Stuology

My migraines are wicked. I make mention of them often enough that people know I suffer from them. The regular ache that I don’t complain about as much are my legs. I’ve been dealing with leg aches longer than migraines. My leg aches aren’t as life stopping as my migraines, so they are something I just deal with and not really mention. Except for now–

They are strange to explain because most people assume you are talking about sore muscles — the kind of soreness you get when you strain one or the kind that makes you stiff and grimace a little when you try to move after being sedentary for too long. That’s not it. My leg aches are an all over pain. They aren’t in one particular muscle, my legs just hurt everywhere. It is so much different than the kind of pain you get from muscle exertion that I don’t quite know how to describe it. I get them a few hours after I do any sort of activity that has me on my feet. I’ll get them after I cook a big meal. I had leg aches last Friday after I spent the entire day doing house chores. Neither of those activities are straining in any way.

The reason that I am writing about it is because my decision to pick up running has upped the pain level a tad above what I’d get when I would just power walk. Adding more potassium to my diet doesn’t help prevent them and taking ibuprofen doesn’t help relieve them. It is typically always below my knee, although if I do really strenuous it can start hurting my legs above the knee as well. The worst one I’ve ever had was when I was doing an activity that was a bootcamp of strenuous activity designed to work you hard. I woke up at night crying from that, both from the level of pain and the fact that it was so bad I kept dreaming that someone was holding me down and beating my legs with a hammer.

I’ve asked a doctor before, but all I got was the eat a banana speech. I wonder if lactic acid is the culprit. Most people do not get this type of leg pain even with simple activities. Aside from any bootcamp training, it is bearable, but running has made it less bearable and I’d rather just not have to bear with it at all. I wonder if someone in sports medicine would have a better answer for me than a general practitioner.

My brother headed this way for a trip to KC. He made us Heart Attack Tacos. They were really good, but something that I should probably limit myself to eating twice a year. Mainly because they were fried. The entire taco.

Ada had dance Saturday morning, but we didn’t spend our typical Saturday together. We headed to one store to pick up a gift for her birthday party she was going to in the late afternoon. Then we went home to spend time with my brother.

I went to listen to Ira Glass speak Saturday night. He talked mostly about This American Life and some about journalism in general. He did it well. He told his story rather than gave a lecture. It’s what he does best. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I would like to go see David Sedaris in April. I’d need to grab tickets to that soon.

The other event of the weekend was the sleet and snow that started while I was at Ira Glass. Most people sort of tumbled out of the parking lot rather than drove. I’m not kidding when I say that the entire line of cars in front of me on Crestline slid down towards 15th. It would have helped if any of them knew not to ride their breaks. A few cars were going sideways, and at least two went off the road to avoid hitting others. I just downshifted as soon as I started to slide and managed to make it down without incident or further sliding. Imagine that.

Lastly, I caught the sickness of the kids, or caught something. Combine that with being up with Jay most of Saturday night, I spent a lot of time Sunday in bed. I had one big house chore that I wanted to do today, but I still don’t feel great and didn’t sleep well. I’m going to spend today much the same way, tackling only laundry and dishes. I even have dinner already made.

Jay had his three year check-up today. It is a little late, I know. There isn’t anything significant to say about it. There were no great words of advice to get Jay to stop peeing all over my house. Ada didn’t really take to potty training until she was about three months past her third birthday, and boys are supposed to be harder than girls. The part that makes it hard is that he really doesn’t care that he peed his pants. He’ll sit in it all day. I was hoping that just keeping him in underwear while we were at home would do it, but so far, not so much.

Here are his stats:

Height: 3′ 3″ – a little under the 90th percentile
Weight: 33.4 lbs – 75th percentile

He’s in between the 25th & 50th percentile for weight-to-stature ratio. I can tell he is losing his baby fat. His legs still look a little chunky at the thighs, but not his arms and chest. Ada on the other hand is a tall, skinny bean pole. She has almost no fat anywhere. I can see muscle! Amazing how fast they grow.

Here is a big news flash for me: I woke up with a headache that is getting worse and starting down towards the migraine road. The guest room is pretty much cleaned up. I just need to remove a few things and wash the sheets since I don’t remember if I did that after the last guests. I can probably afford to take a nap to tend to my headache. The frequency of my migraines is concerning though. One a month is typical. This would be my forth one in February. I have no idea how I managed in high school when I would get 1-2 a week. I couldn’t physically or mentally deal with that at my current age … of 24.

Ada has been home sick the last two days, coughing and fever. She woke up today without fever. If it stays away all day today, then she gets to go back tomorrow. I don’t want her to be sick, but I’ve also been able to sleep in the last few days. Both Jay and I appreciate that.

My brother is coming to visit this weekend which means I have to clean out my guest room so he can actually walk into it and get to the bed. I made some progress last night with Harold keeping me company on IM. It lightened my mood doing something that is a little difficult. I’m going to finish that today.

I also finally finished one play through of Dragon Age, the game that Mac let me play all day on VDay. I ended up going back in time a bit to finish a couple of things I should have done not knowing that once I entered the final quest, I couldn’t go back to any of the side quests. Thanks to Ada being sick, I could put some time in at night and not worry about being so dreadfully exhausted the next day. Now I can start Mass Effect 2. Thanks to a coupon and rewards money, I picked that up with Bioshock 2 for a total of $35 and some change. Mac started Bioshock 2, and to me it looks like it could have just been a cheaper add-on for Bioshock. I suppose the amount of gameplay is more than just an add-on, but I’m not seeing a big difference, other than of course which character you play. I think the way you hack things is different.

Lastly, I’m still working through eating what I have on hand, and have made nothing inspiring as of late. Nothing. I’m not even in the mood to cook or eat. I’ll take advantage of the later.

The other thing that I’ve started doing is running. I used to go out and run during nicer weather days when I was in college. It sort of feel by the wayside and changed to power walking and then nothing at all the summer before I got pregnant with Ada. I picked up walking again by buying a treadmill since talking Ada outside resulted in her screaming by the time I was at the end of the block. I got back up to power walking, which for my short legs is about 3.6 mph, but at a 10% grade. I decided that I want to run. I guess just to see if I can do it again. I’m doing the C25k. I’m on week two, and running does feel differently to my body than walking. I go through music phases, and aside from the two Scissor Sister songs, my current cardio playlist is feeling stale. I’m going to replace most of it with some Nekromantix and ??. What do you have for me?

Today was a good Valentine’s Day. My husband gave me the best gift ever. He kept the kids occupied and allowed me to spend a great chunk of my day playing the XBox 360 uninterrupted. It was awesome.

We made breakfast together, although all I really contributed was making pancakes. Mac did all the rest. Then I played with a few tiny breaks. Then I made dinner, trying to please everyone: shrimp scampi for the kids, crab legs, mashed potatoes and corn for Mac, ginger and blood orange salmon on spinach with hazelnut encrusted goat cheese for me. Jay insisted that he wanted popcorn, so I gave him some of Mac’s corn because in his eyes it is the same even though it isn’t popped. I had set aside some extra goat cheese for Ada because the last time I made it, she ate hers and then she ate mine. She has recently decided that she hates nuts, so she kind of dug at it, but wouldn’t eat it because of the hazelnuts. Mac got a bag of green peanut M&Ms, and she even turned those down. She’s really serious about the nut thing. She wouldn’t eat a turtle she had gotten in one of those mixed chocolate hearts. She turned down caramel because of nuts.

I played a little bit more after dinner clean-up with Jay’s assistance. He likes to tell me where to navigate my character. It works great until he decides to hit me when I don’t agree with his directions.

Ada doesn’t have school tomorrow which means I get to sleep in a tiny bit. We have Jay’s bed delivery tomorrow between 10-noon. If I try to press my luck, they will be here at 9:50 and I won’t be dressed. If I make an attempt to be up and dressed by 9:45, they will come at 2:00.

My initial search to acquire twin sized dinosaur sheets was a bust. I did find cool retro robot sheets, but he doesn’t really like robots as much as I do. He will have to use one of Ada’s extra sheet sets until then. I think I will venture online for this purchase. I did get the kids new step stools. These both have two steps instead of one, and are wood instead of plastic.

Ada Valentine

Even though I dread having to get to the community building by 9:00am because I am not now and never have been a morning person, I’m really enjoying Saturdays with Ada. She has pre-ballet from 9:00-9:40am at the community building downtown. Afterwards, we head to Mass. We alternate going to The Dusty Bookshelf and The Toy Store, both places she really likes. Sometimes I have to give the the talk about how she needs to learn to do things that other people like to get her into a store that I want to browse without hearing her gripe.

Today, she started to complain a little as I told her we were going to The Bay Leaf, but it stopped after she saw the stuffed animals and the aprons her size. Then we played the “what does this do” game until I got tired of it. This was the week to visit The Dusty Bookshelf. She wanted to eat at the noodle place again for lunch, mainly because she remembered that there was chocolate milk there.

One of my actual errands that I wanted to do was to take my wedding ring into Marks Jewelers. I’ve had problems with it, and I’m not very happy with the jeweler where it was purchased. It is white gold which means to have it that nice shiny silver, it has rhodium plating. This plating is suppose to last 1-3 years, but mine doesn’t even last a year. The bad part about this isn’t just the inconvenience or the yucky pale gold my ring turns when it wears off. It turns out that they included nickel in the alloy that makes the gold underneath white gold. So when the plating wears off, my finger starts breaking out in a torturous itchy rash and until I take it in to get re-plated, I cannot wear my wedding ring.

While it isn’t a law that they tell you that there is nickel in their alloys, it is common courtesy to do so for people –say like me–who have a nickel allergy. The original jeweler didn’t give us this courtesy. And the wrap-around ring had to be remade because it broke and it was not done well and they welded the two rings together before I even got to see it and they don’t line up in the front or back. I don’t particularly like the attitude of the employees either.

I’m pricing the cost of having the ring–which is a custom design, so we can’t just reorder one–made in a different metal by a jeweler that knows what they are doing and aren’t a**hats. Doing this will be expensive. Really expensive. I’m really torn because I’m not a big jewelry person, mainly because until I graduated from college I couldn’t afford much jewelry that didn’t make me break out, get infections (as was the case for earrings) or turn my skin black or green after one day of wearing it. I just got tired of dealing and eventually just didn’t wear much jewelry. Now, I don’t care. The only pieces that I ever see that excite me are usually made in a metal that I cannot wear. My wedding ring is my only piece of expensive jewelry that I do care about. It is the only piece that feels like an investment. It is something that I would like to pass down. So, I’m torn. There are so many other things I could use that money for, and jewelry is never on the top of that list, but my wedding ring is different. And I’m leaning towards Marks because it is a Lawrence business, and I talked to the person who would actually be doing the work making my ring in town. And they have a good reputation, so I know that they will do it correctly. My choices right now are between platinum or palladium. Palladium is what is used in white gold alloys for people who have nickel allergies since palladium allergies are more rare. The guy I talked to today said that if I choose palladium, he would loan me a ring to wear for awhile to make sure I don’t have a reaction to it. Fixing this ring is the only significant amount of money I would ever want to spend on any piece of jewelry for the rest of my life^*. My brain keeps going back to all the other things that I would instantly use that money for if it were any jewelry other than my wedding ring. I’d rather spend multiple thousands of dollars on glass.

The photo with this post is part of the Valentine’s photos I took of the kids. Ada had a hard time holding her head still, and I had a hard time directing her to get a good shot, so I don’t think any of the hair ones came out that great. I liked this one due to the eyes. Ada really does have anime eyes.

*Until they come out with my holographic PDA ring with built in sonic screwdriver. However by that time, I’ll be so old, I won’t be able to figure out how to use it.

My brain is slowly forgetting what I made. Thinking…thinking…I’m thinking…

Okay, yes, I made chili mac. I had all the ingredients for cafeteria chili, plus my jar of random pasta was getting full. I combined both. So, it was really Chili With Various Leftover Shapes of Dried Pasta. Whatever. It used up food.

Then I made a crockpot full of my Ameri-Mexican Chicken Mix. This is cooking boneless, skinless chicken breasts on low in the slow cooker all day. About 1 hour before we want to eat, I shred it and put it back with some Penzey’s Chicken Taco seasoning. I use it in tacos, enchiladas, burritos, or quesadillas. We had burritos. I froze the leftovers for a later Ameri-Mexican dinner.

We had one night of leftovers, and one set-aside chicken breast that provided chicken salad for our lunch.

Tonight, I’m making sweet potato and black bean chipotle quesadillas. I’m waiting for my black beans to finish cooking. Since I need to use what I already have in my house–with the exception of fresh produce–I used my dried black beans. I’m out of canned.

Tomorrow will be Pad Thai. I have tofu that I need to use before Sunday. And I had everything except scallions, which I picked up today.

On Saturday we are having breakfast. I took some sausage out of the freezer. I’m going to make some whole wheat banana pancakes because I need to use the bananas. And I’ll probably make eggs in omelette form to use up spinach. I can use canned tomato and not have any other veges except onions, or I can go pick up some other veges. I haven’t decided. I have a heart cookie cutter, so I’m going to cut the kids in heart shape. If the bananas would make it another day, I’d do that Sunday morning. I will see how they look.

Sunday will probably be the exception since it is Valentine’s Day. I’ll make whatever Mac wants. Who wants to place bets that it will be chicken strips, green beans and mashed potatoes. Romantic. Surprise, he didn’t pick that! He wants crab legs, so Sunday will are having Seafood of Choice. I’ll make him crab legs. I’m going to have my salmon with ginger and blood orange marinade served on spinach with warm hazelnut encrusted goat cheese. I’m going to pick up shrimp for Ada and Jay, a seafood that they both actually like. I know Ada will dig into the goat cheese with me. She’s my Partner in Cheese.

VDay Cards

Ada and I made twenty-three bookmarks for her school Valentine’s Day cards. If you would have told me five years ago that I would have even tried to be all Martha, I would have heartily laughed. I’m sure there will be plenty of candy. I didn’t really want to contribute more.

I helped her do the measuring, but she did the cutting with our new awesome craft trimmer. She tried to help do the punching of the backs, but she just doesn’t have enough hand strength yet, so I finished it off. Then she decorated the white part, and I glued on the backs. She had me decorate four of them. Then she wrote her name on the back of all but three. We used the hearts that I punched out of the bottom of the back, stickers and a stamp for decorating. Since these are bookmarks, I convinced her to pass on the glitter glue.

These took us a little over two hours. Yeah, buying them takes less time, but I guarantee none of the kids will get one like hers. And we had fun. Jay sat beside us and decorated paper with markers, stickers and stamps. After all that was cleaned up, I made chocolate covered strawberries for a snack, explaining that they were the Official Snack of Valentine’s Day. And I used some leftover Lindt ganache that I had in the fridge.

I haven’t really been cooking anything spectacular. I’m still just cooking with mostly what I have in my kitchen. I suppose it is my food spring cleaning. I’m just trying to reduce what I have on hand.

Jay turned three last Sunday. Really! Three! We went to brunch at Maceli’s. Ada and I went shopping on Saturday after her dance class to pick up some gifts for him: a couple of books, a play tool set–which he used to fix Ada’s stroller from some unknown injury–and a glow in the dark solar system with stars to hang up on the wall in the playroom. Later on, we headed to KC for a Super Bowl party.

I’ve added another boundary for the kids: No toys in the living room. The living room is being enforced as the quiet room. The only allowed items are books, paper & crayons, or one stuffed animal if they are carrying it around. If they want to be loud and drag crap around, they can go in their room or downstairs in the playroom. That is their room to do as they wish.

This has been hard for them. They can be as loud and obnoxious as they want in the room designated for them, and they have two such rooms. They still always want to be where I am at, and they drag their crap with them. I’ve been spending way too much time directing them to pick up. Yesterday, they had to face the consequence of this: almost all their toys were moved downstairs. They have books, their Build-A-Bears and clothes, and Jay has one dinosaur and his toolbox upstairs. The bins where we keep toys and slide under their beds are gone. It is going to be easier for them to keep toys out of the living room if there aren’t many upstairs. And hopefully they will be able to handle picking up 10 items, so I’m not tripping over toys in their room. Plus, with the influx of new items because of Jay’s birthday, I wanted to remove some older ones. We filled three kitchen trash bags. Gone, or at lease soon as I make a big dump to Goodwill. I will give the kids credit. Not that many toys are broken. They are still in pretty good shape. The laundry basket has been moved into the closet, which now has nothing on the floor. Not only has some of the stress of tripping over crap has eased, but moving Jay’s new bed in on Monday will be really easy because there is nothing to get out of the way except his toddler bed. Oh yeah. We bought him a twin bed. That was his big gift.

I also took the opportunity to dig out the spring/summer clothes from last year. What will be too small for them to wear has been bagged for donation. I’ve also thrown in some things that Jay has outgrown during the winter. Now there is more closet room for me to pick up spring/summer clothes as I catch then on sale. Ada will be sporting a 5, and Jay will be wearing a 4T. Yeah, he did some growing. He can probably do some 3Ts, but I bet they won’t last through the entire summer, so I usually go up a size. As long as the shorts will stay on, I don’t care if they are a little oversized. I do that every year which helps make clothes last two seasons.

I’m doing more clearing out. Hopefully I’ll have spring cleaning done by spring so we can spend time enjoying it and not cleaning. Really. Winter is the best time to clean. Who wants to go out in 13-degree wind?

What have I cooked? Um…homemade pizza. I did make the Boeuf Bourguignon and the Thai butternut squash soup. I have also decided that I need to base all my meals on things that I have to clear out some groceries. I have a lot of pasta and tomato sauce. I also used one meal to take out some leftovers from the freezer. I thought it was my chicken taco meat, but it turned out the be BBQ pork. I use bowls to freeze in, and I don’t want to keep writing on them. Perhaps I should get some dry erase labels for my freezer bowls. I’m busy learning Ruby, so easy meals are a plus, and unless I get twitchy to make something new, easy meals utilizing mostly things I have on hand are on the menu. You probably won’t see me post about any new food. Except for the blabbering I’m about to post…now!

My biggest cooking feat was making an Irish Car Bomb cake. You may take offense at the name, but it is the name of the drink on which the cake is based. I made it as a birthday cake for a friend. I made two of these cakes, one for practice and one for the birthday. These are my discoveries so far:

1. The chocolate you use in the cake is important. Yes, that should always be the case. It isn’t always the case for some people, so I’m going to stress it. Don’t you even dare reach for the Hershey’s if you are making this cake. I used Ghirardelli for the first round. It was not good enough. The second time around, I used Lindt with a 72% cocoa content. I didn’t have any Valrhona on hand, and the local store stopped selling Valrhona, so it is now an item I have to order or find in Kansas City. If I had it, I would have used that. I plan on getting some for later experiments.
2. If you eat the cake the same day as you make it, you don’t really taste the Guinness. It does enhance the flavor of the cake in an good interesting way. You just wouldn’t know it was a stout that was doing it. However, if you eat the cake the next day, you taste the Guinness. It is also just as yummy, and if you are going for Car Bomb flavor, make the cake the day before.
3. The cream part of the buttercream frosting is provided by Baileys. It is wonderful. I’m not a big frosting person. I find that sweet overpowers flavor, however adding the Baileys made it hard to quit tasting my work. When I make something that involves butter as a primary and important ingredient, I use good butter. For this frosting, I pulled out the Plugrá. The big thing for the frosting is that you don’t taste the Baileys as much on the second day. Making the frosting should be held off until right before you plan to serve the cake.
4. The ganache that glued the two cakes together featured Jameson. I ran out of chocolate for this, and sent Mac to the store for more only to find they didn’t have enough for me either. I was going to use the same chocolate featured in the cake, but I had to mix. This featured both Lindt and Godiva. Next time, it will be the same. I will plan better. I didn’t taste the Jameson in the ganache, even after adding more than what was called for. Some recipes use Baileys here as well. It may be better taste-wise. It may not matter at all. This is still in experimental stage.
5. Back to the cake recipe: I’m convinced that the cake recipe that I had was for cupcakes. I made some cupcakes with the batter to keep the size of the 9-inch cakes down a little. The cupcakes cooked perfectly. The cake didn’t. The first time, it sunk in the middle a tad. When I doubled the recipe, it sunk in the middle a lot. This happened in the oven as it was cooking. My first thought is the cause is the vast amount of liquid in the cake provided by the stout. When you cook it in cupcake form, it cooks fast enough to not sink. If you transfer that to a 9-inch pan, it doesn’t, and the outside is done before the inside, thus the heavy inside sinks. I filled in those craters with frosting and ganache, so the final look of the cake wasn’t bad. My other thought is that there is too much baking soda. I did some searching online and while most recipes were pretty much the same as I had, there was one that had 1 tsp less baking soda. If you double that, I would have used 2 tsp less. In the baking world, that is a lot. This is something I’m determined to figure out.
6. One last cake note: This is a dense cake. It wasn’t one of those light and fluffy layer cakes. I don’t think this can be helped because of the liquid. Reading up on stout cakes, that seems to be the case. If people like layer cakes light and fluffy, this isn’t for you. However, if I have to cut down the liquid to stop the cake from sinking, then that will probably lighten the cake up a bit as well.

I’m going to perfect this cake, however, I do think that Car Bomb cupcakes would be, well, the bomb. Really freakin’ good. And you can keep the cake part of the recipe as is. I’d still make it the day before. Do a Google search for them. I think everyone and their dog has made it and posted the recipe–with good reason. Yummy!