We invented something and now it can't be uninvented

This is a Toad-in-a-hole grilled cheese.

What the hell does that mean? You might ask, and I might ask you to tone down the language because there are kids listening, because there are always kids listening, because you know how kids are with bugging our shit.

In our house "toad-in-a-hole" refers to the egg and toast dish, not to the disturbing-looking Yorkshire pudding and sausage dish that the hegemonic Wikipedia has declared to be the normative definition. And since I prefer my food to be named after animals rather than made of animals, I'm going to keep using toad-in-a-hole for this, rather than their preferred nomenclature of "egg in a basket," because who wants to eat a basket? And everyone wants to eat a toad because it is well known that they cure both the hiccups and acne, even if they're just metaphorical toads.

Anyway, Houseboy took two of these and put cheese in between them, and this is what came out:

P.S., that is ketchup, not blood, so don't freak out on me.

It's awesome and yet I fear for us all because just like the robot revolution and the invention of that game in Tron, this is probably going to change all our lives forever and possibly lead to the end of civilization.

But really, who wants civilization if you can't have fried bread, eggs and cheese all in one package?

Tacos from a truck.... but not

So, every time I complain about the Mexican food around here, someone goes: "You should try the Taco Truck!" and I go: "I'm not into drugs."

But really, I have no problem with foods served out of trucks and/or trailers, it's just that this one actually uses its wheels and drives around town. Which means that no one can tell me where it is right now, they can only tell me where it was that one time or where they've heard it goes often, and to me that sounds like one of those cool kid parties I heard about on Veronica Mars where you have to know the code and even if I happened upon it they'd recognize me as an undesirable and I wouldn't get any tacos.

Lo and behold, however, the "taco truck" of Nashville also has a permanent, brick-and-mortar location and is actually called "Mas Tacos" (that link is to their Twitter account, by the way, which was almost a deal breaker for me, as I prefer not to Twit in any way). So, Houseboy and I braved the Saturday traffic through downtown and over the river and picked up some tacos:

My selection: fried Tilapia with a dill sauce, red cabbage, cilantro and some other stuff.

YUM!! The picture of Houseboy's didn't turn out as well, but he got the breakfast taco with chorizo, and seconded my "YUM!"

So, I have joined the chorus. If you're in the Nashville area, and you have any idea what Mexican food is supposed to taste like, I suggest you head to the taco truck (or its more convenient building analog), bypassing all other tempting options that will most likely feature Queso Sauce.

Hockey in Tennessee

So last night for my birthday Houseboy took me out to see the Wild play the Predators, and I talk more about the sportsy part of that here. The most important thing that happened that YOU should know about, though, is this:

That is nachos topped with barbecue sauce and chicken. And what's great about it is that 1) they smoosh all the chicken together in the center so that vegetarians can share it with their omnivore husbands and have reasonable belief that no flesh will touch their gullet, and 2) turns out that nacho cheese (or "queso cheese" as they call it here) and slightly spicy mostly sweet dark barbecue sauce go together reallyreallyreally well.

MMMMMMMMMMMM.

Volunteer Fail

So, in honor of my birthday I volunteered to go help build cots for homeless dogs at a shelter in Madison, Tennessee because that seemed like a safe way to help without accidentally bringing home 12 dogs and thus beginning my inevitable decline into animal hoarding. I woke up this morning and there were about four snowflakes in the air, and so Houseboy and I joked about how maybe they would cancel. You know where this is going, of course. We drive out there and stand around for about 5 minutes trying to figure out where to go before finally the barking dogs roused a man in sweatpants and Crocs* who informs me that they cancelled due to the weather, seeing as how it is so cold. From that I gathered that they intended to do this work outdoors, which brought up the question: which was more of a Southern moment, that they planned a four hour outdoor project in January**, or that they cancelled it when the temperatures dropped below 40 degrees?

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* Totally not judging, if you run a dog shelter you should wear what's comfortable, I'm just fleshing out the story, you know.

** Not that us Northerners won't do the same:

Exponentially Older

It doesn't happen that often, but this birthday I actually felt my age coming. Last night I went to bed with a shoulder pain, so I put a heating pad on it. After a little while it was still uncomfortable, so I lifted my head up to adjust the heating pad, and the pain in my shoulder shot out in every direction kind of like when you're in a water balloon fight and you squeeze the balloon too hard and there's a flaw in the plastic and it explodes all over you and then the water balloon fight is no fun anymore, except in this case the water is pain and so it was never fun in the first place. Anyway, now I feel like a very old person because moving hurts and I walk hunched over. Even Denise Austin yoga couldn't solve it. However, it did make for a good beginning to my birthday since I decided to take this 15 year old VHS tape and finally dub it onto DVD (just in time for DVDs to go completely out of vogue... another sign I'm old), and it turns out that after the credits there is an advertisement for all the other Denise Austin workout tapes, in which she wears pastel unitards and steps rhythmically to some very late 80s / early 90s bowchickawahhh music. That was pretty awesome.

Also awesome were the scones and tea that Houseboy made for my birthday breakfast, which looked just like these, but with butterscotch chips in them! Happy birthday to me!

Moving day!

So, I got the new "Fancy Pants" blog all set up and moved all the so-called fashion entries over there:

http://notastylist.blogspot.com/

Check it out!

In other news, who saw How I Met Your Mother last night? I totally didn't notice the numbers thing (I only wondered why they kept showing close-ups of props) until Houseboy pointed it out, but this person managed to even get screenshots of each of them: http://himymcountdown.tumblr.com/. Pretty awesome.

I also read books

So, in addition to watching much tv, I also managed to read a couple books over my break, most particularly this one, which was a present from Hedgehog:

I'm sure I've written about an Isabel Allende novel before, since I lovelovelove her, and her books are the kind where you might actually learn something, or at least you will if you know practically nothing about what she's writing about, like I do. This one is about Haiti and a little about Cuba and also about New Orleans, all in the late 18th and early 19th century, and the only historical thing I actually knew going in was that at some point there would be something called the Louisiana Purchase, which is what made most of Minnesota part of the United States, so there's that. Because I'm really bad at history and stopped paying attention to it sometime in Junior High, it had never exactly occurred to me that lots of people were living in those areas at that time, and not everyone was necessarily happy about it. Imagine that. Some people would actually rather be French.

Anyway, that's not at all the point of the book, just a little aside that makes me sounds stupid, which I know you all like. The point of the book is more or less about freedom and humanity, or lack thereof and of course about race and what defines it and what it means and all that. It's very very good and so you should take my recommendation for once and go read it.

Yes, I watch television

In honor of trying to return to posting about things that are not clothing-related, I thought I'd tell you about all the TV I've been watching recently. We figured out how to connect our Wii to the Netflix, so we have been having self-imposed marathons of TV shows we weren't cool enough to watch most of the first time around, like Pushing Daisies, The Guild, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and now Dollhouse.

Pushing Daisies was just my kind of weird and bizarre, but I can also see why it got cancelled after only one midseason-replacement season and one strike-shortened season. By the end of it, the repetition of the "I'm sorry I got mad at you, it's just that I'm sad that no one knows I'm alive, but I'm happy you made me alive again, even though it means you can never touch me or I'll die again" and the "I understand why you're sad and I hope you're not upset that I made you alive again because I'm not even though I can never touch you or you'll die again" stuff got a little weary.

The Guild is a web series that started off just wretched, particularly in terms of the acting, which I suppose is to be expected from a web series, but actually did get better over the course of the show. Plus, I just love Felicia Day, because she is adorable and hilarious and altogether awesome.

We watched Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog over Thanksgiving, and it was amazing, as expected, but also terribly sad which I did not expect, but all-in-all reinforced the awesomeness of both Joss Whedon and Neil Patrick Harris and is definitely the best thing to come of the Writer's Strike, in my opinion.

Finally, we're now in the second season of Dollhouse, which we actually did watch some of in its first season back when it was on the air. I remember liking it then (again, Joss Whedon, how could I not?), but recognizing its flaws in terms of the pacing and the not-great acting of the dolls in their "doll state." Watching them all back-to-back definitely improved the pacing, and the "doll state" parts get fewer and further between, and also get more depth. Now the problem in the second season is that we watched the episode at the end of Season One that never aired, but was shown at ComicCon or something, and it puts a very different feel over everything that happens in Season Two, so it's much much darker. Actually, come to think of it, that's not a problem at all, it just makes it so I need to take more breaks between episodes or I descend into utter madness. You know... like that.

Happy New Year!

So, it finally occurred to me that perhaps the "Fancy Pants" project is not exactly in line with what my "loyal" "readers" might have come to expect from my infrequent and illogical blogging, and so I went ahead and started a whole new blog for that stuff: http://notastylist.blogspot.com/

I wanted to use http://fancypants.blogspot.com/, but of course that was taken, and even more of course, it was taken by someone who is afraid and threatened by the internet and was only using Blogger to stave off the inevitable advance of the machines, and luckily she clamped down on the "Fancy Pants" corner of the internet before they could use it against her, as you can tell by the fact that she has four blogs, all variations on "Fancy Pants," and only one of which has any content. Oh, also, the last time she posted was 10 years ago.

Ten years ago. How incredibly frightening is that... some part of my brain doesn't really acknowledge that the internet has been around that long, and suggests that I head into one of those tirades about how old I am and how quickly time moves and the two roads that diverged in the woods and how I should have taken the one that headed to Disney World, because I've never been there.

Anyway, as a result of starting that new blog and also continuing the folly that is a PhD program, you might not hear from me much at this spot, but I'll do my best to keep you updated on my inevitable descent into madness and how it is being staved off with macaroni and cheese...