Why Owning a Black Car in New England Can Be Totally Bogus

Because once the first real snow of the season hits, your car is bound to look like a filthbox unless you go to the car wash pretty much every day.

And it's kind of incongruous, but in the summer when there is NOT salt and grime and grey slush all over the roads, I get my car washed every two weeks. Yet in the winter when these conditions and worse exist and coat my car daily...I am lucky if I go at all because I feel so defeatist about it all.

What's the point?

The minute I leave the car wash it will be covered in salty dirt again.

It's going to snow again in a few days anyway.

WAH.

Of Course!

This is typical for me.

I decided to pop out of the office around 11AM to go to Stop and Shop and pick up what I need to make cookies for a party I am going to on Saturday night (they involve Fluff, marschino cherries and melted white chocolate….jealous?). I was also going to pick up a few frozen meals since this sista will have no time to cook anytime soon and also pick up a bag of frozen fries for the much aggrieved Adam who could NOT believe I bought chicken nuggets for him last week but no fries. Chicken nuggets with fries, he says, are a meal. Chicken nuggets with no fries, are just a snack. Who knew?

Anyway this whole shopping trip was to take 10-15 minutes. Wham Bam Here’s my Stop and Shop Card Thank You Ma’am. But of course this time of year? No shopping trip is an easy venture no matter how innocent at first it may seem.

For one thing, when I arrived the parking lot was PACKED! Which struck me as odd for 11AM on a Thursday but hey, maybe smart minds think alike. I didn’t pay as much attention to the three white busses parked out front as I should have but alas, it was apparently field trip day for a few local nursing homes. That is fine, I am glad they get out to get their groceries. But it does make quickly maneuvering around a supermarket difficult as a lot of these folks just park their carts in the middles of the aisle and meander up and down. Yikes. And since there was already an abnormally high number of shoppers, slowed me down quite a bit. But I summoned my holiday spirit, smiled, and was even able to smile and power through. No big deal.

Then I get to the check out and the lines are obscene, except for the self checkout which is empty. Which makes sense since I don’t think anyone over 75 even knows what self check out is. So I swing over there and begin scanning my 8 or so items through. Beep! Beep! ERROR A STORE EMPLOYEE WILL BE WITH YOU MOMENTARILY”. Ah technical difficulties, how I love you. So a store employee comes over to help me with the persnickety self checkout scanner and within a few seconds of her leaving it starts happening again BEEP! ERROR! A STORE EMPLOYEE WILL BE WITH YOU MOMENTARILY”. And every time I scan something I have to run down and bag it since this machine is clearly not having me. But the lines in the other checkout spots are so long it seems worth it just to deal with it although I get the impression the people waiting in the long lines are watching my ordeal thinking “That right there is why I don’t use self checkout!”.

So once I get everything scanned I swipe my card and punch in my pin and so on and it doesn’t even occur to me that the amount seems kind of high until I am all paid and on my way out. I double check my receipt and lo, I was charged twice for about half of the things in my bag.

Now, a person more aware of the way their luck is going might have just eaten the $6 but I could just not stomach it so, seeing there was only one person in line at Customer Service, I made my way over their receipt in hand.

The fellow in front of me was there to pick up his paycheck and was (of course!) having a very tough time with it. He had a difficult to pronounce last name, and no ability to write it out for the customer service attendant. Which resulted in her thumbing threw her bin of paychecks several times in a row, holding up different ones asking him if that was his check. Seriously. And the fellow is getting more and more irate, the woman more flustered, and me? I am on my blackberry texting Adam to kill me now but maintaining a quite serene outward appearance if I do say so myself.

After five minutes of waiting, I reached the threshold. DO you know this threshold? You are waiting in line for something and it’s the point when you have to weigh how much longer you are willing to wait in line with how long you have already BEEN waiting in line, taking into consideration what exactly you are waiting for. Was waiting in line more than 5 minutes worth $6?

I pondered this as the man waiting for his check started yelling and decided, heck yeah it was. His yelling brought forth a manager. And with that manager, a resolution (for the curious, his paycheck was filled out first name, last name instead of last name, first name as all the others were. Sweet resolution!!! With that I skipped up to the desk gleefully to claim my $6……and was told I was only getting $3 back since I had miscalculated.

D’oh! That would only have been worth it if I had waited 2.5 minutes..if you do my math correctly.

Bottle of White, Bottle of Red. If I Don't Get My Security Deposit Back I'm Dead

Sometimes I feel like I have a guardian angel watching over me. Someone making sure I have what I need right when I need it the most.

And this guardian angel comes to me in different forms. Once it came to me in the form of a relative who sent me a $100 check for my high school graduation six months after I graduated…and it arrived on the very day I went to my parents to ask them to borrow $100 to go to a concert(I was 18 at the time and can only assume my meager paycheck at Contempo Casuals). Another time I was driving home late at night from an ex boyfriend’s home on an empty highway and for some reason randomly moved into the fast lane of the highway (I had been traveling for some time in the middle lane). A few moments after I drifted into that lane, I saw a dead deer sprawled across the middle and right lane that I would have surely hit had I not unexpectedly and for no feasible reason switched lanes. And these weird little coincidences have happened my whole life.

The most recent one happened a few weeks ago at work. A coworker who I hardly ever see sat next to me at a meeting and told me a story about how the night before he had been enjoying a glass of red wine in his living room and when he set it down, his 2 year old son immediately knocked it over spilling it all over their white carpet. Acting quickly, his wife remembered hearing that if you poured white wine on a red wine stain, it lifts right out. So she grabbed a ½ bottle of Pinot Grigio from the fridge and dumped it all over the red wine spatters. Within five minutes where there had looked like a blood bath occurred, was just a wet spot that dried to leave NO STAIN.

This is red wine on white carpet people, every hostess’s biggest nightmare! And NO STAIN.

So fast forward to that weekend. We are decorating the living room for the holidays, and as I reach behind an end table to plug in the garland I knock over my FULL glass of Beaujolais nouveau ALL OVER the white carpet in our living room. And truth be told all over the white wall too. It looked like a massacre and it was! The worst massacre of all. The massacre that results in wasted wine.

In an instant I recalled my coworker’s story and ran into the kitchen. There on the first shelf of the fridge was a somewhat forgotten half bottle of pinot grigio. I grabbed it and sprinted back into the living room. As Adam pondered aloud “UM WTF ARE YOU DOING” I sprinkled liberally that white wine all over the red wine spatters and once it was soaked I dabbed with a towel. And dabbed and dabbed some more. Within ten minutes, I had a cramp in my wrist, our apartment smelled like a booze lodge (not that it doesn’t always kind of smell like that especially over the holidays) but the red wine stains? DISAPPEARED!!

It was a Christmas Miracle. The kind that will be spoken of for years to come. I would not be surprised if whoever wrote “The Red Shoes” penned this into another Christmas classic, The Red Wine Stain.

Of course it is entirely possible that this episode was less the work of a guardian angel and more the inevitability of me spilling an entire wine glass on the white carpet, regardless of what story I may have heard a few days before. But it is the holiday season and I am feeling sentimental!

So the next time you are at a soiree and make the mistake of sloshing your red wine onto the carpet. Grab the glass of the nearest guest driniking white wine and pour it on the stain. Then hand it to the hostess and say "You're welcome".

She will thank you, I assure you.

Spreading Good Cheer

We interrupt this blog hiatus for something very important. Something no holiday season would be complete without.

The perfect party appetizer!

I had an impromptu Christmas party on Friday (started out as inviting a few friends over for cocktails, then a few more, etc) and had literally no time during the week to do any kind of party prep. On Thursday I was lamenting to a coworker that I needed a few great new recipes to try out and she interrupted me to say she had what I was looking for. Her boss had given her a recipe for Garlic Feta Spread last year when she was in a similar situation and it had been the hit of that party, and many other parties since them. And it met my requirements: easy, mostly ingredients you already have at home, and involving some kind of cheese.

So without further adieu, my new favorite party app:

Garlic Feta Spread
4 oz reduced fat cream cheese
1/3 cup mayo
4 oz feta cheese, crumbled
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/8 tsp oregano
1/8 tsp basil
1/8 tsp thyme
1/8 tsp dill

Combine every ingredient but the feta in a food processor and blend until smooth.
Fold in feta with a spoon.
Serve with pita chips.

Couldn't be easier, right? And you can use all dried herbs. I left out the dill because I didn't have any and it was still delicious. It was the only thing to get completely cleaned out at the party. So if you are in search of something to bring to a party or serve at your own, give it a whirl! I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

Christmas Blog-cation

So if you haven't already noticed, there are tumbleweeds rolling across my blog.

Between being buried by and with work and keeping up with social commitments and general insanity I am going to go ahead say I'm going on a little hiatus.

Don't you hate that word? Sors!

I may pop in from time to time with an "Oh hai" but in general don't expect too much from me until 2010 when I have Big Blog Things in store. Hopefully. If I am able to extricate myself from my Hoarders-esque office.

Don't worry you can still catch me on Twitter (holla at me!) or Facebook (feel free to message me and I will add you as a friend!) or Flickr (I finally have a decent camera phone!) or anything else that only requires a minute's worth of attention here and there.

Happy December!!