The Sunday Salon: Printable Grocery and Shopping Lists

My family has never been one for planned, weekly trips to the grocery store, especially since the number of people in the house is pretty inconsistent, between my efforts to leave the nest and my father’s work as a pilot. This has meant, ever since I was old enough to drive and pick up groceries (so, like, four years ago), that putting together the grocery list has meant peeking around the kitchen before running errands. Over the last month, that’s been proving a very inefficient method (“How many tortilla chips can one pantry hold?” I asked myself), so I decided to print out a cute grocery list from online. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one I liked. I just needed a list, nothing terribly fancy.

So I made my own. I thought I’d share, for anyone who wants some cute but minimalist printable grocery lists. (There’s also an alternate shopping list.)

The Sunday Salon: The Hobbit 2 Trailer #1

While I found The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey to be a mixed bag, I, nonetheless, dropped everything and ran to my laptop a little before 1 PM this past Tuesday. There’s always something about your first fandom, isn’t there? (Sit down, Digimon, you don’t count.) Plus, it’s the summer for television, I’m almost done with the Bondathon in real time, and I’m lying in painful wait for a copy of Star Trek: The Voyage Home to come in at the library, so I’m a little starved for content at the moment. And so, like everyone else on the Internet, I offer up my traditional frame-by-frame analysis. Hit it.

The Sunday Salon: Age (In)Appropriate

I must have been about thirteen and we must have been in California. My family was on vacation, which meant I was functionally dead to the world, trying to make myself small enough that I could continue reading and forget how brutally and physically homesick I was. We were eating in a restaurant, outside; all that clear, strong California sun shining down on us. Had I noticed, I probably would have hated the heat for being too dry (and not tangibly and thickly humid), but I was wrapped up in a copy of Lit Riffs.

The Sunday Salon: Bookish Fall Television 2013

Because I didn’t know how network television worked until 2005 (shows come on every week? What dark magic was this?) and thus developed a taste for long-form narratives very late in my development, my television watching habits are pretty scant compared to my peers. And they look downright minimalistic compared to the tumblrinas. (A tumblrina is anyone on tumblr who makes me feel old.) This past television season marked the first time I ever had appointment television shows—Elementary, Once Upon a Time (I should probably review the second season soon, eh?), and Saturday Night Live. And, as another first, I’m actually making decisions about what shows I should pick up come next fall. There’s a few bookish options, and I’d like to share those with you today, in order of ascending ridiculousness…

The Sunday Salon: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I don’t talk theater that much here on the blog. While drama is obviously considered to be a part of literature, I’m a reader-response theorist at heart. If I believe that meaning is generated when reader encounters text, then it follows that I think, for a play, that meaning is generated when viewer encounters production. To be fair, that does mean a play is filtered through someone’s perspective, but it necessarily must be. As a former student actress, I think of scripts as recipes or music notes more than texts unto themselves. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I don’t have a favorite play—case in point, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which tells the story of Hamlet from the perspective of the titular duo. After several years, I finally got to see a production of it on Friday.

The Sunday Salon: She’s Leaving Home

For Christmas this past year, I told my brother to buy me a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Surprises are not very popular in Clan McBride.) That started my first exploration into the Beatles: I listened to their discography for the first time that winter. I’m still parsing them out; there’s a copy of Philip Norman’s Shout! in my to-be-read pile, which I’m rapidly starting to think of as my bibliophilic trosseau. I’ve picked up a few more albums since then, but Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band got into my car and stayed in my car.

The Sunday Salon: Free Comic Book Day

This weekend has been an auspicious weekend for nerds of every stripe: the release of Iron Man 3, Star Wars Day (May the Fourth be with you!), Free Comic Book Day, and Cinco de Mayo have all lined up into a single three day period. (Four days if your journey to an Iron Man 3 screening happened on a Thursday.) “It is a great weekend to be a drunk nerd,” a friend of mine observed yesterday. My review of Iron Man 3 will go up tomorrow, I’ve got nothing on Star Wars, and, considering the torrential downpour, my Cinco de Mayo may devolve into me just watching Once Upon a Time and doing the laugh/cry thing I always do with that show, so that leaves Free Comic Book Day to cover.

The Sunday Salon: Why You Should Be Watching Elementary

Y’all remember last May, when I said that if Elementary (which I was super worried about) turned out okay, I’d eat my hat? Consider my favorite ushanka gobbled, because I am loving it. To be fair, my errant sense of what is and is not good (one of my favorite movies is Rock of Ages, c’mon, people) means that my love does not immediately translate into any meaningful commentary on its quality, but the love is co-signed by friends, critics, and Scott Westerfeld. Step aside, Sherlock, I have a new favorite modern Holmes adaptation. (It’s a niche market.) Here’s three reasons why you should clear up your Thursday nights. 

The Sunday Salon: Food Blogs

Have I mentioned Wolfboy on this blog? I’ve definitely mentioned him on Twitter. Wolfboy is my nephew (so nicknamed due to his astonishing size and presumed lycanthropy). I show him off constantly, assuming others will find stories of his physical prowess just as interesting as I do. I’ve decided that I’m going to try my best to bake him a birthday cake every year, starting with this weekend, which marks his first birthday. My brother and my sister-in-law are trying to keep him sugar-free and gluten-free for a little bit, which made finding and adapting recipes a pleasurable challenge. The quest sent me hitting up all my favorite food blogs, and I thought I’d share a few with you this bright Sunday morning. I’ve highlighted some fictional food blogs, but these are just the regular kind.

The Sunday Salon: Racebending the Right Way

According to Racebending.com, who coined the term when they were founded during the hot, racist mess that was the production of The Last Airbender, racebending means “…situations where a media content creator (movie studio, publisher, etc.) has changed the race or ethnicity of a character. This is a longstanding Hollywood practice that has been historically used to discriminate against people of color.” With the impending release of The Lone Ranger, which features Johnny Depp in red face, Racebending.com’s goals of fighting back against the discriminatory use of this practice, more commonly referred to as “whitewashing”, remains important. (Pro-tip: Do not go see The Lone Ranger. I will be very disappointed in you.)