Archive for the 'Personal' Category

Making Sloe Gin

Published on September 6, 2009 in Country Life, Personal and photos. 0 Comments

Sloe Harvest

Mike is visiting for the weekend and we spent part of the afternoon down at Lower Moor Farm picking sloes to make sloe gin. The collection process was semi-arduous, as was pricking the individual sloe berries with a bramble thorn before adding them to gin. Neither of us really like gin, but somehow we couldn’t pass up this opportunity to take advantage of all these sloes. I think it’s more about living off the land than drinking gin. Not that sloe gin is required to sustain life, but it might be a nice way to coast through the cold English winters (that’s how long it will take for the sloes to dissolve into the gin and make it yummy enough to drink).

Sloe Gin In Progress

Meticulous Pricking

Pictures from Chicago

Published on August 29, 2009 in Personal, photos and travel. 1 Comment

Mom and Stephanie

Flickr photo set: Chicago - August 2009

My latest trip back home to Chicago was totally retro:

  • My best friend from high school got married
  • I drank my first White Russian since New Orleans
  • I made Krusteez Waffles with my aunt, who used to make my sis and I pancakes on the campstove back when we were kids (does that mean we’re not kids anymore?)
  • I caught up with my good friend, Dawid, from UIUC
  • We ate Italian at Superossa, pizza at Papa’s Pizza place, and almost went to Ruby Tuesday’s (all restaurants we used to frequent but haven’t been to in years and years).

But some things do change. New additions include:

  • Mom’s new horse, Lass
  • Stephanie and Jolan’s new trailer in Woodsmoke
  • Mom and Dad’s new house on Gilbert Ave
  • Dad’s fab twice baked potatoes
  • And of course, we’re all drinking age now so let the Labatt’s beer flow.

And let’s not forget: I turned 30 recently. My family threw me a fantastic belated birthday party at Woodsmoke. Highlights include:

Bird feeder prepares for lift off!

  • Thunderstorms and lightening - the rain set the mood for a nice cozy night in the hideaway
  • Keeping it simple with Chicago-style veggie dogs and cabbage slaw, thus allowing us to spend more time relaxing and talking rather than slaving away in the kitchen (though that can be fun, too)
  • Stephanie’s fantastic vegan chocolate and zucchini cake with whipped soy cream and berries - I even went back for seconds!
  • Presents! Everyone was way too generous, yet simultaneously sensitive to my minimalist packing style. They were also eerily in tune with my tastes - it’s amazing how well we seem to know each other despite living so far apart.
  • Mom’s impressive bird house skills - my birds get to live in a rocket ship!
  • Stephanie’s card - I won’t go into details, but her comments about Big Sur were spot on - it really is amazing how far we’ve come since last January
  • Just having a birthday party, with candles and singing and all the trimmings. I haven’t had one of those in years - it’s really nice!
  • Having all of us together in one place for a change - a rarity these days.

All in all a fabulous trip. I’m lucky I have such great family and friends to go home to.

Check out all my pics on Flickr: Chicago - August 2009

Refried beans in print!

Published on August 27, 2009 in Personal, food and photos. 1 Comment

Magazines must love Flickr - it’s full of people like me willing to give away their images for free. Is it cheesy if I say that the thrill of “seeing” my picture in print is payment enough?

My refried beans in Young Buzz Magazine

DIY Accordion Album

Published on August 4, 2009 in Personal and photos. 0 Comments
5CA0525A-D667-4D97-B3FA-C20F73AA6069.jpg

I made a super simple accordion photo album last night for some pics of the new place I wanted to send to the grandparents. Didn’t take a photo of the finished product, of course, but it turned out very well and only took about an hour to make. Much better than sending someone a stack of printed photos that they’re only going to store away in some drawer until the end of time.

Easy one page accordion album

On the importance of good sleep

Published on July 21, 2009 in Country Life, Personal and freedom. 0 Comments

Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com

Gizmo on the ProLite 4 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!.jpg

We’re less than a week into our new place in the countryside and already I can feel the difference. Compared to London, one of the most noticeable differences is the noise (or lack thereof). Without the constant interruption of sleep noise, I’m finally enjoying the most restful sleep I’ve had in AGES! And no more earplugs! The remarkable thing is that we don’t even have a bed yet - I’m sleeping on the floor on a Therm-a-Rest Sleeping Mat, and will be for the next couple weeks, until our pimp new Superking-sized bed arrives. But even on the floor I’m sleeping much better than I did in London, and this is definitely feeding into the amount of energy I have during the day. It feels great to be rested. Now, I’m hoping that this great rest will inspire me to get out and explore the countryside, or at least, write a future post entitled “On the importance of good waterproof gear.” It rains a lot in England!

Photo credit: nguy0833

Photos from my Chicago trip

Published on July 9, 2009 in Personal, photos and travel. 0 Comments

Anything I Got Ain't Worth Your Life

I’ve been having an awesome trip to the States this summer and have actually managed to keep up with uploading my photos. Above is one of the highlights from my trip to Woodsmoke a couple weeks ago.

Click here to see the rest of my photos from Chicago.

Our new place in the country… we hope

Published on June 8, 2009 in Personal and photos. 2 Comments

Our New Home (I Hope)

(More photos here!)

The lease on our London flat is coming to an end so Tim and I have decided to go for something completely different and move to the countryside. After several weeks of mildly stressful house-hunting, I think our search is finally over. Today we found an awesomely cool converted barn in the middle of freakin’ nowhere (Oaksey, UK).

The place is a cool old barn with wood beams and a neat stone wall, but with lots of cool modern features like an open-plan living space and a big window opening out onto a massive south-facing garden (we think we’ll get a dog).

The pic above looks a bit suburban with its well-mown lawn, but up close it’s a nifty old barn made of Cotswold stone that looks out onto the country. Rumor has it we’ll even have some cows coming to visit us from time to time. I look forward to pimping out the garden with a bbq, table and chairs, an herb garden, and other good stuff.

The barn is located on Clattinger Farm, a 60.3 hectare enclave owned by the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust and a “Site of Special Scientific Interest”. It’s a little grassland oasis full of wildlife and pretty flowers. Plus, it’s on the outskirts of the Cotswolds, a range of hills in the south west of England and a designated “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty”. I’m so excited to move. There will be lots of walking, cooking, working on our own thing, being free, and hopefully playing with our dog in the peaceful, English countryside.

Here’s a little snip about the farm from The Wiltshire Wildlife Trust:

Clattinger Farm is a precious remnant of a near-vanished type of grassland, the hay meadow. Its fabulous richness as a wildlife habitat is a tribute to the previous owners who farmed it traditionally, without artificial fertilisers. Acquired by the Trust in 1996, it is considered the finest remaining example of enclosed lowland grassland in the UK and is of international importance for its hay meadow wildflowers. It has legal protection as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and is part of a Special Area of Conservation.

Clattinger Farm is breathtaking in June, when the wildflower meadows are at their most colourful. A walk around the nature reserve will offer a glimpse of plants that were once common, but some of which are now extremely rare. Several species of orchid, including the Southern Marsh-orchid (Dactylorhiza praetermissa), and the nationally rare Downy-fruited Sedge (Carex filiformis), are amongst its treasures.

Earlier in the season, in April, you can see the fragile, nodding heads of the Snakeshead Fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris), once common enough to pick by the armload, but now surviving only in a few protected spots.

And a few more pics of the place:

House Hunting - Barn Conversion - The One?

House Hunting - Barn Conversion - The One?

House Hunting - Barn Conversion - The One?

House Hunting - Barn Conversion - The One?

I shouldn’t get too excited. We still need to fill in the application and get all our references approved. But I’m excited.

The “Smarter” Side of SmarterFitter

Published on March 19, 2009 in Freelance Writing, Personal, SmarterFitter, fitness and nutrition. 1 Comment

Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com

Things have been a little quiet around here. I just started a part-time gig teaching at the Open University, the UK’s distance learning government-supported university. My students just submitted their first assignment and, for the first time since grad school, I’m inundated with papers to grade. I don’t mind, though. The class has been going well, I like my students, and I actually enjoy the “feedback” part of the grading process. This is a far cry from the differential equations (aka “Diffy Q” aka “Diffy Screw”) class I TA’d at University of Texas. It makes a huge difference teaching a.) to a smaller class (20 vs 200) and 2.) to “grown-ups” rather than undergrads.

But I didn’t start this post to wax nostalgic, so let me get to the point.

One of the BIG HUGE benefits of teaching at Open University is that every year I’m eligible for a fee waiver of up to £1,190 for any course of my course. This is a pretty major benefit and I don’t want to pass it up. The thing is, I’m totally stumped as to what to take. My goals are kind of … varied.

This is the question I posted to Directgov’s career advice forum:

I’m a freelance writer in the health and fitness space, with a bent towards nutrition and vegetarian cooking. I write for several publications, including my own blog. I’m really looking to become an authority in this space and I’m wondering what kind of coursework or degree would get me there. I already possess and MSc in Applied Maths and Computer Science. What can I add to increase my credibility and an expert in health, fitness and nutrition?

Yep, I’m just a few months away from 30 and I still don’t know what to do with my life.

Current course candidates are (and the list keeps growing):

Meditation for Trekkies

Published on February 4, 2009 in Personal. 0 Comments

I posted a version of this to SmarterFitter but thought I’d share here. Going to try to crosspost more regularly as more and more personal stuff is filtering over to SF. Blah blah. Too many blogs.

skitched-20090204-212047.jpgI was at dinner the other night with Tim & Co. and the subject of meditation came up. Who of us meditates? How? What technique?

I never really thought of my “mind games” as meditation, but I suppose it’s true that I do practice a sort of self-defined meditation. For example, one of the reasons I find swimming so relaxing is because when I’m in the pool, my mind is totally focused on BEING in the pool. I can’t listen to music or watch TV. I have no choice but to be there, under water, in my own head. I avert my eyes from the clock and try to keep my mind on the movements. And after about 10 minutes or so of this, I really get into being in that place. In the moment.

The other time I “meditate” is before bed. I don’t know about you but I get really wound up at night. Even with the lights out, my mind races, and only when I force my mind to think about something really mundane do I realize that I’m actually really tired and I pass out like a dead person. One of the mind tricks I recently started is a sort of space nerd visualization game. I used to study astronomy, so I know what the stars look like pretty well. So I imagine myself leaving the earth and going up into space, and then traveling around the constellations, viewing them from different dimensions. For example, I’ll set off for Orion’s belt, pass it, then spin around and try to imagine what all the other constellations would look like from this new point of view. At some point during my star trek I pass out. Success!

My friends assured me that this indeed counts as “meditation” even if I don’t call it that. It makes me wonder what the deal is with all these courses on meditation - are they really necessary? Are they effective?

To me it seems really important that a meditation exercise be personalized. For example, my space odyssey works because I’m a sci-fi nerd and I harbor secret fantasies of being an officer on the Starship Enterprise (not a secret to anyone who saw me at the 1995 Star Trek convention in Tinley Park where I sported my Third Officer’s uniform, comm badge and all).

So I wonder if there are any meditation methods out there that teach people how to create this very personal state of ‘mindfulness’. Tim recently told me about “mindfulness-based stress reduction”, a “way of paying attention, on purpose and non-judgementally, to what goes on in the present moment in your body, mind, and the world around you.”

Bogus or brilliant? I have a lot of research to do before I can decide.

What about you guys? Do you meditate? How? And why?

Reading list:

Scientists probe meditation secrets [BBC]

How to Get Smarter, One Breath at a Time [TIME Magazine]

Finding Happiness: Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left [New York Times]

Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com

Coming down from California

Published on January 31, 2009 in Personal, photos and travel. 0 Comments

Beach

I’m back in London from my trip to Chicago and California. You’d think after eight weeks away I’d be raring to come back to London, but if anything, I now see more than ever that my home is somewhere else outside of London. I don’t know where, but I’m really excited to find out, and soon!

I can’t put into words how awesome my trip was without spending hours writing this. Let’s just say that I was too busy having fun to write about any of it in my blog.

I’m slowly uploading pictures from my trip to Flickr. You can see all of the photo sets from my trip here:

Winter Travels 2008 / 2009

I also took some videos with my new Panasonic Lumix (thank you, Tim!). Check out these crazy mating elephant seals:

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