Written by
joeymichaels, drawn by yours truly.
1) I have been running every morning! This means getting up at 6 to go out before work. On
negativeneve‘s suggestion, I took this morning off and simply walked 2k instead of running. I can’t quite do more than 2.5k yet but I am trying not to push myself too hard. I am hoping this coming week, I’ll get up to three.
Since I started running, I’ve found that one of the stretches I have always done is aggravating my hip joints, mostly on the inner side. It’s always been my favorite stretch so I’m a little concerned about this. It’s become very painful to do. It doesn’t really hurt when I’m not stretching. Does anyone know what that is?
2) Part of running means I have also been incorporating breakfast into my morning routine. I never ate breakfast before! I have been eating Fage 2% yogurt with honey and homemade granola all week. I haven’t decided what I think of this morning thing, but breakfast is a plus.
3) My hair is driving me nuts. It’s gotten pretty long– below my shoulder blades– and I am using crazy amounts of conditioner to detangle it. Parts of it are matted pretty much every morning and I have to go in and pick the mats apart. I remember the last time this happened was when I was a freshman in college– the last time my hair was this long. So! I am thinking maybe my hair has reached critical mass and I should cut it back a bit. The question is whether to just cut three inches or do something short again.
4) I just bought two new dresses from eShakti. I have had several of you recommend them, so I finally was un-lazy enough to get out the measuring tape. I didn’t exactly fit any of their standard sizes, but I was closest to an 8, so I bought those. I am hoping they’ll see the big bra size and know what to do about it. If anyone’s wondering, my measurements are 38-27-38.
5) Remember a week or two ago when I told you all to read
boxbrown‘s comics? Well, he has a new one, and it is called Everything Dies, and you should read it! It is about religion and humanism and stuff. There are three stories up for you to try. You should try them!
6) I am going to go meet
rosefox shortly! I am very excited! So excited that I perhaps mistook the time I was supposed to meet her and almost jumped the gun by an hour and a half. Oops!
7) I like lemonade and have been drinking it a lot lately.
8) On the recent LJ thing: I have screencapped all of your locked posts, recorded video of myself reading them, and posted it on youtube. Just so y’all know. No, I wouldn’t share comments from anyone else’s posts with a link to a locked post in it; in fact, the idea to do that had never occurred to me before last night. However, whatever y’all want to do with comments on my posts is all good either way, as long as you don’t send anything I’ve ever locked into the world of public web stuffs. Even then, I will probably forgive you as long as it’s not personal information that implicates another person. If I even find out about it. But that’s just how I roll. I heart you all!
I have been totally fail at posting new cocktails, and I have a bunch, only now I have so many that I don’t even remember what-all I put in some of them. Two of them were good, too. One had gin, muddled stevia and pluots, but I don’t remember what else.
But here are drinks from this weekend.
On Friday, I did something I almost never do, and mixed a drink from a magazine. It was a drink from this month’s Food & Wine, made with Hendricks, arugula, lime, and agave. I mixed it for two reasons: one, because it had arugula in it; and two, because it accompanied an article that reflected a lot of my own thoughts about bartending (and particularly my thoughts on the pretentiousness of the term “mixologist” and the unsettling trend of people putting things in drinks purely as a type of liquid oneupmanship as opposed to making something that tastes good. I wasn’t fond of the agave, and think it’s just not really the right sweetener for gin, but the arugula was really nice.
On Saturday, I made this:
Basil Negroni
This isn’t quite a negroni with basil in it; it’s a little bit off a traditional negroni recipe and has a sort of duskier flavor.
Ingredients for two drinks
6 oz gin
1 oz Campari
1 oz port wine
1/2 oz Grapefruit bitters
About 20 leaves basil, plus two pretty sprigs with blossoms
Instructions
Put everything in a shaker with ice, except basil flowers
Muddle until basil is bruised
Shake
Strain into two chilled cocktail glasses, add flowers for garnish
On Sunday, I started out my day by infusing a bottle of gin I wasn’t too thrilled with with lavender. We’ll see how it comes along next week.
Then I made this:
Elderfields Road
Elderfields Road is the name of the street my father grew up on. This drink is a variation on a Manhattan, and since he grew up right outside the city, I thought that was appropriate, considering the major ingredient here.
Ingredients for 2 cocktails
6 oz bourbon
Juice of 1 lime
2 oz elderberry syrup (homemade)
1 oz red vermouth
2 splashes blood orange bitters
Instructions:
Mix everything but the bitters together in a shaker with ice and shake
Pour into two chilled cocktail glasses, add bitters



