ravnsdaughter

I made a freaking awesome (and relatively healthy!) dinner tonight, so I'm writing it down here so I don't forget what I did.

Ingredients:
Pasta of some sort (I used vegetable rotini - cooked up the whole bag, so that Ian can use the leftovers in pasta salad)
1 largeish chicken breast (I'm talking 1 "boob"'s worth, not the entire breast)
2-3 cloves of garlic
half a medium onion
1/4 of a red pepper
1 carrot
A handful of mushrooms
1/2 cup niblet corn
1/2 cup frozen peas
(or really, any veggies you want would work great)

For the "sauce"
1/2 cup or so of light sour cream
2 tablespoons of butter
a whole pile of fresh dill
A few tablespoons of lemon juice.

Cook your pasta and drain as per usual.
Dice the chicken and all of the veggies that need cutting into similar size pieces. Sautee in a little bit of vegetable oil until the chicken is cooked through and the veggies are cooked to your liking (I cooked the onions longer but left all the other veggies a bit crisp).

When the veggies and chicken are all cooked to your liking, mix in the butter and let it melt. Add in the sour cream, lots of dill (I use the frozen stuff from Superstore, which tastes just like fresh when it's mixed into cooked dishes), and the lemon juice (I used a long squirt from one of those little yellow lemon shaped thingies). Mix all together and let the sauce come to JUST barely boiling. Spoon over the pasta and enjoy!

For anyone not on the sca community, there is a really cool SCA Artisan Talent Swap going on over there - basically a "secret sibling" type swap within the SCA context. The entry is here if you're interested.

Four books

1. Mists of Avalon. Still one of my favorite books EVER.

2. seanan_mcguire's Rosemary and Rue. Just finished it on my way to work this morning. It was excellent.

3. S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire. Read it earlier this year, and absolutely loved it.

4. Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart. Another favorite.

I had formed such grandiose plans in my head yesterday afternoon, for what I was going to get accomplished last night, and in the end all I ended up doing was running a couple of errands
after work and get caught up on my sleep. But really, in the end, those errands and that sleep
were the most urgent and important, so I'm not too worried about it.

On Saturday night/Sunday morning, from 2am to 5am, the power in my condo building was shut down again. Because of my sleep apnea, this is a bit more of an issue for me than all the other
residents. I have the gear to hook my CPAP up to a battery, but the last time this had happened, my inverter started beeping and giving me an error message. This time when I tried to set it up beforehand, it was just giving me the error message.

Well, I could have SWORN I had charged my battery before the last time, but apparently not. When I finally managed to google up a manual for the inverter, I discovered that error message meant that my battery was dead. Well sheesh!

But because I didn't have a CPAP for that night, I didn't get to sleep until the power came back on at 5:45. I ended up sleeping until 1pm on Sunday, which meant I had a hard time getting to sleep at a reasonable hour on Sunday night. So last night, I went to bed at 9:30 to make up for it.

Thanks to the errands I ran after work, I now have a nice quiet, working fan for my desk at work, which will make my work day much more tolerable. And once I bring it upstairs out of the car, I will have a second litterbox set up. I'm finally caving to the idea that I need more than one in the house.

Six places

1. metro Vancouver: I love it here and despite wanting to experience other places, doubt I will
ever leave permanently.

2. 626 Forsyth. My grandparents' home for the past 25 years. This is my second home.

3. Azeroth. I've spent probably WAY too much time inside this virtual place. (It's the universe
within which the Warcraft world is set).

4. Europe. The place I most want to visit.

5. northern Manitoba. Where I was born.

6. Home. I gotta admit, this is more of a feeling than any physical place, but it's what I feel
when I enter most SCA events, especially outdoor ones.

Eight Fears

I started this on Friday and got almost all the way finished, and then got totally sidetracked... and then accidentally deleted the file. So let's start over again.

1. Losing the use of my hands. I use them SO much that I am totally scared of the idea of losing them. My mom has some sort of condition that has made her index fingers swell up and look all mangled, and I really hope it's not hereditary.

2. Heights. I can't even get close to the edge of our (27th floor) balcony without getting woozy.

3. Losing my home.

4. People I love dying.

5. The world devolving to resemble something out of the movie Idiocracy.

6. My parents deciding to disown me because they found out something about me they really didn't like. Probably a completely baseless fear, but it is what it is.

7. Meeting certain people on the street. Not because of what they would do, but how I might react because what they've done to me in the past. Fortunately the chances of this happening are pretty much slim-to-none.

8. Being stuck as a legal assistant for the rest of my life.

Nine loves:

1. Ian. For all he drives me crazy, I really do love him.

2. My pets. I love coming home and having Cody come running to the door and try to jump up to give me kisses. I love Hermione and her need to be within a few feet of me almost all the time, and the way she may hate to be touched, but she shows her love by curling up in the small of my back when I go to bed at night. Onyx and his curling up on my hip at night. And Ember and the way she comes bounding up onto my chest when I sit on the couch, and starts kneading my boobs.

3. Music. I love listening to it, singing, playing instruments, everything about it.

4. Glass and fire. I really do seem to have found my medium.

5. the SCA. It really does feel like home to me.

6. My friends. You're all awesome.

7. diet Pepsi. I'm so totally addicted.

8. creating things with my hands, and buying things others have created with their hands

9. games. Of all kinds, not just WoW. Computer games, board games, card games... just not head games. :)

Ten secrets

This is going to be HARD, as I don't really keep secrets much anymore.

1. I am scared of heights, enough so that I have a really hard time even going to the edge of our balcony (we live on the 27th floor).

2. I have crushes on lots of people: a couple of online acquaintances, one good female friend, a couple of good male friends, and someone whose real name I don't even know, I've only "met" twice and who is like 15 years younger than me. No I will not tell you who any of them are.

3. Part of me wants to say a big "FUCK IT" to this whole weight-loss struggle thing, and commit myself to eating healthy-ish for the rest of my life (which I acknowledge is likely to be shortened), become an HAES and size-rights advocate, just so that I can stop beating myself up mentally over my weight.

4. And part of me wishes I was anorexic so that I could be thin. The same part of me in part 3 is really glad I'm NOT anorexic because I know how horrible it would be for me.

5. I am intensely, horribly jealous of people for whom life is (or at least seems) easy because of how much I struggle with everything, everyday, though I am a lot better than I used to be and am really working on getting over this and not letting it color every thought I have.

6. I love Ian, I am happy with him, and I am happy that we are getting married. But a teeny tiny part of me still wishes I could have found a long-haired, pagan, hippie-ish, artsy musician type who was into the SCA as much as I am to be my partner. Oh well. :)

7. I saw a quote recently that sums up something I struggle with constantly: "Just because you can do anything doesn't mean you can do everything." My mind constantly flips back and forth unable to make up my mind about anything because there is SO MUCH I want to do and learn.

8. Sometimes I wish a "Change" would happen like the change in S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire/Emberverse series.

9. I haaaaaate having to hold down a dayjob. I would love NOTHING more than to be able to be a housewife/stay at home mom or find a way to work at home.

10. I have such total crap ingrained in me because of my upbringing and my first two long-term partners, that I still have a hard time believing certain things are actually the truth in my life. Things like... I have a partner who thinks I'm hot and who won't turn around and leave me when things get hard. And that I have friends who are totally awesome, talented and conventionally attractive and they actually WANT to spend time with me and aren't just being friends with me out of pity. I have to constantly remind myself that no, I'm not the pathetic loser who will never have friends or a boyfriend that I was constantly reassured I was when I was young, and even though I know that THIS is the truth, there is still that tiny part of my brain that doesn't want to believe it.

I'm having one of those days where I just want to curl up in a little ball on my couch at home with my kitties and my pup (I don't care if he's 5 and huge, he's still my pup) and hibernate for a year.

So to cheer myself up, I'm going to make a random list post!

i. Today feels like fall.  I know it's only August, and I have a feeling we're going to be in for an Indian Summer (which is, y'know, a horrible term, but I don't know of any other terms to describe a summer that lasts well into what technically is fall) since the summer weather started so late for us, but I'm craving fall.  I want to buy myself some pretty sweaters, and maybe a pair of leather boots, and be able to wear them without sweltering to death.

ii. I'm already craving my first pumpkin spice latte of the season.  It may be a bad thing that I'm working above a Starbucks now.

iii. Ian's off work this week.  Last night we cooked dinner together - brown rice with almonds and mushroom bouillion, grilled ling cod with lemon/dill sauce, and a roasted beet, chevre, pecan over greens salad with homemade honey/lemon/dill vinaigrette.  Then I made a rainier cherry/almond cobbler for dessert.

iv. I'm completely and totally hooked on the TV show Castle.  I got so hooked in once I started watching it that I think I finished all 3 seasons in about a week and a half, maybe 2 weeks tops.  I'm hooked enough that I actually took the Nikki Heat book out of the library (barely started, but so far it's pretty darn cheesy).  There's another reason I'm anxiously awaiting fall - Season 4 starts on September 19th.

v. Did I mention Ian is off work this week?  Oh yeah, I did.  I am SO JEALOUS.

vi. Plus side to Ian being off work: I can get him to help me with projects that have needed to be done for quite some time now.  On Sunday we started working on the bedroom - ditching the second TV (since we barely watch one of them, let alone 2), swapping the bed around to get the extra mattress somewhere else besides leaning up against the window, and cleaning up.  Tonight we're going to go through the dresser and toss the odd socks and clothes that are half destroyed.  Next up is going to be the den, I think - Ian has a new desk to put together, I'm going to be buying a matching one soon, hopefully, and I'd really like to paint in there.

vii. Wedding planning is continuing apace, though I'll save that for an update in itself.  I am still debating whether I want to have 3 or 4 bridesmaids though. 

viii. I spent all of July driving to and from work, to see whether or not it would be worth it, and discovered that while I did enjoy the process of driving back and forth, as opposed to taking the train and bus, it wasn't going to be worth it long-term.  Depending on the price of gas, it works out to enough more than the bus to make me not want to spend the extra money, especially when you factor in the cost of wear and tear on my car.  Plus, I missed my reading time.  So as of August 1, I went back to taking the bus.  I will probably end up driving about once every 2 weeks, so that I can run errands after work etc., but otherwise, it's public transit for me.  I need to get the stuff gathered up so that I have a sewing or knitting project to work on during my commute.

ix. Cody and Onyx got into a bit of a tussel on Sunday night, and despite the size difference (Onyx is about 11-12 pounds, Cody is 105), Onyx won, such that it is.  While we were fiddling with stuff in the bedroom, Cody poked his nose where it didn't belong and cornered Onyx behind the dresser.  Onyx didn't like that much, and the result was that Cody ended up with a slash across his nose (that one bled a tiny bit and then dried up almost immediately) and one across his muzzle that was quite deep.  Dumb dog.  Dumb cat too.  I'm sure neither has learned his lesson yet.  Cody's fine though, and the cut's almost totally healed already. 

So I vented a couple weeks ago about the state of my house. Since then, I had been working on the baby steps theory, going for 15 minutes at a time on various bits of cleaning and organizing. One day last week I did a whole pile of work in the den that way, getting almost everything done in there (except the major reorganization of the contents of my bookcase).

And then catwithclaws reminded me that I'd offered her my couch for a night or two while she was up here. Actually I had remembered that I'd made the offer, I just hadn't realized how close her visit was. Anyways, an impending visit is ALWAYS enough to get me off my arse and get things done.

Saturday was our relax day this weekend - we went to the Trout Lake Farmer's Market, picked up a few things, and then took a walk around the lake with the dog. The afternoon was mostly vegging on the computer, and then we had dinner at the Keg for Ian's birthday.

Sunday was my cleaning day. I managed to get the kitchen and living room COMPLETELY done (including a few things that have been needing to be done for ages, like wiping down the window sills), and including scrubbing the kitchen floor completely by hand. And Ian cleaned the main bathroom for me! I even got photographic evidence that he knows how to clean a toilet. Bwahahahah. (I would post it, but he's in his underwear while doing it, and I don't think he'd like that much).  So while not perfect, the house looks SO MUCH better than it did, and it's pretty much suitable for company now.

And it relieved SO much of my stress it's not funny, and is giving me a starting place for doing things in 15 minute increments from now on.

Last night I got through half of the lampworked beads I needed to make for this weekend.  Tonight I'll do the other half, and then there will be pictures!