the Diva Platform

The Boy discovered a really good food substitute last week.  We were having friends over for dinner, and when that happens, I usually make my patented sausage dish (this is from an Italian cookbook one of the Boy’s old girlfriends gave him.  I like to think that book was about the best thing from her).  However, one of these friends had an aversion to pasta (thanks, school cafeterias!), so we needed to find a substitute, because my pasta sauce is pretty damn good.

Enter spaghetti squash.  And Facebook.

The Boy had heard somewhere that a pasta substitute existed, so he asked his Facebook friends, and they came through with spaghetti squash and how to cook it.  I managed to get the squash cooked (not correctly because I didn’t have the video going, and I’d forgotten to scoop out the guts first), and the Boy shredded it up.  Looked just like spaghetti, and though it doesn’t taste like pasta, it really did the trick and was a lovely way to enjoy a nice pasta sauce.

So next time, friends, when you need something different, think spaghetti squash.  Instead of pasta!

I’ve talked before about how our liquor cabinet is slowly becoming depleted.  After deciding to focus on the “haves” in the cabinet, I got into just how long it would take to finish it all off.  I’ve polished off the Cointreau, sloe gin, and vodka.  We’ve got a sizable amount of rum left, which I’ve taken to mixing with the maraschino liqueur.  I still can’t figure out what to do with the creme de cacao (that doesn’t require me buying some lactose-filled beverage), and I need to find some way to use our bad tequila in food.

We do have more, still.  Dubonnet, absinthe, some sherry, some vermouth, the creme de violette.  It’s still a lot, even though it doesn’t seem like much to me.

I’m keeping at it though, and I didn’t mean to buy anything until I’d finished–oh, some wine for cooking, but nothing big.  The Boy’s had some Jameson and Maker’s Mark come through the door, but I haven’t been buying any spirits.  Until Saturday.

The Boy wants to figure out the best Manhattan recipe, and the liquor store had a big coupon, so off I went, with my grocery cart down to the store to get the fixings–Maker’s, Navan, Cruzan rum (Cruzan has nothing to do with Manhattans, but we went to a Cruzan dinner, and it was mighty tasty).  I got some cider and some bubbly, but I have to say that I didn’t deviate off of our spirits list.  No Cointreau (even at 15% off).  No gin.  No fancy liqueurs that I have my eye on.

Not until I get that big book deal or clean out what we’ve got.  And I’m hoping I can work hard enough to make the former happen before the latter.

On Saturday I was out going to the liquor store (!–but that’s a post for tomorrow), and I rounded a corner, saw a CVS sign and immediately said, “Fuck!”

Why?

CVS was advertising for Sweetest Day.  Sweetest Day is October 17.  Three weeks out!  Better get your flowers and candy now, before they go bad!

You might remember that Sweetest Day is one of my least favorite made-up holidays.  Apparently, according to a couple of sites, the folks here in the Great Lake states are big fans of Sweetest Day, which may mean why I hate it so much–we probably get it shoved down our throats more, hence the reason we eat it up more.

So this year, instead of just complaining about what a crap day Sweetest Day is, I’d like to have a word with my fellow Midwesterners.  Please, folks, stop the madness.  You don’t need an excuse like Sweetest Day to buy flowers and candy for your loved one and maybe get a fancy dinner at Outback Steakhouse!  Pick a random day and give your girl a daisy.  Surprise your guy with a candy bar.  If it’s the only way to declare your love, hit the Outback on a slow night and allow your fingers to brush up against each other as you devour that Bloomin’ Onion.  Just please, let’s not encourage the marketing madness to start up this early, because I’d really rather just complain about Christmas coming too early.

A week or so after it first aired, I discovered “Glee,” the new TV show about a high school glee club.  It’s hilarious, and I’m so amazed that it even got on the air because it’s such a different show.

I asked Astrochick if she was watching it, and in her reply, she said, “For someone who doesn’t have TV, you sure do watch a lot of TV.”

Then I realized how much TV I actually do watch–and unless it’s on DVD, I’m watching it online.  Let’s see, there’s:

• “Project Runway“
• “Glee“
• “Survivor“
• “The Colony“
• “Mad Men” (we watched seasons 1-2 on DVD; have to catch the new episodes online)
• “Burn Notice” (now off-season)
• “30 Rock“
• “The Amazing Race“

and there would be “America’s Next Top Model,” but I missed the first episode–CW (at least this was how they did the last cycle) puts up two episodes at a time, and they don’t go online until after the Sunday repeat.  Well, I missed episodes 1-2, and now they’re gone.  Episode 3 wanted me to install a new video plugin.  Fuck you, CW, for pulling the episodes so quickly!  I mean, Hulu pulls them somewhat quickly too, but you generally get about a month to watch a hot show.  That’s pretty reasonable, I think.  Hence, it doesn’t look like I’ll be fierce this cycle (and I was curious about the short models)–I’ll just have to read recaps online.

It’s almost frightening how much TV I have decided to squeeze in, but sometimes I need the break from the day, and if I’m watching good writing (arguably, that would not explain my reality TV viewing), can it be so bad?  Though I will say it sometimes gets tiring to be forced to watch the same ads over and over.  I like internet TV because you only get one 20-30 second ad per commercial break, but they rarely vary.  Last night while watching “Survivor,” I almost got physically sick over the thought of eating a big Red Robin hamburger topped with three mozzarella sticks, marinara, and pepperoni.  Talk about caloric content!

Still, it’s worth the time saved by watching online, which means maybe I can fit one more show into my schedule.

Bryant Mumble: Ready for WCR Action

Let’s see, where were we?  Yesterday was a bit of an intro, so let me dive into the fun stuff.  I got to St. Paul in the early evening–rode the bus with Helsa Wayton and The Shoveler.  The Shoveler turned out to be one of the jam refs on Team Legoland, and honestly, I could watch him ref all day.  So elegant!  His penalty signals were large, fluid movements, and he did this beautiful flip of the hand when displaying the score after a pass.  I feel a little silly swooning over someone’s hand motions, but they were mighty pretty.

Anyway, I shared a room with Dr. Vroom, Scorey Feldman, Tally Savalas (penalty tracker extrordinaire), and Elke Hollic (fab ref alternate).  Since there were five of us, Scorey called ahead for a cot in our room, only to check in and discover our hotel didn’t have cots.  Scorey’s bed?  The floor.  He was thrilled when housekeeping left him an extra comforter halfway through the stay–so excited, in fact, that while relaxing on a bed one evening, he drooled all over Tally’s pillow.  Thank goodness they gave each bed about 50 pillows!

Scorey + comfortable surface = drool

We weren’t that far from our venue, The Legendary Roy Wilkins Auditorium.  What makes a place legendary?  Is it because of Roy Wilkins himself, a civil rights activist and former executive director of the NAACP?  Is it the remarkably cool stage backdrop, complete with funky lighting?

The Roy's legendary lighting

Is it because the massive, yet close balcony made for great derby watching?  Or is it because I haven’t seen roaches that big in a long time?  Yes, we were told the place had roaches, and true to form, I immediately ran into one in the ref bathroom (upon seeing one, I immediately did an “ew, bug!” dance/shiver and got the hell out of there….to never use the ref bathroom again the entire weekend), and I saw a couple of large dead ones on the floor in the back.  Delightful, but really, what are you going to do with an older building?

Sad to say, the tournament started on a somber note.  One of the North Star Roller Girls (but not on the travel team) was out walking with her baby daughter, when she was hit by a car and killed.  Her daughter was unharmed.  [note: the police are trying to reconstruct what happened; a fund's been set up for the daughter]

Team Legoland started off the tourney….and to be honest, for the most part I don’t remember who we reffed or how well anyone did, except places 1-4.  I do know that we did all of Brew City’s matches (including an exciting OT ending to their last game)–and Brew City is fun because they chant, “Brew City Bruisers!  Beer!  Beer!  Beer!”  [and if you think I'm not being impartial, I also like a Madison Dairyland Dolls shirt that says on the front, "MOO Bitch" and on the back, "Get out the Whey!"].  We also got to ref the finals, which was Windy City beating Madison soundly to take the regional crown.

I should talk for a moment about the NS official attire.  WFTDA tournaments have dress codes.  That means, if you’re an official who wears a costume, you don’t wear it.  That also means that I, Intejill, had to put my “pants by number” concept on hold (you’ll see it next home season), because, well, frankly, I don’t have a lot of dark pants and didn’t want to wear a skirt.  We NSO’s were given pink “official” t-shirts, which we can put the WFTDA patch on, if we’d like.  We had to pair them with dark bottoms and–as I could’ve sworn I read in the wee hours of the morning as I printed off the dress code before I packed (since I was scared shitless of messing up)–dark socks.

So yours truly is running around in black capris, black socks, and tennis shoes.  It’s not pretty.  And I noticed that everyone else is wearing white socks with their dark bottoms (unless you’re Rink Floyd, and then you’re wearing tall boots with your utilikilt, and you don’t even see the socks).  On Saturday night we were hanging out in our room, talking about dress, when I blurted out, “Yeah, what gives with everyone wearing white socks? We’re supposed to be wearing black socks!”

To which I see four faces–the head ref of the tournament being one of them–staring at me dumbfounded, wondering what the hell I’m talking about.  Tally Savalas is amazed that I even notice everyone’s socks (I’m a girl, I’m insecure about my attire, I notice).  After I go off on everyone wearing white socks when we’re supposed to be wearing black socks, I say I’ll prove it, and pull out my handy A4 folder that’s got my tourney rules in it.  And it clearly states, “SOCKS:  Black and/or white socks….”  Oops.

Thank goodness I was going with formal dress pants on Sunday.  Nobody would notice my black socks.  They’d just notice my stupid tennis shoes with the pants.

Suffice it to say, I’m now known to a select few as “Socks Jaracz.”

It could’ve been all derby, all the time for me, but it wasn’t so.  Usually when I go to a conference or meeting, I’m dying to get out and see some of the city.  I want to ditch.  This time?  Not so.  But I got out because I needed to find a drug store (someone hasn’t been traveling enough–my travel saline expired on me, and I didn’t notice until I got there), and I wanted to see a little of St. Paul, even if it was only a few blocks.  St. Paul has a bunch of Peanuts-related statues all over, and I enjoyed seeing them, especially outside of different businesses who’d sponsored them.  I wandered down the 7th Place Market (a block-long pedestrian zone) to get to Walgreens, and saw the marquee on the Palace Theater, which said, “Minnesota!  It’s not just for Lutherans anymore!” which I thought was funny, until just now, when I looked it up and saw that it was a comedy show that closed in 2005, which means it’s kind of sad.  And maybe that the state is just for Lutherans.

Sadness aside, I came across an awesome candy shop called Candyland that I would’ve spent a ton of money at, if it weren’t for the “no outside food” rule at The Roy.  I really wanted a big bag of popcorn–and even then it was a tough decision.  Fresh caramel corn/cheese corn mix?  Or buttered–and the butter is squirted on in various intervals as the clerk fills up the bag?).  No way I was getting that into the auditorium.  I did get some candy blocks (not Legos, per se, but close enough to make Team Legoland excited), some choco rocks (like M&M’s on steroids), and a coconut haystack.  That was plenty.

Due to only having one bout to officiate on Saturday, I managed to fit in a quick run along the river.  Honestly, St. Paul has/is building a really nice path along the Mississippi River, that is probably stunning later in fall when the leaves turn.  What I loved about it was that the bike and pedestrian lanes were totally separate–makes for a much better experience for everyone.

That said, that was just about it to downtown.  I mean, it was like Chicago, circa 1995–not much is going on at night, and not that many people live in downtown proper.  Yet.  Sure, I felt safe, but it was also weird talking to the hotel staff about the fact that Walgreens closed early.  Still, it wasn’t a bad city.  We went to The Bulldog a couple of evenings, and they had a good bison burger and a decent beer list.  Also, $1.75 an hour for parking at a meter.  What do you think of that, Chicago?

And although we couldn’t do anything dangerous at night that could possibly take us out of the tournament (sorry, but no mechanical bull riding for me), we still managed to drink a few and have fun.  The bummer part of the weekend was that I had some work to do, due Monday night, which meant I dragged around my laptop and skipped the final afterparty, which apparently had this awesome Guns N’ Roses tribute band.  All in all though, excellent tournament, and I’m looking forward to the next one I get to do!

Me and the awesome Steely Danielle

This Non-Skating Official (NSO) has officially recovered from the Brawl of America!  And what a tournament it was–honestly, everything seemed to go really smoothly, from the venue to the bouts, and it really was a great experience.  This was my first tournament to officiate at, and I hope I haven’t been spoiled.

Our tournament head ref was Windy City’s own Dr. Vroom, and assisting her/wrangling NSO’s was Scorey Feldman, aka Nurse Vroom, who is anal in all the ways you want an organized person to be.  When I worked at McDonald’s in high school, I had a manager who constantly harped on “proper procedure.”  Scorey’s developed his own proper procedure for pretty much everything related to the non-skating officiating side, and dammit, it works pretty well (he’s also open to suggestions though, which does take off some of the anal edge).

A quick explanation for those of you who aren’t schooled in derby speak.  Officiating is made up of two types of referees, skating and non-skating.  Each bout can have up to seven skating referees, so each of the bouts here had a head ref (who also did inside pack reffing), two jammer refs (one for each jammer), an inside pack ref, and three outside pack refs.  The pack refs skate around with the pack and specifically look for penalties there.  For NSO’s there was a scorekeeper, scoreboard op, jam timer, one penalty tracker, one penalty wrangler, one inside whiteboard, two outside whiteboards (used for communicating penalties), one penalty box manager, and two penalty box timers.  We also had two alternate refs.  A lot of people are involved.  Our tourney had three crews to staff it all, and we rotated bouts, each crew officiating five times over the weekend.

I was on Team Legoland, led by the excellent Professor Murder, and my job was operating the scoreboard, which is a pretty harmless position and a good one for someone like me who didn’t have a ton of non-WCR experience and no tournament experience whatsoever (people apply for these jobs months in advance–I got lucky and filled in for a dropout).  Scoreboard’s not as much pressure, as say the scorekeeper, who sat next to me and was responsible for making sure the score was actually correct.  I just had to make sure the tallies were correct, start and stop the scoreboard timer, and keep the jam clock as close to the jam timer’s whistles as possible….which I did fairly well.  I had a glitch we had to take a time out to fix once, and in another game, the teams didn’t sit on the right sides, so the score was reversed for a few minutes.  Still, I did all right, and Steely Danielle, my excellent scorekeeper who hailed from the North Star Roller Girls, and I made Scorey proud.

Yawn….did I say I’d recovered?  Apparently I haven’t, so more tomorrow, including drool, what makes The Roy Wilkins Auditorium legendary, avoiding the mechanical bull, and my very own trading card!

Since I did so well with my summer reading project, and I still have piles of books on my shelves that I need to read, I decided to pull out a small stack for fall reading.  I’m doing the same thing as before:  piling them up by my desk so that I see them and feel the incentive to finish the stack.  I don’t quite know what my deadline should be, but maybe I should try to finish them by Thanksgiving.

On the list:

• Ball Four by Jim Bouton.  This is a baseball book that kind of blew the lid off the sport when this pitcher divulged a lot of what went on behind the scenes.  This is in the days before super-huge contracts, so it’s interesting to read about a ball player making $22,000 a year.  I’ve started this one, and so far, it’s interesting.
• The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum.  I’m anticipating this being a fun thriller, since I love the movies.  I realize the book is pretty different, but I could use a page-turner.
• Nul Points by Tim Moore.  I bought this book in Vienna a couple of years ago and haven’t managed to get through the first few pages, but I’m going to make a solid effort.  This book is about the Eurovision Song Contest, more specifically about several acts that managed to score zero points in the competition.  From what I’ve ever seen of the contest, it looks trashtastic, so I can only imagine what an act deserving of nul points is like.
• The 60-Second Novelist by Dan Hurley.  I got this as a gift eons ago and have read bits and pieces.  Hurley goes around America with a typewriter and sets up shop on the streets writing stories about people in 60 seconds each.  This is collection of some of those stories, plus the backstories.
• Rule 53: Capturing Hippies, Spies, Politicians, and Murderers in an American Courtroom by Andy Austin.  I won this book in a raffle recently, and I’m fairly excited about it because I heard the author speak.  Austin’s a courtroom sketch artist from Chicago, and she’s covered the Chicago 7, John Wayne Gacy, and others.  Sounds like an interesting perspective on Chicago history.  I hope it lives up to my expectations.

What about you?  Any books on the docket right now?

So WFTDA North Central Regionals are over.  Windy City won.  I, to paraphrase referee Ana Bender, operated the shit out of the scoreboard.  And I had a great time.  The odd thing was that for once I went to a conference-type thing, and didn’t feel the need to duck out of the show.  Don’t get me wrong, I did duck out a couple of times when I wasn’t working because I wanted to make sure I saw a teeny bit of St. Paul, even if it was only a few square blocks.  I did so in the same way I’ve had to learn to stop eating when I’m no longer hungry.

At any rate, I’ve got work to finish up for today, some sleep to catch up on, and a tournament to ponder.  I’ll have more tomorrow–including a great candy store, a word about socks, whether or not Minnesota is just for Lutherans, and what it’s like to order a breakfast, only to have about a half-dozen eggs, four pieces of sausage, four pieces of bacon, a huge hunk of hash browns, and a basket of toast set in front of you.  Denny’s Grand Slam had nothing on this.

So while I digest this all, tell me something from your last vacation or business trip, or where we should go next.

Apparently the Cubs and Sox both went downhill this year and won’t be in the playoffs.  That’s OK.  You’ve still got some post-season action to cheer about:  This weekend the Windy City Rollers are competing in the WFTDA North Central Regional Tournament.  They’re seeded first, which hopefully means they’ll be heating up the floor and taking out the competition.

I’m lucky enough to be heading up to St. Paul to officiate at the tournament.  A stats person who was supposed to go had to drop out, and I was asked if I could step in.  I’m incredibly excited about working at the tournament, meeting other officials from around the country, and am looking forward to operating the scoreboard for several matches and watching a few more.

If you’re in the Twin Cities area, come on down to the tournament.  Otherwise, catch all the action on Derby News Network!

I hope to be sending you a postcard on Monday, but the mail may get delayed, so to speak.

I still have a bit of a problem with random bits of paper littering my desk, so yesterday morning I tried to toss what I didn’t need–and I found the FULL list of what the Boy cleared out of his closet.  Good grief!

Yesterday I wrote up the list of clothing that I said the Boy either tossed or donated.  That was an error, which I regret. That list was just the stuff he donated.  I found a second list of stuff he tossed (because the items weren’t in good enough condition to be donated):

• 2 pairs of pants
• 2 Hawaiian shirts
• 1 button down shirt
• 10 ties
• 1 pair of swim trunks

So all told, his closet is lighter by:

• 2 pairs of pants
• 1 pair of running tights
• 1 pair of swim trunks
• 1 suit
• 5 Hawaiian shirts
• 3 button down shirts
• 2 polo shirts
• 6 sweaters
• 17 t-shirts
• 10 ties

All told, I think that’s pretty impressive.  The closet still looks nice and clean, though needing to do laundry might also be a factor in that–at least on my side.