Everyone should know how to cook.

Because, I mean, food is nice. It's delicious, if you can make it right.  And everyone should learn to make it right.

My mother taught me how to cook, and she taught me how to be resourceful with my supplies.  I can make a delicious meal without a recipe or with a great recipe and half of the ingredients, which is really helpful now that I'm in college.

If you didn't know, the stores in the dorms have a very limited choice of foods, and most of those are microwave meals.  Which are fine, don't get me wrong, but if you can figure out how to make homemade microwave brownies, that's a lot better.

I can't make microwave brownies, but I can make this:

Not really homemade but tasty

And I could manage to make most of it in a microwave.  I like cooking, and I like being resourceful. And I like food. Tasty, tasty food.

I am going to rename my dog.

This one.

His name is Goren.  For now.

I plan on renaming him Snorty BigHead though.  For several good reasons, not just because I'm quite fond of the name (which I am).

When Goren gets particularly perturbed he makes an odd noise with his nose.  You can tell it's a bothered noise, one he makes when something has gone horribly awry.  And for Goren, pretty much everything goes wrong every day.  He's not the most stable dog in the world.  He's afraid of round things and cell phones when they're on vibrate.  It would be hilarious if - no, wait, it IS hilarious!

He was making the weird snorty noise a lot the other day, because we tried to give him a hair cut.  He doesn't like change, aided by the fact that our dog shears are the noisiest contraption second only to a jumbo jet.  It was awesome (Read: horrifying).

Goren became so terrified that we finally had to let him go, halfway through his trim.  Now, normally we get a professional to cut his hair, but we weren't able to make an appointment this time.  With no prior dog-hair-cutting knowledge, Goren ended up looking like a weird Two-Face, except in tiny dog form.

Still-furry side...oh wait, TOTALLY SMOOTH.

And we didn't trim up any of his head, leading to an awkward, Two-Face Chibi Dog of Hilarity.

Now he's all out of proportion and I can't stop making fun of him even though he can't understand me.

Because he is a dog.  You know. Right. Anyway.

Like I said, he doesn't like change, so it might be a while before I can successfully get him to answer to Snorty BigHead, but I have time.  I am nothing if not patient.

I can wait.

The Nigh-Ungodly Heat May Be Causing Hallucinations.

It is hot today.  Very, very hot.

I think the weather man said it was record breaking, this heat.  (REALLY? I HADN'T NOTICED.)

I woke up this morning fully intending to exercise, or at least get some fresh air, but by the time I had gotten dressed and consigned myself to torturous repetitious lunges and push-ups and treadmills it was as hot inside as it was outside.  And but that I mean it was nearly 80 degrees in the house.

It's nearly 90 now.  Inside.  I asked my brother if the Gods of the Chill Wind were angry at us for something.  He collapsed and was unable to speak for the oppressive heat.  I suggested sacrificing a goat (they sell them on Craigslist apparently).

So now I sit in a pool of my own sweat, trying to prevent my dog from sitting on me and giving me heatstroke.  I try to watch television, but without cable my only options are shows about Judges like Judy or Alex or old black-and-white programs.

I tried to read, for a while. I tried to read The Lord of the Rings, but between the heat and Tolkien's very descriptive account of Lothlorien I began to imagine my house sitting in the middle of an Elven forest.  The leaves were gold and flowers bloomed everywhere and it was midwinter and I was actually cool.

Kind of like this.

And then I thought that perhaps I was going crazy.  "No, I can't be going crazy," I said to myself as Bilbo Baggins toasted me with Elrond.

My point is, it's really hot, and I don't know what to do except fill a grocery bag with ice cubes and lay it across my face.

There and Back Again: A Short Girl's Tale, by Leonard.

Yesterday, in a fit of what I can only call madness, I decided to visit our creek. Not that it's actually our creek, not really; it winds its way through at least three different properties besides ours.  

Or, in actuality, I went because I am reading The Lord of the Rings.  But that has little to do with the rest of the post, mainly because the rest of the post is designed to make you jealous of my back yard. Through photographs.

Exercising when you don't want to and not eating all of the Girl Scout Cookies

Since going to college I have lost some weight, but not because I have made any major changes to my diet or lifestyle. There was really only one major thing that caused the weight loss.

I had to walk everywhere. 

My high school is one building, with two floors and maybe a dozen hallways. It is no colossal labyrinth like some people's seem to be.  We had to take PE for one year and that was it, and I was never quite good enough or motivated enough to join an actual sports team.

But college, that is an entirely different monster.  I'm pretty sure IU's campus is larger than my entire town, with a population nearly quadruple the size.  Between just getting to my classes and elbowing through massive throngs of people, I got a full-body workout without having to go to the gym.

I would also say the lack of a good, home-cooked meal also led to a slimmer figure, but my dorm had a convenience store that never ran out of ice cream or cheese cake.  I will say this, though: Nine times out of ten, when I went on a grocery run, I bought hummus instead of cheesecake. I love hummus; one of the first things I checked when I got home was to see whether or not we had any hummus (we have two tubs full-the mother lode).

But now that I AM home, there IS food everywhere-free food, too, and I don't have to walk anywhere to get it.  For the first couple of days back I was basically sedentary, except when I was making myself food.

When I finally came out of my food haze, though, I realized what I was doing, and decided I had to stop. That particular plan has not gone so well, but in light of that I decided I have to start working out.  So far I've ran for three days in a row, which is a pretty good start, I think.  Also, I use the word run loosely. Really, I walk kind of fast, but I count it.


And I made a playlist (not like a brilliant one, but I like it). It's really random but it helps keep me on track. The centerpiece of the whole thing, the crux, is I'll Make a Man out of You from Mulan. When it comes on I run as fast as I can for the whole song (which is only like three minutes long, but cut me some slack. I'm lazy) and hope for the best.


Not the best method, sure, but it's better than anything else I can come up with.

Today is the first day in many weeks that it has been above freezing.  I went out to get lunch in my coat, because I normally get my weather forecast from the janitor and she had said it was going to be in the fifties.

"Hmm..." I said to myself. "Fifties.  Seventies is warm. Eighties is warm.  But what is fifties?" I had actually forgotten what it feels like to be warm.  "Fifties must still be cold then," I say, and so I put on my winter coat and venture outside.

It turns out that 'in the fifties' is actually quite balmy.  I was about a degree away from actually sweating in my coat.

And then I think to myself, "Today would be a great day to go to the creek behind my house! Too cold for snakes to be up and bitey, but warm enough so that my feet won't freeze off in the water! Perhaps my brother will accompany me..."

And then I remember that I am at school, two hours away from home or any creek lonely enough that I could get completely disgusting and no one would see or care.  Sure, there are little stream things on campus, but all right next to pathways, the 'scenic route' if you will.

And then I was sad.

Those black smudges are my dogs, Fuzz and Rosie

 

Also, my brother is Sasquatch.

 

I COULD BE HERE RIGHT NOW. Instead, I am doing HOMEWORK.

Okay, yeah, this IS my thrid post in like an hour.

But I can't stop thinking.  I was digging through my stories, all half finished and really probably not that good, but that's okay.  I was looking specifically for one story, a really short one, but when I found it it was only half finished.  I have it written down somewhere, but I'm roughly three hours away from the hand-written copy, so there's that plan scrapped.  If I find it I'll finish it and probably post it on here, to the enjoyment of no one but me, probably.

I was thinking of things I wanted to cook when I got home.  I'm reading a book called Meat: A Love Story by Susan Bourette, which is basically about a woman who goes to completely ridiculous yes somehow inspired lengths to find the perfect piece of meat and basically cuts down the Big Business approach to 'farming' (cause it really isn't farming, see) in the process.

She kind of talks about these just glorious pieces of steak and pork and polar bear and it makes me really hungry when I read it so I say to myself, "Alright, self, let's go cook some steak!" But then I remember that I'm at IU and I have no steak to begin with.  And on top of that our little 50's kitchen is closed so I couldn't cook if I had a completely normal recipe.  So instead I thought of ways to cook steak at home. And I came up with a rough recipe.  It has no real measurements and the ingredients are constantly in flux as it is.  'Cause that's how my mother taught me to cook.  Much to the chagrin of my father.  He likes a good recipe; she throws things together that kind of look right.  So that's what I've done.

Basically, you marinate your steak (or whatever)
And in a pan (or griddle, I've always wanted to cook steak on a griddle, but for this, probably a pan)  you put your olive oil on and sweat some garlic cloves
Then you put in some onions (If you like onions, can be replaced with peppers, or like basil leaves or all of that or none of it.  Steak is tasty either way) and you cook them a little
And put in your meat of choice and sear it a little, right, and leave it a little juicy in the middle bits if you prefer it that way, like I do
And then you take it, and your now-cooked vegetable things, and serve it with rice or noodles or another piece of meat if that's your thing, bacon perhaps.

Like I said, it's really, REALLY rough.  But the though of a good steak makes me starved.