About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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May 23, 2018
Week 6
Here are Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, and Week 5
This is the last week of this food diary, and I think I’m really starting to see a difference in my baseline pain.
As Court mentioned, it does seem like my original estimate of two weeks for the de-glutening was really too short. It feels as though this entire six weeks has been necessary to get it out of my system. It could also be because it took me a few weeks to do things like avoiding cross contamination and cooking in entirely separate dishes and so on. Now I’m wondering how to make this more sustainable.
I do want to (very carefully) bake up several batches of healthy breakfast muffins for PiC and JB to have on hand, thus using up the wheat flour, before I start experimenting with alternative baking bases, and get back into the habit of baking and cooking in a GF-friendly way without having to expend a ton of thought and energy on the process. (more…)
May 21, 2018
Meltdown city, continued
We had four glorious days with JB. Ze was calm and cheerful, reasonable, playful and obedient. That was an amazing four days. The OTHER days were soooo much harder. The tantrums of last month? Came to stay.
Ze was so prone to melting down over the most nonsensical reasons, it was incredibly hard to grab hold of my temper with both hands and hang on tight through it all.
We had to be alert for when ze was simply being bratty or when ze was losing ability to reason and react accordingly. One bleak afternoon, overdue for a nap, ze started to melt down AGAIN because ze didn’t WANT to go to put on pajamas, didn’t WANT Daddy, WANT MOMMY! (believe me, if I was the one putting zir to bed, that would be reversed immediately), don’t WANT to read a book.
I grabbed zir vest and dug into the pockets with both hands and told zir to do the same: take out alllll that attitude. Scoop out the grumpy! Pull out all your grouchiness and whining and tears and yucky feelings and dump them on the floor here. I’ll sweep it up later. Go on, pull it all out!
(more…)
May 18, 2018
My first successful pot roast! This was labor intensive but amazing. Don’t take my word for it, this was preschooler approved! JB has been more picky about food lately, more interested in playing than eating, but not for this dinner. Ze didn’t love the potatoes cooked with the pot roast but did scarf down the mashed potatoes.
Ingredients
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2.5 pound boneless chuck roast
2 or 3 tablespoons olive oil
2 onions, sliced
1 carrot, peeled, cut into 1-inch pieces (we don’t love smushy carrots but like the flavor, this was my compromise)
2 large russet potatoes, cut into 2-3 inch chunks
1 cup red wine
2 cups beef broth
1/4 cup italian seasoning (we don’t keep fresh rosemary and thyme on hand, compromise!)
Directions
Take the roast out of the refrigerator 2 hours before cooking to let it come to room temperature. Generously salt and pepper both sides.
Preheat the oven to 275 degrees F.
Heat the olive oil in your Dutch oven over high heat. Add the onions to the pot, browning them on both sides. Remove the onions to a plate. Throw the carrots into the same very hot pot and toss them around a bit until slightly browned, about a minute. Reserve the carrots with the onions.
If needed, add olive oil to the very hot pot, then sear the meat in the pot for about 3 minutes on both sides. Remove the roast to a plate.
With the burner still on, use red wine to deglaze the pot, scraping the bottom with a whisk. Add the italian seasoning to the red wine. Place the onions, carrots, half the potatoes and roast back into the pot. Arrange most of the vegetables under and around the roast, then add beef stock to cover the meat halfway.
Put the lid back on forget it for a few hours. Roast for 3 hours for a 2-3-pound roast. Roast for 4 hours for a 4 to 5-pound roast. The roast is ready when it can be easily pulled apart.
The other half of the potatoes didn’t fit in the Dutch oven, so I made mashed potatoes with them on the side, using the rest of the beef broth.
:: Do you have any winning variations on pot roast?
I first heard of this money management tool called HoneyMoney from J. Money some while ago and it described a system that’s very similar to what I put together for ourselves.
It’s awesome that someone out there’s thinking along the same lines and providing this as a service for people who don’t want to have to re-invent the budgeting wheel. I signed up for a free 30-day trial of this service to see how close it comes to meeting my personal needfs and to share with you in case you’ve been looking for something like this. Let’s dive in…
STEP ONE: Entering accounts
This is all manual! I love that. My current system is all manual. I don’t want to link my accounts to any site for importing. Once upon a time, I loved Yodlee, and then it got old and crochety. I moved to Mint. That worked for a hot minute and then it stopped being useful.
It’s prone to connection errors. It’s prone to getting confused about the data. It keeps giving me “I can’t connect to MAKIN’ YOU BATTY account, please try logging in again to confirm your credentials.”
It’s all a waste of my time! Plus with all the data breaches, I don’t want any other institutions to have access to my account log ins anymore. I’m over it. Out with the account monitoring, in with the manual inputs!
(more…)
May 17, 2018
The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene: “Something was “terribly wrong,” as she put it, but she didn’t even bother to tell her parents about it. Other people went to doctors and got solutions. That had never happened for Jill, so she started looking for answers on her own, the way a kid would.”
It took me 20 years to get any answers but my medical journey was far less interesting and revelatory.
I don’t miss pregnancy, PUPPs, or being unable to touch my toes. I don’t miss missing sleep, or having that mildly insane moment when I think “we’re never going to survive this”, or the tantrums we were having twice a day like clockwork last week. I don’t miss wondering things like Mrs Frugalwoods’ “surely five-year-olds can pull up their own pants and don’t walk around with their bums hanging out“. But I do miss my 12-20 month old something fierce. I adore this child with every fiber of my being, except those three toes ze just stomped on while enthusiastically River Dancing to “Let It Go” (yes, it’s invaded our home).
White male managers treat their colleagues worse when it’s not a white man at the helm of their company: Researchers found that white male executives working under a female and/or racial minority were also less likely to provide help to fellow colleagues, with an especially negative effect on help provided to minority status colleagues.
Come on, men. I know you can be better than this. I’ve seen better with my own eyes.
(more…)
May 16, 2018
Week 5
Here are Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, and Week 4.
This week is all about avoiding cross contamination: cooking in separate pans, using different utensils and plates where we would normally share to cut down on dishes.
I’m not a fan of the extra dishes to wash but I’m also trying to make the most of this trial and we do have a dishwasher so we can handle it.
As I mentioned to Linda, we’re doing more substitutions now than we may later in part because we’re trying to preserve some of our easy go-to recipes but I can see that changing over time as I learn new recipes and adjust them to our lifestyle and time constraints. I adore rice myself and grew up eating it for every meal so I have no issues going to a mostly-rice based diet but the family is going to need a bit of time to adjust with me. (more…)
May 14, 2018
Last summer, I was fed up with my property manager. She’d worked out ok the first two years, with a few hiccups and annoyances, but she’d slid way past “ok.”
The timing was terrible, of course. Our agreement had automatically renewed for a fourth year and it would have cost $150 to terminate our contract part way through an agreement year, but my old property manager, heretofore to be known as Crappy Old PM (COPM), had fallen back into her old ways. ARGH!
Sometime in the second year of working with her, COPM started taking weeks to answer emails. That’s our primary mode of contact! She’d been told quite firmly that I expected a response time within 2 business days. She kept making excuses about her health, apparently incapable of putting up an out of office message or having someone on staff answer her emails at least to tell her clients that her replies would be delayed ever. You know, basic communication.
She improved for a while but about two months after renewal last year, she slid right back to the bottom of the customer service canyon. Every email required 3 follow-ups over 3 weeks. That’s unacceptable. You don’t get to be paid 10% of my rent and fail to answer my MAYBE 1 email a month in a timely manner. To cap any possible guilt, the November payment was 3 weeks late. They didn’t even notice that they hadn’t paid me! They blamed the holiday weekend blocking the payment but honestly I didn’t believe them. (more…)