Eat Me: French Tacos

Yes, that right there is basically a taco, with french-fries subbed for the tortilla. You cannot reasonably tell me that this creation does not make you want to run to McDonalds, then to Baja Fresh and throw it all on one plate.

If you can, you're lying.

Because Three Heads are Better Than One

In this case, it's three heeeeeeeds are better than one. Please tell me you've seen "So I Married an Axe Murderer"! It is seriously one of the best Mike Meyers movies ever. Scratch that- it's one of the best movies ever. I find that I connect with it on a personal level. My favorite lines center around the son who has a rather large noggin and how his father (played by Mike Meyers, who also plays his brother) berates the unfortunate gift of mother nature. Unfortunately for me, lines like "Look at the size of that heeeed.... it has its own weather system" and "His heeeed is like an orange on a toothpick" are repeated constantly in my family because I too have a rather large heeed.

So it was shocking when my heeeed couldn't figure out how to hang my new TV on my new wall (the drywaller/painter-guys filled in an outdated alcove in my living room). When Dad came to help me finish some projects we quickly determined even two heeeds were going to need some help. The problem was that when I had my drywaller/painter-guys fill in the hole- and add some studs to support a TV mount- I didn't mark where these studs were located, and didn't specify how far I wanted them apart. Long story short, when it came time to install the mount it took about 137 small nails holes to find out exactly where the studs were (the stud finder didn't work. Although, my dad will tell you it found him just fine). Those 137 holes told us that the studs were too far apart to properly install the mount. Dammit heeeed!

Thank God for the interwebs and a brother with a mechanically minded brain, we were able to determine that we could screw in a sheet of plywood to all the necessary studs and then screw the mount on to the plywood and as many studs as we could. 10 minutes of holding the mount and 937 quarter turns of the wrench later the mount was mounted. We then attached the TV and held our breaths......................................................................... IT HELD! THE TV DIDN'T FALL! IT'S A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE!

It's been over a week since I mounted that sucker, and it's still standing (or hanging rather)! An addition of a hand-me down white-trash piece of art (it's a car pulling a trailer) my dream living room is almost complete! And with the TV mounted at just the right height, I won't have to hear "Heeed! Mooooove!" when watching TV with the family.

Progress!

God Bless America. First there was progress at the Capitol with gay marriage (then not, then again), then progress in the White House with our first black President, and now progress at the Multi-Colored house in West Sac with families uniting for one common purpose: Get Shit Done!

We actually got so much accomplished this weekend that the only place I can think to start is with this:

It may not look like much, but this one picture actually shows six weekend projects that we completed this weekend.

So there is no way I could have done these weekend projects by myself. Not because they were a more-than-one-person job (some of them were), but because some of them were just things I didn't want to do (paint-scraping anyone?) that certain people in my family had the patience for (thanks Mom!). So the whole damn fam was in town to help me try to bring an end to my redecorating madness. While I'm not done yet- actually I'm nowhere near done- we were able to knock out A LOT of projects, all of which I will be showing you in the coming days.

Now you may not like the chairs, the big TV, or just my style in general, but please don't go all Glenn Beck on me and rain on my parade. This is my house, and I'll do as I please. Or do as my family pleases at least.

Eat Me: Dinner Tonight

Mmm mmm mmm. This looks like just what the doctor ordered after a long weekend of eating and drinking with the family. A light and fresh Melon Gazpacho... shouldn't be too hard to make considering my weekly Riverdog Farms produce box contained most of those ingredients! I might even sneak in some crumbled bacon on top for a treat. Mmmmm... bacon....

Welcome to California!

Ok, most of you are already here, but you're not in my California. My California is located in West Sac, in a multi-colored house, up the stairs and to the right.

Welcome to California, the Golden State:

If you look closely, you see that orange thing is in fact, not a nipple (sorry to disappoint), but the silhouette of our state Capitol. It's just one piece of the California puzzle for that room. And that sucker was quite the scientific feat, courtesy of my mother's and my inartistic sides.

I had the idea of making a headboard the shape of the dome back when I was moving into my two bedroom apartment and wanted to have my guest room be a "California" themed room. It was only appropriate considering I lived right across the street from the Capitol. Unfortunately, I have NO artistic ability, and neither did my mom who was helping me out. So we went about it in the best way we knew how: with cocktails. OK, maybe not cocktails. But I'm sure that would have made sense too. We used equations instead.

First I bought the big sheet of plywood. Then I printed out a picture of the Capitol. From there we measured the distance between each vertex and point on the silhouette (we're talking centimeters on the paper) then divided and multiplied our way to the perfect ratio scale and converted it to a measurement we could use on the sheet of plywood. After we had all the main points, it was just a matter of connecting the dots with the right lines. Then Dad stepped in with the saw and cut it for us, and we finished it up with a layer of batting, an orange velvet curtain, some serious staples and Voila! We had a Capitol shaped headboard that can also easily be mistaken for the nipple of a bottle. To-may-to/To-mah-to.

The rest of the room is a work in progress. As I've mentioned before, I'm always on the lookout for all things California. I've got some "Welcome to..." posters to commemorate some of my previous hometowns (Fres-yes) and I'm working on getting them framed. I've already got one framed beauty in there...

It's California related because he plays for California's team, right? It also matches. That Lakers Gold is one of the new colors for that room. Now you know why California is called the Golden State. You learn something new every day. You're welcome.

Eat Me: We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

... to bring you this!

No, that's not dessert. That's a dinner-ish Blueberry & Chipotle Pulled Chicken Sandwich. I'm sure it doesn't intrigue everyone, but that combo sounds uh-maze-ing to me! AND IT'S ON A BISCUIT(!!!). The end.

Otherwise They'd Call it (House)Play

Gah. It's only 9:00AM on a Saturday morning and I've already been up for five hours. I thought weekends were for sleeping in? Apparently not when there's work to be done. Yes work. Housework, and lots of it.

I didn't purposely wake up that early this morning (no one in their right mind would), but just happened to wake from my dinner/cocktail/dessert coma. Usually I can go back to sleep within a couple of minutes, but my mind immediately started wandering to all of the things I had to do today, and I figured I could either shut it all out and try to go back to sleep, or just wake up and get it done. And so I set to work...

First project was my office that I said I was going to tackle last week. Uh yeah, didn't happen. So I got to it this morning and made an awesome discovery: my desk! I'm actually typing it at now, something I haven't been able to do since this whole thing started. I was also able to put things in their rightful place, including on my walls.

I don't know why I thought I just had to have that gigantor calendar, maybe it was to go with my gigantor calculator.

The calculator actually came in handy after I was done tidying up. For some reason I decided now was a good time to install my kitchen cabinet hardware. All by myself. Trying to do that with help is a freakin' joke, so by myself was hysterical! Right. High-larious. A mathematical nightmare(No, seriously. This really could all be just a bad, bad, dream. It was too early for me to really be doing this, I still had to be in my coma).

When I picked out the hardware at IKEA with my parents, they thought it was so helpful that IKEA also made a template with holes in it to just put up to your cabinets so you don't have to measure 300 times on each cabinet. I thought it was great too. Until I opened it this morning and realized the template was too small for my hardware. Damn Swedes! But I wasn't going to let them leave me handle-less in my kitchen, so I decided I would measure the cabinets 300 times.

I spent a good two hours trying to figure it out, first using cardboard as a dummy cabinet to test on, and then when that didn't work the first 100 times I decided I was ready to try it on the cabinets... genius! Clearly I don't have the patience or the brain for this. One drill hole in the cabinet later in the not-exactly-right-spot, I stopped.

This is what I was left with. I have a feeling this is exactly how things will stay until next weekend when my loving, caring, handy, thank-god-I-have-them, parents come to town to help me with some projects. And so I have to get my complaining out now. All throughout the morning I found myself repeating one of my dad's favorite sayings, "That's why they call it work, otherwise they'd call it play." I hate it when he's right.