Salsa Hechas En Casa

Of all the reasons to love Chicago, Mexican grocery stores have to be in the top five.


Mexican grocery stores sell really cheap produce. And it's good, too—not like the cardboard baseballs passing for Fuji apples at chain supermarkets. However I must say in the chains's defense, their produce is getting better—though not cheaper. Still, nothing compares to $1 avocados and 10 cent limes and nothing, as Sinead O'Connor would say, compares to this:


That, is a cooler full of homemade salsas. And they taste as absolutely freakin amazing as they look. Can you read the sign? $2.89! Each one of those color stripes is a different variety of salsa (except for the off white chunky stripes, which are chicken and tuna salad and the like).

And what should one buy to dip in one's salsas? These:



Homemade chips, made in the back of the store. They are very good, which is bad, because it is easy to eat a lot, and their nutritional value is not so good which is bad because, well seriously, this should be obvious. These chips are delicious and that is bad. But I bought them. For research purposes.

If you're lucky, there's a liquor store next to the grocery store with a fiberglass horse out front. The horse I think is to remind people not to ride drunk.


And here is the pico de gallo back home so you can see how delicious it is. You can tell it is delicious just by looking at it.


Next Time: Korean grocery stores

Desire

This photo almost makes me cry, I want this room so badly to be mine.

(photo found on ffffound!)

Squirrels!

It is the peculiar nature of squirrels that they are so cute in the abstract and creepy in person. Never so creepy as they were this morning, as I enjoyed an apple on the porch, thrilled to be child-less for one morning while the kids were enjoying a sleepover with their aunt in the suburbs.

From beneath the porch came loud click. Too loud. Like only a human or a wildebeast could make that loud of a click. But even if a deranged stranger emerged from under the porch, what caused the click? Before I could imagine further, a deranged squirrel emerged from under the porch and jumped to the second step, sending my heart skidding to my throat. Worse, a second squirrel popped right behind, both eyeing me angrily and emitting that creepy crow-like squawking they usual reserve for throwing things out of trees.

They took off toward the street and were joined by two more squirrels, also squawking. The four of them bounded across the yards horrifyingly rat-like, like bunnies from a horror movie, a melange of The Birds and the final scene of 1984 when Wilson is threatened with a cage of rats strapped to his face.

Two more squirrels joined the pack, the bleating deafening as they wrapped themselves in a wriggling ball like a knot of snakes. This is where one needs a shotgun. My partner was safely ensconced at Target. Had she been at Wal-Mart, I would have texted her to pick up a gun. No other human was on the street, perhaps knowing something I didn't, and I beat a quick retreat into the safety of my house where I shall now continue working on my novel.

Get In The Car

Yesterday became one of those days I had to go to the gym in a tornado. The day started out typically: hot, syrupy air—muggy, stifling. I spent the day careening toward a work deadline, barely looking up from my computer, and by 4pm my brain had solidified into brick. Working from home comes with the risk of not getting out of the house, and I knew I had to get to the gym, else keel over in a stupor for the night.

Usually the kids like coming to the gym. They go to Kids Klub—yes, spelled with two K's— with us on Saturdays, and we have to peel them out of the climby thing at the end of our workout. But when they stumbled into the house from their own busy day, I knew the gym was going to be a hard sell. Our 6-year-old rolled onto the couch, eyes glassy, and shoved her shirt in her mouth, the classic signs of exhaustion. Our two-year-old tripped and fell on his face, another sign of exhaustion. Plus, it had started to rain.

"I think I need to abort the gym plan," I said to my partner, looking at our kids sprawled comatose around the living room.

"Nooooo!" she cried, already having planned out her 1.5 lovely hours to herself.

To show her support and commitment to the gym plan, Sarah bundled the kids in raincoats and galoshes and ushered them to the porch. Now the sky was green and rain was coming down in torrents. They would not step off the front porch. Both began crying.

"Thank you for doing this," Sarah said, pre-empting any further notions I might have to abort the plan.

But the plan was happening. I also had to pick up color copies from the quick printer for a client meeting in the morning. The printer would close in a half hour, and if we were going to the printer, we were going to the gym.

I ran both kids fireman-style to the car, which they did not perceive as the fun adventure I intended. Off we went into the rain-engorged roads, my daughter announcing every two blocks that she was scared.

"You'll be safer in the gym than at home," I said. How can a 100-year-old bungalow compete with a nice steel and concrete skyscraper, after all?

"I'm scared," she said. Thunder cracked. Lightning flashed. I pulled into a water-drenched parking spot in front of the printer. Water lapped right up to the doorway of the quick printer in a lake that spread from the door half-way into the street. I left the kids in the car and stepped ankle deep into the water. Inside the printer, behind carrels of Brite, Brite colored papers, a weather map covered the television screen. Something about a tornado. I asked for a plastic bag for the printouts and the man said "Well I have this grocery bag..." as if I might say no to anything but the most finely crafted plastic bag. When I got back to the car, everything drenched but my printouts, the children were still secured in their car seats, but clutching hands across the back seat.

"We're scared," my daughter said.

I had water half way up my sweatpants, but in my running, jumping and hopping across water, my brain block had cleared. We were going to the gym! In the gym's parking garage, I pulled out my printouts. To my dismay, my lovely designs were covered in gray smudges. I moved the papers around a bit before realizing the gray smudges were shadows cast by rain on the windshield.

The gym had the desired effect. You can't hear the rain so much through their thick plexiglass windows, nor see it, as the bright lights create too strong a reflection. It was as if there was no rain. From the rowing machine, I watched more weather maps on televisions secured to the ceiling. The closed captioning must have been translated from English to Japanese and back again, for there were lines like:

Is the liquid getting more intense? That is the question.
and
Our concern now is the rain is coming down in two barrels.

So I could not tell if we were in danger. The weatherman's head was directly in front of Chicago on the weather map so I couldn't tell what was going on there (here) anyway. Most of the attention seemed focused on Indiana, and I was pretty secure in the Law of Tornadoes, that they don't touch down in Chicago.

After my workout, the rain had subsided to a downpour. My daughter wailed all the way home about the broken, unusable cell phone she left at Kid's Klub which I would not go back to get. It wasn't the phone, it was exhaustion. I turned up Joan Baez. She cried louder. I turned off the music. Her wail dropped to a whimper.

Sarah met us at the door when we got home. I shoved the sodden kids at her. "Did you get my texts about the tornado warnings?" she said.

New Work

This is the cover of a four-unit curriculum I designed for the Chicago Public Schools—a reading and writing program for middle school students. I love the cover and wish my dreams were this beautiful. It was great fun working on a writing program. Sample interior spreads below.

More Balance

When my partner told me our six-year-old neighbor commented yesterday, upon entering our house, "Wow, it's messy here!" my response was: yes it is, and if her parents didn't have their five-day-a-week nanny/maid, it's exactly what her house would look like. Belligerent defensiveness notwithstanding, our house was a mess, and today I directed our daughter through a complete clean up of her room, swept a dustpanful of crumbs, stickers and legos out from under the couch, and hosed the cobwebs with their trapped bunches of gnats off the front porch, a tight voice hissing inside my ear the entire while: if you can't take care of your things, you're living beyond your means.

Whilst hosing the porch, I noticed our neighbor sprinkling a bagful of something on the half of our front yard abutting his. This neighbor also, when he mows his yard, mows half our grass, right up to the front walkway bisecting our yard. So when he's done half our yard is mowed and half is not. It's one of those things I can't bring myself to talk to him about. In the daily rush of things crying to be handled—d0es our son have Lyme's disease, what is this letter from the IRS, why does the basement smell like sewage—why our neighbor mows half our lawn falls to the bottom of the list.

Plus our front yard is in shade most of the day and the grass grows so slowly that in the week stagger between him mowing half our yard and me mowing our entire yard, the difference in grass height is not so noticeable. Or so I tell myself. Fertilizer, dog poison—who knew what he was now dispersing over the lawn. I waved to him. He waved back.

The cleaning frenzy would have happened today even without the 6-year-olds' observation as today is the day before our once monthly cleaning woman shows. It typically takes us three hours to get our house in orderly enough shape to ask someone to come in and clean. Meaning we don't ask her to scoop the Barbies out of the tub or scrape the overturned jar of jam off the butcher block. We clear off all surfaces, and that takes a while.

Our cleaning person calls us one of her best customers, I think because the house is so clean when she comes, but it is only so clean because of how filthy it was the morning before. Whenever we look at our budget, and ways we might cut it, we don't touch the outside housecleaning. If it weren't for someone coming into our house once a month, we'd be living in squalor. I want to protest at this point what a clean and organized person I am. My office is spotless. The car I drive is neat. But I can't compete with two little people who can empty a dresser in what I thought was a blissful two minutes of quiet play, or who are learning to make their own lunches, somehow turning the entire kitchen upside down in the process.

But come on by Tuesday—the place will be spotless.

Balance

It's been three weeks Facebook-free, when, in an attempt to choose substance over opiate, I subscribed to The Economist and deleted my Facebook account. Now when I need a Facebook fix, I must instead read analysis of the impact of climate change on Malaysian fishermen.

Mary's (that's me) law of obsession states that obsession can be neither created nor destroyed, although it can change form—and has taken effect. Instead of trawling Facebook photo albums, I'm trawling information, and have already decided it's time to subscribe to Harper's again. Blogs like fivethirtyeight.com and politico.com are showing up on my recent visits tab.

It dawns on me to wonder what Teabaggers actually stand for. Look, there are five official Tea Party web sites. Tea Partiers don't like illegal immigrants or government regulation. But they are different from conservatives because, well I can't tell. Love home foreclosures? Like the Gulf filled with oil? Become a Tea Partier!

Speaking of the Gulf, why does Britain have nothing to say about the BP oil spill? Shouldn't their government be stepping up? What do I don't know I don't know about the governance of global companies? Off to the on-line British papers. Now here's a bit in the Telegraph UK: in order to gain permission to drill off the coast, BP had promised it could handle a spill ten times the size of the current spill, no problemo. Criminal charges are a-brewin . . . not only that . . .

Wadaminit! Quitting FB was supposed to return me to my novel-in-progress, kids, lawn, business, preparing fresh healthy dinners, etceterah, not plunge me deeper into the bowels of the internet. The internet is a formidable adversary to actually living, but I'm off to prepare for a meeting.