i’m an alligator

maura @ 9:10 pm

What is it about this summer? I’m feeling very blag-challenged lately. Maybe it’s because I’ve been spending too much time with those hip new kids, facebook + twitter. But I’m taking a break from them this week and it’s all about YOU, blag. I still love you best.

Last night, for a variety of reasons, there wasn’t much food in the house to pack for my lunch. So I cooked something! Well, it’s a cold salad, so nothing was actually cooked. But I chopped things up and mixed them together in the proportions Jonathan dictated to me. And there’s enough for at least 3 days of lunch, so I feel victorious.

We’ll call this one: Johnny’s Take on Prune‘s Black-Eyed Pea Salad (thank you Gabrielle Hamilton!)

1. Open a can of black-eyed peas, rinse them just a little bit, and dump into a big metal bowl.

2. Grab a bag of frozen corn, dump it into a colander and rinse with hot water to defrost them. Dump into big metal bowl.

3. Wash and halve a container of cherry or grape tomatoes and, you guessed it, into the bowl they go.

4. Really you should dice a nice-sized shallot at this point, but we didn’t have any so we subbed in a few scallions. Wash, chop, put in bowl.

5. Fresh parsley: wash and ask your sous-chef to chop them (I hate chopping! It is at least 80% of the reason I don’t like to cook). You can put them in the bowl, though.

6. Secret ingredient: gherkins! Any size gherkin pickle will do. Sometimes we use cornichons, but last night we only had the big guys. Roughly chop at least 3 big pickles — it will look like a lot but trust me, you need them!

7. Secret ingredient #2: gherkin juice! Put the lid on the jar and shake it up, then splash a few good pours into the bowl. How much? Well, you don’t want it to be soupy (and the tomatoes will shed water too), but there should be some liquid in the bottom of the bowl.

8. Pour some olive oil over the whole mess. Jonathan had me count to 20, but I counted fast. Remember that olive oil is good for you!

9. Salt + pepper to taste. Mix it all up and taste it. If you need to add more salt the next night, that’s okay.

10. Use the spoon to push everything down to the bottom of the bowl so it call all marinate together overnight. Mmmm, mingly flavors!

Voila! The perfect summer lunch, no hot stove required. Have a thick slice of sourdough bread with roquefort alongside, or even mix in couscous to make a complete meal.

when you walk down the street

maura @ 9:50 am

Ah, Summer Fridays. The days I’ve scheduled for publication-related activities. Last week I had a good workday, but today I am far less motivated. I’m still not 100% recovered from my surprisingly evil head cold. And I feel like I didn’t get enough done this week, what with the 2 sick days. I guess I did finish two books while convalescing (one of which had been moldering on a shelf, half-read, since the spring!). But I’d like to have gotten more done at work, run some errands, cleared out some Coop work, etc.

(Yes, I know it’s not healthy to regret time lost to illness. I’m working on it.)

So, today I would much rather be doing non-publication-related things. But there’s not an infinite number of Summer Fridays, so instead I’ve planned procrastination until 10am (hence this post!) and work after that.

(So here’s the real post now, that was all just explanatory blathering that you’re free to ignore. Oops, too late.)

Two shiny new gadgets arrived in our house this week.

I know, I know, I’ve claimed at least twice that I would not be getting one. BUT, someone in the house joined the iphone developer’s program and needed a testing platform. Also, our old cellphones were really bad, practically unusable, and since our contract was up we would have needed to pay for new phones AND get a more expensive contract anyway since they no longer offer our old plan. And it’s not fair for just ONE person in the house to have an iphone, now, is it?

Admittedly, it still makes me a bit nervous to carry it around. I did bring my old ipod shuffle to work the other day because it seemed conspicuous to be listening to music on the iphone in the subway. But I have to admit that it’s pretty sweet. I stitched up a quickie cozy for it out of some felt I had lying around, but I’ve plans to sew a real case sometime soon. And the headphones fit perfectly into the little knitted cozy that Anne made for me ages ago (thanks Anne!).

I haven’t paid for any software for it yet, but I downloaded a free Othello, because I am a nerd. Now if someone could just make a (GOOD!) listmaking app and Tesserae, I’ll be all set!

like the sound of a bird

maura @ 9:42 pm

I’m sick, bah. Standard head cold, nose is a faucet, you know the drill. Not sure how it happened — no one else I know is sick. Of course, Gus started camp last week so maybe he brought something home with him. Germy germy kids.

I have to go to bed, so what to do with the blag? Why, paste in twitter updates, of course! Recently twitter is the only interwebs thing I can manage. Call it summer brain, or snot brain, or something. Anyway, enjoy my past 2 weeks:

mauraweb still snotty, bah about 3 hours ago from web

mauraweb feeling a bit better, hoping to feel better enough to walk to work tomorrow morning 09:28 PM July 14, 2008 from web

mauraweb still sick, still crabby, sipping ol’ doc johnny’s medical lemony bourbon 09:16 PM July 13, 2008 from web

mauraweb constantly blowing my nose, hating summer colds 08:25 PM July 12, 2008 from web

mauraweb considering whether to feed twitter onto my blog 09:59 PM July 11, 2008 from web

mauraweb finished my outline, yippee!!! 12:34 PM July 11, 2008 from web

mauraweb 3 5 0 1 2 5 go! 09:21 PM July 10, 2008 from web

mauraweb gearing up for tonight’s work: reading (not writing, sadly) 08:21 PM July 09, 2008 from web

mauraweb looking at all the things to be done, wondering where the day went 09:14 PM July 08, 2008 from web

mauraweb watching a kitten spinning on the chair while one of its owners hums pee-wee music 07:30 PM July 07, 2008 from web

mauraweb sliding down the slippery slope to coffee time 02:02 PM July 07, 2008 from web

mauraweb family yay! traffic boo! home yay! 10:08 PM July 06, 2008 from web

mauraweb recovering from a strenuous day of sitting at a couple of playgrounds and hauling a pile of kids’ books home from the library 05:55 PM July 02, 2008 from web

mauraweb wondering if i will ever have time to read everything i want to read 09:33 PM July 01, 2008 from web

3 5 0 1 2 5 go

maura @ 8:48 pm

For our nation’s birthday this year we at mauraweb! decamped to parts north. Unlike other years, when we’ve headed to the Midwest, this year the Midwest met us in New England. Rollicking family fun ensued: lounging around, swimming, feasting on lobster + corn, and indulging in slightly terrifying backyard fireworks. Gus was surprised to learn that he has an 11 yr old first cousin once removed, who has 4 toy lightsabers (including the color Gus covets: purple), a pool, and Super Smash Bros Brawl. I was surprised to learn that teenagers still make friendship bracelets. Who knew?

The kittens were both good and bad in our absence. The house was in decent shape when we returned, but one of them had chewed through the thin Wii sensor bar cable. Luckily Jonathan was able to fix it, saving us from buying a new one (which isn’t as easy as it should be). They also chewed through the ground wire for my turntable, but it needs a new belt so I haven’t been able to use it recently. I’m thinking about upgrading to a USB turntable anyway — this one is nearly 20 yrs old and wasn’t that great to begin with. And it’d be nice to convert some of my records to mp3 so I can actually listen to them in the places I’m listening to music these days.

Sigh, another long + boring post. Sorry, Interwebs! I used up all of my writing mojo today on the first of my five Summer Friday Scholarly Activities Bonanzas: drafting outline of an article and researching the literature review of said article. Go me! I’ll make it up to you in the next post, promise.

like a whole bucket of stars

maura @ 10:17 pm

It’s time to blag, time for the blagging. That’s what the calendar tells me, at least. That it’s been nearly another week. And how can the time go by so quickly, anyway? What have I been doing?

Not much interesting, really. Working at work. Last week was a bad sleep week, so lots of coffee was consumed (and not much scooting done). Enduring high heat + humidity. Moving to temp office space during renovations. The members’ picnic night at BBG. Sesame Place. Family visiting + nephew baptizing. Driving on the NJT, 2nd most hated of all roads (right behind the SIE, which was also driven on). Kitten love (they missed us when we were away). And laundry, there is always laundry.

I am buried under reading at the moment. 1/2 a fiction book from the public library (renewed at least 13 times!). Another fiction book from work (plucked from the shelves mere hours before the PSs were sealed off for the rest of the summer!). 2 kids books. 1 new arty-n-writy book by Lynda Barry that I did not even know existed until my rad spouse got it for me for my birthday. 1 exciting (if you are me!) work book. Rounding out the pack are a few work-related articles, a few articles for the literature review of an article I hope to write, and a few articles for a research project I hope to start in the fall.

I need to stop sleeping. That’s clearly the only strategy.