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Tim and his enterprising cohorts have just released WhenShouldWe.com, a nifty collaboration tool that knocks the ad-ridden socks off of doodle.
Agreeing a date that works for everyone is not easy. WhenShouldWe.com simplifies this by allowing people to vote for the dates that suit them. The results are collated in to a single easy to view list.
Check it out and give it a whirl. If you have any comments or suggestions, please leave a comment on this post (Tim reads my blog obsessively).
The year was 2007. The month, December. It was summer in New Zealand and a light drizzle had just started to fall as Tim’s dad fired up the grill. His spatula was on the steak, but my mind was on the kebabs. Something was missing.
Mushrooms? No. Peppers? No. Onions? I never forget an onion.
In the end, no amount of salt and pepper could raise these sad skewers to their full potential. Only later in a fit of spontaneous tempeh sloppy joe making did it hit me: barbecue sauce!
It was way too late for the kebabs, but I wouldn’t let the tempeh down. I looked in the fridge and wasn’t at all surprised that we were out of bbq sauce. The Brits don’t really get bbq sauce. If you said the words “Open Pit” to a Londoner, they would probably assume you were taking about an unfortunately-placed flesh wound rather than something you’d want to slather on a steak.
But one thing the Brits do get is tomato ketchup, and like model citizens of London’s renowned food culture, we had a full bottle in our fridge (and like slaves to Whole Paycheck, the bottle’s contents were entirely organic). The ketchup, added to a bit of mustard, garlic, chili powder, sugar, and Liquid Smoke, made for a surprisingly tasty impromptu vegan bbq sauce that was perfect with the tempeh, and would have worked wonders for those blasted kebabs.
Adapted from this 5-star “Bobbie-Q Sauce” recipe on Recipaar.
Combine ingredients, bring to a boil and simmer over low heat for 5 minutes.
This post was inspired by Veggie Chic’s latest post on Liquid Smoke. Mmmmmmm… smoky.
Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com
I’ve taken the advice of my former freelancing teacher and started an Excel spreadsheet to log the pitches I send to editors. The spreadsheet has columns for
This will help me remember who I’ve sent pitches to, and thus avoid the embarrassment of sending the same pitch to the same editor more than once. This will also help me keep track of who I need to follow-up with, when I’ve been commissioned, and [the marvellously blissful days] when I get paid.
Looking at the spreadsheet, I see why Andrew Crofts of The Freelance Writer’s Handbook warns that it takes years to set yourself up with a real income: the lag time between pitching and publication is daunting (as if getting a response from an editor wasn’t hard enough). I suppose this is all the more reason to keep sending ideas, every day, to as many publications as possible. But it’s also a good reason to keep writing. Like Andrew suggests, treat this getting-started period as an “apprenticeship”: pursue leads, interview sources, and build some credibility to put in those pitches. That’s how I got the runner’s high article published. So why not do it again?
Last Tuesday was my last day working at the bank. Today is day number two of my new freelance career and time feels like its whizzing by. I spent yesterday in a sleepy haze after enjoying a few celebratory drinks on Thursday evening. I spent today trying to get comfortable in the new role.
Comfort comes easy when you can work from the couch, kitchen counter, bed, shower, or whatever’s most comfortable at that particular moment. I accomplished a lot today: I pitched an idea to a few editors; I blogged on smarterfitter; I wrote some comments and emails to friends, former colleagues, and fellow bloggers; I did a brain dump of all my various projects and lists and recorded it all in TaskPaper. I also made time for tabouleh, the library and an episode of The Wire.
I feel like I’ve been productive, but I also feel like I’m moving way too slowly. The only way around this sense of urgency seems to be stricter time management around my various tasks. If I give myself two hours a day to work on SmarterFitter, and another two hours to write and pitch story ideas, then I can feel good about doing both things in the time I give them without getting distracted by a sense of guilt that I should be working on the other thing.
An income would also help!
Then there’s all my side projects, like photography, this blog, and a blog I want to build about free data (freedatablog.com, stay tuned!). And the most important project of all: plan my mom’s visit to London in less than a week!
Like I said, I’m still getting used to this. I really don’t want to become one of those GTD-obsessed productivity hounds, so I’ll leave my rant at that and actually DO something, like write about freelancing on this blog, yet another project.
Until tomorrow…
I like my dals with something refreshing on the side. Lately, I’m all about this salad, adapted from Das Sreedharan’s “The New Taste of India”, a fantastic cookbook filled with delicious vegetarian recipes from Southern India.
The salad takes a bit of chopping, but it’s totally worth it, both for its flavor, and for the rave reviews it gets everytime I serve it.
For the salad:
1 cucumber, peeled and finely chopped
2 Tbsp desiccated coconut (or more to taste)
1 carrot, finely chopped
1 tomato, finely chopped
1 fresh green chilli, finely chopped
a small bunch of fresh cilantro (i.e. coriander), finely chopped
salt
For the dressing:
2 tsp olive oil
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 dried red chilli, halved
1/2 tsp asafoetida
~10 dried curry leaves
juice from half a lemon
Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com
What a way to spend a Saturday. Surreal and strange: the Docklands.
I discover so much great new music when I listen to KCRW’s music stream, like the Marcin Wasilowski piano trio whose jazzy, instrumental version of Prince’s Diamonds And Pearls
Last Saturday at the Stoke Newington Farmer’s Market, Tim and I bought our usual 12 eggs. Unusually, however, we jumped at the price: £4/dozen, up a £1 since last week. The reason? The rising cost of chicken feed, particularly wheat.
The crisis comes after two successive years of disastrous wheat harvests, which saw production fall from 624m to 600m tonnes, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
Experts blame climate change as heatwaves caused a slump in harvests last year in eastern Europe, Canada, Morocco and Australia, all big wheat producers.
Booming populations and a switch to a meat-rich diet in the developing world also mean that about 110m tons of the world’s annual wheat crop is being diverted to feed livestock.
via The Times
In the U.S., all wheat stocks are down 17% from last year according to this week’s USDA Grain Stocks Report.
I’ve read about the wheat problems in developing countries but didn’t take it to heart until it impacted my grocery bill. It makes me wonder: what other global crises are happening right under my nose? I need to start paying more attention.
Last Sunday, I went on my first run since the injection. I’m taking it slow: about 2.5 km and 20 minutes of running. My ankle was fine, my knees were mildly creaky, and my pride was only mildly offended by my absurdly slow pace. I wish I could say I was thrilled to be running again, but really I felt paranoid. “Am I hurting myself?” I wondered with every step. At the same time, I missed the care-free days of 5 milers down Town Lake on sunny Austin Sundays. But things change.
Today I went for run #2. This time, I alternated running with walking for 5km and about 40 minutes. The run-walk was, without a doubt, the way forward. I was able to cover more distance while keeping my heart rate up, plus it alleviated most of my paranoia around injury. I also felt great. Gone were the creaky legs and stiff joints of last weekend. I could almost recall what it feels like to run. If you’ve done much running, you know what I mean - it’s that feeling of lightness, where the run feels completely natural, the legs are fluid, and it’s easy to breath - to me, that’s running.
But for now, run-walking will do. Though he hesitates to admit it, Jeff Galloway agrees. From his Book on Running:
Our bodies weren’t designed to run continuously for long distances… Sure we can adapt, but there is a better way to increase endurance than by running continously. By alternating walking and running, from the start, there’s virtually no limit to the distance you can cover… Once we find the ideal ratio for a given distance, walk breaks allow us to feel strong to the end and recover fast, while building up the same levels of stamina and conditioning that we would have reached if we had run continuously.
Link to Jeff Galloway’s website
Link to Galloway’s Book on Running 2 Ed
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