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Hello? Hello? Is this thing on? I made a post last night but it won’t show. Here is the placeholder.

Somebody tell a joke. Or something that you’re doing right now.

A friend of mine threw herself a birthday party on a Saturday, and invited a bunch of people to Paint Yourself Silly in Lincoln. She’s got art running through her veins, and though I have coffee running through mine, I was up for something different!

I was glad I went. They have many paintable things to choose from, and of course I went for something practical. I chose a container with a cool silicone lid, and when I saw that you could paint your item black and add colors on top, that seemed pretty spiffy.

The actual painting process was a little painful for me since I get some serious heebie-jeebies from touching unglazed pottery. It was vitally important that no-one bump me while I was painting, lest my holding hand slide a millimeter on the rough surface and cause me to scream like a doomed B-movie actress.

I like how it turned out, but I regret that I painted the whole inside black, then tried to paint over the inside bottom with colors. I should have just made the very bottom bright and surprise-y. Lloyd has a solution, though: “Just keep it filled with jellybeans. No one will know.”

It is food-safe and deep, though. Maybe I’ll just drink tea from it!

By the way, Melanie (birthday girl) gave me the funniest present for my birthday and I never got around to posting about it. She clipped funny sayings from catlogs and made a Keychain of Funny.

I leave it hanging by my computer with my favorite one always in sight:

I like buying whole-leaf tea. I like the idea of not throwing out a tea bag, plus I like being able to see the whole leaf after brewing, (That last part doesn’t often happen, as I am very likely to leave the brewing tool sitting out for a day or so then I hastily smack its grody contents into the compost freezer bucket while looking away. So much for ceremony.)

There is a tea store in the mall called Teavana that is PRO-TEA. They have dozens of different kinds of teas to choose from, carafes of brewed tea you can sample from little plastic cups (which kind of negates the whole eco-friendly angle I was aiming for) and a wide variety of teapots and brewing accessories in case you like spending your money on such things.

Lloyd doesn’t really like going there, but he’ll suffer through a visit because the guys that work there have crazier hair than he does – a very ‘tea drinkers are hipsters, not old fogies!’ kind of vibe.

When I stopped by on Saturday, I knew just what I wanted: Two ounces of English Breakfast. It’s the least amount you can buy and it has a high caffeine content (though just 20% of coffee). Apparently it is one of their ‘lesser teas’. When I ordered, the hipster girl behind the counter discovered that I was not a disciple of their tea religion.

Hipster Checkout Girl: “Welcome to Teavana! What can I get for you?”
Lauren: “English Breakfast, please.”
HCG (repressed shudder and trying not to act as if I had just ordered warm goat spit): “English…. Breakfast?”
Lauren: “Yep. I need the caffeine.”
HCG (Trying to upsell me): “Have you tried Monkey Picked Oolong*? It’s really great!”
Lauren: “No, that’s ok.
HCG (Sighing at my lack of taste and picking up her big scoop): “How much can I get for you?”
Lauren: “Two ounces.”
HCG (with a tight-lipped smile): “You’re really going all out, aren’t you?”
Lauren: “It’ll last me forever.”
HCG: “Do you have an airtight container to store it in?” (Here she gestures at the Teavana-approved , beautifully decorated, highly overpriced metal canisters on the counter.”
Lauren: “Yep.”

I told Lloyd as we left the store what I wanted to say to her, and he was mad because it would have been a much funnier encounter.

How it went in my head:
Hipster Checkout Girl: “Welcome to Teavana! What can I get for you?”
Lauren: “English Breakfast, please.”
HCG (Goat spit shudder): “English…. Breakfast?”
Lauren: “Yep. I need the caffeine.”
HCG (Trying to upsell me): “Have you tried Monkey Picked Oolong? It’s really great!”
Lauren: “It doesn’t matter. Any tea I buy is going to taste like honey and lemon by the time it hits my lips.”
HCG: “How much can I get for you?”
Lauren: “Two ounces.”
HCG (tight-lipped smile): “You’re really going all out, aren’t you?”
Lauren: “Are you really going to give me a hard time for buying the minimum amount of the cheapest tea you have in this expensive store? I know where the Lipton aisle is a SunMart, kiddo.”
HCG: “Do you have a airtight container to store this paltry amount of tea?”
Lauren: “Yep, that baggie you’re loading it in.”

I think next time I’ll just ask for some Nestea and watch them faint.

* I did not make that up. See?

So. Trivia Night 2012 is over.

The Little Smokies were sub-par. We weren’t exactly sure how long they needed to cook, so we started them too late and ran out of time before they were fully done. (Note – it is going to take longer to cook them than 45 minutes.) You win this time, Matt Haden, but Lloyd believes we should test this recipe again and again until we get it right.

The trivia questions were mostly as expected – there were several categories that made me feel like an idiot, a few questions where I felt confident of the answer and got it wrong, but one category where I knew 9 out of 10! Thanks, “Textiles”!

Then we were nominated as a Spirit Award finalist, and each table nominated had 30 seconds to showcase their spirity selves. The Fortune Cookies table sang songs from “The Christmas Story”; Gilligan’s Island table sang the iconic song; the Concordia table played the fight song and cheered; the Magic 8 ball table shook their magic selves; the Star Wars table just stood around to the theme music (which was lame, but still made me jealous because their costumes were amazing); the Cheeses of Nazareth did something, but I don’t know what because they were after our table (4th of July), and we had An Event.

Once we realized we had to have 30 seconds of awesomeness, I was excited because I wanted us to SING, for cryin’ out loud! We decided on the tail end of the Star Spangled Banner, followed by chanting “U*S*A! U*S*A!”

Our moment came, we stood up and started to sing. I was finding some harmony and looking for something on the table I could wave around, then looked up and saw Charles standing on a chair – peeling down to his USA t-shirt and biking shorts. There was a small, small wardrobe malfunction (some tidy-whitey waistband showed – at least from my angle before my eyes shut down), but I was too stunned to do anything but sit down and laugh. I don’t even know if we finished the song. He had told Deborah his plan ahead of time, but the rest of us were just as surprised as the rest of the room. Our guts hurt from laughing.

Sooooooo. There’s that.

Oh, and we didn’t win, but we placed solidly in the slighty-above-dead-center range.

Friday night is the annual Trivia Night hosted by our school’s PTL. Tables of eight compete with 10 rounds of 10 questions (or as I like to call it, “One Hundred Things I Don’t Know”) while eating snacks and drinking drinks. That means Lloyd and I have to make food for other people, and you all know how skilled we are at that.

At Lloyd’s faculty party Matt Haden and his wife, Lindsey, brought Little Smokies Wrapped In Bacon And Baked With Brown Sugar, which were promptly inhaled by everyone. Lloyd was intrigued and immediately subscribed to their newsletter.

Lloyd asked Matt for the recipe, and at the risk of blabbing like the Bush’s Baked Beans dog, here it is:

Ingredients:
1 package of Little Smokies
1 package of bacon (we usually get center cut)
Brown Sugar…
Toothpicks
9×13 pan
Tin Foil

Instructions:
Line the 9×13 pan with tin foil. (This will accelerate the cleaning process. Part of the tin foil might get stuck to the pan but it’s a lot easier to clean up than the mess without the tin foil.)

Take one smoky and one piece of bacon, wrap the circumference of the smoky once, stab with a toothpick all the way through, cut off excess for the next smoky [here, Lloyd wondered aloud if it was the excess bacon or the excess toothpick], repeat until all smokies are fully wrapped. (I had about two inches of bacon left so I just stabbed it with a toothpick and put it in the pan with the rest.)

Shower the smokies with brown sugar. Your preference on how much you want to put on them. (We did add a little more brown sugar halfway through the cooking process.)

Bake until the bacon is fully cooked as I believe most smokies are pre-cooked…

Enjoy!

P.S. Let me know what they think.

There is an alternate version of this recipe where you wrap the smokies in canned croissant strips and then put crushed walnuts in with the brown sugar. Our Kansas City friends called them Crack Weenies.

Lloyd and I made a little assembly line and got the little drops of heaven ready to pop in the oven tomorrow. As Lloyd wrapped them up he sang, “Anything Matt can do, I can do better…..”

Are you going to stand for that, Matt Haden? Are you?

Let me make it clear from the start that though I am going to mock him thoroughly in this post, I really love Lloyd.

I rarely walk home from work anymore since I mostly drive the truck. On the rare occasions that I do and I know Lloyd won’t be coming home anytime soon, I walk down Seward Street to 7th Street. There are store windows to peek in, and Dollar General is open late and I can stop in to browse and warm up. It’s enjoyable.

Here’s the route. Notice the straight lines of this journey?

If I know Lloyd is home, I might call him for a ride to pick me up, then convince him that as long as we’re in the car, we should swing by Subway for a sandwich. (It’s an easy sell.) I tell him where I’ll be: On Seward Street or on 1st Street.

See, when I walk home in the summertime, occasionally I’ll call him at home and ask him to meet me. He grumbles, but he’ll do it. He walks 7th street to Lincoln Street, and I walk 1st street to Lincoln Street. See how we’re just following straight lines?

(Now the mocking begins.) On Tuesday morning my truck wouldn’t start, so I caught a ride to school with Lloyd. We had a staff meeting until 8 p.m., and afterwards I walked out to my truck…. that wasn’t there.

No problem!

I started walking and called Lloyd for a ride. “I’ll be on First Street,” I said.

Now I ask you, dear readers who are not even married to me, by what I’ve just said, if you were at Point B and needed to drive to get me, wouldn’t you drive down Lincoln and turn on 1st?   So would I, because we are reasonable people. That’s why I like you.

Back to my long, stupid story: A few blocks into my walk I was creeped out by a male fellow pedestrian. I called Lloyd again so I’d be on the phone in case MFP tried to talk to me or ninja-chop me. I could sense by the echo-y sound of Lloyd’s voice that he had not yet left the house. “I’m putting on my shoes,” he said.

Really?

I kept walking and kept walking, and as I rounded to Lincoln I wondered where he was. I kept walking a couple more blocks and called again.

Lauren: “Where are you??”
Lloyd: “On First Street. You don’t seem to be here.”
Lauren: “I’m on Lincoln now.”
Lloyd: “You said you’d be on First.”
Lauren: “Not forever.”
Lloyd: “I drove around. You weren’t here.”
Lauren: “Grrrrr. I’m almost home.”
Lloyd: “Oh.   Do you still want a ride?”
Lauren: Facepalm