Monthly Archive:October, 2008

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The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

The Good:

Passing the blowtorch and discovering all the different ways you can brulée a crème for a friend’s birthday dessert (some were brown sugar, some were white).

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In addition to the burnt cream and brownies from F, we feasted on fresh mixed greens for 6 trimmed from our winter garden and 3 different kinds of macaroni & cheese from scratch. Delicious! (I will post the winning recipe at a later date)

The Bad:

This morning, when I got up for my run at 7 AM, it was too dark to leave so I stayed in bed. Grumpy. Then I couldn’t go back to sleep. I hate this time of year. I could never live in Alaska in the winter. Tomorrow, I’ll have to fit it in and go late to work. Plus I have a head cold.

The Ugly:

The stock markets.

Also, discovering black aphids attacking our chard:

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We’ll be spraying or treating soon, we just haven’t figured out with what, exactly. E showed me how the few that made it into the kitchen could be killed very effectively with the blowtorch. Somehow I suspect that will not be a good option for controlling them in the garden. All suggestions for how best to handle these little pests are welcome.

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Snippits

HOUSING: Monday (you know the day the S&P lost almost 9%) we made an offer on a house. They countered the next day, and we found out that a house we really liked sold for way less than it was listed and we were very disappointed that we hadn’t been the ones to successfully low-ball the sellers on that one. So, we let the counter-offer expire and we looked at another house on Wednesday. We haven’t found anything we’re in love with, so we’re still in process…

GARDEN: We’ve finished two boxes of the winter garden, and now I’m just waiting for my shipment to arrive from the Gourmet Garlic Gardens (don’t you love the Internet?) to plant the third box (which, in addition to the garlic, will be full of things to over-winter, including artichokes, red onions, and white onions). The winter garden currently looks like this:

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TRAVEL: After 5 years of flying Delta back and forth between California and Atlanta, we finally *almost* had enough miles to get free flights for Christmas and New Year’s. Round-trip flights were the most expensive they’ve ever been since we started this regular trek — it would have cost $1400 for the flights we wanted. So, instead, we bought $220 worth of miles and paid the $37 per person fee and we’ll be flying to Atlanta on miles. And, we decided to spend most of the Delta miles savings on our New Year’s trip to Savannah, Georgia.

LAWYERING: Work is relatively slow for me for the first time since I started working as a lawyer, really. I’m definitely enjoying it, although, of course, I have a slight fear for the economy and hope that it doesn’t stay too slow, too long.

RUNNING: I dropped a recent race because my sister couldn’t do it with me. We got last-minute invitations to a wedding on the date of my next race, so I’ll be skipping that one too. So, it looks like I’ve got my favorite half marathon as the only remaining race I’ll be doing this year. But, my speed efforts continue to pay off, so I look forward to trying to set a PR at that one before building up distance for 2009’s spring marathon(s).

I think that covers it.

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