Month: August 2005

temperature change

~ brixton ~ Leave a comment

Fall is in the air and I’m tired. As of 10:30am, I had simplified my schedule by dropping my HRE course. As of 11am, I had given in to research interests, confirmed that 40 credit hours doesn’t mean I have to graduate, and picked up another course. Oh well. My current class schedule:

Monday: 501 discussion (Information Organization and Access)
Tuesday: Social Networks & Information
Wednesday: Pragmatic Technology
Thursday: eLearning
Friday: 501 (Information Organization and Access)

If I want to, I can graduate in the spring. The thing is that I really don’t want to – so I’m not sure where that leaves me, but I’m OK with that for the next five minutes.

I made an amazing dinner last night and will be eating leftovers for the next couple of days. Most of the time I really don’t like cooking just for me, but shopping and cooking for one does allow me to buy better ingredients and cook ridiculously wonderful meals that I couldn’t afford if I were cooking for others.

I had a ‘duh’ moment earlier in the week regarding my workout routine – I’ve been really struggling to make it to IMPE because of my work and school schedule, and then it occured to me that there’s a YMCA literally three blocks from my new apartment. I’m going to go check it out sometime in the next week. I can’t say I’m entirely likely to go swim laps at 6am, but having the option to do so at, say, 8am might mean getting to work out more than twice a week.

What else? I read Tricked by Alex Robinson over the weekend, which I really enjoyed. The narrative is much tighter than Box Office Poison, and Robinson does some cool things with the text and the way it represents one character in particular. The novel follows six seemingly independent story lines that collapse together as the story progresses – a washed-up rocker, a temp, a girl in search of her father, a fan who is slowly (or not-so-slowly) losing it, a con-artist, and a heartsick waitress. I think Box Office Poison is the better of the two, but Tricked is well worth the read.

OK, time to find more work to do for the next half hour, then off to the class I just registered for this morning.

mmm, breakfast

~ brixton ~ Leave a comment

Yes, I’m including a cookbook in my “read” list. I suppose I should wait to really pass judgement until I’ve made a few things from it, but I’ve spent a few genuinely fun hours reading the recipes, cooking advice, and other tips in Mollie Katzen’s Sunlight Cafe this week. It’s a really wonderful, cheerful, thorough breakfast cookbook packed with recipes ranging from the really simple – fun things to do with fruit and yogurt – to much more complex – crazy breakfast puddings! If and when I ever get around to making anything good for breakfast this fall, I’ll deffo post more here.

School started this week, and I’m totally exhausted. In other news, and as seen below, I cut off my hair today. Well, I didn’t do it – Jen at Ippatsu did. We talked last week after she chopped off Carl’s hair, and when I went in today and said “I’m in your hands”, she pulled out the magazines, we flipped through and made fun of things, and voila! I have new hair. It requires product *shudders* but I’m saving time in the shower, so it’s all good. I figured it was either pay Jen to do it now, or cut it off in a fit of academia-induced madness in a month or so.

Um, what else? I don’t know. Classes are going to be a lot of work, but good so far. Work has been totally fucking nuts, but the bugs are working themselves out and the new GAs are great. Wednesday and Thursday are going to be 12 hour days every week – in the building from 9-9 – which will suck, but the rest of the week isn’t so bad and will hopefully allow for attending some extra stuff, namely the CAS/Millercomm lecture series and the Modern Critical Theory lecture series. Last night I saw i:scintilla, Form 30, and Relenter under some duress (for a variety of reasons, some more valid than others) but I had a good time and am glad I went, even if I was totally beat this morning.

It’s 1:20am. I’m rambling. Time for sleep so I can hit the farmers’ market before working in the kitchen all day. ‘night.

~ brixton ~ Leave a comment

new plan: make myself so essential and useful to my office that they have no choice but to hire me in 18 months.

alternate plan: revel in the 24 days paid vacation i have coming to me in the next 12 months.

it begins.

Pita Pizza Night

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So last night was the first ‘family dinner’ and damn, we out-did ourselves with the weird and tasty. Here are the pita pizzas I made, as well as other toppings used by my friends:

pizza #1: sweet chili sauce, mushrooms, roma tomatoes, minced green onion, and mozzarella
pizza #2: spinach, mushrooms, goat cheese, and a thick tomato sauce drizzled over the top

other things people put on their pizzas:
peanut sauce
artichokes
zucchini (I hear zucchini on pizza is PHENOMENAL!)
pepperoni
gjetost cheese

We had a couple of mozzarella blends – mozz & asiago & garlic, mozz & basil & (something else) – that were popular and apparently tasty, though I didn’t have any. Seriously, this was such a genius idea. We put the pizzas on individual pitas (2 packs of 10 @ approx $1.50 each from Am-Ko), and each person loaded ’em up with their toppings. We baked them four to a cookie sheet at 300 (?) for 10-12 minutes, or until the cheese looked promising. So easy. So tasty.

Oh, also Hannah made little pizzas with slices of eggplant topped with pepperoni and sauce and cheese. I think that was it, but they looked really really good as well.

~ brixton ~ Leave a comment

I’m so bad at talking about the things I read, which is why it’s a good thing I didn’t stick with lit for a career. Epileptic has been on my to-read list for a while, and I finally got around to it last night/today. It was quietly violent and a little gut-wrenching and mostly a good, intelligent, memorable read. I would’ve liked to have read it in the original language (French) – and am also looking forward to David B’s other work, if I can find it.

School starts in a couple of days, and I’m not sure I’m ready for it. This summer has been a really good one – really busy, lots of things going on, lots of friends around, lots of changes in other people’s lives but mostly an even keel for me. I feel like I need to spend the next four days seeing everyone and doing everything and being everywhere to make up for the lack of anything but school that will be the next four months – four classes plus 2/3rds time plus part time equals me turning into a zombie girl. This semester promises to be good and challenging in a number of ways, but I’m loathe to let go of the late nights on the dance floor, the lazy afternoons spent talking to friends in front of Aroma, the hot sun on my back while I swim laps at IMPE, the days when I come home from work with good intent but end up napping instead. It’s been a long time since I had such a genuinely all-around good summer, and I’m terrifically grateful.

Faithful

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I moved last week. I also painted two rooms of my new apartment, and bleached damned near everything in my old apartment. I did this with one full day off work, and with minimal help. Because of those things and because it’s the end of the summer and because I’m just tired, I decided I needed to read something trashy for a change (not that all my reading is highbrow – just, whatev). Faithful was the perfect choice. There were a few parts that were poignant, but most of it was just damned trashy – a total throw-away beach read. I do have to say two things about it, though – there’s a lot of raunchy sex, if that’s your thing, and OH YES, this novel made me feel worlds better about mine.

la rochelle

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While I was vising Oday in France, we spent a day in La Rochelle, a port town on the Atlantic coast. We took the train in the morning from Poitiers to La Rochelle, arriving with plenty of time to wander before lunch. We passed up on visiting the three towers that guard the port, opting instead to explore the city. We saw all matter of bizarre treats, a man cleaning up dog shit with a scooter-vacuum, lots of signs pointing to attractions that only barely qualified as attractions (La Rochelle must have a VERY active tourism board), people in strange clothes, and a MUSEE DES AUTOMATES. We stopped for lunch at a little cafe where O had oysters (moules) that had him nearly in tears, and I had a magnificent ham and cheese crepe. Mipsy, our constant travel companion, held things that were just her size. In the afternoon after lunch, we walked along the mouth of the port, O on the path and me up on the wall. Sailboats were coming into the harbor, and the light was – not quite as saturated as the light in Spain, but remarkable in the way of afternoons caught between winter and spring.

There was so much more to that day – ridiculous jokes, lots of laughter, constant pointing at the ocean – but what I’m remembering right now is sitting by the harbor, our feet dangling over and near the water, drinking Cacolac and watching the sun linger casting shadows on the water, killing time before our train back to Poitiers. Tired and happy. I’m not sure what brought this to mind today, but La Rochelle has been on my mind all day.