Melicious Details

The worst of the wurst.

I was at the hair salon last week and had this conversation with my stylist.

Kate:  After standing on my feet all day, I get cankles.
Me:  Does everyone call you Hillary?
Kate:  My feet and ankles also get really swollen when I'm on long flights.  So I went and bought some medical-grade support hose.
Me: Don't you need to be somebody's grandmother to be allowed to purchase those?
Kate:  They worked great. But they are sooooooo ugly. 
Me: I bet.
Kate:  I got black. The only other color they come in is that weird color - it kind of fleshy...you know... it's like the same color as potted meat.

I have to stop here for a minute and say that I had never heard of potted meat, but since Kate's mom is British, I figured she was familiar with all kinds of bad cuisine.

Me:  Potted meat?  You mean like Spam?
Kate:  Actually more like liverwurst.
Me:  So you can buy medical grade support hose in two colors:  Black and Liverwurst.
Kate: <squealing with laughter> Right!

I had not thought about liverwurst for YEARS. But it all came back to me:  When I was 7 or 8 years old, I was playing at my friend Cheryl's house.  At lunch time her mom made us sandwiches.  I'm all ready for PB&J, but what is handed to me?  Wonder Bread with mayonnaise and liverwurst. One of my Top 5 Most Horrific Culinary Experiences. Ever.

My Sweet Potato Fries

Here's my easy and delish recipe for sweet potato fries.  They are actually baked, but they look like fries so that's what we are calling them.

Since other recipes always start with this step, I will too:

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

But really, the first step is to go to the grocery store and buy 2 medium-sized organic sweet potatoes - Garnets are my favorite - so don't actually preheat the oven until you are back from the store. When you get your sweet potatoes home, peel them. Then cut them in half lengthwise, and then cut the halves into long spears. Fat spears are fine, I am not too picky about the shape.

Pour 2 tablespoons of olive oil on a baking sheet and roll the spears around in the oil so they get coated on all sides. Sprinkle with 1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of ground pepper.  Roll them around some more.

Bake in the oven for 15 minutes.  Take the pan out of the oven, set it on the stove and using your spatula, flip over the spears so they can cook on the other side. If you happen to be wearing a heat resistant full body suit you can pull the tray out of the oven and turn them right there, but man, your tolerance for heat has got to be pretty damn high.  450 degrees is freaking hot.

Bake for another 7-10 minutes.  Sorry I cannot be more specific but it will depend on a) your oven and b) how fat your spears (which I guess we should now be calling fries) are.  Test with a fork to make sure they are soft in the middle.

Serve your SPFs hot and you can also sprinkle more salt on them if you want. You will have enough to serve four people unless one of them loves these so much they eat like a pig. If you have any leftover, just put them in a covered container in the fridge and reheat in the mic the next day. 

Unnatural Disasters

My new favorite website is called Photoshop Disasters. It's a collection of mostly hilarious examples of what happens when amateurs try to use Photoshop to somehow "enhance" a photograph.

I'm pretty sure the conversation for this ad went something like this:

Marketing Person:  So the model will be wearing the black button down sleeveless shirt.  And jeans.
Photoshop User:  A button down shirt that is sleeveless?
MP:  Yes.
PU:  Seriously?
MP:  We want him to look cool and kind of edgy...let's have him holding a motorcycle helmet in one hand.
PU:  And in his other hand, his fingers can be entwined with disembodied fingers!  Now THAT is edgy.

Photoshop Disasters' posts are sometimes over my head when they show a photo that looks perfectly fine to me, but has a headline that says "clearly a vertical hold problem" or "terrible leveling". 

Which reminds me of the years when I worked for the company that makes Photoshop.  I must have had this conversation a hundred times:

Person I have never met:  You work at the company that makes Photoshop?
Me:  Yes.
Person:  Wow!  I've been using Photoshop since Version 3.
Me:  We're on Version 27 now.
Person:  It's a great product.  But I have a problem when I try to <insert technical words here>.  Do you know how to fix that?
Me:  No.

The other amusing thing about Photoshop Disasters is that it has actual examples of disasters created by the company who makes Photoshop.  What could be more ironic - a Photoshop Disaster featuring a photo of Photoshop packaging.  I thought this was so funny.  Like really laugh out loud funny.  But that might be because I am relieved to a degree you probably can't imagine that I no longer have responsibility for marketing Photoshop.

Taking my wildebeest for a walk

I know it's hard to tell, but that is actually an 18 pound Border Terrier named Trio.

After our walk this morning, I showed Clyde this picture.

Clyde:  Are you going to put that on Miraculous Melissa?
Me:  It's Melicious Details.
Clyde:  Right.  That thing.
Me:  You can't remember that it is called Melicious Details?
Clyde:  I have my own vocabulary.

Shampooing or gunslinging?

I ended up in Dubai for a couple of days last year.  It's not a destination I would recommend, but it was a stop along the way to someplace better.  Dubai seems like the overindulged love child of Disney World and Las Vegas - surreal and excessively excessive.  Water costs more per gallon than oil, yet every highway is lushly landscaped with beautiful flowers.  I wish I had a taken a photo of the diamond encrusted pistol displayed in a jewelry store at the Burj hotel.

But I did have my camera (in fact, if you look closely, you can see my reflection in the saloon mirror) when we came across this strip mall on the outskirts of the city, where the road literally ends in the desert, and apparently you can get a shot of whiskey along with your cut and curl.

So You Think You Can Pole Dance

My friend Celeste decided to celebrate her birthday by inviting several girlfriends to join her in learning how to pole dance.  Celeste is the kind of friend who would do anything for you, so I felt I needed to do this for her.  I admit I was scared.  In grade school I always got hurt playing on the playground bars and poles.  But unlike grade school, this event involved drinking champagne, which is guaranteed to improve my dancing.  And also my "musicality".  Maybe it would help with the pole.

The first thing you do when you enter the pole dancing studio is put on pole dancer shoes.  Which are shoes you wear when walking around the studio.  And when attempting to pole dance.  I realized really quickly I would have to make a choice:  either I could guzzle champagne OR I could wear the shoes.  Even I - who's worn high heels since I was 14, who often said I broke through the glass ceiling with my stilettos - was no match for these shoes.  They scared me almost as much as the pole did.

Our dancing instructor's name was Brandy and she was obviously a professional.  At many things.  I think she may have gotten her name from the standard method of pole dancer naming whereby your first name is the same as your childhood pet.  In case you are wondering, mine would be Snowball. 

Brandy provided us with impossible to follow step by step instructions on how to dance with the pole.  She also told us we should concentrate on the person we were imagining we were dancing for, as opposed to watching the other women next to us who were grappling with their own pole.  But honestly, watching the other women was so hilarious, it's pretty much all I could do.  And anyway, my pole and I had like no chemistry.  At all.

As you might imagine, Brandy takes her pole dancing very seriously.  Her instructions included all kinds of graphic - and creative, by the way - ideas for how to "be sexy and uninhibited with your partner."  After Brandy's third eyebrow-raising suggestion, the woman next to me said, "If I tried that, my husband would say 'What is wrong with you??''.

Brandy also taught us lap dancing, which at first I thought was going to be so much better because we could take the shoes off.  Right?  You don't lap dance in the shoes do you?  Oh. You do?  Really?

When my husband was a ninja vampire.

At the dermatologist's urging, Clyde had a treatment using blue light to remove some pre-cancerous spots on his face. While the end result would be a less spotty face, immediately after the treatment he couldn't be in the daylight or be near a window where sunlight was coming in, or sit too close to fluorescent or incandescent lights for 48 hours.

The morning after the blue light special, I was awoken at dawn to this:

Me: What are you doing?
Clyde: I'm going to water the tomato plants before the sun comes up.
Me: Seriously??  I need to take a picture of you.
Clyde: Are you going to put it on Melicious Details?
Me: Absolutely.
Clyde: You don't need to take my picture.
Me: This would be hard to describe without a photo.
Silence
Me: So then are you going to spend the rest of the day laying under the house?
Clyde: First I have to go to the bank.

And then you asked: Does it come with a bottle of drool?

My friend Professor Steve alerted me to this photo. I told him he should put it on his blog, but Professor Steve doesn't have a blog and doesn't want one.  He says he never will and I can take that to the banque. Steve lives close to Canada, which must be why he spells banque that way.

But enough about Steve.  Here's the conversation I am imagining you and I would be having right now:

You:  What's with the lady and the dog?
Me:   The lovely jacket worn by that lady is made entirely of fur from her Newfoundland!
You:  Shut. Up. 
Me:  Really.
You:  Eeeeeeewww.  Is the jacket really really bulky or is her head just small?
Me:  Um. I'm not sure.
You:  Is that a gold brooch on the lapel? Is she accessorizing her dog fur jacket??
Me:  Hmm.  Maybe.
You:  Do you think she takes the jacket to the groomer when it gets dirty? Like when other dogs lift their leg on her??
Me:  Possibly.
You:  That jacket could not be more unattractive. Who would actually wear something like that? She looks ridiculous.
Me:  You are so mean.

If Someone Offers You a Morphine Pump, Say Yes.

I had surgery a couple of weeks ago.  Because, for one thing of many things, having surgery meant I could avoid having to take a drug for five years (yes, FIVE YEARS) that has a long list of creepy side effects like it might cause you to grow a third eye.  OK, maybe not a third eye.  But still, potentially unattractive side effects are possible with that drug.  Which will remain nameless.  Thus, the surgery.

One of the first things I remember when I woke up from the anesthesia was the nurse handing me a small cylindrical thingy and saying:  Here is your morphine pump.  And me thinking:  she is out of her mind!  I am not using a morphine pump.

Because I don't do drugs.  I've never taken prescription meds for longer than 2 weeks.  I barely know if there is a difference between Advil and Tylenol.  Is there?  I can never remember.

The nurse leaves, visitors arrive, and so does the aching and the throbbing and a kind of searing burning pain that gets worse when I breathe. That's when I realized what I really really really needed was a morphine pump and THANK GOD I has holding one in my left hand.

Those people who invented the morphine pump?  Very clever.  They made it so you only get a teeny tiny little dose every 10 minutes if you push the pump.  When you push the pump successfully it makes a delightful little dinging sound.  If you push it before 10 minutes is up, it makes an obnoxious, let's tell the whole world you are a drug addict BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! sound.

I learned three things happen when you use a morphine pump.
#1. The pains stops screaming at you right away.
#2. You believe you are completely lucid at all times despite the fact that you are injecting a narcotic directly into your vein.
#3. You lose the ability to tell time.

At 2:19 p.m. I am becoming a morphine pump expert.  I make a mental note that in 10 minutes it will be 2:29.  I push the pump.  Ding.  I am blissful.  Did I just have surgery?  I can't believe I don't have any pain.

At 2:23 I look at the clock and realize hey! it's time for more morphine!  I push the pump again.  BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

Something must be wrong. I address all of my visitors, but specifically Clyde because it is his job to fix things.

Me:  This isn't working.

To prove my point, I push the pump again. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

Clyde:  You just did it a few minutes ago.

Me:  I did not.

Clyde:  Yes you did.  It hasn't been 10 minutes yet.

Me:  Yes it has.

I push the pump again, because it has definitely been 10 minutes by now.  BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

Me:  See?? It's NOT WORKING.

I am told this conversation was repeated five or six times an hour for the next 12 hours.  Thankfully, I don't remember any of that.

Mistaken Identity

At first I thought he had somehow gotten the step stool out and climbed up and opened the knife drawer (a real accomplishment without opposable thumbs) but then I realized:  Oh. They are not referring to MY Trio.