The Best Intentions

M. and I spent the better part of this morning -- or what was left of it after our delayed, 11am wake-up -- watching the Food Network, shouting out additions to our wedding registry as we watched Rachel Ray and the Barefoot Contessa and Assorted Others use our future pots and pans and processers and Pyrex bowls to make things that we would surely be making ourselves if only we had the appropriate implements and gadgets.

Of course, not even Williams-Sonoma can furnish all of the items presently missing from our kitchen inventory, including Get Off Your Ass and Go Grocery Shopping; Take La Paloma Burritos Off Your Speed-Dial; and Move Somewhere That Has a Kitchen With More Windows and Counterspace and Fewer Cockroaches. Luckily, we've already got more than enough Go Ahead and Make Up Another Excuse to last us well into our golden anniversary.

The upside is that while my husband and children will be eating Skittles and burritos every night for dinner, they might be eating them from any number of beautiful, mint-condition serving pieces, like this:



or this:


or this:


or this:


or, of course, this:



In other news, I was sitting here fifteen minutes ago, minding my own business, eating Skittles from my enormous box of birthday candy, catching up on Desperate Housewives, when I was startled by the relentless bleating of a farm animal being tortured with a meat tenderizer in our airshaft. So I ran to our bathroom window and spent the next five minutes perched on the side of our bathtub, listening to our downstairs neighbor mangle Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" in his shower. And I mean mangle, but in a completely confident and self-assured kind of way.

Which leads me to wonder whether our neighbors think that Kelly Clarkson actually showers in our apartment, or instead merely wonder what the upkeep costs are for our retarded singing mule.