Seamus would like to wish the Internet a very Happy Halloween. May you get all the Milk Bones -- I mean candy -- that you desire. BatDog will be here to protect your Halloween goodies from villians!
October 2008 Archives
A very dear friend of mine from middle school’s mom died this past Sunday. She’d been ill for over a year now – a long, slow, cruel decline that was particularly hard on the whole family. She was a genuinely wonderful person, a truly kind, encouraging and enthusiastic woman who will be missed by everyone who knew her.
Between the viewing last night and the funeral and the reception today, I’ve had quite the tour of my childhood. I saw people I’ve known since kindergarten and first grade, including the “other Hillary” who I had many of my birthday parties with and the first boy I ever kissed. Plus their parents. And friends from high school. It is weird to see them all grown up, with kids and careers.
Then today I went to the funeral in the church up near my middle school, to the cemetery right by the house where I grew up, drove past Kennedy High School where many of my friends went, past the turnoff to my friend Laurie’s house (Laurie being most notable for having introduced me to the wonderful Mr. Penguin) and to Columbia, where so many of my elementary and middle school friends lived. The reception was in a historic house in Vantage Point, a neighborhood where friends of my parents lived. One year in that house the kids put on a Halloween show for the parents. I particularly remember turning Blondie’s Call Me in to Kill Me, which we thought was very spooky. I drove past Running Brook, which has the distinction of being the neighborhood where I went trick-or-treating for the last time as a kid. At the reception I swapped stories with old friends and their families, remembering events I hadn’t thought of in years.
I’m sorry it had to happen this way, but it was nice to see everyone and be reminded of my past.
On Friday, my knee got really achy and I couldn't figure out why. We'd taken Seamus for a hike in the woods, but it wasn't a very strenuous hike, and I'd deliberately chosen to not work out because I felt like my body needed a day of rest. My knee still gets stiff or a little sore from time to time, but mostly it hasn't been giving me much trouble.
Then on Saturday it poured for most of the day. Mystery solved!
Last night, my knee got achy again, and again, I wondered why. This morning when I woke up, it was raining.
Who needs Doppler radar? The knee knows.
Forget pondering whether or not there is justice, if thinking means you are, or who should control the means of production. The questions we have to answers in today’s world fall into a whole new dimension.
For example, there is the problem of when to buy Halloween candy. Make your purchases too early, and you’ll just end up eating the candy before Halloween. Wait too long and you’ll get stuck handing out weird and irrelevant candy that no kid wants, like Bit O’ Honey and Raisinettes. They’ve pretty much started putting the candy out in August now, so you have to resist for quite a while. I’m may be pushing my luck, but I think I’m going to grab some candy this weekend. I’ll just tuck it in a closet and try not to think about it until Friday.
Then there’s this problem, which may not apply to everyone. Is the benefit of adding a morning workout completely undone if by 2 pm you are so tired that you are forced to turn to Starbucks in order to prevent a faceplant on to your desk? I managed to get up and exercise three out of four mornings this week, but it is completely sucking the life out of me. I don’t understand why an evening workout is usually energizing, but a morning workout makes me a zombie (minus the appetite for brains).
While pondering the following excerpt from a review in the Washington Post of AC/DC’s new album
"But mostly, 'Black Ice' contains songs about rocking. Specifically, about how much AC/DC rocks, how much it's rocked in the past and how, if given the opportunity, it plans to rock some more in the future."
John and I invented the following koan: What is the state of the world when AC/DC stops rocking? Much like the sound of one hand clapping has never been heard, this state has never been achieved, because AC/DC always brings the rock.
And finally, I’ll leave you with two interesting links that people have sent me recently:
Michael Pollan outlines the plan he’d like to see the next President follow for our new food policy.
John and I were supposed to go out of town this weekend, but ended up canceling our trip. I decided to keep my vacation days though, so I’m headed in to a luxurious four day weekend. Hope yours is lovely!
This morning I successfully dragged myself out of bed early, in to the dark, cold morning. It was something like 25 degrees out, which is ridiculous for October. I took Seamus for his walk, gave him his breakfast, took off a couple of layers and dragged myself downstairs to do 30 Day Shred. I was tired but determined, and I gave the workout my all. Then I staggered upstairs and got ready to go to work.
I was sleepy but pleased with myself for following through on my morning exercise plan. After I got to work I went to the kitchen to make my usual morning oatmeal, and ran into one of my co-workers. “Good morning,” he said. “Are you feeling ok? You don’t look well.” And here I thought that morning workouts were supposed to put a spring in my step and make me brighteyed and bushytailed. Instead, I got to be tired and insulted by my co-workers. This had better pay off in the long run!
That last post is proof that I can’t turn a partially formed thought into a coherent piece while also watching the debate and commenting on every answer while also trying to come up with a smartass funny fake answer to each question. I struck gold on a few of those, but unfortunately, my concentration was not on my writing. And on top of that, I had gotten up early to get in a pre-work exercise session and then went to kickboxing class after work, so I was tired. Instead of the intelligent and insightful post that was in my head what came out was kind of an incoherent mess. Sorry.
I really do need to start making some sort of morning exercise a regular part of my routine, because while I feel like I get stronger and more fit every day, I am not losing any damn weight. I already work out most nights after work, so mornings are all that are left. The problem being that I hate mornings. Yesterday I meant to get up and do 30 Day Shred (30 minutes that will kick your ass like you wouldn’t believe) but I was so sleepy I was worried I might do myself bodily harm. Confidence was high that I’d whack myself in the head with a hand weight, and wouldn’t that be a crappy way to start off my day. So I rode the exercise bike instead. Good, but not as good as 30 Day Shred. It’s just so dark out in the mornings now. My internal clock is set to dark=stay in bed. This morning I didn’t quite make it out of bed early enough, but I’ll try again tomorrow.
Speaking of today, apparently today was Bosses Day. My team took me out for a surprise manicure, which was very sweet. I now have freshly manicured fingernails painted a loverly shade of dark blue. My team rules.
I could not come up with a single interesting word to say Sunday night or last night (Monday night I was very busy watching TV), but now all of a sudden there are about different five posts floating around in my head. Hopefully they won’t come out at once in some sort of mutated jumbled mess.
Writing has always been a part of my job, no matter what I was doing for my company. In my new role writing accounts for a large portion of my responsibilities. The timing couldn’t be better because it is so easy to write about stocks and the stock markets right now. Ha! Actually, I have plenty of my own opinions about the stock market, investing and the state of the national and global economy, but no one is paying me to write about that. Mostly, I’m responsible for taking the opinions of experts and parsing them in interesting and accessible ways so that people will want to buy our products. Generally people want to hear about how you are going to make them money, but in the current climate, no one actually seems to believe that is going to happen. Right now they want advice on protecting what money they have left, and encouraging words about when this is all going to get better. The problem being, of course, that even the experts don’t know exactly when that will happen.
I spend a lot of time staring at my computer these days, waiting for inspiration to strike. I write outlines and come up with themes, and then I look at Yahoo Finance and the market has completely changed direction. Even today, I knew the numbers weren’t great, but I didn’t see any horrific losses. Then I checked at 4 to see where the indices closed and just about fell out of my chair. Not that this massive drop was unexpected. Anyone who was all “oh, everything’s going to be fine now” after Monday’s rally is a moron and shouldn’t be allowed to trade stocks. Look at the fundamental problems with our economy. It’s going to take a while to sort this all out, and even then, there’s no guarantee that things will turn around and shoot back up.
Sorry, I digress. That was just a really long way of saying that I’ve been struggling to feel productive at work these days. I read, a lot, and when I get stuck I go play free mahjong online while the ideas swirl in the back of my head. Sometimes that helps jar an idea loose, but I’m not sure my boss would actually buy that as an explanation, so I try not to do it too much. I write stuff and discard it, and then I write more copy and rearrange it a bunch of times, and then I Frankenstein in bits of other people’s copy and hope for the best. I’m good at what I do, (really, I am!) so I know it will be fine in the end. Hopefully five different ideas for work copy will strike soon.
My mood has been a bit uncertain lately. Just ask my poor husband, who has had to put up with my sudden obsession and random hostility over where the Christmas tree will go. In two months. If there could be a physical manifestation of my mood, it would be a sullen, spiky black cloud with bad hair, bags under its eyes and a scowl on its face. I’m outside of my comfort zone in my new role at work, which is good for me and my career growth in the long term, but stressful. I’m pissed off about my lack of weight loss, and my infertility has really been getting me down. I don’t know why sometimes I care more than others, but that’s the way it goes, and right now caring is on the upswing. On top of that, I had a bizarre bruising incident after getting blood drawn. I am not even exaggerating when I say that about 1/5th of my left arm was covered in bruises and very painful. Every time I rolled over at night (and I roll over a lot) I woke up, so I didn’t get enough sleep for about a week. And I was having anxiety dream after anxiety dream. I’m assuming the pain was causing that. Thankfully the bruises have faded and I’ve actually gotten some rest the last couple of nights.
The needle started swinging in the other direction at some point yesterday. Who knows why, although we did settle the burning Christmas tree issue. I’m sure you’re all very relieved. However, as I headed off to work this morning, already nursing a headache because the weather was changing, I turned on the radio and heard: world markets down, futures down, Fed rate cut, markets and futures up! No wait, markets and futures back down. As soon as they said the FTSE and the CAC had zoomed up and then down over 5% even after the rate cut, I said to myself “oh, it’s going to be one of those days. Fuck it, I’m going to Starbucks.” It is so hard to know what to say to people about the stock market when it changes every 15 minutes.
The drive through at Starbucks was packed, so I pulled in and parked next to an older looking Subaru station wagon. As I got out of my car, I noticed it was packed with stuff. As I walked toward the back, I could see that there was a mattress and pillows and blankets in the far back of the wagon. Someone was living in that car. You know, theoretically, that this is happening. That the numbers in the stock market indices and the foreclosure statistics translate in to real losses for real people. But it hadn’t hit home for me yet.
Suddenly my life started looking pretty good. And today, I worked really, really hard to be grateful for all that I've got.
My mom volunteers at a farmer’s market helping to do…stuff of one sort or another, I guess. I never really thought about what exactly she does. I go by the market periodically, but not every weekend. This weekend, however, they had Spike from Top Chef coming to give a culinary demonstration. I couldn’t miss that!
I rushed over to the market this morning, but luckily for me my mom and Spike were both late. Ms. Becky arrived right on time because she is always punctual, and we wandered around buying farmer’s market-y type stuff. I got an absolutely gorgeous bouquet of flowers nice and cheap.
And then Spike arrived. He wandered around the market gathering ingredients, and then gave a little presentation, talking about Top Chef and cooking and his restaurant, Good Stuff Eatery. According to Spike, Tom Colicchio is a really nice guy, and plays the guitar. The Top Chef challenge Spike hated the most was the one where they had to make lunch boxes. If I remember right, they had to make healthy lunches for Chicago policemen. Anyway, Spike was really personable and friendly. Sometimes you meet someone like that in person and it is a real letdown, but Spike seems to be pretty much to be what you’d expect him to be like. He brought his whole family with him – mom, dad, grandma, girlfriend (Becky and I admired her boots), and I think maybe another grandma – which I thought was sweet. I actually spoke to his dad in line at the lemonade stand, without realizing who he was. Based on his dad, I think Spike will age well. I can also see where Spike gets his energy.
He made a Greek peasant dish, that sounded like it was called Rigo. It was kind of like a Greek panzanella, although less salad-like. Crusty bread, special Greek olive oil, yellow tomatoes, fresh basil and goat cheese. It was delicious. I was too shy to talk to him about cooking – I like to cook and bake, but I’m no chef – but it was a fun way to spend a morning.
Me, Becky and Spike (we look fuzzy. I need a new camera):
Then I came home and did a little cooking of my own. Somehow a recent discussion of how a co-worker of mine likes pumpkin turned in to “Oh, I’ll make you some pumpkin cookies the next time I bake” which then turned into three of us agreeing to have pumpkin themed lunch on Tuesday. And then the new issue of Vegetarian Times had a recipe for a fall stew that you make in a pumpkin, so I decided I wanted to try that too. You make the stew, and then you stuff it in to a pumpkin (a pie pumpkin, not a carving pumpkin) and bake it for a couple of hours. Then, when you spoon the stew back out of the pumpkin, chunks of pumpkin come with it. It is really yummy. At least, I think it is. Unfortunately you can’t keep the stew in the pumpkins if you aren’t going to serve it right away. I can whip up a batch of cookies in no time tomorrow night, but I had to make the stew in advance. I did take a photo though:
