invisible

you know it's a nasty day around here when the entire sears tower disappears...

especially considering how close it is! (see picture)

4 days left...

* my period of gainful employment comes to an end on thursday
* my birthday is on friday
* i leave for a week in california on tuesday
* yes!!!
* ok, seriously, i can't find my latest copy of "everyday food" ANYWHERE and it is seriously BOTHERING me.
* we had a giant snowstorm and i need to go dig my car out...
* but, i don't want to!
* let me know if you think of a new job for me!

our little room

more pictures

(1) more of our house
(2) our pretty pretty x-mas decorations

seasonally relevant

today the starbucks by my work was giving away free "holiday" drinks and baked goods. yay!

also, if you have a macintosh computer, but no real christmas decorations, this is an excellent program you can download! it's definitely festivating my computer right now.

real update to come...

lower right-hand corner

holy crap, when i first incorporated the cost of war calculator into my blog code, i really never expected it to get so HUGE!

this is the last picture for now

the view from my train station (the one at the work end, not at the home end... that view would just look like a bunch of broken glass and gravel in a vacant lot.)

it snowed!

this is actually his staff pick!

mathieu at work!

shocking but true!

dining room

it is very large. it has a big empty space in the middle.

the study

in theory, this is the 3rd bedroom. i have no idea how that would work. i don't think there's any wall that's long enough to hold a twin bed without blocking either the closet door or the actual door.

kitchen

pictures of my place

living room

NEW!!!!

click on the link that says "mathieu" to read a new blog. he will be happy if you leave a nice little comment

pictures

(1)from the train
(2)also from the train
(3)freezing at the train station
(4)GOBOU!!!!

meatastic meat

one thing about the "real" world that is different from wesleyan is that i
cook TONS OF MEAT! (another thing that's different is that mathieu eats
SOME VEGETABLES! so you see, it's a compromise). last sunday as i was
pulling the skin off of chicken thighs, it just struck me that one year,
or even six months ago, i probably would have ground up soybeans and
congealed them into tofu myself rather than pull the skin off with my bare
hands. but now i cook meat almost every day! or at least 3 times a week!
and i literally haven't bought a block of non-silken tofu since i moved to
chicago! (we have used the silky tofu a number of times, and i have even
started to understand its appeal.)

yesterday was a milestone in the world of beth-meat-cookery because it was
the first time i cooked pork. before that, i had cooked:

* boneless, skinless chicken breasts (aka the tofu of meat. i don't think
i will ever make these again when the next item on the list is so much
better.)
* boneless, skinless chicken thighs (aka the greatest and perhaps the
cheapest chicken product on earth)
* whole chicken
* pieces of chicken with the bone and/or skin still on/in them
* tons and tons of fish
* bison (a rather expensive whole foods experiment)
* flank steak (aka pure deliciousness)
* ground beef (does that even count??)
* i think that's it
* oh, and we go through chicken soup broth like crazy as we probably eat a
noodle-soup kind of dish twice a week on average. but that's also hardly
meatastic meat. just non-vegetarian.

but the pork was new for me. the pork was awesome. we used a recipe from
my new cookbook (having nice bookstore employees get you heavily
discounted presents is the best!) titled The Best Recipes in the World to
make a spicy Korean stew of pork and silky tofu. my favorite thing about
the pork was that it was extremely easy to cut into cubes! cutting the
pork was so great! i totally want to get more of it just to make cubes!

i took a picture of the pork, but i'll have to edit that in later.

anyway, do any other wesleyan post-grads cook meat? as long as you're not
vegetarian, i would definitely recommend getting some pork and cutting it.
you won't be disappointed.

The Windy City

Within the past 2 days the weather here has switched from being "oh, this really isn't so bad," to "OMFGITISSOFREEZINGCOLD MYNOSEISFALLINGOFF"
40 MPH winds...high of 28 degrees...snow that's blowing around so fast it's going up instead of down....I LOVE IT!!

Also, people keep feeding me this story about how "It's not called the windy city because of the wind, it's because the politicians in the 19th century were such big talkers, full of wind, blah blah blah." Well, all I have to say to that is that it's actually extremely windy. So I don't care. I'm re-appropriating the term to serve my uses. Which are primarily to accentuate the fact that it's extremely windy and blowing my nose off.

bloggyblogblog

so my excellent intentions to write in this blog again got sidetracked for a while. sad!! anyway, what have i been up to?

- working all weekend, due to having to run the united way crisis recovery call center 7 days a week. not to worry, i am simply switching saturday and sunday off for friday and monday off.
- looking forward to being lazy all day tomorrow while other people are hard at work!
- spending too much time dealing with expensive parking tickets
- rocking out with dead by wednesday... aka watching them alienate the entire audience by calling their favorite band racist + fascist! awesome show.
- also watching a guy who is hanging out with their tour drive a nail up his nose, swallow a sword, and stick his hand in a racoon trap. also awesome.
- doing very little work while "at work." ok, basically i'm sitting here "supervising" 3 volunteers who are supposedly answering phone calls...the current group of volunteers has been here 1.5 hours, during which time we have received approximately zero calls. the volunteers this morning and yesterday have already used up all of the office-work jobs we had planned out. if i were these people, i would go home, but i guess they're hoping to be useful at some point.
- ok, i'm totally going to post this now, just to establish the precedent of posting.

the plan for the blog

If you're interested in frequent updates from this blog, plan on tuning in between 8:30 AM and 5 PM CST, Mon. - Fri., when I will probably be posting from work.

This is where I live

The faintness of the skyline should indicate how far I am from downtown....
Readers, can you identify the city in the picture?

NEW!!!!

I think it is time to write in the blog again.

I hope someone reads it!