Random thoughts

It’s been a couple weeks since I started doing this.  Meantime I’ve started reading  the Julie on her Julia project which was written in 2002, can you believe it?  They archived it here. Yeah, I saw the movie but the blog is so much funnier.

Oct. 3, 2002, she writes about her cat discovering how to get into the ceiling in their new apartment and “The best part is when he comes down in the middle of the night and crawls into bed with us. Mmm, rat shit and insulation….”

Or her feelings about vegetables: “And it’s always satisfying to do so much damage to a vegetable so obviously out to hurt you. I trimmed it down, cooked it in a blanc …” Oct. 28, 2002. Although truth to tell she is rapidly changing from hating to eat them, much less cooking them to loving veggies.  She didn’t know how to boil an egg and had to call her mom in one post.  Don’t look at me.  I know how to boil an egg but I don’t have her guts.  She is learning to cook French for goodness sake.

So I look back on my new blog.  I’ve been posting for about two weeks now. And, you know, I realize I’m not funny.  Darn.  Well, I knew that but still.

I am, however, getting into the habit of writing.  Previously I was holed up in the house like it was a cave in a warzone.  Mom liked to be home and I got into the habit with her.  In eight years living in Tucson, I only made one friend, Carol. But the writing is pushing me outdoors, pushing me to learn new things, partly to have something to write but mostly because it’s time.

Like learning the library had heirloom seeds, and then meaning to look up how to plant them, I get sidetracked (happens a lot when I research) by the long history behind them.  Plus one site showed how to have a traditional 3-sister garden.  First you plant the corn (or sunflowers), then a couple weeks later, the beans (so the bean vines can grow up the corn stalks), then a couple weeks later, the squash which protects the ground from drying out in the sun.  And because they are different heights, they can grow in the same spot.  Pretty cool.  I didn’t know that.

My nephew Chris had some cool wood planters in his garden and I was going to ask where he got them.  He made them. Darn it!  Of course, he lives in Idaho where it actually rains and things grow.

Now I have to dig to plant the seeds.  Looks doubtfully at the shovel.  Oh well, I need to lose weight and missed a few times at the gym.  Well, more than a few times. This will be good for me.  Uh huh.

I really enjoyed reading Edible Baja Arizona which mentioned the library seed project. It’s a foodie magazine.  Apparently there is a whole movement out there about eating local, growing historical plants and cooking regional.

So I am checking out the Farmers Markets.  Geez, they are expensive.  Good but expensive.  And they don’t discount things in the last half hour like they do in Berkeley.  So my food budget is totally wonky.  I save money at the 99 cent only store buying spinach, cherries and strawberries for $1.  Then I go and buy one thing at a farmers market that week — $10 for a jar of raw unfiltered honey, but darn it was good.

I made my first cold brew coffee from a farmers market nano-coffee roaster beans.  Nano means a tiny tiny company that roasts their own beans.  The cold brew came out pretty good, tasting like a rich dark chocolate.   And it’s nice getting up in the morning knowing the coffees already made.

Only I found out don’t go out and water the plants and leave your coffee behind for half an hour.  Just because I gave it a dash of caramel syrup, the mosquitos  committed harakiri, dive bombing into the black depths.  Hey, that’s expensive coffee! Looks mournfully into my cup before throwing it out.

I signed up for Ibotta and learned how to get rebates (if you join, use my referral code smtiuhc so you get $10 and I get $5, though you have to do one rebate within 14 days, don’t worry one of the rebates is buy anything at any store and get 50 cents back).  Since I’d never downloaded an app on my phone, there was an itsy bitsy learning curve there.  Like I first had to connect the phone to the web.  Who knew? First I learn to take photos with my phone for this blog and now I downloaded an app.  If everyone else hadn’t learned all this ten years ago, I’d be all proud of myself.

Still I did earn $20 on Ibotta in a couple of days getting a few things from Frys that I can’t get at the dollar store like vodka and couscous. So ok, am patting myself on the back.  Well, $10 was for joining but still I like discounts.

Ooh, and the yummy restaurant Millie’s Pancakes review.  Quiche, fresh fruit and blitzes, floats in a lovely memory.

I went to another place, Costa Vida, since then but the food was crappy.  I probably should have written about that place too but honestly, who wants to revisit  bad food even in their memories?  The Tuesday special there, the Sweet Pork enchiladas … I think they dropped their whole sugar shipment into it — way too sweet, worse even then kid’s cereal.  But their chocolate chip cookie, fresh out of the oven, the chocolate all melty, yum! and not too sweet.  They got that right. So no review. Besides now I’m remembering the cookie.

I love the Goodwill outlet although it can get crazy in there.  Looks at my latest rescue, a couple of champagne glasses with a lovely swirl going through them for twenty cents.  When Rie read it, she said, “I was laughing when you said that the unbroken glass“need rescuing.” It doesn’t have to be YOU who rescue the glass, you have tons of them…”

Rie is itching to reorganize my place but she’s back in Tokyo.  When she visited in June, I suggested a road trip to Santa Fe so she didn’t get the chance.  She is right though.  I do need to get things organized so I will try to work on that this next week.

And plant the garden.

And work on learning how to use my camera for better pics or even, gasp, videos.

And cook something new this week.  I got all these cookbooks and I don’t cook.  I just like looking at the pictures, like collectible comic books preserved on shelves. I’m caught between wanting to learn Pan-Asian cooking (I do love Okinawan, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian and fusion cooking — I really really miss all those restaurants everywhere in the San Francisco bay area) and Southwestern cooking.  Maybe I’ll start simple — with breakfast.  I can boil and scramble an egg.  That’s a start at least.

It may not be entertaining for you to read but I realize the blog is helping me.  I feel like I’m a pinocchio puppet becoming a real girl again.  Ok, ok, a real woman. When you put your own life aside for awhile, for me eight years, it feels weird to have it back.  I am starting to find the shape but it’s not what it was before, neither am I.

 

 

References:

Julie/Julia Project
Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Chris’s picture of his planter