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| Saturday's breakfast. Ground peanuts and fresh blueberries make PB&J a little more wholesome. |
So as I said, it's mostly been banal stuff around here: cooking lots of meals. Let me think, in the past week I made fresh pesto pasta, creamy swiss chard and pea pasta, green curry, massaman curry, several breakfasts and lunches ... tonight is roast chicken, since it's comparatively cool today, with a mess o' veggies on the side. Tomorrow is Taco Tuseday at the Spiher Robinson hacienda, which vaguely excites me.
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| Sunday's breakfast. That's a Parma Sausage banger. And avocados were on sale at Whole Foods!
Two pleasantries popped up, both involving Friend Sarah. On Wednesday night, I met she and Acquaintance Dayle at Sharp Edge Beer Emporium in Friendship for a few after-work beers. (After work for Sarah, anyway.) I've always been a big fan of Sharp Edge's afternoon happy hour -- half-off Belgian drafts from 4:30-6:30, Monday-Friday -- but it turns out that on Wednesday nights they offer half-off Craft drafts, which is good to know. Sarah and Dayle and I gossiped and talked about ponies; it was nice.
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Last night, we again met Sarah and also Friend Davin, this time at Beer Nutz Bottle Shoppe and Grille in Aspinwall, as Ted and I had a Groupon. I didn't have to cook dinner! Sunday nights at Beer Nuts they've got $3 local drafts, and I much enjoyed my Penndemonium. I enjoyed my Turkey Devonshire as well. I think Sidelines Bar and Grill, my favorite Allegheny River hamlet bar, has better food than Beer Nutz in general, but one place Beer Nutz beats Sidelines is on the French fries -- Beer Nutz has some damn good fries. I think I had more grease last night for dinner than I've eaten in the two weeks previous, combined. One effect of eating mostly at home is that we eat a lot more healthily, or at least, a lot more wholesomely. I mean, is creamy swiss chard and pea pasta low fat/low cal? Hardly. But I don't actually consider a cup of half 'n' half and 1/3 cup of parmesan cheese to be particularly bad for (lactose-tolerant) humans, spread over three servings. And there's about six cups of fresh vegetables involved, so nutrition seems pretty well addressed. The thing is, after a long history of poor eating -- either poor in the sense of nutritionally unbalanced and downright unhealthy by almost any metric, or poor in the sense of fucked-up starvation dieting -- I don't think it's wise, for me, anyway, to worry about calories and carbs. Rather, I try to eat as much locally produced food as possible, as little processed food as possible (or at least, as minimally processed food as possible), and a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains. I try to take it easy on the white sugar and the deep fried and the cheese -- with much more success in the former two ventures than the latter. Basically, if I made it from scratch and there's a lot of vegetables involved, I call it good eating.
Anyway.
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| Mmm. Beer. |
The one big event of the last several days was the Sharp Edge Great European Beer Festival. Ted and I bought tickets to this way back in April, when they were a bargain-priced $40. Held in the Sharp Edge's parking lot in Friendship, it's a nice set-up, similar to yet different from our earlier beer fest at Penn Brewing. All of the beer is European rather than local, and much of it is Belgian, so almost everything is of very high quality and high alcohol content. You get a guide to the beer and a little punch card at the beginning of the night, and each sample is punched out, so in theory you can only have one of each beer offered (though the pourers will sometimes fudge for you at the end of the evening). There are probably in the neighborhood of 70 beers, so this isn't too much of a hardship. One thing I liked a lot about Sharp Edge's beer fest was the availability of chairs right in the beer area (as opposed to up on a second level, far away from beer, as at the Penn festival). My neuropathic leg does not like standing on concrete for three hours straight.
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| Mmm. Beer. |
An aside, because I don't know if I've mentioned it here before: I have a bad back and a bad leg. When I was 17, a herniated disk in my lower back contacted an important nerve locus that controlled a significant portion of the nerves in my left leg. This was incredibly painful and also somewhat physically debilitating -- I could not stand up straight, and I walked with a limp. My family physician at the time misdiagnosed my condition for several months, insisting that I was "too young" to have a severe back injury, and explicitly telling my mother that I was faking my complaints to avoid gym class. We should have sued the living shit out of this woman. Finally, my mother, who was inclined to trust the doctor, but who didn't believe I was lying either, insisted that something be done to take my complaints seriously -- this was after months of deterioration in my condition, to where I was bent over at the waist and in more or less constant pain. So my GP reluctantly sent me to get an x-ray. Later that day, she called my mother, very nervously, and told her that she had made me an emergency appointment at a neurologist, and to go that day. After a myelogram, a spinal tap, a CT scan, and some other crap, including another painful month wasted on physical therapy while they tried to avoid surgery on my condition, my back was operated on, two of three herniated disks were corrected, and I was sent home to convalesce.
(Aside the second: my surgeon, although an apparently competent operator, was also a horrible dick. He berated me and my mother for the fact that I was "unbelievably fat", even though, at the time, I was perhaps a size 16 on a broad 6'0" frame -- chubby but certainly not fat, despite what my [non-adult] bullies claimed. When pressed, he would admit that my weight had nothing to do with my condition, which apparently was simple bad luck -- I was born, apparently, with a weak spine -- but then he'd go back to berating me. Gee, I wonder why fat people don't go to the doctor for preventative and even urgent care, thus suffering graver and longer lasting injuries and illnesses -- which are then blamed on their fatness. DO NOT GET ME STARTED.)
Anyway, five years later, when I was 22, one of the corrected disks reherniated. From all I've heard, this, again, was simple bad luck. There's about a one in ten chance that a corrected disk will reherniate, and one of mine did. Unfortunately, whereas the only aftereffect of my first injury was occasional back pain, this herniation resulted in permanent nerve damage in my left leg. I was given emergency surgery on my spine again, but now have uncorrectable numbness and weakness in my left leg, and a bit of a limp.
This is bothersome but not horrific. I miss being able to wear high heels -- it's impossible for my weakened left ankle to balance in them now -- and I find that the limp tires me out sometimes: walking unevenly is more difficult than walking "normally". I also sometimes get a lot of pain and sometimes increased numbness in the bad leg, particularly when I do shit like stand around on concrete for hours -- walking is actually easier on it than standing, for some reason. And my balance is pretty poor on that leg -- no rocky uphill hikes for me. (Luckily, as we all know, I'm not an outdoorsy type in the first place.)
My point in bringing this up is that, while I'm grateful to have the bodily integrity that I do, and am privileged to have a mostly healthy body, I also have a little disability, and it makes me aware in a way I never was before I was 22 about accommodations -- and specifically, the lack thereof -- for people with disabilities both little and large. Sometimes a chair is a real godsend, and unfortunately, nondisabled folk, who, for instance, might be event organizers, sometimes just don't think of things like that, because they don't have to routinely in their own lives. Sometimes the elevator being out, even for just a one-floor climb, is a real hardship; sometimes uneven ground will make it almost impossible for a person to enjoy an event, or even attend it. And you can't always look at someone and know their level of physical ability: it's not like every disabled person is in a wheel chair or on an oxygen tank.
Anyway, thanks for the chairs, Sharp Edge.
On the other hand, food was included in the ticket price at Penn's Microbrewer's Fest, while a piece of pizza cost $4 at Sharp Edge. So, you know, there are cons as well as pros.
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| The beer schwag raffle. |
Ted and I had a nice time, despite my encounters with the Beer Fest Noob Bitches. This was a gaggle of girls seemingly in their mid-twenties, whom I at first thought were merely stupid, but then later discovered were obnoxious. Look, if you don't know, here's how beer fests work: there are many tables behind which are the people with the beer. You wait in a (usually) small line, get your beer sample, perhaps say a few words or ask a brief question of the brewer or distributor doing the pouring, and then move off -- 'cause, you know, it's a line. Once you've obtained the thing you've been standing in line for, you move away, so the people behind you can also obtain the thing they've been standing in line for. That's how lines work.
Except this gaggle of girls would get to the front of the line, get their beer samples, and then just ... camp out. This, of course, blocks the people in line behind them from getting beer. This, of course, makes them noob bitches.
After a while under the tent with them, though, I realized that they had strategery. They weren't just camping in front of every line. They were camping in front of the lines headed by good-looking (in a conventional sense) male beer pourers. So they'd get their beer and then stand in front of the good-looking beer guy, giggling and squawking about how they've like, never had beer before, oh my God, this is really good, I like, think I'm getting tipsy.
Look. Bitches. Please. I try not to be in the business of judging strangers, and I realize that being single is tough. But at a certain point, if you can't respect the beer, and the sanctity of the beer fest, and the primacy of the beer as the focus of the beer fest, then you've gotta get the fuck out, because I don't fuck with girls like you, and I don't advise that others do, either.
The good news is, it was not any of these girls who won an awesome prize at the end of the night; it was me.
Sharp Edge does a raffle at their beer fest -- you put your name on your ticket stub and put it in a drawing for one of several prizes, the winners of which are drawn at the end of the night. I put my stub in the box for a Baltika beach umbrella. It had a base that you could fill with water for stability, and a sturdy-looking, large, collapsible umbrella that I could stand under and would shield two folding chairs from the sun. At the end of the evening the first two people who's stubs were drawn for this umbrella didn't come forward to claim it -- mine was the third stub drawn. Victory! I am totes more fully prepared to drink outside now. I want to go to the beach and bring my umbrella and sit in my folding chair and drink beer in the shade now -- this is a new goal of mine.
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| It's actually still in my dining room. |
So anyway, that was the the past few days. Today I've got to go to -- shudder -- Oakland, to Hillman Library to pick up a few books, and then it's time to hit the farmers' market. I'm looking forward to Wednesday, when I'm going to get to attend a happy hour with Friend Lara, who will be here from out of town, and then Friday is payday, which is always a good day. The downside of the week is that I've gotta read Foucault going on about prisons as unpaid research for the one new class I've been assigned to next semester. Some of the readings seem like they'll be interesting. Foucault is never interesting. Blah.
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| We hadn't had a kitty picture in a while. Matilda always looks so stunned. |
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| Skyler's tummy is a surprisingly common roadblock in my house. |
