outta mind outta site

Butterstick: The Reckoning

The sad news is true: Butterstick is being shipped back to China. This fact prompted me to tweet that it was me and Tommy who named him, sorta, back in the day. This is sort of a whatever fact to me, but apparently it got all my friends who never knew this all riled up. For example:

Phoebe: Catherine you just BLEW MY MIND
I can't believe that was YOU
BUTTERSTICK
Catherine:  hahaha
well to be fair i think it was mostly tommy who actually came up with it one night when we were talking...but i was writing for DCist at the time and started using it all the time and that's when it caught on
Phoebe: I feel like I need a drink at the very thought of this news
I remember when that got big
AND NOW YOU ARE MY FRIEND
it's like mariah carey just touched me, or something
Catherine:  man. maybe i should be constantly making people more aware of this fact
HAHAHAHA
thank goodness the post was there to memorialize the fact or else nobody would ever believe me

Vlogging: Terrible Singing Edition

Kriston and I vlogged on Sunday, we really did. Like, a real vlog. With commentary and stuff. That will take weeks and weeks to edit into anything entertaining or coherent. But we also did this, which has no pretenses of being entertaining or coherent. I apologize in advance.

I THINK WE ARE ALONE NOW MAYBE ARE WE? from Catherine Andrews on Vimeo.

Also while on, like, a bizarre yoga high a couple of weeks ago, I filmed this. I had walked through the rain straight home from yoga and was probably in an altered mental state, so... yeah.

Occasional Progress in Yoga: It's Back!

Hey guys, guess what? I've got yoga fever again. And I've got it bad.

You may not have known that I basically stopped doing yoga entirely for five or six months. There was no good reason except I was traveling and going out a lot and there were a lot of social requirements I had to attend. And once I stopped doing yoga for a couple weeks, it turned into a couple of months…and there you go. Shockingly, during this yoga-free period, I put on weight, was grumpy, moody, and oh yeah, I couldn't touch my toes anymore.

My return to yoga was precipitated by something, that, on its face, is a true tragedy. You may have read in one of my many whiny, frantic tweets that the studio where I learned yoga and fell in love with it was closing up shop and moving to LA. It was a dark, dark day when I found that out. I am not going to lie, I totally gasped out loud at my desk as I read the newsletter announcing the fact. And then I may have gone and sobbed in a bathroom stall, hiccuping something about "down dogs."

But with every cloud comes a silver lining, or, you know, whatever, and I am, in a strange way, thankful that Inspired announced it was closing. Because it made me say to myself: "Self, you have got to go do a fuckload of yoga before that studio closes down." And it brought me back into the yoga fold.

So 3-4 times a week for the past month, I trudged from Farragut Square up to Meridian Hill Park and took a class. It helped that as part of their closing bonanza, the studio offered $30 3-class passes, of which I ended up buying several.

And now? I am newly obsessed with yoga! The re-obsessing was a vaguely painful process, I have to admit. It was sobering to see how out of shape I'd gotten. Even at the peak of my yoga prowess, I was never that flexible, so I wasn't shocked to find out I couldn't do flat palms on the floor anymore, but my arm muscles… oy. My core muscles? Jello. And we're not even going to talk about my glutes. I spent the first week back at yoga on a steady diet of ibuprofen.

But here we are, a month later, and I'm determined to keep the yoga practice up. I just returned from a really solid class at Yoga District, which may not be Inspired, but is three blocks down the street from me, which earns it one billionty points. And I've made good use of home practice, with plenty of Inspired podcasts and Yoga Journal videos.

In fact, I think I am, for no particular reason, going to try to do yoga every day in December. Over the past month of doing yoga for me, and being more cognizant of what was going on in my body, I realized that I'd been in better shape physically and mentally in that one month of yoga than I'd been in a long time. And why wouldn't I want to keep that up as much as possible? So, here we go. 31 days of yoga. Two down, 29 to go.

By the end, I better be doing like, levitating headstands, or something.

The blogging refuge of the lazy

BULLET POINTS!

-I had a great Thanksgiving. It felt like the longest weekend of my life, bizarrely, in a good way. My mum cooked a delicious dinner, saw the am, ran home, biked to Pharmacy Bar with the Utahans, and kicked off the weekend.

I am the World's Best Cook

I made a roast chicken the other night! Holy moly, Catherine cooked! You see this is a miracle because, well, I cannot cook. All the domestic genes that have been passed down from generation to generation (well, from my grandmother, who majored in nutrition and home ec and spent most of her life as a diplomat's wife, and my mother, who is a most excellent cook) had seemingly passed me by. And passed by my brother. (For real; I mean look at his fridge.) And passed by my sister. (No judging, Marggie, but I've never seen you cook more than a pop tart.) 

Sure, I can bake, but (and I know most of you don't believe this) but ANY IDIOT CAN BAKE. Well, not any idiot. I mean, you have to be literate. But that is literally the only skill you need to be a proficient baker. Reading. Maybe you have to own some measuring cups. It's a piece of cake. Ha. Ha. Ha… sigh. 

However, my idea of cooking is…well, let's just say that for dinner tonight, I ate four pieces of bologna rolled up in four pieces of swiss cheese. Making delicious food come together in edible meals has never been my forte.

But a bizarre urge overtook me the other weekend. Self, I told myself: This weekend, you will ROAST A CHICKEN. It was seriously like some total religious epiphany. The matter was out of my hands. I couldn't control the situation. Before I knew it, my feet were walking me towards Logan Circle's Whole Foods, I was spending an ungodly amount of money on a free range chicken and a bag of lemons, and the deed was set in motion. 

I used an astoundingly simple recipe, and the entire process was only confounded by the fact that I could not, uh… I couldn't, um, tell the breast-side-up side of the chicken from the breast-side-down part of the chicken. WHAT! YOU WANT TO MAKE SOMETHING OF IT? I was google imaging the shit out of that but it wasn't helping me. Imagine, several glasses of wine, a screen full of Google Images of chicken, and you have my Sunday night. 

But no matter! I followed the very basic instructions and as if by magic, a delicious roast chicken popped out of the oven! So I am here to tell you: If I can do it, you can too. There is hope for all of us.

Next up: Catherine learns how to boil potatoes to make mashed potatoes. For real. This is happening. I have in my hands what my (wonderful cook of a) coworker says is the "best mashed potato recipe ever," and I plan to try it out on an unsuspecting...suspect. Also, I would like you to place the entire post above, and the fact that I don't know how to boil potatoes, or whatever you do to them, in the context of the fact that I only learned how to cook rice six months ago. Baby steps, people. Baby steps.