Oh, No . . . Guadalajara Won't Do

Yesterday, I had a wonderful visit to one of the Random Non-profit’s sites in Philadelphia. There I was able to shadow one of the employees for a day, attend a meeting at the Philadelphia School District building where parent advocates were able to voice their concerns about some of the District’s policies, and otherwise learn what it’s like to actually work at one of the sites for a day. I got a lot from the trip that I hope to pass on to other employees here at the main office.

But do you know what the best part of the day was?

I got to ride the subway back and forth from 30th Street Station – and use an actual subway token!

You have no idea how exciting that was – I hadn’t ridden the subway or used a token since the end of tenth grade. They have newer trains now, but it still seemed the same. I took both the bus and subway to school for 5 years and I very much missed that sense of autonomy that that 10-14 year old girl had in traveling the city all by herself. It took me a long time to get that feeling back – and in many ways I still don’t have it.

Last night on Justrose’s blog, I saw her mention something about helping plan her Doogie Howser High 20th reunion. (In case you didn’t know, Justrose and I were in the same class together from 5th grade through 10th grade.) I had to leave Doogie Howser right before 11th grade because my family moved to Virginia.

As you may know if you’ve been reading this blog for a long time, I hated moving down here and I hated going to a big suburban high school. I felt very out of place, and I didn’t make any really good friends or anything. On my graduation day, I cried buckets because everything felt so unfinished, I felt so lost.

So my 20th high school reunion is coming up next year. Mr. Random’s is also. Mr. Random actually wants to go back to California for his – he lived in the same house his whole childhood and knew the same bunch of folks the whole time. He’s dying to see what happened to a bunch of people. I will have to go with him, since he also wants to show that he has a cool wife and a decent life going on out here on the East Coast. I won’t know anyone, but I’m sure I’ll be entertained by the strangeness of it all . . .

I will not be attending my 20th reunion. Why should I? I was only at the school for 2 years, I didn’t make any real friends, I have no ties, nothing or no one is there that I would want to see or talk to. It just bring back a very painful time for me and I’d rather not . . .

The really sucky thing is that I won’t be able to go to Doogie Howser’s 20th reunion. Well, I mean, I was gone the last two years and everything, so I missed a ton. I would love to see everyone, but I doubt that most would remember me. I’d be very out of place. It’s very depressing – not being a part of anything . . .

I guess that’s why being back in Philly yesterday was so bittersweet: it’s my hometown and yet, not really anymore . . . it’s a part of me, but I’m not a part of it. What is really “home” anyway? . . .

Well, at least I can gladly claim that the DC/Northern Virginia area is my true home now. It’s where a wonky-geeky-dysfunctional chick like me could find friends, get married and make her way in the world and not feel TOO out of place. I just wish there was more of a connect to the girl I used to be and the woman that I am now . . .

Twice in One Day!

I'm going to Philadelphia on a business trip tomorrow - in and out all in one day, so sadly I can't try and hook up with any local folks that I would love to see - I won't even be able to stop at the ever amazing Reading Terminal Market and get some of that fabulous Amish egg nog that I adore.

The weekend is over and I'm still a bit of a funk. I have a TON to do this week - classes on Tuesday and Thursday, Choir practice Wednesday, Mr. Random's Grad school reception on Friday night. I feel a bit overwhelmed and not rested enough.

I have a major desire to go to a fancy dress party - you know one of those holiday parties where you wear a little black dress and there is a good, jazzy band and dancing and a cash bar. I'm getting tired of potlucks and jeans and sweaters. I want to get all dolled up and have that feeling of excitement and anticipation . . .

OK, so most of the time I always felt left out and like a wallflower when I was at those things, but the last few I went to I actually had a blast. The trick is to bring your own group of friends and not care about who else is there . . . for some reason you tend to meet more people that way, go figure . . .

I had a couple of friends over for dinner on Friday night - dinner didn't quite turn out they way I'd hoped, but the guys still seemed to really enjoy the food - especially the leftover cheesecake. The only troubling thing is that they left rather early - one friend declared that 10:15 was past his bedtime - and the rest of us were rather eager to go one playing our games. Mr. Random and I are still puzzling over that one, but I hope everything is OK . . .

The holiday season has started and I have not been able to order presents yet, which makes me very unhappy. The money has to go towards other, more important things at the moment. I am one of those people who LOVES buying presents for people and the funding problem is just killing me. I am hoping things aren't impossible to get in a few weeks, but I am afraid they will be . . .

Trying to keep my chin up . . . hopefully the week will get better!

Rearranging the Deck Chairs

. . . Actually, not really.

I supposedly made some modifications to the template, but as you can tell not much has changed. It's just more of a pain to add links in the order you want them in, and for my particular template you can't move things around too much.

I added some new links and took out some I didn't use very often.

I hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Over the River and Through the Woods

Hey! Supposedly this is de-lurking week in the Blogosphere, so if you’re a reader of my blog, do give a shout out and say hi. I don’t have counters or anything, so I have no idea how many people read this thing besides my faithful 4 or 5. I don’t do this for the traffic, as you can probably tell by my craptastic postings, but I do try . . .

I’ve been seeing a lot of folks posting some extremely wonderful looking recipes, and I’m thinking about giving a few a try. I am in awe of Mac at Pesky Apostrophe for keeping to the “Eat Local” sentiment as much as possible. If I lived close to the super-awesome Reading Terminal Market in Philly, I would just be in heaven! (The super horrid Eastern Market in DC just does NOT compare. If you have never visited The Reading Market, you MUST visit Philly and go, then go back to the Eastern Market and tell me what you think . . .)

Over the weekend, when I was planning my menus for this week, I put Brownie Mix on the shopping list for Mr. Random. Of course, when he came back from shopping I noticed no Brownie mix whatsoever. Hey! Mr. Random had decided that we could very well make the brownies from scratch at home, and offered to make them himself. He did so as a trial run last night, and might I say that they were just as tasty and moist – if not more – than the box kind. He said that it didn’t take any longer than using a mix, except for melting the butter. OK, we’ll see how it goes tomorrow . . .

I really do want to be the sort of person who buys wonderful fresh ingredients all of the time and makes wonderful tasty meals, but reality interferes and I get home and just want to crawl into bed with a cup of soup, if that. The holiday season is the time when my cooking muse comes out and I have the time and presence of mind to experiment and make lots of tasty treats . . .

I need to go shopping at Target this afternoon. Actually, it would be more convenient to go on the weekend, but I really don’t want to deal with the throngs of holiday shoppers that will be out. I’m probably going to do most of my shopping online – I already know what I want to get Mr. Random, it’s just a matter of pruning down the list. Now what I’m getting various family members is another story. That will take a bit of creative thinking to get nice things, but cheaply . . .

The novel is still dormant, but I hope to make progress over the weekend . . .

My ESL class is almost over and I am so, so happy about that. My students are getting fatigued and I am getting fatigued. They were a really good bunch this semester, they gelled together very quickly and helped each other out a great deal. Discussions got a lot smoother as the classes went on, and people were not afraid to try their hand at contributing their $.02 in English. Dealing with the autistic gentleman was challenging but I do think he got a lot out of the class. He needed a much more one on one interaction from me than I could give, and I do regret that. There was one student who was a bit of a pill towards the end, but as I said, there’s only two more classes left . . .

Question to anyone who is doing the Blogger Beta: Have you played around with moving stuff in the layout templates? Was it relatively simple? Did you have to start from scratch and then have to add back in all of your links? Inquiring minds want to know – I may work on the look of the blog if I have time. If I do go ahead and make changes, I’ll let you all know how it goes . . .

I haven’t had a poem in a while, and I don’t think I’ve put this one up here – even if so, I still like it . . .

What I Did to Time
By Kate Light

What I did to time was ball it up, and
throw it out, when I was unhappy,
years ago; chucked it, sprained my hand
wadding it tight, waiting for an end,
the end of a long season, haul
too long to tolerate, questions
I couldn't answer, changes I couldn't make, tall
orders hovering. Couldn't take suggestions
(stubborn pride); couldn't find solutions
(ignorance, fear); but I could hold my breath
and squeeze away a year—nuisance
years fell into faints and met their death.
Now I'd give anything to have that plethora, that stack;
to feel its truth and call its slow pace back.

Until I post again . . .

Fever for the Flavor

What’s going on with me?

From Wednesday night on, I got a nasty cold, which was not helped by standing in the rain for two hours on Thursday at an event for the Random Non-Profit.

Why were we standing in the rain? No contingency plans! Why didn’t we cancel? Because people only want to see what they want to see when they want to see it.

When I got back to the office on Thursday, I closed my door and put my head on my desk until Mr. Random could come to take me home – I felt that bad.

Stayed in bed pretty much Thursday afternoon through Saturday evening. Watched lots of Food Network, since that is pretty innocuous and I didn’t feel like I missed anything if I fell asleep for an hour during a show. I had no concentration for anything else besides staring at the TV and sleeping.

Sunday I felt a little bit better, and started planning the menus of stuff I am making for Thanksgiving and for a get together the day afterwards. For Thursday, I am taking to my parents’ house:

Green Bean Casserole (because it’s not a holiday without it . . .)

Green Onion-Cheese Popovers

Sweet Potato Cheesecake

For Friday’s get together, I am going to try to make:

Ham

Cranberry Sauce

Roasted Sweet Potatoes

Green Beans

Asparagus

Autumn Succotash

Green Onion-Cheese Popovers

Double Fudge Brownies with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce

. . . I do hope it turns out well!

Wrote 1300 words for the novel. Now up to 3300 words. Unless there’s a miracle this weekend, I will probably only get 10,000 MAX – but that will be about 9000 more words than I have written before, so that’s progress.

I am so glad this is a short week! I really need some more rest. I hope everyone else is going to have a great holiday!

What are YOU having to eat this week?

Modern Art Field Trip

I went to see this fantastic exhibit at the Phillips Collection (http://www.phillipscollection.org/html/exhibits.html) with a friend of mine on Saturday. If you are in the DC area before the end of January, and you love modern art, I highly recommend that you go – both my friend and I were blown away by the works shown, and the exhibit really deserves as second (and even third!) viewing. Mr. Random is really eager to see it, so I am hoping we can go during the Christmas break when his class is over. It will probably be much more crowded then, but at least I will have seen it in relative peace and quiet first . . .

Much more information about the exhibit (and some really cool pictures) can be found here: (http://artgallery.yale.edu/socanon/)

As for NaNoWriMo, I’m still on 2000 words . . . but they are 2000 different words, which I think is progress! I didn’t like the way my story was going, or the way it started, or even the voice, so I just decided to start all over again. I still have a few weeks. All is need is a couple of weekends and a lot of caffeine, and I should be good to go. I’m also going to try to actually donate a little bit to the program – an event like this definitely needs to be supported . . .

I am starting to plan a menu for Thanksgiving. Well, not exactly for that day, but for the day after. Mr. Random and I always go to my parents’ house for dinner on Thanksgiving, so they day after we try to do a dinner at home and invite some friends over to play games – kind of a de-stress day from the whole family thing . . .

I actually DO like to cook, especially when I have time to think things out and do it properly – however, I very rarely have time to do so, except around the holidays when I generally have more time off and more time to play in the kitchen . . .

You see, I have to be in a good mood and rather relaxed to feel like cooking, which is a state that only happens after a few days of being home and away from all sorts of work stressors. So weekends aren’t usually quite enough rest for that – long weekends usually are . . .

There was a recipe for homemade bread in last week’s New York Times’ Food section – Mark Bittman has this incredibly simple/no kneading required recipe that I am dying to try. The only catch is that the whole process takes 18-20 hours, to let the dough rise slowly – but the bread looks heavenly, and it seems that baking bread should be a full on weekend project anyway . . .

Today was a very stressful day at the Random Non-profit, and the week does not look much better. Both Mr. Random and I are deluged with work, with Mr. Random’s grad school homework added on top of it. Things are awfully tense both at the Random Non-profit and at the Random Household. I try to stay out of the way, while trying to be very encouraging, but sometimes it is hard. After being at work all day and talking about work things, I do want to come home and just be a cuddly veggie, but Mr. Random is always still working on some project for work or school. This is only temporary, I know . . . and I certainly have plenty to work on after hours, too . . . so no more complaining from me . . .

I guess I should add a few hundred more words to the “Novel” now . . . I hope everyone is doing well!

Slow Progress

I only have 2000 words written at this point, but I have a good excuse – I had to go to a conference all day Saturday and then was totally exhausted on Sunday – so much so that I never got out of my pajamas or exerted much energy beyond moving from the bed to the couch in the living room.

Also, I had to work on my homework for my online class – had been a bit behind, but I believe I am all caught up now. The last lesson was on theories of adult learning, and so I had to read about the four different theories and then analyze my own teaching style and state which theories I subscribe to, and how I apply those theories in the classroom . . . so that took a little while to do . . .

I am very glad that this semester is going to be over in a couple of weeks because I really need a break. I am also going to have to take a few more trips before the middle of December, and traveling seems to take a lot out of me. Maybe if it was more fun travel, I would not mind as much, but trying to be up and engaged all of the time can really wear a person out . . .

Anyway . . . I hope the rest of you had a restful weekend . . .

The Icon for This Year is Unveiled . . .

Here we go . . . now it's official . . . I HAVE to do this, since I have this shiny picture up here . . .

To Those About To Write, We Salute You

Ladies and gentlemen,

It’s that time of year again! National Novel Writing Month begins today.

The goal: write 50,000 words by the end of November.

Will I actually do it this year? Well, I’m definitely going to try. I do hope to do more than a couple of thousand words, that’s for sure . . .

To those of you who are actually writing your own books (Shout out to Theme Park Experience!), I honestly say I am in awe of your dedication . . .

I am having a bit of troubly uploading this year's icon onto the blog, but I'll try to get it up by the weekend.

Wish me luck!