Started in the kitchen.

The last 2 days I've been working in the kitchen.  I cleaned out the fridge & freezer, tossed a lot of stuff.  I made a white turkey chili with white beans, mushrooms, green tomatoes & tomatillos and served it over cheesy tater tots. (hey the chili was healthy)  This used a lot of the odds & ends. I'm going to use the rest of the partial packs while cooking this weekend.

I also cleaned out my baking cabinet. I tossed a bunch here too.  Filled up my containers with the partial bags of flour, sugar etc that were in zip locs. I need to remember next time I buy a bag, to use the part of the bag that didn't fit in the canister.  I also discovered that I own way too much lime jello.

I went through one other cabinet as well. Three more to go.

Have a great weekend everyone!

My first finished knit item of the year. An owl ornament. Made from scrap yarn from my honey badger socks and scraps from a pair of fingerless mitts! I made.

Sensational Haiku Wednesday

Sensational Haiku Wednesday

Welcome to “Sensational Haiku Wednesday!”

Click here for info and background on this weekly event!

The basics:
Haiku is simple! It is 3 non-rhyming lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively (a great way to use your fingers!)

This week’s theme is: Resolve

 I resolve problems,

Goals are more achievable,

Resolve to make goals. 

Goals I've been working on

As I said in yesterday's post, I have been reevaluating my personal goals.  So most of these I have been working on in some form or another already.

1.  I need to get healthy. I really can't deal with my knees hurting, back hurting, shoulder hurting, and feeling lethargic and tired.  My personality is pretty hyper and I need to be able to keep up.  I did really great last spring and summer and lost a bunch of weight and tightened up. Then I stopped going to the gym as regularly (not totally) and eating crappier because from the hurricane and blizzard and going from garden back to flooring - I pretty much worked 12 hour days and Saturday night overnites from Labor Day to the week of thanksgiving.  Other people got it for a few weeks and wen the wave of rebuilding moved on to the next category they got a break - I ended up following the wave. While getting ready for inventory. ANd because I was working so many hours and was TIRED I started grabbing quick easy food and not hitting the gym.  SO, I've been going back to the gym for the last 2 weeks, and I've been making some healthier eating choices- some.  I'm either going to get a thing on the side of this blog to update the gym/food thing or I'm going to post about it - monthly maybe? So you guys can skip those post but it will give me some accountability- cause I'm not going to want to post - um sat on my ass and ate cookies and ice cream all month.  More importantly - I need to figure out a way to keeep myself going when spring breaks and the overtime hits again.

2.  Blogging - I really did think it through and decided that I want to/ need to blog.  So I need to figure out how to do it with some regularity.  I'm going back to Haiku Wednesday- I really enjoy coming up with a poem for the prompts - yes even the hard ones.  I'm going to do weekly yarny updates.  I haven't decide if it will be a specific day of the week ( what if I have an ooh shiny moment?) or just at some non-Wednesday day.  I'm considering a weekly sports post - not really a news post but more of an op-ed type post - cause trust me, ask any of my RL friends - when it comes to Football/Hockey and Racing I have a ton of opinions!  I'm going to post mini "reviews" on all the books I hope to read. And I am going to use the blogger app on my phone more often - so more picture posts to share with you guys.

     2A - I have a bunch of stuff I need to catch up on - Rhinebeck in October, My sister's Wedding in November and my Brother's Weding in December.

3.  Preventing brain rot - AKA my Goodreads reading.  Last year I set a goal of 24 books - because for a lot more years than I want to admit - I would read the occasional book but most of my reading was magazines - and football stats or recipes really aren't real reading.  I finished the year with 25 books and 3 partials.  The partials because I am not finished with one and 1 I need to get back to eventually and one just didn't catch my attention and this isn't lit class its my life.  For 2012, I'm raising the bar a bit - to 28 books including 5 from the 1001 books to read before you become worm food list.

4.  Yarny stuff - I missed my goal by 6 projects of 52 projects last year.  3 reasons.  First there were 3 months I didn't finish anything. I did do 3 more labor intensive than my usual projects. And I am totally addicted to hexiflats.  I hope to have enough made that I can make a king throw by the end of 2013 - and since they aren't a done project I didn't count them.  I am trying for 52 projects again.  Including 150 hexiflats.  I may edit the flat number at some point but I think three a week is reasonable - since they have become my mindless knitting,  but I think I will count 25 as 1 project.  I also want to knit 12 Christmas ornaments as part of this.  As I said in goal 2- I'm going to post yarny updates - to try to avoid the months that I knit nothing - hexiflats will help that because they are super small and super portable and super mindless.

4A.  I am going to try to knit from my yarn stash this year.  Not the "knit down your stash" that some people are doing. I'm not going on a yarn diet.  I'll still buy the stuff.  Ask anyone who has gone yarn shopping with me.  I rarely buy yarn for a project.  I touch yarn and when I find one I love I bring it home. Then I find a project.  The "problem" (cause having yummy yarn really isn't bad is it?) is that if it comes home and doesn't get cast on right away it gets buried in other yummy yarn.  So I want to give some love and attention to the neglected hanks I own, whose only crime was poor timing catching my eye.

5.  My house is a clutter.  Seriously  those people from the TLC and DIY networks are going to shoe up soon.  Worse - its getting harder to remember where I put something.  So I'm not getting all unreasonably optimistic here - I'm going to try to organize, sort or get rid of something every week.  A nice  somewhat vague, lots of wiggle room goal that will hopefully add up over 52 weeks.  And it leaves room for times I feel super motivated, and for times I don't want to do anything at which point a small accomplishment will still be a victory.

6.  Giving back.  I need to thank NerdWars - their giving geeks category, has given me impetous to give back more,  I did before - but beyond throwing money in a can shake outside the super market or the second collection at church.  This past year ( a lot due to NerdWars challenges ) I've made a bunch of knit items for different causes , and done more myself.  I want to keep this trend - especially in the months (3) between the tournaments when I don't have an outside influence causing me to do something.

Anyone have interesting goals for the year??

Resolutions? No! Goals? Yes!

No resolutions.  I don't do them.  Resolutions lead to breaking resolutions.  They are so all or nothing.  A big proclamation is made " I will do X every single day this year"  or "I will never do Y again"  Then when inevitably you don't get a chance or just don't feel up to X, there is no wiggle room.  You missed it. You can no longer do X every single day.  So you feel bummed.  Then next week you miss another day. More bummed.  Then you actually DO Y.  So you can't meet the expectation of EVERY, you can't meet the expectation of Never, what do you do?  Grab a pint of Guinness and  a pint of Hagen Daz and sit in the corner until NEXT New Years Eve.  Not exactly a formula for success.

Goals. Goals are good. Goals lead to a process.  Goals are the flags on the top of the hill.  Goals allow you to screw up.  Goals are more of a path than a giant set of doors.You don't do X today.  That's ok, you can do X tomorrow.  You did Y.  That's ok, we can start not doing Y again in 5 minutes. You work toward your goals, you aren't expected to be perfect 100% with the program on Day 1.  There is one catch with goals,  to achieve a goal we need progress checks.  A little bit of self examination.

I tend to evaluate my goals a few times a year.  The end of the school year - I'm not in school and my daughter is off in college, so from a practical viewpoint the only thing May/June brings is the need to move the Angie and her crap back from Philly.  But I guess, from all the years in school and all Angie's years in school, it has become a natural time to evaluate.  September.  Besides being one of my favorite times of year because I love stocking up on supplies.  I have half a closet with notebooks, paper, folders, pens, I love shopping for pens!  September seems like a natural time to look ahead and try to set new goals to accomplish.  December.  From my birthday at the end of November through New Year's I tend to really look at my life.  Some people that know me find it odd that I have goals. I know I do give off a very cocky, love my life attitude.  And don't get me wrong, I am pretty cocky, and I do love my life (well most of it) but everyone needs goals, either conscious or unconscious.  When I stop having goals, and stop moving forward, when I decide that inertia is ok , and start to stagnate, that's when I start to die.  Maybe not my body - but my ME.

Some goals we can share.  Some accomplishments we can share. Some failures we can share.  And some we can't.  Sharing goals helps with accountability.  It's sadly too easy to cheat our own selves.  It's harder if the world is watching.  So tomorrow I'll share.  That's a preview of one of my goals.  I pretty much dropped off the blog world the last 3 months. There were a lot of reasons- you'll have to wait until tomorrow if you want to know.  But sometimes reasons become excuses, and I had to decide if I really wanted to blog, was I over the blog thing ( I have a notoriously short attention span after all)..  As you can guess from 3 posts in a row, I decided that yes, I want to blog.  The process, the path is to figure out what I need to do to make that happen.  So tomorrow-

New Year's Traditions

So- other than the occasional hangover, there are a lot of traditions surrounding New Year's Day.  In the Catholic church it is dedicated to the Virgin Mary.  (random fact of the post)

A lot of traditions revolve around "good luck food" . Let's look at my family's New Year's food.  I googled around to see if I could find out why we eat this stuff.  ( My grandmother's explanation of eat for good luck or have a bad year - just didn't cut it.)

*  black eyed peas and rice.  A lot of cultures eat beans/peas/lentils for luck.  My mom is from Japan so she makes a sticky azuki beans and rice dish.  I don't know how to make this.  I make black eyed peas.  I did know this as a Southern (US) tradition.  Apparently this goes back to the seige of Vicksburg, MS.  The townsfolk had run out of food when they found a store  of black eyed peas.  SO they bring luck.

* greens - usually collards.  Also apparently a popular choice.  Danish eat Kale, Germans eat cabbage-usually as sauerkraut .  This one is more obvious.  Greens are green.   They sort of resemble money.  So the more greens you eat the more money you will attract for the year. (Good thing- cause you might start repelling people - wink ;P)

* The above two are usually seasoned with pork, ham hocks - I use bacon or smoked sausage.  There are a lot of countries around the globe that eat these too. There seems to be a twofold reason.  Pigs are high fat and represent prosperity.  Also pigs represent forward movement as they push through while they root for food.

* Catfish.  my family has some dissent on this - about 50% go catfish - but the other 50% goes with another fish - so it's always fish.  I found a lot about fish on the New Year.  But not a lot of why.  I mean to me, saying it evolved around the Catholic Churches ban on red meat on religious holidays doesn't really answer why on New Year's.  The only solid answer I found was why Japanese (thanks mom) eat fish on New Year's - roe is for fertility (people and farm animals) shrimp for long life and sardines for good harvest. (my mom uses sardines to fertilize her tomatoes - i think that works 'cause the calcium in the bones prevents blossom end rot)  So big question mark here.


* mac-n-cheese. The only sort of reason I can find (other than it just tastes really good with the above food) is that it's usually yellow and eating food gold in color will put money in your pocket. hmm.

What I also found out are foods not to eat. 

* lobster. because they apparently move backwards. i never really watched a lobster walk except in tanks in seafood stores and restaurants.  There in the tanks I ever paid attention to what direction they were climbing on each other.  But I guess someone watched and since we don't want to regress lobster is out.

* chicken, turkey other fowl.  Several reasons are listed for this.  The two most popular are that as poultry scratches on the ground for food they scratch backwards.  Backwards is bad on New Years as mentioned above.  The second prevalent reason I read, was that since birds fly, you don't want your luck to fly away.

Other weird things.

* Not supposed to take the garbage (or anything else) out, before something new comes in.  I already screwed this one up. Curt took out 4 bags of garbage this morning.

* Supposed to have a full pantry.  Ok check. The Angie's home and I don't want to go to the store when it is crowded, I get confused when stores close early on holidays. So I shop and stock up.

* Not supposed to do laundry on New Year's day, because some one close to you may get "washed away" (die) I guess this is the warped version of my gramma saying you need to do all your laundry before New Year's.  So since I wasn't going to do a load with only 2 days clothes - check.  (It would probably be nice if I put my clothes away though)

* You aren't supposed to break anything.  SO keep my sister in law away from your candy dishes people. Or if you can't avoid that - hide the lids!!

* you are supposed to do a token successful task related to your work.  Not actually work or put forth a lot of exertion - that would be bad luck.  Well, it's not like I could change a bit of flooring can I? And there aren't any trucks I can play with (maybe I need to buy a tonka... I have a Nascar diecast hauler but what would I do with it?)  I'm a team manager for my team in NerdWars -  a fiber based competition on Ravelry - and as out last round ended yesterday, I did do tasks related to that - does that carry over to work?  So after some thought - Carpet is made of yarn. glass tile is a very popular tile we sell.  The wood floor look is also very popular.  I got about 2/3 of the way through my newest fingerless mitts- made with yarn and embellished with glass beads- using wood needles.  It went very smoothly, I got more done than I planned, and no frogging or tinking.  I'm calling this a check. And to be on the safe side - I'm tossing the Christmas rugs in the bathroom in the hamper and putting down the regular ones.  Rugs are rugs right?  And since I anticipate no issues - check.

So tell me:

What do you eat on New Year's??

Are there other things you do or don't do to start the year?


And please - I know it's all superstition.  I don't want a lecture on it. 

happy New Year's everyone!!