02.26.10
Posted in Environment, Frugality, Money tagged heating, Little Sister at 10:40 pm by kyrias
One of my many faults is that I absolutely can’t stand it when people are stupid about temperature.
The first time my little sister and I went out, I had told her that we were going to be walking up and down Mass Ave between Central Square and Harvard Square. When I picked her up, she had a poufy jacket on over a low-cut shirt, jeans, and ballet flats with no socks.
Brilliant person that I am, I actually didn’t notice her lack of proper attire until she started complaining of cold about 10 minutes in. So, in an effort to remedy my mistake, I bought her a cheap pair of gloves and a scarf at the dollar store. When I dropped her off at her grandmother’s house I told her that she needed to have gloves, a scarf, and more than just a t-shirt under her coat.
The second time we met, I picked her up at her house instead of her grandmother’s and so I was able to “remind” her to put on a sweater over the t-shirt.
Third time we met, I picked her up at the Saturday program she goes to. As I recall, it was 19 degrees out that day. She was dressed pretty much as she was the first time. We were fine on the walk from the program place to the Central Square bus stop, but once we stopped to wait for the bus, it started getting really cold. I had on tights and long underwear under my skirt, a thick fuzzy jacket under my winter coat and I was feeling a bit nippy. I had debated calling a taxi because it was really just that cold. Then I looked at my little sister, and decided that she really needed to learn how to dress herself properly. We sat at the bus stop for nearly 20 minutes until the bus came.
I’m not exactly proud of this, but I really thought it was necessary at the time. I felt it would have been encouraging her bad behaviour to call a taxi because she wasn’t dressed for the cold. I will admit to feeling a peculiar sense of vindication as we sat there in the cold, teeth chattering and feet tapping to keep circulation going.
Lately, since I moved to Framingham for the month, I noticed that the K-kids were strolling around in short sleeves and shorts.
The thermostat in this house is usually set to 70 degrees while people are in the house and 65 when people are out for the day.
I decided that we really didn’t need to be spending that much money on heating the house when the K-kids were walking around as if it were the height of summer.
So — I turned the thermostat downstairs down to 50 degrees and turned the thermostat upstairs down to 60 degrees. In my self-defense, it doesn’t really drop to 50 degrees, ever. The coldest the downstairs has been was 59 degrees and since my brother, the traitor, keeps turning the thermostat up, the upstairs rarely drops below 65 these days.
I spend most of my time in the kitchen, which is arguably the warmest room in the house because of how much cooking goes on in there. I suspect that having the fridge, rice cooker, and hot water pot in here also helps a bit.
The kids, including my brother, immediately started whining about how cold it was. One of them even came downstairs to dinner wrapped in a blanket once. I will admit to feeling extreme glee at seeing that.
However, they still haven’t managed to come up with long sleeves, or socks. I’m really glad that I don’t see the shorts out as much though.
Now, I just need to turn the thermostat down after my brother turns it up again.
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02.21.10
Posted in Drama Ilamas, Homestay students at 1:40 am by kyrias
So I thought that after talking to S about how I really wanted him to get back home by 10:00pm and how I would need to stay up for him to make sure he got home safely — maybe he’d wise up and stop being a pain.
Apparently not.
Saturday morning, I ask him if he wants something to eat at about 10:30am. He says no, he’s going out skiing with his friends later. I ask him when he’s going to return and after a bit of hesitation, he says 11:00pm.
Clearly that whole bit about wanting him to get back before 10:00 pm bit didn’t sink quite in.
I reiterate that I really want him back by 10:00, or even 10:30 — but if it’s really necessary, then at the very latest I want him back by 11:00pm.
That entire day I’m plagued by worries about what if he falls and breaks something. After all, skiing isn’t exactly the safest sport out there. Around 10:58pm, I start glancing at the clock.
I’m simmering by 10:05.
When he walks in at 1:44am, I’m absolutely livid.
I hear him walk in and I station myself in the living room doorway, where he has to pass by me to go upstairs. He tools around a bit in the foyer, then gets himself a glass of water. Finally, he walks into the dining room, straight into my line of sight.
I just stare at him. He pauses, looks a bit uncertain, then apologizes. I start dressing him down for not calling to tell me he’d be late and for being almost two hours late. He makes some excuse about the place being really far away. I coolly tell him to leave earlier next time. He mumbles something meant to be placatory. Tired of the entire thing, I tell him that is all.
Still seething over his nonchalant reaction, I fire off an email to my father asking if I can just kick him out if he keeps this up.
Dad: “Sure, if you don’t mind losing the income.”
I send an email to his aunt, who is his current legal guardian while he’s in the US. I tell her about his past two escapades and inform her that if he does this three more times, we will not be able to keep him as a boarder any longer. She apologizes for any inconvenience he might have caused me, thanks me for caring about his safely, and says that if I made it clear how much he’s inconveniencing me, he’d surely stop.
Hah. I doubt it.
Anyways. I get the joyful job of having to talk to him and N later on, to tell them what’s what. It’ll be great fun.
At least I rejected my brother’s idea of setting them a 6pm curfew and refusing to let them out after dark. Clearly that would have gone over awesomely.
Not.
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02.19.10
Posted in Cooking, Homestay students, Recipes tagged cookies, Mexican wedding cookies, polvorones, Russian tea cakes at 5:20 pm by kyrias
We went out to Minado’s on Valentine’s day and I fell in love with a nutty, buttery cookie that they had simply listed as “butter cookies w/ walnuts”.
By the way, going to Minado’s on Valentine’s day, which was also Chinese New Year’s — was a terrible, terrible idea. The number of people there was staggering. We waited 30 minutes in line to get our food even though we arrived at 5:15, a mere 15 minutes after they opened. When we left at 7:30PM, the number of people crowding the entrance was boggling. Poor hapless, witless fools.
Caesura thought that they tasted like some sort of Mexican cookie and so I went home and looked up “Mexican buttery cookies” on Google. It turns out that they’re called Mexican wedding cookies, or Russian tea cakes, or polvorones. Since I can’t choose between Russia and Mexico, I’m going with the polvorone option.
Although I bought the walnuts this Monday, I finally got around to making them yesterday night. I’d been feeling overstressed and in no mood to test a new recipe, much less a fiddly baking one. It was a good thing too, since what happened afterwards prompted me to make a breakfast of these.
See, we’d been thinking that out of the two homestay students, S was the better one. He’s mostly quiet, didn’t seem to be quite as oblivious as N, and didn’t get up to nearly as many escapades. Note the past tense used for the latter descriptions.
Yesterday night, he told me at about 5pm that he would be going out to eat. This was slightly irritating, because I had already started cooking and if I need to cut back on portions, I really would prefer more advance warning. However, I realized that it was probably a last minute invite from friends and so I brushed it off as a minor issue. I asked him when he would be back and he said around 9 pm.
Later that night…
I’m puttering in the kitchen, it’s about 10:30pm and I’m wondering where S is when I hear the sound of footsteps at the door. Kevin and I turn, only to see two other boys walk in.
Boy1: “Hi. What are you doing?”
Me, somewhat bemusedly: “Making cookies.”
S: “We’re going to watch a movie at midnight.”
Me, blinking more than a bit: “Oh, you have fun with that.”
They leave and my brother rounds on me. He’s livid that S brought two random people home at 10:30pm, and worse, was intending on going to a midnight movie. He thinks that I should have said something. I said that I was hardly going to toss them out on their ear and that I would speak to S separately.
My problem was that, for me, I’m not comfortable disciplining the K-kids. Further, I don’t know as of yet where the line is of how much I can discipline or humiliate them in front of other people and I wasn’t going to just throw cold water on their plans and kick his friends out.
Frankly, I was not processing all of this too well. I vaguely thought that it wasn’t the best idea, but I’ve been living with people who are of-age for far too long and it never even occured to me that I probably should have said something regarding the late hour, the movie idea, and the two people showing up until my brother pointed it out.
Kevin storms off.
He comes back, apparently after having a little chat with S, with more mind-boggling details. Not only did S bring back two people without saying anything beforehand, he intended to have them sleep over.
At this point, I’m speechless. And here we thought he was the easy one to deal with.
This morning, after staying up until 3:30am making sure that he got home safely, I made a breakfast of about half a batch of these polvorones. The only saving grace is that I used less sugar than the recipe called for, and white whole wheat flour. With a little bit of imagination I could almost convince myself that they weren’t that bad for me.
Polvorones
- adapted from Deb at smittenkitchen
- 1¼ cup toasted walnuts
- 1 cup butter
- 2 cups white whole wheat flour
- ½ cup packed brown sugar
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 egg (optional)
I used the food processor to turn the toasted walnuts into a powder. Putting the brown sugar in with the walnuts seemed to help keep it from turning into a paste.
Being the genius I am, I added the butter immediately after pulverizing the fresh-out-of-the-oven walnuts and brown sugar. I was very surprised when with the first pulse, the butter immediately liquidized and spurted upwards. Good thing I had my hand over the feed tube or my night would have gone quite a bit worse.
Somewhat alarmed at the liquid state of the ingredients, I dumped in the flour. Happily, the dough came together and it didn’t seem that much worse for wear.
I stuck the bowl outside in the snow and started on my second batch. 30 minutes later, I brought it back inside and started making balls of the dough.
Not sure if it was the liquidized butter, but the dough was extremely crumbly. I ended up just scooping teaspoons of it and dropping them onto the cookie sheets. The second batch I added an egg, which seemed to help matters and the two didn’t have that much texture difference, so I think I might just throw in an egg the next time too.
I baked them at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes.
Since I don’t like things that are too sweet, I cut back on the sugar in the cookies and utterly ignored the usual convention of rolling them in more sugar.
These were buttery, nutty, and I thought the brown sugar gave it a lovely depth of flavor without being too sweet. However, these are definitely cookies — a couple of them will satisfy cravings for a sweet without sending you on a sugar high. These weren’t dry either, which actually was my problem with the ones at Minado. You can have a couple of these without feeling like someone just stuffed a silica packet in your mouth.
I even think these would be lovely with perhaps a pinch of cardamom, cinnamon, or even rosemary and lavender. I’ll have to experiment a bit more and see what comes of it.
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02.18.10
Posted in Money tagged credit card drama, credit cards, credit companies at 2:42 am by kyrias
A while ago, because I went $3.66 over my credit limit on my Chase Freedom card, Chase slapped me with a $40 fine.
I sent them an irate letter and they reversed the fee.
Today, I found that because I had gone $16 over my credit limit on my Amazon card, they slapped me with yet another $40 fee.
This time, because I didn’t feel that they’d pay attention to yet another irate email asking them to reverse the fee, I just emailed them to ask for them to block the charges if the charge is going to put me over the limit. On top of that, I’m going to call them later on today to see if they’ll reverse the charges, because I honestly feel like this is poor business practice on their part.
The reason I say this is not simply because I’m a spoiled brat who can’t keep track of her money.
It used to be that small balances that went over the line would get ignored by Chase — I didn’t get any fees slammed on me for anything less than, say, $30. In retrospect, that spoiled me so I don’t tend to keep track of my spending down to every penny and dime. However, I will say that with two people using the same card, things can get pretty confused very, very fast.
Also, when I was going to go over the limit, Chase used to simply deny the charges.
Now that they’ve apparently changed their business practices in such a manner as to facilitate garnering more fees, I’m really quite displeased and I’m going to let them know it.
I don’t expect that this will happen frequently at all. In fact, this wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t need to use my credit cards to pay off my tuition bill, which was $3550. As one can clearly see, putting that much money on the cards definitely made it a lot harder to go about our normal business without tipping over the line.
Still, if Chase keeps this up, I’m going to have to start shopping around for another credit card company once we’ve paid off our Chase cards and I’ll be sure to let them know it.
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02.17.10
Posted in Homestay students at 4:55 pm by kyrias
It’s been only nearly 12 hours since my father left for China for a month and left my brother and I in charge of the home-stay students…
… and I’m just about ready to throw in the towel for the day, go back to bed, and pray devoutly to any by-passing gods that tomorrow works out better.
Kevin, my brother, drove my dad to the Logan Express stop so he could take the airport shuttle at about 4:00 AM. Out of solidarity and a wish to see my father off, I went along.
Note: When faced with less than 6 hours of sleep, my brain usually refuses to shut off. This meant that I finally dropped off to sleep at about 2AM and was woken at 3:40 AM. It didn’t help that I started getting hungry at about midnight and the hunger pangs were really keeping me awake.
When we passed McD’s, I suddenly had a craving for hot, oily, terrible-for-you fast food breakfasty badness and said so. My brother was too sleepy to make the turn so we went straight home from the bus stop.
At 8:50AM my brother woke me up because now he wanted to go to McD’s for breakfast. Being absolutely sleep deprived, out of it with no desire to make breakfast, and starving at this point, I went along.
Being similarly sleep deprived, my brother nearly ran a red light into an incoming truck on our way back from McDs. According to him, he didn’t notice there was a red light — as in, he didn’t notice the physical pole with the lights on it.
There was much cursing, shouting, and near hysterics.
After eating breakfast, I fell asleep on the couch watching the Food Network. My brother woke me at 11:30AM to ask about lunch options for the kids. Absolutely tired and still more than a little frazzled from our near death experience, I told Kevin to just make dumplings for the kids and fell back asleep. Never mind that apparently they had already had dumplings for lunch at least twice in the past week already.
Some time later, I’m woken by blaring smoke alarms, the sound of quacking, and a woman’s voice saying something unintelligible. I swear, all I could make out was “blah blah blah blah evacuate blah blah blah”.
Oh well, I guess I got the important bits.
I ran into the kitchen, only to see the burner turned to its full glory of 10k+ BTUs, the Teflon pot sitting on said burner, and a solid pillar of white smoke erupting from the pot.
There being absolutely. no. way. to turn off the fire alarms, we spent a good 15 minutes in the house listening to them blather on. My brother kept up a stream of non-stop cursing as we looked out the window anxiously to see if the local fire department had been notified.
Finally, the smoke alarms stopped.
At this point, my brother was a nervous wreck, “It’s not even the first day he’s gone because it hasn’t even been 12 hours. Oh my god, what the fuck is wrong with today?”
Me? I’m just numb from lack of sleep and way too much adrenaline over too short a period of time. Did I mention that a car who ran a red light nearly ran us over on our way to McD’s and we had been half-joking around about traffic incidents to take the edge off the adrenaline at that point?
K: “The fuck?!” *we turn to look at the car that nearly clipped us as it rushed past*
Me: “Wow, that car totally ran a red light.”
K: “Yeah. Our light was green for at least 5 seconds before it just ran by.”
Me: “Yaaaah. Considering there’s usually a delay between when their light turns red and our light turns green — that was definitely running a red light.”
K: “Yeaaaah.”
Me: “So we call dad and tell him that we got into a traffic incident — because we went to McD’s for breakfast…”
K: “He’d probably just freak. Might even get on the first plane back.”
Me: “Yeaaah…”
…I was thinking about going back to Somerville for a day or so a week to make sure that my house hasn’t burned down or more importantly, run out of food — but honestly, I’m almost afraid to leave my brother at home alone. At this point, he doesn’t want to be left here alone either. He said I’d come back to find the house burned down and the three of them standing in the snow staring at the ashy remains.
The worst part is, I still have to make dinner and clean up. Maybe we could just order pizza out, charge it to dad’s account, and turn in early for the night? Somehow I don’t think using knives or more fire today is a good idea.
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02.13.10
Posted in Uncategorized tagged coconut cake, dairy free at 3:40 am by kyrias
I’ve been having a craving for coconut cake ever since I got some organic coconut oil
from Spectrum to use on my hands. The stuff is unrefined and smells absolutely divine — like coconut cake, to be precise. I keep getting these intense craving pangs whenever I use it, which tends to be quite a lot in this dry winter weather.
So today, I went and looked up some recipes in an attempt to fix the craving.
Usually the King Arthur site is my go-to site for recipes, but I didn’t like the fussiness of the recipes they had on hand, so I looked around some more. I finally settled on this recipe for a small coconut layer cake at CookieMadness because it looked simple, didn’t call for too many steps and it doesn’t need a ton of ingredients that I didn’t have at hand.
Disclaimer: I wanted the cake to taste as much of coconut as possible, so I subbed in organic coconut oil for cooking
instead of butter. This may have been the basis for all my problems — I have no idea.
Coconut layer cake recipe — slightly adapted from CookieMadness
1.5 cups all purpose flour
1.25 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
8 tablespoons coconut oil
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup coconut milk
I beat together the sugar and melted coconut oil until creamy. Then I beat in the eggs, one at a time, making sure they were fully incorporated and beat for at least 30 seconds after each addition. Another departure from the original recipe is that I mixed in the coconut milk into this and then carefully folded the dry ingredients in.
Couple of things went wrong with the cake:
There didn’t seem to be enough batter to make 2 cakes in 8 inch pans. There was only a very thin layer of batter in the pans and it almost didn’t want to even cover the bottom. The end result was that the cakes were less than an inch tall. Also, they baked in much, much less time than the 22-24 minutes mentioned in the original recipe. When I pulled them out after 15 minutes, they were pretty dry.
I don’t know how much of this was my reckless substitutions and how much of it was just bad baking on my part. However, if anyone else wants to use coconut oil in place of the butter, this might happen to you too.
Another problem was that the coconut oil that was sold for cooking purposes was refined and smelled nothing like coconut at all. It didn’t taste like coconut either. Although I used coconut milk in the cake, the end result was really more like a vanilla white cake than a coconut cake. This was quite, quite disappointing. I think perhaps next time I will use coconut extract in place of the vanilla extract and perhaps fold in some shredded fresh coconut into the batter. Also, I might consider using unrefined coconut oil to see if that adds some taste. For what it’s worth, Caesura thought that the cake was very good, albeit “bone dry”.
For the filling, I melted a bar of Ghiradelli’s 60% cacao bars in 4 tablespoons of coconut milk and then folded in a cup of sweetened coconut flakes. This almost made up for the dryness of the cake and was tasty, but I still didn’t have the coconut cake of my cravings — I really wanted a cake that was redolent of coconut on its own without needing the coconut icing. Maybe that’s not possible, I don’t know.
I will probably make this cake again with butter and see if that fixes my problems with not having enough batter and having thin cakes — just to make sure it wasn’t the fault of the coconut oil. On the other hand, I know of vegan recipes that sub that way, so I can’t imagine what went wrong. I was looking for vegan recipes involving making cake with coconut oil, but wasn’t terribly successful.
Oh well, back to the drawing board.
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02.09.10
Posted in Big Sister Association tagged Little Sister at 10:36 pm by kyrias
I’m convinced that I didn’t know what I was getting into when I signed up to be a Big Sister — to a certain extent, I suspect that many women who have signed themselves on didn’t know either. Not that that particular thought comforts me when it’s in the single digits outside, but there it is.
So, when I signed up, I knew that I would be committing myself for at least a year. I agreed to meet weekly with my little sister for 3 to 4 hours for the first three months. After three months, I would meet with her at least twice a month, with phone calls and emails on the weeks we don’t meet.
What I didn’t exactly factor in was how exactly being somewhat broke and car-free would affect things.
It would take about 45 minutes travel time to go pick her up, then whatever travel time required to get to where-ever we would be hanging out for the day, spending 3-4 hours with her, bringing her back, and then getting back home myself.
For some reason I entirely managed to gloss over the fact that I would have to pick her up and bring her home in my calculations…
Assuming I bring her back home to make cookies or something like that, it would be 45 minutes to get there, about 50 minutes to get back, 4 hours of cookie-making, then 50 minutes to get back to her place, and finally another 45 minutes back home. This is not counting wait times for the local transit systems. Clearly, doing the math, that’s at least 6 hours assuming all goes well.
If we wanted to go somewhere else, further away, then more plans would be needed, and a lot more time would need to be budgeted for the excursion. More plans being that I didn’t realize that a 3rd grader would have a lot less tolerance and ability to do large amounts of walking in the cold…
Since I wasn’t clever enough to figure this out at the begining, I didn’t realize that this pretty much means that picking her up after school would be a no-go and so it would have to be on the weekends.
Considering my previous commitment to tutoring kids Chinese out in Framingham — that pretty much leaves Saturdays.
It’s not a terrible situation. Or rather, I am not pleased at the entire lack of weekends, but what I’m most chagrined about is my lack of foresight. To think that I assured my social worker that the 45 minute trip was “nothing”. Looking back at it now, I can’t help but laugh at myself.
So, if you want to be a Big Sister and you’re car-free as well…
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02.07.10
Posted in Environment, Health tagged organic food, pesticides, poison at 8:01 pm by kyrias
I think that I’m going to boycott strawberries from the shopping list unless they’re organic.
So, what I didn’t know before this is that strawberry and tomato farmers routinely fumigate the soil they plant their crops in — literally killing all living organisms within the medium before planting the strawberries.
The chemical that they used to use is methyl bromide, but it is getting bad press because of its ozone depleting properties. As a result, the Montreal Protocol, established in 1987, promoted the US to agree to phase it out by 2005.
We’ll ignore that Bush apparently negotiated exceptions to that protocol for American farmers and just skip to the point: Americans weren’t going to quit using it entirely until they found a suitable alternative.
The alternative that they found is methyl iodide.
If the similarity in names trips warning bells, then you might just be more clever than the EPA is/was.
Let me just say that methyl iodide works so well as a carcinogen that scientists use it in labs, complete with all the safety gear they can get on, to conduct research on cancer.
All I can say is that I personally don’t find it a good idea to grow food in poisoned soil. That purely asides from the ethical implications of using a poison in the environment where it could get into the watershed and where people living around the area are negatively affected by its use.
Now that I’ve heard about this, I’m just curious about what other food crops are grown with this level of poison use. Truly disturbing. To think that the majority of people probably don’t know this disturbs me even more. I wonder who would still want to eat strawberries grown conventionally after hearing of this? Not to be overly melodramatic, but it seems like eating the fruits of murder. Of humans, no less, not just the petty animals or microorganisms.
Hrm, so about potentially planting strawberries in the house…
I think I might be poking our local nursery for strawberry runners next week on my day off.
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02.02.10
Posted in life tagged home-stay students at 9:54 pm by kyrias
My mother is having a hysterectomy because her uterus is tilted backwards in such a way that it is pressing on her spinal cord and causing her terrible back pain.
My father is going to go back to China for business purposes on the 17th and since my mother is having surgery, she isn’t leaving Taiwan until mid-March. So the two of them will be coming back to the US together.
This means that I will have to move to the Framingham home-stay house to look after the kids until the grownups both get home.
Does anyone else see how much this sucks?
You know what sucks more? The fact that the removing of the uterus is called a hysterectomy. That entire bit about the womb and nerves and etc — can’t we move past it? Well, I guess we could, if only we weren’t slapped in the face with the word hysterectomy every once in a while and the whole etymology bit gets my goat and runs with it.
Anyways.
I don’t even quite know how much to charge my father for a full month. I almost even feel bad charging extra because it’s not as if my mother wanted to have surgery, but the fact is that this is going to throw my entire life in disarray.
Caesura’s eating will become problematic, and if not problematic then it’s likely that we’ll have extra expenditures that month from him eating out. My little sister gig in Boston on Saturdays will become harder to do because I’ll need to take the commuter rail in, pick her up, hang out with her, bring her back home, then take the commuter rail back out. The thought of the entire process actually almost makes me want to cry.
I felt sick this weekend, so I stayed home and canceled both my little sister gig and my tutoring. It’s now Tuesday and I haven’t gone into work yet. I’ll be going tomorrow because I feel that’s pushing things a bit too far, but really, nepotism can work both ways, yah?
Ugh. My life, it is getting messy again and I don’t like it.
Can’t imagine how mom feels. She just had her gall bladder out and all and now a hysterectomy? I hope that she’ll be ok — she was never that healthy or strong to begin with and this entire situation really worries me.
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