Average Jane

Author: Average Jane

  • Average Jane’s Longest Week Ever

    Maybe it’s post-holiday fallout or maybe it’s my rapidly increasing workload, but this week has seemed absolutely endless.  I’m practically beside myself with joy that it’s finally Friday.  I need a couple of days to lower my stress levels before my shoulder muscles snap from the tension and my lower esophagus dissolves from the excess acid.

    So how was your week?

    Really, though, despite my typically reflexive stress internalization, things should be more under control by next week.  Solutions are moving into place and the worst uncertainties are nearly resolved.  I just need to be patient a little longer, as difficult as that is for me.

    On Saturday, my niece is coming over to spend the night.  I thought we’d make a pizza, although she is usually more interested in coloring with markers and watching DVDs than cooking.  It won’t hurt to offer, though.  Now that she has her own copies of "Shrek" and "Shrek 2" at home, I might have to consider a trip to Blockbuster to keep her entertained.

    I guess I’d better go find some Tums and take a shower now.  There will be no coffee for me this morning, that’s for sure.  Wish me luck – despite the vagueness with which I have presented my situation!

  • Average Jane Dreams of Monkeys

    I woke up this morning right after a dream that I’d returned home after a business trip and immediately gone to check on my pet monkey.  This dream is silly from the get-go because I have never had any desire to deal with the many problems that owning a monkey can present.

    Anyway, in the dream, I find that my husband has purchased three more monkeys in my absence and they’re shunning my original monkey, causing her to huddle in a corner of her pen with mud on her fur.  This made me quite irate.  (I’ll thank all of you Freudians to keep your interpretations to yourselves.)

    Then I woke up because one of the four lesser mammals we do own was poking me with his damp nose.

    The only thing I can think of that would make me dream of having a monkey is our office in-joke based on the old Saturday Night Live "Bathroom Monkey" skit.  Whenever we don’t want to work on a project, we say, "Monkey hate clean."  Maybe that’s one of those "you had to be there" jokes.

    That’s all I have for today, a little dollop of surrealness to start your morning.  I can’t even think of a question to ask, but feel free to tell me about any strange dreams you might have had that don’t relate to your real life at all.  If they involve a celebrity, so much the better!

  • More Questionable Food from Average Jane

    Wow, I’ve learned something this week!  If I want more comments, all I have to do is ask you a question.  I’ll keep that in mind…

    After yesterday’s vigorous discussion of unwholesome but delicious foods we eat when nobody’s looking, I started thinking about some of the other foods I loved as a child but left behind once I discovered tastier alternatives. 

    When I was growing up, we seldom had restaurant food and almost never ate fast food.  Thus, for a long time I had the idea of my mother and grandmother as impressive cooks.  Well, that wasn’t really the case, as I realized once I got out on my own and started experiencing a wider range of foods.

    Here are some of the foods that I used to really love when I was a kid:

    • "Cheesecake" made with lemon Jell-o.  That was the fancy dessert I always made when company was coming.  Now I have a recipe for real cheesecake – the kind that cures for a couple of days before you serve it.  Back then, though, it was all about the Jell-o and Cool Whip.
    • Celery stuffed with a blend of chunky peanut butter and Velveeta.  As you can imagine, this is very, very salty.
    • Spaghetti sauce that starts with a can of tomato sauce, a can of condensed tomato soup and a can of tomato paste and includes sauteed onion, green pepper and garlic, spiced with dried oregano.  It’s very sweet and thick.  I can actually still eat this on occasion, but I prefer something lighter and fresher most of the time.
    • A supposedly Chinese dish called "Ching Dao" that was made with canned chow mein vegetables, frozen peas, celery, chicken, ginger and a bit of powdered sugar added to the cornstarch used for thickening.  It was served over Minute Rice, of course.  This was my absolute favorite dish when I was growing up, but it strikes me as an unappetizing blob of salty ickiness now.  It’s possible that the dish could be resurrected using fresh vegetables and real steamed rice – maybe I should try that sometime.

    So here’s today’s reader participation challenge:  describe a food you used to love until you grew out of it.  I’m not talking about a food you really still like but think you shouldn’t – I mean a food that just isn’t the same for you anymore now that you’re a grownup.

  • Average Jane Dines Alone

    The other day a friend and I discussed the differences between what we fix for dinner when our husbands are around and what we have when we’re on our own.  There are a number of nutritionally-suspect meals I would never feed to my diabetic husband that I eagerly make when I’m home by myself in the evening:

    • Pork and beans over rice.  One serving of quick-cooking brown rice topped with a pat of butter and smothered with a can of Van Camp’s pork and beans that’s been heated on the stove.

    • Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  Sure, they make EasyMac in small, microwaveable packets, but I can eat a whole box of regular Kraft Mac & Cheese made with butter (but no milk) and accented with freshly ground pepper.
    • Tuna and cream of mushroom soup over rice.  Heat up the mushroom soup and tuna until bubbling, serve over white or brown rice.  This is tasty and filling, but it’s important to note that we called this "throw-up and rice" when I was a kid.  You can add a few frozen peas to make it marginally more attractive.  Potato chips are a tasty side item with this recipe.

    This doesn’t count the perfectly legitimate foodstuffs that my husband just doesn’t like, such as pot roast, beets, tuna noodle salad, pork tenderloin, rotisserie chicken, ham with beans, steamed broccoli or cauliflower, etc.  Those things I usually eat in restaurants rather than waste the effort of cooking a huge meal that one of us won’t eat.  Too many rejected, large meals can lead to unwelcome homicidal thoughts on the part of the cook.

    So tell me, what’s your "guilty pleasure" meal when you’re home alone?

  • Average Jane’s Squirreling Tendencies

    Over the weekend I ran across a discussion thread on Salon’s Table Talk prompted by this question, "What ridiculous things do you squirrel away
    compulsively, thinking that you’ll never get a chance at another one?
    Why do you do it?"

    I try very hard not to squirrel things away, as evidenced by the fact that I rent an enormous dumpster every year to clean out my house.  Still, reading other people’s stories showed me that I still have some squirreling tendencies, despite my best efforts to resist.  They include:

    • Canned goods.  Tomato sauce, tomato paste, Ro-Tel tomatoes, red beans and tuna are all valuable staples.  Therefore, it seems reasonable to buy them every time I go to the grocery store, just in case I want to make a dish that contains one or more of them.  As you can imagine, I have quite the stockpile of most of these items (except when I don’t – you see how reasonable this is?).
    • Plastic grocery sacks.  They’re perfect for wrapping up meat scraps to freeze until trash day or for disposing of kitty litter.  Unfortunately, I tend to amass them at a rate beyond their usefulness as trash sacks.  Still, I could take them back to the store for recycling, if I could ever remember to grab them when I’m on my way out the door.
    • Castoff clothing.  I do a closet-and-drawer purge a couple times a year, but ever since I discovered It’s Deductible, I don’t just bag up the discards, take them to the charity shop and hazard a guess at the value.  No, I must save all the garments until I have time to enter them into the program one by one to get a more accurate value and itemized list for the accountant.  Unfortunately, I never seem to have the updated version of the software or the time to launch into the whole project.  My latest bag of clothes has been sitting so long that I actually retrieved a skirt that should have been long gone and wore it again.
    • Cookie cutters.  Okay, this is a weird one, I know.  It all started because I wanted a set of the lumpy and indistinct Christmas cookie cutters I recalled from childhood (remember Hunchback Santa?  Anyone?).  I won at least two big Ebay lots after I’d already bought a bunch of newer cookie cutters that proved unsatisfying.  Let’s just say I have a whole kitchen drawer full of cookie cutters in every imaginable holiday shape.

    Those are my worst squirreled items.  I have recovered from squirreling away gift boxes and Cool Whip bowls (mostly).  I could still stand to deal with the excess bedding I keep despite the fact that we no longer own a double bed and we won’t go into the reams of paper I keep in my file drawer "just in case."

    So what do you tend to squirrel away?

  • Average Jane on Blogging

    I just happened to start my own blog in 2004, the year blogs really took off and the Merriam-Webster dictionary selected the word "blog" as its Word of the Year.  By then I’d already been reading James Lileks’ blog, The Bleat, for a number of years.  I’d also posted a little on H2G2 and Diaryland, but it wasn’t until I learned how to use TypePad for work that I got serious about maintaining a regular blog of my own.

    Of course, the minute the general public started hearing about blogs more frequently, various language snots decided they hated the word and wanted to banish it from use.  I think "blog" is a perfectly reasonable truncation of the more awkward "weblog."  It’s THE commonly agreed-upon name for the phenomenon.  I’m sorry, but you don’t get to decide to change something’s right name just because you don’t like the way the word feels in your mouth when you say it.

    Then the Pew Internet & American Life study results came out that revealed that "62% of internet users do not know what a blog is."  I think, deep down, every blogger suspected as much.  It accounts for all of those friends and relatives who know we "have a website" but have never been there.  Maybe they’re the same people who think there’s nothing on the internet but p0rn, so they don’t visit our blogs because they’re afraid they’ll see nekkid pictures of us.

    I’ve thought long and hard about whether Average Jane should change, mainly because personal journal blogs are the red-headed stepchildren of the medium.  I came to the conclusion that it’s fine the way it is.  I use it as a daily writing warm-up before work and the subjects open to me are as unlimited as my sleep-befuddled brain can stretch.

    I’m glad to have found such an interesting collection of daily blog reads (see right column and scroll down) and I look forward to adding to the list in 2005.  I’m also pleased to have watched my readership inch up to an average of 62 people per day (don’t laugh, Charlie).  I know many of them came from Google searches about betta fish, cranberry sauce recipes and prom dresses (and see, I’m making it worse!), but I’m grateful for everyone who’s stumbled across the site and come back again to read more.  Tell your friends!

  • Average Jane vs. the Icy Cold

    This morning I went to open my garage door and discovered that it was frozen to the ground.  We had an ice storm followed by snow over the past few days, so this wasn’t a complete surprise, but I’ve been through many an ice storm without the garage door freezing shut. 

    Rather than pausing to consider the novelty, I tried to unstick the door with a few kicks.  The mechanism strained and failed to open the door, so I desisted lest I break the opener.  It was time for a crowbar.

    I was pretty sure my crowbar was in our shed, so I crunched through the snow and ice into the back yard.  The latch was coated in ice and wouldn’t move…until I gave it a nice karate kick.  The latch is slightly above my hip height and I was rather surprised that I could kick that high.  It did the trick, though, and I retrieved my crowbar, took it back to the garage, and pried along the bottom of my garage door until it broke free and opened.

    My trip to work was uneventful.  The little Honda Insight gets around just fine in the snow and slush, although I don’t think I’d have chanced it yesterday.  Yesterday was Jeep weather all the way.

    Today I’m back at work after failing to accomplish anything of note while attempting to "work from home" yesterday.  It’s about 7 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but the ice on the trees is really pretty when the sun shines through it.  That’s winter in the Midwest:  a bunch of mixed blessings for sure.

  • Average Jane Skips A Day

    …and yet I’m so obsessive about posting daily, I’m posting to say I’m skipping a day.

    Really, I’m tied up with work and bad weather and I have nothing interesting to talk about.  I made two stabs at blog posts early this morning after our power went out for a moment and I got up to wash the dishes while we still had lights and heat.  The posts were boring and awful so I deleted them and went about my day.  Our electricity has remained on – hooray! – but I haven’t come up with anything relevant or engaging to say in the meantime.

    Perhaps tomorrow…

  • Average Jane Is Unconvinced

    I try not to watch infomercials because I’m usually too much of a sucker for whatever it is they’re trying to sell.  With enough demonstration and repetition, almost any product starts to look terribly desirable.

    Then there’s this new "cleaning system" I saw advertised the other day.  It uses a superheated jet of steam to clean, well, pretty much any surface.  It looks like a normal plastic bottle with a curved steam jet and a power cord.  The infomercial goes on and on about steam cleaning toilets, sinks, countertops, etc.  The presenter touts the lack of chemical residue, the germ-killing potential and the versatility of this device.

    I watched for several minutes because I had an initial thought about the product that I was sure they would address sooner or later.  I waited and waited, but they never brought it up.

    If you’ve ever cooked or ironed, I’m sure you know what I was thinking:  How can this powerful steamer not put the user at risk of severe steam burns?

    The fact that this fairly basic concern was never covered in the infomercial tells me that the advertisers were hoping to gloss over the whole "agonizing burn" thing and, hey, look!  It steams the wrinkles out of clothing, too!

    I may sleep on a buckwheat hull pillow, sweep my garage with a Hoover SpinSweep and add OxiClean to my laundry, but I think I’ll pass on parboiling myself with the steam cleaner.  Nice try, guys.  What else do you have for me?

  • Unstoppable Average Jane

    I know nobody cares, but I am feeling rather triumphant about the amount of work I accomplished around the house yesterday.  I’m usually hard pressed to lift a finger when I’m home all day, but the siren call of VH-1 clip shows somehow lost its hold on me long enough that I managed to do the following:

    • Cook omelets for breakfast.
    • Clean the kitchen.
    • Thoroughly clean and deodorize the Litter-Maid cat boxes and the room that contains them.  It was absolutely disgusting, but I made it my first big project, knowing that no other job would be worse.
    • Wash, dry and put away numerous loads of laundry.  I’m still not finished, though.
    • Discover that my new cotton sheets get really wrinkled in the wash.  Compromise by ironing just the pillowcases (it was the first time I’d ironed a pillowcase since I moved out on my own).
    • Go grocery shopping.
    • Make chicken fajitas and Spanish rice for lunch.
    • Start simmering a pot of stew meat and Great Northern Beans.
    • Clean the kitchen again.
    • Take down and put away the Christmas tree and other holiday decorations.
    • Scrub the bathroom ceiling and walls.  Vow to paint the ceiling and replace the exhaust fan next weekend, even though the ceiling really needs to be re-sheetrocked.
    • Clean my dressing room and shred a cache of receipts I’d emptied out of my purse in late summer.
    • Rescue 80% of the storage containers I own from Unwanted Leftover Purgatory (a.k.a., the refrigerator and freezer).  This led to my one New Year’s Resolution:  Don’t be so quick to keep leftovers unless you’re pretty sure someone will eat them right away.
    • Take out two huge bags of trash and a bin of recyclables.
    • Make the stew meat and beans into a big pot of minestrone.
    • Fill two storage containers with leftover minestrone (because we will definitely eat it right away).
    • Clean the kitchen again.

    I truly don’t know where I got the energy for all that, but it’s nice to know that if someone dropped by right now, I could actually invite them in without being ashamed of my house.  Tonight:  back to vegging in front of the TV, I predict.