...that isn't.
Last night we concocted, out of various bits of things in the fridge and freezer, a pistachio-encrusted breast of chicken with a yellow pepper-cumin coulis.
It was fabulous, so much so that I had some leftovers for breakfast today.
I am still working on my searing technique though. I want to see if it's possible to sear without setting off the smoke detector. So far, no! But I remain hopeful.
In other food news, my version of gazpacho totally kicks ass. (Can I say that on UThink?!)
We're hosting dinner tomorrow night, for A and her family, from downstairs. She will be living with her grandparents for a few weeks while her parents pack up their apartment to move, without a 3-year-old underfoot. We're really gonna miss her. :(
The bike and I fell over yesterday, while I was negotiating a slight change in elevation at too shallow an angle. I wiped out and slid on my left side and scraped my left knee, left hand, left shoulder and chin. I broke my sunglasses (prescription, damn) as they pressed into my face, leaving a bruise under my left eye.
I thought I had perhaps sprained my left shoulder, but it's my left wrist that's giving me trouble today.
The Ask-A-Nurse (I love this service!) outlined an elaborate protocol for ensuring no long-term head injury, which involved B waking me up every 2 hours for 12 hours to make sure I still knew the capital of Wisconsin. No offense to medical protocols, but THAT would have resulted in even greater net household injuries, as I would likely have wacked him for waking me.
I have also disregarded the advice about drinking only clear liquids for 6 hours (steak is NOT a clear liquid) and not taking Advil (which makes my life worth living).
Anyways, I'm fine and I'm sure the scrapes will all heal in a week or so. B and I will have matching knee scars from biking! Ain't it great to be a kid again!
Imagined cities : urban experience and the language of the novel / Robert Alter. New Haven : Yale University Press, 2005.
PN3352.C5 A48 2005 Wilson in process.
The review in the NYTBR last Sunday really intrigued me. There's not much writing about urban geography in literature that I'm aware of. Jed Perl suggests that Alter is saying how artistic experience/interpretation mirrors the city. How individualistically colored is the artist's take on urbanism?
Perl writes, "one can even argue that if it were not for the city, artists woud never have discovered the country, for landscape is a type of painting that was first imagined in the cities, and the pastoral is surely one of the most insistently urban of all literary modes."
The Ethical Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga. This "neuroscientist argues that ethical behavior is a function of society, not one of brain chemistry." I am reading about ethics again to find newer, better readings for my course on ethics and law of construction. Something like this might be an interesting counterpoint to classical theories of moral philosophy.
After I posted the complaint yesterday about how inefficient it was to delete skankbot comments from this blog, I found a slightly more efficient way to do it, by using the edit function and going through the entire blog, entry by entry (since most of the comments were batched up in particular entries they could be checked and deleted in clumps). I didn't bother getting rid of the IPs.
I suppose it has to be done every so often. Or, I could prescreen comments. Nah, too much work. It took 30-45 minutes to do more than a year's worth of entries, and I got a little trip down memory lane into the bargain.
Anyways. On with the day.
I just spent 30 minutes or so getting rid of some (alas not all) skankbot comments on this blog from long ago and adding their skankbot IP addresses to the Big List of Banned IP Addresses. What a pain. You'd think there'd be a way to display all comments and then just delete en masse.
The Ban IP step is probably a waste of time - the addresses seem to mutate faster than bacterial genomes.
After I finally felt recovered from pinkeye, I had a bout with sinusitis over the weekend. Now that massive t-storms today have cleared and cooled the air, I feel better - although I'm still hypersensitive to smells, as evidenced by the fact that I am all-too-aware that my neighbor is somewhere outside smoking. This, after he burned some evidently-classified papers in a wastebasket this afternoon using CHARCOAL GRILL ACCELERANT and the smell permeates our apartment entirely.
Go to Krakow or not? I can't decide - but I should decide by Wednesday in order to get 30-day advance tix.
A mug I've had for lots of years got broken on Sunday at a BBQ. No big deal, but as I tried to fit the handle back on before going to get the superglue, I thought about when I probably got it.
My boss was a huge believer in promotional trinkets - mugs, pens, keyrings, all that stuff - for the city, for his election campaigns, for special city events. Periodically his office staff would make him clean out items from events past to make room for more-current materials. The last cleanout, when he had announced his retirement, was much more poignant - he foisted stuff on us day after day, and his staff packed up all his plaques and awards and other mementos, until the office was bare.
Then, after he had left the building for the last time, the painters came in and painted his office a different color, and the next time I saw it, with the new mayor in office, it looked disturbingly like a different room altogether.
I have dreamed for the last three nights that I am back working there - not in my old job but as an intern or temporary help. This probably represents my uncertainty about our future, and my frustration that I am not in the groove with prelims or dissertation proposal.
Yes, indeed, I have conjunctivitis, aka "pinkeye." I have never had it before.
It feels like sand in my eyes. B made me go to the doctor, and he prescribed eye drops that have antibiotics in them. I'm not really good with eyedrops, so B has to do them for me - a big production every time.
Reading is more strenuous than before and it rained sufficiently so that I couldn't work outside. Consequently yesterday was a VERY slow day. We did watch "Spanglish" though. It seemed to be missing any sort of tension or conflict that would propel a plot forward, and the characters/situation didn't feel very believable. Friday night we saw "Matchstick Men" and B predicted the plot twist in the first 15 minutes. Sigh. We need to watch better movies.
Made yogurt cheese for the first time ever, after watching my housemate do it once back in the 1980s.
After the whey had drained (24 hours), I made up two batches: one with beau monde herbs (dried onions, parsley, dill and beau monde mix, which is basically celery salt); and one with salt, pepper and garlic powder. A quart of yogurt (the big containers) makes 2+ cups of yogurt cheese. It's softer than cream cheese, and more tart.
I am hoping that this will be a good spread for sandwiches, pitas and bagels. I avoid cream cheese (which I LOVE) because of the lactose. Supposedly the yogurt bacteria have eaten all or most of the lactose in yogurt. So we'll see how it works out.
This is part of my effort to have healthy, tasty, easy-to-snack-on foods around the house, so that I don't eat chips and salsa, potato chips, and B's pistachios.
If anyone has other ideas for using yogurt cheese, I'd love to hear them.
Ok, so now that it's summer, when it's not raining, or hasn't just rained, or isn't likely to rain later in the day, I bike to "work," where "work" means the library and I sit and read periodicals looking for thought-provoking articles about various world cities.
It's a tough job, but hey, someone has to do it.
I am the most fairweather cyclist you can imagine, and my cycling colleagues are probably disgusted. I am mostly motivated by not having a parking pass for the summer (and thus having to PAY if I drive), and slightly motivated by the thought of trimmer legs. If something happens to my bike, I will just call B, who will come pick me up - I haven't the faintest clue about bike maintenance, despite the loan of 3 books on the subject from my brother.
I keep telling myself that biking is no more hassle than driving. But the movements of driving somewhere - sliding into the seat, pulling out, negotiating the road without paying full attention - are ingrained from years of driving, and biking as a means of transport still is pretty new. I have to pay attention on behalf of idiot drivers (or I'll get killed) and then there is lots more stuff to look at generally. More decisions it seems, too: should I cross here, or wait until after that car? Should I speed up and blow through the yellow, or wait? Is a train approaching? Has someone swept up that glass since yesterday?
It is rare to get a string of green lights on 11th Avenue. It happened today for the second time since I started biking last summer. They are timed for cars to get several greens, but for bikes to get every yellow. Tuesday, I watched THREE cars blow through the light-rail warning, as the gates were coming down: not too smart. And when someone's car gets totalled for that kind of moronic driving, there'll be all sorts of calls for a safer transport system, longer lead times on the gates, beefier gates, etc. etc. Oh well - since we can't legislate smarter drivers...
Other than the alertness factor, I really like biking: the wind in my face, daily changes in the landscape, the feeling of achievement from propelling myself forward. Since most of my route is relatively car-free, it's a good trip.
One of my tasks at my parents' house last week was to clean out all my old schoolwork folders from high school, college and graduate school. I had had about two file drawers worth, which I reduced to about 8 linear inches of filing. I saved papers, some exams, syllabi and some other representative work; all the rest went into the recycling bin.
Sorting through (and tossing) my college papers made me melancholy because they collectively represent thousands of hours spent on things I don't even remember learning ABOUT, much less remember. What was the point - for example - of learning major theories of oncogenesis, of reading tens of articles about it? That knowledge has probably all been superceded by newer understandings in the last two decades. What was the point of being able to distinguish between a Picasso and a painting by one of his colleagues? Or the differences between Beethoven and Schubert sonata forms?
Throwing out the stuff seemed to be admitting defeat: that I had learned all this once for no good reason, and forgotten it soon after. But B says it's not WHAT you learn, it's learning HOW to learn, that is the point of college. I don't totally agree; I think you learn the infrastructure and epistemology of a particular field by building it up from the details. Once you have forgotten the details, do you still have the epistemology? I would answer with a qualified yes - but it still bugs me that so many of the details are gone now forever - sort of like the IDEA of a building structure without the beams and supports.
The grad school papers were a lot easier: tons of junk I didn't care about then and don't care about now.
And high school was just fun - lots of things I still remember, such as Latin declensions and the organelles of cells. Pointless stuff - I wouldn't mind if it skipped out of my brain. The most surprising find was the comments on my English papers. I had the same teacher for three out of four years, a demanding, stern woman who cut us no slack, ever. I was mystified to see how truly supportive her comments were. On a 'B' paper - "well done!" On an 'A' paper - "superb analysis." All this time I'd been thinking about how tough she was and how hard I had to work - and for some reason her encouraging comments never sank in, either then or in all the intervening years.
What's the lesson there? I am very self-demanding and while I would never want to change that (as if I COULD!) it's worth seeing it in a broader perspective sometimes. And worth writing a note to Mrs. M and sharing my findsings with her. If she is even still alive...
First we brought the MN rain to New England, where it rained 14 of the 16 days we were there.
Now we appear to have brought the New England Rainforest back to MN. No planting seeds today - they'd drown!
I have been reading various blogs this morning and it's a weird, weird world out there. I have that altered feeling, like when you read a really compelling but weird book and you are totally in the space of the book and then you go back to your own life and it's odd because it's so normal.
We saw a bunch of movies on our so-called vacation: Star Wars; Delovely; The Incredibles; Gladiator (I didn't watch much of that); The Terminal. The Terminal is a cute movie even if Tom Hanks' character's rationale for coming to the US turns out to be somewhat trivial and his accent is pretty ridiculous. It really got me thinking about nationality and how that is defined and enforced and to what extent a kind character can bend the rules a little by spreading goodwill around.
Star Wars: minority opinion here, but I was bored. Ho-hum, another light sabre battle. Wooden dialog, delivered woodenly. Predictable plot. Now you may object to the last - "gee, Sno Cones, of course you know what will happen; it's a PREQUEL for heaven's sake!" But I think that prequels need to be a little creative within the confines of what we know will happen - introduce a subplot just for this film, with some short-term characters. Or SOMETHING. I didn't really care about any of the characters and Skywalker's instantaneous shift to the Dark Side didn't really ring true, even with the setup of his motivation to protect his wife.
But as I say: a minority report.
Delovely: a wonderful movie and characters really brought to life - although I am not sure about Mrs. Porter's motivations for putting up with Cole's wanderings. The cynical surely said "association with fame and fortune" but I think he wasn't so famous when she first met him and perhaps she helped push him towards some fame he perhaps didn't want. That's the way the film seems to show it, anyway.
We bought a couple of cheap videos to watch later too - something about a jury and something about matchsticks. I am thinking we might do classic movies again this summer.
Still haven't seen Sideways - Mega Movie Rental Place didn't have it on tape and my parents don't have a DVD player. A possible Christmas present! Will I remember that in December? Probably not.
Not to whine - no, I'm telling these stories to AMUSE, ok?
1. We caught the cold of the guy two rows ahead of us on the Mpls-Chicago flight who didn't cover his mouth while coughing or sneezing, and we have been sick for the last two weeks. Some days better, other days worse. You never know how it's going to be.
2. Average temperature in New England over the last 16 days: 55 degrees. Do the math: for every 70 there was a 40.
3. Precip in New England over the last 16 days: yes. And lots of it. All days but two, in fact.
4. Cost of fixing the rental car that B's mother ran into with her electric wheelchair: $380. Cash, no checks.
5. Cost of the car we rented while the rental car was being fixed: $180.
6. Number of days B's uncle has outlasted the medical profession's prediction of his passing: 9. And counting.
7. Number of boxes of tissues we have used up on this cold: 6. And counting.
8. Temp in Mpls when we touched down mid-afternoon: 85 F.
9. Number of minutes it took to graduate less than 80 people from the Boston Architectural Center: 150.
End-of-semester break in New England: Priceless.
I had lots of interesting things to blog about while I had no Internet, but now, naturally, I can't remember them. Oh well - maybe they'll come back. I will, anyway.