Man, I haven't had a week this awesome since...I can't even remember. It's been a long, long time.
A sweet hike in the gorge on Sunday, the beach yesterday (the foggy beach, which J. commented looked like that scene from Spirited Away with the train and the lake, etc), and another--ANOTHER--gorgeous, hot, sunny day today.
We woke up, lay around in the sun in our apartment for a while, ate some oatmeal, biked over to the park to play tennis, biked around collecting ingredients for lunch and margaritas, and now we're well on our way to total sated-ness. One margarita in, happy hours to hit all over NE (we're thinking 5th Quadrant, that unnamed bar on Williams, maybe Amnesia or Por Que No so we can compare margaritas...), a picnic in Laurelhurst later...the Blazers game at 7...
This is what we have taken to calling "fun-employment," or in our case, "funder-employment." Yeah, it sucks not to have any money or a job that I can be excited about/proud of/not want to burst out laughing when I tell people where I work, but whatever. I'm going to grad school in the fall and it's going to be a crazy, hectic two years; it's finally sunny here, and I've had a pretty awful couple of months; dammit, I'm going to enjoy anything I can get.
Mmmm. Margaritas. My mom makes the best--not kidding here--margaritas ever, and thank goodness she has shared the beautiful knowledge with me, because I really think I like good margaritas better than any other drink I've ever had. Plus, once at school I was sick and down at Seal Beach, at Abuelito's, and he told me to a) have a shot of tequila, b) eat a jalepeno, and c) suck on some lime, and between those three things, I would kill any sickness that was in my body. A margarita encompasses two of those things--tequila and lime--and we'll just forget about the sugary triple sec that could provide so many little bacterial colonies or whatever I've got in my throat with food for weeks.
Why can we forget about them, you ask? Oh yeah, because J. made pad kee mao, otherwise known as spicy death noodles, for lunch, and there's enough capsaicin in a bowlful of that to take down the Death Star, let alone some wimpy lingering virus/infection/whatever I have. Our eyes were watering and noses running, I'm not even exaggerating. And J. loves spicy things. And he'd used half the thai chillies called for in the recipe!
The best part? He made about 20 pounds of it, so we're going to be eating leftover spicy death noodles for the rest of the week. Or month. Or year. See the picture at the top of this post--we're literally going to be eating this foreeeever.
Anyway, here's the link to the recipe--I suggest you use a quarter of the quarter cup of thai chillies called for, so 1/16 of a cup or about 1 tablespoon. You can always add more spice later. You can't get your mouth back from the burning fires of spicytown without gallons of milk and some screaming.
