I Seem to be Obsessed with These Tomatoes.

Posted on July 21, 2010 by Kate

How is it already/only Wednesday? I feel like either the week (and the remainder of the class I am teaching) is crawling by at a snail’s pace, but at the same time I don’t have enough time to get anything done. It’s a tale as old as time, I tell you.

The highlight of my week so far has been the wealth of tomatoes I got from the CSA — it’s funny how something as small as that can infect your life with sheer pleasure. Salads, sandwiches, snacking straight out of the bag, it matters not. These are to die for.

I will say that my favorite thing so far was the Caprese salad bento lunch I had today, complete with basil from my plant (the gift from my guy friend, still going strong) and some mozzarella-style non-dairy vegan cheese-like product. (Got all that? Good.)

I have been ignoring the blog for a few days just trying to get things done at school, so I am off now to add all the new movie suggestions to my Netflix.

How is your week going so far, friends? What’s the best thing you have eaten?

The Classic Movie Project

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Kate

Greetings, my cinematically savvy friends! Thanks so much for giving me all your suggestions for classic movies in the comments to the last post. Man oh man you guys came through with some GREAT lists and my Netflix queue is quaking under the weight of its newly expanded duties.

Here’s a little more about what I’m doing: I recently realized that there are just a TON of movies out there that people consider classics — ones everyone has seen or should have seen — that I have managed to miss out on over the years. While I have seen every single cookie-cutter romantic comedy released in the last fifteen years and probably every movie that came out on VHS in 1997, the year I worked at a video store, I still had managed not to see such classics as the ones listed below — until now!

So I chatted with some friends at trivia and then called out for suggestions here and it looks like I have my work cut out for me. I have added all the suggestions I haven’t seen yet to my queue and will be working my way through as I can, and blogging about it.

Please don’t be sad if I don’t get to your suggestions right away. There are just so many and I’ll be going by my whims and fancies, depending on what kind of thing I’m in the mood for. So, like, musicals and animated movies may get de-prioritized since I rarely enjoy those genres. (Notable exceptions are few, but include The Triplets of Belleville and My Neighbor Totoro in animation and The Sound of Music and anything Joss Whedon has done in musicals.)

So! Here are the first five new-to-me classics I have seen, and some brief thoughts on them. Please know that I won’t be offering any academic-type analyses, just commenting in my rather pedestrian fashion on whether I enjoyed them, etc. This ain’t no scholarly project!

Annie Hall Oh man, I loved this one. Why did I wait so long to see it? The fashion, the meta-commentary when Woody addressed the camera, the scene with the lobsters (and the second-attempt lobster scene!) were all fantastic. The only thing that I didn’t love was seeing Diane Keaton sing. Over all I am now a devoted fan of this movie.

The Natural I do love a good baseball movie and this one was pretty good, but I don’t love it as much as Bull Durham. It was a little too serious, I think. I can’t complain about young Redford, though.

Citizen Kane I don’t know why this one is always “ranked” “higher” than Casablanca in those AFI lists of great films. It is in no way better than Casablanca. I had high hopes for this but was disappointed. The successful businessman who is sad inside? Please. Sorry, film lovers!

The Godfather Did y’all know that this movie is THREE HOURS LONG? Yeah, I did not know that until like an hour into it, when I was thinking to myself, “How interesting that this entire movie takes place at a wedding; I didn’t realize that,” and then I checked how much time was remaining and saw that I still had over two more hours to go. At that point I think I mentally gave up. The only two male characters I could reliably identify onscreen were Vito and Michael. Everyone else looked alike. I definitely thought Sonny and Carlo were the same person for most of the movie. I kept dozing off again and again. The plot, the motivations, the characters, the Italian dialogue with no subtitles — it was all just utterly incomprehensible to me. Hated it. And no, I don’t plan on giving it another try nor do I plan to try the sequels. Before I even put the DVD into the player it felt like this was a homework assignment and I don’t want to repeat that feeling in what is meant to be a FUN project. Not to get all defensive or anything but my male friends are pretty indignant about this one.

Rocky Most excellent! If you follow me on Twitter you probably saw my gleeful tweets as I was watching this last night. I loved Rocky’s jaunty little hat and his glasses and Adrian and her cool glasses and the overall adorableness of them together. And I’m sorry but I can’t get over the turtles named Cuff and Link! I also love a good sports movie with training montages and an underdog to root for (see also: The Karate Kid and the aforementioned Bull Durham). This hit plenty of my movie enjoyment buttons: good fashion, a love story, cute animals, and sports training montages. Win!

All righty friends, this has been your Movie Project Update! I am off to watch Monsoon Wedding on Netflix Instant Play. I thought I had seen that one but I definitely have not. Indian classic!

Learning to Love Summer (Even in Alabama)

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Kate

The summer keeps rolling on here in Alabama, quite greenly and steamily, and for once I feel like I am taking full advantage of it. Can we talk about the food? Piles and piles of fresh, local, organic, in-season produce every week, and I’ve got nothing but love for it (now that the vicious onslaught of cabbage has finally come to an end anyway).

Just today, my bag was chock full of butternut squash that I can save and use for months to come, according to the ever-informative letter from Farmer G.

Here’s a mystery item that my friends on Twitter and Flickr helped me identify:

The internet is so useful! It was a lemon cucumber! So named, I think, because it looks kind of like a lemon, not because it tastes especially lemony. (Thanks for the assist on this one, peeps!)

I’ve also got a wealth of melon lately (watermelon and cantaloupe) plus the usual summer squashes, cucumbers, carrots, and so on.

This has led itself to the great return of bento lunchboxes! (As always with photos, click the image to go through to Flickr for more info, including what’s in the box, etc.)

Oh yes indeed. If you’ve been around here for long, you may remember a few years back when I got enchanted with the idea of making cute little lunches in tiny Japanese bento boxes — well, the fever has returned!

I’m not making any elaborate recipes or anything at this point, just using the lunches as a nice way to pack fruits and vegetables instead of the old routine of CLIF bars or yogurts or whatever. It has become a great success! My friend M. has already requested that I make some for her and mail them to her (she lives in another state), and my guy friend tells me he is jealous and is going to start showing up to work any day now with a (Hello Kitty-shaped!) bento box of his own. A joke, I assume.

But isn’t there just something charming about the small, pretty lunches? I think so. If I could make them downloadable for all of you, I would, but until The Future (when such things will surely be possible) (and old fogeys such as we will be by then shall forever be reminiscing about the quality of Vintage Analog Food that we just can’t get anymore), these photos will have to suffice.

In other seasonal news, I have been actually enjoying the outdoors lately too — quite unlike myself the past couple of years here! Ever since I have become a runner again the idea of heat and humidity that I might experience doing lower-intensity activities such as walking, sitting, or just being outside? Not so bad. No need to hide in the air conditioning now! I’m still hitting the trails every weekend for a lovely long run in the quiet, green, and eerie woods:

If I can run ten miles in this weather, or do seemingly endless 200-meter sprint reps at a track that is as humid as the inside of a dog’s mouth, I can certainly walk downtown, for example, to catch a World Cup game at the bar. Especially when there will be a cold beer there waiting for me.

So the outdoors and I? We are getting along famously. I am even the proud owner now of sunscreen and bug spray.

This past weekend, we tried to go to an outdoor screening of Night of the Living Dead at a local park.

It wound up getting rained out (HUGE torrential thunderstorm), but fun was had admiring the amazing view and the pink sunset and throwing the Frisbee. My first time throwing a Frisbee in probably over 20 years, I feel I must add.

It’s a summer of firsts in a lot of ways — including my quest to (FINALLY) watch a bunch of classic movies I always felt I should have watched but never got around to. The project is ongoing and this post is already long enough, so I’ll have to write more on that later.

But! If you’re in the mood for audience participation: What are your favorite classic movies? What classic movies have YOU never seen? If I haven’t seen them, they’ll get added to my Netflix Queue! Tell me what to watch!

On Running in Skirts, Showing the World your Moneymakers, and Getting over Yourself

Posted on July 7, 2010 by Kate

I have hated my thighs for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, my mother admitted to me her great shame: she had Thunder Thighs and Thick Ankles, and she had passed down these sad afflictions to me.

Ever since that time, I have viewed my curse with reluctant resignation. I would never look good in shorts. Never catch the eye of a gentleman with a delicately turned ankle peeking out from under the hem of my skirts like all the hot chicks in the 18th century. I was destined to be dumpy.

Even back in high school, when I was but a wee skinny snippet, I had cellulite. I remember worrying about it, hating the way my pale legs looked all cottage-cheesy in shorts and skirts. I remember a girl I knew who was on the track team — one of the most beautiful girls in school, athletic and effortlessly pretty — telling me that she loved running because it made it so easy to get rid of the thigh dimples that started showing up during the off season. Just head back to track practice and soon enough the cellulite would disappear. Well, this never happened for me.

Then of course I gained weight and suffered the bane of every curvy woman’s existence: Thigh Chafing! The effing WORST. If you have never experienced this, consider yourself lucky. My thighs, man. Why did they hate me?

Even now that I am back in shape, they’re still my least favorite feature. (Or one of them, anyway, but let’s not start making a list of my flaws.) Even now, I find it hard to love my legs. They’re too short for a person of 5’9″. They’re chunky. They’re dimpled. They’re thick. They’re TREE TRUNKS. That’s what I’ve always called them: tree trunks.

I saw this ad in an issue of Runner’s World a few months ago and I’ve been saving it ever since. For a few weeks I had the magazine laid open to this page on top of my dresser. I LOVE this ad. There’s just something so funny and badassed and straightforward-yet-cheeky about it. Most of all I love that they have turned my self deprecating insult, my own little hypercritical issue, “tree trunks,” into an epithet of power and strength and speed. TREE TRUNKS, motherfuckers! The other terms are wonderful, too. Wheels! Gravity Killers! Moneymakers! The Quad Squad!

I certainly don’t have the perfectly defined quads of the model in the photo, but dammit I sure do have a set of jackhammers over here. Mostly I use them to just destroy hills. I chug right on up a hill in the middle of a race when others have decided to walk; I keep on spinning up a hill when it would be easier to get off the bike; I keep on going, huffing and puffing and jackhammering and panting I eat hills like this for breakfast — cellulite wobbling the whole way.

I figure if I had cellulitey thighs even at age 16, I will always have them. If the Thunder Thighs and Thick Ankles my mother warned me about are part of the family curse, there’s just not much I can do. Except maybe just get over myself and start seeing that short, stocky legs are kind of a secret weapon when you’re running uphill. And I like to run uphill.

With all that in mind, and with the fact that I do live in Alabama, where temperatures and humidity are high all spring, summer, and fall, I have been having a bit of a Tree Trunk celebration over here. Every day is Arbor Day! The itty-bitty running shorts? Got them. Love them. Running skirts like the ones Kristen posted about? Got one. Love it. People, my thighs are showing up all over this hot, humid town — up and down all the hills, pale and wobbly and exposed. I am showing the world my moneymakers and I am not sorry. So. If you see a set of thighs so large and so pale that you need sunglasses to regard them, and if they are coming in your direction, please kindly step aside. The Quad Squad is headed your way and we slow down for no one.

Holiday

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Kate

Friends, this post comes to you from my cozy, comfy couch, where I am ensconced with my canine companion and my laptop, both of which are emitting a soothing, relaxing warmth. After the crazy and hectic week I had, the three-day holiday weekend could not have come at a more perfect time. I managed to spend oodles of time with my friends and let the stress of summer school dissipate, at least for a while.

Friday night a bunch of us helped Golightly move out of her apartment — she’ll be away for the rest of the summer and fall, so it was also our last night to hang out with her for a while.

We all cooled off after the heavy lifting by floating in the pool and sipping adult beverages. I know I say this all the time, but seriously: floating around in a swimming pool after sunset with an icy-cold cocktail in one hand is one of summer’s most perfect activities.

Saturday involved a lunch composed entirely of beer, consumed while watching the less-than-thrilling Spain-Paraguay soccer match. Afterward, the guy and I went to see Eclipse (his choice!) followed by sushi and a trip to Target to look at grills. Eclipse, sushi, and Target? Perfect night, in my opinion.

Sunday, Independence Day, we broke in the new grill — isn’t it shiny?

There was a Field Roast vegan sausage (my favorite) and an actual steak. On the side, the delicious corn you see here as well as a multitude of other grilled veggies not pictured, salads, fruit, and wine.

The phrase “food baby” might have been invoked after the meal. I also made up a new drink (sadly not pictured): vodka and Fresca with chunks of cantaloupe. It’s as refreshing as it sounds! Unless, of course, you like to refer to cantaloupe as “muskmelon,” which someone does and I am not naming names but that someone is not me.

So what did I do today, to cap off this perfect holiday weekend? Why I went to see Eclipse again, with my friend Brunbec! Oh, yes, people. I saw it twice. I thought it was much better than the first two installments. The action seemed really well done and that nice young whippersnapper who plays Jacob was just as charming as ever. Once again, although I am very much Team Edward when reading the novels, I find myself switching over to Team Jacob in the cinema. The kid is cute, I am saying.

Finally, I made the perhaps ill-considered purchase of a denim mini-skirt from the Old Navy clearance racks. I’m not sure how great it will look now in summer, but come fall and tights-weather, I’m sure I will figure out how to rock it.

And now, I am trying to just relish the last few hours of the weekend before I have to return to teaching life in the morning. How about you guys? Did you have today off? How did you spend the weekend?