As of late though, there have been 2 news stories dominating the headlines here in Chicago. Not the same 2 news stories, but rather the same 2 incidents happening over and over again.

• Children dying or being severely injured by a falling television
• People driving the wrong way down an expressway

I mean, say what? What sort of sick and twisted groundhog day is this? Sure these things happen from time to time, but since the end of 2011? Five children have been hurt by a falling television, most of them older models sitting on a piece of furniture (not a wall mounted flat screen like you might think).  We’ve also had at least 5 wrong-way expressway drivers (and 4 crashes) since December as well, the latest one being this morning and causing the outbound Kennedy Expressway (which, by the by, is how I get to work) to be shut down while they worked the scene of the accident. In fact, we’ve had 3 serious wrong way crashes with injuries in February.

You read about epidemics and pandemics and crime sprees and cold snaps, but right now Chicago is afflicted by something much stranger.

Most likely we will have a public safety campaign, and since we are short on money I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to merge it into one public safety campaign, something snazzy, albeit long, like PLEASE PROPERLY SECURE YOUR TELEVISIONS AND ALSO DON’T ENTER AN EXPRESSWAY EXIT. PPSYTAADEAEE for short. There will be mayoral meetings, and an unveiling, and a graphic design company will draw something to encourage people not to place old school heavy televisions on twee Ikea furniture. Perhaps all the off ramps in Chicago will get bright orange crossing gates and we will all pay a nominal fee (read: high tax) for some sort of wireless device that opens the gates for you when you exit the expressway but beeps loudly and tells you NO YOU ARE GOING THE WRONG WAY if you try to enter an exit.

If that doesn’t work Chicago could give us all a tax credit to buy super lightweight flat televisions made out of carbon (I’m sure these exist, no?) and then employ strapping young men to come around to all the homes in Chicago and professionally mount them (the televisions you sickos) to the wall, all safe like. That will go well until one collapses, ala the back porch and the lawsuits start, but in the interim? Genius. It doesn’t solve the Expressway problem, but Chicago has tons of money, we can probably just put a police officer at every exit to keep an eye on them all. Or something.

I mean these are just general solutions, but you can see where it is going.

Save the people! From…themselves!

Saturday seemed to be going well, as far as Saturday’s go. A trip to Costco, where you can buy enough dish soap to last you three years! (We did). We also stocked up on essentials such as trash bags, paper towels and a set of dishwasher safe cutting boards that led no less than three people to approach us and ask us where they too could find some brightly colored cutting boards for culinary adventures. Aisle four, for those curious, near the blenders.

Later in the evening we went to dinner with friends and had them back to our house and this is when things started to go downhill fast. First there was what can only be referred to as the Wine Incident. Somehow, in the midst of reaching up to scratch my forehead I snagged my wine glass with my pinky finger (true story) and simultaneously dumped and threw my entire glass of wine all over my couch, myself and one of our guests.

This was approximately 1/4 of all the wine, adorning the two bottom cushions of our couch (along with a lot of water as I was trying to rinse out the fabric):

The wine also covered the back cushions of the couch, and in attempt to clean them with dripping water all over the bottom of the couch we flipped the whole thing over on its back so I could dab and blot to my hearts content. Our friends, no doubt concerned after one of them took a red wine shower, left soon after and that is when we realized our dog wasn’t just being strangely antisocial but he was clearly in some sort of distress. After coaxing him out of his hiding spot in the guest bathroom we realized he was crying whenever anyone touched his belly and couldn’t jump up and down off the bed.

Forget about the couch, we bundled him up and drove across town to the emergency veterinarian (don’t worry, spilling my wine was not the result of inebriation and no one drove under the influence) hoping that they would charge us $100 to tell us we were overreacting to something simple.

I bet you can guess how this goes, can’t you? It wasn’t something simple, poor Rhett Butler had pancreatitis and after x-rays and an exam had to get an IV and stay the night at the strange vet. I cried the entire way home as I pictured him in his E-collar with his leg bandaged, scared and not understanding why he didn’t feel right and why I left him in a cage, his biggest fear after living in the shelter for a few months.

No, I’m not dramatic, why do you ask.

Certain everything would look better in the morning we fell asleep somewhere around 4 am. When I woke up around 9 I gave the couch another rinse off only to discover that the cushion covers that I’d washed (on the gentle cycle) had come apart at the seams. Then when I flipped the couch upright I discovered the wine had SOAKED THROUGH THE BACK OF THE COUCH in a large, wine-y puddle. *Shakes fist at sky*

And that is how we ended up rearranging our entire house so our living room has/had seating. But not before I shoved the ruined couch into our guest bedroom, had a good cry and then shuffled to the vet to visit our dog. Two hours, one emergency (another dog, not RB) and a cup of coffee later and we brought a very woozy, incredibly annoyed dog home. Let me tell you how he felt about coming home to an entirely upended house with furniture everywhere. On second thought, no. You can guess. (Hint: he was displeased.)

The “good” news was our very large master bedroom had a settee and reading chair in it, so we brought them out into the living room, took the one good couch back into our bedroom (to replace the settee so we have a spot to read) and rearranged our living room with the “new” pieces. The bad news is we definitely lost seating (our old arrangement was a couch + love seat, I ruined the love seat) that we replaced with a couch with no back and a chair. So a quick trip to Target later, a few things ordered off of Amazon and voila, here is what I’m going for:

Color palate inspired by the china (which I own and we have a platter from the set in the living room). Chair (not pictured) and couch procured, ottoman and bench being ordered. I snagged the plain pillows and wicker basket at Target and I’m now contemplating the lime green and embroidered pillows (to bring in the rest of the colors) and perusing inexpensive curtains to try and tie it all together. Living room on a budget! Whoo! The bench, ottoman and wicker basket all have storage inside of them, which is crucial and the bench will be tucked back and brought out when needed, not on a regular basis. So far, it looks like this:

 

  

Give or take.

And now, I need a long weekend from my long weekend. And my bank account to magically refill. Emergency vets, as it turns out, are quite expensive. (Thanks goodness for pet insurance, eh?) (Speaking of budgets, we’d eventually planned on updating our living room decor at some point (later rather than sooner) but previously it had a lot of khaki and chocolate brown so I’m just adding a little more visual interest and storage…or so I hope)

Rhett Butler says he is feeling just fine now, thank you very much. He isn’t sure why we worried and he definitely doesn’t like his shaved leg.

Ah well. There is always…the weekend.

Here, I’ll let you guess:

If that wasn’t helpful enough:

Yup, it is Mardi Gras weekend. And I’m not there…again.

Last night was Muses, one of my favorite parades/krewes of Mardi Gras- it is an all female krewe and they throw beads with little shoes on them. Each krewe member has a coveted throw as well, a Muses glitter shoes. I’ve caught a lot of “coveted” Mardi Gras throws- a golden coconut, light up beads, glass beads times eight, etc – but I’ve never caught a Muses shoe. One day!!

Of course around these parts, Mardi Gras is scarce. I do have a pretty glass canister on our bookshelf full of yellow, green and purple throws year round, and right now our dining room table centerpiece has beads in it. From time to time I actually wear my glass bead catches:

But for the most part, this is as Mardi Gras as we get….

Yes, he is eating one of the stars. Sigh. Not a cajun beagle, that is for sure.

If you feel like celebrating this weekend, let me suggest my favorite red beans and rice recipe, my favorite King Cake recipe and of course, remember not to pick up the dead beads that fall on the ground- bad luck for a year!
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Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

I should have known better.

Thomas Keller’s recipes, while divine (and worth making, don’t get me wrong) have the small issue of having single ingredients that are an entire recipe unto themselves. Oh, the crabcakes recipe is so simple until you realize, oh, heyo, that aioli is its own recipe that requires an ingredient that I need to order from Amazon, and the potato hash includes melted onions which, oh look at that, take an hour all by themselves (and one of the ingredients within the melted onions is a whole other recipe AGAIN, I’m looking at you “sachet”), and spinach Rockefeller requires, I kid you not, one million ingredients, give or take, including Herbsaint. (We substituted Pernod.)

Whew.

As my friend Cheesefiend said, sometimes you inexplicably find yourself with a roux that has turned into cement that is congealed in your eyebrows as you frantically search for the button to turn the vent on as it all burns.

Or sometimes you find yourself forming crabcake after crabcake and after watching all of them fall apart and crying into the bowl of (expensive) crab and wondering why it won’t just STICK TOGETHER DAMNIT. At this point your husband quietly suggests, as he surveys the scene of 8 sauce pans and various baking sheets and the food processor being used and reused that maybe, just this once, we go by the McDonald’s Rule and order pizza.

SOB.

When he realized that no, I was not letting this crab go without a fight, he disappeared and came back 10 minutes later with a list of all the tips he found On The Internet for making crabcakes stick. He found me staring sheepishly into the bowl.

I forgot the eggs…. I admitted.

He raised an eyebrow.

You mean the glue? he asked quietly.

Pretty much.

And with that I beat some eggs and poured them into the crab mixture while wiping my cheeks with the back of my Panko covered hands.

I know you would be surprised to learn that this is when he decided it was time to open the wine.

The meal was delicious….and we ate at 8:30 pm, a mere two and a half hours after beginning our journey. But those crabcakes stuck together. And I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if those melted onions were not amazing.

If you think about trying to buy someone something to express how much you love them, well. That is an exercise in futility unless you have a secret stash of gold. Then I suppose that task is rather easy. For me, secret-stash-of-gold-less, I went with a whimsy piece of art from Etsy as a token of my love and affection instead of trying to win him over with something over the top:

It reminded me of the view of Chicago from the water, where B spends a good part of his summer on a sailboat. It reminded me of him and so it is here, hanging above the towels in our guest bathroom.

The truth is though, Valentines Day isn’t about gifts or tokens. I’m just happy to spend it with someone who makes me laugh, who hugs me when I cry and who doesn’t ask too many questions when I tell him the “stick on eyeliner” in my latest Birchbox is the worst sample ever and then I do this:

It made sense at the time, I promise.

Related: I have three more packages of stick on eyeliner should anyone need them. I don’t think I’m grown up enough for that nonsense.

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I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d never been to an auto show- a fact that blows my husband’s mind, as a Detroit native- and my husband just kept telling me it would be really cool. I shrugged my shoulders, as the daughter of a pilot I grew up attending air shows and to this day they bore the socks off of me, a little bit of “hmm my neck hurts from all this upward peering” and a little bit of “I’ve seen this act before….” so I just couldn’t believe an auto show full of vehicles that are not moving would be interesting.

But ever since I married into a General Motors family I’ve promised myself to keep an open mind about the iconic American brand. Last September I had the opportunity to drive the Chevy Equinox to review it and I was…pleasantly surprised. Even after that though I wasn’t 100% convinced I could love GM cars only and forever. Occasionally I’d hop into a friend’s new Volkswagon or see a photo of my Dad’s new Volvo and wistfully think “that is a pretty piece of machinery right there”.  So while I’d been thoroughly impressed with the GM car I’d driven, I wasn’t convinced I could love the entire line up.

This is where you shake your head and yell at the screen that you know EXACTLY WHAT IS COMING. My foreshadowing, it isn’t subtle.

I can’t exactly explain it, but at the auto show, where every car brand in the world was present with their most top of the line automobiles, I found myself…most comfortable…at the GM display. When all was said and done, with all the LED headlights and souped up engines and extra features and parking assists and blinking lights and safety ratings and a lot of “can you fit a golf bag in the trunk of this coupe?” I went back to the GM display and smiled. These were the cars that I found myself dropping my jaw at, where I lingered over a design feature or soft leather. This is where I found so much enthusiasm in every single employee that was there, that I couldn’t help but be excited with them. THE 2013 ACADIA HAS WHAT? MORE LEG ROOM IN THE THIRD SEAT? SIGN ME UP FOR SOME MORE LEG ROOM! HOLD ON, I NEED TO TAKE A PICTURE OF MORE LEG ROOM!

The love for design, the pride in the interiors, the explanation of new safety features was done by people who truly cared. GM wants my drive up the Northwoods to be comfortable. They want your kids to be safe in their car seats but have a place for their sippy cup. They want all of our commutes to as painless as possible. They showed off a new crown jewel with a lot of shy smiles, the Cadillac ATS, and all I could think the entire time was my husband would love this car so much. Truth be told, I think I would too.

When my visit was all said and done I said thank you and made my way home I was thinking about all the cars and the features and things that are important to buyers- mileage, interior space, cupholders, captain’s chairs, value- and I thought about what was important to me. Reliability. Safety. Gas mileage. Space for all of our stuff when we go sailing, on vacation, to the grocery store. The ability to fit in our tiny parking garage and parallel park on a busy Chicago street. Sure, I’d like a cupholder or two. I’d like my backseat passengers to have room for their legs. One day I’d like to fit a car seat for a wee one in the back. (No time soon). All of the things that are important to me seemed important to GM. What wasn’t important to them? That I write anything about my visit. They were not there to impress you or my parents or even my husband. GM took the time to impress me and didn’t ask for a blog post, a review, tweets with hashtags or a vlog discussing what I saw. They were there, with a group of owners and bloggers and Twitter personalities and the only people in the room that mattered was us. It wasn’t about what we promised them, but it was about what they are promising as a brand and as a company.

Consider me sold.

I’m proud to be a member of the General Motors family.

From what I hear, the membership is for a lifetime, no dues required.

 I was given one press pass for admission to the Chicago Auto Show on a media day, and a tour of the auto show floor by a GM employee. I have not been compensated for my time or post, nor did GM ask me to post my opinions. My opinions have been and always will be entirely my own and I am not paid to publish positive comments.

It is Friday- and while I know this sounds glaringly simple, I wish you could hear the relief in my voice. It has been one of those weeks so filled with activities and things I began to suspect I hadn’t looked at a calendar when I planned it all, there is no way I’d commit and over-commit myself this way. And yet, there I was, running and doing and cab-catching and now, today, all I have to do is work and go to the dermatologist.

Then I remember that last year I went to the dermatologist and three days after that I had fire ears and we all know how that turned out-22 dermatology appointments later and still one big old fire-y mystery. For 2012 I fervently hope I only have one dermatology appointment.

Sunday was the Superbowl and we had a party- all of the food was delicious.

(Salami squishes: 1/4 pound thinly sliced genoa salami, 1 container of onion chive cream cheese. Place 1 tbsp cream cheese in the center of each salami round & squish together. Serve & impress your guests will less than 15 minutes of “cooking”)

But I will admit that the “healthy food” – fruit pizza, pretzels, hummus and chips and salsa- was hardly touched. But we barely had any cheesy crack dip or buffalo dip left, so hey, people clearly enjoyed themselves.

Monday was Monday + a migraine (yaaay) and Tuesday brought the dentist and my Dad being in town and a big work meeting and the week just goes on and on like that.

On the plus side, I now only have to go the dentist every 6 months instead of every 3. On the downside, I still had to go to the dentist, and I don’t care who you are, no one likes going to the dentist.

Then again on the double downside I’m telling you about my dental appointment. Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel for content.

Ok fine, I also did something incredibly cool this week…I went to the Chicago Auto Show…

….but more on that on Monday, when I can form a coherent thought.

Tonight I have grand plans of a movie at home with my husband a our favorite “date night in” dinner ever of wine, cheese and cured meats.

Ahh, Friday. I knew I loved you.

• Razor blades (are they hand crafted by small children?)
• Avocados
• Eye drops (liquid gold?)
• Good paper towels
• Candles
• Lightbulbs
• Allergy medicine (No big deal, I can choose between breathing & groceries)
• Ziptop bags
• Beef tenderloin (I hardly ever end up buying it instead I just mourn)

All I’m saying is, if you run into me at Costco on the day I have to buy allergy medicine, razor blades and lightbulbs, you should probably stay away from my wrath.

I mean really, exactly what is the process that makes razor blades so damn expensive? If it would help (ahem, Gillette) I’d be more than happy to give up my never-ending razor blades (mark my words, before long we will see a 5-blade razor) for, oh, TWO. I’d take a two blade razor if it meant that they were less expensive. DAILY HAIR REMOVAL SHOULDN’T BE NECESSARY TO BUDGET FOR.

Nor should guacamole. Sniff.

I enjoyed the second book.

The third book….I wasn’t loving so much. And then it ended and I was like THAT IS NOT WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR, KATNISS & PEETA.  

I can’t help but feel like I just spent many hours engrossed in some perverse mashup of Harry Potter 4 + The Truman Show + the last 1/4 of Harry Potter 7. It is like the Triwizard Tournament with less magic and more grooslings and ohh, television cameras, everyone is watching, then oh look, THE BATTLE AT THE CASTLE, WOMP, PEOPLE DIE, WOMP WOMP, OH LOOK FLASH FOWARD, KIDS AND SMILES, ALL BACK TO NORMAL. Do you think when their friends come over for tea they know Katniss/Harry is the person who brought it all down?

Now I need to go reread the entire Harry Potter series to remind my one true young adult fiction love that I haven’t forsaken it, or its amazing ending.

(Give or take the Weasley twin dying. I’m still not over that one.)

But I’m ready to replace my Twilight books with the Hunger Games. Sparkling vampires are absurd anyway, if you really think about it. And Bella is the worst role model ever. I’ll take Katniss over Bella and twice on Sunday but no one messes with my Hermione.

In other news, it is time for Stephen King and some 21+ literature. Teenage angst gives me flashbacks.

I like to think that based on this photo, you understand.

I know, right? Apparently I’m all about diving in without checking how deep the water is. (Not really. Just an analogy. I value my ability to walk.)

Anyway, I thought I’d share what I’m reading for each of my book clubs. Bonus: one of them is one that you can join too!

The first book club isn’t really mine, it is my Mom’s but I like to read the book and talk about it with my Mom after she discusses it with her friends. They are reading E=mc2: A Biography of The World’s Most Famous Equation. I haven’t downloaded it yet but I plan on tackling it soon. My Mom said it is very interesting so far, so here goes.

For my real-life book club here in Chicago we are reading my most favorite book of all time, The Power of One. I could not be more thrilled. I encourage everyone to pick it up and love it as much as I do. (I do not love the movie.)

And finally, my last book club (with the ladies of the Curvy Girl Guide) is reading the Descendants. The fun part about this one is that is an online book club, open to anyone. (No really, please join up and read with us.) I can’t wait to discuss the book in an online format, and hey, it has been made into an Oscar nominated movie, so all the more reason to enjoy, right?

Confession: I refuse to buy books with the “movie” cover on them aka the copy with George Clooney on the front. Even though I find George Clooney delicious.

In addition to my book club reads, I have my own personal reading list on the side. I just finished up Red Mist, the most recent Dr. Kay Scarpetta novel by Patricia Cornwell. The Dr. Kay Scarpetta series is my favorite of all mystery series, beating out Stephanie Plum and Temperance Brennan and Kinsey Millhone, which I think says a lot about how much I love it. I do not count the Eve Duncan series in this list, I think those books are big yawn. Next up I want to read the new Stephen King novel about the Kennedy assassination, 11/22/63. And finally, after all of that, I think I will read The Hunger Games.

I know, I know. But I’m suspicious. Highly suspicious. It can’t be that good, can it?

Read anything good lately?