I’ve been meaning to introduce you to Steve for a while now.
Steve the Beeve.
Steve lives in the garage freezer. Well. Not lives, really.
The above actually represents a little over 3/4 what we started with, plus some strawberry freezer jam I was too lazy to move before snapping the pic. The beef on the right goes down about another foot to the bottom of the chest.
As you might remember we’ve been trying to learn more about our food sources for the last couple of years, and have been convinced for some time that grass fed and pastured meats, and wild caught seafood are the healthiest protein sources available for our family. We buy pastured poultry and eggs whenever possible and organic milk and wild caught seafood always.We love eating this way and yes, we do eat more meatless meals to absorb the cost more effectively.
We’ve been talking about buying a quarter or a half of a grassfed steer for several years and got around to taking the plunge a few months ago. The folks at Black Angus Cattle Company in Plant City Florida had just completed a harvest when I reached out to ask what their availability might be, and they had a quarter left in the freezer that wasn’t spoken for… on the small side.
In other words, for a small family who eats beef once a week at the most, he was perfect.
Plant City is only about an hour from us in light traffic, and next time we’ll plan to go when there IS only light traffic. As it was I knew we were going to be sitting on the asphalt for a while so I planned a stop at Dinosaur World before filling our coolers with grassfed goodness and heading home again.
I’ve already posted this but…. you know. Why wouldn’t I put it up again? I mean, really?
Exactly.
Once we’d had our share of dinosaur fun we made our way downtown and met up with Dodie. Besides being so pleasant to work with she was an enthusiastic ambassador of the benefits of grassfed. She made me feel a lot more comfortable stroking that $500 check and I’m pleased to say we haven’t regretted it for a second.
The color of the meat was the first difference I noticed when we started cooking with the grassfed beef. I’ve never seen meat as richly colored, it’s almost purple really. And the smell as it cooks caught me by surprise as well. Usually I’m not a fan of cooking meat on the stove because it makes my house smell like a fast food joint, but this is different. The aroma is much richer and almost sweeter. It doesn’t smell greasy at all.
And it tastes awesome.
Imagine my relief last week when it was announced that our grocer of preference was included in the recent E. Coli recall. With Steve in the house, that recall’s just one less thing for me to worry about.
On the menu for this week, a Mongolian Beef recipe I found on Pinterest.
I hardly ever do WW but I had to share this photo and there’s not too many words to go with it.
A couple of months ago the HOA sent us a lovely letter stating that they’d prefer our front yard have more grass on top of the dirt. However since we can’t afford to re-sod our entire corner lot on 30 days notice (seriously HOA lady? Put the pipe down.) we put down some seed and then some compost to help it along.
People of the internet, I give you:
BROCOLLI IN THE FRONT YARD
Oh. And I’m not pulling them up. I’ll happily dig them up and transplant them when the fall garden goes in in a few weeks, but I’m not pulling them up.
I kinda can’t wait for the HOA to notice.
So last week all I wrote about was BlogHer and Gee! Aren’t you so glad that’s over?
Well it is. Except for this one photo that I can’t help myself from sharing. This was the scene in my hotel room first thing in the morning on Pathfinder Day.
From left to right: Mandy, Erika (she’s dressed already. isn’t that adorable? I started referring to her as our Den Mother by the end of the trip, and she was the youngest in our room I think.) Beth Anne and Jenna.
That’s how bloggers wake up. Smartphones and laptops before coffee or showers.
So anyway, enough of that. Again.
We’ve been having rather a lot of fun around here since I got back home. I’ve been trying to do a better job of taking pics to prove that my kid is happy and doesn’t just watch tv all day and that I don’t suck at this whole stay-at-home-parent thing after all.
People, I got her to eat an apple. More accurately, she asked for a food she had heard about or seen some other child eating and I actually had it in the house. That and we’ve been using this line from Feeding Baby Green by Dr. Alan Greene about how she may not want to try a food now but most people like it when they grow up and someday she probably will too, and it totally worked. She asked for “an apple someday?” and I said “someday is today! here’s an apple!” and she tried it! We’ve repeated the performance once or twice, but it’s not a greatest hit. It’s the same basic story with yogurt. She always asks for it and when I give it to her 9 times out of ten it’s a reject. Still. I snapped this shot and then texted it to Topher and demanded my Mother Of The Year award. Apparently those are on back-order.
Did you know that these animals are all on an airplane? And that they’re about to jump out of it? But that it’s ok because they all have on parachutes? Well. All of those things are true. Thank you to that Curious George movie where the elephant jumps out of the airplane with the parachute because we’ve had hours and hours and hours of entertainment with this game.
This one time we went to Dinosaur World and while we walked around Piper went on and on about getting a soft blue cuddly dinosaur with a long neck from the gift shop and when we finally got to the gift shop she picked out this molded plastic triceratopsey guy. He’s currently co-starring in a small but popular production called “Dinosaurs and Babies” 3-4 times a week. It’s a classic tale of conflict, redemption and the beauty of friendship. The dinosaur gets really mad and bites the babies, who run away and cry to each other and get snuggles and boo boo kisses while the dinosaur has a time out. When he’s all done with his time out he comes back and gives them rides.
Who says stay at home parents get bored and lose touch with the real world? I’m telling you, I’ve never seen more shows in all my life.
Also making regular appearances: The Robot Family. There’s Daddy Robot, Mommy Robot, and Baby Robot. I currently build Duplo robots about 15 times a day. They used to just stand around and hold hands, and I only had to build them 2 or 3 times a day, but lately they’ve been going on some kind of river rafting trip in the end table drawer Brown Boat of Scary Tides so they’re requiring frequent rebuilds. I built a dog robot one day. Or at least I thought I did. It was rejected. That felt really good.
This one time, my Dad came to visit, and I made my friend Allison’s super yummy Quinoa Stuffed Peppers for dinner (with rice instead of Quinoa for Topher) but when I went to prep my peppers one of them had a spot. I excised the spot and then made a patch. Or a plug. We all sat around discussing for a while which one it was, but since this was also the night I googled “What is that dent in the space between your nostrils and your upper lip called?” so I could sound intelligent when I emailed my PHD cousin to tell her that her new baby and my Dad are philtum twins (you’re welcome) and that’s the way that they resemble each other that no one can seem to put their finger on, I did not retain the correct answer. But dinner was awesome.
This other time we thought Piper had her first ear infection ever so we decided to take her to the after hours, technically urgent care, pediatrician after Topher got home from work instead of going to the hassle of waking everyone up early so we could drop him at work and take the car when we didn’t have any other errands to do that day so we could get her started on medication sooner. The wait wasn’t long and we brought both Mommy and Baby Giraffe with us to pass the time playing “Baby Giraffe tries to climb a mountain by himself but needs to wait for mommy” on the exam table. But it turned out that she just had impacted ear wax and not an ear infection and therefore this photo represents a $50 ear bath/giraffe playdate.
So what’s new with you?
My good friend Liz, after reading a pre-BlogHer freak out email from me a few weeks ago compared the parties and meet ups I was describing as sounding very “Real Housewives” but without the hair pulling and the intentional drink throwing and husband stealing. I might say that this would not be an entirely inaccurate assessment but I don’t watch the show. It definitely sounds good. I only pulled one person’s hair that I can think of and she asked me to. It was part of the teaching of The Flip And Spray, which hopefully you already know.
Not you, Dad. Please don’t flip and spray.
Anyway, it really is a pretty glamorous few days, especially if you take advantage of some of the private party invitations which are actually not that hard to get if you know the right people, AKA my private Facebook Group of Awesome Chicks, which I can’t tell you any more about because I need to hoard that shit for next year, thankyouverymuch.
So the other night while attending one of these fabulous parties on a rooftop pooldeck I just happened to be chatting with Jill and as we discussed some of the more random swag we were encountering, she suggested I write about how conference attendees prioritize the offerings of the bags we’re forced fortunate enough to drag home with us.
There are a few options for how to haul your loot home but there may still be hard choices to make as you prioritize. Hopefully if you’ve never been before, this guide will help keep you from donating some pretty valuable and awesome stuff to your hotel room maid, who, while I’m sure is a very lovely person, is not who the event sponsors had in mind when they printed up all that stuff in the first place. Probably.
- Things to pack in your Carry On Bag:
- Your carry on is the bag of choice for any small and very valuable items that you don’t want to let out of your sight, or those INvaluable items that can be used to make your journey home more pleasant. My carry on this year contained 3 bags of cinnamon pita chips, some bandaids and a reusable BPA free water bottle. It also contained some fabulous photo booth snaps of me and my besties at various parties for me to cry over in the airplane.
Me, Mandy and Beth Anne
- If you’re likely to encounter angry children immediately upon your return home, consider adding some children’s toys to your carry on so you have something to throw at them. What you don’t want to do here is pack ALL the candidates for “stuff mommy brought you while she was away drinking cocktails and dressing cute and peeing by herself missing you sooooo much!!!!one!!!1″ in the checked baggage. This mistake will necessitate letting your kids lay eyes on their future Christmas and birthday gifts while you look for just!one!thing! that will keep them happy for ten minutes while you shower off the airplane stink and remember how to work your coffeepot.
- Remember all of those clothes you brought with you? You no longer have room for them in your checked luggage. Personally I learned from last year and this time around I brought a large, softsided, extremely empty duffel bag inside of my checked bag, with the grand plan of using it to bring the extras home in. It came home full of the stuff I owned before I went to California and most of the new, free, fabulosity ended up in the checked luggage.
- Things you should under no circumstances make the mistake of attempting to carry onto an aircraft:
- There’s a reason I specify children’s toys above. There are other toys available at this conference. If you know what I’m saying. It’s not that you have to take them, it’s just that they’re um, kind of hard to avoid. I mean if your maid did that great of a job, feel free to maybe leave one behind in lieu of a tip. But even if you do that you’ll probably still have a few to pack. Really. Just make sure you’re not that girl trying to bring the “personal massager” through security and getting pulled aside for the patdown and the bag emptying and the very very awkward questions by the grandfatherly TSA agent. It hasn’t happened to me. But I have seen it happen. Ladies, go ahead and check those personal items. Even if TSA sorts through your checked luggage at least you won’t have to watch it happen and explain to a perfect stranger not only what it is but why you have 3 of them. And also maybe a couple of that other kind. Depending on how you and your roomies divvied that up. Ahem.
- This would make a great place to remind you that personal lubricants DO count as a liquid and/or gel and therefore must be placed in the clear ziploc baggie with your toothpaste and lipgloss and sent through the scanner with all the other stuff. I’m not saying don’t carry this on. I’m saying don’t forget you’re carrying it on and forget to put it in the baggie, because that just makes that whole open the bag and ask awkward questions thing happen. Again.
- Corkscrews. Someone (I don’t remember who) gave out some corkscrews this year, which is nice (it would have been nicer to get that placed in our room Wednesday so we didn’t have to use 17 people to open a bottle of wine but whatever. I’m not complaining.) but again is not the kind of item you should be trying to carry on.
- Items to put in your checked baggage:
- Toys. All kinds. One of the problems you’ll almost definitely run into while packing is space. Even with this being my second year and having some idea what to expect, I underestimated how much room I needed. And I got less stuff this year than last year. One of the great ways to save space is to take everything, especially the toys out of their huge and ridiculous packaging. In our case, Piper will be 3 by the time I give her most of this and she’s not going to have a problem with the cardboard being missing. I’m personally more than happy to have left it all behind in San Diego, and even after stripping it all off I still had to repack 3 times and sit on my case to close it. If you think it’s going to creep your kid out, i suggest tissue paper and gift bags. Don’t take the packaging home, you need the room.
- Shoes that tried to kill you while you were there. I left mine in the checked bags, no need to carry those on as even if we crashed on the Lost island there was no way I was going to need them, whereas the jean jacket and pita chips in my Vera Bradley duffel would become pretty precious commodities.
- Things not to put in your checked baggage
- The travel pillow you got from the Tempur Pedic booth at the expo. Or the Tempur Pedic Sleep Mask you scored before the conference even started thanks to someone in your super awesome provate facebook group. If you do this you should be ashamed enough to tell the internet about it.
- The super cute paper cupcake liners you got from the Hostess With The Mostest Party. Smushville.
- Clean socks. Airplanes are cold, yo.
Stuff to ship is an easy one. It’s basically whatever is really really super awesome and you cannot for the love of holy things cram into any other baggage option. Or if you were me last year, almost everything. I left the con for a family vacation last year and had no other real options. It cost about a car payment and took almost 2 weeks to show up.
There’s another category. Every year so far (2. I know. Like I know anything) there’s been an item that I just don’t freaking get. I give you this year’s, “Really? What the hell is that?” swag item:
I did not go to the party at which full size, 1 lb loaves of gluten free bread were given out, but I heard about them. And I saw them. And I’m not ashamed to say I mocked them. Not as like a real thing. I get that gluten free is a thing. But it’s not THAT big of a thing and I heard that they gave it to everyone at the party (it was not a crunchy party. from what I understand, this item seemed to be a kind of random inclusion in this specific swag bag.) and my question is… why? What exactly did they think the majority of the recipients were going to do with that item when the time came to sort the swag? Do you check that? Do you carry it on? Do you make it your personal item and cram your handbag in your carryon? How many of these ended up in the hotel room trash cans after even the maids refused to take them? It’s not that i have a problem with gluten free (haters are gonna find me. I’m sorry.) because I DON’T. It’s my understanding that gluten allergies and sensitivities are real and also rather expensive to manage dietarily. Which should totally be a word. But isn’t. Whatever. It’s just that I wonder how many of the recipients were all “OMG! Finally! The free GF bread I’ve had my eye on!” and ran around trading their Eden Fantasys bags for everyone else’s bread loaves.
If you were that person, I want to meet you. Please bring the logic behind the bread swag with you when we meet up for water. Also bring the bread because I don’t know what to feed you. I’m sorry.
For the rest of you who attended, what did you leave behind this year?
Besides the bread, I mean.
So I have some more to say about BlogHer 2011. Apparently.
There were some definite low points and some seriously high points and I thought I’d share some of mine.
But not all. Because I don’t want to embarrass anyone, or make anyone feel bad. We all have our moments of social awkwardness or worse, and it’s entirely possible that I disappointed someone else with my own behavior, and it’s entirely probable it was unintentional.
Yes I said probable. I don’t actually have to like everyone. Neither do you.
Isn’t that neat?
Anyway I mentioned in my last post that I attended Pathfinder Day, which was new this year and held the day before the general session started. I attended both halves of the Your Blog As Life Changer track, with Gwen Bell and Karen Walrond. I’d read both of them in the past, often, and while I was somewhat familiar with their stories and backgrounds hearing them tell their stories out loud and in person had a huge impact on me. Karen’s story of realizing that just because she was really good at her job didn’t mean that she wasn’t allowed to try to do something she loved, really resonated with me. That’s basically what I decided when I left my own job earlier this year and her path of rebuilding her life in a way she’s still imagining and creating for herself was very inspiring.
Frankly, I thought I would be way more in tune with Gwen Bell than I turned out to be.
Which is actually kind of cool to realize, and I think she’d probably think so too, because she’s just cool like that.
Gwen is a really amazing person, and I definitely found her story very inspirational and moving, but I learned something really profound by listening to her; just because you find someone inspirational and awesome, it does not necessarily follow that you want their life.
Because I don’t.
It’s not that I don’t see the value in her lifestyle, it’s just that it’s not for me.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with how much I can learn from her.
This was a pretty awesome thing to learn. I think she’d agree.
I met a couple of people Thursday that I had been looking forward to meeting, people I talk to frequently online, who were so very obviously only interested in talking to “bigger” bloggers that it was completely off-putting to me and everyone else I know (including those bigger bloggers. nice how that worked out huh…?) that it became less of a disappointment and more of a bonding experience for everyone else.
Friday’s high point has to have been attending the Bill My Parents luncheon with some of my favorite bloggers, Liz, Kristen, Eden and most specifically for me, Alice. Because a friend (Jamie) of a friend (Mandy) had a connection to Alice in real life and was saving us seats (something I did not know ahead of time and I’m pleased to report only caused a slight panic attack, easily managed by stuffing the most amazing cheesecake I’ve ever encountered in my life into my mouth repeatedly) I ended up seated about 5 feet from the dias, facing away from the table and toward the speakers while trying to appear interested and intelligent while I ate salmon from a plate behind my head but not spitting food on myself or saying something stupid.
Which, obviously, didn’t really work.
At one point early in the talk Alice was so very obviously trying to reference something like that Mayan Calendar BS that predicts the end of the world as she explained her aversion to technology and I, literally front and center, in my fangirldom with my salmon yelled out something about “Skynet!” which she totally went with even though she basically immediately realized I was insane and not inside her brain like I thought I was.
Which was awesome on many levels, really, not the least of which was that I spent the better part of my afternoon in the expo hall imagining a Terminator/Mayan Calendar end of the world mash up that also simultaneously featured the Buffy The Vampire Slayer/Harry Potter sister-brother combo that regularly features in my end of the world imaginary mash ups. Buffy is Harry’s long lost big sister you see, but in my imagination James and Lily would have had to be older when they had her because otherwise it gets quite pervy, really.
(You’re welcome)
(This really is why no one reads this blog.)
(I’m so sorry.)
After the luncheon Jamie was super sweet and introduced me to Alice who I proceeded to try very hard not to terrify. I may even have succeeded as I never saw security coming for me even though she probably would have tried to call them when I wasn’t looking, if I’d ever not been looking which never happened because I was so very much RIGHT IN HER FACE with my salmon and dorky skynet references and whatnot from the time she sat down on the dias until she left the room.
In retrospect, I never once told Alice how much I enjoy her writing. And if I learned anything over this conference it’s that no matter how awesome you think a writer is, it’s never not cool for them to hear that someone loves their stuff. Tell people you love their stuff, go do it now. I’ll go email Alice. We’ll meet back here in a minute.
I did it. Did you do it? You should do it. It was only moderately uncomfortable but it felt good.
Ok so later, Friday was topped off with some cool parties at which I got to confirm that Jill is most definitely not scary and may in fact be the sweetest “big” blogger I’ve met. Also she totally inspired me to write a post about swag, which is coming later this week (What? I did zero blogher recaps really last year. Deal with it.)
Later we went to Sparklecorn and my friend Alena saved my life when I almost kind of sort of positively nearly fell backwards off the stage, then later told me she was afraid I wouldn’t like her offline, while we ate chicken fingers at 3 am in the hotel bar.
I’d say she was crazy to worry about that but, as I said above, I don’t actually like everybody. But I do like her.
Saturday was a cool day too, but very low key.
Sitting by the pool drinking bloody marys talking about opera and I don’t even know what the hell else with Andy from How To Be A Dad for what seemed like, and must have been, hours was pretty radtastic. And I went to a session that day and it was nice.
Really.
But truly, the weirdest/coolest thing that happened Saturday was at a party that night, when someone I didn’t know made a bee line for me across a crowded room to tell me she reads my blog and it doesn’t make her ill. I would link to her but my business cards are still in a jumbled insane mess. I guess that’s a low point…?
Meeting her was a super high point for me. Just sayin.
Sunday we left, and I may or may not have definitely cried a little bit in Mandy’s hair before she went through security and then gone to my own gate super early and skyped with my kid before she went to bed.
The 4.5 hour flight from Phoenix that got in at 5am Monday? Definitely a lowly lowly low point.
And seriously I’m sorry about that whole mayans/skynet/harry potter/buffy thing.
Except that I’m not, really. At all.
