Recently in Self Improvement Category

I've been terribly lax about posting, though ideas a-plenty have been cycling through my head. I've got a number of posts cooking in outline mode, and I work on them casually during the waiting. It's about time, after all - time for kiddo to be born - and that's where most of my focus is.

But I thought I'd check in and give a brief update on my goals.

1. Write and publish more. Obviously, I've not been religious with the posting. But I have been participating more - engaging with interesting folks on Twitter, participating extensively via blog comments, and most of all, ignoring the doubt-filled voice in my head that leads me to abandon half-written thoughts as trivial or unworthy.
2. Eat more home-cooked meals. Near the beginning of the year, I thought carefully about what I wanted the days after the baby is born to look like. One of the things I really strongly desire is to eat well, at home, and eat food we've made. I couldn't imagine, however, that I'd find myself more capable and willing to cook immediately after the birth than in the weeks before, so I decided that banking meals in the freezer was the best solution. Freezer cooking became a subject of study for a few weeks, then Sam and I put together a menu, then a grocery list. I plan to write something more extensive on this experience shortly - I'd like to reserve full judgement until we've used some of the banked meals - but I'm pleased to report that we've got about 20 dinners-for-two in the freezer now. Based on the servings we set aside for eating (rather than freezing), we're absolutely smitten with the recipes we chose, as well as the methods for producing them at scale. Time will tell if they hold up.
3. Finances. Aside from a thorough review to ensure that the baby's arrival will not throw our immediate financial situation out of whack, this is unfinished. There are a number of changes coming for us, and there are simply too many variables to do the precise kind of review that I wanted at this moment. For now, I'm handling our taxes, and I plan to look more comprehensively at our budget in late spring.
4. Get what we need; keep what works; purge what doesn't. We've been really good about this. The amount of stuff we've Freecycled or otherwise handed off to better homes has definitely facilitated having room for the baby and all the requisite baby stuff. On the other side of the give-and-take, we've gotten a solid 80% of everything we absolutely need for the baby from second-hand sources, either for very little money or for free. We have essentially everything we need for the birth on hand, though we're planning on picking up ingredients for a meal to share with our midwives and drinks throughout labor. (Should be fun times; virgin margaritas during the birth started as a joke, but turned into a 'why the hell not?'.)

Otherwise, I'm generally healthy, generally happy, and generally ready. Kiddo can arrive any time; we're into week 38 as of yesterday, and ready (or almost ready) with a few knitted items complete or on needles. Newborns! They are so tiny, and so quick to knit for. There will, of course, be photos post-birth.

And that's me, for now!

Last year in March - only about three months into my knitting habit - I decided to try my hand at a really fiendish pair of gloves, Eisblume. This was sort of a symptom of my knitting disease: choosing patterns that are waaaaaaay too advanced for my skill level, which eventually just frustrate me and sit unfinished. Twisted stitches? Cables? Beaded stitches? All of these were skills I'd be learning along the way. But, I told myself, knitting techniques aren't hard - which is true. I've never met a knitting technique that actually seemed difficult after the first few times I did it.

It's a beautiful pattern, and gloves are the reason I decided I needed to learn to knit. My hands are too large for most commercially made gloves designed for women - too long - and men's gloves (which are sometimes long enough) are almost invariably too loose. Plus, gloves you can find in the men's section of most stores are boring. I don't need a pile of frills - I didn't need the cabled, beaded busyness of Eisblume - but a little embellishment or at least a little warmth is nice.

So I bought yarn and beads, and I cast on, and I started knitting. Before I even arrived at any cables or beads, though, the pattern held some new frustrations. I was working with a lighter weight of yarn than I'd ever worked with before - fingering weight, which is about half as thick as worsted weight, the stuff you usually see beginners using for scarves. The needles were thinner, too, only slightly thicker than toothpicks - 2.0mm, the US size 0. (Beginner scarves are usually on much thicker needles, more like chunky chopsticks.) Thin yarn on thin needles means a tight fabric, extra tight because of my own tendency to knit tightly. At such a tight gauge, the yarn fuzzed up in my fingers, and became difficult to slide along the needles.

When I did get to the beads (which started before the cables), that was a new adventure. There are a couple of methods for placing beads in knitted fabric. One involves simply stringing the beads on the yarn ahead of time, but this means that the beads sit sort of diagonally on only half of the knitted stitch (knit stitches are basically loops, and within fabric have two "legs" showing). The other involves placing the beads on the stitches as you come to them - usually using a crochet hook. But the beads I was using were too small for a crochet hook to go through, so instead I had to place them with a needle and thread.

Ordinary knit and purl stitches take me no time at all to work - maybe a second each. In a pattern that isn't easily memorized, reading the pattern slows that down some, but it's still a couple seconds per stitch at most. Account for the tight and slow-moving stitches, and I was moving pretty slowly. But each time I placed a bead on a stitch, that stitch took probably half a minute. Any given round, between beading and the tight stitches and juggling a cable needle (once those started) and just reading the pattern, was taking me about half an hour, and I felt like I was wrestling with the yarn and needles the whole time. I'd have to stop after an hour or so because I was frustrated and my hands would start to ache.

On gauge: you can swatch all you want in plain knits and purls, but there's no way of knowing that your gauge will translate to the gauge you'll get in a pattern with twisted stitches and cables and beads and things. There's no way to tell what your gauge will be like in pattern other than to try the pattern, and you need a good couple inches of work to really tell anything at all. I got about three or four inches into the cuff pattern - which is a good length to check gauge - before I realized that my tight stitches meant that the glove was going to be too small for me to wear, or at least wear comfortably.

And that's about a month of work.

I could keep on with them and offer them as a gift to someone with smaller hands, and that's what I planned to do - eventually. I needed something pleasurable and simple to work on, so I turned to other projects and set the gloves aside.

And they sat for the last seven or eight months. Every time I finished a knitting project or thought about starting something new, I'd look at them and consider working on them, but the thought was always fleeting. It's just too frustrating to wrestle that hard with a project that goes that slowly, knowing I won't be able to enjoy the end result myself.

I admitted my frustrations to Sam recently, and his response was immediate. "Bind it off," he said. "Let it be a cup cozy." He's done exactly that - bound off the first of a pair of Cookie A socks that he just wasn't connecting with (and was incidentally also turning out too small). His steel water bottle wears the cuff part, now.

So tonight, I did just that. I carefully bound off all the stitches, wove in the ends, and now the Eisblume cuff is a water bottle cozy. I'm glad I did it; I don't feel a pang of guilt every time I get an urge to knit something and I don't choose to work on them. Unravelling it after all that work and investment and frustration would have made me sad - this way I can still enjoy it. It is, after all, still gorgeous:

And that's all she wrote. Sam continues to teach me stuff about knitting that really isn't about knitting at all.

Like, you know, stop knitting stuff that makes you miserable.

Smart guy.

Since early in this pregnancy, I've had trouble with my pelvic bones. There's a pregnancy hormone, relaxin, that makes your ligaments loosen up so that your bones can move more freely (which is why people suddenly start freaking out when you try to lift anything heavier than your average novel); it's a good thing, because your pelvic bones are supposed to have some give to allow for passage of the baby at birth time.

In my case (not that I'm alone here), relaxin hit early and with a vengeance. Around 14 weeks, I started having pretty intense tailbone pain whenever I sat down. It was very much like I'd fallen and hit my tailbone really hard - I've done that. But I hadn't when this pain started. As it turns out, the loose ligaments destabilized my pelvis enough that my tailbone had rotated inward, and the other pelvic bones (the sacra and the ilia in particular, since that's what I sit on) were all out of position, not supporting good positioning of... well, anything else.

Like Eddie Izzard, I am somewhat skeptical of the chiropractic-care-for-everything claims that get thrown around. ("You've got diphtheria! I'm gonna crack your bones.") I can understand how it's relevant for some things that aren't directly "bony" problems - after I fractured a vertebra in my neck in 8th grade, I had really awful headaches from muscles that tightened up to compensate for the weak and wobbly bones.

But unstable, misaligned bones to begin with? That's classic chiropractor material. So off to the chiropractor I went, and I described what was going on. And he dug my tailbone back out to where it was supposed to be, and I felt better. (Mostly; my chiropractor is pretty brutal, but in exchange for some pain I wind up actually seeing results in the short term.)

Because my bones are (due to the aforementioned hormone relaxin) unstable in general, I've continued seeing the chiropractor for adjustments for the last four months. He's pretty great, for a number of reasons. Chief among them is his inclination to educate. He's taught me how to sit better, stand better, lie down better; how to exercise and strengthen muscles that are used for balance rather than heavy lifting; and how to self-heal problems as they arise using simple movements, moderate pressure, and rest.

But his methods of practice also make it very obvious where the value of chiropractic lies. Last year, due to pain in my foot, I saw a podiatrist. I told him that when I walked, I'd get intense pain through the midfoot, along the back of my heel, and various places in my ankle. He examined my foot, took some x-rays, and determined... that there was nothing wrong with my foot. No broken bones, anyway.

I started having similar problems again here in San Francisco; problems with this foot have been fairly consistent, if a bit periodic, ever since I dropped a heavy piece of furniture on it in 2000. It's gotten particularly bad in the last month, noticeable when I walked sometimes but really screaming bad when I try to take off the opposite shoe using the toe of the bad foot. I described to my chiropractor what hurt, where, how, and when. And he examined my foot and determined that three of the twenty-odd bones in it were jammed or misaligned. Cue the cracking of bones, followed by a vigorous (and really painful) beating on a muscle in my calf that wasn't helping the situation any. And now when I walk, I'm surprised when it doesn't hurt.

It's a circuitous way of making the point, but here it is: chiropractic seems to see my body as a dynamic system, made to be in motion, while other medical disciplines I've encountered seem more focused on my body as a static system. As a consequence of seeing a chiropractor, then, I've become much more interested in the way my body moves, and the ways I can introduce or prevent introducing dysfunction into it.

I still don't know that chiropractic care would do anything for diphtheria, but if you find that body motions (rather than body parts) are painful, a recommendation to see a chiropractor would likely be the first thing out of my mouth. If you're in San Francisco and can get to Bernal Heights easily, I wholeheartedly recommend Dr. Colin Phipps.

Yeesh. Between being pregnant, being sick a fair bit in the last month and a half, traveling, and all the stuff that comes along with all of that, it feels like we haven't got the apartment all the way clean in awhile. I spent some time digging us out from a mess it feels like has been around since Thanksgiving. (This isn't exactly true, but it feels like it.)

Since we still had some unpacking to do from our trip to Omaha for Christmas and needed to do something (for now) with the baby things we got as gifts, I took the opportunity to pull down the bag of things that were given to us before we moved. It's now all packed up in a Ziploc storage cube and up on a shelf, at least until we make our trip to Ikea for more appropriate baby clothes storage. In the meantime, I discovered that one of the gifts we received this summer was declared by the CPSC and the FDA to be unsafe. It's a sleep positioner - an assembly of foam and cloth and mesh designed to keep babies in a certain sleeping position. I've read enough about baby bedding to be aware that even plush stuff not immediately adjacent a baby - like bumpers, comforters, and stuffed toys - are not recommended. The theory is that plush stuff near a sleeping baby poses suffocation and SIDS risks. The manufacturer has a statement on their website acknowledging the statement, and they're no longer distributing the sleepers; for consumers, they say if you wish to return the positioner, you should take it back where you bought it. No help for me, since I got it as a gift months ago. I'll be calling them tomorrow to see if I can send it in for a refund, or find a local retailer where I can return it.

Now just to finish unpacking and putting away the laundry so we can go to bed.

When we moved to San Francisco, we pared down our belongings by a huge amount. We only brought one piece of furniture with us - our kitchen island, for extra counter space, since our kitchen is without exaggeration the size of a closet. Our dinner and cookware got chopped by about half, our wardrobes by at least a third, and our bookshelves by 70-80%. And now, for the most part, we use what we own. The knives in our drawer get dirty and have to be washed every time Sam does dishes, because we just don't own any that are extraneous.

But getting rid of the extraneous is an ongoing thing, not something we can stop because we're done with the move. We're pretty careful about not making new purchases when we can re-purpose something we own to fit a new need, but we do still occasionally have to bring new items into the apartment. Since we moved from a house (where we had something like 2500 square feet of space for living and storage) to an apartment (roughly 500 square feet), we can't afford to bring in stuff indiscriminately - or without taking stuff out. Even if we could, I don't think we'd want to. Having less stuff around lets us appreciate the stuff we keep - it doesn't get lost behind all the cruft.

So this is not a paring down, but rather a process of continual review, and it is one of our areas of focus - for 2011 and probably beyond.

I'm off to a good start: after hearing that a friend bought Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian on our recommendation, I realized that our copies were stuck behind a number of cookbooks that we never use, plus a few others that we use less frequently. We pulled the ones we don't use from the shelf - I'll trade them in on Amazon or list them on Freecycle - and rearranged the remainder so that the Bittman books and our bread books (which also get used all the time) are much more easily accessible.

Next up: my wardrobe. I have to be careful, because I have some clothes I'm only not using because they won't fit until after the baby comes - I don't want to get rid of those. But I also have clothes that I probably wouldn't wear even if they fit, or would only wear grudgingly. (I have underwear in my drawer that always gets pushed to the back of the drawer. Why do I own underwear I don't want to wear?)

Is anyone out there paring down like this? I'm particularly interested if you're doing a continuous review process, rather than a one-time purge.

A post! Just in the nick of time. First, a year-in-review, then some forward-looking-statements, even though my shareholders balk.

What happened in 2010?

2010 has been a huge year for us. We started off the year living apart - Sam in San Francisco, me in Omaha, each working our separate jobs. When I received my tax stuff from my first six months or so at my job, the reality was quite sobering. Our initial estimation (that the two jobs would allow us to save some money and pay down some debts, even with duplicate living expenses) proved to be untrue - my paycheck, after taxes and deductions, managed to cover the mortgage, car and transportation costs, and utilities, with only maybe a couple hundred bucks left over. It turned out that every hour I was at work, once we paid the bills that resulted from living apart so that I _could_ go to work, I brought home a couple bucks an hour. To live apart from Sam, that hardly seemed worthwhile. We started talking about how we might remedy the situation, which we thought would likely require selling the house before anything else. Mortgages are not trivial things.

Meanwhile, while apart, we explored shared interests; I had started knitting, and Sam picked up the habit shortly after. He very quickly surpassed my skill level, whipping out seven hats in a couple weeks. His work was enviably gorgeous, and (probably owing to his much superior focusing skills) he seemed to finish projects easily while I got stuck mid-project. To be totally fair to myself, this is partly because I have an obnoxious habit of choosing complicated patterns worked with thin yarn on teeny-tiny needles, often with cables, lace work, twisted stitches, shaping, beads - in some cases, combinations of the above. It's an illness. Happily, many of the patterns I'm interested in working on now are simple, leveraging a little textural interest and the beauty of the fiber to become something really lovely.

From February through April, there was of course the lawsuit to occupy my attention. In late February, Sam moved back to Omaha with his employer's blessing to support me, to help get our affairs in order for potentially moving together, and to handle some family issues.

A few weeks later, he was laid off. He job-hunted for months, interviewing in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, and Colorado; he was eventually hired by a San Francisco company and started in early July.

Needless to say, the first half of the year was significantly stressful.

We moved Sam out to San Francisco, but this time I got set to move, too. I gave notice at my job, went to San Francisco with Sam to find an apartment and get him settled, then came back for a few weeks of work and the long process of preparing the house for sale.

The best laid plans, of course - shortly after getting back to Omaha, I discovered that I'm pregnant. First trimester fatigue hit me like a load of bricks; that's not a complaint, it's just the truth. I didn't have a bad time of it, I just didn't have much in the way of energy. My mom and sister jumped up with the helping, and they get credit for 90% of the cleanup and improvement. They're living there, now, with our blessing; that makes money a little tight, but it brings me a little joy to see my mom supported, enjoying a house we love.

In late August, I moved to San Francisco, too, with a week-long stop in Houston to visit my bestie. During the trip, I started having odd pain, as if I'd fallen and whacked my tailbone; turns out this was a side effect of pregnancy hormones. My pelvic ligaments all decided to get loose, and my tailbone rotated in a funky way that caused me pain whenever I tried to sit. I've been seeing a chiropractor since I arrived; pleasantly, he's been able to adjust things so that my bones behave, more or less. I still wind up hurting if I exert myself too much, but I've learned - slowly! - to plan my activities better, limit them to match my capabilities, and take time to recuperate when I overdo it.

The one difficulty with limiting activity is that San Francisco is so damn beautiful. And vibrant. And busy. We left the car with a family member to sell in Omaha; car ownership in San Francisco is more of a burden than a benefit. I wind up walking a lot, and taking transit. It might sound crazy, but I love taking trains and busses. It might be different in cities that are less interesting - not sure. But here, sitting on a bus, I can appreciate the city around me rather than focus on the lights changing colors, or what the dude in the next lane over is trying to get away with. I don't always have to go out to appreciate the city, though; we live up on a nice big hill, with a view out over the bay from our windows and over the Embarcadero and the Bay Bridge from the end of the street. There's a lot to enjoy from home.

In late October, Sam and I decided we'd do NaNoWriMo this year. This may have been the best idea ever, as we made a ton of friends and both successfully cranked out more than 50,000 words in one month. We met Chris Baty and the rest of the NaNoWriMo crew at the Thank God It's Over party, which happened to be on our wedding anniversary; the party felt extra special, like it was for us. Seeing as this year was our ten year anniversary, we celebrated (in true Tesla family style) with fantastic food, hitting Waterbar for lunch the day of, and a special "Chef's Night Off" tasting menu at Coi the day after.

We spent Thanksgiving in San Francisco, but Christmas was about seeing family - we flew back to Omaha to see my nuclear and extended family. I got sick on the way out - crappy sinus crud - which was only exacerbated by the cold, dry air in Omaha. Apparently, my body quite likes the moist San Francisco air. Even so, seeing family was wonderful, and though the actual travel parts of the trip were a giant clusterfuck, seeing my bestie in Houston (twice!) when we got stuck there overnight (twice!) was nice, too.

And that brings me to today. I'm getting better; Sam's a little under the weather, apparently having caught my crud. We're taking the New Year's weekend to get feeling better, then having a midwife appointment on Monday morning. That's one thing I left out above; we found a wonderful midwife that we absolutely adore. Our baby is due in early to mid-March, and we're trying for a home birth; all signs currently point to a healthy, low-risk pregnancy, and we're hopeful that will continue so we can birth as planned.

What's had my attention in 2010?

For reasons that are probably obvious, pregnancy and birth stuff have held a lot of my attention. Pop culture has a ridiculously narrow (and traumatic!) view of what pregnancy and birth are all about, and exploring the alternatives in a sane, methodical way has been enriching and eye-opening.

Also for reasons that are probably obvious, fat acceptance has held my attention consistently throughout the year. Actually, this might seem a little odd, as I've lost a signficant amount of weight this year, even while pregnant. But I don't think you have to be fat to respect people who are, and to believe people ought to be treated well regardless of their size or shape. I've always been an in-betweenie; some people tell me I'm not fat enough to be called fat, and I haven't suffered some of the stigma that bigger friends unfortunately have. On the other hand, I still can't shop at a "normal" store for clothes, and I'm bombarded with the same pop culture messages every day: my body is anywhere from unacceptable to simply less than ideal. I'm sure I'll have more to say on this in the new year.

As the sort of unifying umbrella over birth stuff and fat acceptance has been a deep plunge into feminism. I've been particularly interested in body autonomy, and how it is expressed and supported in the feminist community. There's a huge dose of "none of your business" that serves as a foundation for these other interests: the way I wish to give birth is none of your business, the way (and amount, and with whom) I have sex is none of your business, the shape of my body is none of your business, what I eat is none of your business. My body is mine, what I do with it is mine, and I have a right to make choices and boundaries for it. Which, of course, meant that when the TSA rolled around and decided they'd start putting hands in places I have quite firmly decided they are not welcome, I paid attention. I got righteously pissed.

Also of interest, but nothing I can summarize quickly here: the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell; Wikileaks. I'll almost certainly have more to say on those topics.

Anything you really loved?

Sara Bareilles. April Smith and the Great Picture Show.

My Kindle (oh my gosh, I've actually read some whole books). Anathem (affiliate link), by Neal Stephenson. Knitpicks.

Oh, and San Francisco, duh.

Any resolutions?

I don't remember if I made others, but a couple days after January 1st, I decided I'd stop eating fast food. This was fairly absolute in that I didn't give myself any kind of cooling off period; I just said no more. On the other hand, on a few occasions throughout the year when I was craving something specific - an Arby's sandwich here, a Taco Bell taco there, In-N-Out Burger twice - I indulged without feeling any particular guilt about it. The first three months or so, that didn't happen at all. What's interesting is that after a few months away from fast food, I found that my cravings weren't cravings for the actual fast food, but my memory of it. A few bites of that sandwich I thought I wanted informed me otherwise. Even more interesting was the direct and immediate correlation between eating fast food and really obnoxious gastrointestinal distress. It became completely unappealing to even do once in awhile. I'd estimate I ate fast food about half a dozen times in 2010, and I have no desire to do so at all anymore.

A happy side-effect: once I moved to San Francisco, my food choices extended to Sam, and he's been pretty much fast food free, too. We're both happier for it.

Plus, living in San Francisco has meant all kinds of access to abundant, cheap, fresh, high-quality produce. We've gone semi-vegetarian at home, with all sorts of benefits.

For 2011 - Plans?

I plan to give birth sometime in early to mid-March, give or take a couple weeks. That's my really big plan for 2011: be a mom. It's very likely that we will move at some point during the year, if for no other reason than the likelihood that we'll need more space; our apartment here up on the hill is great for the two of us, but it'll be a little tight as the kiddo grows.

These next few months are going to be a lot about getting ready for the baby - a trip to Ikea and eagle eyes on Craigslist. We're more than a little alarmed at the commercial racket having a kid has become, and we've made a commitment both to not overbuy gadgets and things we don't need, and to source hand-me-downs where possible and appropriate.

I'm also at the stage where I'm sort of obsessing over knitting tiny baby things. I need to get cracking on that.

2011 Resolutions?

I'm going to call these areas of focus, instead of resolutions. We have enough change coming in our lives that I don't think it's a good idea to force anything through the pipe at the moment.

1. Write and publish more. This means blogging - I feel like I have things to say that have gone neglected this past year, for a variety of reasons. It also means, if possible, finishing and editing some of my stories for publication.
2. Eat more home-cooked meals. I totally have an excuse at the moment to order in often, but I'd like to use that excuse less often. I enjoy cooking, and the more I do it, the more I remember that. Eating out adds up - both in money spent and food wasted.
3. Finances. I want to re-develop our budget, as many of the assumptions we made developing the way we do things now no longer apply.

That's it! Pursuant #1 there, I hope to be back and blogging tomorrow, too.

Happy New Year!

I've been reading a handful of personal finance blogs for the last six months or so and seeing the same advice over and over - clip the damned coupons. In particular, The Simple Dollar (favorite grocery/coupon posts: 1 2 3) and Get Rich Slowly (favorite grocery/coupon posts: 1 2) hit the grocery strategies with some frequency. I decided to pick up the Sunday paper today and find out if the coupons inside would actually save someone like me any money. There are a few factors I considered in this exercise:

I'm in New England, again! This visit has been too short, largely because I've slept through so much of it; I had to have unexpected surgery last week to remove my gall bladder, which was apparently the source of many of the stupid-headed ailments I couldn't shake. Here's looking to better health. Anyhow, I've been hopped up on the narcolepsy-inducing wonder-drug Vicodin for a good deal of my trip. I have, however, managed to do some cooking, which is a favorite activity to do when I'm out here. Particularly cooking with fish. It's so jealousy-inducing fresh! Bliss.

So, Will and I visited the grocery store Wednesday evening in search of good food to welcome me to New England for my second visit. Also, because of the aforementioned surgery, I'm on a (lower sodium) diet that's not terribly compatible with a good deal of his pantry. On our trip, we purchased:

• leeks


• asparagus


• white wine (Sauvignon Blanc - cheap stuff)


• red potatoes


• olive oil & black pepper triscuits


• lots and lots of jello


• a bar of dark chocolate (Chocolove Extra Strong Dark 77%)

We also stopped by the seafood counter to ask for fish heads, hoping to find a good bunch to make fish stock. They had none. "Have anything you want to get rid of soon?" I asked.

"Well, if we keep it between you and me..." said the man manning the stand. And so we wound up with four nice looking salmon steaks that were just going to be thrown away about an hour and a half later, for a total of under ten bucks (about half price). Win.

Salmon is not traditionally a choice for making fish stock. It's too fatty. But you know what I say to that? POOEY. I for one am willing to try (and fail) once.

Using four perfectly good salmon steaks just to make fish stock seemed like kind of a waste, or as we say where I'm from, a freaking travesty. So after the stock was suitably stocky, we decided that there would be a salmon salad made afterwards. That's how we roll.

Without further todo:

Leek & Potato Soup with Salmon Stock

Ingredients

• Four salmon steaks


• One bottle cheap Sauvignon Blanc (or other relatively dry white wine)


• Four large red potatoes, cubed to about 1 inch


• Four large leeks, thin-sliced, dark green parts discarded


• About 8 oz portabella mushrooms, finely diced


• 10-12 leaves fresh lemon basil


• extra virgin olive oil


• sea salt


• black pepper

Instructions

1. Heat some extra virgin olive oil (to cover pan bottom) in a large saute pan over medium heat. Bruise lemon basil by rubbing it between clean hands (or however you like to do it); toss in the pan. Stir in with the olive oil to flavor the oil well. Cook until leaves are a little brown but not crispy.


2. Put salmon steaks directly into lemon basil olive oil. Pan will be crowded. Don't worry about it. Let the steaks brown very slightly on one side (about a minute). Turn, allow to brown for a minute, then add a quarter bottle of the wine.


3. Turn down the heat and allow the salmon to gently cook through. This takes a little bit, about 15 minutes.


4. Transfer everything in the pan to a stock pot. Add the rest of the bottle of wine. Crush fish a bit without completely destroying it to release some flavor. Allow to cook another 15-20 minutes.


5. Strain fish stock off using a fine mesh strainer, reserving the fish and other solids. If you don't have one of those, a collander lined with cheesecloth works. In case of utter stock-making fail (i.e., no fine mesh strainer and no cheesecloth), paper towels work for lining the collander, but will absorb some of your fish stock and will also pass the stock very slowly.


6. Back in the stock pot, put the fish stock along with an equal part water, your potatoes, leeks, and portabella mushrooms; allow to cook for an hour on low heat, long enough for potatoes to become tender. (Posterity note that is absolutely not advised: This is the point at which we also added milk. I like milk in my leek/potato soups; it matches well with the mild onion flavors and such. What I had failed to remember is that we had started this culinary adventure with wine, which is acidic enough to (upon addition of heat) make young cheese out of milk. Our milk started foaming after about 30 minutes, and by the time we got the heat turned down, we had a lot of cottage cheese in our pot. I think this soup might well have been very good with paneer in it, but cooking it this way also left all of the whey in our broth, and the cheese was not compact and well-made. We skimmed off and discarded as much as we could.)


7. Season with sea salt and black pepper to taste. Serve with crusty bread - regular old Italian works great.

Sweet Salmon Salad

Ingredients

• Salmon steaks left over from leek & potato soup


• Two medium apples, finely diced


• One heart of celery, thin-sliced


• 1 tbsp nutmeg


• 1 tbsp cinnamon


• mayonnaise to prefered texture

Instructions

1. The salmon steaks, after pulled out of their bath of extra virgin olive oil, lemon basil, and white wine, were still delicious-smelling and ready to be used in another recipe, but somewhat unfortunately still full of bones. We washed our hands well and manually deboned the entire mass of salmon. A number of the bones were soft enough that simply amounted to extra calcium, but some were still firm and pokey, so this step was necessary.


2. Mix apples, celery, nutmeg, cinnamon, and a half cup or so of mayonnaise in with the salmon. You will probably need more mayonnaise to acheive a lumpable salad, but mixing in a half cup at first is more manageable.


3. Serve, either on bread or on crackers. We had ours on Olive Oil & Black Pepper Triscuits, which was optimal - the sweet flavors from the apples and celery played very, very nicely with the savory flavors from the cracker. The salmon flavor was present and well-represented without being overpowering.

Having shared both dishes with self-proclaimed foodies, I can confidently say they were good and it's not just me liking my own cooking. Recipes approved for general release.

P.S. Go Sox!

I currently have the best job I've ever had in my life, as a teaching assistant in the physics department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Twice a week, I give a lecture on basic Newtonian physics (classical mechanics, mostly, plus a smattering of thermodynamics) that runs somewhere between 25 and 40 minutes. Following that, I assist anywhere between one and two dozen students through experiments using the material from my lecture. Each student turns in a writeup on the lab experiment a week later, which I then grade and hand back a week after that.

I love my job. I really do! I love teaching, I love helping students, and I love physics at the level I teach. The money's not bad at all, either.

But I've also been in a lot of jobs that weren't so great. I spent years in corporate America, where being five minutes later could mean a thirty minute lecture, or not making someone ultimately happy could mean your ass. That sort of experience fosters a sort of unhealthy paranoia and fear that can seriously eat you up. I very highly doubt that corporate life will ever be a direction I pursue again.

As an instructive example, a little more than two weeks ago, I overslept my Saturday morning class. I was supposed to be there at 8 o'clock in the morning. At 8:25 a.m., I got a phone call.

Me, bleary: ...hello?
Student: Uh, where are you? Everybody left.
Me, coming to: ...oh, crap!
Student: What should I do? It's just me and one other kid here.
Me: Uh. Ok, just - you and one other student? Alright. Go home, we'll make up the material next week.

I hung up the phone and proceeded to FREAK OUT HARDCORE, as those who were online (or in the address book in my phone and under suspicion of having some sort of applicable wisdom) can tell you. I immediately emailed my boss, and proceeded to bite my nails waiting for repercussions that never came. I never heard back from him about it.

Fast-forward to today. I'm talking with the department secretary about an email I sent her. "I haven't gotten anything from you," she tells me. My freakout starts all over again. What if, I hypothesize (as scientists are so good at), my boss never received my email explaining and apologizing for my absence and seeking guidance? If I go and talk to him and he didn't receive it, I look irresponsible and avoidant. If I don't go talk to him and he didn't receive it, he could find out about the debacle from someone else - ever more irresponsible and avoidant.

So I go talk to him, stomach in knots. "Boss," I say, inserting his actual name instead of the word, "I'm wondering if you got an email from me about two and a half weeks ago?"

He tells me he had, and he respon-- oh, wait, did he respond? He talked to the department head in case there were any students who complained or asked about it. The thrust of the advice - to teach the material even if there wasn't time for the experiment - was exactly how I'd been handling it. "I know how hard it is to wake up and realize you overslept," he said. "I'm not going to beat you up over it. I did appreciate hearing about it right away, though." I thanked him, and went on my way.

...and promptly started crying on the way back to my office. I really hadn't understood just how much stress I was carrying around simply not knowing everything was ok with this job-that-I-love.

Neurotic to my last.

(P.S. For those who may go :( at this entry, please note that I feel much better now.)

Real-Life Resume Blunders to Avoid: Your resumé is a professional document. Give it the proofreading and editing it deserves.

(And incidentally, if you're in the market for such proofreading and editing, I'm your girl. References and rates on request.)