Food!

It's almost February...and the weather is like it's almost February! I'm hesitant to believe it. I just know Punxsutawney Phil is going to pop his head up on Wednesday and say, "It's spring! Wait, back up...I missed a key item I need to get that special game ending, so we're restarting January now."

In the meantime, I hold on to the tiniest sliver of hope that the temperature will stay more than 20 degrees below average. This weekend Sweetie and I could poke our heads out from our own hidey holes for the first time in a looong while. The recyclables are finally off the kitchen floor, local businesses have received our economic stimulation and we're eating FOOD. Not instant ramen, not haphazard wraps five times a week, but food.

Exhibit A:


On the way home from an outing yesterday, I pulled Sweetie into Sahara Mart for some discount Fage yogurts. He's a little wary at the sight of the "Sell by Jan 12" stamp on the container, but how else am I supposed to get them for 80¢ a piece? Besides, it's yogurt. It's alive and fermenting, like cheese and wine. There's a little leeway on the expiree date.

Anyway, I don't have a problem with depreciated goods, but I'm a stereotypically sweet-toothed American and I don't like the yogurt plain. But I also don't like them pre-flavored...the Chobani fruit-on-the-bottom ones beloved the blog-world over taste like watery syrup to me. Enter my favorite fruit-based concoction: blueberry honey sauce. Two cups frozen blueberries, a fourth cup local wildflower honey, a sprinkling of lemon juice and cornstarch, ten minutes on the stove. Amazing on pancakes, oatmeal, with peanut butter or cream cheese on bagels. One scoop into the yogurt, and I'm acting like some model on a Jell-O Pudding commercial enjoying that spoon just a liiitle too much.

Exhibit B:



Okay, it isn't really "food." But it is special, because I shouldn't be able to buy this in the United States. A few months ago I discovered Sweetie has had a secret emotionally-fueled longing for Toblerones ever since elementary school, when his sister would bring them home to sell for fundraisers and he wasn't allowed to have any. I fulfilled his dream with a buck at Target. But as with most nostalgia-induced attachments, he is not particularly generous with his toffee-filled treats. So if I want a Toblerone, I have to get my own. And one week I decided my own should be special, i.e. not plain Jane milk chocolate, and I started craving a white chocolate Toblerone. I knew they existed because I saw them in Switzerland on a trip to Europe with my mom in the 10th grade. But looking online, it appears they only exist in countries like Switzerland, unless you go to a fancy imports store. You can buy them imported on Amazon, but I don't trust re-sold edibles.

So I gave up and decided to wait patiently until we have enough money to fly ourselves to Europe and buy some in person. But what do you know, Sahara Mart is closer to a fancy import store than we thought. Now I have my own special bar that no one else can touch.

Exhibit C, however, I let Sweetie dip into:


I can't point you to a recipe or even give a name for this, because I made it up. It's stewed beef, only without the stew. I took a little over half a pound of meat, dredged it in flour and browned it in a little butter. I poured in about a cup of beef broth and enough water to cover the meat and let it simmer for an hour and a half. Then I put in one chopped carrot and boiled down for another 20 minutes, until the carrot slices were soft and the "stew" resembled gravy. For the side I mashed two small potatoes with soy milk and shredded cheddar cheese. Doesn't it look fancy? Or like a frozen TV dinner, if you're the sour cynical type. Trust me, it didn't taste like one. I'm turning into quite the carnivore.

Is the weather decent where you are? Or are you stuck on the East Coast with 20 inches of snow blocking the path from your doorway to the car?

Peddling Anti-Diet Advice

I don't know why anyone would be interested in someone else's weight. If you are, stop it. The comparison game is a lose-lose for all. But this is my blog, so I get to talk about me. And today I'm going to talk about how pretty and smart I am, and how I beat the system.

As of today, I am officially at the same weight I was before I started dieting again. 130 pounds...only five more than before we set off for Japan last spring. (Yes, Sweetie did threaten to smash the scale with a hammer, but he didn't follow through). Now, the magazines will tell me those five pounds are a matter of life and death...or at least bliss and misery. But you know how I got down to 130? By not reading those magazines. And now that I've slipped into the intuitive eating groove, if I happen to see those food-is-your-enemy articles floating around the Internets, they look absolutely insane.

For example, take a look at a headline that made the rounds last week, summarized by a professional blogger for Glamour magazine:

Weight Loss News: Beware of This Kind of Breakfast

"Breakfast is healthy, right? Of course it is! But, be careful--researchers warn that if you approach your breakfast this way, you may have trouble losing weight and keeping it off...

We've all heard the news that breakfast eaters are more likely to lose weight and keep it off than non-breakfast eaters. But, that doesn't mean to go crazy on portion sizes in the morning, say researchers in Germany. A big breakfast may backfire.

They found that people who ate larger breakfasts didn't experience any greater energy level or a so-called hunger-blunting affect throughout the day compared to those who ate light breakfasts. And, the bigger breakfast eaters consumed 400+ more calories each day.

The bottom line for weight loss: Breakfast is healthy, but make sure you're eating some lean protein and whole grains, and try to keep your morning meal under 400 calories (tops)."

400 calories tops? Oh no, those breakfast sandwiches at Subway can be like 410! And I'd better start counting the calories in each spoonful of cereal, because just one extra Mini Wheat could push me right over the edge into forbidden territory.

Mock-worthy wording aside, the hullaballoo around this "news" is understandable. It's one of the top ten rules of journalism to never, ever read the scientific papers you're reporting on, because that would ruin the story. A couple seconds on Google revealed the following balloon-deflators:

• The study was performed on extremely obese patients only, who probably did not have good established nutrition and exercise habits. Exercise does a lot to stabilize appetite.


• The study judged the size of a breakfast by calories only. Obviously, a "big breakfast" of oatmeal and fruit is not equivalent to a big breakfast of apple fritters. The actual conclusion from this study may well have been that a big serving of sugar in the morning isn't healthy, which wouldn't be news at all.


• The participants in the study did not have regular eating schedules. The authors specifically pointed out that they did not control participants' diets, but rather let them keep journals of what they ate normally. The participants would often eat no breakfast one day, and an enormous one the next. Eating a lot on a starve-and-make-up-for-it cycle is VERY different from eating a reliably large breakfast every day.

I could go on, but I have your attention for a limited amount of time so I'll get to the sausage and eggs of it: making mountains out of scientific molehills is the journalist's job, so the panic-stricken tone and overblown headlines aren't particularly shocking to me. What really bothers me was not the run-of-the-mill premonitions of doom, but the reaction of the public to the news. Here's a sampling of comments that followed the article I quoted above:

"For breakfast at 7:30 or 8:00 I always take 2 hard boiled eggs, remove the yolks, and have 2 reduced fat/sodium sausage links. Then around 10 o'clock I have a low carb yogurt with 12 all natural unsalted almonds in it! Yumm :)"

"I've been eating those fiber rich banana pancakes, 200 calories, most often. Or I have a smoothie at 169 calories and a hard boiled egg at 70 more. I probably need to quit having coffee or have less because I add more sugar and calories with my skinny nonfat latte creamer. Sometimes I'm getting 2 servings at least so adding 60 calories from creamer."

"When I eat cereal I make sure to portion everything out in the measuring cup so that I'm not accidentally eating an extra 100 calories every morning. I find that no matter what I eat I am always hungry for a snack around 10 am"

Twelve unsalted almonds? Are you sure you really need all twelve, 'cause each one is adding like .6g of fat and that totally negates the effort you went through to remove those yolks. And you, #2, 60 extra calories from creamer? You stop that this instant! That's like putting a whole slice of cheese on your sandwich every day! Obviously, that last commenter just has no willpower. If I ate a perfectly level half cup of cereal without the accidental 100 calorie overdose in the morning, I wouldn't need a snack around 10am...because I would have cannibalized my co-workers by 9.

I make fun, but thoughts like this are actually really scary to me. They're the kinds of things I would say during my anorexic days, only to these women it's In-clique girl talk. I sarcastically advised the author of the second quote to abandon Satan's creamer, but other commenters were genuinely encouraging her ("I use a splash of fat free half and half as well as some Splenda. Only 10 calories and it does the trick!") A few even felt the need justify their "bad" behavior to a bunch of strangers on the internet:

"I had a big breakfast Sunday but..it was Sunday morning! Plus we ate around 10:30 so we weren't really hungry until later anyhow."

Please tell me this isn't normal. Please tell me the entire Western world hasn't been sucked in. Thousands of people can't be digging the yolks out of their eggs, portioning 169 calories of smoothie and sneaking looks at their figures in the mirror, right?

Wrong. I've seen the diet mill in action. The victims are unanimously more miserable, and mostly much larger, than me. Like my supervisor boasting to everyone at the party she made the roasted nuts with artificial sweetener, my boss chugging chemically fabricated Slim Fasts for lunch, or my friend picking at the pita and hummus platter in lieu of a substantial dinner. They're jealous of the people who can drink full-sugar juice and eat pizza whenever they want and still stay skinny. I want to tell them they're probably skinny not in spite of the juice and pizza, but because they eat whatever they want without worrying about it.

Unfortunately, we can't change the way the media writes or the way people think overnight. The best we can do is point out the ridiculousness of it all and hope that eventually, people learn to filter out reality from the stream of food-phobic nonsense.

Sexist Breakfasts

I haven't been posting much recently, not because I don't have the time or inclination, but because I don't have anything to say. The most exciting thing I've done this month is go to the grocery store. Just getting out of the apartment complex parking lot is a death-defying act. Corollary to the previous statement: I don't cook anything interesting because the only way to survive until April is to buy in bulk and hit the preparation repeat button.

I can't talk much about my private life, either, because (a) not even I want to hear about my readings for Organizational Informatics and (b) when I'm not doing schoolwork or work-work, I'm pursuing a project which should remain classified for at least another half year. It's not that I don't trust you; I don't trust the devious strangers who stumble upon random sites and pilfer ideas from hard-working bloggers. You know, the same ones who leave nasty anonymous comments just to feel powerful...only with brains.

So for now, you just get tiny glimpses into my mental and physical life. Like this one:


The girliest breakfast I've ever eaten: a pink banana-cherry smoothie and half-bagel with Dark Chocolate Dreams peanut butter. One day, when I have enough money to establish a bed and breakfast and hire someone else to clean it, I will put this on the menu for any pre-teen princess visitors. I could also make a blueberry equivalent for boys, just to thoroughly cement the gender divide at their impressionable age. But I'm not sure what they would have instead of the chocolate bagel. What do stereotypical boys eat for breakfast? Bright Blue No. 2-colored Pop Tarts?

Come to think of it, I'm not sure what males eat in general. Almost all of the food blogs are written by women. I have limited personal experience, and in that personal experience males don't particularly care what they eat. My kid brothers liked pancakes swimming in syrup and cold cereals with lots of dehydrated "marshmallow" bits. My father ate Cheerios or Grape Nuts during the week and classic sausage and eggs on Sundays. Sweetie used to eat chocolate-frosted mini-donuts or Totino's Pizza Rolls until I pleaded poverty. Not only were the packaged foods expensive, but those medical bills later on would be too. Case in point: his father's breakfast of choice is a cigarette and a Coke, and he's looking at $50k+ in hospital debt right now.

What do your male relatives and significant others eat for breakfast?

Bar Food

It's difficult for me to understand people who say they eat out because they don't have time to cook. For Sweetie and me, going out is a big undertaking: have to dress up, bundle up, drive out, be seated, peruse menus, and then wait for the food. Since we don't have fussy tastes, professional cooks take the same amount of time to prepare the meal as I do...and I can do it in my robe and house booties for a fraction of the price.

For example, tonight it took me about 15 minutes to make some tasty bar food for dinner: nachos and "margaritas."


The beef half is for Sweetie and the black bean half is for me. A restaurant probably wouldn't let us do that. And in order to get this on the town, it would take 10 minutes of driving, 5 minutes finding parking, 5-15 minutes of walking and a lot of squeezing past college students to get to the bartender, who won't give my card back even if I emphatically specify "no tab."


Plus, soy milk instead of tequila = strong bones and no hangover. And the whole thing cost about $2 total.

There are a lot of other reasons to go out to eat. To socialize, celebrate, or just to feel rich. But "having no time" is a lousy one.

Rejection Paradox

When we were in New York (technically New Jersey), Sweetie and I watched a rerun of Seinfeld in which Elaine decides she's going to march up to her finicky employer Mr. Pitt and quit her miserable job. When she gets there, he declares that he's put her in his will, glittering with dollar signs. She changes her mind. But after a series of comic misunderstandings involving a pillow and Jerry being mistaken for a pharmacist, her employer and his lawyer believe Elaine is trying to do him in to get the cash. When he says, "Elaine, you're fired," she's appropriately devastated. Momentarily. Until she has a nostalgic montage of all the years of suffering that made her want to quit in the first place.

I had the same conflicted feeling, minus the laugh track, after a month or two of trying to figure out how to tell my bosses at CeDIR that I wanted to leave in summer. When my supervisor beat me to it by telling me their budget was slashed and it was either me or the books, the news coincided perfectly with my own plans to leave and find a job within walking distance of my new department. Still, it made me a bit huffy for the rest of the day.

"I'm the most conscientious worker they've ever had! They have enough work to do already and I know they won't keep up X, Y, and Z. My supervisor doesn't even know how that program works and the librarian is never here. This place will crumble without me!"

The circlet of irrationality repeated tonight. Back in December, I received an email from one of the officers of the Student Chapter of the Special Libraries Association, a tiny group with no real presence but an impressive sounding name for resumes. They were calling for volunteers for various club positions, so I put my name in the hat for webmaster and rejoiced that I might be able to do something with the atrocity of a webpage they have now. Oh, there's nothing wrong with it visually, but the code is warped to high heaven and I hate badly constructed sites more than ugly ones.

That same early December week, I received a timely message, "Thanks! We have two people vying for webmaster, so next week we'll have an election."

Next week came and went with no communications whatever. I emailed to ask what was up and received a vague, "I think someone else is setting something up." The week after that school let out and the campus emptied. "Well," I thought to myself, "it's winter break and all and everyone's very busy with travelling. They'll get around to it soon."

A month later, early last week, I finally received an email about the "election." Read everyone's bios and vote online, and we'll send the results on Monday! My bio had a link to my full-blown portfolio, replete with custom jQuery animations, a list of the programming languages I'm proficient in (XHTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL), and screenshots of the professional websites I've published in the past. The other girl's had a line that she had "HTML skills" and she would be happy to maintain the Twitter account, too. I felt kind of bad...emphasis on "kind of."

Obviously, today is not Monday. On Monday night I started to get annoyed. Yes, I know you're all busy with huge MLKJ Day celebrations, but how difficult is it to compare the number 7 to the number 2 and send a five-line email? On Tuesday I started to think something was wrong and emailed one of the members: was it sent out and my address wasn't on the list? I received no reply.

And then I decided: if they don't send the damn results out by Wednesday, I will contact them myself and say, "I don't care who won; I'm not going to work for an organization that can't get it together." Because there's little more frustrating than being a web developer for the bunch of irresponsible people who can't communicate or even stick to self-declared schedules.

Finally, the notice came at 10:30pm today: the girl with "HTML skills" is their new webmaster. I, who have been coding since the tender age of 12, was shunted in favor of someone who probably thinks a style sheet is list of next season's fashions. I have the inkling she had friends in the group...coupled with the fact that the club president was in my class last semester and got a lower grade on a group project because I did all the work for it (so the professor said in confidentiality).

But none of that should matter, because I should be happy that I don't have to cause drama by backing out now. Yet, I am upset for losing the "election." Not even doing taxes lifted my spirits (and it normally would have, because I'm getting almost $700 worth of refunds thanks to that Make Work Pay credit). I feel like becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg and making millions on the skills they turned down...minus the movies showing me in wild parties with coeds.

La sigh. I think I'm just a difficult person to please.

Sulking

Yesterday it was spring. The high temperature reached the low 40s, the snow melted, and I had to bring an umbrella to school because it was raining. Raining.

But my celebration was short-lived. Actually, I didn't celebrate at all, because I know Mother Nature's sadistic ways by now. Today we're back to winter with the standard flurries and dry air. By Friday we'll be enjoying a sunny start to the weekend with a high of 15°. And next week?

I hate that icon.

This means three things: 1) I need to get to the Recycling Center before we're blocked in again. 2) I would make the least popular weather girl on television because my face has the ugliest, most angry/depressed/resigned expression on it right now. And 3) January is officially my least favorite month in the year. September is a close runner up because it's impossible to sleep in the heat and humidity, but at least you can go about your regular business without an overhanging fear of imminent injury. Hey, those are the months of my parents' birthdays. I guess my family just has really great luck (BTW: Happy Birthday three days late, Mom!)

I have a presentation this afternoon and a backlog of activities on my To Do list (treadmill, wash dishes, find ways to make money...) so I can't sulk for too long. Right now I'm going to enter the HGTV Dream House Sweepstakes and fantasize about taking the million dollar cash option (spend my winters in Vermont? I don't think so) and using it to escape to somewhere warm and dry.

Rice Noodles

This may come as a shock to 1% of you, but I am a workaholic. I'm the dreaded group member who seizes a class project and turns it into a dissertation. I'm the weirdo who goes to a bar on Friday evening for the American Library Association meet 'n greet, talks jobs all night and doesn't drink anything. I'm the straggling hourly who has to be hauled away from her workstation two minutes before the lights go out and sulks that they won't let her in on national holidays.

One of my New Semester's Resolutions was to tone down the Ebeneezer Scrooge just a tad. So over the weekend, I worked on my pet project for one day and stopped. I put off reading my papers for class until Monday afternoon, when I took conscientious breaks to watch a good-looking artist and his perky blonde sidekick decorate rooms for more money than I will ever earn in a year. And, with a little bit of planning, I enabled myself to make some real food.


We found rice noodles at Target the other day, and I bought them just because I've seen people eating them in shows recently and I'm highly vulnerable to the suggestions of commercial media. But they turned out to be one of my wisest purchases yet, because they are not only easy to cook and mix in with lots of nutritious goodies, but they're also incredibly filling.


You can't tell well from the scale of the photo, but the amount of food on my dinner plate is about twice the volume of food I usually eat. And it only took minutes: I poured boiling water over a serving of the noodles to soak for 10 minutes, and sauteed onion, carrots, mushrooms, tofu and broccoli in peanut oil in the meantime. When the noodles were ready, I drained and added to the pan, doused with soy and chili garlic sauces, mixed et voila. Food fit for a desk-bound queen.


This photo is from today, when I repeated the process with wilted spinach instead of mushrooms.

The next time I go to the grocery store, I should stock up on these. Because as soon as I run out, I'll probably start stuffing peanut butter bagels into my mouth as I walk between one library and the other again.

Disappointed Dark Chocolate Dreams

Today we went to the mall because GameStop was distributing ancient fire gods who look like St. Bernards. After Sweetie harvested one on each of his cartridges, we headed back through Target. I, in my infinite folly, had suggested that we skip the College Mall Kroger, where shopping is like stepping into an exported piece of New Jersey (crowded, antagonistic, and confusing as heck), and get the groceries in Target instead.

Summary of the endeavor: the managers seem to play Roulette with expiration dates, half of my items were out of stock (or never in stock), and the store's trademark super-slow service at the check-out line was exacerbated by a newbie worker and some especially sticky bags. On the bright side, the prices were almost identical to the ones at Kroger (excepting a $3 carton of eggs) and there were a few items Kroger doesn't stock. For example:


PB&Co. Dark Chocolate Dreams, which according to all females on the Internet is essentially cocaine. Also, I bought fresh spinach, because freezer burn is starting to ruin my smoothies.


We ended up at Kroger anyway because Target didn't have broccoli crowns or Sweetie's brown 'n serve rolls. But when we finally got home I had the meal most closely approximating a "real" health blogger's you will ever see here.


If I were a real blogger, of course, this would have been breakfast, not a lazy lunch. And I would have trained for a marathon beforehand. Lugging a 34 pound box of cat litter from the store to the car doesn't count.


I also would have been able to make this photo look closer to the real hue of the spread instead of letting my camera wash it out. I tried to fix it with Photoshop, but got distracted....


I showed this to Sweetie for the lulz and he started chanting "Post it! Post it! Post it!" Now he wants a company to come up with pretty bright blue frosted bagels because he's tired of brown.

If I were a real blogger I would finish this post by cooing about how Dark Chocolate Dreams catapulted me to a higher plane of existence. But I have a bone to pick with all the females on the Internet: that was not dark chocolate! It was just a sugary peanut butter. I'd have to dip my bagel in cocoa powder to even come close to registering that spread at the Hershey's milk chocolate kiss level. Note to Peanut Butter & Company: you can't just deepen the color and call it "rich dark chocolate." Hmph.

Conclusion to the Catnapping Saga

As Sweetie wrote yesterday, we had an overnight guest in the apartment.


A continuously moving, camera-unfriendly guest.




Socks looks well-behaved and refined in these photos, but he was mewing up a storm and jumping on things. I think he was hungry, but didn't like the dry food we keep out for Luna. Luna reciprocated by not liking Socks.


In the morning I went to Petsmart to get this cat carrier to take Socks to the shelter.


You're doing it wrong, guys.


Luna doesn't like it when I buy things for other cats. Don't worry--you can use it plenty the next time you need to see the vet.

After tipping the carrier over and shaking a very reluctant Luna out of it, we loaded Socks in and took him to the county shelter. To our disappointment, Socks already had a microchip, and his name was Caleb. We were disappointed because that meant he had an owner, and he couldn't be adopted by a new, better one who doesn't put him out at 1am when it's 12° Fahrenheit. My parents used to put the cats out at night in winter too...in California.

This wasn't a one-time incident, either. Every morning for the past few weeks I would go out and see a tiny set of paw prints leading to our window and away again. If I see them again after Animal Control gives the owner a slap on the wrist, I will be very unhappy.

The Catnapping of '11

"Sweetie" here. Tamara's currently asleep, but I'm slipping in to update about the cat we 'stole'. I've already posted about it on 'my' blog, "Thoughts of INTJ", so rather than reposting it here, I'll link you to the post there:

http://keruble.blogspot.com/2011/01/catnapping.html

Ugh

Good morning!

Or afternoon, if you're picky about that sort of thing.

As of today, I have been sick for 13 days. I thought I was getting better because my throat stopped hurting, but then the congestion and sinus headaches settled in. For the past few days I haven't been able to breathe out of my nose and made a lot of people uncomfortable by using tissues extensively in public.

This morning, I was supposed to go into work at 9 and attend my first class in Database Design at 1. Sweetie woke me up at 7:30. I had Honey Nut Cheerios at 8. And by 8:30 I was back in bed, sacrificing work in the hope of sleeping it all off before class. Then I woke up and hey, it's 2:15.

Fortunately, they were only doing an introduction to Microsoft Access today, which I don't need because I had to use it when I worked at CeDIR.

I'm not used to being sick. At all. Which means these weeks have been horrible for me. Also for Sweetie, because he gets to listen to a broken record sputter, "I can't swallow! I can't breathe! I can't taste anything!"

From now on, I'm getting my 3-5 servings of plant-matter per day. I'm also keeping the medicine cabinet stocked with sinus headache medicine that did not expire last year.

Differences

What's the difference between library science and information science courses?

Well, one looks like this:


And the other looks like this:


What's the difference between a good pet-owner relationship and a cat in the dog house?


This paper towel roll was on the kitchen counter. She is never supposed to be on the kitchen counter because that is also where the very sharp knives are. Bad Luna. Bad.

What's the difference between "these are good" pancakes and "Wow, I could open a restaurant!" pancakes?


Honey.

Last night I wanted to make more pancakes for the week. But they've been tasting sort of bland lately, so instead of sugar I used some local clover honey. Instant gourmet. They would have been more gourmet if I had lemon juice to make them fluffy, but sometimes you need heavier pancakes to make your weekday breakfasts taste substantial. Now if only it were summer and I could use fresh blueberries....

Mental Statistics

You know how a lot of people can't get their heads around the concept of an infinitely stable probability? Like flipping a coin. Every time you flip it it's a 50/50 chance of getting heads. But after a stream of heads, most people expect tails to come up, just to even things out.

This is perfectly normal, I think. Where in nature do you find infinitely stable probabilities? In reality, we deal with finite resources. There's food hanging from two trees. If you keep taking food from one tree, there will be less left. After a while, it's a better bet to go for the other one. Our brains were not initially built for modern card games, which is what gets compulsive gamblers neck-deep in debt. They think if they just stick to their guns, their luck will change...simply because it has been bad for a while.

I'm a compulsive gambler with the weather.

I bore with it when it was 15 degrees in early December. I kept the whining to a minimum when we were driving car-sledding in 36 inches of snow in Jersey. Because it would all end soon, right? With such weird weather in early winter, Mother Nature would have to make up for it later. Maybe we'll have a warmer January, I thought.

Woke up this morning to a fresh blanket of snow. Weather.com says there will be more piling up over the next few days. And the week after that. And the week after that....

And it's still ten friggin' degrees below the average! Which is better than 30 like in December, but come on. I've paid my dues. My gloves are ruined. My jeans are stretched out from shoving them over leggings. And in ten minutes, I still have to go out to stand while frozen water falls on my head and wind kills the feeling in my extremities and the bus crunches carefully through town.

Until then, I'll just sit here refreshing the weather.com page, hoping those numbers change in my favor. Come ooooon, 30s. Mama needs a new place to live.

Sick

I am super-sick.

I rarely get sick, but when I do, I do it with a bang.

The lethargy and headaches started more than a week ago, on New Year's Eve. They ebbed away after we returned to Bloomington, but quickly turned into a runny nose and lots of coughing. Now the congestion is all sitting in my chest cavity, and my throat feels like a furnace. Otherwise, I feel fine, and I shouldn't be contagious anymore, so I can go to work and start the new semester. But it isn't fun.

Last night I was supposed to make pizza sticks per Sweetie's request, but nothing looked better than the pictures on Lori's blog for homemade chicken and dumplings.


I cheated and used frozen chicken and canned broth. I also used I Can't Believe It's Not Butter and white whole wheat flour in the dumplings, which fell apart and left me with lots of soggy crumbs at the bottom. But it did soothe my upper body temporarily. And I know that isn't just nostalgia or a placebo effect, because (a) my mother never made chicken soup when I was sick...she gave me 7-Up and Ginger Ale and had me gargle salt water instead, and (b) chicken has genuine anti-inflammatory properties.

A follow-up to yesterday's post: I did actually swap that blog-happy class for one that (I hope) will be more materially useful. If I want to keep at the second degree, I can always take it next fall or spring, and in the meantime I only have one confirmed aggravating course to deal with for the next four months.

Impatience

WARNING: whine festival commencing.

I am not looking forward to tomorrow.

I finished my library science core courses over the summer and fall, which made me do a happy dance because it meant I could start my information science courses now. As much fun as I had with some of the readings and projects, listening to my classmates present on why every library should use content management systems (hatehatehatehatehate) was wearing on my nerves. Databases. Project Management. PHP. That's what I'm really here for.

But my first round of MIS classes isn't looking any better. For one thing, I had one of my new professors last semester for a library science course...her degree is actually in political science. She would regularly lecture to us on the difficulty of using projection equipment that's been misused by others before her--the policy is to leave things where they were and keep the computer on for the next person to use. But without fail, she would select "shut down" instead of "log off" after she was done with it. Once, after doing this, she made a fuss later in the hour when she needed it again: "It turned itself off! Why did it turn itself off?!" She also teaches one of the required information science courses.

One of my other lecturers just sent us all an email yesterday. Instead of the standard discussion forum, we are to sign up to be contributors to the custom class blog (which not she, but some random person I don't know, set up). The first post explains that we will have weekly rotating rolls as "poster," "commenter," and "discussion leader" (her quotes, not mine). Because we just graduated from high school and write LOLs and OMGs all over our communications, she warns that we are to use "proper spelling, capitalization, punctuation and grammar." Also, because we hard-ass librarians habitually aim sniper rifles at each other from across campus, there will be consequences if we are not "respectful of each others' ideas, opinions and feelings."

Sample comment:
"I don't think you defined that term correctly, Shelly. But please don't cry, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. There is no right or wrong; everyone is right in their own way! Though I believe social bookmarking is the exact opposite of a controlled vocabulary, it's really up to you. *Hugs*"

By the way, this blog will account for 13% of our final grade.

For a while now, I've been getting impatient to get out of this town. It's a fine city to live in, if you want to be 18 forever and live on beer. The shows are nice, too, but they're also expensive and a pain in the patooti to get to. But the students here believe the university owns the town, and the townies just smile and agree because most of them work here.

Example: about a year ago a student was illegally crossing the street when he was killed by a car. Afterwards, Sweetie overheard a boy telling a group of his classmates that traffic laws are different on campus and the driver was at fault because jaywalking students have right-of-way. Columnists in the student paper had the brilliant idea to close the city streets around campus during peak hours or make the locals pay tolls. The person driving the car was a student himself, and witnesses said the jaywalker was stepping backwards into the street without looking first, but no matter.

The students aren't the only problem, though. The townies can be just as bad or worse...not about the school, but about their politics. Because we're an oasis of liberalism in a region swimming in red, a lot of inhabitants believe they are inherently better than everyone else in the world. I won't get into details, because local spats are only funny when it's not your locale. Suffice to say the culture is not kind to independents like Sweetie and me.

Back to my degree conundrum. Well, as I've complained about all of this to Sweetie, he has steadily insisted that I stick it out for the dual masters because without the information science component, he says, we would starve. But then he read the emails from the aforementioned political science professor in which she said her computer got a new virus every time she opened a Microsoft Word document. And he perused that little upcoming blog project. And heard about the most celebrated information science course offered, in which we work as teams to design a real live website!!! And as of this morning, he informed me the second masters is worthless and I can just graduate whenever I want.

The question is, should I? Even if the classes are not personally useful, the name of the degree might be. But then, work experience could do just the same, and it's not like I intend to be a web developer exclusively. Here are my options:

1) Stick to my guns and complete my two degrees in December 2012.
2) Chuck the MIS and substitute a class I really want to take for at least the blog-happy one (which is actually the same course I took last summer with a different name, because they require it for both of my degrees and you have to take it twice). Wrap up my classes this year to graduate in December 2011.
3) Chuck the MIS but do an internship this summer, pushing those classes back a semester and graduating smack dab in the middle: May 2012.

Some other considerations:
-Another year is another $20,000 in loans.
-Another year also gives me more time to grow up and get used to the idea of job hunting and moving somewhere new, which is scary.
-The timing of my graduation has to coincide with the timing of Sweetie's, or else I have to stay in town and find a full-time position while he finishes.

Ugh. It wasn't supposed to be this complicated. I was supposed to just escalator through life and wind up successful with oodles of moolah. But then I had to go and meet people who shook up my world view and now I'm staring down the barrel of a book trolley in a bad economy. Right now I'm leaning towards the third option, because an internship never hurts and I'll be graduating at the traditional point, which means I can apply for my dream fellowship at the National Library of Medicine. I guess I'll trudge through another semester and see how things are a few months from now.

New Jersey Days

We're home! The past 24 hours are a bit of a blur, but thankfully I can remember the bits before that to share with you all.

On Monday we drove up to North Haledon, New Jersey, where Who's best friend from the marines lives with his wife and their German shepherd, Mika. The best friend's first and middle names are the same as Sweetie's by no coincidence, but we call him Woody (nobody in that generation seems to call each other by birth name, anyway). Their house is just like the one Sweetie and I built in the Sims 2, only with more realistic colors (no electric blue kitchen, but the guest bedroom and bath were very purple). It's two stories, with a cavernous living room that fits a Rockefeller-sized Christmas tree in the corner. Their furniture has no holes and their kitchen has the works: granite counters, built-in microwave, cute barstools, and super-deep sink (you notice things like that when you live in a crumbling 40-year-old apartment where two plates and a cup fills the entire sink). They live on a hill, so from the backyard you can see the NYC skyline in the distance.

I didn't take photos because it's not nice to sleep in someone else's house and then broadcast their private lives to strangers...but you can take my word that it was cushier than the hotel. Plus, there was Aussie shampoo/conditioner in the bathroom, which has hands-down my favorite fragrance of hair products.

On our first day, Woody's wife took us to a diner for dinner. First she asked us if we knew what a diner was. We said yes, of course--a diner is a burger joint where someone periodically cleans the tables. Apparently, that's not what "diner" means to New Englanders. The Gotham City Diner had the menu of about five restaurants smooshed together, and dinner plates the size of Luna's entire body.


(Photo from the website, because it's awkward to snap photos of your food even in front of the most understanding of hostesses)

There, the bread smelled like bread and my potato tasted like a potato. That sounds like a dismissal, but it's a compliment; most commercial bread smells like corn syrup and I've eaten one too many "potatoes" at restaurants that did not taste like potatoes. As for my vegetable "side," they literally took a crown of broccoli, boiled it, and put it on my plate whole. I only ate about half the food they presented to me, which would have made me feel guilty but the prices were shockingly reasonable. How they can survive on a business model that equates to "Offer them everything under the sun and then serve them twice as much as they can eat for ten bucks" is beyond me.

We spent the evening gossiping about Sweetie's more bizarre family members ("more bizarre" meaning 99% of them). The next morning, we woke up after our hosts had left for work and found a prettily arranged spread on the counter for breakfast. After checking the box for milk solids, I was ecstatic to see that McCann's strawberries 'n cream Irish oatmeal doesn't have lactose! The warning label says it contains milk, but only the whey, which is perfectly safe for me.


I stole some whole strawberries and plopped them in for a super-strawberry-scented bowl. I savored it perched on a high bar stool so I would have the high ground on Mika, who became my BFF every time there was food in my hand.

Note: Woody's wife pointed out while I was there that I sniff everything before I eat it. I didn't notice before, but now that I think about, everyone should smell their food more. That's where I get most of my pleasure and satisfaction from eating.

For lunch I stole more of their food.


For the record, meat and cheese from a genuine deli is 1000% yummier than meat and cheese from Kroger.

We didn't do anything substantial during the day because I was still getting over a sore throat and sinus headache and Sweetie needed to expend his energy battling off the same germs. That night Woody's son came to visit and we all went out for pizza. He works at a GameStop, which meant he and Sweetie never encountered a shortage of things to talk about. The pizza shop was called Ness, and if the plates at Gotham City were as big as Luna, the pies here were two Lunas and a half. Our hosts bought one for Sweetie and I to split, because he was the only one interested in pepperoni and I was the only one interested in olives, sun-dried tomatoes and spinach. Lots of spinach.


(Freshly reheated for today's lunch. Long live the toaster oven.)

I've been trying to eat more fruits and vegetables to help my immune system out. I "only" ate a slice and a half because my tummy was full from the Boylan root beer, which was made from honest-to-goodness yucca root. A&W, it was not.

The drive back home was uneventful, save for frequent stops to check the amount of oil in the engine. Ellie sprung a leak somewhere, and we'd rather not hear the engine die 500 miles from home. Because of these stops, the trip took longer than anticipated; we left at 9 in the morning and arrived back at 2am. Leftover slices of pizza were very welcome after 10 hours when my Christmas cash was gone and I couldn't stomach yet another round of sandwiches and fries.

After making a rush on the grocery store to fill our empty refrigerator, we could finally come home and de-stress. The most stressed out person in our family, though, was Luna, who looked like she had lost weight and neglected to groom herself while we were gone. Though we asked management to come and check on her and left plenty of food and water, she doesn't take well to strangers and, for a supposedly asocial cat, she's very dependent on human company. She followed us around mewing her throat out for hours, and told us quite plainly that we're not allowed to leave again.


Don't worry, Luna. We're not rich enough to abandon you until next year.

On the Road Today

Hi All,

Today I'll be in a car for 14 hours, so no blogging until tonight or tomorrow morning. Is everyone enjoying the return to work? :p

-Tamara

Downtown Manhattan & The Museum of Natural History

Yesterday was our last day in NYC. I was still under the weather from that bug, which left my head aching and my throat inoperable. But we didn't drive fourteen hours to watch Seinfeld reruns all day. We decided to take it easy by strolling around low-key Downtown Manhattan. We took NJ Transit to Newark Penn Station, then rode the PATH subway to the World Trade Center.

When we arrived, a man in a booth directed us to the World Financial Center to access the unofficial viewing platform for Ground Zero. First, we were to find palm trees.


Check. Then we found the second floor windows formerly facing the towers. Sweetie took pictures, but (a) it's overrun by construction equipment now, and (b) we were not one of the tourists taking group shots of themselves smiling in front of ruin and desolation. Like visiting a concentration camp and making the cutesy peace sign for the camera, or taking a Facebook profile pic in front of My Lai.

After exiting the World Financial Center, we found ourselves on the side of the area opposite our preferred destinations: the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall. Not to worry; the entirety of Downtown has a diameter of about half a mile. We simply walked down Broadway until we found important-looking buildings.




Around 1pm, we stopped at a Burger King for lunch. A sign advertised a buy-one-get-one-free deal for their chicken sandwiches, which made that lunch the cheapest meal of our trip.


I would gloat more about the savings from that meal, but I spent $7 on oatmeal at the hotel in the morning. Even the lady at the coffee counter selling me Sweetie's chocolate chip muffin was shocked at the price. But I was desperate for healthy food, because I'm certain the days of hot dogs and cup ramen did nothing to help my immune system fight that virus.

We found the Stock Exchange tucked into an unassuming corner.



The tree by its entrance was more impressive than the famous Rockefeller one. Note the tiny menorah afterthought.


Federal Hall was right across the street. Since this was a Sunday afternoon, it was impossible to take a clean shot of the monument. People were milling around the base and many, one of which may or may not have been Sweetie, were lining up to stand in front of George.


By 2pm we had run out of things to see. The maps and media have made Manhattan look a lot bigger than it really is. Earlier that day, we had been chastised for skipping over the Museum of Natural History. So since we had hours to burn, we headed Uptown and stopped at the famous Public Library for some obligatory librarian-in-training shots on the way.


We wanted to go inside and look around, but the library system was closed for a block around New Years. So we went down to the subway and continued on towards Central Park.

Now you would think, after five days taking public transportation in New York City, we would have known the difference between an express and local train. Apparently we were just lucky, because we didn't figure out how to read the signs until we were really Uptown. Fortunately, Sweetie noticed the numbers growing very large before we found ourselves in the Bronx. Also fortunately, that particular stop allowed us to cross over to the Downtown-bound trains much more easily than the ones earlier in our trip, and it was only a 15-minute detour.

On the ground floor of the Museum of Natural History is an evergreen covered with origami animals.


Some of those animals were a little, um, untraditional.


But in natural history museums, one should expect bones aplenty.





I walked halfway through the exhibit before I realized all of these bones were real. I assumed they only displayed plaster casts, but one of the placards noted that one of the figures was a cast, meaning the others around it were the genuine article! I personally would question the wisdom of placing million+ year-old skeletal remains in a sea of energetic children, but maybe there are a lot more of these around than they let on.

The rest of the museum was disappointing. If we were ten years younger, we might have been fascinated by the exhibits of animals and other cultures. But Sweetie and I walked halfway around the section on African mammals before stopping to look into the wide, pleading eyes of a cheetah and realizing that they weren't fake. We scurried through rooms displaying delicate birds with soulless eye sockets and bobcat hides nailed to the wall and finally found shelter from the corpses in the room with shiny rocks. Now, I'm not vegan or even vegetarian, and am unphased by the natural order, but that place is morbid. Eating a cow is one thing, but posing its dead body in front of a painted background of green pastures to be gawked at by children? The bits on "primitive" cultures aren't exactly politically correct, either, though the displays of "Indians" were thankfully imitation only.

When the museum closed, we headed back to Penn Station and found dinner near the NJ Transit tracks. At first, we were going to eat at a TGI Fridays, but after being seated and presented with menus, we read prices approximating $25-30 per person. So while the server was fetching bread plates, we pretended to go to the restroom and snuck out the back. Or at least we tried; the back had an emergency door only. So we doubled back and snuck through the bar and, when we reached the doors, sprinted away.

Then we ate at a nearby local shop with much more reasonable rates.


Sweetie ordered a burger made with a meat approximating "sirloin."



I ordered a veggie burger because I was trying to get more nutrients, but it turned out to be more bread crumb than vegetable. I ate about half and half of the fries before I didn't want it anymore, but stuffed down another quarter when I remembered how much I was paying for it.


Right now we're in New Jersey, visiting family friends. I think my impression of New York City improved over time, partly because we learned the ropes, partly because the tourist population dropped to baseline after New Years, and mostly because the snow finally melted off the sidewalks. I wouldn't like to live there, but it was a successful vacation for accumulating life experience points.