I start telling Diego about the taco place we need to visit before we have left Lexington city limits. Tasty Tacos, which is 675 miles away in Des Moines, was started over 60 years ago with a family recipe and the motto “Nada es Imposible,” nothing is impossible. I clung to that thought as we started the boring 12-hour drive — made nearly unbearable by morning sickness — to a family wedding in the summer of 2017. Nothing is impossible as long as those hole-in-the-wall tacos, so unlike anything I could get in Kentucky, were on the other side.
Attempting to describe the cloud-like fried tortillas to my husband brings back memories of my sophomore year in high school….
“Go go go!” five giggling teenagers crammed into Katie’s VW Golf. Monday lunch was a race against the clock. 36 minutes to get to Tasty Tacos, order, eat and drive back to school, park, and get to class. We planned our orders during the frenetic drive to the restaurant so there was no time wasted once we were there. Driving faster than recommended on side streets, we would make the 10 minute drive in 7.
“One flour taco, one order of Krispos.” My order only changed if my funds were low. Payday was still four days away, so no second taco today.
There are a few rules we learned about eating here:
Always remember your receipt, it has your order number on it.
Grab your bottle of sauce before going to your seat, or you will have to trudge back up to the counter for a third time before you get to eat.
The napkins are really small, so grab at least three for each taco to avoid a mess.
Clear the table when you are done. It was a small place and was pretty busy at lunch time. The sauce goes back to the front, there was a cloth to wipe the tables.
Krispos or “sand chips”
This weekly ritual had its own vocabulary known only to our small group. I can’t remember most of it: our word for the tiny napkins, what we would call the walk of shame of forgetting the sauce, or the sound of the chairs as they scraped the linoleum floor.
The Krispos we called “sand chips” because the cinnamon and sugar covered tortillas always came with enough extra sugar to spoon up afterward. I best remember “scruv,” how we would describe how fast we would eat and how delicious it was.
Even as a teenager, I knew this was good taco. It was my first introduction “good grease”, unlike the Taco John’s toilet breaking grease I ate in my childhood.
After tearing through some tacos and cleaning our tables, the ride back to school was even more exhilarating. Somehow we were rarely late for class, even with the limited parking options around the school. We’d race back to the building, still laughing that once again we’d flown close to the sun, but still had our wings. “Nada es imposible!”, we’d shout.
18 years later, Diego and I roll into town after lunchtime and do a quick hello with the family. They offer us some cold cuts, but we have other plans. I’m feeling pretty nauseous, but tacos sound better than explicitly forbidden deli meats.
Barely able to contain my excitement, I drive through my old haunts, pointing out personal “landmarks” along the way. With only one missed turn (I hadn’t lived here in 9 years, remember), we arrive.
It’s a laundromat.
How could no one have told me? Surely the closing of my favorite taco place was deserving of a phone call or a text. A quick google search shows us that many locations are still open (phew!). The nausea ratchets up, so I navigate while Diego drives downtown.
In the downtown maze of one way streets, we miss the restaurant because this location has moved next door into a brand new building. Another trip around the block, we park in the huge parking lot and are hit with a freezing blast of air conditioning as we open the door.
“Two flour tacos and a Krispo, please.” I feel gross, but optimistic that I’ll want the sweet cinnamon chips later in the day if I can’t eat them now. I fill up a cup of water and go lie down in a booth.
Diego studies the menu as if he hasn’t been listening to me tell him about the homemade flour tortillas. He orders two corn tacos. I sit up when I hear that.
“What the hell?” I ask him. Turns out, he has a hard policy about always getting corn tortillas. I can’t believe I’m carrying this man’s child if he can’t trust me about fucking tacos.
I sat there, huddled in the cold, sterile, new restaurant. We are warned that you can never go home again once you have truly left it. Here under the bright fluorescent lights, in all my pregnant misery, I understand this truth for the first time.
Our food is ready, but as we are the only ones there, they don’t even call out our number. Diego fetches our tray. Like any Tasty Taco newb, he forgets the sauce. I hobble over and grab a bottle, then plop a healthy amount on the first taco.
I take a bite, and I am home.
I take a bite, and I am home. The flaky flour shells were delicate yet strong, not unlike how I was feeling. The grease is soaked into the savory tortilla without making it soggy, the meat is hot and spicy without burning my mouth and the sauce gives the perfect bite of acid. Nothing has changed, and I “scruv” the first taco in under a minute. Following up with a krispo, I eat the sweet chip like I’m a teenager, licking the cinnamon and sugar off my fingers and taking a spoonful of the “sand” for good measure.
Diego looks at my tacos with envy. His corn tortilla rule left him with boring, broken tacos. He gets up and orders two original flour tacos.
Laughing, I notice my nausea has subsided. Tasty Tacos has cured my morning sickness. I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, “¡Nada es Imposible!”
The Book of Speculation
Erika Swyler
St. Martin’s Press
Pub Date: Jun 23 2015
When reading an especially good book, sometimes I wonder if I’m under a spell: that the story won’t hold up to the joy of its wonderful writing. As I reach the final chapters, anxiety builds that upon finishing the book, I will see through the prose and find my happiness was nothing but literary lust.
Readers: consume this book without fear! Erika Swyler has given us a gift of magical realism that we will cherish through multiple readings. Buy more than one copy, as you will give this to your siblings, your friends, your coworkers, and they will be loath to give it back.
The story itself is hard to describe, but at the center are a brother and sister and their struggle with normal family and life problems that have only been complicated by a subtle strand of magic.
Readers of The 13th Tale and Water for Elephants will make a home for The Book of Speculation on their bedside tables.
Increase, Decrease
By Judith Durant
Storey Publishing
June 02, 2015
It’s difficult to find an instructional book for a knitter who is just beyond a beginner but well short of advanced, so I was delighted to find Increase, Decrease to be the perfect book for understanding the mechanics of knitting! The simple instructions, step-by-step photos and just overall thoughtfulness of this guide has opened my eyes to projects I never would have attempted. Now I feel I understand the secret language of patterns, and why one technique would be used in preference to another.
This is an ideal book for knitters (like me) who need to understand the details before they can grasp the bigger picture. If you’ve ever looked at a pattern and said “But WHY?”, then Increase, Decrease is the instructional tome you’ve been waiting for.
The room where Leslie had landed resembled any standard StarBus communications center, but most ships weren’t equipped with a Comm operator making animal noises.
Stepping around the corner of a partition, she found the source: a huge, muscular woman sitting between two six foot Comm Screens.
The woman opened her mouth.
“Merow”
“Are you meowing at your Comm?”
The hulking woman looked up, startled.
“Who are you?” she asked. “I thought I was alone.”
Obviously.
“I’m Leslie, but let’s get back to why you are talking to your screen like a cat.”
“It’s just an interface. The comm is reacting to a language I’ve written.”
Oh thank god. At first, Leslie had been worried that this mission involved an alien race that needed their bellies rubbed.
“What’s your name?”
“Georgia.”
“Ok, George, you wrote a language?” Georgia nodded. A “cat-language-for-computers” nod. “What did you go with once ‘meow’ and ‘hiss’ were taken?”
“Technically I coded it, and…” Georgia was blushing and trailed off with a mumble.
“What’s that now?”
“I don’t need a lot of words, it’s tonal.” she hissed out and turned back to her screen.
Leslie wasn’t sure how, but she had managed to find a crazy cat woman in outer space.
Touch
by Claire North
Published by Redhook
Pub Date: February 24, 2015
Die a violent death and maybe you’ll become a strange immortal entity, able to take any body as your own, any life becomes your playground. Want to be a prince? A movie star? Simply get within touching distance and you are. Be admired by many, adored by millions, or just choose a family and be deeply loved by a few. Of course, it isn’t you they love or admire, but the body you stole.
Of course, the existence of these “ghosts” doesn’t go unnoticed. There are always groups that seek to destroy a species that can wear a man like a coat, but until now they had never been successful…
There were some passages in ‘Touch’ that left me gasping for air as I followed the narrator through his/her/his/his/her escape in the most fascinating cat-and-mouse chases I’ve ever read. Characters had multiple dimensions, deepened by the fluid gender of the “ghosts” as they flitted from body to body.
I was surprised at the deeper questions wrapped in the beautiful storytelling and thrilling action. No matter who we are, or rather what we are, we all must consider what it means to be loved, and what we would attempt to achieve it.
Lock In
by John Scalzi
Published by Tor
August 26, 2014
I was worried it would be difficult to objectively review a book by an author I admire beyond his fiction writing, but as soon as I opened John Scalzi’s Lock In, worries gave way to fascinated enjoyment. I knew I was in for a good time when I slowed my usual mile-a-minute reading pace so that I could absorb the humor and details.
We are introduced to a near-future world through the eyes Chris Shane, or rather the vision sensors of a”threep”, Shane’s robotic body used in the real world. Shane is a spanking-new FBI agent and medically locked-in victim of a disease that swept the world a couple decades before. Partnered with a rough-around-the-edges agent Leslie Vann, Shane quickly discovers that casework can hit close to home.
Scalzi does a great job delicately world-building (world-tweaking?) around a gritty and suspenseful mystery. Lock In will surely appeal to both SciFi and thriller readers, or anyone looking for a fast-paced story.
Belzhar
by Meg Wolitzer
Published by Dutton
September 30, 2014
How many heartbreaks can a reader endure in the span of one book? Meg Wolitzer apparently tries to find out in her beautiful new YA novel Belzhar, due in bookstores at the end of September.
Jam Gallahue has no idea how lucky she and the four other students are to be in her Special Topics in English class. Nothing in life has seemed luck since the loss of her wonderful British boyfriend, followed by isolating depression and finally enrollment in a therapeutic boarding school. Compared to her grief, nothing seems particularly special about a class that emphasizes journal writing while studying The Bell Jar.
What Jam and her classmates soon discover is how …transporting writing in these specific journals can be. Each teen has a story of loss that brought them to the school, but leaving their individual traumas behind might be more dangerous and, yes, more heartbreaking than you could ever imagine.
Read this book. It isn’t the “Woe is me, I’m an angsty teenager” YA novel that you are used to. If you are the kind of person who cries at Humane Society commercials, invest in a box of tissues first.
i’m writing a list to avoid writing a cover letter. The World Cup qualifying games remind me that I will be turning 30 during the final tournament next summer. While there are a bunch of things I’d hoped accomplish by my fourth decade, here is a list of what I think I can actually get around to in the next ten months:
Volunteer ✔
Run a half marathon
Learn to cook one new meal ✔
Brush up my Spanish
Finish my novel
Visit my new niece (coming this October!) ✔
See a game in Detroit
Plant a garden ✔
Discover new local places ✔
Sing the National Anthem at a sportsball game
Bike the Legacy Trail
See the US Men’s National Team play ✔
Get a motorcycle permit
Change my own car’s oil
Learn a couple salsa moves
Eat four new foods ✔
Sell 50 books
Paint all the empty canvases in my house
Finish knitting a baby blanket ✔✔✔
Winterize the house before it snows
Not drink alcohol ✔
Drink water nearly every day
Avoid the Internet one day a month
Convince housemate to get rid of his car ✔
Pay every bill on time
Not get bronchitis ✔
Not purchase any hammocks
Make ginger ale ✔
Take photos with a camera ✔
Read 10 new books ✔
Update: Total failures on some, huh? I only bought two new hammocks, though. Let’s see how I do in my thirties.
A few times year a blog or magazine article titled something like “Top Ten Things the Airlines Don’t Tell You!” circulates, claiming to reveal all the horrors that go on behind the scenes in modern air travel. As prices for flights go up and amenities such as free checked bags are taken away, disgruntled travelers clamor to read and share the damning evidence. Most of these list simply regurgitate the same obvious tidbits (“If you are bitchy to the flight crew, they will likely give you shitty service!!”), but one “factoid” stood out to me:
Flight attendants only serve decaffeinated coffee. They want passengers to go to sleep and not bother them.”
This got me miffed. You can take away the free checked bags, tissue-thin blankets, tiny pillows, snacks, leg room, arm room, and head room. You can force me to pack all my belongings into a carry-on, take my shoes off, get a microwave scan and DNA swab. But if you serve me Decaf coffee, all bets are off.
This is a livefeed of a drop of pitch expected to fall any day now. This is kind of exciting because pitch is a fluid that moves so slowly, there have only been 8 drops since the physicists at Queensland University started this experiment 80 years ago. Because the drops are so rare, no one has witnessed one. Now thanks to the power of video and the interwebs, think of this blob as the slowest lava lamp you’ve ever watched, with thousands of your furthest friends.
Please excuse the pun in the title, but the Columbus Crew scoreboard caught fire. We can all agree that Ohio’s professional teams are cursed, right? I mean, where does this even fall on a scale of one to LeBron?
As a Sporting KC fan, I’m allowed to be amused because no one was injured. I’m also amused because they have an advertisement for a shaving cream that leaves legs incredibly dry after use. Seriously, just use baby oil or conditioner.
Call me selfish, but at least a few hours of my life will be significantly dampened if the Red Wings miss the playoffs for the first time I can remember. This is the one sport in which I’ve lived a charmed life, free of the pitying looks that accompanied the 90’s Tigers, Lions and Fighting Irish. The Red Wings play in Hockeytown, for crying out loud. Don’t let them take that away like they took away the College Hall of Fame from South Bend.
It all comes down to tonight’s game versus the no-hope Dallas Stars. Jimmy must be perfect, and our aging stars need to take their arthritis meds and (oh God don’t say it) out-shine the Stars. Once we’ve made the playoffs and Detroit’s reputation stays intact, then we’ll figure out how to inject some vitality into the AARP -bound Wings.
I was pleased as pie to receive the following email from Better World Books:
from:Better World Books help@betterworldbooks.com to:4ambooks@gmail.com date:Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 4:30 PM subject:Your order has been shipped!
Hello Patricia,
(Your book(s) asked to write you a personal note – it seemed unusual, but who are we to say no?)
Holy canasta! It’s me… it’s me! I can’t believe it is actually me! You could have picked any of over 2 million books but you picked me! I’ve got to get packed! How is the weather where you live? Will I need a dust jacket? I can’t believe I’m leaving Mishawaka, Indiana already – the friendly people, the Hummer plant, the Linebacker Lounge – so many memories. I don’t have much time to say goodbye to everyone, but it’s time to see the world!
I’ve bolded books read, italicized books not completed.
The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee 6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
I was a runner once. People who know this always expect me to be good at running. It isn’t the same as learning to whistle or tie your shoes, you can’t just go back to 6:45 mile splits after years of laziness. I hadn’t even bought new running shoes in the three years prior to last month.
Blah, blah, blah. I want this shirt ($25), but only after I’ve started running again. I’ve already promised to start running, because that’s how I justified buying the shoes.
This time I will also do my best not to injure myself in the first month. Once I get back into the routine of running, I usually try to add on miles too quickly and end up with shin splints or Morton’s Neuroma. Then I stop running for six months or so.
Not this time. I am going to Brave the Run, and hopefully be wearing this shirt at a 5K by September.
Call me selfish, but at least a few hours of my life will be significantly dampened if the Red Wings miss the playoffs for the first time I can remember. This is the one sport in which I’ve lived a charmed life, free of the pitying looks that accompanied the 90’s Tigers, Lions and Fighting Irish. The Red Wings play in Hockeytown, for crying out loud. Don’t let them take that away like they took away the College Hall of Fame from South Bend.
all of the writings 