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Month: December 2020

LOL 2020: a year in review

LOL 2020: a year in review

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so it’s time for my year in review, which is actually really fun to do most years, but this year is doubly fun because WOW 2020.

first, let’s take a peek at what i wanted to see happen in 2020:

  1. so first on my list for years and years is take more photos. maybe instead of that as a goal, the goal should be to do something with the pics i take. like last year, an unexpected thing that happened was taking some wedding pics, but i don’t want to do that every year, yeesh. hmm. might have to think about this one.
  2. sit on my new couch. i’m sitting on it now. it’s glorious. this one will be easy.
  3. continue yoga every day. of all the things that i did in 2019, i think yoga every day was the best thing. i’ve got arm muscles, i look forward to spending at least 10 minutes on the mat, and it’s a great way to slow down, if even for 10 minutes. i highly recommend fightmaster yoga. lucky for you, she does a 30-day program at the first of the year every year, and this one is hatha yoga. check it out.
  4. travel! this has gotten easier, whether due to just more expendable cash or me just saying “olé losers” and going. luckily, my boss is super good about pushing professional development, so there’s a trip to florida in march for work. it might also be a black hills year, and i do want to go up the north shore again. it might also be a bwca year with my aunt rae and uncle greg!
  5. running goals? hmmm. earth day half is already registered for. i have a feeling we’re going to do ragnar again. and liz and i are already planning a DESTINATION RACE. destination races intrigue me to no end, so i finally sat down and looked at what destinations i would want to race at (no ultras or mountains for me, thanks). we settled on big sur in monterrey california (well, i settled on that – liz seemed to agree). the 2020 race was sold out by the time we checked it out, but we’re going to watch for registration for the 2021 11-miler, which should open in october. also, a sub-11-minute-mile 5k would be nice to hit this summer.
  6. do something interesting with nate! i actually like this one because something interesting with nate could be just a quick trip to the cities or it could be an excursion to who knows where. any time i get him out of the house means an interesting time with nate hahaha
  7. help out the earth. or rather, help out us humans who are seemingly hell bent on destructing our time on earth. like i’ve said before, is it wrong to want a clean earth, even if it DOESN’T stop climate change? seriously. so my goal this year is to really, diligently try to reduce my plastic use. that includes plastic bottles that are recyclable (plastic is a degradable recyclable, meaning it recycles into a lesser form of plastic, unlike glass or aluminum). (unfortunately, nate buys tons of drinks in plastic bottles; i don’t know if i should even try to get him to reduce his usage.) if i fail at reducing plastic, i will also try to reduce the amount of new items i buy (try to fix or buy used).
  8. perhaps in conjunction with #7, i will add on “write more” in #8. one of the things that helped me really get on the devils syrup bandwagon was to do research on it. if i research stuff about plastic use and a bunch of other keep a clean earth stuff, it would probably push me to do something about it. and while the whole “blog every day” resolution is nice, it just never works out like that. so i think just write is a better thing.
  9. be happy! i felt good about 40, and life is doing ok. let’s continue that trend!

well, it’s hard to realize your goals when there’s a global pandemic, a civil rights and justice resurgence, and a contentious, anxiety-inducing election. but rather than dive into those items, let’s review:

  1. take more photos and do something with them. well….. this sort of happened? i definitely did not take more photos than the year i hit all the state parks. i did rent a macro lens, which was glorious, and i took an awesome few pics up in the dark skies of northern mn and got the full milky way. i sold a few canvasses of said milky way pics. i didn’t do any wedding pics because there weren’t supposed to be any big gatherings this year, but that’s ok. so we’ll give this one a point. why not.
  2. i did, indeed, sit on my new couch. i am sitting on it now. point. on a related note, i am actually getting a replacement couch due to the fact that the fabric has a weird line going through it on the back. but, i am sitting on it. i like it.
  3. yoga every day. i didn’t do yoga every day, but i did do yoga quite a bit. i would say 9/10 days, i did yoga. i even bought myself a nice, cushy, expensive yoga mat. there was some sad news on my yoga mat though. my yoga teacher, lesley fightmaster, died unexpectedly about a month ago. i never met her in person, but i did see her almost every day, and it’s still a shock. her yoga teachings live on, though.
  4. travel? ha! LOL. 2020, wow. so the week before i was supposed to go to florida for my conference, the pandemic basically hit the US. i had plane tickets, hotel reservations, tickets for universal studios purchased, jane was set to come with, etc. etc. and then covid. #thankscovid #thankskim so there was no florida, no black hills. i did go to the boundary waters in august, which was super fun! went to the fake derry reunion at leech lake, and then camped at the state park in southeastern MN. other than that, there was no traveling to be had, other than visiting my parents a couple times. i haven’t even been out of state this year. #thanks2020
  5. running goals were SQUASHED. SQUASHED. #thanks2020. i was signed up for the earth day half, and it was canceled. signed up for ragnar trail, and it was canceled. planned on signing up for big sur 2021 with liz, and that was already canceled back in may. i ran NO organized races this year, which is a bummer. sure, i RAN. that was no problem. but a race is something different; the energy of other people around just makes it an exciting run. so no point on this one. not for lack of trying.
  6. the most interesting thing i did with nate this year was make him come to charlie’s 5-yr cheatin’ the reaper celebration. we stayed overnight in rochester and then headed to my parents’ house the next day. it wasn’t a fantastic adventure, but it was something different! i’ll take the point for this one.
  7. if there was one good thing that came from a lockdown from the pandemic, it was to show people how the earth recovers from people. that was good news for the environment. on a personal front, because pandemic, i did not focus on my plastic use more than usual, which is something i still need to do. however, i drove less, contributing less CO2 to the air. instead of disposable masks, i use cloth ones. i baked a crapton of bread, reducing the plastic breadbags that i purchased (flour comes in recylable/compostable paper bags). so many weird byproducts of a pandemic.
  8. i did not write more. i did not read more. you’d think with staying home and loafing around, i’d’ve found the time for that, but nope. i did do some research into environmental stuffs, but it was pretty minimal. i didn’t even manage to finish kablpomo, which was the first time i’d ever not finished it. sad. no point for me on this.
  9. this was a tough year to be happy. there was a pandemic. there was a contentious election and elected officials who don’t want to do their jobs (mcconnell…). there were fires in australia and the US and there were protests against unnecessary killings and protests against wearing masks for the public good and protests against protests, and people who you thought you knew saying hateful things against groups of people who deserve no such hate, and hypocrisy of “just comply” except when it’s inconvenient for you and the bar you like to frequent, and people who lost their jobs, and people whose jobs didn’t pay enough for their essentialness, and people juggling a job and teaching their kids, and people losing their homes, and WWIII almost happening – twice, and people making insane amounts of money while others were making none, and through all this a virus spreading and people dying in hospitals alone and people on ventilators and people with long-lasting odd symptoms of a virus, and video chats/meetings cannot replace face-to-face interaction because we are a social species, and a year that just wouldn’t quit.happiness was hard to find in 2020.but there were some good things: dolly parton donated $1million to find a covid vaccine. clinics have finally embraced the video appointment. people spent a lot of time outdoors in the trees. we baked a boatload of sourdough bread. i got an awesome tattoo. we decided to not glorify parts of history that oppressed swathes of the populace (and instead put it in a museum, as is appropriate). as noted above, the earth showed what could happen if we pulled back on pollutant output. we found ways to celebrate. cities closed streets for people to dine outdoors. india planted 250 million trees. the internet didn’t crash on us when we needed it the most. a lot of us realized that we have a lot of work to do yet on racism. i painted my kitchen cabinets with help from liz. as a country, we managed to not run out of toilet paper. and i quit facebook.

there it is, year in review 2020. it has been, simultaneously, the longest and shortest year ever. not the worst year personally, but probably the worst collectively during my rememberable lifetime. the apocalypse came, and people couldn’t even be bothered to wear a mask. 2021 resolutions to come.

happy christmastide – calling all calling birds!

happy christmastide – calling all calling birds!

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what the heck IS a calling bird? aren’t all birds calling birds?

time for an etymology lesson!

turns out, the calling bird line in the 12 days of christmas song is a relatively new revelation. the line for 100+ years prior to its adoption was four COLLY birds.

the song was first published around 1780, which means it was probably a spoken poem or song long before that. and the first publications called the day four birds, colly/collie birds.

forget a calling bird – what the heck is a COLLY bird???

colly comes from old english for the cord coal – describing coal dust, the color of coal, etc. and in a 1565 translation of metamorphosis, here’s the line that described a raven:

as thou thou prating raven white by nature being bred, hadst on they fether justly late a coly colour spred.

but, where the four birds supposed to be ravens? more likely the colly bird in the song is supposed to be a blackbird.

BUT! the mystery doesn’t stop there. in the past, the line has also been four canary birds, four colored birds, and four curley birds. it’s even been a tole of birds?

good news bad news, though: in 1909, a tune was set in publication to the poem or song, and the calling birds were put in print. however, it took a while for it to catch on. it wasn’t until the mid 1900s that calling became the preferred word, and in the 1970s, it was the much more common word.

unfortunately, the calling bird is much more ambiguous than the colly bird! even the american ornithological society thinks it should be a colly bird. so let’s chalk this confusion up to frederic austin, whose musical arrangement we all now know, to not transcribing the song correctly.

and bring back the colly bird!

happy 3rd day of christmas! got your french hens?

happy 3rd day of christmas! got your french hens?

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i didn’t eat any chicken today, but i did eat a lot of eggs over christmas eve and day. in general, i don’t eat a ton of eggs, but over the past week, i think i’ve gone through three dozen. if i keel over from a heart attack in the next week, we’ll know why.

exhibit a:

i made my buche de noel, in which i use eggs to make the meringue mushrooms (delicious little morsels) as well as the sponge for the swiss roll. overall, i think i used a half a dozen eggs for the yule log dessert. here’s the recipe and here’s a video of me making it!

exhibit b:

of course what is christmas without egg salad sandwiches? someone at worked asked me what was on the menu for christmas, and i said the main course was cheese, of course. which, it is. i have so much cheese now. but then i added egg salad, and she was like, what? egg salad? and i realized that christmas is basically all about grazing foods. so yes, i made a batch of egg salad with 16 eggs. yes, 16-egg egg salad. i couldn’t find festive bread, so i slathered a heaping helping on a slab of marble rye bread. xmas eve supper was basically egg salad with a side of bread, cheese, olives, and smoked oysters. then dessert from exhibit a with vanilla ice cream.

exhibit c:

christmas breakfast was eggs benedict! how glorious is homemade hollandaise?? it was delicious. the hollandaise called for 6 egg yolks, then i made eggs to go on the eggs benny (over easy fried, not annoying poached). by the way, if there is leftover hollandaise, just throw it out because it is disgusting the next day.

exhibit 1.a:

forgot this one. i made so many christmas cookies that called for eggs. the last cookie i made was a batch of macarons, which calls for a couple of egg whites. so that was in on my egg usage as well.

i still have about 10 eggs left in the fridge, along with maybe two more helpings of egg salad (that should be finished up tomorrow). on a related, side note, santa brought nate a new egg frying pan, which will be so nice to have. right now we have all stainless steel, which is great for everything but eggs. good job, santa.

christmas was ok. i had to buy stuff for my own sock, which isn’t cool. if you want to read something heartwarming and that causes holiday introspection, i implore you to take a look at this twitter thread!


on christmas day, i watched the three pirates of the carribbean movies. today and yesterday i watched the three mighty ducks movies. and i am going to watch the christian bale batman trilogy tonight and tomorrow. it’s a trilogy holiday this year, i guess.

OH and i watched soul on disney+, which i encourage everyone to watch. i would venture to guess that it’s not really a children’s movie. sure, it’s animated, but dang pixar sure knows how to turn on the emotional spigot.

in which i finally have a video of how to make a macaron

in which i finally have a video of how to make a macaron

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several of my readers have benefited from my thing about trying out obscure, results-driven baking, which has included such weirdos as the buche de noel, spatchcocked turkey, and last but not least, the macaron cookie (not to be confused with the macaroon, a coconut heap).

after two or three recipes and watching a youtube video on the proper macaronage (the technique to get the feet to do their thing), i found one that worked for me. so first, the recipe, because we all know how annoying it is to read someone’s life story and 40 million food sponsor ads just to get to the recipe:

[amd-yrecipe-recipe:1]

some BIG TIPS tp make your macarons better:

  1. buy a kitchen scale and weigh all your ingredients. my recipe has no measurements, just weights. (this also helps find package weights so you can buy your postage at home and stick it in the mailbox.)
  2. once you start, you’ve gotta go. boom boom boom – all things happen right after another, especially with the eggs whites beating and making the sugar syrup.
  3. you will need a thermometer to watch the temperature of your sugar syrup.
  4. if your feet suck, no biggie. still tastes the same!
  5. make sure your filling is on point. i’ve just got the recipe for the base cookie, so you can customize flavors how you wish. my favorite is adding lemon zest and extract to the cookie, then having a lemon curd and lemon cream cheese filling. my most recent batch was peppermint mocha.

on a related note, other items that have helped me in the kitchen:

  1. a good knife
  2. an electric knife sharpener
  3. a LARGE jellyroll pan. 18×24?

anyway, the technique for making macaron is basically making a meringue and then mixing it with sugar and almond flour. i tried a straight up meringue with eggs and sugar, then found that a swiss meringue (sugar syrup instead of just sugar) makes a better macaron.

one of the things that took a couple tries was figuring out the consistency of the batter. i looked at the macaronage method, which is beating the batter against the side of the bowl, and read somewhere that your batter should be the consistency of magma. once i figured those things out, i liked the results of the feet of the macaron better.

because the feet is what the macaron is mostly about! it’s this little lift in the bottom of the cookie where the air puffs out and makes a little holey base.

and i have FINALLY made a video of the process! here’s the short process, then watch the sped up video.

  1. line your cookie sheets with parchment paper. i use one large and one medium.
  2. sift flour and powdered sugar
  3. measure out egg whites and throw into mixer to come to soft peaks
  4. once there, add sugar, whisk to stiff peaks
  5. while that’s whisking, make sugar syrup
  6. pour syrup slowly into meringue while it’s whisking, then let it keep going for another 10ish mins
  7. during this time, mix the rest of your egg whites with the flour/sugar mix. it’ll look pasty beige. yum.
  8. mix/fold the meringue into the beige paste with a spatula, then add in flavorings and food coloring
  9. then macaronage until magma consistency
  10. put into a piping bag and pipe circles onto the cookie sheets
  11. let it sit while your oven comes to 320º
  12. put in oven for 10-20 mins
  13. check if done by moving the cookie around and see if the foot moves easily with the cookie
  14. let them cool, then match up two the same-ish size to make little sandwich fillings with your filling of choice!

here is a 3-minute quicklapse of macaron making!

decorating cookies

decorating cookies

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i have no patience for decorating sugar cookies. i thought i would try out the outline then flood method for cookies. i also found a fantastic recipe that holds the shape of the cookie cutter. i was doing well until i got to the decorating the tree part. i should have just left them green!

i mean, these are pretty awesome for being baked! the recipe called for cornstarch instead of a rising agent.

but yeah, after the flooding of the green trees, “decorating” was not a good result.

this took forever! and i have snowflakes and stars left to do! but, lucky for you, i put together a speed video of my decorating process so you can vicariously live through my decorating moments. or minutes. hours, days, decades. i don’t know how long it took me to do these awful looking trees. gah.

gnarly blister

gnarly blister

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when i was 2 or 3 – i don’t know exactly except i don’t think liz was around – we lived in a drafty farmhouse with questionable heating. we had a wood stove in the kitchen, which meant we spent a lot of time in the kitchen during the colder months. since we spent time in the living room too (with the 5 channels on TV and the best record player ever), my parents had a kerosene heater that stood in the corner. the bedrooms were chilly.

one evening, i was being 3 years old and dancing around the living room like a 3 year old should, and i came in for the big finale – TADA – and placed my hand on the top of the heater! oh, man.

i spent the evening with my hand in ice water in our very-70s-esque mixing bowl and watching donald duck holiday specials on tv.

so, it should come as no surprise that i ended up pouring hot water over my knuckles this past weekend! cleaning the microwave comes with some serious side effects. anyway, my blister’s pretty gnarly!

2020 – fails and wins

2020 – fails and wins

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i feel like this title is more in tune with my year in review, so perhaps i’ll revisit. but i just wanted to say that i was a total fail on on kablpomo – i did not blog every day. i did blog most days during november, but not every day. in the same vein, i think i may not hit my goal of reading 55 books this year, which is really discouraging because it’s a stinking PANDEMIC and i’ve got nothing else to do! eyeroll. i should be killing the reading, but instead i’m killing the doomscrolling on twitter and foreverwatching on netflix.

alas.

(i HAVE been hitting baking goals that i never made, i guess. so there’s that)

nate and i just celebrated our 15th anniversary – who knew! we didn’t do anything for it, but it did happen. i wanted to convince him to go to some place fancy to eat, but everything is shut down. thanks pandemic. #thankskim. next year! i swear, once this vaccine is on its way to mass delivery, it’s gonna be one big partaaaay. until then, i’ll wear my mask and stay mostly home. what a (necessary) drag.

christmas is going to be interesting. i’m actually think i’m going to start wearing my fancy clothes all the time. zoom call? put on a party dress. working from home? wear a long cloak and fancy hat. maybe get a bird of prey to hang out on your arm. what’s stopping us? we all wore yoga pants for 10 months; how about we class it up a bit?

speaking of the holiday, i’m going to work on baked goods this weekend, then next weekend it’ll be tree time. i’ve taken down the fall decor, and i’m mid-respite til it’s time to pull out the festive indoor decor (outdoor decor is going full force).

that’s all i got.