Author: Average Jane

SueBob has an interesting post up about sexism from a male perspective. So far only one man has commented (hi, Karl!), so because I know I have quite a few male readers, I’d like to encourage you to visit her post and answer her five questions:

1. What do you like about being a man?
2. What don’t you like?
3. How do you feel about being a man in our culture?
4. If you could magically make one thing better for men, what would it be?
5. What would you like women to know about being a man that you think they might be unaware of?

I have today off for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so the weekend isn’t really over for me yet. However, I figured I might as well wrap up the part that’s already taken place.

On Saturday night, my husband and I joined my sister and brother-in-law at a Brazilian barbecue restaurant to celebrate my brother-in-law’s birthday. If you’ve never been to a churrascaria, it is a carnivore’s dream. You start by visiting a bar filled with salads, soups and side dishes. It is advisable to eat extremely lightly at that juncture because when you’re finished, the meatfest begins.

You’re given a two-sided token to place beside your plate: the green side means "offer me meat" and the red side means "I need a break." Waiters come around with long swords on which are skewered various roasted meats, and they either pull off individual portions or give you slices from larger cuts. Our restaurant had fifteen different cuts and kinds of meat. I tried numerous cuts of beef, bacon-wrapped chicken, and pork tenderloin. It didn’t take long for me to get full, so I never got to the Brazilian sausage. There were also some standard side dishes on the table. In our case it was fried polenta, garlic mashed potatoes, cheesy biscuits and fried bananas with cinnamon.

Afterward, we went to see "I Am Legend," which was a bit scarier than I expected even though the monsters had physics-defying characteristics that only CGI can provide. I had a couple of movie-related nightmares that night. My brother-in-law said he did, too.

The next morning, I went to my sister’s house to take my niece and nephew to Build-A-Bear Workshop. They’re now one of my primary clients at work, so I wanted to go through the process of making an animal to see firsthand how it went. My niece, who is 7, chose a polar bear so of course my nephew (almost 3) had to have one, too. It was fun to watch them stuff the empty bear shell. I also enjoyed the heart ceremony where the kids make a wish on a satin heart and put it in their bear. As you can imagine,my nephew’s version was a bit abbreviated.

My niece was a Build-A-Bear Workshop veteran, so she helped guide my nephew through the process, although I think she encouraged a little more spending than I originally had in mind. Naturally, the kids wanted clothes for their bears, so my nephew ended up with jeans and a t-shirt for his bear and my niece got a little red skirt and a top with hearts on it for hers. I was glad I’d gotten them clothes because the first thing my sister asked me when I told her they’d gotten the same animal was, "Can you tell them apart?"

Bear condos in hand, we went to the mall’s playground for a while. I sat on a bench with the bears, coats and the kids’ stinky shoes while they ran around. We stopped for a brief lunch in the food court, then went back to the play area until I realized that my nephew was past his naptime. After one stop for pretzels on the way out, I took them home and returned home myself.

I spent the rest of the afternoon running errands with my husband before making tacos for dinner and going to bed right around 10:00 p.m. Ahhh.

Today I need to get the lyrics for the nine songs we have lined up for tomorrow’s band practice. It turns out my computer’s CD drive has pooped out, so I can’t burn the songs to CD and I’ll have to listen to them in iTunes sitting at my desk.

Then I have some work from last week that I didn’t get finished, so I’ll probably work for a few hours. It’s nice and quiet in my home office, so I figure I might as well.

Are you off work today? If so, what do you have planned?

I always thought that one of the positive side-effects of not having kids would be that I’d save money on all of the crazy miscellaneous expenses that kids can incur. Sure, sometimes the cats cost more money than I was expecting, but that’s fairly rare.

Well, it turns out that I’m going to be in for some kid-like expense after all.

My husband went to the dentist earlier this week after complaining for months about a sore tooth. It turns out that his wisdom teeth are growing in and giving him trouble. The dentist is sending him to an oral surgeon to have three of them removed. Have I mentioned that my husband is 50?

It gets better. The dentist thinks my husband would be a good candidate for orthodontia. Once he has the bad wisdom teeth removed, the dentist believes that braces would even out his teeth, and fill in the gap where he once had a molar removed when he was young and poor and couldn’t afford a root canal. He needs either braces or a bridge, and he’s being sent to an orthodontist to see if braces might take care of everything.

All of a sudden, I’m really sorry I didn’t sign up for my company’s flex plan this year.

Obviously, he’s going to go ahead and get the wisdom teeth out either way. I think we may hold off the rest until next year just so I can get a flex plan started first. I don’t know why I’ve always pooh-poohed the idea of saving to cover medical expenses. Heaven knows that between our prescriptions, co-pays, deductibles and chiropractic, we spend a ton out of pocket each year.

On the other hand, I’ve decided that I can finally afford to get Velvet’s teeth cleaned. It turns out that cat expenses really are cheaper than people expenses. And the good news is that no one ever suggests braces for cats.

First we have our current digital tragedy: the death of our iBook’s monitor. This means we do not have a laptop available for surfing in the living room, which means we mysteriously aren’t spending much time in the living room anymore.

Then we have last night’s dinner. Yes, you could say I gave up…at least for one day.

I’m saving all my cooking mojo for Friday night, when we’re having some friends over for dinner. The planned menu: green salad with Balsamic vinaigrette, grilled bacon-wrapped filets, roasted new potatoes, Roasted Green Beans with Greek Dressing and mini Costco cheesecakes (which I already have) for dessert.

For you local folks, there’s a KC Blogger Meetup on Thursday, January 17th starting at 5:00 p.m. at Cafe Al Dente at 4th & Delaware in the River Market. It’s another reason I won’t be cooking again until Friday.

The weather has gotten extremely cold again and it makes me want to crawl into bed and stay there for a day or two. The cats wholeheartedly agree with that impulse. Unfortunately, it’s not a practical option.

I worked a long day yesterday, ran by the grocery store and went home to make Pork Tenderloin with Curried Fruit Sauce. It’s one of my favorite dinners, in part because it smells absolutely wonderful while it’s cooking. When my husband’s recording session ended, he came downstairs and said, "That smells like something I might not like."

Dude, that’s grounds for killin’. No jury in the world would convict me.

I sweetly said, "You’ve had this a zillion times and you like it just fine." There may have been a hand gesture involved.

Once he realized what was in the oven, he agreed that it was something he likes. Seriously, if I’m buying the food and cooking it, he’d better eat it, like it and keep his trap shut. For some reason, 15 years of living with me hasn’t taught him that yet.

I’m looking forward to having the leftovers for lunch today. Mmmm.

Changing the subject completely, congratulations to Jeremy and Robin on the birth of their son, Nate. He was due on Friday but decided that he’d prefer to arrive in the middle of the night last night.

Have a lovely Tuesday and don’t work too hard.

TV was pretty much my only entertainment medium over the weekend. From Saturday morning to Sunday evening, I did almost nothing else besides work The Zen Zone’s grand opening and veg on the couch in front of the TV.

The weekend’s tally:

• "The Ghost Whisperer" (Hey, what happened to Ned? Don’t try to tell me that isn’t a new actor. Nobody grows up that fast.)
• "Psych"
• An untold number of "Mythbusters" episodes
• "The DaVinci Code" (So that’s what everybody was so worked up about? How could they even follow the convoluted plot line well enough to get all het up about it?)
• A bunch of episodes of "Clone High" on DVD
• "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" (Good so far – but then again I saw the first Terminator movie at the theater, so I’m inclined to like it.)
• "The Family Guy" and "American Dad" (because I was too lazy to turn off the TV)

I almost forgot about our Friday night selection, Bruce Campbell starring in "Alien Apocalypse," an ultra low-budget SciFi Channel movie we received as a Christmas gift. Let me just say that it would make an awesome episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

It was so bad that we had to watch it again with the commentary track. That’s where we learned about the experience of shooting in Bulgaria on a shoestring budget. I liked that the producer came to realize that it was better to work with non-English-speaking actors than English-speaking non-actors. I would have thought that would be obvious, but apparently not.

We have one more cheapo Bruce Campbell movie left for later: "The Man With the Screaming Brain." I almost saw it in a theater when it came out, but ended up just having Bruce Campbell autograph his book, "Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way" instead. My blurry camera-phone photo of that event is here.

So that was my weekend of fair-to-middling entertainment. What did you do?