Ask anyone who knows me, I have always loved J.Crew.  And, I’m sure J.Crew loves me based on how much moolah I hand over to them on a quarterly basis.  It’s my one vice… (okay I couldn’t type that with a straight face) uh, one of my vices. In fact, once I came into about $5,000 unexpectedly and my only thoughts were how much I could spend at J.Crew.  Sad, I know.

Anyway, I came across this beautiful outfit while perusing the famously poorly-designed J.Crew website and had to say:  WTF?  I mean, seriously - who would wear this outfit together?  Maybe Bozo’s illegitimate daughter or something.  WTF kind of clown outfit is this?

Okay, the pants are cute.

Look what I got in the mail yesterday!  A Christmas Catalog.  Yes, Christmas.  Okay, the whole catalog wasn’t Christmas, but the last 14 pages were!  WTF?  Christmas is FIVE months away!  Nobody but my mother-in-law has even thought about Christmas yet!  It’s not even Labor Day, for Christ’s sake (pun intended!)

BTW - do you see something wrong with this picture?  I mean, besides the fact that that $3,000 chaise is a hideous shade of blue?  Take a look outside…  it’s SUMMER!!!!  Those kids are either really early for Christmas ‘08, or they’re still there from Christmas ‘07 - someone help them!

Also, someone help Horchow get a fucking grip and not freak me out with Christmas shit in August.

I know, you can’t really tell in this bad photo I took, but trust me - it’s gross.  What they don’t tell you when you buy your cool hip white/clear Mac keyboard is that it gets completely disgusting just a short time later. It’s full of cat hair, miscellaneous food crumbs, dirt, grime, dead skin cells and God knows what else. And, because the casing is clear, you can see it all - just like an ant farm!  As an added bonus, the white keys are now a dingy grey.

Let’s just say, it doesn’t look anything like this:

Part of the fun of working for yourself is sending out invoices.  I don’t know why, but I love to put them together, print them on my little letterhead and pop them in the mail. It’s strangely comforting to me for some reason - I guess since for every one you send, you know that’s some money coming in.  I  like that. You know what I don’t like?  Never getting fucking paid from those invoices!

It happens more than you might think, and it always seems that the bigger the company, the harder it is to get paid.  It also seems that if I know the people personally, I don’t get paid on time either.  Why is that?  I would think I would want to pay people I know before I pay people I don’t know. 

I usually base my invoicing on project pricing rather than by the hour pricing.  Sometimes I think I would make more if I did charge by the hour, but frankly I am too lazy to keep track.  Also, I usually ask for half the project price up front, and then invoice for the rest on the back end, but not always.  I should really do it more often, as here I am with a client where the project has been completed for four months, but I have yet to see any money.  It’s great for them… they have their project and I guess they think I am nice enough to have done it for fucking free!

Anyway, pay your fucking bills… you know who you are!

This special dinner is brought to you by my friends at the General Foods Kitchens Cookbook circa 1959.  Officially it’s called the “Elegant Holiday Buffet for Twelve”, and includes a Decorated Baked Ham, Cherries Jubilee and Beef Stroganoff.

 Yes, that green thing is the ham.

A little FoTC for a HOT Friday afternoon!

Love is like a roll of tape
Real good for making two things one
But just like that roll of tape
Love sometimes breaks off before you’re done

Another way that love is similar to tape
That I’ve noticed
Is sometimes it’s hard to see the end…

Deep, man.

Okay, remember when I told you that I went to Napa a few weeks ago with some friends - you know, when the idiots at the TSA stole $30 worth of duxelles from me and threw them in the garbage?  Well, I have another Napa story to share with you.

My friends and I wanted to “splurge” one night while we were there at a really fabulous restaurant, so we picked one of Thomas Keller’s and made our reservations months in advance.  So, our big night comes and we are excited to see what’s on the menu that night: a braised beef short rib over homemade pappardelle - yum! Considering that every one of us in our group has some sort of silly food issue, this is a positive sign that this is something that we all like.

The first course comes, and it’s a fresh heirloom tomato/mozzarella salad with some sort of crack-sauce.  Oops - I mean sherry vinaigrette… it was probably one of the most perfect Caprese salads I have ever had.  I could have eaten five pounds of it and gone home right then and been perfectly happy.

Then, the short rib.  Everything here is served family style, so it’s a hearty helping of boned short ribs that, the waiter tells us, has been braised for 48 hours.  So, we dig in and it is truly sublime.  These short ribs were amazing as they were as thick as a steak, and hardly had any fat on them.  We are all ooohing and ahhhing and I had just  mentioned that I thought there was a very small amount of tarragon in the dish, when suddenly I realize my friend next to me is freaking out.

Yes, there was a hair on her short rib.  A little short black one. And it ain’t hers or mine, that’s for damn sure!  (And, no - it’s not what you’re thinking - it wasn’t a pube or anything like that - I can’t take you guys anywhere…)  Anyway, my friend is totally grossed out and is done with that portion of her meal, even though she only had a few bites.  This starts a discussion around the table about what we should do.  In the end, we don’t say anything to anyone, and we enjoyed the next two courses (which were unbelievably fabulous, BTW) with no problems.

What we discovered was that all four of us would have handled the situation in four different ways.  One of my friends would have asked for a new plate and would have been okay with that.  Another said she wouldn’t have cared if she had to floss with it!  One would have alerted the waiter because we are in a nice restaurant, the rest of us wouldn’t have.

I fell somewhere in the middle.  A stray hair doesn’t bother me so much, (as long as it’s from your head!) I mean, it happens - hairs are falling out of your head right now!  If I had seen it on my short rib, I would have flicked it off and continued eating.  Do I want to pull it out of my mouth?  No.  Do I want to swallow it?  No.  Have I eaten hairs I don’t know about?  Probably many more than I care to think about.  I wouldn’t really say anything to the waitstaff, either.  I never really say anything unless something is really really wrong.  A hair on my short rib?  Phsaw.

Anyway, the whole episode reminded me of the Seinfeld when Elaine gets a Cinnamon Babka for a dinner party and discovers a hair and gets a new one by yelling, “You sold me a cake with a hair around it!”  It kind of became our mantra for the rest of the weekend.

What would you do?

What is going on with Bravo?  It seems that they have caught me up in their bevy of fun programming.  First, they got me hooked on Real Housewives of NYC, now it’s Flipping Out.  It seems I am a 29 year-old gay person when it comes to my ideal programming demographic.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

Flipping Out follows the daily trials and tribulations of Jeff Lewis, a real estate speculator in Los Angeles, and his calvalcade of employees and subcontractors.  I know, sounds kind of boring, right?  Not if the main guy is certifiably nuts.  He readily admits to having OCD, freaks out at the slightest provocation, goes to scream therapy, hires psychics and mediums to clear houses and make decisions for him, and obsesses over the smallest detail.  All this adds up to great television and absolutely gorgeous house renovations.  I just love Jeff  - he’s like the gay best friend I’ve always wanted.

Do yourself a favor if you haven’t tuned in and check it out.  It won’t be hard to find, as Bravo likes to play reruns about 100,000 x a day.  Hell, tune in over a weekend and watch the whole season in one sitting!  You won’t be sorry.

There’s a rumor going around this morning that the restaurant chain Bennigan’s is out of business. What a sad day for Corporate Restaurant Chain America! Bennigan’s was kind of the first big sit-down restaurant chain that I remember - it used to be the place to go when I was in college.  We did a lot of 21st birthdays there.  With the cray-zee decor (Bicycles on the wall!  Goofy signs! Musical instruments!) and innovative menu (The first place I remember having Mozzarella Sticks and the Monte Cristo sandwich!) Bennigan’s paved the way for all the mediocre chains behind them:  Friday’s, Applebee’s, Ruby Tuesday, etc.  Plus, I think they made up the Singing the Birthday Song bullshit to anyone that pretends it’s their birthday.  Another corporate innovation!

My favorite Bennigan’s memory was when I worked at the Olive Garden back in 1990.  We weren’t allowed to drink at the Olive Garden bar even if we were off work and out of uniform, and Bennigan’s had the same rule for them.  Our restaurants were right next to each other, so we worked out a little secret criss/cross system where they would give us free drinks at their bar, and we would give them free drinks in ours.  After awhile, we all kind of knew one another and at one point we figured out that if we were working and took an order, turned it in to the kitchen, jumped in our car (yes, our car) raced over to Bennigans in time to have a shot at the bar and race back just in time for the order to be up.  One time I did this a few too many times in one night and one of my tables walked out on me.  Ahhhhh…. memories!

Farewell, Bennigan’s! Viva the Monte Cristo Sandwich!

Yes,  I’m turning 40 this fall - -  so to try and forget about the crippling depression that accompanies this unsavory fact, I’ve spent the last two years planning a month-long trip to La Belle France for September 2008.  I planned the whole itinerary myself, and this entailed making numerous hotel reservations, rental car reservations, airline tickets, train reservations, not to mention figuring out where to eat, where to go, where to stay, etc. etc.  It seems I forgot one tiny detail: learning to speak French.

Well, I should say re-learn how to speak French. I took French from 7-12 grade and then 3 out of 4 years in college.  You would think this would mean that I could kind of figure some stuff out just from having studied it for so long, but as they say, if you don’t use it you lose it.  And, boy - do you!  My French is just plain sad.

Considering that I have known we were going on this trip for two years I would have prepared a little better, but alas that did not happen.  I did buy a couple of CDs, including the ubiquitous Rosetta Stone, but realized after about 1/3 the way through that I was trying to memorize silly things that not only will I not need on my trip, I don’t think I’ve ever needed in English:

• The milk is white.
• Smell the cake. (?)
• He stole my pocket watch!
• I am very interested in art history.
• I would like a black and white TV (?)