Eating My Vegetables

To make life (well dinner) a little more interesting I've joined the Vegetable Challenge over at Culinate.
So far today has been a bust on the veg front, I've had many pickles with my lunch sandwich and a lonesome tomato slice. Hopefully dinner will get me closer to the 5 cups a day. The hard part is going to be learning to replace some other foods with the vegetables instead of just eating more.

Update: Dinner-
One of my favorites, "3 Times the Crunch Salad"
1.5 - 2 cups baby arugula
1 cup of asian cucumber slices (they're sweeter, but not too thinly cut about 1/4 in)
1/3 cup radish slices
1 cup blanched asparagus, cut into bite size pieces
2 tbsp parsley, chopped
- all in all about 4 cups

blanch the asparagus and mix it all together while it's still warm. Salt to taste, dress with white balsamic vinegar and grapeseed oil to barely coat.
The salad crunches very nicely. The sweet cucumber, bitter radish, spicy arugula and mild asparagus go great together. The vinegar adds just a little acid to balance it all out.

Purse!

After realizing that I don't nearly enough hobbies, rearranging and clearing out some space, I've welcomed my new friend to my crafty corner: She (of course) fits perfectly between the pasta machine and the mini vise and comes with a fun foot pedal and a ton of accessories. Since I don't do anything the easy way, my first project (read excuse to buy lots of pretty fabric) is a handbag from an Amy Butler Chelsea Tote pattern. The bag will be reversible and hopefully sturdy enough to hold all of mine (or someone else's purse stuffings). Of course this project is already turning out to be harder than I anticipated, with all the layers of stiff lining it's hard to sew accurately along the seams. The reversible nature of the bag meant lots of careful cutting out which Twila kindly supervised. So far I have the outside done,

it's shown inside out The reversible side is waiting in the wings to be assembled:


Since I cleared everything out from the old craft table and brought out the additional table, there is also room for the iron, which comes in handy steaming those seams open.
Hopefully it'll be all done this weekend and then I'll get to show it off and start on something new. And I will be once again allowed to shop for fabric (can't buy anything else until I complete a project!)

Sunshine! Amazing how I was rather down most of the week (the during at work times) since it was overcast and chilly. The sun came out today and I can't stop smiling. Sat outside at lunch and while it was muggy and hot in jeans and long sleeves (quite necessary for the freezing office) I was uplifting ot have to put sunglasses on and have the ice melt in the water before I could guzzle it.

The office has been empty all week, even more so today. As a testament to the number of people here and the number of peple doing actual work: I couldn't open up Matlab, it was giving me a fatal server error. Apparently that particular server cable was unplugged and NOONE would have been able to use the program. I told the IT people around 11, they got to my request about 30 min later. Hmm, that is the piece of software everyone uses in the office, and (according to IT) I'm the only one that notified them.
-amused

I have my grandmother's eyes, sort of. Since she was sixty when I was born and older than that by the time I noticed, hers started to fade. They were this pale blue grey sparkle which I know would have been so beautiful with the dark brown hair of her youth (it was mostly grey by the time we met and no color pictures of her exist with it obviously). I'm sure they were a deeper blue to begin with, but the ones I remember are so much like my own that looking in the mirror for too long always brings it back.

so what is it about vulnerability that brings people closer? Is it really more attractive than strength or am I confusing strength with bitchiness and control in my case? Maybe it's the surprise factor, it's always a surprise how easy it is to give it all up once one shield is down.
I'm resolved to not care right now, so far so good.

Cut off the nails on my left hand. The finger pads are still slighly sore from playing on Sunday. Amazing what muscle memory can do when you turn off the "thinking". The "senorita" is totally out of tune (it's only in tune to itself) and needs to be restrung. I found a surprise unopened package of strings, I may change them out this week, but that requires keeping up with it. I wonder if I have a program that can generate an accurate high C to actually tune it to reality.
Apparently I'm not joking when I say I like Aminor, at least 7/8 if not more pieces were in that key. They do NOT all sound the same and if I manage to get into a kind of trance within the first 3 notes, the fingers do the rest pretty well. The ones with a lot of pencil markings are easier, I wonder if that's because I studied/practiced them more or because it's easier to keep the notes straight with handwritten fingering schemes next to them. Some of the tattered pages had dates of first attempt, most of those were from 95 and 96, has it really been 11+ years?