Christmas is almost here!

I find it much harder to get into the Christmas frame of mind without snow. So far this year we haven't had any significant snow at all, and only had two instances of snow sticking. But tomorrow there is a forecast for some. All I really want is about three inches on the ground so you can't see the grass. Grass, which I might add, is still mostly green here because the weather has been so "great". Ug. I am never resigned to cold unless there is snow!

All I have left between me and home (and thusly Christmas) is one final paper, hopefully just five pages long. We'll see how it goes.

Merry Christmas!

Mason jars mason jars

I like few things more than using items in ways that they were not meant for. My newest discovery (thanks internet!) is that you can use a mason jar as a blender attachment.

Delicious multi-tasking

It turns out that the part of the blender with the blade screws onto a mason jar perfectly. So far I've blended up coffee beans to make coffee chocolate (melt chocolate in double boiler, coarsely blend espresso beans, mix, let sit for a few minutes, spoon onto wax paper, freeze, consume), and this smoothie (yogurt, blueberries, strawberries, milk). But really, I mean come on. The possibilities are endless. Whipped cream? Butter? Ice cream shakes? Anything else you can blend, but in smaller quantities?

But also, I just love mason jars. I drink tea and coffee out of them whenever I drink tea or coffee, because they have lids that screw on and absolutely prevent spilling. I store all manner of things in them, and greatly intend on having a large collection of large mason jars for baking item storage. Mom just gave me one with a handle (see picture) which is nice, though I do need to make a cozy for it.

Audiobook mania

I love audiobooks. Forrest and I went through a lengthy period where we would both listen to an audiobook as we went to sleep, which was always fun because you might fall asleep at one part and wake up at an entirely different one. My favorites (almost to the exclusion of all else) were a recording of Little Women read by Kate Reading, the whole of the Harry Potter series (obviously the American version, which, like the cover art, is obviously superior), and the dramatic reading of The Chronicles of Narnia. Little Women with Kate Reading is by far my favorite. I got it as a birthday present a few years ago and it is an obvious must for all long car rides. Kate isn't, I guess, the best I've heard, but I have grown quite attached to her, and thusly will not listen to another version of Little Women. If only she had done Little Men, too....

Quite recently I rediscovered Librivox.org and oh my. So many audiobooks, you can't even imagine! And all for free! Of course, I have discovered the depths of my audiobook snobbery. For instance, I really will not consider any book not read in an English accent. Unfortunately, they are very hard to find, but I have found one woman who has read so many of my favorite books and so I have bookmarked a lot of her catalog. I am about two chapters away from finishing her version of Pride and Prejudice, and intend to start next on Anne's House of Dreams, or perhaps (finally and at last!) and decent version of The Secret Garden, which, I assure you with all the snobbishness of my snobbery, is very difficult to find indeed (do not even get me started on the Focus on the Family version). But beyond that, I have found a version of Little Men in an English accent (Kate Reading does not, in fact, have an accent, and Little Men is an American book bred and born, so I am not sure why I insist on it here. No matter). I cannot seem to find an English-accented version of any Anne book except for House of Dreams, but my day may yet come!

Audio books are so wonderful, though, as you can do all manner of things while listening to them. Just yesterday I made a whole batch of coffee chocolate and two batches of cookies while listening to Pride and Prejudice. Another advantage (or perhaps, disadvantage) is I start speaking like the books. If I am listening to Jane Austen, for instance, my text messages get quite long and use many more words in a quite un-American style. But that's okay. I'm not really upset at all.

Moral of post: Listen to more audiobooks, and do so at Librivox for free.

New Adventures in Old Tea

There's this tea that Aveda salons carry that I love, called Thé Tea. It has this interesting after-sweetness that is great because then I don't add sugar. The only downside is that it costs $15/20 tea bags, so I usually just get it from my aunt for Christmas. Last night I was buzzing around the internet and found a recipe for it and decided to try it. Thankfully the local health food store has a pretty nice selection of dried herbs, and had everything I needed.

Recipe:
1 1/4 cup powdered licorice root
1 cup peppermint
1/8 cup fennel powder
1/8 cup basil (I used sweet basil, but I can only imagine it works with both)

The whole set up cost me less than $5, and it tastes exactly the same. My only problem was that since the licorice root and fennel were powdered, a tea ball wouldn't be of much use, so I sewed up a nice little drawstring teabag for myself. I think it'll be a pretty rare day that I purchase teabags again. I got a cup of peppermint for about $0.40, and since mint and this tea are my favourite and pretty much all I drink, I might as well just buy the straight herbs. Plus, I can make up my own teas! How fun!

Isn't my teabag fashionable?

Pets

Today I cleaned the turtle tank at the school where I have my practicum. It was fun and all but I don't think I'll ever have turtles. You can't knit sweaters for turtles.

Weird things I like

-Fruit on otherwise normal pizza
-Cinnamon and tomato sauce
-Flannel sheets in the summer
-Making up recipes
-Most foods
-Knitting graffiti
-Bubbles all the time
-Big flannel shirts
-Slide stairs
-Mini animals
-Mini houses

The day before I came back to Cornell this year I stopped by the high school to pick up a copy of my old A.P. Psychology textbook for Forrest (I already bought my own copy. Nerd alert). I’ve been back on several occasions since graduation, but every time the smell and atmosphere of Cedar Falls High School hits me in the gut and time travels back to journalism classes, the Alpha room, and speech team. It’s a powerful whack out of reality and into the past. The smell always stays the same.

I unconsciously start becoming more conscious of who is in the hallway with me (librarians are notoriously strict about the cellphone policy), I jump down the last three stairs like I always did, and peer around corners to make sure it’s okay that I’m out of class without a pass. Eventually I shake off the old feelings, talk on my cellphone in front of a librarian, and stride confidently through the halls. But for that first minute or so I’m just a shadow on the wall again.

Kids with cars...

(This is a draft I saved like a month and a half ago and promptly forgot to finish, ta-da)

Tonight Marshall, Sarah, Danny, Cate, Rachel, Alyssa, Henry, Colin, Brooke, a few other lovely souls and I went to the state park and had a grill out/bonfire/italian baby talent show/sing out/dance party. It was lovely. I can't quite describe how wonderful it is to be out with people who are a little crazy. We ran around and didn't fall in the lake and made banana boats and ate fresh tomatoes from Henry's garden. It's nice to just lay around with people and eat food.

Last Night I Went to a Honky-Tonk Bar.

I was not really expecting what I got. I thought I was getting myself into more of a Jane Austen-type scene, with skirts and reels and bowing. So please imagine my surprise when we pulled up to the “Dance-Mor” in Swisher, Iowa and I saw 10 legitimate looking cowboys leaning against the building, smoking like chimneys. I clung to my hopeful delusion and thought that maybe they were just simply local color who enjoyed dances from the 1800s. 

This delusion was quickly dispelled when my friends (who apparently knew exactly what we were getting in to) and I walked through the doors to hear an electric guitar make itself loudly evident. We exchanged our $6 for tickets from a severely bearded man and walked through the double doors into everything I was not expecting: Oversized belt buckles (regardless of gender), oversized cowboy hats, flannel, WalMart chic, cowboy boots, and dim lighting. Despite my reservations about the government telling me what to do, I silently thanked them for the Iowa Clean Air Act. 

 

As we walked further into the fine establishment that is the Dance-Mor, I realised what kind of dancing I was expected to do: Synchronized. I have a pretty well established phobia/general ineptness at synchronized dancing, which was made especially evident when I attended a Zumba class and ended up in tears. I found a chair and made myself responsible for watching over everyone else's sundries. And then, just to make sure every person in the room knew that this girl, dressed as I was in non-cowboy boots/hat/flannel, did not belong anywhere near a dance hall in Swisher, Iowa, I began to crochet a scarf.

All in all, it felt like a high school dance except with beer and very little grinding. But I did have fun, mostly because it was just so entertaining to be expecting one thing and to get the complete opposite. Like that one time when I drank milk and thought it was going to be Mountain Dew. Yeah, kind of like that.

NSO

NSO was okay this year. Last year it was inarticulately fabulous, I had wonderful kids, they've pretty much all gone on to do wonderful things, etc. This year, training was great (as usual, how could it not be), and I made SO many new friends with the other PAs and staff members. For the sake of my sanity, here is a list of the awesome things that happened during NSO:

-I love all the PAs, world without end!
-Bonding time was lovely
-On move-in day my job was to smile, wave, and knit
-All of my children were polite to professors and myself

Too bad I can't do it next year. Student teaching!

Chickenz

I learned how to debone and deskin chicken breasts today! And I'm making chicken stock tomorrow! Hooray!

Two in Two

My lovely parents took a short vacation while my lovely brother was in Colorado, which left me and Groucho home alone for a couple days. I took advantage of the (relative) peace and quiet and invented a couple new recipes that are really just riffs on normal things.

The first one I made for my lovely friends Honor and Torie. I'd been wanting to have a dinner party for awhile and it happened that they could both come over on Friday and then I have basil growing out front so it just kind of fell together.
I made some chicken, which is always good. First I flatted the chicken out so it wasn't quite as thick. Then I combined some flour, fresh and dried basil, lemon pepper and salt. I dipped the chicken in a beaten egg and then into the flour, after which I browned it in a pan and then put it in a small pan (along with lemon juice and a little more fresh basil) and placed it in a 350 degree oven for... Probably an hour. Very tasty, though I would have browned it a little more.

I also fried fresh (red) tomatoes. This was a completely new experiment! I dipped them in some olive oil that had fresh basil and lemon juice in it, and then into the flour mixture from before. I melted some butter in a nonstick pan and fried away! They tasted MUCH better than I thought they would. They actually went pretty well on the baked bread with olive oil that I also made.


Tonight I was hungry and didn't have bread and had had cereal for breakfast. I got out a pound of hamburger, fried it up with some onions, garlic and green peppers, and then added some cooked wild rice. I added some mozzerlla cheese before I ate it and let it melt a little. Very good!

As always I was to busy eating all these good things to get pictures of them, but I promise you that they were wonderful and my tablesettings were something indeed to behold.

Best sandwich

I made a really good sandwich today. I'd show you a picture but it was so good I ate it before I even thought about pictures (or anything else).

Ingredients:
- Homemade bread
-cream cheese mixed with a little lemon basil from my plant
-Tomato fresh from the Farmers Market, sprinkled with salt and lemon pepper
-Caramalized candy onion (from the Farmers Market too)
-a little fresh grated parmesan cheese.

It was so good I laughed while I was eating it. No jokes.

Mini

Recently I've fallen in love with mini cows. And mini sheep. And mini goats. Picture:

mydairycow.com

 

Yes, this woman literally has a cow in her kitchen and it only comes up to the countertop.

sodahead.com

 Again, a kid the size of a rabbit.
Personally, I think that among the trifecta (cows, sheep, goats) of new mini farm animals (Horses are old news at this point), goats are the best. Not as stupid as sheep, but with the benefit of fiber production, not as (presumably?) smelly as cows, but with the benefit of milk. All in a nice, compact, dog-sized animal that has potential to be housetrained. I'm excited.

Small houses

I love small houses. No joke. They're lovely. The whole idea behind small houses is downscaling to just the things you need. This part is hard for me sometimes, as I find myself thinking "Well, couldn't I use that for something? Isn't there a way to upcycle or reuse it?" and then I keep it and never actually get around to upcycling or reusing. My current vice is t-shirts. I've been making yarn out of them to make rugs like this one. But I digress (blogging is so fun! So many things to say!)

Small houses, though. There's a lot of diversity in the size (well, as much as you can have within the "small" range) (which is usually between >100-1000 square feet). Okay, picture:

tinyhouseblog.com

 I believe this is one of Jay Schafer's creations. Mr. Schafer built his first house in Iowa City, which just makes my heart a little happier to see my state getting a drop on all the others. But look at it. Look at how small. This one would be somewhere around 100sqft. Click the link below for more wonderful stuff (their "Tiny House in a Landscape" posts are particularly wonderful), or just google "small houses" or "Jay Schafer" and you'll get enough links to keep you up all night.



It's my dream to live in a small house. Probably not that small (100sqft is pretty hardcore, not going to lie), but somewhere in the 800-1200 range. With a garden. And a mini goat. Those are two posts unto themselves though :)

Away

I went away for a week and you wouldn't believe the things that changed! The corn tasseled out, my basil plant grew and inch and a half, my mint got flowers, Groucho looked like he lost weight (it may have been an optical illusion), and last but certainly least, the cicadas started their yearly assault on my hearing.

Around the corner:
-Sweet corn
-Getting my list of PGMs for fall NSO!
-Dog sitting
-Obtaining more things to make tea out of this fall!