My Daily Morning Surprise - Dog Poop in a Bag

I have a neighbor who I HATE.  Granted, I only know two of my many neighbors (who both just happen to be on either side of our house), and only one I have actually spoken to.  It's the one I have never spoken to that I hate.  First of all, I know hate is a strong word.  And in the beginning I was a little miffed at this family.  First of all, they only talk to and acknowledge Big Man.  But whenever they see me they will literally look right through me and ignore me.  Just the other day they had a bunch of gardeners out redoing their front lawn and the gardeners smiled and said hello to me, which I happily reciprocated.  At the time of this happy greeting/exchange, the Fat Ass Matron Neighbor was standing literally 5 feet from me and pretended I wasn't even there.  Your freaking gardener was saying hello to me and yet I'm not even worth acknowledging.  But that same evening as Big Man came home from work, she had a whole conversation with him about her gardening plans and blah blah blah.  She's a bitch, plain and simple.  Plus she had the nerve to tell our gardener not to park in front of her house.  He has been working at our house for the past 16+ years and had always parked there since it was easier for him to roll out the equipment.  But as soon as she moved her Fat Ass in some pseudo faded mom jeans next door, suddenly the street in front of her house is private property.  She even had the nerve to tell our Pool Guy to park somewhere else.  Thanks a lot bitch, yet you have your loser friends park in front of our house 4 days out of the week.  Sometimes I'm tempted to spray those cars with shaving cream, but I don't because Big Man would have a conniption if I ever did do anything like that.

She's like George Jefferson in that she used to live in a crappier house and they moved into this house last year, so suddenly she's moving on up to a deluxe house in Satellite Village.  I did my reconnaissance on her, and they literally lived a couple of miles away and decided to upgrade their dwelling last year.  My Columbia MBA isn't going to waste here, I'll use whatever I have to find information on my enemies and entertain me at the same time.  So these people have a grandiose idea that they are just better than everyone else.  So good in fact, they don't even have to carry their own dog poop.

So for a few mornings when I went out to drive Little Man to school, I noticed these little black bags of dog poop on our front lawn.  It bothered me since I suspected it was Fat Ass, but I didn't have any proof.  Than one morning as I was getting Little Miss out of bed and opening her shades, I see Fat Ass and her dog walking in front of our house.  First of all, is there a leash law in CA?  Because her dumass dog was without a leash.  And he was running all over our lawn and our other neighbor's lawn.  Than he decided to squat down and take a shit.  This is the same lawn that Little Man and his friends would roll down for kicks.  That just grossed me out and you can bet I put a stop to rolling of any kind on the front lawn.  So Fat Ass's dog takes a shit, she bags it and than TOSSES it back on the lawn.  She did this again when the dog took another shit at the next house down.  I'm standing there flabbergasted and totally disgusted.  You're too good to carry your dog's shit?  So you just leave it there?  Is there a law against that?  What about some HOA rule?  I don't care if you come back after your walk (which isn't working since that ass is as fat as it was a year ago) and pick it up.  That is just disgusting and oh so lazy!!  Seriously, you can't even carry it with you?  You just leave bags of dog shit on everyone's front lawn like a trail of breadcrumbs?  Are you so stupid you don't know how to find your way home?  I swear, this just made me HATE her.  I'm debating if I should take some pictures or video and submit them to the HOA.  But I would have to take them from another angle, otherwise Fat Ass would know it was our house.  But I'll bide my time.  If anything, my time here makes me think of ways to exact revenge and my pound of flesh.

The Lazy Lazy Chef

In NY eating out, or at home, was a virtual smorgasbord of ethnicities and cuisines.  If you went out to eat, you can have anything you desired.  From super dirt cheap Chinese, Michelin star restaurants serving the gamut from exotic meats to foie gras to super stinky cheese (yum), to real farm/rooftop to table establishments.  I remember organizing a dinner in business school at an Ethiopian restaurant, an ETHIOPIAN restaurant, simply because it was close and I was craving lentils and injera.  Turns out the place closed because of some money laundering issues, but that's besides the point.  The point is the variety of food was tremendous and gut busting.  Plus, when compared to the cost of buying and preparing your own meal, eating out was sometimes cheaper for a couple.  So for most of my life in NY, prior to having kids, we were a restaurant or delivery type of couple.  Sure, every once in a while I'll break out the Mauviel and cook a meal.  But it was usually cheaper and quicker to order in.  I even had a binder filled with a pretty large variety of restaurants who would deliver to our building.  It was broken out by cuisine and in alphabetical order (OCD thank you very much).  That binder was our Holy Grail at 6 pm - and we would agonize over cuisine and restaurant whenever we wanted to order in.  Than I had Little Man and started becoming a weekly (sometimes twice weekly!) Fresh Direct customer.  You could order anything in NY.  Groceries - check!  McDonald's - check!  Diapers - check!  Prescriptions - check!  Everyone offered delivery, and if they didn't, messengers were still around to pick up and deliver for a heftier fee.  I basically never left the apartment for real household errands.  I left for museums, for Kidville classes, lunch with my old co-workers downtown on Water Street or Union Square (depending on the time of the month - the end of the month was always busier since deals were closing), or shopping.  Oh how I miss shopping, the sample sales and the beautiful windows at Bergdorf.  But that's a whole other story.

So when we moved out to Satellite Village and I realized my dining options were chain restaurants or fast food joints, I realized something had to change.  That something was me.  Delivery is a joke here.  The only thing you can get is pizza, pizza, or pizza.  I think there are a couple of Chinese places that deliver but their food seems kind of sketchy.  I used to always get the fried chicken wings in NY, but they were no where to be found out here.  And what is this Egg Foo Young?  I thought that was an urban legend, I've never seen that on a menu before.  But it's here and there are about 6-10 different varieties of it.  As a result I've had to start cooking.  And with kids I can't really cook what I like and miss.  So I went out and bought a crock pot.  

To tell you the truth, I have never touched one before.  Growing up my mom never wanted to get one since she was convinced it would burn the house down since you were leaving an electrical appliance on ALL DAY LONG cooking food.  But I decided to get one and try it out.  Can I just tell you that I LOVE this thing.  You can pick one up super cheap and it is a dream!  I just plop in whatever I can think of, turn it on and walk away.  Granted certain things take a lot longer to cook, but it's easy and it's only one pot to clean up in the end!  Oh Crock Pot, where have you been my entire life?  Why have I fought you for so long, when you are nothing but a godsend to me!  Can you ever forgive me for doubting your prowess?  Than I discovered that there are blogs about crock pot cooking.  People even try to use it 365 days out of the year! How insane, yet totally ingenious is that?  So tomorrow night I'm going to try to crock pot some short ribs. There's some pseudo Korean recipe I found which I'm going to try.  I know it's pseudo since the sauce is made with onions and sugar and tamari.  But I'm going to try to authenticate it by adding garlic and chili flakes and scallions.  But regardless of the ingredients, I know it's going to be a lazy cooking day for me tomorrow.

The crock pot has made me a lazy chef, always searching for a recipe I could slap in the crock pot and walk away.  But the flip side is the extra time allows me to try to recreate the foods I miss most about NY.  Like the gougères from Churrascaria Plataforma, the rainbow cookies, black and whites and florentines from all those bakeries and delis dotting the city, macarons from Bouchon Bakery, bagels from H&H (so sad the one on the UWS closed) and anything else I can remember eating and missing.  I'm still hoping to find an Ethiopian restaurant out here but I am not holding my breath.  I don't know when I will ever get a chance to have injera again.  But maybe one day I'll try to recreate the lentil stew (Misr Wot) in my beloved crock pot. 

Yes, I Wash My Face with Oil

We are in an area known as the "Valley".  Okay, it's not The Valley (which I had to ask a local Mom what that really meant and she clarified for me that it meant the San Fernando Valley) but it's another Valley.  I swear, there are so many valleys here and none of them seem to be a true valley of below sea level.  But maybe I'm just missing something.  Anyway, Satellite Village is in a valley but also in a rocky and dry mountainous area (see - it's not a real valley!) where it's almost desert like in the heat and lack of moisture.  My first summer here I remember driving along the 101 Freeway and on my right was a raging wildfire.  I flipped out and had to call the Big Man at work to tell him about the fire that was literally 10 feet away from us zipping by at 65 mph.  Turned out I was lucky because 10-15 minutes later they shut down that stretch of the 101 to fight the blaze.  So in a nutshell it's dry here, mountainous, and the temperature can swing between 80 to 40 degrees in a 24 hour period.  Though we don't get snow or torrential downpours, I do miss the humidity that comes with those weather patterns.  As a result my skin has gotten extremely rough and dry and scaly and just plain nasty.  I don't know how the other women deal with the dryness, but I'm dying from the dearth of humidity.

I've tried all sorts of lotions and serums for my face.  Bliss socks and gloves for my hands and feet, which only work if you never have to take them off.  I tried non soap cleansers for my face, shea butter soaps, baby oils and creams, basically anything that will help alleviate the dryness.  I'm normally not a beauty junkie, but I did start to notice fine lines in my face where it's really dry.  And that scared the crap out of me.  I don't want to start getting brown and wrinkly and turn into a middle aged Magda.  So I resorted to the one product I tried a long time ago in NY and discovered was too rich for my skin, Shu Uemura Cleansing Oil.  I have to say that it's kind of expensive, but a little does go a long way.  I think this bottle will last me at least 6+ months.

Granted my face doesn't feel as dry and tight after using it, but at least when I slather some heavy duty cream on it won't dissipate in a few hours.  It's truly sad that my life has been reduced to searching for heavy oily facial products because of the weather and (gasp!) also because I'm old!  I have to actually do the math to figure out how old I am now.  I think after 30 it was all the same to me, middle aged.  

Anyway, this is basically my exciting news for the week.  I use oil to wash my face, and it works.  I still have to find something for my hands and feet, but at least the skin on my face won't crack when I smile now.