Blogspot, it's been real

After some thought and some fiddling around, I'm moving this blog over to Tumblr. Things are real pretty over there, and quite easy to use, and I'm ready for a change. (Everything already here will remain as an archive, at least until I get too embarrassed by it in my old age.)

If you've got a Tumblr, follow me! If you don't, you can read along as usual—just subscribe to the new RSS feed, update your bookmarks and all that jazz. It's the Internet. You know how to use it.

rachaelmaddux.tumblr.com

getting crispy

In a perfect world we'd have fall weather on summer hours, or at least I'd remember that we don't and would plan my post-work granny-walk accordingly. Well, another day, then.

it's brutal, it's brutal

all the sweet promises

"I liked going to work, liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm of getting out a magazine, liked the orderly progression of four-color closings and two-color closings and black-and-white closings and then The Product, no abstraction but something which looked effortlessly glossy and could be picked up on a newsstand and weighed in the hand. I liked all the minutiae of proofs and layouts, liked working late on the nights the magazines went to press, sitting and reading Variety and waiting for the copy desk to call. From my office, I could look across town to the weather signal on the Mutual of New York Building and the lights that alternately spelled TIME and LIFE above Rockeffeler Plaza; that pleased me obscurely, and so did walking uptown in the mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft tureens in Fifty-seventh Street windows, people in evening clothes trying to get taxis, the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of money and summer."

—Joan Didion, "Goodbye To All That"

not a dam, but damn

The Chattanooga Nature Center was the site of many happy elementary school field trips and probably a couple of summer camps too but maybe not for me, maybe I'm just adopting other peoples' memories of my own, because now that I mention it I don't think I actually went to any camps there myself, but regardless, I really liked going to this place when I was growing up. The taxidermied foxes and birds of prey and whatnot in the visitors' center were all slightly more than mildly terrifying but there was this big awesome room with a to-scale replica beaver dam that you could crawl inside and also there was a turtle tank, and a boardwalk over what I thought was a swamp that was like hundreds of feet below, but that was actually just a creek floodplain that is maybe about ten feet down at the very most.

But you know what they did not have back then? They did not have a treehouse. Not any kind of treehouse, but especially not a treehouse that you could rent out for birthday parties. Do you know who would have been all about this? Me. And Sarah. Yes, this has Maddux Sister Late October/early November Trolls and/or Reptiles and/or 101 Dalmations-themed Joint Birthday Party Circa Early-Mid 1990s written all over it. It's not even all that far off the ground which I'm sure would have been my main concern at age 7.

I'm not even sure what it looks like on the inside because when we were there some other little girl was having her birthday party inside, although I guess I could have just been a real creeper and just barged in. I think my mom would have supported that decision. I could see it in her eyes: "This would've definitely been a better choice than Discovery Zone."

cooking, come hanger or high water

Joe thinks that runny, fried eggs are one of the most beautiful foods ever, and I have to say I agree with him. Look at that.

The day of the flood I decided that I needed to cook dinner for myself, and that it needed to be Orangette's boiled kale with fried egg and Ezra Pound Cake's chai-apple pie coffee cake. My trip to the DeKalb Farmer's Market for ingredients was technically a bit ill-advised, and I actually messed up both of the recipes (did not cook the kale long enough, had to double the baking powder in the cake because I had no baking soda), and I hadn't had a good snack so I was kind of panicked and hangry by the time it was all done—well after Gossip Girl, which I'd planned to watch while face-stuffing my spoils—but it all turned out quite great, actually.

Except that I woke up feeling sick the next morning. Cold-sick, not food-poisoning-sick, so I know I didn't poison myself or anything, but I don't like that apparent cause-and-effect. However, one could surely do worse than being left with nothing to eat from one's sickbed except this stuff. (Pound of butter? What pound of butter?)

At any rate, I recommend both recipes and I can't wait til it's Really Actually Fall so that I can enjoy them without that nagging feeling of it actually being 80 degrees outside. Still. Wugh.

Go Dawgs (!?)

What's more shocking, that I've lived my whole life in the South but have never watched one entire college football game, either in person or on TV*? Or the sheer number of beers on tap at the Lindbergh Taco Mac?

* I would add "until last night" to that—we were there to watch the Georgia-Arkansas game—but I'm not sure it's even true. Apparently, when I get a few Blue Moons in me, all I want to do is watch YouTube videos of French bulldog puppies via other peoples' iPhones. And also post to said other peoples' Tumblr. SORRY, SPORTS. AGAIN. (Kristen, thank you for my Very Special Night.)