Six Month Review

The 64/40 Construction Countdown sign displayed 6 Months 0 Days this morning, which means it's time to check in on this year's goals. Here's the list with comments in bold:

• Plant my own vegetable garden! Done!


• Can my own food! Started with jam!


• Figure out my career. In progress! I'm applying to a part-time masters program...more on that when I'm actually taking classes.


• House maintenance: paint inside, paint the foundation, finish the drylocking in the basement, put up that additional downspout, fix up the backyard....this list could get quite long. Um, hmmm. Currently picking out paint colors for the first floor. House maintenance is hard.


• Learn how to knit Fair Isle-style. It is so time to do this. There are still six months left to do this.


• Do more baking! I've fallen behind this past year sadly. Sort of.


• Secret project with Porkchop. Maybe more details later. Still in planning phase.
  

In other news, check out my nautiloid!

It's going out to a friend as part of my Making Things 2009 project on Facebook.

Proudest Gardening Moment

Tomato success!!!


Our first Sungolds! YAYAYYAYAY!!!

I let a couple get a bit too ripe, but the others are firm and juicy and sweet. *yum*

I also picked some more pole beans this morning.


What else?

We made smoothies for breakfast, I'm making roasted garlic and rosemary bread, Porkchop's working on a corn chowder, and we're enjoying delicious sweet iced tea. It's extra delicious because Porkchop thought I said "around a cup of sugar," when I actually said "around a half-cup of sugar." It reminds me of the iced tea my Grandma Freeman made when we were young, only our tea isn't as sweet.

All in all, it's a good day for the hottest freaking day of the summer.

If it doesn't settle down to the high 80s tomorrow, I will be so sad.

Have a great weekend! Stay cool!

Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough

Who isn't listening to Michael Jackson right now??

Porkchop received a couple of voicemails with the news this evening. It's amazing what happens while you're going about minding your own business.

Michael Jackson had a weird, troubled life, and it's unfortunate it took the turn that it did. That said, MJ's songs are part of my childhood soundtrack, and I can't help feeling a little sad (Porkchop is a lot sad, maybe, but trying to not show it).

Soon after my family had cable hooked up, my mom signed us up for that crazy new station called MTV.

And then our lives changed.

My brother and I spent quite a few hours reenacting videos like Beat It and Billie Jean, and of course don't get me started on Thriller! Since our town's newspaper wasn't so great, we subscribed to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and we anxiously awaited to receive the issues which contained the MTV schedule for the Thriller video. Our mom made sure we turned on the TV at the right time!

I wasn't a big fan of Michael Jackson in his later years, but Porkchop introduced me to the Jackson 5 discography, and I now have the backing vocals of ABC and other hits engrained in my head.

Have you ever seen Porkchop dance to the Jackson 5? It's awesome.

Other Things

I'm enjoying working on this:


It's the nautiloid pattern from Knitty, and it's so fun to knit!

What else?

Just a couple more days until we have some ripe cherry tomatoes!! So exciting!

Using a gift certificate I received recently, we dined at Trattoria Marcella last night. For the $12.20 we paid after the certificate, it was a good meal. I would have been a bit disgruntled otherwise; not due to the food so much as to the service. For example, we sat and sat, and although we received water and yummy hot bread with a cannelini bean dip, there was never mention of our server. Servers walked around all about us, but no one approached. Finally, a guy showed up and explained there had been a "mix-up." We received our food in a timely manner, but our server seemed like he couldn't care less about us. My seared tuna was tasty, as was Porkchop's shrimp and rigatoni, but I didn't really feel welcomed at the restaurant or well cared for, and the food wasn't so astounding that I want to hurry back.

All for now!

rip rip rip

A few months ago, some very special yarn caught my eye. After searching for the perfect pattern, I decided to go at it on my own.

But nothing was working, so I decided upon a little elongated garter shawlette pattern.

I finished the shawlette over the weekend, and feel rather meh about it, so now of course I've found the perfect pattern for the yarn: this slipped rib scarf.

I purchased two skeins of the special yarn. One skein is knitted up in the shawlette, and about a quarter of the other skein is knitted up as a scarf that I abandoned when I started the shawlette. So...I see some ripping in my future.

What's a Yogini to Do?

For yoga this evening, I went to my beloved YogaToday after perhaps a 10-day absence. My, my, how things have changed!

New layout, new features, and a new pricing structure. Yep, we finally have to pay!

I've always said I would pay for YogaToday videos, but now I actually have to make the decision. Pony up the money, or find something else. (They will have one free video a week, but that can mean you're stuck with a novice class with Neesha, as I was tonight.)

Adi and Sarah are my favorite instructors ever - better than anyone with whom I've had an actual class. So...I might just do the $9.99/month unlimited subscription.

I know! Crazy! Spending money!

In other yoga news, I'm rather close to achieving mayurasana. I dreamt about it last night, and awoke inspired. More practice, more practice.

Have a great Friday!

Garden Goodies and Lessons Learned

All of this rain is helping our garden plump out nicely.

Like these pole beans! (And what might prove to be the last of the sugar snap peas.) Pole beans are kind of crazy.


And these tomatoes:


My attitude toward labeling plants is label, schmabel, you'll know what it is when it grows. So, unfortunately, I can't remember what these guys are! Super choice, maybe.

I'm pretty sure these are black krim:


And I'm hoping these are sungolds:


Also, check out our first pepper!


I'm thinking jalapeno, perhaps.

Finally, here are some squash buddies:


Butternut and delicata, no confusion here.

So, as you can see, there are lots of good things happening in the garden. However, we've also had some minor difficulties. It's all a great learning experience!

Here's what I'll keep in mind for next year's garden:

• Start pruning tomato plants early, even if the plant seems too small. Otherwise, you'll end up with sprawling plants with a million stems.
• Investing in some fancy tomato ladders might not be a bad idea! Our stakes are working well, but the sprawling nature of our plants has us improvising with sticks and other things. Sometimes it works, sometimes the stems collapse.
• Start the squash trellis early, and use thick material. I started ours too late, and the thin bamboo doesn't seem to work well. Tonight I pulled up our lettuce (which was getting bitter anyway) so that the squash and melons have more room to spread out.
• When people say that you need sandy soil for root crops, listen to them! My beets and carrots are nonexistent because the soil is too thick, and my onions are flat! I'm considering pulling things up this weekend and mixing in some sand. I really want beets!

Flat onions! Not good!


Also, I might relent next year and label what we plant.

Good night! Keep on growing!

In a Jam

This past weekend saw more jam-making with rhubarb-ginger jam. Ah, rhubarb...

How I miss Wisconsin for its plentiful rhubarb! A friend of ours had a whole mess of rhubarb in his yard, so we were never in short supply. Unlike here, where there is only a smattering of rhubarb in the farmers' markets (in the ones I've been to, anyway).

So, the jam started with making candied orange peel last week.


It uses a ton of sugar, but it's worth it. The dried stuff is good for baking, but I enjoyed it most right after removing it from the boiling water and rolling it in sugar. When the peel still has liquid in it, it's like eating one of those garish candy orange slices that you buy at Walgreen's, but only a billion times better because it's real. When I first tried the orange peel, it was like a big carnival in my mouth - so much flavor! Yum!

But, don't worry, I didn't eat all of the orange peel. I reserved the rest for the jam, which also used ginger and crystallized ginger. The rhubarb hung out in a big bowl of sugar for a day, and then I cooked it all up. Since this jam didn't use powdered pectin, I had to cook it for a while over high heat. While doing so, I suffered my first canning injury when some of the hot hot hot jam spattered onto part of my toes not covered by my Keens. Ow.

In the end, I came out with this:


Two pints and one half pint. Yep, 2.5 lbs of rhubarb, 5 cups of sugar, 1/4 cup of orange peel, and 4 oz of crystallized ginger, and this is all I have to show for it. Well, it is quite tasty, so that's a good thing.

All for now! Have a great week!

Veggie Things

I've been stressing out about my tomatoes and other garden things, so I breathed a huge sigh of relief when Porkchop spotted these guys today:

Maybe I will have tomatoes for real this year!!

I also love looking at this little delicata squash and its unpictured mate. Correction: this is just the ovary...not an actual squash. Let's not get too excited.


Our squash plants are NUTS.

On the tomatillo front, so far there is only a single real one:


But I'm not too concerned, as tomatillos are known to have lots of empty husks, and then BAM, you're drowning in the suckers.

Speaking of BAM, this week's Fair Shares pickup was huge: ground beef, tortilla chips, sundried flour tortillas, salsa, cheese, collard greens, bok choy, broccoli, zuchinni, yellow squash, garlic scapes, chives, eggs, lettuce, and strawberries. And we bought a little bag of Billy Goat potato chips, which holy crap, that was the best $2 we've spent in a long time.

I Didn't Know Beans

Grow so quickly!

We planted our pole beans at the beginning of May, and they are already taller than the trellis and are blooming. See:


Bean flowers!

Meanwhile, the sugar snap peas are finally coming out. It has taken forever. I can't wait to enjoy these guys:


Today was a work day for me. I pulled out junky plants from the yard and pruned the tomato plants. The tomatoes really shot up in the past two weeks, and they are totally out of control. I'm hoping the pruning restores some order without hurting them (I took off quite a few branches).

Our squash plants are in desperate need for their trellis supports. Although we intended on installing these today, we were both too tired from other things. So, tomorrow, tomorrow.

After cleaning up and making dinner, we went over to South Grand and enjoyed dessert at the Gelateria. My dish of chocolate and coconut was delicious, and I plan to stop by a lot more often this summer.

A snack of gelato called for a walk in Tower Grove Park, which was packed with families holding events in the pavilions. And understandably so as the weather was perfect.

I hope tomorrow is just as nice. Porkchop is playing in an ice hockey scrimmage (yay!), and I imagine I will do more garden and yard work (it really is never-ending).

Have a great Sunday!

This is what 28 pounds of Strawberries look Like

These are some of Porkchop's homegrown strawberries:



And these are the 28 pounds of strawberries we picked at Eckert's on Saturday:



We froze a lot of our strawberries:



And made jam out of the rest:



For our first canning venture, we made three varieties: plain old strawberry jam, lemony strawberry jam, and strawberry-balsamic vinegar jam.

Strawberries, strawberries, strawberries! I really don't care to see another one for a few days. (Sad, eh?)

Saturday was a day full of strawberry picking and processing, and going to Porkchop's brother's place for a birthday SingStar party. Unfortunately, I was completely exhausted by 11 pm, so we had to bail out early.

You'd think we would have slept in Sunday morning, but no, we rose bright and early to clean house some before leaving for Porkchop's parents' place outside of Rolla.

Our plan was to camp in her parents' yard (don't laugh, they live in the woods!). The rain cancelled that, so instead we put up our tent on their wraparound porch. Impressive, eh?



So, don't laugh when I say that we didn't even spend the whole night in the tent! That's right, we were too chicken to camp on a porch!

First off, Porkchop's mom's cat scared the crap out of us by sneaking up and clawing the tent. Then there was a seriously scary sound coming from the creek area behind the house. It was either a couple of crazy wild turkeys, or a mountain lion screaming. Finally, critters kept coming up on the porch and making noises. Raccoon or opossum, Porkchop grew tired of waking up to their thumping around. So we went inside for the rest of the night and stole back outside in the early morning. Listening to the rain was so pleasant as it hit the porch instead of the tent rain fly.

Monday went by too quickly, and we didn't find ourselves back in St. Louis until after 8 pm. Once back, we had to deal with more strawberries (didn't have time to finish them on Saturday). And today was exhausting because everyone at work needs something RIGHT NOW. Ugh! I'm having a little drinky-drink at the moment to relax (don't worry - not a habit of mine).

Tonight I harvested lettuce and radishes from the garden, and realized that I have a big slug problem! I would put out beer to drown them, but the rain won't stop long enough for this method to be effective. Yuck.

For dinner, I made this beef curry recipe. Yum! It would have been better had I cooked it for the full two hours, but I didn't read the recipe very closely before starting and didn't plan for a 2+ hour dish! Anyway, 1 hour meant it was still quite tasty (and I don't like beef that much).

All for now!

Recent Food Things

Hello, I'm finally writing about food again...

Tonight I made two new-to-me dishes: tamarind orange glazed tofu and roasted kale. The tofu received two thumbs way up from Porkchop and me. The kale...was a different story. Porkchop took one taste and declined the rest of her serving. I was rather intrigued by it and couldn't stop eating it. Roasted kale is like a kale cracker, and kind of reminded me of papadum (a stretch, I know, but that's what I thought of while eating the kale).

The roasted kale was mainly a good way to use up the huge thing of kale included in our Fair Shares pick up. I love my vegetables, but I'm not the biggest kale eater.

On another note, we received beef stew meat in our share...any suggestions for it? I'm still not a big beef eater, so I've never ventured into beef stews.

BBC Asian Cafe
Last night we tried this little eatery in the CWE. It has recently reopened since being closed for a remodel, a renaming, and a menu retooling, but since we never went to the original restaurant, I can't make a comparison. All I can say is that my unagi crepe was pretty darn good. Eel, avocado, cheese, and some spicy-ish sauces. Unagi is one of my favorite foods, so I was quite happy! Porkchop had a crepe with chicken, basil, and a creamy sauce...rather standard.

The red bean milk tea (sans boba for me) was pretty good too. However, I felt silly drinking it because it was served in the Biggest Chalice Ever.

Unfortunately, the summer rolls were a huge disappointment. The noodles were a big mushy mash, and the wrapper was super gummy. Overall, they didn't pack a lot of taste, save for the fresh mint leaves.

Of course, after experiencing Banh Mih So #1, it's hard to have other spring/summer rolls.

All in all, alright, but we probably won't go back unless there is a compelling reason.

La Dolce Via
Is back! Okay, they reopened a few months ago, but yay! They're back!

We stopped in a couple of weeks ago for dessert.

Yum, yum, yum! I had the flourless chocolate hazelnut torte, which was kind of like eating a giant Ferrero Rocher candy, only a million times better. Porkchop had a piece of the Elizabetta cake: vanilla sponge cake infused with sweetened lemon juice, layered with lemon curd, and frosted with lemon cream.

I've said it once, I'll say it a million times, if you've never been to La Dolce Via...GO!

I'm Amused

The title of today's staff and faculty meeting is "A Busy and Productive Summer."

I love that our meeting is titled! Seriously, I am amused to no end by it.

I can only hope for similar scintillating follow-up titles. Maybe "Fall: A Time to Reflect upon our Harvest of Grants" or "A Long and Lonely Winter as Everyone goes on Vacation except Me."

This isn't Supposed to be a Monthly Blog

Time has just gotten away from me lately. I can't believe it's mid-May, commencement is over, and temperatures are climbing towards the 80s!

We've packed a lot into the last few weeks. This weekend we went to the Tower Grove farmers' market (basil, strawberries, and pain au chocolate), worked on the yard A LOT both days, missed out on a patio set on Craigslist (dang it), and I went a Rehabber's Club tour of some recently finished properties and works-in-progress in our neighborhood (also on the tour was a woman who was head of the student Senate when I was at Mizzou...very strange). Also, we cooked! A lot! Lemon-basil chicken with orzo and asparagus, waffles and bacon, grilled porkchops and potatoes, curried chicken-mango salad (for a work potluck tomorrow), and vanilla pound cake.

The garden is starting to take off. Here are the two big beds this morning:


(Porkchop and Keetah are also in the photo. See if you can find them.)

Porkchop's potatoes-in-a-trashcan experiment is also going well:


Wow, I am hitting a wall of tiredness, so I have to hurry the rest of this post.

Our biggest excitement of the month was flying out to Portland to see our friend Kathy before she moves to Peru (she leaves very, very soon!). While we were there, our friend Sabrina flew out from New York for the reunion trip (Kathy, Sabrina, and Porkchop were all MFA students at Wisconsin together...I was a tag-along).

Portland was beautiful and the company was fantastic! I haven't smiled and laughed so much in a long time. Oh, and our accommodations were vintage midcentury modern - truly fantastic.

In addition to spending a couple of hours in Powell's and hitting the PSU farmers' market, we went to the beach:


(Sabrina taking Kathy's photo.)

And we took a drive just east of Portland along the Columbia River Gorge. Pretty and pretty windy:


Along the scenic road, we stopped at quite a few waterfalls. All spectacular in their own way. This one is Bridal Veil Falls:


The whole area was covered in moss - very neat! And soft.

The day trip culminated at a fish hatchery where we saw a 10-foot, 70-something year-old sturgeon. It was huge!

Other highlights of the trip include eating crazy-good french fries and poutine at Potato Champion, and the world's best waffles at Waffle Window.

Seriously, you can't go to Portland without hitting the Waffle Window. It shares a kitchen with a larger cafe, but WW itself is just a little half door around the corner from the main cafe. You order your waffle at the window, and then there's a special section in the cafe where you can eat.

The waffles are spectacular. Sabrina and I both had the huckleberry waffle - a fluffy waffle coated in pearl sugar and topped with huckleberry jam and syrup, whipped cream, and lemon panna cotta. The panna cotta really made the waffle - yum, yum, yum! I also enjoyed tasting Porkchop's waffle topped with ham, gruyere cheese, and maple syrup.

We loved seeing Kathy and Sabrina again, and we hope the next visit isn't so far away (okay, Porkchop saw Kathy last year, but I hadn't seen Kathy in a few years, and I hadn't seen Sabrina since 2005!).

Okay, I'm tired and I have to check my laundry. Have a great week!

All Tuckered Out

Although we didn't do many things from the Weekend List, we accomplished quite a bit this weekend. And made more work for later (awesome!).

Things started off with working outside for a few hours Friday evening. We planted the remaining raised bed with tomatoes, peppers, basil, tomatillos, marigolds, and other flowers. Things continued early Saturday morning with planting squash and melons, clearing weeds out of the yard, and cleaning up the junky stuff on our neighbor's retaining wall. We took the afternoon and the evening off for leisure activities such as reading and watching baseball.

Oh, we also made our magical rice and chorizo dish...will have to post that recipe someday.

Here is the newest raised bed:


And here are the melon and squash, safely tucked away in toilet paper rolls. I lost one butternut squash to a cutworm yesterday, and I don't want to lose any more. I know we have a lot of melons and squash for the square footage of this bed, but I plan on growing them up. The next step for this bed is to add on to the trellis.


This morning we slept in a bit, made waffles, and then went back to work in the yard. This time we planted along the previously junky retaining wall. Lots of flower and herb seeds went in, as well as purple coneflowers.

After a lunch break, we went back out for more. And things took a turn for the worse. I was clearing some weeds out by the garage in the hopes of planting more conflowers. This turned into us clearing off dirt from the long-away forgotten brick border around the garage. Could look nice again, eh?


Unfortunately, we found this at the other end of the garage:


That's not just a shadow, it's a ginormous hole along the foundation of the garage!! Those bricks in the foreground? They have nothing supporting them underneath!

Fortunately, this answered our question of what to do with all the dirt and debris that we cleared off the brick border. Unfortunately, this thing gives me a headache. The slope and drainage is really weird in our yard, and I wish it could just fix itself.

This is how we left the abyss today:


We took out the bricks that were just hanging in midair, and we uncovered more of the hidden brick border. But, geez, we're tired.

So, is this a sinkhole or what? We're even more convinced that our house is above one of the area's many caves.

On a happier note, Keetah loves the outside so much! The whole yard is her all-you-can-eat salad bar:


Keetah was also busy this weekend doing some calculations and watching TV:


Such hard work! She has also been hanging out with Porkchop:


Buddies!

Have a good week! I am sort of glad for work tomorrow so that I don't get sucked into neverending yardwork.

The Weekend List

Y'all, I am STOKED for the weekend! The only thing that could make it better would be Porkchop and me not working today.

Here is our list of possible weekend activities:

• Plant things. This is a for-sure activity. Tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and tomatillos MUST go into the ground tomorrow. We have had a sad development in our plant raising - it appears that the biggest tomato plants and many of the pepper plants have developed bacterial leaf spot. Probably because I didn't put a fan in the bathroom to allow for proper air circulation. It sucks. BUT, the squash and melons are sprouting like gangbusters. They are big and amazing, and I can't wait to plant them!
• Bike ride! Also a for-sure activity. I want to bike somewhere for Sunday brunch, and Porkchop wants to bike downtown for a Cards-Cubs game.
• Baseball game. See above. (I am dragging my feet on this one because I was just at a sporting event last weekend! And you know how I feel about these things!)
• Earth Day festival at Forest Park.
• Herb sale in Webster Groves.
• Greater St. Louis Book Fair.
• Make waffles. Because we received maple syrup in our Fair Shares pickup, and it would be a shame to not crack it open right away.
• Eat more Salume Beddu's mostarda. This stuff is a revelation! It's described as an "Italian chutney," and it's full of dried fruit, mustard seeds, and chile flakes. It's spicy and not-too-sweet, and it's my new favorite thing. We also received this in this week's share. Fortunately, I'll be able to pick up more as needed once the Tower Grove farmers' market starts up (opening day is May 9!).

I'm sure I left off something! It will be a super-fabulous weekend! Enjoy yours as well!

A Semi-Frittered Day

I am unsure how to feel about this Saturday.

There were outdoor plant-related things I wanted to do, but it drizzled throughout the day, leading to an idle afternoon. Rarely do I spend a Saturday afternoon reading and knitting, so it was kind of a welcome break. It's just hard for me to feel okay about sitting around.

However, with the work we did yesterday afternoon and evening, I don't feel too guilty.

Porkchop and I had doctor appointments in the early afternoon, and neither of us returned to work. It was too darn nice outside! Instead of going back to my drab office, we enjoyed treats from the CWE Gelato di Riso and then went home to do yardwork. Yay yardwork!

Last summer, I noticed that the hardwood mulch in the front flowerbed was....sick, not right, and gross. We could pick up large sheets of mulch; the individual pieces were stuck together with weird white stuff. For the past 8 months, the flowerbed was a blight in my eyes. In fact, I trained myself to not look at it because I hated it so much.

Yesterday after the doctor and gelato, I decided to finally get the mulch the eff out of here. It was more work than I anticipated! There was SO MUCH weird white stuff.

The stuff resembled a mixture of latex paint and mold. And, we think that's what it was! Our hunch is that the rehab people were painting the eaves and dropped a big paint bucket. Instead of cleaning it up, they just dumped a bunch of mulch on it. My theory is that mold then grew because the stuff couldn't dry out (or something like that).

Anyway, most of it is now gone! The bits that are left shouldn't pose a problem. After removing the grossness, we spread out new, healthy soil and compost. And we planted pretty little flowers, which we hope will stay alive and thrive.

I wish we had taken a before photo for comparison, but I didn't think about it.

Here is the work in progress:


The area in question is really small, but the new soil and compost make a big difference. We have two surprisingly healthy azalea bushes, and one that is struggling. We removed a lot of paint mulch mess from around it, so hopefully it will get better.


Keetah surprised us and came out on the porch to supervise our work!


This outing showed a lot of braveness on her part; she's very cautious in exploring new things. Her heart was pounding the whole time. Especially when she was on the steps and cars were whizzing by:


So, with all of the work done yesterday, I feel sort of okay about doing nothing this afternoon. However, we did need a break this evening. Since the rain had stopped, we decided to go for a little walk around our neighborhood. We ended up at the Map Room, where we enjoyed sparkling orangeade and snack-size cheesecake.

The people at the Map Room are super-nice, and they have a great selection of drinks and desserts. We look forward to going back! Indeed, once it is cooler weather again, I know I will be there for some spiked hot chocolate.

Hope you're having a great weekend!

FB Complaining (Or, Jesus!)

Earlier this week, I finally joined Goodreads. I realized that I'm starting to forget what I've read, so I appreciate having a place to track my books.

But I know it will be only a few months until I stop updating my Goodreads account. Just like my Ravelry projects page, I imagine I will abandon it at some point.

With Goodreads, Ravelry, and Facebook, I'm starting to feel overstimulated and overexposed. And I don't even Tweet or Blip!

The main problem, I think, is Facebook. There are so many status updates, and many of them annoy me. But I can't just skip the annoying ones and move on! I read them and my blood pressure goes up...my forehead frowns and I sigh.

So now I'm taking steps to alleviate the problem. If you only post about what your kid is doing, I've blocked you. Whenever you publish a quiz result, I block that quiz application (Hey people, do you know you don't have to publish your quiz result! I take quizzes without publishing my results because although I find it humorous to learn my Crayola crayon color is cornflower, I know other people don't give a rat's ass, and I don't want to overpopulate their homepage feed.) If you post updates every 5 minutes regarding what's happening on the Apprentice, I'm blocking you.

I only wish I could block ALL updates from some people. Because I don't really care if someone with whom I haven't spoken in 12 years becomes a fan of Jesus, yet it still shows up in the sidebar highlights feed.

Which brings me to a tangential point....

Jesus and God have Facebook pages.

I would like to know who took it upon themselves to make these pages...because I don't think it was divine creation.

Isn't that a bit presumptuous? Did someone ask WWJD, only to have the answer be "create a Facebook page"?

(By the way, God has more fans than Jesus. By nearly 300,000.)

Sometimes I think I should create a new Facebook account. To start fresh with people who are REALLY my friends and with whom I've had meaningful interactions, and leave the other account for all those people I never spoke to growing up and who have now donned rose-colored spectacles with which they view the past.

I wonder if Jesus and God feel the same way. Of course, they're probably a bit more forgiving than I am, a bit more ready to excuse others' transgressions and whatnot.

Waiting, Waiting

So, I'm waiting for Porkchop to return from a trip to Columbia. She and her brothers are there visiting their dad in the burn treatment center. You see, their dad had an encounter with some propane last night, and the result is second degree burns on his head and arms, along with a smattering of third degree burns. These are bad burns, but it could have been much, much worse.

It will take some time, but it seems like he will be okay. He might even go home tomorrow! Which seems crazy after looking at the photo Porkchop sent me of his bandaged head.

Poor guy. A bypass, a kidney transplant, stents around his heart, and now this. He can't catch a break.

Other Waiting
To me, spring is all about waiting...waiting to realize the potential of carefully laid plans.

First, we were waiting to go to Chicago with Porkchop's niece. We hit the Art Institute, the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum, Mitsuwa Marketplace, and IKEA.

This was my first trip to the Field Museum, and I would like to go back. SO MUCH STUFF! My favorite section was the Plants of the World, especially after reading about how the glass and wax specimens were made. Amazing!

We saw Sue, of course:


And we saw the artists-in-residence...two brothers exploring their theory of a new optical reality. Which meant tracing things on curved paper. Like this:


Actually, it's a lot more complicated than just tracing. It's about splitting the focus of your eyes and capturing the "ghost image" on paper. It's pretty neat - there's an article and clip here.

Porkchop and I agreed the brothers strike one as being from the late 1800s/early 1900s. "We've got this new-fangled easel contraption..."

So, after Chicago, we were waiting on sprouts. And guess who peeked out of the ground late last week?

Spinach or lettuce (I can't tell at this stage).


And onions.

Then we were waiting on the Blues to clinch the playoffs. And guess what happened Friday night at the last home game? That's right! They won!

Porkchop and her younger brother were the happiest, especially after we got to shoot pucks down on the ice after the game.

Now I'm waiting to plant tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, and basil. And for our trip to Portland to see Kathy before she moves to Peru! So many things to await!

I also look forward to baking more fun cookies this weekend. Monday night, I made these chewy amaretti cookies:


Quite tasty, although the almond paste makes me feel weird, as in allergic weird.

Hope your week is going well...Keetah says hello to her friends!

Do Not Compromise

The Iowa news started me thinking about a conversation I had with a co-worker after the VP debates in October. I was complaining about how Biden was being totally unclear and weak about the gay marriage issue, and my co-worker said something like, "well, it seems like there should be some sort of compromise. I mean, if there isn't gay marriage, maybe there could be something else."

I looked at her with mouth agape as she nattered on about how you can't always have the full deal at the beginning, but maybe compromise is the way to start.

Let me be totally clear: I WILL NOT COMPROMISE.

As long as one group of people can have a certain set of rights, I will not settle for something branded under a different name with different rights specified.

HELL NO.

It's easy to suggest compromise when you're in the group that has FULL RIGHTS!

A lot of people ask if Porkchop and I have had a commitment ceremony and are often surprised to hear that we haven't. Y'all, a commitment ceremony doesn't mean a damn thing without the legal rights that accompany an officially recognized marriage. We are committed to each other already - we don't need a ceremony for it!

I'm not going to settle for a stupid-ass ceremony that won't do crap for me except maybe allow us presents like a mixer. A mixer doesn't stand up in court! A mixer won't give us legal protection over each other or tax benefits or parental rights!

I am glad for Iowa, and now I'm super-pissed at Missouri and the federal government and lots of other things. ARGH!

As Iowa Goes...

So goes the nation?

One can only hope! Yay for the Iowa Supreme Court ruling that the same-sex marriage ban is unconstitutional!

I didn't enjoy living in Iowa, but perhaps we should have stayed. Stupid Missouri.