revolutions, I think, Heather

I cringe when I think how I overdid it this year. These were my revolutions:

• master's degree – only half a course to finish and thesis revisions and binding
• writing – master’s degree and patient messages in all shapes and colors took care of this and then some; between work and degree, I’ve never written so much in my life
• eat more real food, less processed food – I've been off and on with this one
• see a nutritionist for food advice - did this, my liver is still messed up, but my spleen isn't slippery anymore
• use slow cooker at least once a week – I'm all over this, even if some of my cauldron experiments end in disaster
• walk every day – off and on with this one too; the indoor treadmill just doesn't have the appeal it once had
• start cognitive behavior therapy for the panic attacks – did this, not very helpful, did find out my enneagram number
• go to bed at a decent hour – I usually try to be in bed by 10, but there are nights when I'm up past one, wide awake
• get to work earlier – oddly, I found doing grad homework in the morning was easier, so worked out a schedule to go in around 10
• yarn projects - got completely derailed with this due to grad school, and succumbed to yarn ADD so a lot of other projects got mixed in with the ones I intended to do
• start dollhouse – got dollhouse, decided on colors for repainting outside and wallpaper for inside, but have yet to actually get going on it
• de-clutter condo – did a lot of this with help of auricular acupuncture; got rid of bags and bags of stuff and discovered freecycle
• go to UU services on a regular basis – did this intermittently; I can read the sermons online now though
• host tea party for girlfriends in March – did this and included honorary guys
• spend less, save more - managed to do this so I could pay for grad school directly and not have to take out a student loan

I will post 2009 revolutions soon.

I fudged it

My intuition about the peppermint fudge was correct:

• I used 1/2 tsp of peppermint extract instead of a whole teaspoon


• I didn't add the vanilla extract


• I used soy milk instead of coconut milk


• I stirred the milk mixture into the dry ingredients/chocolate chips mixture immediately to completely melt the chocolate chips and avoid lumps of chocolate, none of this "let everything sit for a couple of minutes" business (Jane-the-gardener told me she let hers sit, as instructed, and ended up with lumpy fudge, and no amount of "vigorous stirring" helped)


• I only put the smashed candy cane pieces on top of the fudge, rather than mixing it into the fudge

I often cook, bake, knit, crochet, and paint this way. I am a deviator. Rarely do I stick to the original design or recipe or instructions for anything I make. If a recipe calls for milk or potatoes, I automatically use soy milk and sweet potatoes. I don't much care for onions, so I rarely add them to dishes. My mother almost always uses golden delicious apples for her apple crisp recipe, but lately I've been using granny smith apples, and not adding any flour for the crumble topping but doubling the oatmeal instead, and I've a mind to try it with peaches too and I've already tried it with sweet potatoes too. If a pattern says make the scarf four feet long, I make it at least six, and I always change the colors and usually the yarn recommended and sometimes even the stitch combination if I'm feeling brave. It never fails - I just get ideas...

mmm, minty

So one of my co-workers gave me a juicy big candy cane today. It's at least half an inch thick. I love mint, so I definitely wanted to find some way to make use of it.

Then I came across Amy's blog entry about peppermint fudge, which had a link to another blog entry about adapting a coconut fudge recipe in a newsletter (scroll to the bottom).

So dilemma solved already thanks to the Interwebtube. That must be a record!

I wonder how minty the fudge is. I may decrease the amount of peppermint extract, as I only want a hint of mint coming through rather than an eye-watering, mouth-drooling, throat-choking minty wallop. Oops, sorry, thinking on the keyboard again.

I'm going to have too much fun smashing the candy cane.

Grandma Rita's nut roll

"Hello?"

"Hi, Grandma. It's Cathy. How are you?"

"I'm like a fat cat sitting in the sun."

"Good for you."

"It's really cold here today. It's going to be about eight degrees tonight."

"No wonder you're sitting in the sun. So, I was calling to ask for your nut roll recipe."

"Sure, I've got it right here. How's your shorthand?"

"Pretty good."

"Okay. This recipe makes three rolls. You start with two cakes of yeast, or the powdered equivalent. I usually use the powdered. Pour a cup of warm milk over the yeast. Make sure it's warm and not hot, or you'll destroy the yeast. Then mix in a half-pound of butter and six tablespoons of sugar. Add four cups of flour, one cup at a time, and then two egg yolks. Save the whites to whip up and add to your nut mixture. Also add a teaspoon of salt. Let the dough rise for an hour. Divide it into three sections. You can always freeze sections to use later if you don't want to make all of it at once. Sprinkle sugar and flour on your rolling surface and roll out your dough, make sure it's not too thin or it will break when you try to roll it up. Whip the egg white and add the nuts to it. Or you can use poppy seeds or dried fruit or fruit spread. You can also add honey or caro syrup to the mixture - anything to make it spreadable. You don't want to scratch the dough too much. Roll up the dough carefully and put the logs on a sheet or a dish with sides and let it rise again for forty-five minutes. Bake the rolls for twenty-five minutes at three fifty and then turn down the heat to three twenty-five and bake for another fifteen minutes. Let them cool a bit, and then invert the sheet onto a cooling rack. That's the easiest way to get the rolls off the sheet."

"That sounds easy enough."

"It's an easy recipe. I'm sure you can do it."

"Thanks, Grandma."

Mom and I experimented and made a gluten-free, dairy-free version today (darn those food allergies anyway). The dough was a bit too crumbly, so next time, I'd probably add the whole eggs, and just use honey to mix with the nuts or rice syrup or maybe even molasses. We made one with walnuts, one with pecans, and one with dried cranberries. They came out a bit crumbly, but they taste good.

Mom, Emily (my sister), me, Grandma Rita (April 2007)

*This is the same grandmother who had an 80th birthday party several weeks ago.

you give me a book, I give you a tie...

So I made a hat for Julia, Joe-the office-roomie's baby girl. Joe's wife, Steph, asked if I'd make her one too. So I'm now working on that, which conveniently fuels my current seed stitch obsession. Steph will be getting something in addition to the hat (although probably not at the same time as the hat because Cate Time is about two weeks behind real time this holiday season), because that's just how bad my seed stitch obsession is. Completely out of control, I tell you! I also have a budding obsession with moss stitch. But you know, I can stop any time I want to.

As it happens, Steph makes the neatest jewelry! She offered to make me something in return. I broke down and confessed to my silver pendant addiction, which she enthusiastically said she could feed, er, use for inspiration. So this was in my desk drawer today:


It's a yarn pendant! Is that cute or what?

*blog title comes from the sermon scene at the end of the original version of The Bishop's Wife. Great flick for this time of year. (starts at about 7:00)

nod to the needles

This cold has really knocked me flat. I've been coughing and sneezing so frequently that my neck and shoulders were getting really sore.

I'm not supposed to take ibuprofen while I'm on the Lexapro, and I've come to see how feeble Tylenol is in comparison. It barely does anything for my headaches. Still, I was a good girl and opted for Tylenol Cold & Sinus. Big mistake. Did nothing, and so I didn't sleep for two days for all the hacking and sniffling.

Yesterday, I couldn't take it anymore, so I dragged myself to the grocery store to get the Advil version. Most stores keep it behind the pharmacy counter these days, and the first store I went to had it on back order, as did the second. The third had one box left. So I didn't take the Lexapro yesterday in favor of the Advil C&S. If I start panicking again, it's Tylenol's fault.

I managed to get an appointment with Karen-the-acupuncturist this morning. I got there at 10 and didn't leave until 11:45! She put two needles in my knees, two in my forearms, and one on the right side of my rib cage and left me to cook for 40 minutes. Immediately after she put the ones in my knees, my nose started to get unstuffy. After the full 40 minutes, I could breathe more easily through my nose, and I felt a lot less run down and feverish.

She also did that spooky thing where she asks me something out of the blue because she read it in my pulses. She asked if I had been mad or annoyed about anything last week. There were several things getting on my nerves, so I told her about them (she also serves as counselor, rather like hair stylists do). Amazing how she picks up on that stuff just in your pulses.

This is why I use Eastern medicine before Western. The average time for a visit with a primary care doctor is SEVEN MINUTES. They can only get cursory, symptomatic information before prescribing anything. If what they prescribe doesn't work, you go back for another seven minutes. This isn't their fault. It's how the system is set up. They have to do the best they can within that seven minutes. My doctor is good, she really knows her stuff, but how much more effective might she be if she could have more time with her patients?

When I visit my acupuncturist, I get a minimum of an hour of her time, so she gets a far more detailed picture of me and gives me a treatment right there. I get up on the treatment table, she reads my pulses, she marks points and puts needles in, reads my pulses again, adjusts the needles if she needs to, reads my pulses again, leaves me to relax and cook for 10 minutes or more, comes back and reads my pulses again, takes the needles out, and reads my pulses one more time. Real-time feedback in action.

Obviously, if I break a bone or have a heart attack or something like that, I'm sensible enough that I'd to go the ER and the doctor, but for pretty much everything else, Eastern medicine does a much better job. Karen says Western medicine can save your life, but Eastern medicine can save your health.

As far as cost goes, I have a flexible spending account through work, so what I pay out to her, I get back from my FSA. And the cost per appointment is still less than the full charge for seven minutes with the doctor (ie, if you were paying the full amount, rather than just the co-pay).

By the way, Karen says to avoid sugar and bread when you have a cold, and eat lots of proteins and greens and take vitamin C and drink a lot of fluids and keep warm and cover your head and neck when outside. None of which I'd been doing in the past two weeks. Just had an extra-large helping of broccoli with tofu on the side and huge mug of green tea.

Such a relief to start feeling like me again.

hi, mom!

The coldish, coughish thing turned more coldish yesterday. Just as well, really. The coughing was getting on my nerves, as well as everyone else's.

Being sick at all right now is super irritating because my mom and my stepdad are here for the holidays. This is a big deal, because they flew all the way over here from Australia, which is a minimum of 19 hours in planes if you make only one stop in California. They had a second stop in Dallas.

My sister and I didn't know they were coming. I went out to lunch on Thursday with two co-workers. This is in no way unusual, so I suspected nothing (Jane-the-gardener and Joe-the-office-roomie were in on it). We'd been in the restaurant all of five minutes when I noticed people walking in. At first, I only saw the backs of their heads, but I thought, "Gee, that lady looks a lot like my mom." And then she turned the corner, and it WAS my mom. And I said the most completely original thing I could think of, "OMG, it's my mom!" And Steve (my stepdad) was right behind her.

I had talked to my mom earlier in the week, and she said they were "going away for the holiday." She even came up with the elaborate explanation that they were driving to Melbourne and then going to New Zealand.

They're here through the 27th. Mom will be back for a conference in Florida at the beginning of January. To anyone with a sane mind and a drop of Christmas spirit, it would make more sense if she just stayed here through part of January, but her boss isn't letting her do that, since he wants to take all of January off (I don't see the connection either). Can anyone say "Grinch?"

Alice, anyone?

Has anyone read anything by Frank Beddor? Joe-the-office-roomie mentioned his re-telling of the Alice in Wonderland stories, but neither of us has read them yet.

It started out as a discussion of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland movie project (really, we do manage to get tons of work done despite these discussions; possibly because of them). Alan Rickman is the caterpiller. Johnny Depp is the Mad Hatter. There's some controversy over who is really playing the Cheshire Cat. The actor listed for the part has denied it.

Anyway, Joe had heard of these books. They sound intriguing, but then again, so did Gregory Maguire's Oz books, and only the first one was any good, in my opinion.

Frank Beddor looks to have some graphic novels as well - Hatter M looks interesting. Angel and Gwen, know anything about that? You are my graphic novel advisors, after all.

yes, neil - now we ARE sick

I've been avoiding a cold for about a month now. I've neatly sidestepped it and procrastinated on it with a lot of writing and day job stuff and travel and begging. However, it got sneaky today, and is going to win this round. It was waiting for me when I woke up, which is so not fair as I hadn't had my morning tea yet.

I just ate a double-helping of spicy lemongrass and rice noodle soup with garlic. I also found a recipe for ginger chicken noodle soup, which I'm going to put in the slow cooker tomorrow morning to simmer while I'm at work.

I'm also watching Neverwhere while inhaling anything spicy and chicken soupy I can find. For a low-budget BBC mini-series, it's not half-bad. The only disappointment really is the shaggy bull that's supposed to be the Great Beast of London Below. Completely not what I saw in my head when I read the book (I LOVE the book; I'm sure I've mentioned that before). At least the shaggy bull in the sewers is at the end of the series.

I think I've got zinc lozenges somewhere...

blimey

I was advised to book my hotel early for my London trip next October, so I did.

The Lime Tree Hotel is nice and central in Belgravia and a five-minute walk from Victoria Station. It's a bit of a hike from Heathrow Airport, but I can live with that, especially since I can take the tube all the way from Heathrow to Victoria for a little over 3 pounds (I think that's something like $4).

I'm hoping to divide my time between the touristy and less touristy stuff. Definitely want to see Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, the British Museum and Library, Oscar's house in Tite Street, Yeats' and Plath's houses in Fitzroy Road, maybe some theater, the gardens, and a whirl on the London Eye. If anyone has any other recommendations, let me know. I'll be there for a little over a week.

A friend of my mom's who works at Oxford University has offered a personal tour around the college and the city. How nice a person is that? Can't turn that down - Oscar and T.S. Eliot studied there, C.S. Lewis taught there, a ton of prime ministers and Nobel laureates and kings and saints studied there. Oxford is about an hour bus ride from London.

I'm so grateful to finally have resources and curiosity and bravery and energy and time to get out and see a bit more of the world. I'm already thinking of a two-week trip to Ireland in 2010. Gotta see where the fam comes from, you know? (Mom's side is British and Irish, among other things.)

And next year is my fun year, after all. I did way too much academic and work stuff this year, and my health is suffering for it. I need far more play next year. Everybody needs a fun year from time to time, don't you think?

why I love reading craft blogs

Not only do I get to see and read about craft projects that people are working on, but I also learn all kinds of things about all kinds of things. Like how the Canadian government works.

Who knew?

that reminds me...

I've done way too much mind mapping lately. This is because the only way I was able to layer and connect the three stories in my novel/thesis was to hold them in my head as a web of things connecting to other things. Remember those web diagrams from grade school? Apparently, it's now the latest fashion in the business world.

Anyway, here's how it's showing up these days (warning: what follows is link-heavy, and Oscar figures in the first example; consider yourself warned - you may want to go make some tea or something):

Two of the texts on my thesis reading list were by Oscar Wilde: The Canterville Ghost and The Picture of Dorian Gray. These two stories in particular are his unique contribution to the gothic tradition. The Canterville Ghost was one of my favorite stories as a kid, and reading Dorian Gray is like indulging in chocolate.

As if I didn't have enough to read at the time, I came across two novels by Gyles Brandreth that feature Oscar as a kind of detective solving murders. They remind me of the Jane Austen mysteries by Stephanie Barron. While it may sound far-fetched, Oscar was a shrewd observer of humanity (as was Jane Austen), and he was great friends with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who has had his Sherlock Holmes resurrected by Laurie King. These Oscar Wilde mysteries (and the Jane Austen ones and the Sherlock Holmes ones, for that matter) may not be high literature, but they're fun reads (and rather a nice break from high literature).

I also discovered that Oscar's letters have been published in various editions. I was keen to get the Complete Letters (more than 1500 of them!), but it was nearly impossible to find. I eventually located a used copy at Powell's. I immediately opened the box when it came in the mail, and I was surprised to find that tucked inside the front cover was an e-mail and a Smithsonian article about Oscar's photo session with Napoleon Sarony in 1882 when Oscar was on a lecture tour in the US.

One of Sarony's portraits of Oscar was the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court case. Sarony sued Burrow-Giles after they used unauthorized lithographs of Oscar Wilde No. 18 in an ad. He won $610 (today, that would be about $12,000). Burrow-Giles appealed twice, but the original decision was upheld, and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of copyright protection for photographs. Sarony photographed the Supreme Court justices in 1890.

I'm surmising the article was tucked into the book as it pertains to the photo that is the same one on the book cover. It's not every day you see a 6' 3"-tall man in knee breeches.

The e-mail looks to be addressed to the previous owner of the book. It's quoting a section of De Profundis about Christ. I can never get through a reading of De Profundis without crying. Oscar wrote it while he was in prison, convicted for homosexual acts and sentenced to two years of hard labor. He converted to Catholicism on his death bed.

These discoveries in my precious copy of Oscar's letters reminded me of Roland Mitchell finding documents in Randolph Henry Ash's copy of Giambattista Vico's Scienzia Nuova in Possession by A.S. Byatt, another book on my thesis reading list (and one of my favorite novels - don't bother with the film version; it doesn't do the least bit of justice to the novel).

Here is the non-Oscar example for those of you who needed to go away and make tea:

This past weekend, I received a print from the estate of my grandmother's long-time neighbor, Mrs. Abbie Swain. Mrs. Swain was a lovely lady who was tiny, sharp as a whip, finger-waved her hair, and lived to be 100-something. She read a lot of books, which was likely a part of her secret formula for a long life.

The sign above the librarian's head in the print reads "Metaphysics." (Metaphysics seeks to explain the ultimate nature of being and of the world.)

The print reminds me of Lucien the librarian in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics. Lucien is librarian of all the books ever dreamt of that remain unwritten. (I haven't found a good drawing of him to show you, but if you go read the comics, you'll find him.) Imagine reading in THAT library.

somebody bring me another audio book

I sent off the next-to-final draft of my novel/thesis to my beta readers and my advisor around 2 this morning. Once I get feedback, then I will do a final copyedit and send the manuscript off to be bound.

Remember that verse from Apologia that I mentioned a number of posts ago when I was struggling for a title? I went back and read the entire poem again and was a little spooked to see that either my story fits the poem or the poem fits my story, so I scattered the poem throughout my thesis. I hope Oscar won't mind.

An apologia is a defense of what you say, think or do. That's Oscar all over. Read about his life, you'll see what I mean. My characters do this a lot. It's not so much about regret as it is about the consequences of decisions being worth it in the end. That's Oscar all over, too.

Yesterday, Stephen Fry unofficially declared it Oscar Wilde Day since he was releasing his audio version of some of Oscar's fairy tales. Oscar actually died in Paris on November 30, 1900, but publishing new audio versions of his fairy tales on his death date seems a bit creepy, so it was probably a good thing to wait a day. It was also World AIDS Day yesterday, wasn't it?

I downloaded these and also these from audible after releasing my pile of words to the world, and I fell asleep listening to The Happy Prince. This is a good thing.

If a girl has regular bouts of insomnia and nighttime anxiety (which I do), and if said girl worked on her thesis until 2 am (which I did), and if she was too wound up to sleep (which I was), and if she didn’t have anyone around to read her to sleep as she did when she was a kid (which I don’t), then her best option is to employ the tools of the modern day and find an audio book to put on her iPod.

Stephen Fry does a wonderful narration, as expected. Highly satisfying additions to the playlist. Especially considering that I have his version of the Paddington Bear stories practically memorized, and I needed something new to listen to.