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Insomnia
I have a difficult time sleeping on Tuesday nights, it’s mostly because of my graduate school, the classes meet on Tuesday from 6-10 p.m. and usually by the time I get home and crawl into bed I cannot shut my brain off. There are times over the last two years (which is how long I’ve been in grad school now) that I toss and turn until close to midnight. This past Tuesday I tossed and turned all night long. I think I might have slept 15-20 minutes at a time between the hours of midnight and 4:00 a.m. but I’m not entirely sure.
Finally at 5:30 a.m. I gave up trying, and got on the treadmill and ran for an hour. By the time I got to work I was feeling it: exhaustion. My eyes were getting fuzzy and I really felt like if I were to lay down, I’d surely fall asleep. So I went home at noon, put on my jammies and crawled into bed.
And still I couldn’t sleep. I was certain that if I tried hard enough, and long enough, it would happen. I tried reading a book, but that didn’t work. I tried laying on the couch with the tv on, but that didn’t work.
Finally I gave up. It was a Mom’s Night Out for the Milwaukee Moms and I had dinner plans with Freckles and CeCe before we joined the MM’s for drinks and then a play at the Milwaukee Rep Theater. I warned them both that I had not slept since Monday night. After three glasses of wine, spaced out of course, and then a dark theatre, sitting between two good friends, I finally dozed off for a catnap. Ahhhh, sleep! It couldn’t have been more welcome.
Don’t worry though, I did not spend the night at the theater, nor did I snore during the performance. By the time I got home it was 11 p.m. and while I was a little worried that my insomia would continue, I drifted off and got a full night of rest.
When Does Dinner Become A Disaster?
Last night we had friends over for dinner. It was our second attempt at this, the first time it was cancelled due to a snow storm.
My husband worked all Friday night on baking a cake, then Saturday morning he made frosting for it (both by scratch). He likes to think of the dessert first, but for the main course he was serving parmasean and sage crusted pork chops, with sauteed green beans, and twice cooked french fries that he saw in Bon Appetite. I mean, just look at those fries, you know you want some too! He sliced the potatos and then blanched them. By the time our guests arrived the fries had been laying on cookies sheets lined with paper towels for about an hour. I figured they were dry enough to cook.
I poured the vegetable oil in an 8 qt. stock pot, only filling it about 1/3 of the way because I didn’t want the oil to splatter. I’m psychotic about splatter. I even have this special anti-splatter pan/pot cover that I got from Williams Sonoma — it works great! Usually I can’t even wait for the stovetop to cool down, I have this dying urge to CLEAN THE SPLATTER NOW.
My husband gets out a his new candy thermometer, which he bought just for tonight, hooks it on the side of the pot and notes that the oil is about 1″ below the tip of the thermometer. If we want to measure the temp of the oil, we need to put more in. I know the oil is going to freaking splatter all over the damn place, ALL over my precious griddle-in-the-middle, but what else can I do? I pour the rest of the jug of oil in there, turn up the heat, and wait for it to measure 350 degrees F.
In the meantime, my husband starts the pork chops. It’s finally time to put fries in the oil, so I take a handful of cut potatos, put them in a stainless steel strainer, and lower the strainer into the pot. AND THEN THE FREAKING OIL BUBBLES OVER THE TOP OF THE STOCK POT!!!! It was a like a gush of boiling oil that just wouldn’t stop! My husband quickly shut off all the burners. The entire stove top was drenched in about a half an inch of hot oil (I’d have preferred splatter). The pork chops were in the oven, and I was seriously concerned that the oil would drip into the oven somehow and my griddle-in-the-middle would explode — probaby start my house on fire too. I wanted to shut off the oven. I really did. But my husband and his friend determined that everything was okay.
So, let’s take inventory of what we have to serve our guests for dinner shall we? Pork chops, french bread, wine, and a bundt cake. I couldn’t cook the green beans due the fact that I couldn’t turn on any of the burners, so I pulled out some frozen corn and put it in the microwave. My husband grabbed a can of black olives and poured them into a dish. Well, at least we had wine, right?
During dinner I tried not to think about the hot oil on my stovetop, thankfully my husband cleaned it up the second it was cool enough to handle. What a freaking mess.
Movie & Dinner
Yesterday we went to the movies, we saw Bee Movie, which was cute, but not Shrek-cute if you know what I mean. I’d pay a matinee price for it, but it wasn’t worth the trouble I went to for it which I wrote about on my blog for MenomoneeFallsNOW.com titled Is The Customer Always Right?
After the movie we went to dinner downtown at Rock Bottom Brewery. I guess they are a national chain, so perhaps you’ve heard of them. When the waitress says, “Oh my gosh! I didn’t even know that was on the menu!” you know you’ve got a problem….
First she didn’t know if they had chocolate milk, which should have been a red flag, but whatever. Then Zoe ordered - straight off the kid’s menu - a ‘Make Your Own Pizza’ which clearly implied that they brought the ingredients out to her and then she’d got to ‘Make Her Own Pizza’. My husband ordered some tuna thing. I ordered a burger and a salad. I like the caesar salad because I like romaine lettuce, croutons and parmesean cheese. I do not like caesar dressing, so I asked for balsamic vinegrette on the side.
It took FOR-EVER and a day to get our drinks, and then EVEN LONGER to get my salad, which by the way came with caesar dressing on it AND balsamic vinegrette on the side too. Hello???? Who in the heck orders dressing on the salad and then another dressing on the side?
Zoe’s pizza did not come, and so I asked about it, to which the waitress replied, “Oh, they are making it.” To which I replied, “It’s a make your own, doesn’t that mean that you bring it out and she makes it?” And that’s when she said, “Oh my gosh! I didn’t even know that was on the menu! I’ll go check….”
I was mostly concerned that our dinners would arrive (mine and my husband’s) and Zoe’s pizza would still be waiting to be made, and then of course, she’d cry. I would cry too if I ordered pizza and they didn’t make it. Next thing I know she’s coming back with Zoe’s unmade pizza.
I had already flagged down a waiter to give back my salad and told him what was wrong with it. He said, “It has balsamic on the side.” Duh. And I told him, “Yes, but it ALSO has caesar on it. If someone says they want their dressing on the side that doesn’t mean IN ADDITION TO the dressing already on it. It means they WANT ALL OF THE DRESSING ON THE SIDE.”
Seriously folks. You’d think I had come up with something brand new. Ever since salad dressing bottles have come with the calories on the labels people have been ordering their dressing on the side.
We made it through dinner. The waitress told us she had only been there a week. No! We never would have guessed! Afraid of what might happen, we skipped dessert and went out for frozen custard instead. Thank God for Kopps!
Midnight Nonsense
On Friday night I woke up as my husband came to bed, and let me just say this: I have NO BUSINESS talking in the middle of the night. I made ZERO SENSE, and I got frustrated in the process. What did I say? I vaguely remember saying the following to him:
Where is my wife? and Where are our daughter’s parents?
Where is my wife????? I’m the wife! And I think he told me that. But then I got frustrated because I obviously wasn’t finding the right words in my brain to vocalize my nonsensical questions and so I went on to ask where our daughter’s parents were. To which he said: “Well, I’m right here … and you’re right there.”
Thankfully I either didn’t ask a follow-up question, or it was so ridiculously stupid that I’ve blocked it from my memory.
3 of about 6,000
Three of us successfully completed the 5K last night. My brother and Nephew #2 changed their minds, so it was only myself, my husband, and Red (my sister-in-law). She’s never run more than a half a mile, but she ran the entire race with us and did fantastic! We only stopped to walk about three times. I was able to gage how we were doing, only because I’ve done this before, and my husband can kinda tell what the pace is just by how it feels, but I think Red was pleasantly surprised to cross the finish line in 35 minutes!
We all ran together, side by side, the entire route. There were swarms of runners, and I’m guessing that we were 3 of about 6,000. I wish I would have had my camera because the view from the Third Ward while we were running the final leg up Milwaukee St. was amazing. There is a slight hilll and from the bottom of it all you see under the street lights (the run starts at 9 p.m.) is a school of runners, moving along as one unit, reaching four blocks long and four lanes wide.
Oh, and the place to meet if we got lost was under the Subway sign. Red said if she wasn’t under the Subway sign she’d be directly across the street from it, at her car.
Kiddy cocktails
The dinner party on Friday night was very nice. Although I’m in my 30’s, most the other business owners are near retirement. Not too many people wanted to come over and sit at the kiddy table with our group who included myself, my husband, my brother, his wife, a shop owner, her husband, and a new couple we had just met. One of the seasoned owner’s came over for a while, but quickly shuffled off ….. “everyone knows this is the younger table,” she said. Once she had a few drinks in her, and the lights went down when the dancing started, she came back. What can I say, we may be young, but we’re a lot more fun than some of those old folks who were up past their bedtime.
We usually have gambling (pretend of course) at this event, but this year someone decided that a hypnotist would be a good idea.
Note to everyone: a hypnotist is never a good idea.
They started out with about 20 people on stage, half got up and left when they clearly realized they weren’t going under. 10 remained, including 2 people from my table. The hypnotist was starting to sweat because it wasn’t going so well.
“Now there are bugs flying all around you, go ahead, swat those flies away.”
Of the 20 hands up there, only two were swatting flies.
“Now the flies are gone, now it’s really hot out, go ahead and fan yourself.”
And so it went. He’d make a suggestion, and there would be maybe one or two people who were taking the suggestion and doing something with it. Every now and then someone would peek open their eyes, take a look at the crowd, and then shut them again. Were there a few fakers up there? Possibly.
As I said, a hypnotist is never a good idea.
The night was still good, three out of the four women at my table are wine club members …. it was practically a mini-meeting.
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