Pomegranates and Sheeps

I painted these as a Christmas gift for my aunt. I bought a real pomegranate and everything. They are probably the most absurdly over-the-top ridiculous piece of produce I've ever seen. If you've never cut one up I recommend you try it. The seeds actually are pretty tasty, but their quantity is kind of unbelievable. It's like a clown car. They just keep coming.

And I painted this from a photo I took in Ireland. Gift for my Nana.

Custom Keds

I painted shoes for my sister for Christmas. These started out as plain white Keds slip-ons, and I used Pebeo Setacolor fabric paint. It stays nice and flexible, and was really just like painting on a stretched canvas.

My sister likes sweet potatoes a lot (Sweet Potato Latkes)

Today I did very little that was productive. It was great. I slept until 11, which I haven't been able to do in months because my internal clock is set for 5am. I checked on my Amazon order (Appalachian Trail Guide to Tennessee-North Carolina -- more on that plan later). I changed out my oversized men's sweatpants for my cowboy-print flannel pajama pants. I ate Christmas cookies. That was the first half of my day. Very worthwhile.

In the afternoon, I took my car up to the shop for an oil change and walked back home. I went and traipsed around in a field or two briefly as a detour. It's cold and snowy, but it was really nice to get outside and breathe cold air after so many days curled up in the house wearing flannel and eating cookies.

I walked around the Cauffiel House across from the park, and looked at the Delaware River. Across the river, New Jersey looked very cold.


Then I walked back up Philly Pike.
Then when I got home, I made sweet potato latkes (1 grated sweet potato, an egg, some flour, cinnamon). Hannah put maple syrup on hers and liked them a lot. Here's how you make them:

You need:

1 large sweet potato
1 egg
3-4 Tablespoons flour
Cinnamon
Frying oil (sunflower is best, or you can use canola, or mix butter into either)

Grate 1 sweet potato. Put the grated potato into a towel and wring it out to drain some of the excess moisture. Put it back in a bowl, and mix in one egg, and add flour. Add as much cinnamon as looks good to you, and stir it up until it's well-mixed.

Heat the oil in a cast iron skillet, until it's shimmering and hot. (I flick a few drops of water in it - if it sizzles angrily, it's ready.)

Scoop up the potato mixture by the spoonful and drop it into the oil. You can kind of smush it down a little to flatten it. Let it fry for a minute or two on one side, then flip it over and do the other. They're done when both sides look crispy and lightly browned.

How sometimes we wrap presents

Sometimes presents have packaging that isn't amenable to being wrapped. In the Andersen family, we don't let such things stand in our way.

At home with the Andersens.

Home in Delaware...and I'm not stripping wallpaper this Christmas!! Last year my siblings and I spent about three straight days with a wallpaper steamer scraping 50-year-old paper off of plaster walls, and then another day or two with a tub of spackle and various buckets of paint, as we delivered on the promised Christmas gift of a redecorated dining room. Not this year! The dining room is blue and will remain blue for the foreseeable future, thank all that is holy. All very coordinated with a painting I made a while back, and our second Christmas tree.


Adorning our other Christmas tree is a new ornament this year, crafted by hand out of a Humira self-injector pen. My Dad thought the red plastic could have a new life, after faithfully serving its first purpose as a drug-delivery device. Rheumatoid arthritis does Christmas. (Sustainability! Reduce, reuse, recycle!!)

In other news, I got my new blood work back. Negative rheumatoid factor (again), and no auto-immune markers (again). Pretty much normal, except for some elevated liver enzymes, which just means I need to stop taking anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers. And something called C-reactive protein was also high. Apparently it becomes elevated with inflammation, but doesn't give you specific info about what's actually inflamed, so not terribly helpful best I can figure. My fingers got nice and chubby on Wednesday, but all points of articulation seem to be fully functional today. I've been reading lots of medical journal abstracts though, am becoming increasingly convinced that RA starts in your gut with antibodies to food, and am still grudgingly on for pears, trout and sweet potatoes in 2011. Hooray.
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"You've got a strong story."

I met my rheumatologist today. He listened to my tale of arthritic woe, and said affirming things like, "Yes, you make a strong case, you tell a strong story...especially with your Dad's history, it sounds like something inflammatory, it definitely sounds like something inflammatory." He seemed to be saying that I told a compelling story in favor of inflammation. My primary care guy just kept saying "There's definitely something rheumatological about you. Yes, you've definitely got something rheumatological going on." I suppose I was glad the specialist narrowed it down from there. There's something inflammatory about me, I guess? Or at least I tell a good inflammation story.

He told me I had a good story so many times I finally was like, "Thanks, I try to keep it interesting." He responded with something else about inflammation.

They took three tubes of blood and an x-ray of one hand, ordered a bunch of bloodwork (ANA, RF, CBC, CMP, CRP, CCP), and gave me four samples of what look like the world's biggest nicotine patches, but instead of dosing you with nicotine, they dose you with diclofenac (an anti-inflammatory). Each one is about as big as a paperback novel - they're a little ridiculous.

I was also given a little slip of paper that the Dr. pulled out of his pocket and handed to me. It reads:

Dr. Nami wants you to take these vitamins:

Fish Oil - 4 g daily
Vitamin D - 1000 I.U. daily
Glucosamine/Chondroitin - 1500/1200mg daily

I will try the fish oil after I try my elimination diet. Which I did not tell Dr. Nami about because if he had said, "There hasn't been any conclusive research into the connection between diet and arthritis," I'd have said, "Okay, so what?" And if he had said, "That sounds stupid, have an NSAID!" I would have said, "Um, no thanks." And if he had said, "That sounds great, have fun!" I'd have smiled cheerily and agreed.

I did not show him my spreadsheet, as he seemed happy enough to take my history out loud and I did not want to make him think I'm crazy yet.
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A year ago...

It occurred to me today that a year is a hell of a long time. I started thinking, for no particular reason, about where I was a year ago. I had a life all settled in Chicago, had broken up with Ben a month before, was an emotional train wreck, was still working for Grosvenor, and a week or two before flying home for Christmas I had been suddenly hit with the thought that I might want to move to North Carolina.

Here's part of an email I wrote, almost a year ago today:

I wrote two emails this morning asking people to be my job references, and am filling out an application for the Southern Teachers' Agency (the people who got me my Queen Anne job). I can rent an f-ing HOUSE with TWO BEDROOMS and a YARD for like, 700 bucks in Winston. Screw this thousand dollars a month bullshit, geez. So we'll see about that, but I think I might do it. You've always told me to follow my dreams and what do I really want to do and so on. . . and I think I'd really like to live in the south and be near friends and family and have dirt to plant stuff in and open space to wander around in. So we'll see.

And in another email two weeks later...

Spent the first day of the new decade making art with my new pastels, cleaning old shit out of my house, and sending my resume to recruiters in NC. Juliet has given me all kinds of great reasons why Charlotte is an awesome city and I should totally move there. Nelson has good things to say about NC, but doesn't like Charlotte because it has too many southern people in it. Kristen's gonna call me back later and tell me all about TFA in Charlotte. And I, meanwhile, need to start applying for some other things in case TFA still doesn't want me. But, fact is, I can basically do whatever the hell I want to, wherever the hell I want to do it! I'm really excited and really hoping I get the TFA gig, but either way, I'm crossing that Mason-Dixon!

I guess it's just nice to look back on that, sitting here in my apartment in Charlotte, getting presents ready to drive home for Christmas (because I can drive now, not fly), steeling myself for two more days of rowdy teenagers who are just as anxious for break as I am...able to think hey, I started at Point A, decided I wanted to get to Point B, and here I am. Funny thing is though, all that does is make me think about what else I want to do... if I wanted to move to NC, decided to do it, and then actually did it...what else do I want to do?

(P.S. It sometimes snows a little here and it's beautiful!)

Fun times with arthritis and Excel

Those of you who are unfortunate (and wonderfully patient) enough to listen to me complain about things, or respond to frantic phone calls that I'm dying of some bizarre food poisoning or rare disease I came across on the internet (okay, so I have a problem with googling things), know that for the past year and a half I've been treated to a diverse assortment of mysterious joint pain. Random arthritic knees that show up for a couple days and then vanish. (Yes, knees themselves appear and then disappear.) Fingers that are stiff in the morning. Or fingers that are inexplicably swollen and so I can't bend them and so when I hold the pole to stand on the bus all my fingers grip it except my middle finger that sticks out awkwardly straight so it looks like I'm flipping off everyone around me. Always good for a chuckle.

Anyhow, assorted docs in Chicago assured me they could find nothing wrong with me.

Well, they thought it was Lyme disease at first; despite the fact that I could think of approximately one-half of a very remote chance I'd been anywhere near deer in the past six months. Managed to rule out gout (oh boy!) and finally gave me a quasi-diagnosis of "Well, you're just hypermobile, and sometimes hypermobile people have unexplained joint pain. You should try some strength training." Right. I mean, okay, yes my fingers can bend backwards kind of strangely, and yes, I googled the living crap out of "Benign Joint Hypermobility Syndrome" and it's a real thing, but should I be lifting finger-weights? What?

So...here's what I am almost embarrassed to be proud of. I've got an appointment with a new rheumatologist down here. And, thanks to my time in the hedge fund industry plowing through spreadsheets, and my TFA indoctrination (data! data!! DATA!!!) . . . I have determined to solve my rheumatological mystery with Excel!!


Yes, I really made a graph. I am a huge loser. But when you have data over like, 18 months, and you can turn it into numbers (I rated how inconvenient/painful my joints were each day, and how many joints were involved)...how can you NOT want to make that into a graph? I need Edward Tufte to make me some beautiful, visual data.

Anyway. I am determined to get some doctor to give me something I can do so that I don't have weird swollen lumps of fluid popping up on the back of my hand (even if they're useful to gross out students with). At the very least, I will show up to my appointment with enough paper in hand that someone will have to diagnose me with something before I leave. I'm the obnoxious patient who gets made fun of on "House" because she read something on the internet and is insistent about it. Well, unless Hugh Laurie wants to be my doctor...I have no shame. I come equipped with records of symptoms and my diet and ... oh yeah! That's the other fun part!

I've been reading on the internet (I know, I know, where all the wacky alternative health crazies hang out) a lot of anecdotal evidence about people with rheumatoid arthritis (oh yes, this is my tentative self-diagnosis, by the way) have eliminated certain foods from their diet and been symptom-free for months, or years. Scared it into remission with leafy green or something. Some people think food intolerances can trigger autoimmune responses and blah blah blah, whatever. Point being, after Christmas, I am going to be trying an "elimination" diet of typically-hypoallergenic food (lamb, pears, salad, olive oil, and approximately four other things that don't go together...venison is okay, for example, and bananas) for a couple weeks to see if my symptoms go away. Then if they do, I reintroduce food groups back into my diet to see if anything triggers symptoms again. It's like a fun (okay, 'fun' might be an overstatement) puzzle, with lots of data and lists and tracking (TFA!! Get out of my head!!!) and other fun stuff. Like, am I a huge fan of lamb and pears? I mean, when I can't eat them with anything good like sugar or rice...not so much. I'm not going to like going carb- and dairy-free for a while. But. I also like having full use of all assorted limbs, thank you very much.

That will be the big adventure upon my return from break. To be honest, I need some joint or another to stay painful until then because otherwise I'm going to find the motivation hard to come by. I like food. A lot. All kinds of it. But I also like keeping track of data and trying to find patterns and being OCD about lists of things. And as mentioned before, I like my joints. Bring it, Dr. Something-Persian-sounding whose practice is all the way in Ballantyne. Brace yourself. I come with spreadsheets.
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Christmas!!! (and pickles)

Me and my friend Sarah went to lunch on Sunday. The Atherton Mills Farmers Market had Sunday hours, so we went down to Southend to find lunch and then hit up the market. We ate at the IceHouse on South Blvd., and because it was Sunday (or just because I like fatty food), I got chicken and waffles, with sweet potato and bacon hash. I'd heard of chicken and waffles as a meal, but somehow always imagined it like, chicken and dumplings, or something with gravy involved. Nope. Piece of fried chicken, big ass waffle, little cup of syrup. Why not serve two amazing foods together with a sugary condiment? Fried chicken is not something I know how to make, but I might have to learn soon. (Dear family, I will be frying sweet potatoes and bacon together when I come home.)


The whole reason I wanted to go to the farmer's market was to buy meat. I got a Netflix trial last week, and finally watched "Food Inc." which increased the number of generally icky feelings I have towards our food industry. (Admittedly, not enough to turn down fried chicken on a waffle.) So I got some ground beef and eggs and bratwurst from the Windy Hill Farm guy and had a lovely conversation about the slaughtering regulations for assorted animals. (He can kill his own poultry and rabbits, but has to send his pigs, cows and lambs to a slaughterhouse in Greensboro.)

Then Sarah and I were enticed over to Pickleville. The friendly proprietor (a Jew from Philly who used to make pizzas and now makes pickles) let us try a million kinds of pickles, and I wound up spending five bucks on a tub of the most amazing pickles ever. I got half regular dill (light years beyond Vlasic) and half "half-sour" which I guess aren't pickled as long and so are a little fresher tasting.

Maybe tonight's dinner wasn't picturesque, but damn was it good. (Two kinds of pickles..!! Bratwurst from a pig who got to root around in the forest and eat real pig food!!)


And finally...the best thing to come out of my farmer's market trip? A Christmas tree!!!!!!!

We prefer ridiculous.

To continue with a review of last week's holiday celebrations...

I was in Hagerstown, Maryland with my family and my mom's family. My Uncle Chris lives in California, and because he wasn't able to make it home for Thanksgiving, joined us by video chat. We stayed at my aunt's house, my Nana and my uncle live up the street. In theory, if we had wanted to include the whole family in a conversation, we could readily have gotten all the Boyers and the Andersens in one room, and had Uncle Chris on the video chat. But my family doesn't like to do things logically. We prefer more ridiculous.


Here we have two computers and one telephone. Me and dad are video chatting with Hannah, my Aunt Amanda, and my cousin Zoe on two different laptops across the table. Nana is on the video chat from up the street with both of us, and my Uncle Sean (red sweater) is on the phone with Nana. Chris, off in California, is the ONLY ONE for whom a video chat is the most sensible way to communicate.

I'm not sure if this is an improvement on last year, when Chris's disembodied, digitalized head joined us on the dining room table for Thanksgiving dinner. I believe we took a family photo with his video-chatted face included in the shot.