Thanksgiving and Google

Google is a harsh mistress.

Long ago I started using the Google network and set up an account tied to my primary e-mail address. At some point in the last couple years I made a Gmail account, which is powered by Google and was thus made on the same account as everything else I'd ever done with Google. I made this account specifically for one purpose and this purpose no longer exists, but the name I used on the account does. Its not a name I care to have attached to me any longer, yet its a name that Google insists I use if I reactivate Gmail on that account.

Oh Google, why must you be so enchanting most of the time and yet, every so often, be so cruel?

I had a solution to this problem, however. For months now I have bemoaned my plight and been told by friends that I should simply set up a new account. I insisted that this would be highly problematic as I now have a Google+ account, Google Documents, and Maps set up through my old Google account. Despite this concern, I gave it a shot. It was so incredibly simple to send my contacts from Yahoo! to Gmail, and Google told me that I could toggle between two accounts. This, however, wasn't really as easy as it seemed like it would be, or at least the easiness was over-shadowed by the annoying-ness of switching accounts back and forth. I, therefore, moved my Google Documents over (as simple as sharing them with my new account and then making the new account the only individual that could edit them). I set up a new Google+ account and most of my Friends have already added me back, I'm not worried about the few that haven't. The maps I've set up aren't anything I've looked at in a long time so I'm sure they aren't that important.

"Great!" I thought, "I'm well on my way to getting my new Google account set up and I should be set to delete my old one by the end of the holiday weekend. I think I'll go blog about this ..."

"Oh shit."

My blog is also tied to said old Google account.

I then considered the cons of creating a new blog on my new account.

• It would require a new web address and therefore a new name - If anyone had bookmarked my blog, they would have to change the bookmark. I can't imagine too many people having trouble with this and I could make a name that is similar
  
• I would lose all of my old blog entries - On some level this bothers me, but on another I find it perfectly fine. Other than the few most recent blogs I've written, I'm not especially attached to the old entries. In fact, I look back at them and feel that they could have been done better, or that they are outdated.
  
• I don't know if I could make it look this same - This is by far the con that seems to upset me the most. I recall when I started this blog that it took me a great deal of fiddling to get the look to my satisfaction. I was surprised that the image I uploaded as my new picture at the top of my blog got placed so well.

Obviously, these concerns are not really concerns; they are trifles. So I did start a new blog. It does look a little different, but I think I am satisfied with the overall look of it.

You can now find my new blog here.

In addition, today is Thanksgiving, though I'm not celebrating it today. I'd like to wish everyone a happy holiday and promise that I will be posting about our Thanksgiving on Saturday after we've had our Friday Feast. This post will be on my new blog.

Waste Not, Want Not

I've spent the last couple hours cooking and pureeing some winter squash for a soup I am making for dinner. The soup recipe calls for frozen pureed squash, which would make the recipe unbelievably easy from my perspective. We, however, have entered the winter squash season for our CSA box. I couldn't be more pleased about this even if it does make soup recipes take 4 times as long to prepare.

The winter squash I am working with this afternoon was one that I wasn't really familiar with before it showed up in our box the Thursday before last. Luckily, I have a culinary bible known as Vegetable Love by Barbara Kafka. The last 140 pages before the index of this cookbook has something called the "Cook's Guide" in which Kafka describes the way to identify, pick, store, prep, and cook almost any vegetable you could think of. Her section on winter squash includes the description of what each type of squash looks like and this was my resource for discovering that the squash I just dealt with was Delicata Squash.

And I quote complete with citation:

"DELICATA (Cucurbita pepo) This small (1 to 1 1/2 pound) cucumber-shaped squash has pale yellow skin creased with green stripes. The flesh is pale yellow with a light taste reminiscent of sweet corn and a texture between that of winter and summer squash. Delicata will store for only 2 to 3 weeks. During storage, the green stripes may turn orange; this color change will not affect the taste. Delicata slices easily and is best steamed, sauteed, or baked. Its small size and shape make it ideal for stuffing." (Kafka, 2005, p. 651)

Two pages later, Kafka describes how to cut said squash and also divulges that the skin is edible. Turn one more page and you'll find directions for steaming said squash. This is what I did.

This book is indispensable to the recipient of a CSA box.

In addition to this information, there is a note somewhere in the winter squash section that says that most winter squash seeds are edible and should be roasted. I have an affinity for roasted seeds and decided to try to live more by the title of my blog by spending 45 minutes picking seeds out of gourd snot.

Unfortunately, Kafka doesn't mention Delicata seeds anywhere in her recipes for roasting seeds. This concerned me, and I went on a web search to see if anyone else had ever tried such a feat. Luckily, the mighty Google led me to a blog called "Lighthearted Locavore" and the author included this entry on delicata seed roasting, complete with pictures (which I lack due to the lack of a worthy camera for such a job). I plan to add some chili powder to mine in addition to salt.

I hope everyone can enjoy some winter squash this season!

Addition:
After making the recipe that I linked above, I would say that the sausage seriously overwhelms the dish. Save yourself the money and the calories and use less or something less fattening. We plan to try it with ground turkey that we have mixed dry or fresh sage into next time. Also, there aren't enough beans in our opinion. As an ex vegetarian, I don't often do meals that are heavy on the meat and was raised on my father's super frugal heavy bean, light meat chili (much to the chagrin of my meat eating friends). More beans and less meat would also bring out the flavor of the squash a bit more, which I am sad to say was not even remotely prevalent enough for my liking.

Just my two cents; take it or leave it.

Kelly Mermaid Boob Nose

As soon as I say "Ignore the title of my blog," the portion of people that missed it to begin with will have now noticed it. If I don't make this comment, however, the others would wait the entire blog for some explanation, even if obscure, that would never come. The title is meant to appease a friend that wanted to be able to do a web search for this exact phrase and get a hit. It is unnecessary to explain why she wishes for this.

Now, on to business as usual.

Budgets are apparently something adults have. Fake adults, such as myself, make said budget and then promptly ignore it feeling that they have done enough of an adult act in making it at all. Real adults make said budget and stick to it, at least mostly. It appears that I may be transitioning from a faker to the real deal. Its too soon to say for sure.

When I first moved to this state, I was actually pretty good about budgets. I knew how much I wanted to spend on groceries, and I took a calculator with me to the grocery store to ensure that I stuck close to the designated spending amount. Slowly but surely, however, the company I kept wore down my will to be responsible. I had two jobs, lived in a town with cheap rent, and there was plenty of money to spend haphazardly. The trend continued with shared rent and grad school loans.

And then, I graduated. It's impressive how much of a difference graduate student loans make to your "income" every three months.

After a summer of teaching where my income was (and is always) front loaded ending with a month and a half in which I made nothing, it was the middle of October and I had some serious catching up to do. Desperate times call for desperate measures... It was time to pull out (bumbum BUUMM!) Excel.

I put on my big girl pants and set up a strict budget. I reminded myself of the tricks many professional adults use for sticking to their budget such as having cash for purchases rather than credit or debit, making a list before you shop, and actually figuring out what the hell a normal price for common items is (something someone as old as I am should really know already). I scoured the weekly ads for local grocery stores, stopped shopping at Whole Foods entirely, and even looked for coupons online when I needed to buy some sort of specialty gluten free item for a recipe. It's amazing how easy it is to find said coupons if you have a very specific brand in mind.

I even spoke up at the checkout yesterday when the checker tried to charge me $0.69 for lemons when the price was posted as 2 for $1.00. Granted, most people I know see this as normal, but I have a terrible fear of confrontation and apologized repeatedly for the time spent saving me a piddly 38 cents. 38 cents makes a difference, damnit!

Not to mention, someone needed to tell them that they had them entered into their system incorrectly.

Of course, later in the day Rite Aid thwarted me because I misread their ads... I spent 2 more dollars than I intended to because the sale on soda was not a direct sale, but a $2.00 coupon that the buyer gets after they've made their purchase. "It's like paying 3/$1.99!" Stupid simile.

On the plus side, the changes resulted in a trip to Costco that did not deviate from the list(aside from the item that we forgot to put on the list in the first place). On top of this, we had other sale prices to compare to, and though we bought more at Costco, the items were all things that bulk is actually helpful for (chicken broth, chicken, and potatoes). The coupon for Swanson chicken broth makes each can $0.42 which is seven cents cheaper than the lowest sale price we found.

I'm pretty sure I sound crazy right now...

Well, there you have it. I can now direct my obsessive behavior towards something productive: being a real live adult. All we can do is hope that I continue to manage said adulthood.

FNDs, Crafts, and Christmas

It's almost Sunday, and I suppose that means that its almost my writing day. After a week of teaching math, a day of creativity is almost always welcome.

On Tuesday, one of my students asked me what my hobbies were when I wasn't doing math. Lots of math people have math hobbies, and while cooking, sewing, and painting do require I type of spacial or quantitative reasoning that most don't imagine, they aren't really considered math hobbies.

Early this fall, a friend and I decided to begin a new tradition: Friday Night Dinners. Each Friday, a different person hosts dinner at their house. The person hosting is in charge of cooking, and everyone collaborates on entertainment (usually games). Three weeks ago, entertainment included the option of making sock dolls, and the option of crafting for entertainment continued into the following week. It has resulted in two somewhat sleepless Friday nights for me as my creativity starved brain goes into productivity mode. Of course, it doesn't help that I've been sleeping in until 11am on most Friday mornings.

Three weeks ago I painted. Two weeks ago I worked on a strange monster sock doll. This Friday there were no crafts, and I fell asleep rather early. Yesterday, however, I once again worked with watercolors in the afternoon. Watercolors come in several wonderful forms that make painting with them much easier than other mediums as far as I'm concerned. I thought I was doomed to be a terrible painter forever until I discovered watercolor pencils and liquid watercolor paint sets.

All of this creating has me thinking about Christmas and Christmas presents. For the last several years I've tried to make Christmas presents for several reasons. The primary purpose originally was to give something that was more meaningful. At the time I was working in a framing store and got a significant discount on custom framing. I made 10 copies of an ink drawing I had done and gave those as Christmas presents. The following year when I was no longer working at the framing store, the purpose was driven by finances. While framing the pictures wasn't especially inexpensive, the following year I made a dry soup mix that I put in glass jars. This was terribly cheap, almost embarrassingly so. Despite this, I had another realization later about such Christmas gifts: they often use less resources. The soup was in glass jars which are usually reusable, but also more readily recyclable than plastic (not that they always are). And who is really going to send your art to the landfill, especially when you've gone through the effort to frame it. Even if they don't like the art, they're likely to keep the frame... or at least donate it?

This year, I have a whole host of ideas. Some ideas involve jars, some painting, some sewing; some use recycled materials almost exclusively. Usually, however, I don't tend to have very good follow through. I'm hoping that the continuation of crafting evenings will keep me motivated and moving forward.

One Year... and then some.

What does one say after a sixteen month hiatus from blogging?

"I'M BACK!!" is one obvious option.

Lots has changed in the months that I haven't been writing and I'll spare you the details. One of the only things you need to know about, and one of the things I'm certain you'll hear a great deal about, is that we now get a CSA box weekly.

For those that are not aware of what CSA stands for: Community Supported Agriculture. What it means to get a CSA box is a little different. Essentially, every week we go and pick up a box that is filled with produce, a half dozen eggs, and some kind of cheese. The picture that is now at the top of my blog is of our very first box. Now this sounds cool except for a small catch; you don't get to choose what produce you get. You can opt out of one item and the group is happy to accommodate alergies (our box typically comes with bread, but as we are both gluten intolerant we have obviously opted not to have such a thing arrive at our home). The lack of choice is the draw back for most people, and after a couple months of box pick-ups, I can see their point.

We've identified three families of plants that we have difficulties with. The first is beets. The sheer quantity of beets I've eaten in the last two months is more than I had ever eaten in my life beforehand. We've found a few creative recipes for them, my favorite being a chocolate beet cake that calls for a large quantity of pureed beet. Desserts seem to be the best dishes to make from beets and this week I plan to make a a beet take on sweet potato casserole.

The second is greens: Kale, Mustard Greens, Chard, Spinach, Lettuce, etc. Everything but the lettuce has an easy option for preparation: oil, onion, garlic, wilted greens, done. I even found a recipe that would combine this preparation with pears (of which we currently have an abundance). We've attempted Kale chips with little success, in fact most of our attempts to dry produce in the oven have been predominantly unsuccessful. Our only real victory in that area was making raisins last week for a beet chutney recipe that didn't work out as well as we'd hoped it would.

Third, and lastly, mushrooms...

These were the first members of the box to be identified as a difficulty. We get some variety every week, some more easily consumed than others. Chantrelle mushrooms are by far the least offensive mushroom to be consumed, and we have readily found a delicious (but heinously unhealthy) recipe for Golden Chantrelle Puffs which are little mushroom biscuit type things. The recipe calls for a stick of butter. As for the Portabellas and Criminis? The best success we've had is to simply saute them in some sort of animal fat. Bacon is best.

This week, our box was filled with all three of these items. On top of these, we also received another bunch of spicy peppers which I perpetually lack a use for, but have every intention of finding one. We also got a very large celery root with which we plan to make a type of hashbrown cake with carrots and potatoes. This will be eaten with a large quantity of greens (and maybe mushrooms).

When I look at that last paragraph, I think it sounds like I'm complaining. I'm not, not really. The challenge is a little enthralling! Every week its a mad dash to create a creative and cost effective menu that uses the mystery items in the box, and every week there are triumphs and disasters. Every week I learn something new about food and cooking. Its tiring and trying at times. After the beet fest we had last weekend, seeing another bunch of beets come our way forced me to take a deep calming breath. All in all, though, I think its a lot of fun and even when I put a stick of butter in my chantrelle puffs or crispy beet casserole, I still feel like I'm eating more plant matter than I would without the box.

Maybe that only counts for something in my mind, but that's enough for me.

To Run

It appears that it has only been a little over a month since my last blog posting. I don't feel nearly as badly as I did a few days ago when it suddenly occurred to me that I had a blog at all.

I'm not much of one for goal setting. Don't get me wrong, I continue to try to set goals, it just seems that I do so in vain. The goal setting has significantly diminished in the last few years as I began to come to terms with my personality and life choices. You've probably noticed this, as I've given up speaking about weight loss and getting myself into shape for some ellusive health benefits. You should know that this doesn't mean that I stopped having this goal, I simply changed my approach.

I had to come to terms with some other elements of healthy living before I could really tackle weight loss. I have come to terms with one: exercise. This life adjustment could not have come at a better time. When I began teaching, my stress-stomach and anxiety nightmares from my undergraduate years came rushing back with a vengeance (less so on the stomach front which I attribute to a low gluten diet); and to think that I wasted so much of my time worrying about a little thing like school back then! It was truly silly of me. I will grant you, this level of stress over a job is also truly silly. Exercise saved my sanity when I thought I might lose my mind completely.

I'm sure I must have mentioned bootcamp back when I began, but my posts have been so few and far between lately that I'm certain its time for a refresher. I work out at 5:40 am 4 days a week on the edge of the Willamette River. I am still not the most diligent attendee, but I feel like I have finally worked the program into my schedule so that I am there most days. Its difficult when your friends and significant other have a completely different sleep schedule than your own. I would rather put myself to bed at 9pm every evening, but find it difficult to wind down before 10 simply because everyone else is still awake. Don't misconstrue the explanation for blame; I have no one to blame but myself when I can't roll out of bed at 4:45am on Monday because I've neglected my sleep schedule for two days. Slowly, I am getting used to saying no, getting used to saying "i'm tired" and doing something about it, and getting used to spending more of my evenings quietly and somewhat alone. I'm an introverted person, ultimately its an additional assist to my sanity to live this way. Being alone more has meant a stronger feeling of stability and calm.

There has been one draw back, though. Around the time of my last post, my knees began to hurt. It wasn't just a "oh, I'm a little sore from working out" kind of hurt, but a deep pain that made me stiff if I sat too long and caused me to wince when I walked up and down the stairs. It hurt to walk, it hurt to run, it hurt to sit, it hurt to stand. I am a problem solver by nature, and this was a prime time for my brain to start working it out. I started icing every couple days when the pain was fairly minimal. It helped a tiny bit, but not significantly.

The off week of bootcamp rolled around and I took the whole week off from exercise. Whether it was the lack of movement or the fact that I started carrying a shoulder bag that week (or both), I'm not sure, but the pain became worse. I gave up heels completely (I was only wearing very low heels with broad bases) and bought a new mattress. The pain reduced. Bootcamp started up again and that seemed to help a bit more. I acquired new running shoes and felt a bit more relief. About the same time that bootcamp started back up and I got the new shoes, the school term ended and I didn't need to carry around over 30 pounds of extra weight on my back...

Oh.

Its impressive that I didn't even consider this as a possible cause of my pain.

Its also impressive what a single pound of weight does to the amount of pressure your joints experience. Its a 1 to 4 ratio. For every single pound added to your load (weight gained or weight carried), your joints (knees, hips, and lower vertebrae especially) experience 4 extra pounds of pressure during movement. That's intense! No wonder my knees hurt. Every time i walked a half mile from the bus to school or vice versa, my joints were experienced around 120 extra pounds of load bearing pressure with every step than they would have if I had no bag. This has changed my perspective completely on weight loss goals.

I started out a couple years ago with the general idea of being "healthier" if I reduced the amount of weight I carried. To me this meant less of a chance of cancer or diabetes down the road (both prevalent in my family). But what twenty-something in their sane mind can actually achieve a goal based on consequences "down the road"? Needless to say, I've hovered between 10 and 20 pounds above my goal for two years now).

The knee pain, though... that got to me. Its not that I didn't know that joint pain was a future ailment on "things you can avoid" list of weight loss; my mother is a very tall woman and she would admit to maybe not carrying an ideal amount of weight on her already large frame. She's in pain most days. So, yes, I knew that it could be a consequence. My mother is, however, twice my age and 6 inches taller than I. Why would I think that I had any risk of joint pain? Because I didn't consider my love of running or my addiction to academics when I thought about joint pain, I only considered my upper end of a healthy BMI weight.

I'm working myself up to achieving two goals: losing between 8 and 12 pounds and buying a rolling backpack. The middle schooler inside me that still desperately wants to be the cool kid thinks that the first goal sounds like the easier of the two. Summer term has allowed me to carry less weight and has bought me some time to work up to a bag that will brand me as an old lady. I'm considering something more along the lines of a rolling briefcase... I won't feel nearly as out of place at work with a rolling briefcase.

You might ask why I bother with the 8 to 12 pounds, if I am replacing my backpack. It comes back to that first love that I didn't consider when it came to joint pain: running. I've dreamed of running a marathon since I was 15. I'm currently working my way up to a 5K. Then I'll move on to a 10K, then a half marathon, then a marathon... maybe I'll even do a triathlon if I can ever get into swimming. I'll pay for the running later in life no matter what, but I'll pay less if I weigh less. Simple as that.

Weight loss goals are not something I achieve easily as you might have figured. But if I want to run, I need to do this. And I want to run.

Hot Chocolate Disaster

I lost my will to work this morning when I lost my large hot chocolate to the floor of my car.

I just feel whiny and there's no way around that. Here I am, at work on a Saturday morning. Its not that it isn't my fault that I'm here. I certainly didn't do any work the last two days, but damn if I'm not tired regardless. And then to lose the best part of my day? And not have any cash to buy a second?

At least the hot chocolate came off of my leather shoes, but I've already made an appointment to have it detailed to avoid a spoiled dairy smell in my car.

Now that I have successfully avoided working for an hour and yet somehow have only written the equivalent of an entire paragraph, I should probably get my bitter self to work...

... or at least find something else that doesn't feel quite as much like procrastination.