A curse that will stick

"Epoxy on both your houses!"

(Meg grinned at this.)

Robin Hood

Sorry to be so quiet lately. I started work last Monday (yay!) and have therefore been somewhat busy.

Today, though, our friend Tara offered to babysit, so Jonathan and I went off to watch the new Robin Hood movie! We thoroughly enjoyed it. Spoiler warning! It was like Henry V with Lord of the Rings, a little First Knight, and a reverse D-Day invasion. Very interesting. You never knew that Robin Hood was a returned crusader who was the brains behind the Magna Carta, did you? Well, sort of a proto-Magna Carta, really. And King John outlawed Robin Hood because he (Robin) saved his (John's) bacon when the French landed at Dover (?!!) to take over England, and John was bitter about it.

I never said it was an accurate movie. But it was a lot of fun. We got some great Russell Crowe moments, and I liked how they played Maid Marian as a land-holder who had been keeping the farm going for ten years while her husband was away. It was a bit jarring when she turned up at Dover in chain mail, but I suppose they couldn't help it.

They could have helped the little scene where they cremated the old man with his sword and a sprig of rosemary in his hand. What on earth? There was so much Christian symbolism everywhere else, what, did they think the English randomly reverted back to the pagan Norse? I can only assume that was failure of research.

Eleanor of Aquitaine - oh, she was wonderful. She was what you might call a forceful character and they got that across delightfully. We even got to see some of her signature "diplomacy."

Incidentally, if you ever feel the need to invade England, don't land at Dover. The archers will stand up on the cliffs and shoot you all. Just a word to the wise.

Really awesome quesadillas

So last night we were out and about, and it got to be dinnertime. And we were starving. And there was a Chipotle's right there. And there were Really Good Smells wafting about.

However, we are trying to limit our eating out. Also, last time I ate Chipotle's and the baby (by extension) ate Chipotle's, we were all very unhappy for a couple days.

So we went home and had pretty much the awesomest quesadillas ever of all time. This was how we did it.

1. We fried up some bell pepper and onion strips in a bit of oil very high, so they got soft and pleasantly charred.
2. We grated a generous amount of cheddar.
3. We took our leftover whole chicken, and removed some of its good meat from the bones and cut it into smallish bits.
4. We layered tortilla, cheese, chicken, onions-and-bell-peppers, more cheese, and a tortilla on top.

Now came the tricky part. Jonathan got out our turkey-roasting pan with the little removable grill bars, sprayed bars and pan with nonstick spray, and stuck it in the oven under the broiler for five or ten minutes until it was smoking impressively. Then we took it out, turned the oven down to 350, dropped the quesadillas onto the bars, and poked it back in the oven until the tortillas were very slightly toasted and the cheese was all melted - about five minutes.

Served with salsa, they were amazing. Next time, we are going to make guacamole too, and then they'll be almost indescribable. :-)

Incidentally, I've cross-posted this over at Rational Pie.

Membership application

We're working on our church membership applications today. I'm having a little trouble with number four, "Christian Vitality and Lifestyle: Please describe the impact that Jesus Christ has on your life right now." Um... every way? To start with, I almost certainly wouldn't be here, wouldn't have Meggie, wouldn't have met and married Jonathan, wouldn't have gotten the degree I did at the college I did. We wouldn't budget the way we do, wouldn't play the way we do, wouldn't have the friends we do, wouldn't wear what we do, wouldn't have the job(s) we (mostly) do... I wouldn't be much like me.

I have something that very few people do: exactly what I always wanted! True, a regular income would be nice, but in the meantime He's certainly providing and I get to be home as a wife and mother of a very cute little girl. We're so happy.

Hopefully they'll take that!

This and that

Pool season starts a week from Saturday, and Meggie and I have been thwarted by a mysterious plot on the part of manufacturers not to make very small swimwear. But we finally found one! It's the adorable itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny hot pink leopard-spotted confection you see there. She's going to rot their socks off, just you wait.

And THEN I called Mom to tell her I found it, and she said she had also found one - turquoise, I think she said it was - and would be sending it along. So Meggie can actually go swimming two days in a row! This is very exciting.

Also exciting: Jonathan has a blog and a job! They are not related, and I'm very proud of him on both counts. The Rational Pie blog will discuss food and theology and related fascinating things, and yours truly most likely will contribute as well. The job was through a friend of a friend from our small group. (Job-hunting: yet another reason not to neglect the gathering of ourselves together.) This law office specializes in immigration, a subject Jonathan is excited to pursue. It'll be an unpaid internship for a month, and then, assuming all goes well, he will become PAID staff. We can hardly wait. :-D

On the subject of work and small group, my friend Andi from ours has set up her etsy shop! Her knit purses are very cute - I got to watch her hatch the ideas and bring them about (and then out and about, so we could all admire them). They're definitely worth checking out, and if you ask nicely, she might do a custom one for you.

And speaking of creative people, I just love all of this lady's fixed-up and now hot pink furniture with matching petunias. It's so bright and cheerful, and she even made awful yellow bathroom tiles cute. That takes skill. I also note I've come full circle back to hot pink, and will therefore end this miscellany here and now.

Vacuum or psychic - a quandary

Out and about this afternoon, I just missed the light, so I had ample time to watch what was going on in the mostly empty parking lot across the way. A car pulled in and parked precisely halfway between the psychic, on the left, and the vacuum repair shop, on the right. For a minute nothing happened. Then an old man with white hair got out, and went round to the passenger side and prepared to help the passenger (his wife?) out. It looked like it was going to be quite the production. Just then the light turned green and I had to drive off before I found out what happened next.

So my question was: were they going to the vacuum store or the psychic? If she was so decrepit as all that, why would she go to the vacuum place herself? She could presumably have just sent her husband. A psychic is not something you can really send someone else to do for you. On the other hand, if she was going to the psychic, why didn't he park so her side of the car was closer to the psychic and she didn't have to walk as far?

It's also conceivable they were actually going to the laundromat another door down, but I saw no baskets of clothes, and in any case they would probably have parked closer - say, in front of the laundromat. One last question remains: why would anyone go to a psychic in the first place?

Speculation?

That's REALLY cute, right?

"And you're such a happy girl, Meg! Yes you are!" Me
::Meg shrieks with laughter::
"And then we'll go upstairs to find you something super-cute to put on!" Me
::Further shrieks of laughter::
"Whoa... cuteness overload. It must be a mother daughter thing. And the father shambles away - it's like getting hit in the face with a flash-bang grenade." Jonathan
"We're as cute as a flash-bang grenade, Meg!" Me
"That didn't come out like it was supposed to..." Jonathan

"We save our disasters for company"

Chris and Andi came over for dinner tonight, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Unfortunately, dinner was a partial disaster in every particular (except the sugar snap peas, which Andi fixed). The chicken took nearly an hour extra and the sauce made it really hard to tell when it was done. The rice tried to take over the kitchen. It overflowed one pan, was partially transferred into a second pan, and proceeded to overflow both simultaneously all over the stove and burners, which gave the rice an interesting beige color and smoky flavor. Then, the artichokes (which had cooked for three hours) were discovered to be not remotely done, and the new recipe involving olive oil made them even more slippery and difficult to eat. I was able to zap them in the microwave and soften them up, but that didn't help the oleaginous petals.

Oh well. Andi's peas were perfect, and nobody else knew the strawberry-rhubarb cobbler wasn't supposed to look like that. It sure tasted good - we finished it all off in one sitting. Besides, what are friends for, if not to help eat cooking disasters?

The babushka

Last night we went for a walk and passed a little old wrinkled babushka. She wore a black headscarf and we couldn't quite tell what nationality she was: Russian? Eastern European? Middle Eastern? But as we passed her, she tapped herself on the heart a couple times and smiled at Meggie. "Ah, bay-bee," she said.

Some things are universal.

Family trees

"If people have family trees, so have words, and tracing their branches through time and place reveals the complexity of their characters..." T.L. Simmons, as quoted by Chris's Collections.

Read the full post here. My excerpt doesn't nearly do it justice. It's a lovely defense of learning Latin, among other things.

The Fourth with will be with us, always

I know it's a couple days late, but I didn't get a chance to blog about Star Wars day earlier (May the Fourth be with you - get it?). But that's okay because the Fourth will be with us, always.

The Cake Wrecks site had some amazing culinary something-or-others up in honor of the date. They're not exactly wrecks. But they are well worth a boggle.

War pig

Today we came across a vanity plate reading "warpig." I had an instant vision of the Great Battle Sows of the North galloping up a hill, little red capes fluttering behind them. Grunt! Grunt! Jonathan's vision included Canadian flags as the capes.