notes and eats

The other morning I walk out to my car at 6am to go to work and I see a note on my windshield. I get in the car and read this:

And yes, I was slightly offended, or rather, irritatingly amused. There may be some guilt of the parking example on the right, I back my car in to the spot and don't want to scrape the curb so I might not be all the way in, but I do NOT park crooked like that middle guy! And even if I did, the spots are larger than most spots so who cares. Who is this parking critiquer anyway?! The whole thing was kind of creepy.

Otherwise another good busy week. Doug and I met up a couple of my cousins at a vegetarian restaurant and then went to see a documentary about the Nuremberg trials. It was interesting.

I don't know if people know this already, but an umbrella also doubles as a way to sneak a take-out container of delicious peach crisp, complete with icecream, into a movie theatre...

Doug and I also picked a church for the wedding! It's not too glamourous inside, but it works, and most importantly it will let me bring in my pastor to marry us. Yay! He's great.

Then we drove up to the place we are having our reception and looked at it again. It's so beautiful, I kind of wish we were getting married in the summer. But my favorite season is fall, hopefully it will be nice in November still. Not counting on it though, it has been a chilly summer!

I get the feeling there are a lot of variations of what seems to be Doug's favorite pose in my future...

And I made my favorite veggie burgers again. This time Doug baked us some sweet potato fries and we had green beans from mom's garden

And again tonight with a pickle and corn on the cob. I have always loved my corn so peppery that my lips are tingling afterwards, mmmm

And then tonight I baked some chocolate chip cookie bars with cut up pieces of dark chocolate I got for my birthday. I have been making lots of vegan cookies lately, but they ain't got nothing on these. Real butter, white flour and sugar, eggs, and lots of chocolate, mmmmm

Heat Wave

Now is that special time of year where I hate living in this apt. I feel bad even writing about it, because I know Jill feels bad that she can't do anything about it either. But seriously, I am going nuts. This morning I woke up not by my alarm, but because my ears were in such intense pain. The radiator has been creaking again like crazy, around the clock, and its loud too. Since January I have been sleeping with ear plugs. I had to buy a deaf person alarm clock that vibrates under my pillow so I don't sleep thru class or work. Sometimes I can still hear the creaks thru my 32 decibel ear plugs. The most infuriating thing is that it just doesn't make any sense. My room is the only one that does it, even though Jill's room has a radiator under a window too, I just don't get it. And it is roasting hot in here all day long. Even with the thermostat set at 60 or 70, it doesn't even matter, it's always 80+ degrees.

It makes no sense. It was cold in November and December, except it didn't do the creaks. And since January it's been non stop. I asked the landlord guy about the heat since you'd think he'd care about us having windows open and he was like 'oh you have it set at 72, that's why it's 85 in there, turn it to 60'. But again, see picture. Nothing works. And anyway, what kind of a system is that? If you set it at 70 it should be 70. And it's all-day-long, I can't get anything done in my room ever because I just want to throw things in frustration. Ok, sorry Jill, just super frustrated. Moving on.

Yesterday I saw these at the store and texted my friend Liz the picture, and she wrote back:

I did notice the smallest size was a large, hey, mediums get muffin tops too! Haha.

Cooking fail

I went to make some of my favorite tostadas the other day. It was already like 7 or so and I was really hungry. I'd used up a bunch of leftovers from the bare fridge and when I went to put it in the oven, I must have bobbled it:

I don't even know how it happened, but they fell, cheese side down of course onto the hot oven door and even into the crack.

I was so mad! I did laugh and get my camera, but I was mad.

Confession: except for the one that fell mostly in the crack, I scraped them off the oven lid and cooked and ate it anyway. That actually grosses me out a little, who knows when that oven lid was cleaned, but I had seriously just used everything eatable left in the fridge to make them, I was hungry, and my plain stubbornness made me do it.

Of course first I had to turn off the oven so I could clean off all the melted cheese, salsa, and smeared refried beans. It didn't help that that day was the the first of the really hot days, and I was soaking wet sweaty and nasty as I scrubbed a 350 degree oven in already 85 degree heat. That probably didn't help my irritability.

I'm starting to get worried about the summer. After not sleeping much this winter because of loud pipe noises, it's looking like I'm not going to get much sleep in the summer either because of the heat. It gets really hot and stuffy in my room. My old apt was hot too, it's not just here, but we had a nice big window and some nights 3 fans going. And on the really bad nights we'd drag the air mattress into the living room where the AC unit was. I've thought about putting a little cot in the basement here, but it is a shared basement and the thought of people coming down kinda creeps me out. So hopefully the fan(s) situation will work, we'll see I guess!

Operation Sleep

So I mentioned before that I can hardly sleep in this condo. 2 reasons. Number 1: it is a sauna in here. Everyday it is 80+ degrees. Number #2: the radiator makes an intermittent clicking noise that NEVER STOPS. The heat issue: free heat so my roommate doesn't care and she likes it hot. But the thermostat is pretty much non-responsive. It's one of those old school dials and keeps the condo at 80, even though the needle is set to 65. The second issue I have no clue what it is. A heating & cooling friend I desperately emailed for help just said it's the pipes contracting and expanding because of the temperature differences and there's nothing to do. So I've been sleeping with my window open, fan on, earplugs in, and still I've been sleeping like crap for months now. And slept thru my alarm twice because of the earplugs.

An engineering friend of mine got me some insulation, the kind that goes in cars to soundproof them, and I had a brilliant idea to muffle the pipes.

the offending pipe

covered in insulating fluff

layer of foil to help seal it in. Hey, I don't really know what I'm doing, it could have worked.

But no.

Fail.

I was still taping up the foil but could already still plainly hear the clicks from inside. The heat issue was helped a bit, but nothing for the noise.

I was so sure it was going to work! I feel so discouraged. It is so frustrating.

I don't remember it doing it in the fall, so maybe in the spring it will be quiet again. But it bothers me so much. I lay awake every night near tears and swearing at it. I don't know what else to do. I might need to move out, I can't take another year and a half of no sleep.

Office Thief

I swear this attorney at my office is stealing my peanut butter. I keep a jar of natural pb in the fridge and a bag of bran muffins in the freezer for quick workday snacks. And I can tell the pb level is lowering day by day and I haven't even eaten any in awhile. It bugs me! I hate to be a huge cheapskate, but seriously it is getting more and more expensive plus I just don't feel like I need to be supplying food for everyone. I'm pretty sure I know who it is. Once I was at the table eating lunch and she wanders in and dug into my baggie of carrots and started eating them while she was reading the newspaper. Um. Help yourself?

Yes, I have stolen the occasional office supply, but stealing someone elses food is just wrong :)

So last night I went over to my friend's house. We went for a beautiful walk and came home and made dinner. They usually eat pretty late so by the time of actual dinner at 8:30 I had already been snacking a lot, and was so hungry, I left just completely stuffed. It was good, but I do prefer a bit of an earlier eating time so I'm not ravenous by the time I actually eat!

I wanted to make those lemon chia seed muffins while I was there to show her how good they were. It turned into a bit of a bigger job than I thought. First we had to mill flour because she doensn't eat much of it. So we milled rice, spelt and added some tapioca flour. Then she didn't have any applesauce so we had to make that too. So a few extra steps. I didn't like our flour mix, it tasted kind of heavy and grainy, but the muffins were still pretty good and I got a text this morning saying that I was right and they were even better cold :) Yum!