Ironic Points of Light

Dispatch from the Blue Mountains

2012-01-03T21:58:00.000-05:00

Things look much better from this side of January 1.

There's nothing like fresh air to clear one's thinking, so Michael and I booked some time for ourselves in a cabin up in the mountains, to try to find a little peace before the start of a very difficult semester. It's an amazing spot, tucked into the side of a granite hill just a few minutes' walk from the Appalachian Trail, and it's everything one could hope for in a mountain retreat: cozy bedroom, working fireplace, fully stocked kitchen, a zillion Legos in the loft. Just a few hours here and the cares of the world fade away. Like ice on a burn, their sting isn't gone, just numbed and made distant and stripped of its power to affect what's really important in my life.

We took a long walk this morning on the freshly fallen snow, bundled up to our eyes in winter gear, the first creatures to leave any footprints. It was incredibly cold but clear with a bright, thin sun overhead and a freezing wind creaking through the bare branches. We collected kindling and built up a blazing fire when we got back, which we've kept burning all afternoon and into the night. Looking into the white-hot glow of the charcoal we've built up, I suddenly appreciate how humankind was able to melt iron --- and feel a great upswelling of sympathy for sand about to be fused into glass.

As bleak as the world is, as unforgivably cold and lonesome as things are up here and as fraught with difficult choices as my life are back at home, an overwhelming sense of peace pervades me whenever I'm in front of that fire. We've watched it for hours now, occasionally adding a log, occasionally stirring to take the other's hand, all without saying a word, without needing to. In that silence, the difficult choices resolve themselves into oblivion; the cold and loneliness melt away. I can focus on what I have, not what I lack. There's no shortage of wood, or warmth, or wine. I can cook good food, and eat good chocolate, and read Sherlock Holmes and Lord of the Rings with my feet propped up on the hearth. I have wool socks, a roof over my head, steady and meaningful work, and the ability to discern a sparrow from a mockingbird. I have the respect of good friends, the support of a good family, the love of a good man. And no matter what happens, no matter what goes right or what goes wrong, these are things that I cannot and will not lose.

I don't ask for the path to be easy. I just ask for a way to know what's truly important before I set off on my way.

Reflections on 2011

2011-12-31T22:25:00.003-05:00

And I thought 2010 was a bad year.

Well, it was, in a number of ways that I've documented elsewhere. But this year was worse. I certainly won't be sorry to turn over a new leaf and have the opportunity to start fresh, because, in the words of my dear departed grandmother, this year was a bitch. I've spent too much time in hospitals. I've attended too many funerals. I've been forced a few too many times to confront the bleakness of the world situation, to question my self-worth, to doubt my life choices. I suppose my grandmother would add that such things make one stronger, but let me tell you, if I have been made stronger, it's been no great pleasure getting here.

And so I end this year with a great sense of loss. It's not fair, I suppose, to let that color the many happy things that happened this year, but it does. What's more, that makes it difficult to look to the future with hope. But I'm going to try to hope anyway, because what other choice do I have? I don't want to let that sense of loss define me or to deny me the ability to meet the future with resolve --- and so I won't. In the words of the balladeer: "All you to whom adversity has dealt the final blow / With smilin’ bastards lyin’ to you everywhere you go / Turn to and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain / And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again."

Happy new year, and may 2012 be the year in which we all can rise again.

Vietnamese spring rolls

2011-06-11T21:50:00.000-04:00

IPoL is pleased to introduce my new favorite summer lunch: Vietnamese spring rolls. I've had them before from various markets in the area, but it never really occurred to me to make my own until I stumbled across the right kind of rice-paper wraps at the Asian grocery store.

Basically, these are just another variation on the endlessly adaptable culinary theme of "some protein and veg held together by a starch," aka, a sandwich. In this case, the protein in question is tofu, which was freshly made and pressed by Viet Tofu. (They also make their own silken tofu and soymilk, if you're interested, as well as deep-fried spicy cassava fritters, which are 10 different kinds of awesome.)

The first step was to cook the tofu a bit, which we did under the broiler with a light glaze of soy sauce:

The finished tofu was chopped into long matchsticks, the better to fit inside the wraps.

The rest of the ingredients included some Thai basil from our herb garden...

...rice vermicelli noodles, which we rehydrated in boiling water...

...scallions...

...and some carrots, coriander, and mint (also from the herb garden). The mise:

Once everything was assembled, it was time to roll. First, the rice paper wraps had to be soaked in warm water until they were translucent and pliable. This was actually quite fun. Immersing them in water made them soften up almost immediately, and when they were floating around, they felt a bit like jellyfish goo. (Note: I have no idea what jellyfish goo actually feels like. Just go with it.)

After soaking for about 30 seconds, the wrap was done, and I extracted it to the cutting board to start loading on the ingredients.

The trick to getting these guys to roll right is to pile everything in the bottom third of the wrap. This leaves plenty of room for rolling.

Once all of the ingredients were in, I folded in the sides, and then rolled it up like burrito. (Does that count as fusion cuisine?)

Done! They're best served cold and right away. Long-term storage involves wet paper towels to prevent the rice wraps from drying out and cracking. Short-term nibbling involves Thai sweet chili sauce. Yum!

Maui 2011: The end of the road

2011-03-22T21:13:00.000-04:00

Our last day. It was a good vacation, and a good length, although of course I'd never say no to one more day on Maui.

Luckily, our flight out wasn't until 10 pm, so we had almost a full day to enjoy. We slept right through the sunrise this morning, for a change, and were awakened by full sun on our faces. Ahh.

Michael's snorkeling injuries are looking much better today, although we'll have to be careful about keeping them clean and free of sand, especially the one on his foot. On the other hand, my cough has not improved and if anything has gotten worse. Also, my neck is still from holding my head up while snorkeling yesterday. But otherwise, everything was great.

There was still a lot of wind, but not as much as when we first arrived --- or maybe we just got used to it? But it was quite sunny, and we were keen to take advantage of the break in the clouds to do a little last bit of exploring.

After getting packed and feeding the last of our compost to the worms, we packed our camera and heading back to the trail down to the ocean. It seemed much easier this time, probably because we knew what to expect, and the views were stunning.

The trail started off at the bottom of the lawn below our cabin:

It continued from there into a bit of light woods...

...and let out at a little Thai meditation hut overlooking the ocean. A very peaceful spot.

Below the meditation hut, the trail grew narrower and wilder, with a few strategically-placed ropes along the way to prevent slipping.

Oh, and lots of these guys:

I don't know exactly what kind of spider they were, but they were enormous and they were everywhere. They liked to spin their webs across the trail, so we had to cut quite a few of them down to allow us to pass. I got one on my arm at one point, but managed to fling it off into the bushes --- without screaming like a small child.

And speaking of gross insects, we also spotted a Hawaiian centipede crawling across the trail from under a pile of dead palm leaves. These are the sorts of things that the guidebooks warn you about in big, bright letters: They bite. They sting. They're hideous. Also, they're usually at least six inches long, and the one that we saw did not disappoint in the size department. I swear the thing had muscles. Judge for yourselves:

Eeeeeeewww. Give me a cockroach any day.

Apart from that, the upper trail proceeded without incident, until we got to the marker for the lower part of the trail:

Yeah, no kidding. The rest of the trail was a steep scramble over the rocks, down the cliff to the ocean, aided occasionally by ropes:

We reached the rocky beach just fine and spent a good long while gazing at the water and soaking in the stillness and peace.

There were some great tide pools along the rocks too, inhabited by lots of gray-silver crabs and some mudskipper-looking fish that had their fins at the bottom, so it looked like they were doing pushups in the water.

After breathing the sea air for a while, we explored the pools at the foot of the waterfall:

They weren't quite deep enough for proper swimming, but we waded a bit and enjoyed the feel of the sunshine on the warm rocks.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and with one eye on the clock, we said farewell to the ocean and climbed back up the trail.

We took our last outdoor shower, ate some lunch, and did our last bit of relaxing in the Bamboo Temple before departing up the "magic driveway." On our way out, we stopped for one last drinking coconut at the same stand where we'd gotten our first, just outside of Pa'ia. At this point, it clouded over and started to rain, so we spent a little time talking to the woman who ran the stand: She and her husband were from El Salvador, but they'd fallen in love with Maui and had moved a few years ago to raise tropical fruit.

We were hoping that the rain would subside before we had to get back on the road, but no such luck. So we kept going anyway, driving towards Kahului, and our reward for doing so was the brightest and most brilliant rainbow I've ever seen --- and a double, too.

The conditions must have been just perfect, because it lasted for the entire hour-long drive between Kahului and Lahaina, and even beyond. I've never seen anything like it.

When we got to Lahaina, we parked on the outskirts of town, to avoid the crowds, and walked in. It was just 5:30 at this point and we hadn't made any firm plans about dinner, so we decided to try our luck at Cheeseburger in Paradise --- a cheesy tourist-trap serving mostly burgers (duh) and deep-fried deliciousness right on the water. Yesterday there was an hour-long wait, so we didn't think we'd be able to make it in, but to our surprise they were able to seat us immediately.

As mentioned, it was ridiculously touristy, with all the waitstaff (even the men) wearing grass skirts and loud Hawaiian shirts, cutesy names for everything on the menu, and little cocktail umbrellas stuck into all the burger buns. It was the sort of place that just begged me to order a pina colada, so I did.

It was expensive, but whatever, the drinks were strong, and the food was tasty, and our waiter was really chill, despite the obnoxious crowd.

After dinner, we strolled along the waterfront and watched the sun set, one last time:

Then it was goodbye to the banyan tree and hello to the microscopic Maui airport.

The trip is over, my 20s are over, and soon I'll be back at work, immersed in stress. It's going to be hard to remember the peace and happiness that we found on the island in the weeks ahead, but I will certainly try.

Maui 2011: A snorkel or two

2011-03-21T22:58:00.024-04:00

We woke up to the sunrise again --- no comparison to yesterday, of course, but far more lovely than the one from the Retreat two days ago.

After breakfast, we drove out to the west coast with our swim gear and masks, aiming to rent some fins and find a good place to snorkel. I'd been toying with the idea of booking a trip out to Molokini Crater, since that's supposed to have to best diving reef near the island, but that would have meant another very early morning and very long day. After yesterday's exertions, a more low-key plan was called for.

We picked up our fins at an awesome dive shop in Kihehi, where the staff recommended that we try entering off "the graveyard" --- a rocky cove behind a pump house just north of Makena Bay. Sorta here-ish:

View Larger Map

We got a little confused trying to find it, but eventually stumbled on the right place. The entry was extremely rocky. I had a lot of trouble getting my fins on in the surf, and Michael got a little battered around while waiting for me. We did make it out, finally, despite a strong current, and found some really awesome coral.

We were only able to stay out about 20 minutes or so, though --- Michael's mask kept fogging up, and I was still coughing a lot, which is not a good thing when breathing through a snorkel. Re-entering the cove wasn't much better, and Michael actually cut his foot open on a rock and sustained a few other scrapes from being washed up onto the shore. Poor baby. Although the guy at the surf shop had predicted we'd see turtles in the water, we didn't, but there was a gigantic one tucked into a little rock cave just to the side of our entry point. It was easily as long as I am tall, but it actually might well have been dead, since it wasn't moving and didn't seem to respond to the water splashing on its back feet. We didn't want to get close enough to check, although we did mention it to the surf shop guy when we returned our gear, just in case.

After that rocky (ha!) start, we drove a few minutes up the road to Makena Bay Beach proper and launched back in, much more smoothly this time, off of the glistening white sand. That was more like it. There was some awesome coral and fish just a little way out and to the right of the beach. Snorkeling off of Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef has kinda spoiled me for other locations, but I must say that this was pretty close.

I didn't know the names of any of the fish we saw, although I'm almost certain that one of them was the state fish of Hawai'i: the humuhumunukunukuāpua'a (got that?), or reef triggerfish:

We stayed out about an hour or so, then took a break on the beach with some sandwiches and the remainder of our coconut candy.

Never ones to be content with what we've already got, we drove to a third beach to try our luck in the water: Malu'aka, where we'd been a few days ago, but down at the other end. First, we rested up a bit in the sunshine...

...then took to the water for the third time, off the left side of the beach, to great success. Both here and at Makena Bay it was quite calm, with a little silt but generally good visibility, and at one point we just hovered in the water, watching and listening to the fish go about their business. There were more humuhumu...whatever fish here, and some catfish-looking ones too, digging in the sand with their whiskers.

We stayed out only a short while this time, then had a lie-out on the beach blanket and congratulated ourselves on a day well-spent.

On our way back to the surf shop to return our fins, we stopped along the road for a drinking coconut and for a quick detour to the southernmost end of the road at La Pérouse Bay. This was the site of the last volcanic eruption on the island and the landing point of the French explorer of the same name. As on Haleakalā, it looked like Mars.

We actually weren't supposed to have driven here. The rental car contract was screaming at us not to take the car past the end of the highway, although honestly I'm not sure why. The roads were super-narrow, but they were well-paved and all of the drivers were very polite about passing. It certainly wasn't any more dangerous than driving up the volcano, and quite possibly safer. Must be some old prejudice.

On our way back north, Michael couldn't resist stopping for a taco at this roadside stand:

They can cater your next party!

Then we continued up the coast to Lahaina, in search of a nice island dress for me, to go along with Michael's new Hawaiian shirt. I didn't have much luck at first --- the stuff was either too kitchy for words or just didn't fit at all --- but then stumbled on Katrina's Boutique, a little jewel of a clothing store run by a very knowledgeable and very pushy Israeli. She took a liking to me immediately and saw it as her duty to dress me up properly, taking care about issues of height and body type, all the while keeping up an endless stream of chatter. I ended up with two absolutely stunning dresses and had the best time I've had shopping in ages.

To celebrate my success, we took a stroll around old Lahaina and visited the famous banyan tree, which was planted in 1873 takes up an entire square:

That's ALL ONE TREE, folks.

Following our stroll, we stopped for drinks at one of the many bars along the waterfront and watched the sun set. How delightfully stereotypical.

The thing of it was that I hadn't yet seen a sunset on Maui, only sunrises, in general defiance of the usual tourist agenda. But that's just the kind of iconclast I am.

We went back to Pa'ia for dinner at the all-vegetarian Vietnamese restaurant Fresh Mint, which was absolutely delicious: summer rolls cut sushi-style, ginger "beef" and a "fish" hot pot. Then it was back to the cabin to watch the moon rise, clean out the cut on Michael's foot, and collapse.

Maui 2011: Solstice Sunrise at Mount Haleakalā

2011-03-20T21:33:00.000-04:00

In a fitting start to spring, we woke up nearly three hours before dawn, skipped breakfast, piled on every scrap of warm clothing we'd brought, and drove up a 10,000-foot dormant volcano to watch the sun rise.

The drive took about an hour and forty-five minutes. We passed through dramatic patches of wind and rain and clear along the way, followed by a very bright full moon. At one point, it was so misty and the moon was so bright that there was actually a rainbow --- or, I suppose, a moonbow --- cast in the raindrops by the light of moon, ghostly and drained of color against an ominously black backdrop.

We reached the park without incident, passing a few slowpokes along the way who couldn't handle the steep and windy mountain road. Our admission was still good from our visit to 'Ohe'o Gulch on Friday, so we went straight through. We arrived at the peak at around 5:45. It wasn't dark at all because of the bright moon, and the eastern sky was just starting to fade.

Full moon, bright enough to cast shadows

The summit viewpoint was already quite crowded with cars and people when we got there, and it was extremely windy. And I mean extreme: The weather at the Retreat was 70 degrees and calm, and on the summit it was closer to 37 (yes, Farenheit!) with sustained winds of 35 miles per hour and gusts up to 50. There wasn't really any shelter, since the ranger station was already packed with people, so we huddled at the east-facing rail with the rest of the crowd, trying and generally failing to stay warm. Eventually, Michael and I found a few rocks to perch on just behind the wall of the ranger station, where the wind was blocked somewhat but where we could still get a clear view.

As we watched, the sky gradually blossomed with pink and orange, and then burst into fiery red. The cloud layer that we'd driven through to get to the peak was glowing like hot coals. When the sun finally did rise, the crowd let out a gasp as one --- it was an absolutely magical moment.

People started dispersing soon after the sunrise, about 6:30, so Michael and I were able to edge our way into the ranger station and find a spot to watch out of the windows, rather than continuing to freeze at the rail outside. The rising of the sun had done nothing to help the weather, and it was still very cold and windy.

Despite that, I was feeling up for a hike, wanting to explore the summit area a bit more. But Michael was tired from the drive and (perhaps wisely) didn't want to wander too much in the cold, thin air. But we agreed that it would be a shame to leave the summit without at least trying the beginning of the trail down, so we followed it for the first few hundred feet beyond the main parking lot.

If the clouds hadn't been there, I could have believed that we were on the moon.

The landscape was dotted with craters from the volcano, and there was nothing green or growing as far as the eye could see.

After twenty minutes or so of having sand blown in our eyes and losing feeling in our toes, we went back to the car and drove down through the clouds to the main ranger station, at a more manageable 7000 feet.

Outside the ranger station, they'd planted a small grove of endangered silversword plants, which grow only on this mountain and nowhere else in the world. They'd been decimated by human activity and but are currently being reintroduced slowly along the trails.

When I say this plant was silver, I mean it. Not "silver" because it's kind of gray or kind of blue or kind of reminds one of silver --- no, actually shiny silver, like it had been dipped in mercury. Amazing.

We'd settled on the short Hosmer Grove loop trail to explore the area, and though it wasn't quite the 10-hour summit-to-sea kind of excursion that I'd been hoping for, it was lovely and just the right length. We saw a few different kinds of honeyeaters along the way, and when we rounded the corner at the first lookout point, there was even a woman playing a ukulele to complement the birdsong.

After finishing the walk, we stripped off four or five layers of clothing and drove back to the cabin for lunch and a well-deserved nap. Then we decided to explore the grounds a bit, to make up for the missed hiking opportunities this morning. However, as previously noted, the map that they'd given us was completely hopeless as a guide: letters mixed with numbers in the key, some letters used more than once, some letters appearing on the map with no explanation, and nothing actually laid out on the map in any kind of spatial relation to where it actually was in real life, as far as I could tell. Seriously lacking in representational accuracy.

So we just gave up and walked around. With no help from the map, we managed the find the trail down to the ocean and decided to give it a go. It was much more rugged than we expected, but we kept egging ourselves on until we got to the beach. It was hard going there for a while, hanging onto ropes so as not to lose our footing, which more than made up for the fact that we hadn't done more than a quick nature walk this morning.

The beach itself was entirely rocks (well, some washed-up coconuts and driftwood too), but there were a few inviting pools at the foot of the waterfall as it spilled out into the ocean. We'll have to find some other time to come back and have a swim, since today it was threatening rain. We watched the surf for a while and then climbed back up.

Weird thing of the day #1: We'd picked up some pinot to have as a before-dinner drink, and it came with this wacky environmentally-friendly closure called a Zork:

Not the easiest thing to get off, but it basically guarantees the wine won't be corked. I somehow can't see it catching on, though.

Weird thing of the day #2: There was a set of Native American tarot cards called The Sacred Path in one of the drawers in the room (right next to the Ram Dass books and under the whalesong CDs), so I decided (after a few glasses of the pinot) to give myself a reading. Check it out:

I think it means that I'm going to go on a great journey and encounter the mysteries of the universe in order to restore my faith in my goals. Or something like that.

Maui 2011: Maui Time

2011-03-19T22:24:00.000-04:00

Now this is what I'm talking about.

We're officially on Maui time today. We only barely managed to get up for the sunrise, which was clear and beautiful, and then rested in bed for a while. Despite this early promise of a clear day, it poured rain on and off for the rest of the morning, so we headed out as soon as we could.

Our first destination today was the Kahului Swap Meet. (Their fresh-from-1993 website should actually give you a good feel for it.) I love going to markets when I'm traveling, since they're one of the best ways to really get the pulse of a place. Unfortunately, this plan was nearly derailed by the fact that the Swap Meet had moved since our guidebook had been published, and there was nothing there when we got to the designated address. Luckily, Yelp was on hand to save the day, and we were soon headed in the right direction. As soon as I saw people wandering around with gigantic bags of popcorn, I knew we were in the right place.

We strolled through the stands for an hour or so, checking out the wares: nice jewelry, crap jewelry, Hawaiian shirts made in China, floral print dresses, art, woodcarvings, local produce, massages, spiritual healing (Did you know that lava rocks will align your quantum energy fields? It's totally true!), a little food. We picked up some handmade chopsticks and chopstick rests, but managed to resist the rest of the wares. But we did get one of the aforementioned gigantic bags of popcorn, and it was awesome: a little salty, a little sweet, a little charred, and super-crispy. Exactly the right sort of thing to accompany us to our next stop...

View Larger Map

Malu'aka Beach. At least, I think it was Malu'aka. There are so many beaches along the southwest coast that it's hard to tell which one actually corresponds to the tiny undesignated parking lot at which one is currently located. But heck, what does it matter what the place was called --- it was perfect. There was a little strip of shade under the trees at the back, a gorgeous spread of sand, sparkling blue water, and pod of playful humpback whales slapping their fins just offshore. We got a good view of the half-submerged snorkeling mecca of Molokini Crater, too:

We laid out for a bit, then took a dip (along with the car keys. Oops. The transponder seems to have survived all right, so no one mention it to the rental agency, 'kay?). I saw a dark shape in the water that I thought might be a sea turtle, but turned out to be just a rock. Drat.

After swimming a bit, we pulled up stakes and headed north up the road, seeking a little variety. Big Beach was too crowded to park at, so we ended up instead at the gorgeous and aptly-named Polo Beach, backed up against the tony resorts and fringed by beautiful people and equally beautiful scenery.

We swam a bit, but since it was very hot out by this point, we headed back to the Retreat before too long for showers and a bite of dinner. Rather than cooking in, we drove into Pa'ia for a bit of pre-dinner shopping and pizza at Flatbread Pizza. The shopping was much more of a success for Michael than for me; he picked up a lovely new Hawaiian shirt, the real deal, at a shop called Moonbow. But most of the women's shops were selling modern-style stuff and overpriced crap, and not the sort of more native apparel I was looking for. So I went empty-handed.

Dinner, luckily, was a roaring success all around. We got a large pizza, half mac-nut pesto with olives and half roasted-tomato marinara with Maui onions and goat cheese. Oh yeah. It poured rain on and off through dinner, drumming on the tin roof at the outdoor seating area, but it had the good sense to let up just as we came out and popped next door for dessert at the Ono Gelato Company.

The weather remained unsettled all the way back to the Retreat, with dark storm clouds scudding overhead and a bright full moon peeking out between them. I'm a bit worried about the weather, since we're planning to get up early tomorrow to drive up to the top of the dormant volcano to see the sunrise, but it should blow over by then. And if not, we're going anyway. I didn't come this far not to try it. So I'll need to sleep fast --- the alarm is set for 3:45.

Maui 2011: The Road to Hana

2011-03-18T22:24:00.016-04:00

Last night, I watched the sun set on my twenties. This morning, I watched the sun rise on my thirties.

Despite that auspicious beginning, the power went out as we were boiling water for tea, which made things a little awkward with the breakfast prep. But it came back on shortly thereafter and we were able to continue with our toast as planned.

Michael had suggested that we find a nice beach to lie out on today, but it's my birthday, and I wanted to have an adventure. So, today, we took the road to Hana --- 30 miles along the rugged east coast of Maui, peppered with 54 one-lane bridges. The plan was to do some hiking, bathe in some rock pools, and see some beautiful waterfalls. It's a trip that is definitely about the journey, and not about the destination.

View Larger Map

We packed sandwiches and a few snacks and hit the road around 8:15. Our guidebook had some great suggestions for places to stop along the way, and I'd picked out the ones that seemed most promising. In addition, we discovered that someone had left a Hana Highway self-guided tour CD from Boss Frog in our rental car's CD player. I was a little skeptical, and I wouldn't have paid money for it given that we already had the guidebook. But it was actually very informative about the route and its history, as well as the ecology of the east Maui rainforest and the local language, although the woman who was narrating the tour seemed to be trying a little too hard to pronounce the Hawaiian words accurately. Expanded my Hawaiian vocabulary by leaps and bounds, though.

In case you're wondering about the experience of the actual driving part of this drive, I must report it was more than a little awkward to try to listen to the CD narrate its recommended stops, keep an eye on the mile markers, and check the guidebook for its different set of recommended stops. Not to mention the fact that we were trying to agree on what to do next as well as enjoy the scenery without driving off the nearest cliff into the ocean. Plus, the mile markers along the side of the road did not seem to correspond to the actual road mileage as measured by our odometer. This is not a trip for the faint of heart. But it was awesome.

The Hana Highway officially starts in Pa'ia, so we'd essentially already driven the first section of it, which took us between Pa'ia and the Retreat. So we thought we'd have a good jump start on the day-trippers coming from farther east. But when we set off, there were quite a few cars on the road, and they quickly piled up into a bona fide traffic jam --- there was some paving work going on, and only one direction was getting by. I was a little worried that we were going to be stuck in this kind of bumper-to-bumper caravan all day, but things thinned out soon after the construction and the rest of the day was very peaceful and not at all crowded. Phew!

I intended to begin with a little hike at Waikamoi Trail (mile 9), but the parking area (that is, the tiny unpaved indentation off of the side of the winding, narrow road) was full when we got there. We skipped it and kept moving. It should be easy to get back there if we want to try it again sometime, given that the turnoff for the Retreat is at mile 3.

The next stop was more of a success: Haipua'ena Falls (mile 11.5), a quick hike through scrubby jungle off the side of the road.

Now this is what I'd come for. It was a picture-perfect swimming hole with a waterfall in the back, but I didn't do more than dip my toes. It was still overcast with a bit of a chill on the air, and damn that water was cold! Maybe later.

After pulling out, we made a few quick stops along the side of the road to snap photos...

view over taro fields at Ke'anae

Wailua Peninsula

...before making a legitimate stop at the Ke'anae Arboretum (mile 16.7). We parked on the side of the road outside the gate and walked in to see a huge variety of local and foreign trees and other plants. My favorite were the painted eucalyptus, whose bark peeled away in strips to reveal brilliant colors underneath:

The next few miles brought up a new waterfall around almost every bend, including Three Bears (mile 19.5)...

...and Hanawi (mile 24.1)...

...and Pua'a Ka'a (mile 22.5):

The guidebook recommended this as a swimming spot, and a few brave souls were taking that advice, but it was still just too cold to contemplate getting that wet and then sitting the car for the rest of the day. Maybe later.

Our next stop was the roadside stand at Nahiku (mile 28.8). For those of you picturing a highway rest area, you haven't got the feel for this trip yet:

The guidebook claimed that there was a smokehouse here that did smoked breadfruit, which both Michael and I were quite keen to try. But when we got there it was closed; apparently breadfruit was out of season. Sigh. But we did get some wonderful salty / smoky / sweet coconut candy from one of the stands and had a great chat with the woman who ran the operation. She told us that she has to keep all of her TV remotes in plastic bags because her hands are so saturated with coconut oil from her work that she would ruin them.

As we munched through our smoked coconut, we navigated to the next main stop at Wai'anapanapa State Park (mile 32). Here, we actually had to turn off the road to drive into the parking lot, under a dramatic canopy of trees:

There were two main attractions at Wai'anapanapa: the black sand beach and the lava tube. Never having been on a black sand beach before, I assumed that this would be a regular beach with regular sand that happened to be colored black. Guess I forgot that the reason the sand was black was because it was made of tiny volcanic rocks rather than ground-up seashells. This made it rather dramatic to look at, but not at all pleasant to walk on.

The nearby lava tube, though, was pretty cool. It was basically a cave made of hardened lava that lead into the ocean.

We made sure to wash out our flip-flops thoroughly before getting back to the car.

We reached Hana soon afterwards. Remember how I said that this trip was about the journey, not the destination? Hana is a complete anticlimax after the drama of the trip to get there. As far as I can tell, there's not much to see there, unless you're into random old churches. It was around noon at this point, so we skipped through the town and pulled into Hana Beach Park to have a quick picnic lunch.

On the way out of town, we made a quick stop at the Hasegawa General Store to see if we could find some fruit to supplement our lunch. It was indeed a general store, and they did seem to sell a bit of everything (lightbulbs, kitchenware, pasta, engine oil, sweatshirts, books...), but they were a bit light in the produce department. Luckily, we found a fruit stand just a bit down the road, and were able to buy some fresh mangoes and rambutans.

Once out of town, on the recommendation of both the guidebook and the CD, we turned off the main road to take a small loop road to one side, called Haneo'o (mile 50). Rather than going inland, this took us down along the water, allowing us to stop and have a stroll at the lovely Hamoa Beach.

The soft sand was very soothing after that lava tube.

From there, it was just a few more narrow and very windy miles to the southern entrance to Haleakala Park, the location of 'Ohe'o Gulch, sometimes called "the seven sacred pools." It should surprise no one to know that there are actually 24 pools, and none of them were ever sacred. The misnomer comes from a tourist ploy in the '70s.

Whatever they're called, though, they were awesome. I'd wanted to hike a bit to get to the upper pools, since I was worried about crowds, but Michael was worried about the time --- it was then 3:00, and we'd have to go back the way we came, which would be quite treacherous in the dark. So we struck out for the lower pools, which turned out to be the right move.

There were certainly other people around, but it didn't feel crowded. Heck, it didn't even feel touristy. One had to scramble quite a bit over the rocks to get to the pools, so everyone who was there was being very respectful. Plus, it was finally sunny and finally "later"! We tucked away our shoes and clothes, spread our towels over the rocks, and headed in.

What a great way to turn 30, and to wrap up a great day.

When we got back to the car, we turned around and headed back up the road to the Retreat. It's a shame that it's not actually possible to drive around the whole island, since that would have been the logical extension of our trip, but past the park there's a part that impassable for cars --- or at least labeled as such on the rental car agreement, and we didn't want to risk it.

There were fewer stops on the way back, of course, although we hit the General Store again to get some supplies for dinner, and the coconut candy stand in Nahiku for a drinking coconut and some more snackies. In addition to cutting the top off the coconut so we could drink the water, the woman cut it open when we were done so that we could scoop out and eat the tender, young coconut flesh. Best $3 I've spent in ages.

The trip back didn't take nearly as long, and was quite beautiful with the lowering sun shining through the trees and dappling the road with golden light. Back at our Temple, we showered, rinsed out our bathing suits, and made dinner (Gardein's mandarin "chicken" over rice noodles with bok choi). As if the day couldn't get any better, as we were relaxing in the sitting area, I spotted a gecko stuck to the glass of the main window:

The only sour note is that I'm still coughing, and more this evening than previously, but I will soldier on. Especially since tomorrow we're planning a relaxed beach day to counteract all of today's excitement.

As our Boss Frog CD would say, I'm pau (finished) for now --- see you in the morning.

Maui 2011: Last Supper

2011-03-17T23:12:00.000-04:00

Today is the last day of my twenties. I think I can say I made the most of it.

We started out this morning with another go at the waterfall trail. Actually, we started off by trying to find the trail down to the ocean, but given the fubar map and the fact that a half-hour of wandering ended us up on a construction site on someone else's property, we decided to save that for another day. So, back to the waterfalls. Now that we knew what to expect, the trail didn't seem as intimidating, although it was still muddy and covered over with spiderwebs, some quite large. We cut them aside with sticks and kept going.

But when we got to the bottom, it was so windy and overcast that swimming was the last thing we wanted to do. Plus, the wind kept tossing spray from the falls back in our faces, making the rocks that formed the entry to the pools very slippery. As I didn't feel like ending my twenties with an unscheduled dive over a waterfall, we decided to stay on terra firma and head back up to the Bamboo Temple.

On our way back, we bumped into the elusive Rafael, who said that the weather was due to clear in the early afternoon, so we might want to try again then. He also said that the overgrown bit of jungle we'd encountered that morning was indeed the correct trail down to the ocean. He said that he'd try to get it cleared. And he also said that there was going to be an earthquake in California on the 20th because the guy who predicted the New Zealand quake in Christchurch said so and because the pull of the moon was exerting a greater than average effect because it's so close to the Earth. Riiiiiiight.

We escaped before he could lay on any more bullshit and sought refuge from the chilly and windy Retreat down highway 365, towards Makawao. The Retreat is certainly in its own little world, in a variety of ways, but most markedly in terms of the weather --- a few miles down the road and things cleared right up, the sun came out, and the temperature rose 10 degrees. Much better! Plus there was no one spouting conspiracy theories about gravity.

We pulled over at a completely charming hiking trail at Waihou Springs, recommended by the guidebook.

The trail meandered through some lovely, pine-y forests planted by the government to determine what kind of wood grows best in this climate. If only all experiments were this delightful to wander in. We didn't make it all the way down to the springs --- too many switchbacks, and some ornery-looking wild chickens --- but the loop through the forest was quiet and peaceful and the air was clean and very fresh.

We stopped back in Makawao for some lunch at their general store, as well as a can of coconut water. I think I'm addicted. It's a very cute town; a little touristy, but mostly genuine. After checking out a few of the shops, we continued down the road through the lush green Upcountry and out to Surfing Goat Dairy, purveyors of fine goat cheese to Maui's restaurants and better food stores. It's a small operation but with a thriving little shop, where they were eager to peddle the wares. Not that we would have come so far without buying anything, plus they were giving tastes. We ended up with one that was aged with Provençal herbs and a fresh one marinated in olive oil and lemon zest, plus two goats-milk truffles, which didn't make it far past the counter.

We also got to meet the newest batch of kids, who were frolicking in an enclosure just beyond the gift shop, the girls wearing pink bows and the boys wearing blue. So cute. I'm not sure why they felt the need to de-horn them, though; it seems just cruel. :(

But we couldn't linger to find out, since it was getting late and we still had a two-hour drive to dinner. We headed back to the Bamboo Temple to shower and change. It was still very windy, making the shower extra-interesting, but it was sunny and clear rather than cloudy, as it was this morning. All in all, the weather promises to be much better from here on out, give or take a little radiation blow-off from Japan.

Despite the wind, I think we managed to make ourselves quite presentable:

We repeated our drive from yesterday, down through the center part of the island and up the west coast to the Plantation House Restaurant. We'd decided to travel so far for dinner because it was the only fancy dinner we'd planned to have, and because the restaurant is famous for using locally grown ingredients, and, most importantly, because they will substitue tofu in all of their fresh fish preparations. As their website says, "For vegetarian diners, our fresh fish preparations can be prepared substituting tofu for fish and leaving out any animal protein. We realize vegetarians are a growing segment of our dining guests, we would love to give you the opportunity to try them. Enjoy!!" With an attitude like that, how could we refuse?

It was awesome. We started off with a glass of champagne each and watched the sun set over the Pacific:

For appetizers, I had the cheddar-almond croquettes with roasted red pepper and tomato sauce, and Michael had a fricasse of local mushrooms with polenta. For mains, I had The Maui: pistachio crusted ~~fresh Hawaiian-caught fish~~ tofu on Maui onions, Kula tomatoes, and upcountry spinach, with Mediterranean couscous and virgin olive oil. Michael had The Nice: seared ~~ahi tuna~~ tofu on a salad of Kapalua pole beans, Olowalu heirloom tomatoes, fingerling potatoes, imported olives, shaved Maui onions and citrus oil. The wine was a really delicious Rex Hill Pinot Noir.

(As if anyone is actually interested in exactly what we ate and drank, but whatever, you've read this far, so why not get all the details? Besides, the tofu-cum-fish presentations were really good and are likely to become a part of our summer cooking routine, so now you can say you knew them when.)

Unfortunately, neither the rest of the dining room nor the dessert menu quite lived up to our expectations, or to the standards set by the dinner. We were easily the nicest-dressed people there, which was a feat considering that we'd packed very minimally, but everyone else in the place looked like they'd wandered in off the golf course without bothering to check whether their shirts were straight. Worse, the dessert menu was boring and uninspired --- key lime pie, bananas foster, brownie sundae. Why did I bother to save room for stuff I can get at a Jersey diner? So I decided not to order dessert.

But I got some anyway. A sharp-eared server had overheard Michael wishing me happy birthday, and brought us a brownie sundae with a candle in it. How sweet! A lovely start to what promises to be a great day tomorrow, as I cross the threshold into my third decade.

Maui 2011: Orientation

2011-03-16T21:49:00.000-04:00

The wind has not let up at all since yesterday --- today dawned cloudy and stormy with even a little chill on the air. I thought to myself, if this is the best that Maui can offer, I'd have been better off staying at home, without the jetlag and the humidity. But, of course, that didn't turn out to be the case.

Last night, we spent a little time getting to know our room, which is called the Bamboo Temple. It's a stand-alone structure on the grounds of the Retreat, encompassing a large bedroom and sitting area with a small kitchen and eating area off to one side.

It's actually quite an interesting feat of engineering: The whole thing is built entirely out of bamboo, and the owners claim that it's the only freestanding bamboo structure in the entire US. It's constructed roughly in a spiral pattern, like a nautilus, and there's an eight-sided skylight at the very top, over the bed:

It's decorated with all sorts of unusual Southeast Asian art, which does help the atmosphere but which was occasionally a bit odd:

Ganesh watches over the coffee maker

Freaky horse statue

Err...is this depicting what I think it is? Probably.

Quarter-to-sailboat already? Is this what they mean by "Maui time"?

The whole Maui Retreat, as you may have gathered, takes its eco-friendly status seriously. I mean, really seriously. All of the food scraps need to be taken to the worm box for composting. We were admonished not to flush our used toilet paper (!), because that can be composted too. They provided a small bin on the side of the toilet for temporary storage purposes. Well, we did want to get away from it all...

But it's plenty cozy and the bed was comfortable, and last night we were lulled to sleep by the sound of the palms creaking and the geckos chirping in the ceiling above. (Yes, geckos chirp. Don't worry, I didn't know that either.)

I'd left the front curtains open last night since our room faces east and I was hoping to see the sun rise. No such luck, though; it was cloudy. In fact, several storms blew in off the ocean as we were making breakfast, soaking the lawn in a torrential downpour, then leaving almost as soon as they'd arrived. Despite the rain lashing the windows, breakfast was very pleasant and quite delicious: freshly squeezed orange juice, a mango, and toast with goat cheese from Maui's own Surfing Goat Dairy.

After breakfast, we braved the shower. I say "braved" because the shower is located outside. It's almost threateningly rustic.

This turned out to be more of an adventure than I thought. Not because of the temperature, since it was perfectly warm and there was plenty of hot water, but because of the wind. It's a bit odd to have the shower stream constantly shifting on you while you're trying to rinse off, and doubly odd to have to take into account whether it's windy or not before deciding whether to get into the shower in the first place. But it was quite refreshing and there's something kinda nice about being able to look up and see the sky while getting clean.

Then we took a quick stroll around the grounds. We started off by trying to find the trail down to the waterfall that was prominently advertised, both on the website and in the materials in our room. This was easier said than done. The map that we'd been given did not seem to stand in any particular representational relationship to the real Retreat. Let me show you:

The text on the bottom says, "literaly [sic] feel your feet." Right.

See the bit in the lower left-hand corner labeled "Entrance"? That's where we came in last night. And it looks like continuing down that road will lead directly to the trail to the upper waterfalls, labeled "G." No such luck. There's nothing down that road. The trail actually starts from inside the compound grounds, somewhere to the back of the main house.

Also, as I'm sure you'll notice, there are various numbered structures on the list that don't appear on the map, various letters used on the map that have no corresponding label, and several letters and numbers that are used twice. Sigh. Like the "interns" that checked us in last night, I'm sure it was trying its best to be helpful, but it was, in actual fact, failing miserably.

We did eventually stumble onto the trailhead for the upper waterfall trail, but it turned out to be much steeper and more difficult than we anticipated, plus it was quite muddy from the rain. There were ropes on either side of the trail, which helped a bit, and we managed to get all the way to the pools that caught the upper waterfall before it cascaded over the larger, lower waterfall.

Upper waterfalls and pool

View over the lower waterfall

The pools did look quite inviting, but we decided to save our swim for a day that wasn't quite so windy and unsettled. Plus, we'd booked massages for that morning and definitely did not want to miss them.

After the massages and some lunch, we hopped into the car to do some exploring down on the west coast. We made our first stop just a few miles down the road at a roadside fruit a flower stand, where we bought a drinking coconut. The woman at the stand went at it with her machete, opening up the top so that we could suck out the coconut water:

We also bought a few pieces of pineapple and some fresh bananas for snacking. Then we drove across the narrow part of the island and around to the west coast.

View Larger Map

We started off by going all the way up to Kapalua, where we have dinner reservations for tomorrow, just to see how long it would take. (Answer: two hours. Yes, it's a small island, but the roads are windy and people drive really slowly. Plus, the most direct route between our lodging and the restaurant is marked as impassible with all sorts of red letters and stern warnings on our car rental agreement. Hrm.) Then we headed back down the west coast to see what there was to see.

By this point, it was blazing hot and sunny, and the jeans and sweaters we'd put on up at the Retreat to ward off the chill were getting very oppressive. We stopped at a beach along the side of the road to dip our toes in, our first tactile encounter with the Pacific Ocean. We also stopped briefly at Lahaina to stroll around, but again this was a bit less pleasant than it should have been because we really weren't dressed for the weather. We'll be back.

On our way back to the Retreat, we picked up a few more groceries and a mixed six-pack of the local brewing company's beer. Michael had the coconut porter --- not half bad. I had a double helping of herbal tea to soothe my poor sore throat (remember, I'm on vacation, that means I'm sick!). Then dinner, then some sleepy discussion about what to do tomorrow. We probably stick close to the Retreat since we'll need to leave around 4:00 to make our 6:00 dinner reservation on the other side of the island.

Maui 2011: The Arrival

2011-03-15T16:03:00.140-04:00

Those of you who read this blog might have noticed that Michael and I travel quite a bit. You may have been tempted to conclude from this fact that we take a lot of vacations. This would be a mistake. While we've done a few fun side trips, all of our travel for the past five years or so has been work-related in one way or another. Yes yes, I know, cry me a river...but we need to be clear on that so that you can understand how unbelievable it is that, for once, this spring, we took a vacation. Like, a real vacation. As in, we got on the plane without our laptops (!) for no reason whatsoever other than to relax. (Oh, and to distract me from my upcoming 30th birthday. Yipes!)

View Larger Map

All those frequent flier miles from all those trips to Australia came in very handy; we got the two of us from Philadelphia to Maui for a mere $20. Sweet.

We left very very very early this morning and watched the sun rise over the airport parking lot before taking our first leg to Denver. I'd hardly slept at all last night because of a fever...

(Okay, let me just stop there for a second. While I'm on a whinge about how we never get to go anywhere just for vacation and all that rot, I would also like it noted for the record that I almost always get sick on vacation. In fact, as far as I can tell, I only get sick on vacation. Remember that France trip from last year? Fever and chills. Tasmania? Head cold. Melbourne? Horrible nausea. My honeymoon? Don't even ask. It's like my body can manage to keep it together while it's being distracted by work, but as soon as I let my guard down and start to relax a little --- bam! So unfair. Anyway. Sorry to interrupt you there, let's get back to the program.)

...so I slept for pretty much that entire flight. We had a bit of lunch during our stopover, then boarded up again for the seven-and-a-half hour flight to Maui. That should seem like child's play after the trans-Pacific flights we're used to, but it's still a long damn time. Luckily, the movies were good (the True Grit remake and The King's Speech), and the flight crew provided their own little distraction in the form of the "Halfway to Hawai'i" contest. The goal was to calculate at what time we would pass over the halfway point between Denver and Maui, given the distance, time of departure, air speed, and headwind, which were announced by the pilot. Michael made the calculations on his napkin, but it's a good thing I was there to check his math: 3.46 hours is not the same as 3 hours and 46 minutes, pal. But with a little more fiddling we came up with the exact answer, which Michael submitted as his entry. I
figured that, because there was a slight headwind, we wouldn't make it to the halfway point in quite that time, so I added 7 minutes to the exact answer and turned it in. And I won! I was within 18 seconds of the true time, and collected a bottle of wine for my troubles. (The brochure for the contest said I'd win a ukelele CD, but this was definitely better.)

When we arrived in Maui, we picked up our rental car and headed up the coast to our --- well, I'm not sure whether to call it a hotel, really. Judge for yourselves:

Those are some pictures from the website of the place we stayed, the Maui Eco Retreat (also known as Kahua O’Malio, which means "a place of happiness and comfort"). Unlike the huge resort hotels, which are located on the south and west coasts of the island, the Retreat is on the north side, where actual people live --- presuming you're happy calling leftover hippies and hardcore windsurfers "actual people." The idea was to go off the grid for a while, avoid paying $400 a night for some nice but anonymous hotel, and actually get to know the island as the residents might. Also, we booked a room with a kitchen, so we planned to eat in quite a bit in order to save on food costs. Plus, after flying so much to get there, it felt good to stay in a place that ran on 100% solar power. So, literally off the grid.

Given that we had a kitchen (and a bottle of wine!) we stopped in the closest major town to the Retreat, Pa'ia, to pick up some groceries for the next few days at the Mana Food Market. The prices were horribly steep, but the selection was good and the crowd was pretty much what we expected: think Whole Foods after being squeezed through a Grateful Dead concert, with a side order of hemp. (Or is that redundant?) We also stopped at the overlook at Ho'okipa Beach, famed as one of the best and most dangerous windsurfing spots in the world, to get our first view of the ocean. Then it was on to the Retreat.

If you want to get a feel for how that part of trip went, you should really check out the Directions page on the Retreat's website. They kinda lost me at the part where you turn off the second dirt road onto the third dirt road and bear right at the statue of the Hindu goddess of music. Thank goodness Michael was driving.

Here's a view of the turnoff to the road (ha!) to the bamboo farm where the Retreat is located. They call it "the magical driveway." Right, because it takes some magic to find the damn thing. (Oh, and because they're stoned, but that should go without saying.)

After many a bump, we finally made it to a grassy area that seemed to qualify as the parking lot, but there wasn't anyone at the reception desk. More precisely, there wasn't any reception desk to speak of. There was just a lawn with some statues and a gazebo and a yellow house draped with Tibetan flags. The wind was whipping through the trees and kicking up dust, and the flags were snapping happily, but not a soul in sight. Okay...

As we were looking around in consternation, we were spotted by one of the "interns," a young man of indeterminate hair color who was somehow managing to be more bleary-eyed and confused that we were, despite the fact that we'd been flying for over twelve hours and driving for two on about six hours of non-restful plane-seat sleep. We told him we were there to check in and asked him where we could find Rafael, the owner, with whom we'd made the arrangements. He didn't know. He beckoned a second intern who offered the opinion that Rafael was, um, probably in his tent, but he could totally check on that for us. They both disappeared and returned a few minutes later without Rafael but with a middle-aged woman who had lost her reading glasses but was nevertheless trying to read a printout of our reservation that had been left on the breakfast bar in the house.

At some point during this transaction, the first guy, in a nice but misguided attempt to be helpful, suggested that we could just take our stuff down to our room and Rafael could, like, come find us later. Sure, we could do that...if only we knew where our room was. It took a minute for that one to sink in for him, but eventually he handed us a map of the property and showed us down a winding path behind the yellow house to a lower lawn, where we found our accommodations. Thanks! But we can't get the car or our luggage down that way, so could you...nevermind, he's gone.

To make a long story short (too late), we managed to find our driveway and our parking spot in spite of their help, and unloaded the groceries and our luggage. We unpacked, opened the wine, and cooked a simple pasta dinner. To my surprise, as we were settling in, Rafael did indeed stop by to welcome us and give us a brief orientation to the room. Then we had dinner and sat on the floor in front of the big picture window, watching the moon gild the palm fronds. It's been terribly windy all day, the room feels a bit like we're on a ship being tossed in a tropical tempest. Well, it may be unconventional, but it sure is lovely.

Baked Brie

2011-02-12T18:14:00.000-05:00

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

After the holidays, DiBruno Brothers was having an awesome sale on Brie --- they'd ordered more than people bought for their Christmas soirées, so we took advantage and bought an entire wheel. And, as everyone knows, there's only one thing to do with an entire wheel of Brie: slather it with hot pepper jelly, wrap it in puff pastry, and bake it.

Unfortunately, we hadn't counted on the fact that the Brie itself was fairly good quality, and hence leaked a good bit of oil when cooked. I think that most baked Brie recipes assume the use of crappy supermarket Brie, which probably holds together better, due no doubt to its inclusion of non-Brie like substances (stabilizers, fake rind, etc.). But our version was surely more delicious, if not more nutritious.

Still, it's not a stunt I intend to repeat on a regular basis, despite the ease of making it. For one thing, my arteries just couldn't deal. For another, we're unfortunately out of habeñero jelly. Summer can't come soon enough.

Panoramas

2011-01-24T13:47:00.000-05:00

Photo update! Here are two panoramic pictures from my winter trip to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. Click to make them big!

Red Rocks Canyon

The Grand Canyon with view of the Colorado River

Inch by inch

2011-01-23T16:58:00.000-05:00

It's the coldest day of the winter so far. To distract myself from the fact that I can't walk outside without losing feeling in my ears, I've been reminiscing about my garden. Just looking at these pictures is making me feel warmer; I hope they'll help you too.

Tomatoes!

This was the first year that I was able to have something resembling an actual garden. Because I live in the city, I did the whole thing in pots, with the help of a fantastic book on container gardening that I would highly recommend to anyone looking to start a similar project. Most books on container gardening assume that you're doing flowers and don't provide any advice on growing anything edible. I did plant a few flowers, but mostly I was interested in growing veggies and herbs, and this book was a great reference.

In the spring, I started with a few terra cotta pots of herbs on the first-floor deck, just off the kitchen for easy access.

left to right: cilantro, parsley, parsley, lemon thyme, rosemary, and lavender

As the months progressed, I added a few more herbs (mint, regular thyme, tarragon, and chives), and some snapdragons for color.

These were all started from seedlings, so I guess you can say I cheated a little. But the sunflowers I did from seeds, and they were extremely happy on my third floor deck, which faces southwest and hence gets a ton of sun. I just love sunflowers; they always make me smile.

I also did the shell peas from seeds, and these were far and away the most satisfying to watch. I started them inside in a little nursery container on my kitchen windowsill...

...then moved them outside to a proper container with lots of trellising once they were big enough. I fear that they were a bit overcrowded, but they managed OK.

There weren't quite enough to make spring pea risotto, as I was planning, but they did taste lovely in a light tomato cream sauce with mushrooms and fresh whole wheat pasta from the Italian market.

I also grew tomatoes and basil, of course, those home-gardening staples. The basil I bought at the garden center, but the tomato seedlings were a housewarming gift from my real estate agent and her boyfriend, who maintain what can only be described as a rooftop jungle of tomato plants. The basil was especially happy on the third floor, basking in the sun and producing enough bounty to keep our freezer stocked with several month's worth of pesto.

But nothing was as happy as the habeñeros. I started off with one measly three-inch-high seedling and ended up with a bumper crop over over fifty peppers.

They were so spicy that even Michael couldn't stand to use more than half of one to flavor an entire dinner. After quickly calculating that, at this rate, we would both be well into our retirement before using them up, we gave them to the cook at the pub on the corner to see what he could do with them. This turned out to be a really smart move. He made an insanely good batch of sweet-hot pepper jelly, part of which we served in our Thanksgiving meal, and the last of which is going on a baked brie later this afternoon.

Another big winner was the green garlic, which is so ridiculously easy to grow that it's a wonder I ever bought garlic shoots. Here's how: Take a head of garlic. Break it up into cloves. Push each clove root-side down into the soil. Don't worry about spacing them evenly or burying them too deep. Wait about a week. Snip off the green parts about an inch above the soil. Make green garlic soup with new potatoes. Feel happy.

I cut all of them over the summer and pulled up most of the cloves, but left some in the pot to go dormant over the winter. If all goes well, I'll have full heads of garlic, as well as more garlic shoots, in the spring.

I'm also overwintering some of the herbs on our windowsill in the kitchen. They're quite dried out by this point, and I fear that they're dead, although Michael (not generally known for his optimistic outlook or his knowledge of gardening) assures me that they've merely gone dormant. We'll see come spring.

We'll also see the results of my fall bulb planting frenzy, for which purpose I re-mulched the tree box on the sidewalk and tore out the plants in the window box. On a side note, I really should have been more careful with what I planted in the window boxes; I think I kinda forgot that plants, you know, grow.

May

October

Anyway, in their stead, I planted bulbs for purple and white crocuses, since they start coming up in the very early spring, right around my birthday. I also planted bulbs for purple hyacinths and for daffodils, to give some color contrast. I can't wait until they start sprouting --- not only because that will mean that it's spring again, and not only because that will mean that it's my birthday, but because it will mean that the damned squirrels haven't eaten them all.

Bonus video! John Denver on The Muppet Show, singing "The Garden Song." Aww!

TTPMO: Kitchen unitaskers and the people who think they need them

2011-01-12T18:11:00.002-05:00

I was in a reputable national-chain housewares store the other day, and in my search for a set of airtight containers in which to store my rice and beans, I found myself confronted by what can only be described as a Wall of Gadgets.

There's one of these in every reputable national-chain housewares store, and even in some not-so-reputable or not-so-national ones. They are in. They are hip. They are, by and large, a useless waste of space.

So yes, okay, everyone needs kitchen tools. You've got to have your wooden spoons, a nonstick spatula or two, a set of measuring cups. But the rest of it? I mean, have you seen the sort of crap they're trying to sell?

Take this thing, for example. It's an avocado pitter.

Don't ask me why someone would need a tool that is designed specifically for slicing an avocado. I don't know (though it is described as "sensational" on the website). But you can own one for the low low price of $14.95, and then it can sit in your drawer, unused and forgotten, until that one afternoon you decide to make guacamole, at which point you can't find it anyway because it's wedged in the back of the utility drawer, between the garlic press and the corn-on-the-cob holders.

Speaking of garlic presses, they're also on my list of "kitchen unitasker gadgets that everyone thinks you need but you really don't," and they provide the perfect opportunity to define what I mean by "unitasker." Here, have a look:

What makes this a unitasker, obviously, is that it does just one thing. It mashes garlic. (In fact, it mashes garlic into an unrecognizable paste that hardly can be said to resemble the original product, but that's another story.) And that's all she wrote.

But, you object, most things in the kitchen just do one thing. I mean, spoons are only for stirring, and knives are only for cutting --- aren't those unitaskers too? Well, no. Spoons are for stirring, but you can stir anything with a spoon. And knives are for cutting, but you can use them to cut a huge variety of things. Unitaskers are different: they only do one thing to one type of thing. Put differently, kitchen unitaskers match one verb with one noun. A garlic press is only for pressing, and it only presses garlic. You just can't use it for anything else. (Well, maybe Play-Dough.) An avocado pitter is only for pitting, and only for use with avocados, and you can't use it for anything else. Spoons and knives do have their own proprietary verbs (stir, cut), but you can match these with any number of nouns.

With that in mind, consider the peanut butter knife.

They're calling it a "multi-purpose spatula spreader," but we're not fooled. Any time you have to add the words "multi-purpose" to the name of a kitchen gadget, you've already lost the unitasker battle. This thing is sold under the pretense that it's all you'll ever need for making peanut butter sandwiches. You can spread your peanut butter and jam with the broad side, and then you can cut the sandwich with the serrated side. Ingenious! Except that you already have a butter knife and a regular knife in your kitchen, which do the job just as well, and these jokers are trying to get you to cough up an extra $40 just for the novelty factor. Thanks but no thanks, guys --- keep your unitasker (and your pyramid scheme) out of my kitchen.

And that's not all. There are little silicone cups you can use to poach eggs. There are apple slicers, and onion slicers, and egg slicers, and pineapple slicers, and mango slicers (note: these are all different tools). There's a little hand-held guillotine thingie that's designed only for snipping the lids off of soft-boiled eggs, which is currently at the top of the running for Most Useless Unitasker 2011. There's even something called The Bacon Genie, about which the less said, the better.

My point is not that these things are useless. I'm sure that they all do their respective single jobs very well. My point is that you just don't need them. Take the panini press, for example.

I bet it's great at turning out pressed sandwiches. (It's also great at being expensive and taking up lots of counter space when it's not in use, but that's another story.) And it would be great if you worked a little café or something where there's no stovetop. But you don't work at a little café, and you do have a stovetop, and you can get exactly the same effect by heating two frying pans and nesting them with the sandwich in between. (You do have two frying pans, don't you?)

To generalize, what really pisses me off about these dumb little single-use gadgets is that everything that you can do with them can be done without them. Need to mince herbs? You could get an herb mincer! Or you could just use your knife. Need to chop nuts? Yes, you could get a nut chopper! Or you could probably just use your knife. Need to cut the kernels off of an ear of corn? Don't look now --- there's a corn stripper! (Sounds deliciously dirty, doesn't it?) Or you could really just learn to use your damn knife. And while you're doing that, you could try tucking your fingers back so that your fingernails protect your knuckles from the blade, and throw out that stupid finger guard.

Now, don't get me wrong. I really like some of these gizmos. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I even own some of them. (Not the avocado pitter.) But what really pisses me off is the attitude that leads to their existence. It's the people who think that the more of these you have, the better cook you'll be. Whoever dies with the most, wins!

I can't currently find the words to express how insanely stupid this attitude is. But I did once, a few years ago, while on line at the omelette station at a friend's bridal shower. The cook was frying onions (badly, I should note) and chatting with the women ahead of me on line. "You know what makes a great cook?" he asked, and then answered his own question: "It's the tools. You see this frying pan? It's a great frying pan. It's really the tools that make the chef."

I didn't say what I was thinking, since I knew better than to start a row with some idiot CIA-dropout line cook working the brunch shift at a bridal shower. But if I weren't the meek, well-raised young lady that I am, I would have said, "Really? You think that if you can't cook, you'll get better if you have a better frying pan? You think that what makes Thomas Keller a culinary genius is that fact that he has the right knives? You think that there are kitchens full of two-star Michelin chefs moaning about how they could have gotten another star if only they'd used the right brand of food processor?"

Ugh.

As Alton Brown likes to say, there's only room for one unitasker in my kitchen, and this is it:

Saturday morning muffins

2011-01-08T16:04:00.002-05:00

It was snowing when we woke up this morning, so we decided to make a breakfast treat: blueberry muffins.

The setting:

The wet stuff (melted butter, soy milk, one egg):

The dry stuff (flour, a bit of cornmeal, sugar, cinnamon, baking powder, salt), plus blueberries:

Assembly:

I honestly don't know why we don't do this more often, seeing how ridiculously easy they are to make. The batter comes together in less than the time it takes to heat up the oven, and then you can just pop them in and ignore them for half an hour or so.

The hardest part by far is waiting five minutes for them to cool after they come out of the oven.

Navel-gazing

2011-01-05T14:59:00.001-05:00

It's the beginning of a new year, and that means that it's time for a little self-reflection here at IPoL headquarters. I've been doing this blog-a-day thing for two months now, and I've learned a few things that I'd like to share with y'all.

First, on the whole, I've enjoyed it. It's been a fun challenge to come up with something to post every day. Sure, some days have been easier than others, and some posts have certainly worked better than others, but generally it's been a good experience. I've also noticed that it makes me look at the world a little differently. I'm no longer just experiencing things as they happen, I'm also constantly observing and culling for shareable bits and putting together post drafts in my head. It's a new way of looking at the world, which I sort of like, but which I also sort of need a break from.

That leads me to my next point, which is that I don't plan to keep it up. I gave myself two days off this week and it was really nice not to have to worry about finding time to get to the computer to bang out a post. I enjoy blogging, but I will probably be a more sane person if I only do it once or twice a week or so, and not every day. Though there's something quite thrilling in seeing my post dates marching forward, one day at a time, the overall pacing is just a little too fast for me. I like doing posts that are a bit longer and more involved, and it's hard to do that under this kind of time pressure.

Third, I've had a bit of chance to think about why I'm doing this. Why bother blogging at all? Do I really think that anyone is interested in my incoherent ramblings about this and that? (Okay, anyone other than my mom.) There are a lot of strange, pedestrian, small-minded blogs out there --- a curious click on the "Next Blog" link at the top of this page once led me to a site that chronicled all of one woman's shopping trips, including how much she spent out of her pocket versus how much she saved with coupons. Seriously. But do I really think that what I'm doing is any more interesting, or less inane, than that? Well, no. No one should be any more interested in my Thanksgiving menu than in her most recent trip to CVS. Then why do it?

The answer is remarkably simple: I do it for me. I don't particularly care if anyone ever reads what I write here. Really, I don't. What's important to me is that I have some space to express myself, to do a little writing that isn't related to work, to try out ideas in way that has some kind of published finality and also some kind of you-won't-find-it-if-you're-not-looking-for-it privacy. If anyone else finds this stuff amusing or entertaining or thought-provoking, that's a bonus, but it's not the point. I do seem to have somehow attracted one follower (Hi, follower! Glad you're here!), but otherwise I am not holding out any hope of more than, say, a dozen people ever taking more than a passing interest in this tiny corner of the web.

And that's fine with me. I just like that I have a tiny digital room of my own, and I intend to keep inhabiting it whenever and for however long the spirit moves me.

Zoom and doom, part 3

2011-01-01T22:19:00.000-05:00

It's gonna be a happy new year after all.

After a little too much research and less-than-calm contemplation, Michael I decided that our time and sanity are worth more than a few hundred bucks --- especially since those bucks are attached to a brand-new zippy red car with a sunroof and a smile. We took the final offer from the dealer and signed the paperwork this afternoon, and finally can put the whole sorry incident to bed. Phew!

Now all I have to figure out is what to name it. Suggestions?

Zoom and doom, part 2

2010-12-31T18:11:00.000-05:00

We've progressed from "psychological warfare" to "middle school dating" --- which, I suppose, is pretty much the same thing.

I did a good bit of hand-wringing last night and this morning, not to mention lots of mucking with the cars.com website, looking at pictures, trying to price out some good options. Plus we were still playing a waiting game with the Mazda dealership, hence the allusion to middle-school dating: Will he call? Should I call him? Will that make me look to eager? But then what if he doesn't call at all? How will he ever know I like him? And then I swore I wouldn't think about it at all and just put it aside. And then I thought about it anyway, all the more obsessively. Oh, the drama.

Then I started flirting with a different car just to make me feel better about possibly not getting the Mazda: the Ford Fiesta. We test drove one this morning, in electric lime green (ew).

It handles really nicely and gets great gas mileage. Michael was a big fan, but I didn't feel quite as comfortable driving it. Perhaps my expectations had already been set, but the steering wheel felt too thick for my hands and the seat didn't work with my short legs as well. Oh, and just to push the middle-school drama quotient to the max, the Ford dealership that we went to was attached to the Mazda dealership, under the same name. So I could cast longing glances across the parking lot and wondering if they were thinking of me.

Finally I broke down and called them after driving the Fiesta to see if they would lower the price at all, which they wouldn't. So we priced out some options on the Fiesta and headed for the grocery store. To be continued.

Oh, and happy new year.

Zoom and doom

2010-12-30T16:09:00.001-05:00

I'll put it as plainly as I can: Buying a new car sucks.

Yesterday, we went out looking at our three top contenders: Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic Hybrid, and Mazda 3. After visiting a few too many dealerships and enduring some tense test drives with weary old salesmen, we zeroed in on the Mazda. It's a sleek, sporty little car that gets just as good gas mileage as the Corolla but is way more fun to drive. As one of the Mazda dealers put it, "it's a performance company," which I guess is sales-speak for "you won't feel like you're driving a rental car."

We'd even identified the individual car we wanted to buy: a dark red 2010 model, still new but unsold, with a sunroof and kicked-up speakers. We hadn't gotten a chance to drive that particular car since it was only put into play as we were leaving the dealership, but the sales manager at that location gave us a decently good price for it that we kept simmering on the back burner. Later in the afternoon, as we were winding down for the day, we called him back to check that number, and he'd lowered it by $500.

So I figured we were on a roll. We knew that they wanted to move it off their lot, since they were now trying to sell their new 2011s, and he'd already shown a willingness to drop the price. It was still a bit higher than what we wanted, so we planned to visit there first thing this morning, test drive the actual car, and get it down a little lower so that we could seal the deal.

The first part of the plan went fine. They had a little trouble locating the car on their lot since they'd had to shift around their inventory due to the snow, but once they did we were able to take it onto the highway and test out the stereo system. It's a great little car, and handling is really nice.

But things didn't go quite our way in the negotiations. The offer from late yesterday was still on the table, but when we tried to get them to lower it a bit, the sales manager got huffy about his bottom line. We'd done enough research by this point to know what a fair price was, and we knew that he could possibly meet us halfway if he wanted to. So we asked him to make us a counter-offer, but he refused. We walked out.

So now it's not so much "car shopping" as it is "psychological warfare." I don't feel bad for walking out when we did, since we really don't want to pay the higher price, but I'm bummed. I know that it's all in the game, and Michael is convinced they'll call back and give us a better number, but I'm not so sure. Guess I wasn't cut out for this kind of hard-nosed negotiation; I get too attached. And I'm sure that we'll end up with a great car no matter what happens. But it's hard not to feel disappointed. So I'm going to put it out of my mind for now and focus on happier things --- like my super-stretch circus class tonight, at which I'm finally going to get myself to do a split. At least some things are under my control.

UPDATE, 9:15 pm: As I predicted, the Mazda dealer has not called us back. But I'm in better spirits after my workout (though my poor hip flexors are not!), and I've almost let it go. Almost. Meanwhile, Michael, being the ever resourceful Googler that he is, has come up with some other options for us to test-drive before we resign ourselves to the ultra-sensible and utterly practical Corolla. There's the new Ford Fiesta, and a few small VWs that seem to get good gas mileage (including, improbably, the New Beetle), and we haven't even looked into the Hyundai Sonata or whatever. Although I was hoping to have this wrapped up by the new year, I think I'll be OK if it's not. At least now we'll have more of a chance to try out our options without feeling rushed.

How the other half lives

2010-12-29T21:04:00.000-05:00

In style, baby!

Michael and I very much enjoyed our temporary stint in first class yesterday --- not enough to want to pay for it, mind you, but we weren't about to complain about the automatic upgrade on United's dime. We got right to the front of the check-in line (though that didn't do us any good since the people in front of us were taking forever to sort out some passport snafu) and right to the front of the security line (that definitely did us some good because the regular line looked like Disneyworld on a Saturday in the summer). Immediately on boarding, we were served water --- in real glasses! You know, like, they were made out of glass. Like, we were able to drink water like human beings and not like those disposable peons in so-called "economy class." Wow.

A flight attendant took our food and drink orders as soon as they were up and about after takeoff. We ordered red wine, which again came in an actual glass, and was served with a little cup of toasted nuts.

Also, they came around and refilled our glasses about once every ten minutes the entire flight, so we were pretty well lit by the time we got to Chicago for our transfer. Now that is the only way to fly.

The only snag was that they didn't have any vegetarian food for us, because the upgrade request had been processed too late. The regular menu options were no good --- a toasted ham and cheese sandwiches or a salad with sliced chicken breast. I suppose I could have picked the ham off the cheese, or the chicken off the salad, but I really don't like doing that. Actually, I suppose if I really were getting into this first-class thing, I would have ordered one of the flight attendants to do it for me. Too late now. They served us the soup, a southwestern vegetable bisque, which they assured us half-heartedly was made with veggie broth. I'm not sure I quite believed it, but it certainly didn't taste like it had chicken broth in it, and I can almost always tell after nearly 10 years of being vegetarian. It was fairly tasty, and again the ability to eat with actual silverware off of porcelain, instead of plastic, went a long way towards making me feel relaxed and well-looked-after. It's the little things. Like the yummy warm chocolate cookie we got for dessert.

We were also treated to a beautiful view of the Rockies out the window. I suppose I could have seen from the back of the plane, but it wouldn't have felt quite as nice. Well, maybe it would have, but I was three sheets to the wind by this point and that seemed to help me appreciate it more.

Otherwise, it was a blessedly uneventful trip, and we were able to stay quite serene --- unlike everyone else in O'Hare who had been stranded due to the snowstorm or who had been dealing with irate stranded passengers. But we made our connection with time to spare, grabbed a flatbread vegetable pizza for dinner, and snoozed through the next leg to Philly.

And here we are, back at home, hopefully to wrap up the car saga tomorrow or the next day. Stay tuned!

End of vacation

2010-12-28T12:29:00.002-05:00

[Birthday shoutout to my baby brother Josh, who turns 23 today --- yikes!]

Yes, sadly, it's true --- my week of vacation in Las Vegas has come to an end, just in time to coincide with the re-opening of the East Coast airports after a huge snowstorm. So the bad news is that we might hit massive delays and/or get stranded in Chicago. The good news is that we were upgraded to first class for both legs because we have ridiculous amounts of frequent flyer miles due to several trips to Australia. I'm kinda excited to see how the other half lives, not least because it means we can skip to the head of the damn security line.

Since I'm going to be traveling all day and haven't really got the presence of mind for a full blog post, in lieu of my trademark inane babble I offer to you a Wordle visualization of my last few blog posts. Oooh...pretty colors...

Car shopping

2010-12-27T22:27:00.027-05:00

We've been looking around for new cars, since the insurance company decided that my darling baby-blue 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid (aka Sally-Anne) was a total loss. Boo. As Michael points out, ever ready to see the silver lining, now we can get something that will be a bit newer, a bit safer, and have a few more of the options that we want.

We've test-driven a few cars to this point: a Toyota Corolla, a newer model Honda Civic Hybrid, a Nissan Sentra, and a MINI. (Cue Sesame Street music: "One of these things is not like the other..."). Obviously, we're going to end up with something small, sensible, and Japanese that gets good gas mileage. But even after having narrowed it down that far, it's complicated. Do we want a sunroof? If so, how much extra are we willing to pay for it? How many miles per year would be reasonable on a used car? Does it have an auxiliary audio jack so that I can hook up my iPod? Or a telescoping steering wheel to accommodate my short legs? How about curtain airbags? Can we get top-end options without the leather seats? And...er...what the heck else should we be asking about?

The thing is, neither of us have ever shopped for a car before. Michael's previous cars were all hand-me downs, and Sally-Anne was a gift. It's one of those life milestones that I thought we could put off for a while, but one f'ed up highway entrance later, here we are. We've done a ton of research, but none of it really seems to help all that much. For instance, just this afternoon, we took out a new Civic Hybrid for a test drive. This car was a top contender before we drove it, and afterwards, it still was. I have no idea what exactly is going to break the symmetry, but our goal is to find something before the end of the year when we can presumably get some better financing deals. I'll keep y'all posted.

In the meantime, I'll just note that this has been rather stressful, but in a strange way. I desperately miss my old car and everything else seems to suffer in comparison, plus the whole process only serves to remind me about the accident and the fact that I've stupidly cost us the price of our deductible and a lot of headache. But that was expected, and I'm getting over it. No, the strange part is that the stress comes in fits and starts. Suddenly, I'll think it's the best idea to spend an hour obsessively checking websites for statistics and prices and options, and then, just as suddenly, I'll ignore the whole thing and just presume that it's pretty much settled. And then something will set me off again and I'll haunt cars.com until Michael reminds me that we're almost certainly getting a Corolla anyway, so I'll back off, but then he'll ignore his own advice and start dithering about which dealership to go to. As I said, strange. But hey, that's par for the course for us.

The Grand Canyon

2010-12-26T15:19:00.000-05:00

Remember that 880 foot overlook at the Hoover Dam from the other day? Turns out that that was just practice for this:

On Christmas Day, we drove two and a half hours to the west rim of the Grand Canyon, to a recreation area managed by the Hualapai Nation. It's called (predictably) Grand Canyon West. The real draw here, besides the opportunity to see stunning views of the Canyon, is the Skywalk: A U-shaped observation platform that juts out of the bedrock over the edge of the Canyon and provides stunning views of the rocks and the Colorado River.

The catch? Its floor is made of glass.

After we wound through line in the main building, which is still just plywood and raw steel beams even thought it's been open for over three years, a guide provided us with what looked like hospital booties to cover our shoes. I presume this was so we didn't get messy footprints on the glass. Then, we stepped out onto the platform.

The edges of the Skywalk, closest to the rail, were made of opaque glass and there were occasionally metal plates in the center for those visitors who needed a break, but the rest of it was crystal clear and looked out straight down to the canyon floor, 800 feet below. I took it at a bit of a fast walk so that I would force myself to make it to the outside edge, and looked out.

It was amazing. The view was spectacular, and the illusion was almost complete. If it weren't for the occasional scratch in the glass and the seams where the pieces were put together, it would have looked just like I was flying, suspended in the air over the canyon floor. Even though I knew I was perfectly safe (Just look at those fat tourists over there! If it's holding them, it can hold me!), I couldn't stop a hot little twinge in my stomach every time I looked down. Something in my brain was saying, "Hey, you're fine! It's made of a million tons of steel and anchored 46 feet deep into the bedrock, so just look around and have fun." But something in my body was saying "Aaarrrgggghhhh!!! I'm gonna fall!!!"(1)

It was totally fun.

They wouldn't let us take cameras onto the Skywalk because they wanted to charge us $30 for the photos that they were taking, so I can't share any of my own images from up there. They really have this tourism thing figured out. Oh well.

I did get lots of good pictures from a different site, Guano Point, formerly a guano mine. (Why anyone needs to mine bat shit is beyond me, but the view was great.) Because it's a point, it jutted out into the canyon a bit, and we climbed to the top of a high promontory to take in the 360-degree vista.

All in all, it was a great trip. Sure, the tickets were quite expensive and the food was overpriced and not very veggie-friendly and we had to take their shuttle bus to get anywhere, but the experience was completely worth it. The drive to get there was really dramatic too, through forests of Joshua trees, with water-carved red rocks on all sides.

Although I was hoping for a sighting of some bighorn sheep, I had to settle for a few wild longhorn steer instead.

(1) Tamar Gendler, a friend and professor of philosophy, calls this kind of experience "alief," to contrast with "belief." Alief happens when I believe one thing, intellectually (I'm perfectly safe), and yet viscerally feel that something else is the case (I'm gonna fall!). It's a great descriptor for this kind of situation, or for any other time when there's that kind of tension between the mind and the body.

The Atheist Christmas Carol

2010-12-25T08:50:00.001-05:00

music and lyrics by Vienna Teng

it's the season of grace coming out of the void
where a man is saved by a voice in the distance
it's the season of possible miracle cures
where hope is currency and death is not the last unknown
where time begins to fade
and age is welcome home

it's the season of eyes meeting over the noise
and holding fast with sharp realization
it's the season of cold making warmth a divine intervention
you are safe here, you know now

don't forget
don't forget I love
I love
I love you

it's the season of scars and of wounds in the heart
of feeling the full weight of our burdens
it's the season of bowing our heads in the wind
and knowing we are not alone in fear
not alone in the dark

don't forget
don't forget I love
I love
I love you

Across the bridge

2010-12-24T15:36:00.000-05:00

It's been another lovely day here in sunny, scenic, Las Vegas --- mostly because we spent a good chunk of it not in Las Vegas. Today, we drove to the newly-opened Hoover Dam bypass bridge, which connects Nevada to Arizona. It's the longest concrete arch in the country, and the second-highest.

We strolled along the pedestrian walkway, 880 feet above the river, with spectacular views of the Hoover Dam:

But we obviously couldn't get a real view of the bridge itself, being on top of it. For that, I turned to the interwebs:

Pretty cool, eh?

Finally, on the way back into town, we stopped at the Lake Mead overlook and met a well-camouflaged little furry friend:

Bonnie Springs

2010-12-23T19:52:00.000-05:00

It's winter break, and I'm in Las Vegas. Most people assume that this means I will be gambling, dancing, drinking, and generally having a debauched good time. But the reality is that I'm staying with my in-laws.

However, I am having a good time. We had dinner last night at a fabulous and very veggie-friendly Indian/Tibetan restaurant, and this morning we went a little crazy in Whole Foods, picking up ingredients for the weekend's dinners as well as some odd snacks that caught our fancy (whole fried okra sticks?).

We just got back from a nice jaunt outside of the city, into the mountains by Red Rock Canyon, to Bonnie Springs Ranch. It's like a tiny little Wild-West-themed amusement park, but without the rides and with a small-gauge railroad and a completely cheesy "general store," which features melodramas every half-hour.

The real draw, though, is the petting zoo, which features all sorts of animals from the area and beyond:

The zoo was founded by Bonnie sometime in the '50s, and since she's developed a reputation for adopting strange strays, her cages have filled up with exotic chickens, albino peacocks, angora rabbits, ravens, tame coyotes, and some lamb-sized critters that looked like oversized guinea pigs. (I think they were capybaras, but I didn't pay to get into the petting zoo proper so I couldn't read the sign.)

There was even a wild burro on the road on our way up, begging for food from the passing cars:

Oddly (for Vegas), it had been raining for a few days before we arrived. All of the springs at the ranch were running, and the cloud formations over the red rocks were spectacularly dramatic:

Still to come: maitake mushrooms for dinner, celebrating Grandmom's birthday, and shopping for a new car (sigh).

Airline lingo

2010-12-22T21:08:00.000-05:00

I took a flight today, and was reminded at almost every turn of the immortal words of George Carlin: "Something else we have in common --- flying on the airlines, and listening to the airline's announcements, and trying to pretend to ourselves that the language they're using is really English."

I can't possibly do justice to his brilliant observations on the topic, so here he is to do it himself:

But I couldn't help but notice that there's (at least) one linguistic quirk that escaped his notice, and hence his scorn. Luckily, I am here to fill this need.

Have you ever noticed how often airline personnel use the helper verb "do"? It's crazy, and now that I've pointed it out, you will see it everywhere. "We do hope you've had a nice flight." "We do apologize for the delay." "We do ask that you keep your seatbelt securely fastened." What the hell is this? Is there any reason for anyone to speak this way?

I know, this isn't technically grammatically incorrect. The verb "do" is always there, even if it's not spoken: "I cook" is really a paraphrase of "I do cook," and the helper verb moves around if you're asking a question ("Do you cook?") or forming a negative ("I don't cook."). So it's not that these flight attendants or pilots or gate agents are doing anything wrong, really.

But they are doing something weird. Why bother inserting an extra word when the sentence is fine, even better, without it? Why say "We do recognize that many bags look alike" when "We recognize that many bags look alike" is a much more natural phrasing? Maybe because they think it sounds more polite? It's true that longer phrasings often are taken to be more polite, so maybe that's what they're going for. Even still, this "do" thing has seriously gotten out of hand. If I think of it, I'll keep a tally on the way back and see exactly how much the "do + verb" phrases outnumber the bare verb phrases.

In the meantime, I do note that I do appreciate your patronage of this blog, and I do apologize if the jokes aren't always funny. I do recognize that you have a choice of blogs and I do hope that you will choose IPoL again for all your language-snark needs. I do wish you a happy holiday.

Solstice Eclipse

2010-12-21T14:32:00.001-05:00

9:35 pm - Following a lovely Indian dinner, we decide to stay up all night instead of going to sleep and setting an alarm.

10:07 pm - Dishes are done, except for the electric wok, which has developed a nasty patina of okra slime. I leave it in the sink to soak and head for the computer.

11:10 pm - Hot shower, following which I put on my Icebreaker long johns and camisole and two layers of sweaters.

12:03 am - We head for the pub. A friendly beagle out for a late walk nips playfully at our heels.

12:05 am - Our entrance doubles the number of paying customers at the pub. I get a hearty handshake and a Young's Double Chocolate Stout from Ben, the bartender.

12:30 am - The other two customers clear out and the remaining staff joins us at the bar. We engage with Nick, one of the cooks and a senior at Temple, on vegetarianism and public health.

12:45 am - Sean, off-duty bartender, wanders over to lament the recent loss of his 70s porn-star mustache due to a morning of overzealous trimming.

12:52 am - Ben talks me into an additional half-pint of the Young's.

1:37 am - We pay the tab and head for home, leaving the staff to lock up. Hugs all around.

1:41 am - Someone thought it would be a good idea to eat the rest of our half-full bag of Trader Joe's White Cheddar Corn Puffs. I'm not saying it was me, but I'm not saying it wasn't, either.

1:46 am - Wearing coats and bedroom slippers, we stretch out on the roof deck. The moon is at its brightest and fullest, now starting to fade a bit on the left side. The air is crisp and bitterly cold, and the occasional breeze makes us shiver.

1:52 am - Michael complains of cold toes. I pop inside to grab some spare blankets from the guest room and spread them out for us on the deck. The shadow has spread across a quarter of the moon.

2:03 am - We take a quick respite indoors while we wait for totality. I flop onto the bed, still in my coat, to read a few more pages of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

2:15 am - Back outside on the deck, we are joined by our next-door neighbors standing on their roof and craning their necks at the sky. Michael and I each take a blanket and bundle up. I find a relatively sheltered spot on the stairs and rest my head on the railing.

2:39 am - The moon has turned an ominous shade of rust-red, except for a bright white sliver on its right edge. We watch as this, too, is overcome by the shadow.

2:46 am - I am in some danger of losing feeling in my fingertips. The neighbors pack it in to catch a few winks before the peak, at 3:17 am.

2:50 am - Michael and I follow suit, giving one last glance at the now blood-red moon, hanging just above the constellation Orion, like a poorly-struck coin or a wound in the sky.

2:55 am - Bed.

5:20 am - I wake up without expecting to, and use the opportunity to dash outside and check on the state of things. Dawn is already brushing the eastern sky, and the moon has returned to full. It is the shortest day of the year. From now on, the light will only continue to grow.

NASA information

TTPMO: Jeggings, clarified

2010-12-20T12:38:00.002-05:00

So I guess it wasn't quite enough said yesterday, because I'm back on the same topic.

Here's the deal: People need to figure out that there are some things that they can wear, and some things that they just can't.

Don't believe me? Photographic evidence coming up.

see more Poorly Dressed

see more Poorly Dressed

see more Poorly Dressed

Really, this shouldn't be that hard. There are two basic rules: Dress your age. Dress your weight. Simple, right? Is it really that hard to look in the mirror and figure out that you shouldn't try to stuff your lard butt into that Speedo? Is it really that hard to look at the calendar and realize that you probably aren't the target demographic for Victoria's Secret Pink?

Once you've mastered that, we can get more subtle. Like the fact that plaid doesn't go with polka dots, or that fact that there's never a reason to wear that hideous shade of green, or the fact that high-top sneakers went out of fashion sometime in the late Middle Ages. But these are subtle issues, which are clearly beyond some people's mental capacities.

see more Poorly Dressed

see more Poorly Dressed

Yes, if you've got it, flaunt it. And yes, sometimes you do need to muster up a little confidence to wear something that seems a bit daring for you. I'm all for that. I recognize that it's a fine line between "believe in yourself" and "eye bleach" --- but good Lord, there is a line. The rest of us would very much appreciate it if you could stay on the right side of it, and not walk around wearing a bubblegum pink velour tracksuit with little kittens embroidered on it if you're a candidate for Botox.

And finally, there are some things that no one should wear, which brings us to the title of today's entry. Jeggings, for those of you fortunate enough not to have encountered these abominations against all that is good and holy, are the mutant child of jeans and leggings. Why? I dunno, because the '80s weren't traumatically skin-tight enough the first time around? Because skinny jeans have been co-opted by the emo kids? Because people needed something new to stuff into their Uggs? Because I really need to walk around the world being assaulted by camel toe? Your guess is as good as mine. They piss me off. Make them go away --- now.

TTPMO: Jeggings

2010-12-19T17:51:00.002-05:00

'Nuff said.

Reflections

2010-12-18T14:12:00.001-05:00

The year 2010 is almost over, and I have to say, I won't be sorry to see the back of it. It's not been a particularly bad year, I suppose, just not a particularly good one. My job situation is very frustrating. My brother's job situation is even more frustrating. I've gotten many (what I thought were) good papers rejected from journals, and none were accepted. And these past few months have been especially hard: My youngest brother got in a bad car accident. I got in a bad car accident. I had a fight with my parents. I had a fight with my advisor. I can't seem to shake the blues.

My current negative attitude is making it hard for me to remember the good times that I had this year, although I'm sure they were there. I have had fun working on this blog (although the post-a-day thing is starting to wear on me). I read some good books, of which I would particularly recommend Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. I gave my first public performance as a trapeze artist. I went snorkeling off the coast of Australia and saw an octopus. I visited Tasmania and got to pet a devil. It was the first full year that I've spent in my new house, and we had a great Thanksgiving here.

Part of the trouble is that the good times tend to be the small moments --- making a really good almond tart, or learning a new aerials trick, or having a nice pint of beer at the pub --- while the bad times tend to be larger, more life-altering things, like the ongoing job-search troubles. That makes it hard to have any good perspective on the year as a whole.

All in all, I suppose, I guess everything evens out to neutral. Here's hoping that the new year weighs in a bit more to the positive end of the scale.

UPDATE: Just finished re-re-re-re-re-reading the first Harry Potter book, and am feeling better. Maybe it is the little things, after all, that make the most difference.

Aerials open practice

2010-12-17T22:55:00.001-05:00

I was back at aerials open practice tonight. Michael was kind enough to accompany me and play photographer:

He also took some video of a little sequence --- not quite ready for prime time, but far enough along to convince me that maybe I can pull off a silks act for this spring's student showcase --- but it's taking forever to upload. I'll add it later.

For now, I will simply note that being at circus is always a great experience. I don't think this is just because I'm exercising, which releases endorphins and all that. It's not just random strength-building exercises, done by rote. I'm actually learning something, and something that's so new and different from anything I'm doing in the rest of my life. The goal is to learn the tricks and learn how to put them together into sequences, and the strength- and endurance-building just comes along for the ride.

But more than all that, it's the people that make the place what it is. Everyone, the students and the staff and the teachers, has been incredibly kind and encouraging. We lift each other through rounds of pull-ups, we chatter and tease when things get difficult, we cheer when someone does a new trick for the first time. This is especially true at open practice, when we have only each other to rely on for help and guidance. I love that feeling, that combination of freedom and support, where we're all working hard on our own but also keeping an eye out for each other. It's such a wonderful atmosphere of camaraderie (sorority, to be more accurate), and these days, there's almost nothing I look forward to more.

UPDATE: Video is up!

Test drive

2010-12-16T23:30:00.001-05:00

While my car is in the shop, I'm driving a rental --- a 2009 Toyota Prius, to be precise.

After three days, I have to say that I don't really like it all that much. (Cue hatemail from Prius owners.) I'm not saying that it's a bad car, or even that I hate it. I'm just saying that I really don't see what all the hype is about.

The main problem is the rearview. There's a thick plastic spoiler that divides the rear window into a tilted upper part and a straight lower part. This means that, when I look out the rearview mirror, I see three separate pieces: the upper glass, a black stripe, and the lower glass. So I can't really get a good view of the road behind me.

As if that weren't bad enough, the headrests from the back seats impinge further on the view, as does the rear windshield wiper. Plus, the two panes of glass are tinted slightly different colors. All of this means that I really have to do some serious work to piece together a full picture of the road behind me. It's really annoying. And when it comes to changing lanes, it's not just annoying, it's dangerous. And when it comes to driving at night, the plastic spoiler is in exactly the right spot to block the headlights of the car behind me, so I can't even tell if there's anyone there. Majorly bad design.

The sideview mirrors make up for this to a certain extent, but the glass on them appears to be somewhat warped, so that I get a distorted view. I'm not sure whether this by design or accident, but it's a bit like looking in a funhouse mirror. Not helping.

I know some people are really jazzed about the sleek, technology-heavy interior, but it frankly leaves me cold. In order to do anything in the car, like operate the radio or check my gas mileage or adjust the heat settings, I need to interact with the touchscreen in the center of the dashboard. Frankly, it's a pain in the ass, not to mention distracting. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my physical buttons and dials. I like being able to reach right over and turn a knob to turn the heat up, or push a button to toggle the air recirculation. I'm sure that I could get used to where the controls are on the Prius given enough time, but that's not the point. The interface should be more intuitive than that.

To try to address this problem, the designers did add physical buttons for some of the most common functions --- on the steering wheel. So now, every time I change my grip to make a turn or something, I inadvertently turn on the rear defroster. Seriously, there are a good dozen buttons on the steering wheel, and another dozen features that I get to from various stems coming off the steering column, and I can't manage to keep them all straight. Again, I could learn, but I shouldn't have to.

Sure, it gets good gas mileage, but so did my (possibly now-defunct) Honda Civic Hybrid. And one of the things I really liked about the Civic is that the hybrid functionality was seamlessly integrated. I never had to know that I was driving a hybrid if I didn't care to; I was just driving a car (admittedly, a car with extra-grabby brakes that would occasionally shut off when I was stopped at a red light). But the Prius really wears its special status on its sleeve, and not necessarily in a good way. It also shuts its engine off at red lights, but with a little shake and shudder that feels somewhat ominous, like the car's decided to give up. It starts with a push-button, which is cool and novel, but it doesn't really start like a normal car. It turns the electric components on first, and then, after a few moments of me wondering when the heck something is going to happen, it turns on the engine. Putting it in park also involves a push-button, which sets me on edge a bit, although I can't fully explain why. But I can explain why I'm annoyed that it lights up an orange icon whenever it engages the antilock brake system: I already know that I'm driving in the snow, and I'm already tense enough because I can feel the car slipping, so does it really need to blink this symbol at me and distract me further from the task at hand, namely keeping myself from fishtailing because Philly has not seen fit to salt the roads?

Anyway, as I said at the start, it's not that it's a bad car, it's just a bad car for me. Partially that's because of the things that I've already pointed out, here but partially that's because it's not my own car, which I love and which I've been driving for close to eight years. I'll hopefully find out her fate tomorrow; stay tuned.

Sprouts!

2010-12-15T21:56:00.000-05:00

Ask just about anyone which vegetables they hate the most, and Brussels sprouts are likely to be at the top of the list. I'm not sure what these humble mini-cabbages have done to garner such deeply negative feelings, but it can't have been good. I think the trouble is that they let themselves get boiled by decades of well-meaning but not-culinarily-inclined mothers. If that's the case, then I have to agree with the majority opinion: Boiled Brussels sprouts are gross. Broiled Brussels sprouts, on the other hand, are super tasty.

Plus, they're such an awesome-looking vegetable. We got a whole huge stalk of them at the farmers' market the other day, which was great just to have around the house:

Come on, how could you not love these gorgeous little guys? They grow in turrets!

And they couldn't be easier to cook. We pulled them off the stalk and peeled off the outer leaves as needed, just as you'd do with a head of lettuce. Larger sprouts were halved; smaller ones were left whole. All of them were then spread on a baking tray with salt, olive oil, and some chopped garlic. Bacon is the traditional accompaniment here, but being vegetarian, we were content to do without.

Then we threw them in the oven and cooked them until they turned crispy. We had the oven set to 425 F, but sprouts are pretty flexible, so you could do them at a higher or lower temperature as long as you keep an eye on them. They came out browned on the outside and a little creamy on the inside, the perfect accompaniment to the last of our leftover onion soup from Thanksgiving.

Finally, I note in closing that the correct spelling, as you have no doubt noticed by now, is "Brussels sprout." As in, sprouts from the city of Brussels (capitalized, as the proper noun it is). They do not appreciate being called "brussel sprouts." Menu writers, take note.

Smashing

2010-12-14T22:24:00.002-05:00

Okay, so originally I was going to do a post about how the "w" key is sticking on my laptop keyboard, and it would have been an interesting and entertaining exploration of the hos and hys of English spelling and of hy various letters ork the ay they do. Seriously, it would have been good.

However, those plans were dashed by the fact that last night, on the way to circus practice, I got into a car accident. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I caused a car accident, although it really was one of those situations where the situation itself was more at fault than any individual actor. Judge for yourself; here's what happened:

To get onto the highway from my house, I take a right turn off of a bridge onto a long downhill left-side entrance ramp. There are two particularly relevant fact here. First, "entrance ramp" is a bit of a misnomer. There's barely two car-lengths worth of room to speed up in order to enter the highway once you get within striking distance, and no way from the rest of the ramp to see with any precision what's going on on the highway itself. Second, "left-side" becomes extra important in this circumstance, because one has to merge into the fast (left) lane of traffic rather than into the slow (right) lane, as it more typical. So it's a bit of a nervy situation to begin with. Throw in the fact that this highway entrance has only been open for about a month following two years of construction and you have a disaster waiting to happen.

It wasn't a disaster that happened, but it wasn't pretty either. I was coming down the ramp, looking in my side-view mirror to see if there was space for me to merge onto the highway. I found my opening and started to turn into it, shifting my vision back to the front. At that point I saw that the car in front of me, rather than maintaining speed or speeding up to get onto the highway, as one should, had actually stopped. But by then it was too late for me to do anything about it, and I ran right into the back of him. I'll spare you the rest of the details, but suffice it to say that that was not how I saw my evening being spent.

The front of my car is pretty badly smashed, and I'm waiting for word from the insurance claims adjuster about what they're going to do. But other than that, I have to say, everything turned out as well as could possibly be expected. I'm not hurt, and neither was the other driver. His car suffered some damage to the back bumper, but he was able to drive away. He was upset, obviously, but not angry or hysterical, and we exchanged information as pleasantly as it was possible to do under the circumstances --- that is to say, in the back seat of my car to keep out of the cold wind, under the continually fading glow of my dome light. Fortuitously, a tow truck was coming onto the highway just a few minutes after the crash, and was able to block traffic for us and call the police. The police arrived in due course and took our statements. Everyone was very professional and calm and kind: the tow truck driver, the police officer, the insurance agents.

And me. It's strange how these situations can affect one, but I don't remember being terribly upset. I was later, when I got home and it had a chance to sink in, but at the time all I remember is calm. There were things that needed to be done, things that needed to be taken care of, and I just took care of them. I wasn't going to let this get the best of me. I relayed the details to the police officer, cleaned everything out of the car and put it in a bag before it was towed away, and checked and double-checked with the other driver that he wasn't hurt. He was supposed to be on his way to an exam that night, so he was a bit antsy about that, but I pointed out that a police report would probably make for an acceptable excuse.

The tow truck driver even complimented me on being the calmest person he's ever seen in such situations. I think that was a bit of hyperbole, but I thanked him anyway. It's the little things like that which make such a difference under these circumstances. Like the fact that the police officer let me wait in the back of his squad car after they towed my car, so that I didn't have to be outside in the cold. Or the fact that the insurance company arranged for me to get a rental car that night so I could pick it up first thing in the morning and not have too much disruption to my schedule.

So I guess I got lucky, all things considered. My neck is a little sore and they might total my car, but that's not really what's important. I know that now more viscerally than I did before, so that, too, is something.

UPDATE: Michael went down to the impound lot and took some pictures. Not pretty.

Back to context

2010-12-13T13:07:00.000-05:00

Michael and I saw Harry Potter Part 7 Part 1: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows of Making More Money By Splitting the Last Installment into Two Parts yesterday at the Roxy Theater.

First, I have to say that I love the Roxy. It's a tiny, independently owned movie theater on Sansom Street, where the screens seem dwarfed by my 40-inch LCD and the seat cushions have springs in them and haven't been changed since the '70s. Yes, literally. But they make real, fresh popcorn and put real, fresh butter on it and serve it in gigantic bathtub-sized buckets, just like popcorn should be served. Plus, it's only $6 apiece for the matinee. It's pretty much the perfect place to watch a movie on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Second, I have to say that I was kinda disappointed by the movie. The atmosphere was right and the characters were well-played and well-cast as always, but the plot stumbled between exposition and explosions like a drunk frat boy lurching home from the pub. I have never watched a movie based on a book and felt so powerfully the urge to go back and read the book to find out how it really happened. That's a shame, but not really a surprise. There's so much richness to Rowling's world that I never expected it to translate neatly, or at all, to the screen. But it still seems to me that the filmmakers missed quite a lot of opportunities to make the story more coherent and smooth, or at least not quite so talky. It would have been almost impossible to understand all the goings-on if one hadn't read the book, which rather obviates the need for the movie in the first place.

Oh well. Perhaps the next installment will be better. In the meantime, I'm going to curl up on the couch and do some reading.

'Tis the season

2010-12-12T18:09:00.000-05:00

Michael and I were at a Christmas party last night, hosted by our neighbors from across the street. We met them at the pub on the corner and became friendly, and it was very sweet of them to invite us. But in retrospect, they could have prepared us a little.

Their house is very modern and elegant, but in honor of the season, it was done up to look like the post-Christmas clearance bin at Wal-Mart exploded in the middle of the living room. Everything had a Christmas decoration on it, and I mean everything. There were ornaments hanging from all of the doorknobs and drawer pulls. The tablecloth was embroidered with Christmas trees. The dishtowels all had Santa's face on them, as did the disposable plastic cups set out by the punch bowl. The paper plates and napkins were poinsettia-themed. There were three advent calendars (three!), one of which was magnetic and stuck to the fridge. A shockingly large fraction of the men in attendance were wearing bright red sweaters that would have made even Mr. Rogers blush.

Forget the "war on Christmas," this was all "war FOR Christmas." As if we were to suddenly forget the reason we were crowded in the kitchen munching on hors d'oeuvres and baby carrots, there was always some reminder underfoot (literally in the case of the tinsel). I'm thoroughly convinced that we were the only Jews at the party, and that's quite an odd position for us, being academics and all. Whatever, we had a good time and met some nice people and I'm very glad we went.

But here's what I'm wondering: Is this normal? Is this what most people do on Christmas? Is it typical to string colored lights over every inch of one's ceiling while wearing a pair of Santa Claus earrings and listening to the all-Christmas station on the radio? Am I just so hopelessly, provincially non-Christian that this kind of dedication to the birth of Our Lord and Savior seems excessive to me? Or is it just that I'm used to Christmas parties being more "Christmas parties" than this sort of high-wattage goy-ism? Seriously, people, I need to know. 'Cause it would seem creepy if I went to the home of a Jewish friend to find it smothered in blue and white lights with little stars of David pasted to every available surface with pot-holders that had a picture Judah Maccabee on them.

And then what the heck does one do with all these decorations when it's not Christmastime? I know they have a large basement, but really, this stuff must take up half of it when it's all boxed away, and that's not counting the ornaments that were actually hanging on their seven-foot-tall tree. Well, God bless 'em for their dedication. Or something.

TTPMO: Myself when I'm not perfect

2010-12-11T17:58:00.000-05:00

Ridiculous? Maybe, but it's true. This is a bit of an addendum to something I said in yesterday's post, namely that sometimes it's harder to love and be honest with ourselves than to love and be honest with other people. Today's point is that it's often easier to be frustrated with ourselves than with other people when things aren't going right.

And things here aren't quite going right. I'm trying to learn something new, something that I've wanted to do for a long time and something that I should be good at because it's a combination of several skills that I have (at various levels of polish) in my arsenal. But putting them all together in a way that works has been very trying to me --- and also to my poor long-suffering husband, who has been helping me.

Right now, I need to take a break and recognize that I can't possibly get it perfectly right on the first try. I know that intellectually, so why is it so hard to recognize that viscerally? Until I do, unfortunately, I'm going to keep pissing myself off. Be perfect, self! Do it right the first time! I don't care that it's hard or that you've never done it before or that you're running out of time!

Grr. Time for some chocolate.

Letting go

2010-12-10T16:32:00.000-05:00

I'm going back to circus open practice tonight to work on some moves on the silks. While I'm there, I'm going to force myself to practice a few drops. These are just what they sound like: moves on the silks (or rope) which involve falling. Generally, you get yourself wrapped up in a particular way, and then let go so that you fall and are caught by a combination of the wrappings and your hands or knees.

I have a confession to make: This kind of terrifies me. It's not that I'm so high up in the air, and there's always a mat, and (at least in class) there's always an instructor around to make sure that everything will go all right. It's just that there's always a moment where it's down to me. I'm all wrapped the way I'm supposed to be, I've got the go-ahead, I know what I'm supposed to do, and all I have to do is let go. And there's always a moment right between the one in which I'm holding on and the one in which I'm falling through the air that fills me with a jolt of mortal fear. I want to chicken out. I want to crawl back down to the ground. I want it to just be over. But the only way to get down, the only way for it to be over, is for me to trust to my strength, work up my courage, and let go.

Now that I've been working on drops for a while, I see moments like this everywhere, in my life and in the lives of others. There are time in all of our lives when we hold on too tight, able to see the next step on the path but too afraid to take it. We hesitate. We reconsider. We close our eyes and wish it were over, instead of doing something to make it so.

I know those moments all too well now, but I also know that I can get past them. And the way to get past them is not by denying the fear, but by finding the courage to push through it. It's only by trusting myself, trusting that I've done the right thing in order to keep myself safe, trusting that I'm strong enough, that I can convince myself to let go. It's ironic that sometimes the hardest thing to do is to trust ourselves, but there it is. In so many ways, it's so much easier to love the whole rest of the world, to see it the way we want it to be, than to love and be honest with ourselves. But unless I can do both of those things, I'll never be able to do the drops, to take the chances that I need to take.

So that's what I'm going to do tonight. I'm going to climb up, wrap up, and let go. I'm not going to let my fear get the best of me. I've done it before, and I can do it again. And I will. I'd be lying if I said that I'm not afraid. I am. But the important thing is learning how not to let that fear get the best of me. The important thing is learning how to feel safe enough to be brave.

TTPMO: People who can't argue

2010-12-09T21:43:00.000-05:00

You know what I mean. You're having a conversation with someone, and you think things are going well, and all of a sudden you're off on some high-temperature tangent about whether high school cafeterias should be allowed to serve Brussels sprouts for lunch. What the hell?

This happens to me a lot when I'm talking to civilians, and I'm starting to notice it more and more as I get old and crotchety and further enculturated to the academic environment. Most people don't know how to argue properly. They can't tell the difference between a claim and evidence for the claim, they don't understand when they're being circular, they're caught up in some example and don't see the big picture...

Frankly, it's exhausting. I'm trying to get to the bottom of why Aunt Ethel thinks the moon landing was faked, and the best I can manage is to have her repeat some crackpot theory that she heard on the radio as though it came from some proper scientific authority. Or my sister-in-law's cousin is banging on about how bad cucumbers are for your health because he knew a guy who broke out in a horrible rash after eating a cucumber. Well, too bad for him, but there are a gazillion possible explanations for the rash other than the cucumber, and could you please pass the salad, thanks. Or Uncle Bill continually gives a slightly different answer every time I ask him why he thinks we shouldn't be eating genetically modified tomatoes: You know, it's because people should keep their hands off of nature just let food be the way it is. Oh, and also because there isn't enough regulation of our crops and these damn farmers should really let the government decide what works best. Um, wait, those two things are incompatible. But just as I'm about to point that out, my next-door neighbor chimes in to support Uncle Bill because she agrees with the conclusion and has failed entirely to recognize that the argument for the conclusion, frankly, sucks.

God forbid politics get involved, since that's when things get really ugly.

Why is this such a problem? Why do most people seem incapable giving legitimate reasons for why they believe the things that they say? Is this something weird that only academics do? I really hope not. It would be beyond depressing if most people are walking around believing all sorts of things, true or false, that don't have any rational connection to a decent argument. But I fear that that's the state of play these days, and guess what? Yep, it pisses me off.

Happy Chanukah!

2010-12-08T16:46:00.000-05:00

It's the last night of Chanukah tonight, and I'm going to be spending it with one of my best friends from childhood. It's kind of a crazy story, actually.

Becky and I went to kindergarten and elementary school together, but I transferred to a different school in fifth grade. We kept in touch sporadically after that, even attending the same Hebrew school for a little while, but we pretty much lost track of each other sometime around the middle of high school. Then I went to college and graduate school, got married, moved to Philadelphia, and joined the congregation at Kol Tzedek, a Reconstructionist community based in West Philadelphia.

Then one day, two years ago, I was sitting in Shabbat morning services at KT and looked up to see a somewhat familiar face across the room from me. At first I ignored her --- I'm really terrible with putting names together with faces, and it was far more logical to assume that she was just a congregant who looked somewhat familiar because I'd met her a few times than to assume that she was a childhood friend who I hadn't seen in over ten years. But that's exactly who she was. It turns out that she was living barely a few blocks away from me at the time and had just started attending services at KT. What an unbelievable small world we live in.

We've gotten together a few times since that unlikely reunion, and it never ceases to amaze me how much we still have in common after all this time. I don't believe in fate or anything like that, but I do believe in friendship, and I'm so excited to have Becky back in my life. (Not just because she's making me latkes for dinner.)

So in the spirit of Chanukah, here's to all of the happy coincidences like this one, to all of those times when things don't turn out the way we expect, but they turn out just the way that they should anyhow. Chag same'ach!

A weight off my shoulders

2010-12-07T17:24:00.000-05:00

Literally.

I stopped carrying my laptop to the office. When Michael got his new allocation computer from Penn, I inherited his old, somewhat banged-up but still serviceable MacBookPro, which now lives in the bottom drawer of my office filing cabinet and has taken over duties as my work computer. That means that I don't need to schlep my own laptop into the office anymore. It stays happily ensconced on my desk, and I just keep my vital documents sync'd between the two computers via Dropbox (what a lifesaver!). Sure, I still to carry my purse and a small bag for my lunch, but it's a massive improvement.

Really, it's almost criminal how happy this makes me. No more worrying about tumbling down the stairs in high heels because my weight balance is off. No more shifting the laptop bag from hand to hand and back again as it gets too heavy to carry. No more feeling like a kindergartener, heading off to school with a sack full of crayons strapped to her back. I'm an adult now! I'm free!

And yet, I seem to be experiencing a strange sort of phantom limb syndrome. I'll get to campus, park my car, collect my purse and my lunch, and start walking to the office. About halfway there I'm overcome with the feeling that surely I have forgotten something important. Surely. I'll start to stoop over, almost unconsciously, trying to recapture what it would feel like to be walking to work if I hadn't forgotten something. I'll reach up to grab at my shoulder, trying to figure out why that space feels so wrong and weightless. And then --- aha! I'm not wearing my computer bag! Because I don't need to be! My posture straightens, my eyes brighten, my step lightens, and I can head for the office like a normal human being. Until the next morning, of course, when it happens again.

I'll get over it soon, I'm sure. I'm so happy to have worked out a good system whereby I can have all my file both at my office and at home and not have to get a horrible crick in my neck while doing it. (That can wait until I'm actually seated at my computer and hunch over my keyboard to type.)

The only drawback to the new system is when I need to travel. Until I spring for an iPad, there will still be times when I'll have to take my laptop with me (conferences come to mind), and then it will be back to the neck-cricking and ankle-wobbling. Such is life.

But even on those occasions, I'm never going back to my old nylon laptop bag. It served its purpose reasonably well, but it really did make me look like a kindergartener --- nearly took up the entire space on my back even though it was meant to be a messenger bag (for a six-foot tall Amazon, I suppose). Nope, I've dug out my old, skinny neoprene laptop sleeve and have my eye on a sensible and versatile (and vegan!) tote bag from Crystalyn Kae. After all, what's the point of being an adult if I can't look like one?

First snow

2010-12-06T21:56:00.000-05:00

I love snow. I'm really not much for the cold, but if it's snowing, it kinda makes all the shivering and bundling up and nose-running worthwhile.

Today was one of those days. There was a perfect dusting of light flurries coming down all morning, making the air twinkle. It didn't stick at all, so I didn't have to worry about maniac drivers or cleaning off my car, and I could just enjoy the quiet beauty of the flakes landing (as they say) on my nose and eyelashes.

There's something about snow that makes me feel giddy and happy, like I'm a little kid again, wriggling with excitement to get into my snow pants and make snow angels and pick out the perfect carrot for my snowman's nose. I'm know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Everyone around me today seemed to perk up. Yes, it's cold outside --- but it's snowing! That makes it all better. I think we all have collective memories of happy snow days where we didn't have to go to school, of the novelty of seeing the world covered in white, of cocoa by the fire and cold ears and bright red cheeks.

It's a small kind of wonderful that that feeling never really goes away. Even in all of our staid, sensible adult lives, when it snows, we all get to feel like kids again. There's a joy to the snow, an innocence, that never really leaves us. Let's hope it never does.

TTPMO: Ugly cars 2

2010-12-05T17:48:00.004-05:00

It's a bonus edition of TTPMO: Ugly Cars! (For the original installment, go here.) I passed this one, which I will generously call a "minivan", on the street the other day and I couldn't wait to add it to my list.

The Nissan Cube

Yeeeeeaaaaaah. Where do I begin? Was no one looking at the drawings for this thing before they put it into production? It looks like a milk carton on wheels. It has wraparound glass in the back, presumably so its hapless passengers can press their noses to it and stare longingly at the normal cars passing by. Its grill looks flimsy and cheap. It's a disturbing shade of powder blue. I heard that the sixties were back, but this is ridiculous. Just because Walter Cronkite looked good when seen inside a rounded-off square doesn't mean that you will, too. Quite the opposite, in fact.

One more for today:
The Ford Sport Trac

I can't believe I forgot to include this on my original list. I have hated these creepy-looking half-bed pickup trucks ever since I first saw them. There's only one way to describe them: mutants. Some mad scientist got the brainy idea to mate a regular pickup truck with a four-dour sedan and deliver the baby in a room full of plastic shrapnel, and this is the result. It's the worst of both worlds. The front says "Grr! I'm a manly man's truck!" and the back says "I'm with stupid. Help! Get me out of here!" Only it says it in a really high, squeaky voice because it's just a pickup-like growth attached to the cab and hasn't reached full size yet.

My best guess is that they left the "k" off the end of "Trac" as an accurate reflection of the shame and embarrassment that this truck must feel whenever it looks in the mirror and realizes that it's incomplete. Then it sulks back to its parking spot and weeps hot tears of transmission fluid.

Auto idiocy

2010-12-04T17:49:00.000-05:00

And now, for an edition of "life's little moments."

Last night, I went to circus practice. I pulled my car into a parking spot, which sloped forward a little bit and had a fire hydrant on the other side, so I set my hand brake. I turned the car off, eager to get to the ropes...and the key wouldn't come out of the ignition. It was totally stuck. In fact, it wouldn't even turn back past the first position.

Okaaaaay...so I wiggled it around a bit, trying not to pull too hard, and finally I got it to release. Whew! Problem solved, I spent a very pleasant two hours depleting my grip strength developing large green bruises on my legs.

Then I got back in my car, preparing to drive home for dinner. I put the key in the ignition, turned it to the crack position --- and nothing happened. Nada. Well, not nothing: The lights on the console went on and the car beeped at me, but the engine didn't crank. It didn't even try. Uh oh.

I know enough about cars to deduce that it wasn't a problem with the battery, since if it were, the lights wouldn't have come on. But beyond that I had no idea what could be wrong --- especially considering that I'd taken the car for its 100,000 mile service and state inspection two days before and it come back with a completely clean bill of health. Grr. I tried turning the key again, visions of tow trucks and large repair bills dancing in my head. Again, nothing. Had the guys at the garage messed something up when they were working on my car? Did the key break somehow? Was the universe trying to prevent me from getting home and having the dinner that I so richly deserved after my workout?

Defeated, I pulled my AAA card out of my wallet and started dialing. As I made my way through the phone tree (all automated! pretty cool!), I looked down and saw that the hand brake was set. That's unusual for me; I almost never need the parking brake. Since I use it so rarely, maybe there was something about it that had gone wrong and was now interfering with the normal functioning of my car?

I released the hand brake. The car immediately started rolling forward, down the slope, aiming for a head-on collision with the fire hydrant. Not good! I stepped on the brakes, but they didn't work. Seriously not good! Luckily I had the presence of mind to drop the phone and yank on the parking brake again. The car stopped mere inches from the fire hydrant, and my body slipped out of heart-attack mode. At the same time, looking down at the hand that had performed my life-saving maneuver on the parking brake, I noticed the gear shift for the first time.

It was in drive.

I was an idiot.

I shifted into park, mashed my foot down on the brake, and turned the key in the ignition. It worked! My baby was alive! I hung up on AAA and cruised home for dinner.

I'm still not sure whether to berate myself for being such a moron in the first place, or congratulate myself on having been able to figure out the problem all by myself. Since I'm in a good mood tonight, I'm going with the latter.

Home alone

2010-12-03T16:38:00.000-05:00

Michael left this morning. He's going to be in North Carolina for about 36 hours, giving a talk and meeting with people. I'm going to have to go to bed alone.

When people hear this, they tend to get this worried, pitying look on their face. "Poor dear," it says. "Her love is away, and she's been left all by herself." But the truth is that I don't mind all that much. In fact, it's my dirty little secret that I kinda like it. I am, by nature, a retiring and secretive sort of creature, and it gives me great pleasure to have long periods of silence and contemplation, during which I don't have to worry about imposing on anyone else's space nor about anyone else imposing on mine. I don't need anyone's permission to go out, and I don't need to tell anyone what time I'll be back. I can stay up as late as I want, sleep as late as I want, nap when I want, and eat popcorn for dinner without anyone being the wiser. Not that I'd actually do any of those things, mind you. (Well, okay, yes I would.)

It's funny, because I (like most people) spent a good portion of my adolescent and early adult life longing for anything but that. This was especially acute when I was in graduate school in Connecticut and Michael was starting his professor position in Philadelphia, three and a half hours away by train. We saw each other regularly, but only on weekends, I missed him so terribly during those years. I spent a good deal of time wandering listlessly around my apartment, feeling bored and strangely empty. Feeling lonely.

But feeling lonely isn't the same as being alone. It's the latter that I like. I know that Michael is out there, that he loves me, and that he's coming home soon. So even though I'm alone right now, it's not the lonely kind of alone. It's the kind of alone that I can enjoy. And I do.

My truly dirty little secret is that sometimes I even look forward to it. I look forward to reconnecting with myself in lots of quiet little ways, to making no compromises, to following my own rhythm. I'll can enjoy myself tonight however I want, knowing that tomorrow will come, that Michael will come back, and that I'll be able to slip back into our relationship rested and recharged. When we reunite, I always appreciate him and us so much more. That alone makes it all worthwhile, and might even account for the fact that I sometimes feel positively good when Michael and I are apart.

If most people are honest with themselves, I think they'll admit to feeling the same way. I love the relationship I have with my husband and the closeness that we've come to share. But it can get very intense at times, in a million little ways, and it's nice to have a breather from that. When I'm alone, sometimes I feel a happy, guilty little twinge of freedom. It's not that I truly long to be free of him; far from it. But it's in the space between our moments together that I can truly work on being myself and on being true to myself.

It also doesn't hurt that I don't have to listen to anyone whimpering about being forced to watch Pixar movies. Bring on the popcorn!

iPhone surgery

2010-12-02T21:53:00.001-05:00

Two days ago, in an act of monumental carelessness, I dropped my iPhone down the stairs. I was coming down to breakfast and carrying way too much stuff and the iPhone slipped right off the top of the stack and landed face-down on the living room floor.

To say that this cracked the screen would be a bit of an understatement:

More like "shattered." Most of the big pieces were intact, but there were little tiny shards of glass everywhere. Not good.

However, by some miracle, the LCD screen underneath the glass was completely undamaged. My phone still worked. It was a little dicey to make calls, though, since I didn't relish the thought of an earful of glass shards. That would be a little too much like being on hold with customer service and having to listen to their damn "your calls is important to us" music. Anyway, clearly something had to be done.

Michael was all for just getting a new phone, which is his usual solution to such issues, but I wasn't ready to chuck it out just yet. It's frustrating to me how willing people are to throw things out when they don't work exactly right, rather than taking a little time to fix them. But was this the sort of thing that could be fixed?

Yes, as it turns out. But since Apple was going to charge me $100 for a replacement screen and the installation, I needed to find a better option. A bit of Googling around turned up a $10 repair kit that claimed to be able to solve precisely my problem. (At this point in my writing, Michael is whinging at me that actually he was the one who found the repair kit, so I include this information in the interest of full disclosure, despite the fact that it's messing up my narrative. As I have said before: Sweetie, get your own damn blog.) I ordered it, paid for the overnight shipping, and took to obsessively watching the YouTube instructions for how to do the repair.

When UPS delivered the kit last night, we set up a workstation on a cloth placemat at the dining room table and set to work. The first step was to take the entire screen assembly off of the iPhone base:

It was pretty cool to get a look at the guts of the phone, since it looks so sleek and featureless from the outside. But the inside is a different matter. We then had to take out six near-microscopic screws that held the LCD screen in place:

Here's a view of the new glass, along the with the base and the LCD screen, waiting to be re-assembled.

Although it did take a bit of doing to pry the phone open in the first place, things had been pretty easy up until this point. But now came the tricky part: separating the (now broken) glass off of the front of the frame so that the new glass could be installed. We used a hairdryer to heat and loosen the glue, and a jeweler's screwdriver to (carefully!) scrape the glass off the frame:

Whew! With that done, it was relatively easy to stick on the new glass using the custom-fit adhesive that came with the repair kit. Then we slid the LCD screen back into place. What the instructions didn't mention was how easy it was to get fingerprints and dust trapped between the LCD screen and the new glass, and being as how I'm anal retentive, it simply wouldn't do to leave them there --- that would've driven me insane. We fixed the problem with a few squirts of compressed air and some elbow grease applied via a microfiber cloth.

Finally, though, everything was clean, and we snapped the LCD into place on the frame, replaced the six near-microscopic screws, and reattached the top assembly to the base of the phone.

Et voilà!

Good as new. The home button is a little loose, probably because the top assembly doesn't fit quite as perfectly onto the base as it did before, but that's the only issue. Otherwise, it's clean and works just as well as the day I got it. Plus, I get to say that I disassembled an iPhone. Now, isn't that worth $10?

NaBloPoMo reflections

2010-12-01T22:28:00.001-05:00

I did it!

I put up (at least) one blog post a day for a whole month. The time seemed to fly. I have no idea where November went. I sailed right over the 100 posts mark without even noticing. Wow.

Looking back on it for a moment, I'm really happy with how it turned out. Some of my posts worked better than others, obviously, but on the whole I think I managed to put up moderately decent material every day without stretching too much. That's not to say that it was always easy --- it was a real struggle to find time to post on some days --- but I really enjoyed the challenge.

Partially that's because of the training that I got working on my college newspaper, a daily. When you have to put out a paper every single day, there's no time to procrastinate, and no room for excuses. Those years trained me to be able to just put something, anything, down on paper and work with it from there, without being too judgmental about it to start with. That's a skill that's served me well in all aspects of my life, not just here, although there were some days over this past month that I could feel that training kick in big-time.

But mostly I enjoyed doing this because I really like writing (unlike most people, I am led to understand). I always have. But I haven't been able to write just for me lately because I do so much writing as part of my job. When I have a bit of a break, then, I'd rather do something different. At least that's what I thought. But writing this blog has made me realize that it's not necessarily the writing itself that I'm tired of at the end of a long day, just the academic and work-related stuff. It's been nice to have a more personal, less stressful writing project to look forward to every day.

The question now is, will I keep it up? November is officially the month for NaBloPoMo, but the challenge continues every month (see the website for details). My thought right now is, sure! Why not? I'm feeling really energized by the fullness of what I was able to accomplish in November, and I'm excited to see how long I can sustain it. It's also nice to be able to challenge myself in that way while having the opportunity to give myself a break if I need it. Now I know that I can do a post a day for a month, so if I miss a day here and there from here on out, I won't sweat it.

The other question is, what else will I do? In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I took on NaBloPoMo because I was a little scared of jumping fully into its big sibling, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, also November). I kinda wanted to have that challenge, to write a full work of fiction a little bit every day for a month, but I also suspected that I wouldn't be able to go straight from writing purely for my job to actually crafting a work of fiction. So NaBloPoMo presented a nice in-between step, and has gotten me geared up to try the "real thing" next year.

In the meantime, keep checking this space for new stuff!

Many thanks to Michael for his support over the past month and always, and also to Diana (who blogs at dianasaur dot net) for introducing me to the NaBloPoMo concept.

On a stick

2010-11-30T12:31:00.001-05:00

I have a terribly busy day today, so I thought I'd celebrate that fact by posting some pictures made by people who obviously didn't share my predicament. These were found pinned to the hallway bulletin board near my office at Australian National University over the summer. One was added approximately once a week, so I can only assume that by now the entire hallway is covered with variations on the critter-on-a-stick theme.

Warning to faculty supervisors: This is what happens when you let your graduate students get bored / give them so much work they feel the need for dramatic levels of procrastination. Don't let it happen to you!

The seatmate conversation

2010-11-29T12:29:00.000-05:00

It's back to work here at IPoL, after a fantastic and relaxing Thanksgiving break. Being back to work reminds me that most people in the world don't really "get" what I do. This isn't normally a problem, being as I am usually surrounded by people who not only get what I do, but basically do the same job. But sometimes, when I do need to confront large numbers of non-academics, this fact is driven home to me rather forcefully.

Usually this happens when I'm on an airplane or a train and I strike up a casually friendly conversation with whoever has the wonderful good fortune to be sitting next to me. Oh hi, how are you doing, where are you going, gosh that security line was long, the usual. At some point, of course, the jobs question will come up: "So, what do you do?" There are no good options for how to respond to this. Trust me.

Me: I'm a psychologist.

Seatmate: Ooh, you read minds???

Me: Um, no.

Seatmate: Right, so you're going to ask me about my mother and about dreams and stuff?

Me: Er...not really. I work with children.

Seatmate: Wow, that's great, helping out those poor kids with emotional problems and learning disabilities and all that. Gosh, I just don't know if I'd have the energy to ---

Me: No, actually, I'm not a clinician. I'm a research psychologist. I work with normal, typically developing children. I'm trying to find out how they think and learn about the world.

Seatmate: *blink* *blink* Oh. *puzzled silence*

And that's when it's gone well. Usually, I don't get past the first round of this conversation because, as soon as people hear that I'm a psychologist, they start right in on their personal problems and I can't get a word in edgewise until we've landed in O'Hare and I have to dash for my connection.

Lately, I've taken to avoiding the word "psychologist" altogether and telling people that I'm a cognitive scientist. People still don't know what that is, but at least it sounds vaguely respectable and doesn't engender a host of bad Freudian stereotypes. Or I just stick in my earphones and fall asleep. Humans can be so tedious sometimes, especially when you study them for a living.

Earliest memory

2010-11-28T14:35:00.000-05:00

This semester, I'm auditing a graduate-level course on autobiographical memory. A lot of the studies that we're reading as part of the class ask their participants to describe and date their earliest memories, and then use these data to draw conclusions about infantile amnesia and identity formation and suchlike.

There's a lot to dislike about these studies. But when they're not activating my critical-researcher training, they're making me think about how I would respond if I were asked about my earliest memory. This isn't such an easy question to answer. A lot of what we think of as our personal memories are actually not. Instead, they're stories that we've heard so much that we've internalized them, or pictures of us at events that we don't actually remember but feel like we do because the pictures are so familiar. Case in point: There's a famous (well, in the family at least) picture of me when I'm about two years old, sitting in the middle of a mountain stream, laughing my head off. It's a wonderful picture, and it's one of these pictures that tends to get dragged out family gatherings, graduations, etc., along with the story about it: My parents were hiking around Tanglewood on a vacation, and I was so excited about this stream that I toddled over to it and plopped myself down as if there was no place in the world that I would rather be. And probably, at that moment, there wasn't. It's a great picture, and a great story, and something that clearly happened to me. But I don't actually remember doing it. I just remember the story.

Once you eliminate all of the events like that, the things that you know happened but that don't really jog any first-person reminiscence, it's difficult to come up with something that could legitimately qualify as an earliest memory. The best candidate that I've managed to unearth is a brief moment of the first time that I fed my little brother solid food. It's nothing more than a fragment, just a brief sensory impression of the event, but I know that it's real and really mine. I can see our old kitchen, the burnt-orange ovens, the blue walls, and my brother Eliot sitting in his baby swing (or maybe it was a highchair?) with his chubby cheeks all puffed out like a hamster. I have the baby spoon in my hand with some tan sludge on it (mashed bananas? pureed carrots? applesauce?), and my mother has her hand over mine to steady it. I bring the spoon up to Eliot's mouth and try to slide it in, but mostly he just ends up with with tan sludge dripping down his chin.

And that's it. Nothing special, just a completely mundane family moment that for some reason has lodged itself in my consciousness. I don't even remember feeling much about it, aside from maybe some general annoyance that Eliot wasn't cooperating as I was trying to feed him. I also don't remember how old I was, although I can extrapolate: Eliot is three years younger than I am, and if he was at the point of eating solid food, I must have been about four years old.

I kinda like this memory for those reasons --- it encapsulates basically all the canonical characteristics of people's earliest memories. They tend to date from around the age of four, they're mundane events, and they don't have very much detail. I suppose that makes me about average, which normally I would sneer at, but in this case it makes me feel comfortable. Like everything has been going right. Except, of course, that I was left holding a messy spoonful of banana goo.

TTPMO: Poorly trained waitstaff

2010-11-27T13:11:00.000-05:00

Some sneedy whinging to reward y'all for having lived through the Thanksgiving saga:

So you're going out to eat. Maybe you're too tired to cook because you've been in the kitchen for the last forty-eight hours straight, or maybe your parents are in town and you want to take advantage of their generosity, or maybe (as in my case) both. You find a nice restaurant. Nothing too expensive, but not too cheap either --- a place with actual cloth tablecloths and/or napkins, some nice-looking sconces or other decor that didn't come from Ikea, or at least doesn't look like it did. You sit down, peruse the menu, forget to actually make a decision before striking up a conversation with your seatmate, and then have to tell the waiter/waitress to give you just another minute. You put in your order. The food comes. It's tasty. You share a bit around. You argue good-naturedly over who gets the last French fry. You're enjoying yourself.

And then, all hell breaks loose.

Some of you at the table have finished eating. Some of you haven't. The waitress comes over and starts taking the empty plates. I frickin' HATE that.

Do they really not realize how incredibly rude that is? I'm still eating, here! I've got my fork and knife, I'm actively chewing, and someone is clearing off the other half of the table. It's like they just can't stand how slowly I'm eating. Like the fact that I'm still enjoying the meal that I paid for is getting in the way of the rest of their lives. Are they trying to make me feel guilty or something? It's like, "Hurry it along, lady! These guys managed to finish their food in a reasonable amount of time, so what's wrong with you?" Oooh, that pisses me off.

I keep trying to see it from the waiter's/waitress's point of view. I know that they're busy people, and they're trying to keep everything moving forward. But it's not like they really need to chase us off the table, and it's not like the poor Ecuadorean immigrants working at the sink give a shit about how fast the plates get washed. So what's the deal? Is it so bloody hard to wait until everyone is done and then clear the table? You wouldn't want me breathing down your neck while you ate your last bites of dinner, would you?

And another thing, while I'm getting myself all righteously indignant. You know how you tell your wait-person what you want to order, usually going around the table in some kind of logical fashion, and then they write it down on that nifty little notepad? Right, so, said wait-person should be able to figure out who ordered what when they get it from the kitchen. Which means that there's absolutely no excuse for them to come to the table with a plate of food and ask, "Yo! Who ordered the penne?" Seriously. That sort of thing might fly in a diner or a bar or something like that, but in a nice restaurant? Come on. I've even had that happen in a seriously expensive restaurant, and guess what? I never went back.

Finally, just to round out the rant: I shouldn't ever have to be thirsty. I shouldn't be sitting with an empty water glass, ever. If I am sitting with an empty water glass, it shouldn't be that way for longer than a minute or so, and I certainly shouldn't have to flag down my server to fill it. I'm paying them to notice these things, not to be chewing gum and gossiping with the maitre d'.

Well, I guess I've gotten crotchety in my old age. But this is something I've noticed more and more lately, maybe because we cook at home almost all the time and tend to go out quite rarely. This is what makes the difference between a good restaurant and a great restaurant --- not the food, but the service. At Per Se, which granted is at the top of the scale on both, the food was brilliant and the service was impeccable. We were made to feel welcome, never rushed, and my water glass was always full, often without my noticing that it had slipped below the one-third mark. And while it's true that really good food can make up for crappy service, or that thoughtful service can make up for mediocre food, it's also true that crappy service can ruin an otherwise perfectly good meal. Is it so much to ask to have both?

(For more waitstaff pet peeves, see this New York Times blog post.)

Thanksgiving 2010: A meal in pictures

2010-11-26T14:13:00.000-05:00

THE SETUP

THE MEAL

Porcini and Pecan Pâté
crostini, herbes de Provence olives

Smothered Cornbread
smoky seitan, microgreens, habeñero jelly

Fillet of Butternut Squash
red coconut milk curry, jasmine rice, fried shallots, keffir lime leaves

Carrot Salad
sultana purée, warming spices, Haystack Mountain Queso de Mano

Soupe à l’Oignon Gratinée

THE DESSERT

Chocolate Truffle Tart
Nói Síríus Icelandic chocolate

Almond Frangipane Tart
J. W. Lees 1997 Vintage Harvest Ale macerated prunes

THE AFTERMATH

Dinner is served

2010-11-26T13:52:00.001-05:00

Thanksgiving 2010

Porcini and Pecan Pâté

crostini, herbes de Provence olives

Smothered Cornbread

smoky seitan, microgreens, habeñero jelly

Fillet of Butternut Squash

red coconut milk curry, jasmine rice, fried shallots, keffir lime leaves

Carrot Salad

sultana purée, warming spices, Haystack Mountain Queso de Mano

Soupe à l’Oignon Gratinée

Chocolate Truffle Tart

Nói Síríus Icelandic chocolate

Almond Frangipane Tart

J. W. Lees 1997 Vintage Harvest Ale macerated prunes

Montgomery’s Cheddar

Domaine Jaume Côtes du Rhône La Friande 2009

Corte Gardoni Custoza 2009

Thanksgiving 2010: Calm before the storm

2010-11-25T15:31:00.000-05:00

The cooking is done. The table is set. The seating arrangements are...well, arranged. We're hanging out on the couches (which have been pushed against the far wall to accommodate the tables), watching football with the sound off, chatting about (and drinking) beer. Showers will happen soon. People will arrive soon. Last-minute panic will set in soon. But not yet.

From earlier today:
Dad-in-law sliced the cheese for the top of the onion soup...

...while Mom-in-law ironed our new, super-classy black tablecloths...

...and we shredded carrots...

...took the corn muffins out of the muffin tins...

...sliced cheese...

...and whipped cream.

Now, everything is set up in the kitchen, ready to go.

Thirteen people, seven courses, twelve bottles of wine. Two and half hours away. One last deep breath, and then...

Miscellaneous mid-afternoon update

2010-11-25T13:37:00.000-05:00

It's stopped snowing.

The squash is baked, the corn muffins (really, "muffins") are made, the cheese is sliced, the carrots are shredded, the table is set...

Oh man, the table. Apparently, it requires four adults and a degree in advanced calculus to get thirteen people to fit into my living room. The original plan was to use our large dining room table plus two folding six-foot tables. Sounds good, right? But there wasn't quite enough room for both of the folding tables before hitting the couch, so maybe we could move the couch against the wall...nope, still not enough room...but if we use only one of the folding tables and then put the leaf in the dining room table..but then the tablecloths won't fit right...well, okay, we could try moving everything against the other wall and putting no one at the head of table...but then the people on the other side can't get out...do we have enough folding chairs...what about turning it lengthwise...watch out for the stereo speakers...

In the end, of course, the original plan was the one that worked. Argh! It's like family therapy, but without the large bill.

But the table is set, and it looks wonderful. Michael and his mother are in the kitchen re-polishing the crystal, and when I'm done here I'll unload the dishwasher and work on slicing some more cheese. Now we just have to figure out where to put the centerpiece. Oh, and figuring out the seating arrangement. And we have to start warming the onion soup, as well as the seitan, and I need to load the gougèes onto a baking tray to be re-warmed...I should probably take a shower at some point...what am I wearing again...?

Man, I love this holiday.

Miscellaneous mid-morning update

2010-11-25T10:07:00.000-05:00

HOLY SHIT IT'S SNOWING!!!

Also, corn muffins!

That is all.

Thanksgiving 2010: Dash to the finish

2010-11-25T09:37:00.001-05:00

You know it's Thanksgiving when you wake up in the morning and make two frangipane tarts before eating breakfast.

Right now, I'm waiting for them to finish baking so that we can re-purpose the baking sheets for toasting crostini and roasting squash. Michael is pre-soaking some rice in the rice cooker, and as soon as this post uploads, I'm on cornbread duty. Isn't life delicious?

UPDATE: They're done!

Thanksgiving 2010: The home stretch

2010-11-24T23:12:00.008-05:00

Wrapping up today; gearing up for tomorrow. We had a lovely dinner a new veggie Chinese place at the edge of Chinatown, then visited David and Julia to see how their newly installed bamboo floor was holding up. (Dusty, if you're wondering. But lovely nonetheless.) Then we headed up to squeeze in a bit more preparation before The Big Day.

Mid-afternoon, Michael made the seitan sauce for part of one of our main courses. Don't worry about his knife skills; the red stuff is smoked paprika.

We both had a great time making and piping gougères. They're so much fun to watch while they're baking because you can see them puff up right before your eyes.

And finally, we stayed up late to finish baking a slicing six baguettes:

Thanksgiving 2010: One day more

2010-11-24T16:12:00.001-05:00

A quick late-afternoon update of where we're at: Most of the cooking projects are done for today, except for our amuse-bouche course and the baguettes. The in-laws have landed safely and will be put to work shortly polishing the silverware (no, I didn't actually get to that yesterday) and making sure all of our folding chairs have felt on the bottom of their legs so that they don't scratch our nice wooden floors. Meanwhile...

Ah, tart crust, my old nemesis. We meet again.

Ah, chocolate ganache, my old friend. We meet again.

Meanwhile, on the savory side of the kitchen...
Check out the pictures, so that you can play along with "guess that menu item"! Here's one:

And a second:

The mystery deepens...the cooking continues...

Thanksgiving 2010: Onion Day wrap-up

2010-11-24T10:32:00.005-05:00

It's over! Here's the poor-man's time-lapse of how it went down.

12:50: The first transport is away!

2:30

3:15

4:25

5:23

6:19

7:06

7:46

8:28: Ready for soup!

And how long did it all take?

Whew!

So the onions are caramelized, the soup is made, and the pots are cleaned. We finished some other Thanksgiving-related tasks, too, like slicing squash and making tart dough. Plus I'm drinking kava tea and Yerbatero is playing on the stereo, so I'm feeling pretty good.

UPDATE: Well, I was feeling pretty good at this point yesterday, which was about 11:30. But then Blogger, in its infinite wisdom, decided not to upload my photos. So I wasn't able to finish this post until this morning. I knew I shouldn't have been quite so sanguine about getting everything done...

Blogus Interruptus

2010-11-24T00:05:00.000-05:00

I f'ing hate this blog interface. I had a great post all set to go about making the onion soup, but the damn thing won't upload my photos. Grr. Sigh.

I'm going to bed and will try again tomorrow. I hope that will give Blogger some time to reflect on what it's done.

Thanksgiving 2010: Onion Day

2010-11-23T17:12:00.000-05:00

If it's Tuesday, it must be onions.

After morning yoga, Michael and I started our multi-hour process of caramelizing 25 lbs of onions. We set up an assembly line: Michael chopped the onions in half and took the skins off, and I fed them into the food processor and added them to the pots.

Right now, the two very large pots on the stove are filled with softened onions bubbling away happily in their own juices. We look in on them from time to time between other tasks: picking up our CSA, buying a few more kitchen towels and some slightly larger piping tips, and making the first course (Hint: It involves mushrooms. And rosemary).

Unsurprisingly, the whole house is filled with the smell of simmering onions, and the kitchen is warm and steamy from the cooking. It's very cozy. We'll keep letting them cook down slowly over the course of the next few hours, until all that will remain of that gigantic box is a pile of sweet, mahogany goo. Sometime later tonight, we'll add water and salt and some other spices to make it into soup.

In the meantime, I can catch up a bit on reporting what we were up to yesterday on the Thanksgiving front. In the morning, I went to work and we had the house cleaned while Michael went downtown to DiBruno Brothers and picked up this year's complement of cheese. We got a huge amount of Gruyère as per usual, to melt on top of the onion soup, and a few other assorted varieties for other dishes. This is Rich, one of our favorite cheesemongers, cutting us a piece of Queso de Mano:

We'd originally wanted Manchego, but Rich convinced Michael that this would be better for our purpose. Who are we to argue with the experts? We also got some Cantal and Montgomery's Cheddar, for as-yet-undisclosed culinary purposes.

After I got back from work, we had a quick bite of lunch and went to Moore Brothers to get some wine. We bought nine bottles of red and three of white (case discount!), as well as a gorgeous bottle of cognac. Some of that will be for the cooking, but most of it is just for drinking during the cooking. :)

The afternoon was spent cleaning. Michael polished the crystal and ran the new silverware through the dishwasher. Unfortunately, since our water is so hard, there are a few spots and stains on both the crystal and the silverware, so I've taken it upon myself to do some touch-ups later today. I also washed the china that we'll be using. As I said before, we don't have a complete set of any one type of plate, but I was able to find some websites that are selling odds and ends, so perhaps we will be able to build up a full set soon. Just not before Thursday.

We're pretty much where we want to be with our schedule, which is good news. The rest of today will be spent doing some of the heavy prep work and making things that don't mind sitting for a few days to let their flavors meld. I'll check back later with an onion soup update. The anticipation is mounting!

Thanksgiving 2010: Le Menu

2010-11-22T16:02:00.011-05:00

Michael and I are working out the final wording for our Thanksgiving menu. So, as a reader service today, IPoL will be presenting a brief workshop in how to make your menu sound more glamorous than it actually is. Of course, it helps if your menu is actually glamorous, as ours is. But even if it's not, here are a few simple tips for making your favorite snotty foodies feel right at home.

Adjectives
If I could pick only one tip for gussying up a menu, it would be to add more adjectives. Some people think they can get away with serving just "beets," but that simply won't cut the mustard these days, if you'll pardon the expression. You gotta get some descriptors in there. They're "baby beets" or "roasted baby beets" or even "roasted red baby beets." See? Doesn't that sound like something you'd pay $10 for as an appetizer? If you're lucky, you know where your food came from, and you can say something like "Keystone Farms organic roasted red baby beets." If you're not so lucky...well, I'd just stick with the basic descriptors and avoid saying "Acme Aisle 5 blue-light special roasted red baby beets." It just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Think you're getting the hang of it? Pop quiz: What do you serve your Keystone Farms organic roasted red baby beets with? Just "bread" and "sauce"? Oh no! It's "fresh, crisp-toasted slices of baguette" and "mushroom red-wine sauce" --- or perhaps "porcini mushroom and shiraz sauce." The more specific, the better.

The nice thing about the adjective trick is it doesn't much matter how banal your description is. Even if you're serving "butternut squash" or "red beets" instead of plain ol' "squash" or "beets," it makes a difference. Dickens was paid by the word; act like you are too. For instance, instead of "roasted beets" you could say "oven-roasted beets." See what I did there? There's pretty much no way to roast a beet other than in an oven, so the first part is totally irrelevant. Yet totally fancy.

French
Ooh la la, cherie! Nothing says fancy, expensive food like using lots of French terms. It used to be that you had to know French in order to know French, but now you don't, if you know what I mean. No? Two words: Google translate. Stick a few key phrases in there and stuff 'em onto your menu, and you're golden.

Allow me to illustrate. Instead of boring "onion soup," you now have "soupe à l'oignon." Much better --- and there's an accent in it too, so people will know it's all foreign and exotic and stuff. Tired of regular "green beans"? Nothing spices them up like calling them "haricots verts"! Well, some pepper might help, too. What kind of pepper? "Finely-ground Chinese white pepper," of course.

Quotation marks
When all else fails, bring out the big guns: quotation marks. These are best when you're serving something that didn't quite work out, but you want to make it look like that was all on purpose and you're being playful and witty. Thomas Keller is a master at this. He serves a dish called "peas and carrots," which contains (you guessed it) peas and carrots. But playfully. They're not your grandmother's peas and carrots! They're hip! They're modern! They're so totally over just being peas and carrots that they've transformed into being the blasé, too-cool-for-school "peas and carrots" that proudly slouch before you today. It's like having teenagers at the table --- only tastier.

~~And there we have it!~~ Et voilà! Now you too can live the dream and please the food snobs in your life. And if you send me just $29.95, you'll get the full-length DVD, "Better Dining Through Sexing Up Your Menu Rather Than Improving Your Cooking." But that's not all! If you order within the next five minutes, I'll also send along a free bonus gift of gently off-white part-linen paper on which you can print out your very own culinary-language masterpiece! Amuse your friends! Amaze your guests! Confound your enemies! Call now!*

*No substitutions. Limit one per customer. Offer valid only where fine snark is not appreciated.

Thanksgiving 2010: Epic shop

2010-11-21T17:22:00.000-05:00

When I say epic, I mean epic. Check it out:

And that's just from one store.

Michael and I made a gigantic list of all of the ingredients we needed, and then, in true sneed fashion, broke it down by which stores we needed to go to in order to get them. Here's a sample of the software section, as a tease:

all purpose flour
heavy cream
vanilla extract
almond extract
nutritional yeast flakes
white miso
carrot juice
cocoa powder
olives
20 lbs onions
eggs
cornmeal
smoked salt
coriander seeds
peppercorns
cinnamon sticks
cloves
4 lbs Gruyere
dried porcini mushrooms
lemons
sun dried tomatoes
microgreens
galangal
lemongrass
coriander root
kaffir lime leaves
fried shallots

And the hardware:

muffin tin
tart pans
ring mold
kitchen towels
crystal cleaner

My somewhat lame attempt to be artistic with one of the new tart pans:

Maybe it would look better in sepia? Anyway, if you can believe it, we're still not quite done with the shopping --- there were one or two odds and ends that we weren't able to find on our massive Whole Foods run, so we'll have to head out tomorrow in order to complete the shopping mission. But we're getting close.

That was yesterday. Today is general house-straightening in preparation for house cleaning, which will happen tomorrow. All of the new plates and silverware are getting washed, and the new tablecloths (thanks, mom- and dad-in law!) are spread out on the dining room table to air out and un-wrinkle. After some prompting from both mothers, we decided to get black tablecloths, and they look very dramatic, if I do say so myself:

Tomorrow: more cleaning, more shopping, and twenty pounds of onions prepare to meet their maker. Stay tuned.

Wrestling with angels

2010-11-20T19:54:00.000-05:00

This morning at Shabbat services, we read the Torah portion in which Jacob wrestles with an angel. The struggle lasts all night, and as dawn approaches, the angel, in a desperate move to escape, breaks Jacob's hip. But Jacob triumphs in the end, and the angel gives him a new name and a new identity: Israel, the father of a people.

This story has been interpreted in various ways over the years, with commentators speculating that the angel was an evil spirit sent by Jacob's estranged brother Esau, or a manifestation of Jacob's own guilty conscience, or the guardian of the river that Jacob had just crossed. But the interpretation that speaks to me the most today may also be the most straightforward one: Jacob, in a literal sense, wrestles with an angel. He wrestles with his faith. His struggle leaves him injured and weak and permanently changed.

I resonate to this part of the story because I, like so many, struggle with faith. Like Jacob, this wrestling match has left me scarred and exhausted and renewed. But unlike Jacob, the new identity I have wrung out of the struggle is not as the parent of a God-fearing tribe, but of a woman who has accepted a world without the presence of God.

This acceptance has been a long time in coming, prompted by many different experiences and teachings. In the end, I believe that the world that I live in doesn't have room for a God, at least not for the type of God who orders the universe and cares about the individual lives of humans. Evil is too pervasive, too random, too successful. The usual response about the existence of a divine plan is unconvincing. The rational mode of thinking in which I have been trained makes me cautious about any role that a God might have in creating life, or in perpetuating it, or in designing the laws that govern it. And lest you be tempted to conclude that this is a simple case of science killing the ability to appreciate the divine, I offer the observation that becoming a scientist has given me more opportunities to marvel at the wonders of the world than I ever thought possible. I am still moved by the beauty of the stars, by the rush of the seas, by the joy of loving my family and friends --- but because I am human, not because I believe.

Why, then, do I continue to be a practicing Jew? Why light candles on Chanukah or refrain from eating bread on Passover or fast on Yom Kippur? To please a God who doesn't exist? No. Then why? Why bother to go to Shabbat morning services, as I did today, or to continue to learn and teach Torah, or to put up a mezuzah on my door? All of these things, and more, are meaningful to me. But why should they be? Because this is what my family has always done? Because these are the ways in which I can keep in touch with my community? Because I just haven't come up with a good reason to stop?

These are the questions that form the basis of my struggle now. Having rejected the idea of a literal God, I now find myself searching for a way to bring meaning to the practices and rituals that are important to me. And even after several years of this search, I can offer no particular insight, only the vaguest sense that my religious practice matters to me because of my community, because of my family. I can't and don't want to stop feeling that connection. But I also can't explain why that leads me to do the things I do or to feel the things I feel.

Even today, when I was moved to tears by a fellow congregant's story of why he chose to convert to Judaism, I knew that his faith wasn't mine. After years of struggle with homelessness and heroin addiction, he'd found a family where he felt that he belonged. It's true that I belong to the same family and feel the same way, but for him the connection was divinely inspired, the answer to what he called "a God-shaped hole in my heart." I had such a hole once, and I did feel it filled by God, but I don't anymore. And as I stood there in the synagogue, unsuccessfully holding back my tears, I couldn't help but ask myself the same old questions: Why do I not believe as he does, even though I have the same capacity for it? Why is my soul still stirred by belonging to this community when I don't believe that I even have a soul? Why am I the way that I am?

The wrestling match goes on. Shabbat shalom.

TTPMO: Christmas creep

2010-11-19T12:04:00.000-05:00

Note to the world, particularly the retail world: Christmas is on December 25. That's December, people, the last month of the year. Not November, or October, or September, and certainly not August. Can we just get this straight? Because I am seriously pissed off by the fact that stores start putting out the holiday decorations before it's even Halloween. Give it a rest! We've barely gotten over the tinsel typhoon from last year, and you're already trying to shove more holiday crap down my throat? I'll tell you where you can shove your holiday crap.

Why do stores do this? Does it actually help to move the merchandise to have a bunch of reindeer in the shoe department when I'm still shopping for flip-flops? Does it make me more likely to spend money when I see I red and green and cheery lights and those creepy animatronic carolers waving their arms about like pasty white zombies moving through molasses? Or does it just make me more likely to head to the nearest bathroom to find a place to retch other than all over your two-for-one scarf sale?

Some would say that I'm not being properly moved by the Christmas spirit. To these people I say, it seems that the Christmas spirit has sold out to Disney and Coca Cola, and while I'm all for goodwill towards my fellow humans, I am certainly not moved by a four-month assault on my wallet. Nor should I be. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to my Thanksgiving preparations. Bah humbug!

In the 'hood

2010-11-18T13:54:00.000-05:00

I have exactly ten minutes to finish this post before my haircut appointment so here goes nothing.

As you will no doubt already have deduced, I am getting my haircut this afternoon. I go to Deluxe Salon, which is about five minutes walking distance from the house. My stylist is Maria, and she's been doing both my hair and Michael's for nearly five years now; she's more of a friend than a service provider. On my walk over to the salon, I'll pass Betty's Speakeasy, home of the most delicious cupcakes and fudge in the city. If I have a moment on the way back I might pop in and chat with the owner, Liz, about the new condo developments going up across the street or about her new fall lineup of cake and fudge flavors. Then, I'll walk over to Penn (over the newly renovated South Street Bridge --- huzzah!) to hear a talk, and after that I'll walk back to Resurrection Ale House, the pub that's about a block away from my house. I know the owner and his wife, and have for years, ever since he was the bartender at the Nodding Head brewpub, another favorite haunt. I also know all the bartenders, as well as most of the waitstaff and the head chef, who made some delicious spicy pepper jelly out of the last batch of habeneros from my roof deck. Maybe I'll run into Reese, my contractor who's done some great work on the house and whom I met because we both were at the bar one night, or Wes, the guy who opened a new yoga studio a few blocks away.

My point? This is what life is supposed to be like. I love living in a city where these sorts of things can and do happen every day. I love that I have a neighborhood where I know my neighbors and the people who run the businesses around here. I love that I can walk to get my haircut, to get to the university, to get a drink, to get groceries. Everything I need is at my fingertips, or at least within reasonable walking distance. The shops and restaurants are small businesses, not big chains, and the people behind the counters are the owners or their dedicated employees, not surly college students looking to make extra beer money. I repeat, this is what life is supposed to be like. God save me from the suburbs, the sprawl, the car-based alienation, the oh-sorry-it's-after-10-so-everything-is-closed mentality. Viva la ville!

One of those days

2010-11-17T21:39:00.001-05:00

It's been one of those days. You know the kind I mean. It's not that anything has gone wrong, exactly, it's just that nothing has managed to go right. I tried a new study design on my preschool subjects this morning and they completely failed it. A really good symposium proposal was rejected from an important conference. My paper was rejected from a high-ranking journal and now I have a ton of work to do in order to re-submit it somewhere else. I woke up alone this morning because I spent the night at an anonymous hotel in Somerset so that I could be closer to the office in the morning. I left my lunch in the fridge at said hotel and didn't manage to get anything to eat until nearly 3:30. My car is completely out of gas and probably won't run the next time I need it. I was stuck at the office until 7:00, and then had to drive an hour and a half to get home. I need a beer. I need a hug. I need to crawl under a blanket and curl up and tell the world to go away.

The trouble isn't so much all of these trivial insults to my pride and sanity. The trouble is me. I've had days that were much worse but that I was able to handle much better. But today, for some reason, it's been extra hard for me to cope. Maybe it's the lack of support: I didn't see Michael all day, and there was no one around the office for me to commiserate with. Or maybe it's that I've been feeling unsure about my chosen career lately because of the uncertainty with the job market, and all of these rejections are playing on my fears. Whatever it is, I'm feeling very morose this evening. Beaten down. Dejected. Did I mention that I need a hug?

Unfortunately, when I'm feeling like this, there's very little that can help pull me out of it. The usual words of comfort sound like hollow platitudes and only serve to make me more bitter: "Don't worry." "It will all be OK." "You're going to be fine." "It will all work out for the best." The people telling me these things mean only the best, but can't they understand how shallow they sound?

Luckily, I still have just enough grounding to believe them, to believe that everything will be OK, to believe that the setbacks (if indeed they are) are just temporary. And just as luckily, I have a little time and space tonight to regroup and work through it. I've also cleared my schedule so that I can go to yoga in the morning, and that always helps to take the edge off, whether because of the workout endorphins or the deep breathing or the focusing of energy, it doesn't matter. I just have to keep reminding myself to stay strong and not to deny the sadness I'm feeling now, but at the same to let it pass through me, to refuse to let it define me.

What helps me the most at times like these is to think about what Gandalf says to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring. Cheesy though that sounds, there's something in his words that soothes me. As Gandalf himself would say, that is an encouraging thought.

Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.

Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

TTPMO: Ugly cars

2010-11-17T16:32:00.003-05:00

In today's installment of Things That Piss Me Off, we'll examine an aesthetic pet peeve: ugly cars. While the Apple fangirl in me hates bad design in all forms, for some reason the hatred is particularly acute when directed at cars. There are a few reasons for this. One is that they cost so damn much, and anything with that kind of price tag should be able to stand up to a little extra scrutiny. Also, cars have to pass through so many different hands before reaching the market --- advertising execs, focus groups, engineers, presumably a designer or two --- that any ugliness should have been eliminated long before I see the thing driving around on the New Jersey Turnpike. To put the same point another way, if I do see an ugly car driving around on the New Jersey Turnpike, it's because a large number of people decided that they wanted it to look like that. It's ugly on purpose.

Finally, I would like to dedicate today's post to my good friend and former roommate Derek, who is possibly the only person more obsessed with this topic than I am. Seriously, the guy could go on for hours about bad taillights. And as we all know, nothing kills a car's aesthetics more quickly than bad taillights. (Editor's note: Not really.)

Let's take a look at some of the worst offenders, shall we?

The PT Cruiser

I know that some people are nuts about this car, but I just don't see it. What the heck is this trying to be? What's up with that grille? And why does it look like the bastard child of a 30s airplane and a tractor trailer? Also, its headlight placement makes it look cross-eyed. I hate that.

The Chevrolet HHR
It gets worse. Rather than rebelling against this offense to good taste, as all sane people should, the geniuses over at Chevrolet tried to copy the design. Seriously? Not only that, they ended up somehow making it look even uglier, which is saying something.

At least the actual PT Cruiser had originality going for it. And, when pressed, I'll admit that there may in some ways be something a little cool about its sleek lines. But the Chevy designers, in their infinite wisdom, made it squarer, squatter, and dumber-looking. Way to go, guys!

The Toyota FJ Cruiser
Note to car designers: Do not name your care anything with the word "cruiser" in it. Recipe for disaster. Just look at this thing:

This is an especially shocking entry on this list since it comes from Toyota, which is usually in the business of making sensible, decent-looking vehicles. Maybe they thought that they'd accumulated enough pretty-car karma to make up for this travesty? I can find no other way to explain why they thought it would be a good idea to release a car that looks like it's been made out of Legos. And have you seen the taillights?

Ugh. Get this bug-eyed beast off my highways.

The Honda Element
Again, a hideous mistake from a company that should know better. Lest you think that this is just a sweet, albeit square, family car, take a look at the siding. It's plastic. It looks like you should cut a hole in the bottom so your six-year-old can stick his feet out and run around the driveway.

Why they wanted to draw attention to the fact that they skimped on proper car materials is beyond me.

To be fair, the newer models have replaced the plastic with...well, with plastic, but it looks like metal. Anyway, it's gotten better, and I should probably take it off the list, if it weren't for the fact that the original version was so egregiously gross.

The Pontiac Aztek
No wonder Pontiac is in the toilet. Honestly, who came up with this car? Was it designed by committee? A committee of ten-year olds? All of whom were drunk?

I don't even know where to start. It's making my eyes bleed. And it gets worse from behind:

What is up with that rearview? Did someone's uncle get a special on glass and they had to use as much of it as possible? Is this so that when you throw the bodies in the trunk, they can have a nice view?

What's almost crazier to me than the fact that they manufactured this thing is that people actually bought them. Yes, people actually paid good money for these, and then seemed to be unashamed to be seen in them in public. Oh, the humanity!

I could go on in this vein for quite a while, but I will content myself with just one more entry in my Ugly Car Hall of Fame:

The Mercedes G-Class

This one just kills me. It's trying to look like a Jeep or a Land Rover or some other tough, sporty, off-road vehicle --- but it's a fucking Mercedes. You're not fooling anyone, G-Class. Plus, you're ugly. Take your ball and go home.

Well, that's all for today. You will no doubt have noticed that all of these cars are of fairly modern vintage. That was to keep things focused; believe me, I have some choice words about the cars of yesteryear as well (I'm lookin' at you, Edsel). You will also no doubt have noticed that what makes these cars ugly is purely what meets the eye. But there are lots of things about cars that make them ugly other than their appearance. I haven't even gotten to venting my spleen on hideous gas-guzzlers (epitomized by the Hummer), overly expensive wastes of space (Porsche makes an SUV?), or other automotive disasters that seem to exist for the sole purpose of allowing their owners to wave their dicks around (too many to name). Those, of course, will have to wait for another entry.

The non-dairy double-take

2010-11-16T19:45:00.030-05:00

My newest favorite snack:

They're bite-sized chocolate-coated vanilla ice cream nibbles, and I love them with an irrational passion. The nutritional info is a little scary, since each serving has 230 calories and contains something like 50% of my daily fat intake, but reading the fine print reveals that a serving is about 15 pieces. I'm perfectly content with four or five pieces, so I'm all set.

Plus, they're made with almond milk. So they're vegan and suitable for lactose-intolerant relatives of various sorts, because they're non-dairy.

But hold on a second --- what's up with the packaging?

Have a look:

No, look closer:

Does that make any sense whatsoever? Are they dairy or aren't they? Honestly, someone needs to explain this to me, since it's making my head hurt.

Thanksgiving 2010: Phasing

2010-11-15T11:22:00.000-05:00

Last night, Michael and I locked off the menu. Whew! I think that people don't quite realize what an effort it is to think of ways to serve the same set of ingredients that we haven't tried before, but at any rate, we've managed it. (Full disclosure: I am going to be repeating a dessert that was served in a past year, but it's too delicious not to have it again. Plus, it won't be the only dessert.)

That, then, marks the end of the menu-planning phase of Thanksgiving 2010, and as I've been suggesting, it wasn't trivial. We started thinking about it sometime back in August, when the winter food magazines were out in Australia, and have been tossing around ideas on and off ever since then. We got really serious about the planning about last week, and have been spending significant time since then looking through cookbooks, magazines, and websites to refine our courses. In the final analysis, we have five main courses that will all be individually plated, plus an amuse-bouche, plus dessert and cheese. The recipes we're using come from eight different cookbooks. A quick glance at the combined ingredients list yields a whopping sixty tablespoons of butter. We're going to need a bigger boat.

We're also going to need to move on to the next steps of the process, or the next phases of the operation, if you will: making a shopping list, making a shopping and cooking schedule, doing the shopping, and executing the schedule. Oh, and actually eating the damn thing, although it might surprise you to know that that's the farthest thing from my mind right now.

If this sounds more like a military invasion than a meal, I think that's quite apt. The logistics are somewhat staggering, and anything that involves buying that much butter at a pop deserves a more dramatic moniker than merely "cooking." Can we make "Thanksgiving" into a verb for this purpose? "Thanksgiving-ing"? Whatever it is, it's really its own thing, a multi-month affair that, in its penultimate phase, consumes our lives for a solid week (longer, if you count the time it will take to wash the glassware).

But guess what? I love it. I've been belaboring the amount of labor that it takes only to make precisely that point. It's so different from what I do in the rest of my life, and so all-consuming and dramatically extravagant that it just makes me happy, from top to bottom. And even if it means running around to half a dozen different stores to do the shopping, even if it means spending three solid days in the kitchen, even if means insisting in very strong terms to my mother and mother-in-law that no, there's really nothing that they can do to help so they should just just sit down and enjoy themselves for once, it's all worth it. How could it fail to be? When all is said and done, we get to eat!

Thanksgiving 2010: Building a menu

2010-11-14T09:21:00.000-05:00

When I said yesterday that we hadn't yet started purchasing food for Thanksgiving, that wasn't quite true. We were at the farmers' market in Clark Park yesterday to pick up a few odds and ends for the week, when we stumbled across a stall selling butternut squash. This wasn't at all unusual, since they're the sort of thing that tend to be sold at farmers' markets 'round this parts at this time of year. What caught our collective eye was that these squash had extremely long necks:

Perfect for our squash dish this Thanksgiving! Why, you ask? Oh...not telling.

I'm being coy about the menu for a reason. I like the extra enjoyment that a bit of surprise adds to the proceedings. If people don't know what's being served, they can't form expectations, either good or bad, and just have to work with what's being served at that moment. It makes the appearance of each course just a little more interesting, a little more highly anticipated. So you want to know what's for dinner? As my grandfather would say, "You'll see it when it hits the table."

It's impossible to keep the menu entirely secret. For one thing, everyone knows that we're having onion soup, since that's basically become our tradition at this point. For another, one of the points of this meal is to showcase ingredients and flavors that are at their peak this time of year. A quick look around your local market can thus give you some idea as to what we'll be working with: squash, beets, carrots, mushrooms, hearty greens. Anyone who knows me also knows that dessert is pretty much guaranteed to have chocolate in it. Also, loyal readers (or people who click here) will know that our menu adheres to several simple rules: Use what's fresh and in season. Make as much as you can yourself. Keep palates fresh by serving lots of small courses. Never repeat a flavor.

But those are the only clues I'm willing to give out. I won't be telling how those ingredients are being combined, or in what order they'll be served, or whether they're the only ones we'll be working with. Let me keep some air of mystery, eh?

Getting serious about Thanksgiving

2010-11-13T19:11:00.001-05:00

Yep, it's that time of year again. Michael and I are heading into what has become our annual Thanksgiving ritual: Making a very large meal for a very large group of people. Well, fine, I suppose that's nearly everyone's Thanksgiving ritual. But ours happens to be all vegetarian and involves seven or so courses and three or so straight days of preparation.

It also involves lots of counting. You'd think that Thanksgiving is all about the food, but no --- this year it seems to be all about the math. How many people are coming? Fourteen. Okay, so how long of a table do we need to fit all of those people? A bit of wrangling with the tape measure indicates that we'll need about 18 feet of table. Well, we could do that by using our regular dining room table with the leaf plus an eight-foot folding table, or we could do it by using our regular dining room table with the leaf plus our card table plus the kitchen table, or we could do it by using our regular dining room table without the leaf plus plus two six-foot folding tables, or...

You get the idea. If you're interested, we settled on the latter plan, which necessitated the purchase of two six-foot folding tables from Lowe's. While we were there, we got two gel-cushioned "comfort mats" to put on our tiled kitchen floor, anticipating several days of sore feet and knees during the prep phase. And since we've got new tables, we need new tablecloths. But how much overhang will we want on a table that 6 feet by 3 feet? Back to the measuring tape.

There's also lots of counting to be done. Do we have enough cloth napkins? Enough plates? Enough glasses? Enough silverware? As of right now, the answers are yes, maybe, probably, and yes (finally). Yes, we are now the proud owners of a new set of silverware, service for sixteen (thanks Mom and Dad!), to replace our old and dishwasher-battered service for six and a half or so.

I've been just itching to get these out of the box and start using them; they're so sleek and elegant (and shiny!). But no, I will wait. They deserve a grand meal to kick them off right.

The napkin issue was solved last year when we had the foresight to buy a set for sixteen, and I think we should have enough water glasses and wine glasses for everyone. The plates, however, are posing a bit of an problem. We'll be having fourteen people, and we're planning on serving five courses, plus an amuse-bouche, plus dessert. That's at least six major courses at which we'll need plates (or bowls, or oven-safe ramekins in the case of the onion soup). We've got large plates and salad plates from our regular set, plus a set of square white plates that we bought a few years ago for this purpose, plus the ramekins. So that's four courses covered. To make up the gap, we acquired a new set of rectangular white plates, which should make for a lovely presentation of one of our more colorful dishes:

We've also inherited a set of china from my grandmother, which has been sitting in our basement waiting for just such an occasion to make its debut at our table. When we were first pressed into taking the china, we were worried about silly curlicues or garish flower patterns, but these are the perfect thing for Thanksgiving:

There's an interesting history lesson that comes along with them too. When we looked at the back to see where the plates were made, we found this:

So in addition to expressing a bit of family history, these plates also express a very particular period of world history, and one that's been almost lost, at least to my generation.

But nothing comes easy. We originally thought that the china set was service for twelve, but it turns out that there are lots of missing pieces. We do have the full complement of soup bowls, but there are only seven dinner plates and five salad plates. We should be able to put together fourteen plates of some size or other out of the lot, but it's a lucky thing that we don't need the whole set to do its duty all at once.

And, of course, there's one other type of math that I don't particularly like doing this time of year: adding up the cost. Michael and I love putting on this production, and we especially love picking out the best ingredients and pairing them with the best wine, but that sort of thing doesn't come cheap. New tables, new tablecloths, new plates, new silverware, extra kitchen tools, the floor mats --- and we haven't even started buying the food yet! Luckily, we're in a good financial position to be able to do all this, and that helps me feel all the more grateful that we can.

Post-workout blues

2010-11-12T22:04:00.000-05:00

I'm back from circus practice, have had a bit of dinner, and now I must confess that I'm a little disappointed in myself. There were so many tricks that I wanted to work on, but I hardly got to half of them, and some of the ones that I had time for didn't work out correctly. I seem to have inexplicably forgotten how to do one of my favorite tricks on the silks, French back balance, to the point where I actually got myself tangled. Okay, the forgetting isn't so inexplicable, since according to my notes the last time I did it was in June, but still. It was really frustrating.

Before tonight, I had been planning to work on a silks routine for the spring showcase next year, but now I think that there's no way I can make that happen. My strength and endurance aren't enough for more than two or three tricks in a row, so how the heck did I think I would be able to manage a four minute performance? Plus, some of the tricks that I was planning to put into the act won't work quite as expected, so I have some major rethinking to do. I know that there's lots of time between now and then, and I shouldn't get so down on myself, but it's hard to keep my spirits up when the things that I thought would be easy for me turned out to be so challenging. So how am I ever supposed to learn the things that I thought would be hard?

There were some notable successes tonight too, though, so it wasn't all doom and gloom. I spent a lot of time on the trapeze working on my front balance, and I managed to hold it quite well and for much longer than ever before. That felt really good. I should clarify --- it felt good inside, although it really hurt the top of my hips. I feel like my inability to do a decent front balance has been holding me back, since it's involved in a lot of tricks, and I'm happy with my progress in getting closer to mastering it.

I also had some success on the silks recreating a drop that I learned when I was in Australia. The instructor there called it an Isle of Man drop, and I've never seen anyone do anything like it at my school, which makes it extra fun for me to have in my repertoire.

Plus, I got to try out a new circus outfit: Fluorescent red stirrup tights under a pair of black running shorts. Finally, I've something that American Apparel is good for other than convincing frumpy middle-aged women and overweight high school girls to squeeze themselves into brightly colored 70s throwback outfits that were designed for spindly, anemic-looking tarts with anorexia. I couldn't get any pictures, alas, since we open-practicers were chased out at 7 sharp to make room for the class that needed the studio after us. Besides, I didn't have much strength left at the end of the practice to get into any particularly interesting positions for a photo. But I'll be back next week, with lots more tricks to try and a new resolve to whip myself into shape for the spring.