Partial to the bean…

Just like that, summer is over. The weather turned last week, while we were on our trip (about which I have not yet blogged…), and now it just feels like fall. The air got all crispy.

School starts in a week for us. (The public school kids started yesterday.) We’re more or less pleased about the return to routine, and to daily social contact. Our start-of-year conferences are on Thursday, after which we will have a better picture of what the year is going to be like. Alice is excited about starting high school, and also a little freaked out about the fact that high school leads inevitably to things like driver’s licenses and SATs and college and adulthood and, one supposes, death and the abyss.

We had a pretty good summer break. We had an earthquake, we had a hurricane. We hit the beach, we saw the mountains (about which I have not yet blogged…), we had some adventures.

We only went to the pool $98-worth, which means I wasted $177 of pool-pass money, which is Not Cool. I’m not buying pool passes any more — next year we’ll just pay as we go, if we go at all. I always have fantasies at the beginning of summer break of us hanging out at the pool for lazy days on end, but the reality is that the chlorine makes everyone’s hair unhappy, the girls are different enough in their needs and play preferences that I end up grouchy and wanting to leave after 45 minutes because they’re driving me crazy by bickering or pulling me apart, we’re too introverted to go on a weekend because it’s too crowded, and we’re so fussy about “perfect pool” weather that we really only end up going swimming a handful of times each year. So no more wasted money. No more pool passes.

In other money-related news, my computer (which I off-handedly mentioned was getting a bit dodgy) now freezes for 10-12 seconds every 20-25 seconds, which makes getting much of anything done quite the rhythmic exercise: Type type type pause… Type type type pause… I need a new one, but money (after two small vacations, two pairs of glasses, and a spur-of-the-moment mortgage refi where they wanted $900 worth of fees upfront) is so unbelievably tight, y’all. So I’m just enduring for now. It could be worse, I know, so I can’t really complain, really, much.

Continuing to bookmark recipes I want to make “one of these days” when I’ve already got hundreds of bookmarks for recipes I want to make “one of these days” is either an inspiring testament to hope, or a strong indicator of mental insufficiency.

We had a wild and windy Saturday night, and none of us slept very well. The power went off around 9 p.m. on Saturday and came on again around 8 p.m. last night, thank goodness, so all of our freezer stuff should be fine. I was really really stressing about that. We had one small tree fall down, but it was a tree we hated and were planning to get taken down in the spring anyway. I wish it had taken some of its friends with it.

All in all, we were very lucky. We went out for a long drive this afternoon because we were all so bored and stir-crazy, and we saw some really epically huge trees down, blocking roads, suspended from power lines, etc. I was very surprised and pleased when the power came on last night — I was expecting it to be out for at least another day or two…

We’ve got a Tropical Storm Warning for tomorrow night through Sunday here, thanks to Hurricane Irene. We’ve stowed away all of our deck furniture. I’m anticipating/expecting a power outage of 1-2 days (hopefully no more than that), so we’ve stuffed our downstairs freezer full and set it to its coldest setting. If/when we lose power, we’ll put a blanket on the big freezer and take everything out of our fridge and put it in an ice chest for easy access. We’ll fill the tub tomorrow (after everyone’s had what might be their last shower for a few days) so we can have water to flush the toilets. I’m making extra ice and will fill our big 5-gallon cooler with ice & water tomorrow for drinking. I’ve located all of the flashlights and made sure we have enough batteries. I’ve put out some candles and located the matches. We’ve got charcoal for the grill. We have some gas in our cars, and some cash, if we need to get anything after the storm passes. Sammi’s all freaked out about the storm (because she’s Sammi), but I’m feeling okay about it. Barring any freak wind damage, which I can’t really prepare for, we’re as ready as we can be. I like having actual warning of a catastrophic power outage, for a change.

I made this last night and it was good.

Today is 8/13, a day of great and mysterious importance to my husband.

I wanted to post about this before it became hopelessly distant in my memory…

Last week, the girls and I took a Ready to Nosh tour called the Philadelphia Food Truck Crawl. We got a half-price deal through LivingSocial, otherwise we really couldn’t have afforded it (this apparently being The Summer of Stinginess, monetarily speaking). It was SO FUN.

We met and started at Tyson Bees, where we each had a Korean BBQ Short Rib Beef Taco (seasoned short ribs on a corn tortilla with shredded red cabbage and thinly sliced radish), which was divine. After that we headed to The Crepewalk for blackened chicken crepes (spicy chicken on a crepe with peppers and onions), which we devoured while we strolled through the University City District. It was a sunny and warm day, so the next stop was perfectly timed — tasty cool smoothies at La Vie! I had strawberry peach, Sammi had peach mango, and Alice had orange pineapple coconut. (This was the only stop where we had a choice — everywhere else, the food was pre-ordered. It’s a testament to the tastiness involved that even picky Sammi scarfed everything she was given.) We took our smoothies across the street to our last stop — Gigi’s and Big R, for Jamaican Jerk Chicken with assorted sides. Each of us got a big plate of smoky, well-cooked chicken with two different sides (we got beans & rice, mac & cheese, cabbage, collard greens, green beans, and sweet potatoes). We’d heard that nobody had ever finished all of the food on the food truck tour, and Alice was all

but Gigi’s vanquished us all. Everything was so good but the servings were huge. We took almost all of it home, and all four of us ate off of those plates for another day and a half.

We had a blast doing the tour, and our tour guide Megan was friendly and fun. I’m already eying the Philadelphia… Flavors Exposed tour, which leads you around Reading Terminal Market and feeds you cheesesteaks and soft pretzels and pizza and more more more!!

Two recipes up…
- Chicken Fried Rice
- Warm Vanilla Milk

I got my glasses yesterday, finally. I was fully nude-faced for just over a week. It didn’t really bother me that much (my prescription is extremely mild). I had a low-grade headache for the first few days, but even that went away. The thing that bothered me the most was reading — suddenly I was reading soooooooo sloooooooowly, and that really irritated me. Also, I was unable to read while exercising, which made exercising just that much more boring.

So I’m prescriptionally correct again, which is nice. The frames are similar to my old ones, but more rectilinear (less curvy), and the temple thingies are fancier. A picture will come eventually, I’m sure…

Given assembled, room-temperature ingredients, I can turn out a perfect batch of Tollhouse cookies, without reference to a recipe, in under half an hour.

My glasses just completely broke in half. How fun.

Yeah, I said I was gonna post some pix. And now I have. Small batch up, starting here.

Well, crap, my glasses just broke. Glasstastrophe 2: Electric Boogaloo. I wasn’t even doing anything to them; the frame has just snapped near the nosepiece, from sheer metal fatigue (they are many years old). Obviously it’s high time for a new pair, and I’ve been eagerly anticipating this moment because I am desperately jealous of my daughters’ Transition Lenses, but now is not a good time for this, money-wise. Bleh. They’re still in one piece, but they feel all cockeyed on my face, and they’re clearly fragile — I think that if I handle them wrong, they’ll stop being in one piece. Bleh. Krazy Glue, maybe? *sigh*

Bee Tee Dubs, I neglected to post on Saturday, which was my 10-year Blogiversary. W00t!!