52 Changes - You Can Take it With You

Here's a fun little confession: even I don't get the pun in this week's title.  Apparently there is a play called You Can't Take it With You, which was followed by a film version in the 1930s, neither of which I have ever seen.  In fact, the only reason I've even heard of this play is that it is performed by a character in a book I've read.  And no, this wasn't some grand work of literature - it's a teen horror book called Chain Letter that we used to have.  It's basically another incarnation of the whole I Know What You Did Last Summer genre, but we had a random copy of it floating around the house, and I used to read it periodically when  I had nothing to do.  So there you go.  This all has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm writing about today, but you never can tell what you'll get with this blog.

With that out of the way, what I obviously intend to write about today is my car.  Yeah, didn't see that coming, did you?  Well, much like the entire condo, and my desk at work, and pretty much any other place I've spent any amount of time at lately, the inside of my car has become a cluttered mess.  We take camping trips in my car, do most of the errands around town in my car, and probably the biggest offender: when we travel home we do so in my car.  And any car trip pretty much necessitates some snacks and beverages.  Oddly enough, we never seem to remember those when we leave home, but by time we hit the Iowa 80 truck stop, it's time to grab some munchies.  Sometimes literally.

So we start with just a car full of packed belongings and a few foil wrappers and some pop bottles, then spend the weekend at home, during which time any trash can just be tossed in the car.  The dangerous thought in play here is that if we've already got trash in the car, we can just add to it and we'll get it all when we clean things up post-trip.  But that cleaning session rarely if ever seems to happen.  After a long weekend away, cleaning up the car is hardly the first thing we want to do when we return.  So it gets pushed back a day, then another day, and finally ignored until the car is a mess.

This was the case until a few weeks ago when my left front wheel started making horrible squealing noises any time the car was in motion.  It was pretty apparent I needed to take the car in, so I just scooped up everything in the car and dumped it into a bin in the garage.  The guys at the garage fixed my brakes for the minor sum of $880 (#!$*!%) and were kind enough to throw in a vacuum of the inside.  I got in, was able to drive without traumatizing all the dogs in a five mile radius, and thought that my car actually looked pretty nice now that it was clean.  No more need to wait for others to offer to drive to lunch.  No more petrified tangerines bouncing around the passenger foot area for months (sadly that did happen).  It was great, and I wanted to keep it that way.

Realistically, there's no way to ensure that junk doesn't find its way to my car.  That's just silly wishful thinking.  So the key is to address the junk when it happens.  The plan - to always take a thing or two that doesn't belong out of the car when I get home.  In time, assuming I don't add to the mess at a greater rate than I remove, the car should get clean and on the average stay there.  And if there's a day where I don't see anything to pull out of the car, as there actually have been so far, I can pull from the bin in the garage.  So far I haven't been missing anything important, so in all likelihood I could just toss the whole thing, but I can whittle it away gradually, just like with the car.

I like this one, because it's not a major change.  Forcing myself to do dishes every other day or so (last week's entry) is hard, because it's not something I usually do.  But going inside from the car is something I already do; I just need to slightly modify the routine to grab a piece of trash before I go.  Simple, and making progress.  It'll be like being the boy scout I never was as a kid: leave the car in better condition than I found it.  And with a clean car, I'll be better able to focus on driving, so I won't run someone over and thus won't get threatening chain letters forcing me to do horrible things as some sort of mysterious punishment.  Ha!  Tied it all back together.  :)

52 Changes - Everything that goes with it!

If you’re like me (i.e. you have a soul), you love Disney movies.  Particularly the string of them that had good stories, great songs you just love to sing along with, and classic beautiful animation.  I’m talking to you, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King, Pocahontas and Mulan.  And even though you’re not Disney, much much love for Anastasia.  But the undisputed greatness of these movies isn’t the point of today’s post, though I have no doubt I could talk about that for a long time.

No, today I was inspired by a scene from Aladdin, which isn’t even my favorite of those listed above, and which I haven’t seen in ages anyway.  Near the end of the film (Spoiler alert!  As if you haven’t seen Aladdin before…), Jafar uses his final wish to become a genie, matching the power of the loveable blue genie but without the corny jokes.  As he lets loose his evil laugh, Jafar is suddenly reminded by Aladdin of something.

“Not so fast, Jafar!  Aren’t you forgetting something?  You wanna be a genie, you got it!  And everything that goes with it!”

Jafar is sucked into the lamp, subject to the rules of genie-dom that he only be allowed out to grant wishes for others.  Hooray!  Aladdin and Jasmine marry, Jafar is cast away somewhere and all ends happily.  Now, what, you might think, does this have to do with anything?

Well, for quite some time, I’ve been acting like Jafar in the last moments before he’s sucked into the lamp.  I want to cook, I like doing that, just as Jafar likes, umm… zapping things with his fingertips?  I don’t remember exactly.  But anyway, I didn’t want to do the everything that goes with it, namely, the damn dishes.

To be honest, I kinda hate doing dishes.  I think everyone does, unless they’re deluding themselves.  I always procrastinated and tried to weasel my way out of it at home, waiting until the moment that I absolutely had to do it, and then only grudgingly.  Well, once I was living in my own place, you can imagine how eager I was to wash dishes promptly.  So things started to pile up.  Couple that with the tiny kitchen we had in Ames, and the not-so-much-bigger one we now have in West Des Moines, and you have a case of magically vanishing counterspace.  (Side note, next time we buy a house, item 1 on my list is size of the kitchen.  Why I keep liking places with tiny kitchens is seriously beyond me).

So you get things (dirty dishes, used kitchen appliances, cutting boards, pots and pans, etc.) piling up on the already cramped counters, and it becomes a real challenge to cook dinner the next day.  We’ve become fairly adept at preparing food in very limited quarters, which I guess would be good if we move to a submarine or something, but it’s really not ideal.  Sometimes it’s sufficiently frustrating that we just decide to order a pizza or go out, but on other occasions it just makes the cooking experience less fun, which is a real bummer.

The solution, as much as I don’t like it, is to force myself to wash dishes.  Duh, right?  Well, I haven’t been doing it, and it does need to get done, regularly.  Therefore, this week’s change is to create a rotation of kitchen chores that need to be completed every other day.  Right now the rotation is hand dishes one day, dishwasher the next, and (just to space things out since they don’t accumulate that quickly) do laundry the third day.  Repeat twice a week, one day off for the expected random day where we’re just to lazy/busy to get any one of these done, and we’ve got ourselves a goal.

Hopefully this will lead to a cleaner kitchen overall, which not only makes cooking more fun, but is also better for food safety, now that I think about it.  If I come up with another kitchen task to throw into the mix, we can boot laundry to a separate timetable, but for now I think this will work.

Three weeks in, zero snoozes, most days featuring some relaxation/decompressing after work, and we’ve meal planned for the upcoming week as well.  So far, so good!

Off in Mulsannes...

My interests are usually pretty cooperative with me regularly posting on this blog.  I like to cook, so it makes sense to write about what I’ve been cooking lately.  Gardening, camping, going to baseball games, hanging out with my family: all also things that allow for regularly posting thoughts and updates.  But what about this interest?

And what if that interest was screaming around the Circuit de la Sarthe for 24 hours straight?  Well, that would probably mean that the 24 hours of Le Mans race was going on (this past weekend), that there was a new big chunk of space being used in my DVR (still) and that no one better tell me who won the race until I get caught up, darnit!  In the meantime, things have been going on, I have lots of things I’d like to blog about, but there are still 5 and a half hours left in the race, so my free time is booked for the next little while.

I have a change for this week that’s already commenced, but I’ll be back later to write about that.  And food.  And gardening.  And sheepdogs.  And, if I can justify writing something 3 weeks late, Memorial Day weekend.  For now, I’ll just leave you with that super-cool picture of totally awesome race cars.  Which is probably at least as good as my writing anyway.  ;)

52 Changes - Cooking up a Plan

You know how I knew that I needed to start making some changes recently?

Picture this:  I come home after a long work day, lounge around and wait ‘til Stacia gets home, at which time one of us says “what should we do for dinner?”  Then we open the doors to the fridge, then the freezer, then the cupboards, and though there’s food in all of them, there’s nothing you could make a meal out of.  I’d usually feebly suggest that we run to the store to pick up some staples, but more often than not, we’d end up going out to eat.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I started to think...

“For a guy who says his favorite thing is cooking, you aren’t really putting in the effort to actually do it.”

I needed to get myself back on track, and it was clear that the meal plan was the key.  We’ve meal planned at home for years now, but with all the diversions and distractions, I’d kind of let it slide.  We were able to get by with going out, scavenging at home or picking up ingredients day-of.  But with the Farmer’s Market now in season, it’s especially imperative that we plan, since I really don’t want to have to stop at Hy-Vee for fresh ingredients that we forgot to pick up.  Simply put, this week’s change is to make a meal plan every week.

Now, the very phrase “meal plan” may sound unpleasant, hearkening back to school days where the meal plan defined the one or two options you had for what to eat that particular day.  Either you ate what was offered, or you went hungry.  Outside the limitations of school, that could never work.  If I come home to a meal plan that says we’re having Chop Suey, for example, and I just don’t feel like “Chinese” food that night, I’ll just say F-it and we’ll go out for burgers or pizza.  There needs to be some flexibility built in.

Not everyone who plan meals ahead of time does it the same way, but the following is the way that works for us:  One dinner each with fish, vegetarian and white meat as the base.  One meal every other week of red meat, on off weeks fill with another category.  One meal of leftovers or something quick and easy, like frozen chicken nuggets, etc.  There’s one dining out option per week.  And one “wild card” which is usually a homemade option, but leftovers are common and dining out does sneak in there sometimes.  I also want to try to implement one big breakfast per week, since virtually every other day begins with cereal.

Starting with those categories, I’ll find recipes or come up with ideas to fit them.  Here’s this week’s plan:

Fish – Olive oil poached salmon with Indian spices, wilted spinach and rice on the side

Veg – Homemade Caesar salads with Romaine lettuce from the garden and other veg from the store

Wht – Turkey breast roulade with homemade stuffing and canned cranberry sauce

Red – Seared goat chops (yes, goat!) with garlic scape mashed potatoes

Wild Card – BLT’s with Van de Rose farms bacon, local tomatoes and garden lettuce

Bfst – Peach and yogurt parfaits with granola on top

There was also plenty of leftover lentil soup from last week to fill some spots, and we haven’t gone out yet, so I don’t know where that will be.

To an outsider, this may sound very structured, and maybe it is, but the key to me is not assigning days of the week to the various meals.  I can come home from work, choose between up to 7 different options, and have all the ingredients right there to make any one of them.  Granted, towards the end of the week your options become more limited, but in general we make food that we like, so there aren’t that many cases where we flat out don’t feel like anything on the plan.

And it’s not a big deal if the plan runs over, either.  There are lots of occasions where more than one of the planned meals ends up providing us with lots of leftovers.  We can take those for lunches instead of our usual sandwiches, or just make another dinner out of them, pushing one of the planned meals back a bit.  The plan doesn’t so much lock us into certain meals as it just ensures that the ingredients are there to be able to make something if we want to.  Ideally we’d follow the plan exactly, but I know that will virtually never happen.  Much like vacation planning, the best way for me is to make a perfect plan and then assume that things will come up to change it.

I don’t suppose I’ll post meal plans on here, since that would get pretty dull, but I’m thinking I might start using my newfound Twitter account to update the meals as they happen.  The more interesting ones will warrant Kitchen Zink posts, but maybe I’ll do a quick tweet for them all.  Or maybe not.  The important thing is that we’re meal planning again, and that means less time sticking my head in vain into an empty fridge.  And that’s better for everybody.

52 Changes - Ten Good Minutes

If your home is at all like mine (and let’s face it, it’s not, unless you also live with a psychotic cat and her aloof sister ;), the time when you first come home from work is hardly your most productive.  Work is exhausting, and what I usually want most is to put it far from my mind once I’m at home.  So, generally speaking, I’ll walk in the door, toss the mail on the table, turn the TV on, and veg out on the couch with either rerun-daytime television or mindless video games until Stacia gets home.  Which can be fine, but it’s not exactly in line with my plan to get better at achieving some goals.

That said, it’s still a fact that when I come home from work, I’m pretty wiped out and don’t want to launch immediately into cooking or cleaning.  I still need some relax time.  So what I’m asking myself to do is give myself “Ten Good Minutes” when I come home, and then I can do whatever I want.  For those who watch Pardon the Interruption, I did steal that title as a take-off of their “Five Good Minutes” segment where the guys interview whichever sports star happens to be of interest that particular day.  And coincidentally, things like PTI are exactly the kind of shows I don’t really care much about, but find myself watching after work.  :)

Obviously my goal is not to interview sports stars.  That might be neat if you’re way into sports, but I only follow a few niche ones, and besides I can never think of intriguing questions to ask people.  (note: maybe a future topic for something to work on).  My Ten Good Minutes is instead focused on small achievements and on spending a little time for myself.  My plan is to sort each day’s mail immediately and then actually decompress from work.

The mail thing isn’t too interesting, but I figured it wasn’t worthy of its own topic so I threw it in.  As I mentioned last week, things have been piling up at home since I’ve been particularly lazy, and mail is one of the primary contributors.  Almost all of our mail is junk, but when you don’t feel like sorting it and throw it on the table daily, a handful of junk mail becomes a giant stack of mail that needs to be sorted.  And usually there’s a bill that sneaks through, somewhere in the stack.  We’ve yet to be legitimately late, but we’ve been close a time or two.  So, part one is to spend five minutes or so sorting the mail and getting it thrown out or filed away.  Exciting!

The second five minutes is more for me than the household.  My work life consists of sitting in the same chair at the same desk staring at the same screen for eight hours straight.  The work can be interesting, but it also can be frustrating, and the combination leaves me a little bit stressed, physically and mentally.  Flopping right onto the couch, I’m still in the work mindset, then there’s the dinner rush, then more TV or reading or out-and-aboutness, and I never really reset from work until it’s time for bed.  I’m not about to have a panic attack or anything, but this may be a contributing factor to my recent lethargy.  What I want is a clean break from work before I can become home-Greg.

To start with, I’m going to spend 5 minutes daily on simple mindful breathing.  Relaxing, taking deep breaths, focusing on the breath, keeping my mind free but not actively focusing on anything.  After five minutes, if it’s time to make dinner, I can work on that, hopefully re-energized rather than still carrying work stress.  If I learn enough, this might one day evolve into real meditation, but even if I just keep doing my meditation-lite, it’s still a good way to decompress from the workday.  Overall, it’s just ten minutes, but together they should contribute to decluttering the house, and decluttering my mind.

I’ll be honest – though this is this week’s change, it hasn’t gone perfectly.  The mail thing I’ve done, and as such there’s no mail lying around on the kitchen table.  The “meditation” has been a bit harder.  I’ve done it every day so far, but I haven’t made it right after work consistently.  It’s really easy to jump right into doing something when I get home.  But it’s only a five minute delay to just settle down and (literally) take a deep breath, so I’ll try to focus on actually doing that.

This one’s a bit harder to gauge whether it’s really worthwhile or not.  I plan to give it a try consistently and see if I enjoy it.  If not, it’s not a failure to decide I don’t need to do that behavior anymore.  Not snoozing is a no-brainer, but pseudo-meditating is something I’ll have to try to find out.  And incidentally, we haven’t hit the snooze this week either.  So far, so good.  Oh, and next week’s change is more in-line with the big goals, so that should be fun.

May Filmfest

As you may have seen in the last entry, I got through an incredible 8 movies this month!  To save room here, I’ll stop yakking and get to the reviews.  As usual, from least favorite to most.

8) The Jazz Singer (1927) – I was supposed to watch this one last month, but couldn’t get the DVD until now.  Although it was a pretty decent movie, I don’t think I was missing out too much.  This film is basically well-renowned as the first talking movie, which was a major technical achievement, but the story is just so-so.  The protagonist sets off on his own to be a “jazz singer,” upsetting his conservative cantor father.  It all unfolds in a pretty predictable manner, up to a decently satisfying ending.  And the talking parts are actually fairly few, so this is mostly a silent movie.  Hypocritical as it may seem for a devotee of old film, I just can’t get into the silent ones, so this one didn’t excite me.

7) Frankenstein (1931) – The classic in the monster-movie genre.  I’ve seen it before, so I knew all the great scenes: bringing the monster to life, the run-in with the girl at the lake, and the ending at the windmill.  Good scenes, all, but the overall movie was a bit choppy for my liking.  My major complaint, though, was the well-known scene with the “criminal brain” they steal for the monster.  Unbeknownst to many, this was not in the original novel, and it takes out a lot of the interesting ambiguity of the inherent good or evil of the monster.  The movie was campy fun, but that just bugged me.

6) Platoon (1986) – Ranking this low just goes to show that this was a pretty good month, movie-wise.  I actually liked Platoon, despite my aversion to war movies in general.  In it we follow a group of green new recruits, including a young Charlie Sheen, heading into Vietnam in the middle of the war.  As time progresses, the viewer sees the awfulness of  it all along with the soldiers, as they gradually become either hardened, broken down, and/or morally bankrupt with the horrors they’ve had to endure.  By the end, you are left with a feeling of how pointless it all was, epitomized by Sheen’s reaction in the final scene.  I still don’t like war movies, but it’s pretty worthwhile to see films like these to fully understand what the consequences are.

5) Titanic (1997) – It’s kind of odd, given how many times I’ve seen this movie, that I still can’t decide whether I like it or not.  Trying to be cool in high school when the movie came out, I developed a jaded attitude toward it that I’m slowly overcoming as I see that it is a good movie.  Aside from all the Leo-hype at the time, and the focus on the effects (which are incredible), it’s a good story with characters you care about, and what ends up being a truly sad outcome.  It really is less a movie about a boat sinking than it is a movie about people that happens to be set on a boat that sinks.  I did think the cutaways to modern times weren’t necessary, but I accept them as a part of an overall good movie.

4) Fargo (1996) – Oh my gosh, this was so weird.  I wasn’t sure if I should expect a crime drama, a wacky comedy, a bizarre indie film, or what, and I ended up with all of them rolled into one unique movie.  Ostensibly about a man who has his wife kidnapped to cash in on the ransom money, this ends up being a twisted story with a hodgepodge group of odd characters.  And the humor is mixed in so artfully that you can find yourself laughing at even some of the most gory parts.  Finally, of course, there are the Minnesota accents and mannerisms that this movie is known for.  Though they’re nothing noteworthy on their own, seeing the way “Minnesota nice” responds to this series of crimes if kind of hilarious.

3) Duck Soup (1933) and 2) A Night at the Opera (1935) – To save some space, here are the two Marx Brothers movies from the month of May.  Not sure how they ended up scheduled in the same month, but it made for a zany, hilarious comedy marathon.  If you’ve never seen a Marx Brothers movie, watch one or both of these, or pretty much any other one that exists.  These are some of the funnies movies ever made, with a perfect combination of physical comedy and the snappiest dialogue you’ve ever heard.  Groucho’s back-and-forth with either Chico or Margaret Dumont are reason enough to get hooked, and as a bonus you get the stateroom scene in Night at the Opera, the mirror scene in Duck Soup, and so many more.  Some of the music scenes get a bit tedious, but you can just fast-forward through them to get to more comedy gold.  Probably my favorite funny movies of all time.

1) 12 Angry Men (1957) – If you haven’t seen this one, make a point to do so.  You could describe this movie as a courtroom drama, but interestingly enough, only one short scene takes place in the courtroom.  The entire rest of the film takes place in the small, hot, tempestuous jury room.  The jury have already heard all the testimony at the beginning of the film, and are headed in to deliberate a murder case.  All of the jurors have their own biases or predispositions, and at first all but one of them are convinced the case is straightforward and obvious.  Once they begin discussing the case, though, we see the prejudices the jurors carry, and how that effects their reasoning.  It’s a really brilliant examination of the way people interact with one another.  And as tempers begin to rise, you find yourself feeling drawn in, with serious opinions of your own.  Also, it’s great to see a movie where one man’s convictions can make people rethink what they think they know.  This is a top 3 film of the ones I’ve seen so far.

At this rate, I have no idea how many movies I’ll see next month, but it should be at least these 5 (Mutiny on the Bounty was pushed back to July due to availability):

Giant (1956)

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

Modern Times (1936)

Spartacus (1960)

The Wild Bunch (1969)