personal stuff

If you send holiday cards and always seem to wind up with a couple of extras, pop them in the mail to the Red Cross. They’ll be delivered to a wounded soldier or a veteran.

Please send cards to this address, following the guidelines listed below:

Holiday Mail for Heroes
PO Box 5456
Capitol Heights, MD 20791-5456

I’ve obviously cut off the guidelines, so go take a quick look at them. Basically, your card must be postmarked by 12/10 and cannot contain any inserts (photos, gift cards) or your contact information.

If you have the resources to do more this year, you can send a calling card or a care package.

(Unfortunately I can’t figure out the original poster of this image, but my friend Ellen pointed it out at this link.)

Also, maybe I will get this to wear for the inaguration. Here he comes to save the day!

You did, right? Good. So did I. Lines weren’t bad at my polling place this morning around 9am. (I actually waited longer to see my dentist than I did to vote.)

Here’s hoping that the Enoch Pratt Free Library bond issue passes, since part of the money will go specifically to my local branch. (Here’s also hoping that one of the things they do is add wi-fi.)

This weekend, I went to Amelia Island, Florida (about 30 minutes from Jacksonville) for another wedding — my friends Danielle and Paul. They were the first people I became friends with after moving to Baltimore, and I was incredibly happy to be invited to join them on their big day. They got married on the beach near Danielle’s grandmother’s house, and the reception was held at her parents’ house. The weather was just gorgeous for the ceremony — warm and sunny, with a stiff breeze (but not so bad that you got sand in your eyes). The reception was fun, with a delicious dinner, two cakes (love that Southern groom’s cake tradition) and lots of dancing. Here, the happy couple is re-enacting the scene atop their cake, which features Nancy Pearl and Geek Man. (Danielle is a digital services librarian; Paul is a computer security guy.) Click through for photos of the ceremony and the reception. More to come, but I am having trouble uploading photos from my apartment.

Much like Andrea and Bill’s wedding, this was another small, informal celebration. Guests were called in to help carry things to and from the ceremony & reception sites, and I wound up carrying Danielle’s train during the ceremony. Personally, I can’t imagine having a wedding as small as these two (though I can imagine having one as informal). With just my mom & dad’s siblings and their families, you’re already at 26 people — roughly half the size of these two weddings. (I may have caught the bouquet, but as I said to Darra, don’t hold your breath.

Also, would you believe that the cake is from a grocery store? It was delicious!

(No, not the TV show, though you can still hear my Mom say “More power, Tim!” randomly.) Earlier this week, I installed part one of a two part system that I hope will improve life in my apartment this winter — adding lights and a curtain to the stairway/entryway.

For those who haven’t been here, my apartment is the top floor of a three-floor Baltimore row home (basement & first floor belong to the downstairs neighbor, and I have the second/top floor). I have my own entrance on the side of the house, and when I unlock my door I am at the first-floor level (the house is built into a hill, so there are steps up to get to that point). As soon as I open my door, I have a flight of stairs up to the top floor where all the living space of my apartment is.

Last winter, I discovered that the apartment is very, very drafty. There are (chintzy) double-paned windows (except in the bathroom, which is still an old single-paned), none of which have a complete seal. In fact, there is one in the kitchen were a strip of wood has been nailed on to the sill because the gap between sill and sash is an inch at one end. The door also does not seal completely. The windows were not shrink-wrapped last winter when I moved in, and so while I will certainly do that this winter, I can’t exactly shrink-wrap the door. Read the rest of this entry »

The first half of September proved to be quite expensive, so I decided to do a pantry challenge and see if I could get through a week making lunches and dinners with what I already have in the house. I’m still buying things like OJ, milk, yogurt, etc. I also decided that if I needed to, I could buy one item for each meal (frequently I will eat the same thing for several days running, so this stretches farther than it sounds). That means something that’s required to make the dish — for example, I had a box of vegan sloppy joe mix (no, I am not vegan; yes, it’s pretty good) and that requires tomato paste, which I do not keep around. For $.50 and what I already had lying around, I had four dinners.

Anyway, for dinner tonight I just finished a bowl of shrimp scampi with a side of garlic ciabatta bread topped with tomatoes, mozzarella and black olives. Everything in this meal was something I already had in the house (or on the porch growing in little pots!). It wasn’t as good as I had imagined it would be — my own shrimp scampi never compares to what I get when I eat out, probably because I can’t bring myself to use an entire stick of butter — but it was still a good meal. Certainly not what you would expect when doing a pantry challenge, but that’s the great thing! I might not have hit upon even having this meal if I hadn’t been mulling over the ingredients I have on hand to see what kinds of combinations I could put together.

Given how easy it was for me to do this week — both lunches and dinners — I’m going to try for next week, too. Admittedly I haven’t been eating the most exciting things (unless faux oreos as the main entree counts as exciting), but that’s not so unusual. And also, lunches were easy. Three days of PB&J, with bread from last week, and the last two Lean Cuisines. Next week I will actually have to think about lunch, but that should be manageable. I’m pondering some kind of couscous and beans thing, but I could also do tuna. We’ll see how I feel on Monday.

Of course, this week I get a craving for takeout pizza. Usually I get takeout once every six months, and I wait until I really, really want something. I blame Beckett and Ellen.

Little open-faced sadwhich-type-things: Wasa Fiber Crispbreads topped with Garlic & Herb Rondele Pub Cheese, slices of tomato, vidalia onion, and a little bit of turkey from the deli. It’s quite good. The nice thing is the Wasa crackers are substantial enough that they don’t crumble when you take a bite.

One of the biggest changes for me in moving from a PC to a Mac (other than the absurd amount of affection I now feel for my laptop) is the change in how I’m doing my budgeting. Since I got my Gateway in December 2002, I’ve been using Microsoft Money. It came pre-installed, and I was pretty happy with it. It’s easy to import data from my credit card companies, and there’s a lot of ways to manipulate the data and see what’s happening with your spending. But, no more Money for me.

I didn’t really want to buy a new piece of software — something about buying software for budgeting seems incongruous. And I didn’t want to set myself up on Mint.com. While I pay all my bills online and use the online access associated with all of my accounts, something about having everything aggregated into a single place online gives me pause. This is despite the fact that Mint doesn’t store your account numbers or logon credentials. Irrational, I know. So that left me with the spreadsheet option. But I knew I would drive myself batty making absurdly complicated and idiosyncratic spreadsheets. (I have them now, and am using them in addition to Money. It is absurdly complicated and I frequently forget what I’ve already done.)

So, I started searching around to see if I could find anything useful for spreadsheet-based personal budgeting. I went straight to Consumerist and took a look at the financial management sites & blogs they were pointing to. That very quickly got me to The Simple Dollar. I spent some time digging around in the archives and hit upon Pear Budget. They’re doing an online version which I assume is similar to Mint, but they started out as a spreadsheet. An amazing, wonderful spreadsheet that exploits what seems to be every nook and cranny of Calc (aka Excel). I spent a few hours getting started yesterday, slowly but surely transcribing the data from this year into Pear Budget. So far, it’s fantastic. Here’s a description of what you get, and some thoughts: Read the rest of this entry »

EKW has been posting an occasional series on what she’s been eating. I think it’s a neat idea and I am going to completely rip it off, starting now. Tonight I am in the midst of enjoying garlic ciabatta bread with a perfectly ripe tomato, basil picked off of my basil plant just before I ate, mozzarella and a tiny bit of balsamic vinegar. Oh, and the glass of Green Path Organic Chardonnay (Austrailian), which I highly recommend (and will be refilling shortly). Available at Wine Source for the Hampdenites, but the Interwebs tell me that Whole Foods is behind this, so it should be available all over.

This is one of my absolutely favorite summer meals. It has been stymied once or twice this summer by the lack of good bread at Giant at the end of the day, and my unwillingness to walk the few exra blocks up to SuperFresh when this happens.

Congratulations to Bill & Andrea, who got married this weekend in Meredith, Colorado, at Norrie Colony, where Bill’s family has had a cabin since 1940.The whole area — the Fryingpan River Valley — is just gorgeous. It’s way up in the mountains, about an hour away from Aspen. The GSLIS contingent at the wedding is already making plans to return for a vacation in a couple of years.

Apparently, there’s nothing quite like a country wedding (except maybe a faeries & jedis wedding, but I didn’t know Sparkle J & JeT yet). We sat on hay bales, and the backdrop was miles of mountains and sky. It was a lovely, informal ceremony (take a look at the photo of Andrea and her parents walking down the aisle) for a wonderful pair. I’m so glad I was invited!

At the moment only photos of the ceremony itself are up on Flickr - more to come, though, including some hikes and reception shenanigans.

Congratulations are also due to Darius & Ellen, who marked their first anniversary on Monday. I still can’t believe I missed their wedding . . . actually more than that, I can’t believe I haven’t seen them since before they were engaged (that would be why there is no photo). We hope to remedy that sometime soon, but wrangling the schedules of a grad student, a travlin’ PR guy and an instruction librarian is no small task.