Guitar Hero Failure

Guitar Hero Failure

Originally uploaded by gabbyenoaktown

You can be pregnant and still lose … play Guitar Hero. Pam kicked my butt. Check out her concentration. She didn’t break. She didn’t turn her head. She didn’t look like a muppet. I think I look like Beaker … but wider and not in a lab coat.

Mister, deep in thought

Mister, deep in thought

Originally uploaded by gabbyenoaktown

Mister has Eliza Block’s 2 Across crossword application on his iPhone. It has become his favorite thing on the phone, it seems.

Camino: Retake

The first time Mister and I ate at Camino (still with a useless website), I liked it but I didn’t love it. I loved the interior and the design, but I thought the dishes were overpriced and my entree was not good.

Mister, however, loved it and we’ve been back a couple of times with friends who read restaurant reviews and can’t wait to go. We went with our friend Martha a few Sundays ago. She and I shared the liver on toast — mmmm. I keep saying I hate liver, but I know I love pate, which this was not. Chopped liver, a little creamy, spread on slabs of crisp toast. We also shared salad (pregnancy brain and lack of notes inhibits recall) before our entrees. The chicken with crusty beans for Mister and me, the whole fish for Martha. Nothing left on the plates. I avoided the polenta, my first-time Camino mistake. (It is crispy, but mine tasted days-old.)

Last weekend, we were joined by the Madleys. Though I think $3 for a shot of lemonade is too much, I have to acknowledge how good the lemonade is at Camino. Yum. I sipped mine while we played catch up in the bar. We brought eggs from the girls, some of the Oregon trip jam, and a jar of pickles from my most recent canning frenzy.

Dinner was, again, fabulous. This time, we had a little headcheese (so different from what I expected … less gelatin and more flavor), a tomato salad, bibb lettuce salad, and something else. Mister and I again had the chicken for dinner, this time with farro, broccoli rabe, and something else mixed in. Mrs. Madley had the tuna, taunting me with her ability to have some given she’s not pregnant and is no longer breast feeding. Cruel, cruel taunts.

One of Camino’s appeals is its sides to the main dishes. Mister and I need more fiber, more vegetables in our cooking, but I think we both have had our fair share of bean sides that are uninspiring. Camino’s are not. I am ready to try creamy, crusty beans at home (using a recipe from Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Cooking: Five Ways To Incorporate Whole and Natural Ingredients into Your Cooking). Another appealing aspect? The staff. Friendly, on top of things.

Just don’t order the polenta.

Shameless Plug for Wesabe

My husband’s company, Wesabe, has been named a finalist in the Industry Standard’s 100 Top Innovators awards. This phase is where the public votes. Do I think Wesabe deserves to win? You bet. I don’t write about the company here, but perhaps I should.

Mister and I started talking about how people manage, and mismanage, their money before we were married. I had, several years earlier, paid off all of my debt, then lost my job. Careless planning before the market downturn and lack of foresight during the downturn led to debt — I owed family, the government, and American Express.

In the last few years, I’ve paid all of my debts off, in no small part thanks to Mister’s support because we put our money towards debt payments. I didn’t pay rent, I paid the IRS. A word to the wise: do not avoid your taxes, even if you think you can’t pay them. Oy, did that hurt.

So how do people get out of debt? Some consolidate their credit cards and pay them systematically. Others eliminate expensive habits such as dining out or shopping for new shoes. Wesabe is a community site that helps people get control of their finances both through financial tools and through group discussions. Teachers, for example, don’t get a lot of perks, but when we do, wow. In Paris, for example, I do not have to pay for museum entrances. This doesn’t sound like much but if you go to 10 museums, as we did on a trip five years ago, that’s cash. My local stationery store, Piedmont Stationers, gives teachers 10 percent off purchases on the spot. Elmwood Stationers used to, but changed its policy to only give the discount to Berkeley teachers. I no longer shop at Elmwood. That bit of information becomes a tip that I can post to Wesabe for other teachers to find because we aren’t some special club of mind-readers. Sometimes the discounts are unexpected — Clogs-N-More in Portland, OR gave me a 10 percent discount on a pair of Dansko’s last year. Wow! I don’t even teach in the state but the clerk said they like to support teachers anyway they can. That’s a good tip, too.

The Wesabe community doesn’t just suggest the cheapest place to get groceries, gas, or dry-cleaning. There are tips about saving for a house, creating an emergency budget, and other topics. Users have goals, for example, I had a goal to stop paying overdraft fees with my bank. I was always cutting it close with my account — too close — and paying $20 a pop for overdraft fees. I created the goal, stuck to it, and have not paid an overdraft fee in a year. I can make suggestions under the goal as to how others can achieve it, too.

There are micro-communities, such as a teacher group (okay, I started it and am the only one who’s posted ideas, but I’m hopeful!) and a getting green group. Ideas on getting green include changing the cleaning materials used in your house (we eliminated bleach and most commercial cleaners a couple of years ago), registering with fuelly to share and compare MPGs (I am loathe to do this as I drive a 95 Jeep. I carpool to work and try to fill up a couple times a month but it’s a guzzler. We’ll drive it into the ground, though, rather than have an extra car on the road), or use other means to track green footprints.

Recently I started a nice budget spreadsheet using PearBudget, recommended by several folks in the Wesabe community including Mister. But I more frequently use the spending limits I set in Wesabe. I log in about once a week, or once every two weeks, and check my balances and spending, and instantly I can see how much I have left in a category. For example, I limited my book purchases to $100. This seems like a lot, but for the last five years, I’ve spent that money primarily on books for my classroom. I can tag these purchases, too, for the IRS, for example. Then, when tax season comes, I can pull all of my IRS purchases and compile them for our tax person.

Mister has remained staunchly committed to building tools to help people get out of debt, save for a home, wrangle their finances into something that they control, not vice versa. His tools are built in-house by an amazing set of engineers who also believe in Wesabe’s goals. You can’t work there if you don’t.

Wesabe’s main competitor offers snappy tools, but it uses a third party service to gather bank data whereas Wesabe doesn’t have any access to your bank data (your password is kept on your hard drive, not in Wesabe’s database), and Wesabe doesn’t offer you deals on new credit cards or other services that could, in the long run, interfere with your debt reduction, not enable it

I realize that I hammered this out and will need to reedit for clarity, but here’s to shamelessly plugging something I believe in.

Wild Wild Comedy of Errors

Comedy of Errors set on the Elizabethan

Originally uploaded by gabbyenoaktown

Oregon Shakespeare Festival set Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors in the Wild West. This is the biggest set I’ve seen on the stage (in my, ahem, two years of attending) — certainly it seems bigger than Taming of the Shrew or Romeo and Juliet because it fills the Elizabethan and stays onstage the entire performance.
This picture was taken during our backstage tour (highly recommended) and is the only theater in which you can take photographs. I wondered how the actors would maneuver in and around it. I need not have wondered. They were everywhere and it was wonderful.

Baby, Oh Baby! — hats and blankets

Rudich’s Lentil Hat

Originally uploaded by gabbyenoaktown

My friend the Radish has her hands full with baby gifts this year. (One came in April, two more are due … that we know of.)
The hat and blanket are from MinnowKnits and are cuddly soft.

The second hat, the blue fish hat, is Alicia’s, knit for her baby. She modified the top and added the fish (tweaking the i-cord).

Big Bad Berry Gang

The jamming bug bit me hard a few years ago though I didn’t start jamming and canning until last year when I took a class at June Taylor with my friend Barbara. I’ve made a few batches, including plum jam with our friends the O’Reillys, and with Barbara as well as on my own. This summer, Barbara and I made a peach-nectarine conserve with fruit from Blossom Bluff Orchards. Wowee zowee. 2008 is all about jams and homemade for holiday gifts in December.

While on the becoming-annual trip to Ashland and Portland, we stayed with our friends Pia and Jonathan and their daughters. The jam bug bit Pia this year. We thought it would be great to go berry picking and then make jam. Off we went, with Natalia and Amy, to Alebeke Farm to pick some marionberries and maybe raspberries, too.

Marionberries, if you’ve never seen one, are like blackberries but are longer (oooh, and sweet), about the length of a thumb.

Word of warning people: 36 pounds of marionberries and 8 pounds of raspberries is a big, time-consuming yield. You can see the boxes in our cart. (You can also see me looking big, not fashionably pregnant, just big pregnant.)

Wise folks would start the jamming process immediately, but we went to the store to buy 40 pounds of sugar (we used nearly 25) and other doo-dads, took naps, ate dinner.

And started jamming at 9pm.

At 9pm, we are laughing and singing and taking rib shots from Jonathan and Amy. Why? Because 44 pounds of berries requires a lot of lemon juice. When we did calculations, it seemed we would need close to 60 lemons (I’d originally purchased six thinking it extravagant). Lemons, at 9pm in the middle of downtown Portland, cost $1 each. Forty-four pounds of berries cost $66. Hmmm.

A few hours, and several jars later, Amy left (smart!) and Natalia valiantly made a third trip to the grocery store for more jars.

In all, we made 54 jars of jam — marionberry, mix of marion and raspberry, and raspberry — primarily of half-pints but about a third were pints. (The photo doesn’t show all the jars.)

We finished at 2am.

I think this shot of Pia shows what happens when you go too long. If only I’d taken a picture of my feet, which were as puffy as soaked kitchen sponges.

(The jam is fantastic.)

Laughing at Doctor’s

Laughing at Doctor’s

Originally uploaded by gabbyenoaktown

Mister likes to take pictures of the Lentil, and me, whenever the mood strikes.
There is a serene version of me in the doctor’s office, but Mister was making me laugh.
The Lentil is heading into its 27th week. Kicks, by the way, are totally weird. They start like little fish flutters but have moved to showing bumps against my belly. Lentil isn’t so packed in my belly that we’re seeing elbows and aliens but the feeling is elbows and aliens.

Easter in August

Lala’s first eggs

Originally uploaded by gabbyenoaktown

The Girls started laying this past week though it’s not without hiccups. Lala has been laying consistently — tiny blue-green eggs. The other two, Minnie and Izzie, lay larger, brown eggs. Those two, well, we’re not quite sure about what’s going on with them but we suspect that they are laying from the roost which means the eggs break when they hit the ground. An open egg looks like food so they get snacked on a bit. This part is a big bummer because once a chicken gets a taste for egg, it’s a difficult (some say impossible) habit to break.
Either Mister or I checks the coop in the morning, evening, and a couple times a day. The faster we can get the eggs and get them out, the better chance we have to get the girls on a good laying cycle.
I left for a week and a half and came back to the eggs, and three chickens who look like they are teenage girls who went through puberty while mama was on a trip. Feathers are fluffier, chests are puffier, they look bigger. Whoa.

Candy, Everybody Wants Some

Lentil has been on a few trips this summer - Truckee, New York, camping, and now Ashland. For the second year, my friends and I have traveled here to take a class and attend the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It’s a great deal. We get credit (one of two ways a teacher increases her salary) and we get to see plays. Lentil’s first theater experience was Othello. Kind of heavy but it kicked all the way through acts four and five which I took as a good sign. Last night we saw Our Town. I’ve never seen either play live before and enjoyed both, different as they are.

You can stay in hotels in Ashland, but we prefer to rent cottages. You get some control over your meals this way — a little less expensive than the hotel route. Plus, we’ve met some really nice people as both years the owners have lived on property.

Last night, we returned home after the play. Natalia busted out the caramel ice cream for her second ice cream round of the day. Alicia was enjoying the raspberries we’d bought for her at the Ashland Food Co-op earlier in the day. As a child, Alicia was often denied raspberries because her younger sister, Amanda, would snatch them up before Alicia had a chance to get any. (My older brother and sister would not have tolerated this. I’m sure pummeling and reclaiming the berries would have ensued had I been so bold.)

So there’s Alicia, also pregnant (15 weeks), reclining on the sofa with the berries on her belly. She eats them one at a time, selecting the right one for the bite before carefully extracting the berry and bringing it to her mouth. She employs this process when eating anything that involves many in a bowl — popcorn, chips, grapes. It’s a very serious system, one not to be trifled with.

Apparently she applies similarly method to eating Nerds. She pours the Nerds onto the table (clean) and sorts them by color. Then, she arranges them from smallest to largest, and eats beginning with the smallest.

I’d love to make fun of this procedure but since I need one of every color, or some kind of symmetry in the candy selection in my hand. For example, if I’m eating Dots, then I prefer to have one each of the orange, green, yellow, and red. If I end up with two yellows and a red, fine because I can eat a yellow, then red, then yellow. If I have one orange, a green, and to reds, I need to either return a red to the box or shake out another orange or green. It’s like this for all candy for me.

When I eat sunflower seeds, I take an odd number from the bag and split the number in half minus one. Each half goes into either cheek with the odd one as the starter for eating. Again, peculiar, I know. Yet people have their own eating rituals, even if it means simply grabbing handfuls and stuffing it in their mouths with no regard to what they are eating. It’s just that that ritual is gross.