Chuck O’ The Irish

Apparently we often get our dog Chuck groomed in March, as evidenced by all the Irish-themed bandanna pictures I seem to have of him. In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I thought I’d share the best of Chuck celebrating his Irish (?!?) heritage. Dave insists that Chuck is a Finnish Lapphund, but I guess he can still be an honorary Irish dog since he looks so good in green.

We had Chuck groomed last weekend in preparation for a visit from my Mom this week. She really dislikes animals (I have no idea how I came from her), so we like Chuck to be all freshly coiffed when she’s going to be around him. Here is this year’s shamrock bandanna…I think Chuck rocks the argyle.

Last year’s bandanna was a little creepier…leprechauns!

But the bandanna that started this photo series was from a grooming visit in 2006. The picture from that year is quintessential Chuck. Not only is it the best of the Irish-themed Chuck pictures, but it is also my favorite picture of Chuck ever.  I titled it “Chuck looking adorable.” I love the sparkling bright happy eyes, I love how it looks like he’s smiling at me, and I love how his cheeks and neck are made entirely of fluff.

Dave used this picture to buy me the best present ever a few years ago for Christmas. He sent Baby Faces this picture and they made a custom pendant for me. When I opened it I was so confused. I thought Dave somehow found a Chow Chow pendant that happened to look a lot like Chuck, which would be weird since Chuck is a part-Chow mutt. I asked him how he found such a thing, and he explained that he had it made for me. This gift made me a little teary. It gives me comfort to wear this pendant when I have to be away from my Chucky puppy.

Quite frankly, I find the pendants of people kind of creepy, but the pet ones are adorable. I think animal eyes lend themselves to this application better.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Playlist Week 9: Hard Now To Picture A Me Without A You

I’m challenging myself to get through a whole shuffle of my music collection on my iPod without skipping. Then I write about what I heard each week.

The title of the post this week comes from Mew’s song “Chinaberry Tree.” Mew’s music is so pretty and evocative, I just want to travel to this song and be a tourist inside it for awhile.

Here is the weekly summary:

* Songs listened to this week:  136
* Completed:  44%
* Number of double shots:  2 (The Police, Genesis)

* Percentage of songs that came up during running that were so totally not helpful in motivating my running:  29%

The songs that came up during my Tuesday evening run were so great, including my favorite running motivation song ever:  Electric Six “Gay Bar.” I’m linking to a not-at-all official video for this song because it is so excellent, you have to check it out for at least a few seconds.

* Best coincidence:  After finally mentioning the under-representation of Interpol songs in the shuffle thus far, four of their songs came up this week. It’s like the iPod knows, even though I’m sure it’s just my human brain looking for patterns.

* Guilty pleasure:  Olivia Newton-John and Cliff Richard “Suddenly”

Rude Cactus, one of my favorite bloggers, discussed guilty pleasures this week and when I commented, I was all like “You don’t know from guilty dude!” Now I feel a little bad, because who am I to say that his guilty pleasures aren’t guilty and that mine are more so. Guilty pleasures are personal. Anyway, with that said, at the risk of judging guilty pleasures again…THIS is a guilty pleasure. I’m fully aware of how cheesy this song is, but goddamn, I love it. Just watching the video when I grabbed the link for this post made me all tingly. I’m a sucker for songs that are fun to sing. Plus, that Cliff Richard is dreamy, no? And I adore Olivia Newton-John, have loved her ever since my Mom took me to see Grease when I was five years old. She epitomized cool to me, even before Sandy becomes a slut in the movie.

* Best double shot of heart-satisfying musically-intelligent love songs:  James “Just Like Fred Astaire” and The Police “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”

I would totally have chosen “Just Like Fred Astaire” for my first dance wedding song if Dave and I had had a real wedding with those traditional bells and whistles. Oh yeah, and if the album had been released prior to our wedding.  I think it came out a few days later.

I could listen to “Every Little Thing” eight million times on repeat and never tire of it. Before the shuffle challenge, having one of the live bootleg versions come up on my iPod made me stop the shuffle and play the original. Just hearing the first soft cymbals at the beginning makes my heart leap with joy that I get to hear this song. I love how energetic it is, a love song you can dance to. I love the video too, the guys are just so adorable with their dancing around. During the Police reunion frenzy, I downloaded what are apparently some of Sting’s demos for the Ghost in the Machine album. This song is just brilliant even on the demo. They supposedly couldn’t record a better version in the studio, so Stewart just played his drums over the demo.

* Random memories:  The Beatles “Two of Us”

This song reminds me of high school. I planned on using the line “you and I have memories, longer than the road that stretches out ahead” as my senior yearbook quote but think I changed my mind to something dumb at the last minute. I can’t check this because somehow I have possession of my grade school yearbooks, but not the ones from high school. I just added that to the list of crap my Mom needs to bring down next week when she comes to visit for the NCAA tournament at Verizon Center.

I had really hoped that line from the Beatles would still ring true years later, but sadly, save for a couple of exceptions, I have lost touch with so many friends over the years, not just from high school. Often it was my fault, but sometimes it was just a drifting that happens when you can’t choose to live nearby to everyone you love after you grow up. Sucks.

* Song/video to celebrate the week that Dave’s bass pedals finally arrived:  Genesis “Abacab”

Dave helpfully forwarded me the link to this video so that I could see the bass pedals at the beginning (at the 4 second mark). You see, Dave needed bass pedals. Now he has bass pedals. Every day is like Christmas around here!

I Gets No Sleep*

Getting more sleep was my key goal for 2011. Here’s an update…not so much.

If anything, my sleep deprivation might be worse so far in 2011 because there’s just so much that I want to do. Like I said in my year-end post, I resent the small amount of free time I have so I just steal hours from my sleep. Recently, what’s been worse than the stubborn drive of mine to stay up is the sheer inertia of my exhaustion. I’m not even actively choosing to still be awake anymore, I am just too tired to move from the couch downstairs to the bed upstairs. Listen to how messed up that is–too tired to go to bed.

Part of the problem is the winter running group I joined to help keep me motivated to train for a 10 mile race in April. I did this last year too and I forgot about how much it messed with my sleep schedule. Every Saturday since mid-January, I’ve had to get up earlier than I want to–about as early as I get up for work. Getting up early six days in a row means that I sleep like the dead on Saturday night. Like snooze 4 or 5 times without being aware of it deep.  I get up really late on Sundays and then have trouble getting to sleep on Sunday night and thus start off each week already sleep deprived. You would think after 9 weeks of this (and 16 weeks last year) I would have figured out a way to get a handle on this, but apparently not.

I’m pulling out the big guns on this sleep issue…LENT. While I’m sure the Pope would excommunicate me if he was even aware I existed (I am Satan, you know!), there are certain things that stay with a person after 14 years of Catholic school. One of those things for me is the Lenten promise. I’ve long since passed the time that the fear of God made me do this, but for some reason I have better willpower to do difficult things during Lent.

So a few years ago I decided to take advantage of this situational willpower of mine. Since then I have given up fried foods, TV (!), and dessert (twice!) for Lent, all successfully. Two years ago, I tried sleep for my Lenten promise and not once did I go to bed by the appointed hour of 11pm (or even by midnight). My sleep problem is a pesky little bitch.

But I’ve had enough. I’m so tired lately that my executive functioning is noticeably off. I’m exhausted yet wired all at the same time. I give my best hours to work, so that means it’s really my personal life that is suffering the most and that’s not acceptable.

Given the recent difficulty I have had physically getting myself to the bed from the couch where I’m entrenched with my entertainment, my Lenten plan this year is simple. Each day during Lent my goal is to be in bed at 11pm. I’m not saying lights out, I’m saying physically in the bed. So as long as I am in bed, I can read, screw around on the iPad, or do anything else that can be done in bed (!) after 11pm. If I start getting groggy like I have been, rather than having to forklift my ass off of the couch and go all the way upstairs, I can just close my eyes and drift off to dreamland.

NOTE: I’m finishing this post around 11:10pm, so already you can see how fantastically this is going. Love the irony of breaking my Lenten promise on day one because I was writing a blog post about my Lenten promise. Oy vey!

*title comes from ‘Insomnia’ by Faithless, which ironically came up on my iPod shuffle last night during my run

Cupcakes Part The Last (!)

The cupcake eating must and will stop…on Ash Wednesday, which is technically today, so I need to get my latest reviews posted now. The last thing I’m going to need while trying not to eat cupcakes is to write a cupcake review.

We tried Bake Shop in Arlington a couple of weeks ago. The reviews I’d read were quite favorable, and it’s local and not part of a chain so I wanted to like it, but this place didn’t do it for us. The cupcakes were small, I’m talking tiny. They weighed a bit over 2 ounces. I got red velvet, since that’s my head to head comparison flavor. Bake Shop doesn’t frost its red velvet with cream cheese frosting. I think I would have been OK with this had the buttercream been really good, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t sweet enough, it tasted like barely sweetened butter and the texture of the frosting was unpleasant–very greasy feeling,  like whipped butter. Dave didn’t think his toffee cupcake was anything special either. For people who don’t like things sweet, these might be the cupcakes for you. We are not those people. The cupcakes there were cute though…

I knew that there was an Arlington location of Crumbs from New York City, but we hadn’t tried it yet. During a recent staff meeting at work, I learned that there was also a location very close to my office. This was information I really didn’t need. I lasted one day with that knowledge before stopping by. I got a “fluffernutter” cupcake that day and ate the whole thing but should have stopped at half. It was good, but so sweet. I love sweets and have never really tasted anything too sweet, but this was close. These are about as far removed from Bake Shop as I can imagine, and strangely I didn’t love the cupcakes from either shop. Here is a photo of the cupcake I ate after lunch at work (stooping to new lows, eating dessert with lunch!).

Dave surprised me one night with Crumbs’ red velvet and I couldn’t even finish it. It was overpoweringly sweet and half was more than enough. These cupcakes aren’t really horrible, but they are huge, taste processed rather than homemade, and are so sweet that they burned my throat about half way through. They are just too much. I also thought about shipping these cupcakes to my nephew for his birthday because they seemed like a treat a teenager might enjoy. But the cost to ship 6 Crumbs cupcakes is $58. You can buy a dozen from Georgetown Cupcake and ship them for less than that. Insanity. Here is me being artsy with my macro lens on the Crumbs red velvet.

Finally, the long-awaited Sprinkles opened in Georgetown on Thursday of last week. They even sent me an email about the opening…how did they know? By Sunday, I was shaking like a junkie with the need to try them. So Dave and I drove to Georgetown in the rain. Even with rain and the new Sprinkles competition, the line outside Georgetown Cupcake was as long as I’ve ever seen it, so we didn’t bother to get their cupcakes for a head to head. We’ve eaten enough Georgetown Cupcake to do this from memory.

There was a short line at Sprinkles, and it seemed like a place that had only recently opened. Even though there was what seemed like a reasonable number of customers, it was chaotic. Everyone was very pleasant, but there were a lot of people behind the counter and too many of them dealt with us. It was very confusing. Also, some flavors are available in sprinkled versus non-sprinkled versions and Dave hates sprinkles. Luckily I told the girl who waited on us this fact, because it sounded like the default would have been sprinkled. So I saved myself listening to some whining.

I got a red velvet and a carrot. Dave got a chocolate with dark chocolate frosting and a vanilla with milk chocolate frosting, which was the closest available to his usual flavor (vanilla with dark chocolate frosting). Sprinkles cupcakes are bigger than Georgetown’s, with the important and annoying caveat that Sprinkles does not appear to be very careful about portioning their batter. The dark chocolate cupcake was noticeably smaller than the other three (one of the things below is not like the other…).

Here are the weights:

red velvet:  4.8 oz.

milk chocolate:  4.6 oz.

carrot:  5.0 oz.

dark chocolate:  3.4 oz.

I think the dark chocolate discrepancy is unacceptable.

When I removed the red velvet, I noticed a greasy feel to the cupcake liner (see the picture of the bottom of the box after I’ve removed the red velvet and notice the grease mark the cupcake left behind). That didn’t seem good to me. I was also worried based on the look of the cupcakes that there wouldn’t be enough frosting but the look was deceiving as once I bit into the red velvet there was clearly enough frosting. The circle decorations on the top of the cupcakes look nice but are hard as a rock and don’t taste good, unlike the fondant decorations on Georgetown’s cupcakes which are softer and taste fine.

I liked the flavor of the cream cheese frosting on the red velvet a lot. The cake was very moist and flavorful as well. The cake was pretty delicate, almost like a boxed cake, and didn’t seem to want to hold up the frosting once I’d eaten about half. The carrot cake was moist as well. It was very spiced and flavorful and I liked that it didn’t have any fruit in it, just nuts and carrots. The cream cheese frosting was flavored quite heavily with cinnamon, which I didn’t like at first but grew on me. This cake also had a delicate feel and crumb and a somewhat greasy feel. This one actually left a film on my teeth which I could have done without. Here is a picture of the frosting depth on the red velvet.

I realize that these comments might make it sound like I didn’t like Sprinkles, but that’s not accurate. I did like them, but they reminded me of boxed cake mix (which I happen to like). The resemblance, both visual and texture-wise, of the cupcakes to boxed cake made me start to think that Sprinkles must use oil rather than butter. That would also explain the difference between Sprinkles and Georgetown in taste and texture, since I know Georgetown uses butter. But then I found a review of Sprinkles red velvet cupcake mix and the directions clearly call for butter, not oil. So much for that theory.

Dave didn’t like his vanilla cupcake. He said the cake was tough. He let me have a bite and I loved the flavor of the cupcake (I much prefer milk chocolate to dark, so this cupcake was right up my alley), but I could see his point about the cake part, as it did have a tougher crumb than either of my flavors. He much prefers the Georgetown (and Baked & Wired) version of that flavor. He really liked the dark chocolate cupcake, although he said it was as good as the chocolate cake I always make for his birthday (from the can of Hershey’s cocoa), and given the price of these cupcakes, maybe the cake should be better than what I can do at home. In terms of the delicateness of the cake, the dark chocolate split in two when Dave tried to take the cupcake out of its liner.

Dave says we should stick to Georgetown and Baked & Wired. I think I want to give Sprinkles another chance (perhaps next week, when they offer “green velvet” for St. Patrick’s Day…what? green is my favorite color!). It’s weird how all three of our favorite cupcake places are so close to each other. When I looked up the location of Sprinkles on Sunday, I noticed that Georgetown Cupcake, Sprinkles, and Baked & Wired were situated in a sinister looking compass-like shape on the map. I guess the Masons are behind the D.C. cupcake trend too.

Bear

My childhood best friend lived next door to us. She was three years older than me, three years more creative and more fun. Playing with her was much more fun than playing by myself and those were usually my only options. We were inseparable, especially during the summer. She would come over and make up impossibly sophisticated stories for us to act out with my dolls.

During middle school, she started to tire of having a younger shadow. She and some other girls her age would gang up to play tricks on me and laugh at my confusion. I would blink back tears and go home, only to go back for more at the first invitation. Over time, she stopped being my friend altogether. The next summer extended before me like an eternity of empty time.

The couple who rented her family’s upstairs apartment got a puppy. I discovered the puppy once when I headed out to sit in the backyard to pretend I had something to do and I was overjoyed. I realized I was considerably more excited about this puppy than his owners were because they left him out there alone a lot. I think I learned his name from the yelling his owners’ provided from the back door.

Bear was adorable and sweet and very aptly named. He looked like a little teddy bear and he was desperate for attention. I started engaging him through the chain link fence that separated our backyard from his. I felt sorry for him and I fell in love with him. One day he started digging under the fence. Though I sensed there would be trouble, I encouraged this behavior. I wanted to hold him and pet him and love him without that stupid fence in the way. When he finally squeezed over to my side, being with him was as wonderful as I had imagined. I picked him up and brought him to my face and talked to him and felt his warm puppy tongue on my cheek. I plopped him down on my lap and stroked his soft puppy fur and felt such joy and love.

I wanted to keep him.

The neighbors were paying more attention than I thought and it wasn’t long before I started hearing them calling for Bear. I hid behind out house for awhile in a futile attempt to keep him longer. The longer the search went on when Bear was right next door, the more trouble for me. Eventually I decided to go sit with Bear on our front porch and let his owners find us.

I held Bear on my lap and tried to make peace with giving him back. I watched with dread as Bear’s owners turned the corner and finally noticed us sitting together.

“Didn’t you hear us calling him?” They looked pissed.

I ended up saying I’d found him, that he must’ve dug under the fence and gotten free. I could tell they didn’t believe me. But there was no harm done, so they just took him back from me without another word.

When I went to the backyard after that, Bear would run over and immediately go to the hole he had dug. The owners tried to fill the hole with soil, but that was no match for Bear, so they eventually secured that area of the fence with plywood. I couldn’t go out there anymore because he would still try to dig and it was heartbreaking and I was afraid he’d hurt himself. I also didn’t want to have to see the day that he stopped trying.

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The prompt this week was to write about a scene from your life that best illustrates your true self.