Normally at this time of night, I’m ensconced on the couch with my knitting and the cat is all curled up in my lap. Then I realized it’s been a while since I updated, so I thought I’d post something. Besides, my wrist is sort from all the knitting I’ve done today, or maybe it’s because I shoveled my back deck this afternoon. During the winter, I don’t use the deck, let alone the back door, so I don’t bother shoveling it. Today it was sunny and gorgeous and warm, which I don’t trust in Northern Ontario in March – we’re due for another cold snap! – so I thought I’d take advantage of that to clear the snow. There’s only about two feet of snow, but it’s two feet of snow that’s thawed, been rained on, refreezed, snowed on again, and repeat from the top. It was definitely crusty, but not the kind of crusty you would associate with pie – soft and flaky ¹. No, this was a hard crusty, crunchy and heavy, like you would associate with the crust on a creme brulee ² – you have to smack it firmly a few times to break the crust to get at the stuff underneath.

Okay, now I’m hungry. Awesome.

In all fairness, it’s been a busy few weeks.

The Family Day long weekend was lovely and relaxing. I’d get up in the morning and change out of my night pajamas into day pajamas, and then spent the day knitting, watching TV, or going to the gym. It was the first Family Day I didn’t have to go into work because some major systems update/server migration absolutely needed to be done and since the library was closed, it was an ideal time. I’d also like to mention that both times I had to do this? Whatever we were doing ran into unexpected obstacles that required a tech who wasn’t in because it was a holiday ³

Then there were the Olympics, of which I need to say no more. Y’all know how it turned out. I did participate in the Knitting Olympics and successfully finished a pair of mittens for my sister.

I lack just enough modesty to say these are pretty awesome, considering that I designed the pattern and knit them up in just 17 days. In retrospect though, because I can’t resist the urge to punish myself for my lack of modesty, I should have made the pattern on the back a mirror image on each mitten instead of the exact same pattern. Normally that’s not a problem because the motifs are symmetrical, but these are asymmetrical and should have been flipped between the two.

Last week I was in Toronto for a conference where I:

• Ran myself ragged for five days. Sit-down meals were a rare luxury, and food was mostly eaten on the fly. Fortunately, I seem to have made it through with no ill effects except for a desire to catch up on my sleep, while my boss is suffering through his annual post-conference cold.
• Sat through a session about programing with Perl, which is complete Greek to me. I compared it to looking at a lace chart which makes no sense at first, but once you know what all the symbols and lines mean, you know what to do. Actually writing and editing the code is like learning how to knit, and one day I will get there. ⁴
• Had fly-by visits with three groups of friends, with whom there is almost no overlap. Julie, who also shared a room with me, knows some of my Sudbury friends, so I was able to combine some of those encounters.
• Didn’t get to the Mexican restaurant, which has been our conference tradition for the past few years. Instead, we went out for delicious Thai food, so I’m still happy.

I will begin the following post-conference story by telling you up front that my sister and her friends are fine, the place they are staying has very minimal, if any, damage, and she will be coming home sometime next week.

Saturday, the last day of the conference, my mother was supposed to come up and we were going to go for lunch before heading home. However, she hasn’t been feeling well, I was exhausted, and the weather was kind of craptacular. I called home to tell her not to bother coming in, as I would be heading out after the session I was presenting ⁵

Mom: “I hadn’t planned on coming because I need to be here in case your sister calls.” (My youngest sister is on holidays in Chile with some friends and they were staying in some kind of conservation area.)
Me: “Why? What’s wrong”
Mom: “Have you seen the news?”
Me: (blood running cold) “No – what. happened?”
Mom: “There was an earthquake in Chile, between Santiago and where she is. It was bigger than the one in Haiti. We haven’t heard from her and we don’t know how to find out if she was okay.”

Everything after that was a bit fuzzy. I think I suggested she call the Red Cross, but I don’t remember what her response was. My mom sounded pretty calm even though I knew she wasn’t, and I managed to hold it together until I got off the phone and burst into tears in front of Julie, who then offered to go to breakfast with me instead of going to the plenary session like she had planned. I called my mom back and gave her my cell number, and told her to text me if she heard anything (fortunately, my sister had taught mom to text before she left.) During my session, I got a text from her telling me that they had heard from one of the other girls in the group, and that they were all okay, except the power had gone off. You can imagine how relieved we all are that they are okay, and that the greatest hardship they suffered was that they didn’t get to watch the gold medal hockey game Sunday night because they went to see the penguins. Yeah, I kind of hate her too.

When she gets home, we are confiscating her passport and not letting her leave the country until she is at least 40.

A few weeks ago – I can’t remember exactly when – I made something else from my list of food to make: apricot lentil soup. I love soup – soup is good food! It makes a great meal! ¹ And on a cold winter’s day, what’s more comforting?

I got the recipe for this from Allrecipes.com; since the link has gone AWOL from my bookmarks I can’t send you there. However, I did print it out:

3 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
1/3 c dried apricots, cut up
1 1/2 c red lentils
5 c chicken stock
3 roma tomatoes (I used half of a can of tomatoes)
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp thyme

First, you saute the onion, garlic and apricots in olive oil, and then you add the lentils and stock, bring to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Then add the tomatoes, the spices, and simmer for another 10 minutes. The next step says to put half the soup into a blender and puree, but I have a fancy schmancy handheld immersion blender (also called a “wand”) so I used that to puree the soup instead. ² Easiest. Soup. Ever!

The problem with soup for me is this: I am a single lady, and a pot of soup is all well and good, except that it lasts forever. On day one of soup, it’s all “YAY! SOUP! YUMMY!” and day two goes something like “SOUP! Still awesome!” By day three, the blush is definitely off the rose and by day four I’m cursing the fact that I made the stuff in the first place. “Well, why don’t you freeze it?” you are saying. I could, but there’s the problem of the itty bitty freezer, and the fact that when I cleaned out my freezer last week, I pulled out about a dozen containers of unlabeled soup-like product that had been there for an indefinite amount of time. There’s also the problem that some soups don’t freeze well – potatoes fall apart, mushrooms get rubbery, and let’s not talk about the disgusting mess that zucchini and other squash becomes when it thaws.

The solution for me, then, is to either label and date any containers of soup I put in the freezer and not put any more in until I’ve used up what’s in there, and/or make a smaller batch each time.

1. On Friday, I came home from work early in the day with what would become a two-day migraine, which are as rare as hen’s teeth for me. Usually, the last a few hours, and then they go away. This one knocked me on my ass and then jumped up and down on my head and stomach. Sweet.

2. While I was home, I took the opportunity to watch a couple of movies on TV that I hadn’t seen (or hadn’t seen all of ) before. The first was 17 Again, which was surprisingly good. There were some genuinely funny moments, especially between Mike’s nerdy best friend and the principal. And while I know I may not be alone in acknowledging that Zac Efron is a pretty, pretty guy, he’s actually not that bad of an actor. The second was It’s a Boy Girl Thing, which is a mostly Canadian production, about two teenagers who swap bodies ¹ I’d seen parts of it before, liked it, but never actually got to see the whole thing. It also is surprisingly good – I thought that both of the actors who were playing the teenagers did a good job of mimicking the body language of each other when they were supposed to be in the opposite bodies. Certainly worth checking out.

3. A few weeks ago, when I posted about this year’s theme, I mentioned wanting to have more meatless weeks. There are many reasons for it, both personal and environmental, in addition to examining how often I fall back on eating meat or meat products. It’s worth noting that I am still drinking milk and eating eggs, as they are important sources of calcium and protein; while I do enjoy soy milk and have used egg substitute successfully on a number of occasions, this whole thing is about awareness, not making radical changes. ² That day marked the first day in what was going to be my first meatless week of the year – I had a menu all planned out, including lunches that didn’t include lunchmeat, and was pretty gung-ho about it.

Except, here I am, three Sundays later, and I am still meatless ³ I haven’t run out of meal ideas, and have often surprised myself with my inventiveness, especially when it comes to lunches. Yesterday I was craving one of my favourite comfort foods, chicken and dumplings, because I still wasn’t feeling great; however, this morning I looked at the chicken in the freezer ⁴ and then looked at the corn I froze this past summer, and decided that corn chowder is just as comforting, especially with biscuits. As well, most of my meals this week don’t involve meat, such as the veggie fajitas I’m going to have for lunch this week, the roasted tomatoes with pasta, and the curried tofu possibly Friday or Saturday. It’s become less about “I am only going to do this for one week” and more about “let’s see how long I can keep this up.” ⁵

4. There will be a full post about this later, but I managed to fit in some reading this month. I was reading five books in total which leads to all kinds of distractions, and only managed to finish two of them.

Not long after I came up with my list of cookery-type things I wanted to make this year, I decided that I would start with the item that triggered the whole list: raspberry white chocolate scones.

Oddly, it wasn’t easy to find a recipe, and I wasn’t confident enough to wing it. Eventually, I found a recipe here and was very please to discover that I had all the ingredients on hand. Well, all of them except for the yogurt – all I had was the Liberté Méditerranée, which has a glorious 8.5% milk fat content ¹. OH WELL. They were delicious!

Some thoughts:

• The recipe calls for frozen raspberries, but it doesn’t indicate whether or not you should thaw them or not before adding them. I think if they had been thawed, they would have lost their shape and not been as good. I did, however, rinse them in a strainer because they had frost on them, and I didn’t want there to be too much extra liquid in the dough.
• The frozen raspberries made the dough very cold. Duh.
• Once I had everything mixed, it didn’t look like it was going to turn out very well. The dough was wet and sticky, and I threw my hands up and thought, “Well, I tried.” The scones look huge in that picture (and they were) because I didn’t want to bother making nice, neat, smallish ones if they were only going to come out half baked on one side and burned on the other ² Despite that, they came out baked just right on all sides, so I guess the joke was on me.

If you are going to make these scones ³ I would suggest on reducing the amount of white chocolate chips you use. There isn’t really all that much in the scones, but it was still a little overpowering. When I was telling this to someone at work, they made the suggestion that the chips you don’t use in the scones can be melted down and drizzled over top of them once they are baked, and it’s a suggestion I fully endorse.

Finally: how do YOU pronounce “scone”? When I was younger, I used to pronounce it sc-AWN because that’s how my mother and grandmother pronounced it. Once I got to grad school, my roommates pronounced it sc-OWN, and try as I might to resist it, I eventually started pronouncing it that way, too. ⁴

I’m not that bad at making resolutions and keeping them for a few months, but I’m really bad at keeping them for a whole year. And I’m getting to be Of An Age where self-improvement should be ongoing, not just something I resolve to do once a year. So rather than set a whole lot of arbitrary goals to try and stick to, I decided to pick a theme to guide me through the year. And the theme I picked? The Year of Culinary Experimentation!

The idea came to me while I was on my way home after Christmas. I was in a Second Cup in Toronto and saw that they had raspberry white chocolate scones, which I hadn’t had for a number of years ¹ and was inspired. I loved those damn things, and while I wouldn’t want to eat them more than once in a while ² they would be something I could add to my playlist.

That got me thinking of other things I want to bake or cook, the tools I had, and what skills I want to learn. Once I got home, I made a list of things I’d thought about, and decided that over the coming year, I want to try and make them. Some of them are simple, some… not so much, but all are things I know I and my family/friends would enjoy.

• White chocolate raspberry scones – I made these a few weeks ago, and I have pictures and a recipe to share.
• Bread – growing up, my mom always made bread. It makes the house smell good, and I can’t think of a better reason to try making it.
• Samosas – love these! And, from what I understand, they’re not all that hard to make.
• Pumpkin ravioli – I have a pasta maker, and I have a ravioli form. I tried making ravioli a few years ago, and it was a disaster. However, I learned my lessons, and I think I can make them without messing up too badly.
• Lasagna – see above about the pasta maker. Plus, it’s something that would be great to stick in the freezer for those times when I can’t be bothered cooking supper.
• Quiche/Bad Baby Pie ³ – this is something I would definitely share, since it’s too rich to eat by myself.
• Cheese fondue – it’s better that you just accept this and move on to the next item.
• Flourless chocolate cake – guess what I’m making for my birthday cake?
• Spring rolls – these are just about my favourite thing at Thai and Vietnamese restaurants.
• Cinnamon rolls – not like sweet bread-type rolls, but like the ones at the market in Halifax. This is going to be a challenge because I’m not really sure what the base is. Some kind of pastry or biscuit, I think.
• Manicotti – another good frozen food.
• Apricot red lentil soup – one of my favourite local restaurants ⁴ often has this as their Soup of the Day. It’s sweet and hearty, and it makes me deliriously happy when I eat it.

On top of that, I have a few other goals:

• Host at least four dinner parties, one for each season. The guest list shouldn’t be the same every time, but the same person can attend more than once.
• Clean out my freezer, and keep it stocked with only the necessities. The freezer on my fridge is narrow and doesn’t have a lot of room, and while a chest freezer, even a small one, would be an asset for preserving food, I also think it would be too easy to fill it and forget it. As of now, I only buy things to freeze if I know I’m going to use it in the coming week, or if it’s something like frozen fruit or vegetables that I might need. I’d like to have a few frozen meals, preferably that I’ve made myself, on hand in case I don’t feel like cooking dinner.
• Plant more vegetables and herbs in my (admittedly small) garden. I tried planting tomatoes and squash last year, and it was not a success. Granted, that may have had more to do with the lousy weather than my ability to grow things. As for herbs, I had some cute little pots that I got last year which will be perfect for some fancier things like cilantro and cinnamon basil, while the more standard fare like rosemary and parsley can go in the garden.
• Have more meatless weeks. I’ve tried in the past to set aside at least one week a month to go without eating meat, although I may have cheated when it came to lunches. I have a really great vegetarian cookbook, not to mention the several at the library, from which I can find tasty things to make, like the Curried Chickpeas I had on the weekend. I’m also aiming to make my lunches meat-free, and to go for longer than a week at a time.

And, as I’m trying to get back into the habit of blogging more often, I’m going to endeavor to post about all of these attempts.

This weekend, I was all set to write a post about what this year’s theme was going to be, as opposed to making resolutions. Sadly, on Thursday (or thereabouts), I was struck down with Braindeaditis. My ability to focus on important tasks was nil ¹, and making any sort of decision required at least fifteen minutes of navel gazing. Things that were at the top of my “To Do – NOW!!!!” list just kind of… sat there. Episodes of Braindeaditis always seem to hit when I have important deadlines to meet, and I can’t afford to sit around admiring the dust patterns on the stacks of things on my desk.

This is the conversation I had with myself earlier today:

Me: Um, Brain? Could you please pull it together? I have to finish a Very Important Presentation Including Handouts, plus write an update on the status of a Very Important Report That I Have To Redo. And let’s not forget the schedules that need to be examined.
Brain: Leprechaun giraffe sidesaddle!
Me: What does that even mean?!

So, making sense of anything is damn near impossible right now. In lieu of anything meaningful, I’m going to tell you about my new bedtime ritual. It’s all well and good to say that I go to bed shortly after 11pm, but all that means is that I make my way upstairs at that time; there’s still getting my pj’s on, brushing my teeth, remembering to go back downstairs to make sure the cat has water, going back upstairs because the cat is in the tub crying because he wants water from the tap, trying to remember where I left my book ² and so forth. By the time I’m in bed and am ready to read a few pages, it’s well after 11:30 and it’s time to shut off the lights (and yet I read until midnight anyway.)

To cut down on the amount of puttering I do when getting ready for bed, I start much earlier. Around 10:30ish, no matter what I’m doing, I go upstairs and do the following:

1. Put my pajamas on.
2. Brush my teeth ³
3. Turn on the heating pad on my bed so it’s toasty warm when I get in.
4. Fill the humidifier and turn it on low.
5. Make sure the cat has food and water.

This way, when I meander up shortly after 11pm, all I have to do is hang up my housecoat and crawl into bed, making my reading time that much longer!

Okay, it looks like I wasn’t on the ball about getting this up sooner, but the honest truth is that I was trying to avoid the crush of New Year’s posts from all the other blogs you read ¹. This way, you’re still in the New Year frame of mind, but aren’t sick to death of everyone and their maiden aunt blogging about how this year, they’re really going to use the treadmill this year. Or go out and start that fantasy roll-playing league they’ve been talking about doing for years. Or traveling to exotic locations like Sarnia or Markstay-Warren. ²

I had started a post on the weekend about how I spent the last ten years, following the keen examples of both Dr. Beth and Sarah. However, in retrospect, I’ve had a mostly dull past ten years, with the exception of 2000 and 2009.

2000: I was a semester into grad school, and loving it. Not so much with the stomach cramps and weird bouts of internal pain, which would eventually be diagnosed as gall stones, necessitating the removal of my gall bladder in May. I spent my summer working in the Department of Medical Informatics at Dalhousie ³ I traveled to Edmonton and Jasper, and got to see the tall ships in Halifax. I attended an epic Halloween party and a truly epic St. Patrick’s Day party. I was the person in charge of the Orientation Week activities, and managed to pull off a 99% on an assignment. ⁴ Unfortunately, I got bronchitis in October, which lasted until the end of December.

2009: I was one of the planners for my section at a major conference in Toronto. I traveled to exotic Washington, DC for another one. I bought a new car, and realized that the cracking paint in my office? Was actually evidence that my roof was leaking and would need to be redone. I picked up yet another hobby, complete with expensive toys: spinning (as in “wheel” and turning straw into gold.) ⁵ My adorable niece was born, bring the total niece/nephew count to 2. I started an exercise habit and actually stuck with it.

This year, I haven’t really made any resolutions, except maybe to stick with the ones I made last year. Maybe actually finish a few of them. ⁶ I do have a few ideas for things to do this year, and once I get them fleshed out, I’ll pass them along.

I know that a few of you are still waiting with baited breath [1] to find out if I actually succeeded in completing NaNoWriMo again this year. The answer is: yes, yes I did. As of 9:30pm last Sunday night, a whole 26.5 hours before the official deadline, it was confirmed that I had 50,459 words in my story and was thus crowned a winner once again. This makes it three in a row for me, a feat which I am quite happy with.

Some NaNo stats of mine for your pleasure:

• This was my sixth year participating, so this gives me a 50% success rate so far.
• I skipped 2007 because I couldn’t think of anything to write. October that year had been hell, and I wasn’t prepared.
• 5 of the 6 stories have been sci-fi [2] and the 6th story was a romantic dramady [3].
• Two of the wins have been with sci-fi and one with the rom-dram. You’d think that I’d stick with the rom-dram since I have a 100% success rate with that genre, as compared to a 40% success rate with sci-fi.
• Over the course of November, I had four days where I wrote 5,000 words or more, meaning that I wrote 40% of the story in four days. If I could only harness that awesome writing power, I could have been done in slightly over a week. [4]

A lot of writers say that sometimes the characters you are writing will sometimes stand up and wrestle control of the story away from you, and it sounds like a lot of malarkey, but there’s a grain of truth to it. For instance, all the way through my story outline, I had two characters named John and Paul. Halfway through the notes, Paul stopped feeling like a “Paul” and decided to become a Jamie. Okay, fine – it’s early enough to change. But then when I started actually writing the story, John stopped acting like a John and started calling himself Liam. And one of the other characters, who was supposed to be a airhead named Bijou, had a great moment near the beginning which made me decide that she wasn’t an airhead and “Bijou” was actually a silly name for her, so she started being called by her nickname, Beez.

And then there was the story. It’s the same story I started working on all the way back in 2003, and it’s carried me all this way without running out of ideas. There’s this space ship, and there’s this crew on this space ship, and they do stuff, and then there’s a conspiracy going on. Last time I wrote about them, in 2006 [5], I wrote the end of the story without actually figuring out what the conspiracy was, so this year I worked on the middle part where more people start finding out about the conspiracy and trying to figure out what’s going on. However, this year I did it from the perspective of a different crew on a different ship which I had mentioned in passing last time – not that I didn’t like the characters, I just wanted a different group of people to do things this time around.

And next year? I had this one character in this year’s story who was absolutely not what I thought he was going to be, so I’m thinking I might have him set out by himself to see what he’ll do with his own story.

[1] There’s a mouthwash for that. You might want to look into it.
[2] They’ve been part of the same story.
[3] Calling it “fiction” seems so pedestrian.
[4] Somewhere, my boss is hollering “if you could have harnessed that awesome writing power, you would have finished those post-project reports months ago!” To which I reply: “pthththtbbbbbb!”
[5] I wrote the rom-dram in 2008.

An update, of sorts…

A few weeks ago, I announced my intention of participating in NaNoWriMo again this year. What I hadn’t mentioned were all the misgivings I had about starting something that I wasn’t certain I could fully commit to. See, I was going to be in Ottawa for a full weekend for Dave’s Movie Marathon (which was a blast, as usual), plus I knew I would be going home for a few days to see my new niece (she’s adorable!). While I knew I would do what I could to work on the story while I was away, I knew it was going to be difficult, there would be major distractions, and I would fall way behind. But hey, I’m no stranger to that having done this a few times before.

What I was not counting on at all was getting sick. And no, it wasn’t H1N1, but it was almost as bad: a cold that kept coming and going for almost two weeks, starting the day after the movie marathon and lasting until this past Thursday. One day, I’d feel fine and the next I’d be out cold. On top of that, I was stressed out about work, so I never really let myself take the time to get better and I’d keep relapsing from something which I should have recovered from in a few days.

At no point in there did I get much chance to work on my story. Over the course of two weeks, I wrote less than 2000 words, which is, as you can guess, not good. I needed a marathon writing session to get me over the hump.

Fortunately, this weekend was free from work obligations, and I vowed to write at least 10,000 words or I was going to pronounce this attempt DOtS [1]. I’ll spare you the suspense and come right out and tell you that I did manage to make my goal, and the finishing line is well within my cramped, writerly grasp now.

In other stuff: I haven’t been to the gym in almost three weeks, what with the travel and the sick. Last week while I was home sick [2], I was watching a program where people were running, and it made me sad. Suffice to say, I’m going to make it in at least twice this week, but I’m not going to overdo it.

In other other stuff: Crazy Off-Key Singing Guy Who Walks With Purpose, a fixture of my neighborhood but who has been missing for the past year, is back. I’m not sure that I can honestly say I missed him.

[1] Dead on the screen. As opposed to the printed page.
[2] I sucked it up for a day and a half and stayed home sick. It was what I should have done from the very beginning.

I’m at Dave’s place, and we’re spending the next 24 hours watching movies. If anyone is interested in the goings on, Jorge is does a stellar job of blogging it all.

I expect there will be fun, frivolity, and, if things go all to hell, shenanigans.