My toes are numb

It is ten degrees out and I had to go to the laundromat, because I haven't done laundry in, oh, three weeks or so and it is becoming a problem. I had so much laundry and the laundromat is so far away I could only manage to carry my darks, so after classes today I will have to go back and do my whites, which is a total drag. Carrying all my clothes seven blocks to the laundromat in ten-degree weather is making me REALLY wish I had a car. Maybe a 1971 Buick Riviera.

Yesterday I made a loaf of Laurie Colwin's long-rise whole wheat bread. It rose all day while I was in class and then after a short second rise it was ready to bake. It came out of the oven just in time for dinner, and K and I had a cozy, if somewhat austere, meal of bean soup and warm, crusty bread. This bread makes me happy because it uses three kinds of flour (the more flours a bread involves, the happier I am), one of which is a stone-ground wheat from a local mill, which I got at the farmers' market this fall. I am looking forward to the farmers' market starting up again ... I am getting ready for spring.

I think this week I will buy some sort of meat, maybe a chicken.

Better Homes and Gardens

After nearly three months in the Hoosier state, I have finally bought a couch. It folds out into a bed, even, so if you want to come visit me, you will no longer have to sleep on the floor.

Doesn't it look homey, with the lamp and the plant and the Chagall? It's rather intimidating to own something so large and heavy, but I already have a bed, so in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess. I can never move now. Not that I'd be able to find something so well-located again, anyway.

I've been sick for going on two weeks, which meant no homemade bread this past week. On Sunday, my breadmaking day, I was too sick to even contemplate mixing, let alone kneading. I have, however, been having a lot of fun with soups. I tried Laurie Colwin's curried broccoli soup, which was pretty good and fairly easy to make, plus a ridiculously easy sweet potato soup: Bake some sweet potatoes until soft. Let cool a little and then peel, then put them in the food processor with a quantity of chicken or vegetable broth. Season with red pepper, cloves, and ginger. Very soothing.

As soon as my cough goes away and I can eat delicious dairy products again, I'm going to make some roasted autumn vegetable soup using one of the recipes I got last week at the Farmers' Market. The recipe sounds rather unhealthy so I'm going to make some alterations. I'll see how it goes.

Happy Hour at the Irish Lion last night with a bunch of people from the department. The Lion is not an ideal venue for this sort of thing because one sits at long tables and I invariably end up with a bunch of non-talkers. I rallied as best I could and brought out one of my favorite conversation starters: what was the first album you ever bought by yourself? (Mine was Jagged Little Pill, by Alanis Morisette, I think.) (Confidential to CLA: note carefully the "by yourself" part.) This was a very musical crowd and so that was quite effective.

Tonight I've got mountains of epistemology to go through. Maybe I will do it while sitting on my couch.

I am officially a middle-aged woman

Nothing else could possibly explain how excited I am about my new spice canisters. They're little aluminum canisters with clear lids, and they stick to the fridge! Pictures to follow!

Bed Bath and Beyond is truly a shrine to consumerism. Did you know there's such a thing as a "flavor injector"? You use it for shooting up your turkey with heroin flavor, I guess. Do you have any idea how many different kinds of spoon rests there are? I may have little magnetic canisters of tumeric and cloves, but at least I lay my dirty spoons on the cutting board (or sometimes, yes, the stovetop) like a normal person. Don't even get me started on trivets.

Also on my mall adventure I got a poster frame at Target. We now have art on our wall! I think the room looks nicer already. Irritatingly, my Klimt poster is a weird size and Target doesn't have frames to fit it. I guess I'm going to have to get it framed specially, which is annoying.

The Werewolf is giving a talk on Kierkegaard this afternoon, which I'm looking forward to - largely because the Werewolf has a very pleasant speaking voice and I've never heard him say more than ten words at a time before. There may be some subdued hijinks afterwards, which would be nice, although I'm a bit under the weather.

The Horse told me yesterday that he was thinking about whether I should use my real name when I start publishing, or whether I'd be better off with just initials. Apparently there's enough gender bias in philosophy that my girl-name might be a hindrance. Especially, he said, in fields like epistemology, logic, and metaphysics - "the hard stuff," as he put it. Maybe I should go with Ellis.

I just found out that a second X-Files movie is coming out this summer, which is way exciting. Not that I'm going to get my hopes up or anything, since the last season was pretty awful, but David Duchovny is at least going to be in it, so right away that's a start.

Darn those pesky tsetse flies!

As usual on Mondays, I am barely conscious, owing to a weekend of staying out late and waking up early, since you're supposed to sleep best if you wake up at the same time every morning and I like to get my weekend chores - marketing and bread baking - done by noon. Normally I have class on Monday afternoons, but today I did not, since my prof is out of town, and so I napped all through the time I would've had class. I did, however, go into the office this morning (what a grownup turn of phrase! And it's true: I went into my very own office, despite the presence of The Werewolf, my scary officemate) and turn out another draft of my analyticity paper. It is now in a form which could be turned in, should I slip into a coma until Wednesday afternoon, and this is comforting, though I will diligently continue to tweak it until the buzzer sounds.

Perhaps I should elaborate on that allusion to The Werewolf. He's writing a dissertation on Kierkegaard (amazingly the Blogger spellcheck has no problem with "Kierkegaard" so maybe someday when I'm a famous philosopher it will stop telling me my last name is "Neutered" or perhaps I meant "Neuterers" which is a new one) and is in the office ALL THE TIME, and never says a word, and every time I go in there I want to announce, "My name is on the door!" because I feel like I'm intruding. But it is silly and babyish to be afraid of my own office, so I'm sucking it up.

Oh, and I call him the Werewolf because he kind of looks like a blend of Oz-from-Buffy combined with my mental image of a young Remus Lupin (i.e. not like this). Plus he's just kind of lupine. (His girlfriend Kari is very cool and gave me a ride once.)

Um. Where was I? I just finished The Orange Tree, by Mildred Walker, which was pretty good - it is apparently kind of a modernization of Chekhov's Three Sisters and it's published by Nebraska University Press, which perhaps partially explains its occasionally jarringly bad editing. To be fair, the editor was trying to reconcile several different versions, as Walker apparently kept fiddling with it for years and years after it was rejected, but since this editor didn't feel any compunctions about inserting references to an orange tree so the title would make sense, you'd think she could've somehow smoothed some of those scene changes. I was constantly thinking I'd skipped a page.

And it's Columbus Day, which, despite its dubious political correctness, I kind of love, because when I was little, my grandparents would take me and Floss and our cousins on an outing every Columbus Day. We'd go to an orchard and each pick one apple, have lunch at a hotdog stand, go to this beach with lots of neat rocks and interesting driftwood and debris, and then on the way home stop at the Dollar Store, where we were each allowed to choose any item to buy. It was super great. (I've just dashed off a letter to them, since this made me think of it, so no need to tell me.)

Weekend Highlights, bullet-pointed and with a minimum of personal pronouns

• Went to the Farmers' Market, of course, which featured lots of flowers and way more crafts than usual, which was cool. Music, of course, and a butternut squash which will, in the fullness of time, become butternut squash risotto, and an overpowering sense of sun-drenched wellbeing
• Drew and inked several comic strips, which made me happy, as I hadn't drawn in a little while and I'm getting to the fun part of the story. Listened to a lot of Death Cab.
  
• Drank red wine and played Fictionary with a ton of amiable people at the lovely Susan's house. Talked probably way too much but at least got a few laughs. There was one word that I really didn't know, but we were almost done and I was bored, so I wrote "having to do with awesome robots" as my definition, and bluffed very convincingly, so that Sam, who didn't know what I'd written of course, wrote "what Emily wrote" as his definition
• Went to Mass, where we prayed that people who work with animals be kind and humane like St Francis of Assisi and that we all become closer to the Virgin Mary, and I'm down with both those things
• Baked three-flour bread, except that I forgot to buy soy flour yesterday, so I left my starter mixed with molasses, oil, and dry milk and ran to the store to get some, but they didn't have any, and of course by the time I got back it had begun to rise without flour so I just hastily threw in all the whole wheat flour I had and some white flour and hoped for the best. It rose like crazy but I haven't tried it yet.
• Chess with Value Theory Lad at the Spoon - I haven't played chess in years and I was never any good, but he's going to loan me a book, and oh look I think I just found a motivation to learn how to play.
  

Slowly but Surely, Fall Comes to Bloomington

Midwestern Weekend

I'm kind of compulsive, and sometimes this is good and sometimes it is bad. I always wish that I could put my need to stick to a schedule to good use, for instance, by ritualizing exercise so that I have to go for a five-mile run every Monday at 8 a.m., but this rarely works. Instead these rituals only seem to develop for activities which, though pleasant, are inconvenient when they cease to be optional. For instance, whether I need anything or not, I have to walk half a mile and back to the grocery store on Saturday morning, and when House comes back on next week I will have to go to the Student Union and hope I can commandeer one of the TVs near the Burger King. (There's never more than one person there at that time in the evening, and there are two TVs, so this should be do-able, but it irritates me that I don't have a choice in this matter. I actually bought a television exclusively to watch House and schlepped it all the way out here to the Midwest, but was, when it came to the point, too cheap to spring for cable, so it doesn't get any channels. It just sits in the living room and makes the place look lowbrow.)

For better or for worse, I have also developed a ritual of getting up early on Sundays and baking bread. This is a good thing, because I love having fresh bread, and store bought bread is either really expensive or not very good. And it's such fun to choose a different recipe each week and purchase small quantities of various flours at the Sahara Mart, and the kneading, and the thrill of watching it rise, and the pleasant, homey scent of baking bread. (This last only applies when I am not also scheduled to set the apartment on fire.)

This week's bread is a high-protein whole wheat loaf, made with soy flour. Since K and I eat so little meat (though we do drink more milk than you'd expect of 20something grad students), I felt the extra protein would not go amiss. I had a slice today for lunch, along with a bowl of Laurie Colwin's black bean soup, and it was quite good - nice crumb, good crust, and a pleasant wheaty flavor. But what I am really craving is sourdough: a daunting prospect.

Laurie Colwin has this to say about sourdough starters: "What with stirring them or using them once a week and taking them out for an airing and keeping them in the right place in the fridge... who needs a sourdough starter? You might as well get a dog." She gives a recipe in Home Cooking but states that the results were mixed and no one really liked it. (I love this about Home Cooking, that it includes recipes that don't really work and encourages the reader to have a bash anyway, but in this case it's not very helpful.) K's copy of The Joy of Cooking recommends undertaking a starter if you are "adventurous, persistent, and leisurely." I am not accustomed to having a recipe make demands on my character like this.

Anyway the only kind of sandwich K and I ever have is peanut butter and jelly, which would be rather nasty on sourdough bread, although I have an ongoing desire to roast a chicken. A cold chicken sandwich on sourdough would be very nice. I need a roasting rack and possibly a baster before this can happen, however.

In the meantime, I am enjoying polenta with black bean and corn salsa. Learning to cook is fun.