I eat Alone....Yeah, with nobody else.....

They say that breaking up is hard to do.... But eating ramen and go food can prolong the misery.
So, I am going to treat myself like a new boyfriend and try to convince myself that pescatore for one tastes exactly the same as if it were for two. Guess what, if ya miss pissin off the old boyfriend from time to time, you can indulge yourself by really irritating the man at the seafood counter in your favorite super market!!
I'll have 2 oysters, 2 scallops and 2 shrimp,please- no not that shrimp, this shrimp. ( I have done this before)
Saute some garlic in olive oil and a little butter and toss the seafood in it a minute. Douse with some lemon juice. Remove the seafood and add diced onion until soft, toss in chopped olives(green and black) and some chopped basil and a drained can of chopped tomatoes
. Salt and pepper the tomatoes. Keep cooking and if you have a jar of B&B mushrooms, throw them in.A microscopic pinch if cinnamin and a speck of cayenne. When all the ingredients seem to be enjoying their new relationships, return the seafood to the sauce to heat up and pour it over some linguini. Parm cheese and a glass of petite syrah. Is there a photo of your x in the trash can? Good, scrape your plate on top of that and go see what's on tv.

Yes, Virginia, There is a sippy cup

When my babies were babies we had bottles. We used them for many things: to get out of breast feeding, A bottle allowed you to leave a hungry child in the arms of someone else, leave an almost sleeping baby with it propped up on a suffocating recalled item on the couch and the bottle was also used to play terrifying games with mommy as the child's super control powers began to develope.The bottle became a tool for the baby beginning with an innocent little game called "oops".Baby drops the bottle and mommy gets here figure back bending over 200 extra times per day to retrieve the it. The game eventually turns into hide and seek. The baby will hide the bottle and mommy has to find it. The baby later adds a twist to the game by screaching at mommy until she finds it. The game can be played indoors or outside and is quite popular to play in the car. Every baby comes with 2 dozen bottles but they don't last long.When you get down to just a couple of them that hide and seek game becomes a matter of life or death. By the age of 2 some wiser mother comes to town and says "maybe it's bottle breaking time" A new mother might ask why would I break the bottles? She will soon find out that bottle breaking means 2 things.a)No more bottles for the baby and b) Mommy gets her life back.
So, we move to the mop stage of mothering. No more bottles means the baby has to steady a cup and injest one tenth of the contents of the glass in it's mouth and help mommy stay in shape by following the toddler around with a mop and a dish rag. This phase lasts about a month and if ya stick to your guns, mommy achieves her goal.
Man continues to evolve and just a few years after my children were graduates of drinking like a grown up some invented the sippy cup.
Gee, a new device!
It is a bottle shaped like a glass with a hard plastic nu-nu on the screw top lid. It is intended to use when you want the baby off the bottle.
This means that instead of mastering a drink out of a glass by 2 , you can tack another year (or 2) on that.
Sippy cups come in 217 dfferent colors and an additional 300 cartoon characters on the bottom.
They cost more than bottles and they are harder to locate when you need one. They really blend in in the toy box, play room and video collection in your living room.
Don't be fooled, They are NOT spill proof. When you find one in the cushions of your couch you can only PRAY it didn't have grape juice in it.
I'm converting little Faith to the glass from the sippy cup. I start each day with a mop and a dishrag and a stack of her size dixie cups. I expect this to last about a month.

Le jardin

Marty and I ate our way through the French Quarter Festival today and after sampling 6 different restaurants we proceded to search for obnoxious T- shirts for our up-coming cruise in December. There is no challenge in satisfying Marty's good taste, within 5 minutes we found: " If it's true beer damages brain cells, I must have been a freakin' genious". No, the challenge today would be finding something for me. As we continued to search, we found Zues the perfect t-shirt for the dog park: "It's not gonna lick itself". An hour passes and then another one and I whined to Marty that there isn't anything here for me. Sadly, we agreed to head to the car and as we walked through the French Market pushing through piles of tourists and thousands of beads, I saw a hand towell that read " silence of the Labs". And then there it was, my perfect t-shirt, the one that only I could wear, the one that BELONGED to me. It has a big sprig of rosemary and a tiny sprig of rosemary on the front. In soft pretty letters it says" Rosemary's Baby".

Mrs. Butterworth or Anything for baby....

The grandchildren are here for the weekend. Faith is in charge of everything! Where we sit, what we eat, what we watch on TV, bed times, rising times, good times, bad times, the weather and the latest bills sent to congress. This morning she wanted my chair. Of course, I GAVE IT TO HER. Then she wanted pancakes and Marty whipped them up and placed them in front of her. She then muttered meanly "BACON' so he made her some bacon. "Juice" was delivered and " FORK" was retrieved over and over and maple syrup was reapplied multiple times on her pancakes. I was relieved of duty long enough to get ready for work ( and believe me, I sloooowly got ready for work). As I reached for my purse and suit coat (official work jacket of the de la Monnaie) I realized they were both on the back of my chair, the chair the baby had demanded at gunpoint.
My jacket collar is stuck to the back of my sweater and my purse zippers are all glued up

Fleurs de lis

I met Suzanne when I was 15. We were both volunteers working on West Carthage's first Teen Center in a church basement on Main street. I was from the Catholic school and she was from the public school. She chose a name for the kitchen area and I made the sign. " The Slop Shop"! A few days later I ran into Suzanne with her little dog, Pansy. She was really upset and told me what her stepfather had done to her, that she couldn't go home and she was leaving town. I dragged her to St. James rectory to talk to someone. I remember asking Father Spinard if she could just sleep at the church until we could come up with a plan. He said, very catholicly,"no". I then went home, pinched a five dollar bill from my mother's purse, returned to Suzanne who was waiting for me at the abandoned train car and said I'd go with her.( I was an experienced hitch-hiker at 15) We went to Virginia. We wound up in a half way house for teens called Bumpy Oak Counciling Center. When interviewed after the cops took us there, it was determined that I was as fucked up as a soup sandwich and Suzanne, the rape victim of her stepfather, was fine. Parents were notified and my parents called her parents to arrange transport and were told that they wouldn't be bringing her back. My Dad showed up 12 hours later in his sunday suit and top coat. Doctors approached him to reccomend institutions for me! When I learned that nobody came for Suzanne, I actually did go nuts, "I'm not leaving if she's not leaving". My father took temporary custody of my new best friend and we slept in the back seat for most of the 12 hour ride home. Over the next few years we would take many trips (some road and some right there at the abandoned train car) She thought I was courageous and creative and I thought she was grounded and determined. I thought she was the real Suzanne and she thought I was.

I found out today that she died.

Beware the hides of March...

The first little hide arrived on the 11th in 1980 and the second on the 12 1981.My brother has twin hides who were born in March as well, not to mention bubba was a hide of march also.
For me, JUNE has been the month to beware.
Happy birthdays

If I only had a name....

When we replace items at the hotel they are raffled off to the employees!
I won the fax machine this week. Ernestine is now in my livingroom.
You all know my affection for the telephone... My land line, homey, and my cel , Matey, as well as her charger, bat food, are concerned about their rightful places on the table in the living room.
I tripped over Mr. Toasty ,my heater, yesterday and knocked over Jason, my new food processer. My wine rack, bubbles,endured quite a shake as I sturdied myself on my potrack, vincent.I am now taking out an accident insurance policy. I'm gonna call it my stimulous package.