Apostroplease

Let's talk about grammar! You all probably know by now that my brother is addicted to commas. But some of y'all out there are addicted to apostrophes, the commas of the sky. Look. I get it. I'm not perfect. I'm frighteningly close - but not perfect.

Like everyone else I have my flaws. I will never be able to spell the word acomodation accomodation acommodation acommadation accomadation accommadation acommodation accommodation right on the first try. Or even the third try. I question everything each time I have to use quotations and I would rather rewrite an entire paragraph than learn how to properly use a semicolon.

What can I say, you're in good company. I think the reason apostrophe errors bother me so much is because we have been learning about them since elementary school. It's like your/you're. If you misuse fewer/less or incorrectly hyphenate some adjectives, that's fine. We all have more important things to do than run every post past the AP Stylebook. But I feel like we should have apostrophes down by now.

So I created this video that explains some of the more common apostrophe errors that I see on social media. Use code WGW to get a free one-lifetime subscription to Grammarly.

 

Pass the Pretzels

You may or may not know that I received possibly the best Christmas present of all time. A KitchenAid mixer. I've wanted one for ages but they're pretty expensive so I had accepted that it would need to wait for my wedding registry. And in recent years I accepted that there may never be an aforementioned wedding registry.

But Emily, her mom and her stepdad got me one for Christmas and now there is a whole new world of recipes available to me. I mean sure, I never let the fact that a recipe called for a stand mixer specifically stop me before, but that method led to...mixed results. (Get it?) Most recently I attempted a shortbread. I didn't let the lack of a proper stand mixer deter me because there were only 4 ingredients and 3 of them were butter so it was a low-stakes gamble. The result was almost good enough to eat!

Luckily, those days are behind me now. With my KitchenAid mixer I feel like I can do anything. When I opened the present I wanted to use it right away. But I was at Emily's mom's house so I didn't have access to my baking ingredients. So I settled for Googling KitchenAid mixer recipes and daydreaming. I read some of the more mouthwatering titles and Meg said that she probably had the ingredients for pretzels. Game on!

I am obsessed with those big soft pretzels. I've tried some make your own pretzel kits before but they never really worked. They made something that was pretzel shaped and edible but nothing to write home about. Surely the only problem was not using a stand mixer. That was the missing ingredient. Now that I had my KitchenAid the pretzels would be delicious. I could open up my own Auntie Rae's, gain a cult following, franchise it and make my first million. Easy peasy pretzel squeezy.

Here is the recipe I used.

Before starting we had to make sure that we had all of the necessary ingredients. Yeast? Check. Flour? Check. Butter? Check. Dark brown sugar? Nope. Light brown sugar should be fine, right? Food-grade lye? Definitely not. But I could substitute baked baking soda. Wait...baked baking soda? I'll worry about that later.

The first step was to mix the yeast in warm water. Easy enough, right? That's where Emily's stepdad Jeff comes in. I am turning on the faucet and waiting for the water to warm up when he sticks a thermometer into the stream of water and insists it must be 110 degrees EXACTLY or it will kill the yeast. I know that baking can be an exact science occasionally but I have never in my life waited for an oven to preheat so we were approaching this from very different perspectives. After a few attempts of getting the water hot enough and then maintaining the proper temperature once in the bowl, he gave up. Said it can't be done. He was so angry he literally threw his hands up and was like you guys try and walked away. It was hilarious. Meg immediately got the water to 112 degrees and poured it into the metal bowl which cooled it to 110.

And with that it became clear that this recipe was my Vietnam. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into until I was in the thick of it. But by then it was too late to turn back, we were in too deep. We had only completed the first step and I was already way out of my league. Measuring exact temperatures? Give me a break. But the yeast had been activated. There was no deactivation option. There was no way out but through.

Now I had to add in the other ingredients. I decided to take out the pilsner because I don't like beer, I don't need beer-flavored pretzels just normal pretzel-flavored pretzels. This left the dough very dry because fun fact...the beer is actually important for that pretzel taste we all know and love. Beer is an integral part of pretzel-flavored pretzels. There was no pilsner so we subbed in a lager and moved on. Now before the dough could be considered ready, I had to check off a laundry list of adjectives. Was it firm? Could it form a ball? Was it tacky, but not sticky?

Once my dough could jump through all those hoops it needed to rest in a bowl with a towel on top. And then you had to roll the dough out into pretzel snakes. And let those rest on a pan with a towel on top. And then you could finally form it into a pretzel shape before you...let it rest again with a towel on top. Lot of union breaks in the pretzel world. The Teamsters have nothing on these guys.

After like 4 hours of this nonsense they can finally go in the oven. But now you have to prepare the soak that you are going to dip them in when they're done baking. This is where we bake the baking soda. Then you take your baked baking soda and dissolve it in some boiling water. Which you will need to stir constantly until you are done dipping each pretzel for like 20 seconds.

If you are going to attempt to make your own pretzels I would recommend having at least 5 people on hand to help. And that's a LOW estimate. There are a lot of steps that need to be done essentially at the same exact time and without Emily and Meg and for one brief shining moment Jeff, I never could have done this. It really takes a village.

I was so anxious while they baked. How would they turn out? There were so many ingredient substitutions, so many timing errors. I decided that if the end result bore even a passing resemblance to a pretzel I would consider it a success. After what felt like a solid 12 hours but in reality was only like 6 hours, the pretzels were done. They looked like pretzels. They smelled like pretzels. Could they really be pretzels? Did I just waste half of my waking hours on flavorless dough? Actually, that doesn't sound too bad, never met a carb I didn't like.

After everything was soaked and salted and cooled off, I finally bit into what I can only describe as a pretzel-adjacent bread. For all intents and purposes, I had just baked a pretzel. I am now taking requests for my next baking adventure. Souffles? A Bearnaise? Perhaps some macarons? I might even audition for The Great British Bake Off. The world is my bakery.

Little Woman, Big Bill

Let's talk about the best film of the year. Aside from my Instagram stories. Little Women. 

Actually, the 2 are combined here.

I'm sure by now you have all heard that Saoirse Ronan gave a masterful performance...as expected. She played Jo, the Carrie Bradshaw of the March sisters. When you're little girls (or Little Women, I suppose) everyone thinks they're Jo but you know you're the only real Jo in your friend group. No matter how many times Sarah is like "I'm Jo because I'm going to move to New York" and you're like "shut up Sarah, your mom packs a Hostess cupcake in your lunch every day and you whine when it's vanilla instead of chocolate, you're NOT Jo" and that kind of makes you Amy, doesn't it? 

But anyway. What I was not expecting was to leave the theater loving Amy March thanks to Florence Pugh. The whole film was just fantastic. What was not fantastic...aside from Greta Gerwig not being nominated for best director...was part of my movie-watching experience.

See I went to see Little Women on a date. A first date. (Those are the only kind I have.) And I saw it at CineBistro. I had never been there before but when my date suggested dinner and movie I counter-offered that we combine the two because if you don't run your schedule your schedule will run you.

We arrived at the theater and my date paid for our tickets. The tickets themselves were a lot more than I thought they would be. I think $17 or $18 each. As we walked to our cinema, he made a joke about our next date needing to be at a park or something and I thought oh jeez, he already wants a refund but I decided to walk it off because I was dying to see the movie.

We were seated and the waiter began explaining the process to us since we hadn't been to a CineBistro before. And as my date was asking the waiter questions I realized that he thought all of the food was included. I don't necessarily blame him because the tickets were ridiculously expensive even for such a sprawling metropolis as Cary, North Carolina. But there were prices on the menu, surely he would see them, right? I didn't know what to do. Do I womansplain the way menus work to him our first time meeting? And isn't there a chance that I'm wrong? I mean I've never been wrong before but you never know. So I just let it happen.

It was like when you're playing foosball and you're able to stop some of the fast shots but then a slow one just rolls by your men and into the goal. And you watch the whole thing happen in slow motion but are powerless to stop it. It's like your brain and your body stop communicating. You reach for the bars but can't find the right ones. You try to twist them into position but your wrists don't know which way to go. Does this happen to anyone else or am I just really bad at foosball?

So I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a $12 appetizer, and he ordered a salad. And a glass of wine. And some calamari. The waiter punched in our order on his tablet and it printed out a bill. My date took the bill and I watched as he looked it over and eventually realized that the Arabic numerals beside each menu item weren't purely decorative. Now we wait.

Would he pull a Charles Daniel and say "so nothing is included with the $20 ticket? Are the Rold Golds here made of real gold?" loudly so that the other patrons could agree with him and perhaps revolt?

Would he be a Karen and ask to speak to the manager? Please don't make a scene, please don't make a scene.

That's when he looked at me and asked if I had a card. And I said yes. Because what can you do? I didn't want to make this a whole thing, a note my date should have taken earlier, so I said yes. He asked the waiter to split the bill and the waiter confirmed that he wanted everything split down the middle and my date said yes. 

So I paid $30. The waiter seemed to be very empathetic that my date wasn't realizing that his meal was a lot more expensive than mine. But I did the math. I had technically covered my ticket and my meal, no matter the order of operations. So there would be no "thank you for dinner" unless I was thanking myself for my dinner. Which I paid for. Myself.

So I sat there and watched a movie that I paid $18 to see. And ate tater tots that I paid $12 to eat. With a man who had ostensibly just asked me to split a bill he was more than 3/4s responsible for. I don't demand to be treated to expensive gifts and dates and dinners. I don't expect to be pampered. But I also don't want to be robbed. He knows I'm a teacher. He made a comment about how teachers don't get paid enough. I practically live in the genteel poverty that Little Women exemplifies.

It's okay. I've moved on. I enjoyed the movie. I cried the whole time. My mascara stayed put. It was beautiful. And  then I made guesses at which zodiac signs matched which March sisters. I am hoping that I recover from this ordeal with the wisdom of Meg. The determination of Jo. The kindness of Beth. And the pout of Amy.

Cats! Inspired By Cats!

If you do not get the title reference please Google it. This is VERY important.

Only once you have watched that video in its entirety should you attempt to watch my video review of Cats the movie.

 

TL;DR Cats the movie doesn't suck - Cats the musical sucks. Can't make cat food out of cat poop.

Hindsight

You didn't ask, and I delivered. 20 new things to try in the year 2020. Or not. You do you.


1. Watch a show other than Friends. I love Friends as much as the next phalange. But Netflix has spoken. It's time to move on.

2. Stop asking for advice on Facebook. Think about the idiots that you're friends with on Facebook. Don't go there for parenting advice. If you want advice you have exactly 4 options. Ask your mom, ask my mom, write in to MBMBAM or watch Dr. Phil.

3. Visit Sanford, NC. Now that the bridge in Carbonton is complete there's a whole new world to explore. There's a real nice Kiwanis park. Check that out.

4. Cheese curds. Ya gotta eat em. That's dairy. Y'all want weak bones? I don't. I know the concept is a little gross. Don't think. Just eat.

5. Buy something from Rareform. It's a great company, check them out. Bags and such made from recycled billboards which makes them pretty weather/spill proof. And some excellent customer service & coupons.

6. Try clicking ads on this very blog. What do you have to lose?

7. Watch Last Week Tonight. Get politically informed. Right now some of y'all are out here looking like the Girl You Wish You Hadn't Started a Conversation With at a Party. Being apolitical ain't cute.

8. Use cookie cutters. Just experience what it is to roll out cookie dough instead of spooning it out. It will make you appreciate every decorated cookie you've ever eaten much more because it is such a pain in the butt to do.

9. Save every $20 bill you get in 2020. This seems unrealistic but just think of all the money you would have if you stored away each bill featuring ole AJ that you got all year and also this is crazy don't do this. Live a little.

10. Get a flu shot. I don't care how many times you have or haven't had the flu.

11. Proofread your social media posts BEFORE posting them. Maybe do a quick Google search if you have a grammar question. Ask Alexa?

12. Try pineapple in A.1. steak sauce. That's it. I just think it's really good.

13. Learn what exactly is up with the American healthcare system. Then explain it to me.

14. Teach yourself to tap dance. I really want to learn how to tap dance. So I think I'm going to DIY it and it would be cool to have some partners.

15. Look through old pictures. Not like you in college because that's just depressing but like you as a kid. When you didn't care how you looked.

16. Participate in the census. And while you're at it, maybe read the Constitution. Just give it a glance.  Know your rights.

17. See a movie alone. I do this all the time when my family is going to the movies and I have no interest in seeing whatever superhero or Star Wars movie they're watching but still want my dad to pay the price of admission. It's liberating.

18. Try cricket flour. Entomophagy is the future. Eating insects is the most sustainable source of protein and this premise really intrigues me. Should it really be taboo or is that just cultural bias? Spoiler alert...it IS cultural bias. We gone do it together.

19. Make sure your sunscreen isn't expired. That's a thing. It happens. Replace it if you need to BEFORE you learn the hard way.

20. Make a charitable donation of any kind. It will make you feel good, help others and give you the right to be pretentious about it too. It's a win-win-win.