Author: Zannah

VOLT

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We had two reasons for going to PA and MD this time:

  1. Meet our new nephew, Graham!  This was supposed to be the first time we met the baby.  That was before the funeral trip, which, obviously, was unplanned, but since everyone was there, we met him in October instead.  Still, the tickets were booked and it cost more to move them to Christmas (or to just cancel and keep them as a credit) than it did to keep them and make the trip anyway.  Plus, we had reason #2.
  2. Celebrate John’s parents’ 40th wedding anniversary!  Their anniversary is the 20th, but we took the opportunity of coming into town to see the baby to get the whole family in one place and take John VII and Pat out to dinner.

We weren’t really sure just what we were going to do to celebrate at first – big family party?  small family party?  dinner out? – but then Emily had the brilliant (and very expensive) idea of taking them out to dinner at best restaurant in Frederick, MD: Volt.  She and Sean had been once, and they’ve been raving about it ever since.  She booked the nine of us (plus Graham) into a private room, and let me tell you – I have never felt so fancy.  The restaurant is in an old mansion in downtown Frederick.  The decor is pretty modern, but the room we were in was the conservatory, with a bay window at the end, and big windows along both sides looking into the garden.  The room was just big enough for us and the full staff serving us.  Seriously, every time they brought in a new course, five waitstaff came in at once and served us at the same time.  It was like synchronized swimming.  Synchronized service.  Very cool, very fancy.

Special menus were printed with “Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad” and their wedding date on them.  We had a four-course meal, with three choices per course.  I couldn’t tell you everything that was on the menu, but I can tell you what I had.

  • Garlic: tom cove clams, black garlic, onion blossoms.  It was a soup, and it was SO FREAKIN’ GOOD.
  • Goat cheese scarpinocc: chicken of the woods mushroom, spinach, honey vinegar.  Little bitty filled pasta, and this was even better than the soup.
  • Lamb loin: mushroom oatmeal, maitake caramel, wax beans.  Also very very good, but the little bitty pasta was better.
  • Mini apple tart: maple ice cream, confiture de lait, ginger, rosemary.  By far the disappointment of the meal.  I mean, it was fine, but it wasn’t up to the standards of the first three courses.

Tiny portions, but plenty of food.  I would definitely eat there again, but I’ll have to save up for a while.  Graham cooperated by sleeping through most of the meal and letting Sean feed him when he woke up.  No crying, even though we were in a sound-proofed room, so if ever there was a time for a baby to cry in a restaurant, this was it.

We all look demonic in the one picture I have of the group of us at the restaurant, so you don’t get to see that unless you look for pictures I’m tagged in on Instagram.  Or go to Facebook.  Everyone in the family has probably posted a picture or two there. Pictures of the baby tomorrow!

Crossing time zones is exhausting

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We’re back home from a trip to PA and MD that included a very cool anniversary dinner and quality time with our new nephew, and I will tell you all about those things, but not tonight.

Goal: get back to regular posting

Deadline: ….soon

Right now: sleep

We got up at 4am this morning so we could leave the house at 4:45am so we could be at the Philadelphia airport by 6am so we could get on a plane at 7am.  We landed in Portland (after a stop in Denver) at 1pm, which felt like 4pm, and then we had to drive back to Eugene, where we stopped at the grocery store before finally getting home about 4:30pm, which felt like 7:30pm.  Now it’s 7pm but it feels like 10pm, and I’ve been awake for 18 hours and traveling for 14 of them, and I’m going to stop typing now and go to sleep.

I am VERY happy to be home.  I love our bed.  It’s better than every other bed.  All of them.

Seriously, why isn’t this a thing?

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I went flying with John not that long ago (and I didn’t get airsick!  YAY!), and even though the plane has GPS, I was trying to navigate by landmark.  (GPS is cheating.  Plus, what if it failed?)  I mean, we were within sight of I-5 the whole time, which certainly helped, but what if we headed east or west for a bit?  I know Eugene well enough by now that I can pretty much identify the highways and the river, the stadium, the mall – I know where we are, what we’re flying over, and where we’re going.  But what if we were flying into Corvallis or Salem or any airport we’ve never been to?  Little planes fly low enough to follow roads, but how do you know which road is which?  We’re not low enough to read signs.  So I was thinking – we should put identifying codes on the roofs of big buildings, like they do with buses.  (Pop quiz, hotshot: How do I know about the numbers on buses?)  Those building codes can go on maps and there you have it – no one gets lost.

That’s it.  That’s my big idea.

I could use some sunshine

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I’m going to stick to my theme of inanity, which I’m sure won’t surprise anyone, but it means I may need another day off. I’m in an airport again, writing this on my phone (which is going surprisingly well). Traffic sucked getting here, so we had that stress on top of last night’s disappointment.  The weather is gloomy to match our moods. I’ll be looking for puppies and kittens, real or virtual, to make me feel better. Actually, that’s been backfiring lately, too. Puppies and kittens make me think of Roxy and Riley, and that’s STILL too raw.

Were you looking for depressing inanity today? Glad I could help.

I’ve never lost my keys

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I meant to post last night.  We were downstairs, watching TV, eating homemade chicken wings (not terribly good ones), and I thought, I’ll post after I climb into bed. I already knew what I was going to write about; this would be easy.  I even thought about how convenient it was that my laptop was already upstairs.  But when I got upstairs, I got into bed and fell asleep without a single twinge of Wasn’t I going to do something?

So here we are, 7am, dark and cold as usual, and last night’s episode either means I’m losing my mind or that I have successfully rid myself of the pressure to post every day.  I prefer to think it’s the latter.

You can have last night’s post tomorrow.  Or maybe tonight, if I get to it.  Probably tomorrow.  Teaser: it’s about food!

It wouldn’t win in a cook-off

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We made chili in the slow cooker today.  The house smelled delicious all day long, but the chili turned out a little disappointing.  It wasn’t bad, and we still ate too much of it, but the texture was a little strange, it wasn’t thick enough, and it needed more flavor.  I’m not sure which flavor, but something was missing.

We’ve made better chili.  Next time, different recipe.

Nope, I’m too full to spend much time thinking about next time right now.  Quick, change the subject!

…

Elephants?  Really?

And I swore I’d never rake leaves again

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Today, I willingly voluntarily raked leaves.  I raked ALL the leaves in the front yard, and let me tell you – there were a lot of them.  There were so many I wasn’t sure they’d all fit in our yard waste bin.  (Eugene doesn’t do yard bags, and the street leaf pickup doesn’t start for another two weeks.)

This is the bin I planned to fill, sure at the beginning that I would have no trouble:

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Here’s the pile of leaves, mostly raked, which is when I began to worry:

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Here’s the bin, overflowing even after I climbed onto our retaining wall and stepped into the bin to smoosh down all the leaves:

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But the story has a happy ending, since I was able to close the lid:

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Of course, then I found out that our next yard waste pick-up day is the day before the street leaf pick-up day, and I could have saved myself the trouble.

Winning the book lottery

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I’ve been on a roll lately, book-wise.  I have liked every book I’ve read in the past three weeks (ever since giving up on The Lake House).  Some of that was planned: two of the seven books were sequels, so it was pretty much a given that I would like them.  One (Word Puppets) is a collection of short stories by an author I’ve heard a lot about but had never tried.  Her short stories were really good (yay!), so I’ll be reading more of her.  The next book (Serpentine) was recommended by a couple of the authors I follow on Twitter – young adult, fantasy/Chinese mythology – very good.  I found the other three just browsing in Powell’s.  It’s riskier than going on recommendations, but one of those turned out to be pretty good (The Girl With All The Gifts), and the other two are why I’m writing this post because they were SO FREAKIN’ GOOD.

Illuminae is told through documentation found by a researcher trying to piece together what actually happened out in space after a planet was attacked, so the format is all letters, emails, chats, transcripts of videos, interviews, etc.  It was funny and it totally captured my imagination.  I didn’t want to put it down, and when I had to, I was thinking about it.

Then I read His Majesty’s Dragon, and – THANK EVERYTHING – it is the first in a nine-book series.  It’s set in pseudo-1800s Britain, with the British Navy and a war with Napoleon and DRAGONS.  The dragons and their riders (!) make up the air force, basically, and it’s like a mash-up of the Patrick O’Brien novels and the Pern novels (!!), and it makes me very happy.  Like, the-world-is-a-better-place-with-these-books-in-it kind of happy.

I started the second book in the series last night.  I’m so happy.

You can’t make this up

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Yesterday, I shipped my laptop off to the office for a stupid reason.  Truly, it is the dumbest reason a laptop has ever had to be shipped somewhere in the history of shipping laptops.

I have to ship my laptop back to the office so that IT can…..reset my network password.

Yes, my password, the one that I reset just a few weeks ago (DEFINITELY fewer than 90 days ago), no longer works when I try to log in to my laptop immediately after booting it up.  Why?  I don’t know.  No good reason, I’m sure, since it worked last week.  IT says try my previous password – it should work.  Well, that would be great, but since I haven’t used that password since I changed it WEEKS AGO and I don’t write down my passwords BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN PROTECTING MY PASSWORDS, I don’t have the faintest clue what it was.

Oh, IT can’t change my password remotely?  Of course they can’t.  It’s not like we have several people working remotely full-time now.  Sure, it makes perfect sense to set up a computer in such a way that it has to be on the network to change the password, but you can’t get to the part where you can change the password unless you’re on the network.

So off I went to ship my laptop back to the office.  To make it go a little quicker, they suggested I ship it to the Utah office instead of the VA office, since it ought to get there from Oregon faster.

You know what they’re going to do with my laptop once they get it?  They’re going to turn it on, log in, change my password, shut it down, and ship it back to me.  It’ll take 3 minutes, max.  For that, I’m without my work laptop for 4-5 days.

To top it off, I checked my tracking number this afternoon and found that my laptop is in Indianapolis.  Uh huh.  Apparently, the fastest way to Utah today is through Indiana.

Who knows when I’ll get it back…

Broken promises

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I broke my vow to eat only chocolate on our return to Oregon.  At breakfast.  I had an omelet that was not made of chocolate.  And then I got Twizzlers at the airport.  And then I ate a bagel, and then I ate Cheez-Its at ten o’clock at night on the drive home from the airport.  So junk food, sure.  Chocolate, not so much.

To make it up to myself, I had chocolate for breakfast today.  (We have no other food in the house.)  That might be all I eat today because I am SO FREAKIN’ TIRED I’m not sure I can find us any other food.  Everything is too much of an effort.

Next time won’t you sing with me

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In the airport again (LaGuardia this time), same deal with only 30 minutes of free WiFi.  Whatever, airports.

In the same vein, we got here, following the signs to Terminal C to check in for American Airlines.  Got our boarding passes for gate D-something.  The guy who took our bags said we had to go to Terminal B for the D-gates.  Don’t terminals usually have the same letter as the gates?  So we checked in at C and got a shuttle to go to B to get on a plane at D.  I am now reciting my ABCs.

It’s not THAT confusing (we made it to the gate, after all), but I’m cruising on very little sleep over the last few days.  Saturday started early, with a long day of travel and a late night when we arrived.  We didn’t have to get up especially early Sunday, Monday, or today, but I slept pretty badly.  The hotel walls were thin, there was constant activity in the hallways, and the pillows SUCKED.  They looked all fluffy and nice, but they flattened into nothing as soon as you put your head down and the air squeezed out.  My neck hurts.  Plus all the emotions and the public face on the whole time and I’m. So. Tired.

We land in Portland at 7:30pm local, but then we have to get our car and drive home, so it’ll be 10pm at the earliest before we get home.  Probably closer to 11.  And tomorrow morning has to start on time, so there will be no sleeping in until Saturday.  On the plus side, there’s no one to tell me I can’t go to bed at 6pm tomorrow night or every night the rest of this week, and Saturday isn’t that far away.

I don’t really feel like it

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I don’t have much to say, but I feel like I’ve been MIA a lot this past week, and I don’t like that feeling.  We’re on Long Island for the funeral of John’s cousin Kerri’s husband, and we spent the entire day yesterday at a funeral home for a very emotional wake.  Lots of people, lots of tears.  The burial is this morning (Monday), followed by lunch with the family (I think), and then John and I will spend the evening with his parents, hopefully discussing happier things.

Then back home to Oregon.

We met Emily and Sean’s new baby boy yesterday (SO cute at nearly 6 weeks old), who fell asleep in my arms during breakfast.  That was maybe the best part of the day.  They went home last night, though, so I don’t have that to look forward to today.

Eating badly

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I don’t think I have ever eaten normally while traveling.  It’s difficult, of course, but I don’t even try.  Yesterday, we got up at 5:30, got to the airport at 6:30, and bad coffee and a stale, crunchy croissant near the gate for breakfast.  Lunch was too much Italian food during our Chicago layover because we knew we’d land in New York too late for dinner so we figured we’d eat a meal and a half mid-afternoon to cover both meals.  Then we snacked because, well, we got hungry again.  But it was all sucky food, pretty much.

We could make the attempt.  I could have had a banana at breakfast.  I could have had a salad at lunch.  I could try harder and do that on our way home in a few days.  Right now, though, I don’t want to do that.  I want to go the other way.  My plan is to have nothing but chocolate (or at least nothing but dessert-type food) when we travel back.  I don’t think it would make me feel worse, and it has a decent chance of making me feel better.

Entitled

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Is free WiFi an unreasonable expectation in public places?  I mean, sure, someone is paying for it, so I can see how it’s not reasonable to expect it in a park or pretty much anywhere you can hang out for free.  But most places we spend any period of time are places we go to buy things (food, drinks, coffee) or see things (theaters – why not free WiFi in the lobby?), or wait to go somewhere else (airports, train stations).  Lots of those places DO offer free WiFi, and for the most part, people are buying things so the cost can be covered, and that makes sense.  Even in places where an individual might not buy anything, like, say, an airport, the vast majority of the people around that individual are nearly guaranteed to buy something, so again – cost covered.  So why would O’Hare only offer 30 minutes of free WiFi?  The airport is enormous, they probably make a ton from parking alone, and everyone who walks through here buys snacks, water, magazines, whole meals – the money goes to the stores, sure, but O’Hare didn’t give those stores space for free.

I suppose I should be glad they’re offering any WiFi for free (I wouldn’t be typing this right now if they didn’t), and I know it’s not the airport’s responsibility to make our layovers fun (FOUR HOURS this time) or to make up for the airlines who make us pay for every little thing, but they could help.  If I know I can’t get online at a particular airport, I might choose to fly through a different one next time.  Maybe they should consider THAT.

Aaaaaannnnnddddd #firstworldproblems.

All decked out

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During my run the other day, I tried to take a picture of trees in fall colors over a still lake with weeping willow in the foreground, but the camera on my phone decided to quit on me and I couldn’t.  You’ll just have to imagine it.  It’s the camera on my old phone, that I pretty much only use for podcasts during workouts, so I can’t really get mad at it.

In other news, it’s John’s birthday today.  He’s wearing the new TARDIS slippers I bought him and they FIT (well enough – they may not be bigger on the inside, but they’re big enough).

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This house isn’t well-insulated, so his feet get cold.  We can match now – my hands get cold, so I bought these:

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(They’re fingerless gloves.  I realize that might be hard to tell from this picture.  The little bump by the windows at the bottom is the thumb hole.)

I want a gym that is nearly empty all the time but makes enough money to stay open

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8:30 on a Monday morning is not the greatest time to go to the gym.  It was packed.  There are 12 treadmills, and all but two of them were occupied by older ladies walking.  Nearly every weight machine and all of the ellipicals were in use.  I was able to nab one of the remaining treadmills, but I need to keep this in mind next time I try to work out on a rainy Monday morning.

AND it didn’t even rain.  The sky was half-threatening, half-sunny, and the threatening part appeared to be taking over and the forecast said the rain was supposed to start any minute, so I figured it would be smarter to run on a treadmill than get caught out in a downpour.  And then it didn’t rain.  Still threatening, and it probably will, but I could have run outside this morning.  Boo.

Running on a treadmill is BORING.

Oh, wait, it just started to rain.  Still, I would have made it back.

It begins

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Today is the end of the second day of rain.  The forecast calls for at least one more day, probably two, before we see the sun.  I took these pictures just the other day in preparation for this.

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This is my sun lamp.

(They were taken in Alton Baker Park, also where I saw the bird from Friday’s post.)

Adulting slow-cooker style

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Check it out.  We bought a slow cooker, it arrived yesterday, and I’m cooking in it today.  Can you believe it?  I’ll give you a minute to fan yourselves and get over the shock.

Here it is, yelling at me, apparently, telling me to COOK.  Yeah, I get it.

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And here, beneath the steamy lid, you can kind of see dinner.

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My first recipe is beef and broccoli, and if the recipe is correct, it’ll be ready in 5 minutes.  I didn’t tell John what I was making, but he’ll find out soon.

I hope it’s good.  I hope it’s edible.  Good is secondary.

Update: It was DELICIOUS.