Susan fell down.

Susan and her friend Anna met after work for fancy cocktails and dinner. She knows what you're thinking already; falling down and cocktails in the span of thirteen words?

Yeah, OK.

The girls spent two hours happy to be in eachother's company, during which time Susan had two cocktails (vodka house-infused with pineapples, freshly muddled mango, lemon juice and a thin slice of jalapeno), a bowl of spicy lobster bisque, and seared tuna over rice with avocado and fruit salsa.

At the end of the evening Susan went to visit the ladies room, and within the first few steps she felt her heel slip in a direction she was not headed, but she caught herself, recovered and said under her breath let's not fall down. Five or six steps later she felt the same heel slip and this time she just kept going until she was on the floor.

Whenever Susan has fallen, which averages once every four or five years, it's always in slow motion, and as she's always surprised how far she has to go to hit bottom. Like she's taking an hour to tumble down a mountainside. On this occasion she watched a family eating dinner watch her, then stare until she resurfaced and gave them the double thumbs up.

She checked her heel for foreign matter and resumed her navigation to the restroom where she surveyed her knees for damage, then went on to buy a pair of gloves in Macy's without further incident.

Day One: New Orleans

Susan is spending a few days in New Orleans with her kids.

Her pre-getting-on-an-airplane-anxiety hit critical mass the day she had to pack, complete a few errands & get to her destination on time. The actual flying through the air was uneventful. She shared inflight coping strategies with her nervous armrest infiltrating seatmate who rewarded Susan with her brand new Food Network magazine.

During the ride to the hotel Susan saw palm trees everywhere! She never considered that she may encounter palm trees and it was a nice surprise. She also passed exotic cemeteries filled with above ground crypts, Susan's a sucker for architecture in any form & got woozy with anticipation of getting an up close crack at them. As for architecture, her French Quarter hotel is a real looker all tarted up for Christmas, even the beautiful wood paneling cleverly distracted her from panicking in the claustrophobically sized elevator.

In the interest of expediency and because Susan is tired, here's a partial list of things she saw on her first day in New Orleans:

• A noon seizure
• Gas lights everywhere
• A preponderance of people encouraging Susan and her children to drink alcohol
• Helicopters
• Tarot card & palm readers set up in the street
• Music!
• Raspy voiced black men
• Folks walking around with portable cocktails
• Fancily attired ladies and gentleman, different than New York fancy

By 8pm the neighborhood was insane with drunks, homeless, normal people, little kids, loud music and police sirens moving everybody along. Neither Susan nor her children objected to retiring early.

The end.

Susan is determined to use up that bottle of maple whiskey so that she never has to encounter it again. She dumped two cups of it into apple cider then threw in star anise, ginger and cinnamon. Stay tuned to find out what her fellow Thanksgiving revelers will have to say about it.

Disclaimer: This is not Susan's photo, she pinched it from here.

Susan is too disinterested to BLAHg.

She has buyer's remorse after spending $43 on a bottle of maple whiskey. She wouldn't have minded the expense if she liked maple whiskey, but she had to spend that amount to discover that she didn't.

Hope y'all liked Day 20.

Susan cleaned three rooms of her house for company Saturday night; the bathroom, livingroom & kitchen. Oh, and she made her bed. The dining room was kept dark to conceal that she prefers to keep her table piled high with household debris.
Susan had some pears which she wanted to incorporate into a cocktail. Last year her friend Anna served her a lovely concoction of pear puree, pear vodka & lemon juice. Susan pureed the pears & added vodka. She didn't have any citrus, so Italian grapefruit soda was a surprisingly tart substitute topped by seltzer and lots of ice.
Presto! Susan is a genius.
Susan's company arrived, they threw a Duraflame log in the fireplace and had a terrific three hour chat.

A few weeks back Susan had a delightful time with a mob of people all fifteen years her junior or worse. One of the highlights of that evening were the two cider cocktails she drank.

Of course two cocktails are a very unremarkable number, but for our elderly heroine they represented a continued time commitment, meaning she was gonna be hanging out with the kids a while.

Ultimately she joined them as they went from the first location to the second, then declined the third but appreciated the invitation.

The cocktail had been haunting her dreams ever since, it was liquor-y, tart & a little sweet from maple bourbon, pear vodka & apple cider.

On Sunday she paired some Maker's Mark with cider and maple syrup, the real stuff not Mrs. Butterworth's. The maple syrup added a smoky element which she liked, so she pushed the cocktail further into that direction with a pinch of smoked hot paprika. She squeezed half a lime for tartness, and because she puts lime juice into all her cocktails whether they need it or not.

Perfection!

It's earned a place in the little notebook of home cocktails Susan keeps. It just needs a name.

While Susan and her little sister were in North Carolina they enjoyed a marvelously refreshing cocktail provided by an adorably under attentive bartenderess at Yo Sake. The bartenderess took pride in her concotion and was kind enough to provide the ingredient list for home replication.
Susan likes to call this cocktail the Near Miss, which relates to a funny occurance earlier that day.

The Near Miss

Gin
Ginger liqueur
Simple syrup infused with basil
Lemon juice
Muddled basil
Seltzer
Serve with lots of ice, a lemon wedge and a basil leaf garnish

Susan recommends that you guzzle the first and sip the second.

*Editor's note: In the absence of fresh basil Susan infused her simple syrup with rosemary and declared it to be a marvelous substitute.

Susan baked lemon cookies with her friend, Anna.
Of course they had cocktails.
Anna served Prosecco and pomegranate juice into which she submerged a modest ball of raspberry sorbet then covered it with more Prosecco. Anna is all about making people feel good.

Susan ate lemon cookies the next morning for breakfast.

Susan is accompanying her sister down to North Carolina later in the week. She's looking forward to a good, old fashioned road trip, crashing like a college student on her niece's floor and meeting Wild Bill's wee grandson.

Wild Bill suggested Susan bring something to hike in.
Hike?
Yikes!
Susan's footwear options are heels, cute flats or snow boots.

Susan wishes everyone a good Super Bowl Sunday.
She will be spending hers far away from the television in Brooklyn, USA at The Urban Jungle accompanied by her daughter, little sister and cousin Lisa.

During Susan's BLAHgy Christmas blackout she left her folks' Christmas card on the table for at least two weeks and when she finally opened it a little piece of paper with some numbers and a signature fell out.

A few days later Acme Sweatshop held their fancy holiday party which involved a lot of top shelf liquor. By the end of the evening Susan had lost her eyeglasses.
They were gone.
As if they never existed.

Susan likes to live on the edge and not keep a back up pair. So, twelve hours later she had an eye exam and a $474.95 pair of eyeglasses ordered.

Susan's ability to see things clearly again has been made possible by a Christmas card grant from her mommy and daddy.

Susan HATES

After work on Friday Susan went immediately to the liquor store. They didn't have her favorite bottle of sangria, so she considered purchasing a box of sangria. A number of reputable people with whom she's acquainted have used boxed wine with no ill effect. She read the panel and discovered that her box of sangria would last six weeks.
She bought it.
Once home she stashed her box of sangria in the fridge and went on with her life.

Saturday night Susan felt like cooking so she set the laptop on the counter and pulled up this recipe. She poured herself a glass of boxed sangria, put on a pot of water, sauteed onion & garlic, cubed 5 cups of acorn squash, chopped five cups of kale, and knocked her glass sending the sangria up in the air and all over the kitchen.

Susan hates when she douses her crappy laptop with sticky liquor.

Red Sweetie

Susan's palate leans toward cartoon penguins and twist off tops.

Susan was all prepared to write about her resolutions for the new year, or more accurately about how she's still categorizing them by personality flaw because there's too many to choose from.

She's definitely got to cut down on her beloved sugary sweets now that cookie season is on the way out.

She's also going to consider how often she's been drinking. Not about how much, just about how often.

Anyway, Susan was seated at the dining room table, poised over the laptop, thinking her thoughts when the most HORRIBLEST thing in the world happened. The daughter came in to the room and was immediately invited to sit on Susan's lap for a little snuggly hug. In doing so her ungainly pre-teen body knocked Susan's glass of sangria all over the laptop.
OMG!
All over the laptop!

Susan beat at her chest and tore out her hair but neither helped. She flipped the laptop over in an attempt to have gravity pull the sticky poison away from the works then went to tattle on the Laptop Killer.

Everyone in the house just stood around in disbelief, staring at the upside down laptop, waiting. And if this weren't bad enough, that was the last of the sangria.

3 pm on a snowy Sunday is one of the reasons Susan did her best to keep a lid on her alcoholic tendencies in her twenties and halfway through her thirties.
Susan and liquor were an enthusiastic couple and she wanted them to be together for the long haul, not just flare up and die out like many of her contemporaries.
To this end Susan maintained all sorts of rules to stay in control; she observed a pre-determined drink maximum, was a practitioner of six months on the wagon and six months off and employed a buddy system. When she wasn't strictly following her rules she was getting drunk as often as she could without missing work and then going to sleep on the kitchen floor.

Susan had a lazy weekend of playing in the snow, baking chocolate biscotti with cranberries, green cleaning two bathrooms top to bottom, hosting a girlie sleepover and discovering that her Fuckleupagus of a son remained a lazy liar. By 3pm Sunday Susan was ready to transform an unpleasant bottle of red wine into a cold, sweet and tarty pitcher of sangria.

Just in time for holiday guests Susan would like to share her recipe for CHOCOLATE BISCOTTI:
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3/4 teasp baking soda
1/2 teasp baking powder
1/2 teasp salt
6 tblsp butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, lightly beaten
3/4 cup dried cranberries, Susan chops them up a bit
3/4 cup mini chocolate chips

350*
Mix together dry ingredients.
Beat butter & sugar till smooth then beat in the eggs.
Mix in dry ingredients till blended.
Fold in cranberries.
Divide dough in half, shape each into a 12 inch long log, 1/2 inch thick.
Place on a buttered, wax paper lined baking sheet and bake for 25-30 minutes.
Let cool completely.
Slice into 1/2 inch thick cookies, stand them up on the baking sheet & bake for 15 minutes.
Makes 38-48 cookies depending upon how thinly you slice them.

The End Of A Long Week

How is it possible that as soon as Susan pours herself a glass of wine there's a dead fruit fly in it? There's not even any fruit in the house unless you count limes.
Susan removed the wee fly undeterred & continued as if it were still in flight.

Long ago Susan drank a whole collection of fruit flies in the bottom of a glass of sherry. She mistook them for some fruit pulp. It took a few sips to realize there's no pulp in sherry. But, that was back when she was more in the habit of drinking and a little slow-witted. Now she's right on top of the situation & aware of what's floating dead in her glass before she drinks it.

In her youth Susan had a few bad habits, but let's just stick to drinking and smoking tobacco for now.
Being Irish, Susan was in love with alcohol. She was also in love with cigarettes although that was more love-hate. Susan has alcoholism in her family and wanted to avoid that route so she entered into a drinking awareness partnership with her friend *the undertaker, who has a similar background. Together they helped eachother emerge intact. Then came motherhood for Susan and the cigarettes went out the window.

Nowadays Susan is happy with her reduced alcoholic intake, as long as she can still have some sort of intake. Susan never missed the cigarettes although she likes to smell the dirty smokers as they file back in from their break.

*Susan's friend used to be an undertaker now he does this.

Sangria

Susan loves sangria.
She makes it exclusively with cheap red wine and whatever fruit she happens to have on the kitchen counter, except bananas.
She adds plenty of orange juice.
Her little sister prefers to use orange soda.
Lately Susan has been adding some homemade limoncello, which is essentially pure alcohol infused with lemon peels, and simple syrup. It adds a wonderful tarty sweetness. However, Susan's little sister commented that it made the sangria too strong. So, in went more orange juice.
Susan has a bottle of Portuguese firewater
which is totally undrinkable and when added to sangria,
it makes that undrinkable too.

Lovely Day For A Guinness

Arthur Guinness was an Irish brewer and father of twenty one children, Sweet Jesus!

In 1759 he left his little brother in charge of the brewery & signed a 9,000 year lease on the abandoned St. James Gate brewery in Dublin which remains the blessed home of Guinness Stout to this day.

Stout is an ale. It began as a porter, which was a dark beer popular with the fellows who humped heavy objects all over town for a living. These guys needed a drink after a long day toiling away at their careers in cheap labor.

Guinness has many beneficial qualities. Aside from being a bloody fantastic brew it contains iron, antioxidants and only 125 calories per 12 ounces. A nurse friend of Susan's used to mix it with condensed milk and serve it to her elderly mother. If that isn't a proper testiment to the medicinal properties of a wee nip o' the Guinness, well then I don't know what is, Bejesus!