Soup and the Blue-Collar Life...

...leads, inevitably, to sandwiches also. They're easier to carry.

Tonight The World's Greatest Husband begins a second job. Thank YOU, Mr. George W. Bush and your first-class wrecking of our already-ailing economy! The reader will understand if Mama wants to roll back the Reagan-era tax cuts for the wealthy, from the 80's; as well as let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire. Ahem. Anyway, yes, he is getting a raise at the full time job, but the miracles of compound interest on accrued credit card debt, run up just to keep moving forward while in search of new ways of life, has us btoh taking on plenty of extra, umm, "earning opportunities," if you will.

Thus it is that I have packed him one helluva sandwich, as he will be eating in the car, driving from his full time commission-sales gig to his brand new part-time telephone-research call-center gig. And I? I return to the Big Retailer with the Giant Red Bullseye logo tomorrow, as a financial support system for the wonderful play I'm currently rehearsing (which pays a very generous stipend, but not for another seven weeks). We will both be carrying sandwiches tomorrow. And for quite a few working days thereafter.

It's a real bitch to be a baby-boomer these days; we were skimmed off the workforce like rancid cream off old milk during the Great Layoffs of '08, and we represent millions just like us. Like we have to get punished for our parents' generation's proclivity to over-breed. So a lot of people from the general area of graduated-high-school-in-the-the 70's are working too hard, too much, for too little, after their savings and 401(k)'s were destroyed and their career paths wiped off the face of the collective map.

All hail Soup, and Sandwich, blue collar foods for the new Depression.

I have black beans soaking on the stove.

I think I'm a soup girl

Right now, one floor above me, the crockpot is warming a lovely batch I assembled over the weekend... small white navy beans, smoked pork hocks, cabbage, onions, carrots, and a quart of home-made chicken/vegetable stock I found in the freezer. Fabulous. Lots of Worcestershire sauce. Made it up as I went along and yum yum yum.

The love of soups and soup-creating came with the Great Layoffs of '08, when my husband and I were among the millions of couples where both partners got laid off within a week or two each other, right before Christmas. SO-O-O-O Dickensian! Gotta love the classics.

(The typical unemployed worker is now unemployed for over 40 weeks.)

We lost our full time gigs and benefits, and as we began our long downward slog through what was left of our 401(k)s and many underpaid substitute jobs, I began to make soups, and plenty of them. Black bean, kidney bean, split pea, navy bean, pinto bean; sausage, bacon, pork hocks, chicken, oxtails, leftover anything; tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, celery, cabbage, sweet potatoes, parsnips, spinach; I've made everything but my classic beef stew. I'm saving up the beef stew for when I feel wealthy enough to buy stewing meat, cut up, outright. I always get into this protestant guilt episode when I look at the price of stew beef and compare it to other soup meats and do mental math about what it's costing me to let the butcher cut it up vs. how much time it'd take me to actually cut it up myself.

My husband's getting a raise. I am going to buy the beef cut up for stew. Celebrate!

re-mixing 2009

You see? I told you I don't post that often. Sheesh.

OK, I am back from an amazing summer's adventure in the creative and weird world of Regional Theatre (non-Equity), and have launched into rehearsals for the 2010 re-mount of my 2009 Christmas show and am about to launch into the 2010 re-mount of my 2009 Christmastime seasonal retail job.

And of course I have re-dedicated myself to my poor little neglected blog, which, if it were one of those electronic pets you have to pretend feed, would have perished ages ago and a foul stench would be emanating from behind whichever appliance it had last crawled under.

Also I fixed up my website a little over the summer: http://www.dianawilde.com/

Really? I last posted on Pearl Harbor Day 2006?

Well... I was busy. That's it. Busy.

I should go back and read those first two lonely posts of mine. And I will. But right this minute I'm thinking of what an aversion I've always had to keeping a diary or a journal or anything of the kind, & I wonder if that's what I was tying to tackle when I made those sad little posts. I don't even know if the posts themselves are sad, I only know that a mere two posts in four years seems a little bit non-committal & that strikes me as sad... :) for the posts themselves, anyway.

Me... I've been busy. ;)