serinde

I remain overpressed with squash, and there's another box staring down the tunnel at me next week, so it behooved me to stir my stumps a bit. I'm kinda bored with roasting, though, so I was still looking for new and exciting options. I must tell you, I'm getting a lot of mileage out of Smitten Kitchen; the stuff there is generally good and -- bless her -- organized by vegetable. This recipe calls for being served over couscous, which I do have, but I don't feel like I need a starch whomp, so I ain't botherin'.

1. Start eviscerating a sugar pumpkin from its rind. OH RIGHT THIS IS WHY ROASTING THE SQUASH IS POPULAR. (The recipe calls for butternut, but let's be honest, most of the winter squashes are created equal.) After some cursing and wasteage, cut the flesh into chunks.
2. Chop a smallish onion and a few cloves of garlic.
3. Melt a tbsp. of butter and one of olive oil in the Dutch oven.
4. Get distracted by a naughty, naughty man on the phone.
5. Return to the kitchen. Oh dear. It is now a browned butter Moroccan stew. I am sure the Berbers had this problem sometimes. Sort of.
6. Skim the worst of the browned particulate matter off, then throw in the onions & garlic. Add some cumin, salt, pepper, and a cinnamon stick. Let that go for a bit.
7. Recipe calls for potato. There is no potato, but there is a sweet potato. We're all tubers here, amirite? Peel it and cut it into large dice.
8. Add the squash & potato to the pot, stir to coat with the spices, let it go a few minutes.
9. Add about 2c. chicken broth and a can of diced tomatoes.
10. Prepare to open the can of chickpeas. Watch in annoyance as the pull tab pulls without doing anything to the can itself.
11. Attack the chickpea can with a regular can opener. Well, that didn't work at all. Fortunately, we are equal to this task; call in the Swiss Army (or in this household, the Leatherman). THANK YOU.
12. Add drained chickpeas to pot, for fuck's sake.
13. Take the real saffron from the locked treasure vault, add three threads.
14. Bring the pot to a boil; turn down to simmer, cover, and let go until the hard things are soft (aheheh).
15. OM NOM NOM

Results: Very fragrant and pleasant. One is meant to serve these with preserved lemons; and in the holiday season I had actually gotten an Imperial ass-ton of Meyer lemons, some of which were earmarked for experimenting thus, particularly after having read caelfinn's article on same, but I never got the round tuit. Bah. Making do with plain yogurt.

There is one reason to serve over couscous, which is that it gives the broth something to soak into, but it's certainly not necessary.

Turnips are a rather fraught topic with me. I wouldn't eat them at all as a kid (except when Mom would sneak them into stew and say "no no, that's a potato"), and then, when I grew up and started having my own Thanksgiving dinners, audiovile felt that it was not truly T-day unless there was mashed turnip on the table. And thus I was at much labor and headache to make this happen. And only he would ever eat it, and not much of it, at that. Grump.

But, turnips I have, and therefore I must do something with them. Another CSA-provided recipe, thus:

1. Chop 3/4 c. onion, start sauteing gently in 2 tsp. butter.
2. Recipe calls for leeks. I have no leeks. How about a clove of garlic?
3. Peel and chop a turnip of ~1.5 lbs. (Or around 4 cups.) Put it in the pot when the onions have come along nicely, and let them saute for a couple minutes too.
4. Recipe says 6 c. of broth AND 2 c. water. This seems utterly insane for something described as "creamy", particularly since there is still milk to be added at the end. Let us start with 2 c. chicken broth and 1 c. water.
5. Throw in some fresh thyme because, as Hillary said of Everest, "it was there".
6. Let simmer, covered, until turnips are tender.
7. Immersion blend the snot out of it. Yeah, 3 c. liquid was plenty.
8. Stir in 3/4 c. milk, grind in some pepper, and...seriously? There's no salt in the recipe? I don't think so.
9. Let all that simmer for a bit.

Taste test: Not bad. There is a slight sweetness to it that you do not get with potato. I'll leave that on the warm until lunch as well. It's very virtuous, too.

30 min. later: Oops. The fire wasn't completely off. Mmmm, curdled milk!

As I type this on the aged repurposed-from-work MacBook at the country estate, I have another window which is an OS X Screen Sharing session back to gfefx, on my desk at home; on which is running my last ever session of City of Heroes. And I can't even as who should say play, because between the screen resolution mismatches and the lossage over the connection and the fact that the Mac client is a mess inside a WINE wrapper anyways, if I tried to actually enter a combat the entire thing would probably go foom. So I'm standing on the steps of Atlas Park holding a torch instead of going to bed, whence sweh has already retired, charitably not saying anything about my insanity. Why?

CoH has been a major part of my world for the last eight years. A bit less in the last couple, true; but before that time, I was online nearly every day. I started playing in September 2004, while audiovile was noodling with World of Warcraft; soon I got him into it, and then elibalin, then xlerb, then others. Some of our D&D group joined; then some of Steve's co-workers; occasionally Dave or Johan or ideological_cuddle. We settled on Sunday nights as our regular supergroup nights, and on other evenings Steve and I would go out as a duo, or Eli and I as the Team Supreme, or random other pick-up groups.
( More memories and shibboleths ahoy )

There's so many more, and I'll probably think of them in the morning.

Four minutes to go.

Here comes the Nothing.

So the leadership program of great renown had its last session the first week of this month; and once that heat was off, as well as the start-of-semester wharrgarbl dying down, I determined to make another go at the various lifestyle changes I had worked out back in June. If you don't feel like making the clicky, it boiled down to these:

1) stop what I'm doing by 10:30, be in bed by 11
2) do some yoga or other calisthenics in the morning, rather than coffee-and-stare-at-internets; carry coffee into work
3) ride bike more
4) spend less money; take lunch more, cook more
5) be diligent about tracking what I eat

Concurrent with this, right after the program ended I was feeling unusually down. There are, of course, any number of possible contributing factors--kitty, major project stress, seasonal change?--but it made a useful benchmark.

For each of the last three weeks, I have done yoga 4 of 5 work mornings; rode my bike to & from work either two or three times; been increasingly good about food tracking (it's not 100% but we're getting there); and been cooking and taking my lunch more often than not*. I've also been going out less. I have not been entirely diligent about bedtime, but I'm in bed by 11:15 more often than not.

Results thus far:
+ I am in much, much better state of mind, on the whole.
+ Weight is at last starting to creep downwards.
+ I have spent a lot more time working on my stuff, whether it be knitting, sewing, cooking, or domestic improvements.
+ My complexion has gotten clearer (!). This makes little sense to me, considering I haven't eaten less sugar or chocolate, neither of which is usually my downfall anyways, but there it is.
+ The apartment is getting closer to where I want it to be.
+ Biking is becoming easier! I am in my top gear (of 7. don't judge me.) for much of the ride, and I can get up the first half of the OMG DOOM DOOM hill under the GWB.
- So far the yoga has not yet seemed to improve the weakness in my left leg.
- I keep waking up half an hour before my alarm, at what seems to be the end of a REM cycle? Then drifting back to sleep, then snapping awake when the alarm hits.

This looks like pretty unqualified success, and although it's really hard, in that first five minutes, to drag myself from the warm snuggly bed and go to something exercise-y, I always feel better when I do; and one morning the lizard brain had convinced me to lame out, and within ten minutes I found myself on the mat anyways. So it is full speed ahead, and maintain these changes as best I can through the exigencies of the holiday season.

* of course then I spent money I shouldn't have on fripperies, but I mean, one problem at a time

( No one is truly gone as long as someone speaks his name. )

If you have memories of my ginger kitty, please post here.

I have just returned from the open-on-Sundays vet, from whence Ranger has departed these fields (futons?) we know.

He had been declining gently over the last few months; walking was clearly more of a chore, and especially after the weather turned it was harder for him to get comfortable when curling up, but he'd been otherwise behaving according to his usual habits and I thought we still had some time before us.

Middle of last week, I had a scare where he was mrowing in that very-unhappy-cat way, and was about to take him to the vet when I realized that he would probably be much more comfortable without the half-extruded poop strung on a hair coming out his butt. Upon coping with this situation, he seemed much happier, and I figured "crisis averted" and thought little more of it. But then, I was gone Friday and Saturday as is my custom; and upon getting home last night I found that he was really doing nothing but sleeping, and when he got up he'd move about ten feet and then sit down for about ten minutes before moving another ten feet. I also--and this was of much greater concern, remembering Mage's Solid Silver Cat incident--took note that there was no poop in the box and that, as far as I could tell, he had not been digging into his dish at all. I offered him cheese; he took a piece to be polite and ignored the rest. So, I planned to take him to the vet in the morning, before things got really bad.

After a brief detour in which Google Maps pulled an iOS 6-style map fail on me, we got up there, and bless them, they managed to squeeze us into their extremely packed docket. They took his history and looked him over, and long story short, the prognosis was that things were just starting to fail. Their best guess was that he wasn't in pain at the moment, just kind of out of it and drained, but that it was likely to spiral to Very Bad very soon, and it was very unlikely that any measures would even buy him time that was worth living. So, I made the call at quarter to noon, and I held him as they gave him sweet nepenthe. (I recommend the Riverdale Veterinary Group highly. They were incredibly kind and thoughtful.)

If you look at it traditionally, Ranger is my 4th cat (well, tied for fourth with Mage, obvs). But if you look at it another way, he is my first and my only cat. All the cats we had growing up were bonded to Mom, if anyone; and Mr. Mage was, of course, everybody's pal. Ranger was mine and I was his in our little co-dependent bubble, and at 17.5 years is my longest-running relationship, and I feel empty and broken inside. No cat could ever be like him, my Spinach Cat, my Mr. MOW, my precious boy, and I can't yet imagine what any other cat could be to me.

Although I like a nice bit of roast chicken as much as the next carnivore, it's almost the least part of roasting a bird for me. It's about the golden-brown, warm-smelling grease I'm siphoning off to make gravy. It's about that crispy salty herbed bit of skin right at the top of the breastbone that I nip off and nibble on before I carve. It's about the scent of the carcass rendering slowly down to broth overnight. It's about looking at the juicy breast meat and seeing ginger chicken salad and cold chicken sammiches and who-knows-what-else.

And it's about taking all of those bits and making CHICKEN PIE later in the week.

Thus spake the vet, upon giving me the results of Ranger's blood work.

The immediate issue is not such a big deal: Spinach Cat has a urinary tract infection. I have antibiotics for that; it shall be handled.

But, his kidney levels are four times higher than normal. This is the same as it was in March, so it hasn't gotten worse, so that's something. But still with the 4x higher thing. Also, now he is anemic (probably as a result of the kidney problems). The mitigations are that I shall pick up an iron supplement, which he'll need daily for the rest of his life, and some trial kinds of kidney-medicinal cat food (it comes in both canned and kibble) to see if he will eat some or any of them. This does not, as you know, cure kidney disease; it just slows down the progress.

I confirmed with the vet that, since Ranger is eating and drinking and moving around and MOWing at me and all that, it is likely that he's not in any particular degree of discomfort beyond old bones; but as it progresses, he could begin to be. And I asked her, is there a standard or even rough guess at the progression timeline? If he eats his medicine and nothing else goes wrong, does he have six months or a couple of years or what? When should I start being afraid?

And that's when she said, "At these kidney levels..."

Apparently yesterday's mental vomit cleared the poisons from the system. Although I did wake up a few times last night, it was for purely climatological reasons ("too chilly with the fan on, turn it off" "too stuffy with the fan off, turn it on"). And that shall be addressed with the purchase of a ceiling fan, which I shall undertake today. Watch this space for hilarious tales of home improvement follies--though at least, after blowing a fuse two sewing nights ago, I know which circuit to turn off while messing with the electrics.

Lo, the chronology of my bike ride in:

T(8:15am): Leave apartment, go down to bike room. Spend five minutes cursing at the really shitty door lock that you have to get the key exactly right in.
T+5: Actually out of the building and on the street.
T+10: Off the street, up the Dyckman stairs, mounting up to start on the greenway.
T+15: Temple waypoint--the long slow uphill is done
T+20: Bottom of the Big Bridge Hill. Hurrah for the fun flat part along the river!
T+22: oh crap my seat is loose. Mem.: Start carrying the multitool.
T+32: Off the greenway, back onto city streets.
T+35: Top of Riverside Hill, which I still have to walk my bike up
T+40: Inside campus gates
T+45 (9am): In my office, bike parked.

Further notes to self:
* The big hiking backpack is really overkill, most days. Either panniers or a wee daypack is in order.
* Do not, do not forget to pack a regular bra with the work clothes. Because wearing a sweaty sports bra all day: yechhh.