Had a lot going on this week. For starters, I partially melted the head of our carrot peeler by putting it on the bottom rack of the dishwasher. You can still use it, but it looks all weird and melty. It's actually an awful peeler, so I kinda wish I had ruined it completely, so we'd be forced to buy a new one. The other day I was peeling a yam for Lil' S (He didn't like it, by the way. Oddly, he doesn't dig on the sweetish foods we've given him. He much prefers the greens like broccoli and asparagus. I guess that's a good thing.), and bits of peel kept getting stuck in the blade so that I'd have to pick it out after every other swipe. I figured it's because the peeler is designed for carrots, not yams, but S said it does the same thing with carrots. What the hell? Is it too much to ask that a tool serve the one purpose it was built to serve? It's not like a carrot peeler is an iPhone, where if the podcast app doesn't work very well*, it's somewhat excusable because the phone has a hundred other functions and probably not all of them are going to be fantastic. All a peeler has to do is facilitate a relatively effortless peel for the user. If you are a peeler maker, how do you not get that aspect of the peeler right?
One other product we have like this is a set of coasters that stick to the bottom of glasses. The coasters are coated with a glossy sheen, and once your glass gets a ring of moisture on the bottom (you know, the ring the coaster is supposed to protect your table from) it bonds with the sheen. So you lift up your glass and the coaster comes with it, and then it drops off and falls on the floor or your lap. It's super annoying. You can get around it by flipping the coasters upside down (the bottom is a feltlike material), but that's not the point. The point is, WHO DESIGNS A COASTER ON WHICH YOU CANNOT PRACTICALLY SET A DRINK? It's a coaster, not a Swiss Army knife. It has one ridiculously simple purpose. Get it right.
Anyway... In sporting news, I went to my first Nats game of the season on Thursday. It was fun, but cold. Weather.com screwed me. It was predicting temperatures in the 70s all night, and the morning and afternoon were beautiful, so I was clad in shorts and a polo shirt. It got windy and chilly in the evening, and as the game wore on I started getting pretty cold. At one point I went to the stadium team shop to buy something with sleeves. I fully expecting to be gouged, but I was in utter disbelief at the prices. A thin hoodie was $120, and a long sleeve tee, the kind you'd buy at Target for $10, was $57. That's not a gouging, that's a violation. I didn't buy anything. I decided I'd rather be cold than raped.
S always makes comments that we never do anything social now that we have a kid, but the evidence completely belies this. We just don't go out together at night anymore. Considering we have an infant kid, we're actually quite social (sometimes too social, if you ask me). Today we went to brunch with this couple we just met who have a one-year old. It was pretty cool. The restaurant was great. It was tapas style (i.e., lots of little dishes), which made me a bit uneasy at first, because with tapas I never know if the expectation is everybody eats the dishes they specifically ordered, or if it's suppose to be a free-for-all, and then if it's the latter, I never know how much I should take of each dish, and all that. I didn't really want to go through this with a couple I had never met before. But it all worked out pretty seamlessly; we just ate the dishes we ordered. S being a vegetarian really helped, because she couldn't get in on the meat dishes, so there was no expectation to share.
This couple just moved to the U.S. She's Dutch, he's Italian, and they met in Mozambique, so, of course, S knows them somehow. They seem pretty cool. They're on my "No Objection To Hanging Out Again List". Their little boy is pretty adorable.
Our adorable little boy has been not so adorable of late when bed time rolls around. He's doing a lot better with sleeping through the night, but now we're having trouble actually getting him to sleep. He wants somebody to hold him the whole time, but he's taking longer and longer to get actually fall asleep now, so this is becoming less and less practical. Plus, even if you do coddle him to sleep, unless he's in R.E.M., he'll wake up and start pitching a fit as soon as you set him down, anyway. He's doing it with naps, too. Even our nanny, who's some sort of baby sorceress, is having trouble with him. It's not good, but what can you do? My sister said she read somewhere that you can fill a glove with barley, sew it shut, and use it as a fake hand to keep a sleeping baby pacified. This sounds like a great idea for a couple much more arts-and-crafts-y than S and I. We'll have to get really desperate before we attempt any sewing. Plus, I have a feeling that replacing my hand with the fake hand on our sleeping child would go something like this...
Until next time...
*And by the way, it doesn't, but that's a whole other entry I've been meaning to do -- just how shitty the podcast app on the iPhone is.
One other product we have like this is a set of coasters that stick to the bottom of glasses. The coasters are coated with a glossy sheen, and once your glass gets a ring of moisture on the bottom (you know, the ring the coaster is supposed to protect your table from) it bonds with the sheen. So you lift up your glass and the coaster comes with it, and then it drops off and falls on the floor or your lap. It's super annoying. You can get around it by flipping the coasters upside down (the bottom is a feltlike material), but that's not the point. The point is, WHO DESIGNS A COASTER ON WHICH YOU CANNOT PRACTICALLY SET A DRINK? It's a coaster, not a Swiss Army knife. It has one ridiculously simple purpose. Get it right.
Anyway... In sporting news, I went to my first Nats game of the season on Thursday. It was fun, but cold. Weather.com screwed me. It was predicting temperatures in the 70s all night, and the morning and afternoon were beautiful, so I was clad in shorts and a polo shirt. It got windy and chilly in the evening, and as the game wore on I started getting pretty cold. At one point I went to the stadium team shop to buy something with sleeves. I fully expecting to be gouged, but I was in utter disbelief at the prices. A thin hoodie was $120, and a long sleeve tee, the kind you'd buy at Target for $10, was $57. That's not a gouging, that's a violation. I didn't buy anything. I decided I'd rather be cold than raped.
S always makes comments that we never do anything social now that we have a kid, but the evidence completely belies this. We just don't go out together at night anymore. Considering we have an infant kid, we're actually quite social (sometimes too social, if you ask me). Today we went to brunch with this couple we just met who have a one-year old. It was pretty cool. The restaurant was great. It was tapas style (i.e., lots of little dishes), which made me a bit uneasy at first, because with tapas I never know if the expectation is everybody eats the dishes they specifically ordered, or if it's suppose to be a free-for-all, and then if it's the latter, I never know how much I should take of each dish, and all that. I didn't really want to go through this with a couple I had never met before. But it all worked out pretty seamlessly; we just ate the dishes we ordered. S being a vegetarian really helped, because she couldn't get in on the meat dishes, so there was no expectation to share.
[This picture is apropos of nothing. It's just one I meant to post a few weeks ago when we had a random spring snow flurry, but forgot.]
This couple just moved to the U.S. She's Dutch, he's Italian, and they met in Mozambique, so, of course, S knows them somehow. They seem pretty cool. They're on my "No Objection To Hanging Out Again List". Their little boy is pretty adorable.
Our adorable little boy has been not so adorable of late when bed time rolls around. He's doing a lot better with sleeping through the night, but now we're having trouble actually getting him to sleep. He wants somebody to hold him the whole time, but he's taking longer and longer to get actually fall asleep now, so this is becoming less and less practical. Plus, even if you do coddle him to sleep, unless he's in R.E.M., he'll wake up and start pitching a fit as soon as you set him down, anyway. He's doing it with naps, too. Even our nanny, who's some sort of baby sorceress, is having trouble with him. It's not good, but what can you do? My sister said she read somewhere that you can fill a glove with barley, sew it shut, and use it as a fake hand to keep a sleeping baby pacified. This sounds like a great idea for a couple much more arts-and-crafts-y than S and I. We'll have to get really desperate before we attempt any sewing. Plus, I have a feeling that replacing my hand with the fake hand on our sleeping child would go something like this...
Until next time...
*And by the way, it doesn't, but that's a whole other entry I've been meaning to do -- just how shitty the podcast app on the iPhone is.
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