The Face Game

Among my many social ineptitudes, one of them is my terrible memory for faces.

It's a nightmare when I go to my boyfriend's family functions. I'm surrounded by his cousins, most of whom I've met multiple times, and yet I could still swear they're all perfect strangers to me. I survive these kinds of events by putting on my friendliest smile, greeting everyone with enthusiastic hellos and hugs, and basically treating each person like I know exactly who they are and am extremely happy to see them. Mostly I get away with this artifice by dodging meaningful conversation and never calling anyone by their name.

When not at social gatherings, I try to make up for my awkwardness by getting better at facial recognition. I didn't start it on purpose, but somehow I've fallen into the habit of practicing my skills through the diligent study of gossip rags.

The lifestyles of the rich and famous aren't really my thing, but somehow I have gotten on the email lists of many, many women's publications, which seem to love nothing more than that very subject. So I read them. Even a media-clueless nerd like myself can't always resist a headline like "Wow, Meghan Markle Has Gorgeous Handwriting," or "Miley Cyrus Wore a Super Revealing Outfit on 'SNL' Last Night and Twitter Is Losing It," or "Kate Middleton's lessons on being photogenic!" At worst, I can always use the intel for my highly lucrative fashion blog!

So nowadays, when I'm reading a roundup of the best awards-night dresses, I'm not just taking in all the glitter and lace and fashionable eye candy, I'm also scrutinizing every celebrity's face to see if I can match it with a name. I've made it into a game, and I'm not very good at it.

The hardest faces to recognize are the ones that belong to famous families. Try telling apart all the many Kardashians, or remembering which Hadid is Gigi and which one is Bella. The trickiest challenge yet? Figuring out which of the Olsen twins you're looking at! I've been doing this for years, and I still can't remember (though I think it's Ashley who has the rounder eyes).

But still, I persist! I like to think all this intense staring at faces (in the relative safety of the Internet, where there's no risk of accidentally making eye contact!) will make me better at identifying people in real life. But until then, I still have my default awkward greeting to fall back on: "Hi! I have a terrible memory for faces. Have we met before? I'm Valerie."

An Ode to Sleep

Since my last list of "Things I like/dislike" focused exclusively on the "dislike" end of the spectrum, I was anxious to come out with a second list, of a more optimistic bent.

But when I added the fifth item to my slowly growing tally, I realized it was such a like-worthy topic, it really warranted a whole post of its own. What's that topic? Well, if you read the title, you already know, but it's sleep.

Sleep is an underrated thing. While I have met a few high-schoolers (during my student-teaching days) who proudly listed sleep as one, if not their single most, favorite thing to do, I think that was more reflective of teenage angst (and disrupted circadian rhythms) than the values of the general public. Most adults who issue an opinion on the subject seem to think that sleep is nothing more than a nuisance.

I used to be one of them. As little as 5 years ago, I was bemoaning the 8.5 hours per night I had to spend sleeping, wondering what great things I could accomplish if I weren't wasting 1/3 of my day, every day, for the rest of my life.

Except that sleep is not, in fact, a waste. It is, by all scientific accounts, vital to health and happiness. Among the good things I've heard about a solid night of shuteye: It helps you form memories, it helps you repair your cells, it helps you maintain a healthy weight.

Over the years, I have come to accept my excessive sleep requirements—which is good, because in those 5 years, they've risen to around 10 hours a night. (Or maybe that's my body just trying desperately to catch up, because since we acquired two puppies in the course of 5 months, I haven't been able to get in a single night of uninterrupted rest!)

Who can sleep while this is constantly going on in their bed!?

I have finally changed into the angsty teenager I never was in my past (back then, one of my favorite things to do on the weekends was wake up at sunrise before everyone else, and tackle my day!)—now, sleep is definitely one, if not my single most, favorite thing for me to do. But the other thing that's changed, is I no longer feel bad about it!

I used to moon over the thought of what I could accomplish with one extra hour a day, but now I know the truth: the world is an overwhelming place, and I couldn't handle another hour of it anyway. What would I do with my extra hour? Probably spend it shopping online, brainlessly watching Netflix, or wandering aimlessly to the fridge again, hoping that this time there might be something tempting inside. Ha! Better to spend that hour in my bed, refreshing my mind and body for another run down the gauntlet tomorrow.

Sleep, I now know, is not the enemy, but a rare gift of from nature, a precious ambrosia, a medicine, and a refuge, and I mean to appreciate it rather than curse it! There is nothing quite like that slow divestment from daily concerns as you drift off into dreamland. There is no more peaceful feeling than that moment when you awake, conscious of nothing more than soft pillows and blankets around you, before the demands of reality set in. When else in life can something feel this good and still be good for you? Never!

So enjoy your sleep! Embrace it, love it, and never let anyone make you feel bad for demanding 9+ hours of it per night! Sleep may be a burden forced on us by our biology, but it's one burden we can truly be thankful to have!

Things I Dislike: The Sensory Processing Issue

As I was compiling my current list of things I like and dislike, I noticed they were pretty heavy on the things that involve the five senses—mostly things that irritate my five senses. I guess that makes sense (lol) — your senses are your primary way of interacting with the world, so if there are things in the world that are bothersome, you're going to experience them through your senses! So today, I bring you a special edition of Things that Annoy Me: the Sensory Processing Issue!

• Touch - Paper Straws

  You've probably noticed that there's recently been a lot of backlash against plastic drinking straws. People are pulling them out of turtles' noses, coffee shops are ceasing their use, and cities are banning them en masse. Even where plastic straws are still legal (like where I live), I've noticed that restaurants are becoming more conscientious about their straw consumption—now servers are asking if I want a straw when they take my drink order. I'm pretty excited about this development, because obviously it's a step forward for the health of our planet! What I'm not excited about are the paper straws that some places are using as an alternative. There is something about putting a tube of paper in my mouth that just makes me cringe! It's like the oral version of fingernails on a chalkboard. I can't deal with the texture—the way the paper becomes soggy and clings to my lips, the way it collapses just slightly too much when I touch it, the way it rasps if it encounters my teeth. Ugh! Do I want a straw with my drink? Not really. But especially not if it's paper!

• Smell - Smell of fabric softener

  Fabric softener is one of the many things that Millennials are supposedly responsible for killing off, and I count myself proudly among their ranks. I'm not exactly anxious to add more products (and thus more cost and more effort) to my laundry routine, but I also simply can't abide the smell! I can't count the number of times I've acquired some used clothing and had to immediately bury it in my laundry pile because of its weird aroma—not the disgusting stench of B.O. or mildew or whatever you'd expect from secondhand clothes, but rather the overpowering smell of flowers and synthetic chemicals! Blugh! Sometimes I have to wash my thrift store finds twice before their scent is reduced to the point I can wear them.

• Sight - Fluorescent colors

  One of the things that makes me me is my penchant for everything colorful. In almost all situations, I eschew neutral hues in favor of the bright and brilliant. Sometimes this makes color coordinating my various possessions a challenge, but for the most part, the more colors I see, the happier I'll be. The exception is highly saturated fluorescent colors. There's something not just off-putting about neons, but downright distressing! I have bought clothes online that looked pastel on screen, only to find them veritably DayGlo in real life...and I hated them so much that I actually found myself getting angry every time I tried to put them on. Needless to say, I purged those items from my wardrobe pretty quickly. Fluorescent colors have their place—mainly under a blacklight—but for everyday purposes, I prefer that my eyes not be assaulted by such intense hues.

• Taste - Uhhh...

  Taste is probably the most difficult of the five senses to use as a basis for hating something, because it is in fact too simple. There are only four tastes: salty, sweet, sour, and bitter (OK, and umami—you explain that one; I still can't figure it out!), yet when we say we describe the taste of something, we're really describing a complicated melding of taste, smell, and touch. If I wanted to take the easy way out, I could probably just say, "I hate the taste of bitter things," but since everybody basically does, there's not much story value in that. Let's talk instead about how a good taste can go bad—namely, when sweetness is used unsuccessfully to make something repulsive more palatable. Cough syrup is the classic example.  All the sugar in the world can't hide that fact that what you're consuming is a nasty non-food that basically tricks your body into doing things it wouldn't otherwise do. Cough syrup is gross. So I can't understand why drug companies take perfectly good tastes (sweet) and flavors (fruit) and ruin them both by combining them with medicine. It will never work. There's no getting around it! Stop the madness!

• Sound - basically all movie sound effects

  I do not watch a lot of movies or TV, but thanks to living with someone who does, I certainly hear a lot of them. Sometimes, my boyfriend will be watching something in his room, and the sounds of violence will start drifting out into mine. At first, I don't even notice, but then it just keeps going on and on—one minute, two, five. So many explosions! So much screaming! I don't know how he can tolerate watching it, because just hearing the noise is enough to make my cortisol levels rise! Actually, I have this theory that watching movie violence is less stressful than just hearing it, because when you can see the action, you can also see the good things that might be happening to mitigate the violence (e.g. superheroes arriving to save the day), but when you're listening, all you hear are the sounds of horror. So if you're watching a violent or otherwise disturbing movie and you have other humans in the house, help them keep their sanity by putting on some headphones!

What can I say about my truck?

 
It's been over six months since I bought my pickup truck.

When I was shopping for it, I imagined the process would make a magnificent blog tale, much like my search for a phone, or my search for a house, or my search for a bike. I even promised, when I was still in shopping mode, that I'd tell all about my decision and purchase when it happened.

Well, it happened. And after it happened, I felt it would be bad luck to gloat about my success too soon, in case my victory blew up in my face.

Sure enough, things blew up. Not the engine, thankfully. The driver's side door became hopelessly jammed only a day after passing inspection, and the battery conked out the day I was about to take it to have the door fixed. I was able to eventually solve both of those problems mostly on my own, but by that point, I was so fatigued by truck ownership that I had nothing I wanted to say about it.

Only now, after months of relative reliability, do I feel it's safe to proclaim, "I have a truck now!"

I have to admit, I am proud of this accomplishment. I've always secretly desired to drive a pickup. My first car was a tiny Plymouth Neon with clouds on the roof and friendly messages on the hood—about as cutesy as you can get without inducing vomiting. I loved that car literally to death, but at the same time, I always fantasized about another form of car ownership—a form that would reflect the fiercely self-sufficient side of me that always remained hidden under my girly exterior. There was once a book I read (I don't remember which one), and one of the characters was a girl who proudly drove a pickup truck while all the other kids in her high school coveted sportscars and limos. This was a down-to-earth girl who did her own thing and didn't care what anyone else thought. I wanted to be that girl.

But dreams are dreams, and reality is reality, and a down-to-earth girl can admit that a Neon gets better gas mileage. Practical concerns always dictated that I keep the car I had, or take the one that was basically free (I speak of my second car, Korg).

But as time marched on, practical concerns shifted in their nature. Whereas in the past, my car had been driven almost daily, in recent years I've clocked almost no miles at all. I bike to work, I no longer go to school in another city, and my live-in boyfriend has a car of his own. No sense in both of us driving a compact SUV! When I drive somewhere these days, 80% of the time it's to pick up construction materials at Home Depot or free furniture from around the neighborhood, and my most practical concern is how to not get mud all over the interior while doing it. What better car for those needs than one where the exterior is the interior?

When the cost of repairing Korg rose to equal the cost of replacing him, I decided that my next car was going to be a pickup. Although I said I'd tell all about my decision and purchase of the truck, it's been so long since it happened that I don't really recall any of the most salient details. And besides, that's not the interesting part of this story. The interesting part is how proud I feel, still, after so many months of ownership, to step into my pickup truck and turn the ignition. I'm the girl who drives a pickup truck! I'm a strong American woman with a powerful American car!

They say Americans have a love affair with trucks, which makes me just an average American—somewhat diminishing the image I have of myself as the valiant nonconformist, out to thumb my nose at convention in my unapologetically utilitarian vehicle. But average or not, I haven't been this pleased about a car since I glued a plastic bunny rabbit to the front of Zoot's hood.

There's only one thing left to say about my truck, and that's its name. Like all the good vehicles that went before it, my truck has a solid, strong, one-syllable name, and like the good vehicle immediately preceding it, this truck is named after a synthesizer. Can you guess?

I'll give you a minute.

Here's a picture!

A picture of my truck named Moog.

Adventures in Cooking: Green Bean Casserole Supreme

If you've been following my Adventures in Cooking!, you'll notice that they often involve ingredients that I've acquired under unusual circumstances, and I'm trying to find innovative ways to use them up.

The key player in today's Adventure is the humble green bean. I buy my green beans frozen from Costco and eat them raw (after thawing, they have the consistency of cooked beans). But my most recent bag of green beans took an extraordinarily long time to get finished. After surviving two near-complete defrosts due to equipment and power failures, they had turned withered and mushy, and I could no longer stomach eating them alone.

But they were still edible; they just needed to be cooked and combined with other foods to disguise their flaws. What better way to prepare some inferior beans, than to whip them up into a green bean casserole?

I do not recall exactly when I discovered green bean casserole, but I know it was fairly late in life (maybe college?), and I know I fell instantly in love. If you think about it, green bean casserole is really no great shakes—basically it's a can of soup and some beans, but I think I was enchanted by the onion straws on the top, which I also had never tasted before, and which were crispy and fun. Well, in more recent years, I've discovered I have a sensitivity to onion and so I try to steer clear of onion straws, but I still harbor fond memories of my early experiences with the dish.

So, to use up my green beans, I vowed to make them into a casserole...but, since this was not going to be just any casserole side dish, but a full-on meal...I was going to turn them into green bean casserole on steroids!

Here are the steps to replicate my great Adventure in Cooking!:

1. Thaw and thoroughly drain your freezer-burned green beans
2. Cut green beans into 1-inch long slices
3. Preheat oven to 350°F
4. Dump green beans in a casserole dish
5. Top with 1 can of condensed cream of mushroom soup
6. Throw in the remains of a bag of cheddar cheese
7. Add in a handful of Quorn vegetarian Chik'n cutlets
8. Stir.
9. Grab a frozen hunk of sourdough bread, microwave for a minute, then tear into breadcrumbs and toss over top of the casserole.
10. Bake casserole at 350 covered for 25 minutes or thereabouts (it's hard to tell, because you naturally start cooking before the oven is fully preheated)
11. Uncover the casserole and bake about 10 minutes more.
12. Let cool for a few minutes, then eat!

The verdict? I do not love Green Bean Casserole on Steroids (but I'm going to call it Green Bean Casserole Supreme so that other people might be suckered by the nicer-sounding name)! Everything in it is too mushy except the breadcrumbs, of which there are not enough. I think I might have liked it better if I'd put the cheese on top rather than mixing it in, but there's no going back now! Fortunately, I still have a few more beans left over from my last Costco bag, so maybe I'll try this recipe again sometime. As soon as I've choked down all 5 of the remaining servings of this attempt...

Hedge Apples

My last night and morning have been fraught with the kinds of misfortunes that won't make anyone feel sorry for me except myself. Bottles of hair dye and expensive conditioner spilling while I'm trying to mix them, dogs digging giant holes in the yard and tracking the dirt all over the house, a robot vacuum cleaner that's better at sucking up discarded articles of clothing than the aforementioned dirt, the same vacuum cleaner deciding to die 6 inches away from its charging port in the middle of the night without ever getting around to cleaning the house, violent movies blasting in my ear when I'm trying to de-stress before bed, and dogs vomiting on the couch (the first time in months that this had happened, and the only time in several weeks that the couch cover wasn't on it...naturally)—that about sums it up.

Oh yeah, and we have cockroaches again. This is nothing new in the past 24 hours; I've been spotting them creepy-crawling around the house with disturbing regularity since late spring, but they make just one more nasty thing floating around in this cesspit of unfortunate circumstances. Do you feel sorry for me? I feel sorry for myself, that's for sure.

I was busy feeling sorry for myself as I biked slowly and grumpily to work this morning (shoutout to the dude at the bus stop who probably just said good morning—I'm sorry if I glared at you, I couldn't really hear you and was caught by surprise), when what to my wondering eyes should appear? A hedge apple, reposing beautifully by the side of the bike trail!

This photo is a reenactment, using
another fruit I found in the afternoon.

A hedge apple? you say. I don't blame you. I said it to myself as I rolled even more slowly down the path, debating whether I should turn around for a closer look. But if you, unlike me, were not merely trying to decide whether to make yourself late for work with a botanical side trip, and were instead wondering what a hedge apple is, well, in short, it is a fruit that is said to have cockroach-repelling properties.

I was first introduced to hedge apples the last time we had a cockroach infestation, when my stepmom was nice enough to have a box of them shipped to my house. Upon receiving this unexpected bounty, I learned that if you place a few hedge apples strategically around your house, you might (emphasis on might) be able to keep the cockroaches away. Apparently the evidence for their efficacy was mostly anecdotal, but hey, it couldn't hurt to set a few out, and if they did work, they would certainly be more humane than poison.

So I distributed my five (?) hedge apples around the house and kept them there until all of them had rotted (some of which took months). By the time I got rid of the last one, my roach problem was  completely eliminated. I have to admit that that may have been thanks to the Advion cockroach gel that my boyfriend had bought, but I can't say conclusively that the hedge apples hadn't helped! So come this spring, when cockroaches began to again rear their ugly heads, I began to think about hedge apples, and wonder if I might ever run across some at a farmers' market or something, and should that occur, if maybe I should buy some for further cockroach prevention.

Well, fast forward to today, and a hedge apple had all but jumped into my path! What a way to reverse the streak of bad luck I've been having! After minimal deliberation, I did choose to turn the bike around and retrieve the fruit, even at the cost of my punctuality. In fact, as long as I had stopped, I decided I might as well see if I could find any more hedge apples, so I hiked up my skirts, waded into the brush, and managed to scavenge 3 more fallen fruits.

When I got to the office, I decided to check that what I had acquired were indeed hedge apples, and the Internet confirmed my hypothesis.

While I was there, I learned some Hedge Apple Fun Facts:

• Hedge apples are also (perhaps more commonly) known as osage oranges.
• They are scientifically known as Maclura pomifera.
• They are in the same family as mulberries.
• The tree they grow on has spines (good luck picking your hedge apples straight off the tree!).
• The sticky sap of the hedge apple tree and its fruit can irritate your skin.
• Some people use them to treat cancer, but that might not be such a great idea.

The most useful fact I learned is that, while certain compounds in the hedge apple have been scientifically shown to repel insects, the concentrations of them found naturally in the fruit are not high enough to really make a difference in practical usage. One article specifically warned, "don't be fooled into spending much to use hedge apples as an insect repellent."

Well, that is both disappointing and reassuring at the same time. It didn't say not to use hedge apples at all, it just said not to spend too much on them. As long as I can get my hedge apples for free by the side of the road, I don't see any harm in continuing to use them in my war against the roaches. At the very least, they make an interesting decoration!

Still Life with Hedge Apples. © 2018

Adventures in Cooking: Avocado Toast

You probably already know I'm a picky-eating vegetarian, and that means I often have to reject entire restaurants on the grounds that they have nothing on the menu I can eat. But there is one thing any restaurant can offer and be assured that I'll happily dine there—avocado toast! People liked to make jokes about how much Millennials love avocado toast (at least until avocado toast morphed into a metaphor for economic collapse), but regardless of the dish's spotty reputation, this Millennial is happy it became a trend.

Unfortunately, while avocado toast makes a nice splurge for a single-meal Sunday, it is entirely impractical as part of a daily diet. A dollar-twenty-nine for a single avocado on sale!? That is not the way I spend my money. In fact, I cannot recall a single time when I have ever purchased a whole avocado (though I have purchased a house, so maybe I'm not such a Millennial after all).

The other thing people like to make jokes about is how really bad cooks can't even cook toast. Well, I confess, I am the butt of those particular jokes. I cannot make toast. Just add avocados, and you've got another kind of toast I can't make either. But that's about to change, because I just snagged a free avocado!

Let's have an Adventure in Cooking together, and make...

A Recipe for Avocado Toast!

Ingredients

• 1 avocado. You can't afford to buy an avocado, because you're a Millennial, so use the one that your coworker left on top of the mini-fridge 3 weeks ago. The first week, it was wrapped in a paper towel and you didn't know what it was. The second week, the paper towel had disappeared but the avocado remained. The third week, you went away for a vacation. The fourth week, your coworker went away for a vacation, and you decide that if anyone is going to eat that avocado, it's going to be you.
• 1 piece of garlic bread that you took home from a restaurant and stashed in the freezer.
• 1 tomato, because you wanted to put radish slices on top of your avocado toast, but you could only buy too many radishes in a bunch, so you needed something else red to make your toast photogenic.
• A handful of arugula, because your boyfriend loves that stuff and you usually have it lying around, plus it seems to be a common item to put on avocado toast.
• Salt

Instructions

1. Stealthily remove avocado from lunchroom and rehearse the story about why you took it, should anyone come questioning you.
2. Slice avocado in half and remove pit and skin.
3. In a small bowl, mash up half the avocado with a fork.
4. Cut garlic bread in half and put in toaster oven. Feel the sweat bead on your forehead as you turn the temperature dial to "toast," and the timer dial to "something slightly closer to light than to dark." This is the moment of truth. Will you make toast, or will this Adventure in Cooking end before it's even begun!?
5. Wipe your brow. You made toast! Now it's time to up the ante and make avocado toast. 
6. Take the mashed avocado and spread it on the bread.
7. Sprinkle the avocado with salt, top it with sliced tomatoes and arugula, and dig in!
8. NO WAIT! You're a Millennial! Instagram the shit out of it first!

I used a Hudson filter, with a dash of cropping.

If you're good at math, you noticed that the recipe only calls for half an avocado, so I made it twice. The second time, I even put some cheese on top, because I was feeling extra.

Another Adventure in Cooking, successfully survived.

Please comma back

As written English gets lazier and lazier, I have been witnessing the demise of one of my favorite punctuation marks—no, not the em dash—the comma.

Direct-Address Commas

One of the comma usages that I miss the most is the direct-address comma. The direct-address comma is the one that you put next to someone's name or term of address when you are speaking directly to them. Sometimes the comma goes before the name, sometimes after, and sometimes both, but it always serves to separate the recipient of the sentence from the content. Some classic examples? "Hello, Clarice."  "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

I notice the absence of this special type of comma almost every day in my emails, which begin with greetings like "Hi Valerie..." I've learned to accept and even adopt that particular non-usage because a direct-address comma in a 2-word sentence seems like overkill (You still know exactly what I mean if I write "Hello Clarice"), but there are plenty of times when a direct-address comma is still right and proper and downright required. As people are fond of putting on T-shirts, commas save lives.

Oxford Commas

Another kind of comma that clarifies meanings, yet is frequently disregarded, is the Oxford comma. If you haven't heard the debate about the Oxford comma, you've either been living under a rock, living in a house but without internet, or you have no interest in grammar. But if by some stroke of luck you do have internet and you are interested in grammar and you have not heard the debate about the Oxford comma, here's how it goes.

In a list of 3 or more items, every item must be followed by a comma. The final item is preceded by the word "and," which is in turn preceded by a comma. For example, "My outfit today is blue, white, and orange." That last comma is the Oxford comma. It is considered indispensable by some style guides, and unnecessary by others (notably the Associated Press, which rules most journalistic publications). Many people who do not adhere to any particular style guide nonetheless have very heated opinions over whether to use the Oxford comma (also known as the serial comma, though I like to give it its capitalized name, because that in turn gives it an air of refinement).

As you might guess, I myself am firmly in the pro-comma camp, as I believe it serves a valuable role in helping the reader quickly determine where a sentence is going. The serial comma is a visual clue that the next word you are going to read is another item in the list, rather than something that should be grouped with the item before it. For example, "The company has three branches: finance, research, and development." In this sentence, the Oxford comma lets you know that development is the third and final branch, and not just part of the frequently combined "Research and Development."

Take a gander at this sentence, lacking the serial comma: "The company has three branches: finance, research and development and marketing." What a slew of 'and's! And which is the combined branch? Research and Development? Or Development and Marketing?

In most cases, the context usually clues you in to the meaning, with or without a comma, but that little punctuation mark just helps makes comprehension occur that much faster. And sometimes it's downright necessary!

In conclusion

I don't make the rules; in fact, sometimes I purposely break them (If you don't believe me, check out the doozy of a sentence in my second paragraph about Oxford commas, beginning with "but if by some stroke...", which is short no less than three commas by the dictates of a more traditional grammar—I chose to leave out the commas so it would read in one breathless rush), but there are times when inserting a comma is just the right thing to do. Sure, if you want to go around writing your sentences just a little faster at the expense of clarity, I won't yell at you, but I'll definitely judge you.

It only takes a fraction of a second to type a comma, and in many cases, it makes a world of difference in meaning. Regularly using the Oxford and direct-address commas would almost certainly make your communication more comprehensible, and it would definitely make me happier. So if you've got a few extra seconds to put your punctuation where your breath is, why don't you comma on over to my side of the debate?

Dogs are the mother of invention

I used to say I get my best ideas while walking to the bathroom (this is at work, where the nearest bathroom takes the better part of a minute to reach). Nowadays, I seem to get my best ideas while taking my dog to the bathroom (that is, the dog bathroom, a.k.a the great outdoors). There isn't a walk that goes by where I'm not suddenly pointing my finger to the heavens and exclaiming, "Wouldn't it be great if there was..." usually followed by some fantastical invention that would make dog ownership easier.

Here are some tools for dog owners that, if someone just had the technology and I just had the money, would make my dogs more like my best friends and less like my worst frenemies.

The automatic fur remover

This is the first dog-related invention I ever dreamed up. Between covering up my couches to keep the dog fur off in case of guests, to buying coats to match those of my dogs, to being unable to fall asleep at night thanks to the wisps of dog fur dangling off the blanket into my face, to washing and folding my clothes inside out to prevent them from picking up fur during the laundering process, dog fur is a constant source of struggle in my life. While I beg my boyfriend to brush his dogs at least once a week, he never actually does, so it would sure be nice if we had something that would do it for us...or at least, remove the shed hair from everything it lands on. We have an automatic dog-fur remover for the floor (it's our robotic vacuum cleaner!), but wouldn't it be great if there was something I could just set on top of the bed and let do its thing? Maybe a little box that I could just drop a shirt into and have all the dog hairs meticulously sucked off?

The automatic leash detangler

The catch-22 of dog walking is, if you don't put your dog on a leash, he'll run away, but if you do put your dog on a leash, he'll get it tangled. Around everything, but most annoyingly, under his legs approximately every five steps, which will cause him to slow down and attempt to walk sideways, or just plain fall over. Wouldn't it be great if there was just some kind of tool that would keep the leash out from under the dog's legs at all times?

The dog force field

Better yet, wouldn't it be great if there was some kind of force field you could turn on to keep your dog in your vicinity, so you didn't need a leash at all? Not only would this solve the leash-around-the-legs issue, but it would also prevent other mishaps such as the dreaded walking the leash around the table in a spiral until dog is trapped one inch from the table leg but can't figure out how to unwind again,  and the infamous two dogs meeting each other and walking under and around each other's leashes, forcing the owners to do a little dance and/or pseudo-handshake to get them separated again. My boyfriend tells me there is some sort of shock collar you can get to keep your dog nearby, but I think a force field sounds much more humane and way cooler.

A typical dining-out leash situation

The indoor dog toilet

One of the grossest things about having dogs is having to pick up their poop with your hands. Even cat owners get a scoop to go with their poop, so why do dog owners have to go around fondling it like coprophiliacs? In fact, why do pet owners have to clean up poop at all? I can't believe, after so many millennia of living hand-in-paw with companion animals, and so many centuries of indoor plumbing, we still haven't invented a surface that would appeal to a dog yet still enable us to flush its waste away with the flick of a finger. This would undoubtedly be the greatest dog invention of all...but if someone made it a reality and I never had to walk my dog again, how would I get any more of these marvelous ideas?

This story holds water

In case you weren't aware yet, collecting water runoff in a rain barrel is an eco-friendly way to prevent erosion and provide a water supply for your outdoor needs. I first started considering a rain barrel when I moved into my house, but after thinking about the amount of water I spend on my lawn and gardens (none), I decided a rain barrel probably wouldn't be the most worthwhile investment. Last spring, that all changed when I planted some seeds in the backyard and had to water them a handful of times. This got me to thinking that maybe a rain barrel wouldn't be such a bad idea after all.

The timing was perfect. That summer, I learned that if I installed a rain barrel outside my home, Prince George's County would reimburse me the cost of the rain barrel, as part of the Rain Check Rebate program. If the rain barrel cost me nothing, well, that was a horse of a different color! At minimum, it would create at least one spot in my yard where the gutters don't run directly into the ground next to the foundation. So I bought and installed a rain barrel.

A lot of time passed. Summer turned to fall, fall turned to winter, the water in the rain barrel alternately iced up and overflowed out the overflow hose (right into the ground next to the foundation, SMH), and I still hadn't used a drop of the water I collected. I needed to step up my rain game.

Other than watering the plants in my landscape (of which there are few, and which I have very little interest in watering after their planting day), the first use I came up with for the rain barrel was to hose off my bike after riding it home in messy weather. For this, I tried to use the garden hose I already have attached to the front yard spigot, but it was too long and too high off the ground to produce enough gravity-powered pressure to blast the gunk off the bike. So I was obliged to purchase a hose, naturally the cheapest one I could find: a 15-dollar spiral hose that also failed to produce enough pressure to blast the gunk off my bike (I should have expected that, but optimism won over my tenuous grasp of hydraulic flow). Oh, well, at least I now have a hose for watering the plants in my landscape, should I suddenly develop a passion for gardening and a boatload of patience (watering a single plant takes forever with the trickle that comes out of the hose).

The second use I came up with for the rain barrel was to source the water I use on my houseplants. Unlike my lawn and yard, my houseplants are cared for more or less faithfully, and as they continue to grow in number, I need increasingly large vessels to water all of them efficiently. For the past several months, I've been using my boyfriend's beloved VitaMix blender cup, as it's the largest easily poured container in the house, and it's always sitting conveniently on the counter.

However, the first time I used the rain-barrel water for my indoor plants, I realized I needed another container. As I watched the water flow out from the spigot labeled "non-potable," I realized I probably shouldn't be using a food preparation vessel to haul around water of questionable purity. Of course, I washed the blender cup thoroughly after that, but as if to remind me that the water from the rain barrel was just about as sketchy as water can be, my Norfolk Island Pine sprouted a magnificent garden of neon yellow fungus just a few days after watering.

That's not the kind of mushroom I want touching my kitchen equipment, so I vowed not to water the plants with the Vitamix any more.

But what to use, then? A sensible person would advise me to use a watering can, but I have never owned a watering can in my adult life, and I've never even run across one on Freecycle or at the thrift store. They must be the kind of thing that once you have, it's til death do you part. But my conscience (scientifically proven to be one part Extreme Cheapskate, one part Tree Hugger) wasn't really too keen on the idea of buying one new. Watering cans are outrageously expensive, apparently starting out at well over 10 dollars for a decent size. For something whose basic purpose is just to carry a couple liters of fluid, they seem exorbitantly priced compared to, say, a 2-liter bottle of soda, which can be less than a dollar in the right stores, and already comes with the fluid in it!

The compulsive crafter in me tried to devise a clever solution that I could construct from, say, a gallon milk bottle or one of the aforementioned 2-liters of soda, but ultimately, I decided I really wanted a watering can. I needed something with a spout that could get down to the base of my plants without spilling on the leaves (and thence to the floor, as such things go), that was sturdy enough not to collapse no matter what part of it I held onto, and that was graceful enough that I could maneuver it around my window fence without spilling or stabbing myself on a cactus. I needed an honest-to-goodness watering can, and I needed one now, before my plants dried out and I was forced to load up the Vitamix with fungus spores again. Finally, I acknowledged that, barring a miracle (perhaps a rain of watering cans instead of water?) I was going to need to pay money for this new necessity.

And this is when the other half of my conscience revved into action—the tree-hugging one. After reading a lot of recent news about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I'm more depressed about the environment than ever, and, consequently, trying extra-hard to avoid buying new things made out of plastic. But sakes alive! All the steel watering cans out there are like 3 times the price of an equivalently sized plastic one...and the plastic ones are already exorbitantly priced, as I might have mentioned. I decided to search for a watering can made of recycled plastic, and I found one—one of the cheapest cans of its size, even, and made in the USA! Wow! Practically everything an ethical miser could ever want! I put it in my Amazon cart, and when I came back to make my purchase the next day, I found an even cheaper version of the same can! So, for 9.63$ (3 times as much as I'd originally hoped to have to pay, but less than I'd resigned myself to paying), I had a watering can of my very own.

When it arrived at my doorstep, I took it out of the box and was instantly worried because it looked smaller than the blender cup, and I'd really been hoping for an upgrade. But once I filled it with water, it became clear that looks are deceiving. It held as much as the Vitamix, and then some! I watered half my plants, did not stab myself with a cactus, and considered the whole endeavor a success. The can even makes an acceptable addition to my decor!

I usually like my stories to have a moral, but this one doesn't really, except perhaps to illustrate that even if you get a rain barrel for free, it's still going to cost you at least 25 dollars in new things that you didn't need before. However, if you are still looking for a more meaningful takeaway, let it be that if you're in the market for a botanical hydration vessel, perhaps you should consider this one.

Rat Tale

The latest of my adventures in home ownership is a short one—about four inches, to be exact.

I speak of none other than Rattus norvegicus, a single creature that terrorized me like a plague for months on end.

I might have had a rat in my home as early as last November, when I first noticed chew-holes in a bag of coffee in the basement. At the time, I blamed it on my last Airbnb guest, a particularly negligent fellow who had left spilled food all over the carpet and a window open to the bitter cold when he checked out—I wouldn't have put it past him to have also somehow mutilated the bag of coffee. But as time went on, the evidence began to mount that I had some kind of vermin problem.

At first it was just noise—occasional scratchings from the attic that were so rare, I was sometimes able to convince myself they were nothing more than the neighbors working outside, somehow acoustically reflected to sound like they were coming from above.

One time in early March, I had to purge my basement renter's refrigerator during a 2-day power failure, and I found a bunch of bags of potato chips at the bottom of the fridge. I never asked her, but why do you keep chips in the fridge, unless you're trying to keep them safe from rodents?

The noises continued, and I was pretty sure we had mice, except that they were unusually loud for such small animals. "Do you think we have a rat?" I asked my boyfriend one day when the scratching was especially noisy. "Nah," he said. "People usually only get rats in the city."

Unfortunately, he was wrong.

One day in March, I stepped into the basement storage room, turned on the light, and saw a grey creature streaking along the floor and into the space behind the drywall. That was no mouse! At the speed it was moving, it looked positively enormous. There was no doubt about it; we had a rat.

Although I said this adventure was a short one, I'm lying. From the moment I discovered the rat to the day I finally rid myself of it, approximately a month and a half passed. The intervening time was a long journey of frustration, which you now have the pleasure of viewing, in timeline form.

• March 19-ish: I see rat in basement, and my life changes forever. On this date, I also find the place where I presume the rat originally entered the house: an exhaust vent leading from the basement stove to the outside. The flexible ducting that connected fan to the the wall had been torn to pieces, basically leaving a huge 4-inch hole in my house just above ground level.
• March 20-something: I get crafty and make a pitfall-style trap out of a five-gallon bucket, some ramps, and a cardboard seesaw. Spoiler alert: While this trap will remain in place over the next several weeks and even get triggered twice, it will never succeed in catching the rat.
• March 24: I order a catch-and-release wire trap from Amazon.
• April 2: All quiet on the basement front, I begin to believe that maybe the rat is gone. Or, possibly worse, dead and rotting in the walls. My bucket trap hasn't been touched in a while, so I disassemble it.
• April 3: I see the rat again! Same rat time, same rat place! I begin to suspect that this rat is cleverer than I give it credit for. It's been deliberately avoiding my trap!
• Date unknown: At several points during this month and a half, I realize that the various repairs I've made to the entry hole have been unsuccessful. Stuffing the ducting back into the hole does not seem to last long, even when using rags to press it in more firmly. Closing the flap from the outside with a tile works, until the tile slips out of position. My last fix, wedging the tile into the ground before pressing it onto the flap, stays where it's put, but it's frustrating to think that the rat could have been exiting and entering my home multiple times during this ordeal, possibly mating with other rats and getting pregnant! For my own peace of mind, I decide the rat is a male.
• April 14: Where the heck is that trap I ordered from Amazon!? I check, and the arrival estimate is not until late July / early August! Amazon failed me! I cancel my order.
• April 15: I ask my boyfriend to order the same trap using his Amazon Prime account.
• April 17: At around midnight, the rat begins his invasion of the upstairs kitchen, tearing into a bag of tortilla chips and leaving havoc in his wake. I move all foodstuffs off the counter and into hard-to-reach places.
• April 18: Boyfriend's Amazon order arrives, but the rat trap is not part of it. I suspected this might happen, and wonder if I am meant to fail at this endeavor.
• April 19: Around midnight, the most horrible scraping noise emanates from somewhere near the kitchen. It sounds like the rat is trying to chew the house down. In the morning, I find puffs of pink insulation all over the floor of the basement storage room, indicating that he has been burrowing inside the wall.
• April 20: Taking boxes outside for recycling, I find the rat trap in one of them. My boyfriend just did a terrible job of opening them, and completely missed the most important part of the order! I set up the trap in a corner of the basement storage room.
• April 20 - May 7: I check the trap diligently multiple times a day...then every day....then every couple of days. It has not even been touched. Again my optimism gets the best of me, and I wonder if I might have gotten lucky and sealed the rat outside the last time I closed off the vent.
• May 7: I see the rat again! He runs right past my trap, and has clearly been doing so for weeks, so either the trap must be in the wrong place, or the rat has lost interest in peanut butter and tortilla chips (for the record, he never seemed interested in peanut butter, despite all the Internet advice to the contrary). I take the trap upstairs to clean and re-bait with something more tempting.
• May 8: By this point, several friends know about my rat situation, and one has been encouraging me to "borrow" one of the kill traps that are all around our buildings at work. Upon hearing of this third sighting, even the friend who has patiently indulged my desire for a humane catch and release is now suggesting that I just put out some kill traps. But no! I stand firm! I will take this rat alive! I bait the trap with buttered popcorn and painstakingly maneuver it into a dark cranny behind some plumbing, where I saw the rat emerge from last time. Later, while doing laundry, I see a patch of paint scraped off the basement outer wall that I swear wasn't there a few days ago. The patch is in the same place where we had a water leak repaired a few years ago, so this gets me to thinking that maybe, the rat might be thirsty and trying to get at the moisture behind the paint. So I place a dish of water inside the trap as well.
• May 9: Success at last! When I get up in the morning, I check the trap to find the rat inside it.

OMG!! For such a thorn in my side, the rat sure was cute! With his bulgy black eyes and soft grey fur, he looked like he would make an adorable pet. However, after all the damage he did to my house, I was happy to get rid of him. After taking a couple selfies, I carried him off into the woods at the end of my street.

For the record and others who would rather put 1.5 months of effort into humanely catching a rat rather than just poisoning it and being done, PETA says that you should release a rat no more than 100 yards from where you found it, because putting it in unfamiliar surroundings might confuse it and ultimately lead it to die of starvation anyway. The woods at the end of my street just squeaks into that radius, and there are plenty of unguarded garbage cans in the vicinity!

I never knew rats could jump (and I'm glad I didn't, because I would have been terrified to even enter the basement!), but they do! When my rat exited the trap, he took a couple of hesitant steps and then bounded away, leaping into the air every few feet in an impressive display of acrobatic activity. Well, that explains why he didn't stay in my bucket trap! 

Afterword

If all this action in this tale seems to take place in the basement storage room, that's because it is the least finished area of the house. A flood a few months ago resulted in the bottom 3 feet of drywall being removed from this room, making it basically the only place where the exterior walls, and insides of the interior walls, are exposed. I never thought I'd be grateful for this disaster, but it proved instrumental in identifying and catching the rat, since the room is now basically a window into the guts of the house.

Help, I'm dating a dog person

Although in my entire adult life I've never owned a cat of my own, I've always considered myself more of a cat person than a dog person...or rather, more of a cat.

However, as they say, opposites attract, so somehow I found myself sharing my home and life with an undeniable dog person. Not only is he a dog person, but he is bound and determined to make me into one, too. He regularly foments chaos in my calm and peaceful existence by bringing home new, increasingly disruptive dogs every couple of years.

The newest one is, fortunately, not a lazy, grumpy, foot-piddling cat-dog, nor a yapping, anxiety-ridden bundle of health problems. It's something much worse: a puppy.

Cuteness not withstanding, there are many irritating things about having a puppy, but anyone who's had a puppy probably already knows what they are. What you might not know is that the most irritating thing about having a puppy has nothing to do with dogs at all—it's dog people!

People in general love dogs (even I, a certifiable antisocialite, love dogs, in a commitment-phobic kind of way), but dog people not only love dogs; they act like dogs! And when you're out and about with a cute puppy, you're bound to attract at least a few dog people—that is to say, people with no sense of boundaries.

Here's a typical exchange:

Cat person: [Walking dog, enjoying the weather, generally minding her own business]

Squealing girl: Can I pet your puppy!!!1!!???

Cat person: [only hissing mentally] Of course!

Girl pets puppy. Puppy loves it. Other dog people descend like wolves, eager to get in on the action. Puppy is ecstatic. Cat person is hovering awkwardly nearby, trying to suppress the instinct to flee.

This is a best-case scenario. In a worst-case scenario, the dog person will want to do the unthinkable: engage in conversation.

The conversation is always the same: What's your dog's name? How old is he? What's his breed? After running out of standard questions, the dog person will then begin to rhapsodize on how cute the puppy is, how he is making her day, and/or all the ways the puppy reminds her of her own dog.

This may sound like one-way nattering, but when two dog people get together, just like dogs, they both feel the need to get in each other's faces and yap. A simple encounter can easily turn into an endless exchange about the characteristics of the dog in question, the characteristics of every participant's every pet since the time of their infancy, and the defining characteristics of every breed known to man.

It can really get annoying. And I know, because my boyfriend is a dog person. I've watched him get mired in conversations with other dog people that lasted so long, I had to walk away. There's only so much smiling and nodding a cat person can force out before she has to return to solitary pastimes. Being a cat person in a dog person's family is not unlike being a cat in a bathtub: sometimes you just want to run away screaming.

Yet, as a responsible pet owner, you know you have a duty to to treat your dog with loving kindness, and meet its needs. Even when those needs involve...(dum dum dummm)...going out in public!

Every day, the puppy must be taken on a seemingly infinite number of walks. Of course, I could just hustle him out for a quick potty break and dart back inside like a ghost, as would be my preference...but the less you exercise the puppy outdoors, the more he wants to run around the house or office, barking, digging at the carpet, and chewing up the couch.

So instead, it's long tedious walks around campus—walks which inevitably lead to hordes of dog people wanting to meet the puppy. 

I thought this ordeal was inevitable, and as a cat person, I was uncertain if I could survive it on my own. But in only one short solo excursion with the puppy, I learned a trick for tolerating walks when feeling antisocial (which, if you're a cat person, is all the time). It even comes in the form of a game, which should make even the most hardcore dog people happy. I call it "Dodge the Humans!"

The rules are simple:

1. When out and about with your dog, try to only walk where other people are not walking. This may mean eschewing paved pathways, and suddenly changing directions when you see a crowd.
2. Be especially wary of children and groups of female humans. These are the ones most likely to attempt to approach you.
3. When forced to cross paths with a human of any sort, don't make eye contact! I find it helps to stare intently at the dog while continuously uttering a stream of commands and praise. That way you can at least pass for a fellow dog person, and not some humanoid robot that hates all living things.

By following these rules assiduously, I was able to survive an entire walk around the mall (and then around a couple of extra buildings to avoid a school group) without once having to tell anyone my dog's age! We even made it almost all the way back inside when I started to feel sorry for the puppy, who seemed sad about not getting all the pats and attention he is used to whenever he goes out....So I let him run up to someone entering the building, slip through the door, and nearly escape out the other side. This resulted in a flurry of apologies, an even more awkward interaction than any silly dog-talk chat could be.

From now on, I think I'll stick with what a cat person does best. I'll continue Dodging the Humans and only participate in puppy play when it suits my mood. I'll leave the socializing, the endless activity, and all the yapping to my boyfriend. After all, if there's one good thing about being a cat person stuck in a dog person's family, it's that you have a dog person to do all that.

Putting the War in Wardrobe

The week before last, my boyfriend was away, visiting with a friend in China. Since the two of us spend approximately 22 hours a day within a 40-foot radius of each other, I thought it would make for an amusing tale to chronicle my experiences with the single life.

And it was, at first. I humorously (so I'd like to think) photo-documented my glee at finally having a clean house, my efforts to get the dog to eat dog food, my attempt to drown my loneliness (mostly hyped up for dramatic effect) in a pint of ice cream, and so on. But then, I decided to get a wardrobe.

As you might recall from the distant past, I've always had a wardrobe, but since my clothing collection grew bigger and my closet grew smaller, I felt the need to supplement it with a second identical one. But soon those two wardrobes and tiny closet became no match for my still growing collection, so I began to entertain dreams of maybe, someday, buying a newer, larger, better wardrobe. Now, I don't buy big things often because there's a lot you can get for free if you're just willing to wait, but I do make exceptions for wardrobes (My boyfriend's wardrobe was the only home furnishing item I've purchased since 2010), so I started planning my dream closet on the IKEA Pax Planner. My dream closet ended up being almost a thousand dollars, and I decided I could not waste my money on such a frivolous purpose when I really needed to improve and repair certain essential parts of my house. So I did. For months, I ignored my wardrobe plans in favor of focusing on home improvement.

However, the first weekend that my boyfriend was out of town marked a tipping point in my financial priorities. I finally had a solid 15,000$ squirreled away in my basement remodeling fund and a contractor friend working on it in his spare time; I had recently bought a truck, which had been an additional big purchase I was conserving my money for all winter; and then that Saturday, a different friend helped me finally fix my leaky bathtub faucet handles. (In my "single-life diary," I introduced this story with, "The men are already flocking by to assist a lady in distress.") Suddenly, all the pressing maintenance tasks were well in hand! I could finally spend big money on clothing storage without feeling like an irresponsible homeowner!

So I returned to my Pax Planner...and instantly balked. 855 dollars just for an upgraded closet? It wasn't even all that great of a closet, I now realized, with dead space hidden in a corner that I wouldn't be able to use for anything. People sell Pax wardrobes on Craigslist all the time. Surely a used wardrobe at a hefty discount would be a better investment than a brand new one that suddenly wasn't my dream closet any more. So I ran a Craigslist search for "wardrobe," and instantly found one for sale in my own neighborhood. Since this is a long story, I'll shorten it by saying I bought the wardrobe. It was rather impulsive, not my usual carefully considered decision that typically involves changing my mind several times and missing out on multiple opportunities while I'm deliberating. The only deliberation I did was to go home and measure my wall to ensure the wardrobe would fit, and then head out in my pickup truck to bring it home.

My single-life diary had this to say about the purchase: "Day 5: No longer content with a clean house, I have decided to sabotage my tidiness by buying furniture. Now an entire disassembled IKEA wardrobe adorns the wall of the living room." I thought I was making light fun of a messy situation that I'd surely resolve the next day, with a triumphant "who needs a man of the house—I just assembled the world's biggest wardrobe on my own!" type of follow-up.

But no.

It was at this point that the war began. 

My Day 6 diary entry started out with its usual tone of playful self-mockery, but ended on a much darker note that was to foreshadow the struggle to come: "The net result is even more destruction of my hard-won cleanliness." If you couldn't guess, my attempts to build the wardrobe that day were disheartening. I was trying to tell a funny story, but it had stopped being funny.

I didn't record every step of the process, but the battles I fought were many. First there was the usual oops-I-put-that-part-in-backwards moment, which everyone can expect when building modular furniture, but immediately following that was the oops-that-peg-just-snapped-in-half-and-oh-no-now-all-the-pegs-have-snapped-in-half moment, which made it a little harder for me to maintain my optimism.The end result of that fiasco was me having to hold that part of the wardrobe together with a couple of L-shaped brackets I was fortunate to scavenge from other parts of the house.

There was the time on Friday night (Day 7 of my Single Life, Day 2 of trying to assemble the wardrobe), when I realized that the legs that level the wardrobe were missing their plastic tips, necessitating a trip to IKEA and a consolatory Chipotle burrito. There was that depressing moment when I realized my measurements must not have been precise enough, because the edge of the wardrobe overlapped the sill of my window, looking less than pretty and preventing the wardrobe from sitting flush with the wall. (As a slight victory, I rectified this by putting some shims against the baseboard in a few strategic places. I've never used shims before, but I bought them recently for another project I haven't started yet, and I'm really pleased at how they worked!)

There was the time when I realized the doors that I had received did not seem to have an assembly guide on the IKEA website, resulting in a moment of despair when I thought I was just going to have to scrap the whole project and buy a new set of doors from IKEA. Fortunately the doors still had their original stickers on them, so I was able to Google their name and find an older manual that was apparently not listed in the product catalog. This, of course, resulted in the realization that I was missing a metal bracket, a couple of bolts, and two door-length edge pieces.

Some emails with the seller ensued. She didn't have any of the missing parts, but I was able to determine from the patterns of discoloration and indentations that the missing bracket and bolts had never been there. Likewise, I guessed that the enormous edge pieces were more for aesthetics and probably weren't essential. This concluded the eighth day of my Single Life, and fortunately the last. I had given up on my cheeky diary, as by this point, it mostly consisted of hopeless statements like "Now on Day 3 of trying to assemble wardrobe on my own. Time for a second trip to IKEA."

My boyfriend returned home the following day, a Sunday, and we spent that morning waiting a very long time at IKEA customer service to get the parts I needed. We were only able to get the bolts, so it was with a certain sense of doom that I returned to my project. But (again in the interest of making this long story shorter, I will skip over the decisions I made about how to handle the missing parts and get right down to the end), I succeeded in finishing the doors at last, and finally had a big (slightly too big) wardrobe to contain all of my clothes! The war was over, and I guess I won it!

As always, I'd like to offer a few pointers for anyone in my position in the future, and they are:

• Don't buy any used furniture that's already disassembled. It makes it hard to figure out how to put the pieces back together, and you have no way of knowing if the pieces are really all there or not!
• If you insist on buying used disassembled IKEA furniture, make sure you live less than 2 miles from an IKEA. Had I been unable to take a quick jaunt to the store for missing pieces twice during this process, I probably would have had a catastrophe on my hands!
• No matter how many times you look over the manual, you are going to do it wrong the first time.
• In spite of all this, and the big cartoons on the first page of the manual that say you should work with a buddy, it is totally possible to assemble IKEA furniture all on your own. Even after my boyfriend returned home, I still finished the project alone when he was out of the house. And when I did, I was so proud of myself that it was almost all worth it!

I doubled my closet space, and the mirror door doubles the appearance of space! Wins all around!

Adventures in Cooking: Peanut Butter Pi

Happy Pi Day! Once a year, on March 14, I put on my chef's hat and pretend I know how to make pie. This is mainly so I can show off my Pi Day masterpiece on social media, because everyone else does it. But I'll share a secret with you—I don't actually know how to make pie!

What I do know, is how to have grand Adventures in Cooking! This year's Adventure will take us into the depths of the kitchen, to use two of the best ingredients ever invented—cream cheese and peanut butter.

Please enjoy this peanut butter pi recipe!

Ingredients

4 oz. cream cheese
1 c. confectioner's sugar
1/3 c. peanut butter
1 c. whipped topping (semi-optional)
1 9-inch graham cracker crust

Steps

1. Whip cream cheese until light and fluffy. There is a lot of room for interpretation in this statement, but I take it to mean you should use an electric mixer. You should probably have a brand new hand mixer for this purpose, particularly one that likes to fling tiny particles of food all over your kitchen.
2. Beat in sugar and peanut butter. The addition of sugar will make the batter extremely dry, resulting in even more food particles flying everywhere! Wheee!
3. Fold whipped topping into peanut butter mixture. If you don't have whipped topping, don't worry; it's not like it's an essential part of the recipe or anything!
4. Since you don't have whipped topping, the batter will still be extremely dry and crumbly at this point. To help it soften up, add a hearty dollop of more peanut butter.
5. More peanut butter is not enough to liquify this recipe! Add an arbitrary amount of more cream cheese, until the mixture is soft enough to hold together.
6. By now, you should realize that you don't have a 9-inch graham cracker crust. That's the kind of thing that people who know how to make pie have around, and you are none such person! That's OK, though, because a graham cracker crust is basically just graham crackers and some other things, right? You can make one from scratch.
7. Start with four graham crackers. Crush them into crumbs with a rolling pin and pour them into a bowl. Make sure it's one of those bowls that gets blazingly hot in the microwave—this will be important later.
8. Add 2 teaspoons (or thereabouts) of sugar to the graham cracker crumbs.
9. A graham cracker crust needs something to hold it together, and that something is butter! Since you're just guessing at quantities by this point, grab a couple of those foil-wrapped pats of butter you get at restaurants (you do save those, right?) and dump them into the mix.
10. Microwave the mixture to melt the butter. Cook it in 30-second intervals until you get bored and the bowl has reached the temperature of lava, but the butter is still not melted.
11. Remove the still-solid butter from the bowl and place it in one of your measuring cups instead. Try microwaving it again, this time succeeding in melting it.
12. Mix the butter into the graham cracker mixture. 
13. This is not enough butter, so then add in a melted blob of butter that you took home with the bread from Cheesecake Factory. Waste not, want not!
14. Dump the the graham cracker mixture into two 5.5-inch pie tins, gingerly pressing it into the sides. Since you didn't use enough butter (even with the help of the Cheesecake Factory), it barely sticks to the sides, but that's OK. It will stick to your ooey-gooey pie filling.
15. Divide the pie filling into two portions, and dump each portion into a prepared pie crust.
16. Carefully press down the filling until it covers the crust, and you're done!
17. That is, unless you want to turn your peanut butter pie into peanut butter pi! In that case, you should use some chocolate chips to make the pi symbol on the top of your crust.
18. Refrigerate for a few hours, until the texture turns rather like cookie dough. Eat straight from the pan like some kind of heathen. Makes one 8-to-9-inch pie, two 5.5-inch pies, or 2.828 3.14-inch pies.

I actually had to do a lot of geometry to figure out if two 5.5-inch pies are equivalent to a 9-incher (they're not, but it works because I modified the recipe so much!), so let's all give 3.14 cheers to the number that made this Adventure in Cooking! possible!

More winter biking secrets: Three years' worth of wisdom

Every fall when the weather starts turning chilly, and I start showing up to work on my bike in increasingly noticeable layers of cold-weather gear, I get some pretty predictable reactions:

• "Aren't you COLD!?"
• "Wow, you're biking in this weather!?"
• And my personal favorite, several variations on, "That's hard-core!"

Since people seem to be shocked by the very idea of biking on anything less than a balmy spring day, I'm here to share, with all those who might be on the fence about taking the chilly plunge, that it is indeed possible, and not nearly as bad as you might imagine! It's been three years since I first started riding my bike in cold (sub-40) weather and shared my tips with the Internet. That's 3 years of learning experiences, and I've made a lot of adjustments since then to the way I ride in winter. Here's an updated guide to cold-weather biking.

On keeping your head warm

They say that most of your body heat is lost through the top of your head. Of course, the enlightened among us know that silly statistic is based on bad data, and that you really lose about the same amount of body heat through any area of exposed skin. Thus, the majority of us who are not bald are actually less likely to lose heat through our heads than any other part of our bodies...and that means that wearing a hat is actually one of the lower priorities for keeping warm in any weather.

The takeaway for bikers is, don't bother with a hat! It's a lot simpler to wear a helmet if that's your inclination, and if you're not a helmet-wearer, it also makes it less likely that you will show up to your destination with the dreaded hat hair!

On the other hand, covering your ears is a must! I don't know about you, but I start experiencing dizziness and headaches when my ears are exposed to temperatures below 60, compounded when there's wind, as there always is on a fast-moving bike. So I cover my ears while biking pretty much 8 months out of the year. When I first started winter biking, I wore a full-coverage balaclava for all weather below 40°F, but I've found since then that I can get by just fine with my oversized earmuffs alone, in temperatures well below thirty. The nice thing about earmuffs, as opposed to headbands, the other non-hat ear-covering option, is they do less damage to a hairstyle, especially if you have bangs.

Normally not worn with pajamas

In frigid weather like what we had the early part of this January, I did find that the earmuffs weren't enough, because the sub-zero wind chill was freezing parts of me that I never before thought about, like my forehead. For that weather, I decided I'd have to embrace the balaclava, in spite of it making me look sinister and inhibiting my respiration. I couldn't do anything about the former (except maybe top it off with a cute hat just for effect?), but I didn't have to let it suffocate me.

I marked where my balaclava's mask met my upper lip, and poked three holes below that, using a pointed-tip soldering iron (I removed the mask from my face for this process!). The heat melted the polyester fleece, making perfectly round sealed holes that shouldn't fray. I haven't had a chance to wear the newly perforated mask while biking, but I can already see that it allows for an improved airflow.

On keeping your feet warm

The nice thing about biking in winter is that your feet actually get less cold than they do while walking, because they aren't in direct contact with the frozen ground. But there's still the wind to contend with, so your everyday (probably quite ventilated by design) gym shoes will not suffice.

One of the most annoying things about a bike commute is having a cold wind slipping into the tiny space between your pants and socks (I call it a wind gap). Even if the rest of me is warm, that tiny uncomfortable distraction can totally ruin my mood on a ride, so I almost always wear a pair of warm mid-calf boots I got from REI when it's below 50 out. I would advise against fur-topped boots because the fur might touch your chain and get damaged.

On keeping your hands warm

Aye, and here's the rub! By which I mean, unless you've got your biking thermoregulation down to a science, you'll probably have to rub the life back into your hands after every ride. While your feet are probably getting a fresh supply of blood with every turn of the pedals, your hands are remaining entirely motionless, which can only exacerbate problems with the cold. Plus, as the foremost part of your body in a riding posture, they take the brunt of the wind.

While in my previous winter post, I recommended a pair of thick skiing gloves, I retired those because of their significant hindrance to my dexterity, plus the fact that they still allowed my fingers to get cold! The following winter, I made, as I'd planned, a pair of pogies (a.k.a handlebar mittens, if you're me) from my old white coat. Although they are far from fashionable, I detailed the story of their making in my fashion blog. 

I loved them! They blocked out every hint of wind and kept my hands warm and toasty every time I tried them. However, when I made and tested them, I was still storing my bike in my apartment, so I didn't get to experience how they performed when the bike had been sitting out in the cold all night. That didn't happen until the following winter, when I was back to living in a house and storing the bike in a shed.

At that point, I learned the literal hard cold truth: A bike that's been sitting outside all night in 20-degree weather will inevitably have 20-degree handlebars! No matter how thick my pogies, they couldn't protect me from the cold that was already within! Over that entire winter and a significant portion of the next (that's now the current winter), I tried various things to keep my hands warm for my morning commute:

• Wrap the handlebars with faux fur to provide a little extra insulation against the heat-sucking metal (Perhaps helped a little, but not enough)
• Make microwaveable handwarmers out of sacks of flax seeds (Were very warm, but hard to keep attached to the handlebars and in contact with my hands. Also tended to get in the way when shifting and braking).
• Attach disposable adhesive toe warmers to the handlebars (Took too long to warm up, did not stay warm enough, tended to fall off)
• Attach disposable adhesive toe warmers to the inside of a pair of mittens (Worked very well on my fingers, but, still could not keep my thumb warm enough. This is one of the most effective options thus far, but I have ethical and financial issues with having to use a new pack of disposable toe warmers every day, just for a 20-minute bike ride).
• Buy heated gloves (I shopped online, but couldn't find any pair with the heating elements all the way down the palm side of the fingers and thumbs, or that didn't cost a fortune)
• Buy an electric handlebar heater online. (This is the best solution yet, thus it warrants a whole paragraph of its own! See below.)

Electric handlebar warmers. I can't believe it didn't occur to me to look for this sooner. I guess I just assumed they wouldn't exist, but after exhausting all my other ideas, I searched for some on a whim, and eventually found a pair that's powered by USB, meaning it would work with one of the many USB portable chargers we have at home. I ordered the cheapest one I could find, naturally from a Chinese seller on eBay, which took 3 weeks to arrive. There's a good chance that it's a knockoff, but it did work. The only problem was, it didn't work with any of my portable chargers. They did not produce enough current, so next I had to order a 2-amp power brick, which took another week.

Once I finally got them running, the handlebar warmers proved pretty effective. I plug them in a few minutes before I leave, to give them a chance to warm up, they stay warm the entire ride, and the brick retains its charge for at least two rides. Probably longer, but I haven't tried to run it to empty yet. They produce a comfortable level of heat, and do help with keeping my thumb warm (though I did have to position them very carefully as the actual heated surface is not that big).

Of course, like all the solutions I've ever explored, they aren't perfect. I wish the power cord were a little shorter (it's 1 meter long, which is a little excessive considering it only has to reach between two handlebars!) and the warmer pads were a little bigger, as they don't completely wrap my large ergonomic grips. To connect the power brick to the warmers, I must suspend it, in a vinyl pouch, from my handlebars with two shower curtain rings (one would suffice, but I like the security of two).

Hard to tell the electronic cable from all the other cables, but it's the one
that's one-freaking-meter-long folded up into a bundle.

There are many flaws with this setup, the obvious one being that it looks silly! But as someone who bikes around with diapers on my hands all winter, that is the least of my concerns. What's more important is the fact that a delicate piece of electronic equipment is dangling down where it bangs into the frame of my bike with every bump. I wrapped it with bubble wrap for the time being, but my next project is to find a way to attach the power brick securely but removably. I tell you, it's always something! If you give a bike a pair of handlebar warmers, she's going to want you to provide an endless stream of complementary accessories! Someone should write a children's book about this!

Since I mentioned the diapers I wear on my hands, I might as well add that this year, I discovered a new way to wear them. Rather than keeping them on the handlebars at all times, and trying to force my hands into the openings while really just futilely pushing the floppy things backwards, I discovered that I can wear them much like actual mittens.

 
I put them on before I start my ride, using both hands to position them securely around my sleeves, and then slip the open edges around the handlebar and brake lever. The benefits of wearing them this way are enormous. The long portion now goes up my arm, keeping me warm and preventing that loathsome wind gap at my wrists. The short portion covers the handlebar and brake lever, but not the light or bell (which used to be inaccessible in the old configuration). Better pogies, better life.

On keeping your body warm

This is actually the easiest part of a warm winter biking plan, because when you're exercising, you naturally produce enough body heat to keep you comfortable in almost any temperature as long as you have a thin insulating layer over the top.

You will need much lighter clothing while biking than you would use for just standing around in the same weather. I've worn a puffy coat for walking around outside in approximately 11-degree weather and still felt cold, but have worn the same coat, in the same weather, while biking, and found it to be stiflingly hot once I got about a mile down the road. Puffy coats are a no-no, unless you're biking at a snail's pace! What works best for me is a zippered hoodie, for temperatures down to the upper thirties, and a light wool coat for anything colder than that. I strongly advise you get a coat that covers your butt even when you're bending over, because, wind gap!

For the coldest weather, make sure you have something that covers your throat and exposed areas of chest (if you're fond of scoop- and V-necks, as I am). Wearing a scarf while biking is just not worth the hassle (flapping ends and such), so I made myself a simple turtleneck dickey out of pieces of an old sweater, but I don't wear it often because my most worn coat buttons all the way to the top.

While we're on the subject, I also recommend a buttoned coat rather than zippered, because that way if you get too hot, you can easily unbutton some of the lower buttons while still keeping your neck covered. But conversely, some button plackets let in too much wind even when closed, so maybe a zipper would be preferable to that. Really it's just a matter of finding the right coat for the right weather, and making sure your layers can be adjusted mid-ride.

So let's review the entire biking outfit! Cozy winter boots, cheap leggings, a lightweight but long button-up coat, a pair of lightweight hand covers, and over that, some removable pogies (shown with my hand poking out the opening, which is a useful trick for when you actually need some dexterity while dressed up for a ride), and a pair of ridiculously fluffy earmuffs! Bonus fact! I'm standing next to my new bike storage solution, which consists of a retired old air mattress stapled to the fence. This keeps me from having to walk all the way through the minefield that is my backyard (consequence of having dogs, if you know what I mean) to the shed.

I wish I could say that I've figured out all the secrets to winter biking, but after three years of it, I'm still banging out the details. Now that the weather has taken a turn for the warm, I probably won't get many more opportunities to perfect my system this winter, but if there's one thing certain in life other than death and taxes, it's that winter will come again. So we'll see what new tricks I figure out in the next year!