Constant Craving

Ok, so I owe you all an explanation. I've been blogging a lot less than I used to. And I don't post pictures of my meals with recipes anymore. And I don't do any baking to speak of. I haven't had the time or the energy. I've had bouts of really sad times balanced by good but busy and productive times. I'm working on posting more. I'm working on lots of things.

I am super proud of myself for my most recent accomplishment. My dissertation is in the hands of a good editor, and I'm turning it in in a couple of weeks for printing. But it's done. No extra work needed. That, in an of itself is a big effing deal. I get that. I do.

And I got to go home! I missed it much more than I realized. It was nice to see my family and friends, and even nicer to have something to celebrate while I was there. Seeing my friends and the old hood was pretty cool too.

While I don't want this blog to be a "pity me" blog, it bears mentioning that the day after I got back,  instead of ushering in a few weeks of rest and relaxation, my job situation really tanked.

Remember how I work at Wolfram & Hart, the evil law firm? And remember how they had me doing horrible foreclosure hotline stuff, where I'd have to talk to people who were losing their homes and tell them that they had to pay huge sums of money within a week or their house will be sold? Well that stuff sucked and was shitty. Also apparently a lot of it wasn't too legal. My firm is being sued in a class action lawsuit (along with our clients, big giant banks). This has resulted in a massive amount of layoffs.

My friends at work started to disappear. The week I got back, they started laying off people in batches of 15. Then they slowed down. Then I got transferred again. This time, to a department that handles out-of-state cases. Then they started laying off people again. Important people. People needed to get things done. People who have worked there for 15 years. People who were in the middle of celebrating their birthday. Yeah, that's right, one guy got fired ON his birthday. It hasn't been a month since I went out to LA for my defense and yet a huge amount of people at my firm are gone and each day has been incredibly stressful. Every time the phone rings, we jump because it might be HR asking for a private meeting. Even some of the demon lawyers are gone! Demon on demon crime, you guys! It's a crap shoot each day that I'll have a job. Which means an apartment and medical insurance and CABLE TV.

Anyway, I have been a stress ball each day all day! If I don't have a job, we're screwed. M. hasn't found decent employment, we've got a dwindling savings, and none of my teaching applications have yielded much in the way of even one adjunct class. I can't even get any kind of academic adjacent job.


I've tried to love Philly. I love parts of it a lot. But a year should be enough time to get a spot teaching one class as an adjunct with a PhD. And if M. can't get a decent job after applying for over 300 positions (ranging from full time benefited to hourly retail), then I think we have to reassess our long term plans. The major reason we came was to have a better financial future.

We're thinking of moving back to Long Beach. We've done some soul searching about it. M wanted to move back 6 months ago, but I thought we owed it to ourselves to give it one year. Now that the dissertation is done, I feel like I can finally think clearly about what I need and what I love to do.

Until I finished, I felt like it would take forever. I felt like I'd never be done. I was running in place for a long time. Doing whatever I could to avoid the work that needed to get done.  And now that the work is done and I'm actually proud of it, I feel like a million bucks. And Wolfram & Hart is destroying this million bucks feeling. They are tearing into tiny tiny pieces and crushing each piece.

I've got a very possible job situation happening in January 2012. A good one. One with possibilities for the future. One that would make it very easy to move back to Long Beach. I think it's happening. And I think I'm happy at the prospect. Some people would look at this Philly thing as a failed experiment. But I look at it as my last chance to do a big crazy move, to experience totally new things, to understand myself better.

I want to not be stressed out all the time. It's really messing with my mind and my body. And I want my husband to be happy. And this war of ovarian aggression will one day end. I want to be on the winning side of that one. Sigh. I've given up on the need to be a homeowner. I've looked at enough awful mortgages and ruined lives at Wolfram & Hart to never ever sign a mortgage. Not until I've got real stability and a hefty savings. And I've started to be OK with that. I can have a rental house someday. And I can take good care of it like it was my own until things get better.

So this was an apology (for being gone), an explanation (for why I've been gone), and an indication of what's coming.

Wish me some luck already, damn!

Fall Bounty

Are you ready for fall? Maybe it's already hit you where you are, but it doesn't get here until late November if at all. Sometimes we just skip it and go straight to winter. Southern California winter is boring. It's just chilly and things turn brown. No cool fall colors unless you live in Claremont or one of those places where they've carefully grown some colorful trees. Halloween is usually warm. Actually, it's always too warm on Halloween. I can't remember ever needing a jacket when I was little and we'd go trick-or-treating. That's kind of good, costume-wise, but these days I hate sweating in my costume. It's annoying. It could be worse, of course, and believe me I'm not bummed out on our temperate climate, it's why people move here, but as a creature of the night who refuses to wear shorts....I like cooler temperatures and I love fall.

Starbucks already has its pumpkin latte on the menu. A way too cheerful barista indicated to me that I should try one. Sadly, I had to decline. It was 7:30 am and already 80 degrees! No, fall is not here yet. However, just because it isn't here doesn't mean I shouldn't prepare....

I went to Williams Sonoma to redeem a gift certificate this weekend. I was also hoping to see some of the fall-holiday stuff (Halloween and Thanksgiving). There weren't that many cool Halloween things there, other than black and orange cake decorating stuff. A lot of the stuff they have is for people with little kids, you know, like a goofy vampire spatula, or napkins with an embroidered giggly jack-o-lantern. Not my thing really. But these fall-related things caught my eye:



Yes, that is a spiced pecan pumpkin bread mix, which I'm itching to make. And I couldn't help but also buy the pecan pumpkin butter as well, for when I want to remember the pumpkin bread long after it's gone. It's supposed to be really good on toast. As is the Snickerdoodle spread on the right. No joke, it's like a cinnamon-sugar-brown sugar spread. For a cinnamon toast to die for. I love snickerdoodles. They are cookies that are fluffy like little cakes.


I also bought these pans (like I need more pans, but whatever, they're pretty!) The one on the right is for my pumpkin bread. It has fall leaves and pumpkins molded on it. I'm thinking of serving the bread with cream cheese frosting on the side or maybe piped delicately on the sides of the mold.

The tea cake mold is something I bought because I'm considering making snickerdoodles in that mold. Tea cakes are great, but you can't frost them because you lose the beauty of the mold, so you have to make something that you don't need to frost. Snickerdoodles get tossed in cinnamon and sugar before they go in the oven and don't need any frosting, so I was thinking of doing that. Does anyone know if you can make them in molds like this? They are kind of like short bread cookies, but will they just not cook right in the mold? It's going to be a crazy experiment, smelling all that good cookie smell and maybe not getting good treats at the end. But experiments are my thing. I'll update you if it works. If not I'll probably just say "I haven't had time to try."

I started to search for cookie molds to see if there are particular kinds of cookies that you can put in molds like the tea cake pan. I found some cool vintage replica cookie molds from Blueberry Forest. Check them out!

Lots of cute molds like this one were on the site for individual cookies.

And I loved the rolling pin molds as well.

I tried looking for more contemporary versions of these things, but there isn't really a market for them apparently. I'd love to find some if you know of any.

So with my fall bounty I left the mall a happy lady. Although, with the heat and stuff here in SoCal, I doubt I'll turn on the oven until well after November. Sigh...fall, I wish you were really here.

Everything Went Shaky Shaky

Today was the first day this summer that I felt inclined to go to campus and collect the stuff that had accumulated in my part-time faculty office cubicle (see my mess above). The department admin. asst. sent us all an email telling us to clean it out before the end of the week because we are all going to be shuttled over to some other office. It happens every semester. I am a gal without a permanent office. It is the major complaint of part-time (or as I like to think of it, adjunct) faculty. One day in all of the summer that I trek out to campus and what happens? Oh yeah, an earthquake! Centered like 10 miles away. I was in an elevator when it happened, holding a big box of papers for shredding. I thought we were plummeting, but when I got out of the elevator, which opened its doors mid-quake, it looked like everyone on the floor had experienced something as well. The building was retrofitted, so it continued to sway for a minute or so. Yikes! People filed out of buildings, alarms went off, it was a big mess.

The phone lines were jammed, but when I found out it was centered in Chino, I called my family anyway. I know that Corona is very close to Chino and I had to make sure my stepdad was ok. He's wheelchair bound, so I hoped all was well. Once I found out he was ok, I could breathe easier. In my haste to get home and check on my puppy, I locked my keys in my trunk. God, I'm such a spaz. Luckily, AAA came quickly and I hurried my ass home. My pup was frightened, as I had expected.
Only one casualty in my apartment, a beautiful glass polka dot vase that we got as a wedding gift. Smashed to pieces. I loved that vase. Damn. By the time I got home and called everyone I know, I got a text message from my university telling me that classes were canceled, which generally means there was some damage somewhere. I'm glad I walked away unscathed.

When I knew everyone was ok, my thoughts turned to Dr. Kate Hutton, the earthquake lady. She's a CalTech seismologist that is on the news whenever there's anl earthquake. For as long as I can remember, she's been on my television right after a quake. My friend Brande and I had discussed this a little over a month ago. We looked up her Wikipedia entry and saw that she was described as a "lesbian icon" who has been out since 1984. Both of us were very impressed with her "icon" status. I wish I were an icon of something. Anyway, since we just talked about her not long ago, we sent dueling text messages to each other, not saying "Hey are you OK?" or "did you feel that?" but "I bet Kate Hutton's on tv right now!" Hope everyone reading this is doing well and didn't lose anything important in the quake.

Dr. Kate Hutton, Cal Tech Seismologist