One Friday night, back when buffalo wings first became popular, I decided to make them at home. After cutting the wings, I breaded them by shaking them in a paper grocery bag filled with flour, a little paprika, some salt, and pinch or two of powdered cayenne. Then I deep-fried the wings and dipped them in Texas Pete hot sauce. They looked and smelled right, and when I sampled one, it tasted right. I’d cracked the code on the buffalo wings recipe, and done it on my own. We put on a DVD and sat down to enjoy our wings. But as I bit into my second or third wing, I felt something in my mouth that shouldn’t be there. Could it be … no, no way … was it a hair?
I don’t know if there’s a word for the involuntary thing you do when there’s a hair in your mouth … that thing where your tongue comes forward, your lips form an O, and you go “p’too” … but I did it, and then it felt like there was more hair in my mouth, so I did it some more. I looked up, and Donna, Gregory, and Polly were all making O-mouths and going p’too.
As soon as I cleared my mouth enough to talk, I asked “How did this hair get in the wings?” Everyone shrugged and said “I dunno, I didn’t do it.” To demonstrate that it certainly couldn’t have been my fault, I described in detail how I cut, breaded, and cooked the wings. Polly … who was about twelve then … asked if I’d used the paper grocery bag that was on the kitchen counter. “Yes,” I said. “Oh,” she said, with a stricken look, “Fluffy was playing in that bag earlier.”
I still make buffalo wings, but I no longer bread them.
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Friends sent me an e-card for my birthday, but I must have forgotten to click the link to view it. This morning the e-card service sent me a friendly … and unusually detailed … reminder:
This is just a friendly reminder that you have not yet viewed the Care2 e-card that Bob and Linda sent you 7.0416666666667 days ago.
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The icemaker in our refrigerator began leaking a month ago, forming first an icicle and then a glacier. When our goddaughter Natasha was here, her husband Natale volunteered to fix it. Donna put all the frozen food into our big Igloo cooler and Natale held a hair dryer to the iceberg until it melted, then took the icemaker apart. The problem turned out to be a tear in a rubber seal, and the easiest solution was to buy a new icemaker mechanism. The local appliance parts store had one so I ran down and bought it. Natale installed it and now our fridge is happily cranking out cubes again.
Which would be a happy story if it ended there. But when Donna gets things fixed, she gets ideas, and now she wants me to fix the handle on the dishwasher, which works but “doesn’t feel right.” Sadly, Natasha and Natale are back in California and I have to do this one on my own. I have the tools and can probably get the necessary parts; it’s the talent I lack … I’m just not very handy around the house. If it were up to me, we’d just buy a new dishwasher. If it were up to me, we’d have gone bankrupt years ago.
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We watched Captain America on pay per view last night (no chicken wings, alas). It had some of the splash and exuberance of the first Iron Man movie, but was, I thought, not nearly as much fun, and most of it was a ripoff of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Movies like these can’t be taken seriously and are just too fluffy to bother reviewing. But that’s not to say I don’t like the occasional comic book-inspired flick. Some are damn good, like Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and Defendor; at least one, V for Vendetta, is a masterpiece.
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It dawned cloudy and rainy, but a moment ago the clouds broke up and what should I see outside my window? This:
Yep, that’s snow. I don’t know if this is a record for Tucson, but snow on the mountains in early November is at least most unusual. Not only is there snow on the mountains, I have a cold. Clearly, this destroys the very notion of global warming … Rush Limbaugh, the Koch Brothers, and Matt Drudge have been right all along … it’s all a hoax!