relapse

I guess I felt entitled to a little bit of indulgence, since I had taken a stab at chipping away at my stack of reading. I’ve read less than half a book and skimmed another, though: progress which definitely does not justify my purchase of two more books this afternoon. I was in Barnes & Noble searching for a book the University bookstores didn’t carry that I need for research on a final paper and I succumbed to the temptation of Rushdie and Keillor.

I know.

So, on my way home from the bookstore, books in hand and tail between legs, I came up with a set of goals for spring break, which starts officially in a few weeks and practically Monday afternoon when I finish my last class and move to reading week and finals.

And here they are.

A Set of Goals for Spring Break

• Give my apartment a thorough shakedown. I’ve been so busy lately that my feeble efforts to combat the clutter are failing pretty miserably. I need to clean out my massive mail pile, recycle my collection of old newspapers, do a bunch of laundry, vacuum, mop, the works.
• Read three more books. This entails finishing the book I’ve started and removing three more from my reading list. I can tell you right now, the three I tackle will most likely be this one, this one, and this one.
• Finish Super Mario Galaxy and Super Paper Mario. And get some work done on Zelda. I’m behind the times, I know, I know.
• Cook a lobster loaf. And while I’m at it, write out the history of my logo/emblem/blog name. It’s pretty boring, but it lets me draw stupid pictures, so it’s worth a blog post of its own.

There you have it. I’ll let you know how it goes.

This photo is in honor of the birth of Wanda Sykes, exactly 44 years ago.
It makes sense. Just trust me on this one.

-@

if wishes were fishes, beggars would ride

I wish I weren’t stage managing this quarter. I’m having fun with the Tattoo Girl process, and I’m looking forward to getting started on the Bacchae, but I miss my evenings off.

If I still had my evenings off, instead of having chicken nuggets and hasty salads and hot pockets for dinner before running to rehearsal at 5:30, I would cook everything on the Eat Yet? blog. Everything. Their most recent recipe for warming winter squash looks like just the thing I need to pull me out of my “Is it really snowing AGAIN?!?!??” funk.

I think I will be attempting their red velvet cupcakes on Thursday, to bring to rehearsal for Valentine’s Day. There is a scene in Tattoo Girl in which something or other is described as a “red velvet map”. Since we blocked that scene we’ve all been craving red velvet cake. It’s time to satisfy the craving.

In other news, I’m still smarting over Ingrid Michaelson’s having been denied even a Grammy nomination. There must be some reason for it that I’m missing. Maybe her album came out in the wrong month. Maybe it’s just deep magic from the dawn of time. Whatever the reason, I’m still bummed about it.

-@

I can explain.

I took my laptop to school and left it there for a few days. So when blog inspiration struck while I was sitting on the couch these past few days, the daunting task of trying to keep warm in my frigid bedroom to get it onto the Internerd through my desktop kept me firmly planted in place.

Here’s what’s up, though.

I have essentially finished Endless Ocean. By “essentially”, I mean that I have completed the vague storyline and figured out what triggers the credits. (No spoilers, but despite the relaxed, hands-off, lazy plot, it was actually super cool.) I haven’t explored the whole map, though, or discovered every type of fish, or spent nearly enough time just kind of swimming around and playing with my dolphin friends, or riding whales, or lying on the beach chair on the deck of the Gabbiano – my “small but sturdy ship”.

You can do that, you know – sit on the deck and look at the virtual ocean for however long you want. It’s an island vacation right on your couch! (Blegh.)

I managed to discover all this in between the onset of midterm season and the start of Tattoo Girl rehearsals and the casting process of the Bacchae. I forgot how insane my life is when I’m not taking time off from theatre. The thing is, it usually doesn’t take me this long to get used to it and start liking it again. So tired! No wonder I’m becoming an English major.

In other other news, I bought a thoroughly secondhand copy of this book:

I bought it because it contains a recipe for “Sweet Potato Lobster Loaf”. I don’t think I have any excuse for not bumping this up to the top of my Recipes to Try list.

Other enticing dishes from this tiny (30 pages!) cookbook include avocado soup, mango steak, guava catsup (??), mango whip (sounds much more promising than prune whip, don’t you think?), and banana fudge.

It looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me.

-@

“I think what we’ve got here is a thing.”

Today I am home sick from school. I was fine yesterday until about four o’clock, at which point my body said, “You, to the couch. Right now. Or else!”

So I napped for a while and watched a thoroughly unremarkable episode of American Idol (I’m not sure anyone can ever top Renaldo Lapuz, seriously) and tried to do some homework, which resulted in what possibly was the most hilarious/delirious response to the Pardoner’s Tale in the history of the Canterbury Tales. A few Sudafeds and Advil PMs later, I was fast asleep at 9:30.

I tried to wake up to go to Stats. I really did! Obviously, it didn’t happen. So now the kitty and I are sitting on the couch watching the guys on Mythbusters build the biggest slingshot ever. I’m also wishing I could smell the popovers I just pulled out of the oven. Even better than being able to smell them would be having them be cool enough to eat. Mmm…

I think I picked the right day to stay home from school. Weather.com says it Feels Like -11 F today.

Tomorrow there’s a high of 23. I’ll go back to school tomorrow.

-@

minimize interruptions

I realized something just now – something my mother would love to hear, and which will make just about everyone else go “um… duh? Okay, whatever.”

I realized that I really like cooking.

For starters, it’s a really great way to eat up (no pun intended) as much or as little spare time as you’ve got lying around, plus it has clear benefits after the fact in the form of leftovers. And if it’s low-impact, easy cooking, you can do it while doing something else – watching seventeen episodes of Scrubs, for example, not that I’ve done that, or listening to music.

I realized this on my walk home from class this morning, when I was stressing a little bit about how my evening’s going to go. I have a meeting at 5:00 followed directly by auditions at 6, in which I have to sit for a good five hours. I was thinking about how much work I have to do (because I was right about yesterday, I didn’t get anything done) and how I’m barely going to have time to eat (I used to be able to eat dinner at 4:45, but now that I’m out of the dining halls, dinner time is much closer to 8:00 for). Then it dawned on me that I can make use of the five hours sitting in auditions by reading (because I don’t actually have to make any casting decisions. The whole process is quite mindless for me).

And once I was hip to the concept of multitasking in auditions, dinner followed quickly behind.

So I was standing in my kitchen cooking up a pot of rice (that awesome dirty rice mix from a box, a brand that starts with a Z, Zatarain’s, or something) and making chickie dickie (this is a family secret, I have just decided) and slicing stuff up for a sandwich for immediate consumption, I realized that I was having a really good time.

I wasn’t doing anything particularly complicated – I think the highest degree of difficulty I ever attained was stirring the rice and eating my sandwich at the same time – but I really did enjoy it. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that my kitchen/living room wall is basically made of windows, and I have a really nice view. It isn’t of anything special – just the alley and some parking lots – but my building is on the west side of the block and I can see all the way to the southeast corner. It’s not a great view, but it’s a long one, a sweeping vista if you will, which makes it seem all the better. That coupled with the fact that the sky is a gorgeous blue today and with the fact that I’ve got a great set of speakers for my iPod in the kitchen made the whole time a great experience.

And now I’m happily full and I’ve got a dinner all packed to bring to school tonight so I won’t have to spend eight bucks on something nasty at Norris.

This gives me an idea for a future post, too, about my favorite cooking music.

I’ll save it for later.

-@

two best things ever

Guys.

Are you hip to silicone baking cups?

They’re the paper things you bake muffins or cupcakes or whatever in, right, only they’re made of silicone so you can wash and reuse them, plus if you spray them with Pam they peel right off your muffins like nobody’s business. Maybe these things are super old and I just never knew about them? I made muffins with them tonight for the first time and seriously, I now swear by them. The coolest thing is that not only can you put them in a traditional muffin tin, but also you can (allegedly – I haven’t tried this) sit them by themselves on a regular cookie sheet and the result will be the same. Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you this: will muffin-baking ever be the same?

In other news, have you ever been asked what your all-time favorite song was? I have, and I’ve never really been able to answer it until tonight when my answer came down to me from the god of iTunes shuffle. This is my answer: “Like a Prayer” by Madonna. It really just doesn’t get old for me. I wouldn’t say Madonna is my all-time favorite artist, but that song has been sitting on top of my list for at least five years now. It’s catchy and upbeat, but it doesn’t get stuck in my head. It’s singalongable. It fills me with energy. If I ever get a speeding ticket, it will be because I was listening to this song while driving.

As far as Madonna songs go, the runner up for my favor is “Express Yourself”, with honorable mention going to “Borderline”. As far as artists who have songs that give me a rush like Madonna’s do go, the runner up is – for now – Bon Jovi for such delicious adrenaline-rushes as “You Give Love A Bad Name” (is there a better first few seconds anywhere in music? I think not) and, of course, “Livin’ On A Prayer”.

In doing personal research for this mini-feature, I have noticed that iTunes has downloaded not one, not two, but ten new Lin’s Bins for me from the XRT podcasts I’ve subscribed to. Hot dog! For the uninformed, WXRT is a Chicago radio station that I listened to – thanks to the wonders of streaming radio – even when I was on the East coast because I really haven’t ever found anything better. Listen here. You’ll be glad you did?

In other news, my back hurts for no good reason and I am about to take a crowbar to the car outside my window whose alarm will not stop going off, and today may or may not be Charo’s birthday, depending on whether you trust the Dlisted birthday list or IMDb. Me, I can’t decide. I’ll just have to celebrate twice!

In other other news, life is a mystery. Everyone must stand alone. I hear you call my name, and it feels like…

… home.

-@

get that son-a-gun off my tractor!

The news of the morning is that Emily’s notoriety continues to grow all over the Interwebs, now that The Gamer Gene and Grrr have hopped on the “look how cute these are!!” bandwagon. Em’s knitted mushroom desk pals are pretty much the most adorable desk pals ever created so there’s really no surprise there.

In other news, my mother emailed along the recipes I asked for the other day. Unlike last night, today I’m posting super secret family recipes that you or I might actually want to eat, and that might actually go together. I don’t know about you, but prune whip and meringue cookies seems to me like the food combination from hell. Or worse?

Anyway, see the legitimately tasty recipes after the break.

more than a feelin’

I have approximately three (3) buttloads of reading to do for tomorrow. I haven’t looked at my assignments yet, actually, so I can’t be sure, but I do know that I have my most reading-intensive classes back-to-back-to-back tomorrow morning and that gives me the vaguest of senses that I should maybe be doing something.

So I ate a very long dinner while watching nine episodes of Scrubs, and now I’m updating this blog instead of getting started. There are a few reasons for that. One is the fact that I thought up another thing to put on my wishlist: a nice new bike. A street bike with a ladies’ frame. I like the seating position of street bikes, and I like the handlebars, and my current bike is a) too small for me, b) a piece of crap that cost $45 new at Target, and c) rusting into oblivion because I leave it outside all the time.

Cool.

I also am developing a new plan for this blog, maybe? Instead of publishing eighteen thousand little entries in the same day, I’m going to hit “Save” instead of “Publish” each time and just publish the one no more often than once per day.

We’ll see how that goes.

For the record, I actually am enjoying my classes this quarter very much. I have crushes on both my English professors, friends to sit with for Hebrew Bible, and Statistics is early and boring but easy. That being said, I still don’t want to get started on the reading but since I’m basically out of things to write about here I suppose I must.

Oh, except I thought of some more things I wanted to say! Not only am I using this little Internet space of mine to keep track of my miscellaneous wishes for miscellaneous things, but I am also going to use it to keep track of miscellaneous recipes that I have for miscellaneous things so I don’t have to worry about losing little bits of paper! Here’s what I’ve got so far, just so the “recipes” category isn’t so lonely…