fieldwork

I don't know what happened but I thought I just typed all this.  Maybe I was hallucinating.

Anyhoo, I might have posted this before but I've got another blog jsut for my fieldwork stuff and things are finally starting to happen so I'll finally start having things to say, and I'd be honored if you'd all follow along and offer any brilliant insights you (certainly) have:

http://saicfieldwork.blogspot.com/

Food... oh! and other stuff!

This is turning into a what-i-ate blog, but it'll serve a purpose.  G and I cook so much and so often sans recipes that it's worthwhile to at least note what we've made even if we aren't quite good enough to write down *how* we make it all.

So, since Wednesday:
Tuna casserole topped with BBQ Lays potato chips
Milk punch (which turned out to be basically eggnog, but milk. Milknog. Delicious)
Maple parmesan brussels sprouts
"Chicken" and root veggie pot pie (including salsify and roasted radishes, both new to me), with a sage and smoked gouda crust
Regular and sweet potato latkes with fresh homemade applesauce (using the last of the apples we picked back in October!)
Pumpkin pie topped with maple syrup roasted walnuts and a cinnamon crust
One giant turnover with the leftover sage crust, stuffed with orange-peach-mango cranberry sauce

And I think we're making greens and something Indian for dinner.

Having a farm share has really changed my culinary life, and I can't tell you often I think, "OMGILOVEBEINGVEGETARIAN!" 

Oh! Other news, as of last week, thanks to a serious error by someone inputting airfare rates to Europe and a totally radical boyfriend who finds those things, I'm going to Barcelona and Provence over Spring Break.  I'm simultaneously intensely stressed out and deeply relaxed by this fact (yes, it's very confusing), as it will be right in the midst of major thesis stress (yeah, now is nothing!).  But I'm mean, in the middle of such stress, what could be better than having many straight hours on a plane to write, plus activities like biking to wineries and eating cheese and baguettes in the country and saying, "Honh, honh, honh!" in response to everything? Not a whole heckuvalot, I think.

Also, I have an amazing idea that might actually give me some way to get paid after I graduate.  I'm starting it as a project for John's Eth/Ped class but it's been at a rolling boil in my brain almost nonstop for a week now.  Need to flesh it out before I go any further here, but... I mean... people can live off grant money if they have enough grants, right? At least kinda live... right?

lo siento, too

I wonder how it happened that I used to blahg excessively... I mean, every day, multiple times a day... before it was called blogging... and now, despite reading other people's blogs everyday, I so often just completely forget about my own.

But here we are!

So let's talk about Thanksgiving!

G and I spent Wednesday night visiting a friend of his in Champaign, then on Thursday we woke up and drove to St. Louis where it started snowing right as we got into town! Yay! Snow quickly turned to sleet but we were quickly tucked away in G's sister's kitchen cooking up a storm of our own.  We made pumpkin-walnut and sweet potato+walnut+goat cheese wonton things with a cranberry lemon sauce, a very savory leek and shitake bread pudding, maple brussels sprouts, bourbon candied sweet potatoes, pumpkin kugel, and pumpkin pie, all from scratch, then also this weird but very tasty hazelnut loaf thing we grabbed from Whole Foods (we were the only vegetarians in attendance so we needed our own protein!).  Y U M.  Seriously, it was all really good.  And we drank a lot of Great Lakes Christmas Ale (always a pleasure) and... wine... and... other stuff.  Lots of everything. Yay, Thanksgiving! Yay, 8-hour coma!

Friday morning we stopped at a market and then got outta town and headed south to a cabin we rented in the Ozarks.  I cannot recommend Big Spring Lodge and Cabins enough, and I can't wait to go back when it's greener and warmer (aaaand again when it's back to cold and sparse).  We got to spend two days and nights in a little cabin with just a fire place and a cozy living room and a bedroom that was toooo far from the fire and a teeeeny bathroom and a teeeeny "kitchen", all in the middle of the woods, well off the beaten track, in the mountains, wonderful.  There's something surprisingly awesome about waking up a few times through the night to tend the fire and throw on more laughably oversized logs.

We took a ton of pictures but right now I only have the few I snapped with my phone...

Cabin in the woods!

Cozy living room

Forest path

A CAVE!!!

The beginnings of cabin cranberry sauce

We made some really stellar food while we were there, mostly thanks to G's ambition and dedication.  Fancy greens each night, plus a potatoey cheesy bready savory thing, and the rest of our Thanksgiving roast, and a grilled cheese sandwich, and his special tofu with my cabin cranberries, and a weird but delicious lentil-based desert that G would not give up on. What a trooper.

So that's that. An epic Thanksgiving post! Theeeee end.

Paralyzed

How many existential crises can one (thesis) survive?


I feel crippled by the unknown unknowns.  I feel rundown and disheartened and it seems just entirely impossible to make any headway on anything.

Is this one of those things where it will all just suddenly come together?  I can't really count on that.  I don't know where to go from here, because I don't even know where here is.

Ugh. Aimless.  I don't mind being lost when I have nowhere to be, but May is closer and closer and I have no idea how to get there.

Sigh.

Somebody dial whine-one-one and get me a wah-mbulance.

The future:

Champaign, St. Louis, a cabin in the woods of southern Missouri, Houston, Las Vegas, Puerto Rico.

All between now and February.  I am so excited and uhhh...



Apropos or what?

My first comic ever

Yay comics!

Which is to say:
On Monday I went to the lecture that Bill Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner gave about To Teach: the journey, in comics.  Getting some behind-the-scenes info on the construction of this (wowza) book was really great, but the comic workshop that Ryan led for John's class (plus Lee) afterward really blew my mind.  I didn't want to stop drawing, despite my penchant for reminding people I'm not a draw-er.  (I'm also not a drawer.)  So here I present my first comic ever:

And if you're curious about the Exquisite Corpse-style comics we made as a class about Mr. John Ploof... well I'm gonna try to figure out how to post that PDF collection here, too.

Oh, like T H I S .

cat cam

http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/


the starting point. didn't buy it form here though.. think i found it on a geek website because it was sold out every where else.

some amazing photo's from mr. lee
http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/pe_cc_u.htm