Why I don't mind getting up early sometimes...

Hannah and I rolled out of Charlotte shortly after six on Wednesday morning to make the six-hour drive up 81 to Hagerstown, Maryland. I bribed her awake with cooked breakfast, and we were on 77 before the sun came up.
I have a bad habit of taking photos while trying to drive.

The drive up was glorious. Mountains and glowing trees and an Amish man silhouetted against a beautiful sky as he drove his buggy across an overpass. Photography-while-driving reflexes weren't fast enough for that one, sadly. The drive back was much longer. Traffic on 77 was miserable for a while, and at one point we went back and forth between a standstill, and gaining maybe five yards at 2 mph. Towards the end of our incredibly aggravating stint in traffic, the highway wound around the side of a mountain and instead of being stuck at a standstill looking at dark highway trees and oncoming cars, we were suddenly stuck at a standstill looking across a valley at this...
I'm pretty sure I have at least one or two other posts comprising of similar sunset photos, but I find myself faced with something like that and I can't help myself. If we hadn't been stuck in traffic, it would have flown past in my periphery in a few seconds. I was glad for the traffic.

Do you know who Sarah Josepha Hale was?

Because I did not.

I'm embarrassed to admit that if you had asked me yesterday when Thanksgiving was first established as a national holiday, I would have had no idea. Today, in my internet meanderings, I discovered that it was officially declared a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of the Civil War, of all times. Cool, I thought, way to go Lincoln!
Then I meandered through the internet a little more, and discovered that it wasn't Lincoln's idea at all. A woman named Sarah Josepha Hale (who wrote Mary Had a Little Lamb) had spent 17 years writing letters to presidents trying to get one of them to make an official proclamation that the last Thursday of November would be a national day of thanksgiving. (FDR changed it to be the fourth Thursday so that the Christmas shopping season would be longer.) She wrote editorials in her magazine about a national Thanksgiving holiday, and finally Lincoln listened to one of her letters and voila, the whole country eats poultry, bakes pies, and watches football at the end of every November.
And so, for your cultural edification (and as a little reminder of how much more eloquent and literate people used to be), here is Lincoln:

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln

Trout! (Pan-fried)

I bought trout at the Atherton Mill Farmers Market last week. It was caught in NC and was sold to me in a ziploc bag. I have never bought or eaten or cooked trout before, but the guy asked what kind of fish I wanted and when I said I didn't know but I wanted something I could fry in a skillet, this is what he handed to me.
First of all, isn't it beautiful? Fish are amazing to me sometimes, with their little sparkly rainbow scales. Like that kids book, right? Almost too pretty to eat. Except...not really.

For all my years as a fish-eating vegetarian, I know approximately one way to cook one kind of fish. I can pan fry salmon. That's it. So I wasn't entirely sure what to do with two whole trout, but I figured if I messed up the first one I'd still have a shot with the second. So I did what I always do when unsure how to cook something...I fried it in buttr!!

Pan-fried Trout

a fish (1 lb seems to be two fishes worth of fillet)
flour
salt and pepper
butter

Rinse the fish, and use a sharp knife to separate the two halves of the body from each other if they're still connected (mine were). Pat dry with a paper towel.

Mix a half-cup or so of flour with salt and pepper on a big plate. Dredge the fish in the flour on both sides.

Melt the butter in a cast iron skillet until it's bubbling, but not starting to brown. Put the fish in the pan, skin side down, and cook for a couple minutes (3? 4?) Flip the fish over with a pair of tongs and fry on the other side. Ideally, you only flip it once. Shouldn't take more than 10 minutes (max!) to cook through. Yum.

Done and done. The result? The absolute best piece of fish I think I have ever eaten. Like, seriously. Not as the result anything fancy I did, but because I swear the little guy must have been swimming around the day before. I'm never buying fish at the grocery story again. I'm absolutely serious. If you're going to eat food, why eat the crap version?

On patriotic symbols...

We learned about propaganda today, and watched a bunch of campaign ads.
(If you never caught the Demon Sheep ad...I suggest you check it out. Good for a big wtf.)

Anyway, one of the propaganda techniques we covered was the use of patriotic symbols. Sarah Palin's PAC ad is thoroughly doused in American flags, for instance. We asked what other patriotic symbols they could think of. One of my favorite kids took that as a springboard for a little tangent about eagles:

"Yeah, we got them symbols man like, ain't that why we believe in the eagle? Man, you don' wanna fuck with an eagle. I'm tellin you man, I seen one of them fuckin' eagles, he walkin right up behind me and he was bigger than a dog, man! That fuckin' bird was fidna pick me up! That how big it was! Man, and I'm afraid of heights!"

School-appropriate language? Nope. Do we have bigger battles to fight? Yup. Couldn't not laugh.

I guess when you ask...

So I'd been feeling kind of church-less and un-rooted this week. I finally (yeah, should have done this sooner) prayed and asked God to find me the perfect church. I'd been going to this one for maybe two months or so, and it just hadn't felt permanent yet. I'd emailed someone about joining a small group and hadn't heard back, and I felt like everyone I met on Sunday disappeared the next Sunday to be replaced with more people whose names I wouldn't remember and whose faces I wouldn't recognize next week. So, I prayed. And hey, guess what happens when you actually DO that?

The day after I prayed I woke up and the guy had emailed me back about small group - they're just getting started but hope to start meeting this week or the next.

Then I find out that a friend from college who recently moved out of Charlotte went to Hope (this church) for three years and loved it and the people there. And he knows the guy with the small group and tells me he and his wife are lovely people.

Then I went to Hope this morning. The sermon was on this one idea that God has been pounding me with all week. The pastor reads the EXACT scripture that has kept popping into my head all week (Luke 12: 31). There's a baptism, and the dad reads this unbelievably beautiful "blessing" thing for his daughter that's, AGAIN, about the same idea. (And man, I'm a weeper when it comes to dads reading beautiful blessing things to their little baby daughters - sheesh.)

Then we sing two of my favorite songs at the end of the service (How Great is our God, and Be Thou My Vision).

And then the couple sitting behind me invites me to lunch with two more of their friends from the church. And they're just cool as can be and so friendly and legit, not friendly in a fake-churchy way.

Okay, thanks God, I get it. Church = found.

Brown-sugar baked pears

I'm always overwhelmed by the 38 kinds of pears you can buy, so this week I bought one Bosc pear and one Bartlett pear and decided to actually compare them instead of just eating one and thinking, 'Oh, that was alright' and then the next time I go to buy them forgetting what kind I bought the last time. So, last week I baked a Bartlett pear with a brown-sugar/maple syrup/butter glaze. Pretty good, but overly sweet. I thought I'd try again with the Bosc pear. Recipe worked better, but the Bartlett pear I think is better for baking than the Bosc.

This was my breakfast yesterday:

Fry them in butter!!! Once they were browned on the open side, I dumped brown sugar into the butter, melted it all around, spooned it over the pears, and threw them in the oven for 20 minutes. I ate them with cottage cheese, although some kind of biscuit or something would have been better to soak up the syrup. Oh, and check out how resourceful I am. I don't have a melonballer but found that a teaspoon measuring spoon works great for scooping out the cores. Ha!

I'm Irish and I love potatoes.

I'm also Norwegian and I love mugs that have the Lord's Prayer written on them in Norwegian. Thankfully, I can enjoy both.
I've been trying lately to get good at cooking basic things. I've spent the last year or two teaching myself to make things like balsamic reduction glazes and orange-honey popovers and things that aren't like, basic food I'm going to want to eat for dinner most days. So I made chili the other day. And decided to figure out how to make breakfast potatoes today. They turned out fantastic, so in case you're interested:

Easy Breakfast Potatoes

Potatoes (1-2 small white or yellow potatoes per person)
1 TB paprika
1 TB ground black pepper
1-2 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp salt
olive oil (a few TBs)

Dice a bunch of potatoes. (That's like, one potato in the photo.)

Boil them for about 5 minutes - just until they're barely tender. While they're boiling, dice some onion and start sauteing that in vegetable oil.

Drain the potatoes and rinse them in cold water.

Mix up the following in a bowl: a bunch of paprika (a big spoon), a bunch of black pepper (another big spoon), some garlic powder (like a teaspoon or so), and some salt (another tsp). Go easy on the salt cause you can always salt when they're in the pan. Add enough olive oil to make a kind of slurry. Then toss your potatoes in the spice/oil until they're coated.

Chuck them into your skillet, which should be hot by now and still have the onions cooking in it. Fry them until they're crispy on the edges! Add whatever extra salt and pepper you want at the end.

Potatoes are best enjoyed while wearing ridiculous bedroom slippers and reading Orion magazine.

Lizard!!

So I'm sitting on my couch watching the news and eating my chili when I hear a sudden, soft thud from across the room and see something move in my peripheral vision. What is it? Oh, just a freaking LIZARD jumping onto my armchair.
The weather's gotten chilly lately and so evidently, my little anole friend (who lives outside by the recycling bins, and whom I recently spent a silly amount of time chasing off of my car) had decided to come inside where it's warm.

I'm pretty good at catching insects and letting them go outside. Unless it's going to bite me, or is a centipede, I usually try to just relocate any home invaders. (Cockroaches are another story; I went after one a few weeks ago with hairspray and Clorox bleach cleanser to no avail.) However, I've never had a lizard pop up onto my living room furniture fixing to make himself at home. It took me some time to find a box I could put over him without catching his ridiculously long and fragile-looking tail, but I finally managed to corral him into one of the big filing Tupperware we keep our students' work in.
As much as I'd love to have a little pet, I'm not trying to breed crickets, or fool around with heat lamps. While he waited patiently in the Tupperware, I did a little research and discovered that the Carolina anole usually hibernates in winter, hiding under wood or rocks or in other sheltered places. Apparently it's not uncommon for them to find their way inside when it gets cold out. It still is cool as shit to a yankee like me, however, as I've never lived anyplace where wild lizards show up in your living room.

I took him outside and set him out in some sunny grass. And then, because I'm a giant nature dork, I sat and watched him for a while. Everything on him is so tiny! He's got these tiny little eyes, and the pattern on his skin is so delicate and precise. I get a little blown away sometimes by things in nature that are beautiful. He was almost sparkly in the sun. He's shedding too, which you can see starting on his two back feet.
Anyway, coolest thing to happen all day. I get way too excited about wildlife, but like, how can you NOT be amazed at that? Does it ever just blow your mind how there are like, millions of kinds of animals and they all work perfectly and are perfectly adapted to wherever they live, and they're all completely, completely different from each other? Cause I get a little freaked out sometimes by just how insane nature actually is, when you sit down and think about it.

Two Successes, One Almost-Success, and One Not-Successful-Yet

Our kids bombed their midterm (we're talking like class averages in the 50s). And then they bombed the quiz we gave them on Friday that was designed to be relatively easy and give them a confidence boost after failing the midterm so miserably. However, I refuse to count this a failure because we have three more quarters to get them ready for N.C.'s End of Course exam; it just goes in the category of not-yet-successful. This morning I got up and cranked out two study guides for them to complete as homework on Monday and Tuesday in preparation for their test on Wednesday. Do you know what two people make up the city's Executive Branch? How many justices are there on the N.C. Supreme Court? What is our state legislature called? No? Well, neither do a lot of our students...yet. But they had damn well better know it on Wednesday, because we will have worked their butts off and they will have no excuse. End of story.

Success #1 today was finishing spray painting my porch furniture. Well, almost-success. I got two hand-me-down white plastic deck chairs and a matching bench from my no-longer-neighbor Genevieve before she moved. I wanted them to be something other than white, so I decided to try Krylon's Fusion paint, which is supposed to bond right to plastic without priming or sanding or any prep work at all. The stuff is magical! My two chairs look beautiful.
The bench, on the other hand, had been painted white in a previous life (white paint on top of white plastic...not sure what sense that makes). The Fusion paint does indeed fuse beautifully to plastic, without chipping or looking blotchy or puddling up or anything. However, it does not fuse beautifully to crappy old paint. I tried to scrap off as much of the old paint as I could, but it still looks like the furniture equivalent of someone with a skin disease.
Gross. I'll have to make a seat cushion, and throw some pillows on it.

My second success of the day was chili. When I lived in Chicago, I was fortunate enough to live a block away from a fantastic chili and pizza and hot dog place called Chili Mac's. If you're ever in Chicago and want an amazing chili dog instead of those funky "Chicago-style" hot dogs with neon-green relish and celery salt and nasty little "sport" peppers... take a 22 or 36 to Briar and Broadway and thank me later. I'd never heard of "Cincinnati-style" chili and honestly had no idea what made it any different from what I knew as like, normal chili. Chili powder and cumin = chili, as far as I knew. BUT! I did some googling this morning, found a couple recipes, and actually made a batch of chili that I won't get sick of and throw away after a week. It has cinnamon, coriander, allspice, paprika, cumin, chili, cayenne, and bay leaf (as well as the usual garlic, onion, etc.) I have a tendency to relegate things like cinnamon and allspice to cookie recipes, and forget they can make other things too.
Next up: polyurethaning my blue bookshelf and putting plastic insulation film over my windows.

Fantastic Weekend.

This was a good trip. I’d been feeling nostalgic about Chicago lately, and missing parts of my life there, and contemplating in that back-of-your-mind kind of way what it might be like if I moved back some day. When I drove away in April I wasn’t leaving anything behind that I hadn’t loved for the time I was there. There were things I was moving away from, but not to escape them, just to grow up from them. So I was afraid that I’d get off the plane on Thursday, drive through the city, go for a drink, walk around my old neighborhood, and wish I still lived there. But I don’t, and that’s a really good feeling.

Since graduating from college I’ve felt kind of pulled from one place to another, without feeling like I could ever safely start to put down roots in any one place. Maryland was always a temporary stay, and although at first Chicago felt like it might be permanent, slowly that idea showed itself to be less and less likely. I told myself I wanted to move to North Carolina because I wanted to live in a place I felt could be permanent, but I’ve only been in Charlotte since July, and that’s not a lot of time for a place to really be home. Missing Chicago the last couple weeks was kind of unsettling, in an actual sense of feeling not-settled anymore, but being back for the weekend was just what I needed to feel settled again.

Everything was just as I left it – maybe some people had lost a little weight, my friends’ kids were six months bigger, new businesses had opened, new construction had started…but it was comforting to know the city was still there, and that my presence or absence makes very little difference. Comforting because it means I can go away for as long as I want to, and come back, and it’s still there. Nothing is happening that I’m missing out on. I think I’m always a little paranoid about missing out on things. Not that I really thought the city would disappear Brigadoon-style, but our egocentric selves have a tendency to imagine that if we can’t see things, they stop existing. It’s good to be put in our place sometimes. It’s good to feel small.

I heard a speaker talk last week about how we have such a hard time holding on to God’s promises to us, really trusting that he wants to give us good things. The guy was speaking in the context of relationships, and how often we hold on to relationships we know aren’t what we need, or even what we want, because we don’t really believe that God wants us to find the intimacy we’re looking for. We try to grab hold of what little of it we can get on our own. I think the same idea holds true in so many other areas of life, and I know for me it’s been a struggle to really hold onto the promises God’s made that convinced me to go out on the biggest damn limb ever and pick up my whole life and move it to Charlotte.

I had a great time this weekend, catching up with friends and spending time with people who mean a lot to me. I got pistachio gelato at L'Appetito with Shan.

We dressed up for Halloween (Shan was an owl, I was Mr. Rogers) but I failed to take any photos of our get ups, and will have to get them from Shan. I went to Covenant on Sunday, got brunch at the Bristol with my fantastic small group ladies and stopped by Pastoral later for some fancy cheese. I got to enjoy the 146, 77 and 50...none of which I can say I missed especially. Waiting for the bus though at least gives you the chance to look around and enjoy the outdoors...which was GORGEOUS and cool and the leaves were all yellow and blowing all around.

I think what’s even better about this weekend though was that God relented a little bit, and gave me a little reminder of why I really should trust him after all. I didn't freak out and want to move. I didn't notice all the things in Chicago I miss in Charlotte - in fact, I missed things in Charlotte that I realized I didn't have in Chicago. I’m still thrilled to be in Charlotte, I’m still excited for my future there, I’m still thankful for my time in Chicago and grateful for everything it taught me, and I’m still ready for whatever’s next!