It was 84 degrees in Austin, Texas today. A nice warm winter day that makes you think the whole world is just fine… like I was definitely too busy at work to get out of there in time to enjoy the weather, but it was just still such a beautiful temperature when I did leave, I was like, should I hug the security guard? I don’t know?

I saw so many people running on the way home… I guess everybody decided it was a good day to reboot the NYE resolutions… I guess I should have joined them, but as usual, I found myself in my driveway with a frozen pizza, a bottle of wine, and a full HEB rotisserie chicken.

I know, I’m not a healthy lady… but maybe this is the year. It’s now been right at 10 years since I engaged in any sort of regular workout…. thing. So, we’ll see.

Family was in town this past weekend so Dad could run the LIVESTRONG Austin Marathon.

He’s 58, so we were all like, uhhh, are you sure? But, he did a great job and made it across the finish line in 5 hours… then immediately started walking like a 6,000 year-old man. I assume he’ll be in pain for several months. I completely forgot my camera, but here’s a nice cellphone snappy snap post-race.

It was also PJ’s 29th birthday this weekend… yeah, we’re officially getting up there ourselves. My mom helped me bake him a cake… and by ‘helped me’, I obviously mean did all the work. It was delicious because she is a good baker and has the patience to read directions. I assume you develop that type of patience after raising three children who were all at one point teenage girls. Anyway, we used this white cake recipe and despite the fact that it says to top it with any non-chocolate icing, we topped it with this chocolate ganache.  It made a super fluffy cake and nobody in my family is super big on icing, so ganache worked really well.

The niece and nephew were here for the visit, too. I don’t have a ton of experience with other kids, but with these two, especially the girl, it’s always 1,000 mph no matter what. Since PJ is in school to be an elementary teacher, he had some insta-snow laying around, and they got a kick out of that. A messy, messy kick. We also hung up Christmas lights in the bedroom for them to look at, played with toys, read books, jumped on stuff, etc… it’s pretty easy to keep kids entertained if you’ve got the energy to do it… but good grief, who has that type of energy? Despite their ability to literally suck the will to live out of you, they are the cutest, most fantastic little people.

The only reason I can come up with for my many and varied failures at cooking is that I’ve got a diagnosable form of insanity. I know how basic logic operates, yet time and time again, I find myself ignoring the physical laws in place in our world. I would say that I’ve still got time to learn, but I’ve been living on my own and caring for myself for a full decade now, so I’m starting to wonder if it’s something that I just can’t do? I’m going to present exhibit A to you here, but know that exhibit A is not unique. It is just one in the long, messy string of food-related failures I call my own. Now I like to watch the cooking channels and I like to chop and saute vegetables… although the chop part usually starts disintegrating pretty quickly. After that, though, everything starts to go downhill. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t have the right equipment… sharp knives, expensive stand mixers, clean dishes… or whatever, but once I get to the stage where you’re supposed to start putting stuff together, it all goes to shit. Today started out with a few minutes of happiness chopping up and sauteing an onion. Cooking up the ground beef and pouring some tomato sauce in the pan were pretty alright, too. But, as fate would have it, I guess my crockpot is about half the size of whatever internet asshole I got this recipe from was using. It wouldn’t have been that big a deal, but when it comes to food, I have a weird depression-era mindset that makes it very hard for me to waste anything. So, even though I realized about half way in that there was going to be a problem (remember, I do have basic logic skills), I kept piling the tomato sauce up. I started moving away from the edges of the pot, obviously recognizing those as danger zones… but I just couldn’t cope with leaving any substantial amount of the sauce/meat in the pan, in my mind, it clearly all deserved to make it into the crockpot, onto the winning team. Anyway, by the end of this dance with the tomato sauce devil, I was looking at Mount Saint Lasagna. And here is where I start to really think I might have a mental condition exacerbated by cooking. I looked at it… was able to quickly assess that there was no way to put the lid on this, and then rather than spooning some out, I just dropped that lid right on. It’s like a small cooking devil sitting on my shoulder, whispering in my ear that it’s okay, the laws of space (mass? physics? he’s not a smart devil.) actually don’t apply to me. For me, things will be different. When I put the lid on, a bit of magic will take place and everything will fit. This is not true, clearly, but the cooking devil does what it will and I end up with the same mess I made last time. It’s still in there cooking right now. I haven’t been able to bring myself to go back in there since cleaning it up the first time, but I assume it’s eaten one of my dogs by now.

Longhorns opener happened over Labor Day weekend. My dad bought us tickets and we went and had a real good time. He usually buys us tickets for a Longhorns game every year, or at least every other year. It’s expensive, but it’s one of those things you can really bond over. Sports… they’re just easy. You can be passionate or you can be passive. But, you’re basically having a good time. Enjoying the people you love. Enjoying the idiots. Enjoying the business of being alive. Especially if you have a glass of wine or two before you head out for your day of sportsy things.

To start the day off right, I jammed 10 Coors Lights into my purse. Motivation to sweat our way through a tour of the madness that is Austin, Texas tailgating. This was Casie’s first Longhorns game, so we needed to show her the throngs of  fans that are dedicated enough, or at the very least drunk enough, to battle some serious heat for several hours before anyone kicks a ball anywhere. I wish I’d taken a picture of my decidedly Bohemian bag stuffed full of Coors. Slight juxtaposition.

We did Scholz and the massive $7 beers, we met up with friends and drank purse beers, we met up with people we barely knew and drank their beers. I let my dad wear my decidedly feminine pageboy hat to block the sun during a game of washers with a guy he was certain was a hustler.

Casie bought a ridiculously short-lived Longhorn balloon animal hat. Stop twisting its horn, we all said, it can not be adjusted in that fashion! But, she didn’t listen, and he abruptly and unceremoniously became… unihorn.  
Like that thing was gonna make it through the game and all the way home to the kids anyway, but I think we all thought it was gonna last longer than the 17 minutes it did. She popped him while preparing for the photo op here on the right. She literally sawed ’em off. But, lucky for her, we still won the game, so no need to accuse her of any voodoo… poor unihorn. A trashcan outside Darrell K Royal, his final resting place.

This was a night game… honestly the only kind of game you can humanely have during an early Texas September… but a night game means you had a lot of hours to celebrate opening day. All day to drink purse beers and murder balloon animals. So, the game itself is a little… tough. Adrenaline gets you through a lot of it, because college football is really fun. For one thing, there are young people there, young people with a lot more stamina and enthusiasm than you, so the place is filled with life, despite the fact that you definitely peaked about 45 minutes before walking into the stadium and now you’re just concentrating on not crying from exhaustion. Then there’s the marching band playing the fight song. And even though you gave the university more money than you can physically stomach, you still don’t really know it… but by god if you don’t swell with pride and punch your skinny arms in the air when everyone else does and yell something about give’em hell, give ’em hell, make ’em eat shit? There’s gravity defying cheerleaders, there’s frat boys dressed like cowboys blasting off cannons, there’s flags flying and they’re bigger than your entire house… it’s all very exciting. So, you forget you drank more beers than your body has a right to and you scream and you cheer and hope it’s a blowout so you can take your ass to bed. But if it’s not, you sit there with the people you love the very most and be really happy to be able to do this living thing.

My dogs make me laugh and are some of my favorite things in the world, but they’re also one of my biggest sources of stress. They’re just not easygoing as far as dogs go. Their emotions range from depressed to psychotic to exceptionally psychotic. I’m very jealous of people who can just toss their dogs in the car and go to the stupid park. They get where ever they’re going and just open the door and let little Furr-do fly. It’s an epic battle just to get my dogs in a car. And once they’re in the car, I basically just have to sit there for a minute and then go back inside because there is no public place I can take these ogres.

But anway, they’re the lot life handed me so here they are.

This is Cowboy. I’ve had him since I was about 19. I told my mom I needed a dog to cope with the crippling homesickness that often comes with being in college, and I told her I’d like that dog to be an adorable yorkie. So my sister found him at a feed store, I guess the sort of place where they sell neon pink baby chickens at Easter and other genetically modified animals. So, he’s sort of a yorkie… a large, awkward yorkie. But let me tell you I was never more happy to get that little puppy and I just hope that you’re lucky enough to have the sort of family that when you tell them it’s hard being 300 miles away and you’re sad and becoming an adult kind of sucks a little and so you need a constant companion… that they’ll drop everything and get you a little ogre of your own. Fast forward eight years later and here we are. Cowboy is… different. He hates everything, he thinks toys are gay, and he wants you to pet him maybe twice a year. He’s your standard cat in a dogs body.

Here’s Penny. She is technically PJ’s dog. He got her a few months after we started dating. If this dog knows you well, she loves you very much. Loves you to the point of frequently climbing into your lap and staring you directly in the face until you’re so uncomfortable that you call for help. But if she doesn’t know you that well, she’ll trick you into petting her and then show you her teeth so that you, too, need to call for help. Another awesome habit she has is being in a dead sleep and then when an unfamiliar guest stands up from the couch, she leaps into action, sprints across the living room, and snaps her teeth in the air about an inch and a half from their femoral artery. So yeah, owning a pitbull stresses me out quite a bit. But, I also know that all of her personality quirks come from not being properly socialized as a puppy, so I blame myself and PJ. But mostly PJ.

And now we have Kitty Biscuit. And my god is this dog insane. She showed up in the neighborhood on the Fourth of July a couple of years ago. She followed the neighbor’s kids home. I said I would take her and find her owners. Surely she would like to play with my own plus sized yorkie for the night. So the next day we begin the search. Homegirl was not microchipped. So we drove around looking for lost maniac signs, and searched every craigslist posting and lost pet website out there. But like a very small, adorable phantom, she seemed to have appeared from nowhere. So, we kept her. And indeed, if there is a better way to describe this dog than psychotic, bloodthirsty asshole, I don’t know what it is. It’s no wonder no one was looking for her. She is as Jekyll and Hyde as Penny though, and as soon as you’re ready to boot her to the moon, she curls up on your stomach and bats her big brown eyelashes at you and tells you she’ll love you forever. Stupid dog.

Anyway, I guess dogs are about 0.3 percent the work of children, but I imagine them to be equal parts stressful and rewarding. And yeah, I’ll probably keep telling stories about my dogs in response to stories about your kids like they’re the same damn thing.

Look at these assholes. That furry white mess is Milo. He’s not mine. I’ll tell you about that nutjob some other time.