Avocado Fries

Hello all, so much for me being a bad influence! On Monday, my compulsive Pinteresting paid off. (I Pinterest a lot of recipes and crafts and follow through on very few of them). Mandy came over and we made avocado fries.

To make avocado fries, one must start with avocados. We had a hard time finding good ones at the grocery store but we eventually succeeded. To prepare them, it's a pretty standard flour-egg-panko situation and then you drizzle them with some olive oil and put them in the oven for fifteen minutes. Simple enough!

The recipe we had suggested making a chipotle dipping sauce but we went with chipotle mayo instead because the recipe called for mayonnaise anyways and we couldn't find some of the other ingredients. We paired it with white bean veggie burgers which we topped with cheese, onion and more chipotle mayo. It turned out really well. Mandy thinks the avocado fries would be a perfect appetizer. I just think they were delicious.

She went home and I went to bed. It was my first Chicago “holiday” and I’d say that it was successful.

Yesterday started with laundry. Having been on tour with MCT for a year and a half, I have visited a lot of laundromats. My superpowers include the ability to find a laundromat anywhere (and I mean anywhere, have you ever tried to find a laundromat in eastern Montana? Because I have and it isn’t easy) and being able to break down how people spent their money at a laundromat if they give me their total (i.e. you used two double-load washers and went through four dry cycles).

Now, it is every 20-something’s dream to have an apartment with a washer/dryer (actually, we all dream of winning 10 million dollars, but apart from that, the washer/dryer combo would be nice), but dreams don’t always come true, so I have to walk four or five blocks to the closest laundromat. I tried to count but I forgot, so I’m guestimating. My laundromat is called Friendly Wash and it is very friendly. It would actually be a great place to do MCT laundry! They had lots of big machines and space for sorting, but mainly, they had free WiFi. WiFi is still an issue at the apartment, so the free WiFi was a godsend. (That’s another 20-something dream – for the entire world to have free WiFi).

I need to find a psychiatrist in the city, so I figured that I could use the free WiFi and the time I was going to spend sitting on my butt waiting for my laundry looking up numbers and making calls. I didn’t have much luck, I got a lot of voice mails (of therapists… I couldn’t even find a real MD) and when I finally did reach a human, it was a disaster.

I was look for doctors through my insurance’s website so that I could find a doctor in network for obvious reasons. This doctor was listed on that site so I called him. The call lasted 23 seconds. He picked up the phone and said “Hello.” No, hello, I’m Dr. Blah blah blah, just hello. I could already tell I wasn’t interested in having him as my doctor but I started to explain that I was new to the city and was looking for a doctor and was wondering if he was accepting new patients. He cut me off and asked what insurance I had. I told him and he just said “I don’t accept that insurance” and HUNG UP ON ME! What an asshole. I know that I don’t know what was happening on his end of the phone etc. etc. etc. but this guy is a doctor! He’s a psychiatrist! He knows that it is highly likely that the people on the other end of the phone are depressed and suicidal (I am neither thankfully, but imagine if I was) and he treated me like garbage. I was so pissed. I wrote a lot of negative reviews for him on any site I could find because people should know he’s a jerk before they even pick up the phone to call him.

When my laundry was done, I went back to the apartment. I was still really upset so I decided that the best thing to do was going to be to get myself gussied up even though I have nowhere to go, so I went and put on a face of makeup and did my hair (well, I washed my hair, it sort of styles itself by just being attached to my head). I did some proofreading work for my mom and “cleaned the apartment”, which meant washing the dishes and lighting a candle. I’m still the only one living here fulltime right now, but Janell will be coming back this afternoon.

I was going to take myself out to dinner (mainly for WiFi) but I realized that I still had three avocadoes and they would go bad if I didn’t use them, so I got out a knife and got to work. I only used one avocado but I just made myself the exact same dinner from the night before.

And then I was sort of at a loss for what to do. I wanted to watch a movie, but I am so bored with my DVD collection (it needs work – it has a lot of DVDs that I’m not longer interested in and I haven’t bought a new DVD in nearly two years!) so I ended up going to the grocery store and picking up Sisters at Redbox and a pint of brownie batter core ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s (well, technically from Tony’s because that’s the grocery store but B&J get the credit).

I wasn’t ready to just dig into the ice cream and start the movie, so I thought I would take advantage of the lack of furniture in our front room and do a little yoga. I thought I was going to do a 10-minute little stretch routine but it turned into a 40-minute power flow and I was drenched in sweat by the time I was done. I’d earned that ice cream! The movie was cute, but it made my miss my sister, so I texted her and then went to bed!

And now, I’m going to use my leftover avocados to make some guacamole and wait for my first ever out-of-town visitor! My dad is coming to Chicago today!! He has a business conference the next few days and it was the perfect excuse to come see me. We haven’t decided exactly what we’re doing tonight and he’s on the plane right now so I can’t really text him but I’m so excited for him to get here! I can’t wait for him to see my place (which needs to be cleaned because my clean laundry is currently doing a wonderful job as a makeshift carpet… Guess it isn’t so clean now…) and just see him in general.

P.S. I'm supposed to start calling Mandy "Amanda" now. I'm not doing a very good job.