Ouch! I think I bruised something when I fell off the wagon...

Ugh, but I think it was still mostly my ego. Its somewhat ironic that this post follows the Seven Days one...but I fell off the smoking wagon. I didnt fall far & I didnt jump into the deep end, but I fell none the less.  It started with a shitty day, it ended with me at Get Go buying a pack of smokes. It further ended by getting called out by Mister for cheating. Either way FAIL. And Im not real happy about it...obviously.

Excuses? Oh Im sure I can find about a bazillion.  Long story short The Wizard was being unusually anal about a new party room & it took everything I had not to tell him to just go fuck himself if he thinks we suck this bad go do it yourself. Stack that on top of an already busy week, trying to actually GET the party room set up and dealing with some overall Negative Nancys about EVERYTHING that I needed to accomplish and I got tweaky and strung out ~ two things that I generally am not. Stopped at the store to get some caffeine and with next to no thought what so ever bought a pack of smokes.

Now I only smoked 4 out of that pack, the 4th one being the one that got my ass called out by Mister for the cheat, and the next morning dipped the whole pack in water and threw it away to prevent any urge to go get them and smoke them. Main issue - my resolve is broken. I failed. Apparently that first week for me was pretty easy compared to the 2nd week for whatever reason and after a clean week I broke.

I think its time to admit defeat over this bullshit and find a different way that doesnt rely on me sticking to my guns to knock this habit out. I cant even begin to explain how unhappy with me I am at the moment, to be doing so well and then just fuck it all up. BUT I am not a dwell on what has already happened kind of gal...its a matter now of figuring out where to go from here.

I figure I have 3 options.

1. Drugs - call the doc and figure out what my options are for smoking cessation drugs. One that would make me violently ill if I tried to smoke would be ideal. The bad side is I am not a fan of pill popping, dont particularly care for the idea of pumping myself full of chemicals to kick a nicotine habit and really dont want to invest a couple hundred dollars a month into kicking an already expensive habit.  The good side is I know more than a couple people that have gone this route and it worked for them quite well with minimal side effects.  Long term going this route is STILL better than continuing to smoke.
2. Hypnotism - yeah this is totally not something that I would normally ever even consider, but its been recommended to me multiple times, doesnt involve fooling my body with a bunch of chemicals and from what I can read works in most cases. I still feel like its some parlor trick bullshit, and if it wasnt $300 per session I might have already tried it...but to shell out $300 for some dude with a watch to subliminally tell me to not smoke with NO guarantee that itll work? I dont think so. Now if I could do it and if it DIDNT work I could get my money back that would be different, but thats not the way it works from what I understand.  I honestly wonder if this is one of those things that you have to believe in in order for it to work and I think Im a tad too cynical for any methods that involve blind faith...but my mind is open & im considering it.
3. Hire a violent monkey to follow me around and pop me upside the head when I reach for a cigarette. This one has a couple different plus points 1) I get a fucking monkey! Even if its smacking me upside the head its a monkey and that would be cool. 2) It would be hella entertaining for anyone around me to watch me get the shit kicked out of me by a simian with violent tendencies when I want to smoke. 3) I would HAVE to follow my own rules because there is no reasoning with a pissed off monkey.  Now on the down side there is the whole monkey poo flinging creature thing...but really, whats a poo flinging monkey compared to a pack a day habit?

Well whatever I decide to do Im not giving up completely. I will find a way to kick this, I am just going to have to come to terms with the fact that it wont be by sheer force of will and I may need some *gulp* help. I wont allow myself to go back up to even close to a pack a day...so control at this point is a must but that I can deal with, I just suck at the NONE thing. So Im going to keep fighting with myself to keep me from being a full blown smoker of 20 smokes a day (the fact that its sub fucking arctic out side will help with that), talk to my doctor to see what my options are for drugs and seriously consider this hypnotism thing because it wont hurt me to keep an open mind.

Im open to suggestions or even opinions about where I go next. Anyone out there have a magical cure for nicotine addiction and wanna share?

Im still so mad at me it's UNREAL.

SEVEN DAYS!!!!

Its been a week. A FULL WEEK! I think Im over the hump so to speak and can say with some certainty that I am a non-smoker. I can sincerely say that this is the first time I have ever made it this long without completely collapsing and just buying a pack. No cheats no matter how tempted because I know me and that would have been all it would have taken for me to fall off the proverbial wagon.

I had my first real "my precious" nicotine moment yesterday for the week and gum came to the rescue.  I have meeting with my store managers (90% of which smoke) every month and yesterday and today are those days. When the meeting breaks we generally head out front to chitchat & have a smoke, I was involved in a couple diff conversations so I wandered out with them. Mistake. 5 of them standing there smoking away in front of me. Any of them would have given me one or a hit if I had asked. First time since I quit that I actually thought well maybe Ill just have 1 and thats all. I kicked myself in the head, found my gum and resisted the urge. 

Will power has NEVER been a strength of mine when it comes to vices and I was quite proud that I didnt fold and take one. I also am still looking forward to the day that smell will gross me out. Sources say its going to be another week or so and I will start to be incredibly sensitive to it. It already repulses me when a hard core smokers wanders past me and their clothes reek of dirty ashtray, but that smell has always grossed me out. I need the wafting smell of cigarette smoke to turn my stomach...and the sooner the better.

Have to go into town post meeting tonight to visit my Gram in the hospital - Mercy.  She tripped over a rug in her bathroom and jacked up her Tibia.  Didnt break the knee cap as originally thought, but cracked the top of the tibia. After much debate it has been decided that surgery is a senseless risk that she would not benefit from, which I am pretty sure is the exact decision she wanted us to make but would do what my dad & aunt thought was best for her. At the moment she is all drugged up on pain pills so shes as comfortable as she can be and awaiting a transfer to a skilled nursing facility in Bethel Park where she will be 12 weeks in a wheel chair so it can heal.  She already walks with a cane & will now probably have to use a walker, but it will heal and she will be mostly mobile again.

Granted the injury could have been worse, but I think this is the end of her being able or even wanting to live on her own.  Shes been alone in her own home since my pap passed 6 years ago and she does amazingly well, but I think this will have shaken her and she will be afraid to stay alone.  She had to crawl to the phone to call my aunt for help and thankfully she could. It makes me sad. Shes been a strong, independent woman my entire life and it makes me sad to see that coming to an end no matter how smart or in her best interest that may be. Fortunately a lot of her church buddies have also moved into assisted living retirement homes so she will be happy to be closer to them for her card games and such and overall will still lead a very happy & much safer existence ~ but I still dont like to see it. Part of it is a sadness for the major and unexpected change she is going to go through, the other is this being a milestone in my life...she was my last grandparent that was living on her own and watching my dad have to make these decisions with my aunt for her is hard. Not only is she getting older but I am too.

She is going to be in the hospital for the holidays so we are going to do everything we can to make that as awesome for her as possible. Christmas is her favorite holiday so since she cant come to it we will bring it to her. All things considered the catalyst for this transition for her could have been so much more severe and on the sunny side I am happy as hell it isnt serious, she will heal and she will bounce back however slowly...but it still marks the end of an era that I dont think any of us were wanting to see.

Woopsy!

I got so tied up in some minor domestic goddessing yesterday that I forgot to post. This is getting monotonous I am sure but still smoke free.  I found out yesterday though that my car still has a little bit of that funk when you turn the heat on - I guess my nose is now working a bit better, too. I can only assume that the smell will go with time...and if it doesnt I will have to detail the interior of the car which sounds kind of shitty for as cold out as it is at the moment. Truth be told Im just happy that I can smell it.

So some fun news! Tim at Craft Pittsburgh Magazine has asked me to write another cooking with beer column for the next issue.  I had written the Cooking with Beer feature for the Pilot issue a couple months ago and was pleasantly surprised when it showed up in print almost exactly as I had written it with a delicious recipe for Beer Braised Chicken Thighs & Cauliflower Smash and all of my beer tip rambling.  Im flattered and excited to be participating in the next issue as well.  It will probably go to print & be available for download sometime in late January early February.  Honestly I was quite impressed with the magazine.  Tim believes, and I happen to agree, that our fair city has one hell of a beer scene that is grossly neglected in most of the regional beer rags and could be well served by a local publication so he started one.  If the pilot is any indication great things are coming and I love his website for keeping up with the latest info on beer goings on around the Burgh.

I also decided to donate some homemade cookies to Secret Agent L and her fundraiser for the CHS Christmas Cards & Cookies event coming up so that'll be fun! Gotta love it when I can help out with a charity by doing something that I love doing anyway, its a beautiful thing!

We are supposed to get some snow today...it was originally predicted at epic level proportions...I now hear maybe an inch. A note to all my fellow yinzers: CALM THE FUDGE DOWN! Its winter. We live in SWPA. Its going to get cold. Its going to snow. These are all facts. Facts we can do nothing to change. We dont need to flood the grocery stores for Milk, Bread & TP.  Wind does not require that you drive 20 miles under the speed limit because there is snow on the ground somewhere. I know Snowpocalypse is still fresh in your minds...but really, was that the worst thing ever? Lynch me if you wanna but I kinda dug it, even the shoveling part. I would rather look at snow blanketing the earth than dormant trees and dead leaves, it feels more like the holidays when there is snow on the ground and this twisted soul really genuinely enjoys the extremes of all 4 seasons we are lucky enough to experience here!

I FINALLY sort of started my Christmas shopping....I am such an AWESOME procrastinator!

Random Woooos!

Still not smoking and it gets better everyday.  Its funny how different things taste to me in less than a week.  I love it. I noticed it first on, of all things, a Diet friggin Coke and since then have found that EVERYTHING tastes better, or at the least more pungent. This is a pretty important thing for a chef...obviously.  This is really the longest I have ever made it without some type of cheat or just a plain all out fail...so if you see me daily and youre sick to hearing me woooo! about my accomplishment Im afraid youre just going to have to deal with it...I am WICKED proud of me.

Another bonus ~ I havent had to step foot into a "convenience" store in over a week. I love that. I can actually take my life in my hands and go to *GULP* Get Go (you guys know what Im talking about - that place is fucking insane no matter what or when you get there) get gas and go without having to go through any of the crap inside the store. This makes me happy.


Unrelated me & Mister went out for a late lunch yesterday & I have a note to all the dive bars/bar bars out there - stop with the frozen bullshit breaded fried chicken. Please? Seriously...it is really not all that challenging to bread and fry chicken parts to order, its actually cheaper and you can take a relatively pedestrian sandwich to another level by that one simple thing! I usually stick with wings and other bar-like noms there and decided to go for the gusto and get a sandwich ~ I know I'm living dangerously ~ but it SOUNDED good - fried chicken tenders, bbq, fried onion straws & mozzarella. The bun was perfectly grilled, the bbq was pretty good, the onion straws salty & crisp...and then those damn stupid prebreaded dry as hell flavorless yucky chicken tenders. The sandwich would have been worthy of some raves except for that one part. Two more minutes and a little bit of give a fuck and it would have been next level. Its lazy. And dumb. Bread your chicken to order. Feel the same way about places that use frozen burger patties ~ and it makes me ragey when I see people RAVE about them being the best burgers ever when I KNOW they are those damn puck burgers you can buy at Sams Club. Want a good burger? Portion fresh ground beef, dont freeze it, dont smash it into oblivion when its on the grill and put it on a good bun. Frozen burger patties? Really? You should be ashamed. Pattying ground beef is not rocket science & the end result is just a eleventy times better than ANY frozen burger patty.

It was another good day...The Pens kicked come C-Bus ass tonight and it was epic, Angkor made me my most favoritest Cambodian fried rice for dinner {note to self: figure out what that delicious sausage is in there would ya?!?} and imma bout to practice some Grand Turismo so when Mister decides he wants to challenge me I wont embarrass myself with my suck.  Also might toss together some snickerdoodles because, well, they are delicious and I want them.

Happy Saturday Y'All! Hope it was as awesome as mine if not better!

My favoritest Friday!

In the famous words of Ice Cube....today's been a good day!

Its Day #3 and I am still smoke free.  Today was actually a pretty easy one - I wasnt around any smokers all day since I was off. I had some shizzle to do this morning so I had to RO the day from work, completed obligations and then had a day with Mister. The days with Mister have become a rarity...I pretty much work all daylight and his bartending gigs are mainly at night so yeah, we see each other in passing upon occasion and if we are REALLY lucky have a matched day off ~ today was one of those days. And for the record it was an EPIC day.  I will divulge more details as to the Epic as I can, but rest assured it was the best day I have had in a very long time and barring unforeseen bullshit it will only get better from here.  WOOOOOO!!

I was feeling inspired to make us dinner tonight ~ Paupiettes of tilapia stuffed with shrimp mousseline topped with lobster hollendaise with broccoli & purple cauliflower couscous. It was friggin delicious. I forget sometimes how damn easy it is to toss together something that sounds wicked complicated in about half an hour. Felt good to cook a real meal at home as opposed to grabbing something at the restaurants, take out or cereal.

Talked Mister into getting the steering wheel doohickythingie for the Grand Turismo 5 game he bought. This is going to be a cant beat 'em join 'em scenario and the steering wheel looked kinda cool.  Thank god I can really drive better than I can in that game....prob didnt help I'm imbibing a St Bernardus Christmas while playing...but regardless I kinda suck. This is going to require some practice. I dont like hes better at me at it and I will need to fix this. Yes, I am 34 and play video games...got a prob with that?!? :-)

So today I give thanks to chewing gum for saving me from myself, for lights at the end of some tunnels and for Mister for sharing a pretty awesome day with me and supporting my crazy while I try to kick this crap habit Ive acquired. Somewhat related: He has agreed to not make me walk the dogs the whole winter when hes home if I stay smoke free ~ that is some SERIOUS motivation right there, its effing COLD out there!

This isnt as bad as I thought it would be really.

So its Day #2. This is the day that everyone has told me would be the worst. If thats true then it should be all down hill from here.  Think it helped immensely that I was busy as hell at work all day...but thats the case most days so that should continue to be helpful.  Havent had any major headaches that werent caused by a human or anything else.  I can still tell in my own head that Im edgier than normal, but it is what it is.  Still havent cheated even though I have been more than tempted by all the co-workers that have delicious cigarettes all around me, but I have adopted the "these idiots are NOT going to knock me off this wagon" mentality that seems to be working. Still taking it one day at a time and thats about all I can do. I can tell you that I am very sincerely anticipating the day that the smell of cigarette smoke will repulse me...so anytime that side effect would like to show up I would be most appreciative.

Got home last night and was thinking about bailing on the visit to Mom's but decided that sitting here all obsessing about how bad I want a smoke was a BAD idea and went.  Didnt dig through the Fenton but had a great time making cookies with my nephews and trashing my mom's kitchen. Got me thinking on my holiday baking so that will be starting soon.

So I had a little back and forth about the holiday season with some Twitter friends today and it does make me feel better that I am definitely not the only one who is just not feeling the holiday love this year.  This isnt uncommon for me - I in essence work in retail. NO ONE who works in retail loves the holiday season...you'd be a sadistic fuck if you did. But in my travels today I reflected on some things that were said by a Christmas Zealot that I follow. He's an interesting fellow that I find I rarely agree with on most things but thats what makes life interesting, right?  Bottom line his argument for all of us Bah XMas folks to just relax and enjoy it, its only a month, whats the big deal just get over it and enjoy yourself.  I get where hes coming from...hes been dry humping Christmas since Halloween and obviously is much more into it that I am and that cool, but I disagree with a lot of it. I especially found his speeches funny because this person who is all about ramming holiday cheer down all of our throats has also had his fair share of pouting & whining like a 5 year old when plans hes tried to make to help him live out this ridiculous ideal about the serenity of his Perfect Holiday Season falls through because hes living this ideal outside the realm of reality and is then just dumbfounded when real life interferes with his dream of  Normal Rockwell Christmas.  The hypocrisy of his "spread the love and all of us be happy" message is complete tossed out the window when he doesnt get his way...and me having the dark sense of humor I have finds that LaughOutLoud funny.

Its not just a month. The holiday bullshit has been on display, on my TV and generally infiltrating my existence since 2 weeks before Halloween. That makes it what...over 2 months plus of BUY BUY BUY, Norman Rockwell ideals of holiday perfection, warm fuzzies and sentimental bullshit being rammed into my consciousness for MONTHS. Thats just too much. It actually makes me want to buy less rather than more, it makes me want to dodge the retail and commercial aspects of the holidays entirely and just ignore that its coming. Its the entire retail industry's fault. There need and desire to make the holiday shopping season a quarter of the year ruins it for me.  Yeah I get that they want the sales revenue - but they have taken what was when  I was growing up a holiday that was less about spending a gajillion dollars buying a bunch of shit we dont need and was more about time with family & friends, taking time to celebrate being together and just taking the time to appreciate what you have and share it with others. 

Black Friday crap sickened me this year. People camping out in Best Buy parking lots for days, waiting in line at 3am to get some great deal, people fighting & attacking each other about toys & electronics, stores opening up in the middle of the night and psychotic people actually GOING out at 3am to shop there. I mean its news all day how many people get injured at a walmart stampede, the people arrested for assault fighting over a TV, old women being assaulted by people to get a damn doll. Really? This is what Christmas shopping has come down to? This is what this holiday as become? We should all be ashamed. They retail industry keeps taking it further because there are enough assholes out there they make money doing it. And I HATE it. With ever ounce of my being. There was a time when I enjoyed going out shopping...hunting for that perfect gift for that special someone, walking the mall and looking at decorations and just enjoying the festiveness of the season but that time has long gone. I dont find it very "Holiday Season" to go to the mall and have to deal with the assholes there that are literally and figuratively FIGHTING for the hottest trend because some ass on TV said it was the coolest shit ever and you MUST have it. Bury your head in the sand all you want...but Christmas stopped being about family & friends and started being about greed & materialism years ago and I dont have to like it.

I will definitely have my kind of Christmas. We will go to my Mom's on Christmas Eve and have a fantastic dinner with my family and sit around the tree and open gifts with the kids, we will eat until we can teat anymore, we will talk, tell stories and enjoy my mom's awesome decorating and the warm glow of lights.  I will spend Christmas Day making a feast for my family and we will spend more time eating, drinking, relaxing and enjoying each others company being thankful that we have each other and appreciating the time we have together. I will get some presents, I will much more enjoy giving presents and it will be a great holiday for us all.  I will hope we get snow, its cold and crisp and I will see Christmas lights reflecting off it giving a time of year that is usually gloomy a warm and heartening glow. I will watch Rudolf, Frosty the Snowman, Charlie Brown Christmas, A Christmas Story, Christmas Vacation and all of my other favorite holiday movies. I will donate money and toys to help family's around me have better holidays and feel good that no matter how small I played a part in helping some child or family have a happier holiday. I will bake enough cookies to feed a country and revel in sharing those little pieces of me with people I genuinely care for. I will spend this holiday with a husband I adore and who adores me back, my family and friends and it will be as awesome as any has ever been and it will be far too short as always...

And even with all of those amazing things that will make this holiday awesome for me...i will still HATE the blatant commercialism that has infected this holiday like a plague, the Christmas ads I see on TV will still make me sporky especially the make me want to vomit jewelery ads (real people in real life dont fucking act like those idiots they script in those ads), I will still get ragey watching people be just dickish to each other just because they can be while wrapped up in their own selfish existences, I will still be nauseated by parents who think that the only way they can give their kids a nice holiday by buying them half of a toy store while their kids apprecaite none of the crap they get and I will still abhor the way Christmas went from family traditions to a gluttony of commercialism.

Yes, I still love Christmas, the traditions, the time to get together and enjoy our friends and family...but as a sane person I will at the same time completely hate and do my best to not participate in all of the overly commercialized and insulting transparent attempts of the majority of the planet to turn this holiday into retail gluttony.

And for any that say Im a hater...you very well may be right, but in my opinion you're living in denial if you cant see that your holiday is designed to cost you a fortune, stress you out, has little or nothing to do with the holiday & is more about giving your money to the retail machine ~ when in reality the best gift I will get this year is just some down time to celebrate life with my nearest and dearest.

I would rather be flat ass broke sitting near my Charlie Brown christmas tree with my Mister drinking a beer laughing at crude dick & fart jokes all night than frantically trying to make sure that our holiday lives up to some imaginary standard set by Martha Stewart or whoever.

Im curious to hear your thoughts.  I can see both sides of the equation...but seriously I cant imagine I am the only one that has reached max for the forcing of Christmas down my throat for over 2 moths so Old Navy can see cheap fleece.  Christmas means more than stupid shit to me. Its about appreciating what you have, helping others who may need it and saying thanks to the people in your life that make it a better place to be.....and Im pretty sure that a drill doesnt express that as well as a hug, a personal gift and just saying the damn words.  Am I wrong?

Day #1 - The Bitch is a Lil Bit Bitchier :-)

So at this point I have officially completed the first 24 hours of being smoke free. Honestly I think I am handling it pretty ok.  I can honestly say that as of yet I have not felt any ZOMG GIVE ME NICOTINE BEFORE I BREAK YOU moments and the hardest parts have been the habit breaks - like getting in the car to go to work, after I ate lunch today and when some of the guys I work with went out to go BS & have a smoke.  This is actually pretty consistent with the other 42 times Ive tried. Ive heard people say that they have these awful nicotine cravings...but I dont know that I ever really did.  Cigarettes are the BEST excuse ever to take 5 in a restaurant ~ you dont smoke you dont get a break. Either way I havent cheated yet, havent really had the urge to and I think I inspired the main smoker I work with to quit with me meaning my office will not have any smokers that I can bumm one off of and that is SWEET!

So the cravings might not be all that bad...but the overly aggressive I am going to tell you off whether you like it or not and you better damn well stand there and take it because if you werent so stupid in the first place I wouldnt be this annoyed so this is all your fault moments....yeah Ive had a couple of them. They are like a more extreme version of PMS. The reasonable person in my head is all "whoa woman, you need to chill out, annoyed & bitching is one thing...scaring the person you are talking to is another" but then the raging bitch in my brain beat up Miss Reasonable, hog tied her and threw her in the back until the I Wanna Smoke Monster has vacated the premise.  Honestly I think Miss Raging Bitch actually is just enjoying being let off her leash a little bit and is taking advantage...and I have been somewhat selective with my victims because some deserve my wrath more than others.  Fortunately I am not really known as being warm & fuzzy with most people, so my being a tad more aggressive will be noted, but not in any extreme way so theres always that.

And its snowing today! This will help bolster some Christmas cheer...just havent been feeling it yet.  We have Christmas dinner at my house every year so I have to do some decorating and such, but I think Im going to keep it somewhat low key this year. The holiday for me is less about driving myself insane trying to make sure its the absolutely most perfectest Christmas ever and my world drips in lights & tinsel...its more about getting to spend time with my family & friends over good food & drinks. I do have to start my baking though soon; or at the very least start to make up the list of what I plan to be baking. last year I made in the month of December 3460 cookies (not a made up number!) and this year we have added a new restaurant with a ginormous staff so that means more baking to do.  I definitely cant afford to buy each of my employees a gift, but I make up huge platter of cookies for them to munch on the days leading up to Christmas as a thanks.

I havent even begun shopping, but I really dont have all that much to buy and will do 99% of it on line. I despise malls and shopping and crowds...i adore the interwebs and free shipping!!

Tonight though it is going to be cookiecity at my moms. My nephew needs 48 cookies for the afterparty for his performance recital on Saturday and since I'm not attending (its another Jebus Play and he hasnt asked for me to be there) he has requested that I make him his most favorite cut out cookies and help decorate them so he can take them with him. I also FINALLY get to go through my Grandmothers Fenton Glass collection that she has been building since she got married in 1942 or so tonight with Mom.  There are a few pieces that Gram insists that I have and a bunch of others my Mom thinks I will want and Im excited.  I have been itching to go through this stuff because I adore some of her pieces and cant wait to check them out.

Im sincerely looking forward to the near future when all of my thoughts arent punctuated by "smoke break"...but i feel like Im doing ok and am not going to slay any dragons before i get there.....

Related: I would give my left arm for some Peanut Butter M&Ms right about now :-)

The bitch is back!!

Hot damn its been a while since Ive come to tend my little piece of the internets! Its been a busy busy busy couple months (as always) and Ive thought of a bazillion things that I wanted to blog about but just have just not taken the time to actually sit and write them out once I get home from work.

So this post is going to be a "random" post in a way because I have a goal here I want to share~

• The primary reason that I havent posted for a bit was because I was feeling a bit exposed.  I have unleashed my store managers on the Twitters because I couldn't keep up with the comings and goings that were necessary for the 5 of them.  My Twitter account is public (because I kind of feel like what is the point of twittering if you are going to privatize your account - if you are that worried about what you have to say then maybe you shouldnt be saying it) and it is my personal account - so the views, opinions and thoughts expressed here and there are MINE and mine alone. I make it a point to not mention anything specific about my place of work or my coworkers & employees here or there and always have.  Well it took them all about 2 weeks, but the Pittsburgh beer scene is a close knit one but they found me so instead of blocking and hiding I just let it go and they follow me.  This is good and bad. But bottom line is I shouldnt let it effect me saying & doing what I want to do on my personal blog or twitter account. I think I can safely assume that all of my peoples get that there is the Me they work for and the Me that exists outside of that realm and though they both live in the same body they are very different people. Well that and I swear to all thats holy that if they are reading this and decide to turn my blog or twitter into any kind of gossipy bullshit with ANY of my employees or coworkers that there will be extreme hell to pay (If youre reading this guys you have been fairly warned...ok).  I do NOT invade their personal lives and doing that to me would be an excessive invasion of my personal life...but after much consideration I dont think they will. I work with some pretty awesome people and they are all grown ups...so I am going to roll the dice and see what happens. 

• I think Im really done smoking. Been pondering this a lot of late and I feel like its time.  I had this AH HA! moment a couple weeks ago. Im a smart person. I have a good job, I pay my bills, I am a good person, I possess the ability to make all kinds of good decisions large and small all day every day.  And yet at least 10-15 times a day I CHOOSE to put something in my mouth, light it on fire and inhale the smoke full on KNOWING that it will kill me. I wouldnt step in front of a bus 15 times a day. I wouldnt play Russian Roulette with a double barrel shot gun 15 times a day. I wouldnt jump off a roof 15 times a day. But I will smoke 15 cigarettes a day. Took me 17 years but yeah...thats fucking stupid. So there are 2 left in my current pack. I am not buying or bumming (see how I sealed up that loop hole right there) anymore of them after these last 2. I also am going to do this cold turkey even though the general consensus is that may be a bad idea. Through all this thinking and pondering I have also come to this conclusion - my smoking is a choice. Yes...there are things that make them addictive, yes there are chemical receptors in my brain that are going to be PISSED for a couple weeks, yes I might be more bitchy & aggressive than I normally am (sorry in advance) but fuck it. I am NOT going to spend a couple hundred dollars a month to make it easier for me to quit. I am not a weak person and there has not been one thing outside of this that I havent been able to accomplish in my life once I have set my mind to it and this is no different. I am not going to stop giving my money to Big Tobacco only to give it to Big Pharmaceutical. Fuck ya both...Im gonna buy a flat screen or a new Mac!! 

•  Related: I am going to blog my quitting. I am promising myself I will post at least once a day until I have kicked the habit and have realigned my routines accordingly. I genuinely enjoy blogging, it gets a lot of things that get trapped in my head out for me to look at and I want to do more with my little space on the internets. I like being able to read my thoughts with some objectivity...which is hard to do when wrapped up in your own head.

• Sarah Palin. I am pretty sure I have launched off about her before, but I read an article today that really pissed me off.  Michelle Obama has made it her initiative to help curb and control childhood obesity. I dont give a flying fuck how you feel about her politics - but this IS a huge problem. I dont have kids - but I know kids and shes right. They spend far too much time sitting on their asses in front of monitors & TVs than is good for them shoveling shit they really shouldnt be eating into their faces. I walked around for trick or treating with my nephews and my sister had her husband go home and get the car because  HER 9 YEAR OLD COULDNT WALK ALL THE WAY HOME BECAUSE HE GETS TOO TIRED. Hes 9. Are you fucking kidding me?!?!? I wanted to hit her and make him run laps. Through this entire conversation he is rooting through his bag looking for more reeses. Sheesh. Her kids also dont eat vegetables. They eat garbage. She eats garbage. Maybe if they learned about healthy eating in school it would help. Maybe it would inspire then to try different foods. I full on blame my sister for the poor eating habits of her kids...but maybe healthier school lunches & better budgets for those programs would help all kids. Its possible. It definitely cant hurt.  But Mrs Palin launched off about Mrs Obama's program saying it is the government's attempt   to tell us how to eat and control our diets. She was down right obnoxious about it, ill informed and just plain wrong.  I wont even link to the story - I cant bring myself to contribute in any way to more people hearing what she has to say. The School Lunch Program and its supporters are not trying to control our diets, they are attempting to educate kids and families to make better choices for their overall health and if that woman is too dumb to see that WHY DOES ANYONE GIVE HER THE TIME OF DAY?!? I dont get it. It scares me...sincerely scares me...that she may make a run for President in 2012 and there are a large amount of vocal people who insist she will win. Please. No. Just No. She is terrifyingly stupid. Believe what ever political ethos youd like - hell! be a tea partier for all I give a shit - but see her for the vapid & ignorant woman she is and make her go away. Her and her entire family. Oh...and take Glenn Beck with 'em - hes just an asshole no matter what you believe.

I will return tomorrow with more focus...promise. I hope you all had a great Turkey Day and Im doing my best to get in the Christmas Spirit without much luck.  The icky rain today isnt helping. Go ahead and assassinate me if you want...but I really really really wish it were snow!!

I already know I perpetrated a Stupid.

And yes...it was a Stupid with a capital "S".

So Monday night/Tuesday morning. I am sleeping, as I should be at 3am. Cell phone rings (we dont keep a house phone & it has to be on because I am the first call for the security company for all of our buildings - you SO want my job now, dontcha?!?) and its our security company telling me that a motion detector has been tripped on the second floor of the restaurant closest to my house. Fine. Am I happy about this ~ fuck no. Did I lay there and pout for 10 minutes or so ~ hell yes. But I eventually got up, found clothes, pulled the hair into a ponytail and head to the store to see what stupid fucking Oktoberfest decoration set of the stupid fucking alarm that I am getting up at 3am to go check out. Because every damn call I have to go on is something dumb like that, but I still have to go. I did ask them to send the cops out, but I ask them that most times and have yet to actually see one.

I get there around 3:30. I drive the lot & walk the perimeter, I dont notice anything alarming. I go inside and in my best Paul Rudd Wet Hot American Summer impression I start to check the building. I hit all the lights, look for anything out of place, stomp around a bit and dont find anything out of whack that would have set off the alarm. I am confused by this. I believe I said so out loud while standing in the second floor dining room tired & out of sorts. Yes, I talk to myself, dont judge. I do a very perfunctory look in the upstairs bathrooms, hit the lights, go back to main floor, walk the basement (fucking CREEPY when its NOT the middle of the night for the record) check all the doors, still see nothing odd, hit all the lights, reset the alarm and go home. Cranky. I was home a smidgen before 4am.

At 4:10am my phone rings AGAIN. Its the security company AGAIN. Telling me the upstairs motion detector went off AGAIN. This time I tell this way-too-fucking-happy-to-be-calling-me-at-4am-woman to silence the alarm, send the cops and ignore that sensor...something must be wrong with it and I will deal with it in the morning. She says fine, whats your passcode, enjoy the rest of your evening blahblahblah. I go back to sleep.

At 5:07am the phone rings. Guess who it is this time? If you took the security company you WIN!!! I got bitchy. Something to the effect of "which part of ignore that goddamn sensor did you NOT get when I told you an hour ago?!?!?" to which the pleasant lady replied "well we are, for the upstairs, but this time its the bar & side door. In that order." Hmmmmm. This is odd. Unless the whole system shit the bed. Which would also be odd. So I have to go back in and check it out. I tried the boss first because he is usually up at 5am...but he didnt answer my text & I didnt want to call.

So I go back. And this time I go over that place for about an hour trying to figure out WTF is setting off the alarm. I find a bottle of tripel sec & a screw driver on the floor behind the bar that wasnt there at 3am. I dont like that, its just not right & no reasonable way for them to get there outside of our building's ghost - which is not out of the question.  I finished up around 6am. Didnt rearm the building because the opening manager was due in in about half an hour, came home and emailed the boss to 1) tell him what had been happening all night and 2) tell him my ass wouldnt be in until later because I needed some fucking sleep and then go back to bed. Where I promptly passed out.

Woke up at 10am and the boss texted me that yeah, someone had in fact attempted to break in but was unsuccessful.  They had smashed in a window under the deck and tried to gain access by removing the hinges from a door. They failed because the doors wont open that way...

Him telling me this weirded me out. They could have been under the deck while I was there. Wasnt freaked out, just a tad unsettled.

Well after I go back in daylight and start piecing together all of the stuff the Boss found and what I found and doing some Sherlock Holmes work me & my General Manager are convinced that there was definitely SOMEONE in the building last night. Had to be. Boss is unconvinced. We ask him to come down so we can show him what we found that has us so sure. We show him, he is skeptical. We push harder, he believes.

So this is what happened after it was all figured out.  At some point after the closers left at 1:30am someone broke in under the deck. They busted 2 screwdrivers and destroyed the door hinges in their FAIL to get in. When this didnt work they tried to pry open a door on our deck & on the side of the building - both new doors and also a fail. They then used our hood duct work and the deck railing to get onto a roof that gives access to the 2nd floor windows and came in through said window, setting off the alarm at 3am. I can only assume they were on the 2nd floor while I was at 3:30am hiding somewhere I didnt find them. *shudder*

They attempted to leave a little after 4am, setting off the alarm again because I had reset it while I was there. But this time I didnt go out, I just had them silence it so as not to bug our neighbors and went back to bed. But Im guessing they hid again waiting for me to come back or the cops to arrive. Either way they stopped moving.

At 5am they moved again, only this time down the service steps, into the kitchen and behind the bar...where they attempted to clean sweep a liquor shelf quickly, dropping the screw driver they brought up from under the deck, knocking over the tripel sec and a bottle of tequila we found behind a piece of equipment. They grabbed partial bottles of Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, Well Bourbon, Grenadine (LOLZ), Seagrams VO & SoCo. Less than $40 worth of liquor, really, it was just the closest to the door and the alarm was blaring at this point. They dropped the grenadine outside by the side door, where boss found it in the morning.

I arrived about 10 minutes after the alarm went off. I probably missed their exit by a couple minutes.

Fucked up, huh? Things I figured out: 1) Not going to go into a building on an alarm call without a cop no matter the circumstances ever again. I was naive to just assume it was something dumb setting off the alarm. 2) I am amazingly lucky. I could have been very seriously hurt if I had come across this person on my first trip in had I accidentally confronted them while I was there. *shudder* and 3) I really really really miss my big lab, Diamond, that passed last February. I usually took him with me on calls because he was the Protector & would have let me know that I wasnt alone in that building at 3:30am.

We finished Tuesday night at The ScareHouse for the Crazy Scary event that was a fantabulous fundraiser & one hell of a good time that raised almost $6300 for Christmas Crazy & Make Room for Kids which is awesome.

And I have decided the only kind of scary I want to experience for awhile is of the Haunted House/Scary Movie variety. No more creeping on thieves by myself in the middle of the night. Promise.

Cinnamon Roll Cookies!!!

I'm going to double post today, but first the cookies. The next story kinda shook me up and needs its own posting.

I made them over a week ago & thought they were so yummy I should share...well that and the recipe was requested by a couple folks so here it is.

I will preface with this ~ it would be totally ok to use a premade sugar cookie tube thing for this recipe. Personally I wouldn't, but if you're not a baker, dont have the tools/time or just want to make them fast it would be ok.  Personally, I wouldn't. Those tube-o-cookie things have a very odd flavor that I dont particularly like & have never been able to identify...well that and read the ingredient list. I dont put any of those super long nonsense words in my cookies.

For the record I use a KitchenAid Pro stand mixer (yeah, it really is as badass as it sounds like it is, basically has a honda motor in it) with a paddle for all cookies and for this recipe following the right mixing procedure is important because you have to form & slice these...

The Recipe.

2 sticks Salted Butter - softened
3/4 cup Granulated Sugar
1/2 cup Light Brown Sugar
2 whole Eggs
2 Egg Yolks
1 Tbsp Vanilla Extract
1 Tbsp Butter Extract (optional)
2 Tbsp Heavy Cream (can sub sour cream or milk)
2 1/4 cups All Purpose Flour
1 tsp Baking Soda
1/4 tsp salt

•  Cream the butter until light & fluffy. Add both sugars and continue to cream until light again. Add the eggs & yolks one at a time beating well between additions. Add the extract(s) & cream and mix in to combine.
• Place all the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix with a wire whisk to incorporate. Add in small increments to the butter mixture and mix until well combined. Have to make sure you get it all mixed in thoroughly or you'll get weird blops in your dough.
• Eat some of the dough...it really is pretty damn delicious.
• Line a half sheet tray with plastic wrap so it over hangs on the left & right sides (yeah-not parchment. The wrap is easier to deal with later, I learned this the hard way. Benefit from my frustration) and dump the dough on top. Use your hands or a rolling pin to evenly spread the dough out to cover the pan evenly.  I start w the hands and finish it off with the pin to even it all out. Side Note: flouring your hands a little makes the dough not stick to everything.
• Eat some more dough...I heart cookie dough. 
• Place the tray in the fridge until the dough has chilled enough to be workable by hand.  Mix up a bowl of roughly 1 cup brown sugar & 4 Tbsp cinnamon* (you can add other spices here too, like ground ginger & some allspice or nutmeg - go nuts!). Pull the dough out of the fridge & remove from the pan using the plastic wrap to help you.
• Cover the top with the brown sugar mix. Should be a light, even coat so dont dump it all on, it may be too much. cut the dough sheet in half vertically, making more of less 2 almost squares.
• Use the plastic wrap to roll the dough up cinnamon roll style. Dont stress about perfect seals or anything, the dough can be pinched & forced into submission- its a cookie. When its a lovely tube wrap it tight in saran wrap and refrigerate until it is firmly set.
• Preheat oven to 375, slice the tubes into 1/4" slices and lay on parchment lined trays to bake. My oven took 11 minutes so thats a good place to start. Cool on the tray for 5 minutes then transfer to a cooling rack
• For a glaze I mixed up 2 cups powdered sugar with 3 Tbsp of Milk & 1 Tbsp of vanilla. I also tossed a chunk of really soft butter in there because I like it that way.  When the cookies are TOTALLY cooled use a spoon to drizzle the glaze over top, let it set for a couple minutes then devour. 

These were very pretty pinwheels & easy enough my nephew could handle making them with some direction if he wanted to, so they are good for fancy schmancy cookies or to just make at home with the kiddies. Not to mention they are buttery, soft & chewy & packed with cinnamon. LOVE them.

The *cinnamon - I use a Vietnamese cinnamon, so its rather pungent and spicy. Would highly recommend & you can find it at Penseys or online. It really is much different than the crap on grocery store shelves and takes a good cookie and makes it aromatic & dreamy. Like an oatmeal cookie is next level with this cinnamon.

I also make my own vanilla extract so its more pungent than store bought as well....

I am a baking dork.

But I dont care. My shit's delicious!!

Hope you make them! They really sound more complicated than they are. Start to finish I probably spent less than an hour putting them together, the hard part was patiently waiting for dough to chill so I could bake them....but I always suck at patience.

Let me know how they come out!

PS - I bet these would be good with orange zest in the dough & an orange glaze too...like those Pillsbury orange cinnamon roll thingies my mom used to make...

Happy Happy Weekend!!!!

So I know its only Saturday night but its been a pretty awesome couple days so far!!

First Mister FINALLY got the ice maker & water doohickeythingie (that is a VERY technical term) on my 10 month old refrigerator fully operational. It makes me giddy that I will not have to make stupid ice in stupid ice cube trays ever again...or at least as long as the maker keeps working anyway...because I do not know the recipe for ice ~ and this drives Mister nuts! (psssst- dont tell him but I really do know how to make ice I just absolutely hate doing it!)

I bought my tickets to Scarehouse for the Tuesday Night Tweet-Up shenanigans on 10/5 that is described ever so fabulously by BurghBaby right here. It benefits a couple of awesome charities, as she explains, and I am asking that if any of y'all would like to join that you do so via HER link on HER page. Please and Thank You! I have also managed to get Mister to agree to take me to this event, which would be our first haunted house trip in years. See...I LOVE this kinda stuff but him not so much but because he loves me he has agreed to deal with me there and buy me some depends just in case. I thank him for playing along and promise not to do too much damage to him as I am getting the bejesus scared out of me. Should be an excellent time!

Attended a seminar this morning & afternoon held by SCORE Pittsburgh about entrepreneurial types of things that provided confirmation that I DO know more than I thought I did (yaay!) and learned a few other things that will be helpful.  I think me & Mister have finally decided on the smartest path for us to take that will get us where we want to go with far less head bashing and am actually looking forward to starting this process. We have had a bazillion ideas about "what we want to be when we grow up" and all of them have been pretty awesome, but this one feels right and makes the most sense in my head. We need to think of an awesome name and start the planning, but because Im me half of the plan is written in my head already...now to get it on paper.

Since we were in town all morning & afternoon we decided to have lunch down there. Let me first say that holy hell all the Market Square construction bullshit is going to be well worth it once it is all complete. It was very reminiscent of a Grand Place in Europe and was gorgeous! We had a delectable Mexican lunch at Las Velas (if you dig Mexican you HAVE to go...it was delicious) and had a walk around the Cultural District. They had a bunch of the street lights wrapped up in that colored cello paper stuff and I dont know why though... It was a beautiful afternoon for a walk and as we rounded the corner to head back up Penn I HAD to go get a Burnt Almond Torte from Prantls. I got THE last one and wanted to squeeee because I have been jonesing for that cake since my birthday in August.

I finally got a meeting scheduled for next Tuesday with a financial planner dude so we can get our personal affairs in order and get a plan of attack for getting that all squared away. Im sure it wont be the most exciting meeting ever but its a baby step toward bigger ones so win. I kinda felt bad for the guy, 3 weeks hes been trying to get me to set an appt...we finally found a day that works. He wanted to come by the house...I didnt think that was such a great idea unless he happens to be a dog person. Little puppy butt likes strangers a lot and can be a bit much to take if you dont dig beasts.

And in case anyone missed it....IT WAS A HOCKEY NIGHT IN PITTSBURGH!!!! In case you cant tell I'm a tad excited. Baseball - hell freaking no. Football - meh, if Misters watching it I will but otherwise I could care less. Hockey on the other hand - I will watch that alone! It was awesome to see all my boys back on the ice tonight at Consol! Chris "Sex Hair" LeTang had 2 fights, Geno (my hard core hockey crush) beat a guys ASS, I was impressed from all 3 preseason games with Mr Hillary Duff (Comrie, I know but my way is funnier) and Fleury looked really good in net. I will miss Staal until he is back but honestly Im just happy to have hockey back...I missed it so. I also decided that I will sell a kidney (or maybe even kill The Wizard for his tickets) to get into Consol at least once this year to see a game live. Anyone have 2 tickets and need a kidney? I haz an extra one & am willing to sell!

Mister & I also made a mostly final decision...we plan to sell this house sometime spring/summer next year as quickly as possible and move. We want to go downtown/East End and rent. After years of trying to force ourselves to be "responsible homeowners" we have decided that it just isnt us and would rather not deal with all this bullshit. We work way too much & would rather spend our down time doing things we want to as opposed to shit we HAVE to because of this house. If we had kids and had to worry about schools or whatever that would be one thing, but the dogs dont really care where we live and we just plain dont want to. It is going to be a project & a half getting this shit ball rolling but I am motivated to get the fudge outta here. Between the shitty neighbors, abandoned houses, ridiculous borough and just an overall unhappiness with the 'hood its time to roll! Yay!!!

Who knows what tomorrow will bring...but its Sunday so it cant be all that bad. I see a trip to an orchard to I can get some apples to make applesauce and some fall stuff I want in the very near future and as soon as my replacement paddle comes for my mixer I will be regaling you with a recipe for these cinnamon roll cookie things Mister found on line that just look like they should be awesome.  Hope you all are having a great weekend too!!!!

An adventure in food blogging

I blog about food alot. I know this, its what I do and what I like. I wouldnt call this a "food blog" though. I was quite disappointed that I wasnt able to join PghPodCamp this last weekend, but I was able to listen & watch a few streaming while I was at work and that kind of rocked. I got to see Michelle from BurghBaby and loved her presentation and caught a little bit from a food blog focused presentation that I also liked & introduced me to some food blogs I didnt even know existed. I will be making it a point to get there for at least 1 day next year...I dont wanna miss out!

So Ive spent a few evenings checking them out and just seeing what they say.  I, personally, couldnt run a food blog. I kind of feel that would somewhat a conflict of interest. Running local restaurants I dont feel it would be considered kosher for me to critique the work of others...well that and I really dont have time to go out so many nights a week to make that worth it. But I found a few to be great and a couple others that made me stabby.

The good ones are well written, objective and informative. The ones that have made me stabby bring to mind people who have watched too much TV, have a key board and feel the need to share. I will not list names or link to their blogs, I dont think that is fair and Im not looking to start a food blogger war but if you are a food blogger and you are reading some things to consider...

• You cant go into a restaurant to review it, modify a menu item from its original form and them bitch you didnt like it. Of course you didnt like it. Chefs dont put menus and foods together because we have nothing better to do - it is done that way because that is the flavor profile we were going for and all of the components need to be included in order to get the dish. If you change it its now YOUR dish and we cannot be held responsible for your poor taste.

• You cant go once and thats it. No food writers does that, even the really really good ones. You have to go back 3-5 times on average to get a solid feel for the consistency of the service & food, check out a variety of menu items and get a feel for the atmosphere. To only go in once, order 1 item and then make a snap judgment about a place is unfair. I mean seriously, just as a customer I would never go someplace once, have a bad or mediocre experience and write it off completely. Thats narrow minded & short sighted. It isnt possible to get a full scope of any business with 1 visit, especially a restaurant or bar.

It was painfully obvious reading some of the blogs that about half of them have never stepped foot in a professional kitchen and the knowledge they are basing their "reviews" on is from reading Bon Appetit & Gourmet and watching Food Network. Im sorry, but liking to eat and liking food doesnt make you qualified to review someone's work. I know that I can go into a restaurant, order a dish and when its put down in front of me know that the fish doesnt have a crisp crust because a line cook didnt heat their pan enough, or the mashed potatoes are gooey because they were allowed to cool too much prior to mashing or the green beans are shriveled because they were cooked from a raw state with too much acid - that puts me at a distinct advantage and in a unique position to honestly evaluate the food in front of me. I dont feel some of these self proclaimed food writers are able to do that...so how do they objectively review anyplace? Can they identify that the plate put in front of them was at one point perfect, but because a server took too long to get back to the kitchen and it sat under a heat lamp and is now lamp burnt - which doesnt mean bad cooks - it means bad servers. I also noted a bunch of "I" statements going on...food reviewing isnt about your personal tastes or preferences, its about the technical merit & flavor of a dish. I personally cant stand curry powder - but you put a curried dish in front of me I can appreciate it for what it is and tell you if it is good or not - personal feelings about curry aside.

As an industry professional I take bad reviews of my work personally...especially if it was literally MY work. In my current position yeah, I might create a recipe, but I depend on my staff to execute them and rarely am I actually the one making your food in any of my restaurants...so I tend to get irritated by them, but not hurt...and a hell of a lot more likely to go find the offending KM and crawl up his ass and out his mouth so he understands exactly what they did wrong and it never happens again. But reading some of these blogs I actually felt bad for the chefs. We do what we do because we love it, and its a bitch having to read what some dude wrote about the ONE night he came in that you were training a new grill cook who over cooked a steak or burger, didnt tell his server about it so we could fix it and then writes a post saying the cooks at This Restaurant cant cook. Harsh man...and not true.

I have a few notes for you folks...

1. If you are so damn good at what we do and think you can do it better come on down and give it a shot. I will be more than happy to sit idly by and watch over a beer while you drive yourself nuts trying to do what we do everyday...and when you collapse in tears in a corner I will also happily jump in and bail you out. I dont come into your full time marketing job (or whatever it is these folks do to as their day jobs) and and tell you how to do your job. I would never assume I could walk into your office and proceed to tell you what you need to do to make your operation better - why would you assume your qualified to that to us? Eating in a restaurant doesnt qualify you to run one - ask any of the millions of people who have failed at operating a restaurant & try to be objective about what you experience.
2. Restaurants are operated and staffed by humans. Seriously. Real live humans. And guess what...we have bad days too! Ever have one of those days at the office that the fax machine blows up or you forgot to do something for a flipping out client or clicked the wrong button and lost 4 hours of work because you forgot to save...you know, the days that make you want to walk in front of a bus? Restaurant employees have those days too. We have days where shit just doesnt click, the day that you forget to ring in a tables apps, or forget to run their salads, or just cant get the timing right for shit coming off the grill or drop the last item on an 8 top on the floor and have to hold the whole check back for the refire or the managers didnt order liquor so your out of well vodka or the bartender is fighting with her boyfriend and just cant it together to get service bar drinks up in any kind of a timely fashion. We are people, not robots, and we have lives too and as much as we would love to be able to leave that bullshit at home it doesnt always work. Only differences are 1) we dont get "personal days" to handle our shit...we have to go to work and 2) we get to take the abuse of patrons who think we should be infallible and think its ok to treat us like garbage because we made a mistake. Believe me - there is not a single person I know who works in the food industry that sets out to make sure their guests have the worst experience ever or to fuck up their food order. That would be stupid.
3. Realize that it is entirely possible that you just dont get the restaurant you are at. One of the reviews I read basically had the writer raking a place over the coals because the menu wasnt "pretentious" enough for the location. Ummm...Ive been to the place he was referencing, multiple times...and that was their point. The point of this place was to create an environment that fit aesthetically into their neighborhood without loosing their comfy feel and in my opinion pulled it off beautifully. This guy just didnt get it and then felt the need to make this the basis for half of his review. Um no. Thats bullshit. And yet another reason to visit a place a couple times, get to know it and then pass judgment on it - but after reading a few of his other reviews I feel he has that problem more often than not...well that and we just do not agree about food. 
4. I read quite a few that were obviously written by people with crushes on the owners/staff/ management. Thats some epic level bullshit. I read about places that get constant raves about how fanfreakingtastic they are...in my experiences at these same places its less than awesome - which I feel comfortable saying because Ive gone to them. Are they good bars/restaurants? Yes. Do they have a pretty great atmosphere? Yes, in most cases. Is there food amazing? No. Not by a long shot on most of my experiences. Is their service exceptional? Not at all usually.  Are they cheap? In some of the cases, yes; in the majority of them, no. BUT I know why these places get sucked off (pardon my french) by anyone who reviews the place...they know how to pimp and who to pimp to. I havent read one review of most of these places that I would say reflects any of the experiences that I have had at them. They are some of my more regular watering holes because I like them, I like the staff, I like the menus & regardless of the imperfections I will go because I want to. Some of them I will get fed up with and wont go back for awhile, but I always end up giving them another shot eventually.  As an operator its a brilliant marketing strategy for creating a loyal customer base, but that isnt the purpose of a restaurant review & isnt bait that a reviewing blogger should take. Facts about their operation shouldnt be skewed by personal feelings about the staff. Go ahead and hang there all you want...but the review should be honest & unbiased.

As a professional I welcome valid feedback. I want to know what people think of my food. I want to here that I made you a dish that made you quiver or that I missed the mark on seasoning whatever. I like that level of interaction - will I get defensive - SURE! You are attacking what is in essence a part of me that I gave you and I should take that personally, but it makes me better at what I do. I enjoy reading what others think about my places and that of my competition to stay ahead and see what my guests want and react to it. I just think less emotional attachment and more objective observation is key if you are going to label yourself a "foodie blog".

I dont know if I have said this before, but if I have you get to read it again. Every human on the planet should at some point in their lives have to work in a restaurant. EVERY human. The life skills learned in that environment are priceless. You learn conflict resolution, tolerance, patience, how to multi-task, how to handle difficult customers & coworkers, team work and immediate deadlines. You learn about all kinds of people and their backgrounds and cultures, you learn to laugh, how to not be so goddamn PC & sensitive and how to curse like a champ.  It would also teach people to treat service employees like humans...because there are far too many out there who are just out of line with their behavior & expectations when they are out to eat.

And if youre going to blog about food and "review" restaurants like a pro then do it like a pro and follow the basic etiquette about food writing. Realize the effect you have on the business you review and the potential customers you are either driving there or driving away. Yippie for you that you got a bazillion hits to your site...but in the mean time you have given a small restaurant a "bad service" tag that might not be true because you didnt do your homework adequately.

All that being said I still found some great bloggers that do objective reviews that actually give you a great scope of a place and have made me try places I might not ever have gone to and thats pretty damn awesome...and I promptly removed the ones who seem to be writing for their ego from my feed, their tabloid story like reviews are not valuable to me at all. I dont want to hear about your idiosyncratic dietary issues that led you to not like what you ordered...I want to know objectively what your experience was.

I think maybe I should read more & save myself some irritation...

Well 2 days back to work. The first was 13.5 hours...today was 12. I really do feel like vacations are some times not worth the pain in the ass catch up I have to do when I get back. Granted I'm loving having the time to get some stuff done around the house, but 15.5 hours in 2 days, hours in meetings with my managers and problems galore.... ilovemyjobilovemyjobilovemyjob. Hopefully by the time I get to the Steel City Big Pour 4 portion of my weekend I will have sorted out some bullshit and be able to enjoy it as opposed to be on the phone dealing with crap all day. *fingers & toes crossed*

So anywho I got home from The Great Day of Meetings Hell Part 2 and my DVR was kind enough to record Master Chef for me. So I made myself breakfast (yeah...I was totally up at 7am today and literally the first piece of food that touched my lips today was at 10pm) and sat down to watch.

Now I avoided the first half of the season because it was some epic level stupid. I've never watched American Idol, but the concept for getting to the final 16 was kind of like the AI auditions & I had no interest, so I picked it up once they were down to the actual competition. Tonight's episode was getting down to the final four. Overall the show is less than stellar. The winner gets a cookbook deal and some cash I think. So I've watched the last few episodes and this one tonight has made me stabby.

I am a chef. I went to school & have the degree...but in all honestly that doesnt mean shit. Im a chef because I love food, because I have worked a lot of hours in a lot of kitchens. I have cooked fine dining in some of the best restaurants in this city, I have cooked upscale fast casual, I have cooked in a pool snack bar, I have catered, done banquets, worked with one of the best pastry chefs in the country & done full scale commercial from scratch baking. I can make you a batch of chocolate chip cookies off the top of my head that will make your mouth sing just as easily as I can make you sauteed halibut cheeks dusted in fennel pollen served over sauteed fiddle head ferns with a meyer lemon vinaigrette that will make your eyes roll into the back of your head. I havent met a protein yet that I havent been able to butcher or break down and I dont mind getting dirty. I am a chef because I EARNED that title through a lot of blood (work with knives a lot & youll bleed eventually), sweat and definitely tears. I am a chef because that is what I am. I am one of the fortunate few who figured out early that not only do I love being in a kitchen but I'm good at it and I can make a living doing it. Cooking for me is an instinct. I am one of the most klutzy people I know. I drop everything, trip over my own 2 feet constantly and am just generally a danger to myself....right until I walk up to that stove. I can make up recipes with a 90% success rate off the top of my head.  Food makes sense to me the way science & math make sense to other people. I hope I'm not coming off as egotistical...I am not. The greatest thing about what I do is I always get to learn, meet people who have so much to teach and constantly explore the food around me. I do not think I know everything and I hope I never will...but that doesnt change the fact that I am good at what I do & for the most part love it. Even now when most of my job entails managing my managers & orchestrating the operations of 5 restaurants I can still step on that line and out cook anyone who works for me....I kinda have to, thats my job.

Now the Master Chef bullshit is all non-professional cooks. They are home cooks. I give them mad credit for their passion and ability but it NOT the same as being a chef. Being a chef doesnt mean standing in front of a small stove making some intricate delicate dish for you & your nearest and dearest or cooking the food for your cousins bridal shower or making a holiday feast for the family. It is also NOT the crap they sling on Food Network. They make it look so fun & ideal...and some days it is...more often than not it isnt.

Being a chef means researching ingredients & methods, tasting, sampling and trying out new things. Its getting up at the ass crack of dawn to hit your line early. Its balancing your food cost, labor cost, budgets & staffing needs. Its hiring, firing, training and leading a team of not always so dedicated cooks. Its standing on a line over a saute stove in 120 degree heat sweating your ass off while perfectly crisping the bacon on a wrapped filet before searing and getting it in the oven to finish while a stock simmers on a back burner and you're cooking 3 other dishes and their sides. Its hefting heavy cases of all kindsa shit and rotating them into coolers, its educating waitstaff about your food so they can sell it. Its dealing with retarded dishwashers that dont get that they need to give you CLEAN plates and that all pots & pans have outsides, too. Its dealing with irrational customers that think you should be able to do whatever it is that they want you to just because they are customers & why cant you hurry up and make me that olive tapenade you had as an amuse bouche a week ago in the middle of a friday diner rush and then bitching out your staff when they are told that isnt possible. Its working 12-14 hours a day until the wee hours of the morning cleaning up a wrecked line after service. Its drinking way too much, smoking far too much pot to maintain your sanity, chain smoking cigarettes and mainlining caffeine to make it through the hangover. Its dirty, sweaty & rewarding work. Being a chef means that inevitably no one will ever tell you you're LOW on anything, just that you're out of it and stopping yourself from launching yourself through a window to ring that idiots neck for not watching the station stocking levels & telling you before you had 4 orders hanging on the board and only 3 left to cook. Its working with many purveyors, watching all your products and foods for freshness & going nutso when they drop the ball so that they know not to do that again. Its stress, its love, its passion, its frustrating.....its fucking awesome & I wouldnt change a thing even if I could.

Because being a chef is also creating the perfectly balanced bernaise sauce that is thick yet fluffy with that divine tarragon white wine tang. Its taking a perfectly seared steak off the grill, its seeing that gorgeous rich purple of sashimi grade ahi as you remove the skin, its getting all a flutter when you get word the Copper River salmon is coming in...or Dover Sole is out & about. Its the smell of toasting almonds and crispy bacon...its the pop of a perfectly heated pan when you slide a filet of Chilean sea bass into it or the crackle of the oil as you drop in something delicious. Its the clanking of plates, the chatter of a busy staff, fast paced-angry & sometimes violent. Its getting the perfect sear on a seasoned pork tenderloin, or the golden brown of a caramelized shallot reduction, the snap of a fresh pea, the ripe richness of perfect tomatoes & the earthy delicateness of wild mushrooms and the sweet crunch of an in season apple. Being a chef is having a vocabulary of curse words that is almost unequaled & using those words daily, speaking a secret restaurant language civilians dont understand & being extra raunchy - seriously I have worked on lines with cooks that would make Richard Pryor blush and that was just the idle chit chat going on between the service & kitchen staff during service. There are about eleventybillion more reason I could give you for why I love what I do and all is better than the next while I am thinking about it.

And now back to my original point...I swear to great fictional dieties if I heard this toolbag on this show call himself a great chef one more fucking time I was going to hunt down his over testosteroned egotistical ass where ever it was in California and drag him to the nearest restaurant and throw this "chef" on a hot line and watch him cry like a little girl who lost her dolly. Watch him get burnt by the guy on saute slinging pans like a mad man putting out 4 dishes while cooking 5 more & setting 3 more up for firing while listing to an expo holler out orders that you have to keep in your memory and telling the guy on fry what sides & garnishes he needs to plate. See if he can call himself a chef when the host comes back to tell you that we just had a walk in 20 top off the menu that was just sat & needs to be out the door in an hour for a show they are going to or having the Skippy the Wonder Server (every restaurant has one I guarantee it) come back while you're 20 checks deep with a pasta dish that was supposed to be the dinner special and he got confused when taking the order and you now have to fly the right item out because the guest was pissed or my personal favorite the steak/burger/fish that is cooked to a PERFECT medium rare that is sent back because "its too bloody, I just wanted it pink" was the reaction of the lady who ordered it that makes you want to go out onto the floor, find her and inform her with great anger then order it MEDIUM you fucking twatball!!! I wonder if he could call himself a chef when he finds out half way through service that Jackass the Prep Cook (every restaurant has one of these as well) SAID he made the minoinette sauce only to find out mid service he didnt and you are chopping shallots like a mother fucker while cooking checks because 86ing that item isnt an option with ingredients in house & orders on the board.

I doubt it. I am willing to bet that these "chefs" would no more be able to handle the pressure that your average line cook does every shift than I would be able to pilot a rocket ship to the moon.  It pisses me off to hear the term "chef" used so loosely.  Chef is a title that is earned, it is a title that you work for...and Master Chef - fuck me. There are chefs that work their entire careers to actually attain that level through certification programs, and it offends me that it is used so cavalierly. Not one of those people, regardless of their skill level, would last more than an hour on any of my lines & its a bunch of bullshit they are being proclaimed as Chefs by anyone. I cant throw a bandaid on a cut and call myself a surgeon - how the fuck can you saute off a piece of salmon butchered by your fish monger and call yourself a chef? Any asshole can put a pan on a stove - it takes love & talent to make that pan give you a dish that will make your mouth smile & belly happy.

I'd like to take a minute to thank Food Network for making every idiot with cable think they can cook and that being a chef is this picture perfect overly romanticised delusion of grand cuisine- its not - sometimes its tearing apart a clogged dish machine drain & scrubbing pots. And shows like Master Chef for equating really good home cooks to real chefs who would eat those people alive in the real world of chefdom. There is so much more to being a chef than reading a recipe and cooking. Its a hard job, a demanding job and for me, an amazingly rewarding one some days and a frustratingly irritating one on others...and I wouldnt change a thing about it. I do love what I do.

I have worked with some amazing chefs & cooks and for all of them and myself I finish with this - you want to be called a chef then earn that right with the blood, sweat and tears we did - not by winning some reality TV show that brings you 15 minutes of fame followed by a career of mediocrity that embarrasses us all. Real chefs dont need to tell you how great they are...they show you that on their plates every freaking night. Reading a cookbook or getting on a reality cooking tv series doesnt make you a chef any more than driving a car makes you a mechanic. Know that.

Side note - the jackass that inspired this post (Sharone for any who watch the show) was eliminated tonight and I did the happy girl dance while reveling in his embarrassment. Perhaps if he talked himself up a little less & learned to combine flavors & textures a little more he would have been a chef....after about 10 years working in a real kitchen.

What I did on my (2nd) Summer Vacation

HOLY HELL! So Ive been on vacation all week. Sort of. Well.....I havent been to work all week anyway.

First - I will NEVER understand why when I tell the folks that work for me that I will be off work and incommunicado for a week and to PLEASE email me if I am needed they still insist upon calling. I would NEVER call any of them on a day off, least of all while on vacation, unless it was dire. None of the calls have been dire. For the record I have let them all go to voicemail and havent returned one of them...all could have been very easily handled via email, so thats what I did. Just annoying. I run restaurants, not hospitals...there is no life & death in my job generally and an email will suffice. I have had a blissful week of not really knowing where my phone is...leave me alone and GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

So Mister''s jerkface manager decided to go ahead and schedule him to work this week and ignored his ROs for the weekend...so no going aways for me. Side note: I have met & chatted up Jerkface manager he is not JUST a jerkface - he is also an amazingly incompetent assbag who, if when my vacation rolls around end of October, is still Mister's manger and pulls this bullshit again will not only be dealing with a surly Mister (this is torture BTW, I know from personal experience) he will also be getting a pissed off Mindy upside his melon of a head. Last I had spoken to Jerkface Manager was while I had dinner at the bar while Mister was tending. He was telling me how amazing he was for being a corp assistant manager at 34 and all about his resume full of suck (Mister did not enlighten him as to what I do for a living at all apparently) and I took a moment of sheer pleasure when I told him my job title at 34 and a little about what I do. Unrelated - through the course of this conversation he said the weirdest thing to me. Hes a black guy, and made a crack about how he doesnt understand ebonics. He made this comment out of no where and it had NOTHING to do with our conversation. Even made a comment about his brother not being professional and "ghetto". I am not sure why he felt the need to tell me any of this -strange fucker to say the least. And Ill kill him if he fucks up another vacation for me.

Anywho....back on track. So since all travel plans were prohibited by Misters work schedule I decided some home improvement was necessary to keep me busy - I cant sit on my ass at home all week with no purpose. The Dining Room. It was one of the first rooms we tackled when we moved in here...and it showed in the plaster & patch work we were learning to do when we did it. Honestly that wasnt the main driving force behind my desire. When we did the room initially I did a sponge paint on the walls, we hung mahogany wainscoting & a chair rail and it was done in taupe & beige colors. This room is also in the back corner of the house  so its kind of dark but I dug it for awhile. The more Ive looked at it over the last, oh I dont know, 5 years, the less Ive liked it. For some unknown reason that I do not understand at all I decided that I wanted the ceiling painted the same base color as the walls - a beige kind of color - and I hated it more the more I looked at it. Made the whole room look like a cave and it was just dark and felt oppressive......yeah for the 3 times a year we actually use that room.  So dining room make over it is.

I painted all the wood a light sage color, the walls are a really light yellow, ceiling is white finally and we spent yesterday laying a laminate floor that I AM LOVING. The whole room just looks airy & bright and welcoming. Have a couple more floor pieces to lay today or tomorrow that involve some serious cutting around the radiator base...but overall I feel like we have a new house! So many hours of labor, a lot of swearing and most of a bottle of ibuprofen later and its looking good. Once its finished completely I will post some pics...at the moment it looks like a bomb went off somewhere around the center of the house and shit got flung everywhere.

My Mother-In-Law will be here Monday for a week - itll all be cleaned up & put away before she steps foot in my house!!

Have a whole nother post to write about this house....but I'll write that one later. I'm going to go sit on my new floor and bask in the glory that is our happy new dining room!

Twitglish?!?

An observation I dont fully understand....

I use Tweetdeck to follow my Twitter feed and my work ones. I actually love the program, makes it wicked easy to keep track of things at a glance and I am all about that kind of efficiency. Because I use it for both work & personal I have a couple search columns loaded up with some fairly general search terms that bring up a completely random list of tweets that are most often completely unrelated, sometimes amusing and occasionally relevant to what I am looking for.

I have noticed though that a portion of this random feed of humanity speaks a complete different language. It is challenging to even try to read and translate this twitglish into comprehensible english. I noticed this special language a lot a couple weeks ago, it was a particularly chatty day I guess, and started watching my personal feed for it. I dont really pay much attention to my counts, but I think I follow somewhere around 175 people. These are all kinds of people; regular people like me, celebrities, news & sports stuff, random tweeters I find entertaining, all kindsa people. And none of them speak this special language (thanks to them all!). They use their vowels, manage to speak mostly coherent thoughts in 140 characters and I can read all of them without having to say them out loud to try to figure it out.

I usually just skim the Twitglish over. I very much doubt that I am missing much by not spending the time to translate them. But I do not get it. Its not phonetics. I know that not everyone is excellent at spelling, and im totally cool with typos, I make a lot of them...but this is just strange and very deliberate.  If I had any idea how to take a screen shot I would to show you what I am talking about.  If you have the ability to see tweets around you on your smart phone of choice check it out and you'll see this bizarre language. I warn you, it'll make your brain cramp up a little.

It is the deliberateness of it that makes me scratch my head. I've met a lot of people in my adventures and would say that very, very few of them weren't at least high school graduates. Even those that may not have graduated from high school attended school for a a good number of years before leaving for whatever reason. Basic reading, writing and spelling is taught early, like what...1-6th grade? I think it is safe to say just about all of us made it that far with varying degrees of success...but we made it. And I kind of figure if your smart enough to figure out the Twitters there's an even better chance that you've made it out of high school and beyond....

So why Twitglish? Some may argue its the 140 character thing...but I disagree. You can be brief without your tweet reading like the random ramblings of an intelligent toddler. Use your words people!

Google News made my head explode...

*WARNING* this post is about politics & religion...if you dont want to hear it stop reading.

Third day in a row I opened up my browser to my google news page and saw ANOTHER article, the 3rd in as many days, speculating about Obama's religious preferences.  I will not link to any of them because I feel it perpetuates the problem, but they were from various legit news sources & were editorial pieces, to clarify.

The first was loaded with opinion pole data about what we, as Americans, THINK his religious views are regardless of what he says they are. This made me twitch. So we are placing it to a vote now as to what church we think he attends and what religion he practices? Silly me, I thought that if the man and his family SAY they are Christian that should be enough and what a percentage of our dear population THINKS is really quite irrelevant.

The second I read was more or less an open demand for Obama to PROVE hes Christian by stopping the building of that Mosque, proving he isnt Muslim and for him to find a way to show Americans that hes Christian and not Muslim. I have a slew of issues with the whole article. 1) How does him stopping that build on PRIVATE PROPERTY prove anything outside of him caving to political/religious pressure? 2) Why does he have to prove a damn thing? I dont have to justify or prove my religious beliefs at all, why is it different for him and what business is it of anyones? Faith is a very personal thing and something that you have to choose on your own, not justify to a nation built & founded on the basis of FREEDOM, freedom of religion specifically for fucks sake, read a god damn history book. 3) What fucking difference does it make what religion he practices? He wasnt elected to the Presidency because of his religious affiliations, he was elected to do a job, and that job was not The Pope.

The one I read today wanted to know why Obama doesnt wear his religion on his sleeve.  Why the hell should he? If that is how you choose to celebrate your faith more power to you, but just because he doesnt treat the Oval Office like a church pulpit doesnt negate his role as a leader or render him less effective in his job.

Honestly I dont care if you like him, if you voted for him or if you agree with what he has done thus far.  As I stated in previous post, I dont think it matters who was elected last term - this was a shit sandwich of epic proportions and I feel he has handled it as admirably as possible given our polarized political climate, the complete lack of cooperation in our government and the almost total collapse of our economy. I challenge any of you to say you could do better given the hurdles that man faced the day he stepped into that office. I sure as fuck wouldnt have wanted that job and it irks the hell out of me to listen to arm-chair presidents think they can fix this. If it was possible to make it all better easily it would have been done by now. He sure as hell didnt make the mess but has been trying to clean it up and anyone who holds him totally responsible for the state of our nation is either naive or looking for a reason to hate him.  Took decades to make this clusterfuck - gonna take just as long to get out and I dont think remaining open minded to change and maybe trying to support the COUNTRY is too much to ask and just may serve us better as a society instead of picking out demons and angels. All politicians suck. Period. Our local government proves this every day, and their political or religious affiliations dont change the level of suck.

That being said I think what truly bothers me, and bothers me a lot, is that the line between Church & State has become so blurred that discourse like what I have seen on Google is deemed ok. Its not. At all. I firmly believe in everyones ability and right to practice the faith of their choosing and not have to justify that faith to anyone. This country was founded by people who were run out of their homes for not agreeing with the religious mandates of their country's government, they came here so they could be free to worship as they believed and we built our governing rules on this principal. Since when are the only acceptable religious beliefs from that of Christianity? Since when did it become a crime to practice something other than Christianity? When did it become necessary to prove your Christianity in order to not be crucified on a national level if you are in a position of power? Never is the answer to all 3 of those questions. I understand that the majority of people in America do practice one form of Christianity or another...but that doesnt mean it is the ONLY acceptable option out there by any strech of the imagination.

I absolutely abhor the power of the Christian right in my government. I find it almost intolerable that laws are written to govern our society that are based on the puritanical views of a percentage of our population. It makes my skin crawl that there is enough money and power in the Christian Right to greatly effect the law making process of our country. Laws & Faith are 2 totally different things. Laws are based on morality, for sure, but there is far more to morals, right & wrong than just faith. Where did the separation of church & state go? In my opinion this is an area that needs reinforced & revisited.

Gay Marriage and abortion are the 2 hot topics off the top of my head that demonstrate this point most effectively. Opponents of both site biblical/faith reasons why neither should be allowed legally. Last time I checked we were governed by the Constitution, not the Bible, so how are these arguments relevant? God is not the president, we elect a human to do that. Laws should not be written that effect all based on the faith & beliefs of some.

For the record I think it is ridiculous gay marriage is even an issue that requires debate. Marriage is not a sacred covenant anymore. 50% divorce rate proves that more than anything else out there, not to mention its more of a legal issue than a religious one. If you are in a same sex relationship and your partner is lying in a hospital bed dying for whatever reason, as a partner you have no say so in the course of treatment or what happens because you are not recognized as a husband or wife or even a family member. Thats some bullshit. Me & Mister were together almost 10 years before we tied the knot. If something had happened to him and they even TRIED to keep me out of that room there would have been blood spilled, I dont care if we were married or not. So these people and groups will go out of their way to stop people who's relationships have ZERO effect on their own from getting married just because they can. Related - all those "God hates Fags" poster carriers I see pics of from their rallys - I disagree - God hates ignorant, mean and stupid people who can only communicate their points with vulgarity & offense. It amazes me that this is even a debate. Why shouldnt same sex couples have the right to get married and all the benefits that come with it and how is this anyone's business but their own? I can get married and divorced a bazillion times - doesnt that ruin the sanctity of marriage more than a gay couple getting married? I would think so.

And abortion I am absolutely Pro-Choice. I know that it isnt a decision I could ever make and one that thankfully for me (because my parents TAUGHT me about how to protect myself - thanks mom & dad) I have ever had to make...but I dont feel its right for the government to tell me that I can or cant have that as an option. There are far too many scenarios that I could see that being viable for someone else, and I feel that it should be their right to make that decision. Yes, it needs to be monitored & there has to be rules for having an abortion, it should never been deemed a method of birth control, but I feel its a personal decision that needs to be made by the people involved, not one that should be made by a politician or religious group on my behalf. Believe what you like and practice it until you die - but forcing other people to live their lives according to your beliefs is bullshit. If 50% of Americans hates broccoli are we going to outlaw it? No. So if 50% of the population hates the idea of gay marriage or abortion why do they get to stop it from happening? They shouldnt, they should just mind their own business and live their lives and leave others to do the same. Just because you have an opinion doesnt mean that the world needs to agree with it. Opinions & Laws are very very different.

It makes me sad and also worries me to see the involvement of the religious fanatics in our government. It makes me angry to hear those same people calling anyone out about extremist religions while being so blissfully unaware that they are just as bad. It makes me want to cry that they feel ok blindly passing judgment on other religious beliefs - like the Muslims - without ever bothering to learn more about their beliefs, practices or faith.  It baffles me that they cant see the forest for the trees and realize that they are themselves religious terrorists on our own soil. The hipocracy makes my brain hurt. I know so many wonderful people that practice their Christianity and other faiths with a good heart, open mind and with love.  I know those that get the press and make the most noise are the minority and the most vocal...but I really think they miss the point of having faith in the first place. Faith is not about forcing your beliefs on another person, its about acceptance, love, forgiveness and understanding...but I think someone must have torn that chapter out of their bibles, because that is def not what they practice regardless of what they preach.

Ok Im done. Well at least ranting about it here. I hope that in my life time I get to see this get better and get to see people start to see the light. Our system doesnt work. It needs adapted to accommodate the times, technology and cultural climate. I hope that we as a society can rise above all the petty bullshit slung across our media by a minority of jerkoffs and find the greater good. I hope we can stop being such sheep and make intelligent choices in the coming decades. I hope we can learn to respect each others opinions and learn to celebrate our differences. I hope...