utenzi

Have you ever been seeing someone for several months only to find it was all due to pretense? That's what has just happened to me. The culprit? Julie, over there on the left, of course. Women are devious. I had been under the impression that Julie had been spending a lot of time at my house due to her wanting to be around me. But no, that's not the case. Today, in a unsettling development, Julie revealed that a semi-permanent guest at her house is living in her study/sewing room. And she wants to use my study and sewing machine! The pattern below is what she started on today but according to Julie, she'd like to use my sewing machine a lot in the next few months. Apparently our time together up to now was just setting the hook. Now that she thinks that she's got me where she wants me, her real motives are being revealed. It's my space and toys that she's really interested in. You can see her perfidious fingers below as they lead material along, shepherding it to

That nap yesterday was very nice. However it gave me a bit too much energy at the wrong time. I stayed up until 7am! And Julie was awake most of that time also. In fact, at 3am we made cookies. This is Julie chopping up some bittersweet chocolate. It had a strong "chocolaty" smell but all in all I prefer milk chocolate. She did assure me that milk chocolate was not ideal for baking but I still wanted to give it a shot. She said "no." That's the wet ingredients in the bowl above and below you can see the oatmeal and chocolate added into the mixture. It's starting to look pretty good, y'know? And below are the finished cookies. They weren't quite as good as we were hoping but still tasted fine. The liquor that we were sipping was surprisingly tasty too. A very low alcohol content combined with a high sugar content added up just fine to me. No need for butterscotch cookies when you have a little of this liquid around. And this is Julie scolding me for t

Like I mentioned yesterday, tonight was "meet the parents" night for me. It's been a while since I've had to do this. My last few relationships have been remarkably relative free. But no longer---Julie's parents have a house just a few miles from hers, her sister lives right around the corner from them and one of Julie's brothers is just a half hour away in Wake Forest. Eeeek. That's the start of a bean dip that Julie put together after work for the family gathering. Three of the attendees had recent birthdays and one of the brothers, the one living in CA, was married 3 months ago. Lots of reason for some celebrating, eh? This is a cat. I don't approve of the species but do admit they often are photogenic. We promptly grilled him up after this picture was taken. Only evil animals were harmed in the making of this post. We promise! The name was Tifa, aka Cream. RIP. (btw, I didn't detect even a hint of cream taste---just goes to show, don't

If you read this blog very often you're probably aware that I kinda like candy. Which is to say I place approximately the same emphasis on candy as I do on oxygen and water. And Butterfingers are one of my favorite types of candy. Which makes the box there on the right nearly a religious experience for me. 36 FULL SIZE candy bars. Not those shrimpy snack size that I usually get. These are the big boys. We need a little history here. First, that's what the lovely dears look like when they're exposed to the light. Wonderful, aren't they? Anyway, around a week ago Julie came over during the week and we were going to cook dinner together. I was missing a couple of items so we went on a Wal-mart run. I happened to notice, while walking through the candy aisle, that the store was out of Butterfinger bars. No, I didn't make a scene or pass out. No, nothing like that. I was calm. Well, maybe I hyperventilated a little---after all, I only had a few packs left at home. In an

Chicken Piccata and the risotto from last night. There was no way we were going to toss out the leftovers from last night's dinner--and Julie's suggestion that she could just bring it home with her was resoundly ignored. Instead it was some chicken on the side with Tarheel basketball as an accent as we finished off the wonderful leftovers from Friday. BTW, the Tarheels smoked Villanova despite an uninspired second half. On to the finals and Michigan...

We actually did what we planned and made risotto last night. To be more honest, Julie did almost all of it. I was just enlisted for small chores that were peripheral to the main endeavor. I did open a bottle of Riesling though and that helped move things along. As you can see to the left, it looked very pretty. I got home around 45 minutes before Julie arrived. I quickly straightened a few things out in the house, then changed my clothes and pulled the mower out of my shed. I'd not started it up yet and due to lots of rain the lawn was out of control. The half hour before Julie's arrival gave me just enough time to mow down the worst spots. Since I'm going to SC soon for a day or so--my Mom's 70th birthday--I wanted to get the lawn under control before leaving. I'll cut it shorter when I get back. This was just a get-to-know-one-another mowing. Back to the risotto: even better than the taste was the fragrance. It smelled wonderful. The mushrooms and sausage combined

There's a changing of the guard going on. For a while I was going out with Jules then she decided that she wanted to have a little more space. Or in her words, "You are such an asshole. You are mean and selfish and a pig." Not exactly high praise, but what can I say? Maybe Julie was right. In any case there's another Julie interested in me now. Yes, that's her on the left, munching on some bruschetta that we made as a snack on Sunday while watching a few episodes of Planet Earth on Discovery Channel. We'll just have to see if the first Julie should have warned the second Julie about me. There's another picture of Julie. A perfect way to close out the month of March. In like a lion and out like a lamb? I don't even know what I mean by that, but maybe my subconscious does. It often processes information far better than my conscious mind does. And speaking of March ending, did you see that report on 60 Minutes about the Conficker worm ? Pretty scary stuf