You come at the king, you best not miss. -- Omar Little

Crap. I missed posting yesterday. I was tired. I have no real excuse.

Anyway, in honor of my dear sister-in-law who is coming for a visit today (who is in medical school in Baltimore), I will write about the Orioles.


Bawlmer.

I have some pretty strong feelings about Baltimore. We used to live there. We still own a house there. I wish we didn't (we rent it out, but at a loss). Apparently, moving away right as the housing market crashed was not the financially savvy thing to do. Hindsight. Hopefully we'll get to sell it someday soon and come out close to even, because I'm not exactly planning to retire there.

I really don't like it there. The city politics are horribly corrupt, urban blight was practically invented there, and commuting to DC from there was on paper, not bad, but in practice, terrible.

It's like Pittsburgh, but awful.

Part of my negativity about the city likely stems from the fact that we bought a house and renovated it, and finished it right before we moved out, and during that year and a half of renovation that we did mostly ourselves we had a baby and commuted an hour and a half each way to DC for work and all of my friends and family were at least 40 miles away and we had very little money and people kept getting mugged outside...so I was exhausted and worried and broke and we had no help with the baby and few friendly faces. I was miserable there. I get that, realistically, this is not all ENTIRELY the city of Baltimore's fault (and in retrospect, there may have been some post-partum depression at play), but it frankly feels that way, and I can't untie my personal misery from the experience of living there.

The best thing about Baltimore (besides overuse of the word "hon" and beehive hairdos) is The Wire. It's the best television show ever produced, and won exactly ZERO important awards. People are idiots.

See, even writing about Baltimore puts me in a sh*tty mood.

The Wire was on HBO, and tells the story of the city via drug dealers, drug addicts, dock workers, cops, kids, the politicians, and the press.  It is the best show that you have ever, or never, watched. I guarantee this. It's remarkably true-to-life -- seriously, that stuff HAPPENS there -- and it will break your heart. Especially season 4.

The show also has some of my very favorite tv characters: Stringer Bell, Bubs, and Omar Little. Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks Omar is fantastic. And Jimmy McNulty is a super-hot train wreck of a man. There is one of the most creative scenes I've ever seen on tv that takes place between Jimmy and his partner Bunk, where they walk you step-by-step through an entire murder scene using only gestures and the f-bomb, and you completely understand exactly what transpired. It's been written about extensively, and aptly described by one author as a "goddamn symphony of profanity".

The show will make you laugh, and cry, and think. It gives you hope and crushes it, and not necessarily in that order. If you haven't seen it, watch it from the beginning, you WILL NOT be sorry you did. Stick with it, even if Season Two isn't your favorite (sometimes it's not), it is absolutely worth it.

So, that's my tale of Baltimore.

All in the game, yo, all in the game.

(In the interest of equal time, I will also say that one of Matthew's favorite restaurants is in Baltimore, Golden West Cafe. They have awesome tater tots. It is definitely a redeeming feature of the city. That, and the cheapness and availability of crab. And Poe lived there. Yeah, I think that's about it.)

Blame Canada.

The Toronto Blue Jays are in Canada.

I love Canada. Although I think it would be alright if they only competed with us in hockey, and left baseball alone. Just seems unnatural.


Anyway, Canada is fabulous. It's like Minnesota, but even cleaner, with fewer guns, and more francophones. And poutine. And socialized medicine. And pâté. And liberals. And up until recently, a favorable exchange rate with U.S. dollars.


Let me tell you a little story about Canada. We went to Canada on our honeymoon, 10+ years ago. We got married in December, in between semesters in law school, so we were *broke*. While I wanted to go to the Greek isles, that was simply not possible given our budget. And seeing as we like snow and my husband wanted to ski, we decided to go to Canada. We went to Calgary for a couple of days, which looked exactly like Minneapolis but with a rodeo. The exchange rate was killer, so we stayed in a Fairmont hotel (fancy!!). We had a suite, for the low low price of about $119 USD / night. 


When we arrived, I was really tired so I took a nap. I woke up from said nap with a sore throat and a fever. The next day, my brand-new husband called the front desk and they found us a doctor that was open on a Saturday and sent us on our way. At the clinic, we waited for about 10 minutes and then got to see the doctor. The receptionist asked if I had my Alberta Health card, and I said no, I'm American. They were so apologetic when they told me the visit would cost $35. Canadian. Even a broke law student can afford that!


I got in to see the doctor a few minutes later. He looked at my throat and in my ears and wrote me a prescription for antibiotics for my strep. He then spent the next 10 minutes writing down places for us to visit, eat, and ski  -- he was our own personal Not For Tourists guide.


I got my prescription filled at the Canadian pharmacy for about $5 CAD, and then bought all sorts of fun flavors of Halls that they don't sell in the US (blueberry!) and boxes of allergy medicine that were prescription-only back home (Allegra!). Customs didn't seem to care, thankfully.


I felt better right away, so we drove to Banff and Lake Louise right on schedule and skiied and ate and had a fabulous time, for a very reasonable amount of money. I hope we can go back for our 15th and do the same, although I doubt it will be as cheap.


(Socialism + snow / decent exchange rate ) * really nice people = what's not to love about Canada, eh?

 

 

Brave(s)

 

Now that's out of the way.

Braves. Bravery. I'm trying to be brave, I started doing the Jillian Michaels Body Revolution this week. I had lost all of my baby weight three weeks after she was born -- I had gestational diabetes and I was absolutely religious about diet and exercise, so it was very well controlled without insulin. That meant that I was actually losing weight while I was pregnant -- the baby kept growing, but the rest of me was shrinking. Nice, right? So I lost everything immediately...and then what did I do? Exercise? Eat right? Nope and nope. I ate Halloween candy, Thanksgiving pumpkin pie (and whoopie pies), and Christmas candy and cookies and everything else...so I gained 10 lbs before you could say "King Arthur Flour". 

Matthew is doing it with me. We began with the 7 day kickstart, which is about 1200 calories and two 30 minute exercise periods a day. The first two days were fine. And boy, do I hate to be hungry. HATE IT. But it really wasn't terrible...until lunchtime today. Today, I was EXHAUSTED and sick...to the point where I took a two-hour nap this afternoon and woke up and still could hardly stand up. So I broke out my handy dandy diabetes sugar meter left over from the pregnancy, and lo and behold I had ridiculously low blood sugar. Apparently, all of the exercise and so little food and nursing the baby don't all combine well.

So, we're off the kick-start phase and onto the more varied but still calorie-restricted diet. I'm just really happy to not have to eat tilapia for dinner or tomatoes with everything. I feel kind of like a failure, because  I should have been able to gut this out better. But, I will keep trying to do what I can do and follow the program; if I need another 200 hundred calories of lower-carb food a day to be able to walk around like a human being, so be it. If I can't stand up, I can't exercise, and that seems to be very important for this program (and in general, of course).

I actually threw away the last homemade Twinkie from the ski trip today. Not easy, but I did it. It's gone. Maybe I'll make it through after all.

If you build it...

The Chicago White Sox were at the heart of the 1919 "Black Sox Scandal" and "8 men out" --  when eight players were banned from professional baseball for life as a result of intentionally losing games for $$$.

You know how I know so much about this? Wikipedia? Perhaps a little. But REALLY...what I need to know about the White Sox I learned from "Field of Dreams."

I really like this movie. It's fun and sentimental and takes place in Iowa and there are ghosts and James Earl Jones and a tagline -- "If you build it, they will come."

[I do wonder, though, if Dennis Quaid looks at Kevin Costner and thinks "Dude, you totally stole my career...and I could have done it much better than you." If he did, he would be correct.]

BUT...there's something else that comes to mind when I think of "If you build it.." And that's Pinterest.

If you don't know much about it, Pinterest is a social media pinboard site, where people post ("pin") pictures of things that interest them and organize those pictures into folders, and share that with their friends. Pinterest took off like gangbusters -- in January 2012, it had almost 12 million unique users, and was the fastest site in history to break the 10 million mark. Apparently, they built it, and people came. Quickly and in large numbers.

I don't just blog about Pinterest; I'm also a client. I have a love/hate relationship with Pinterest. I LOVE many things about it:

• I enjoy wasting time
• I enjoy looking at pretty pictures
• I enjoy seeing what my friends are up to and which pretty pictures they waste their time looking at
• I like being able to keep track of things I've seen that I want to get back to later

I HATE the following:

• How much time I can waste on it
• How completely detached from reality most people's pins are (including my own)
• The ridiculousness and pretentiousness that abound

For example, on any given day you will see the following:

• a picture of a mango-quinoa blueberry corn salad posted by someone that you know who subsists on burgers, fries, and chinese food, with the caption "Nom nom! So yummy!" Whatever. You will never make that, let alone eat that. Who do you think you're kidding?
• prints with variations on the "keep calm and _______" theme and exhortations made by 1950's style housewives that the speaker is fluent in "sarcasm and profanity" and other various someecards. Yes, we've all been to the site. They are funny. But do you need to collect 40 of them and refer to them on a regular basis? 
• a picture of a dessert that looks full-fat and fabulous but is called something like "low-fat brownie yogurt balls" with the caption "These are amazing!!! And only 86 calories per serving!!!" Really? Did you make them and eat them? Then don't attest to their fabulousness. Frequently, if you click through these pictures back to the original or semi-original poster (which is the only way to get the actual recipe) you'll see comments like "Huh, you know, when I did the math they were 200 calories per quarter-sized serving, are you sure about that?" Caveat eat-tor.
• Pictures of cupcakes with elaborate toppers and exquisite party decorations that are re-pinned by everyone you know with kids -- "Perfect for Madison's 4th B-day!" Um, sure. Is someone from Land of Nod stopping by to hang all of that crap up for you, or is this for you to show your professional party planner? Or are you really just going to tape up some balloons and streamers and buy the matching Disney Princess plates, cups, and plastic tablecloth from Target? Because THAT'S OKAY too.

My husband asked me "what is the deal with Pinterest? I have no idea what it's about." Here's my answer:

Pinterest is:

• food that one will never cook
• houses one will never own
• crafts one will never do (see previous post re: that damn tooth fairy door)
• quotations one will never say
• clothes that one will never wear
• books that one will never read
• parties that one will never throw
• hairstyles that one could never pull off

Kevin Costner had the Field of Dreams, but apparently Pinterest is the website of dreams.

And that's my baseball post of the day. Time to go pin stuff.

Are you going to San-Fran-cisco....?

The San Francisco Giants. These guys.

They were originally the Gothams, which is a much more interesting name, and apparently have a big rivalry with the Dodgers, also formerly from NY. The Giants used to play in Harlem, near Central Park and then later further north, deeper into Harlem, always renaming their home field "The Polo Grounds".

I did not know that.

San Francisco is the most expensive city in the continental US that I have never lived in or visited for any length of time. I have no interest in living in California, but if I did, it would be in/near San Francisco.

This is interesting though - San Francisco is the most expensive city in the country for renters, according to a recent article in the Daily Mail. New York didn't even make the top 10. That's going to annoy a lot of New Yorkers, because they (formerly we) love to kvetch about how everything is so expensive and tiny and it's such a huge pain to live here but why on earth would anyone live anywhere else because this is the most fabulous city in the world? 

Until you do. And you find another place that suits you. Which sounds like exactly what the Giants did.

Sorry this is so devoid of actual content....Read yesterday's post, it's longer, if you're fixin' for more reading material.

Happy Monday, everyone!

Dodgers...dodging...skiing...

Today I'm going to write about the Dodgers.

Well, kind of.

Actually, not really.

I'm going to relate them to something I would like to talk about -- my weekend. We went skiing in Vermont...with some friends of mine who used to live in L.A. [relation 1] They used to ski in Mammoth, but this weekend they skied in Vermont. With us. [relation 2] The mountain was pretty empty on Friday, but on Saturday it was crazy full, and we had to DODGE people all over the place. [relation 3] It was really sunny and warm this weekend, about 60 degrees, which is pretty much like L.A. [relation 4]

Relevance satisfied. Now for my story.

So we went to Vermont to ski. Brought the baby, left the big girl at home with her grandmother. This was our first time skiing since our honeymoon 10 years ago, and let's just say I'm not in nearly as good a shape as I was then. When we planned this trip, we knew that this had been a pretty warm winter, but typically March is a very snowy month in the Northeast, so we figured that between early February and mid-March, there would be a few wicked snowstorms.

We thought wrong.

There was a decent base, about 3 or 4 feet, but when it doesn't keep snowing and the weather is over 50 degrees, that base does not last long. So we participated in what skiers like to call "Spring Skiing", but I like to call "Suck".

Friday was okay, but my boot was all jacked up and by the time I took it off, I couldn't really touch my shin without yelping. I thought it would be fine by Saturday, but when I put the boot on and walked around the condo we had rented, I was kind of in tears. I sucked it up though and went outside. "Oh yeah, I can totally do this, I'm fine."

"Ski in, ski out" -- that was the whole point of staying there, right? Well, by the time I got over to the "ski out" portion, I could barely get my skis on because there was a crust on the snow that I could not penetrate. Turning was impossible, between the icy ground and the fact that whatever muscle/tendon thing is in the front of my shin had a huge lump on it and screamed with pain every time it touched my boot. I couldn't shift my weight forward; ergo, I could not ski. We paid $70 to ride the chair lift twice and take two icy crappy runs where I pretty much had to snowplow because I couldn't rotate my inside leg.

Lame. Literally and figuratively.

My remarkably considerate husband went to get the car so I didn't have to "ski in" back to the place we were staying...and because of the conditions he had to hike up the hill carrying his skis over the shoulder. He was a sweaty exhausted mess by the time he came to get me, so we just called it.

Now here's the good part - we showered and then went to a cute little Vermont town and bought whoopie pies and craft beers and THAT'S how we spent the rest of the sunny afternoon. And it was so warm we didn't even need our jackets.

That is what I like to call a "silver lining."

Also, through the magic of Facebook, a girl I knew in high school saw the picture I had posted during the weekend and commented, "Hey, is that Sugarbush behind you? Do you know I live two towns away?" So we stopped by her house on our way out of town and had a lovely afternoon visit -- I haven't seen her in 19 years. (MY GOD! That's like a whole PERSON!) Plus, she scored because I brought her all of the beers we hadn't finished. Win/win.

Essentially, I spent the entire weekend skiing a little, eating a lot (the aforementioned whoopie pies, fondue, cupcakes, bacon and eggs), drinking more beer than I've drank in the past year combined, and enjoying my dear friend's and my husband's company. Plus, on the way up we stopped at a place my husband saw on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives and I bought homemade Twinkies. They taste like regular Twinkies but minus the chemical aftertaste.

Turns out you don't even miss it.

See all the beautiful snow? No? Me neither. But that's a damn fine donut.