Big list of STUFF that is helpful PART 1: Pregnancy and Postpartum mom items

I have a 14 month old tiny toddler She is amazing, wonderful, fun, and has been a very easy baby. I can’t take credit for her being easy, we just got lucky, but I’d like to think not being stressed out because we felt well prepared have helped.

This is as messy as I ever let the living room get. Otherwise I’d go BONKERS!

Here are some items that have helped us feel like prepared, confident new parents. I’ll try to list them in age order of when they’re most useful :)

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So, this is happening rather quickly…

Ben has accepted employment with Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and it looks like we’re heading out West to Albuquerque, NM in about a month (he starts on the 20th)!

Shira’s soon-to-bloom cactus flowers

The loose plan right now is that we’ll drive out together on July 14th and then I’ll fly back here and will stay at my job (in DC) through Labor Day– unless something interesting comes up sooner for me out there.

the Big Red Arrow, with a fresh coat of red paint

About 2 months ago we moved almost everything we own into a 10×15′ climate-controled storage unit (if I’d been OK with stacking things higher, we could have gotten away with a 10×10′) and are now staying in the guest room at my parents’ house with just our summer clothes, toiletries, and any food/pantry items we couldn’t pack into our storage unit. We moved because our lease ended shortly after Passover and Ben has been looking for a new job since the beginning of the year and didn’t want to be saddled with a month-to-month lease “convenience fee,” effectively increasing our rent by 40%. Since moving in we’ve taken over the rec room as our own living area, and do miss having our own kitchen but are happy to have access to a grill and people to share the chores with.

Ghostbusters car at an airport carpark

I am so glad to have things more sorted and less abstract. We had a really great visit to ABQ two weeks ago and I am feeling much less anxious about moving now that I know that Ben is so excited about his job and there are jobs for me to apply to there and nice (Jewish and not) folks to befriend. While we were there we visited Old Town, visited the synagogue we’ll be joining, met other folks in our Jewish cohort, fell in love with the Nob Hill area, ate some great food (red or green? Christmas, please), were shown around by a realtor, and drove by more museums we want to visit than we knew even existed in ABQ. We’re going to have lots of things to keep us busy out there, including attending the Balloon Fiesta, joining the ABQ model rocket club and learning how to grow a vegetable garden in the high desert. It’s going to be an adventure and I’ll try and keep you all posted!

Sandias from the Sunport (it’s too sunny to be an airport!)

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Planes!

Hello blog-y people! I haven’t blogged in FOOOOOOOREEEEEEVVVVEEEEEEEER (now, go watch Goonies again if you need to). Apparently when I’m gainfully employed and not lonely (i.e. have enough friends/social activities to keep me from getting restless), I just don’t blog much.

Yep. Living in Rockville, Maryland and working in aviation regulatory law in DC has been good for me. Currently we are living in Northern Virginia, in my parents’ house (but in the guest room, not my old room, that would be weird) while Ben works on securing continual funding for more AMO physics research. Dr. Smarty-Pants!

Anyway, the real reason I’m blogging today is to dump all the photos and a few videos I took of today’s flyover off of Ben’s phone (we swapped today because I left the big camera at home, even though I’d gotten it out to take to work with me today).

Want more info about the WWII war plan flyover to celebrate the 70th anniversary of VE day?

Schedule and route:       http://ww2flyover.org/general-information/flyover-schedule-and-route/

Great write-up of some of the pilots and their planes:     http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/pilots-prepare-for-historic-wwii-flyover-of-mall/article/2563250

Here are the photos from the lower terrace of the Kennedy Center (no filter, just a Moto G cell phone doing whatever it wants), I know they’re not the best, but PLANES! (There is a video on my Facebook page, but not on here because I’m cheap.)

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Rape Jokes and The Oatmeal

Just sharing a well written critique of current humor threads (PS- I usually like The Oatmeal, but it does toe the line of funny and raunchy)

The Belle Jar

Yesterday, Matthew Inman from The Oatmeal wrote a comic about the “delicate relationship” that he has with his keyboard.  This was the final panel of the comic:

The comic in its entirety was about how he feels and behaves towards the various keys in his keyboard. This panel specifically was about trying to get a webpage to load when you have a slow connection, with the joke centering around Matt “raping” his F5 key in order to make the page load faster. Yes, it’s a rape joke. No, I’m not surprised. Yes, it’s supposed to be funny. No, no one would ever  actually “rape” a computer key. Yes, in spite of all that, I’m still grossed out. Now that all that is out of the way, can we talk about how terrible this is? Because it’s terrible. Really, really terrible.

The panel above is the type of joke that normalizes…

View original post 1,253 more words

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I am always distracted.

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Why I am on an iPhone Detox

Read my acquaintance Julie’s reasoning for not replacing her iPhone (which is virtually the same as my reasoning for NOT getting one in the first place). Neither of us wants to be plugged in and available ALL THE TIME, boundaries are good!

Why I am on an iPhone Detox.

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Early October recap

In early October we celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary! We started with brunch on our awesome patio, where we discovered the biggest, most evil looking caterpillar EVER had been causing our tomato plants to look leggy and bedraggled. Stupid tomato hornworm! Ben didn’t want to get stabbed, touch it, or have much of anything to do with it, so he put on his heavy work gloves (also helpful to assembling and disassembling the sukkah), grabbed a water glass and a flat-head screwdriver, and pried that big thing off and flushed it down the toilet (we don’t have a compost pile to bury it in, as my grandmother suggested and were afraid to open the garbage bin and see it crawling around in there later).

giant hornworm and giant poops

scary, plumpy, huge tomato hornworm

That was our relaxing morning at home…. Oops.

We made up for it with a lovely drive to Brunswick, Maryland, for Brunswick Train Days. Brunswick is a cute little town, about 1/2 way to Harpers Ferry. We didn’t get tickets to ride on the train, but wondered around a bunch of antique stores and had a rootbeer float instead. Then we stopped at the Wegmans off 270 on the way home and bought lots of goodies.

Model Train through Downtown

Model Train House Fire

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I don’t blog much when I’m busy

Apparently it is NaBoloPoMo, yeah, I didn’t know what that meant either until I looked it up. National Blog Posting Month, where folks challenge themselves to blog everyday to get [back] into the habit of it. I’m not sure I can come up with something worth sharing EVERYDAY, but I can go for 2-3x week (at most).

Between my new job, (which I started after returning from Labor Day/Rosh Hashanah week Boulder, during in the middle of the High Holidays), commuting, and general house chores I am exhausted most of the time. Thankfully the major holidays are over and things have settled down to our new normal. We attend Segulah Minyan every other week, and blob out at home and maybe stock up on local produce and other items at the farmers market on the alternate weeks. Ben has been keeping me sane by packing my lunch every morning, otherwise I’d be spending all my hard-earned on lunches (plus I’d be breaking my personal policy of not eating out more than 1x week).

Here are a few photos from our week in Boulder. It was SO nice to spend time with friends (and their baby bellies and babies), as well as have some time with Ben where I didn’t feel like I was keeping him from work or where either of us were competing with a laptop for the others attention. Sometimes we have trouble putting our gadgets down, it’s a work-in-progress.

squash from Robyn and Mark’s garden

BUTTES in Golden, CO

crazy topography in Golden, CO

sunset in Boulder, CO

overheated Dan and sassy Ronya

Miri and King-of-the-rock Danny

Yom Kippur was a Segulah Minyan event, at a rented church social hall in Sheppard Park/Silver Spring. Services were great and I actually felt present for most of them, but it really punctuated how much we miss CBS in Boulder. Speaking of Congregation Bonai Shalom, the synagogue was CRIPPLED by the flooding in Boulder in mid-September (it started 2 days before Yom Kippur, which was thankfully held at nearby Naropa University’s East Campus). Reading the news out of Boulder in mid-September was terrifying and sad. If you have any pennies to share, I’m sure Bonai would appreciate them (instructions on how to donate via email or phone are on their website).

You’ve already seen our photos of the AMAZING sukkah Ben built on the patio, and my friend Jennifer came down from NY for the day for the first day of sukkot (we dwelled with dinner, brunch over the news paper in the AM, and general lazy lounging in the afternoon after a nice walk exploring my neighborhoof) before she had to head back to the city for work the next day. Boo. We don’t see each other enough. I guess I need to take a turn and go to New York again!

What else is going on….

Weight Watchers as a program is great, but my progress has been glacially slow. lately I’ve either hit a plateau or gotten lazier at tracking than I thought. Blergh. Soon it will be cold enough to blame it on heavy winter clothes, but that trick only works once!

Now that we’ve moved past the craziness of ALL the Jewish holidays feeling like they are ALL AT ONCE (it always feels like that when they swallow Shabbat whole, or turn it into a virtual 3-day chag), and I’ve gotten more used to my 8 hour + lunch day, things are settling down.

In more upbeat news:

In late September we helped my friend Andrea, from way-back-when at IAC, move from her temporary furnished apartment into a gorgeous flat in Adams Morgan. She’s pregnant and her husband was traveling for work and Ben and I didn’t want her trying to unpack without help! We also explored her neighborhood a little (all new to all of us) and ate some awesome falafel and fries for lunch and pizza for dinner, YUM! It was the first real fall-weather day we’d had and it was crisp and beautiful. It was a bit of a shame we spent it unpacking, washing bedding, installing a new printer, and buying what felt like ALL THE THINGS at Target, but it showed off how great her apartment is that the windows really let in the light and air and it was still nice and quiet even though she’s 1/2 a block from a major urban shopping/dining area (think Pearl Street in Boulder). I’m kinda jealous.

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Our first sukkah!

Ben and I built our first ever sukkah this year. It is HUGE (8×12′), big enough to fit our 6′ table and four comfy chairs around it. It is awesome. We mail ordered the 6×8′ s’chach from The Sukkah Project and built the frame from 2x4s (and two 1x2s) from Home Depot and some metal framing braces.

Here’s a photo of our sukkah all lit up and set for a nice dinner. Lovely! The back wall (up against the parking garage) looked bland, so I picked up a plastic shower curtain from the BB&B clearance section to hang up there and it really helps it look less blocky and more festive.

A friend from Interlochen, JMV, came down from New York for the first day of sukkot and I had to remind my new bosses that I wasn’t kidding when I said that there were 3 major Jewish holidays in 3 weeks (really 4 in 4 weeks, but I usually only fully observe two of them, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur). Ben worked his spousal magic and had a wonderful dinner waiting for us when we got home (picking up cupcakes at the train station, en route home) for Erev Sukkot (the night before the first day). We had a great time and ate too much together. JMV and I spent the first day of Sukkot living in the sukkah (i.e. vegging out, the weather was lovely!).

That’s the latest from here. I’ll try and catch up on my photos from Boulder and then tell you all about my new J-O-B soon!

 

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Avocado Pie FAIL!

Let me start by saying that this pie was DELICIOUS! It also looks like Slimer from the Ghostbusters cartoon. I’d say it also qualifies as a FAIL inspired by Pintrest.

Almost every week one of my favorite bogs, Serious Eats, has a Share Your Sweets photo roundup. This weekend’s challenge was “summer pie.” I had just bought a bag of HUGE, Costco-sized avocados (from Costco) and decided that since I’d purchased them in August they were a summer fruit and therefor I would look for a recipe for avocado pie (also because I realized WTF am I going to do with 7 huge avocados when they all ripen within 24 hours of each other?!). This seemed like a good plan to use up the smallest two (AKA normal sized) avocados.

Here were my inspirations:

Pinch My Salt’s seemingly simple avocado pie, as modified by chez us.

simple avocado pie from Pinch My Salt

inspiring avocado meringue pie from chez us

Yeah. Mistakes I made:

1. We didn’t have any sweetened condensed milk, so I googled how to sub evaporated milk and sugar (hint, it’s 3/4 cup of sugar for every 5 oz of evaporated milk, I eyeballed 1 1/3 cups of sugar into 12 oz of evaporated milk to “keep the sugar content down”). You have to heat the mixture to combine the sugar and then cool it completely before using it, mine was tepid. FAIL ONE.
2. I misread 3.5 oz of lemon juice for 3.5 Tbls. FAIL 2. Plus, I used lime, but that shouldn’t have mattered as much as the missing 1.5 Tbls of juice.
3. I tried to “bling out my pie” by slicing a small avocado into thin slices and fanning them in the crust before pouring in the goop. FAIL 3. SPLORT!

Oh, you want to see how mine came out? Sure, OK:

avocado lime pie with meringue topping

attempting to serve avocado pie

VERDICT: I will try it again with the right ingredients, without sliced avocado, and without the meringue topping and maybe just a dollop of plain yogurt or unsweetened whipped cream. Even with the slightly reduced sugar it was a seriously SWEET dessert. I remember sweetened condensed milk as a more mellow sweet, kinda caramel-y, rather than the assertive WHITE SUGAR sweet that I got from the glop I made. With so many possible easy fixes, how can I not try to make this again in the future?

avocado lime pie “glamor shot”

I know I’m not going to win any food photography contests any tim soon, but I really did want to try with this! Look, I had props and everything! I was going to cut open the avocado and display the 1/2 with the pit, but decided against “wasting” good fruit on such a deliciously sloppy pie.

FINAL LATE NIGHT THOUGHT: If I rename this Slimer Pie, would that make it better?

NUTRITIONAL INFO: I don’t want to know. I guessed 7 WW PointsPlus per 1/8th. It might be closer to 11. Like I said, I don’t want to know. I ate my slice 90 minutes ago and now I have a slight sugar hangover.

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