Light and Momentary

Winter woes and their partial solutions

This is the time of year when my brain is slow and sluggish. My job is at peak intensity and my energy level is at its lowest ebb, which is not an optimal combination.

If you know someone else who struggles with winter, I have some suggestions!

FIRST, my light box helps a lot. I bought it in 2005 or 2006 and it is going strong.

SECOND, I am taking fish oil and vitamin D every day and they seem to make a difference. I ran out of vitamin D last month and didn't replace it immediately, but I bought more when I found myself in the throes of sunlight hunger again.

THIRD, I am dressing for the weather. I am a total wool convert, you guys, after thinking a year ago that my friend sounded a leetle bit like she had joined a wool cult. I've always worn more wool than average because I'm a knitter, but I've given away a surprising fraction of my non-wool clothing over the past year. If you are shopping for a generous and magical gift for a person who spends a lot of time outside in winter, these leggings might be the single best piece of winter clothing I've ever owned. Fantastically warm outside, but perfectly comfortable indoors. I would not have believed you if you had told me that I could wear leggings more than once without washing them, so you might not believe me when I tell you: they really are odor-resistant. If you use this link we can both get $20 off. (Sometimes Woolx lets you stack discounts, and they offer promo codes with some regularity, but I am not sure about the details.)

FOURTH, I am looking for little pockets of winter cheer. This is the fifth Advent in which I have used my Christmasy washi tape. In 2019 I bought some with and some without gold foil, and it has bedecked my bullet journals every year since then. I also bought a bag of these toffee truffles to pass around after Advent vespers, and they are very tasty.

FIFTH, I am going to bed stupid early because I seem to need a little more sleep in December. I spent a lot of years arguing with myself about that one, but I never managed to win the argument. So! Good night! There are only 18 days until the solstice -- we can do it! 

Finished

Finished Thing #1: Today I finished the file transfer process AT LAST. I don't want this to be a whiny post, but it was so painfully slow and cumbersome. So many clicks and pauses and silly avoidable steps. But HUZZAH it is DONE. I might have to award myself a prize.

Finished Thing #2: Today I also finished the fall semester session of Swole for Science. Back in the pretest week, my trainer took me pretty close to my ceiling on the compound lifts and plugged those results into an online calculator so it could estimate (with variable accuracy, I'd say) a starting one-rep max. Today he asked me to see how many reps I could do in a single set at my original (approximate) one-rep max, and used the new results to estimate an updated one-rep max. For Future Jamie, here are the numbers:

Squats: 115 x 24 
Bench: 85 x 14 (could have squeezed out another one)
Bent-over rows: 95 x 10
Deadlift: 145 x 6
Push-ups: 18
Pull-ups (with 50 pounds offset): 9 (so much arm fatigue by this point-- lats were okay but arms were shot)

I am not accustomed to that kind of repeated max effort on compound movements. I am sure I could have doubled the deadlift reps if it had been the first exercise, but my quads and glutes were fatigued from the squats. And I can definitely do more push-ups than that, but not right after a max effort on bench.

When I said goodbye to my trainer I kinda wanted to give him a hug but I also did not want to make it weird. "You worked really hard this semester," he told me, and he spoke the truth. It was a fantastic experience. 

Finished Thing #3: Today I also also finished NaBloPoMo: thirty days, thirty posts. My brain is tired from #1 and my body is tired from #2, and I think I shall now wobble off to bed. 

Thanks for reading, friends!

More tales of file transfers

I had a caulking-the-tub moment this week, in which a weird urge to complete a task turned out to be totally providential. Although I have to be sure to get all of my content out of our old LMS this week, I thought that I had plenty of time to move my lecture videos. That platform isn't going away until January. But I got into a video-transferring groove a couple of days ago, and I just kept working my way backward in time. 

"Why am I doing this?" I asked myself. "Wouldn't it be smarter to finish up the loose ends in the time-sensitive task first?" But instead I just kept moving videos out of their old storage location and into the new one.

When I got all the way back to the 2018 videos, I found myself flummoxed. In 2018 I taught my first fully online asynchronous class, and so I had made a boatload of lecture videos. But for some baffling reason, the first third of the course wasn't showing up with my other videos.

Had they been auto-deleted, because I'd exceeded a storage cap?

Were they in some secret folder I couldn't see?

I contacted tech support, and they were also flummoxed.

Somewhere in the dim recesses of my brain a faint recollection stirred, and I looked at the course website from 2018. I had totally forgotten: I switched platforms in the middle of prepping those materials. I started out storing videos in the LMS, but bumped up against the limit on data storage for a single course.

If not for that weird itch to transfer my videos ahead of schedule, I would have lost all of that material. Ai yi yi, I am wincing at the thought.

I am feeling grateful tonight for weird providential urges.

28

This is the day of NaBloPoMo on which I say, "Huh, I might be temporarily out of ideas for new blog posts."

Can't have Thanksgiving without pecan pie

"You need to write all these recipes down," Pete told me after Thanksgiving dinner, and then the next day a guest requested the pecan pie recipe. So here's a pecan pie post.

I make a pecan pie that is fussier than the ones I grew up with. I think it looks so pretty and festive that I don't mind the once-a-year hassle. You do have to hunch over a hot partially set pie to arrange pecan halves in concentric circles, so keep on scrolling if that's not your cup of tea. (Pecan pie is at approximately 1:00 in this picture of our consolatory 2020 dessert extravaganza. We had no company; we had so much pie.)

Roll out shortcrust pastry to line a 9-inch tart pan with a removable base. Let it rest in the fridge for about an hour so it doesn't shrink in the oven. Preheat your oven to 400, and blind-bake the crust, anchored by pie weights or dried beans, for 20 minutes.

While it's in the oven, cream together 6 T. softened butter and 125g brown sugar. (I will never again pack brown sugar into a measuring cup with a spoon, but we can still be friends if you hate baking by weight: that's about 1/2 c., packed.) When the mixture is light and fluffy, beat in 3 eggs, followed by 100 ml maple syrup and 150 ml corn syrup. Add a pinch of salt and a spoonful of liquor -- bourbon or dark rum, as you prefer.

Put a tablespoon of flour into a baggie, and add 150 g chopped pecans. (My cookbook estimates this as 1.25 cups; pinpoint accuracy is not essential here.) Shake them around to coat them with flour, so they are less likely to sink to the bottom of the pie. Fold them into the filling mixture.

Do not neglect this next step, even if you are feeling lucky: set the tart pan with its parbaked crust in a rimmed baking sheet, on which you have set a foil square that will cup the sides of the pan and contain any oozing pie filling. You are now going to pour most of a pound of sugar into that crust, and if you have even a small crack in the crust you will make a disastrous mess in your oven floor as the filling seeps through the removable bottom of your tart pan. If you are baking the pie while you eat your Thanksgiving dinner, the dining room will be filled with acrid smoke and the shrill voices of angry smoke detectors. (Why, yes, this is the voice of bitter experience! Learn from my mistakes, friends!) Don't overfill the crust, or you'll get overflowing baked-on goo gluing the pie to the pan. If you have extra filling, bake it until it's set in a separate little dish, like the white ramekin in these pie pictures. Turn the oven temperature down to 350 and give it 15 minutes.

Here is the fiddly part: scoot your oven rack out and place pecan halves in concentric circles atop the lightly set filling. Slide it back in and bake until it's completely set. Check it after 30 more minutes; if it's still jiggly in the middle you might need as much as ten more minutes. Cool it on a wire rack until you can slide it out of its pan and onto a pretty plate. Cut it in small slices so you will have leftovers.

This is a recipe from Barbara Maher's Ultimate Cake, the book behind many of our celebratory desserts over the years.

Alas

I was going to make a nice cozy pot of turkey-barley soup tonight. Just the thing for a cold night, I thought to myself, with the added benefit of getting rid of some of the stock taking up space in the fridge. A few days before Thanksgiving I like to serve roast chicken for dinner and make stock with the carcass, so there's plenty on hand for moistening stuffing and making gravy. But I often make more than I need, which means the extra stock is competing with the Thanksgiving leftovers for fridge space.

I minced an onion and a stalk of celery and set them to browning in a mix of olive oil and butter. I cubed up a few small carrots and added them too, and once everything was turning golden I added some slivered garlic and sprinkled the veggies with salt. I poured in stock and added a couple of handfuls of chopped leftover turkey, and then I grabbed the quick barley. We had an open box in the pantry, left over from last soup season, and I tipped it all in. It seemed a little clumpy, but I told myself it looked fine. If you are reading this post in hopes of finding an actual recipe for turkey-barley soup, you're almost done: simmer until the barley is tender and check the seasoning. Easy, cozy, golden, frugal -- who could ask for anything more? But this is not primarily a recipe post, because the story takes a sad turn:

Fifteen minutes later I peeked in and discovered an armada of little cream-colored crescent-shaped items afloat in my soup. 

For a moment I thought optimistically that all the broken bits of barley must have been crescent-shaped. And then my heart sank, and I pulled up the magnifier app on my phone to survey a few ships from the fleet, kind of like Gulliver in Lilliput if Gulliver had been an iPhone user preparing to eat the Lilliputians.

It turns out that boiling one's specimens in chicken stock does not assist in the process of accurate entomological identification, but the miniature navy in my soup pot looked an awful lot like these little guys. (Don't click that link if you're an easy-queasy person.)

"Hm," said Elwood, when I asked him for a second opinion, "that doesn't look right." 

He was less grossed out by the weevil picture than I was, pronouncing our visitors "free protein." "We didn't even have to pay for it," he added cheerfully. "Joe's always trying to eat more protein. And you! You want gains too, don't you?"

I don't want gains enough to eat larva soup, I assured him.

I need to find out who the patron saint of pantry infestations is, so I can pray earnestly: deliver us from weevils.

Succinctly

Kids' return from Germany: safe and timely

Belated Thanksgiving dinner: tasty and abundant

Number of dinner guests: 14

Dirty dishes: plentiful

Ability to form complete sentences: temporarily fractured

Eighth time is the charm, maybe

I am determined to finish The Game of Kings. I keep hearing that it's amazing. Just give it time, people say. It's worth it, they tell me.

I am almost 200 pages in, feeling impatient.

There are spots where I can tell it's supposed to be funny, but I am not invested enough in the characters to be amused. It seems willfully esoteric in a way I find irritating.

I keep telling myself that it's probably like Master and Commander, which I also found a little irritating. I didn't even pick up the second book until a few years later. But then I galloped through the whole series, cheering and chortling.

Let's hope I'm enjoying it more a hundred pages from now.

Just getting started

This has been the quietest Thanksgiving day I've ever had.

Pete and Joe have been in Germany this week, and so we've planned for months to have our Thanksgiving celebration on Saturday. We'll have about a dozen people here to eat turkey, but right now the turkey is still hanging out in the fridge, uncooked. 

Today I made the cranberry sauce and the stock and the pastry. We had Indian food for dinner, which felt pretty weird.

There will be lots of cooking and cleaning to do tomorrow. Here's to uneventful travel for all the travelers, and smooth easy cooking and cleaning for those of us at home.

For the curly-haired people

I've been using Shea Moisture hair products for years now, and I'm usually a coconut-hibiscus person. Last month I was at CVS looking for a replacement tub of my old standby, and they didn't have quite what I was looking for. I tried a new-to-me product line, the Jamaican black castor oil.

It's not a fabulous name, to my ear -- I associate castor oil with sad children's literature characters from the 1950s and earthy-crunchy moms trying to kick-start labor. But it is a fabulous cool-weather hair product. This is today's zero-effort hair, curl definition courtesy of the smoothie cream. 

With any product for curls, there are tradeoffs: crisper curl definition usually means more residue. That's true of this one, too, but I like it anyway. And this is probably a niche issue, since I don't know how many people with fading red hair read this blog and also buy curl products, but I find that thick and opaque curl products like this one mute the color of my hair. I'm a fan, though. I'll definitely buy it again.