Being a Maker

Good people, I am alive.

2011-01-08T03:19:00.002-06:00

Among other gifts which amazed me and did make me feel known and loved, Noah and I received FOUR blankets for Christmas: two beautiful crocheted blankets from his aunt, in light and dark browns and oranges; and two down-filled throws from my parents, one of which is also lined with long-pile fleece. Noah gave me new slippers among other things; they are amazing, with their nice tassels and rubber soles that keep me from slipping. I bought myself a new down vest a bit before the holidays; it also keeps me very warm.

This is all to say, I am warmer than last year. It involves a lot of blankets and down, but I am indeed warmer.

There's been knitting, editing, some consideration of possibly writing again, great joy in helping a dear friend settle into Seattle, much meditation on apartment-tinkering and furniture rearranging. A lot of cooking. Does anyone else cook between 6-10 servings of food three times in three days and then not cook for many days onward? I'm a little tired of the vaguely New Orleans-spiced Hoppin' John, but it's still here, and I have been eating it, along with the curried lentils with raisins and the garbanzo-potato-spinach soup thickened with tahini and cream. But I made a broccoli frittata yesterday ANYWAY, and a rosemary olive oil cake with dark chocolate bits today ANYWAY.

Also job searching, reflections on injury and pain levels (on that front: things are better than they were at the worst, but they are very much still nerve-damaged, nerve-impinged, inflamed, and muscle-weakened, and none of that seems to be changing of its own accord or of my own accord). For a while I had a bit more pain relief from a medication I was taking for post-shingles nerve pain, but that medication also gave me brain fog, typing errors, heavy distraction, and effectively cut my editing pages per hour rate in half. Working twice as slow is a different pain. The whole process made me very aware of how extremely detail-oriented and demanding developmental editing is--I love doing it, and my clients say I do it well, and I'm glad for that, but man, I didn't really understand how much of my focus it takes over. It takes it all over, because I'm simultaneously thinking about the word, the clause, the sentence, the paragraph, the section, the chapter, the whole manuscript, and the writer's stated goals, all at the same time. While copyediting as well. Self, I give you more credit than I used to. However, this is also why brain-fogging pain meds will never work for me.

In closing: I have been thinking very often of my friend Ryan, from college, who died suddenly this fall of a brain aneurysm. We hadn't been in touch for six years when he found me on Facebook in August and wrote me a quick note to say hi. We wrote back and forth a little; it was absolutely wonderful to be hearing from him, this person I'd been very close to a very long time ago. Then my grandmother died, and I went to St. Louis, and after a few weeks, I found out he had died. He died a week after he and I wrote each other for the last time. It's still shocking, the way it unfolded.

The highlight reel of our friendship goes like this: we meet the first day of college and proceed to begin scheduling classes together; he gets me to start listening to more bands than the Grateful Dead and Counting Crows; we give honest feedback on each other's writing; we start a knitting group with other mutual friends because we are first-year students and we are so cool that we make dinner and knit together in the dorm lounge on Saturday nights; I cut his hair a few times, and so begin my years of free, untrained haircuts for men; he loans me a suit and hat so I can cross-dress as James Joyce for a presentation in my modern lit class, complete with an eyeliner moustache; we go on a giant road trip with nine other people to Colorado for four and a half days in late February, two of which we spend driving nonstop, and at the end of the trip, we try to go through a car wash and get his convertible stuck spinning out in the Iowa snow for what seems like forever; we go see his friend's band the night of my great-grandmother's death, and I dance my heart out, because that's somehow the right thing to be doing, and he gets it; when I'm grieving for her hardcore and don't know what to do with myself, he convinces me to go on walks and drives in the Iowa hills; we dance a lot of swing together with friends; we fight; we grow apart; he tries to get us closer again, and I push him away for reasons I will always regret; I wake up to how dumb I've been and try to make it up to him, and he accepts, and we find a simple peace again; our college puts on The Laramie Project, and he acts in it--Westboro Baptist comes to our campus to protest, and our college stages a counter-protest, and it's touching but very anti-climactic--his acting is amazing, and I'm so proud of him, and he's so glad to see me there, and we're just two friends again, supporting each other's creative work with fervor. Then I graduate, and we go very separate directions, and I think of him and wish him well, and I look for him online sometimes, when I have this feeling that he's having trouble with drugs and booze again, and I never find him. And then he finds me. And then he dies.

A few days ago, I dreamed that he and I were hanging out in the present time, and he was laughing. Everything was great and happy. And then I woke up, and the rest of the day was very dark. Because it will never be like that, and the world is really missing out on this person with a great laugh and talent and kindness.

And so, dear readers, all of us flung far away from each other now, I wish you well, safe, healthy, happy. I wish I could be enjoying your company up close. If you've stuck with this blog through its droughts, there's a good chance I know exactly who you are, and so--know that I value you very much. I wish I could bake us all cookies and make tea and laugh together. I want you to feel loved by the world and to know the world needs you in it. I have a highlight reel for all of you, even if there are months or years of silence between us. You matter more than I can say.

What Blog?

2010-10-18T13:46:00.002-05:00

Oh, right. This one.

I am indeed alive. I am indeed still in Seattle, steeling myself for the imminent seven to eight months of light rainy mist without sun. I am brainstorming ways to insulate this apartment, which has no insulation in the roof or the walls--thanks, 1907 home builders of Seattle--and currently those plans include that window-sealing stuff, hanging curtains and quilts strategically, and not being at home. Being at home last winter was a mistake, a horrible mistake, when there are something like six coffee/tea/chocolate/vegan doughnut shops within a half-mile radius of my house.

Seattle is a beautiful place that I am very much coming to love, though I miss insulated homes, sharp seasonal weather changes, a lower cost of living, and hills with less than 20% grade roads.

What have I been up to? Editing, entertaining various beloved houseguests, dealing with the aftermath of the death of two loved ones, traveling to the Midwest for a very hectic almost three weeks--during which I realized that I now live in a heaven of vegetarian food offerings, but I did not grow up in one or go to college in one.

Writing? Yarn dyeing? Huh? Soon.

Sick Girl Eats Beans, Lives

2010-05-12T19:27:00.002-05:00

Getting better. A little bit. Currently not so much better. But, damn it, I am going to meet up with the knitters tonight. I am. They're meeting at a chocolate shop, for god's sake. I've missed them for two weeks, which means my face-to-face social contact has been 1) Noah, 2) Noah's company party, complete with 1.5 hours of swing dancing (which I paid for with exhaustion), 3) A Mariners game with some friends, with the best seats ever, and sadly a 0-8 score, and 4) clerks at grocery stores and the yarn store where I bought wool wash.

Made a giant pot of beans yesterday. Was so excited. I cannot overstate my love of beans and crock pots.

VEGETARIAN BLACK BEANS

4-6 servings, with lots of liquid--quasi-soup, quasi-consistency of canned beans. I put them over brown rice as they are. But you could eat them as thick soup. Or use a slotted spoon to get them out.

Day before:
Soak 2 cups of dry black beans. Sort before soaking.

Day of:
Drain beans. Rinse.

Put beans in large crock pot. Add 8 c. water. Add 1 chopped onion, 1 chopped bell pepper, 1/2 c. tomatoes (sauce, diced, whatever), 1/2 t. cumin, 1-2 chopped jalapenos or chipotles in adobo sauce. Or something else hot--seriously, people, this is a giant vat of beans. You can do this. Stir it.

Cook on high 4-6 hours.

Add 1-2 T. red wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar. Add at least 1 t. salt. Maybe more. Salt to taste, is what I mean, and keep in mind there is no other salt in this recipe so far.

Eat it, because nothing else could possibly be as easy or delicious or cheap or nutritionally sound.

Top with cheddar cheese, or goat cheese--goat would be awesome. Or don't top it. Or top it with a drizzle of olive oil.

(No crock pot? Do the same thing, but put it in a big pot instead. Bring to a boil on the stove, cover, simmer for 2 hours.)

In Which This Blog Returns to A Sole Focus on Illness

2010-04-25T16:09:00.004-05:00

Shingles. Really? Shingles? Really. Not only did I have lice for the second time when I was 21, I now get chickenpox for the second time at age 26. (I know lice doesn't work like a dormant virus. I do know that. But it's the spirit of the thing, and the bizarre fact that I apparently got lice from riding the bus in Champaign, with my super long hair at the time.)

Anyway. The shingles has decided to take over the right side of my upper body, especially the neck, shoulder, upper chest, and right arm. Which is also where the damage from my repetitive stress injury is greatest, which is making for some weird perceptions of pain and numbness. Really weird. I had soreness in my neck and shoulder a week ago but didn't think anything of it--I am often sore there. I am getting intermittent stabbing, burning pain in my right arm--which is also not that new, just now has a new cause. And today, I woke up after 12 hours of sleep (plus a three-hour nap and 12 hours of sleep yesterday) feeling ... weak. And numb. Weak and numb enough that I asked Noah to bring me food to eat before I left the bed (yay oatmeal and blueberries!). I felt a little better then, and got out of bed, and have made it to the couch with the lappy, where I expect to hang out until I nap again and go to bed again, while taking 400 mg of an antiviral drug at four-hour intervals, five times a day.

So, knitting! Right? Not the lace knitting I've been doing, not the sock knitting either, but knitting with some bulky CashSoft I dyed for my uncle with the goal of making him mitts to wear while he does his woodworking business.

Knitting with hand-dyed bulky yarn in an easy pattern is definitely the thing for sick people to do. I mean, 3 stitches in stockinette to an inch. Really. I made one mitt over like three hours of knitting. Yay, size 10 bamboo double-pointed needles, and a nearby man-sized hand model to try them on (Noah).

Complications of shingles: inability to do anything except sit upright, sleep, and maybe knit with bulky yarn. And maybe read online. Also: contagious to pregnant women, young children, and people who haven't had chicken pox. So, now, before people come to our apartment, I ask them if they've had chicken pox. What an ice breaker. Also: Noah's company is hosting a cocktail party with jazz on Saturday, which I am/was excited to attend with him--fancy and dancing! Whee! Problem: crusted-over or weeping sores on neck, upper body, and arms, which is, you know, the realm of the cocktail dress. I'm working on that. I am hoping to feel better enough then to go. But that may not happen either.

Um, I'm going to put my head back down now.

House Tour, Or, Why I Feel Like I Live on a Farm

2010-04-15T16:38:00.012-05:00

Welcome to our home.

I thought you might need some photographic evidence of our urban-farm life.

"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd ... "

And maybe you've never seen a chicken before?

This is a loud, angry chicken.

Angry because I wouldn't let her out in the yard to roam, catch worms, and take dust baths.

But she laid me an egg anyway. At this point, it is still warm. Like body temperature warm.

Anyway, what else have I been up to?

Dyeing yarn.

Making wild-yeast-only whole wheat sourdough baguettes.

And generally hanging out in the kitchen.

What about you?

A Cautionary Tale

2010-04-13T16:18:00.003-05:00

Looking for an (apparently) surefire way to trigger all your latent/not so latent repetitive stress injuries? Here you go.

Day 1: do yoga, including one downward dog pose (as in, put most your body's weight on your hands and bent wrists) and a few triangle poses.
Day 2: do yoga again, including one downward dog and a few modified cobra poses. Continue to do lots of dishes, yank at your sourdough starter, browse the internet, type a little, then manhandle two of the giant (3' by 2', maybe), badly made plywood drawers in your kitchen which are currently full of your heaviest pots and pans. Don't think, "Hmm, maybe I shouldn't pull on this so hard; maybe I shouldn't lift this entire plywood box of a drawer full of heavy things out." Instead, think, "It is so important that I do this right now! So important! Keep going." Reach in an odd way with your left arm. Trigger giant throbbing pain shooting out of your neck, into your shoulder, down your bicep, and down your forearm. Try again with your right arm, because you are that dumb. Trigger pain again in right arm. Breathe through it, try again, reach and fix the thing you wanted to fix, then lift the drawer back into the slot mostly with your knees (it was a weird maneuver). Collapse a bit, realize you are now in great pain in both arms. Realize the pain is getting worse.

Make a brief list of the things you can do without using your arms. Jump into a hot bath with epsom salts. Watch Project Runway. Vow to not be so dumb. Stop typing.

Don't Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight

2010-04-08T12:15:00.004-05:00

Or wear high-heeled boots to the farm, or make a sourdough starter the week before Passover, et cetera.

Welp, nobody bought yarn at the thing I went to last night. The yarn was petted by many people, however (good job, merino/silk blend!), and the colors were admired by many people, too. It became clear once I got there, though, that everyone else was selling yarn from their own stashes, yarns that were maybe 10-20 years old, commercially spun and dyed, weird old yarns, for very cheap. The woman closest to me was selling for $1 a ball. A DOLLAR.

I was not selling my yarn for a dollar. I was selling it for, you know, a real price that reflected the quality of the base yarn and my time in dyeing it by hand. So, no sales. No takers for my business cards, either.

But I will not lose hope! Okay, last night, I kind of did. But mostly because I'm not used to failure (how conceited does that sound? Goodness.) because of ... the perfectionism. I just don't do things I won't do well. Honestly. I'm working on it. I'm ready to no longer be a person who says, "I'm afraid to do that one thing I love (job, whatever it is) because I love it so much and I might not be good at it/it might not work out." I have been that person for a long time, and I feel pretty dumb about it. I mean, how much longer am I going to make myself wait before I do things, make things, try things that I want? A year? Ten years? Never?

And how much more of life is there? Segue: morbid thoughts. People die, people get hurt, people develop diseases, other life-altering things happen, and suddenly, there is no chance, there is no time, no money, no arm strength left to chop onions for dinner (remember that one last year? good times), and ... nothing to show for it.

So, new strategy: rely on the fact that I am smart enough to learn how to do whatever I want to do, stubborn enough to set my mind on a giant goal and make it happen (see: senior art show of 80 ceramic tiles made in three weeks, fired [without a bisque firing, which is beyond flirting with disaster] two days before the show opened), and good enough at translating the images in my mind to objects or words that, eventually, I can make things look how I want them to look ... that I can learn to ask for help, learn to listen to my body's limitations, learn to try and fail and try again.

Whew, that kind of turned into a manifesto. And, in the spirit of manifestos:

"Come, my friends!" I said. "Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness."

We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel — a guillotine knife — which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. "Smell," I exclaimed, "smell is good enough for wild beasts!"

(Just ignore the parts about war forever, getting rid of feminism, and hating on museums.)

Now, Put Together a Business in Three Days

2010-04-05T14:58:00.004-05:00

Wednesday night will be the first chance I have to sell my hand-dyed yarns in person, to people I don't know, and specifically to a group of enthusiastic local knitters. I completely forgot the Seattle Knitters Guild was hosting this "fiber frenzy" event, but they are, and since I'm a member, I can sell there.

But, but, but. I only have seven skeins that I've dyed on hand. If I count literally everything, I have six skeins of undyed yarn on hand. I don't have hang tags, I don't have an etsy shop up and running, and while I've claimed a blog for the yarn company, I don't have any posts on it either. And, of course, I have some freelance editing to do today.

Essentially I am completely overwhelmed and scatterbrained and trying really hard to focus on some very important editing work, when really, I would like to be making hang tags, reskeining things I've dyed, skeining out things I haven't dyed, creating blog posts, creating an etsy shop, applying for a business license, and generally already having all of this together. But no! Instead, everything is exactly as organized as it usually is in my life, and I am working at the pace I always work out when it comes to creative work--long contemplation period, short frenetic working period.

Thank goodness we have leftovers galore, from the seder and from a giant vat of lentil soup I made last week. Expect photos. And think diligent thoughts for me.

Seder and Table Complete

2010-04-04T18:32:00.006-05:00

I thought you should see this.

The table and benches are done. The seder was fun, delicious, full of remembrance.

And now, back to the relaxing.

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Edging Tool

2010-04-01T12:05:00.004-05:00

So, I'm about to (try to) finish painting our kitchen white. I'm not working on the should-be-black-but-is-actually-purple trim. I'm not working on the cabinets, which also need new paint, but maybe on the back splashes.

But I really want to be painting and stenciling our bathroom. Like this, vaguely. I have mid-tone blue paint, the bathroom has black/purple trim that I'll paint new black, we have weird white half-tiled walls on the bottom ... I don't know if I'll actually make it to stenciling, though. I keep thinking there must be some easy negative stencil to use, since the walls are already white, that I could put up and then roll blue over ... but ... that sounds hard. And like I'd have to make my own stencil. And maybe just painting it blue would be enough. Then I would hang art/posters in there and be happy sitting in my giant clawfoot tub. Right? Maybe.

Yesterday I finished sealing the table and benches. I am exhausted. But I am ambitious! There is more to do before the seder on Saturday! Cooking, cleaning, painting, cooking. We aren't even cooking that much; I just haven't started, so I feel behind--stock, matzo balls, hummus, beef (that's Noah), chilled citrus-broccoli salad, fro yo, chocolate matzo crunch, roasted rhubarb citrus compote.

Maybe I will also plant succulent cuttings from the front yard in the kitchen windowbox. Surely I will need to go outside for some fresh air at some point, though we do have the zero-VOC paint, so it doesn't give me an immediate migraine.

Also, I still haven't made yogurt successfully since moving to Seattle. What happened? At least the chickens love eating yogurt. Seriously.

And we bought new napkins yesterday, and I am so happy, because they are one of my favorite blues and one of my favorite greens.

So, what does painting mean? It means listening to This American Life and Mates of State on repeat.

WHAT IS UP MY FRIENDS

2010-03-25T17:13:00.004-05:00

At least that's what they say on qwantz.com. And I've always wanted to be as cool as those dinosaurs.

Guess where I was headed, here?

The grocery store, five blocks away.

Since it hurts to lug things with my arms, I carry them on my back. And since the best bag I have for back-carrying is my internal frame pack from Arc'teryx, the one I bought in the Tetons and promptly carried 30 pounds in for 15 miles, 8 miles of that with a twisted ankle ... I used that. And of course I wore my only waterproof hooded coat. Which I also bought in the Tetons, on sale, in florescent yellow and puce. (No one has run me over yet, while wearing that coat.) And the hat because I get cold ...

The cashier at the grocery store asked me, with a smile, if I needed a bag, and if I was going hiking. I was suddenly self-conscious and told him my apartment was just hard to get to.

Anyway, moving on. There has been lots of editing over here, some two-day migraines, some more bread-baking that we ate before I took a picture (I am so not used to this "camera" device), some knitting, some more knitting, and yarn-dyeing plans. Solar ovens! Wholesale orders! Acid dyes manufactured without heavy metals! The possibility of finding locally produced wool, hand-spun by local people! Business license thoughts, colorway thoughts, viral marketing thoughts.

All this makes it difficult to actually edit. But edit I do, I do. I'm mellowing a bit in my old-editing-age. I'm more willing to accept that some people don't follow any citation style at all, that some people don't notice how many spaces appear between sentences, and some other people revise their own writing amazingly well. That is why I love repeat clients--improvement.

Meanwhile, we have decided to host a Passover seder. If you've been to one, you know the gluttony involved, and if you've been to one of ours, you know that we abscond with tradition and replace it with horseradish-eating contents. This year, we will be hosting a mix of Jews, Messianic Jews, Christians, and a few whose beliefs I'm not familiar with. The wine and the matzo smooth it all out. Four prescribed cups of wine, people. If you are invited to a seder, bring wine! You will drink a bottle of it!

And yet ... we have no dining table. Or chairs.

So we are building one, with the help of Noah's aunt and uncle, who run a woodworking business. And have a shipping container full of lumber that Noah's grandfather milled himself. Pretty great. Pictures on facebook.

And me? I am all right. I am ready to dye a lot of yarn and sell it. Almost.

I looked out the window of this office room, this back room with three windows, and realized our cherry tree finally bloomed. Wowza. Like one day nothing, then fully bloomed.

How are all of you?

Whole Wheat and Sprouted Quinoa Bread with Raisins

2010-03-16T13:15:00.005-05:00

RECIPE! This takes 2 days.

Day 1:
Soak 3/4 c. quinoa in 1-1/2 c. warm water in a lidded container, room temperature, overnight.

Make biga:
1-3/4 c. ww flour
1/4 t. instant yeast
3/4 c. warm water

Mix, knead until it all comes together. Put in covered bowl/container and stick in fridge overnight.

Day 2:
Remove biga from fridge; let warm up at room temp. for 2 hours.

Drain water off quinoa. Check out the sprouts! Place drained sprouted quinoa in food processor; grind to a mash if possible.

(I use a stand mixer for all my mixing and kneading, so my method goes like this.)

Put ground sprouted quinoa in mixing bowl.

Put biga on floured surface; chop into 12 mixes. Dust pieces with ww flour so they don't all stick together immediately.

Put chopped biga into same mixing bowl.

Add to bowl:
7 T. ww flour
1 t. salt
2-1/4 t. instant yeast
1/4 c. water, room temp./warm
3-1/2 t. honey
1 T. vegetable oil or unsalted butter, melted
2 T. vital wheat gluten (optional, but I used it and it helped, I think)

Begin mixing with dough hook at medium-low speed until it comes together, then low speed. At this point, I added several more handfuls of ww flour--not sure how many. Add flour until the dough comes together in a ball. It should be soft and slightly sticky. (You can also use the mixer to bring it together, add raisins, and then knead by hand for 5 min.)

Add a handful of raisins. Keep mixing with dough hook to assimilate.

Let dough rest 5 min.; then knead 1-2 min. more. Add any necessary water or flour for final adjustments.

Place in oiled bowl and let rise 45-60 min., until 1-1/2 times original size. (I always let my dough rise inside my oven, with no heat on--my house is really cold, but my pilot light keeps the oven warm.)

Shape dough on floured surface: either a sandwich loaf in a pan, or a freestanding ball or torpedo shape. For a batard/torpedo like mine: flatten dough into a rectangle shape. Fold top half down to middle of dough; seal seam with finger pressure. Fold bottom half up to middle of dough; seal seam. Then, fold the current top of the loaf to the current bottom of the loaf; seal seam. Rotate loaf so seamed edge is on bottom. Smush ends in a little, pinching closed if needed. Dust with flour. Place on proofing sheet (I use the back of a cookie sheet dusted liberally with flour).

Let loaf rise 45-60 min.

Prepare oven for baking. If sandwich loaf: just turn on to 425. If baking a freestanding loaf: Place baking stone in oven, with a steam pan below it. Turn on to 425. Let preheat at least 20 min.

Cut shallow slashes in top of loaf while the oven preheats--3 diagonal, 1 long slash, whatever.

For sandwich loaf: put in oven; turn oven down to 350. Bake 20 min., rotate loaf 180 degrees, and bake 20-30 min. more until loaf registers 200 degrees and sounds hollow when thumped.

For hearth loaf: slide/lift loaf onto baking stone (if it's going badly, try using a spatula to help get it off the sheet pan. If it's going really badly, leave it on the sheet pan, put the pan on top of the baking stone, and after 20 min., try lifting the loaf off the stone with oven mitts, then putting it on the stone and taking the pan out of the oven.) Add 1 c. hot water to steam pan; don't burn yourself! Wear oven mitts! Close door quickly. Turn down to 350. Bake 20 min., rotate loaf 180 degrees, and bake 20-30 min. more until loaf registers 200 degrees and sounds hollow when thumped.

Let cool one hour.

EAT.

Yarn dyeing pictures!

2010-03-15T00:36:00.005-05:00

Oh dear ones. I've had a flood of editing come in, hooray hooray, and have been a bit focused on that and not on blogging. Moving on, a recap:

Yarn dyeing!

And more yarn dyeing and attempts to improve my photography skills.

Also, a fierce bread bake-off in which I determine which whole wheat bread is tastiest (Peter Reinhart is winning that one), I cook a lot of dry beans, we eat a lot of food, we decide to build ourselves a farmhouse table because we don't have one and I fell in love with them because of this video but, you know, don't have 1K to spend on a table. And we still don't have a table to eat at. We have our military boxes serving as a coffee table. And Passover is coming, and the promise of a wonderful seder ...

So, more editing is on the way for me. But I am also working out the details of buying a whole lot of yarn, undyed, then dyeing it after developing my own colorways, and making an etsy shop (I do think I'm going with Nomenclature Yarns, because creating is like naming, and naming colors is especially odd, and I am Swedish and so is Carl Linnaeus).

Urbana folks, I want to tell you, the other night, Noah and I bought some Bandit in a box. And I was full of nostalgia.

What are you all up to?

Sunlight and Visuality

2010-02-22T20:01:00.002-06:00

What's it like to be a writer again? Is it anything like this sudden desire to photograph, which I really am terrible at doing, or to explain? Does it have to do with how sunny Seattle has been since I got back--this feeling that I can actually see things, they glow somehow, the moss is so green and the dusky sky so clouded and mute-blue?

Of course, I am freakishly cold right now. The apartment isn't cold, but I am. So it goes. But cold sharpens things ... no, probably not. It probably distracts things.

Yarn is more expensive than I want it to be. I'm investigating the prices of blank yarns per 100 g skein, and man oh man, are yarn-sellers an unorganized bunch. No pictures? Pictures and now no way to buy online from you? Why do you have a website that showcases your goods and yet has no way to sell them to me? And WHY OH WHY do you not list the AMOUNT of the thing you are selling? I can buy "quantity 1" and pay a million dollars and you don't tell me how many grams of yarn it is ... Is that a winning strategy? No, it is not. I am a crabby online shopper who is used to Amazon, and I like my websites easy to use. (Why do people still list a limited number of items on a page? I can scroll ... at least give me an option to view all ... )

Whatever. All of this is really here only to say that things look more beautiful to me than they have in a while, in a way that is difficult to pin down, and may have everything to do, literally, with sunlight and visuality. And that I'm ready to buy a whole lot of yarn, like $300 of yarn, and play with it. And sell it to you. But I want to be certain I'm getting the best deal first.

Quest #2: Which whole-wheat bread recipe is easiest and best-tasting? Trial and error. This recipe from cook for good is pretty tasty, but this recipe from Bob's Red Mill is also really tasty, and today I put together Peter Reinhart's basic whole wheat bread recipe from Whole Grains, and it is really tasty, as well. I am a bit worried that Peter's recipe might bring about the death of my KitchenAid mixer, because it requires a lot of kneading some really tough doughs together, which I am not about to do with my hands. Full disclosure: I did try kneading some bread together yesterday, and it was perhaps the stupidest thing that I've done since I was injured. No idea what I was thinking. It hurt a lot, and my elbows are mad at me, and my left hand is mad at me, in a way that I don't remember feeling before -- probably because I haven't been this stupid before.

And perhaps you are interested in the black bean chili recipe which features bourbon, which I mentioned elsewhere online? I will get it up here soon enough.

Be well, friends. Do not be stupid.

Eating Really, Really Well

2010-02-17T19:00:00.003-06:00

It's been a while since I talked extensively about food, and me, and us over here. And since it crossed my mind the other day that some of you may be eating bland, unwholesome, or expensive food, I want to share my current meal plan. And yes, I'm making meal plans now, and our grocery bill and our diet is much better for it.

I started following the cookforgood.com plan, and while I love the idea and the woman has some great recipes, I'm not enthused about following it exactly. Okay, I'm not enthused about following it exactly at all. I don't want to eat three dishes based on black beans in one week, once for dinner and the next day for lunch. I don't want to eat pasta every other day. And I hate making side dishes. I like eating them, but I run out of drive when it comes to making them. I just end up looking at the head of broccoli and thinking, Why am I cooking you again? I don't want to. I just want to eat my bowl of vegetable-filled legumes and whole grains.

What follows is a list of 17 vegetarian meals I wrote down off the top of my head, with this week's meal plan at the end. I'd be happy to share recipes; just ask. They come from many sources, so I won't bother listing them. They're roughly sorted by shared ingredients.

Thai peanut noodles with cabbage, carrots, and broccoli
Pasta with tomatoes and kale

White beans with cabbage and parmesan
White bean stew with tomatoes and garlic

Pizza with parsley pesto and mozzarella

Black bean chili
Black bean soup with corn
Cuban black beans
Black bean and vegetable soup
Black beans with salsa, rice or tortillas

Garbanzos in curry (chana masala)
Garbanzos with quinoa, green something, and garlic-tahini dressing
Hummus

Lentils with kale and roasted tomatoes (really good with polenta)

Hoppin' John
Baked BBQ black-eyed peas

Green soup with ginger

... and for dinner/lunch next day this week:

Black beans with salsa, brown rice
Black bean soup with corn, brown rice
Pasta with tomatoes and kale
White beans with cabbage, roasted potato wedges
Thai peanut noodles
Butternut squash soup, garlicky greens, something bready
Pizza with parsley pesto and mozz.

What are you eating these days? Hmmm? Is it as bad as I imagine?

My Grandmother is Not Dead

2010-02-14T22:26:00.003-06:00

She lives! We spoke on the phone once, she didn't return my call after that, she did return my brother's call, and somehow, we don't know how for sure, she went to a doctor's appointment despite snow and winter, which were previous excuses for not going to the doctor, and is apparently kind of stable. Stable for her condition? Stable really? Not sure on that one.

Folks, we are playing it by ear. And I am back in Seattle.

Land of Noah, land of humidity, land of green moss everywhere, and even sunshine greeting me on this fine V-Day. There are roses (I think) blooming in my yard. BLOOMING. Because I live in a temperate rainforest. The more I remind myself of that, the easier it is to accept that I've traded snow (which I had today, in St. Louis) for green things. Not a terrible trade.

But there was lots of excellent family visiting, lots of cooking good food, lots of throwing things out of my parents' pantry and fridge that have expired. Examples: dried black beans from 2002. But the worst: just-add-water cocoa mix from 2000.

All this death watch business comes down to ... improvement in her condition, more time, a chance to let her know I do care about her, and let her do with that what she will. So far, that means not returning my calls. It feels like my evil grandmother has either decided she is a) totally done with me and most of my family, b) pushing us away to see if we stay away, or if we run in to save her and prove our love, or c) resolved to die alone, not in a sinister way, but in a kind of surrender. All of this is uncertain.

One certain thing: I went to the Fremont farmer's market today and bought maple syrup from a guy who is a grad student at UW, whose family makes it in Vermont, who takes off spring quarter to go make syrup, then brings it back and sells it to ... me. A delicious certainty. On waffles.

Reminder: Keep Breathing

2010-02-01T12:39:00.003-06:00

Sunshine, sunshine, snow, days of fires in the old stone fireplace that nearly fell on the neighbor's house and had to be mudjacked back into place. Days of babysitting Amelia, helping her in and out of her new pink princess dress with the flower crown and wand and a choice of either a pink sash or a silver sequin sash. I've watched Mulan and the Lady and the Tramp so many times that I think I could sing them all to you. I keep humming "A Girl Worth Fighting For," and since my mom teared up once at the end of Mulan, where the emperor bows to her, I keep tearing up no matter how many times we've watched it that day, and my brother said that he does, too, that it's the kind of movie that can take your emotions and run with them, if you let them.

My grandmother received 5 units of blood and 4 of platelets in her 9-day hospital stay, then was discharged home. Her doctor said he'd never written the order for "placement" and that he didn't think she'd comply if he did write it. My brother and I tried to reason/argue with her that she needed to move into assisted living (Zak, serious: "Nancy, you're straight f*cked." Nancy: giggles), and she tried convincing us that since she won't receive any more chemo (because she has permanent kidney damage from losing so much blood a month ago), she would feel "better," be able to organize her hoarder's hellhole of an apartment (literally boxes to the walls, covering all the floor, with a cot and one chair in the kitchen and some room on the floor to lay down and watch TV), and then, "I can't think of anything better than to lay down on my bed at home one day, go to sleep, and never wake up."

Of course, someone else in her position might say "hospice" at this point, but no, she is too deep in her manipulation games of controlling people to do that. I am pretty certain that right now, what she wants more than anything is for both 1) everyone to leave her alone and let her die in peace and 2) for all of us to rush in and save her somehow. I suspect she's waiting for things to get bad enough that my mom demands she move in with my mom--which would be an emotional disaster and a physical disaster, since my mom couldn't take care of her needs at all, as my mom can't cook, clean much, or help someone else move around. So, these goals are incompatible, and I have a feeling the dying will happen first.

The lesson? Crazy people are always crazy. They die crazy. It is ugly for everyone.

I called her yesterday and didn't hear back; she had a doctor's appointment today that she rescheduled for Wednesday. I'm sure she rescheduled because she feels bad, which would be a good reason to see a doctor, especially if you spent the last nine days in the hospital receiving a unit or two of blood and platelets every other day. So, will my grandmother (Nancy, I don't call her grandmother, per her request when I was an infant and she said, "I'm too young to be a grandmother" even though my mom was 30) die at home in the next two days? Will she call us? Will she call an ambulance? Will my deeply embedded feelings of hyperresponsibility take over, guide me to drive to her apartment and drag her back to the hospital? Or will I let her be responsible for her own bizarre, deluded, totally crazy decisions?

I have no idea. I have a feeling the end of her life is right here, that we are all staring at it, and that she is still playing games to ensure that people do what she wants. I have a feeling that I was right to pack funeral clothes.

A nice thing: being with my family. My dad's mom (who is Grandma) is coming to visit next week, mostly because I'm here and our timing lined up nicely. She is so wonderful to be around, lots of reading, sleeping, talking, coffee-drinking. We had a big family dinner last night with my brother, his wife Lucy, and their girl Amelia--pulled pork, baked bbq black-eyed peas, and the best collards ever: collards with garlic, raisins, and orange juice. Amazing. And cornbread. Bryant Terry's Vegan Soul Kitchen is wonderful; the collards and peas recipes are his.

I read The Road in two nights. I, um, I'm working on my post-apocalypse skills. I'm glad the boy made it through. And I learned that even after the apocalypse, one must be concerned about the safety of consuming home-canned vegetables. Good lord, Cormac McCarthy can write a lyric. Can't believe I hadn't read him before. The plot would get so bleak and terrifying that I only kept reading for the lyric. And the subplot of "is this boy a god or not."

So, keep breathing, little girl. Your skin and hair are drying out in this familiar Midwest winter air, so drink more water and less coffee. Be wary of old canned goods.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

2010-01-23T21:04:00.002-06:00

When you were young, you were the king of carrot flowers ... No idea why this album is the one to listen to right now. But there it is.

I am flying to Saint Louis on Tuesday to be with my family. The impetus is my grandmother's illness, dying, hospital stay, stage four cancer in July, remission in December, five units of blood in the hospital in December, three units of blood and two of platelets now, in a reverse isolation room, with an order for "discharge with placement" which means assisted living or custodial or something. Not that she's at all ready for discharge yet.

She's 72? 73? Her mother lived to 98.

This woman ... I told my dad this summer that she is the most evil person I know, and I am sticking by it. Loads of abuse, alcoholism, irresponsibility, denial, crazymaking, paranoia, and, to top it off, she really hates people. She was close to one of her cousins for decades and broke off their friendship because her cousin talked about her grandson a lot, and it annoyed my grandmother. Also the most bizarre person I know.

So, sadness, well. Let's not address that. I've written poems and essays about this woman because she is that kind of negative muse, you know?

But I want to be with my family, with my mom, and right now I can be. So I will be.

Of course, I'm just settling into Seattle, into my apartment with the working heater and bathroom light, into baking bread at home, cooking the best pizza I've ever made (whole-wheat crust with an overnight rise, parsley pesto for sauce, whole-milk mozzarella shredded on top), being with Noah. Waltz lessons. Ice cream at Molly Moon's afterward.

I'll come back, though. Sometime. Maybe in a week or two. I didn't buy a return ticket.

Sunny, and a Petition for Comments

2010-01-18T13:30:00.003-06:00

Where are you, people? Here I am talking into the ether, and you refuse to comment. A right I also enjoy, I occasionally refuse to comment on your blogs, your links, reddit.com's links, Facebook status updates, et al. But you could at least say hello.

So shall I say, hello.

Our bathroom's ceiling light fixture stopped working (at midnight, of course--headlamp to the rescue); now it works again. Thank you, Dave the handyman. Thank you for working hard and sighing and asking to borrow my laptop so you could look up what the hell was going on. Apparently, the wiring comes from the main box to the light switch with an outlet which is seated outside the bathroom, then to the light fixture and exhaust fan in the ceiling, then back down to an outlet with no switch by the sink inside the bathroom. No power leaves the outlet in the hall. And when something is plugged into the outlet by the sink, A SERIES CIRCUIT IS COMPLETED, and, without turning the hall switch for the light/fan on, the light and fan come on dimly. Because the bathroom is wired like old Christmas lights. And it is obviously a code violation.

And the other handyman is coming by tomorrow morning to take down the leaky bathroom ceiling, which maybe will help the wiring situation.

And he's going to look at the heater which should be working--not the boat heater, the house heater.

After all this apartment drama, this code-violation-tragicomedy, Noah and I look at each other and say, You know, there are lots of things I don't like about this apartment ... but I hate moving. And it is cheap. And it is in a great neighborhood, and there are chickens, and gardens, and basement storage, and it is painted in colors we like, and it's big enough ... So we might be here a while.

Yarn, right? And writing? And this editing? And on and on. Whatever. It is sunny out. You have no idea how rare that is.

On Marriage

2010-01-11T17:51:00.003-06:00

Oh, and I've been married for five years now. To Noah. He was 16 when we started dating; I was 17.

And it is awesome. Don't want to go on and on, but it is. Could not do life without you, Noah. Could not do it. Would not want to try.

To celebrate, we walked down the street to Sutra, a vegan supper club kind of place, which starts each seating by ringing a gong and thanking the farmers who grew the meal's ingredients. (Neither of us are vegan; I'm still vegetarian (a year now! longest ever so far!) but Noah loves steak and bacon.) We sat at the bar, facing our dreadlocked sous chef, talking about the kombucha we were having with the first course (they offer a n/a pairing along with a wine pairing, and we both were feeling the n/a--an option I'm really pleased they had). Kombucha, or, as we proceeded to call it, the Booch.

I wanted to share the menu with you. There are few menus these days that I read and say, I don't know how to cook that. This menu, I read and thought, I don't want to try. I just want them to feed me. How often does someone else feed me top-notch vegan food? Dream away:

First Course

Celery Root, Leek, Tarragon Soup served with a Sorrel-Cara Cara Orange-Black Radish Salad and finished with a Sesame Seed Crisp

Second Course

Sunchoke, Smoked Beluga Lentil Cake, with a Honey Crisp Apple-D’anjou Pear–Yellow Beet–Chile Compote Finished with a Balsamic Reduction and Truffle Oil

Third Course

Hedgehog-Trumpet Mushroom, Roasted Cauliflower, Tonnemaker Pumpkin and Basil Mung Been Crepes served with a Roasted White Carrots, Steamed Lacinato Kale, and a Porcini-Almond-Marjoram Sauce

Fourth Course

Chocolate Ganache Torte with a Crystallized Ginger, Raw Cacao, Pistachio Crust with a Wild Foraged Blackberry Glaze

The torte was INCREDIBLE. I will be trying to recreate it for sure. Giant vegan ganache on top of all that, with a blackberry glaze? Amazing.

And then we listened to the mix CD we made for our wedding guests, as a favor, and danced in our living room.

Or, The Lack of a Christmas Miracle (in Regards to Heat)

2010-01-11T12:49:00.003-06:00

No heat yet. So that is that. Of course, it is 49 degrees out, right now, so the need for heat is not the same as it was. Still, it is cold inside. I'm wearing two hoodies right now. No joke: a microfleece hoodie of mine and a giant cotton sweatshirt hoodie of Noah's.

Also I have worn through the sole of one of my down booties, and broken up the elastic tie that closes them at the ankles, and so I am contemplating getting new booties. I'm on pair 3; that would make new ones pair 4. Of the last nine years. I wore through pair 1 quickly, but they were more decorative than hard-working; pair 2 was lost, at the same time that I lost a knee-length wool coat; and here we are with pair 3.

I recently asked some folks via Facebook for book recommendations; you all delivered. I thank and thank you.

I am editing; I am editing in a blitz of editing. I took on two clients each with a 200-page manuscript due at approximately the same time, though the times have staggered a bit now. Then I had no usable computer for editing with Dragon. Then I had another solution with no internet access. Then I had a final solution, a new PC, but no Windows 7 (for a few days). Then I had them all but was quite ill with the Winter Cold of Aught Nine, as it will go down; the cold I had then the cold Noah brought back then the cold we shared between us for two weeks.

Now I am better and editing, editing. I feel smarter, having not done any editing for a while (since May for freelance and August for the job)--like my brain is turned back on. And though I am good at it, I keep thinking, man, I don't love doing this. I do not love it. I don't hate it, really, but ... fixing citations, converting citation styles, weighing in on others' arguments, looking up whether "at risk youth" or "at-risk youth" is more commonly used (go with the hyphen, btw) ... fixing someone else's writing tics ... part of the frustration definitely comes with needing to do a lot of editing quickly, but well. Doing a lot slowly is better, since my brain just falls out of my head at some point and I end up having trouble using keyboard shortcuts for italics (this happened last night: I ended up highlighting text and aiming for ctrl+I, but hitting shift+I instead, and wondering, where did my text go and why is a capital I here instead?).

However, I am a great editor. A GREAT editor. But I was a good teacher too. And I'm a good artist. And, for the record, I was all right as a violist. A good baker and cook too. But what do I love to do? What would I choose to do? Here in the free world of near-limitless choices, here in Seattle, the land of rain?

I'll think it over as I finish a chapter today.

A Christmas Miracle

2009-12-29T16:03:00.002-06:00

Our landlord just said, yes, okay, call the handyman and ask him to fix the main heater, the one that was designed to be used in a home and has the potential ability to actually maintain 65 in all livable rooms in your apartment.

IT'S A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE! A few days late, yes. But wheee! We were rereading Seattle Tenant Law last night and were just about resigned to getting an estimate on fixing the heater, notifying the landlord of the estimate, paying for it ourselves, and deducting it from the rent (because you can do that here, which is pretty cool). But this is what I really wanted--for him to pay for it.

Other Christmas happenings/miracles: great dinner with Noah's aunt and uncle; recurrent chest colds for both of us; great time with Seth; great video chats with family on the 25th; a Kindle; waltzing lessons with Noah; an upcoming trip to Vancouver, WA to visit with Noah's older brother and family for a day or two, since they're visiting our sister-in-law's family there; a visit from our friend CJ, who drove the bus Noah lived on for most of the three years he lived on it, who is now a pilot in Alaska and has amazing photos of Alaska that make me want to go there; and ... I'm sure there's more, but those are the main ones.

Now that we're both recovering from our colds--still sick but able to stand up and walk around--a kitchen full of disaster awaits us. Hooray. And more editing awaits me, which is just fine. And a million loads of laundry and lots of other housecleaning and all that. Yay for the new portable dishwasher!

Thriftiness

2009-12-20T23:46:00.003-06:00

Noah is back! And how wonderful it is to be together again. We haven't been apart that long since he went to Japan for six weeks in 2006. Together, together, together. I will say it is weird having him in the apartment after being here alone for that long--whose dirty dishes are those? Who ate all the cereal?

I am still sick, or sick again, it doesn't matter which. Focusing on moving past it, which involves sleeping 12 hours a night and feeling lightheaded for a good part of the day and coughing until my chest hurts. Please, echinacea tea, make me well again. Please, green soup with ginger and sweet potatoes, heal me.

Our new PC is here, and tomorrow we should have Windows 7 from Seth for a decent price, and I will actually do some editing for the two clients I have with manuscripts of the same length (200 pages), due the same time, in mid-January. I may disappear after tomorrow for a while, surface for Christmas, disappear, surface for New Year's, disappear, surface for my FIVE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY, and ... hopefully be close to done. It isn't that much editing, really, since I am not working any other jobs. And I can probably average 5 pages an hour. So, 80 hours worth? I will make the deadline for both of them.

Remember my repetitive stress injury? And my worker's compensation claim? It is settled, 1.25 years later, I have the check, I am depositing it, and that is done. If only I was healed all the way. Still, it is enough money to start the yarn-dyeing business and to throw some serious money at whichever student loan I choose. For that I am thankful. I am also thankful that I have less constant pain now that I ever have since the injury, that I'm more aware of how to manage the pain, what to avoid, what I can do. What I can't do. I had some really amazing occupational therapists to get here, and I am most thankful for them. The lawyer, eh. The doctors, no. But Becky the therapist, yes.

And so, in the middle of this, our new life here in Seattle, we are making enough money to get by without trouble, but we want to pay off all of our loans as quickly as possible while rebuilding our savings that have been totally depleted by leaving Urbana in August and moving to Seattle in November. And trying to set aside money for things like our car which will inevitably die some day and need to be replaced, and how great would it be to buy our next car flat-out in cash, like we did this one because of Noah's careful planning, and not have payments? And set aside money for a house? A house, here in Seattle, where houses in my current neighborhood start at 300k? And the fixer-uppers start at 150k and are described as "needing new plumbing and being stripped down to the studs"? I am handy but that kind of house ... that is a lot of work.

But what I came here to write about is cooking, and eating, for less money, but cooking and eating well.

Ideas:
--use this woman's meal plans--they seem a little boring, but I can use her plans and sub in my favorite recipes with the same ideas, with the goal of feeding the two of us for about $200 a month
--make bread at home, since I love making bread and homemade bread is delicious
--make yogurt at home, in the crock pot?! That's revolutionary.
--make our own cleaning products when possible, with vinegar, baking soda, and a basic degreaser like castile soap, and maybe essential oils that I already have

Now, don't get me wrong--we're planning on buying an LCD TV that is somewhere between 32" and 40" sometime soon. But being thrifty some places means we can spend in other places, right?

On to knitting for Christmas!!

Guess What? Still Cold

2009-12-14T12:48:00.002-06:00

If you are in my family or follow me on Facebook, you already know that my apartment is inadequately heated with 1) a gas heater that hasn't worked in two years, 2) a gas heater that was intended for use on a boat, 3) an electric/ceramic space heater that works well but can only heat a room at a time, and 4) an oil/electric space heater that just doesn't do much. Add to it an old, lathe-and-plaster house that probably isn't insulated at all, old drafty windows, old drafty door with an open gap under the door, in the sill, that leads down into who knows where, a back room that is falling away from the house at maybe a 5 degree angle, leaving a one-inch gap between house wall and room wall, and a two-inch gap in one of the windows that won't close because the room is so out of plumb.

So it's cold. Yeah. Colder than 60 when I wake up, maybe getting up to 65 or 67 on a sunny day in the main room, with both heaters on, with the room totally closed off from the rest of the apartment (which makes the bathroom cold, kitchen cold, hallway cold, office/back room cold, bedroom cold). Cold cold cold.

And I am used to cold. Iowa. Central Illinois. I lived in a turn-of-the-century house in Iowa for a year with four windows in my dorm room (beautiful), and I had a travel alarm clock with a digital thermometer, so I always knew my room was 64 or 66 degrees in all of January when I was taking an American literature survey (month-long class) and reading, literally, 8 hours a day, 200-400 pages a day. I spent the whole month in my down sleeping bag on the couch in my room, reaching out to my electric kettle to boil more water for more tea.

In Illinois almost three years ago, we had a blizzard and campus closed for two days. Something like 15 inches of snow in two days? Last winter, the temperature didn't break 15 for at least a month, maybe a month and a half. One day the high was 0 degrees, and I drove to work, amazed that my little Civic started, made it to work, made it home. That was really cold. The kind of cold that you walk out in and scream as you run to the building, then wish you'd closed your mouth because now your mouth is really cold.

But this cold, in Seattle? Outside it is not so cold at all. 38 or so right now. But inside it is not even 30 degrees warmer. And that is frustrating.

I wrote my landlord a huge email, quoting the Seattle building code's requirements that permanently installed heaters (which is only my boat heater) must maintain an average temperature of 65 in all livable rooms. Ha! Ha ha. I can barely maintain 65 in one room with the two heaters going. And that means all other rooms are 62, 60, 57, 54 or so.

So there's a lot of hat-wearing, fingerless-mitt wearing, technical hiking gear wearing (Patagonia capilene tops and bottoms, fleece jackets, down-filled booties). And a lot of thinking about residual heat from my stove, range, and bathtub water. (I have to bake cookies, right?) A lot of tea drinking. A lot of brainstorming ways to get out of the house and go somewhere else with better heating to thaw for a while.

And Noah is out of town--has been for a week, will get home on Friday night. So it is cold and a little lonely too.

But! Fear not! Seattle is awesome. It is just my landlord that is terrible.

Seattle, home of excellent Thai food everywhere I go, the best coffee I've ever had, a wonderful neighborhood that I'd like to live in forever (Wallingford! Or Green Lake! not sure which one I'm technically in), nice people, and absolutely gorgeous. This town does not hold the title of prettiest place I've ever lived (hello Tetons--that is the view from the part of the park I lived in), but it is indeed a close second. And the artisanal ice cream available does put its total score of awesome a little higher, in a way.

The chickens? I love them. The yard, the gardens, the layout of my apartment, the clawfoot tub (best baths of my LIFE, I am never going to shower here, bath only forever), the giant kitchen, the view of the Olympics from my windows, etc.

But I miss my family, and my friends, and I miss knowing how people drive (hard to put a finger on, but it is quite different here). I miss knowing how to get somewhere without using my GPS. And I think we moved here at the worst time of year, in terms of enjoying Seattle. Everyone we meet is like, Don't believe the weather is always this bad! This is the worst it's been in years, YEARS! Like they have forgotten the blizzard they had last year that caused two buses to dangle off a bridge.

I remember the stories of that storm, how Microsoft told Seth and all other employees to work from home, and then they all logged on to their remote server at once, and they crashed their servers. All of them. For the whole day. Oh, Microsoft.

Noah is liking Accenture, what he's learned of them so far, at least. He's doing a lot of training that seems newer to everyone else but replicates things he's already done before. Good job, Illinois and Noah. His trainers put him and other new hires in a mock client interview to gather specs for a new project, and the other five new hires had never done that kind of interview before. And I guess, they are new hires, they are also fresh from school, but Illinois had Noah doing that for his senior design project and then deliver a completely implementable solution to the problem. Perhaps Illinois is as good at training engineers as they think they are.

Noah's wardrobe is quite different now, though--Accenture requires business casual that is basically anything up to a suit without a tie. So, dress shoes, dress slacks or suit pants, button downs. We thought it would be suits, so he has suits and ties now, too. But, for me, this makes Noah the only person I'm related to directly who has ever worn suit clothes to work. My dad: jeans, Coveralls, work boots. My brother: navy Dockers to cover up all the oil stains. I guess other people wore nurses' uniforms. But I wore jeans and skirts and stuff, but suits? This is foreign.

And I am the girl who focused on textiles in her art degreee and didn't know how to iron. I scorched a lot of white t-shirts before my professor stopped me. Good times.

So, today? Freelance editing, hopefully, if it works on my now-dual-booted MacBook that starts up as a Windows machine, eliminating the virtualization that was killing Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Our new PC is coming sometime this week, though.

Editing, tomato sauce, maybe blanching carrots and kale to freeze, hopefully these cookies. And a walk to a coffee shop to thaw at some point.

SEATTLE WHAT WHAT and a long drive to get here

2009-11-20T12:45:00.013-06:00

Yes, yes, we are here. We arrived just over two weeks ago, are still painting, are still unpacking, are still without a kitchen table, a desk, much-needed additional bookshelves, a mattress, a wardrobe/armoire deal ... Noah gets paid in a few weeks, so until then, there may not be much progress on that front.

But who needs furniture when you can buy an as-is futon from Ikea, disassemble it, fit it into your Civic, and sleep on that?

And more importantly, who needs furniture when you live half a mile or less from these following gems: an artisanal ice cream shop (so amazingly good); literally ten or more Thai places, one vegetarian, another one in a beautiful all-wood temple-ish place, and another one with a super-secret, super-hot red curry; a beer shop that serves and is full of punk music but without any lame attitude (it is obvious everyone is focused on beer completely); a teahouse; a lake; a park; a zoo ... We haven't been to all of those places yet, but we will.

Okay, honestly, I still would like furniture. Ice cream and furniture are not the same thing. But we split a sundae last night made with one scoop vanilla bean, one scoop theo chocolate (I think local chocolate?), cranberry orange chutney, candied hazelnuts, and candied orange slices. I enjoyed it more than I enjoy bookshelves. So maybe they even out.

Now, to share pictures chronologically or what ... I go with chronology.

Niece Liora driving our car as we leave St. Louis ... what a good driver, that one. Knows her colors and how to shift lanes ...

Sunset in Oklahoma or Texas, I am not sure which.

A big, beautiful canyon in ... New Mexico? Arizona? We drove from St. Louis to San Diego really, really quickly, though not quickly by Adam's standards (who took two days to get from Florida to San Diego in a van, carrying his Vespa and books).

Southern California or western Arizona--at this point, I am constantly saying to Noah, Wow, we are in the West! This doesn't look like Missouri or Illinois anymore! And he patiently nods, being the 49-state traveler that he is. That black spot is a cow.

Sequoia National Park! Wherein we leave the cats in a Motel 6 and ascend 6000 feet in our car, then hike around for the afternoon with much gasping for air. But where are the sequoias?

Oh, here they are.

They are really big and beautiful. This was taken in a meadow where, the last time Noah visited, he was within fifty feet of a bear eating lunch. However, I am myself bear repellant and we saw no bears. I have never seen a bear in person in the wild, not in the Tetons, not in Yellowstone, not in Sequoia, and not even when everyone else in the car saw one--when I looked, it was gone.

We drove through Kings Canyon National Park on the way out of Sequoia, since they border each other, and it was beautiful too.

Then, north to San Francisco for dinner with Noah's friends from his years of touring, and then, we thought, let's drive the coastal highway through California and Oregon! It will be legendary! And it was.

But even before this was taken at Muir Beach, our older cat Hobbes was throwing up because, you see, the coastal highway is full of things like hairpin turns at 15 mph and no guard rails and lots of hilliness. So we went back on I-5.

And here, in Oregon, it was still gorgeous. Next, on to Seattle and our apartment!

What's that in the background? Is that FLORESCENT ORANGE PAINT beneath the chair rail and dingy yellow paint above in the main room? Are those paint chips on the floor? Oh yes, they are. Here begins the saga of the apartment. The following photos are all from our "evidence of how crappy this place was/is" file, taken the day we moved in.

Hmm, nice architecture, nice bo tree, nice cat, but really, that color orange? Someone mixed that paint for you? They should be fired.

The bedroom! Pool blue walls, a bright yellow ceiling, and spackle everywhere from the landlord's handyman. When we got in, we asked him, So, are you painting? His reply: Oh no, I let the tenants paint and I'll pay for paint.

Two weeks of painting literally every paintable surface in the apartment, I understand the great deal he is getting from our labor.

The clawfoot tub is truly awesome for taking baths, but it may or may not fall through the floor someday. May neither of us be in it or our neighbor be below it when it does.

This is the "second bedroom"--maybe 8 by 8 feet, two orange walls, one yellow wall, one red wall, and a yellow ceiling.

And ill-fitted carpet.

And a window that doesn't close. Not at all. I stuffed the crack full of bubble wrap yesterday, and it's warmer already.

And that room? With the many-colored walls? It's essentially an insulated second-story porch, and it is falling off the house proper. On the left, it's porch, and on the right, it's house. May it also not contain us when it falls, or hit our neighbor, or hit the chickens.

"After" photos later!

So, as you sit in your centrally-heated places of residence, think of us and our one natural gas heater ... and honestly, it is starting to look a lot better.

Keep in touch, y'all! I will try to do the same.

Allergens!

2009-09-08T15:31:00.002-05:00

Severe allergic reactions. Today I told Noah what to do if my throat is really closing (take me to an ER for some epinephrine) even if he has to trick me: "Let's go to a movie!" At least I wouldn't drive myself this time.

I'm trying out this set of actions: nasal wash; Flonase; Claritin 40 mg (like they take in Europe, unlike our 10 mg dose). I'm also going to try eating foods that cut inflammation down ... nuts, fish, red grapes, apples, oranges ... we'll see.

So far, my throat is still itching and feels swollen, my ears still feel weird, my skin is a little itchy but no hives, I have my sinuses calmed down ...

Pretty brain dead with it all. I will tell you I'm thinking about the GRE, about running a business, about making things full/part time ...

Life is quite different, and it is only beginning to sink in.

Cursed by The Wheel of Time and ...

2009-08-27T14:39:00.002-05:00

Here I am in the city of my childhood, living this beautiful little time wherein I can sleep and eat and play with nieces and go to Friar Tuck down the road, and read, and rediscover my humanity and my writing life and my art making and blah blah blah, and what do I end up reading?

Effing The Wheel of Time, for a third time, and Twilight.

Now, to argue for whatever remaining brainpower and coolness I might have in your mind, I am rereading The Wheel of Time again in preparation of THE LAST BOOK coming out on October 27, while I will be en route with Noah to Seattle. There is an entirely likely possibility that I will read it to him in the car while hopped up on anti-nausea meds. And sadly it is not even the last book--it is part one of three parts which together make up the last book, which is cheating, because the now-dead original author wanted the last book to be one book, even if it was 2000 pages long, which it would be, because the man has introduced at least 200 characters worth following by book 7 of 11 so far. As a former worker in the publishing industry (former, yall!), I can admire the brilliance of publishing three things for a loyal reader to buy instead of one. And I will buy them all and love it.

Twilight ... do I have an excuse? Not really. My brother's wife owns all three, and I saw them on their shelves, and I wanted to read something while he was bleeding my rear brakes in his little alleyway parking space. And then I read 57 pages without stopping. This is why I don't pick up bad novels--I will read them all the way through, I will read every word, and I will do it in like five hours. I read wickedly fast, which is why I love reading The Wheel of Time, because I can read it over a few weeks since each book is 800 pages long. (I know, I know, I'll read Infinite Jest some day.) So now I am reading Twilight, and it is terrible, and I know exactly what will happen, and I don't like any of the characters, and they talk crap about the Pacific Northwest and rain and that hurts my feelings. But I am reading it anyway.

I would ask for reading suggestions, but to be honest, I won't take them. I have two series of novels to work on between apartment hunting and car repair and reading books to my nieces.

Moving

2009-07-25T16:54:00.003-05:00

Well, well.

We're leaving Urbana in two and a half weeks, moving to Saint Louis for two months, and then moving to Seattle in mid-October. I'm done working my job in a week and a half! Wahoo!

We're using ReloCube to store our stuff and move it to Seattle for us ... should be interesting. Lots of breakables to pack ...

and since we'll be only taking the Civic to Saint Louis and Seattle, and the two cats are moving with us, we will have really limited amounts of stuff with us for a while. Makes me think, why do I have the rest of my stuff? So the getting rid of things ensues.

I am actually excited about it, just also low-key.

Thinking in Colors

2009-06-28T18:50:00.002-05:00

Maybe this is what I'm here to do: think in colors, textures, fibers, spaces, and sometimes lines and paragraphs. That's where I feel peaceful these days, in colors. It's hard to explain, but it's like the weight of color theory, art history, and tunnel vision on one presentation of color all happening in my mind.

Blue like cobalt glass, like cobalt oxide, like my 75 ceramic tiles, like cyanotype, like blueprints, like a weaving made with blue cotton thread.

I'm not a weaver, but I'm thinking in weavings, too, and I could learn to weave. Noah's mom had a beautiful loom that was offered to me after she died, but with no skills and no place for it, we couldn't take it. I think it's okay. Sad in that way of things passing but okay in the way of art equipment being in use by someone somewhere.

We're starting to look for apartments in Seattle, and we're trying to find one with room for me to do some serious dyeing. I need big flat spaces, a sink, and a stove, so it shouldn't be too hard. It feels incredibly self-validating to say, I need studio space, and then to look for it.

Green like summer sunlight through the maple leaves, like the spring on its way to its deepest point, like new growth on a philodendron, like my batik piece, like lots of yellow dye with a tiny bit of blue.

I'm using my pastels now to try to get these colors down. They all have descriptions written next to them. Oh, typical, can't have images without words, can we?

I keep thinking, I have an unlimited color palette in yarn dyeing. Oh my god. That is unheard of. I was a ceramicist first, happily stuck with the colors of things that would form a glaze on clay. I loved my ash glazes--gray. My iron-rich clay from Missouri--red, then purple in the kiln. I was never a painter, never a photographer; in surface design, I was most excited by cyanotype and its one color, blue. Maybe I'll end up moving towards natural dyes because of this, just in an effort to limit the palette.

When I decided to try painting pictures at home, I bought black paint and nothing else.

But I have these memories of colors, of skies, of times of day, of plant textures, and I think, I would wear those as socks or a scarf. I would wrap the night sky full of fireflies around me; I would put summer green leaves on my feet. There is a joy in this functionality, this object-making, and in my part of that process, producing color.

I miss knitting so much, more than I can explain, more than I miss almost anything else connected to my arm injury. But this is a good way to stay close.

And who knows, maybe I'll end up weaving yarn. Sometimes I imagine giant weavings full of dropped stitches hanging from the ceiling against the wall ... in a medium brown, mud brown, burlap brown. It's been a long time since I took the things from my mind and made them happen; maybe it is time.

I Haven't Died

2009-06-08T22:25:00.002-05:00

Believe me.

My younger cat Eto got sick yesterday after drinking the water-vodka-essential grapefruit oil infusion I made to freshen up my house (DIY reed diffuser, yall), as he knocked it over and drank it and then threw up and squeaked a lot. Terrible and funny. It felt like coaching a kid sneaking booze ...

My brother may be getting a new job, a dream job, doing vintage restoration on cars from the teens to the 80s. Pretty sweet, but we are both not getting our hopes up.

I feel kind of bland, can you tell? Kind of white rice these days. Kind of.

Tell me all how you are.

Kale Pesto

2009-05-20T17:53:00.002-05:00

It was a hit, on its own and with 8 oz. linguine. (Doesn't that sound fancy? Would your mind change if I told you the linguine might be four years old and might have moved between two apartments?)

Kale Pesto

1 bunch kale (99 cents at the grocery store; buy some already)
2-3 cloves garlic, minced (maybe unnecessarily minced)
Zest of half a lemon
Small handful almonds
Small handful walnuts
Salt
Tons of olive oil

Boil 2-3 quarts water; add trimmed kale. (The easiest way to trim kale is hold it by its leaf end and pull down away from the stem, against the vein grain.) Boil maybe three minutes, stirring a little. Drain quickly. Do not overcook!

Add with other ingredients to food processor. Puree as much as possible. Maybe pour olive oil in through the chute while it's running; maybe not. I can't tell if that actually helps.

And eat it ... yum. It ends up tasting like some vaguely parsley-spinach pesto, kind of. The lemon is great.

Showing Back Up

2009-05-18T19:40:00.003-05:00

Sometimes we entertain and go to gatherings many times in a row, like this last weekend, and we end up bringing home leftovers or leaving leftovers, and suddenly, I don't cook for days. It is always odd, this huge energy of cooking and then the leavings after.

Regardless, I go to a grocery store midway through the mayhem and buy things like kale. Kale, kale, kale. I am in love. (I also lust after golden beets.) It's also full of iron, so maybe I'm anemic too. And today I thought to myself, hmm, kale pesto. That sounds crazy. That sounds like that terrible hummus you made when you were drunk several years ago that included canned peas. (It was awful. We'd been aiming for spinach. I don't recall exactly why we used peas, but I regretted it immediately. There is no redeeming canned peas.)

But then the people at the Times go and write about kale pesto ... and I'm entranced. I'll probably eat it tomorrow. Maybe without cheese. Not sure yet.

I dyed more yarn, and every time I do, I feel like I could do this for a living. With some surface design and writing thrown in. I need better tools and I'd like more room, but I am happy to have space to do it at all. I need to make a niddy noddy. I shall make one out of PVC pipe.

My arms are not better. This is still very sad.

The weather is turning, and that is not sad.

I'm trying to take full advantage of living so close to the library, what with my new library card and all. I want to read books about bookmaking. It makes me feel like a cannibal.

Noah has graduated, and, in a fitting end to his terrible semester, his group members have not turned in their final project correctly and he has to take care of it. No big deal, but a terrible last note.

We are finally both out of school. It is shocking. I'm sure we'll establish some kind of more-normal cohabitation, but so far it's a lot of looking at each other and watching TV online together. As it well should be.

Eat your kale, friends, and enjoy the height of spring. Make merry with me, ye who have been studying too hard. Come into the sun.

Being Homemade

2009-05-07T20:34:00.002-05:00

Because aren't we all, in a way? Or VW bus-made if you let my mom tell you a story ... which can stop right there, Mom! Geez.

I mean yogurt, granola, bread, dinner. Dear Jeff sends me good reading, which is not so different from when he was a student of mine (ha ha! compliment complete), such as this woman who did a cost-benefit analysis on homemade vs. store-bought goods. And she apparently loves this granola, though I argue for this one. Really, the second one is called "honey-toasted" and it didn't burn in the oven like my last batch.

I think my own cost-benefit analysis would turn out differently because we eat differently. And what I make has a lot to do with what doesn't hurt my arms and elbows, so it has to fall into this easy-to-make category of homemade. So, in the last six months, we've gone from eating, say, pasta with crockpot sauce heavy on onions and red wine to marinated, then baked, tofu and frozen stir-fry vegetables. Not a terrible change ... but you should notice the lack of chopping, the lack of stirring, etc.

I shall, then, list out what I make at home and wouldn't change:

1.) Yogurt. No question. I crave the taste of my own yogurt. I drained some yesterday and drank the whey mixed with peach nectar. I put the drained stuff in a yogurt tart. I love love love yogurt and, even with shopping at Aldi, making our own is cheaper than buying. Not by a lot, but by enough, and the taste is much better. I haven't tried the easiest method of making it, which involves letting it sit in a warm place overnight--I'm still using a hot water bath--but the 8 hours would be even easier.

2.) Bread for the right occasions. Mostly that means weekend eating. (Don't you eat differently on the weekend? We graze like crazy. Good crusty bread facilitates this.) Homemade, good bread is easy, I say, and I've been doing it for eight years now, off and on. My bread now veers into no-knead, or all mixer-knead, but either way it is great. And I love the original no-knead recipe--I bake it in my 8-qt. steel stock pot with aluminum foil to cover. Which is developing a roasty patina.

3.) Bath salts. Not edible, but if you take a lot of baths, there is no question. Sugar scrub too.

4.) Hummus. Though I'm disappointed lately with how mine turns out.

Okay, I can go on, but mostly it comes down to me saying, "People still buy that already made? Why?"

And in arm news, I may not get better. This is too sad to say much about. So that is the end of that.

Off to rest, shall we?

Resurfacing

2009-05-04T21:53:00.002-05:00

Only to say I finished editing 300 pages in 1.5 weeks and am now editing 42 pages in 2 days. Which is a much better editing-to-days ratio. Good lord the end of the semester! I'm not even a student and yet it haunts me still, with all this work, all these people who pay me. I do like getting paid.

I may have found my perfect granola/muesli recipe, with 3/4 c. honey and 4 T. oil; I love my yogurt; I cook sometimes, things like carrot-potato soup with nutmeg, honey, and leftover quinoa; and Noah buys the best groceries. I haven't been going with him lately, as I can't carry or pick up things, really, and am mostly useless and grumbly because of that--anyway, he goes and I don't and he gets home and I'm all, wow food! Avocados! A block of cheese! Wow! Best way to receive groceries ever. Excellent at grocery-shopping, that one, buying frozen pepperoni pizza rather than sausage because pepperoni is easier to move off of a half (for me).

Am I really an editor? All this editing and my grumbling about it make me wonder if I really am suited for it, or if it's something I can just do. Like algebra--I can do algebra but don't love it. You know? I grumble about style sheets and people who don't know how to use commas (I don't mean errors, I mean AT ALL) and inconsistently styled headings and question myself about my understanding of hyphenation rules. I don't think I hyphenate as correctly as I could.

So, maybe not a real editor. Maybe a pretend editor. Or a skilled editor who'd rather be making anything at all.

It's been five years since I graduated from college, this spring. Oh my a long time. I think the art degree and the head copy editor job I had there are the two most useful things I got out of college. Loved the rest, for sure, but those are the useful ones.

And I'm definitely moving to Seattle in late October.

Am I Really Okay with This?

2009-04-22T20:14:00.002-05:00

Doing some editing on a dissertation, and the references have no style. Fashion police, no; they adhere to no one school of style. And this really bothers me. BOTHERS ME.

But they are mostly consistent to themselves. And the dissertation committee members apparently do not care.

However ... I care. Poor little unstyled citations, I care about you. Because I know three different schools of style and can recite them. Honestly. I recognize them on sight. I am an editor. This is what I know.

I am leaving them alone. I am. I am. I am. Breathe.

And should I capitalize "with"? I am undecided on that one.

Squash, Rotten, with Deceit and Broccoli Pesto, Updated with Photos of Railings

2009-04-14T18:32:00.003-05:00

I slow-cooked a spaghetti squash today. Set it out last night and everything. Made this broccoli pesto with generous amounts of parsley. Tossed and ... tasted and ... it was totally rotten! I should have surmised that from the weird root looking things inside it with the seeds when I cut it open.

Definitely the first time I have cooked something ROTTEN without knowing it was rotten. Oh squash and slow-cookers, so useful, and with a hidden currency of deceit. Deceit!

The broccoli pesto was tasty with some whole-wheat fusilli, though.

Should I walk to the library now? Yes I should.

Update: Kaffe Fasset's book, Glorious Color, makes me wish I was twenty years older, living in Fasset's pattern photos; Gary Paulsen published a book for adults in 1992 that I picked up, fell in love with, and thought sadly, No one publishes books like this anymore, on great paper with full-color paintings, with no real plot; David Sedaris is really funny but I keep hoping for a happy ending anyway; and these photos of railings make me feel indelibly peaceful. LA, maybe? I don't know.

Oh Hai Guyz

2009-04-13T20:10:00.002-05:00

Aren't you always thinking in lolcat?

Let's see ... hosted a Passover seder, chopped things with few painful repercussions. Went to a large Easter brunch full of excellent largess. Am making the second batch of chocolate matzo crack right now. Dyed yarn; feel like I'm getting somewhere on my dye trials. Good lord I am the same girl I was in college, mostly; I think in the same trials, I record results the same way (haphazardly), I try to be kind of scientific about all of it, and I freak the hell out when I encounter toxic materials.

Oh, toxic you say?

The dyes I use are only toxic in their dry state. Once water is in there, well, I wear gloves and wouldn't drink it, but it won't kill me anymore. But, let's say, a container full of dyestock leaks and leaks through the plastic bag and leaks into the large bin it's inside of and ... all the liquid evaporates. And there's dry dye everywhere. Oddly enough I moved so fast I forgot to wear gloves during the whole ordeal. And given the lack of migraine or sinus freakout, I am assuming I have not absorbed too much toxicity.

In college, I used cyanide to make cloth blue in the sun. I crushed glass and didn't wear a mask or gloves (bad idea) with a hammer inside a piece of canvas. I mixed clay in a room with an incorrectly-installed vent fan, which pulled nothing out of the room. Yay clay so light it floats on air, living in your sinuses for a few years. In grad school, in my ceramics class, I angrily and kind of crazily left the clay lab in a blaze at the end of the semester ... and forgot my beautiful particulate filter mask.

Well, I'm sure I'll get a new one soon enough. Because I have sinus trouble and I don't want to die. From my dye ...

I think I just forgot my laundry. Uh, bye again!

Darning Socks, Insulting Peasants, and Food

2009-04-01T18:29:00.003-05:00

Perhaps I am overly excited about this, but I just watched a video on darning socks, and let me tell you, I have more socks that need darning than I want you to know about. I am a bit of a sock lover, a sock-wearing fool, and I decided in college that it would benefit me far into the future to amass as many high-quality wool socks (Smartwool, really) as possible. And to love them forever. And hopefully own enough to only do laundry every two weeks ...

Anyway, few of my to-be-darned patches will match, you know, at all, but the holes will be filled!

Brief interlude: younger cat Eto just brought home another maimed bird, two in two weeks; I am closing the blinds again, as I cannot take such violence. I think some of my neighbors are witnessing this as well ... I hope it's the dog-owners whose dog maybe, hopefully, scared Eto away and hopefully didn't see him and his bird-victim, or maybe one of the many immigrant neighbors, who I imagine are not as freaked out by this, since they cook a lot of cabbage and peanut oil and onions, which I find to be earthy, like peasant/farm earthy. I am revealing all my assumptions, aren't I? In other words, maybe peasants don't mind animals eating animals? I am two or three generations removed from farming, so I should be more realistic about this. And the main neighbor in question is a graduate student in physics with a gigantic Apple TV or iMac thing.

Since I am not making a lot of things right now except food, and am insulting my neighbors, all farmers, and all peasants, I will change topics. I plan to write more about those foods I am making in days to come.

SUCH AS:

--Mole skillet pie with greens, teamed with sauteed corn, red onions and kale
--Chinese noodles with stir-fry vegetables and orange pan-glazed tempeh
--No-knead bread with steel-cut oats, served with roasted carrot "fries," garlic tahini sauce, sun-dried tomato hummus, and parmesan-yogurt sauce (which is exactly what it sounds like)
--Lentil soup with spinach, teamed with poppy-seed polenta (accidentally made with 3 tablespoons, not teaspoons, of poppy seeds, postponing all possible drug tests by necessity)
--Almond-quinoa muffins with dried cranberries (they are a bit weird, almost too health-food for even me)
--And lots of nori rolls, when the mood strikes, rolled by Noah the master roller

We are eating more home-cooked food because my arms are a little better and I am chopping a little more. Yum, food. Yay, lower food bills. Yay, food that is more real-ingredient-centered.

It's NaPoWriMo and I am not participating. Go elsewhere.

Change in Plans

2009-03-18T20:38:00.004-05:00

Well ... we won't be moving to Seattle until sometime between September and November. Not May or June. Accenture can't start Noah until then, which has some very real effects on our projected income ... and where we are working, and how we are living.

Anybody want to sublet my place after we move? Heh? Or, you know, let me live in yours? While you live somewhere else, I guess? This is a quandry. We have some time to figure it out, though--August sometime.

All cost-saving and money-making ideas are welcome. Comment below, pls. And I'm already planning things like selling books and clothes and other things ... we live very low-cost, so looking for ways to lower cost is difficult. But not impossible. We will work it out. Positive thinking.

I've been wanting to dye yarn a grey-blue shade, and I looked at the nearly-raining still-winter sky a few nights ago and realized that was it. Yarn to come in some semblance of shade.

I keep singing Arcade Fire songs out loud, and they make no sense at all. "Come on Alex / you can do it / come on Alex / there's nothing to it" ... "All the neighbors can dance" ... "The crown of love / is now upon me" ...

And, yesterday, while cleaning our apartment in ways it has not been cleaned in some long, long time (with baking soda! mixed with rosemary essential oil! it smelled great in here--spring cleaning!!!), I took refuge in not one but two Saint Louis radio stations, KWMU the NPR affiliate, and KDHX the community-supported independent station. I know one of the DJs, I grew up listening to this, and I have positive associations with nearly every show of theirs. Yesterday I was all, "Mid-Day Jamboree! Wahoo!" And now I'm all "Songwriters Showcase!"

I'm sure there are good radio stations wherever I am, hopefully, but maybe there are not, and maybe I am lazy--whatever the case, hearing those two stations shout out their call signs is comforting wherever I am.

Oh, And Kelsey Keyes! Or, Increase Your Karma Now!

2009-03-16T21:30:00.004-05:00

If anybody here has time on their hands, click through the links below ... and help out my friend Kelsey.

Karma! Do it! You don't need to know why! The more clicks the better.

MY BLOGS
http://kelseykeyes-kelseykeyes.blogspot.com/
http://kelsey-keyes.blogspot.com/

CARL'S BLOGS
http://kelseyanncloughkeyes.blogspot.com/
http://spiridontrepka.livejournal.com/2138.html

Robin
http://kelseykeyesrecipes.wordpress.com/

Christy:

http://kelseyannkeyes.blogspot.com/
http://cruellestmonths.livejournal.com/

Christine (yes, me)
http://beingamaker.blogspot.com/2009/02/shout-out-to-kelsey-keyes-and-food.html

Helen
http://kelseyanncloughkeyesrocks.blogspot.com/

Andrea
http://helpinafriend.blogspot.com/

Susie
kelseykeyesblog.blogspot.com

Agnes
http://happybirthdaykelseykeyes.blogspot.com/

OTHER SITES I'VE SET UP
Flickr
http://flickr.com/photos/56496703@N00/
http://flickr.com/photos/56496703@N00/3203836103/

Yelp
http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=HjfYmrBBTaXnlD_rAB1ViQ

Naymz
http://www.naymz.com/search/kelsey/keyes/2448114

LinkedIN
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/kelsey/keyes

Delicious
http://delicious.com/kelseykeyes

Brainify
http://brainify.com/Details/User.aspx?id=3562

OTHER EXISTING LINKS THAT ARE GOOD TO LINK TO

Skyline
http://www.skylinehighschool1999.com/

GSLIS
https://apps.lis.uiuc.edu/wiki/users/viewuserprofile.action?username=keyes

Accountancy
http://www.business.uiuc.edu/jdperkin/Accy304/Announcements.html

RateMyProfessor
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=757427

Knox
http://deptorg.knox.edu/newsarchive/news_events/2002/student_english_conference.html

Library Cards and Turmeric-Infused Trash

2009-03-16T20:59:00.004-05:00

Yeah! Changing it up, "blog redesign," etc. Soon I will figure out the graphics stuff about what I'd like to see in my banner. I am perhaps surprisingly inept where design and computers interact.

And now Goodreads.com can tell you what I'm reading. And seeing it here will remind me to actually read rather than watch Project Runway and Legend of the Seeker. Put that Book Gem to use.

I got a library card today! This seems ridiculous, to have not had one in the public library system here AND have lived here five years. I found the textile area (746.42, oh yeah) and didn't leave for a long time. Eventually they will see me every week, I am guessing.

While "business plans" are something I have never dealt with in my life, except for that sport management skills book, wherein I read about them via flowcharts, I am probably going to write one with Noah sometime. About yarn. And dye. And etsy.com. And on and on.

You know, being a maker and all that.

I am also a maker of lentil soup and no-knead bread. Served together with some turmeric-infused yogurt. Somehow my jar of turmeric shattered inside its lid ... it's a latch-top jar, so maybe it fell and the force of impact messed with that part. I do not know. Noah sifted some out through my teeniest whole-leaf-tea filter. The rest is in the trash. Turmeric-infused trash, that is.

And after a day at work, of a literal five hours of voice-typing and index-reformatting (loop "move left, move down, tab" in my scraggly voice), I am amazed by voice typing as an entity and am also tired of it. Or perhaps more tired of index-reformatting. Freelancers, beware: format your work correctly. I have no sympathy for incorrect formatting. Honestly, no sympathy at all.

Neverwhere or Fabric, huh? Where to start.

Making What?

2009-03-15T15:08:00.003-05:00

* yogurt again

* dyeing yarn again

* headway into new apartments in new cities

* headway also into what to eat, when, how: I finally started using the power-flow timer thing, like plant grow-light timer, for my crock-pot dry-bean cookery: turn on at 1pm, turn off at 4pm, and since they're just beans, the time spent soaking before cooking probably won't kill us

* tofu pasta bake with friends--yes, it sounds awful, but it is intensely delicious, and perhaps using four cloves of garlic in the tofu cheese was a little much, given Noah's reaction when I came home: "Garlic! Ahhh!"

Perhaps in my next life (which is not so far away) I will be making things with fabric and yarn and dye, selling them, healing this injury, cooking good food, living calmly, maybe teaching or tutoring or freelance editing part-time. I should learn to be a better blogger. The artist bloggers are all so hip.

Oh Ye Booyahs

2009-03-13T13:15:00.002-05:00

Sentences like this make me first laugh then desperately want to be asleep (taken from the good folks here):

Mr. Cramer, the host of “Mad Money,” barely had time for his usual shuffleboard games at the Elk’s Lodge near his home.

The lodge “is a booyah-free zone,” he said, using his trademark exclamation. “I was not able to get away from the booyahs this week.”

Nor, sir, have I been able to get away from the booyahs for a long time. Oh ye booyahs, persecuting me for my many, loud personal contributions to this economic crisis. Pain is not felt for ye.

Also, I played shuffleboard in middle school gym class for a while and loved it. LOVED it. Anybody besides this dude that wants to play shuffleboard, call me up.

Other news? I am talking with a new surgeon dude who will hopefully not be a terrible person who disrespects me for twenty minutes and then expects me to say, "Yes, please cut me up in a procedure with a 20% complication rate of nerve damage." I did a lot of dishes this week. I found an old, wonderful friend online after losing touch for five years. I am planning to wear a t-shirt and pearls tomorrow, or some such outfit, to an organic wine tasting with friends to be followed by frozen treats and hot chocolate sauce. Some things are really bad; other things are not so terrible; and every day that passes makes more of the bad things a little farther away.

Green Spinach and Green Shirts and Greener Towns

2009-03-06T17:43:00.002-06:00

I decided to cook saag paneer ... with tofu instead of paneer, having leftover tofu and lots of spinach and some kind of comfort food association with curried spinach. So I took a vegan saag paneer recipe and added yogurt to it. Can't be vegan for the life of me.

Well, no grad school yet, thinking surgery might be a good idea, got a lawyer (!) who seems nice and wanted my case, and ... you know, not sure what I'll be doing in three or four months, but I know we'll be living somewhere with lots of water and trees. And kayaks and lattes and local berries and, and, and.

Moved offices at work today, to my first single office ever, and I pretty much hate it. I have had seriously great office mates, and the silence is deafening, and it is as cold as a meat locker, and dark enough that my plants will surely die. Glowing, huh? It should make voice typing easier, though.

Enough typing for today, however. Unofficial and Noah's out drinking; I inadvertently wore green today and felt stared at by all U of I alumni at work. No, I am not taking body shots today or drinking colored beer. No, no. Just like green.

I Have to Stop Having This Kind of a Day

2009-03-03T20:04:00.002-06:00

Was not offered admission into UW's PhD in English program. This makes moving to Seattle considerably more complicated.

I'm betting on things being okay eventually, though. Me and the pan of brownies will make it through.

I Might Be Okay, Actually

2009-03-03T10:38:00.002-06:00

I'm keeping my job! I'm protected under FMLA!

Oh I'm breathing again. Breaaaaathhheee.

Still Got the Check, But No More Claim

2009-03-01T17:53:00.003-06:00

My worker's compensation claim was denied on Thursday evening, after a great meeting at work about this very thing earlier in the afternoon. Totally shocked me and the insurance case worker, but to no avail, claim is denied. They're paying for everything up until Thursday, which is good and reasonable, but ... the only reason they denied the claim is because the independent doctor they had me see read my EMG results and said, "no pre-existing condition, and not work-related"--with no explanation. I'm talking to a lawyer.

So, imminent medical bills, not sure what this changes for me at work, not sure that they won't try to let me go ASAP, which I would fight, and this is all back to terrifying.

It is good to be back in OT--they'll be making me new splints for my thumbs, for the de Quervain's tendonitis there, and I have a new stretch, and I got to use their magical heat packs again. Three times a week and then two times a week--I'll see lots of them. My main therapist there says there's a 50/50 chance that OT will work it all out, or that OT will help and I'll still need surgery. So we're doing intense OT for a month and reevaluating.

Now, to make yogurt, to dye yarn, to make a plan for myself titled "how to survive: eating, sleeping, and thinking well." Surely we can make it until July in Seattle. Right?

A Two-Item Bulleted List

2009-02-23T22:50:00.003-06:00

* Is there any way that any one can convince me to actually like red kidney beans? Please suggest ways if you have them. I can buy them cheaply but I think they are gross. Sad quandry.

* I am enthralled with mint.com. Totally in love. I wanted to set up my E*Trade account with this level of filtering, but this mint thing is much much better. And faster. And yes I/we have very negative net worth but you know ... okay I have no consolations. It's better to know about. (And my biggest loan isn't even loaded on there yet! Ha! Sigh.)

* BONUS ITEM I am trying new things with my hair; this is embarrassing. I do think about my hair, but I also go to lectures on design by guys from Patagonia and walk out feeling certain I could have explained the brand and business model better BY FAR. Hello stand-up shorts and the history of recycled fleece? Hello great cuts for women and a mind for color? And he didn't mention their "send it back" program. Which I hope still exists ... oh good it does, with less glamorous shots of beat-up shorts than I remember in decade-old catalogs.

Calmer with Fingerless Mitts

2009-02-22T18:55:00.004-06:00

All right, I'm feeling a little calmer.

Not doing hardly anything at all makes my arms feel so much better. It's ridiculous. No pain meds today, and I'm feeling fine so far. Of course, the most intense things my arms have done today is 1) hold a phone and 2) mend some knitted fingerless mitts of mine that I literally WORE THROUGH, breaking the yarn (not even at the end!) and subsequently patched up some hanging loose stitches. Oy, how much I rely on these mitts, which hopefully you can see on here ...

Anyone who's wishing they had something to knit, I can hook you up with yarn and a pattern ... and you can knit me new ones! I have yarn and ideas for two, maybe three pairs. The faster you knit, the better.

My friend Adam is doing a cool thing, publishing a handmade chapbook of one poem (of someone else's) and distributing them for free.

Feeling also absent-minded today, like, what should I do today? Huh? How many hours just passed? Wha? Eat cookies and plan installation art in my head? Sounds all right.

But perhaps the big thing is ... career, job, life, injury, what to do, what to decide not to do in order to stay better, and weighing, where can I convince people that my voice software is awesome and will be great for me, that yeah giving me a single office is totally worth it, and that, while I could invoke the ADA whenever, they really want to hire me before a legal battle ensues ... and I don't really want to get into any of that. Today, I want to design fabric in a really large workspace and run some installation shows. Maybe sell on etsy.com. Forget words; words, you bring pain, lately. I want my knitting back.

What Not to Talk to a Hand Surgeon About

2009-02-19T23:51:00.002-06:00

My new doctor wants me to have radial tunnel release surgery. One of the main risks of the surgery is that you can lose nerve ennervation and muscle strength in the back of your hand ... and the pain might not go away, and the compression might not be over. Oh and they can accidentally sever the nerve. And it puts your arm mostly out of commission for over a month, and it's only fully back after three months.

Not a surgery I'm interested in. He is a hand surgeon, so I guess his recommendation would be surgery.

Totally disheartening visit ... left me really hopeless, i.e., will I ever get better, why am I not better, why is the world so bad, when will I get better, will it be before my life changes drastically as everybody thought in September when I began treatment ... this could make moving cross-country v. difficult ... why does this doctor act like I'm lying to him about where I feel pain, saying crap like "I only have proof that you have radial tunnel and that your forearm should hurt" but clearly more hurts than that, et al, et al. So I dropped out of the world for the evening and feel better now. And I did dishes, and I don't feel like I hurt myself, and that is awesome.

Official In The Way That Only A Big Check Can Be

2009-02-17T22:33:00.003-06:00

This claim thing is official. The check for back-pay (for temporary partial disability pay) came in today, and wahoo, I am breathing a little better. And I talk to a doctor on Thursday! For the first time in two months! Unbelievable. I started this claim almost six months ago. But it is happening, and that is a blessing.

I don't think or talk blessings a lot these days--I'm not sure what I think about them--but today I am thinking about them in an essentialist manner, kind of like I know it when I see it. This claim is a blessing in that way. Also there's anger in a "I got hurt doing my job correctly" way, but leaving bitterness aside, I am focusing on knowing the medical bills are paid, and focusing on recovery.

Recovery ... which still means doing nothing, inexplicable pains in my arms, and, despite being careful, wearing elbow pads and lately wrist braces, being totally achy and done after six hours of work. I feel like I should be able to carry things with my arms and hands by now. And do dishes every day. And not be in pain after doing NOTHING AT ALL. But this is the nature of injury, I guess; I can tell my body is happiest when I am totally resting, relaxed, and on enough pain meds. I should probably meditate daily. Meditating is really hard, though. You would think that years of hippie training would make it easy. I am a high-anxiety hippie, though.

The other happy thing that came in the mail today is my book holder. I am in love. Back story: holding books open hurts my thumbs, palms and elbows, really my whole arm, and books are obviously something I will not go without, unlike, say, the act of vacuuming. (Thanks, Noah!) And a book holder is cheaper than a Roomba. Off to bed with my electric blanket and book holder, to swoon together and approach old age before my third decade.

Yogurt-Making

2009-02-16T20:13:00.002-06:00

Or would the style authorities I know call that an unnecessary hyphen? CMS might.

I will attend a yogurt-making class on Saturday at my local co-op! I am so excited. I do vaguely know how to make yogurt, or perhaps more accurately I know how yogurt is made. Even the class description mentioned that 4000 years ago, people were making yogurt, without a $50 W-S yogurt maker. (No hyphen that time. I should write a style sheet for myself.) But I am no nomad, I do not have this dairy-curdling in my mostly northern European blood, and for a $5 attendance fee I could have bought yogurt. And then I would eat it and it would be gone, but the eight ounces of starter I will take home after the class will make LIMITLESS YOGURT.

Yogurt is one of the top reasons I'm not vegan--soy yogurt is pretty gross. Maybe making my own could be better ... not sure of that one.

Okay, really, whenever I talk the big vegan game, someone should say, "Hey, remember that time in college you told your friends you might as well be vegan--while eating a piece of pizza with not only cheese, but ham and pineapple on it?" Yeah, I remember.

Also, the co-op sent the email today at 12:30pm, I read it around 1, and when I signed up at 7:55, I took the last spot. YOGURT-MAKING IS HOT.

Slouchy Slouch

2009-02-16T18:29:00.001-06:00

Maybe I'm watching too much Project Runway.

Book holder, oh when will you arrive? I have real books to read.

Cookies and Kelsey Keyes

2009-02-15T15:52:00.001-06:00

I bet Kelsey would make cookies with me. Like espresso-chocolate shortbread, and toasted coconut shortbread, and super ginger cookies.

I want cookies.

Kelsey Keyes, make me cookies!!! Okay you don't have to.

Procrastination, Dinner, and a Poem, but Not AWP

2009-02-12T23:21:00.002-06:00

For all writers of all kinds: Shauna talks about procrastination.

Yeah, I might not eat meat anymore. Like for real.

How good it is to have burritos with a friend, and some wine, and some assisted paper-cutting.

Enjoy AWP, yall. Maybe I'll see you in Denver next year. I do love Boulder.

I wrote a poem today; my hands ached like crazy after handwriting for a few hours at work today; I had tasty dinner; I had tasty wine; I did not make truffles. I really want to adapt this recipe to make cardamom-infused truffles. Yum, cardamom and dark chocolate.

Yeah, I did write a poem today. I'm back to my every-six-months routine, unlike some people I know, cough adam cough. It's a poem about winter and losing earrings in snow-covered parking lots and finding them in spring. Mashed flat by your car.

Talk about spoilers ...

Newsprint and Fountain Pens

2009-02-11T23:40:00.003-06:00

Today I discovered I really like writing on newsprint with a fountain pen. And if I listen to Vaughn Williams' "The Lark Ascending" while I write with those two things, I can write about difficult things without freaking out too much. So, big yay for newsprint and its cheapness, the fountain pen I already own, and last.fm having "Lark" easy to find.

Okay weird right hand middle finger knuckle aching, I will go to bed.

Victory! I think!

2009-02-10T17:39:00.002-06:00

My worker's compensation claim was finalized today, in my favor, as in, "yes this is work-related." I will really believe this when I get a check for 66% back pay, and I see that the medical bills this has already accrued are paid.

But really dudes!

I see a doctor next Thursday who is going to treat me!!!

The final final final word on my diagnosis seems to be:
radial tunnel syndrome
de Quervian's tenosynivitis
and more tendinitis
and maybe there were carpal tunnel symptoms, but maybe not, early on.

Which means treatment is blessed hot packs, massage, and ultrasound, and stretches galore.

Today, though, is sinus headache day, which I've been hitting back with yogurt and granola. And decongestant etc. Off for more of that.

Activity!

2009-02-08T20:09:00.004-06:00

Today I am doing things!

I want to be eating these cookies. Maybe I will make them and THEN eat them.

I'm about to be dyeing yarn in a orange red pale color. Hard to explain. I have the image in my head and can maybe make it happen--which makes me feel like I'm composing again (I composed classical music for strings for a very short time a long time ago) because I composed multiple parts in my head and then had to figure out how to write it down.

Also I hung some art for the first time and switched out some other art today in my apartment, and it is like I have a new apartment. Or at least I'm noticing a wall now that I didn't notice before because it's white like the other walls ... suddenly my apartment is bigger.

Perhaps I am reading a little too much design*sponge, or not enough, but I want to do everything. Or at least hold stamping classes and charge $90 a person per hour.

My arms are starting to feel better than they did a week ago, when the pain went crazy. Doing nothing at all has been good to them. Imagine that--stop using a body part that's injured and it heals a little. Rest = less inflammation and compression. Insert a Neo whoa here.

I am also about to purchase a book holder. Holding books open is proving to be pain-inducing, which is what happens when your thumbs are injured ... and palms ... and elbows ... anyway, since all of you readers are also readers of books, I may end up recommending the thing if it is as good as it seems. Suspend judgment for now.

Shout-out to Kelsey Keyes! And food!

2009-02-07T16:59:00.002-06:00

I'm going to be writing today about my friend Kelsey, that's Kelsey Ann Clough Keyes, who is great in a multitude of ways. This is going to be different from the kind of things I usually write about my blog, so you may want to stop reading now. However, if you have some time to waste, I'd appreciate it if you click on the links I'm going supply below. This is all in an effort to spread peace and love about Kelsey throughout the Internet, with a secondary purpose of manipulating Google’s search algorithm.

My favorite things about Kelsey have a lot to do with some of my favorite things in life -- knitting, eating food, watching good television, and hanging out with friends. Today I'm going to focus on eating food and how awesome food itself is and how awesome the food that Kelsey feeds me is, in particular.

There is a memorable roasted garlic soup. I think it was winter. I remember it was just as salty as it should be, and there were a lot of tomatoes in it, and that bread plus that soup made for a really tasty time of eating.

I should also mention the hot buttered rum, the very messy mango lassis, and the bars of chocolate, and a plate of ridiculously good cookies and confections that she left me before Christmas. She also left a plate for my neighbor, which almost did not make it to him because I was going to keep them all and eat them. By myself.

Let it be known that my friend Kelsey is ridiculously awesome, a really good baker and cook, a friend to vegan food, and a friend to me. You can read more about her at the following blogs:

http://kelseyanncloughkeyes.blogspot.com/
http://spiridontrepka.livejournal.com/2138.html
http://kelseykeyes-kelseykeyes.blogspot.com/
http://kelsey-keyes.blogspot.com/

An Unnumbered List of Beautiful Things

2009-02-04T21:44:00.003-06:00

"Yes, the springtimes needed you." -- Rilke, first elegy

Empty glass jars.

Winter overcast light.

Bare branches.

Sleeping faces.

Creaking, drafty, unevenly-sinking homes.

Water.

All the candle holders I received as wedding gifts: the glass block ones, poured in a mold that left edges like a milk carton would; the single piece of sandstone for four votives in a grid; the small mirrored tray with glass votive holders and molded glass edging. How they all fit on the edges of my bathtub.

Books with their set type and unmoving written language.

* * *

Do the springtimes need me? Do they need me to survive the winter, to witness their arrival? Will they happen if I don't watch?

* * *

Big spike in pain this week, no reason why. Lots of baths with epsom salt and lots of painkillers. Think anti-inflammation and anti-compression thoughts for me.

The People Have Spoken

2009-01-30T00:10:00.002-06:00

You get an updated blog.

The updates are not so big, though. It's winter. I finished all my grad apps. My arms still hurt all the time.

I haven't had a migraine since I stopped drinking red wine and champagne. This is both great and terrible news. Not too important, though.

I made the no-knead bread today, and, perhaps because I am a multi-generational and amazing bread-baker, it was really good. And my arms do not hurt. And my 8-quart stainless steel stock pot survived being in my miniature oven at 450 for an hour and a half. Nothing died! I made bread!

So ... I haven't wanted to update because I want to tell you all about a terrible thing, but I don't want to, but I do, and I am. One of my cousins in Texas was killed in a car accident the week of Christmas--it was the morning, he was driving, he got distracted and swerved into oncoming traffic and collided with a gravel truck. He was killed instantly. He was 26. 500 people went to his funeral. I did not go; I stayed in Missouri/Illinois. We were close in a way; I'm closer to his immediate family, but he's in the group of cousins I'm closest to. His mom has been battling pancreatic cancer for half a year; I heard Danny, her youngest, had been killed and figured she would die within a month. Instead, her doctors can't get any visual confirmation of her tumor. As in, her tumor disappeared the week after he died. Her doctors told her it was a gift from God and to accept it. He was my responsible cousin, the one who had a professional driver's license and drove trucks full of explosives for a living, who was quiet and handsome and tall like his dad and loved his niece and nephew and was nearly engaged and ... was 26.

I want you all to be safe, and not swerve, and not be killed.

Okay? Okay.

Today, in Tech News at 8

2008-12-30T20:12:00.002-06:00

new MacBook is here
VMware Fusion is here
Windows XP is here
Office 2007 for Windows is here

and finally

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 is here, with a terribly ill-fitting headset I'm wearing around my neck

oh, and a new printer, wireless.

more non-tech news later.

Oh Friends

2008-12-20T18:35:00.003-06:00

Friends, if you be true friends, do not let me ever, ever publish something with a title (or a chapter title or even an a-head) with those witty parentheticals inside a word, e.g., Trans(per)forming.

Also, I do not want to take the GRE Subject Test in Literature. And so I am not.

Also, where is my MacBook? Our new printer got here first. None of this would be possible without an incredibly generous friend, and I thank him ... and the printer was $35. And is wireless. And prints photos and has five ink tanks. Wowzer. Our current printer goes to the curb or the craiglist.

When did I decide to apply to grad school? A month ago? Maybe that is why I am behind and buying books with expedited shipping rather than wait for the interlibrary loan folks to do their thing, via Noah's library card. Today I found a receipt for a lot of money that I gave to UIUC after I graduated, which makes me think I do NOT owe them several hundred dollars, though perhaps speaking with them will clarify that further.

How many schools to apply to? Why? One in NYC, one in Atlanta, one in Nashville, one in Seattle, one in Pullman, WA, and the list stops there so far. The NYC might not keep my interest; they have some weird no-MA-offered thing but let you get it through another college nearby, and I'm sure it's less complicated in person, but it seems crazy from far away. Looked into U of Oregon and Oregon State, and one requires the Lit test and one sounds really, really lame and only offers an MA.

Do I really have to take coursework? I guess I do. I can maybe transfer two classes. Could have been three if I had stayed in Cary's Modern American Poetry, but honestly, auditing that was so much better than really taking it.

I just keep thinking ... is this it? Professor? Comp studies, creative writing pedagogy, trauma studies, et al et al? It has seemed like it could turn out this way since I was in high school; I just thought then that it would go faster. I don't remember why I decided to go for an MFA anymore; does that scare anyone else? I remember ... having written a lot of stuff and being really encouraged by faculty ... and thinking it sounded more job-ready than an art degree. I guess I'd stopped thinking about lit in the same way. But oh, how all the rivers flow into each other.

I keep looking at satellite images of Seattle and thinking about floods. But apparently, bays and sounds don't flood like deltas do. And Seattle doesn't seem to be a major watershed. All this makes me feel very Midwestern but specifically of Saint Louis and its flood plains.

Friends, again, if you be true, don't let me use air quotes.

Renaming this blog to ... Sick = Sick = Sick

2008-12-16T21:34:00.003-06:00

My last occupational therapy appointment was Dec. 4. I have another EMG/nerve conduction test scheduled in Springfield, 90 miles away, on January 19. They hurt, no matter what the literature says about 'mild discomfort,' and I do not enjoy being told to relax when I can't ... the test shoots electricity through your nerves to see how well they conduct, and it buzzes if there's muscle tension. Yet doesn't the prospect of electric shock encourage muscle tension? Yes.

Anyway, EMG on 1/19, give the doctor two weeks to finish his report, give the worker's comp claims worker two weeks to get back to me with a more final say on the claim, so maybe in late February I'll be treated again.

I am so angry.

And keep in mind that occ therapy = pain relief for me, things like ultrasound which is magical, massage which is magical, the world's best moist heat wrap things ... I'm taking way more ibuprofen now than I was pre-Dec. 4. And ibuprofen scares me; I think I was taking way too much in middle school and high school and that it freaked out my kidneys. The kidneys seem okay now, though. I worry anyway. I like my kidneys to function.

So I am not being a maker so much these days. I'm beading a necklace for someone, I'm weaving in ends of knitted socks for someone, but mostly I'm wishing I was knitting. I really miss knitting. It hurts to hold books up for too long. And to hold heavy drinks.

So maybe I am better than I was, but not really better. More in a super funk. And maybe deciding to make risotto tonight was a bad idea, as it involved the chopping of onion and kale, the zesting of a lemon, the shredding of Parmesan. And stirring of broth into rice as it released its starch.

And I am ANGRY about the reasons I am injured, ANGRY about the medical expenses still unpaid and my work hours missed due to medical restrictions remaining uncompensated, ANGRY that the only time I've been warm today is now, sitting inside my down mummy bag, with the hood over my head and the zipper closed to my waist, flapped open for arms-out typing.

Angry yes. Angry angry. Sick = sick = sick = angry.

quick posts again

2008-12-14T20:24:00.002-06:00

Christine is ...

*glad to hear Deutsch is en route to San Diego

*wearing splints again, under my own orders

*getting weird pain that wasn't there before, or at least not prominent, and was aggravated today by carrying a plate full of brunch food

*sad that her meat-free brunch food was too heavy for her to carry ...

*probably buying a new MacBook on Tuesday, then VMWare Fusion, then Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, and hoping that the combination works well enough for the kind of writer and editor I am/she is

*hating facebook's grammar quandries

*thinking, focus on the dissertation and screw everything else, or at least, is trying to use the fact that she's thought about grad school a lot to her advantage

*silently crying at the prospect of more grad school, a little bit, and is gearing up retaliation now: bring on the affirmations, preferably in post-it note form

*going to stop typing now

NYT and me

2008-12-09T19:20:00.004-06:00

The New York Times is me:
* watching TV online, though I don't mind the threat of "getting busted" and use surfthechannel.com
* writers with hurting hands who can't leave their Macs
* people who like sorbet, but Bittman's sounds kind of lame and I'd rather use my ice cream maker
* people who should think about buying a house, but hopefully in a place where homes are a) affordable and b) not projected to plummet in value by 2012

What else is up? Work is lame but today I learned something and reminisced with a former boss about how hard my first year has been there, in terms of projects; I will come out better financially next year in regards to health insurance if I spend a lot of money on my health quickly, in a meet-the-deductible-and-get-partially-reimbursed scheme that isn't so scheme-y; I am cold and slowly convincing Noah we should own a down comforter, as he has stolen! my! down sleeping bag!

And I called it a good, healthy dinner night yesterday when we had a garlic shrimp pasta frozen skillet meal and a spinach/apple/gorgonzola/balsamic vinaigrette salad.

What's with all this llama drama?

2008-12-04T18:58:00.003-06:00

Ongoing drama: In August I start feeling a deep ache in both thumbs, then intense burning pain in my palms and soreness, burning, tingling, and aching from the elbows down, though the pain in my palms distracts me from everything else and interrupts my sleep. I see my doctor, she says "it's carpal tunnel; here are splints," and before I quite know what I'm doing, I file a worker's compensation claim. (I type a lot at work. And otherwise literally do the same thing over and over.) The first claims worker from the worker's comp insurance company never speaks to me, doesn't return calls, and my company's HR folks ask that he go away and someone else take over. Someone else does; she calls me and is helpful, if a bit brisk and odd--a strange interaction not entirely unexpected, given the situation. There are literally thousands of dollars at stake. Meanwhile I wear one set of splints, I see another doctor, and I undergo a nerve conduction test and have no nerve damage or compression to be found, nixing the carpal tunnel diagnosis and leaving me with "lots of tendinitis." I take a prescription pain reliever twice, react to it with chest tightness and throat tightness, go to the ER and OccMed and the ER again, only for it all to pass with the six hours I spend waiting at the hospital, no epi pens at all. I see a new doctor, I start going to occupational therapy, I get new splints, and these kind folks say, oh my, your elbows are awful too, and your shoulders and neck, and did you know you're hypermobile? (I'm hypermobile. It's like double-jointedness but not; for me, it's more like my ligaments don't know how to hold my joints in place, and it makes stretching difficult because I can stretch forever and then I hurt myself.) Now I do lots of stretches and they are all awesome. I am showing my joints and soft tissue what is what. I am wearing splits for wrists and elbows every night, I am on lots of ibuprofen all the time, and the worker's compensation claim is still not finalized. They send me off for a second opinion, an IME. That doctor says, it's work-related, but I don't know what it is; have another nerve conduction test. The claims worker says, I'm not approving any more occupational therapy until we're sure of what it is. I say, folks, it's been three months, I'm getting better, and of course my symptoms are weirder now--half of them are gone. But if this is what it takes, I will do it. Meanwhile I am still working, at first still full days and full computer use, now six-hour days and one hour of computer use a day, now "advancing as tolerated" though I am bad at anticipating what I can't tolerate.

And grad school apps, and freelance clients, and work, and now probably a new computer and voice recognition software at home, and a couple really great flax-filled heating packs. The llama drama is from someone else's child, I don't remember whose, who was apparently involved with drama and llamas. The high today was 27.

Why trauma theory? It's incredibly complex, and I like complex things. "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society). "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living ..." (Adorno, Meditations on Metaphysics). "Learn to think with pain. ... Where is there the least power? In speech, or in writing? When I live, or when I die? Or again, when dying doesn't let me die?" (Blanchot).

I feel like I read someone saying "death is no longer sacred," but maybe it was just something Cary repeated in Holocaust Poetry often.

And I like things to be as complex as possible, or else there are no stakes, and why do anything with no stakes.

Sickness and Trauma Theory

2008-11-29T19:22:00.002-06:00

My pecan pie was fine. I do want to try Carl's recipe that does not call for corn syrup ... interesting idea.

Noah is alternating sicknesses and allergy attacks and then is fine and then is getting me sick. Wahoo four day weekend of sickness!

I am also relearning trauma theory. I just diagrammed and outlined a 19-page paper of mine, a process I've advised others to do but never have done myself. Enlightening. Also makes me want to delete half of the draft and add in five to ten pages of smarter-sounding awareness of one of the subfields I'd like to study.

Which also means I'm rereading Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster. Here, so you can share the joy with me:

To read, to write, the way one lives under the surveillance of the disaster: exposed to the passivity that is outside passion. The heightening of forgetfulness.
It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.

2008-11-27T01:44:00.001-06:00

I'm really worried about my pecan pie.

The Trouble with Grad School Applications

2008-11-25T19:12:00.003-06:00

I'm really glad I didn't start watching Project Runway until this point in my life. Last time I applied to a graduate program, I was hooked on Prison Break. What the shows have in common is that they always end. Eventually, someone wins, someone breaks out of prison, and it happens within a season.

The trouble with the applications? They are long and complicated; they cost money, which is a terrible affront to my sensibilities; and, listen, critical readers of literature, you can't organize a website for crap.

So, yeah, I'm applying. Here and maybe here and I'll come up with some other places. Seattle because it's Seattle, Emory because two rockstars of trauma theory teach there.

Oy vey.

Things I Like

2008-11-15T13:37:00.002-06:00

*trauma theory

*trauma theory and creative writing, and ethics, and the evaluation of creative writing in light of trauma theory

*teaching creative writing well and learning in a CW classroom/workshop

*creative writing pedagogy: the revolution, by me

*literature

*nonfiction writing about landscapes, especially western

When everything is over and done, what do I want to have done? Made things, written things, shared the making and the writing with others. Cooked and eaten things I feel good about cooking and eating. Been a positive output to the world at large. Maybe teach people, maybe directly help others to write better and communicate their ideas well.

I feel more and more strongly that it's easier to see where I don't belong than where I do or might. In example: I don't belong in a company whose product I'm not invested in (which cancels out, you know, most of everything); I don't belong in a position where I'm unable to direct my own tasks or offer input regarding a project (which is also nearly everything). That leaves ... editorships in literature, teaching things maybe, making things, freelance developmental editing, and I'd imagine that I'd be good at reviewing books for a bookseller. Scholarly work in CW, trauma, pedagogy ... volunteer work with things like 826 ...

Well, first I need to eat, and that means tempeh chili.

2008-11-13T21:06:00.002-06:00

Well ... no Teach for America for me. They're not interviewing me further. I feel quite weird about it, but whatever reasons they may have all lead to me not working with them, and so, I will work with/for someone/thing else. Noah's job prospects are changing--another consulting firm and another chance for Seattle and further interviews with T for A--so we are quite up in the air. Way up.

I'm not wearing splints during the day anymore, and taping instead, which is great except the tape wrecks my skin and there's no way I can tape everyday. So I did yesterday, didn't today, maybe will tomorrow.

To everyone I haven't gotten back to: I love you all, and I am sorry, and I will. With no date specified. Try calling me again. I am this absent-minded.

What to give one's father-in-law for the holidays? If I could knit, it would be so easy: socks, fingerless mitts, a hat, something. If only I had some of my mugs kicking around, or something ... he and I both like tea, but he also has everything he needs ...

In general, folks, what do you see me as being good at? I am adrift when it comes to this lately. This T for A thing is throwing me off like someone punched me in the gut.

And maybe there are bigger things to worry about.

2008-11-11T22:00:00.002-06:00

I survived driving! But I paid for it in pain. Bath salts help. So do naps and early bedtimes. Ciao, yall.

facebook format is easy

2008-11-09T23:17:00.003-06:00

is excited about Obama but still in disbelief and will be until January 20th

is going to Springfield tomorrow night so she can go to her independent medical exam on Tuesday and ... have the most important doctor's appointment ever! It decides her entire worker's comp claim!

is nearly asleep

blow-dried her hair today for the first time in two months

did dishes for the first time in two months

wants to support etsy.com this holiday season

"...up with which we shall no longer put!"

2008-11-02T23:23:00.002-06:00

Okay, I love Keith Olbermann (I call him Keithy) and since SNL is redeeming itself for a decade-long slump this season, I shall link to Ben Affleck's skit of Olbermann. Or Keithy. Whichever. The man does have impeccable grammar, which is at least half the reason for my love, and Ben A. does it well. I may watch it three times today.

Since everybody knows I'm moving in the summer, and looking for jobs in a very not-sure-what-town-I-should-look-in way, I will also give y'all the scoop on me. Noah and I are applying to Teach for America--not sure what will happen, not sure if it's for me, but it seems like applying is the way to find out. I'm also starting to consider applying for grad schools, e.g. PhD programs, in creative writing and other stuff. What program will let me study creative writing (my own), creative writing pedagogy, and trauma theory/contemporary poetry all at the same time? Sounds kind of like a lit program, or a lit/cw program, or a ... program in education. T for A has all these partnerships with master's and PhDs in education ... like money-giving partnerships ... I don't know, man, I don't know. I miss big words.

Other options: find a great little press that I can do everything for (hi Graywolf!); work for some arts-based initiative, company, museum, gallery, thing; freelance developmental editing and something else to fill in the gaps, like copyediting or breadmaking; dye yarn; make bread; make pots once I know it won't hurt me; write a lot; on and on. Other options welcome.

read with me/vote with me

2008-10-28T13:40:00.002-05:00

Al Qaeda endores McCain:

"Yet the endorsement of Mr. McCain by a Qaeda-affiliated Web site isn’t a surprise to security specialists. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, and Joseph Nye, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, have both suggested that Al Qaeda prefers Mr. McCain and might even try to use terror attacks in the coming days to tip the election to him.

“From their perspective, a continuation of Bush policies is best for recruiting,” said Professor Nye, adding that Mr. McCain is far more likely to continue those policies."

Are there any reasons left to vote for McCain? Honestly?

Okay, I do still agree with him on two things: (1) corn subsidies tied to ethanol production are no good at all since it takes more energy to produce ethanol than ethanol provides; there are things like, you know, the sun and the wind which cost NOTHING that we could subsidize instead; and corn is, well, still good for eating--especially in the middle of a global food crisis (though in an election year, I forgive Obama for sidestepping the issue entirely); (2) nuclear power is an energy option that needs to be seriously considered--the current methods of its production disallow nuclear meltdown, and they are insanely efficient, hence better, than crap options like clean coal. "Clean" coal? More like "what's going to happen when those hydrogen-filled caverns break through the earth and kill me" coal. And again, the sun, the wind ...

But notice that is two subpoints of energy policy. The man has left me gaping with everything else he says.

I don't like abortion but I want to run as far away from legislating "moral choices" about people's bodies as possible; I don't like either candidates' take on gay marriage (I want more equality, if you were wondering); I'm not convinced that any options for health care reform and economic crisis-averting are going to work.

But good god I'm ready to vote. But I think I'll wait until the 4th. Voting early sounds like a hoax.

2008-10-23T18:20:00.002-05:00

smells like coffee after using the grinder at Trader Joe's for her folks' Costa Rican blend and subsequently collecting coffee particulate on her splints and splint liners.

has put a grill pan on her wish list.

has eaten meat everyday for something like two weeks. she's a carnivore.

(in facebook status format)

2008-10-21T12:52:00.002-05:00

is convinced her nightly healing imagery therapy is working good things on her canker sore.

is still in stl.

is sweeping up the remains of her shattered neti pot.

is now using a new, all-plastic neti pot and breathing free.

is now smelling that whiff of death that comes from inside her head when her sinuses are clear.

is a little sick of passive voice, oh well.

is also sick of resting her elbows, wrists, hands, and arms.

is glad to have taught some really great poetry students who are pursuing poetry in various ways. she's getting interested in creative writing pedagogy again.

is almost definitely moving to chicago.

is praying that republicans don't steal the election again.

Still Alive

2008-10-03T16:46:00.002-05:00

Sometime next week I will find out if, in November, I will be paid 66% of 25% of what I normally am (since I'm 25% work-restricted and compensated at 66% of that), or 66% of my normal pay.

It's a weekend of repurposing, folks ... from pantry ingredients to things stashed in the closet to NEVER BUYING ANYTHING EVER AGAIN. Also, have you heard we're in a recession? And this whole financial crisis too? And that if worries about money were something you or I had before, those worries could triple now and that would be a reasonable amount of worry?

However, within the next few weeks, Noah will finish some interviews and decide on a future job and a city to move to, and with all that comes a different sort of salary. Did you know engineers and editors make different amounts of money? They do. And so while these tripled worries are reasonable, they will also pass in a very definite time frame.

To end, I will tell you I am still alive, figuring out ways to manage pain, letting Noah do kind of everything our house needs, and thinking thoughts of reduced inflammation and the opening of nerve tunnels (folks now say I have carpal and cubital tunnel syndrome, and bilateral tendinitis in wrists and elbows).

Also, a brief list of awesome RSI prevention/recovery things:

for PC's--Workpace is a free customizable break timer and activity tracker, and it is awesome. It includes stretches to do on breaks, a "lock my computer" thing to do in one click if you get up and walk away ... really good for offices.

For Macs--Time Out is also a free break timer, though with no activity timer, and has a very pleasing transparency/opaque thing to indicate break time.

Honestly, anyone and everyone who is reading this should install either, or both, if you use a PC at work and a Mac at home like me.

I'm doing some new stretches for shoulder, neck and upper back muscles ... if anyone is interested, let me know, and I'll make some PDFs of them to circulate. I'm doing easy stretches every hour and hard ones four times a day ... and they feel good. My OT is pretty sure that if I can loosen the insanely tight muscles I have there, I'll reduce nerve pinching throughout and feel generally better.

the right to bear arms

2008-09-26T07:20:00.002-05:00

So, Noah has a list going of circumstances under which he will buy a gun and drive to DC--things like, the government says they're postponing elections until this crisis is over, things like that.

I don't like guns so much, and I'm not up for that long of a drive, but ...

What's your list like?

my job tried to hurt me

2008-09-25T19:53:00.003-05:00

*i believe my worker's compensation claim has been approved

*OT says, 6 months until i am all better

*OT also says, you have cubital tunnel (elbow) and nerve pinching there, not damage

*OT also has me in two custom splints for wrists, elbow gel pad tube socks, currently some kineisiotape for my right wrist going up my forearm, and two stretches to do ... arm straight out in front, hand flexes up; arm straight out with elbow to floor, hand goes back/down ... with a terrifyingly tiny range of motion

*also, i believe my worker's compensation claim has been approved

*also, my work restrictions will probably be revised on monday morning; i'm betting the doctor will say, three days off, then you can work only 6 hours a day -- because when i'm not working or doing anything at all, i'm in pain, but less, and when i work over six hours, i'm in way more pain

*i have decided that pain, in this case for me, is an accurate ethical barometer: i am in pain, so what i am doing is bad; i am not in pain, so what i am doing is good

*my company's short-term disability insurance policy says, if you have to stop working, we'll pay you something, but if you leave in the next six months, you have to pay it all back. umm ... uncomfortable conversation possibly in my future

*noah has interviews on the way, wahoo!

Wrong Again

2008-09-20T12:08:00.002-05:00

The EMG and nerve conduction tests say ... I do NOT have carpal tunnel syndrome. Or at least I have no nerve damage. The doctor said I might have had mild carpal tunnel when I started wearing the splints three weeks ago and that it's had time to recover since then. Whichever it is, I am SO HAPPY to not have nerve damage because ... nerve damage doesn't get better. You can't regrow nerves or heal them, just kind of cope with them. And nerve damage is in my family, of course: paternal grandfather with myasthenia gravis; mom with spinal cord injury and now MS ... I can stay off the list for now.

I do have bilateral wrist and elbow tendinitis, though. The doctor was like, this is rare. You're still 25? So ... I'll stop typing soon ...

Doctor's orders for the weekend: don't do anything. I think yarn dyeing can stay on the list, though. Our full-DVD-collection of The West Wing finally arrived, so I have things to watch at least.

Six more weeks of occupational therapy, with better splints on the way, with the great elbow gel pads already, nice OT named Becky ...

still alive

2008-09-19T06:56:00.002-05:00

*had an allergic reaction to a NSAID, which is basically hyped-up ibuprofen, throat swelling and chest tightness; fought with my dr's nurses about going to the ER, then went to the ER, only to 1) try to give them my parents' address as my own and 2) get sent to occupational medicine ... because a drug allergy is related to the worker's comp case that brought about the drug prescription? and four hours later, when i've been sent back to the ER, and see finally a real doctor who just will do something, and am falling asleep in the exam room and really even more out of it ... the reaction is waning and so they don't give me anything. thx guyz.

*bilateral carpal tunnel, wrist tendinitis, and elbow tendinitis. everyone doctor-related keeps asking, really? you're only 25? yes, yes.

*saw an occupational therapist, awesome older woman who's done this for 38 years. she made me a custom splint (which sadly is still irritating my far-too-bony wrist--do you have the bony bump on the far side? it's annoying when wearing splints) and gave me TWO ELBOW GEL PROTECTORS which in short are tube socks with the feet cut off and a pad of thermal gel stuck in at the elbow. they are AWESOME. i'm on zero pain meds right now and, while still in some pain, am in much less pain.

*this story's ongoing moral: don't ignore pain. you shouldn't be feeling pain--it isn't normal. (i kind of figured it was.)

I Can Be So Wrong

2008-09-08T20:17:00.002-05:00

*not allergic to mold or dust. Had an allergy skin test today (the horror and pain! I am verifiably sensitive to everything) and ... am allergic to ONLY tree and ragweed pollen. Then had a systemic reaction to the test that did not, thankfully, get as far as any kind of anaphylactic shock--more like crazy itching and hives. Very significantly allergic, and this does help explain the whole pain of spring-summer-early fall, but really? Is my war with mold over?

*still have carpal tunnel, still hurts, blah blah blah

*I have wasted the years of my life during which I have not been watching Arrested Development.

*Rethinking all future career choices in light of this carpal tunnel thing.

*Aveeno makes really wonderful, non-irritating products ...

Short Posts

2008-09-03T19:17:00.002-05:00

*was diagnosed with carpal tunnel
*wearing wrist splints on both wrists, 24 hrs. a day
*still getting pain, tingling, burning, numbness, etc.

*yes, I'm still 25.

*and my ergonomic keyboard never leaves me-board. i take it to work and then take it home as needed.

*the carpal tunnel web sites recommend wearing fingerless gloves at work. ha! do it! just don't knit your own, apparently.

*expect less typing from me for a while. still i love you all. just going to rest my hands a little ... put the knitting and clay work on hold ... the work-work and freelance-work ... i recommend the free download Workrave, which has a really great mandatory break program and a really scary tracker of all your mouse use, keystroke volume, and how long you're active on your computer. i'm at a consistent three to four hours of active use. that excludes reading online.

*and is this the dumbest health problem i've ever had? yes.

A Recipe and a Workers' Compensation Thing

2008-08-26T22:52:00.003-05:00

I have a feeling some of you would like the superfood scone recipe. So I'll add that sometime.

And I think I am developing/already have some repetitive stress injury, a la carpal tunnel, blah blah. My hands and arms and shoulders hurt, ache, burn, go numb, get super cold (it's a symptom, apparently) ... so far it's nothing big, in terms of filing, and I'm really careful with documentation when I feel like it, so I'm being careful.

Man, what does this all mean? Braces? Massage (I want to call it 'court-mandated massage')? Anything at all?

I guess I should start with seeing a doctor ...

Superfood Scones Again

2008-08-25T20:42:00.002-05:00

Hello, world. I'm still here.

I have some superfood scones baking. They're vegan, banana, walnut, dried blueberry, and whole wheat pastry flour scones.

This is a bad sign--not because they're vegan, or so superfood-ish. Bad sign because I'm not working.

I'm finishing up that 712 page book at work, and ... it just doesn't end. For any other book, it would be reasonable to end at 400 pages. So it is, often, quite literally twice as long as I imagine it will be. Well, it goes to the printer on Friday, and it will be gone from me then, for real. Even if I don't catch all the errors. It will go away.

Noah's home. He started school today, wahoo, send him your wishes for passing Japanese III. He's totally capable of passing (Hi Noah! I love you!), but you know, taking other classes gets in the way of his excellence at all things.

I made frozen yogurt with Fage Greek yogurt, which has, as its main ingredients, whole milk and butterfat, and yes, it was decadent and tasted a lot like frozen cheesecake filling. I don't want to think about it too much, so the cravings don't come back.

And in the middle of this work, this Noah, this cooking/eating, are other things: the secret book review I guiltily neglect; the proofreading I did for a freelance client at the last minute; the desperate urge to be in the ceramics lab making flat/gently curving things; the cats; the laundry; the health freak outs like, "Am I jaundiced right now? Am I about to faint? Am I so overstimulated that I really just spent five minutes, in the shower, doing nothing but letting the water hit under my fingernails?"; and yes, the scones. And a visit from a longtime friend and her husband-dude this weekend, and a possible drop-in from another longtime friend, and ... me. Wanting to be anywhere else, maybe a field, maybe a river bank, maybe the cloisters from my old church, in the middle of the afternoon, when no one was there, looking out the mid-century stained glass blocks, feeling the stone stay cold.

Oh and I'm reading William Gibson novels obsessively.

How're you?

Things I Am Learning

2008-08-07T19:18:00.002-05:00

--Capitalization rules according to CMS 15.

--I love feisty older women. Older = 60s and beyond. One is a coworker, who I did not love for some time, but then came to love once she called the book's author "a fussy ass." Other examples: my great-grandmother Nana, who died at 98 with a perm still in her hair, still caring; my best boss ever Vera in the RV park, who cut her own hair, could burn you in your place with her eyes, and drove me the whole two blocks to the cafeteria after I sprained my ankle.

--My older cat hates vacuums, but not as much as the younger, and this difference of hate carries over to lots of things: car noise; thunder storms; my absence.

--Looking stylish is not so much about looking good all the time; it's more like something large about you looks good right then. This is different than "being stylish" which can only be observed over time. Looking stylish can be achieved by wearing great heels, combing your hair that morning, and walking really fast. If you followed my inner monologue at work, you'd agree. All these stylish people, walking so fast in heels.

--I smell different in summer.

--When all my friends at work are gone, work is really lonely, and my people-watching and daydreaming increases tenfold. It isn't a large company, so the people-watching is limited; the daydreaming feels unlimited, but since I think and work in fifteen-minute increments on my timesheet, I can feel the reasonable limit of daydreaming approach.

--Maybe you didn't know this about me, but I'm a third-wave feminist, and so is Liz Phair.

Dad, Do You Hate the Comment Function?

2008-08-06T17:21:00.001-05:00

I'll copy his thoughts here:

Ways I'd Really Like to Kill Mold
1.) with vodka, both for me and for the mold--vodka's like bleach,
right?
....good idea....wouldn't it be expensive?

2.) with sound, I'm thinking death metal
3.) with love: "Can't we live in harmony? I love you in cheese!"

Good luck with that....evil does not respond too well to this approach.
4.) by growing mushrooms, to encourage jealousy and rivalry, with hopes
the mold would lose to the mushrooms in some kind of fungi-bacteria-all
tiny things war
5.) with ground-up penicillin scattered about
6.) by burning lavender-scented candles
7.) by wishing really hard

Always a good idea....
8.) by donating to NPR, in a kind of karmic way

Sure...NPR can use the money..
9.) by talking trash about it (not working yet)

Always take out your trash....
and 10.) ... by doing nothing at all

This method will NOT get rid of mold.

Thanks, Dad. What if I threaten it with bullets?

A Very Disgusting Story

2008-08-05T19:11:00.002-05:00

Mold of all kinds and I are locked in an epic battle. That isn't news. I come from a moldy part of the country, I live in a "garden-level" basement apartment, I am allergic to mold, and I love moldy cheese. That's just how things are.

Mold and my apartment love each other. They make out every day. It's disgusting. But that isn't the story.

The story is this: I have a portable dishwasher, and it is a handy appliance until it stops sucking water out of the sink's faucet and spraying it into the dishwasher body. A few weeks ago, I loaded it with dishes that had been carefully rinsed, loaded my very-eco "biokleen" dish detergent that is only scented with grapefruit oil, and turned it on. It made a huge growling, churning sound, and I turned it off, saddened. It might not be dead, but it was not going to run that day.

Then I kind of forgot about it. And then remembered, put it off, remembered, left town for a week, remembered, and finally opened it.

I had forgotten that the dishwasher had pulled maybe two inches' worth of water into its main compartment.

And so there was mold. Mold growing on the dishes (green), mold growing in the water at the bottom. Mold mold mold. I washed three loads of dishes with more hot water and more soap than I have ever used on dishes ever, ever; I found places to dry them; I realized I needed to get the water out of the bottom, but how to do that? I tried mopping it out: let the mop head soak up some water; squeeze it out in the sink; repeat. Then, since it has wheels and I have a patio/pit thing, I rolled it outside and tilted the whole thing forward, letting the mold water run out. At 1:30am.

After I finished treating the inevitable hives and sinus freak-out, I resolved to 1) do dishes every day and 2) figure out how to fight mold for real. Apparently running the air conditioning helps, so the internet says, especially in a tightly-sealed apartment, which I do indeed have. Drying wet things helps, cleaning helps, bleach, soap, on and on.

I've also been feeling really dizzy for the last few days, and I think it's an allergy thing maybe mixed with a med side effect, and I'm hoping that less mold will help allergies go away. Maybe?

But to end the disgusting story with some glee:

Ways I'd Really Like to Kill Mold
1.) with vodka, both for me and for the mold--vodka's like bleach, right?
2.) with sound, I'm thinking death metal
3.) with love: "Can't we live in harmony? I love you in cheese!"
4.) by growing mushrooms, to encourage jealousy and rivalry, with hopes the mold would lose to the mushrooms in some kind of fungi-bacteria-all tiny things war
5.) with ground-up penicillin scattered about
6.) by burning lavender-scented candles
7.) by wishing really hard
8.) by donating to NPR, in a kind of karmic way
9.) by talking trash about it (not working yet)
and 10.) ... by doing nothing at all.

My New Strategy for Dinner

2008-07-29T20:03:00.002-05:00

1.) Boil some water
2.) Add some frozen cheese ravioli to boiling water; cook
3.) Meanwhile (in the two minutes they're cooking), heat olive oil in a small pan
4.) Saute garlic and some crushed red pepper
5.) Throw in a can of diced or crushed tomatoes; stir
6.) Add snipped fresh basil (four big leaves? more? less?) if available
7.) Drain pasta; toss sauce with pasta; consume

CONSUME or INHALE like me, when I am so absurdly hungry for dinner. What is the deal with being so hungry? I eat like a real person, especially like a real person in an affluent country with lots of food available. Oh well, absurd hunger: I will satisfy you.

Things I should probably be doing:
1.) more dishes my dishwasher cannot do, as it has died
2.) laundry, oh the never-ending laundry
3.) vaccuum
4.) figure out what my neighbors are jabbering about in the hall ... it's raining, what else is new?

What else causes jabber?

Oh and something I'm not going to talk much about until it's ready for real: I'm writing a book review! And since secrets are so much better, I will keep the book and the people secret for now. Let me say it is awesome, I am honored, it doesn't pay, and I am still honored. Poems full of declarative sentences? Poems full of white things, blue things, black things?

Okay, that thunder crash is saying, go get some candles, little girl, and a match, just in case.

class vs. class

2008-07-21T01:20:00.003-05:00

Saw The Dark Knight; more in love with the Joker's makeup than anything else. I don't know; something about rich-boy do-gooder sets me off. Rubs the wrong way, if you will. Still like a big film on a big screen, especially one that uses so much BLACK.

Here's a snippet of Noah and me discussing:

me: I'm thinking of doing a class-based critique of Batman.
Noah: You could do an independent study.
me: Independent of class and program?
Noah: ... You mean economic class, don't you?
me: Yes.
Noah: You can still do it; you'll be independent of deadlines ... ?

Oh Noah, oh Noah. One of us is a student, and one of us is not; one of us is a systems engineer (I've recently decided that sounds both more accurate and cooler than 'general') and one of us is me.

This just in, an update on me and clay: toilet brushes are the perfect thing for stirring glazes in buckets that have sat, untouched, and separated into their sediments and water. Definitely toilet brushes. Also I was assigned all the crazy-hard-to-make glazes, and I appreciate this immensely. Purple? Yellow? "Mirror Mirror" that actually does reflect light? Yeah, I can probably mix those up. I can use a scale. If they have the million things that go in those, then sure, I can do it.

Does wood ash melt at cone six? Does glass? These are things I need to know.

Also, New Belgium's Mothership Wit is a fine hefeweizen.

"If Panache is What It Takes to Brighten the Musty Corners of Your Soul"

2008-07-16T22:05:00.002-05:00

Got a raise! It just overtakes the cost of inflation!

I am actually excited, actually, because this means I feel okay eating the pomme frites with truffle oil and creamy Parmesan sauce, drinking the hoppy draft beer, eating the Custard Cup Heath snowstorms.

And Jeff, yes, these salt blocks ... they speak to me. I want seven.

Take it from the salt people:

"h) If panache is what it takes to brighten the musty corners of your soul, try serving up an entire meal using large round or square Himalayan salt plates. Moist foods take on a touch of saltiness, dry foods do not, and everything glows with the otherworldly power of the ancient world (see Ogling below)."

SEE OGLING BELOW.

A Dream

2008-07-15T18:51:00.001-05:00

Standing in an airport, next to a man I don't know, who just keeps looking out the window at a slow, pink sunset. Lots of bustle; just the sunset.

My Bizarre Love of Humidity

2008-07-11T18:28:00.002-05:00

It's bizarre.

But it arises especially in mid-summer, when the air conditioning in nearly every building is so cold, and I am dressed for not-cold, and so I go inside and get very cold, then go outside and breathe, "Ah -- humidity!"

Also, I'm in such a mold-busting regimen that I can't switch to a dry-skin-care regimen now. So humidity it is. And humidity is nostalgic for me. I haven't gone that far out of the Midwest for that long, but every time I leave and my skin dries out, I don't know what to do ...

Another thing in the not-knowing-what-to-do category: I made four friends at work, two are gone (and I had another pre-work friend who is still a post-work friend, Ms. L), another is leaving within the calendar year, and I ... I remain. I'm not really friends with my coworkers, not anti either, but not friends ... I see knitting and reading on breaks in my future. Also the possibility of taking walks (in the humid air) on my breaks.

Is it too silly to buy this blouse with birthday money? I'm leaning towards no, not too silly, for it is a blouse I dreamed of for weeks and then saw on Anthropologie. So? the buying?

I keep thinking about dreams, intelligence, intuition, and learned behavior today. Do less intelligent people (and how to measure intelligence is enough of an issue) exhibit less intuition? More? Do higher intelligence and intuition collide at some point negatively, where the higher intelligence starts prohibiting the intuition because of too much analytical ability? And dreams -- do less intelligent people have less intelligent dreams? How can that be compared?

And what if a person possesses, however this happens, higher intelligence, but through learned behavior, begins to lose that intelligence? Can we make ourselves dumber, or do we just act dumber? Do you lose intelligence if you don't use it? I've experienced the loss of old memories when new knowledge had to take its place (the saddest example is rosters of Rhet students and childhood memories) -- is it like that, limited somehow? Or depreciating -- are those memories worth as much, as full (I won't say accurate) as they used to be?

Outside of the chemical death of brain cells, can I lose intelligence?

I'm thinking of all this because I'm getting ready to start writing, making, and designing in some kind of stricter way, some way that says "this is an act that is worth your time, and if you don't do it, it will fade." Because I haven't been able to keep a pot on the wheel yet, and that's so disheartening that I stopped trying for nearly a month. And I'm a bit worried that I'm losing some of that intelligence, that memory, and also that I can be taught to not value that intelligence in myself and let it go.

"Hear me out"

2008-07-07T22:36:00.005-05:00

I'm not sure what policy Starbucks baristas have regarding sleepy drivers who wander into their shops, looking for caffeine, but I feel that I might have butt up against it last night in Effingham. Between the blond's really perky "Hi!" and her manager's questions about my leavings and goings, I felt them both getting ready to call, I don't know, who do you call? The cops? She nearly sold me a double tall latte at 10pm.

Eto lets me know he missed me with incessant licking and small bites. Also the not leaving my side.

Anyway, something today got me thinking of William Carlos Williams and "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" so I think I will end this non-post with an excerpt of his. I think the best line, still, is "Hear me out. / Do not turn away." Of course I can't get Blogger to keep the formatting ...

I cannot say
that I have gone to hell
for your love
but often
found myself there
in your pursuit.
I do not like it
and wanted to be
in heaven. Hear me out.
Do not turn away.
I have learned much in my life
from books
and out of them
about love.
Death
is not the end of it.

Sleep is So Uncool

2008-07-03T19:15:00.002-05:00

I certainly don't believe that, but my body certainly does. It's all, oh sleep, so last season; the big new thing is the return of the puffy under-eye circles that will not lighten no matter the makeup; isn't the room more exciting when it's a little spinny even without any drinks at all?

And yes, I'm going to take another nap in a little while.

I bought two wonderful used books yesterday: that bizarre facsimile of TS Eliot's original and edited version of The Waste Land, and also Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (it's the fault of officemate Kyle, though I admit the scary scribbled notes all through the front matter did draw me in).

This TSE manuscript book is fascinating. The book isn't anything new for those who know, but I often am not among them, so I'm still in awe. There's also no good reason I keep quoting from it these days, but I can't stop. Unreal City ... I did not know death had undone so many ...

On a brief jaunt to STL tomorrow; when it's been this long, I usually get choked up at the sight of the Mississippi River valley. Tofu kebabs for everyone!

Big Ol' Update

2008-07-01T19:56:00.004-05:00

Warning for cupcake fanatics: cupcakeblog.com is dead. The archives are up, they are not nearly as searchable, but man, can that woman make a cupcake. Cupcake/chemical engineer, may you and your newborn rest well.

I was in Chicago! For a long time! Noah took me to see Stevie Wonder (or hear, in the midst of nearly a million other people in Grant Park), to eat food on sticks (or even better, cheesecake and grilled plaintains), and then -- surprise -- on a jet boat off Navy Pier to watch fireworks. You are a good man, you Noah-man.

And we saw his dad and Nancy, and his aunt and uncle who make hand-cut wooden puzzles, and we worked their craft fair booth with them despite the pounding rain. And the next booth over was a potter who fires a wood/soda kiln! Wood and soda with a catenary arch and kiln bricks in her backyard. Oh my. We talked a lot. I'm sad I didn't buy a tea bowl, but I promised myself to stop buying ceramics for a while, and I kept the promise. And we saw nieces and siblings (in-law), and my oldest niece Selah not only remembers me but LOVES me. I love you too, Selah! Now go to bed!

Officemate Kyle and I (yes, he's a returning character) have made our third mix CD, and it may be the final installment. It's a double -- quiet and loud -- and it is amazing. I will send you all a copy if you want. It will rock your socks, especially if your socks alternately love really sad songs and really goofy pop songs. And clap tracks, and men and women harmonizing, and trumpet peals. Those are themes, apparently.

Heading to STL for family time, barbecue, more barbecue, etc.

Working a lot before I go. Going back to that now. Note: taking on copyediting jobs that will take at least 7 hours, and planning to finish them in three nights or less, is maybe ill-advised.

2008-06-22T20:59:00.002-05:00

What to use my birthday money for? Pot rack, new chef's knife, pizza peel to go with the stone maybe, classy shoes and silly shoes. A haircut.

Saturday I spent some hours at the C-U Potters' Club's massive booth at the Taste of Champaign, where someone donated a 100-gallon propane tank and we did on-site raku firings. We did one about every half-hour, and they drew a great crowd. Selling people non-food-safe pieces is hard, though. Still I got two good pinch pots, the first pots I've made since 2005.

Noah's commissioned me to throw some ramen bowls with notches in the rim for chopsticks. Ramen bowls need to be extra-deep and large enough for a whole pack of ramen. I see some Christmas gifts in my future ... I've also seen bowls with holes near the rim, in the walls, for chopsticks, but that seems more dangerous.

Of course, to make bowls like that I need to be able to prep clay for throwing well enough to keep it on the wheel, figure out how to throw on this sitting kick wheel they have, figure out if I can attach the splash pans like I want to ... Why doesn't everyone embrace how great standing kick wheels with built-in splash guards are? I miss mine from Iowa. Hey Doug ... I can't even find it online. I'll keep looking. Creepy, though: my blog comes up in my own searches ...

My wild yeast whole-grain starter is nearly done. There will be excellent bread this week.

Brother Zak wants to buy me a tattoo. I only like rivers and trees enough to have tattoos of them. Ideas?

What if This Was a Want Ad

2008-06-17T08:50:00.002-05:00

Migraneur, MWF (not mon/wed/fri, married white female), seeking no more migraine.

I don't want to admit this, but these things could be triggered by red wine, and I should be more aware of that. Damn it.

Also I have wonderful friends, some of whom cook amazing food, others of whom sneakily ask what candy bars I like and buy them for me at work, others of whom leave unintelligible Facebook messages (!! !), and yet still others of whom who kind of lurk in a reassuring way. I don't always see the lurkers much, but they're comforting.

And I am older.

More on all this later.