Festivus, Wherein We Perform Feats of Strength

Today and yesterday have been a bold celebration of "the holiday for the rest of us" for me. I undertook, as per my New Year's Resolution, to deal with the kitchen remodel. This was to entail, in theory, removing the old sink and faucet and taking the old countertop and backsplash off so that the granite company could template.

In practice, it has so far entailed the following: the discovery that we own only abnormal tools and subsequently having at a stubborn piece of the old backsplash with an ice axe and a geology hammer (without damaging the drywall!); more intimate knowledge of the garbage disposal than I ever thought I'd have; a late inning run to the hardware store for a pair of channel locks; leaky plumbing; the unpleasant realization that Josh and I had different expectations regarding the dishwasher air gap; the discovery that the builders who built our complex did a half-assed job on every aspect of the construction except for the part where they glued the kitchen sink to the countertop with copious amounts of The Strongest Adhesive Known to Man; laboring for hours to wedge the long piece of countertop between two walls followed by several more hours of laboring to free it again; and a daybreak jaunt to procure a reciprocating saw.

I googled reciprocating saws several times to optimize my chances of finding a suitable one and one of the searches turned up porn. I don't remember the exact words that I typed in, but one of the phrases was definitely "reciprocating saw." I don't want to know what that porn was all about.

There was one point when I looked up from my work, geology hammer in one hand and ice axe hanging from my pants, and thought that it was a good thing that neither my father nor either of my grandfathers could see me at that moment. They'd have either died or rolled over in their graves, respectively. But maybe they'd have given me a few points for improvisation. I couldn't decide.

On the bright side, I've stopped feeling guilty about the fact that I haven't lifted weights all week.

I was going to note how long it's been since I last bathed, but then I realized that I was having to think about it for several seconds, and that means that I'm filthier than I thought I was. I see a long shower in my future.

Now, grievances successfully aired, I will go out to obtain disposable dining ware and pick up Josh's shirts from the dry cleaner.

Scarf-n-Barf

Gross.

About 5 minutes ago, I heard Sandy walk into the kitchen and eat a meal of nuggets out of his bowl. Suddenly, he came tearing out making that pre-vomit pumping noise, and then he threw up all of the recently eaten food. Bindy took one look at the pile and saw nuggets instead of vomit, so she started eating. What I don't understand about that is why the thrown up nuggets are so much more appealing than the fresh ones sitting in her bowl in the kitchen, but they must be. She only eats small amounts of bowl nuggets at specific times, but she breaks the schedule all the time for vomited ones. I know because the above scenario is a weekly occurrence at our house.

Gross.

I'm All For Livin' Large, But...

Outside magazine has gone off the deep end. One of the major features of the January 2006 issue, not yet on the website, is a list of 50 Ways to Live Large. I am all for aiming high, but some of these things are ridiculous. What do they envision? That we will train for our climb of an 8,000 meter peak by completing the Hawaii Ironman, or will it be the other way around? And how will we manage to fit in all of our training for the Olympics? Some of the 50 Ways are reasonable, like making the perfect martini or... I dunno, but there must be others.

If it weren't for the fact that Reinhold Messner may have abandoned his brother Gunther to die on Nanga Parbat, I would have no way of distinguishing one Outside issue from another. It's like a revolving door of Lance Armstrong, naked women rock climbers, and lists to help you live a more _____ life.

Not that I have a problem with any of the above, it's just that I like to read other, new things once in a while. I like Lance Armstrong, and let's face it, while I may feel envious of the ability of my fellow women (oxymoron!) to make careers out of blending athleticism with soft core porn, I support the fact that it happens at all. And who doesn't love a list? It's just that it gets bor-ing.

It Was All So Different Than I Thought It Would Be

Fairly recently, I met a man and liked him. I like liked him. He was beautiful, easy to talk to and be with, and had a captivating personality. We had some cool things in common. If I'd been single, I'd have been, as they say, all over it.

I knew that something like this was bound to happen (perhaps even several times) after I was married. Life is long and people come and go, and it only stands to reason that some of them might be people you'd think about dating if you were single. Common sense, right?

Even so, it was weird to actually confront the situation. I think I was expecting it to feel very significant, only it didn't. Instead of feeling like this great big opportunity that I couldn't take, it felt quiet. It felt like a great chance to make a friend, about whom I shared a happy secret with myself. Sex is emotionally messy in a way that friendship is not. It's somewhat sad to admit this, but this was the first time in my life that I made friends with someone I was attracted to instead of bonking him somewhere along the line and complicating things or else freaking out and avoiding him completely. Awww, my id grew a superego, and isn't it cute?

I don't consider myself to be a particularly religious or spiritually connected person, but something about that whole experience made me feel very at peace inside myself. I think that it's just reassuring to discover like minds and compatible personalities elsewhere in the wide world, regardless of what kind of relationship you develop with their owners.

I didn't talk to him about my feelings because it would have been Bad on many levels and Pointless on others, but also, I didn't want to. Keeping it to myself is what made it pleasant rather than weird and stressful. Maybe he could tell how I was feeling anyway. I thought a few times that he reciprocated to some degree, but I was only ever curious just for curiousity's sake. I think it's always interesting (and sometimes humbling) to assess how far in left field you're actually standing.

The Following Two Things Happened To Me Last Night

1. I went to the trash room to dump some trash and recyclables. I guess that the sign on the one recycling bin that says "glass and plastics only" was too unclear for the person who stuffed the bin full of cardboard.

2. I heard a siren in the distance as I walked back up the driveway from the trash room to the house and it made me remember that when I was little, all of the sirens sounded different. I could differentiate between police, ambulance, and fire engine just by the sound. I haven't thought about that in years, but thinking about it last night made me realize that I can't do that anymore. I asked Josh when I came back inside whether he remembered the different sounds from childhood and he said that he did. He also told me that he still thinks that the different kinds of sirens make distinctive sounds and that he can usually tell the type of emergency vehicle without looking at it. This made me feel vaguely sad. Why can't I tell the difference anymore?

Maybe now I finally have a frame of reference for how he feels about being colorblind. Sometimes it really drives me nuts when he comes up to me holding out a pair of pants and asks, "What color are these?" I never know what to say because, I mean, what color is anything really? I can tell him that the pants are greenish grey, but as for what kind of picture those words make in his mind, I have no idea if it matches up with what I see when I look at the pants. I try to be patient with color inquiries, but even when I succeed, it's like water slowly eroding rock. I lose patience in the end. It just takes longer.

My To-Do List Just Got A Makeover

I have been working on a to-do list all week, with the goal of having the entire thing accomplished by the time I leave the house on Friday for my annual holiday sojourn in NY. Then the granite company called and wanted to schedule a time for them to come here and do the templating that they need to do in the kitchen before they can cut the granite for the new countertop. This was a very welcome phone call, I just hadn't been expecting it because I thought they might slack off until after Christmas/Hanukkah/whatever-they-celebrate-at-the-granite-company. They are going to be here on the 28th, which means that I am now in a compressed schedule about when the old countertop needs to be removed. I believe it can be done, but there can be no dawdling.

Also, when I got the mail today I saw that three (3!) people had sent late inning holiday cards and I feel inclined to reciprocate, particularly given that one of the people is my aunt that I somehow forgot about during my intial round of card sending.

Add to that the fact that I agreed to help Susan drag Maxx on his death row march (AKA trip to the dog groomer) tomorrow morning, I'm suddenly feeling a little pressed for time.

I Just Fell Over While Standing Stock Still In Rite Aid

I hurt my knee, I think during an unanticipated sprint yesterday, and now it's all messed up. I was standing in Rite Aid about an hour ago, trying to remember the third thing that I wanted to buy (it was mouthwash), when I locked my left knee. Every time I've done this today, it's felt hyperextended although I'm not sure that it ever actually was. It made a mushy sound that I felt rather than heard, I said, "ughghuh," and promptly fell over. I caught myself before I hit the ground and even before I dropped any of the other items I was carrying (lactaid, cotton wipes, and kitchen sponges), but it was still a strange experience. It didn't hurt me nearly as much as it disgusted me. The feeling of one's joints bending in the wrong direction is really creepy. I've been careful ever since to not lock my knee at all.

The reason behind yesterday's sprint was that the facocta (sp?) metro got me to CTF late and I was nervous about not being let in at all if I arrived too far after noon. I got to Metro Center alright, but then the screen on the orange/blue platform kept changing the ETA on the next train and I ended up waiting far longer than I originally thought I'd have to. I sprinted up the long escalator at Stadium/Armory and then sprinted the approximately 400 meters to the CTF entrance. It felt pretty good at the time, although I coughed for about 10 minutes afterward. I made it in time for my appointment and ended up feeling very happy that I'd bothered to run because a girl I recognized from the train trailed in after me and was penalized for lateness.

I Guess This Is Goodbye

WASA recently put up fencing and signage around the not-a-shit-pipe that has been on the Duke Ellington Bridge for about the past year, and the sign says that it's going to be a water main restoration. I guess this means that they've repaired the main pipe and are going to be taking away its replacement. I think of it as the not-a-shit-pipe because when we first saw it, Josh and I assumed that it was bound to be a sewer pipe, this being DC and all. But then I googled it and learned that it is a replacement water main because the one under the bridge had cracks in it and was going to take a long time to repair. I've grown attached to the not-a-shit-pipe. It has a clever way of never freezing in the winter, never allowing snow to accumulate on its back (it melts it), it's very comfortable to sit on when waiting for one's friends to arrive, and it's a weird little conversation piece.

So Weak...

I went to yoga this morning for the first time in ages. I first stopped going during my bar exam prep and then continued not going because I got into a night weight lifting routine that left me not in a yoga mood in the early mornings. Since returning from Ecuador, I've been meaning to start going to yoga again, and today I finally did. Not too much has changed; Karuna is fostering dogs now for the animal shelter and she has slightly altered the sequence of events at the beginning of class... or maybe that was just today because we did a sivananda class, as much as could be fit into 55 minutes.

Anyway, somewhere in the middle of the third round of sun salutations, my upper arms started to feel a burn. This was not a good sign. The rest of my body was an ecstasy of joint paint and muscle stiffness, but some of that started to work its way out toward the end of class. It's going to be a while before I can get my upper body anywhere near my legs again in seated forward bend, I can tell you that much.

A Hangover of Incompatible Foods

I spent most of today feeling craptastic, and I think it had to do with the wide variety of party foods and drinks that I consumed yesterday. To the best of my recollections, I ate the following things in roughly the following order: alcoholic egg nog at 10am, mini quiche, kamut with spinach and portabello mushrooms, a piece of a scone, hummus and carrots, half a large cheese pizza, Coke, hot apple cider, ham, a mozzarella stick with red sauce, garlic bread, ham, onion dip, fruit and marshmallows dipped in chocolate fondue, water, tomato basil soup, half an orange, and a piece of bread dipped in salad dressing.

I managed to simultaneously eat too much (variety) and not enough (calories). I went to bed starving hungry, which always makes me feel unwell the next day. But I also had a headache and general malaise brought on by the fact that my GI tract did not like having to deal with all of that crap. I'm just happy that I stopped drinking when I did.

I went to two parties, one a solstice brunch at Andrew's place and one a Christmukkah celebration at a friend of Josh's. The Christmukkah folks have two pugs that I absolutely fell in love with. I wanted to steal them. They live out near Lorton and we got a bit lost on the drive there. I thought the situation had the potential to be just like the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry and Cheryl go to Gil's party and can't find it and eat a bag of chips in the car because they're so hungry and they finally get there and find out that it's a small dinner party and then they look rude for having eaten and the other guests are pissy because they've been waiting to eat and Larry won't take his shoes off even though it's a "house rule" and Cheryl gets offended because everyone else at the party keeps talking about porn. But it wasn't like that at all. We were only lost for about 3 minutes, it didn't turn out to be a small dinner party, everyone kept their shoes on, and no one mentioned porn.

But one of the pugs did do a circular butt-scoot on the rug underneath the food table, and if that doesn't make it a party, then I don't know what does.

Immigration Reforms

Today on Sunday morning political television, someone said that Latinos who cross the border illegally come from a culture of criminality, and that this is why citizens object to their presence. I think, judging it as leniently as possible, that he meant that someone who is willing to cross the border illegally breaks the law as the first thing he does in the US. But getting to this interpretation of what he said required a few leaps of logic, and I'm not clear why he specified "Latinos" either, because no one can seriously believe that Latinos are responsible for all of the illegal border crossings. I wish I knew the name of the person who said it, but I wasn't actually watching the tv at the time. I was only listening, and I didn't have time to watch the rest of it in an attempt to figure out which one was the bigot.

They were talking about the new House measures designed to stem the tide of undocumented workers. On a personal level, I find the whole thing offensive. As someone else pointed out on the tv this morning, things that are currently being said about Latin American immigrants are the same things that used to be said about Jews and Italians, among others. It's not got anything to do with the groups specifically, but has got everything to do with fear of something new.

On an intellectual level, it's laughable. Undocumented workers are an established and integral part of the US economy. It's funny to watch politicians try to walk the thin line between pandering to socially conservative voters who think that immigrants are stealing the jobs of citizens and/or freeloading rampantly on tax dollars, and trying to keep on the good side of the businesses that really don't want to have to verify the immigration status of their workers.

I think a good solution would be to set up every undocumented worker with a random citizen on friend dates, and see what happens.

Rockin'

Last night we saw Bon Jovi at MCI Center. Everyone in the audience was partying except the ones immediately surrounding us. We ended up in Section Lame-ass. When the show started, one of the girls in front of us stood up to cheer. No sooner had her ass left the chair than a bitchy yell rang out from behind us, "SIT DOWN!" She sat down. I turned around and saw that the woman behind us was so fat that she barely fit into the area bordered by her seat and the back of my seat. I guess she can't stand for long periods, which I understand (sort of), but who goes to go to a rock show at an arena and expects to keep everyone in front of them seated the whole time? She didn't even say "please!"

We didn't let it get us down though. We stood up to dance most of the night, but in an area to the right of us that didn't block Lazy Lady's view. The seats over there filled in eventually and we moved back over to the area in front of our seats, but LL didn't say anything else about it. She got up to dance a few times.

Apart from the general lameness of our section (the girls in front of us had brought men with them who appeared to have been dragged against their wills/better judgment, and about 15 other people were sitting for reasons that weren't clear to me), we had a lot of fun. Rockin'.

The Corollary: An Assessment of My New Year's Resolutions for 2005

I had two resolutions for 2005:

1. Finish law school and deal with all related issues, including the bar exam and getting my educational debt into order. I did all of these things, although not with any great relish or sense of accomplishment. It was a hollow victory after a long and bitter war waged against my own better judgment. All I can say is that it is over now and therefore, I am free to call it a learning experience rather than a problem.

2. Stop spending money on stupid crap like unnecessary clothing items, shoes, and accessories. I thought it would be more difficult to do this than it actually was, but all I had to do was stop visiting stores as a method of recreation, and the urge to shop more or less left me. I still have to quash it from time to time, but I've mostly found that I need things with enough regularity that I get a fix here and there. My long term goal is to get my debts into a manageable state before the end of next year, and then I can reintroduce recreational shopping. It's going to be a revamped form of shopping, though. I'm not going to go back to buying stupid crap just because it's on sale and I kind of like it. I am going to buy things that I really like and that look good on me, even if they are more expensive, but I'm going to do it less often. I instituted the shopping diet for fiscal reasons, but I think it helped me stylistically too, because it's given me a chance to run through some older wardrobe items, wear them out, and move them along while they were still current.

New Year's Resolutions

I guess it's a bit early for New Year's resolutions, but for some reason, I woke up today excited to make resolutions. Sometimes I feel embarrassed about my zeal for things like New Year's resolutions because it seems to be slightly abnormal, but I have to go with what works for me. I like resolutions because I have a good track record of keeping them, and so I think of them as a proactive motivational tool that actually works. I don't have many of those, so I get really excited about making resolutions.

Previous successes include: no more binge drinking (admittedly, this still happens, but it's less often and what constitutes a "binge" now is smaller than it used to be; more importantly, I rarely use alcohol anymore as a method of dealing with anxiety), stop wasting money on stupid crap like pants that are identical to other pants that I already own and of which I don't need more, stop eating most of my meals out, and make an effort to try new things (this was particularly successful, triggered by my first attempt at climbing and discovery that I liked it, and giving me newfound enthusiasms for yoga, snowshoeing, and skiing). Looking back on it all now, I can probably blame the success of trying new things for the fact that I have acquired a lot of expensive sporting habits that necessitated the making of resolutions like "stop wasting money on stupid crap like ______."

Here, in no particular order, are my resolutions for 2006:
1. Get a job, you lazy slob! I still harbor a faint hope that this can be accomplished in 2005, but the time is running out and I have to be realistic. I strongly hope that it will not take me an entire year to knock this one off, and if it does, my resolutions for 2007 will undoubtedly include taking my own life.

2. Pay off my credit card debt. A prerequisite for achieving #2 will be achieving #1, but I believe that both are possible. I look forward to many years of being chained to my law school loans, but I am trying to maintain a positive outlook by tackling smaller debts along the way toward greater financial independence.

3. Finish the kitchen remodeling and replace that ugly wallpaper. This is a bit of low hanging fruit to encourage me. I have already done a substantial amount of the work needed to accomplish this goal.

4. Prepare more of my own meals. I make this resolution every year and each time, I get a little bit better about it. My goal is to have as many healthy and well-balanced eating days as possible, so there is always room for improvement.

5. More hiking and doing fun stuff outside (apart from riding my bike)! It is depressing to me to have to turn this into a resolution at all, but if I'm to learn anything from 2005, it's that I need to get myself over a certain level of inertia. I like being able to leap from bed (maybe the part about leaping is an overstatement) and decide on the spur of the moment to have a hike or do whatever. But that's not possible here unless I want to do all of my hiking at Great Falls. So I need to take the additional step of planning the night before to drive somewhere, and for some reason, that doesn't come to me naturally. The reason I'm exempting bike riding from this resolution is that I already do it weekly (in the summer anyway) and the purpose of this resolution is to get me into other activities.

This is a larger number of resolutions than I normally resolve, but some of them, like getting a job and finishing off the kitchen, are things that I hope to cross off early on. I don't normally turn those kinds of goals into new year's resolutions, but these are a big enough deal to me that I think it's warranted. By adding in some long term ones, it's a good mix of things to feel good about being able to cross off and things to keep me busy for the entire year.

Just What Everyone Wants: Phlegm Update!

I ran again this morning, 3 miles this time. I briefly considered doing it outside and then decided in favor of using the treadmill instead. It's warm at the gym and there is a convenient holder for my iPod. They have new two new treadmills at the gym and I tried one of them today. It was beautifully springy.

I hacked up far less phlegm than I did on Saturday, but it still wasn't good.

I Really Don't Know What To Say To You People

I was getting sandwiches with Susan this afternoon and we stopped to chat with Sandwich Lady. Sandwich Lady was feeling uneasy about her upcoming 30th birthday and let the uneasiness spill over into a rant about a recent clothes-shopping experience she'd had. Attracted by a window display of cool coats on sale, she went into a store that sold clothes sewn on the Barbie scale of women's sizing and she had been unable to fit even into a large. Sandwich Lady is not very big. She thought that the salesgirls all looked like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie and "wanted to throw hamburgers at them." I restrained myself during all of this because no matter how tired I get of hearing people complain about the bodies of others, Sandwich Lady provides me with tasty food on a regular basis and I am therefore willing to give her leeway. But it doesn't mean I'm not going to bitch about it later to random people on the internet.

Sandwich Lady also told us that she is too bootylicious to fit into skinny pants, took a look at my legs and said, "I guess you can't relate." Um, thanks? She couldn't actually see my ass because I was facing her and wearing a long coat.

I never know how to respond when people shine the spotlight on me during conversations about how skinny women suck and/or need to eat more. I want to tell them to fuck off, but when they're my friends and acquaintances and the person who prepares my sandwiches on a regular basis, I search for kinder and gentler phrasing.

People seem to think that saying, "You're so thin!" is a compliment, but in reality, it just makes me feel uneasy to hear it. I have skinny genes, I guess, but I also exercise a lot. I don't exercise to be skinny, I exercise to be strong and healthy. When people tell me that I look strong and/or healthy, it makes my day. But when people tell me how skinny I am, I really do just want to tell them to shut the fuck up, because they're missing the point. It's like saying, "Your hair is soooo brown!" Yeah, it's brown. But I don't hear much about it.

People who tell me I'm skinny and expect me to feel complimented have no business complaining about "society's" fixation with bodily appearance! They've bought in and are perpetuating it!

I really hate it when people take in my general skinnyness and then extrapolate, as Sandwich Lady did today, that I'm flat-assed, flat chested, or both. Not only does that suck, it is untrue.

Everyone wants to be found attractive, I get that. We all have things that we like and dislike about our bodies and appearances, and I guess that's normal. But the one thing that I always love is, for the most part, the stuff inside my body works well and doesn't give me much trouble.

I got lucky: I have a great body. But not because it's skinny. I feel sad that so many people don't get that.

Also, to address the other aspects of Sandwich Lady's rant that pissed me off: all skinny people are not anorexic (some are bulimic!), and no one wants hamburgers thrown at them. Finally, rather than making me feel antipathy toward the Parislike salesgirls at the Size 0 Emporium (or wherever she was shopping... she didn't say), Sandwich Lady only caused me to feel bad for her, because she sounded so fixated on something meaningless.

Now that I've succeeded in sounding fixated on the same meaningless subject, it is time to go buy dinner ingredients!

Phlegmatism

I don't know if phlegmatism is a real word, but nevertheless, it is the state in which I find myself. I usually don't hold on to chest congestion for very long, but the cold that I caught in Ecuador is really sticking with me. I went for a run yesterday and got two miles in before I started to feel like I was breathing through a dense film of yuck. I had only been planning on a short run anyway, so it didn't inconvenience me. It only disgusted me.

I stretched after my run. I never want to stretch after very short runs because my muscles aren't yet warm enough to make for a comfortable stretch, but I've learned from experience that if I don't stretch, my body complains about it the next day.

I also weighed myself: 125 pounds. That means that I lost 6 of the 8 new pounds I gained during my training regimen... not too bad. I thought I might lose them all or even start to lose some of my normal weight. I think all of the missing pounds must have gone from my legs, because pants that used to be tight on my thighs and butt are now loose.

I spent about an hour after my run coughing up phlegm and blowing my nose, and then it was time to leave for the holiday party at Josh's work. Why they had to have a black tie optional event on a Saturday night is not clear to me, but I didn't complain because I have the sense to graciously accept offers of free food and booze. Unfortunately, I accepted a little too much booze. I felt light headed and sick by 11pm and was soon begging Josh to take me home so I could rest my head.

I forgot that I hadn't had any kind of boozefest in about 6 months, and my body was not pleased about my dumping a lot of gin down in there. Now I'm trying to figure out if I even want to work back up to being able to binge drink. I'm thinking it might be time to enforce some limits... I'm getting old.

When Technology Fails

Tonight's mission: pumpkin pie. I'd just gotten all of the dry ingredients for the crust loaded into the food processor for mixing, pressed "pulse," and then found out that the food processor is broken. Oh, the heartbreak. It's only a year old. It's possible that it just needs to be tinkered with, but I wasn't in the right frame of mind at that moment to do it. Instead, I became even more determined about the pumpkin pie and cut in the butter by hand. I've never done that before and actually haven't seen it done since I was about ten years old, but fortunately, I have a great memory when it comes to cooking. I've got the crust in the freezer right now, so it will be a little while before I can assess how it turned out, but I hope that it's ok. I really want pumpkin pie tonight.

It's Times Like These That I Feel Thankful for The Washing Machine

I don't want to see another load of laundry again for at least a week. I decided today to get through all of the laundering that needed to happen to the clothes we took with us to Ecuador, and I've been at it all day. It's taking a long time because there are many specialty items, things that don't go in the dryer and for which I need to find indoor air drying space. I took my crampons into the shower with me to really have a go at them, but some of the dirt was too much for my old-toothbrush-and-soap combo. I want to go to the store to get some oil that I can put on there and hopefully loosen the rest of the crap, and then put on a light coat to treat them until the next use.

Ideally, I'd like to air out some of the mustier non-washables, like my sleeping bag and hard shells, but the entire deck is wet. It snowed again and, although much of the snow melted today, the deck is still wet. I managed to air out my backpacks yesterday when a thin strip of deck dried close to the house, but that's been about it.

Josh is going to a Caps game tonight, so I am on my own for dinner and evening amusements. Looks like a night of drinking alone for me!

Culinary Notes

It was Josh's birthday yesterday and I prepared for him some foods of his choosing. There was French onion soup, in which I used marsala wine to deglaze the pan. In the past, I've always used a white wine, but I don't think I'll do that again. It worked out very well to use a sweeter wine, and I think that a sherry or even a brandy would carry the same effect.

There was also bacala/bacalao. I took my inspiration for the dish from bacala, but I didn't use any dried salt cod. I used only fresh cod and garnished the whole thing with sea beans in order to get a salty taste. Bacalao is a Portuguese dish made with codfish in a tomato-based broth, and bacala is the Italian version of the same thing. I think that the Spanish also prepare it, but I've never eaten that so I can't describe it. Both of them traditionally use dried salt cod as well as fresh, but in my version, I use only fresh. I can get the dried stuff at Vace, but it's much easier to work with fresh. You don't need to soak it 6 times to make it palatable. Because my version is Italian-inspired, I start with a base of caramelized fennel, onion, and garlic, and then make up my broth out of white wine, diced tomatoes, and chicken stock. Last night, I put in some thinly sliced potatoes and then used them as the bed for the whole thing. I am thinking of using the leftovers tonight, but removing the potatoes and cooking some pasta in there to soak up the excess tomato broth.

Finally, Josh's requested dessert was chocolate brownies. I used the Ecuadorian baking chocolate that we brought back with us and the results were excellent. I have no complaints, and more importantly, neither did he.

Home Again

It feels like we were in Ecuador for a very long time.

The weather is completely different now than when we left. The trees have all shed their leaves and the temperature has dropped into the 30's during the day. It snowed the day after our return. The daylight hours feel very short. In a way, it was better to come back to weather like this than to heat and humidity. We were used to being cold on the mountains and in the huts, and the heat and moisture of Miami was a shock when we stopped there between flights. I was happy to get onto the air conditioned plane and leave the natural air outside.

My Doppelganger Is A Bitch To Work For

Occasionally, I get work related emails aimed at a woman who shares my name and apparently has a very similar email address. I've never done anything about these because I've never been motivated to care. Sometimes I get a fleeting feeling of compassion for the people who think they've emailed the boss a spreadsheet and probably get nagged about it later. But the feeling goes away and frankly, if the boss and her employees can't keep it all straight with whatever her email address actually is, it's not my business. I just hit "delete" and move on with my day.

It's not like the Angry Black Woman whose outgoing message sometimes takes over my mobile phone voice mail. [I'd phrase that in the past tense because it's been a long time since we've had an episode, but I'm afraid of jinxing myself]. That problem inconveniences me. Greatly. And I don't like getting her phone calls either, because the people that call her always seem to be Angry about something.

This afternoon, I received a resignation letter in my email inbox from someone who felt "lied to" by my doppelganger. The text of the email was as follows: "Attached is my resignation letter, that I had in my purse, the day I thought that you and I had worked out the conflicts of my job. I hope you will read it, but at this point, it really doesn't make any difference. I feel lied to." The letter was attached. I wrestled with myself over the moral dilemma of whether to open it, but I couldn't open it anyway. It was a .wps file.

I wrote back to the resigner. I wanted her to know that Julias aren't all bad... even if I was burning with curiousity to read the attachment.