Norm Covers Jay-Z and Reader's Wives, Birthday Brunch and the Boston Flower Show

This weekend I joined my roommates and one of their mothers in a visit to the Boston Flower Show at the World Trade Center. Pictures of that soon. There we ate nuts, bought butterflies in boxes and squeezed through big crowds of mostly middle aged and older women to see landscape exhibitions and prize winning flower arrangements. It was awesome.



This is my dear friend Normie, getting his performing on:




Sunday we hosted a brunch to celebrate Emily and Veronica's March birthdays. I totally failed in the photo-taking department but highlights included bloody marys, deep fried eggs, tater tots, burnt sugar cupcakes, carrot-apple-ginger juice mimosas, homemade pizza and lots of deviled eggs. Mmm mmm.

Who's really progressive?

Interesting ideas on progressives divesting from the Democratic Party courtesy of my friend Tyler Zimmer in his blog post "Kucinich Sucks." Look for it on Pink Scare, in the list of blogs on the right. (My blog isn't letting me make hyperlinks anymore...sad face.)

...and then the most amazing thing(s) happened

I haven't blogged in forever and there is A LOT to catch up on. I'll try to be as brief as possible for, as it is written in Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, "vigorous writing is concise."

1. Congress passed the health care reform bill! F-ing Finally! Details here.

2. My five year quest to find out what's wrong with me and finally get well might finally be over. I learned today that I have Lyme Disease, four associated infections and dysfunctional ligaments in my neck, similar to what someone with whiplash might have. I also learned that all of these can be drastically improved or eliminated with less than six weeks of treatment. Score! Knowing that I might not have to feel like I'm 80 years old up until the day I turn 80 is a pretty amazing feeling for me. In addition to all the muscular pain, I've recently had a lot of fevers and an intense earache. I'll be really excited when that's gone. Try making someone a large cappuccino when it feels like your head is exploding out of your ears. I'm pretty sure I'd rather go to a Creed concert.

3. I found the neat blog of a woman named Heidi who writes about the intersection of her own food, travel and other things she likes. She started it after realizing she had 100 cookbooks and never really used them so she has put them to use and takes a lot of pretty pictures of the results. She is also vegetarian and a lot more chic than moi. I can't seem to link it to my blog but it's called "101 Cookbooks." Google it.

4. Saturday, with a little help from Wyatt, I tore my garden apart in preparation for the growing season. I'm looking at growing zucchini, cukes, peas, collards, radishes, beets, tomatoes, squash, salad greens and a few other treasures. We currently have some striped zinnia sprouts in the kitchen.

Babies in the kitchen:

An aerial view of the front yard: This is roughly three times the size of last year's growing operation. The cinder block square is a (ghetto) raised bed filled with compost from the backyard. Go Team Compost on the second floor! The white things in the other beds are milk jugs. Since we don't have a hose, the milk jugs will serve as irrigation systems. With holes punched in them, they will help deliver water under and around the different plants. One of our neighbors reportedly told Eleanor it looked like we were growing milk. From the street, it really does.

Many thanks to my Ula coworkers for helping me save all the jugs. I have a few more that I'll be using to germinate 'maters and other goodies as soon as I get some more soil.

5. Album of the week is Lou Reed's Coney Island Baby. Side A to B, that album's a gem. Listen to "Crazy Feeling."

Dreaming of Heat Waves

You know you could use a bigger paycheck when you're going on a trip to see your mom and after seeing your mom, you're most excited about eating in a restaurant. It doesn't even matter what kind of restaurant because at this point, anything that isn't lentils or that hasn't come out of your own frying pan, is pretty damn exciting. And by "you" I'm clearly speaking about myself. What I have learned, is that being less than privileged makes you more creative. It gets you asking questions you might have never asked otherwise: who do I know with a wheelbarrow? how many times can I reuse a teabag and still get some caffeine out of it? would my neighbors think I'm weird if I ask to borrow toilet paper? eating refried beans cold out of the can isn't weird, right?

But seriously, I'm thinking of starting a thread in my blog about how penny pinching is making me smarter, like a lab rat in a new maze. My latest learning curve has come with needing to warm myself.

It's now the middle of March and we're at less than a quarter tank of heating oil. Filling up the tank can run $700, just to give you southerners some perspective. Rather than pay for more for the apartment, we're trying to forgo heat for the rest of the season. My roommates are a little luckier than I in that a) they aren't here all that much and b) their rooms don't have unlockable, uninsulated doors to the outside (my room has a porch- which is totally rad when Boston is sunny and warm, three days a year). To be clear, I don't want to shell out money for oil any more than anyone else does so I've been trying to come up with innovative ways to deal with the drafty situation.

First, I commandeered a space heater from the third floor. This worked very well for a couple weeks, until my housemmates came back to town and reclaimed it, and Emily caught an increase in our electric bill- foiled! Next, I tried sleeping with even more clothing, an extra blanket, socks and a hat. That was okay but my nose was cold and I shivered until I fell asleep. This week I hit the jack pot. Remembering an instrument I saw at Colonial Williamsburg that used hot coals to warm the beds of pasty patricians (shown below), I put an electric heating pad ($10 at CVS) in my bed 10 min before I planned to get in it.


By the time I brushed my teeth and washed my face my bed was toasty. The nice thing about the heating pad is you can snuggle with it for a little while and move it around sore spots of your body to relax your muscles before you fall asleep. No money for heat or a massage therapist? No problem. Get a heating pad.

Finally!

Google has finally put a bicycling option on GoogleMaps! It's in Beta- you can tell because it doesn't recommend using the JP bike path to get downtown- but still, it's a step in the right direction.