Quodlibets

Ashland

Ashland makes me angry.  I thought the commute in general made me angry, but then due to the Ike construction and the Congress construction and the Lower Wacker contstruction, I started taking Ashland, and that's when I really started to hate my commute.

For 4 years? (something like that) I took Lake Shore to Lower Wacker to the Ike, and though at times it was overwhelming and awful, it was pretty much okay.  I didn't mind it.  Going through the park always seemed like such a crap option, anyway, and I have a great love for Lower Wacker, so maybe it was better than pretty much okay.

Then all that crap started in the spring, and I switched to Belmont to Ashland to the Ike and vice versa (with a brief interlude called North Avenue), and my life became hell.

Not in the morning.  I like Ashland in the morning.  It gets me to the Ike in about 18 minutes (give or take), and I don't have to deal with Congress or the bridge work.  It's nice. 

Nope, the afternoon.  The afternoon on Ashland just seemed to get worse and worse.  People driving terribly.  Missing every light.  Hoardes of traffic at Division and Milwaukee and trucks loading furniture and inept use of turn lanes and just....aaaagh.  Horrid.  Let's not even talk about the killer stretch between Cortland and Fullerton.  Makes. me. want. to. scream.

Two weeks ago, it took me 43 minutes to get up Ashland.  43 minutes from the Ike to Belmont.  Here is how that feels: like someone is killing you slowly, by degrees, by beating you with a blunt object.  Maybe I exaggerate, but it wasn't good, okay?

So I decided, bam!  I'm done with Ashland in the afternoon.  And so far, I've been taking the Ike through the Loop, through the park, and then I go up Lake Shore.  It's actually mostly proved to be faster, but even if it's not, even if it takes more time, the park and Lake Shore give me something that Ashland can't do with its stoplights and bad drivers and slow slow slowness.

Somehow, being away from those roads made me love them more.  I love the lake and the skyline and parks.  I love seeing people being Chicagoans, making use of the lakefront.  This commute feeds my soul in a way the other one never can.  It's worth 5 or even 10 extra minutes to not show up at my house like a raving, murderous lunatic.  It's worth it to enjoy the city for those five or ten minutes, to enjoy the city in a way I never get to, spending at least 40 hours of my week away from it.  And I can't wait (CANNOT WAIT) for the new Lower Wacker to open eventually, so I'll get back to that soul-affirming ride to work in the dark and mist and loveliness that is LSD to Wacker.

Follow-up re: grocery shopping

Sam and I are incredibly lucky, as in the course of most weekends, we shop at two or three grocery stores.  We have a car, and we divide up the shopping over the course of two days (in the summer, mostly, due to things not being able to be left in the hot car), or go all at once in one big shopping trip on Sunday morning.  We live near at least five different grocery stores, so have a pretty unlimited choice of where to buy what.

Over the past few years, we've cut our grocery bill down from about $120 a week to around $70-80.  I don't think that's insignificant, and there is a list of reasons for that:

1. I clip coupons for things we need anyway.  We never stockpile, or buy something simply because we have a coupon, but if we need eggs and I see a coupon for eggs, I clip it.  Likewise things like shampoo, paper towels, toilet paper, etc etc.  The only thing we sorta stockpile is detergent; if it's more than $4 off at the store and I have a coupon for more than $0.75 off, we'll buy it.
2. We have become really good at meal planning.  Before we shop, we figure out everything we're going to eat all week, and thus our grocery list is very targeted.  We only buy the things we know we're going to eat, and we've become very good about carry-over.  So if we have breakfast for dinner one week, we'll look for something to do with the eggs and bacon the next week, without being too repetitive about dinners.  (Yesterday, I used the rest of the bacon from a dinner from the week before in the soup.)
3. In that same vein, though, we don't plan things out solidly until after we go to Whole Foods.  Because we only buy butchered meat there, and we 100% only buy it if it's on sale, we have to plan around those meats after we've gone to WF.  In some ways, this is why it's good for us to go to WF on Saturday night, because then we've got a while to figure out how we're using the meat.  I would say in general, we're usually buying enough meat for one dinner, sometimes two.  But never more than that.
4. We only buy dairy at WF, minus cheeses.  I've been drinking organic milk for nearly 10 years now, and I'm never going back to conventional. Since that is nearly the only fresh dairy I really eat, save for cottage cheese occasionally, I'm not buying a ton.  Sam gets half-and-half for his coffee at WF, and always gets organic yogurt at WF.  Believe it or not, the prices for Sam's yogurt are better at WF than at our regular grocery store, which is why we get it there.  Some other things cheaper at WF: Kashi cereals and granola bars, frozen Amy's meals.  We don't buy those things all the time, but if we need them, we'll get them at WF.  (And preferably on sale!)
5. We shop at a local-ish chain called Strack and Van Till for all our other groceries, on a weekly basis.  Strack's prices just can't be beat.  There are no loyalty cards that jack up prices artificially to lower them later, and the store brand is even cheaper.  Shopping at Strack alone cut our bill by $15 or so.  If we bought all the same foods at either Jewel or Dominick's our bill would be higher, I believe.
6. I don't buy much veg.  Or fruit.  It's not that we don't buy things occasionally, but Sam barely eats any veg, and I don't need a lot.  So what I do buy, I have preferences for.  Celery must be organic.  Cucumber, eh.  Wherever it's cheapest.  We always buy organic potatoes at WF if we're eating them.  I like buying carrots at WF because you can buy them one-at-a-time, which is brilliant for us.  I've tried Stanley's, and I find the fruit and veg from there, while cheap, rots at warp speed, thus negating the value.
7. We do go to Trader Joe's every once in a great while.  We get TJ's gift cards as gifts sometimes, so that's when we go.  We always always always buy our parmesan cheese there, and Sam likes to get bananas there (holy moly are they cheap).  We don't make a regular trip to TJ's, because honestly, there's not that much we like from there.  Oh, if we've got a GC, I'll buy chocolate-covered raisins there, because they're my favorite.  We've dabbled in frozen foods there, but we just don't like anything enough to make it a regular occurrence. 

I think I got off-topic a bit, but that's, in general, what happens every week when we grocery shop.  We're really lucky, because we have the means to shop around a bit.  I can't underestimate how important that is.

Sunday Recipe

Sunday is the day that I reserve for making big efforts for food.  New recipes, recipes that take all day in the slow cooker, and things that just need lots of attention.  If I don't have plans, I'm cooking.  I rarely take a Sunday completely off. 

(I also like to make things that make big batches--hence the slow cooker love--so one or both of us can take the leftovers for lunch the next day or two days.  During the week we tend to eat things that don't make extras--chicken legs or burgers, for instance--both because it's more effort and because we almost always only buy meat enough for the two of us.  We shop for all of our butchered meat [as opposed to processed meats, which we buy where we can] at Whold Foods, and it's too expensive for us to buy for leftovers unless we splurge on a roast or a whole chicken.)

So, this week I knew that I wanted to make a creamy soup, because cold weather and no more daylight savings time just seems to add up to soup.  A few years ago I made a heavenly lemony potato soup, but at the time I made it, I didn't have an immersion blender, and it was a pain in the ass.  PAIN IN THE ASS.  So I never made a creamy soup again, until tonight, because we acquired an immersion blender as a wedding present.  I didn't make the lemony potato soup this time, but found a recipe for a delightful sounding corn/potato chowder and experimented with that.  I heavily modified this recipe, but here it is where I found it.

Now here is my recipe:

3.5 large potatoes
1 carton low sodium chicken broth – divided use and 2 cups of water

6 slices bacon (diced as small as you like it)
1 small onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced

2 smallish carrots, diced
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dried parsley
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup shredded cheese
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 small can (11oz) whole kernel corn – divided use

Peel and cut the potatoes into small cubes.  Boil in 3 cups of chicken broth plus 2 cups of water until the potatoes are fork tender. Drain the potatoes reserving the broth (you’ll probably have about 4 cups left). Set both aside.  

In a large pot cook the bacon until done; take out bacon and drain on paper towel.  Get rid of all of the bacon fat, minus about a TB. Saute the onion, carrots and garlic in the bacon fat until tender.  Add the flour and salt, and cook for a minute or so, to let the flour cook a bit.  Stir in 3 cups of the potato broth, and the rest of the carton of chicken broth.  Add the parsley and pepper. Mix very well. Bring to a boil.  Add the milk, cream and cheese, and as much potato and corn as you'd like (keep more out if you want a chunkier soup, put more in if you'd like it smoother).   Use the immersion blender until the texture is to your liking. Add the remaining corn and potatoes and heat through.

Garnish with shredded cheese and bacon from earlier.  (You can garnish this with practically anything you think would taste good, but this is what we had.)

This is definitely one of the better things I've cooked, and even though we really liked it, I can't wait to try more creamy soups.  I'd like to try a baked potato soup at some point (and possibly an asparagus, though I can't hope to serve that to Sam.).

 

I am a dictator

I am.  In a game.  It's called Tropico 3, and I've been playing the Tropico games since the first one came out.  I used to play them on PCs, but the lovely company that makes Tropico put it out for consoles for the first time with this iteration, and so I now play it on our Xbox 360. 

To say that I am obsessed with this game is a slight understatement.  I'm nerdy about any computer (or console) game that doesn't involve any sort of combat, believe it or not.  I hate wars.  I hate making war.  I hate defending myself against marauders and armies and rebels and so on and so forth.  I hate hand-to-hand combat.  I hate shooting things.  In the Civilization games, I generally play with war turned off (seriously) and in Tropico, it's very very easy to avoid war.  Generally, I end up playing games like...Harvest Moon.  And Animal Crossing.

Sam calls them girl games, but whatever.  In Tropico, I am a dictator.

Annotated Friday Random Ten

1. Polly -- Nirvana.  This is the unplugged version, which is the only Nirvana album on my iPod.  I like it very much, still.  I don't think (and never did think) Kurt Cobain is that awesome, and a lot of people can track their musical awakening to Nirvana, but I can't.  They were my sister's band, and as such, I never did get into them.
2. Policeman Skank -- Audioweb.  Of all the random....anyway, yes.  This song is on a soundtrack that I like, even if the movie stunk.
3. Tomorrow -- Morrissey.  I love me some Moz.
4. Run Devil Run -- Jenny Lewis with the Cocteau Twins.  I like exactly one Jenny Lewis solo song: Rise Up With Fists!
5. The Luckiest -- Ben Folds.  I'm personally feeling some backlash towards this song, possibly because I killed this album with overlistening.  To be accurate, however, this is from the live album, and I never did particularly like it.
6. Losing Lisa -- Ben Folds.  Ah, iPod, throwing out two Folds' songs in a row.  Not even close to the best song on this album, though it must be said that this might be on my top ten albums of the past ten years.
7. We Didn't Do It -- Tegan and Sara.  I wish I hadn't bought this album.  QED.
8. Crazy -- Gnarls Barkley.  Are there people who can't groove to this song?  It's on our after dinner mix, the one we made for the wedding.
9. Immigration Man -- Crosby Stills and Nash.  Not a song I even really know by them.  Sadly.
10. Angels of the Silences -- Counting Crows.  The Counting Crows still astonish me.  By that I mean: I can listen to their albums all the time, and every time, somehow it seems like the first, best time, when you were just discovering August and Everything After, and the songs just rocked you all the way down and it's taken me a long time to realize, but these first albums just get better and better and better, and whether or not that's the music or who and where I was when I first heard the albums, I'll never know, but I don't think my hunger for these songs will ever diminish and I kinda like it that way and I thought I'd feel that way about other bands and now I don't, and it's weird, it's so weird that it ended up being the Counting Crows that belong to me so well.

Uh...oops?

I just forgot.  I just forgot to blog yesterday.  I thought about doing it yesterday morning, but then I got called to the reference desk and I never thought about it again.  I did homework (successfully, thank goodness) and then I got home and went to class and then it was bedtime.  And no blog.

One of the things about this grad school experiment is that suddenly there is a lot more crowding my brain.  I've always been the kind of person who just remembers things (for instance, I still don't use a day planner, which is the height of insanity, no?  I'm 31, and I still can't use a calendar to keep track of myself.  Mostly, though I just don't need it.  I remember things.  Not blogging, apparently, but appointments and events?  Golden.), things like directions and dates and homework tasks and what time class is and so on and so forth.

(Incidentally, I also remember things like how you conjugate Spanish and Italian verbs, and random vocubulary from both languages, thus making my foreign language competence low but interestingly hybridized Italo-Span.  When I was actually taking the classes, I remembered these things by remembering the pages on which the information was presented to me.  I'm not saying it was photographic [because it wasn't, not exactly], but it was at least some form of that type of memory, because I could sometimes picture that page exactly.  Anyway.  Italo-Span.  Or should that be Span-Italo?)

Grad school.  Brain crowding.  But honestly, I don't know why I should feel this way, because it's not as if I ever have to recall anything instantaneously.  There are no tests, for example.  If you don't give me a test, why am I learning it?  I guess to learn it (and I am learning some things, never you fear.  It's not a COMPLETE waste of money.) for the glory of learning it.  In this same vein, I have stopped doing the reading for any class that doesn't expect me to answer for it.  If you don't quiz me, or don't make me write reading responses, why in heck would I do pages and pages of (pardon me) boring reading?  I wouldn't, that's the answer.  For the first time ever in my academic career, I wouldn't.  (My sister, who has a Master's degree in something computery, told me that she didn't do any reading in grad school, which scandalized me until about 6 months ago, when I figured out why.  I'm with her now.  Which leaves me ever-so-much time for my pleasure reading, which is really, in the long run, more important to me anyway.  I am now reading a fascinating book about the periodic table of elements.  It doesn't sound fascinating, but it is, it really is.  Why I would rather read an interestingly educational book about the periodic table of elements than educational works about libraries I don't know, but there it is.)

I will try not to forget to blog again.  No promises, as apparently I am now getting to the age when things begin to just slip my mind.  Perhaps I should make a renewed effort to use a day planner.

Yes, Master

I broke one of my rules last night: I did homework at home.  I've been very lucky, in this grad school endeavor, as I've been able to basically complete my homework at work.  I still have to go to class (through the computer) at home, at night, but I feel very strongly that as much as possible, I need to avoid school during any free time I have.  As I've said, I'm lucky.  My workplace can't give me any monetary support for school, but they love to support me by allowing me the freedom to do my homework at work.  Lucky.

There are a few reasons I won't do homework at home.  I'm incredibly hungry for as much time for my life as I can get.  I want to spend time with Sam.  I want to sew.  I want to play video games.  I want to watch movies and TV.  I want to go out to eat.  I want to be able to clean my house without feeling like all I've done for the past five days is do work.  I want to be able to cook meals without feeling like the cooking is eating into my time.  I just....I want to have a life.  The amount of homework that I've had this semester has been daunting, and if I was doing it at night and on weekends, I feel pretty strongly that I'd hate my life a lot.

As I said, though, I broke that rule last night.  I broke the rule, because since about noon, I'd been thinking about the two weekly practice quizzes for my class.  If you follow my tweets, I'm pretty sure you can guess that I wasn't so much happy with my quiz work yesterday.  It's not that I don't know what I'm doing, because I'm pretty sure I'm on the right track with the way I'm working the problems.  No, the issue is that the databases I'm working in are apparently buggy, and with both searches, I end up with an error message at some point.  The ProQuest error is syntax, I believe.  The Engineering Village error?  No idea, because the thing didn't give me any hints.  Just...boom!  Error.  The most frustrating thing is that these errors show up fairly far into the work.  I spent two hours yesterday and had nothing to show for it.

So last night, I HAD to see if those errors would come up again.  And the ProQuest error did (I avoided the EV quiz), and I spent 30 min last night finding that out.  I literally obsessed about that problem from 12 pm to 8 pm, and I have nothing.  I have no answer for the quiz.  I want to bang my head against a wall.  I'm thinking I'll take today off from that particular homework, and give it a go tomorrow.  I need a break.  I need to not spend eight hours trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong.  I need to cook dinner and sew.  I need to do laundry and pick up some.  The quiz will wait.

Every day a blog post

And possibly, every day a terrible blog post.  I feel like I might have blog posts brewing in me, but I also feel like a good deal of my skill at writing (anything) has disappeared.  So let's see if I can be coherent for 30 days in a row (right on through Thanksgiving!  And a vacation!  And a few intensive weeks of homework!).  I'm guessing no.  I might be able to blog everyday, but not coherently.

I think Fridays will be for Friday Random Ten (phew, one day out of seven done already.  Or nearly done.).  The day before Thanksgiving is, of course, Un-Thanksgiving.  I can spew out all the uck that I'm not thankful for.  So....five out of 30, done!

Oh, and the end of my reading year on November 12.  That's a fun post.  My reading year (Nov 12 2009 to Nov 11 2010) has been epic.  I can't lie.  I've gone over 200 books for the first time in a few years (if ever; I'm not 100% sure I've ever done it before) and there are reasons for that, which I will discuss in that post.  I'm pretty excited about that post.  I've been composing it since I hit 200 a week or so ago.  That's one blog post that would exist with or without NaBloPoMo.

I also am going back and forth on whether or not to write a post about the following subjects: anxiety, body issues, grad school, fantasy football, money.  Those are all things I've contemplated writing posts about in the past few months, and haven't moved on, so we'll see if NaBloPoMo can pull those posts out of me.  If I can write about anxiety, I think it'll be a miracle, since part of the experience of having anxiety is being anxious about talking about anxiety.  It's a vicious cycle.

So anyway, that is my sketchy plan for this month.  I don't know how it will end up.  That's the thing about everything: you never do.