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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April 12, 2013
Bacon pasta. Does it get better? (Not really, no.)
Back by special request this week for PiC’s carbing up pre-MAJOR NEW RACE, I get to make an enormous batch of this amazing new recipe. As race support staff, I (so modestly) rock.
One of my favorite things to do is experiment with new recipes if I 1) don’t screw it up and 2) have an appreciative audience. Number two is a given with PiC. Our diet tends to get staid and boring which, for such a health-oriented eater, is a surprising thing about him, but he does appreciate and enjoy anything I cook even when I think it didn’t turn out. So all that’s left to do is Not Screw It Up. No pressure.
After reading Eat and Run this week, I’m also inspired to experiment with the recipes shared in the book to see how that helps PiC’s running. And maybe it’ll have a positive effect on my health too. Guinea pig-dom!
Also happily, a now-local childhood friend is close enough to visit with us once in a while and we’ve found that we love cooking and eating together. We try to share new or new-to-each-other recipes each time.
This was the first time I’d ever cooked with crushed red pepper and boy howdy! Did I ever screw up. I normally always follow new recipes as exactly as possible (ahem, except every other recipe where I substitute one or three ingredients because our cupboard’s too lean. Including this one, as you’ll see.) and as it turns out, even our fire-mouth SE-Asia-travel hardened friend thought the first batch was eyewateringly spicy. Whoops.
We had this with an amazing kale salad and leftovers were just as incredible. The next time I made a batch, we two greedy-faces ate up the whole skillet in one meal. Good grief. Not totally recommended.
Bucatini All’amatriciana
serves 2 greedy-faces or 4 normal people.
Ingredients
1/2 pound thinly sliced pancetta, coarsely chopped*
1 red onion, thinly sliced
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1 1/2 teaspoons crushed red pepper*
12 ounces prepared tomato sauce*
Kosher salt
1 pound bucatini*
1/2 cup flat-leaf parsley leaves*
Grated Pecorino Romano cheese, for serving
*I use regular bacon instead of pancetta since it’s faster and easier to find.
HALVE the red pepper for the love of your taste buds.
Just used jarred sauce to spare my hands.
Bucatini is remarkably hard to find! So I use linguine instead.
I pretty much never have parsley.
Directions
1. (I trim at least half the fat off the bacon first.) Then, in a large, deep skillet, cook the pancetta over moderate heat, until lightly browned. Cook about 6 minutes.
2. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the pancetta to a plate.
3. Pour off all but 2 tablespoons of the fat in the skillet.
4. Add the onion, garlic and crushed red pepper and cook over moderately high heat, stirring occasionally, until the onion is lightly browned. Takes about 6 minutes.
5. Return the pancetta to the skillet. Add the tomato sauce, season with salt and simmer until very thick. Cook about 10 minutes.
6. Meanwhile, in a pot of salted boiling water, cook the pasta until al dente. Drain the pasta, reserving 1/2 cup of the cooking water.
7. Add the pasta to the sauce along with the parsley and the reserved cooking water and stir over moderately high heat until the pasta is evenly coated, 2 minutes.
8. Serve the pasta in bowls. Parmesan if desired.
:: Have you ever seen bucatini in a store?
:: If you’re a runner, how do you like to dietarily prepare for races?
:: Or are you more like me and just like to make yummy food?
April 10, 2013
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
–The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett
I’m absolutely prepared to swear that I’m not the one who snores. [Admission: I used to sleepwalk, sleeptalk and sleep fought back against nightmarish intruders that have turned out to be … PiC. Oops. In my defense … well ok, he didn’t even notice so do I need a defense?]
PiC and I have put a lot of money into a fantastic new mattress, bigger and better than ever!, and really need to replace our pillows. But every so often PiC wonders if we should have gone our separate ways for sleeping since his snoring keeps me up or wakes me so many times in the night.
Katie recently asked this same question about Separate Bedrooms.
The thing is, except for those nights when a literal earthquake couldn’t wake me for the exhaustion, my body’s become attuned to having him around and startles awake if he’s not there. This probably stems from those many nights when he’d have one or another thing to do before bed and would end up falling asleep where he sat. Around 2 or 4 am, something would trigger in my brain and I’d get up to fetch him. Can’t win for losing!
It’s like Mind-Reading (but worse)
While cooking the other day, I heard the scrape-scrape-scrape of the dog food container we’d just gotten to prevent any bug infestations. Not a problem now and not a problem ever, we hope.
Unhappily, the touted stackable container that should hold greater than 40 lbs appears to have all it can do to hold about 25. Other than that, though, we quite like the container. Until I heard PiC’s cursing: “why can’t I close t— oh. Never mind ….. ”
“Because you were turning it the wrong way?”
“YES. How did you know?”
simultaneously: You/I just did that!
*burst out laughing*
Learning to make the best of things
Talking to my dad about trying to start to plan a wedding reception has uncovered a whole pot of simmering tensions. He’s holding firm on some pretty unreasonable expectations, in my opinion, and basing it on fairly illogical logic. *sigh* It’s hard to say how we’re going to navigate to the other side on this but I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around how, frankly, selfish he’s being about this.
I’ve willingly sacrificed pretty much everything I wanted in the past ten years for them. And now when it comes to the wedding, instead of working together to figure out how to compromise, he wants his way or no way at all for the sake of his reputation. Those are my choices. I can have all the family he “has” to invite, or none of them. Which is no choice at all in my book. And utterly ridiculous when he keeps insisting that we have to have 300-400 family members minimum, before we even look at non-family we would choose to have there for either side.
By virtue of distance alone, we won’t be able to return the invitation to a great many people he feels he “owes” an invitation to (by the backwards logic of “they expect to return his wedding gift to them or their children”), a great number of our family are overseas… and a great number are in SoCal too. Based on the criteria “because I have to save face”, there are still a hell of a lot of people who can’t be invited. So why is it we can’t just invite the family that I actually know, keep in touch with or care about, and include a reasonable number of his-choice invites? That’s still a large number by itself.
This has me quite annoyed on principle. Quite frankly, his priorities shouldn’t only be his standing in the community or how he looks. This isn’t entirely, 100%, about him. He’s not paying for one cent of this and saying “don’t worry about it, I’ll handle all the details” doesn’t make it better. You can’t just push me out of a core part of our wedding and expect that I’ll be ok with that. I’m all about including his input, but I am NOT about rolling over and giving him everything he wants.
I’ve lived my whole adult life focusing on what would be best for my parents, isn’t it time he stepped up and cooperated?
/rant.
So I asked a pretty-exasperated PiC what he’d like. Guest list and other BS aside, what would he actually LIKE?
An Enchantment Under the Sea, a la Back to the Future theme, says he.
[headsplosion] Seriously??
Yes. {starts singing the song}
[hilarity ensues]
We can’t have a DeLorean because if no flux capacitor, then no DeLorean. Authenticity dammit!
Costumes? Sure. But for other people.
Wonder if we can get the local high school gym?
{text old high school friend who still FBs with high school administrators}
We’ll see!
How about Enchantment Under the Sea in the gym, and luau outside?
ROAST PIG. YES.
This could be expensive.
Or … not? Hm. Yes. It could be. If we’re going to do it, I’d like it to be cool, not slapdash. Also, I stipulate that I must have Wolverine something. If we’re going geek, I want something of mine represented.
Deal.
Being married and getting married. Two strange states of being when cast simultaneously.
April 9, 2013
[Warning: possibly a little spoilery]
Sometimes I do it to tweak PiC, or at least he thinks so, but this time I picked up the book he chose because I’ve already finished all my library books and his looked moderately interesting.
I’m not a runner and certainly don’t ever see myself marathoning but I love a well told story, particularly one of achievement, so even though I had never heard of Jurek, the book flap sounded promising enough. I’m so glad that I did.
It gave me insight into a person who knows how to endure because he learned long ago that sometimes, that’s just what you do. This resonated. It gave me insight into a journey of growth and coping, of discovery and delight in pushing yourself. This resonated. It gave me insight into the life of a runner, then an ultra runner, and how they endure through their races. This… suggested ways I could support PiC in his bid to be an ultra runner.
Written with Steve Friedman, in Eat and Run, Scott tells the story of his life as an elite athlete and as a vegan starting from long before either of those things were relevant in his daily lexicon or the running world. He was a meat and potatoes Midwestern kid managing a difficult home life who found the world of running almost unintentionally, derisively dismissed as “the flatlander” on his entrance into his first major 100-miler, and slowly transformed himself, step by step, into the elite athlete he is today.
Honestly, I say again, I’m not a runner, never was more than a sprinter in my best days, but reading this about made me rise up and go out for a long run.
Never self-effacing, Jurek also doesn’t sound like someone wrapped up in himself. He doesn’t sound like anything but a remarkably human guy who’s managed to figure things out one step at a time, painfully sometimes, and with all the steps forward and back that comes in a normal life. It’s not all about the wins, though there were those, it’s about the experience of the runs, what he learned from it, who he was at the time of the race.
That might be what struck me the most: he was incredibly focused on the running in his life, perhaps sometimes to the detriment of his personal life, occasionally giving rise to self-doubt over whether he’d made the right choices years down the road.
He doesn’t succumb to the doubt but he acknowledges it, he acknowledges that he wasn’t necessarily 100% sure of the choices he made in his life and he acknowledges the possible mistakes. I really identified with that as I’ve wondered many times in the past year how my actions failed my mother and whether she would have been better had I this or that.
Then there was a period of time he lived in debt to run those races and of course, as I’m highly allergic to debt in my post-debt life, that made me cringe a little. Still, I understood. Given the results, I mean. I would have loved to hear more about how this part of his life came together. Because I’m nosy …
The recipes he discovered, developed or loves are seeded throughout the book, linking into his forays into healthy eating and ultimately veganism, and his narration includes notes of what worked best for him during races. Once, the idea of dispensing with the medication entirely would have sounded like a pipe dream to me, living in chronic pain, but the timing is good. I’ve given up my medications this year as a regular routine and instead only take them when I can’t endure any longer. Incorporating more healing foods into our diet sounds appealing and he shows how easy and delicious it can be.
There’s precious little ego in this book, so long as you don’t think that telling your own story is ego (I don’t), just a hell of a capacity for endurance.
He sees himself as an Everyman, and sees in everyone the potential to achieve just about anything. Whether anyone can run an ultra (looking in the mirror skeptically), his modest and welcome all-comers approach makes me want to get to know him a bit more.
April 8, 2013
On a very quick visit to the Midwest…
A) I nearly shivered myself to pieces in the approximately 30 degree weather. Brrr. Brrr…. BRRRR….
B) Thankfully PiC really loves me and on a morning jaunt, scouted a Top Shop for me. Seriously, the guy remembered the one store where I like to get my leggings. My one pair of leggings I’ve ever bought. Thank goodness for the ridiculously good Patagonia jacket he found for me a couple years ago.
C) The Water Tower had a fun art exhibit and I had to document a few things for @CthulhuChick. Cthulhu-rabbit! Octo-heart?
D) What trip isn’t all about the food for me? Thanks to @aledonne for the recommendation, we stopped into Giordano’s for a few different pizzas. They were pretty good. Of course, I had to stop into Downtown Dogs for a Chicago dog appetizer ….
E) We also tried macaroni and cheese pizza, grilled chicken pesto pizza, and a fish fry. So. Good. (I want to eat mac and cheese pizza forever.)
F) My second old-fashioned with a cinnamon stick. You wouldn’t expect that a single detail like that would make a huge difference but it absolutely made the drink.
Except for the cold, I loved the city, the feel of fun and culture, and most definitely the food. We’ve been there on another quick trip in the past and were focused on Millenium Park and saw the famous Bean, etc., and I’ve worked in the city (again, briefly) and saw the Field Museum during a closed exhibit.
It feels like getting little very spaced-out nibbles of a vast and wonderful area.
Have you been to the Midwest? (I know some of you are FROM there!)
Next time, what would you recommend?
April 1, 2013
March was WAY better than February. Hoo-rah!
I’m not back in the gym yet, but have extended Doggle walks on every nice day so that we both get our Vitamin D and stretch our legs a little more.
One night, I had this nightmare that PiC signed me up for a marathon, because he decided to run even more than that, and for some reason an ex-classmate I really didn’t/don’t like was going to run with me so of course I couldn’t admit that I couldn’t do it. Yeah, toughing out a marathon when you can’t run a full mile yet – that’s an awesome idea.
It’s probably an indication of how much desperately I want to be my “normal” self. The one who could run a mile without being utterly wiped out, or work out for a few hours and actually enjoy the process. Of course, that’s getting ahead of myself in a big way. It’s as frustrating to be this thoroughly out of shape as it was to be in debt; it feels like someone’s chained my wrist to my opposite ankle. Awkward AND limiting!
It would be amazing to have a workout buddy who can hang with me in the little leagues and work our way up together. Exercise is much more fun as a cooperative endeavor.
All true and so relevant. I’ve never talked about it but I really hate doors, and heavy doors that remind me that I’m weaker than I used to be, or just plain make me look weak. This is why I “shoulder” or “hip” doors instead of pushing them when I can. There’s an amazing number of things that are much more difficult to manage b/c of pain: pocket doors, can openers, pots before food’s in, pots after food’s in, fancy cookware, lifting wet laundry in and out of washer and dryer. Round door handles suck, scissors suck, skinny pens suck. Yoga mega sucks because it’s so appealing, and not possible to do without hands/arms. Life is a strange thing viewed through the lens of what you can do or handle with only a very light touch.
It’s easier to dismiss said things I can’t do anymore or do well as jerks. All jerks. And then move right along.
Food
Using different grains and making more from-scratch recipes has been on my mind a lot lately; it seems like it’d be easier to eat more healthy foods this way. I finally had the energy (and the ridiculous need to procrastinate) to experiment with a couple recipes: Pasta and Barley Soup and Bucatini All’amatriciana.
The Pasta and Barley Soup was incredibly easy:
1 cup of ditalina pasta
3 liters of vegetable broth
1 diced onion
lots of diced garlic
1 diced potato
1/2 c diced celery*
2 diced carrots*
3/4 c barley
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil for drizzling**
Parmigiana Reggiano**
Parsley**
* I only used 1 diced carrot and substituted in one extra potato for the other carrot and for the celery I didn’t have on hand. So, extra carbalicious!
** For topping the soup and serving.
1. Saute onions and garlic.
2. Add broth and barley to simmer for 30 minutes.
3. Add the vegetables and pasta to cook for 6-8 minutes. Original recipe called for 6 minutes but I had to go to 8 minutes to fully cook through. Add salt and pepper to season.
Serve!
I played with the ingredients a bit, cutting back on some ingredients (broth, pasta) to make a smaller batch. It was perfect for the first seating but needed extra broth for the next day reheating.
Your turn: what did you do in March to be a little healthier and happier?
March 29, 2013
When I look around, it occurs to me that I have a techish problem. A plethora of devices and some strange habits to go with them.
I have:
2 PCs, one personal and one work, though the personal one gets impressed into work relatively frequently and is about to quit on me with a screen that’s been going black;
1 netbook;
1 tablet;
1 smartphone that drives me nuts w/how crap it is (Tmobile MyTouch).
Also no charger, since I managed to break mine a few months ago. PiC and I are sharing because I have (vice #1) this insane prejudice against buying replacement chargers since PiC’s “losing chargers since 2003” spree.
With some upcoming business travel, travel being kind of always the impetus for my realizing that broken down tech is probably going to be limpingly pathetic (vice #2), I panicked and shopped for a new phone and a pay as you go internet hotspot I’d meant to test.
The Phone
After some research and asking for recommendations from good friends, I decided that the Nexus 4 made sense.
Some specs
It’s a well-reviewed phone, though it has two major flaws in the eyes of the reviewers: lack of LTE and it seems to be built in such a way that you can’t use it on other carriers (T-mobile only, it doesn’t work with Sprint, Verizon or AT&T).
Major pluses:
it ships unlocked so theoretically I could change to being carrier-free with just a purchased SIM. (of course, not working on other major carriers is the drawback that sort of negates this a little)
it works internationally (as verified by a military friend overseas)
it has good expected battery life (maybe not quite as good as my original model iPhone but still more than 24 hours with use)
the OS looks to be user friendly and fast.
The price
It cost (ulp!) $380 after taxes and shipping direct from Google Play.
I had my reservations about the fact that they not only charge a 15% restocking fee, they charge MORE if you return a damaged phone. So you get punished if the phone arrives to you damaged?? Customer service, not so much Google.
Still they were $60-100 cheaper from GPlay than anywhere else so I bit that bullet after being two nerds for 2 days.
The phone plan
At the same time as the shopping, I dropped into a conversation with @singlema about our cell phone plans and how much we’re paying. We realized that Tmobile had these new Simple Choice plans that were MUCH cheaper for pretty much the same services.
+ Unlimited text / talk / data (first 500 MB at high speeds)
+ A Tmobile hotspot
+ NO CONTRACT
+ $80
+ Applies to first two lines; additional lines for $10
A couple of our phones are still on contract this year, those will just lapse and carry on as contract-less phones.
The things that drive me crazy about T-Mobile:
– Until this year, they refused to allow fee-free line cancellation for my mom’s line despite the fact she’s been deceased for over a year.
– They had a password associated with my account that I did not set, could not remember, and prevented me from talking to the CSRs about anything on my account. And said that I couldn’t reset it in any way except by going into the store. Sheer insanity. Until I realized I was talking to incompetent people who didn’t know what they were doing and wouldn’t ask anyone. Even their twitter help insisted that you had to go into the store. MADNESS. I got the best CSR ever, Greg, who actually knew what to do to give me access after 3 very frustrating hours.
– Their idiotic voice response system kept resetting my own website password when I was calling to reset a password for another account.
– If you can’t remember your password and do the password reset, even entering the temporary password they give you counts against your number of allotted tries and locks you out for 24 hours (unless you call) (wasting more time). Thereby rendering the Forgot Your Password function totally useless.
I was ready to tear my hair out and I’m still hating on most of their customer service.
But I was able to change our plans from $140 before tax ($160) to a new plan for $100 before tax (guessing, $120?) for four lines. When the paperwork to cancel Mom’s line goes through, that’ll be $10 less.
It’ll take about ten months to offset my new phone. And another ten if PiC decides he wants the Nexus too.
The Hotspot
I’d been planning to try this hotspot thing to review on the blog but I was dawdling on the ordering it thing. Finally I realized that I had to order it if I was going to take it to work with me. And lo, I ordered a day too late so that it’ll probably arrive when I’m already gone. And worse, the new T-mobile plan has this hotspot feature thing but I didn’t know about that when I ordered this device. Rather annoying.
Still I suppose it’ll be worth trying, though I won’t truly need to have access for more than myself in the upcoming months.
Put me down for another $85.
The Computer
Please, oh please don’t make me research, buy and configure yet another computer. There’s only so much patience in my life and it’s going to be severely taxed by the above new stuff. Also, taxes. Because those need filing.
Perhaps my IT friend can take a look and magic up a few more months (years? heh) of life out of this machine.
:: What are your thoughts on devices that keep you plugged in?
:: Do you have anything good to say about the Nexus 4 that’ll make me feel better about paying nearly $400 for it?
March 25, 2013
Needle aversion notwithstanding, I’ve had a long-running desire to give blood. For science?
Maybe it’s the one thing I want to do to fit in because a) Lord knows I don’t care that I don’t “fit in” anywhere else; b) it feels chumpish not to when just about everyone I know can.
Maybe it’s because these past several years, I’ve lost so many dear family and friends to dementia, cancer, heart disease, accidents and medical complications and there was never a damn thing I could do about it. “Helpless” is not a mode I play well on. So maybe giving something of myself, literally, seems to be the only thing that feels like a tangible help.
Sadly, it’s been years since I discovered that the blood bank was serious about their weight limit. And that none of my friends were willing to go along with an illicit donation – they don’t actually weigh you, after all. Apparently friends think that giving that much blood for my body weight would be a problem. Even arguing that some blood draws ordered by the doctor took at least half a pint or more didn’t convince anyone and PiC would just give me The Look. I remain unconvinced that it would be a problem. “What’s the worst that could happen?” occurs to me but I’m not totally willing to risk it alone in case I do pass out… or whatever.
Blood donation drives: the one time my weight makes me feel totally worthless. Dammit.
Then I got to thinking that…
Be the Match blood marrow donations would be a Good Thing: no weight requirement and Asian donors are lacking in the registry. Let me try to Be A Match!
But guess what? Too defective for that. ><
It feels like I’m standing outside banging on the window of society. Hullooo! Have I got today’s leprosy? Grump.
Mid-month I finally decided it was time to chop off the hair.
Tired of sitting on it, and tired of shedding a mini-me every day, I crowdsourced my new style and headed off to the salon.
@PhysicistLisa asked if I meant to donate it since I mentioned a specific length. Ah-ha! Yes indeed! It was quite long enough for that! And I never dye my hair or anything so it’s in good shape. WHEE. Even the shortest layers were about 8 inches, the longest layers measured 12 inches. And that was with the lady cutting a less generous length because she didn’t believe how short I wanted to go.
All that was left was to decide where to send it. I hadn’t made time to research the various possible organizations when this lovely post from A Practical Wedding’s team popped up: Pantene Beautiful Lengths it is!
They only accept the hair they can use with clear instructions on what that is, they give the wigs away to cancer patients and they don’t sell your hair. This is important to me.
The donation lifts a pall over my heart. I haven’t had short hair since I lived with and helped my parents directly, since I still had a mom, our last time together was when it was long, at the courthouse. Cutting it, though I’ve never been attached to hair for appearances’ sake, was a reminder of all this. But this feels right.
And since my recent changes in banking yielded a new set of checks sent in a plastic envelope actually intended for reuse, the stars were clearly aligned. The envelope’s packed, addressed and ready to mail. I’m excited. I’m finally good for something. 🙂
Can you donate blood? Are you registered for the marrow registry? (Or can you be?) Would you donate your hair if it was long enough?