For a cherry-picking friend. Plus it just makes me snicker helplessly.

Thursday Devotional

Let us praise God. O Lord, You are so big, so absolutely huge. Gosh, we're all really impressed down here, I can tell You. Forgive us, O Lord, for this, our dreadful toadying, and barefaced flattery. But You are so strong and, well, just so super. Fantastic. Amen.

Dear [god or God or G-d or Jebus or Goddess or classic American semi-agnostic patchwork of deistic powers involving core protestantism with lazy doses of eastern religion and modern convenient prosperity theology and a lil bit of Oprah despite best efforts or Gaia or Mary or Mother Earth or ancestors or Higher Power or into whatever form it is that atheistic 12-steppers rationalize Higher Power despite careful nomenclature or the Great Attractor or indeed Julia Phillips or that last blue crab hiding in the Chesapeake Bay or Things Beyond My Ken or anybody listening at all]:

A boost, please. A boost, if you please, humbly I seek.

I am thoughtfully not going bananas after being laid up with the same immuno-compromised sinus hell I've fought through every month the last few years, one that knocks me out, removes me from human activity in solid swathes of weeks, pushes me back in my life, every time. Look at all the things I'm not doing, all the convenience stores I'm not robbing and small children I'm not screaming at and boxes of ball bearings I'm not throwing onto busy streets. Look at all the things I am doing, such as hacking, coughing, mouth-breathing, not sleeping and killing off boxes of Kleenexes every couple days--surely for the trees, if nothing else, you would spare me. Think of the trees.

In return I would love...a boost. Some help. Some serendipity, a langiappe, a benison. A mighty meaty finger on the pause button. A tiny little quantum leap. An unexplained improvement. Oh Pliz.

I understand this is all the result of a complicated set of larger problems that I also seek to ameliorate, so in fact I am perhaps asking for too much to shake out at once, but since that's the ultimate goal too, I'll just throw it out there, naked as I wanna be. Any help with any of this would be appreciated.

Be Careful What You Wish For is the equal-and-opposite reaction the universe works in when it comes to specific prayers, so please note I am asking for whatever's...best. Whatever you find best, and I will make it work. Any boost at all!

Yours by the grace of door-to-door grocery deliveries and Kimberly-Clark Global Sales,
I remain,
humbly ever yours--

Lizzy (awful tired)

Elspeth Eugenie Iphegenia Melissande Scott Dolly Dupuyster von Sputum und Wheeze
[submitted via blogger.com]

p.s. Hey, how about that koala bear? How neat was that. What a brave lil bearkin.

Totally Extemporaneous Non Lactose-Focused Sorta Kinda Frozen Hot Chocolate

I was thinking about it, on low simmer, just in the very most back kitchen of my brain, and then I sproinged into the kitchen and did this, without really thinking at all:

Poured a cup/cup-and-a-half of boiling water the jar of my blender over a lot of cocoa and as much sugar, or a little more. I like insane amounts of cocoa in my cocoa, hot or cold (FLAVINOIDS!), and in this case (I had a box of it to finish, which meant scraping out the last of it, as well as filling the container with granulated sugar and shaking it to abrade off the most tenacious powder) I think it was probably 4-5 tablespoons. (Or more? not sure.) Use the pulse button on the blender to combine, and let the heat from the water dissolve the sugar. Add some spoonfuls of Schokinag drinking chocolate flakes for good measure (in this case it was Triple Chocolate Schokinag, I think), maybe 2.

Have standing by your ice tray. Throw in handfuls of ice and let them whirr up with the cocoa mixture, cooling it and thickening it. I used maybe 3 handfuls. I was going to throw in soy milk to keep this from being too melted sorbet an experience, but I remembered I had a can of Redi-Whip on the fridge door so I squozed in a solid squirt. And whirred again.

I don't know if it's in the stablizers in the Redi-Whip or what (I actually think that's just cream), but the half of this drink I have leftover in the refrigerator is still beautifully suspended and emulsified. Cocoa can do that (especially in soy milk), so maybe it's not a fluke. All I know is, yum, and yum. Put it in a tall glass and watch it foam thickly up, dark as can be. Drink it down. No pinch of salt, no vanilla, no anything else in this. Really good! Very cold and sweet. Luxe.

"Extra Creamy" ice cream? You're payin X-TRA for AIR (is how to translate that).

It happens every July 3 in my lake-kissing, riverfront-abutting, tourist-absorbing neighborhood. Why all these people? Cops? Why the folding chairs and...? Ohhh...Venetian Night. A beat ahead of the actual holiday and partly a surprise, every single year. Oh I do love my funny neighborhood, though. I love it mostly when the river's in charge and bridges go up and boats noodle around.





















Great website. The one on the image and its parent site, http://www.says-it.com/. LOVE IT.

Finally saw Sexo en la Cuidad today. Or should I say....gave myself over to it. You don't actually watch anything that consumerist, bless its heart, you just...buy it. Had a very good time, felt quite willing to watch it go where it went. Other thoughts: 1) WRINKLES! They have them. I do too. They are my age. 1a) Quite enjoyed this, even if the ladies top out at a size four. Interesting parallel phenom: Movie about four fat urban chicks? Many fewer wrinkles (much more fabric, though). 2) Ending reminded me unavoidably (not read reviews...is this a common comparison?) of ending of How to Marry a Millionaire...'slumming' delicious NY meal with chick friends and conquests. Only this is to be a post-happy ending fairly tale, and HTMAM wound its plot up much earlier and more conventionally in the arc, just as the initial deception ends, in fact. But are they that different? Is SITC just more/farther, not different? It's still all about unrealistic acquisition of New York real estate. 3) I would have enjoyed more actual hairdos to go with the clothes, not just long hang-y stuff 4) Jennifer H*dson impossibly self-conscious, like a bad audition tape...what the heck happened there? 5) Poor gays get short shrift always in SITC...they are basically hags, themselves, in bad old connotation. 6) Chris Noth with black eyebrows starting to look more and more like Tito Gobbi playing Scarpia. 7) Everyone in the whole world wears jeans except the people in this movie (and me). I still had fun :).

BTW, in the spirit of unplugging ears occasionally for the bad news I should already know about (I am only sort of an adult), I am actually now living between TWO huge construction projects. The Spire, but also the new 100-story Waldorf Astoria (see pic--Waldorf on the left, spire on the right), going up NEXT DOOR. And when I say next door, I mean RIGHT UP MY FUCKING ASS (sorry). You can actually see a little bit of my building next to it: dwarfed, as it were. Topped. I really am living in the enchanted penis forest here down by the lake. Did Burnham want/plan this?

It annoys me the way that T*p Chef in effect treats the chefs like they plucked them out of thin air or discovered them. I mean, they talk about their backgrounds and stuff, but Stephanie ran what seemed to be and people I know thought was the best restaurant in Chicago. I think it's totally fun to see chefs compete--put all the background aside and compete--but sometimes that dopey show can make it all seem a little too fucking miraculous. Stephanie had already won accolades doing that cuisine in a serious food town...she's not some pixie they plucked off the street. It's like they're patting her on the head sometimes. I guess it's like that with everybody, but it bothers me. I mean--they probably did the same with Dave Lev*tski, I just didn't see it. And that is my foodie, chauvinist (Chicago-ly), crankypuss thought for the day. Great to see her win.

The best thing Verve ever did was rerelease those Ella Fitzgerald American songbook collections in the late 80s, and the best thing I ever did was play them in the way I play anything I love, half to death, thousands of times, rolling the lyrics around my head, for they forged the core of what knowledge I have of those songs. Augmented eventually of course, with many others, especially Frank and Doris, but I think everybody should know them, I really do. And I really didn't. Actually, to be totally honest, the acquisition started with Linda Rondstadt in college, only that's not as cool, right. HEH. HAH.

The ad's been chopped, and maybe pulled, but the worst, gnarliest, fatfuckingphobiest ad EVER was recently released by Subway restaurants, they of the turbo-stale bread and vitamin-less vegetable toppings and profit margins of 95% from their 1/8" of protein per 3" sub. Mean, disgusting, hateful, dismissive, smirky, wrong. If you wanna boycott/complain (I'm doing both), try their customer service form. The gist of the ad (still can't find link) shows a man at a regular fast food joint "needing" deodorant, fatty pants and therapy along with his combo meal....fuckheads.

I finally realized why I like almond and hazlenut-studded biscotti so much: it's the textural contrast...biting into something that's actually crisper than the nut, but not too crumbly/crisp to lose togetherness. Oh that contrast! I love a good plain biscotti.

It is very very hard to think about soldiers over in Iraq and other areas right now, so fucking past their due date, soldiers who are as I see it terrorizing/being terrorized rather than fighting a war in any traditional way we know it. What is going to happen when they are all back? How can they possibly be supported thoroughly enough to really come back from all that trauma? There are so many really broken--literally--people who are surviving assaults that would have killed them in 1969, but are they being given what they need to survive afterward, despite fistfuls of prozac from the commissary? It is very hard not to think about those not remembering history being condemned to repeat it. This war looked like Vietnam five years ago, it still feels like it.

Today's lesson: Take care of your teeth, people. Yes, it is a boring lesson, I know, death and taxes, but hella true. Take care of your teeth. This message brought to you by the ADA, my achin teef, and a few paranoid viewings of Cast Away.

1. Noosflash: Wallace's new love interest (I think it's going to be called "A Matter of Loaf and Death") is a cute fattie; she is ""local beauty and bread enthusiast, Piella Bakewell." Is she an improvement on Lady Tottington or Wendolene? Only time will tell.

2. George Takei's BF is cute! Golly.

3. The Chicago premiere of Kit KxitterXidge (whatever), the latest bit of comforting revisionism from the American Girl franchise, was across the street last night. I saw a lot of...pink bunting. I rather wanted to set up shop on my balcony with a crack pipe and my opera glasses and hoot at the goings-on.

4. RIP Cyd C. Nobody...nobody had greater pins than you.