day is done

the radio faceplate was stolen out of my car a couple of months ago when it was broken into.. so now while i'm driving down the highway i sing songs to myself and my favorite is taps. one of the directors taught us the words to it at camp and we used to sing it around the campfire to close. it's so pretty.

i only knew about it in the context of military funerals.. but while searching for a version with lyrics on youtube, i found out that it's the lights out song. wikipedia says.. "The tune is actually a variation of an earlier bugle call known as the "Scott Tattoo" which was used in the U.S. from 1835 until 1860,^[1][2] and was arranged in its present form by the Union Army Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield, an American Civil War general who commanded the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Division in the V Army Corps of the Army of the Potomac while at Harrison's Landing, Virginia, in July 1862 to replace a previous French bugle call used to signal "lights out". Butterfield's bugler, Oliver W. Norton, of Erie, Pennsylvania, was the first to sound the new call. Within months, Taps was used by both Union and Confederate forces."

in the sunshine

"i was so toasty tonight since i was wearing megan's silk underwear." jeff

...i let jeff borrow the long underwear bottoms that aunt carol sent me when i went to england. he's been wearing thai fisherman pants or just any pair of pants underneath his normal pants because he gets cold at concerts. i keep trying to tell him it's important to include the long when he's talking about long underwear. cracks me up. 

the change in my pocket

well, friends. i went to a real yoga class at yoga yoga for the first time in two years, and i aaalmost died. ok, not quite, but it was a lot harder than i was expecting it to be. i think a lot of it had to do with the heated room. i can't decide if it's because it's winter or because ashtanga is always hot? the website didn't mention anything. anyhow, my face turns bright red when i get even a little bit hot, and i saw the instructor glance at me, widen his eyes and click the heat down a couple notches. but! i survived and decided i'm more of a hatha girl. 30 rounds of sequences all ending in 5 breaths of downward dog is a little too much for this girl. weak elbows.

it's cold this week. when you say 'cold' in austin it could mean anywhere from 60 on down. but this week we're going to see a couple days with highs in the 40s. that's cold by any standard. today was the best kind of wintery sunday though because there was continuous drizzle. nothing like being inside a warm house under a quilt, sipping tea or abuelitas mexican hot chocolate on a day like today.

magic in the air

i have a hereditary disorder that involves not being able to keep large, open surfaces free of clutter. my bedside table has a really large top.. it's proobably 2 feet square.. and i cannot stop myself from piling all kinds of stuff on it. the other day i was about to go to bed and i looked over and just had to laugh at how much junk had accumulated. and there's also a bottom shelf that you can't even see and it has even more than the top does. 

 but when your whole life is stored in one little room, that's just part of reality.

this week i tried a couple more recipes out of how easy is that? and we decided the tuscan white beans are our fav so far. delicious. i was a little afraid of cooking with fennel because i know i don't like licorice flavor, and raw fennel smells just like black licorice. but when you cook it down.. it's more like celery but with an earthy taste to it. pretty yum actually.

the recipes from the cookbook aren't online, but i'd be happy to type it out if you want it.

went to a sichuan restaurant with the fam tonight and we had hot pot. it was freaking me out to be smelling taiwanese smells, tasting taiwanese food and then i would look up and maj and faj were sitting across from me. glad they got to experience that though. now if we could only find a ching xin tea shop.

long long long ago

made the french lentil salad in ina garten's new cookbook today. you start with lentils and add an onion, studded with whole cloves, and a turnip cut in half. she saysss that the recipes are tested something like four times each, but i don't know about this one. you're supposed to discard the onion and turnip after you simmer it with the other ingredients, but the onion had separated into a million pieces, and i just don't like the idea of throwing a turnip away after using it to flavor some lentil water. 

after you drained it, you add 4 teaspoons of dijon mustard, 1 T of red wine vinegar and 1/4c of olive oil. it was powerfully mustardy. next time, i would cut that way down. 

i think i'm the only one in our house who has/will eat it. but it's nice to eat something you haven't tasted before, at the very least. 

and this is what i'm counting for the creative every day challenge today. i made these passport pages for the mandarin preschool in indesign. the top two pages were modeled after a template we found online, and i copied some of the stamps on my own passport for the interior pages. wingdings does occasionally come in handy.

gram had an operation to have a little skin cancer taken off her nose today, so if we could all send some healing thoughts her way that would be nice. 

tigers in the wild

mutti got me ina garten's new cookbook, how easy is that?, for christmas (actually maj remembered that i had mentioned it a few months ago and suggested it to mutti) and i am looooving it. so far i've made the turkey meatballs and roasted vegetables. the meatballs were really yummy. i've never use ground turkey in a recipe before, but if you closed your eyes, you wouldn't have any idea it wasn't ground beef. she has you take a sweet italian sausage out of its casing (another first) and mix it in with the turkey. very easy, really delicious.

french lentils tomorrow.

also, if you haven't seen this yet, it will blow. your. mind. youtube isn't cooperating by letting me post a tiny video screen, but you can click on it and watch it there if you want.

2010

i don't want to start 2011 on a negative note, so i'll just say i am ready to very say goodbye to 2010. on to the next!

do you think playing upwords counts as part of the creative every day challenge..? i did have to create words..