Weeping Meatloaf

I hate meatloaf. It's just never really impressed me in any way. But I was watching Good Eats with Alton Brown and he did a meatloaf that I thought looked really good. (Maggie calls the food shows "food porn" which never fails to crack me up.) The basic premise of Alton's meatloaf is that you don't cook it in the loaf pan - you turn it out on a cookie sheet so that you have more surface area for the yummy glaze. This seemed to make all kinds of sense to me and I think it is valid logic. The problem is that the REST of the recipe was kinda yucky. I have named this recipe Weeping Meatloaf (and I hope Mr. Brown doesn't sue me) for three reasons.

1. 1/2 onion and 1/2 a red bell pepper go into this thing. My eyes were just streaming tears.
2. When it finally came out of the oven, there was a pool of really nasty looking grease weeping out of it and pooling around the base. Not yummy.
3. Spending this much time, effort, money on new gadgets, and tears on this thing makes me cry even more.

Furthermore, I found the recipe to be annoying. I'm not the world's most precise cook - I usually just throw things together. But if I give a recipe to someone else, I try to figure out measurements that will be meaningful to the other person. Weeping Meatloaf calls for really imprecise things like 1/2 onion (size? color?), 1 carrot, 1/2 red bell pepper, 3 cloves garlic, dash of this, dash of that, etc. Not super helpful.

In any event, this thing wound up tasting like a big greasy baked vaguely loaf shaped lump of taco meat. Whoopee.

Here's the link in case you have to serve a meal to people you don't really like.

Weekly Winners 12.30.07

Idea, organization, and all-around coolness the brainchild of Lotus.

I'm so new to this. Please click pictures to view fuller. If you have any tips on how to put these on here in a more interesting way (MAGGIE HELP ME), please let me know.

LOLCAT

LOLKID

I'm really going to regret this at bedtime.

This is so naughty that it makes me want to hyperventilate.

I'm peenching ur head.

GASP for real

I think I just hyperventilated.

Really.

Dylan was vacuuming the living room (because of the styrofoam - pictures tomorrow) and Noah threw a sock at him. Dylan then accidentally vacuumed up the sock. This alone was funny but when you add in the look of horror and panic on Dylan's face when he saw the sock spinning around in the little collection basket thingy it became unbelievably freakin' hilarious. I started laughing....this gets so confused....I like blacked out for a second or two....and then my hands and face were all tingly....and my head felt like it was shaking back and forth but it actually wasn't.....then I felt all dizzy. A couple minutes later I felt perfectly fine.

Weird. Dylan says that kind of in the middle of laughing I took this huge, deep breath before the weirdness happened. Maybe I'm making too big a deal of this but it just felt so weird. I'm assuming I didn't do something really scary like have a quasi cerebral hemorrhage or a mini-stroke.

If you've ever hyperventilated (or had a quasi cerebral hemorrhage or mini-stroke) and any of this sounds familiar, please let me know. No more crazy laughing for me for a while. I think I'll be morose for the rest of the weekend. :-\

GASP

Just got my bill from the ambulance company. I'm really glad the billing department is not running the dispatch department - this accident happened two months ago. Here's the breakdown:

BLS Emergency - $369.36 I have no idea what "BLS" is. Maybe...."Blubbering Lug Slipped?" Does this charge differ based on emergency? Is this the "clumsy fool Aunt Bunny-ed down the steps" charge. (10,000 bonus points if you get the Aunt Bunny reference.) Is there a "moronic idiot with a power drill" emergency charge that costs more?

BLS Mileage - $9.17. The hospital is, at most, 3 miles from my house. I guess they're figuring about $3.00/gallon for gas?? Who knows?

Decontamination - $39.87. WTH???? No one sprayed me with Lysol or Clorox that I can remember. I know my basement steps needed to be vacuumed, but I don't think I needed to be decontaminated after touching them. Sheesh.

BLS Pers Care Supply - $20.48. Again, no clue. "Personal Care Supply"???? No one gave me Kleenex or wet wipes. Maybe this is for the gloves that the paramedic had to wear to protect herself from my contaminated filth.

BLS Disposable Sup - $0.00. Ok, no argument from me on this one. I'll pay it.

Pulse Ox Probe - $37.55. This is either that thing they stick on your finger to measure your blood oxygen or someone made a side trip to perform veterinary services on a farm animal and are trying to pass the charges off on me.

All I can say is I LOVE AFLAC. I submitted this bill to my AFLAC rep today and it takes less than a week (generally) to get a check from them. Quack quack. I'm sold on them for life.

Finally, some pictures!!

Happy Brothers
Perfect Christmas Portrait
Lying to Santa
That's way too much flash lady!
Bye bye ghetto camera

Tagged!

I'm such a newbie at this. I only learned what a meme was like a month or so ago. Well I have now been tagged so here it goes:

Name Game Meme

Tagged by: Lotus

Using the first letter of your name, answer these questions. They have to be real answers, nothing made up, and you can’t use your own name as an answer.

1. Famous singer: Tony Bennett

2. Four letter word: Tail

3. Street: Tenth

4. Color: Taupe

5. Gifts/presents: Tableware

6. Vehicle: Toyota

7. Things in a souvenir shop: T-shirts

8. Boy name: Tim

9. Girl name: Tina

10. Movie title: Tango & Cash

11. Drink: Tea

12. Occupation: Teacher

13. Celebrity: Tom Cruise

14. Magazine: Time

15. U.S. city: Tallahassee

16. Pro sports: Tennis

17. Fruit: Tangerine

18. Reason for being late for work: Taking a nap

19. Something you throw away: Trash

20. Something you shout: Tag me with a meme again and I'll kill you!!!

I’m tagging: Julie and Kathleen (I'm not sure how to link to a MySpace blog and she might not want me to anyway.) I'm tagging these two because 1. I'm a dork with not many blog friends and 2. J and K are going to be REALLY hard!! :)

Pictures this weekend - I swear!

Excuses, excuses, and love

Ok. I know I promised Christmas tree pictures. I'm a horrible tease. You certainly won't get them now because we are at my mom's. BUT!!!! I have something like an excuse. I have a cousin that has always been more like a niece to me. I love this girl with all my heart. She was very ill and I was beside myself with worry. I am thrilled to announce that she is now ok AND that I am a proud new great-"aunt" to her gorgeous little boy who was born yesterday. Woohoo! Mom and baby are doing well and I'm going to pester her mercilessly until she brings him home for a visit so that I can plant kisses all over him.

Further happy news - apparently someone heard/read my temper tantrum from a few days ago and magically dropped a $300+ insurance check in my mail. In the interest of good pictures (and, I'm sure, shutting me up), dear sweet hubby went out and bought me a fancy schmancy new digital camera. So I PROMISE that I will put up pictures (nice ones) before the end of the year.

I don't know that I'll post again before Christmas so......

To all the Chantix/Quit Smoking bloggers - I'm so glad we all gave ourselves such a wondeful present this year. Not only did we quit smoking, we also found some of the coolest, funniest, most honest, and most supportive people on-line.

To all the Mom Bloggers - I hope the little brats appreciate all the money we spent. Uh, I mean, I hope you and your families have a nice holiday. It's nice to know I'm not the only mommy quietly going nuts in front of my computer.

To all my other readers and blog friends - thank you for all the comments and gems that made me think, laugh, gasp, and roll my eyes.

Also thanks to everyone who left such nice comments about my knee injury and didn't once tell me to quit complaining, get over it, and learn to walk the dang stairs already.

Ok ok, I'm a jerk

LOL. The Thanksgiving pictures are, indeed, on the laptop. So most of that tantrum from yesterday was for no good reason at all. Of course now the tree pictures are downstairs on the PC. So I think what I'll do is give you a turkey picture and put up the tree pictures later tonight when I finally get downstairs.

Interruption. The doorbell just rang. I received something I ordered from Amazon. Also, someone sent me a package of really nice cheeses. Cheeses are as good as (maybe better than) hot chocolate for making me a happy camper. Thank you from the bottom of my heart cheese sender person.

Here's the turkey...I need to find some crackers and a knife:

Nice try though

Introduction.
So I was all set to be a better blogger. I was going to put up my Thanksgiving pictures, my decorating the tree pictures, and even offer to email any (weirdly) interested parties the pictures of my Franken-knee. I swear I was going to do all these things. But then it all just started to go downhill.

1. Ghetto camera.
I got my digital camera free when I bought my laptop. (Lucky for me or you'd still be looking at bad scans of crappy Polaroids.) Well at some point the digital camera got dropped and the spring loaded battery compartment door broke. This causes the batteries to be loose and the camera won't work. Normal people might buy a new camera. Not El Cheapo. I just slapped a rubberband around it and called it good (nevermind the fact that the rubberband doesn't really hold and I'm going through batteries like a....LOL....all my similes are nasty...forget it). So anyway, I sat down here with ghetto camera, the batteries are dead, and now I'm already cranky about the whole operation. (If you find "ghetto camera" to be racist in some way, just switch it to "rez camera" and back off.)

2. Idiot me.
After I FINALLY get ghetto camera working I realize that I deleted all the pictures from Thanksgiving without downloading them. Moron. Somehow I managed to do this without deleting the Franken-knee pictures. I'm not sure how this happened. But it was almost surely I who did it. Luckily my dad was also taking pictures at Thanksgiving, but those pictures are sitting 50 miles away on his computer instead of RIGHT HERE IN FRONT OF ME THIS INSTANT LIKE I WANT THEM TO BE!!!

Sorry. I didn't even do a tantrum alert.

3. Possible further idiot and most certainly lazy me.
There is a teeny tiny chance that the Thanksgiving pictures DID get downloaded and are, in fact, upstairs on the laptop. I have a Vicodin-hazy memory of Jeff downloading some pictures at my request. Why not go check? Because the laptop is upstairs and I am downstairs. Everyone remembers about me and stairs, right???? Furthermore, Jeff is gone, Noah is sleeping, and Dylan probably isn't speaking to me (for a whole host of other making-Tasina-cranky reasons). I am WAAAAAAY too chicken to try the stairs alone. Plucka-plucka. And I'm also WAAAAAY too pessimistic (at this point) to believe that dragging my lame ass up there will result in there actually being pictures on the laptop. I think that they WILL NOT be there and I will just be more mad....and having to navigate the stairs again.

In conclusion.
I'm very sorry that you came here to my blog expecting maybe a pleasant little snippet or (how hopeful of you) maybe even some pictures and INSTEAD got me having a tantrum and being kind of a brat.

P.S. At least I'm not smoking. That's good.

P.P.S. Remember a couple of posts ago when I was so happy that the $40 monthly smoker fee is coming off my insurance? We found out today that Jeff's insurance (which covers him and the boys) is going up $40 a month. :-/

P.P.P.S. I promise to try very hard to NOT be like this tomorrow.

P.P.P.P.S. Maybe.

P.P.P.P.P.S. What I really need is some hot chocolate. But that's upstairs too. :(

For the mice

Julie thought that maybe glow in the dark cats would be good for mice. But according to this article, I think the mice are going to be just fine.

I was kind of gently reminded that I have been a bad blogger lately. Sorry. I guess NaBloPoMo wore me out.

I have been back to work. I still have some swelling in the evenings, but I'm not using the evil evil cryo cuff anymore. No thanks. I also am having a really weird pain that is very hard to describe, but I'll give it a try. OK - this surgery cannot avoid some amount of nerve damage to the front of the leg. So from right below my knee to my ankle I have numb spots. They are very superficial - it's just the skin that's numb....I can feel pressure. Well anyway, I get this shooting, burning pain that goes up and down the front of my leg. It's pretty bad. Have you ever gotten your hands or your feet REALLY cold? Like just-this-side-of-frostbite cold? And then when you start to warm back up it's unbearably painful? That's what this feels like. It seems to happen only at night. I don't know if it's because I'm in a physically different position (lying down or whatever) or because of the stress on the leg during the day. It's really not fun. Also, today was the last day of the crutches. I have been trying to hobble around the house for the past couple of nights. It's very scary. The whole leg is very weak because it hasn't been used. It's almost like I've forgotten how to walk - I can't remember how to make the motion....I feel like I look stupid too. *sigh*

Sorry - I didn't mean to go off on a long pout. It just seems very weird to me to not have any pain at all in either the area of the original injury or the hamstring (from where the new ligament was harvested). I get a little tiny bit sore in the middle of the knee....but not horrible pain like this nerve thing.

Ok - Jeff just brought me a mug of hot chocolate. I am a happy camper now. Leg schmeg. I have warm chocolate liquid and marshmallows. Woo hoo!!

So many kinds of wrong

Glow-in-the-dark cloned cats (not Kats).

What a horrible thing to do to living creatures. I'm not 100% against cloning - I think there could be real medical reasons to do it. But to make a designer glow-in-the-dark kitty????? No.

We're moving

Cougars. 'Nuff said.

(Ok, Deadwood is a couple hundred miles from here - but it's a SMALL STATE!)

Weekly Non-participant

I see a bunch of my blog friends have been doing something called Weekly Winners. They pick their favorite photos from the last week and post them. It's been neat looking at all the pictures. I go through cycles with my picture taking. Sometimes the camera is glued to my head for weeks on end and at other times I just can't seem to remember to take pictures. Somewhere in the middle is where I am now. I've only been taking pictures of "big" occasions - Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc. Then it takes me forever to remember to get the pics off the camera. (Hey - part of that is due to the injury. All the camera software is on the PC which is downstairs. I've been blogging and doing almost everything from the laptop since the big fall. Furthermore, there are only so many good pictures that one can take from the couch - I've been sitting in this spot for a month and am completely sick of it and the view.) Anyway, I've really been enjoying all your photos and maybe will join the game.....sometime.

We're going to put up the tree today. That's picture worthy. I love having the Christmas tree up. It's a pain in the butt with the cats and world's tiniest living room, but it still looks so pretty. It will help the view from the couch immensely!

Noah and I were eating baby carrots yesterday and talking about what different animals eat. Here was his contribution:

"Blueberry dogs eat blueberries and they live in a blueberry world."

Maybe not exactly true, but it makes a wonderful mental image.

Four Months!!!

Four months smoke free is a very important marker for me. After being smoke-free for four months, I get to remove the smoker penalty from my health insurance. I am now saving an extra $40/month on top of the other savings from quitting. Yippee!!

Random

Got the staples out today. Didn't get a chance to save one for Noah. I did, however, get a set of pictures of the inside of my knee. I'm thinking about using the images for our holiday cards this year. They don't really look like anything. I found myself politely nodding at what the doctor was showing me just like you do when someone tries to point things out on an ultrasound picture. I thought about posting the pictures up here, but that seems really grisly.

So I did finish "The Time Traveler's Wife." It was pretty good. A keeper. One I'll likely read again. There are still some free will issues that bother me. I just don't think the wife had many options but to marry the guy. It borders on creepy that he seemed to kind of groom her to be his wife. It got me on a line of thought that could lead to crazy-ville. There seems to be a certain percentage of life that is governed purely by randomness. No matter how many plans you make or how careful you are or what you do, things will happen to you just because. Like....falling down the steps or whatever. How much of the rest of my life is changed because of what happened on those steps? What would be different right this instance if it had never happened? Or....what if Noah was a girl? Would something more fundamental than my floor being covered with Barbies rather than Hot Wheels happen? Or that horrible mall shooting on the news today. Things like that really drive me nuts. What if one of those people decided to go shopping yesterday instead of today? I really can't let myself go down these paths very far. I have to believe that the percentage of our lives that are ruled by chaos is so tiny that the chance of major changes is very small. Maybe that's being completely naive, but if life were HUGELY random, then what would ultimately be the point of planning anything?

There was one other part of the book that bothered me. One of the characters voices the opinion that adopting a child is "cheating" and that they must have a "real" child. The character who says this is otherwise an appealing character - it's not a "bad" character who says/does other "bad" things. I find that viewpoint to be really offensive. Certainly adoption isn't for everyone, but why paint it in such an unflattering light? That attitude makes it seem like the love that adoptive families feel for each other is also not "real" and that it's just a sad substitute for a "real" family. I would hope the author didn't intend to come across this way, but she did.

Swell Time

I tried to go back to work today. By 2:30 my knee had completely ballooned up and hurt like a....thing that hurts bad. I was not a happy camper. I had to come home and elevate it and put the evil cryo cuff back on. I've had many jobs I didn't really like and taken classes that were mind-numbingly boring and would have PAID for a reason to stay home at those times. So now when I have a job I do like, people I like to work with, a ton of stuff to do....of course this happens. I was able to do some stuff from home. It's just frustrating. I even called my mom and had a tantrum over the phone. Bleh.

I have to see the surgeon tomorrow. I wonder if he's going to take out the staples. I have 14 staples covering 3 incisions. Noah has been wildly curious about the staples. He first wanted to know if they hurt (they don't). He then wanted to know if I would have them forever (I'd better not). When I told him that the doctor would take them out he wanted to know if THAT would hurt (I don't think so) and if it would bleed (maybe). I was worried that he would find my leg scary or upsetting - but he's cool with it all. He's mostly curious. I almost wish I could take him with me when I get them out. Is that creepy? (Kat???) Maybe I'll save one for him.

I'm reading a very strange book called "The Time Traveler's Wife." I think I like it. I really like the idea of time travel. This book is kind of messing me up though. The wife of the title meets her husband when she's 6 and he's....I don't know...way older. She keeps meeting him throughout her childhood/teen years. Then they "really" meet when she's 20 and he's 28. But as he gets older he goes back to visit her when she's younger. Ok. Well he would not have done that in the future if he had not met her and married her at 28 right? But SHE would not have loved and married him at 20 if she had not known and loved him since she was 6. Right? I don't know. I'm not sure that it matters ultimately. One thing I do like about the book is that it's about people my age in my time. Does that make sense? The wife character was born in 1971 and grows up liking the same music and movies as me. While there are tons of books in many time periods that I love, it's kind of nice to read something truly contemporary once in a while. Maybe reading "older" books is the only way we ever time travel. Who are we and where are we when we read those?

Quite Possibly the Dumbest Thing I've Ever Read

There are lots and lots of good reasons to try to make a marriage work. There are also many understandable reasons to leave a marriage. People have their own reasons for doing whatever they do. But I honestly cannot imagine a scenario that would go something like this:

"Honey, I'm leaving you - it's over."

"You can't leave me."

"Why not?"

"Because it's bad for the planet."

Give me a break. This makes me want to burn tires again.

Also - I saw that tortoise and hare Chantix commercial tonight. I know it's not the same guy, but the narrator sounds just like the guy from those old 7Up commercials. I kept expecting to hear, "Nevah had it, nevah will."

Stew

Here's a beef stew I made up. I read through a lot of different beef stew recipes and this is my version.

Ingredients

olive oil
beef stew meat
2/3 cup flour
salt & pepper to taste
2 cans beef broth
1 can Italian style diced tomatoes
1 bay leaf
1/2 cup red wine
1 tsp thyme
yellow onion (I just cut off a side and put it in like that - didn't dice)
2 cloves garlic
1/3 cup diced portobella mushrooms
1 package frozen mixed vegetables (corn, carrots, green beans)
1/2 box rotini

Directions

Heat olive oil in large skillet.
Combine flour, salt, and pepper in a baggie.
Dredge stew meat in flour mixture.
Lightly brown meat in batches.
Remove meat to crock pot/slow cooker.
After all meat is browned, slowly add 1 can beef broth to skillet to make a roux (make sure to scrape up all yummy brown bits), then dump into crock with other can of beef broth.
Add diced tomatoes, red wine, bay leaf, thyme, onion and garlic.
Cook on high for 4 1/2 hours.
45 minutes before serving, add frozen veggies, mushrooms, and rotini.
Continue cooking on high until noodles are tender.
Serve with crusty bread.

This turned out really good. Perfect for a snowy winter day. I might make some changes next time though. I prefer to use beef stock for things like this - broth has so much salt. I might also try different mixed vegetables - maybe carrot/broccoli/cauliflower/water chestnut. Colorful noodles might be fun too - or maybe egg noodles. One nice thing about recipes like this is that you can add/remove things as you like.

P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that Jeff actually *made* this - but I made it up and walked him through it. But now he knows how to do and can from now on!!!

Big Dork

Ok - maybe every 13 year old kid in the country knows how to do this, but ** I ** just figured out how to get videos off my phone and on to YouTube. I was going to subject everyone to a little clip of my stitches and gigantic disgusting bruising, but I figured this was WAY cuter.

Snow

We're getting our first snowfall today. It looks really pretty from my perch on the couch. I'm not looking forward to dancing around in it with my crutches, but I'll just have to make do. Actually, by the time I go anywhere on Monday this will probably all be gone. Jeff took Dylan out for his first drive in snow. That's upsetting. I can just HEAR the gray hairs springing out of my head. I guess he did ok - I don't really want to know. We're supposed to get 3 to 5 inches. The first snow is always kind of scary. You have to remember how to drive in it and walk on it and all that. The summer makes it easy to forget.

I was supposed to wait until Monday to take a shower, but I couldn't stand it anymore. My hair felt like it had been dipped in Crisco. I didn't get my incisions wet so I think I'm ok. I think I needed the psychological boost of being clean and dressed and sitting up. Stewing in my own stink was just making me depressed. I feel way better now.

The pain is not nearly as bad as yesterday. In fact, I haven't taken a pill of any kind at all today. It only hurts if I put any pressure on it. It's really hard to explain. And it doesn't hurt anywhere near the knee itself - but down by my ankle. I know that doesn't make any sense - but I think that's where the nerve endings come back to life. My harvested hamstring is a little sore too.

A friend of mine who I know reads this blog from time to time is getting married today. I really wanted to be there for it, but there's just no way.

S - He's a lucky guy and I wish you all the happiness in the world!!!