The Garden

Posted on September 21, 2008 by Frog

We pulled up all the summer plants today. Before we pulled up plants we picked 3 eggplants, a few tomatoes and a distressing amount of peppers. Have I mentioned that we have a bunch of peppers? We have some friends who want another bottle of our habanero chili oil. We bought one of those metal cans of olive oil yesterday so there will be a bunch of oil made this year.

After tilling the garden over, we planted 18 broccoli and 12 cabbage plants. Then using seed, we planted a half row of mustard, a half row of radish, a full row of turnip, a full row of kale and a full row of spinach. I can hardly wait until the end of October to see what’s going to be a viable harvest. We’re betting that we have at least into the first week of November before it gets too cold for plants. We have plenty of seed left and so we’re planning on planting again in March/April. I had no idea how beautiful mustard seeds are-a rainbow of colors.

While the better-half ran the tiller, I moved some nandina to, hopefully, better spots. In the place of the nandina, I planted some grasses we had in pots around the pool. I hope all of those plants survive the winter. It’s amazing to me how the soil in our front yard varies between being pretty rich looking to being utter crap. It is nice to realize how the vegetable garden soil has really come along since we first planted a garden there three years ago.

At some point we’ll have to go into the jungle portion of our vegetable garden and clear out all the weeds from the strawberry and asparagus. At this point, it’s a huge mess but that’s a chore for another day.

Posted in Eating, Gardening | Tagged | 1 Comment

Steam Valve

Posted on September 18, 2008 by Frog

I’ve been trying like hell not to complain but a habit is a terrible thing to break.  Things that are driving me to distraction:

Schoolmates who can’t or won’t get the hang of using wikis and blogs. It’s a text editor folks, presumably you already know how to use them. Schoolmates who write like five year olds. It’s graduate school, write like you are taking it to a higher level. Schoolmate who decided a Shrek video was worthwhile. No. It isn’t. Really. No.

Sluggishness of computers at work and the general slipshod of no one seeming to care that stuff is not getting fixed. Speaking of, I’ve been waiting more than 5 minutes for my email to open. Unacceptable.

The night and day switch of my supervisor. One week it’s all let’s shit down the neck of an employee and the next it’s all wow maybe she’s onto something. I’m exhausted. Make up your mind.

The damn McCain sign two doors up. The damn McCain signs are all along my route to the interstate. I saw so many “Blank for McCain” signs today that I entertained myself with filling in the blank with things like “Armless Women for McCain”, “Out of Work and In Foreclosure but still for McCain”, “My Child Got Killed in the War but I’m still for McCain”, “Dumbasses for McCain”. Give it a whirl, it’s fun.

By writing that name so many times, there are probably people out there who think I actually like him. Um, No. Really. No. Do Not Like. And that harridan running mate. Don’t even get me started on her and her lying, arm twisting, cronyism and other bullshit.

Ah, pressure valve has been released.

Updated because the annoyances just don’t go away: Why do people think it is OK to use multiple exclamation points? Are you really that excited? Exclamation points should be used sparingly.

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Quick thoughts on new food stores in Richmond

Posted on September 17, 2008 by Frog

I haven’t been to the new Whole Foods yet over in the Short Pump area. Frankly that area is a train wreck of traffic and it takes me at least 40 minutes to get there from my house. Trader Joe’s is opening in a week in the same area so, perhaps, we’ll hit both of them later in October when the insanity of TWO NEW COOL GROCERIES! opening calms down.

I will say that the ripple effect has already started and I am so glad. I’ve only been able to find Fage yogurt in far away lands and over the weekend I saw it in two regular, been in Richmond for years, grocery stores. I bought a container and have been enjoying the heck out of it for breakfast. I buy the plain and mix my homemade granola into it. What a thickly delicious way to start the day. So thanks Whole Food for finally coming to town. I’ll see you in a month or two, but until then, I’ll enjoy what you are making other stores do. Gracias.

Posted in Eating | 1 Comment

The End of Summer

Posted on September 14, 2008 by Frog

We swam in the pool for a little while this evening. If it isn’t the last swim, it’s definitely the next to last swim. I feel like I’ve been cheated out of swimming this summer–too many cool nights, too much school, not enough time. Ah, well, there’s always next summer.

Today I washed all the peppers that I’ve picked over the last week and they are now in freezer bags getting really, really cold. After I rinsed them, I laid them out on the kitchen table to dry. The tabletop was nearly covered. I should have taken a picture. If not of the table, then of the crisper drawer they were sitting in. A ridiculous number of peppers. We’ll be infusing more vodka, making more chili oil and figuring out other mischief with them.

We’re planning on planting a Fall/Winter garden. We’ve never done that before but went through the master gardener book the better-half has from his time as an undergraduate. You can’t go to Va Tech and never take an Ag class…old book, fresh advice. We can’t do anything until Wednesday so hopefully we’ll be able to either find seeds or plants and then put them in by the weekend.

We’re making this for dinner tonight. Better hop to it since it’s nearly 7.

Posted in Gardening | 1 Comment

Seemingly not connected

Posted on September 13, 2008 by Frog

In case you are worried the earth is about to be destroyed, there’s a new page (with a RSS feed) to reassure you.

You never know what silly thing is going to generate a world-wide community:

This was one of the things covered in the web 2.0 conference I went to yesterday. To grasp the impact this crazy little video had check out the wikipedia entry.

The connection? Web 2.0 is changing the way we interact.

Posted in Generic Thoughts | 2 Comments

Sometimes a Beer and a Remote Control Soothe My Soul

Posted on September 11, 2008 by Frog

And sometimes, it’s food. I didn’t know what to do about lunch today so I walked over to J + K’s Mobile Munchies over on Main. They are pretty much there all the time and have tasty food at excellent prices. Their service is outstanding and includes advice to the lovelorn as well as tips on what bands are playing at local venues. I told them I needed hot and spicy today on my chicken salad and tabouli wrap. I washed it down with a mildly sweet iced tea. So many people overwhelm iced tea with sweet but I’ve never had a tea from there that wasn’t spot on.

The hot and spicy was a huge hit with me. I needed this simple lunch to soothe my soul and make things better for me today so that I could go ahead and do what must be done this afternoon. I think the hot sauce burned my funk right out of me. When people say how can you eat spicy foods, I say how can you not. It just isn’t about the heat (although there is often lots of heat). It’s about the interplay of heat and spicy. Today the interplay was perfect.

Posted in Eating | Tagged | 3 Comments

Whiny Post #2,422,333

Posted on September 11, 2008 by Frog

Yesterday my unit held a much overdue meeting to divide up our work plan for the year. The year that started 7/1/08. I found that the course I had been told to work on was now back up in the air as to who was going to own it. It is an elearning course so it should be mine since that’s supposed to be what I do (well it’s really been just lip-service up to this point no matter how I try to push for it). I had already done some research on it. Now I’ve offered the research to whoever ends up with the course. I thought about contradicting my boss in the meeting but just didn’t feel like it.

Then we talked about some other courses and one of those is, in fact, mine–has been since I developed it from scratch. A co-worker offered to take it over so that one additional paragraph can be written. The paragraph is coming from a meeting the co-worker and the boss are having today with someone from our client organization. I was told about this meeting after it was scheduled and remarkably on the day I’m not at the office. Any mention of speakerphoning the conversation? No. I told the co-worker since I’ve been shackled with the course, I’ll continue to write it.

Then I mentioned again how the course should be elearning. Both of them disagreed but their arguments are as unheard by me as my ideas are unheard by them. It’s a course that touches people who perform on-call duties. If you are only performing those duties infrequently, wouldn’t it make sense to have a resource that you could go back to and refresh yourself? Instead of actually acknowledging that I may have something intelligent to say about the subject they start talking about how these on-call people should take the week-long course instead. That’s not our call and so I’m not even sure why it was brought up. Except to beat me over the head with their HUGE knowledge of the social service system. Which is something I’ve been very respectful about and have never questioned. I feel like I’m beaten with it like a dead horse.

So, for the next nine months I get to perform basic maintenance on a handful of courses, develop an online component for a system refresher course (I won’t be developing content–just taking what’s given to me and putting it into an online framework–this project will be “live” by February), reviewing one course and writing up a detailed explanation of why it should or shouldn’t be moved to online and sitting with my thumb up my ass. I broached the subject that this is not nearly enough work for a year but was shut down.

Furthermore, I also brought up the fact that we’ll have a captive audience of a group of people we never get to see in a system refresher course (the same one I’m turning into an online course) and we could possibly take 5 minutes at the end of the pilot sessions or the actual sessions to ask these people what they need to feel supported in the training environment. Shot down again. I pointed out that we’d have them in a room in small enough numbers that we could direct our questions to specific items and why not see if we can partner with and play to the strengths of system refresher course. Shot down. Then my last ditch effort was to point out we can capture their names off the course roster and then do whatever the fuck they want to do.

I was given some advice last week that I need to have something else in my life that I look forward to and love so that I don’t dwell so much on this hell on earth known as my job. I think there’s some wisdom to that and so I’m really trying to get back to my “I’m a rock in a stream” philosophy (the water flows by–as does the BS, but the rock may also change the course of the stream) and focusing on school and some as yet unidentified thing. By the way, the rock in a stream thing was eye-rolled by my boss. We’ve started to eat our young at work…a great environment, don’t you want to come work here too? How is it that I can like my boss and at the same time want to tell her she’s a shitty supervisor?

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Hot Sauce and hotter me

Posted on September 9, 2008 by Frog

When I got home from work today I had to process the tomatoes I picked on Sunday. Don’t get me started on all the freaking peppers still sitting on the counter. I decided to make a batch of hot sauce since it called for a pound of tomatoes (which is really not many tomatoes as it turns out) and 2 anaheim peppers and 2 habaneros. Whoohoo, 4 peppers in one recipe! Oh Happy Day.

I don’t normally wear gloves when slicing peppers but I’m not fool and fished some out for the habaneros. When I cut into them I could tell the gloves were a good idea because my eyes started burning from the fumes alone. I added everything to the pot, cooked the tomatoes down and then carefully put everything into the blender.

I should state for the record that using the blender with hot food scares me because I’m sure that the whole thing is going to blast off and burn the crap out of me and ruin the kitchen forever. I got over my fear and turned on the blender. The hand atop the blender was protected by a hotmat and an oven glove. The hotmat got a couple of specks of hot sauce on it but the counter top was toast. Somehow this happens to me on an infrequent but maddening basis. The frapping base was not attached tightly enough to the blender glass and so the shit leaked. All over the place.

I managed to salvage the day, though, by using my third hand that thankfully grew out of the top of my head. I got a plate to set the blender glass on and then poured the mixata into a fine sieve as instructed. Only our fine sieve is evidently the finest fucking sieve there ever was because nothing came out of it. I was totally overjoyed at this point.

I got out our itty bitty sieve and used that to extrude the sauce. I lasted about 10 minutes of gently coaxing the hot sauce through the tiny sieve and then said some other curse words and threw the remainder into the compost tin.

Even with all the problems I ended up with a decent amount of hot sauce, which, as per usual, I have not tried. Because then I had to move right into making more spaghetti sauce with the remaining tomatoes. I should probably go downstairs and make sure that pot hasn’t totally exploded all over the kitchen too.

Posted in Eating, Gardening | 1 Comment

I just kept shoving my foot in my mouth and I DID.NOT.CARE.

Posted on September 9, 2008 by Frog

My supervisor has three kids. One is a senior in college and one is a freshman. The other one is still in high school. Today I had to hear about how the freshman’s dorm lost A/C over the weekend due to the storm. Without using my filter I just blurted out I didn’t care that he didn’t have A/C. She gave me a look and I said that I never had A/C and I walked both ways uphill in the snow when I was in college. I didn’t even go there with the “my parents don’t have A/C in their house and I lived there for years” story.

Then she topped me with the actual walking both ways in the snow because she grew up in a snow-getting state. We returned to talking about her poor, pathetic son who has a box fan and his lack of A/C. I couldn’t take it and repeated that’s too bad–college rooms suck. I refrained from the rest of what I was thinking: College rooms are concrete block boxes that are slightly larger than prison cells. The point of college is not to sit in your room and marvel at the decor.

Besides I’m sick of her interjecting stories about her kids in conversations that don’t warrant another wacky caper starring her children.

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Nice Walk

Posted on September 8, 2008 by Frog

We needed coffee at home so I walked over to Rostov’s to purchase a couple of pounds of coffee. It’s so nice to be able to walk somewhere to buy things. I really miss having a permanent office on campus. My temporary office is located in our “headquarters” building but, sadly, the building is slated to be knocked down in the coming months. This end of the block will be a construction zone for awhile as a new building is constructed. Word has it that the School of Social Work will be moving into the new building and many say it’s about time as the old building is a crumbling mess. I’m not sure what else will be in the new building. Until the wrecking ball comes, I’m relishing sitting on campus twice a week this fall.

As I was out this morning, I decided to get some money out of the ATM. The first ATM I went to had a young man standing in front of the machine attempting to use it. Parents, please, educate your kids before sending them out into the big wide world. This ATM has a big flashing card slot and the kid didn’t know where to put his card. Since I am an old, bitter woman and not his mother, I went to the other ATM.

Yes, I left him floundering. I don’t approach people using ATMs whether they are confused or not because the space at the ATM is sacred–I’m talking to all you people who feel the need to stand too close. Back up. The invisible bubble around me is even bigger when I’m making financial transactions.

Posted in Generic Thoughts | 3 Comments