Thursday, December 27, 2012

"New"

I made a big commitment today.

I cut the tags off my washcloths.

Yes, this is stupid, but somehow I didn't consider the washcloths I bought, that I use to wash my face, to be mine.  Mine enough to have the right to cut off the tags, at least.  But today as I was folding the laundry, the little tags sticking out of every single washcloth in the pile seemed to taunt me.  I have scissors.  I have power.  So I cut them off.

All of them.

This might be a symptom of a larger issue I have of sensing the age of soft goods.  I've had these washcloths for months, ever since I started doing the oil cleansing method and found it disturbing to scrub my face with Pixar characters (Wall-E, get deeper into my pores!).  And recently I've realized that clothes I consider "new" are three to four years old.  I looked at my Facebook photos and saw that I'm wearing the same three jackets in all of them. 

Part of my problem with clothes is that I've been following the advice to periodically go through your clothes and get rid of everything you haven't worn in a year - but I haven't been shopping to make up for it.  So I have one drawer of public-eligible shirts ("top drawer" shirts) and one drawer of jeans, a foot of closet space of work shirts, around a foot and a half of skirts I can't wear to work because I'd splash chemicals on my legs, and those three jackets. Three other drawers are yardwork and gym t-shirts ("lower drawer" shirts), pajamas, underwear, and socks.  The rest of my minimal closet space is slacks I only wear at conferences and sweatshirts.

I've tried.  In the past few weeks I've gone to my normal stores (Target, JC Penney, Sears, Kohls) both here and in the East Bay, and I've found a few things.  An embellished t-shirt (for the top drawer), a sweatshirt jacket (simply because it was fuzzy).  Ah dang it, is that it? Didn't I buy anything else?  No no, I bought two blouses at Target.  But I did figure out I purchase around 3% of what I try on.  Or, I have to try on around 33 items to find one I want to buy.  And that doesn't even account for everything I look at in the store before even selecting those 33 things to go into the dressing room with.

I made that one clerk at Target really sad.

I should get a button that says "I'm sorry I'm doing this but it wouldn't be necessary if your store used consistent sizing."


Thursday, December 6, 2012

Unromantic

The older I get, the less I believe romantic movies.

That isn't that much of a revelation.  Romantic movies tend to be pretty ridiculous. He travels through time for her!  They had been married the whole time and didn't know it!  Jennifer Lopez is Italian!  I've read articles warning women against romances because they set "unrealistic expectations".  But we're not idiots.  We're not stupid enough to expect any of the normal romance movie tropes:

  • Secret millionaire!  If he appears down on his luck, chances are he's really rich but is just hiding that to make sure a woman loves him "for him".  Or he's outwardly rich, and needs to be brought down to earth.  Sub-category, she's the rich one!  Her riches may or may not be secret.  Played to great effect in Overboard.
  • Love overcomes death AND the space-time-continuum!  Played with less effect in Lake House, among others.
  • Romance is extravagant gifts, whirlwind trips, and rose petals everywhere!

It's not the obvious ridiculousness like that that's bothering me more as time goes on.  It's other, subtler aspects of the movies that's getting to me.

One is that sex is the ultimate expression of love.  In many movies, it seems like the end of the story doesn't matter as long as the main couple got to have sex.  Case in point, Cold Mountain.  I hate that movie.  Jude Law spends the whole time going through horrible, horrible things to get back to Nicole Kidman who I think is supposed to be portraying a young, innocent preacher's daughter which makes the whole thing less believable from the start (she's nice but she's not 18 even with soft focus).  After meeting several colorful future Academy Award nominees on his way back, he finally finds Nicole Kidman, they have sex, and then he gets killed.  I'm serious.  That's a romantic movie?  We're supposed to be impressed they finally had sex?  What if it was different.  What if Jude Law was the same grizzled Civil War deserter, went through all the same difficulties, then finally, finally found a prostitute who would take Confederacy money and he gets his jollies with her before continuing on his way?  Would that be romantic?  Or is it just because Nicole Kidman's character is clean as the wind-driven snow that it's romantic?  Also, Titanic.  How do we know Kate and Jack loved each other?  Because they had sex.  Otherwise it would have just been two people who enjoyed each other's company and one happened to die when the ship sank.  Sad, but not romantic.  It's romantic because they had sex before they croaked?  Awesome.

Another is that it's romantic when men persist in pursuing a woman long past when she has turned him down.  The woman will turn him down, turn him down, turn him down, change her mind, and him coming back the fourth time is what's romantic?  What would be romantic would be if he got some self-esteem and found someone that was less of an indecisive witch.  This cliche is perhaps more worrying because it encourages men to keep going after unattainable women in the hope they'll cave eventually.  It's not romantic.  It's stalking.

I think the real appeal of romantic movies to women is much simpler.  What I like in romantic movies is a very simple formula.

1. Man pursues woman.
2. They fall in love.
3. They get married.
4.  They live happily ever after.

And I'll sit through time traveling, extravagant gift-giving, and Jennifer Lopez to get it.



Thursday, October 4, 2012

The Transformation

The kitchen transformation is complete!

Before:


After:



I put up shelves as well:




It's so much better than before. What the pictures don't adequately convey is how gross the cabinets were before.  The yellow paint was thick, soft, and chipped, and all the cabinets were coated in sticky grease.  Parts of the interior weren't painted, even though they had to be original to the house, which is 65 years old.

Next project: the overly dolphin-ed bathroom.


Friday, August 31, 2012

Nutrition

I was standing in Trader Joe's, frozen in indecision in front of the breakfast breads, when I realized that I have an ever-increasingly complicated approach to nutrition.

The debate at hand was whether to buy bagels.  I love bagels.  Bagels led me to relax my stringent distaste for white condiments and to actually try cream cheese.  I just requested (and received) a bagel-enabled toaster for my birthday.

But in my nutrition scale, bagels have no point.

Literally, no points.  To me, bagels have no nutritional value.  No whole grains, no protein, nothing but deliciousness.  So I ended up getting the Trader Joe's "Force Primeval Bars" which have whole grains, apples, raisins, and walnuts.  They achieved a similar goal as the bagels (I wanted to try out my new toaster), but without the attendant guilt of eating something "pointless."

Over time I'm realizing I have some useful and some very odd ideas underpinning my ideas of nutrition.  They include:

  • Whole grains, super-fruits, and fish are very good for you
  • Sugar, butter, spices, onions, tomatoes, and salt are flavorings, not food
  • Chicken is better for you than red meat
  • Cheese and cream are bad for you
  • If I like it, I get less "points" for eating it.
  • If I don't like it, I get more "points" for eating it

Based on that, some foods get lots of positive points for getting very good press, and because I hate them.

+ +
Whole wheat
Brown rice
Fish
Leafy greens like spinach and kale

And some foods get lots of points because they're legitimately healthy.

+ +
Cranberries, pomegranates, blueberries
Beans

Some I view as only kind of good for you because they might be legitimately healthy but I like them, which downgrades their "worth".

+
Whole grain oats
Green beans
Cabbage
Broccoli
Strawberries

And some I think are only kind of good for you because they're not known for being super-foods but they're not bad for you either.

+
Chicken breasts
Apples, grapes, oranges
Eggs (for protein, since I don't have a cholesterol problem)
Skim or 1% milk
All other vegetables

Then some stuff is bad for you, mostly for having high fat.

-
Butter as a main ingredient
Soft or melting cheeses, like Cheddar and Jack
Cream
Sour cream
Deep frying
Coffee creamer and CoolWhip (for being made of plastic)
Bacon


Things that don't fall in any of those categories don't have positive or negative points.  Some have no points because I'm not sure whether they're good for you or not.

0
Red meat (conflicting positive value on protein, negative values on fat and cholesterol)
White flour (empty calories)
White rice (empty calories)
Olive oil (conflicting good press and fat)
Coffee (conflicting caffeine and antioxidants)

And some don't have any points because, for reasons my conscious mind can't discern, I count them as flavorings, not food.

0
Butter for a saute
Parmesan, Romano, and Grano Padano cheeses
Onions (probably legitimately healthy, but it doesn't count)
Tomatoes (ditto)
Cream of mushroom soup
Sugar

With that basis, my mind, mostly unconsciously, computes the total value of a meal.  Tonight, I had two hard-boiled eggs, whole wheat spaghetti with pesto, and corn on the cob.  Lots of points.  All positive.  No negative.  Mental pat on the back.  But what about the Cincinnati chili I like?  That's a ground beef chili (0) over white spaghetti (0) with beans (+), onions (0), and Cheddar (-).  Not healthy.  But the pasta primavera I make?  That also uses white pasta (0), plus cream (-), but has mushrooms (+), green beans (+), zucchini (+), and peas (+).  Definitely healthy. 

 Dessert doesn't have a system.  Dessert is supposed to be delicious.

That is its only point.



Saturday, August 18, 2012

Kitchen Colors

After seven weeks I finished the cabinets.

My friend Cindy came over for dinner and helped me hang the last of the doors - specifically the ones that were too heavy for me to hold in place and screw in at the same time.


After that I thought I would take a break before deciding on a color for the walls.

Yeah, that lasted two days.  I ended up getting samples from Lowe's and Home Depot, depending which I was nearest at the time.  One fun discovery was that both stores can look up and give you colors from other places.  I had brought in a paint chip from Sherwin Williams, after I found out Sherwin Williams paint runs $70 a gallon and yeah, that's not gonna happen.  I handed it to the girl at the Lowe's paint counter and asked her to color match it, assuming she would hold it up to the little color scanner like they do with stuffed toys in the commercials or with a chip of paint from the outside of my house when I had to do some touchups on the front.

After perusing doorknobs and shelf brackets because owning a home has made me a boring, stereotypical Saturday morning DIYer as cloyingly portrayed in sunlit HGTV clips, I went back to the paint counter.  The girl was examining the paint dot on the top of the sample.  "This looks like it," she said.  "I found it on the computer." At my puzzled look she said, "Oh, we can look up other company's colors." "Really?" I said.  "I thought I was cheating but apparently it's legit!" 

So I used that to my advantage and got two more expensive brand colors in big box brand paint.






Current frontrunner is Benjamin Moore's Everlasting (1038).  Funny, because it was the first one I picked before getting distracted by Sherwin Williams "Interactive Cream".  Interactive Cream was too dark, and orangey, so I also tested Sherwin Williams Biscuit.  That was too close to flesh tone, and once I realized it reminded me of the color of what's stuck under your fingernail when you scratch a lot it was never going to happen.  I also think the Behr sample was closer to paint chip than the Valspar samples, so maybe Home Depot's color matching works better or Valspar's new oval sample cans don't mix as well.  I could see streaks of white or green unmixed in the Valspar samples, so those colors might not be exactly true.

Now that this is my kitchen wall I'm kind of committed.  Maybe that's something I can do over Labor Day.  Compared to painting the kitchen cabinet it will be ludicrously easy!

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Expectations

I remember library card catalogs.  I know that's one of the things the next generation will have no concept of, like payphones or the US having a thriving economy.  I'm definitely not one of those kids who always had the Internet at their fingertips, who never had to figure out the Dewey Decimal System to find the right section in the library to find the right book to find out what koalas eat for their fifth grade report.

And yet, I find myself still expecting to be able to find through Google every single thing possibly worth knowing.  And normally, Google has not let me down.  Though it took a few months, and extensive rephrasing, I did end up finding that painting my college roommate (Karen, actually) described as "dead people on a raft."  Google has obviously refined their algorithm since then because the Wikipedia article for "Raft of the Medusa" is now the first listing.

But what Google is now not able to serve up for my intellectual delectation is pictures of every paint color I might conceivably want to paint a room in my house.  Yesterday I thought I might be interested in Sherwin Williams' "Bagel 6114" for the kitchen walls, but the majority of the photos I found on Google were "a similar  color would be Sherwin Williams' Bagel 6114".  Well, yeah, sure.  Even harder to find where pictures of Benjamin Moore's Mohave Desert, since those photos were of the actual Mohave Desert.

So to perhaps keep others from hitting the same dead ends, I wanted to contribute my small part to the Internet's paint color collection.


The dining room is Tinsel Beam by Valspar, eggshell finish.


The living room is Bay Waves by Valspar, satin finish.  It is a very good honest gray, not too dark or too light.


Visitors often ask if the rooms are blue or gray and I have to explain that one is blue and one is gray.  Here are Tinsel Beam and Bay Waves side by side:


The kitchen cabinets are in Mascarpone by Benjamin Moore, satin finish in the Advance paint.  The pulls are Thomasville Grayson from Home Depot.


The Mascarpone is a creamy, slightly yellow white (like the cheese, I guess).  Here is the Mascarpone up against the whiter white of the trim.  I don't know the color of the trim because it is original to the house.


And against the white fridge:


This bedroom is Aqua Spray by Behr, adjusted to 75%, in satin.  The cabinet is Du Jour by Valspar, in high gloss.


Here is the 75% Aqua Spray in a different light.  I admit it is a bit more fluorescent than I wanted. 


This bedroom is Maple Cream from Valspar, in satin.  The trim here is Du Jour by Valspar as well. 


This bedroom is Desert Seedling by Valspar, in eggshell.


Sunday, July 15, 2012

Kitchen Conundrum

After Catherine and Karen left, I impulsively decided to start re-painting my kitchen.  For a refresher as to why:

Yeah.  My kitchen really was those colors.

I thought I could cut my teeth on a few drawers.  But painting a few drawers required a lot of equipment.  A sander.  Sandpaper.  Fancy, high-VOC primer (Zinsser BIN Shellac-Based Primer-Sealer, to be exact).  Wood putty.  So it ended up being less of an introduction and more of a head-first dive.

A long, slow, dive.

All the instructions I've found online say that painting cabinets isn't quick.  "Not a weekend project", they say.  Well, yeah.  As I sit here over three weeks later and am only maybe starting to see the end in sight.

See, the process sounds straightforward.  Clean, sand, prime, sand, paint, sand, paint, done.  Even with a day between each coat that's still just three painting days.

But cabinet doors have two sides.  So expand that to six.  And even after borrowing a portable table from my parents I only have space to lay out four cabinet doors at once.  And I have 16 doors.  So that's four sets of doors, six days each...My mind boggles.

But the product is looking good.  The drawer hardware arrived on Friday and I ran to take pictures of it on the only finished portion of the kitchen - two of those original drawers on the one section of frames I had finished.

I'm pleased!

But there's a long way to go.



Thursday, June 21, 2012

Catherine and Karen Visit California

This week, my friends Catherine and Karen came to visit.  It was great seeing them again.  I've come to realize there are in life a few people you can completely be yourself with, and Catherine and Karen are two of mine.

On their first full day I thought we should take advantage of the warm weather and visit Half Moon Bay.

Since it was Half Moon Bay it was in the 50s and Catherine and Karen froze but I think they had fun.






On the way back, we stopped at a glass art shop in the back of a winery and Karen did the demo to make a glass pumpkin.


























We tried to visit the tidepools at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve but it was too high a tide to see anything.  Since low tide was at 1 am that wasn't going to ever happen, so instead we climbed to the top of the bluff and took pictures of the interesting trees and scenery.

















The next day I took Catherine and Karen on a driving tour of SF.  It was mostly the 49 Mile Drive but we made detours to see the painted ladies at Alamo Square (aka "the Full House houses") and the Victorian on Broderick that was used for the Full House exteriors.


























We also walked up and down Lombard, which let us take lots of pictures and (the main point) meant I didn't have to drive down the curviest street in the world (or US, or city, or whatever Lombard is known for).







Near the end of the drive, we rounded the corner and I uttered a large understatement that  Catherine and Karen mocked for the rest of the trip: "Well, there's something."











Yes, turns out the Palace of Fine Arts really is something. With the palisades and the lake it was very beautiful.  I attribute my complete ignorance of its existence to locals' apathy.











Catherine and Karen tried to get a shot of Catherine holding one of the egg things.
















With moderate success.










The last thing we saw on the tour was the Sutros Bath ruins.  Here are Catherine and Karen looking out to the Pacific.












The next day we headed over the Golden Gate to see the Bay Model and Muir Woods.

We tried to take pictures at the northern side of the Golden Gate bridge but it was too windy.  My hair got remarkable mileage, though.








Muir Woods was calm and shady beneath the redwoods.  We walked on an easy trail and played "spot the hipster" and "guess the ethnicity of these children".

































On their last day we could have gone to Santa Cruz but instead decided to hang around home.  Mostly we lazed around, watched TV, and ate things, but we also went to Smart and Final because Catherine hadn't been to a restaurant supply store before, and went for a walk on the Bay Trail.  Because we're all engineers we detoured off the trail to see if a large structure across the street was the capture plant for the landfill's methane, but we couldn't tell.

What better way to end a trip than watching the sunset over the Bay?

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Oil for Your Oil

In the most counter-intuitive move in my lifetime skincare regimen, I've been smearing cooking oil on my face for a week and have the least acne in recent memory.

It was my sister's doing.  She suggested I try the oil cleansing method, which I guess she had read about when deviating from nail polish research.  I found the relevant websites, but couldn't find the relevant castor oil for the life of me.  Or for the special ordering of me -- if I couldn't find it at CVS or Walgreens it wasn't going to happen.  So I just used olive oil.  Instead of washing my face at night I just smeared my face with olive oil, briefly steamed my face in a hot towel, and then rubbed the oil off with the towel.  Then I rinsed and dried my face for good measure (having forgotten the Internet instructions at that point).

And it works!  At the moment I don't have any active zits and the redness on my chin has calmed down some.  I also think I'm not as greasy at the end of the day.  So overall I'm a fan.

Maybe if this works I can decrease some of the rest of my regimen, since right now I used the oil to replace my night cleanser but I still am using Retin-A at night, benzoyl peroxide soap in the morning, and apricot scrub a few times a week.

My friends Catherine and Karen from Georgia Tech are coming to visit this week, which will be Catherine's first visit out.  I've planned lots of things for us to do and also anticipate plenty of sit around and watch TV time, which we always enjoy.  Like my friends Bonnie and Allison from high school, no matter how long it's been we always have plenty to talk about.  They're people I can just talk with.


Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Accurate Prejudice

I have a system for finding the quickest checkout line at Target. 

It bears a lot of resemblance to my method for finding the quickest security line at the airport.  At the airport, the ideal line to get it is the one with the most English-speaking businessmen traveling alone.  At Target, there are rarely many recognizable businessmen, so my preference is for men over women, English-speaking over non-, young over old, and for heavens' sake, avoid children.  It might not be politically correct, but that doesn't mean I'm not right.

Today, most of the lines broke the English and children guidelines, so I got behind a middle-aged woman who had a very full cart which can sometimes be a bad sign but it was full of several bulky things like a bedding set and large watering can.

However, she was placing on the conveyer belt six (SIX!) bottles of diet cranberry pomegranate juice drink.

"Wow," I thought to myself.  "She seems like a high-maintenance witch."

That sounded ungenerous even inside my own head, so I hastily revised my opinion.  "Well, maybe she has a UTI."  Though buying diet and therefore diluted cranberry juice drink for that would be silly.  Having to revise my opinion to infected and stupid isn't much better than high maintenance.

But that inner dialogue didn't last long.  Because that woman ended up being the most high maintenance witch I've ever had the misfortune to be behind in line. 

First she wanted a price check on a toy lantern, then she had to decide whether she wanted it.  Then she wanted a price check on an opened and manhandled sheer curtain.  Then she decided she didn't want it.  Then she let the cashier scan a few more items, then decided she wanted the opened sheer curtain but didn't want the sheer curtain the cashier had already scanned. But at least she knew how to swipe a credit card, so after that her transaction cleared quickly.

However, she didn't know how to load the bags into her cart, so the cashier handed every single one of my 20-odd items to me over the counter, which I put into my own bags and loaded into my own cart while the woman blocked the exit.  She was frustrated that the Target carts did not have a lower shelf beneath the basket, and querulously asked the clerk twice why the cart lacked it.  Then she asked the clerk what she was supposed to do, since all her purchases wouldn't fit back in the cart.  Since clearly all her items had fit in the cart before she got in line I have no idea what she was thinking. 

The clerk was calmer and much more polite than I would have been, and suggested the woman get a second cart, and also asked if she wanted help out.  After refusing each offer once, the woman finally acquiesced to have someone help her out, and as I left the clerk was trying to flag down another Target employee for assistance.

Turns out my instincts about what six bottles of diet cranberry pomegranate juice drink means were spot-on.

Saturday, April 7, 2012

German Afflictions

Oddly, after the trip to Germany my weight is down and has stayed down for the week. While we've been joking about "meat poisoning" at the office since the trip it's more like "meat exhaustion". Since coming back I've been thinking "Ugh, something that used to have legs. Where are the vegetables?"

Unfortunately my eyes have also been itchy since I got back, which I finally remembered today could be a recurrence of my super-attractive occasional affliction of eyebrow dandruff. I can't see it, and the last time my eyes were super itchy the doctor couldn't see anything either, but exfoliating the heck out of them was the cure. I remembered at the time my grandfather mentioning he had eyebrow dandruff once, though his doctor recommended something complicated that involved baby oil and a toothbrush. Apricot scrub works better for me. Since I'm a girl and already exfoliate, I guess.

Today Nathan and I intended to put a vegetable garden in the back yard. While we had disagreed on the amount of soil amendments a vegetable garden would need it turned out to be moot. I had thought the area where the play set used to be would be a great place for a garden. Already walled off, ready to go. Just have to push back the redwood bark and pull back the liner underneath right? Well, the section nearest the house had concrete under the redwood bark, so we moved toward the fence. Concrete under that too. Okay, concrete under the whole play structure. That's weird. Oh well. I thought it would be fine to sacrifice the patch of grass west of the shed. But, strangest of all, there was concrete under the grass! Near as we can figure from Nathan pushing the shovel in the ground all over, most of the backyard and part of the front yard is over concrete!

I'm trying to imagine the sequence of building in the backyard but I just can't do it. I can understand putting a play structure over concrete (the presence of concrete also explains why the redwood chips are so deep). I can understand putting in the RV pad on the other side of the yard, since obviously they had an RV. But grass over concrete? The grass itself might make more sense too if there wasn't a shed smack in the middle of it. What came first - the grass or the shed?

Mysteries.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Meat Poisoning

Back from Germany and don't need to eat meat for a long time.

Before I went to Germany the first time I read descriptions of the cuisine as "hearty" and "homey", but there wasn't quite an adequate emphasis on how much pork would be involved. The last time I went I was on my own and eventually starting eating mostly Italian, but this trip was with a sizable contigent and we went to Bavarian restaurants almost every night, where meat was the name of the game.

I think I had pork three nights in a row. Schnitzel the first night. Pork medallions the second. Pork in a pepper cream sauce the third. The fourth night some of the men from my office had already left so the remaining three of us went to an Indian restaurant so the one vegetarian could eat something other than potato-based side dishes.

The meeting itself was successful, but I learned an important lesson about setting agendas: include breaks! The first day I made the mistake of sitting on the far side of the conference table, where it was impossible to get out without asking two other people to move. I have rarely regretted two cups of coffee more. If we had had the foresight to put on the agenda "10 to 10:15 - break" everything would have been much more enjoyable. For me. Maybe no one else cared.

Saturday morning my boss's boss and I stopped in downtown Munich on the way to the airport. I had seen it several times when I stayed there for a month last time, so I knew my way around pretty well. We went into three churches and climbed to the top of Peterskirche for the view. Here is the quintessential view of the Munich skyline with Frauenkirche on the left and the Neues Rathaus on the right.

Since I had a 7 am meeting the day we left, and an 8 am experiment commitment 36 hours after we got back I am slightly worn out. While I bounced to either time zone fine not having a good day to sleep in for a while is messing up my internal clock. Yesterday afternoon at work I could tell I wasn't perfectly coherent, so I stopped doing email and solely did data analysis, which is hard to mess up with the tools we have.

Also in Munich I saw pointy cabbages. Weird!

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Suspicious Reprieve

I had every indication that this weekend was going to be a busy one - full of working from home and answering round-the-clock emails.

Or rather, I had one indication, which was the email telling us that we would be answering round-the-clock emails because the project was so busy.

But when I got home on Friday, I checked my work email another time and saw the official notice from the IT department. The whole network was going out! Email, the way to log in the shared drives, everything. Every single way to connect to anything would be down starting right then for the whole weekend. And since I store all my files on the network, I couldn't do a single thing all weekend long.

Horrible irony or God's answer to an unasked prayer?

In any case, Monday is going to be very busy now. I have a 7:30 am videoconference with Germany and Switzerland (a recent assignment I think I was given because few other people will agree to a 7:30 am videoconference) and a 9:00 pm flight to Germany. And between those two I will have to fit all the work I am not doing this weekend. It's going to be one long workday. Especially because it's going to last 36 hours. Or something like that. The time change really confuses me.

I'm also pretty confused about the network outage. I've been at this job for almost five years now and there's never been a network outage, let alone one that lasts an entire weekend, let alone one that comes on with less than an hour warning. It's such a big deal I got not one, not two, not three, but four texts through the emergency notification system they have. There weren't that many for the gas pipeline explosion the town over or for the ammonia leak at the sausage factory that shut down the campus for a day. We also all have to reset our passwords before we can get back on the network on Monday.

I really want to hear the whole story.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Ocean Waves of Tedious Painting

The third bedroom did eventually get painted in 75% Aqua Spray, which wasn't too hard. Nathan and I did it in a weekend and it didn't seem to take too long. I'm pretty fast with a roller now.

The hard part was the scalloped shaped green trim, which needed three coats of white high gloss paint before it looked remotely okay. I'm still debating coat four.

Here's the room color before:



















And after:



















With a close-up of the trim:




















Imagine that trim around the entire room.

Three.

Separate.

Coats.

Removing the upholstery in the alcove was a big deal, but the trim might be even more annoying in the end. Luckily I don't have a use for that room so there's no hurry to finish. But it will be nice to have it painted. While painting it I realized how gross the walls were. Greasy in some places. Lots of dust and cobwebs others. Since buying the house I've learned about myself that I don't care if the dirt is still there if it's entombed in paint.

Work is sending me back to Germany next week so things at the office are getting crazy as the team of us gear up for the trip. Lots of data putting together, final experiments, trying to figure stuff out. One nice thing is since there's five of us going and we needed to be on the same flights and in the same hotel the department admin made all our travel arrangements for us. It was awesome! It makes me want to use a travel agent the next time (or rather, the first time) I plan a big trip. I hate having to pick out and buy flights, pick out and book hotels. I already bought fruit snacks to bring on the plane. I view fruit snacks as having no nutritional merit and will never buy them for myself unless I'm flying. A 12-hour flight to Europe merits a whole box of Gushers. I did learn from my trip in 2010 that they do actually feed you on international flights so I didn't need to pack half my carry-on with snacks.

Friday, March 2, 2012

Colorimetric Confusion

Choosing a paint color for the third bedroom has had me flummoxed.

Each previous room took two paint samples, or three at most, before I decided. This one is up to six. Maybe this was because for the original painting stint I had spent weeks pouring over paint chips and only had to decide between deeper and lighter shades, or that the first green for the bedroom wasn't so much "sage" as it was "vomit".

I was certain I wanted the third bedroom to be an ocean blue. I could see it in my head perfectly. On the paint chips? Not so much.

First try was Behr "Refreshing Pool" 50% lighter, since they weren't able to go halfway between Refreshing Pool and Glacier Bay, the next lighter on the chip.

It made me feel like I was living in an ice cave. No go. Needed a warmer color.















So tried Behr "Windwood Spring". Not "Woodwind Spring", like I keep typing.

Way too baby blue. Makes me feel like I'm a NC State Wolfpack fan. Not acceptable.

Unsure if I needed the colors to be more green to really be ocean blue, I tried "Sweet Rhapsody" and "Botanical Tint".

Too green. Too dark.

Next try, "Cool Jazz" and "Aqua Spray".












After all that I think "Aqua Spray" is the closest. But it still seemed too blue.

So I painted another swatch on the section of wall I primed today, to see it against white instead of the mint/hospital green of the rest of the walls.


















Now it looks pretty green! What gives? I like it though. That's a good teal. A good guest room teal. It can go with lots of funky color accents. Or something.

Until the color indecision hit I thought I would paint the room yesterday and today because I had taken these days off of work. Since I didn't pick a color that didn't happen. I also didn't totally prep the walls for paint, either, which I had meant to do instead. I did caulk the baseboards in preparation for paint, and primed the drywall patch Nathan and I put in. I also caulked the new water heater vents outside (which the realtor's handyman put in a while ago), and re-caulked the small bathroom's sink area which made it look tons better. It was kind of...black before.

I had my church group over last night and they were very complimentary about both the house and my poppy seed chicken casserole. It's probably the stick of butter that makes it really good. I should make other things out of the Crazy for Casseroles book since it falls open to the poppy seed chicken page.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Iron, Where Art Thou?

I'm pretty sure I'm anemic again.

It's a relatively simply equation. I was feeling tired, in a way sleep couldn't fix, which is the defining symptom for me. Plus I had little appetite despite having a bag of Doritos and six types of ice cream in the house (I'm not exactly certain how that happened). And I kind of stopped taking my iron pills two months ago because I felt fine and had already been taking them for four months and had almost, almost passed the blood tests at the two month mark.

But then Sunday I weighed myself and saw I was accidentally down three pounds from my normal weight which simply. Doesn't. Happen. I looked up the symptoms for iron deficiency anemia and confirmed lack of appetite is a classic manifestation.

Drat.

So now I'm taking my iron pills again, and debating whether I want to take the blood tests I'm due for right now, to prove I'm still anemic or wait until I've been taking the pills again so the results look better. I'm almost leaning toward the first because if my anemia was due to over-donating blood it should have resolved by now.

In other news, I think skunk season is over.

Since I moved into the house after Thanksgiving I have smelled skunk at least every other morning when I open the bathroom window after my shower. Once I woke up in the middle of the night because I smelled skunk, and found out it smelled the most right under the entrance to the attic, which weirded me out until I realized these windows probably don't let in the smell too well, so the attic is where it would come through. But for the past few morning I haven't smelled skunk! It does make your morning a little more pleasant to not have that smell.

What I don't get is why I smelled skunk so often here and never at my apartment, which is only 2.5 miles away. I did look up whether meth labs smelled like skunk, when I didn't believe there could really be that many skunks. But Google said no, plus I kept seeing skunk roadkill which I took as corroborating evidence.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Carnitas? Car-NO-tas!

Every fiber of my being is refusing to eat the carnitas I made in the slow cooker on Tuesday, so I'm trying to quell the loud, internal voice that's telling me not to waste food and actually throw it out.

The voice sounds like my mom.

I think the extreme aversion I get to leftovers when they're nearing their week of fridge time is actually my body trying to avoid food poisoning, so I've been trying to obey that more.

Today was busy. First church, then work for longer than I expected because a reactor was having trouble so I had to move it to a different control station and didn't want to leave until I knew it was doing okay. Yeah, reactors are like pets a lot of the time. Are they happy? Do they need to be fed? Have they pooped themselves to death?

Yesterday was busy too. Nathan took me to see the Bay Model up in Sausalito, which is how they used to figure out water patterns and stuff for the SF Bay before computers were invented. It was very nerdy and very awesome. While the cement topography is only painted blue for water and tan for land they have signs up for cities and I could identify certain coastal features, like the small jetty near my office and the old and new Benicia bridges. However, my lack of geography skillz meant most of my identifications were in the vein of "The Delta? I guess it is really big...I saw a dead cow there once!"

Then on the way back we visited both the Point Bonita lighthouse in the Marin Headlands and the Sutro Bath ruins in San Francisco, which wasn't the type of bathhouse I was thinking of but more of a swimming pool. The ruins were quite picturesque:




















They looked very ruined for only having burned down in 1966 but I guess that's what salt water can do.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Breaking Bread

I've been helping set up for Communion at church for about two years now, so I know breaking the crackers for Communion has a very specific progression.

I'll break the first matzoh sheet carefully, trying to get uniform squares of equal size. I'll carefully count each one, then estimate based on the number of sheets in a box if we have enough to cover the expected number we'll need.

This comes into play because despite the number of juice cups I'm expected to prepare, it's always one box of matzoh. Two hundred people? One box of matzoh. Four hundred people? One box of matzoh. I feel like it shouldn't work, but it does. So far.

The second sheet of matzoh I stop counting, but I keep trying to make it into squares. Halfway through the second sheet I realize, again, that matzoh doesn't break cleanly down the rows of fork marks.

Third sheet? Anything goes. Lots of triangles, long skinny cracker bits.

There are normally ten sheets in a box.

I'm on the second sheet now.

We'll see how it goes.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Chock Full O' Meat

Today I might have eaten the best meat of my life.

Of course, in the irony of the universe, it came in the most unexpected form - leftover meeting food.

I went to go heat up the lunch I had brought but I saw that trays were out on the leftovers table. The food was cold, but it was baked potato wedges and bacon-wrapped steaks so I decided to eat that over my soup. There was the usual salad, sliced fruit, and dessert tray, too, that always come with these lunches.

I should note here we simply don't get steaks in these lunch meeting lunches. I would say most often it's chicken breasts baked in some way, but they also run to mystery meat patties (which I actually quite like) and hot dogs (which I also enjoyed the one time we got them), with occasional forays into Indian curries and imitation crab lettuce wraps (which I don't like).

So, steak? Nuh uh. But these were freaking bacon-wrapped filet mignons. The Sharpie on the top of the tray cover said so.

And it was the tenderest, tastiest, most flavorful piece of meat I can remember eating. I thought I wouldn't be able to cut the meat with the plastic knife (based on previous experience) but I probably could have used a spoon. The flavor of the bacon and the mushroom sauce had permeated the entire piece of meat, and the bacon itself was crisp and not at all wibbly. And the flavor of the beef itself shone through like a champ.

See, I've had filet mignon before. I don't know how many times, but I've never been impressed. The texture struck me as slimy. There wasn't a lot of flavor. Until today I had actually settled on sirloin steak as my favorite (which is conveniently always the cheapest on a steakhouse menu).

So I wonder if this was a grade of beef I've never experience before. Grass-fed, or aged, or one of those other adjectives that has never before been attached to my food. It was unbelievable.

I have two theories on what happened. Either:

A) It was a mix-up and we got someone else's food by mistake. Or
B) The caterer somehow had leftover or excess excellent filet mignons she had to get rid of.

Based on the fact that "Bacon-Wrapped Filet Mignon" was written in four-inch letters on the lid of the tray, which the caterer would have seen when delivering the food, I think it must have been B. Also, the admin and I were talking about how good the meat was and she looked up the invoice to double check they only charged the regular amount.

Amazing, amazing meat.

The potato wedges were only okay.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Un-plugged, De-plugged, and Re-plugged

I am unplugged.

Today the electricians are at the house doing the first step toward re-wiring the whole thing: upgrading the service to 200 amps and installing a new circuit breaker panel. While I’m not sure I need 200 amps (my Google search was inconclusive), the panel had to happen because there wasn’t enough space in the existing panel to re-wire the interior rooms that need grounded outlets. All these things I’m learning. Also, the head electrician said installing a new panel would eliminate the fuse subpanel that the home inspector really didn’t like, so all in all it’s hitting several nails on the head all at once. So that’s worth not having electricity for a while (battery powered devices excluded, obviously).

Being without power today makes me realize how much time I spend watching TV and doodling around on the Internet, which is a little unflattering. So far (and the power’s only been off around four hours) I have written a thank you card to my grandmother for the Christmas money she gave me (“Thank you Grandma, I used it to buy a cordless drill and install lots of things around my house”), I read several pages of Harry Potter in Spanish and congratulated myself on remembering or deducing enough Spanish to understand it, I cut up a box full of memorabilia T-shirts as the first step of making them into one or more quilts, and I got halfway through a novel my sister left at my parents’ house to be donated which features a cantankerous cowboy who loves babies, like they all must do if you believe the romance genre has any basis in real life.

I’ve used my Christmas ice cream maker twice now and the ice cream is freaking delicious. I remember I made tortellini once by hand, which was excruciatingly tedious, and determined that the end result tasted just like store-bought except a little purer and cleaner so just buy the store stuff and put sauce on it and you’re even. But the ice cream, though it tastes like vanilla ice cream like you expect, is purer and cleaner in a delightful way. Enough that you don’t need chocolate sauce, which is a revelation. Normally I buy vanilla ice cream because I’m either A. putting it on something or B. putting something on it – never to eat on its own. The homemade ice cream is worth eating on its own. The little pamphlet that came with the machine has other interesting recipes to try, like coffee butter almond, chocolate mint, pumpkin pie, and raspberry gelato. I’d also like to look up a recipe for Thai Iced Tea Ice Cream because I think that would be delicious, and I finally found the Thai tea in Ranch 99 (segregated from the proper teas, past the coffee even, which explains why I never found it before).

Of course, this making my own ice cream will only likely recur when Costco sells heavy cream for $6 a half gallon. $4 a pint at Safeway is not going to cut it. Plus, I have about two gallons of ice cream in the freezer right now so those have to get worked down. What? I have priorities in life.

Out of curiosity, I wonder how much dust and crumbs has to get into a laptop keyboard before it stops working.

Obviously, blogging freestyle like this turns into the stream-of-consciousness writing my college roommate Catherine was the recipient of when I used to write her letters during down times in a summer internship. Beyond a lengthy diatribe on the audacity of Lifesavers to change the green colored candies from lime to watermelon and describing a (male) chemical engineering classmate as a Canadian ice princess I have no idea what they said, but Catherine said they entertained her whole family and that she would keep them, meaning I can never enter politics in case she unearths them.

This past week I’ve been experimenting with Asian noodle dishes (hence the Ranch 99 visit mentioned above). I was trying to re-create the chow mein I liked at the Zen restaurant I went to with my sister, so I bought dry chow mein noodles, fresh chow mein noodles, and then on a whim also got fresh ramen noodles and yakisoba. The fresh ramen I wouldn’t get again because while the broth was tasty and the noodles had a good texture the noodles didn’t have any flavor themselves, unlike 10 cent ramen in the package. And this cost over ten times as much, so that’s an obvious choice. I do enjoy yakisoba. Yesterday I stir-fried some onions, cabbage, and bean sprouts, and then added tofu I had marinated briefly in grated ginger, garlic, and soy sauce (having learned the tofu has to have something added to it or it’s worthless squishy lumps), and then added the yakisoba noodles and seasoning packet as recommended. I enjoyed it. And the chow mein recipe I tried that used hoisin sauce was very good too – just not like the restaurant. Next I’ll probably try a recipe that uses oyster sauce and honey, but I foresee this going down the road of pad thai where I learn how to make decent versions, just not the one I want to make (and therefore give up, never to try again).

Now, later, I can say that I had an eventful evening. Since the electricians packed up and left around five I have had them come back and had PG&E out too! Separate issues. One of the light switches the electricians installed didn't actually switch off the light fixture, so the owner of the company came back and fixed it, which I appreciate (he gets a good Yelp review from me). I don't blame them for not getting it right since the power was off, it was dark in that bathroom, and there are two light fixtures going to one switch so it would have been easy to miss a wire. The other thing was that while I was checking out the new circuit panel I realized I smelled a little gas coming out of my meter. When I called PG&E they didn't just reassure me that that is normal, which I wanted them to do, but they did send someone out within an hour who did detect a small leak (unfortunately reinforcing my worrywart tendencies) and fixed it. He also checked all my gas appliances for gas leaks and said they look good, which I did appreciate.

So now I'm going to have some ice cream, watch the Work It pilot because a guy from church whose mother I know is a writer on it so I'll give it a chance despite it being a blatant Bosom Buddies rip-off, and go to bed early.

I like this electrician. He's always calm and never gives me the impression my wiring is going to burst into flames and kill me in my sleep.

That's what Google is for.