burnt toast life

happiness on delay

I’m a happy-delayer. What I mean is that I like to intentionally deprive myself of good things and get the bad things out of the way first. I’m sure a lot of people do this – getting the difficult tasks done makes it more likely that you’ll finish the whole project. The problem is that I married a non happy-delayer (an instant-gratifier?), which has led to some interesting arguments.

For example: if I bought a flavor of juice that I didn’t really care for, I would be sure to buy a better flavor the next time I went shopping. I would not, however, open the new juice, drink the new juice, or even think about the new juice until the old juice was gone – not until I had suffered through it. Eric, on the other hand, will forget about the old juice the second the new juice hit the refrigerator shelf. I try to argue him on this point and say, “Why don’t you finish the old one first?” to which he replies logically, “Because it’s disgusting.”

Sometimes I wonder if it kind of goes back to the whole discarded food thing (doesn’t everything?). Maybe it’s a waste not, want not situation. But then I think that no, it’s actually more than that. I enjoy the anticipation of waiting for the new juice. With every sip of the gross old juice, I think, “This takes me one step closer to deliciousness.” And it’s a proven fact that the anticipation of a thing makes you happier than getting the actual thing. I read a study once that claimed employees rated their happiness much higher the week before their vacation than when they were on the actual vacation. Seems strange, but makes perfect sense in my twisted head. Once you are on vacation, it’s impossible to stop counting the days that you have left before you leave. With every fun activity, you can’t help but think “Only 3 days left of this. Then it’s back to the old grind.” But before vacation? That’s when your imagination can run wild, imagining all the exciting times that you’ll have… once you suffer through 2 more days at the office, of course.

Today I got an email from a friend into my work inbox and made myself wait to read it. I intentionally read all the emails around it and left it unread so that through each tedious task of my day, I could look forward to reading it after I had finished the self-appointed hurdles I had to jump to allow myself to read it. Did it make that hour go faster? Of course it did.

But back to my instant-gratifier hubbers. In a way, I think he can teach me something. Like… it doesn’t really profit anyone to suffer through disgusting juice. I deserve to be happy, and I deserve it right now, not later. Like that whole life’s short, eat dessert first thing; maybe I can incorporate that – at least partially – into the suffering that I somehow think is unavoidable in life. There’s enough sadness that we can’t avoid, so when it comes to those little things we can give ourselves to make the day a little brighter? That’s when it’s OK to just throw out the disgusting juice.

amazing ammonia

You know when you are thinking about doing something but you keep putting it off and putting it off and then it just seems too momentous to bear? Sometimes that’s how I feel about blogging. I’m not really sure why – I love writing and I love sharing my writing. But for some reason I feel a sense of obligation to constantly update my blog, which makes the posts obligatory. And once they become obligatory, I don’t want to do them anymore. Of course, this guilt/anxiety is 100% self-inflicted. My new goal is to update when I feel like updating and stop feeling shitty about not updating. Hopefully then I will post more often than every three months.

What has happened since November? Not much. I do have a new obsession, and her name is Pinterest. Oh, Pinterest! I spent the entire weekend pinning, searching, admiring, swooning. Yes, I’m late to this bandwagon – but better late than never, of course. Actually, the slew of new ideas may be just what I need to keep me blogging. Maybe I’ll make brilliant crafts and post pics. Maybe the projects I find will go horribly awry and I can post about that. Either way, it provides something to talk about besides the dog.

Ryder is doing splendidly. He has a few behavioral issues that we need to get taken care of, but for the most part he is a good boy. His first birthday is coming up in March and I intend to have a full-fledged party with cake and balloons. And dog treats.

The point of this post isn’t to ramble on and on about how I’m going to write more. The point is to actually write something, which is why I am sharing my incredible story of oven burners, ammonia, and Google.

We moved into our house in June. It didn’t take long for us to realize that certain things had been left, shall we say, uncared for. The bathroom was unusable. The kitchen cabinets were filthy. There was a mouse living in the dishwasher.

We hired a professional cleaning service, and they did an impressive job transforming the house from practically uninhabitable to comfortable. They even revealed to us that our kitchen floor was really light tan, not brown as we had originally assumed. The one thing that they could not solve was the oven burner problem. The burners on the stove had so many layers of baked on, caked on grease and food spills that they suggested we buy new ones. The cleaners had spent a good amount of time and an entire package of Magic Erasers to get one burner semi-clean. It simply wasn’t worth the effort.

Unfortunately, these burners are $60 a pop, and there are four of them. So the past six months I have been trying to ignore my repulsive burners and hope that guests think they are black (they’re light gray). The other night, on a whim, I decided to use Google to figure out how to clean them. I think it was the Pinterest inspiration, actually. I discovered that all you had to do was put each burner into a Ziplock bag with 1/4 cup of ammonia, let it sit overnight, and scrub it off the next day. It seemed too good to be true, but ammonia is cheap. It was worth a shot.


The pictures don’t lie. Not only did it work like a charm, the grease that had “demolished 10 Magic Erasers” literally washed right off with hot water. It’s a little sad how excited I got over this cleaning mini-miracle. I had to use a scrubber sponge in the corners in order to get them perfect, but remember these things hadn’t been cleaned in approximately 50 years. I’m sure someone with a reasonably dirty stove wouldn’t have to use a sponge at all.

That’s it. That’s my story. Wasn’t it worth waiting 3 months for?

the Wegmans conspiracy

it's a magical place


I’ll never forget overhearing a conversation in my high school French class.

Student 1: “Hey, wanna go hang out at Wegmans after school?”
Student 2: “What’s that?”
Student 1: “Cool new grocery store.”

Now, these weren’t particularly strange students, meaning they weren’t the type to hang out at grocery stores for fun. So there had to be more to this ‘Wegmans’ than the description “grocery store” implied. I remember jotting down the name in my notebook and making a point to go check it out later that week.

From my first wide-eyed, jaw-dropped visit up until today, I have loved Wegmans. Truly, I think no grocery store in the nation, or even the world, compares. Many argue that they are expensive, but I disagree. While their specialty products and imported cheeses are a bit on the pricey side, the typical household staples are the same price or cheaper than they are at other grocers. Bags of baby carrots are always 99 cents, and I’ve never seen them cheaper than $1.29 at Giant, even on sale (side note: you know you’re a grown-up when you can give baby carrot price comparisons). I think people want to believe that it’s more expensive because it looks like it should be – the atmosphere is more beautiful, the store’s artwork is… well, artwork, and they actually make grammatically correct signs. I still smile every time I see the “15 items or fewer” line rather than the horrendously offensive (to an English major, anyway) “15 items or less” line. Employees are friendly. You know how I know? Because I used to be one! Yes, many years ago I worked as a barista at the coffee bar in the Lower Nazareth store, and I absolutely loved it. They really do treat their employees like gold and they pay well for a grocery store, which is partly (or mostly?) why most employees are so darn helpful and genuinely happy to be there. They know they’re appreciated, so they treat customers well. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if all employers were like this?

But.

I have one very big complaint, and it’s only recently that I started to notice its pervasiveness. It began years ago, when I was still working there. My mom asked me to bring home an Entenmann’s coffee cake for some guests that she had over. I went to look, but quickly realized the store didn’t carry Entenmann’s products. Not a single one of them. I left perplexed and brought home a Wegmans store brand cake instead.

Next there was the turkey incident. Since I regularly switch between Giant and Wegmans for my weekly shopping, I ordered at the deli counter without thinking, requesting “One pound of Boar’s Head turkey, please.” The deli counter person looked at me strangely. “We don’t carry Boar’s Head, we never have,” she said. So once again, I was forced to opt for the store brand. On that same trip, I headed over to the pickle section for my Claussen dill sandwich slices. I found Claussen bread & butter (ew), gigantic Claussen spears (seriously?) and in the spot where my sandwich slices belonged, the Wegmans store brand dill slices in a similar looking jar. That’s when I started to wonder.

It seems that the Wegmans philosophy is that if a brand or product is too delicious, they must refuse to carry it and offer their own store brand as the only alternative. As a girl who often buys store brand products when they are cheaper than name brands, I feel indignant about this. I mean, we can all agree that Wegmans brand items are fabulous. Their cakes? To die for. Some are better than Entenmann’s. Their pickles? Not quite Claussen, but a worthy adversary. What frustrates me is that they won’t even give me the option, but choose rather to force their store brand upon me, giving me no other pickle choice and therefore making me resent their pickles rather than happily choose them. It’s all a bit paranoid, if you ask me. What they’re really saying to customers is, “I’m afraid you won’t pick us if you have the option,” like some self-conscious teenage girl who is convinced her more attractive friend will be asked to the prom instead. But why not give me the chance? Listen, Weggies, I love my Boar’s Head meat just as much as the next sandwich eater, but if you offer your oven-roasted, honey glazed 99% fat free turkey for $1 cheaper, I will pick you every time. Same goes for all the other high-quality items you refuse to stock. Because in these tough economic times (sorry, necessary cliché drop), price trumps name brand every single time. Well, except when it comes to macaroni and cheese. You could give that stuff away and I’d probably still buy Kraft. Sorry.

wordless wednesday

I know, it’s been too long! I wish I had some good excuse, something like “I’ve been busy working on my novel,” but the truth is that I’ve been busy catching up on recorded episodes of Auction Hunters. Anyway. I do have a whole post planned out and I’ve even arranged to blog on Nazareth Patch too (yay!)… I just haven’t been motivated. I spend all day writing and when I get home at night, sometimes the last thing I want to do is stare at a computer screen. But anyway, just so y’all don’t think I gave up on the blog, here are some pics for wordless Wednesday. Or in my case, not so wordless, but not as wordy as usual, Wednesday.

the unbearable sadness of discarded food

1) See? I told you this blog wasn’t just about dogs. This post has nothing at all to do with dogs

2) I dedicate this one to my sister Ashley, who graciously put up with me panicking, chastising, and lamenting for 5 straight hours at Addison’s baptism celebration because there was just. too. much. food.

Leftovers make me sad. An abundance of food that will likely go to waste makes me anxious. Throwing away week-old stir-fry often moves me to tears. Ok, the last one is an exaggeration – but only slightly. It has only recently come to my attention how much inanimate objects, particularly food, make me uneasy or even upset. It’s a very difficult thing to explain if you’ve never felt it. But if you have experienced it, you may be thinking, “Yes! That’s how I feel, too! And I thought I was the only one.” IKEA captured it perfectly with their lamp commercial a few years ago:

Oh, that commercial makes me tear up. I’m not crazy – I know that lamps, rugs, and leftovers don’t have feelings. But it’s so easy to assume that they do, or to create them in your mind. Bear with me, I’m going to try to paint a picture: Imagine a yogurt. Just a regular, plain container of yogurt. That yogurt was manufactured and shipped to your grocery store and unloaded onto a shelf. Its entire purpose in life (ok, assuming it has a “life”) was to be consumed and enjoyed by someone. That’s why I find it so upsetting to throw away spoiled yogurt – it’s like discarding a wasted life without meaning. Is this mentality a stretch? Perhaps. But still I can’t shake the feeling that food has a distinct purpose and should always reach its intended destination.

This also works the other way – I get a deep sense of satisfaction from chopping up that last green pepper for my salad just before it spoils or perfectly timing meals around the almond milk expiration date. And anyone who drinks almond milk knows that it gives me about 3 months – which is part of the reason I prefer it to cow milk. Quick expiration dates are highly stressful.

I know at least one other person who feels exactly the same way I do, and this comforts me into believing I’m not insane. Plus, IKEA clearly made that commercial for a reason, even if that reason was to sell more lamps. I think this post makes it obvious why we absolutely had to adopt that dog (dammit – I knew the dog would sneak his way in!) I feel deeply sympathetic for unloved food, so when you start to tell me about actual LIVING things being mistreated, my compassion meter goes off the charts. My hierarchy of empathy goes something like this: household objects –> food –> plants –> animals –> people (especially babies).

So the moral of this story is that if you plan to get a new lamp, please do me a favor and have a yard sale, or at least donate it to Goodwill. They may end up throwing it away, but then the responsibility is on them. And then I won’t know about it.

 

how to become a mother overnight

I swear, this blog isn’t just going to be about puppies. But the dog is new and the blog is new, so this is what I have.

It’s no secret that Eric and I want to have children, but haven’t been blessed with one yet. I guess that’s a very short and compact way of summing up a much more complicated reality. But anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The point is that I used to mock people who treated their dogs like children, talked to their dogs like children, and behaved as though their dogs actually were children. Now that I have a dog, I’m starting to understand why this is so easy to do.

It all started at Marshall’s when I was shopping for a dog bed and various other accessories. I started perusing the dog toy section and thinking, “Ooh, this one’s cute. Should I get the wittle bitty lambie or the wittle bitty lion? Oh my, but then there’s a giraffe, too!”

baby toy? dog toy? both..?

Yeah. It felt suspiciously like shopping for a small child, and the similarities were not lost on me. Plus, from the moment we brought him home to live with us, Eric automatically became daddy and I became mommy. Ryder’s new tag bears our last name. It’s like we effortlessly adopted a very furry child.

And like having a new baby, I feel desperately guilty every morning when I leave him and anxious to get home to see him. The romanticized notions are basically gone, and he gets in my way and annoys me daily – you know, like when you have a kid. I’m proud of what he has learned so far – you can already tell he’s getting more comfortable in his own skin and he’s even learning how to walk properly. Our little boy is growing up so quickly…

One non-baby related thing that makes me very happy about Ryder is that he has forced me into exercise. For the past year I have made up excuse after excuse to go back to bed for an hour after waking up at 7 to pack Eric’s lunch. Every night I would go to be saying, “Tomorrow will be the day. I will stay up and do my Pilates video or maybe even go for a run. I will not go back to sleep.” And then morning would come and the bed would look so inviting that I would abandon exercise in favor of sleep. But now that I have this very active pup, I’m guilt tripped into walks in the morning. Well, the first morning was a guilt trip. Now I actually enjoy these walks, probably as much as he does. I actually have more energy during the day, and I feel just slightly less guilty about crating him all day. Eric and I even started taking evening walks, too, rather than flopping down on the couch the minute we get home from work. So all in all, this dog has improved our lives and given us a pseudo-child.

Don’t get me wrong – we still want a real baby. But he’s a nice distraction in the meantime.

must tolerate dogs

I’m not a dog person.

This may even be an understatement, especially since several friends responded to my text about getting a dog with, “What? Did pigs start flying to announce that hell froze over, too?”

The truth is that I never wanted a dog. A few years ago I would go as far as to say I disliked them, but really only when they were jumping or drooling on me. However, I married a “dog guy” and we talked about getting one since the idea of sharing our lives together finally became reality. He insisted that he needed a dog, and over time the idea grew on me. I even began to romanticize the notion, imagining a stoic companion to keep watch beside my armchair while I sipped hot cocoa and delved into a good book. In my doggie daydreams, of course, I never imagined a poorly behaved pup.

Eric and I clashed on what breed to get, and somewhat violently. I wanted a small, pocket-sized dog to carry around in my handbag and strut with down the street. His inclinations leaned more towards large, bad-ass dog that could be his best friend and not threaten his manhood while on walks. He wanted a pitbull; I wanted a pug. We both agreed that whatever dog we picked absolutely had to be a rescue from a shelter and not a pet store purebred. Since we disagreed on just about everything else about our future pet, the matter was laid to rest for the time being.

Then Friday afternoon rolled around. My mom forwarded us an email about a 7 month old Golden who needed a home – and fast. The email came with 2 snapshots, a sad tale of allergies, and a warning that whoever wanted the dog needed to make a decision before Saturday evening. We called and set up a meeting for the next morning.

We could tell Ryder was going to be a firecracker from the first time we saw him straining against his leash as his family walked him down the street. There’s just something about the way he walks – it’s as if he doesn’t quite know how to coordinate his front legs with his back legs. It was immediately apparent that this was a high energy, high maintenance dog – but he was a purebred Golden worth $1,000 that we were getting for free. He was a big dog (Eric’s happy) but a loyal, friendly dog that’s great with kids (Amanda’s happy).

Then we heard a bit about why the family was getting rid of Ryder, and that’s when I knew he was absolutely, without a doubt coming home with us. Eric already chastised me for speculating and giving credit to hearsay, so I’ll just say this – they (supposedly) did not give him the love and attention he deserved, allergies notwithstanding. It became apparent that he was my “burnt toast dog,” which went along well with my burnt toast husband and various other burnt toast people/items in my life. But that’s another story for another time.

So Ryder is our dog, and so far things are going well. He is rambunctious, excitable, and has endless stores of energy. My biggest complaint so far is the ridiculous amount of dog hair and dog dandruff all over my clean floor. It’s pretty obvious that he has never been to the groomer, so hopefully once we get that out of the way the shedding will be less intense. We took him to the dog park on Saturday afternoon and he had an absolute ball, plus he seems to play well with others. He sleeps curled next to our bed at night and follows Eric around the house wherever he goes. He clearly needs to be trained and to get comfortable in his element, but I can tell he’s a good dog already. We definitely made the right decision – though I still would not call myself a “dog person.”