Half of what I say is meaningless 20 December 2009

Almost a week since I posted??  Good grief.  I used to be so good at this.  Honestly I have been stinkin’ busy, so that’s not entirely a bad thing.  And my life will only get busier, what with my parents and my sister and her husband arriving on Wednesday.  It’ll be a full house over at Chez Bluesleepy!

The snow was scheduled to start falling about 4pm yesterday.  I guess Mother Nature enjoys a wee bit of procrastination, since the snow didn’t arrive till after 8:30.  But it arrived with a vengeance!  The snow was really coming down, and we had a good foot on the ground by the time we went to bed around midnight.  By this morning, we’d gotten an official 20″.

I am in heaven.

I really like snow.  I guess I am still enough of a kid to get excited to see it falling from the sky, to think about frolicking in it and throwing snowballs and making snowmen.  Even if all I do is stay inside and admire the beauty, that’s enough for me.  I don’t even mind shoveling it, though Kurt’s done it for me this time, because I look at it as just another chore that has to be done over and over again.  I mean, I have to mop the floor every other day all year ’round; I can handle shoveling a few times each winter.  This snow was easy to shovel, too — very light and fluffy and easily flung out of the way.

Maybe if I had to do it winter after winter after winter for all of my years, it would get to me more.  But there’s just a certain beauty to snow, a blurring of lines, a gentling of the scenery, a certain etherealness to it all.  There’s just no other way to achieve it, and it’s so fleeting as well.  How long does snow last?  I was a senior in college in Virginia one winter, and it began snowing on my way to class, even sticking a little bit.  But a couple hours later there was no trace of the snow, no sign to show it had snowed at all.  People who had been in class the whole time wouldn’t believe those of us who had seen the snow; they thought we were putting them on.

Sure, snow can be a right pain in the ass, but sometimes I think we just like to complain.  In the summer it’s too hot, in the winter it’s too cold and snowy.  Granted, I don’t live in an area where it’s snowy from September through May, nor do we get excessive amounts of snow, and I would probably want to shoot myself if I did.  But living in my nice, temperate climate, I will enjoy what I have for the fleeting time I have it.

Besides, we’ve already established I am NOT  a warm-weather fan.

Tonight I made the perfect dinner for such a cold, snowy, wintry day — Curried Chicken Pot Pie.  It’s absolutely divine!  My two favorites combined into one pot — I adore pot pie, and curry is just so delicious.  Plus I had most of the ingredients already on hand, which is a good thing when you consider the 20″ of snow that’s covering the ground.  The weathermen were insisting that the roads weren’t bad at all, since it didn’t ice over before it started to snow, but I was thinking that most parking lots wouldn’t be plowed.  And getting stuck in a parking lot isn’t my idea of a good time.  I’ll pass, thanks.

In the midst of making dinner, though, I stumbled upon an awesome little science experiment that catapulted me back to fifth grade.  We were living in Illinois at the time, and my teacher, who we called Mrs G., as she had a rather unwieldy last name, decided to do something fun.  She had us bring in empty peanut butter jars for this project, and of course I ended up bringing in the super ginormous Sam’s Club three-pound tub of peanut butter.  Gotta love bulk shopping when you’re a kid.  Anyhow, we measured out water, and we measured our cornstarch, and we mixed the two things in our jars.  And voila!  We had a non-Newtonian fluid.  In the case of cornstarch and water, when you apply a great deal of force, like banging it with a spoon, it acts like a solid. But treat it gently, by resting your spoon on the surface, and your spoon will gently sink into the liquid.  Today I accidentally recreated that fluid by mixing together two tablespoons of cornstarch with one tablespoon of water.  I couldn’t stop playing with it either!  It was just as I remembered it.  That experiment has stuck with me so vividly, to the point where I remember telling Kurt all about it a while ago, long before I recreated it tonight.

So for all of you teachers that despair that we students remember anything, know this — WE DO.  I loved Mrs G., I really did.  She was the teacher that would have a container of peanuts on her desk, and when it was time to practice our mental math, or to answer questions on what we’d just read, she would lob peanuts at us as rewards.  (Of course, you couldn’t do that now, not with the incidence of peanut allergies.)  She treated all of her students with dignity and respect, but never once lost control of her classroom.  She was so gentle with me too, back when I had so many issues of all kinds, and never once made me feel embarrassed or unworthy.  She was a fantastic teacher.  I should really ask to see what ever happened to her.

And on that note, I leave with you my last photo of the day — sunset from my backyard, with the Pell Bridge silhouetted against the sunset:

It’s a matter of instinct 14 December 2009

I’m pleased to report that I am feeling much, much better today.  I managed to get up at a decent time, get myself and the kids dressed and fed, and we headed off in the late afternoon to go to Grace’s swim lessons.  I absolutely love Monday swim lessons because there’s a mother there that I just click with, and we sit and talk and laugh the entire time.  She’s originally from Spain, and every time I hang out with her, my Spanish comes flooding back.  I’ll speak a bit of Spanish to her younger daughter and then turn to ME and expect her to understand me.  Oops.  I told my friend I wish we could move in with her family because I think it would be freakin’ awesome if my kids spoke fluent Spanish the way her kids do.

But you know, maybe there is another way for my kids to learn a foreign language.  Kurt’s been able to call for orders to see where we can go in the fall, and one of the options is — Japan!  I think it would be really amazing if we could go.  I grew up a Navy brat, but I never did make it overseas.  We were supposed to go at one point, but it was right when we were trying to adopt my brother and it would have messed up the adoption proceedings.  So we stayed in the Midwest, which was foreign enough for my dad’s East Coast tastes, until we made it back to Virginia.  Thus far, Kurt and I have lived in southern Virginia, Washington state, and Rhode Island.  I have a bit of a feeling of desperation to this because Kurt already has seventeen years in the Navy.  This could be our last shot at overseas.  I don’t know if Japan would be my first choice, only because it’s so far away and because of the language difference.  But Japan!  How do you turn that down?

I only wish the kids were a wee bit bigger so they’d remember more.  I know Grace probably would, as she’d be nearly six by the time we left, but ME would just have hazy memories.  Better that than nothing, though.

In other news, I have managed to wound myself yet again.  Maybe I should give up cooking!  It’s hazardous to myself.  After the bulgogi incident on Thursday, where I sliced open my left ringer finger, I tried to be as cautious as possible when slicing some onions for dinner tonight.  In fact, I looked at the mandoline as I was using it and said, “Self, you really need to be careful before you slice open your finger.”  Seconds later, a chunk of my right thumb was missing, and my finger would not stop bleeding.  Not good!!  When Kurt came home, he found me pressing a paper towel to my thumb to try to stanch the bleeding.  He rolled his eyes at me and said, “You know I told you not to use that mandoline!”

See, I know you’re supposed to use that guard thing with the mandoline so you don’t slice yourself open.  But if you do, you lose so much of the vegetable you’re trying to slice!  And I never did get the hang of it.  Maybe I need to try again… or at least get myself one of those cut gloves that chefs use in the kitchen to prevent this kind of injury.  It’s getting quite annoying to hurt myself time after time after time when I’m just trying to get dinner on the table!

Fortunately Kurt really stepped up and helped me out.  I already had the chicken in to brown, but I still had to soften the onions with the garlic, slice the potatoes and the carrots to roast once the chicken came out, and to get the chicken in the pot to braise with some red wine and red wine vinegar until it was cooked through.  He sliced all the veggies while I softened the onions, and then helped me to get the dinner on the table in general.  He did tell me that I didn’t have to slice my finger open for him to help; I just had to ask!

Haha.  I know that.  He usually acts as my sous chef, if Gracie hasn’t taken over first.

Dinner turned out deliciously, though, so Bittman’s Tarragon Braised Chicken definitely stays on our list of delicious yet easy meals — and it’s an amazingly fast way to cook a whole chicken.  The only downside is the skin  doesn’t get as crispy as I would prefer.  I can live with it, though, because it’s so delicious in every other way.

Tomorrow’s meal is meatloaf with mashed potatoes.  Alas, my friends are moving this week to head to Colorado, which makes me super, super sad.  I just got to know the mom well in the last month or two, and now she’s moving all the way across the country.  I offered to help them out by cooking them dinner so they don’t have to go out, or eat in an empty house off paper plates.  Plus her husband loves meatloaf, apparently, and it’s just something she normally doesn’t make.  I found an awesome recipe my cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen that got rave reviews from my family a few weeks ago, and meatloaf is one of Kurt’s favorite meals to boot.  I can’t help but be amused because he’s normally not a fan of red meat.  But meatloaf is something he love love loves.

I need to get some latex gloves so I can mix the meat, though.  It wouldn’t do to get raw meat onto my sliced open finger.  Dying of E. coli isn’t on my list of things to accomplish in my life, that’s for sure.

Of couch time and football 13 December 2009

I feel like crap today. In fact, it is 3pm and I am still in my jammies. If that weren’t bad enough, I am laying on the couch composing this post on my iPod because I just cannot handle being too upright at the moment. I am snuggled up under Kurt’s old quilt with football on the tv, and I conned Kurt into going to Walmart for me to pick up some more stuff for Christmas. Now I have my photos to insert into my Christmas cards, and Grace and I were able to bake some salt-dough ornaments as gifts for the grandparents. Later tonight we will paint them, but I’ll have to rest up for that first. Fortunately Kurt has offered to make dinner, and I am mostly caught up on housework.

The party on Friday went quite well!! It was so grand hanging out with my friends from college. It has been eight gets since I’ve seen everyone, but it was just like old times. My salted brown butter Rice Krispy treats were a huge hit; my friends just could not stop eating them. I never did get around to making bread, but I did make Muddy Buddies (Chex cereal coated with chocolate and peanut butter and dusted with powdered sugar) and buffalo chicken dip. Sooooo good. We watched Zombieland — well, everyone else did. It’s a funny movie, but a bit too gory for me. I am a wuss when it comes to Hollywood gore. No horror movies for me!!!

I really wanted to spend more time up in Boston with my friends, but it was time to come home and act like a responsible adult once more. Kurt had agreed to meet his friends at the Christmas festival on the base, and the girls were so excited to see Santa. As soon as I drove up, it was time for us to head to the base.

It’s really starting to feel like Christmas over here. Grace made some incredibly cute decorations at the party last night, and she has been helping me wrap presents and get them under the tree. I love this time of year so much. I am not sure why, since it was rarely a happy time in our house when we were growing up. My dad has a lot of issues with his childhood, and the holidays were never a pleasant time for him as a result. And if Daddy ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. You’d think I’d hate the holidays too, but I love them. There is so much magic and hope in the air. It feels like anything is possible, if only we all believe.

Now if only the snow would start falling, my life would be complete.