I’m fat. I know it. I’m not ignoring the fact that my weight is incredibly unhealthy and probably will cause a myriad of problems with my organs and glands if I don’t rectify it sooner rather than later. I haven’t been living under a rock, so I’ve read all the studies showing how much obesity costs in the long run in healthcare costs and how life expectancy suffers for those who are unhealthy. I’m lucky so far that I haven’t been diagnosed with diabetes or any number of other disorders that afflict the obese.

Body acceptance is a way of telling myself that I am not a worthless piece of shit. It’s a way of accepting that this is how I am at this moment, and that I am a worthwhile human being, even though I haven’t made the best choices for myself in the last seven years or so. This wasn’t an overnight journey, and I know that. So, I am endeavoring to accept my body for what it is. It is a reflection of the last seven years of my life, and the choices that I made during those seven years. I  can’t deny that it happened, but I can choose to try not to hate myself for it. Hate and self-loathing in the past have only led m into a deeper spiral of poor decisions. It’s hard to decide to do anything positive for yourself when you hate how you look and think you’re worthless because you can’t manage to make good and healthy choices.

So, I have chosen to embrace body acceptance. I am embracing myself for what I am and also for what I can and will be. I’m making better choices for myself and for my future. I am a worthwhile human being despite my fat. I am beautiful and feminine. I am also obese. That last bit? That’s the one that has to go. The rest can stay. But I’m accepting the obesity along with the rest of it. They say the first step toward recovery is admitting that you have a problem. I’ve already done that. Now I’m remembering that beneath the problem is a person. That person is a human being just like any other. She’s one who has problems with portion control, a penchant for junk foods and a massive sweet tooth. Yep. Those are there, too. I’m me, and I’m learning to accept my bad along with my good.

What this message of personal body acceptance should not be misconstrued as is fat apology. I am not making excuses for why I got fat. I got fat because I made bad decisions. I am not saying that obesity is good in any way, shape or form. I have experienced many hardships as a result of being obese. I can’t shop in regular stores and half the time have to shop online. This leads to headaches for returns if things don’t fit or if the wrong item is sent. It’s not fun, let me assure you. I have to have a seatbelt extender on an airplane and in most theaters, I spend at least 30% of my attention trying not to encroach on anyone else’s space. It’s not fun, and I’ve ruined a number of situations for myself by sheer merit of being fat. I am not unapologetically fat. I understand that my fat has ramifications for myself as well as for others.

Fat apology has a tendency to be somewhat abrasive. It’s fat people fighting back against the public shaming that many of us have endured for (often) years and years. I’m not saying it’s okay to react in such a way, but it’s similar to other groups reacting negatively, defensively and abrasively to similar situations. These people have become so sick of being shamed for their fat that they have decided to buck the trend and instead of fighting against it, they accept it. They say, “It’s okay to be fat. It’s my choice after all, isn’t it?” I can’t get behind this mentality, even though I can understand some of the reasoning behind it. It is a form of body acceptance, but not, in my opinion, a very healthy one.

It’s not easy to be fat. Obesity rates are rising exponentially in western civilizations. We are getting fatter faster and younger. There is a huge backlash against those who are fat, as if we are somehow mentally deficient. Most of us have an unhealthy relationship with food; that much is obvious. The fat shaming that tends to go on from people who are thin either by their own volition (hard work in the form of exercise and calorie restriction) or by the blessing of biology does not help most of us abolish this unhealthy relationship with food. Teasing me or ridiculing me because I’m fat really only makes me feel worse about myself. As I feel worse about myself, I feel less like I’m worth the effort it would take to change the cycle of obesity. And then I get fatter. This tactic is not helping people. Walking around degrading fatties and teasing people who are fat is ignorant. Who are you to know what these people are doing?

I am obese. Yep. But in the last month, I’ve changed my diet and begun to exercise. I’ve started drinking more water and keeping an eye on the nutrients that I take in. If  I were to pass someone on the street, he or she might choose to ridicule me for being fat without knowing the changes that I’ve made. The fat didn’t go on quickly, so I know it won’t come off quickly. It’s a slow process, particularly since I’m actively trying not to over-fatigue myself or injure myself. Many of the fat people who are shamed could be making poor decisions. They may have already started making the change. Perhaps they’ve changed from a diet of fast food and junk to one involving lots of fresh vegetables and lean meats. Maybe they’ve already lost 20 pounds. There’s no way for a stranger to know that.

The looks that come with being fat are not easy to take. It’s embarrassing to have someone see me and cringe, as if I am a behemoth made of fat and ugliness, as if there are no redeeming qualities about me. I know there are, and the stranger does not, of course. But what if I were to look at them with the same disgust? That’s not okay. Of course it’s not okay. I don’t know them, or their story, just like they don’t know mine. The only part of my story that they know is that I’ve made some unhealthy choices about food and that I’m not, perhaps, as active as I should be. The very idea that a person deserves the right to judge me for that without knowing me is offensive. The fact that these people can judge me and think that I’m not doing anything for myself or that I think the fat is okay or even great is offensive. The very idea that body acceptance is the same as fat acceptance is offensive to me.

I am accepting my body in its current form. I accept it for all of its flaws and for all of its fat. I acknowledge that I am unhealthy. I acknowledge that my unhealthiness has ramifications for others. I am beautiful despite these things. My body is okay the way it is, but it can be much, much better. From here forward, I am making the decision to do better for myself and my body for the sake of longevity and a more active lifestyle. It’s hard to be active after not being active for so long, so I’m taking baby steps toward being able to walk around Walt Disney World all day without feeling like I’m ready to keel over at the end of the day.

My body is okay the way it is. It could be much better, and it will get much better. I’m awesome the way I am. And now it’s time to become even more awesome.

This post is not about ladybugs.

This particular family friend used to give my dad the same gift every Christmas – a shoebox wrapped in lovely holiday paper (she even individually wrapped the lid and bottom so that it could stay pretty all year) filled with almond roca. I freaking loved that stuff, but of course it was for my dad so I couldn’t have it very often. Usually just on Christmas and other holiday-type occasions that she felt like making it for. It wasn’t often.

After I moved out on my own, I realized I wouldn’t be seeing her as often and therefore would not get to partake in chocolate-toffee-almondy goodness. What followed was natural: I would find out how to make my own.

I found a recipe… somewhere. I don’t even know where I found it. I’ve been making it for about six years, though, and certainly am not straying from this recipe now.

Ingredients

1lb real butter
2 cups granulated white sugar
2 Tbsp light corn syrup
6 Tbsp water
1 cup finely chopped almonds
1 (11.5oz) bag milk or semi-sweet chocolate chips

Directions

Melt butter in a medium soup pot. While butter is melting, chop up almonds and toast them in a pan. (Alternatively, buy pre-sliced almonds and crush them in the bag before putting them in the bag; really saves time.)

Note: Once the almonds are toasted, I like to put them through a sifter or strainer to remove most of the larger pieces but keep the small bits aside to sprinkle on top at the end. This is totally optional as it is mostly decorative.

Once butter is melted in the pot, add sugar, corn syrup and water. Keep cooking the mixture, stirring constantly until it reaches hard crack temperature and turns the color of a brown paper bag. Remove from heat and stir in the almonds. Transfer to a cookie sheet (with edges) and spread it across the sheet until it is evenly distributed.

Let the candy cool for a few minutes (to harden) and then begin sprinkling chocolate chips across the top. (I like the mini chips; they are easier to distribute and the chips melt faster.)  Use a spatula to spread the chocolate over the surface as the chips melt. Once it is spread out, sprinkle the reserved almond bits across the top. Let cool at room temperature until candy is hardened and chocolate has solidified. It may take up to 12 hours for this to happen. (The candy can be put into the fridge or freezer to help it cool faster, but this will change the texture and may prevent the chocolate from staying solidified at room temperature.)

Some notes:

• I prefer unsalted butter just in general. I doubt this has much impact if any on the candy, but it’s what I use.
• I like the mini chocolate chips because it’s easier to get them spread out over the candy, and as such get a much more even coating of chocolate.
• Humidity is a bitch for this recipe. I’ve ruined more than one batch of candy because I didn’t take the humidity of the day into consideration. This wasn’t as much of a problem in Portland but has been a problem more than once in Cleveland.

I love this recipe. I usually only make it when I know I can share it with others, otherwise I end up eating a lot of candy in a short period of time. Not so good on the waistline. It has gone over very well at more than one potluck at work, and it makes a nice gift during the holidays.

Calorie content? Hell if I know. I’m not sure I want to know right now. If I did the work to figure it out, I might never make this candy again. Where’s the fun in that?

Ingredients

1 lb ground turkey (alternatively: ground beef or stewing beef cut into bite-size pieces)
2 cans kidney beans (light and dark together give it a nice color texture)
2 bell peppers, large dice
1 large onion, large dice
2 cans diced tomatoes
1 cup frozen corn
3 Tbsp chili powder
1 tsp cayenne pepper (or to taste)
1 tsp ground cumin

Directions

1. Cook ground turkey. Set aside.
2. Sautee chopped onion and pepper in the pan with the beef drippings. Drain pan.
3. Combine kidney beans, diced tomatoes, corn, cooked veggies, meat and spices in a large pot. Bring mixture to a gentle boil, then turn the temperature down to low/medium-low to simmer. The longer it simmers, the more flavor the chili will have.

Note: If the chili looks too thick after it is initially combined, water or stock can be added to thin it. It will continue to thicken as it simmers.

Serves 8.

My dad always serves cornbread with his. I’ve made mine and served pieces of french bread with it, that’s good as well. Most of the time I eat it with a bit of cheese mixed in and a dollop of sour cream, no bread necessary.  A serving of the chili is about 250 calories, which is not so unreasonable, considering the serving size is approximately 1.5 cups. It’s a very decent amount of food for a meal!

In reality, this is probably nothing like my dad’s chili. It certainly didn’t taste the same as the chili I had last time I visited my dad. The thing with this chili is that it changes. I’ve yet to make the exact same chili twice, and I’m sure he hasn’t either. Any modifications that you fancy making to the recipe would be perfectly fitting with the spirit and history of this chili. Go to town, and I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I have.

1 lb ground turkey
2 cans kidney beans (Kuner’s no salt added)
2 bell peppers, large dice
1 large onion, large dice
2 cans diced tomatoes (Hunt’s no salt added)
1 cup frozen corn
3 Tbsp chili powder
1 tsp cayenne pepper (or to taste)
1 tsp ground cumin

The most heated topic on the MFP board is regarding “starvation mode.” There are people who believe that all women, regardless of height, weight or body type, should be eating a minimum of 1200 calories, and men should eat no fewer than 1500. This is, of course, one of those general rules for which there are always exceptions. Obviously someone who is 4’11″ would not need the same amount of fuel as someone who is 5’11″. A person with a small frame would need less fuel than someone with a bulky frame. But this is a good rule of thumb for beginners to pursue. It can be difficult to ascertain without the assistance of a licensed nutritionist and doctor how much food one should eat per day to accomplish weight loss. And, let’s face it, bodies are not mathematically perfect. What might work for me one day is not necessarily going to work the next day or long term. It’s just how it goes.

This 1200/1500 baseline is in place so that people can avoid going into so-called “starvation” mode. This is when your body stops consuming fat and instead stores it, because it is not getting enough nutrients and believes it is heading into a time of less available food. As such, it will put up stores just in case things get worse. This does happen to some. It can stall weight loss or even create weight gain, even though people are eating relatively little food. What can also occur when eating too few calories is that the body will consume fat and muscle, thereby giving weight loss, but the metabolism has slowed to a point of being able to accommodate the smaller amount of calories. Then, when these folks who have been eating so little start to eat an amount that should help them maintain the weight loss, it piles back on. The body has been sabotaged into believing that this new amount of food is excess, and therefore stores it as fat for the next time that food is scarce. It’s a biological response to aid in ultimate survival. Our brains might know that we’re well-off enough to be able to get a meal next time we’re hungry, but the bits of the body that control the weight loss are not that “smart.” They do what they’re biologically programmed to do.

We can’t know at what point our body is going to start storing instead of burning. Height and weight are a good way of estimating how much a person should eat for weight loss, but all the same it’s difficult to know where that line is. Even an expert nutritionist with the assistance of a doctor and a myriad of tests may not be able to ascertain that. Bodies are fickle things. The drama comes because what is right for one person is not necessarily right for everyone. But, when people seek to give advice, they most often draw on their own experience. It was that way for them, so it must work this way for everyone, right? I would wager that a majority of the people giving advice on MFP are not experts in any way. And if they are, they’re not posting their qualifications. This leads me to believe that they are not. (Just like me!) So, advice in these cases should be taken with a grain of salt, as each person’s experience is different and can’t possibly apply to everyone.

What really bothers me about these posts (and please don’t ask me why I read them – I’m apparently a glutton for punishment) is not that these people are sharing their personal experience. Those experiences are absolutely relevant, particularly for someone who has a body type similar to theirs. However, these posts often claim that their way is the Right Way. They claim that science can’t be proven and that starvation mode is a myth. These claims can ultimately be harmful to a person who is new to the weight loss process and hasn’t done excesses of research on the subject the way I tend to do. (Often it’s more confusing the more I read, yet I do it anyway.) People often believe the first thing they’re told, especially if it sounds convincing, and many of these people are. I worry about the damage that could be done to people who eat a minimum of calories per day (for instance, 1200) then exercise every single one of them away. There are people who have ended up in the negative digits for their calories in vs calories out goals. It’s not healthy to burn so many calories without putting in a sufficient amount of fuel, and it’s definitely not healthy to lose a lot of weight in a short amount of time. That’s a fact that these folks seem to pointedly ignore.

I’m not claiming to be an expert in any sense of the word – I am categorically not an expert at this (or anything else, for that matter). I’ve done a little bit of research and found some truths which I will stick to. I’m not going to give advice where I am unqualified to do so, and I’m certainly not going to feed the trolls by suggesting that starvation mode is actually real, thereby getting into a war of words over what happens to one person’s body versus another’s.

I don’t know why I keep reading the threads on MFP. It’s not beneficial to me, and only ends up frustrating me more often than not.

Science can’t be proven? Seriously, people?

There was a main problem with this meal, however: it calls for Velveeta. I have nothing against velveeta in theory. It’s great for making queso, and who wants to slave over a roux and bechamel sauce when trying to whip up dinner in half an hour? Making the meal faster shouldn’t mean I have to do an hour’s worth of work in half an hour just to be able to call it a half hour meal. So, I understand the appeal of the Velveeta. It’s pretty impossible to ruin unless you grossly overcook it, and it melts easier than most cheeses do. My main issue is that it’s high in calories for what it brings to the party. Let’s not even get started on the sodium content. (I have a hard enough time excising excess sodium from my diet – I don’t need any help from the over-processed “easy” foods.)

Given this fact, I sought a relatively easy way of re-doing the recipe to bring the caloric and sodium content down. I did searches, most of which came up with either literal Velveeta replacements (the types that hardened into blocks of meltable cheese which seemed a little bit… icky to me) or bechamel sauces. I’m not interested in concocting a cheese sauce that I could potentially screw up, particularly when this was supposed to be a quick meal. I learned in the course of my search travels that muenster is a good cheese for melting. I wanted something other than muenster cheese in the dish, though, since we don’t usually buy it and frankly I’ve never seen it on the shelf where we usually buy our (admittedly cheap, fairly low-quality) cheese. That means it’s probably expensive, right? Well, we lucked out there. Helluvagood makes muenster cheese. We combined muenster, monterey jack and fat free cheddar to substitute the Velveeta. What we came up with ended up being pretty tasty!

Ingredients

1 lb chicken breasts, cut into bite-size pieces
1 lb frozen broccoli OR 2 heads broccoli, chopped into bite-size pieces
1 can Cream of Chicken Soup (adequate substitute here)
4 cups brown rice, cooked
2 tsp minced garlic
1/2 cup fat free cheddar cheese, shredded
1/2 cup muenster cheese, shredded
1/4 cup monterey jack cheese, shredded

Directions

1. Heat a large pan. Drizzle with olive oil and begin cooking chicken.
2. When chicken is cooked through, add broccoli and reconstituted cream of chicken soup mixture. (If using condensed cream of chicken soup, dilute according to the instructions.)
3. When mixture begins to thicken, add garlic.
4. After the mixture is hot, add rice and cheese. Mix well and remove from heat.
5. Cover and let sit for 5 minutes.
6. Enjoy!

Serves 6.

The original recipe calls for instant white rice. I substituted brown rice because I prefer the complex carbohydrates. We undercooked ours, so that was a bummer, but that’s obviously not a feature of the recipe. One other thing that I’m considering changing for next time is to replace the monterey jack cheese with a more pungent cheese. The fat free cheddar is mild, and the muenster also did not bring a lot of flavor to the party, so other than adding creaminess, it felt like the cheese was lost in the dish. Perhaps a swiss or gruyere would make an excellent substitute. Either way, it was a good dinner and it was excellently filling for the serving size.

One serving of this comes out to about 370 calories and while not sodium-free at 468mg of sodium, it’s much better than it would have been with the Velveeta in it. We’re definitely keeping this one in our arsenal, particularly with the re-design.

Ingredients:
1lb stewing beef, cut into bite-sized pieces (would also work with diced chicken or pork)
1 pkg Frozen Stir Fry Vegetables
1 medium onion, chopped
1 medium red bell pepper, chopped
1 Tbsp minced garlic

Sauce:
2 Tbsp Hokan Szechuan Sauce
1/2 C Light Sour Cream

Directions:

1. Heat a large pan to medium-high. Begin sauteing the beef and garlic.
2. Meanwhile, chop pepper and onion.
3. When meat is done, remove from pan and set aside. Saute pepper and onion in same pan.
4. Once pepper and onion are slightly softened, add frozen vegetables and reduce heat to medium-low.
5. Mix Szechuan sauce and sour cream together and combine with beef.
6. When frozen vegetables are heated through, combine vegetables and meat mixture.

Serve with pasta, rice or couscous, if desired. Makes four servings.

This comes out to about 300 calories for a serving of the szechuan stuff, so adding in a starch does make it a higher calorie meal, but it’s not exactly going to cause epic weight gain. It fits easily into my daily calorie “ration.”

Note: If you’re sensitive to spice, you will probably want to cut back on the Szechuan sauce. It is quite spicy, and while the sour cream helps to cut that, it doesn’t take away the spiciness completely.

Recently the bug to cook has started again. Well, I think it has. I’m thinking about food again and creative ways of using what we already have in the kitchen. I have a regular staple of things that I like to have in the kitchen, but they’re not very adventurous. Pastas, onions, certain vegetables (depending on what isn’t $5/lb at the moment), and certain meats. Sometimes jarred pasta sauces (GASP, I know). Canned tomatoes and canned tuna. We don’t do canned vegetables but I am amenable to frozen ones. (Actually, they’re kind of great. They’re easy and I like that.)

So, with health consciousness in mind, I am cooking again. There will be a lot of brown rice and a lot of searching high and low for recipe substitutions that won’t make me gain ten pounds overnight. I have about three recipes that I’d consider worth sharing, and hopefully there will be more to add to the arsenal as time goes on. Not everything will be healthy, but since I’m actually trying to lose weight (again…), there will certainly be health consciousness in mind.

Upcoming Recipes:

• Szechuan Stir-Fry (Sort Of)
• Almost Dad’s Chili
• Almond Roca
• Recipe Makeover: Chicken and Broccoli Cheese Rice

People feel very strongly about what the “right” way is to give birth (natural versus with the assistance of drugs versus c-section), and what the right way is to nurse your child and bring them up. There are the people who feel like breastfeeding should be out there in the open for all to see, arguing that the baby shouldn’t have to be hidden just because it eats “naturally.” The people who think that those who bottle-feed for any reason are lazy and gave up on the natural way. There are people who very obviously look down on anyone who had to have a c-section for any reason, or who had drugs to assist the very painful process of vaginal birth.  The more I read, the angrier I get, not because people aren’t entitled to their opinions about what is best for them and their child, but because they are projecting those beliefs onto everyone else and making bad situations worse by making women feel guilty who, for one reason or another, did not or could not do it the way that the advocates believe is the best.

I am not an expert when it comes to having children. The closest I come is having a monthly period, and that’s, well, exactly the opposite of pregnancy. So I’m as close to it as the north pole is to the south pole, really. I do, however, have some strong opinions about it, despite not having done it myself. I was around for all of my step-mother’s first pregnancy, and also around for the early stages of my older half-sister’s life. I witnessed the nine months of morning (noon and night) sickness, the changes that she went through, and then the “aftermath”, so to speak. (She was born by c-section because she was breech and they couldn’t turn her, so right there, her pregnancy gets discounted by a lot of people online. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do, you know?) I was there when the lactation specialist visited, and I was there helping when we made baby food for the baby. She wasn’t my child, but I was a major part of her life for her first ten months or so until I moved out after my graduation. So I was there for that part.

It doesn’t take a genius to take in the norms that emerge when it comes to having a baby. For instance, babies are going to poop. It happens. They spit up, they pee, they poop, they drool, they snot, they make messes with their food. It’s normal. They pretty much control the schedule for the first part of their lives, too. The fully-developed humans work around the schedule of the baby and go through sleep deprivation and lack of showers in order to facilitate the normal growth and development of this tiny, in development human being. These are the things which seem to be standard across normal early parenthood. And that’s where the “norms” stop. After that, everyone has their own way of dealing with aspect of it. Cloth diapers or disposable? Breastfeeding or formula? Jars of baby food or homemade? Do you do baby swim lessons? Do you listen to Mozart for hours to facilitate development? At this point, I have to shrug and say, “Hell if I know.”

What really bugs me is that it seems to me that parenthood is a very personal thing. I can understand giving advice and anecdotal evidence when requested to do so, but there are so many people who are willing to give out advice without being asked, or going far beyond the request so as to be pushy about it. The thread I was reading devolved into a bunch of people going back and forth about what they experienced and what was the “right” way of doing something. All of this, of course, without taking into consideration that there are plenty of reasons that it might not work or be able to work that way for any other person. It takes all kinds of people and situations to make up the world, and for as many pregnancies there are, that’s how many different parenting and child-rearing styles there are likely to be. I feel like as long as the child in question is growing up as healthy and strong as possible, it shouldn’t matter whether mom is able to breastfeed or whether she used disposable diapers to catch the refuse.

This kind of advocacy bothers me more than any other kind. It is the same as evangelism in that it doesn’t consider what the audience wants, instead pushing its own view of what’s right regardless of extenuating circumstances or differing opinions. I’m not saying that these people aren’t entitled to their opinions and views. They are every bit as entitled to theirs as I am to mine, but I should be entitled to feel differently than them without feeling persecuted by them for the difference. I guess this comes down to my dislike of someone touting any one idea as the only truth and asserting that all around them should agree.

Ultimately, I had to stop watching the thread. I ignored the user who was pushing the hardest and who started the “argument” (it was very civilized, but I didn’t understand why it had to happen at all), but that doesn’t stop the conversation from happening. I wish the lady who started the thread all the best, and I sincerely hope that she has a smooth pregnancy and that parenthood suits her perfectly. I can’t read the preaching and pushing anymore. That particular user, it seems, is just not willing to let the subject drop until she has somehow proven that she is in the right on each issue on which she believes herself to be an expert. And maybe she is an expert – I have no way of verifying or disproving this claim. But whether she is an expert or not, she is giving her expert advice in a venue that is really inappropriate, since she can have no way of seeing whether her advice is the most appropriate for the people in question. And frankly, it comes across as very judgmental for those who do not adhere to the way of behaving during pregnancy, of birth or of child rearing that she believes is best.

Opinions are all well and good, as is active and healthy discourse about those opinions. It can open up people to ideas that they maybe hadn’t considered before. However, I think we should draw the line at making actual statements of how things “should” be and what is the one and only “best” way of doing anything. Whatever happened to live and let live?

As it turned out, that someday was expedited when we found out that there was going to be a W00tstock in Chicago. We had heard good things about the 1.0 concerts, and then even better things about 2.0 in Seattle and 2.1 in Portland, OR. (Portland’s concert ran really long – 5 hours instead of 3!) So, we decided that we had to go. And while we were there, why not meet up with friends who live in the area? This quickly became more than just a “jaunt” out to Chicago for a concert. We decided that we had to stay the night if we were going to go, owing to the length of Portland’s concert. It took us a couple of days to get clear answers from work, but we both were able to secure that Monday off. We decided that instead of staying one night and driving out that same day, we would instead stay for two nights. That way we would have one day to travel and one day to see some of Chicago and have fun. So, we booked a hotel near the airport and figured out what time we wanted to leave. Voila! Plans!

On Saturday the 5th, I got up earlier than I had intended to get up. My alarm was set for 8:30AM, but I got up at 7AM. Oh well. C’est la vie. Johnathan didn’t get up until later, however, and even later than intended because he hadn’t set his alarm and I didn’t remember to wake him up at 8:30. Whoops. We got off to a later start than planned, and further delayed ourselves by stopping to eat breakfast. (I had french toast stuffed with vanilla cream cheese and topped with bananas and strawberries. It was totally worth it.) We got some car adapter charger thingies and some cash for tolls and then got on our way.  Lady Gaga was apparently our theme music for the trip, because we seemed to listen to her music more than anything else. It was easy and not bad to listen to, if sometimes a little weird.

Chicago is, according to Google Maps, 5.5 hours drive away from Cleveland. That’s fine. It’s a long drive but we survived. However, we were not in any way prepared for the traffic that we encountered as we came into Chicago. There were so many people! The first thing that occurred to me was that people were driving much less aggressively. We didn’t have to worry about how close to follow so that people wouldn’t zoom in to the spot assuming it to be large enough for a car regardless of whether it is or not. We saw more signals than we usually see at home. Still, it took us quite a long time to drive over near to O’Hare.

Google Maps was a bit misleading as we tried to find our hotel. It told us to go left when we should have gone right or vice verse at least twice. We did eventually find our hotel, which, for its cost, was really quite nice. The beds were squishy, which was nice after a long day in the car. And, hey, it was clean. I like clean hotel rooms. The first order of business was to find some food, and I wanted to do something that Chicago considers unique to, er, itself. Deep dish pizza “is” Chicago, right? So we found an area chain that did deep dish pizza and headed there.

Lou Malnati’s was our dinner destination, and we figured by how busy it was that we’d made a good choice. I don’t usually prefer deep dish pizza, but I was willing to sacrifice my preferences in order to try something new and local. I’m thinking that before then, I had never tried real deep dish pizza. We got one plain cheese and one sausage, mushroom and onions. They were both delicious! It certainly changed my mind about how I felt about deep dish pizza. Seriously, the cheese was so stringy and beautiful, and the sauce and oh the crust – I love crust and this was good. Okay, now I’m drooling. Moving along.

After that, we weren’t really sure what to do. We hadn’t made any plans for when we got there and given how long a day we were destined to have the next day, I kind of thought it would be a bad idea to try to go into Chicago proper. Johnathan had an inspired idea, though: IKEA. I’ve never been to IKEA and neither has he, but we’ve both heard good things and wanted to visit. The closest to Cleveland is in Pittsburgh which is about a three-hour drive. Other than that is Cincinnati and then, I think, Chicago. So it wasn’t ever really convenient to get to one.

How on earth have I lived 24.9 years without knowing the wonders of IKEA?

I had no idea, to begin with, that the store was so big. We drove up to it and I went slackjaw, just seeing that it was three stories tall and not skinny stories at that. Then we walked in. That place was enormous. We got our little paper tape measure and our little pencil and map and went up the escalators. Since the store was set to close about an hour or so after we got there, I wanted to start on the third floor – living room, dining room, kitchen, etc – since it seemed like it would be the most up our alley. I’m glad we did, too. We have been talking about redesigning our living room so that it actually has a design and I was able to see the ideas we’ve tossed about and help push those into a more tangible scheme with lots of the things that were on display. I loved the style of a lot of the furniture, and I especially loved that there were display rooms about for shoppers to get an idea of how things can fit into small spaces and how various things can be used. It was very clever and I was pretty much geeking out the whole time we were in the store.

As we walked around the store, I began to have visions of what our apartment could be with some of the furniture that was on display. I mentally redecorated our living room, dining room, computer room, bathroom, kitchen (even though there’s no way we could redesign it!), and bedroom. Basically, I mentally redesigned our whole apartment. The first order is the living room, however, as our bookshelves aren’t going to last through our next move, if they last even that long, and we really would like to tie everything together aesthetically. IKEA was a wealth of inspiration for that. We made it through both floors, although we did not browse as leisurely as we would have liked. They “kicked” us out at closing and we had browsed most of both the second and third floors, and only had a short while to gawk at all the flat-pack furniture available on the first floor before we left. There was such elation after we left that we went straight to the IKEA website after we got back to the hotel. We played with some of their planners (which were really fun, if a little difficult to use at times), and tried to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, knowing that we would very likely be out quite late the next evening for the concert.

The next morning we got up, well, not too early and headed out for the day. We met a couple of friends for lunch at Todai at a nearby mall, which was really nice. I was expecting to sit for maybe an hour and then go our separate ways. We ended up eating lots of sushi and chatting for about two hours, which was nice. I learned a lot about the Quaker belief system and we talked about nerdy things. As we do. By about 1:30, it was time for our friends to leave to go to a baby shower, and we wanted to get downtown.

We had planned to go on an architecture boat tour on the Chicago river at 2PM, but owing to how late our lunch went, the 2PM tour just wasn’t going to happen! The boat tour had a few more running until about 5:30PM, though, so there was nothing to worry about. We headed toward the CTA park and ride near our hotel. One thing I’ll say for CTA is how easy it is to understand. It’s one of the transit systems on Google Maps, which is very helpful, and, well, it was just pretty easy to figure out what we were supposed to do. (Easier than the NYC transit we’ve navigated, I’ll say!) Park and remember your spot number. Pay for the parking at the kiosk. Get a fare card. Ta da! You’re ready to get on the train! Even on a Saturday, the trains were running more frequently than the RTA trains usually do, other than maybe during rush hour. Anyway, we took the train to the station that Google Maps suggested and found our way to the street. Then we walked about three blocks to get to the boat launch. We missed the 2PM, and we just missed the 3PM (owing, I think, to the fact that we crossed the street on the wrong side before realizing we couldn’t cross the other way from that corner – lost a few minutes), so we got tickets for the 3:30 launch. Then we got in line, and it started raining. Pretty hard, too! We didn’t think to bring long-sleeve shirts with us, nor umbrellas. We had assumed that the weather in Chicago would be the same as in Cleveland: very warm and mostly sunny. Silly us. We should have known better. So all I had were tank-tops with high temperatures of 75, and then we got rained on to boot! Ah well. After a few minutes, they let us onto the boat and everyone crowded inside to escape from the rain. Just before the tour was going to start, it stopped raining! Thank goodness! Except that meant all the seats were wet. We wiped ours off the best we could and it was time to go.

The tour was very interesting. I didn’t know much about Chicago architecture other than that it had the Sears Tower (now known as Willis tower, apparently), and I couldn’t have identified it for anyone even if I had to. So I was definitely not well-versed on Chicago’s buildings. The lady who was talking had quite the accent. I suppose it could be considered “very Chicago”. Chicago is pronounced with an “aw” sound in the middle, apparently. That aside, the tour was very interesting. She was able to tell us the history of nearly all of the buildings (the interesting looking ones, anywa) on the river and how the social climate regarding the river had changed over the years. She talked about the varying construction styles, how certain buildings came into being and under what conditions some of them had to be built. The tour was an hour and a half long, and we went all the way up to the lake, as well as on both forks of the “Y” portion of the river. I learned for the very first time about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which is apparently surprising to a lot of people. What, I ask you, difference does a fire in Chicago make to someone in Oregon? It’s just not part of the regional history! So I never learned about it, and while I’d heard things said about Mrs. O’Leary’s cow in the past, I think I made little notice of it. Now I know about the fire and about the legend surrounding it as spread by a newspaper reporter. Anyway, if you’re ever in Chicago and have a couple of hours to spare, definitely try to see the tour. It was wonderful and I learned a lot. I think Johnathan got some good pictures, too, but I’m still waiting for him to process them.

After that, we hopped on a bus and rode over to Park West for W00tstock. W00tstock was such a huge undertaking that I’m going to have to write about it fully later, but I’ll give you a run-down. We rode a bus over to near where the venue was, and then walked to the venue. It was convenient that there was a Subway close by, because it had been a good five hours since I’d eaten at that point, so I was hungry! We ate, taking note of the W00tstock goers all the while, then decided to get in line. I think my favorite anecdote of this time was with Johnathan:

Johnathan: Hey, check out that guy’s shirt! I bet you he is going to W00tstock.
Me: Um. Did you see who it is?
Johnathan: Holy crap! That’s Wil Wheaton! He better be going to W00tstock!

So, Johnathan noticed someone’s shirt, but not his face. Ah well. It’s okay, Wil Wheaton, I knew who you were. We got in line sometime around 5:30, and then had to wait until 6:30 for the doors to open and let all the nerds in. By the time we lined up, we were around the corner of the building already, and we were there extra early! The unfortunate thing is that at some point while we were all waiting, it started raining. And then it started raining harder. Some folks had umbrellas but most didn’t. It was cold and I was only wearing a tank-top. The couple behind us was nice enough to share their extra umbrella, so we huddled under it while they huddled under their other umbrella and we waited for 6:30. The rain just kept getting harder and it didn’t let up before the line started moving, signifying that people were being let in. By about 6:35 or 6:40, we were finally inside the building. We were cold and wet, and the air conditioning was on, but at least we weren’t being rained on anymore!

The show itself was amazing. It lasted for 5 hours, even though the show is billed as “3 Hours of Geeks and Music”. So much for that! We saw Molly Lewis, Bill Amend, Peter Sagal, Kevin Murphy, Trace Beaulieu, Bill Corbett, Len Peralta, Jason Finn and, of course, the four W00tstock founders, Paul & Storm, Wil Wheaton and Adam Savage. It was a wonderful night and I would do it all over again if I could. (In fact, if they ever go to Pittsburgh or something, we are so there!)

So, the show started at 7:30 and didn’t end until about 12:20AM. I was pretty thankful at that point that we’d verified that CTA runs all night. It meant we didn’t have to take a cab back to our car. We managed to pull together enough change for two bus fares, because we hadn’t loaded up our passes with enough money for the return trip, and we got on the bus. The next adventure was finding a working fare machine that took credit cards. We were tired, very hungry (we hadn’t eaten since the subs at about 5PM), and just wanted to get back to our car. The box in the station lobby that we went to first had a machine, but it didn’t work. We found someone whose only suggestion was to take cash out. Well, eff that! We weren’t putting $20 each on transit cards, and the machines didn’t give any change, so we were kind of SOL. We walked across the street to the other lobby where the man suggested we might find another machine that took cards. We must have walked around it five or six times and not found anything. I was ready to cry at that point because I was just so tired. We were going to walk out and try to find somewhere that gave change, but we spotted the card-taking machine at the last minute. Oh, thank FSM for that. Then it was just a matter of getting to the platform and getting back to our station.

The ride back was relatively uneventful. We listened to a group of guys try to speak German to one another (one of them, I gathered, actually speaks German fluently, possibly as a native language, but the others were n00bs at best, and even I could tell!) We saw a rough-looking guy go out into the space between two of the trains to smoke a cigarette – he was sandwiched between them, and there was absolutely nothing keeping him from falling off if the train jerked suddenly. People aren’t supposed to be out there. Ah, the things people do for a nicotine fix.

We got back to our car at about 1:45AM, and headed for food. There isn’t a lot open late-night. We could have gone to our room and ordered a pizza from the place that advertises that it’s open until 4AM, but then we would have had to wait for the pizza and we were too hungry to consider that as a first choice. We passed a McDonald’s which was not at all appetizing, and ultimately had to go with a Denny’s because, really? What else is open at 2AM? We at really bad diner food and went back to our room where I promptly sacked out. It was a long day.

We got a late check-out – which really meant checking out at noon instead of 11, but the hour helped. We packed everything up and headed out for some lunch. I wanted to eat something that was “uniquely Chicago” that wasn’t deep dish pizza, and it seems that there’s a certain kind of hot dog that’s considered to be unique to Chicago. One of the places that was recommended in a couple of sites online was Portillo’s. We decided to stop there for lunch. Once we got there, it was clear that this was no ordinary fast food joint. They had a double-drive through and people standing in it to take orders. It was amazing how efficient they were! Even inside there were two people standing in the line getting people’s orders, so that when we got to the register, we’d just hand someone our bag and be ready to go! I got a Maxwell style polish dog, and Johnathan got, I believe, a jumbo hot dog. We got cheese fries with chili on them (we ordered chili cheese fries when we really meant cheddar cheese fries – a fortuitous error), and a couple of drinks and we were ready to go. We only waited a couple of minutes for our order to come up. The trays had drink holders in them which I thought was very clever.

Words cannot adequately describe how good that dog was and how tasty those fries were. The fries were just what I wanted after a long day, and the hot dog was just delicious, slathered in mustard and covered with fried onions and peppers. Whenever we go back to Chicago, I will have to have another one of those because it was just too good to pass up. After that, we headed back east, bound for home.

The drive home was fairly uneventful, thought it felt painfully long, probably because of how tired we both were. We got home at about 8PM and were bombarded with needy kitties who had missed us in the days and days that we had been gone. Our kitties are not at all dramatic. Not one bit.

On the way home we ruminated about what we’d felt while we were in Chicago. It is city full of life. It is a city which is proud of itself, its roots and everything that defines it. It is not, like Cleveland, a city full of self-loathing. There were things to do, even late at night. The people were generally less suspicious, I felt, than people in Cleveland, who always seem to be suspicious of anything remotely friendly and who don’t know what to do if you’re trying to be polite. Chicago was night and day with Cleveland both in attitude and in city planning. Chicago has a plan! And they actively pursue those things which will breathe life into areas of the city which are currently not thriving. Cleveland needs to take a page from Chicago’s book, I think. Clean up the attitude, clean up the streets and make neighborhoods that people will want to live in, other than just Ohio City! That is, I think, most of what I came away from Chicago with. I had fun, and I definitely want to go back, but ultimately, Chicago showed me what a city like Cleveland could be with the right leadership and the right ideas applied to its neighborhoods.

For an impromptu trip with very little pre-planning, our trip to Chicago was, I think, one of our more successful. I really can’t wait until we can plan a trip to go back.

What we’re planning to see:

TiMER 3/18 7:00PM [Opening Night Gala @ 9:00PM]

Twenty 3/19 11:45AM
The Big Gay Musical 3/19 2:20PM
Cosy Dens 3/19 4:15PM
Dear Lemon Lima 3/19 7:10PM
Applause 3/19 9:50PM
Midnight Shorts Program #1 3/19 11:30PM

Love Hurts 3/20 11:45AM
Trailerpark 3/20 1:45PM
In the Heat of the Night 3/20 5:00PM
Bomber 3/20 7:20PM
The House of Branching Love 3/20 9:20PM
Down Terrace 3/20 11:40PM

Ingredients 3/21 11:45AM
Turtle 3/21 2:10PM
Accident 3/21 4:30PM
Divided We Fall 3/21 6:50PM
Disco & Atomic War 3/21 9:00PM

Adrift 3/22 11:45AM
Fire in the Heartland 3/22 2:00PM
Black Sheep 3/22 4:50PM
Inside Hana’s Suitcase 3/22 7:30PM
Bare Essentials of Life 3/22 9:30PM

Forgetting Dad 3/23 11:50AM
The Happiest Girl in the World 3/23 2:10PM
Hipsters 3/23 4:25PM
German Shorts Program 3/23 7:20PM
Fire Keeper 3/23 9:25PM

The Baby Formula 3/24 11:50AM
Three Days with the Family 3/24 2:15PM
Chameleon 3/24 4:30PM
The Girl on the Train 3/24 7:10PM
Small Crime 3/24 9:40PM

If I Knew What You Said 3/25 11:45AM
Best of Times 3/25 2:00PM
The Last Days of Emma Blank 3/25 4:45PM
Mrs. Moscowitz and the Cats 3/25 7:20PM
A Call Girl 3/25 9:45PM

Protektor 3/26 11:30AM
Father and Guns 3/26 1:50PM
Convention 3/26 4:05PM
I Am Love 3/26 6:50PM
Ivory 3/26 9:50PM
Storage 3/26 11:45PM

Independent Shorts Program #11 3/27 11:20AM
Bananas!* 3/27 2:15PM
French Shorts Program 3/27 4:10PM
Mid-August Lunch 3/27 7:30PM
The Taqwacores 3/27 10:00PM
Midnight Shorts Program #4 3/27 11:45PM

Honeymoons 3/28 11:45AM
The Enemy 3/28 2:10PM
My Year Without Sex 3/28 4:50PM
Paper Man 3/28 7:10PM [Closing Night Reception following]

We’re both pretty excited for the festival to start tonight. There were a lot of films that we picked out that didn’t make the cut due to time constraints and our disinterest in staying until midnight then turning around and coming back for the 9AM. Some of the ones that didn’t make it are: Will You Marry Us?, A Shine of Rainbows, Together, Please, Please Me!, Quest for Honor, Saviors in the Night, Nora’s Will, My Heart Goes to Hadippa, Cow, Beyond Gay: The Politics of Pride, The Girl, Harvest,  and still yet others. I think 25 or more from my list didn’t make it, and Johnathan had about 12 or 13 that didn’t make the list. One that we did pick and fit into our schedule but won’t be seeing is 8: The Mormon Proposition. We were even going to do the film forum. It ended up getting canceled, and we found out that it’s because the film got a distribution deal. Good for them! I hope it will get a wide release so that we can still see it.

Planning this many films was no easy task, I can tell you now! We each got a program in the mail since we’re members of The Cleveland Film Society, so our game plan was this: we each went through and highlighted the films we were interested in seeing. I went through both of our guides when we were done and made a list for each of us. With our lists, I made a combined list of films that we both wanted to see. Then I picked out showings of each one of those so that we would be able to see all of them. That, in itself, took some juggling. Then I went through and filled in all the remaining time blocks with films from each of our lists, alternating so as to try to be fair. More of my films ended up on the list simply because there were more on my list and more of them that fit into our open spots. It probably took a couple of hours of planning, all-told, but it means no guesswork when we get to Tower City this week. We can just check out our Google calendar and cross-reference with the program to ensure that we’re not missing anything that we had planned.

Since we started eating better in January and losing weight, we wanted to make sure that we had a solid plan for what to eat while we’re there. Last night, we made two pasta salads that should give us quite a bit of food. We’re going to supplement with sandwiches, yogurt, fruit and veggies and other snacks as well as a couple of times eating in the food court (with pre-planning so we can still fit it in our plans). I’ve got all of the food that I “plan” to eat from Friday to Tuesday (the farthest SparkPeople would let me track when I started – I may add Wednesday and Thursday today) so that I know everything will be balanced and that I should have plenty of food. I’m looking forward to this. It will be a true test of our new lifestyle to see whether we can maintain it in some semblance of normalcy while our lives are turned totally upside down for eleven days.

The planning is done. My hair is “styled” and my makeup is on. We have our tickets and director-level passes in hand and we are ready for the film festival to start.

Let’s go.

I was looking for some new recipes to make, some with less fat and more complex carbohydrates instead of simple ones. I ran across the idea in my searches for once a month cooking. It seemed like an intriguing idea to me. We already do our shopping twice a month, but what if we did it only once a month and froze a lot of things to thaw and eat later? Interesting concept! The idea was that we’d have something at home to eat, even when were decidedly uninterested in cooking. Well, I picked out some recipes – mostly healthy ones, and very few which said anything about the freezability of the recipe – and made up a grocery list. We went shopping on the thirteenth of July for all of the ingredients for about twenty recipes, and commenced with the cooking the following weekend. The cooking went fairly well. I discovered that cooking and freezing up a few recipes on my own is a tall order, particularly as it leaves me less time to clean up after myself unless I literally want to be in the kitchen all day. However, when Johnathan and I did a bunch of cooking together things ran smoothly. One of us could clean up or do prep work while the other checked on recipe instructions or tended to something that was already in progress. We managed to use up nearly everything in our freezer with the exception of the frozen vegetables and fill it until it was absolutely packed 100% full. There was no more room in that sucker when we were done!

Now that we’ve done it once and experienced what it was like to do the work and reap the benefits, we’re going to go again this month, this time with some new knowledge. Some things we learned:

• Stuffed peppers do not freeze very well.
• White lasagna that includes a pesto sauce is pretty good but the whole thing gets oily if not baked right away because the pesto separates.
• The only way this actually works is if someone actually remembers to get something out of the freezer. Trying to quickly thaw things is a pain.
• Chilis, soups and stews freeze very well!
• Recipes that include just regular ingredients are more likely to be pleasing than those that require ingredients that we don’t even know how to find. (In other words, keep it simple, stupid!)

Overall, we’re both really happy about the whole experience. We’ve got a list of recipes already picked out to make for next month, and I expect we’ll go shopping for that pretty soon and use our experiences to our advantage. We’re making a bigger variety of meals and recipes with simpler ingredients – ones we’ve purchased before and know how to locate in the various stores. I expect we’ll come in under budget this time around, and hopefully be able to pack up our freezer just as much as last time.

I’m so glad we thought to try this. It has saved us so much time and frustration, not to mention a ton of money that was previously spent on eating out becuase we were too lazy to cook!

Now, if only we could get our hands on a bigger freezer so that we could have more storage.

With little counter space, we got creative with where we, er, stored things.

A dozen cupcakes, some thawing chicken, and a card table that's only kind of holding up the microwave.

We mentioned there's not much counter space, right? This is where the laptop lived so that we could access online recipes.

Cookin' some chicken. I have no idea which recipe this was for.

Produce storage overflow. (Note the bottle of vodka: that was for after.)

It was a long weekend, but the payoff is obvious.

Packed full. There was quite literally no more room in there.

The fridge remained pretty full throughout.

Since I now have Saturdays free, it meant we could go together to the market, and since it’s going on Summer, we figured it would be good to go back to the market to get some fresh vegetables and support local growers. This past Saturday, we headed out fairly early to get there before the place was absolutely packed with people. It was nice to walk from stand to stand and take in what each one had to offer. We tried to keep from buying too much from any one stand and we did our best to scope out the cheapest prices that were offered. In the end, we came away with four zucchini, four yellow squash, two limes, two lemons, two things of broccoli, two enormous vidalia onions, one very large red onion, an orange, about six peppers (at least four red, not sure why), two ham hocks and a loaf of bread. We spent about $30 total while we were there.

Incidentally, we loved doing our shopping on Saturday morning for a change instead of a weekday evening. People are so much friendlier! Both the customers and the cashiers at the stores were less pushy and stressed out. It was fantastic. It took us three hours from when we left for the market until we got home and finished putting all of the groceries away. I’d say that’s pretty good for three stops and a massive amount of groceries. (We needed to stock up on pretty much everything.)

I was feeling pretty good about our choice to buy our veggies at the market, until Tuesday morning, when I got up and wondered what the foul smell in the kitchen was. It took me a little while to figure out what it was, but I did eventually find the source. The first thing I found was that our orange was half molded over. Following that, I discovered that the foul smell actually originated from our zucchini and yellow squash. One zucchini was so rotted through it fell apart and was oozing in the bowl where I had put it. Another was almost at the same point, and a third had mold all down one side. One yellow squash had an enormous rot spot on one side. Four days after we purchased this produce, it was going bad. It doesn’t seem reasonable to me to lose so much produce in such a short span from purchase. All in all, we lost about $8 worth of produce. I was able to salvage the orange – thankfully the mold was only on the outside and I only needed its juice, but everything else was a total loss.

Needless to say, we weren’t very happy about how that turned out. We wanted our trip to the market to be a nice change to our usual shopping habits, and I really wanted to be able to support more local commerce than megamarts. I’m disappointed that we put so much faith in the people who put these stands together and that their produce ended up being sub-par. We will be going back to the market, but with this in mind, the way we shop will change:

• We won’t buy as much. Obviously this stuff is so close to being on its way out that it doesn’t last as long as expected, so we might as well go more often if we need to.
• We’ll keep track of which vendors have given us produce that’s gone south in a hurry, and which ones have given us quality produce. We might as well play favorites in this kind of scenario.
• We won’t let them pick for us from the back. With the squash and zucchini, we let them do this for us, and I think that may have been part of the cause – it was the older produce to begin with. (The orange we picked out ourselves. I have no idea what happened there.)

It’s not a lot of change, but it’s some. I’d hate to give up on the market completely so quickly after going back for the first time in a year and a half. We do want to shop at the market. We just don’t want to lose what we buy so soon after bringing it home.

If you’re in the Cleveland area, do check out the West Side Market! We’ve gotten some great bread there and the produce is really nice when it lasts a reasonable amount of time.

Let’s see: Johnathan and I signed the lease on a new apartment in mid-September. We painted two of the three rooms that we planned to paint before we ran out of time and interest in painting for the time being. We still plan to paint our bedroom, but we’ve got to unpack first. The living room, which was planned to be a nice, soft gold color, is more like a pumpkin. It’s not what I was hoping for, but it’s still nice, and I think it makes the room very cozy. The bedroom was supposed to be a rich blue, which… well, it’s definitely rich. It’s also bold. So bold that the room seems to glow in regular daylight. When we have the soft desk lamp on, though, it’s much tamer and it’s a very nice color. I’m now hesitant to see how our bedroom will turn out. It is supposed to be a kind of mocha color, nice rich brown. I’m hoping it won’t turn too dark, although I think it will still be okay even if it does. It’s just a little worrisome that we’re 0 for 2 on intended paint colors. We like both of them anyway, though, so maybe it’s not so bad.

We also had to pack up the old apartment and move everything to the new apartment. The packing part started out really well. I was cataloging everything so that we’d know where every one of our possessions was. I got about ten boxes put into the spreadsheet, then just gave up. With everything going on and working full time on top of it, there was just no way that I was going to have time to deal with trying to log everything at the same time. We got the bulk of our stuff to our new place before my family got into town, but at that point, everything started to fall apart for the moving business.

My dad showed up on Saturday while I was at work. They drove out from Portland and took a week doing it, but I had no idea when they were going to get to the Cleveland area. It was a bit of a surprise for me. Johnathan and I went over to their hotel room after I got off of work and hung out for a while. Some things never really change, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

On Sunday, we went out for lunch at Red Robin with my dad and his family 2.0, and then my dad and my older half-sister came to our new apartment and we shot the breeze for a little while. Allison arrived while my dad and half-sister were still at the apartment, so there was more chatting as well as some perusal of Veggie Tales videos on youtube before they left. In the interest of my dad’s sanity, I lent them some DVDs so that he would no longer have to watch the same four over and over on the trip back. I’m sure they were just as tired of the new ones as the old ones by the time they took the trip back across the country with the two little girls.

That evening, Allison, Johnathan and I had what we called a Bachelor/ette party. I got to wear a sparkly crown that announced my “bachelorette”-ness, a bright red boa and attempt to use straws with little penises on them to drink beer. (I think that was the strange part.) We had some Harvest Moon and some Woodchuck, which Johnathan and I insisted on calling Chipmunk. We played Disney Scene-It, and Allison and I tied throughout half the game. We must have had at least ten tie-breakers, and at least one tie-breaker to break a tie from a tie-breaker. I still won, though! My record is still nearly perfect. Whoo!

The next day, we waited for my mom to come into town. We watched The Devil Wears Prada (hooray for cable!) and Dan in Real Life. Both are excellent movies. My mom didn’t get in until about 5PM, though we were originally expecting her to be up to the Cleveland area by about noon. They got lost on the way up from Cincinatti, apparently. We went to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, which was very yummy. I’d never been there before. My mom and Allison and I were going to go shopping at some point, but after such a long drive up, my mom wasn’t up for it, so Johnathan, Allison and I trekked over to Avenue. I got a lovely jacket, a nice shirt and a very nice sweater, as well as some jewelry to wear while we got married. I so infrequently wear jewelry that I didn’t actually own any to wear. Now I do! Hurray! Afterwards, we went back to the apartment, Allison and Johnathan had a bit of alcohol (I opted for pop instead), and we watched Bernstein’s Candide. I do love that operetta so!

In the morning, I woke up way too early, as is my habit whenever I have a deadline. I was showered and pretty much ready to go by about 8:30, when we didn’t have our appointment until 11AM at the courthouse. Johnathan ran out for breakfast and coffee, and we hung out and watched HGTV until it was time to go. We were planning to get there early, and left even earlier than originally planned, getting there just before 10:30. Almost everyone else arrived just after we did, so we weren’t hanging around doing nothing. There were lots of pictures taken, none of which I’m interested in sharing at this time (maybe later!), and lots of semi-awkward family interactions as two divorced couples tried to make nice for our day. Nobody was rude or even slightly terse to anyone else, so I’d say it was a roaring success. The judge was running very behind, so even though we were there plenty early, our 11AM appointment turned into an 11:45 ceremony. The ceremony itself was short and sweet, with very little religion injected into it and not much outside of the vows themselves. It was perfect. We had a few pictures, and more hugs than I ever like to give in one day, and then we all headed to Buca di Beppo for lunch. Lunch was good, excepting that the families made things needlessly complicated by insisting that we split the checks. It was a good lunch, even if we had to look at a bust of the very creepy pope the entire time! Afterward, Johnathan and I left for the Red Maple Inn, and we holed a way for a few days. We had fairly good food, wine, cheese and a fair amount of scrabble playing. The vacation wasn’t as relaxing as it might have been due to the fact that we had a ton of stuff left to do when we got back.

The day we left the Inn, we went straight to the DMV BMV so that I could get my Ohio license with my new name on it. I called a bunch of places and got my name changed that day. We got new car insurance and purchased renter’s insurance (finally). We did very little else that day because once I was done jockeying with the phone, I was exhausted.

The rest of that weekend involved a lot of packing, cleaning, moving, more cleaning, some unpacking, and even more cleaning. We cleaned that old apartment from top to bottom. Every cabinet was wiped out. The stove was scrubbed until my fingers almost bled. The fridge scrubbed out, the carpets scrubbed and steam cleaned. We’re convinced we left that apartment in better shape than it was in when we moved in October of last year. It felt pretty good. Let me tell you, though, those late nights getting it that way were brutal. By the time I went back to work on Monday and Tuesday, I felt like I needed a vacation from my vacation! I still do, actually. We’ve been very, very slowly unpacking the new apartment. We should be doing more to get it unpacked, but by the time we both get home from work, neither of us is very interested in doing anything involving cleaning or tidying up, let me tell you. Especially with the added distraction of having cable television at home now, it makes it really hard to get motivated to do anything some days. I’d rather just veg out!

We’re finally back on track with our groceries, now that most of the kitchen is unpacked. We cooked for the first time in the new apartment this last week. We’ve made chili (a hacked up version of my dad’s recipe), mishmash pasta (or velcro pasta, however you like), and beef stroganoff. We used our brand new, empire red Kitchenaid Artisan Series Stand Mixer yesterday for the first time, too! We mixed pizza dough in it. It was gratuitous use of the stand mixer, but we’re totally okay with that. Imagining all the things that will be made in it in the months to come makes me very happy. Pies, cakes, cupcakes, cookies, breads… mmmm! Between the mixer that Johnathan’s mom gifted us with and the cookware that my mom gifted us with, cooking, even in our miniscule kitchen, is a dream.

So, that’s where we’re at after a long month of moving, packing, family, getting married and other assorted life chores. How’s everyone else?

Lately, we’ve eaten out a bit more often, if only to have something different. Since I moved out here, we’ve had German food once, and to have it, we had to go down to Columbus. I happened upon a mention of a local German restaurant on a Cleveland food blog and it’s been sitting in the back of my mind for a while. Finally, we decided to find this place and try it out.

To start with, the restaurant looked like a fairly typical, older-style German restaurant, complete with schmaltzy decor. The bar area was fairly nice, so while we attempted to flag someone down to seat us, we were hopeful as to the rest of the meal. The dining room was not as nice as the bar area. The seats were hard and actually quite shallow. The table was small and quite far away from the booth seats, which did not move. Since we were there for the food, I didn’t let this aesthetic aspects bother me.

I started out by having a white ale, which was actually quite good. After further investigation, we discovered that I was drinking a Canadian beer, so that really had no bearing on the fact that it was a German food restaurant. (Or, German-American, I guess. That’s what their menu said.) I ordered the sauerbraten, which came with spaetzel and red cabbage. Johnathan had a sausage platter with bratwurst and knockwurst. We also ordered a side of German potato salad. The dishes were rather pricey ($18 for mine and $17 for his), but this is the kind of pricing I came to expect from the German restaurant that I frequented in Portland. We both ordered the German potato soup for our first “course.” (Tell me, why is it that a German restaurant must append ‘German’ in front of the dish? Isn’t that the point of it being a German restaurant?) The soup was good, though I would have liked it to be a bit spicier. It would have improved it.

Our main dishes came fairly quickly afterward, and I was struck by how cheap everything looked. Looks can, however, be deceiving, so I was still hopeful. My sauerbraten tasted like it was overcooked and then covered in a barely heated sugar-based sauce. I wasn’t overly impressed with it. Suffice it to say that I’ve had better. The red cabbage was good, but I think it would be difficult to do red cabbage poorly. The spaetzel was good as well. Just a touch sweet which I enjoy. Johnathan liked his sausages, though I was wholly unimpressed by both of them. The German potato salad wasn’t very warm and to be perfectly honest, wasn’t very good either. The food, overall, was a disappointment.

I think the worst part was that it took for-ev-er to get our check and finally be able to pay and leave. We had to seek our server out in order to pay the final bill which was much, much higher than the service and food that we got was worth. The fact that this is apparently the only German restaurant in Cleveland is possibly an even bigger disappointment because it means that, unless we go to Columbus (or perhaps to Portland!), we won’t be eating German food. I wouldn’t recommend this restaurant to anyone because it would just leave a poor opinion of German food in general. I promise there’s better German cuisine out there – it just won’t be found at the one in Cleveland.

Next time, I’ll write about our experience at the Indian food restaurant that we went to this evening. I promise the next one will have a happier ending.