Category Archives: The Usual Junk

Just More of the Same

Election Day PSA

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This is an Election Day Public Service Announcement…

Fellow Marylanders, if you’re looking for a good online source that lists all candidates along with an overview of who they are and what they stand for, I recommend the Voter’s Guide published by the League of Women Voters. (http://www.lwvmd.org/vg/bw_printlist.html) Quite comprehensive and easy to read. Also seems to be free of bias. It could be a good way to brush up before you pull the lever. Or touch the screen. Or mail in a paper ballot. Or whatever.

…This has been an Election Day Public Service Announcement.

F.F’n.C

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Ohhhh, right. The fried chicken.

That fried chicken. That fried fucking chicken.

You see where I’m going with this?

It was good, I guess. It was definitely fried, had a pretty good level of breading (not too little, not too much), and I did not burn the house down.

The problem was in the spice rub. My proportions were ok, I just used wayyy too much of it. By damn that was some salty fried chicken. By damn that was some paprika-y fried chicken. I ate my share and Emily, god love her, ate hers too. She even managed to work in words like “good” and “tasty” while she wasn’t preoccupied with keeping her heart from shutting down due to the overwhelming levels of sodium.

Next time, we figured, we’ll go with much less of a spice rub. Also instead of rubbing the chicken with spices and then coating it in flour, we’ll just mix the spices in to the flour to begin with.

I think with fried chicken, less is often more. With mine there was definitely alot of the more, and so the overall taste was, well, less.

What?

No Good Reason

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Sometimes you can’t really think of a good reason why you did something until after the fact.

Last night, for example.

I was sitting on the couch, eating dinner and wondering why I hadn’t gone over to the Blogger Happy Hour. I had no good reason not to go. Dizzy Issie’s is six minutes away and is one of our usual go-to places. Not exactly outside of my comfort zone. But I stayed in and didn’t really know why.

Then the screaming started.

It was coming from the alley right behind our house and it wasn’t kids. It wasn’t a booze-infused lovers quarrel like you sometimes get. It was my next door neighbor and she was screaming in abject terror.

She had been taking her dog on its nightly walk, with her husband and 10 month old by her side. As they made their way up the alley, a pit bull jumped its backyard fence and attacked her dog. By the time I made it out to the back yard, the pit bull’s jaw was firmly locked on the neighbor-dog’s neck and, I’m sure now, It wasn’t going to let up until neighbor-dog was no more. Without thinking, I was halfway out the gate about to dive in to the fight when I realized that, even if I pulled the pit bull off, when it came free it was still going to be hot for blood and now it was either going to choose me, my neighbors, or their 10 month old. None of those were attractive options to me. So, I ran back to the house, dialed up my friends at 911, and went back outside. When I returned to the alley, the pit bull’s owner was out there and used some sort of Jedi mind trick to separate the dogs. The neighbors piled in to their car and took off to the Veterinary ER.

And the cops? The cops took 20 minutes to arrive. No wait, they took 20 minutes to arrive after our 2nd 911 call. Total wait time from the 1st call until a cop was on my stoop? About 45 minutes. Baltimore finest, indeed.

We talked to the cops and gave a statement on behalf of our neighbors who were still at the pet ER. They talked to the pitbull owner who didn’t want to get sued was very apologetic and admitted that his negligence momentary distraction was what caused his dog to be unsupervised in the back yard.

Through talking with other neighbors over the course of last night, it seems like the house is a pit bull breeding factory/fighting arena. “Animal Control is well aware of that house” one neighbor told me. Consensus on the block is that no humans actually live there, they just stop by to (very rarely) feed the dogs. Sometimes they fight the dogs in the basement, sometimes they take them elsewhere for a fight.

I’m sickened by this and don’t know what I can do other than keep my eyes open and the number for Animal Control close by. (And, God forbid, call 911 again if I need to).

Later, as we were finishing up last night’s Lost (thank you inventor of the DVR and it’s fine, fine, pause button) the neighbors returned. Their dog was ok. A puncture wound in the ear and a scraped and bruised neck, but otherwise no worse for the wear – well, physically speaking.

As we stood there and recapped and talked until we knew we were all ok, their normally-effervescent dog calmly padded around their backyard munching grass; its tail tucked between its legs.