Pig Eye Balls and Other Parts (a hot dog story)

I've always told my (own) kids not to eat hot dogs because they have pig eye balls in them. I don't really remember where I heard, saw, or read that little bit of information, but it's not important. What's important is that hot dogs do not look like dead animal flesh the way meat should.

Yeah, yeah, I know everyone tells me there are good quality hot dogs out there that look exactly the way a dead pig should look. I'm sure they're probably right. Who the heck knows? I thought the whole point of hot dogs was to give your kid something disgusting yet cheap to eat and to fulfill some sort of requirement at baseball games.

But all that is beside the point. The point is, here's a story about a pretend six year old we'll call Joe who may or may not have been a member of a classroom next door to mine.

Joe's one of those kids that every teacher in the school knows by name because, you know the kid: you don't stop hearing his name. All day long.

His teacher is afraid he's going to bring one of his family's guns to school wreak havoc one day, but aside from that he's basically a sweet kid. Just, y'know, not so much cut out for the dog eat dog world that is public school (No pun intended. OKAY!!!! Pun totally intended!!!!!! What can I say.).

One day I was at the head of my line of first graders and he was at the end of the line in the class directly ahead of mine. I hear him say to the girl just in front of him, "Amanda! Do you know what's in hot dogs?" She shook her head no and he whispered something into her ear.

Curious to know if his information confirmed or refuted my pig eyeball claims, I slowed my line of children until there was a big gap in between Joe's line and my class. I stepped ahead into the gap and called him back so that we could have the following discussion fairly privately:

Me - "Joe! What's in hot dogs?"
Joe - "Huh?"
Me - "You just told Amanda something about hot dogs. What IS in hot dogs?"
Joe - (confidently) Pig anuses. There's pig anuses in hot dogs.
Joe - (looking up at me quizzically, squinting) Aren't there?
Me - I don't know. What do you think?
Joe - (again confident) There are.
Me - (shrugs) Go ahead & catch up with your class.

I-Tunes Hates John Egan

(not to be confused with John Treacy Egan that I-tunes would apparently prefer that I listen to). That has nothing to do with anything. I just thought I'd take a lesson from Alf and use a total nonsequitor for a blog post title.

In other news, I think I need to make a Sporadic Blogger Award:Except, I'm not sure who I'd give it to because I think I'm the most sporadic blogger I know. It's just that blog posts don't normally occur to me so much as they ambush me and demand to be posted. And, well...I wasn't attacked by a blog post this week.

But none of that is the point. The point is, I've had complaints about the length of the name "The-Guy-Who-Knows-A-Song-About-A-Chicken." And truth be told, it IS slow to type. In fact, several of the complaints came directly from my own fingers. So, unless I get a negative response from the guy himself, I'm changing his name to Razor. Razor is what my friend Laurie calls him anyway for reasons that fall into the category I just made up called "Things That Make Sense Only To Laurie".Yes, that's her. I first realized the need for this category when Laurie was telling me a story I can no longer remember except for this part: "While I was raiding their refrigerator because (pause) well...because...that's what I do..." For just a moment during the pause, I half expected to hear a logical explanation for why she would be raiding a refrigerator. But I quickly realized the reason was "because I was being myself..."

At any rate I seem to have made a few scattered points:
-My life is not as exciting as one might hope based on my absence from blogging
-Then again it's not boring either, because I'm going to see STEVE EARLE tonight!!! (not that I'm excited or anything)
-The guy is now called Razor
-Itunes might or night not also hate Hayes Carll. Oh wait, I didn't make that point. But I should have, because I love to talk about Hayes Carll. Also, I-tunes might even hate him because his "She Left Me For Jesus" caused some kind of stink amongst those who don't like their humor flavored with a little blasphemy.

I can't find my brain

or my checkbook. I'm not sure which is stressing me out more at this moment...Although I'm pretty sure my checkbook's around somewhere because as of yet no one's tried to write a check against the $3.72 I have in my account. I'm not quite as optimistic about my brain...

I'm posting my daughter's version of the Passover story again. This is how she told it to me when she was three:

The king was very bad. He wanted to take away all the baby boys. But baby Moses’s mommy didn’t want him to be taken away. She put him in a basket and took him to an ocean and put him in. Another person found him.

Then the burning plant was God. God told Moses, “Here. Have a stick.”

My brother has a similar version, told to me when he was 36:

Slavery - BAD!

Freedom - GOOD!

Thanks God!

Wooohoooo! Let's eat!!!!!

I'm missing how one fits four cups of wine into all that, but I'm know its in there somewhere...

On a totally unrelated note, The-Guy-Who-Knows-a-Song-About-a-Chicken said there's a good chance they just put these signs up solely for my amusement. Let's hope so. I'd hate to think I've been guzzling calories all these years by drinking plain old tap water. If so, not to worry. Walgreens sells water without all those pesky calories:Meanwhile, it's a lucky thing Mike has this sign hanging up in Fioza. Otherwise, the coffee, tea, and smoothies would all be made from sewage water I'm pretty sure.I'm KIDDING!!!! Mike would NEVER EVER serve sewage water at his shop. It's just, he explained, that his mom likes little signs everywhere. Either that, or he just put the sign up to amuse me.
Happy Passover!

Just Call Me Martha

Or Rachele Ray or whoever the heck's job it is these days to make scatterbrained moms like me feel hopelessly inadequate. At any rate, I have big news: I actually do know how to cook!

No really, stop laughing. Dinner at my house is not always thrown together at the last minute. I even belonged to a veggie co-op for awhile. For some odd reason, I even took a picture of my kids’ dinner one night for something or another that I never did post to my blog:Who the heck knows what that white stuff is over to the left. I took the picture a year ago fer’ cryin’ out loud. But that’s not the point. The point is, I know how to cook AND more than one someone wanted the recipe for a Passover dessert I make.

The goal of Passover, as I understand it, is to cook as many things as possible using absolutely no ingredients. Failing that, the goal is to cook as many things as possible using absolutely no ingredients except matzah (matzah being flour and water baked into a “board” within I think it is 18 minutes).

Actually, depending on what that white stuff is on the plate in the picture, that meal might actually be ok for Passover. Except, there’s probably a rule against green beans. And if there’s not, there’s at least got to be a rule against disturbing looking Chinese green beans.

So, to make a short story long, here is a recipe for chocolate covered matzah. It really is delicious the way most anything that’s covered in chocolate is:

3-4 boards of matzah
¾ cup butter
12 ounces of GOOD chocolate chips*
1 cup brown sugar

*The recipe actually calls for 10-12 ounces, but I say the more the better and even put in more than 12 ounces sometimes.

Melt the butter with sugar. The recipe says to boil for 3-4 minutes, but I do less, probably only 2 minutes.

Put one layer of matzah onto a greased cookie sheet.

Pour sugar mix over the matzah, even out and heat for a few minutes in the oven. The recipe says 15 minutes, but I never do more than maybe five at most. I just like it a little softer.

The recipe and I have another argument here: recipe says put the chocolate chips on and wait for them to melt. I always have to put it back into the oven for a moment or two. Maybe it’s because I never let it cook for the full 15 minutes in the previous step. Whatever. Mine is yummy.

Spread the melted chocolate chips evenly.

Refrigerate until cold. Break into pieces.

Eat before anyone else notices there’s chocolate in the house.

Unless They're Banging Themselves Up...

they're just NOT happy! My boy's formerly gushing head wound that required 24 stitches back in January now looks like this:
Except when I poke him in the eye while trying to take the picture. Then it looks like this:Not bad, right? He doesn't like the scar medicine and thinks he looks like Harry Potter without it. The-Guy-Who-Knows-A-Song-About-A-Chicken's 20 year old daughter says girls don't go for scars, but a waiter assured him, "My girlfriend. She always kisses me there." while pointing at the remnants of his own elementary school gash. I guess we'll know when he hits teenagerhood.

In any case, my gal didn't want the local emergency rooms getting lonely for us. She went ahead and tripped and fell in her room, so that now her foot looks like this:AGAIN! If I were more organized, I'd show you a picture of that same foot in a similar costume, except the cast would be pink. But I'm not that organized and I can't find the picture.

When the xrays came back, the doctor said she was going to treat it like a fracture on the growth plate. The nurse, in not so many words, said the doctor was full of baloney.

The doctor said she was going to put on a cast and Cassie could pick the color. But the nurse beat the doctor to the punch and put on a splint. The doctor came back into the room ready to put on the cast but explained that it wasn't actually worth removing the splint.

It's a hard splint that the nurse had to wet, causing a chemical reaction so that the material would harden around her foot. Except for the fact that the splint is softer on the outside than the cast, the only difference I can tell between the cast and the splint is that on a cast she would have been able to walk. But...y'know...who wants to be able to walk?

Oh wait! I know who!!!! A middle schooler!!!! There may be less pleasant people wandering the earth than an injured middle school student who has to hobble on uncomfortable crutches, but I'm not sure who.

Oh wait! I know who AGAIN!!!! It's the MOTHER of an injured middle school student who has to hobble around on crutches!!!!!

His Salt Shakers Have NO SHAME I Tell 'Ya!!!!!!!!

As if both of us being capable of enjoying chicken songs weren't enough, it just so happens that The-Guy-Who-Knows-A-Song-About-A-Chicken has the same exact salt and pepper shakers that I used to have! His are way more animated than mine ever were though.

Look, here his are standing around looking surprised as salt shakers are apt to do. Mine did that. It's fairly common in the salt shaker community:These guys come from the MoMA. They hug and look adorable on your counter and stuff. Mine hugged a lot on the counter just like his:This morning though, I noticed that The-Guy-Who-Knows-A-Song-About-A-Chicken's salt shaker had PUKED on his pepper shaker!I never, EVER noticed my salt shakers puking on each other, and if they did, they certainly cleaned up the evidence before I woke up!

As if that weren't indecent enough, The-Guy-Who-Knows-A-Song-About-A-Chicken and the salt shakers apparently had some fun while I wasn't looking, so that I was surprised to find these pictures in my email:I would like to assure you that most salt shakers are much more modest and would never find find themselves with pictures published on the internet of themselves in compromising positions. I would like too, but the truth of the matter is that I have limited experience when it comes to the morals and values of salt and pepper shakers.

I might recommend having a little chat with ALL your kitchen utensils and make sure they are aware of dangers of their indiscretions being exposed on the internet this way. In fact, I believe these very salt and pepper shakers had aspirations of shaking salt and pepper in the White House, but alas their chances are probably ruined.

Gone Batty

I took a hiatus, Ricardo style. Except, unlike Ricardo I never know when my little breaks from blogging will be. It's more like "My internet went out during conference time before I got done unpacking from being out of town and by the time it came back I was being pecked to death by chickens!" rather than Ricardo's planned, refreshing absences.

In any case, one of the results of my hiatus is I'm moving to Austin! Okay, I only WISH I were moving to Austin. Because, as The-Guy-Who-Knows-A-Song-About-A-Chicken put it, there I discovered heaven on Earth, otherwise known as Sixth Street.

Sixth Street is a lot like that other heaven on Earth, Provincetown on Cape Cod. Except Sixth Street noticeably lacks a beach and transvestite karaoke which are big draws in my book. I’m sure it has better weather though, and that must count for something. While my girl was at the bat mitzvah that brought us to town, we had to make sure my boy was properly educated. It turns out that there's more to Austin than Sixth Street.

We saw America's largest urban bat colony fly out of the Congress Street Bridge. It happens that I sort of figured out how to do video on my camera! There are way better videos on utube, but I was so impressed with myself for not only figuring out how to take the video, but also figuring out how to post it that I had to use my own:

Of course we had to see the capital building:
And last but not least, The-Guy-That-Knows-A-Song-About-A-Chicken showed my boy how to blow up peeps in the microwave, a skill highly in demand the week after Easter when Peeps are on sale for 12 cents a package:I'm sure there's a career for him somewhere in the Peep destruction field. After all, it seemed like there were enough leftovers in the stores for them to take over the country if we take our eyes off them for even a second.

Here's my sweet pea showing off her new haircut too: