Organized Eats

My mission thus far in 2012 has been to, in blunt terms, fucking get my shit organized. I’m a big fan of keeping things rattling around in my head to the point of bursting, which if you read any books on organization or listen to anyone who knows what they’re talking about, that’s the absolute last thing you should be doing when you’re trying to get organized. Instead you need to get it all out of your head, and onto paper. Or screen. Or something that’s not your brain goo.

For me, this falls into three categories. If people are interested, I’ll be glad to do some more blog posts, but this basically broke down into things I eat, money I spend, and crap I work on. I’m still going to be fidgeting to get the crap I work on organized for some time, and the money I spend is basically under control with this awesome app that I downloaded (Expense Tracker, I think it’s called?), so the easiest one to tackle ended up being things I eat.

Here are the problems with how Nick and I eat: I love to cook, but I never feel like I have time for it (part of the reason I’m getting organized in the first place), we always want to lean towards things that are quick or easy, and we always feel like we eat the same things over and over when we know we are capable of cooking many different things. Our typical week might consist of two nights of Hamburger Helper, a night of baked pasta, two nights of fast food, and one night of, like, anything we can find in the fridge.

That’s not how we should be eating. I am a huge advocate/fan of healthy food, and healthy seems to be so time consuming and you have to buy fresh things and it’s just hard. It shouldn’t be hard. It should be easy.

So I tried to get down to the basis of the problem – organization. Because we don’t know what we’re going to eat until we eat it, our meals depend largely on what dishes are clean or what we have in the fridge. This is backwards. We should be planning our dishes and our shopping around what we want to eat. It’s much easier, less stressful, and more cost effective.

I’m a huge fan of index cards, and I found these tiny 3″ x 2.5″ cards at Staples the other day. They were like this, but plain white. (Though I’m thinking now I need to get some of the colored ones.) I have a bulletin board outside of our kitchen that I wasn’t using, and somehow this idea just clicked.

I flipped over seven of the cards to the plain white side, and wrote a day of the week on each one. Then, I took more of the cards and wrote down what we ate for dinner and what ingredients it called for, down to the specifics. If we were having something that involved stuffing, I even wrote down the butter needed to make the stuffing.

I ended up with a bunch of cards like this, pleasantly surprised by how many meals I could think of off the top of my head that we could easily make that were cost effective, including three non-home-cooked cards: one “Wild Card” for fast food or takeout, one “Scavenger Hunt” (eat whatever you can find, nobody’s cooking), and one “Pizza Night” for us to get a $10 take-and-bake pizza from our favorite joint.

What was extra fun for me about making the cards was that it started to feel like a card game of some kind, something that – just in case you’re new here, I’m a fan of. Sure, it may be a little childish, but by making the selection of what we were going to eat that week “fun,” I think I made it a much more enjoyable process. Plus, since I listed out all of the ingredients and only made one card for each meal, it’s much easier to prevent us from slipping into the monotony of “baked pasta, again?”

Ultimately once I hug the board up and chose what meals we were going to eat, it looked like this:

If you couldn’t tell, the little ziploc next to the pinned cards holds all the rest of them. Since this is my first time trying this, I haven’t quite figured out what the process is going to be to switch the cards over, but I’m thinking after we get through Tuesday I’ll sit down and figure out those days again so I can include them in my weekly shopping, or maybe just shuffle the cards as we go. Last night we had Hamburger Helper, so I went ahead and pinned that card up so we don’t do that anymore this week. That’s it. Fin. No more Hamburger Helper.

So now I can see at a glance what we’re going to eat, I can know that at least at some point this week I’ll be able to have a nice slice of pizza, and make my shopping list much more effectively. As a bonus, I have like ten more recipes in the ziploc that I can use for the next few weeks, which is a nice assurance that I won’t have baked pasta eight times this week. It’s also right next to our kitchen and entryway to the apartment, so we HAVE to see it. No ignoring it.

I’m not sure if this will work for everyone, or how well it will work for me, but I’m feeling pretty confident about it, and the internet wanted to see what I had going, so here we go.

Do any of you out there have your own meal-planning systems? Anything as organized (or more organized?!) as this? Have a favorite quick-fix recipe we can add to the rotation for those nights we just don’t want to spend 3 hours preparing a meal?

Throw ‘em at me.

Goodbye Until Tomorrow

This was an amazing year.

I’m having a hard time believing I’m sitting here again already, already working on my new content to release at Vault 713 at midnight, already marking dates on my calendar that end in 2012 instead of 2011. I feel like I was only moving into this apartment yesterday, when really it was over a year ago. Has it really, really been a year?

The funny thing about New Years Eve for me is that I never think about it the other 360-something days of the year. I only think about it on New Years Eve, and suddenly all of the memories roll into one. My brain becomes a mush of years spent waking my dad up in the middle of the night to say “Happy New Year, can you upload this code for me so I can put it on the website?” and eating my weight in Junior Mints and the years like last year, where some of the folks from the very website I was maintaining got together in my apartment to do a live-broadcasted New Year’s Eve party.

But one year was different.

One year my mom had heard from a friend that sometimes people went to the Wright Memorial for New Year’s Eve. Some people shot off fireworks all around the beach, and it’s a well known fact that the Wright Memorial was one of the few places you could see both the ocean and the sound at the same time if you tried. She said that some people went up there to see the fireworks all over instead of just one fireworks display. It sounded like a cool idea, and my dad never stayed up for midnight, so it seemed fun.

It was freezing cold. In retrospect, it was probably only in the 40s. That doesn’t seem cold to me after a year in Wisconsin, after a year of snow and ice and letting your car warm up before you get in. At the time, 40 was a death wish. We were bundled up, flashlights in hand as we pulled around to the back entrance of the memorial, where the airport was.

You weren’t really supposed to be there at night, I’m sure, but people did it all the time. People went there to jog and run even if they weren’t going to actually “see” the memorial. So we parked our car amongst the 2 or three others and made our way to the top.

So there we sat. My mom, my dad, myself, in the cold. Before cell phones had the internet on them and before Twitter and before people felt like they always had a place to be. I had a place to be, I’m sure; I vaguely remember wanting to go home and get online, but this was special. It wasn’t to be toyed with. There were maybe a dozen other people there, all spread out. Lovers snuggled together for warmth, maybe another family. There were only a few of us.

It was just darkness and seeing your breath in the glow of the lights that illuminated the memorial to man’s first prolonged flight. It was peaceful.

Midnight came and went without alarm – the fireworks started at random intervals and our watches beeped to tell us it was finally the new year. Some people had brought champagne or beer or wine or cider for themselves and opened it to drink.

We sat in the dark and let the New Year come like New Years have been coming for centuries – quietly and unsuspecting in the middle of the night, just a whisper to tell you what lies ahead.

I’m getting older, now. The years are moving faster. I found myself talking about how to store our Christmas wrapping supplies for next year, because it already seems so close. Quietly and unsuspecting, somehow the world has sped up around me, with no sign of slowing down. This is it. Life is happening.

This past year was amazing. More than I could have asked for. I could only hope the same for the next, and the next, and the dozen after that.

We are all going to accomplish great things. From the small to the large, the noteworthy to the quiet and unsuspecting. I welcome the challenge.

I’ve been listening to a lot of musicals lately. They make me feel like home. In particular, a tiny, unsuspecting Off-Broadway production by the name of The Last Five Years. The finale seems all but too appropriate for how I feel tonight, going into this thing head on and arms open for 2012:

So goodbye until tomorrow, goodbye until the rest of my life,
I have been waiting, I have been waiting for you. 

 

Fresh Kindling

If you’re like me, maybe you got a lot of books for Christmas. I know I’ll be kept busy for the next few months – the parents sent me Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible to peruse for new heart-stopping butter-filled recipes, the boyfriend got me The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and his mom got me the entire Hunger Games trilogy. As if that wasn’t enough, my parents got me a subscription to Angry Robot Books, which means I’ll be getting “free” ebooks for the next six months from what is basically my favorite publisher. Awesome.

Maybe you’re not like me, though – maybe you’re like my mom, who got a brand new Kindle Touch for Christmas, and you’re looking for a few things to fill it up with. I am here to help.

I love ebooks, and though I love regular books too, the cool thing about ebooks is that you can just download them instantly and start reading. I’ve actually read way more in this past year than I had the year before, just because I had access to ebooks on Nick’s kindle (and now my tablet.)

So here’s some of my favorites from this year and things I think you should check out if you’ve got a brand new shiny device to fill up with brand new shiny books:

–

Shotgun Gravy – Chuck Wendig, $2.99

I just finished this one a few days ago, and I’ll be honest, my head is still ticking about it. Chuck is one of my favorite writers, and this novella seems to be dipping a toe into the Young Adult (YA) genre that I love so very much…only, you know, with a heavy dose of profanity and vulgar language. It tells the story of a teenage girl who we know very little about, except that she’s done something very bad - and how she gets herself into and out of a mess. Highly recommended if you’d like a taste of “YA for Adults,” as it were – thanks to the “novella” style of the story, it’s also a fast read that will leave you ready for more in just a few hours.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson - John Green & David Levithan, $8.99

A little “pricey” for an ebook, but worth every cent – Nick and I read this book earlier this year in it’s actual hardcover form and absolutely loved it. An actual YA novel peppered with nerdy jokes, this book tells the story of two very different teenagers from different sides of the same town, both named Will Grayson. At first you aren’t totally sure how the alternating chapters have anything to do with each other – until the book turns, and suddenly everyone is muddled together with one another. Easily one of my favorite books I read this year.

Vegas Knights – Matt Forbeck, $4.79

Remember earlier when I said I loved Angry Robot Books? The folks at their publishing house were kind enough to send me an ARC of this book before it hit shelves (digital or otherwise) and I absolutely could not put it down. Matt tells us a story of two college-age magic users (sound familiar?) who get themselves in a mess larger than they can handle when they head to Las Vegas to try using magic to cheat in the casinos. If you’re a fan of Harry Potter or other “urban fantasy” type settings, you’ll love this one – and as seems to be the case with Matt’s other books (I also highly recommend Amortals) he throws in a twist before you reach the end that you won’t see coming – but will keep you on the edge of your seat til the end.

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins, $4.69

Another book that I read in paperback (and now own the hardcover of, thanks to Christmas) – this book also falls under the YA header, but is absolutely suitable for readers of all ages. Suzanne’s writing is a little difficult to work past at first, but once you get to the core of the brutal story, you won’t be able to put it down. Our leading lady, Katniss Everdeen, has volunteered to take her sister’s place in a gruesome battle that takes place each year in the nation of Panem. Only two contestants are chosen from each district each year, and only one of the children – yes, children - can survive. This book follows Katniss to the end – and you’ll want to follow right along, too.

The Secret Garden - Francis Hodgson Burnett, $0.00

As a kid, I remember watching this movie. I remember being fascinated by the garden, frightened by the epidemic in the beginning, and just incredibly moved by the entire thing. Since this book is a freebie, I downloaded it to read and – uh, wow, okay, I forgot how dark this story was. The epidemic in the beginning? Terrifying. In fact, I’m actually not all the way through this one, but since it’s a freebie there’s no reason you shouldn’t pick it up, right? Go for it!

Beauty Has Her Way - Anthology, $4.99

Last but not least, if you like stories of kickass female protagonists, you’ll want to pick up this anthology. This is another one that I admittedly haven’t finished yet – I like to read short stories one-or-two at a time – but so far the tales within have been wonderful. If you’re a fan of role playing games and things like it, you’ll be pleased to see some stories from folks like Ed Greenwood, Filamena Hill, Chuck Wendig, and so on tucked between these digital pages. Since many of the folks have more kindle books and novels that they wrote on their own, this could be a great sampler for someone looking to discover new authors that publish in the digital format.

So what about you, folks? Have a favorite book you read this year, digital or not? Are you an e-reader person? Share your story suggestions in the comments, say hello, share your love of reading, and so on. Lets get our read on.