All of Us

I hadn't been paying much attention to "occupy Wall Street"--in part because the news media weren't paying attention to it, and in part because I don't pay much attention to the news beyond the front page of the NY Times. But last night I stumbled across this site, started by two of the people who started the occupy Wall Street effort. (There's an article on the Mother Jones site about the creators.) And it nearly brought me to tears--it's every Springsteen song about hard luck and hard times.

It made me think of my own luck, and the luck the rest of my family shares. I've told you about my mom's new kidney, and my dad's onoing bladder cancer treatment, and my dad's quadruple bypass surgery, and my mom's back surgery that fused seven of her vertebrae. Why aren't my parents crippled by debt from all that health care? Not because they're wealthy--it's because my dad, thanks to his union, has excellent health insurance. Without that, my parents would be poor, or dead, or both, and that is all because my dad was a union member for 40-some years.

Thanks in part, again, to my dad's union membership, my parents were able to save money, and invest it. (Yes, there was a certain amount of hard work in there, and saving--and, again, luck: my dad didn't become disabled on the job, and he was able to work until retirement age, at a job that paid a good wage.) Thus, when my sister-in-law didn't pay the mortgage for more than a year, my parents were able to help my brother and SIL keep their house. When I've gone through bouts of grad school and unemployment, my parents have been able to help me out, too. (When I was in grad school, that extra couple hundred bucks meant that I could eat a little better, and maybe have a beer once in awhile.) In neither case was it the kind of "help" that trust fund kids get, but it was just enough.

Just enough so Bro and SIL were able to keep the house, and pay off their consumer debts, and start over without having to either lose everything or be saddled by crippling debt for the rest of their lives. Just enough so that I never truly worried about starving--moving back in with my parents when I was in my mid-30s (or mid-40s) would not have been the least bit desirable, but I did not have to worry about becoming homeless.

I've been able to pay off my debts, too--three rounds of student loans!--but it's all so precarious. Suppose, for example, that when they got rid of my boss last year they decided to get rid of me, too--six months after I took on a mortgage. Finding a job in this economy is a nightmare, and finding one that would enable me to keep my home--in which I had put nearly all my savings--might have been impossible.

There are other parts to the luck, too: my parents didn't just throw money at my brother's problems, they were also knowledgeable enough to sit down and consolidate the debt and get a lower interest rate (by cosigning, I think). Someone who doesn't have access to that form of help is going to get in trouble all over again, even if the immediate cash need is met; more likely, they'll get just enough out of the hole to stay afloat and keep paying exorbitant interest rates on any credit they get.

So, even though I make a decent living, and can enjoy myself a bit, I, too, am one of the 99%. And the good luck I've experienced isn't entirely luck. Some of it is that my father made a good living working with his hands--thanks to a union. Some of it is that my parents didn't have to deal with any major financial crises. Some of it is that my mother's parents earned and saved a little, too, along the way, Some of it is that we were all able to work hard, and we have done that--no crippling medical conditions; no mental illness; no disabling accidents.
Some of it is that I was able to go to a good college, and end up with less than $5k of debt, thanks to government programs (and thanks to having a sister who was only two years behind me in school, so we both ended up with more financial aid than if we'd gone separately).

But that list isn't so outrageous. It should not be beyond the reach of most people. People should be able to start over, either out of choice or necessity. (Suppose you're in a terrible marriage for 30 years and your spouse spends every nickel and you have kids and can't or don't quite want to or don't know how to get out of that situation, and now you're nearly 50 and divorced and have no savings and you lose your job, or even are just stuck in a job that pays enough to live on, and gives you health insurance, but you can barely get by. Suppose your partner runs up debts that you dont find out about until it's too late, and your name is attached to that debt, too. Suppose you buy a house and don't use it as a cash machine and take all the equity out, but you lose your job and your adjustable rate goes up and now you can't pay the bills, even though you found another job--at a third less money--because you had to live on credit cards for awhile, after you drained your savings.

I could come up with a thousand more scenarios, because they're all out there. The thing is, money isn't a good in itself. Money insulates us from disaster. (For the 1%, it buys big homes and private schools and yachts and European trips or whatevs, but for us, it's insulation.) Money means, if you make a mistake--even a stupid one, like your spouse isn't paying the mortgage but writes it in the checkbook, so you don't find out for more than a year, and then only because a coworker saw in the paper that your house is up for a sheriff's sale--you're not completely doomed. Money means if you have to start over, you can come up with the security deposit and moving expenses for a decent apartment. Money means that you can get medical care if you need it--and medical insurance, in case something big and expensive comes along. And none of these amounts of money would be a pimple on the ass of the 1%, but all these amounts of money are the difference between having a life and barely clinging to the edge of the abyss for the other 99% of us.

Change

Well.

The Big Transition continues at work, and it's taking its toll on everyone. While I can rant with the best of them, there are days when I think that I am least . . . deeply bothered? freaked out? of all of my coworkers. It's really kind of fascinating to watch (and to have a hand in, for that matter). Some of it is definitely age, but most of it, as I think I've said before, is that I have changed "careers" multiple times in my life, sometimes by choice and other times not so much, and each time I've done so, I've had to learn a whole new field. On one hand, of course, this is a bit stressful, but, on the other, it gives me something new to learn, and it has given me experience being discomfited, if you will. The people within whom I'm now working have (a) worked with the organization for at least 10 years, and (b) worked with each other for at least 10 years; at this point, they have worked out all of their miscommunication and their routines and their divvying up of the world.

Suddenly, the world has gotten much larger, and it has new stuff in it, and they must work with people who do not have any clue how they Do Things, and there are many more Things to Do, and some of those things are Very New Things. This all makes for much discomfort and dislocation, and, as we all know, people deal with that in different ways. (I actually think my boss created the position for me that s/he did precisely because of my experience with such dislocations.) As I have been saying, despite the multiple frustrations we experience with each other, no one is lazy, malicious, or stupid, and that is huge. No one else seems to think it's as huge as I think it is, but I think it's absolutely vital. It doesn't mean that we're going to be able to work everything out with no bumps or irritaitons or rashes, it just means that the people involved are capable of working it out, are unlikely to sabotage working it out, and will likely work hard to work it out.

It's also true that I have lost a couple of battles--that makes it sounds too dire. It's true that, in several arenas that I think are important, the person who is making the decision doesn't see/agree with the things I've observed and pointed out. I do think it will backfire, in a big way, but some mistakes have to be made for people to understand the flaws in their systems.

What's also interesting and sort of amusing to me is that the people who are, at least theoretically, taking over chunks of what I have been doing, are both multitudinous and freaking out. Seriously--and not to pat myself on the back--but it's taking three or four of them to even begin to do what I have been doing single-handedly, and they haven't really taken over yet. It's more like they look over my shoulder as I keep doing big chunks of it. And criticizing, of course, when they're not freaking out.

The other thing around which I have not yet wrapped my head is that they don't seem to forego vacation time when there's something big due. The last two Big Things--including the one where we/I fucked up--included vacation time by people who are supposed to be taking over big chunks of what I do, and the vacation time was within a week or 10 days of the due date. Which makes no sense to me, and probably explains why I have nearly maxed out the amount of vacation time one can accrue. One of them included airplane tickets to a foreign country, so that's understandable, but that person also arrived back in town and started fucking with my Plan, because That's The Way WE Have Always Done Things (even though I could only have discerned the Way YOU Do Things through psychic abilities, and was therefore taken aback and peevish).

And, truly, I'm not being critical there. Having a Way to Do Things that actually includes people other than oneself does probably mean that one can take vacations, and there was no way to know that this particular adventure really didn't allow for vacations for the people in charge of getting it done. Lessons have been learned, i believe, but there's still a lot of freaking out to do.

Not by me, though, if I can help it. Loaner Cat does what she can to refocus my attentions, which is always good. I've also been reading again. There for awhile I was rereading a bunch of stuff, but suddenly I'm back in New Book land. And my latest somewhat guilty pleasure has been the George Martin books, or the first one, anyway. People whose opinion I trust (all online) seemed to like it a lot, so I figured I'd get the first one and see whether I like it, and, so far, it's entertaining, A potboiler, for sure, in the manner of Dorothy Dunnett, I'd say, but I admit to liking her stuff, too, way more than I probably should.

I'm always a bit annoyed at comparisons to Tolkien, though. While I freely admit that Tolkien isn't for everyone, and while i have registered my various objections to the film versions here, and while I recognize that Tolkien's inclusion/treatment of women leaves much to be desired in many ways, I fell under the spell 35 years ago, and it's not going to change. More to the point: the issues notwithstanding, Tolkien's fiction was an outgrowth of his philology and linguistics, of his invention of new languages and the creation of backstories around the beings who spoke those languages. While others have certainly created whole worlds out of whole cloth--Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea, for example, which I love--that world creation takes a different form. It's neither good nor bad (except for the occasional author who apparently consciously tries to emulate Tolkien in some way, which is a project doomed to failure), but it has a different origin than Tolkien's world creation.

Thus, while I am only part of the way into the first volume, I would liken the Martin books more to Dunnett, or, I suppose, LeGuin, than to Tolkien. But Tolkien got a big boost with the movies, and nobody knows Dunnett, mostly, so, to sell the books, Tolkien gets thrown around, which does a disservice to both him and to whomever is supposed to be the "new" Tolkien.

Look, people, Tolkien is sui generis. Unique. Singular. Stop using him to sell things that Aren't Like His Works At All.

Count Me Out

Remember that big thing I was working on in June? The important thing worth a lot of money to my organization? Well, in the mad dash (not created by me) to get it submitted in time, I ended up going over the page limit, so we lost the money. We can likely get it back, by doing a big thing (and counting correctly this time through), and the people who kinda-sorta took it away are also trying to make sure we get it back and are covered in the gap, but, yeah, a little stress. Fun times.

The whole experience has been useful in a meta way, to me and, I think and very much hope, to others, but fuck, this is NOT the most fun way to learn these lessons. I already knew these risks existed, but control over things was kinda ripped from my hands in the days prior to its due date. Which is not to say that it's someone else's fault that I cannot fucking count (though one coworker was quick to point out to me privately that the only time in my long experience at this where I've made such a mistake is the one wherein others were fiddling, at the last minute). I've tried very, very hard to keep that observation between us, rather than starting the fingerpointing in team meetings that has so far been avoided. There's no point to it except as a defensive measure, and that hasn't been needed.

Meanwhile, this weekend was another exercise in using the things that were closest to going bad in the fridge. So: last night we had salmon with a warm chutney (mango, tomato, onion, and fresh basil, barely warmed in a bit of butter), white bean dip (rosemary, onion, garlic, and white beans, cooked in chicken broth and then pureed with some olive oil) with carrots and slightly steamed broccoli (both from the farm share), and eggplant (farm share) tossed with rehydrated dried pears (because I didn't have apricots), crystalized ginger, lime juice, and olive oil, then baked, then tossed with coconut milk and lime juice and soy sauce, with the whole shmear mixed with farro. It all was quite tasty.

Today's exercise was to use the bag of sweet cherries that was starting to get kinda soft in the fridge. I was thinking I wanted something with chocolate, so I pitted the cherries, macerated them a bit with a little of the chocolate port I bought on Friday, then cooked them on the stove with a little butter to soften them up and further infuse them. The vanilla went in the cherries, too. The batter was a combo of things and utilized flax seed, whole wheat pastry flour and all-purpose flour, cocoa, some ground hazelnuts that had been hanging around forever in the freezer, and the usual stuff--butter, sugar, baking soda (not powder), and eggs. I haven't tasted one yet, but they sure smell good. The rest of the cherries are sitting in a little red wine and will be used for a sauce for venison, I think, along with some caramelized onions. Plus there are a few more eggplant to use, and I have some kale I have to use as well.

So the things I (will have) used up this weekend included, from the farm share, tomatos, broccoli, kale, some of the onions and garlic and basil, and most of the eggplant (all of it by the end of dinner tonight, I hope), I also used up a bag of cherries, a bag of dried white beans, some old hazelnut flour, and some old cocoa (it turns out I had two UNopened tins of cocoa powder, in addition to the one that was open), and continued to work my way through the whole wheat pastry flour that's been hanging around. I also used up my brown sugar, so must buy more of that.

I find that I enjoy this exercise, by and large; it's an interesting challenge. It has the unfortunate effect of making me feel more virtuous than is probably warranted, but still. I'm getting lunches out of it, too, as I basically try to cook as many things as possible, even if I/we only have a little of it for that meal, because then I have lunches, too.

Anyway. I'm exhausted--Loaner Cat was rambunctious last night, and I haven't been sleeping all that well anyway--but a nap is probably not possible. So: time to stare vacantly.

Into the Wet

At what point does principled objection become mere intransigence? Interesting question, no? And, let me hasten to add, I'm the one who has the objection, and, indeed, it's principled. It would do little harm to break the particular rule for This One Time. But it's a rule that has been broken in the past, and I have spent most of my time at the organization cleaning up various messes that resulted from such breakage, so I am disinclined to do so. More to the point, I am disinclined to break it, or allow it to be broken, precisely because of the attitude of the people who want to break it. They want to break it for the sake of expedience--and not expedience that will actually result in more services being provided. In addition, they do not seem to regard the principle as an important one, and they seem to regard expedience as more important, and that is making me dig in my heels more than I otherwise might do so. Finally, they do not fully understand some of the pieces about which they are being insistent, and I do not like when people are trying to make big decisions when they do not have full information.

All that aside, I had to act like a Senior Management-Type Person on Friday. A string of circumstances led to the ceiling falling in, in several places, because of leakage from storms. Given that I was the only Senior Management-Type Person in the vicinity, I closed the place down. There was some immediate fallout from that--I sent people home, with pay--but, as the full extent of the damages became clear, the fallout has lessened. And then, last night, at my house, in addition to having to try to sleep through lightning outside the buiilding, and in addition to running around closing windows, the electricity went out. Which, normally, who cares; roll over and sleep.

Except, now that I'm a Property Owner (or, at least, I share ownership with a bank), I have an Alarm System. Which beeps, when the power goes out., every 20 minutes or so. (The first time this happened, I looked at the display, which says, among other things, "No AC," and thought, because it was the middle of the night, "But I don't HAVE air conditioning!" Eventually I realized this was "alternating current," not "air conditioning.") I could not, for the life of me, get it to stop beeping. Finally, at 2:45 am, I dug up a phone number and called the company. No, I do not, in fact, remember my "code word," but, for the love of FSM, tell me how to stop the beeping. (The unspoken threat, in my head, went something like, "Or I will take a fucking HAMMER to the thing.") I got it to stop, I think, and then the power came back, but not much sleep was left in the night, and then today I had to put together the report that I would have put together yesterday if the sky had not fallen on everyone's heads.

Yes, I AM tired; why do you ask?

But it is what it is. There are interesting challenges, which I would relate if i didn't want sleep so badly, and I could rhapsodize about the steamy weather, if I didn't want to collapse on the bed, and so on, so it'll all have to wait.

The Takeaway Was . . .

My antipathy toward kumbayfuckingyah activities is well-documented and longstanding. Nothing I experienced last week has caused me to change my mind. I won't get into my objections to the day's events that were specific to our organization; those are internal, and a function of the work we're doing now to merge some service bits together. And I won't even object to some of the other training sessions I've had to attend recently; while they didn't do much for me, they clearly seemed to be valuable to many other people, and I don't want to harsh that. Sometimes you just have to sit through shit and do your best not to put a damper on other people's experience. I didn't succeed in that nearly as well as I would have liked, and I admit that it's a challenge for me, and one on which I truly feel I need to work.

However.

Two things in particular highlighted my opposition. The first thing was in relation to the afternoon's "team-building" exercise. Even though the team that I was on actually won (despite have two people, me being one of them, with official Bad Attitudes about the whole thing), I found the whole thing to be completely tedious and, more important, a complete fucking waste of time. I tried very hard not to let my attitude fuck up other people's chances to win, and, in fact, it could be argued that one of my contributions was instrumental in our winning. And I still think it was a complete fucking waste of time. Why?

Because teams don't get "built" by forcing people to work together on some stupid, pointless task. Every last person, except, of course, our would-be Galtian would-be overlords, recognizes that nearly everything we do is a group effort. Even my dissertation, which, of course, I had to actually write, relied on many other people for help, advice, a sounding board, etc., and those pieces were, in fact, crucial to my being able to write a goddamned dissertation. Should their names go on it as co-authors? Well, no, probably not, given the way we think about these things, and given that, without me, that particular piece of scholarship would not have occurred. But I absolutely believe that others' contributions were vital to my being able to do it.

Back to my point: the whole afternoon's exercise was just stupid and pointless. It accomplished nothing. Nothing was gained. No teams were built. We would have spent our time better if we had come together to take a crack at some of the issues the organization is actually trying to address, rather than what we did, and people would have ended up with a greater sense of real accomplishment.

My second serious opposition was to a different activity during the day, one wherein a speaker came in and talked about changes, and how to deal with them, and blahblahfuckingblah. S/he had a particular Model Of Change (of course), which was simplistic and not at all how I think about these things, but whatevs. I could suffer through that part by stressing about all the writing that wasn't getting done on the thing that is due this Friday and not listening much to the speaker. The thing that put me over the edge, though, was that each table was supposed to use this Model to write down some change in the past year that we experienced, and to analyze the change in terms of the Model.

I absolutely refused to do it.

I didn't say anything, but I didn't fill out my notecard, and I didn't say anything when we were all supposed to be Discussing It In Our Groups. I try, as best I can, not to piss too much on what others are doing, and, hey, maybe some people get something out of shit like that; not my place to say, and good on them if they do.

But I am profoundly uncomfortable talking about made-up shit like that, in groups of people at work. I will tell people very intimate things. I have had some very deep discussions with all kinds of coworkers. I share all kinds of shit. Nevertheless, I repeat, I am profoundly uncomfortable doing this kind of pseudo-group-therapy. I hate it. I think it's worse than pointless, and I have no interest in babbling about this shit to the people with whom I work. I think it's demeaning and degrading, and I think it's a distraction from the true issues that we face, from the true elephants in the room that everyone's ignoring.

Meanwhile, I spent substantial parts of Saturday and Sunday in my office, and today was nearly a 12-hour day and tomorrow and Wednesday are likely to be similar. In fact, I'll be lucky if it's just tomorrow and Wednesday, and not an all-nighter on Thursday as well.

Other than that? The kumbaifuckingyah event was wonderful.

Sing With Me

Rest in peace, Big Man . . .

Today is a big kumbaifuckingyah day, and, as you might imagine, I am absolutely breathless with anticipation. The fact that I have a major fucking competing grant due next Friday and have done not nearly enough work on it yet, and the fact that I'm going to be losing Wednesday afternoon to training on some new purchase order system (a four-hour training? is calculus involved? because otherwise four hours seems excessive), aren't bothering me at ALL! You know why? Because I simply love, love, love all-day retreats. It just excites and energizes me So. Much.

Was that convincing? Yeah, I figured not, but it's the best I can do. Welcome to the world of senior management, where you slap on a happy face and do the needful. And get paid for it, mind you. But still; I have so much fucking work to do. I hate these things to begin with, but when I am completely overwhelmed, it just makes them worse.

In non-work-related news, I have managed to find someone to fix my broken paneling, which excites me to no end. He'll do the work after the beginning of July, and he won't be cheap, but he really does seem to know what he's doing. I also ordered the chairs for the sunroom, and they're under construction at the moment--I'm also getting a third chair, plus footstool, for the living room, at half price. Turns out some bozo decided he didn't want what he ordered after all, and returned it and made a huge fuss about it, and my furniture guy was happy to get rid of it. I also seem to have located someone who can move the stuff when it's complete, for cheaper than the shipping costs would have been, so that's exciting news, too.

And rowing classes! Those turned out to be totally cool. It turns out I was, in fact, Doing It Wrong for all those years, and that doing it right is harder. I liked the classes so much I bought a package, too, and am aiming for once or twice a week, plus the workouts at home.

I had intended to go to a class last night, but work got in the way, and, by the time I got home, I simply could not motivate myself, despite the fact that these days I look at pictures of food and my clothes get tighter. I'm trying not to stress out about that, but not doing very well. Some of it is vanity, of course; no denying that. But some of it is practical--I really do not want to have to buy new clothes; and I really like the clothes I have, but I can't wear many of them without looking like an overstuffed sausage and feeling very uncomfortable (physically: they're tight); and I can't help but think that hauling around an extra 20 pounds is just tiring in and of itself--it's like having a load of groceries strapped to me at all times. Actually, it IS groceries strapped to me--in the sense that I've already consumed them and they're now attached. And of course this morning I had all these grand plans of a workout before the kumbaifuckingyah event, but that didn't happen, either. Too bad; so sad.

A full night's sleep would be nice, too. I don't need all that much, but more than four hours would be nice . . .

Lady Cooks-a-Lot Strikes Again!

One might surmise that things have been a bit hectic. And, yes, that would be a good guess. The short version is that my new boss is now our new head honcho; the old head honcho is out. I don't really know details, and I sure as fuck wouldn't put them here if I did. The upshot, though, includes a promotion and another raise for me, which, yay, and a very cool new job that actually maximizes the use of many of my best skills (or it will eventually; for the time being, I have to learn a whole bunch of stuff and teach a whole bunch of stuff to other people), while working for one of the best bosses I've ever had and working with a team of people I like and respect. So, yay.

Today's cooking has included, so far: more whole wheat soft pretzels and pretzel rolls (the latter will be used for tonight's venison sandwiches, more on which in a moment), lemon bars (more meyer lemons, and a recipe cobbled together from multiple sources), and wild turkey and white bean cassoulet, which is simmering on the stove at the moment. The soft pretzel/pretzel roll recipe is cobbled together from the KAF whole grain book and from the bakery formula for soft pretzels (and, needless to say, I use baking soda rather than lye in the water bath), and the whole grains in it reallty give the bread a wonderful chewy flavor. The preferment definitely helps, I suspect; I use whole wheat flour for that, which probably helps mellow it out some.

The lemon bars include a crust from the KAF book, sort of--I used a mix of chopped oats, whole wheat flour, and unbleached flour--and the filling was sort of from a David Lebovitz recipe, except I had to double it because the crust formula was for a bigger pan. I also cut back on the sugar--actually I used honey--because I was using Meyer lemons. They're quite tasty, too--lemony without being either too sweet or too sour. I'll probably cut back the sugar in the crust next time I make it, but in general I thought they were a success.

The cassoulet recipe is from "A New Way to Cook," and instead of cooking the meat that she suggests, I rendered some pancetta and then threw in some already-cooked wild turkey meat from Friend. I also used wild turkey broth. It's simmering still, and I have to add the chopped carrots and onions to it in awhile, but I suspect it's going to be pretty fabulous.

I have not exercised in weeks, though. I've either been out carousing (week before last) or coming home and staring at the wall with the Loaner Cat in my lap, stirring only to put on a hockey game or Top Chef. This is not a desireable development, however, not least because it has reversed all the progress I'd made in fitting into my clothes again. And then Friday I managed to finally catch a cold--I say finally because it seems as though everyone around me is sick more often, and more seriously, than I am. I actually had managed to completely avoid all illness this winter, and this cold is pretty mild. (I started sucking on zinc lozenges and drinking extra liquid before I was even sure that it was, indeed, a cold, and that seems to have reduced my "suffering" to "blowing my nose and sneezing a lot.")

One of the things that has occurred to me in the past month or so has to do with change. As you can imagine, there have been a whole boatload of changes in the past six or seven months--bosses and head honchos and organizational structure and even some organizational direction have been changing steadily, with some big dramatic bits every now and then for punctuation. While it is a little unsettling, in many ways, I've realized that it's not really bothering me as much as it's bothering some of my coworkers, and I was wondering why.

Was I hiding from my own stress or something? And then I realized that, for me, the stressful changes in my life have included big questions like "how the fuck do I pay the rent?" and "what about food?" and "oh, fuck, now what am I going to do with my life?" and "how am I going to pay off those loans?" Generally, several of those are in play, and, more often than not, there are multiple explosions in my personal life as well. So, compared to those kinds of stressors, the past six or seven months hasn't felt so bad. Not necessarily all puppies and unicorns and flowers, of course, but compared to being unemployed, it pretty much rocks.

Okay, so the cassoulet is pretty much done; the venison is sliced thin and marinating with garlic and a little wine; in a minute I'll get up and slice an onion, maybe actually caramelize it and take it out of the pan. The shrimp can be cooked quickly, and then the venison can be flash cooked, basically, the the cheese gets melted on top and the whole thing gets scooped up onto a pretzel roll (in Friend's case, one that has been smeared with mustard).

Friend has gotten addicted to these steak sandwiches. I did it on a whim months ago, then we didn't do it for awhile, but we've started again, and added the homemade pretzel bread, and it's just amazingly flavorful. We'll probably switch to the grill when it warms up a little (and the Loaner Cat is back at either Friend's house or his mom's; she doesn't like being abandoned). But in the meanwhile, this rather rocks.

Lemony Goodness

Yogi Berra noted that nobody went to Ruggeri's restaurant any more because it was too crowded. That's how I feel about going out to dinner around Valentine's Day. I don't have much of an opinion about VD either way; I do not participate in the craziness, I do not expect the men in my life to make gestures of any kind, much less big flower-and-jewel-encrusted gestures, and I tend to take the Twisty Faster view of it, that it's a big trade--baubles in exchange for access to vaginas, or, more to the point, access to a particular vagina. What it means, though, is that the restaurants are all clogged up with people engaging in this trade, which means I avoid it like the plague. The only drag of that is that Friend and I like to go out to dinner once a week or so, and lately weekends have been more convenient for that, but it's out of the question this weekend. (Chuck and I took the same approach to this.)

So I headed to Whole Paycheck yesterday, and got some tuna steaks, which I marinated in orange juice & peel, garlic, and fresh rosemary, a handful of shrimp (Friend likes shrimp), and three pounds of butter. And a bunch of other stuff, of course, because what's the point of a shopping trip if you don't haul 50 pounds of stuff on the el? I also braised some chard and collard greens with some pancetta and onions, and they were pretty tasty, too. I had bought a bunch of pancetta and I'd had the person slice it very thick, and then I froze it in approximately-two-ounce portions, and it has been extremely useful. Whenever I want a little of that bacony goodness, I just grab one of the portions and chop it up. It just occurs to me that I should have thrown a splash of balsamic vinegar into the greens, too . . .

And then I made up a recipe! Sort of, anyway, with some help from the chatline person at King Arthur. I was looking for a way to use the meyer lemons and make a cake, but with flour rather than almonds like the last time, and I wanted it to be very lemony, but I didn't want something that had a ton of fat in it. So I found a recipe (from KA, actually) that used buttermilk, and I reduced the butter, eliminated the buttermilk, and subbed lemon juice, water, and powdered milk, and used a lot of peel (about 10 grams--I ended up using the peel and juice of four lemons). I didn't have a mary ann pan (and had to look it up to figure out what it even was), but I suddenly remembered that I had a mini-bundt pan, and that worked beautifully. I topped the cakes with some whipped cream and raspberries and strawberries that Friend hauled over here from his freezer. The cakes were absolutely delightful; I suspect muffin tins would have worked as well (and were actually my first thought). Lemony and cakey and even a little chewy, because I buttered the tins very thoroughly. And, for once, I wrote down what I was doing, so I can actually make them again. I know! Who woulda thought!

Today I think it's going to be some venison steak, because I love me some venison steak. I have a head of cauliflower I need to use, and I'll see what grains I have floating around in the cupboard. And cookie-making needs to ensue, as well, so I can bring some to work tomorrow. I already mixed the dough; it's been chilling (literally) in the fridge since yesterday--I made a double batch. And I also bought a pineapple and two mangos, so I think I'll make a fruit salad, too, to take for breakfasts this week.

I think a lot of my food blogging is because work is still, as noted a steaming pile of stress. It doesn't affect me in some ways, but it does in others; one of the people with whom I work most closely isn't holding up his/her part of the work. Our old boss used to cover for him/her, or rope the person into line when I (privately) bitched enough about it, but the old boss isn't there any more, and Coworker is pulling the same old shit. Newboss is less tolerant--okay, not tolerant at all--and the rest of the team is getting really damn tired of the shit, too. It will come to a head sooner rather than later, I think, because Coworker thinks s/he can skate and it is just not going to fly. Newboss won't allow it or cover for it, and the rest of us are getting mighty tired of doing Coworker's work.

One thing that's been interesting to me is my own . . . complicity, I guess. I realized way back when that Coworker isn't able to do some of the things that would have been associated with his/her position--vital things, that really needed to be done--but also brought other strengths that we didn't necessarily know we needed. So, I took on some of Coworker's stuff--okay, a lot of it--which has worked out okay for me, because I've gotten experience that I would not otherwise have and some of it has been an interesting puzzle for me to solve, and I got my big raise as a result of it.

When Oldboss was around, I realized Oldboss wasn't going to confront Coworker in any meaningful way, and I recognized there wasn't anything I could do, short of quitting, and that I didn't want to do that. It was, after all, working out for me, even if it meant the labor distribution was somewhat unfair. When Coworker was getting too out of hand in some way, I'd bitch to Oldboss and get him/her to deal with it at least a little, and Oldboss also would cover for Coworker, in the sense of being present in the office when Coworker took many of his/her vacations and days off and whatevers. Newboss isn't willing to do that covering, and I'm finding that I'm actually rather relieved. I didn't like it before, but I liked Oldboss and there wasn't any way to really confront openly what was going on, other than my bitching about it, so I realized that and let it be. Now, however, it's coming out in the open, and I much prefer that, uncomfortable though it may be in some ways.

The other three of us on the senior management team are basically fed up with the whole charade, and Newboss is behind us on this, so it will be interesting to see what happens. Me, personally, I'm getting tired of people coming to me with things that are Coworker's responsibility--they do it because (a) Coworker isn't doing the thing, or is out of town or out of the office and/or (b) they know I'll get it done somehow. What Coworker doesn't realize is that it makes him/her look bad--people already questioned what Coworker actually contributes, and this isn't going to make answering that question any more pleasant for Coworker. The other thing Coworker doesn't realize is that I've been his/her biggest advocate, in some ways, pointing out the assets that may not be visible to everyone. Now, however, I'm sufficiently tired of my plate getting more heaped while s/he gallivants off somewhere, I'm less willing to come up with a cover story.

My main goal, through all of this, is to try to be clearheaded and fair-minded. I haven't been doing a great job at that, so far, but I'm working on it. I did realize that the thing that bothers me the most is that I get pissy and annoyed, and that's not a place I like to be. I don't like when I get that way--and my actions are my own responsibility. I don't care if it's "justified," it's not helpful or pleasant, either to experience or to be around. It's all a learning experience, I guess.

I am arguably throwing away $30 tonight, and I am not usually so profilgate, but I simply could not face it. My tile-making class meets tonight--it was cancelled last week but will be made up, which means I haven't been there in two weeks as it is. However, I had to shlep to the other end of the city not just yesterday but today as well, as the temporary filling fell off again yesterday. This means I was up by 4 or so and out the door by a little after 5 am two days in a row. In addition by the time the class is over tonight, it will be bitter cold again, with multiple degrees below zero wind chill, and the trip home takes at least 40 minutes, on a good night with good public transportation karma, which I have not been having lately. (Today's episode: the bus on which I was riding this morning pulled over on Lake Shore Drive. We sat there for 10 minutes, waiting for the next bus, onto which we were all herded. Luckily I had left some wiggle room in terms of the buses I was planning to catch, but the driver never did explain what the problem was.)

And I just didn't feel like it. Work continues to be a steaming pile of stress, and it's been brutally cold this week, and whine, whine, whine. Somehow, coming home and sitting on the couch with a cat in my lap and working on getting on the outside of some wine just sounded like a much better idea. So far, I'm right about that. I'm usually pretty good at figuring out whether I'm just whining and I need to STFU and get on with whatever it is, or whether I really do need to skip whatever it is.

So, yes, I have hauled my sorry ass all the way to the other end of the city three times in the past week, and two of those three episodes have involved the asscrack of dawn. The dentist was a bit abashed today--but it's just the kind of thing that's going to happen with an inlay as big as mine is, so I saw no point in getting pissy about it. It also means that they'll make it a point to get me in as soon as the piece comes back from the lab rather than making me wait a month (which is when my appointment was originally scheduled). Meanwhile, I've also discovered that the culprit in the recent recurrance of the back pain was my winter boots. Last weekend, Friend hauled my new boots--purchased at the end of last winter, on sale, and left at his house--over here, and I've been wearing them all week, and my back pain and heel pain? Nearly non-existent.

What I really want is a couple of days off--to go hang at the tile studio and work on my stuff; to get a massage; to take myself out for a meal; to work out (I haven't been able to get myself to do that this week, either); to sit somewhere with a hot beverage and a good book. And somehow I'm going to figure out how to get that, despite the continuing pile of things on fire on my desk.

Shovelday

Wow.

I did, in fact, go outside (if I get ambitious, I'll post pics eventually). The thing that was so weird is that there were spots where there is no snow at all--and a couple of spots where the street is completely blocked by 10-foot-high drifts that go from curb to curb. Cars are buried on one street and the street is clear a block south. At one point, I was walking down the middle of a main artery (Sheridan, for those of you out here) and there were no vehicles in either direction. The drifting is in part because I'm so close to the lake; the park space on the lakefront is windswept, but the street that goes along the park is blocked. I did make it to work today, and there is a big buttload of snow out there. In a lot of places, they're going to need front-end loaders rather than plows, because the streets are too narrow and there's just too much snow.

Weather like this--or like heat waves in the summer--amuses me in the ways it brings out responses in people. So many people are so insulated from weather--by heat and by air conditioning--that they whine incessantly. I am, of course, also insulated: I'm sitting on my couch, with a TV and a computer and warm-enough clothes; I am not huddled in a drafty hut watching the snow blow in through the cracks in the logs. I will take a hot shower tomorrow morning, and I do not have to go outside to pee. I can afford warm clothes. So, yes, it's not like I'm living off the land here.

But so many people with whom I work basically go from their houses to their cars to the office building. One of my old bosses didn't even have a warm winter coat because he was never out in the winter weather for more than a couple of minutes. Those of us who actually expect to be walking a few blocks, or standing on a corner waiting for a bus, or standing on a platform waiting for a train, tend to dress for it. It IS winter, after all.

Remember that central office person who's been giving me a pain? As of today, the person is no longer with the organization. I don't know for sure that s/he was pushed rather than jumped, but the suddeness of it suggests a shove rather than a leap. A part of me has a certain amount of compassion, because I believe that person was in over his/her head and was being asked to do things that were beyond his/her competencies, and I like the person personally. At the same time, the fact that I've mentioned it here, multiple times, gives some idea how annoyed I've been. The person really wasn't able to do the job that needed doing, which has been making my job more difficult.

Anyway. My dentist texted me at 4:30 this morning (after calliing me at 9:45 last night) to let me know that he was still snowed in and I shouldn't shlep to the 7 am appointment today, and then his office called to reschedule for tomorrow at 8:30. I was supposed to have a vacation day, but instead I scheduled an acupuncture appointment for the afternoon and just took a sick day instead. I need some vacation though, and soon.

Snowmageddon Rising

Okay, so maybe they were right about this one.

If you can see out my front windows--which is difficult to do, because of the snow clinging to the storm windows and screens--you can see that the cars are nearly buried and that the street has no tire tracks. There are some footprints, but not even a lot of those. Apparently some of the public transportation is running, but everything is really buried. The most recent "special weather statement" notes that lake-effect snow is moving through the area: "INTENSE SNOWFALL WITHIN THIS BAND AND WIND GUSTS TO 40 MPH WILL DROP VISIBILITIES TO ONLY A COUPLE HUNDRED FEET. SNOW FALL RATES OF UP TO 2 INCHES PER HOUR ARE POSSIBLE AS THIS BAND MOVES SLOWLY EASTWARD." Being half a block from the lake has its down side, too. And Lake Shore Drive is closed. So, yes, staying indoors with the cat on my lap sounds like a fine plan, though I admit that part of me wants to at least go outside and trudge around the block, just for the experience. And I sort of wish I'd put together a preferment of some kind last night just to bake something today.

More likely, though, I'll fire up the DVD player or my Netflix instant watching thing and just make the cat happy.

Which would be fine. The ways in which work is stressful keep changing, which makes it interesting, in some ways, but also provides the sensation experienced by randomly shocked rats (or so I suppose). The good news is that the new boss is proving to be excellent. Very different set of strengths than the old boss, and, in some ways, ones that are more suited to my own style and inclinations. I don't want to sound disloyal--I really like my old boss quite a bit, and I'm very excited that s/he just got a new job. But--you saw that coming, didn't you--the new boss is better suited to the particular politics in play at the moment. OldBoss would not have gotten along at all with the new Big Boss, and, more to the point, would have had a hard time doing what the organization as a whole wants done right now. So, really, we're probably all in somewhat better places.

I must add that BigBoss makes me nervous, though. S/He has a style of operating that I don't like any more than I liked the style of the last person in that position, even though the two of them are very different in oh so many ways. On the other hand, as with the previous regime, my current boss does a fine job of protecting me and valuing my contributions and using my skills, so I will find a way to live with it. I also think that Newboss is doing, and is going to do, a better job of utilizing me, so that's actually kind of cool. We'll see.

And we'll see whether my mouth gets me in trouble. I'm getting increasingly impatient with a coworker (two, actually; one is at the central office), so I'm trying to regard it as an exercise in patience and such, but that is really not one of my best things. Actually, that's not quite accurate: I can be extremely patient in many circumstances. Where I get impatient, however, is when someone will neither lead nor follow nor get out of the way--when, in fact, someone gets IN the way, and then bitches about it. That makes me kinda nuts. The other person isn't holding up his/her end of the workload, IMHO, though s/he thinks s/he is; my feeling is that you shouldn't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.

When push comes to shove, though, the Top Chef rule is what matters: cook your own food and don't worry about someone else's dish. The problem here is that I'm trying to do that, but we need those to people to do specific things and they're not doing them, which makes my job harder. Which is where my impatience and peevishness come galloping into the fray.

Ah well; lessons in buddhism, I suppose.

Meanwhile, though, it's time to make some more tea and settle in to watch something; I don't know what yet, but it pretty much doesn't matter. Or maybe that walk around the block first?

Random

I only seem capable of food blogging these days . . . let's try something else.

Partly it's because all of the stuff at work goes on, but I've become more wary about going into detail on the 'tubes (not that I've ever had any inkling that any coworker even knows I have a blog, much less has stumbled across it, number one, and, number two, the people about whom I would be most dismayed stumbling across this thing don't have enough internet savvy to find it--most probably don't know what a blog is, much less how to find mine; but you never know). Some things are going quite well--the new middle lord (my direct supervisor) has turned out to be quite good; I like hir personally and professionally, and zie seems intent on finding ways to use my talents to their fullest rather than just letting me continue to do three or four jobs in obscurity. Which, hey, all good. But it's too soon to even try to talk about it here; it remains to be seen what can or will be done.

So I go to work, submit the next thing, come home and provide a lap for the cat (Friend's cat is living with me for a little while, as I think I mentioned), work out, watch the hockey game if there is one, watch Top Chef on Wednesday night, maybe go out for dinner with Friend one night, maybe do some cooking or baking if I'm inspired.

My tile-making class started this past week, and I'm already feeling weird about it. Part of it is that I know that what I need to do is to sit down and do some drawings, start doing something, anything, really, but, instead, I dink around. The one tile I made last year actually came out reasonably well for a first effort, and I'm looking forward to making it even better, but that was a goddamned expensive tile. And now I'm in a class where I'm surrounded by people who are Genuine Artists--or it feels that way to me--and I'm just a schlub with no ideas about what I want to create. And I know that that approach violates the Top Chef Rule--cook your own food and don't worry about what other people are cooking--but my brain keeps going there anyway.

Well, there's only been one class, so maybe I'll get my head out of my own head and actually do the drawings I need to do, and create some fun playful stuff just to amuse myself, and take a couple of afternoons off of work and spend some time in the studios (which doesn't cost anything extra if you're taking a class). I also know that I do my best work when I have the opportunity to just fuck around, play, see what evolves, and I didn't have much of that last spring. I have a ton of vacation time--nearly three weeks, plus five personal days--so we'll see. And did I mention that I want to just have fun with it, fer chrissakes?

This week's other task is to find out what the weird patch on my leg is. I called my dermatologist today and got an appointment for Thursday. I'm perfectly willing to pay my co-pay only to be told that it's just a patch of, I don't know, eczema or something, but it doesn't look like anything I've ever had on my skin before, and it's in a location that isn't a good candidate for plain old dry skin, and I moisturize after my showers, and I've been treating it for 10 days or so with no results, so I figure it won't hurt to have an expert take a look at it. It's probably something stupid and routine--and that would be absolutely fine with me.

As for cultural commentary: Lately I've been reading Eliot Pattison's Inspector Shan series, and absolutely loving it. I've worked my way through the first four, I think, and I alternate with other stuff, of course, but it's way fun. The other thing I've discovered--and, yes, I realize I'm late to this party--is "Big Bang Theory." I've been getting it on Netflix and watching it while I row, and it makes me laugh out loud. I just finished season two (I alternate with the BBC's Inspector Morse series), so I have a few more disks to go. But it cracks me up, and I've always had a crush on both Johnny Galecki and Sarah Gilbert, so it's even more fun. I got a new TV, too--a big-ass sucker--but I'm using the old TV in the back bedroom with the rowing machine, i.e., I only get to watch the little TV while I row, but I have the rowing machine out of my living room. No furniture yet, but the furniture maker was here the week before last, and as soon as I figure out what I'm getting back on my taxes I'm going to order some stuff.

Okay, that's the best I can do without involving food.

Whinealicious

I'm going to a pity party tonight--would you like to attend? No? Well, that's okay; I'm not going to stay long either. But.

We had a five-hour meeting today, and it was actually useful: we needed to sort through how we're going to spend some pots of money we have, and, in particular, what types of positions we need to expand our service provision. In general, it went pretty well. Everyone stayed on task, and we plowed through it and got to a place where we can move forward, so that was good. But the reason for the pity party is that I've finally identified what kind of help I need (and I'm reaching the point where I really, really need that help). That position was one of the few--in the 10 or so we discussed--that we ended up just not finding a place to put on a budget.

On one hand, I understand why not; for one thing, it's an administrative position, and we have other types of managerial staff we also need, so it kind of took a back seat. And I didn't jump up and down and wave my arms around; in retrospect, I was kind of hoping that someone else would kind of go to bat for me on this position, acknowledge what I need, and that didn't happen. At all.

So that's disappointing.

But then, I have this big proposal due on the 15th, and my new overlord, and others, keep asking how they can help, and I say, oh, I'll have to do it. Their response to that is to act as though I'm somehow at fault for not letting go or asking for help or whatthefuckever, i.e., that it's All My Own Fault that I'm doing it alone. I finally realized today why I'm doing that: if I do hand it off to someone and he or she fucks it up, then it's going to be up to ME to fix it, which will completely fuck my schedule. And today's meeting fed into that feeling: if no one recognizes what I need when I actually say it, out loud, in words, and then tries to facilitate that happening, why should I trust that people will do what they say on these other fronts? I would be a fool to do so, in my opinion. And, realisitically, I know my coworkers: who, exactly, is going to "help"? Most of them do not write very well to begin with--which is not a criticism, mind you, just an accurate statement--and other people whom overlord supervises can write but do not know our programs. So who, exactly, is going to do this "helping"? And, as noted, what if they fuck it up? Or suppose someone writes something and I do a lot of editing? And s/he is the kind of person whose panties bunch up when that happens? I do not fucking have time for drama.

If we had more time, I'd be willing to risk it, and to use others, and be able to provide the guidance and support they'd need to be successful and to maybe actually provide some assistance to me, but I do not have very much time, so, no. I think I'm going to have to share this with Overlord--in a slightly more polite way, of course--so it doesn't look like I'm being a martyr. Trust me, I'd love to share this, but realistically, I know what would be involved, and what would be involved is actually more goddamned work for me.

But!

A new season of Top Chef! It was interesting for me, because I did not see very much of the early seasons and don't remember any episodes that I might have seen. I've gone back and read recaps on Television Without Pity, and I have one of the seasons on my Netflix queue, but I hadn't gone through a whole season with many of them. And? Richard Blais may be talented, but his comment that the thing his season is known for is that he lost when he "should have" won? Fuck off, dude. What a narcissistic remark. Some people may remember that season for the person who ACTUALLY won; just a thought. Marcel, the guy who was physically assaulted in S2, already has me hating him (which is absolutely no justification for the assault, period end of sentence). Stephen seems like a complete ass. And so on. It should be quite interesting, because every one of them has been around this block, and many of them made it to the final three or four, so there are some serious cooking chops in the room.

The best thing about last night's challenge is that it called on one of the things that I've been saying forfuckingever: each chef had to remake the dish for which s/he was eliminated. They could change it a little, but not a lot. First off, anything that gets served in a fine dining restaurant is likely NOT the first version of that dish that someone tried to make; the higher up the price/quality range you go, the more likely that probably is. Point being, if you're trying out a new dish, you get to REmake it, to fix whatever seemed broken--you get to learn from your experience. Second, another thing that made it interesting is that anyone who was eliminated in the finals or the final four probably had a good dish but had one flaw in it--too much salt in Jen's dish, for example--such that the dish wasn't bad, in and of itself, it's just that someone else made something better. But people who were eliminated in earlier rounds had a higher likelihood that the dish that sent them packing just sucked ass from the conception. Making THAT a better dish is going to be a bigger challenge than merely not oversalting something.

So, really, I liked the concept of the elimination challenge quite a bit. And the person who lost--Elia?--served fish that was raw (but was supposed to be cooked), and apparently didn't really change the dish at all. No learning going on there. I also didn't like her personally.

Anyway. Tomorrow I'm going to dump a bunch of text into my outline for this fucking proposal--chunks of stuff that I can steal from elsewhere, coupled with notes on where to get other stuff--and see where that gets me. And then I'm going to another hockey game. I was supposed to make chocolate ganache tonight, but I didn't get to it; maybe tomorrow morning before work, because it won't take long. (Saturday is the condo association holiday gathering, and I'm bringing the mini hazelnut smores--maybe I'll actually get it right this time--and the ganache really has to sit for a day. If Brazen Tart is reading this, I'm using the Palet d'Or formula from school, because it ends up being firm enough.)

Our Friend the Turnip, Part II

This month's big decision is whether to do the CSA farm share next year; I want to decide by the end of the month because there's a discount for signing up and paying them now. And I really don't know whether I want to renew with them. On one hand, the delivery to my doorstep really can't be beat--no hauling bags of vegetables on buses, and no trying to carve out a couple of hours on a Saturday morning to get to the farmers' market, and the vegetables aren't beat up by being hauled on the bus.

The two down sides, though, are non-trivial: for one thing, I don't think the quantity really has been where it could be, and I mean that in two ways. There isn't a whole lot of product on a given delivery--no way could two people eat from one share--and often there is too little of a given item.

The other problem is that the variety has been lacking, in my opinion. I have had more fucking turnips this summer than EVER in my life--all of the turnips I've had in the previous 52 years wouldn't make a dent in the pile I've received. And, oh joy oh rapture, I'm getting more of them this week and next week! Also way too many radishes and way too much lettuce. I've received lettuce at least half of the weeks of the season, it seems--it's more like a salad share than a farm share.

This week I got two acorn squash (one of which has a mold spot on it), another huge bag of spinach (probably some kale in there too), 8 or so turnips, and a bunch of beets (very small beets) with the greens attached. So, not so bad, but fucking turnips. Again.

This week's cooking challenges are to figure out what to do with all the spinach (which won't be that difficult, because it's my second-favorite vegetable) and what to make for the condo association party on Saturday night. (Friend also wants to make some venison tenderloin for me . . . mmmmm, tenderloin.) I'll probably do a dessert; I'd love to make the poached pear tart that convinced me to go to pastry school, but ti takes a lot of fiddling around, so the more likely production is mini smores again. I've almost perfected the recipe, and it's not that difficult, and it's a nice bite-size thing to make, and I have all the ingredients, so, score.

Tomorrow I have to lead another half-day strategic planning and budgeting meeting, and I have to redo several budgets in the next couple of weeks, but after that, I'm going to put a "go away" sign on my office door and just do what I need to do. Should be nothing but fun.

Back Here

At first, I continued with my usual pattern of writing two thirds of a blog post and then trailing off, or thinking it was too long and rambly and wtf was the point, or I got tired and went to bed, thinking I'd finish it the next day, but no. Then, in early November, I thought, oh, I can do that blog post-a-day thing that all the Kids These Days are doing. Then I thought, wait, better idea, given how busy November is going to be, how about if I NOT blog in November, not even start posts, and then get back to it later, maybe in December. Which seemed like a way to take a break from this without giving it up entirely. So, even though it's not December, here I am, finally, again.

The Busy isn't over yet, either; two of the proposals are done, but the really huge big one that's due on the 15th isn't done yet--fuck, it's not even started yet--and everything is made more difficult by the necessity of bringing three people up to speed (new overlord, new over-overlord, and new finance overlord). Whatevs; yes, I miss my boss, and yes, there's a lot to do, but the new overlords don't appear to be evil, so it could be a whole lot worse.

One of the things that has been sort of interesting for me is that the Top Overlord kept asking what Made Me Happy, what kind of job would excite me, etc., and the Overlord has asked similar questions. What they both appear to be getting at is that the current work I'm doing, while important and they're happy I'm doing it, doesn't appear to . . . fully utilize my talents. And, on some level, I suppose that's true, but it doesn't seem very important to me.

For one thing, I don't particularly look for capital-H-happiness from my job. I took a stab at that--twice in my life, actually--and neither worked out, so I'm content to be working on the side of good rather than evil, doing work that's useful to the organization, and generally working with people I like. And that'll get you pretty far. Yes, I know, it flies in the face of the "do what you love" mantra that professional advice-givers like to chant, but I really don't think that many people get to do what they love AND get paid a living wage for it AND have a balanced life. So, really, I'm getting two out of three, and I at least like what I do, so it's a win.

For another thing, though, the "comma in every paycheck/no sacks of flour" aspect has continued to be absolutely crucial, even nearly three years after I hoisted my last sack of flour. (Yes, my last day was December 29, I think, 2007, and I started this job in February 08.) I would not have predicted it, but that episode in my life seems to have permanently rearranged the way I think about the world. Even though I've been insanely busy, and am going to be even more insanely busy for the next two weeks, still no sacks of flour and still a comma. Some of it is probably age, and some of it is a kind of resignation--as I've said to a few people, if you go by the evidence, then it appears that I do not get to Do What I Love in this lifetime--but it's been quite persistent. So be it.

Meanwhile, I spent all day yesterday baking cookies for beer school. We were going to be tasting holiday beers, which usually have a lot of spices added to them, so I decided to make cookies that focused on the simple ingredients in beer. One was a ginger cookie, mostly because I love ginger and look for excuses to use it. A second was a cookie that used barley flour, malted milk, and malted barley syrup, so you could get the barley flavor that grounds most beers; a third cookie used the same dough but added chocolate chunks, so it tasted like malted milk balls. The last one was a simple whole wheat cookie, which I glazed with orange; reminiscent of the fruit that often gets added to wheat beers. King Arthur adds orange juice to a lot of the whole wheat recipes, including this cookie one (apparently the flavor helps cut the tannins in the wheat), so I figured this would work. They were all pretty good (the ginger ones and the malted milk ball ones were pretty awesome), and I think people were entertained by the effort, so it was all good.

There are multiple other subjects I could mention--the new Bruce box set; other cooking or baking adventures; the CSA share--but I think we're going to stick with a training-wheels post for today.

Evil Asshole and the New Overlords

It's difficult to determine just how many posts I have started and abandoned--some of them quite lengthy. But I get half way through a story, or some more-or-less-connected thoughts on something, and I just don't finish it. Tonight, though, I am determined to finish, and the yeast in the kitchen will make sure I have the time. I tested a recipe for Cooks Illustrated, for wheat bread, and I really rather liked it. I only made a couple of changes--all butter, instead of some butter and some oil; wheat bran instead of wheat germ; and I made rolls instead of a loaf of bread, because rolls are easier to freeze and grab from the freezer for lunch--and I rather liked it, so I'm making it again. One of the good things about it is that you start part of it 8 to 24 hours before the rest of it: a biga and a soaker. It says 24 hours, but I left this one for more like 30, and I'm sure it'll be fine. The down side is that it raises three times after you mix everything together, but you don't have to do much, so it's not too bad.

Anyway, it's on its final rising, and obviously hasn't baked yet, so maybe I'll actually finish this.

Work continues its stressful march. I think what was happening was that several people, including the finance person (not the one w/ whom I continue to work, and my opinion of that person has improved some), but the higher-up person, who is an evil asshole rat bastard. I didn't trust that person to begin with, but I have since discovered that Evil Asshole was one of the major promulgators of the various canards that contributed to my boss's departure. Luckily, I don't have to work much with EA; s/he has been kicked upstairs, is going on to Even Greater Things Within The Organization, blahblahfuckingblah.

In any case, EA (and others) basically told the New Overlord that we were all a bunch of incompetent boobs, with my ex-boss being the least competent of the bunch. So NewO and others had the idea, I think, that they'd get rid of my boss, and maybe a few other people, and so on and so forth. Except, oh wait, we're actually NOT incompetent! So maybe it might not be a good idea to shuffle us around like a pack of playing cards. The other crimp in the plans is that they keep adding administrative salaries to our budget. Well, fine, but where the fuck does everything think those dollars are coming from?

So I just try to do my job, and quietly point out that yes, the emperor is still without any fucking clothes. It's very tiring, though.

Luckily, I've been reading some really great books. In particular, I have finally discovered Eliot Pattison and Michael Gruber, and they are both completly riveting me.

I've also been doing my usual use-up-the-vegetables cooking: yesterday's side dish involved turnips, onions, garlic, potatos (which were, unbeknownst to me before I cut them, a lovely pinkish-purple inside), kale, and spinach, all of which came from the farm share except the kale, which came from friend's garden, and some gruyere. Didn't suck. And one night last week I used kale, turnip greens, and some other stuff. So, all in all, the farm share has improved somewhat, though I have had more damn lettuce this summer than ever in my life. At least it's not iceberg, and is a mix of various greens, but I am getting very sick of salad, even though I'll be eating it this week and likely next week and possibly the week after. I throw in some carrots and radishes (also from the farm share) and some cheese, and it's pretty tasty, but still. Enough with the salad, please.

Okay, the bread is not just baked but now cool enough to eat, so I'm going to go test some.

The Bitter Greens of Petra von Kant* Narya

I don't have the energy or motivation to detail all the shit at work; let's say that it continues to be tense and nervous, and leave it at that.

This weekend's cooking, however, deserves some energy! The past few weeks I got a bunch of turnips in the CSA shares, and I hadn't gotten around to doing anything with them. I also had a trombone squash, or part of one, to finish off. (Someone at work who also has a CSA share had this big beautiful trombone squash for me, and last weekend I used about half of it in the Sunday dinner adventure, but there was a bunch sitting in my fridge.) So: one morning last week, I peeled the turnips and cut them up a bit, and then browned them in a little butter and added some parsley (the only herb I've gotten from the CSA), water, salt, pepper, and a little honey. I cooked them until tender. They're in the fridge now, but I've had a little of them and they're fine--for turnips.

Saturday we went to Farm Aid and got back to my place at about 2:10 am. I rarely sleep really late, but Friend needs his sleep, so I got up around 7:30 or so, when I woke up. I shaved the sqaush--or some of it--and put the rest through the food processor (slicing blade, not shredding). I took it out and sliced an onion in there, too, while I was at it. The onions have been REALLY strong, as in tear-inducing, so this was a great way to avoid that. I sauteed the onions for awhile, added some garlic, sauteed some more, then added the squash from the food processor (but not the shaved squash) and a hunk of pesto from the freezer and let it cook awhile. When it was cooked through, I stuck the immersion blender in it to puree it a bit, then added the shaved squash until that was cooked. I put some water in there somewhere; would have used broth if I'd had any. I ended up with three portions of soup for lunch, which, since I was using scraps from other meals, was kinda like free food.

Yesterday I cleaned out leftovers. I chopped up some venison that we had seared on the grill a week ago, and I threw it into Friend's slow cooker (I don't have one, so if I'd been at home I would have used a stew pot of some kind) with a cup or so of red wine that was sitting around, a can of chopped tomatos, and a couple of cloves. The venison already had salt, pepper, and garlic on it, and, IIRC, had been marinated a bit, too. That cooked for about three hours, most of it on high.

About an hour before dinner time, I put some barley on to cook. Then I pulled out the turnip greens and a few leaves of Russian kale I'd brought over from my house, plus some kale from his garden. We'd had some fabulous glazed brussels sprouts Friday for dinner, so we nibbled the leftovers, but I saved the chunks of bacon or pancetta or whatever. In the frying pan went a little butter, a little olive oil, and said chunks. I added about three big cloves of garlic, a can of drained cannellini beans, and all of the greens (which were still damp, so I knew they'd steam a bit, too), and let it all cook a bit. I rescued some tomatos from the garden, some leftover fresh mozzarella, and some basil from the garden as well--we harvested nearly all the basil a few weeks ago and made a whole bunch of basic pesto, but left some leaves on the plants and they've grown back some. I splashed some balsamic vinegar in with that salad and in with the bitter greens.

The barley went into a pasta bowl, with the stew on top; I kinda wish I'd done it in a pot so it would have reduced some, but it was fine. The greens could have gone in there, too--I had leftovers that way for lunch today--but keeping it separate allowed construction of various bites of food.

All in all, some pretty fabulous food. I basically managed to make five or six meals from those leftovers, plus another three from the squash, and some more from the turnips. I still have beets in the fridge that I'd meant to do up tonight, but I didn't feel like it, so I'll have those to do later in the week; we'll see what's in this week's share and go from there. The share runs through December, so I'll be interested to see what comes in the next two months.

*I have some vague memory that I saw that movie when I was in college, but I guarantee you that I don't remember a single scene from it, if I did, in fact, see it.

It's Not Death, It's Only Cake

Which is one of the most awesome things a judge on Top Chef (or, in this case, Top Chef Just Desserts) has ever said. Sylvia Weinstock, who is a wedding cake maven, apparently, was a guest judge last night, and one of the contestants was getting sniffly (as opposed to last week's full-out breakdown by a different contestant--a breakdown that involved weeping and sobbing, "The red hots were for my mommy") because her wedding cake kept getting worse and worse. It was difficult to watch, because I've had that sensation, where every single thing you do doesn't just not help or not work, it actively makes things a whole quantum level worse. In her case, the cake basically started to fall off the cake stand as she stood there. And Sylvia was tactful, and gracious, and very nice to her, and she also reminded the contestant that hey, it's only cake.

So I think I need to embroider that on a sampler or something, especially as things at work continue to get weird. The new person is apparently going to be making Large Changes, though not all of them have been revealed yet, and s/he's doing a number of things that I suspect are likely to fail, and s/he is definitely listening to some of the wrong people. But you know what? It's another thing about which I can do nothing, so I'm trying to keep my head down, stay calm, do my work and find another job. What the fuck else can I do?

Yes, it's very disappointing, because I like the organization, in large part, and I like the work well enough, and I feel like I'm doing something useful. It's not my life's work or anything, though, and I'm waiting to see how a few things play out (e.g., will my boss lose his/her job? betting says yes), and I'm absolutely not jumping (will I be pushed? hard to say for sure) into just anything. But.

And, of course, it has been unpleasant since I returned from vacation. It's clear that we've been maligned--in some cases, by people with whom we work closely--and it's looking like, if the boss goes, some of the people who have been doing the maligning will be my/our new overlords. But unless the lottery comes through for me, or a new job does, they'll be my overlords and I will need to obey them.

In any case, Sylvia's comments made me think of a running conversation that K. and I have been having (for nearly 25 years . . .). She, like me, buried a sibling (though she was much younger than I was when it occurred). We have realized that, even all these years later, we have a tendency, when things are really shitty, to say, well, nobody died. Both of us being relatively strong people (and I do not pretend to know the direction of the causal arrows on that), that realization is a shorthand for put your grownup pants on and deal with it. And, really, that is a useful bit of perspective.

On the other hand, we have decided recently that we probably need a spectrum of good and bad that is more than binary: somebody died = bad; nobody died = not bad. There really are more gradations than that. For example, when Chuck was basically having a breakdown? That completely sucked, for both of us, and especially for him, in oh-so-many ways. There wasn't a single fucking thing about that whole hot mess that was good at the time. (Yes, sure, in retrospect, he has gotten the help he needs--and is doing quite well; I had lunch with him and CK on Saturday--and so on, but at the time? Awful. As I'm sure you all remember, and you didn't read about more than about 25% of it.)

So, now, at work, I find myself being the calm one. Well, more or less. But in general, I've been the Voice of Reason and Calm, or one of them, anyway, and I find myself thinking, yeah, this sucks, but not only did nobody die, this isn't nearly as terrible as about six other times in my life. Possibly it's age at work, too; when you get to be an old broad like me, especially when you've done the kind of shit I've done, you kinda figure something shitty will happen, and you'll have to do something about it, or get through it, or . . . something. But there's no point in worrying too much about it, because what good will worrying do? Oh; right; none.

So, dinner tomorrow night, then off to Farm Aid on Saturday (back Saturday night), and possibly some cooking over the weekend. At the moment I have two batches of graham crackers in the kitchen--for one thing, I'm trying to find a version of the recipe that I really like. It tastes fine, but is missing something. One of the original recipes called for molasses, and that was fine, but very strong molasses flavor, which I like but not everyone does. So I swapped out some of the molasses for honey, and that works well enough, too, but it's still not quite right. The next attempt will include some malted barley sugar, I think; see what that does for the flavor. The reality is, I have a huge wad of leftover ganache from last week's bake sale, so I'm going to be making graham crackers until I run out of ganache. Yeah, I know, another tragedy. But nobody died.

Currying Favor Eggplant

This particular recipe is from Moosewood's New Classics cookbook, and I've (of course) made changes, as noted.

2 cups of chopped onions (I probably used closer to 4, because I have a bunch of onions)
2 tblp vegetable oil (no idea how much I used)
2 large garlic cloves (okay, more like five or six)
1 fresh chile, minced and seeded (left it out because I don't have any)
1 tblsp grated fresh ginger (probably more than that, maybe double)
the spices (I used approximately these amounts)
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cardomom
1 tsp salt
generous pinch saffron

1 cup orange juice (didn't have any, so used the juice of a lemon in the fridge, plus a splash of orange extract, plus some honey; didn't measure anything)

5 cups cubed eggplant (I had roasted the eggplant already, several days ago: cut in half lengthwise, put face down on parchment, oiled lightly, and baked for awhile; I might have had a little more or less than 5 cups of the cooked stuff)
4 cups zucchini (didn't have any)
1.5 cups bell peppers (I never include these)
3 cups diced fresh or canned tomatos (I used a can of Muir Glen tomatos)
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil (I used some pesto I had in the freezer)

I also added a handful of beet greens that was too small an amount to freeze on its own, plus about a cup of frozen spinach sitting in the freezer.

I did the onions, then added the garlic and ginger, then the spices, then the eggplant. What mostly appealed to me was the spices, plus making use of the eggplant. I like to roast or bake eggplant before adding it to a recipe--and, when I'm feeling really ambitious, I salt it first and then rinse it, to draw out some of the water. Zucchini would have been nice, or more eggplant, but the whole thing is quite tasty. I've been eating it with one of the wheat rolls I made last weekend when testing the Cooks Illustrated recipe.

This week's cooking adventure will include turnips, plus maybe their greens, and, separately, a big summer squash (I don't remember what type) that one of my coworkers is going to share with me. (We have been trading tales of our CSA shares over the summer, and, in general, discuss cooking and baking quite a lot.)

Meanwhile, speaking of work, lots of shit going down; as John Fogerty noted, there's a bad moon on the rise. No, really; seriously unpleasant shit. And, for once, I'm one of the calmer ones. The reality is, I can't afford not to be (and I don't think I'm in immediate danger). I have some suspicions about how the new powers that be are going to rearrnage my job, because of what they think I should be doing. Of course, if my suspicions are correct, they're going to take away the things I like most and do best and I'll keep the really boring parts and add some more of that. I can't afford to have an opinion about that, though. Remember that part where I gave all my savings to a bank? Yeah. That. Which means I'll do what I can and what I have to do, and I still won't be lugging 50-pound sacks of flour.

I'm reminded of John LeCarre's "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy." The beauty of the whole plot was how the spy basically managed to turn the whole place inside out. The people who were right were shoved out the door, or made to seem wrong or discredited. In my case, if stuff happens the way I expect it will, the powers that be will be taking exactly the steps needed to fail, and fail big. Fun times.

So, really, I think I need to move up that "win the lottery" plan and implement that immediately.

Road Trip

It's possible I could be more useless tonight, but I'm not entirely sure how.

I'm starting to get my crap together for the Large Trip to the Coast of My Birth, With Multiple Stops in the State Where I Colleged. Friend and I are grabbing his sister and heading to, in order, his brother's place, a rendezvous in Pennsylvania somewhere, at a location yet to be determined, my parents' house, a possible day of touring Philadelphia historical bits, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, because they have a Bruce exhibit I've been wanting to see, plus it's the R&R HoF and probably has some Cool Stuff. I would like to stop in the actual town where I went to college, but I think that's unlikely to be part of the adventure. All in all, though, it will involve about eight days of stuff, at least four of which will include driving.

I've been monumentally tired lately, and I've been trying to piece together why that is so, because it's not lack of sleep--I'm not sleepy, exactly. In discussion with Friend last night I decided that it's partly, or mostly, stress from work. (And not working out probably doesn't help, either.) It's not that I hate my job--actually, despite the multitude of frustrations lately, I actually like a lot of what I do, on some level. Yeah, it's boring and tedious in a lot of ways, and it doesn't engage my intellect, for lack of a better word, in any way whatsoever, but it's Good Work, and for a good cause, so if I don't get to use my smarts in ways that make me happy & fulfilled, well, at least other people get to benefit from it. There is some measure of satisfaction from that, and I make a living that allows me to do stuff and enjoy myself and even save some money, so it's pretty damn good, as these things go.

The thing that's causing me stress is that I don't have any help. There isn't another person in the whole organization who knows as much about what I'm doing as I do, and, in particular, doesn't know nearly as much about the budget as I do, and that makes me nervous. Our downtown financial folks don't concern themselves with the actual program activities or rules governing same, and they don't make any effort to learn what we're doing, and they don't particularly provide us with tools that would help; they mostly add layers of hoops through which we must jump, and communicate poorly about same, which just adds to the strain. Sometimes, when I'm really lucky, they lecture me on what fabulous tools they're providing and how we should really use them. But really, they don't know our programs nearly as well as they ought. (For example, today our controller called and asked MY opinion about a thing that the head of the whole organization wants to do that would affect one of the satellite programs in our corner of the organization, and I got the strong sense that my feedback was what made the decision, even if it doesn't go out with my name on it, plus I sent the controller to an additional person whom I knew would have a relevant opinion about another aspect of the whole thing.)

On top of that, there really isn't anyone else who knows our data needs and reporting requirements. (One of our funding agencies requires 40 reports a year. Yes. Forty. And that's just one bit of the reporting.) Some of the stuff I pull myself. Some of it I get from our IS person (who's a level above me on the food chain, so she isn't exactly support for me, though she does, in fact, do her best to get me what I need). It gets reported in multiple formats, and multiple arenas, and to multiple internal and external ends, and very little of it gets reviewed or even examined by anyone else before I submit it, and mostly people don't even know about it.

Yes, I know I need to write all of this down somewhere. I'll do that as soon as I put out whatever's on fire right now, and I can think of a half a dozen things that are smoldering or actually in flames.

My boss and I both recognize the need for some infrastructure, and I have occasionally given some thought to what it would resemble, were any of it to come my way. At the same time, I know our programs in the detail of the matter--i.e., both in terms of budgets and in terms of performance--better than anyone, and I know the huge unmet need, so I have a very difficult time taking money that could be used to provide direct services to people who's lives are much, much, much worse than my Stress At Work problems. On the other hand, I know that infrastructure is vital, so I'm willing to make an argument to hire someone when we have the dollars to do so and I have enough work to keep that person busy. It's a balancing act.

Add to it that I absolutely do not want to cheap out on the eventual position: either hire someone good, at a reasonable salary, or don't, but don't hire a warm body at 2/3 the necessary salary, and expect that person to do what I know needs to happen. To me, that's a complete waste of money, and, likely, a waste of my time.

So, really, it's the sole-responsibility part that is making me a bit anxious. I would like to have someone around whom I can trust and past whom I can run things, with some expectation that s/he will actually be able to look at what I've done and find my mistakes. Right now, I work alone, and the things I send downtown get put through some weird translation device that fucks up everything and puts it into a spreadsheet in ways that make it impossible to actually follow, but no one actually reviews things in a way that is likely to find any relevant mistakes. Irrelevant bullshit, yes, but not actual mistakes. Not the desired result.

Anyway.

All that aside, I'm still taking time off. As of February of this year I get three weeks of vacation a year, so even with this trip I'm going to have more than two weeks of vacation days left. And I'm taking this time. I want to see my dad near his 80th birthday, while all of his organs are still on the inside of him. I want to see my nephews, if I can. I want Friend to see a part of the country that is beautiful to me, but that he has never seen. (I find that I don't much care about seeing my brother, which kind of bothers me to realize but I don't know that I want to, or can, do anything about it. But that's another whole story.) And you know what? I'm not indispensible; the place will manage without me for another week. The other thing that helps is that I have worked hard to develop relationships with our various funding agencies and project officers, so if something does blow up, they'll be on our side. Who knew that someone as fundamentally grouchy as I am would have the patience for that . . .