We're here, folks. We've hit the summer weather, the days are sunny and breezy, and the weekends are cooperative. It's like the great outdoors wants us to enjoy it.
So this weekend, we used the little grill that Kate bought from Amazon for $30. We used it Saturday, we used it Sunday and we used it earlier today, because we had some sausages that were just begging to be charred up and eaten with a generous dollop or two of spicy mustard.
Saturday afternoon, we fired her up and ate burgers and guacamole with tortilla chips. We piled our burgers high with toppings and ate them in the shade of the overhang on our tiny little porch. Kate made raspberry lemonade with fresh raspberries, that earthy, sour-sweet taste that rings true on your tastebuds, and we sparkled it up with seltzer water, served over ice.
We more than doubled our usage of the tiny little grill this weekend, feeling indulgent but also resourceful.
On Sunday, we had kebabs (kabobs?), and parroted "ke-bab" at each other over and over, laughing as we threaded cubes of meat and vegetables on soaked bamboo skewers that blackened on the grill but did not burn. I marinated the chicken and beef both in a concoction of oil, freshly squeezed lemon juice, worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, dijon, garlic and black pepper, and the meat sat out in a ziplock bag for three hours or so, more than enough to soak in and stick.
We all agreed that, surprisingly, the chicken was nicer than the beef. It was juicy and moist and just-so, the lemon coming out on a high note when you bit into the chicken, the other flavors seared appealingly on the outside. The beef was tougher and the flavor didn't come through as clearly, but I did think it might have been an artifact of beef+chicken, because one might like medium-rare beef but one does not like medium-rare chicken. Honestly, though, it might just be that I didn't get the right cut of beef.
We didn't really have sides for the kebabs, because the meal is fairly complete on its own. We chopped up squares of white onion, elephant garlic, bell peppers, summer squash; whole baby bella mushrooms and grape tomatoes; cubes of pineapple. Some larger slices of pineapple were saved to be seared on the grill on their own, affording a burst of hot flavor when we, impatient, bit into them.
Grilled pineapple, on and off kebabs, is going to be a staple this summer. It just is.
However, we've also agreed that the relative ease of kebabs plus the lovely customizable, delicious results mean we have to do them again and again, and maybe with just chicken from now on because it was better and cheaper than the beef.
I made watermelon limeade that also went with seltzer water, and was surprised how thoroughly the delicious flavor of watermelon floated over the top. We used an old quarter of watermelon for it, all the sweeter for being older, and pureed it into a simple syrup. Squeezing enough juice from limes for the limeade portion was a rather thankless task, though.
This morning, we woke up and leisurely headed outside; we had the aforementioned sausages and another entire watermelon that I cubed into big pieces the way that Mom used to do and put into a large tupperware container, told Kate and Ben that we needed to eat at least enough that we could fit the top on to store it in the refrigerator.
We achieved the watermelon goal, and we also had potato wedges rubbed with chili powder and cumin, then roasted over the grill. We went through one small cylinder of propane this weekend and ate most of our meals outside.
With our lunch this morning (I headed to work later than usual because of Memorial Day and enjoyed my respite), I had iced coffee from the cold brew I made during the week. Ben made coffee ice cubes from the same batch of cold brew at some point yesterday, so we popped the cubes from their silicone mold to ice our coffee without diluting it (although I did add a lot of milk and enough water to thin it a bit, so the iced coffee cubes seem almost a little silly in retrospect). The cold brew is milder over ice, soft rich tones that actually do achieve a dark-chocolaty flavor without any added chocolate.
Last Wednesday, Kate bought a rosemary plant and a basil plant at the farmer's market, and I repotted them into plastic planters designed to look like terra cotta pots, set them out on the back porch to catch some sun. I'm strangely invested in their success. The rosemary is tall and spiky; the basil is squat and rounded. We've named them Sonny and Cher - Cher is the rosemary, naturally. I watered them this morning, misted their leaves (didn't last long with the sun beating down around 80 degrees by noon, but I think it's the thought that counts) and hoped that they were perky and happy.
All weekends should be like this one: warm, leisurely, full of piping hot food fresh off of the grill so that we can walk back into a cool, dark apartment afterward. It just feels so good to be outside. The air is fresh and the sun hasn't quite roasted us yet (although we're supposed to feel the heat this week, that's for sure). Combined with today being a holiday, I think I'm going to carry the refreshment from this weekend right on into the week.
Monday, May 25, 2015
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
commuter life
But, really, everyone's a commuter when you "grow up". No one lives at work.
This morning wasn't necessarily a rough morning. I did manage to gouge a little piece out of my hand with my opposite thumbnail, which has drawn a little sprinkle-sized pool of blood and hurts a lot. Probably because public transit is dirty and because fingernails are dirty. It's like the Daily Double. I should wash it out pretty carefully, I guess.
When I exited the T station, I headed to the left, as always, to take myself to work. One of the minor streets that branches off of Main is plain, unmarked, no stop sign or light or crosswalk. This is almost never a problem, because there is almost never anyone trying to turn onto this street.
Not so this morning!
A woman in a black sedan was crawling up, signal winking, and I couldn't quite figure out what to do, having used up all of my aggression in exiting the train car to begin with (there is an unreasonable amount of pushing, some mornings). I wasn't far enough away to conclusively stop, and I wasn't close enough to enter the road without being the kind of pedestrian that (if we're honest) I sometimes dream of being.
Lawlessness.
So I was watching the woman in the sedan very closely for any kind of indication. If she waved me forward, I would cross. If not, I'd wait. Unfortunately for me, she had one hand on the wheel and one hand on the phone she was talking on, so she couldn't make any gestures.
She slowed to a stop. I started to enter. She jerked forward. I stopped. She stopped. And so on and so forth. If she called me names (I couldn't hear her), I'm rubber and she's glue, etc etc. Don't care. You have to be the duck and let it roll off in these situations.
When she finally cleared the intersection, painfully slowly and probably giving me a death glare the whole time (DON'T CARE, GET OFF YOUR PHONE), I also cleared it, feeling like an amateur. Then I heard a voice from behind me, low and that deadpan monotone.
"Never trust that any drivers around here know what they're doing."
"Yeah. Yeah, I see that," I replied, turning to see the man with small round glasses.
"There's a reason they're called Massholes."
I laughed.
"You new here?"
This didn't help with my feeling like an amateur, but he meant well. Just wanted to make a connection by complaining about drivers in the city.
"No," I said, "I've been here a while, I just..." I shrugged. "This morning, you know? I used to have a car for the first few months I was here, but actually, getting rid of it was the best thing that's happened to me."
He looked at me. "If I had to drive to work every day, I'd slit my wrists." No smile, just the same deadpan monotone. Then he turned off to enter a building and wished me a nice day.
What a world, eh, Boston?
This morning wasn't necessarily a rough morning. I did manage to gouge a little piece out of my hand with my opposite thumbnail, which has drawn a little sprinkle-sized pool of blood and hurts a lot. Probably because public transit is dirty and because fingernails are dirty. It's like the Daily Double. I should wash it out pretty carefully, I guess.
When I exited the T station, I headed to the left, as always, to take myself to work. One of the minor streets that branches off of Main is plain, unmarked, no stop sign or light or crosswalk. This is almost never a problem, because there is almost never anyone trying to turn onto this street.
Not so this morning!
A woman in a black sedan was crawling up, signal winking, and I couldn't quite figure out what to do, having used up all of my aggression in exiting the train car to begin with (there is an unreasonable amount of pushing, some mornings). I wasn't far enough away to conclusively stop, and I wasn't close enough to enter the road without being the kind of pedestrian that (if we're honest) I sometimes dream of being.
Lawlessness.
So I was watching the woman in the sedan very closely for any kind of indication. If she waved me forward, I would cross. If not, I'd wait. Unfortunately for me, she had one hand on the wheel and one hand on the phone she was talking on, so she couldn't make any gestures.
She slowed to a stop. I started to enter. She jerked forward. I stopped. She stopped. And so on and so forth. If she called me names (I couldn't hear her), I'm rubber and she's glue, etc etc. Don't care. You have to be the duck and let it roll off in these situations.
When she finally cleared the intersection, painfully slowly and probably giving me a death glare the whole time (DON'T CARE, GET OFF YOUR PHONE), I also cleared it, feeling like an amateur. Then I heard a voice from behind me, low and that deadpan monotone.
"Never trust that any drivers around here know what they're doing."
"Yeah. Yeah, I see that," I replied, turning to see the man with small round glasses.
"There's a reason they're called Massholes."
I laughed.
"You new here?"
This didn't help with my feeling like an amateur, but he meant well. Just wanted to make a connection by complaining about drivers in the city.
"No," I said, "I've been here a while, I just..." I shrugged. "This morning, you know? I used to have a car for the first few months I was here, but actually, getting rid of it was the best thing that's happened to me."
He looked at me. "If I had to drive to work every day, I'd slit my wrists." No smile, just the same deadpan monotone. Then he turned off to enter a building and wished me a nice day.
What a world, eh, Boston?
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
cold brew: an adventure
It's funny that the last time I posted was in the beginning of December. I guess I'd like to say a lot has happened since then, but I'm not sure that it would be entirely true.
The weather has warmed up an awful lot, though. In some ways it's nice - our gas bill has fallen to half of what we paid just two months ago, and will fall further as we desperately try to keep the apartment from becoming a functional greenhouse
Which, I suppose, begins our discussion of what isn't so nice about the weather.
On Sunday, it hit 90 degrees outside. This was some serious temperature whiplash, up from 50s and maybe low 60s during the week previous. We kept all of our shades down, but cracked all of the windows, and in desperation plugged every fan we own into any outlet we could find. I did not sleep well on Sunday night, tossing and turning fitfully under a single sheet until 4:00am, when I can only assume my brain finally shut itself down and I woke up four hours later to a cheerily chiming alarm.
Needless to say, yesterday was a tough day. I climbed out of bed, brushing at the sheen of sweat already beading on my skin, and put on the lightest shirt I could find. Exhausted, hot, and miserable, I entered the kitchen and couldn't even think about heating water for coffee. Hot coffee when the apartment is 80 and muggy? No thanks.
As it turns out, cold brew coffee is easy to make in a French press, and I have a French press (I'm slowly moving along the path to fancier and fancier coffee, although the internet laughs at my sad little attempts because I don't roast my own beans - who has the time?! - but more importantly, because I drink my coffee with a little cream. I, coffee plebeian.). So I did a little research and tried to figure out where I wanted to pick up some coffee beans.
Even though Starbucks is conveniently located both directly next to the building where I work and about a three minute walk down the street (WHERE IS YOUR DUNKIN DONUTS NOW - it's in many of the T stops and also everywhere else), I didn't particularly want to pay for Starbucks beans for an undertaking that I wasn't even sure whether or not would work for me. Especially since I prefer lighter roasts for hot coffee, but the general consensus on the internet is that lighter beans don't have a bold enough flavor profile for cold extraction, which would lead to, what, caffeine water? Would that be so terrible?
Quick sidebar: I tried some iced coffee on that self-same hot Sunday, made by the pourover method over ice. It was pretty delicious but I can't justify paying $3.21 for a relatively small cup of iced coffee every time I have the urge. Cold brew is supposed to be easy!
So. Anyway. Yesterday as we left work, the temperature had dropped to a relatively balmy 65 or 62 or something that was exquisitely lovely after the unforgiving 80 degree heat in the morning. (Also, wow, what a change!) I asked Kate as we were boarding the train if she wanted to take a walk to Trader Joe's with me, because I had never been to this one and she had never been to one, period, and the weather was nice.
I have somewhat complicated feelings about Trader Joe's, mainly because I don't totally understand the praise that it gets. To me, it is far more a specialty store than an all-purpose grocery store. I would never do all of my shopping at Trader Joe's. Still, for the sweet tooth that I undeniably have, Trader Joe's has a truly impressive stock of various chocolate-type things. I bought some dark chocolate toffee with roasted pistachioes - what?? I came in well under-budget for this month and sometimes you just want to treat yourself a little - and then headed slowly around the store with Kate. I narrowly avoided buying cookie butter by remembering that even if it tastes amazing, I don't have anything to eat it with, and do I really need something that tempts me to have it straight from the jar?
We already have Nutella at home, I guess is what I'm saying.
So eventually we found the coffee, and I stared at the wall of colorful cylinders for a while before I just picked a dark Italian roast. Who knows? This could be a total bust. But the beans smelled pretty good, and I figure cold brew is supposed to be forgiving.
I guess I haven't been totally straight with you about the reason I wanted to go to TJ's for coffee, and it was that they have a grinder right there in the store with variable grind sizes. Perfect! I poured the entire cylinder of oily brown beans in, selected the coarsest grind (gotta filter that sediment with a French press grate, after all), and hit start. I won't run you through the whole gory process, but I did eventually figure it out.
Also, grounds take up way more space than beans. I sort of felt like I was cheating myself out of some coffee, so I took a break, tapped the can around to try to get everything to settle, and ground those last seven beans. Ah, life.
I bought chocolate and coffee; Kate bought milk and grapes. Oh well.
When we got back, I read approximately thirty different recipes for cold brew coffee, and thought that I had maybe stumbled on a ratio of grounds to water that would suffice. It's all very complicated. Luckily for us, I have a food scale. Talked Jonathan into buying it for me for Christmas with the intention of using it for bread (flour weight is way more reliable than volume because it packs so easily), and then discovered that to actually make a good loaf of bread, you have to trust your hands to tell you when enough flour is enough.
So I started to weigh out 140g of coffee grounds and got a little concerned around 50g when I already had probably close to a cup of coarse grinds. I compromised by filling the container I was weighing them in for a grand total of approximately 120g, then dumped them in the French press.
"Kate," I said, laughing, emerging from the kitchen with a French press literally half-full of coffee grounds. "Look at this."
She humored me by looking and laughing about it, and then I poured in about 3.5 cups of cold water, tried to figure out how to saturate the mountain of grounds, then rubber-banded some plastic wrap over the opening and pushed it into the refrigerator.
This morning was nice and cool; the temperature outside was right around 60 as we left for work, the temperature inside hovering around 68 if the thermostat is to be believed. Today is supposed to be hot, but sitting in my climate-controlled, air-conditioned workplace wearing a sweater over my clothes, I couldn't tell you whether or not it's living up to the hype.
I think, ultimately, that since cold brew coffee is meant to be brewed as a concentrate and then diluted, that this will work out. But if it doesn't, at least I still have my dark chocolate roasted pistachio toffee to remind me that the trip wasn't a waste. Anyway, in about six hours, I'll be pouring off what is hopefully a dark brown, caffeinated nectar.
It's a good thing I have a lot of milk in the fridge. I'm excited.
The weather has warmed up an awful lot, though. In some ways it's nice - our gas bill has fallen to half of what we paid just two months ago, and will fall further as we desperately try to keep the apartment from becoming a functional greenhouse
Which, I suppose, begins our discussion of what isn't so nice about the weather.
On Sunday, it hit 90 degrees outside. This was some serious temperature whiplash, up from 50s and maybe low 60s during the week previous. We kept all of our shades down, but cracked all of the windows, and in desperation plugged every fan we own into any outlet we could find. I did not sleep well on Sunday night, tossing and turning fitfully under a single sheet until 4:00am, when I can only assume my brain finally shut itself down and I woke up four hours later to a cheerily chiming alarm.
Needless to say, yesterday was a tough day. I climbed out of bed, brushing at the sheen of sweat already beading on my skin, and put on the lightest shirt I could find. Exhausted, hot, and miserable, I entered the kitchen and couldn't even think about heating water for coffee. Hot coffee when the apartment is 80 and muggy? No thanks.
As it turns out, cold brew coffee is easy to make in a French press, and I have a French press (I'm slowly moving along the path to fancier and fancier coffee, although the internet laughs at my sad little attempts because I don't roast my own beans - who has the time?! - but more importantly, because I drink my coffee with a little cream. I, coffee plebeian.). So I did a little research and tried to figure out where I wanted to pick up some coffee beans.
Even though Starbucks is conveniently located both directly next to the building where I work and about a three minute walk down the street (WHERE IS YOUR DUNKIN DONUTS NOW - it's in many of the T stops and also everywhere else), I didn't particularly want to pay for Starbucks beans for an undertaking that I wasn't even sure whether or not would work for me. Especially since I prefer lighter roasts for hot coffee, but the general consensus on the internet is that lighter beans don't have a bold enough flavor profile for cold extraction, which would lead to, what, caffeine water? Would that be so terrible?
Quick sidebar: I tried some iced coffee on that self-same hot Sunday, made by the pourover method over ice. It was pretty delicious but I can't justify paying $3.21 for a relatively small cup of iced coffee every time I have the urge. Cold brew is supposed to be easy!
So. Anyway. Yesterday as we left work, the temperature had dropped to a relatively balmy 65 or 62 or something that was exquisitely lovely after the unforgiving 80 degree heat in the morning. (Also, wow, what a change!) I asked Kate as we were boarding the train if she wanted to take a walk to Trader Joe's with me, because I had never been to this one and she had never been to one, period, and the weather was nice.
I have somewhat complicated feelings about Trader Joe's, mainly because I don't totally understand the praise that it gets. To me, it is far more a specialty store than an all-purpose grocery store. I would never do all of my shopping at Trader Joe's. Still, for the sweet tooth that I undeniably have, Trader Joe's has a truly impressive stock of various chocolate-type things. I bought some dark chocolate toffee with roasted pistachioes - what?? I came in well under-budget for this month and sometimes you just want to treat yourself a little - and then headed slowly around the store with Kate. I narrowly avoided buying cookie butter by remembering that even if it tastes amazing, I don't have anything to eat it with, and do I really need something that tempts me to have it straight from the jar?
We already have Nutella at home, I guess is what I'm saying.
So eventually we found the coffee, and I stared at the wall of colorful cylinders for a while before I just picked a dark Italian roast. Who knows? This could be a total bust. But the beans smelled pretty good, and I figure cold brew is supposed to be forgiving.
I guess I haven't been totally straight with you about the reason I wanted to go to TJ's for coffee, and it was that they have a grinder right there in the store with variable grind sizes. Perfect! I poured the entire cylinder of oily brown beans in, selected the coarsest grind (gotta filter that sediment with a French press grate, after all), and hit start. I won't run you through the whole gory process, but I did eventually figure it out.
Also, grounds take up way more space than beans. I sort of felt like I was cheating myself out of some coffee, so I took a break, tapped the can around to try to get everything to settle, and ground those last seven beans. Ah, life.
I bought chocolate and coffee; Kate bought milk and grapes. Oh well.
When we got back, I read approximately thirty different recipes for cold brew coffee, and thought that I had maybe stumbled on a ratio of grounds to water that would suffice. It's all very complicated. Luckily for us, I have a food scale. Talked Jonathan into buying it for me for Christmas with the intention of using it for bread (flour weight is way more reliable than volume because it packs so easily), and then discovered that to actually make a good loaf of bread, you have to trust your hands to tell you when enough flour is enough.
So I started to weigh out 140g of coffee grounds and got a little concerned around 50g when I already had probably close to a cup of coarse grinds. I compromised by filling the container I was weighing them in for a grand total of approximately 120g, then dumped them in the French press.
"Kate," I said, laughing, emerging from the kitchen with a French press literally half-full of coffee grounds. "Look at this."
She humored me by looking and laughing about it, and then I poured in about 3.5 cups of cold water, tried to figure out how to saturate the mountain of grounds, then rubber-banded some plastic wrap over the opening and pushed it into the refrigerator.
This morning was nice and cool; the temperature outside was right around 60 as we left for work, the temperature inside hovering around 68 if the thermostat is to be believed. Today is supposed to be hot, but sitting in my climate-controlled, air-conditioned workplace wearing a sweater over my clothes, I couldn't tell you whether or not it's living up to the hype.
I think, ultimately, that since cold brew coffee is meant to be brewed as a concentrate and then diluted, that this will work out. But if it doesn't, at least I still have my dark chocolate roasted pistachio toffee to remind me that the trip wasn't a waste. Anyway, in about six hours, I'll be pouring off what is hopefully a dark brown, caffeinated nectar.
It's a good thing I have a lot of milk in the fridge. I'm excited.
Monday, December 8, 2014
too bad it's Monday
It is a chilly (bone-chillingly chilly) day, and it is dark and dreary. I have accomplished the VeggieTales inverse-goal (they were the Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, after all, and not the Pirates with a Very Nonsensical List of Goals) of being in Boston in the fall.
It is now Boston in the winter.
The gas bill was very expensive, last month. We think it’s a combination of trying to heat a relatively sizable apartment to a civilized temperature and doing a lot more cooking in the winter. It is hard to be motivated to eat a salad or some other unwarmed meal when one is already bundled up and shivering at one’s dining room table.
We turned the heat down but then we turned it right back up because it turns out we can’t actually stand having it at 60. We are babies. Also my futon is nestled back into fairly drafty bay windows.
This is going to make summer really difficult, because the apartment will be unseasonably warm and we will not be thankful, only irritated. It is somewhere between 70 and 73 at work most days, and this is pretty nice. I guess.
I am also very dehydrated this winter, which I blame on the unsporting rule of no food or drink, yes, even water bottles, at our desks. Some people have desks in rooms that are away from the lab, and they can have water at their desks. I am slowly shriveling into a raisin. I don’t like raisins.
And when I’m home, I don’t think about drinking water the way that I do in summer, because it is cold and water doesn’t warm my bones. I am getting a lot of use out of slippers this winter.
Unrelated: I like my Mac, but the next time I actually buy a laptop, I think it will still be a PC. I don’t like that the Mac makes it almost impossible to troubleshoot, and I also don’t fully understand how to use it to its best advantage, which I guess makes it a good thing that it’s basically an email and word-processing machine.
Naively, I thought that I had finished my Christmas shopping last week, but the Amazon system is apparently a bit too clever for its own good, and decided that the combination of my name with my parents’ address was clearly wrong. So the packages that were supposed to arrive in Illinois before my own arrival have arrived in Boston, saddling me with their presence and the question of how best to transport them alongside me.
I emailed Amazon’s customer support, and received a reply from an accommodating fellow who didn’t seem to have fully understood my email query or really much about the issue at all.
I have now been issued a full refund with instructions to refuse the package from the driver, then to place my order again with Amazon. They offered me free one-day shipping for my troubles.
Unfortunately for this fellow, I clearly stated in my email that I knew where the order had been sent because I had received the package, and I had not refused to accept it from the poor middle-man of a delivery driver. So now I have money credited back to my Amazon account, gifts in my possession with an uncertain fate, and I’m supposed to place the order again. One-day shipping is not all that attractive to me – it’s not as if the calendar is threatening to roll over to Christmas Eve.
I don’t know what to do with the merchandise that I currently have. Admittedly I have never worked customer service for an online retail giant, but it seems to me that the reasonable thing to do would have been to either offer some financial incentive for the misstep and leave me to my own devices to get these things to Christmas, or to send me some materials for returning the merchandise and to send new merchandise to my parents’ house and not bother with this refund deal.
Right now the most tempting thing to do is take the refund and run with it, but I’m not certain about how legal that is (and I do get 5% cash back at Amazon this quarter, I guess). So I probably have to call them tonight. Shipping things, for whatever reason, is never easy for me.
I want to make Christmas cookies next weekend. Tis the season, and it is the last full weekend when I’ll be in town, which seems to situate it nicely for cookie-baking.
It is now Boston in the winter.
The gas bill was very expensive, last month. We think it’s a combination of trying to heat a relatively sizable apartment to a civilized temperature and doing a lot more cooking in the winter. It is hard to be motivated to eat a salad or some other unwarmed meal when one is already bundled up and shivering at one’s dining room table.
We turned the heat down but then we turned it right back up because it turns out we can’t actually stand having it at 60. We are babies. Also my futon is nestled back into fairly drafty bay windows.
This is going to make summer really difficult, because the apartment will be unseasonably warm and we will not be thankful, only irritated. It is somewhere between 70 and 73 at work most days, and this is pretty nice. I guess.
I am also very dehydrated this winter, which I blame on the unsporting rule of no food or drink, yes, even water bottles, at our desks. Some people have desks in rooms that are away from the lab, and they can have water at their desks. I am slowly shriveling into a raisin. I don’t like raisins.
And when I’m home, I don’t think about drinking water the way that I do in summer, because it is cold and water doesn’t warm my bones. I am getting a lot of use out of slippers this winter.
Unrelated: I like my Mac, but the next time I actually buy a laptop, I think it will still be a PC. I don’t like that the Mac makes it almost impossible to troubleshoot, and I also don’t fully understand how to use it to its best advantage, which I guess makes it a good thing that it’s basically an email and word-processing machine.
Naively, I thought that I had finished my Christmas shopping last week, but the Amazon system is apparently a bit too clever for its own good, and decided that the combination of my name with my parents’ address was clearly wrong. So the packages that were supposed to arrive in Illinois before my own arrival have arrived in Boston, saddling me with their presence and the question of how best to transport them alongside me.
I emailed Amazon’s customer support, and received a reply from an accommodating fellow who didn’t seem to have fully understood my email query or really much about the issue at all.
I have now been issued a full refund with instructions to refuse the package from the driver, then to place my order again with Amazon. They offered me free one-day shipping for my troubles.
Unfortunately for this fellow, I clearly stated in my email that I knew where the order had been sent because I had received the package, and I had not refused to accept it from the poor middle-man of a delivery driver. So now I have money credited back to my Amazon account, gifts in my possession with an uncertain fate, and I’m supposed to place the order again. One-day shipping is not all that attractive to me – it’s not as if the calendar is threatening to roll over to Christmas Eve.
I don’t know what to do with the merchandise that I currently have. Admittedly I have never worked customer service for an online retail giant, but it seems to me that the reasonable thing to do would have been to either offer some financial incentive for the misstep and leave me to my own devices to get these things to Christmas, or to send me some materials for returning the merchandise and to send new merchandise to my parents’ house and not bother with this refund deal.
Right now the most tempting thing to do is take the refund and run with it, but I’m not certain about how legal that is (and I do get 5% cash back at Amazon this quarter, I guess). So I probably have to call them tonight. Shipping things, for whatever reason, is never easy for me.
I want to make Christmas cookies next weekend. Tis the season, and it is the last full weekend when I’ll be in town, which seems to situate it nicely for cookie-baking.
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Thanksgiving: a harrowing tale
This is an entry that I wrote while sitting in a McDonald's fused to a Mobil station somewhere in the westernmost tip of New York on the evening of November 27: Thanksgiving proper. I considered giving it a once- or twice- or thrice-over before posting it, but then I thought that maybe it would be better to post it the way that it poured out of me while I sat, shivering, in a McDonald's with bags and a pillow and a large decaf coffee, two creams, on Thanksgiving night while people filtered in and out, making blase conversation about the weather and road conditions and asking each other 'well have you even driven in the snow before?'
I would like to preserve the integrity of this work as the product of the event and the representation of my state of mind at that time. So here it is.
I accomplished a couple of life goals I didn’t know I had today, but I guess I can cross them off of my bucket list.
I would like to preserve the integrity of this work as the product of the event and the representation of my state of mind at that time. So here it is.
I accomplished a couple of life goals I didn’t know I had today, but I guess I can cross them off of my bucket list.
Today is Thanksgiving, so it’s important that I look on the
bright sides. Besides, all of this
happened less than three hours ago, so I’m too close to it to really feel much
of anything. Tomorrow I will probably be
unhappy when the adrenaline wears off, and I finally dealt with that sore neck.
I crashed my car.
This wasn’t the goal. We’re
calling the goal a discovery. The
knowledge of the ultimate freedom of just driving your car off of the highway
and down the hill that it (the highway) is perched atop.
In retrospect, having accomplished this discovery goal, this
is not ultimate freedom. The feeling is
a weird calm and resignation, because panic kills. I was weirdly resigned to the fact that I was
going to leave the highway. I even,
dully, sort of wondered if I was going to die, and thought about how everything
just seemed so awfully slow.
I felt the traction go as I was on a curved portion of the
highway, and the car continued in the wrong direction. I wrenched the wheel, which was probably the
wrong decision, but at this point nothing was going to stop the fishtail train.
Seatbelts, folks. I
was convinced that the car had actually busted through a guardrail, but the
very nice policeman informed me that I had just missed the guardrail and the
impact I was thinking about had probably been the ground. I wouldn’t know, all I could see was the
smoke that my bizarrely tiny airbag had punched into my car. My seatbelt held. I stayed upright.
The car slid sideways for a while. Everything was so slow-motion that I just sat
and observed, wondering how on earth I was going to manage to not ruin
everyone’s Thanksgiving. I wondered if
the car was going to roll over and I’d have to climb out upside down, like in
the movies.
The car did not roll over.
I sat, the calm in my stomach roiled, and suddenly the panic
burst through. I couldn’t start the
car. I could barely force the car into park. The windows weren’t broken. I stared at the smoky airbag. It was smaller than I would have guessed it
would be. I looked at the broken plastic
around the bag and tried, halfheartedly, to stuff the bag back into the
steering wheel.
My music wasn’t playing.
Why had my music stopped? Where
was my phone?
Half-sobs, panic without tears, burst from my chest as I
scrambled to find my phone, which had been torn from its cable moorings as the
car slid down the embankment. I called
Dad, half-insane with fear, stranded here down a hill in the snow with a car
filled with smoke. I jumped out of the
car into the muddy snow, and stared at where the front end of my car used to
be. Now there were only wire ends and
boxy under-the-hood things, no headlights, no license plate, no bumper.
I called AAA. AAA
called me back – well, my tow truck contact called me back – quite displeased
with my inability to tell him exactly where I was. I called 911, and they were way more
helpful. Would definitely call 911 again. 10/10 stars.
And they had GPS, so I didn’t even have to try to explain where I was.
The cop and the AAA guy showed up, and I achieved unknown
life goal number two: sit in the back of a police car. There was no grating separating me and my boy
in blue, but the door did not have a handle.
I learned this when I wanted to get out and find out what was going on.
He took my keys to engage the emergency brake, I think. I don’t know.
They winched my car up the hill (AAA guy: “uh, I can tell you now, AAA
won’t be covering this.” Cop: “it’s
okay, that’s why she has insurance.”)
Everything was quiet.
I watched while they pulled my car up the hill and out. The cop gave me some commentary on various
things.
“We saw you from over there.
Thought something bad might have happened ‘cause you took quite a
dive. Called it in for EMS and they said
no, they’d talked to you, you were fine.”
“Oh. Wow. Your front end is gone. That might be totaled.”
“You know, people get really angry that we ticket so much for
not wearing seatbelts, but this is why it’s so important. You would have had a head injury if you
hadn’t been wearing yours.”
I ran back and forth, grabbing my things from the car and
moving them to the backseat of the police car (he had to let me out). I asked if I needed to talk to the AAA guy.
“Nah,” said the cop, “He doesn’t need anything from
you. Your insurance will find him.”
“But,” I said, “I need some of the keys on my keyring.”
“Oh, you do? Go talk
to him.”
So I did, and AAA guy was also sort of nonplussed that I
needed keys back. I took my bike key, my
apartment key, my tags for Stop & Shop and my ESF lanyard. I headed back to the police car and the cop
handed me my accident report and dropped me and all of my things off at a
McMobil. I am sitting here now with a
huge decaf coffee.
I didn’t need any more stimulants.
I am perversely excited to see the seatbelt aftermath
tomorrow across my chest. It is already
a little tender and there’s a tiny little burn where it dragged across my skin. I am not excited at all to find out how much
pain I’m going to be in.
The AAA guy just called me.
He wanted to know who my insurance company is. “You’re not gonna have to worry about this
car no more,” he said, laughing a little.
AAA guy isn’t mean (he grew on me eventually); that’s the way I feel
too.
We laugh because it hurts, we laugh because it’s absurd, we
laugh because we don’t want to cry in a McMobil right off of the highway.
Friday, November 21, 2014
I typed 'Christmas' a ton of times in this entry
I'm a little off-balance this year. In my defense, it's been an uncharacteristic year.
Are any years characteristic when you're 25? I'm not sure when life settles down. Often, I wonder whether or not life will ever settle down, or if I will spend the rest of my life waiting for it to settle down. This is something that I've been worried about since I was fourteen and crying in bed at night because I didn't want to grow up and go to college.
Hindsight, huh?
My neck has been out for a couple of days. I toughed it out on Wednesday, stayed home yesterday when I found myself unable to hoist myself out of bed without the painful tightening of everything north of my ribcage. Eventually I bundled up and walked the half-block or so to CVS, where I eventually found these Salonpas patches that Mom sent me out for.
Returned home and slapped a couple of those babies onto my neck, where they immediately smelled comfortingly of menthol (minty!) and started tingling away my pain. Since this morning, I've had much more range of motion and fewer moments of searing pain, and I peeled off the old ones and slapped on a new one. It makes me feel like a bionic person.
I know that's weird, because the patch isn't really any sort of robotic thing, but it makes me feel like a bionic person.
It makes me remember the preview for that movie "Meet the Robinsons", where a women has blanketed her arm in caffeine patches: "Each patch is the equivalent of 12 cups of coffee. You can stay up for days with no side effects! AHHH! Sorry."
They make me feel ALIVE! Although I did poke at myself a couple of times last night, between the patches, and tried to figure out if that was my skin. I guess the NSAIDs and the menthol really numbed me up. It was awesome.
I've been listening to Christmas songs a lot earlier this year, but it's not really a Christmas spirit thing. I think Pentatonix got me in the mood when they released their second Christmas album and I stumbled across pieces of it in various places. I also keep thinking Thanksgiving is over already because of the Thanksgiving dinner that Kate and I hosted (the joy of double Thanksgivings! I love Thanksgiving!!), which is definitely going a long way toward pushing me into the Christmas spirit.
For once, though, I have attempted to take the bull by the horns and get Christmas presents all sorted out before December 20th, before I have to ask everyone in the family what they want for Christmas. Happily, I think I am almost done figuring out what I want to gift.
I'm not sure what I want for Christmas. Honestly, the thing I remember most fondly about Christmas is the togetherness: the contagious happiness pouring out of everyone's sleepy smiles in waves as we organize the gifts into little piles and start taking turns opening them. The smell of breakfast baking and coffee brewing, the warm quiet of slippers and pajamas while we all find places to sit and delve into books rich with the new-book-smell.
It's harder to remember specific gifts I've received, because that's just not the point.
I have this song on right now, partly because I love Sara Bareilles and partly because I guess I'm kind of in a Christmas mood.
Are any years characteristic when you're 25? I'm not sure when life settles down. Often, I wonder whether or not life will ever settle down, or if I will spend the rest of my life waiting for it to settle down. This is something that I've been worried about since I was fourteen and crying in bed at night because I didn't want to grow up and go to college.
Hindsight, huh?
My neck has been out for a couple of days. I toughed it out on Wednesday, stayed home yesterday when I found myself unable to hoist myself out of bed without the painful tightening of everything north of my ribcage. Eventually I bundled up and walked the half-block or so to CVS, where I eventually found these Salonpas patches that Mom sent me out for.
Returned home and slapped a couple of those babies onto my neck, where they immediately smelled comfortingly of menthol (minty!) and started tingling away my pain. Since this morning, I've had much more range of motion and fewer moments of searing pain, and I peeled off the old ones and slapped on a new one. It makes me feel like a bionic person.
I know that's weird, because the patch isn't really any sort of robotic thing, but it makes me feel like a bionic person.
It makes me remember the preview for that movie "Meet the Robinsons", where a women has blanketed her arm in caffeine patches: "Each patch is the equivalent of 12 cups of coffee. You can stay up for days with no side effects! AHHH! Sorry."
They make me feel ALIVE! Although I did poke at myself a couple of times last night, between the patches, and tried to figure out if that was my skin. I guess the NSAIDs and the menthol really numbed me up. It was awesome.
I've been listening to Christmas songs a lot earlier this year, but it's not really a Christmas spirit thing. I think Pentatonix got me in the mood when they released their second Christmas album and I stumbled across pieces of it in various places. I also keep thinking Thanksgiving is over already because of the Thanksgiving dinner that Kate and I hosted (the joy of double Thanksgivings! I love Thanksgiving!!), which is definitely going a long way toward pushing me into the Christmas spirit.
For once, though, I have attempted to take the bull by the horns and get Christmas presents all sorted out before December 20th, before I have to ask everyone in the family what they want for Christmas. Happily, I think I am almost done figuring out what I want to gift.
I'm not sure what I want for Christmas. Honestly, the thing I remember most fondly about Christmas is the togetherness: the contagious happiness pouring out of everyone's sleepy smiles in waves as we organize the gifts into little piles and start taking turns opening them. The smell of breakfast baking and coffee brewing, the warm quiet of slippers and pajamas while we all find places to sit and delve into books rich with the new-book-smell.
It's harder to remember specific gifts I've received, because that's just not the point.
I have this song on right now, partly because I love Sara Bareilles and partly because I guess I'm kind of in a Christmas mood.
love is not a toy
and no paper will conceal it
love is simply joy that I’m home
Friday, November 14, 2014
true crime
It rained last night.
I noticed it, pattering quietly against the windows in my bedroom, as I paused on my journey toward sleep to crane my neck around and identify the noise. It was so soft that it almost sounded like a crinkling or a fluttering, and then I thought maybe it was water in the pipes from a shower upstairs. But it was rain.
The weather is becoming more aggressively cold, a reminder that winter follows too closely on the heels of autumn. I am resisting the ritual suiting up in all of my wintry gear because I don't want to jump the gun on it; I want it to be delightfully warm when I finally give in.
This means I wear a lot of pullover hoodies these days, carelessly casting off all of the advice about dressing for the job that I want (or am I? maybe what I want is a job that lets me wear pullover hoodies, hmmmmm? HMMMMM?). Sometimes I take a scarf, and sometimes I don't. My fingers are usually cold, wrapped around the tupperware in which I carry my lunch.
This morning, when I and my pullover hoodie, Kate's computer (gotta help a sister out sometimes), and my lunch arrived at the T station, I found myself frantically presenting my Charlie card to the turnstile, again and again and again, as it buzzed nastily and told me alternately "SEE AGENT" and "NOT ENOUGH VALUE".
Unfortunately for me, my hoodie, the computer and the lunch, no agent was in sight. Particularly distressing when the "SEE AGENT" is refusing to resolve into the usual "ENTER [valid until 11/30/14]" that I have seen for the past two weeks on this monthly pass that cost me $75.
I looked around, at the dark kiosk where the agent presumably ought to be, at the Dunkin Donuts bustling with coffee-drinkers and (apparently) cronut-eaters ("the cronut is here!!"), at the turnstiles, each of which I had tried in turn. I walked back to the card-feeding station, that small contingent of boxy machines that plead for my credit card.
I swiped my Charlie card. $0.25, it said - a residue from the days it was cheaper to load money onto the card because I didn't need the MTBA in any kind of daily fashion - and down below, monthly pass valid until 11/30/14. THIS machine knows that I have paid for the privilege of riding the T this month. Why doesn't that one?
I tried again and again, wondering if, for some reason, the turnstile was registering the quarter's-worth of value on the card before the monthly pass, if there were some way to strike those twenty-five cents from the record. Finally, the frustration hit its peak.
Holding my wallet firmly in hand (I am a good citizen who has paid for my T pass, not a sneaky one trying to backpack on your ride), I entered closely behind someone else, touched my wallet to the contact as I passed through the gate, and it belatedly tried to close on me, buzzing insistently, now, and angrily.
I, with righteous adrenaline coursing through my veins, courtesy of my rapidly beating heart, passed through to the other side and boarded the train as the buzzing quickly faded out behind me, lost in the noise of the morning commute.
After all, if someone had been there to stop me, I wouldn't have had to sneak through in the first place.
I hope it works tonight or I'm destined to live a life of faux-crime until December.
I noticed it, pattering quietly against the windows in my bedroom, as I paused on my journey toward sleep to crane my neck around and identify the noise. It was so soft that it almost sounded like a crinkling or a fluttering, and then I thought maybe it was water in the pipes from a shower upstairs. But it was rain.
The weather is becoming more aggressively cold, a reminder that winter follows too closely on the heels of autumn. I am resisting the ritual suiting up in all of my wintry gear because I don't want to jump the gun on it; I want it to be delightfully warm when I finally give in.
This means I wear a lot of pullover hoodies these days, carelessly casting off all of the advice about dressing for the job that I want (or am I? maybe what I want is a job that lets me wear pullover hoodies, hmmmmm? HMMMMM?). Sometimes I take a scarf, and sometimes I don't. My fingers are usually cold, wrapped around the tupperware in which I carry my lunch.
This morning, when I and my pullover hoodie, Kate's computer (gotta help a sister out sometimes), and my lunch arrived at the T station, I found myself frantically presenting my Charlie card to the turnstile, again and again and again, as it buzzed nastily and told me alternately "SEE AGENT" and "NOT ENOUGH VALUE".
Unfortunately for me, my hoodie, the computer and the lunch, no agent was in sight. Particularly distressing when the "SEE AGENT" is refusing to resolve into the usual "ENTER [valid until 11/30/14]" that I have seen for the past two weeks on this monthly pass that cost me $75.
I looked around, at the dark kiosk where the agent presumably ought to be, at the Dunkin Donuts bustling with coffee-drinkers and (apparently) cronut-eaters ("the cronut is here!!"), at the turnstiles, each of which I had tried in turn. I walked back to the card-feeding station, that small contingent of boxy machines that plead for my credit card.
I swiped my Charlie card. $0.25, it said - a residue from the days it was cheaper to load money onto the card because I didn't need the MTBA in any kind of daily fashion - and down below, monthly pass valid until 11/30/14. THIS machine knows that I have paid for the privilege of riding the T this month. Why doesn't that one?
I tried again and again, wondering if, for some reason, the turnstile was registering the quarter's-worth of value on the card before the monthly pass, if there were some way to strike those twenty-five cents from the record. Finally, the frustration hit its peak.
Holding my wallet firmly in hand (I am a good citizen who has paid for my T pass, not a sneaky one trying to backpack on your ride), I entered closely behind someone else, touched my wallet to the contact as I passed through the gate, and it belatedly tried to close on me, buzzing insistently, now, and angrily.
I, with righteous adrenaline coursing through my veins, courtesy of my rapidly beating heart, passed through to the other side and boarded the train as the buzzing quickly faded out behind me, lost in the noise of the morning commute.
After all, if someone had been there to stop me, I wouldn't have had to sneak through in the first place.
I hope it works tonight or I'm destined to live a life of faux-crime until December.
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