Rebecca

08:38 pm: Dinner
For dinner we had:

-pasta with butter, salt, pepper, parmesan, a ton (well, really a handful) of fresh picked garden basil, and a garden tomato

-fresh picked garden kale sauteed in olive oil with garden garlic, seasoned with salt and pepper

-tofu seasoned with soy sauce, garlic and red pepper (?), sauteed until crispy

Heaven. 

06:13 pm: garden
the peas I planted sprouted-- lots of them.  and, after I'd given up on this year's crop, the sunchokes finally sprouted too!

06:34 pm: stressed out brain dump
Today around midday I was thinking how I like my job, I like the excitement, the accomplishments, just getting things done, and pretty well.  

Right now I'm stressed.  I hate it when employers don't tell us about problems (even when we ask) until everything explodes, by which I mean the client explodes, metaphorically speaking.  and I hate it that clients have chronic illnesses that cause them to make decisions that hurt themselves.  I hate not being able to fix things.  My work to-do list and my home to-do list are both far too long, and deadlines are approaching and I don't know what's going to give.  Commuting to work is both easier and harder than expected-- easier in the morning, and harder in the evening, when I'm tired.  I don't have shabbat lunch plans yet and maybe that's a good thing because I'm exhausted, but I still feel out of the loop, like I missed a memo everyone else got.

Ugh.

10:47 am:
Since becoming the proud owner of two pairs of wool blend pants, I've been agonizing over how to clean them without carcinogenic, polluting, dry-cleaning.  (I haven't cleaned them at all yet)  Apparantly, wet-cleaning wool isn't as hard as it's made out to be.  I mean, people must have been doing something for the thousands of years they wore wool, but hadn't discovered  tetrachloroethylene, or even kerosene (one of my great-great-grandmother's many side businesses was dry-cleaning rich people's clothes in kerosene). 

I'll test it on some scraps first, but here goes.

Wet Cleaning Wool and Silk
 

• Hand wash in a sink by gently swirling the clothes in cool water; never twist or wring out wool or silk.
   
• Use a mild detergent with a pH below 7 for wool, such as Infinity Heavenly Horsetail, available in health food stores. A mild liquid castile soap such as Dr. Bronner’s baby soap is best for cleaning silk, since it won’t strip the natural oils. Any harsh lye-based soap with a pH above 10 will destroy silk.
   
• If necessary, spot clean with vinegar or lemon juice, but test for dye color fastness first.
   
• Gently press water from the fabric. Block wool—lay it flat on a towel and stretch it to the correct size and shape—before drying; it will dry to the blocked size. Wool is resilient and recovers quickly from wrinkling if hung. Hang dry silk.

08:47 pm: student torah
When learning the story of Avigayil convincing David not to kill her husbands household, my students says: "It's like God on Mt. Sinai wanting to kill all the Israelites, and Moses convincing him not to"

Man, this kid thinks in interesting directions.  I think any goals of getting her to think textually have been accomplished :)

12:08 am: wow, pesach is over.   weird.

I even ate a token cracker, just because I could.  But it hasn't totally sunk in yet.

11:47 am: wtf?
A friend of mine living in Israel is under house arrest, after spending a night in a police custody earlier this week.  The whole thing is insane.

04:19 pm: Does anyone else feel...
. . . that Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Sen. Barack Obama are playing good cop/ bad cop on the race issue?

Not necessarily intentionally  (though that's possible), but maybe both sides are needed.  The fire and brimstone telling-it-as-it-is, and the message of optimism, bringing out the best in people by trusting them to already have it within them. 

11:52 am: Unexpected
And most intriguing.  Life in Israel keeps getting more complicated.  None of the lines hold, none of the boxes work.   Or maybe they do and I'm just over optimistic at the moment, reading this.  But I'd like to think that even people who make me angry can surprise everyone.  

06:44 pm: things that make me happy
1.I loved Reading Rainbow as a kid (yeah, there was a time I watched TV), so this made me very happy :)

2. Almost a year ago, when 5 of us went to New Orleans, one of the houses we gutted belonged to a Miz Dorothy.  She was (is) a wonderful old lady,a lifelong New Orleanian, I believe, who insisted very firmly on getting all our addresses so that she could send us holiday greeting cards.   She'd been very upset that the last group of volunteers had left before they all had given her their contact info. 

She told us about her troubles getting any Road Home money, and about how it was hard to be living with her daughter, as her daughter tended to "mother" her.  She'd come out specifically the day we were there out of her sense of courtesy-- if we were going to work on her house, she would be there to greet us. 

I just got my card today, and it made me very happy.  I'd figured if I didn't get one, it would mean she had died, since it seemed like hell and high water wouldn't stop her. 

I hope she's well, and that she's been able to move back into her home.  

10:58 am: Another night at the B&N hostel
Fasting went well yesterday.

Teaching went well yesterday.

But the two of them together?  totally wiped me out. 

I had a small break-fast during the kids break, and by the time I was at curlybopbop  and groovyjew 's , and had had a real dinner, I was exhausted.  good thing I had an alternative to having to drive home :)

11:14 pm: Shabbat was lovely.  I really need to make plans to spend more shabboses in DC. 

I don't feel like recap-ing at the moment, especially since the majority of people reading were present for most of it.

08:19 pm: Grapes of Wrath, modern version
I find this incredibly disturbing.  Even more so because I haven't the faintest idea what do about it. 

It's easy to see "fair trade" as something that is needed to protect people who live far away, on different continents.  And easy to follow it in regards to non-essentials, like coffee, tea, and chocolate.  Not that I have that good a track record with those, but I've been working on it.

It's harder when it's about fruits and vegetables.  And God knows what else. . .  meat processing plants are also often bad, and I don't know anything about any other food production workers.  How are the workers involved in grain production treated?  And in factories and bakeries?

I've never even thought about these issues before today.  So I don't know where to begin, or what to say. 

11:30 pm: the way of the future
Just got my second facebook wedding invitation.  (This one I'll hopefully be able to go to.)

11:54 pm: It was a dark and stormy night

 I didn't stay long at post DCBM socializing-- it wasn't all that happening, and I wasn't in the mood.  When I got home and began to open the car door, the wind immediately blew it the rest of the way open, and the cherry tree branches were whipped back and forth.

I figured I should take a walk.   The solid cloud cover had become patchy, and it was blown so quickly that when I was walking, it looked like the stars and the moon were racing across the sky.  The stars, when uncovered, were remarkably clear.

The air was so full of energy that it seemed something should happen. 

10:34 pm: Veggie Alternative Thanksgiving
This is my second thanksgiving as a vegetarian.  Last year, we got an Unturkey, and it was pretty bad.  It was basically a solid lump of textured vegetable protein, wrapped in tofu skins.  We decided it looked like a mutant stuffed cabbage.  And it tasted like Hillel meal plan veggie deli.  

I think I've gone a step(or several) better this year.   arctic_alpine suggested beans as a better veggie entree, but the problem was finding one that fits in with all the other thanksgiving food.  So not chili, or barbeque beans, or tomato-lemon-sage garlic, or any of my usual bean recipes.

I tried looking for traditional New England bean recipes, but they pretty much all included ham as a vital ingredient.  Not helpful.  Finally, I googled the following:  beans squash apples cranberry.  And I got this. 

I worked out a few adjustments, like substituting navy beans for the kidney beans and garbanzos, because I don't like either without tomatoes.  And substituting maple syrup for honey, partly to be New England themed, and partly because I like excuses to cook with lots of maple syrup.   And adding garlic, because it was too sweet (I think I overdid the maple syrup).   And I made a big dish of the bean-fruit mix, but only some of it will be stuffed into acorn squash, because we couldn't get enough acorn squash.  Apparantly, it's popular this time of year. Maybe I'll cut up some butternut squash into the rest. 

Anyways, I kept eating it as I cooked it, and it's pretty darn good :)

Oh, and those two years as a vegetarian are destroying my ability to navigate a meat-and-dairy kitchen, including the one I grew up in.  I started cooking the onions in a dairy frying pan before my mom caught the mistake.  They are perfectly good, but useless for Thanksgiving dinner.  So now we have a tupperware of sauteed onions in the freezer.  Maybe I'll make soup for next week. 

09:28 pm: Libraries and Rain
Seeing as I teach in a library once a week, I figured I should see about using it as a library as well. I asked about getting a Calvert County card, and it turned out that I could have my Montgomery card extended.  Cool.  I didn't know they could do that.  The only restriction is that I can't use the databases.  I think I'll survive :)

It's fun to have a library again.

In other news, all the rain we got today was truly gishmei bracha-- rains of blessing.  The ground's gotten so dry lately.  But it made for tough driving, especially on the way home when it was dark, and I could barely see the ground in some stretches.  I heard of several accidents, and one person seriously hurt, possibly killed, while changing a tire.  Gishmei klala-- rain that is a curse-- too. 

11:54 am: I think I'm getting crunchier. . .
.  .  . or else more aware of how my body feels.   'Though those are kinda the same, right?

Anyways, I decided to take cough medicine last night so I could sleep.  After failing to swallow the gel kind (that's one full glass of water and one of soy milk worth of failing to swallow)  I resorted to mildly expired cough syrup (6/07), which tasted every bit as nasty as I remembered.  And I went to sleep, and woke up feeling groggy, and ickier than I'd felt when I was actually sick*. 

I think I'll stick to tea and cough drops.  I should have known there was a reason I'd ended up so against the stuff.

*I'm not sick anymore, it's just that my lungs are clearing out all the guck from when I was, so I feel better but sound much worse.  promise.

12:30 pm: vinegar
I've been trying Bev's classic vinegar remedy today and yesterday.  It either works, or is the world's best placebo. 

11:35 am: inspired by Desh's idea
any DC area folks interested in a corn maze?