I knew it last night when I was laboring over their stupid filmy skins. I knew these onions were so labor-intensive that they would be unbelievably delicious, tender golden spheres of sweetness and bite. Also they shrank by more than half in the cooking process and I could have easily made twice as much. There will be no onion leftovers.

I'll post the recipe tomorrow or something; it's not on Martha's site, I had to keep referring to the 4-minute OnDemand movie.

Meanwhile the flat pie somehow cooked super fast and I almost burned it like ten minutes before it was done. Everything else cooked slower than expected but that. Had one of those HOLY SHIT GET ON THE OVEN MITTS moments when I looked to see how it was going. Cooking! It's never the same river twice, know what I mean? (Should have been keeping a better eye on the little oven thermometer in there.)

Luckily TDO's parents live five minutes from here, however it will take longer than that to get all the food in the truck.

We roasted the monster pumpkin. TDO peeled it, along with lending a hand with a bunch of other tedious cooking things. Now we have literally pounds of roasted pumpkin meat and a giant bowl of unroasted pumpkin strings, pumpkin seeds, and pumpkin skin with meat on it. Given that the dogs were hanging around through the whole process like we were roasting meat, I wonder if there would be any harm in giving them leftovers? I know pumpkin puree in a can is a good thing to give doggies with upset stomachs.

I should just ask Mr. Google.

Also: peeled and blanched and re-peeled a bunch of little onions for Martha's balsamic onions. In the On Demand thingie, which is 4 minutes long, she starts out with the onions blanched and peeled. This is because peeling 30 ozs. of tiny onions is a huge pain in the ass and the video would have been 20 minutes long and nobody would do it.

I am wide awake and haven't decided yet if I am going to try to go to bed soon or going to go ahead and bake the pumpkin pie and prepare the onions tonight. I probably should. Ehhhhhhhh.

First stop was Whole Foods, which was where I thought I had to go to get dry-packed roasted chestnuts. Then I hit Grandmart, the international/asian supermarket. Finally I ran into Giant, which is a basic American supermarket.

Whole Foods was a freaking madhouse. The parking lot was almost full and inside, the aisles were jammed, at about 2 PM. Lots of people picking up their turkeys and their catered, pre-made Thanksgiving dinners, ok, but also a lot of people seemingly doing all their Thanksgiving shopping today. I attribute this to rich people being entitled enough to believe Whole Foods won't run out of whatever they want and/or wanting the very very very freshest ingredients money can buy. I got the chestnuts and some other stuff I needed for a last-minute addition to my list of stuff to make to bring to TDO's parents' house tomorrow. Whole Foods has the fancy "sugar pie" pumpkins but they looked really expensive. I'm going to use the big orange uncarved monster we have left over from Halloween.

Grandmart was practically deserted, really, there were fewer people there than you would expect on a random Wednesday afternoon. I got a pound and a half of shrimp weighed and bagged without waiting at all. They were sold out of cauliflower! Who knows why! I didn't need it, I just noticed. No pumpkins, fancy or otherwise. Eggs on sale for 99 cents a dozen!!! I got 'em, what the hell, doggies love eggs. The Grandmart parking lot, which is usually notoriously terrifying (sorry, it's true), was a breeze today.

Giant was moderately crowded inside but the parking lot was the craziest of all. People in here were buying small things, filling in little last-minute gaps in their holiday shopping so there was a lot of in and out in the lot and I was sure I was going to ding or get dinged but I didn't. DAMN IT Giant had the fancy obscure (SO I THOUGHT) chestnuts I'd already got at Whole Foods -- ON SALE. ::shakes fist:: No pumpkins.

As I noted elsewhere, the muzak at Giant was playing Bronski Beat, which screws up my brain whenever it happens. Bronski Beat = soothing shopping music but Adam Lambert is a threat to our children? OK then.

This year I am making my usual Flat Pear Pie and Hot Pepper Cranberry Chutney. By special request I am making chestnut apple stuffing in the oven, I'm tackling the pumpkin pie for the hell of it and throwing in balsamic pan-roasted tiny onions because they looked delicious when Martha made then in a little On Demand episode I saw. Dinner will be TDO, me, her parents and our friend J, who is a good cook in her own right and so I am kind of inspired to step up my game.

PUMPKIN INQUIRY

Has anyone ever made a pumpkin pie w/ fresh pumpkin? I am considering doing this. When I search online for instructions on preparing the fresh pumpkin meat, the recommendations vary widely. Hot oven? Cooler? Skinned? Unskinned? I get that I roast the thing, then puree it but at what heat, for how long, will it be too wet, etc., etc. I do have canned pumpkin for backup in case of disaster....

MOOD/HAIR/MEDS UPDATE

About a week ago, I decided to hit up the old bottle of zoloft I have lying around. Took one dose for three days and any mood-lifting benefits were offset by the immediate brain fog of doom. Halved that dose, and now, I am back where I was when I was happy w/ the Wellbutrin -- I'm free from both brain fog and what I think of as the inertial inner gravity of depression. Gotta call my doc next week and get a proper prescription (although I could coast on leftover z. for quite some time, since I had a lot left over at a higher dose when I switched meds BUT THAT WOULD BE WRONG). Hair is still growing back, I can feel all the baby hairs sprouting on my scalp. Got my color done and my colorist was adamant that the loss was due to medication, said she sees it all the time. She didn't say it, but I sensed she was a little miffed that I called my doctor and not her (the real hair expert) when it first happened. I mentioned that there had been eyebrow loss which I had attributed to old age and my eyebrows going gray. Then, in the last minutes of the dye job, she swiped color across my eyebrows without me asking, just to beef them up as they grow in. I heart my colorist.

Long story short, I feel quite good right now. I wouldn't be thinking about using a fresh pumpkin and/or adding homemade pumpkin pie to the list of things I'm bringing to TDO's parents' house tomorrow if I didn't. No doubt the zoloft will work until it doesn't; at least in my experience with it, I don't have ridiculous side effects or psychotic withdrawal if I miss a dose. Happy Thanksgiving!

My eyebrows are growing back! I had attributed their (recent) thinness to old age. But I can see new hairs sprouting! Also my scalp doesn't feel as naked as it did.

My doc insisted that it wasn't Wellbutrin-induced (as I predicted) but she also said sometimes this happens when the grow/shed cycle crisscrossed with hormones or something and that it would grow back. Whatev. Told her I was dropping the W. anyhow and she was cool w/ that and said if I got depressed, I could just call her. Meanwhile I went to a lab the next day and gave bodily fluids for tests; no word back on that yet.

I am hungrier and less focused than I was on the W., but not depressed. I miss the lack of hunger and the focus. Maybe I just need ritalin. I totally have the ADD or the ADHD or whatever but that's another story, really.

I'm seeing my doc at 4:10 today, I'll tell her my story, tell her I'm not using W. anymore and ask her to run tests for other stuff but I'm very unlikely to go back on the W, even if it turns out I have a hair-shedding thyroid problem. I'm just going to make sure it's not something else that I could be doing something about.  Somebody told me yesterday that her mom lost a lot of hair, wrote it off to menopause, and later found out that it was a thyroid thing that could have been fixed if she'd addressed it sooner.

I am ridiculously? understandably? extremely! upset about this. I had great effing hair. Now I have a lot less of it and it's happened so fast. WTF.  I was really liking the W. despite other weirdnesses from it -- like it really lowered my ability to not burst into tears when I was moved.  Not crying because I was sad about something, but like crying through all of the movie "Up," crying when Colbert played for the troops overseas, crying when I watched that video of the wedding with the dancing people at the beginning, etc., etc. I won't miss that. I won't miss having more brittle moods, if that makes any sense. I have enjoyed *feeling* things intensely but it's been almost as artificial-feeling as when I was numbed out on Cymbalta. I had a lot more energy and I lost weight. Mostly it was worth it but with hair loss on the scale suddenly  no. Not worth it.

My mood is pretty good except for the hair-grief when I look in the mirror or touch it. See my icon? I think I have about half as much hair as I did there. That's fucked up.

In other news, I have a hard time being angry at "Maine" when I suspect there are lots of states where the vote wouldn't be as close as it was. I am now of the opinon that these popular votes on MY RIGHTS are just bullshit and this should be decided in the courts. I agree with Rude Pundit, who says, among other wise things: 

So have you all read about the latest studies on the placebo effect? It's really fascinating.  This article in Wired has been making the rounds.

So instead of taking my Wellbutrin in the morning, I'm going to take one of those low dose aspirin that I should be taking daily anyhow to protect my heart. TDO brought me the bottle this morning (I forgot that I had planned this) and was like, Here is your "anti depressant'!  I am aware that the placebo effect isn't supposed to work if you KNOW YOU ARE TAKING THE PLACEBO but what the hell, humans are very suggestible.

What the hell. It felt good to take my usual pill (!!!??? It did, I got the usual hit of "I'm taking care of myself when I take my pill") and it just might help and there's no downside. You know how they say that -- well you might not know this. They say that studies are unclear whether taking supplements actually works but they do show that being the sort of person who would take a supplement is a good thing. I suspect there is some placebo effect working there, too. Anyhow! I feel fine so far. Even if I didn't, feeling like I'm doing something positive for my hair feels good. YES I AM THAT VAIN.

Apparently all I have to do is see like 5 seconds of any iteration of V on the SyFy channel to be first, completely sucked in and end up watching the whole whatever (episode, miniseries) and second, launched into a time tunnel of 1980s fashion and cultural mores. So I ask: How can the new V be V without shoulder pads and big hair? HOW? 

(I had a vivid memory of the Shocking! birth of the Visitor-Earthling baby in the miniseries sequel to the first V, and I saw it again yesterday and. Yeah. Not that Shocking! anymore. Hilariously not. Oh well, it was like 25 years ago.)

So a week or two ago I noticed that there was a lot more of my hair caught in the drain after a shower and then it seemed like it was coming out whenever I ran my fingers through it and it looks visibly thinner and this weekend I started googling and found this: 

Wellbutrin and hair loss

Immediately after reading the stories on those pages, which sounded exactly like my story, I threw my bottle of Wellbutrin across the room. The end. Now I am going to go get some Rogaine.  [insert hours of cursing]

Anyhow I have been taking some sort of anti-depressant for years now so what the hell, we shall see what my baseline is. And if I'm super depressed in a month or two, I'll see what I can try. I hesitated to write this post because -- well because anytime I post about depression, someone says, "Boy those anti-depressants are [negative]! I'm glad I never took them!" and then I want to go kill that person because it seems to me that they have never been very depressed. If you are thinking about posting that in my comments, DON'T.  I have never taken an anti-depressant on a whim or anything, and my entire life since I was a teen has been about self-medicating, and/or finding a doctor after anti-depressants were discovered and (reluctantly) taking them and enduring side effects and withdrawal and doing all this stuff just to feel *normal.*  I have a chronic problem involving my brain chemicals. If you have never felt like you needed to take anti-depressants, you don't. Please don't remind me of that in comments, I am well aware that not everyone's brain is like mine.

Anyhow I just posted this in case someone else is taking Wellbutrin and is experiencing hair loss and hasn't thought to put the two together and maybe is writing it off as old age or even getting tested for other weird conditions. In my experience, the internet knows more about the side effects of medications than your doctor does so ... there you go.

Hopefully my hair will look like it does in my icon again in a few months. [insert more cursing]

GOD I AM SO PISSED. I didn't get my FACE LIFTED so I could accidentally give myself hair loss a year or two later. Yeah, if you haven't been reading me forever or something: I AM VAIN AS HELL. So this is bad and wrong and a not good thing.  

Nobody has posted anywhere if their hair grew back after they stopped taking Wellbutrin but I am attributing that to the fact that people are more likely to post about a problem online than they are to report back about their success six months later. WISH MY FOLLICLES LUCK! 

Please click on this link for a story about illegal dog "fondling," if only to see the appalled German Shepherd in the picture accompanying the article with the priceless caption "German Shepherd: A dog similar to this was allegedly fondled by a police officer". I wonder how long and hard they had to search to find a photo of a suitably scandalized GSD.

The internet should say "WARNING! DO YOU HAVE ADD? THEN DO YOUR CHORES AND RUN YOUR ERRANDS BEFORE ENTERING THE INTERNET!" At least for me. Because I got up today and thought, I should have an alarm that will go off in half an hour to remind me to get off the internet and do my chores and errands and so forth. So I went to look for a free alarm clock app, and then I found a free video-playing app for Mac OS which I had been meaning to get, so I downloaded that and then I had to look for the person on my LJ friend's list who posts vid recommendations to ensure that my recently downloaded app worked, and then I was in LJ where I saw that someone had responded to my comment yesterday and thus I had to reply to that, and read other posts, and then I remembered what I was doing, so I found the vid recs and proceeded to test the app and so forth, and then my girlfriend IMed me from work to add something to my chore list and FUCK it had been 90 minutes and I still didn't have the alarm app.

Then I told my girlfriend this story in IM and she sent me a link to an alarm clock app, which worked. Though, of course, it was too late for today. But, you know, Yay free apps!

Just click and check it out, I like the way he thinks.

Here are the first two paragraphs: 

It is a moral imperative. I cannot enjoy health coverage and turn to my neighbor and tell him he doesn't deserve it. A nation is a mutual undertaking. In a democracy, we set out together to do what we believe is good for the commonwealth. That means voluntarily subjecting ourselves to the rule of law, taxation, military service, the guaranteeing of rights to minorities, and so on. That is a cheap price to pay.

Do you make guacamole? Do you add chopped tomato to it? Try adding chopped fresh tomatillos instead. Holy cow, that's good. I made a batch the other day with all green ingredients (scallions, tomatillos, cilantro, lime juice, half a serrano pepper, avocado) and it was heavenly, plus it was a really pretty color.

Man, I should really keep a closer eye on this dude, Steven L. Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, AZ, almost everything he does makes me crazy.

Full disclosure: I was involved in a discussion thread in an anti-racist community where the discussion went downhill extremely quickly when I admitted that I felt less bad about laughing at him getting tazed in a video when I learned that he was a horrible racist homophobic asshat. Look, I suck: if I see a pompous white guy getting tazed due to his pompous white guyishness, I will laugh. Tazing by police is nevertheless totally out of control and terrifying, and it is cruel and unusual punishment for the "crime" of talking back to a cop.

That said, here is what this douchebag has been preaching lately, and whatever, it's probably triggering if you are triggered by reading people who think gay people are child molesters who should be rounded up and shot:


If you would like to see him tazed, go here. He totally asks for it and then cops beat the crap out of him. I am able to hold two opposing opinions at the same time, so even though "asking for it" shouldn't get you tazed and beat up, in this case it's AWESOME (I mean sometimes something can be totally unjust but BY ACCIDENT it turns out to be just what someone deserved). Also he disses the police doggie, and acts like he knows what it looks like when a dog indicates when I am certain he has no effing idea what it looks like. He's just a douche on so many levels and he doesn't look particularly beat up either.

I didn't understand this comment from Rep. Virginia Foxx at first -- it just seemed like an awkward sentence construction. I mean who says that, most of us are living as much by the Constitution as we -- what the hell, that's weird, it's not something one tries to adhere to, it's the CONSTITUTION. But then it hit me, duh, much like children often confuse "Santa Claus" with "Jesus Christ", she has confused the Constitution of the United States with the Bible:

"The Constitution doesn't grant a right to health care, and most of us are living as much by the Bible Constitution as we can."

Then when I realized her mistake, my stomach actually turned over. I'm not one of those people who says that things "make my stomach turn" at the drop of a hat, but this did it. I do not want my laws decided by people who are so addled with Biblespeak that they don't even notice they're still doing it when they're talking about the Constitution.

I mean, no offense if you're totally into the Bible (kind of), but if you are, I'm curious: Have you read the whole thing? The WHOLE thing? Because it's seriously messed up.

And on a similar note, please go read The Authoritarians NOW. It is the fascinating work of a Canadian which explains how people think the things they do about the Bible, their religion, homosexuals, atheists, etc., etc. Just download and read the first PDF of the first chapter and see if you are not hooked.

Repeated usage of "made of win" and "THIS!" in comment threads is inversely proportional to the wisdom and nuance to be found therein.

I know, I know, I've sworn off comment threads! But I had to see what The Fans were saying about Torchwood since I watched the damn thing and because Cleolinda had said something to the effect of "Torchwood fans are losing their damn minds," which coming from Cleolinda is pretty strong stuff.

The weird, girly, THIS!-riddled mob mentality of fandom is really creeping me out. Is this why I fought for equal rights for women and gay people? So girls could lose their minds over plot points and character deaths??? So people could pretend that Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki are boyfriends in real life? Really?  Yay girl power!? God I almost feel like these young people would be better off pole dancing. At least that takes place in 3D reality (she said, typing on the internet).

OK enough LJ rant -- I gotta check Facebook.

MAN, that was harrowing. Holy crap. I'd like to see American TV pull that kind of shit, as in, it would never happen. OR WOULD IT???  Maybe on The Wire, where endangered kids was the plot for a whole season.  Anyhow, whoa. Also, I guess I can almost see the point of the death on Day Four since the subplot of the whole thing was "Captain Jack's Worst Week EVER, p.s. he's immortal so it's v. v. bad." 

The episodes of Torchwood: Children of Earth that have aired in the US so far -- 1-4 -- are all the episodes of Torchwood that I've ever watched. I don't watch Dr. Who either, although I accidentally saw part of the ep that introduced Captain Jack to the Dr. Who universe. I got sucked into this miniseries from reading about it on LJ and now I'm hooked on this story. That said, I have one question which may or may not have already been discussed to death in the fandom: What is the explanation for an immortal space pirate with "movie star" handsomeness having gained like 20-40 pounds since his first appearance? Is he just another victim of creeping weight gain all over the planet? I don't really care about an actor gaining weight unless it undermines his role, and, well, I kind of think it does here. Dude's pretty soft -- for a movie-star handsome irresistable bisexual space hottie -- and moreover I can't help but notice a million little decisions about how they film him which ineptly disguise this. (Like when he is sitting on the couch with his arm across his soft middle whining about being stuck in sweat pants. Don't tell me that there wouldn't be visual pandering of his plight if he was as ripped as, say, Brad Pitt. Or when he is on the phone with that dude at Thames House and is awkwardly leaning against the car, again obscuring his belly. Half the time it's like when they're trying to hide that an actress is pregnant.) Throw the coat over it and it just makes it worse, imho. Again, I wouldn't care if it didn't seem to be canon that he's like the handsomest alien ever.

And (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER) the ending of Day Four just -- I don't get it. I don't get that writers don't get how fucked up it is to invariably kill one or both of the gay couple.  There must be something really tempting in it, or they wouldn't keep doing it. But please stop. Please stop killing the gay characters. At least for some years, at least until there have been an equal number of prominent storylines in the world with gay characters/couples who don't die. It's overdone, therefore sloppy, and it hurts. It's like being punched somewhere that is already bruised.  Do writers just not know what to do with a gay couple who live? Is that like a billion times harder to write than the Tragic Truncated Love Story? Probably. It's still not an excuse.  (DOUBLE SPOILER: That Ianto went out a Hero only made it worse, like being queer for an alien and then heroic was akin to Dobby in Harry Potter and his "free elf" finale, which was genuinely moving to me although mawkish as all hell.)

In other superficial comments, can I say that there is almost no fashion for women which I hate more than skinny jeans tucked into supertight boots with stupid flat soles and teetering little heels? It's not flattering unless you are 6 feet fall and underweight.  And even then, not so much.  The heroine would look a hundred times better in Doc Martens, imho, but nobody asked me. To be fair, almost all the fashions on everyone in the whole miniseries have left me completely underwhelmed.

Less superficially, I am enjoying the plot and found myself thinking -- after all the powerful people at the table decided to cut their losses by throwing the powerless (CHILDREN!) under the bus -- that this is how the world works most of the time, only aliens aren't blackmailing anyone into it. It just works that way via ruthless self-interest.

20 Performances by Michael Jackson that will give you chills

Bunch of pics documenting MJ's vitiligo. I wish he'd been more open about it.

He looks so sad here:




His eyes were so big and round, he always looked like anime to me, moreso as things went awry with his nose.