egghead23's world

15 Great Movies and One Mini-Series to Watch During Memorial Day Weekend

egghead23 — Sat, 26 May 2012 01:56:18 +0000

1. Saving Private Ryan

2. Platoon

Believe it or not, Charlie Sheen was once a serious actor.

3. Stalag 17

4. Full Metal Jacket

5. The Deer Hunter

6. Apocolypse Now

7. Glory

8. Empire of the Sun

9. Casablanca

10. M*A*S*H

11. The Hurt Locker

12. Black Hawk Down

13. A Midnight Clear

14. A Very Long Engagement

15. The Red Badge of Courage

AND The Mini-Series:

Band of Brothers (Big surprise, but it is an awesome series. I mean, I’m a girl, and I think it’s awesome.)

A Review of The Black Keys Concert, Ovation Hall, Atlantic City, May 19, 2012

egghead23 — Mon, 21 May 2012 02:39:35 +0000

From my other blog, Practice What You Pinterest:

Living the Dream with The Black Keys.

Caine’s Arcade

egghead23 — Sat, 19 May 2012 02:58:11 +0000

Here’s a great story that I heard about this week:

How cool is that??

Battleship (in Theaters May 18): The Complete Original Screenplay

egghead23 — Fri, 18 May 2012 02:40:29 +0000

Reblogged from japecake:

DRAMATIS PERSONAE Tyler Brody Tyler’s Mom

INTERIOR: TYLER’S BASEMENT TYLER and BRODY sit cross-legged on a worn shag rug

TYLER A-7.

BRODY Miss! F-4.

TYLER Miss! B-7.

BRODY Miss! J-10.

TYLER Miss! C-7.

BRODY Miss! A-4.

TYLER Miss! D-7.

Plastic-Eating Fungi Found in the Amazon May Solve World’s Waste Problem

egghead23 — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:36:22 +0000

Plastic-Eating Fungi Found in the Amazon May Solve World’s Waste Problem.

How cool would that be??

A Shout Out for My New Blog: Practice What You Pinterest

egghead23 — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:14:27 +0000

While this is a place I will always reserve for my adventures in parenting and life in general, I have decided to start a new blog devoted to cooking and crafting: Practice What You Pinterest. Hope you enjoy it!

Pintrest in Practice (Brown Sugar Balsamic Pork Tenderloin)

egghead23 — Wed, 02 May 2012 16:10:10 +0000

In the last month or so, I, like many others, have become swept up in Pintrest. It’s a great place for sharing craft ideas, recipes, and other things. I like pinning photos that grab my eye as well. In short, it’s my new favorite Time Burglar.

Anyway, I have been trying a few of the recipes, with varying success, and thought I would start to share some of those experiences here.

Last night I made a delicious Brown Sugar Balsamic Pork Tenderloin, whose recipe called for a crock pot. What could be easier, right? The photo on Pintrest looks like this:

So, as the recipe called for, I cooked the tenderloin in my crock pot for about eight hours. Then I made the sauce, on the stove, and it thickened nicely in a short period of time. As I went to brush the tenderloin with the sauce, things got a little more challenging. First of all, there was still water in the crock pot, so I wasn’t sure how that was going to affect the flavor of the dish.

I also like pork tenderloin to be a little crispy on the outside (grilled outside is my favorite way to make it), so I decided to take it out of the crock pot to brown it in an electric pan for a few minutes while the sauce soaked in and glazed the meat.

This is where I ran into another logistical problem because after all that time in the crock pot, the meat was so tender that it pretty much fell apart. What went into the crock pot as two tenderloins came out as four fragile pieces. But they browned nicely in the pan, and the glaze was delicious.

My only problem was that the meat came out so stringy that it wasn’t easy to slice at all. We ended up putting what amounted at that point to pulled pork into buns and eating sandwiches instead of the nice sophisticated presentation I had planned in my head. Also, after the 8 hours in the crock pot plus time in the pan, the meat was a little dry.

I would make this recipe again, since the glaze was so yummy, but I think I would cook the tenderloin in a more traditional way, either on the grill or in the oven, and then just coat it with the glaze toward the end.

Two great questions from my six-year-old

egghead23 — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 19:03:32 +0000

The Princess came up with two great ones today. First she asked me if they had shoes when God was born. That was her focus: the shoes.

And then, because she can read now, she read the street signs when we were driving in the city, and she asked, “One way to where?”

Another old snapshot…

egghead23 — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:04:44 +0000

I am cleaning out my inbox, and I found some old memories…

June, 2008

(We belonged to a pool that summer. It was like a little party club. There was a main clubhouse there with changing rooms, a kitchen, and a little playroom with toys for the kids. Edison was 8, Clooney 4 1/2, and The Princess was almost 3.)

Yesterday I took the kids to a play date at a pool. When it was time to leave, Clooney totally melted down. People were offering condolences, words of comfort to me. I wasn’t too flustered. I just kept

Clooney and Edison under the sprinkler. June 2008

talking to him calmly while herding him inside. He’s going through a phase. I got him into the changing room and calmed him down a bit before realizing that I had left Edison’s underwear in my bag back out at the pool. I ran out to get it, leaving them in the otherwise empty changing room for what could not have been more than 30 seconds. As I came back, I saw Clooney, doing a full-circle streak-show, out the changing room door, through the toy room to the kitchen, and back out through that door to the patio. Got him corralled and back into the changing room, came through the door, and there’s Edison, BUCK NAKED riding the back of this rubber hippity-hop animal thing; The Princess was cheering him on. And the hippity hop wasn’t the only thing that was bouncing, if you know what I mean.

Insane. Luckily no one else saw that, but if they did, they’d have to burn the hippity hop.

Confirming, once again, it’s me

egghead23 — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:10:56 +0000

So, I did get Confirmed at the Easter Vigil Mass on Saturday night. Manfrengensen was my sponsor, and we were kind of worried that it was going to be long and laborious, but it wasn’t at all. In fact, it was quite lovely.

My in-laws came over to watch the kids, and Manfrengensen presented me with a gift; a lovely rosary, because he knew I had been wanting one, especially one that wasn’t too flashy, like the one he has.

I spent Saturday afternoon making cookies, figuring I would bring a small sample of them for the Deacon to say thank you for taking the time to prep me for the Sacrament, because that’s how I roll. I made some butter cookies, and on some of those, I put Butterbeer frosting. Then I also made biscotti, and some of those were covered in white chocolate. Then, I put them in a nice little box with a cellophane window on the lid from the craft store. It was all very Martha Stewarty. Even she would have been proud of me, I think.

We got to the church a little before eight o’clock and took our seats near the front. The other couple from my nights training at the Deacon’s house were there, and I actually felt my heart soften for them. The girl was really nervous. Her fiance hugged me as a greeting. I was kind of surprised, but I went with it.

Then the Deacon came over, shook our hands, and brought us up to introduce us to the Monsignor. I love the Monsignor. He’s an old man, and he can talk…boy, can he talk…sometimes, when he’s reading the homily, he’ll look up and go rogue, and if it’s not written there, if he’s improvising, it can get kind of comical because he just goes on and on, but it’s usually in a funny kind of way. And another funny thing is that the congregation never seems to get his jokes. Manfrengensen and I have a theory that the Monsignor was quite the card in the seminary. But of course now, everyone thinks he’s serious, and they don’t know whether to laugh. It used to kind of bug me that he’d go on like that, but again, my heart has softened, and he is just a sweet old guy. I mean, he doesn’t have a mean vein in his body. Sure, he’s like Dagwood Bumstead, but like I said, totally sweet.

So, the Deacon brought us up to the front of the church and introduced us (making his usual mistake of calling me Kathy…which is not my name..despite my correcting him on past occasions and the two of us even sharing a laugh about it), and I was holding the cookies in my left hand as I shook the Monsignor’s with my right. The whole time this was going on, the Monsignor’s eyes were on the cookies. Nice to meet you, nice to meet you, etc, but I could tell that what he was really thinking was, “Are those for me?” and kind of hopefully too.

Like I said, he’s a sweet old guy, but he never remembers me. Doesn’t remember that I sat next to him at my sister-in-law’s rehearsal dinner, or that he’s baptised all three of my kids and come to the reception after. Has no memory of the occasions when I have said hello, asked how his holiday or his weekend was, introducing myself anew each time. But whatever, he’s Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy, and the more I embrace that fact, the more I kind of love the guy.

So anyway, the Mass was very nice. It was the Vigil, so it was long, but it wasn’t bad. In fact, it was kind of beautiful with the lighting and the choir and all. After I’d been Confirmed, I actually felt kind of emotional, which was a feeling I hadn’t expected to have. I felt complete. I had never expected it to mean something to me, but it did. And I think the fact that I chose to do this, rather than having it just be what I was expected to do at the age of 13 or whatever made it a more meaningful experience for me.

Anyway, it was all nice, but you know all weekend, I was haunted by the Monsignor’s disappointed expression when I handed the cookies over to the Deacon. I felt guilty, especially since I had seen the Monsignor buying Girl Scout cookies last month, pulling his wallet from under his vestments after Mass, out in the front courtyard there, picking his favorites from the piles on the card table the girls and their den mother had set up. I didn’t actually see which cookies he chose, but I’m guessing he’s a Do-Si-Do man. I’ve seen him at the little grocery shop near the church, picking up his Hagen Daz. I know the old man has a sweet tooth. And I bet not too many people think to bring him some homemade cookies on a regular basis. So, I put a box together, and on Monday, I stopped by the rectory to drop it off.

I rang the bell and waited, and after a minute or two, he came to the door and let me in.

“Good morning, Monsignor,” I said. I felt nervous for some reason. I didn’t want to intrude on his day, just wanted to stop by to show my appreciation. Show that I was thinking of him. I felt embarrassed that I hadn’t thought to bring him cookies in the first place, so I kind of spoke quickly and deferentially. “I made some cookies on Saturday for the Deacon, and I don’t know what I was thinking, but I thought you might like some as well, so I brought you some today.”

He nodded and said, “Thank you, thank you.”

And I was smiling.

Then he said with no hint of recollection whatsoever, “And you are?”

The dude had no memory of me from 36 hours earlier! It all came back to him once I told him my name (even though I didn’t say I was Kathy) and he congratulated me, took the cookies, and I stepped back outside.

That guy cracks me up.