Patience and the Nitrogen Cycle

This weekend was the "big weekend" for Wausau. Each year they have hot air balloons from all over the country come and set up their balloons. It coincides with the Rib Fest and the annual fireworks. I must say that Wausau fireworks are some of the best I've seen ever. Not only are you right underneath them, so close that ash comes down around you, but they tend to spend some dough on getting good ones. I thought a small town would skimp on the show, but they were impressive.

I also managed to clean out my closet this weekend. It's been full of boxes. There are still boxes in our house from our last move, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were boxes still from before we came to Chicago. Some stuff I'm just shuttling from place to place, and I don't have a clue what's inside of it.

Over the weekend I baked what I craved. Peanut butter cookies and homemade pizza. In my baking past I have made peanut butter cookies a bunch of times. This time I had to do it because I was dealing with an unfulfilled month-long craving. Each time I would buy a peanut butter cookie, thinking that I would be satisfied at last, it would be terrible. One particular bakery I had high hopes for, but the cookie was dry and not sweet. The peanut butter was very light, almost nonexistent. So I went home and made some. These were much better. Sugary, with a definite peanut butter taste. And now I can rest. We ate half of them and I froze the rest for Robbie's lunches.

I also made pizza. I was inspired by an episode where the Barefoot Countessa grilled pizza and all of her good looking gay friends came over. I wanted that. I wanted to have scads of good looking gay friends to come over to my house on a moments notice for pizza and chit chat. This dream would become a reality.

I had never seen anyone make pizza dough before. It looked easy, and I had a dough hook on my kitchenaid. Why not!? The first try was a disaster, since I read the recipe wrong and put in 1.5 cups of water instead of .5 cup. I had flour soup. So I pitched it and tried again. This time I had dough. I kneaded it to the best of my ability and lack of knowledge (must look up on youtube). I let it rise. I kneaded it again. I let it rise again. I kneaded it again a bit and then rolled it out and put some olive oil, fresh tomatoes, red onions, fresh motz, sea salt and basil from our garden. The next time I try it, I will let the dough sit for longer, and I will cook it for maybe 5 more minutes. But the experiment was a success and we ate the entire thing, yeast and all.

My parents were initially concerned when I told them that my husband and I bought a house that didn't have air conditioning. They were skeptical. But what they didn't know is that hot June days in Ohio, equal chilly June days in Wisconsin. We haven't turned off our heat yet. We even had a fire in our fireplace this weekend to deal with the uncommon chill in the air.

The truth is that we don't need air conditioning in the north woods very often. Generally, summer highs are in the 60's and 70's. Occasionally we'll get an 80's, but it is a day here and there, nothing much to speak about.

The few days I spent in Ohio recently in May we had hotter weather than I ever experienced in Wausau.

Last night I was having lovely dreams about what it would be like to own a yarn store. It was great and I was having a fantastic time until I woke up drastically with the realization that something was crawling on my face. My face people! It was a spider. So I freaked out. I knocked it off my face and then turned on the light to locate it. My husband ushered it outside by putting it in a jar and it was all done.
But it didn't feel done.
I spent a long time getting back to sleep because what if there are more bugs just waiting for me to fall asleep and then jump on my face? Why does our house have an unusual number of spiders? We have to move a spider outside about twice a week. That seems high to me.
Not only that, but it seems like we have a variety of spider species in our house. The one last night was small and brown and had a big bulbous body. We see small black ones a lot with long legs, and occasionally a large black one with white stripes that eyeballs us menacingly until the cats bat it into a ball.
And I wouldn't mind it so much, if they didn't invade my bed, my private and most vulnerable space.

Thefinalgirl tagged me, so I am responding. Feel free to consider yourself tagged if you like such things.

The rules :
1. Respond and rework; answer the question on your blog, replace one question that you dislike with a question of your invention, add more one question of your own.
2. Tag eight other people. (Uhhhh, I think that only 2 actually look at my blog)

What is your current obsession?
Knitting and spinning my own yarn. This has actually been an obsession for many years and it doesn't seem to be letting up. I really enjoy it.

What is your weirdest obsession?
Vampire books, movies, etc. (Buffy, True Blood, the Twilight series...even though I didn't love the books), maybe I should say "the paranormal" is my weirdest obsession, because I make my husband go on all these ghost tours and I watch paranormal research shows and stuff

What are you wearing today?
My gray suit with blue pinstripes

What's for dinner?
I think we're going to have omelettes

What would you eat for your last meal?
Steak from Prime with all the mustards, spagetti with meat and veggie sauce, fudgy chocolate cake

What's the last thing you bought?
fruits and diet foods from the grocery (I'm trying to avoid the delicious foods in the question above)

What are you listening to right now?
Typing, coworkers talking on the phone, papers rustling, someone speaking Hmong to a patient

What is your favorite ice-cream flavour?
It used to be the Salty Caramel icecream from Haagen Das, but I think my allegiance lies with Jeni's version.

If you could have a house totally paid for, fully furnished anywhere in the world, where would you like it to be?
New Zealand, and it would be really cool and woodsy, but with a contemporary undertone

If you could go anywhere in the world for the next hour, where would you go?
New York, I've never been there and it sounds fun

Which language do you want to learn?
Spanish.

What's your favorite quote (for now)?
"When a man has to prove to a woman..." Tobias talking about the facts of life with George Michael from Arrested Development

What is your favorite colour?
Dark teal.

What is your favorite piece of clothing in your own wardrobe?
Probably my sweater that I knitted from Briar Rose fiber. It's my go-to sweater and I love it.

What is your dream job?
Independently wealthy philanthropist

What's your favourite magazine?
Real Simple

If you had $100 now, what would you spend it on?
An iphone, but I'd still need another 100

Favorite designer?
Ack, I don't really have one. Ann Taylor?

Do you admire any one's style?
Kate Winslet

Describe your personal style?
Business suits, business shirts, and then pajamas

What are you going to do after this?
Go home for lunch

What are your favourite movies?
Groundhog's Day, Clue, The Jerk

What's your favourite fruit?
(Is this meme British?) A good orange. Not the dry ones, but a really good one.

What inspires you?
I think that's my problem lately. I'm not inspired to do much of anything after work is done. I use up all of my energy.

Your favorite book ?
Just one? This is too hard.

Do you collect something ?
Yarn, gobs of it

Robbie's birthday is today. His big 3-0. We celebrated it yesterday with chicken wings, the Star Trek movie (which we loved), and chocolate cake. The cake was a soda can cake with the addition of peanut butter chips and fat free cool whip for frosting. It was his pick.

I decorated the kitchen with streamers and shiny signs that said "30." Even though we're not having a party, I think it was fun to wake up early and create the surprise.

The Sims 3 comes out sometime in June. I hesitate to get it right away, because classically EA/Maxis games have been so buggy that they completely ruin game play. I have had lots of Maxis experiences where I really liked the game, but couldn't play it because of some bug or another. Plus there was the DRM fiasco, and that really alienated much of their fan base, not to mention that they delayed the launch of the Sims 3 the day that it was supposed to come out. (Let's not even begin to talk about Spore, because it just hurts.)

In order to get the Sims 3 also means that I would have to upgrade to a completely new system. So if it sucks, (and it might suck) I will be out a lot more money than just the software cost. But really, I need a new computer anyway. It's been years and I could use a new system. Maybe this time I'll actually get one with the intent to play games on it.

Next week is the Great Lakes Fiber Show, which I go to every year with my Mom. We stay at a B and B and shop the barns full of yarn and fiber. This will be our fourth year of going and I'm excited for the break. The same women come every year to the B and B and we swap knitting stories and they show us stuff on the wheel or talk about their farms. Sometimes they do shots of bourbon and sometimes we go out with them for steaks and have a bitch session about the lady claiming to sell buffalo fiber, when really the fiber only has 5% buffalo content. Last year I bought a year's worth of yarn for really cheap, and spent the entire year knitting it into shawls and socks or spinning yarn up and not having a clue on what to do with it (yet).

Last week I had a terrible week. So this week seems like a breeze in comparison. I'm happy not to have revisit last week.

At work I'm currently dealing with a catch-22. I can provide mental health services only if I get medicaid certification and get background checks on my counselors. But I can't hire my counselors unless they can bill under medicaid and they need medicaid certification to do that. Bureaucracy. I know this paragraph only really makes sense to me, but let me just say it like this: I'm stuck and I need to get unstuck and it is unclear how to do it. And patients need mental health services and they can't get them until I get unstuck.

Today I had sushi for lunch, which was fun and unexpected. I thought I was going to have to heat up the secret stash of soup I have hidden in my bottom desk drawer. Southwestern vegetable.

Over the weekend we acquired a crock pot. My husband was able to procure it from a garage sale for $2.00 and it is bright orange. I've always wanted to use a crock pot, because the idea is so nice. Set it up, go to work, come home to a made dinner. But I never purchased one, because it just never came up.
So yesterday, with the help of a recipe book on loan from my mother-in-law, I decided to go on my maiden crock pot voyage.
Why I chose a recipe with sauerkraut is a bit of a mystery. I never really had a whole lot of sauerkraut growing up, and it was a gamble about whether I would like it now, not to mention having it cook in my house for hours on end with chicken, mustard, and russian dressing. Sauerkraut just sounded good to me. It sounded tangy and pickley and German. I was in.
I set the whole thing up during my lunch time, because chicken crockpot recipes tend to only take around 4 hours, and I fully expected to see flames engulfing my house as I came home in the afternoon.
When there were no firetrucks, and the crockpot seemed to be unharmed, I went to survey the progress.
Much to my surprise the chicken had cooked and was very tender, the drained sauerkraut was hot but not burnt and it smelled nice.
I dished it out and it was very good. Crockpot chicken has that homey tenderness that is so comforting. And I couldn't get enough sauerkraut. I could eat a whole jar.

Thinking of my next crockpot adventure, I've been reading this blog, A Year of Crockpotting, of a woman who is cooking a new crockpot recipe every day. It's pretty fun to read. And I really want some hot buttered rum right around now.

Make your Stick Figure Family at FreeFlashToys.com

Planting things. In a warm sunny spot. With a margarita. And a gigantic sun hat with a wide black brim. With my husband. Lounging on our deck. Talking about our future. Letting go of the small betrayals and hassles of our daily work life. Remembering those who love us.

Try as we might, Rob and I couldn't remember what we did for Easter last year. Did we just not celebrate it? That seems unlikely. But we don't remember. Livejournal archives reveal nothing. It's a mystery.

This year we went to a friend's house, a friend I met at my step class about two years ago. It was a pleasant afternoon, and the fun part was that the only travel involved was getting to his house and back. Rob and I had the rest of the afternoon to just veg out. Normally there are planes to catch or a 6 hour drive ahead of us after any holiday.

The patient educator at my clinic owns and operates a farm. It's a hobby rather than a career, but she does have horses, several dogs, and lots of chickens. She let me know that they've started laying again and brought some for us to eat. I love fresh eggs. They are so bright and beautiful and have a much fresher taste. The assortment she gave me ranged from pinkish to hazy green (the colors didn't turn out so well since my flash seemed to wash them out a lot). The owner claims that the colors of the eggs match the color of the inside of the chicken's ear. Prior to her saying that, I never really thought about chicken's ears before. But also, some chickens have greenish inner ears?

File the last two weekends under the category: "See, we have friends."

I've seen maybe 35% of this stuff. I better get to work.

Next week Robbie and I are off to New Orleans. It's crawfish season and we're already imagining getting a bunch of the little guys and eating them up with a nice cold beer.
We're also going to walk around, go shopping, gamble a little, go to a few fine dining establishments, eat oysters, and wear sandals. There are good tours around the area, and I hear that their zoo and aquarium are both good too.
I couldn't be more excited about this trip.

I miss playing with Barbies. Or at least, I miss that feeling I used to get playing with Barbies, where I would get lost in my world and then end up getting bored, and realize that hours had passed. I remember that the majority of playing with Barbies was prep work. We had locate the little hamburgers that went in her McDonald's or we'd have to get the hotel set up or locate both of Barbie's two remaining shoes or mix up the casting material. I can't imagine that very much of the playing was actually play.
I also remember that my Mom had gotten me a big box of Barbie clothes that included little nighties and I used to dress them on her vintage Ken doll. He was so much more skinny than the modern Ken. And sometimes Barbie was too busty for the nighties, and it didn't sit right with me to dress them on Skipper. I hated Skipper. So they went on vintage Ken, but since they were nighties, Ken ended up sleeping a lot in my barbie senarios, or his interactions took place at night. Like he was sleepwalking in his nightie and got hit by the Barbie corvette. Sometimes the Barbie dog would alert Barbie to the situation, much like Lassie. I remember one time that an injured vintage Ken died on the basement stairs before modern overly-muscular Ken and Doctor Barbie could get to him.
My barbie's lives were never very tame. They didn't just have an outing. No. Instead they would have a birth and death, and someone would end up in a cast, most of the time a full body cast because it would start as a leg cast, and then I would get overzealous. There was an elevator in one of the barbie houses we had that was controlled with a small pulley system. Many barbie deaths were caused by that elevator. Frequently the cause was that the victim forgot to look where they were were going and ended up falling down the shaft. Occasionally they would be crushed by the elevator.
I do remember that my barbies ate very well, and had a variety of fake foods to choose from. But special occasions called for a barbie wedding cake, which consisted of ritz crackers layered with honey. A little messy, but not a bad recipe, and it was completely edible.

I listen to this podcast called the Paranormal Podcast on itunes. A couple of weeks ago the subject was a medium who explained that as we sleep, our souls go up to the astral plane. We come back because we are tethered to our bodies by some form of energy.

I like the idea that the astral plane is the place I go to experience all the weird things I deal with in my sleep. That someday, when I die, I will forever be naked or under dressed in key situations, terrorized by haunted houses and zombies, and periodically have my teeth fall out. Those are often the themes of my dreams. I'm sure I get others, but those stick out the most.

And speaking of sleep, I've been getting a lot of it lately, falling asleep on the couch at 8:30 pm and then moving to bed and sleeping until 6:30 am. How is it possible that I would need so much sleep? I really do enjoy it. I love the feeling of being comfortable under covers and warm and safe.

On another subject, I hope that this season of Dexter is good. I don't get Showtime, which is a shame because I saw the pilot for that new Tara show and it seemed pretty good too. When did Showtime become the new HBO? I'll have to wait for them on DVD.

I went to Madison to meet my legislators and tell them that supporting health centers was a great idea, and yes, thank you for doing so in the past. (Community Health Centers are not a hard sell it turns out.)

While I was there I managed to catch a virus, a certain virus that has been infecting people in Madison for some time. It completely made me inoperable for 4 days, ruined my weekend, took me away from work at a critical time, and made me completely miserable. It was intestinal and it was a nightmare.

Thankfully I woke up Monday morning with that newly-well feeling, that one where you are suddenly well again and your body is super happy about it. I love that feeling.

Although my appetite hasn't completely returned, I am in fantastic spirits. That combined with the warm temperatures has left me optimistic and hopeful.

I have to ask though, could the groundhog have been wrong? What's with this weather?

One of my favorite This American Life radioshows is called "Fiasco" and it's about stuff that goes terribly terribly wrong. Everytime I listen to it, I laugh and laugh. Most recently this was when I was working out, and I was sweating and laughing and freaking out people around me.
They say in the show that the people involved in the fiasco were just reaching a little too far outside of their comfort zone, and Ira Glass mentions that it's just that reach that can also make something really really great. It's at that point when someone can truly achieve greatness. But also, it's that point when people can fail miserably and hard.

Let's just say that I had a hard night last night, simply because I watched someone elses plans destroyed by a bunch of angry right-wingers. It wasn't a fiasco in the way that the play in the radioshow was, but it was a fiasco caused by angry people worried that abortionists are going to roam the streets and stalk pregnant women. They believed that condoms didn't protect anybody, that people should have as many babies as possible, and that giving young women gardasil shots would make them go out and have sex. They had a lot to say. Some of it involved God, and some of it didn't, but it was all difficult to hear. I felt really sorry for the planners of the event.

I think what I learned from this is that the anti-choice people are scared as shit right now. After 8 years of being outraged at my government, finally things are turning around, and they are scared.

Am I the only one in the world that didn't like Slumdog Millionaire? I think part of the problem was that everyone was billing it as a feel good movie. Rob said that one critic even said it reminded him of Juno. Juno??!
We didn't expect it to be so traumatic and sad. And then when we got home, we needed a shot of vodka to calm down.
I'm not really a fan of non-scifi violence. Sure if Alien shoots or kills Predator, that's all good. But kids getting mutilated. Not my bag. Not what I would have chosen for my Sunday afternoon escapist matinee.

So I went out today and had sushi for lunch. And we're talking Wausau sushi. And I somehow may have overdone it, because I have managed to stuff myself with terrible sushi and make myself sick with it. I am completely and utterly stuffed, to the point of discomfort and heartburn. And you'd think that a clinic would have heartburn medication, and we do, but just prilosec, which is not for occasional ate-too-much-ridiculous-sushi heartburn, but for the more roadbust heartburn that comes every day after the sixth cup of coffee. Instead my choices are water, which seems to spread the burn around, or a large array of acid-based colas.
I don't see how it's possible that I liked the sushi enough to stuff myself with it. It is a mystery.