Taste of India: "That Turd Thing Was Nasty"

Location: Taste of India, 2621 Connecticut Avenue NW, DC.

Cost: $38.71 before tip (this included drinks, entrees, naan, dessert, and tax).

Rating: Don't go. Ever.

I took my sister to Taste of India tonight, the middle restaurant in a trio of Indian lunch buffet/dinner places directly across from the Woodley Park Zoo/Adams Morgan metro stop. As the three restaurants all looked pretty identical, and all had the same amount of people crowded into their outdoor patios, my sister asked why I had chosen this one over the two others.

"I looked at the menus," I told her, "and this one was the cheapest."

I ordered baingan bartha,and my sister had the chicken biryani.

The biryani wasn't at all spicy or particularly pungent (which my sister appreciated -- she doesn't like heavily spiced foods), and tasted mostly of cashew. The baingan bartha had about twice as much onion and garlic as it did eggplant, and tasted mostly of cilantro.

I also ordered gulab jamuns for dessert, which my sister had never seen or tasted. When she saw them -- that is, it, as the entire palm-sized dish was filled with one enormous, lumpy gulab jamun -- she said "I'm not tasting that until after you do."

I tried to explain. "It's not supposed to look like a --"

"Shh!" She stopped me. "Don't say that word in the restaurant."

I tasted it.


"You don't have to eat this," I told her. "In fact, I'd rather you didn't."

But she tried a bite, and then another one. And then she stopped. And then we left.

As soon as we were out of hearing range, she gave her verdict:

"That turd thing was nasty."

It took just about a half-hour for me to become sick, and then five minutes for me to become sick again. Hooray!

I guess cheapest doesn't always mean best, or even good. In this case, cheapest meant indigestible.

Can My One-Room Apartment Have Its One Room Be A Kitchen?

I'm in my sister's apartment in DC, applying for jobs.

She's got a studio, which is actually a pretty nice place; hardwood floors, etc.

Except for the kitchen.

The primary problem with my sister's kitchen is that the refrigerator blocks access to the cupboards and countertops. Seriously. The kitchen has a single wall of cupboards above/below a counter, but someone had the good sense to put the refrigerator right in front of them.

The secondary problem with my sister's kitchen is that it's too small for anything but the refrigerator. The sink is tiny (and has only a single drain), making dishwashing torturous and time-consuming. Not to mention that every dish has to be hand-dried immediately after washing (see "no counter space, above," otherwise I'd be out buying a wooden drying rack immediately).

I've cooked every night I've been here; Madhur Jaffrey's "cheese vali gobi" the first night, yellow bell pepper pizza the second, and tonight, inspired by House ep. 2:15 --

HOUSE: What's that smell?

WILSON: Stuffed bell pepper.

HOUSE: What are they stuffed with, vomit?

I made stuffed tomatoes with farfalle, peas, ginger, pesto, fresh garlic, and parmesan.

So clearly I'm surviving.

But it's made me decide that the most important factor in my future apartment or group house will definitely be the kitchen. I don't care about a crappy showerhead or a window that looks out over a back alley. Give me countertops, and places for storage, and a sink with two halves so that I can wash and rinse. Give me a kitchen large enough that I can actually prep in the kitchen, instead of using a table in my sister's bedroom.

Before that, of course, give me a job. ^__^ But once that's in place... well, we will see what kind of kitchen I can find.

Don't Use BWI SuperShuttle

Flew from St. Louis to Baltimore yesterday.

The flight was delayed for five hours because the incoming plane was stuck in tornado-heavy Dallas.

So the timeline looked a little something like this:

Drive to airport: 2 hours
Wait in airport: 7 hours
Flight to Baltimore: 2 hours
Take SuperShuttle from Baltimore to DC: nearly 2.5 hours.

The last leg of the trip, the SuperShuttle leg, was just... priceless. We all crammed into the shuttle and then waited for about 25 minutes as the driver painstakingly typed all of our destination addresses into his GPS. He was a very bad typist. Hunt-and-peck. He would type an entire address, and then the system would say "this address is unavailable," and then he'd have to go back and type it again. He also kept telling a passenger that he had never heard of Chevy Chase, MD, and that she must live in Bethesda.

Once the drive got going, it was a little like being on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. Although the GPS told our driver where to turn, etc., he kept missing the turns and then having to circle around to find them. He also drove through stop signs and stoplights, which was more than a bit unnerving. Oh, and he spent huge chunks of the ride talking to his buddy on his cell phone.

Considering that it was nearly 4 a.m. by the time I reached my sister's apartment, I left the shuttle definitely wishing I had taken a taxi instead.

Fly Me To The Moon....

Today is another travel day, and with any luck I should be safely tucked away in my sister's apartment by midnight.

I don't have room for everything in my suitcase, so I am packing three books: my yoga manual (I've been told I should be ashamed to say it's the Richard Hittleman one), The Newcomer's Guide To Washington, DC, and one other.

If you can guess what the third book I'm taking to DC is, I'll tell you. ^__^

(Hint: is fiction.)

Nasal Spray Is Evil

I've had a stuffy nose for the past week or so.

When I stopped off to visit a friend on the tail end of the Nashville trip, she gave me some decongestants -- Benadryl, and something else in the morning when I didn't need to be drowsy.

They both worked okay, but not great. I was still sniffling and still generally uncomfortable.

So that evening I went to the grocery store to grab some NyQuil, because I knew that would at least knock me out well enough to sleep.

That's when I saw the nasal spray. It was the right price ($1.59) and it had the advantage of containing neither sleep aids nor caffeine. The NyQuil/DayQuil combo pack, by comparison, was almost eight dollars. So... I chose the nasal spray.

I had never used nasal spray before, and I had no idea what to expect. I did notice that the bottle gave a very clear warning not to use the product for more than three days. But what if your cold lasts for more than three days? I thought. Most colds last almost a week!

Well, I shot the stuff up my nose and was rewarded with instantly clear sinuses. Brilliant. This stuff worked better than salsa and hot soup combined. No drips, no stuffiness, no nothing.

The next day it wore off, so I sprayed again... and etc. etc. until there I was at the end of the third day, nose stuffed so hard I could only breathe through my mouth, staring at the warning label on the bottle.

Do not use for more than three days.

Well. I googled "nasal spray dangers" and found out that, as I had suspected, the nasal spray itself doesn't cure you. It just... stops the snot for a little while. All the snot that wasn't dripping from my nose for the past three days is still there, ready and impacted and trying to find a way out.

Using the nasal spray for more than three days won't necessarily harm you, but it's not the smartest thing to put into your body. Mine contains oxymetazoline hydrochloride, which... well, Wikipedia says it sympathomimetically causes a decrease in interstitial fluid accumulation (via alpha-2 adrenergic receptors), which essentially means... okay, I don't know exactly what it means, but there are plenty of warnings about how a person shouldn't sympathomimetically aggravate their alpha-2 adrenergic receptors too often, or the nose lining will get irritated and start to break down. Not to mention all of that impacted snot still sitting around, dreaming of Kleenex Heaven.

Unfortunately, because of its effectiveness, nasal spray is also incredibly addictive, as I found out at about 1:30 a.m. when I squirted the stuff into my nose just so I could sleep, rationalizing it with "well, the internet says it won't kill me... I can go off the spray in the morning."

Now I'm sitting here, nose-constipated and miserable. I wonder if stuffing a raisin up there would help.

CafePress FTW!

A few weeks ago, I received a t-shirt from Threadless as a present.

I also bought four t-shirts from J. C. Penney.

And then I went and got a single t-shirt from CafePress.

The Threadless shirt lasted two washes before it started looking dismal and worn. The J. C. Penney shirts shrank in the washing machine, which is strange, because I didn't dry them.

And the CafePress shirt looks exactly like it did when I bought it. It's sturdy, durable, and doesn't wreck itself in the washing machine.

I think I need to buy all my novelty t-shirts from CafePress from now on. ^__^

Size 4 Is Not Fat... Yet

Let's get the nitty-gritty stuff on the table right away.

I stand 5'2" and three-quarters inches.

I weigh anywhere between 114 and 118 lbs, depending on what day of the month it is.

I am, very clearly, not fat.

Still, I'm not exactly skinny. There is stuff covering my bones. Some of it is muscle, and some of it is squishy. All of it contributes to my having enough curves to not be able to fit into a standard pair of pants. (Then again, does anyone fit into a standard pair of pants?)

And yesterday a friend told me that this next year would be the one that determined whether I would become a fat person or a thin person... for the rest of my life.

To wit: I'm on the other side of 25 and my metabolism's slowing down. I'll be starting an office job which will probably involve more sitting. I may get caught in the trap of eating lunches and dinners out. The odds are stacked so that I might put on a little weight.

"But if you let yourself start to gain weight," my friend said, "it'll never go away, and it'll never stop."

How to prevent creeping obesity? Apparently, with a triathlon of intercultural effort: a little Ashtanga from the Indians (Maya, the video you sent rocks); Hello Kitty-shaped portion control from the Japanese; and from the Americans, ritual-obsessive gym attendance.

Hmmm. The first two sound entirely doable. (And I would totally be the cube chick with the kyaraben.)

But gym? Every day? For the rest of my life???? Even with the thought of plugging into a video iPod and mastering stairs to the soothing blue eyes and tortured voice of Mr. Laurie, gym just sounds miserable.

On the other hand, I've heard they've improved gym since I went to high school, and I might be able to buy some cute workout clothes.

And I suppose if this is "the year," I might as well get to it.

So... woo-hoo! (Right?)