Amy & Amy

Obviously, I am livin' life wrong in '09, because I'm being punished by the tech gods. Woke up yesterday: couldn't make calls; couldn't get calls.

I don't talk on the phone much, so it took me a few angry emails to realize that it wasn't even working. Oddly, I still had text, email, and online. But then, apparently, I sprained those -- because today, right after AT&T managed to get the phone part working (they had to re-boot the phone, and some device number didn't match something else), the pearl on the blackberry stopped scrolling. Again. And again, it will go right, and left, but not up or down (so, no rolodex, no texting, no emailing, and definitely no blogging).

I'm typing this out at an actual desktop (yeah, yeah, like an animal).

This is my second replacement BlackBerry since FEBRUARY, so I suggested to AT&T that they have a DESIGN FLAW on their hands.

But once they transferred me to Amy, in "warranties," I relaxed. Amy has the voice of an angel, and she speaks SOUTHERN.

I have no problems with the good people of Bangelor (I saw the "30 Days" installment on outsourcing), but I did lose a LOT of hearing from my early days as a music critic, and I can't always decipher accents -- as my Boston friend Sandy will attest. Amy soothed me with reassurances like, "don't you worry, we're fixin' to be done here in just a minute..."

After she assured me a replacement model would be winging its way to me as soon as we hung up, I asked her to spell her name, and asked if I could speak with her supervisor. Without even asking why, she assured me, "why yes ma'am, I surely can, if you don't mind holdin' for just one l'il minute."

Once the boss came on the line (improbably named Amy as well), I told her I just wanted to take a second to compliment (the other) Amy on how helpful she'd been, and how much I appreciated her speaking Southern to me.

The Boss-Amy responded, without missing a beat, "why, sure 'nuff." And she sounded sincere.

I still don't have a phone, but I feel a little better after talking to the Two Amys. Surprisingly, I very rarely take the time to complain. At least not in person. I do it later, in print.

But I picked up on the idea of complimenting people from my Dad. He always does it, and he always reminds me to ask for a supervisor -- that it isn't enough to say Thanks to the person who helped you; you have to tell their boss.

If the phone actually shows up on time, I might even write a letter.

Slumber Parties

Probably everyone says they prefer to sleep in their own bed, but I'm pretty pathological about it. I kinda can't sleep anywhere else.

So I put it on my to-do list for 09.

Last night was a trial run. Movies + a sleepover, in another town.

I love movies. I especially love Death Race - the night's feature attraction. Plus the house I was going to has all the comforts of home (HBO, TiVo, Ambien) but better -a nicer kitchen with all the top chef tools (where he heats up the Stouffers), a home theater with a 60+ inch screen, and a nice master bedroom flatscreen with 42 inches (I asked).

Popcorn and my boy Jason Statham made for a pretty good evening (yes, I do realize he doesn't meet my height requirement, as was pointed out to me all night long). Bedtime was accompanied by Orangina, Ambien, comforting re-runs of Family Guy, and the compulsory Ambien-chatter that (as always) I can barely remember: Kate Hudson's putting a lot of weight on in her face; maybe she's pregnant; no way Diane Lane is younger than I am; do you think she's younger than I am?

That kinda thing.

Followed by repeated assurances from the host that he had indeed hidden all the birthday pastries I'd brought him from Fresh Market. That tulip full of mousse coulda spelled death - unfamiliar stairs + a kitchen under construction + ambien-snacking.

At some point, I must've stopped talking and dozed off on a Tempur-Pedic mattress much nicer than mine, on sheets with even higher thread count than I have at home.

I woke up to a 60 degree January day and what sounded like Spring Rain on the roof.

I was considering the experiment successful even BEFORE he said those three little words every girl longs to wake up to everyday: "You want bacon?"

Yes Man

When Tex called for date movie advice last night, he had narrowed it to two choices: Marley and Me, or Yes Man.

I hadn't seen either, but still had to explain to him that in the history of cinema, Jim Carrey has never, ever gotten anybody laid.

I asked if she was a hot girl or a smart girl. Smart girls want to be told they're hot; hot girls want to hear how smart they are (and frankly, they'll believe anything).

After he described her in more detail (ok, actually he just told me her occupation -- and I'm not printing it here, because everytime I say something disparaging about this particular profession, I get a LOT of hate mail), I sent them to Slumdog Millionaire.

I haven't seen it either, but I knew it was the kind of movie you'd pick for a hot girl who THINKS she's a smart girl.

It worked.

Me? I stayed home and read Revolutionary Road so I'd be ready for the smart-girl movie adaptation that hits town later this month. (The book is very Mad Men, but WAY more distressing.)

I plan to see it with a Hot Guy.

I'm the smart-but-shallow girl.

Tex says he would just sum me up to unwitting victims as "a handful." I think that's fair.

Early Adopters

It would be safe to say, I'm not an early adopter.

I admit this, because there are witnesses... witnesses who will be more than happy to confirm that I am the person who said, "this email thing will never catch on," and whined loudly from my 1980's Edit Desk when the writers stopped bringing me disks I could read.

So 2008 was a big year for me.

In February, I ditched my seven-year-old Nokia for a BlackBerry, under protest, and only because I'd finally worn the number eight off that phone.

By summer, my friends Elle and Kimmy dragged me kicking and screaming onto Facebook and MySpace.

A little after that, my banker sent me so many WSJ articles about Twitter that I felt compelled to sign on for fear he might stop cashing my checks.

And by Thanksgiving, my friend Tex had talked me into manning not one, but two blogs. (When I say "talked me into it," I mean: we sat down with some beignets and he mashed a lot of buttons on his laptop, and suddenly, I was a blogger. A blogger lightly dusted from head to toe in powdered sugar.)

When I told him I didn't adapt easily to new technology, he said I reminded him of what his Little League baseball coaches had said once of him -- that it's like watching me run the bases with a piano strapped to my back.

Sounds about right.

Sometime in 2009, I will have an entirely new website at work. By way of direction, I only told the guys renovating it that it must be idiot-proof -- that they should be picturing Lenny in Of Mice and Men when they're thinking of the person who'll be updating it at 3 a.m.

Sometime in January, I'll have a new laptop.

These are not baby-steps, for me.

My friend Ian doesn't even have a cell phone, and over Christmas Eve dinner, he had the same facebook complaints I did -- i.e., we don't know HOW to put your seahorse back in the ocean, or clean your garden, or catch the Duke Sucks wave. Pleeeease stop asking us.

But 2009 will be different.

I have told Wes at TAO and Dave at Elevation that I'd like for them to team up and build me an iCar this year, and then install a thought portal into my head so that I can just communicate directly, without the bother of a keyboard (otherwise, Dr. Nick is going to have to treat me for carpal tunnel).

I'll show YOU an early adopter.

Power.Less.

I woke up this morning without power.

Not the AA kind. The KU kind.

Sitting in the dark. Like an ANIMAL.

I had just read "See you in a hundred years" -- the chronicle of a yuppie couple who decided to return to 1900, for a year (in a gesture after my own heart, they picked 1900 at least partly because toilet paper had been invented then). It's not half the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is (a year in the life of eating locally), but it was entertaining, and I stayed up most of Christmas Eve finishing it, so I could give it to my stepdad for Christmas.

(Yes, I shamelessly read and watch and listen to most gifts before I dispense them. Hope you're ok with that if you're on my gift list.) Anyway.... The book was the subject of some discussion over the annual Christmas Eve dinner -- where we all decided we ENJOY our online, and blackberry, and other 21st century addictions.

So when the lights (and more importantly, the HBO) flickered this morning, my first thought was, "But I don't wanna go back to the land!!" I was just there. I don't liiiiike it.

First, I went straight downstairs to the mailbox. I didn't want to YELL at anybody until I had determined 100 percent that I had in fact paid my bill. (Turns out: I had.)

I needn't have worried. There's zero risk during a KU outage that you'll actually talk to anyone at KU. First you have to click through the language options. Then you have to ID yourself as an existing customer, with a phone number. Mine wasn't in their system.

I called back, and tried my OLD phone number (easily remembered because it was prefix + HELL), and they matched that to an address in the suburbs (as if). I called back again and they asked for my Meter Number. (Sure. Who doesn't have THAT memorized?)

Then I went out to the garage, fished out an old bill, FOUND the meter number and called back again... Only to discover that BlackBerry's keyboard doesn't let you enter a mix of numbers and letters. (A "C" for example, on the Pearl's QWERTY keyboard isn't where it is on a numeric keypad. Somebody REALLY should've fixed that glitch by now.) After I kept repeatedly pounding ZERO for Operator, the digital voice just told me the call volume was too high anyway and I should call back later.

Then I posted my outrage on Facebook.

That's where I learned a transformer had blown at the library. And shortly after that, the lights came back on. I'm told, by Facebookies, the crisis lasted a half hour. (The daily said it was a couple hours.)

Really? It seemed longer.

Luckily, I was able to crudely fashion this blog out of some twigs I found in the backyard.

Home Cooking

Yesterday was the first chance I'd had to share a kitchen with my brother since we put together a cook-out at Dr. Nick's last summer -- and I think it was the first time we EVER, in our entire lives, shared a kitchen together putting out the Christmas meal.

He was interested in cooking from about the age of 5 or so. I didn't pick it up 'til college -- probably as self-defense because I still looooved to eat, and he and my parents were no longer around to feed me.

On separate paths, we both arrived at the same conclusion: that cooking is what makes us happiest. It's therapy. It's expression. I don't think there's anything either of us would rather do.
I always get annoyed when people say they "fancy themselves" writers, as if access to a laptop makes it so (yeah, I could "fancy myself" a surgeon, but no one's handing me a scalpel), so I never, ever say I "fancy myself" a chef.

I'm a cook. An avid cook, a devoted cook...but just a cook.

My brother's an actual chef. He went to school for it. He trained. He apprenticed with a nice Greek family. He also has a Master Baker's Certification (don't try to say that one too fast) -- which is unusual in that he can be both chef and pastry chef -- most culinary pros do one or the other; he's qualified to do both (as anyone who's tasted his desserts can attest).

He was so happy that my Christmas package from home included knives this year -- having relentlessly made fun of me this summer when he asked for the sharpest knife in the house and I sheepishly handed him a steak knife. He told everyone at dinner I'd handed him a rusty shiv I'd crudely sharpened from an old spoon. (I said I wasn't a chef.)

When I first walked into the house, I couldn't quite discern the delicious aroma that greeted me -- even less as the folks kept explaining it as "Pazzoli." Sounded Italian (rhymed with Fazoli), and I couldn't make it out. Finally I asked Brother to spell it. Posole. It's a traditional festive stew that includes hominy in Mexico and New Mexico. Around the kitchen, I could see evidence of an entire night's worth of meticulous prep work.

He'd stopped in Lex on his way to their house and called me for directions to La Favorita (the best taqueria in town) and made a 45 minute detour to get there in driving rain and Christmas Eve traffic just to get the final few ingredients he hadn't already shipped ahead from Austin (and that was a big box). Multiple bags of herbs, peppers, garlic, spices, etc. loaded down the groaning fridge shelves.

My stepdad bragged how they were out in the garage earlier roasting the peppers with a blow-torch. (He would eat a shoe if you barbecued it and didn't tell him -- and my mom would be content to nibble on the laces -- but they try hard to be good sports about the fact that my brother and I were apparently raised by the wolves at Dean & Deluca.)

This was just the meal that was designed to tide us over till dinner...

Which we'd been instructed to get on the table no later than 5 pm. That IS dinner hour in their house. (They met in Florida -- land of the Early Bird Special -- so it seems appropriate.)

What I also know -- from attending many a social gathering hosted by my mother -- is that if she says 5 pm, that means everyone has a plate in one hand and a cold beverage in the other by 5 pm. If she has to greet you in the driveway and stuff a canape through your driver's side window to pull this off, she will. By 3, she was getting antsy when prep didn't seem to be getting underway. By 3:30, when we got started, she was edging into panic and offering the guests bourbon balls.

At first, I was only given simple tasks. "Could you cut the broccoli into florets...?" After I'd demonstrated reasonable proficiency, I got tossed complex assignments, with uncomplicated instruction, "can you make the bechamel for that broccoli?"

And I started to. Before realizing there was no cream, no half & half.

I was lost. He was nonplussed, and handed me a couple cans of condensed milk, describing it as an acceptable Eastern Kentucky variant of cream.

From there, we diverged significantly. His version of bechamel includes eggs, and tempering. Mine's just basic butter, flour, and cream. I made his version... and nearly accidentally served scrambled eggs along the way. And it was still the only dish I really accomplished.

Meanwhile, he busted out carnitas for appetizers (small bites of roasted chicken, on homemade tortillas, with an avocado tomatilla sauce that I still can't stop dreaming about; the sauce had been started the night before and he painstakingly educated me about each component of the flavor profile -- why I was interpreting the acid of the tomatilla as lime on my palate, the finishing note of watermelon rind at the end of a poblano pepper). I still don't remember all the steps that went into the brown butter gravy, but I now know to chill my roux in between before I return it to the pan.

At one point I disappeared from the kitchen and returned in time to hear him joking with my stepdad that in a REAL kitchen, you don't leave without yelling out "bathroom break Chef!" (and the Chef has to yell back "Aye!" before you leave).

I didn't know!

When only the appetizers had been served at 5, my stepdad was (half-kidding) yelling into the kitchen, that we'd better get a move on, "we're losin' customers!" But by 5:30, everyone was seated for a feast.

I was pretty embarrassed that my only contribution to the table was the very simply roasted broccoli, with the bechamel. But I took comfort from the fact that there wasn't a Ritz Cracker or potato chip anywhere near it, and that it in no way resembled anything anyone could call "broccoli casserole."

On Page 17

You will find this week's COLUMN on page 17 of this week's Ace. The print version of Reality Truck won't be on stands again until January 8, 2009.

BUT there will be blogs, and micro-blogs (twitter.com/RealityTruck) here throughout the holidays.

If you want to see the actual columns when they come out in print, pick up an issue, or visit aceweekly.com (currently under renovation).