Thanksgiving Is Over and I'm Thankful to the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills

Hi World,

I hope that if you were celebrating Thanksgiving today that you are well and truly stuffed full of good things.  Well, even if you didn't celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you at least got a marmite sandwich and a bag of crisps.

I've decided that if I get to come back for another life, I'm coming back as someone who gets to sit on my ass all day, watching the parade and then the football game, until it's time to get up and go sit on my ass in the dining room.  That seems like a lot more fun than trying to remember how to make gravy.

To be fair, I spent a lot of time tweeting, which is getting to be a little bit of a problem.  You know, problem, as in a problem that you point out to someone behind a raised hand so that the person who has the said problem you are pointing out has absolutely NO idea that you are talking about them.  Enough of a problem, in fact, that the bushel of carrots I peeled and tried to cook boiled dry on the stove, burned, and stunk the place up.  Not only were we were robbed of that lovely turkey roasting smell, we had to eat dinner smelling the scent of burned carrots, reminiscent of a bad 50's sitcom about newlyweds in which the wife burns everything she cooks and makes horrible meatloaf. 

I'm wordy tonight, aren't I? I'm sorry.  What I meant to say is I burned the damn carrots because I was  busy tweeting and then I ran around the house doing my Lucy Ricardo imitation, which I thought was funny, but caused the people sitting on their asses to roll their eyes.  Which was probably more exertion than they were prepared for today.  Then I had to make more carrots.

Here are some tweets for you, and I didn't even have to lose any sleep over them: 

littleb wants to mail his Christmas cards now. Right now. Tried to explain we are slackers. We don't send cards. He's not buying it.

about 16 hours ago via web

If you r watching the MD parade and you see the Office Max float, can you tweet me the color of the elf's hat? Can't depend on Matt Lauer

about 16 hours ago via web

note to self: You being a flake will not automatically result in flaky piecrust. It does not work like that.

about 16 hours ago via web

lost a follower. I think it was Matt Lauer.

about 16 hours ago via web

What's a good substitute for corn starch? baking powder? Flour? vodka? I'm going with the vodka.

about 14 hours ago via web

Chicken, remember last summer when, in a organizational frenzy, you cleaned out your spices? Did you replace them? That's what I thought.

about 14 hours ago via web

Recipe for Worst Pumpkin Pie Ever: Suspicious can of pumpkin filling, gelatin, sugar, vodka, cinnamon, molasses. Better luck with turkey.

about 14 hours ago via web

And now I will attempt my signature recipe...Boursin Potato and Green Bean Gratin with Pancetta topping. Innovation, necessity, yada yada

about 12 hours ago via web

The number of people in your kitchen asking if you need help will increase in direct proportion to the readiness of the meal. True. Fact.

about 8 hours ago via web


I'm thankful the potato, gratin, greenbean experiment worked out, that the turkey was moist (but not contaminated) and for many, many things

about 1 hour ago via web

In between those somewhere, my left brain hemisphere and my right brain hemisphere got into a fight because, you know, holiday tension and burned carrots and all, and the left side tried to execute a coup to take out the normally dominant right side.  You know who won, because you wouldn't be reading this if old battle axe Righty had gone down with the carrots.  You'd be reading my potato gratin recipe with very exact directions, as if you need a recipe to make potatoes, cheese and cream taste good, and a sweet story about how TWLITB helped clean up after dinner.  You can go find me @chickensfeed if you really want to read about it, but who wants to read about my brain bickering with itself when you could be doing your Black Friday shopping at Walmart, am I right?

Oh.  And then after dinner, I got to sit and watch t.v.  Just reading that back makes me all soft and gooey inside.  I never get to watch t.v. except for Nick Jr.  but S. left the television on when she left and I sat in front of it.  The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills marathon was on.  I watched it for a half hour and then, in what can only be described as a transcendent and beautiful stroke of genius, I hid the remote and told littleb it was lost, whereupon he retired to the office with BigB, who is left-brained and therefore did not have the genius tools with which to even think of hiding the remote, and watched Max and Ruby until he fell asleep drooling chocolate hershey kisses. 

Yes, we can discuss my parenting skills later, but I've never seen a housewives show.  It was fascinating, primal and oh so disturbing, and I loved every minute.  I'm thankful to you, Housewives, for every brain cell-destroying second.  I just hope you went after the left side, which wouldn't be missed much.  Something tells me you did good, because I haven't had one coherent thought since I first considered whether or not your cheekbones and noses are for real. 

And so-for my successful potato-green bean-gratin and moist turkey, a decadent night of trash television, and TWLITB's generous gesture, and for many, many other wonderful things including you guys, I am thankful and fulfilled.  And BigB is thankful I didn't make my special meatloaf.

Enjoy your shopping tomorrow, if you do that kind of thing.  I'll be tweeting and feverishly trying to find that housewives channel.  I'll probably have to wrestle littleb for the remote but I've been working out.  I think I can take him.

Chicken out





 

Things That I Will Tweet in the Middle of the Night if Santa Brings Me a Smarter Phone Which, For Everyone's Sake, Let's Hope He Does Not

Greetings Worldlings,

I've been thinking of ways I can stay more connected to you. 

I'd like to stay connected to you like some obscure, ironic and clever hipster greeting card line that you've probably never heard of, but if you had heard of it, you would say YES that is exactly the way I want to be connected with.   

I think I've found the solution. 

I have trouble sleeping.  To clarify, I have no problem falling asleep-I do that all the time and quite well, but staying asleep is not something I do well.  It recently occurred to me that I could be using this time in a way that is more productive than my current practice of staring at the clock while chanting, "If I fall asleep RIGHT now, I can still get four hours sleep......If I fall asleep RIGHT now I can get 3 hours and 45 minutes sleep....etc."

I could be tweeting.  I could be tweeting you all night, World, because interesting things happen and obscure, ironic, clever things are thought.  Okay, once in a while something clever is thought.  Technically, I never remember anything remotely clever the next morning, but I do remember the aura of clever things being thought.  I'm sure there is cleverness happening, and I could be tweeting about it.  That's my point.

Here are some examples of things I could be tweeting at 3 a.m.

• Which came first, the fork or the spork?
• Here I am zombies, wide awake and it's feeding time
• When littleb was a baby we loved having him sleep with us, but he just took out my right kidney and I don't love it anymore.
• R.  You are home.  And here I was just drifting off.  Thank God you woke me up.
• If I go to sleep RIGHT now, I can still get 4.5 hours sleep.
• I wonder if Lady GaGa still has that meat dress
• It would be funny if Suri Cruise wore it to the Oscars in 20 years.  It would be a vintage meat dress.
• And not to be out done, Shiloh could wear Bjork's Stork dress.  Bird Vintage.
• Actually, Shiloh is more likely to show up in Celine Dion's backward tuxedo and fedora
• But Celine's tuxedo is hardly a meat dress, I don't care how hot Shiloh grows up to be.
• And let's face it, she's probably going to wipe the floor with Suri considering her gene pool, not to mention lacking a congenital propensity for couch jumping.
• But Suri's cute.  She is.  And I'll bet she's nice, too.  She'll make some alien a super wife someday. And she won't have the brother kissing gene, so there's that.
• If zombies busted down the door right now, maybe looking for a meat dress, I would give them BigB to eat instead.  That's what you get for snoring like a herd of elephants, BigB.
• If I fall asleep RIGHT now, I can still get two hours sleep.
• Hmmm.  Why did I dream I was wearing Jim Carry's thong on American Bandstand? That can't be good.
• Why is Jim Carry even wearing thongs? And more importantly, is Dick Clark still alive?
• You would think modern medicine would come up with a better alternative to the spine, right?  Something with settings.  Low setting would make it flexible for optimal sleep and high setting would make it optimal for daytime activities.  If they can come up with penis implants, a bendy spine is clearly not out of the question
• Pro athletes would have to get a turbo spine version.
• Or would that be considered an unfair performance enhancement aid?
• There would have to be pre-Olympic and Tour de France spinal tapping
• Then all the high school football players in Texas would get Turbo Spines, too. 
• There would be Turbo Spine crime rings and Spine runners, and backwoods Turbo Spine labs. 
• The President would announce a war on Spines
• Chicken WTF?  Shut up about the spines.
• And wouldn't it be great if you could unscrew one of your arms so that you could sleep on your side?
• I wonder what Kate Middleton will wear for the wedding.
• Maybe a meat gown.
• I'm hot
• I don't mean I'm hot like Shiloh and Suri.  I mean I'm hot like a volcano.  I'm volcanic. 
• Not to be confused with Vulcans.
• If I were a Vulcan, my son could, possibly, grow up and marry Suri.
• And they could jump on couches together. 
• I'm cold
• littleb if you do not stop kicking me, you'll be a zombie snack and never get to marry Suri, I mean it.
• I'm so tired I could eat a horse.  That makes no sense Chicken.
• I'm so tired that if I fell asleep right now a horse could eat me and I wouldn't wake up
• Better but still kinda stupid
• Note to self:  Invest early in spine prosthetics

Tonight, World, we've established that there will be no clever or ironic tweeting, but still that was fun, right?  Right? 

Pearl Annabelle LaFleur says y'all better pray hard that Santa has better sense than to update my technology.

Okay, if I fall asleep RIGHT now, I can still get 15 minutes.

Good night, World.  Sleep tight.  Don't let the zombies bite.

Chicken out

Where Does the Weekend Go?

Hi World,

I personally believe the weekend gets sucked into a big black hole.  It much resembles a washing machine.

I don't have time for a full post today, but I did want to share a quick story about littleb's recent interest in cooking.  You may remember that littleb has a slight chocolate addiction.  Actually, that's like saying that Lindsay Lohan has a slight drug addiction. 

littleb will do anything if you pay him in chocolate; anything you ask-eat broccoli, take out the garbage, not talk for 3 minutes....But of all the chocolate treats in the world, his favorite, bar none, is fudge brownies.

On Thursday, when I last posted, I was sitting here at the computer, maybe focused a bit more on you, World, than littleb, if the truth be told, which is never a good idea.  I knew he was in the kitchen.  I could hear him in there talking to his two dogs, Sparky and Chunky, and his two cats, Francesca and Sweetie, and his hamster, Elephant.    His horse, Chuckles, must have been out delivering the mail.  What? You've never heard of Pony Express?  littleb has.

What I didn't realize, until I finally dragged my butt out to the kitchen to perform a visual check, was that the six of them (five imaginary pets and one littleb) had been quite busy.  littleb was making brownies, and his clueless friends were crowded around him, calling instructions.  The kitchen resembled a science project gone terribly wrong.

I asked littleb what his recipe was.

brownie mix
water
orange juice
eggs

Almost right, littleb.  Not a bad first try.  He hadn't gotten to the eggs yet, so we added those and baked it off.  This is what we got:

It wasn't bad on saltines.

BigB came home, saw the *brownies* , immediately intuited what had happened and asked with completely phony innocence, "Do some blogging today?"
Yeah.  Smartass.

The proud chef (and five invisible helpers)

We took another stab at cooking on Saturday, and this time I read the recipe.  Much better.  No offense imaginary friends:

littleb's secret ingredient?  The rainbow sprinkles!

And then today we made our usual chocolate chip pancakes, but instead of making Mickey Mouse pancakes we made Mickey Dog pancakes:

Why are we making Mickey Dog pancakes?

Because S. has a new dog and we all love him.  His name is Mickey.  Here he is:

Why yes, that is me dressed as Batman.  But I am not really batman.  I know.  The resemblence is striking.

Have a great rest of the weekend,

Chicken out