Monday was my brother-in-law's birthday and we went out to dinner. We went to this place called something like Salyer's Old Country Kitchen in Portland and there is no reason to go to this place unless you are going to eat a big old slab of red meat.

Their gimmick is the 72 oz. steak (that's 4 1/2 pounds, in case you're slow at math) and if you eat the whole thing, you get it for free. You have to sit by yourself and you get one hour and you also have to eat a salad and some french fries and a celery stick or something -- there are specific regulations. In the lobby there are newspaper clippings showing some of the challengers and it made me lose my appetite. Do you know how big a 72 oz. steak is? Can you imagine digesting that thing? There is no way that can be good for you. There's also a tally board with how many people have tried and how many succeeded. I can't remember the exact numbers but I think it was like, 8 women out of 90 who tried and 150 men out of 600. And this is since the restaurant opened in 1946.

I had a piece of grilled halibut and some vegetables for my dinner, since as you may or may not know, I am not a red meat eater and can count on one hand how many times I've eated red meat in the last 10 years.

There is this song I like. I've heard it on the radio on a couple of times -- it's sort of a hip-hop kind of song and not what I normally like and not the usual fare on the radio stations I tend to listen to. I really want to know who the band is but can't figure out how to do that. Last time I heard the song I dutifully waited for the DJ to tell me but instead he told me about some great product I should buy or maybe it was some contest I could win, but it was not the name of the artist. I also tried going to cdnow.com and I went through several of the charts and clicked on the samples to see if I could find the band that way -- labor intensive and yielded nothing. Someone asked me how it goes and I said "do do-doo, do do-doo" which also didn't help -- I'm apparently not a gifted vocalist or even capable of humming in a way to make the song easily identify-able.

Yesterday I tried to make manapua and I'm no expert on the correct names and origins of this food but generally I think you could also call this hum bao or bao buns or steamed buns. I have never made this before or seen anyone make it, but my cousin Lisa told me she made them once and it was easy.

So I made the filling and that went fine. I didn't like the recipe's filling so I invented my own which was chicken and pressed tofu baked in homemade bbq sauce and then minced carrot, turnip, onion and mushroom sauteed in a bit of bbq sauce and mixed with the tofu/chicken.

Then I made the dough and that actually turned out okay too except it seemed to need an awful lot of flour and I had a tough time getting it all mixed in and the recipe said to be careful not to knead too much because you didn't want gluten to form.

I did all the steps, did the dough rise, rolled out my dough, filled em up and here's where the problem came in. The recipe guy said he steamed them in a bamboo steamer in his wok. Since I don't have a bamboo steamer or a wok, I decided to use the steamer insert in my soup pot. He said he did 12 at a time, two layers of six, but as I made mine I thought, "Hey, I can fit 12 at a time, in two layers," and I packed them all in elbow to elbow.

So when I did the rise, the buns all fused together into a giant lump of dough and then when I did the steam/cook part, the only part that cooked was the bottoms and along the sides. Then when I took them out, the individual buns were all stuck together and when I tried to separate them, the filling flew out. So bascially I ended up with a manapua dough cobbler. We threw them on a cookie sheet and baked them in the oven and salvaged them somewhat. But I was quite disappointed as this was a fairly labor intensive meal. At least I know what I did wrong for next time.

The person that cleaned our office quit in November, pretty suddenly, because we dared question the quality of her work. In the meantime, we've done without cleaning and I've emptied the trash and ran the vacuum and scrubbed the toilet bowl now and then.

If finally was getting to me because the office was getting grunge city so I went in on Sunday and did the full monty cleaning pam-style which means I move furniture and everything. I took some cds to listen to, including Limp Bizkit. We have a potty mouth jar -- .25 per word and we're pretty lenient and only charge for sh*t and f#ck and variations. Also, the boss is exempt by his own choice. We still have managed to accumulate over $30 and talk about using the funds for a trip to Disneyland.

Anyway, Fred Durst owes the potty mouth jar about $35 and I intend to collect.

I have a yahoo email account that I set up last summer before my trip in case I couldn't send mail from my regular account. I don't use it much, but that's not part of this story. The sign-in page has an advertisement and mine always was coming up as a weightloss thing and I started to get paranoid that maybe my computer was trying to tell me something. Yesterday I got an ad for eye makeup and later for some skin stuff so I guess my computer would like to see me with a more comprehensive beauty regime.

omigod. I haven't been here in almost a week. What happened?

It's not lack of thoughts. I can make an essay out of a library card application.

Yesterday on the radio as I was driving in to work they were talking about 80's bands which I consider myself to be pretty expert at. The guy was saying this stuff that was DEAD WRONG like David Coverdale used to sing for Rainbow, or possibly DIO. I think the only person that ever sang for Dio was Ronnie James Dio -- correct me if I'm wrong. Then he talked about John Waite and mentioned he was in The Babys (which I STILL own on vinyl) and a band called Modern English. doh! Someone called and corrected him. It was Bad English.

So one of the other DJs was just amazed at this guy's knowledge and he was like, "yeah, I know all about 80's bands." In the meantime, I am bursting a blood vessel screaming at the radio because these people are such bucket heads.

I don't understand this whole morning radio thing. Every single station needs to have their team of "funny" DJs who pull pranks and get people to call in a humiliate themselves or others. When I'm in my car and I'm driving to work, I want to hear traffic reports relevant to me and I want music.

Yesterday I got home from work and immediately jumped in -- making dinner, emptying the dishwasher, folding clean laundry. Basically doing 100 things at once because I wanted to try to watch Buffy that I'd taped.

So someone leans on the doorbell. DingdongDingdongDingdong. Normally I ignore the doorbell if I'm not expecting anyone, but I've been trying to change my ways to be more neighborly and what do I get for my efforts but the Bible thumpers and the Sierra Club. I believe there is no excuse for being rude so I try to be honest, but kind.

So Mr. Sierra Club starts his song and dance with the whole manipulation how all my neighbors have signed his clipboard and the Arctic and oil drilling and save the polar bears, etc. So I'm standing there, hungry and tired and he's talking to me like he suspects I don't understand English. I am politely listening and then he asks for my signature and $75!

I snort and hand him back his clipboard, like I have $75 laying around. And he pushes it back at me, "you can donate at any level."

Now isn't it sort of presumptuous to show up at some strangers door, ask for personal information, a signature and $75? I say, "Look, I'm tired, I'm hungry and I don't even want to think about this right now."

So he gives this pained look and checks his watch and says, "oooh, I'm only here until 9 o'clock. Should I come back?"

"No," I say, and hand him back his clipboard.

It rained yesterday and today and I have the biggest hair in the world. It's hard to believe it's a part of my very own head. It's Rosanne Rosanadana and then some.

I got my tomatoes in yesterday. I'm not sure what to do about the cucumbers. I sort of cleared a patch but it's pretty dry and weedy and rocky and not the kind of place you'd want to raise cucumbers. But I could put the seeds in and let them decide.

I bought this OneClick software years ago and still hardly ever take advantage of it and I'm finally trying to play around with it and can never seem to make it do anything that the books/tutorials suggest. Like it will say, "open the ---- menu" and I won't have that menu which makes me feel like a big fat idiot.

I baked a pie tonight and we'll be digging in when Simpson's is on.

I wrote this earlier and my blog got eaten. What a world.

SNACKS
Bob and I have been talking about cleaning out our shop for months. The "shop" is a room off the garage that's a handy place for throwing empty boxes, broken chairs, old moldy tarps - you get the picture. We never seem to get around to it so I decided to schedule a time. Last Friday I taped a sign to the microwave that said, "Sunday Shop Cleaning 2-4pm, Featured snack: vegan chicken nuggets with dipping sauce." Bob thought this was hilarious. I explained that I thought a snack would ensure participation.

CINCO DE MAYO
For Cinco I made a bunch of festive foods. I tried a Sunset magazine recipe for Green Chili Rice which came out great even though I didn't have some of the ingredients and I didn't follow the directions very well. The recipe said to add to make 3 cups of liquid but I accidentally put in 4 cups of liquid so I just threw in some more rice and we didn't have long grain so I used short grain -- if you enjoy eating it that's all that matters, right? Then I made sweet potato quesadillas which sounds like a yuppie restaurant food, but we liked it. Next time I'd mash the sweet potatoes better. The last thing I made was chicken posole soup and I used the slow cooker which turned out to be a mistake. But we added green chili rice and salsa to our bowls which perked up the boring soup.

GARDEN
I'm behind in the garden. I got one row of greens in a month ago and now that the sun's come out they're growing like crazy. I put in two more rows last weekend and bought my tomatoes yesterday. Earlier I reported that I'd planted about 60 peas and only about 3 have come up -- the slugs eat them as soon as they show their faces. Next year I'll sprout them inside first.

CUSTOMER SERVICE
I hesitate to even write this because that goofy guy from SW Airlines is probably going to come back and beat me up again for having my panties in a wad and wanting the world to run my way. (Well, we all do, don't we?) But since when did customer service turn into employees running over to you the instant you pause in a store to ask, "Can I help you find something?" Yeah, it's nice to see there are employees around who can help you if you need it and if I need help I will ask for it, but sometimes you just like to look at the salad dressings to see if there's a new one to try or you need to stand there for a minute to remember what you need and you've got some employee interrupting you and saying, "You look like you need some help." Sometimes I want to hand them my shopping list and just go wait in the car with a magazine and some cookies. The latest that got me going was this goofy guy in this bookstore downtown who says across the entire store in his priggy voice, "May we help you?" when I very clearly did not need help.

Today I was standing outside Pioneer Place and a sort of skanky looking guy walked out of the mall and I could seem him holding a wad of cash and then stick it in his pocket. About 15 seconds later he comes up to me and holds out his hand which has a couple of coins in it and asks if I can spare 50 cents. I did not feel inclined to share.

Somewhere I have a bunch of notes for items I want to blog but I think it's at home so it will have to wait until later.

I want to add something about Billy's computer which FINALLY got fixed on Thursday when I convinced the audibly sneering techie guy to drive to my office to do it for me. I guess it was a master/slave problem and slightly above my amazing technical skills. I just couldn't deal with it anymore, I could not be kind concurrently with trying to fix that f*#king thing and it cost me about $5 to the potty mouth jar.

oh, another week like this.

Just have another margarita. My car developed an unfortuate sound like the Karmann Ghia I drove when I was in college and the lovely repair shop, once they got their heads under her skirt found about a zillion dollars worth of maintenance that I should look into, why would I be driving a 100 year old car with zillions of miles on it if I had money laying around?

So how does anyone know how to make webpage stuff? Am I just slow? I've been trying to work my way through these tutorials and I still can't create anything.

Monday was an incredibly wet day so I decided to do the non maintenance hair and it ended up looked just about the same as if I would have tried to use products to force it into submission.

I bought a new CD last week, the new Limp Bizkit. I can't tell you how happy I am that I like a currently popular band. I was walking downtown and this young guy said hi to me and I think it was because he knew I like Limp Bizkit.