Turnips & Parsnips

The slow-cooker trials continue. This weekend I tried out a recipe that included turnips & parsnips as major ingredients. When I got to Safeway, however, I realized that I had no idea what a parsnip looked like.

The produce bin I was searching had three choices: Turnips, parsnips, & Rutabega. Turnips I picked out readily, but now the question: Which was the parsnip? How to determine the identity of the parsnip?

A memory came to mind- a Homestar Runner cartoon that interestingly also included parsnips a a major ingredient. With this thought in mind, I confidently picked up the parsnips and brought them home with me for some slow-cooking action.

Thank you, interweb!

My aching piles

This weekend was a mixed bag.

On the one hand:
- I went to the Giants Fan Fest and took some fun pictures with Captain Awesome. We tooled around the stadium, bought a 6 pack of tickets for the coming season, and laughed at the anti-steroids sign up in the locker room.
- I got to spend Saturday with friends in the city and eat disgustingly awesome fried food
- CA and I took a very nice walk around SF
- Ruby slept on my back on Friday night
- I got to try out my new slow-cooker for the first time- Success!
- I stayed up until 1am Sunday morning watching Queen of the Damned on SciFi. (This might seem like it belongs in the other column, but I enjoyed myself!)

On the other:
- I had to stay late at work Friday night because the Friday on-call person was off doing an ERNIE assessment at an offsite clinic and another 5150 page came in.
- I didn't get to run a major errand due to my overtime duties
- I had to de-skin 3 huge chicken breasts to use my new slow-cooker. It was really gross.
- I had to study for my licensing exam, constantly confronting the vast region of space between me and being prepared to take the test.
- I got paged at 4:45pm on Sunday and had to go into the hospital to do a suicide assessment. For 2.5 hours. During the Colts-Patriots game.
- My reward for successfully using my slow-cooker ended up being that I had to then dismember the chicken breasts, spending a good portion of what remained of the evening fishing gobbets of bone and cartilage out of the pot.

Mr. Turkey and Friends

I remember right around Thanksgiving Captain Awesome and I went to see a movie with another couple, who are respectively a lawyer and an ad exec. At dinner as we talked about our days, it seemed I was the only one wandering through the hallways with a handmade turkey puppet on my hand doing the voice of "Mr. Turkey." Strange.

I thought of that again this morning as I met with my supervisor to show him videos of not one, but two sessions with (different) 7yo girls doing puppet shows. As we discussed the relative merits of my responses to said puppet shows, as well as the similarities in the thematic content between the two clients, not to mention their differing dramatic styles, I had to wonder, "What do people think when I try to explain my job?"

No matter what you may think, however, the Board of Psychology is a fan: you are reading the words of an official Registered Psychologist. Hot damn!