Stuff I made today

For the past couple of years, Mr. RK and I have been making holiday presents for the friends and family members over 18 (the kids still get goodies from the stores), including ornaments that I paint and woodworking projects that he does.

We use the money we would have spent on presents for the adults in our lives (that sounds dirty, but I didn't mean it that way) to donate in their honor to nonprofit groups.

I put the finishing touches on these and several other ornaments today.

I also made pasta that actually tasted like pasta! This was the second try - the first one was an unmitigated bloody disaster. Why? Because the recipes all said to use "all-purpose flour." I'm sure it's fine for a number of other purposes - like throwing at others, for instance - but NOT for pasta.

If you make it at home, use only semolina for this baby:

I have to say, it was yummy, but holy cow! I had no idea how much upper body work some cooking can be. Yes, that might sound naive, but keep in mind that I didn't even have a set of pots and pans until I got married.

I actually made and rolled out this pasta dough, then rolled it over a pasta cutter. Between that and Thanksgiving, I'm hoping I get used to it - or else I'll keep gulping the ibuprofen.

Now I am off to eat dessert that I did *not* make!

PS The ornament pictures are also courtesy of Mr. RK. They were very difficult to get (I totally failed to get any good ones.)

Happy Thanksgiving from a vegetarian (me)

I stole this from Green Tea, laughing so hard my cheeks literally hurt afterwards.

I'm posting this in between bouts of attempting to cook. Haven't burned anything...yet.

Happy Thanksgiving!

PS Here is the link if you can't make this play:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR0OrgKtgsM

If ever there was a reason to swear

Someone recently described a web site that my friend B had sent us both as juvenile and as having "poverty of expression" because it had "the f word," as she called it.

(Well, it does have a lot of fuck words in it: See for yourself. fuckchristmas.org)

Anyway - I wrote her back in the e-mail I had been included in that she must think my friend B and I both had poverty of expression and were juvenile as well (although we felt that she had poverty of humor, frankly), because we both use the word "fuck" a lot. "Either that," I wrote, "or you are a snob."

I had planned to blog about how versatile that word was but something happened today that changed the course of our afternoon at work, and I challenge anyone to think we should not have used the word "fuck" after reading this.

My office is in charge of training teachers and support group leaders for the free classes and groups that we offer all over the state. It is both labor-intensive (read: we have a staff of two) and costly to put on these trainings, which can have as few as half a dozen or as many as 20 people.

We pay for all of it - our state chapters just have to send us the candidates who are willing to donate their time to do these programs. All of our programs are free, by the way, and delivered mainly by volunteers.

Nevertheless - or maybe because of the fact that it's free - people still fuck things up. They cancel at the last minute (after we have booked hotel rooms and catered lunches for them), for reasons including - I am not making this up - the fact that their workplace has been infested with swine flu, and although they personally didn't get it, well, things were busy. Right.

But today I found out about something I just couldn't believe.

A couple of weeks ago one of the people who had signed up to take a training called up and bitched at me about the fact that we were starting in the late morning. Mind you, we did that so people that were coming from an hour and a half away, like she was, wouldn't have to get up at the crack of dawn.

Not good enough. "You'll have me going through morning traffic!" she complained.

Um, lady. Try my commute every morning.

Anyhow, we did not have money - nor did we think it was reasonable - to put her up in a hotel the night before. Mind you, we paid for two nights in a hotel, all of the meals, etc., for everybody. And the training. All she had to do was show up.

But no!

Guess what the bitch does? She somehow manages to put another night at the hotel - to the tune of $120 - on our corporate card. Even though the room was reserved for her, this never should have happened because 1) her name wasn't on the card, and 2) it's THEFT.

After a long and painful phone conversation, my boss managed to get the charge removed.

After which we both said, "FUCK!!!"

I mean, who is mean enough to steal from a nonprofit, and dumb enough to think she is going to get away with it?

C U Next Tuesday.

Just curious

It is Mr. Riot Kitty's mom's birthday in a few days, and we were corresponding over e-mail regarding plans. I asked if she wanted to go to our favorite chocolate/dessert cafe, a craft store, or perhaps the porn store. Then I wrote, "Just kidding!" after the last one (luckily she has a sense of humor.)

I told Mr. RK, who laughed about it and probably had some perverted seed planted in his brain because of this conversation, because later in the day we had this conversation.

Him: "You know, I wonder how you get a job selling corporate porn to hotel chains."

Me: "WHAT?!"

Him: You know. I mean, how would you apply for that kind of a job? What would your resume look like? Would you sell different - um - packages to a Motel 6 versus a four-star European hotel? And what would the performance-based raises be based upon?

You've got to wonder now, don't you?

On a trip to London several years ago with a female friend, we were both offended by teaser ads (no pun intended) when we merely turned on the TV in the hotel room. There were short snippets of every channel the hotel had to offer, including one with heterosexual male-centered porn.

Now, I'm not a prude - I don't think porn should be censored if everyone is of age and it's consensual - but I don't need to see chauvenistic porn against my will, just because I'm trying to tune in to BBC. (Boy, there's a sentence that can't come up too often.)

But this memory came back because of yesterday's conversation and I wondered. Someone had to sell that porn package (haha) to that chain of hotels, right? What do these people say when - say on a date - someone asks, "So what do you do for a living?" Or worse, when their prospective in-laws ask?

It kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it?

*Snuggles*

Usually it's hard to get good pictures of Earl Grey, because he moves or stares right at the camera and gets red eye (alien kitty.)

Mr. Riot Kitty got this adorable one a couple of days ago.

Earl Grey was a very jumpy guy when we first got him - he spent his first couple of days here hiding under the bed. Given his chewed-up ears, scarred eye and fear when he hears anything outdoors bark (even dogs that are smaller than he is), we guessed that he might have been attacked by a dog.

But little by little, in the year and a half since Earl Grey joined our household, he has been easing up, warming up. In the past few weeks he has become quite a cuddler.

This is probably a silly post but I am so happy we were able to give him and Lucky a home. They were both at the shelter for over a year - Lucky for over two years - because it's harder to adopt out older kitties than kittens. Like most of us, these two came with issues. But that did not stop us from loving them.

I may not be able to fix all the things in the world I want to fix - I may pull out my hair because of a tough call at work, or wonder why, as a society, we have the ability to end poverty, but don't - but this is one small thing that we did change for good.

How many people does it take to irritate a Riot Kitty?

Not many, if they are REALLY irritating.

My first e-mail of the day at work, from a member of our walk committee:

Hi RK,
The people who put on the "Race For the Cure" have a catagory (her spelling, not mine) called "Sleep for the Cure". I thought we could have a catagory called "Sleep Walk for (our organization)" or "Sleep Walking for (our organization)" in which a person would sign up for the walk and tell their sponsors that they can't walk that day, but they are earning money by sleeping in that day (or something like that). What do you think?

*What do I think? I think you are in need of our services. What a great way to eliminate the stigma of mental illness: ask people to pay us to sleep! Or even better, to sleepwalk!*

Coming back from lunch, I almost get run over in our own parking lot by a guy who gave me an apologetic, shit-eating grin. I gave him the snake eyes, walked into my office, and said, "Some asshole almost ran me over in the parking lot."

Guess who walked in a minute later for a meeting with my boss?

During this meeting, a person who runs a support group for us - God knows how she made it through the screening, because she's irritating, a pain in the ass, a troublemaker, and convinced the world is out to get her - walked in to pick up some brochures. And sat. And sat and sat waiting, in the same room where my boss was having his private meeting, for over an hour.

Guess who wouldn't leave? Guess who kept making stupid comments, requesting materials, and just about demanded a fucking security blanket? On the plus side, it was amusing to see her talking to (at) my boss, because he's 6'4", and she is under 5'. The little annoying shrew meets the Jolly Green Giant. He was wearing a green sweater, too.

Then we get a helpline e-mail from a couple in Ohio who have a son in Portland who is staying with their other son. He needs Medicaid, housing, and meds RIGHT NOW, and we need to figure this out for him because they can't or won't. Um, anything else? World peace? The lottery, perhaps?

I ask a colleague at one of our chapters to give a quick glance to a simple power point presentation I prepared for our volunteers to get people involved. In response, I get a 500-word, nitpicky-as-hell critique including the question - and I kid you not - "Can you use a picture of an iris instead of a picture of a daffodil on slide # 6?"

FUCK OFF!

And so this is one of those days where I would love to go run all of this stuff out, but I can't because it's already pitch black out, even though it's not 6 p.m.

I'm excited, though, because my rolling pin and pasta maker are in the mail. So the next time I have a day like this I can take it out on the dough and make linguine!

Winter sucks

*I took this down because it was starting automatically every time I visited the page - so check out the link below to watch the Cowbell skit:

http://www.funnyhub.com/videos/pages/snl-more-cowbell.html

At the end of this month, I will have lived here in the Pacific Northwest for nine years. That is the longest time I have ever lived in one area.

And it's days like to day that make me question - what the fuck was I *thinking*? Because it's gray, dark, blah. If only it were raining, it would be worse.

I have seasonal affective disorder (appropriate acronym = SAD) and yet I live in a place that's gray 9 months of the year.

The weather is probably not nice in a lot of other places, either (especially for my friends in the UK and Scandinavia), so I'm guessing the rest of you could use a laugh, too.

Watch this SNL clip in its entirety.

If you have a straight face - hell, if you haven't almost peed your pants laughing - I'll eat my hat. Well, I have no hat, so I'll eat chocolate. That way it's a win-win.