In Case You Missed It

Look, the weekend wasn't going to light itself on fire, y'all. Someone had to do it, and that someone was moi. (That's French for 'Gina.')

By Wednesday I had already declared that the entire summer was to be perfectly expressed in a 36-hour window of awesomeness and amazement. The weekend to end all summer weekends.*

Reds game, helmet sundae, fireworks, pool, shopping, grilling out, etc etc.

Etc etc = watching Rosie grind on Gapper. 'Cause nothing says summer like mascots behaving all Jersey Shore.

Now you know what was up this weekend.

*Even though it's still 90 degrees outside, I get cagey about summer being over when school supplies show up in the seasonal aisle at Target, which immediately sends me over the edge and right over to the boxed wine aisle.

My Summer BFF

I am so in love with this song I want to marry it and cook it breakfast. More about Tennis.

What It's Like To Fall From Space - Transfixing

Just before the two minute mark the booster separates from Space Shuttle STS-124 and a camera captures the free-fall to Earth. Wait for it, the last 60 seconds a smile will spread across your face.

Splendid.

Tgif!

Now More Awake!

Observations from being a awake at 6 am:

• But, but… I was just starting REM sleep.

• Blink, blink, blink. It's... dark

• Omg, I'm BLIND!

• Wait... ohhhhh, the sun hasn't risen yet.

• I can totally put on make-up in the dark. And Visine.

• Everyone else on the planet is still asleep, laughing at me in their dreams.

• Hold up. Is the cat talking to me? Oh right, I'm actually still asleep.

• Traffic lights? Phssht. Disregard. There's no traffic at this hour.

• O.M.G. Look at all this parking!

• Arrive at 6:30 am meeting - Look, I don't know what cesspool in hell you monsters crawled out of, but I hope you go back there. (In my head.)

• Now, everyone raise their hand, Who likes to rise and shine all early and get shiz done?! All rightty, you go getters!! Now back the hell away from me because we are not friends.

• P.S. This post has nothing to do with First Watch other than I think their logo looks really awake. Like it's already had two Triathlete omelettes and a pot of coffee.

Got Game by the Pound

Did Blackstreet have more than one song? Who cares, because the best one, this one, was playing in the Clifton Chipotle yesterday during lunchtime.

Dave said, "Chipotle is throwing it down."

I was 'bout to turn it out when Dave got low then did that leg thing I haven't seen since the '90s. You know what I'm talking about.

I can't get her out of my mind
(WOW?!)
I think about the girl all the time


It was ON. Then we ordered burritos.

*snif, snif... My Baby!

I smacked its ass and brought this seven pounds of peaches, sugar, flour and cinnamon into the world.

Because all baked fruit dishes should weigh as much as a newborn.

Gina and the Giant Peaches

My late brother's peach tree is dragging the ground with peaches this year and last week I brought back several bags of not-quite-ripe peaches from my trip home.

I'll make a crisp, I thought. Easy.

For three days a cookie sheet and a pizza pan sat covered in ripening peaches on my dining room table, patiently waiting for time to turn them into the deliciously smelling peachy goodness that is summertime. I'd sit at my computer watching them ripen, encouraging them to be the best peaches they could be.

Give me a P! Give me an E! You guys will become the most delicious crisp on the planet. Gooooo peaches!

Last Thursday evening came around and I decided it was "go-time." With my super-secret peach peeling and slicing technique Carolyn taught me I figured it'd take me 30 minutes, max.

Riiiiight. In shocking news, I grossly underestimated the time it takes to peel and slice 900 pounds of peaches, even with kitchen ninja skillz. It took forever. As in, This-is-the-longest-I've-ever-been-in-my-kitchen forever.

Not to mention, peaches are weird. Their insides are all kinda... tentacle-y and fibrous around the pit. And red. Like some sorta peach blood. Plus those tentacle-y fibers cling to the pit for dear life. I must have jammed 40 pointy peach pit ends under my thumbnail digging those damn things out.

And do you have any idea what slippery little devils super ripe peaches are? I bet you don't. But let me assure you, I'd rather step on a banana peel than a ripe peach.

Halfway my epic skinning and slicing of one babillion peaches I was covered in gooey peach juice and sucking my sore thumb. It was peach freakin' bloodbath, people. Little chalk outlines of peaches everywhere. The cats were like, "Wtf is going on in here?!"

I needed help, and lots of it. Hmm... What would Martha Stewart do? Naturally, I decided she would call Carolyn, queen of the dark kitchen arts. I was totally calm. "Carolyn!!! What the eff am I going to do with all these peaches?!"

She was totally surprised to hear from me.

"I knew you were gonna call... Ok, do you have lemon juice? (crickets) Of course you don't have lemon juice. Do you have sugar? Ok, sprinkle sugar on them and put them in the freezer. Hope you like smoothies!"

Eventually I couldn't deal with it anymore and found myself halfway through a bottle of screw top wine (don't judge) when my schmoyfriend kicked in the door to rescue me, er rather, to rescue the peaches.

"Can I take charge here, is that ok? You seem overwhelmed."

Really. I seemed overwhelmed. Folks, I was drowning in peaches. So while I stood around getting drunk he sugared and bagged and pectin'd the peaches. I might be ignorant, but I'm resourceful in my choice of friends.

The next day I went to make my "crisp" and discovered my flour expired in 2008. How is that possible, how does flour expire?

But check this out, did you guys know that putting sugar on fruit creates some kind of natural fruity syrupy stuff? Like that deliciously gooey strawberry shortcut stuff only not high fructose corn syrup from a bag, but rather, natural delicious fruit gooey stuff... Yeah, FACT. It's pretty much a miracle of chemistry, fruit and sugar.

I should probably get my own cooking show.

Ignoramus

Boss Man: Your life is so easy.

Me: Phssht. That's what you think. You don't know anything about me.

Boss Man: I know that your life is easy.

Me: Like hell... I have to peel and slice five pounds of peaches when I get home. Then I have to make a "crisp" with them, which you need a casserole dish for, apparently. Who owns a casserole dish?!

Three colleagues all offer to loan me theirs.

Me: Oh. Right.

Then because she is smarter than me, Carolyn intervened and told me step-by-step how to peel peaches quickly, then how to score and slice them all Martha Stewart-like.

Me: Whoa, who knows this kinda stuff?! It's miracle!

Boss Man: Maybe the reason your life is so hard is because you're so ignorant.

I Missed The Kick

Ever since I saw Inception I keep waiting for Leonardo DiCaprio to enter my dreams and walk around looking hott. What's a girl gotta do to get dream stalked these days?

So Inception… basically it goes like this: Some dude wants to plant an idea (hence, inception) in someone's dream so one energy company can best another. Energy companies. *shrug. And there's this dude who is all sad because his dad doesn't love him or something. *shrug. And that girl from Juno runs around as the narrator, essentially, because sometimes it's kind of confusing. And that kid from 500 Days of Summer's character is boring.

Meanwhile, Leo runs around as a guy named Cobb looking gorgeous and incepting me. Wait.

But forget the caper and those characters. The most interesting aspect of the movie is the wild card - Mal, Cobb's dead wife. Beautiful and eerie and lovelorn and probably insane. The rest of the movie, backdrop. Window dressing for cool effects and gun battles. (Though I'd argue the scenes in my dreams are more interesting, the colors more vivid, the situations more surreal.)

Cobb is accused of maybe killing his wife, and so he spends the movie trying to get his kids back, which is nice and all, I guess, but mostly I wanted to know what was going to happen with him and his siren dead wife who kept popping up all over the place wrecking stuff. She may be dead, but the ghost of their old love certainly isn't. Will they live together in dreamland forever? Will he let her go? Can he just keep visiting her via the rickety elevator of his subconscious? Their story is only human element of the movie, and it is the best.

I guess I hoped they pulled off the inception for the energy company. I mean, I guess I didn't want them to die or whatever. But mostly, eh, I was along for the ride.

The ending is ambiguous and I liked it that way. Does Cobb end up with his kids, or no? Is the whole movie a dream? Or just maybe the ending? Maybe Mal was right, maybe we were in Cobb's dream the whole time. Or maybe I was dreaming... it was a really long movie.

All of this is to say I enjoyed Inception. It was entertaining. I also enjoyed the popcorn, Milk Duds, Diet Coke and cushy chair - and boy did I need it because this baby comes in at 2.5 hours. The best part though was when my schmoyfriend (look, I just can't say the words, ok?) imitated a rabid groundhog halfway through. But that was totally unrelated to the movie, but I did laugh so hard I cried.

Inception: B.

Tryin' To Get To Heaven

Mowed down Virgin Mary statue, not shown.

Because it's not awesome enough that I have to visit my brother in the cemetery, but whenever I am there I also get a big granite reminder that my parents, too, will be joining him, eventually.

Ray and Susie are nothing if not prepared. They've got their plot bought, their headstone engraved and in place, their funerals already paid for. This is so, "Gina, when we die, you don't have to worry about all that nonesense. You'll have enough trouble spending all of our riches." Then we laugh, hard.

The last time I visited my brother's grave there was this beat-up plastic statue of the Virgin Mary next to his plot. I winked at the Gods for this bit of amusement.

Hahaha. Of all the places for the Blessed Virgin to land, she ends up here. Does Billy even know Jesus had a mom, who was a virgin? Hahaha.

We are not a religious family. We are certainly not Hail Mary-ing Catholics. The only person I know who goes to church is my mom, and she doesn't even believe in heaven or hell. My only form of religion is buying those cool Mexican religious votive candles with Jesus and Mary and Joseph on them in the international food aisle at Bigg's.

God, I love those candles.

But there was Mary. All 5 inches of her, serene and draped in white and blue... and chewed-up looking... at my brother's grave.

Shit Billy. When you'd get all religious on me? I sniffled and giggled at the same time.

I imagined Mary's spiritual journey to this lowly spot in her plastic statue life. Some deeply religious person probably got her at some church gift shop, placed her on a loved ones grave with a sincere prayer of peace and love and the hope that one day, when deal goes down, they will run open armed to each other and sit watching the daffodils sway in the breezes of heaven. But then the groundskeeper, just trying to get his job done and get paid, probably listening to Black Sabbath on his iPod, ran over Mary with his cutting blades, flinging her across the grass to land hopelessly - and possibly taking that poor person's prayers with her - at my brother's headstone.

The indignity.

I went home and told my mom this story - Hahaha, Billy has a little plastic beat-up statue of Mary leaning on his tombstone.

Oh, I think the Mary is nice, my mom happily informed me. Then she went back to piddling around the kitchen - la-la-la-la.

Wait, whaaat?

Turns out, it was my mom who put the Mary there and is, therefore, responsible for Her getting run over by a lawnmower.

I will not repeat the rest of the story of how it came to pass that Susie Daugherty put the Virgin Mary at my brother's grave because certainly hell, fire and damnation would strike us all, and possibly burnout out the eyeballs of any religious person reading this post, but believe me, it. is. a. doozy.

Mary, I am sorry you got chewed up by lawn mower on our watch.