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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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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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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D.I.-Why? and the Allure of the “New Domesticity”

Here’s my take on it: I like baking bread, cookies, canning, entering recipe contests, etc. because they give me projects, goals, and satisfaction when I’ve completed/entered them! Sending resumes out into the great void of employers is demoralizing and depressing (I send out 12-20 cover letters  and resumes per week, I hear back maybe 3-5 times per week, most of those being something like “We have received your resume and will contact you if we would like to interview you.” If I don’t get some curt, reply-all, email I don’t know if a person or a computer has screened me out but I typically don’t get so much as a note saying “Your application has been received” to let me know that the email and attachments even went through. Thank goodness for mailer daemon or I might think they’ve all been rejected!

And Emily Marchar‘s take on the subject of why my peers and I like doing stuff is why she’s a writer and I’m not:

There’s a degree to which this New Domesticity helps people justify and feel good about the choices that they basically had to make. A lot of women are pushed out of the workforce, and nobody wants to feel like they’re a pawn, nobody wants to feel like they don’t have any power.

D.I.-Why?: Emily Matchar on the Allure of the “New Domesticity” | The Hairpin.

home made spicy tuna and carrot maki rolls, for a gluten-free friend’s birthday in 2009

UPDATE: And while we’re at it, THIS! Our life isn’t ready for a baby but I am: let’s talk about dealing with baby fever” | Offbeat Families. I just wanted to throw that our there too, to add to this morning’s general “Woe is I” feeling. I ♥ you, ladies of the interwebs.

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3/5 of the way to my goal

I don’t really like blogging about my Weight Watchers success. It makes me feel weird, like I shouldn’t have let myself go so far before I had to look for outside enforcement, but that’s the nature of having a problem. You won’t accept help until you look for it yourself. Going to a WW meeting mustn’t be too far off from an AA meeting, food addicts, alcoholics, we’re not that different. Well, maybe our stories are less depressing at WW, but we’re there to be supportive of each other and to share what’s working and what isn’t and learn the science behind the whats and whys of the program.

Anyhow, it’s working slowly but surly for me. Since Thanksgiving 2012 I’ve lost 20 lbs (well, I hit that milestone a month ago and have been near it since, but I haven’t been great about limiting my birthday/wedding celebration consumption either). Yes, that’s 9 months to loose 20 lbs, or about 2 lbs per month overall. I’m actually quite proud of it and expect that because I’ve lost it so slowly it’s more likely to stay off.

Every time I hit a setback it’s been 3-4 pounds over 2 weeks after some major event revolving around food: baby shower, road trip, baby shower, wedding, birthday, etc. Then it takes me a month to get back on track, and loose what was there before too, which is really frustrating because I feel like I’ve lost the same weight over and over again. It also means that sometimes I loose 6 lbs in a month when 1/2 of those were pounds I’d already lost and yo-yoed back because I ate too much salt/fat/whatever and just had an awful weigh in previously. FINALLY though I’m starting to see that I look and feel different. My waist is back where it should be and old clothes not only fit but are a tad roomy! And the best part is that yoga is getting easier, not because I’m getting stronger, I feel I may have in fact lost muscle tone because I’m not as active as I have been in the past, but because there’s less belly to have to modify around!

The biggest milestone for me is that my wedding dress not only fits again, but it fit without the Spanx I wore underneath for my wedding! WOOHOO!

pointing out my favorite wedding photo in my wedding dress almost 3 years later
PS- please ignore the mezuzah that appears to be sticking out of my head

Go me! Oh, and I got new glasses too. Not a huge change, but I also got my first pair of prescription sun glasses rather than the magnetic/clip-on sunglasses that went over my regular glasses that I had in the past. I feel like a real grownup now. Watching my food intake, trying to track my physical activity, and real sun glasses. I guess 30 isn’t so bad, it just can’t the tequila/beer and nachos/pizza festival that 23 was and I am 100% OK with that; I like veggies, whole grains, and lean protein!

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work, travel (and being left behind), and vacations

English: Drum Point Light, Solomons, Maryland, December 2008 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ben was in Triste, Italy last week. He learned lots of stuff, met some new-to-him atomic physics folks, and got to show off his 3 month-old knowledge of his current lab’s research and publications at the International Centere for Theoretical Physics. Yeah, I’d never heard of it either. He took some really lovely photos that he might let me upload later.

I, on the other hand, have been temping at a lovely firm on K Street. It was a two week gig to cover the interim between hiring a new person an when she started and was subsequently extended to three weeks to cover someone else out vacation. I wish I could stay here…. Oh well. I did have an interview for a job I don’t want, so I left that to the staffing agency to communicate for me. If I’m going to leave the path to being a paralegal I’m going to do so in the non-profit world, not in employee benefits (albeit serving law offices, which is why they were hiring someone with a legal background).

This weekend is Memorial Day and we are going out to Solomons, MD on Saturday evening to spend some time with my gramma and see some museums. I’m excited to share the Calvert Marine Museum with him (even though it’s not yet fiddler crab season), but apparently the Calvert Nuclear Facility stopped offering tours or having a visitor center after 9-11. Doh. We were also hoping to go up to Annapolis and visit the Naval Academy Museum or we might just walk around, find somewhere to eat rockfish for lunch, and have some unscheduled time.

Bonus: I found this wonderfully written blog post while looking for a recipe. This woman writes how I would like to: http://youmadam.com/2009/02/21/what-to-do-with-those-daikon-you-bought-at-whole-foods-that-have-been-hanging-out-a-bit-too-long-in-the-fridge/

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what do I do during the week

When I was in Boulder, and between jobs, I would bake a lot, volunteer with our CSA, volunteer at our synagogue (before I worked there), and blob-out (like I’m doing now).

Now that we live so close to my parents, I can tag along with my dad on business trips! Woohoo! In February I went to NY with him for 36 hours. This time we went to Philadelphia for 24 hours. It was too short of a trip to meet up with anyone, but I did get to visit some smaller museums and go for a lovely walk in the sunshine, The NEW Barnes Foundation Museum and the Academy of Natural Sciences, while my dad was attending a lunch meeting at the Museum of Art (yes, with the Rocky stairs).

Deinonychus

Neither museum permitted photography, but I did take a few snapshots while wandering around outside. If you’re ever in Philly, the new Barnes museum is GORGEOUS!

I could get used to this not being lobster-red after spending an hour outside at mid-day thing. No wonder visitors to Colorado always end up sunburnt, the sun is so much friendlier here!

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It’s finally spring in DC!

This has been a BUSY month. During Passover I went through a few rounds of interviews for a new job, which I was only at for about two and a half weeks. It wasn’t a good fit. Tax law was too passive for me, I really like getting to do legal research and helping support aggressive arguments, and tax law was more about actuarial calculations and data entry; not enough law for me in the long term. Oh well. At least I hadn’t gotten too settled yet. It was never meant to be, I was just too optimistic to realize that at the time. The entire time I was there, I felt a bit like this:

 

That is NOT how one should feel at work when the job and the employee are a good fit.

In cheerier news, we went downtown as the cherry blossoms were starting to bud (but before most had blossomed) 2 weeks ago.

Now, I’m back to where I was a month ago, looking for a NEW new job, but at least I have a slightly better idea of what to look for and what I should have seen as warning flags earlier in the interview process.

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Fellowship of the Physicists and other updates

Ben got the NRC (National Research Council) Fellowship! WOOHOO! That’s 2 years of funding, starting July 1! Sweet.

In my job news I’ve registered with a bunch of temp agencies, had work with one, as well as TWO interviews with the same firm. I’m waiting to hear back about the interviews, but WOOHOO, I might be employed soon. Sweet.

We bought our plane tickets to Austin, for WBF’s wedding later this month and will probably be renting a room through AirBnB or someone’s carriage house/in-law suite through VRBO. We’ll have Saturday daytime to explore as well as all day Sunday (we fly in Friday afternoon for the rehearsal and then fly out on Monday since it cost the same to stay overnight on Sunday or try and fly out on Sunday and the Monday flights had less crazy timing).

Today, it’s sunny, chilly, and WINDY, so I’m camping out on the couch with the classical radio channel, my laptop, and letting my plants soak up all the open curtain light they can.

Anyone out there have any advice about container gardening? My “full sun” plants don’t seem to be suffering in our reflected-light only corner unit, but I worry about food plants not getting enough oomph from reflected light. I’m thinking Rainbow Chard, and any herbs that I say they’re happiest in partial shade. What else does well in partial shade?

Last little piece of news, Weight Watchers works. Seriously, I’m fitting into my old clothes, feel like a rock star, and have lost over 10 lbs!

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