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dissolve 1 cup splenda in 2 cups boiling water
add 2 cups meyer lemon juice (I used 5 lemons)
chill

ice cream maker until thickens

harden in freezer

recipe called for zest but I forgot

next I want to try frozen yogurt

After a morning workout and a lovely brunch with friends (Sunday is the day I get to cheat on the New Year’s diet resolution), I noted it was a gorgeous day and I actually didn’t feel all tired and lazy.

So got some laundry started and picked up the clutter in the sunroom. Then couldn’t resist being outside so got started on a long-delayed and not-much-fun task…. scraping old paint on my exterior woodwork in preparation for painting.

When along comes my neighbor, who informs me that her adult son – whose day job consists of handling all the repairs for their string of rental houses – has been looking for handyman work, to make extra cash. I expressed interest and she promised to send him by once he was home for the evening.

So since it looked like I’ll be able to outsource that unpleasant task, I turned to other jobs – cleared out some weeds and brush from one bed, pruned an out-of-control vine, replaced some rotted wood on a trellis. He stopped by shortly after dark and agreed to tackle scraping, sanding, repairs/patching and painting my woodwork starting week after next.

So at the end of the day I accomplished a fair amount of useful stuff but if my neighbor’s son works out as a competent handyman, that’ll have been the biggest achievement of the day by far! I really need to offload some of the basic non-creative maintenance work around the house so I can move forward with some of the more creative improvements I’ve been planning (sometimes for years…).

The new year’s resolutions have crystalized – K has decided he wants us to do “healthy eating” to join our daily exercise routine. I told him if he’s going to resolve it, he has to quantify it in a way that can be measured – so he’ll know if he kept the resolution. Since we both could stand to lose a few pounds, he’s quantified it as the following (not all that extreme) rules:
1) Obvious treats (chips, ice cream, etc) only on special occasions
2) “naughty meals” (eg cheeseburger with fries, or all-you-can-eat buffet) no more than twice a week.
3) Existing stash of holiday treats (cookies, candy) is rationed to one or two pieces per day;
4) Self-regulation of portions, etc, with a weekly weigh-in. If not at ideal weight, must be making steady progress in that direction; if at ideal weight must be maintaining it.

So that’s what he laid out. I’ll be very intrigued to see if this lasts – he’s said we’ll eat healthy before and it usually lasts until the next time Randall’s has a sale on Blue Bell.

Meanwhile there’s a shaggy kitty – obviously a young Tom – who’s decided to target our house. He hangs out in front or back, meowling piteously. He doesn’t appear to have a collar. He’s got a good thick coat and (from a distance) doesn’t seem too thin; his ears are the typical jagged mess that you see on tomcats who’ve been out catting for a while.

Our indoor beasties are quite engaged in his visits, being alternately fascinated and frightened. He’s stuck around through most of the weekend and we’re starting to cave. I’ve told K that if we give him food, we have to do the whole thing – capture him, do the vet check-up, shots, neutering, and get him registered. I also warned K that if he pets the thing, he needs to scrub up good before petting our cats – at least until we have had him checked for FIV, etc. Then I suppose we’d have to figure out if he can be an indoor cat or if he’ll become our emergency-backup-cat who lives outdoors. If the latter, we need a setup so he doesn’t have to fight the raccoon and the possum for his food.

As a crass side-comment… wow, it’s been a while since I saw an un-neutered adolescent male cat. I’d forgotten how … obvious it is to identify the cat’s gender in that case.

For some years I didn’t make any New Years Resolutions. I thought I wasn’t likely to keep them so saw no point in making them.

Then last year, when K asked if I’d like to make any resolutions, I made two – one half-joking, the other less so. I said that I wanted to keep my job (just started in Dec ’08) for longer than I kept the job I accepted at the end of ’07. And I said I would exercise every day. I’ll let you decide which one was the joke.

Amazingly enough, I’ve kept both resolutions. I confess that "exercise" has meant, on a couple of low days, a 20-minute treadmill trudge while I cough and wheeze and blow my nose the entire time. But I have done cardio, weights, or yoga every single day of 2009 to day.

And I kept my job 🙂

So now I’m wondering if I can tackle another resolution for next year? If so, what might it be?

One thought is to commit to some other worthwhile daily activity. I’m considering committing to at least 15-20 minutes of some sort of "housekeeping" activity daily, whether that is literally housekeeping or figuratively (paying bills, for example, or arranging for a plumber). Or I might even expand that definition to something like "maintenance" and include some activities like shopping, getting my hair cut, and visiting the dentist – things I need to do periodically to maintain my general health and quality of life.

15 minutes a day doesn’t seem impossible but I believe it would add up to a significant improvement in quality of life over the next year. Think I could do it?

What other resolutions might I consider for the new year?

And having finished a whole year of working out daily – do I have to keep doing it? 🙂

Today my group went out to lunch to celebrate birthdays – mine, last weekend, and my boss’s earlier this month (not celebrated earlier due to Ramadon).

On our return, we met briefly in his office so he could give me my birthday present:  a promotion!

My new title is "Senior Physician Systems Analyst". I was an applications analyst before. The titles are all just words, I suppose, but the new title was created just for me so, like Tigger, I’m the only one!

My newest co-worker is a Physician Systems Analyst, though, so no doubt he’ll make good and get himself promoted to senior at some point… at which point I’ll be happy to share 🙂

The title comes with a bit of a raise, which seems to prove that it’s actually a promotion, not just a rephrasing. And, they’re moving my group before long, and in the new space, I get my own office! (that’s sort of but not entirely related to the promotion).…

Likin’ the world right now…

(Since there’s just one of me, I suppose I could say I’m THE Senior Physician Systems Analyst… saying "The senior…" makes it sound more exalted than it is, probably…)

Oh, and I’ve apparently reached a point where I remember to post to Facebook long before I remember to post here, so most of you probably already saw this news…

Yesterday was my revved-up "I’m gonna accomplish something!" day.  So I set out to pull the carpet from the third bedroom (which we use as an exercise room)… a job which required clearing up rest of house so there was room to put furniture from that room, moving said furniture, then starting the dusty, gross task of pulling out carpet that’s got at least 15 years worth of dirt, spills, mildew, etc ground down into it.

Midway through the task, there’s a popping noise from somewhere, and a few of the household lights get brighter while whole swaths of the rest of the house go dark.  And a bit of a burnt smell.  Oh, dear.

The circuit that supports the internet connection seems to be dead, so after doing the standard checks (crawl through attic looking for anything smoking or burning, check box for blown breakers or signs of damage, go through house cataloging what’s affected and looking for signs of damage), I used the phone to google for an electrician with weekend hours.  Found a pleasant company with good BBB ratings and arranged for someone to come out.

Before the electrician got here, a Reliant truck came cruising down the street.  Seems the problem was some fairly serious incident at the transformer, not at my house. One phase of our two-phase power was out.  The burning smell was probably something in my house reacting badly to the unbalanced power (the remaining phase was running slightly hot at 140 v instead of the 110-120 we expect). It took them over six hours to repair it. 

Meanwhile my electrician appeared, did due diligence to make sure the house wouldn’t burn down, and while he was out there we discussed several other things I’ve needed to do for the house.  He wrote up a contract for us for bringing the circuit box and ground wire up to code, installing a whole-house surge protector, and dropping a couple new circuits into key areas of the house… we will do that work next week.  So it wasn’t such a waste of his time or ours.

That’s our excitement for the week, I guess.  Today I will finish the carpet job…

The hospital where I work has a large indoor atrium area, with a central fountain, big sunroof, scattered tables and chairs, guy playing the piano, etc.  A pleasant place to pause if I have a little time between meetings.

So today I was sitting at one of the tables, with my back to the fountain.  I hear a woman behind me, bitching at her kids:  "Don’t play in the fountain!  I told you not to play in the fountain!"  *splash*  "See, I told you you shouldn’t play in the fountain or you’ll fall in and start bleeding like that man did!"

So I spin around to see that an elderly gentleman has tripped on the edge of the fountain and fallen in.  And lazy Mom – in addition to not bothering to restrain her own children – hasn’t made a move to help him.

So of course a half-dozen others of us did help him, got him out of the fountain and into a wheelchair and down to the ER to be checked out (and given something dry to wear) and got staff in to clean up the puddles of water, and so on.  And the whole time I’m involved with this (staying around long enough to ensure the cleanup was complete, so no one else slipped in the water), whinyMom was there in the background, berating her brats.

I’m sure they’ll turn out wonderfully. In sociopath terms, that is. 
 

One of the dishes I make in advance and heat up during the week is this sort of florentine-ish stew – chunks of chicken, browned with some masala spices, then stewed with onion, mushroom, spinach, cream cheese, and chicken broth.  It all comes together into this savory, creamy sauce which is very tasty over a pile of egg noodles.

But you know, when it’s just come out of the fridge to be reheated, it looks less smooth and creamy and more… gloppish.  Green and gloppish.  And when I drop a big scoop of it into the bowl it sort of falls with a hearty glorp. 

It really does look like the generic green gloopy food you might include as the horror cafeteria item in some real-life or cartoon comedy….

Looks like we’ll be going to the Netherlands for Thanksgiving week.  Anyone know of any fun stuff to do in Groningen (the uni town) or in Amsterdam (in Winter)?  Would we need a vehicle?  How about good places to stay in Amsterdam?

Hey, I haven’t posted in weeks.  This seemed like a conversation-starter.  Less boring than work, street reconstruction, fence-building, housework, and the other sorts of things that seem to occupy my time lately.

I dreamed last night that a strange cat had kittens in my bedroom closet.  They were really cute kittens.  I spent the entire dream scrambling around trying to find appropriate food and drink and so on for Momma-cat, who I figured must be starving to death if she’d been trapped in my closet having kittens without anyone knowing.

Oh, and   and   had their triplets last night!

Their names are:
Tadpole
Teddy-bear
Jim-Ben

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise….