Archive | November, 2011

Gameplan For a Perfect Thanksgiving

23 Nov

One week ahead
Confirm guests and dishes they’re bringing. Pot-luck all the way, people!

8:00 am
Cuddly lie-in with the Hubbs and doggies.

8:15 am
Kick rowdy doggies out for disturbing lie-in.

10:00 am
Clean the house

  • dishes
  • tidy up
  • vacuum
  • clean bathroom
  • wipe tables/dust
  • make bedroom presentable for coats and bags. Because they have such high standards.

11:00 am
Prep

  • Quarter celery, onion, carrots, out in roasting pan
  • Cube bread
  • Slice fennel
  • Chop carrot, onion, sage
  • Peel & chop apples
  • Brown sausage
  • Trim green beans
  • Half and peel pearl onions

12:00 pm
Make cranberry sauce & vanilla bean whipped cream

12:30 pm
Do prep work dishes

1:00 pm
Light lunch, with pre-game mimosa

2:00 pm

  • Take organic, free range, hormone free, just like the pilgrims enjoyed it, turkey out of fridge & put in roasting pan
  • Preheat oven to 325°

2:15 pm
Cook sausage, fennel, and carmalized apple stuffing components and combine, set aside

3:00 pm
Bird goes into oven

3:30 – 4:00 pm
Guests arrive

3:40 pm
Put water on to boil for green beans

4:00 pm

  • Cover stuffing, pop into oven
  • Cook balsamic glazed green beans with pearl onions

4:30 pm

  • Turkey out of oven, on cutting board to rest
  • Turn oven to 400°
  • Start gravy

4:40 pm
Uncover stuffing

4:50 pm
Put beans into oven to warm

5:00 pm
Stuffing out of oven, carve turkey

5:15 pm
Sit down with family and enjoy a sumptuous feast with perfectly paired wine

6:00 pm
Start food-coma recovery process

6:30 pm
Take dogs for a walk to shake off the coma

7:30 pm
Eat homemade pumpkin and pecan pies with eggnog, courtesy of my middle sister.

8:30 pm
All guests go home, leaving hubbs and I to enjoy a nightcap and surreptitiously pick morsels of turkey out of the Tupperware.

9:30 pm
Enjoy an early night, courtesy of tryptophan.

Do you have a perfect plan for Thanksgiving, or are ya just gonna wing it? Have people over, or just family? What’s your perfect Thanksgiving plan?

Frozen Yogurt Makes Everything Better

23 Nov

I love trying new things, and I love to share the things I find that are awesome. So I’m introducing a new category here on BiRL, Raves and Reviews. I’m a positive person, so I’ll only review things I like. There are no sponsors, there are no kickbacks, so everything I write is my own, objectively biased opinion.

Yesterday I had a migraine, all day long. Last night I had an indulgence craving. When I get one of those, I usually head down the street to my neighborhood Trader Joes – or Whole Foods if I’m feeling saucy – and decide between a decent bottle of wine or a really good pint of ice cream. Last night, ice cream won and I brought home Double Rainbow’s Pomegranate Blueberry Frozen Yogurt. What does this have to do with a migraine? After four Aleve, an hour of resting my head, and kicking my noisy dogs out so I could have some peace and quiet, the relentless pounding only subsided after I savored this tub of creamy tartness.

I love frozen yogurt. Let me clarify, I love good frozen yogurt. With real yogurt. With active cultures. There is a lot of yogurt shops out there that pass off any old soft serve as fro-yo just to get the trendy nod.

I’d never tried Double Rainbow’s frozen yogurt, but I made frequent trips to Castro Tarts to pick up a scoop of their ice cream when I lived in the city. The pomegranate blueberry flavor was tart – surprisingly so. The kind of tart usually reserved for summer fruit sorbet. But once you get past the shock of the tart, yougurt-ey creaminess comes through and melts on your tongue in an incredibly satisfying bite. And at 120 fat-free calories in 1/2 cup, it’s an indulgence I can feel good about. It’s a perfect scoop for my palate because it perfectly combines my love of tart fruit flavors and the creamy texture of ice cream. This won’t be the last time this happy little pint graces my freezer.

No post tomorrow, happy Thanksgiving!

Why Facebook and I Are Not Friends

21 Nov

I am not on Facebook. It became a thing for me when I overheard my two sisters discussing a trip one of them had taken. “I didn’t know you went to San Diego for a week,” I said, to which one sister replied, “you’d know if you were on Facebook. That’s how I knew.” “Or I’d know if you would pick up the phone and actually call your sister!” I replied. I’d heard “you’d know if you were on Facebook” one too many times, so that day, not being on Facebook became a thing. And anyone who knows me knows that I don’t give up on things easily.

There are a million reasons why I should be on Facebook. For all intents and purposes, I am a prime candidate to be part of the Facebook generation. I have friends and family around the world, I’ve mentored high school students for eight years now, and we know how they grow up and graduate and move. But I just can’t bring myself to do it. I know myself really well, and if I let myself go I have no doubt that social media would replace actual communication as my main form of connecting with people. I’m an incredibly social person, and I like to be caught up and involved in the lives of those I love. Currently I do this by seeing them at church, at work, at Bible study, and reaching out when I haven’t seen them for a while. Not being on Facebook forces me to send a text, to make a phone call, to physically do something to reach out and be present in their lives. Sure, I miss things by not having access to their regular status updates, but when we get to talk in person it’s real. Just being on Twitter makes me feel like I’m getting caught up on my friend’s lives by reading their 140-character soundbites. But that’s not real connection.

Rachel of the hilarious MWF Seeking BFF wrote about the perils of falling for Facebook today, and it reminded me that I’d been meaning to write about this for a while, as I keep getting asked why I’m not on FB. “But you can catch up with people you knew in high school!” “But you can see all the things your friends like and get recommendations!” “But you can post updates and get instant feedback, which is really validating!” All good arguments, but you know what I say?

  • Anyone that I want to be in my life is in my life. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the people I see on a regular basis to spend an hour looking at the walls of old high school friends that I haven’t seen in years. That’s an hour that I could spend having coffee with a real friend, and building a foundation of personal face-to-face friendship that no virtual interaction will ever be able to replicate. Sure, I wonder from time to time what bygone friends are up to, but that’s what email is for. The benefit of keeping up with everyone I ever knew does not outweigh the cost it would have on my current friendships.
  • If I need a recommendation, I call a friend who has good taste and ask them about it. Often this results in a plan to get together to pursue whatever it was that I was calling about, a plan to get together for drinks soon to catch up, or at the very least a ten minute chat during which we personally update each other on our lives. Actual social interaction, people. Get into it.
  • I’ll admit it, I like to feel like people care about what I say and what’s going on in my life. I get excited every time a comment pops up on this baby blog of mine, or I get an @ response on Twitter. It’s validating. It says to me “I have thoughts, I have a voice, what I think and feel matters to people.” I have no doubt that it feels great to have people post messages on your wall on your birthday, or put up sympathetic emoticons if I post that I’m having a bad day. But I’ve noticed that that type of validation is a double-edged sword. My real life bff @MelissaMcAlpin tweeted recently “You know when you post something revealing on FB or twitter and nobody replies.. That’s like the webs version of an awkward silence.” And she’s exactly right. When we post we start looking to those things for validation and when we don’t get a response back it sucks. I’ve tweeted about a bad day and felt like I disappeared into the white-noise of the internet when all I got back was crickets. So maybe not being on Facebook means I’m missing out on regular feelings of validation, which I’ll be the first to admit I crave. But I’ll take getting less validation online, because I have friends who call me. Who text me at the last minute to see if I want to meet up. I get voice mails on my birthday from far away loved ones singing to me over the phone. I get invitations to things in person, usually prefaced with “hey, I know you’re not on Facebook, so I wanted to make sure you knew about this get-together I’m planning…” Would that all happen if I were on Facebook? Maybe, but I doubt it.

So Facebook and I are not friends. Maybe we will be one day, because I do see the value in that type of easy communication. (In fact, I’ll be posting a counter-argument tomorrow about why I might consider joining Facebook, because I’m masochistic enough to like being my own devil’s advocate.) But for now, I’m happy with my life and the friendships I’ve made and maintained the old-fashioned way: face-to-face.

So what’s your take on Facebook? Worth it or not? I know I’m in the minority, so I’d love to hear why you love it or choose to live without it.

Saturday Soundtack – Brought to You By Bad 80’s Annimation

19 Nov

introducing a new feature on BiRL: the Saturday Soundtrack! (Aren’t they all new features, this being a new blog and all? Oh, well.) I walk through life with a constant soundtrack playing in my head – yes, I am the star in my own movie, thank you for asking. In Saturday Soundtracks I’ll share what’s playing in my head right now. The music that makes me move, the tunes my toes are tapping to, the melodies that make memories…you get the idea. Hopefully you don’t think me schizophrenic after you see how varied the soundtrack of my life is. 🙂

Today’s Saturday Soundtrack goes out to my hubby, who is in Texas visiting his Ex-Pat bff. (Yes, Ex-Pat, because Texas is a different country.) I was trying to come up with the sappiest songs I’ve ever heard about missing someone, and this little gem from my childhood popped into my head. This also goes out to my mother, who taught me to love really bad Olivia Newton-John movies at a tender young age (remember when ONJ & John Travolta had matching mullets?). Oh, and you get a bonus of seeing some of the most cracked-out whimsical animation I’ve ever seen in a music video. Disney it is not. Enjoy!

“Don’t Walk Away” by Electric Light Orchestra, from the amazing, the timeless, Xanadu.

#23 Complete – I Love My Job!

18 Nov

We continue with our series of posts about at the things that were crossed off my list before this blog existed.


I added #23 – work at a job I love, or make the leap to self-employment – to The List when I was working at a job that I hated. It’s hard for me to say that because I don’t like to be so negative, but I really can’t sugar coat it, it was that bad. A trained monkey could have done what I did. 

I’ve had fantastic jobs for my whole working life, this one bad job aside. I lost a job that I loved because California’s schools have no money, and took a job in another district that was below my experience level just to have a job. When I was offered the position I called Aaron crying, because I knew I didnt want it, but we had a mortgage to pay. I convinced myself that it couldn’t be that bad and took it. My first day, after going through my ‘training’ to answer phones and the perils of the photocopier, I excused myself to the bathroom where I had a mild panic attack because I couldn’t believe that this was my life. I spent five months in that job; looking back, it’s true that I hated it, but it kept a roof over our heads and for that I am grateful.

Last January my good friend Brian suggested I try for a position at the private school he worked for. I got the job, and I was good at it. It was challenging, every day was different, and I was still working in education. What coulld be better?  I got my answer this past Spring. Before I left for my five-year anniversary with Aaron, our schools had our Spring programs which I got to watch and review. Thanks to my comments about the quality of hte singing, the Powers That Be at the top of our schools figured out that I had a background in music. Because of my experience on the corporate side of our schools, and my musical background, I came back from Hawaii to a brand new job offer. Now I get to work with teachers, teaching them how to teach their students to sing. I get to be in the classroom, working with students, improving teacher’s knowledge base. I make my own schedule, and every day is still different. While I still believe I was meant to teach (a feeling that is reinforced every time I start making a difference in a classes’ voices and all I want to do is stay with them forever), this is the best possible job that I never could have dreamed of myself. I say it all the time, I can’t believe they pay me to do what I do.

I never thought I’d be able to combine my love of teaching and music so soon. I prayed, so hard, for so long. I was unemployed, we ate through our savings, I worked a job that left me crying every night, moved to a new job when God opened the door, and was blessed more than I had hoped for or imagined. Thank you, Lord, for letting me cross #23 off of the list.

What was/is the best job you’ve ever had? Got any work horror stories? I want to hear them, so join the discussion!

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →