Best & Wurst

Blargh.  Under a lot of stress right now.  I'm feeling a lot of transposed stress from what my Outlaw Bro and Sis are going through right now - in the thick of the campaign with less than a month to go.  I just wish I could do more to help them out and it's killing me watching them have to slog through the muck and mire.

My sister and I are also polar opposites in a lot of respects.  When it comes to stuff like organization or tidiness we're like two positively charged ions.  She hasn't converted to the gospel of organization or being a type A micromanager the way I have.  BUT DON'T YOU SEE HOW MUCH EASIER IT MAKES YOUR LIFE?!??!!!  She says, to everyone else in the whole world.

This weekend was jam-packed.  It started with EPIC ARMAGEDDON between me and the Dotytron that was forged in the flames of: travelling, long-weekend traffic, the Dotytron being responsible for packing the car, and a failure to return cell phone calls.  Any one of those things will turn me into a mad dog on a good day.  Combine them all?!  It was the worst and I basically turned into this guy:

Note: I've actually never seen Yellow Submarine because I only semi-care about the Beatles.  

The point is: it got uuugggglllly.  Then in classic me armageddon-quickly-flaming-out-to-a-bed-of-cold-coals fashion, I was like, "I'm done with being an a**hole! Let's start over!"  Hahaha.  I'm a jerk of the highest order.  Anyway, we ended up at WVRST for dinner and a combination of sausages, duck-fat fried fries and a substantial list of interesting beers went a long way to tempering the Dotytron's ire.  

The concept is similar to that place in Cleveland that we LOVE, Happy Dog.  You order either a basic ($6) or gourmet (think kangaroo and duck - $9) sausage either on a bun or served currywurst style with a curried ketchup dipping sauce, you add on your choice of 2 of 4 toppings, decide if you want fries and with your fries you get a choice of 2 of many dipping sauces.  The Dotytron had the boerewors and an oktoberfest sausage, I had a brat and their calabrese.  The duck fat fries were really good - salty and crispy and improbably soft on the inside...though not necessarily worth the extra money...given that you're dunking the fries in sauce anyway.  The sausages were all uniformly good - except the Dotytron didn't like his boerewors.    The toppings are kind of uninspired - onions, under-cooked peppers, sauerkraut and hot peppers don't really add to the taste experience much.  Overall, this is a good place to go with a group of people, since splitting the bill is easy and they're all big long communal tables.  It would actually be a pretty good place to bring kids, if they weren't being such giant King West jerks about it (i.e. it's super loud in there and they turn down the lights at like, 7pm and it's full of King West bros).  The beers were expensive but the list is interesting (according to my dining companion).  I liked it but I'm not in a hurry to go back.  It's a good, quick, decently priced option though.

Saturday morning we did a 5km run (me and the Dotytron) and the rest of the family did a walk in support of this organization that helps victims of domestic abuse.  It was my first official 5km (like, I got a number and everything!) and I haven't been running in forever.  I'm not exactly sure of my overall time, BECAUSE I MISSED THE TURN TO THE FINISH POINT AND OVERRAN.  Also, trying to stay with the Dotytron slowed me down.  I was ahead of the Dotytron and he finished around 29 minutes, so I'm saying my time was 29 minutes.  I'm pretty proud of myself!  Mostly for beating the Dotytron and for not having practised at all.  As the Dotytron said, "I'm proud of you, and you're proud of you, but you're not as proud of me as I am of you, so basically, you're DOUBLY proud of yourself, but I get the shaft."  LOL!  So true!  Haha.

The rest of the day was pretty low-key.  The Dotytron and I stayed and watched the babies while the rest of the family was out stumping/doing family stuff.

This happened.  I cannot describe to you how thoroughly DISGUSTED Little Big Cuz looked when the Big Yam hopped on this little car buck-naked.  Little Big Cuz kept giving me the look like, "Uhhh...can you do something about this?" and was definitely not okay with how okay the Big Yam is with being naked.

The Big Yam LOVES his cousins.  Loves them!  It's so cute.  He's so blasé about other kids normally but he was just beaming being around them and spent time actually playing WITH Little Big Cuz instead of playing individually alongside him.  It was cute.  When the two woke up from their nap, I offered them a snack and Little Big Cuz (LBC) started chirping "snack! snack!" and led me to the snack counter at my sister's which is an impressive mountain of every name brand snack you could possible want or desire.  As we all know, I'm super-mean about sugar/salt consumption so I grabbed the healthiest option (graham crackers, which to me are the cookie equivalent of Proustian madeleines) and doled them out.  The Big Yam, who is routinely denied sweets was in the throes of ecstasy.  LBC?  Not so much.  He held the cracker in a limp, disdaining wrist and gave me the most, "b***h, PLEASE." look and then ground the cracker to crumbs on my sister's couch.  Crumbs that the Big Yam then spent 10 minutes LICKING UP.  Those two!

Sunday morning we went to an AYCE breakfast at a Veteran's Hall.  Ummmm...these oldies are NOT kidding around!  Scrambled eggs, sausage links, toast, home fries, pancakes, french toast, biscuits, sausage gravy, orange juice.  ALL YOU CAN EAT.  FOR FIVE DOLLARS A PERSON.  Like banh mi, this breakfast operates outside the laws of macro and microeconomics.  I ended up donating more because a) they're old people and b) that was one of the finest sausage gravies I've ever had in my LIFE.  So good!

Then we went to this place Stokoe Farms, which is a pumpkin patch, petting zoo type thing.  The Big Yam had his mind blown going on a tractor ride.  We launched pumpkins and climbed a giant mountain of hay bales and launched mini pumpkins at a broken down van in a field (BEST!).  There was also some ziplinining happening - check out the Dotytron's form:

In a corn maze.  What I learned: my upper limit for a corn maze participation is about 10 seconds.  Then I need to get OUT, like yesterday.

For dinner we got dinner from the hilariously named Questa Lasagna, which actually does a really, really good lasagna.  Think: heavy on the mozzarella top layer so you get a 1 cm thick gooey, burnished layer of cheese with some crispy edge bits.  Good stuff.  We also did a cake and did an early birthday celebration for the Big Yam.

Monday we headed home in the afternoon.  We took the route that takes us along side roads and through these cute towns.  We stopped at the Pok-A-Dot, which is the cutest thing I've ever seen:

The Pok-A-Dot is known for their beef on weck, which is a Western New York thing - shaved sliced roast beef served on a salt bun with optional horseradish.  The bun is what makes this dish truly special - it's flecked with caraway, which I don't usually like as a flavouring, but I think the top of the bun is brushed with salt water, so you get a nice salty kick before biting through the yielding bun into the relatively moist, unseasoned meat below.  Good stuff.

That was my weekend!  

Last night we had the Roomie and T over for dinner.  We had cheddar broccoli soup and grilled fresh mozzarella, onion, and tomato jam sammies for dinner.

LOOK AT THAT BABY!  The cutest!!!

Last week's dinner of steamed brown rice w/ Chinese sausage & Chinese stir-fry greens from my CSA, with braised pork belly 

Tonight's dinner of baked eggplant parmesan on my new Modern Twist Kyoto placemats!

I was really mad on Friday before leaving town and what turned me around was opening the trunk of the car and seeing this craft the Big Yam had made at daycare.  So freakin' cute.

Fin.