Entries from March 1, 2011 - March 31, 2011

Thursday
Mar242011

getting things in order

I've taken next week off from work so today is my last bento for a bit. I'd packed it with the idea that I would try to leave a little early today, and figured a small lunch would be added incentive to do that, but it's now 2 PM and I'm just now getting to eat it, so we see how well my plans tend to work out....

Not going anywhere for vacation or anything, just taking a break that I'm planning to use to spend on some organizational stuff at home. Which probably makes me the boringest person ever, but I'm actually excited about it. I'll put a favorite show in the DVD player to marathon while I sort through papers and shred things and fun stuff like that. It'll feel good to put affairs (back) in order and be checked out of the rat race for a bit.

lunch, deli club:

  • steamed broccoli
  • two very wee creamer potatoes with cheese
  • imitation crab (packed while frozen)
  • orange wedges
  • dark chocolate covered raisins
Monday
Mar212011

we have doors!

We have eave closet doors! Which you can't see yet! Because we still need to paint them! But still! DOORS!

Six years, you guys. Six years we've had big gaping holes uncovered closet openings in our attic eave walls. To say that we are overjoyed to finally have doors for those damn closets would be an understatement so gigantic it has its own gravitational field.

Of course, given our track record, it'll probably take another six years to get them painted, but let us hope for all our sakes that it does not. Let us hope that the preliminary plan of attack we came up with for getting them painted in a reasonable and timely manner actually, you know, works.

We also, also got doors for the kitchen shelf space that is actually the back side of the dining room buffet. Those doors also need to be painted, and we need to get glass for the inserts, but the frames, at least, are done. And even unfinished, they look wonderful. I can totally see why some people prefer to renovate with a checkbook instead of a table saw.

We didn't get started on the painting this weekend, however. Sal had to work for a bit yesterday in preparation for the big James Beard Award event taking place at OCI today and he was also fighting off a nasty cold. And I...well, I just played around in the studio all weekend.

Which means I have no good excuse for my sad little bento today, nor for not having a dinner bento for tonight. I am not proud of this bento. This is a bento composed entirely of laziness, sloth, and procrastination, with a side sauce of not-giving-a-crap. But, I figure I should post the bad with the good, so here, let me inflict it upon you.

lunch, pink natural lunch:

  • orange ginger chicken
  • Thai sticky rice with green onion for garnish
  • orange ginger chicken sauce

All items are courtesy of last night's takeout leftovers from the neighborhood Thai place. Which is delicious. And is probably the main reason I have a lunch today. Clearly, it's time for a vacation.

Thursday
Mar172011

tip reminder about time management

A quick post for a quick (and quickly packed) lunch.  I was up late last night working on stuff for website clients but thanks to the wonders of leftovers, managed to pull together a tasty and pretty (if I do say so myself) little meal. I already had the flowers done from a few days ago for Tuesday's lunch, which is a good reminder that if I can do a little extra when I'm preparing a meal and keep a stash of things made/cooked/cut ahead of time, it'll make life easier on days and nights when I'm pressed for time.

lunch, pink natural lunch:

  • chicken teriyaki meatballs in green lettuce leaves (to use as scoops so my fingers don't get greasy)
  • steamed broccoli
  • honey glazed red garnet yams
  • orzo pasta salad (mushrooms, roasted red peppers, caramelized onion, parsley, rosemary, and balsamic vinaigrette) with two glazed yam flowers and a purple heirloom carrot tulip for garnish
Tuesday
Mar152011

distilling a personality with four simple letters

Today was another work retreat like the one we did last month. Which meant bringing in both a breakfast and lunch and again eating it while everyone else ordered from the restaurant menu. For someone who prefers not to call attention to herself, I've become remarkably ambivalent about this. Remarkable only to me, perhaps, but still.

We took one of those personality/temperament tests (a Myers-Briggs sort of test) as a team building exercise, and let me just say that I am apparently the most textbook case of the "Rational" temperament ever invented. I am, in fact, an INTJ, quantified in this particular test as a "Rational Mastermind". Which makes me sound like the most boringly benign super villain ever. Among other things, I:

  • have a temperament (Rational) considered rare (5% to 10% of the population) and a personality type (Mastermind) even more scarce (1% to 2% of the population). [No wonder I often feel like I'm from another planet.]
  • value logic and pragmatism above almost all else. [And that planet was apparently Vulcan.]
  • am ingenious, independent, strong-willed, and skeptical.
  • am generally even-tempered and goal-oriented. [Unless there's something good on TV.]
  • yearn for achievement and accomplishment. [A high score on the Scrabble game on my phone counts as an achievement, right?]
  • have an innate ability to grasp a project's necessary progression and understand how each step leads to the next.
  • prefer to stay in the background, reluctant to take command despite a skill for big picture thinking and focus on details. [HAHAHAHAHA TEST PEOPLE HOW DO YOU READ MY BRAIN WITHOUT A PROBE SCANNER THINGIE FROM A SCI-FI MOVIE.]
  • am fascinated with developing strategic plans for others to use. [Hello, my entire job.]
  • prefer a work environment where I can exercise intellectual freedom, am provided with challenging work, and have flexible hours, needing time to play at my own outside interests. [Otherwise, I get a little stabbity stabbity.]
  • am more comfortable alone than in a crowd, and if a job or social situation requires me to be outgoing or take center stage, I can soon become exhausted and need down time in a quiet place to rest and recharge. [SRSLY TEST PEOPLE YOU ARE KIND OF CREEPING ME OUT WITH YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF ME.]
  • draw energy from private, solitary activities, including reading, listening to music, and working by myself on my latest project or hobby.
  • crave closure and finality, as well as orderly procedure, and can be quick to make schedules, agendas, or timetables for myself or others to follow. [Excel is my woobie.]
  • feel unhappy or unsettled when my personal space is a mess. [HAHAHAHAHA NO REALLY]

There are actually 18 pages of details and charts in the report. My entire me-ness distilled into 18 pages with the accuracy of a DNA test. I read some of it to Sal last night and it was so spot on that he just started laughing. Somewhere around page three.

breakfast, cute animals sidecar:

  • cream cheese and barrel pickle in a sundried tomato wrap
  • Fuji apple chunk with an heirloom carrot garnish
  • peanut butter for dipping

lunch, Paris slimline:

  • honey-glazed red garnet yams, with a yam garnish
  • steamed broccoli
  • parmesan-breaded chicken breast
  • orzo pasta salad (mushrooms, roasted red peppers, caramelized onion, parsley, rosemary, and balsamic vinaigrette)
  • Fuji apple slices and heirloom carrot sticks
  • peanut butter for dipping with carrot garnish
  • yogurt covered raisins with carrot garnish
Monday
Mar142011

more like daylight suckage time

I'm normally not a strong Daylight-Savings-Time hater, but in the days immediately following the spring switch, I can understand why others are. Yesterday was all out of whack; today isn't quite as bad, but combined with a tight schedule, I think it's going to take me longer than usual to adjust.

Sister, Guy, and the Fabulous Miss M were here for the weekend, so that actually did make it a nice weekend despite the time change. While they were at the Shamrock Run yesterday morning, we played with Miss M, then per our now annual tradition after such things, they returned bearing treats. Specifically, a box of Voodoo Doughnuts. Hence the appearance of a few odds and ends in today's lunch. Then they left with an extremely sugared up and overly exhausted 3 year-old, and I'll admit, I prayed for their sanity. I haven't heard anything on the news about them being committed for psychological observation so I'm assuming everyone survived the remainder of the day.

After they left, we hit Rejuvenation to pick out hinges and handles for the new cabinet doors we're having done for the display shelves in the kitchen. I haven't talked about that much yet, but it's part of the project to get the attic eave closet doors done; the contractor we chose didn't charge much extra for these three cabinet doors, so we figured it was a good time to scratch that little side project of our list, as well. Afterward, we stopped at Miller Paint to pick out a pretty color -- the doors will have glass inserts and we're going to paint the shelves and interior to reallly make it spark. But you'll have to wait to learn more about the color, because you know how I am about the big reveals....

lunch, blue bunny & moons:

  • wee potatoes with cheddar heart
  • teriyaki chicken meatballs
  • steamed broccoli
  • Fuji apple half with heirloom carrot sticks
  • a few random bits of Voodoo doughnuts: buttermilk bar, powdered sugar doughnut, peanut doughnut leftover from yesterday

dinner, pink Natural Lunch:

  • ham, barrel pickle, and cream cheese in a sundried tomato wrap
  • heirloom carrots
  • Fuji apple half
Thursday
Mar102011

shame, shame, shame

Most everyone who knows my history knows how strongly I feel about the labor movement and how much it shaped me. It's not hard to imagine, then, how wrapped up in the Wisconsin situation I've been. Or how much of a gut punch yesterday's outcome was. This sums up my feelings pretty well:

If you're outraged by the movement to obliterate unions and want to do something to help, ActBlue has several campaigns where you can help fund recall efforts for the governor and Republican senators who perpetrated this travesty.

lunch, Laptop Lunch:

  • peanut butter and strawberry jam on whole grain bread (with the cut-off crusts as gap fillers)
  • rainbow carrot sticks and peas
  • hard boiled egg with dried cherries in the little container
  • cinnamon apple sauce
Monday
Mar072011

there was an old woman who swallowed a fly

I was late to work this morning and it's all my mother's fault.

See, I spent the weekend writing -- with middling success -- while Sal brewed another batch of beer. He's supposed to be posting about these ventures in chemistry here, and in fact has a page set aside on this website for that purpose, but has as yet to actually do it. We'll see if me guilting him publicly will move him to do it.

Anywhoodle, I did, as I say, spend time writing but was hampered to some degree by a new Scrabble-type game on my phone thanks to my mother, damn her, who talked me into giving it a try.  "We can play against each other!" she said with glee. And since I don't get to see as much of my mother as I would like, I figured it would be fun to share this enjoyable little diversion with her throughout my day.

Of course, I don't have many games installed on my phone for a reason. I know full well how easy it is to get sucked in, and I try to be oh-so-careful about squandering my precious free time. I only recently broke my hour-per-day Angry Birds habit -- and that only because I conquered all the levels and got three stars on everything and unlocked all the golden eggs, for both the regular Angry Birds AND the Angry Birds Seasons (including, yes, the Valentine's Day levels), although we're of course not counting the recent addition of the "Ham 'Em High" level, which I conquered but haven't mastered AND ANYWAY my point is! I did not need this distraction.

But this was my mother! How could I deny my mother? And anyway, it would require little from me: I could submit a word when I had a quick moment, between phone calls, or waiting for the microwave to defrost something, whatever. Perfect!

Well. We've had an epic game going since Friday, and are down to the last three tiles of the entire game, each of us with three left. I'm leading by over 100 points, thanks largely to a 45 point word score off of one of her higher scoring words late in the game. And thanks to that I'm now addicted, playing another board with her while we wrap this one up (and maybe possibly several other boards against random other players, as well) and really, my mother is responsible for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, here. I AM NORMALLY VERY RESPONSIBLE OKAY.

So this time suck I did not need, as I say, and it's the primary reason I still have three baskets of unfolded laundry. NOT because I opted to watch three episodes of Princess Tutu Friday night when I could've been folding laundry, nor because I spent Saturday morning searching for old An Evening at the Improv segments on YouTube. And it was also not because I spent a few hours minutes browsing Tumblr for new and pretty campaign pics for the Fandom Cage Matches, and especially especially not pics of my beloved Leslie Knope who understands my deepest truuuuuuuths. I also did not browse for new bento boxes as a reward for my promotion, nor did I start a new bookmarks folder of creative space decorating and organizing idea. I totally did not do any of those things. You can't prove anything.

Nope, it was all because I whittled away the time playing a not-Scrabble Scrabble game with my mom on my Droid and so my clothes did not get folded and my socks did not get mated which is why I had to dig for a replacement pair of socks at the last minute this morning because I stepped into a pile of cat vomit in the kitchen because our linoleum is the exact camoflaged pattern for cat vomit, and that is why it's my mother's fault that I was late to work today.

lunch, pink natural lunch:

  • rice pilaf with broccoli and onion
  • wilted spinach and bacon salad
  • Braeburn apple slices

dinner @ Prompt, deli club:

  • ham & smoked gouda skewers
  • Braeburn apple slices
  • dried cherries and yogurt-covered raisins
Thursday
Mar032011

a vp, a chef, and a maestro walk into a bar...

Guess who now has something in common with Joe Biden?! Thanks to a promotion a few days ago, I am now the Vice President of Internal Operations, which means that I'll basically be doing what I've been doing for awhile, but with a more impressive business card.  My mom will be thrilled that I (sort of) share a title with Joe Biden, since she loves him. Of course, that also means that I have something in common with Dan Quayle, but I suppose the laws of physics dictate that the universe must remain in balance.

It's also meant being addressed as "Madam Vice President" by Sal every chance he gets. "What would you like for dinner, Madam Vice President?" "I do believe it's raining outside, Madam Vice President." "Be careful not to step in the cat barf, Madam Vice President." I suppose it's payback for when I learned his students call him "Chef" in the same way you would call someone "Doctor", as in: "Chef said the chocolate has to be tempered first" or "I remember Chef's lecture on the importance of oven spring in bread baking". I teased him about being in that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine is dating a symphony conductor who insists on being called "Maestro" by everyone. (Even though he's never asked his students to call him that, they just do.) So I...may have had the mockery coming....

lunch, deli club:

  • baked potato with strips of smoked gouda, with steamed broccoli as gap fillers
  • more broccoli and a lone spicy meatball
  • mandarin halves with blueberries as gap fillers