June 29, 2006 | Son of a...

I’m not much of a cook. I like to eat, but I really don’t enjoy cooking at all.

Some of this stems from the fact that when I was in college one of my roommates gave me a hard time and said I screwed up a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. After she said that I was so pissed (there was nothing worng with it. At worst it may have been a touch resal dente at worst) that I resolved to never cook for her again. After a couple of years of being out of the habit, and because everyone began to assume that I couldn’t cook, it just became a thing for me. “Oh, I don’t cook”.

Gabe is a fantastic chef and he actually gets pleasure out of creating good meals. For the last 8 years I would say that he has made about 90% of our meals. Lately I have been trying to step up and change all of that.

Yesterday I decided to try to make something we saw on “Good Eats”. (Yes, we are Alton Brown followers). Here is the recipe I was using.

There were only two things that I didn’t do correctly. 1) I didn’t have any tomato paste. No big deal. It only called for 1 tablespoon. Now go back and check out the recipe again and guess which one other step I didn’t follow. (This is going to be a lot easier if you know me.)

That’s right. You guessed it. The part that reads “being careful” and I splashed hot vegetable oil on my hands. It sucked a lot.
The good news is that the meal ended up being quite tasty. The bad news (you know, besides the obvious fact that I burned myself) is that I obviously still haven’t figured out how to make these pictures do what I want in a post.

*sigh*

Anyway, we’re off to the beach. Well, The Goon Squad and Gabe’s Mom and I are off to the beach, hopefully the kids will behave for their Nonny. I’m also hoping I can score the neighbor’s internet connection if I sit out on the porch. If not, I’ll talk to you guys on Tuesday or Wednesday and I may have even read a new book or two.

June 28, 2006 | Housekeeping, Randomness

Please remember to change your bookmarks and links and bloglines accounts for me. You may have gotten here the old way but (Karen installed a redirect for me, but I don’t think it will last forever. I am now just htttp://sarahandthegoonsquad.com/ - no blogspot. Neat, huh?

Wow. Virgin Insurance? Apparently you need this if you think you might have to assume the costs of raising the second coming of the Christ Child. (I got this one from Linkateria.)

Hey other twin parents! Stacy needs your advice.

Go over to It’s Okay, Sweetie and read Sweetie’s Moms story of how we realized we already knew each other.

The Kaiser sent this for all you Star Trek fans. He called it Cap’n Picard, ya’ll.

Why do people always make jokes about corn or peanuts in poop, but never raisins? As any parent of small children can tell you, raisins don’t break down at all

June 27, 2006 | Housekeeping, The Blue One

If I got the picture thing to work you can thank Kelly, Laurie and Mark.

Well, sort of Mark. He told me to right click on my Mac. It’s an iBook, I just have the one big button. I’ll let it slide because Mark sometimes brings beer to my house.

Did I mention that Kelly was cool enough to give me help over the phone? We talked for about an hour. She also sent me some cool links on flickr that I will check if Ian keeps pretending to sleep on his little couch and Claudia keeps sleeping for real.

Can a two year old have mono?

Now - who knows how to make the picture move?

The Pink One, potty humor

On Saturday Claudia and I were in Sunglass Hut in the mall. I was trying on sunglasses and Claudia was helping me by touching all of the lenses.

At some point she noticed that her father and brother were no longer with us and she said “Where Daddy Ian go?” (She talks in complete sentances, but she doesn’t like to waste her time with any pesky conjunctions.) I told her that they had gone to the restroom to change Ian’s diaper.

This must have given her the idea, because all of the sudden, my delicate little flower yells “I HAVE DIARRHEA!” Even though it sounded more like dia-wea I’m still pretty sure everyone else knew exactly what she was talking about. Being the mature adult that I am, I doubled over laughing and so she yelled it again. “I HAVE DIARHEA!”

The strangest part about it is that it wasn’t even true. I checked her diaper and she didn’t even have solid poop. Nothing. She was barely wet.

My baby girl has learned about bathroom humor. I think she’s a riot.

* Dung.
Thank you to Monty Python’s Flying Circus for my favorite poop joke.

June 26, 2006 | The Cats

I am patiently trying to figure out how to work my fancy new blog when I hear this crazy noise coming from the kitchen. It was a loud crinkly and thumpy sound.

Both kids were in their beds, so I knew it wasn’t them. Then I saw a crazy blue flash run by. It made the circle from kitchen to living room to dining room and back to the kitchen three times. It sounded like an angry rain stick. It looked like a cat wearing a cape.

It was in fact a cat with a blue grocery bag around it’s neck.

As some of you know, my cats are from the same litter. They look more alike than my twins do. Gabe’s Mom says she can’t tell them apart at all. Usually it isn’t a problem for me, but in this case I wasn’t sure which cat I was looking for.

First I found Sid. Initially I thought Sid had somehow shaken the bag because his tail was all puffed up and he looked scared, but after not being able to locate Klaus for about 10 minutes I started thinking that it had probably been him and he was hiding somewhere with the bag still on. I started to convince myself that Klaus was suffocating on the grocery bag in a closet somewhere.

An eternity Five minutes later, with the help of a flashlight (that I should have been saving in case we lose power due to the apocalypse) I found Klaus and his cute little outfit under my bed. Way under my bed. So far under my bed that I had to move it to get to him.

So, I pulled the king size bed away from the wall all by myself (like this) and carefully (sorry) let the cat out of the bag.

True story.

Housekeeping

I am just checking to see if I know how to post pictures in my new space.

Nope.

Well, it was a picture of Gabe and The Squad looking at a dump truck. If you are still curious, you can find it here. In the meantime, if any of you guys know an easy way to resize pictures on a mac, please let me know.

June 23, 2006 | Housekeeping

I’m here.

Let me know if there are any problems with any of my links or if anything looks wrong. I’ll most likely be changing all of my add ons all this week. Please let me know if you see anything that links to the old site.

Randomness

Small World

I’m going to let her tell the story of how we figured this out, but in one of the strangest coincidences that I have ever been involved with it turns out that I went to the same high school as Sharon at It’s Okay, Sweetie, and I have known her brother since 6th grade. He rode my bus. Our parents live no more than two minutes from each other. I swear that I had no idea who she was when I gave her my Perfect Post award for May. I don’t even remember how I found her blog.

Conversation With Lumpyhead’s Mom

Lumpyhead’s Mom and I were talking about how it was sort of awkward telling people that we became friends because we met on the internet (These comments started it all).* It can be even more difficult for her to explain because a lot of her friends and family don’t know that she has a blog.

Here is the e-mail conversation we had trying to decide what we should tell the others.

S: We should tell people we met in NA or getting our GED’s. Way less embarrassing.**

LM: I met her at the free clinic while we were both getting tested.

S: We had the same pimp.

LM: The Greater DC Area Creed Fanclub

S: We could say we met at the bedwetting clinic.

BlogHer
Holy crap. Plane tickets to San Jose are EXPENSIVE. I hope next year they have BlogHer somewhere that I can drive to in less than three days. I thought the conference tickets were expensive, but wow. The irony is that after I buy this thing on my credit card it will probably push me over the edge and I’ll have enough points to get a free airline ticket. I need a quick show of hands of who is going. Am I going to meet a bunch of cool new people, or am I just going to spend all my time in a hotel room drinking with The Kaiser? (This is starting to sound more and more like college to me each time I talk about it).

* I know, since then I’ve talked to several people who have met a lot of friends on the internet and even people who met their spouses online. It’s not that weird. It’s just the look that you get from non-bloggers or people that are a generation older than us.
** Not that there is anything wrong with a getting a GED or being in NA or getting tested for disease. However, the Creed Fanclub could be grounds for the M’Naghten defense.

June 22, 2006 | Housekeeping, Randomness

I am completely traumatized. My blog was down for at least 12 hours for no reason. (Thanks to those of you who noticed and asked about it.) I tried to sign up for a WordPress account and now I can’t log in over there, and I can’t get to their tech support without signing in. I’ve found someone who can fix it all for me, but she is on vacation.

Talk amongst yourselves, or go read The Official Site of Grant Miller. It makes me laugh a lot.

You could also talk about why the Knicks are going to suck next year, or If the bidding isn’t over yet you might still have a chance to go on ebay and get this Ben Roethlisberger Replica Helmet. (It’s is in much better taste than you would think for a link like that - thank you for the link Kaiser.)

In the meantime, unless some brilliant philanthropist knows how to solve all of my problems for free, I am going to go throw up because I am having unreasonable amounts of stress from this stupid blog move. Then I’ll probably go do some laundry.

June 21, 2006 | Uncategorized

It turns out that people aren’t searching for Brad Pitt’s Butt. Go figure. If this had been the “Doodlebops Without Makeup” or the “Laurie Berkners Boobs” or “Lazytown” experiment it would have been a smashing success. I have had at least 34 hits regarding the Doodlebops naked faces and eight recent hits for Laurie Berkner without clothes on (more if you count searches for her in compromising positions or other specific parts of her anatomy, including nipples specifically). Brad Pitt’s butt - no so much. The experiment was a bust.

We’ll try another experiment some time in July. I have it on good authority that the way to go is to post an mp3 of a song that the kids are looking for.

In the meantime, I will spare you the entire list (who keeps looking for “goon riding” and what the hell does that mean?), but here are some questions that people searched for that I can answer.

- Should I give Sarah some food?
Yes
- who narrates “The Deadliest Catch”? (I got this one twice)
Mike Rowe. I looked it up on imdb.
- Jordy what happened?
He is sixteen, lives in France, and hopes to be a techno star someday.
- calorie intake for rolos candies
Well, there are 228 calories in a package. So if there are 10 in a pack (and I’m just guessing here) it would be 22.8 calories each.
- Did Gabe die in the show “Six Feet Under”?
Yes.
- Want to join my fantasy football league?
I probably do.

Any other questions?