I Really Just Wanted an Excuse to Write Bafflingly

I have to time leaving my job perfectly.

If I leave between 4:55 to 5:00 on the dot, I'm fine. No problems! Might get stuck behind vehicles driving more slowly than I would like, but not a big deal... I just have to pay attention.

If I leave any later, though, if we just don't make it out the door or I stop at the store to pick something up (last night, it was delicious turkey bacon), I find myself having to deal with a group of people who take their lives into their hands every time they get on the road.

Who are these people, you ask?

Moped drivers.

Mopeds are sort of bafflingly popular in the town I work in; I can count an average of ten to twelve I'll see in a day, sort of put-put-putting around town past my window. The people driving these mopeds are never wearing helmets, and there have been days where more than half of the ones I've seen haven't even been wearing shirts. Not that I honestly blame them, what with the blazing sun and 15,000% humidity that is a fact of life I haven't quite adjusted to yet.

No, the moped drivers in town don't bother me.

It's the ones chugging away on the extremely busy country highway during my commute home, on the only road I can take that will get me home in less than a hour, that are a problem.

I'm impressed at their serious chutzpah, though.

They can't really drive above 40 miles per hour, and that's at their fastest. The highway I drive to work on, however, is full of hills and curving bits, which translates to a Moped whose engine is screaming I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can at a dismal 20 miles per hour or less the whole way up every single hill, with a line of fifteen to twenty cars backing up behind them.

Cars going the opposite direction - people coming home from Greenville up to the town I work in - are zipping past us at a constant clip, making it so there is just no way to safely pass the Moped drivers.

People pass them anyway.

I have watched an angry trucker (I know he was angry because of the gesture I could see him sticking out his window) fly around the poor guy hugging his moped for dear life. I've watched them be passed by every single car and wondered what it must take to drive the hour from one town to the next (it takes me a little over 20 minutes, but with the speed these guys are driving I'm thinking it's closer to an hour for them) being passed so often and in such dangerous places by angry, impatient, end-of-their-long-workday people driving screaming metal deathtraps.

For me, mopeds are a thing of serious anxiety. For one, if I get stuck behind them I also have to navigate a less-than-safe passing situation, since there is basically only one place where you can easily and safely pass anyone on that road. And only about four spots where it's even legal.

For another, if I get stuck behind someone else who is stuck behind a Moped, I will watch them inch closer and closer to the poor guy sitting on his little scooter, almost touching the back of his vehicle with their bumper, shouting and waving their arms and generally being as much a road hazard as the guy on the Moped is.

I hate getting stuck behind them, because it feels like a holding pattern for an accident that is always just about to happen. It makes me miss tractors from back in Illinois; they may be slow-moving monsters, but they are big enough that you can see them from a mile back, so you have some warning. With Mopeds, the first car in the line is usually nearly on top of the guy before they even realize he's there.

The worst part, though, about Mopeds is that it means I will get home later. Because I will get stuck as one in a long line of backed-up drivers stuck behind a guy put-put-puttin' along the road like it ain't no thang.

Mopeds may not have been meant for highway driving, but some people spit in the face of safety and all reason and common sense.

I try as hard as I can to grab that extra two to three minutes on the road in the evening, because it makes all the difference. The Moped drivers leave their places of business - or residences, I don't know what they're doing honestly but I do assume it's work - at just after five o'clock. So if I can get past the second stoplight of my drive home before they do, I'm safe the whole way.

If I leave even a couple of minutes later than usual, say not getting out of the store until ten after 5 like I did last night, the first half of my drive becomes a monotonous slog of trying to interpret the obscene gestures of the people in front of me and feeling overwhelming pity for the guy on his Moped using a busy two-lane highway on a pseudo-vehicle that was never meant to be there.

I ended up in stand-still traffic last night anyway. There was some kind of accident outside a gas station right as I hit the final third of my drive home. It must have been something crazy, because I counted no fewer than seven emergency vehicles, and that's not counting the cop cars. That's just ambulances, fire trucks, and a couple of lit-up SUV-style things. I hope to God it wasn't someone on a Moped or a motorcycle.

I sat behind a truck... and sat... and sat... and sat. I had kind of had an intuition when I and the rest of the traffic on the road had to pull over for two ambulances and one of the emergency SUV's, sirens blazing, that went flying past us, but still.

I don't really have the self-preservation God gave a goat, so rather than turn off onto a side road when I saw that, I ended up in the line of traffic anyway.

Eventually a cop drove slowly past us to tell us how to take a certain road ("If you turn right and right and right, you'll be fine!") and get around the accident site, which led to the most pitiful line of people attempting terrible three-point-turnarounds you've ever seen in your life. On either side of the highway at that point there are fairly deep ditches and then an awful lot of trees, so it was not an easy turnaround situation... and for some reason nobody wanted to drive the four hundred feet up and turn around in the gas station parking lot.

Which is what I did, because I do not like ditches.

So my drive home, which should take about 25 minutes on any usual day, took around 45-50.

There is a special kind of empty place your brain gets to after your drive takes twice the time it should, where everything just shuts off and you find yourself not even hearing the voices on NPR so much as letting them wash over you. Your brain is nothing but vaguely furious buzzing.

Luckily, the answer to that problem is an easy one; spend about twenty minutes playing with your dog, who doesn't care that you're late because he has no sense of time and no matter how long you're gone, it's been SO MANY HOURS and he MISSED YOU SO MUCH.

The best part of having a dog is that it is hard to be mad that your day was slightly inconvenient when there is somebody who is so happy you are there to play with them that they fall over from sheer ecstasy. 

5 Things Friday - All Links, All The Time

Every time I think to myself, you know, I don't need any more coffee mugs (usually I have this thought while playing the Tetris game that is trying to fit all our mugs on the shelf they belong in), I see something like this, and I realize that there can never be enough.

Or then I see a shirt and I think, maybe enough mugs (as I force the cabinet door shut and it insistently cracks outward, just the slightest bit, pushed by a handle I just can't figure out)... maybe enough mugs...

but never enough shirts, right? I say this while steadfastly not looking at the jillion other shirts in my closet.

I really need to stop going to anthropologie's website. I feel like soon there's going to be some kind of serious talk about spending way too much time on websites for clothes I can't afford.

But my impending clothing and/or mug intervention is not really why I'm posting today.

I'm just going to leave a few links here, some interesting things I've been clicking around on this week.

1. Dressed Up Like a Lady is one of my absolute favorite of-all-time fashion blogs. Cammila wears the weirdest, coolest things and strangest, best outfits with grace and a serious rock-and-roll attitude. The post of hers I want to share, though, is her 'What I Eat' post, or at least the first one of what looks to be a series.

One of the things that I had to look at, when getting healthier, was how my exercise plan was and continues to be a big part of it (albeit one I am keeping to myself, for a couple of reasons), but what I was putting into myself was more important. The regional/local delivery service that we are currently getting vegetables and fruits from is fantastic, in no small part because it's thanks to them that I have been eating enough greens to choke a small donkey.

Now, I don't eat exactly like Cammila does (I am far too much a fan of meat, bread, and my demerara sugar), but the woman knows what she's talking about. Go read! Read! Read and leeeeeeeearn! And keep in mind that Cammila isn't telling you what to do, except when she totally and completely is. Because she is awesome.

2.  The Navajo Nation has been working hard for years to preserve their language and make it more widely spoken and available to the population. One of their latest efforts is also one of the coolest; they're translating Star Wars, from start to finish.

The Navajo language is one of the most complex languages in the world. They touch on it in the NPR interview that this link is to, when he talks about the different types of objects. Well, that counts for nearly everything. The professor who taught my absolute favorite class in college (a Languages of Native North America class I took my senior year; I was one of only a few undergrads and definitely the only art major in the class, I'll tell you that) worked extensively with the Navajo and much of our classwork touched on their way of shaping thoughts into objects; round, small, soft, rigid, flat.

So... that's really cool.

3. This CNN piece of fluff on tomboy style.

'Tomboy' is an interesting term, since it is basically just used to denote any woman that dresses in a fashion that's been declared 'masculine', or at least less than 'feminine' by her particular culture. What means feminine and masculine, of course, changes rapidly with time; less than a hundred and fifty years ago, pink was considered the 'masculine' color (after all, it's a shade of red and what color is more dynamic and manly than red?) and blue the more wishy-washy 'feminine' one.

At some point, fairly recently insofar as history goes, we decided to switch those colors up.

Then, we pretend it's set in stone and I can't find a single baby girl dress for my friend's soon-to-be that isn't pink or so couched in ruffles I can't imagine how anyone's baby is supposed to play in it.

I really like the slideshow, personally, although I may disagree here and there with who CNN declares a 'tomboy', or what makes one. But it's always been nice to see other women in the world who never felt comfortable in the odd, uncomfortable little ruffles and floofy things girls are often informed they are supposed to wear.

This whole conversation makes everyone so glad for my mother that she had another daughter who did enjoy the occasional floofy thing, doesn't it?

4. Merrick's Art's DIY on making a version of the anthropologie patterned-back shirt I like so much. She always makes her DIY's look so great.

This is probably the answer to my "love all the things at anthro, maybe I can afford that single teacup" problem. You know, to just learn how to sew and make my own!

But I think we all know I'm too lazy to do that.

Instead I'm going to read the DIY and then go back to sighing wistfully over the pretty things. And sighing more heavily over their price tags.

Send help.

5. Here's something you haven't been hearing much about on the news; there's a tuberculosis outbreak in upstate South Carolina.

I'm not joking.

An employee at a local elementary school was put on home quarantine after they tested positive. More than 400 people in the school system have been tested now, and more than 50 people have had preliminary positive test (those people are not necessarily contagious; mostly, children aren't. That's something new I learned today.)

The employee I am calling Patient Zero, because I have read too many zombie books. They are likely the first to have the disease of this particular outbreak... and they ignored DHEC's instructions to stay home, lied to DHEC about where they were going or who they had spoken to (and who therefore might be at risk), and changed their story more than once.

So DHEC sent them to "a medical facility", to be "contained". So that they wouldn't continue going places where more people would be exposed to the pathogen. Because apparently when DHEC told this person they had TB, a hugely contagious disease that has been one of the top killers of mankind since the dawn of our species, their response was to go cough on people.

Good job, buddy.

What's even more interesting than that?

DHEC has known about this since March, and the news reports are just coming out now. The superintendent of the school apparently wasn't informed about why DHEC had swarmed all over the school until late May, at which point he sent out notes to parents as fast as he could.

So... would you like to have a conversation about how angry and scared all those kids' parents must be, finding out that their children were at risk and DHEC's response was, 'meh, we'll tell 'em later'?

Well, now it's actually out that DHEC screwed up and, in response, they apparently fired several people.

It's all very exciting.

I have been staring at everyone who coughs without covering their mouth with growing, obvious horror as the days go on, as the school in question isn't actually all that far from where I work or where I live. I am bathing in hand sanitizer at work all day.

I kind of feel like there's going to be a movie about this in six years and Morgan Freeman will play someone wise who nobody listens to until it's too late, and they'll only just barely contain it, and maybe monkeys will be involved somehow.

Wait, I think they already made that movie.

The Mad Tagger of Travelers Rest

There is someone who keeps tagging things on the Swamp Rabbit Trail, up near Travelers Rest, with this.

For the longest time, I thought it was the word 'Argyle'... as in argyle shirt patterns, vests, stuff like that. And I kept trying to imagine what kind of person would pick 'argyle' as their Hardcore Graffiti Artist Name. Maybe he just really likes vests, I thought, or maybe he doesn't even know what argyle is and thinks it's some kind of venomous snake in Australia.

I have this mental image of Argyle, the Mad Tagger of Travelers Rest, spray-painting his name on every conceivable flat surface while pushing his taped-together glasses back up and making sure his suspenders are tight enough. After he's done being super hardcore, Argyle goes home to play video games and tell people on the internet what a super-cool graffiti artist he is.

Then I realized...

Argue.

Argue is the word spray-painted there, not Argyle.

This isn't in any way the name of Argyle the Mad Tagger of Travelers Rest.

This is some kid with a can of spray paint out there thinking that spraying a word like 'argue' on the side of a clock off the Swamp Rabbit Trail will somehow cause the runners, walkers, cyclists, and various and sundry assorted animals they bring with them to really, y'know, think, man. About, like, the world. 

And you know, good for you, kiddo. Although I mostly want to argue with you about why you'd spray paint your super-helpful suggestion on something put up by the city for the public good and not on, like, an empty brick wall or something. Ooooh, or a tree. Wouldn't that be super-political and whatnot.

Honestly, though, whoever you are, I'm not annoyed at you. Not really.

What I'm really annoyed about is that it wasn't Argyle, after all. You don't even understand how happy the idea of Argyle made me.

There's no bespectacled graffiti artist sneaking out in the middle of the night between Bioshock Infinite levels or quantum physics discussions, sweater-vest always on, trying to make his mark on the world. There's no 15-year-old Mathlete just hoping to overhear someone asking, Who is Argyle, anyway? No taped-together glasses, no suspenders, no nerd-graffiti-subculture in Upstate South Carolina headed up by the shadowy figure of Argyle.

This makes me sadder than you can ever know.

Things From My Phone

I cannot tell you how much I love having short hair. I end up growing it out over the course of a year or so, because I am terrible at doing more than the occasional trim, and then we cycle back around to South Carolina's incredibly humid spring and summer and I can't take it anymore. Usually around the time I realize I have done nothing but wash my hair and pull it back in a ponytail for a week straight, I decide it's time to visit the nice people at Great Clips and listen to them tell me you have so much hair fifteen thousand times while most of it finds its way to the floor.

On the other hand, the humidity is still nothing to sneeze at (or rather, the air is the thing that is making me sneeze forever and always), so headbands and I? We become very, very good friends. And we are going to stay friends until the temperature gets back into something I consider manageable.

Which... will probably be late October.

In any case, I have barely taken any real photos at all with my regular camera this week, so I don't have any good stuff to show. Also I received some less-than-stellar news yesterday, so I'm not exactly feeling overly effusive.

Here's a few things from the last several days that are helping brighten my mood:

The bracelet I bought at Artisphere and my two new bracelets from Liz Daly Designs in downtown Greenville. Between those three, they will go with essentially 80% of my summer wardrobe. I'm still eyeing the turquoise and orange from Nicole Wayne, though.

I've got a wedding anniversary coming up, right? That's a reason for presents, isn't it? I don't even know. Do you even get presents at five years? Is there some kind of etiquette for this?

I don't know why I'm even asking; I am terrible at etiquette. I still have to remind myself not to stick my elbows on the table when I'm eating.

(Also I know I took that photo in my car, but I swear upon all that is holy that I wasn't driving at the time.)

Puppy playdates!

Jason had some friends over last night, and a couple I had previously not met came by, Hester and... I do not remember her SO's name, which makes me a terrible hostess, but in my defense I wasn't actually there most of the night. In any case, they brought their little four-month-old pile of extra skin and cute over and he and Indy got on like gangbusters.

It was actually really difficult to get them to hold still long enough to even get a photo this good.

I'm debating blowing it up poster-size and tacking it up over the bed with white text over it that reads "THIS IS WHY WE NEED ANOTHER DOG. LOOK AT HIS LITTLE FACE."

Because why have one dog when you can have two dogs, right?

Beer.

There's a great scene in an earlier season of the Simpsons when they visit Australia, and Marge tries to order a cup of coffee and it turns out they don't know what that is, they only serve beer. That scene runs through my head literally every single time I am buying beer.

Last night before meeting my friends for dinner, I stopped over at Community Tap, a locally owned beer, wine, and growler store. My original plan was just to pick up that four-pack of local Greenville brewery Thomas Creek's new Chocolate Orange IPA, but I ended up walking away with Vanilla Cream Ale, too, which we had before and really liked. I'm not usually an IPA person, but Jason and I tried the Chocolate Orange last night and agreed it's probably the strongest IPA we've ever tasted. Nice and super-hoppy, a really strong flavor, bright citrus notes. I really enjoyed it! If you like a really mild IPA, though, you may not like it.

I picked up Edible Upcountry while I was there, too, a local foodie magazine that has expanded more and more in the couple of years we've been living here. I know at first I could only find it in a couple of places, but it's kind of exploded now! My favorite natural foods store (and coffee bar, not coincidentally) in Pickens carries the magazine now.

Our first tomatoes! They hardly count right now because they are the size of my thumb, but I noticed while looking them over today before I left for work that we have at least eight of those little things starting to pop up! I am so excited for fried green tomatoes and then ripe ones later on!

Jason and I planted an herb garden out front this year, as well as keeping a hanging basket strawberry bush (that is producing exactly two strawberries at a time, which is... kind of problematic if we want to do more than eat them in two bites), and then we have this tomato plant and a hot pepper plant, too.

Seriously.

Fried green tomatoes.

Cannot wait.

I force Jason to make most fried things. Something in his southern blood means he is better at frying stuff. Don't argue with me; we've proven this through many, many attempts and pseudo-failures on my part and the seemingly effortless perfectly crispy frying on his. In my expert scientific opinion, southern people are just better at frying stuff.

Except pumpkin blossoms.

I am a boss at pumpkin blossoms.

These Old Navy shoes.

I am living in these shoes right now.

They're cute enough to wear nicer places, but casual enough to just wear with jeans and a T-shirt wherever I go on my day off, too. I have them in which off-white color and in black, but it's really the off-white that I find myself pulling on every other day or so.

Being as they cost me something like 15 dollars, I don't actually expect them to last much longer than this summer (I have a somewhat similar pair of orange shoes I bought last year that have basically no rope braid left on the back already), but I think I've already gotten my money's worth.

So, yeah.

Those are some things making me smile right now.

I hope at least one of them made you smile, too.

Peachy Pancakes For Two

Man, it's been a while since I've done a recipe. Not for any particular reason; I've been cooking up delicious foods (especially since Jason and I started getting a localized veggie/fruit delivery every week), but I keep eating them so fast I forget to take pictures. And what's a recipe without photos? Well... it's still a recipe. But much less fun to read.

Anyway, yesterday I had a little extra time in the morning and made myself an adaptation of a pancake recipe I found while trying to search for 'healthy pancakes'. I'm going to tell you right here and now? No such thing.

What I did manage to do was take a distinctly unhealthy recipe and make it very slightly less unhealthy.

So, easiest awesome Sunday (or... Thursday) morning breakfast in the world... Peachy Pancakes!

Ingredients

3/4 cup whole wheat all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon sugar

3/4 tsp baking powder

Pinch salt

1 tsp vanilla extract

3/4 cup milk

1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted

1 egg, beaten

1 ripe peach, diced as finely as possible

Canola or vegetable oil, for the pan

Onto the Creation!

  

This is the easiest thing ever. Mix all your wet ingredients (minus the peaches) together in one bowl and all your dry ingredients in another. Add the dry to the wet and mix thoroughly, then fold in your diced peaches.

Heat up a tablespoon or two of the oil in a skillet. Drop in the pancake mix with about two tablespoons for each pancake. When you start seeing bubbles in your pancake (like little holes in the surface), flip to the other side. You should need only a minute or two for each side. 

Your mix should make about six pancakes, which is perfect for two people. 

You can top it with syrup, whipped cream, or whatever. In the photos I topped it with a couple of tablespoons of nonfat Greek yogurt, which I really like the taste of, and some blueberries and honey. Looking at the photos makes me wish I'd had whipped cream, though.