ammogirl

I learned two lessons in regards to sleepovers last night. One, don’t try out a fancy new recipe when there is a girl over that you know doesn’t even like pizza; and two, singing a rousing version of 4 Non Blondes “What’s Up” during karaoke induces very dramatic (and unnecessary, really, I’m not THAT bad) eye-rolling and face-covering in my daughter. Have I really entered the stage of embarrassing parent? Really? How thrilling! I never thought I’d get to this point, you know? I mean, I can remember like it was yesterday being in the 7th grade and fighting on the phone with Kari from the writing life about who David Broderick liked more. Now, I HAVE a 7th grader. God.
So the fancy new recipe I made last night was probably the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire life, ever. I stole it from my mom, who just recently got an entire new kitchen installed in her house and subsequently decided super fancy meals were most definitely in order. Anyway, I’m definitely not a cook. I’d LIKE to be a cook, and at one point of my life, even considered going to a Culinary Institute to be a pastry chef, but after researching, I realized you need this pesky thing called “creativity” to be any sort of chef, so I went to travel agent school instead. Do you want to take a guess at how that turned out?
Actually, the school itself went swimmingly, and I loved it, and holy crap could I ever fill out those airline tickets by hand. I interned with a local agency for awhile (read: did their filing) and then: the interviews. Or, “interview”. I went on one, and didn’t get hired, and got all pissy and childish and decided I never wanted to be a travel agent anyway, and went back to work at the tree nursery in Boring, Oregon. My job was color coding trees with paint, which entailed walking through hundreds upon thousands of saplings and determining what genus/variety they were, and then marking them with various different colors (two pink marks for Acer Silver, one red for Acer Red Sunset) so they could be inventoried at a later date. You guys. Saplings? All look the same. Whenever I went out to mark, my crew had to have one more color than every other crew: black. This was to cover up my erroneous markings, and you could always tell where I had been, because you would find row after row of black-marked trees. I, um, didn’t last long at that particular task. Instead, I went on to delivering saplings to the other farms the nursery owned throughout Oregon. THIS particular endeavor lasted until I totaled the company truck in an episode of mistaken right-of-ways. At this point, one would think I would’ve been fired, don’t you think? But no! Instead, I was put in charge of the potted tree divisions office and inventory operations. Well, I wasn’t officially in charge, but the girl I worked for did nothing but take credit for the stuff I did. You can ask my sister. She worked there too.
It was while working there that I experienced the most surreal moments of my life. I have sat here for the past ten minutes trying to think of just one that I could tell you, but I can’t think of one that wouldn’t require 87 pages of back story - there’s the biting dog, the catholic lesbian friend, the three Cherrys, the stalking, the awkward date moments, the Elusive Trout. Blues festivals in Portland. Sitting in the car for hours outside the Brightwood tavern while my two sisters sat inside and had beer after beer, because I wasn’t yet 21 and they were both really, really mean. I could go on…but I won’t. I’m not even sure why I started, actually, but we all know I’m quite fond of the ol’ tangent.
Anyway, so…the recipe. Penne pasta, sun-dried tomatoes, spinach, artichoke hearts, feta cheese, and pine nuts. Glorious. Seriously.

Tschuss!!