Occasional forays into thought

Well, I have a couple moments in which I can't really be doing anything else at the moment, so let me tell you about the food I made the other night.
I hadn't had any real MEAT for a while, so I got some when I saw Safeway had some good stuff for 1/2 off. I felt like doing something different from the standard salt/pepper/basil/wine/yadda/yadda that I usually do. So, looking around, I lighted on some peaches in the closet. Sounded interesting. Threw those on the meat, along with some honey, molasses-style syrup, red wine, and..I think that was all to start. Cooked it about 40 minutes (should have pulled at 25-30 - got weller than I wanted), and it tasted *alright*, but was a little blander than I wanted. So, while the rice finished cooking, I threw some Worchester sauce in, a little soy sauce, basil, salt, pepper, and some cardamom, and put it back in the hot oven for about 10-15 minutes. Just letting it set like that for a little while dramatically improved the flavor, much more kicky. Kind of like a duck a la orange sauce kind of flavor. I think cardamom is one of the best spices. I actually put it in one of my most recent poems. Check it out.
So, I have another hunk of beef to cook, but I'm thinking I'll do it more standard. Cook it up, cut it up, freeze it up - then I don’t have to cook so much.
Made some interesting egg salad/tuna salad the other day too. To make it a little different, after I did the standard Miracle Whip/mustard/relish mixture, I added a splash of Tabasco, some chili powder, and some dill. Pretty good, actually. Still have a little bit of that left in my fridge.
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In other news, the poetry page is slowly coming along. Added a counter, guestbook, mail-back feature, my pic (which doesn't always come up for some reason - might need to relink), and have a total of seven of my poems listed on there now. Soon, I want to make a more enhanced menu, and eventually make a flash-style portal on my Stanford site that will direct visitors to my various pages and blogs. It's a slow process. Amazing how long it can take to post a poem, even when the template is all worked out. I guess it's the addition of new buttons on the page before it that take time, plus changing regular text so that it will come out how you want it to in HTML. Actually, just found some new freeware that might help me with that, so that I don't have to go through and add the *br* function at the end of every line. We'll see if it helps or not. I still think the best freeware I've found is SlickWare, which I have the link for on my "fun" blog.
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I think it's just about time for dinner, or at least church, so I'm going to sign of. Parents are down here this weekend for Stanford's Parent's Weekend thing, so dad went to hear Sapolsky speak on middle age today. Probably going to hear some a cappella tomorrow. Sunday have a senior class bruncheon at Scott's seafood. Should be good. Actually though, I just need to be working on schoolwork. Papers are all coming due, and are coming out of my ears. C'est la vie.

Ciao ;)

Woo Woo, I finally got a couple poems and linked pages working at my new poetry site. Just one old and one new one for now, but since I got the template worked out with margins and colors and backgrounds and font sizes and stuff, it will be fairly easy to add more from now on. I am making my digital presence known. Watch out world!
Once again, the new site it is swimminglessons.bravehost.com. I'll put a regular link to it from here later. I do have a direct link from my fun blog though. Cheerio mates.

(Note - strange sign off because it is really later than the tag says - I reserve the right to alter the post time to protect the innocent and insomniac)

Just saying goodmorning before I go to bed. The html bug has got me good now, and I working on starting another page, one where I will be able to post my poetry. Just a skeleton at the moment, but the site is swimminglessons.bravehost.com, and hopefully I'll be able to get it up and running in a few weeks. Anyway, just a little post.

Well, just trying something new. Wanted to see if I could post pictures on here, specifically ones that are clickable to get a larger image. We'll see what happenes. What you should be seeing is a small picture from Valentine's day, when I had lunch with my neighbor Nina, a friend from Shelter, Lisa, and my mom, at a great little French restaurant in Walnut Creek. Not going to write much now, except that the food was good. I had Petrale Sole, escargot for an appetizer, and some kind of wonderful orange crepe cake creation for dessert. French lemonade is pretty good too, surprisingly, since I don't like lemonade. -----I guess it all works. Will do more later when I have the time

I thought one month was a long time in between blogs. Guess it was a little longer this time. And so much has happened in the interim - where do I begin. Let's see...Christmas break was good, but like it always is, it was too short. Oh, and I had to move to a different apartment too, with like only three days to move. I STILL haven't gotten everything put back into a designated place yet. Everything is slightly smaller in this new place, so nothing goes exactly where it went in the old place.
School started alrigh - taking Aggression with Bandura, Observation of Children with Jeanne Lepper, Principles and Practices in Care of the Dying with Riordan, Advanced Poetry with Gaby Calvacoressi, and Poetry and Poetics with Jenkins. All good classes, but reading is ... shall we say difficult to keep up with? It's a lot like when I took my swimming class at DVC. Hold my breath, kick, push, and struggle to the other side, take a breath, and do it again. Actually, I decided to take the name ofmy first book from that. I think "Swimming Lessons" will be a good title. It's a lof of fun in Gaby's class, and I have been going crazy with all the poetry that has been wanting to come to me recently. Some real kick-ass kind of stuff. Really growing in how and what I write. We are doing author's first books as a theme, which has been interesting. one book though was fairly disturbing. It was about this guy's experiences as a child, being molested by his brother, and then it just goes on from there. When I first read it I had to take it in chunks 'cause it was too disturbing. But, he came to class, and I can see better what he was doing now that I have seen and talked with him. I'm not going to do a persona peom of something like that, but I am exploring a lot of other new avenues. One thing that, funnily, seems to have been comig up a fair bit lately is biblical themes, even from non-religious people in the class. I decided to catch that coat tail, took a little hint from Teare's book title, and went out on an adventure. Something inspired by Song of Solomon and C. S. Lewis' story "Till We Have Faces," which is a mythical retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche. It is a really fun poem, and decently written, if I may say so.
So, poetry is going fairly well, though I am not looking forward to reciting 50 lines next week. I am going to do them from Kunitz's "Wellfleet Whale," which I like, but I just don't like recitation. I am struggling at the moment with a research paper for my aggression class, and I also have a research paper coming due in my child observation class. Thought that would be one of my easier classes, but it actually is quite demanding. Being with the children is rewarding though. I feel like I am finally starting to settle in there, and I think the children are startiing to like me.
Shortly after I got back to school, second weekend I think, had the winter retreat with Chi Alpha. (Check out pics at collegeretreat.org) I didn't like that it was up in Tahoe, but there was a good turnout and God really showed up. Through Shaowei, He spoke some things to me that I really had been needing to hear. Just trying to live in them now. Also, I read two books over break, "Wild at Heart," and ... I'm totally blanking on the other one...it was really good too. My memory is really frustrating. I forget people's names, people I know really well, if I don't see them for a couple weeks. Studying I do right before tests, and I still don't remember. Well, that's ot true. I know the stuff, but I just can't recall the words that I want, so it's the same as if I couldn't remember them. Frustrating.
I finally did ALL my dishes the other day. I REALLY hate washing dishes by hand, and so I have a bad habit of letting them pile up. Of course it's always right when I have a lot of school due that I decide to do them. At least my sink was clean for a day. Starting to fill up again though, have to eat every day, pretty much. Going to try to do them tonight when I come home from Chi Alpha, but I do have a bunch of reading to do for poetry tomorrow, so we'll see.
As always, God is faithful with me and my finances. I haven't been able to get ahead for a good long while, but I always have enough. Just barely sometimes (like about four dollars left in my checking after sending out my last round of bills), but enough. The trick is moving the faith I have in that to the other areas of my life. I'm working on it, and making progress I think. Yeah...I see it happening. It doesn't happen overnight though.
Well, this seems to be getting insanely long, s I think I'm going to have to nip it in the bud. I guess I'm making up in quantity what I lack in frequency. Catch ya'll later. Or, as I like to sign off my AIM coversations...C-YA :)