Liver and onions and beer, oh my!

I've been having so many random and (to me) very interesting thoughts lately, I've decided just to do a sort of round-up of the ridiculous today. And since Blogger now seems to be accepting photo uploads again, you're in luck – there are pictures!

1. Liver and onions Every once in awhile when Mr. A is away for several days I take advantage of the opportunity to stink up the house with one of my favorite meals: liver and onions. He thinks it's disgusting, but I – and the dogs – beg (yes, they literally beg) to differ. It's delicious! I get the regular beef liver, not the pale and insipid-looking calves' liver, which lacks the requisite deeply, bloody and oh-so-livery flavor we love.

Tonight while enjoying this classic dish (if liver and onions can be called a dish, and why can't it? It can!) I realized one reason why people might not realize how glorious it really is. The name is all wrong. If you make it like the name says – plain old liver, with plain old onions – it really is nothing special. What it should be called instead is "liver and onions and ketchup." It's the ketchup that makes it magic. Add on top of that a cold non-alcoholic lite beer, drunk straight from the bottle, and you have a meal fit for kings, dogs and frequently anemic red-haired and carb-restricted diabetics with a few pounds left to lose. (No onions for the dogs, of course – onions are toxic to canines!)

2. Summer reading. Someone asked what I've been reading lately and so I will report that I'm back to Alice Munro, whose oeuvre I still haven't exhausted even though I guess she's not putting out much new material lately (or possibly at all). Right now I'm reading a story collection called "The Love of a Good Woman," which contains the following very arresting paragraph:

There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can't tell such people things, it is too disruptive ... It used to be older people who claimed this protection from you, but now it seemed more and more to be younger people, and someone like Eve had to try not to reveal how she was stranded in between. Her whole life liable to be seen as some sort of unseemly thrashing around, a radical mistake.

At this point in the story the main character, Eve, has just returned her young grandchildren to her daughter after an afternoon of unintentional adventures during which what started out as a light-hearted and spontaneous turn off the road came very close (or felt like it might be about to come very close) to going horribly, hideously wrong. The sense of uneasiness, of having escaped something without being quite clear exactly what it was, the nebulous guilt and wondering if the grandchildren will mention it to their mother ....

Oh blah. You just have to read it. "Her whole life liable to be seen as some sort of unseemly thrashing around ..." A feeling, a vague worry I know so well.

3. TV yoga. I just learned that our cable package includes an on-demand channel that has a dozen or so occasionally updated yoga and Pilates programs you can watch whenever you want. Most of them are only about ten minutes long, so I've been stringing them together into nice little custom workouts of varying lengths, to be performed on either end of my dogwalks, bike rides and other forms of exercise. I'm enjoying this very much.

4. More gardening. I got a sweet 100 tomato, a sugar baby watermelon and more of those tiny delicious Alpine strawberry plants. It's going to be a delicious summer.

5. Dog shave. I gave Tater a day off on Saturday to rest and recover from his trauma at the vet, and then on Sunday we gave him a bath and shaved him down. We took a whole shopping bag full of hair off him and he looks great – sleek, sweet and slippery as a seal. We found several foxtails already worked halfway under his skin, so our timing was perfect. Plus, every hair that ended up in that bag is a hair that will not end up on the floor. Or in my bed. Or between the pages of books, or on my t-shirt, or in the soup, or in any other place. Hooray! I do love his long silky beautiful hair (it was one of the reasons I picked him, and our next dog will have the same kind of hair – I'm addicted to it!), but it's nice for a few months out of the year to have a little break from cleaning it up all the time.

So here he is before the haircut, hiding next to the picnic table. Click for the big picture; you can actually see cookie we bribed him with, and the whites of his eyes as he glances at me over his shoulder as if to say, "Do we really have to do this TODAY?"

And here's the after, with a pile of hair and a pair of scissors included for scale. It really is a great big pile of hair, right?

6. American Idol. Speaking of addiction – I got hooked on this show last year totally by chance, and this year I've been mesmerized by it all over again. It's on in the background right now (I can't stand to actually watch the whole thing, I just love to follow the action) and in just a few minutes, maybe even before I finish writing this post, they will announce the winner for this year. It's been especially interesting to me this year because there were two Mormon contestants, and now it looks like one of them is going to win. If he does, I wonder what he'll do in two years when it's time to go on his mission?

7. Blueberry season. Just as in winter there is a time when I start checking the produce aisle almost every day to see if the satsumas are in yet, in summer there's a time when I start looking for local blueberries. Well, today was the day! They're back, and they're only a buck and change for the little package – not eight dollars like the ones from Chile were just a couple of months ago (not that I ever buy berries out of season, of course – that would be so un-green of me).

8. Silver clogs. Another obsession I haven't quite decided to satisfy yet ... I'm still just fantasizing over pictures online.

For example, these. I love the little flowers and have been intensely tempted to get them even though the closest they have to my size is about two sizes too big. Maybe with socks ...?

Or these. I love the high heel, and the fact that the strap can be worn in two different positions – over the top, or back behind the heel. Plus, they're Swedish!

I have to give props to Julie here as the fabulous person who got me started on the metallic clogs thing, with this picture (the second one down – click it for the big version in which the shoes are clearly visible) in one of her Monday fashion posts. I highly recommend these posts if you're not already aware of them; we chicks-in-the-sticks really rely on our friends on the ground in hip places to keep us informed of what's being worn in the upper echelons of real street fashion and Writermama never fails to deliver in this regard. Thanks, Julie!

Realistically, silver shoes are something I will probably end up Not getting. I know myself well enough to know that if I did get them, that would be about all I'd do with them – get them, but not wear them. Silver is a color I love to look at, but not to wear. Those second ones come in metallic bronze so I might get those, though my worry is that they'll be 1) too narrow, 2) too uncomfortable, or 3) both.

Still, that's what returns are for, right?