Rover, wanderer, nomad, vagabond

I just got home (and cleaned up) from reffing my first hockey game. A former teammate/coworker and I had taken the test with USA Hockey & attended the seminar in the fall so we received our crests. I put attempting to ref on hold until after I had finished last semester's classes, but since furlough is this entire week I'd left my calendar wide open for games to ref if they felt the urge to assign them to me. And did they ever take advantage of that; my first game was tonight, I have one on Saturday, and one next Monday. But it's really fun and a lot to think about all at the same time and I didn't even trip over any of the 10 year olds (my biggest fear is sitting on one of them & crushing 'em) who were playing in this game and I got a great workout chasing after them to watch the goal line/offsides. And I get paid to do it, to boot. It was awesome!

I hope I screw up less on Saturday than I did today.

Christmas this year was cool -- my mother and dad enjoyed the food D & I cooked for them & the gifts we gave them. Mom gave me a cookbook from Hell's Kitchen (the Minneapolis restaurant, not the TV show) which has all the stuff that my dad & D love to eat (bison sausage, lemon ricotta pancakes, homemade peanut butter). I am enjoying the thought of trying all the recipes myself. Plus maybe reading the ingredient list for the caramel rolls which involves 2 sticks of butter per batch will make me stop wanting them so much....or at least give me a better idea of how much running I'm in for after I have one.

I spent some quality time this past Saturday with Lilabeth & Stan. Stan is at the stage now where he likes making cat and dog noises when he sees cats and dogs (I have a beanie baby of each of them) and also where he finds noses fascinating--moreso if they're not his own. The side of my nose he was grabbing & twisting over the weekend now moves in ways the other side doesn't, and is accompanied by pain when it does so. I'm guessing the two things may be related--having a small monkey hanging off my face & having it hurt afterward.... Good thing I don't rely on my world-famous nose to get a paycheck. ;-)

Otherwise, I appear to be getting a headcold from the way my throat is feeling. That makes me sad; I don't want to be sick when I'm supposed to be entertaining my parents on Thursday.

Today was a final in the earlier of my two classes & the anniversary-luncheon at work.

The good:
-Overall, I think I needed approximately 15% on the final to insure that I got an A in the class. I believe I got more than that.
-The chocolate cake with fudge frosting & raspberry sauce for a garnish was great at lunch. Also, the 'house' salad dressing was yummy.

The bad:
-Our test had a bunch of things on it that he'd mentioned how to do in passing but never actually had us do ourselves.
-The main course at lunch was weird; chicken & bologna(?) in creamy pasta. I'm ok with one meat or the other. Both together makes it feel very much like a meal my dad is throwing together based on leftovers in the fridge 'cuz we don't have the money to go to the store this week. Also, it had olives in it; I hate olives (they're one of fewer than 5 foods I just don't like). They were easy to pick out, though.

The ugly:
-He had one thing on the test which we'd never ever had to do before. Fortunately, the command for it was pretty straightforward & I'm sure the help menu was at least marginally useful (I didn't bother to try to use help). Most people didn't seem to get to that section, though. Relative to how quickly I finished the mid-term, this test took forever.
-I had to stand in front of about 40 people at lunch while they talked about my accomplishments. This makes me feel beyond self-conscious.

I will be glad when it's time to go home today. I'm sleepy--it feels like it's been a long day.

I just reinstalled Baldur's Gate 2 (and the expansion) on my desktop (600 x 800 resolution, how I've missed thee?). Why, you ask? Because I was about six dragons away from finishing the expansion and I never got around to it. Jokingly, I used to say I was sure I'd have the game done by the time I turned 30. Now the clock is ticking....

The Monster Half (and 10-mile) are coming up in a couple weeks and I can't decide if I want to run another 10-mile without training much for it or not. On one hand, the last one turned out really well, especially relative to the effort I put into it. On the other hand....I'm not sure if Lilabeth would be able to do it with me or not. (But there's a discount for signing up for both the race on Oct 31 AND the half-marathon next spring which I think I'd like to do again! And discounts are good....right?!?)

I tried my hand at a different butternut squash ravioli recipe tonight. It was an epic fail. I'm somewhat curious if anyone else has had success with making the stuff at home and, if they have, what recipe they used. The filling tonight was over-seasoned so it tasted almost like an over-nutmeged pumpkin pie. The sage-brown butter sauce which was supposed to go with it was just weird. *sigh* Someday, I will find a version of this I can make at home. 'Til then, many squash will die to bring me that information.

My mother knows of my cooking experiments this past year, with the CSA and generally getting sick of eating the same five meals over and over again and all. So she keeps bringing a different cookbook from the library every time she sees me. The latest one was from Clotilde Dusoulier, the author of Chocolate & Zucchini, a food blog which has been around for millenia (by internet blogging standards).

She's very...interesting and her love of food is quite....earnest. Her food pairings in the cookbook are positively bizarre in a lot of cases, and her portion sizes are very VERY French. By which I mean that some of what she mentions using as a main course would be fine--if I'd also had a soup &/or salad course and a pasta course beforehand, and were intending to finish up with dessert after the main. I can't imagine feeding most of them to my father and actually satisfying his appetite. Or to my mother, and actually expecting her to eat 90% of the ingredients. Perhaps if I were enamoured with goat cheese, this might have helped me along the path of loving her ideas but as I am not it was quite a large stumbling block in about 40% of her recipes. And to the best of my knowledge, canned duck is not a very simple ingredient to get ahold of here in the US. I don't even know in which aisle one would find it at Cub.... I suppose I shouldn't mock her (or Cub). Maybe they do sell it & I'm blissfully unaware, as the only duck I ever ate growing up came from one of my father's hunting trips, not a cannery and therefore I am the food-snob. But I can't help but think, when I read the section about stocking my pantry, that it's much easier to do if I don't have to shell out Euros & have things shipped across an ocean prior to putting them on my shelf.

But her desserts? I'd totally eat that! (And pretty much every other one I read.) A sweet tooth apparently transcends our varying cultures.

( Today I did a lot of stuff )
Man, am I ever happy that it's about bedtime. I'm tired!

Fortunately, I have nothing going on tomorrow which would necessitate I leave the house with my car
as that sounds like it will suck.

*looks at her calendar*

Oh, wait. I'm supposed to wade through downtown 4 times....

/sad face

My work computer shuts off now, when I am not at my desk for some extended time period. The shortest time I have been gone and come back to discover it off is just over an hour. Yet the power settings claim it is never to shut down of its own free will, no matter how long I leave it alone. I can hardly wait 'til it starts shutting itself off when I'm still _using_ it.

A great big THANK YOU to Lilabeth & Jme for dinner tonight; it was delicious. I do enjoy Solera...

I just made a fairly quick, semi-nutritious, and tasty soup for dinner which involved chicken, noodles, coconut milk, lime, garlic/onion, and asian fish sauce. I love it when I stumble across a decent recipe on the internet kind of at random.

On the down side, my hands now smell like lime, garlic, and fish sauce. All at once.

Last night saw my first attempt at making veggie stock using this handy website's suggestions, coupled with some comments from the CSA message board. (These sources caused me to add some strange ingredients--like celery leaves from when I cleaned and froze several partial heads of celery, rather than throwing the leaves out like I normally do.) It smelled great while it was cooking and it used a bunch of what I'd normally consider to be rubbish (most folks with a garden would call it compost), so I think that's a double win. And thanks to my cooking fit over the weekend and the menu we've got planned for this week, I won't have to "worry" about lunches at all--by the time I run out of weekend leftovers, D will be making some of his dishes which give lots of leftovers, too.

This morning when I woke up, it was pissing down with rain which did not make me want to go for a run outside. So instead, I was a wuss and used a treadmill indoors. I've been working all summer to try and get myself to run a 5k at an ever-faster pace. I managed this morning's in about 29 minutes, which is my new "fastest time" evar, so I'm happy with that.

Last week Wednesday was our final trap shoot of the year. It was also pissing down with rain that day, when I was out shooting. My first 3 stations in the first round were terrible; then I got mad. I was 9/10 in the last two stations, and the second round I tied my lifetime high score of 21/25 (made earlier this summer). Note to world: I apparently aim better when angry.

I'm sad August is nearly gone because it means summer has nearly evaporated on me and soon life will be cold and dark and full of hockey. But that's alright too, I suppose.

Last night, we tried our hand at making eggplant parmesan (except baked, not fried). It turned out pretty well and it's not nearly as difficult as I would have expected.

That is vegetable number 4,286 (give or take a few thousand) that I knew was enjoyable from eating it elsewhere but would never have purchased one myself from a grocery store to bring it home and try cooking it. However, since the CSA sent it to me, I was forced to try cooking it and wound up with pleasing results. This whole summer really has taken a lot of the terror out of the veggie section at the grocery store.

(Yay for leftovers for lunch!)

For my dad's birthday party last night, I brought some fruit salad with me. A super-ripe mango from the CSA fruit share which practically disintegrated when I tried to peel it, a softball-sized peach, a branch of red grapes, the last handful of last time's cherries (which are more work to cut up and pit than I'd care to do again), a handful of blueberries from the farmer's market, and a tiny and medium-sized nectarine from the grocery store. Since I was playing with drying apricots yesterday, I already had a lemon juice/water solution mixed up for that, so dunking the peach and nectarine chunks in it meant that my fruit is still all appropriate-colored today instead of having a bowl full of variations on the shades of brown sitting in the fridge.

Trying to dry some of our 30-odd ripe apricots in the oven yesterday to preserve them so I can enjoy them in a week or two (instead of having to inhale them in the last 3 days) has lead me to believe that I need to find better methods to preserving fruit--like canning or owning a REAL food dehydrator. Though if anyone wants some apricot crisps, I seem to have a pretty good quantity of them... D was disturbed by how this experiment turned out. I told him with all the good luck I've been having at my experiments lately, it was about time one of them turned out terribly.

This past week has seen all sorts of success and failures on my to-do list, simultaneously.

Last Thursday, we went out for dinner with my coworker A whose out-of-country daughter and son-in-law were in town. The daughter and son-in-law are big nerds, so we had a good time discussing all sorts of nerd-topics with them, in addition to getting to eat at the "other" location of Good Earth. While the Roseville one is much more convinient to us generally, it's nice to know they also have a restaurant in Edina.

Last Friday on the way home from work, I stopped by a florist in Richfield to talk about centerpieces. (Since there are about 10 of them on 66th Street, I figured one of 'em should be able to fit in a short-notice appointment.) That was when I found out the coolest thing, evar--when you're talking about spending a fair pile of money for wedding decorations, florists send you home with "free samples". I now have two individual orchid flowers floating in a glass on my desk, and a spray rose next to the computer monitor. I might go out of my way to interview floral folks, just so I can keep getting free flowers. ;-)

Saturday, after running errands in the morning, I succeeded in spending some quality time chatting and laughing and eating and crafting with kranberry4, for which I am extremely grateful. We got a new backing for my quilt assembled, and then settled down to the arduous task of tacking it down with little bits of yarn, while having no frame to hold it as we worked. I see now why the pioneer women, in their infinite wisdom, used to do that step as a group effort. It took us about 5 hours to do, just the two of us. Maybe longer...it's kind of a blur. Suffice to say that it's MUCH more structurally sound now. And that it was so worn out, she couldn't even tell the original backing fabric had been flannel.

Yesterday, I went over to Lilabeth's house for breakfast, and hung out with her family for a while afterward, watching terrible (perish the thought!) teen movies. I never knew they'd made SOOOO many remakes of sequels to Bring It On; thank you, ABC Family, for showing me the error of my ways.

And last night was dinner with spidermonkey20s and inukosama. It was quite fun, and I'm left starting the week in a much happier mood than I ended last week--even if I was so out of it this morning that I forgot I was at the chiropractor's office (not trying on bridal dresses) when I put on the gown they supply you for use during adjustments. Fortunately, I realized my legs should not be cold and that I needed to put my pants back on before I left the changing room to get my adjustment.

We went to dinner at Spoon River tonight. I would recommend you do likewise sometime. Lots of vegetarian options, lots of organic/local/free-range ingredients, lots of deliciousness. I had a daily special which involved salmon, potatoes, and a 'salad' of corn, tomatoes, avocado, and cucumber. D had the beet & chevre ravioli, and we split a dessert which was a blondie garnished with chocolate sauce, chocolate/espresso ice cream, and a tiny chocolate cookie. Yum!

With yet another batch of CSA veggies arriving from our share-splitting household last night, D was after me today because we have 3 partial heads of cauliflower in the fridge, a large pile of beets, and more carrots than I care to count. I have no idea what to do with beets, since I find them "ok" as a pickled beet garnish, but I don't feel the need to go out of my way to make them myself. I can't imagine what I'd do with several whole servings of them. The internet has provided me with a "tradition ukranian borscht" recipe which uses carrots, beets, cabbage, & potatoes--all things we seem to have in the fridge/cupboard in abundance right now. I'm currently roasting the beets in the oven as an "easy" way to peel them once they cool. The carrots are grated and the potatoes are chopped, so it should be coming together soonish. I hear it's best to leave the flavors sit together for a few hours, so I'm hopeful that it'll make a good lunch tomorrow/dinner tonight. I think the cauliflower will be turned into "cauliflower gratin" with cheese sauce, a smidge of horseradish seasoning, and some panko bread crumbs on top. (With a recipe that has as much butter, milk, and cheese in it as the one I found, it _has_ to be good. There's some kind of culinary law about that...)

I'm also trying to think of questions I have related to wedding stuff so I can write them all down (we see my folks tomorrow for a while so we can talk about things) and mentally sort-of planning a few different craft projects (I've been feeling oddly crafty of late). Because trying to prep 3 different dishes at once while making a grocery list is apparently not stimulating enough.

The other night I was at the craft store near work looking for ribbon embroidery supplies (turns out no one really seems to sell them in the store anymore--those bloody bastards! Hobbies I would like to have right now are so last-decade), and I ran across a clearance-priced remnant bolt of material which is pink enough, non-itchy enough, soft-but-not-too-soft enough, and big enough to be used to fashion a new back to the quilt that was my 12th Christmas's present from my aunt. (She'd made quilts for all the nieces & nephews that year.) I dearly love that quilt, but it's been through hell and back and it is starting to show its age. It has been washed so many times that when I was tossing and turning one night I actually put my foot through the back of it. There aren't enough shreds fabric left on the back anymore to actually repair the damage, so my solution was just to replace the back. I've been searching (when I think of it and am in a craft store for other things) for new backing fabric ever since and I finally found some. Now I just need to get some pink thread (my childhood bedroom was pink and white; what of it?!?) and a day where I can sit down and sew, and it will be in one piece again. Hopefully that day will be soon. I was thinking it might be today, but cooking soup at D's house while repairing a quilt at mine sounds like a bit of a hike to stir the pot every so often...

Yesterday and earlier today, we were at a family reunion for D's dad's side of the family over on the far side of Wisconsin. They were nice folks and it wasn't an unpleasant time (or drive, really) by any stretch of the imagination--just a LONG time to be cooped up in a car, for a very short visit with people. And the town was cute, though it rolled up the streets at about 5:30 pm on Saturday and was (generally) not open at all on Sunday. On the bright side, at least we got to share a hotel room; I don't know that my folks would be ok with that yet, engagement or not. I was fully expecting to get there and end up rooming with D's mom, while he & his dad shared another room.

I am so glad to be home....

Last night, D and I met up with several friends at the Tea Source in Minneapolis where we tried various types of tea and some of their desserts. I had the Vanilla Chai which comes with powdered milk and sugar already mixed in, and found it to be fabulous. So fabulous, in fact, that I bought some to take home with me and am enjoying a cup right now. Mmmm!

In summary: you should go to the Tea Source if you find yourself sad because your house is lacking in tea.

(Let's don't discuss my terrible taste in music lately, on a separate note.)