Les Bonnes Choses

Crazy week is finally over. Today was tax day in Canada, so I got my Canadian tax returns completed and mailed off this week after taking a week break following the US tax day. It's not the tax returns themselves that suck (we get money back), it's the stress associated with the scavenger hunt for documents that always hide themselves (or in some cases, never arrived), especially after you have moved. Add to that the complete reanalysis of some experiments for a resubmitted manuscript because I'd been away from it so long that I needed to convince myself that my stats were right. And finally, I got to give the lab talk for the data blitz, which also required a fair amount of data analysis in the last week.

What will I be doing with my free weekend? It's a secret. But I think I'll start by blogging. This evening, we went for dinner at a family-style Italian restaurant. On the way back, I pushed the stroller carrying Jude and Asher along Chicago's Magnificent Mile and I noticed something: there was a certain cross-section of the young female oncoming pedestrian population that I was carefully not running into that were totally checking out my little guys. It was almost as if I could see the thought bubbles over their heads mulling over how cute my kids were, and how they wish they could be so lucky to have kids so cute. So while I don't get checked out anymore (if indeed I ever did), at least my genes do.

Did I ever mention the time that Rebecca told me off in her sleep? That's why she isn't allowed to have chicken wings after 8:00. Sleep talking seems to have a genetic component, because Jude talks in his sleep too. He first did it at age two, when his distressed exclamation of "marshmallows!" gave me some insight into his tormented mind. He hadn't even seen Ghostbusters by that time.

The silence of the pre-dawn hours was broken a couple mornings ago when Jude exclaimed "yoink!" in his sleep (as it happened, I was laying awake with a case of the Mirandas, watching the room lighten). I asked him later on at breakfast what he dreamed about, expecting his usual response of "cars" (referring to the Pixar movie of the same name), but instead, to my amazement, he replied that he dreamed about taking something.

So Jude is the perfect melding of Rebecca and I: Rebecca's crazy sleep talking tendency meets my study of jurisprudence. I've already heard him claim that "if your friends don't dance then they're no friends of mine" while taking a bath, so all indicators would suggest that we're doing a fine job as parents.

I finally was able to pay a speeding ticket that I had gotten back at the beginning of the year. I was driving with Amy back to Chicago from London via the Bluewater Bridge, and was approaching Sarnia. Anyone who has traveled highway 402 into Sarnia knows about the point where the highway inexplicably changes from a 100 to a 80 and then a 70 km/h highway. There's nothing built up along the highway -- no strip malls, no traffic lights, just the same rural landscape you find along the road all the way from London. I had been describing the rules for a new game I had gotten for Christmas, and thus hadn't noticed the sign posting a lower speed limit. And because there are no other cues that the speed limit might be lower, I sped right into a radar trap. I will say that the OPP officer was nice about the whole thing, and knocked down the fine from 35 over to 15 over (115 in a 100), so I wasn't about to complain. And in fact, had he set up the trap just 100 meters down the road where the speed limit was 70 km/h, and had I been going 5 km/h faster, that would have been grounds for an immediate vehicle seizure.

I'm ambivalent about the whole situation. On one hand, the apparent disconnect between the speed limit and the terrain is annoying, especially because I'm $56 poorer for it. On the other hand, it's an absolutely brilliant way to generate revenue. Think of how much money the government could make at car auctions if the speed limit along the highway 401 corridor dropped to 60 in a few randomly selected locations.

I have, on occasion, used my blog as a recipe repository. I had some difficulty finding the first such entry -- a recipe for Stroganbuddies, possibly because google tries to avoid indexing nonsense words. I did manage to find it, and my meal is coming along nicely. While I am on the topic, I'll post another recipe which I cooked up some time in December when I was about to drive back to London for the holidays and trying to figure out what to do with a head of lettuce, a tomato and a stale loaf of bread. The answer: deconstructed clubhouse sandwich! It sounds fancy, but it's pretty damn easy to make.

• 1 boneless, skinless Chicken breast, cooked (or an equivalent amount of leftover chicken)


• 1 head of lettuce that will go bad if you can't figure out what to do with it


• 2? 3? strips of bacon. I've considered joining the bacon of the month club, so I'd consider using a whole pound of the stuff


• 1 tomato


• 1 red onion


• 1/2 loaf of stale french or italian bread. If it wasn't stale, you'd just make the damn sandwich. As it is, the bread is going to become...

Croutons! First, fry up the bacon in a large sautee pan. Set it aside, but keep the grease. Next, cut the bread into cubes. Fry the cubes in the sautee pan until they start to brown, then remove them to a cookie sheet, and pop those bad boys into a 350 degree oven to toast them up.

While the croutons are coming along, tear the lettuce up into your salad bowl. Slice your tomato, onion, and chicken and chop up the cooked bacon and add those guys to the lettuce. Eight minutes in the oven should for the croutons should be good, I would think. Pull them out and add to your salad bowl. Now all we need is some kind of dressing. I honestly can't remember what I did for a dressing, but I don't think it matters that much because the rest of the salad is going to rock. I suppose if you wanted to be really anal about deconstructing a club sandwich, your dressing should have some kind of mayonnaise base. You'll have to look that up for yourself though because I only do vinaigrettes. I likely made up a balsamic vinaigrette and it all turned out just fine.

I have already taken the position that air transport security has enough holes as to be pointless, though I have recently come to the conclusion that it is also unneeded. Going through security, I was told that I could only have 3 pieces of carry-on. I had a backpack containing my computer and a million electronic gadgets, a soft duffel containing my shirts and panties, and a rigid plastic poster tube containing a 3.5' x 6' roll of paper. That's three pieces. Before I could get irate that it was going to cost me $15 to check a roll of paper, the security officer told me that I could stick my backpack into my duffel with an implied wink. So I'm not sure what the point of that exercise was. I'm also not sure that it's impossible for a bomber to obtain a prescription for over 100 ml of liquid to circumvent that particular restriction either. It was when I had a pair of crappy nail clippers confiscated that it occurred to me that all this nonsense is completely unneeded. Sure, maybe back in the 80's, if an airplane got hijacked, there was a good bet that the hijacker planned to land the plane. Now? First thing that will go through anyone's mind is 9-11. Even if the hijacker has a firearm, I'd take my chances with a gunshot wound over hitting a building, and I'd bet you'd find at least a dozen other guys over 180 lbs on any given flight thinking the same way. How many rounds are in a clip? 13? So what the hell am I going to do with a nail clipper? How about we dial down the threat level, and if anything comes up, let the mob deal with it? As it was, I got quite the hassle with my leather toiletry bag both coming and going. As he was swabbing down my toothpaste, the security guy helpfully suggested that I make sure I pack my deodorant (a solid) along with the rest of my liquids and gels. I guarantee that the next time I travel I most certainly will not take his advice. I needed that extra time to get dressed again after going through the screening.

Nothing promotes blogging like sitting in an airport terminal with a laptop and refusing to pay $12 for 40 minutes of internet access. I just went through the airport security motions here at Pearson, which is somewhat safer than other airports on account of the fact that you don’t have to take off your shoes, putting air travelers at a lower risk of contracting athlete’s foot or plantar warts. In a few hours, I will be crashing Corinne’s birthday party. I really hope that she and Jeff didn’t have anything romantic planned. And I really, really hope that they don’t have anything romantic planned that involves me.

I’ve been doing a lot of driving in the last couple of days: Chicago to London and then London to Toronto. When I drive, I mostly only have my own thoughts to keep me company, so I spend the hours mulling over better ways of doing things, should the world ever come to its senses and elect me their benevolent dictator. I’d share them, except I tend to forget the ideas almost as soon as they come. I used to fret about that, but now reassure myself that if the idea was good enough, it’ll come to me again. It’s not like I don’t have a lot of driving time ahead of me.

Epilogue: I made it in to Corinne & Jeff's just after midnight, following an interesting taxi ride -- that's interesting, as in bizarre, not interesting as in we talked about economic policy alternatives. The cabby muttered in French pretty much the whole time we were on the island -- I'm not sure whether to me or to himself, because I gave an early and incorrect impression of fluency in the language. Note to self: start speaking french like an American. Anyways, staying here is much more interesting than staying at a hotel -- that's interesting as in talking about midgets, Doctor Who and volcanic ash babies, and not as in twiddling your thumbs and paying $220/night for the conference rate. Though they didn't have a mint on my pillow, Julio the cat was sitting on the inflate-a-bed, so that was a nice touch.

There's no shortage of billboards along the interstate highway system which are, I presume, directed at lonely male truckers. Some are directed at truckers who are eager to get back home to see their wives, feeling a little frisky and want to surprise them with toys or a little latex number. Yet others seem to be directed at those who either have no wives, or are not missing them quite so much. I find the name "gentleman's club" to be a somewhat ironic euphemism, though one such gentleman's club, Deja Vu, seemed to be aptly named, as, if you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all.

I called my mom today to tell her a familiar story. Rebecca went to pick up Jude from preschool and the teacher told her that Jude was reading. The story is familiar because the same thing happened to my mom one day when she picked me up from preschool. I'd use this as an opportunity to boast about my superior genetic heritage, except that yours truly shaves his head as a way to cope with premature baldness, and can no longer run more than 50 yards without having an asthma attack. So, knowing this, my kids might want to take a pass on my genes if they're ever given the opportunity. Anyways, my mom was listening to her iPod and did not hear the phone ring, so I got the answering service. Living at that address are my mom, dad and oldest sister, Erin. Carrie just moved out at the beginning of the school year and the message hasn't been updated since. If you know the number, you might give it a call just to hear:

You have reached Rick, Donna, Erin ... and Carolyn. Sorry we can't come to the phone, etc.

The part that I always find funny is that pause between Erin (the 2nd born) and Carolyn (the 4th born) is very clearly my mom mentally skipping over Heather (the 3rd born), who moved out something like 10 or 12 years ago, whereas omitting me is apparently second nature to her. I'm not sure if I should be reading anything into this.

You know, ear worms? Those songs you get in your head that you can't shake. I don't currently have one, though I have been experiencing an urgency to use the phrase, "mouth feel" in my day-to-day discourse. The only thing stopping me is that I don't work at a food marketing firm, and it otherwise makes conversations take really bizarre turns. Rebecca has had an ear worm for the last week: Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl. She's been playing the video to which I have linked to as well. I don't think there's anything she's trying to tell me; I'm there for all the girls' knitting nights, and, far from pillowfights, the only thing that ever breaks out is a game of Settlers of Catan, occasionally punctuated by games of Puerto Rico.

In any case, Asher is usually on Rebecca's lap when she plays the youtube video, so between exposure to this video and the Single Ladies video that Amy likes to play for him, I predict that Le P'tit Monsieur (now also called Danger Boy) is going to be the kind of boy that parents warn their daughters about. I'd still like to see him hooked up with Robyn, but in all fairness, would advise Michelle and Jeff against it.

It has become a tradition here in Evanston to host what my mom calls "orphan dinner", where Amy, Gill and Rebecca and I -- all far from our families -- have Sunday dinner together. This being Easter weekend, things got kicked up a notch. Amy was over on Monday making a mountain of potato and cheese perogies to feed 8 adults and 1 child. Also on the menu: grilled vegetables, bruschetta and a ham butt.

Cleaning up the dishes wasn't too troublesome because I tried to clean up as I was going along while I was preparing the food. We also used fewer dishes than I had expected because two of our guests were unable to attend. The biggest difficulty I encountered was in dispatching the leftover ham. Apparently pork is value priced in these here parts, which is why we came to have a 12 pound pork leg to feed 6 adults -- almost two pounds of pork per person (I don't include the 3 year old in the calculation because he weighs less than 35 lbs, and eating that proportion of his body weight in pig meat in one sitting would require boa constrictor DNA). The bruschetta appetizer, perogies and grilled veggies were stiff competition, so naturally there was quite a bit of leftover ham to be cleaned up. Ziploc bag after Ziploc bag filled with meat. It struck me at the time just how daunting the logistics must be for an axe murderer.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard about problems that some high-profile celebrities have been having with their addictions.

How did living under a rock come to be synonymous with being uninformed? People live in lots of different places, so I don't know why that particular building material was singled out as being a marker of ignorance. Asphalt doesn't seem especially clever, so I don't know what gives people with shingled rooves the right to be so high-and-mighty. Maybe people living under rocks know something that the rest of us don't? Do they have well-placed spies in North Korea telling them that Kim Jong Il has to be talked down from pushing the button once a week?

Anyways, last night, Rebecca and I went out for dinner while Amy spoiled our two kids with a trip to Baskin-Robbins. Over dinner, my addiction to socks came up. Rebecca first knit me a pair of socks some number of years ago -- my first time getting a pair of knit socks. They weren't like all the other socks I've had before; these socks were different. Soon I started asking for socks all the time. She told me that most knitters aren't very promiscuous -- she hasn't knit socks for many people, and that a pair of hand-knit socks is very special, and something you do only for people you care deeply about. Then I started to feel bad about pressuring her to make me socks all the time. Perhaps all those times she said she felt too tired to knit me some socks it was just her way of saying I should give her time -- to finish her cardigan.

So I now that I recognize that I have a problem, I will try to keep it from affecting our relationship. And I suppose in the end I can be grateful that I am one of the few people for whom Rebecca has knit socks. Because when you knit socks for a person, you are knitting socks for everyone who has knit socks for that person. Or something like that.