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Earlier today, we went to the park with the hilarious dog.

We were eating dinner outside (homemade black bean burgers — I was ready to post the recipe I wrote as I prepared them until they stuck like hell to the grill and ended up being kind of a mess, even though they were absolutely delicious — the main secret is cumin). Ben was off doing something and I was getting to that silly state, where I start laughing at shit that isn’t even that funny but kind of is but once you start laughing at it you just can’t stop, like that one time in junior high (which I guess now is “middle school”) when this Jason kid figured out that I can’t stop laughing once I start and was saying “House!” to me over and over and over because the word “house” isn’t actually funny but then it is and you’re a heaping mess of laughing until you cry and it’s the greatest thing ever. So Soren was making noises that sound like: (1) he’s auditioning to be the harmonica player in a death-metal band; or (2) he’s trying out for the part of Satan in A Christmas Carol, all “BRRRRAAAAAAAGUGUGUGGOIGGNIOGNIGONGOINGOIGNGOINGNIAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!” and eventually I’m all “Ha. Haha. HahahaLOL. HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA *snort* *sob* AAAAAHHHAHAHAHAHAH!” and then I’m grabbing my soggy old napkin that I used to wipe chipotle ranch off the patio table to dab the corners of my eyes because shit if I’m not crying from laughing so hard. So then, right in the middle of this, Soren looks me square in the eye and I swear — you guys, I’m not even lying and I’m totally not one of those “OMG my kid is so special and so advanced and so awesome and so much better than all the children who came before who were just, like, amateur children and totally unsuccessful at being awesome” people — but he looked me right in the eye and just made this little face that said, “Dude, I totally understand why you’re laughing right now and it’s because I’m absolutely hilarious and I made you laugh.” And that totally blew my fucking mind. Then he sat there for like 10 minutes and blew raspberries and screamed and shoved chunks of Day of the Dead bread into his mouth (that shit is really good) and was generally awesome.

I guess this is kind of a my-baby’s-growing-up post. He’s starting to understand that he can get reactions from people — that he can do something that causes another person to react in a certain way. If I’m really honest, I’d say that I used to think babies were really boring. But holy shit, they’re not. Watching the very beginnings of a person understanding how to interact with other people is just about the coolest thing, ever.

Ben is giving Soren a bath right now. He just said, “Dude. You’re a wheelbarrow.” I don’t even know what that means, but it made me LOL.

Vegetarian “Bacon” “Cheeseburger” pizza

Ingredients

• Pizza crust of your choice (The type of crust is not important for this pizza; it serves only as a delivery system for the toppings. Ben usually makes his own and doesn’t use a recipe. Use whatever you like, even a Boboli. It’s all good. Our pizzas vary in size from 12 inches to 16 inches, and we use approximately the same amount of toppings, except the cheese.)
• Pizza sauce of your choice (I’ll post a recipe for this sometime, but, like the crust, the sauce isn’t super important for this pizza. The one thing to know is that it’s better to use crushed tomatoes than tomato sauce, which I stupidly used to do all the time before I knew better. Don’t go overboard on the sauce with this pizza.)
• 1/2 cup chopped onion
• 2 Morningstar Farms Grillers Prime (microwaved for approximately 1:11 — just to thaw), chopped
• 4-5 Morningstar Farms bacon strips (microwaved for approximately 2:22 — this makes them nice and crispy), broken into chunks
• Grated parmesan cheese (the cheap stuff in the canister is good here)
• 1 to 2+ cups grated cheese (1 cup is okay for a 12-incher, use more for a bigger pizza) as follows: 1/2 mozzarella or “pizza cheese” mixture and 1/2 cheddar
• Dill pickles (we currently have Claussen dill halves), sliced or chopped (this is the best part)

Directions

Make your dough if you’re doing that and do a 5-minute parbake at 450. (I guess this is a thing? You just put the dough on your pizza pan and bake it for 5 minutes before putting anything on it. As you can see, I don’t make the pizza crust in this family.) If you’re using prepared dough or a Boboli, just put it on a pizza pan. Add as much sauce as you like (less is better than more here). Distribute the onion, burgers, bacon, grated parmesan, mozzarella, and cheddar evenly over the pizza. Bake at 450 for 15-20 minutes or until the pizza is as done as you like (or follow the directions for packaged dough or Boboli). After removing the pizza from the oven, distribute the pickles over the top.

Sorry for the lame recipe (Make your own crust! Use whatever sauce!), but the toppings are the focus of this pizza and it’s kind of poor college student food, so it’s not worth getting all fancy.

Here’s what it looks like (and as always, sorry about the terrible photo; the lighting in our kitchen is not good and using a flash makes everything look weird — I need to find our little tripod):

Here’s the playlist I made:

Old School Chicago (pdf songlist)

Listen here on Grooveshark

One song isn’t available on Grooveshark (or anywhere else on the internet, as far as I know, except for a newer version that isn’t as good). You can get it here: Give it 2 Me.

There was an awesome remix of Lick Shots they used to play on WGCI and/or Power 92 back in 2002 or so — it was housey and fast. If you know what I’m talking about and where I can find it, let me know.

Although I hate the word “impact” (It’s one of the most over-used words in the English language; I believe it should be reserved for discussion of car accidents or blows to the head.), I’m going to try to participate in Low-Impact Week.

This picture has nothing to do with Low-Impact Week.

Here’s the plan:

Day 1 (Aug. 16): Eat no meat.

Day 2 (Aug. 17): Eat one locally grown meal per day.

Day 3 (Aug. 18): Use no paper (toilet paper excepted).

Day 4 (Aug. 19): Produce no non-recyclable trash.

Day 5 (Aug. 20): Do not drive/ride in a fossil-fuel burning automobile with fewer than three people in it.

These are cumulative — meaning, “no meat” starts on day 1 and continues through day 5.

Not eating meat will be easy because I never eat meat. The other things will be difficult, but I’m going to try.

For example, I’m not sure where to even get locally grown food other than a farmers market (maybe a pricey restaurant that probably serves a lot of meat), and we didn’t go to the farmers market yesterday (we sometimes go to the City Park Esplanade Fresh Market). There’s one in Aurora tomorrow, but I’m guessing that driving all the way to Aurora to buy locally grown food would negate the benefit of eating locally grown food. There’s the  Cherry Creek Farmers Market on Wednesday, but I’ll be at work. Do places like Sunflower carry a good selection of local foods? Maybe Soren and I will check it out.

[ETA: Duh! If I don't get locally grown food in time for a meal tomorrow, we can have beer for dinner!]

The good thing is that even if I fail at, say, eating a locally grown meal tomorrow, at least this has me thinking about where we get our food.

I know Low-Impact Week doesn’t demand perfection, but I’m bummed that I’m definitely going to fail the thee-people-per-car thing. That comes up on Friday, when I’ll have to drive Soren to school and then go to work. I don’t know anybody who’d need to hitch a ride with us from our house to school or from school to work. Also, there apparently is no safe way to take an infant under one year old on a bike (we wanted to get a bike trailer this summer, but everything I read on the internet says the kid should be at least a year old to ride in a trailer and this makes sense to me — I tend to be pretty conservative in terms of child safety).

The good news is that we’re not big drivers, anyway. This is incredibly dorky, but I just calculated how far I drive on the days I drive the most — when I go to daycare, work, and the gym. On these days, I drive approximately seven miles. That’s not too bad!

I’ll let you know how it goes!

Tonight’s walk started as many of them do, with us encountering our neighbors’ dog who likes to jump the fence and run around the neighborhood. (Yesterday she jumped several fences to end up in our back yard, where she rolled around on the ground and refused to leave until I bribed her with a “Sadie get your ass in the house” — I mean a carrot.) After we returned the dog to her rightful home, we set off past what used to be Muhammad Mosque and walked down Curtis Street, headed toward downtown.

As someone who has always considered location (particularly the location of my home) as important as people, going for a walk in my neighborhood and the feelings it gives me have been a big deal to me ever since I started caring about going for walks. I can tell you about walks in Andersonville (Chicago) and, better yet, Oak Park. (Oak Park provided the best walks ever, including one time a little cat followed us all the way home and we drove her back to her house and left her there, but not before I saved the phone number from her tag on my cell phone and then eventually one night when drunk called them up and asked for Levi, who was the cat, and the guy who answered the phone said that the cat got phone calls all the time.) Walks in Nederland were usually too short and/or left you feeling a little like a tourist as you passed the Best Western in the middle of town and walked along the rushing creek before ending up at the reservoir. (Nederland is just as awesome as Oak Park but in a totally different way.) We walked around Wash Park a lot when we lived in Baker. This was before we had dogs. I remember one walk in particular where we spent an hour bitching about the house we wanted to buy and the way we were getting jacked around in relation to an issue with the furnace (the furnace was replaced with an overpriced model, we split the cost with the former owners, and we still live in the house today).

When we take walks, our general habit is to comment on houses we wish we might live in one day, which is most of them. Don’t get me wrong — I love our little house in the ‘hood. But someday, maybe when Soren is older and likes to spend a lot of time in the bathroom, I wouldn’t mind having two bathrooms. Ben really wants a basement (we have a partial basement that’s good for storage only). So maybe one day, we’ll have a house with two bathrooms and a basement. Maybe it’ll be in a better area for schools than we’re in now. Who knows.

We pass lots of beautiful houses as we walk through the Curtis Park Historic District. We end up by the Greyhound place, where things get kind of ugly, and turn right on Park Avenue West. Park Avenue West isn’t a good street for walking (it’s busy and not the most attractive street in the world), so we turn right on Arapahoe, the next street.

We run into what looks like a little bar. It has Great American Beer Festival (the best event in the history of events) postcards and Flying Dog stuff in the window. The door is open. We stop to gape and try to figure out what the place is. Someone from inside says, “Come in! Free beer!”

Okay. We’re out with the baby in a big giant jogging stroller, but if you really want us to come in and have free beer, we can totally accommodate you! I was relieved that the stroller fit through the doorway. There were two awesome dogs hanging out. Ben got Soren out of the stroller and a guy at the bar poured us each a Raging Bitch. For free.

This was the coolest shit, ever.

Apparently we stumbled on the Flying Dog Tasting Room. I didn’t even know this existed. (They have a big bar/restaurant at 2301 Blake Street — we haven’t been there since they moved, but the old location was always awesome, especially before/after Rockies games.)

We also enjoyed some Double Dog (this is the shit) and a little Gonzo Imperial Porter. All for free. Poured by an awesome bartender who played totally random music. Soren got a little stressed out (he couldn’t believe we took him to a bar while he wasn’t wearing pants), then tried to eat a coaster, and then chilled out and kind of had fun. He tried to eat the beer list but nobody minded. (Unfortunately, I didn’t have my phone and couldn’t take pictures.)

According to the bartender, the Flying Dog Tasting Room operates on Thursdays and Fridays, from 4 p.m. until 6-ish p.m. (read: maybe 8:00 or so if people are there drinking). It seems the policy is to offer tastes of two beers (for free!) but I have it on good authority that it is possible to get more.

It’s so random that of all the hours of the week, we happened to be walking by this place during one of the four it’s officially in business. There’s something about really good beer and the people who like really good beer that kind of makes you love the world. We left the Flying Dog Tasting Room with a little hint of a buzz and walked home, amazed by how awesome that was, even if the baby was getting a little grumpy because he was hungry and I kind of felt like an asshole for hanging out at a bar while wearing sunglasses (I just wear prescription sunglasses when it’s sunny and we go on a walk and don’t bring my regular glasses, and I can’t see without glasses so it’s a tradeoff between being the asshole who wears sunglasses in the bar and the asshole who can’t see anything that’s more than two inches from her face).

We stopped at the local carniceria on the way home so we could get an avocado that would be ripe enough to eat right away, and then Ben made killer BLATs. (Is that what you’d call a vegetarian bacon, lettuce, avocado, tomato, and cheese, plus friends sandwich?) I wait outside at the carniceria because to me it smells like raging death and I suspect the stroller won’t fit in there (Ben is a vegetarian too but not as delicate about it as I am).

Denver is awesome.

There are two tricks to making really fucking awesome homemade nachos:

1. Make your own tortilla chips.
2. Think in terms of layers, like you’d do with lasagna.

I wasted many years of my life thinking I couldn’t make good nachos at home. Just so you know, I really, really like nachos — good nachos, not the crap with the liquidy cheese you get at baseball games (although that has its place, especially when you’re pregnant and baby wants an efficient jalapeno-delivery system). I tried many times. Many of these attempts involved pouring a bunch of Tostitos on a plate, spooning a bunch of refried beans mixed with salsa over them, topping with some cheese, and throwing the whole mess in the microwave. It seems like this would turn out okay, but I never liked the result.

As soon as Ben started making tortilla chips, I kind of saw the light. Making tortilla chips isn’t rocket science or anything — it’s super easy and people have probably been doing it since the dawn of time but I never thought of it. All you do is cut up some small corn tortillas (if you’re really bad ass, I’m sure you can make your own corn tortillas but I’ve never done it), coat them with a little oil, and bake them. The bonus? You won’t believe me because as a general rule, leftover nachos are gross, but I swear, leftover nachos made this way are actually good. Seriously!

So here is how you make really good nachos at home.

Ingredients

• small corn tortillas (however many you want — I just asked Ben how many he usually uses and he said he has no idea, however many you want, at least a dozen)
• olive oil (or whatever oil you prefer — we pretty much use olive oil for everything)
• salt
• part of a brick of Velveeta (I know, but Velveeta is the shit in nachos), cut into smallish cubes
• shredded “Mexican” cheese of some sort
• a can of black beans, drained and rinsed
• chopped onion (as much as you want)
• toppings, such as guacamole, salsa, green chili, or whatever (even fresh tomatoes if you like — I’m just learning to tolerate fresh tomatoes, so I do not use them on my nachos)

Directions

Brush both sides of each tortilla with a light coating of oil (you don’t need a ton). Stack the tortillas and cut them into six equal pie-shaped pieces. Distribute evenly on a cookie sheet and bake at 375 for approximately 20-25 minutes, flipping approximately halfway through the baking process (I go for a shorter time because I like them to be more soft than crunchy — when they’re starting to get brownish around the edges, they’re probably good). Salt to taste  (I’m usually generous because these are tortilla chips and tortilla chips are supposed to be a little salty).

Place a layer of the tortilla chips on an oven-safe plate — you want to do the best you can to create a thin layer that covers the plate, allowing each tortilla to overlap a little. It’s not an exact science, but your goal is to create a nice, thin surface for your toppings. On top of your tortilla layer, place as many black beans as desired (I usually do a good handful), chopped onion, salt (if desired), several chunks of Velveeta, and a nice handful of shredded Mexican cheese. On top of this, place another layer of tortillas, beans, onions, salt (if desired), Velveeta, and Mexican cheese. Then do that again (I usually do three layers of everything.)

When you have the whole mess assembled and have probably spilled Mexican cheese everywhere, cover the nachos with aluminum foil and bake at 375 for approximately 25 minutes (check them after 20 or so — you just want the cheese to be all nice and melted). After the cheese is all nice and melted, remove the aluminum foil and bake 5-10 more minutes until the top is nice and brown.

Top with a little sour cream. Serve homemade salsa (I’ll post a recipe for this later — you just need a food processor), guacamole, and/or green chili on the side.

Pictures of the process are behind the cut (like all pictures I take of food, they suck), on the off-chance they might be useful because I know I’m not very good at writing recipes.

tortillas

Ben’s homemade salsa

cubed Velveeta

homemade tortilla chips

thin layer of tortilla chips on a plate

tortilla chips topped with black beans, onions, salt (if desired), and Velveeta

with shredded Mexican cheese

three layers of chips, beans, onions, salt (if desired), Velveeta, and Mexican cheese, ready to go into oven

the finished product

So I’m reluctant to talk about running, but I’m going to do it anyway. Running and I have never been pals. Although I work out all the time, running (even snail’s-pace running) gets me really out of breath. I’m top-heavy with broad shoulders — I don’t have a runner’s body and probably am better-suited for rowing or swimming or some other crap I’ll never do. There’s also this thing called “runner’s trots” and, well, yeah, that.

When I was a kid, running was the bane of my existence. In grade school, sometimes we’d have to “go run a lap” after recess. I hated this. I remember running miles or whatever in high school, and I was always one of the too-cool-to-give-a-shit kids walking at the end of the pack, because I didn’t give a shit but also because I sucked at running. I remember going for runs a few times in college, but it was pretty rare that I managed to squeeze in any strenuous physical activity with all that drinking.

Now, my runs often go something like this:

Minute 1: Okay, I can do this.
Minutes 2 – 20: [puff puff puff gasp] This sucks.
Minute 20: Did somebody just lodge a knife into my left shoulder blade?
Minutes 20 – 30: [puff puff cough cough, glance at watch or treadmill timer every 30 seconds]
Minute 30: Hello, knee. Thanks for letting me know you’re there!
Minute 35: I’m totally going to have the poops.

I learned many years ago that the trick is to run slow and to gradually build up time. For example, Ben and I have been going for 35-minute runs the last couple Saturdays (with the jogging stroller, which, holy crap not good). Next week, we could do 40 minutes but not 50. This helps with the whole runner’s trots thing, but doesn’t eliminate it.

I try to do all these little psychological things to fool myself into thinking that running doesn’t suck. I bought the shoes pictured above a few months after Soren was born. I didn’t put his birthday on them for any profound reason — like, I’m not thinking about running for my glorious joyful health and for my child or any of that shit. I put his birthday on my shoes as a reminder that no matter how far/fast/long I run on any given day, it can’t possibly suck as much as giving birth. On 10.25.09, I gave birth to a baby in my living room after 25 hours of labor. That was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced in my life and, unlike running, I couldn’t control when it happened and how long it took. At least running isn’t childbirth.

When Ben and I run outside, I try to look at the sky and the trees and how beautiful it all is, or think of how as citizens of Denver, we’re obligated to be doing physical activity outdoors so we don’t become the only fatties in the state or whatever stupid shit pops into my mind. None of it really helps. Mostly I just think about how I can’t breathe and wonder how many minutes of this crap are left.

(The one thing that does help, and that I don’t do when I go for a run with Ben and Soren but always do when I run on the treadmill, is listen to really good music. “One Mic” by Nas, for example, is an awesome song for running. Girl Talk’s “Feed the Animals” works, too, as do Ben’s mashup mixes. I’ll post a playlist sometime.)

Sometimes after a run, I feel awesome. Those are the times I’m glad I still do this even though it sucks. Sometimes after a run, I feel like I’m going to pass out and die. Those are the times I think I should just give up running because I’m never going to be good at it and I’m never really going to like it all that much. Although I know better, sometimes I think about running a marathon one day. That’s probably the stupidest idea I’ve ever had, but sometimes you want to make a stupid idea work, just to see if you can do it.

Well shit, it did happen. Gonzalez smoked the hell out of the first pitch he saw. It was a walk-off home run, giving the Rockies a 6-5 win over the Cubs.

That’s pretty bad ass, right? You’d think people would be talking about that shit on Twitter.

Well, no. (Click the picture to get to a larger version. I tried to post the big version here, but it totally broke my site. I know you can’t really see what I’m talking about when it’s this size, but I guess that’s better than jacking up the whole site.)

(Pls. note my groundbreaking tweet, wherein I said, “What’s sad is that if Carlos Gonzalez played for the stupid Yankees or the Stupid Red Sox, he’d be trending on Twitter right now.” I actually thought about adding the stupid Phillies, but 140-character limit and all, I knew I had to stop somewhere.)

Do you see what the #1 trending topic on Twitter was when I took this? Robinson Cano. As far as I can tell, Robinson Cano, who plays for the stupid Yankees, hit a home run and the Yankees won. Oh, wow. Later, Brad Lidge, Phillies closer, was a trending topic. As far as I can tell, Brad Lidge sucks ass and blew another save. Wow.

Since Carlos Gonzalez accomplished the monumental feat of hitting for the cycle and hitting a walk-off home run to beat the Cubs, he has not been a trending topic on Twitter.

Wait! I lied! As I’m writing this to bitch about people on Twitter not talking about the awesomeness of Carlos Gonzalez, he is finally trending!

That kind of defeats the purpose of me writing a post to bitch about people on Twitter failing to talk about Carlos Gonzalez, but I’ve already written a post to bitch about people on Twitter failing to talk about Carlos Gonzalez. So here it is.

The police scanner? Holy shit. I didn’t even know this was possible. That night, I found RadioReference.com, which lets you listen to Denver (and other!) police, fire, and EMS. I curled up with my MacBook in bed and listened to it until I got nice and tired. I did that for the next few days.

Most of the time, you hear pretty routine shit. An officer will get called out because there’s some sort of altercation or a no-injury car accident. These are fine. My favorite is when there’s an “unwanted party,” which is a nice way of saying a trespasser or someone who shouldn’t be there (I always like imagining an unwanted party, like you’re just sitting at home one night and all of a sudden a party appears in front of your house and people are like drinking champagne and dancing and using those noisemakers you get on New Year’s Eve and don’t really understand, and you call the cops because you’re just not having that shit).

Of course, there’s all kinds of bad shit, too. There’s the grandma who calls the police on her teenage granddaughter who allegedly burned her baby with a curling iron (and they give names and addresses — there’s no confidentiality on the police scanner) or the mohawked kid who goes off his meds and tries to kill himself. One of the first nights, there was a woman at the Grand Hyatt who called EMS around midnight because she was shaky and hadn’t pooped in three weeks (I’m not making fun of her and hope she was okay, but I’m also trying to imagine how you go that long without pooping and then decide to call EMS while alone in a hotel — she must belong to the Tracy school of trying to ignore any potential health issues until they become unignorable).

Most of the time, the scanner is all business, but one time I heard two women talk about how one of them just got married and her husband lost his job so she was “wearing the pants” in the family. She didn’t seem very happy about it. I’m starting to recognize the voice of one of the EMS guys, but I still don’t really know who anybody is.

Of course, Ben makes fun of me for listening to the police scanner, which I now do every night as we’re going to sleep, using the Scanner911 iPhone app. (I can’t fall asleep for shit these days, and having something to listen to helps prevent my mind from racing like it usually does.) However, one night there was a police chase near our neighborhood, and we heard the whole thing. It was kind of awesome (even Ben thought so, although he won’t admit it), except for the parts that weren’t (somebody was killed and police officers were injured). The police were speeding down neighborhood streets chasing some dude, then blocked off his vehicle and he took off running, possibly wearing one or no shoes. Eventually the hounds were released. (The guy got away. I don’t know if he’s been found yet.)

Anyway, I recognize that listening to the police scanner is pretty freaking dorky, and puts me dangerously close to becoming one of those old people who sits outside with a cane and yells at the kids to get off her lawn while her little yappy dog barks her head off. It’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?