Big Meat

Before I got married I never cooked much with large cuts of meat. Mostly I cooked chicken breasts, either whole or in pieces. Occasionally I'd throw a whole chicken into a crock pot and let it cook all day, and once I made a roast chicken, but mostly it was smaller stuff. After all, I'd have to eat everything I cooked by myself. I couldn't make too much.

Now, however, I can make things that are a little bigger. This evening while Mike's out with his friend Jim I'm sitting at home making a pot roast.

I'm actually pretty excited, which makes me feel exceedingly lame. But the lame-excited combo isn't so bad. I'm using my grandmother's recipe which is extremely delicious. But I'm also eager to start working with big meat. For years I watched my mother work with chickens, chops, and roasts, and I saw my grandmothers and aunts work with hams and turkeys on holidays. Working with the same meats and same recpies they used makes me feel connected with them. Now I know what it feels like to be tied to the kitchen for four hours while my beef is roasting. I know how it feels to spend the afternoon on a new recipe and have my husband peer at it suspiciously. I know how it feels look down into that pot and feel like you've accomplished something.

I guess it's partially because we don't have many traditions in my family, but damn, we have our food. The recipes for my grandma's scones, my mom's potato soup, and my great-grandmother's oatmeal cookies are the things we pass down.

I hope my pot roast turns out. I've been working hard!

Apartment venting

I'm not sure if I've written very much about my apartment. We actually live in the first floor of an old house, so it's kind of like a flat. Our rent is really cheap because Mike had an agreement with the landlord that he'd fix the place up. The last tenant trashed it...he painted weird tripped-out graffiti on the walls, gouged the linoleum in the kitchen, and let his cat use the entire bedroom as a litter box.

Mike was able to clean up and paint over most of it, but not all of it. There are paint stains on our kitchen floor that are there for life, graffiti on our metal cabinets that we can't seem to cover, and the kitchen walls bear an extremely uneven coat of orange paint. Mike's parents painted it, but didn't do the best job. They also didn't paint too closely around the stove or fridge, so you can see a halo of the original black paint around all of our appliances.

There are also things wrong with the place that had nothing to do with the last tenant and have everything to do with our landlord. He bought two adjacent lots in hopes that he could tear down the houses and build a condo, but then he found out that you can't combine lots in that part of Milwaukee. So he's been renting out the houses and letting them crumble ever since. There's a shattered window in the upstairs apartment that will never be repaired. The basement is damp and growing some sort of evil black mold which I think comes up through the furnace ducts and aggravates my allergies, and the washer and dryer in the basement broke long ago. There's a good-sized piece of siding on the outside of the house that's just hanging from one nail. All of the paint on the house is peeling. Last summer I was ready to confront my fear of ladders and offer to repaint the house in exchange for a month or two of rent, but then I found out that all the paint on the outside of the house is lead paint, so I wouldn't be able to get it off without fancy ventilators or something.

And finally, there are quirks that are unique to our building. We have very few outlets...it's not like modern apartments that have them every ten feet. We barely have any. The door to our bathroom has been missing as long as Mike has lived there. We currently just have a curtain hung over the doorway. Only about a third of the windows have screens so we can't open them up in the summertime. And now there's the power issue.

We have an upstairs neighbor who owed the electric company over a thousand dollars, so they finally shut off his power. Unfortunately because of the way the place is wired, one of our kitchen outlets is on his circuit, so when they cut the power to his place they also cut the power to our outlet.

Now, we only had two usable outlets in the kitchen to begin with, and this outlet that got turned off was an important one. Because of the way our kitchen is configured it was the only possible place I could plug in the mixer, microwave, toaster oven, pizza oven, and Foreman grill. I had a power strip. Unfortunately I could only run one appliance at a time because otherwise it would blow a fuse, but at least they were all functional. Not any more. Now we run an extension cord from the kitchen to the living room and plug it in there. It makes the place look even more craptastic.

People tell me that I should move, but what apartment would allow five cats? And what house could we rent when Mike's medicine costs $300 a month and his insurance still hasn't kicked in? Other people tell me that I should make the landlord repair everything, but when the dude can barely cash our rent checks in the same month they're written, I don't think that he'd bring himself to actually come out and repair something.

Man. I know things could be a bunch worse. But they could be so much better too.

Committee

The school year is winding down. We only have sixteen days left. I'm eager for summer to get here but, as always, I have no idea how I'm going to finish my mountain of paperwork. In my district they give all the therapists - speech therapists, occupational therapists, social workers, everyone - the last two weeks of school off from therapy. So I won't be seeing any kids, I'll just be tying up my loose ends. Unfortunately since everyone knows we have those last two weeks free, they assume that we have time to do extra stuff for them. So far during those two weeks I have an evaluation, three meetings to discuss students, two days devoted to district training, another day devoted to a department committee meeting, and a mandatory department picnic. I might have to come in on the weekend just to get everything finished up.

The department committee meeting will be interesting. Every year the head of the Speech department lets us sign up for end of the year committees, and during those last two weeks of school we meet to complete some task - filing, check in materials, revising forms, things like that. I signed up for the time management committee, which will meet to discuss how we should divide up our time next year. I chose this committee for two reasons. Number one, I'd like to have a say in how I'll spend my days. And number two, it'll be all talk with no expectation that we'll complete any task. Sounds good to me.

Yesterday I got an email from the lead therapist of the department, saying that she wanted me to be the chairperson of my committee. It's not a big deal - all you do is organize your committee's meeting and then make sure you report the results back to the lead therapist - but hey, it's not every day that you're named chairperson of something. I was puzzled, and at first I thought it was because out of everyone on the committee I had the first name in alphabetical order. But then I noticed that someone else had a name that came before mine. Then I figured it had just been a random choice, or I had possibly been the first person to sign up for that committee.

As the afternoon progressed, though, I became increasingly paranoid. What if she picked me because she knew it would be extra work, and she didn't like me? What if she felt like watching me screw something up? What if she had asked everyone else to do it, and they'd all refused?

At no point in the afternoon did I think that maybe she had picked me intentionally because she thought I'd be good at organizing everything.

Isn't self-esteem lovely?

To everyone in Milwaukee....

...Mike's trying to get everyone to see Chuck Palahniuk. He's speaking at Alverno College tomorrow. The cost is $32 a ticket, but the cost includes a copy of his book, which you can get signed! I've heard he's pretty awesome, so if you have a chance, go check it out.