I was home today because I was sick. I don’t know what I have but it’s not looking flu like so yay! Most of my issue has been due to being achy and having a sore throat. I’m not running a fever or anything like that and I’m not coughing. I’ve been really, really tired as well.

One of my projects for today was making these cookies. I came across them in one of the non-Xanga blogs I like to read and have been thinking about them ever since. I made a few changes to them. One change was I used salted butter instead of unsalted because that’s what I had on hand. The cookies still tasted really good. Also, I used coffee powder instead of espresso powder and I used more than what the recipe called for because I likes the coffee.

Here’s the recipe I used:
1.5 tbsp of instant coffee powder
1.5 tbsp of boiling water
2 sticks of salted butter
2/3 cup of confectioner’s sugar
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
Half-bag of milk chocolate chips (the recipe also says you can use something like heath bits if you’d like)
Confectioner’s sugar for dusting (I didn’t do that because I actually don’t like my cookies super sweet)

1. Dissolve coffee powder in boiling water. Set aside and let cool.
2. Beat butter and sugar together until smooth (about 3 minutes or so). Beat in vanilla and coffee mixture. Slowly add in flour and then add chocolate chips.
3. Put dough in fridge for two hours as possible (the dough will be super sticky and is much easier to work with when it has been refrigerated).
4. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Put dough on cookie sheet and roll flat. In order to avoid using more flour, I put a sheet of plastic over the dough and rolled it out. Don’t roll it out super flat; the dough doesn’t expand much.
5. Bake for 18-20 minutes
6. As soon as you take out the cookie sheet, cut cookie into desired shape (you can shape the dough beforehand but I chose not to and it works just as well).
7. Cool and serve. This would be great with coffee or a dark tea. I had mine with vanilla soy milk and that still passed muster.

“Come on, it’ll be fine. We’ll throw the ball gently. This ball isn’t even that hard anyway,” said Chet

“It’ll be fun. Mom and Dad said not to leave the house. They’ll never know that we were even playing in here. This is the biggest room. Come on, girls!,” said Bebo.

“Alright but only for a little bit; I don’t want to get caught. Let’s play, Danny,” said Mary.

“I guess. Are you sure that this is a good idea? Mom is going to be mad if she catches us. We’re not even allowed to move furniture in here,” said Danny tentatively.

“It’ll be fine. Mom and Dad are going to be gone for a few hours. We’ll move the furniture back when we’re done,” said Chet.

The kids pushed the furniture out of the way in the living room. All of the chairs and the big couch were pushed more towards the walls. The space was clear enough for the kids to spread out in a circle.

“Okay, now hit the ball gently. We’re going to be in trouble if we hit anything,” said Mary.

“It’ll be fine. Like I said, this ball isn’t really hard. We can stand in a circle and throw to each other. Who wants to throw the ball to me,” asked Chet.

“I’ll do it. Mary, you stand next to me. Danny stand in between Mary and Chet,” said Bebo.

Bebo threw the ball and Chet caught it with ease. They kept throwing the ball around the circle.

“Okay, let’s change things up a little. You can throw to whoever you want but call out their name so they know you’re throwing to them,” said Chet.

Chet threw the ball towards Bebo. All the four of them could do was watch as the baseball sailed over Bebo’s head and land squarely in the nut bowl on one of the side tables in the room. In what seemed like slow motion, the nut dish shattered.

“See, I told you this wasn’t going to be a good idea,” said Danny.

“It’s fine. I’ll fix the dish. Mom and Dad still won’t be home for awhile. Put the furniture back and I’ll get some glue out and fix the dish. It’ll be as good as new.”

Mary, Bebo, and Danny put back all the furniture and ran upstairs to play. They wanted to be out of the way in case Chet’s plan didn’t work. Chet scooped up the pieces of the nut dish and took them to the kitchen table. He got out some glue and painstakingly put the nut dish back together. He heard the family car pulling up in the driveway and so he quickly scooped up the dish and put it back on the side table just as his father opened the door.

“We’re home!,” called Margaret.

“Hi Mom! Hi Dad!,” yelled Chet as he walked upstairs.

Flash forward to dinner time…

“Kids, it’s dinner time. Wash up and come downstairs,” Margaret yelled up the stairs as she walked into the living room carrying a bag of nuts. Margaret poured the nuts in the bowl and the bowl slowly began to crack and then shattered. Stunned, she walked back into the kitchen to get the dustpan to clean up the mess.

“Frank, you’ll never believe it! I just poured these nuts in that blue bowl that was on the side table. The nuts were so hard that they shattered my bowl! Can you believe it? You would think that a nut dish would be able to have nuts poured into it… hm”

 

Note: This is a family story with some of the details filled in where my grandma (Mary) left them out. My grandma was a wonderful story teller and she had some great stories from growing up with her two brothers and sister. It seems all four of them got in trouble a lot from their parents. My grandma and her siblings never told my great-grandmother about what really happened to her dish so she went to her grave thinking that the nuts shattered her dish and telling the story all the time.

Melanie sat cross legged on her bed. She still hadn’t quite woken up. From this vantage point, she could gaze out the window and sleepily watch the wind gently swing the old tire swing in the backyard. It was gray again that day. Snowy. Cold. It was the kind of day where you wake up, realize that there is nothing better to do, so you chop away at the day with fits of boredom and not much else. You move slow and the day stretches out before you as far as you can see. Melanie took a sip of tomato juice recalling when she was able to play on the tire swing. She could swing for hours watching her mother’s tiger lilies blow in the breeze. Eventually she grew up and at the ripe old age of 15 found it beneath her to even sit in the tire swing any more. Her mother had gone back to work full time a few years prior and now had no time to plant her field of tiger lilies. Time changes us all. Now that was the Bible truth if there ever was one. The lava lamp on her bedside table made the room glow with greenish shades. Melanie glanced over at the amoeba like shapes floating up into the water. It was going to be another long day.

E pluribus unum

Out of many, one

And then

Out of one, many

Out of this mixing bowl, many ingredients?

Out of this salad bowl, many vegetables?

Metaphors

Metaphors for who we are

Metaphors for who we are not

As a people

As a place

We are here

Whether or not we like it

We are the many into one

 

It’s gray outside today. And cold and rainy. It’s kind of a crummy day for a birthday but it’s a birthday nonetheless. 24 is a weird age. There’s a lot of big stuff happening this year. I’ll have my Masters while I’m 24. I’ll get married while I’m 24. The juxtaposition between the events and the number of years I have under my belt are just very strange to think about. It’s going to be a good year!

Today is not a really big production. Due to prior obligations, I have to work and do stuff for school. My live in architect/chef will cook a special dinner for me. We’re having chicken with butternut squash ravioli in a goat cheese sauce (I have an obsession with goat cheese… and butternut squash ravioli for that matter) with salad. The ravioli will be homemade as will the goat cheese sauce. He’s making peanut butter and chocolate brownies for dessert (I also have an obsession with the peanut butter/ chocolate combo).

Allow me to briefly gripe about school. Sometimes I really don’t get why people go onto get their Masters. Are they forced to by their employers? Are they forced to by their situation? There’s been several times that I’ve questioned why some people are there. God forbid that they actually want to learn or realize that they have to do work. It’s frustrating for those that actually want to do well in school like myself.

I’m taking statistics right now and we have to do a group project. We had a basic outline of our project due Tuesday (as in yesterday) by 11:59pm. I am not staying up until 11:59pm to turn in an assignment. I do have to work as well. Trying to coordinate time to get together was just painful for this week because everyone in the group had different schedules so I wrote up the entire assignment that we had to turn in and sent an email asking everyone to take a look at it and comment on it by 7pm on Tuesday evening so I could get everything together and post by 9pm. I did this on Sunday and didn’t hear from anyone until about 8pm last night and then I only heard from one person. Sigh…

I understand that some people are forced to go to college. Either their parents or other family members want them to go or there are other forces pressing against them to go. I understand that there may be some people that are forced to go to grad school but I have to imagine that most people go because there is some part of them that wants to go. One would think that they would at least act like they want to be there…

Of Note: The contractors came back to put an additional lock on the front door (sort of like a hotel door type lock). They told us that the leasing company’s insurance and the woman who had the fire’s insurance are fighting over who has to pay for repairs to her apartment because the woman is claiming that there was a plastic spatula left in the oven from the previous owners and she didn’t notice it when she went to use the oven. I’m not sure how much I believe that because she came over and apologized for having the fire that resulted in our doors being busted and said that it was because of a malfunction with the oven… not that there was a plastic spatula. I’m not sure that I believe it also because the leasing company cleans pretty thoroughly between residents. Bottom line: I hope that there are no more plastic spatulas left in any oven in our building no matter who did or did not put them there!

As of this morning, I have read 100 books this calendar year. I totally blame my commute. I have about an hour commute each way. Add to that, I read pretty quickly (for that, I blame college and grad school) Mind you, I’ve essentially been in school year round (I took summer classes) and working full time. I read fast. I can only imagine how much I’m going to be able to read when I’m finished with school (the 100 books doesn’t include any books that I’ve read for school either). I’m pretty impressed with myself. That’s about two books a week on average! Woot!

Are you on Good Reads? Add me!

Of note: I turn 24 on Thursday. I keep forgetting that my birthday is so close and the idea of turning 24 is rather strange to me. Is it possible that I really am this old! In other news, it is so cold here. On Friday, it was 80 degrees and today it only got into the mid-50s. Brr! Welcome Fall!

When I was a young girl, I’d have dreams of flying. Sometimes it would be dreams of hot air balloons, other nights dreams of heavy military aircraft and yet in other dreams, I would simply sprout gossamer wings and fly over the hills and valleys that surrounded our farm.These were in the days where we could only dream of being able to drive to the airport and take a quick jaunt to wherever in the world we fancied. Had it been appropriate for a lady in our family, I would have gone to flight school as soon as possible. In my family, this would have been frowned upon. I was expected to marry well and raise a family.
Growing up, one of my heroes was Katherine Wright. She had as much to do with the first flight at Kitty Hawk as either of her brothers did if you ask me. Unfortunately learning to fly was never in the cards for me. After high school, I married Thomas Chain, whose parents owned the farm next to ours. We moved to the city and he got a job as a salesman in the 1940s. I stayed home and did what was expected of me: I kept house and raised our family. We have four: two boys and two girls. They are the joys of my life and I would not change my life for anything. Their well being became what I hoped for. It was what I lived for. Flying just wasn’t plausible anymore
It’s funny how many dreams get lost along the way. You defer your dreams for necessities. Dreams often aren’t what you need to live. I certainly didn’t need flying to live.  I suppose that most dreams are simply that, dreams. They are meant to be things that keep you going, keep you moving towards something better. One gets so busy with life that eventually the things that you wished for begin to lose priority.
Eventually the children grew up and left the nest as the all do. It’s completely normal. When the children left the nest, it was Thomas and I again. After being a part of the family for so long, we didn’t know how to simply be a couple. I can blame it on so many different things but after thirty years of marriage, we had lost what it meant to be simply together. Thomas threw himself into work and I threw myself into getting involved with the community through volunteering and the such. It was something to take my mind off of things. I found myself more or less alone in my 50s trying to find my wings again.
My 59th birthday found me on a solo trip to Napa Valley. I stayed at a small bed and breakfast at the edge of a massive vineyard. I spent my days sipping tea and getting lost in a book on the porch. It was quiet and felt like the kind of healing that I needed. I was up early every morning to take breakfast on the porch. One morning, I watch three hot air balloons rise over the vineyard and float up into the sky. At that moment, the innkeeper came out with a  breakfast tray for me.
“Ah yes, there’s a couple balloon tours here in the valley. There’s one just about a mile from here. They’re very good and the area looks so pretty from the air. Would you be interested in taking a flight?”
The next morning, I found myself in front of a small shelter about a mile away from the inn. The balloon was already inflated and ready to go. Bill, the owner of the balloon, helped me into the basket.
As we lifted off, he asked me, “Did you ever think you’d fly?”
“No, I never did,” I said as I smiled.

Growing up, my parents always taught me to treat others the way that I wanted to be treated. I took that lesson to heart and fancy myself a pretty nice person. I understand that not everyone takes this lesson to heart but I believe that a majority of people in the world are nice.

Let’s say you have Person 1 that keeps bullying and bullying you and then Person 2 comes along and is kind to you and treats you the way that you would like to be treated, does this mean that Person 2 deserves some kind of prize? I would argue that they don’t. They are simply being decent human beings and I think it’s a problem when we start rewarding people for simply doing what all other human beings should be doing: being nice to our fellow men. To me, prestigious prizes should be given to the most extraordinary acts, not the ones that everyone should simply be expected to do.

Okay, I believe that it’s a pretty good argument that Gee Dubs probably wasn’t the nicest person ever in the political arena. He bullied a bit. He pushed, he shoved. Bottom line, he wasn’t particularly well liked by the international community. But then when President Obama comes along and is nice to the rest of the international community and gets a prize for being nice to the international community, it’s a little crazy. To me, putting the act of being nice on the level with things such as working towards solving the Israel- Palestine conflict (1994- Arafat, Peres, and Rabin), bringing an end to the USSR (1990- Gorbachev), and bringing an end to apartheid in South Africa (1993- Mandela and de Klerk) is ludicrous. Not to mention that President Obama has not even been President for a year. Maybe a little wait and see would have been in order? Now if he had been able to end either of the wars that we are fighting, that would definitely be prize worthy.

And who knows? Maybe there weren’t any other good contenders in the running for this prize? That in itself is kind of sad that simply being nice beat out all of the other contenders. What does that say about all of the other contenders? Don’t get me wrong; I think President Obama seems very nice but not really any nicer than a regular nice person. I think he has potential to win other prizes but I just don’t think being super nice to everyone really cuts it.

What do you think about President Obama winning the Nobel Peace prize?

 

 

So yesterday I mentioned something about some sort of explosion on the Metro, right? Apparently one of the collector shoes fell off of one of the train cars. I do not fancy myself an engineer but here’s the very basic way a collector shoe works. There are four on each train car and they run along the third rail (the third rail is full of electricity and makes the train run). One of these shoes fell off, presumably on the third rail and created a loud boom and a lot of smoke.

Without saying anything further, it’s bad news when your trains start falling apart… literally.

To brighten up the somber mood of the falling apart of the trains, WMATA (the lovely people who bring us Metro service here in DC-land) decided that yesterday was the perfect day to break the news that they spent $20,000 of their apparently very strapped budget to get two segway type vehicles for their transit po-po. In their defense, the segways are supposed to help the police get bad guys breaking into cars in the Metro garages but this begs the question as to how segway things help protect cars from bad guys. Can you run a person over with a segway???

Really, I for one feel soooo much better that the transit roflcopters have transit vehicles now that the trains are literally falling apart. Oh WMATA! What would we do without you?