From My iPhone

I'm testing out my new toy... And sadly deciding that photo uploading to blogger is beyond me. Anyone have advice?

Piece of Cake Pizza

Yeast scares me. I don't know what to do with it outside of a bread machine. So I took a page from the Joy of Cooking (and from my roommate who's amazing with all things baking) and made some pizza (#27 complete!). Turns out, it only takes about 2.5 hours total... not too bad for two large pizzas!

Pizza a la Adrian

Dough:
1 packet Active Dry Yeast
1 1/3c Warm Water
3 1/2c Flour
2 tbsp Olive Oil
1 tbsp Salt
1 tbsp Sugar (optional)

• Mix yeast with water and let disolve for 5 minutes.
• Add remaining ingredients and mix until the dough combines and is smooth.
• Form it into a ball and drizzle with olive oil. Place dough ball into a bowl and cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let rise until it doubles in size (about 1-1.5 hours) in a warm place (75-80ºF).
• Punch down dough and divide in half, wrap each half in plastic and let rest for 10-15 minutes. Meanwhile, grease and dust 2 baking sheets with olive oil and corn meal and preheat oven to 425ºF.
• Stretch dough carefully (I did this both in the air and then on the cookie sheet) to fill baking sheet. Fold and pinch edge to form crust. Brush with olive oil to prevent it from getting soggy and dimple it with your fingers to prevent it from bubbling.

Sauce (make while crust is rising):
2 tbsp Olive Oil
1 small Onion, diced
3 cloves Garlic, crushed
1, 28oz can of Crushed Tomatoes
2-3 tbsp Italian Seasoning (dried)
1 tbsp Parsley (dried)
3 stems of Basil

• Saute onion and garlic. Add tomatoes and seasonings.
• Simmer for 10-15 minutes minimum to thicken.
• Allow to cool. Spread over prepared crust.

Toppings:
1lb Mozzarella Cheese
chopped basil
sliced garlic
sliced tomatoes
chopped onion
chopped red pepper
sliced kalamata olives
...really, anything goes here

• Sprinkle toppings over pizza, cheese goes last.
• Place Pizza in oven and bake for 12-15 minutes until cheese is bubbly and melted and crust is slightly browned.
• Devour... but don't burn the roof of your mouth!

A Book List to End All Book Lists...

I don't know that this is comprehensive or even a good list, but it's a compilation of multiple lists I found online along with suggestions and books I've wanted to read for a while. I went by the criteria of "Have I heard of it before?" to slice off some of the chaff, then tried to get a swath of women writers and some international writers (sadly few of each really...) and I tried to cut down on repeat authors. Faulkner, Joyce, Fitzgerald, and Lawrence could probably fill a list all on their own if some of the "100 best" editors online had their way. I personally banned Joyce and Fitzgerald (Except for The Great Gatsby, out of guilt) due to taste reasons, and my personal opinion that Ulysses and Fitzgerald's books are greatly overblown. So here it is, a list to start pulling from, in no partiular order:

1. The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
2. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
3. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
5. The Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
6. 1984 (George Orwell)
7. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
8. Lolita (Vladmir Nabokov)
9. Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
10. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
11. A Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
12. Animal Farm (George Orwell)
13. For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemmingway)
14. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
15. One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)
16. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald – begrudgingly)
17. Slauterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
18. On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
19. The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemmingway)
20. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
21. Portrait of a Lady (Henry James)
22. The World According to Garp (John Irving)
23. A Room with a View (EM Forster)
24. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
25. The Jungle (Upton Sinclair)
26. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence)
27. A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
28. My Antonia (Willa Cather)
29. In Cold Blood (Truman Capote)
30. The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie)
31. Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton)
32. Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe)
33. Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut)
34. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
35. Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
36. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
37. The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias (Gertrude Stein)
38. The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett)
39. The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer)
40. Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller)
41. The War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells)
42. Kim (Rudyard Kipling)
43. Rabbit, Run (John Updike)
44. Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham)
45. Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
46. Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
47. The Prince (Niccolo Machiavelli)
48. The Inferno (Dante Alighieri)
49. The Richest Man in Babylon (George Samuel Clason)
50. Dracula (Bram Stoker)
51. The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith)
52. Moby Dick (Herman Mellville)
53. Peter Pan (J.M. Barie)
54. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
55. All the King’s Men (Robert Penn Warren)
56. A Town like Alice (Neil Shute)
57. The Call of the Wild (Jack London)
58. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
59. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
60. Circle of Friends (Maeve Binchy)
61. Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi)
62. The Agony and the Ecstasy (Irving Stone)
63. Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
64. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
65. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
66. The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)
67. The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri)
68. The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
69. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
70. Madam Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
71. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
72. The Shipping News (E. Annie Proulx)
73. Little Women (Lousia May Alcott)
74. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)
75. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
76. The Diary of Anne Frank (Anne Frank)
77. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
78. The Illiad & The Odessey (Homer)
79. Middlemarch (George Elliot)
80. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
81. An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)
82. Tess of the D’ubervillies (Thomas Hardy)
83. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
84. In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)
85. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
86. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
87. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Attwood)
88. Walden (Henry David Thoreau)
89. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbra Kingsolver)
90. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder)
91. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
92. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
93. Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
94. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
95. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carrol)
96. The tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu)
97. Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
98. The Red and the Black (Stendhal)
99. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing)
100. The Trial (Franz Kafka)

Please, Let me know in the comments if I've duplicated a book, left out a priceless gem, or listed a book that is completely not worth my time. For most of these, I am going by hearsay since I've only read a select few. But, that's another one off the list at least!

Short List: September 21, 2008

I need to get some shit done! I'm oh so very close to getting a new leaser for the apartment, and I did some really fun spreads in my journal today (see below to get a glimpse of my mental landscape), but there's more to be done. Packing and moving doesn't take as much time as it sometimes seems like it will. I'm going to pack up a lot of stuff and take a load down on Tuesday, then I've got a shared U-Haul with BL on Saturday, so I think I'll be containing moving to those two days. So then, what else to do?

Short List for the week of 9/21/08:
(yes, I want to get these things done this week, by 9/28/08)

• Take a yoga class and sign up for yoga podcasts. (#2 in progress)
• Get a massage. (#17, in progress)
  
• Drink no soda. (#32, last soda was 9/12/08, and I'm going for it this time...)
• Buy produce at farmer's market. (#25, to complete at the end of September!)
• Make pizza from scratch (and maybe some quick bread too...). (#27, to complete)
• Make/find list of 100 classic books. (#49, to complete)
• Back up hard drive and make note to back up in late October. (#67, in progress)
• Buy another CD (or two). (#94, in progress)
• BONUS: Develop a filing system. (#69, to complete)

If I succeed, I'll have 3 (or 4 if I challenge myself...) things crossed off and many of my in progress items better underway. I think this is reasonable, considering how much time I have to kill. Yay for to-do lists!

Packing

Part of me agonizes about moving home. It feels like I'm just giving up on being independent. I realize how much money I can save, how much more Zoe snuggles I'll be able to get, and how much commuting I will cut out... but it's so sad to end the Wedgwood Era. Writing the Craigslist add for the apartment made me realize how great this place was, and how much I'm going to miss it and it's "Easy walking distance to grocery store, bank, post office, library, restaurants, and yoga studio!"

BL's decision to leave made everything so much more real. It suddenly didn't make sense to have an apartment empty all but maybe 6-10 nights a month, at even the cheapest rent in town. Plus, who would pick up the mail? Would we turn off the heat only to have to come home to a freezing apartment and inefficiently warm up the apartment for a day? I didn't want to not be KN's roommate, but coming home to a completely empty apartment week after week suddenly seemed hard to fathom.

Moving back in with the Parents is not really ideal in my "growing up" theory, but ideal in practice. The kitchen will be stocked (by me and my parents, I'm not getting nor expecting a free lunch) with things that I can cook--in particular, fresh items (milk, cheese, vegetables) that I could not eat in the day that I would be home for. The laundry machines are in the house, and while I don't expect Mommy to do my laundry, I can throw in a load and leave... coming back a few hours later to change it--something impossible when you're using a shared laundry facility in an apartment complex. I'll be 15 minutes from the airport, and not so far from friends that I won't be able to see them when I come home. Plus, I'll have ideal storage space for my raspberry wine as it rests.

So I've packed up my books and my blue glass into liquor store boxes and have agreed to share a u-haul with BL for the big stuff (Daddy and his SUV just won't tote the full sized bed like the pickup could). So now I just get to wait for a few days before Load #1 heads south. Piece by piece, I'll dismantle the room I've grown to love, and probably have to paint it back to the icky white it started out. I'll move to the room I'd left behind, and probably have to reshuffle quite a bit to make it function like I need it to: As a big welcome home hug.

Boredom Hits Critical Mass

Well, doing nothing is fabulous until you hit a point where it ceases to be so any more. Then it becomes stifling, confining, depressing, immobilizing and just plain annoying. You spend a whole entire day sitting at your computer, commenting on your photos, fiddling with facebook, youtube, and any blog you can find. Then you look around, realize it's dark out and you haven't A: gotten out of your pajamas or B: left your apartment.

YES.

How long have I been dying to hit this point? I want to see what happens now, once I'm good and bored and needing to figure out what part of my life I want to focus on. Here's what I can come up with with an extremely bored brain--

• Option 1: go finish reading the book I'm working on.
  
• Option 2: pull out the art journal and make a huge arty mess.
  
• Option 3: go clean my room and the kitchen for the people who are coming to look at the apartment tomorrow morning.

Obligations schmobligations... I'm going to put on some loud music, put on some dancing shorts and dance-clean my room and do my dishes. I'm going to get a semblance of organization to gear up for the big move and clean out some of the cobwebs floating around in my head. Then I'll probably collapse on my bed and read for a few more hours before waking up tomorrow and finding a solid purpose.

I've done nothing for a week, with a few minor acheivements... the greatest of which was buying a pair of grown-up pants (technically: a designer pair of grown-up pants that weren't eggregiously expensive but were definitely more than I had initially counted on spending. of course, I think I thought I was going to get nice tailored tweed pants for $30. wrong.) Doing nothing to the point of absolute boredom was what I wanted to do, but now tis time to enjoy being unemployed. Really enjoy it.

Re-evaluating, and #96

So, I guess I was counting on life getting in the way of getting things done when I put in the last few goals on my 101 list. Either that or I was copping out of thinking of four more goals. I've been really bad about getting around to re-evaluating the list, which I was supposed to do in June, but here's my changes:

• 4. Bike to work every day for a month. No longer an option, so it's going to become "Go on a 30+ mile bike ride."
• 6. Take a tap class once a week for three months. I don't see myself doing that, but taking a single tap class will be feasible, and will likely make me want to take more.
• 7. Do a stretch routine every night for a month. and 9. Do an ab workout every night for a month. and 13. Floss 1x a day for a month straight. These are simply not working because i seem to not like to do things on a daily basis (surprise). I'm going to aim for 3x a week, and make the flossing for two months straight because that's a habit that I need to really get into.
• 46. Read Popular Science to see if I'd ever want to write for them. I need to scope out more magazines than just the one, so I'm changing it to "Read three science magazines to understand what science writing is all about, especially medical science."
• 48. Read Bonnie's New Yorker's fiction piece at least 6 times. Well, I never did that and now Bonnie doesn't get the New Yorker, and I'm not going to be living with her anymore... so now it's going to be "Read non-fiction or travel writing in a magazine I could submit to and write an article in the same style." since I need the writing practice anyways.
• 60. Complete a Project 365. Well, the camera met the ocean and I was so far behind already at that point that 2008 is no going to work out, so I'm adding in a little extra goal to this, to entice me to start before Jan 1, 2009: "OR a photo-a-city for BER."

I'm also going to relax a bit on the goals themselves as they reach completion... There have been many that I really haven't kept track of as I was actually doing them. That and I went to Mexico and never really learned any spanish, but didn't need to know any. So completed goals are now up to 15/101. I'm behind by 9 for being at 8 months in (at a 3/month completion average rate required). Luckily, I've got a lot of free time to work on some of the easier-to-complete goals, being unemployed and all.

Lastly,there is number 96... What to put in for that one? I think the new goal, much facilitated by my new job and ever-increasing competition with some friends (who know who they are... ;)) will be to "Increase my states visited to 40/50." Should be fun, relatively manageable, while getting some stories along the way.

A Grand Mis-Adventure, Part III

And cue the start of day four… Bail Out Day. The sun was barely up when Vinh and I opened our tent flap to the waves washing ashore. A little oatmeal and hot cocoa warmed us up and off we went, finally figuring it out that starting BEFORE low tide meant that we had double the amount of time to get around headlands. Walking down the beach was an interesting experience after the day before: no elevation changes, but the ground under our feet was constantly changing. Soft sand, hard packed sand, small pebbles, medium pebbles, large round stones, small boulders, large boulders, logs… anything you could think of was included in this 2 mile stretch of beach. It still took longer than we’d have planned to hike, although it was much easier than the day before.

Luckily for us, as we approached Ozette River Vinh’s phone picked up a miraculous signal at the estuary… as sunlight filtered through some sparsely planed trees and the river bubbled along in a wide, shallow ford. I called my Dad and arranged for a drastic change to our rendez-vous plans. Originally, they were to have met us on Saturday at Rialto beach (about 25 miles south of where we were at the time). Now, Vinh and I were going to hike out to the Lake Ozette campground on Friday and snag a site so that Mom & Dad could meet us there. It was a moment where you could almost hear the harps playing and bells ringing.

As we forded the river we’d be afraid would be running far too high after all the rain and came around some extremely beautiful headlands, we finally had some time to look around without worry. The tide pools were chock full of interesting critters and Vinh spent way too much time ogling the mussels and daydreaming about a steaming pot of them as we walked on them (there was no where else to put your foot!). Around one bend, we came to a very large, very shiny rock… or so I thought until the smell caught up to us. Nope, it was in fact some sort of whale or porpoise washed up on the beach. Amazing to see… from a relative distance. Finally we arrived at the biggest let down so far—Cape Alava, the intended campsite for day 2. The tide stretched out before us, across a long stretch of shallow kelp beds. The tide pools must have been wonderful, but the stench drove us inland as fast as we could go. We’d seen so much that was drastically more beautiful that we didn’t need to stay much longer than the time it took to appreciate the barking sea lions and a brief snack break.

Three miles up the boardwalk trail to Lake Ozette and we were back to civilization and FLUSH TOILETS. Campsite snagged, we waited for good old Mom and Dad and cold beer. An evening of stories ensued, followed the next day by a day hike back out the boardwalk to the coast, and then south along the coast to Sand Point, where the beach became sandy and nice once again. The amount of people went from the maybe 25 people we’d seen in passing the other 3½ days to hundreds enjoying the day hike and picnicking opportunities of this stretch. It was a nice little jaunt, and enough of a hike (9miles) to make me allow myself to indeed count this as a 5 day backpacking trip (plus, I didn’t shampoo my hair until I hit home, and that is in fact the definition of “roughing it” for me). Another night dinner with the parents (mmm chili!) and off to bed.

Sunday was not so wonderful as the previous two days. Waking up to rain pouring down, our previously dry tents were hastily stuffed into the car along with everything else, and we drove back up to Neah Bay. Parting ways, the long drive back loomed ahead. Vinh quickly came down with motion sickness and after letting him fall asleep in the front seat I was able to drive the windy roads in the absolute downpour. Thank god for my CD collection. He woke up right before the second round of windy roads at Lake Crescent, and seemed to be getting better as we pulled into Port Angeles. Five minutes after going into a café though, he was back in the car trying not to puke. After I’d eaten something, we sped off to the drugstore for something to help him. Back on the road, I was sure we’d be home in no time until we hit Squim. An accident had closed 101, and we sat there, engine off, for almost 3 hours. Then of course, the ferry traffic was backed up, and all in all, we got back to Seattle 10 hours after leaving the campground.

All in all though, the saddest, craziest, most wonderful part of all of it is… I’d do it again.