A Faustian Pact Lunch

I'm a Wiener!

2008-12-08T15:35:00.000-08:00

I did it! I did it! I made it to 50,000 words in one month!

The rub, of course, is that the damn thing isn't done: I started segmenting it into chapters, and I left off at about the eighth or ninth chapter, and I think there are about fifteen chapters. So it looks like I've got some work to do. But—it's actually turning into a book! A terrible book, a giant piece of dreck, but it's mine, darn it, and I'm actually starting to believe I could finish the darn thing.

Yay, me!

Oh, happy day!

2008-11-06T17:41:00.000-08:00

The first president I remember anything about is Ronald Reagan. From there it was sour for a while, until Clinton, when we had some good times together. And it's been crap for a long, long time.

I am so happy today.

NaNoWriMo Begins

2008-10-31T19:24:00.000-07:00

This year I'm going to make it. Unlike last year where a) I didn't actually know what I was doing, and b) the damn cat got in an accident halfway through the month and it totally derailed my story, this year I HAVE A PLAN, a fully thought-out plot outline, and there will be NO ACCIDENTS and everyone will remain in perfect health and we will have no disasters and nothing to hijack my creative process. 50,000 words, here I come!

Sticky Rice

2008-08-25T11:51:00.001-07:00

Inspired by my obscene fondness for a few of the dishes at Whiskey Soda Lounge, I did a little searching about how to make sticky rice and my favorite dish (so far) that they serve, Neua Naam Tok. I didn't think it was going to be so simple, but a look at one of my cookbooks and a couple of websites was enough to get me going.

Sticky rice is actually so simple it's ridiculous. You just have to buy the right kind of rice, soak the rice, and steam it in the proper implement, the traditional basket-and-base thing shown here. I was somewhat reluctant to purchase a unitasker that was so large, but I figured that was the thing that would give me the real-deal sticky rice I wanted, and I figured we could find room for it. Bonus, the market up on Sandy, Thanh Thao, had everything I need. A search for Neua Naam Tok dug up its translated name, Waterfall Beef. The version I made at home was not quite as awesome as the dish at Pok Pok, or as brain-meltingly spicy, but it was still really tasty and I think it may become a new staple.

A bonus was that Thanh Thao carries all kinds of awesome, like Thai iced tea mix, which tastes just like what you get in the restaurant, and great veggies, frozen fish, and a hot deli of unpronounceable things that I can't wait to try out.

"I kinda thought I was supposed to end up with Bait, but..."

2008-07-15T15:44:00.000-07:00

Happy Act One Day!

It's all well and good that I'm in the Whedon-Is-My-Master-Now camp, but when the dude dumps Wonderwoman, and Dollhouse could very well blow, one starts to consider one's loyalty.

Fortunately, Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog was totally officially charming, so I guess he can live. They packed so much into 13 minutes: cute nerdling pining, a super villain named Moist, Wonderflonium, and an unseen duo of chick villains named Bait and Switch. AWESOME! And - both Doogie and Mal can sing! Even though the amount of traffic to the site killed the internets, forcing me to iTunes, it was a $4 well spent.

Superheroes and Their Later Careers

2008-07-11T10:09:00.000-07:00

So, I'm working, half-watching Mystery Men in the corner of my screen while I'm plugging away in Flash. It's a movie that I didn't appreciate enough the first time around, and it makes me weirdly nostalgic for the late 90s, a time that seems farther and farther away all the time. I thought that the guy who played The Waffler looked kind of familiar; turns out it was Dane Cook, who I've never seen in a movie but who has nonetheless inserted himself into my subconscious somehow anyway. I idly went over to IMDB to see who else played the try-out superheroes, and it turns out that the guy who played Pencilhead also played, among other things, the Pale Man in Pan's Labyrinth, Abe Sapien in Hellboy, AND one of the Gentlemen in "Hush". Nuts! He's a freaky prodigy.

There's also the fact that the movie has not only Janeane Garofalo, whom I will always love, and TOM WAITS. 'Nuff said.

Best kind of breakfast

2008-07-06T20:50:00.001-07:00

Best kind of breakfast
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

Now that it's summer, we should be doing this a lot more often. So far it's only happened once, but that's not saying it couldn't happen again. Like tomorrow, for instance!

I have a big girlie crush on Tina Fey.

2008-04-17T17:03:00.000-07:00

I think I have a weird thing for sharp-faced, sharp-tongued ladies, because I find both Tina Fey and the blonde lady who's always on VH1 shows and also sells some kind of snack cracker totally absorbing. (I think her first name is Rachel; the last name eludes me.)

In general, the show is BRILLIANT. The best things about last week's episode, "MILF Island":

The idea of a show called MILF Island. I know technically it was practically a throw-away line from the first episode, but the fact that they would bring it back is AWESOME.
Frank getting trapped in a vending machine for a Soy Joy.
"Deborah" vs. "Deh-BORE-ah" on MILF Island.
"Yeah, but Shakespeare never had a confessional shower sponsored by Dove Pro-Age."
"So, step aside, Randy Quaid."
Liz Lemon's extravagant use of the word "poo".
Gilly
Liz Lemon's Cathy imitation.
Liz Lemon having to wear corrective shoes because of the malformed extra baby foot from the congenital twin that she absorbed.
The music for MILF Island.
"Dog Swap"
The fact that Frank's wedding ring is now a recurring character.
Everything else.

IKEA can be goth, too.

2008-03-18T18:49:00.001-07:00

I've been re-doing the spare room. It's on its way to being the prettiest room in the house, if in a totally gothed-out pastel way.

I went all out: I patched the cracks in the ceiling, painted the ceiling, found the palest kinda-neutral-but-still-a-color color I could find without overthinking it, and painted the trim. The trim, I ask you!

I had some Amy Butler fabric and it went alarmingly well with the wall color, so I decided to use it to make curtains. The mirror came from an IKEA trip in which we came away with nothing on the list but lots of good things regardless.

I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. The next trick is to coordinate everything with the peculiar color scheme.

Canadian Bread

2008-02-06T16:13:00.001-08:00

Bread
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

We visited Vancouver, B.C. over the MLK Jr. weekend with a frouple of ours (that's a couple who are friends), and had a simply marvelous time. We ate baked goods on Granville Island, Malaysian food in the West End, Indian in SoMa, and dim sum in Richmond. There were also some beautiful snowy mountains and film crews and lots and lots of shoe stores. It was a wonderful time.

Just re-watching the last episode of 30 Rock and marveling at how brilliant it is, not the least of which is the metaphor: "Love: a urine mirage in a desert of fear."

Please Nock

2008-01-14T18:08:00.001-08:00

Please Nock
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

I can't say anything else about this. I'm upset, as upset as I usually am when I see things that are just flagrantly wrong. It's not even misplaced-apostrophe wrong, but please, people!

Now, one might argue that the whole silent K thing is just absurd anyway, and shouldn't we just get rid of it? I nod, consider, and then I just get upset all over again. I love silent Ks. They are silly and anachronistic and strange and I don't care, I want oddball spellings to stick around. What on earth else are we using our big brains for anyway if it's not to remember bizarre spellings of Old-English derived verbs?

Dismounting soapbox.

Cat Hat

2008-01-12T13:50:00.001-08:00

Meow!
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

I'm making another hat, from this pattern, which seems to be pretty popular. (Seeing other people's finished ones on Ravelry convinced me it would be cute; it's kind of hard to tell from the picture on the pattern itself.) It's going to be a snug fit, and I'm wishing I had cast on an extra twelve stitches or so, but as longs as it will make it around my head—and ears—I'm content.

Perhaps I will have it finished by next weekend, when we visit Vancouver, B.C.! I'm excited to get out of town, especially since we're going with two friends who have been more times than us. I imagine we'll have a good time involving lots of walking through a cold, blustery Robson Street and eating lovely things. Can't wait! Our friend found a good deal at the Sutton Place Hotel, which looks fantastic. Common sense might dictate a trip to a warmer clime, especially since PDX is so miserable during January, but I love Vancouver, and I don't mind being cold at all. I am just looking forward to getting out of Dodge for the long weekend.

Spooky Eyeball, or Balls-Out Mod?

2008-01-10T18:31:00.001-08:00

Wall Design
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

We returned home after the holidays to find that Miss Mina had left many poo presents in the closet upstairs. Apparently she prefers carpet for her tuckus. I washed that corner of the carpet in the tub, laid it out to try for a couple of days, and in the meantime, plotted how to turn the closet into an uber-cool reading/napping nook. Since we got our new sofa,, we have extra furniture. We're going to try putting the couch up there, and to make it super-fun, I'm going to paint some designs—like this one— on the newly-painted walls. Yay!

Happy New Year!

2008-01-03T18:40:00.001-08:00

Tapes!
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

The word for January is PURGE, as in get rid of all the stuff we've been hanging on to that clutters my psychic space. Perfect, right? Easy, right? Well, maybe not so much, but Ro is sick and his defenses are down, so it's a good time to wear down his objections.

Then I ran into a box of old tapes. I used to have a lot of tapes, which gradually became whittled down to a collection of about forty tapes, which are hanging out in a box in the closet. I could just toss them in the Goodwill box. But this is music, right? And the music that I liked enough to hang on to since HIGH SCHOOL for goodness' sake. And some of it's music that's not albums but MIX TAPES that someone made for me, or that I taped off someone else because I never had money to spend on music, so I'd wind up borrowing whatever I could and taping it, so that the Pixes album winds up on the other side Enya. (True story. And don't laugh, I was in high school and didn't know any better. And Enya isn't BAD for goodness sake sometimes she's quite GOOD and enjoyable to listen to. So there.) Pictured are a few highlights, but other albums lurking in that dusty box are the soundtrack to Chess (awesome!!!), Nick Cave, Tom Waits (Big Time), the Damned, and Rabbit Choir, who about five people know about , and you know who you are.

So I'm going to take the box to the car, listen to the tapes until they melt or otherwise bite it, and then if I still need to hear, say, The Wonder Stuff, buy the album from iTunes.

I've also been working on the office in general and photos in particular, so I've been cataloging everything in iPhoto (an app I don't love, but which mostly does a good job). Because of this I found that I'm totally missing 2004 (hello, France?) and a couple of weddings. I'm just not sure what happened to those photos. I hope that they turn up in my travels through our clutter; otherwise I may forget that year all together.

Modeling the Pickle Hat

2007-12-21T23:54:00.001-08:00

Modeling the Pickle Hat
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

It's done! I'm pretty excited with how well it turned out. I'm sure a pickle-shaped hat is not for everyone, but I think it's marvelous. I have the pattern up here (PDF).

It wasn't difficult, and it was a good project to learn a couple of new things on. The wool was wonderful to work with, too.

Best of all, it looks even cuter on a little boy. Ghee!

Pickle Hat!

2007-12-19T22:55:00.001-08:00

Pickle Hat!
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

It's a hat! A hat that looks like a pickle!

I've spent a fair amount of time cooing inwardly over small children—and a few adults, I suppose—who wear those adorable hats that look like strawberries and apples. Because who doesn't think that people dressing like fruit is cute? NOBODY, that's who, unless they're a total troll.

Anyhoo, this is a gift for a boy called Pickle, who has a ginormous head. This is the first project I've done where size actually mattered, and I actually very carefully did a test to check my gauge, which fortunately was right on the first time. Thank goodness. I used this pattern as a base, because the intermittent purl stitches create a nice vegetable-y look. I then learned how to make bobbles from the book that my dear mother gave me back in 1994, and placed them intermittently to give it that warty pickle look. I decreased with a slip stich/passover combination, which gave it a neat spirally top. The stem is just the last ten stitches knitted up in stockinette for a few rows, then bound off.

I had a few disasters in the making of this lovely hat. The first time I was done—I was making the stem, and I discovered a dropped stitch that had gone all the way down the hat. There was much yelling. Mesmer just licked his hairless butt and yawned while I cursed and cursed and flung invectives at the heedless air. I stripped down to the halfway mark, where I had to add yarn, and started over. Then I had to take it out a second time when I screwed something else up. Don't even remember what it was now. I really need to get better at correcting mistakes in situ instead of just taking everything out. This advantage of this is that I was able to a better job on the decrease the third time. Practice makes better.

The child who will wear it, (I hope he wears it, but I know kids are fussy about stuff on their heads and it may wind up flung to the side), has an enormous head. His dad measured it, then I measured my own head, and his is only—right now—two inches smaller than mine. The boy is EIGHT MONTHS OLD. Whatta freak.

So now I'm ready for the rest of the vegetable family. Bring it on! Eggplants, zucchini, yellow squash, leeks, you name it, I'll knit it.

Soon.

I'm making a hat!

2007-12-16T12:43:00.000-08:00

It's going to be a pickle-shaped hat, a gift for friends whose adorable baby boy is nicknamed Pickle. I'm using this pattern, which is intended to be like a pumpkin, but adding bobbles so it looks like pickle warts, and a longer stem. It will be green, of course, and I'm using Waterlily brand in color #1972, which is a very pretty, slightly variegated green. Pictures to follow...

Good Things

2007-11-20T12:37:00.001-08:00

Coq au Vin
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

Will you please check out this lovely dish? Coq au vin, couscous, a sprig of parsley. Did I make it? Nope. Some lovely friends, knowing that we were having a rough patch with our kitty coming home from surgery, dropped by to say hello and bring us some of their coq au vin and apple crumble for dessert. I swear, we have the bestest friends in the WHOLE WORLD.

Also check out my NEW MIXER! We found it for a crazy good price on Amazon, apparently because "dark pewter" is not as popular as it should be.

We've finished putting in the tile for the most part, and now have to grout and pain. The pot filler faucet is in too, and works beautifully after a little fixing of some drippage. It's brilliant!

Yay, kitchen! Yay, kitty's home! Yay, Thanksgiving's coming!

One pill makes you larger...

2007-10-04T22:23:00.001-07:00

Wachoo lookin' at?
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

I am a sucker for a checkerboard. This has manifested through or because of a childhood love of Alice in Wonderland (both book and film, though the book will always be superior in every way), and a teenage love for ska music. Now it's returned, here in our new kitchen, which is taking shape more and more quickly.

Our new floor is so pretty. It will be finished tomorrow. I am so grateful that Ro and I agree—most of the time without even talking it through—on aesthetic choices, colors, and so on. There are exceptions of course, but it's pretty gratifying to finally reach adulthood and find that I can, indeed, have the awesome traditional-yet-trippy floor of my dreams and have the fella I'll be staring at it with enjoy it too.

KitchenAid Mixer

2007-09-30T17:44:00.001-07:00

KitchenAid Mixer
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

Our new kitchen is coming closer and closer to doneness, and all the cooking I haven't been doing is starting to threaten to erupt in a massive spree of chopping and roasting and so on. It's also bringing me dangerously closer to actually purchasing a stand mixer. I've always wanted one, but as a reluctant baker, I'm not sure I actually need one. The question is, then, if I had one, would I use it? I really hope so because they are so beautiful...and useful, of course!

Me in Flickr Letters

2007-09-06T19:10:00.001-07:00

The New Choice

2007-09-04T12:40:00.001-07:00

The New Choice
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

The kitchen progresses, but slowly, and things I thought would be easy are difficult, and things that I thought might be difficult seem kind of impossible. I haven't been home yet today because we've been house/dogsitting, but supposedly our cabinet guy is starting the toe-kicks today. That's pretty exciting. I still need to buy a door, and figure out if the cat door will fit in the door we chose, and if the window we bought will fit where it's supposed to, and what size a window we need to replace the one over the sink.

It's all a little much, and in the meantime there's just dust. Dust and mess.

I'd like to plan a little time away, a weekend elsewhere, but school starts tomorrow, I have absolutely nothing, and a whole new class to plan. So I've got to buckle down and get it done. So it goes.

Stairs

2007-08-27T08:38:00.000-07:00

The crew is already here, working on our stairs. I didn't get to the laundry in time, so it will just have to wait. By the end of today, our kitchen will be a whole new shape!

This weekend we bought a new sink and looked at tiles and chose colors for the Marmoleum. There's still a lot to do, but I'm pretty convinced that we're going to have a gorgeous kitchen.

They didn't have my nose.

2007-08-24T16:19:00.001-07:00

When in Springfield...
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

The school year is starting soon, and I just looked at the hypothetical calendar I designed for myself. I remembered that I'm teaching two new classes. One of them is co-taught, so it will be somewhat easier, but the other is an entirely new thing that I made some really quality notes for back in June and then pretty much stopped thinking about. It's a GREAT idea that I was really excited about. Now that I actually have to do it, I'm thinking about how I could duck out of it and do a period of, say, silent reading. How's silent reading? Awesome. Who doesn't love reading? Oh, right. Most of our students. Crap.

So, over here at Time Kill Central, as I listen to the episodes of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe that I have in iTunes and then never actually listen to, I make myself over as a Springfield resident. It's not bad, considering especially that I finally freshened up my dye job and the color is pretty close. Mine is kinda redder, though. The podcast is pretty good, too.

I also found this guide for all the shortcuts for characters on a Mac via Lifehacker, which is awesome because, although going to the Character Palette every time I need an accent grave or acute or what have you is fine, I'd like to know the shortcuts for the ones I need all the time. I have this need to be precise, you see.

Lastly, I continued shopping for faucets and sinks. I think I picked out the pot filler, finally, which was way harder than it should be. Here it is. No work on the kitchen today—our contractor was supposed to cut our new stairs today, but his other job interfered. Harumph.

So, that's productive, right?

Plum

2007-08-23T16:58:00.001-07:00

Going, Going, Gone!
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

We planted the Nichols' Red plum tree not soon after we bought the house; it was the first thing, I think. This is the first year it's produced any fruit, and it managed to squeeze out a single plum. We were pretty excited.

We waited all summer, and it finally felt ripe enough to pop off the tree. We took it inside to our wreck of a kitchen, and I used a butter knife to cut it in half. It was very delicious, very juicy, a gorgeous reddish, purply ,orangey color inside. It made me sad that all the beautiful stone fruit is going to disappear soon and it will be a long, long time until next August and the next—much larger, I hope—crop of plums from our tree.

Live 105

2007-08-22T12:53:00.001-07:00

I listened to the radio a lot in high school. In retrospect, Live 105 actually played some great music, though it's largely because of them that I cannot listen to "Rock the Casbah" without rolling my eyes heavenward. Steve Masters may have been a giant doof, but he played awesome music. I would always keep a blank tape in the stereo, and if a song that sounded good came on I would hit record. I had a few mix tapes that were full of awesome songs that were cut off at the beginning, many of which I never knew what they were called or who they were by, and in some cases not until years later. If we had the internet then, I would have been a much better consumer of music. For example, I think I knew that this song, was called "Doot Doot", but the way the DJ—whoever it was, Mark or Steve or Big Rick Stewart or Roland West (incidentally I called in and won the West Test one night, tickets to Laurie Anderson at the Warfield!)—couldn't pronounce it, not that I could blame them, because who could, and I thought the name of the band was Führer, which is of course a terrible name. It's not. It's Freur, which is just a dumb, unpronounceable name.

On a related side note, Mark Hamilton used to DJ for them, is now the program director at 94.7 here in Portland. It's pretty weird hearing his voice on the air now, here, more than ten years later. It's also a consolation that even though it makes me feel kinda old, he's older.

The Big Noise

2007-08-16T16:18:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting upstairs in my haven of calm well-orderedness, shopping for undermount stainless steel sinks and half-watching episodes of 30 Rock online. Downstairs there is much noise, much noise that I really want to peek out, but I think it will be more interesting to see what it looks like when they're done for the day. It's really hard not too look, though.

What a weird game I play.

How I Spent Yesterday

2007-08-16T10:49:00.001-07:00

Pooter
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

While Ro was gone, I bought a filing cabinet, finally, from a used office furniture place in the southwest. It was a little dinged up, and a really unremarkable gray color, so I got some white spray paint and went at it. I only sprayed the body, not the drawers, because I couldn't take out the handles and it would have looked weird, I think, even if I had tried to mask them. So it's a two-tone white and silvery gray, which actually fits pretty well with the rest of the stuff in the office. The paint job came out not so hot, so I think I will definitely be making or buying some Blik-style decorations to disguise the patchiness.

It's also frakkin' huge, and even with the drawers out, Ro and I had to huff and puff to get it up the stairs. Then I cut my hand trying to get the drawers back in, which took about a half an hour. What a beast.

The rest of the day—literally, until I went to step at 5:45—I spent sweltering upstairs putting the files back in and filing away the piles and piles of unfiled papers laying around. It's done, but it seems like this always happens, and I need to figure out a way to avoid our usual slothful routine where things wind up on the stairs, then they get carried upstairs, then the pile gets so big it falls over, and I throw it in a box thinking I'll file it later, and then it turns into two boxes, or three, and a year later I waste an entire day filing the damn things. It blows. We also have lots of records stored that we really don't need, so I think I'm going to designate a clearing-out day at the end of the year when we shred our old phone bills for plans we don't even have anymore, last year's electric bills, and so on.

There are still some things to do up here: hang the shelf, buy and install the baseboards, deal with the closet (there's still stuff behind that curtain!), donate books and such that we will never ever look at or use again, and purge in general. I'm also planning on putting my computer on my new desk, and the sewing machine on Ro's old one, but until we've got the baseboard in I'm not trying to get too attached to the placement of anything, or set anything up that's hard to move and involves un- and re-plugging in things. But right now it looks clean, it's functional, and I may actually be able to get some work done in it. I think that actually counts as a success.

But for now I'm off to the DMV to replace the license I seem to have lost in the past week. Crap.

De drapeau à escargot.

2007-08-14T19:41:00.001-07:00

De drapeau à escargot.
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

The lovely little FIRA box, good for holding so many things. In this case, it's replacing the sad but awesome sewing box I inherited (*cough* stole *cough*) from my mom.

A little bit more about where the pictures are from and how they came to be stuck to the box is in the last entry, here.

La boîte de mots français

2007-08-14T19:36:00.001-07:00

La boîte de mots français
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

I have lots of weaknesses, and this project represents a few of them, including IKEA, stuff you can put together yourself, fancy stationery stores, children's alphabets with quirky pictures, and découpage.

While with a friend at Oblation, I bought a piece of paper. They called it wrapping paper, but since it cost like $4—for a single sheet of über-fancy wrapping paper— and I'm more likely to use a gift bag that you can then reuse, there was no way I was going to wrap a present in it. Anyway, the paper was maybe 14" by 24" or so, printed in squashed squares with the letters of the alphabet and little pictures to illustrate them. I thought about framing it and hanging it somewhere so I could remember the words for "nest" and "holly" and so on. Entropy set in, and I taped it to the wall and piled things in front of it and it was as good as invisible.

However, all it took to make myself a place to store thread and needles and other sewing supplies was 1) IKEA finally coming to PDX! 2) getting over the fear of cutting into the nice paper and 3) figuring out that I wasn't going to be able to use the whole squares on the drawer fronts because they were just a little too small. Instead, I cut out the pictures that were the best size for each drawer and used Mod Podge to affix them, and swiped some over the top, too. The larger pictures I put on the sides of the FIRA box.

I was a little worried because the Mod Podge was causing the paper to buckle, so as soon as it was dry enough I put the drawer fronts under a few books. They weren't quite flat yet, and I was worried about peeling, so I took them outside and gave the whole thing spray with some clear glossy spray varnish, and when that was dry I pressed the whole thing again. After that, it was nice and flat. Here's the finished product.

Lessons learned: in future, I might forgo the Mod Podge and just use some spray adhesive and then spray varnish on top. Also, I found it really hard to nail the drawers together with the nails they give you. After doing six of the drawers and bending most of the nails, I tried using wood glue instead, which worked great, even without nails. Next time I think I'll just use wood glue and nail only if I need to.

Painting, Done!

2007-08-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

A freshly painted room (or closet!) is so sweet: clean, antisepticky-painty smelling, fresh and perfect. I've put the rod back in, after getting the slopped-on paint off, and hung the clothes back up. I also installed two coat hooks to hang the canvas shoe bag I got at Storables. I have many more hooks to install that I've been collecting for a while, various girly ceramic-topped things, and I need to figure out a way to maximize my scarf-hanging space. I have a lot of scarves that get daily play during winter.

I also picked up a BEKVÅM stool at IKEA to help me reach whatever shelf solution I decide on. The closet has a lot of vertical space, not so much with the horizontal.

I also got my lead test back from Kaiser, and though I can't quite understand the results it has "LOW CONCERN" or similar marked, so I guess I am content. And wiser.

Closet of Pain

2007-08-09T15:50:00.001-07:00

Curtains Up!
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

The smallest room I've ever painted has now outstripped any other painting project I've done. I started on—Sunday? No, it was frakking Saturday. Today is Friday. By the time I'm able to hang my clothes back up, this project will have taken a whole week. How is that?

Admittedly, painting something does have the same time-sucking effect as laundry: you can't do it all in one go because you have to wait between coats, so there's lots of down time involved. This project, too, had other problems. First there was the two days it took to strip all the wallpaper off, including the lead fear that made me stop work on the first day to self-mediate with a glass of wine or three, as well as removing the old shelves. Then there was the fact that it's a closet, which means that it was very hard to maneuver in, and I had to keep moving the bulky, heavy ladder in and out, and it was only accessible around the huge bed and the supplies that accumulated. Not easy to get to. Lastly, I had to not only clean and prime everything, but I also had to paint the ceiling and keep going back over all the mistakes I made, which meant endless cleaning of brushes and rollers, frustration, obscenities, and weird looks from the cats.

I'm almost done. One of the last things is to paint the baseboard, which would be half painted already, except I realized that I needed to fill in some gaps with spackle first, and of course that needs at least an hour to dry.

While that dries, I'm noodling around and trying to finish cleaning out the kitchen. We were supposed to start the demo today, but work intervened for Ro. Yesterday I got most everything out and arranged in the basement, but already our space feels chaotic and cramped with the new dishwasher and some shelves and the table full of dishes and food. I'm now thinking that maybe everything should go into the basement, and if we need it, we'll get it. Right now it's not a happy place, and I'm starting to get the fear. You don't miss your water til the well run dry, as the man said, and I know that very literally we'll soon miss not only the water but the counters, the space, the dishwasher, the sink itself, and the luxury of a range. For two or three months.

At least I'll have a nice closet to sit in so I don't have to look at the gaping hole.

Amy Butler Curtains

2007-08-06T20:46:00.001-07:00

Amy Butler Nigella Primrose in Lime
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

I took myself to Bolt yesterday and, after staring at all the pretty things for a while, chose the biggest, loudest pink and green combo I saw. I made the curtain for the closet today, which will replace the hideous beige plastic blinds that were in there.

The painting is going very slowly, not just because I had to scrape off hundred-year old wallpaper first. I was finally able to start cutting in this evening, but it's almost nine o'clock and I think dinner is in order first.

I also got word from my doctor that he's ordered a lead test for me, so I'm going to go to Kaiser in the morning.

Leaf Wallpaper

2007-08-04T19:27:00.001-07:00

Leaf Wallpaper
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

So, I'm working on the closet in the guest room, which also happens to be the place where I keep my clothes. I always thought that having an old house meant discovering old things and uncovering layers from past inhabitants, but since our house has been remodeled so much already, there hasn't been that much to find. This closet was pretty much the only thing that hasn't been touched. There were two layers of wallpaper that had started to sag and wrinkle, and someone had just painted over them with what looks like primer. I had dreams of changing it into a sparkling little room (very little!) with a new coat of paint or even wallpaper (something like these from Walnut Wallpaper and a slick system of rods and shelves that would allow me to sail out of the house each morning shod, dressed, and as spiffy as the closet would be when I was done with it.

That whole paragraph was leading up to a "but", of course: after working in there all day, I realized that the entire thing is coated in lead-based paint, the dust of which I was scraping and breathing all day. I may be irrevocably poisoned and infertile, as well as darn stupid.

I hope I'm being reactionary and unreasonably overwrought, but looking around the house I realized that there are still plenty of places where old paint is still there, chipping and exposed, and it's not a safe place to be. Instead of just beautification I have a new goal: to make this a safe place for humans and cats to be. As well as beautiful and comfortable. I called my doctor and asked him to arrange a lead test, and I just hope it can happen soon so I can know how much I should be worrying about our health. After all my angst about nutrition and eating organic and exercising and the polar ice caps melting, I'd like to have one fewer thing to angst about. And a plan to deal with it.

Off to drink a calming glass of red wine (just because I could become neurally damaged doesn't mean I'll stop getting my antioxidants!), and try to relax. Like so many things I do, it's a cautionary tale. Good luck to me.

Sew Crazy!

2007-08-03T14:20:00.001-07:00

Less Gappy
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

After a long, long time without a sewing machine (pretty much since we moved to Portland, which means four years, which means LONG for someone who, well, feels more at home behind a sewing machine than behind the wheel of a car most days), having the new PFAFF! has been a welcome joy rather than the dread-inspiring thing I thought it might be.

(People say sewing is fun, it's creative, blah blah blah. It's all those things, but it's also WORK and it makes you tired and cranky when things go badly or it's a big project or you stab yourself with pins. An explainer for any non-sewers out there.)

Take, for example, this project. A few yards of fabric (IKEA's BLAD, one of the new Stockholm series) hemmed up and hung sideways, some DEKA clips & wire, and we're in business. For now the curtains hide the stuff in the closet, but eventually there will be a nifty daybed kind of thing for lounging that has drawers underneath. Supernifty, even. I just have to design it. And build it.

Still Seeking Svelte

2007-08-03T13:58:00.000-07:00

From the last couple of posts, one might assume that I had completely abandoned my quest for svelte and have been begun shilling for IKEA. Not so, my friend! It's just that, as has become the rule, I have remained in a place that looks a lot like a plateau from here. Not a lot of valleys or hills, if you catch my drift. Kind of flat. A little scrubby. Some shrubs.

The current number is 17 lost, 11.2 to go. Beyond the halfway mark, but it still seems so far away. And it has been for a while. I had a breakthrough, an extra push, when the weather got nice and school ended, but I think sometimes I'm going to have to wander around this plateau for a while. Check out the scenery, see where the trail DOWN is for goodness' sakes. Is there a frickin' sign anywhere?

Anyway. I'd like to find another graph-making tool to illustrate progress and lack thereof, so that goes on my ever-growing and shifting list. Until then, here's to 17! A pretty good number.

While I was sleeping...

2007-08-03T13:40:00.001-07:00

While I was sleeping...
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

The quest to complete the office project continues. The desk was a major piece, made more major by the fact that it's frakkin' huge.

Yesterday was a landmark day. After months of disuse, I finally got over my trepidation around driving the truck and called AAA. I had it towed to Les Schwab where I spent $22 to have the two flat tires and a busted air valve fixed, drove to a yard waste disposal place and paid $18 to get the bags of clippings, weeds, and unwanted plants that we'd been storing there out (sands a rake, broom, or gloves, which made for a sweaty, messy job), all to have a clean, driveable, truck again.

All of this was merely prelude to being able to drive to IKEA one last time for the final piece, the ginormous desktop that we had purchased and returned all in the same trip because it wouldn't fit in the car. I also picked up the little HELMER drawers, which are great for holding things like pens, labeler, tape, and random crafty things that otherwise don't have home right now. Ro helped me put the drawers together after I put the slides in upside down and injured myself while trying to pound them back out with a mallet, and when I fell asleep he quietly put the whole darn thing together.

Not that it will get much use until the baseboard is finished—because why would I put everything together only to have to take it all apart?—but isn't it just so pretty?

The desk goes in the corner there.

2007-08-02T10:28:00.001-07:00

The desk goes in the corner there.
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

The choosing-of-the-color part wasn't easy, but the office is now painted. The color is "Devine Foam", which kind of has Aphrodite/Lakshmi connotations.

It's a challenging color, sometimes green, sometimes blue, changing from light to dark as the light changes. At first I worried that it was too odd and mental hospital-y, but then I realized that a) I like that kind of color and b) it's not really mental hospital-y at all; rather, it matches perfectly the stills from Monsters Inc, that Ro has had for so long and that I finally hung to get them out of the way. I'm always hesitant about hanging pictures—I worry that they won't be straight, or that I'll rip a hole in the drywall, or that they'll fall out some day and kill me. But these have lightweight frames and went up easily. Presto! A plastic level and a metal ruler made things even easier.

Next steps are 1) Buy and install wood for the baseboard, 2) Cut and install the trim for the baseboard that we've had since we moved in, 3) Buy my desktop and put the desk togethre 4) Buy a file cabinet, 5) Design and build the daybed nook/drawer thing 6) Slipcover the chair so the cats won't destroy it 7) Make an even bigger list with everything I've forgotten that has more steps, 8) ??? 9) Profit!

Mina & SKRUVSTA!

2007-08-02T10:25:00.001-07:00

Mina & SKRUVSTA!
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

And it's finally mine!

After all the hype and fear, the PDX IKEA hasn't been impenetrable or crazy. I went on the opening day—to find of course that they did not have my chair in stock then. However, we went back on Sunday and though it was claimed that they had no more, I checked the shelves and there it was! I also bought all the components of my desk, except for the actual desktop, which was too big to fit into my car. (I previously had thought that I could fit anything into that Honda, but apparently it's not as elastic as I had assumed. I had to take it back in and return it. I'll have to go back and fetch it when we've gotten the truck's tires fixed and dumped out the yard waste we've been hoarding there.

The chair and desk are all part of my grand plan to make the office into a super-comfy, clean, organized, engendering-productivity space that will be a welcome when we are kitchenless and in the midst of the mess and muck of renovation, starting next Thursday! So there's the paint, then there's the finishing of the baseboard, and the creation of a nifty tucked-in daybed/drawers thing in the odd closet up here.

And after that, everything else...

SKRUVSTA!, Alice Waters, and Me

2007-07-15T15:00:00.001-07:00

Skruvsta and Me
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas

Nine days and counting until I can put my office together. Sure, there are other ways of getting office furniture, but I'm set on the chair, and a big table, and IKEA will give me both. Plus meatballs, if I so choose.

We were down in the Bay Area for a wedding, and also took some time to ourselves. IKEA was actually a stop on our way to a late meal at Chez Panisse, a place for all its famosity we'd never been. We feared the disappointment that follows hype and venerability, so we kept our expectations simple. We both wound up ordering fish dishes, with something called "fig toast" to start. Happily, everything was quite good: the fig toast turned out to be a bruschetta with a fig compote kind of thing, Ro's trout was lovely, and my salmon was perfectly cooked, buttery and sweet, with corn and peppers, simple and so tasty that even amending this post a month later, I still wouldn't mind eating it again RIGHT NOW.

Free Champagne

2007-06-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

We went to the opening night of the Platform Animation Festival last night. The reception afterward was full of well dressed successful people and badly dressed wanna-bes and lots of free champagne. Urged on by a certain evil redhead, I managed to swill three glasses before insisting that we HAD to leave immediately and eat happy hour food at Jake's. We had ahi sushi, salmon cakes, and frog's legs, which, contrary to what you may have heard, do not taste like chicken, but more like a not-unpleasant GMO hybrid of chicken and crab, which is pretty good when you're somewhat pickled—especially for a Monday night! but then again I'm on vacation—and it comes with a fatty side of aioli.

Other recent notable comestibles include every darn thing we ate at Toro Bravo. A new favorite place. We also went in for happy hour at Alberta Street Oyster Bar & Grill and had champagne cocktails, clams, frites, panko-fried oysters, and an arugula salad with candied pecans and bleu cheese.

In fact, we've been eating really well recently, though when our kitchen remodel finally kicks into gear, I have a feeling we'll become tired of eating out. I'm looking forward to that kind of ennui, though.

The Swedes Are [Finally] Coming!

2007-05-31T18:59:00.000-07:00

July 25th!

That's the day—of course, my gripe is that it is so far away from today. Why must I wait so long for my Skruvsta and my Galant corner desk? Oh, the humanity. It weeps.

On a funner note, we went to Sasquatch this weekend after a co-worker had to give up their tickets. We saw Ozomatli (funky awesome!), Neko Case (achingly beautiful awesome!), The Long Winters (last-minute awesome!), and Manu Chao (totally spry for his age awesome!). We both escaped sunburn, vomit, and the four and a half-hour drive. Each way. God.

The weight, it stays. The new J Crew swimsuit, it fits. But it reveals the usually hidden fact that my shoulders belong to a linebacker and not I, so I think it has to go back. Drat.

Eleven school days remain!

Klippan Sofa

2007-05-11T19:27:00.001-07:00

Klippan Sofa
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas.

A major obsession recently has been the coming of IKEA to Portland, and with it, the bulk of my office furniture. Right now I'm sitting at a too-tall drafting table with a spindly stool that gives me back pain, eye strain, and is just terrible for my wrists. So I need a desk, right? And a comfy chair.

And apparently, the comfy chair has a cousin. And we've been talking about having a couch upstairs. So, the question becomes, can I stand it? Would it be horribly matchy-matchy, or would it be the best thing ever?

But mostly I just spend a lot of time waiting for IKEA to open. Come on!

Nefertiti, Veiled

2007-05-04T09:30:00.001-07:00

Nefertiti, Veiled
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas.

It feels like I have a really bitchin' sports car in the garage that I'm only able to take our for twenty minutes at a time before I have to head back home and turn off the engine. Despite its awesomeness, I haven't yet really been able to spend quality time with Nefertiti here, and it's making me a little crazy. Having to wait until school winds down to get some quality creative time with the new beastie is very frustrating. The plastic is off, but it still feels new.

So I wait—but tongight we are going to put it to use to watch the first episodes of season three of Battlestar Galactica, which my sister and her husband's friend was so kind and diligent to rip onto two DVDs, and that they have passed on to us. After a rough morning, I am very much looking forward to getting comfy upstairs in the loft, perhaps with some Thai takeout or Chili Gagagua and diving into the season.

On the get-svelte front, after three weeks at the same exact weight I finally switched it up—and put on two pounds. But they're coming off again, the plateau continues mostly unchanged, with, however, one key difference: my exercise routine is definitely starting to pay off. I can feel the muscles returning; when I walk, I feel springy and strong, and I can bounce through a step class with high energy all the way through—mostly. The weight component is still frustrating, but it's supremely gratifying to feel my muscles again.

Skruvsta!

2007-05-04T09:16:00.001-07:00

Skruvsta
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas.

Sounds like a Swedish cheer, right? I'm coveting this chair for my new office layout, but I won't be purchasing it until IKEA arrives in Portland. Oh, how can I wait? Mostly, whether it winds up being this chair or another, the important thing is that the chair I wind up getting to sit in front of my lovely new iMac is thatit have a wide, comfy seat that is big enough to hold my butt and Mina's butt, too. Right now her favorite thing is to circle my stool (so unfomfortable and bad for the back!), mewing plaintively, then to surprise me by jumping up on the keyboard, at which point I pull her onto my lap so she can hang out with me while I work. She purrs and purrs and is dandy company, but she also has a tendency to slip off. I'd like her there while I'm working, but not if it means I wind up with claw marks in my thigh. Hence the need for Skruvsta!

The Plum Tree

2007-04-06T16:18:00.001-07:00

The Plum Tree
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas.

I've been all about the yard recently. Digging holes, planting things, paying more attention than I ever have to everyone else's yards. The flowering cherry tree had one open flower yesterday morning; today the whole thing is abloom. All I want to do is sit outside gazing at the flowers. I feel like Ferdinand the bull.

Undoing Mistakes

2007-03-29T09:50:00.001-07:00

We've been doing lots of work in the yard, weeding, moving things around, buying new plants. I've got lots of azaleas that need to get in the ground, some camellias, lots of things. Initially my intent was to work on my stair project over spring break, but the yard has taken precedence because I very much want to be able to be in the yard enjoying a cocktail when the weather is steadily nice, not despairing over the fact that it's a mess still. Today is lovely, so I think I'm going to take it outside for a bit.

Pinhole Portrait

2007-03-20T16:15:00.001-07:00

Pinhole Portrait
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas.

I'm guessing this would have come out a lot better if I had aimed the camera up toward the sky, and let the figure contrast against it. Again, a lot of sun.

I made some interesting choices about food today. I ate both an unidentifiable starch product with cheese in the middle, and a peanut butter cookie. I also ate grapefruit and drank a lot of coffee. It's a rocky start to the week, but as long as I get to the gym, all will be well.

Tiny Tree

2007-03-15T16:36:00.001-07:00

Tiny Tree
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas.

We ate at Pho Van last night on Hawthorne. Really delicious. We had the seafood pho and a kaffir-lime beef noodle salad. Then I came home and made a clafoutis (out of desperation, really, because we had nothing for dessert and I had the ingredients), which also served for breakfast. And an afternoon snack.

The pinhole experiments continue. I am constantly being teased by the weather, though, which will pour out lots of shiny happy sun in the morning, and by my afternoon classes, it's all gone. Drat!

Salad Days

2007-03-08T10:22:00.001-08:00

Electric VW
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas.

We've been eating salad for dinner the last couple of days, and I realized that (in addition to greens) there is a trifecta of ingredients that go into making a good salad: a fruit, a nut, and a cheese. However, if you want the salad to become meal, you must add protein. And that's it. The only limit, of course, lies in finding out which things suit each other.

Last night's salad had greens and some shredded purple cabbage, chopped apple, feta, garbanzos, and sunflower seeds. The vinaigrette was our standard, but I used some pomegranate vinegar instead of the usual balsamic, and some of the basil-flavored oil that is going to go south on us if we don't finish it up soon. It could have been a mess, but it turned out pretty well.

The VW belongs to a colleague, who converted it to electric and spiffied it up. The recent bright sunshine made for a great pinhole-photo day. I'm hoping we get another one today, but the gray sky outside would seem to indicate otherwise.

Down this week after a disappointing rise last week (which may have been due to the soda I drank just before my meeting, oops), but still hovering in the same range. Drat.

Salad Rolls

2007-03-01T19:27:00.001-08:00

Salad Rolls
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas.

Aren't they pretty? They were a bitch and a half to make, but I've been making recipes out of Quick and Easy Vietnamese, which I checked out from the library and may need to actually purchase. The Goi Ga salad in particular is delicious: fresh, crunchy, and practically pointless. I also made the soup with pork meatballs wrapped up in cabbage leaves and tied with scallion tops like little presents, which may be the prettiest thing I've ever made. It, too, was fantastic (if a little fatty). Next step is to figure how to de-pointify it so we can have it all the time.

Snow-Covered Poop

2007-03-01T19:22:00.001-08:00

Snow-Covered Poop
Originally uploaded by cacahuete & ananas.

I mentioned this a while ago, namely here, back in January, and only now have gotten around to getting all our photos off of the camera. Here's my delicious scatalogically themed dessert, born of desperation and eaten fairly quickly.

Miss Understanding

2007-02-16T15:13:00.000-08:00

I spend a lot of my days despairing over the fact that students’ lives and work could be a bazillion times easier and less time-consuming if they actually read the directions first.  I could not quantify, but intuit, that 85% of the questions I answer are unnecessary because the answer is right there in front of the questioner, right there, it’s right there, darn it!

So, imagine my chagrin when I realized that the goal weight I’ve had in mind for simply ages, in fact since I began this crazy journey, is wrong.  My error is no doubt the result of wishful thinking as much as misreading, since the number I had in mind is six pounds more than the maximum goal weight I should be aiming for.

So instead of having a mere 14.8 pounds to lose (from this date), it’s 20.8.  It just seems like so much more.  1’ve lost 13.4 pounds to this date; at the lowest point thus far it was at 16.4.  That’s still so far from here.  Far!  A long long way to run!

I’m ready to measure myself again and see if I could stretch up to five foot three.  I’m practically there—maybe with a slightly elevated posture, and really thick socks, I could make it.  I wonder how much shorter the journey would be then.

I’ve started looking for ways I could change things up.  One way is to sign up for a monthly pass, which gives me access to the online tracker and tools, which is fairly bitchin’—especially the Recipe Builder, which allows you to enter ingredients, amounts, and label info if necessary, and it tells you the point value of a serving of that meal.  Awesome.

I used the Recipe Builder to figure out the points value of the tom yum I made last night, which was pretty simple and turned out well, though it lacked the same lovely tart, bright flavors of the tom yum at Thai Noon.  I think next time I make it, I will add a lot more lime juice and make sure it’s fresh.  I put shrimp in it, which was totally a treat, and I also bought pre-sliced carrots (the sort that look like they’ve been put through a mandoline so they’re ridged and fancy-looking), so it had a more professional-not-made-by-me look, which also makes it taste better, I think.

The only down side of tom yum is that it’s not a soup that improves over time, so it’s really the kind of soup that you make, eat, and don’t think about leftovers because they won’t be pretty.  But it’s also only three points per serving, and that’s definitely good eats.  I think it’s going to find its way into my regular repertoire if I can remember to keep lemongrass on hand.

Fool for Boule

2007-01-29T18:18:00.000-08:00

No update on the travails of weight management here; I’m stuck on something much more important, namely, bread.  You would think the two are mutually exclusive, and with me, in fact, they are, but heck, it’s bread.  Good bread that even I can make.  After my threat in the last post, I have made good, and here’s the story of the loaf.

Now, I love bread.  I think that most people do; in fact, I have known many people to wax poetic about how much they love bread, good bread, crusty, soft, airy, chewy, fantastic bread.  I have tried to make bread in the past and it never comes out right: it doesn’t rise enough, it tastes raw, it remains leaden, mere flour untransformed by yeast, time, or heat—revolting.  In fact, I’ve never made a decent thing involving things that rise, quick breads included.

The recipe for this majestic bread—a boule, really, a chewy, hearty, rustic-feeling bread—as it came recommended with breathy hosannahs by two friends who had had good success with it, I could not resist the siren song.  My first boule was not fantastic; it didn’t rise well, and it was a little too dense, but I could see the possibilities.  The crust was fantastic, and I won’t lie and say we didn’t eat the whole thing regardless.  But I knew it could be better, and I figured the relatively cool temperature of the house (about ten degrees cooler than recommended overall) had most to do with it.

This weekend I tried again.  I mixed the dough in the afternoon and put it in our bathroom, which is much warmer than the rest of the house (and not gross at all, thank you, as it was well covered and the bathroom was clean, well, enough).  I could see the difference instantly as the dough had risen more in the first couple of hours more than it did on the first go.  When I rolled it out of the bowl to fold (the second step), it was pliant and airy and felt like a breast, just like good dough should.

And when it came out of my Le Creuset Dutch oven, it did not stand a chance.  That boule is history because it was awesome.  I’ll be making another soon—and twenty hours later, we’ll have bread, bread that I made, bread that doesn’t taste like raw flour.

This is the recipe from the NY Times, previous linked to, now reproduced here for your benefit, because otherwise it’s just not fair.  And you should go make some bread.

No-Knead Bread

Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Time: About 1 1/2 hours plus 14 to 20 hours' rising

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Yield: One 1 1/2-pound loaf.

Snow-Covered Everything, Actually!

2007-01-16T21:00:00.001-08:00

It’s a snow day!

This means that my usual routine is completely thrown off: no work, no meeting, and no tracking, at least after a certain point in the day. I spent all day geeking out and reading Getting Things Done, going through the pile of “filing” that has been sitting in the office, and trying in a less-haphazard-than-usual way to sort out the mess of our office. It’s going pretty well, but soon our lack of places to put things is going to be a liability. However, I know that until I know exactly what I need to store, I shouldn’t make any purchases. I have, though, been using my labeler a lot, and it just makes all the difference.

I invented a new dessert this evening, (inadvertedly) as an homage to our day spent inside, snowbound, borne out of desperation for something sweet and dictated by the contents of our cabinets. I call it “Snow-Covered Poop”. Pictures to follow.

Me, Cook? Perish the Thought

2007-01-10T14:47:00.000-08:00

Since we arrived home, I haven’t been able to do much cooking, which feels strange. After preparing (not cooking, as there was no chopping or heat involved) a single meal in the entire two weeks we were gone, I was really looking forward to cooking again, but that hasn’t quite happened. First there was the aggressive not-eating I did after being sick, then the busy and tired of being back to work, and after that the being not-prepared and lacking raw ingredients.

The much-hosannaed No-Knead Bread (pdf), however, may change my mind. As dangerous as it is to have bread around, I don’t think I can resist making it, especially after friends have praised it so. I’m going to purchase some flour, yeast, and cornmeal right after school and get crackin’ tonight after I go to the gym.

I’m still also feeling the need for soup (which of course goes so well with bread), so I’ll need to figure out which kind I’d like to make.

Lunch: Pastrami on wheat with lettuce and pickles

Return from the Land of Cheese

2007-01-04T15:01:00.000-08:00

Out of some far-fetched, insane troll logic, I thought I was indeed capable of posting every day.  Of course it turns out I was mistaken; however, I didn’t realize how remiss I could indeed be.  However, it’s a new year, and however arbitrary that may be, I’m back.

I am spurred on—also arbitrarily—by my recent “success” in the Saga of Loss.  We had a wonderful trip over the winter holiday to France and to Spain, during which I kept a journal of each meal we had, from desperate-morning Nescafé to homard and langoustines and paella.  On our last day, however, I managed to come down with a truly vicious case of food poisoning (I suspect the béarnaise sauce that came with my New Year’s Eve meal), and I vomited back home across the Atlantic and didn’t eat much for two days.  To this event I attribute the total loss of five pounds in the time we were gone.  It surely will not last, and it’s a horrible way to make great strides, but it was kind of exciting to see the scale dip so low regardless.

Being in France made me realize how much healthier it is to be so obsessed with food:  if there were time for a relaxed, healthy lunch, if portions were a third of the size they are, if meals were eaten in courses and savored, how much healthier would all of us be?  Today I was running down the hall, chomping on my sandwich, thinking about what I was going to do next period, not really able to enjoy the sandwich, as tasty as it was (curry sausage on sliced sourdough with brown mustard and tomatoes), and it felt insane.  Why not the time to be able to sit, with a plate, and enjoy?  Insane.

Wish we were still there, tainted béarnaise sauce and all.

A Ritual Sacrifice. With Pie.

2006-11-22T16:17:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Thanksgiving, the Best Holiday Ever (Except for Halloween)! Thanks to crazy xenophobic puritans, Sarah Josepha Hale, Presidents Lincoln and FDR, and crazy overeager capitalists, we can devote a whole day to cooking, gluttony, and board games. Then we shop. It’s so…American.

I’ve been remiss in posting, putting up images, as well as actually dropping any weight. But I’ve mostly held fast, despite going back up over my ten percent goal by a pound.

Details about recent food exploits to follow this weekend, perhaps after the eating.

Mussels in Hooker Sauce

2006-10-19T08:46:00.000-07:00

After accomplishing my miraculous reaching of my 10% goal last week, I was a little fearful about this week’s weigh-in. Depending on which nanosecond you looked at the scale, I was either the same or down 2/10 of a pound. Either is fine with me.

This week is looking a little grim already: fewer opportunities to exercise, more eating. We had friends over last night and I went all out: mussels puttanesca—with bacon—a nice salad with pears, chévre, and rosemary hazelnuts, and awesome bread. They brought some nice desserts and we had a lovely time, but I was so full by the end, used up a bunch of discretionary points, and I know I’m going to want them later. It was delicious, though, and naturally I took no pictures.

Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup!

2006-10-12T17:29:00.000-07:00

The soup du jour (and likely the next couple of jours) is chicken lentil. Finely diced onions, celery, carrot, and jalapeño, the last of the turkey bacon sliced into ribbons, some chicken browned with fresh rosemary, green and yellow lentils, and fresh sage in chicken broth. Not too thick, not too thin. It’s fairly delicious, and since I can’t think of what would make it even better (except a lot more bacon!), I’m going to just say I like it.

10%

2006-10-10T21:55:00.000-07:00

I have two lovely words for you: ten percent! Woo hoo! After a year and a half, I bloody well made it!

Apparently the soup helped. So has, I am sure, upping my gym regimen and again doing lots of weight-bearing exercise. Prosy but true.

Yay, me!

Sunday Omelette

2006-10-08T13:07:00.000-07:00

At the same time I was working as a donut delivery gal, Levi’s ran a series of radio commercials hawking 501 jeans, featuring (I believe) original songs by different artists. One of them was by 4 Non Blondes, and you know, it was really good. Just Linda Perry and an acoustic guitar. It was the kind of commercial you look forward to hearing. I wish I could hear it again.

Breakfast: Potato, chèvre, red pepper & onion rouille omelette. It sounds better than it tasted.

Dashed Hopes, Inc.

2006-10-05T15:11:00.000-07:00

Still not to that elusive five-pound mark. I could tell you that it's been since approximately a year that I haven't lost it, but why would you believe me? It's preposterous, that's why. No one in their right mind would believe such a thing.

This week it's all about soup. I shall eat soup for dinner until it happens, and that is the truth.

Last night's soup: Sesame veggies with a sprinkle of rice. Not bad, but could have used some protein.

Bathsville

2006-09-26T11:25:00.000-07:00

We’ve been painting the bathroom.  It’s the color of bricks smashed into russet potatoes.  It’s taking a long time and we had to take the shower curtain down, so I’ve had to have baths the past couple of days.  I don’t mind too much.

I weigh in today.  I haven’t mentioned that in a while, though the news has been mostly good.  I’ll be more specific later.

Dinner last night:  Chicken and veggies in TJ’s korma simmer sauce with rice, and soy ice cream with chocolate sauce for dessert.

2006-09-19T18:13:00.000-07:00

Saturday
Saturday we went to a party, where I ate too much Mexican and then burped it up for the next day. Note to self: don’t eat Mexican! It just makes you unhappy later! Later that evening, we had dinner at Ken’s—oh, delicious pizza!—with a friend of Roland and his girlfriend, who were in town for the weekend. They stayed with us that night.

Sunday
Sunday morning the four of us went to Vita Café for breakfast, where I sensibly had potatoes—spicified—and fruit. That evening we grilled with some new friends we hadn’t seen in a long time, and some friends we’ve had the pleasure of seeing more recently, and they all brought delicious food and put us to shame. They brought over amazing dad-caught salmon, marinated in ginger and soy, steak from a real live dead cow, and delicious buttery miniature madeleine-style pastries with pistachios that she couldn’t remember the name of except that it was kind of like “financiers”, so that’s what we called them. I ate three.

Monday
Our friends generously donated all the leftovers from Sunday, so we’ve eaten very well since then. Monday night we ate dinner on the floor in front of the television as we watched the next disk of Lost. Dinner was a Blue Heron each and leftover salmon, eaten with our fingers.

Today (Tuesday)
Lunch today was eaten very early and consisted of leftover chicken from Sunday’s grill-fest—eaten sans cutlery. Today was also weigh-in day. In the spirit of last week’s success, I ate very little today and peed as much as I could before going to my meeting. This may fall under the TMI heading, but I don’t like to withhold.

And it worked okay: I am now, again, 12.8 ounces away from the 15-pound mark, a benchmark I have not yet achieved since I began this madness last July.

And dinner will likely be more leftover chicken. Chicken!

P.S. I had to return the Dr. Scholl’s boots. They were completely unwearable. And the others didn’t fit either. What’s with the baggy ankles, people? My calves may be large, but my ankles are svelte! Figure it out!

Lauro Kitchen

2006-09-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

We chose Lauro Kitchen for my birthday dinner because we hadn’t been there yet.  It’s not super fancy, but it’s definitely a place with a not-too-slick, kempt ambiance and solidly good food.  Let me tell you what we ate!

We went a little late, around eight o’clock, so we were both hungry already, and while we waited for a table (no reservations at Lauro), we sat at the bar and had drinks and some bread to stave off the fainting.  We each had one of the house cocktails: I had La Dolce Vita, which had gin, grapefruit, and limoncello (and was delicious, by the way, definitely a contender for Gin Day next year), and Roland had their sangria, which was infused with ginger and therefore out-of-the-ordinary and also delicious.

Lauro Kitchen is generous with the bread (which comes with lovely olive oil and shrivelly, salty olives), which is a blessing and a curse; however, it is definitely a blessing when it came to Roland’s appetizer, the mussels, which come served in individual clasp-closed metal dishes and have a gorgeous rich, tomatoey, sausage-soaked sauce (suitable for being sauced up by the bread).  They were fantastic.  My appetizer, plums stuffed with goat cheese and wrapped in pancetta, were also quite good, but Roland’s mussels won that competition.  We shared a half-pitcher of wine (not a carafe—they serve their wine in glazed earthenware pitchers, which is a nice touch), a white that I think was Spanish but I made Roland choose so I don’t remember what it was, but it was a good match, light and citrus-grapefruity.

Roland opted to try their paella (for all my searching over the summer, I still do not have a paellera, so we still haven’t started making it at home even though I have fava beans and some Spanish rice languishing in the starch drawer waiting to be made into paella), and I had one of the specials, ahi tuna served with green and wax beans, cooked with bacon and peaches and drizzled with balsamic.  Roland’s paella was tasty, but my tuna was exquisite.  I ordered it medium rare and the level of sear vs. raw was just perfect: just grilled enough on the outside to get a slight crust, but meaty and melty on the inside.  The green beans and wax beans with bacon were delicious as they should be, and the taste explosion was completed by the peaches, which wrapped up the trifecta of savory, sweet, and carbonized nicely.  It was totally simple but just delicious.  They don’t skimp on the portions either, though, so by the time we got halfway through our entrées I was getting seriously full.  I didn’t think I had room for dessert, but it’s not a birthday if one of us doesn’t pretend to go to the bathroom so we can ask the server to stick a candle in dessert, so Ro ordered the peach cobbler and we both had coffee.  He sang “Joyeux Anniversaire” and I ate more of the cobbler than I thought I could.  Even though it was advertised as a cobbler, it was more like a clafoutis, with brown sugar ice cream on top.  Again, just simple and delicious.

After dinner I was full for hours, all while we wandered around the TBA Festival, sipping free beer and socializing with studio-ites who had turned out to see the show.  It turned out that the show was wholly unwatchable, so we wound up outside in the beer garden, freezing on the first cold night of the season (welcome to autumn!) as we drank and chatted.  At least it had merits as a social event.  Around midnight we went home to celebrate both our unbirthdays and get started with some serious weekend relaxation.

What the heck are you looking at?

2006-09-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

Our new hobby is playing with the old Ricohflex. Out of the first roll we took, four pictures came out. This is one of them.

Today is my birthday, so there will be some good food to report on later! Tune back in tomorrow to see what kinds of things we ate at Lauro Kitchen this evening.

Rice Pudding. Delicious!

2006-09-11T13:58:00.000-07:00

I made coconut milk rice pudding last night, but the batch I made was only big enough for two smaller servings for us then, and one big one, which turned out to be lunch. It was good—I mean, how could you not cook together coconut milk, jasmine rice, orange zest, sugar, and milk, and have it not be good?—but it wasn’t the lunch of my dreams. At least there was fruit on top, which makes it more like food. I think I need something more substantial, though.

I didn’t have time for coffee this morning, either, which has thrown my day off a bit. How will I make it through the staff meeting?

Kudos to Shoes.com

2006-09-10T13:33:00.000-07:00

After finding the boots I ordered on Shoes.com at Nordstrom’s for $10 less, I sent an email to Shoes.com, and they immediately credited me for the difference per their “115% lowest price guarantee”, in which they will refund you 115% of the difference up to the price of the item if you find it for cheaper elsewhere. I’m not one to gush, but that’s great service!

Of Boots and Breakfast

2006-09-10T13:25:00.000-07:00

Dinner last night: sushi from Marinepolis. Highlights include the veggie roll and the strawberries with Hershey’s drizzled on top. Very Japanese.

Breakfast this morning: sausage, chèvre, onion, garlic, and pesto scramble on leftover hamburger buns, eaten outside on the deck in the almost-fall morning sunshine.

Recent boot purchase: Dr. Scholl’s Illusion boot from Shoes.com. We’ll see if it fits. I’m also going to check out this boot because they actually come in a wide-calf version.

I expect the best!

P.S. I figured out what "GS" stands for. Now I feel silly, but I know the limits of my memory at least. No more abbrevations for this girl!

Le Deuxième Sandwich

2006-09-08T14:09:00.000-07:00

Lunch today was the same sandwich as yesterday, only today I made it. (Roland packed lunches yesterday.) I also had two nectarines, an apple, and a peanut-butter cup from TJ’s. (I bought some to bring to advisory, and the kids actually seem to like them, or at least most of them do, which is nice. Sometimes they are weirdly picky.)

Happy Friday!

P.S. I just checked off the “Do GS stuff” item. Now I’ll be left to wonder what I have forgotten.

Goal Setter

2006-09-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

The produces aisles are brimming over with peaches and nectarines.  I think after cherries and grapes, nectarines are my third favorite fruit.  I’ll take a peach, but I prefer the slick, smooth skin of a nectarine over the quibbly fuzz of a peach.  We visited Fred’s last night when we realized that we had no real food in the house, and I bought nectarines.  One was my morning snack/breakfast, lunch was a tasty sourdough-pesto-chèvre-tomato sandwich, and my afternoon snack started at work with coffee—which I spilled on myself, a clue that I really needed to go home—and ended with three pieces of toast here at home, where I sit in exercise pants on the couch.  Hello, tasty carbohydrates!

Getting a Palm has changed my life—for the better!—but last night in a hazy, sleepy fit of must-write-down-things-to-do I wrote “Do GS stuff” in my Task list, and I have no idea what GS stands for.  Grandpa Simpson?  Great Scott?  Gimme Shelter?  Good Samaritan?  Gurgle Shurgle?  I woke up this morning, checked my to-do’s, and said, “Er?”

What chafes me most, beyond the fact that I don’t know what it is, is how vague it is.  I’m trying to get over that whole setting-impossible-and-imprecise goals thing, and my task list has been (perhaps overly) rigidly specific of late.  More tree, less foresty.  I’m tempted to just check it off; after all, if I don’t know what it is, I can’t do it, right?  But if I wrote it down, it must be important.  So I think it’s going to stay there for a couple of days.  Either I will remember what it stands for and do it, realize that I miswrote and it’s not “GS” at all, or it will turn out to be not important at all and I can simply point, check, and move on.

Haute Meal

2006-09-06T19:55:00.000-07:00

Inspired by watching Alton Brown at the gym, I made real honest-to-pete steel-cut oat oatmeal last night in the crockpot.  (I mean I was at the gym, watching Good Eats, an episode called "Oat Cuisine".  Funny guy, that Alton.  Alton Brown does not go to my gym.  I don’t think.)  I figured since it was the first day of school, I should make my morning less stressful by making a nutritious, hot breakfast that would be ready when I woke up.  If I had been really on top of it, I would have set the coffee timer too so I could have a potful of Stumptown’s Breakfast Blend gurgling away when Renée Montagne and Steve Inskeep and their ilk start a-yackin’.

Here’s what I put in it:

1 cup steel-cut oats
3 ½ cups water
1 cup whole milk
1 cup dried cherries
¼ cup dried pineapple, chopped
1 cup dried apricots, chopped

So here’s the skinny on the oatmeal.

Ups:  It was indeed done in the morning and the oatmeal was edible.  The fruit I put in made it sweet enough that I didn’t crave any extra sugar.  It was tasty enough and definitely nutritious, if not downright colon-busting.

Downs:  I should have used cranberries or blueberries or currants instead of the Turkish apricots I used, because the apricots were a little—I don’t know, bitter?  Earthy?  They were fine on their own, but their flavor became a lot more intense after being crocked for eight hours.  I also should have set the alarm clock about a half hour earlier, because for all my forethought I still was running around like an idiot in the morning, didn’t have time to enjoy a cup of coffee, much less breakfast, and wound up taking it all to work with me, still fifteen minutes late, as usual.  But I will totally do it again, sans apricots.

Two Bananas

2006-09-05T13:04:00.001-07:00

My classroom is a mess. Tomorrow is registration. I have so much to do between then and now. These are all trite statements that do not reveal how much panic I am starting to feel.

Last night we grilled food with friends (vegetable skewers, tomato-bread salad, and chicken kebabs) and watched Cannonball Run, projected up on the wall of their garden shed in 16 mm.

Food so far today: a café au lait and two bananas.

Day 4 of Labor Day Weekend: Potatoes & Inertia

2006-09-04T14:47:00.000-07:00

Last night we were lucky enough to receive an invite to friends’ house for homemade grilled chicken wings, tomato salad, grilled corn, and blueberry coffee cake. Everything was delicious, the company lively, and we had a lovely time. They sent us home with some leftover homemade mint chutney mixed with sour cream, which we had eaten with the wingfest. I made oven fries that turned out very well, possibly the best batch yet, and we had them with ketchup and chutney for breakfast.

It’s the last day of quote unquote freedom. I read The History of Love yesterday at my neighbor’s behest. I enjoyed it until the last seven pages.

Day 3 of Labor Day Weekend: Who Knows What the Day Will Bring!

2006-09-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

It’s Sunday.  Sunday, in my opinion, is the worst day of the week.  At least we have coffee.  And milk.  Each without the other is useless.

We’re sitting in the living room, paying bills and trying to figure out what we’re doing today.  It may involve very prosaic things like buying tires and getting oil changes.

I have made a big switch and cancelled my current membership at WestCoast and joined 24 Hour Fitness.  While I’m not thrilled about going in league with a huge chain-gym that has dynamically-posed photographs of extremely fit people looking happy everywhere, they have a nice new building down in Hollywood, pretty good classes, and they’re cheaper than my current gym.  Updates as events warrant.

Day 2 of Labor Day Weekend: Gin Day!

2006-09-03T11:18:00.000-07:00

Saturday was Gin Day.  Gin!  Gin!  Gin!

Desiring a substantial but light base upon which to build the layers of Gin Day, we made breakfast coffee and toast with hummus and cream cheese (not together) and slices of tomato on top.  These were the last of the dips from the party.  I keep thinking that we’ve managed to eat all of the leftovers, but then I realize that we still have bean dip, crudités, and something unidentifiable in tuppers in the fridge.

Gin Day was fantastic.  Highlights included the French 75, a big favorite from last year, and the Kismet, which includes gin, fresh mint, and ginger beer.  The giñatas were also well received, the detritus from which no doubt is still littering Stacy’s porch.  Erm.  We also managed to lose almost all of the shuttlecocks during a spirited and dangerous game of badminton.  It was proposed that the Kismet be renamed the Shuttlecock, with all participants who were actually paying attention to the drunken ramblings voting “Aye”.

Happy Gin Day!

Day 1 of Labor Day Weekend: Edgefield

2006-09-03T11:07:00.000-07:00

Friday of Labor Day Weekend contained lots of good food. Having no coffee in the house, we elected to go out to breakfast at the Tin Shed so we could at least drink coffee while we were waiting for a table. I had the Fetch, no biscuit, and Roland had the Good Dog, with a biscuit, and their coconut-rice pudding with mango. Delicious.

After running errands—getting me a piece of particle board to use at school as a cutting board—and ogling other people’s porches to get ideas, we drove out to Edgefield, where one can drink in multiple locations. We tasted some wine, experimented with the Ricohflex, ate some barbecue, poked around, made a misguided visit to the outlet stores (Worst. Outlets. Ever.), stopped by the river and waded around in the water, and came home. I grilled the last real food we had in the house, drank the last of the rum punch from our party last week, and slept very badly.

The Blue Nile

2006-08-31T16:26:00.000-07:00

We ate at the Blue Nile last night. It’s an Ethiopian place on Broadway. I had put off going there for the longest time because every single review—at least the ones on CitySearch—complained about the fact that the TV is always on, which made it sound like they didn’t have a lot of atmosphere going on, but I needed to eat something spicy and it came up and there it was. And you know, it was great.

The place is very hole-in-the-wally, in a good way. Eating there felt like being in your foreign friend’s parents’ basement that they’d painted with really bright white paint and cleaned it up, and they bring you food and play the TV upstairs. Awesome food. I totally scarfed down the Blue Nile Combination, and it’s lucky that Roland is fast because he could’ve lost a finger easily in the mess of chicken, lentils, peas, and injera. They had good beers, the prices were okay, and if they had to play the TV, at least Scrubs was on.

Recent Food Exploits

2006-08-08T11:58:00.000-07:00

I have neglected to mention recent food exploits, a shame of the dirty variety.  Highlights include the crêpes I made this weekend, the batter for which which lasted through Sunday. They came out very thin and crispy, which was delicious, and we stuffed them with a variety of ingredients, including bananas, chocolate, strawberry preserves, apples, and cheddar.

I also made a casserole thing that was kind of like a bolognese sauce covered with mashed potatoes and baked.  Or maybe it was like lasagna without noodles.  It was pretty tasty, regardless.

I have also been working on my Bloody Mary recipe for AngelFest this weekend.  I made one last night that was pretty fantastic.  It’s not a drink I’d ever think I would like, but as my tastes have changed and matured I have to say I enjoy it muchly.  I think there’s something about being able to chomp on olives and pickled veggies as an accompaniment to an alcohol drink that I enjoy very much.  Two of my favorite things, in the same drink!

As far as eating out goes, we have recently been to 5th Quadrant; we shared their portabella mushroom thing, I had a small chopped salad, and the honey had the clams.  Then we went next door and picked out some chocolates from Pix and took them home to have with a little glass of red wine.  Delicious.

The Cats May Starve

2006-08-07T15:32:00.000-07:00

The boots were not good.  They have gone back.  Their toe was lacking in character.  They did fit nicely, and I could zip them up, which puts them several steps up above most boots.

I have been watching episodes of Mad About You.  It is a guilty pleasure, much like Sex and the City for some or The Golden Girls for others.  Mad About You is now doubly significant for me because Steve Paymer—you know, David Paymer’s brother?—is a co-producer.  This is only amusing if you are a total dork of the Angel-watching variety.  As I am.

I went out and managed to buy extraneous ingredients for Bloody Marys, but forgot the cat food. (Maries?  Either way looks wrong.)  Bad kitty mom!

Leftover Barbecue

2006-08-03T13:01:00.000-07:00

I slept way in and ate six-day old barbecue leftovers sandwich at eleven-thirty. A hollowed-out roll, nayonaise, ketchup, and leftover grilled chicken-apple sausage, onions, eggplant, and zucchini. The sausage tasted like cinnamon, which was not good. The sandwich was okay, though.

Oooh! Ooh! My new boots are here! The UPS guy just drove up. Off to try them on!

Shrimpy

2006-08-01T21:53:00.000-07:00

Down again, if ever so slightly…

Had a fantastic salad with shrimp, arugula, and couscous. Not much else to report. Have slid into sloth as summer edges into August and my freedom starts trickling away. Where has all my drive gone? I did clean out the front closet and have made the bed every single day for days, however.

Lukas Rossi is freaky looking. And the guys in Supernova are simply asshats. Why am I watching this tripe?

Eleven

2006-07-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

When you don’t have an espresso machine at home, a hand blender works pretty well to make impromptu foam.  I am having an impromptu cappuccino while the honey is away at SIGGRAPH and watching the kitten chase a piece of paper across the floor.

I looked at my records, and it’s been just over a year since I started this project—July 5th was the date I started in 2005.  Hardly close to my goal, I still feel accomplished in having solidly lost eleven pounds and kept them off.  Eleven.

My goal of hitting my final goal by December still holds; however, the stats are not terribly encouraging, so I’ve changed my graphical representation above to represent my ten percent goal instead.  I’ll worry about the next step when I get there.  It’s incredibly frustrating when I think about how close I was to my ten percent goal—I mean, I was less than a pound away on more than one occasion.  That’s just ridiculous.  And now, if I reached my ten percent by the start of school I would be content.

I know that it’s far more sensible to change slowly because it’s more realistic and sustainable, but I can’t help but feel that my progress is not so much slow and sustainable than it is reluctant and pig-headedly slow.

Tom Yum

2006-07-21T10:25:00.000-07:00

Out of shock and shame I have not sat down to note my progress in a week—until today, because I managed to drop the two pounds I put on during our recent visitors’ stay and am quite happy to be somewhere close to on track, even though I’ve managed to gain overall this summer, rather than the opposite, as I had hoped.

It was going to be so great!  I was going to spend leisurely hours at the gym, cook things with whole grains and vegetables and fruit, work at home, and gracefully arc toward my goal.

This, obviously, did not happen.  However, I do still have half the summer, and I do still intend to meet my goal by the time of our trip in December.  I have registered for two PE classes in fall—dance and weight training—and I’ve reinvigorated my gym routine with some strength training courtesy of a couple of fitness podcasts.

I also made tom yum last night, not that I wanted to eat hot soup when they’re saying it’s going to be over a hundred degrees, but it sounded good, and I had the ingredients from my trip to Uwajimaya last week.  I used this recipe, but I added chicken and used sliced japapeños instead of the really fiery Thai chilies. It was so easy—and delicious!  Now that I’ve made it and know where all those fantastic flavors come from, I’ll think twice about paying $8 for a carton at Thai Noon (though theirs is better than mine).

And I have leftovers for lunch!

Mushy Can Be Good

2006-07-13T10:03:00.000-07:00

After not checking in for two weeks, what have I learned? I have learned that I can’t check in for two weeks and expect to like the results. Harumph.

But disappointing numbers aside, things are okay. Lunch today is oatmeal with dried cherries, banana, and some maple syrup. New technique: when cooking oatmeal, throw the frozen bananas that wind up in the freezer because they got too ripe and when am I going to make frickin’ banana bread anyway? in the boiling water, get ‘em mushy, and voila, banana oatmeal, cleaner freezer! Take that, Martha!

While the Cat is Away

2006-06-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

I’m on my own for the week while the honey is in L.A., until Friday.  This means it’s way easier to go to the gym in the morning.  And I get to have the kitties all to myself.  And I’m going to be very happy to see him on Friday because I’ll be way lonesome by then.

I went into work today, the first day of no school.  I didn’t get quite as much done as I thought I might, but at least my room is mostly on its way to being clean.

Lunch: Thai seafood soup from New Seasons.  Very coconut milk-y, but tasty.

On Watching the Opening Ceremony of Match #25

2006-06-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

What’s up with the frickin’ American team? Lamely mouthing the words to the national anthem—or, in the case of that one guy, just standing there, eyes closed, like they’re getting ready to throw up? At least the Italians appear to know the words to their own national anthem, which, I’m guessing, was not composed to the tune of a drinking song.

Not that that’s not cool.

Crepes

2006-06-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

We had a late snack and played Yahtzee at Le Happy after seeing Banlieue 13 at the Fox Tower. I had their version of a Long Island iced tea, which is called the Bucket, and the honey had—at my prompting—a drink called the Here Kitty, which was pink and frothy. His crêpe had salad with gorgonzola, pear, and walnuts, and mine had chèvre and caramelized onions—not enough chèvre, too much onion.

Banlieue 13 was fun enough. Escape from New York with parkour in Romania trying to look like dystopian French suburbs. You know.

The Little Car Goes Vroom Vroom

2006-06-15T18:59:00.000-07:00

I didn’t quite get around to posting on Tuesday due to it being the end of the year and all, but here you go.  Look, another week in the same range!  It’s amazing!

Anyway, enough of the snark.  I’ve been neither flex nor core this week thus far; I’ve been just trying to get my summer work off to a good start.  And strangely, it seems to be working pretty well.  If I’m busy and happy with my work, I don’t freak out with food, and that will allow me to get off to a good start, and when things settle down I’ll be able to cook to my heart’s content.

Lunch today: School potluck with a surprisingly good spread.  Barbecue, homemade on the premises!  Plus, fourteen kinds of salad, rice krispie treats, and cupcakes!

I’m off to the gym, after Cash Cab. I’m winning.

Ten Things

2006-06-12T10:25:00.000-07:00

Again with the slacking!  Worst. Food. Blogger. Ever.  But let me sum up the twelve days since my last post:

1. Not really keeping track of much of anything.  I am counting the days until school is out so that I can spend all of my extra time making healthful things from whole grains and vegetables in order to achieve goal.

2. Aladdin’s Café, the new Lebanese place on 33rd, near Foodzilla, is pretty awesome.  And close enough for us to walk to!

3. The elk burgers that we got at the farmer’s market were fantastic.  They’ve been oxymoronically burning a hole in our freezer, and we finally grilled them last night.  Awesome.

4. Lemon-ricotta stuffed raviolis from Pastaworks.  Saying nothing more, because nothing more needs to be said.

5. I’ve been really into the idea of rice dishes recently, and I really think we need a new rice cooker, and this is the one that does so much I don’t need it, but I covet it nonetheless: the Zojirushi NS-JCC18 Neuro Fuzzy 10-Cup Rice Cooker & Warmer.

6. Looking forward to World Cup fun with friends this Sunday when Brazil plays Australia, though since I am lacking the gene that allows one to truly understand sports—or any kind of strategy at all—it’s mostly going to be for the yelling and drinking.  And as far as I can tell, they both wear yellow on top, which it not going to make it any easier at all, what with all the running around.

7. Had good eats with my sister and brother-in-law when they visited last weekend, especially at Siam Society out on their back patio.

8. Also looking forward to Buffy on the big screen tonight at the Mission.

9. There are a ton of pictures that I have taken of food still holed up in my camera.  Gotta get those out of there.

10. Three more days of students!

She's Gone Wacky!

2006-05-30T20:51:00.000-07:00

How do you know when you’ve gone wacky?  When you have weighed your jeans to find out how much weight you really gained over a two-week span.  Wanna know how much mine weigh?  1.475 pounds.  Wanna know how much I was up?  3.6.  That makes 2.125 total.  Kind of.  Damn it.

But this is no surprise, really.  It’s just sobering, that’s all.  It’s back to Flex again this week, and I’m off to the gym.  Really.  I’ve been putting it off for about two hours now, but I’m rarin’ to go.  Look at me go.

Wait, I’m still sitting here.

Oh well.  The major achievement of the weekend—the long, uninterrupted gray weekend—was finally going to Nordy’s to get fitted for a bra.  By someone else!  Just as one might surmise if you happen to watch Oprah, I was wearing the wrong size.  I thought I was a 36C, but apparently I am a 34D.  Not a huge difference, but the difference between my previous bras and the one I just bought is like the difference between Jell-O pudding and chocolate mousse.  I feel fantastic.  Two pounds heavier, but fantastic nonetheless.

Overdue

2006-05-27T13:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I lied. I didn't go Thursday—life got in the way, in the form of a very pleasurable alternative, a dinner with friends. I did go to the gym. Yesterday I did not. Today I will. But first, shopping!

Apathy & Chocolate

2006-05-24T15:39:00.000-07:00

Erm, oops. My ambivalence has seemingly become apathy. I didn’t go to weigh in last night! I will go Thursday. Promise.
I did, however, have a marvelous little dessert at the new Pix Patisserie in NoPo to celebrate a friend’s birthday. I had two candies, one chocolate with Earl Grey and the other chocolate with essences of rosemary and a port reduction. Oh. My. God. So fantastic. I may insist we go back very soon just so I can taste more. With wine this time.

Karaoke + Drinking = Greasy Food

2006-05-22T23:42:00.000-07:00

Whatta week. Did I make good choices? You betcha! Did I also choose to drink two and a half beers and two mai-tais at The Alibi on Saturday night, followed by a very greasy sandwich at Holman’s? Again, affirmative. I admit, I got nervous that I was going to have to sing. But the honey took that bullet for me and I was merely drunk. Is tomorrow going to be a total wash? Again, yup.

I am continuing to perfect my potato technique. I think that I am finding that thin slicing—about a ¼ inch—and steaming instead of boiling are two ingredients of success. Another is leaving them the hell alone just longer than I think I should so that they can get a little black.

Dinner: A simple salad of greens, tomato, and avocado, and the aforementioned potatoes, with garlic, fresh rosemary, chicken sausage, and roasted peppers.

Just Move It Along, Pal

2006-05-17T15:37:00.000-07:00

Nothing exciting to see here, just move along. Down again, a total of 1.8, another obvious fluke. Exasperated, I? You betcha. If this is the path to success, then apparently I should drink a lot, stay up too late, and eat fries from Oba every week.

So far today: a banana, two hard-boiled eggs (honk!), and some three-bean salad salad. I’m kind of hungry, actually, and I think a snack is in order. That—and a big fat cocktail to allay the lingering irritability from a day full of über-obnoxiousness. Cheers!

Allergic to the World

2006-05-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

My consumables for the day were rivetingly Core until I went down the hall and dug two peanut butter chocolate eggs out of my co-worker’s drawer. An orange in the morning, and for lunch a salad of lettuce, tomato, avocado, and tuna. Alarming.

I really want to do well this week, but I just feel awful: something has started spreading its pollen everywhere and I feel like I’m walking uphill all the time with a cold. I can’t breathe, my breath is short, and my nose is starting to get raw from the blowing and the wiping. All I want is to feel normal.

Bleah bleah, bleah bleah bleah

2006-05-02T22:29:00.000-07:00

Up another 6/10ths. Bleah bleah, bleah. Dinner: a salad of red-leaf lettuce with green peppers, avocado, tomato, and chicken, with a potato.

Big Fat Whatever

2006-05-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

We had some great food this weekend.  On Saturday we had croissants and coffee at Ken’s for breakfast, and then went to the farmers’ market at PSU and bought all kinds of delicious things, among them elk burgers, which we will enjoy when the folks are here next weekend (not because we didn’t intend to eat them, but because we had so much good food there wasn’t time to eat it all), fancy stinky cheese, steamer clams, butter lettuce, gouda, dried cherries, chipotle pesto, and three tomato plants (not for eating).  Yum!

Have I been tracking?  No.  Have I been keeping to Core?  Not really.  Will I be alarmed when I step on the scale tomorrow?  Not necessarily but likely.  Do I care right now?  Not really, but if I stopped lying to myself, kind of.

Dinner: corn tortillas spread with avocado, popcorn, salad, and a glass of white wine.

Unholding My Breath

2006-04-23T16:43:00.000-07:00

Down again this week, blah blah blah.  It’s finally gorgeous outside, and while I am officially done holding my breath, I have not quite lost my optimism.  This is week four of Core coming to a close on Monday, and I think I’m ready to keep giving it a go.

Last night we went to see the Livewire Wordstock show.  It was pretty fantastic, and an eclecticly fabulous lineup of performers, including our talented friend Stacy.  I blew Core entirely by eating a grilled cheese sandwich—so not Core—and drinking a fair amount.  Yet last week I dropped two pounds still eating a crapload of Peeps and drinking multiple gin and tonics, so we’ll just see about that.

I’ve been experimenting with potatoes.  Today’s experiment was another take on a potato pancake, which was good with garlic, bad with uncooked saffron.  Next weekend I’m going back to slicing and boiling.  No more grating.