A month of summer condensed into a paragraph.

I haven't written in over a month, it seems. A record, of sorts. I'll give you all a quick rundown of the last month. Ready?

Drove to Florida with my family, saw cousins, giant spiders, drove down nature trails on a golf cart, beach, pool, pool, food, 12 hour drive back to Charlotte, AT for hike number two, Blue Ridge Parkway, hike, sleep in a shelter with a family of bats who dive bomb us, hike, feel like dying, hike hike, EAT MORE FOOD MOLLY, hike hike, get a call in the middle of the wilderness that I have a job back at West Meck teaching Honors Civics and AP Psych, hike, views!!!! sunsets!!!! beautiful!!!!! hike, get a ride to Buena Vista, eat half a delivery pizza, a mexican combo platter, a hotdog, a fried bologna biscuit, and a bag of nachos, drive back to my car through a cloud on the mountain, then back to Charlotte, hurt my foot running, gain five pounds, join the YMCA, Teach for America training, CMS teacher workdays, move my stuff to a trailer classroom, plan like crazy, live at Amelie's for two weeks, wake up at 4:30 this morning, chase a cockroach behind my classroom whiteboard, bell rings, kids arrive!

Whew!

My first day back to school was great. I'm teaching solo this year, which I'm excited about. I'm teaching Honors and AP kids, which is going to be very different in some ways, but I'm excited about it. I'm actually organized to start the year, like, I have binders with all my papers, I'm in the process of making files for each student, I've got my computer file structure all nice and tidy. If you know me you know what a feat this has been. I saw a bunch of my kids from last year at school today, and was reminded again of why I love this job... I love those darn kids.

I'll get some pictures of my classroom once I get my new posters up. And I'll have a new wealth of wonderful student quotes to share, no doubt, although I don't know if anyone can top some of my students from last year for saying the smartest funniest things. A kid today wrote about Civics and Economics, "I thought this class was about cars. But government sounds interesting too."

I love my job. Every so often I just stop and think about leaving Chicago and my hedge fund job and all of that...and I think "Damn.. Best. Decision. Ever." Bring it, school year. I'm ready for you.

Bug Hunting!!

My sister is taking an entomology class at her college this month. She kept sending me text messages with pictures of bugs she'd caught for her bug collection, usually accompanied by multiple exclamation points and lots of capital letters. Hunting bugs with nets sounded kind of awesome, so I decided to head down to Greenville, SC this weekend to help her work on her collection. (She has to have 100 specimens identified by the end of the class!)

Walking around the science building at Furman I regretted (as I do with some regularity) not having at least minored in biology. Hannah collected vials and killing jars and giant nets, and we headed out! I'd failed to bring any shoes that weren't flip flops (although I had managed to bring my Smartwool socks) so I borrowed some shoes.


We drove about forty minutes to the Blue Wall Nature Preserve up near the NC/SC border, and near very little else. And we caught bugs!
(...although this approach was not very successful.)


All told we got about twenty-something different insects. And got to enjoy lots of other very cool nature. I wish I actually knew things about insects and could tell you what kind of butterfly will come out of this chrysalis. Right now my money is on the Gulf Fritillary, but I'm really not sure. Look at those gold spots though! So cool. (Did you know 'chrysalis' comes from the Greek for 'gold'? I did not.)
And for some reason I can't not take pictures of mushrooms. I have no idea what these are.
These butterflies are, I think, Eastern Tailed Blues. We caught one for Hannah's collection, so once she identifies it for certain I'll make sure to update this post. They're little guys, and would all cluster on the ground like this and then all fly up into the air en masse, flutter around like a little whirlwind of blue leaves, and then settle back onto the ground.

I'm apparently heading out to the Appalachian Trail in a month. I can't wait to see bugs and mushrooms and things up in the mountains.

I drove back to NC this morning, and thanks to an alert on one of those those overhead electronic signs on 85, was able to hop off the highway just before traffic slowed to a stop and all lanes were closed. (The warning sign just said "incident at mile marker 93.") I added about 40 minutes to my drive by taking back roads, but I would infinitely rather drive a longer distance than sit in traffic. So I drove through Gaffney and a few other little towns, played some Shins CD I found in my car, and enjoyed the gorgeous day.
I had a great weekend, a lovely detour, and summer seems so close I can almost touch it. Six more days of class with my kids. Then it's testing, retesting, grading, and out. Done and done. Hard to believe.

My Nana's advice on how to not raise birds.

The nest on my porch has been coming together beautifully. I think the builders are wrens, not sparrows. I haven't seen them working on it lately, and there aren't any eggs in it yet, so I'm not sure where exactly they are in the whole continuance of their species process, but I guess only time will tell.

I mentioned to my Nana in an email that I had birds building on my porch. This is my Nana...
Besides being an all around fantastic grandmother and human being, she writes the world's best emails. She replied to my tale of invading birds with one of her own. I can't say I haven't been warned:

About 15 years ago, I had a robin building her nest in one of the wreaths on my front porch. What fun, I thought to watch this whole process from scraggly twigs to darling little chirpies. I could stand in the entrance hall....if I snuck up quietly enough perhaps, and espy momma regurgitating food into their tiny little mouths et cetera. I even posted a sign on one of the poles on the porch directing visitors to the back door so they wouldn't scare the birds!!

I did not foresee.....silly me... that the little tiny birds become as big as full sized robins before they are wont to leave the nest, that they make an awful racket...and more to the point, they make a helluva mess deficating all over the grillwork, the glass, the wreath, the door mat etc.

Then the ornithological genius in the neighborhood explained to me that robins will sometimes bring forth several issue before the summer is spent, so once this crop leaves, I had better take down the wreaths or they will build anew. Soooooo....good luck, Honey Babes

Greenville and Wheat.

Yesterday was the first day of the two-day wheat test, in which I'm supposed to eat wheat (shredded wheat cereal or whole-wheat pasta) at every meal for two days. If I don't run into any problems with the wheat by the end of the second day (today), I can try whole wheat bread tomorrow. Shredded wheat cereal is about as boring as cereals get, but as someone for whom cold cereal is a go-to comfort/convenience/snack food, sitting down to two giant bowls of the stuff yesterday morning felt pretty great. Coupled with the fact that I've been drinking tea for a few days - it felt like a real breakfast.

I decided to visit my sister yesterday, two hours south in Greenville where she's in school. Through the wonder of facebook, I found out that an old friend from my freshman hall at Wake also lives in Greenville, and so I caught up with Ms. Jess Held (now Martin) for lunch! For all the creepiness of facebook, and the immense drain on productive time that it can be, I have it to thank for an increasing number of real-life reunions with old friends, for the ability to keep in touch with people I would probably not have kept in touch with, and even for becoming good, real-life friends with people I knew casually from years ago. Hannah and I had a lovely afternoon in Greenville, and although eating in restaurants proved a bit of a challenge for me still (I had steamed vegetables and plain baked sweet potatoes at one place, and a very boring build-your-own salad at Mellow Mushroom) I was able to enjoy an Oolong and milk and honey drink at a little tea bar. Post-tea, we realized we had not taken any photographs to document our sisterly weekend, and so we quickly took a slew of awkward self-shots on the way to the car.

Today's agenda includes a long overdue trip to the laundromat and, barring any sudden onset of symptoms, baking bread for tomorrow. I haven't baked anything in ages, so that prospect is pretty exciting. I figured, for the full experience of enjoying bread, nothing beats baking it at home, where the oven heats up the kitchen and the bread smell fills up the apartment. Mmmm... Minus my brief encounter with my wrist bump, I have continued to be essentially symptom-free, which is really nice after spending most of November and December wrapping my wrist up in an Ace bandage and taking NSAIDs. I still have no evidence to tell me whether feeling great is a result of the diet, or whether my on-again-off-again arthritis was just about to start an off-again period that happened to coincide with my diet experiment. I keep introducing new foods until February 16, after which point I just keep careful track of what I eat and how I feel going forward. I guess we'll see.

Dinner tonight will likely be sweet potatoes roasted in the cast iron skillet with chicken, which has proven incredibly delicious in the past. Plus whole wheat pasta, I guess, since I'm supposed to have it at every meal. I'd never really known how to do savory sweet potatoes, but roasting them in an oven in a skillet of chicken fat makes them kind of extraordinary.

You need:

Bone-in, skin-on chicken quarters/thighs/drumsticks
Sweet potatoes
Oil (I used sunflower)
a little salt for the chicken once it's done

Brown the chicken in a skillet with oil. Add peeled, cut up sweet potatoes, turning in the oil and chicken fat so they're coated. Cook until the chicken is browned on both sides, and the sweet potatoes are starting to look slightly cooked/brown on the edges. Throw the whole skillet in the oven at about 375. Cook for another 30-40, or until the chicken is done and the sweet potatoes are soft. (If you use thighs it'll take less time as they'll cook quicker. If you use big-ass quarters like I did below, it'll take closer to 40-50 minutes.)

Dreams of carbs....

I was going through my folder of photos and came across some pictures of food I took over Christmas. Food made out of lots of sugar and flour and things I can't eat yet. I'm going to post these photos so that in a month, or a few weeks or whenever I establish I can eat things like this again (hopefully that's what happens, anyway), I can look back at this post and feel especially grateful and inspired.

My dad always makes Norwegian Christmas cookies. These are Smultringer (basically, lard rings). They're little fried donuts.
Although not the best photo, I made this trifle for Christmas dinner. I soaked the ladyfingers in cointreau, and used mandarin oranges, made the custard from scratch and dumped whipped cream on top. And then doused the whole thing in cointreau again. It was amazing, and better the next day after chilling/settling in the fridge.
I've made these cheddar biscuits a bunch of times, and they're always easy and turn out great. The colder you can keep all the ingredients (especially the butter) before mixing and kneading, the better. They're flaky and wonderful and I'd give my firstborn child for one about now.
The recipe is from Ina Garten, here. I never have buttermilk, so I put a little vinegar in milk to substitute and it works just fine.
The last few years, since all the Andersen kids are now adults who don't need to open presents at the crack of dawn, we've enjoyed having a long breakfast on Christmas morning. This year I made sour-cream blueberry muffins (recipe here) and a leek and cheese frittata. We had smoked salmon too, which I love, but the only salmon I can have right now is fresh, which I'm absolutely sick to death of.
Sigh. I do get to eat rice today, although without butter or cheese or black pepper or spices it will be a pretty unexciting affair. Still, it'll be good to eat something truly starchy. I had two bananas for breakfast today, and they've never tasted so good. I've been surprised at how much I've started craving fruit, because it's the only source of sugar I have right now. I dropped eight bucks on a damn sack of grapes and I'll probably eat them all within 48 hours.

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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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.

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.

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!

Gettysburg and Antietam

This past week, all five Andersens piled into my Dad’s Camry and we did a two-day civil war battlefields trip: Gettysburg and Antietam. We stayed with family in Maryland, and my cousin Zoe, who just turned six, drew my portrait.

The battlefields themselves were similar in a lot of ways. Both involved a visitor center, with a dramatically-narrated movie (James Earl Jones for one, Morgan Freeman for the other) with lots of reenactors and some museum-type exhibits.

The main attraction at both battlefields was the self-guided driving tour through the farmland and woods where the fighting took place. The fields at Gettysburg, and Antietam to a lesser extent, were lined with memorials erected over the years by veterans groups to various regiments: the 11th Pennsylvania Infantry, the 1st Maryland Cavalry, the Massachusetts Sharpshooters, and so on. Hundreds and hundreds of stone markers, obelisks, bronze soldiers, men on horseback, crosses, slabs – over acres and acres of battlefields.

You drive along, and get out to look at some of them. The map tells you where to stop to see where this charge happened, or where this skirmish took place, or where the cannons were lined up. Military history per se has never really done it for me – battlefield strategy, maneuvering, who had what guns and what numbers – just not my thing. So honestly, I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened at either Gettysburg or Antietam. I know that Robert E. Lee tried to move North, and failed each time. The thing that hit me though, was the sheer number of people who died at each battle. Something like 8,000 men, all Americans, killed each other at Gettysburg. At Antietam, 4,000 people killed each other in a DAY. And in the whole Civil War, over 600,000 people died altogether. More than half a MILLION. I just can’t wrap my head around a number that big, period, much less when that number represents actual people. There was a quote from the period typed up in one of the visitor center museums: “Every name is a lightning stroke to some heart and it breaks like thunder over some home, and it falls a long black shadow upon some hearthstone." The other thing too is that there were so many photographs from the Civil War. So you see these mens’ faces, and their funny hats, and bad haircuts. I don’t know. Just unbelievably sad, I guess.

And you like to think we’re moving forward. We don’t line people up in fields and charge at each other with rifles and bayonets anymore. Soldiers don’t die from infection right and left, or have limbs sawed off in tents. But now, instead of slaughtering each other in cornfields, we can kill people half-way around the world with remote-control drone planes operated from some air-conditioned military base safely in the U.S. Which makes war much less terrible for us, of course. But there was another quote I remember from one of the museums, that Lee said at some point during the war: “It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it.”

A less-somber side note. Gettysburg was swarming with groups of high school students. Hordes of teenagers, punching each other, singing songs and, mysteriously, pretending to be galloping horses running around the museum. Of course, in fairness, I remember field trips being basically fun times to hang out with your friends and act ridiculous. But man, I hope I am ready for the youth of America.

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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