Friday's One Day Deal at Whole Foods...

...is Grass-Fed Ground Beef for $4.99/pound (regularly $6.99/pound). This beef is rated Step 4 in the Animal Welfare Rating System Whole Foods implemented with the Global Animal Partnership, which means that the animals are raised in a "pasture-centered" environment. Though this is not the top rating (5 and 5+ which are totally animal-centered), it does mean that the animals are provided access to the outdoors and opportunity to engage in their innate behaviors like roaming and foraging.

Sage pesto, fab article, etc

Did you read this preposterously entertaining article in the NYTimes Magazine recently? Tom and I were in stitches and complete admiration of the monkey. Seriously, it is an absolutely awesome piece. That monkey rocks! Can I just tell you about my youngest son? A) It is good that he is enormously cute and charming because he'll need both attributes to offset his extreme mischievousness and bad-yet-hilarious sense of humor. For example, he B) death-gripped-of-love his penis for about 8 hours today, and C) tried to put said penis on my leg at bath-time, all the while laughing like a hyena. D) This morning, he flew out of the bathroom with a long piece of toilet paper hanging (I think purposefully) from (out of) his bottom. E) He is one of the cutest children I've ever known. This may be because he's mine, but I don't actually believe that. His eyelashes touch his eyebrows when he opens his eyes for the love!

In any case, you see what I'm dealing with.

My oldest son...well, A) I just spritzed him with lavender spray and applied a silk eye mask to the tender visual part of his visage because he's having trouble sleeping. This might be because I just went in and found him B) listening to a book on tape and, concurrently, C) reading -in the dark- another book from the same series but NOT the same one. Christ almighty.

Between the times of tucking in and this awake discovery, I made a sage-walnut pesto, slapped it on some ziti lungo (long ziti), topped it with toasted walnuts, fried sage leaves and pecorino and devoured my half. Delicious!

Wish I'd made some dessert, but the time, it ran the heck out.

It's been a long time since I've vented about idiot drivers but here's a new one: don't leave your car door wide(!) open on any, but especially a really busy city street, while you're doing whatever you're doing instead of closing the door and moving on. You are just inviting someone to drive straight through your door, like a bull through a toreador's flag. Good grief, people. You've got minds, use them.

WTF re: Clint Eastwood?

Unspeakable

Did you hear about the Republican convention attendee who threw peanuts at a black CNN camerawoman and said "This is how we feed animals"? He was then expelled. I'm so sick to my stomach with hurt for the camerawoman, disgust for this jerk who is not even human, and an overall sense of horror and sadness that this kind of racism still pervades the Republican party in such ways. Remember when Palin accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists" and being "not one of us"? Birtherism! The lunatic county judge in Lubbock who, just this month, said about Obama, "He's going to try and hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N. O.K., what’s going to happen when that happens? I’m thinking worst-case scenario: civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war, maybe. And we’re not talking just a few riots here and demonstrations. We’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy.”

And now this guy at the RNC? These examples abound, and it's heartbreaking and sickening. I cannot understand why we're listening to and electing people like this. Together with voices like Akin, Limbaugh, Santorum, Ryan and so many others, this is a party of hate, selfishness, pettiness and even evil sometimes. They have no real ideas that will help the people who live beyond the walls of their little white enclave. They're damning the planet to environmental destruction, they politicize everything possible -even the really stupid stuff like the penny- to obstruct real and meaningful progress which our country so desperately needs.

Sick. Sad. Scary.