The Myth & The Majesty

Calm down, calm down. I got to see Niece #1 when we had Thanksgiving dinner at Shorty's last weekend. Maggie (a boxer/terrier mix) was a shelter find a few months ago and although she had a somewhat rough start, she has turned out to be an incredibly well-behaved, friendly dog. One that doesn't lick too much, which means I can hang out with her, too. The most recent addition is Niece #2...   Mia Sorella and The Dude decided they wanted a cat a couple weeks ago, and this past ... Thursday? they got Chamkay. (That means "Sesame" in Korean, by the way.) I got to meet her this morning via webcam and she's tiiiny.   Okay, so not that tiny, but I'm used to full-grown cats.   As I don't have any real, human nieces (or nephews) this may mean I have to make a long trip to PetCo before Christmas...   (Both pictures were Facelifted from said siblings' pages.)

Every once in awhile, I find myself narrating my day. Sometimes I have the urge to write it down. Today, you get to see it. *  I run home for lunch, as usual. Aside from having a steady paycheck again, that's been the best part about this job: I can go home for lunch every day. I've never gotten to do that before, never had a job close to home that didn't require me to do something during lunch, never had the freedom to take a full hour. It's nice. There are no leftovers. Instead, I make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, flipping over the heel so I don't see the crust, a mind-over-matter trick I learned at the camp years ago. Haven't wasted a slice of bread since. Potato chips, a clementine -- not super healthy but not bad. That's the other thing. I haven't lost much weight since moving back west, but I haven't gained it, either. I imagine a lot of things contribute -- more movement, less desk time. I drink less now, too. That last yea

Not those living daylights... Ever have a moment when you realize your Master Plan scares the living daylights out of you? (Or when your backup plan is just as scary as your Master Plan? What a week.) Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. -Helen Keller

May your season be interesting, fun, and just relaxing enough. May your plates be full enough to share. May your favorite stores be full of smiles and short lines. May your scale stay at its current number. May your wrapping paper be unrumpled and your ribbon untangled. May your family be at peace with each other. May Thanksgiving be only the beginning of a long season of thankfulness.  

My family is NOT a shopping family. Plain and simple. We're a family of get-in-get-out shoppers. We don't linger (except over shoes) and we don't really go for fun. So perhaps you can see why Black Friday really isn't our thing. This doesn't mean we don't dive in on a fairly regular basis. Black Friday does, after all, follow a holy-cow-I-ate-too-much holiday that begs for exercise, and sometimes we just need to get out of the house after too much together time. And sometimes ... there's a purpose. Mom and I headed into the Hills this year, first to the Jon Crane Gallery in Hill City and then into Rapid. (Jon Crane -- who looks a bit like Santa -- is an artist who largely does old sites in midwest/western states, including some locations particularly familiar to my parents.) The gallery was giving away small prints to the first 100 visitors, so we figured we'd give it a shot. This was, of course, where we saw our longest line of the day. (We

a.k.a. "The Post In Which Ashley Talks A Little About A Lot Of (No)Things" I am really quite glad the election is over. Now we can get to the next topics ... You know, speculation about the 2016 campaign. And potentially a strange new trend in petitioning for secession. (I've seen Texas and Indiana so far.) Apparently threatening to move to Canada is no longer enough. Thanksgiving used to be a glorious little island in the midst of Christmas shopping. This year, both Shopko and Target start their sales Thanksgiving evening, because waiting for midnight is apparently not good enough for them. I find that tremendously annoying. I am relieved it was the Packers' bye week. Hate to add Aaron Rodgers to the list of injured starting quarterbacks. One of my more ... I'll say "free-spirited" friends informed me that she was observing No-Shave November. My response was approximately, "....Hm." (Another friend's response was, "You mean

My final election season thought is this: as long as there is an electoral college, there will not be a dominant third party candidate. And I find that a tad depressing. Now, to get on with my November.

In the past 30 hours, I have: - Cleaned six dozen bottles, thereby stinking of bleach for the rest of the day - Filled most of those with beer - Baked a cake that became part of what I'm calling a raspberry tiramisu trifle - Aaaaalmost finished my Christmas shopping - Polished my resume for the 87th time - Changed a tire on my car (poor Sophie picked up a nail) - Eaten dinner with a fantastic group of women - Read up on my brewing stuff, my Ruth stuff, and perused the catalog at Coursera.org for what I'll inflict on myself next month. Okay, so most of that was yesterday. Today has been more of the studying-and-resume stuff, which feels considerably less productive but is still headway. That being said, perhaps you understand my frustration with the fact that although I'm not at work today and can pick and choose my time to vote, I'll still end up standing in line for 45 minutes. Maybe it's a good thing there's a book in my purse...

I love beer. Not, you know, in a Homer Simpson kind of way. It's more of an Alton Brown thing -- I'm intrigued by tastes and textures, by processes, by ingredients, by the things that have to go right for a batch to turn out and the things that can go wrong. It hasn't always been this way. My dad brewed beer when I was younger and the smell of half-ready wort was enough to scare me away from the stuff until I was 23 years old. I didn't drink the cheap stuff in college -- as long as I can remember, I've been of the opinion that if I'm going to consume something, I will enjoy it. When I was a senior, I took a biochemical engineering class where as an extracurricular activity, we brewed beer at our professor's house. It was a lot of fun and reintroduced me to good beer, the kind where you can pick out multiple flavors and just enjoy ... instead of referring to it as "carbonated excrement." And then ... I moved to Wisconsin. There, I found p

Now, I spend a fair bit of time trying not to offend people here. Call it a peacekeeper tendency, if you will -- it's just part of my personality. However, that doesn't mean I don't have opinions and as it is election season, I think it's high time I stated a few of those. I'm not too worried about offending most of you because hey, we're friends, of various sorts. We understand each other and can respect each others' differences. And if we can't ... I'm just not going to worry about it. So! I dislike political seasons. In fact, it's borderline hatred -- I don't like being inundated with yard signs, I get annoyed with commercials blasting oppositions far and wide (which, by the way, bump local businesses off the air), and I have yet to find a candidate that I really, truly feel like backing. In any race. Ever. Which makes voting hard. This rant started with a website ... ISideWith.com exists to clarify. There are questions -- long

Alrighty, folks. I've decided to start a new occasional column (of sorts) about my adventures in homebrewing. This is partially to keep a log of things and partially to, hopefully, get some feedback when problems arise. I'll explain the origins of this new bit in a later post, but first I'd appreciate some insight into your worlds. 1. Do you drink beer? 2. What variety? (Light, dark, only the best, anything free?) 3. Have you ever made your own? If so, have any disasters to share? Thanks!

12 Thoughts Since 7AM 1. Why on earth do I have a Weird Al song stuck in my head?! 2. Online package tracking may be the best AND worst innovation of the 21st century. So far. 3. If you had told me three years ago that one day I would care about billboard locations in Tennessee, I'd have been happy to call the nearest mental hospital for you. 4. Similarly, I never thought I'd be a company's closest thing to tech support. (Stop cringing. You don't think I can see you but I can.) 5. Thank goodness for a mini-lesson from Moonie a few years back. "You do realize that if I've never done something, I just Google it to see what other people have done, right?" 6. Holy crap, it's November. 7. I need to cut back on the caffeine again. 8. Mixed up a batch of a nut brown ale yesterday. Now I keep getting distracted, wondering how it's doing. 9. I really can't wait for political ads to be done, even if I'm not fully prepared for what