Yesterday I had a cold coming on like an overwrought metaphor that was…ah, forget it. Anyway, I left work early to take a nap. The first half hour I lay in bed and my mind jumped gleefully between random topics. The weight of steel bars? Could you burn your tongue on the sun? Not sleeping, no sir, but not awake and coherent either. I had to set my alarm clock to wake me up to pick up BH from day care. Waking up at 5 pm by an alarm is a cruel, cruel thing. Which made our movie choice for the evening, Coraline, perhaps not the thing to tether me to Earth. I read the book and got chills from the imagery, altered realities, and scary scenes I wasn’t expecting. While the movie got all the components right and had enough LSD-influenced whimsy to make you search for a stable horizon, it didn’t feel creepy enough. Keep in mind that Coraline the book gives you the scare ammo to let you shoot yourself. Somehow seeing it on the big screen took all the mystery out of it.
Last night’s dinner was Uncle F%#$-Up Makes Dinner, Take Two. On Saturday I made, conservatively, four thousand skewers of shrimp for the barbecue. They looked fantastic and smelled great. Then came the peeling. I have peeled and deveined shrimp before and it’s usually easy. But these suckers were bonded together like that guy with the superglue hanging from his hardhat. There was cursing and flinging of shells. After a half hour I was redfaced, exhausted, and had a thumb-sized portion of meat. Then my hands smelled like low tide for the next two days.
Okay, fast forward to last night. Did I learn my lesson? Please, this is Uncle F%$#-Up you’re talking to. Of course I didn’t.
Lobster tail on sale? Sure, says the wife, let’s spoil ourselves. I should have known this would be a literal command. After steaming, the tails looked fantastic. Bowls of butter ready, lemon wrapped in a cheesecloth, and aforementioned movie queued up and ready to go. But the meat wouldn’t separate from the shell. I split, cut, tugged, cried, ripped, crushed. At one point I just wanted to go at the tails with a hammer until there was only bisque, then I’d strain the whole mess through my teeth like krill through a whale’s baleen. Again we each ended up with a thumb-sized portion of meat. Nuthin’ like shellfish to lose weight!
Writer, architect, father, husband.