Day 84

Today marks 12 weeks since the last meal I ate in my own kitchen – a salad and various other leftovers with SP while the movers emptied the house around us. In honor of this minor milestone, here’s one I made earlier: my last major cooking project before we left Missouri.

 

In the midst of one of our many conversations about food (which we talked about at least as much as music theory or guitar technique), my guitar teacher mentioned the toasted ravioli that he had eaten on a recent trip to St. Louis, and how he wanted to replicate it. He thought, knowing my Italian heritage, that I might be able to assist him in this endeavor. I’d never heard of toasted ravioli (apparently a St. Louis specialty?) until he described it, but I’ve been making batches of ravioli with various gatherings of female relatives for as long as I can remember, so I figured I could at least help him with the raw materials. I offered to be the teacher for a change, and we spent an enjoyable Saturday afternoon in May covering every flat surface in my kitchen with flour. He concocted a filling of spicy sausage and chopped, sautéed mushrooms, and I contributed my grandmother’s cheese filling (it took me a long time to find out that ravioli was ever stuffed with anything else).

Nana's ravioli

If you do this by yourself, it will take a couple of hours from start to finish. I highly recommend doing it as a group project if you've got any like-minded friends or family around; it's much more fun and gets done a lot faster.

Phase 1

I am now officially kitchenless - for the time being, anyway. The packers have been here since this morning, and are in (I hope) the final stages of putting all of our belongings into boxes. They're coming back tomorrow to load everything onto the truck and take it away, and then we'll hope to see it again, in more or less its original form, in Canberra, in 3 months or so - assuming that it clears customs without difficulties (fingers crossed) and that we have found a house to have it delivered to (fingers and toes crossed).

Thus begins Phase 1 of our Great Trek from KC to Canberra....more updates to follow.

Intercontinental (again)

I have been trying to figure out how and when to put up this post for about six months now.

First, because it seemed too soon and too far off from impending events. Then, because I didn’t want to jinx myself in the midst of complex bureaucratic maneuverings. And finally, because I kept hoping some clever way of making the announcement would suggest itself. But I think I have run out of options…and very nearly out of time.

If any of you have been reading this blog since the beginning (or have gone back through the archives), you will know that the life event that first brought it into existence was my move to Australia in September 2008. I wanted to document that once-in-a-lifetime experience as it unfolded.

Or so I thought. Because it turns out that we’re moving back.

(As one of my friends responded when I told him, “Who moves to Australia twice?”

That would be me, apparently.)

It’s been in the pipeline for a long time—there were very preliminary discussions about a more permanent role for DP while we were still living there in 2009—but now nearly all the moving parts have come together, and a few days ago the real estate agent came and put a sign out in front of our house. We’ve got just under a month left here in Missouri before we head back to Canberra. I’m back from my Paris trip, which was my last mental hedge before moving fully into transition mode—gearing up to show the house, get estimates from movers, buy plane tickets, fix firm dates.

It feels real now. And taking up the majority of my conscious brain space. I can’t not blog about it any more. So, to sum up without benefit of catchy narrative devices, my news is as follows:

I’m moving back to Australia at the end of May. I’m excited and terrified. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Wordless Wednesday: Home ownership

How's your week going?

Frugal redecorating

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned on Twitter that I was taking a Friday afternoon off from my usual work and/or cooking projects to focus on repurposing items around my house. Here’s why:

That’s a ‘before’ picture of my front hall. It has looked like that, give or take packing boxes, random piles of stuff, cat toys, and cartons of Girl Scout cookies, since we moved in more than 18 months ago. Not exactly the most welcoming feel for your arriving guests, is it?

Well, I finally got fed up with it. DP had another onslaught of guest lecturers coming in, several of whom were invited for dinner, and I just couldn’t face the thought of opening the front door one more time with that void behind me. Something had to be done.

And lo, my exasperation became my inspiration when, lying awake one night, I worked out how to pull something reasonable together out of various things that I had stashed here and there, waiting to find a permanent location in the home decor.

Here’s what I came up with:

What do you think? I think it looks pretty good. I don’t expect any calls from House Beautiful any time soon, but at least the front hall no longer gives the impression that the house is inhabited by squatters, as one of our more frequent visitors so lovingly expressed it. And the best part is that I spent a grand total of $20.00 - for the lamp base. Everything else you see was stuff that I either already had, or that SP contributed from her renovation stash (namely the Ikea embroidered lamp shade) to fill a gap. SP also contributed an afternoon of elbow grease, after I called her in a tizzy when I couldn’t find the hardware to assemble that piece of furniture: she came over with her professional drill and put it together using hardware from her collection and sheer force of will.

So overall, I feel pretty happy and thrifty. I think I’m going to keep fiddling with the details, though. Suggestions from people who are more designer-y than me are most welcome.

Wordless Wednesday

RL kitchen, midway through a jam-making session, January 2012. And I thought I was a neat cook....

Wordless Wednesday: Happy New Year!

Hope 2012 finds us all in our happy place!

Holiday perfectionism

Last night I went with a group of friends to our town’s annual Candlelight Homes Tour, wherein you hand over a chunk of cash in exchange for license to snoop through other people’s festively decorated magazine-layout homes. Today I started the process of decorating our own house for Christmas—possibly not the best conjunction of events for a would-be perfectionist.

I say would-be because I don’t think I actually am a perfectionist: when push comes to shove, I’m too slapdash and impatient to be as painstaking as true perfectionism requires. Whether it’s an ingrained characteristic or a logical outgrowth of permanently having too much to do, I don’t know. I just know that I constantly tell myself, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”—and then periodically, when would-be perfectionism gets the better of me, berate myself for the good not being good enough.

This time of year is particularly bad for that, I find. As I mentioned earlier in the week, nearly everyone else on my street had their houses fully decorated by the end of Thanksgiving weekend; I, on the other hand, finally managed to remove the pumpkins from the front steps 3 days ago. Which shouldn’t really be a big deal, you know? It was still November, after all. The problem is that I care. I like the way other people’s lavishly decorated houses look. I’m even secretly thrilled by those completely tacky, over-the-top houses where the whole front yard is full of lit-up stuff, but I swoon for the really elegant presentation. I even think I could achieve it, if I was willing to spend enough time and money. But when it gets down to it, I’m usually not in a position to do either in the quantities that seem necessary.

So sometimes the gap between the two—what I’d like to do for the holidays and what I actually feel able to do—makes me a little cranky. And that’s really missing the point of what it’s all supposed to be about. Lucky for me, I have Miss B around to help me regain my perspective. After a fairly frustrating hour or two today spent wrestling with garlands and light strings and decoration-destroying kittens, I sat down for a few minutes to make the one thing she had asked for: a big red bow for her bedroom door. It took me seven minutes, tops, including refashioning a paper clip into a hanger to hook it over the doorknob. But her joy in seeing it there (imperfections and all), bubbling over into asking if we could make them for all the doors, was infectious, and suddenly it didn’t feel like a who’s-got-the-best-looking-house contest anymore. Suddenly it was back to being what it should be: a heartfelt expression of joy, goodwill, and festive spirit.

My goal this year is to keep it that way.

Ten things

Things I did today:

1. Wrangled a skittish cat through a Pet Day presentation to 50 first graders.

2. Bought 5 bags of cranberries and 10 pounds of apples.

3. Made the first public announcement (of several) that I am resigning from a project that has been part of my working life for nearly 10 years.

4. Improvised math-homework manipulatives out of colored paper clips.

5. Wore my winter coat for the first time.

6. Discovered an authentic small town nearby, hidden behind a barrier of strip-mall nowheresville.

7. Ate some truly delicious homemade Mexican food.

8. Managed to get to a KC bloggers' meetup for the first time in 6 months.

9. Used the word "pedestrian" in a sentence.

10. Kept on schedule for #NaBloPoMo with minutes to spare.

How 'bout you?

Prairie weekend

I had a prairie kind of weekend: I went to visit Rocky Ridge Farm, where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived for more than 60 years and wrote the "Little House" books:

got up close and personal with some bison at Prairie State Park:

and rounded off my 19th-century field trip with a visit to the now-defunct US Army Fort Scott:

Oh, and I also went to a "dessert lounge" for the first time ever. Kind of the antithesis of a prairie experience:

Is this a thing now? It would be nice to know just how out of the loop I'm getting while I'm off examining calico sunbonnets and such.

What adventures did you have this weekend?

Applefest weekend

Autumn is festival season here in the lower Midwest; everyone comes out of summer hibernation, turns off the central air conditioning, and enjoys spending some time outside. Winter and summer are harsh and extreme, and spring is fickle and unreliable (you never know when a thunderstorm might brew up and send forth a twister), but autumn is placid, sunny, and beautiful. You could probably hit a different festival every weekend in September and October without going too far from home; our town’s big one is the annual Apple Festival, which was last weekend.

I really don’t like the summer hibernation, and autumn is my favorite season anyway, so I get a little hoopy when it starts to cool off. I certainly have this year, probably because this summer was even more intolerable than last summer. Or maybe it just seemed that way because this year I had patio furniture which I couldn’t use without getting a) melted or b) devoured by mosquitoes.
In any case, when last weekend rolled around I suddenly realized that I had invited a rather large number of people to a) park on our street, b) wander downtown with us to Applefest, or c) eat a meal at our house in conjunction with said wandering. In many cases, all of the above. And as the weekend shaped up to be bright, sunny, and mild, it became apparent that all of them were going to take me up on it.

Wordless Wednesday

Snowmageddon, MO edition, February 2011

Red tape

Speaking of needless complication….

I think I have neglected to point out that, in buying a house, we are also not in Kansas anymore, but have moved across the Big Muddy to Missouri. Although keenly observant readers may have noticed that the blog subheader has recently changed to reflect this. (It was really just to stop the Wizard of Oz jokes. The house was gravy.)