Chocolate Lounge opening on Saturday
Further proof that the world really does revolve around my whims:
The French Broad Chocolate Lounge will be opening Saturday at 10 S Lexington Avenue! (A’ville Citizen-Times has an article in today’s paper http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008801300302) Yes yes yes yes yes yes!!
Chocolate, wine and comfy chairs, HOORAY! Their French Broad Luscious Chocolates are fantastic–they’ve been available locally at places like Greenlife and Earth Fare for a while now and they are super tasty morsels, decadent and fresh . Please support our local businesses, folks, and stampede on over to the French Broad Chocolate Lounge this weekend!! They do have a website if you don’t live close enough to visit the shop in person, and they can ship right to you wherever you are: http://www.frenchbroadchocolates.com/index.html
Dear Dan and Jael, owners o’ the fabulous business: I live very close to you in West A’ville, so please feel free to drop off any mole negro truffles that aren’t pretty enough to sell on my porch. :^)
I love this poem
Periodically, I like to share a fave poem–found this in my desk drawer this morning, so it must mean that I should share it with you asap:
THINGS TO THINK
by Robert Bly
Think in ways you’ve never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.
Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.
When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
Chiquita Womb Watch Update
For those of you on womb watch with me, Chiquita and her Ninja are having a boy! We saw boy parts on the ultrasound screen this morning, and Aunt KittyKat is beside herself with glee! (and we’ll pause for just a moment to say: I told you so, I told you it was a boy!) I’m super excited for them as they start a nifty new chapter in their lives. I’ll teach him to play soccer and give him mosh pit etiquette tips!
In unrelated news, either Angelina Jolie is pregnant again or she’s smuggling orphans under that gigantic sack dress she was wearing at the Screen Actors Guild awards…
oh my gawd, valentine’s day is lurking…
…and i have no valentine. who will send me flowersssssssss……………………….. i think it’s important that i completely freak the hell out over something as inane as not getting flowers on feb 14.
bear with me as i freak the hell out for a bit
ack!
eek!
oh no!
woe is me!
what will i do?
no one loves me!
i should dye my hair red. no wait, i was freaking out…
ack!
eek!
woe!
sigh.
now that i’ve gotten that over with, let’s think about this: i can’t be loveless on valentine’s day! i can’t! how will i fix this? what should i do? how can i find a beau who offers flowers AND fine chocolates in less than a month’s time!?!?
in the words of LL Cool J, I Need Love! hey, is LL free on that day?
Whiskey in the Jar-O
Tonight was “Heritage Night” at Minime’s school, and the kids each signed up to bring a food from the land o’ their heritage. Now somehow we missed signup day initially, so my plans to celebrate my Irish heritage with Irish coffee for the kids went down the drain (all school functions are better with coffee and whiskey, children!).
England got taken. I wanted to fake being Italian so I could just make spaghetti, but that was taken as well. We ended up with
Scotland, as some relative or other is a Scot, so fine and dandy, it can’t be too hard to come up with something.
I started researching recipes, and you can only imagine the foods from the country that brought us haggis are a little scary. I found lots of recipes involving animal guts and whiskey that I opted to skip, so I thought perhaps we should look for dessert recipes instead…and found a lot of recipes with fruit and whiskey. Whiskey is an important part o’ my pale heritage!
Finally I tracked down a recipe for a sweet treat that didn’t involve sheep guts or alcohol, and woohooooooooo, the results turned out really, really good and it’s very easy!
Oat Cakes
8 tablespoons butter
¼ cup sugar
2 cups quick cooking oatmeal
¼ cup white corn syrup
Melt the butter in a 10 inch skillet over medium heat. Stir in sugar with a wooden spoon. Let it bubble together for 20 seconds, taking care not to let it burn. Add oatmeal and stir over heat until it is golden brown. Remove from heat, dump contents into a big bowl and stir in corn syrup.(Pause to celebrate your heritage and drink some whiskey.) Pack mixture into 12 muffin tins, dividing equally. Really smoosh (we’re not smushing, we’re smooooooshing) it down so they stick together.Refrigerate at least 3 hours, or freeze 20-30 minutes. Loosen by running knife around edges, gently slide out.
Now, at this point, the oat cakes are nice tasty little cookies, sweet and good with a cold glass o’ (soy!) milk. Or whiskey.
But if you want to kick it up a notch Kat-style when you make them, get some mini chocolate chips. Throw a ¼ cup of chocolate chips in the bottom of the bowl before you dump your hot buttery oats in the bowl. Throw your buttery oats on top of the chips, then throw in your corn syrup as above, and toss another ¼ cup of those mini chips on top of the warm sticky mess and stir. Pack into the muffin tins and yadda yadda yadda as directed above. Super good, I swear, whether you’re wearing a kilt or not.
oooo thanks for the ideas!
So many great ideas on what to do with my engagement ring! I think the best ring idea came from a gal pal that I lunched with this week: she thinks I should save my bling-y engagement ring for a while and later melt it down, take the stones out and have it made into earrings or something special for a milestone in Minime’s life, like high school or college graduation. That’s a nice way to put it to use, so high five to Annie Oakley for that.
Annie Oakley is also to thank for the idea of tying said heavy ring to fishing line and twirling it around like a ninja weapon next time Mr. Kat 2.0 gets too flippin’ rude and mouthy again. That idea makes me happy, too.
Botox makes me laugh until I snort
On Saturday, I was up in the gym just workin’ on my fitness, and since I was the only brave soul in the cardio room at the time, I flipped the channel on the tv to a marathon of “Real Housewives of Orange County.” There’s nothing like a dose of this unreal reality show to help get you through the grueling “Alpine” workout on the elliptical machine.
If you’ve not seen it before, the show focuses on these ridiculously wealthy women who reside in a gated community in Orange County. Their lives are full of drama like which million dollar home should they live in, which million dollar home should they give to their kids and which million dollar home should they put on the market for a multi million dollar profit. They have Botox parties. Someone’s always marrying or divorcing to upgrade to a wealthier man. They wear diamonds to sit around the pool. They have personal trainers and luxury cars and fake boobs.
In the episode that I was watching, one of the women was preparing for her umpteenth wedding, which apparently was going to take place in the back yard of her palatial home. She’s gazing out over the work in progress, and I think she’s trying to look concerned as the voiceover conveys her worry that all the work won’t be done in time. She could be conveying a look of concern, or a look of great glee—who the hell can tell the difference? Her forehead and around her mouth are absolutely paralyzed from Botox treatments. As she tries to muster a tear, she looks sort of like my chihuahua when he needs to go pee as her eyes get sort of wide and dewy…and she makes some attempt to furrow her unfurrowable paralyzed eyebrow that really makes her look like my chihuahua and I start laughing so hard that I snort. As the camera goes for a closeup of her glistening (chihuahua-like) eyes and smooth forehead while I sip my water, I completely spaz out and snort the water out my nose. I am so cool!!!!!!! And Botox is so wrong.
Now what do I do with the ring?
I’m mad right now, so now is not a good time for decision making…but I’m wondering what I do with my engagement ring? Going back in time to my first marriage to Minime’s dad, we had very little money, so my engagement ring and wedding band had only sentimental value, no dollar value. I saved those rings for Minime to have when she’s older if she wants them.
Fast forward a decade to now, and Mr. Kat 2.0 gave me a lovely diamond ring for our engagement (not the ring I wanted, mind you, but that’s another blog), one that was not cheap. According to the law, it’s my ring to keep…but what the hell do I do with it?
Every time I see the ring in my jewelry box, it reminds me both of wonderful times when I believed that Mr. Kat 2.0 and I were a perfect match and it reminds me of lies, disappointments and dreams crushed to dust. After a day like today, I wish I could do something dramatic and spirit-smashing to Mr. Kat 2.0 with it, but I know that’s not right. I will wish him well even if he doesn’t wish the same for me.
Do I sell it for some microscopic fraction of what it’s worth? Do I throw it in the ocean? Do I offer it back to Mr. Kat 2.0 to give to his next woman because what woman wouldn’t love a pre-enjoyed ring full of bad vibes? I don’t know, I just don’t know. To put it away for Minime seems weird because at this pace, she’ll inherit more rings than she has fingers. Any ideas? Let me know.
I am a waste of time
For those of you not paying attention, Mr. Kat 2.0 and I have been separated for about 8 months, on our way to what was to be a fairly amicable divorce, as amicable as these things can be. I will still stand by my original plan of not trash talking him as best I can, but I’m pretty dismayed this evening.
Minime and I were out of town for the week of Christmas. Mr. Kat 2.0 called several million times that week, quite upset, all “I miss you” blah blah blah, “let’s talk” yadda yadda yadda. And I was all like “we can talk when I get back in town.” But when I was getting back to town was the day he was to be leaving town on his own little vacation, so a few weeks pass.
And in this few weeks time, I’m thinking thinking thinking, losing sleep. I’m trying to put myself in his shoes, understand where his sadness is coming from, trying to get a grip on what it would take for us to potentially reconcile. Hard things to think about, really tough matters of the heart. I considered what I would expect from him and wondered what he would expect from me in return.
When I finally do get to speak to him in private, no Minime ears listening, all he wants to know is how soon he can divorce me. He’s apparently zipped right past all that missing me he was doing, do not pass go, do not collect $200, when can he divorce me. I was FURIOUS! I’m still pretty pissed, just thinking about it. Jerk me around with a sad story, have me pondering getting back together, only to turn around and want to get in the express line for divorce.
I told him he had to wait out the full year to be divorced and he was not pleased. He actually asked me to fake the date of our separation so he could just “get this over with.” Needless to say, that conversation didn’t go well.
In Mr. Kat 2.0’s favor, I will say he and Minime get along very well as long as they aren’t living in the same house. They usually do something a couple Saturdays a month, and that’s great. I’m pleased they get along so well now that they have some space between them, and I won’t stand in the way of their fun.
Today was one of their days for fun, and when Mr. Kat 2.0 brought Minime home at the end of their outing, he of course has to blurt out something rude and snarky to me. And I fell for it, hook, line and sinker and rattled off a string of nasty remarks like machine gun fire. And he left.
I felt bad immediately. No matter what he said to me, there was no need for me to stoop to that level, no need for me to let loose with all that negativity, very uncool of me. So after a bit, I called him up to apologize for being so nasty and to let him know that I was still pretty peeved about the Christmas-boohoo-I-miss-you-so-much to the complete opposite Happy-New-Year-divorce-me-now emotional roller coaster he had me on. Told him I was mad and hurt and my defenses were up and all that.
And because he apparently likes nothing better than hurting my feelings, he said he didn’t really mean all that he said at Christmas. He really meant that he missed my house since it was bigger and roomier than where he’s living now and he missed the big television and things like that, that he never meant that he actually missed me or being a family. Now, at this point, my stomach is absolutely sour, I think I’m going to throw up because this was not the conversation I’d called to have, but Mr. Kat 2.0 isn’t done yet! Oh no, he has more! In fact, he wants me to know that he wishes we’d separated sooner because our marriage was really just a waste of his time–more specifically, I, Kat, was a waste of his time and that he can’t believe he’s wasted this much of his life on me. I thanked him for clearing everything up, and hung up on him.
And so here I am, blogging right along because I can’t think of anything else to do with my restless hurt heart. Our separation hasn’t been all unicorns and rainbows and fuzziness, but it really has not been ugly. It has been full of wishing each other the best as we go in different directions, up until now. Telling me that our relationship, our dreams and plans, were all just a waste of time is very possibly the meanest thing anyone has said to me in recent years, because it cut so very close to the soul. He essentially said he’d have been better off without knowing me, and I don’t believe that to be true.
My perspective is that it is hard and sad to end this marriage, and that I was willing to go through counseling to see if we could pull it together. Mr. Kat 2.0 disappointed me in some tremendous ways that I don’t care to go into, but I never saw our marriage as a waste of my time, even at this moment. I learned many things from him and we shared some really neat times, and even as the whole thing imploded, I never thought of it as a waste. Every experience is a gift if we look at what we’ve learned, what we’ve gained from it.
But according to Mr. Kat 2.0, I am a waste of his time. And that stings.
New Year, new post…
First, yes, I do have heat as the potential for serious winter weather bears down upon us. But I’m not sure if it really worksworks for real, or if it has just been rigged to work temporarily, since the person who did the work (Mr. Kat 2.0) is not speaking to me for some reason. So. At the moment, I have heat and I’ll hope it holds up as the wind roars outside my window.
Next, my stalker. Once upon a time, I had to leave my Asheville home in the middle of the night and move away because of a man who wanted to harm me and/or kill me to prove his love for me. I was gone for many years, and only returned once I had a new last name, new career and an unlisted phone number. Years have passed, around 13 years or so actually…and he’s popped back up, sending me messages through another website. I’m really unhappy about this, so for those of you who do know me in “real” life outside my blog, please don’t ever give out any info–my last name, where I work or anything else–to anyone ever ever ever without my permission. I’ve been pretty strict about not giving out my personal info over the last decade, but I guess Asheville is too small a town for me, a stalker and people who like to gossip. I have some folks on the case, so he may crawl back under a rock for a bit, but obviously not forever. Sigh.
Moving right along, let’s talk about “Trick My Truck.” Oh my god, I love this show. It’s on CMT, and I don’t think I’ve ever watched anything on that channel before I got sucked into a “Trick My Truck”a-thon today while channel surfing. Wow! Big redneck men in workshirts with tats and power tools tearing stuff up and making it all shiny again: I’m in heaven. I’ve been watching episode after episode this afternoon, loving it. Especially loved when they tricked out the ice cream truck. Ooooo and the truck that they tricked out like a train, and the owner of the truck cried when he saw it: crying big redneck men! I love this show almost as much as “Dog the Bounty Hunter.”
Did you eat your collard greens and black eyed peas today for good luck? For those of you who ain’t from around here, it’s the traditional southern first day of the year meal for prosperity, sometimes with a little bit o’ pork thrown in there. I had my collards and peas, but I skipped the pork.
I also didn’t sweep my house today. According to some feng shui mojo, if you clean on the first day of a new year, you sweep away or wipe away the good fortune the new year has brought you. I didn’t clean anything, and even took it a step further by not showering, so all that good fortune could soak right into my skin.
What else…oh yeah! My friend and the nosejob: yeah, he’s still going for his consultation, even though I tried to talk him out of the money so I could continue my education with it. Apparently, me thinking he is hot is not enough validation for him, since the girl o’ his dreams does not think he’s hot or something (can you imagine that I am not the girl of his dreams? yes, it’s hard for me to fathom, too!). But I tried. I tried to reassure him of his hotness factor and shake the cash out of him, but alas…
A big shout out to the Image 420 posse for hooking Minime up with a rainbow of birthday shirts to wear to Disney to celebrate her 10th birthday! She racked up on birthday greetings, loot and cake thanks to her stylish t’s.
And Disney. Ok, what the hell are the people carrying in those backpacks and rolling suitcases all around the theme parks? It’s bad enough that people are elbow to elbow smashed into the Magic Freakin’ Kingdom like sardines, but why does everyone have a backpack? And why did they all have to hit me with their backpacks or run over my feet with their rolling suitcases? What is so damn important that you can’t leave it in the car or in your hotel that you must pack a suitcase and bring into the line for the Haunted Mansion ride? All Minime and I had was our ticket for admission, a little cash for a cold beverage and a camera, all of which will fit into one of my pockets. What else could you need that requires luggage in a theme park?? This baffled me during my entire visit and baffles me still.
So. Happy New Year! I wish you and yours all the best. Psychic Sylvia Browne on “Montel” said 2008 should be a better year for all things compared to ‘07, that odd years are years in which things get started or a change begins and even years are the years for things to reach their fruition. I know ‘07 sucked in many ways for me, so sure, I’ll take that!! So may all your hard work pay off in ‘08! Blessings to you all–kiss kiss kiss.