Equilibrium for 95 pts

Trying not to beat myself up about skipping my morning run.   I'm not zombie sick, but I woke yet again to a stuffed nose and dry mouth, with the added bonus of an unpleasant off-kilter feeling, probably due to sinus pressure messing with my equilibrium.  I'm waiting for my nasal decongestant to kick in so I can go run morning errands without swerving over the center line too much.

In the interest of remaining stationary, and killing time, I've already played a move in the current Words With Friends game I've got going, albeit a weak one, so I thought I'd head over here to scatter some letters about, unrestrained.  

Speaking literally, a word of warning- that game is addictive, and not only can it invoke airplane hostility (what doesn't?), it can also lead to bad dreams and marital strife.  Particularly when only one spouse is playing the game, but the other (with mad skills) really wants to be.  Stew and I are at the joking-about-it stage of reconciliation, unless writing this sets us back a step (*waves a white flag*).  Final closure might come from the two of us duking it out over a board ourselves.  But as he has no access to a virtual one, we'd have to go old school, blowing the dust off our shelved board game.  Possibly there is a round of Strip Scrabble in our future.  Maybe when my head doesn't feel like a balloon.  

Until then, the curing powers of the couch have sufficed, in the form of shared video viewing.  Instead of schilling out dough for Season 2 of Walking Dead, we marathoned through another NetFlix'd Joss Whedon series,  Dollhouse (oddly compelling).  

And last night we watched Warrior.  Like Moneyball, it was better than I thought it would be and had a song in it begging for download.  At the end of the movie, the haunting baritone in "About Today" by The National hooked me.  Might have to check out more of their stuff, but for now I downloaded a live version, which was double the length and half the price of the movie version.   Like getting 45 pts using only three tiles...

About Today (Live) - The National - Virginia EP (via)

Love You Like A Sister

Today is my wonderful older sister Cathy's birthday.  

She is super awesome.

Here we are being awesome together in the 90s.

I'm totally going to wear that sweater today.

Here we are being awesome together earlier this month.  

Where did all those nuts come from?

This morning, after breakfast, the boys happily obliged me when I said,

 "Let's record a video for Aunt Cathy."

Happy Birthday Cathy!

There is something coming in the mail, but also, how about for a present, 

I'll formally announce my plans to run a 13.1 with you.  

So we can be awesome together in the '10s.  Teens?  30s... and 40s...

Rest of the Meat Story (NSFV, obvs)

On Friday I left off with a chilling cliffhanger-

How would my Crock 'o Beef kitchen experiment turn out?

Edge of your seats stuff, I know.

The answer is fairly anti-climatic too.  It ended up quite yummy, though not as spicy saucy strong as I'd hoped.  Which means next time, dump more stuff in.

For the side entree, I ended up pounding the hell out of something we had on hand, a head of cauliflower.  That was both therapeutic AND new, as the goal was to end up with cauliflower rice, a trick I'd bookmarked but had yet to try.

That experiment turned out REALLY good, but maybe not as rice-y as imagined.  Which means next time, pound harder (or try the blender- we don't have a food processor... well we do- me).

And the rest of the meat story... after Sunday's family drive into Raleigh, we now have a deep freeze full of fancily vacuum packed joisey beef.  Below I've documented Stew using his superhuman, Tetris-like, spatial-visualization packing/stacking skills to configure the 2 lb bricks of ground beef, while Wiley takes inventory of the 6 or so different cuts waiting to be stored.

Now let's all just cross our fingers for no extended power loss in the near future.  Of course, typing that, the way our luck goes, I've probably just opened up the gates of hell.

Check back toward the end of May, early June... we might have to be holding a huge Welcome to the Armageddon BBQ.

Oh, and I ran across this in my morning reads.  

A cute song, but really it's Mr. McConaughey (reprising his Dazed & Confused role) that interests me.

Talk about Grade A meat... 

Whoops, my Matthew hungry sister informed me the earlier embedded video (from vevo.com) wasn't working.  Here it is on trusty YouTube: