This is a boring post. But at least I'm not telling you too much about yesterday's visit to the vet.

Okay, listen.  This is the last time that I'm going to hound you to go enter to win the HomeGoods gift card on my reviews page.  The sweepstakes ends tomorrow, so you totes need to head over there to enter a comment.  Or chirp about it.  You and I both know you want to go shop at some HomeGoods.




I was going to post yesterday, but didn't because I had to take my little furry child to the vet, which proved to be quite traumatizing--both for the dog and for me.  After I dished the DISGUSTING deats to Cassie, she swore that if I posted them on the blog she'd unfriend me forever.  So I won't, but let's just say it was awful, and that afterward Mitch wouldn't even look at me, and I wanted to forget the whole experience so I went home and took a nap until almost 10:00 pm and only reason that I even got up then was because Matt had made chili dogs and Alexia fries for dinner, and I couldn't resist.

Poor little handled pup.

Anyway, aside from that, there's not much going on at la casa de M Cubedo.  You know, except for my recent mastery of Spanish.  Right now all of my energy is being consumed by the last week of school, which is simultaneously the easiest and the hardest week of the year.  The last week of school also really distorts my understanding of time; I did not know that time can, in fact, stand still.

Earlier this week, I was crazy productive at school--so productive that now I don't have much to do during my planning period.  Yesterday, then, I decided to take some pictures of what the last week of school looks like in my happy little room.  This was also a chance to play with Ann's 50mm lens.  If I could marry a camera lens (and if I wasn't already married to a human fellow), I would marry this lens.  But, alas, I'm neither into committing myself to inanimate objects nor am I a polygamist.  Oh well, can't please all the people all the time.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, what my classroom looks like.  This is really just a glorified version of that whole "what's in your purse" bull jive that I think is stupid, so I'm kind of a hypocrite.  Sorry about that.

Here's what makes me happy at work (oh, and I posted about the classroom itself a long time ago).

Freedom Tomorrow! 

Picture that I took in high school of one of my scariest and most hilarious teachers, Randy Richardson.  Occasionally the students will ask me if that's a picture of my husband, and I'll tell them that yes, yes it is. 

Better for grading your essays, my sweet!

Textbook accounting is the most fun.  And by most I do mean least.

Old magazines (early '60s) that I scored from the media center.  The kiddies love them.

                                                                   I am a schoolsupplyophile. 

This is the greatest stapler in the world.  If you have to staple things ever as a part of your job, treat yourself to one.  It has the best sound, and it staples stacks of papers like it's goin' out of style.  

Not that stapling stacks of papers was ever in style, but you know what I mean.

 No desk is complete without a Mitchouette.

 Kind of a writing utensil hoarder.

 Shakespeare insult mug, you whoreson villain!

Well, I told you that this post was boring.  I'm going to go see if Mitch and I are on speaking terms again.  If not, I'm going to suck up to him with slices of cheese and prosciutto.

This and That

Hey!  You!   Go to my reviews page and enter to win a $100 HomeGoods gift card.  All you have to do is enter a comment to win.  Easy as pie.  Or ice cream.  (Pie is probably easier.)

1.  This is going to be a short post because it's Sleepover Tuesday.  You know what ST looks like.

2.  Had grilled wings tonight for dinner.  If you haven't already, and if you're a lover of the chicken wing, you should def try grilled wings.  Mmmmmmmmmmmm.  Also, they provide you with an excuse to wield your meat cleaver like a crazy maniac.

3.  I am so mad at Anthony Weiner.  SO MAD!  Is it really that hard NOT to chirp a picture of your junk to a woman you're not married to?!?!  F'ing idiot.

4.  Today (it's the last week of school, people!), my students were looking for some pictures to color.  After a couple of minutes on the world wide web I was able to provide them with these coloring sheets (um, because they were already finished with their final exams and other very hard-core assignments).  Ha!  The captions that they provided were. . .fantastic. (One may have had to do with the fact that Ms. Eakle eats babies.)

5. I am a master at beating the hiccups.  All you have to do is think about the hiccups.  Focus.  Seriously.

6.  Matt has started to watch the local news, which means that I now watch the local news.  Note: the local news is weird and kind of trashy.  The only redeeming factor is that one of  the anchors wears a bow tie.

7. Three more days of school.  Three days.  I can do it.

That is all.

Want One.

A hummingbird brother for my Mitchell!



Oh, and if you're at work*, you can totally watch this on mute.  All you're missing is a Jack Johnson song.

*Slacker.  

Weekend Fun

This weekend was very productive, but also very relaxing.  In a nutshell: took a 5-hour nap, ellipted, ate dinner, baked a cake, proctored the SATs, iced a cake, went to a birthday party, bitched about how I couldn't buy Iris a Barbie for so many years, drank a few glasses of wine, talked on the phone, ellipted again, did laundry, scored some awesome loot from Craigslist, more laundry, lunched at Blowin' Smoke, planted peppers, sprayed the dog with the hose, more laundry, a 4-hour nap, skipped dinner and drank wine instead.

F'ing fantastic.

And here's what it looked like.

Strawberry cake that started to fall apart.  Eek!  Earthquake cake. 

Iris's first bike. 

Birthday party decor. 

Making my favorite sorbet. 

Very jolly.  And sweaty. 

Cooling off. 

Iris really likes cake. 

Craigslist score!  More on that later. 

Right now I'm suffering through one of the hardest weeks of the year.  You know, senior pranks (baby oil slickin' up the halls?!), rambunctious ninth graders, and vain attempts to keep those fifteen-year olds interested in The Taming of the Shrew.  Save me, Heath Ledger!

Hope your weekend was lovely, and that your week is full of happy things like handsome men singing on bleachers.  It's never not awesome.

Barbie Girl.

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Here's something that probably won't surprise you: I love Barbies.

Barbie, her kid sister Skipper, her [probably gay] boyfriend Ken, and her Island Fun ethnic friend Miko were my toys of choice in the late '80s.  MY GOD, how I loved to dress them and come up with twisted scenarios for them to act out!

Most of these scenes involved the ladies fighting over Ken.  It was a supply and demand kind of thing, and there was only one of him and there were like 12 of them.  Barbie and her gals had to turn a little slutty.  (It was very much like attending a liberal arts college.)  I would usually spend about two hours dressing Barbie and brushing her hair and setting up her house, only to climax with a sordid scene during which Barbie and Miko got in a big fight because Ken liked Miko more, and Barbie would slap Miko with her bent-elbow arm and then drive off in her Corvette.  And then Ken and Miko would strip down to nothing but their rubbery bodies and slap themselves together while making kissing noises.  It took about 2 hours of preparation for about 3 minutes of drama.

My friend Sloan and I playing Barbies in my closet.  Note the headless Barbie to the left.  

And the Osh-Kosh overall straps.  Oh, the eighties.

Later, I'd decide that Miko needed different arms because she wanted to slow dance with Ken (you know, after the hot sex), so I'd rip Barbie's head off of her body and put Miko's head on that bent-arm body.  As time passed, I had accidentally broken the neck piece that allowed the heads full rotation in almost every one of my dolls, so I had to smoosh their heads down.  So I had a bunch of tall, skinny, no-neck supermodels.  Oh well.  At least their clothes were cool.  And at least they could still go chill in the Hawaiian Hut.

My Barbie interest would ebb and flow.  In middle school my friend Krissy and I would go hide in her room and play with all of her Barbies.  Her parents were divorced and her mom spoiled her something rotten, so she had the dream house and boxes and boxes of clothes and cars and dozens of dolls.  We knew that we were too old to be playing with Barbies, but we didn't care because they were SO AWESOME!  And if you think that the plots of my late '80s Barbie play were awful, you should've heard what our mid '90s Barbies were up to (this was also during 90210's heyday).  Unfortunately, the content of these storylines is not blog appropriate.  Shooot.

Later, during college, I again became very into Barbies.  This time it wasn't so much for the playing, but more for the nostalgia.  So after a few birthdays and late-night shopping trips, I quickly found myself--again--the owner of a brood of Barbies.  They even featured part of my Barbie collection in the feature that our school newspaper did about our house on JMU Cribs.  (Which kind of deserves its own post.)

Fast forward.  I move to Savannah and grow up and get married.  And then I meet Iris, a little fashionista on whom I love to bestow gifts.  For Iris's second birthday, Cassie and I wanted so badly to buy her a Barbie.  But, no!  Ann, Iris's mom, was dead set against it, claiming that Barbies promote negative body image, and that Barbies are whores and so on.  Cassie and I persisted, later telling Ann that we would be buying Iris either a puppy or a Barbie for [birthday, Christmas, random Wednesday].  But Ann was so against Iris having Barbies that even our manipulative tactics were futile.

"Don't you dare buy my kid a stupid Barbie!"

You can imagine how aghast I was, then, when yesterday, at Iris's 5th birthday party, I saw Iris receive not one, BUT TWO (!!) Barbies.  AND ONE WAS FROM HER MOTHER!  And you can imagine Cassie's reaction when I emailed her these pictures.  There was lots of language that is also not blog appropriate.

Basically,  Cassie and I are now in a fight with Ann. And you know what Cassie and I do when we're in a fight with someone?  We go to Target.

Brace yourself for the Barbie-splosion!

Big Time Sports Fan

Tonight I watched basketball.

And I know a lot about basketball.

I know that you'll probably be better at basketball if you're tall.

I know that you'll probably be better at basketball if you have good aim.

I know that basketball will make you tired.

I know that it looks easy to palm a basketball but it is not.

I know that basketball has started to suck more in the last decade or so because it's all about these big douchey stars who are ball hogs and take all the attention for themselves and it's less about teamwork.

I also know that basketball shorts are way longer now than they used to be.

[source]

Told you I know a lot about basketball.

Anyway, I watched basketball tonight and it was really exciting.  Usually I don't care about basketball (probably because I know everything there is to know about the sport), but I cared tonight for two reasons.

1.  About five years ago, Miami and Dallas played basketball for the championship and Miami was down by a bunch of games and Matt bet a bunch of money* to guys at work that Miami wouldn't come back to win.  Miami def came back to win.  That sucked.

2.  I've had a running joke with a student of mine about Dwayne Wade, who the student claims is "the rawest in the nation."  I've insisted that, no, Dwayne Wade is the least raw in the nation, and that I read on Facebook that Michael Jordan is the one who holds the "rawest in the nation" title.  It's been kind of like this:



Except not as angry.

Anyway, after tonight's game (during which Dallas was VERY good at basketball, and Dwayne Wade was not really all that raw at all), my student*** might find this picture accidentally taped to his seat.  Or maybe I can get the art teacher to make a button out of it for me?

I haven't been this excited to go to work in a long time.

Hope your Friday is raw.


*Bunch of money like "Oh, shoot, we totally could've gone to Applebee's** like two or three times with that money" bunch of money.  Not like a Brandon Walsh seeks out a loan shark sum of money.


**It was five years ago.  And we never claimed to have good taste.  I'd still fight a hobo for a plate of their nachos.


***This is the same student who once said to me, "I know you're gonna miss me when I'm gone," to which I replied, "Yeah, why's that?"  "'Cause you're gonna miss my club moves."  He then proceeded to dance (very well, I might add) his way out of the classroom.

This and That

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1.  Cassie spends the night at our house once a week now so that she doesn't have to stay in a hotel when she comes to the SAV for work.   We call it Sleepover Tuesday, or ST.  Every week we say that this will be the week that we don't drink wine.  And then, inevitably, every week we find some reason that we need to drink wine (like, "Wine is delicious" or "I had to go to work today.")  So, with every ST, there seems to be a HW.  Shooooot.  This week, though--BECAUSE WE'RE AWESOME!--we managed to imbibe responsibly.  You know it's sad when the content of your email exchange during the day is just self-praise for not being hungover.

2.  I will never learn which ones are the high def channels.  Matt insists that they're actually easier to learn, but, hey, I'm an old dog.  And it wasn't terribly convincing when he tried to point out the difference between high def and non-high def by using MSNBC's Lockup.

3.  Also, who the hell watches Lockup?  Couldn't MSNBC make more money showing reruns of Friends or something?

4.  Slate is totally making me self-conscious about my overuse of the dash.  F you, Slate!  Just for that, I will keep reading you all day every day.  And I will use more dashes than ever.  And fragments.  (And parentheses.)

5.  I've been an ellipting fool lately.  It's a good thing, too, because I quit Weight Watchers a couple of weeks ago.  I figured that since I quit my second job, I didn't need to be spending $40/month just to feel more guilty about eating cake and ice cream.

6.  Seven more days of school with my kiddies!

7.  Brag time.  Totally whipped up a cake on the fly for Iris's pre-birthday celebration last night.  And it was, um, out of control delicious, and beautiful.  Cassie had the idea to swirl Iris's favorite colors in the batter, and then she made an i stencil for the top.  It was a completely last-minute decision to even make the cake, and it ended up being just lovely.  And we didn't have any birthday candles, but we did have a tall hot pink taper candle that Iris jammed into the cake.  Two years ago I didn't even know that vegetable shortening could go bad (it can, by the way, especially if it's been in your pantry for five years), and now I'm just baking a cake from scratch in less time than it takes to watch an episode of True Blood.  So proud!

Hope your Thursday is the bee's knees!  Thursday's going to be a doozy here.  I'm already thinking about my Friday afternoon nap.

Candied Bacon Ice Cream

So, this one time, when I was 15 and Jordan was 11, we were standing outside in my grandma's driveway, and Jordan was bugging me.  So I cooly (at least it felt cool at the time, like everything when I was 15--rainbow nail polish, Calvin Klein t-shirts, and the crush on that one-eyed Jehovah's Witness) sauntered back to the house, saying, "Well, that's fine. I'm just gonna go get a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch."

After I took about six steps, Jordan realized what I knew already: that there was only enough Cinnamon Toast Crunch for one more bowl.

So he ran.

And so did I.

And we met at my grandma's storm door, wrestling away, fighting for the last bowl of tasty, delicious, brand-name cereal.

But here's the thing.  Jordan's big.  Like 6'5".  And I'm not slight by any means, but even at those ages he pretty much owned me physically*.  So we wrestled and fought.  I might have thrown a knee or accidentally bit him.  But he was winning.

And then my elbow went through the door.  Through it.  Like glass everywhere through it.

Mmm hmmm, we broke Grandma's door.  Shoot.

The cut I had was so deep that I probably should've had stitches, but we didn't roll that way in our family, so I got a bandage and some ice and I cried.  I cried partly because I had a cut on my elbow that was about 1/2" deep and it hurt like a sombitch.  But mostly I cried because, as I nursed my wounds, I looked over to see that jerk of a brother of mine sitting at the table, eating the last bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Now, 15 years later, I have sweet revenge, because I discovered David Lebovitz's (I bow to you, Mr. Lebovitz!) recipe for Candied Bacon Ice Cream.  And it's pretty much the greatest thing that's ever happened.  And it tastes like the breakfast that they would serve you on a farm in heaven.  Except better.  Because there's whiskey in it.

And bacon.

 Candied bacon that is basically like caramel corn bacon.

Every bite tastes like the best breakfast you've ever had.  Except that it's ice cream, so you can totally eat it whenever you want.  Does it get any better than that?  Nope.  I pretty much just want to make buckets of this ice cream and then run up and down the streets of Savannah sharing it with everyone.

Except for Jordan.  I kind of hold a grudge.

*Which is totally why I resorted to evil mind games.  I'm good at them.  Just ask Matt.  Or my students.

David Lebovitz's Candied Bacon Ice Cream

For the candied bacon;
5 strips bacon
about 2 teaspoons light brown sugar

For the ice cream custard:
3 tablespoons (45g) salted butter
¾ cup (packed) brown sugar (140g), light or dark (you can use either)
2¾ (675ml) cup half-and-half
5 large egg yolks
2 teaspoons dark rum or whiskey
¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
optional: ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

1. To candy the bacon, preheat the oven to 400F (200C).

2. Lay the strips of bacon on a baking sheet lined with a silicone mat or aluminum foil, shiny side down.

3. Sprinkle 1½-2 teaspoons of brown sugar evenly over each strip of bacon, depending on length.

4. Bake for 12-16 minutes. Midway during baking, flip the bacon strips over and drag them through the dark, syrupy liquid that’s collected on the baking sheet. Continue to bake until as dark as mahogany. Remove from oven and cool the strips on a wire rack.

5. Once crisp and cool, chop into little pieces, about the size of grains of rice.

(Bacon bits can be stored in an airtight container and chilled for a day or so, or stored in the freezer a few weeks ahead.)

6. To make the ice cream custard, melt the butter in a heavy, medium-size saucepan. Stir in the brown sugar and half of the half-and-half. Pour the remaining half-and-half into a bowl set in an ice bath and set a mesh strainer over the top.

7. In a separate bowl, stir together the egg yolks, then gradually add some of the warm brown sugar mixture to them, whisking the yolks constantly as you pour. Pour the mixture back into the saucepan.

8. Cook over low to moderate heat, constantly stirring and scraping the bottom with a heatproof spatula, until the custard thickens enough to coat the spatula.

9. Strain the custard into the half-and-half, stirring over the ice bath, until cool. Add liquor, vanilla and cinnamon, if using.

10. Refrigerate the mixture. Once thoroughly chilled, freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Add the bacon bits during the last moment of churning, or stir them in when you remove the ice cream from the machine.

Happy 5th Birthday, Iris!

Just wanted to wish a happy birthday to the funniest, most responsible, most neurotic, most fashionable five-year old on the planet.  Oh, and smart.  Did we mention smart?  Or, as Iris would say, cerebral.

Hope your birthday is full of kisses and cake and fun.  And new clothes and more cake.  And then, maybe, some more cake.  And then some shoes.  And dresses.

And then more cake.

Just remember, you don't get to drink wine until you're six.

xoxo, little lady