Cripes, Suzette!

It's Nice To Be Important But It's More Important to Be Nice

I used to be nice. I used to talk about my puffy hairdo, lipstick and nail polish, Vera Bradley pocketbooks and my obsession with vintage dinnerware and everybody was happy.

It's not that I'm no longer nice, but you can't tell that by my blog anymore. You should know that all of that is still going on. In fact, I just bought 4 of these on eBay:

Belvidere, 1941-1978

My dear friend, co-worker and psychic twin has left the company to strike out on her own.  We were glued side-by-side through good times and bad (mostly bad) for seven years and I can't think of better way to honor our bond than with somebody else's cast-off  teacups.

I joke.

I bought these because they have forget-me-nots painted on them and I'm planning to write something mushy about never forgetting our time together. I'd copy something from the internet but most of what I've managed to find has to do with dead people, mostly mothers. So that's out - I'm going to have to write my own. I was thinking of a poem - maybe you all could help me. So far all I've got it this:

__ __ __ made me puke every day
__  __  __  __  __ not enough pay

These pieces are in a retired Lenox pattern called Belvidere and it is perfect. The picture sdoesn't do it justice - it's so elegant that it could make your heart break. There's no indication that this was ever used for anything except sitting in a cabinet.( p.s.The company stopped making that cup shape long ago.) I am thrilled to have found this because while I thought the forget-me-not idea was good, most of what I found was crap like this:

They say every pot has a lid so I guess these would be a good buy if you had a crap pot. To me they are just a little bit corny and tacky and unlovely. Look again at the delicate pattern on bone china lovliness of the Lenox:

Amitrite?

Maybe you don't care but I am utterly thrilled.

p.s. That eBay! Boy, what a dangerous place. Try not to hang around there too long otherwise you might become obsessed with another discontinued Lenox pattern. Don't think it can't happen because it happened to me!

 

Kingsley, 1954 - 1979

Lenox, as you know, has gone bankrupt. *pause for weeping to subside*  I'm not saying that you'll never have the chance to buy new Lenox china dinnerware again. I'm just saying that if you do, it will be because some crap Chinese company bought it for 10c on the dollar so they could put the Lenox label onto some crappy dinnerware and make a lot of money until you catch on.

Abebooks.com Has 121 Copies of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" for $1.00. Perhaps You Should Have Invested A Buck Before You Made That Costume.

Ok, now look. I get what the red part is and I get what the pink part is - I even get the purple, pinworms and all. But what is the green part supposed to be?

 

I have many questions about this get-up. Is it possible that this person got lost on her way to play the eggplant at the elementary school nutrition pageant and some opportunists gave her a sign to hold? Is that smiling face supposed to be one of those born-alive abortions that Obama is so fond of? Is it some kind of outdoor hygiene demonstration?  Walking billboard for Summer's Eve on the way to the beach to frolic about? It's all too vague and confusing.

If you ask me, we don't do enough with our vaginas. Yes, they are well suited for the one or two special tasks they were designed for, but what are they doing the rest of the time? I say let's use 'em to pull that lever on November 4th. Maybe they could drive us home afterwards.

The key here is to be specific. If you're going to be carrying around a sign about vaginas, make the message count. Take this one for instance:

This image is several months old and I can no longer remember the protest venue where the sign appeared but as soon as I saw it, I adopted it as my go-to complaint template, customizable for any occaision when I was angry. Just remove the word immigrant and replace it whatever is suitable for the situation. My diligent vagina, my hypertensive vagina, my artistic vagina, and so on. It was fun for a while but now I've dropped the adjective and just go with the generic "my vagina is angry" whenever something annoys me.

The lunch room was abuzz today with nitwit coworkers discussing the campaign coverage on the 12 o'clock news. They made some comment to include me in their sweeping nitwittery and it made my vagina very angry indeed. Then my friend asked me if I was watching the presidential debate tonight and I told her that I couldn't because it made my vagina angry the last time I watched.

I'm going to get myself a sign.

 h/t Sweetness & Light

I Interrupt My Woman-Focused Media Reviews to Post A Recipe

Free lunch today and someone brought in homemade pancit. I love this stuff, except for the shrimp. As you may recall, I have reached my lifetime capacity for shrimp but there's no limit on pork consumption. That is a cradle-to-grave foodstuff.

To share my happiness with you, I will now post a recipe. In an economy of blogging effort, I pinched this straight off of a well-known recipe site. I include the picture but not the sappy reviews ("My family begged for more!") where people start off by raving about the final dish and then drfit over to adding peas and crumbled sausage by the 5th review. People, as you well know, can never leave well enough alone but are compelled to tinker until they ruin things. Crumbled sausage. My God.

PANCIT

Ingredients:

• 1 (12 ounce) package dried rice noodles
• 1 teaspoon vegetable oil
• 1 onion, finely diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 cups diced cooked chicken breast meat
• whatever whatever thin strips of pork
• whatever whatever shrimp
• 1 small head cabbage, thinly sliced
• 4 carrot, thinly sliced
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 2 lemons - cut into wedges, for garnish  

Directions:

• Place the rice noodles in a large bowl, and cover with warm water. When soft, drain, and set aside.
• Heat oil in a wok or large skillet over medium heat. Saute onion and garlic until soft. Stir in chicken cabbage, carrots and soy sauce. Cook until cabbage begins to soften. Toss in noodles, and cook until heated through, stirring constantly. Transfer pancit to a serving dish and garnish with quartered lemons.

The stuff I had today had pork and shrimp in it, so I added that to the pinched recipe - can you tell? This looks easy enough but chances are slim that I'd ever be making it myself. I'll just endear myself to people who know how to make it and then drop broad hints about bringing  more of it around. And as long as they are making this, why don't they make some of that nice sticky rice cake with the coconut milk on top of it while they're at it? Hmmm?

 

This Could Have Saved Me $39.95 in DVD Fees

Continuing our chick-focused entertainment theme this week, our next offereing is a highly useful website called Book-A-Minute Classics where well-known works are distilled down to thier essence. Take, for isntance, The Collected Works of Jane Austen:

Female Lead

I secretly love Male Lead. He must never know.

Male Lead

I secretly love Female Lead. She must never know.

(They find out.)

THE END  

Now that's shit hot.

Shit Hot

The Thornbirds has long been one of my favorite pieces of schlock, and I say that in the most loving way. The book, the TV miniseries - both. I've been trying to convey how compelling the 1983 TV miniseries was to my daughter, but she resisted me. Even after I ordered the DVD, she still felt she had to maintain her hate-everything-that-mom-likes position and wanted nothing to do with it.

Last week, she had a soft moment and suggested that we start watching it, but true to form, she reserved the right to ditch it if it was lame. Well, I fell asleep right around the time that Father Ralph was explaining  to little Meggie that what she was experiencing was her period and I didn't  wake up until Mary Carson died.

This stuff is intense, let me tell you. Those TV miniseries people knew what they were doing by splitting it into weekly installments. She and I  can pop Pride and Prejudice into the DVD player and happily spend an entire Saturday  watching it straight through. But not this. It takes a full week to emotionally cover to the point that you can face what happens next.

This was some hot stuff for TV in 1983.And we're only up to the part where Ralph becomes a bishop and Meggie announces she's going to marry Luke.

All this Thornbirds on the brain caused me to google the author, Colleen McCollough, today and I came across this delightful interview from 2007. She's a pip and you would be entertained to read the whole ting, but I'd like to point out this one bit where she talks about her husband giving the first editorial critique of her writing:

Ric always reads what I work. He’s my one and only guinea pig reader, but he’s a man of very few words so if it’s a chick book he just sort of says “Mmm.” And if it’s one of these macho books that I also write he goes “Shit hot.”

Shit hot. That is my mantra for the next few days. Look for it.