Asshole

organic and local, but still iron chefed

Let's talk about the food first, yeah? Last night, groom and I shared some organic wheat and butternut squash ravioli nestled in sage brown butter accompanied by a pile of vegetables roasted in the oven with basil from the garden and topped with a hint of grated parmesan cheese.

Doesn't that sound awesome?

Okay. Now I'm going to write the same thing again without the spin. Last night, I pulled an old container of freezer-burnt solid ravioli left over from this winter, walked down to the weed-infested herb garden to shoo our peeing dog away before cutting some sad basil and weird sage. Groom showed up with a box of vegetables from Blackie's in Auburn, and we played Iron Chef with whatever else we could find, including old and flaky cheese that we both sort of figured had to be parmesan or asiago or romano. It certainly couldn't have been cheddar...could it? Dinner was still good, but that's a far more honest depiction of how the night went.

Just as I suspected, a little bit of TLC with a heck of a lot of martini made my sore ankle right as rain again. By the end of my gin and wine fest, I was walking on my ankle like nobody's business. I asked Groom if he thought it felt better because I was walking it off and stretching it out. He answered me in one word: "Booze."

This morning, he went fishing while I slept off my...um...sore ankle.... By 9:00, however, I was good to go and I walked half a mile for him to pick me up at the old Phippsburg Center where there used to be a bustling shipyard but now it's just a bend in the road with a fantastic view of Squirrel Point Light.

As you can imagine, the old wharf is now a hump of rocks and seaweed. As I scrambled to meet Groom at the water, I pretended I was on a balance board as a way to embrace the "fun" and ignore the "terrifying."

Groom was holding a ladder at the end of the wharf, signaling me to climb down. The ladder was old, rusted, and pulling away from the seaweed-covered balance board rocks. This thing was rickety in 1920. Nope.

Instead of being gracious, I huffed off. What the hell, man?

I had huffed away for about two minutes before I realized, my biggest problem at that moment was that I couldn't comfortably board a boat for a beautiful day on the water.

I'm an asshole.

how can i be grumpy looking at this?

I did get on the boat eventually, but I insisted Groom pick me up at a town landing where the wharf is sound. We took a ride for lunch at Five Islands where I encountered my second inconvenience of the day. I order two grilled haddock sandwiches and they showed up fried. Can you even believe the insanity??

I temporarily forgot my private rule: If you order something one way, but it shows up in a more fattening and therefore more yummy way, you happily enjoy it as a gift of deliciousness. Order a mocha latte with skim milk and it shows up with whipped cream? Hallelujah. Ask for low-fat balsamic dressing and you get blue cheese? Yes please! Request unsweetened iced tea and it arrives like the sweet tea it wants to be? Thanks y'all!

(I have a similar liveable rule about assholes. If you encounter three assholes in a day? That means you're the asshole so change whatever it is you're doing. Sometimes I forget that too.)

So, I tried to put it all into perspective and chalked it up to my own tension that needed to work itself out. I was also grumpy because now my ankle was starting to swell up from my haughty, irrational walk back from the the old wharf and holy hell did it hurt. (And yes I recognize that I was complaining about my mildly swollen ankle to the man who had his leg rebuilt less than a year ago.) In the midst of this, I stressed to Groom that I had a hankering to drive up to my family's summer place in Damariscotta so could we please just go there? I've been itching to go up there for about a week.

Moments later, as we were docking the boat, I remembered that I needed to call my brother because it's his birthday and you know what my brother does on his birthday?

He comes up to Damariscotta with a handful of his fabulous friends. This year, he couldn't come up.

make way for the SS Fatass

I realize my craving for Damariscotta was really a craving to see him. Groom and I drove up to the house and, as he slept off his early morning of fishing, I paddled around the lake in my sister's kayak (thanks May for leaving those about for us to use) for an hour to get my "no ankles required" daily activity in. It was windy as frig out there and I had no rudder. At one point, I was like, "Okay. Use your core, swivel with the hips. Ferry ferry ferry....annnd...where's the nearest lee so I can turn the F around."

p & me dancing like white people at my wedding

I would like to point out, my brother who is celebrating his birthday today is the same brother who likes to remind me, when I complain about being stuck at home because my car broke down, "Are you talking about your four-bedroom home on the water with the big field? Is that where you're stuck because your Mercedes broke down?"

Happy birthday, Paully. I won't mention the poorly placed electrical outlet in your penthouse condo overlooking the CN Tower in Toronto, nor will I mention how you had to wait forever for a BMW so you got an Audi instead.

Oops. I just did.