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I spent the past weekend with my family at Rice Alumni College Weekend.  This is an event where you sign up for a variety of interesting classes, which are presented with interspersed breaks for snacks (or meals), socializing, and general fun.  It’s always a good chance to catch up with Mom and Dad as well as a chance to learn new stuff.  I’ll comment on new stuff I learned in other posts, as this helps keep discussion threads a little more understandable.

Also working on a variety of projects and brainstorming about how to meet various challenges.  Some of those will also stimulate posts, I suspect. 

And will start with a request for advice.  I am looking at a variety of present and future tasks for both me and K.  I notice that many of those tasks involve managing someone else’s work in addition to my own, and recognize that I don’t have a lot of great inspirations about how to do that.  Too often, delegating work to someone else (say, a grad student) is something that ends up taking as much time as energy as it would’ve taken to just do the work myself.  There’s gotta be people who’ve looked at this problem and come up with some concrete suggestions to avoid it.  Can anyone recommend some resource (book, class, etc) on the topic?

Exercizin’ – I’m shamed to say that I haven’t worked out since Wednesday – first time I’ve skipped this long in over a year.  Am planning to do both cardio and weights this afternoon and then will stay on the wagon from there!

So have spent my morning accomplishing a few things, each of which required maneuvering through the questions and suggestions of idiots.  Or perhaps just people who are more ignorant than they should be…

I think I need to spend the afternoon on a project that doesn’t require the input of other people…

Just got off the phone with my insurance company – we stand to save some $$ by combining our auto insurance.  But it was a little of an unusual experience, because the agent was… well, slow.  And her speech was sort of slurred, maybe?  It was hard to make out what she was saying, as if she wasn’t really enunciating.  So the phone call took a lot longer than it would have, because we kept having to go over stuff that had already been covered.  My usual experience with this insurance company (USAA) is that they’re really sharp.

Which is of no interest to anyone, probably, but just felt like commenting….

Ever wake up grumpy?

I have every reason to be in a good mood today.  My sweetheart has the day off, as do I.  Work-wise, I have interesting projects on my plate, things I enjoy doing.  I have a couple writing projects that are high-likelihood for publication nearing launch.  At home, I have a variety of ideas for cool stuff to do and some time to get to those ideas now that the wedding’s over.  My family comes into town later this week for a long weekend, and I’ll get to enjoy them without dealing with a Major Event.

But I woke up this morning grumpy. Lay there, couldn’t think of a single reason to get out of bed.  Nothing excited me, nothing tempted me. Didn’t want to be social, didn’t want to play, didn’t want to work. The cat came over to snuggle and I didn’t want to do that, either.

Slept in a bit, then spent the morning doing silly stuff that usually puts me in a good mood (e.g. reading fiction, solving puzzles, eating) and then worked out.  No go.  I feel just as grumpy as before; in fact, now I have a headache on top of my grumpy angst. 

After spending the first part of the day trying to tempt me into a better mood, K has just given up and gone in to the office. So now I feel guilty on top of grumpy and headachy.

Bleagh.

So my cooking activities are limited.  That is, I make about a half-dozen interesting recipes and K, who is generally happy to do the same thing over and over again, never asks for anything different.  And since he does the grocery shopping, my kitchen is generally stocked with just the ingredients for those same half-dozen things.

So last year on Valentines, I launched a new recipe – chicken, with a cheesy spinach sauce over chicken and mushrooms. Decided to create a tradition this year, by fixing K something new on VD (which we really don’t bother to celebrate otherwise)…

Tossed some rice and water into the rice cooker before getting started.  Began with chicken breasts; cut strips, browned them in chili oil, and set them aside. Then cooked up mushrooms and some fresh garlic in the same skillet, also with chili oil, and set them aside. Next were onions cut into good-size chunks and fresh green beans, again in that same skillet, with more chili oil, then set aside (but kept separate from the chicken and mushrooms).  I had pre-cooked the veggies a bit in the microwave so they just needed a quick saute.  At this point I put a cup of orange juice and a cup of chicken broth in the skillet and brought it to a simmer, added about a cup of shredded carrots, the pulp and juice of a whole orange, a heaping tablespoon of brown sugar, a heaping tablespoon of corn starch, and a dash of salt.  Simmered that for a few minutes to get the carrots started towards cooked/softened, then put the chicken and mushrooms back in and let that simmer for 15 minutes.  Tossed in the veggies and about a cup of caramelized walnuts.  Served it over the rice.

It was nice.  There was nice flavor contrast – the sweet of the brown sugar and carrot, the tangy of the orange juice, and the hint of spice from the garlic and chili oil.  There was texture contrast, since the walnuts and beans were crunchy, the chicken was meat-y, and the rice and onions were soft.  I felt good after eating it, as I usually do when indulging in lots of fresh veggies.  And it didn’t take terribly long to cook overall – which is a major criteria for acceptability in my household.

I made a few mistakes – like, initial skillet was too small to hold the final mixture, I’ll use a stewpot next time.  And I simmered at slightly too high a heat so the orange juice and sugar caramelized a bit at the bottom of the pan – I think it’d be better without that trace flavor. I don’t think the orange pulp added anything noticable to the mix, and it’d have been easier to use just orange juice.  And

nicoleallee

pointed out that it would benefit from some ginger, so I’ll try that.

K informs me that I should give him the ingredients list for this one, so I will have the chance to correct those mistakes and I’ll have another tasty dish in my repertoire. I’ll never reach the level of expertise of someone like

kcarp

or

tksan

, but it feels good to be slowly expanding my range.

Of note… I actually am capable of cooking a bunch of other things that we never eat around here.  But, K is pickier than me and I try to avoid the ingredients that he isn’t fond of. I wouldn’t be so accomodating to kids, but I figure K’s old enough that it’s unlikely his eating patterns will change at this late date…

Saturday, I got started trying to sort out the leftover food from the wedding festivities, figuring what was left, what needed eating real soon before it goes bad, what could be stored for longer, and what we need from the store.  This got me poking around in the pantry which got me noticing layers of dust and that got me started on spring cleaning – the kind of intense cleaning you only do every couple years where you take everything out of a cupboard, wash everything and the cupboard, put it all back after sorting out the useless or expired stuff…

My first reward was finding a bottle of raspberry flavoring syrup I’d forgotten.  Mmmm, raspberry-flavored hot chocolate. 

Of course, I also discovered that it looked like something had nibbled a box of candles… in the silverware drawer!  Shudder.  Now in the process of running everything in that drawer through the dishwasher, and everything from the drawers beneath it as well, just for completeness’ sake.

On other fronts, it’s pouring out.  Welcome to February.

I haven’t posted for a while, which is perhaps understandable because I went off and got myself married.  Which is how K has been describing it as he calls the various people (work benefits, bank accounts, etc) who need to know his new status:  “I went and got myself married last weekend…”

Anyway, my parents came in a week or so before the Event, to help with last-minute details. I dragged Mom off on scavenger-hunt shopping trips (“OK, we need… a roll of four-foot wide paper.  A garter.  Something to serve as a pond for the bride and groom rubber duckies to float in….”) and set Dad to projects like cutting a half-dozen wooden supports to be used for train tracks.

Yeah, train tracks.  Don’t all weddings include train tracks? Ours did.  We decorated the tables with various toys – one table with a train set, another with blocks and an abacus, another with a toy toolbox complete with toy drill, circular saw, and jigsaw.  Other tables had games – Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, Jenga, Cranium.  The wedding party tables had enormous multi-arm candleabras – with neon colored stuffed monkeys swinging by their tails off the candleabra arms.

There were the inevitable wedding etiquette failure moments.  Like when my M. of honor invited someone to the bachelorette party who hadn’t been invited to the wedding… not because K and I don’t like this person (we do, very much – she may read this and I want her to know that) but because the guest list for the wedding was kept rather deliberately small. Generally, we only invited people who not only know K and me, but also are known to at least one of our families… My weak solution to the problem was to invite another such person to join us, so no one felt singled out… the two of them were great fun at the party and I’m awfully glad they joined us, even though it was a gaffe worthy of the etiquette hell page.

In general, though, the wedding went off just as we wanted.  There were old friends to catch up with at every table.  Kids scrambled around underfoot and took over the dance floor. We danced to “Shout” and gatored, of course.  We danced to “Louie, Louie” and in an impressive display of geekiness, about a third of the guests were willing to demonstrate the proper dance steps to “Let’s do the time warp again”.  Almost every guest participated in the conga line, from the youngest to the eldest.  And no one got cake smeared on his or her face, which is a good thing.

When I am old, I will tell my great-great grandkids (or grand-nephews and grand-neices, at the rate I’m going) that I wore comfortable shoes to my wedding.  I swear that “white shoes” were on that scavenger-hunt shopping list; we even found the white shoes I wanted, but then somehow… forgot to buy them. So instead I wore pale blue bedroom slippers. No one seemed to mind. Hey, I needed my “something blue” anyway.

The whole thing was possible because I have the most amazing friends in the world. 

nicoleallee

pulled my a** from the fire on multiple occasions.  Rehearsal dinner venue cancels on us two weeks before the event?  No problem, she’s already researched a half-dozen alternate venues, complete with banquet menus and pricing options, and we end up with something even better than before.  Confused about what to suggest for wedding jewelry?  No problem, she’s prepared with customized, hand-made jewelry for every participant, even the flower girls. I never had the chance to be bridezilla, because every problem was fixed before I had the chance to throw a tantrum.

The one unfortunate part was the whole germ-vector thing.  Someone brought a nasty stomach bug to the event, which wiped out half of Keith’s family as well as several guests (hi,

johnbrandon

!)  in the days after the wedding and caught up with me mid-week.  Kind of a honeymoon-killer, really, though it thankfully passed quickly.  K also came down with a cold which he’s still fighting.  I’m not sure how many people were affected – seems a little funny to call people and say “excuse me, but were you up all night puking anytime last week?” And it is not the sort of thing that comes up in conversation unless one asks.

So anyway.  Back now.  Will talk about something else in future, I promise.

auspeople

was bemoaning the restrictions of cooking for a picky family, which got me musing about my own upbringing and parenting styles in general.

My parents took the philosophy that children shouldn’t be running the household. This shows up in many things they did – for example, they required good table manners for the length of an adult meal, from a very young age. (e.g. from before my conscious memory, which extends back to age 3 or so). Even though I know this was unusual,  I’m always a little startled when kids finish eating and leave the table before the meal is over, or eat at a different time than the rest of the family.

When it came to the food itself, the situation was simple. Mom (or Mom’s designee, which was usually me) prepared a meal, and your choices were to eat it or to go hungry. Sure, you could usually get away with eating a token portion of the yucky thing and fill up on whatever else was on the table (e.g. choke down the required few bites of liver, and then fill up on the veggies and rice).  But you couldn’t ask for something else, or prepare something else for yourself, or skip the meal and then have a snack later – in fact, if you didn’t eat much, Mom would go ahead and put saran over the plate and later requests for a snack would be met with “your plate is in the fridge”.  It turns out that cold liver is even gross-er than warm liver…

The end result is that my brother and I will eat most anything. Sure, we have a few dislikes, and we’ll express preferences if asked.  But being extremely picky was simply never an option – didn’t Ben Franklin say hunger is the best spice?  Actually I think the quote was actually “hunger is the best pickle”, but I digress…

I do think Mom tended to prep the things that everyone liked, most of the time.  But then again, we weren’t picky so she wasn’t really limited in her selections.

So I am musing is the pros and cons of parent-centered (versus child-centered) households. I can see a lot of pros. Because the behavior we learned from the start is the behavior expected by society at large, there were no painful transitions later on. We were probably healthier as a result of the good diet. Our parents had a better quality of life because we were remarkably well-behaved (and never realized there were other ways to be). And dinner table conversation (usually very child-focussed since we’d finish eating before Mom and Dad, so we’d be the ones talking) is a key part of a lot of my most precious childhood memories. I have an excellent adult relationship with my parents and a lot of that has to do with those open lines of communication at mealtime.

So, what are the advantages of the more child-centered approach? None of my friends take this approach to child-rearing, though to be fair many of their kids are really too young at this point.  My brother hasn’t taken that approach with his kids, and mealtimes with his family are really pretty unpleasant, what with the noisy kids grabbing the stuff they like, whining about stuff they don’t like, coming and going from their seats, playing noisily in the next room… But my friends (and family) are all pretty smart people so I assume there are benefits to this approach that I’m just not seeing from my non-parental viewpoint?

From my email:

“The Student Epidemic Intelligence Society (SEIS) would like to invite you to participate in our student program”…

…

There’s a joke here somewhere, I know it.