Haiku is for amateurs

Should
be
doing
lesson plans,
but geeky poems
are so much more entertaining.

My modest attempt at a Fib, a 6-line, 20 syllable poem based on the Fibonacci sequence...it's math and poetry all in one!

(1) As
(1) a
(2) former
(3) champion
(5) Mathlete, I think these
(8) suckers are incredibly fun.

(13) From this you can conclude that I have no social life.

Julia's Back

As the kitchen gods have had time to get over the hysterical laughing that my upside-down roast chicken no doubt incurred, I thought I'd try out something new today: beef stew and beer bread. Surprisingly good things came of this endeavor. First, I mostly made up the beef stew recipe from bits and pieces of recipes I had and a liberal dose of my mother's soup making theory, "throw whatever you have into it until it looks good." The result was not brilliant, but it at least passed for beef stew.
The crowning achievement came with my beer bread. This recipe doesn't exactly get difficulty points from the judges, but it's really pretty good! And I didn't screw it up! I served it with a little homemade honey butter, which was perfect. I ate three whole pieces...I don't think this will last too long!
Mmmmmm...

Book Brahmin

I'm a nerd. I love book questions! These were inspired by Susan Wiggs' answers at Shelf Awareness

On your nightstand now:
Two remotes, because one doesn't work properly, a Lenten daily meditation thing that I haven't opened in 2 weeks, Penny Kittle's The Greatest Catch: A Life in Teaching, and two different alarms that I managed to shut off in my sleep this morning.

Favorite book when you were a child:
As if I could pick one…well as we say in second grade, my "forever book" is The Good Night Book, by Lynn and Mandy Wells. "Hello pillow, hello bed. Here I come with my sleepy head."

Your top five authors:
As shallow* as this list looks, these are my favorites: L.M. Montgomery, Nora Roberts, Nicholas Sparks, Anna Quindlan, and Jodi Picoult.

*It's sort of like gourmet food: It's nice to have tried it and it's good for a nice meal every once in a while, but when you've had a crappy day, you just want some Chef Boyardee.

Book you've faked reading:
David Copperfield…thank goodness for SparkNotes. I passed the quiz (and got an A in Victorian Lit), but for the life of me I couldn't begin to give you the basic plotline today. I just know that I hated David.

Book you're an evangelist for:
Right now it's The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I don't know how more people have not read this book. Maybe it's just my sheltered little corner of the world.

Book you've bought for the cover:
I have literally no idea.

Book that changed your life:
I don't think it can say that it changed my life, but my go-to standard is Anne of the Island. I think I could probably recite it by now, I've read it so many times.

Favorite line from a book:
"I don't want sunbursts and marble halls. I just want you." Anne to Gilbert, in Anne of the Island. (P.S. I am totally in love with Gilbert Blythe. Always have been, always will be.)


Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Jewels of the Sun by Nora Roberts. I want to ditch it all and run to Ireland and fall in love with a handsome bartender named Aidan too!

Adventures in Online Dating

To make a long backstory short, I've tried just about every dating site there is, and while it works for some people (and even myself on occasion), it seems more to offer fodder for a good story than any sort of romantic possibility. Past emails from potential suitors included a 62-year-old who listed "cutting wood" as a hobby. Today's, though, brought new levels of unintentional comedy to my dating chronicles. This gentlemen, 11 years my senior, noted that while we don't seem to have very much in common, at least we live close by. He described himself as "not too slender" and pointed out that he doesn't watch sports because he can't sit still that long. Then he went on to say that he has all of his teeth and because he's not from here, we can't be related so we should really get together. I think that last part was supposed to be a joke, but from the profile picture, he really could've fooled me on the teeth thing.

You can't make this stuff up.

Dancing

Is it just me, or does Dancing With the Stars make everyone want to be a ballroom dancer? Seriously. It's a good thing I live alone, because I make quite a picture dancing around my apartment. It's sort of like what Ginger Rogers would look like... if she disconnected her brain from the rest of her limbs.
Go Ty!!

Impressive

Oh I am so supposed to be doing lesson plans and all that jazz, but I'll just take a moment to update...

Yesterday I opened up the wedding announcement page of the paper and found my ex-boyfriend's announcement...and was genuinely happy for him. Then I spent the whole day playing seventh wheel to my mom and dad and my sisters and their boyfriends.

All this with NO chocolate. Take that, universe.

Sorry, Julia.

So yesterday I had a snow day...hooray for being able to sleep in and watch Steven and Chris, not hooray for the nice warm sunny days in June that I will now be spending in my classroom. I had planned to cook a chicken in my crockpot, because I've pretty well idiot-proofed that recipe and all it takes is getting up about 5 minutes earlier in the morning to molest the chicken (I'm sorry, but sticking my hand up the chicken's ass to take out its extra parts feels WRONG) and put it in the crockpot before work. Except...snow day. And sleeping in. And hanging out in my pajamas for a long time. So I forgot to put the chicken in the crockpot until it was much too late. So, emboldened by the aura of fake domesticity I get after watching Steven and Chris, I decided to roast the chicken. I have never done this before, but how hard can it be? I get my chicken ready, take out the little bag of innards, stuff it with some stuffing (more on that later), rub some butter on it and plop it in the oven.

A couple hours later, my chicken is done. It's nice and roast chicken colored and my thermometer has determined that it is sufficiently warm and no longer carrying disease. I take it out of the oven and it occurs to me that I have no inkling of how to carve the darn thing. Luckily my trusty Betty Crocker cookbook has a picture for idiots like me. Except that it is not carving as well as I would like.

Now I'm not sure of the exact moment or reason for this epiphany, but it suddenly occurs to me that I have roasted the damn chicken upside down. UPSIDE DOWN. Not that this has disastrous effects on the chicken, but what kind of a moron roasts the chicken upside down??

The same kind of moron who, failing to read the directions, assumes the dry stuffing will turn into a nice fluffy substance inside the chicken. Julia Child, I ain't.

Warped

You know how they say there's a lid for every pot?

I think it's more like this...you're cleaning out the Tupperware cupboard, trying to match up all of the containers to their proper lids. You get mates for almost all of them, and then you're left with some perfectly good containers and...warped lids. They fit, but something is always just a little off.


Feeling like the last container in the cabinet today.