Category Archives: Randomness

So I’ve been trying for weeks to get Murray’s to do SOMETHING with the phrase, “Queso Serious?”  I’ve gone so far as to carve it into a pumpkin with an image of the joker underneath!  (Disclaimer: by “carve,” I mean that I liquored up my Japanese friend, Keiko, and put her little OCD attention-for-detail hands to work carving out lettering while I painfully chipped away at the Joker’s face)  In truth, the title of this post has nothing to do with anything, but damnit, a corny Spanglish pun that good just cannot go to waste!!!

Beware, ladies and gentlemen, Murray’s is about to let me loose from my cage.  I am about to roll out my first 2 months of classes, complete with a newsletter that I’ve had to design in Photoshop, a program I have about 2% knowledge of — think the computer equivalent to me drawing a newsletter on the back of a napkin in crayon…  I’ve leaned HEAVILY on my friends for the upcoming 2010 class schedule, pulling chefs and drinking experts from here and there to come in and bail my sinking ship out.  Thanks to them, there is an outside chance that I may not be fired (or quit) within the first quarter of 2010!

I will definitely post more about upcoming classes next week when my brain will hopefully start to emerge from the cheese fog that it’s been engulfed in for the past few weeks… or has it been months?  Apologies to the handful of readers still actually clicking on my sad, dwindling blog…

where my brain has been... aging in a cheese cave.

So for the past 2 weeks, my blackberry has been little more than a paperweight.  Sometimes it works while plugged in… sometimes not.  And the best is that it would shut off randomly and then not turn back on until you plugged it in… sometimes.  When it did turn back on, it would pull up the messages that you missed while it was on hiatus… sometimes.  Occasionally, it would pull up a message that it seemed to have forgotten to bring up during its last reboot, making me a good week late on a text message – that’s if I got the text message at all.

I would have switched it out sooner, but unfortunately, my blackberry had suffered some water damage – twice – voiding it from the warranty.  Oh, and on a blackberry, there’s a little square sticker that turns BRIGHT RED in the presence of water, which is the first thing that those clever AT&T Wireless reps check for when you bring in your fritzy blackberry.  What’s interesting is that my blackberry survived both its suicide-by-drowning attempts and only crapped out when I plugged in an earpiece into the phone and then laid it on a washing machine to talk.  Somehow, someway, I must have shorted something.  All I heard was static and then ever since, my phone’s been on life support. Today, I pulled the plug.

Right now, I am sitting here typing while staring warily at my new iPhone.  Did you know that you can’t insure an iPhone?  My husband and the cell phone rep exchanged dubious glances at each other while I explained that I wasn’t sure the iPhone was right for me because of the lack of insurance and then recounted all of my poor Blackberry’s past traumas.  When I pulled out my blackberry, the wireless sales person’s eyes grew wide and I could tell that he was fighting back a “holy son of a…”

But, after comparing the latest blackberry to the latest iPhone, I just couldn’t help myself.  The iPhone was so shiny and held the promise of hours of wasted brain power and time playing with Apps that I will never, ever use again.  Procrastination?  Yeah, there’s an App for that.  It’s called an iPhone.  So instead of opting for the right, super-insured choice, I went with the lightly insured and fragile iPhone.  The sales rep pulled out what he said was the most protective case for the iPhone and recommended that I buy it.   I would have if it hadn’t been so ridiculously large – I’m sure it’s protective since it’s basically a cover 3x the size of the phone.  It was the George Costanza wallet of iPhone covers.  Absurd.  I went with the next best cover, which isn’t nearly as pretty as the sleek but useless red one that I wanted.

Of course, the size of the cover makes putting the iPhone in my pocket somewhat impossible.  And since I hate carrying purses and just carry a small wallet/clutch that has a broken zipper that I haven’t replaced, I’m at a loss as to how/where I’m going to put my phone.  Couple that with the no insurance and relatively delicate structure of the iPhone in general, and everything SCREAMS disaster.  “Danger, Mindy Lvoff, DANGER!”

As the warning signs scream around me, I know what I should do…  Download the Magic 8 Ball App and see what it says.  Oh Magic iPhone 8 Ball, will my iPhone last me until my next upgrade? “Concentrate and ask again.”  Great, now my iPhone is insulting me.  Can’t concentrate now, too busy playing with my new iPhone.  Ladies & Gentlemen, go ahead and place your disaster bets…

Listen, I don’t have a fever, but now I’m STARVING.  I actually felt worse this morning than yesterday, but I think the antibiotics are starting to kick in and I’m feeling a little better.  I still sound terrible, which bodes well for tomorrow’s panel discussion at Hay Qua.  I’ll just be seen and not heard, which isn’t really a great option… trust me, if I’d grown up as someone who people enjoy looking at, I wouldn’t have learned to be so loquacious.  My husband told me it’s OK to back out if I’m not feeling well, but I quickly shot him down.  First, I made a commitment and second, there’s going to be BANH MI there!!!

The other night, my friend Nick brought over a crazy dish from DELICIOUS Pio Pio that is now the most prominent leftover sitting in my fridge: french fries with hot dogs.  If you’ve never had it, you may have the same reaction that I did when Nick pulled it out of the takeout bag: uh, what?  But he quickly broke it down into simple word that I could understand: “french fries, delicious. Hot dogs, delicious.  French fries & hot dogs, delicious.”  He was right, the fries actually start to get a little soggy from the hot dog juice, which doesn’t sound ideal, but damn – that’s one delicious, freakin’ french fry.  I wish I could have finished the full order, but I think I was already getting sick, so my appetite wasn’t quite there.  So I packed it up and put it in the fridge, where it has sat since Monday.

Here’s the thing, I still feel like someone kicked me in the head repeatedly and then sat on it, meaning that 4-day old french fries with hot dogs would be a terrible “get better” food choice.  However, it’s so easy – it’s right there on the 3rd shelf of my fridge, taunting me with its deliciousness.  It’s also already in an aluminum container that I can easily just pop into the oven to reheat… And did I mention how perfectly salty and potatoey it was the first time?  I’m curious to see how it keeps and reheats.  Maybe I’d better eat it for the sake of experimentation.  And now that I’ve blogged about this, I’d better heat and eat it before my husband reads this and calls home to stop me!  I’ll follow it up with a grapefruit or something to make it healthy…  What???  Stop judging me, I’m sick…

All 5 minutes of it… I just dropped my sunglasses and broke a piece of the lens off. Great. That’s ok, who needs sunglasses in LA, right?

…Because if my efforts WERE paying off, then the universe wouldn’t get such a kick out of making me suffer. Right now, I am blogging from Gate D7 of Dulles International airport. D… as in DELAYED.

Remember that fork in the road that I mentioned last week? Well, I picked the potentially MORE disastrous path because I figured, “hey, I’m only young once! Might as well make as many bad decisions as possible and get it all in there!”. Right off the bat, it involved me flying out to LA this week. Everyone I told thought, “Yay! How fun!”. Not me. I love to be in other places, but I hate traveling. I enjoy driving a car somewhere as long as there’s no traffic, I can make frequent stops for food, and oh yeah, I’M DRIVING. I don’t like big boats because I think I was on the Titanic in a past life, and big boats make me feel trapped. And more than anything, I HATE to fly. Hate it. Flying freaks me out.

So week 1 into my new, unpaid for an undetermined time frame, career, I have to fly. Hilarious. Even better, the flight I was booked on left at 6AM, meaning I was up at 3:30AM. Oh! Better news: it was a connection with a 2 hour layover in Dulles. Which is where I am now… Almost 4 hours later.

It gets worse. We actually boarded on time… Then sat for an hour while they tried to start the engines – you know, those silly little things that make the plane go up and then keep the plane up? Yeah… Then they made us get off the plane, which I can still see outside the gate’s window. I’m a nervous flyer to begin with, so the thought of getting back onto a plane that wouldn’t start AND that is currently revving over and over outside while an engineer stands staring at it, perplexed and rubbing his head… Well, that’s why I’m writing this post. Therapy.

Well, when it does finally get started, I know that I get to get back on and sit in between 2 people who seem to have barely escaped a perfume counter at a department store somewhere… Disaster… Delayed… I’m going to start a list of bad words that start with a D when I get back.

This is kind of great in a, “should have figured as much” sort of way.  Someone was searching for my blog and could only find the Cooking Issues blog that I write for.  Huh, that’s interesting.  So I Googled “Mindy Lvoff” and found the same thing – I keep coming up under the Cooking Issues posts that I write.  So I decided to Google “Mindy, recipe for disaster” to see if I could find my blog that way.

Well, this came up as the second match in google…

It’s a story about someone buying a dog, naming her Mindy, and finding out that she’s an absolute… disaster.  She quickly gets labeled as a “killer dog,” even though she doesn’t kill anyone, and terrorizes the owner’s village.  At one point, she runs around, nipping at a shepherd’s flock of lamb (where the hell is this place?  we’re not in NYC anymore) and refusing to stop until her owner literally throws herself onto Mindy to restrain her.  All I could think while reading was that I, too, enjoy lamb.

Feel free to read the little story, but it ends sadly with Mindy being trained into an obedient child, I mean dog.  I wonder if my father wrote this as an exercise in creative writing.  Mom, feel free to comment on this post under your usual name: “Anonymous.”  It’s really a story about crushing the spirit of the dog – personally, I thought she had a lot of character in the beginning of the story when she was a wild, unmannered, female dog…  But the owner says that if she didn’t train her, someone was actually going to “shoot” Mindy.  Again, where the hell is this place?

First, I just want to clear up a previous comment that my friend, Michelle Kwak, posted.  She said something along the lines of “I called my pastor and just because you have my church’s pen doesn’t mean you’re going to hell.”  Well, apparently that came off like I STOLE A PEN FROM HER CHURCH.  I didn’t.  Nor did I steal that pen from her.  She gave it to me for luck… shortly after telling me that she would pray for my soul.  Which is not the first time I’ve heard that… which is disconcerting…  Add to that the whole psychic-assault, and I’m starting to think that I should stop shoving old people and cutting off strollers.

Here’s another little oddity that might mean my soul is destined for tropical climates: every Sunday, my phone goes on the fritz so that no matter which button you hit, you end up typing “hlhlhlhlhlhlhlhl” over and over again…  Every Sunday… the Lord’s day… and if you sound out “hlhlhlhl,” it sounds a lot like…

Michelle, if you’re reading, you need to pray harder.  And get some friends to help you or something.

1) Holy cheez its, the NY Times Diner’s Journal picked up my Cooking Issues Post about the Red Hot Poker AND used my photo!!!

2) Believe it or not, this is part of my job: Check out the new SKOAL page on Cooking Issues

3) I’m headed to Sakagura tonight with friends for one more birthday celebration before I officially accept being 29.  Afterwards… karaoke.  Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and parts of Long Island residents: please cover your ears between 10PM – 3AM.