another productive day at the office

. when i started here, there were sixteen people in my department. today we're down to three, we're the cream of what had already been a select crop, and we're a pretty tight bunch. three nights a week, our schedules coincide in such a way that allows us a long, leisurely dinner together. 

while we're all interesting people with creative backgrounds and our conversations tend to range over a wide variety of subjects, our perennial focus seems to be [and always has been] food, which we talk about incessantly. first, we cover what each person has brought to the table that night--where we got it, what's in it, what we paid for it and/or how we made it, if it's as good as it was last time. then we talk about what we've eaten since last we saw each other, and then, often as not, we talk about our favorite dishes past and present, with excruciating attention paid to every detail of how each is prepared. 

seriously, we never tire of this shit. 

well, one night not long ago i went off on velveeta/ro-tel queso, about how it had once been a staple of my texas youth and how much i missed it. to my amazement, neither of my colleagues had ever experienced the bliss that is this simple dish, nor could they understand how an ungodly combination of canned tomatoes and an engineered cheese product with a millenial shelf-life could even be edible, much less addictive--i said "don't knock it 'til you've tried it." 

next day sue walked in, dumped the following grocery-sack full of ingredients into my lap and said, "let's do it." and thus white-trash fridays were born. 

sadly, i was too busy gorging myself that particular friday to take pictures of the finished product, but it looked very much like this: it always does--seriously, microwave or stove-top, you can't fuck this stuff up, and i've never met anybody, no matter how high-brow, who didn't love it [this now includes my two colleagues]. 

next white-trash friday, we went with a favorite culinary ensemble from my college days: carl buddig lunch-meat sandwiches on pillowy white bread with cheddar-american cheese, mayo, iceberg lettuce and tomato, lipton california onion dip and ruffles potato chips, as lovingly pictured below: lemme tellya, just buying all this shit was an adventure--i found myself in aisles of the supermarket i hadn't walked in years, but it was totally worth it. and fuck the preservatives--it was a most excellent and gratifying meal. 

which brings us to tonight (yeah, it's only thursday, but it was john's birthday so we made an exception). john's menu was very specific, and straight from his childhood: oscar mayer turkey-bologna sandwiches on wonder bread [and only wonder bread would do--he was like a dog with a bone on the subject], best foods mayo, kraft macaroni-and-cheese with a can of hormel turkey chili thrown in, all accompanied by hawaiian punch. oh, and sara lee pound cake and reddi-whip for dessert. 

i ask you, does it get any more white-trash than this? 

sue volunteered to pick it all up, but called me on the way in and asked, "what about the card?"

i told her i'd take care of it. 

i googled, found the images i wanted, realized that since i was without my laptop i was gonna have to do this without the benefit of photoshop or illustrator, sighed and opened the infernal microsoft word on my office desktop, prepared myself for the inevitable struggle. the front was easy enough: but the inside? fuck--after struggling for an hour trying to get text and pictures to play nice together in word, i finally wised up and did it in powerpoint: turns out the biggest problem involved my dyslexic ass trying to figure out how to turn the paper for each pass through the color laser printer in order to get the sonofabitch to come out right--eventually i succeeded. 

 then a stop downstairs in the copy-room at the paper-cutter, swing by the mailroom for the appropriately-sized envelope, and we're done:

[and thank you, shitty iphone, for these quality photos]

 

oh, and the food: tomorrow i may take a serious shot at doing some actual work.