What Have You

I keep thinking about getting a Crock Pot/slow cooker. However, I have several issues with this idea.

First of all, every recipe I've ever seen for one of them seems to involve mushroom soup and appear on the cover of Family Circle magazine. Or on one of those magazines that turns up on the newsstand when you're looking for, say, Gourmet, which is called something like "Feed your family for 12 cents a week!" Secondly, all these recipes say cook for six hours or eight hours. Well, now there's a major problem. My office hours are usually 9:30 to 5:30. That's eight hours right there, and there's travel time. And shopping time, if I want to, after work. Meanwhile, this thing has turned itself off, but there's all that food sitting there, hot, in a very enclosed space. This seems to me like a recipe for ptomaine poisoning if I ever heard one. I think I'll wait until they invent a slow cooker that will refrigerate the food when it's done and then reheat it at the touch of a button. That seems safe, right?

Anyway, nothing in a slow cooker will ever have crisp edges, and I'm very big on crisp edges. Admittedly, I make stew, but the stews I cook are invariably named ragout, or daube, or bourgignon...or carbonnade a la flamande. Somehow I feel none of this would work, and anyway it wouldn't make the house smell good on a cold day, which is the point of stew, isn't it?

I got my new microwave! I was so excited I came home immediately, plugged it in, and reheated some leftover lo mein. Yahoo. I almost got the microwave I REALLY wanted, but I'm saving that purchase until I get rid of Joshua, whose grasp on technology is shaky in the extreme. PC Richards had a microwave/convection oven for only $149, and I was drooling over it (I paid, with tax, $86 and change for mine), because we used to have one when they first came out and it was something like $500 bucks then. However, given what Joshua can do to appliances (and almost anything else), I felt the better part of valor was to wait until he moved out. Anybody who can bend a slotted spoon nearly in half and break a potato masher should not be near anything that requires pushing more than one button at a time.

And tomorrow is glory day...I'm off to get my new SAG card! On the advice of pals who are in SAG, I have carefully removed my student film stuff from my resume, because I wasn't supposed to be doing it and SAG gets frantic about this sort of thing. Thing is, they want you to bring in a resume when you arrive to pay your (fabulously expensive) fee, and I didn't want to risk it. The resume I actually send out has all that stuff on it, of course.

Also, I want a country house in Vermont. This is something I will never under any circumstances get, on account of it requires lots of things I don't have, not counting money. This dream would need:

1. Either a man with a car or a car and chauffeur (I'm a true city kid - don't know how to drive and don't want to)

2. A deep desire to spend more than two days out of the city

3. The ability to exist without an all-night deli (well, one does run out of cigarettes and Ben & Jerry's - not to mention cat food)

4. Changing my sleeping habits altogether to allow for the fact that in the country, I've noticed, those friggin' birds start in at 4 in the damn morning and nobody can sleep.

5. Some sort of actual love for trees and all that stuff. Trees have their place - which are along sidewalks. I'll also give you Central Park. But at least you can see buildings from Central Park.

My cottage in New England fantasies were somehow awakened by reading H.P. Lovecraft today, which is very weird - both Lovecraft and the notion of a cottage in the woods. This is because all of Lovecraft's stories involve New England and populate it with horrible monsters...kindly don't ask why my psyche suddenly began to think that this would be ANY place for me. Frankly, I don't sleep well without fire trucks, ambulances, and gay bitch fights under my window. This is my lullaby. I find country silence extremely threatening. Ah, well. I'll just go back to my other getaway dream - a place in Key West, near Duvall Street, where I can walk to everything - and have fire sirens, ambulances, gay bitch fights AND an ocean. This is obviously perfect. (And of course there's the REAL dream - a flat in London - but that'll have to wait until I win MegaMillions.)

Ah...the welcome sound of a soprano shriek of either fury or delight outside my window. Now I can sleep.

Love, Wendy