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month-long blog (feb edition): day twenty-five

am kind of bummed. Was planning on going to a show this saturday night. Never much expected it to sell out, but it did. Now jesus is a sad boy. That's what he gets for lollygagging. Couple of other shows coming up in the next few weeks, so maybe I'll get to see those. Like how jesus bounces back and forth between first and third person? Takes a talented (read: lazy) writer to do that, I tell you. Only a couple of days until my brother's birthday. Normally the last day of february, but not this year. That's what the calendar gets for lollygagging. I know this is stream of consciousness and that this type of writing rarely reveals anything. I don't much expect this to, either. But I am also trying to write without editing (minus the occasional backspace to remove typos). As such, I am going to be all over the place. It's spring training. There's still time to work out the kinks. I know there's this kid in camp that's gunning for my spot in the roster. He's green. Not green with envy. Green with inexperience. No, it's not a literal kid. Heck, it's not even a figurative kid. There really is no kid at all. I was going for a sports metaphor (what? nobody uses those anymore, do they?). Now that I've gone for it, I feel a little cheap. I should try and push myself more. Go for the real metaphor. The comparison between two dissimilar objects. The metaphor that hasn't necessarily been crushed between mortar and pestle and spooned into the apple sauce for easier digestion.

month-long blog (feb edition): day twenty-four

crock pot day!

today's recipe: sweet and smoky chicken

2.5-3 lbs chicken pieces
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground balck pepper
1 cup chicken broth
1/2 cup raspberry jam
1/2 cup dried apricots
2 canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce + 1 tbsp adobo sauce
1 tbsp quick-cooking tapioca

throw it in the crock and cook for seven hours or so.

not as sweet as I thought it would be and not as smoky as I thought it would be, but one hell of an interesting taste.

month-long blog (feb edition): day twenty-three

was inside my head a bit today. on the drive home form work, I ended up behind an ambulance that was on it's way to an emergency (I know this because the lights/siren were on and it was heading away from the hospital). Traffic stopped at the intersections and I was able to breeze right through following the ambulance. I was not speeding and I was not running red lights, but I still felt like I was pushing the boundaries of karma and good taste by taking advantage of the stopped traffic. When the ambulance turned, I exhaled a little more boldly than I probably should have and ran a silent prayer through my head on the inhale.

month-long blog (feb edition): day twenty-two

yesterday, I saw my mother. Not a big surprise, really. I see her every thursday. We went and got some chinese food and went to wal-mart. She updated me on my uncle's health (he is coming back from NC soon) and we discussed what we were going to do for my brother's birthday, which kind of sneaks up on us now since it is only two weeks after his oldest daughter's birthday. He also defers to his kids' birthdays (like a good parent does) and will never tell us what he would like, so we always have to improvise. So we came up with an idea or three and then drove home. On the drive home, we noticed that mom's odometer was about to trip to 30,000. So we sat there in silence and watched it flip as we went around the curves of Route 44 south.

month-long blog (feb edition): day twenty-one

again, since this is retroactive, you the readers are getting some insight into my day today. Am watching the oscars pre-awards show and saw the woman who was in "La Vie en Rose" (Marion Cotillard) and this reminded me of a girl who I don't talk to much anymore. She absolutely RAVED about this movie about six months ago. She is the only person I know who has seen it and it made me a little sad that we don't talk/type as much as we used to do, even if it wasn't that much to start. She is one of those people who seems to bend the world to her will, rather than being knocked into dank submission like a good lot of folks seem to do. So, in the off chance that she is reading this, I will say that she was in my thoughts today.

month-long blog (feb edition): day twenty

This post is not about food, so much as it is about food preparation. I bought a new set of knives for my kitchen this week. I bought a set when I moved into my apartment about a year and a half ago. One of the casualties of splitting things after a split is that both people involved in the split end up having to fill these weird everyday holes. One of those holes was not having knives. The ones I bought looked nice in the store, but once I got them home, I realized that they didn't really feel fight in my hand, like they were off-balance. This off-balance feeling was further buttressed when I actually used the knives to cut. About a week or so ago, one of them slipped during my sunday crockpottery adventure and  I almost took a nice hunk out of my left hand. So I went and got one of those three-knife trial sets. Took them home and fell in love with them (well, as much as someone can fall in love with cutlery). Finally got around to getting the complete set. Was reminded of how much I loved them when I was washing the paring knife and ran the blade under the running tap water. Even when I held the blade at an oblique angle, the running water flowed over it like one of those car commercials that show how aerodynamically fancy their car is and that's why you should buy it. Except it was a knife. And nobody was filming it.

month-long blog (feb edition): day nineteen

this week was the birth of E.L.B.C.

I forget, exactly, which day she was birthed. That's one of the hazards of blogging retroactively. The memory becomes hazy.

E.L.B.C., for those not already in the know, is an acronym for the Either Leaguer Bleacher Creatures. This is Tony F'n and me. We may have a guest host or two along the way, but this is to help us document the 2008 baseball season from the vantage point of a pair of baseball fans who live betwixt cleveland and pittsburgh.

http://elbc.mlblogs.com/

month-long blog (feb edition): day eighteen

I am lagging on the blog entries again. Can't chalk my negligence on sheer laziness, however. Some of the fault must, and I mean MUST, lie with the game linked below. It is intoxicatingly simple and just a bit mesmerizing...

http://bored.com/boomshine/index.htm

month-long blog (feb edition): day seventeen

this is what sloth looks like:

wake up about nine.
crawl to the couch.
fall asleep watching NBA slam-dunk highlights.
wake up about eleven.
go to the video store
go to the grocery.
come home.
let parrot out of his cage.
throw the peppery pork into the crock pot.
crawl back on the couch.
get up to get the dvd remote.
start movie.
pause movie.
fall asleep on the couch.
wake up.
drink can of ginger ale.
check e-mail.
crawl back on couch.
stay awake.
watch rented movie, "waitress".
think keri russell is cute.
drink another can of ginger ale.
be unimpressed by "waitress".
pay bills.
do taxes.
watch last 6 laps of nascar race.
put parrot back in cage.
take peppery pork out of crock pot.
shred peppery pork.
put shredded peppery pork in fridge.
meander through myspace.
write sloth blog.
click preview & post.

month-long blog (feb edition): day sixteen

ordered the kelly pavlik-jermain taylor pay-per-view fight tonight. Am not a big boxing fan, but I like to see a local kid done good. Realized, when talking with some friends, that I hadn't ordered a ppv fight since the mike tyson-michael spinks fight back in 88 or 89.

google break!

Turns out it was 1988, maybe the zenith of the mike tyson ferocity. Two freaking decades ago.

holy crap.