I get the most amazing spam.

Tomorrow night is my Two Months Past Midsummer’s Barbecue. I’m doing North Carolina style barbecued pork, which involves very slowly cooking a gigantic pork shoulder in a jerry-rigged barbecue/smoker thingummy monstrosity - well, for me it does, for most people it’s just in a smoker. My main goal for the day is to finish it out with my eyebrows still in tact, since I’m speaking in church on Sunday. I shall document the whole thing and post pictures. I SWEAR.

The menu is as follows:

I mispunctuated “Finger’s” - it should have been just “Fingers,” bah.

I have no idea why I made this menu brown, except that it barbecue seems cowboy-ish, and that is a brown color, I guess. Also, both chocolate and peanut butter are brown, and I’ve been thinking about those a lot lately. I also have absolutely no idea why I typed “our” secret sauce - there is no “our”. It’s just me, in the kitchen, alone. Slaving away over a hot stove/grill/monstrosity thingummy.

Speaking of thingummies…. No, just kidding! Ha, I crack myself up. Anyhoo, you know the other Tai Anderson? The one that is the bass player for the band Third Day? Yeah, well, I’ve been jammin’ to their latest album “Revelation” for the last week and a half, and it’s the official soundtrack to tomorrow’s barbecue. Look for my in depth review NEXT WEEK.

Semi-spoiler (because I’m impatient and really kind of ADD today): I will say this -  I am not generally a fan of religious music - outside of the context of simple hymns and say… Handel’s “Messiah” (as my buds will know). But this is a good album - surprisingly so - I found it applicable to all religions, and most definitely good, uplifiting music that - bonus- you can really rock out to! What is more, (and this is a great, great thing in my book) it isn’t cheesy, or embarrassingly dramatic under the guise of spiritual experience. However the lyrics do read sincerely, and the album is a great listen. More later, with the official review.

Rodney Smith photo from this week’s New York Magazine.

It’s not worth crying over spilled milk, har har. This morning as I was eating my cereal, I spilled about 1/3 cup on my keyboard. Never fear, not my laptop keyboard, but my external keyboard. No, if I had spilled milk on my MacBook Pro, I would be dissolving right now. I once had a dream my MacBook was stolen from my New York apartment, and I WOKE UP CRYING. This sucker is my life, and yes, I do back it up constantly.

Anyway, so I spilled milk on the lower left hand corner of the keyboard, all over the Control key region.  So I popped the Control key out, set it aside, and then dabbed at the keyboard with a clean paper towel until I’d soaked up all the milk, and then I wiped it out with a clean, damp paper towel to make sure it doesn’t get sticky. Somewhere in that process, I lost the Control key.

And I thought to myself: Isn’t it indicative of my entire life, that I’ve lost the Control key, of all keys? Yes, yes, it really is.

*Update: I found the Control key hiding under my stack of New Yorkers.

I would just like to emphasize heavily, very heavily, that this is not an exaggeration. At all.

So this video is from the Sydney Olympics in 2000. After the other two swimmers are disqualified for false starts, the swimmer from Guinea is left to swim the heat on his own. Success is all relative.

My guitar skills are coming along… shall we say, slowly? I struggle mostly with the pure fact that my fingers are short, and my hands seem to be too small or weak to play some chords. However, I perservere! I shall endure to the end!

My practice sessions go like this. I take like 20 minutes to tune the darn thing, and then I’ll figure out a stream of chords (there’s lingo for this, I know, but I don’t know it yet) and I’ll play them on endless repeat until people in the house start making throat slitting motions in my direction. The only one who doesn’t seem to mind is Abby, who will wake up from her nap and come and lay on the ground next to my chair while I practice. Either she enjoys repetetive strumming or she knows I need guarding (from the ones doing the throat slitting).

I have three more weeks to finish learning some kind of song that is recognizable. Wish me luck!

I sang in church yesterday, and when my mother called, my grandmother told her all about it.

And my mother, MY OWN MOTHER who raised me, said, “What? Tai Li sings? I had no idea she could sing!”

Actually, I can see the popsicles just fine as long as they’re within 15 feet and you don’t want me to read the joke lasered onto the side. In the middle of a headache, two days ago, I peeled my contacts off my eyeballs and threw them into the trash. They were my last set, so I need to go buy new ones, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I can’t find my ‘backup’ glasses, and so for the last 48 hours I’ve been in a bit of a haze. My eyes are just good enough that this doesn’t prevent me from doing anything except driving, but honestly, how long can that last? And I can’t go get new contacts until I find my glasses anyway, so I’m stuck in the house, doing my thing, in a haze.

Speaking of haze, I’m psyched for the Beijing Olympics. I hear the opening ceremonies were downright astonishing, so I’m excited to watch the reruns tonight on the good old NBC. It’s been forever since I’ve watched television, (even Iron Chef, can you believe it?). In New York I watched a ton of television, which is weird, because you would think there were better things to do. But I think it has something to do with familiarity. The more comfortable I am in a situation, the less TV I watch. Mythbusters and the Travel Channel are predictable and safe, whereas my high strung and paranoid roommate? You just never knew.

All from Anthropologie.com.