Salty Potatos

Jen and I for the first time and my entire family over for dinner, which was me, my mom, my little sister Marti, and my older sister Marin. Marin is five months pregnant, my mother just has to put her dog (our dog) down because she had cancer, her aunt, 103, is in the hospital with no hope of returning to her assistant living car facility, her brother most likely has alzheimer's or some form of dementia, his son, my mother's god son, my cousin, recently died of a heroin overdose. So needless to say, things could be better, however my sister is having a little girl, which is the ray of sunshine in this somewhat bleak year. That is just what is going on with my mom, I am not talking about my back, tooth, car, Jen's family, brother, friends, it is all really trying. In my family when we are all at each others through and when things are the crappiest we do the only logical thing, have a family dinner. My mother and sisters were all at each others throat while they were waiting for 3 hours before we were ready to have them over for dinner. I am not sure exactly what happened, but around 5:30pm a 1/2 hour before they were all supposed to be there I got a call from my mother, who was at the grocery store near my house. Apparently my sisters left her there because she was being difficult. So I did what any good son would do, I picked her up, took her home, and gave her wine, a lot of wine, and she began to relax and we were all having a good time. For a brief moment in this dark moment of our lives we were all having a good time, though there was still some tension left over from the days events. This was the first time I have ever had my entire family over for dinner, and obviously the first time for Jen. It is a little weird having them over to our place, which my sister owns, but we did the best we could. My mother wanted to take us all out to dinner so we wouldn't be troubled. Marin wanted us to do this, our first dinner, she knew that we needed to, and she was right. I made my mediterranean chicken. Jen made the appetizers, salads, bread (she outsourced this to Marti only to have her burn the first batch, o - how Clark over her), and potatoes. Jen makes the best potatoes ever. I was happy to buy all the stuff for these potatoes, which was a good 50% of the dinner cost. (I already had the chicken and other stuff). Upon tasting the potatoes Jen noticed they were too salty, this would not do. Now my family loves salt, my brother in law will not have popcorn with Marin because she dumps a load of salt on them. This is who we are, and we all have low blood pressure, odd. Jen, getting nervous about the shape of the potatoes decides to do something about it, and not clearing it with me first. See this is the biggest obstacle with Jen's cooking. She is so good at it when she doesn't impulsively do something really really stupid. So, the potatoes are too salty, what do you do with salty potatoes drenched in olive oil? Put some more potatoes in there to absorb it? Ask me if my family would mind? Not Jen. Jen decides that the best thing to do for salty potatoes was too... Pour water on them. What do you do when you eat salty food, get thirst, so you drink water. Makes sense? Not to us, but Jen this was the best solution. It didn't work. The potatoes were still salty. Jen thinks, "Hmmm, I didn't put enough water in them, I will put more." And she does. So now we have salty and soggy potatoes. Jen claims that her plan was to wash the salt way and have it evaporate, never mind the olive oil or where the salty water was going to go, this was just not a good idea. However, this idea, made perfect sense to Jennifer, and she will still defend it citing salt in the air near the beach and how she was rinsing the potatoes, and will not admit that this was another one of her bad cooking ideas. She is learning, I give her that, and I can't help but think that these innocent fixes to problems based solely on Jen's unique logic is what I love most about her.

Missing Spatula

So we were wondering where our spatula went. Jen was obsessed with finding it right then and there. I have to admit that I was pretty curious too. She opened up the drawer in which the spatula was supposed to be there. She pointed right where the spatula was supposed to be and said, "It is supposed to be right th..." Then she noticed that she was pointing directly at the spatula. This is almost as funny as the time that she brought over a bag of holy water, well there was a bottle in the bag, that leaked. She held up the bag of holy water and started saying, "Fucking A- Fucking A"

Mucking up computers

People that no me this does not come as a big surprise, especially my dear friend who was with me when I bought our first Pentium computer, I tend to do stuff that makes computers, for lack of a better phrase, not work. I do this probably once a quarter, I delete something or install something that i shouldn't have and in the processes of trying to correct my mistakes I end up making the computer simply not work.

My latest is removing some codecs on my computer which made the system unable to play any music, Itunes will not load, uninstall, or reinstall. My video is gone, can't listen to mp3's, and what I did is not covered by the automatic correction ability of system restore, which blows.

Now I have become quite good at fucking up my computer so instead of a week to rebuild the machine I can do it in a few hours. Now it was a challenge explaining this to Jen, which I just set up her own Itunes, system profile, and generally made it like she had her own computer. She was pleased, unfortunately, I destroyed all that through 10 sec. of bad judgment. I tried to explain to her that the computer is not working, and I indeed messed something up, and when I get the time I will fix it.

"What do you mean?"
"Well I messed, looking back on it I really should not have uninstalled that."
"But Itunes doesn't work"
"yes, I know, my bad, I made it so the computer doesn't know how to play audio or video"
"why doesn't my mp3's work?"
"Well, I kind of screwed up the computer and I need to re-image it."
"So are all my mp3's gone?"
"No, see I am quite good at this and I know how to put data on a computer, so in the event that I do something like this it is easier to put back together."
"Why did you do this?"
"Yea, that was pretty stupid of me, trying to uninstall codecs, oops"
"But the computer doesn't work."
"Yea, just to warn you I do this quite a bit."

Day 15

It has been fifteen days since Jen has moved in. Every night she is at her mothers getting more stuff. Her closets are overflowed with more clothes than I have owned in my entire life. The living room looks great, I am really happy with that, but the dinning room has all her stuff in it and there is just enough space to eat. Mind you this is not a small dinning room, it is rather large. She had made no progress on cleaning it today, we will see about tomorrow. I tried to put some of it away, but now every time I get close she yells at me. I try to have faith that she will eventually do it, but I think it will have to be a day that I am very motivated to keep her on task. We will see. I have $1000.00 save up for a ring.

Shrimp Sauce

The other day Jen when to the grocery store on her own, this in retrospect was a mistake she should never again go alone. Now you might think this is me being controlling, but in reality we have a very tight budget and can no longer afford what Jen thinks we need, mainly because to her it is "yummy." Some of what she spent the $120.00 on was useful, we needed Bisquick and peanut butter, toilet paper (to Jen 20 rolls is not enough), but when she made that one purchase that now, two days later I still can't comprehend. She bought, shrimp sauce. WTF? Did she get shrimp, no, does she plan to get shrimp, some day, have I ever seen her eat shrimp, no, but it is yummy. Now I hate shrimp almost as much as I hate hippies, so I know I don't plan on cooking it. Plus, good shrimp is between 8-11 dollars a pound. We can't afford that stuff. "But its yummy and I might want it." She that is Jen's MO, she loves to buy stuff that is cute or yummy that she might need some day and feels if she doesn't buy it right then and there it will be gone for ever and she will be doomed to search the Earth wanting what she can't have. This is my life now. It would piss me off if it wasn't so damn funny.

24

Unfortunate timing from my friends girlfriend I am force to wait a whole day to watch 24. Since Jen is a fan of the show I boot her out at 20 min to 9:00 so she can watch the show at her mom's place . I will not have 24 going on at our place when I can't watch it. That is just too much for me to handle. I tell Jen that she cannot mention even seeing the show much less tell me about what actually happened.

She couldn't resist.

She tries to tell me about something about the show and I wouldn't let her. Dead asleep I remember shouting "DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE SHOW" now this should only be said no more than three times. Jen does not like taking requests much less orders especially when the order is for her to be quite. I spend 10 minutes with my hands over my ears begging her not to say anything. See with Jen, telling her to be quite is much like asking her to turn down a tank top at 90% off, just ain't happening.

The lonesome bla conversation

Jen is trying to get my attention. She asked me something and is now talking to herself in the kitchen. I guess I should go and talk to her, this could get a little disturbing, of course it is interesting the bla conversations that she can have with herself.
“So bla, do you blab la, hmm they went to Old Navy and bla.’” Ok I am going.
(I went to go an tease Jen)
That made her happy; she should be quite for about 3 minutes before new stunt is pulled.
Literally 5 minutes, I am not even going to adjust to make it appear that I was right. Jen is now in a full blown “bla-bla” which is coming right after she was trying to get my attention and it didn’t work. I can only assume that Jen is in the bedroom not the dining room because she found something that needs to be done more than getting the dining room put together, which is what she promised.
Haha- Jen instead of cleaning the dining room felt the need to make sure that there was an equal amount of toilet paper between the two bathrooms. I guess the phrase, “there is nothing more important that the living room means just that, except if there are 4 rolls of toilet paper in one bathroom and six in the other, we can’t have that can we?