Jul
25
The spoon of moo, and other assortments
Filed Under Uncategorized | 92 Comments
July 25, 2006
Bowls? Really? Bowls?
You guys should have told me how strongly you felt about bowls. God, here I’ve been going on and on about babies and ill-fitting jeans and lube and dog fur and getting all kinds of weird search engine referrals for things I swear I did not write (today’s freaky google hit as of 3 hours ago: “I wanna fuck my pregnant sister in law”; on a whim I just searched for that myself and would you believe the first hits are not porn related at all, but rather posts by, respectively, Julie, Julia, Amalah, and Jen? My personal blogosphere is taking over the entire internet, which is both awesome and faintly disturbing) when all along I should have been talking about BOWLS.
Like this one!
It’s enormously huge and I use it for eating vats of pho.
And this one!
It’s eentsy-weentsy and I use it for feeding Riley, or as a dipping bowl for soy sauce and wasabi, or for pretending I’m being dainty while devouring multiple servings of something super fattening.
Don’t forget my fanciest, most attractive-yet-spectacularly-utilitarian container of all!
Oh yeah. I totally eat out of plastic beer cups sometimes. None of this fussbudget Goldilocks too-shallow too-opaque too-candy-dish-70s servingware namby-pambiness for me, dammit, I’ll take a feedbag if you’ve got one.
I used to think JB was weird, not only for his distaste for our green glass bowls (you know…the UGLY ONES?) but also for his behavior regarding the larger of our two spoon sizes, which he refers to as “cow spoons” because they are tooooo big.
“I don’t want a cow spoon,” he’ll say, staring in dismay at the utensil, which is a perfectly normal sized spoon, a “place spoon” I believe, versus the smaller teaspoon sized spoon. It actually affects his eating experience in a negative way. A SPOON that is not misshapen, not a SPORK, not ugly or covered in spikes or dripping with antifreeze, but this exact spoon:
…instead of the preferred spoon, the superior spoon, the non-cow-spoon:
(See the difference? Oh, you don’t? Because it’s, like, MICROSCOPIC?)
Anyway, now I’m guessing that there are many of you who would wholeheartedly agree that the size difference would fuck up your entire meal and turn the creme brulée to ashes – yea, ashes! – in your mouth.
I’d call you freaks, but I guess we all have our own special issues: for instance, I can’t be separated from a tube of Burt’s Bees for more than twenty minutes without clawing at my mouth and screaming. Live and let live, I say. But if you come for dinner, do let me know if the COW SPOON bothers you.
:::
In other news, the last bugaboo of the remodel work is coming together this week. Behold, tile! Which we decided not to do ourselves, because while we may be picky about lip balm and glass bowls, we are not, as it turns out, completely batshit insane.
Jul
23
July 23, 2006
It has been hot, here in Seattle. To us Pacific Northwesterners who often must don fleece coats and rain hats on the fourth of July, the temperatures have been hot. Africa-hot. Thank-god-we-got-air-conditioning-three-weeks-ago hot. Let’s-freeze-root-beer-in-ice-cubes hot.
(Root Cubes! Add to massive serving of ice cream for optimal flavor.)
I bought this awful kiddie pool a while back, it took so much effort to inflate its various parts I completely gave up on it and so for the last few weeks we’ve had this deflated hunk of plastic in the backyard that JB loved to make fun of. But this weekend I redeemed myself by scissoring off the entire top “canopy” section, which left a perfectly decent pool base. When Saturday got muggy beyond all reason, we put Riley in:
He was definitely a fan. Sadly, Dog had to be sequestered inside the house while the pool contained water, so badly did she want to splash and dig and rip it to pieces with her claws.
Today we made our first foray to a local beach. We’d lived here for what, four years now? And we’ve never gone to a beach to go swimming. I didn’t even think Lake Washington was swimmable, honestly. I thought people who actually got in the water and swam were wearing wetsuits, or were drunk, or had a seven-inch protective layer of blubber, or something.
I guess my own blubber finally worked in my favor today because that water felt amazing. It was just a knockout day, sunny and blue-skied and the lake sparkled and even the proximity of the I-90 overpass was sort of nice. We took Riley in the water and he went nuts, splashing and kicking and generally having a ball.
(Once again the photogenic mother-child moment escapes me.)
Man. Summer, you know? It goes by way too fast, every year.
This was a crazy weekend in terms of keeping Riley out of various dangers, I wrote about his current stage here, but suffice to say the boy is constantly moving, curious, pulling himself up on various things, and turning me into a nervous wreck.
A rare moment of sitting still.
Peeking at me from behind the sofa.
On a final note, I’d like to ask you something. Actually, let me show you something first:
Now let me recall for you a recent conversation I had with JB.
JB: I don’t like eating cereal out of these green bowls.
Me: Why?
JB: They’re too…fancy.
Me: I got them at Target for like three dollars. What do you mean, fancy.
JB: They’re too – I end up eating too much cereal when I use them.
Me: So put less cereal in.
JB: They’re just weird.
Me: They’re nicer than our plain white bowls, I think.
JB: I think most people would agree with me.
Me: That they’re…weird?
JB: Ask your journal readers.
Me: Fine.
JB (as an afterthought): But make sure to ask the guys.
W the proverbial F? Are the green glass bowls weird? Do you fear them? Would you be hesitant to fill one with cereal? If you’re a guy, does the white bowl reinforce your manhood in some inexplicable manner?
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