Last night, BB and Seth and I went to see I Am Legend and holy crap, that was a freaky movie. Not what I’d have choosen if I’d had even an inkling of what it was about. Anyway, afterwards, BB suggested a riding out along the coast today, and it sounded like fun, so we said sure.
View Larger MapIt was the right answer.We left around 2 or so this afternoon, and scootered up Highway 2. It was gorgeous. I got to see more of the scenery than either Seth or BB, since I got to ride along behind Seth instead of driving myself (I hadn’t been feeling well this morning, and I didn’t particularly think it was a good idea to drive). We stopped a few times along the way. The first was to get some food - there was a pullover spot where we bought a whole roasted chicken (they graciously removed the head for us) and some coffee, and sat under an umbrella that offered a bit of protection from the wind, if not the cold.
Above, the view from the table (click for big, if you dare).
My babushka look.
Seriously, folks, it was cold. I should have been wearing long underwear.
So cold, in fact, that I’ve clearly lost my ability to aim the camera so that we all get into the photo. I haven’t lost my ability to paste on a cheesy grin, though!
Getting ready to get back on the road.
BB’s all set!
Have I mentioned it was cold?
All ready to go! (Except I think Seth needs a scarf. Sheesh.)
We stopped again a bit later for some more pictures, since it was so pretty. Of course, you can barely tell in the pictures I’m posting here.
It was windy out by the coast - check out the bottom of my braid!
Heh. BB hates to smile for pictures. Silly goose.
Finally, our turnaround point - we found a spot we could climb up for some fantastic views of the distant and close-up landscape.
It was really pretty, but we were all beginning to feel like popsicles, so we decided to head back. I was so cold that I hopped into a hot bath as soon as I got home. Now I’m in bed, and I think that’s a good place for this post to end.
Goodnight!
I’ve been sitting on this story for a while, but I haven’t posted lately, so here goes:
BoingBoing has had a couple of posts lately about a magic rubber pig that squishes and returns to normal. We have a couple of those each, though I have a pig and a tomato, and Lisbeth has a duck and an egg. We use them in classes for games. A few weeks ago I took the tomato to a class in which none of the students had seen any of the magic balls. One of the girls, (around 12,) saw me squeeze it and said it looked like “the little chicken.”
That can’t be what it sounded like, right?
To help me find out what obviously innocent thing she actually meant, I asked “What now?”
“Little chicken,” she said. “Is a boy’s… um… a boy’s,” she shook her hands exasperatedly, trying to think of the word as I noiselessly flapped my mouth, intending to tell her “Stop. Seriously, stop talking right now.” As I worked my jaw, still unable to speak, while she “ummed” and continued waving her hands and rolling her eyes to the ceiling, a boy jumped up onto his chair, pointed to his crotch, and yelled “Teacher, this!”
I’d have felt much better if she hadn’t smiled and said “Yes, that.”
I hate it when experiments fail. Even though, by definition, that’s what happens with experiments more often than not.
I’ve made a few batches of No-Bake Cookies this month, and I plan to make some for our Christmas party. I also thought I’d like to try to find some recipes that use rice, since that’s more plentiful and cheaper than wheat flour. Not rice flour, but rice. Cooked rice. Do you see where I’m going?
Cooked rice is a softish grain that still has some tooth to it, like oatmeal. Alas, it doesn’t seem to work as a replacement for oatmeal in No Bakes. I put it 6 cups of cooked rice (twice the amount of oatmeal called for!), and either I really screwed up when I was cooking the chocolate and drastically undercooked it, or there’s some thickening property of oatmeal I hadn’t considered. Considering it now, I guess oatmeal does thicken when cooked like there’s some starch there, unlike rice, which is all distinct little granules, huh? Dur. So, now I’ve got a bunch of chocolate and rice puddles hanging out on parchment paper. Maybe I’ll try scraping it all back together and incorporating something that might help bind it. Like, I dunno, oatmeal. Or maybe I’ll dump in some hot cocoa mix - that might be interesting, right? I mean, as they are now, I’ve pretty much written the cookies off.
Don’t worry though, if you’re planning to come over - I’ve got a new canister of oatmeal, so I can make a standard batch that should be fine. I got a lot of chocolate chips today at Costco, too (seriously, an embarassingly large amount of chocolate chips), so we’ll have all sorts of variations on chocolate chip cookies. I got the goods to make brownies, too, and assorted other spendid sugary, high-fat, yummy treats.
Also? I still have lots of rice to play with. How’s rice pudding sound? Oooh, or maybe I’ll try puffing rice (I’ve read it’s similar to making popcorn) and make some rice krispy treats!
Well, maybe not the last one. Another batch of brownies would probably by a good deal easier and more likely to taste good.
You know the whole “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”? Yeah….sorry about the silence.
Work has been sort of sucky lately, and it’s Christmas but it doesn’t feel like Christmas, and I’m getting sick (see, that’s how you know it is a holiday, even if it doesn’t feel like it).
I had a topic in mind to write about this morning, but it’s gone. Really. I just stared at the screen for 5 minutes trying to think of what I wanted to write about. Shoot. Sorry Lindsay. Is there anything you (you being anyone reading this) want to know about me/Seth/Taiwan/work/my bellybutton? Leave a comment and I can pontificate!
I forgot to show you this in the previous post.
Why am I posting a photo of an orange? Let me tell you a little story:
In front of our kindergarten, there are a handful of potted trees. Recently, some of the kids one morning began pointing at one of the trees and shouting “aw-run-jooh!” This is six-year-old-Taiwanese-English-student for ‘orange’.
I looked at the tree and saw nothing orange. “Where?” I asked them. One of my boys came up and pointed to a small, green something, about the size of a shooter marble, dangling from the tree. I then noticed several of them. They were all miniscule and a darker green than a perfect lime. I wondered why immature fruit would be just now growing, since, warm or not, it is winter here. I also wondered what the kids might know about the life cycle of plants, so with great difficulty, after several attempts at restating my question until one of them understood what I was asking (they are mostly six, after all,) I queried “When will the fruit be big and orange and ready to eat?” Eva, a very bright, very sweet, and ridiculously cute little girl,
(only complete face in the picture,) lit up as she realized what I was asking. She excitedly smiled up at me, raised her hand, index finger extended upward in the universal gesture of one about to bestow knowledge upon another (otherwise known as “droppin’ science,”) and answered, “Wait.”What does that have to do with this particular orange? Well, naturally, it’s one of the very same oranges from that tree, now ripe! It fell off the other day. And for an idea of why I picked it up and brought it home, here it is again, in my hand for a size reference:
While our friends and family at home are finishing up their power-free stints courtesy of one absolutely wicked ice storm,
we’re missing the winter weather, (well, I am,) because it’s between 60 and 80 F on any given day here. Granted, with 100% humidity virtually 100% of the time, anything below maybe 68-70 is a little cold, especially on a scooter. Still, most days it feels like a crisp mid-spring or early-fall day, which makes holiday spirit a bit difficult to muster at times.
So we’re manufacturing it! We made a tree on the wall entirely out of lights and tape, (pictured at the top in glorious low-res animated .gif!,) and though neither of us are fans of blinking Christmas lights, they’re stuck on blink because they don’t work without the blinker bulb at the end, and didn’t come with non-blinker replacements. No biggie, really, we’re just glad to be starting our decoration.
We’re having a party for Christmas, we’ve invited all(?) of our friends in Taiwan (unless we’ve missed anyone, in which case, if you read this and didn’t recieve an invitation, please feel free to drop in) and we’re going to eat cookies and stuffing and basically all of a Christmas dinner minus the main courses, because our oven is actually a toaster oven (no one bakes here) and it just isn’t quite big enough for a turkey. We’re planning to do a small gift exchange, and to watch lots of classic Christmas specials and movies, and to just enjoy each others’ company and be family to each other. We and most of our friends here have come to think of each other as surrogate family, especially those at Hess, because we just need it here. We have some friends who are quite well travelled and have spent holidays alone abroad before and not been at all bothered by it, and are just so bummed by the conditions at this school that they feel they really need it this year. That’s not happy, change of subject!
So we’re cleaning house/watching TV right now, off and on, and Lisbeth’s making some cookies, too. We’re pretty stoked to see everyone, and to have people to spend Christmas with. It’s always been one of my favorite times of year, partially for the complete and total unpredictability of it (my family has an unofficial tradition of celebrating Christmas differently every year) and partially because it’s just great to see people you love.
Merry Christmas to all of you at home, all of our family and friends. We’ll miss you all this holiday, and we hope we can see every one of you in the months following our return home, or in the month during which we visit home, if we decide to stay here more than one year, which quite frankly is still undecided for us at this point. Despite some negative experiences we’ve already whined and moaned about here, and quite a few more we haven’t discussed here, we’re really enjoying this country, and (probably shouldn’t post this next statement where my employers might see it) though there is absolutely zero chance at this point, particularly after an event this past week that I won’t get into at the moment, that anything on Earth could persuade us to sign on for a second year with Hess, if we can find employment at some other place next year, there is every possibility we’ll stay here a while longer.
Sorry there was so much un-Christmas-y stuff in there, but there are a few days left until Christmas. I promise I’ll post at least one all-cheer-no-gripe post before it passes.
PS: The photo set of the ice storm was shot and posted by Jon Brisbin. He’s a great guy I know from writing (and a few other English related) classes at Pitt State. I don’t know if I’ve linked him before on here, but I think I should go ahead and name-drop him now while he still knows me, because I’m about as sure as I can be that within the foreseeable future you’ll be able to purchase novels with his name on the cover. Pop on over to his blog, he’s full of interesting thoughts, and had some great stuff about the recent ice storm, elements that photos and even television news coverage (I got to see NBC’s coverage because I discovered this week they’re video podcasting the Nightly News now) can’t express. And when you see this, Jon, you’ll be glad to know that though Lisbeth and I have considered ourselves to be an OS-agnostic household, we recently picked up a MacBook, and we’re total converts now. We have Windows, Linux, and OSX in the house, and now anything other than OSX borders on infuriating an awful lot of the time. Never would have guessed I’d be as thoroughly sold as I am as quickly as I was.
This evening, I made my favorite Cheese Soup (see, I love it so much I give it big shiny capital letters). I even managed to find Worcestershire Sauce here, at a regular grocery store — not an import or specialty store. The Cheese Soup was very, very good.
That is all.
Cheese Soup
- 2 T. butter
- 2 T. canola oil
- 1 c. chopped onion
- ¾ c. chopped carrot
- ¾ c. chopped celery
- 2 cans (14.5oz) chicken broth
- ¼ c. flour
- ¾ c. half-and-half or heavy cream
- 3 c. grated cheddar cheese
- ½ t. Worcestershire sauce
- ½ c. beer
- salt and pepper to taste
- In a medium pot, heat the butter and oil over medium heat. Add the onion, celery and carrot; saute 5 minutes. Add 2 tablespoons broth and cook an additional 5 minutes. (This is where I, in all of my vegetable-avoiding glory, dump it all in the blender and smoosh it all up into a paste. I usually add a little more of the chicken broth to facilitate this.)
- Stir in the flour and cook 1 minute. (The mixture will be very thick.)
- Add the remaining broth slowly, stirring to smooth out the flour. Bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer 15 minutes, stirring often.
- Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the half-and-half, grated cheese, Worcestershire, beer, salt and pepper. Place back on low heat for 5 minutes until the cheese has melted. Hold on low heat.
- Note: This is a pretty forgiving soup. I often add more cheese than the 3 cups, or more or less beer depending on my mood and who I’m serving. Also, it’s really, really good with beer bread. I’ll share that recipe sometime later. It’s really easy, so I ought to post it so you can all share the goodness…mmm….
-
Well. Today I went to work at 8:00am. I got home at 10:00pm. It wasn’t a spcial day. It was just a Thursday. This is frustrating, and while I’m mildly irritated (la la la, pretending everything is OK, I think I’m actually a little numb inside…), Seth is pissed. He’s calmed down some now, but really, he’s pissed. I don’t think we should really go into details just yet (email or bug me on Facebook if you do want the down and dirty), but we have a meeting with our sort-of superior-cum-advocate, who’s not really available most of the time to be either. In, oh, about 15 minutes. It’s 11:12pm now. And we have to be in at 8:30 in the morning. I don’t really have high hopes (oh, really, who’s kidding - I have pretty much no hope) (update, 11:58pm — well, that was the opposite of useful - instead of having a way-to-late meeting, we just stayed up later than we wanted to and got stood up for our super-awesome video teleconference) (It’s almost midnigt. I’m going to sleep now) that this will result in any sort of compromise that’ll actually be worthwhile.
Sometimes, this is ridiculous.
Is this normal? I mean, really? I know my mom and others have said this is par for the course for teaching, but 14 hour days? Really? Let me know what you think in the comments (really, all of you - I see you all in Google Analytics {which I check more than daily, because I am such a nerd}), because I’m having a hard time believing we’re not being royally overworked.
Blargh - it’s almost midnight and I still haven’t written (or gone to sleep, which might be the greater problem of the two). So, it’s a quickie today!
Tomorrow I’m headed to the zoo with my kindy class. Should be fun. Or not.
We got our Christmas box today - thanks Mom and Dad! I went ahead and opened after Mom said she’d wrapped all the stuff that we have to wait to open, and woo! We got some candy! And stickers! And WeeSing books! And presents! Wooooooooo!
…then you’ll be enthusiastic! In a few scant minutes, I’ll be heading back to work for the first time in a week. I’m just so excited I could throw up! Seriously though, I guess I’m glad to be going back, if only to get out of the house. It’s a phased return, with partial work days today and tomorrow, and a full day on Friday. I have to admit, when I mentioned doubts about our HNST before, he proved me wrong this time. He seems to have really gone to bat for me, and it kept most of the pressure off while I recovered, which was good.
Now I need to clean up the mess that’s inevitable when you leave things kind of a mess to begin with, and then ask two or three different people per mess to sustain what you’ve done. Everything was sort of chaotic and disorganized when I left, due in large part to the fact that I’d actually already been sick for a while, and just wasn’t keeping up with things because I wanted/needed to go home and sleep.
It’s time to go now, so I’ll tell you more later.