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Category: Uncategorized

My kitchen needs more storage space

I have a small apartment, and in some ways it has been a good idea to limit my available storage space. I will fill anything… and that will just make it harder to move in the future. But I love my apartment, and I’m likely to stay here for a while.

So I am trying to figure out what to do with my available floorspace.

Option 1: Nothing.
Bonus: It keeps me from accumulating a whole lot of extra crap.

Option 2: Shelves
Can hold my cookbooks and extra pantry stuff… and, if the shelves end up sturdy enough, I could finally bring my mixer from my parents’ home.
Minus – omg, I already have enough food staples stored to hold out against a seige for a fortnight… but they could be in more visible locations so that I’d use them up… *cough* yeah, right, like I wouldn’t just fill the space because it was there… but I would move it all to a level where I didn’t need a stepstool to get to the ketchup.

Option 3: Chest freezer
I can steal all the 8 year old beef that is filling the bottom of my mother’s chest freezer and I can have more room to store my own stuff without having to keep 40 lunches at work.
Minus – I will hoarde food and possibly not get around to eating it, either. And what’s the point of having room to get free meat, if I’m going to spend $150 to get it? Also, it doesn’t solve the book storage problem. Do they make hutches to go over chest freezers, like an etagere?

Things I eat in strange ways

Nestle Signature Treasures – Creamy Caramel:
If you bite off the two ends, then you can suck out the caramel center with a *pop* and then eat the hollow chocolate repository.

Kit Kats:
So you snap off a single strip. Again, bite off the thick chocolate at the two narrow ends. Then, bite gently from the top, and you can lift off each crispy wafer individually and nibble on it one layer at a time.

Bananas:
So there’s the sexy way to eat bananas… and the straightfoward way… and then there is my way. y’see bananas come in (6) sections. If you break of a half or a third of the banana, you can persuade the sections to separate. It is almost impossible, however, to separate out an individual section, instead you have to eat them three by three or two by two by two.

M&Ms:
To the best of my knowledge, every librarian has an anal retentive system for eating M&Ms, so this isn’t that strange… but I eat them in color order, in sets of twos (one for each side of my mouth)… if I have an odd number for a color, the last one gets bitten in half… dark brown, orange, yellow, red, blue, green. And I am all excited about the dark M&Ms.

Oreos:
Again, everyone has a routine for eating oreos… but I don’t know anyone outside my family who tries for a naked middle. Seriously. We were doing this back when we were three. You need to start with a double stuff, because the regular ones just don’t have enough middle to support the proceedure. Then… twist off one cookie. Eat it. Then you try to eat all the rest of the other cookie off of the stuffing until you have a naked middle — this is very difficult and requires much practice. Now you try it.

Not food, just west philly

I took my time walking home tonight because the weather was lovely and I had no need to rush. I stopped for dinner; I picked up laundry; I meandered.

I overheard two men from college speaking:
A: Where is your girlfriend tonight?
B: At some ritual. Who celebrates the crescent moon, anyways?

I overheard one college guy talking to his two friends:
I have trouble figuring out where we are in the relationship. Are we just friends? Is it more? What does it mean when I flirt with her, and how much flirting is okay? … etc…. How do I know?

And, being a busybody, I interrupted: “You ask.”
He looked at me incredulously: “You ask?”
“You ask.”
“That sounds more difficult.”
“Well, good luck with it.”

On the way to pick up my laundry, I passed one man getting up into the another man’s face:
“…children are turning against their parents.
These are the days when wives are turning against their husbands…”

One the way back, they were laughing together like the best of friends.

As I passed the mosque, I was stopped and anointed with oil scented through the grace of Allah.

Poetry for all

The Egg Suckers
– by Steve Scafidi, found in his collection, For Love of Common Words

To the snakes and the rats and the weasels
who skulk and tunnel and dig underneath
the moon and the earth to find the shiny
white ovum of their dreams lying there

warmed under the hen who coughs a little
moving away in the darkness of the gold
hay and the dust of my chicken coop
I say hello now from about fifty feet away

in my writing room and the beginning of Spring
for you are the egg suckers, the midnight
takers-away, the despised and slinky
snoopers, the geniuses of the world who

will be here when we are no more —
you who move with such deliberation,
what you want eventually you get, hauling
the precious cargo gently between your jaws

moving back down through the hole you dug
cradling the egg, tonguing and sucking on
the white egg I was to gather and I was
to eat and the poor hen with her one

eye open wide watches you come and go
as she watches me reach my hand beneath her
in the morning and hold this small compact
beautiful form up to the sun to admire

the subtle brown of the egg and the perfect
religious fit of it in my palm and I roll it
across my kitchen table in the morning
before I crack it open and pour the egg

into my skillet and fry it openly thanking
the holiness of the hen, this exotic bird
roosting here whose children I eat everyday
over-easy with black pepper and a spoon.