Post Costco Adventure

I feel that my short post from this morning doesn't really count as my post for the day.
The Costco Adventure was fine, although I was not exaggerating about the hitting people with shopping carts. It's a little embarrassing so I can't even write about it. I spent a lot of time removing shopping carts from their position pinning helpless old people to produce aisle (where they previously had been innocently selecting limes or collard greens) and smiling apologetically at strangers.
Here is an example of my grandmere's navigation skills:
Me (driving): Ok, we're on Route 3. Where do I need to go next?
G-mere: We go to Trader Joe.
Me: How do we get there?
G-mere: Get on the left lane.
Me: Ok, what exit?
G-mere: I don't know. I don't know exits.

Let me stop for a minute. I can't type the accent for the whole dialogue, but know that my grandmere has a distinct accent. Even when the words themselves aren't pronounced that strangely, the stress is always on a different syllable than the syllable on which most English speakers would place it. For example, "I don't KNOW. Idon'tknow ex-IT."

Me: Ok, what's the next road I want to get on?
G-mere: Eighty. No, the forty-six. The forty-six then the eighty.
Me: How do I get there?
G-mere: ........... *
Me: Do I take the Parkway to get there?
G-mere: There's the Parkway.
Me: Yes, there's the Parkway. Do I take that exit for the Parkway?
G-mere: Yeah, that's the Parkway.

(The exit for the Garden State Parkway disappears behind us, soon becoming no more than a memory.)

Me: Was I supposed to get on the Parkway?
G-mere: That was the Parkway. Oh, no, no! You'll take the forty-six.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In other news, for dinner tonight I made a savory zucchini tart with a hazelnut-thyme crust from ChocolateandZucchini.com. This was on my list for awhile; when I found a bunch of soon-to-be-thrown-away zucchini packaged up and on sale for $1 at the produce market the other day, I felt like I had to rescue it and take it home. The tart was fine but it was kind of bland. I think the crust had too much flour. I feel like there should have been olive oil somewhere. And some kind of allium, like garlic or a layer of caramelized onions. Maybe a dash of balsamic vinegar...

In other food news, I bought Winesap apples today in Paterson. I love those markets, where you can get Middle Eastern groceries for a good price and all kinds of olives in bulk...for super cheap. I'm sure stores like that exist in the Portland area; I just haven't found them yet. (I have found that most stores sell things like flour and dried beans in bulk bins...I can't tell you how much I miss that in sleepy Sussex County, NJ.)

- - -

In craft news, I'm working on Christmas gifts. I was overambitious with my pattern selections last month, and picked all kinds of complicated patterns for which I bought moderately expensive (Malabrigo) yarn. Fortunately, I've found less complicated patterns that will use the same yarn. I'm knitting this multidirectional diagonal scarf, but got stuck for awhile on the direction "turn." What saved me was not a video from KnittingHelp.com or even Ravelry message boards; it was a blog post I found from frantic Googling. It is here. I do not know this blogger, but I am grateful to her. If you find yourself knitting something with these tricky "short rows" and it is NOT a sock (for which there are an abundance of instructions), check out that blog.

- - - - - - -

That's pretty much it. No more news. Tomorrow I'm going to bring two bags of my stuff to a thrift store and go to the Lake Mohawk German Christmas Market. My mother wants me to go to a local Christmas tree festival this weekend. I'll be on the lookout for good stories.

Row 3: Inc,

* The same sentence uttered by my mother's Roomba when she found it under the living room couch last night.

Costco Adventure

I've agreed to take my grandmere shopping today.
I wanted to go to the fabric stores with her, so she told me that she goes to that part of the world (Paterson) on Thursdays. This is true. Every Thursday she goes shopping in Paterson. She has a group of stores that she goes to, on no other day but Thursday. Sometimes this includes a spice market (fun!), sometimes this includes Corrado's (also fun!), and once in awhile it includes fabric stores (very fun!)
However, I forgot what it also includes.
Costco.
We're bringing her friend, too.
I hate Costco. I hate going to Costco with a cranky lady who likes to bang her cart into things/people.
I'm going to make the best of it. I'll try to just collect funny stories.

The Konstanz Chronicles

Awhile ago, I started a series of posts about the time I visited my best friend in Germany, and the two of us got stuck for about a week with a crazy guy, who later wrote me a very angry e-mail regarding a debt of 12 Euros. I didn't get very far--I believe I wrote one post which does not count as a series.
Anyway, I stopped writing about this because I realized I couldn't remember some of the days and details. I kept a journal during that week, so my plan was to locate that when I was back in NJ for the holidays and start writing.
I was convinced that I knew where that journal was. I can picture the shelf--picture the journal on the shelf....
It's not there.
I'm looking, but in the meantime, the Konstanz story will remain on hold.

Why only children shouldn't make cross-continental moves

Right now, the short, half-French, black-haired version of this woman is singing in an operatic voice to the cat.
Before that, I overheard the following:

"It's just sitting there! Roomba, you're just sitting there!"
(silence.)
"Whatsa matter with you!?"
*Beep*
"What does that mean?"
"Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...."*
"What are you doing? There's a big leaf! Go back over there!"
"Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr."
"Good job! Good job!"

The next time I come to visit from Portland, if I find Roomba wearing my clothes and sitting at the dinner table, I will be very upset.

(But not surprised.)

*That is how I type "vacuuming noises."

Veggie Tuesday

What a goofy title.

By the way, my NaBloPoMo lasts until December 8th, since I started on November 8th. This is a "post every day" kind of post. That was your warning.

I was like a housewife today. I did laundry, cooked, knitted, and watched The View and Oprah. Maybe I should erase that sentence.
Anyway, I made three things for dinner--beet soup with ginger, a fall potato-parsnip-carrot salad, and an acorn squash thing. The squash thing was bland. If I made it again I'd add garlic, caramelized onion, and maybe more spices. More corn and less egg/milk mixture. The recipe is here, and here is the potato salad. The salad was so good and so simple--a great way to use fall and winter vegetables. I think I am going to make throughout the cold months, trying different variations.
Tomorrow is going to be a similar day. I want to make Persimmon Soup for my grandmere and I to try when I visit her on Thursday. I have no idea if that will be good or disgusting.

More fun-filled Wednesday plans--call the unemployment office to ask what happened to my first three checks, sort through my stuff that's in storage (and maybe bring some of it to a thrift store to donate!), and start reading the Oregon Drivers Manual. How will I survive all that excitement!?

Here are some less boring vintage posts.
Not quite a year ago, but the only post from December 2008. (I was too busy being miserable to post much during my Morristown Life.) I remember where I was when I wrote this--in the Douglass Campus Center, waiting for some friends with whom I was going to eat lunch before going to the herbarium.
Three years ago. Every year, on December 1st, I think of this day and how weird that weather was.

Migraines and Claritin-D

This is one of those times I'm blogging about something because I was trying to find it on Google. Like the time I blogged about my slow Linux laptop. This is a disclaimer to tell you that this may be a really boring post.
I didn't get much done today because I had a horrible headache, probably a migraine. I haven't had a migraine in three years!
To sum this up in three to five sentences, I took Claritin-D for what I believed to be a sinus/allergy-related headache. I take Claritin-D maybe five times a year, on the rare occasions that I have an allergy/sinus problem that's ruining my day. It usually works, but today, within an hour of taking the Claritin-D, I went from having a slight headache to having all of the symptoms of a migraine (except light sensitivity)--horrible pain in my head, nausea, etc. I just did some Internet research, which showed that while some people take Claritin-D to treat migraines, the "D" part, the pseudoephedrine, is a vasoconstrictor. Vasoconstriction causes migraines, so in summary, I think the Claritin-D made my not-sinus headache turn into a migraine, but since it helps me on the five days a year I have allergy symptoms, I'm still going to take it.
I just wish I hadn't taken a 24-hour dose! I hope the migraine stays away and that I have a more productive day tomorrow. It wasn't totally fruitless (and here, the post stays boring, just in a different way). I took my mom's car to the inspection station, got a lot of grocery shopping done, and made vegetable broth.

Eventual Favorites List

I should just post a Favorites List like Heidi Swanson. (Side note: When I was a little kid, I had several imaginary friends which were all based on cartoon characters. If I were to lose my mind as a twenty-something, my imaginary friends would probably include Heidi Swanson and Clotilde Dusoulier. They would be my Kitchen Friends. Then I would have some people from the first three seasons of Project Runway as my Sewing Friends.)
An item I plan to blog about is a place in Portland that's becoming one of my favorites. It is called Toast. Their website is here. I'm not sure why this of Portland's multitude of brunch places is becoming a favorite. (I also like Genie's and Screen Door.) I think it's the centerpieces. On each table rests a small glass vase or bottle holding a simple yet creative arrangement. On some tables, I've seen three sticks of dried teasel. On others, I've seen clematis, which is, at this time of year, vines of whispery, spidery fuzz. Not only are these centerpieces seasonal, I'm pretty sure they're collected near the restaurant--from what I've seen just walking to Toast.

Bridge Kitchenware

is a magical place.
I might have written about them before; I'll have to look.
Anyway, they've moved since I visited them in June. They are now located at 563 Eagle Rock Ave., Roseland, NJ. It's just a little further east (I think it's east?) of their June 13th location, which was on the same road but in East Hanover, just past the intersection with Ridgedale Ave. The store is larger now and better organized. They didn't have any pressure canners, but that's probably for the best because how would I ship a thing like that to Oregon?
My only complaint is that they don't list their prices on the items themselves. Their prices are great, of course, it's just that they range from 50 cents for a mustard spoon to way out of my budget. Everything looks like good quality to me, so I have no idea which is $5 and which is $50. (They have a quiche pan I am eyeing up that looks much nicer than the one I bought at Target--the one I hold responsible for this disaster--for half the price.) Anyway, they're not snobby, so I don't mind identifying myself as a hobbyist and not a real chef who either a) automatically knows which pans are $5 and which are $50 or b) doesn't care how much she pays for quality. I just ask.
Also, they have photos on the wall of Julia Child shopping at Bridge Kitchenware. I heard other customers exclaim, "It's Julia!" as if she were a friend. I think she kind of is everyone's friend.

I'll write more later. My mother needs help knitting a Mobius and my father is conversing with the Roomba.

Almost Thirty

Sometimes people meddle because they care.

Last night, someone told me I was "almost thirty," listing this as a reason that I should hurry up finding a husband and getting pregnant.
I'm about four months shy of twenty-six. Since when is that "almost thirty"?
- - - - -

Earlier in the evening, I had said, "Let me tell you about all the great guys I've been meeting!" and was met with the following:
"Don't tell us about the guys. Talk to me when you find The Guy."
"I am not looking for The Guy right now."

- - - - -

Later, the married couples were discussing when they plan to have children. That's when I was told to hurry up. I think I was starting to list the reasons why I will not hurry up when my age was (inaccurately, hyperbolically) pointed out.
"Don't you want our kids to be able to play together?" I was asked.
"Your kids can babysit my kids," I responded.

- - - - -

Tonight, someone reminded me of a saying I had last year. I'd nearly forgotten it. When going to holiday parties, I had trouble getting there with everything put together: my appearance, my food, my timely arrival. It would be so nice, I thought, if there was someone else here to watch the oven while I write down the Google Maps directions or vice versa. It would be nice to have someone read the directions to me.
When I did succeed in getting it all together and out the door, the damn cakes always slid around in the car. Everything is at an angle in the Sunfire, and normal driving activities--turning, merging onto a highway, stopping at a traffic light--all caused any objects on the front seat or the floor to sail toward the windshield. I need a boyfriend, I used to think, just to hold the cake in the car!.
Someone told me I set back feminism twenty years every time I said this, but I disagree. If he's holding the cake in the passenger seat, then who's driving the car?

- - - - -

I realized recently that whenever I hear that someone's gotten their Masters degree and they are my age or--gasp--a year younger, I get a little sad. I haven't even started on my Masters degree yet. I know that I shouldn't live someone else's life, but it makes me a little sad because I used to think it would be my life, to do everything possible for an early start on a brilliant career. Now I hope to begin a PhD program before I'm thirty--which apparently I'm almost.
Some women get upset when they see, on Facebook for example, that someone their age (or younger!) has gotten married and/or had a baby. That's how I feel when I see that someone else has completed a graduate program.

What am I doing with my life now, working towards neither career nor family? I'm making myself useful, I'm not hurting anyone, and I'm enjoying my life. I haven't neglected my goals; I'm just not rushing headlong toward them. In fact, I am working towards my career in science, just in a slower, less orderly fashion than I'd once imagined. It is the "casual dating" approach to a career, as opposed to the "married at twenty-two" approach.
And I was never working towards a family; I only want that for about five minutes a month if, during the week I'm ovulating, I see a cute baby on the bus.
I'm not sure how many people understand this; they either don't understand why I'm taking a meandering, leisurely path towards my PhD, or they never understood why that was my goal in the first place.
They worry because they care--every single one of these people. I have to keep in mind that it comes from a good place.

No one in Oregon questions my choices; maybe they just don't know me well enough to be concerned with how I manage my life. Maybe they will grow to care, and pretty soon I'll have a whole new batch of people telling me whom to date and which career to pursue. All I know is that in Oregon, I've never once worried about who would carry the cake in the car.

Christmas Dinner List Update Three

Everyone likes:
Mushrooms
Potatoes
Whipped Cream

Christmas List Updated

Things The Family Doesn't Like
1. Cilantro
2. Dill

Things the Family Does Like
1. Cheese

Masthead

The first ever. I think I am still on West Coast time. It's similar enough to NJ time that I can't stop staying up ridiculously late at night and sleeping in...just about three hours later than I normally would.
Insomnia led me to get bored playing Solitaire, knitting, and looking up Christmas recipes. I decided to tackle the complicated GIMP Image Editor that came with the operating system (Ubuntu 9.04, for you nerds.) I knew how to use GIMP even less than I knew how to use Linux in general. The documentation was not easy for me to follow, and I learn by doing anyway. (So I usually forget whatever I read in the documentation, anyway.) Once I learned how to paste my layers (because of course, the simplest stuff is the most difficult to do with these programs) so that they were visible above the background layer, I declared my love for GIMP Image Editor. I guess this is why people love PhotoShop. But GIMP is free! (As long as you have the patience to put Linux on your computer. If you don't want to let go of Windows, you can dual-boot!)

In summary, this is one more thing pushing me away from buying a Mac. I don't need to when I have my beloved Ubuntu.

Anyway, I know the alignment is off and that there's a weird blue thing above the car, but it's a first draft. Future versions will be longer and thinner, I think. I took the photo of Mount Hood at Brooks Meadow, which is part of the Dalles Watershed. You're not allowed to go there without a research permit. (Fancy!) I think my roommate took the picture of me, and it was taken at the Chapman School where we went to watch Vaux's swifts (birds.) It was one of the first pictures taken of me in Oregon, and it was the first weekend that I met both my roommate and another one of our close friends. The coffee cup and the camera are from Wikimedia Commons.
I have more colorful photos of Mount Hood (even from Brooks Meadow) but it is fall and the autumn picture seemed more accurate.
I guess if I really wanted it to be accurate, some of the floating images would be unemployment checks. My mother said there should be some beer bottles and something representing "all your men."
I wasted so much time thinking I had to have someone else make a masthead for me (like a graphic designer.) Also, I wish I had known about this free graphics editing program last year, like at my old job. I could have made some really cool stuff!