Wednesday, November 18, 2009

My new project

http://hundredpushups.com/index.html

Monday, October 26, 2009

Adventures in Cooking, or... Potatoes Potatoes all around the room

Sleepless nights always get me into trouble. I always end up either concocting some grand ambition or a hopeless fantasy to try to lull myself into sleep. Last night it was the former of the two. Sometime around 2:30 a.m., wide-eyed and frustrated, I became fixated on idea of becoming a better cook. Probably because it was 2:30 a.m., my idea quickly went from practical and responsible to ambitiously unrealistic. I- the horrible and mistake-prone cook-  decided to take on making pierogies from scratch. (wikipedia tells me the plural is pierogi? But that sounds weird to me. So I decline.)

So, today was pierogi day! In retrospect, also known as an utterly exhausting day! After class I made a trip to Target and the grocery store-- still very excited-- to gather all my supplies.

The first challenge was making the dough. The recipe told me to knead it until most of the stickiness was gone, but not to overdo it. How exactly do you know when most of the stickiness is gone? I basically punched at it like a cat for a long time. Then I'd think -- this is probably done? Then I'd think... but wait! Maybe there is more stickiness to tackle? The end result was what I'm pretty sure the recipe meant by "don't overdo it." But, it was in dough form! So I claimed it as a victory. Check!

Next step: Make a mashed potatoes type substance for the insides while the dough is chilling. Easy, right? Peel & cut the potatoes, simmer some onions, throw some cheese in there, mix it all up with a mixer... creamy, delightful potatoes will ensue. True. Except when you forget the whole boil the potatoes step. As it turns out when you put a mixer to hard potatoes, all you get is potato bits flying like food casualties around the room.

Potatoes, potatoes everywhere.
Potatoes on the walls, potatoes in my hair.




It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that I might have done something not quite right. A gchat question later to the helpful Miss JK resulted in me learning the secret ingredient to making mashed potatoes-- boiling them first! (And by secret, I mean cleverly hidden in the recipe.) About an hour later after redoing all of the previous steps, however, victory on step 2! Cheesy potatoes! Check!









I did make up for the idiocy of step 2 with some genius, however. Because I didn't have a rolling pin, I decided to use my bottle of wine. Which basically meant I got to drink the rest of the contents before this next step-- yay!




So.... still cooking. This was beginning to take forever. I switched from Joni Mitchell to Kanye West's "Stronger." Then I rolled out the dough with my wine bottle (now mourning the fact that my wine was gone and there was still a ton left to do). I was supposed to cut little circles out and fill them with cheesy potatoes, then close 'em up, boil them, and sautee them with onions. It turns out you can do about 4 at a time with the pans/pots I have, and most of the little fellows didn't seem to make it through the end of the journey. While some of them came out, others tragically lost their potato insides in the water. It was kind of sad. I had sort of bonded with them by this point.





Anyway, 4 hours = about 7 pierogies. I'm hungry because I couldn't stand to eat them all in one sitting. Not after all that. Though they ended up pretty tasty after all.

In the end, I learned a valuable lesson- sometimes there's a reason people never make these things from scratch.


Friday, October 2, 2009

Law school .... and zoology

I'm having trouble giving up my critter fascination after all. Here is another parking lot friend. I think he sort of looks like Fred Thompson, actually. Yeah? 






Monday, September 28, 2009

When critters attack!

A few weeks ago, with some spare time on my hands, I received a facebook-type poke from Mother Nature (or so I imagined). It was a gorgeous weekend and I decided I needed to do something earthy… nature-y…communing with the great outdoors…type of activity, as my proverbial “poke back.” Thus emerged “Critter Hunt 2009.”

Critter Hunt 2009 began when I saw the most amazing (and vaguely terrifying) preying mantis chilling outside of my front door. He/she (who knows??) rather politely posed for me after I ran into get my camera, and the result was pretty spectacular! Smugly, I figured that my point and click camera skills were right up there with National Geographic. (As a footnote, the Wikipedia preying mantis article is both fascinating and disturbing reading! Apparently they can eat small rodents and practice sexual cannibalism ((?!!!))).















Following my preying mantis sighting, I had another critter run-in a few days later. This time it was an ENORMOUS mosquito that had flown in to bask in our AC, and I decided to snap another picture. (Which I figure was good, because the remains of that mosquito are now attached to my roommate’s church hymn book.)




















Now that I had two random critter photos, I figured I might as well keep going. Over the weekend I decided to find animals around town and document them into an album—critter hunt 2009. In my optimistic mind I expected a fair number of adorable critters—merry squirrels, frolicking deer, hopping bunnies? In reality, I realized there are just waaaaay more strange and gross insects than I really wanted to know were occupying the same space as me. I also realized my photography skills don’t extend to being able to capture tiny insect in focus. Guess National Geographic will not, after all, be knocking at my door.
















I learned that some insects clump together for maximum grossness potential.

















Williamsburg = Spiders Galore!! This is just one of many varieties I encountered. (And, of course, the only one that showed up in focus)















Finally a fuzzy critter!! Deer in the distance!
















Complete FAIL attempt to capture what I thought were swans, but then realized were probably just geese. As gracefully as a fake swan, I stumbled down the hill in the woods to get this stunning picture of a far away white blob.
















Grocery store critters. Very sad.



Epilogue:
Since Critter Hunt ’09, I’ve been bitten by 20 mosquitoes and was greeted by a snake when I stepped out of my car. I’m not sure, but I think the critters mistook my intentions. Maybe I should have considered a description other than “hunt”? In any case, mother nature and I are no longer facebook friends.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Waldorf and Statler go to Starbucks

Today I had a coffee shop run in with two old men who reminded me of real life incarnations of the Statler and Waldorf grumpy old men Muppets. One of the men came up behind me in a wheelchair, hair bright white, thick, and standing straight up in the air. The other, who ordered drinks, was dressed in a formal shirt with contrasting gray sweat shorts, his extremely long and skinny legs bare to the breeze.

As we waited for our drinks, the man in the shorts turned to me and asked if I was a student. “Yes,” I replied. “Where?” He asked. I told him that I was a student at the law school. “You don’t say! The law school.” he repeated and then paused for a moment. Then he asked, “Why don’t you become a nurse or an elementary school teacher?” Thinking that he was commenting on the shortage of teachers and nurses, I responded that it’s certainly true we could use more of those. Without responding to me he turned to his friend and yelled across the store, “Look, Jim! We’ve got a WOMAN lawyer over here.” They both laughed.

After the man in the shorts sat down, I heard them say: “a woman lawyer. I can’t believe it. Next thing you know one of them will be president . . .”

I got my drink and sat down not too far from where the men were sitting. Jim, still waiting for his friend, asked me in a bemused tone if I was “investigating” or “going to court” today. I smiled and just told him today was a studying day. They continued their conversation with each other, amazed at all the electronics students had out on their tables in the shop.

“It certainly is a different world today,” they said.

Thank God that it is.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

But not even headlines or the bitter smear of newsprint or the choke of smokescreen and gas or chatter of brokers on the stockmarket or barking of phantom millions or oratory of brasshats laying wreaths on new monuments
Can blur the memory
Of the chilly December day
Two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, OH
first felt their homemade contraption
whittled out of hickory sticks
gummed together with Arnstein's bicycle cement
stretched with muslin they'd sewn on their sister's sewing-machine in their own backyard on Hawthord Street in Dayton, OH

Soar into the air
Above the dunes and the wide beach
At Kitty Hawk

- From John Dos Passos, The Big Money