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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So many candles!

I’m getting up bright and early and heading to Winston-Salem tomorrow! Since I won’t be at home for my birthday on the 8th, we had our little family party last night. My dad made me a cake, I frosted it awkwardly, and my siblings wrote “25” on it in candles. Only in Roman numerals, so it said XXV. Which takes a LOT of candles. I love my family.
We also grilled steaks, plum tomatoes and big mushroom caps. And ate corn on the cob and homemade Caesar salad. As my Nana asks rhetorically after each meal, “Isn’t food wonderful?”

Also, I said some mean things to the tinfoil roll and it ran away. Woops.

Swamp funk

I love doing outdoor work and feeling like a homeowner! Only minus the actual mortgage and responsibility. I wandered outside this morning to cut some flowers, and noticed that the one rose bush was looking scraggly. So I got the pruning shears and trimmed it a little, cut out a bunch of dead wood, and tidied it up nicely. But I tend to get carried away when I have clippers in my hand, so I wandered down the backyard and thought I’d prune the other rosebush. Then I noticed there were some unwelcome Japanese maple saplings that had sprung up around it and were blocking the light. So I hacked those back. Then I noticed the magnolia tree had some branches that were hanging down awkwardly, so I got the BIG pruners and lopped those off. By the time I was done I had a hefty pile of tree chunks sitting in the yard; but now there’s room to sit under the magnolia!! How lovely!

A week ago I had a dream that my dad was climbing on a ladder and the ladder fell backwards and he fell down – terrifying. The day after I had the dream, he pops up suggesting he should clean the gutters! Um, no way! Not that I’m usually a superstitious person, but why mess with that shit, right? So I said I would clean the gutters. Smelled like swamp funk, and there was a hole in one finger of my gloves, but when suddenly the gunk cleared and you heard a scratchy rushing noise and gobs of foul muddy leaves came gushing out of the downspout…HA! Victory!

Food Shoes Flowers

I’m getting dangerously used to having all day, every day, to do whatever I want. Apart from working on a tan and sleeping in, I’m cooking a lot. Both my parents and my brother are at work all day, and when I got home a week ago it appeared that my family had been living on pretzel rods, frozen hamburger patties, boiled eggs, and coffee, simply for lack of time to make anything else. Having appreciative people to cook for and a food budget courtesy of the Bank of Dad is pretty nice. I made grilled steak tacos for Cinco de Mayo, pepperjack cheese burgers for my brother’s birthday, pan-fried salmon with citrus dressing for Mother’s Day. Tonight we class it up with a risotto, and salad with homemade Caesar dressing and homegrown romaine. I sound like a food network douchebag a lot these days. Oh well. Nothing food-snobby about a mini Weber kettle and 15-year-old lawn chair set up next to trash cans in the driveway. We like that carefree line between white trash and epicure.

In further enjoying that line, I bought a pair of Michael Kors shoes today at the Goodwill. They were eight bucks! My office building in Chicago also housed a silly-expensive shopping mall. Every morning I walked inside the building and past the Michael Kors store, but since my clothing budget isn’t in the gazillion dollars range, I never went inside. I’m not one to care about designers or labels, and wouldn’t have recognized this one if I hadn’t walked past the store every morning for the past year, but there’s something satisfying about spending less than a pair of shoes is actually worth (I’d have maybe paid $30 for them) when other people are spending ten times that for no good reason. Not exactly Schadenfreude, but something rewardingly similar.

I also have grand plans for landscaping my parents’ front garden. In the meantime, Dad and I went to the garden store yesterday and put together a little pot of perennials for Mom. I am newly determined not to rent another apartment without a yard, deck, porch or balcony.

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“A supermarket of surrogate experience”

One of the perks of living in a house where people have an almost unhealthy inability to throw things away, is that along with the piles of useless things, there are often some interesting things kicking around too. This morning I noticed pile of Life magazines from the 1970s sitting on a bench in the living room. The September 1971 issue promised a special section on “TV: The First 25 Years.” Wild. Maybe one day we’ll get “A quarter-century of Facebook.”

The article was eerily…not prescient, but something similar. The main gist of the piece is the isolation and segregation of TV viewing. I suppose TV hasn’t really changed much in that respect (texting your votes to American Idol does not a community make), but so many of the other technologies we have developed since 1971 have expanded, rather than reeled in, that isolation. Not all of them of course – Skype and cell phones and things connect us with real people we know in real life – but a lot of things keep us apart in ways we didn’t used to be apart. Riding the bus to work every morning for the past two years surrounded by 15 people all with ipods in their ears, who couldn’t hear my “Excuse me, can I get by?” much less any effort at friendly small talk, made me a little sad. I thought these bits were interesting:

“But as always before, to see a performance was to share an experience with a visible audience. At a concert, or a ball game, or a political rally, the audience was half the fun. What and whom you saw in the audience was at least as interesting, and often humanly more important, than what you saw on the stage. While watching TV, the lonely American is thrust back on herself. She can, of course, exclaim or applaud or hiss, but nobody hears except the family in the living room […] And while myriad island audiences gather nightly around their sets […] with more and more two-TV families, a member of the family can actually withdraw and watch in complete privacy […] A new miasma – which no machine before could emit – enshrouds the world of TV. We begin to be so accustomed to this foggy world, so at home and solaced and comforted within and by its blurry edges, the reality itself becomes slightly irritating.”

The article goes on to wonder if “TV-democratized experience” can “carry us to a new society, beyond the traditional democracy of learning and politics.” The answer given is, in part that “We must find ways outside TV to restore the sense of personal presence, the sense of neighborhood, of visible fellowship, or publicly shared enthusiasm and dismay.” Fair enough. The other part of the author’s answer is a bit different: “We must try every institutional and technological device—from more specialized stations to pay TV, to cable TV, and other devices still unimagined.” Pay-per-view as the answer to society’s problems! Oh, those wacky 70s.

Vitamin D production through ultraviolet B exposure

I love my Delaware backyard – especially when it’s just warm enough to be pleasant but not hot enough to be sweaty. I have decided to attempt the delicate and ambitious task of getting a tan. This has only really been successfully attempted once before: my freshman year of college when I had a convenient roof deck and classes that ended by 11. I don’t want to look like a leathery, crusty-orange tanning-bed junkie, but my transparent Irish-Norwegian skin could use something resembling color. Given that I have a large stack of books to read, or finish reading, this month, I can at least feel productive while I skirt carefully along the line of premature aging and skin cancer. I am also in the market for a large floppy sun hat, so that when I’m not intentionally working on my Vitamin D production, I can be safely guarded from wrinkles and freckles.

Mr. Bun Buns Arrives

My month of unemployment and leisure is off to a good start. Yesterday I got up early to unpack, clean, and rearrange my bedroom furniture. Today I got up late, lay in the sun in the backyard, bought a money order at the post office to pay the FBI to verify that I’m not a felon, and then, in memory of the Mexican army’s defeat of the French in 1862 at the Battle of Puebla, I made dinner for the family: grilled steak tacos, homemade salsa, and corn and poblano pepper salad. Also, my brother is taking care of some girl's rabbit for the summer, so we have a cute furry thing to feed celery to, and I’m pretty excited about it. His real name is C.J., which stands for Captain Jean Luc Jaeger Bomb Picard [something something] Louis Vuitton [something]. But we know him as Mr. Bun Buns.