Turkey Mum

Sometimes you'd be surprised at what you can find in the local grocery store. I was out running errands the weekend before Turkey Day and had some time to kill before my evening plans, and decided the best use of that time was to go to the grocery store. There wasn't anything on my shopping list, cause I had just gone the day before to Trader Joe's. So I already knew I would be overspending cause I was "looking" for groceries to buy.

I got some hummus, taco seasoning mix, sponges, etc. Nothing all that exciting. But walking past the floral section I noticed some really cute flower arrangements. I thought about buying some for the big Turkey Day dinner, but thought bringing pie is probably more than enough. So I kept walking.

Then I saw the most creative thing - a mum, dolled up to look like a turkey with pipe cleaners. I couldn't resist and sifted through to find the most "turkey looking" one and brought it home.

They did a pretty good job. The picture doesn't show it well enough, but there are gold sparkles on the mum itself. The eyes are just lop-sided enough to make the turkey look dopey, especially when it leans the same direction as the thing that hangs from its neck (which I just learned is called a wattle). It fits the color scheme of my kitchen so there it sat to accompany us at dinner and any other time we're at the table (which is almost all the time).

It's totally an impulse buy and way overpriced for a single mum. But the entertainment value is well worth it, cause it's still going strong.

I Caught a Gigantic Cold!

Well no, not really. I didn't actually catch a cold, but the GIGANTICmicrobes are just that much more fun and more cute than the GIANTmicrobes. Come on.. admit it! It's adorable! and it's blue! and if you know me you'd know that my favorite color in a stuffed animal is just irresistible. Alas I did resist taking this cold home from the Museum of Science store and brought home a reusable plastic cup+straw instead. Better for the planet that way (and less than half the price!). I won't stop gawking at it though. It's enormous! I love it! =)

Washer Agitator Filter Took Flight

Today was laundry day, and I did 3 loads because I put off one load from the last laundry day, and a bunch of towels needed to be done as well.

Apparently this was too many loads for the poor washer to take. The first load went ok. The second load was sounding kind of odd, where during the spin cycle it was shaking a whole lot (for a load that's not as heavy as the first). I stopped it to check that it wasn't off balance, and everything looked good.

When the third load started it seemed fine, but I had gone down to the basement when the spin cycle was going and didn't hear the really awful clanging until I came back upstairs. It stopped shortly when the cycle ended and when I opened the lid, I found the agitator filter had detached and scrapped along the edge so much it left plastic pieces all along the well opening.

I took the part to Sears and asked how much it would cost to replace it. The part itself isn't too bad, but not knowing whether the original clanging was indicative of a larger problem, and why there's this oily residue all over the place, tells me I might need a technician to come out and make sure there's nothing else wrong. Given that will cost a pretty penny, after the part is added, it's already half the cost of a new front load washer.

The unfortunate thing is, I currently have a connected stacked washer/dryer, so I can't replace the washer without replacing the dryer. Sigh.... I guess it's time to buy a new set of washer and dryer. This time, I'm going for separate washer and dryer so they can be independently serviced and replaced.

The Minion Family

So I went back and created a whole family of Despicable Me Minions. Every single one of them has a different combination of hair, eyes, mouth, clothing, and arm positions. I don't believe I repeated any. Here they are in alphabetical order.

Baby Eye

Bewildered Eye

Dancer

Dopey

Inspector Eye

Miss L-eye-lac

Mr. Boss

Newton

Sleepy Eye

Tool

Despicable Me Minions

A whole bunch of us went to see Despicable Me at the school movie showing last night, since we all managed to miss it when it came out in the theaters. The most fun were the minions!

So I went searching for fun minion artifacts and found a Minion Maker, where you can make your own minion! Here's a bewildered one I just made. Sort of representative of my psychological state at work at the moment. =P

I'm sure I'll be going back and making some more funky and fun ones if I get time to play around with it more.

Life Without Blackberry

Original image from crackberry.com

It's been 5 days since I turned in my blackberry and I'm uncertain how I feel about life without it.

The fact is I've had that continuously buzzing creature within a 5 ft vicinity of me for about 3 years. The only time in recent memory that I can recall not having it near me is on my trip to Mexico, and perhaps my trip to Hawaii as well. Other than that, it has served as my access to the world without a computer, holder of directions (I email Google Map directions to myself and have my Gmail open to the directions when I'm going somewhere) and as rescue navigator (though only through Google Maps cause the models I had didn't have GPS) when I get lost, which is more times than I would like to admit.

Most of those things can be mitigated with some planning (i.e. print directions before I leave the house). It's not horrible to not have access to my email 24/7. Kind of a nice separation, actually. However the one thing that has proven slightly difficult to manage is when there are back to back meetings. For 3 years I didn't have to worry about it because the blackberry would alert me to the next meeting, and where it will take place. I can also get instant updates to those meetings because Outlook was on the blackberry, and if the meeting got moved, I would know immediately.

I already encountered this on Friday at work, where I was heading out to my welcome lunch, heading directly to a meeting after, and then going to another one after that. I had the foresight to bring all the notebooks with me to lunch, and write down the location of the meetings on my notebook before leaving for lunch. But if I had back to back meetings all day long, this would be much more difficult.

Still, this might be manageable if I truly am going to back to back meetings and had my laptop with me. I would have access to my email wherever I went (assuming the battery lasted all day long). It's not pretty, but it can be done.

To throw a curve ball in the mix, cell reception is bad inside the buildings, such that it drains the power of my phone if I leave it on during the day. So I turn it off by the time I get into my office, which means I don't even have my cell to keep time. Now this is interesting, because I truly have not been without my cell near me in years, except for when I was in Mexico! Now I have to find my wrist watch. I don't even know if I have a working one lying around. I might need to rely on the Windows 7 clock widget or something crazy, assuming again, I have my laptop with me at all times.

This of course, would be mitigated (somewhat) if I have a smart phone device that is hooked up to my work email and calendar. Not sure how that resolves the low signal / battery issue though. So I am going to try to tough it out without a smart phone for awhile.

For a person who works in a high tech industry I'm surprisingly without gadgets. I have a Gen 3 iPod (which I only got used from a friend after my Gen 1 killed itself), I don't have a GPS, and my personal phone is a good old feature flip phone. I only recently bought a netbook (first major gadget since I purchased my digital camera in 2005). So I wonder, now that I've been with a blackberry for 3 years, how long I can go without it. We'll just have to wait and see.

Be Margaret

This pic says it all! =D

Original is a collage of celebrity athletes on the adidas miCoach website's homepage. As a going away lunch celebration, one of my colleagues, Ryan, who is obviously a very talented visual designer, photoshoped me into the banner. The crazy thing is all the photos except for 2 were taken during the lunch. That's some fast fingers! :)

Here's the original for comparison.

Riding Reno

That's me riding Reno! She's 21 and full of life. The whole ride she was trying to gallop and wanted to turn in different directions than the rest of the group. She's the biggest horse that I rode on this trip. I think Elvis from my first ride in Phoenix was larger. Yesterday I rode Val, which is all black and very slow. It's all good. My ride count now totals 4 and I wish I could do this every morning. But for now I'm glad I have had the chance to ride as many times as I have. :-)

In Ottawa..... Illinois!

No, still didn't leave the country. I love how most town names here make you think you are though. :-) This statue and fountain are in Washington Square where Lincoln and Douglas had their first debate for a US Senate seat. The first time Lincoln said all men are created equal and it was central to his argument.

Riding Casper and Avoiding Biting Lady Bugs

No, not the ghost. Although I can see how you might be tempted to think that given it's that time of the year. I got to ride a pretty horse name Casper today on the trail ride right on the Fox River resort property. The weather was great for it too. It's probably 75 out, and there's a nice breeze along all the time. I got on the 2:30 PM ride so it wasn't in the dead heat of high noon. I will definitely do it again tomorrow, and the day after, and possibly even the day after that if I can get away with it.

So the one weird thing is the lady bugs here bite. That's right, you read that right. They BITE. Those things are mean and they swarm! I'll find out later just how many chunks they took out of me.

The embarrassing thing is I wore a v-neck tank top today, and they kept going down my chest. I had to reach into my shirt more than once to get the bug out of my tank. Good thing the other riders were mostly women or girls. If I can stand the heat, I am definitely wearing a long sleeve tee tomorrow.

In the mean time, I'm going to go enjoy my jacuzzi after I figure out what to do for dinner. :)

Chicago

The primary reason for coming out this way was for Bill and Yelena's wedding. They held it in the Architectural Artifacts building, which is a very cool venue. It was great to see lots of familiar faces from our days back in the dorm, even though we're in all parts of the country now. I'll get around to uploading all the photos later when I have a better internet connection.

It was actually rainy on Saturday, the day of the wedding. I managed to get myself up to the John Hancock Observatory. It was worth it because the wind was blowing hard enough that the rain was going side ways up there (94 floors up). I almost thought it was snow given the way it was floating, but it was only rain. Crazy physics!

Of course Chicago is known for all the great architecture. I have a ton of pics, but it'll be too much to show here. This is the Cloud Gate in Millennium Park. Everyone here calls it the Silver Bean. I'm on the left side of the photo, wrapped up in a hat and scarf because it was actually kinda cold.

Visions of Eternity by Salvador Dai

One of the coolest things was going to the Art Institute of Chicago. True to all my friends' and colleagues' recommendations, it has the largest amount of Impressionist art I have ever encountered in one place. I took many photos (totally allowed) of many great works by Monet, Renoir, and Degas. Additionally there were a lot of great Dali work like the one at right. The "Melted Clock" wasn't here, but it was still great. I also bought myself a very expensive canvas tote, but it had The Gashly Tinycrumbs by Edward Gorey on it and I couldn't pass it up.

I went to the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum as well. It was really cool to see one of the most complete T-Rex fossils in the world (Sue). It looks so real! I was definitely in a Jurassic Park moment here.

I learned a bunch about the world on this trip to the Field Museum. I learned that there were actually 5 major mass extinctions, not just the one 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs were wiped out. I'm still wondering how they figured those other ones out given the first one occurred something like 430 million years ago (there abouts). It's amazing what we can learn these days through science and technology.

I got to do a little comparison between my own feet and that of a dinosaur. I think I would have been road kill within 30 seconds if I lived in that era. That's just ridiculous!

All in all, it was awesome to see the city. I finally got a sense of where East was by the end of my 3 day stint there, and then it's off back to Norway (boonies) for some R&R before heading to Indiana.

In Norway...... Illinois! :-)

Arrived without getting lost just before midnight. I've forgotten how the lodges are set up and am glad to see the jacuzzi in the room. My turtle is wearing his new gift from Slava in front of the nicely folded 4 leaf clover towels. I'm ready for a good night's sleep!

One Whole Farm Share in 3 Nights

There was this one crazy week where I decided I was going to be able to use up  the entire CSA (farm share) that Iris has for the week. Mind you this normal share is meant for 4 people to eat. I managed to cook it all in 3 nights of crazy cooking.

The share of the week consisted of 4 lbs of tomatoes, a dozen ears of corn (of which we only took 10), about 8 cubanelle peppers, 2 zucchini, 2 lbs of potatoes, and 2 egg plants.

On Wednesday night, I made my tomato and corn soup, a giant pot of it. This time I cored the tomatoes first. But I still missed one step - boiling them first to get the skin off. Otherwise it would have been a smoother texture.

Tahini substitute - peanut butter

On Thursday night, I made baba ganoush from the egg plants (double batch), and the recipe called for tahini. But I didn't have any, and after a brief search of the great Tubes that is the Internet I found that I could substitute peanut butter - so in it goes into the lemon juice! :-)

For the egg plant, you needed to roast it first, then let it "drain". I stuck it in a salad spinner to expedite.

Also on that night I made potato and zucchini pancakes (effectively latkes). I didn't quite realize when the recipe says it will serve 8 people, that it meant it would be the entire meal for 8 people with nothing else. So I was frying batter for about 3 hrs. That was a long night of cooking.

To finish it all off on Friday night, we stuffed the cubanelle peppers with chicken sausage and baked them. It was super easy, just remove the raw sausage portion from the casing by squeezing the meat out onto the hollowed half pepper shells and bake. To finish, top with marinara sauce, which I doctored with some fried garlic and onions.

And voila, the meal is served! Thanks Iris for taking all these awesome pics! It makes my food look so much more appetizing than the fuzzy ones I take with my little flip phone's camera. :-)

The final product - basil chicken sausage stuffed cubanelle peppers with apple sauce drizzled potato and zucchini pancakes. Creamy tomato and corn soup to follow. Tortilla chips and baba ganoush as appetizers.

Dinner is Served

Cod fillets with the salsa I made this morning and store bought guacamole, served with the tomato, corn and basil soup. I like the plating part of dinner best. It's the most visual part of all the preparation. :-)

Sunday Cooking Adventure

So it seems my original hypothesis that "if I have a nicer kitchen then I would cook more" is partially true. Having the space conducive to cooking is only one piece of the puzzle. Having ingredients to cook with is the other major piece, if not the larger of the two.

My roommate has a farm share, and every week many green vegetables that I cannot identify show up in the fridge. I try to help make a few things here and there when I happen to know a recipe that will use those ingredients.

This has partially contributed to me not going grocery shopping in very many weeks. I actually would need to check my credit card bills to find out when it actually was that I had gone grocery shopping last.

Creamy Tomato, Corn and Basil Soup
(without any actual cream)

This is certainly not a bad problem to have. I made a tasty soup that came from a need to use up some tomatoes from this week and corn from 2 weeks ago. I added in some fresh basil from my one and only edible plant on my porch (thanks Alisa!) and voila! Tomato, Corn and Basil Soup. It actually came out so well I wished I had more tomatoes and corn. There's only 2 small servings in that pot.

Though being an inexperienced cook does create some interesting results. It's ok, it's all in the name of science. Ok, maybe not really science, but at least it's always a learning experience. =P

Accidentally Pureed Salsa

So as I said, we have tomatoes this week. We also have banana peppers, which I figured I could use as a bell pepper substitute.

There's no cilantro this week, and I had already used up all my lime juice from the half a dozen batches I made before. So I decided to make do with other ingredients instead. The jar of store bought salsa in the pantry lists sugar, vinegar, and garlic as ingredients, so I added those to my salsa. My tomato dicing techniques were horrid, so the salsa was too chunky. But I don't have a food processor so I thought I would just have to live with the super chunky salsa.

Then I thought, why not use the blender to dice it down more? How much of a difference is there between a blender and a food processor anyway? Well, I tried it and learned what the difference was. The blender/smoothie maker I have is made to completely pulverize ice and fruit chunks, so the salsa ended up being accidentally pureed. Oops.

Properly Chunky Salsa

Unsatisfied with the results I tried again. This time I thought, how about I only pulverize the tomatoes and then throw in my regularly diced unions and banana peppers.

It achieved the desired consistency and I was able to put the properly chunky salsa in a jar. It looks almost professional! =D

And last but not least, we had some leftover pita bread, so for breakfast I made some scrambled eggs, and created breakfast burrito / pockets with eggs, salsa, and some store bought guacamole. The leftover pita bread was cut up and baked into pita chips, and now I can snack on the leftover guac and the ridiculous amount of salsa I have leftover.

8 tomatoes, 5 banana peppers, 6 eggs, 2 onions, 2 stalks of corn later, this Sunday's cooking adventure comes to an end with breakfast burritos/pockets, salsa, pita chips, and soup. No ingredients were wasted and my fridge is ready for another batch of alien greens next week. Not bad for an inexperienced cook. :-)

Tiger, Fish, Crab, Oh My!

So I went to Newport Beach in Rhode Island for the first time with some friends. It was a very relaxing time - the weather was just right and the beach was moderately crowded with other sunbathers. The water was a good temp and I had great company.

We drove in a jeep with the top down around the neighborhood and I got a glimpse at some of those famous mansions Newport is known for. At some point I'll make another trip to go tour those places, but probably not any time soon. I feel poor enough already.

One thing about this trip that stood out from just another beach trip, was this one park where there was so much wind kites could totally fly themselves. A kite vendor had set up shop and the sky was filled with wonders.

I was enamored. I could have spent the whole day just watching all those creatures fly around if there was the time. But we had food to eat and places to be, so we only stopped for short while. But I was glad I snagged a shot of the giant flying crab and the puffer fish. I took several shots of the crab in fact, because I just loved the concept of a flying crab. Where else would I have seen such a sight? See more shots of the kites on flickr.

A Festive Occasion... with Saris and a White Stallion

Ankur and Anca's wedding ceremony was gorgeous in so many ways. It doesn't hurt that Ankur rode a white stallion to steal away the beautiful Anca in a red sari. Fairy tales do exist!

Golden Gate Bridge

I was long overdue for vacation, and took the opportunity to finally walk across the Golden Gate Bridge when I went to SF for a friend's wedding. I've been to SF, oh, about half a dozen times in the last decade. It really is quite a shame that in all that time I have not done this one, basic, touristy thing.

I can, however, proudly say I've ridden the Cable Cars about a dozen times or more.

Maybe next time I'll splurge on one of those little go carts and zip down Lombard.

Size 14 big red shoes!

Yup, size matters. ;-)

Shaun's got big feet because he's a tall tall guy. How tall? I dunno. You have to ask him. But that means finding shoes that fit him will limit the options significantly.

That's him in the adidas store looking for shoes that fit, and well, if he doesn't mind looking like Bozo the Clown he could go for those.

Experiencing adidas miCoach: Discovering Workout Trends

The long weekend was good for catching up with friends, sleep, and…. workouts! The weather was pretty good on a few days and I went out to explore new grounds and new neighborhoods. I found that the bike path was a great place to run because it was well shaded with lots of trees and a nice breeze came through frequently too.

I got a few workouts in and am now almost a quarter of the way through my plan!

It’s exciting to see progress in terms of the plan, and it’s pretty cool too when you look at overall progress over time. I’ve been at it for about a year now, and the history graphs show I’ve been consistent in some areas and sporatic in others.

Here’s my Time breakdown per month in the last year. I was definitely a bit overzealous when I started and there was definitely some slacking around the winter and the holidays.

But taking a look at the Distance breakdown it looks a bit more even.

My Pace breakdown is pretty even as well. Good to know that after the winter hiatus I didn’t regress much.

The most interesting one of all is the Heart Rate breakdown. The system captures how much time I actually spent in each heart rate zone during my workouts, and colors the bar graph in with the zone color I was in.

This graph is revealing because it shows I haven’t been working as hard as in the beginning. I spent a lot more time in red in the early months, and I’m barely in any red in the last two. I credit that to following the plan better, which doesn’t require me to work super hard to gain results. Work smarter not harder. :)

Another way to see workout trends is in the Workout Journal, which is linked both from the Track menu and also on the bottom left of the History graphs. It shows data for every workout I’ve done in a table format.

Selecting the column headings will sort all the data by that stat. Since I’m on the lose weight plan I wanted to see workouts where I’m burning the most calories.

The sorted view shows top calorie burning workouts are all from my current plan, so I’m heading in the right direction with this plan!