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popping pills

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In the last day, I have gained a greater appreciation for those little boxes that tell you not only which day to take your pills, but what time of day as well.

This week I finally received my January blood work from my endocrinologist’s office, and confirmed that my blood counts remained at last year’s low levels. Both my acupuncturist and nurse-practitioner agreed that I needed supplements: from one, I received a prescription for a blood booster, and from the other, a prescription for an iron pill (with instructions to take it with a vitamin C drink).

Really, the only tricky thing about this is that I can’t take iron or calcium within four hours of my thyroid medication. And, of course, I can’t take iron or calcium within four hours of each other. And, I need to take all of these things with food, including the one that I take three times a day. So I need to eat three times a day, four hours apart, beginning one hour after I wake up and take my thyroid medication. Oh, and in between two of those meals, the probiotic supplement, with water only.

Thankfully, I have a sports watch with five alarms. Its original purpose was to time me for run/walk intervals, but reminding me to eat meals and take pills is a perfectly useful adaptation.

The upside: I finally have a use for those eensy weensy plastic storage containers that you get when you buy a set.

popping pills

new thermostat

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This weekend’s big excitement was that we replaced our main thermostat, the one in the original house. We have two thermostats, but the second one (in the family room addition) only turns on the second circulator and doesn’t have the ability to kick on the furnace. There were a variety of issues with the old thermostat, but they can be summed up as: it didn’t really work.

Our happiness with the new thermostat can be summed up as: it works! It’s really kind of odd and satisfying to have the house temperature be maintained at a specific temperature. No more are we freezing and having to turn up the heat to get the furnace to kick on, nor do we wake up in the middle of the night in a sauna because it finally got cold enough to get the thermostat to work…and heat has been blasting out for hours. We’re hoping this will do wonders for our natural gas bill, but it’s already helped us to feel much more normal.

The only down side was that the installation required us to scuff up our nicely (newly) painted (yellow) wall. The new round backplate doesn’t quite cover the old rectangular hole, and the scraping off of bits of wallpaper that were hidden behind the old thermostat caused some wear that is visible now. I’ll paint it, but at a later point we really should take it back off and spackle and sand behind it. That would be the point when we get to improving of parts of the house that are perfectly functional and not in plain view. You know: later.

new thermostat

book challenge 2007 progress report

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At the end of month two, I have faced two major hurdles in my efforts to not buy new books this year, and come over them slightly battered. Vows were meant to be tested, right? Slips are an opportunity to get back on the wagon, right? Right.

In January, I visited Powells for the first time, and managed to limit myself to the purchase of used books (mostly poetry volumes) only. The whole category of previously owned books is an admitted gray area in my challenge: they are new-to-me, and they constitute more books that will need shelves in my home. In terms of managing the numbers of piles of books, then, it doesn’t get me there. In terms of managing the percentage of our budget that flows into book purchases, it improves the situation somewhat, although of course isn’t as good as just not buying anything. I hesitate to invoke that stalwart truism of consumer capitalism, ‘I could have bought even more, so what I did buy is small by comparison.’ Nonetheless, when it comes to visiting the most well-known independent bookstore in the country, I have to say: it could have been worse.

This past week, I smacked head on into my second hurdle, and it gave me a Texas thumpin’. Having chosen to attend an in-store reading, I was unable to resist buying the new book by one of my favorite authors, as I didn’t want to miss the chance to have it signed. In this instance, my vow to not spend money on books was in open conflict with my long-standing vow to purchase the books of authors I want to support when those books come out (rather than as remainders). In the end, the latter won out, and I was similarly unable to resist buying his book analyzing international law using Marxist theory, as I’ve been eager to read it and waiting for the less expensive trade paperback version to become available. And then, well, it became a matter of damage control, and I managed to leave the store with only an additional two books: his collection of stories that I’d not yet picked up, and a book on competitive birdwatching that hooked me in the first pages of the introduction.

Moral of the story: don’t go to bookstores, especially not well-stocked independent ones, and definitely don’t pick up books from the sale rack to leaf through while waiting in line for the loo.

book challenge 2007 progress report

roasting vegetables

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This week, I roasted vegetables for the first time. One might think that, as a vegetarian for over 10 years, I would have tackled this basic cooking style before now. But I hadn’t; I typically sauté or stew or steam. Truthfully, I never used the oven much for cooking. Baking, yes. Cooking, that I did on the stovetop.

Enter the farm share, and the aforementioned bags and bags of turnips. Lovely little gold and purple turnips. It seemed a shame to boil them and then pour all that vitamin water down the drain. Plus, roasting with olive oil, garlic, and fresh rosemary sounded a lot more appetizing.

The first challenge was finding a suitable dish. I have three rectangular glass/pyrex baking dishes, a round and lidded glass/pyrex casserole dishes, and a square and lidded glass/pyrex casserole dish. I wasn’t keen on using any of these, but we don’t have a roasting pan (since I don’t, well, eat roasts). Then I remembered the terrine we acquired in Switzerland, ten years ago now. It wasn’t exactly right, as we weren’t able to spread the turnips (and chunks of onion, and cloves of garlic) into a single layer, but with checking in and tossing everything around periodically it turned out decently. Some of the turnips were overly soft, but we mixed in two kinds plus larger chunks of rutabaga, so that could have contributed to the uneven result. All in all, tasty enough to repeat.

Coincidentally, we initiated this roasting venture during the same week that I was trotting around to different stores comparing pots and pans. We need to replace our main over-sized frying pan (the nonstick stuff has bitten the dust, as happens), and we’re trying to create a matrix of cost, utility and quality that will guide us to the single most useful replacement pan, but that’s a topic for another day. As a result of all this hanging out in cookware sections, I came across and snapped up three stoneware dishes more suitable for roasting: a rectangular one, a shallow oval one, and a medium-deep oval one (all of which were of discontinued colors or styles or something that led to them being dramatically less expensive).

Tonight, then, we successfully roasted our turnip dinner in less time, with a more even result, in a dish that allowed for all the pieces to stay in a single layer. Huzzah!

roasting vegetables

anxiety dream

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When I transitioned totally from student to teacher a few years ago, my standard anxiety dream changed as well. The old student standby of ‘I show up for the first day of classes, only to discover that they have been going on for weeks and I am behind, with only one night to do all of the (math, statistics, science) homework sets,’ only to discover that I can’t read the book because it’s a dream. This last was usually a relief, as it allowed me to wake up and be done with the dream-cramming for the dream-exam in the dream-class that I was doomed to fail.

Later, the teacher version of this dream went something like ‘I show up for class, I’m totally prepared, I’m zipping along, and suddenly the entire class starts rebelling, leading to a near riot.’ The first time I had this dream, I woke up totally perplexed. Why were my students out of control, why? Then I came to recognize it for the place-holder that it was, and didn’t pay much attention. It varied slightly over time, just like the student dream did, but it was always that same basic formula, ending in me abandoning all hope of any kind of pedagogical endeavor and just trying to get out of the classroom.

This week, I had my first not teaching anxiety dream. This is the first February since the 70s that I have not been connected to an educational institution as either student or teacher. In looking back, I did have two autumns away from schools (the first year after college, and the first year we were in DC), but in both of those years I began teaching in some form by February. So, truly, this is the first year I’ve successfully resisted the urge to rush back to an institution of learning in some form.

Thus, the dream: I go to the university where I used to teach, agree to teach several classes, then go to another university in town and beg them to let me teach two literature classes (one on camping as it appears in American literature, and one on fulcrums), all the while figuring out how I’m going to have time to run back to the first university and quit my teaching job before classes actually start…that afternoon. Conflicted much, subconscious? I woke up from that one thinking, ‘Why was I begging for a teaching job, only to decide immediately thereafter to quit it? Why were they going to hire me to teach in the literature department? Why was a class on fulcrums the second most popular literature class after the Shakespeare seminar?’ I’m not sure which of these burning questions was the most perplexing, honestly.

The upshot? I’m torn about breaking my lifetime association with the institutions of education. After this dream experience, though, I’m even more curious to see what new opportunities come along once I successfully resist the siren call of the teaching profession.

anxiety dream