Radio Silent

Our internet may not be set up for the next few days, so we might be flying below the radar for that reason. Probably a good thing for my study habits, not so good for the rabid internet addiction I've developed while in law school...

Celebrate!

I got the job!

Today is my last day of law school classes!

Tonight we move to Reston!

And, I just had an incredible egg and cheese bagel!

Sh!tstorm!

We THOUGHT we had coordinated ...

our move-out date
with a truck rental date
with Matt taking vacation
with the date we take possession of our new place
with the date we pick up our new futon
with my hours at work
with applying for Georgetown (getting transcripts/letters of rec/app filled out/essay written)
with studying for 4 3-hour law school finals
with changing over our renter's insurance*

BUT, after having one or more of these factors change multiple times by people who fail to inform us of such in a timely manner, thereby knocking down all the other dominoes in the sequence and necessitating either multiple pleading phone calls or frantic trips out to Reston or last-minute cancellation of shifts (which work most definitely frowns upon)

...we're not so sure anymore.

*All of which is extremely reminiscent of the apply to law school/ finish Matt's master's degree/ plan a destination wedding/ apply for both our jobs/ move across the country festivities of the FIRST six months of this year. Are we gluttons for punishment, or what?!

Houston, We Have a Sublease.

If all goes well, we're planning to move ON THURSDAY.

THIS THURSDAY.

We'll keep you posted...

Thankful

To be back together again. To be sorting out the housing situation (more below). Perhaps most of all...that we don't make a bad vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner!

To start off, I spent the first half of Thanksgiving like I've spend 90% of all holidays in the past eight years--in scrubs. Changing my career focus back to nursing--nurse-midwifery, no less--probably means that that isn't going to change much anytime soon.

However, we had a sumptuous, Matt-and-Katie-style dinner when I got home. (Not that that's any different from usual.) We had mushroom bread pudding, mashed potatoes (with the skins on, and plenty of sour cream and garlic), and pumpkin pie, along with steamed vegetables. It was absolutely amazing! It made us realize how much we had to be thankful for, realizing that there were so many people out there who were just eating plain turkey. ;)

To rewind a little, Matt got home safely Tuesday night about 11. I met him at the airport and we had a big juicy happy reunion, followed by late-night heaping helpings of Mexican casserole, which I'd made earlier in the day. He opened his birthday presents and I delightedly opened the pillow chocolates he'd brought home for me from his hotel. For his birthday, I'd made this cake, which I was actually honestly a little disappointed with. It seemed to be lacking both in the flavor and the moisture departments, which are two essential departments to me when we're talking about cake. These brownies were so good that I wondered how this site could go wrong, but, well, it did. The only tweak I made was to use espresso instead of the water, and I can't imagine that had a negative bearing. (It also didn't seem to bear heavily on the flavor, to my disappointment.) The frosting (cocoa version) was another story--tangy, creamy, chocolatey goodness--but I'm not sure even it was able to save the cake. Matt claims he didn't find anything wrong with it, but, well, he kind of has to claim that, right?

Wednesday, we spent the day basking in each other's company, marveling at the fall colors, falling in love with Reston and the largest Indian food buffet in Northern Virginia...and...drum roll...picking out an apartment. About 2 miles from the hospital where I'd hopefully be working, and about a mile and a half from Matt's work. It's a spacious 1 bedroom that has a lot of the features that matter to us-- a gas stove, tons of counter and cupboard space, and very pretty views of the woods outside. We're getting almost twice the square footage for our money, and peace of mind to boot, which is worth a lot. As I got ready for work yesterday, I felt the old Midwesterner's cold-weather urge to go out and start the car while I got ready for work, and then I had a good hard laugh about how quickly someone would steal the car as soon as I turned my back. But...in Reston...it'll hopefully be a different story.

The other huge development of Wednesday was that we went to speak with the admissions department at the Georgetown School of Nursing about their midwifery program. It sounds better and better all the time. I feel like I really hit it off with the person there, and she made it sound like I might be able to slide into a class for spring semester if I were so inclined, even though the application deadline has passed. Since the job situation is up in the air, I'm going to go ahead and try to push it through. If the job in Reston doesn't work it, it might be worthwhile to try to get a couple of classes done with. If it does, my inclination is to save on transportation and essentially just hole up in Reston for 8 months, then start full steam ahead in the fall. (If I get in.) We'll see what happens.

But now, to the mad scramble that is law school finals, we've added packing and moving, applying to grad school, possibly starting grad school, and (hopefully!) changing jobs. Well, we certainly like a challenge around here.

*Special happy birthday shout-out to my mom!

Relief

Matt's coming home tonight...I now have a job interview a week from tomorrow!...And I'm baking a cake (details to follow). Doesn't get much better than this.

Change

Of career path (again). Of jobs (hopefully). Of apartments (perhaps imminently). Of whether to be fruitful and multiply (more distantly; and more on that at a later date).

It's all adding up and the uncertainty is getting to me, a little.

Throw in that Matt's been gone for a week and law school finals are approaching, and...OK, it's getting to me kind of a lot.

I'm having renter's remorse about having given notice to our landlady, who now seems twice as eager to be rid of us as we are to be out of here (who would have thought?). All of a sudden the proximity to the subway and the fact that we're already here, coupled with the fact that I have heard nothing from the Reston hospital and thus so far have absolutely no obligation that awaits me there, are making me incredibly anxious that we're making the wrong move. That I'm going to be marooned out where there is little public transportation and I'm going to have to spend long hours in traffic, every day, to a job that's driving me up the wall.

I realize these aren't the world's most pressing concerns, but hey, this isn't the world's blog, either.

I'm worried that we're making the same mistake again--succumbing to the charms of a place (in DC's case, the culture and the experience of it; in Reston's case, its beckoning walkability, among other things) while not yet recognizing that its drawbacks (for DC, the crime and the noise and the inconvenience; for Reston, the hours a day I may well end up spending in traffic) are what we really should have thought about. The things that will wind up affecting us on a daily basis.

I recognize that I have brought this on myself, but that doesn't make all the uncertainty any easier to bear.

Holly's Here!

And, despite the fact that she started the visit feeling under the weather (pediatric unit=germ pool), I know that I, at least, am having a wonderful time with her here. I hope she is too. I got an email from Matt the other day that told me to "have fun with your friends. Feed them well." So far we've had mushroom risotto and made a pan of amazing brownies (swapping the nuts for chocolate chips since we both have funny feelings about texture like that) and just generally done lots of catching up. It's been awhile since I've been around a nurse friend, and so we had lots of conversing (read: bitching) to do about that. She agrees with my assessment of the current hospital situation (with wide eyes: "Oh, honey, you need to get out of there!") and is imminently supportive of the nurse-midwife idea. She is, in short, delightful company. I've missed her and now she's here. So let the mad self-photography begin!

Other than that, yesterday I placed a weekend-long hold on an apartment in Reston. Not, unfortunately, one we've seen, but one whose location is very promising and whose price is more or less right (lower than what we're paying now, but not low enough to be scary) and which we'll see on Wednesday. I had an encouraging conversation with HR at the new hospital, in which I was told that I'm on their radar, that they were going to meet to discuss me on Wednesday but the nurse manager was called into an emergency. Is this a bad sign, because it means they're understaffed? A good sign, because it means that a) they need my help and b) the NM is at least INVOLVED with what goes on on the floor? It's too early to tell, but I'm getting to the point where I feel like anything else can't be any WORSE than what I'm currently doing. I'm choosing to be optimistic and hope that it's actually better. Wednesday I also have a meeting with the program director at Georgetown to discuss applying for the fall. So...it seems like things are, hopefully, starting to come together.

That's really about it. Matt is still knocking 'em dead out in Salt Lake City, and I miss him terribly, but he's wonderful about calling often, and I'm so proud of all his hard work.

But I'll still be so glad to get him back.

The Loneliest Number

Well, we successfully launched Matt this morning, after waking up at the excruciating hour of THREE A.M. in order to get in a taxi at four, for a flight time of seven. He should hopefully be touching down in Salt Lake City just before noon Eastern Time (though he won't, of course, be on Eastern Time). As a result, a cup of coffee and a few stray tears later, I'm at school a good hour and a half early, trying to use the extra time for something more productive than surfing the Internet and feeling a little sorry for myself.

You can see how well that's going.

But, a quick update before I force myself to get down to business. Yesterday we went out to Reston and toured two apartments and picked up information for two others. They were all very nice, and all bigger AND less expensive than what we're currently living in. The big question mark is whether I'll be able to get a job out there, which is the thing that would most tip the scales in favor of moving out there. If we trade an hour-plus commute on Matt's part for an hour-plus commute on my part (with the added consideration that my job starts at 7 to his 9), we may not have gained a whole lot. But, if we were both working there, it would simplify things considerably. So I'm hoping to hear from the hospital soon and we'll take it from there. We did really enjoy walking around town (and marveled over the giant FREE parking garage in the Town Center), and gave into the impulse to go out for a farewell dinner.

Speaking of food (and when are we not?), here's a stray recipe I meant to post last week. It's vegetarian chili that's sort of a culmination of the recipes that sounded best to me, combined with what we had in the house. We thought it turned out wonderfully, not to toot our own horns or anything.

Chili
2 cups water
28 oz crushed tomatoes
1 onion, diced
1 tsp minced garlic
1 stalk celery, chopped
3 tsp cumin
3 T chili powder
2 cans beans (I drained but didn't rinse them. I used a can of kidney and one of navy, because that's what we had, but you could use pinto or black or whatever)
2 cups of corn (I used frozen)

Combine everything but the corn. Simmer on medium heat for about an hour. Add the corn about 10-15 minutes before serving.

Cheap, easy, healthy good. It doesn't get any better than that. Unless you top it with crackers, sour cream, chopped onions, and cheddar, like we did; and make it with this corn bread, which is, as the recipes says, VERY moist, and almost cakelike.

Since I Know Everyone's Dying to Know...

...how I did on my second memo assignment.

Rainy Days and Mondays

Today, alas, is both. Is that what's getting me down? (In poor Karen Carpenter's case, I think it's more likely that hideous dress.) Or is it more frustration, stemming from the juggling of so many seeming irreconcilable factors (cost, proximity to Matt's job/my job [which is on the rocks but what else is new]/where I might end up going to school, the absence of roaches and violent crime) as we try to find a new place to live? The idea that I'm not sure I can stomach eight more months at my current job? The uncertainty of not knowing whether I'll get into the midwifery program I want? Or the thought that Matt's going out of town in two days?

To be fair, I'm not even sure that "down" is the best way to describe how I'm feeling. It's more like "blah." It's a feeling of being just plain tired of wrestling with the same ideas over and over again. Trying to find a place to live that meets our needs, trying to find a job that isn't batshit crazy and a huge liability, literally; trying to get through the rest of the semester of law school without being literally bored to death. (Really, I fear this.) I realize these aren't major problems, they don't even really demand a solution, except for "wait and see," but that doesn't stop me from wishing that we'd get a break in the case, a change, a clue, something to refresh this weary sluggishness.

To be even more fair, a lot of things have swung our way lately. Confronted by Matt, who has been pushed to his limits by the bugs et al, our landlord has agreed to let us out of our lease, with 60 days' notice. The hospital in the town where Matt works appears to have a number of openings in labor and delivery; there are even some affordable apartments nearby. While the idea of living in an internationally known planned community from the 1960's feels maybe a little Stepford at first, on the other hand, there's something about it that seems kind of utopian and right for people who save their vegetable scraps along with their old underwear. (And what, the idea of me as fawning and submissive and impossibly beautiful doesn't sound realistic to you?) The town's objectives, having to do with leisure and walkability and the premise of (*gasp*) living in the same town where you work, sound like we could have concocted them ourselves as an antidote to what we've found are the MAJOR downsides of living in the city.

As far as school goes, maybe I'll get in and maybe I won't. It's the chance you take when you move across the country to do something and then change your mind about it. It seems unrealistically fortuitous that there would even be such a program in the same town where I moved to go to law school, but there is. Not everybody's husband would have the same kind of loving patience for this sort of flip-floppery that mine does. As for said husband's being gone for a week, it's going to be rough, as anyone who's ever witnessed our separation can attest... but I'm lucky that I'll have good friends there with me the whole time, so that at least I don't have to worry about being alone.

That just leaves finishing law school: 17 days until the end of classes...11 days of actual school, plus 12 hours of final exams...but who's counting?

Early Bird

Matt has been going through some stressful weeks at work as they prepare for their weeklong out-of-town conference, so this morning he got up and went in to work about an hour early to try to get a jump on the workday. I got up too, in a show of solidarity, which is how we like to do it when we can, and we actually enjoyed a nice morning together. Starting our relationship with schedules 180 degrees apart has given us a deep appreciation for the ability to spend these times together, and we're thankful for that.

Once I saw him off, I dialed into what I still think of as "work," the hospital back in Iowa, and chatted with a few long-lost friends, which was lovely. We're beginning to formulate plans with friends for over the holidays, which will include approximately 3 days in each Iowa and Wisconsin, and are really looking forward to the trip. Time will be tight but it should be lots of fun.

Last night, in homage to the aforementioned stress-filled workday which didn't end until around 7pm, we went out to the Old Siam, which is rapidly becoming one of our favorite places to eat. It's nice to have found a place nearby that's cozy and nice, but not fancy; quick with the food (and oh, how we love Thai food); and the home an excellent mojito, the likes of which I haven't had since we moved away from the Atlas. Then we came home, climbed in bed (the only warm place in the house since we've resisted turning on our heat up to this point, preferring to rely on sweaters and the frequent workouts we give the stove and the oven), and put a Six Feet Under DVD on the MacBook. Whether this technically violates our self-imposed year of no television depends on how much of a purist you are, I guess, but it made for a snuggly evening in followed by an early night to sleep, which was what we both needed.

Two nights ago we finally had the pumpkinfest we'd been waiting for. We made the following (picture ours):

My Best Pumpkin Soup

2 Tablespoons Olive Oil
1 medium Onion, chopped
2 cloves Garlic, minced
1-1/2 teaspoons Garam Masala
1/2 teaspoon Black Pepper
1-1/2 teaspoons Ginger, grated
1 can light Coconut Milk
2 cups Pumpkin, pureed
Salt, to taste
1–2 cups Water or Vegetable Stock
1 Lime, juiced

Heat olive oil in deep pan over medium heat. Add chopped onion and sauté until soft and translucent. Add the garlic and sauté for 1 minute. Add the garam masala, black pepper and ginger, and sauté 1 more minute. Add the coconut milk and pumpkin, and stir to mix thoroughly. Place mixture in blender, and puree until creamy. Pour soup back into rinsed deep pan or soup pot. Cook for 15 minutes, adding salt to taste. If needing to be thinned, add a little water or vegetable stock to desired consistency. Before serving, mix in the juice of one lime.

– Recipe by WAC Nutritionist Shana Hopkins

We didn't actually do the lime juice at the end, because we forgot, and we bumped up all the spices because that's just what we do. We also topped it with toasted pumpkin seeds, like croutons. We both really enjoyed it. We were surprised that it didn't come out...orange-r, because the pumpkin puree was certainly vivid enough.

For the broth, we used a batch of ginger stock that we made out of the peelings of two pounds of ginger that Matt convinced me would be much more economical to process ourselves in the Cuisinart, instead of buying fresh ginger puree like we usually do. He was right; at about $2.39 for four ounces, the ginger wasn't prohibitively expensive, especially since most recipes don't take much; but the raw ginger was $1.28 a pound, and out of two pounds, we got easily at least eight times, maybe ten times, as much as we would have in the jar. Plus it made the apartment smell wonderfully gingery for an evening. Now have enough fresh ginger puree to last us a long, long time; not to mention the stock, which is perfect for times like this!

The other thing we made was this pumpkin pie (notable because it uses honey and cream/milk, or in our case half-and-half, instead of sugar and evaporated milk; we appreciated the difference) with this crust (because I'm not a huge fan of traditional piecrusts). It turned out delicious, but, since we had no pie pan, we just baked it in a regular square glass pan and in order to get the filling in the middle cooked, we had to make the sacrifice of a rather toasty crust. Bummer. However, we got to experience the joys of make a crumb crust in the Cuisinart (like falling off a log, as opposed to the old "cutting butter into the flour/crumbs" method that I have NEVER gotten the hang of!). And our big discovery of the evening was after we used the spice grinder (read: old coffee grinder) to grind up some cloves to add to the filling (there weren't any in the recipe but we thought there ought to be) we decided to whip up some impromptu powdered sugar for our whipping cream in there too. So we threw some Sucanat on top of the remnant clove powder (because we were too lazy to clean it, and also had an inkling it just might be good) and whipped that into the heavy cream and hot damn, ended up with the most deliciously subtly clove-y whipped cream to plop on top of the pie.

Today, I'm working hard to drum up the motivation to study that has been MIA for, oh, weeks now. As my mom would say, it's the end of the grading period, no time to let down, and I know that. I know that my entrance into midwifery school likely hinges largely on the kinds of grades I get at the end of this semester, which is no less pressure (and in fact a far more important one, to me) than that to "grade onto" law review. So. It's 7:30, I've blogged, I've had a cup of coffee, and now it's time to hit the books.

My Favorite Time of the Week Again...

...Not just the weekend, but specifically grocery shopping. Don't ask me why I get such a big kick out of this; on some level, I always have, and used to beg my parents to accompany them (and, later, them plus my grandma) on those massive weekly outings. Partly I think it's because I enjoy food; partly I think it's because early on I got the idea (from whom? Not you, Mother...) that controlling what you eat gives you some measure of control over your life. And actually, I've found that to be even more true than I initially thought.

At this point, there's not a whole lot in our budget that we can really control; rent is woefully beyond our means to affect, student loans demand what they will, but by simply changing where we shop and a few other small things, we've essentially cut our grocery bills in half since we first moved out here. Now, there are sites out there that will instruct you painstakingly in the ins and outs of how to maximize your every dollar--I love them, I read them, and I direct you to them, but here are a few of the simplest things that have worked for us.

1. Cook almost everything from scratch. Yes, a can of soup makes a pretty cheap dinner, but for the same cost and a little more effort, you can make a pot from scratch, know exactly what's in it, and have at least enough left over for lunch tomorrow. The same goes for restaurant meals

2. Buy the basics in bulk.
Knowing that we always have basic things like flour, butter, sugar, onions, potatoes, etc on hand means I don't have to do a pricey stock-up when there's something we want to make.

3. Get to know your own eating habits.
Otherwise, you end up being pennywise and pound-foolish. For us, that means that if we skimp on buying foods for snacks (fruit, nuts, granola bars, whatever), one or both of us ends up just "picking something up" while we're out. For the price of one or two of these little jaunts (which don't tend to be foods we enjoy all that much anyway), we could have bought snacks for most of the week.

4. Plan ahead.
It sounds obvious, but I'm amazed at how many people just don't do it. Our current biweekly shopping trip first involves planning out two weeks' worth of menus. Not only do we save money because we aren't picking up things that we won't need in the next rotation, but it's a relief to come home in the evening and know what to expect, instead of having to a) figure out what to have, b) figure out what we need, c) go out and buy that, and d) finally get around to cooking dinner.

5. Eat mainly unprocessed foods; when you do go processed, buy generic. I find that this cuts down on a lot of unnecessary buying if I ask myself "Could I make this myself? Would it be cheaper? Am I willing to do it?" If the answer to the first two questions is yes, but the last is no, than it probably isn't something we needed anyway. It also pretty much eliminates the impulse buying of newly introduced products just because of their novelty value.

Here's what we bought at Aldi's today.

I was really excited because we've been trying to eat more produce lately, and we were able to get two cartons of OJ, ten pounds of potatoes, a bag of onions, a pound of carrots, a bag of celery, frozen peas, frozen corn, a bunch of bananas, two pints of cherry tomatoes (organic, the same brand we'd get at Safeway but $1.69 a pint instead of $4.99!), two bags of prewashed lettuce for salads, and three huge cans of crushed tomatoes...plus several pounds of shredded cheese, a tub of ricotta, half and half, and some of the snack foods to fill the aforementioned gap (two boxes of faux Triscuits, knockoff Health Valley granola bars, and the totally irresistible box of White Cheddar "Binge Cracker" Cheez-Its)...all for $60! That seems to be a pretty typical two-week shop at Aldi, which leaves us a good amount of leeway to go to the Eastern Market, pick up staples at Costco, or just pick something up in the middle of the week without going over budget. Once again, I know there are others who could do it for much much less, but at this point in our lives, this works pretty well for us.

In case you're interested, here's the menu for the next two weeks:

Puerco Pibil

Tamales

Corn chowder & bread

Vegetable soup & salad
Chili & Corn bread?

Pasta & veggies

Red lentil Indian & flatbread

Pizza & salad

Spaetzle or Mac & cheese

Curried pumpkin soup (we're still hoping to pick up a post-Halloween pumpkin, but I did score a can at Aldi's for $0.69 in case it doesn't work out)

Twice baked potatoes & salad

Pancakes or waffles

Egg and cheese biscuits

What fun things are you planning to eat in the upcoming days?