Moose in the Kitchen

Friendly, innocuous-seeming questions are often the most likely to make you want to poke out your left eyeball with the nearest fork.

Example one: “What’s your novel about?”

If I’m on my game, I’ll simply regurgitate the plot of the novel currently sitting on my bedside table and hope the listener hasn’t read that one yet. If I’m not on my game, I’m forced to stutter for a bare minimum of 20 seconds before I admit, “Nothing yet. But I only have 13,000 words – so there’s still plenty of time to make something happen.” It’s true. I have 13,000 words worth of random people – with no idea who they are or where they came from – cavorting merrily across the page, eating burritos and thinking deep thoughts. I know. GRIPPING.

Example two: “So! When are you two getting married?”

This is when I long for a small, hairless cat to carry around in my purse. I would stroke it under the table and feed it bits of raw beef so it would be ready and willing to do my bidding when I whisper “Kill, Bosco…. KILL!”

Example three: “Can I have that last piece of mozzarella?”

“HELL NO! Hands off!”

Luckily, no one at yesterday’s Festival o’ Carbs 2007 asked any of those questions. Or any questions at all. Possibly because my mouth was stuffed with mozzarella.

We drove up to Oregon on Saturday, leaving the house at 5 a.m. and stopping at Black Bear Diner, where breakfast means a slab of ham steak the size of a marble tombstone. Which is what you’re going to need once you’ve eaten the ham, the hash browns, the eggs, the two biscuits shaped like a sumo wrestler’s fist, and you’ve dropped dead because the butter has suffocated your heart. I assume that, like any responsible restaurant chain, they have an EMT on staff.

I needed that EMT when I climbed into the car a few hours later. The car wouldn’t start. I pulled the key out of the ignition. (This is where a great wave of doom and foreboding should overwhelm you.) The key had BROKEN IN HALF. Half my car key was missing. You don’t know befuddlement until you’ve pulled your key out of the ignition and found half of it gone. The key worked well enough to get us six hours away from home – with someone else driving – but once I took charge, the key had just enough left in it to open the door, before IT DIED. I’m jinxed. Don’t let me near your pets. Or your car. Or, um, your stove.

Two hours, $120, and a copy of Vogue later, a locksmith had yanked a new key out of the ether and sent us on our way. I managed to drive 45 minutes before almost sending us into a ditch. (Highway driving is hypnotic. The highway says “Ram
your car into a tree. Ram your car into a treeeee….”) This is why I get to nap instead of drive.

Since you’re only here for the pictures of carbs and stories about my dog getting her ass kicked by a Holstein, I’ll get down to it.

See that big bowl? That’s a bowl of garlic butter. A BOWL. Of GARLIC BUTTER. It’s lazy writing to use caps to convey emotion but I have nothing left after eating my way through a bowl of butter. Then I consumed my weight in lasagne. Then I shifted the weather patterns of central Oregon with my newly acquired heft.

Want to hear about the dog and her decision to taunt a beast that outweighed her by about 900 pounds? I know you do. If you don’t, just imagine watching your six-year-old wrestle a Buick. Now imagine your six-year-old doesn’t speak English. Yeah. Meeka loves to play with dogs bigger than she is – and she makes little distinction between “dogs” and “enormous, testicle-swinging hunks of hamburger”. She just wants to tussle. If you’ve ever seen a dog chase a cow, it’s pretty damn funny. If you’ve ever seen the cow gather its buddies into a phalanx of hulking beef to stare down your dog, it’s even funnier. As long as the dog is back on the cow free side of the electric fence.