Answers to your burning questions!

Anonymous said...
Dear Miss Amy
How do I get ground in grass stains out of my sons jeans. i have all ready washed them in hot water and dried them in a hot dryer.

signed,
hopelessly stained
July 15, 2008 2:44 PM

Dear Hopelessly stained,
Throw them away and buy new ones.

Anonymous said...
any why are you so funny in your writings? You remind me so much of your sister Wendy. Is it possible she is writing your blog for you? Please be honest
July 15, 2008 2:45 PM

Dear Anonymous,
Thank you for the compliment. Those of you who don’t know my darling sister Wendy she is a true gem and one of the inspirations in my life…or at least she was before we discovered that she was in league with the local drug cartel and had been smuggling drug mules across the Colorado Border and into Utah. She should be out of prison in three to five years with good behavior, everyone keep your fingers crossed for her.

LPP06 said...
1. What do you think of this "Dr. Horrible" blog?

2. Do you wish to join the Evil League of Evil?

3. What would you do to get in?

http://www.drhorrible.com/

A must see!!! (If you want to laugh!)
July 17, 2008 9:14 PM

Joss Whedon, is that you?
How can you not be smitten with an internet show whose main bad guy is a literal horse? The thorough bred of sin. Awesome. Like Mr. Ed, but menacing.

Kirkrocks said...
A serious question...

How can a person know all of the ***gross, utterly stomach turning*** stuff involved in the physiology of human reproduction and still want kids of their own?
July 18, 2008 1:11 PM

Here’s the thing about women: Pain doesn’t faze us. We seek it out and conquer it on a daily basis. We get things waxed and plucked just for the adrenalin rush. So, childbirth? Not so big a deal. Just don’t ask me to kill a spider. That is gross.

Anonymous said...
Amy,
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
July 18, 2008 3:58 PM

5

Anonymous said...
If you were one of the New Kids on the Block, which one would you be?
July 18, 2008 4:00 PM

I would be Danny. He seems to be pretty well preserved and hasn’t tried to cash in on his peak teenage years. That being said, Jonathon is hot.

Anonymous said...
What are more afraid of? Clowns or spiders?
July 18, 2008 4:01 PM

Good question, Anonymous. How about a clown covered in spiders? Actually, I would have to say clowns. They still have the shock value that spiders don’t. If I saw a spider in my basement I would say “ewww, a spider” and then make Charlie kill it. If I saw a clown milling about in my basement I would have a heart attack and die.


Anonymous said...
Will you make me a cake?
July 18, 2008 4:02 PM

Yes. I enjoy making cakes. But you would have to come to my house to eat it because I don’t enjoy cake smeared across the trunk of my car.

Anonymous said...
Dear AmyLyn,
Are you ever going to answer all of these questions?

Curious in Vernal
July 22, 2008 10:50 AM

Yes I am. Stop nagging.

Nightmare on spanish oaks blvd.

Once upon a time in a far away kingdom there lived a fair maiden with big dreams to be a rock star…or chef to the stars…or maybe an actress portraying a rock star…or maybe just writing a really good poem about stars or something star related like the Hale-Bopp comet …or heck, she probably would have settled for discovering a star. But, as she grew older and older and more and more distracted with the mundane details of life like paying mortgages and trying to figure out what to make for dinner, her dreams grew more earth bound and she started to dream about someday being able to sleep for a solid eight hours.

Mia has a recurring nightmare about bugs in her bed. When she had her monsters under the bed phase I knew how to handle it and armed her with a bottle of monster spray (a.k.a. sweet pea body spray from Bath and Body Works because monsters HATE sweet smells). But, I have yet to find a defense against imaginary bugs. Every night she runs in to my room in a deranged kind of panic screaming about the bugs in her bed. Every night I calmly mumble that they aren’t bugs. Every night I take her by the hand and walk her back to her room, turn on the light and smooth out her sheets so that she can see that there were no bugs, just shadows and some mysterious crumbs that found their way up from the kitchen table. Every night I gently usher her back into bed and turn out the light and try to keep from falling out of her rocking chair as she falls back to sleep. Every night, 20 minutes later she is in my room again, this time getting her dad because she is sure that mom doesn’t know what she is talking about. Every morning we discuss her bug fixation and she looks at me like I’m speaking German and states “Mom, I like bugs.” Grrrrr……And apparently bugs are not afraid of monster spray. Mia says she has already tried that and I am an idiot for suggesting such a thing (ok, she didn’t say I was an idiot but her tone implied it.)


So, for now, the dream of a full night of sleep is on hold. But some day, you just wait. I will hide somewhere, perhaps the bath tub, and sleep ALL NIGHT LONG. Mark my words.

Taking a hike

You know how in any new social situation someone inevitably asks you what sort of hobbies you enjoy? I hate this question. I don’t want to be a loser and admit that any free time I come upon is spent reading fashion magazines or eating Ben and Jerry’s while watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so usually I lie. My stock answer is that I am passionate about hiking. The truth is that I grew up with a grandfather who was as passionate about hiking as I am about Johnny Depp. The minute I was old enough to find something better to do on “hiking Saturdays” I escaped this ritual (although to be fair, it might have been his death defying driving that turned me off on these outings as much as the actual hiking). So, somewhere deep inside I have hiking genes (probably being crushed by my mom’s obsession-with-Egyptology genes) so I don’t really feel like this is a 100 percent lie.

Most of my real hobbies would have to do with a couch. Can you be a couch potato if you don’t watch TV on said couch? What if you are just reading a trashy novel or updating your fantastic blog. Maybe there are different degrees of couch-potatoeness. For example, someone who wakes up in the morning and immediately is glued to the Home Shopping Network every day is a huge-gigantic Idaho russet couch potato, whereas I am really more of a tiny new couch potato that you would roast gently in the oven with some rosemary and olive oil.

So, here I am coming clean about a deep dark secret again. I have no interesting hobbies. I don’t craft or sew, or do wood work. I don’t play any instruments (not for lack of trying, I just always seemed to have commitment issues with whatever instrument I was trying). And I don’t volunteer as a tour guide at the local art museum. I just kind of sit around in my free time. Wow, this blog is better than a confession box.

Q and A with Me!

Someone who shall remain nameless suggested that I answer a few of my adoring publics questions. So go ahead and post whatever it is you have been dying to ask me in the comments section and I will have an answering extravaganza soon.

Only, don't ask me about laundry. I'm really really bad at laundry.

My Amy Vices

See what I did there with the title? It's like Miami, but it is My Amy. Wow, I am on a roll already. Also, I am on some pain killers. I had a neck injury while bowling (shut up, I know I should be in a bubble) so now I am flying high, although I do not endorse the use of pain killers for anything but pain killing so don't blame me for whatever vices you have.

Speaking of which...I love Diet Coke. I know this is a shocker because I come from such a puritanical family, where we are not allowed to have bodily functions, let alone a habit, innocuous or otherwise. Some of you loyal readers out there (all three of you) know that I have also claimed a love of chocolate, which is pretty much a given since I have ovaries, so I don't think that counts as a personal vice, but Diet Coke is different. If I could buy it in barrels off the black market I would. I used to have a dealer (literally, Charlie's brother was a Coke delivery guy for a while and would pull up in his huge Coke truck and bring me crates of it for a small fee, it was like that scene in The Music Man where they are all singing about the excitement of the Wells Fargo Wagon, except that I knew what was in the truck and that it was for me, and I couldn't really find anything that rhymed with coke truck that had the right rhythm.)

I realized my habit may be getting out of control when I was in a grouchy mood yesterday and Mia stared at me for a minute and said "Do you need a diet coke mom? Daddy will go get you one." I stared in amazement and confusion. Proud that my little girl was so empathetic and intuitive, ashamed that she was aware of my substance abuse problem, and irritated that she was stalling because she didn't want to go to bed. Am I a bad mother who needs diet coke rehab? I had these same feelings last week when Mia told me that her favorite song was Shorty Got Low by Flo Rida after I realized she sang most of the chorus to me in the car. (If my local DCFS representative happens to read this please don't take my child away, she also is really good at eating vegetables and takes baths on a regular basis, I don't just sit around drinking diet coke and blarring rap music all day while she is wandering around the neighborhood on her own).

So, there you go. I have my vices and I am doing my best to not let them interfere with my daily functioning. Unless Mom is reading this, then I am just kidding. I never ever drink anything besides water and sugar free juice while reading the scriptures and thinking about oatmeal.

Suart Little must die

So, here’s what happened. I went to Mia’s Wednesday Morning Movie (where they play a dumb kids movie you really really don’t want to watch but you do it anyway because it occupies your child for at least an hour and fifteen minutes) and they were playing Stuart Little. It was horrifying. I avoid movies where animals talk and have facial expressions as a rule. It’s just too creepy. Add to that a possessed cat and as many over used platitudes you can stuff in a kids movie and you just have 80 minutes of pure psychological torture. For me. Mia loved it. Kids are dumb. To make things worse I dragged Charles along today because he had the day off (Woohooo! Summer!) and I told him it would be “fun”. Now we are having trust issues.

To make up for killing some of Charlie’s brain cells I cleaned the house from top to bottom when we got home. I know a lot of you are saying to your computer “Amy, how does scrubbing your bathroom floor relate to forcing your sweet husband to Guantanemo Bay type torture in the name of family togetherness?” And I have an answer for you because I know on a surface level it’s just a silly idea. But if you dig a little deeper and spend some time with my husband you will understand that he is a clutterphobe. I myself am irritated by useless objects that lay around my home, but he outshines me my far. But here’s the other thing. He hates to throw things away. I know, your wondering how I can handle such a delicate combination of crazy. Well, I have figured out that the perfect solution is to wait until he is in the bathroom and then I throw piles of stuff away. He comes out and sees nothing but gleaming countertops and thinks “Wow! I know that there was stuff there before, but it is now gone of it’s own volition back to it’s place of origin.” (Because sometimes boys are dumb like kids).

I know I am outing my secret cleaning strategies because Charlie reads this blog every once in a while. But I feel better. I have shared the pain instilled by Stuart Little, and I have confessed a dark secret in one fell swoop.

Character Flaw

A certain special little brother of mine has remarked that I need to add some pictures to this blog because there were too many words. My first instinct was to offer to hire him a reading tutor. Then I thought, why am I so technologically impaired that I can’t figure out how to put pictures to illustrate my manic thought processes throughout this blog? I’ve come to the point where I’ve realized that there are certain things I just cannot do. Like pass up a desert containing peanut butter...or care about who Leonardo DiCaprio wants me to vote for, or learn more than the bare minimum necessary to carry me through the age of I-things. These character flaws are what make me special.
In order to cope with anything that comes up I have married a techno-idiot savant that is happy to push me aside and figure out how to load my favorite game onto my PC or what happened to the last four hours of work that I’ve done on my computer and then somehow deleted. This is called team work. I make sure he isn’t wearing black socks with his shorts and his hair isn’t plastered within an inch of it’s life before he walks out the door in the morning, and he makes sure I don’t accidently purchase a 70's era skate from Ebay for $500,987.04. Sometimes, when my boss calls me to inform me that my margins are somehow misaligned on the latest set of dictations I’ve typed I silently hand the phone to Charlie and sit in the corner while he fixes everything with a few keystrokes. Maybe this makes me less of a self-reliant woman of the new millennium, but I don’t care. Thinking about any sort of programming gives me wrinkles and we all know that my vanity trumps any other conerns.
So, yes, Russ. I don’t know how to put pictures on my blog. Sorry. Maybe you can read every third or fourth word so you don’t get a head ache...or maybe Whitney can read it to you instead of Good Night Moon at bedtime. I’ll work on getting Charlie to fix it, after he figures out how to stop making my mouse quack like a duck instead of making the little clicking sound.

Hey Good Lookin...

I don't know if you know this about me, but I am a brilliant chef. Shut up, I AM a brilliant chef, stop laughing. Ok, I am more like a brilliant chef that just got lazy and stopped trying, but still I am brilliant deep inside as I cook. I watch the food network religiously, unless someone irritating is on (I'm looking at you Sandra Lee and you too Rachel). And in my mind I am cooking right along with the greats and am a caviar aficionado (even though the thought of actually eating or being near fish eggs makes me gag just a little bit).

So, every once in a while I get on a gourmet kick and my darling husband and daughter just roll their eyes and secretly start stashing junk food in their underwear drawers. I don't know how a three year old can manage to find Twinkies to stash in her underwear drawer, but Mia is my daughter so I am not entirely surprised. A few nights ago I was determined to create Nectarine Salad with green tomato confiture and hazel nut sabayon. So I went to Albertsons and bought some nectarines and then I skipped the whole tomato idea because I remembered I hate tomatoes. I gathered the rest of the ingredients and rushed home in order to begin what was sure to be a life changing dish.

The French Laundry Cookbook wanted me to slice the nectarines into paper thin slices, but since I had to hurry and cut them up before Charlie got home and took the knives away from me in order to spare himself another emergency room bill, I just ended up cutting them in half. The recipe called for six nectarines but somehow one of them disappeared into Mia's mouth (ok, maybe I ate half of it, but she started it).

Then it was time to make a sabayon. What the heck is a sabayon, Amy? Well, if you were a gourmet chef like me you would know that it is a creamy sauce...kind of like melted ice cream. In fact, I used melted hazelnut chocolate ice cream, because hagen daaz was on sale and it had almost all the same ingredients on the label that were in the sabayon recipe, so there. It was totally justified. Also, I was suppose to make a sort of hazelnut meringue cookie, but it looked like a lot of fuss for just a couple of cookies so I used a couple of Mia's animal crackers.

I don't know how to post pictures on this blog yet (Russ's Amy needs to give me a lesson), so I can't convey the end result adequately. But it was good. It didn't look like the picture in the recipe book because I used only 15 percent of the ingredients it suggested, but it made me happy and Mia actually ate it. Charlie didn't because we ate it all before he came home, but he would have loved it too. I'll have to tell him about it sometime.