December 2007 Archives
It feels like such a luxury to not post every single day. I'm far too lazy to post every single day. It's almost more than I can handle just to take a picture every day (236 photos so far!). And then there's all the breathing and sleeping and going to the bathroom that has to happen every day too. There's only so much you can ask of me. But I probably just have a bad attitude because I didn't win a prize.
Things I did this weekend instead of posting:
- Shoveled some snow.
- Watched some Dr. Who.
- Listened to some podcasts.
- Knitted some stuff.
- Ate some dinner with my husband and mother-in-law.
- Neglected to call anyone I should have called (I'm sorry, J.! Time got away from me.)
- Plasticked some windows.
- Polished off an entire pint of Haagen Dazs coffee ice cream.
Season three of Dr. Who has been a disappointment, overall. There were a couple of excellent episodes, but the rest have ranged from "meh" to dumb. The Heroes season finale is on tonight (stupid writer's strike), and Heroes is the only thing I care to watch on TV. We'll be done watching Dr. Who Season 3 very soon (two more discs to go; hopefully they'll be better). And then there will be nothing left to watch, which is bad because I still have a LOT of knitting to do before Christmas.
Luckily I have lots of podcasts and audio books to keep my mind occupied while I knit. In case you're a Philip Pullman fan, the audio version (unabridged) of The Golden Compass is currently on sale at iTunes for only $9.95. For 10 1/2 hours of amazingly read and performed audio. I highly recommend it.
I've also been listening to Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which I got from the library (I love the library). It's just as engrossing as all of her other books, though there have been times when I haven't quite been up to the grimness of it.
Now I have to go and do one of those pesky daily tasks: eat lunch.
Also: upside down Christmas trees. WTF. There's a vacant office space in my building and someone (building management, I guess), has put an upside down Christmas tree inside it, where there are floor to ceiling windows so it's easy to see inside. Maybe because I've never had an artificial tree, upside down Christmas trees just seem disturbing to me. Uncanny, even.
Also: it's a beautiful sunny day today, one of those quintessential winter days with cold air, blue sky and a foot of blindingly white snow on the ground. I can see part of the tiered roof of my building from my window and the snow is melting off it, forming small icicles with a constant drip. Every once in a while the snow will come sliding off the metal roof and crash to the roof below it. It looks deceptively warm because of all the bright light and the melting snow. Actually, it's 5 degrees out there.
Also: my cousin's little boy had brain surgery (!) yesterday. They live in South Dakota, so I don't see them very often. They came to Minneapolis to have the surgery done (a wise move, I think), but I can't go to the hospital to visit because I think I'm getting a cold. Crap! The last place I should take my fresh germs is to the ICU.
So far, he seems to be doing well. This is a good thing.
Happy Friday.
The next big culinary innovation, originally uploaded by AMK.
I've heard of other strange parties like soup parties and bad sweater parties, but this is the first whiff I've ever had of a sandwich party. And so far, it smells like fries (or chips, if you must), bacon, and a faint hint of Nutter Butters.
But, the internet being full of random things, it has given rise to the idea of a sandwich party. And I can't pass up things like this, especially when they involve food. I also can't just do things once, so consider this my Sandwich Party Post, Part the First.
Above, you will find the Hamandmacandcheese sandwich. I think it's funny, so I wanted to post about it. But it will never be eaten by me since I'm a vegetarian and I can't bear the idea of participating in a sandwich party without actually getting to eat a sandwich. So please expect my Sandwich Party Post, Part the Second sometime later this weekend.
Back to the Hamandmacandcheese sandwich.
The Hamandmacandcheese sandwich is comprised of two key ingredients - ham and mac and cheese. These are sandwiched lovingly between two bunches of romaine lettuce and two slices of toast. It was conceived of one day when my sister was making a leftover ham sandwich and we also had some leftover baked mac and cheese and I coerced her into adding it to her sandwich to satisfy some kind of vicarious meat sandwich curiosity.
The ham is a ham my mom made. I don't know anything about ham, so I can't comment extensively on it, but I know it came in a large hunk and was sliced in thick slices. None of this "ham" food substance. Only thick slices of leftover ham will do.
The mac and cheese is a baked mac and cheese, also made by my mother. Using baked mac and cheese is key in a Hamandmacandcheese sandwich, as it's less runny and gooey than regular mac and cheese, and will kind of moosh and squish together, preserving some sandwich structural integrity.
And the toast and lettuce seemed to add a nice crunch.
I can't say how this sandwich tastes from personal experience, but I do know that my sister ate the whole thing and said it was "pretty good".
This is what I get for promising that I'll participate in something. The delicious feeling of not doing what I said I would do. Which is much more delicious than the sandwich I ate this weekend. BECAUSE I DID NOT EAT A SANDWICH THIS WEEKEND.
I intended to eat a sandwich this weekend and write about it as part of the great Sandwich Party of 2007. My previous post about the sandwich party, where I talked about the violation of macaroni and cheese, doesn't really count. I didn't eat a sandwich. I just talked about a sandwich that I didn't even eat - and the sandwich in question was eaten (not by me) like a month ago.
Oh well.
If I were to have participated in the sandwich party, I probably would have had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, because that seems to be the only sort of sandwich I'm eating these days.
Skewed, originally uploaded by AMK.
I was looking over my recent Photos of the Day when it suddenly became very obvious to me that all of my recent photos have the same angle in them as a very prominent element of their composition.
Weird.
I've barely been able to keep up with taking a photo a day, never mind actually posting them in anything close to a timely manner. And now all my photos lately have a strange resemblance to each other, despite their varying subject matter.
All my creative thought has been attached to knitting lately. I suppose it's just natural for me in the winter to focus on warm, wool, knitted things when it's too bloody cold to go outside and take pictures, and it's dark too early besides. But I'm far too stubborn to give up on my photo-a-day project until I've done it for at least 365 days.
Fragile Things, originally uploaded by AMK.
Hi! I'm still here!
I seem to be unable to put together a few minutes to write an entry lately. Usually I can manage a five minute break at work to write something, but I've been busy and inspired at work lately, which has made it difficult for me to even take a break to eat lunch, let alone write an entry. This hasn't happened (at least to this extent) in a good long while and I appreciate it so much. I'd so much rather be busy and inspired and even overworked, if it means I have energy and I care about what I'm doing. At home, I've been too busy trying to frantically finish all my Christmas knitting.
So. In the small amount of time I am spending reading lately, I'm currently reading Fragile Things, a short story collection by Neil Gaimon. I've only just finished the first story, A Study in Emerald, but just that one story alone has reconvinced me that this man is a genius. An Arthur Conan Doyle-esque mystery set in an alternate version of Victorian England. Need I say more? I can't wait until after Christmas when I'll have time to read more again. My reading list is piling way up.
So, does anyone have any book recommendations for me to delve into after I've been freed from the knitting mania?
The Schmap Minneapols guide people asked if they could use one of my photos in their Schmap guide. I couldn't think of any reason not to say yes. So there it is.
It's pretty smart of them to get photos from people on Flickr. Instant advertising. I mean, here I am talking about the Schmap guide when I've never even heard of it before.
I hope you all had a lovely Christmas. Ours was snowy, which was a nice change from recent years. It felt more like the Decembers of my childhood than the wimpy winters we've been having lately.
Also, I had the opportunity to snuggle a lot with this charming cat, Bo.
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
Bo is my sister's cat. Her two cats live with her boyfriend in Minneapolis while she's going to grad school in Boston. The cats spent the Christmas holiday at my parents' house, though, because the boyfriend was out of town. The other cat, Elliott, was too timid to come out from under the couch.
I had a good Christmas despite several things being out of whack (my mom wrote a nice post on Pink Argyle about one of the major reasons Christmas was out of whack this year). Like my mom says, the important thing is spending time with family. And I guess one nice thing about having a weird Christmas is that we get to have another Christmas when my sister's in town next weekend. We're going to try mulling wine, something none of us have ever done before. It should be an adventure. I'm not very adventurous when it comes to Christmas (I get pretty stuck on our traditions, to tell you the truth) but I think it's good to be shaken out of my routine sometimes. I hope 2008 is a year of being shaken out of my routine... in a good way.
I'm considering making a 2008 calendar for myself out of some of my own photos (yeah, it's narcissistic, so sue me). So I've been looking through my Flickr photostream from the very beginning, trying to pick out some pictures. And it is making me ridiculously nostalgic for the summer.
The summer of 2007 has got to have been one of the best summers of my life. I can't wait for winter to be over. In the meantime, I'm trying to shake off this malaise and get back to the gym so I can stay in shape so I can get out there enjoy the warm weather as much as possible as soon as it begins.
