Things ain’t cooking in my kitchen
Well, that was fun. I’m not sure I’ll ever have that many comments again, but that’s OK. It was good while it lasted! And it came at the perfect time because I’ve been quite busy lately, coming off vacation, and it gave me an excuse not to write anything. And this week I’ve basically had a free dinner out each night and you know I can’t turn those down. Luckily for me, Okies seem to make the best ROTM’s.
But that gives me a moment to meditate on the fact that I really haven’t cooked anything at all in the last four months. The nadir is probably this evening, where my cousin and loyal reader Pious B is coming to dinner and I ran out this morning in a panic to Kosher Marketplace (one of the five cramped local kosher shops near me) to buy apricot chicken for $10 that I could have cooked myself for $3. But the sabbath starts at 6, I’m leaving work at 5, it takes me 25 minutes to get home, chicken takes an hour to cook, etc. You do the math!
I feel like a failure. I like to cook. I’m OK at it. It’s healthier. But I get home late, I’m surrounded by excellent food of every variety and I am, as always, truly lazyass. And this week I calculated that it’s actually cheaper to buy prepared food than cook my own! Except for that chicken. Whoops.
I think what I really hate is conforming to the idea that most of you already have from Sex & the City that New Yorkers use their kitchens merely to open Chinese food containers. OK, I do this. But not all the time, I swear. It’s just that in order to afford my teeny-tiny kitchen I have to work 12 hours a day and then there’s all that nightlife. Who has time to cook? Isn’t that what people come to America for? To open delightful ethnic restaurants and bring me dinner on a bicycle?
No, no, I kid. I know the American dream is to actually receive dinner on a bicycle. But not me, I actually walked two blocks and bought mine. See? I’m not as lazyass as I thought.
Title comes from:
Crowded House – Weather With You
Here’s RN with a permanent tattoo she got of her favorite team. Observant Jews think OU stands for Orthodox Union, but apparently things are different out there.
Back home in Tulsa (the city, not the movie), RN has two and a half kids. The half is an exchange student but RN was coy on the subject of what exactly was exchanged for her. RN’s son plays in a rock band and her daughter doesn’t. Three cats who are part of no bands also help make up the RN household.
Speaking of bands, RN seems to really like them and their members, especially Gene Simmons of Kiss, pictured here getting up close with RN and some friend who doesn’t read J-Ball and therefore merits no mention. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, Gene Simmons doesn’t read me either, sue me
No song today due to laziness and/or vacation. Instead, please enjoy this adorable yet non-topical photo of a baby holding onto a subway pole which I’ve dug out of the archives.
Tonight begins yet another exciting holiday, Sukkot (soo-COAT), or the Feast of Tabernacles. It lasts 7 days and has another fun holiday tacked on at the end (more on this next week), so it’s kind of like eight. My friends used to be able to keep track of this because my answering machine would have the message, “Hi, you’ve reached Becca. I can’t answer the phone right now because I’m out in my tabernacle.” Yes, we Jews build little structures outside where we eat, drink, and make merry. Some people even sleep in them but I was never much into camping. The sukkah, or booth, is made of wood or canvas or whatever but the roof has to be made of something that grows, like branches or bamboo and you have to be have more shade than sun. Most people make all sorts of fun decorations and hang things from the s’chach (that’s the roof material).
The picture at the top is of my sukkah. Well, no, it’s just a cute cartoon I found on the Internets. But let’s pretend. Here’s a picture of former ROTMs’ 
