So, after years of saying that I want to do this, and that someday I'm going to do this...
I just registered for the Twin Cities Marathon.
Holy crap.
I've got a little over 5 months to figure out how to run 26.2 miles (that's 26.2 miles all in the same day, mind).
Holy crap!
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
My day
6:30 - 8:10Get kids up, fed, off to school
8:10 - 10:30Clean up from breakfast
Make more dishwasher detergent (yes, I am such a dork, I make my own)
Make more laundry detergent (yes, I am such a dork, I make my own)
Change and wash sheets
Make bread
10:30 - 2:00Write a quick blog post
Work on novel
Eat lunch while working on novel
2:00 - 3:00
Walk the dog
3:00
Shower, get ready for work
3:30
Kids home from school
After-school snack and how-was-your-day debriefing
4 - 5:45
Clean my bedroom (Mondays we clean bedrooms; since we do this every week, it's a pretty quick job)
Help the girls clean their bedrooms as needed
Supervise homework
Kick them outside to play as soon as bedrooms and homework are done
Start dinner for Pete and the girls
5:45
Pete gets home
I go to work
10:45
Get home from work, change clothes, eat leftovers from dinner
11:00
Sit out in the living room and read (because there's no way I can go straight to bed right after I get home from work). Or maybe I'll put some more time in on the novel. Or work on some crits for my writing group.
1 a.m. or so?
Bed
And people ask if I ever get bored since I quit my day job. Ha.
Friday, April 11, 2008
On my bedside table, or, why I love the library
Currently reading:
The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden -- William Alexander
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy -- Carlos Eire
A Thousand Splendid Suns -- Khaled Hosseini
The Secret History of the World: As Laid Down by the Secret Societies -- Mark Booth
How to Grow More Vegetables: (And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains) -- John Jeavons
I have a confession. Even though I work for a bookstore, I get almost all my books through the library. My reasons for this are twofold. First, I don't want to spend my entire paycheck every week at work. I'm sure the store would appreciate it, and it would probably be a lot of fun! But that's not why I'm working there. So, no.
Second, I've gotten really picky about what goes on our bookshelves at home. We have a lot of books: floor to ceiling shelves in our family room, bookshelves in our bedrooms, shelves in our living room, all crammed full of books. (This is what happens when two English majors meet and get married: they live in houses stuffed with books.) It's great. I love it. And it's been really good for our girls: they've been surrounded by books and read to literally since day one. No wonder they're both little bookworms and reading several grade levels above their actual grade. But we're constantly running out of room, even with me constantly hauling bags and boxes of books to Goodwill, because a certain someone keeps buying more books...Okay, I'll fess up: it's me. But I don't have a problem! I can stop at any time. Really I can...
Ahem. About a year ago we put up some more shelves and I filled them like *that* and still had books waiting for shelf space, and realized that this had to stop or at least really slow down. So I went through and got rid of as many books as I could, and then instituted a 3 to 1 rule: for every 1 book purchased, 3 books need to go off the shelves and into the donate box. Wow, that sure makes a girl think twice or even three times about what she's buying. It also makes that girl get lots of advance reader copies at work and on the waiting list at the library for anything she can't get through work. (Currently #134 for Stephen King's Duma Key!)
If I really like a book -- and I mean really like, as in, I will read this over and over again AND it's something that Pete would probably like and the girls too, when they get a little older -- then I'll buy it (and then agonize over which 3 books are going to go away).
But otherwise, to the library we go. Hi ho, hi ho! And really, how awesome is the library?! Sure, you sometimes have to wait for the really popular or just-released books. But they've got lots of other books you can be reading in the meantime. And our library has this completely fabulous online system: I can and do request books online and have them ready and waiting to be picked up! I can and do also keep a book list going. And if the library doesn't have something I'd like to read, I can even suggest it for purchase. I did this with Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry's Extraordinary Ride, by Peter Zheutlin and joy! They're ordering it. Oh, happy day.
The library. What a wonderful place. (But please, support your local bookstore and its friendly, hard-working staff too!)
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Oh MY
For dinner tonight I made salmon poached in a white wine.
In a word: divine. (OK, that wine-divine rhyming? Totally unintentional, I swear.) Mouth-wateringly, swooningly good. It was so good that I did not pause to take even a single picture but instead ate every single bite and when it was all gone thought seriously about licking my plate. Man, I impress even me sometimes. That Pete, he's one lucky guy. =D
(I am also unbelievably modest!)
In a word: divine. (OK, that wine-divine rhyming? Totally unintentional, I swear.) Mouth-wateringly, swooningly good. It was so good that I did not pause to take even a single picture but instead ate every single bite and when it was all gone thought seriously about licking my plate. Man, I impress even me sometimes. That Pete, he's one lucky guy. =D
(I am also unbelievably modest!)
No, I didn't forget about this blog again. There just hasn't been much to blog about lately. I'm mostly either working on the novel or at work. If I'm not doing one of those two things, then I'm running the kids to and from their various activities, or cooking, or walking the dog, or cleaning, or watching it snow (because that's what it does here: snow, snow, snow! In fact, there's more snow coming tonight, they say. Drat.) or any one of all the other things that make up my days. Pretty exciting stuff, let me tell you. (Actually, that's OK. I like my peaceful, boring existence. When I was in my teens and 20s, excitement was fun. Now that I'm in my late 30s, I find that excitement is generally highly overrated and comes with a hangover.) But I figured I should drop in and say "Hi!" So, Hi!
Our winter sowing experiment is a limited success so far: 2 out of the 8 "greenhouses" have sprouts despite below-freezing temps and a mix of snow, sleet, and rain. The only problem is that our labels washed away, even though we'd used a Sharpie permanent marker. That, I didn't expect. I'm a bit chagrined about this, although why I should be, I don't know. It's not like I could have easily anticipated this one. God knows, Sharpie markings don't easily come out of anything else....
It's a good thing that 1) girls had gone crazy with their drawings, so much so that they didn't wash entirely away and 2) I'd taken "before" pictures, otherwise we'd still be trying to figure out what's what. We still haven't positively IDd two of them, though, and I'm not 100% about a few of the others.
Look, it's spinach (or "spinch," as one of the children labeled it) in a milk jug! In April, in Minnesota! Who'd have thunk?
Awww, little spinach sprouts, so cute.
We don't know what this is. Petunia sprouts, maybe, or perhaps lobelia? If they keep growing, we should find out in June or so...
Yesterday, I took up yogurt making. Oh, wow, this is so much fun, I can't even tell you how much fun it is. (Yes, yes, I'm a big dork, I know.) To make the yogurt, I followed this tutorial, brilliantly titled How to make your own yogurt. Super easy. And good, oh yeah, mouth-wateringly so! And economical, too. Aside from the milk and starter (I'll come back to that in a minute) I already had almost everything I needed to make this in my kitchen (pot for the milk, glass containers, pitchers) and garage (cooler); my only investment was a candy thermometer, which I'd been meaning to get for a while anyway after my old one broke.
Pete the home-brewer pointed out after that fact that he has a fermenter which would probably work just as well if not better for incubating than the pitchers of hot water and cooler. I'll try that next time.
The tutorial has lots of photos, but of course I had to take a few of my own.
Post-inoculation, ready to go in the incubator aka cooler. Pouring was a little sloshier than I'd anticipated!
Post-incubation and in the frig. YUM.
Thank you, cows of Cedar Summit Farm!
This yogurt is GOOD. It's so good, I don't think I'll go back to buying commercially produced yogurt. And cost-wise (I said I'd come back to that, remember?)...Right, I'm not going to count the candy thermometer into this since I've been meaning to get one and will be using it for more things than just yogurt-making. So, a half gallon of milk (64 ounces), plus a 6 ounce container of Stonyfield yogurt went into this batch of yogurt.
$1.15 for 6 oz of yogurt (about 19¢/oz)
+
$4.19 for 64 oz of milk -- organic, from a local dairy, in a glass, returnable container (about 6.5¢/oz)
= not-quite 8¢ per ounce for 70 ounces of organic, mostly locally-produced yogurt, with no sugars, additives, pectins, packaging or anything to recycle except for the 6 oz container the starter yogurt came in.
If I throw in the candy thermometer and pretend that I will only use it this one time for this batch of yogurt (which is silly, but it makes for easy math) then we have
$3.99 thermometer
+
$1.15 starter yogurt
+
$4.19 milk
= $9.33 for 70 ounces of yogurt, or a smidge more than 13¢/oz., which still beats the cost of an individual container of plain Stonyfield yogurt.
And like I said, this stuff is good. Really good. Really, really, really good. In fact, it's so good, I think I'm going to go eat some more as soon as I hit "post"...
POST!
Our winter sowing experiment is a limited success so far: 2 out of the 8 "greenhouses" have sprouts despite below-freezing temps and a mix of snow, sleet, and rain. The only problem is that our labels washed away, even though we'd used a Sharpie permanent marker. That, I didn't expect. I'm a bit chagrined about this, although why I should be, I don't know. It's not like I could have easily anticipated this one. God knows, Sharpie markings don't easily come out of anything else....
It's a good thing that 1) girls had gone crazy with their drawings, so much so that they didn't wash entirely away and 2) I'd taken "before" pictures, otherwise we'd still be trying to figure out what's what. We still haven't positively IDd two of them, though, and I'm not 100% about a few of the others.
Look, it's spinach (or "spinch," as one of the children labeled it) in a milk jug! In April, in Minnesota! Who'd have thunk?
Awww, little spinach sprouts, so cute.
We don't know what this is. Petunia sprouts, maybe, or perhaps lobelia? If they keep growing, we should find out in June or so...
Yesterday, I took up yogurt making. Oh, wow, this is so much fun, I can't even tell you how much fun it is. (Yes, yes, I'm a big dork, I know.) To make the yogurt, I followed this tutorial, brilliantly titled How to make your own yogurt. Super easy. And good, oh yeah, mouth-wateringly so! And economical, too. Aside from the milk and starter (I'll come back to that in a minute) I already had almost everything I needed to make this in my kitchen (pot for the milk, glass containers, pitchers) and garage (cooler); my only investment was a candy thermometer, which I'd been meaning to get for a while anyway after my old one broke.
Pete the home-brewer pointed out after that fact that he has a fermenter which would probably work just as well if not better for incubating than the pitchers of hot water and cooler. I'll try that next time.
The tutorial has lots of photos, but of course I had to take a few of my own.
Post-inoculation, ready to go in the incubator aka cooler. Pouring was a little sloshier than I'd anticipated!
Post-incubation and in the frig. YUM.
Thank you, cows of Cedar Summit Farm!
This yogurt is GOOD. It's so good, I don't think I'll go back to buying commercially produced yogurt. And cost-wise (I said I'd come back to that, remember?)...Right, I'm not going to count the candy thermometer into this since I've been meaning to get one and will be using it for more things than just yogurt-making. So, a half gallon of milk (64 ounces), plus a 6 ounce container of Stonyfield yogurt went into this batch of yogurt.
$1.15 for 6 oz of yogurt (about 19¢/oz)
+
$4.19 for 64 oz of milk -- organic, from a local dairy, in a glass, returnable container (about 6.5¢/oz)
= not-quite 8¢ per ounce for 70 ounces of organic, mostly locally-produced yogurt, with no sugars, additives, pectins, packaging or anything to recycle except for the 6 oz container the starter yogurt came in.
If I throw in the candy thermometer and pretend that I will only use it this one time for this batch of yogurt (which is silly, but it makes for easy math) then we have
$3.99 thermometer
+
$1.15 starter yogurt
+
$4.19 milk
= $9.33 for 70 ounces of yogurt, or a smidge more than 13¢/oz., which still beats the cost of an individual container of plain Stonyfield yogurt.
And like I said, this stuff is good. Really good. Really, really, really good. In fact, it's so good, I think I'm going to go eat some more as soon as I hit "post"...
POST!
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