Amy picked up a package of Kraft cheese singles this evening so she could make an egg sandwhich, and I discovered this awesome recipe on the back of the package. You’ll definetely want to save this one.
DELI DELUXE sub sandwich
1 bread roll or French bread roll
2 Tbsp KRAFT Mayo Real Mayonnaise or MIRACLE WHIP salad dressing.
2 KRAFT DELI DELUXE American Cheese Slices
6 slices OSCAR MAYER VARIETY-PAK meats, any variety
Lettuce and tomato slices
SPREAD roll with mayo FILL with remaining ingredients
Makes 2 servings
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THANK YOU, KRAFT!!!!! I always wondered how Subway did it!!!!!!!!!!!
Those two lovely weeks every two year when I pretend to be a sports fan.
I really get caught up in the whole proud-to-be-an-American, we’re the best swimmers in the world! hoopla. I love every minute of it. I love the opening ceremonies. I love the incessant repetition of the John Williams Theme from the 1984 Olympics. I love hearing the national anthem and getting all choked up because we just won our first-ever gold metal in Men’s Indoor Pillow Fighting. I love all the corporate marketing tie-ins; because we’re stupid enough to believe that these world-class athletes with rock hard bodies start each morning with a McDonald’s deep fried chicken breakfast sandwich. I love that little elf-man Bob Costas who never ages or updates his tie collection. I love all of the syrupy video vignettes they play over epic music clips that tell the life stories of athletes you’ve never heard of before or will ever hear of again, so that you can invest yourself in them long enough to get a little teary-eyed when they come from behind to win a gold medal in a sport you never realized had organized competitions, or…rules. I love the expert commentators in all of the filler events like Women’s Synchronized Diving who so passionately describe the minutia of each second, because I mean, really, without them explaining it to you over endless slow motion screens, how would you ever know what constitutes a good synchronized dive? I love all the drama, the anticipation, the over-inflated importance about what the Olympics means to the host country. I love it all. Love.
Okay, I still don’t love watching Basketball, or Soccer, Baseball, or any of the normal boring sports. But I’ll sit for hours watching Tennis, Gymnastics, Beach Volleyball, Regular Volleyball, Swimming, the Kayak Slalom, and Fencing (I can’t even tell what’s going on, just lot’s of hopping and screaming, and then somebody gets a point). I’ll even watch the sports that are like freakish, socially awkward cousins of other sports: Water Polo, Handball, Badminton, and of course the awesomeness that is Synchronized Swimming.
For those of you who love to cheese out on the Olympics even though you know how absurd it is, here is a fun list of olympic events that didn’t quite stand the test of time. I am personally hoping the 56-Pound Weight Throw experiences a revival in time for 2012. Because a 55-pound weight throw….enh. But a 56-pound weight throw, now that’s where it becomes a sport.
I got encouraging notes from many of you after the post about the strange goings-on at work, and I know some of you are upset that I have left you hanging. I have known for a couple of weeks the nature of what is going on, but I haven’t wanted to talk about it because everything at the time was theoretical. As of yesterday things have for the most part been finalized so I think it’s okay to talk about.
To explain why my supervisors approached this in the unsettling way they did is a long, convoluted, and boring story that I won’t go into. What I will say is that they had their reasons, and a lot of it was outside of their control, as they had to wait on decisions that were happening in central administration. I’m still not sure they went about it the best way; all the sleuthing around, they must think I’m pretty obtuse to not have figured out something was going on. Still I understand why they felt they needed to keep everything on the down-low for awhile. And I was sure to let them know that I had figured it out weeks ago.
Anyway, it turns out to all be good. Effective September 1, I’ll be taking on the responsibility of Development Liason to the College of Fine arts. My job will be to advocate for the School of Music to the college development team, to be the school’s representative to our major donors, act as the staff liason to our advisory council (aka board of directors), and to help coordinate major fund-raising and alumni events. It actually is all very closely related to what I already do in Outreach, and it makes perfect sense for me to take over these responsibilities.
I’m pretty excited about the prospects for a number of reasons. It’s a promotion for one, although a small one, when you’re talking financial. But politically it is an important position. I’ll be working with very important people in the Austin Arts community, making good contacts, and I’ll be privy to the guts of the school and the college basically. It’s also a perfect way to learn about development without having to become a development officer, which is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It is also a huge vote of confidence from my director, as I’ll be the first non-faculty member to have this role at the school. He had very kind words to say–as they usually do when they’re asking you to take on more work–saying that I have the right personality to be trusted with our major donors, and the ability to let the drudgery of the politics roll of my back and focus on what’s important (a skill I attribute to my experience in church work, so I guess something good came out of that after all).
Ironically, after all that, I WON’T be giving up creative control of the radio show because they really don’t have anyone else they can trust to do it well. I’ll also still be doing the graphic design and other creative kinds of things I’ve taken on, which means what I get to get rid of is almost 100 percent administrative. They’re giving me an admin to handle the administrative part of the radio show and some of the other more paperwork oriented things I have to do currently. Which isn’t to say their won’t be administrative things I have to do in this new role, but the point is I get to keep the creative things, while essentially trading off the least important things of my job for much bigger things. There really is no down side to that.
So in conclusion. I’m pretty excited. I think this will be another insane year, with a huge learning curve, and a lot of extra hours to get a grip on the new responsibilities, but it should be enlightening, informative, entertaining (development people are insane) and all-around good.
We made it home from West Texas yesterday evening. Marfa was awesome. Hopefully I’ll have time this week to blog a little more about it, but highlights were the Chinati Foundation, the food, and the McDonald Observatory. I’ve posted some pictures to my Flickr page, and even more pictures to my Web Gallery so check them out.
This Friday, July 18, Amy and I turn 8. I can hardly believe it.
This year, at some point, we realized that Amy and I haven’t taken a vacation that was just the two of us in 6 years. We’re starting to sound like old married people with 12 kids, only minus the kids. We’ve been on a couple of awesome trips with my parents, and around most of the holidays we try to get up to see Amy’s parents our my parents. I think in this sense it almost works against us that we both genuinely enjoy spending time with each others’ families. We live so far from both parents that making those trips eats up most of our off-time. We’ve also both taken a few trips independently of one another, but nothing together.
But we decided 6 years is just too long, so tomorrow we’re off on a trip over our anniversary weekend. We’re off to check out Marfa. which is supposedly one of the coolest little secrets in Texas. Full of art galleries and museums, some awesome dining establishments, surrounded by lovely desert, and full of small-town rural charm. We’re going to check out a couple of wineries, a brewery, the McDonald Observatory, and of course, the Marfa lights, which plays perfectly to my love of all things creepy and sci-fi. Of course, it’s a tiny, tiny town, which we hope leaves us plenty of time to hang around by the pool at our hot little motel, and listen to some old vinyl records on the vintage record player in our room.
We’re dropping the girls off at Meg and Mort’s bright and early and hitting the road. We’ve got our road trip mix tapes all burned and ready to go. Amy has supplied Jazzin’ and Pickin’ which I believe is an homage to West Texas, and I’ve supplied Funkin’ and Contemplatin’ which is an homage to my passion for moody, oogy music, even on road trips.
I’ll have my Macbook with me, but I don’t know how much I’ll take the time to post while we’re gone. I’ll try to remember to post to twitter, and a few pictures before we get back, at the very least.
We’ll report back on the worthiness of Marfa to be called one of the hippest places around.
In junior high, when we studied propaganda, our teacher showed us a video of the process of a mitsubishi car commercial being made. It documented the entire process, from the first meetings of the ad firm with the mitsubishi execs, through the development, pitch, and production.
One of the things we talked about was the Mitsubishi exec, who apparently had a single task of dissecting every single idea the ad firm had and giving all the reasons why the ad wouldn’t work. She was hardcore, right down to criticizing the drawing of the car in one of the storyboards for making the car look small and cramped…in a DRAWING. We talked in class about how important her role was in making sure that the final commercial represented the company and their product well.
I’ve always thought this is a job I would be good at, because I’m really, really proficient at criticizing other people’s ideas. Today as I was watching television, it was confirmed to me that I could be successful in a job like this. Because if I were in charge of making sure my company was represented well, I would never, ever, ever greenlight an ad that contained the sentence “And the result is a delightful nut snack.” Because some people are hard of hearing, or might have the volume down low, and “nut snack” is only one letter away from being something really unappetizing.
So, we get tons of fax spam here. Far more than at any place I’ve ever worked, mostly the usual schlock about great penny stock deals, or 50 dollar cruises to some hole in Mexico. The most awesome part is that our office administrator must think they are legit, because she always puts them on the table next to the microwave so that we can have a look if we’re interested.
She’s out of the office this week, and this morning when I went to fax some stuff to the radio station, This was waiting for me. I think it’s pretty brilliant. I mean sure the w.w.w. is a little over the top but I thought pretending that he ran over to fax this after his cell battery died was particularly brilliant.
I made the well-trodden pilgrimage to Kerrville this weekend to fill in on Sunday morning at one my old stomping grounds. This is something I did once for 18 months straight, and something I do now a couple of times a year, and it is one of the only remaining connections I have to a life that is so distant that these days it sort of seems like it is someone else’s life, or maybe something I dreamt once. I’m sure that sounds ridiculously dramatic, but it is the truth. There is a certain lazy, slow pace to Kerrville that always makes it a nice place to spend a weekend, and there are always old friends to catch up with which is doubly nice. But there is also a certain sad nostalgia that I feel there. on some visits I feel it stronger than others.
Amy and I talk about it occasionally still, the amazing sense of community we found in Kerrville. It lasted for a relatively brief time, but it was a very intense time. The nature of that kind of intensity makes it easy to romanticize, and I can look at things rationally and say that overall our lives are so much more balanced than they were then. I am happier, Amy is happier, as a couple we are happier. Everything about our existence is so much more stable. But we can both acknowledge that there is an element to that focus on community that we both miss.
sometimes when I think about how much my life has changed in the past five or six years, it really does feel like that other guy isn’t even me. And then something as simple as driving into Kerrville gives me this overwhelming rush of remember this other you? It isn’t a particularly enjoyable thing to experience, and every time it happens, I swear I’m going to stop agreeing to do this gig, which would effectively close this one last doorway into an old existence.
But I never follow through.
Saturday evening as I was making my way into town, as soon as I rounded that last hill and saw the town below me, I got that strong sense of two Nathans colliding. Then, as if on cue, this song Father’s Son started playing on my stereo, and I drove through town listening to it, and it was one of those quiet, surreal, shattering moments.
UPDATE: almost immediately after posting this, a friend (who I didn’t know read this blog) emailed me and was very concerned that I have had some kind of a falling out with my dad. In case you are reading this and having the same question: No. And neither this blog nor this song have anything to do with my relationship with my family. The father mentioned here isn’t really a biological father. Its a metaphor. You know. Symbolic and stuff.
Steady, girl - on your feet
You and your wonderings
Bread can feed a few
So can some cartoons
So it ends, so it begins
I am my father’s son
Plant another seed of hate
In a trusting virgin gun
Steady, girl, for the show
god versus god ringside
Littered with corpses
Neither god can forgive
So the desert blooms
Strawberry cactus
Can you blame nature
If she’s had enough of us?
So it ends, so it begins
I am my father’s son
Plant another seed of hate
In a trusting virgin gun
Steady, boy - watch them pray
To you, I suspect
If you keep my flesh firm
I’ll ready those sacraments
So it ends, so it begins
I am my father’s son
Plant another seed of hate
In another father’s son
My photography instructor prodded me to do it. It seems like a pretty good idea.
I like the layout that my dotmac-soon-to-be-dotme web galleries offer better, so I’m keeping them and will continue to update them. But you can find me on flickr now too, I’ve added a badge on the sidebar.
