proper noun: sherlonya

So, a little while ago, I stated over on Facebook that I had planned my meals up through March 5th. A few friends said, hey, I’m curious, what did you plan. Nonchalantly, I replied that I would post about it on my blog. And then I meant to do it, and then I didn’t. In the meanwhile, I spent more than a few of the days when I was supposed to be making these pre-planned meals feeling utterly nauseous and eating a whole lot of plain grits.

So, I  have gone back to the drawing board. and I am planning next week’s meals. A word about my plan though. Typically I am cooking for either one or two, depending on whether my son is at home with me or if he is with his dad. The other thing  is that I am notoriously bad at reducing recipes, even when I should. As a result, eating, in my life, involves lots of leftovers. Sometimes I throw a new sauce on it, or poach an egg on it, but usually, the  leftover situation means that I am eating something a whole lot of times.

Because my scanner is broken, I fear, you will lose a bit of  the original flavor of my meal planning which on good days happens on graph paper, on other days, it might happen on recycled envelopes. But then, again, considering the rambling nature of my thoughts, it might be best that you will see the cleaned up version. The whole point of this paragraph is to state for the record that I don’t actually do my meal planning in Excel. I love Excel more than a non-accounting layperson should, but my program lust is not that deep.

A few notes about my schedule. Tuesday evening, I go to my writing group which means that I don’t cook on Tuesday evening. So, Tuesday’s dinner needs to be ready ahead of time, as does Wednesday’s lunch. Here goes: mealplan.

You’ll see a few notes that make reference to recipes that are available online. You’ll also see an abbreviation: RtSB. This stands for Raising the Salad Bar, a cookbook I use often with little disappointment.

I once lived in an apartment for two years without ever appropriately decorating. This is not right, as I like to look at things. Colorful things. Lots of them. It was another time, a rough time full of driving, driving and more driving. Some of it turned out to be worth it, other of it turned out not to be worth it. But such is life. We make choices.

I have been living in my current spot for about four and a half months. It is already more decorated than the place where I had lived for a couple of years. But, I am determined not to let this fall off the radar. I like to make stuff. I like to draw stuff. But, like before, time remains the issue. Time, I guess, is always the issue. Make some, or not.

So, I decided that today would be the day that I take up a bare spot on the wall with an image that would make me smile every time I looked at it. The official seal of the US Presidency. I uploaded the image to be rasterbated, then laminated the results. The trickiest part was figuring out how I was going to stick it together. I wanted this to be neat.  The answer turned out to be double sided tape. And then there was the trip to the office supply store for an additional ink cartridge. Ah, the life of a crafting writer…always in need of ink.

And a project was born.

I could probably write a story full of tension and woe about the steps that I took in order to get ready for the writing group extra session. As any diverse group of people who gather around an interest, there is a tech guy. So, tech guy, offered a session on working on  your blog. I’ve been meaning to work on my website, generally, and since the blog is the major hunk of this, it seemed like the natural place to work on  one of the goals.

So, I decided to upgrade the the newest version of Wordpress. You know, housekeeping and all of that. And then I broke my blog. So then, after considering weeping, I went back to the version of Wordpress that I had. And my blog was no longer broken.

But, I am not easily deterred, and I wanted to upgrade, you know, start what I started. But I ran into problems all day long. finally, I find myself looking at the new interface, but still, I think that something is wrong. This could involve a series of tests. And sighs.

Sometimes something happens in the kitchen that etches itself on your mind never to be forgotten. Like, you know, hypothetically, you make risotto in someone’s kitchen for the first time. And your masterpiece turns out just as you hoped it would. It is delicious and pretty and darned satisfying. Until the owner of the kitchen says something like, “This is good, but it sure uses a lot of gas to make this.”

Embarking upon cooking in someone else’s kitchen could be a nerve-racking experience from the get go. Add to it cooking in someone who isn’t feeling well’s kitchen just as he falls asleep. I am not the kind of girl to wake someone from sleep, especially if they’re sick. So this involved pawing, unguided, through kitchen drawers. Well, as a writer this isn’t a hardship. And when you have a friend who is sick and has been sick for a little while with a wily cold that seems to be trying to pin him down and laugh pleghmtastic laughs right in his face, you gotta do what you gotta do. So I made soup. In someone else’s kitchen. Again. But this time, the response I got was, “Mmmm.” Which was more like it.

Thanks, Anna Thomas, for your book, Love Soup, and your Cream of Mushroom recipe. I did add one more tablespoon of half and half than the recipe called for. And it was good. And a friend was nourished. And it was a good time.

So, one of the birthday goals is to read a biography of each US President. This goal came from writing a poem or two starring a few of our Presidents. Then someone asked me if I was going to write a poem about each US President. I thought that it sounded like a good challenge. The problem, however, was that I just didn’t know enough about them to write about them. And a project was born.

It turns out that there are a whole bunch of people doing a Presidential Reading Project of some sort.

So far, I have read about Presidents Lincoln, Polk, Clinton and Kennedy. I have started in on Presidents Adams (the father), Wilson and Madison.

Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, another book that I am reading right now wrote 40 Ways to Look at JFK, which I finished reading last night. Being of a generation that was not a direct witness to this personality and relies solely on the images that seem to be everywhere, my mind was blown by this bio. The presentation alone was interesting, reminding me that people all look different depending on how we look at them.  I’ll say this, I came away from that book seeing Kennedy as very human, as opposed to a sterile icon. This is actually most of the point of this particular goal. You see, the original poems that started it all were about those moments that these men had, which we don’t think about much. We think of them in terms of their jobs, what they represented, but hardly as people like us, people who did things like blow their noses and occasionally burn toast.

I have about eight months to complete this project. It is ambitious, but I feel sure that I can do it. Actually, I  hear President Madison calling right now.

You gotta love those slogans. Actually, my favorite one is, “Pork: the other white meat.” Seriously? But that’s neither  here nor there. Perhaps that slogan actually got into my brain somehow on a deeper level, the cheese one. Because today at Casa Turner|Augustine (Taugustine?), it was cheese day.

So, we made ricotta cheese this morning (goal 27!). Right there in our home kitchen. And I felt like Ma Ingalls again, and I spent a minute swooning over Michael Landon, because that happens every time I feel like Ma Ingalls. This time, I got so into it, that I felt like I should go face Mrs. Olson at the mercantile.Hey, I spent many childhood hours watching Little House on the Prairie on TNT.

Then, we went to Zingerman’s Creamery for a bit of a tour. Why  not. I mean, if we are beholding the power of cheese (and gelato), we might as well go the distance.

And the little guy even got sorbet out of the deal. I love my life.

So, I do these birthday goals.

The thing about year-long goal setting is that life can get in the way and then, unless you are diligent, you can lose sight of those goals. That general you really refers to me.

So, I’m checking in. When you set 31 goals, you sort of know that you won’t meet every single one of them, unless all you are doing is working toward those goals. Considering that have a bazillion other things that I like to do, not to mention those that I have to do, exclusive attention to goal-progress isn’t an option.

Well, so far, I’ve achieved 2/31 goals. (I made homemade horchata and I completed a half marathon).

I’ve got some work to do!

I’m supposed to try 31 new-to-me cocktails. This goal seemed really cute when I wrote it, but the truth is, I just don’t drink that many cocktails. A few  months slipped by and I hadn’t had any. So, I had to step up my game. I am at 9, which isn’t bad, but really, I have to stay on track. That isn’t something you want to leave off until the very last minute. That could get pretty ugly, pretty fast.  One goal is to try 100 new recipes. I don’t know quite where I am with that, which is the problem. I cook plenty. I also try new things plenty, but I have not been the best at keeping up with them. That leads into the goal of blogging more. Had I kept up with that, I would have better documentation of the recipes.

If I had to grade my efforts, I would give myself a C+. I am doing better than the average person who, say, sets goals on January 1 and  has forgotten about them by the time February rolls around. But I don’t see myself as doing THAT much better than that average person.

And if you know me, you know how I feel about average grades.

In 1939, Thanksgiving, which at that time was the last Thursday in November, was to fall very close to the end of the month. Folks in the retail world complained that with only three weeks for holiday shopping that sales would be crappy, not ideal for an already crappy economy. So, Roosevelt declared that Thanksgiving would happen that year on November 23 instead of November 30. However, he waited until August to make that announcement. Travel plans had already been made, football schedules had been long established established, et cetera. About half of the states observed Thanksgiving on the new day, half did not. Some folks, taking the opportunity to poke a bit of fun at the commander-in-chief called the day Franksgiving.

I do love presidential trivia.

I have a different problem that I face at this time of year. I love to cook and I love cooking “holiday” food. Not enough that I am going to roast a turkey in July, but enough that I have considered making holiday meals from other regions and cultures at the appropriate times that have no personal significance. So what is the problem with Thanksgiving? I visit Mom on Thanksgiving and there, I eat her mouthwatering vittles and come home with leftovers. Score! But, I’m not going to cook my own Thanksgiving spread when I know I am going to eat heartily at Mom’s.

Enter Franksgiving! For my purposes, Franksgiving=Thanksgiving dinner one week early.

So as you see in the bad picture taken by the dying camera, there were roasted turkey legs, homemade cranberry sauce (with pecans), cornbread dressing (with celery, onion, green pepper and onion), sweet potatoes (baked in spiced cider), mixed greens (with liberal quantities of onion and garlic brightened with lemon juice) and whole wheat macaroni (well, penne) with cheese.

Alex was interested only in the turkey and cranberry sauce. I was glad to see that he was interested in the turkey, as I was not. Sometimes, Alex and I like to eat like Jack Sprat and his wife, I guess.

Full bellies. Good times. No complaints.

I sit before my computer several hours after I ran my very first half marathon. In fact, a mere 14 hours ago, I was in the car, on my way to Detroit. The half marathon was the third road race in which I participated.

When it is just you and the road before you and a lot of miles, there is a lot to think about. Today I realized that one of the things that I like about running is that it is a time when I explicitly feel thankful. Especially when I am running in a race. I can’t tell you how many things I thought about today and felt thankful for. Like my health. Without my health, this accomplishment would have been impossible. When I run, I don’t take it for granted. I was grateful to have parents who allowed me to become who I am. Grateful to have the wonderful son that I have. Grateful for my job. And believe it or not, I had a moment when I felt grateful for my country. My country!! Now that, I have to admit, that’s something I regularly take for granted. But when I heard the national anthem followed by “Oh Canada” it made me think about what opportunities that being raised here, under the circumstances that I have been raised, have afforded me, the opportunities Alex will inherit. It feels good to me to think about those things and take the time to really feel grateful. Maybe I run to chase that feeling.

Now, if you know me well, you know that it would be insincere of me to pretend that I only thought these good, wholesome, grateful thoughts. There were plenty of not so great thoughts in there too. Not bad thoughts, but just observations. I spent a good quarter mile thinking about the woman in the brown pants who had liberally powdered her thong panties. How would I know that? I could see the powder outline through her pants. Then there was the woman with the “mission marathon” shirt. I was going to read the rest of the shirt, but much of the text was hidden as the shirt crept into her numerous rolls and folds. (Hey, I’m not dissing the rolls and folds, but seriously, next size up.) And then there are all the butts. When you’re running that long, you see a lot of them. And upon watching all of that bouncing and jiggling, and jangling and, I don’t know, kersplankering, I was grateful for the one I have. It is by no means perfect, but I decided today to stop hating on it. Maybe I ran to chase that feeling.

I was all set to write something that I observed today in my son’s classroom. I thought it was funny, and a cheap and easy way to make an blog post on a day when I’m tired an a bit uninspired (but still wanting to meet the goal of posting every day for a month).

Then, I thought twice about what I was going to say, and thought of something that Alex said recently:

“If I get it out to say it, I’m not going to say it. I’m going to put it back in my head.”

As parents, we all  have to make the decisions that seem right to us day after day, minute after minute. The last thing any parent needs is yet another person slinging judgment…even if it is just to make a little joke.

So, I declined.