Good Old Days of Music

I was at a friend's for a BBQ a few weeks ago, thoroughly enjoying the food, drink and great music playing. Sometime around Bob Seger's "Night Moves", the following exchange took place:

Me: "This is a great playlist."
My friend, laughing: "I put it on just for you. It's my 'Southern Rock' playlist."
My friend, turning to everyone else present: "Scribe doesn't think any music of value was written after 1978."

Now, that's not entirely true - there are songs and artists who have come out in the last 20 years that I like - I just don't appreciate music containing the words "Disco Stick" or with group dance sequences in the videos. I hold a soft spot for a particular generation of Rock/pop
. . . it's just not my generation.

But I try to have an open mind when it comes to new music and love discovering some new great song or artist. In fact, several different people (including my friend at the BBQ) have recently recommended that I listen to Kings of Leon. One friend even made me a CD of their music and I've been giving it a listen. I will say that I'm intrigued and this ditty in particular has been stuck in my head for a week:




At the same time, I'm currently debating whether or not I want to go see "Taking Woodstock", Ang Lee's new movie.




The preview makes it look a little cheesy, but my sentimentality over the era and the event might win out. I mean, I may have been the only 15-year-old to ask for the Woodstock soundtrack for Christmas - in the 1990s.

Amazing!

A few days ago I accidentally deleted one of my posts from August 20. Then I discovered what a scary and magical place the internet really is.

Here's the post - recovered!

Remember this when you take that photo of yourself . . . you know the one . . . and post it somewhere. It will live FOREVER.

>>Thursday, August 20, 2009

>>Hello Out There

I don't think I have that many loyal followers, but to those of you who are kind enough to frequent this space, I'm sorry for being absent for a while.

Things have been quiet on the blog because things have been busy in my life. Job interviews, freelance work, volunteer work . . . I've been go, go, go for the last week or more but trust me, I'm not complaining!

One of the projects I've been working on is writing a small piece on the new organic food regulations for an online women's magazine. I've spent the majority of my career writing for researchers or professionals in the life/health sciences, so I'm used to editors asking for more detail! More numbers! More specifics!

This project would require me to do things a little differently since I was writing for the average Joe, but I'm trying to branch out and add to my skills so it seemed like a totally doable challenge. Hey, I've written for the average Joe before. Heck, I am the average Joe.

I did my research, had my interview and wrote up my little piece feeling pretty good about my efforts. Then comes an email from the editor: A+ for effort, she said, but you need to dumb it down. More bullet points, less big science words. What a wake-up call . . . I thought that's what I'd done!

Hopefully it's just a case of "old habits die hard" and not a warning sign that I need to get into a new line of work.

How I Learned to Stop Worring and Love My Slow Cooker

When I was growing up my mother only ever used her slow cooker for chili, so for the longest time I associated the slow cooker with winter - a time when you wanted things like chili, soup, stew, etc.

When I started to get ready to go back to work at the end of my mat leave, I started looking into ways I could use my slow cooker more and found a whole whack of recipes that go beyond the stew genre. The funny thing is, a slow cooker is perfect for the summer months because it doesn't heat up the kitchen like a stove does. If only we'd known this during my air conditionless childhood!

The reason I wanted to learn how to use the slow cooker more was to save time . . . see I was supposed to be juggling work, getting a kid home and fixing dinner all in a short space of time. It didn't exactly work out that way, but I now have a nice pile of recipes that work great in the slow cooker and one of last week's recipes was a prime example: pulled pork sandwiches. This is one of my favourites and it always turns out great - tender, juicy meat in a mouth-watering, homemade BBQ sauce. Just slap it on buns and serve with a side dish. Remind me why we don't have this every week again?

Dedications

To the Kinko's employee with the bad breath who curtly told me yesterday that I couldn't print my file because the program version I had used was superior to their own and then still charged me for what amounted to 30 seconds of computer time (me going to computer, me trying to open file, me realizing I can't open file): Boo-urns to you!

To the Kinko's employee I chatted with today who was super kind to me and who unexpectedly took three minutes of computer time and one print out off of my charges because he got busy and I was left waiting: I salute you! I have a stressful day ahead and you got it off to a great start. Plus you saved me about $2.50, so you will always hold a place in my heart.

To the woman at Kinko's who was printing out copies of her resume, which included the words "freelance" and "writer," causing me to have a mini panic attack and fear you were in the midst of preparing for the same job I was preparing for, only to then realize you were just putting your resumes into envelopes for mailing: my apologies. Although the apologies don't really need to go out to you directly since I managed to keep this moment of lunacy locked deep inside my crazy head and you had no idea what I was thinking. Oh, and best of luck to you!

Romance

Just in case you didn't believe me when I said gift-giving occasions are low-key around here or that we pinch our pennies, I present our anniversary dinner:

Tacos with a $10 bottle of sparkling wine.

My gift to the husband: Rice Krispie treats.

His gift to me: the latest People magazine.

Sigh. This is (cheap) love.

You're Such A Card

Today is my anniversary. Wait, before you go, that isn't what my post is about.

Yesterday, while I was out not last-minute shopping for an anniversary card for my husband, I saw a new line of greeting cards by the Podleski sisters. If you're not familiar with them, they're the ladies who write the "Looneyspoons" cookbooks that are filled with silly cartoons and where every recipe has a ridiculous name like "I Got Stew Babe" (yes, that's an actual recipe. I'm not creative enough for that kind of prose.)

I have all three of their cookbooks (why wouldn't I? I own 40,000 cookbooks. I own EVERY cookbook!) and I have to say the recpies are generally quite good. The silly cartoons and puns I can live without. Which is why I'm not sure I'm a big fan of the greeting cards. The front image on the card is a cartoon similar to those in the cookbooks and inside the card is a recipe.

Now, I understand the need to branch out as a company to keep your brand name in people's minds, so it made perfect sense to me when the Podleskis started a line of frozen food. I got the cooking show on TV. The line of kitchen gadgets made sense. But greeting cards?

I mean, I'm just not sure the message I want to convey to a dear set of newlyweds is "Glad you met the loaf of your life - here's a recipe for zuchini bread."