I work in an office of all women. The vast majority of our clients are women. My breasts don't solidify my station as a decorative object in the workplace or make me seem more frivolous than my professional male counterparts. I don't have any professional male counterparts. Everybody here has boobs. In this space I can stop considering the ramifications of my mammary tissue. They can just be body parts, like my nose or my hands.

Please understand how privileged I feel that I am worrying about the neckline of my shirt and not being beaten by my husband behind closed doors or having sexual favors extorted from me by my boss or being raped and mutilated by government forces while collecting firewood outside of my village. But, I also feel privileged that I can go to work every day in a place where my body parts are nothing more than that, and it's sad for that to seem like a privilege. Why can't I feel confident that we all can expect that without any second thought?

The Mysteries of Brain Chemistry

I've been having these amazing, complicated, vivid dreams lately. Last night, I dreamed about infiltrating a mafia family by going undercover as a dance hall girl. Of course, all the mobsters had mobster names, like Fat Tony and Louie the Mouth. But my subconscious managed to come up with the very best, most bizarre gangster name ever: No-good Schadenfreude.

Random Photo Friday: Junior High Edition

Meet 1st period girls' P.E. on the last day of 7th grade, May 1990.*



The next picture was not randomly selected, but I dug it up so you could see exactly what I'm wearing in the photo above. How AWESOME are those pants?



7th grade was a really hard time for me. My family had moved the summer before, and the new school district wouldn't accept my test results to place me into honor's classes. I was stuck in (gasp!) ~regular~ classes with ~regular~ kids.

My social skills among the un-dorky were rather lacking, so I ended up way overcompensating. I argued with my teachers, purposely flunked tests, snuck out in the middle of the night, and stole cigarettes and booze from my parents. I wasn't very smart about it, however. One day after school my friend and I got passing out, puking on ourselves drunk after school before our parents came home. I'm not sure how I thought we were going to get away with that one. Of course there were a lot of other shenanigans I did get away with, most of which involved getting drunk and wandering around the neighborhood at night.

By the time 8th grade rolled around, I'd straightened myself out. I think I just got it out of my system. My whole life I had been a pretty uptight, type-A kid who never, ever got in trouble. It turned out that being bad got boring and wasn't worth the hassle. I credit my parents for not making too big a deal out of my sudden rebellion. If they stirred up a bunch of drama about my behavior, it probably would only have made things worse. Luckily, deep down, I was just a normal, boring, straight A student.

It wasn't until college that I discovered I could be a goofy, drunk-ass, straight A student.

Ah, good times...




*I planned to anonymize any people who showed up in my random photo selections, but in this case it seems like a little much. So, if you recognize yourself in this picture and want me to take it down, feel free to email me. I doubt that's going to happen considering approximately 10 people read this blog and I probably know them all personally.

I Nearly Had My Big Break

My fifteen minutes of fame will have to wait. All week a local television news reporter has been scheduling and rescheduling an interview with me about one of the programs at the nonprofit where I work. It was finally set for this afternoon, but about twenty minutes before our meeting, she canceled. The story will still be on the news, which will be good publicity for our agency, but they decided to just interview one of our clients and not me.

I'm mostly relieved, but a little disappointed, too. The idea of being on TV gave me a stomach ache and sweaty palms, but I thought it also might be a fun experience.

After my confrontation with serious anxiety, this is how I know I'm back to my normal self. Even if something makes me half sick with nerves, I still feel like I'm up to the challenge. There's a misconception out there that anti-depressant/anxiety medication dulls people's real emotions, turning them into mindless, grinning zombies. But, I'm finding that I feel like myself again. The prospect of a news interview still made me nervous enough to be nauseous, but I could overcome it.

Several months ago, I would have called in sick everyday until the news reporter quit calling me because I would have been literally incapable of facing the physically gripping terror that kind of stress would cause. Sometimes I think it's worth it to feel really bad for a while, so I can remember to appreciate it when I feel good again.

Misdiagnosed

After my doctor appointment earlier this week, I'm pretty sure "HYPOCHONDRIAC" is scrawled all over my medical records because of this one physician's assistant who thinks I'm crazy. Let's call her Physician's Assistant Who Thinks I'm Crazy, or PAWTIC for short.

I've been seeing this doctor for several years now, mostly for my yearly check-up, but from time to time I get sick and she fixes me up. I've had bronchitis and a bladder infection and a few other minor things over the years. Generally I go to the office, the doctor tells me what's wrong, and she writes a prescription for whatever will solve my problem.

Except, when I'm unfortunate enough to get an appointment with PAWTIC. No matter how bad I feel and how many tests she runs, there's never anything wrong with me according to her.

The first time, I didn't think too much about it. I was complaining of a sharp stomach pain that would come and go. I had already been diagnosed with irritable bowel, but this hurt worse than usual, so I didn't want to ignore it and end up dying of an aneurysm even though I was pretty sure they would tell me it was nothing to worry about and send me on my way. However, after poking my guts and asking me some questions, PAWTIC decided to send me for a CT scan. Of course the results were fine, but that just verified what I had assumed all along.

Maybe a year or so later, I started having shortness of breath. My childhood asthma flairs up sometimes when my allergies get bad, so I made an appointment for a breathing treatment. But, after the treatment I still had trouble breathing, and I started freaking out a little bit. PAWTIC measured my oxygen levels and air flow and told me I was breathing plenty, so there was nothing she could do for me. This is when I started to notice a skeptical look passing over her face, and I thought it looked familiar from the time she told me my CT scan was clear.

Looking back, maybe I was a little crazy and suffering from not-yet-diagnosed anxiety which was causing my chest to feel tight. However, instead of telling me I wasn't having trouble breathing despite my insistence otherwise, PAWTIC could have - I don't know - tried to figure out what my problem was. But I'm not bitter.

I didn't see her again for a few years since I was staying basically healthy and she went away to have a baby - that is until earlier this week. I made an appointment because I was feeling a little "feminine discomfort" (and yes, that is as specific as I'll get). The doctor wasn't available on short notice, so I got stuck with PAWTIC. She prodded and jabbed my nether regions and proclaimed I was perfectly fine with an unspoken "except that you're a pathetic attention seeker" in her voice. Of course I didn't want something to be wrong with me, but just once I'd like her to have to admit I have a legitimate medical complaint.

I'm thinking about giving myself food poisoning just so I can show up and puke on her.