mmm, food

It is a rainy Saturday morning, misty and cool and very Northwest. The mist makes me think of rain forests, and I could go visit one on the island if I chose, but I have lots of other things to do. Instead of doing those things, I have been reading S. J. Rozan's Lydia Chin and Bill Smith mysteries and making chocolate oatmeal cookies. The books are mysteries, but Lydia's books are also about food. (Bill's are about music.) Chinese food mostly, but also other wonderful food, all in New York. Glistening greens, white scallops that taste like the sea, sproing-y garlic, tofu, shrimp, pork, sesame cakes, and lots and lots of tea. Real tea, not the herbal stuff I drink because real tea doesn't like me. Also pot roast and pumpernickel and liver sandwiches (which I do not yearn for) and many wonderful things. It makes me want to go to New York. Preferably with a native who knows where such things can be found, and will show me all I want to see and do and eat.

Instead of those things, I am making cookies. Chocolate oatmeal cookies, my mother's favorite. They are basically baked fudge with oatmeal. Incredibly sweet. I made the dough last night and am baking the cookies now, so of course I ate a lot of dough last night. I always do, and have accepted that I am dough-eater. I will surely pay. Anyway, I am pretty happy that I didn't go into a diabetic coma, and I can see that if and when I get diabetes, this particular recipe will be off limits to me. So much sugar. Really tasty. The first batch just came out, and my kitchen smells like a fairground, like doughnuts. Honestly, there isn't that much fat in them. I mean, no more than the usual. They smell heavenly. Along with the obscene amount of sugar, they also have an obscene amount of vanilla. I used Safeway brand vanilla, which claims to be "PURE vanilla extract", and also claims to have corn syrup in it. Ack! Does all commerical vanilla have corn syrup? I don't believe it. I'm shocked. I will try making my own vanilla, like Mother used to do. Well, she's doing it now for the first time, but she started before me.

All this sugar makes me yearn for vegetables and protein and tofu and meat.

The High and the Low

It is Easter and it is raining in an all-day sort of way. The sort of way that makes me want to stay inside and do nice things. But instead, I will probably stay inside and mope around doing a smidgeon of work and a smidgeon of laundry and some cooking. I did my nails, and I fear that there are nail bits all around my living room. I'm usually very careful with my nail bits, but I trimmed with abandon this morning, and things flew. Disturbing. There are good arguments for trimming your nails outside, where your nail bits can be left to rot (if that ever happens). But there are even better arguments for trimming your nails in private (probably inside), because no one really wants to be around other people's nail bits, especially when they are flying. During my epic journey to Maryland on Christmas, I was sitting fairly peacefully at the Philadelphia airport waiting for my flight (cancelled, no surprise), when the middle-aged couple sitting near me decided that it was a good time and place to floss their teeth and trim their nails. Finger nails, thankfully, but still. I felt like asking them if they also wanted to clean the grit out of their bellybuttons, and if they would like some privacy for that particular ablution. But I didn't. I glared instead, in a passive aggressive sort of way. It was a long day.

I'm glad to see that the captain of the Maersk Alabama has been rescued. I was worried. I hope that he and his family will be okay. I'm sorry the pirates were killed. It feels a little naive to worry about them and their families, but it feels closed-minded, arrogant, and cruel not to. Where do we draw the line between loving our fellow man and condoning really bad things? What is the difference between the person and the act? What if you want to forgive someone, but they don't acknowledge a fault? It's probably a good thing to learn to forgive anyway, but it's not always easy. I have forgiven the couple in the airport, but if they sat near me on the ferry and did the same thing, I would have a hard time. It's true, I don't know their story or the pirates' stories, and public nail-trimming is a far cry from piracy, but there are standards of behavior to be observed. Also, the sounds of the nail clippers really annoyed me.

In theory, I am full of tolerance. In practice, not so much.

Bread Pudding

I am making bread pudding. It is in the oven, and it smells heavenly - all cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla. These are good, good smells! The timer just beeped, but the pudding is not set. I have never made bread pudding before, and used a mix of skim milk and soy milk in place of whole milk, so maybe it will never set. I'm okay with that, as long as the eggs are mostly cooked. Mmm. Yum.

Everybody is at Camp right now, but I am at home, making bread pudding. I'm okay with that, because I am cold and I know that I would be colder at Camp. Maybe. Also, I am going to an improv show tomorrow with Deb and Chris, and that will be fun. And I have to get my taxes done and this dumb paper. I keep on rewriting it, and it keeps on needing more rewriting. My aim is to have it done in two weeks, when Vaishali and Elliot and Ari and I go to Orcas Island for the weekend. That would be soooooo nice to have the paper done by then. At least submitted to John, if not to the journal. That's my goal. So that's what I'll be doing tomorrow when I'm not cleaning and going to the show. Fun, fun!

The bread pudding will help.

sunshine and work

It is Saturday and I am sitting at my computer because I'm supposed to be working. I have my flash drive plugged in and the files ready to open. My yellow legal pad is turned to the right page. I have a pen. I am all ready to go. But I don't wanna. I never do wanna at home. My home computer is for surfing the web and playing pop-top games. Generally, it is for wasting the largest amount of time possible, although I actually bought it to do work on at home. Today, I have made a pact with myself - no games until I do at least 2 hours of work. I'm not sure if that's a pact or not. It has to be two hours of actual work, not just two hours of sitting here. Now, it is lunch time, and it is sunny out (and cold), and so maybe I will eat lunch and then go outside, and return and do work later. It sounds great, but chances are that if I don't start work now, I never will.

I know, there is nothing startling in this post. Another goal for today is to get some photos off of my camera and onto my computer. If I do that, I will put one here. But that involves not going completely brain-dead when I sit at the computer. Tricky, tricky, tricky.

Still the best

see Sarah Palin pictures

Farewell, Mr. President

I have been dreaming about George W. Bush. Much to my surprise, my dreams are sympathetic to him. I am worried that he feels like a failure, that he is sad because so many people are so happy to see him go. In my dreams, people give him tender good-bye kisses. He's not so bad. On the other hand, in my last GWB dream, I am pretty sure that he murdered Dick Cheney with a wire whisk on a carousel. Some big leader murdered his second-in-command, in despair because he had finally realized just how badly his Number One had screwed him over. Thankfully, my subconscious did not dwell on how someone would murder another person with a wire whisk, or what the victim would then look like. A crowd of concerned citizens gathered to solve the murder mystery. An FBI agent listed all the suspicious clues at the scene. But the leader had fled.

All this tells me that I am an optimist at heart. I look for the best in people, even if the best is simply that the person is a good-hearted and complete idiot who is easily led. But in fact, I still have my doubts about ol' George. He may in fact be a complete idiot, but I wonder about his heart. Still, if he really was aiming for the best possible outcome throughout his presidency, which one must assume he was, then the result is very sad. It is sad to try so hard and to fail so miserably. That's me with teaching middle school - I tried hard, but boy, was I bad at it. I don't think it makes me a complete idiot. But it does mean that I was trying to do something that I was not at all meant to do, and no one was the better for it. I think George W. Bush has been trying to teach middle school for 8 years, when he should never have been put in charge of a classroom.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

What a load of crap that is. I heard that song on the radio the other day as I made my way through the snow storm to the airport and hotel, just so I could get to my early flight the next morning, after the big storm came through. I made it to the hotel, made it the airport, waited for hours with many stressed and frustrated people, and then the flight was finally canceled.

First it was delayed two hours - the airline called me at 4:00 am to tell me that, and then just as I was finally falling back asleep, Orbitz called me to tell me the same thing, but that my original check-in time still held, so I had to get up and over the airport at the same time. It turns out that I could check in from my hotel lobby, but I didn't know that at 5 AM, when Orbitz called. Then, when we were supposed to board, they said that it "would be a bit longer" because the covered walkway to the plane was frozen, and couldn't be extended to reach the side of the plane. They had to thaw it out. A little voice inside me knew right then that it was all downhill from there. Sure enough, it took 2 1/2 hours to de-ice the walkway. They finally let us on, and then we had to sit while they waited for the go ahead to leave, after which they would begin to de-ice the plane. They said that if they de-iced and then went up to the runway, we would just have to de-ice again. I think they were waiting for the weather to change or something. That never happened, so they canceled the flight, 5 1/2 hours after it was scheduled to depart. I started to get a hotel room for the night near the airport, but decided to just come home, which was an adventure in itself (not as much as it could have been, thank God). The power went out in my town just as the ferry docked, and I was seriously considering crying, since swearing out loud in public hadn't helped any. The taxi could barely get out of the ferry parking lot, and the driver was also being the dispatcher and so was on the phone constantly, it was still snowing, with 3-4 inches already on the ground, no power, and my feet were already frozen. But as we got closer to my apartment, there started to be signs of electricity. And I had power. Rarely have I been that thankful. It was off today for most of the day, but it came back on about 30 minutes ago, and again, I am super thankful.

The thing is, when I got to the airport on Sunday, and even when we were supposed to board, it was not snowing. It was cold and there was snow on the ground, but it was not snowing. By the time they let us board, it was snowing hard. If they hadn't taken so darn long thawing out the walkway to the plane, we could have left and I would be in Maryland now. Grr. As it is, the next flight I could get is on Christmas Day. Same itinerary, so I am going to stay at a hotel again Christmas Eve - isn't that the most depressing thing you've ever heard? I got one with a restaurant, but I'm too cheap to really splurge, so it's going to suck. I was able to push back my return flight also, so I will have the same length of time in Maryland, which is good. It would have been even better if the power had not gone out today, because I was planning on getting absolutely tons of work done today (and tomorrow and Wednesday). But the power went out, I lost the clever code I had just figured out, and then I spent the rest of the day with Laura, Carol, and Natalie. They have been without power since yesterday sometime. They have a nice wood-burning stove and a gas range, so they can cook and be warm (though not throughout the house), but they have no water without electricity. I had water, but no heat and no cooking. So they came over and bathed, and then we went out to lunch at the one restaurant open, and stopped off at Safeway because I had no food - I had eaten it all in honor of leaving for more than a week.

Yesterday sucked, but when I got home, I was so thankful to be in my own home, with my own bed and with power and food and heat. Lots of people were stranded at the airport. If I hadn't gotten out when I had, I might have been stranded there, too. The shuttles and taxis were swamped and were having trouble, since the roads were terrible. I have never seen the taxi line that long. Finally, the taxi drivers started shouting out the neighborhoods they were going to, so they could take multiple parties. I took the shuttle, and they were on a reduced schedule/plan/whatever - they would take people to the downtown hotels (and the ferry, yay), but not make any residential drop-offs. Got lucky there. And throughout the day, Cindy was so helpful. She had already gotten me the hotel room for the night before, and she went online and tracked the weather and news, and even offered to have her brother come out in his 4-wheel drive to pick me up. She is so sweet. And she is taking off tomorrow (with her brother, in his 4-wheel drive) to drive to Las Vegas to see their parents for Christmas. I'm worried about the roads. Las Vegas got snow last week, and it hasn't melted yet - amazing. Anyway, I am super grateful for Cindy, and for Mom, and Aunt Sally, and Marnie (my neighbor), and the shuttle driver, and Skip the Taxi Driver, and the power company (yay, Puget Sound Energy) and all their workers who are out there risking their lives to get our power back on. Yesterday could have been so much worse. I just hope that the trip on Thursday is better. But I am afraid it will not be, since we are expecting another storm tomorrow afternoon and evening and Wednesday morning, and Thursday is supposed to be cold. So I'm still not counting on getting of here.

I hope you are having a better Christmas week than I am. Be thankful for all that you have. There is a reason the Christmas story is at the darkest time of the year. Then again, as Laura said, "F**k Solstice!"