a cold pizza night

You may have noticed that this post is date-stamped as 7:53 on Friday night. What better things do I have to do on Friday night than write about my life? You know what people say about writers: if you can't do something well, you write about it instead.

Well, we did have great plans involving good friends and Killer Bunnies tonight. Followed by great plans: round 2 tomorrow night with Nacho Libre and Taco Salad.

But Abe got the flu, so none of that is happening. Abe doesn't get sick often, and he doesn't take it lying down (unlike the Man Cold video my friend Elizabeth shared). But I knew it was bad when I got home from work and heard the microwave beeper go off - you know, the one that beeps 3 times every 5 minutes to let you know that your food is still waiting for you. There was a half-full tupperware of spaghetti sauce on the counter and some crusty cooked noodles on the stove top.

I went back to the bedroom to ask Abe about his late lunch (it was after 5 by now). He looked at me with glass-glazed eyes and mumbled something about the microwave going off since I had called him earlier - around 2pm. In his incoherent muttering he mentioned that it had started to get kind of annoying.

Now that's desperation.

bean bag!

We have sort of a minimalist living room. 1 couch. 1 chair. 1 lamp. 1 end table. 1 candle. And 2 pictures on the wall. It's fine for us, but when we have people over to watch movies (via projector that is wheeled in and out of sparse room on demand), it can be uncomfortable viewing.

And then a few weeks ago I was feeling crafty. So I decided to hand craft custom bean bag chairs for lounging in the living room. I found this design online and basically followed it, but without putting the round patch. The filling was a bit difficult. The styrofoam beads in bean bag chairs are somewhat expensive. I found some large foam pieces at The Scrap Box, an awesome local store full of tons of terrific junk. I had to cut the foam into tiny pieces, which I did while watching "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (badges! we don't need no stickin badges!).

Here's the result. Two more chairs are en route whenever I get a spare evening or two.




The blue looks more royal here than in real life. It matches the couch well.



I also installed a zipper. May be my favorite part. The foam shown here was cut into smaller pieces to decrease lumpiness and increase comfort.



Foam cutting at its finest.

against the odds?

I faced a crisis of faith the other day when purchasing airline tickets for an upcoming trip. I had avoided the chore of actually looking for good ticket deals until about 4 weeks out from the actual trip. I was unpleasantly not surprised to see the ticket price was quite high.

But somehow in my surfing I came across Farecast. This site shows you a graph of past tickets prices for your specific query and uses that data to predict whether fares will rise or fall in the near future. It won my master-of-information heart over. Data-driven decision-making! Information visualization! Customized search tool! Nifty web application!

The prediction for my search was that fares would rise and I should wait a few days before purchasing. As I thought about this, risk aversion kicked in. They were only 60% confident in the prediction. The fares could possibly rise. And the site is run by Microsoft!

In the end, I decided to trust the stats and ignore qualm #3. Check out the results.



I saved something like $60/ticket by waiting until Farecast told me to buy. And now I find myself, against all likelihood, actually promoting a Microsoft product.

Maybe I can take the $60 I saved from the ticket at put it towards finally buying a Mac.

you may want to close your eyes for this part

Votes for the scariest restaurant ever . . . and the winner is: Big Boy. The fear factor is self-evident in the pictures.



The resemblance to Chuckie is particularly disturbing.





When I was young, my family went to Big Boy. When we entered the restaurant, I was confronted by a live Big Boy, frolicking around the restaurant, chortling, and making happy gestures with his hands. I don't remember what happened after that, but it was as traumatic as the time my sisters made me pose for a photo with a costumed Shamu at Sea World.

slurp!

If thermal underwear isn't enough to keep you warm, here's a favorite winter-weather recipe.

Doris Lamb's Clam Chowder
(I don't know who Doris Lamb is, but I found this recipe in my Grandma's cookbook)

1 can clams
1 onion finely chopped
6 cubed, cooked potatoes
1/2 c butter
1/4 c vegetable oil
1 c flour
5 cups 2% milk
1 tsp sugar
salt and pepper to taste

Pour clam juice over onion and cook until tender. Melt butter, add flour and blend together, add milk and stir until thick. Add clams and vegetables. Heat and serve.

social construction zone

This month my book group discussed Your Money Or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence. A worthwhile read if you skip all of the case studies, which didn't add much besides approximately 100 pages of italicized text.

Besides having a good discussion all around, the book group touched briefly on status and social scripts. One of the main points of the book is that we usually think of work in terms of money. By confounding work with paid employment, we end up defining ourselves in terms of what we do for paid employment. But paid employment is only one part of who we are and what we do. There is a lot of "work" that we put energy into that is not paid. The book goes on to talk about how it is individually liberating to separate the concept of work and paid employment, because then we can have a self-definition and purpose that goes well beyond our 9-5.

I've been thinking about this in terms of social interactions. Not only do we define ourselves by our job, but we also define others (almost exclusively upon first encounters) the same way. We embed these social scripts into ourselves. Think about the last time you met someone for the first time. Which of these phrases did you use within the first 5 minutes of conversation?

"What do you do?"
"What brought you here?"
"What are you studying?"

etc.

I don't think these questions are meaningless or harmful. I think social scripts are important for creating common ground between people, for helping us make mental models that allow us to act appropriately and make people feel at ease. But when social scripts never go beyond just that, then we get into trouble. We make judgments about each other based on our paid employment, education ... in essence, our resumes. Personally, I hope my resume is not a very accurate portrayal of who I am. Hello, boring!

So next time I'm at a party, my goal is to bulldoze through the social script and get to the things that really matter. I'm not exactly sure how to execute this plan (the whole point is to get away from the script, right?). My best guess is that it will involve a lot of follow-up questions, and a good deal of real listening. It may even mean that I will start caring about the other person, instead of just thinking about myself and what witty comment I can interject next.

Wish me luck.

for everyone flogging themselves through eat-healthy-exercise resolutions

Stair machines are the worst exercise equipment ever. If you've ever been to the gym, you've probably seen the people on the stair machines. They look miserable. Collapsed over the arm bars, laboriously pumping up, down, up, down. Shoulders hunched, butts sticking out, faces bright red, still they pump up, down, up, down.

And no wonder they are miserable. What do you think about while you're on the stair machine? The eliptical crowd is sprinting through a lush green countryside, the rowers are dipping in and out of a glistening Potomac River. The stair machiners are ... almost to the 8th floor of the office building?

I saw the stair machiners the other day when I was at the gym. I wanted to tap each of them on the shoulder and say, "It's okay. You don't have to do this." And after coaxing them off their beasts of burden, I would explain to them that the remarkable truth about exercise is that you can actually enjoy it. And, for most people, stair machines don't enter into that equation.

With the New Year, I took stock of my 4 categories of a balanced life (mental, physical, spiritual, social) and made some goals for each. Under "physical" was eating well and being active. Thanks to Chaz and 6 months of unemployment, I was doing fairly well on being active with yoga, so it was easy to want to keep that goal going.

Here's the thing about Chaz. Cue angels singing. My sister introduced me to these yoga video podcasts called Yogamazing with instructor Chaz. Free yoga instruction, new 20-minute workouts each week, focuses on different areas of the body and different types of workout - balance, strength, flexibility. A well-balanced workout, new and exciting each week (with the ability to go back to past workouts you really like), quick, from the comfort of my office floor, and free.

Angels slowly fade.

So I was doing alright with yoga. But my husband and I both agreed we would like to do more. Our active season runs May through October, when we are playing Ultimate 3x/week. November through April is when we curl up on the couch, eat lots of meat, and get a comfortable winter layer.

Last week I purchased a gym membership to the university facilities which Abe gets into for free. We've been 4 times in 2 weeks, mostly playing racketball. It taps our competitive genes, so I don't even realize it's exercise because I'm so into finding ways to beat Abe. (Note: while racketball did prove to be a good way to love being fit, it also proved to be a good way to get us mad at each other. After a few seasons, we have worked that out. The solution is that Abe has to score twice as many points as I do to win.)

So if you're trying the exercise thing and it's not going so well, try something new. Find a partner to go with. Look up Chaz. Because I'm convinced that there's a good fit for everyone, it's just a matter of finding it.